The public hospitals crisis and Australia’s anti-democratic electoral laws

Margaret Rees

The COVID-19 disaster has exacerbated a systemic crisis in Australia’s chronically underfunded public hospitals, triggering frustration and hostility among health care workers and professionals, as well as patients and working people more broadly.

With the pandemic set to worsen as governments, both Labor and Liberal-National Coalition, rush to lift international and state borders for the sake of corporate profit, this anger is another factor in the bipartisan rushing through parliament of anti-democratic electoral laws designed to stifle dissent by blocking many parties, including the Socialist Equality Party (SEP), from contesting federal elections.

Nurses and other health workers are fed up with operating at breaking point. Hospitals are experiencing “access block,” where patients can be denied beds for more than eight hours. There is widespread ambulance “ramping” outside over-stretched emergency departments, simply because there are not enough beds and staff to cope with demand.

The situation was so bad in Melbourne on November 7 that a Code Red was almost declared, indicating that ambulances are unable to respond to any new patients. Similar emergencies have been declared on several occasions in South Australia in recent months, and ambulance ramping has been reported in other states, even where the pandemic has largely been suppressed until now.

A nurse holds a phone while a patient affected with COVID-19 speaks with his family from the intensive care unit. (Image Credit: AP/Daniel Cole)

In the states most affected by COVID-19, hospitals have been able to meet the demand for beds only by cancelling so-called elective surgery. This can be dangerous, even life-threatening. Far from being optional or non-urgent, some procedures are extremely time-sensitive, including diagnostic ones that could reveal cancer.

Despite government promises to provide thousands more intensive care unit (ICU) beds to cope with the pandemic, Australia has lost 200 staffed ICU beds since March 2020. New South Wales (NSW) has cut 45 ICU beds in the past year and Victoria has reduced its total by 40.

Declaring that the population “must learn to live with the virus,” these governments have now dispensed with lockdowns and dismantled other essential safety measures. The resulting unrestrained COVID outbreaks will place the hospitals under enormous strain, inevitably compromising patient care and threatening hospital workers’ health.

The Australian Medical Association (AMA) has predicted that the situation is about to get “much worse.” Up to 2,400 hospital beds are likely to be required by COVID-19 patients on an average day for six months after the “opening up.” This would lead to even greater ambulance ramping and reduce the capacity for elective surgeries further by up to 40 percent.

Already, health workers have been at nearly three times greater risk of COVID-19 infection than other members of the community. According to official statistics, 4,822 health care workers in Victoria were infected by COVID-19 up to October 2021. Of these, 2,687 acquired the virus at work. NSW figures are only available to June 2020, by which time 208 health care workers had been infected, 88 due to workplace exposure.

Many hospital outbreaks have occurred in NSW and Victoria, including in non-COVID wards, such as outpatient services, dialysis, psychiatry and geriatrics, where staff are not routinely provided with respirators. Effective N95/P2 respirators often have been restricted to ICUs, emergency departments and COVID-19 wards, with an over-reliance on inadequate surgical masks elsewhere.

To add to the stress and danger, managements have been covering staff shortages by continual overtime demands. A NSW auditor-general’s report released last December found that almost 90 percent of nurses interviewed said they had worked unpaid overtime. Of this group, one third said they worked overtime on a daily basis.

As a consequence, there has been a mass exodus of critical care nurses over the past year—20,000 have given up their registration.

Nurses are not the only ones suffering. A recent AMA Victoria report showed that unpaid work and fatigue were also plaguing trainee doctors in hospitals. In 2020, 47 percent of trainees were never paid for the unrostered overtime they worked. And 50 percent of trainees had made a clinical error due to excessive workload or understaffing.

Blame for this situation lies with federal and state governments, Labor and Coalition alike, which have carried out a war of attrition against the public hospital system for decades, accompanied by the expanding privatisation of healthcare.

During the 1990s, this offensive was taken to a new level by the introduction of “casemix” funding by the Kennett Liberal-National government in Victoria. Hospitals only received payments for procedures performed, weighted according to a national “efficiency price.”

That system laid the foundation for the Rudd-Gillard federal Labor government’s 2012 imposition of Activity Based Funding, which allocates funds based on a set and inadequate “price” for the numbers and types of patients already treated, not projected need.

All this has been achieved with the help of the health trade unions, which have repeatedly prevented or sold out struggles by health workers against cuts and for decent wages, conditions and staffing ratios.

Health workers have been expected to bear the burden of gutted health budgets through intolerable workloads and hours. This has intensified during the pandemic. As well as the danger of infection, many have developed post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and anxiety.

Under these conditions, the Coalition and Labor combined to push through electoral laws that will deregister 36 parties, including the SEP, that currently do not have members of parliament, if they fail to submit lists of 1,500 members by December, trebling the previous requirement. If deregistered, their party names will not appear beside their candidates on election ballot papers, robbing voters of the right to know their political identities and policies.

Kellogg’s threatens to permanently replace striking workers

James Brookfield

In a major escalation of its attack against striking workers, US-based food giant Kellogg’s announced Wednesday that it would begin hiring permanent replacements for the 1,400 workers who have been on strike since October 5 at the company’s cereal plants in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nebraska and Tennessee.

In a terse press release, the company said it “had no choice but to best serve the short- and long-term interests of our customers and consumers by moving to the next phase of our contingency plans.

“We will continue to run our plants effectively with hourly and salaried employees, third-party resources, and temporary replacements, and now where appropriate, hire permanent replacements.”

The company has been using temporary replacement workers nearly since the beginning of the strike, and has been aggressively moving them through picket lines, resulting in several strikers being hit by vehicles outside the Omaha, Nebraska plant last month. Management is also seeking a court injunction to allow freer movement of the scabs and is working with the strikebreaking firm AFIMAC Global.

