Amid pandemic, Washington escalates war threats against Russia

Alex Lantier

The US-led NATO alliance, which includes most of the world’s wealthiest countries, has suffered 115.3 million COVID-19 cases and 1.89 million deaths. It is passing through a winter pandemic surge that the World Health Organization (WHO) projects will claim 700,000 more lives in Europe alone. Moreover, the new Omicron variant, which will likely evade current COVID-19 vaccines, is now spreading in both America and Europe.

On Thursday, Biden pledged there would nonetheless be no “shutdowns or lockdowns” to halt the contagion, only continued use of existing vaccines. This means leaving the flow of profits to Wall Street untouched, at the expense of millions of lives lost to the pandemic.

Soldiers take part in an exercise at the Yavoriv military training ground, close to Lviv, western Ukraine, Friday, Sept 24, 2021. Ukraine, the US and other NATO countries continue joint military drills in Western Ukraine presenting offensive exercises in town-like surroundings with tanks and other military vehicles involved. (AP Photo/Pavlo Palamarchuk)

Against this backdrop, Washington, assisted by its NATO allies, is stoking military tensions that serve to distract from mounting internal opposition to its criminally irresponsible policies on the pandemic, and that risks triggering all-out war with Russia, or also China.

NATO is launching a military build-up on Russia’s borders. It is arming Ukraine with Javelin anti-tank missiles, guided-missile warships to be built by Britain, and anti-air missile batteries. The Ukrainian regime in Kiev has not contested Russian reports that it is massing 125,000 troops on its border with Russia.

Then, on Friday, as 521,291 NATO inhabitants fell ill and 3,876 died of COVID-19, Biden called for NATO to prepare for war with Russia, a major nuclear-armed power.

Preparing for a phone call tomorrow with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Biden recklessly declared that he rejects Russia’s “red lines,” that is, that he will take actions even if Russia warns they cross a red line and will lead to war. Speaking of Ukraine, Biden declared, “We’re aware of Russia’s actions for a long time and my expectation is we’re going to have a long discussion with Putin. I don’t accept anybody’s red lines.”

Biden’s rejection of Russian “red lines” was in response to Putin’s warning last week that NATO arming Ukraine with missile bases was a “red line” that could lead to war with Russia. Cruise missiles fired from these bases would need just six minutes to reach the center of Moscow.

Washington presents its policy, of course, as a defense of Ukraine against Russian aggression. After Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov alleged that 94,300 Russian troops are massing near the Ukraine-Russia border, and that “the likelihood of a large-scale escalation from Russia exists,” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken denounced Russia.

After claiming that China is preparing to invade Taiwan and warning of “terrible consequences,” Blinken said, “We’ve seen this playbook before, in 2014 when Russia last invaded Ukraine. Then, as now, they significantly increased combat forces near the border. Then, as now, they intensified disinformation to paint Ukraine as the aggressor to justify pre-planned military action.”

This is a pack of lies. Blinken himself admitted that “we don’t know whether President Putin has made the decision to invade,” and that “uncertainty about intentions and timing” remains. That is to say, Washington and Kiev are alleging only that Russian troops are located on Russian soil, and that they do not know what these troops will do. Yet on this flimsy basis, they are insisting that NATO countries must effectively ignore the pandemic and instead prepare for war with Russia.

Examining the 2014 events shows that the aggressor is not Russia, but NATO. In February 2014, when Biden was Barack Obama’s vice-president, Washington and Berlin backed a putsch led by the neo-Nazi Right Sector that toppled pro-Russian Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich. It brought to power a far-right regime that included the Svoboda Party, which the European Union had formally condemned in 2012 for racist and anti-Semitic views. It also pledged to ban the speaking of the Russian language and murder ethnic Russians in Ukraine.

As far-right militias launched raids into Russian-speaking areas of eastern Ukraine like the Donbass and the Crimea, these regions voted to secede. The fascistic regime in Kiev had no firm claim on the Crimea. It was annexed by Russia in 1783, the year the United States won independence from Britain, and was only ceded to Ukraine by Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev in 1954, when its internal status within the Soviet Union was of little importance.

Yet ever since 2014, NATO has fraudulently claimed that Crimea’s vote to rejoin Russia constituted a Russian “invasion” of Ukraine justifying NATO preparations for war.

NATO is not defending Ukraine, but arming it and goading Moscow to attack. In this regard, it is worth pondering Democratic Senator Chris Murphy’s statement Sunday that “Ukraine can become the next Afghanistan for Russia if it chooses to move further.”

Murphy was referring to the Democratic Carter administration’s decision in 1979 to try to provoke a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The policy, proposed by Democratic strategist Zbigniew Brzezinski, involved arming Islamist mujahedin against the Soviet-backed Afghan regime. Moscow ultimately intervened to support the Afghan government, trapping the Soviet army in a bloody, decade-long war with CIA-backed Islamists allied to future Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. Two years after suffering a shattering defeat, in 1989, the Stalinist bureaucracy dissolved the Soviet Union.

In 2014, amid the mounting crisis of US wars in the Middle East, as Russia and Iran backed President Bashar al-Assad against NATO in the Syrian war, Brzezinski called to repeat this policy.

A few months after the Ukraine putsch, Brzezinski gave a speech at the Wilson Center, during which he proposed to trap Russia in a war in Ukraine. After a Russian invasion of Ukraine, he cold-bloodedly explained, NATO could sacrifice Ukrainian cities like Kharkov and Kiev to wear down the Russian army, the way urban warfare at Stalingrad wore down the Nazi armies in World War II. He said:

“There is a history to be learned here from urban resistance in World War II … If the major cities, say Kharkiv, say Kiev, were to resist and street fighting became a necessity, it would be prolonged and costly. And the fact of the matter is—and this is where the timing of this whole crisis is important—Russia is not yet ready to undertake that kind of an effort. It will be too costly in blood, paralyzingly costly in finances. And would take a long time and create more and more international pressure. …

“[W]e should make it clear to the Ukrainians that if they are determined to resist, as they say they are and seemingly they are trying to do so (albeit not very effectively), we will provide them with anti-tank weapons, hand-held anti-tank weapons, hand-held rockets …”

This is the reckless policy the Biden administration is now working to implement. The most serious warnings are in order for workers in NATO countries, former Soviet republics, and internationally. This would not be the first time in history that a desperate ruling class has concluded that a war will provide a way out of an explosive internal crisis for which it has no progressive solutions.

