UK will see millions of COVID-19 infections this summer

Thomas Scripps

Boris Johnson’s Conservative government is not only openly pursuing a herd immunity policy. It is reveling in its own indifference to the prospect of mass infection, illness and death.

From July 19, all businesses will be allowed to reopen and mass events authorised. Mask requirements and social distancing will be ended. Health Secretary Sajid Javid announced Wednesday that, from August 16, double-vaccinated adults and all under-18s will no longer have to self-isolate if they have been in close contact with a person who has tested positive for COVID-19. Quarantine bubbles in schools will be scrapped at the end of the summer term.

Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty speaking at Monday's press conference in Downing Street. July 5, 2021 (credit: Picture by Andrew Parsons/No 10 Downing Street/Flickr)

Transport Secretary Grant Shapps is expected to announce that fully vaccinated adults will soon be allowed to travel abroad to amber list countries without quarantining, as will unvaccinated children if they travel with family.

Yesterday evening, 60,000 football fans were encouraged to pile into London’s Wembley stadium to watch the England-Denmark semi-final of the European Football Championship. Asked Wednesday morning if he was concerned about the match becoming a “super spreader” event, Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng replied, “There’s always risk in life… We’ve just got to see what happens.”

Johnson has said bluntly that the UK “must reconcile [itself] to more deaths” and that infections will rise to 50,000 a day. Javid, demanding the population “learn to live with the existence of Covid”, admitted that daily case totals could reach 100,000 before the end of summer. Professor Neil Fergusson, an epidemiologist and modeler for the government, has warned that there is “the potential for the UK to have a very large number of cases, 150,000 to 200,000 a day.”

The Guardian newspaper reports that there could be a staggering two million cases in the remaining six weeks of summer, but this is based on a very conservative estimate of an average 35,000 cases a day between now and July 19 and 60,000 from then until August 16.

A frenzied bloodlust has gripped Britain’s boardrooms and editorial offices who are pushing to tear away the last vestiges of a public health response. Yesterday’s front pages were filled with complaints that the date for ending self-isolation requirements was too delayed, meaning millions would be forced to stay at home and causing “chaos” for employers.

The Daily Mail proclaimed, “Isolation Insanity”, warning, “You cannot lose your nerve now, Mr Javid”, calling for him to scrap restrictions “right away” and telling the nation, “It’s time to let go of nurse”. The Daily Telegraph declared that isolation rules “slam the breaks on freedom”, quoting Tory right-winger and former party leaders Sir Iain Duncan Smith saying the government’s plan “makes a mockery” of “Freedom Day”. Its editorial said of ending self-isolation “why wait?... This country needs to move on”.

Kate Nicholls, head of Hospitality UK, complained that self-isolation was causing “carnage” for businesses, and the plan to scrap it “doesn’t go far enough, quickly enough.”

The Labour Party weighed in, with Sir Keir Starmer telling Johnson in Prime Minister’s Questions, “It won’t feel like freedom day to the businesses who are already warning of carnage because of the loss of staff and customers.” Labour accuses the government of a “reckless” reopening, but calls only for window dressing “baseline protections”.

The logic of the government’s policies leads to the August 16 date on self-isolation being brought forward. Based on the Guardian figures, some 10 million people will be forced to self-isolate this summer given the surge in infections. Every effort will be made to prevent this disruption to the profit making of big business. According to a Whitehall source, speaking to the i newspaper, the government scrapped mandatory mask wearing after being told keeping them risked losing the events and hospitality industry £4 billion due to their increasing public hesitancy.

The consequences of this criminal abandonment of public health measures will be terrible.

Vaccines have substantially reduced the mortality rate of COVID-19, with most estimates agreeing that the UK now sees one death for every thousand infections. However, this still translates to between 100 and 200 deaths a day in just a few weeks’ time. Increased pressure will be placed on a health service still reeling from the last year.

Modelling by the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) suggest there will be 1,300 COVID hospitalisations a day by late July-early August, if daily cases reach 100,000. Coronavirus admissions are already surging, rising by 70 percent in England in the week to July 5 to 416 people.

Vast numbers of people will also contract debilitating Long Covid. The British Medical Association (BMA) told the Independent that as many as 10,000 people a day could develop the condition, with 20 percent of them likely to be unable to work, study or do normal day-to-day activities for more than a year. Two million people have so far been affected by Long Covid and 385,000 have lived with it for more than a year—only 9 percent of those were hospitalised when they were first infected. Dr David Strain, speaking for the British Medical Association, said there is currently no evidence of vaccines causing a decline in the 10-17 percent of infections estimated to result in Long COVID.

The highest levels of infection will be among the partially vaccinated and unvaccinated, young adults and especially children. Figures from the Department for Education show that, on July 1, 640,000 children were absent from school and 560,000 self-isolating due to COVID, a 66 percent increase on the week before. This includes 28,000 children with a confirmed case and 34,000 with a suspected infection.

As before, the harm will fall overwhelmingly on the working class. A Health Foundation report published Tuesday found that, for people under 65, those in the most deprived 10 percent of areas had a COVID mortality rate 3.7 times higher than the most affluent 10 percent. Those in the 5th most deprived decile were still more than twice as likely to die than those in the 1st.

None of this matters to the ruling class, who feel liberated from even the pretence of concern. The reopening strategy is being backed by an open embrace of herd immunity, still to be achieved in substantial part by mass infection. The Daily Mail reported a government source who said, “There is an element of herd immunity in what we are doing… it is inevitable that some people are going to acquire immunity through infection”.

The government is seeking to rationalise lifting restrictions rapidly now based on the assertion that the resulting herd immunity will supposedly prevent a bigger surge later in winter, when children are back in school and the National Health Service is under greater strain. Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty told the Downing Street press conference on Tuesday, “At a certain point, you move to the situation where instead of actually averting hospitalisations and deaths, you move over to just delaying them… going in the summer has some advantages”.