Workers from a Kellogg's cereal plant picket along the main rail lines leading into the facility on Wednesday, Oct. 6, 2021, in Omaha, Neb. (AP Photo/Grant Schulte).

The company says negotiations with the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union (BCTGM) broke down Monday and are not slated to restart until December 6. While management claims to have offered a plan to “graduate” workers with four or more years to higher pay scales, BCTGM refused to sign, aware that they could not get such a deal ratified by the rank and file.

Workers are looking to overturn the two-tier wage and benefit system previously accepted by the BCTGM, which includes numerous pay scales for senior “legacy” workers and 30 percent of the workforce stuck in a “transitional level” with lower pay and benefits. On the picket lines in Battle Creek, Michigan and elsewhere, workers are carrying signs saying, “Our future is not for sale,” expressing their determination to fight for equal pay, pensions and retiree benefits for the next generation of workers.

In 2013, the company locked out 200 workers at its Memphis, Tennessee plant for nine months after they resisted company demands to expand lower-paid casual workers. The plant was later put under the BCTGM master agreement, which included the two-tier system.

Workers who have risked their lives during the pandemic are also fighting excessive overtime, including 16-hour shifts and seven-day work schedules that have robbed them of rest and family time. Ironically, Kellogg’s introduced a six-hour day for many of its workers in 1930 to create jobs for laid-off workers during the Depression and counter efforts by militant workers to unionize its plants.

The Battle Creek-based company and maker of Corn Flakes, Frosted Flakes, Rice Krispies, Special K, Pringles, Pop-Tarts and Nutri-Grain brand cereals and snack foods had global sales of $13.7 billion and is expected to earn more because of the increased consumption of its products during the pandemic. It has a global workforce of 31,000 and operates manufacturing facilities in 18 countries.

The BCTGM and the national AFL-CIO labor federation, however, have let the 1,400 striking workers fight the global giant alone. In other struggles, such as the eight- and nine-month-long strikes by Warrior Met Coal miners and St. Vincent hospital nurses in Worcester, Massachusetts, the unions have also isolated strikes, leaving workers vulnerable to strikebreaking and company and state violence.

The Kellogg’s workers started their strike last month, as workers were engaging in what was developing into the largest strike wave in generations. The AFL-CIO and its affiliated unions responded by shutting down the Deere strike, blocking strikes by 3,500 Dana auto parts workers and 100,000 film and TV production workers and Kaiser Permanente nurses and other healthcare workers. In all of these battles, the unions worked to defuse the social anger that has been mounting within the working class over pay and conditions since the beginning of the COVID pandemic.

The BCTGM web site says nothing about this latest assault by Kellogg’s. Its last press release was three weeks ago and was a mere 159 words long. Its online magazine tries to cover the impotence of the union officials by presenting a very distorted view of the strike wave in October, with the BCTGM president, Anthony Shelton, writing, “Kellogg workers, like their brothers and sisters at Frito-Lay and Nabisco, are saying, ‘Enough is enough’. Workers are rising. We are refusing to settle for less. And we are using every tool at our disposal to win what is fair.”

Left unsaid is that fact that Shelton’s colleagues in the AFL-CIO worked hand-in-hand with the employers to bring this strike wave under control. Also passed over in silence is the fate of the workers at Frito-Lay and Nabisco (also represented by the BCTGM) who did not realize any of their demands to dismantle two-tier pay scales, recover decades of real wage losses and put an end to ten- and twelve-hour days.

PSOE-Podemos government cracks down on Spanish metal strike

Alice Summers

Yesterday, as the strike of over 22,000 metalworkers in the southern Spanish city of Cádiz for pay increases and against plant closures entered into its second week, the social-democratic Socialist Party (PSOE) and the “left populist” Podemos party launched a police crackdown. They unleashed thousands of riot police and a 15-ton BMR (Blindado Medio sobre Ruedas, or Medium Armoured Vehicle on Wheels) in Cádiz.

On Tuesday, around 5,000 metalworkers and supporters marched through Cádiz. A number of workers split off from the main demonstration and tried to block the Carranza bridge with barricades. Police attacked the workers with tear gas and rubber bullets. At least one protester was arrested on supposed public disorder charges. The demonstrators shouted slogans such as “The police kill!” and “We are workers, not criminals!”

There is widespread support for the strike. Around 200 local students from the third grade through to secondary level took part in a school strike on Tuesday, setting up pickets outside their schools and joining the metalworkers’ protest. Demonstrators shouted support for health workers as they passed by Puerta del Mar hospital, with healthcare workers responding with applause for the strikers and students.

Protesters march during a strike of metal workers in Cadiz, southern Spain, November 23, 2021. (AP Photo/Javier Fergo)

Cádiz residents were outraged by the deployment of the 15-ton armoured BMR, one of two such vehicles retired from the armed forces and handed to the Spanish National Police in 2017. It marked the first time that a BMR has been deployed against striking workers in Spain. The BMR drove through working-class neighbourhoods of San Pedro and Bazán and near local schools, crashing through obstacles on the street. Many residents shouted slogans denouncing the BMR from the balconies of their homes.

The deployment of the a military vehicle to Cádiz is a desperate threat against this powerful strike, and a comprehensive exposure of the PSOE-Podemos government. It has already proved its visceral hostility to the working class, consistently adopting the fascistic Vox party’s policies, from ending COVID-19 health restrictions to implementing violent anti-migrant policies. Making undeniably clear the class gulf separating Podemos from the workers, it is now threatening the working class with militarized violence.