The pandemic is a trigger event, massively intensifying class and international tensions. Deeply destabilized, the Biden administration and the imperialist governments across Europe are flailing about desperately, looking for a target at which to lash out.

The decisive question today, to save millions of lives, is to mobilize the working class and unite it in a powerful international movement against war and for a scientific policy to halt the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and eliminate transmission of the virus.

Global vaccine inequality: “A policy decision by the rich countries”

Jean Shaoul

Of the 8.07 billion doses of the multiple COVID vaccines administered, most have gone to wealthy countries.

While around 60-70 percent of adults have been fully vaccinated in North America and Western Europe and many are now receiving their third jab, only 6 percent of people in low-income countries have received even one dose. More than 3.5 billion people, nearly half the world’s population, are waiting for their first dose.

Wealthy countries have received over 16 times more COVID-19 vaccines per person than the poorer nations that rely on the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) COVAX programme. According to analysis carried out by the Financial Times, just 9.3 vaccines have been delivered to low-income countries for every 100 people, of which 7.1 have been delivered through COVAX. This compares to 155 for every 100 people in high-income countries, of which 115 were received through known bilateral and multilateral agreements. In many low-income countries, even healthcare workers have not yet been vaccinated.

People who have just received their jab against COVID-19 Friday Dec. 3, 2021 wait for their vaccine card to be processed at the Orange Farm, South Africa, multipurpose center. (AP Photo/Jerome Delay)

Some of the world’s richest countries will have 1.9 billion doses more than they need, prompting the WHO to issue yet another pathetic call for donations and dose-swapping .

None of this was accidental. In his interview with the Financial Times, Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel, replying to those who had criticized Moderna for not doing enough to distribute the vaccine globally, let the cat out of the bag. “This was mostly a policy decision by the rich countries,” he said. “In the US, we were told we had no choice but to give 60 percent of our output to the US government.”

These same countries, on behalf of Big Pharma and other corporations and financial institutions, rejected waivers of intellectual property rights on vaccine manufacture, while stalling on granting additional manufacturing capacity in low and middle-income countries and greater access to vaccines through increased supply through COVAX—the United Nations-backed public-private initiative designed to share vaccines globally at lower cost.

The consequences are devastating for both poor and rich countries alike. Without the full range of global virus-elimination measures, including widespread vaccination, social distancing, closure of non-essential workplaces, schools and universities, infections will rise, enabling the emergence of Omicron and other more virulent strains.

Without measures to contain the virus and protect lives, the United Nations has estimated that low and middle-income countries will suffer economic losses of $12 trillion through to 2025.

This situation flows inexorably from the operation of the capitalist mode of production and distribution, based on profit maximisation by the major corporations and their financiers.

At the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the advanced capitalist countries that are home to the handful of giant drug companies that own vaccine patents, whose development was largely publicly funded, acted to bolster their already obscene profit profiteering. They rejected calls from India and South Africa, backed by more than 100 countries, 100 Nobel laureates and prominent human rights groups, including Doctors Without Borders, Human Rights Watch and Oxfam, to waive intellectual property (IP) rights and allow them to manufacture or import cheaper generic versions. While US President Joe Biden publicly backed the call to waive patent rights, this was for public consumption. Washington did nothing to address the technicalities involved or confront the pharmaceutical companies.

As WTO director-general Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, a former Nigerian finance minister and World Bank number two, pointed out, “The WTO’s work is not just defined by the IP waiver. If you get the waiver but you don’t have manufacturing capacity, you can’t use it. If you have manufacturing capacity but no technology transfer, you can’t use it.”

Big Pharma has no interest in boosting vaccine manufacturing capacity that would push down prices, nor in eradicating a virus which has proved to be a gold mine for them. Just seven countries in Africa have vaccine manufacturing facilities that have largely been denied the right to produce Western vaccines under license. Morocco and Egypt have announced plans to start producing China’s Sinopharm and Sinovac vaccines. Rwanda has signed a deal with the European Union to bolster its vaccine manufacturing capabilities, with South Africa recently signing a $700 million deal with the US and Europe to produce 500 million doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine by the end of 2022.

Pfizer’s former CEO played a key role in developing the WTO’s global patent agreement, known as TRIPS, that underpins Big Pharma’s profits, with Pfizer also leading the drive to bypass the WHO’s COVID-19 Technology Access Pool CTAP, calling it “nonsense.” The CTAP scheme was set up in May 2020 to boost the supply of COVID-19 therapeutics, diagnostics, vaccines and other health products and enable timely, equitable and affordable access via public health-driven voluntary, non-exclusive and transparent licenses.

The imperialist powers have backed the pharmaceutical corporations to the hilt in their refusal to share their technology and know-how and to prevent their vaccines from being donated to certain countries. Even when doses are filled and finished—the final stage of vaccine production—in poorer countries such as South Africa, as in the case of the single shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine, they are exported to wealthy countries. The US and European Union have further limited production by restricting not just vaccine exports but also the raw materials needed for vaccine production.

The COVAX scheme has missed all its targets, despite begging rich countries to share their vaccines, as a result of vaccine nationalism and profit gouging. With rich countries rushing to sign deals with the manufacturers, COVAX was left out in the cold, with no power to force manufacturers to honour their contracts via lawsuits, forcing it to rely on donations.

