Sri Lankan government to remove pandemic restrictions despite continuing Delta variant infections

Naveen Dewage

The Sri Lankan government is preparing to abandon its limited pandemic restrictions, despite continuing infections of the highly-contagious Delta variant across the island.

On July 5, President Gotabhaya Rajapakse said that he would fully reopen the country by September, claiming that by that time everyone over 30 years of age would be vaccinated. “To face the pandemic, the only solution is the vaccination,” he declared, but then added: “Without opening the country we cannot sustain the economy.”

Workers jostle to get seat in bus at Kottawa [Credit: WSWS]

In May last year, the government, in response to big business demands, fully reopened the economy. It was forced, however, to later impose some restrictions because the reopening paved the way for a sharp surge of infections and deaths.

Rajapakse’s moves to do away with existing restrictions defy numerous warnings from the World Health Organization (WHO) and Sri Lankan health experts.

On July 2, WHO director Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned against governments adopting a “vaccination is the only solution” policy.

“Public health and social measures like strong surveillance, strategic testing, early case detection, isolation and clinical care remain critical as well as masking, physical distancing, avoiding crowded places and keeping indoor areas well-ventilated are the basis for the response,” he told international media.

Delta variant infections are rapidly increasing around the world, including in the US, the UK and Israel, which have vaccinated much of their populations but have seriously reduced COVID-19 precautions.

People lining up without social distancing outside vaccination centre in plantation region [Source: Facebook]

The main concern of the cash-strapped Rajapakse government and the capitalist class, which face a deepening economic crisis, is not protecting Sri Lankan lives but boosting profits. Last week President Rajapakse appointed his younger brother Basil as the new finance minister whose task will be to further bolster big business and intensify the government’s attacks on living conditions.

According to the Daily Mirror, Basil Rajapakse met with some ministers yesterday and “emphasised the need to revitalise the manufacturing base of the country as otherwise the government would fall short of money to run the economy.”

Director General of Health Service Dr. Asela Guanwardena has further relaxed COVID-19 regulations by allowing cinemas, theatres, swimming pools, day care centres and museums to be opened with 25 percent capacity. All Sri Lankan factories are now fully operating, including the garment industry, which has continued without restriction since May 2020.

Education Minister G. L. Peiris yesterday announced that the vaccination program has been expedited and that all Sri Lankan schools will be reopened in August.

Colombo is attempting to paint a rosy picture of COVID-19 infections. This is false and dangerous. The total number of coronavirus infections rose to 274,538 on July 11 with 1,507 new cases that day and the seven-day daily average stands at 1,273. In the past ten days, 500 people have died from virus, including 33 on July 11, taking the total death toll to 3,467.

The number of infections and deaths in Sri Lanka, however, are not properly reported because of the low level of polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing, a deliberate government policy. On July 11, for example, there were only 13,777 PCR tests.

Sri Jayawardenepura University immunology and molecular department head Dr. Chandima Jeewandara reported yesterday that 20 Delta cases were discovered in Colombo with new test samples still to be examined.

Public Health Inspectors Union leader Upul Rohana told the Daily Mirror yesterday that the situation was serious and that Sri Jayewardenepura University health officials were downplaying information on Delta variant infections.

On July 3, 14 Delta variant infections were detected in a batch of 142 samples from across the country. As well as Colombo, Delta cases were reported in Galle, Matara and Trincomalee, which means the deadly variant has spread to many areas of the island.

Independent health expert Dr. Ravi Rannan-Eliya responded with a Twitter comment: “It’s worrying that one in ten of 142 samples from all over the island were Delta. Don’t know the details, but strongly suggest we now have several hundred or thousand Delta cases in the country.” He warned: “We should be doing everything we can to control this.”

On July 5, a garment worker from the Koggala Special Economic Zone, where almost 12,000 workers are employed, was found to be infected with the Delta variant. Economic zone director Sisil Fernando insisted there was no danger of other workers being infected because a vaccination program was underway, indicating that production would continue at the factory.

Poonduloya tea estate workers demanding COVID-19 compensation and relief funds [Source: Facebook]

Employers, with the blessing of the government, have not shut their plants after the discovery of infections. In fact, factory closures have only occurred when employees refused to work in unsafe conditions. Those plants, with the full backing of the trade unions, soon reopened.

The Sri Lankan media is fully supporting the government and big business’s criminal reopening policies. A July 5 editorial entitled “Living with Covid-19” in the Daily Mirror praised the Singapore government’s abandonment of basic pandemic safety measures.

“They propose scrapping lockdowns and mass contact tracing, to allow for a return to quarantine-free travel and the resumption of large gatherings… it even wants Singapore to stop the count of daily Covid-19 cases,” the editorial gleefully declared.

The Singapore government taskforce “proposes changing the pandemic into something less threatening, to something like influenza, foot and mouth disease, or chickenpox,” the newspaper continued. “The Singapore model is different, and the math seems to add up… Perhaps it’s time to look east for solutions.”

Next day the Daily Mirror published a comment by P.K. Balachandran which endorsed this strategy and the Rajapakse government’s moves. “As in the West… no room should be given to paranoia about the virus. Paranoia will damage public morale and their confidence in the future.”

Balachandran praised the government and declared that it was important to “resist the temptation to re-impose lockdowns and movement restrictions… which will only retard the economy, affect income generation.” He referred to the murderous “herd immunity” policy, which has led to the death of millions of people around the world, as the “solution.”

