UK: Johnson moves to Plan B measures over Omicron variant amid escalating government crisis

Robert Stevens

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson has announced a move to the government’s pandemic “Plan B” in order to deal with the rapidly escalating spread of the Omicron variant.

He made the announcement after Health Secretary Sajid Javid told Parliament that “Omicron is significantly more transmissible than Delta.” Delta cases had doubled every seven days but for Omicron “it’s between 2.5 and three days.”

He warned, “The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) estimates that the number of infections are approximately 20 times higher than the number of confirmed cases, and so the current number of [Omicron] infections is probably closer to 10,000.

“UKHSA also estimate that at the current observed doubling rate of between two and a half and three days, by the end of this month, infections could exceed 1 million.”

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson chairs a press conference on the Covid-19 variant Omicron in Downing Street with Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance and Chief Medical Officer, Professor Chris Whitty. (Picture by Andrew Parsons/No 10 Downing Street/FlickR)

Having ruled out any more lockdowns months ago in order to protect the profits of the corporations, the Plan B measures are extremely limited, inadequate, and, as always, way behind the times.

Insisting “It is not a lockdown”, with everything to remain open, Johnson declared masks will become mandatory in most indoor venues, including theatres and cinemas but not pubs, clubs and restaurants, from Friday. A vaccine pass or proof of a negative test will be required to enter nightclubs and other venues where large groups of people can continue to gather, including at outside venues with more than 10,000 people.

Johnson said that those who can will be encouraged to work from home from next week, but insisted that schools, the main vectors of COVID spread, must remain open until the Christmas break and that face-to-face learning continue in the universities.

“We don’t want children to be taken out of school before the end of term, not that there is long to go now, we don’t want nativity plays to be cancelled,” he said.

Johnson had no choice but to impose a few more restrictions given that he has been warned, according to leaked minutes of a meeting of the government’s scientific advisers held on Tuesday, that hospital admissions from the Omicron variant could reach 1,000 a day in England by the end of the year without extra restrictions put in place, possibly peaking above 2,000 a day.

But he also announced the measures under conditions in which he and his government are reeling due to a series of explosive leaks.

For nearly a week the government has been fending off criticisms that a Christmas Party was held in Downing Street on December 18 last year, attended by 40-50 people in contravention of COVID safety restrictions.

The month before, London had been part of a national four-week lockdown with indoor socialising prohibited. The capital was then placed under Tier 2 restrictions which prohibited households from mixing indoors. By December 16, two days before the party, London was recording the highest COVID case rates in the country and was moved to Tier 3, meaning all indoor mixing was prohibited except in household bubbles.

Number 10 Downing Street is the headquarters and London residence of the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. (Wikimedia)

The government attempted to ride out the scandal, denying that a party had taken place or insisting that no rules were broken. On Tuesday, these claims fell apart when ITV News published a video leaked to one of its journalists showing Downing Street officials, including Johnson’s then Press Secretary Allegra Stratton and No10’s head of digital Ed Oldfield, joking about the Christmas party as they rehearsed a televised briefing in the press room.

As part of the Q&A session, Oldfield asked Stratton, “I’ve just seen reports on Twitter that there was a Downing Street Christmas party on Friday night, do you recognise those reports?”

She replied, giggling, “I went home… hold on, hold on, erm, err … What’s the answer?”

“This fictional party was a business meeting,” she continued, laughing.

The leaks provoked widespread public disgust, with the video already viewed around 10 million times. The government was brazenly flouting its own COVID laws, even as the country was about the enter the deadliest phase of the pandemic. The Downing Street party took place took place on a day when 514 people died from COVID and the Downing Street press video was shot four days later as another 641 were reported killed by the disease. At least 167,000 are now dead from COVID.

Yesterday, during Prime Minister’s Questions, Johnson was forced to apologise “for the offence it [the video] has caused up and down the country and the impression it gives…” Stratton, who had already stepped down as his press secretary last April, resigned as a government adviser.

The event took place less than two months after Johnson blurted out in Downing Street, after being forced to agree to a second truncated lockdown late last year: “No more fucking lockdowns—let the bodies pile high in their thousands!”

The leaks to the media are widely believed to have come from the prime minister’s far-right former chief adviser, Dominic Cummings. Indeed, every major embarrassing leak aimed at destabilising Johnson over the last year, including the “let the bodies pile high” statement, came from him.

Cummings was forced to resign last November after it was revealed he drove hundreds of miles from London to Barnard Castle in the north of England, flouting national lockdown restrictions. His exposure and exit was part of a power struggle in Downing Street in which Johnson’s partner Carrie Symonds played a significant role.

After Cummings was forced out, Stratton, a close friend of Symonds, was among those brought into the governments inner circle. Before he left government, Cummings was instrumental in setting up the £2.6 million Downing Street media briefing room in which Stratton mocked COVID regulations.

In June this year another leak, of images taken from CCTV footage showing then Health Minister Matt Hancock kissing an aide in his Whitehall office, quickly led to Hancock’s resignation. The previous month, Cummings had told a parliamentary committee that Hancock should have been fired for “at least 15 to 20 things—including lying to everybody on multiple occasions” during the pandemic.

On Monday, Cummings warned that it would be “very unwise for No 10 to lie” about social events that occurred in Downing Street during last year’s Christmas lockdown. On Wednesday, he tweeted, after Johnson authorised an investigation into the December 18 party, “Will the [Cabinet Secretary] also be asked to investigate the *flat* party on Fri 13 Nov, the other flat parties, and the flat’s ‘bubble’ policy.” Cummings should know what happened in Downing Street that day, as it was the day he was sacked as chief adviser.