The scheme had been banking on supplies from India, the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer, but has received no doses since March. This was because India banned the export of the Serum Institute’s output of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine in order to supply the home market amid a massive surge in cases and struck a deal for an additional 600 million doses.

This forced poorer countries to strike their own deals with the manufacturers, further weakening the scheme’s negotiating power as COVAX was left to negotiate on behalf of fewer nations. With the vast majority of the 10.9 billion vaccines expected to be manufactured this year already sold, most of the remaining 950 million supply includes Chinese vaccines and an Indian vaccine, Covaxin.

As a result, COVAX has so far only delivered about 582 million doses of an already much reduced annual target of 1.4 billion and now faces the impossible task of delivering the rest by year end. African Union officials estimate the scheme will deliver just 470 million doses to African countries by the end of December, less than a quarter of the 2 billion needed to deliver two shots to its entire adult population. WHO Africa regional director Matshidiso Moeti said, “At this rate, the continent may only reach the 40 percent target by the end of March 2022.”

While the cost of vaccines and the limitations of supply have been major problems, low-income countries face the additional, far higher and often insurmountable costs of cold storage, distribution and administration without either the infrastructure or healthcare personnel to do so. The Democratic Republic of Congo had to give away 1.3 million out of its COVAX-supplied 1.7 million AstraZeneca doses because it couldn’t administer them before they expired. With only 28 percent of health-care facilities in sub-Saharan Africa having reliable electricity, GAVI, the public-private partnership that works with COVAX, is seeking to procure thousands of cold boxes, vaccine carriers, refrigerators and freezers for 71 low-income nations.

The major powers are using vaccines as an instrument of “soft power” in pursuit of their geostrategic interests. US President Joe Biden announced at a COVID conference held on the sidelines of the opening session of the UN General assembly in September that the US would donate an additional 500 million of the Pfizer vaccines to low and middle-income countries, bringing America’s total global donation to more than 1.1 billion doses. This was widely seen as an effort to shore up Washington’s position after China’s announcement the previous week that it had delivered 1.1 billion vaccine doses to more than a hundred countries. Europe has announced that it will give 70 million of its vaccines to COVAX.

As all evidence shows, any appeals to the ruling elites to combat vaccine inequality, let alone eliminate the virus, are doomed to fail.

A science-based coronavirus policy that puts lives before profits requires the seizure of the assets of the pharmaceutical and other major corporations and their financiers to pay for the necessary measures to eliminate the virus that include: the abolition of the intellectual property rights held by the giant pharmaceutical companies, global collaboration in vaccine production and distribution by all those countries that have the facilities to do so, and the provision of mass funding for every country to implement a comprehensive vaccination programme via public health officials and health systems to ensure their safe and effective distribution and administration.

Chile’s election: Boric and pseudo-left offer no defense against threat of fascism

Mauricio Saavedra

Immense pressure is being exerted on Chilean workers and youth to vote for Gabriel Boric of the Apruebo Dignidad electoral front in a second-round presidential ballot. Boric, who won 25.8 percent of the vote in the first round will face off with the fascistic candidate of the Christian Social Front, José Antonio Kast, who won 27.9 percent, on December 19.

The working class has every reason to be alarmed by the electoral growth of the fascistic right in Chile. Kast’s program of slashing public spending and gutting the public sector, lowering taxes for the super-rich and erecting a police state is aimed at making the working class pay for the crisis of Chilean capitalism, which has been deepened by the government’s criminally negligent response to the COVID-19 pandemic over the last 18 months.

There has been a pervasive propaganda campaign to sell the Frente Amplio and the Communist Party coalition as some “radical left” alternative to the right. It is nothing of the sort. Boric, a radical university student leader in the 2011 education protests, has since 2014 sat in the lower house of congress. There he infamously entered into national unity talks with the current right-wing government of President Sebastian Piñera in 2019 to head off massive anti-capitalist demonstrations. While the history of the Communist Party is far longer and more complex, today it is a thoroughly bourgeois party.

Gabriel Boric (Credit: Mediabanco)

The Frente Amplio models itself on the Spanish pseudo-left group Podemos and the government it formed with the Spanish Socialist Workers Party in 2020. While in Chile it was the right-wing billionaire President Piñera who allowed COVID-19 to rip through the working class neighborhoods, in Spain it was the Podemos-PSOE coalition government. Under their watch 88,000 COVID-19 deaths and over 5.1 million infections were recorded as the fake left regime kept non-essential industries open. It has also deliberately downplayed the growing danger of fascistic military conspiracies to overthrow the government as it cracks down on the strike wave sweeping the country.

Chile’s parliamentary opposition, which is desperate to cling to some political power, has come out for Boric. From the Christian Democrats to the Socialist Party, they are cynically sounding the alarm bells over Kast’s rise.

“I will vote for Gabriel Boric,” said Christian Democrat presidential candidate Yasna Provoste the day after losing in the first round elections. “José Antonio Kast represents the reversal of all advances and the serious risk of plunging the country into a new wave of violence…”

Supporting Boric “is what any democrat would do today, be it a liberal democrat, a right-wing democrat, a center-left democrat, or a left-wing democrat. What is at stake today is democracy, what is at stake today is respect for human rights,” argued Party for Democracy (PPD) senator Guido Girardi. His remarks were echoed by Ricardo Lagos (PPD), Álvaro Elizalde (PS), Jaime Naranjo (PPD) and other dinosaurs of the former ruling center-left coalition.

Yet over the last three years they all tacitly supported Kast’s law-and-order crusade when Piñera gained parliamentary approval for key aspects of his platform to unleash repression against ongoing social protests, immigrants and the indigenous communities.

