War in Afghanistan spills over into Tajikistan, heightening Kremlin’s fears

Clara Weiss

As the US is completing its troop withdrawal from Afghanistan after two decades of a bloody and criminal war, numerous reports indicate that the ongoing conflict has already begun spilling over into neighboring Tajikistan. Last Monday, 1,500 Afghan soldiers fled across the border into Tajikistan, an impoverished former Soviet republic, to escape the advance of the Taliban. Tajikistan has a border with Afghanistan stretching 1,357 kilometers, or 804 miles.

According to the BBC, the soldiers, who were later flown back to Kabul, were desperate for food and water. Another 1,000 civilians reportedly also fled into Tajikistan. Political commentators are warning that many thousands more refugees may seek refuge in Tajikistan and other neighboring countries in the coming weeks and months as whatever has remained of social infrastructure in Afghanistan is experiencing a catastrophic collapse. One commentator in Foreign Policy warned that millions of people in Afghanistan could face famine within the next 12 months and that the country could become “the world’s next Yemen.”

Tajikistan itself has been devastated by the impact of capitalist restoration and is the most impoverished of all former Soviet republics. Almost half of the population lacks access to clean running water and a third of the country’s GDP comes from remittances sent by Tajiks working under horrendous conditions as migrants in Russia. The country is highly unstable politically and was just recently embroiled in a bloody border conflict with Kyrgyzstan that killed over 50 people.

Afghanistan-Tajikistan border bridge (Credit: BRFBlake)

Since last week, the Taliban have made further advances in Afghanistan, and are now claiming to control 85 percent of the country’s territory. The Tajik government has ordered the mobilization of 20,000 military reservists and requested help from Russia to guard the country’s borders. However, a report by Eurasianet indicates that the border is already de facto under the control of the Taliban.

The outlet quoted Anatoly Sidorov, the head of the Joint Staff at the Moscow-led Collective Security Treaty Organization, as saying on July 8,“They [the Taliban] have set up observation posts, checkpoints, and security posts [along the entire border]. It is all marked with white flags, there is everything there in open view, including weapons. They are not hiding anything.” Both the Afghan government and the Tajik government have refused to respond to requests for comments on the situation by Eurasianet.

The spill-over of the military conflict in Afghanistan into Tajikistan, which is home to a Russian military base with 7,000 soldiers, has provoked enormous concerns in the Kremlin. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov stated last Wednesday, “We are closely watching what is happening in Afghanistan where the situation has a tendency to swiftly deteriorate including against the backdrop of the hasty exit of American and other NATO troops.” He also made clear that, if necessary, Russia would use its troops stationed in Tajikistan to secure the country’s border. However, Russian press commentators assume that the Kremlin would only act in case of an open military assault from Afghanistan.

The spill-over of the conflict to neighboring countries and the emerging humanitarian catastrophe underscore that the US troop withdrawal, coming after three decades of unending wars in the Middle East is far from bringing an end to the crimes of imperialism in the region. Rather, it is serving as a catalyst for an escalation of geopolitical, ethnic and religious conflicts that have been fueled for decades.

From its beginning, the war in Afghanistan was part of the efforts of US imperialism to bring the entire core region of Europe and Asia (called “Eurasia” by geostrategists), especially the Middle East and Central Asia, under its full control in the aftermath of the Stalinist dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. While invading Iraq and Afghanistan in the Middle East and Central Asia, the US has systematically encircled Russia on its western borders, drawing many countries of the former Soviet bloc into NATO and staging coups in the Black Sea region in Georgia in 2003 and most recently Ukraine, in 2014.

In Central Asia, the US orchestrated a coup in Kyrgyzstan in 2005. Having emerged from the restoration of capitalism by the Stalinist bureaucracy, and deeply dependent upon imperialism, the Russian oligarchy has been incapable of responding to these ongoing interventions and aggressions outside of a combination of appealing to the imperialist powers and the promotion of nationalism and militarism, which has only served to further fuel military and ethnic tensions, including within its own borders.

Now, the Kremlin fears that the shift in US foreign policy and the rapid rise of the Taliban will further destabilize the entire region and strengthen Islamist tendencies across Central Asia and in Russia itself.

From 1994 to 2009, the Kremlin has waged two bloody wars against separatist, Islamist tendencies in the North Caucasian republic of Chechnya, which sought to break away from the Russian Federation. These forces were encouraged by US imperialism, especially in the 1990s, with the aim of fostering the break-up of Russia along ethnic lines.

Since then, Islamist forces from the North Caucasus, especially the Caucasus Emirate, are known to have developed close ties with the Taliban, al Qaeda and ISIS, all of which have been able to recruit a significant number of fighters from Chechnya.

In 2014, an active-duty US special operations officer told ABC News that “a fair percentage of the overall enemy population” in the early period of the Afghan war were “Chechens.” Radical Islamists from Chechnya are also known to have joined various US-backed militias that have been fighting against the Assad government in the civil war in Syria.

Moreover, the Kremlin is well aware that the US troop withdrawal, far from signaling an end to US imperialist aggression, is part of a broader reorientation of US imperialism toward preparations for a great power conflict, targeting above all China, but also Russia. Especially over the past decade, China has developed extremely close economic ties with the countries in Central Asia, including Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, often outstripping the previously dominant influence of Russia.

Having already been drawn into the maelstrom of the imperialist encirclement of Russia, geopolitical tensions in the region will now be further fueled by the open US war preparations against China. Russia and China, too, have competing interests in Central Asia that are often only barely reconciled, based on the common goal of limiting US influence.

