In face of protests, US judge imposes Puerto Rico debt restructuring plan

Rafael Azul

On January 3, demonstrators rallied at the Federal Court House in San Juan, Puerto Rico, demanding that U.S. District Court Judge Laura Taylor Swain reject Puerto Rico’s debt restructuring plan, proposed by the Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico (FOMBPR).

Pointing out the precarious state of the island’s economy, the protesters, who included retirees, teachers, government employees and students from the University of Puerto Rico, demanded legislation forbidding the payment of illegal government debt, and instead prioritizing education, such as funding for the University of Puerto Rico, other essential services and guaranteeing retirement pensions.

Mass protest in Puerto Rico, July 2019 (Credit: Daryana Rivera)

Judge Swain, who presides over the Puerto Rico bankruptcy case, while acknowledging the popular opposition in Puerto Rico, approved the FOMBPR plan on January 18.

Puerto Rico’s 25 years of financial implosion and economic decline will now take a new turn with Swain’s approval of the debt restructuring plan engineered by the Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico, an unelected body appointed by the US Congress in June 2016 under the Obama administration to manage the US island territory’s debt crisis. The seven members of the financial oversight board are well connected to European and US banks and to the Wall Street vulture funds.

Five years in the making, the restructuring plan cuts Puerto Rico’s 2016 debt default in half, while assuring multi-million-dollar profits for Wall Street high risk hedge (“vulture”) funds, at the expense of public employee pensions, jobs and wages.

The debt restructuring plan, which is expected to be approved by most debt holders, continues the island government’s prolonged austerity policies, including replacing defined benefit pensions with 401K plans (subject to the vagaries of stock markets). It also reduces Puerto Rico’s current public debt from $70 billion to $34 billion, lowering what the government pays in debt service. Investors will get $7 billion up front, plus billions more if tax collections exceed projections. The Financial Oversight Board is to remain in control until four years have passed with the government budget in balance.

Unresolved are other aspects of the island’s financial crisis, such as the bankruptcy of the public Electrical Authority.

Puerto Rico defaulted on a $2 billion government bond payment on July 1, 2016. At the time it had already missed debt payments on tens of billions of dollars worth of other government debt and unfunded pension liabilities.

The effects of the 2008 global financial crisis worsened Puerto Rico’s crisis, causing the collapse of labor-intensive firms (construction, agriculture, and small and medium businesses). The Puerto Rican establishment responded with a combination of austerity and borrowing. In 2009, the administration of Governor Luis Fortuño Burset passed emergency legislation that led to the sacking of 30,000 public workers, increasing rates of unemployment and encouraging mass emigration.

US firms that had established plants in Puerto Rico in the 1980s, due to US government tax breaks, such as big pharmaceutical firms, moved their production to other parts of the world, as these tax advantages were abolished during the Clinton administration. Puerto Rico witnessed a mass exodus of young skilled workers to the United States; its population fell by half a million, from 3.8 million in 1996 to 3.3 million in 2020.

As industries were shutting down and plants and jobs were disappearing, the borrowing continued. Old debt was paid with new debt, in violation of the island’s constitution, which sets limits on how much the government can borrow. The crisis continued to worsen.

By 2014, as it became clear that the situation was untenable, Wall Street rating agencies downgraded Puerto Rican bonds to the status of junk bonds. Vulture hedge funds, such as Aurelius Capital, began buying bonds at a fraction of their face value, determined to collect full payment in the future.

The crisis became what the New York Times described as the “biggest financial collapse in United States history.” The amount of money involved, $73 billion, was complemented by $50 billion in unfunded pension obligations.

In response to the debt crisis. The US Congress imposed the unelected seven-member Financial Oversight Board on Puerto Rico under the terms of the newly approved Puerto Rico Oversight Management and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA). Individual debt holders were barred from suing Puerto Rico, while the unelected Oversight Board came up with a plan to resolve the crisis.

The board’s real purpose was to protect the investments of Wall Street’s financial speculators by imposing deep austerity measures on wages, education, health services, electricity and government pensions. These measures included moves to privatize public education and electricity services.

Following the imposition of PROMESA and of the Financial Oversight Board, a series of natural disasters struck the island.

In September 2017, Hurricane Maria, a Category 5 storm, had a devastating effect, destroying much of the electrical infrastructure and resulting in more than 5,000 deaths, as well as damages exceeding $100 billion. By 2018, Puerto Rico had lost 15 percent of its medical specialists, leaving only 9,500 to serve the entire population of 3.2 million. Three years after Hurricane Maria, 130,000 people had left the island, while Puerto Rico had only received $1.5 billion in federal assistance, out of the $20 billion it had originally been promised.

All these events, austerity, unemployment, the debt crisis, and the disastrous response to Hurricane Maria combined to provoke mass demonstrations in 2019 that led to the collapse of the corrupt administration of then-Governor Ricardo Roselló, alarming the US and Puerto Rican ruling classes.

In 2020 the Guayanilla earthquake, which registered 6.4 on the Richter scale, the strongest in 102 years, left the island without electricity and destroyed parts of the southwestern coast, destroying 8,000 homes and creating conditions for a new wave of emigration.

These natural disasters also exposed the high rates of income inequality on the island, the highest in the Caribbean and the Western Hemisphere. Forty-five percent of the population subsist below the poverty line, including over 50 percent of Puerto Rican children. One-third of adults report food insecurity, while one-fifth report missing meals because of lack of money.

With the COVID-19 pandemic the situation is becoming even worse, due to high rates of unemployment and lower incomes.