Another Cummings tweet yesterday, “Fish rots from the head. #Regimechange”, made his agenda clear.

The implications of these machinations in the most right-wing sections of the ruling elite must be understood by the working class.

Johnson was only able to take office because he was handed a massive parliamentary majority in a betrayal of a mass movement for social change by former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. Corbyn took the Labour leadership in 2015 after winning a landslide against his Blairite opponents fuelled by hundreds of thousands of Labour members and supporters who wanted an end to Tory rule based on a socialist agenda.

Having lost to Johnson in the 2019 General Election, Corbyn then handed the party back to the Blairites when Sir Keir Starmer took the reins of the party in April 2020, operating in a de facto coalition with the Tories ever since.

The damaging leaks undermining Johnson are evidence that the most right-wing sections of the Tories are planning ahead. Large sections of the parliamentary party and their business backers were content with using Johnson as their figurehead against Corbyn, but do not consider him capable of steering British imperialism through the stormy waters ahead as Omicron threatens to spread out of control and with multiple indications of an upsurge in the class struggle.

As difficult as it will be for many workers to believe, the moves afoot to replace Johnson would see a sharp lurch to the right. Cummings is a fascist who has made clear his wish for a “strong man” to run the country.

Among those being touted for taking over as prime minister are the multi-hundred millionaire Chancellor Rishi Sunak or multi-millionaire health minister Javid. Both oppose any further COVID restrictions as an intolerable threat to big business.

Turkish currency, living standards in free fall as pandemic rages

Barış Demir

The depreciation of the Turkish lira and the sharp increase in the prices of basic necessities affecting tens of millions of people are creating a deep economic and political crisis, as the raging pandemic infects tens of thousands and killing hundreds every day.

The Turkish lira has lost half of its value against the US dollar, from 7 TL to the US dollar in February to 13.70 TL today.

The depreciation of the Turkish lira was previously accelerated by Ankara’s conflicts with its imperialist allies, particularly over NATO’s regime change war in Syria.

The Turkish government has opposed the US decision to make the Kurdish militias the main proxy force in Syria, fearing that a Kurdish proto-state in Syria would strengthen separatist tendencies within its borders. Growing tensions in the relations led to a NATO-backed military coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in 2016. After the failed coup attempt, Ankara has further increased its geopolitical, economic and military ties with Russia.

A man buys food at a market in Ankara, Turkey, Friday, Dec. 3 2021. Turkey's annual consumer price index rose by 21.31%, the largest increase in three years, according to official figures released by the Turkish Statistics Institute, or TUIK on Friday. (AP Photo/Burhan Ozblici)

While this situation has created an unstable political environment, it also caused Western finance capital to stay away from the Turkish markets.

In addition to this and increasing turmoil in the global capitalist economy amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Erdoğan’s financial policies have accelerated the massive depreciation of the Turkish lira in 2021. Just in the last month, the US dollar has risen from 10 to 13.7 TL.

Erdoğan has been pressing the Turkish Central Bank for a while to cut interest rates to support economic growth based on exports and the construction sector. The Central Bank’s 4 percent interest rate cut in the last three months has triggered the purchase of US dollars by companies having foreign currency debt and deposit account holders.

The interest rate of 15 percent is below the official inflation rate of 21 percent, which means a 6 percent negative interest for the TL. Economist Mustafa Sönmez stated: “In all developed and developing countries facing the problem of inflation, central banks have been hiking their policy rates to cool their respective economies. In sharp contrast, Turkey’s Central Bank has cut its policy rate by 400 basis points to 15 percent since September at Erdoğan’s behest despite a nearly 20 percent inflation, which is well above the mean of emerging markets.”

This policy contradicts the rising inflation and interest rate increase expectations of the international financial oligarchy and accelerates the flight from TL into the dollar. It is stated that the rate of foreign currency deposits in banks of Turkish citizens exceeds 60 percent.

The rise in inflation is not unique to Turkey, but it is a global tendency. As the World Socialist Web Site recently explained: “The US consumer price index (CPI) had risen by 6.2 percent in October compared to a year ago—the fastest annual rise since 1990. … The global character of the inflation surge is reflected in rising CPI figures elsewhere. The Eurozone inflation rate was 3.4 percent in September, the highest level since before the global financial crisis, and well beyond the European Central Bank’s target of 2 percent. In the UK the inflation rate is expected to reach 5 percent in the first months of next year.”

This surge in inflation adds pressure on central banks to start tightening their monetary policy to continue providing positive real returns on capital to investors.

Erdoğan’s financial policy is however based on the claim that inflation in Turkey is a result of interest rates in the country, regardless of economic trends in the world. For this reason, there has been a growing government pressure on the Central Bank to cut interest rates and close the current account deficit, rather than price stability. The Turkish Central Bank’s chairman has been changed three times in the last three years. After the latest developments, moreover, Finance Minister Lütfi Elvan recently resigned.

Elvan reportedly did not adopt Erdoğan’s policies. Shortly before his resignation, Elvan made the following statement, tacitly criticizing Erdoğan: “The central bank’s main responsibility is to ensure price stability. … Narrowing the current account deficit is a responsibility of the government. The tools to be used in monetary policy are obvious, and it is the central bank that is supposed to apply them.”

Moreover, social unrest in the working class has reached the boiling point in the face of an unprecedented increase in cost of living as hundreds of people have lost their lives from a preventable pandemic. The Erdoğan government hopes that encouraging an export-based economic growth by lowering interest rates will alleviate this unrest.

Terrified of the impending social explosion among working people, the government is preparing to make a significant increase in the minimum wage at the beginning of 2022. It is stated that the monthly minimum wage, which is 2,825 TL, will be increased to the range of 3,500-4,000 TL.