The blood price of illness and death will not buy an end to the pandemic. Professor Paul Hunter told the i on Wednesday that herd immunity was in reality “out of reach” due to Delta’s substantially increased transmissibility outstripping the protection against infection offered by the vaccines.

Moreover, the government has announced no plans for the vaccination of children, leaving a huge reservoir of potential infection. The result will be persistent waves of COVID-19, especially in the colder months. As the Guardian ’s science editor Ian Sample explained on Monday, “For the health service, living with coronavirus means learning to endure a double wave each winter as coronavirus and flu arrive together.” Whitty told the Local Government Association on Wednesday, “it will still be quite a difficult winter, especially for the NHS.”

The government is in fact creating conditions for the development of a new, more vaccine-resistant and potentially more deadly variant of the virus, which will be given ample opportunity to mutate by the surge of cases being prepared.

The UK is now a bellwether for the world, the vast majority of which faces an even more devastating scenario due to significantly lower vaccination rates. With governments globally rushing to remove all public health restrictions, Britain shows the deluge of infections which will inevitably follow. Its example must be taken as a warning to the international working class that it must act now to take the response to the pandemic into its own hands, based on the fight for a socialist programme which puts trillions at the disposal of a globally coordinated public health programme for the eradication of the virus.

All Covid safety measures being lifted in UK schools as Delta variant explodes

Margot Miller

UK Education Secretary Gavin Williamson confirmed Tuesday that all remaining safety restrictions in schools will be lifted in England in September, even as the new deadly, more transmissible Delta variant spreads exponentially.

The measures are part of the Conservative governments’ lifting of all mandatory Covid health protections to reopen the economy fully on July 19. This necessitates all children attending school so parents can be at work.

Teacher Miriam Mizzi talks to socially distanced year seven pupils during their first day at Kingsdale Foundation School in London, Thursday, Sept. 3, 2020. From July 19, all Covid safety regulations in England will be scrapped. (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)

Among the restrictions ending is the policy of sending “bubbles” of schoolchildren home to self-isolate if one child in the bubble comes into contact with a Covid case. Children will only have to self-isolate if they personally test positive. The policy of setting up “bubbles” in schools was always a token measure and could never have halted the spread of Covid, but ending it will escalate the spread of the virus and make schools more unsafe for children, education staff, other school workers and parents.

At the beginning of the autumn term, secondary school children will have two lateral flow tests—which are not accurate—and then twice weekly tests at home until the end of September.

The UK now has more daily Covid cases than the whole of the European Union combined, recording case numbers similar to the high point of the virus in December/January. Health Secretary Sajid Javid said on Tuesday that daily cases could reach 100,000 by August.

Department for Education (DfE) figures recorded 640,000 (8.5 percent) pupil absences on July 2 associated with Covid, the highest since schools reopened in March. This was a leap from 375,000 the previous week. Public Health England (PHE) figures revealed 151 new school outbreaks in school week ending June 20, compared to 96 the previous week. In the week ending June 27, 15,000 children tested positive for Covid and 24,000 were absent with suspected Covid.

While children are less likely to become ill than adults, a proportion end up hospitalised while others develop debilitating Long Covid symptoms.

The advocacy and support group Long Covid Kids provided the following alarming statistics for England, compiled from Office for National Statistics and Public Health England data.

• Hospital admissions rose 28 percent to 6,129, week ending June 21.

• Children's covid hospital admissions are rising faster than in wave 2 of the pandemic last autumn.

• 8 percent of all Covid hospital admissions are children.

• One in every 100 child Covid cases result in hospitalisation.

• Infections are rising fastest in 5-14 year olds.

• Outbreaks in school nearly match those in December.

• 9,000 children have Long Covid extending beyond 12 months.

• One quarter of those hospitalised experience Long Covid symptoms for an average eight and a half months.

• There have been 59 paediatric deaths due to Covid.

The full consequences of Long Covid, including evidence of brain damage potentially impairing cognitive development, are unknown. Allowing the new variant to run rife as the government is doing, without any opposition from the Labour Party or the trade unions, means these figures could rise hugely.

Dr. Zubaida Haque of Independent SAGE (Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies) said July 2, 'I don't think we can do anything but conclude that this government is seriously carrying out its herd immunity policy through natural infection, through school children.'

Professor James Naismith, Director of the Rosalind Franklin Institute, said Prime Minister Boris Johnson 'is effectively conducting a mass experiment on young people as he lifts coronavirus restrictions.”

To justify its homicidal mission, the government and supporters assert that schools are overzealous in sending children home to isolate. They cite the damage disruptions in education—which are in fact due to them allowing the virus to spread—is doing to children’s mental health and lost learning, including among the disadvantaged.

The Conservative supporting Telegraph launched a “Campaign for Children” to stop sending “bubbles” home, backed by former Education Secretaries, Tory Kenneth Baker and Labour’s Lord David Blunkett, the Archbishop of York, head of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children Peter Wanless, Javed Khan, the chief executive of Barnado's, and Children’s Commissioner Dame Rachel de Souza.

This hogwash is not gaining traction with educators and parents. On the twitter page of SafeEdForAll—a group of parents “sharing a strong concern about the lack of Covid19 safety” in schools—someone tweeted that pupils are not sent home lightly from schools. Headlines in newspapers should reflect the truth and read, “pupils sent home to safeguard them from highly contagious chronic disease.” Another commented in support, “Schools not sent home because of overzealous isolation policy, they’re closing because infection is exploding.”

Many tweets complain about lifting mask wearing, and the lack of funding for Co2 monitors and adequate ventilation systems.

Feigned handwringing over disadvantaged children and the need to “catch up” on missed education is belied by ongoing education cuts and the redistribution of wealth to the richest in society. According to the National Audit Office, education funding is being shifted from schools in the more disadvantaged areas to those in less disadvantaged areas.