Nor has Kast fallen from the sky. He was a longtime congressman of the extreme right Independent Democratic Union (UDI), a party closely associated with the fascist-military dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet. Like Pinochet’s University of Chicago and Harvard-trained civilian aides of an earlier period, the post-dictatorship parliamentary center-left was also inserted by imperialism into a convulsive political situation in the 1980s. When working class struggles erupted in that decade in response to a deep recession and bloody military repression, this center-left political opposition channeled the incipient rebellion into calls for a return to parliamentary democracy in which the fascistic military-civilian alliance was left intact.

The greatest fear of the “renewed” left and the Stalinist Communist Party was a return to the revolutionary struggles of 1970-1973 when the question of dual power was sharply posed in Chile. More than a decade had passed since Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government successfully reined in the rank-and-file committees, the Industrial Belts and other organizing bodies of the proletariat in advance of the US imperialist financed and backed coup d’état of September 11, 1973.

Their chief ideological weapon was the Stalinist theory of a two-stage revolution and the bankrupt concept of a “peaceful parliamentary road to socialism” through Popular Fronts—both of which disarmed the working class and prevented its mobilization at the crucial moment. Part and parcel of this ideology was their promotion of national exceptionalism, with the claim that Chile’s state institutions, its police and armed forces, had a legacy of adherence to democratic and constitutional norms.

These misleaders were able to effectively paralyze working class political action because of their domination of the labor movement in the 1970s and because there existed no Bolshevik-type party to provide political leadership.

Under the influence of Pabloite revisionism and its contention that the Cuban Revolution of 1959 proved that the socialist revolution could be carried out through “blunted instruments,” i.e., petty-bourgeois nationalist guerrilla movements, without the participation of the working class or the leadership of a conscious Marxist vanguard party, the Chilean section of the Fourth International had abandoned Marxism and liquidated itself into the guerrillaist Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR) in the 1960s.

The transition from dictatorship to civilian rule in the late 1980s was deliberately realized without even touching the pillars of Pinochetismo —the amnesty law protecting the military from prosecution, the authoritarian constitution, the autonomy of Carabineros and the Armed Forces, the subsidiary state and extreme social inequality. The Stalinists, who remained on the parliamentary periphery but held trade union posts, limited themselves to bourgeois demands to redraft the Pinochet constitution and to “democratize” the state apparatus.

It is under the present conditions of a renewed revolutionary period that the bourgeoisie is relying on the pseudo-left to play the role of the old and deeply hated political caste that emerged in the transition from military to civilian rule three decades ago and the Popular Unity of an earlier period.

Like all these previous permutations, Apruebo Dignidad is beholden to capitalism and is dedicated to upholding the capitalist nation-state.

“We are preparing to be a government that provides certainty of change and brings stability to our country. Aware of the moment we are going through, we present this government plan made with the utmost responsibility,” the alliance’s program states. The paeans to stability and responsibility are directed at Chilean and international investors, guaranteeing that in power they will be “fiscally responsible.”

Whether the historically weak, subservient and virulently anti-Communist Chilean capitalist class buys their program is another question. The president of the Confederation of Production and Commerce again raised concerns about the inclusion of the Communist Party. Seeking to allay any fears, Boric replied by saying: “we have the duty to talk to everyone, and to bring everyone together, and in this sense, large companies ... have to be part of this transformation process.”

The specific function of this electoral front is to obstruct an increasingly rebellious and militant working class that will inevitably come into conflict with the ruling class and their servants amid the worst global capitalist crisis since the interwar period.

Notwithstanding the media’s promotion of Boric as a “radical left,” the Frente Amplio-Communist Party coalition is part of the pseudo-left, whose social constituency is the upper-middle class—lawyers, professionals, academics, the political and trade union bureaucracies, the upper civil service, state functionaries, and artists and media celebrities. It is deeply hostile to the independent mobilization of the working class and is opposed to the fight for social equality.

It has taken less than two weeks since the first round for the Apruebo Dignidad coalition to begin shifting from pledges to initiate “transformative” changes to a law-and-order discourse. In an attempt to woo the center-right, Boric has taken up all of Kast’s talking points of being tough on delinquency, assuring “unwavering commitment to confront drug trafficking, crime and recover public spaces with security…”

Major League Baseball owners lock out players

Alan Gilman

The owners of Major League Baseball (MLB) teams locked out 1,200 professional baseball players after the collective bargaining agreement expired Wednesday at midnight. Less than two hours prior to that deadline the owners voted unanimously to lockout the players, provoking the first work stoppage since the players’ strike of 1994-95.

Baseball’s owners are representatives of the financial aristocracy of America. Twenty-three of its 30 owners are billionaires, with the other seven each worth several hundreds of millions of dollars. Driven by continual increases in television revenues and soaring ticket prices from ultra-modern new stadiums financed largely with public funds, revenues for MLB reached a record $10.7 billion in 2019, the last year before the coronavirus pandemic.

The major issue in this dispute centers on attempts to alter free agency and compensation, and ways to promote more competitiveness across the league. As part of recent negotiations, the players union, the Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA), proposed changes that included free agency after five years of service time (instead of six), salary arbitration earlier in players’ careers, and a raising of the luxury-tax threshold, so big market teams can spend more on player salaries without penalties.

Major League Baseball union head Tony Clark, right, and chief negotiator for the players association Bruce Meyer listen to a question during a media availability in Irving, Texas, Thursday, Dec. 2, 2021. Owners locked out players at 12:01 a.m. Thursday following the expiration of the sport's five-year collective bargaining agreement. (AP Photo/LM Otero)

The model that has been used by baseball for the past several decades provided that during the first three years of a player’s career, a team could unilaterally dictate a player’s salary. For the next three years, a player would gain arbitration rights and an arbitrator would resolve any differences between what a player wants to earn and what an owner is willing to pay. Then, after six years, a player would become a free agent, with the league’s most veteran players being in a position to obtain contracts worth tens of millions or, in some cases, hundreds of millions over several years.

