Brazilian authorities, media hide rise in respiratory illnesses in children to promote end of COVID-19 pandemic

Eduardo Parati

As the end of the 2021 school year in Brazil approaches, the campaign to return to classroom teaching is bringing more cases and deaths from COVID-19 among children.

Teenage students receive COVID-19 shots in local schools in Salvador, Bahia (Credit: André Carvalho/Smed/FotosPublicas)

With the spread of the more transmissible COVID-19 Gamma and Delta variants this year, there have been 1,245 COVID-19 deaths among 0-19 year olds as of September 18, with an unknown number since then amid a dramatic drop in testing as vaccinations advance among the adult population. This number of recorded deaths, which had already surpassed the total number of deaths in all of last year—1,203, precedes schools reopening with 100 percent occupancy and the mandatory face-to-face teaching ordered all across the country in the last two months.

A report by the public health agency Fiocruz, published last week, pointed out that despite the stability in the overall number of SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) cases, the number is increasing among children aged 0 to 9 years old, with about 1,500 cases every week. With the insufficient number of COVID-19 tests in Brazil, the number of SARS cases has been used by Fiocruz as a proxy for the real situation of the pandemic in the country.

Although the cases of COVID-19 do not currently represent the majority of SARS cases, their increasing numbers, which can have multiple viral diseases as their cause, show how easily airborne viruses can spread in schools and expose the need for their immediate closure to prevent them from once again becoming centers of pandemic transmission.

Instead, amid record surges in Europe and warnings by Fiocruz that circulation of people is higher now than before the pandemic, the decrease in the number of hospitalizations and deaths from COVID-19 in some regions of the country and the advances in vaccinations are being used by the government to justify “living with COVID-19.”

Since October, state and local governments have been pushing for compulsory in-person education to force parents to leave their children in schools and return to unsafe workplaces to secure corporate profits. At the same time, in the state of Rio de Janeiro, requirements for the use of masks in open environments were lifted, and the same was announced for São Paulo beginning December 11, as part of a propaganda campaign by authorities to convince the public that the virus is under control.

Such propaganda could not be further from the truth. Today, it is impossible to determine precisely the pandemic situation in Brazil. The country ranks 128th in the world in tests per million inhabitants, next to war-torn countries like Iraq and Libya. With testing prioritizing symptomatic cases, the positivity rate is 27.54 percent, far above the 5 percent needed to monitor the transmission of the virus in the population. The official number of new COVID-19 cases has been decreasing, with 58,312 cases reported last week.

Even assuming that the official numbers are reliable, the attempts by the government and the corporate media to promote “living with” the coronavirus mean accepting over 1,000 deaths each week, with 1,365 confirmed deaths last week, in addition to tens of thousands more who will suffer the effects of Long COVID.

Last week, the state of Piauí reported 100 percent occupancy in ICUs, having maintained that rate for the last three months. Instead of reining in the virus, local authorities have announced efforts to expand its in-patient capacity regardless of the high fatality rate of the disease for people needing intensive care. In the city of Serrana, in the state of São Paulo, where the population over the age of 18 was completely immunized seven months ago as part of a study by the government-linked Butantan Institute, the number of cases tripled in October and continued to rise during November.

In the capital of the state of Bahia, Salvador, the city government announced the mandatory return to schools on November 17, following announcements by dozens of states, including those governed by the Workers Party (PT). The city government admitted difficulties in implementing the reopening in the face of strong opposition among parents. Many are refusing to send their children to crowded schools with only weeks left in the school year.

In a backhanded admission of the wide opposition to the return among parents and teachers, on November 7, Rio de Janeiro’s Municipal Secretary of Education Renan Ferreirinha Carneiro went to Folha de São Paulo to defend mandatory in-person classes. In calling for a quick return, Carneiro stated that “in the municipal school system alone, 25,000 students are neither interacting with the school remotely nor going in person.” This number corresponds to 5.5 percent of the students enrolled in the public network of the state capital.

As has been done internationally, Secretary Carneiro fraudulently portrays compulsory in-person education as a fight against exclusion, covered up by lies that “schools have been adapting to the required sanitary and infrastructural conditions.” The exact opposite is true.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, the measures implemented for remote learning were adjusted to the needs of big business interests, providing deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars to mobile phone companies and internet providers for mass education platforms. Meanwhile, millions of students without adequate internet access or digital equipment have been effectively excluded from remote learning.