The spread of the Omicron variant on the island is affecting hospitals and clinics, which are on the verge of collapse due to lack of supplies and personnel. As of January 23, Puerto Rico reported 3,338 deaths, out of a population of over 3 million, since the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020. It recorded a daily death toll of 14, the first double-digit figure since the summer of 2021, while nearly 700 patients are hospitalized, more than at the last peak of the pandemic.

The protests on January 3 were a warning of growing popular anger. Just as in 2019, all the elements are coming together for a social explosion of the Puerto Rican working class.

Poverty surging so fast in UK that foodbanks unable to keep up with demand

Henry Lee

Despite the claims of the media and Johnson government during the pandemic that “we are all in it together”, warnings this month by poverty and food campaigners reveal the depth of the social immiseration facing the working class.

As rising death tolls from the pandemic have mirrored the rise in financial markets, so too have rates of poverty, debt and hunger.

According to the Food Foundation, one in five households with children reported they were unable to access enough food during the first lockdown. In the first year of the pandemic, from April 1, 2020, the Trussell Trust, one of the UK’s largest networks of food banks, distributed 2.5 million emergency three-day food parcels, an increase of 33 percent on the previous year. Nearly a million of these parcels were for children.

In the six months from April 2021, Trussell Trust foodbanks distributed 936,000 parcels, but as the new year sees many more workers thrust into poverty and desperation, this is expected to sharply increase. Inflation has risen to 7.5 percent, the highest monthly increase in prices in almost 30 years, pushing up the average bills faced by households.

The Footprints in the Community food bank in northern England (Image credit: Twitter/Footprints_UK)

With the financial difficulties caused by inflation and the ruling Conservative government’s attacks on the working class, The Independent newspaper reported at the start of January that foodbanks were concerned that the situation was so bad that they would be forced to turn people away this winter due to supply problems. Food banks reported not only higher levels of need, but fewer donations, as many people were less able to donate to charities, and supply chain issues meant retailers had less excess food.

The impact of price increases will be much worse for the poorest households, as the cost of certain essentials, such as heating, is increasing even faster than the average price of goods. At the start of October, the energy price cap—the maximum that can be charged for a household on a default tariff—increased from £1,138 annually to £1,277, an increase of over 12 percent. Fuel poverty charity National Energy Action (NEA) said that before the price cap increase, 4 million households were classified as in fuel poverty, unable to afford to adequately heat their homes as well as meet other daily necessities. According to NEA’s estimate, this price cap increase pushed a further 500,000 households into fuel poverty.

The government is planning to pass more fuel price increases onto the working class, with a further rise in the energy price cap planned for April. According to the NEA, this would push the number of those in fuel poverty up to 6 million. The charity quotes industry experts who estimate the price cap could even be raised to over £2,000 per year, doubling heating costs compared with the winter of 2019-20. A poll commissioned by the NEA showed that 28 percent of all households would need to reduce how often they turned on the heating “by a great deal”, and 31 percent “by a fair amount” if prices increased so sharply.

Office for National Statistics (ONS) data for 2019-20 showed that 8 percent of households were “food insecure”, unable to afford balanced meals or forced to skip meals. Of households receiving Universal Credit (UC) welfare payments, 17 percent were classed as having low food security, and 26 percent as very low. In October, the government sadistically ended the meagre £20 weekly uplift to UC for over six million people, which had been introduced at the start of the pandemic. This has seen more working class families impoverished and forced to rely on charity. The Independent reported that a foodbank in Swansea had seen demand double in the months following the UC cut, distributing 472 parcels in September and rising to 1,103 in November.

According to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation charity, in addition to struggling to feed themselves and heat their homes, millions of workers have fallen into debt during the pandemic. In October, it reported that 3.8 million households were in arrears, both with bills and borrowings, and 4.4 million had taken on new borrowing during the pandemic. The figures showed that low-income households owed £3.4 billion in rent, utilities bills and other household expenses, and £1.8 billion in personal borrowing.

The Labour Party has sought to conceal the true cause of the social crisis facing workers in the COVID-19 pandemic. In parliament, deputy leader Angela Rayner described rising inflation and the increase in National Insurance contributions as examples of the “incompetence” of Prime Minister Boris Johnson and called for the government to take the meagre step of cutting VAT (sales tax) on energy bills.

Johnson is following a conscious strategy of defending the interests of capital through vicious attacks on the working class. As share prices collapsed at the start of the pandemic, hundreds of billions of pounds were paid out in direct government subsidies to corporations and quantitative easing to protect the wealth of the bourgeoisie, while workers have been forced to bear the brunt of both growing poverty and the lethal risk of the virus. The right-wing hardliners in the Tory party demanding that Johnson act as a “true Thatcherite” and threatening a leadership challenge, are demanding even more brutal attacks against the working class.

At the end of last year, while spreading the lie that the Omicron variant was “mild”, the British ruling class celebrated the return of the FTSE100 stock index to its pre-pandemic level. As the World Socialist Web Site has explained, the astonishing rise in financial markets during the pandemic does not represent the generation of real value, but a claim on future value that must be extracted from the working class.

This has been reflected in the changes to Universal Credit (UC) paid to working families. Its introduction by the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government in 2013 was part of an explicit drive to “make work pay”—that is, to ensure workers have no choice but to work long hours for low pay. Those working who receive UC payments because their income is so low are subject to a “taper”, essentially a punitive tax on their wages. Financial journalist and broadcaster Paul Lewis reported in December that despite a small reduction in the taper in November, anyone receiving UC who earned enough to pay National Insurance and income tax would take home only 30p of each pound they earned, equivalent to a 70 percent tax rate. This can be even less for recipients of other tapered benefits.