Against this background, the Kremlin has been particularly alarmed by news reports indicating that the US is looking into opening a new military base in a former Soviet republic to keep troops stationed in Central Asia. In May, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing anonymous sources in the US government and military leadership, that “U.S. military commanders want bases for troops, drones, bombers and artillery to shore up the Afghan government, keep the Taliban insurgency in check and monitor other extremists. Options being assessed range from nearby countries to more distant Arab Gulf emirates and Navy ships at sea.” According to the newspaper, the US is eyeing “Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, which border Afghanistan and would allow for quick access.”

The Russian Nezavisimaya Gazeta commented at the time that these reports “seem to have seriously alarmed the Russian leadership” and that the “Kremlin clearly regarded the news reports on this as a preliminary political probe.” Following the American press reports, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu travelled to Dushanbe and Tashkent, and Tajik President Emomali Rakhmon was invited to Moscow for a state visit.

In the American ruling class, a new military base is still being debated. The military policy blog War on the Rocks recently published a piece strongly arguing against a new military base in Central Asia. The think tank journal Foreign Policy published a comment by Phil Caruso, a member of the US Council on Foreign Relations, warning that the US would not be able to defend its interests in the region after the withdrawal “without bases nearby.”

Wave of revulsion at racist abuse of England football players

Robert Stevens

Last Sunday’s European Championship football final came down to a penalty shoot-out, which was won by Italy against England. Following the game, the three England players who missed penalties, Marcus Rashford, Jadon Sancho and Bukayo Saka, suffered racist abuse on social media.

Twitter said Monday, “In the past 24 hours… we have swiftly removed over 1,000 Tweets and permanently suspended a number of accounts for violating our rules…”

The mural in Manchester dedicated to Rashford (WSWS Media)

The Guardian carried out an analysis of the scale of abuse directed at England’s black players. Across England’s three group games against Croatia, Scotland and the Czech Republic, there were “2,114 abusive tweets directed towards or naming the players and [manager Gareth] Southgate. This included 44 explicitly racist tweets, with messages using the N-word and monkey emojis directed at black players, and 58 that attacked players for their anti-racist actions, including taking the knee.”

A mural in Manchester dedicated to Rashford, who plays for Manchester United, was daubed with racist graffiti within an hour of the final game finishing.

The racist attacks immediately prompted a wave of popular revulsion, as hundreds of thousands of people sent supportive messages to the players on social media platforms.

Local residents immediately covered the graffiti daubed on the Rashford mural with bin liners. Over the next 24 hours, a large part of the wall mural was covered with hundreds of messages in support of the player.

Rashford has won the admiration of millions, above all for his activities off the football field. Many messages referred to the campaign he launched last year, in the teeth of government opposition, to demand that over a million of the UK’s poorest children be provided with free school meals over the summer holidays during the pandemic. Rashford relied on free school meals as a child. The mural includes a quotation from his mother who brought up her children holding down several jobs as a single parent: “Take pride in knowing that your struggle will play the biggest role in your purpose.”

An online petition created Monday morning demanding “Ban racists for life from all football matches in England” secured more than 300,000 signatures within eight hours. By Tuesday evening it had been endorsed by nearly one million people.

Amid official declarations by the Football Association and Prince William condemning racism, the Conservative government rushed out its own statements. This immediately backfired as one commentator after another pointed out the actual record of key government figures in cultivating racism. The main targets of public anger were Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Home Secretary Priti Patel.

Home Secretary Priti Patel (left) and Prime Minister Boris Johnson [Credit: Hannah McKay Pool via AP]

On Monday, Johnson told a Downing Street briefing that he hoped those who have been directing racist abuse at players “will crawl back under the rock from which you emerged.” Home Secretary Priti Patel said she was “disgusted” by the “vile” abuse, declaring on Twitter, “It has no place in our country and I back the police to hold those responsible accountable.”

Many noted that Johnson and Patel had both opposed England players taking the knee during the tournament as a mark of opposition to racism. Johnson refused to criticise those in the stadium at England’s tournament warm up games who booed players taking the knee, with a spokesman saying he was “more focused on action rather than gestures.” Patel went further in an interview on the newly founded right-wing news channel, GB TV, declaring, “I just don’t support people participating in that type of gesture politics.” Asked whether fans had a right to boo players taking the knee, she replied, “That's a choice for them quite frankly,” before stating that protests against the police murder of George Floyd last year had had a “devastating” impact on policing.

Johnson is a man who wrote of the Commonwealth’s “regular cheering crowds of flag-waving piccaninnies” with “watermelon smiles.” As recently as 2018, flush from his success in the Brexit campaign, he sought to bolster support among the most right-wing layers in the Tory Party by referring to women in burkas as looking like “letter boxes” and “bank robbers.” He wrote an article on Africa in 2002 declaring, “The continent may be a blot, but it is not a blot upon our conscience,” adding, “The problem is not that we were once in charge, but that we are not in charge anymore.”

Most of Patel’s waking hours are spent on devising attacks on the rights of immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers.

England player Tyrone Mings wrote of her, “You don’t get to stoke the fire at the beginning of the tournament by labelling our anti-racism message as ‘Gesture Politics’ & then pretend to be disgusted when the very thing we’re campaigning against happens.”

Former England defender Gary Neville told Sky News, “The prime minister said it was OK for the population of this country to boo those players [taking the knee] who were trying to promote equality and defend against racism. It starts at the very top. I wasn’t surprised in the slightest that I woke up to those headlines [of players suffering racial abuse]; I expected it the minute the three players missed.”