Despite scientists recommending the roll out of vaccines to children over 12 to halt further spread of the virus, the government remains reticent about vaccinating. The UK’s medical regulator MHRA approved the use of Pfizer in 12-15 year olds, but the government is awaiting further data. The US, Israel and France have begun inoculating this age group.

The fascistic herd immunity policy that has cost over 150,000 lives is epitomised by comments by Nervtag (subcommittee of SAGE) member Sir Robert Dingwall.

Dingwall is also a member of the government’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation. He declared “children are better protected by natural immunity generated through infection than asking them to take a possible risk of a vaccine.” Without a shred of evidence, welcoming the lifting of safety measures in schools he said, “A last wave of mild infections in unvaccinated younger people may well be what we are now seeing.”

Dingwall urged the government to stop spreading “panic” by disclosing daily Covid cases. “Medicine cannot deliver immortality. We’re all going to die one day,” he added.

Labour insists, in the words of leader Sir Keir Starmer, that children should be in school, “No ifs, no buts, no equivocation.” Shadow Education Secretary Kate Green urged the government to publish data before the end of term on pilot schemes in 200 schools to compare sending bubbles home to daily testing.

School are only open and contributing to the surge in cases because the education unions sabotaged large-scale opposition by parents and educators. National Association of Head Teachers leader Paul Whiteman, ASCL’s Geoff Barton and the National Education Union’s Kevin Courtney and Mary Bousted wrote a joint letter to Williamson asking for clarity as schools “still have little idea” how prepare for next term.

On Tuesday, Courtney said “It seems clear that the government policies are based on a new form of herd immunity strategy. They are hoping that the increase in vaccination rates and the increase in infection rates across the summer will eventually get cases to fall simply because there is no one left to infect.” Bousted said in a press release regarding the lifting of restrictions in education, “This is neglectful and reckless decision-making, when schools and colleges quite obviously need the backing of Government to ensure their workplace remains safe.”

Yet again, as the pandemic significantly worsens, there is no talk by the pro-capitalist unions about calling their members out on strike—only appeals to the government on how they should work with the unions as the proven means to keep education settings open.

Another 43 refugees drowned off the coast of Tunisia as a result of the EU’s fortress Europe policy

Martin Kreickenbaum

According to the Tunisian Red Crescent, 43 refugees drowned off the Tunisian coast near the town of Zarzis on 2 July, when their completely overcrowded boat capsized. Of the 127 on board, only 84 could be rescued. The refugees, who came from Egypt, Sudan, Eritrea, Chad, and Bangladesh, set out last week, near the Libyan town of Zuwarah.

The cemetery for migrants who have died trying to reach Europe, in the village of Zarzis, Tunisia, Saturday June 12, 2021. (AP Photo/Mehdi El Arem)

Four other boat incidents off the Tunisian coast have claimed the lives of almost 50 more refugees in the last ten days alone.

The situation for refugees in North Africa has worsened in recent weeks. The European Union is stubbornly refusing to take in refugees from the horrific, completely overcrowded detention camps in Libya and is not even sending an independent rescue mission to the central Mediterranean. Instead, the EU is cooperating closely with the criminal gangs known as the Libyan Coast Guard, notorious for interning, torturing and enslaving refugees.

The criminal character of the European Union is revealed nowhere more clearly than in its brutal treatment of people seeking refuge.

The 127 refugees had been wandering in the south-central Mediterranean for three days until their boat finally capsized off Tunisia. Those rescued included many minors and even a three-year-old. Quite a few had previously escaped the hellish torments of the Libyan internment camps. A woman from Cameroon who was rescued by the Tunisian Red Crescent reported that they were “treated like rubbish and raped” there.

A spokesman for the Tunisian Red Crescent, Munji Salim, said Tunisian reception centres were already overcrowded because many more refugees had met with an accident off the Tunisian coast this year while trying to reach Europe. The Italian immigration authorities have already registered nearly 21,000 refugees landing this year, more than three times as many as in the same period last year.

Added to this are almost 15,000 refugees who were picked up by the so-called Libyan Coast Guard in the first half of 2021 and brought back to Libya. According to the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), at least 720 refugees have drowned in the central Mediterranean this year, almost twice as many as at the same time last year, although the number of unreported cases is far higher.

Worrying incidents have been mounting in recent weeks. The Ocean Viking, belonging to the private aid organisation SOS Méditerranée, has rescued 572 people from distress at sea in six missions in Maltese and Libyan waters in the past five days and is now desperately seeking a safe harbour to bring them ashore. Of these, 369 refugees came from a wooden boat rescued in distress in Libyan waters that was in danger of capsizing. In two previous rescue operations in Maltese waters, more than 130 refugees were taken from boats rescued in distress.

Among others, 183 minors are now on board the Ocean Viking. Many of those rescued are suffering from fuel burns, sunburn, dehydration and extreme exhaustion after spending extended time at sea. Despite this, the ports on the European coast are refusing to allow the Ocean Viking to enter to bring the refugees to safety and provide them with medical care.

The Ocean Viking rescue mission exemplifies the European Union’s murderous policy towards refugees. The EU is deliberately driving hundreds of people to their deaths as it seals off its external borders.

The Ocean Viking is currently the only boat belonging to a private rescue organisation operating in the central Mediterranean. Other rescue ships are being detained by the Italian authorities on flimsy grounds and prevented from leaving. This currently affects, among others, the Geo Barents of Médecins Sans Frontières, the Sea-Eye 4 and the Sea-Watch 4. The Sea-Watch 3 has been allowed to sail to its homeport in Spain for repairs.