While the free agency system has led to substantial rises in average salaries since its introduction in 1975, extreme levels of inequality exist within rosters. The average major league career now lasts three to four years, meaning most will never even make it to free agency. Of the players on opening day rosters last season, 46 percent made less than $1 million, with 35 percent at less than $600,000, according to an Associated Press salary survey. The minimum salary last season was $570,500.

In the minor league system, thousands more each year earn sub-poverty wages of between $8,000 and $14,000 in the hopes of one day earning a spot on a major league team, but only about 10 percent of minor leaguers end up playing even a single game in the majors. In September, ESPN ran a story of the devastating mental health impact of these impossible financial difficulties on minor league players.

In this era of analytics, teams have learned it is smarter to pay players for what they are projected to do rather for what they have done, and consequently the younger and less expensive player is being prioritized. Players often are now released before they can go through salary arbitration three times, and when non-elite players hit free agency, they might find a minor league contract just as likely as a multiyear contract.

Owners of less competitive teams have also used the strategy of “tanking,” to trade and sell off their best players, who are generally older, restock with younger inexpensive players, and build a more competitive team in the near future with higher draft picks for much less money. Under the franchise system used by US professional sports but uncommon everywhere else in the world, the worst teams not only retain their spots in the league the following season but are granted the first pickets in the following year’s amateur draft.

Under the present system, the teams with the worst records get higher draft picks. As Sporting News put it, “The way the system is set up now, owners reap two giant benefits from fielding awful teams: 1. They’re pocketing money they could/should be spending to keep/bring in better players. 2. They’re collecting high draft picks every year that they’re awful.”

In 2021, the publication reported that six teams lost at least 95 games out of a 162-game regular season, bottomed out by the Orioles and Diamondbacks at 110 losses each. In 2019, four teams lost at least 103 games, and another six lost 90-plus. In 2018, eight teams lost at least 95 games, “led” by the Orioles, at 115 losses. This is close to the worst record in modern MLB history set by the New York Mets, then an expansion club, in 1962, when they lost 120 games.

The players insist that to correct these disparities there should be a lottery type draft that will not reward teams with the worst records. They also want players to be compensated earlier in their careers by allowing them to reach salary arbitration and free agency sooner.

Since CBAs were first negotiated in the late 1960’s, they have been structured to expire during the off-season. Initially the owners locking out players was a frequent occurrence, with lockouts taking place in 1973, 1976 and 1990. Players also carried out four strikes in 1972, 1980, 1981 and 1994-1995.

The 1994-1995 strike, which also revolved around owners’ attempts to limit free agency, was the longest in professional sports history, lasting 232 days. During this strike, 948 games were canceled in the 1994 season and the first 18 games of the 1995 season. Eventually various court and arbitration rulings reimposed the prior CBA until another agreement could be negotiated.

For the past 30 years, Major League Baseball has been played without any lockouts or strikes. Today, however, its owners and its players are being influenced by the same economic tensions and pressures, including the global pandemic, which are impacting workers in this country and globally that has led to a massive strike wave.

In the last ten days before the lockout, contrary to their claims of economic hardship regarding contract talks, many of these same owners were able to scrape together over $1 billion to sign nine players.

The owners, by instituting a lockout now, can do so without risking losing any games since the season does not begin until late March, and at the same time place pressure on unsigned players and free agents who are now prohibited from negotiating or signing any new contracts during the lockout, as well as attempting to create a divide between the higher- and lower-paid players.

One of the top player representatives, however, is Max Scherzer, one of baseball’s premiere pitcher’s, who just a few days ago signed a three-year $130 million contract with the New York Mets.

Scherzer, in response to the lockout, commented that the union has over the last five years been amassing money to weather this labor dispute. “We have a pretty good war chest behind us of money that we can allocate to players. The best-case scenario is not to tap it. Obviously, hopefully, we get a deal at some point in time, but just know as players, we’re steadfast in our belief of how we see the game.”

Indian courts continue to sanction open-ended imprisonment without trial

Kranti Kumara

Despite last July’s shocking death of the 84-year-old tribal rights activist and Jesuit priest Stan Swamy in what was widely recognized to be a state murder, India’s courts continue to sanction the prolonged detention without trial of his fifteen co-accused in the phony Elgar Parishad terrorism case.

The activists are being framed up by India’s National Intelligence Agency (NIA) under the country’s draconian “anti-terrorist” Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA), because they have voiced criticism of Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government, its big business policies and suffocating Hindu-supremacist agenda.

The BJP government has targeted them for mobilizing tribals and Dalits to legally defend themselves against state-led and state-sanctioned attacks.

Indian authorities are holding the 70 year-old Gautam Navlakha, one of the left-wing activists targeted in the Elgar Parishad frame-up case, in solitary confinement, placing his health and very life at grave risk. (Photo Credit: wikimedia.org)

Stan Swamy died after the Bombay High Court and vindictive prison authorities cruelly denied him timely medical treatment after he contracted COVID-19 whilst in prison.

Another persecuted activist, the 82-year-old Telugu poet Varvara Rao, who was granted temporary bail in February due to extreme ill health, was recently ordered by the Bombay High Court to “surrender” for reimprisonment this week.

In an unusual judgement, which the NIA is now appealing before India’s Supreme Court, the Bombay High Court on December 1 granted “default bail” to lawyer and tribal rights activist Sudha Bharadwaj on technical grounds. Bharadwaj has been behind bars since August 2018. The court ordered her release because the police did not file a charge sheet within 90 days after her arrest. The Bombay High Court has ordered Bharadwaj to appear on December 8 before a special court designated to try NIA cases. It will decide on the conditions and the date of her release, if the police agency’s Supreme Court appeal fails.

The same “NIA court” has previously denied medical bail to Bharadwaj, who suffers from numerous ailments because of her imprisonment. The judges essentially accepted the NIA’s cynical argument that Bharadwaj was “taking advantage of the pandemic.”