Events, however, don’t just reveal hypocrisy at the highest levels of government. The public reaction to the abuse of the three players testifies to the overwhelming hostility to racism within the British population and to the Tories.

Also targeted for public anger was the right-wing media. The Sun tabloid made sure to lead off its front-page Tuesday with a full-page St George flag, with pictures of Rashford, Saka and Sancho superimposed, accompanied by a headline, “Nation Unites Against Racists: We’ve Got Your Back”.

Among the responses on Twitter were, “The Sun fuelled it. Nurtured it. The hypocrisy is stunning”; “I wouldn't use this paper to line my bins. This paper causes division with the ignorance and racism it spews on a regular basis. You're not fooling anyone with this”; and “maybe they can offer an unequivocal apology for publishing a column saying that taking the knee was ‘virtue-signalling baloney’, and a ‘grotesque woke pantomime’.”

Such an outpouring of mass sentiment is not only a latent threat to the government. It gives the lie to the claim of the various petty-bourgeois advocates of identity politics that racial divisions are more important than class divisions, and especially the assertion of a universal “white privilege”.

The scoundrel Sir Keir Starmer and his forerunner Jeremy Corbyn are both busy striking a pose of defending the England squad and making some easy political capital at Johnson’s expense. But this did not stop Labour under both leaders from working hand-in-glove with the Tories during the pandemic, while relying on the trade unions to suppress all opposition in the working class.

Events since Sunday’s match show that the Labour and trade union bureaucracy are sitting on a political and social powder-keg. The working class is more than capable of dealing a decisive blow to the most right-wing government in British history and the fascist dregs that take their cue from it. But this means breaking from these rotten organisations, and uniting all workers based on their common class interests in the fight for socialism.

Scores die in Iraq COVID hospital fire for second time in three months

Bill Van Auken

Protests erupted in Iraq Tuesday as the death toll from a horrific fire that tore through a makeshift COVID-19 isolation ward in the southern city of Nasiriyah climbed to 93. The blaze left at least another 100 people injured.

The fire began at 10:30 p.m. Monday night, reportedly as the result of an electrical short in an air-conditioning system, which in turn touched off the explosion of improperly stored oxygen tanks. The fire quickly spread through the facility, which had been hastily constructed from a fleet of trailers made of cheap and highly flammable sandwich panels topped with a tin roof to house COVID patients outside Nasiriyah’s al-Hussein Teaching Hospital. The facility was equipped neither with fire extinguishers nor smoke alarms.

Rescue workers and civilians clean up the fire site at a coronavirus hospital ward in the al-Hussein Teaching Hospital, in Nasiriyah, Iraq, Tuesday, July 13, 2021. Health officials said scores of others were injured in the blaze that erupted Monday. (AP Photo/Khalid Mohammed)

Hundreds of relatives and young men from surrounding neighborhoods rushed to the scene of the fire in a desperate attempt to rescue patients, many of them unable to breathe without oxygen and incapable of getting out of their beds, where they died from burns and asphyxiation. Some of the rescuers died carrying patients when the roof collapsed on them, blocking an entrance. In one incident, a young man succeeded in pulling out of his father and carrying him to a waiting ambulance, only to see him die because the vehicle had no oxygen.

Angry crowds gathered outside the hospital and the nearby morgue. Distraught family members searched through the still smoking rubble for remains of their loved ones, while many of the recovered bodies were burned beyond recognition. One youth was seen collapsing in tears while searching for his grandfather, father, uncle and aunt, all of them lost in the fire.

Demonstrators outside the hospital chanted “revolution” and “The political parties burned us,” while setting police cars on fire. Protesters later set up tents and occupied Nasiriyah’s central al-Habboubi Square, the scene of mass protests during the nationwide anti-government protests that shook the country beginning in 2019. Nasiriyah was at the center of this rebellion and hundreds were killed and wounded there. Demonstrations were also reported spreading to other Iraqi cities.

The outrage provoked by the entirely preventable fire has been intensified by the fact that this is the second such massive criminal tragedy in the space of barely three months. On April 24, a similar fire ravaged the COVID intensive care unit of the Ibn al-Khatib hospital in a poor neighborhood of southeastern Baghdad, killing 82 people, including patients on ventilators, and injuring another 110. That fire was triggered by an accident causing improperly stored oxygen tanks to explode and, as in the blaze in Nasiriyah, the hospital had no fire protection system and its shoddy construction allowed flames to spread rapidly. At the time, investigators had warned that the same conditions that led to the Baghdad hospital fire existed throughout the country.

President Barham Salih issued a statement Tuesday declaring that the two hospital fires were “the product of persistent corruption and mismanagement that undervalues the lives of Iraqis and prevents reforms of institutions.” Prime Minister Mustafa Al-Kadhimi has responded, just as last April, with the suspension of various officials and similar denunciations of corruption. He held a crisis meeting Tuesday that included the head of the Iraqi armed forces and other senior security officials to consider what a tweet from his office described as “the causes and repercussions” of the Nasiriyah disaster. The presence of his security aides indicated that the “repercussions” are foremost on his mind, with Iraqi society increasingly resembling a powder keg.

While endemic corruption has unquestionably devastated Iraq’s hospitals along with every other area of basic services, the horrific inferno in Nasiriyah, like the one before it in Baghdad, is another price paid by the Iraqi people for the systematic destruction of the country’s healthcare system and infrastructure by US imperialism.