Since the EU and NATO have also completely stopped their rescue missions, the Ocean Viking is, in fact, the only remaining rescue ship in the central Mediterranean. The fact that the number of refugee crossings has nevertheless risen sharply refutes the EU’s claim that the presence of rescue ships constitutes a “pull factor” and encourages refugees to venture across the sea to Europe. It is the threatening situation in Sudan, Eritrea, Chad, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Bangladesh that forces these desperate people to make the life-threatening journey to Europe despite the risks.

Instead of rescuing refugees, the EU is working ever more closely with the so-called Libyan Coast Guard and is handing the refugees back over to the henchmen from whom they had escaped shortly before. The brutal means used by the Libyan Coast Guard against refugees are shown in a film by aid organisation Sea-Watch, which was recorded by the reconnaissance plane Seabird on 30 June.

The Seabird intercepted a distress call from a boat with 50 people on board in Maltese waters. On its way to the refugee boat, the Seabird encountered the Libyan Coast Guard vessel Ras Jadir. The Seabird then informed the Maltese Coast Guard of the threat of the refugees’ illegal repatriation from international waters to Libya, but the Maltese authorities simply hung up the phone.

When the Seabird spotted the wooden boat with 50 refugees on board, it witnessed a brutal attack by the Libyan Coast Guard. The Coast Guard fired at the refugee boat and only stopped firing after the Seabird had warned them several times. Then it sailed at high speed towards the small wooden boat and threatened to ram it. The refugees’ lives were in danger, and they were lucky to escape. According to current information, they reached the Italian island of Lampedusa safely.

In the meantime, the public prosecutor’s office in Agrigento, Italy has started an investigation based on the footage from Seawatch. Chief prosecutor Luigi Patronaggio, however, said the Italian Ministry of Justice would have to agree to the investigation as their target was a foreign authority. The Ras Jadir was provided to the Libyan militias by the Italian government, along with three identical ships.

The responsibility for the violent attacks on refugees by the “Libyan Coast Guard” lies with the governments in Rome, Berlin and Paris, who want to keep refugees out of the EU at all costs. Deliberately looking the other way and waiting for their Libyan stooges to do the dirty work has now become standard practice.

An incident that occurred on June 13 is significant. A wooden boat overcrowded with 170 refugees in distress at sea sent out a distress call. However, the Maltese and Italian authorities, as well as the European border protection agency Frontex, refrained from taking any rescue action for more than ten hours, although the situation on board was becoming worse.

Finally, the merchant ship Vos Triton, which flies the Gibraltar flag and belongs to a Dutch shipping company, took the refugees on board in international waters. Immediately afterwards, it handed the refugees over to a Libyan Coast Guard vessel, which brought them back to Libya against their will, where they were interned.

It was obviously a set-up. A merchant ship was brought in and secretly ordered to hand over the refugees to the Libyan henchmen. In the process, international maritime law was blatantly violated, and an illegal pushback operation carried out through middlemen. That the European Union simultaneously claims to uphold human rights is cynical and mendacious.

The cooperation with the Libyan militias goes so far that the EU is even indirectly involved in the internment camps for refugees in Libya.

Conditions in these camps are so atrocious that Médecins Sans Frontières recently withdrew from the last three camps where it had been providing medical care. The aid agency’s head of mission in Libya, Beatrice Lau, justified this step by saying that “the persistent pattern of violent incidents and serious injuries to refugees and migrants, as well as the danger to our staff, has reached a level that we can no longer accept.”

In mid-June, allegations emerged that minors had been sexually abused by guards at a camp run by the EU-funded Libyan Centre for Combating Illegal Immigration. The United Nations has long warned of the inhumane conditions in Libyan detention camps, which are particularly worrying in the Mabani, Abu Salim and Triq al-Sika camps.

The sharp increase in the number of victims and refugees illegally returned to Libya is a direct consequence of the European Union’s inhumane refugee policy. It wants to repel refugees from its own borders at all costs and does not shy away from cooperating with the most criminal elements to this end.

The EU’s claim to be acting against human traffickers in the central Mediterranean is also just a pretext. In April, the Libyan government released Abdulrahman Milad, one of the most wanted international human traffickers, “due to lack of evidence.” Now, he earns his living as a commander of the Libyan Coast Guard and serves the EU as a stooge in its restrictive fortress Europe policy.

Haiti under state of siege after president’s assassination

Bill Van Auken

Haiti’s interim prime minister Claude Joseph declared a state of siege throughout the impoverished Caribbean country Wednesday after the early morning assassination of de facto President Jovenel Moïse.

Soldiers patrol in Petion Ville, the neighborhood where the late Haitian President Jovenel Moise lived in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Wednesday, July 7, 2021 (AP Photo/Joseph Odelyn)

Moïse was shot dead at 1 a.m. by a commando squad armed with military-grade assault rifles. His wife, severely wounded, was flown via air ambulance to a trauma center in Florida. According to witnesses and an audio recording of the raid, the members of the death squad spoke English and Spanish.

Sustained gunfire was preceded by one of the members of the squad shouting out in American southern-accented English, “DEA operation! Everybody back up, stand down!”, an apparent ruse aimed at identifying the gunmen as members of the US Drug Enforcement Administration.

The US State Department issued a denial that the assassins were American agents.

While Moïse’s black-clad killers have been widely described as “mercenaries,” there were indications of a high level of sophistication in the attack, as well as of apparent support from within the Haitian regime. Witnesses reported that drones were seen flying above the home of the Haitian president during the raid and also heard the sound of a grenade.

Moïse’s private residence, where the killing took place, is located in the wealthy Pelerin 5 district of Pétionville, an area of fortified villas in the hills above the capital, Port-au-Prince. The only road leading to and from it is routinely guarded by Haitian security forces. Militarized police only arrived on the scene after dawn, while the media had free access, photographing abandoned black balaclavas and spent shell casings on the ground.