While ordering Bharadwaj released, the Bombay High court simultaneously denied bail to eight of her co-accused in the Elgar Parishad case. Police had also detained them for months without charge, breaching even the arbitrary, flagrantly anti-democratic rules set out in the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act. Yet the court refused to grant them “default bail” on the grounds the police had laid charges against the eight prior to their formally appealing for release on these grounds.

All long-time left-wing activists, the Elgar Parishad accused include prominent writers, academics, lawyers and journalists. They have languished in India’s atrocious prisons for over three years without trial.

The Indian judiciary, at all levels, has repeatedly denied them bail. The courts have thus given their stamp of approval to the NIA’s and Modi government’s violation of basic democratic rights. Thousands of other opponents of the Modi government and its Hindu supremacist agenda have similarly been locked away in prison for years without trial, after being charged under the UAPA. Not only does this legislation lower evidentiary standards in the adjudication of cases. It gives the authorities great leeway to deny bail, enabling them to imprison people for years on trumped up charges without trial.

In another vile development, Elgar Parishad-accused Gautam Navlakha, was suddenly and arbitrarily transferred to what is colloquially known as the “Anda Cell” (Egg cell) of the Yerawada Central Jail. The Anda cell is a tiny egg-shaped prison cell with very little light that is located in a special “high-security” wing of the prison. It was constructed in the 1990s to house the two pro-Khalistan terrorists who killed the Indian army chief who directed the 1984 assault on the Sikh Golden Temple (Operation Blue Star.)

Navlakha was jailed in April 2020, after the Supreme Court rejected his bail application and ordered him to be turned over to the NIA. He is a journalist and human rights activist well known for highlighting the Indian government’s decades-long repression in disputed Kashmir. He is a consulting editor to India’s well-known left-wing political magazine, the Economic and Political Weekly (popularly known as EPW.)

The “Anda cell” is designed to impose the most rigorous and inhumane form of solitary confinement, with those detained denied any access to the outdoors, sunlight and fresh air. It was built with the sadistic goal of breaking prisoners’ spirit.

Solitary confinement is a violation of Article 7 of the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights, which prohibits inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. The United Nations has condemned solitary confinement lasting 15 days or more as a form of torture.

Navlakha’s fate was brought to public attention through an open letter written by Sahba Hussain, Navlakha’s partner for 25 years, and widely shared on social media. When this author spoke to Ms. Hussain, she expressed a great deal of concern for the wellbeing of the 70-year-old Navlakha, whose health has already deteriorated severely due to the deplorable conditions of his imprisonment. These have included massive overcrowding amid the COVID-19 pandemic and disgusting toilet facilities. She also demanded to know why activists must constantly run to the courts just to uphold their most elementary democratic rights.

Navlakha was detained at the Tihar Jail in New Delhi when he surrendered on April 14, 2020. He was subsequently shifted to Taloja prison in Mumbai in late May 2020. However, when he was first brought to Mumbai, he was lodged in a school that had been converted into a “temporary prison” where inmates were forced to live like animals. Despite the raging COVID-19 pandemic, 350 prisoners were packed like sardines in six rooms with just three toilets, seven urinals and one common bathing area. They even lacked access to a mug or a bucket when bathing.

The NIA accuses the 15 surviving defendants in the Elgar Parishad case of being “urban Naxalites,” i.e., of acting as an urban front for the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist) or CPI (Maoist). The NIA has also absurdly charged them with plotting to overthrow the BJP government. According to the NIA, their aim was to “spread rebellious thoughts” by attempting to create a national “anti-fascist front” so as to “wage war against the government.”

The NIA claims that the evidence these activists were either working with or are members of the CPI (Maoist) is based upon numerous documents it purportedly discovered on the computers of some of the accused. A forensic analysis conducted by Arsenal Consulting, a highly regarded US-based computer forensics firm, concluded that these documents, located in a hidden folder, were planted by a well-financed computer hacker. Arsenal stated, “It should be noted that this is one of the most serious cases involving evidence tampering that Arsenal has ever encountered.”

The charges are based on the activists’ alleged instigation “of violence” on January 1, 2018, during an event marking the 200th anniversary of Elgar Parishad (literally, a gathering with a loud declaration). This annual event, held at the village of Bhima Koregoan, in Maharashtra, commemorates the heroism displayed two hundred years ago by several hundred Dalit sepoys (soldiers) in the British colonial army during a battle against a much larger force fielded by the upper caste Peshwa-ruled Maratha Confederacy. The Peshwas were notorious for their abuse and mistreatment of Dalits.

In reality, it is Hindu-right activists who are responsible for whatever violence occurred at the 2018 Elgar Parishad event. A close ally of Modi and another Hindu-extremist working with him whipped up a frenzied, saffron-coloured flag-waving Hindu mob to attack the gathering, causing violent clashes.

While the real organizers of this violence are roaming free due to their intimate connections to the BJP government, the innocent and elderly activists have been left to rot in atrocious prisons indefinitely, and with the sanction and approval of India’s courts.

Most of the activists were not even present at the Elgar Parishad gathering. In spite of this, the 16 activists were arrested by the Pune police, which accused them of being its “main organizers.”

In fact, it was two activist retired judges, B.G. Kolse-Patil, a former Bombay High Court judge, and the late P.B. Sawant, a retired justice of the Indian Supreme Court, who were the “main organisers and sole funders” of the December 31, 2017 Elgaar Parishad event. They emphasized to the Scroll.in online publication, “We have openly been saying this from the beginning.”

Australia’s under-funded healthcare system confronts major nursing shortages

Gary Alvernia

As the criminal policy of allowing COVID-19 to spread in Australia results in more than 1,000 cases daily, and nearly 2,000 patients dead already, the strain on the public health system continues to worsen.

The emergence of the even more infectious Omicron variant will intensify the crisis, which has seen a reported nationwide exodus of nurses from the workforce, including an estimated 20,000 this year.