As to the supposed “adaptations” made in schools, a glimpse of their complete inadequacy was provided by a report from the Paraná State Court of Audit from September, pointing out that 14.3 percent of schools had damaged, very small or awning windows. Such conditions exist in schools all over the country.

Parents and teachers are completely aware of this situation, despite the flood of government and media propaganda in favor of the spread of the virus, and have reported to the WSWS the real conditions in their communities.

Fátima, a mother from the city of Nova Iguaçu in the state of Rio de Janeiro, participated in the Rank-and-File Committee for Safe Education in Brazil (CBES-BR) online meeting on November 2 titled “The need to close schools and the means to end the pandemic.” She reported on the state government’s efforts to dismantle any measures to control the spread of the virus.

She said, “Here in the region, the politicians say that there are no more hospitalized patients and that vaccination is up, and there are almost no more cases of COVID-19, but the reality is different. In every suspected COVID-19 case, the doctors give the medicine and say that it is sinusitis. Anyway, now we have sinusitis outbreaks, because in my mother’s house there were four people with the same symptoms. At my daughter’s school, the agglomeration continues. The pressure to go back has been enormous.”

Luís, also from Rio de Janeiro, is a teacher, who sent a report of the unsafe conditions at the school where he works to the CBES-BR meeting. He described the situation which families are being subjected to.

“[The end of the school year in] the state was a surreal mess. At the end of the day you still have students who haven’t returned due to pre-existing conditions, and students without internet delivering handouts, only now the classrooms are a little more full. Technically, classes will last until December 17, but I am already finishing up the activities of the attending students in order to be able to dedicate myself to the ones who haven’t returned, also thinking about emptying the school soon.”

Their worries are compounded by the long-term risks presented to children exposed to COVID-19, even if they are not as severely affected by the respiratory symptoms as adults and the elderly.

In an interview with the WSWS, immunologist Dr. Anthony Leonardi, who co-authored a recent study on the impact of Long COVID, explained that molecules bound to the virus’s spike protein induce an excessive immune response, which results in damage to the body’s tissues and cells.

Long COVID has the potential of damaging any part of the body, with one of the biggest concerns being neurological damage. “The immune system is responsible for going into all the tissues in the body, except for a few immune-privileged sites. But SARS-CoV-2 doesn’t respect the immune-privileged sites whatsoever. It brings T-cells into the brain. So, we can see the impact of the infection across every physiological system. Because if it distorts the immune system and the immune system is responsible for patrolling the body everywhere, then there are going to be problems everywhere.”

Endemic COVID-19 would bring terrible consequences: “For this virus to become endemic, we would see a lot of maimed people with autoimmunity. And with immune memory, that is not able to fully prevent mild and moderate infections again. In my opinion, the damage could be cumulative.”

Dr. Leonardi criticized efforts to hide the severity of COVID-19 in children, “There’s a terrible assumption that kids are okay with SARS-CoV-2 infection when there’s data coming out that they have lost out on a greater number of healthy years than adults,” he said. “And kids are more likely to be infected than adults and are more likely to be reinfected than adults.”

In their opposition to the mass infection of children and the continued exposure of the population to the deadly SARS-CoV-2, with horrific immediate and long-term consequences for millions, parents and teachers are not alone.

A growing strike movement is developing internationally against the capitalist policies towards the pandemic, which are provoking mass death and impoverishment.

In Brazil, throughout the year, there have been several strikes and protests by nurses, truckers, oil workers, app drivers and other sectors. In September, Jurong shipyard workers went on strike over the company’s refusal to pay wage increases, and last month, more than 4,000 General Motors workers in the ABC industrial region went on strike for two weeks, rejecting contract proposals made by the company and the union.

Education workers went on strike for months during the pandemic to oppose the return to schools to prevent the spread of the pandemic. Recently, there was a demonstration by thousands of municipal teachers in São Paulo against pension cuts.