From the first days of the strike, the PSOE-Podemos government has mobilised riot police from across Spain to assault workers with pepper spray, truncheons and rubber bullets.

Workers responded by setting up pickets and barricades blocking the way to the city’s industrial district and other major highways; they burnt cars, bins and rail tracks to prevent police from accessing the area. Buses attempting to ferry scabs to the factories were forced to turn around after strikers blocked the road and threw stones.

An explosive political situation is emerging in Spain, as broad masses of working people support the strike against the PSOE-Podemos government. Large protests in support of the metalworkers have been held in Cádiz, with demonstrators carrying banners with slogans such as “Working class unite!” Further solidarity demonstrations took place in other cities across the region of Andalusia, with more scheduled to take place throughout the week.

On Monday, approximately 4,000 workers and youth in the town of Algeciras, part of the larger Cádiz province, protested in solidarity with the striking metalworkers. A further solidarity protest was called on Monday in the nearby city of Huelva. Around 300 protesters also gathered in front of the Palacio de San Telmo in Seville—the seat of the Andalusian regional government—the same day in a show of support for the workers in Cádiz.

Members of Podemos and the Stalinist Spanish Communist Party (PCE)—which also governs as part of the Unidas Podemos electoral alliance—were jeered when they tried to address the assembled workers in Seville. One PCE representative attempted to defend the party, ludicrously claiming that “We are in government, but not in power,” but workers responded with further booing.

The best ally of strikers in Cádiz against Podemos and the PSOE are workers internationally who, like Spanish steelworkers, are striking against real wage cuts, industrial and economic dislocation, and mass deaths caused by the criminal official handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Cádiz strike comes amid an upsurge of the class struggle across Europe and internationally. Numerous strikes are scheduled in Spain by the end of the year, including by meat processing workers, lorry drivers, and supermarket workers. In neighbouring Portugal, tens of thousands of workers across multiple industries took strike action in September and October, including rail workers, teachers, hospital workers and prison guards.

In the United States, dozens of strikes have broken out since October, involving carpenters, transit workers, auto workers, nurses, film production workers, and airline crew workers, among numerous other sectors of the economy.

Across the world, strikes against worsening living and working conditions, exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic, are bringing workers into a headlong conflict not only with the companies, but with the trade union bureaucracies and nominally “left” capitalist governments.

In Spain, the Podemos party has cynically attempted to posture as sympathetic to the strikers and distressed by its own deployment of armoured vehicles against them. At the same time, it demands that the strike be ended immediately. In what amounts to a barely concealed threat against the strikers, Podemos Deputy Prime Minister and Labour Minister Yolanda Díaz demanded that the unions and companies reach an agreement to end the strike as soon as possible, for the “good of the workers and the companies and for the good of Cádiz.”

As for the trade unions, they have longstanding political affiliations to the government parties. Workers Commissions (CCOO) is linked to the Stalinist movement, the PCE and Podemos, while the General Workers Union (UGT) is historically tied to the PSOE. They are fully playing their role as tools that the PSOE-Podemos uses for the same basic purpose as the riot police: to try to break up and demoralise the movement in the working class.

Forced to call an indefinite strike after it became apparent that metalworkers’ anger would not be dampened by the token one-day protests organised at the start of November, CCOO and the UGT have continually worked to demobilise opposition and bring the strike to a close.

Last week, the UGT and CCOO national federations issued a statement demanding that strikers stop blocking highways. “We must manage this conflict well,” they declared, “and therefore we believe it is necessary to concentrate our actions at the entries of the principal workplaces. Therefore, we are asking that highways be left open.”

Regional secretary of the CCOO, Fernando Grimaldi, also made clear that the union opposes militant actions taken by workers during the strike, stating, “People are extremely angry; we are going to see how this can be controlled.” Denouncing strikers for setting fires outside of refineries to block access to the riot police, he declared, “I do not agree at all with that type of action.”

In a press conference on Friday, UGT head of industry José Manuel Rodríguez Saucedo again criticised metalworkers for supposedly inconveniencing Cádiz residents with their strike. While striking workers were generally “acting reasonably,” he said, “there has been collateral damage, for which I apologise to the citizens of [the region of] Campo de Gibraltar for the disturbance that we have caused.”

US stokes tensions with Russia over claims of an impending invasion of Ukraine

Clara Weiss

The US continues to fuel tensions with Russia, promoting unsubstantiated claims over an alleged planned invasion of Ukraine.

In recent weeks, NATO has significantly stepped up its military activities in the Black Sea. The US has sent three warships to the Black Sea and the UK announced it would deploy 600 troops in case war breaks out between Russia and Ukraine. In a further move designed to escalate tensions, the US sent two US Coast Guard boats to the Ukrainian navy on Tuesday. The two island class patrol boats will be deployed by Ukraine in the Black Sea and the Azov Sea.

Russian President Vladimir Putin emphasized in a meeting with Russian diplomats last week that Moscow needed “clear guarantees” from NATO in Eastern Europe and that the US-led alliance’s latest military activities in the Black Sea constituted a “serious challenge” for Russia.

US Coast Guard ship in the Black Sea in May, 2021.

Meanwhile, the US government and media have escalated their campaign over an allegedly impending invasion of Ukraine by Russia. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken claimed last week that Washington was concerned Russia could invade Ukraine, and CNN, CNBC and Bloomberg have all published reports issuing the same warning. As is always the case in the NATO war propaganda machine, these statements and reports are based virtually exclusively on sources in US and European intelligence.