The removal of the £20 UC uplift is a key part of the Tory government’s strategy to force reluctant workers back into unsafe workplaces, with many employers being hit by labour shortages.

The British Chambers of Commerce released figures on January 13 showing that four in five companies who attempted to recruit staff reported difficulties, especially in the hospitality sector, where workers face low wages in return for extreme exposure to COVID-19. ONS data show that across the economy, there are still 27.8 million fewer hours worked per week than before the pandemic.

Work and Pension Secretary Thérèse Coffey linked the end of the UC uplift with the record number of job vacancies, telling BBC Breakfast, “I’m conscious that £20 a week is about two hours’ extra work every week—we will be seeing what we can do help people perhaps to secure those extra hours”.

As Paul Lewis pointed out on the BBC’s More or Less, the UC taper means that to make up for the cut would require many times more than £20 in wages. According to his latest calculations, someone would need to work sufficient hours to earn an additional £83 (almost 9 hours at the new minimum wage) to then receive just £20 in UC and Council Tax benefit after the taper was applied.

Accounting for other taxes paid by those on Universal Credit, the Resolution Foundation calculates that claimants take home as little as £2.24 for every hour worked.

Herd immunity policy leading to several hundred thousand cases daily in Germany

Tamino Dreisam

The Omicron wave in Germany is spreading massively. On Friday, for the third day in a row, more than 100,000 people became infected with the coronavirus. Within one day, 140,160 new cases were confirmed, and the 7-day national incidence rate jumped to 706 per 100,000 inhabitants. The number of active cases currently stands at almost 1.2 million.

In 229 districts—more than half in the country—the incidence level is currently over 500. In 25 districts, the incidence level is already over 1,000. The city-states are particularly affected. In both Bremen and Berlin, the incidence rate is 1,258. In Hamburg it is 1,221 and in Berlin Mitte it is as high as 2,286.

Health Minister Karl Lauterbach (SPD) during a press conference on January 14 (AP Photo/Michael Sohn)

The positive test rate of 24 percent and the high load on testing laboratories indicate that the actual incidences of infection are still far above the recorded figures.

The number of daily hospitalisations and deaths is dreadful. On Wednesday, as well as on Thursday and Friday, the number of new hospitalisations exceeded 1,000. About 2,500 patients are currently struggling for their lives in intensive care units. Over the course of last week, some 1,000 people died from COVID-19.

In the next few weeks, a much greater catastrophe threatens. Federal Health Minister Karl Lauterbach (Social Democratic Party, SPD) said on Wednesday on broadcaster ZDF’s Markus Lanz programme that “the wave will roughly peak in mid-February, and that we should then expect several hundred thousand cases per day.”

In other European countries, the Omicron wave is already hitting with full force. In France, about 300,000 people are currently being confirmed infected every day, in Italy almost 200,000 and in Spain about 150,000. In Britain, the health system is on the verge of collapse.

Cursorily, Lauterbach pointed out that such high case numbers in Germany will have particularly catastrophic consequences. “Because we have a high number of unvaccinated elderly people in Germany, it can turn out very differently in our country than in Italy, France or England, for example,” he explained. “I would expect the real burden in the intensive care units to come in the middle, end of February.”

Lauterbach’s appearance throws a spotlight on the criminal character of government policy. While the health minister warned of a tsunami of infections and overloaded hospitals, he did not announce any measures to prevent the catastrophe. The federal and state governments are subordinating every aspect of pandemic policy to private profit—no matter how cruel the consequences.

To keep the profits of the banks and corporations flowing, schools and businesses must remain open. Even industries like automobile manufacture and the arms trade have not been shut down once throughout the pandemic. When there were outbreaks in factories, production was maintained as far as possible.

To keep the economy running despite the exponential rise in infections, governments around the world are dismantling the most basic coronavirus protections. In Germany, the government has reduced the quarantine period to 10 days with a release option after just seven days, and even after five days for children and young people.

Now the federal coalition government is preparing measures limiting the use of PCR tests to certain settings. A corresponding draft resolution is to be agreed at the next State Premiere’s Conference on 24 January. For example, the better PCR tests are to be used only for essential workers. For all others, the less accurate rapid lateral flow tests will suffice for free testing. As a result, sick and/or infectious people and their contacts will continue to go to work in the future.

Politicians and the media are openly preparing to end all protective measures. “We cannot react to Omicron with lockdowns alone,” declared Bavarian Prime Minister Markus Söder (Christian Social Union, CSU) on Thursday, announcing a “change of strategy.” Specifically, the state government is planning further relaxations for the culture and sports sectors.

In a recent Der Spiegel article, Andreas Gassen, chairman of the Federal Association of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians, calls for “a comprehensible exit strategy” and “an end to the restrictions on basic rights.” Gassen's declared role model is British prime minister Boris Johnson, who announced the end of compulsory mask wearing on Wednesday and wants to lift the last restrictions on social contacts on January 26.

In Germany, too, the ruling class is pursuing the strategy of deliberate mass infection. “Contact restrictions” were “only there to prevent the health system from being overwhelmed,” Spiegel quotes Andrew Ullmann, a Liberal Democratic Party (FDP) member of parliament.