Until the 1990s, Iraq boasted the most technologically advanced and professional healthcare system in the Arab world, providing free universal primary care to its population through a network of 172 modern hospitals, 1,200 primary care centers and 850 community clinics, and attracting patients seeking treatment from neighboring countries.

The first Gulf War waged by the US military against Iraq in 1991 included a bombing campaign that deliberately destroyed basic infrastructure, including electricity, water and sanitation systems, the foundations of the public healthcare system, while damaging hospitals and other facilities. This was followed by more than a decade of draconian sanctions aimed at bringing down the government of Saddam Hussein by denying the country basic food and medical supplies. High levels of malnutrition, the lack of medicines, and diseases resulting from a lack of clean water were estimated to have cost the lives of half a million Iraqi children by 1995. In a television interview in 1996, then-US Ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine Albright infamously stated, “We think the price is worth it.”

The decade of sanctions was followed by the 2003 US war of aggression and subsequent occupation of Iraq, which further decimated the healthcare system. Fully half of the already depleted ranks of Iraq’s doctors fled the country amid the violence unleashed by the US occupation. The US occupation regime responded with a policy of privatizing healthcare, creating a two-tier system in which the rich are able to access adequate treatment, while the rest of the population is forced to pay for previously basic care, and offer bribes to save the lives of loved ones.

The occupation also placed in power a collection of sectarian-based political parties led by former exiles that have enriched their leaders through wholesale corruption, including the diversion of billions of dollars from the healthcare system. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought this system to the point of collapse.

Iraq is facing a third wave of the pandemic, which, according to official figures has thus far resulted in roughly 1.5 million cases and 18,000 deaths. These figures are considered a gross underestimation of the real toll. Nonetheless, the official case count is now reaching 9,000 a day, a figure universally regarded as threatening an unprecedented spread of the virus and resulting deaths.

Fewer than 2 million Iraqis out of a population of over 41 million have received a COVID vaccination.

The unrest provoked by the mass death at the Nasiriyah hospital comes on the heels of protests over power blackouts and by violent clashes between police and unemployed university graduates demanding jobs outside oil facilities.

As Washington prepares new military provocations to maintain US troops in Iraq, the legacy of three decades of US wars and sanctions threatens to unleash a mass revolutionary upheaval.

New Zealand nurses prepare more strikes as healthcare crisis worsens

Tom Peters

About 30,000 nurses, healthcare assistants and midwives in public hospitals around New Zealand voted earlier this month to hold another three nationwide strikes. The members of the New Zealand Nurses Organisation (NZNO) held an eight-hour strike on June 9 after rejecting a derisory pay rise offer of just 1.38 percent. The District Health Boards’ offer was effectively a pay cut relative to inflation and contained nothing to address the staffing crisis in hospitals.

The Labour Party-led government announced a wage freeze in May for the next three years for the vast majority of public sector employees, including healthcare workers and teachers. The government is imposing severe austerity measures to make workers shoulder the burden of the economic crisis triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Nurses protesting outside parliament. (Credit: WSWS Media)

Workers in New Zealand, as in other countries, are seeking to fight back. The main obstacle they confront is the unions, which support the government and function, as they do in every country, as the industrial police force for the state and corporations.

The first 24-hour strike is scheduled for July 29, followed by an eight-hour strike on August 19 and a 24-hour strike on September 9. In announcing these deliberately spread-out dates, the NZNO made clear that it is allowing time to return to negotiations with the DHBs, cobble together another sell-out deal and cancel the strikes.

On July 6 a union spokesperson said recent negotiations had “given us some hope a resolution can be found around pay and safe staffing.” No details were given to support this claim.

The union bureaucracy is using similar tactics as in the 2018 dispute. Then, the NZNO cancelled one of two scheduled strikes and presented nurses with multiple offers that were essentially the same—a wage increase of just 3 percent per annum, combined with empty promises of better staffing. The aim was to wear workers down, isolate them and convince them that no better deal was possible. The NZNO’s 2018 deal set a benchmark for similar sellouts of doctors and teachers.

Three years later, the result is a worsening crisis in the healthcare system. Even though New Zealand has so far not experienced a major outbreak of COVID-19, the country remains extremely vulnerable, with only one tenth of the population fully vaccinated. The virus is spreading more rapidly than ever worldwide, with catastrophic consequences across Europe, in Indonesia, Fiji and many other countries. Through sheer luck, New Zealand avoided an outbreak last month when an infected person visited from Sydney, Australia, where the highly infectious Delta variant is has since surged.

Numerous reports show that NZ’s hospital system is already overwhelmed with winter-related illnesses, revealing that nothing has been done to prepare for an outbreak of COVID-19.

The severe staffing shortage is placing both hospital workers and patients at risk. The government’s border restrictions, some of the harshest in the world, have contributed to the crisis, since a significant proportion of New Zealand’s health workforce are immigrants.

According to the NZNO, Auckland City Hospital has nearly 400 nursing and healthcare assistant vacancies. Last month, the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons told Stuff that nationwide “shortages in just about every part of the hospital system, from specialists and technicians through to administrative staff, are seriously affecting patient care at all levels.” Surgeries, including for cancer patients, are being routinely delayed and cancelled because of the shortage of staff and beds.

On July 9, the Taranaki DHB told Radio NZ (RNZ) that Hāwera and Taranaki Base hospitals had “reached critical levels of demand” with “very high occupancy,” including cases of RSV (Respiratory Syncytial Virus).