However, this increase will neither eliminate growing social anger nor substantially increase the purchasing power of the working class. The minimum wage, which was nearly US$383 at the beginning of the year, is now just US$206, and Turkey now has the lowest minimum wage among all European countries. Even with the alleged increase, the 2022 minimum wage will be as much as US$100 lower than in January 2021.

According to the Turkish Statistical Institute (TUIK), annual consumer inflation reached 21.31 percent with an increase of 3.51 percent in November. The producer price index increased by 9.99 percent to 54.62 percent in November.

Official data, especially the consumer price index (CPI), are far from truthful. Independent Inflation Research Group (ENAgroup) announced that the CPI increased by 9.91 percent in November. According to the group, the 12-month price increase thus became 58.65 percent. It means the minimum wage hike will not cover these losses, and inflation will continue to rise throughout 2022.

This has already led to a surge in the class struggle as part of the global tendency among workers. After several wildcat strikes and factory occupations in recent months, teachers, health care workers and all other sections of the working class are increasingly unsatisfied with their wages and living standards, demanding serious improvements with protests. Over 150,000 metal workers and autoworkers also expect a revision and a sharp increase in their proposed contracts by pro-company trade unions.

Forced to work in extremely dangerous conditions during the pandemic, workers are outraged that they and their families are being put at great risk every day. The policies followed in this process are based on sacrificing the lives of the working class in exchange for the protection of the profits of the ruling class and covering the entire cost of the pandemic process with an attack on the social conditions of the workers.

While a handful of corporate and financial elite have made massive profits from this criminal policy, the impoverishment of broad sections of workers has brought the Erdoğan government’s support in the polls down to its lowest level since 2002, when it first came to power.

As Omicron begins to spread in India, school reopenings put tens of millions of children at risk of infection

Yuan Darwin

Reports continue to emerge of the Omicron variant’s spread in states scattered across India. At least 30 cases had been identified as of December 7, with government officials acknowledging that some of them have no connection to travel. Given India’s notoriously poor record of mass testing, this strongly indicates that community transmission of the potentially more infectious and virulent variant has already begun.

With initial data from South Africa suggesting that children are at greater risk of being infected and sickened by the new variant, the Indian ruling elite’s continued drive to reopen schools threatens to produce mass infection, compounding an already dire social crisis facing children and families that has been decades in the making.

There is widespread public apprehension about the Omicron variant in a country that has already experienced two devastating waves of COVID-19 that, according to studies of excess mortality have left at least 4 million and most likely 5 million Indians dead. But India’s far-right Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) central government and state governments, whether led by the BJP or the Congress and various other opposition parties, are determined to prioritize profits over lives. Reopening schools is seen as a vital element in forcing Indians to “learn to live with the virus.”

Students wear face masks and wait outside a school on the day schools partially reopened after they were closed due to the coronavirus pandemic in Kolkata, India, Tuesday, Nov. 16, 2021. (AP Photo/Bikas Das)

The reopening of schools for in-person learning has taken place across the country this fall. In Kerala, the Stalinist Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPM-led Left Democratic Front (LDF) government reopened higher educational institutions from October 4 and schools from November 1.

The DMK-led Tamil Nadu government reopened schools for Classes 1 to 8 from November 1. The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP)-led Delhi government ordered in-person classes for all grades to recommence November 1. In Madhya Pradesh, the state government resumed physical classes for students of primary and senior classes from September 21. In Karnataka, in-person classes for Classes 1 to 5 began October 25. Schools, colleges and universities in West Bengal were reopened for physical classes on November 16.

Meanwhile, the University Grants Commission (UGC), which is part of the Ministry of Education, released a circular on November 4 claiming that higher educational institutions can restart physical classes with 50 percent attendance in areas outside containment zones. All colleges affiliated with Delhi University partially reopened on September 15.

Although India’s current 7-day average of COVID-19 daily cases is around 10,000, representing a decline from the figure reported in early September, i.e., above 40,000, these numbers are highly undercounted, due to a lack of reporting and testing. With the arrival of the Omicron variant, a new COVID-19 surge among the country’s large, overwhelmingly unvaccinated population of children and young people threatens to occur.

Numerous infections related to schools have already been reported. More than 400 school students and nearly 50 teachers tested positive for COVID-19 in Himachal Pradesh’s Kangra district last month. A 13-year-old girl student from Uttar Pradesh’s Hamirpur district died of COVID-19 on October 21. Meanwhile, the northeastern state of Sikkim had to shut all schools and colleges within a week of reopening on September 6 due to the high number of positive tests. During the last week of October, 32 students tested positive for COVID-19 at a residential school in the Kodagu district of Karnataka. At least 30 students and teachers have tested positive for COVID-19 since the reopening of schools in Tamil Nadu.

A study conducted by the World Health Organisation (WHO) found high COVID-19 rates among the 0-19 age group in India. “Using viral genomic sequences from 9,500 COVID-19 patients, the study found an increased number of infections among younger age groups (0-19 years) and women, a lower mean age for infection and symptomatic illness/hospitalisation, higher mortality and more frequent incidences of post-vaccination infections with Delta variant compared to the non-VOC (B.1) variant,” the WHO update said.

Doctors have warned that school reopenings will lead to the spread of the virus. “Children can be potential reservoirs of the Sars-CoV-2 and vaccinating them becomes a public health imperative,” commented Indian virologist Dr. T Jacob John. “We have underestimated the epidemic among children as they are not falling sick so much, but we must think of children as a reservoir of the virus.”

India currently has no vaccination program for children and adolescents. Since the late spring, the Modi government has claimed to offer free vaccinations to all adults, but it insists on distributing 25 percent of vaccines through private hospitals who charge fees that represent well over a day’s wage per shot for hundreds of millions of workers and toilers.