The normally crowded streets of Port-au-Prince were deserted Wednesday as the population waited with dread for a response to the assassination. Justifiable fears range from a bloody state crackdown to an escalation of violence by armed gangs linked to the security forces or even an armed intervention by the United States and other foreign powers.

With a population of 11 million, Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.

“In line with article 149 of the Constitution, I have just chaired an extraordinary council of ministers and we have decided to declare a state of siege throughout the country,” Joseph said during a speech broadcast on social media Wednesday. He added, “You can kill President Jovenel Moïse, but you cannot kill his ideas.”

The pretense that the actions of Joseph have anything to do with the constitution is laughable. As for Moïse’s “ideas,” there is no indication that they consisted of anything beyond securing his own power and the interests of his imperialist patrons.

Joseph is attempting to succeed Moïse, who was himself regarded by the majority of the Haitian population as an illegitimate president, even as Washington, the other major imperialist powers and the Organization of American States continued to lend him support.

Moïse came into office as a result of fraudulent elections, the first round of which had to be nullified in 2015. He was installed through a second election the following year in which barely 23 percent of the electorate participated. Under Haiti’s constitution, his five-year term ended in February, but he refused to step down, insisting on remaining in power for another year.

In the meantime, he sought to consolidate a presidential dictatorship. After the country failed to hold parliamentary elections, Moïse ruled by presidential decree for more than a year, with his appointments, including that of Joseph, never legitimately approved. On Monday, Moïse had announced that Joseph would be replaced as prime minister by Ariel Henry, a longtime US stooge, who would have been the sixth to hold the post since 2017. With the president’s assassination, the line of succession is far from clear.

Moïse had also replaced local mayors with his own supporters and was preparing to ram through an illegal constitutional referendum aimed at further consolidating a presidential dictatorship and protecting presidents from prosecution for any crimes committed while they were in office.

Moïse was the hand-picked successor of Michel Martelly, a former singer known as “Sweet Micky,” who was installed as president as the result of direct intervention into the 2010-2011 Haitian elections by then-US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Martelly, like Moïse, had close political ties to former members of the US-backed Duvalier dictatorship, which ruled Haiti for three decades before “Baby Doc” Duvalier was toppled by a popular revolt in 1986. Both of them made it a political priority to refound the Haitian Armed Forces (FAd’H) which were disbanded in 1995.

While Martelly received the backing of the Clintons (Bill Clinton was then the UN special envoy to Haiti) as the man to lead the recovery from Haiti’s devastating 2010 earthquake, Moïse cast himself as the “Haitian Trump” based upon his equally suspect claims about success as a businessman. Both were supported by Washington because of their unconditional support for IMF-dictated policies that subordinated the interests of the Haitian masses to the drive by foreign capital for profits based upon sweatshops, agribusiness, mining and tourism.

Moïse confronted mass opposition in the streets since 2018, when his government suddenly announced a 50 percent hike in gas prices as part of an IMF “readjustment” program. Mass demonstrations continued as it emerged that some $4 billion in oil import subsidies supplied by Venezuela under its Petrocaribe program, supposedly meant for Haitian development, had been pocketed by the government and its cronies. In the bargain, the corrupt Haitian government managed to solidify support from Washington by backing its regime-change operation against the government of President Nicolás Maduro.

Demonstrations erupted once again in February against Moïse’s refusal to step down after the end of his term and his assumption of increasingly dictatorial powers. Popular anger has only grown as the COVID-19 pandemic spreads through the impoverished country, without the government providing a single vaccination.

To the extent that demonstrations have waned, it is largely due to the government’s unleashing of violent repression, including by gangs linked to the police force, with opposition figures assassinated and inhabitants of Port-au-Prince’s shantytowns massacred.

No doubt reflecting urgent discussions within the US state apparatus, the Washington Post quickly posted an editorial Wednesday warning that Haiti was on the brink “anarchy,” posing “an immediate humanitarian threat to millions of Haitians and an equally urgent diplomatic and security challenge to the United States and major international organizations.” The Post editorial board’s conclusion? “Swift and muscular intervention is needed.”

The Post continues: “To prevent a meltdown that could have dire consequences, the United States and other influential parties—including France, Canada and the Organization of American States—should push for an international peacekeeping force, probably organized by the United Nations, that could provide the security necessary for presidential and parliamentary elections to go forward this year, as planned.”

The Post is apparently suggesting a revival of the “blue helmets” of the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), which conducted military operations in which hundreds of people were killed in various impoverished neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince between 2004 and 2017 under the command of Brazilian generals. The MINUSTAH deployment also triggered a cholera epidemic, the first in the country’s modern history, which claimed roughly 10,000 lives.

US President Joe Biden issued a statement Wednesday describing the assassination of Moïse as “heinous,” and declaring, “we stand ready to assist as we continue to work for a safe and secure Haiti.”

The last assassination of a Haitian head of state took place in 1915, when Jean Vilbrun Guillaume was captured and butchered after he himself had ordered the mass execution of his opponents. The day after his killing, US Democratic President Woodrow Wilson ordered the Marines to invade Haiti, where they stayed for nearly 20 years, ruthlessly suppressing a popular revolt.

The United Nations Security Council has scheduled a meeting on the situation in Haiti for today.

The Billionaire Space Race

Eric London

This month, the world is watching with bated breath as Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Virgin’s Richard Branson dash toward the finish line in the space race of the 21st century. Since the dawn of time, man has looked to the sky and wondered: Who will be the first billionaire in space? The wait is now over.

Jeff Bezos exploring the universe (Image composition credit: WSWS Media)

Never mind the fact that 250 million more people live in extreme poverty than in early 2020, according to the World Bank, or that 1.5 billion informal workers living on the margins of society lost most or all of their income last year. This week, in some unknown hospital located somewhere on this planet, the 4 millionth person died of the coronavirus.