The potentially deadly RSV has spread throughout New Zealand in recent weeks. Government statistics show there were 688 confirmed cases in the week to July 4, up from 538 cases the week before. The New Zealand Herald reported last week that 22 children were in intensive care or high dependency units with RSV or other respiratory viruses. A 63-year-old Auckland woman reportedly died on July 12, possibly from RSV-related complications.

Christchurch Hospital and Burwood Hospital have experienced record numbers of patients in the past week. To try and prevent the spread of RSV, the hospitals have limited visitor numbers.

Earlier this month the Counties Manukau DHB and Auckland DHB warned of longer waiting times for emergency care, and told patients to seek help from a general practice if possible. On July 1, RNZ reported that 11 sick babies were “being cared for in a playroom at Middlemore Hospital [in South Auckland] because it has run out of space in the regular wards.”

Stuff reported that Wellington Hospital’s emergency department was seeing “overcrowding at record levels.” The crisis has been escalating since March, with the department “often exceeding 100 percent occupancy.” DHB spokesperson Joy Farley said higher volumes of patients across the hospital meant emergency patients had to wait longer to be admitted to wards.

“It’s just unmanageable. It’s a ticking time bomb. Patients are going to die, especially the ones in the corridors,” one nurse told Stuff.

On July 12, TVNZ reported that patient Emma Maguire was told by Wellington Emergency Department staff that there was a seven or eight hour wait for her to get an X-ray for a suspected broken leg. She went home instead of waiting, potentially causing further injury. ED staff have issued a Provisional Improvement Notice to hospital management, saying that last Tuesday they were unable to see all patients, and there were no systems in place to manage patients safely.

Health Minister Andrew Little was booed off the stage by healthcare workers outside parliament during the June 9 strike, while trying to defend the government. He has recently feigned concern for nurses, telling Newstalk ZB on July 7 that nurses “have been undervalued for so long.”

In fact, the government has rejected nurses’ demand for an immediate pay increase of 17 percent. As in 2018, Labour is again telling healthcare workers it does not have enough money to fix the crisis in the health system.

The government says it is working on a “pay equity process” to lift nurses’ salaries to a level comparable to male-dominated professions with similar workloads. This has been promised for more than three decades, but never implemented. In 2018, the NZNO cynically exploited the government’s vague pay equity pledge as an argument to vote for its sellout deal.

The crisis in the health system is the result of decades of underfunding, which has gone unopposed due to the unions’ suppression of any resistance by the working class. Before 2018, there had not been a nationwide strike by nurses since 1989.

A real fight against government and corporate austerity requires new organisations: rank-and-file workplace committees run democratically by workers themselves. The International Committee of the Fourth International is calling for an international alliance of such committees, independent of and opposed to the corporatist trade unions and the entire political establishment, including Labour and its allies.

Above all, workers need to fight on the basis of a socialist perspective to abolish the profit system and place the resources of society under workers’ control. The government’s lie that there is no money for decent healthcare services should be rejected with contempt. The tens of billions of dollars hoarded by the super-rich and the banks must be redirected into hospitals, schools and other vital public services.

120 million people pushed to extreme poverty by COVID-19 pandemic

Kevin Reed

In addition to four million deaths worldwide from COVID-19, between 119-124 million people were pushed back into poverty and chronic hunger and 255 million full-time jobs were lost from the pandemic, according to a United Nations (UN) report published on Tuesday.

The figures come from the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals Report 2021, which said the pandemic had created major setbacks for efforts to eliminate poverty. In releasing the report, UN Under-Secretary-General Liu Zhenmin said, “The pandemic has halted, or reversed, years, or even decades of development progress.”

A woman looks to a homeless Lebanese man who sleeps on the ground at Hamra trade street, in Beirut, Lebanon, Friday, July 17, 2020. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar)

Prior to the pandemic there were 700 million people going hungry and 2 billion people suffering food insecurity. The UN data shows that an additional 83–132 million people likely experienced hunger during the pandemic in 2020.

Life expectancy, which had been increasing, has also been reduced as the pandemic halted or reversed progress in health care and posed major threats beyond COVID-19. Meanwhile, the mortality figures and true impact of the pandemic remain incomplete due to a lack of accurate data in many parts of the world.

The pandemic is intensifying inequalities within and among countries and impacting the most vulnerable people and the poorest countries hardest. The UN report reveals the extent of the unprecedented and devastating impact of the coronavirus on the world’s working class and poor population over the past year.

The report examines the status of seventeen indices on a global scale and says in the Foreword—signed by UN General Secretary António Guterres— “More than a year into the global pandemic, millions of lives have been lost, the human and economic toll has been unprecedented, and recovery efforts so far have been uneven, inequitable and insufficiently geared towards achieving sustainable development.”

Among the other indices examined are a rise in gender inequality, a decrease in the availability of clean water and sanitation, a decrease in affordable and clean energy, a reduction in investments in infrastructure and an intensification of the exploitation of children.

Every one of the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)—which were defined by the UN six years ago along with targets set for each to be achieved by 2030—showed a marked deterioration over the past year. Although the word “capitalism” does not appear in the 68-page UN report, its summary of the devastating conditions facing billions of people on the planet in the past year is an indictment of the response of the profit system and the ruling establishment to the COVID-19 health crisis.

The data is also a statement of bankruptcy by the UN itself, a global capitalist institution established after World War II and sponsored by the US as the hegemonic imperialist power, to address any of the fundamental social needs of the world’s population.