This weekend, the head of Ukraine’s intelligence, Kirill Budanov, alleged that Russia had amassed 92,000 troops near its border with Ukraine and was preparing for an attack on Ukraine by the end of January or beginning of February.

Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov described Budanov’s statement as “warmongering rhetoric” and an indication that Ukraine, with the backing of Washington, was preparing “a provocation, to bring the conflict into a hot phase.”

According to CNN, the Biden administration is discussing sending military advisers and new equipment, including new-Javelin anti-tank and anti-armor missiles as well as mortars, and an MI-17 Russian helicopter that had initially been purchased for Afghan military forces, to Ukraine. The Kremlin has made clear that it would regard further military equipment of Ukraine’s armed forces as crossing a “red line.”

Both Democratic and Republican lawmakers are calling for new sanctions on Russia, and Washington has already announced new sanctions on the Russian-German gas pipeline Nord Stream 2. Last week Berlin, which has so far refused to yield to pressure to stop the project, announced it would temporarily pause it.

On Monday, Russia’s foreign intelligence agency compared the current tensions in the Black Sea to the build-up to the 2008 war between Russia and Washington-backed Georgia in the Caucasus, which brought the US and Russia, the world’s two largest nuclear powers, to the brink of a military confrontation. The statement sent the Russian ruble tumbling. Moscow and Washington are reportedly discussing another, virtual, meeting between Biden and Putin that might take place before the end of the year.

The latest flare-up of tensions in the Black Sea region is ultimately the outcome of the US-led NATO encirclement of Russia in the wake of the Stalinist bureaucracy’s dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Ukraine and the Black Sea, which connects Europe and the Middle East, have been central to the US strategy of establishing its hegemony over the landmass of Eurasia.

The US orchestrated two coups in Kiev, one in 2004 and another in 2014, which toppled the pro-Russian government of Viktor Yanukovych. The 2014 coup heavily relied on neo-Nazi forces that have since been integrated into the Ukrainian political establishment, the state apparatus and the military.

The coup triggered an ongoing civil war in East Ukraine, in which the Ukrainian army, armed and equipped by NATO, has been engaging in a stand-off with pro-Russian separatists. Crimea, a strategic peninsula in the Black Sea, was annexed by Russia following a referendum in March 2014. Over 13,000 people have been killed in this conflict, and millions more have been displaced.

Tensions in the region have been running high throughout this year, stoked by NATO and the Kiev government.

Map by Wikipedia user Norman Einstein

This February, the Ukrainian government approved a new strategy document, declaring its determination to “recover Crimea” as well as the Donbass, the region in East Ukraine now controlled by pro-Russian separatists. The announcement of this policy was an open declaration that Ukraine was preparing for war with Russia, and provoked a military crisis in April.

Then, in June, the UK launched a major provocation in the Black Sea, sending a warship into waters claimed by Russia. In response, a Russian border patrol boat fired several warning shots and a Russian fighter jet bombed the path of the British destroyer HMS Defender.

Following a summit between US President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin in June, at which the US sought to ease tensions with Moscow as part of its growing focus on preparing for war against China, Moscow, clearly hoping to exploit the shift in US foreign policy, launched a flurry of diplomatic activity. The Kremlin hosted CIA director William Burns, as well as Victoria Nuland, waiving earlier sanctions that had banned her from entering Russia. Like perhaps no other figure in the US foreign policy establishment, Nuland, who now serves as Biden’s undersecretary of state, is associated with the blatant US orchestration of the “Maidan” in Ukraine that culminated in the February 2014 putsch.

No details about the talks, which lasted three days and took place in mid-October, were published. Shortly thereafter, Russia ended its decades-long mission to NATO and the US began claiming that Russian troops were massing along Ukraine’s border, a claim initially denied by both Kiev and Moscow. The US then sent the head of the CIA to Ukraine, and several warships into the Black Sea.

Simultaneously, the EU and NATO used the attempt by thousands of defenseless refugees from the Middle East to cross the border of Belarus with Poland, a EU member state, to accuse Russia of conducting “hybrid warfare” with refugees. While the immediate crisis has somewhat subsided as Belarus’s Alexander Lukashenko started deporting refugees back to the war-torn Middle East, Poland is still threatening to entirely shut down its border with Belarus.

Whatever the immediate intentions and calculations of the US and its NATO allies or, for that matter, the Ukrainian government and the Russian oligarchy, the situation is deeply unstable and with the potential for a dangerous escalation. In its increasingly reckless course toward war against both Russia and China, US imperialism is driven above all by the explosive growth of social tensions amidst the pandemic, which have begun to find an initial expression in the biggest strike wave in decades.

The situation in Eastern Europe, however, is hardly any more stable. The working class of Ukraine and Russia is suffering immensely from the pandemic, to which the ruling oligarchies, the heirs of the Stalinist bureaucracy, responded in no less criminal a manner than the capitalist class of Europe and the US.

Both Russia and Ukraine have been leading the worldwide ranking in daily numbers of COVID deaths for several weeks now. Crematoria in the Ukrainian capital now have to work around the clock to cremate the bodies of all those who are dying. Russia still sets almost daily new records of COVID deaths, with well over 1,200 people dying each day. Hundreds of thousands of children have been infected, and an untold number of them have died, yet the Kremlin rejects imposing any serious public health measures to contain the pandemic.

Child infections fuel COVID-19 surge across the US

Evan Blake

On Monday, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) released its latest weekly report on child COVID-19 infections, hospitalizations and deaths in the United States. The data is hampered by the deliberate efforts of state and federal authorities to cover up the spread of the pandemic, but nevertheless it presents damning evidence of the impact of the full reopening of schools this fall.

