Israel’s labour court bans teachers from striking in opposition to soaring Omicron infections

Jean Shaoul

Tel Aviv Labour Court issued a ruling Wednesday barring members of the Israel Teachers Union from striking against Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s new school attendance policy. Bennett has exempted children from quarantine if exposed to a confirmed Covid carrier. The ruling comes amid soaring infections and rising opposition to the government’s lifting of public health measures.

In this September 1, 2021, file photo, a girl raises her hand in class on the first day of school at College des Freres in the Old City of Jerusalem. (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo, File)

Teachers and educators at all public kindergartens and schools, excluding special education schools, had been set to hold a protest strike yesterday.

The court ruled that as the strike notice arrived just 11 hours before schools were due to open, there was insufficient time to hear the matter. Unions are required by law to announce a labour dispute at least two weeks before taking strike action. Education Minister Yifat Shasha-Biton said his ministry was issuing orders preventing protests and demonstrations by teachers following the court’s ruling.

The court’s injunction comes as the government, like ruling elites across the world, is relaxing all virus mitigation measures. Israel is suffering a fifth wave of infections but is pursuing a “let it rip” policy, relying on vaccinations--including a fourth jab for the over 60s, and clinically vulnerable under the age of 60--and “socially responsible behaviour” by the public to limit the spread of disease.

Orna Barbivai, Minister of Industry and Trade declared, “The government is leading an economic policy alongside coronavirus [rise] with the intention to cause as little damage as possible to businesses and workers who constitute a major growth engine in the economy.”

She added that where 20 percent of the workforce are in isolation, employers will require essential staff to work overtime, “to ensure a minimum impairment of the ability to function and provide necessary services and products to citizens and the economy.” In effect, workers are to be forced to work inhuman stints to keep profits rolling in.

The government has also cut the period of quarantine from seven to five days as hundreds of thousands of workers isolate at home. Children are now required to take a home antigen test twice a week before going to school and the government will distribute nine million free antigen test kits to 400,000 families.

Israel’s pediatricians have urged the government to delay its plans to exempt school students from quarantine. Professor Tzahi Grossman, who chairs the Israel Pediatric Association, told Kan Reshet Bet public radio, “We’re waving a red flag. It’s still not too late to change the decision.”

The teachers’ union, which represents 150,000 teachers, had called on its members to stay home in protest at the government’s new measures. On Wednesday, 93,000 more people tested positive to COVID, equal to a 22 percent positivity rate and an R number of 1.17. The average number of daily deaths is around 40, fast approaching last year’s peak of 60. As of Tuesday, there were 888 serious cases, with 187 on ventilators.

With hospital admissions rising, more than 8,000 doctors, nurses and healthcare workers are self-isolating, leaving hospitals and clinics unable to cope. On Wednesday, the government announced that as of Sunday, healthcare professionals including physiotherapists, communication clinicians, dietitians and occupational therapists in hospital inpatient units would start working in emergency “Sabbath mode.”

The government’s decision follows a letter sent by Health Professions Association chairman Eli Gabay to government ministers saying, “We will not be able to continue to give the dedicated care we provide on a daily basis in hospitals. Health professionals have been stretched too thin. I’m calling on Nitzan Horowitz [the health minister] to intervene in this severe crisis immediately.”

The situation in schools is no less dire, with more than 100,000 children in quarantine. Many schools are half empty and some schools are moving to remote learning.

On Tuesday, the Knesset (parliament) approved a law restricting the government’s ability to impose restrictions aimed at curbing the spread of the disease. In future, the government will only be able to declare a healthcare emergency or “special healthcare situation”, while also limiting its duration, with the approval of the Knesset or its Constitution Committee.

The new law effectively bans the government from ordering a lockdown or requiring schools to move to remote learning or imposing restrictions on people leaving the country unless it has declared a state of emergency. It also restricts the application of Israel’s green passport system that limits entry to some venues to those who are vaccinated, allowing unvaccinated people to present a negative antigen test instead.

Yaffa Ben-David, secretary-general of the Israeli Teachers Union, has done nothing to oppose the dangerous reopening of schools and in-person learning. But faced with mounting teacher opposition she announced a strike in certain knowledge that Israel’s labour court would outlaw it.

The union’s de facto collaboration with the Bennett government, in office since last June, comes as Israel’s National Insurance Institute (NII) issued its annual report showing income inequality, already the highest among OECD nations, had widened by 3.3 percent in 2021. It found that 22 percent of Israel’s nine million population now lives in poverty, mainly due to the government’s ending of COVID aid packages, including unemployment payments for those laid off during work closures in 2020. The NII estimates that child poverty stands at 31 percent, up from 29 percent in 2020, with lowest paid workers hardest hit by the pandemic.

Israel’s poverty rate fell during 2020, due to the impact of Covid support packages. This was especially so for those among the bottom 10 percent of income earners where per capita income increased by 12 percent. The 10 percent of the population just above that group experienced a 5.6 percent rise. Without government aid packages, workers’ income would have fallen by more than 10 percent in 2020.

LaTet, an anti-poverty advocacy group, confirmed that over 220,000 households fell into economic hardship during 2021. Nearly two-thirds of poorer families went without medical care or prescription medicine last year when they were sick.

Gilles Darmon, LaTet’s president, said, “It is important for us to show the gap in 2021 between the start-up nation and the soup kitchen nation. There are two different realities in Israel.”

He added, “The Israeli middle class is on its way to disappearing. This is more than one-quarter of the entire Israeli society that is in danger of falling into poverty.”

Israel is burdened by one of the highest costs of living in the world. The Economist Intelligence Unit, a sister company to the Economist magazine, recently rated Tel Aviv the most expensive city in the world, above Paris, Singapore, Zurich, Hong Kong and New York. Greater Tel Aviv is home to around 42 percent of Israel’s population.