The pandemic has shown that the capitalist class is hostile to harnessing scientific advancement to meet the needs of the human race here on Earth. What better time for two men to pour billions of dollars into plans to launch themselves into space (actually, sub-orbital flight) to impress shareholders and have a bit of fun?

A substantial layer of the financial aristocracy unironically agrees. The same Scrooges who hoard their wealth in offshore tax havens so they don’t have to chip in for social programs were desperate to outbid one another for a seat on an upcoming billionaire space flight. At a recent auction, one poor sucker paid $29.7 million for a ticket aboard Bezos’s Blue Origin flight.

The Wall Street Journal described a gripping, absolutely ripping moment at the auction house: “Bidding opened at $4.9 million and rose quickly to $10 million before four participants competed to ultimately raise the price to $28 million. A 6 percent buyer’s commission is added to the winning bid, taking the final cost to $29.7 million. Blue Origin said 7,600 bidders from 159 countries registered for the event.”

Team Bezos and Team Branson are engaged in petty sniping over who will be the “real” first billionaire out of the atmosphere. It isn’t exactly Kennedy and Khrushchev.

Branson brags that he will depart sooner, but Bezos claims that Branson is too chicken to travel as far out as he. A Bezos spokesman told the New York Times, “We wish [Branson] a great and safe flight, but they’re not flying above the Karman line and it’s a very different experience.” The Karman line is located 62 miles above Earth and is used by scientists to mark the line between Earth’s atmosphere and outer space.

Amazon workers have many guesses as to why Bezos is so eager to make it into space. There are no taxes out there, surely, and since a day on the Moon is the equivalent of 27 here on Earth, that means a worker’s 14-hour shift would be the equivalent of 380 hours of labor, and try making that without a bathroom break! Or maybe Bezos figures if he sets up shop on the far side of the Moon no pesky reporters will be able to expose the sweat shop conditions that exist inside.

On the other hand, what is not for Bezos to like here on Earth? Democratic and Republican politicians line up to hand him billions in subsidies, and there are hundreds of administrative judges and doctors ready to help deny workers’ compensation claims.

Actually, Bezos himself explained what the venture is really about in a 2019 interview with CNBC:

We send things up into space, but they are all made on Earth. Eventually it will be much cheaper and simpler to make really complicated things, like microprocessors and everything, in space and then send those highly complex manufactured objects back down to Earth, so that we don’t have the big factories and pollution generating industries that make those things now on Earth. And Earth can be zoned residential.

In other words, Bezos’ actual desire is to build factories on the Moon and on Mars, where presumably all the workers will be forced to live, since nobody working at Amazon is going to have the time or the energy to make the commute back to Earth.

It seems that all Earthlings are happy about Bezos and Branson leaving the planet. Over 150,000 people signed a petition on change.org titled “To the proletariat: Do not allow Jeff Bezos to return to Earth.” The petitioners explain, “Billionaires should not exist ... on earth, or in space, but should they decide the latter, they should stay there.”

We at the World Socialist Web Site wish only that there was extra room in those space pods for Henry Kissinger.

The fantastic scientific gains of recent years, as expressed in such “giant leaps” as the 2012 Mars rover, only show the potential for harnessing the technological and intellectual capacities of mankind to meet human need. The rover, “Curiosity,” is still rolling across the surface of Mars, gathering data and samples that promise to open up new pathways to the understanding of our Solar System. It is an insult to humanity’s remarkable drive for scientific development that such advances are now used, under capitalism, to satisfy the megalomania of two individuals who pass on what they learn to the weapons manufacturers and intelligence agencies.

But there is something more than megalomania in Bezos’ and Branson’s strange desire to personally travel into space. In his 2016 novel Zero K, Don DeLillo captures something of the instability of an aristocratic layer that knows it is destroying the planet and sitting on a social powder keg.

The novel features an aging hedge fund manager who joins an elite group of billionaires and statesmen who cryogenically freeze themselves, clinging to the possibility of eternal life. One group member explains to the oligarchs that burying their frozen bodies deep down in the Earth will make them safe from revolution, war or climate disaster, and allow them to live until a time when they can rule again:

Your situation, those few of you on the verge of the journey toward rebirth. You are completely outside the narrative of what we refer to as history. You are about to become, each of you, a single life in touch only with yourself. That world, the one above, is being lost to the systems. To the transparent networks that slowly occlude the flow of all those aspects of nature and character that distinguish humans from elevator buttons and doorbells.

Like the French and Russian aristocracies swept away by the revolutions of 1789 and 1917, an entire social layer comprised of Bezoses and Bransons see itself as belonging to a class of people who are “out of this world.” Their interests are directly hostile to those of the broad masses of the world’s population, who comprise the working class, whom they exploit to acquire astronomical wealth. If Jeff Bezos makes it into space, it will only be on the backs of the Amazon workers he exploited and ground up to make profit.

Only a revolutionary overthrow of capitalism can sweep social parasites and exploiters like these from atop the commanding heights of the economy and harness the immense technological advances of humankind to serve the interests of billions of people.

Protests grow against the Tokyo Summer Olympics as COVID-19 cases surge

Emily Ochiai

With three weeks until the Olympics, new COVID-19 cases in Tokyo are on the rise, after the government ended the state of emergency on June 20. The following week saw a doubling of infections. On July 1, Tokyo had more than 670 new cases, at least 63 of which were the more infectious delta variant.

People walk by posters to promote the Olympic Games planned to start in the summer of 2021, in Tokyo, Wednesday, June 16, 2021. (AP Photo/Koji Sasahara)

In response to the sharp increase in cases, Prime Minister Suga stated: “If the state of emergency is reissued, games without an audience may be a possibility.” The Tokyo Olympics Committee and the International Olympics Committee have shown no intention of cancelling or further postponing the Games, which are expected to bring more than 15,000 athletes and thousands of coaches, trainers and officials from all over the world.

