Faced with a new wave of COVID-19, France ends public health restrictions

Jacques Valentin

An extremely dangerous health situation is emerging in France and across Europe. As the number of COVID-19 infections rises rapidly, states are removing all health restrictions that previously helped to somewhat contain the contagion. The prospect of a huge new wave of COVID-19, driven by new variants, is looming.

Medical workers tend a patient suffering from COVID-19 in the Nouvel Hopital Civil of Strasbourg, eastern France, Thursday, Oct.22, 2020.(AP Photo/Jean-Francois Badias)

France’s fifth wave of COVID-19 began in November 2021 following the accelerated spread of the highly contagious Omicron variant across the globe. This wave infected around 17 million French people, i.e., a quarter of the population, peaking at 501,000 daily infections on January 25. The number of cases declined rapidly in February and stabilised in early March at a high level of about 50,000 cases per day in France.

Now, however, the number of infections has risen again to 116,618 on Wednesday and 108,832 yesterday in France. A similar trend is evident in Britain (91,345 cases yesterday), the Netherlands (60,263 cases), Belgium (11,180 cases) and Italy (72,568 cases): Their infection curves all began rising again around March 1.

Amid media propaganda that Omicron is “benign” and that one has to “live with the virus,” the dismantling of public health measures is well underway. On February 28, the obligation to wear a mask in indoor areas requiring a vaccination pass was abolished. Since March 14, the mask is no longer compulsory, except in public transport, hospitals and old people’s homes. In addition, health protocols in workplaces have ended, and the vaccination pass has been suspended.

On February 22 in the Senate, Health Minister Olivier Véran said the March 14 measures would be implemented only if the virus reproduction rate (R) was less than 1, the incidence rate was under 500 per 100,000, and there were fewer than 1,500 COVID-19 patients in intensive care.

Now, however, the removal of health restrictions is underway although the incidence rate is 629, 1,855 people are in intensive care and on Sunday the effective viral reproduction rate was above 1. This underscores that the public health criteria proclaimed by the government are smoke and mirrors. In fact, the state is turning to a policy of mass infection in the hypothetical and false hope that repeated waves of infection and mass death will produce herd immunity.

The tsunami of Omicron cases has been devastating, killing over 20,000 people in France and 300,000 people in Europe. The milestone of 140,000 COVID-19 deaths was hit in France on March 10. The level of deaths remains high, despite 794 deaths in the last 7 days.

Never before, however, has the media reported so little on COVID-19 deaths. This trend has intensified with the Russia-Ukraine war, as French media beat the war drums against Russia.

We are witnessing an unprecedented collapse of public health policy. To get an idea of what the current “return to normal” means, it is useful to compare the excess deaths from COVID-19 with those from influenza. The two major influenza mortality peaks in France after the 1918 Spanish flu were the Asian flu of 1957-58 (over 20,000 deaths) and the Hong Kong flu of 1968-69 (over 30,000 deaths).

In 2010, the National Institute for Demographic Studies wrote: “From 1970 onwards, the death rate from influenza has fallen dramatically, without the disappearance of epidemics. Over the last 40 years, the risk of death has been divided by 10, and in 2005, the year of the last major epidemic in France, the number of direct deaths hardly exceeded a thousand. This impressive drop in influenza mortality is the direct consequence of an appropriate prevention policy, based on vaccination of subjects at risk and associated with better therapeutic management of complications.”

Since Omicron’s appearance, COVID-19 is typically presented in the media as an endemic that we will have to live with, “like the flu.” In fact, the fight against influenza has been constant for 50 years with appreciable results, leading to a huge reduction in mortality, even though influenza remains endemic.

To claim that COVID-19 is endemic and would lead to mortality comparable to that of influenza is a lie, which serves to conceal the colossal regression in health care that is being prepared.

Over just three months, the fifth COVID-19 wave alone has killed as many people as the Asian flu of 1957-58 and claimed 20 times more victims than the 2005 flu peak. This is despite mass vaccination, which means that popular immunisation is high compared to that of influenza. In addition, COVID-19 has specific effects distinct from influenza, requiring more hospitalization, rehabilitation for Long COVID, and significant neurological damage, the long-term effects of which remain unknown.

The much touted “return to normal” thus involves only the dismantling of the precautionary measures but not the end of the pandemic in 2022 or after.

The Omicron BA.2 subvariant is driving infections in Europe and worldwide. It has risen above 50 percent of cases in France since March 1, and its share of cases rises every week. Far more contagious than BA.1, it will soon be overwhelmingly dominant.

The Pasteur Institute has predicted a sixth wave starting in March, fueled by the lack of health protocols.

Much has been made in France of WHO technical officer Maria Van Kerkhove’s statement that “The Omicron sub-variant BA2 does not cause a more severe form of Covid than BA1.”

However, the scientific data is contradictory and not at all reassuring with, for example, animal studies showing a deeper lung penetration by BA.2.