In its recent survey of the European housing market, financial services firm Deloitte estimated that a 70-square-metre home in Israel cost more than nine times the average salary, making it the fifth-costliest country in the world in which to buy a house. Prices for many basic items in 2019 were typically 19 percent higher than the average of 36 countries in the OECD, while Israeli salaries are lower.

Finance Minister Avigdor Lieberman and his officials, who speak for Israel’s super-rich, have warned that regardless of any lockdowns in the future, the government has no intention of reintroducing aid packages. At the same time, documents leaked to labour news website Davar show the repressive state measures being prepared to deal with worker unrest. It reported that the Ministry of Public Security, responsible for Israel’s police, prisons, and fire services is preparing legislation restricting firefighters’ right to strike, with a leaked letter stating, “It is important to neutralize any obstacle that the workers try to put in our way.”

All COVID restrictions ended in UK amid deepening government crisis

Robert Stevens

The delayed report by senior civil servant Sue Gray into drinks parties held by the Conservative government at Downing Street and other venues during the first COVID-19 lockdown in 2020 remained stalled Thursday, with its publication date still unclear.

Gray’s findings had been scheduled for publication this week. However, Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson left London yesterday morning for a scheduled trip to North Wales. With no government business scheduled in Parliament Friday, and most MPs having left for their constituencies, it appears likely that the report will not be made public until next week.

The Prime Minister Boris Johnson accompanied by the Secretary of State for Wales Simon Hart visits RAF Valley in North Wales. 27/01/2022. (Picture by Andrew Parsons/No 10 Downing Street/FlickR)

The report has been delayed after the intervention of the Metropolitan Police Tuesday, who said they were opening a criminal investigation. Reports attest to concerns in Downing Street and by the Met over how much of the report can even be published.

Politico reported, “Government lawyers, police officers and human resources officials are poring over the document line by line because there are legal concerns that publishing some of her findings on the eight alleged events being looked at by the police could prejudice their investigation.” One issue is those who have given statements to Gray will have done so without a lawyer present, and those statements could result in criminal prosecutions.

The crisis wracking the Johnson government is only spurring on its reactionary agenda at home and abroad. MPs left the capital amid discussions on the UK possibly sending hundreds of troops to Eastern Europe to confront Russia and on the day that, from 7am, all COVID “Plan B” restrictions in England were lifted. England is by far the most populous area of the UK, with 56.2 million people of a total 68 million population. Restrictions are also being rapidly withdrawn in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Masks are no longer legally required anywhere except on public transport in London, where they remain mandatory. Mask wearing has been prohibited in schools, even in communal areas. The government’s determination to consign mitigations to history is clear in the stipulation that if any local authority reintroduces mask wearing at any point, these orders must be routinely reviewed and “removed at the earliest possibility”.

From next Monday, care home residents will be permitted to receive unlimited visitors. Self-isolation periods being undertaken by residents will be cut from 14 days to 10 for those who do test positive for the virus; and care homes will have to follow outbreak management rules for just 14, rather than 28 days.

Restrictions were ditched as Johnson declared that the “the pandemic is not over” and the most accurate tracker of the spread of COVID cases recorded a surge of Omicron, directly linked to the decision to abandon all restrictions in schools. This came amid predictions that the more transmissible sub-lineage of Omicron, BA.2, was predicted to be the dominant variant in the UK within a month, as cases caused by it are doubling every few days.

The Financial Times reported, “In the UK, the subvariant accounted for 1 percent of genomically sequenced cases uploaded to the global repository Gisaid in the week to January 23, up from just 0.5 percent the week before. In Denmark and India, BA.2 already makes up about half of all sequenced cases, according to Gisaid.”

Around 100,000 cases of COVID are still being reported in Britain every day, along with hundreds of deaths. Thursday’s 96,871 cases and 338 deaths brought the total in just the first four days this week to 380,662 cases and 1,180 deaths. More than 16,500 people are ill in hospital with COVID.

A staggering 16.2 million people have been infected in Britain, almost a quarter of the population—23.7 percent. In total cases, the UK is behind only four other countries—the United States, India, Brazil and France.

The number of those dead within 28 days of testing positive stands at over 155,000. More than 176,000 people have died when measured by those who perished with COVID mentioned on the death certificate.

The Financial Times noted that “coronavirus cases in the UK are rebounding, driven by a jump in infections among schoolchildren”.

It was citing the latest result of the Zoe Covid surveillance study run by Kings College London researchers, which found that cases jumped 10 percent in the week to January 26. The results, from an app on which tens of thousands of users record their symptoms, found that around one in 30 Britons had COVID symptoms in the week to January 26.

It confirms yet again the central role played by schools as vectors for the community-wide spread of COVID. The Mail reported, “The latest report states the uptick in cases among under-18s since [sic] was triggered by pupils returning to the classroom at the start of the month and has now accelerated to the highest level ever recorded by the study. One in 11 children aged under nine have the virus (8.8 percent), while one in 21 people aged 30 to 39 are infected (4.6 percent). Meanwhile, 4.4 percent of 10 to 19-year-olds have symptomatic Covid, compared to 3 percent of adults in their 20s and 40s.”

Professor Tim Spector commented, “The bounce back in case numbers just as we lift restrictions has come sooner than many expected. But it's not surprising given that, throughout the pandemic, we've seen the end of school holidays repeatedly usher in a rapid rise in cases among children, which then cross over into parents and school staff.”

The is in fact the desired outcome of the government’s herd immunity policy, which has kept schools open for virtually the entire pandemic bar a few months during the first lockdown in early 2020 and a few weeks last year. This January, with the collaboration of the education unions, schoolchildren were sent into classes without masks; the last mitigation that had been in place, albeit only among secondary school children.