The working class must reject the Rajapakse government’s herd-immunity agenda which is backed by every faction of the ruling class. There is no national solution to the pandemic under the capitalist system where profits take precedence over human life.

EU and Russia’s Fraught Relationship – A Timeline

Livneet Shergill

Russia and Europe share strong historical and cultural ties from time immemorial. But these ties did not translate into amicable trade relations between the two.  The Russian Federation and the European Union both came into existence in the early 1990’s. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Russia we all know today came into being. During the same time period, the European Union also came into existence with the signing of the Maastricht treaty. When the EU was coming into existence in 1993, Boris Yelstin, the premier of Russia did not show great eagerness in joining the European Union, as there was much to handle within Russia. Moreover, at that time the economic structure of Russia was very different from other member countries of the EU and it would not have been in the best interest of the EU to also include Russia in it.

To begin with, Russia did not formally enter into the EU, nonetheless, a declaration was signed between the two, to strengthen their relationship. The Partnership and Cooperation Agreement (PCA) was signed in 1994. With the signing of the PCA, the European Union aimed at developing better bilateral relationships with member countries of the former Soviet Union; on the other hand, Russia was aiming at forging better relations with other western democracies, especially the United States. When it came to the practical implementation of the PCA agreement, Russia was not willing to fully comply with EU standards. Instead of focusing on dealing with the EU collectively, Russia preferred to deal with member countries individually. Whereas on part of the EU, PCA didn’t show any flexibility towards Russia; it was expected that either Russia would comply with the entire EU policy or it would have to stay outside the European Union.

In 2000, when Vladimir Putin got elected as the next President of Russia, he initially exhibited aspiration in cooperating with the EU and eventually joining it. Putin’s Russia harbored the wish of regaining its old glory; and in this light, Russia saw the United States and NATO as a threat, and the European Union as an ally. However, with the Iraq invasion by United States led forces in 2003, there was a paradigm shift in the Russian thinking. Now, President Putin wanted Russia to be a powerful country in Eurasia, with its neighbors aligning with it rather than the EU. In 2004 when several more countries (including the three Baltic countries) became members of the European Union, Russia began to see the EU as an expanding power, which might eventually encroach its sovereignty. Russia accused the European Union of being a participant in the “color revolutions” in Georgia (2003), Ukraine (2004) and Kyrgyzstan (2005).

During the period of 2006-2011, paths of Russia and EU further diverged. In this period, Russia began to see the EU with the same threat perception as the United States and NATO. Putin was not happy with Russia’s position in the post-cold war scenario. Thus, Russia began on the path of “independent foreign policy.” Following this, Russia’s war with Georgia in 2008 further strained the relationship between the two. This led to suspension of negotiations by the EU with Russia with regard to the new Partnership and Cooperation Agreement. Then in 2009 EU started a partnership program with six Eastern European countries, namely Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, the Republic of Moldova and Ukraine. As a counterweight, the Eurasian Customs Union was established, with Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan as its members. Thus, both the EU and Russia strived to enhance their regional dominance.

Putin’s reelection as President in 2012 was marred by protests. Russia claimed that these protests were backed by Western democracies and the EU. February 2014 Revolution of Dignity in Ukraine was also seen as being supported by the EU. The situation went from bad to worse with the Crimean Crisis. After the Ukrainian Revolution of Dignity, Russia via military intervention annexed the Crimean Peninsula in March 2014. This was a step towards increasing the regional power of Russia. As a result, March 2014 started a period of restrictive measures against Russia by the European Union. These restrictive measures took many forms. Russia was excluded from G8. Russia’s induction into OECD and International Energy Agency was stalled. Bilateral summits between the EU and Russia also got deferred. Furthermore, economic sanctions targeting specific economic sectors were put in place. As a retaliation to these sanctions and restrictions imposed by the EU and certain western countries, Russia too responded with counter-sanctions on agricultural goods, raw materials and food.

Poisoning of the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny in August 2020 further deteriorated the relations. As a result, in March 2021 new sanctions were imposed on senior Russia officials by EU and US. In a retaliatory action Russia banned senior EU officials in April 2021.

Presently, the EU-Russia relations have reached their lowest level. From here it is going to be a tightrope walk for both Russia and the European Union. The basic conflict arises due to the inability of Russia to shrug off its Soviet era pride. Russia is not ready for a secondary role in the European Union. Moreover, the EU and Russia follow different schools of thought when it comes to international relations. The EU adheres to Liberalism and Russia prefers Neorealism. The European Union and Russia’s relationship is fraught with more downs than ups. But there is no denying the fact that both of them long for a more harmonious relation with each other. The bright spot in this topsy-turvy EU-Russia relationship is that both the European Union and Russia have a continental vision of Europe. Notwithstanding the fact that at present Russia prefers to be a free agent, the continental vision of Europe is going to act as catalyst of better EU-Russia relations.

Personality and ambition potentially fuel divide among Gulf states

James M. Dorsey

Personality as well as the conflation of genuine national interest with personal ambition contribute to the widening gap between Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

It was only a matter of time before Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman would want to come out on his own and no longer be seen as the protégé of his erstwhile mentor and Emirati counterpart, Crown Prince Mohamed bin Zayed.

By the same token, there was little doubt that the Saudi prince and probable next monarch would want to put to rest any suggestion that it was the UAE rather than the kingdom that called the shots in the Gulf as well as the wider Middle East.