Only 29.4 percent of India’s population is fully vaccinated. This means that broad layers of workers as well as school-aged youth are highly vulnerable to contracting the disease.

Children and adolescents who contract COVID-19 are at risk not only of dying but of developing Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children (MIS-C), which attacks multiple organs and creates other possibly permanent illnesses. Already, 4 children have died and over 300 were infected by MIS-C, a post-COVID complication, in Kerala in the last five months, according to the state health ministry. Twenty-nine MIS-C cases were reported in neighbouring Karnataka and 14 in Tamil Nadu in the last six months.

The Union and state governments have cynically seized on the dire social conditions confronting children and their families across India to legitimise their school reopening push. The horrendous levels of poverty and misery that exist in the country’s teeming slums and rural areas—the product of the ruling elite’s refusal to adequately fund social services and education for decades—left the vast majority of children deprived of any schooling whatsoever during the period of pandemic-related school closures.

The results of a recent survey on School Children’s Online and Offline Learning (SCHOOL), carried out in 15 states and Union territories and prepared by a coordination team that included Indian economists Jean Drèze and Reetika Khera, points to a massive educational crisis. Titled “LOCKED OUT: Emergency Report on School Education,” it found that a lack of access to the proper tools required for online learning was one of the main impediments to children’s participation in any kind of education during the period of school closures. The report found that only 51 percent of rural households surveyed had even one smartphone—and only 8 percent of children in rural areas had attended regular online classes.

According to a report released by the United Nations Children Emergency Fund (UNICEF), merely 8.5 percent of students in India have access to the internet. The overall availability of computing devices (desktops or laptops) in school is 22 percent for all India, with rural areas seeing much lower provisioning (18 percent) than urban areas (43 percent).

A recent report titled “A Future at Stake–Guidelines and Principles to Resume and Renew Education” prepared by the National Coalition on the Education Emergency, a group of academics and educationists, revealed that the “overwhelming majority of India’s 250 million children had no structured learning opportunities during the pandemic, leading to an education emergency of incalculable proportions.” The report highlighted “the loss of the most basic language and mathematics skills” among children of the rural and urban poor, and migrant labourers.

If India’s fabulously wealthy super-rich and the political establishment that does their bidding were so concerned about the educational development of the country’s hundreds of millions of young people, why have they permitted the disastrous social conditions documented in the reports on childhood education to develop and fester? The lack of access to basic necessities of life for the vast majority of India’s population was not a phenomenon that emerged overnight with the adoption of lockdowns, but the product of decades of underfunding of critical social services to pay for India’s ever-expanding military and the enrichment of its billionaires. The Union government spends a pathetic 3.1 percent of GDP, while providing India’s military with the third-largest military budget in the world, behind only the United States and China.

According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) 2021 State of the Education Report (SOER) for India, entitled “No Teacher, No Class,” there are as many as 110,971 single-teacher schools in the country and 89 percent of such schools are in rural areas. The UNESCO report noted that the country is short of 1.1 million skilled teachers, with the rural areas accounting for the lion’s share of the deficit. Teacher vacancies in schools in some rural areas reach as high as 69 percent.

Across the country, over 200,000 schools (16 percent) do not have a library facility, 900,000 schools do not have functional computer facilities for the students (28.55 percent), and over 1.1 million schools do not have internet facilities, states the Unified District Information System for Education Plus report. According to official estimates, 10 percent of schools do not have hand wash facilities, leading to unhygienic conditions for the students. A total of 29,967 schools do not have drinking water facilities within the school premises and over 6,000 schools across India do not have a building. A recent official report by the Parliamentary panel on education stated that only 56 percent of schools have electricity and almost 40 percent of schools do not have boundary walls.

Philippine Justice Department files charges for just one murder in the Bloody Sunday massacre

Isagani Sakay

On December 1, eight months after nine activists were gunned down and six arrested in simultaneous police raids on March 7, the Philippine justice department announced that a special investigating team had recommended the filing of murder charges against 17 police officers for one of the killings, that of labour leader Emmanuel Asuncion.

The horrifying events became known as “Bloody Sunday.” The killing of Asuncion was part of a crackdown on legal political and activist organizations staged by the police just two days after President Rodrigo Duterte delivered a speech in the city of Cagayan de Oro in a meeting of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELAC).

Speaking of “communist terrorists” to an audience of military and police officials, Duterte declared, “If there’s an encounter and you see them armed, kill! Kill them! Don’t mind human rights! I will be the one to go to prison, I don’t have any qualms.” He continued, “make sure you really kill them, and finish them off if they are alive.”

Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte (Presidential Communications Operations Office/Wikipedia)

Asuncion was gunned down in his office in Dasmariñas City in the province of Cavite. Police separated him from his wife, who they sent to another room, and then shot him repeatedly. According to the Onenews.ph website, Asuncion was shot three times in the front and three times more in the back.

The eight other activists were roused from their beds in the early morning, separated from their families and killed. Ariel and Anna Marie Evangelista were killed outside their bamboo hut in Batangas province while their 10-year-old son hid under his bed. Both were leaders of an environmental organization, composed largely of poor fishermen in their community, opposing mining, land-grabbing and climate change.

Melvin Dasigao, Marklee Bacasno, Abner and Edward Esto were leaders and members of an urban poor organization fighting for decent housing in Kasiglahan, Rizal province. They were gunned down in their homes as their families were herded outside into the cold dawn. Bascano’s killing was particularly merciless. He was shot seven times.

