Brazil’s PT and PSOL ally with right in face of Bolsonaro’s coup threats

Tomas Castanheira

The threat of a fascist coup in Brazil emerged with blinding clarity on September 7 as demonstrations organized by President Jair Bolsonaro and his ultra-right supporters openly advocated the establishment of a dictatorial regime.

September 12 anti-Bolsonaro rally called by right-wing groups in São Paulo, Brazil. (AP Photo/Marcelo Chello)

Only two days after the demonstrations, Bolsonaro issued a “Letter to the Nation” in which he declared his loyalty to democracy and stated, “I have never had any intention of attacking any of the Powers [of the Republic].” There could not be a more cynical statement.

Bolsonaro spent weeks systematically preparing the fascistic rallies, with his virulent threats of causing an “institutional rupture.” In the speeches he gave on September 7 in front of crowds raising banners demanding a “military intervention,” he openly threatened to shut down the judiciary system and declared that only God will remove him from power. The fascistic president stated in his “Letter” that “my words, sometimes forceful, resulted from the heat of the moment and from disputes that always aimed at the common good.”

The document was written with the open assistance of former Brazilian President Michel Temer of the Brazilian Democratic Movement (MDB). As Dilma Rousseff’s right-wing vice president, he assumed the presidency in 2016 after the Workers Party (PT) president was impeached on trumped up charges.

The “Letter to the Nation” was hailed within the top echelons of the Brazilian state as a sign of reconciliation from Bolsonaro, and the havoc he has systematically promoted was immediately forgiven as a simple misunderstanding!

The president of the Congress, Arthur Lira of the Progressive Party (PP), declared, “Everything that happened and was ‘off script,’ we can frame as the fervor of politics, emotion of the moment ... the president of the republic rightly calms the tempers.” For his part, the president of the Senate, Rodrigo Pacheco of the Democrats (DEM), said that the letter was “a positive sign from Bolsonaro” and “meets what most Brazilians expect.”

The tactical retreat signaled by Bolsonaro’s “Letter,” however, can only be understood as an integral part of his dictatorial drive. Responding to a disappointed section of his fascistic supporters, who expected an immediate coup after the demonstrations, Bolsonaro declared, “Some want me to go there and slit everyone’s throat. [But] today there is no isolated country, everyone is integrated into the world.”

In other words, the consummation of a fascist military coup in Latin America’s largest country requires the alignment of both internal and external factors, among which the support of US imperialism is fundamental. While the bourgeois media and the petty-bourgeois pseudo-left have cast the election of President Joe Biden in the US as a bulwark of Brazilian democracy, the attitude of the Democratic administration—the same party that backed the Brazilian military coup in 1964—is by no means defined.

From the internal perspective, the very response of the parliamentary leaderships to the president’s cynical letter reveals a glaring degree of collusion with Bolsonaro’s coup moves. This attitude permeates both the traditional bourgeois political parties and the military. While some of the generals brought into the government by Bolsonaro have appeared on the platforms at his fascist rallies, others have made unprecedented threats to the civilian regime, such as the joint statement by the military command warning that it will not accept “frivolous attacks” by the legislature on the Armed Forces.

Such developments demolish the claims that the Brazilian regime is supposedly shielded from coup threats by the self-regulatory mechanisms of state institutions, especially by the “constitutionalist” commitment of the Armed Forces. More deeply, they expose the putrefaction of the country’s state only 35 years after the establishment of a civilian regime in the wake of more than two decades of brutal military dictatorship.

The ostensible opposition to Bolsonaro, headed by the PT and its pseudo-left satellites, has responded to this deep political crisis in the most politically criminal way. They are fighting to neutralize any independent political movement of the working class, while trying to convince the population that the only possible way to resist the dictatorial threats is by forging an agreement within the bourgeois state.

On September 12, various right-wing political parties and movements promoted a demonstration against Bolsonaro, seeking to capitalize on the growing popular hatred of the fascistic government and presenting themselves as alternatives. The demonstration was headed by the Free Brazil Movement (MBL) and Vem Pra Rua (Come Into the Streets), which originally emerged as organizers of the extreme right-wing demonstrations for the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff and supported the election of Bolsonaro. It also had the participation of São Paulo Governor João Doria of the Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB)—elected as a supporter of Bolsonaro, Ciro Gomes of the Democratic Labor Party (PDT), supporters of the Maoist Communist Party of Brazil (PCdoB), and the main Brazilian trade union federations, with the exception of the CUT, which is presided over by the PT.

This reactionary political march did not include the participation of the PT and its pseudo-leftist ally, the Socialism and Freedom Party (PSOL), only because, according to the presidents of both parties, they were not “invited” to “build” the demonstration together with the right wingers. Speaking to Carta Capital, the president of the PT, Gleisi Hoffmann, added that “we need to gather the democratic field and build together. The main thing is this. It’s not an adhesion, but a joint path.”

This political orientation, however, was rejected by elements within both parties. This was revealed by the action of São Paulo’s state deputy Isa Penna, one of the PSOL’s main parliamentary figures, who disobeyed the decision of her party and openly called for participation in the right-wing demonstrations against Bolsonaro.

Penna comes from the PSOL’s Insurgency faction, which is affiliated with the Pabloite Unified Secretariat. She is a mono-thematic advocate of upper middle-class identity politics. Her actions express the desperation of sections of the petty bourgeoisie in the face of the disintegration of the Brazilian bourgeois regime and their swing to the right in response. Her speech during the demonstration made clear her politically criminal attempt to give a democratic cover to the spurious goals of the extreme right-wing forces. “Today I consider that they [MBL] are in the democratic camp. ... I know they are no longer that group that flirts with fascism,” she stated.

The reactionary politics promoted by Penna, however, are not essentially different from the orientation advocated by her party. Behind organizational justifications for not joining the right-wing demonstrations, the PSOL and the PT are basing their actions on purely electoral calculations.