Schools form a central building block of the herd immunity policy, which are to be kept open with the full support of the Education Trade Union (GEW). The incidence level in the 15 to 34-year-old age group currently stands at 958. The incidence level in the five to 14-year-old age group has doubled in the last week and now stands at 1,383. Since the end of the winter holidays, almost 300 outbreaks have been officially recorded in schools.

The deliberate infection of children is having a dramatic impact. Already, about 200 children under the age of fifteen are being hospitalised every week. The official propaganda that the virus cannot harm children is based on lies. In the US, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 1,127 children have now died from COVID-19.

The latest Oxfam report, entitled “Inequality kills,” makes clear in whose interest the murderous policy of deliberate mass infection is being pursued. While the incomes of the bottom 99 percent of the population fell and an estimated 17 million people died from COVID-19, the fortunes of the world's ten richest men doubled. According to the German preface to the report, inequality has risen particularly sharply in Germany:

The ten richest individuals have increased their cumulative wealth since the beginning of the pandemic from about 144 billion to about 256 billion US dollars—an increase of about 78 percent. This gain alone is almost equal to the total wealth of the poorest 40 percent, i.e., of 33 million Germans. Meanwhile, the poverty rate in Germany is at an all-time high of 16.1 percent.

These figures alone make clear that the fight against the pandemic requires a fight against the capitalist system. By its very nature, capitalism stands in opposition to the basic needs of society. Yet both the knowledge and the medical possibilities exist to contain the virus within a few months and end the pandemic.

What is needed are strict lockdowns—especially for schools and non-essential businesses—combined with vaccinations, mass testing and isolation of all infected people and their contacts. However, the measures are not being taken because they run counter to the profit interests of the corporations and a small parasitic financial elite.

Around the world, the struggle to end the pandemic is developing. In the past few days alone, teachers and students in France, Greece, Austria, the UK, Canada, and the US have launched protests and gone on strike against keeping unsafe schools open.

Resistance is also growing in Germany. Last week, the protest of 13-year-old student Yasmin from Hagen against attending unsafe in-person classes triggered a wave of solidarity. Parents, students, teachers, and other workers are taking to social media to condemn the “profits before lives” policy that has already led to more than 116,000 deaths in Germany alone.

As death toll mounts, US officials, media try to declare the pandemic over

Benjamin Mateus

As of yesterday, there have been 72 million COVID infections and almost 890,000 deaths in the United States. At the present rate, deaths will reach 900,000 this week, and will top one million before winter is over.

But even as the Omicron surge continues its spread across the country, hosannas are being proclaimed that the end of the pandemic is nigh. Every media report claims to detect a silver lining in even the grimmest figures. Biden administration COVID spokesmen like Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Rochelle Walensky endorse such distortions.

A registered nurse is illuminated by the glow of a computer monitor as a doctor examines a COVID-19 patient inside Scotland County Hospital in Memphis, Mo., on Nov. 24, 2020. (AP Photo/Jeff Roberson, File)

Dr. Ali Mokdad, a professor at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) and chief strategy officer for population health at the University of Washington, told Bloomberg News, “We are going to go through a couple more weeks that are very difficult on our hospitals but come mid-February, March, we should be in a very good position.”

The only real objective evidence on this prognosis is that repeatedly, throughout the pandemic, high-profile scientists and political pundits have declared the latest surge to be the last. And each time a new, more virulent variant appeared, the same health officials quietly discard such claims into their social media wastebaskets as hospitals surge past their capacity and deaths pile higher, only to emerge once the wave recedes and proclaim once again that the last wave has passed.

Such prognoses are entirely in conflict with developments on the ground and lack any scientific merit:

• The daily average number of COVID-19 cases remains over 700,000 per day, nearly five million people each week
• The COVID test positivity rate for the US has surpassed 30 percent, demonstrating that even the current sky-high case metrics are underestimates
• The daily average of patients admitted to hospitals is 159,000, the highest level of the entire pandemic
• The daily average death rate has reached 2,162, above the Delta peak in September, and headed towards the all-time high of last winter
• On Friday alone, there were 3,856 COVID deaths reported
• Almost a million children (981,858) were infected last week, and, on average, 880 children are being admitted to hospitals each day
• Fifteen children died last week of COVID

The Omicron peaks in regions along the Eastern seaboard, hit first by the new variant, are subsiding, as New York, New Jersey, Washington D.C., Pennsylvania, Florida, and Massachusetts see both cases and hospital admissions declining, though the figures remain near pandemic highs.

However, the Mountain West, South and rural areas generally—states like Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, South Carolina, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Kansas—see cases, hospitalizations, and deaths all continue their ascent. And Omicron is now hitting resource-poor regions with the fewest people vaccinated and health systems in shambles.

Meanwhile, public health officials are moving to end daily case counting, and they declare that the Omicron surge will end with the virus entering a state of “endemicity.” This means that the virus remains indefinitely within the community at more or less stable levels. However, such a prognosis is ludicrous for a respiratory pathogen like SARS-CoV-2 that constantly mutates while population immunity achieved either by vaccination or infection is short-lived.

A report published by the Pew Research Center noted, “Months into the pandemic, epidemiologists said COVID-19 ultimately would become endemic, infecting nearly everyone and remaining in the population indefinitely. That endemic era may have started. As a result, many state health officials say they’re preparing to scale back the frequency of case count updates, possibly as soon as the current surge.”

Accurate metrics that include the number of daily infections, the positivity rate, an adequate scale of testing, location of outbreaks, and hospital statistics are a vital part of a functioning public health infrastructure. The essence of abandoning such metrics is the public health establishment embracing the principle of the ignoramus Donald Trump, that if you don’t test, there is no disease.