Their urban poor organization, San Isidro Kasiglahan, Kapatiran at Damayan para sa Kabuhayan, Katarungan at Kapayapaan (SIKKAD-K3), had previously been labelled a communist front group by the military. According to the human rights organization, Karapatan, the four slain activists were publicly portrayed by the government as members or former members of the New People’s Army (NPA), the armed wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP).

Puroy dela Cruz and his cousin Randy dela Cruz, farmers and members of the Dumagat indigenous group in Rizal Province, suffered similar horrendous fates. They were shot repeatedly as the police held their families outside their homes.

Out of all of these horrifying crimes, murder charges have only been filed in one. Even that case is likely to be dragged out interminably. Justice Secretary Menardo Guevarra told the press that Philippine judicial procedures dictate that the actual prosecution will depend on the preliminary investigation by the Dasmariñas city prosecutor who has reportedly invited the accused police to file their counter affidavits.

Guevarra also announced that the special investigation teams for the killing of the Evangelista couple, Dasigao, Bacasno, Abner and Edward Esto were still conducting their investigations. The killings of Puroy and Randy dela Cruz were not included, he stated, as he claimed that no connection to any cause-oriented or activist group had been established. The murders of these two farmers did not fall within the remit of the special investigation teams established under a 2012 order of then President Benigno Aquino to investigate the extrajudicial killing of members of cause-oriented organizations, advocates of political, environmental, agrarian, labor, or similar causes and journalists.

In the wake of the justice department announcement, police officials insisted that the killings were the outcome of legitimate police operations servicing search warrants for loose firearms and explosives. All of the victims they claimed resisted arrest, “nanlaban.” “Nanlaban,” is a semi-official term popularized under the Duterte administration for “fighting back against authorities” and any case in which “nanlaban” is reported is widely understood to be a police rub-out, or extra-judicial execution.

Extrajudicial killings, massacres, illegal detention and torture are the pillars of bourgeois rule in the Philippines. In the decades since the military-backed ouster of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos, only one of the many known torturers and killers of that dictatorial regime and of the administrations that succeeded it has been prosecuted. Two leading torturers and killers, former Police General Panfilo Lacson and former special forces commandant Gregorio Honasan, were made Senators. Lacson is now running for president and Honasan is again running for Senate on a shared slate with Duterte.

The Bloody Sunday massacre demonstrates that the ruling elite will use mass murder to protect its interests in confrontations with the working class who are being driven into struggle by soaring prices, abysmally low wages, and the social weight of the pandemic.

Last year, Philippine congress passed an Anti-Terror Law, which was signed into effect by Duterte. The law grants the government the power to arrest anyone without warrant on the basis of unsubstantiated allegations of terrorism. The Anti-Money Laundering Commission announced that it would freeze the bank accounts of any organization accused of supporting terrorism. The Foreign Affairs Department has requested that the European Union stop all funding and donations from Europe to any cause-oriented organization labelled by the government as a communist front.

Under the Anti-Terror Law, government allegations of communism are now sufficient evidence to shut down organizations, freeze their funding, and arrest their membership. If, in the process of arrest, the police claim that the suspects “nanlaban,” the law is sufficient pretext for murder.

The lives of grass-roots activists and of the broader working class have been gravely endangered. Political responsibility for this peril rests with the leadership of the Stalinist Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP).

Under the ideological leadership of Jose Maria Sison, the CPP and the numerous organizations that follow its political line, supported Duterte’s bloody rule as mayor of the southern city of Davao, where he oversaw a notorious apparatus of death squads. The CPP endorsed the rise of Duterte to the presidency in 2016 and selected members to serve in his cabinet. Relations with Duterte soured in 2017 as a result of the intervention of the Philippine military, which threatened to carry out a coup d’état should Duterte’s ties with the CPP persist.

Only when all possibility of cultivating profitable relations with Duterte had ended did Sison and the CPP leadership begin denouncing him as “a fascist.”

Following the Bloody Sunday massacre, CPP chief information officer, Marco Valbuena, published a statement that “the targets of Duterte’s state terrorism can be absorbed by NPA units or provided safe haven within the NPA’s guerrilla base areas.”

In other words, the CPP had no intention of organizing the working class and oppressed masses to defend their democratic rights in a fight for socialism. The party, rather, is attempting to channel and isolate all political dissent into the countryside, while its leaders forge ties with a new section of the ruling class.

Preparations for dictatorial rule in the Philippines are far advanced. The mass murder of workers and the poor and the silencing of political dissent are being codified into the laws of the land. Sison and the CPP have made this possible.

In bid to blow up nuclear talks, US imposes sanctions, steals Iranian oil

Bill Van Auken

With Washington deliberately stoking tensions that could trigger all-out military clashes with both Russia and China, there is every indication that it is simultaneously seeking to blow up Iranian nuclear talks, setting the stage for a dangerous new escalation of conflict in the Middle East.

On the eve of the resumption of talks in Vienna between Iran and the P4+1 (the four permanent members of the UN Security Council still nominally party to the agreement plus Germany), along with indirect talks between Tehran and Washington, the Biden administration has carried out a series of flagrant provocations.

On Tuesday, the US Treasury and State Departments piled on a set of new sanctions against Iranian government entities and officials on the grounds of alleged “human rights” abuses. These come on top of the “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign imposed by the Trump administration in 2018 after it unilaterally abrogated the 2015 Iran nuclear accord.

Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy (IRGCN) vessels cross the path of US warships in Persian Gulf.

The US sanctions regime amounts to an economic blockade of Iran, targeting countries and companies daring to do business with the nation of over 85 million people and resulting in deepening poverty for the Iranian masses, while severely hindering the country’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has inflicted over 130,000 recorded deaths.

The Biden administration has maintained Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign in place, continuing actions that against Iran that are tantamount to a state of war.