The PT and the PSOL intend to launch former President Lula da Silva as their presidential candidate in 2022 election, contesting Bolsonaro. Those who called for the September 12 demonstrations are hoping to advance a “third way” and have raised the banner of “Neither Lula, Nor Bolsonaro,” with which neither the PT nor the PSOL can agree.

The PT’s efforts to once again rule Brazil in the name of its national bourgeoisie have a purely reactionary character.

On the eve of September 7, Lula made a public statement in response to Bolsonaro’s coup plans for that day, which by then had already been exposed. Speaking directly to the ruling class, to whom he is offering his services, Lula attacked Bolsonaro from the standpoint that his actions, “instead of uniting forces, stimulate division.”

According to Lula, the “role of a president of the republic is to keep confidence alive in the present and in the future, to show that it is possible to overcome obstacles.” He affirmed that as president, “especially on September 7 of such a difficult year” he would have made a speech to console the “families of the victims of the pandemic” and to present plans that “would give a lift of hope to the workers” affected by unemployment and hunger.

Lula is advocating that, in the face of the profound crisis of Brazilian capitalism— completely discredited before the working masses because of the obscene levels of social inequality, the growth of mass misery and the normalization of hundreds of thousands of deaths by COVID-19—what the bourgeoisie needs is a leader capable of mitigating and not deepening social divisions.

But the growth of social conflicts in Brazil and internationally is irrepressible. The rotten alliance proposed by the PT and the PSOL to hold together bourgeois rule can only result in the deepening of its crisis and growing threats of a fascistic coup.

Inflation in Germany rises as wages fall

Elisabeth Zimmermann-Modler

In August, the annual inflation rate in Germany officially rose to 3.9 percent compared to 2.3 percent in June. Prices of goods and services are rising at the fastest rate in 28 years, i.e., since December 1993 when the inflation rate in the country peaked at 4.3 percent.

SGP placards at a demonstration against high rents (WSWS media)

Across Europe, inflation has risen to 3 percent, and in the US it already exceeds 5 percent. The price increases mainly hit the working class and in particular low-wage earners, single parents and poor pensioners.

Energy and food prices have risen especially sharply. Energy prices in August were 12.6 percent higher than one year earlier. The price of heating oil increased by 57.3 percent, fuel/petrol by 26.7 percent, natural gas by 4.9 percent and electricity by 1.7 percent. Energy prices were also affected by the CO2 tax of €25 per tonne, introduced at the beginning of this year. This tax is due to rise regularly to €55 by 2025.

Food prices have risen by 4.6 percent, vegetables by 9 percent, and dairy products and eggs by 5 percent. Prices for consumer durables, such as autos, have also risen by 5.5 percent and by 4 percent for furniture and lighting. Clothing, personal care products, flowers, newspapers and magazines have also become more expensive, while prices in restaurants have risen by 10 to 20 percent.

Savings are particularly difficult for average and low-income households when it comes to heating, energy, food and other daily necessities, the prices of which have all increased. Inflation hits workers and the poor disproportionately hard because they spend most of their income on such commodities.

Many households do not have enough left to live on due to rising energy and food prices. At the same time, the huge increase in rents in recent years is not fully included in the official statistics.

Especially in metropolitan regions, rents have risen sharply in the period from 2016 to 2020. In Munich, the price per square metre rose by 12.4 percent to €18.48 in the first quarter of 2021, in Frankfurt/Main by 14.5 percent to €15.75, in Stuttgart by 14.7 percent to €14.74, in Berlin by 8.6 percent to €13.68, and in Hamburg by 10.8 percent to €13.50. The prices refer to apartments built in the last 10 years (Handelsblatt, April 28, 2021).

In Berlin, rents already rose by more than 100 percent between 2009 and 2019. “This development,” says Handelsblatt, “is not limited to urban areas. The phenomenon of steadily rising rents can be observed throughout Germany and across settlements.”

The explosive nature of the rent price development is also made clear by a publication by the German Trade Union Federation (DGB) outlining the situation in the state of Lower Saxony.

“The rent screw is now being turned everywhere,” it says in #schlaglicht (no. 30/2021). “Even in rural regions and smaller communities, prices are soaring. But the situation is particularly precarious in big cities—also in Lower Saxony: More than half of all tenant households in Hanover, Oldenburg and Osnabrück have to pay more than 30 percent of their income for rent. The situation is hardly better in Göttingen, Braunschweig and Wolfsburg. In total, there is a shortage of 86,000 affordable flats in these six cities.”

Low-income earners, according to the publication, i.e., those with less than 60 percent of median income at their disposal, have to spend on average of about 50 percent on rent. Nationwide, about 2.1 million people are left with less than the subsistence level after deducting rent and utilities. Single parents and couples with children are particularly affected.

The DGB’s own demands for a rent freeze and a minimum wage of €12 are utterly hypocritical. The trade unions themselves sit on the official committee that sets the minimum wage. It is set at an extremely low level and rises only a few cents a year. Since July 1 it has stood at €9.60 per hour, and on July 1, 2022 will rise to just €10.45.

At the same time, the unions have ensured that workers have remained in the factories to generate profits, despite the deadly consequences of the coronavirus pandemic. They also support the opening of schools, even though this puts millions of children at risk of contagion with dramatic long-term consequences and deaths, all to ensure that parents are forced to work in line with the government’s profit-before-lives policy.

During the pandemic, the trade unions in many sectors agreed on zero or very low-wage settlements over many years, which now has the effect of massively reducing real wages.

IG Metall, for example, has suspended its scheduled wage contract negotiations for the 3.8 million workers in Germany’s engineering and electrical industries until the end of the year and has agreed a deal for this year that does not include any increase, merely a one-off payment of €500.