The AAP report found that for the week ending November 18, another 141,905 children were officially infected with COVID-19, the 15th straight week of over 100,000 official new cases. After reaching a trough of 100,630 new cases for the week ending October 28, this figure surged by 41 percent in just three weeks. The region with the greatest increase in child infections was the Midwest, where nearly 60,000 children were infected last week, a roughly 40 percent increase from the week prior.

This screenshot from the American Association of Pediatrics shows that COVID-19 cases among children have surged 40 percent over the past month.

Children accounted for 25.1 percent of all COVID-19 infections last week, making clear that the reopening of schools continues to fuel the broader surge of the pandemic across the country. The spread of the Delta variant since the end of summer has coincided with the reopening of schools, with roughly 13.5 million Americans officially infected with COVID-19 and 164,291 killed by the virus since schools began to fully reopen four months ago.

Alongside the surge of infections, child hospitalizations are once again on the rise, with just under 1,250 children now hospitalized with COVID-19 in the US. An average of 152 children under 18 are now hospitalized with COVID-19 each day.

The AAP report notes that 636 children have now officially died from COVID-19, with 12 children dying last week in Arizona (4), Ohio (2), California (1), Indiana (1), Kansas (1), Minnesota (1), North Dakota (1), and Texas (1). No information on any of these deaths has been made public, with only one article each from local press in Kansas and North Dakota even acknowledging them.

The deepening wave of infections, hospitalizations and deaths among children are all the more tragic given that a vaccine has finally been approved for all children above the age of four. On Monday, Pfizer and BioNTech released preliminary data finding that their vaccine remains 100 percent effective against symptomatic infection for children ages 12-15 years old four months after the second dose. Roughly two-thirds of all children ages 5-17 remain unvaccinated in the US, and millions were exposed to the virus just weeks before the approval of the vaccines.

The data in the AAP report provides only a glimpse into the devastation wrought by the pandemic policies of the American ruling class. Texas, Alabama, Nebraska and New York (excluding New York City) no longer report child infections. Only 24 states report data on child hospitalizations. Michigan, Montana, New York (excluding New York City), Rhode Island, Utah and West Virginia do not report figures on child deaths from COVID-19.

Furthermore, the level of testing conducted in the US is totally inadequate for all age groups, including children. While the official cumulative total of child infections documented by the AAP is roughly 6.8 million, seroprevalence studies conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimate that in reality roughly 25.8 million children under 18 have likely been infected with COVID-19 from the start of the pandemic through September 2021, over a third of all children in the US.

The long-term social impacts of the pandemic are not quantifiable. Studies on Long COVID among children indicate that millions continue to suffer debilitating symptoms for many weeks after their initial infection, and it remains unknown how long these symptoms will last.

A study published in the journal Pediatrics in early October found that by June 30, 2021, over 140,000 children in the US experienced the death of a parent or grandparent caregiver due to COVID-19. This figure has likely surpassed 200,000 amid the ongoing surge of the Delta variant.

The catastrophic impacts of the pandemic have radicalized millions of workers and young people, who increasingly recognize that their lives and those of their families and communities have been sacrificed in the interests of the financial elite. There is a growing understanding that the only reason schools were reopened was to send parents back to work to produce corporate profits.

Last week, roughly 200 students led their teachers in a 20-minute walkout at Martin Luther King, Jr. High School in Detroit, Michigan, in response to widespread infections at the school and district. Official data from the state showed that 44 students were infected last week at Renaissance High School, while 38 students and staff were infected at Cass Technical High School in Detroit. In total, there were 140 new outbreaks in Michigan schools last week, a 61 percent increase from the previous week, while the number of positive cases linked to those new outbreaks rose 71 percent to 891.

Fearing that last week’s walkout would spread throughout the district and galvanize broader opposition, Detroit Public Schools (DPS) quickly announced an extension of the Thanksgiving break to this entire week. Nearly three dozen other districts throughout Michigan have similarly closed schools this week, both in response to COVID-19 outbreaks and worsening staff shortages.

The entire American political establishment, backed by the corporate media, the teachers unions and the CDC, have continuously lied to the public about the effects of COVID-19 on children and the impact of school reopenings on viral transmission.

The campaign to reopen schools before the elimination of COVID-19 began on July 8, 2020, when then-President Donald Trump tweeted, “SCHOOLS MUST OPEN IN THE FALL!!!” Despite multiple scientific studies having already proven that children catch and transmit COVID-19 as readily as adults, then-CDC Director Robert Redfield modified school reopening guidelines with the lying claim, “We really don’t have evidence that children are driving the transmission cycle of this.”

Upon his election, President Joe Biden pledged to fully reopen schools in Democrat-led districts that were still providing remote learning. In fulfilling this pledge, he relied on the new CDC Director Rochelle Walensky to modify school reopening guidelines repeatedly in February and March. The updated guidelines downplayed the significance of ventilation and reduced spacing recommendations between students from six feet to three in order to pack each classroom.

Biden himself lied directly to a second grader on national television, telling her, “You’re not likely to be able to be exposed to something and spread it to mommy or daddy.” He added, “Kids don’t get … COVID very often. It’s unusual for that to happen.”

The most critical role has been played by American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten, who told the New York Times in February 2021 that she spent upwards of 15 hours each day on the phone with the White House, the CDC, local politicians and union officials to orchestrate the school reopening drive in Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and other major cities.

On Sunday, Weingarten and the AFT purchased an advertisement in the Times in order to promote the unions to the paper’s upper-middle-class readers. In the ad, Weingarten writes, “Our affiliates across the country negotiated health and safety protocols to reopen schools and keep them open for in-person learning during the pandemic.” Of course, the ad omits the fact that since July 22 more than 2.6 million children have officially been infected with COVID-19.