On Wednesday, the US Justice Department announced that it had carried out the “successful forfeiture” of 1.1 million barrels of Iranian petroleum products seized by the US Navy from four tankers bound for Venezuela. Seized in separate acts of US piracy in the Arabian sea were Iranian weapons, including surface-to-air and anti-tank weapons, allegedly bound for Yemen to aid Houthi rebels in their protracted struggle against the US-backed forces of the Saudi monarchy.

The proceeds from the “forfeitures”—court orders allowing the government to sell seized goods—amounted to nearly $27 million, according to the DOJ.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon announced that US Defense Secretary Gen. Lloyd Austin (ret.) will meet with his Israeli counterpart Benny Gantz today “to discuss the United States’ commitment to Israel’s security and shared concerns regarding Iran’s nuclear provocations and destabilizing actions in the region.”

Mossad chief David Barnea is also in Washington for meetings with US intelligence chiefs on Iran. The Israeli officials are pushing for a joint military campaign with the United States. No doubt they presented their American counterparts with a menu of options ranging from an escalation of Tel Aviv’s assassination campaign against Iran’s scientists and sabotage of its facilities, to strikes against Iranian interests elsewhere in the Middle East and all the way to an all-out war.

Senior Israeli military officials visited the Pentagon’s Central Command headquarters in Florida at the end of last month for detailed discussions on Iran. The Israel Defense Forces reported that the two sides “deepened their operational preparedness and strategic discussions.”

Israel has engaged in increasingly bellicose threats and actions against Iran in apparent coordination with Washington’s provocations. Early Tuesday morning, Israeli warplanes carried out missile strikes against Syria’s Mediterranean port of Latakia, blowing up containers in a cargo area and igniting a blaze. Israeli officials claimed the containers held weapons bounded for Iranian-backed militias in Syria and Iraq. The Latakia port is Syria’s main lifeline to the outside world and it is used by both Iranian and Russian vessels.

Israel is preparing major exercises over the Mediterranean in the coming spring designed to rehearse a major bombing campaign against Iran’s nuclear program, the Kan broadcasting network reported. The drill would include dozens of warplanes, including F-15s, F-35s and F-16s, as well as spy planes and refueling jets, flying 1,000 kilometers to simulate the distance to Iran.

Earlier this year, Tel Aviv publicly announced a $1.5 billion program to prepare for an attack on Iran and obtain weapons, including bunker-busting bombs, to destroy Iranian underground nuclear facilities.

Amid US-Israeli talks on confronting the Iranian “nuclear threat,” the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution Monday calling for a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East by a vote of 178-1. Israel cast the sole opposing vote, with the US and Cameroon abstaining. Iran was among those voting in favor.

While Israel maintains a nuclear arsenal and has rejected all international nuclear treaties and inspection regimes, CIA director William Burns, speaking on Monday before the Wall Street Journal’s annual CEO Council, acknowledged that the agency “doesn’t see any evidence that Iran … has made a decision to weaponize” its nuclear program.

In advance of Thursday’s talks in Vienna, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken declared that “the runway is getting very, very short” for achieving a negotiated settlement with Iran. Blinken has repeatedly threatened that “all options are on the table” if a deal is not struck.

In an interview with Reuters last Friday, Blinken charged that Iran “does not seem to be serious about doing what’s necessary to return to compliance” with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, as the 2015 agreement is known.

This imperialist arrogance turns reality on its head. It was not Iran that sabotaged the JCPOA, but rather Washington. When the Trump administration tore up the agreement in 2018, Tehran remained in full compliance with the agreement’s demands that it curtail up to 80 percent of its civilian nuclear program and submit to an unprecedentedly intrusive international inspections regime.

This was despite the fact that the US never offered any significant sanctions relief. Tehran continued to maintain its strict observance of the agreement’s terms for another year after the US abrogation, taking steps to increase its levels of uranium enrichment and stockpiles only after it had become clear that the Western European signatories to the JCPOA would do nothing to challenge Washington’s “maximum pressure” campaign.

The Iranian government’s position is clear. Washington deserted the agreement, not Tehran. It must return to compliance by lifting sanctions, and then Iran will roll back its nuclear activities.

The Biden administration, however, has sought to put the onus on Iran, demanding even further concessions in return for the US returning to the accord. Blinken has stated US demands for an accord that is “stronger and longer.” This would include both Iran’s scrapping its missile program and ceding its influence in the Middle East to Washington’s continued drive to assert US hegemony over the oil-rich region.

Tehran has also called for the US to provide guarantees that it will not pull out of the deal once again, given a shift in the political winds in Washington. The Biden administration’s ability to push a binding treaty through the US Senate is virtually nil.

Given the scant prospect of genuine sanctions relief from Washington, Tehran has little motivation for accepting new concessions.

While the “pivot to Asia” initiated under the Obama administration was supposedly a shift of US military might from the decades of wars in the Middle East toward confronting China, every region of the globe, and the Middle East in particular, remains a battlefield.

Under the impact of the US economic blockade and Western Europe’s complicity, Tehran has forged closer ties to Beijing, signing an agreement earlier this year that guarantees China discounted oil exports for the next 25 years in exchange for some $400 billion in investment under the Belt and Road initiative.

Whatever the motivation advanced by the Biden administration for military confrontation with Iran, it will be bound up with the drive toward global war with China.

Confronted with growing class struggle within the United States, amid unprecedented levels of social inequality that have deepened as the ruling elite has enriched itself amid the mass death of the COVID-19 pandemic, the US ruling class is driven toward war as a means of directing the irrepressible contradictions of US capitalism outward in an explosion of military violence, in the Middle East, the Asia Pacific and internationally.