German government refuses to order lockdowns despite hospitals reaching capacity under crush of COVID-19 infections

Gregor Link

The Robert Koch Institute (RKI) reported a record 66,884 new coronavirus cases on Wednesday. In the past two weeks, about 630,000 people in Germany have officially been infected with the coronavirus and more than 2,700 have lost their lives. With a mortality rate of 0.8 percent reported by Lothar Wieler, president of the RKI, the infections of the past two weeks mean a death sentence for more than 5,000 additional people. In the last 24 hours alone, 335 people died from COVID-19, according to the RKI.

Charité intensiv - Station 43 (Bild: DOCDAYS Production)

Like the nearly 100,000 coronavirus deaths in Germany so far, these people have been the victims of a policy carried out in the interests of the German stock market, which has reached historic highs in recent weeks in tandem with the surging infection figures. If industry, schools, offices and daycare centres are not shut down, another wave of mass death threatens to dwarf the pandemic’s previous course.

“Cumulative reported deaths [in Europe] by spring of next year are expected to reach more than 2.2 million,” the World Health Organization (WHO) predicted in a report presented Tuesday in Copenhagen. So far, 1.5 million people have already officially died from COVID-19 in Europe since the pandemic began. If current trends continue, another 700,000 deaths are imminent by March 2022, according to the WHO.

“The pandemic is not under control,” Gernot Marx, president of the German Association for Intensive Care and Emergency Medicine (Divi), warned in the Tagesspiegel newspaper on Monday. The situation in hospitals in Germany resembles developments a year ago, when 1,000 people were dying daily. Compared to the previous year, Marx said, there are 4,000 fewer intensive care beds available due to the nursing shortage.

According to Divi data, of the 3,675 COVID-19 patients in intensive care, one in two currently requires invasive ventilation—with a strong upward trend. In the past week alone, an additional 1,887 new COVID-19 patients were admitted to intensive care units. Experts put the likelihood of COVID-19 patients dying in an intensive care unit at between 30 and 50 percent. Their length of stay, averaging 14 days, is more than three times greater than for other ICU patients and is expected to increase.

“Exactly what should always be avoided” is what now threatens, concludes the Tagesspiegel: an “overload of the health care system,” with the introduction of triage, the selection of which patients receive life-saving treatment and which do not, giving rise to “dramatic images like those in Bergamo, Italy, in the spring of 2020.”

World Medical Association Chairman Frank Ulrich Montgomery had already warned last week of a “deadly coronavirus winter” and expressed the hope over the weekend that the “waffle about freedom,” which “in reality is a freedom to [accept] illness and death,” will not prevail. Bundestag (federal parliament) vice president Wolfgang Kubicki (Liberal Democrats, FDP) then denigrated the physician at an FDP state party conference in Schleswig-Holstein as the “Saddam Hussein of the medical profession.”

In fact, Wednesday marks the last day that comprehensive shutdown measures could be enacted due to the “traffic light” coalition of the Social Democrats (SPD), FDP and Greens ending the designation of an emergency situation. Instead of closing schools, daycare centres and workplaces, breaking the chains of infection, and rapidly vaccinating and caring for the population, federal and state governments are sticking to their profits-before-lives policies, putting tens of thousands of lives at risk.

In Bavaria, where the incidence rate per 100,000 among school children has now risen to more than 1,300, Minister President Markus Söder explicitly dismissed the “closure of schools” in a government statement on Tuesday. However, international studies have repeatedly shown that school closures are an indispensable part of any real pandemic response.

In the hospitals of southeastern Bavaria, intensive care bed occupancy is currently at 95 percent, despite hospitals already transferring patients to other Bavarian hospitals whenever possible. In the region, “only absolute emergency care is still guaranteed” and all “non-urgent operations,” including tumour cases, have been “postponed until further notice,” reports broadcaster Bayerischer Rundfunk. The hospitals in the Neu-Ulm district have already begun to prepare for the collapse of intensive medical care by establishing a “triage team.”

In Saxony, according to the president of the state medical association, intensive care units could be overwhelmed as early as the end of the week, so that “even large hospitals would have to implement triage.” It is likely that anyone who has to be admitted to the intensive care unit and be given artificial respiration in the state will not be able to be transferred to other hospitals because the situation in surrounding states is similar.