Denmark, which experienced a large outbreak of Omicron BA.2 in the fifth wave, had a higher level of infections and deaths than at any other time during the pandemic, despite a very high vaccination rate.

Hong Kong, a densely populated area of nearly 7.5 million people, held the virus at bay for nearly two years. Now it is facing a deluge of Omicron BA.2 infections, flooding hospitals, filling morgues and causing the health care system to collapse.

The Omicron BA.1 and BA.2 subvariants are genetically very different, making it easy for those who have been infected with BA.1 to be reinfected. The efficacy of vaccines developed on the basis of the initial strain of the virus offers minimal protection from infection and mainly affects the severity of the disease. However, the vaccine'’ effectiveness against the Omicron variants fades rapidly after a few months.

Russian court rejects appeal by historian Yuri Dmitriev, upholds 15-year prison sentence

Clara Weiss

Amidst the war in Ukraine, the Putin regime is continuing its crackdown on all efforts to research the history of the crimes of Stalinism.

On March 15, the Supreme Court of the Republic of Karelia in Russia rejected an appeal by Yuri Dmitriev, a historian of the Stalinist Great Terror, who was sentenced to 15 years in prison in a massive state frame-up. The Russian Supreme Court has also excluded all attempts to overturn the sentence. Having exhausted all legal paths in Russia, Dmitriev’s lawyer will now bring the case before the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).

Yuri Dmitriev

Yuri Dmitriev was centrally involved in the excavations of mass graves in the Sandarmokh forest in Karelia, a region bordering Finland, and the establishment of the names of those who were murdered there by the Stalinist secret police, the NKVD, during the Great Terror in 1937-38. Over a million people were killed during the Great Terror, among them tens of thousands of revolutionaries from Russia, Germany, Poland and many other countries. It was a political genocide, targeting above all the supporters of Leon Trotsky, who opposed the Stalinist, nationalist reaction against the October revolution of 1917. It also targeted all those who remembered and played an active part in the revolution.

As of this writing, the whereabouts of Yuri Dmitriev in Russia’s prison system are unclear, but it appears that he has now been sent to a penal colony. Dmitriev is 66 years old, and the rejection of his appeal is tantamount to a death sentence.

The case against Dmitriev, which is based on allegations of sexual assault of a minor, was a politically motivated state frame-up from its start in 2016. The charges have never been substantiated. The trial proceeded behind closed doors for years until he was sentenced to 13 years in prison in September 2020; the sentence was extended to 15 years last December.

The character of the charges not only served to create a basis for his persecution but also to discredit and defame him personally and, by extension, his work.

Thanks in no small part to Dmitriev’s efforts, the Sandarmokh shooting site, along with the Kommunarka and Butovo shooting sites in Moscow, is today one of only a few mass burial locations from the Great Terror that have been uncovered and whose victims are known by name; many more such shooting sites remain undiscovered to this day.

For decades, the Soviet bureaucracy kept the location of mass graves at Sandarmokh and elsewhere a “state secret.” The site was not uncovered until the crisis of Stalinism in the late 1980s created conditions for the partial revelations of the historical truth about the scale of the Great Purges. Expeditions headed by Dmitriev discovered 236 burial pits in the 1990s; he helped compile the list of names of those who were shot in the forest, as well as the names of their executioners; authored several works on the Great Terror in Karelia and became the head of the regional branch of Memorial.

The so called “Solovki” operation, in which 1,111 political prisoners were murdered, gives a sense of the political scale of the crimes committed by Stalinism in Sandarmokh alone.

In a sinister mockery of the ideals and leaders of the October Revolution, the bureaucracy organized its single biggest mass shooting here for the week of the 20th anniversary of the October 1917 seizure of power by the working class. As one historian of the Sandarmokh shootings noted, about “half of those who were shot were simple workers from Petersburg [Leningrad],” the city of the 1917 revolution.

Among those shot on October 27 and November 1-4, 1937 were also several Old Bolsheviks and members of the Left Opposition, including Nadezhda Smilga-Poluyan, an Old Bolshevik and the wife of Ivar Smilga, who had been a close collaborator of Lenin in 1917 and leader of the Left Opposition in the 1920s; the Old Bolsheviks Grigory Shklovsky and Georgy Yakovenko, who had signed declarations of the Left Opposition in the 1920s; Revekka Shumskaya and Noi Vol’fson, party members since the first years of the Soviet Union who had been arrested for support of the Opposition; and Martin Yakobson and Aleksandr Blaufel’d, two Old Bolsheviks who had fought for socialism in Estonia since the revolution of 1905.

In total, over 9,500 people from 60 different nationalities are believed to have been killed at Sandarmokh. A large number of them fell victim to the “national operations” by the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, which targeted national minorities such as the Ukrainians, the Finns and the Poles.