All of these figures bear primary responsibility for the homicidal school reopening policies that have been implemented in the US. They have consciously allowed masses of children and their families to be infected, suffer long-term debilitation and die.

Presidential election lays bare sharp class divisions in Chile

Mauricio Saavedra

In what has been described as “historic” by the corporate media, the two main victors in Sunday’s presidential election in Chile are the fascistic José Antonio Kast of the Christian Social Front, with roughly 27 percent of the vote, and Gabriel Boric of the pseudo left-Stalinist electoral front Apruebo Dignidad, with 25 percent. The two will face off in a December 19 second-round ballot. International finance capital is following closely the events as they represent a microcosm of the global development of the class struggle. Chile’s stock market soared by 9.25 percent on opening Monday based on the news of Kast’s front-runner status.

“The two men offer antithetical agendas,” The Guardian commented. “Kast has centered his campaign on conservative social values, security and migration, while Boric espouses an egalitarian, feminist and ecological future for Chile. While Kast proudly declares himself politically incorrect and opposes marriage equality, Boric pushes inclusivity and progressive social values.”

José Antonio Kast of the Christian Social Front

The overriding concern of the financial markets is not who wins the presidential election. While they clearly would prefer a victory for Kast and the far right, the leading candidates in the election all have a proven record of defending private property relations and upholding the capitalist market:

• Kast, the son of a Wehrmacht officer who fought on the Eastern Front, unashamedly declares his unwavering support for Chile’s former fascist military dictator Augusto Pinochet. He was a congressman for the extreme right Independent Democratic Union (UDI) until 2017, when he ran as an independent in the presidential elections of that year. Kast is closely aligned to Spain’s fascistic Vox party, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and is part of the international anti-communist alliance, the “Madrid Forum.”
• Boric, a radical university student leader in the 2011 education protests, has since 2014 sat in the lower house and infamously entered into national unity talks with current right-wing government of Sebastian Piñera in 2019 to head off massive anti-capitalist demonstrations. Boric models his Social Convergence party (which is part of the Broad Front or Frente Amplio coalition) on Spain’s Podemos, which formed a bourgeois government with the Spanish Socialist Workers Party PSOE last year. Like its Spanish counterpart, this pseudo-left party speaks for so-called “progressive” upper middle class professional layers, who espouse identity politics. Its main political purpose is to thwart any independent political mobilization of the working class.
• Sebastian Sichel, from the right-wing ruling Chile Podemos Más, was one of Piñera’s cabinet ministers until early this year. A relative unknown, he attempted to posture during the year’s election cycle as moderate but has supported the violent military repression of youth and indigenous-peasant protests. He will now call for a vote for the fascistic Kast in the second round.
• Yasna Provoste, Christian Democrat, was a minister under Michele Bachelet’s presidency who was disqualified from holding office in 2008 after a civil servant embezzled millions of dollars on her watch. From 2013 until mid-year, she was a congresswoman for the northern mining region of Atacama, whose mining sites were kept operational despite the high number of COVID-19 cases.

The candidates, from the extreme right to the pseudo-left, have moreover pledged to the business world economic stability, no matter what. Boric’s electoral partners in the Stalinist Communist Party (PC) have been at pains to assuage any fears about their role: “We believe that today voting for Boric is the only way to maintain a high level of stability in the country,” said PC president Guillermo Teillier to CNN. Teillier is desperate to win a seat in the Senate.

Gabriel Boric of the pseudo-left-Stalinist electoral front Apruebo Dignidad

Last week, the head of the Chilean Confederation of Production and Commerce, Juan Sutil, said his meeting with the candidates was “of a very high standard” and made special note of “a lot of moderation in all the proposals that we heard.”

The main question that is causing so much consternation in capitalist circles is whether any of the contending political forces will be capable of delivering stability in a country undergoing extreme social polarization and political instability.

The first round result speaks for itself. Only 7 million of the 15 million eligible electorate voted in this Sunday’s presidential elections, or 46.7 percent. Of these, 1.96 million cast their ballot for Kast (13 percent of the entire eligible electorate) and 1.8 million for Boric (12.1 percent of the eligible electorate), obliging the candidates to run a second round.

Even more extraordinary is the continued electoral annihilation suffered by the old and deeply hated political caste that emerged in the transition from military to civilian rule three decades ago. Less than six percent of the eligible electorate cast their vote for Piñera’s candidate, Sebastian Sichel, and just 5.4 percent for Yasna Provoste from the center-left coalition, Constituent Unity.

Polls have shown that support for the Armed Forces and police, the courts, the executive and legislature and the right and so-called left parties has been in the low double or even single digits for three consecutive years. The state has lost all credibility and confronts a historic crisis of rule.

Chile’s changed class relations have been starkly laid bare by the criminally negligent policies in response to the coronavirus pandemic. The state’s violent repression of massive anti-capitalist protests in 2019 and its casual indifference to mass death and infection caused by the virus over the last 18 months have sparked restlessness and a growing militancy in the working class.

In an address to Congress in September, the Central Bank governor reported that labor participation remains today lower than the last five-year average, while companies have encountered among employees a significant decrease in the willingness to work longer hours. In another study, a large share of companies have reported being unable to fill vacancies, and in some cases no candidates applied. Moreover, in the last year miners, health workers, teachers, port workers, retail staff and civil servants have staged strikes and protests over unsafe conditions and poverty wages, some in defiance of the corporatist unions and in defiance of police brutality.