No doubt, Prince Mohammed will not have forgotten revelations about Emirati attitudes towards Saudi Arabia and the UAE’s strategic vision of the relationship between the two countries that was spelt out in emails by Yusuf al-Otaiba, the UAE ambassador in Washington and a close associate of his country’s strongman, that were leaked in 2017.

The emails made clear that UAE leaders believed they could use Saudi Arabia, the Gulf’s behemoth, and its Saudi crown prince as a vehicle to promote Emirati interests.

“Our relationship with them is based on strategic depth, shared interests, and most importantly the hope that we could influence them. Not the other way around,” Mr. Al-Otaiba wrote.

In a separate email, the ambassador told a former US official that “I think in the long term we might be a good influence on KSA (Kingdom of Saudi Arabia), at least with certain people there.”

A participant in a more recent meeting with Mr. Al-Otaiba quoted the ambassador as referring to the Middle East as “the UAE region,” suggesting an enhanced Emirati regional influence. In a similar vein, former Dubai police chief Dhahi Khalfan, blowing his ultra-nationalist horn, tweeted: “It’s not humanity’s survival of the strongest, it’s the survival of the smartest.”

To be sure, Prince Mohammed has been plotting the UAE’s positioning as a regional economic and geopolitical powerhouse for far longer than his Saudi counterpart. It is not for nothing that it earned the UAE the epitaph of “Little Sparta” in the words of former US Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis.

No doubt, smarts count for a lot but in the ultimate analysis, the two crown princes appear to be exploiting windows of opportunity that exist as long as their most powerful rivals, Turkey and Iran, countries with far larger, highly educated populations, huge domestic markets, battle-hardened militaries, significant natural resources, and industrial bases, fail to get their act together.

In the meantime, separating the wheat from the chaff in the Gulf spat may be easier said than done. Gulf analyst Bader al-Saif notes that differences among Gulf states have emerged as a result of regime survival strategies that are driven by the need to gear up for a post-oil era.

The emergence of a more competitive landscape need not be all negative. Mr. Al-Saif warns, however, that “left unchecked…differences could snowball and negatively impact the neighbourhood.

Several factors complicate the management of these differences.

For one, the Saudi crown prince’s Vision 2030 plan for weening the kingdom off its dependence on the export of fossil fuel differs in principle little from the perspective put forward by the UAE and Qatar, two countries that have a substantial head start.

Saudi Arabia sought to declare an initial success in the expanded rivalry by announcing this week that the International Air Transport Association (IATA), the airlines’ global industry body, had opened its regional headquarters in Riyadh. IATA denied that the Saudi office would have regional responsibility.

The Saudi announcement came on the heels of the disclosure of Saudi plans to create a new airline to compete with world leaders, Emirates and Qatar Airways.

Further complicating the management of differences is the fact that Saudi Arabia and the UAE are likely to compete for market share as they seek to maximize their oil export revenues in the short- and medium-term before oil demand potentially plateaus and then declines in the 2030s.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, economic diversification and social liberalization are tied up with the two crown princes’ competing geopolitical ambitions in positioning their countries as the rather than a regional leader.

Mr. Al-Oteiba, the UAE ambassador, signaled Emirati Prince Mohammed’s ambition in 2017 in an email exchange with Elliot Abram, a former neo-conservative US official.

“Jeez, the new hegemon! Emirati imperialism! Well, if the US won’t do it, someone has to hold things together for a while,” Mr. Abrams wrote to Mr Al-Oteiba referring to the UAE’s growing regional role.

“Yes, how dare we! In all honesty, there was not much of a choice. We stepped up only after your country chose to step down,” Mr. Al-Oteiba replied.

Differences in the ideological and geopolitical thinking of the two Prince Mohammeds when it comes to political Islam and the Brotherhood re-emerged recently for the first time in six years.

Differing Saudi and Emirati approaches were initially evident in 2015 when King Salman and his son first came to office, a period when the Emirati crown prince, who views political Islam and the Muslim Brotherhood as an existential threat, had yet to forge close ties to the kingdom’s new leadership.

At the time, Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al Feisal, barely a month after King Salman’s ascendancy, told an interviewer that “there is no problem between the kingdom and the movement.” 

The Muslim World League, a body established by Saudi Arabia in the 1960s to propagate religious ultra-conservatism and long dominated by the Brotherhood, organized a month later a conference in a building Mecca that had not been used since the banning of the brothers to which Qataris with close ties to the Islamists were invited.

Saudi Arabia adopted a harder line towards Brotherhood-related groups within months of the rise of the Salmans as Emirati Prince Mohammed gained influence in the Saudi court.

The Muslim League has since become the Saudi crown prince’s main vehicle for promoting his call for religious tolerance and inter-faith dialogue as Saudi Arabia and the UAE promote themselves as icons of a socially moderate form of Islam that nonetheless endorses autocratic rule.

The kingdom signalled a potential change in its attitude towards Brotherhood-related groups with the broadcasting last week by Saudi state-controlled Al Arabiya TV of a 26-minute interview with Khaled Meshaal, the Doha-based head of the political bureau of Hamas, the Islamist group that controls the Gaza Strip. Hamas maintains relations with Iran and is viewed as being part of a Brotherhood network. Mr. Meshaal called for a resumption of relations between Saudi Arabia and the movement.

Saudi Arabia designated Hamas as a terrorist organization the year before the rise of the Salmans as part of a dispute between Qatar, a supporter of Hamas and the Brotherhood, and Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain, which had withdrawn their ambassadors from the Gulf state. The kingdom was particularly upset by the close relations that Hamas had forged with Iran as well as Turkey, Saudi Arabia’s main rivals for regional hegemony.