Wherever additional measures have been announced, they are completely inadequate.

On Friday, the Saxony state government decided on a supposed “wave break lock-down,” which, however, does not provide for any closure of the manufacturing sector. Instead, the governing coalition of Christian Democrats (CDU), Greens and SPD amended the Working Hours Act to allow crematoria to burn the victims of their policies on Sundays. Until December 15, the maximum daily working hours may also be exceeded for medical treatment and care and mobile vaccination teams, among others.

In Thuringia, clubs, bars and discos, as well as indoor and outdoor swimming pools, are to close from Wednesday. A night-time curfew between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m. is in effect for the unvaccinated. Christmas markets will be cancelled. But schools, daycare centres and businesses will remain open without any restrictions.

Similar measures are apparently also being discussed at the federal level. Tuesday evening, outgoing Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) invited her designated successor Olaf Scholz (SPD) and the other leaders of the “traffic light” parties—Annalena Baerbock and Robert Habeck (both Greens) as well as Christian Lindner and Marco Buschmann (both FDP)—to a crisis meeting at the Chancellor’s Office. According to media reports, the discussion was “about further measures in the fight against pandemic.”

Again, the goal is to avoid the urgent need for tough measures. Just last week, the traffic light coalition leaders in the Bundestag had decided to allow the designation of an “epidemic emergency” expire, thus eliminating the legal basis for nationwide school and business closures. Closing recreational facilities or curfews for the unvaccinated are not nearly enough to prevent hospitals collapsing and significantly curb the pandemic.

The same applies to the introduction of a general vaccination requirement. The governing parties have so far strictly refused to do so but are now signaling a possible change of course. Berlin’s mayor Michael Müller (SPD) told RBB Tuesday that he believed there would be no getting around compulsory vaccination. “Only vaccination permanently ensures that we can experience everything as we want to.”

In fact, it has been scientifically proven that vaccination alone is not enough to reduce infection rates and end mass deaths. To contain and eventually eliminate the virus, schools and non-essential businesses must also be closed, first and foremost, and measures such as testing, tracing and isolating all cases must be carried out systematically.

In addition, the vaccination campaign in Germany has been a disaster. The RKI’s recent “COVIMO” report, which surveyed more than 3,000 adults about their willingness to be vaccinated, suggests that this is far higher in all age groups than the vaccination rate realized to date. But instead of ensuring that the entire population receives the desired protection, the federal and state governments have largely shut down public vaccination centres.

Federal Health Minister Jens Spahn (CDU) had recently even issued an order cap of 30 doses per doctor’s office for Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines, claiming that “not all orders could be filled” due to the “short-term” increase in demand. The Moderna vaccine, which is to be delivered instead, is recommended by the Standing Committee on Vaccination (STIKO), in contrast to the Pfizer shot, only for people over 30 years of age, so that the vaccination of younger people is once again in danger of being delayed.

The same indifference of the ruling class to the health and lives of the population is evident in the vaccination debacle as in all other areas of pandemic policy. “Probably by the end of this winter everyone in Germany will have been vaccinated, recovered or died,” Spahn declared at a press conference Monday. With that, he summed up the fascistic indifference of the ruling class to mass death.

By allowing infection numbers to explode while millions remain unvaccinated or boostered, the federal and state governments are increasing the risk of another “escape” variant emerging. Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), warned of this danger in a public statement in late September.

“With the amount of virus currently circulating in the US, especially among unvaccinated people, our greatest concern as public health officials and scientists is that the virus will become even more transmissible and have the potential to evade our vaccines that protect us from serious illness and death. The next elusive variant,” Walensky said, may be “just a few mutations away.”

Germany’s “traffic light” coalition government reaches agreement: Welfare cuts, state armament and militarism

Peter Schwarz

The Social Democratic Party (SPD), Free Democrats (FDP) and Greens in Germany agreed on a 177-page coalition agreement on Wednesday and presented it to the media. After it has been passed by the responsible party committees, nothing should stand in the way of the election of a new federal government under Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) after December 6.

Wrapped in flowery phrases about modernization, transformation, climate protection and solidarity, the program of the “traffic light” coalition (red, yellow, green—for the colours of the parties) is a declaration of war on the working population and a commitment to militarism. The coalition consists of three parties, one which represents in distilled form the interests of the corporations and banks (FDP), another the affluent middle class (Greens) and the third the state (SPD).