The union has concluded a similar contract for steelworkers. They are to receive one-off payments of €250 in late 2021 and early 2022 and €600 in 2023. At the same time as the government has handed over hundreds of billions of euros in support packages to corporations and banks, workers have been left empty-handed.

Also, IG Metall has agreed to real wage cuts at VW, which has its own in-house contract. A wage increase of 2.3 percent is not due to take effect until January 1, 2022 and will run until November 30, 2022. The percentage wage increase is thus only 1.15 percent per year, far less than the rate of inflation.

At Deutsche Bahn the DGB union, the EVG, has agreed to no increase for the current year, while the rival union, the GDL, has just agreed to a real wage cut for train drivers and other rail staff.

Some of the unions’ settlements are so low that there have been nominal wage reductions for the first time since surveys began in 2007. Gross monthly earnings, including special payments, fell by 0.7 percent in 2020 compared to the previous year. Consumer prices rose by just under 0.5 percent. This has left workers with 1.1 percent less pay in real terms. The current increase in inflation will serve to significantly drive down real wages even further.

Pensioners are particularly hard hit by both inflation and the negative wage development. Since German pension levels are linked to the wage development of the previous year, there was no pension increase this year in the West of the country and only a very small one in the East.

In many sectors, resistance is developing against falling wages, growing work stress and imminent mass dismissals. Care workers, train drivers, airport workers and delivery drivers, to name but a few, are protesting and striking against intolerable working conditions and attacks on wages and jobs.

More than 1 in 500 people in the US have died from COVID-19

Bryan Dyne

Numerous media reports have emerged noting the latest macabre milestone of the coronavirus pandemic, that COVID-19 has killed more than one out of every 500 people in the United States since the virus first emerged in the country in January 2020. The total tally currently stands at 42.5 million confirmed cases and more than 685,000 dead.

In this Sept. 14, 2021, file photo, a syringe is prepared with the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine at a clinic at the Reading Area Community College in Reading, Pa. COVID-19 deaths and cases in the U.S. have climbed back to where they were over the winter, wiping out months of progress and potentially bolstering President Joe Biden’s case for sweeping new vaccination requirements. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File)

The last such milestone occurred in mid-December of last year, when one out of every 1,000 people in the population had died. Nine months later, the number of deaths has doubled. Virtually everyone now knows a friend, colleague or family member lost to the deadly contagion.

In marking the premature passing of so many lives, CNN noted that, “It's a sobering toll that comes as hospitals in the US are struggling to keep up with the volume of patients.” An age breakdown in the Washington Post revealed that those aged 40-64 have a death rate of 1 in 780 and those aged 65-84 have a death rate of 1 in 150. Those aged 85 and older have a truly staggering death rate of 1 in 35, amounting to a total of 171,000 lost human lives.

The pandemic has ravaged both the elderly as well as those caring for them. The AARP Nursing Home COVID-19 Dashboard reports that, as of September 15, at least 186,000 nursing home residents and staff have been killed by the pandemic. AARP’s data implies that tens of thousands of nursing home and long-term care facility workers have died alongside those they were working to care for. Nursing home deaths are also on the rise, particularly in Alaska, Florida and Montana.

Comparisons to wars and past pandemics are increasingly apt. In absolute numbers, the COVID-19 pandemic has killed more Americans than total US combat and non-combat deaths in World War I and II combined. The coronavirus pandemic has also now killed about the same number of Americans as the 1918 flu pandemic, which killed an estimated 500,000 to 850,000.

There are also many indications that the coronavirus pandemic will surpass or has already surpassed the grim milestone set by the 1918 flu. Excess death estimates from the Economist place the true death toll in the US closer to 900,000, while the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation place the total toll from COVID-19 at more than 1 million.

Official figures are equally macabre. There are currently an average of more than 1,600 people dying each day, a number which has been trending upwards since July.

What none of the media reports seriously probe, however, is the source of the immense amount of casualties. At most, there is a despair that “not enough people have been immunized” with coronavirus vaccines, as put by the Post. The Biden administration itself has remained silent on the figure. More generally, the deaths have been treated as “no longer a matter of if … but a matter of when” they would occur, as if the pandemic is some sort of unforeseen natural disaster and that we must simply accept the consequences.

Instead, the decreasing cases were seen as an excuse to more fully open the economy. July 4 was celebrated as a day of “Independence” from the virus and plans were made to fully reopen schools come the fall. Warnings of numerous scientists about the dangers of a surge of the new and highly infectious Delta variant, which had ravaged India for months, went totally unheeded. Decisions were made to prioritize the interests of Wall Street investors over human life.

The consequences have been catastrophic. There are now nearly 153,000 new cases reported daily in the US, a figure which is again rising after the dip in reporting over the Labor Day weekend. Cases are also increasing across all parts of the US, not just the American south where cases have been concentrated over the past few months. Data from the New York Times shows that states including Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia, Alaska, Montana, Wyoming and Idaho have some of the highest case rates in the nation.

Montana and Idaho also have some of the highest increases in hospitalizations in the country. Montana leads the entire nation, with a 47 percent increase in hospitalizations over the past 14 days, while Idaho has suffered a 29 percent increase over that same period. Other states with similar high changes to their hospitalization rates include Ohio, West Virginia, Alaska, New Hampshire and Pennsylvania.

As a result, hospital systems are increasingly overwhelmed. Nearly 100,000 people are hospitalized from COVID-19 on a given day. One in four hospitals currently reports that more than 95 percent of their intensive care unit beds are occupied, and there is at least one such overwhelmed hospital in nearly every state. And many hospitals, such as those in southern Illinois and southwest Montana, have reported zero ICU bed availability.

The surge in cases, hospitalizations and deaths since mid-summer is a damning indictment of the policies of the Biden administration. Since he took office, Biden has banked on vaccines being enough to slow the spread of the disease, promoting the false claim that it was safe to reopen workplaces and particularly schools since February. Other public health measures, including testing, contact tracing and isolation have been largely abandoned. Closures of businesses and schools have been rejected outright.