Earlier this year, in an attempt to convince the population that the Olympics will be safe, Prime Minister Suga announced that Japan would finish vaccinating all elderly citizens by the end of July. As of now, however, only 12 percent of the adult population is fully vaccinated.

A poll in May showed that 83 percent of people in Japan do not want the Olympic Games to take place. There have been numerous protests against them.

On June 23, a demonstration was organised in front of Tochomae—the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Station—calling for the cancellation of the Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics. Numerous signs were held up reading: “Use the [Olympic] funds for COVID” and “Olympics destroy lives. End them now” were held up. The demonstrators then marched throughout the Shinjuku district with more people joining. By 9 p.m. the gathering had swelled to more than 850.

On June 26, nurses and medical staff protested in Sapporo to demand the cancellation of the games. Placards included “Cancel the Olympics. We must do everything to fight COVID.” They told the media: “We have to cancel the Olympics Games and put all our efforts into medical care, so that we do not have a healthcare crisis.”

An online poll conducted, on June 29, revealed that the overwhelming majority of the nurses are opposed to the games, with 54 percent calling for postponement and 32 percent for cancellation. One person commented: If they force us to have the Olympics now, it would be completely chaotic. I cannot stand a worse healthcare crisis”.

The ruling class has responded by deploying police to intimidate and discourage people from voicing their opposition. In May, the home of an anti-Olympics protester was raided by police and her computer and smartphone taken away. Her lawyer told the media, “There is nothing illegal in the protest. It is likely that the aim of the police in raiding her house was to investigate the anti-Olympics movement and also to set an example—a scare tactic for others as a deterrent.”

A day after the Tochomae protest, 140 police raided a Kyoto University dorm and arrested a member of a pseudo-left group, Zengakuren, for using a false address when renewing his driver’s license in October 2020. Throughout the pandemic, Zengakuren has been prominent in opposing the Olympics and criticizing the administration.

A petition to cancel the Olympics games on Change.org now has over 445,000 signatures from all over the world. Its organizer, Kenji Utsunomiya, submitted the petition to the Tokyo governor on May 14, with more than 350,000 signatures at the time, and a letter requesting the cancellation of the Games. In June, it was revealed that the Tokyo governor had never reviewed or considered the request, despite having received it.

Another Change.org petition was initiated on July 1, stating: “We appeal for the cancellation of the Tokyo Olympics, where the danger is becoming more and more apparent!” In just over three days, the petition has had more than 44,500 signatures.

One person commented: “Now that the spread of variant strains is becoming more and more serious, if the Olympic Games are held forcibly, Japan could become a source of further explosive infections. If that happens, the lives of people, not only in Japan, but around the world will be endangered. Decide to cancel now!”

Another declared: “We strongly oppose the Olympics, which is an event that serves the interests and profit of the organizers and those closely related, and not for the majority of the people! Preventing COVID and stabilizing people’s lives must be a priority!”

It is clear that the interests of the capitalist elites and the working class are in direct contradiction internationally. The ruling class is willing to sacrifice millions of human lives to COVID-19, in pursuit of profit, while workers are demanding rational and scientific measures to stop the pandemic.

In Japan, the pandemic is creating a crisis in the health system, which has already been hard hit by funding cuts, resulting in the elimination of more than 20,000 public hospital beds between 2008 and 2018. Hundreds of people, infected with the virus, are waitlisted to be admitted to hospital, forced to quarantine at home with no adequate care.

Okinawa has experienced one of the sharpest increases in COVID cases, and the occupancy rate of hospital beds for COVID patients is 92 percent.

The social crisis has also dramatically worsened. It is estimated that more than 100,000 people have lost their jobs during the pandemic. Homelessness has increased to the highest level since the economic crisis associated with the collapse of the asset bubble in the early 1990s.

Last Friday, fearing protests, particularly by athletes, the International Olympics Committee announced new rules, supposedly allowing for athletes to express their views at venues. At the same time, however, all demonstrations on medals’ podiums, fields of play during competitions, and at the opening and closing ceremonies are strictly banned.

What the growing class struggle in the US reveals about the pseudo-left

Marcus Day

Both in the United States and in other countries, workers are engaging in an upsurge of strikes and militant struggles, seeking to reverse decades of worsening living standards and working conditions. As has often been the case, the development of the class struggle is shedding light on fundamental aspects of contemporary social and political life, putting to the test political programs and tendencies.

Shortly after midnight on Monday, nearly 600 Frito-Lay workers in Topeka, Kansas, walked out in the first strike at the facility since at least the early 1970s, when the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers, and Grain Millers union (BCTGM) initially established a presence at the plant. Last week, workers at the snack food giant overwhelmingly rejected a fourth contract proposal this year, defying the BCTGM’s efforts to pass a deal that failed to meet workers’ demands for substantial raises to make up for years in which pay has been virtually frozen.

The Frito-Lay strike is the latest in a recent series of rebellions against company-union concessionary agreements. At Volvo Trucks’ New River Valley plant in Virginia, roughly 2,900 workers are entering the second month of their strike after overwhelmingly voting down two contracts pushed by the United Auto Workers. The contracts would have significantly raised health care costs and throttled wage increases. At Warrior Met Coal in Alabama, striking miners rejected a United Mine Workers-backed contract in April by a stunning 1,006 to 45 vote, burning copies of the pro-company agreement outside the union hall.

And beyond the US, nickel miners employed at transnational firm Vale Inco’s northern Ontario operations are continuing their strike after overwhelmingly rejecting a United Steelworkers-backed contract which would have kept raises far below inflation.

In every struggle that is taking place, workers are fighting against appalling conditions of exploitation previously agreed to and enforced by the trade unions, which have spent the last 40 years integrating themselves more and more deeply into management and the capitalist state. As the recent wave of contract rejections shows, workers are now moving into increasingly open conflict with the present joint corporate-union efforts to maintain these conditions and deepen the attacks.

