Canada admits aerosols are major source of COVID-19 transmission after nearly two years of denying it

Roger Jordan

Almost two years into a pandemic that has claimed the lives of close to 30,000 Canadians, Canada’s Liberal government has admitted what scientific experts have long insisted—aerosols play a major role in the transmission of COVID-19.

Indeed, research has conclusively demonstrated that aerosols are the virus’ principal means of transmission.

Yet up until late last week, the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC), which is overseen by the federal Liberal government, stubbornly insisted that respiratory droplets are far and away the most important means by which COVID-19 is transmitted. This is because highlighting the key role aerosols play in spreading the virus points to the dangers people face when they congregate in workplaces, schools, buses and subway cars, and thus cuts across the ruling elite’s drive to corral working people to return to work amid the pandemic.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, left, with his British counterpart Boris Johnson, who infamously declared in Oct. 2020, “no more f***ing lockdowns, let the bodies pile high in their thousands!” (Jeff J Mitchell/Pool Photo)

Chief Public Health Officer Theresa Tam tweeted the new public health advice concerning aerosols late Friday afternoon. “Since the outset of the pandemic, we’ve learned a lot about the SARS2 virus that causes COVID-19,” the tweet read. “Importantly, we’ve learned how the virus can linger in fine aerosols and remain suspended in the air we breathe. Much like expelled smoke lingers in poorly ventilated spaces, the SARS2 virus can remain suspended in the air, with those in close proximity to the infected person inhaling more aerosols, especially in indoor and poorly ventilated spaces.”

The PHAC has not followed up Tam’s tweets, which appear to have been timed to minimize their impact, with a public information offensive to alert the population as to the dangers of aerosol transmission. Nor is it advocating any policy changes to prevent a surge of infections, as people increasingly congregate indoors during the cold winter months.

The PHAC’s belated admission constitutes a devastating indictment of the political establishment’s prioritization of corporate profits over human life, which has gone hand-in-hand with a systematic repudiation of a science-based response to the virus.

Until Tam’s tweet, the federal government had treated aerosol transmission of COVID-19 as little more than an afterthought. Not until November 2020, long after scientific investigations had demonstrated the centrality of airborne spread, did the PHAC even admit that aerosol transmission was possible. Moreover, as the CBC noted at the time, this change to the PHAC’s COVID-19 guidance was done “quietly,” and was not accompanied by any campaign to warn the public of the danger of aerosol transmission, let alone any changes in government policy.

The federal government’s insistence that droplets were the main mode of transmission, a claim followed by provincial governments across the country, was driven by political motives. The ruling elite’s “profits before life” pandemic policy, based on forcing workers back into unsafe workplaces so they could churn out profits for corporate Canada, required that airborne transmission be denied or at least downplayed. This enabled governments to avoid imposing any responsibilities on employers for taking adequate precautions to stop the airborne spread of COVID-19, while at the same time removing any obligation from governments to fund basic upgrades to improve ventilation and air quality in schools, colleges and other public buildings.

Speaking at the October 24 webinar “How to end the pandemic” organized by the World Socialist Web Site, Prof. Jose Luis Jimenez, a chemistry professor at the University of Colorado (Boulder), addressed this issue directly. Noting that governments and public health authorities around the world have concentrated above all on transmission via droplets that are inhaled at close proximity or transferred via contact with surfaces, he remarked, “Droplets and surfaces are more convenient for governments, organizations and companies. If you get infected, you didn’t wash your hands, you didn’t keep your distance, you didn’t wear your mask well, so the responsibility is mostly yours. But if it was airborne, your employer or your government didn’t provide you with good ventilation, and they have a horror of that.”

One of the most notorious examples of this outlook in practice came in the fall of 2020, when provincial governments across the country reopened schools with virtually no protections against virus transmission. Campaigners who pushed for the use of HEPA filters and other ventilation devices in overcrowded and poorly ventilated classrooms were contemptuously dismissed by the authorities, while the education trade unions connived with provincial governments to suppress opposition among teachers and education workers to the reckless return to in-person learning. The back-to-school drive, as a study carried out in Montreal later demonstrated, played a crucial role in fueling Canada’s second pandemic wave, which claimed over 10,000 lives last fall and winter.

Similar devastating scenarios played out at numerous workplaces. Over 600 Amazon employees at the company’s massive Heritage Road facility in Brampton—more than 10 percent of the workforce—were infected by COVID-19 in a massive outbreak last winter. Thousands of workers crammed elbow-to-elbow in meatpacking plants also got infected in Quebec and Alberta, with several losing their lives.

There is no indication that the Trudeau Liberal government, or any of its provincial counterparts, intend to pull back in the slightest from their back-to-work/back-to-school drive in response to Tam’s admission about the dangers of aerosols. On the contrary, Tam’s statement came as governments move to dismantle all remaining public health measures aimed at limiting the virus’ spread. Despite resurgent infections, the Ontario Progressive Conservative government led by Doug Ford is pressing ahead with a timeline that will see the abolition of all public health measures, including mask-wearing, by March.

In Quebec, the hard-right Coalition Avenir Quebec government lifted a mask mandate for high school students on Monday and eliminated restrictions on karaoke bars and dance venues. COVID-STOP, a group of health care experts, attacked the government for refusing to acknowledge aerosol transmission, which it says accounts for between 85 and 100 percent of all COVID-19 transmission. Nima Machouf, an epidemiologist and member of COVID-STOP, said in response to the lifting of the mask mandate in high schools, “It’s like replaying last year’s movie. We were expecting that the government would have learned from it. The timing is not right.”

In fact, the situation being provoked by the ruling elite this winter is arguably even worse than a year ago. Under conditions in which the significantly more infectious Delta variant is dominant, and the immunity provided by vaccines is beginning to wane, even the inadequate protective measures deployed earlier in the pandemic are being tossed aside. The health care system, which has operated at the breaking point for close to two years, is even less equipped to deal with an influx of patients than it was 12 months ago, with thousands of overworked, mentally-exhausted health care workers having left the profession.

Nonetheless, the ruling elite is determined to resist taking even the most basic public health measures to reduce COVID-19’s further spread. Tam’s admission that the virus is transmitted by aerosols was itself somewhat contradictory, with the Chief Public Health Officer unable to even bring herself to recommend high-quality N95 masks or equivalents for workplaces and other indoor settings. Instead, she merely suggested that a “well-fitted and well-constructed mask” should be worn.

Nicolas Smit, an Ontario-based engineer and scientist who has been a strong advocate for better access to personal protective equipment (PPE) throughout the pandemic, told the WSWS in an interview that protections for workers must be strengthened following the government’s admission that COVID-19 is transmitted primarily through the air. “There have been a lot of outbreaks at Canada Post facilities, for example,” he said. “Federal workers should get N95 masks at a minimum.”

Smit added that the revised PHAC guidance makes a “big difference” to how the threat of infection in schools should be viewed. Classrooms now become “a danger zone,” he continued. “As we enter the winter, it will be harder to open windows. They’re going to have to use other methods of protection and technology, like N95 masks and elastomeric respirators,” he said. “But in Ontario, you have teachers getting suspended for wearing N95 masks.”

Workers who have based themselves on the science ignored by the ruling elite and fought for improved PPE over recent weeks have been met with intimidation and reprisals from their employers and trade unions. In Ontario, a campaign initiated by the biostatistician and educator Ryan Imgrund, and supported by hundreds of teachers, calling for only N95 masks to be worn in schools was viciously denounced by the teachers trade unions. Teachers who wore N95s to school were suspended by their school boards, including some with immunocompromised children at home.

These events underscore that if science-based policies to combat the pandemic are to be implemented, they must be enforced through a mass movement led by the working class. This movement must be guided by the understanding that the only way to prevent an airborne virus like COVID-19 from inflicting further mass infection and death on workers across Canada and internationally is to fight for its elimination.

This requires the immediate closure of all nonessential production and in-person learning in schools, with full compensation paid to all workers from the vast wealth being hoarded by the pandemic profiteers. It also requires the development of a comprehensive program of testing, isolation of infected people, contact tracing and vaccinations, to bring community transmission down to zero.

Governments reject pandemic controls amid record COVID-19 surge in Europe

Alex Lantier & Will Morrow

It is two years exactly since the earliest documented case of COVID-19, which scientists have traced to November 17, 2019. Two years later, while lockdowns, social distancing and contact tracing policies have blocked the circulation of COVID-19 in China after less than 5,000 deaths, Europe is deep in yet another wave. Yesterday, over 290,000 people were diagnosed with COVID-19, and 4,141 died in Europe.

Thus, even if the pandemic stabilized and somehow did not accelerate further, over 400,000 people would die this winter. In fact, the World Health Organization (WHO) has projected that with current policies, 500,000 more people will die of COVID-19 in Europe by February 1. Virologist Christian Drosten of Berlin’s Charité hospital has warned of 100,000 more deaths in Germany alone.

A crowded COVID-19 isolation room at the University Emergency Hospital in Bucharest, Romania, October 22, 2021. (AP Photo/Vadim Ghirda)

Europe is currently reporting 2 million COVID-19 cases per week. Last week, daily infections set records in Germany (50,377), the Netherlands (20,168), Austria (13,152), and Greece (8,613) and continued at high levels in Britain (37,243), Russia (36,818) and the Czech Republic (11,514). France’s daily new cases nearly doubled over the last week from 10,050 to 19,778 yesterday. Over 1,000 deaths were recorded last week in Russia (8,593), Ukraine (4,590), Germany (1,194), Bulgaria (1,147), Poland (1,119) and Britain (1,083).

Yet governments across Europe are rejecting social distancing and especially strict lockdowns that can halt circulation of the virus on the present, massive scale. Only the international mobilization of the working class, fighting for scientific policies of social distancing and contact tracing, can stop the transmission of the virus, end the pandemic and avert a massive loss of life.

The strategy of the European ruling class is expressed most bluntly by the British government. Prime Minister Boris Johnson infamously stated, “No more f…ing lockdowns, let the bodies pile high in their thousands.” Now, London proposes to allow the virus to spread across the population and become endemic, as UK Secretary of State for Education Minister Nadhim Zahawi said earlier this month: “[w]e will, I hope, be the first major economy to transition from pandemic to endemic …”

If London boasts of its strategy of “herd immunity” via mass infection, the “mitigation” strategy of other European governments is not substantially different. Berlin, amid its greatest ever surge of COVID-19, is moving to end its official declaration of an “epidemic situation of national scope,” ending the legal basis for public health measures against the virus. In Paris, Health Minister Olivier Véran has boasted that vaccines are “100 percent effective against lockdowns.”

This would mean that every year thousands would die in Europe and millions worldwide of COVID-19. Arguments for this politically criminal strategy are being advanced on French television by Martin Blachier, a physician who left medical practice to run a “public health expertise consultancy” and promote state policy on the news. A week ago, he told CNews: “We are at the beginning of a phenomenon of pandemic resurgence, and there is no reason for it to stop.”

Blachier called for governments to avoid any change in policy. “The hysteria over this resurgence that is seizing Western Europe, which has high vaccination rates, is a bit exaggerated. I think we must calm down! We are not in the same situation as last year. … We must above all not get in the same frame of mind as we were in last year!”

If Blachier is worried, it was because in the spring of 2020, strikes erupted in Italy, Spain, France, Britain and beyond, as workers in nonessential industries demanded the right to shelter at home until the virus was contained. This terrified the ruling class, which was forced to allow public health personnel to implement lockdowns that massively reduced infections. This also cut across plans to use the pandemic to massively enrich the financial aristocracy, whatever the cost in lives.

Ultimately, it was not until workers could be forced back into workplaces to make profits for the banks that massive bank and corporate bailouts could be poured into the pockets of the super-rich. After the announcement of €2 trillion in European Central Bank and European Union bailouts last summer, the net worth of Europe’s billionaires rose by $1 trillion, while 1 million people died in Europe, in what the BMJ (former British Medical Journal ) correctly called a policy of “social murder.”

Now as the latest winter surge erupts, the Dutch and Austrian governments have announced partial lockdowns. These inadequate measures keep workers on the job and youth in school to keep making profits for the banks but limit the ability of the population (or the non-vaccinated population, in Austria) to meet others outside work. Most contagion occurs in workplaces, schools and medical facilities, however, and such measures—imposed during last year’s deadly winter surge—do not stop mass contagion and death from COVID-19.

This break with official opposition to lockdowns is manifestly a pre-emptive response to growing criticisms of state policy by medical professionals and social anger among workers.

Yesterday, hospitals in the southern Dutch province of Limburg warned that they could not cope with the onrush of COVID-19 patients and are again approaching collapse. “We are heading straight for a health care blockage, and the entire system is grinding to a standstill,” they declared in a public statement. “We are convinced that other parts of the Netherlands will soon follow.”

On Monday night, however, Blachier went on LCI to defend the policy of mass infection and denounce any move to re-establish social distancing policies. He admitted, “the infection levels we should reach by December 15 will be the highest we have ever seen. In terms of infections, we’ll probably get pretty high.” Nonetheless, he demanded that nothing be changed. “We must go towards vaccination and not go back to social distancing like the Netherlands. For me it’s crazy that they are doing that today.”

To be blunt, such declarations are politically criminal. As the World Socialist Web Site warned in August, “Vaccination is a powerful tool. However, disconnected from a broader strategy aimed at rapidly reducing new infections to zero and thus eradicating COVID-19, vaccination and other mitigations amount to nothing more than palliative care.”

Thus German health authorities reported that in the four weeks ending October 10, 55.4 percent of symptomatic cases were breakthrough infections of vaccinated patients. Vaccine effectiveness wanes over time, moreover, and in this time period, 28.8 percent of vaccinated COVID-19 patients over age 60 required intensive care unit treatment.

Last week, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus again warned, “COVID-19 is surging in countries with lower vaccination rates in Eastern Europe but also in countries with some of the world’s highest vaccination rates in Western Europe. It’s another reminder, as we have said again and again, that vaccines do not replace the need for other precautions. Vaccines reduce the risk of hospitalization, severe disease and death. But they do not fully prevent transmission.”

Profit instead of science: The German government’s COVID-19 policy

Peter Schwarz

“The fourth wave of the coronavirus pandemic is building before our very eyes at full power. The daily rate of new cases has reached the highest level since the beginning of the pandemic, with a continuing rising trend. Seven hundred people die every week in our country, with a continuing rising trend. Every day of waiting costs human lives,” warns a letter signed by 35 well-known professors and scientists addressed to Germany’s federal and state governments.

Initiated by the Braunschweig virologist Melanie Brinkmann and the Cologne internist Michael Hallek, the letter was signed by the well-known intensive care physicians Christian Karagiannidis and Uwe Janssens, among others. Dozens of other scientists have since joined them.

The scientists leave no doubt that the disaster in Germany could have been prevented and that the government is responsible for thousands of COVID-19 deaths. “Once again, the time for early action has passed despite all warnings,” they write, and express their “deep disappointment” about “the repeated negligent treatment of the well-being of the people who depend on the protection by the state.”

German Chancellor Angela Merkel [Credit: Stephanie Lecocq/Pool via AP]

For them it is “incomprehensible that decision-makers in this country have allowed such a situation, despite the existence of effective tools to stop the Sars-CoV-2 virus.” Although scientists have clearly communicated “various relevant recommendations for action,” these were “unfortunately only hesitantly, incompletely or not sustainably implemented.” The letter added, “Urgently necessary infrastructure for pandemic control, such as contact tracing, testing and vaccination centres” have been dismantled.

In the fourth wave, “pandemic management is not succeeding in the ways that should be expected in light of Germany’s prosperity and its technological and administrative capabilities.” Instead, politicians “shift responsibility for crushing the fourth wave to the individual. Such an attitude is totally inappropriate during a national health crisis of this magnitude.”

Scientists are not politicians. Their letter does not address the question of why the established parties ignored all the findings and warnings of science and instead accepted 5 million infected people and 100,000 COVID-19 deaths, the number of which threatens to double this winter. Instead, they appeal to the same politicians, whose irresponsibility they denounce in harsh words, to “fully meet their responsibilities” and to base their “decisions much more strongly than before on scientific findings.”

But this will not happen. The systematic disregard for scientific knowledge by those responsible in the federal and state governments is neither a mistake nor a misunderstanding. It is the result of a policy that systematically subordinates the health and life of people to the profit interests of capital.

The principle of “profits before life” has determined the coronavirus policy of the governments from the beginning. Not only in Germany, but with very few exceptions—in particular China, and initially also New Zealand, Singapore and Australia, where the number of infected and dead remained very low—all governments have followed this brutal policy.

Lockdowns were only imposed when the intensive care units overflowed and working class opposition threatened to spiral out of control. As soon as bailouts were handed to the banks and big business, and the pandemic situation relented slightly, restrictions were lifted again despite urgent warnings from scientists. In Germany, there was never a lockdown at all for workplaces—one of the most important sources of infection. Schools were kept open after the first lockdown, despite the lack of protective measures, so that parents were available to return to the labour force. Young people were and are being deliberately infected, in spite of the devastating health consequences.

Combined with the billions in COVID-19 aid from the federal government, the government’s pandemic policy led to an unprecedented orgy of enrichment. Many companies are posting record profits despite a drop in sales, the DAX has climbed from one record high to the next after two years of the pandemic, and the wealth of the 100 richest Germans rose by 19 percent to €722 billion. The working class is bearing the costs in the form of death, contamination, welfare cuts, real wage cuts and job losses.

The consequence of this policy is a fourth wave of the pandemic, which dwarfs all previous ones. The seven-day incidence, the average of the daily infections per 100,000 inhabitants, which was in the single-digit range at times in the summer, has reached a new record of 303 and continues to rise steeply. Sixteen districts now have an incidence of over 900. The front-runner is the district of Saxon Switzerland-Eastern Ore Mountains with 1,303. This means that 1.3 percent of the population was infected within a week.

The seven-day incidence rate is similarly high in Europe at 264 infections per 100,000 inhabitants. Slovenia is the front-runner with 1,058, followed by Croatia with 918 and Austria with 851.

The number of deaths is also rising exponentially again. In the past week, 1,159 people died of COVID-19 in Germany, 10 times as many as in the summer. The intensive care units in the east and south of the country are already overflowing.

Nevertheless, the Social Democrats, Greens and Free Democrats—the parties set to compose the incoming federal government—are stepping up the “profits before life” policy of the grand coalition before they have even formed a new government. On Thursday they intend to use their majority in the federal parliament, despite urgent warnings from doctors and scientists, to let the “epidemic situation of national scope” expire. This means that the containment of the pandemic will be left to the federal states, which are deprived of the ability to take necessary measures such as curfews, contact restrictions, school closings and vaccination mandates.

The chairman of the World Medical Association, Frank Ulrich Montgomery, called this decision “absurd” in view of the incidence rate of around 300. “The winter is going to be cold. It’s up to us that it doesn’t become bitter and deadly,” he told the Rheinische Post. Anyone who said “no vaccination mandate and never again lockdown” did not understand the epidemiology of the virus, he added.

The situation in schools is particularly devastating. In some districts, the seven-day incidence among children and adolescents is now over 900 infections per 100,000 people. So far, only about half of those over 12 and none of those under 12 have been vaccinated. Seven million out of 11 million students have no protection against the virus. Hans-Peter Meidinger, President of the German Teachers’ Association, recently warned of a “loss of control over the pandemic” in Germany’s schools this winter.

Nevertheless, all politicians, led by Britta Ernst (SPD), the chairman of the Conference of Education Ministers and spouse of the designated Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz, insist that “schools remain open.” In most schools, even in the second year of the pandemic, the most elementary safety measures are absent.

“I just can’t understand why the schools are unprepared for the autumn and winter again,” virologist Isabella Eckerle, who co-signed the scientists’ letter, said in an interview with Der Spiegel. “There were so many warnings. And there are now many recommendations for protective measures in schools, the effectiveness of which has been proven in valid studies. The summer should have been used intensively for this.” It “really hurts to watch how we slide back into a situation that is about to get out of control,” she added.

Ukrainian government deploys armed drones against separatists

Jason Melanovski

Despite its obligations under the signed 2015 Minsk Accords peace agreement, the Ukrainian government is continuing to ramp up its military capabilities against Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine. In late October, it deployed Turkish-made Bayraktar TB2 drones there for the first time ever.

In response to an ostensible shelling by separatists, Ukraine used the TB2 drone to destroy a Russian-made howitzer, provoking the deployment of Russian troops to the Ukrainian border and the renewed risk of a full-scale war between Moscow and NATO-backed Kiev.

Polish soldiers erect a fence on the Belarusian border (Photo: Attila Husjenow/Instagram)

The attack in the separatist-controlled village of Hranitne, which was reported on favorably by the New York Times on Tuesday, is another demonstration that the government of President Volodymyr Zelensky is committed to a policy of escalation as it seeks to reintegrate the breakaway provinces of Lugansk and Donetsk in eastern Ukraine.

For the past year the Ukrainian ruling class has sought to deepen military ties with the Turkish government, with both powers seeking to diminish Russian naval control over the strategic Black Sea region. The Ukrainian government offered Ankara advanced missile technology and in exchange received the coveted Turkish-made armed aerial drones.

Drones played a pivotal role in Azerbaijan’s defeat of Russian-backed Armenia last year in the Nagarno-Karabakh war, and the Ukrainian oligarchy quickly became enamored with their potential use against its own Russian-backed separatists.

Kiev received the first shipment of drones in July and plans to purchase approximately 50 of the TB2 drones. In September, the two sides signed a memorandum to create a joint drone training and maintenance center in Ukraine.

Russia has predictably reacted with hostility to the use of drones in Ukraine, which could spark a new wave of targeted bombings and assassinations by Kiev in the more than seven-year-long war that has claimed the lives of over 14,000.

Speaking Saturday on Russian state television about drones and Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin accused the Zelensky government of violating the 2015 Minsk accords, which specifically ban the use of aerial weapons:

“Now the current president cheerfully reports they’re using Bayraktars, that is, unmanned aerial vehicles. Europe said something incomprehensible and the US even supported it and officials in Ukraine openly say that they used them and will use them further.”

With Russian troops now amassed across its northern border in response to its drone use, the Zelensky government has continued to duplicitously depict Russia as the aggressor while domestically preparing for war and refusing to abide by the 2015 Minsk peace accords that call for a cease fire, free elections, and a special federated status for the breakaway provinces.

Speaking of the reported Russian troop buildup, Zelensky hypocritically stated via a recorded video speech, “I hope the whole world can now clearly see who really wants peace and who is concentrating nearly 100,000 soldiers at our border.”

In reality, the right-wing government of Zelensky, which originally came to power thanks to mass opposition to the militaristic, nationalist policies of former President Petro Poroshenko, has taken increasingly reckless actions in order to provoke Russia and gain military and economic support from its imperialist backers, namely the United States, France and Germany.

In March of this year, Zelensky and the country’s National Security and Defense Council provocatively approved a strategy that is aimed at retaking Crimea and reintegrating the strategically important peninsula. This step ultimately led to a similar Russian troop buildup along the border last spring, although Moscow later withdrew its forces.