While the UN refers to increases in wealth inequality throughout the pandemic, the UN carefully avoids any discussion of the amassing of vast fortunes by the financial elite and the increase in the number of millionaires and billionaires during the pandemic. It is a fact that the ruling elite in every country took advantage of the public health crisis to secure for themselves a greater share of the wealth of society than they possessed before the start of the pandemic. Part of this increase in the fortunes of the rich—fueled primarily by the injection of trillions into the financial markets by the central banks—has been an intensification of the exploitation of the working class by deepening the attack on wages, working hours and reductions of benefits.

Indicating that the pandemic actually accelerated economic and political tendencies already present in the world situation prior to its outbreak, Secretary Guterres states, “Regrettably, the SDGs were already off track even before COVID‑19 emerged. Progress had been made in poverty reduction, maternal and child health, access to electricity, and gender equality, but not enough to achieve the Goals by 2030.”

In a section entitled “Views from the pandemic: stark realities, critical choices,” signed by Zhenmin, the report says that since the start of second year of the pandemic, “it is abundantly clear that this is a crisis of monumental proportions, with catastrophic effects on people’s lives and livelihoods.”

The UN report is based on “the latest available data and estimates to reveal the devastating impacts of the crisis on the SDGs” and was prepared by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs in collaboration with more than 50 international agencies.

Significantly, the UN analysis points to the contradiction between the international collaboration within the scientific community in the development of “life-saving vaccines and treatments in record time” and the global inequality in vaccine distribution. As Zhenmin writes, “as of 17 June 2021, around 68 vaccines were administered for every 100 people in Europe and Northern America compared with fewer than 2 in sub-Saharan Africa.”

The figures on the rise of global extreme poverty in the past year are particularly important as both the right-wing and liberal defenders of capitalism have held up the previous two decades of declines in these figures as evidence of the viability of the profit system. The UN report says that the share of the world’s population living in extreme poverty—the number of people living on less than $1.90 per day—“fell from 10.1 percent in 2015 to 9.3 percent in 2017.”

The UN’s projection data shows that the share of extreme poverty went from 8.4 percent in 2019 to 9.5 percent in 2020 and will rise to more than 10 percent in 2021. While the conclusion drawn by the UN is that the rise in extreme poverty shows the “importance of disaster preparedness and robust social protection systems,” the return of a dramatic rise in poverty is a demonstration of the failure of capitalism and a harbinger of revolutionary struggles by the working class on a world scale.

The UN report is a vindication of the analysis provided by the World Socialist Web Site and the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) since the pandemic began in the early months of 2020. On February 28, 2020, the ICFI issued a call for a globally coordinated emergency response to the pandemic through the mobilization of the working class to “make available the resources required to contain the spread of the disease, treat and care for those who are infected, and secure the livelihoods of the hundreds of millions of people who will be affected by the economic fallout.”

The statement warned that the economic damage from the pandemic “could exceed the scale of the 2008 financial crisis” and that “the response of ruling elites and the governments they control to the crisis combines incompetence with a criminal level of indifference.”

Before governments throughout the world raided the federal treasuries with unlimited trillions of dollars in “stimulus” to prop up the investment portfolios of the financial oligarchy, the ICFI statement called for “financial support and income compensation for all those impacted by the economic consequences.” The statement also warned that “the major capitalist governments, led by the US Federal Reserve, have allocated virtually unlimited sums of money to drive up the market value of equities” following the 2008 crash and that the “working class must demand that governments impose emergency taxes on the fortunes of the oligarchs to the extent required by the emergency.”

Record inflation in US leads to double digit increases in basic consumer goods

Jacob Crosse

On Tuesday the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), released the latest consumer price index (CPI) data from June, which showed that prices for basic consumer goods and services continue to rise at historic rates. The BLS reported that the CPI rose 0.9 percent from May, nearly double what Wall Street analysts had predicted, leading to a year-over-year CPI increase of 5.4 percent, the highest in 13 years.

The core inflation growth statistic, which just measures the increase in consumer goods, minus energy and food, showed a 4.5 percent year-over-year increase, which is the highest since 1991.

A woman carries a box of food away as hundreds others impacted by the COVID-19 virus outbreak wait in line at a Salvation Army center in Chelsea, Mass. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)

Driving the soaring increase in the CPI is the rising cost for energy commodities such as fuel oil and gasoline, which the BLS recorded rising 44.2 percent in the last year. Used car prices are also showing an unprecedented rise in prices, jumping 10.5 percent in June, which follows a 7.3 percent increase in May and 10 percent in April. New car prices also rose 2 percent in June, the biggest increase since May 1981.

The meteoric rise in car prices is being driven by two main factors: a global semiconductor shortage, components used in nearly every modern electronic device and a so-called labor shortage. Major car companies, such as General Motors, have lamented the fact that workers are unwilling to work in COVID-19-infested factories for the $16.67 an hour offered to new hires under its agreement with the United Auto Workers (UAW) union.

The labor contracts signed by the unions have long included raises at or below the rate of inflation and lump sum payments instead of increases in hourly wages. The contract proposed by the UAW at Volvo Trucks would provide an average annual raise of only 2 percent over six years for the top-paid workers at the factory. With the annual rate of inflation at over 5 percent, this would result in a nearly 20 percent cut in real wages over the life of the contract.

Rising prices have been one of the major factors in the growth of the class struggle, including the five-week strike by Volvo workers who have rejected three UAW-backed contracts and are demanding substantial raises and a cost-of-living escalator, a demand abandoned by the UAW long ago.