US: No money for COVID tests, blank check for the military

Andre Damon

On Wednesday, White House spokesperson Jen Psaki rejected the idea of sending free COVID-19 tests to all Americans to protect against the dangerous new Omicron variant, pressing reporters, “How much would that cost?”

At wholesale prices of approximately $1 per test (the going price in Germany), it would cost approximately $329 million. Sending every single American a COVID-19 test would cost the equivalent of less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the military budget, the largest in history, passed Friday by the US House of Representatives.

In other words, the military budget is 2,000 times more expensive than this critical measure to protect Americans against COVID-19, the single greatest threat to their lives, more deadly than cancer, heart disease, smoking and auto accidents.

The massive budget weighs in at $740 billion, with another $28 billion thrown in for the US Department of Energy to develop additional nuclear weapons.

Former President Donald Trump repeatedly boasted of his record military budgets. But this budget is tens of billions of dollars larger than anything ever passed under Trump—a budget far, far larger than even the Biden administration or Pentagon asked for.

The 2022 National Defense Authorization Act, the summary of which alone is over 600 pages, was released just six hours before the overwhelming majority of lawmakers in both parties voted on it.

An F-35 production line (Credit: Lockheed Martin)

Included in the bill are, to quote the official summary of its weapons systems:

• “$4.9 billion for Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, an increase of $2.9 billion to build three guided missile destroyers in fiscal year 2022.”
• “A $4.7 billion increase for shipbuilding, including 5 additional battle force ships: 2 destroyers, 2 expeditionary fast transports, and 1 fleet oiler”
• “$3.1 billion for the Columbia-class submarine program, an increase of $130 million, for industrial base development and expansion in support of the Virginia and Columbia shipbuilding programs.”
• “$6.6 billion for the procurement of two Virginia-class submarines and advance procurement of future submarines, including an additional $200 million to expand the submarine industrial base.”
• “$4.4 billion for the F-35A program, including an increase of $175 million for the purchase of F135 power modules and the resources to begin upgrading the fleet to TR-3/Block 4 capability.”

• “$1.0 billion for 12 F/A-18E/F aircraft”

It includes further lump-sum appropriations for “great power” conflicts against Russia and China:

• “Extends and modifies the Pacific Deterrence Initiative (PDI) to realign DOD efforts towards PDI objectives and identifies approximately $7.1 billion in FY22 investments [to counter China]”
• “Increases funding by $50 million for the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, which authorizes the Secretary of Defense, with the concurrence of the Secretary of State, to provide security assistance and intelligence support to military and other security forces of the Government of Ukraine [as part of a military-buildup challenging Russia]”

But the largest portion of the bill deals with funding the United States multi-trillion-dollar nuclear buildup, focusing on the creation of smaller, more “usable” nuclear weapons:

• “Authorizes $20.2 billion for the activities of the NNSA [National Nuclear Security Administration]”
• “Authorizes $6.48 billion for the Department of Energy’s defense environmental cleanup activities”

Commenting on this bloated handout to defense contractors, journalist and historian Fred Kaplan asked, “Did anyone even look at the massive defense budget before passing it?”

Kaplan added, “No officials or lawmakers have spelled out why the budget—which includes $740 billion for the Pentagon and $28 billion for the Energy Department’s nuclear-weapons programs—needs to be quite this huge.”

Kaplan adds,

Critics of government spending on domestic programs frequently complain about “throwing money at a problem.” Yet that is exactly what Congress is doing with the defense budget. When Biden submitted his infrastructure and Build Back Better plans, a few legislators from both parties got together with the White House to pare down their size, narrowing the definition of “infrastructure,” reordering priorities, and questioning the urgency of some needs. One can argue about the final result, but Congress subjected Biden’s plan to legitimate oversight and analysis.

There has been almost no oversight or analysis of this defense budget.

With inflation soaring to levels unseen in decades, all US fiscal spending is being reviewed with a fine-tooth comb. The vast majority of social spending projects, including child care and student loan forgiveness that Biden campaigned on, are being thrown out the window, based on the claim that additional government spending will contribute to inflation.

And yet, when it comes to the military, anything goes. The generals simply get everything on their Christmas wish list and then more in the form of unspecified and unenumerated slush funds.

The dominant thinking driving this insane level of military spending was outlined in a new book by Elbridge Colby, a lead author of the US 2018 national defense strategy, as well as the 2018 essay, “If You Want Peace, Prepare for Nuclear War.” In his latest book entitled The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict, Colby writes,

Pandemics do not put geopolitics on hold; power politics exists even during and after such outbreaks. They may even intensify geopolitical competition. … This means that, while the effort and expense required to control the threat of pandemic disease may be very great, these efforts do not logically trade against national security requirements.

But, as economists like to say, “All dollars are green.” A $70 million spent on an F-35 is 70 million Americans who do not get a COVID-19 test.

What is behind America’s binge in military spending? As the World Socialist Web Site warned in October, “Under conditions of deepening social, political and economic crisis, dominant sections of the American ruling class see a conflict with China as a mechanism for enforcing ‘national unity,’ which means, in practice, suppressing and criminalizing domestic opposition.”

If American capitalism cannot afford to protect the population from COVID-19, it at least has the resources to use a foreign conflict as a pretext for a crackdown at home.

Bank for International Settlements raises concerns over financial system

Nick Beams

As speculation on Wall Street and other stock markets roars ahead, researchers and analysts are continuing to delve into the events of March 2020 when global financial markets plummeted at the start of the pandemic and had to be rescued with a massive intervention by the US Federal Reserve.

So far, while some of the causes for the meltdown, which was centred in the $22 trillion US treasury market, have been identified, no solution has been advanced.