Hundreds of thousands more children have been infected as a result. Department of Education figures released Tuesday found that 415,00 children (5.1 percent) of pupils in state schools in England were off for reasons linked to coronavirus on January 20. This was significantly up from 3.9 percent a fortnight earlier. A staggering 322,000 pupils had a confirmed case of coronavirus on January 20. This was almost double the 159,000 who had a positive case on January 6, during the first week that children returned to class for the spring term.

The number of staff absent from school is rising at a similar rate. The Financial Times reported, “Nearly one quarter of all state schools had more than 15 percent of teachers and school leaders off work, up from 8 percent in September at the start of the academic year.”

The head of Burnt Mill Academy Trust in London revealed that almost 50 percent of staff were currently absent at one of his schools.

The only priority of the ruling class, with or without Johnson in charge, is fully restoring the flow of profits into the pockets of the corporations and super-rich and to ensure every penny in public spending paid out during the pandemic is brutally torn out of the hides of the working class. This was the meaning of Johnson’s statement in North Wales, as the Tories announced a raft of attacks on the working class, complaining, “We had to spend over £400 billion keeping the British economy going during the lockdowns…”

Commenting with satisfaction on the ending of restrictions, the Telegraph demanded one more policy be implemented. “The one remaining imposition is mass testing, which is becoming increasingly pointless and harmful given the large numbers with omicron”, it editorialised yesterday.

There is utter unanimity among the parliamentary parties of the ruling elite in backing this murderous offensive. After Sir Keir Starmer declared last week that Labour “does not want to see restrictions in place any longer than necessary,” the party did not even note the ending of restrictions Thursday as cases and deaths continue to mount.

Canada secretly amends Safe Third Country Agreement with US to nail door shut to refugees

Louis Girard

In close collaboration with Washington and in blatant violation of international law, Justin Trudeau’s federal Liberal government is moving to completely seal the border to asylum seekers entering Canada from the United States. According to government sources who leaked information to the Montreal daily La Presse last month, Canada and the United States have negotiated an agreement to close “loopholes” in the Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA).

Protest against the reactionary Canada-US Safe Third Country Agreement (Photo credit: David Asper Centre for Constitutional Rights)

The purpose of the agreement, signed in 2004 by Paul Martin’s Liberal government and the administration of George W. Bush, was to allow the Canadian government to turn back all asylum seekers entering Canada from the United States on the pretext that the latter is a “safe country” for refugees.

The agreement stipulated that asylum seekers would be turned back if they made their claim at an official port of entry to Canada. However, it did not specify how asylum applications should be handled if they were filed by people who had entered Canada from the US “irregularly.” This loophole encouraged refugees desperate to escape the Trump administration’s vicious persecution of immigrants to cross the 8,900-kilometre-long Canada-US border at unguarded points in order to file their asylum application on Canadian soil. To do so, tens of thousands of impoverished refugees from Latin America, the Middle East and Africa have undertaken a dangerous and often life-threatening journey that often involves walking long distances in bitterly cold temperatures.

The leak to La Presse, which has close ties to the Liberal Party, came shortly after a ban on migrants entering Canada, put in place at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, was lifted last November. Agitating against the migrants, the anonymous government source responsible for the leak urged the government to quickly implement the till now secret agreement, declaring, “We don’t have the leisure to wait much longer for the new agreement to be implemented to be able to stop this flow, which is totally unsustainable in the more or less short term.”

Amending the STCA to nail shut the door to all refugee claimants has been a longstanding demand of the Conservatives and the most right-wing provincial governments, such as the Ford government in Ontario and Legault’s Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) government in Quebec. Stoking anti-immigrant chauvinism and openly courting the far-right, they have regularly referred to the border as a “sieve” and blamed refugees for the dilapidated state of public services.

In a recent tweet, calling for the “closing of Roxham Road,” a commonly used “irregular” border-crossing point for migrants seeking refuge in Canada, CAQ Labour Minister Jean Boulet scapegoated migrants for the spike in COVID-19 cases produced by the Omicron variant. In reality, if Quebec and Canada are now being devastated by the pandemic’s fifth successive wave, it is because Canada’s federal and provincial governments, acting at the behest of big business and the financial oligarchy, have systematically prioritized the protection of corporate profits over human lives The CAQ has played a key role in the implementation of this murderous agenda by embracing an explicit “herd immunity” policy and denying high-quality PPE to education workers, health care staff and other working people.

By acceding to the demands of the most right-wing sections of the establishment over the STCA, the Trudeau Liberal government is demonstrating, yet again, that its claims to be “pro-refugee”—that is supportive of those fleeing oppression—are an utter fraud.

The ruthless persecution experienced by asylum seekers under Trump has continued under Biden and the Democrats, who have upheld Trump’s reactionary “pushbacks” at the US-Mexico border and backed the fascistic thugs of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to the hilt. The Trudeau government was intimately involved in Trump’s anti-refugee campaign, with Canada-US collaboration on anti-immigrant measures reaching unprecedented levels during the Republican president’s four years in the White House. Trudeau and his ministers have themselves repeatedly discouraged migrants from coming to Canada, while escalating deportations and ensuring only a small percentage of asylum claims are accepted.

In 2018, in the name of “securing the borders,” the Trudeau government implemented a target of 10,000 annual deportations, a 35 percent increase from the previous year. Hundreds of people who have had their applications rejected, including children, are being held in prison-like conditions, similar to those imposed on prospective deportees in the United States, while they await expulsion from Canada.

In 2019, the Trudeau government dramatically reduced the ability of migrants to claim asylum in Canada by surreptitiously adding reactionary amendments to the Budget Implementation Act. While adding $1 billion for border security, the amendments prevent migrants who have already made an asylum claim with countries that have an “information sharing agreement” with Canada from making an asylum claim. These countries are the United States, Britain, Australia and New Zealand, all of which, along with Canada, are members of the “Five-Eyes,” a network of countries that conduct mass surveillance on the world’s population.