This policy is being adopted wholesale even as the pandemic continues to kill thousands of Americans every day. It is an affront to the memory of the nearly one million or more that have perished in less than two years since the first US COVID death was officially reported at the end of February 2020.

In particular, the CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky’s role in this regard is a nefarious one.

Her one-year tenure has seen the mismanagement of the COVID vaccine rollout, three massive surges of the pandemic, and the emergence of ever more virulent strains of the coronavirus. More than 450,000 Americans have died under her (and Biden’s) watch, even more than under Trump, while hospitals and health care workers are drowning in cases.

As the pandemic enters its third year for the US, she effectively threw up her hands, telling Politico, “I actually really think many people have thought [that] this is CDC’s responsibility to fix public health [and] the pandemic. The CDC alone can’t fix this. Businesses have to help, the government has to help, school systems have to help. This is too big for the CDC alone.”

Later in the interview, on the state of the pandemic, she added, “I would love to say I know exactly where we are because I think people really do want to know. But the most important thing that we can say is that we don’t know exactly where we’re heading.”

These statements are an abdication of her responsibilities as a public health leader and would warrant demands that she tender her resignation immediately. However, she receives her instructions not from the public, or the health care community, but from the White House and Wall Street.

When asked about what indicators she and the CDC are using to gauge where the country is headed, she said, “When cases stay down … or if cases are high, [but] severity will be such that we’re in an okay spot in our hospitals … our masks might be more likely to come off. And then if you get a case of runny nose, you might say, ‘Okay, well, I’m going to stay home, because that’s what I do when I have a runny nose.’ But you don’t necessarily have to isolate.”

Not once did she raise any genuine concern about the current state of hospitals, infections among children, chronic complications of Long COVID, the issue of anti-vaxxers and the unvaccinated, or the tremendous death toll, especially among the elderly and those with chronic and debilitating conditions.

Meanwhile, states like Alabama are at 143 percent hospitalizations compared to last winter’s peaks, with numbers continuing their climb. On a Facebook live event last week, Dr. Scott Harris, health officer for the state, admitted, “It’s just mind boggling, and we don’t know how much longer it’s going to go on.”

Dr. David Trasher, a Montgomery-based pulmonologist, said, “Our hospitals are overwhelmed. The morale and the stress on our staff if really unbearable.” These are sentiments repeated over and over.

More recently, the Omicron variant is hitting nursing homes again, infecting residents and staff in record numbers. According to the CDC’s data, there has been a ten-fold rise in cases since November. Last week more than 40,000 residents tested positive while 67,000 staff were infected. Though this high-risk group has been heavily vaccinated, almost 1,000 deaths were reported among them the previous week.

Katie Smith Sloan, executive director of The Global Aging Network, told NPR, “older adults who live in nursing homes have underlying health conditions. They tend to be frail. They live in a nursing home because they need 24-7 nursing care. And we know from the beginning of this pandemic that that’s the population that was most at risk, and that hasn’t changed.”

Amid these developments in the US, there are reports of the spread of a new subvariant of Omicron, BA.2, which possesses 80 to 90 mutations compared to 60 mutations of the current Omicron variant. It is rapidly growing in northern Europe, specifically in the UK, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway. Professor Yaneer Bar-Yam, a complex systems physicist and head of the World Health Network, which calls for global elimination of COVID, noted, “[They are] not the same thing. [BA.2] It is about as different as Delta started out from the original variant.”

Any attempt to declare the pandemic over and implement a policy of living with the virus has disastrous consequences. Experience over the last two years has shown that the ruling elites place no limit on the misery that could befall the working class to ensure the engines of profit are operating at full capacity.

Scores killed in Saudi-led airstrikes, highlighting US-Saudi war crimes

Jean Shaoul

The last few days have seen a sharp escalation in the number of airstrikes by the Saudi-led coalition against its impoverished, southern neighbour Yemen, with a series of horrific attacks on civilian infrastructure and buildings that have played no part in the seven-year-long war. The attacks amount to crimes under the Fourth Geneva Convention.

On Friday, a Saudi airstrike on a detention center in Saada, northern Yemen, housing African migrant workers transiting through Yemen to Saudi Arabia, killed at least 82 people and wounded 266 more, with the number of casualties expected to climb as paramedics dig through the rubble.

Map locates two Saudi airstrikes in Yemen. One striking a prison in the northwest city of Saada and the other in the western port city of Hodeidah, where a telecommunications hub was struck, crippling the country’s internet access. (AP Photos)

A separate attack on a telecommunications center in the port city of Hodeidah shut down the country’s internet and killed three children playing nearby. Netblocks, which monitors internet blockages, described Yemen as experiencing “a nation-scale collapse of internet connectivity,” while the aid agency, the Norwegian Refugee Council, described the strike as “a blatant attack on civilian infrastructure that will also impact our aid delivery.”

Earlier this week, the UN said that this month’s violence could soon surpass that witnessed in December, when 358 civilians were killed or injured, as a result of an alarming number of airstrikes, drones and rockets used against civilians and non-military targets. According to the humanitarian aid organization Save The Children, the last three months of 2021 witnessed a 60 percent increase in civilian casualties.

There has been ferocious fighting in the Marib and Shabwa districts in southern Yemen, the last regional stronghold of the Saudi-backed government and location of most of the country’s oil reserves, as the Houthis reached the outskirts of Marib city. Its fall would signify the definitive end of the regime headed by President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, who long ago fled to Riyadh. In the last few days, pro-Hadi fighters, aided by scores of Saudi airstrikes and UAE-funded and trained proxies, including the Giants Brigade, have pushed back the Houthis, killing hundreds of Houthi fighters. This in turn prompted the Houthis to launch a drone attack on Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), on Monday that killed three people and wounded six.