A litmus test of the degree of change in the kingdom’s attitude will be whether Saudi Arabia releases scores of Hamas members that were arrested in 2019 as part of Saudi efforts to garner Palestinian support for former US President Donald J. Trump’s controversial Israeli-Palestinian peace plan.

Quoting the Arabic service of Turkey’s state-run Anadolu news agency, Al-Monitor reported that Al Arabiya had refrained from broadcasting a segment of the interview in which Mr. Meshaal called for the release of the detainees.

The Saudi-UAE rivalry and the ambitions of their leaders make it unlikely that the two crown princes will look at structural ways of managing differences like greater regional economic integration through arrangements for trade and investment as well as an expanded customs union that would make the region more attractive to foreign investors and improve the Gulf states’ bargaining power.

In the absence of strengthening institutions, the bets are on the Saudi and Emirati crown princes, in the words of Mr. al-Saif, the Gulf analyst, recognizing that despite their differences, “it doesn’t make sense for either one of them to let go of the other.”

Scars from NATO

Slavisha Batko Milacic

After Yugoslavia’s (Serbia) President Slobodan Milosevic refused to accept the so-called Rambouillet Agreement in 1999, which in reality was NATO ultimatum that demanded from Serbia and Montenegro to allow NATO troops to occupy the province of Kosovo as well as that NATO can build bases in Serbia, and that all NATO personnel have diplomatic immunity, which means that they could not be held criminally responsible in Serbia and Montenegro, NATO attack was launched without any authorization from the United Nations. The intervention was called humanitarian under the pretext of stopping the persecution of Albanians. In media presentations by the BBC, the Serbs were the modern Nazis and Albanians the Jews. After they successfully presented the Serbs as the bad guys, NATO had a free hand to open excessive force. NATO claims about tens of thousands of killed Albanians later turned out to be completely false. The real death toll in Kosovo before NATO attack was revealed after the war and it was  around 2,000 with the majority of the killings committed by the armed terrorist-separatist group, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). The KLA, previously classified by Washington as a terrorist organization, was elevated in the run-up to the war as the sole legitimate representative of Kosovo’s Albanian population. The KLA sought to create as much violence and death as possible in order to pave the way to NATO intervention.

The war against Serbia and Montenego lasted for 78 days. Hospitals, factories and schools were destroyed, along with bridges, roads and military infrastructure. The airstrikes killed around 2,500 people and wounded another 12,500. The bombing destroyed and damaged 25,000 housing units, 470 km of roads and 595 kilometers of railroad were disabled. 14 airports, 19 hospitals, 20 health centers, 18 kindergartens, 69 schools, 176 cultural monuments and 44 bridges were damaged while 38 were destroyed, according to Serbian estimates. During the bombing, 2, 300 air strikes were carried out on the 995 facilities across the country. NATO launched 1,300 cruise missiles, bombed Serbia and Montenegro with 37,000 “cluster bombs”, using prohibited ammunition with depleted uranium. The decision to bomb Serbia and Montenegro was made for the first time in history, without the approval of the UN Security Council. One of the NATO airstrikes used laser-guided bombs to take out railway bridge in southern Serbia, killing at least 10 people on a passenger train. A deliberate attack on the Serbian TV broadcaster RTS in Belgrade took lives of 16 civilian workers. This was the first case that the media house was declared a legitimate military goal. In one of the most provocative acts of the war, NATO carried out a strike on the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, killing three men. Washington claimed that the bombing was an “accident”. The “humanitarian” intervention to halt “ethnic cleansing” has resulted in massive ethnic cleansing. After NATO arrived, 250,000 Serbs were expelled from Kosovo.

Also, the 2004 unrest in Kosovo is the worst ethnic violence case in Kosovo since the end of the 1998–99 conflict. The violence erupted in the partitioned town of Mitrovica, leaving hundreds wounded and at least 14 people dead. The unrest was precipitated by misleading reports in the Kosovo Albanian media which falsely claimed that three Kosovo Albanian boys had drowned after being chased into the Ibar River by a group of Kosovo Serbs. That is why Albanians are embarking on a coordinated action against Serbs, in which they have committed numerous crimes. Given the magnitude of the action, it is clear that this ethnic cleansing was planned and not spontaneous. Here, too, the question must be asked whether it is possible that NATO intelligence services did not have operational information that Albanians were preparing attacks on Serbs, with the aim of ethnic cleansing of Kosovo. The answer is obvious, especially if we keep in mind that NATO forces have peacefully observed the ethnic cleansing of Serbs, even if their primary task in Kosovo is to maintain peace and order.

Years later, International courts in Pristina have prosecuted several people who attacked several Serbian Orthodox churches, handing down jail sentences ranging from 21 months to 16 years. However, these are extremely small numbers of people and with small penalties. The absolute majority of criminals were not punished. A part of the destroyed churches have since been rebuilt by the Government of Serbia and in cooperation with the Serbian Orthodox Church and the UN mission in Kosovo. However, almost none of the exiled Serbs returned to Kosovo. It is important to note that NATO forces have peacefully observed the ethnic cleansing of Serbs, even if their primary task in Kosovo is to maintain peace and order.