For any genuinely left-wing organization, let alone socialist or Marxist one, such a renewal in the fighting capacity of the working class—and its opposition to the agencies operating on behalf of the corporations—is to be not only welcomed, but aided and encouraged to the maximum degree, which has been the response of the World Socialist Web Site, the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) and its affiliated Socialist Equality Parties.

But this is the opposite of the reaction of a host of parties and publications that present themselves as left-wing or socialist.

Most striking has been the response—or lack of response—to the strike at Volvo Trucks by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and its most prominent media outlet, Jacobin magazine. To date, Jacobin has not published a single article on the struggle at Volvo, which has been ongoing since April, nor has the DSA issued any official statements.

The silence by the DSA and Jacobin on the Volvo strike has been mirrored to one degree or another throughout the entirety of what falsely presents itself as the “left” in the United States, from Socialist Alternative, which has also published zero articles on the strike, to Left Voice and Labor Notes, which have published only cursory reports.

In the little coverage that has appeared in these publications, there is no mention of the Volvo Workers Rank-and-File Committee, which has played a leading role in organizing opposition at the Virginia plant where workers are striking. The one notable exception to the media blackout on the VWRFC was an article that appeared in Counterpunch (“The Volvo Strike,” by Kenneth Surin), which did note that workers at the plant “have a deep distrust of their union, so much so that they formed the Volvo Workers Rank-and-File Committee to counter the UAW’s attempt to isolate striking workers.”

It is worth contrasting the overall reticence on the struggle at Volvo by organizations such as the DSA with the wall-to-wall coverage and support they gave to the unionization drive at Amazon’s facility in Bessemer, Alabama. The drive to bring in a union at Bessemer was a top-down, state-approved effort that received the official blessing of the Biden administration, the Democratic Party, and even sections of the Republican Party, along with substantial portions of the corporate media.

While Jacobin has published nothing on the Volvo strike, it produced close to 50 articles on the drive by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) to unionize Amazon. Socialist Alternative produced 15 articles, Left Voice 10, and Labor Notes eight.

Under conditions of a growing movement of the working class against the pro-corporate trade unions, the pseudo-left is moving to shore up the very same trade union apparatus, bitterly opposing any independent initiative and organization of the working class. The DSA has stated that its “highest national priority” is to ensure passage of the Protect the Right to Organize Act, or PRO Act, a Democratic Party-sponsored bill aimed at bolstering support for the trade unions, in particular their ability to “organize” the growing sections of workers who are not unionized, such as gig workers at Uber, Lyft and Doordash.

The differing responses of the DSA and other pseudo-left groups to every state-backed effort to expand the unions—boundless enthusiasm—versus the rebellion against the UAW at Volvo—frosty silence—is itself an expression of the social basis and political orientation of such organizations, which do not represent the working class, but rather privileged sections of the upper-middle class.

The pseudo-left endlessly insists on the supremacy of the corporate police agencies falsely described as “unions” because of the role they play in disciplining workers and subordinating them to the Democratic Party, which these groups all either operate within or are oriented towards.

Not least among the reasons that the DSA has said nothing about the Volvo strike is the central role played by the WSWS and the Socialist Equality Party, which have assisted workers in forming the VWRFC and found a wide hearing among those opposed to the corporatist UAW. While the DSA routinely denounces the WSWS as “sectarian,” what they really fear is the growth of its influence among the working class and the possibility of a broad movement of workers towards socialism, which would threaten the considerable investment accounts of the upper-middle class layers which the DSA and Jacobin represent.

Their conception of a “labor movement” is one that is thoroughly integrated into the state and corporate management, with sections of the middle class functioning as arbiters. This means, under the present conditions, a “labor movement” that is dedicated above all to the suppression of the class struggle and the imposition of the demands of the ruling class.

An increasing number of members of the pseudo-left organizations have made their way into the union hierarchy and the wealth and privileges offered, with perhaps the most prominent recent example being Jesse Sharkey, president of the Chicago Teachers Union, formerly a long-time leading member of the defunct International Socialist Organization, and now the DSA.

The integration of the pseudo-left into the structure of the unions has coincided with the unions’ own transformation into auxiliaries of the corporations and the state, increasingly unable to conceal their subservience to corporate profits and contempt for workers’ interests.

Beginning in earnest with the defeat of the PATCO air traffic controllers strike nearly 40 years ago, which was deliberately isolated and broken by the AFL-CIO, the unions have worked to ensure a highly regimented and controlled labor force wherever they hold sway, with pay low enough to make US workers “competitive” on an international scale.

The trade unions have hemorrhaged members throughout this time, both through the destruction of large swaths of jobs in the auto, steel and other industries—which the unions suppressed resistance to—and through the increasing rejection of the unions by workers who have witnessed or suffered through their endless betrayals.

The inability of the RWDSU to get more than 13 percent of workers at the Amazon Bessemer plant to vote to bring it in is not an expression of a rightward movement of workers. It is, rather, another expression of the same moods that led to massive repudiations of union-backed contracts at Volvo and Frito-Lay.

The union executives and officials have nonetheless grown rich in the process. Objectively speaking, they have made their way into a different social class than workers, drawing salaries in the low- to mid-hundreds of thousands, placing them in the top 5 or even 1 percent of income earners. They have shifted a growing share of their assets and wealth into the stock market, making them, like their confreres in the pseudo-left, increasingly hostile towards and terrified of any movement of workers that could overturn the low-wage regime on which US corporate profits and inflated share values are based.

The union apparatuses in the US, which for much of their history have been dominated by a ferocious anti-communism and support for capitalism, have shifted even further to the right politically, in line with the change in their material interests, constituting now a hothouse for the most reactionary nationalism, corporatism and even fascistic politics.