Notwithstanding the raging pandemic, 12,222 refugees were deported during 2020, the highest total for deportations since 2015. Of the 58,000 migrants who have crossed the border irregularly since February 2017, just 14,500 have had their claims accepted and 12,000 have been rejected, according to the Immigration and Refugee Board in Canada. Around 29,600 claims are still pending.

The Canadian government’s attempt to posture as a defender of “human rights” is highly hypocritical. Ottawa has one of the world’s most restrictive immigration policies—a fact underscored by the explicit praise it won from Trump during his presidency. This policy is not constrained by any humanitarian responsibility to asylum seekers, but rather shaped by the mercenary labour market needs of big business. Thousands of poorly paid and abysmally accommodated migrant workers from impoverished parts of the Caribbean and Latin America labour on farms, in meatpacking plants and other low-wage sectors every year on the basis of temporary residency permits. These programs, which are akin to the indentured-labour contracts of centuries past, only grant a worker permission to stay in Canada if they maintain their job with a specified employer, and block any legal route to permanent residency.

While claiming to be welcoming to immigrants and refugees, Canadian imperialism has natural and political “walls” to shield it from the large numbers of people uprooted from their homes by the wars, environmental devastation, and economic restructuring programs that it and its western allies inflict on the peoples of Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere. Not only is Canada bordered by oceans on three sides, it can rely on Washington, under Republican and Democratic Party administrations alike, to ruthlessly police the Mexican border and bully Mexico to “deal” with migrants from Central America and further south by sealing its own southern border.

The persecution of refugees and immigrants enjoys the support of all institutions of the Canadian capitalist state. Last year, the Liberal government won its appeal of a federal court ruling that found the Safe Third Country Agreement unconstitutional, because those returned to the US in accordance with its provisions have been subject to treatment that “shocks the conscience.” This includes automatic imprisonment, often in concentration camp-type conditions, with children potentially separated from their parents and detainees deprived of food, medical care and “basic human dignity.”

In overturning the lower court ruling, the Federal Court of Appeal willfully ignored both the barbaric conditions in which those returned from Canada are held by the US government and their subsequent fate. That is, almost certain deportation to their countries of origin—to countries, like Haiti, that invariably have been ravaged by American and Canadian imperialism.

Had it not been for the leak to La Presse, the US-Canada agreement to make the STCA even more restrictive and draconian would have remained secret till Ottawa and Washington choose to enforce it. This begs the question: What other secret agreements have been concluded between Canada and the United States?

Washington is currently provoking a direct military confrontation in Eastern Europe with Russia, which threatens to plunge the world into a catastrophic conflagration involving nuclear weapons. What secret deals has Trudeau made with Biden on how Ottawa would respond if war breaks out?

In recent decades, Canada’s close military-strategic partnership with Washington has seen the Canadian military participate in an uninterrupted series of wars and military interventions led by Washington, whether in Haiti, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan or Iraq, which, not incidentally, are the countries of origin of a large percentage of the world’s refugees. Canada is closely integrated into the ongoing diplomatic, economic and military-strategic offensive against China and Russia, the two powers the United States has identified as its main rivals.

The correction of the “loophole” in the STCA, which will increase the refugee-claimant population in the United States and the number of ICE expulsions, represents a favour granted by the Biden administration to Canada. In return, Washington no doubt expects Ottawa to work even more closely with it in its diplomatic and military offensive against Russia and China, as well as in upholding their common imperialist interests in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Since taking office, the Trudeau government has worked assiduously to strengthen the eight-decade Canada-US military partnership. This includes increasing military spending by more than 70 percent by 2026, reaching a little-publicized agreement with Washington to “modernize” NORAD, the North American aerospace and maritime defense command, participating in Washington’s “freedom of navigation” operations off the coast of China, and continuing to work with far-right forces in Ukraine to threaten and prepare for a military offensive against Russia.

Yet the United States, whether led by Trump’s Republicans or Biden’s Democrats, and significant sections of the Canadian ruling class are demanding that it do still more. Recently the Trudeau government announced that it is developing an anti-China Indo-Pacific “strategy” in close consultation with the Biden administration. The latter has ratcheted up the US offensive against China, by forming the US-Australia-United Kingdom (AUKUS) military-intelligence pact, arming Australia with nuclear submarines, and championing the Quad, a quasi-military alliance of the US, its key Asia-Pacific allies, Japan and Australia, and India.

Spain’s PSOE-Podemos government backs NATO war threats against Russia

Alejandro López

Spain’s Socialist Party (PSOE)-Podemos government is provoking mounting opposition as it sends warships and fighter jets to join NATO’s threats against Russia in Eastern Europe.

Last week, Minister of Defence Margarita Robles announced Madrid was sending one of the most modern frigates in the Spanish navy , the Blas de Lezo, to NATO’s permanent fleet, to operate in the western Mediterranean and the Black Sea against Russia. Spain will also send the BAM Meteoro to join the Standing NATO Mine Countermeasures Group 2, which it will lead for six months. The group’s role is to provide NATO with immediate operational response capability against Moscow.

Podemos party leader Pablo Iglesias speaks as Spain's caretaker Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez looks on after signing an agreement at the parliament in Madrid, Spain, Tuesday, Nov. 12, 2019. (AP Photo/Paul White)

Robles said that she had offered NATO to send fighter jets to Bulgaria, beyond the 360 soldiers already deployed in Lithuania and six Eurofighter jets in Romania. In addition, she recalled that for six years Spain has had more than 300 soldiers in Latvia. She threatened Moscow, “Russia cannot tell any country what it can do, and NATO will defend any country that Russia wants to enter.”

The deployment of Spanish military troops and the warmongering threats of the PSOE-Podemos government are provoking growing opposition among workers and youth. Over the past several days, the hashtag #NoALaGuerra (No to war) has been trending on Twitter.

“No to war” was the main slogan throughout 2002 and 2003 on the eve of the Iraq war when America, Britain and Spain, led by the right-wing Popular Party (PP), all pushed for an invasion that devastated Iraqi society and led to the deaths of one million Iraqis.

Jose Antonio Pérez tweeted: “Today Spain has decided to contribute ships, planes and troops because it is intolerable that Russia has soldiers on its territory next to the border with Ukraine. The US has had bases in Spain and in half of Europe for more than 50 years and nobody says anything.”

Helena, a public health worker tweeted: “This Russian thing reminds me ‘a bit’ of Iraq. They repeated ad nauseam that they had no weapons. The trio of the Azores [former US President George W. Bush, UK’s Tony Blair and Spain’s José María Aznar, who sent an ultimatum to Iraq in 2003 from Azores Islands] insisted on yes. War. Russia is repeating ad nauseam that IT IS NOT GOING TO INVADE UKRAINE. NATO insists that yes... this is going to end very badly.”

Laura tweeted: “Today, thinking about the possible participation of Spain in a war, I was assailed by the anguish of thinking that they would begin to recruit every man over 18 years of age. I thought of my son, with his whole life ahead of him. I imagined how I would try to hide him. And this has happened and continues to happen.”

Another user, Anibal, raised an article headlined, “Spain positions itself and offers its jets to Bulgaria amid the Russian threat,” saying, “Partisan headline: the threats come not Russia, who is asking for security guarantees, but the [US] and the EU sending weapons to Ukraine and trying to corner Russia by joining NATO. The PP got us into a war and the PSOE wants to get us into in another.”

Hector wrote: “Between NATO and Russia, they have more than 12,000 nuclear weapons. If there is war, we all lose.”

Another user, Josep, recalled the mass protests involving millions throughout the world against the Iraq invasion 20 years ago: “Once again a chill is running through my body, almost twenty years later, ‘No to war!’ is back. I shouted this with all my might—it was useless. Mass mobilizations around the planet were of no avail.”

This is an exposure of the bankruptcy of the Podemos party. Twenty years ago, the political layer from which it emerged—the Stalinist-led United Left movement, trade unions and petty-bourgeois activists—subordinated the mass movement against the Iraq war to the PSOE. The PSOE then joined NATO wars in Afghanistan and Libya while sending troops to Lebanon and off the Somali coast. Now joined by Podemos in government, it is leading Spain’s participation in NATO war threats against Russia.

Aware of growing opposition in the working class, Podemos is cynically posturing as a critic of the militarist actions undertaken by the government of which it is a part. To cover its alignment with the NATO war drive, it advances calls for the EU to develop its own foreign policy, claiming it is too subordinated to the US-led NATO alliance.

Last week, Podemos released a statement “rejecting” the deployment of Spanish troops to Eastern Europe. Podemos advocated “détente” and “strategic autonomy” to defend Europe’s own interests, claiming that the extension of NATO towards Ukraine and Georgia “is exclusively due to US interests and puts peace at risk.” The Minister of Equality, Podemos member Irene Montero, stated the following day that Spain is “the country of no to war” and called for “dialogue and diplomacy.”

On Saturday, former Podemos leader and Deputy Prime Minister Pablo Iglesias stated at a campaign rally that Europe does not have “the slightest interest” in a military confrontation on European soil with a country that has nuclear weapons. He added that NATO is “a military alliance to protect the interests of the United States.”

Podemos’ statements are empty posturing. The deployment of Blas de Lezo frigate was approved in a government meeting on 21 of December. Podemos’ ministers did not raise any opposition. The Frigate’s deployment has simply been advanced three weeks from the time it was expected to be deployed.

Podemos is not an anti-war party. Founded in 2014, boasting it had entered Spanish politics to “democratise” the post-Franco regime and re-distribute wealth towards the poorest, Podemos has instead channeled growing social opposition to capitalism back into the PSOE, the ruling class’s main party of government since the fascist Francoite regime fell in 1978. The PSOE has a decades-long record as a party of imperialist war and militarism.

Before entering power with the PSOE, Podemos recruited leading members of the army, including former Air Force General and Chief of the Defence Staff Julio Rodríguez, the man who led the Spanish army’s participation in the US-led neo-colonial wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and who played a major role in the 2011 NATO war on Libya. Rodríguez is now a leading member of Podemos.

Once in power, Podemos has aligned itself ever more closely with NATO wars in the Middle East in Afghanistan and Libya, pledged to keep the four US military bases in Spain, and supported the increase of Spain’s weapons sales to a record €22.5 billion, including Saudi Arabia in its bloody war against Yemen. Last October, it participated in the militarist-chauvinist Day of Hispanicity on October 12. It has also voted in favour of the latest military budget, which has increased 9.4 percent last year, beating its earlier record rise from €19.7 billion in 2020 to €21.6 billion in 2021.

Podemos’ defence of European “strategic autonomy” is not an anti-imperialist position. Rather, speaking for factions of the European ruling class, its support means mass militarisation of Germany, France and other European states to wage wars in Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe independently from the US. Internally, this can only be accompanied with the gutting of public expenditure in health care, education and social spending.

There is deep, historically rooted opposition in the working class in Spain and internationally to militarism and nationalism. However, the lessons of the anti-war protests in 2002-2003 must be assimilated. Middle-class groups like Podemos are not opposed to militarism, and are neither willing nor able to mobilize the vast opposition against the current war drive. These forces aim to subordinate, isolate and finally suppress the mass anti-war sentiment.

BA.2 subvariant of Omicron in more than 40 countries across the globe

Benjamin Mateus

During his opening remarks at the 150th session of the World Health Organization (WHO) executive board, Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned that conditions were ideal for new variants to emerge and that countries, if acting collectively, had the power to change the trajectory of the pandemic.

The Director-General’s comments this week come in the wake of approximately 8,000 new cases of an Omicron subvariant designated BA.2 being detected in more than 40 countries. Some scientists have also nicknamed it the “stealth omicron” because it can only be confirmed as BA.2 by gene sequencing. As a result, the exact incidence remains speculative, but it is considered still very low. It was first reported on in November when the BA.1 subvariant was exploding in South Africa. Its precise geographic origin remains unknown, but it was also first detected in South Africa.

Venn diagram showing the similarities and differences between the three Omicron family viruses. (Source: Access Health International)

The Omicron strain (BA.1), also designated by B.1.1.529, has an S gene dropout or S gene target failure. A widely used PCR test is unable to detect this one gene of three target genes, meaning that if the PCR tests lack this target when an infection has resulted, assumptions are made that is the Omicron variant causing the infection. The Alpha variant that came to dominate the UK in December 2020 shared this characteristic, and the S gene failure was used to track its spread with PCR testing. The BA.2 subvariant lacks this S gene dropout, making it more difficult to track.

According to a recent statement from Statens Serum Institute (SSI), Denmark’s leading public health academy, BA.2 is spreading 1.5 times faster than the BA.1. “Preliminary calculations indicate BA.2 is effectively well over one and half times more contagious than BA.1,” it wrote, with the spread fastest among children.

Omicron has already hit children with ferocity. A recent report out of South Africa had shown pediatric hospitalizations were almost 50 percent higher than with the Delta wave. Children under five were being admitted at rates higher than the elderly. In the UK, hospitalizations among children 6–17 were 2.3 times last winter’s record.

Like BA.1, the new subvariant does not appear to have the same clinical impact as Delta on those infected, though extensive previous infections and high population vaccination appear to diminish the virulence of these subvariants. Still, virulence and vaccine efficacy data still need to be evaluated before true comparisons can be made.

Dr. Tyra Grove Krause, epidemiologist and a specialist in public health medicine at the SSI, said, “It is the Omicron variant that is driving the epidemic right now. We estimate that more than 99 percent of all COVID-19 cases in week three [of January 2022] are due to Omicron, and data show that it spreads faster, but gives a lower risk of serious disease outbreaks compared to Delta. At the same time, we can see a marked difference in the risk of being admitted between vaccinated and unvaccinated. The vaccinated are better protected against being hospitalized—even if they are infected by the Omicron variant.”

The present seven-day average in hospitalizations in Denmark is approaching pandemic highs at 822, but ICU admissions have been trending downward since early January. However, just counting ICU admissions may confound the real picture, as Denmark relies on long-term care nursing homes, according to Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding. New infections are at pandemic highs with 43,719 cases on January 26, 2022. Daily deaths, though remaining low in general, turned upwards before the Christmas holidays and have now exceeded the first wave in April 2020.

With the more contagious BA.2 dominant in Denmark, the current wave may extend well into February. However, it remains to be seen if BA.2 will supplant BA.1, which is currently responsible for 98 percent of infections worldwide. It is also spreading into the UK, Singapore, India, and the Philippines, where it is beginning to edge out the original strain.

In total, there are three sub-lineages of the Omicron variant. BA.3 has remained dormant with only a few hundred cases detected. However, what distinguished these three is that the number of unique mutations they possess, which sets them apart as much as Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and Delta, are different from one another.

Looking at the evolution of the wild-type strain that first emerged in Wuhan, China, in December 2019, a precursor variant denoted as the Omicron parent most likely arose sometime in March 2021. It remains unknown why Omicron then surfaced in November 2021. These events underscore the warnings made by the WHO Director-General. As Dr. William Haseltine, science contributor to Forbes, wrote, “One thing is clear: SARS-CoV-2 has an enormous capacity not only to continue to produce new variants, but variants that surprise us both in their number and their biological properties.”

Regarding the three sub-lineages, Dr. Haseltine explained, “The three share 39 mutations, which we include as the presumptive ‘Omicron parent.’ The Omicron parent diverged into the Omicron Family: BA.1, which contains an additional 20 mutations (13 unique); BA.2, which includes an additional 27 (ten unique): and BA.3, which consists of an additional 13 (one unique). Remarkably, all the family members were detected simultaneously in South Africa, although they likely diverged from a single variant several months previously. This is a unique example of such highly divergent strains appearing in a population simultaneously.”

Variants of SARS-CoV2 for select countries. BA.1 in dark purple. BA.2 in light purple. (Source: Covariant.org)

Most of the mutations are located on the spike protein of the virus, which it uses to attach to the human ACE2 receptor and enter the cell so that it can reproduce itself. These mutations on the spike determine, to a large extent, its transmissibility and immune-evasive properties. For instance, BA.1 has proven to be three time more transmissible than Delta and its vaccine-evasive capacity has deemed the importance of obtaining a booster. The additional and unique mutations of BA.2 will need further study in the real-world setting.

Despite the continued tsunami of Omicron cases across the US, according to the GISAID virus database, the BA.2 subvariant is now present in 22 states across the country, including Arizona, Texas, California, New York, and Washington. Scientists are speculating that given the high rates of reinfection with Omicron, it could mean that BA.2 may be a second wave that quickly follows.

Dr. Anders Fomsgaard, chief physician and virus researcher at the SSI, said, “It is possible that you can be infected with BA.1 Omicron first and then shortly after with BA.2.” Several cases in Norway have confirmed this. He added, “The eyes of the world are resting on us to find out what is happening with BA.2. There is no explanation as to why it has come to Denmark and is spreading so much right here.” Aside from being more contagious, Fomsgaard cautioned, “It may also be that it is more resistant to the immunity that is in the population, which allows it to infect better. We do not know yet.”

Eighty-five percent of Tonga’s population impacted by volcanic eruption

John Braddock

Almost 85 percent of Tonga’s 105,000 people have been affected by the recent volcanic eruption and tsunami, the government said earlier this week.

The tsunami destroyed buildings and flattened trees in coastal areas. (Image credit: Facebook/Joanna Michael Stanley and Kofeola Marian Kupu)

The Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano is located about 65 kilometres from Tonga’s capital Nuku’alofa. The eruption on January 15—one of the biggest in the last 30 years—triggered a 1.2 metre high tsunami that crashed ashore on the main island of Tongatapu and devastated islands in the Ha’apai group, near the volcano.

Nomuka and Mango islands both sustained extensive damage. Sixty-two residents of the remote Mango Island had to relocate to nearby Nomuka after losing their homes and belongings, but were forced to relocate again to Tongatapu due to food and water shortages.

Communities, roads and airports were blanketed in thick ash, and flood waters damaged infrastructure, homes and schools. Power and communication channels were almost completely cut off. Many of the country’s boats were destroyed by the tsunami. The death toll remains at three.

A New Zealander living in Tonga told Stuff on January 25 that people are “struggling” to breathe and shops have closed due to ash fall. Jordan McCarthy, from the village of Pangu, said gardens, roads and houses were now blanketed by a “fine ash.” Food businesses and markets had been badly affected and most produce was wiped out when a mixture of ash and water hardened into a “hail-like stone,” McCarthy said.

Experts have confirmed that the ash fall would affect residents’ health, contaminate fresh water supplies and damage crops. Auckland University Professor of Volcanology Shane Cronin said the ash could take weeks to wash away, depending on the rain. “Without running water, it was impossible to wash the ash off. Instead, Tongans will need to sweep the ash away,” he said.

Several flights from the New Zealand and Australian Air Forces have landed at the main Fua’amotu Airport, bringing relief supplies. The flights were only able to land because more than 120 locals flocked to the airport to sweep ash from the runway. The volunteers spent 16 hours a day for four days sweeping the landing strip. Another 50 have been involved in a similar effort at Ha’apai Airport.

Many areas are still scrambling to restore basic necessities. The National Emergency Operations Centre said clean water was still their main concern. The Aotearoa (New Zealand) Tonga Relief Committee itemised breakfast food, mainly for children, gardening tools and outboard motors as desperately needed. Auckland’s Tongan community has so far collected $NZ1.6 million worth of food and groceries with shipping containers set to reach Nuku’alofa on Monday.

Telephone communications between the islands are still a major challenge according to the Tongan government. Both international and domestic communication was lost when the undersea cable connecting Tonga with Fiji was damaged. The extent of the damage won’t be known until a repair ship arrives. According to the company US Subcom, repairing the cable is “no simple process,” and is expected to take weeks. Tonga Cable Ltd chairperson Samuiela Fonua told Radio NZ the cable lies in the area that was directly affected by the eruption and the conditions at the site are a major concern.

The problems establishing essential communications produced one notable degrading episode. Several desperate appeals, including by Parliament Speaker Lord Fakafanua and New Zealand opposition MP Shane Reti, were made to US tech billionaire Elon Musk to provide internet terminals to help reconnect Tongans to the internet using his company SpaceX’s 49 Starlink satellites.

Musk tweeted in response: “This is a hard thing for us to do right now, as we don’t have enough satellites with laser links and there are already geo sats that serve the Tonga region.” Replying to a subsequent Reuters’ story, Musk asked Tongans to confirm “if it is important for SpaceX to send over Starlink terminals.” In a heated exchange, people pointed out that Tongans couldn’t reply to Musk because they had no internet connections! In the end, nothing has been forthcoming.

The amount of aid offered by the local imperialist powers, New Zealand and Australia, remains woefully inadequate. New Zealand’s contribution totals $NZ3 million, which covers relief supplies, water generation capability and clean-up equipment, as well as grants to humanitarian organisations. Australia’s total is a similar $A3 million. Canberra usually uses its allocated aid budget in such emergencies, but this represents just 0.19 percent of gross national income, far less than the 0.7 percent recommended by the UN.

International assistance is under way, with New Zealand and Australian air force and navy ships having arrived and others coming from Japan, the US, the UK, and Fiji. The operation is fraught with dangers over the possible introduction of COVID-19 into the fragile country. Tonga has reported just one case of COVID and is one of the few countries currently designated virus free. Only about 61 percent of Tongans are fully vaccinated. The importation of the virus could well trigger a bigger human disaster than the volcanic eruption.

The dangers were underscored this week when nearly two dozen sailors aboard the Australian naval ship HMAS Adelaide, en route to Tonga, were confirmed as infected. The vessel was eventually forced to deliver supplies without contact with the population. An Australian C-17 Globemaster military transport plane was earlier turned around mid-flight after a crew member aboard was also diagnosed with COVID.

The international aid operation has little to do with meeting the urgent and overwhelming needs of the Tongan population. The imperialist powers are seeking to exploit environmental and humanitarian catastrophes, which are frequent in the vulnerable region, for geo-political and militarist ends.

The crisis is already being used to whip-up anti-China sentiment. Writing in Nikkei Asia, New Zealand journalist Michael Field noted that former Australian Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd had promptly tweeted that Australia must be first to give Tonga assistance. “Failing that,” Rudd said, “China will be there in spades.” Large Australian warships should be sent immediately, he declared: “It’s why we built them.”

Jonathan Pryke of the Sydney-based Lowy Institute said that the aid Australia and New Zealand provide is “not entirely altruistic.” Such support generates “a lot of goodwill and ‘soft power’ in the region,” he said, and gives the “defense assets” of both countries “the chance to ‘get into the field.’”

The New Zealand website Stuff also ran an op-ed repeating charges levelled by Washington that Beijing is conducting “debt trap diplomacy” in the Pacific. In 2006, China offered Tonga a $US100m loan to rebuild Nuku’alofa after rioting. Tonga currently owes almost two-thirds of its debt to China's Export-Import Bank. In 2020 Tonga asked China for its debt to be forgiven.

The reality is, as Washington’s escalating build-up to war intensifies, the US and its local allies, Australia and New Zealand, are seeking to strengthen ties with Pacific countries and boost their military presence in the region, in order to push back against China’s influence. While doing the bare minimum to address the humanitarian disaster, the imperialist powers are utilising the Tongan crisis to further this reactionary and dangerous campaign.

IMF cuts global growth forecast as Omicron spreads

Nick Beams

While it was certainly not its intention, the latest update of its World Economic Outlook (WEO) by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), issued earlier this week, is an indictment of the “let it rip” policies pursued by all capitalist governments in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The IMF report points to lower economic growth as a result of the continuing spread of the virus, together with the possibility that following Omicron, new and potentially even more infectious and severe mutations could develop, increasing the risks to the global economy.

International Monetary Fund headquarters in Washington [Source: Wikimedia]

What emerges from the report is that the present policies, based on the claim that an elimination strategy, using stringent public health measures, would cause too much economic damage, are in fact worsening the economic outlook.

The IMF also adds its voice to those calling for the suppression of wages on the grounds of fighting the inflation resulting from the pandemic.

Since its WEO report issued in October, the IMF notes that the outlook for the world economy has worsened. Global growth is expected to come in at 5.9 percent for 2021 and then fall to 4.4 percent in 2022, half a percentage point lower than previously estimated.

But this forecast may well be blown out of the water because it assumes that adverse health outcomes, including severe illness, hospitalisations and deaths, will come “down to low levels by the end of 2022”—something that is far from guaranteed.

A clear indication of the economic effects of the pandemic was provided in a blog by IMF chief economist Gita Gopinath. She noted that the global death toll had risen to 5.5 million and “accompanying economic losses are expected to be close to $13.8 trillion through 2024 relative to pre-pandemic forecasts.” Of course, she did not mention that much of this devastation could have been averted if a global elimination policy had been pursued from the outset.

The IMF points to significant falls in economic growth in the major economies in 2022. The forecast for the US has been cut by 1.2 percentage points from the estimate of last October because of the blocking of the Biden administration’s so-called Build Back Better fiscal package, tightening of monetary policy by the central bank and continued disruption to supply chains.

The growth estimate for Germany has been marked down by 0.8 percentage points, the euro area by 0.4 percentage points and the UK by 0.3 percentage points. The growth forecast for the Chinese economy is also revised down by 0.8 percentage points to 4.8 percent with “negative implications” for the prospects of its trading partners.

While the growth forecasts assume, without any evidence provided, that infections will fall, the IMF acknowledges that new variants may emerge the longer the virus circulates.

With inflation rising in the US, the Fed is moving to tighten monetary policy, not least to try to suppress workers’ wage demands. The IMF report says this will produce tighter global financial conditions “putting pressure on emerging markets and developing economies.” It will make borrowing more expensive and put a strain on public finances.

“For countries with high foreign currency debt, the combination of tighter financial conditions, exchange rate depreciations, and higher imported inflation will lead to challenging monetary and fiscal policy trade-offs,” it states.

As always, a class war agenda is laid out in language that seeks to obscure its central meaning. What is being said is that poorer countries, already in the octopus-like grip of banks and finance houses, will have to cut social services and health facilities to pay off their debts to the financial oligarchs.

These prescriptions are not confined to the poorer countries. While it stated that inflation is expected to subside, again advancing no evidence, the IMF report said there was a “risk that persistently elevated living costs and tighter labour markets will compel workers to ask for (and firms to accede to) higher wages. The resulting higher labour costs would in turn push up prices further, perpetuating an inflationary cycle that would require aggressive policy action to combat.”

In other words, if wage demands sparked by inflation cannot be contained, central banks will have to lift interest rates to higher levels, inducing a recession, in order to suppress them, returning to the road taken by the US Fed under the chairmanship of Paul Volcker in the 1980s.

The report also points to the prospect that public spending will be cut in order to repay the debts incurred by government.

“Public finances,” it notes, “will come under strain in the coming months and years, as global public debt has reached record levels to cover pandemic-spending at a time when tax receipts plummeted… and as a result fiscal deficits will need to shrink in the coming years.”

What this means in practice is further reductions in spending on health care, education and other social services. Of course, no mention is made of the fact that such facilities could be massively expanded by expropriating the vast fortunes accumulated by the pandemic billionaires.

The report contains something of a warning to the ruling elites, noting that: “Social unrest which had declined earlier in the pandemic, is once again on the rise in some countries—related in part to elevated food and energy prices.”

In so far as it advances any strategy for dealing with the virus, the IMF places central emphasis on the take up of vaccines, even though it is well established that while necessary, they are far from sufficient.

But even within this framework it is forced to acknowledge the disastrous situation that has been created with the fully-vaccinated share of the population running at just 4 percent in low-income countries.

And in 86 countries, comprising more than a quarter of the world’s population, “the aggregate shortfall of administered doses… was 974 million below the amount needed to meet the end-2021 target” with “nearly all countries in this group” facing “unpredictable supply.”

The report says that without a world-wide effort to ensure the supply of vaccines and other measures “the virus will be more likely to mutate and further extend the pandemic’s global grip.”

But in line with the IMF’s function as one of the international guardians of the profit system, the authors of the report obviously considered it would be just too impolite to even mention the fact that a central reason for the vaccination shortfall in poorer regions is the vaccine nationalism of the major powers and the refusal of the pharmaceutical companies to waive patent restrictions.