The coalition’s COVID-19 policy reveals the class character of the new government most clearly. On the same day that the SPD, Greens and FDP presented their coalition agreement in Berlin, the official death toll exceeded the threshold of 100,000. The number of infected in Germany reached a new daily record total of 67,000. In much of the country, the pandemic is completely out of control, with seven-day incidence rates well over 1,000. Such an incidence rate means that one in every one hundred residents of a district has been infected within the past week.

Press conference of the 'traffic light' coalition partners

The traffic light coalition bears direct joint responsibility for this catastrophe, and not just because the SPD has been in government for eight years. Just six days ago, the coalition used its majority in the federal parliament to allow the COVID-19 emergency to expire on November 25. This means there is no longer a legal basis for imposing lockdowns and similar measures essential to contain the pandemic.

The SPD’s Scholz could not ignore the pandemic at the press conference and announced a series of measures, such as an expansion of the vaccination campaign, the establishment of a permanent crisis team and an expert group in the Chancellery, and a one-time bonus for overwhelmed health care workers. Scientists have long warned that only a combination of all available measures can prevent an even greater catastrophe.

But the traffic light coalition is determined to continue the brutal “profit before life” policy of the grand coalition. It would rather accept tens of thousands of deaths and the mass infection of the youth than endanger the profits of big business.

Perhaps the most important decision in the coalition agreement is handing over the finance ministry to the FDP. Although the ministers will only be named in the coming days, it is certain that FDP leader Christian Lindner will take over this post. Lindner has made a name for himself as a vehement advocate of austerity policies, an opponent of any tax increase for the rich and a representative of big business.

The coalition agreement accordingly states that the debt brake, which strictly limits new government borrowing, will come into force again without restriction from 2023. In Europe, too, Germany should “continue to live up to its pioneering role as an anchor of stability” and ensure compliance with the Stability and Growth Pact, which caps the deficits of European Union (EU) member states. “Financial solidity and the economical use of tax money” are “principles of our budget and financial policy,” the agreement asserts.

Olaf Scholz (Photo credit–Steffen Prößdorf)

Given the huge subsidies for the climate-friendly transformation of corporations, a massive increase in rearmament spending and the planned repayment of the COVID-19 debt, this can only be financed through drastic social cuts. The SPD is responsible for this. The FDP, the smallest of the three coalition partners, received not only finance, but also the justice, transport and education ministries.

The Greens will take over the ministry of economic affairs, which will be expanded to include climate protection, as well as the foreign, family, environment and agriculture ministries. Annalena Baerbock, a Green co-leader, is expected to become foreign minister and Robert Habeck, the other co-leader, to be named Vice Chancellor and minister of economic affairs.

Baerbock is known for her hostility to Russia and China. Accordingly, the coalition agreement describes the “transatlantic partnership and friendship with the USA ‘as’ a central pillar of our international action.” The government’s China policy is to be “coordinated transatlantically,” and cooperation with China will be sought only “on the basis of human rights.”

Like the current government, the traffic light coalition is also striving for a global strategy designed to serve German imperialist interests. Under the heading “Germany’s responsibility for Europe and the world,” Eastern Europe, Ukraine, Turkey, the Middle East, Africa and even the Indo-Pacific are defined as German areas of interest. “We know about the global responsibility that Germany, as the fourth largest economy in the world, bears for this,” the document declares.

In order to bring Germany’s weight to bear, the European Union will be strengthened. A “capable and strategically sovereign EU” is “the basis for our peace and prosperity.” The document continues, “As the largest member state, we will assume our special responsibility ... for the EU as a whole.”

To this end, the rearmament of the German army ( Bundeswehr ) will be accelerated. All restraint is thrown overboard, with the coalition agreement committing to “arm the military’s drones” and nuclear deterrence. “As long as nuclear weapons play a role in NATO’s strategic concept, Germany has an interest in participating in the strategic discussions and planning processes,” the coalition agreement states. We “are committed to maintaining a credible deterrent potential.”