As the corporatist trade unions and companies conspire to depress wages and increase profits, workers are finding it difficult just to afford basic food items, leading to an increase in food insecurity across the US. Some 20 million adults are without enough to eat as of mid-June, according to data collected by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, while the latest US Census Bureau survey found that 42 million US adults reported not being able to afford the types of food they want to eat last month.

Food price changes since February 2020 (Insider)

The BLS found that the price of beef rose by 4.5 percent in June, while eggs, pork and ham all rose by 3.1 percent. Milk prices also increased by 0.5 percent, potatoes increased by 1.5 percent. The price of fruits and vegetables have increased by 6 percent since February 2020, while cakes, cookies and bread have all jumped over 4 percent in the same time period.

To give a sense of the rapid increase in prices within the last two years, below is a list of staple items with the average June 2019 price listed first, followed by June 2021.

* Gasoline has increased by 32 cents from $2.83 a gallon to $3.15, an 11.3 percent jump. Earlier this month, AAA said prices would rise another 10-20 cents by the end of August, meaning it will cost $53.28 to fill up a standard sedan and $86.58 for a pickup truck.

* A pound of boneless, skinless chicken breast rose by 27 cents from $3.08 to $3.35, a 9.0 percent increase.

* Average rent has increased by 5.1 percent, from $1,712 to $1,799.

* A pound of ground beef cost $0.67 more than it did two years ago, from $4.20 to $4.87

* The average household electric bill has increased by 4.2 percent, or roughly $5.00 from $121 to $126

While the national average for rent has increased by 5.1 percent in the last two years, just this year alone, apartments.com found that rent prices are up 7.5 percent this year, three times higher than the normal average rate of increase.

Over a dozen cities have seen a 10 percent jump in rents over the past year according to Zillow, a real estate website. From February 2020 to May 2021 rent prices in Stockton, California have increased by $268. In Boise, Idaho the average increase is $236 a month, followed by Ventura, California ($229) Phoenix, Arizona ($195), Fresno, California ($193), Sacramento ($184) and Stamford, Connecticut ($180).

As rent, food, energy and consumer goods increase in prices, real average weekly earnings for workers have completely stagnated, leaving many with hard choices as to what bills to pay, or who gets to eat.

In an interview with the Washington Post, Pamela Porter, 68, of Fort Worth, Texas spoke on the difficulty of making ends meet on a fixed income. “I’ve noticed food prices going up. And gasoline. Oh my. That shot through the roof,” said Porter, who just received a notice that her rent is rising by $40 a month, to $780. The increase in rent, said Porter, “could definitely impact my ability to buy groceries and buy my medicine. I’m not going to even mention car repairs. Life shouldn’t be this hard.”

Despite the financial squeeze being placed on millions of workers and their families, the Biden administration has no intentions of re-upping the Centers for Disease Control eviction moratorium, which is scheduled to end in less than three weeks.

Similarly, Biden and the Democrats, beholden to the same financial oligarchy as the Republicans, have indicated there will be no extension on federal unemployment benefits, including the $300-a-week booster, which is set to expire September 6.

While some companies have been forced to offer one-time bonuses to new-hires to fill some 9 million available jobs in the US, BLS data shows that real earnings for workers in the US have flatlined for over a decade, with average weekly earnings down 2.2 percent from May 2020 to May 2021. The only reason the figure is not higher is because the BLS found that there has been a 0.6 percent increase in the average work week.

Earning of all employees, private sector, January 2011-May 2021

Overall, the Labor Department found that average hourly earnings increased by 0.3 percent from May, bringing the total to 3.6 percent over the year, nearly 2 percent less than inflation. The modest wage gains some employers have given are not permanent, with many companies already rescinding pandemic-related bonus and shift premiums.

Speaking to CNBC, David Weliver, founder of the personal finance site Money Under 30, explained that it is very unlikely that wages will be able to keep pace with inflation. “There’s going to be a lag,” Weliver said. “The prices at the gas pump or grocery store may change very quickly but you might not get that raise for a year.”

The miniscule increase in wages has led to complaints from the financial oligarchy and its media mouthpieces of a “dreaded spiral” in which increased wages will drive inflation and vice versa. The ruling class fears that a “wages push” by the working class could lead to a collapse of the inflated stock market, which depends on the continued suppression of workers’ wages.

The struggles by workers at Volvo, Frito-Lay, Warrior Met Coal, ATI, ExxonMobil, St. Vincent Hospital in Worcester, Massachusetts and other locations are an initial sign of the explosive battles by the working class that are on the horizon, in the US and internationally, against the social inequality produced by capitalism and the corporatist trade unions and big business parties that enforce it.

Commonwealth Professional Fellowships 2022

Application Deadline: 9th August 2021

The deadline for submitting references is 16:00 BST on Monday 30 August 2021.

About the Award: Commonwealth Professional Fellowships are for mid-career professionals from low- and middle-income countries to spend a period of time at a UK Host organisation working in their sector for a programme of professional development.

Purpose: To provide professionals with the opportunity to enhance knowledge and skills in their given sector, and to have catalytic effects on their workplaces.

Type: Fellowship

Eligibility: Mid-career professionals (with five years’ relevant work experience) working in development-related organisations in low and middle- income Commonwealth countries.