Everything that happened after 1999 proved that NATO’s primary goal was not the protection of human rights, but the abuse of this idea for classical geopolitical possession of strategic space, in this case, the southern Serbian province of Kosovo. The Serbian army fought heroically in Kosovo and it was not defeated on the battlefield. The withdrawal of the Serbian army from Kosovo was caused by an open threat from the NATO that it will exert over Serbia humanitarian destruction of the whole country. When the destruction of infrastructure did not gave results, NATO began hitting hospitals, trains full of passengers and throwing away so-called graphite bombs that destroyed the electrical network and left entire cities without electricity. Cluster bombs were thrown in the cities, and bombardment of depleted uranium kills Serbs even today.

Immediately after the bombing the regime change operation was supported, after which the “reform of Serbia” began. Shortly after the arrival of pro-Western authorities in Serbia, in October 2000, “the reform of the Serbian army” began. The majority of proven war officers were retired, while the number of soldiers was so low, to the level, at which the security of the country was seriously threatened. Through its agents of influence, NATO played a major role in separating Montenegro from Serbia. Yet again, two decades later, despite its propaganda and corruption of the elite, NATO is still undesirable among the ordinary people. Montenegro became a member of NATO by political violence, against the will of its citizens in 2017. Serbia and Republic of Srpska continue to resist. More about NATO’s activities in the world can be seen in an excellent documentary:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQragYh9jj8

UK: Labour-run Slough council declares bankruptcy after failed commercial deals

Paul Bond

Labour Party-run Slough borough council has become the third English local authority, after Northamptonshire and Croydon, to declare itself bankrupt.

It has issued a Section 114 notice under the 1988 Local Government Finance Act, required if councils do not have sufficient financial resources to function, and announced an immediate “pausing [of] non-essential spending.”

Slough Town Hall (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

The notice followed discovery of a projected £96 million deficit in the council’s budget, and revelations that its reserves had fallen from £7.5 million to £500,000. If not addressed, the budget deficit could rise to an estimated £150 million by 2024.

The problems come from poor financial management and accounting errors related to the council’s reliance on commercial investment. The uncovering of problems built up over the last period suggest the council could already have been technically insolvent in 2019.

Steven Mair, Slough’s chief financial officer, warned that the council risked not being able to set a legal budget for 2022/23 without additional savings and additional government support in the form of an increased capitalisation directive What this means are cuts, privatisation and sell-offs. Labour’s policy is to support this.

The council has announced that it will impose “rigorous spend control measures.” These have not yet been detailed, but will result in job losses, further cuts to services and the sale of some of the council’s £200 million assets like buildings and land. The community care web site noted, “The council will review its services along with internal structures, vacancies, assets and land. It will not make any new commitments to spend money, including in social care, and has suspended non-essential spending pending a council meeting on 22 July to determine specific budget controls.”

The cuts will follow a council tax increase 4.99 percent already imposed this year as apart of the annual budget.

The “severe weaknesses” and “poor practice” identified in an internal review have seen borrowing quadruple from £180 million in 2016/17 to £760 million. The 2018/19 audit has still not been signed off, and the review suggested local income tax and collection rates have been inaccurate for several years. The report noted that, following the departure of many staff recently, the financial team is currently comprised entirely of temporary staff.

The impact on the most vulnerable of government policies and councils’ politically bankrupt and socially disastrous responses can be seen in the case of Slough’s children’s services. These were turned over to the Slough Children’s Services Trust in 2015, following an “inadequate” assessment from the government’s Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills (Ofsted). Ofsted assessments have been a weapon in driving the privatisation of schools and services.

The Trust was in continued financial difficulties, issuing warnings of insolvency as it went into the last 18 months of its contract. In April this year, the Trust was taken under council ownership, although it remains operationally independent. Absorbing the Trust’s debt was one of the two main factors in wiping out the council’s reserves.

The Trust, now called Slough Children First, has said it is “too early” to know the full impact of the Section 114 notice on services.

The coronavirus pandemic has had a devastating effect on the borough’s finances, seeing a collapse in income from council tax and business rates, with many residents applying for a council tax support payments. This only exacerbated an existing crisis. Slough now relies on 96 percent of its income from local taxation. All local councils have seen their budgets cut to the bone over a decade of austerity, which has seen central government funding slashed.

The Conservative government aims to eliminate central grant funding to councils, offloading the cost of services onto impoverished residents via Council Tax. Councils will be able to retain an increased share of business rates, up from 50 to 75 percent, but this would not make up what has been cut, even without taking account of the collapse of business rate income because of Covid.

In December 2020, Slough requested the agreement of the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government to spend £15 million of capital loans on funding day-to-day costs. The Section 114 report admits that the emergence of further financial issues since March means this is now not enough to fill the gaps.

The projected £96 million deficit, equivalent to 72 percent of its budget, was already contingent on receipt of an £15.2 million government loan. This loan, however, is dependent on the council convincing an external review it has a credible financial sustainability plan.

This is not a unique crisis. Slough is one of eight councils facing such an external review. In March, the National Audit Office warned that 25 councils were on the edge of bankruptcy.

Councils of all political colourations responded to the austerity cuts by making murky commercial deals. Labour-run councils did nothing to oppose cuts, becoming instead the most enthusiastic in establishing the closest ties with big business. Over the last decade, Labour councils have developed intimate relations with property developers, with some directly benefitting from the rich pickings on offer.

Commercially incompetent Labour councils have taken extensive loans to finance such deals and maintain services in order to avoid a struggle against Tory cuts. Residents have been saddled with the costs of servicing the loans to ensure the profits of the private partners.

Since 2016, Slough has borrowed £580 million. The finance reports point to the cost of servicing these loans as further pressure on the council’s budget.