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

That represents a loss of 5 percent of the approximately 400,000 nurses in the country, in a system that was severely understaffed even before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Particularly concerning has been the loss of intensive care unit (ICU) nurses, leading to a reduction in available ICU beds since 2020, and of nurses in aged care. Both these areas are being heavily impacted by COVID-19.

It is broadly acknowledged that the public hospital system is buckling under the pressures of the pandemic.

In a recent report, published before the Omicron variant was identified, the Australian Medical Association (AMA) anticipated that up to 2,400 hospital beds were likely to be required by COVID-19 patients on an average day in the coming six months. This would lead to even greater ambulance ramping and up to 40 percent reduced capacity for elective surgeries.

The loss of nursing staff has already resulted in 12,000 vacancies nationally, forcing some hospitals to close entire wards. According to Australian College of Nursing chief executive Kylie Ward, the worst shortages were to be found in critical care (ICU and emergency departments), maternity, mental health and aged care wards.

Many of the nurses resigning are experienced staff who are necessary for the training of junior nurses and new graduates, thus affecting the capacity of the healthcare system to grow and train the workforce.

The horrific conditions that hospital and aged care staff have been subjected to since March 2020 are undoubtedly a driving cause of resignations. Like their counterparts internationally, Australian health workers have been subjected to hugely increased workloads, absence of proper PPE, exposure to COVID, and traumatic situations and patient deaths in hospitals overwhelmed by infected patients.

New South Wales (NSW) emergency department (ED) nurse Hannah told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC): “At times we have had 70 people in the [emergency] department, ambulances ramped for hours, COVID patients sitting in the waiting room exposing people… we still don’t have [staff] ratios that are safe. And people die. And that’s why I’m leaving nursing.”

Steph, an ICU nurse in the southern state of Victoria noted: “My workplace is making staff look after patients with equipment they have no training for. When you raise these issues with management you’re met with a look that says ‘stop being difficult and just do it.’”

In comments posted to an ABC article on declining ICU nurse numbers, one health worker wrote: “The covid crisis simply magnified the contempt with which NSW health treats all of its staff. They endlessly send out ‘are you OK?’ emails when all of our stress is related to understaffing and under-resourcing. We are dehumanised and not listened to as experts when we raise issues … we are forbidden to talk to the media. In the end people just burn out and leave.”

While the burden of COVID-19 cases has thus far been primarily limited to the populous states of NSW and Victoria, staffing shortages and deteriorating work conditions are leading to burnout and resignations in all states and territories. Amy, an ED nurse from Queensland, reported: “We work understaffed every shift in our ED and are at capacity every day. Most nurses will complete double shifts (16 to 18 hours) so we can safely provide patient care. We are extremely burnt out.”

Such experiences were corroborated in a Monash University study, which estimated that as many as 40 percent of healthcare workers in Victoria had developed post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD) by the end of last year as a result of the COVID-19 waves in that state.

Despite the brutality and challenges of their work, nurses are the most poorly-paid professional workers, with a median annual salary less than $80,000 in Sydney, one of the most expensive cities in the world.

The resignations are not limited to only nurses. Surveys indicate that one-fifth of frontline and emergency services workers are considering quitting their current jobs. While exhaustion and burnout from COVID-related workloads are an immediate cause, ultimately the situation confronting health workers is due to persistent attacks on health workers and public health over decades, perpetrated by Labor and Liberal-National governments alike.

Health workers raised opposition to unsafe staffing levels for years before the pandemic. Last year, prior to the Delta outbreaks, nurses and other workers in NSW and Victoria launched multiple strikes, each of which was isolated and betrayed by trade unions collaborating with governments and health employers.

In 2014, a government-commissioned Health Workforce Australia (HWA) report warned that the country would confront a shortage of 85,000 nurses by 2025, and 123,000 by 2030. HWA was abolished in the same year by the Liberal-National Coalition government, with no assessment of staffing levels conducted since. With tacit assistance from the Labor and Greens opposition, the Coalition also pushed through $50 billion of cuts in hospital funding that year.

The previous Labor governments under Rudd then Gillard introduced so-called “national efficient prices,” by which public hospitals would be funded only for current levels of activity on the basis of “efficiency.” That gives them no capacity to anticipate population increases or deal with complexity in patients, who are growing older and sicker on average.

No state government has increased public hospital funding and infrastructure in real terms since the start of the pandemic. Instead they have frozen or capped the wages of health workers and allowed hospital capacity decreases, elective surgery waiting list blowouts and ambulance ramping to continue.

In an attempt to deflect mounting public hostility, state governments, feigning poverty, recently issued public calls for additional funds from the federal government, a proposal that Prime Minister Scott Morrison immediately rejected.

The refusal to increase healthcare funding is in line with government opposition to measures designed to stem the pandemic. This is a bipartisan policy, driven by the dictates of finance and corporations for the exploitation of the working class to intensify.

Australian government in “chaos” as pandemic intensifies political disarray

Mike Head

With the highly-transmissible Omicron variant of COVID already spreading, there are growing signs of a deepening political crisis in Australia after more than a decade of unstable and short-lived governments.

The Liberal-National Coalition government is wracked by rifts and desertions, yet there is continuing low popular support for the opposition Labor Party, accompanied by rising distrust in the entire pro-business parliamentary establishment. Polls show Labor’s primary vote still languishing at the near-record lows of around 33 percent that it obtained in the last federal election in 2019.

This raises the prospect of yet another minority or near-minority government after the looming next election, which must be held by May. Since 2007, when Coalition Prime Minister John Howard was so detested that he lost his own seat, no prime minister has lasted a full three-year parliamentary term.

The last two-week session of federal parliament for 2021 ended on Thursday with Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s government in obvious disarray and its legislative program in tatters, unable to push through its key bills.