Eligible Countries: Developing countries

Number of Awards: Up to 25 fellows (in total)

Value & Duration of Award:

Each fellowship provides:

• Approved return airfare from the Fellow’s home country to the UK
• Stipend (living allowance) payable monthly (or pro rata) for the duration of the award at the rate of £1,704 per month, or £2,115 per month for those at organisations in the London metropolitan area (at 2020/21 rate)
• If a Fellow declares a disability, a full assessment of needs and eligibility for additional financial support will be offered by the CSC. See the CSC disability support statement for more information
• Arrival allowance of up to £22 (at 2020/21 rate), including an element for warm clothing
• For the Girls’ Education programme a £1,000 travel allowance to facilitate attendance at events
• Reimbursement of the standard visa application fee
• Flat rate contribution of £800 to the costs of the Host organisation relating to the administration and support of the Fellow, setting up of appropriate meetings, any materials required, and incidental travel for the Fellow during the award (to be paid to the Host organisation on receipt of an invoice).
• Fees can be agreed for costs associated with Fellows attending short courses/conferences as well as travel to visit other UK organisations where this forms an integral part of the Up to a maximum of £3,000 can be agreed for awards of three months (to be paid to the Host organisation on receipt of an invoice)

Full justification must be given for the amount being claimed.

Host organisations should bear in mind the restrictions set out in our <guidance on claimable costs> (link will be added on Monday)

The Girls’ Education Fellowships are designed to:

• Begin on 15th January 2022
• Run for three months
• Promote collaboration across host organisations with each host holding an engagement event for the full cohort of Fellows

How to Apply: We welcome enquiries for organisations working in Girls’ Education that are interested in becoming Fellowship Hosts. More information and details of how to contact us about this programme are available through the links below.

• Information for prospective Hosts.
• Information for prospective Fellows.

• It is important to go through all application requirements in the Award Webpage (see Link below) before applying.

Visit Award Webpage for Details

Huawei HMS App Innovation Contest 2021

Application Deadline: 5th September 2021 (UTC+8)

To Be Taken at (country): The contest will be held in Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East & Africa, Latin America, and China, respectively.

About the Award: HUAWEI Developer is a platform ecosystem that integrates various services and resources for developers to develop and promote their apps. After registering and being verified as a HUAWEI Developer member, developers can access complete services from development and testing to promotion and monetization. Aimed at providing quality experiences for end users, HUAWEI Developer looks forward to achieving a win-win situation with all developers.

Type: Contest

Eligibility:

• Open to global developers. You only need to register a HUAWEI ID and complete identity verification.
• You may not participate in the contest if you are under the age of 18.
• Employees of Huawei and its affiliates and their immediate relatives should not sign up for the contest.
• You can participate in the contest on your own, or as part of a team. For a team, all members must belong to the same competition region before participating in the contest in this region.

Selection Criteria: Judges will review works on the basis of the following framework:

• Business value: Has substantial commercial potential, with sustainable business models that indicate clear market positioning and a target user base.
• Design, technology, and user experience: Features a distinctive visual design that incorporates user-friendly characteristics, and meets universal user requirements for a stable, responsive, broadly compatible, and privacy-conducive app.
• Innovativeness: Comes endowed with innovative design and/or technological attributes, which represent a clear improvement over those in existing apps.
• Social value: Benefits society at large, by improving the allocation of public services, or addressing social problems. This can involve enriching the lives of individual users or facilitating industry-wide development, and span a wide range of fields, such health care, education, transportation, the economy, and the environment.

Value & Number of Awards: Huawei has set aside US$1 million from the Shining Star Program as prize money for the contest. Up to US$200,000 will be allocated for the following award winners in each participating region:

• US$15,000 each for 5 Best App
• US$15,000 each for 3 Best Game
• US$15,000 each for 3 Best Social Impact App
• US$5,000 each for 1 Most Popular App
• US$2,500 each for 12 Honorable Mention

Winners are also eligible for a treasure trove of enticing incentives:

• HUAWEI AppGallery promotional resources
• Huawei cloud resources

How to Apply:

(1) Sign in to HUAWEI Developers with a valid HUAWEI ID (register for a HUAWEI ID if you do not have one, and complete identity verification) and click Sign up. If you are a team leader, click New team and enter the team information. If you are a team member, click Join us and enter the name of the team you wish to join.
(2) Create your work and integrate HMS Core. For details about HMS Core, please refer to HMS Core.
(3) Click Submit work on the contest details page, enter the app name, ID, and description, and upload the APK and app introduction document.

Visit Programme Webpage for Details

PTCIJ Climate Change Media Fellowship (Paid) 2021

Application Deadline: 16th July 2021.

About the Award: The Premium Times Centre for Investigative Journalism (PTCIJ), through its Natural Resources Programme (NAREP), is pleased to invite journalists, media professionals, researchers and analysts for its inaugural climate change media fellowship across west Africa.

NAREP aims to strengthen the capacity of media and civil society to carry out deep and impactful reporting as well as advocacy around issues relating to natural resources, extractives and climate change.

Type: Fellowship

Eligibility: The fellowship which will last for three months is open to journalists, policy analysts and researchers working around climate change-related issues in any of these English-speaking West African countries: Ghana, The Gambia, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Nigeria.

Number of Awards: Not specified

Value of Award:

• Training and mentorship opportunities for fellows
• Monthly stipend and data allowance
• Media appearances on topical climate change issues

How to Apply: Please note the following Guidelines:

• Pitches/research proposals must be centred around climate change in West Africa (you can focus on a country)
• Applicants must have relevant experience in investigative reporting, research, or policy analysis.
• Female journalists/researchers are encouraged to apply.
• Applicants living with disabilities are encouraged to apply.
• Only shortlisted applicants will be contacted.

Click here to apply.

Visit Award Webpage for Details