Mair pointed to these kind of deals as contributing to the council’s crisis. He wrote that the financial problems, which “have not arisen in the past few months,” related to “financial decision-making, leadership and management, processes, quality assurance and review.” Much of the “significant financial risk” was generated by weak management and oversight of commercial companies owned or part-owned by the council, many of which are not in Slough.

The council has purchased almost £100 million worth of assets. In the last few years, it bought an Odeon Cinema in Basingstoke, a Halfords motoring and cycling products store, the site of a Wickes retail store in Wolverhampton and a Waitrose supermarket in Gosport. In a joint venture with Marriott, the council owns two hotels in Slough town centre. A major investment, the North West Quadrant development, has been made by Slough council in partnership with the private sector on a former university site. It involves a £600 million plan to develop shops, offices and more than 1,000 new homes in the town centre.

The rest of the hole in Slough’s general reserves related directly to just such a deal. They were drained of £7 million to correct an accounting error made two years ago. This had drastically overestimated income from Slough Urban Renewal, a joint venture between the council and Muse Developments, part of the commercial construction company Morgan Sindall Group plc.

Muse is heavily involved in these joint venture partnerships with councils across the country. It has partnerships with two of the eight authorities now facing external review—Slough and the Wirral.

The council’s own assessment of the project that “Slough is enjoying an epic period of rejuvenation and renewal” reads as a sick joke.

Conservative government Communities Secretary Robert Jenrick said the council’s “financial position and clear mismanagement is deeply concerning and completely unacceptable.” Slough council’s opposition Tory group leader, Wayne Strutton, also moved to exploit the crisis, demanding that “those responsible [be] held accountable,” and accusing the Labour authority of “years of financial negligence and over-ambition.”

In Liverpool in March the government utilised a financial crisis to impose unelected commissioners to oversee services.

The search for a fast buck practised by the Slough Labourites takes place to lesser or greater degrees in every Labour-run authority. This was further consolidated under the nominally “left” leadership of Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, who on taking office in 2017 instructed Labour councils not to fight Tory budget cuts but to set “legal budgets.” Slough has seen a cut of £100 million in central funding since 2010, with cuts faithfully imposed by the Labourites.

CDC’s lifting of mask recommendations in US schools threatens massive surge of infections

Evan Blake

Last Friday, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) abruptly released new guidelines on reopening K–12 schools during the COVID-19 pandemic, effectively scrapping all mitigation measures. The guidelines encourage vaccinated teachers and students not to wear masks and promote the full reopening of schools regardless of vaccination levels, even if they cannot guarantee three feet of distance between students.

The guideline changes, which have been universally hailed by the corporate media, the entire political establishment and the teachers unions, amount to the reckless endangerment of millions of children, educators, parents and the broader population. They take place under conditions in which the highly infectious and lethal Delta variant of the coronavirus is already the dominant strain in the US and causing a major surge of infections. Worldometer reported a near-doubling of daily new cases in the US last week, from 15,326 last Tuesday to 27,237 last Friday.

Children under 12, roughly half the school-aged population, are not expected to be eligible for any vaccine until September, meaning that tens of millions of students would be unvaccinated during most of the fall semester if not longer. If fully implemented, the CDC guidelines will ensure that roughly 42 million unvaccinated children are packed into poorly-ventilated school buildings across the US in the coming weeks, creating the perfect conditions for the airborne virus to spread like wildfire.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases [Credit: Sarah Silbiger/Pool via AP]

Over the past year, the federal government under both Trump and Biden criminally refused to track COVID-19 infections in K–12 schools. According to the CDC’s own estimates, which the corporate media have covered up, as of May 19 roughly 22.7 million children under 18 years old had been infected with COVID-19, with a large percentage undoubtedly taking place in K–12 schools. The new guidelines will vastly expand these figures, causing untold long-term damage to an entire generation. Various studies estimate that between 7 to 20 percent of infected children develop Long COVID in which symptoms linger for months after their initial infection.

Friday’s announcement by the CDC marks the latest in a series of unscientific, politically-motivated measures that the institution has enacted on behalf of Wall Street and the Biden administration, as part of the broader ruling class campaign to fully reopen the economy and fabricate the illusion that the pandemic is over.

Interviewed on ABC’s This Week, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director Anthony Fauci stated, “The bottom line is we need to get the children back in school, in-person classes in the fall.” Regarding social distancing within classrooms, Fauci added, “even though those are the things you want to pay attention to, if you can’t implement them, you should still do everything you can with testing… do everything you can to keep the in-person classes going.”

Speaking on CBS’ Face the Nation, former Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Dr. Scott Gottlieb bluntly stated, “I don’t think they’re really going to do checking [on vaccination status]. I think what’s going to happen is some schools are going to implement mask mandates, others won’t, depending on what state you’re in.”

Indeed, eight states—Utah, Arizona, Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Iowa, Vermont and South Carolina—have already banned the issuing of masking requirements by local school districts. So far, only California has said they plan to continue require masking in schools, although this will likely be curtailed in the coming weeks before districts begin reopening.

The CDC’s latest unscientific guidelines have provoked opposition among educators, who have borne enormous stress and suffering during the past year of being forced to return to unsafe classrooms.

Clair, a teacher in Alabama, commented, “The CDC has shown us once again that the health and concern for students and teachers are not their priority. They are okay with us dying because they need kids in school so that parents can go to work. No one cared to find out why children were less sick this year. It’s because they were largely out of school. If you think there’s a teacher shortage now, wait until the Delta variant starts taking lives again. You would think scientists would want to preserve life but the CDC unfortunately has proven to be a political puppet. Teachers, do what you must to preserve your health. Parents, ask the hard questions necessary because your children’s lives are in danger.”