In doing so, Biden has adopted the policies of his predecessor and the entire US ruling establishment. While the media and various other representatives of the capitalist class may momentarily note the scale of the ongoing disaster, no solution, especially not one which impinges on the profit interests of the banks and corporate elite, is presented.

It thus falls upon the other major social force in society, the working class, to fight for a policy of eradicating COVID-19. This requires the closure of schools and non-essential businesses, together with massive investments in testing, contact tracing, and other vital public health measures.

Pegasus and Fables of National Security

Hiren Gohain

Government pleads in Supreme Court  in defence of its stubborn refusal to disclose if it has used Pegasus spyware against civilian targets, that terrorists might disappear from the radar if the answer is made public. But the moment it became known that it could be used against suspected terrorists, they would have taken prompt  precaution to disable the spyware or dive deeper into the digital cavern. Unless they are absolute duffers rather keen on coming under limelight when caught. Citizens are less fortunate in that they are both unaware and incapable of countering such abuse of law.

Pegasus hit the headlines when Whatsapp revealed to its customers, and government, that some of them have been snooped upon through Pegasus. It created a stir but died down when nobody seemed to know what to do about it. The IT minister Ravishankar Prasad came down

heavily upon Whatsapp when it later came up with a peculiar privacy policy that appeared to turn on its head the very notion of privacy. Security seemed to become  unlimited access of  service provider to private data of the hapless customer. We guarantee, it seemed to say, complete security to your data if you leave them in our possession.

National security is also a  serious business as it concerns the sovereignty of the nation and the safety of lives and property of the  people. National security, the government might be suggesting, is safest when the private space of any or all citizens is occupied and watched by it. Some will find this plea quite reasonable, except those dunderheads nursing a suspicion of the government, which has the holiest of intentions.

Pegasus seems to have turned up at the same time as the formidably wily  Benjamin Netanyuhu of Israel was hand in gloves with our leaders. So the common Indian became more curious about his Protean capabilities. As a tough guy he used all means, literally all means, to keep himself in power through all kinds of scrapes. Did he use Pegasus to stay ahead of his rivals for years together? Difficult to say since the Israeli firm marketing it would not respond to such a question.

But it is obvious that if through the alibi of national security it is operated by an incumbent government, it will have an enormous advantage over its political rivals.

It will have prior knowledge of every move of its rivals and will be in a position to frustrate or disarm their plans. Besides its prior knowledge might enable it to plant agents to mislead and doom its opponents’ campaigns.

Journalists swayed by vain ideas of their integrity can be prevented from filing their stories with a direct phone -call to the management or the story could be deactivated like a virus with stories bearing opposite content. A storm could be raised on social media about his loyalty to the nation or to his profession. True, he will also have friends and followers who won’t be taken in. But the threat to the government will be greatly weakened or nullified.

One feature of this apparatus has not been much discussed. That is its potential use to implant and infiltrate into  the targeted person’s phone false, misleading or incriminating data, the kind of use that the Bhima Koregaon accused have allegedly been subjected to.

Such deployment practically enables the government through its security agencies to influence and manipulate the behavior of the targeted individual. And he would be convinced he was acting completely on his own, a volitionally free agent. With sufficient planning and skill he could be steered into involvement even in terrorist acts, made to fall out with faithful friends and allies, and act in ways that would completely destroy things he valued most. The police might become criminalised elements not above the level of private armies of drug lords. Even a  judge might be trapped in ways beyond his legal acumen and wisdom to take biased  or hesitant positions in cases embarrassing to the government. Frightening, you say. Yes, but entirely possible with this kind of powerful device. The Dystopia may have already arrived in some parts of the world.

If such practices are sought to be  condoned by invoking hallowed national security, then there is only one remedy against their dreadful illegality. Make sure that the government of the country is not enabled to guarantee its own probity. The secrets of the state must not be a government monopoly. The  opposition must be made part of the mechanism of legislative oversight and monitoring. Policies guiding intelligence operation must be reviewed from time to time by parliament and the highest court in the land so that they do not go against the constitution. That must be made mandatory. Otherwise democracy will turn into  a shadow- play directed by power-hungry thugs.

Greece reopens schools amid new wave of COVID-19

George Gallanis

Schools in Greece reopened Monday, a move that will lead to a new surge of COVID-19 among children and in the wider population. Infection rates in young people are already very high. According to the Ministry of Health, more than 12 percent of all cases occur among those aged under 17 and 38 percent among 18-to 39-year-olds.

After the New Democracy (ND) government ended lockdown restrictions mid-May, cases began to surge to record levels. The largest wave of cases were in August, with many days breaking the 3,000 mark of reported cases and a record of 4,608 daily infections on August 24. On average, 2,171 new COVID-19 infections are still being reported each day with numbers steadily rising. On Monday, 2,279 cases were recorded, but just 24 hours later rose to just short of 3,000 cases (2,919).

These numbers must increase significantly after this week as schools, colleges and universities reopen. ND Education Minister Niki Kerameos told Skai TV that the government's priority is face-to-face teaching in all educational institutions.

A teacher wearing a protective face mask speaks to her pupils in junior high school in Athens, Monday, Sept. 13, 2021. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)

The government is requiring teachers and lecturers to present a certificate of full vaccination, or proof of having contracted coronavirus within the last six months, or a negative laboratory test result that must be presented to the schools twice weekly.

Such mitigations will not stop the spread of the Delta variant, which can partially evade immunity provided by the vaccines, and is vastly more transmissible, producing viral loads roughly 1,000 times higher than the initial virus.