The latest institution to examine the crisis is the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the umbrella organisation for central banks, which published a major analysis in its quarterly review issued earlier this week. It called for greater regulation of non-banking institutions, in particular bond funds, that have come to play an increasingly significant role in global financial markets over the past decade.

A graph on the BIS website (bis.org)

The bulk of the review is made up of highly technical details of the operations of the financial system but the conclusions of the analysis were clearly summed up in a foreword by Agustin Carstens, the general manager of the BIS.

He began by noting that non-bank financial intermediaries (NBFIs), such as bond funds and hedge funds, have “massively increased their footprint” since the global financial crisis of 2008. It is estimated that this virtually unregulated non-bank sector now accounts for nearly half of all financial assets.

Carstens claimed these institutions offered a broad range of investment and funding opportunities and represented a “healthy source of diversity” in financing.

At least that is the case when markets are operating normally, and things appear to be going well. It is a very different story when they are not.

“When things go wrong,” he continued, “NBFIs can trigger or amplify market stress.” This was the case at the start of the pandemic.

“In March 2020 and in previous episodes of market turmoil, the NBFI sector amplified stress through inherent structural vulnerabilities, notably liquidity mismatches and hidden leverage. With system-wide stability under threat, massive central bank support was necessary to restore the calm. Such repeated occurrences suggest that the status quo is unacceptable.”

Carstens said fundamental adjustments were needed in the regulatory framework for NBFIs to make it fit for purpose.

In his summary of the March 2020 crisis, when the US treasury market, the basis of the global financial system froze—at one point there were no buyers for US government debt—Carstens pointed to one of the fundamental contradictions of all capitalist markets. This is, what may be rational behavior for an individual participant can be irrational for the system as a whole.

When considering the system as a whole it was necessary to zoom out from the trees and consider the forest, he said.

“The overall system may be unstable even if individual institutions, considered on a standalone basis, may appear stable. In other word, actions that seem prudent from the viewpoint of individual institutions may destabilise the system.”

This is what took place in March 2020. Faced with demands from investors for redemptions, NBFIs tried to obtain cash by selling assets under conditions where all sought “first mover advantage”—that is, moving out before others decided to do the same. The process was similar, Carstens noted, to a depositors’ run on a bank.

Faced with actual or the threat of withdrawals, fund mangers tend to hoard liquidity or liquidate assets.

“But what is prudent from their point of view has potentially negative repercussions for the system” and protecting the viability of individual funds “exacerbates the system-wide liquidity shortage.” These mechanisms “were at play in March 2020.”

The BIS review also noted that concerns for financial stability were rising in the world of cryptocurrencies or what it termed decentralised finance (DeFi).

Carstens noted that, in what he called the crypto ecosystem, problems had so far surfaced mainly in the form of frequent and sizeable price crashes. “Whether such fragilities are limited to this ecosystem or can spill over to the traditional one is still unclear.”

However, the danger should not be underestimated because “as history confirms anything that grows exponentially is unlikely to remains self-contained and thus merits the closest attention.”

As was noted in the body of the review, if DeFi were to become widespread, “its vulnerabilities might undermine financial stability.” And the disruptions could be severe “because of the high leverage, liquidity mismatches, built-in interconnectedness and the lack of shock absorbers such as banks.”

The massive borrowing undertaken by NBFIs is also a source of destabilisation. The archetypal example is the use of leverage by hedge funds and asset managers for the purchase of securities with borrowed funds. This included the use of repos—very short-term, often overnight, procurements of cash—that are used to finance bets in financial markets.

“More recently,” Carstens noted, “leverage has become high and pervasive in the DeFI world too. In such a context, price drops and increases in measured risks may make the lender call in a loan or charge a higher haircut, inducing forced selling.”

Leverage was also pervasive in private markets which have gained ground in the recent period. Here risk-taking is procyclical. That is, investments increase when stock markets do well, and liquidity is ample, but increase instability when there is a downturn.

“Such risk-taking has contributed to the recent accumulation of debt in the system at large and may have broader financial stability implications, not least because banks fund private market operations and investors.”

The central thrust of the policy prescriptions outlined in the review was a call for greater regulation of NBFIs.

But here Carstens was forced to acknowledge great obstacles, particularly in the case of the crypto world, or DeFi.

“Regulatory challenges may appear insurmountable in the case of DeFi, which is designed to avoid central oversight and rulemaking,” Carstens wrote.

However, the problems confronting would-be regulators do not stop there because financial markets respond to increased controls by seeking new strategies to get round them. Carstens described regulatory efforts as a “continuing endeavour” and the task has “no clear beginning and no clear end.”

“People inevitably want highest returns and higher liquidity. The financial system will try to deliver, in part by adapting to regulation [that is, seeking to get round it] as it evolves. All this inevitably raises system-wide risks,” Carstens wrote.

Recent history provides a graphic example of this process. After the global financial crisis of 2008, which centred on the banks, new regulations were introduced in the US which somewhat constricted their activities in the treasury market.

But these actions only led to the growth in the activity of NBFIs which played a major role in the crisis of March 2020, and are now at the centre of the continuing threat of another meltdown.

The ongoing reports on the fragile state of the global financial system, including the latest review from the BIS, have major implications for the struggles of the working class.

Firstly, they reveal the essential driving force of the homicidal policies of all capitalist governments in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic. Their fear, as was revealed so clearly at the outset, is that any meaningful public health measures, based on science, will precipitate a collapse of the financial house of cards.

Secondly, they make clear that at any time an adverse event in the financial system, such as a wrongly placed bet by a hedge fund or some other financial institution, could trigger a chain reaction, bringing about a collapse of the entire system with incalculable economic consequences, including a depression and mass unemployment.