On Tuesday, Saudi air strikes killed 20 people, including several civilians, in the capital and largest city Sanaa, where Houthi websites show horrifying scenes of women, children and the elderly alongside ruined homes, hospitals and clinics without medication and operating theaters lit by flashlights because there is no electricity. Other strikes on water treatment facilities have left more than 120,000 people in the capital without access to clean drinking water.

None of these atrocities could have been carried out without the fighter jets, bombs, weaponry, materiel, training, maintenance and logistical support, including targeting intelligence and aerial refueling for Saudi planes, supplied by the US and UK. Washington and London have backed the Saudi-led coalition in its onslaught which began in 2015, providing it with political and diplomatic cover at the UN.

While President Joe Biden lifted the Houthis’ designation as a “foreign terrorist organization” and made a vague declaration shortly after taking office last year that he would end “American support for offensive operations in the war,” US support for Riyadh and the war has continued unabated. The Biden administration refused to order any sanctions whatsoever against Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who ordered the savage assassination and butchering of exiled Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey in October 2018, despite possessing conclusive evidence of his role. Last November, Biden approved a $650 million weapons sale to Riyadh that included 280 AIM-120C air-to-air missiles for use by Saudi Arabian fighter jets.

On Wednesday, Biden said that ending the seven-year war was “going to be very difficult,” which was as good as saying that he would back Riyadh and Abu Dhabi come what may. He went further, adding that he was considering re-designating the Houthis as an international terrorist organization, an act tantamount to starving the people of Yemen into submission, most of whom live in Houthi-controlled areas, since it would make it almost impossible for humanitarian aid to reach the country.

On Friday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken called Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister to emphasize “the US commitment to help Gulf partners improve their capabilities to defend against threats from Yemen.”

Saudi Arabia—with the help of its regional allies—launched an air, land and sea assault on Yemen in March 2015, following an uprising by rebels led by the Ansar Allah/Houthi movement that toppled the Hadi government, to restore its puppet to power. The ongoing war is part of the House of Saud’s efforts to maintain the rule of the Gulf despots and their allies across the peninsula amid seething social tensions that came to a head in the Arab Spring of 2011.

Since then, Yemen has fragmented amid fighting by numerous competing militias, whose alliance and loyalties have repeatedly changed: the north and parts of the south are controlled by the Houthis; the southwest is under the control of the UAE-backed separatist Southern Transitional Council (STC); and the south and east are under the control of the Saudi-backed government, leading to open warfare between the local allies of Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

The Saudi-led war had by the end of 2021 killed 377,000 people both directly and indirectly through hunger and disease, according to the UN. Four million people have been forced to flee their homes. At least 75,000 children under the age of five have died of starvation, while the world’s worst cholera epidemic in modern times has infected 2.5 million and killed more than 4,000.

The war has crippled Yemen’s economy, with the central bank split between the rival authorities in Sanaa and Aden, as the rival powers struggle for control over trade flows and fuel taxation. The collapse of the riyal’s value in nominally government-controlled areas has pushed the price of imported goods such as food and fuel beyond the reach of most people. As a result, the UN has described the war as causing the world’s worst humanitarian disaster.

The naval blockade mounted by the UAE with US naval support with the aim of starving the Yemeni population into submission has compounded the devastating impact of the hundreds of thousands of Saudi airstrikes. Nearly 80 percent of Yemen’s 30 million population are in need of some form of humanitarian assistance or protection for their survival.

Last November, the UN said that five million people are on the brink of famine, with almost 50,000 already experiencing famine-like conditions. Nearly 2.3 million children under age five, the highest number ever recorded, are at risk of acute malnutrition. Four out of five children are in need of humanitarian assistance, 400,000 are suffering from severe acute malnutrition and two million are out of school. Last month, the World Food Programme said it was “forced” to cut aid to Yemen due to a lack of funds and warned there would be a surge in hunger in the coming months.

It is clear that the recent US-backed airstrikes are but the prelude to a total all-out war without even a passing nod to international law prohibiting attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure and crimes against humanity to regain control of Yemen. Yet the response—or to be more precise the silence—of the major powers is striking. No government will call what has happened by its rightful name: a war crime. There is at best merely some tut-tutting over the dreadful scenes of mass carnage and suffering.

While Blinken had condemned the Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia and the UAE on Monday, there was no comment from the State Department about Friday’s Saudi-led attacks on Yemen.

The UN secretary general, António Guterres, simply issued a bland statement in response to Friday’s attacks, saying “The escalation needs to stop.” He added that the airstrikes, as well as others in different parts of the country, had resulted in child casualties and pointed out that “attacks against civilians and civilian infrastructure, are prohibited by international humanitarian law.”

The media’s hypocrisy and cynicism know no bounds. The filthy pro-imperialist press remains silent about the crimes committed by US and UK allies in Yemen, as well as in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria—while raising a furor over US and UK reports, without a shred of evidence, that Moscow is planning to stage a “false-flag” operation that will then be used to justify invading Ukraine. In reality, this is just a cover for precisely such an operation by Ukrainian special forces, trained by US military advisers working inside the country, for an attack on Russia.