Australia Prime Minister Scott Morrison [Credit: AP/Kiyoshi Ota]

In order to cling to office, the government has virtually suspended parliament. It has scheduled only 10 sitting days for the first half of 2022.

An unprecedented nine government MPs voted against the government on various issues during the final fortnight session. Several declared they would not vote for any government bill at all unless the government took action to overturn even the limited pandemic mask mandates set by state and territory governments.

Many government members have deserted the ship, declaring their intentions not to contest the federal election. By the end of Thursday, the number of government ministers or ex-ministers issuing such statements had risen to six, including Health Minister Greg Hunt and former Attorney-General Christian Porter.

Another six backbench MPs had done the same. So the government is losing 12 representatives altogether, with more likely to go before the election. Bitter internal faction fights are underway to pre-select Coalition candidates for an array of seats.

In the dying hours of the session, the main corporate media outlets gave prominence to claims of abuse made against Education Minister Alan Tudge by his female ex-media adviser. That forced Morrison to stand aside Tudge, who has been a close supporter of both Morrison and Defence Minister Peter Dutton, pending an in-house investigation into the allegations.

Sections of the ruling class appear to be losing confidence in the government’s capacity to deliver the agenda that big business is demanding. That is first, a guarantee of no more pandemic lockdowns, no matter how deadly Omicron and other variants become, and second, a stepped-up offensive against working-class conditions in order to further boost profits.

The words being used by the media to describe the government include “chaos” and “a train wreck,” beset by “division,” “sabotage,” “disloyalty” and “insurrection.”

Among the bills that the government had promised but was forced to shelve, at least until after the election, were: to permit religious bodies to defy anti-discrimination laws; to establish a token corruption commission to protect government politicians from accusations; and to impose blatantly anti-democratic voter ID legislation designed to disenfranchise many working-class and marginalised voters.

With the government falling apart, Labor’s response has been to step up its efforts to win the backing of the financial elite, while joining hands with the government to try to shore up the two-party political system that has ruled the country since World War II.

Yesterday, in his latest pro-business pitch, Labor leader Anthony Albanese released a policy to supposedly reduce carbon emissions by 43 percent by 2030, mainly by handing out massive subsidies to companies. Albanese boasted that the policy was based on what business leaders themselves had proposed! The Business Council of Australia (BCA), representing the largest corporations operating in Australia, immediately hailed the policy as “sensible and workable.”

Labor also struck a cynical and self-serving deal with the government to postpone the voter ID bill, which had provoked widespread outrage, while helping the Coalition ram through another anti-democratic electoral law. This bill retrospectively compels environmental groups and charities to hand over lists of donors for campaigns in support of a growing number of “independent” candidates trying to exploit the public disaffection.

This deal extends Labor’s record of backing laws to try to block any challenge to the two-party duopoly. In August, Labor helped spearhead laws to deregister parties not currently represented in parliament unless they filed lists of 1,500 members—triple the previous requirement—by this week. The Socialist Equality Party is conducting a determined campaign against these laws.

Since September’s unveiling of the AUKUS pact against China, Labor also has repeatedly reiterated its commitment to the US military alliance. It is backing the Biden administration’s escalation of Washington’s confrontation with China, raising the danger of a catastrophic nuclear war.

Crucially, from the standpoint of corporate profit, Labor leaders, including Victorian state Premier Daniel Andrews, have pledged to continue lifting any remaining COVID safety restrictions, and to keep all schools open. That is despite the ongoing Delta wave in Victoria and New South Wales, which has started to leak into other states and territories, and the rapid emergence of Omicron cases.

An Australian Financial Review editorial on December 2 vented the anxiety within the ruling capitalist class over the government’s disarray and accused the political elite of failing to impose a “pro-growth” agenda. It complained that the “low-brow and low-energy election may not even produce a win. If it delivers a hung parliament—where Greens or independents hold sway—then three years of greater paralysis beckon.”

The editorial demanded economic restructuring to overcome the impact of China’s moves to lessen its reliance on huge Australian imports of iron ore, and to claw back from social spending some $1.3 trillion in state and federal government debt, primarily incurred in bailing out business throughout the pandemic.

This is a warning of the big business dictates to be unveiled after the election, regardless of whether the next government is led by the Coalition or Labor.

The ruling class agenda was echoed in today’s Australian by editor-at-large Paul Kelly. He insisted that the “bedraggled” government’s fate depended on its ability to deliver “economic recovery.” Above all, that meant enforcing Treasurer Josh Frydenberg’s declaration this week: “Lockdowns are behind us.”

Kelly said the government had to “manage” Omicron “without premiers blowing up the place by reverting to populist repression.” That last phrase, however, reveals the fear in ruling circles of the mounting discontent in the working class, especially among teachers, parents and health workers, over the failure of governments to protect the population from the pandemic. This anger has been intensified by the infections already raging in schools, hundreds of which have had to partially or temporarily close since being reopened in the past six weeks.

Nervously, Kelly also pointed to the years of stagnation in wage levels, citing a warning from the big business BCA itself that “people don’t feel they are getting ahead.” As figures like Kelly are fully aware, the pandemic has seen the social gulf between wealthy and the working class widen to staggering and ever-more glaring levels that have triggered workers’ struggles around the globe.

One factor is holding back a social explosion. Australia’s trade union apparatus, which is tied closely to Labor, is doing everything it can to keep suppressing strikes and unrest, as it has for decades.

This week, the Transport Workers Union struck a deal with FedEx to end the last of a series of stoppages against logistics companies, while Maritime Union of Australia national secretary Paddy Crumlin ruled out dockworkers taking industrial action at Patrick Terminals ahead of Christmas.

Appearing on the Seven Network’s “Sunrise” program after Morrison had threatened legal action against stoppages, host David Koch asked Crumlin: “So, no industrial action before Christmas?” Crumlin replied: “No, of course not.”