Djk Freeman, a teacher in Tennessee, stated, “Without any mention of the risk and uncertainty we will face entering classrooms this fall, the CDC states that the priority is for a return to in-person instruction. Despite conflicting information from health agencies regarding the threat of the deadly Delta variant, vaccine effectiveness, and mask protocols even for the vaccinated, state and local governments are being entrusted to determine for themselves the level of safety protocols needed in their communities. What a joke! When antiscience sentiment is running rampant in state legislatures, local health departments are being stripped of their powers, and vaccination rates are barely at 50 percent nationwide, how can we be expected to trust that our leaders will do the right thing when they have already proven they will not? Once again the CDC is placing the health and well-being of the economy ahead of the lives of teachers, students, and families.”

In contrast to the hostility of rank-and-file teachers, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and National Education Association (NEA) immediately endorsed the updated CDC guidelines. AFT President Randi Weingarten, who in May pledged to help fully reopen schools this fall, absurdly described the guidelines as “grounded in both science and common sense.” NEA President Becky Pringle, who recently covered up the deaths and suffering of educators during the 2020–21 school year at the NEA’s convention, voiced her agreement, adding, “There is no substitute for in-person learning.”

While the CDC guidelines are framed as applying to the fall semester, they were issued during an unprecedented summer school in which major districts across the US have opened their doors to as many students as possible, as part of the broader effort to pressure parents to return to work. Many districts and states will likely invoke the new CDC guidelines to justify their reckless summer school plans. In most districts, huge numbers of teachers have opted out of teaching this summer, meaning that understaffed classrooms will be packed to the brim with students.

In New York City, the largest school district in the US with roughly 1.1 million students, over 200,000 have enrolled in summer school. Despite a teacher shortage, city authorities are actively encouraging more parents to sign up. Setting a precedent for every other city in the country, the district will not offer any virtual instruction options this fall.

Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), the second-largest in the US with over 660,000 students, has an unprecedented 100,000 students currently enrolled in summer school. The School District of Philadelphia (SDP) has roughly 15,000 students enrolled in summer school, triple its normal amount. Guilford County Schools in North Carolina has 12,000 students enrolled, roughly 10 times the annual average before the pandemic. Broward County in Florida has roughly five times its normal enrollment this summer, with 45,000 students attending in-person.

As a harbinger of what will transpire in districts across the US this summer and fall, in late June two summer school programs in St. Joseph School District, Missouri, were forced to switch online after COVID-19 outbreaks infected or led to the quarantining of over half of the students in each class. Missouri has one the lowest rates of vaccination in the US, and the Delta variant has spread rapidly throughout the state.

The CDC’s abrupt change of masking guidelines and demand that schools fully reopen, which was clearly coordinated with the Biden administration, took place exactly one year after the Trump administration similarly pressed for all schools to reopen. On July 6, 2020, Trump tweeted, “SCHOOLS MUST OPEN IN THE FALL!!!” This marked the beginning of a massive campaign to reopen schools in order to compel parents back to work, which escalated under Biden with the fulsome support of the unions. At every turn, this campaign provoked widespread resistance by educators, leading to the growth of rank-and-file committees independent of the teachers unions and both big business parties in states across the US.

The Delta variant has been detected in 104 countries in new surge of the pandemic

Benjamin Mateus

“The world is at a perilous point in this pandemic. We have just passed the tragic milestone of four million recorded COVID-19 deaths, which likely underestimates the overall toll. Some countries with high vaccination coverage are now planning to roll out booster shots in the coming months and are dropping public health social measures and relaxing as though the pandemic is already over.”—Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, World Health Organization (WHO)

The World Health Organization (WHO) reported that the Delta variant of coronavirus had spread to at least 104 countries last week in conjunction with the worrisome trend in the epidemiological curves of new infections. During the WHO’s coronavirus press brief, Dr. Maria van Kerkhove, the technical lead for COVID-19, warned about these dire developments. “I counted again this morning. There are more than two dozen countries that have epidemiological curves that are almost vertical right now,” meaning the pandemic is growing at an exponential rate.

On June 21, the seven-day moving average had reached a low of 360,000 COVID-19 infections each day. It has presently climbed to 425,000 cases per day or an 18 percent increase in little more than two weeks. The epidemiologic curve for reported deaths has also swung upwards. As of July 10, 2021, 187.2 million COVID-19 infections and 4.04 million deaths were reported globally.

A mural warns in Swahili about coronavirus in Nairobi, Kenya, Saturday, June 12, 2021. (AP Photo/Brian Inganga)

In every region of the world, weekly statistics indicate that infections are either turning up or continue to remain high:

• The trend in Europe is alarming as the week-to-week change has been accelerating over the last three weeks. The week beginning June 28, 2021, there were 543,584 confirmed cases, a 40.1 percent increase.
• Though the Americas have seen a 13 percent decline over the last week in June, the number of weekly new infections remains nearly one million.
• Cases across Southeast Asia have turned up again with almost 613,000 infections per week, a nearly 7 percent increase.
• Similarly, the Eastern Mediterranean has seen cases surge once more, with almost 246,000 infections for the week beginning June 28, 2021, an 11.1 percent rise.
• Africa had the highest number of confirmed cases ever reported during the pandemic, with 204,000 new infections, a 14.8 percent increase from last week. It appears the number of new cases being reported is slowing, but this will need to be followed closely.   
• The Western Pacific continues to see high community transmission though reported cases have remained stable. There were 128,000 new cases for the week beginning June 28, 2021.