The reasons the House of Saud gets a free pass are clear. It is a key market for US arms and plays a vital role on behalf of US imperialism in suppressing the working class in Saudi Arabia and throughout the region and supporting Washington’s domination in the resource-rich Middle East. It has allied with Tel Aviv in an anti-Iranian axis that threatens to push the region into another catastrophic war.

Malaysian government sets the stage for mass Omicron infections

Kurt Brown

With 90 percent of all COVID cases detected at ports of entry being the Omicron variant, Malaysia’s Health Minister Khairy Jamaluddin indicated last Thursday that the Omicron variant will inevitably overtake the Delta strain. He warned of an Omicron wave between February and March.

Daily new COVID cases for Malaysia reported on Saturday were 4,046. While this figure has fluctuated between 3,000 to 4,000 since late December, the number of Omicron cases is rising, particularly local transmissions.

A nurse prepares a dose of the Pfizer vaccine against the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) for a secondary school student at a vaccine center in Shah Alam, Malaysia, Monday, Sept. 20, 2021. (AP Photo/Vincent Thian)

The official Omicron tally so far stands at 439 cases with 54 cases from local transmission. Between January 14 and 18, 186 Omicron cases were detected. Of these, 41 were detected in Malaysia’s most populous state, Selangor, and 17 were detected in the capital, Kuala Lumpur.

The official figures are small but it is highly likely, given the extreme infectiousness of Omicron, that it is spreading undetected through the country. While genomic sequencing capacity in Malaysia is better than in Indonesia, it is still limited to about 400 tests every two weeks according to parliamentary reporting from September.

Recent Omicron modelling from the Malaysian Ministry of Health puts the reproduction number of COVID infections with the government’s very limited restrictions at 1.6 during an Omicron wave. Any figure greater than 1 indicates that infections will continue to rise.

Based on the government’s modelling, the number of daily cases is predicted to rise to more than 30,000. The highest daily case number recorded so far in Malaysia was 24,599 on August 26 2021 during the peak of the Delta variant wave.

Given the dangers, strict public measures are needed: stricter quarantine requirements, the shutdown of non-essential production and a shift to remote schooling with financial and other support for those impacted.

Like its international counterparts, the Malaysian government is pursuing policies that are the complete opposite of what is required and is vehemently opposed to lockdowns.

As the latest World Health Organization situation report for Malaysia notes, COVID clusters predominate at workplaces and schools, meaning that key pathways for Omicron to rapidly multiply already exist.

As well, home quarantine is permitted. This has recently been the chief point of the entry of Omicron infections as some pilgrims returning from Mecca mingle with visiting relatives at home.

Moreover, quarantine periods have been shortened from 10 to seven days for those who are asymptomatic and fully vaccinated. In addition, those who have received their booster shot and are asymptomatic are required to quarantine for only five days.

These changes have set the stage for a major new wave of Omicron infections that will put severe strains on the public health system and other infrastructure. Even before mass Omicron cases, the current COVID ICU bed usage stands at about 17 percent.

The shortening of quarantine times means that potentially infectious workers will be forced back to work placing further stresses on key services such as logistics and health care.

In spite of the serious warnings by scientific experts, the defacto head of the quartet of ministers handling Malaysia’s pandemic response, Minister of Defence Hishamuddin Hussein, stressed “that the large-scale movement control order [MCO] that we all faced previously will not be re-implemented.” That is, no more lockdowns.

The MCO during the Delta wave in August and September was a lockdown in name only. At the time, 18 manufacturing centres were allowed to operate, mainly at 60 percent capacity. These became vectors for further significant transmission of the virus, leading to terrible levels of death that peaked at almost 600 daily deaths in September.

The Malaysian government’s gross mishandling of the pandemic during the Delta wave and the associated staggering loss of life was a significant factor in the ouster of former Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin.

To date, based on official statistics, there have been over 2.8 million cases and almost 32,000 COVID deaths, but this is a significant undercount. A more accurate estimate of COVID deaths can be established by considering current deaths over and above recent historical averages prior to the pandemic.

Such an excess deaths calculation by the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington estimates total COVID deaths in Malaysia at about 52,500 deaths to date. That is, almost two in every thousand people have died from COVID. For older age groups who have borne the brunt of COVID deaths, the fatality rate is significantly higher.

While some COVID public health measures are still in place, such as mask wearing indoors and smart phone QR code check-in at public places, the overarching approach of the Malaysian government since October 2021 has been a criminally irresponsible drive to re-open the Malaysian economy and prop up businesses. This was the meaning of the comment by Director general of Health Tan Sri Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah at the time that the country was in the “endemic stage” of the virus.

Chief among the re-opening measures has been the resumption of face-to-face teaching which, in turn, facilitates the return of parents to work. Already there has been a large number of young people infected.

On Thursday, Khairy indicated that nearly 580,000 children aged 18 and under have been infected with COVID since the start of the pandemic. “To date, there have been 144 deaths due to Covid-19 among those aged 18 and under. Of this, 31 were aged 5 to 11,” he said. The death of so many young people is an indictment of the Malaysian ruling elite.

In addition, the young people who are infected face the danger of Long COVID.

As reported in early January, the Finnish Minister of Family Affairs and Social Services stated that Long COVID, whereby COVID symptoms persist for months after an initial infection, could become the largest, or one of the largest, chronic diseases in Finland.

The statement was based on a Finnish expert panel’s examination of more than 4,000 international studies “which showed that one in two adults and around 2 percent of children may experience prolonged symptoms connected to COVID-19.”