Summing up this crisis, the journal of British imperialism, The Economist, wrote last Friday: “For most of this century Chile was a stable and predictable country, with steady economic growth and moderate politics. Outsiders saw it as a success story and a model for Latin America. But that stable Chile disappeared two years ago, in an explosion of massive and sometimes violent protests.”

The London-based markets news site Argus commented: “The polarized elections, which are taking place in parallel to a controversial process to rewrite the Pinochet-era constitution, are already alienating domestic and international investors. Growing nervousness over the future of a country long considered a stable economic and political bastion…”

Bloomberg newswire said: “Financial markets have swung wildly in recent months as Chile debates the future of an economic model drawn up in the 1970s and 1980s by the so-called Chicago Boys, disciples of University of Chicago professor Milton Friedman who advocated for open market policies including deregulation and privatization.”

When billionaire Sebastian Piñera became president in 2017 with the support of a mere 25 percent of the eligible electorate, social polarization caused by decades of military and civilian-imposed “free market” policies was already deeply entrenched.

That year, the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) reported that Chile’s ruling 1 percent controlled more than a quarter of the country’s wealth, while the top 10 percent held two-thirds. In contrast, the bottom half of a population of roughly 18 million accounted for just 2.1 percent of the net national wealth.

Taking advantage of the insecurities of the petty bourgeoisie and the decades-long muzzling of the working class by the national reformist parliamentary pseudo-left and the corporatist trade unions, Piñera’s right-wing government sought to capitalize on the political situation.

Assisted by media consortiums which polluted the public discourse with salacious reports of migrant gangs and drug trafficking, Piñera adopted Kast’s xenophobic and authoritarian program, calling for police-state law and order to combat so-called “rising delinquency,” being tough on “illegal immigration” and dealing with indigenous “terrorism” in the south.

This backfired, however, when in October 2019, violent police repression of student civil disobedience protests provoked mass anger in the working class, youth and middle class.

This transformative experience expressed the conscious attempt by the masses to articulate grievances accumulated over decades—entrenched social inequality, poverty wages and starvation pensions, a crippled public health and education system, burgeoning student and household debt, rampant police and military violence, criminalization of social protests, suppression of indigenous demands, and nepotism, corruption and graft at all levels of the state.

Piñera’s immediate response was to resuscitate Pinochet’s phrase declaring that he was “at war with a powerful enemy.” A state of emergency and curfew were decreed for first time since the return to civilian rule, placing the murderous Chilean military on the streets. Human rights abuses began to pile up, with thousands suffering horrible injuries and mutilations and mass arrests resulting in cases of rape, torture and murder.

This only infuriated an insurgent population. All of a sudden, anti-capitalist marches and demonstrations erupted across Chile, involving at one point half the country and lasting for months.

It was then that the beleaguered government called for the aid of the so-called opposition—the Christian Democrats, the Party for Democracy, the Socialist Party, the Progressive Party and the pseudo-left conglomeration Frente Amplio—to stage in November 2019 national unity talks.

Piñera responded to an existential threat from below, as the Chilean bourgeoisie has during other critical moments, by relying upon the corporatist trade unions and the Chilean “left” to disorient, divert and render harmless the struggles of the working class, as he beefed up the repressive state apparatus for use against the masses.

From that moment on, the parliamentary “lefts,” Frente Amplio and in particular the Stalinists, set themselves the task of redirecting the explosive mass struggles into harmless appeals to change the authoritarian constitution.

In sowing the dangerous illusion that by rewriting the republic’s charter the nature of the capitalist state can be reformed, they concealed the fact that it is an instrument that upholds the political dictatorship of the capitalist class, who, when threatened by revolution, sweep aside parliament and constitutional norms and rule by force.

The progenitor of the theory of national exceptionalism—that Chile rests on a supposedly democratic and parliamentary tradition and that its institutions and repressive apparatus adhere to constitutional norms—is the PC. They bear political responsibility for paving the way to the 1973 military overthrow of the Popular Unity coalition government of Salvador Allende and the violent repression of the Chilean working class.

British government declares Hamas political wing a terrorist organisation

Jean Shaoul

Priti Patel, Britain’s Home Secretary, used her visit to Washington last week to announce plans to proscribe the political wing of Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated group that rules Gaza, as a terrorist organisation.

She aims to push the ban through parliament next week, her third such order in the last year. Hamas’ military wing, the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, was outlawed in 2001.

Priti Patel (right) meets US Secretary of State for Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas in Washington (Priti Patel/Twitter)

Under the UK's Terrorism Act 2000, such a ban means Hamas’ assets can be seized and its members jailed. Any expression of support for the organisation, be it fund-raising, flying its flag or logo, wearing clothes with its image, or holding a meeting for the organisation, would be in breach of the law, with supporters facing prison sentences of up to 10 years and/or a fine. Hamas would be joining 78 groups already outlawed under the Anti-Terrorism Act.

On November 12, Feras Al Jayoosi, 34, appeared in a British court to plead guilty to the charge of wearing T-shirts supporting Hamas’s military wing and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which the UK banned in 2001 and 2005. He wore the clothing in the Golders Green area of north London, home to a large Jewish population, on three occasions in June.

Patel tweeted Friday, 'Hamas has significant terrorist capability, including access to extensive and sophisticated weaponry, as well as terrorist training facilities. That is why today I have acted to proscribe Hamas in its entirety.” She claimed it was impossible to distinguish between Hamas' political and military wings.

Founded in 1988 shortly after the outbreak of the first Intifada in the occupied Palestinian territories, Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement, aims to establish an Islamic state in Palestine. Winning support from Palestinians disillusioned with Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas’s subservience to Israel, rampant corruption, nepotism and economic mismanagement, Hamas received the most votes in the 2006 elections, the last the PA has held. In June 2007, Israel, with the support of the PA and later Egypt, imposed a land, sea and air blockade on Gaza that has continued to this day, after Hamas forces defeated an attempted coup in Gaza by Abbas’ Fatah movement.