The epidemiological curves for reported fatalities are trending with the infections in their respective regions.

In the United States, where the Delta variant now dominates, the seven-day average of new daily cases has been rising since June 21, 2021, when they had reached their lowest point with only 12,000 new infections per day. The last time the US saw such numbers was on March 26, 2020, when the emerging pandemic first fell on the population of New York City.

Cases are climbing again, having reached 18,000 cases per day. At the end of last week, the US saw a sudden jump in new infections to over 27,000 per day. The seven-day average of deaths has ceased its decline, with about 220 people dying every day. As of July 10, 2021, the cumulative death toll stands at 622,819, and 34.7 million reported infections.

Florida appears to have become the new epicenter, as cases have jumped from around 1,000 per day in mid to late June to almost 5,800 cases on July 10, 2021. However, regions in the Southeast and portions of the Midwest where vaccination rates are comparatively low continue to see rising infections. COVID-19 hospitalization rates over the last two weeks have risen 40 percent for Arkansas, Nevada and Iowa.

Ashish Jha, dean of Brown University’s school of public health, who has taken a laissez-faire attitude about school reopening, told Politico, “I am a little surprised how quickly Delta has become widespread. We’re one week into July, and it is everywhere. It suggests that it is far, far more contagious than the Alpha variant. It makes me nervous… how contagious it is and how quickly it has spread.”

Across Europe, weekly trends in cases have alarmed international public health agencies. Many countries are seeing vertical transmission rates, meaning cases are exploding. The Netherlands has a near 400 percent weekly increase in cases, with 22,071 new cases in seven days. Other increases: Greece, 163 percent; Spain, 101 percent; Belgium, 66 percent; France, 61 percent; Portugal, 39 percent; the UK, 31 percent with 203,159 new cases in just one week; Germany, 19 percent; and Russia, 13 percent with 171,858 new cases.

Despite these developments, the Euro 2020 football finals hosted more than 60,000 jubilant fans cheering at Wembley Stadium for their teams in the match between England and Italy. Both countries have seen around 128,000 of their citizens die during the pandemic. A guaranteed superspreader event that will claim more lives, the match epitomizes the dangerous game the ruling elites play with the population’s lives.

In Africa, ten countries, including Libya, Senegal, Nigeria, Chad and Mozambique, are seeing cases doubling each week. Tunisia, with a weekly rise of 44 percent, reported 49,000 new infections for the week. The most severe outbreaks are unfolding in southern and eastern Africa. Zimbabwe, with 12,403 cases for the week, has seen a 67 percent weekly rise in new cases. With 137,861 new cases for the week, South Africa saw an 11 percent climb in cases but a 46 percent rise in fatalities.

For seven consecutive weeks, cases have been climbing throughout the continent. Infections increased by 20 percent for the seven days ending the first week in July compared to the previous week. Fatalities have also jumped by a similar figure. WHO’s regional director for Africa, Matshidiso Moeti, stated, “Africa has just marked the continent’s most dire pandemic week ever. But the worst is yet to come as the fast-moving third wave continues to gain speed and new ground… The end to this precipitous rise is still weeks away.”

Indonesia has assumed the wretched status of the epicenter of the pandemic in Asia. With a diverse population of 270 million people, 700 regional languages are spoken there, representing 300 ethnic groups. However, the pandemic has thrown the country into recession, adding to the social strife caused by the tsunami of infections.

The seven-day average in new infections continues to rise sharply, having exceeded more than 33,000 per day. Fatalities are abruptly climbing and will exceed 1,000 deaths per day on a seven-day average very soon. On July 7, 2021 alone, the country reported 1,040 deaths. The names of the dead are being announced from speakers at nearby mosques on Java, the most populous island, providing a grim reminder of the virus’s deadly toll.

However, according to Dr. Dicky Budiman at Australia’s Griffith University, the official numbers are significant underestimates based on the fatality data recorded at local levels. “We know we have already achieved more than 100,000 a day,” he told the Guardian. The public cemeteries in Jakarta are brimming with corpses. According to city officials, the number of burials has spiked ten-fold since May.

As hospitals face a deluge of patients, doctors and nurses are also falling victim to the infection, further incapacitating the health care system’s frail infrastructure. Oxygen and medical resources are being quickly exhausted as social tensions and confusion abound. Adib Khumaidi, the Indonesian Medical Association’s risk mitigation team leader, observed, “What is happening right now in the hospitals is a functional collapse.”

Share of people vaccinated by continent and select countries

With nearly 3.4 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines (44 doses for every 100 people) administered, there is an alarming trend that the rate of immunizations is beginning to decline globally. This is compounded by the continued disparity in vaccinations programs in different countries.

At present, 25.2 percent of the world’s population has received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. However, only one percent of people in low-income countries have received at least one dose. As the bar graph demonstrates, Asia, South America and Africa, where the majority of the world’s people reside, have seen a minuscule fraction of these life-saving treatments.

Governments of high-income nations have continued to ignore the repeated warnings made by the WHO to employ all public health measures to stem the rise in infections. Instead, the vaccines are used as levers for enacting measures to ensure a rapid return to economic normalcy regardless of the threat posed by the iterations of new variants that continue to develop higher virulence.