In line with its counterparts internationally, the Malaysian government is opening the door for mass infections and high hospitalisations that will inevitably lead to rising deaths and the long term debilitating impact of Long COVID.

Omicron outbreak in New Zealand

Tom Peters

On Sunday, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced that the extremely transmissible Omicron variant of COVID-19 is circulating in the community in New Zealand—and confirmed that the Labour Party-led government will do nothing to stop it.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern addresses a post-Cabinet press conference at Parliament in Wellington, New Zealand on October 4, 2021. (Mark Mitchell/Pool Photo via AP)

This paves the way for a surge in infections and deaths, as has happened in every country where governments have adopted the murderous “let it rip” policy.

There are currently 19 known Omicron cases. On Sunday, 10 were confirmed in Motueka, in the Nelson-Marlborough region of the South Island. The cases were in a family that attended a wedding and other events in Auckland in mid-January. Another person at the wedding tested positive, and a flight attendant on the same flight as the family from Auckland to Nelson on January 16 also tested positive for the variant.

Officials do not know how Omicron entered the country. There is no known link between the Nelson cases and the border, meaning that it is likely already spreading in Auckland, and potentially Nelson and other areas. Fifteen Air New Zealand workers are in self-isolation as close contacts, and chief executive Greg Foran told Radio NZ that some were showing symptoms.

New Zealand’s COVID-19 “traffic light” setting has moved to “red,” but this is not a lockdown of any sort. Gatherings are now capped at 100 people and there are more rules around the use of masks, physical distancing and vaccine certificates. All businesses remain open, and schools are due to open on January 31.

Ardern has cancelled her planned wedding to TV personality Clarke Gayford due to Omicron. But hundreds of thousands of children will be herded into schools, which have been a major source of COVID-19 infections internationally. Only 20 percent of children aged 5 to 11 in New Zealand have been vaccinated or are booked to be vaccinated with a single dose of Pfizer, after becoming eligible just one week ago.

In the United States, Canada, France and other countries, teachers, parents and students are walking out and striking in opposition to in-person education. They are defying governments and the trade unions, which insist that schools must reopen to ensure parents stay at work and businesses remain profitable, no matter how many people get sick and die.

Ardern told a press conference yesterday that the government expects “up to 1,000 cases a day” within 14 days. She misleadingly said the government would take a “stamp it out approach,” and “slow the spread and reduce the number of cases” by using contact tracing and isolation.

These measures will not eliminate the virus, nor are they intended to, as Ardern made clear. Once case numbers escalate to “thousands per day,” which is expected in a matter of “weeks,” the government will “make changes to contact tracing, the definition of contacts, and isolation requirements.” This suggests that once these systems are overwhelmed by the number of Omicron cases, people will be compelled to work when they may have been exposed to COVID-19—just as governments in the US, Australia and elsewhere are now doing.

The government has embraced an extraordinarily reckless policy, the opposite of the elimination strategy adopted early in the pandemic, which has kept New Zealand’s death toll relatively low at 52.

Last October, ignoring the advice of public health experts, Ardern announced that the government was ditching elimination. It then proceeded to lift lockdowns, allowing the Delta variant to spread across the country. There are currently 467 known cases of COVID-19 in the community, with the largest clusters in Auckland, Bay of Plenty, Waikato and Rotorua.

In addition, 666 cases of Omicron are among returned travelers isolated in quarantine hotels.

Ardern misleadingly declared that for “most people” Omicron is “a mild to moderate illness,” but added that older people and those with health conditions are at risk of severe illness. The situation internationally proves that Omicron is not mild; it is far more transmissible, and poses significant dangers to people of all ages.

On Friday, the US reported nearly 4,000 deaths and a record 159,000 people in hospital for COVID-19. Children are being admitted to hospital in record numbers in the US, France, UK and other countries.

Australia, which has a similar vaccination rate to New Zealand, has recorded 1.9 million cases since mid-December and more than 800 deaths so far this year, with dozens more every day.

COVID-19 modeler Michael Plank told Radio NZ that up to half of New Zealand’s population of 5.1 million could become infected with Omicron. Microbiologist Siouxsie Wiles said the current public health settings were “not good enough at stopping transmission” and called for the closure of night-clubs and indoor dining.

Epidemiologist Michael Baker told Newshub: “We will see tens of thousands of cases and unfortunately several hundred deaths in the next three or four months.” He called for a faster rollout of vaccines.

The vast majority of people are not fully vaccinated. Only 23.2 percent of New Zealanders aged over 12 have received a third dose of the Pfizer vaccine, which is essential to significantly reduce the risk of catching and passing on Omicron.

There is a severe shortage of N95 and similar masks, which scientists recommend. COVID-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins told RNZ today that surgical masks, which are much less effective at stopping the virus, are “the best masks for the public’s use.” Ardern said the government is not considering making masks free.

In unleashing the deadly virus on the country, the ruling class is relying on the complicity of the trade unions to suppress opposition from the working class. As in other countries, the teacher unions, the NZEI and PPTA, are collaborating fully with the dangerous reopening of schools.

On January 19, FIRST Union general secretary Dennis Maga told Radio NZ that the union was talking to employers about making rapid antigen tests available “to make sure that we can sustain the operation of businesses… It’s critical that we have enough workforce to maintain the supply chain.”

The New Zealand Nurses Organisation’s (NZNO) Glenda Alexander told Radio NZ today “we’re as prepared as we can be” for Omicron, despite the crisis of understaffing and underfunding in public hospitals. She said the loss of staff to illness was a “concern” and would “put immense pressure on an already stressed workforce.”