In the last 14 years, Israel, the strongest military power in the Middle East, has killed thousands of Palestinians in its savage wars of 2008-09, 2012, 2014 and 2021 on Gaza’s essentially defenceless 2 million population in retaliation for the launching of amateurish rockets, balloons and incendiary devices that rarely cause any significant damage, let alone injure or kill anyone.

Benny Gantz, Israel’s Defence Minister and former military chief of staff, faces the possibility of prosecution by the International Criminal Court for war crimes committed by Israel during its 2014 military assault that killed more than 2,100 people, mainly civilians. On the Israeli side, 67 soldiers and five civilians were killed.

Patel ignored Israel’s reign of terror over the Palestinians and failed to provide any evidence of Hamas’ terrorist activities in Britain or elsewhere to support the ban, claiming, “It’s based upon a wide range of intelligence, information and also links to terrorism. The severity of that speaks for itself.”

She added that Hamas is “fundamentally and rabidly anti-Semitic”, arguing that the ban was necessary to protect Britain’s Jewish community. The implications of the ban were made clear when the Daily Mail gloated, “Jeremy Corbyn [the former Labour Party leader] faces TEN YEARS in jail if he meets his ‘friends’ from Hamas again under new measures to treat supporters of the Palestinian group as terrorists.”

In 2009, Corbyn, who has been stripped of his membership of the Parliamentary Labour Party and now sits as an independent MP, described Hamas as “friends” in 2009 during an appeal for dialogue, stating after being attacked that he regretted using the term.

Patel is a former vice-chairperson of Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI). In 2017, she was forced to resign her position as Department for International Development (DFID) Secretary after reports she had held 12 meetings with top Israeli officials, including the then Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other political leaders, arranged by the former head of the CFI, while on a 12-day “family holiday” to Israel. On her return, Patel lobbied to use part of DFID’s aid budget for Israeli army field hospitals treating Al Nusra Front and other Al Qaeda-linked forces fighting the Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad. Her attempt to launder money to groups with proven links to terrorist activity exposed the duplicity of Britain’s “war on terror” and Israel’s role in providing the imperialist powers with deniability for their dirty work in the Middle East.

Patel’s announcement was hailed by Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett predictably declaring Hamas is “a radical Islamic group that targets innocent Israelis and seeks Israel’s destruction.” Notorious for his hardline response to the Palestinians, he has boasted of killing “lots of Arabs” and criticised previous governments for failing to respond to Gaza’s incendiary balloons.

Israel’s Foreign Minister Yair Lapid said the move was a result of “joint efforts” between the British and Israeli governments. It follows reports in the Israel press that Bennett had asked Prime Minister Boris Johnson to proscribe the group when he met with him at the UN COP26 climate conference in Glasgow to discuss relations between the two countries and the Iran nuclear negotiations in Vienna.

Patel’s announcement followed a meeting with US Secretary of State for Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas that, according to the Daily Mail, included an agreement to embed more British spies in US agencies, and vice versa.

On Sunday, Israel’s President Isaac Herzog began a three-day visit to Britain, where he is to meet Johnson, Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, Prince Charles, Jewish community leaders and members of parliament. Top of his agenda is Israel’s opposition to any renewal of the nuclear accord with Iran.

Patel’s move against Hamas must also be seen within the context of Britain’s domestic politics. Patel and other right-wing politicians are using the mantra of “combating anti-Semitism” to push through policies targeting the right to protest and freedom of expression on university campuses, and ultimately the subject matter of research itself. This is bound up with efforts to militarise the campuses and turn them into centres for government propaganda and adjuncts of Britain’s war machine, directed against widespread anti-war sentiment among students and youth.

In September, the University of Bristol set a filthy precedent by sacking David Miller, a professor of political sociology, for his support for the Palestinians, based on allegations that his criticisms of US militarism and Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people were “offensive”. This followed a two-year campaign for his dismissal by pro-Zionist lobby groups and MPs. Miller was sacked despite the university admitting that his alleged remarks were not unlawful,

Last week, a protest organized by student Palestine solidarity activists at a talk given at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) by Tzipi Hotovely, Israel’s far-right ambassador to the UK, provoked a furious backlash from Israel’s supporters. Hotovely’s record as a rabid nationalist and racist politician includes: advocating bringing the occupied West Bank under permanent Israeli control without giving citizenship to Palestinians who live there; inviting a racist and violent anti-miscegenation group into the Knesset, stating that it was 'important to examine procedures for preventing mixed marriages'; and calling the expulsion and flight of 750,000 Palestinians from their homes before and during the 1948-49 Arab-Israeli war “an Arab lie” during an event organized by the Board of Deputies of British Jews.

The Jewish Chronicle denounced the protest as a “Jew hunting mob on the streets of London,” drawing parallels with Kristallnacht, on whose anniversary the protest took place. Conservative and Labour politicians branded the protest as anti-Semitic, calling for harsh measures including a police investigation into those taking part.

This comes weeks after the House of Commons approved a second reading of the Police, Crime and Sentencing Bill, which introduces severe restrictions on the right to protest. The UK government also intends to introduce a Boycott Bill in early 2022 banning public institutions, such as local authorities or universities, from implementing boycotts of products from other countries for political reasons. It targets the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions (BDS) campaign aimed at pressuring Israel to withdraw from the Occupied Territories, remove the Separation Wall in the West Bank, provide full equality to Israel’s Palestinian citizens and respect the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties.