Workers in Australia face soaring prices and debt

Mike Head

While governments and the media promote illusions in a “post-pandemic recovery,” the reality confronting workers in Australia is surging inflation, unsustainable levels of household debt, falling real wages and the prospect of crippling interest rate rises.

The corporate elite is pushing workers back into unsafe workplaces while continuing to exploit the COVID-19 disaster to drive down wages, increase casualisation and restructure working conditions, with the help of the trade unions, which are suppressing strikes.

Unemployed workers outside an inner-western Sydney Centrelink in 2020 (Photo: WSWS Media)

Misleading claims of record low unemployment levels are being issued to hide the underlying deterioration in living standards, as are reports of billions of dollars in household savings just waiting to be spent, when that money is increasingly held in the hands of the wealthiest layers of society.

For working-class households, the cost of living is rising far faster than incomes, deepening the impact of the decline in average real pay levels over the past decade.

Officially, the Consumer Price Index rose by 3.5 percent in 2021, including by 1.3 percent in the December quarter, which means an annualised rate of 5.2 percent. But the Wage Price Index barely rose from a two-decade low of around 1.3 percent annualised to about 2 percent.

Even this severely understates the impact on working people. Petrol prices jumped 32 percent over the past year, cost of constructing new dwellings rose by 7.5 percent and there were large price increases for a wide range of consumer durables.

In addition, house prices soared by another 22 percent in 2021, placing home ownership further out of reach for young and lower-income workers, who are also experiencing punishing rent increases.

According to the latest Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) statement of monetary policy, issued last week, the gap between prices and wages will grow. It forecast that the Wage Price Index would increase by 2.75 percent this year and 3 percent during 2023.

Addressing the National Press Club, RBA governor Philip Lowe attributed this wage depression to the “substantial inertia” produced by multi-year union-negotiated enterprise agreements, plus public sector wage caps and annual award wage reviews.

“Inertia” is a discreet term for the role of the unions in helping to push down wages. One of the most recent examples is the proposed four-year agreement struck by the Victorian state Labor Party government and the Australian Education Union to restrict wage rises to less than 2 percent a year for teachers and other school staff members.

In line with the US Federal Reserve and central banks in other major capitalist countries, Lowe said the RBA may not lift interest rates immediately from their historic record lows, but would do so if “aggregate wage growth” rates started to rise.

In other words, the central banks stand ready to hike rates to curb any action by workers to demand higher pay. Lowe referred to “uncertainties” about wages, reflecting nervousness in ruling circles about the capacity of the unions to keep a lid on workers.

If and when official interest rates rise from 0.1 percent—the level set, along with central bank bond-buying, to help pump hundreds of billions of dollars into big business and the financial markets when the pandemic hit—it will have a staggering impact on working-class households.

Ordinary people have gone deeper and deeper into debt over the past three decades to offset declining real incomes. Between 1989 and 2021, as the RBA’s cash rate fell from 18 percent to 0.1 percent, the ratio of household debt to disposable income tripled from 0.6 to 1.8 times.

In 1989, loans and advances totaled $151.4 billion, or about 50 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). By 2021, the mountain of debt had grown to $2,966.1 billion, or around 150 percent of GDP.

That represents compound annual growth of 9.74 percent, outstripping the 6.4 percent compound annual growth in the median house price. Thus debt has grown faster than the property values on which most of the loans are based.

Any rate rises now would hurt heavily-mortgaged households, about 1.1 million of which have never even experienced a rate hike. The last increase was in November 2010, following the bailout of the money markets in response to the 2008 global financial crisis.

Perhaps the greatest delusion being peddled by the Liberal-National Coalition government and its state and territory counterparts, Coalition and Labor alike, is that unemployment is headed for lows this year, under 4 percent, not seen since the early 1970s.

In the first place, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), which reported a 4.2 percent rate in December, severely underestimates the actual levels of joblessness. That survey was conducted in early December, before the Omicron wave of the pandemic cut a swathe through jobs. Moreover, the ABS applies a narrow definition of unemployed, confined to those actively seeking work and not having worked even an hour a week.

By contrast, data compiled by the Roy Morgan polling company showed that 1.25 million people were unemployed in December, or 8.5 percent of the workforce. Another 1.42 million, or 9.7 percent of the workforce, were under-employed—that is, seeking greater hours of work. Unemployment fell marginally by 78,000 in December, but under-employment grew by 218,000.

Commenting on the results, Roy Morgan CEO Michele Levine said “the surge in cases of COVID-19 driven by the highly infectious Omicron strain of the virus” from mid-December had infected two million people and forced millions of workers into 7–14 days of isolation.

This had “forced many businesses to hire part-time staff on reduced hours to fill gaps… So even though many people who are fully employed have been spending time at home unable to work, these labour market dynamics have led to a significant rise in part-time employment.”

Another factor in the artificially low official jobless data is the absence of overseas workers. Before COVID-19, more than 2 million temporary migrants accounted for up to 10 percent of the Australian workforce in sectors such as construction, healthcare and hospitality.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s government, backed by the Labor Party, announced this week that it would fully reopen the international border to allow the return of this cheap labour force, together with international students, backpackers and Pacific labourers who have arrived in recent weeks, despite the continuing high levels of COVID-19 illnesses.

All the predictions of “recovery” and low unemployment are based on stifling workers’ opposition and wage demands, and intensifying the drive to “reopen” the economy by dismantling all pandemic safety measures, regardless of the inevitable rise in infections, hospitalisations and deaths.

With a federal election looming, there is concern in corporate circles that the unravelling Morrison government is incapable of suppressing mounting working class resistance and delivering the further economic restructuring and attacks on workers’ conditions demanded by the financial markets.

There are also fears in the ruling class that a Labor Party-led government would do no better. That is despite the repeated pledges made by Labor leader Anthony Albanese to work closely with the unions and business to exploit the pandemic to impose a new wave of restructuring, emulating that imposed by the Hawke and Keating Labor governments of 1983 to 1996.

NATO, Ukraine, Russia stage military exercises amid US-promoted war hysteria

Patrick Martin

More military forces will be engaged in simulated combat across Eastern Europe Thursday than at any time in recent history, as NATO, Ukraine and Russia all begin military exercises involving tens of thousands of soldiers.

The Russian exercise in neighboring Belarus is long-planned, and is scheduled to end on February 20, a date reaffirmed by Russian officials after French President Emmanuel Macron portrayed it as a concession won by his diplomatic foray to Moscow. Government spokesman Dmitry Peskov dismissed Macron’s claims, saying there had never been any plans to extend the exercises or deploy Russian troops permanently on the Belarus-Ukraine border.

A security patrols an area around the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv, Ukraine, Monday, Jan. 24, 2022. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)

Peskov said the maneuvers in Belarus were doubly necessary because of “unprecedented security threats” against the two countries. He cited “blackmail and pressure” by the western powers who were arming Ukraine.

Earlier in the week, Russian President Vladimir Putin warned that entry of Ukraine into NATO would inevitably mean war between NATO and Russia, because of Ukraine’s announced plans to carry out the reconquest of Crimea.

The NATO and Ukrainian exercises have been organized suddenly, in a provocative manner, as part of the ongoing campaign of war hysteria, spearheaded by the Biden administration, Boris Johnson in Britain and the corporate media in both countries.

Several thousand US paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne Division are deploying into southeast Poland, near the border with Belarus and Ukraine, and will simulate combat parachute drops in the coming days, the Pentagon announced, without giving an exact date. Hundreds more US soldiers began arriving Wednesday in Romania, redeployed from a base in Germany.

The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday, in an “exclusive” story, i.e., an authorized leak from the Pentagon, that the US forces in Poland were there to receive a possible surge of Americans fleeing the Ukraine in the wake of a Russian invasion. It noted that the officer in charge of the operation, Major General C. D. Donahue, had previously commanded US forces at the Kabul airport during the mass evacuation last August.

The portrayal of the 82nd Airborne as a group of Mother Teresas setting up tents and stockpiling food, water and bedding for refugees hardly squares with the historical role of that division as the spearhead of countless US military attacks. The paratroopers are far more likely to act as an offensive force, although the Journal article hastened to reassure its readers: “The troops aren’t authorized to enter Ukraine and won’t evacuate Americans or fly aircraft missions from inside Ukraine, officials said.”

In Estonia, British and Estonian forces began a simulated tank battle within sight of the Russian border, only a short drive from Russia’s second-largest city, St. Petersburg. Under the name Leningrad, that city endured a nearly three-year siege by Nazi armies during World War II, in which more than a million Soviet citizens died.

More British troop movements to Eastern Europe were announced Wednesday, as Prime Minister Boris Johnson arrived in Poland to show the flag and meet with officials of the ultra-right government. Johnson was no doubt happy to flee London, where he is under siege over the so-called “partygate” scandal, involving drinking parties at his offices which flagrantly violated COVID-19 pandemic rules.

In Ukraine, where President Volodymyr Zelensky has sought to downplay the US claims that a Russian invasion of his country is “imminent,” the defense ministry is starting extensive military exercises Thursday to coincide with the exercises across the border in Belarus, involving Russian and Belarus troops.

Ukraine’s defense minister, Oleksii Reznikov, said soldiers would train with new antitank weapons just provided by Britain and the United States, and with Turkish armed drones. He did not reveal how many troops were involved, but thanks to extensive aid and equipping by the NATO powers, Ukraine now has the second-largest army in Europe, behind only Russia—a fact rarely noted in the corporate media.

Reznikov told one media outlet Tuesday that Ukraine hopes soon to receive military equipment “we have long dreamed of” from a NATO supplier.

The diplomatic shuttle between Washington, Moscow, Kiev and various European capitals remains busy. Beside Johnson in Warsaw, his foreign secretary Liz Truss (touted in right-wing circles as a possible replacement if Johnson is ousted) is traveling to Moscow for talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

The purpose of her visit can only be to inflame the conflict, given her statement, released before she boarded a plane, that she plans “to call on the Kremlin to de-escalate and stop the aggression against Ukraine.”

Outside Europe, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was in Melbourne, Australia, for a meeting of representatives of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or Quad, a quasi-alliance of Australia, Japan, India and the United States organized as a gang-up against China. While the meeting was previously scheduled, it will undoubtedly be viewed as the imperialist response to the meeting at the Beijing Olympics on the weekend of Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

While troops on both sides conduct drills in conventional armed conflict, the American media campaign has taken an ominous new turn, with the first references to the possibility of nuclear warfare as the outcome of the crisis.

This came in the form of a lengthy article appearing on the front page of Wednesday’s print edition of the New York Times, written by one of the newspaper’s Moscow correspondents, Anton Troianovski. Much of the article was taken up by an effort to portray any action by Russian President Putin, from a full-scale invasion to a diplomatic deal, as part of an implacable long-term plan to seize control of Ukraine. This seems aimed at positioning the US media to intensify its anti-Russia campaign whatever the immediate outcome of the current crisis.

But in the course of the report, Troianovski raises the subject of nuclear war, although he attributes this entirely to Russian foreign policy and military analysts who made such comments. He quotes “Ruslan Pukhov, a Russian military analyst,” predicting “a renewed threat of war” next year even if no armed conflict breaks out soon. “Ukraine in NATO, from my point of view or Russia’s, would be the equivalent of nuclear war,” Pukhov says.

The most explicit and inflammatory remark quoted by the Times is attributed to Dmitri Kiselyov, an anchor on Russian state television, who allegedly said Sunday, “Let’s remember that Russia doesn’t need a world without Russia.” He added, “And then not just America, but also Europe, will turn into radioactive ash.” Troianovski describes this language as, at least in part, a paraphrase of a remark made by Putin in 2018.

The import of this article is to inject into the minds of Times’ readers the idea of nuclear war arising from the crisis, while attributing the danger (of course) to nefarious Russians. This is under conditions where the expansion of NATO—particularly if Ukraine were to be added to the alliance—increasingly follows the map of Hitler’s onslaught on the Soviet Union in 1941–42.

Far-right “Freedom Convoys” prepare to occupy capitals across Europe

Samuel Tissot & Alex Lantier

After a “Freedom Convoy” demanding an end to all public health measures against COVID-19 occupied downtown Ottawa, the Canadian capital, a network of far-right and anti-vaccination activists are planning similar actions across Europe. Occupations of Paris and Brussels, the seat of the European parliament, are planned for February 11 and February 14, respectively.

Like Canada’s Freedom Convoy, linked to far-right forces involved in former US President Donald Trump’s attempted coup on January 6, 2021 in Washington, this is the result of a carefully-prepared campaign. A series of Facebook groups, Twitter pages, and twenty-four Telegram channels were set up on January 26 and 27 to organize convoys to European capitals and thence to Brussels. They feature promotional videos glorifying convoys in Ottawa and at the Canadian-US border and calling for the spread of the movement to Europe.

This action is led by a group named European Freedom Convoy. On Twitter, it denounces restrictions like mask-wearing inside shops or schools and proof of vaccination to enter restaurants as “martial law.” It demands instead the “right to conduct business freely” and to maintain “national pride” and “spiritual beliefs.” It also features a “World Freedom Convoy” Telegram channel linking the movements in North America and Europe, and which is awash in posts on QAnon, anti-Semitic and anti-vaccine conspiracy theories.

This reactionary movement aims to accelerate the elimination of anti-COVID-19 measures that European governments are carrying out despite growing opposition among youth and workers.

Having recorded 1.65 million COVID-19 deaths and 140 million infections, Europe now faces a tsunami of Omicron variant infections, with over 23,000 deaths last week. France, which recorded 691 deaths on February 8, the highest since March 2021, saw almost 1.5 million cases and 2,302 deaths from COVID-19 last week. Yet governments across Europe are tearing apart masking mandates and self-isolation rules for those exposed to the virus, fully reopening public venues and schools, and thus ensuring that the virus will spread.

The Freedom Convoys’ posturing as an opposition to state policies is a political fraud. They denounce state public health policies such as full or partial lockdowns that were adopted at the recommendation of scientists, after strikes across Europe demanding that workers be protected from the virus. However, they are demanding a more rapid implementation of the policy of “living with the virus” demanded by French President Emmanuel Macron and other governments across Europe, who are determined to boost the stock markets at the expense of human lives.

While the Freedom Convoys present themselves as “apolitical,” they are ties to far-right parties who campaigned against vaccination last year and now for the Freedom Convoys.

Actions are scheduled to take place throughout Europe on Friday and Saturday in the lead-up to the planned occupation of Brussels. In the Netherlands, the convoy’s Dutch Telegram channel has over 32,000 members, in Belgium over 12,000, in Spain over 10,500, and in Austria over 9,500. In Spain and Austria, truckers plan to occupy Madrid and Vienna on Saturday, before heading to Brussels. Telegram channels in the UK, Denmark, Germany, Portugal, Italy, Sweden, and other countries have a few thousand members.

The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) is promoting the Freedom Convoy occupation of Brussels. On Twitter, AfD European parliamentarian Christian Anderson denounced Brussels as “the capital of lunacy, the origin of this whole digital green certificate madness and all the discrimination, harassment and oppressive measures that came with it.” She pledged to greet the convoy in the streets when it arrived in Brussels.

The largest action organized so far is in France, where the Freedom Convoy has received support from neo-fascists including supporters of presidential candidates Marine Le Pen and Eric Zemmour, as well as from the “populist” Unsubmissive France party of Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

Convoys of a few dozen trucks, work vehicles, cars, and motorbikes, left the southern cities of Perpignan, Nice, and Bayonne yesterday, as part of a three-day convoy that will reach Paris on Friday. Other convoys from French cities closer to the capital are scheduled to depart today and tomorrow.

Wall-to-wall coverage of the Freedom Convoy and of its launch on Wednesday has been provided by the C-News television station, Zemmour’s former employer, which is owned by billionaire Vincent Bolloré. As a result, the Facebook group providing updates on the convoy in France has swelled to over 320,000 members since it was launched on January 26.

An independent journalist using the pseudonym Remi Monde describes himself as the leader of the French movement. In a video on Facebook, he asks, “Can we block everything?”, before declaring: “We take our destiny in our hands. Let's get together and head to the capital.” Monde has previously made posts in support of Florian Philippot, head of the far-right Patriots Party, although he has claimed that the Freedom Convey is apolitical.

Philippot tweeted, “It looks like the global house of cards of corruption has begun to crumble, and it’s starting in Canada! Trudeau is hiding! The wave will break over France!”

On Wednesday, Zemmour supporter Jean-Frédéric Poisson tweeted: “After Canada, French and European truckers are organizing. Support the Freedom Convey! Everyone to Paris!”

Marine Le Pen said she “understood” the Freedom Convoy, as globalization has “turned our societies into pressure cookers that can explode at the slightest event.” Calling however for her supporters “to vote,” she added: “Demonstrating one’s anger, yes of course, making it clear to the government, yes of course, but when the time comes, every five years … it is the presidential election, that is when the great decisions of our country are truly made.”

In an attempt to rally broader support and hide its far-right roots, the French Freedom Convoy also demagogically claims to be an “apolitical” movement opposed to rising living costs. In this, it has received assistance from Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s populist Unsubmissive France (LFI) party, whose national organizer, Adrien Quatennens, endorsed the Freedom Convoy yesterday in a televised interview with France Info.

“Obviously” LFI supports the Freedom Convoy, Quatennens declared, adding: “We must immediately end the vaccine pass and do away with all these measures against liberty, which have no effectiveness.” If LFI supporters “want to go, I encourage them to go,” he said, adding that the Freedom Convoy “has demands addressing other problems, like purchasing power.”

The impact of such false political propaganda could be seen in one Paris-Actu interview with an unvaccinated trucker who is considering attending the Freedom Convoy. “I work in a small firm, I see my boss struggle with fuel prices and my bills always going up. … Plus, I’m seen as a bad citizen because I’m not vaccinated,” he explained. However, he added that he still hesitates to join the Freedom Convoy: “I do not know who will show up, and I don’t like the idea of honking my horn next to the far right.”

Workers’ economic problems cannot be resolved, however, by what are in fact far-right protests, demanding a policy that will make the pandemic, and its attendant mass deaths and economic dislocation, continue indefinitely. The Freedom Convoy is a far-right provocation, abetted by pseudo-left parties such as LFI. Workers must oppose it, seek to influence unvaccinated workers who may join it, and oppose the attempts of the European bourgeoisie to assemble a fascistic movement based on a policy of mass COVID-19 infection.

From “herd immunity” to “endemic”: The ruling class policy of perpetual mass death

Evan Blake

Throughout the world, capitalist politicians are scrapping all remaining public health measures that slow the spread of COVID-19. Many have done so by falsely claiming that the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 has caused the virus to become “endemic” in society or will do so in the near future. The implication of this false and unscientific claim, the corollary to misleading statements that Omicron is “mild,” is that the virus is now no more harmful than the flu or even the common cold.

The term “endemic” implies a predictable and controllable level of disease in a given geographic region. The trajectory of the COVID-19 pandemic is the exact opposite.

In this Jan. 12, 2021 file photo, provided by the LA County Dept. of Medical Examiner-Coroner Elizabeth "Liz" Napoles, right, works alongside with National Guardsmen who are helping to process the COVID-19 deaths to be placed into temporary storage at LA County Medical Examiner-Coroner Office in Los Angeles. Just days after, the county announced a case of a new, more infectious variant of COVID-19. (Photo: LA County Dept. of Medical Examiner-Coroner via AP, File)

In the span of just over two months, Omicron has caused a record wave of infections and has been second only to the Delta surge in terms of global deaths. Roughly 140 million people have officially been infected with COVID-19 since the end of November, with the real figure believed to be well over 1 billion. According to the Economist, the number of excess deaths from Omicron reached a peak of 41,200 per day on Monday.

Contrary to the claims that letting Omicron rip through society will produce “endemicity” and “natural immunity,” there are now growing signs that the BA.2 Omicron subvariant could cause another global surge in cases in the coming weeks. It is believed to be at least 30 percent more infectious than BA.1 and can reinfect people within weeks of a BA.1 Omicron infection. BA.2 rapidly became dominant in Denmark and the UK and is rising quickly in the US, where its percentage of cases tripled over the past week.

The corporate media has played a leading role in spreading misinformation that COVID-19 is becoming “endemic.” On Monday, the New York Times asked, “What Would Covid Being Endemic Mean For Travel?” On Tuesday, Forbes ran an article titled, “Pandemic Endgame: What ‘Endemic’ Covid Means—And When We May Get There.” The Financial Times warned its readers, “Living with endemic Covid will not be painless.”

Over the past month, dozens of similar articles have appeared misusing the term “endemic,” while uncritically accepting politicians’ use of this term to justify the lifting of all mitigation measures.

On Wednesday, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced that laws in England which require people infected with COVID-19 to self-isolate could be lifted by the end of February. Last month, Johnson declared, “As Covid becomes endemic, we will need to replace legal requirements with advice and guidance urging people with the virus to be careful and considerate of others.”

As fascist supporters of the Freedom Convoy continue to occupy Ottawa, Canada, their demands for the lifting of all COVID-19 mitigation measures are being implemented. In Alberta, Premier Jason Kenney announced Tuesday that the proof-of-vaccination system will end at midnight Wednesday, saying the province must “move on from a widespread pandemic response, to get our lives back to normal.” Nearly all restrictions will be lifted in Quebec by mid-March, with Premier François Legault stating Tuesday, “We will need to learn to live with the virus. There may be a sixth wave eventually, but we will have to live with COVID.”

Amid a rollback of restrictions in Spain, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez stated in January, “We are heading towards an endemic illness rather than the pandemic it has been up to now.”

Across the United States, Democratic governors have begun a campaign to remove all mask mandates and other measures that were reestablished during the Omicron surge.

In California, Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom announced Monday that the state’s mask mandate will expire on February 15 as part of his “endemic plan,” which will be fully unveiled next week. This is expected to include the lifting of mask mandates in schools and other remaining COVID-19 mitigation measures.

On Wednesday, New York’s Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul announced that the state will end its mask mandate for most indoor public settings. In New Jersey, Delaware, Connecticut, Massachusetts and other Democrat-led states, mask mandates in schools were lifted this week.

These moves have clearly been sanctioned by Biden and White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Jeff Zients, who meets weekly with the National Governors Association. Following last week’s meeting, the association’s vice chairman, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy, told reporters that the discussion centered on the question, “What does the road from pandemic to endemic look like, and how do we keep score?” He added, “There was broad agreement that that’s the task before us.”

On Wednesday, Politico revealed that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is considering updating its guidelines for states on when to lift public health measures, such as mask mandates. The CDC, which has repeatedly manipulated science to suit the needs of corporate America, is expected to change its metrics to be based on hospitalization data instead of infection data, under conditions in which the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) last week stopped collecting a wide range of daily data from hospitals, including deaths, hospital capacity and more.

While the White House has been careful to not yet officially declare COVID-19 “endemic,” top officials have repeatedly alluded to this conception as part of an effort to disarm the public.

In an interview Tuesday, Biden’s chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci told the Financial Times, “As we get out of the full-blown pandemic phase of Covid-19, which we are certainly heading out of, these decisions [on mitigation measures] will increasingly be made on a local level rather than centrally decided or mandated.” Appealing to the most backward forms of American individualism, he added, “There will also be more people making their own decisions on how they want to deal with the virus.”

In lieu of using the term “endemic,” Fauci instead used the euphemism “equilibrium” to vaguely describe this same process. He stated emphatically, “There is no way we are going to eradicate this virus. But I hope we are looking at a time when we have enough people vaccinated and enough people with protection from previous infection that the Covid restrictions will soon be a thing of the past.”

Speaking last month at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Fauci stated, “It is an open question as to whether or not Omicron is going to be the live virus vaccination that everyone is hoping for.”

All of these policy changes and claims that COVID-19 is becoming “endemic” are completely unscientific and will create the conditions for new, potentially more dangerous variants to evolve that will cause further surges of infections, hospitalizations and deaths.

In a comprehensive interview with the World Socialist Web Site, Boston University epidemiologist Dr. Eleanor Murray spoke on these issues surrounding endemicity and made clear that it is entirely premature to proclaim COVID-19 endemic. She noted that those politicizing the term “endemic” are intentionally exploiting the ambiguity of the term, which has multiple definitions.

Dr. Murray stated, “The first thing is that a pandemic is an epidemic at a much grander scale, and endemic is not on that spectrum, it is an entirely separate idea. The official World Health Organization (WHO) and CDC definition of a pandemic is a disease spreading out of control in two or more regions of the world.”

She noted that the term “endemic” can refer to a mathematical model in which a disease “infects one new person for each current infection over that period,” adding, “there’s a slightly more vague definition of a disease that is just behaving predictably over a sort of long-term period in a given area.”

Commenting on the way in which the latter definition of “endemic” has been misused during the Omicron surge, she stated, “They’re saying that if COVID is endemic, we don’t need to do anything any more. And that is a ridiculous prediction. What they are implying by calling COVID endemic is that we will no longer have any COVID, which is patently false.”

Dr. Murray pointed to the dangers of this policy, stating, “Every infected person is a chance for a new variant to arise, and we have so much infection right now there is no reason that there couldn’t be a complete immune-escape variant. There’s no reason we couldn’t have something twice as severe as Delta.”

The deliberate misuse of the term “endemic” is comparable to the distortion of the scientific concept of “herd immunity” by Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Jair Bolsonaro and their right-wing co-thinkers internationally. While previously applied to the level of vaccine-induced immunity needed to protect a given population, in 2020 this concept was manipulated to justify the premature reopening of all businesses and schools in order to achieve a mythical “herd immunity” based on mass infections.

In effect, this homicidal strategy has been embraced by Biden and other world leaders that previously maintained a pretense of seeking to end the pandemic through limited mitigation measures. Their distortion of the term “endemic” serves the same purpose and same interests of a ruling class determined to maximize the extraction of profits by fully reopening every school and workplace.

It is now clear that at the start of the Omicron surge, the Biden administration made a cold-blooded decision to allow the virus to rip. Undoubtedly, there were private meetings at which they asked, “How many Americans will be infected and die in this wave?” When told that millions would be infected and hundreds of thousands could die, they carried out a cost-benefit analysis and chose to proceed with this homicidal plan. As a result, over 100,000 Americans have now died during the Omicron surge.

Since the start of the pandemic, there has been a lively debate within the scientific community about whether the best response to COVID-19 is an all-out effort to eliminate or eradicate the virus, or whether it can be managed through aggressive mitigation.

But reality is rendering this question moot. On one hand, the experience in China has shown that it is possible to save millions of lives through an elimination strategy, even in the world’s most populous country. Throughout much of the rest of the world, making COVID-19 “endemic” has become a slogan for ending all restrictions on the spread of the disease, meaning that the death of 1 million Americans in the US will soon become two, three and more.

Singapore International Graduate Award (SINGA) Fully-funded PhD Scholarships 2023

Application Deadlines:

• 1st June 2022 for January 2023 intake
• 1st December 2022 for July 2023 intake.

Offered annually? Yes

Eligible Countries: International

To be taken at (country): National University of Singapore (NUS) and the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) Singapore

Eligible Field of Study: Research areas under the PhD Programme fall broadly under two categories:

• Biomedical Sciences; and
• Physical Science and Engineering.

About Scholarship: The Singapore International Graduate Award (SINGA) is a collaboration between the Agency for Science, Technology & Research (A*STAR), the National University of Singapore (NUS) and the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) to offer PhD training to be carried out in English at your chosen lab at A*STAR Research Institutes, NUS or NTU. Students will be supervised by distinguished and world-renowned researchers in these labs. Upon successful completion, students will be conferred a PhD degree by either NUS or NTU.

Type: PhD, Research

Eligibility and Selection Criteria

• Open for application to all international graduates with a passion for research and excellent academic results
• Good skills in written and spoken English
• Good reports from academic referees

The above eligibility criteria are not exhaustive.

Number of Scholarships: up to 240

Value of Scholarship: The award provides support for up to 4 years of PhD studies including:

• Tuition fees
• Monthly stipend of S$2,000, which will be increased to S$2,500 after the passing of the Qualifying Examination
• One-time airfare grant of up to S$1,500*
• One-time settling-in allowance of S$1,000*

* Subject to terms and conditions

Duration of Scholarship: For 4 years

How to Apply: 

If you need more Information about this scholarship, kindly visit the Scholarship Webpage

US Government Professional Fellows Program 2022

Application Deadline: 18th March 2022

Eligible Countries: Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, and Ethiopia

To Be Taken At (Country): USA

About Professional Fellows Program: Fellows will participate in an intensive five-week program at a university-based research and education center for disabilities in the U.S. They will learn innovative strategies to promote economic empowerment of individuals with disabilities through the growth of inclusive employment opportunities.

The Professional Fellows Program on Inclusive Civic Engagement is a professional program funded by the US Department of State for emerging leaders in Africa to exchange and implement best practices for inclusive civic engagement. The program will support approximately 19 disability rights professionals (Fellows) from Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, and Ethiopia to participate in a 5-week Fellowship Program in the US. Applications are due March 18, 2022.

As a Fellow, you can learn approaches to inform your efforts to build and strengthen fully inclusive civic societies for people with disabilities in your home countries. The core of the program is an individual Fellowship with a university-based research and education center for disabilities or similar host site organization in the US. As a Fellow, you will select a key policy or practice issue related to disability and civic engagement in your home countries. This policy or practice issue will provide a focus for your individual Fellowship placement training and will inform the project that you will design and implement upon returning home. The Fellowship training will also include weekly leadership seminars, mentorship, and community service.

• Begin your US Fellowship: Work with US host site organizations, such as university-based research and education centers, during your customized Fellowship placement.
• Develop a plan: Collaborate with colleagues from US host site organizations to design an individual project action plan that you will implement upon returning home (this is called the follow-on project).
• Sustain your project: After your Fellowship in the US, your US host might visit your organizations in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, or Ethiopia to facilitate project sustainability and long-term collaboration.

Type: Fellowship (Career/Professional)

Eligibility: US Government Professional Fellows Program is a merit-based competition open to candidates in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, and Ethiopia.

To apply, you must meet the following eligibility criteria. You must:

• Be between the ages of 25 and 40
• Be a citizen and resident of Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, or Ethiopia
• Be eligible to receive a US J-1 visa (Visit the US Department of State website for information about J-1 visas.)
• Be proficient in spoken English
• Be proficient in reading and writing English*
• Have at least 2 or more years of professional work experience
• Not currently participate in an academic, training, or research program in the US
• Be able to travel to the US for a 5-week Fellowship beginning in September 2022 or March 2023 (Please see the program dates below.)
• Commit to return to your home country for a period of 2 cumulative years after completing the Fellowship Program

*Please let us know if you use American, Kenyan, Tanzanian, Ugandan, or Ethiopian Sign Language. We will provide American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation or cover the cost for arranging interpretation in any of the other sign languages.

How can I be selected for US Government Professional Fellows Program?

A panel of program staff and professionals working in the disability field in the US and in Africa will review all eligible applications and select and interview semi-finalists. Interviews will include an English language proficiency test.

The panel will evaluate your application based on the following criteria:

• Demonstrated past leadership and collaborative skills broadly related to disability inclusion
• Demonstrated ability as a leader to overcome obstacles and learn from failures
• Professional interest and/or experience and motivation to work on disability and civic engagement in your countries
• Knowledge and understanding of issues in disability and civic engagement in your countries
• Quality of the proposed individual inclusive civic engagement project to be implemented in your countries upon completion of the US-based Fellowship placement (this is called the follow-on project)
• Capacity to plan, implement, and sustain this follow-on project
• English language oral and written proficiency*

Number of Awards: 19

Value of Professional Fellows Program: As a Fellow, you will receive funding and support for:

• Passport application fees (if applicable)
• Visa expenses
• Round-trip travel between home country and the US
• Fellowship-related travel within the US
• Accident and health insurance for the duration of the Fellowship in the US
• Living accommodations in the US
• Living allowance to cover costs of meals, housing, and incidental expenses
• Cultural allowance to spend on books and attending cultural events
• Disability-related arrangements, if needed

Duration of Program: We will have two Fellowship exchanges, each with approximately 9-10 Fellows:

• Fall (September 30, 2022 – November 3, 2022) plus travel time
• Spring (March 24, 2023 – April 28, 2023) plus travel time

Note that Fellowship start and end dates may be subject to change.

The Fellowship training will be in-person in the US, unless otherwise specified. If COVID-19 or related travel restrictions occur, we will conduct the program virtually.

How to Apply for Professional Fellows Program:  APPLY HERE

Visit the Program Webpage for Details

Not Everyone is Male or Female: the Problem With Sex Designations

Carl Streed, Jr. & Frances Grimstad

Check out your birth certificate and surely you’ll see a designation for sex. When you were born, a doctor or clinician assigned you the “male” or “female” label based on a look at your genitalia. In the U.S., this has been standard practice for more than a century.

But sex designation is not as simple as a glance and then a check of one box or another. Instead, the overwhelming evidence shows that sex is not binary. To put it another way, the terms “male” and “female” don’t fully capture the complex biological, anatomical and chromosomal variations that occur in the human body.

That’s why calls are growing to remove sex designation from birth certificates, including a recent recommendation from the American Medical Association.

I am a professor of medicine who has worked extensively on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex and asexual (LGBTQIA+) issues. My co-author is a professor of gynecology who is deeply involved in the health of people who are trans and intersex.

Our research and clinical experience show that sex designation is not something to take for granted. For those who don’t fit neatly into one of two categories – and there are millions – an inappropriate classification on a birth certificate can have consequences that last a lifetime.

The problems with sex designation

Variations in genital anatomy happen more frequently than you might think; they occur in 0.1 to 0.2% of births annually. In the U.S., that’s about 4,000 to 8,000 babies each year.

Other sex traits don’t necessarily help either. Doctors examining the reproductive organs can find people born with both a vagina and testes, and also those born without any gonads. And when evaluating an individual’s estrogen and testosterone hormone levels, long defined as key determinants of female and male bodies, doctors find some people with vaginas still produce significant amounts of testosterone. Because of this, testosterone is not a great indicator for defining sex; higher amounts of testosterone do not necessarily make someone male.

Even karyotyping – a laboratory procedure used since the 1950s to evaluate an individual’s number and type of chromosomes – doesn’t tell the whole story. While we typically expect people to either have XX or XY pairs of sex chromosomes, many people have variations that do not fit either category. These include Turner syndrome, in which a person is born with a single X chromosome, and Kleinfelter syndrome, which occurs when a person is born with a combination of XXY chromosomes.

In short, human diversity has demonstrated that the binary categories of male and female are incomplete and inaccurate. Sex designation, rather than “two sizes fit all,” is on a spectrum. Up to 1.7% of the U.S. population – that’s more than 5 million Americans – have an anatomy and physiology that present intersex traits.

Binary designations can be damaging

Those with intersex traits who are assigned at birth to be female or male can experience medical care that harms them, both physically and psychologically.

Sometimes physicians perform surgeries to align bodies into binary categories. For example, those born with a larger than typical clitoris may have it reduced in size. But some who have this childhood surgery suffer as adults from pain and difficulty having sex.

Additionally, governments sometimes limit those with intersex traits from fully participating in society. For instance, in Australia, marriages have been annulled because governments have previously ruled that an intersex person – someone not seen to be “100% man” or “100% woman” – cannot be legally married.

Private entities often do the same. The International Olympics Committee uses cutoffs of hormone levels to determine who plays in women’s sports. As a result, some athletes have been barred from participation.

And for those with a gender identity that differs from the sex designation on a government document, discrimination, harassment or violence can result.

State governments have begun to acknowledge sex diversity. Some let gender-diverse people change their designation on birth certificates, although there are restrictions. Medicine too is changing. For example, some pediatric centers have stopped performing surgeries on newborns with differences in sex development. Still, society at large has been much slower to move beyond the use of strictly binary categories.

As clinicians, we strive to be accurate. The evidence shows that using male and female as the only options on birth certificates is not consistent with scientific reality. Evidence shows that removing this designation will tell new parents that it’s not sex assignment that’s most important at birth but rather the celebration of a healthy and happy baby.

The Embarrassing Discourse on Marital Rape

Shantanu Dutta

rape 1

It is embarrassing to any right-thinking person to read that since January 7, a two-judge bench of the Delhi High Court has been conducting daily hearings of a clutch of petitions asking for the marital rape exception under the Indian Penal Code to be struck down. India remains one of the few countries in the world that does not treat non-consensual sex within marriage as rape. One of the primary issues being considered is whether marriage gives the husband an expectation of sexual relations and if there is implied consent for sex by the wife.

Four years after the Supreme Court referred to Justice J.S. Verma’s committee’s recommendation to make marital rape a crime, Indian courts continue to take views on marital rape that are the polar opposite of each other. The recent response from courts to complaints of marital rape has been contradictory. When the Kerala High Court backed marital rape as a valid ground for divorce, a court in Maharashtra gave anticipatory bail to a man while concluding that forcible sex with his wife was not an “illegal thing” though she said it left her paralysed.

Section 375 of the Indian Penal Code 1860 says that sexual acts by a man on a woman against her free will or consent would constitute rape. However, there are two exceptions to this. The first exception says that “a medical procedure or intervention shall not constitute rape”. As per the second exception, “sexual intercourse or sexual acts by a man with his own wife” when the wife is above 18 years of age would not constitute rape. It is this provision that is being constitutionally tested. The petitioners want the exception to be struck down in totality, on the grounds that this exception violates the fundamental rights of married women.

The government has been at best ambivalent and at worst, obscurantist. The former Minister for Women and Child Development, Ms. Gandhi had said while in office that ‘marital rape’ cannot apply in India because of factors like illiteracy, poverty, social customs, religious beliefs, and the “sanctity” of marriage. How are we to understand this? That it is okay for a man to sexually abuse his wife because they are poor? Because they are illiterate? Because their marriage is solemnized by a religious ritual? Invoking arguments of destitution, religious belief and social custom can result in justifying several regressive practices that have rightfully been thrown out by law. In fact, it is because we are a country still terribly hobbled by ignorance and custom that it becomes even more important to provide legal protection for women.

Marriage in India is, among other things, a sexual contract because it gives the man implied consent to sex in perpetuity. It reinforces the man’s “ownership” rights over the wife. Refusing to criminalise marital rape is to accept that sexual coercion against a woman, so long as it is within a marriage, will be endorsed by both government and society. In 2011, a survey in India revealed that one in five men have forced their wives to have sex.1 More than two-thirds of Indian married women between 15 and 49 years old claimed to have been beaten or forced into sex by their husbands.2 In another study,3 it was found that one out of seven married women in India has been raped by her husband at least once.4 Women cannot report these rapes because the law does not acknowledge this as a crime. The International Institute of Population Sciences claimed that 26 percent of women in Pune, 23 percent in Bhubaneswar, and 16 percent in Jaipur often have sex with their husbands against their will.

Societies such as India that condemn and penalise sex outside of marriage often force men into marital relationships only for free access to their wives which puts women under incredible sexual threat. To say that the institution of marriage will be threatened by such a law is to either underestimate the very real affections, bonds, and negotiations that hold good marriages together despite deep disagreements and differences, or to accept that sexual abuse and coercion is so common in marriages that no man dares risk such a law.

The Indian government has suggested that those seeking to stop women from being raped by their husbands were “blindly” following Western customs. The government is arguing that since a majority of people in India are illiterate, uneducated, poor, conservative, and religious — unlike in America — they believe that a husband cannot rape his wife because a good Indian wife will dutifully consent to her husband forever. Then the government argues that if in such circumstances, they criminalise marital rape, a majority of marriages will fall apart presumably because women will stand up to their rapist husbands (who will then become criminals in the eyes of law) and avail of the legal recourse they have to seek justice and protection. The idea that once a woman is married, she hands over never-ending, continuous sexual consent to her husband is a deeply embedded one in our society.

Indian laws still date back to the 1700s, when Matthew Hale of England had declared that “the husband cannot be guilty of rape committed by himself upon his lawful wife. Rape is rape, irrespective of the identity of the perpetrator, and the age of the survivor. A woman who is raped by a stranger lives with a memory of a horrible attack; a woman who is raped by her husband lives with her rapist. Our penal laws, handed down from the British, have by and large remained untouched even after 73 years of independence. But English laws have been amended and marital rape was criminalised way back in 1991. Violence, sexual violence in particular, is pervasive, common, and a critical instrument in the subjugation of women and their confinement to private spaces. Meanwhile coming back to the Delhi High Court Hearings as recently as February 4th, the Union Government submitted to the Court that it defer the ongoing proceedings, seeking time to carry out a consultation process with all stakeholders including all the State governments. Clearly, the writing is there for all to see.