In addition to the purchase of Turkish drones, Zelensky’s foreign policy since that time has only increased the risk of all-out war between the two countries.

Following the pull-back of Russian forces, the Zelensky government spent the summer begging for NATO membership and held a number of joint military and naval drills that were openly directed against Russia.

In August, the Zelensky government held its inaugural “Crimea Platform” summit, which brought together its imperialist backers in Kiev. Zelensky took photos with world leaders and declared “Crimea is Ukraine.”

In response, the Russian government openly declared its opposition to Ukraine’s NATO accession, stating, “President Putin has repeatedly noted the issue of the potential broadening of NATO infrastructure on Ukrainian territory, and (he) has said this would cross those red lines that he has spoken about before.”

NATO’s major powers have recklessly backed Kiev’s escalation. On Monday, French President Emmanuel Macron warned Putin via a phone conversation that he would be prepared to defend Ukraine in case of war between the two countries.

“Our willingness to defend Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity was reiterated by the president,” a French adviser to Macron told reporters regarding the phone call between the leaders of the two nuclear-armed countries.

The US has sent a missile destroyer, the tanker USNS John Lenthall and the staff ship USS Mount Whitney, to participate in the US Joint Forces Command Europe military drills in the Black Sea.

This past Sunday, the British press reported that the UK was preparing to send 600 troops to Ukraine.

Ukraine itself has deployed 8,500 troops to its side of the border with Russia and announced that parts of its naval fleet would move from the Black Sea to the Sea of Azov, whose waters are claimed by Russia.

The tensions between Moscow and Kiev are escalating as the conflict between neighboring Poland and Belarus escalates over a refugee crisis in which thousands of desperate migrants seeking safe harbor in the EU have been trapped at the border and brutalized by Polish forces. Russia, which is allied to Belarus’ government, is accused of playing a central role in orchestrating the crisis.

Imperialist powers hold Libya “peace” conference, 10 years after NATO war

Will Morrow

On Friday, government representatives of more than 30 countries gathered in Paris for a fraudulent “peace” conference ostensibly devoted to organizing a transition to “democracy” in Libya. The event was jointly hosted by France, Germany and Italy, and was also attended by US Vice President Kamala Harris.

In reality, the very same imperialist powers who professed their commitment to the “self-determination” and stability of Libya are directly responsible for plunging what was previously among the most advanced countries in Africa into a devastated society.

French President Emmanuel Macron, center , German Chancellor Angela Merkel, left, and Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi attend a conference on Libya in Paris, November 12, 2021. (Yoan Valat/Pool Photo via AP)

Ten years ago, Washington, Paris and London launched a seven-month war on Libya, cynically justified under the banner of “human rights,” involving a campaign of aerial bombardments and support for Islamist and tribal militia forces. The war led to the overthrow of the Libyan government and the lynching of its former President Muammar Gaddafi. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton infamously rejoiced at his grisly murder.

Ten years on, the infrastructure and social fabric of the country is destroyed, while it has been in a permanent state of civil war, with rival militia gangsters backed by competing regional and imperialist powers battling for control over the country and its lucrative oil reserves.

The Paris conference communiqué nonetheless grotesquely affirmed its “respect for the sovereignty, the independence, the territorial integrity and national unity of Libya and our firm commitment to them. We are opposed to all foreign interference in the country.” While it pledged to support “democracy,” among its main participants was Macron’s leading ally in Africa, Egyptian military dictator General Abdul Fattah al-Sisi, who took power in a 2013 coup and has since ruled Egypt through mass executions, torture and arbitrary detention of protesters and journalists.

The Libya conference was ostensibly held to promote the upcoming elections on December 24 as a path to stability in the country. It is still unclear if the elections will actually be held. The Guardian newspaper, a vocal supporter of the 2011 Libyan war, admitted that “there is a strong chance that [the] militia will seek to intimidate voters.”

In the decade since the NATO war, the different local militias that NATO de facto placed in power have carried out war crimes, including mass killings, arbitrary detentions, torture and the expulsion of thousands of people from their hometowns. These were documented in a recent UN report, which avoided any mention of the NATO war and its responsibility for creating the present bloodshed in Libya.

There is currently no constitution governing the election, and candidates have not been announced, just over a month before polling day. Registration for candidates opened last week. Current Prime Minister Abdulhamid Dbeibah has still not announced his candidacy, and current electoral law states that any current office holder must announce his candidacy three months before the vote. The date of the vote remains unclear: presidential and legislative elections had previously been scheduled for the same date, but the legislative elections were pushed back to January in October.

It has been speculated that there will be election bids by Gaddhafi’s son, Seif al-Islam Gaddafi, and ex-CIA “asset” Khalifa Haftar. Haftar is the head of the so-called Libyan National Army, one of the country’s two main factions based in the east of the country, that has been backed by France, Russia, Egypt and the UAE.

The rival Tripoli-based Government of National Accord, which has been backed by Turkey, Qatar and Italy, has already proclaimed that it will not accept the election results if Haftar is declared the winner. Chairman of the High Council of State Khaled Al-Meshri stated in televised comments that the group would resort to violence to prevent Haftar from taking office. An unstable truce has held since 2020 between the different factions.

The day before the Paris summit, Haftar’s forces claimed that they would dismiss some 300 foreign fighters active in Libya, ostensibly to show their commitment to a de-escalation of the conflict. No information has been provided about the fighters’ countries of origin. The announcement was clearly coordinated with Paris in order to provide legitimacy to the conference’s call for the withdrawal of foreign fighters from Libya.

The French government has particularly demanded that Russia and Turkey withdraw their mercenaries from the country, absurdly presenting Paris as a defender of Libyan sovereignty.

In a press conference on Friday, French President Emmanuel Macron declared that “a first step has been taken with the announcement by the Libyan military committee for the retreat of 300 mercenaries. … It is only a beginning. Turkey and Russia must also immediately withdraw their mercenaries and military forces, whose presence threaten the security and stability of the country and the entire region.”

The statements point to intensifying geo-political conflicts and military tensions across the region and internationally. In April, Turkey summoned Greek and French ambassadors after a joint Greek-French naval excursion into territorial waters claimed by Turkey, while France has backed Greek claims over the territory.

The conference was also held amid a rapid escalation of tensions between Russia and the NATO powers over a border conflict in Eastern Europe, with the EU and NATO states illegally denying entry to thousands of refugees at the Polish-Belarusian border and accusing Moscow of carrying out “hybrid warfare” against NATO.

There is an escalating struggle for control over the geo-strategically and economically important region of northern Africa. France has waged a neo-colonial war in Mali and the Sahel since 2013, under the banner of combating terrorism. In September, the Malian government announced that it had requested that Russia’s Wagner security forces be deployed to the country in response to a French announcement of a withdrawal of occupying forces.

A further element in the European powers’ determination to set up a neo-colonial government in Libya is that country’s key role in enforcing the European Union’s criminal refugee policy in the Mediterranean Sea.

The EU provides Libyan militias with funding and naval equipment to catch refugees who seek to travel by boat across the Mediterranean to Europe. From there they are thrown into prisons, tortured and held in inhumane conditions, and either held hostage until their families can pay their ransom or literally sold into slavery. These conditions are a conscious policy on the part of the European powers to deter refugees from exercising their democratic right to claim asylum in Europe.

China and Solutions to Climate Change

K.J. Noh & Michael Wong

The Earth’s greenhouse gas concentrations are at their highest levels in 2 million years, driving catastrophic climate change, and creating an existential threat to the planet. But there is a way out.

Last year, President Xi Jinping, pledged that China’s CO2 emissions would peak before 2030, and China would become carbon neutral before 2060.

China has a track history of setting ambitious, nearly impossible goals and then achieving them–often before deadline–so this pledge is significant. Under the CPC, China has already created “an economic miracle” in transforming China into the largest economy in the world. It ended extreme poverty while creating the largest middle class in the world.  It has virtually eradicated Covid through non-pharmaceutical methods, while vaccinating up to 20 million people daily, and pledging the largest number of vaccines (2.2 Billion) and distributing over 1 Billion-to the rest of the world. It has also been applying this incredible focus and national resolve to tackle Climate change.

China has the greatest program of renewable energy of any country. It generates more renewable power than North, Central, and South America–42 countries–combined.  It has more solar parks and wind farms than any other country.  Last year it built more wind power than the rest of the world combined.

It has more electric vehicles than any other country: it operates 420,000 electric buses, 99% of the world’s total; Shenzhen alone has 16,000 e-buses and 22,000 e-taxis. It aims to have 325 million electric vehicles operating by 2050. Its high speed rail network of 38,000 km is so extensive and effective that domestic air travel is starting to become obsolete.  No country has as dense, large, and efficient system of clean public transportation and high-speed rail as China.

In addition, China also has the greatest carbon-sequestration afforestation program in the world, creating forests the size of Belgium every year. It has doubled its forest coverage to 23% over the past 40 years. Satellite analysis by NASA’s Ames Research Lab proves that China has contributed more to greening the planet than any other country in the world.

In other words, by almost every sustainability index, China a world leader–far ahead of the US–and is pioneering a way forward for the planet. It will likely hit its targets ahead of time.

These things are happening because the CPC has written sustainability and ecological development directly into its constitution.  This is then implemented into regional and local policy, such as sustainable eco-city mandates, transportation policy, energy infrastructure, advanced research, as well as dedicated funding for alternative energy development for companies to start up and build clean energy technology.

These commitments exist despite the fact that China’s historical and per capita GHG and CO2 emissions are a fraction of the world’s total. According to the World Bank, on an annual per capita basis, China share is less than half of the United States; its household energy consumption is 1/8^th of US’s.

Even more important, here’s a chart showing the cumulative emissions by country.

Source: Carbon Brief/No Cold War.

Cumulative historical amounts matter because CO2 does not dissipate but accrues in the atmosphere: stocks, not flows, are what matter. In accounting, you look at a person’s total accrued debt, not their daily credit expenditures, to determine what they owe to others. Likewise, you have to look at historically accrued GHG to accurately understand harms, liabilities, and mitigation responsibilities.

Note also, between 14–33% of China’s annual GHG emissions–are the West’s that has been offshored through manufacturing. This way, the West gets to have its cake and eat it, too: consume, pollute and destroy the planet, while virtue-signaling and blaming developing countries like China for the cost of its consumption.

Much, too, has been made of China’s coal plants, but the fact is that China’s plants are advanced supercritical or ultra-supercritical plants, which means they are much more efficient and cleaner than many of the industrial-era legacy plants of the US.  China has a more sustainable approach along the entire chain of production and consumption. That said, China understands coal as a transitional source that it wants to phase out, except that the US has an explicit military plan to choke off China’s alternative fuel imports at the South China Sea. China needs to maintain back-up capacity in clean coal, as it leapfrogs into renewables, which will constitute fully 80% of its energy portfolio by 2060. As for overseas coal plants, 87% of that funding comes from the West or Japan, and China has committed to not fund any foreign coal plants. With these commitments, China has demonstrated that it is dedicated and committed to both national and global sustainability and carbon neutrality.

Lastly, most calculations of GHG emissions leave out the US military boot print, the single largest institutional emitter in the world, ranking higher than the emissions of 140 nations. Add the cost of endless US wars, and subtract offshored GHG from the West from China’s total, you get a different picture of responsibility for global emissions.

Despite the hypocritical finger-pointing at China at COP 26 by the worst polluters, the US and the West, the simple facts refute the lies. China is a net GHG creditor nation, not a debtor. The Lancet showed that 92% of emissions above the safe level of 350ppm can be attributed to the Global North, of which 40% of these emissions are the US’s alone. By contrast, China is a net creditor nation. In other words, the atmosphere (atmospheric carrying capacity), a global commons, has been colonized and monopolized by the West to the detriment of the rest of the world. In this, the US bears the greatest individual responsibility for the Global Climate crisis.

Despite all this, China leads in solutions–in technology, policy, transition planning, and implementation. It is not only pulling its weight, it is showing the world a way forward.

This is in stark distinction to the US, where 25% of the US Congress still refuses to believe in human-caused climate change and where the last President claimed that “Global warming was a Chinese hoax”. The US was also responsible for disabling the original 1997 Kyoto protocol by lowering targets, engineering carbon indulgences (“carbon trading”), exempting military emissions, and unjustly trying to offload responsibility to developing countries.   (After all this cynical, rapacious, profit-driven sabotage, led by Al Gore, the US still refused to ratify, demoralizing global efforts for decades). These cynical actions by US leadership, along with US overshoot of its share of the carbon budget, bear a large responsibility for the current critical state of affairs.

Despite decades of denialism, evasion, and sabotage by the US, there is still a path forward to tackle Climate change. But the US needs to step up to do its part and it needs to engage honestly with China’s sustainable, ecological model of development.  With low-carbon eco-cities with 40% greenspace, pollution-free mass transit, mass afforestation, GHG capture technologies, mass shift to renewables, ecological mandates written into their constitution, China offers an inspiring and feasible policy model.

But this cannot happen if the US continues to threaten China militarily, encircle it with hundreds of bases–all emitting GHG–and resorts to carbon intensive military Keynesianism and neoliberalism, and denigrating and attacking everything positive China does.  By constantly bashing and attacking China, instead of engaging and learning from the structural solutions they are implementing, the US is abdicating its duties as a responsible global stakeholder and undermining—yet again–the world’s chances of tackling Climate Change.

In the recent China-US Joint Glasgow Declaration on Enhancing Climate Action, the US momentarily dropped its China-bashing, and pledged to strengthen implementation of the Paris agreement.

However, the constant demonization of China by the US leadership, not only on Climate change, but on all fronts, along with endless echo-chambering in the MSM, would suggest that this is not a good faith change of heart, but only a temporary tactical reset. The fact that the US still bans Chinese polysilicon for environment-critical solar panels on fraudulent charges is evidence of this dishonest opportunism.

For the sake of the planet, sanity must prevail to seek real win-win cooperation on all fronts to tackle the existential threat of our time. China is doing its part by demonstrating what an ecological, sustainable civilization based on socialist common prosperity could look like.

Will the neoliberal West and the US follow suit, learn and cooperate, or will they play at politics and war, doubling down on the suicidal Carbon-fueled endgame?

Clear-sighted citizens must challenge the lies, the mendacity, and the escalating demonization, and urge their governments to work for peace and cooperation.

The future of the world depends on it.

African National Congress suffers electoral collapse, as its rotten record is underscored by the death of de Klerk

Jean Shaoul

Recent nationwide municipal elections in South Africa delivered President Cyril Ramaphosa’s African National Congress (ANC) just 46 percent of the vote, the first time it had failed to cross the 50 percent threshold.

It was by far the ANC’s worst result since taking office in the 1994 elections following the end of the hated apartheid regime and minority white rule.

According to the official tally:

• The ANC won 46 percent of the vote, compared to 54 percent in the 2016 municipal elections
• The main opposition Democratic Alliance (DA), which gets most of its support from white and coloured (SA’s term for multiracial citizens) voters, won 22 percent, compared to 27 percent in 2016
• Julius Malema’s black nationalist Economic Freedom Fighters won 10 percent, compared to 8 percent in 2016
• The Zulu Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), based on Zulu ethno-nationalism, won 6 percent
• The largely Afrikaner nationalist Freedom Front Plus Party won 2 percent and
• The newly formed ActionSA, whose leader has made vociferous xenophobic remarks, also won 2 percent.

The ANC suffered defeats in key cities including Johannesburg, Pretoria and Gqeberha (previously known as Port Elizabeth) and lost its majority in KwaZulu-Natal, by far the largest ANC region and home province of former President Jacob Zuma. It holds a majority in 161 of the 250 councils, down from 176 in 213 councils in 2016, while the DA has a majority in 13 and the IFP in 10. A total of 66 municipalities are hung.

The debacle was expressed not only in the loss of votes for the ANC and the main opposition parties. Voter turnout was just 47 percent of South Africa’s 26 million registered voters, 11 percentage points down on the last election. But even this fails to capture the extent of the debacle. More than 13 million of South African’s 40 million people eligible to vote—one in three eligible voters—mainly first-time voters disillusioned with electoral politics, did not bother to register.

Cyril Ramaphosa (Credit: Tasnim News Agency)

It follows ANC losses in both the municipal elections in 2016 and the parliamentary elections in 2019 as anger mounted over widespread corruption. In 2018, Ramaphosa’s faction in the ANC forced then President Zuma to resign over longstanding claims of corruption, amid fears his actions and those of his cronies were impacting adversely on South Africa’s business interests at home and abroad and costing the ANC electoral support.

Earlier this year, the 79-year-old Zuma, a veteran of the anti-apartheid struggle since the age of 17—serving a 10-year prison sentence on Robben Island in the 1960s alongside Nelson Mandela, and a member of the Stalinist South African Communist Party (SACP) until 1990—received a 15-month prison sentence for contempt of court for refusing to testify before the Zondo Commission into corruption and state capture. Protests by his supporters, largely in KwaZulu-Natal, morphed into a wider movement against the ANC government. Released two months later after being granted medical parole, Zuma now faces a long-postponed trial for fraud and corruption relating to payments made for a 1999 arms deal.

Ramaphosa, Zuma’s successor, likewise expresses the trajectory of the ANC and its politics. A former leader of South Africa’s largest trade union, the National Union of Mineworkers, Ramaphosa became ANC general secretary in 1991. He soon became a multi-millionaire and in 2012, in his capacity as a shareholder in the Lonmin mines in Marikana, he called on the authorities to take action against striking miners. This was orchestrated by the ANC government and its allies in the official trade union federation, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), with the security forces firing on the strikers, killing 34 and wounding 78 others.

On becoming president, South Africa’s richest politician promised to root out ANC corruption, revive the country’s flagging economy and reduce unemployment, especially among the youth, in a bid to restore the ANC’s electoral fortunes. Far from achieving this, he has presided over a deepening economic crisis that has turned South Africa, with one of the highest levels of income inequality in the world, into a social tinder box.

While the ANC deputy Secretary General Jessie Duarte stressed, “We're not losers, we are the winning party,” there is no question that the faction-ridden ANC leadership is dismayed at the result. Ramaphosa is likely to face a leadership challenge from within the ANC or be forced to fire some of his more openly corrupt colleagues, potentially precipitating splits in the party.

What is playing out is an historic collapse in the ANC’s popular support. In the most immediate sense this is the price paid for its handling of the pandemic, the vaccination rollout, power outages, water shortages, rising prices, the 34 percent unemployment rate and endemic corruption. But this is only the end product of the failure of the ANC to advance the social interests of the millions of black workers who looked to it for leadership and an end to the grotesque inequalities that characterized white minority rule under apartheid. The ANC has instead, having rescued capitalist rule, presided over a deepening of social and economic inequality while a thin layer of black bourgeois clustered around the party have reaped the benefits of “Black Economic Empowerment” as stooges and frontmen for the major corporations.

The ANC’s difficulties would not have been helped by the efforts of international figures and the corporate-controlled media to eulogise F. W. de Klerk, South Africa’s last president under apartheid, who died last week. Nothing better epitomizes the ANC’s role in suppressing the revolutionary strivings of the workers and oppressed masses than the reappearance of de Klerk in the role of Banquo’s ghost—reminding everyone of its great political crime.

It was de Klerk who in 1990 announced the end of the reviled apartheid regime, lifting of the 30-year ban on the ANC, releasing Mandela from prison and opening the way for universal suffrage that would bring the ANC to power in the 1994 elections.

But those praising de Klerk as a “man of courage” are perpetrating a deeply cynical fraud. Steeped from childhood in apartheid politics, he became a legislator for the ruling National Party in 1972, entering P. W. Botha’s cabinet in 1978 and serving for years as his right-hand man, before becoming president in late 1989.

De Klerk decided to work with the ANC as the only means to preserve South African capitalism and indeed to prevent its collapse, which would have set off a chain reaction throughout the former colonies of the imperialist powers.

De Klerk made his surprise announcement in January 1990, after South Africa’s apartheid regime had faced years of mass protests and strikes since 1984, losing control over the black, working-class townships and teetering on the brink of civil war.

His act of realpolitik in seeking a modus vivendi with the ANC can be compared to a degree with the adoption by his contemporary, Mikhail Gorbachev, of certain limited democratic measures (glasnost) to placate popular opposition, while he presided over and economic programme of marketisation (perestroika), that set the course for capitalist restoration. Capitalist restoration proved catastrophic for the mass of the population in the former Soviet Union, while a small layer of old bureaucrats and new capitalists usurped state owned property and made fabulous fortunes.

De Klerk’s action was likewise bound up with saving all that could be saved for South Africa’s capitalist elite. Like Gorbachev, who relied on the disorientation of the working class after decades of Stalinist rule and the support of petty-bourgeois dissidents, de Klerk understood that only Mandela and the ANC could provide the capitalist class with a political life jacket. The ANC’s political perspective, like that of its allies in the Stalinist South African Communist Party and the Congress of South African Trade Unions, utilized the Stalinist two-stage theory to proclaim the formal end of apartheid as a democratic revolution and a necessary stage before any struggle for socialism could be mounted. This reflected the aim of petty-bourgeois social layers to develop a black bourgeoisie standing alongside its white counterparts—politically dominant even though possessing less economic power.

The ANC, no less horrified than the white bourgeoisie by the militancy of workers and youth in the townships, channeled everything into a negotiated programme of “democratic reforms” that preserved the wealth and property of the international corporations and the country’s white capitalist rulers, ditching all pledges to take the banks, mines and major industries into public ownership and signing secret agreements with the International Monetary Fund to implement free market policies and open up South Africa to international capital.

The ANC served as a means of suppressing the black working class whose revolutionary struggles threatened the continuation of South African capitalism in a period of rapid transition, during which the globalisation of production had become widespread, rendering nationalist and autarkic regimes, including South Africa’s apartheid regime, obsolete.

ANC governments, first under Mandela, who even appointed de Klerk to serve as his deputy, then Thabo Mbeki, Zuma and now Ramaphosa, are now widely seen by South African workers as the corrupt representatives of a wealthy ruling establishment they once claimed to oppose. Like its counterparts in the Middle East and Africa, the ANC was unable to provide any solutions to the social and economic problems confronting the working class and peasantry. Its only response to steeply escalating social tensions is repression, arrests and the lethal crushing of protests and strikes.

Once again, the South African bourgeoisie confronts a working class seeking to advance its independent social interests, embodied most recently in last month’s three-week-long strike by 155,000 steel and metal workers that was betrayed by the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa.

The path of the ANC from opposition to co-option has been replicated across Africa and the Middle East, including the Palestine Liberation Organization, which pursued similar policies, making its peace with imperialism and pursuing wealth and privilege for a narrow layer following the first intifada that erupted in 1987.

The national bourgeoisie, dependent upon imperialism and fearful of the working masses below it, cannot resolve the fundamental democratic, economic and social problems confronting the masses.