The deal also promises the acquisition of a “successor system for the Tornado fighter aircraft” at the beginning of the 20th legislative period.

The defence ministry will be led by the SPD, which will also head the interior, labour, health, building and development aid ministries. The SPD will also hold the posts of Chancellor and head of the Chancellor’s Office.

The ministry of labour, which the SPD has led for 23 years with a four-year break, is of particular importance in the traffic light coalition’s program. Under the heading “Modern world of work,” the torture instruments associated with the Agenda 2010 welfare reforms will be further developed. In the last red-green coalition under the SDP’s Gerhard Schröder, Agenda 2010 marked the initiation of the most extensive social cuts in recent history.

In connection with these attacks, the coalition agreement adopts a consistent approach. Measures that met with popular anger and outrage will be abolished and then reintroduced in a different form or under a new name.

For example, the unemployment benefit II (better known as Hartz IV) will be referred to as Bürgergeld (Citizen’s Benefit) in the future. “Citizen’s benefit focuses on the potential of people and aids the sustainable integration into the labour market, and enables social participation,” the coalition agreement proclaims in harmonious prose. But the “duty to cooperate” will be maintained. That is, the recipient of the citizen’s benefit will continue to be harassed by the job centre until they accept a low-wage job. Such jobs—mini and midi jobs, temporary work, agency work, fixed-term contracts, etc.—are not being abolished, but “adjusted,” according to the agreement.

The increase in the statutory minimum wage to €12 [$US13.45], which the SPD is celebrating as a great victory, has also turned out to be a sham. The minimum wage is now €9.60 and would rise to €10.45 in the middle of next year anyway. The industry-specific minimum wages are already almost all over €12. In addition, the coalition agreement expressly calls for the retention of work contracts and temporary workers, with which the minimum wage can be undercut.

The same applies to the promise that there will be “no pension cuts and no increase in the statutory retirement age.” The decision to raise the retirement age from 65 to 67 has not yet been completed. And no one can live on the “minimum pension level of 48 percent” of the average income after 45 years of contribution payment guaranteed by the traffic light coalition.

In fact, the coalition agreement specifically stipulates that older people, even if they have long since reached retirement age, will return to work in order to supplement their meagre pensions. To this end, numerous provisions of labour law are to be changed.

To address the housing shortage, the traffic light promises that 400,000 new apartments will be built every year. But the grand coalition already promised in 2017 to build 1.5 million apartments in four years. This target was never met. Even in 2020, when the number of new buildings reached a new record, only 306,000 units were built—and rents are now hardly affordable.

The traffic light coalition promises the introduction of a “basic child benefit” to tackle child poverty. But this merely involves the amalgamation of previous benefits—child benefit, child allowance, educational support—into a single support benefit.

In order to counter the growing social opposition, the coalition will strengthen the police and surveillance state. “The members of the security authorities in our country, who support us every day anew in the defence of the free democratic basic order, deserve our respect and recognition,” says the coalition agreement, and adds, “Intelligence services are an important part of a well-fortified democracy.”

Video surveillance, data retention, surveillance software and other forms of surveillance should not be abolished but made “legally secure.” The “use of agents, warrant officers and other informants from all security authorities” should not be prohibited, but regulated by law. There should be an “independent supervisory body” for “disputes” in the context of classifications by the Verfassungsschutz secret service (Office for the Protection of the Constitution). Instead of draining the swamp of far-right operatives in the state apparatus, the traffic light coalition intends to make March 11 a “national day of remembrance for the victims of terrorist violence.”

The traffic light coalition will also seamlessly continue the inhumane refugee policy of the grand coalition. It wants to allow more immigration—in order to attract workers and counteract the aging of society—while keeping refugees out even more rigorously. “We will reduce irregular migration and make regular migration possible,” the document states.

Climate protection, hailed as a breakthrough by the Greens, turns out to be an additional enrichment program for corporations and banks on closer inspection. It is approached exclusively from the standpoint of creating new sales opportunities for the troubled German export industry.

“As the largest industrial and export economy in Europe, Germany is facing profound transformation processes in global competition in the 2020s,” says the chapter “Climate protection in a socio-ecological market economy.” “We therefore see the task of giving the economic strength of our country a new dynamic.”

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.