The government is forcing students back into the classroom, dropping remote learning options. “It is not justified for a student to be absent from class because parents are afraid to send him to school because of an outbreak in the class,” Kerameos said. Like her counterparts in Europe and around the world, the education minister categorically rejects school closures.

“Before, we still had school classes closed to protect students' families from spreading the virus. But now most are vaccinated and if not, they have the option to do it immediately,” Kerameos claims. She and her ilk were never concerned about protecting the public from the virus, only about “saving the economy,” meaning the profits of the corporations. For this schools must remain open so to allow parents to work.

The most basic quarantine measures have been thrown out. Kerameos announced that a classroom would be closed only if more than half the children in the class contracted COVID-19. “The infected person's contacts will not be quarantined, but a laboratory test will be done.”

Athina Linou, an epidemiologist and professor at the National and Kapodistrias University of Athens, reacted to the move in horror. This is “not right at all”, she told ANT1. “If we know that 11 children are sick, then probably at least five more are also sick. At some point, those 20 kids will go home, pass the virus on to siblings, parents, grandparents, friends, maybe a household helper and a neighbour. That means one class can infect another 100 to 150 people, given the transmissibility of the new variant. Add to that the tutorials and activities.”

She warned, “Of the 100 children who get sick, 10 percent will get very, very sick. And a certain percentage, whether they get seriously ill or not, will have long-term after-effects, for a year, for two years. That's going to create an explosive situation in the daily lives of families.”

With classes too large, rooms too small and children still unvaccinated, Linou previously described the opening of schools and kindergartens as “criminal”. She told Skai that the ministry was ignoring “that we have a much more contagious virus” and that schools were closed most of the time last school year. “It's terrible that we're not taking action. The same goes for public transport, in the workplace the issue of home offices needs to be addressed again. It's a difficult situation.”

Nikos Tzanakis, the Professor of Pulmonology at the University of Crete’s medical school, speaking to iatropedia.gr, this week estimated that coronavirus will infect 30,000 to 50,000 children. “We believe that 25-30 percent of children will come in contact with the virus. Assuming that we have a transmissibility specific to the Delta virus, this means that one third of these children will be infected, that is, around 30 to 50 thousand children will be infected.”

Mathematical modelling research at the University of Crete found that if 50,000 children are infected with the virus, 1.5 percent are likely to develop more severe symptoms and may require hospitalisation. Tzanakis warned, “We are dealing with a strain that 'hits' children very hard”. While during the pandemic, hospitalizations in paediatric departments did not exceed 240, it could not be excluded that they could reach 300 and even more than double to 600 cases.

George Pavlakis, a doctor and academic, advised before schools returned, “The smartest policy would be to make a huge effort to bring down the cases even with a lockdown. Another solution would be not to start schools next week or to have the lesson outside, not to have the children in the classrooms”. Cases could reach a record 4,000 a day, said Pavlakis as he warned that “the Delta mutation should be treated as a new pandemic, because of the huge difference in infectivity.”

The growth of cases will be made worse with Greece’s health system already under enormous strain. Doctors are decrying low capacities and major staff shortages in the pandemic. On August 31, all five intensive care doctors at the Rethymno hospital on Crete submitted their resignations due to exhaustion from being overworked. “We have been sounding the alarm for a long time in several letters, but the management not only ignores us completely, but also burdens us with additional tasks every day,” they said.

A few days prior, the heads of Rethymno’s Intensive Care Unit, the Emergency Department, the Department of Pathology and the Department of Pulmonology addressed an open letter to the directors and the public: “We are in the second year of the pandemic and despite the assurances of the management, we are working with the same staff.” A few holes had been “plugged” by untrained staff, which “is not enough”. In addition to their departments, they are also supposed to support a new COVID clinic. The staff are treating corona patients on their wards, even though they do not officially have beds dedicated to COVID patients.

The head of the intensive care unit at Papanikolaou Hospital in Thessaloniki, Nikos Kapravelos, warned a week ago on Open TV, “The hard part is still ahead, the disease is progressing faster this time.” More than 95 percent of the available COVID beds in his intensive care unit were already occupied, with only a few beds left for patients with other conditions. “When we consider that holidaymakers are still returning, schools are opening and many remain unvaccinated, it's not good news,” said Kapravelos.

UK businesses call for prisoners to be used to plug labour shortage

Julie Hyland

Food manufacturers are calling on the UK government to allow them to exploit prison labour.

The British Meat Processors Association and the Association of Independent Meat Suppliers (AIMS) are reported to have approached prisons directly and to have spoken to the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) to discuss the recruitment of current prisoners and ex-offenders. But other sectors, from hospitality to care homes, are said to be considering the move.

Tony Goodger for AIMS said, “Much of the food industry is facing a recruitment crisis,” with 14,000 job vacancies in the meat business. The British Poultry Council reports a vacancy rate of more than 16 percent, approximately 7,000 jobs.

Leyhill prison in Gloucestershire, England (Credit: Creative Commons)

Goodger said he had contacted HMP (Her Majesty's Prison) Hollesley Bay in Suffolk in August but was told the demand for inmates was so great that it had reached its quota. Usually, those available for work are in open prisons and coming to the end of their sentence who are released on temporary licence (ROTL), of which there are just 3,000 in England and Wales.

Moves to employ inmates are being presented as part of a new “rehabilitative” approach, with the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) stating, “Helping prisoners find jobs during their sentence and after release makes it much less likely they will reoffend. We will support all industries with skills shortages where possible.”

Penal servitude was abolished in 1948 in England and Wales (1950 in Scotland and 1953 in Northern Ireland). For almost 200 years up until then, the transportation of convicts to the colonies was a feature of the consolidation of Britain’s Empire. Imprisonment with hard labour included the treadmill, the most famous victim of which was Irish novelist and playwright Oscar Wilde.

Any gains from its abolition were rapidly lost. Prisoners are meant to engage in “purposeful activity”, although not necessarily paid labour. Those on work programmes earn a minimum weekly wage of £4. But years of “law and order” policies, combined with massive cuts to public services, means England and Wales have the largest prison population in Western Europe, at almost 79,000 in November 2020—173 prisoners per 100,000 of the population. Rehabilitative measures have largely been jettisoned, with most prisoners confined to their cells for much of the day.

Until now, the UK has not emulated the United States, where convict labour is a multi-billion-dollar industry. Direct employment of inmates is relatively small scale, from the Turkey producer Bernard Matthews to the Timpson Group. But more recently inmates at HMP Leyhill, Gloucestershire have been employed on minimum wage to build eco-homes for Torbay Council, with their wages placed into a fund overseen by the prison governor, and which can only be accessed for housing.

Frances Crook, Chief Executive of the Howard League for Penal Reform, wrote in the Guardian that many prisoners “would jump at the chance to get out of their cells and do something useful”, and urged, “Let firms set up shop inside prisons, as I have done, but inmates get the same wages and employment rights as anyone else.”

There is no chance of that. Crook notes that a commercial graphic design studio set up by the Howard League at Coldingley prison, Surrey ran “successfully for years until the prison authorities realised that, because they paid income tax, the prisoners had employment rights.”

The MoJ said prisoners hired by meat companies would get paid, unless unpaid work was part of their sentence and that “wages would vary according to which businesses inmates work for” but would “probably be less than what an ordinary member of the public would earn.”

This is the real impulse for a return to penal servitude, especially under conditions of a significant labour shortage. Virtually all sectors are impacted. Most attention has focussed on the lack of HGV drivers, a shortage upwards of 90,000, which is blamed for emptying supermarket shelves. But from hospitality to health and social care, it is a growing complaint.

The source of the shortages is manifold. Britain’s exit from the European Union, on December 31, 2020, has seen an estimated one million non-UK born residents leave the country, 700,000 in London alone.

The pro-Brexit campaign centred on claims that the UK would be able to “take back” control of its borders and clampdown on EU migration. EU citizens already employed on that date were able to continue living and working in the UK, provided they registered, but anyone coming to work afterwards requires a visa.

The Brexit deadline came only weeks before the world was notified of the deadly COVID-19 global pandemic. Boris Johnson’s Conservative government, like many the world over, first tried to ignore and then play down the dangers. It openly proclaimed a policy of “herd immunity”, allowing the virus to spread through the population.

In the face of wildcat strikes and protests, it was forced into a lock down at the end of March 2020, but only after it had organised a £330 billion bailout of the corporations and super-rich and £895 billion in quantitative easing—money printing—almost equal to that over the 11 years following the financial crash in 2008.

In October Prime Minister Boris Johnson declared “let the bodies pile up in their thousands. No more f**cking lockdowns” and has been true to his word. With the support of the Labour Party and the Trades Union Congress, all mitigation measures have been abandoned. This centres on keeping schools open despite the known dangers in order to force parents into unsafe workplaces and recoup profits.

The result is a health and social catastrophe. More than 7.2 million people in the UK have been infected, and more than 159,000 people have died. Between November 2020 and February 2021 COVID-19 was the leading cause of death in both England and Wales.

Details of the ages and occupations of those who have died are barely counted, According to government figures, almost 8,000 working age adults died from COVID between March 9 and December 28. Those most at risk were men in “elementary” and service jobs, and women in factories and “caring” occupations. Cases among young and working adults are now rising exponentially.

The numbers stricken with ongoing health complications are unknown. This includes not only Long COVID but thousands unable to access treatment for cancer, cardiology and other critical care due to the severe strains on the National Health Service, which has a 5.45 million people on its waiting list. The number of deaths from all causes was 12.1 percent above the five-year average in the week ending August 27, 2021.

The virus has impacted most on the most exploited and socially vulnerable. Not for nothing has COVID-19 been deemed a “disease of the poor”.

For almost four decades, the ruling elite, whether represented by the Tories or Labour, have carried out a social counter-revolution against the gains and conditions of the working class. Years of deindustrialisation and cheap labour jobs, reinforced by austerity, meant that even before the pandemic wages over the preceding 17 years had been falling—the longest period since the beginning of the 19th century. More than half of those below the official poverty line come from working families, as wage cuts and freezes have been policed by the trade unions.

Those celebrated as “essential workers” during the pandemic are especially exploited. HGV drivers worked long hours for a median hourly pay of £11.80, with the result that average age of drivers is 55. Wages in the food processing plants average £8.91.

Individual firms in certain sectors have sought to resolve their immediate problem by offering “golden handshakes” and a slight increases in wages. Even so, starting salaries are estimated to have increased by just 3.5 percent on average, following a 1.5 percent fall in the year to June 2020.

Solving the shortage through real improvements in overall wages and conditions is off the agenda as far as the financial oligarchy is concerned. The government has already imposed a freeze on public sector wages. At the end of this month, it will withdraw furlough support to almost 1.8 million workers and six million people on Universal Credit are to lose the £20 per week “pandemic top-up”. Together with limiting increases to pensions to just 2.5 percent and a 10 percent hike in National Insurance Contributions, these measures are aimed at making the working class pay the costs of the pandemic crisis.

The primary instrument enabling the imposition of these attacks is the trade unions. Speaking to the annual Trades Union Congress conference this week, General Secretary Frances O’Grady called on the government to “Invite unions in with employers. Get us around the table, and let’s make that industry deliver decent conditions, direct employment and a proper pay rise.”

Her example of a “proper pay rise?” £10 per hour for social care workers, approximately 50 pence per hour above the current average rate, and below the Living Wage.

ICUs across the United States stretched to capacity by COVID-19 Delta variant surge

Benjamin Mateus

The Delta wave of the pandemic has left an immense hidden trail of devastation stemming from a complete abandonment of or inability of local and state public health departments to provide a timely and accurate statistical accounting of the number of cases and deaths. The actual toll of the pandemic becomes guesswork pieced together by daily reports from health systems to their respective states.

However, the limited data available to the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) demonstrates that intensive care unit (ICU) capacity across many healthcare systems in the Southeast, Midwest, the South, specifically Texas, and the Southwest, including California, has exceeded 95 percent.

According to the New York Times, “One in four hospitals are now reporting more than 95 percent of ICU beds occupied, up from one in five last month.” The latest metrics from the HHS website on hospital utilization indicates that out of 84,513 staffed ICU beds in the country, 67,175, or approximately 80 percent, are in use. Almost 31 percent of these beds are being occupied by patients admitted for COVID-19.

The tragic death of Ray Martin DeMonia, a Cullman, Alabama antiques dealer, in Meridian, Mississippi, from a heart attack earlier this month, may seem anecdotal but depicts in glaring reality the consequences to the population when health care systems become inundated by an entirely preventable disease. DeMonia was turned away from 43 hospitals across three states because their ICUs were full. The nearest available bed was 200 miles away at Rush Foundation Hospital. Delay in care, in this case, led to his untimely death.

A heart attack need not be fatal nor debilitating. Rapid intervention that allows the reopening of a blocked coronary artery can restore oxygenated blood to the heart muscle and prevent the tissue from dying. If the blockage persists for five or six hours, a significant portion of the heart muscle can fail, and acute heart failure can occur with the heart attack leading to a dangerous combination. After twelve hours, the damage is irreversible. Additionally, dangerous heart rhythms can be generated that make the remaining heart work inefficiently.

The care of patients in ICUs is labor-intensive. It requires a tremendous investment in resources that include highly trained specialists—a cadre of nurses, physicians, therapists—and a sundry of complex equipment used to treat patients. Additionally, interventional radiological suites, blood banks, laboratories, and pharmacies must work together intimately to allow the hospital services to function efficiently.

However, when these systems reach capacity, the ability to care, treat, and respond immediately to a medical emergency is compromised. Instead of nurses caring for one patient, they may be assigned three or four patients in their extended shifts. Non-ICU staff is utilized who are unfamiliar with the processes or do not know how to respond to critical results. Patients must be monitored in busy emergency rooms or makeshift units lacking the necessary support systems.

A sustained surge in sick patients also means that essential procedures or operations must be suspended. Patients with life-threatening illnesses have to cope until health systems can return to routine operations. But as the current surge of COVID-19 impacts younger patients, ICU stays are more extended. The state of siege under which the hospitals operate runs into weeks, which can be a matter of life and death for patients who desperately need urgent comprehensive medical attention. They also take an incredible toll on the mental well-being of the staff, who feel they are perpetually working over an assembly line of severely ill patients.

Speaking with U.S. News, executive vice president of the Houston Methodist hospital system, Roberta Schwartz, frankly stated, “We basically do ICU in the emergency room. You may hold down there for 45 minutes, and you may hold for three days. You’re going to get great care if you can come to one of our facilities. But ideally, you want to get people up to the appropriate unit as quickly as you can.”

“It’s not very comfortable, but it works,” she told U.S. News about the makeshift ICU. “And a blow-up mattress is better than a sleeping bag, which is better than a tent outside.”

The answer for the ruling elite to the current crisis is the implementation of hospital care rationing programs, as Idaho’s Department of Health and Welfare (DHW) announced last week as the state faced a massive surge in COVID-19 patients. On September 11, there were over 600 patients hospitalized, far above the winter peak when 466 people had been hospitalized at any one time.

DHW Director Dave Jeppsen wrote, “Crisis standards of care is a last resort. It means we have exhausted our resources to the point that our healthcare systems are unable to provide the treatment and care we expect. This is a decision I was fervently hoping to avoid. The best tools we have to turn this around is for more people to get vaccinated and to wear masks indoors and in outdoor crowded public places. Please choose to get vaccinated as soon as possible – it is your very best protection against being hospitalized from COVID-19.” The crisis standard of care, in basic terms, means resources are diverted to those the hospital staff believes have the best chance for survival.

Yet, beyond meagerly suggesting that residents consider getting vaccinated, Idaho’s Republican governor Brad Little, like his counterparts in Florida, Texas and elsewhere, has remained vocally opposed to any mask mandate.

Governor Little is also working with the state’s attorney general, Lawrence Wasden, to use the court systems to stop President Joe Biden’s large employer COVID vaccination and testing mandate.

Meanwhile, patients are being transported across state lines to Spokane, Washington, where there is some capacity in their ICUs. However, as Dr. Christopher Baliga, an infectious disease specialist at Seattle’s Virginia Mason hospital, told the Washington Post, “We are keeping our head above water, but barely. Our capacity to absorb overwhelmed patients from other states is severely limited.”

According to the Economist’s analysis, though COVID deaths are averaging close to 1,700 per day in the US, excess deaths are almost twice as many at 3,100 per day. Cumulatively, with more than 662,000 reported deaths due to COVID, there have been 860,000 excess deaths. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, an independent global health research center based at the University of Washington, places the current excess deaths in the US at over one million.

Not all these deaths are directly related to COVID infections. Dr. Steven Woolf, director emeritus of the Virginia University’s Center on Society and Health, noted last year, “Some people who never had the virus may have died because of disruptions caused by the pandemic. These include people with acute emergencies, chronic diseases like diabetes that were not properly care for, or emotional crises that led to overdose or suicides.”

To be even more precise, the current preventable deaths are a byproduct of deliberate neglect on the part of state and federal governments, when in the face of inundated health systems operating at overcapacity they steadfastly refuse to lock down and disrupt the transmission of the virus, thereby perpetuating the social murder that is measured economically and tabulated in the ledgers of the financial aristocracy’s portfolios and ever-larger bank accounts.

TV election debate in Germany: All candidates stand for herd immunity, mass layoffs and welfare cuts

Christoph Vandreier

Rarely has an election campaign been so detached from social reality as this year’s campaign for the Bundestag (federal parliament). This was underlined by the penultimate TV debate between the candidates for chancellor of the Christian Democrats (CDU), the Social Democrats (SPD) and the Greens, broadcast simultaneously on both main TV channels on Sunday evening.

The three candidates for chancellor – Olaf Scholz (SPD), Annalena Baerbock (Greens) and Armin Laschet (CDU) – in the Triell (Screenshot)

The three-way debate between Olaf Scholz (SPD), Armin Laschet (CDU) and Annalena Baerbock (Greens) was held in Berlin-Adlershof on the outskirts of the capital, but it seemed like something from another world. All major social developments were blanked out, since all the parties pursue the same ruthless policies in the interests of the super-rich.

In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, the 93,000 deaths in Germany were not even mentioned. All three candidates had previously ruled out a lockdown, which would be necessary to save hundreds of thousands of lives. Instead, they have promoted policies that place the profits of banks and corporations ahead of people’s lives.

The only issue under debate was how to increase vaccination rates, although with the spread of the Delta variant, vaccinations alone can never be sufficient to bring the pandemic under control. With the enforcement of in-person schooling, millions of unvaccinated children are left defenceless and exposed to infection so that their parents can work and generate corporate profits.

Instead of saving lives, all the parties in the Bundestag have gifted billions to the super-rich. According to data from the US business magazine Forbes, German billionaires recorded an increase in wealth of $178 billion in 2020!

A recent analysis by Oxfam found that the world’s 2,690 billionaires would still be $55 billion richer than they were at the start of the pandemic even if they gave away 99 percent of their 2020 profits on a one-time basis. This money, according to Oxfam, would be enough to pay for the vaccination of every single person on the planet and, in addition, transfer 17,000 euros to every one of the world’s unemployed.

In light of these figures, the staged dispute during the debate over tax increases could hardly be surpassed in absurdity. While Laschet categorically ruled out any tax increase, Scholz advocated raising the top tax rate for very high incomes by just 3 percent.

The last SPD-led government, headed by Gerhard Schröder, had cut the top tax rate by 11 percentage points. At the time, Scholz, as SPD secretary-general, played a leading role in implementing Schröder’s “Agenda 2010,” which, in addition to tax cuts and pension reductions, promoted the creation of a huge low-wage sector.

By refusing to tax the rich, all three parties participating in the debate made it unmistakably clear that they would far eclipse this policy and squeeze the hundreds of billions transferred to the corporations and the super-rich out of the working class.

That is why the mass layoffs in industry were not mentioned at all. What is already being pushed through at Opel, Continental and Daimler will reach completely new dimensions after the elections. In the auto industry alone, 500,000 jobs are up for grabs. The same workers, who were forced into completely unsafe workplaces under pandemic conditions, are now to be put out on the street.

In this general attack on the working class, the employers and stock owners can rely on the new federal government, regardless the new chancellor’s party affiliation.

This is evident in the current train drivers’ strike, which also received no mention. The federal government is trying to make an example here. The train drivers are to pay for the crisis with real wage losses and, at the same time, be subjected to the control of the main trade unions in order to suppress any resistance. This is to be extended to the entire working class after the elections. But all these issues were carefully sidestepped in the debate.

With regard to climate change, which was loudly argued over in the debate, all the candidates are pursuing a program that is oriented toward the interests of big business rather than the needs of ordinary people and the environment. Laschet demanded “creativity instead of regulations and bans.” He wants to speed up the approval process for construction projects and relieve companies of red tape—in other words, eliminate environmental and worker safety standards.

Baerbock also presented climate policy as an opportunity for big business. Even the Financial Times, the authentic voice of European finance capital, noted with satisfaction the extent to which the Greens had submitted to the interests of business.

“Baerbock’s ‘pact with industry,’ aimed at helping the country’s businesses cope with climate change, shows how much her party’s relationship with the corporate world has changed,” the finance paper commented on Monday.

The German Institute for Economic Research has just published a study proving that even the rosy promises of all the election programs would not be adequate to achieve even the climate targets set by law, let alone keep global warming below the critical 1.5 degree increase.

In the preceding debates, the candidates had given assurances that they would assert the interests of the German economy internationally, including by force of arms. From the debacle in Afghanistan, which revealed the brutal nature of the Western powers’ war of occupation, all parties drew the conclusion that Germany would have to rearm even further. In the debate they sought to outdo one another in declarations of support for strengthening the Bundeswehr (armed forces) and implementing an aggressive foreign policy that, in the words of Green candidate Baerbock, “does not duck away.”

In every single area of policy, all of the Bundestag parties agree on the broad outlines, and in every single area the line is determined by a ruthless class policy that is rejected by the vast majority of the population.

That is why the debate took on such an artificial character. All the candidates were at pains to hide their real program behind all sorts of platitudes and smokescreens. In the media, too, one found nothing about the parties’ plans. Instead, the coverage resembled a sports report: Who scored a hit? Who went on the offensive, etc.?

When the grand coalition consisting of the Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union and the SPD was voted out of office four years ago, the parties spent four months negotiating behind closed doors over the continuation of the hated government constellation. In this way, they made the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) the official opposition party, while they themselves pursued the extreme right-wing policy of unrestrained enrichment of the ruling class, culminating in their common herd immunity response to the pandemic.

Similar talks behind the backs of the population are taking place again. This was very evident in the debate, which was watched by 11 million viewers. The event was based on an agreement not to address any of the issues that move millions of people.

Regardless of which parties form the next federal government, the homicidal coronavirus policies will continue and the hundreds of billions given to the rich will be recovered from workers through mass layoffs and wage theft.