Although Dmitriev, a deeply religious man, has always approached the crimes of Stalinism from the standpoint of anti-Communism, his work constituted an important contribution to reestablishing the historical truth about the Great Terror. As such, he was an intolerable thorn in the eye of the Russian state. The merciless crackdown on him is aimed at intimidating all those who are seeking to learn the truth about the crimes of Stalinism—be it professional historians or ordinary people.

The persecution of Dmitriev was also accompanied by a campaign, spearheaded by Russia’s Ministry of Culture and backed by neo-Stalinist forces in Russia’s pseudo-left, to propagandize the lie that the mass graves in Sandarmokh were the result not of the Great Terror, but rather of Finnish executions of Soviet soldiers during World War II.

The state vendetta against Dmitriev has been a central component of the years-long, systematic efforts of the Putin regime to rehabilitate Joseph Stalin, the “gravedigger” of the October revolution, and justify his crimes. This campaign has involved the production of a viciously anti-Semitic series smearing Leon Trotsky in 2017 (the series was then distributed by Netflix); the systematic destruction of archival material about the Great Terror; and, mostly recently, the liquidation of the Memorial research center, the single most important research institution on the history of the Great Terror.

Motivating this extraordinary campaign of state repression and historical falsification is a profound fear by the Russian oligarchy of the political consequences of the establishment of the historical truth about the October revolution, and the internationalist-socialist opposition to Stalinism, which was led by Leon Trotsky and his Left Opposition.

The Putin regime is the direct heir of the Stalinist reaction against the socialist October revolution of 1917, which culminated in the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union by the bureaucracy. Thirty years later, the Putin regime and the oligarchy as a whole are in a profound crisis. While its reactionary invasion in Ukraine is above all a bankrupt and criminal response to the systematic encirclement of Russia by imperialism since 1991, the Putin regime also seeks thereby to divert from immense class tensions and escalate the promotion of Great Russian nationalism. Tellingly, Putin began his speech justifying the war by attacking the October revolution and Vladimir Lenin in particular.

As the war drags on, developing ever more directly into an open confrontation with NATO, the economic sanctions are creating conditions for a socioeconomic disaster unseen in the country since the Second World War. After over a million people died because of the oligarchy’s criminal response to the COVID-19 pandemic, now, entire branches of industry are being devastated and millions of workers face the prospect of losing their employment.

The attacks of the Putin regime on historical truth and its rehabilitation of Stalinism are aimed, above all, at suppressing the historical truth about the October revolution and the socialist opposition to Stalinism in anticipation of major social and political unrest in the working class.

P&O Ferries sack 800 workers on-the-spot in class war offensive

Robert Stevens

In a major escalation of the class struggle, P&O Ferries sacked its entire 800 crew workforce Thursday with immediate effect. The firm said it intended to reemploy a new agency-based workforce.

P&O Ferries bringing agency scab crew onboard a ship to replace terminated staff (video screenshot/Nautilus International/Twitter)

There was no warning by P&O, owned by container and logistics conglomerate DP World. P&O halted all crossings and ordered its ships back to port before firing its workforce ahead of releasing an announcement later in the afternoon.

The company said its actions were necessary as it was “not a viable business” having lost around £250 million over two years. It warned of “significant disruption” as passengers were left stranded desperately trying to make alternative arrangements. The firm operates four routes: Dover to Calais; Hull to Rotterdam; Liverpool to Dublin; and Cairnryan, Scotland, to Larne, Northern Ireland.

In a cost-cutting operation its Hull/Zeebrugge, Belgium, sailings were axed in January 2021. Prior to the pandemic it carried more than 10 million passengers a year and about 15 percent of all freight cargo in and out of Britain.

As part of its brutal pre-planned operation, P&O had a scab workforce of agency workers waiting at docksides in uniform ready to board the ferries.

P&O mobilised private security guards to remove sacked crews off its ships. Workers shot social media footage of men in balaclavas entering ships. The Daily Mail reported that the hired goons were told they were on a job that “would last a week and be paid at £14.50 an hour.”

The Daily Telegraph revealed an email sent to the goons from a private security firm last week reading, “You have been selected to deploy on a task in Dover that will be fairly high profile. This task will run for 1 week... the client we are assisting requires 16 officers (handcuff-trained) to support their security teams in the unlikely event some of their staff become challenging.

“Essentially, our client will be informing staff of redundancies and there is a possible risk of backlash... You will all need your uniform including cuffs and utility belt.” The instructions ended, “You will not need body armour for this task.”

One woman whose husband and son have lost their jobs in Dover told the press, “When P&O suspended sailings this morning, crews were waiting on the ships with no idea what was happening—even the captains didn’t know… They were told they had five minutes to get their stuff and get off the ships.

“These guys are week on week off workers who have called these ships home for half of the year every year. They have personal effects in lockers which they can’t get to—clothes, bedding, photographs and in some cases financial documents which will be taken out and thrown.”

Workers onboard ships were dismissed on a pre-recorded Zoom call. A company boss read out a three-minute message declaring that all serving crew members would be fired and replaced by a third-party company. It concluded, “You are terminated with immediate effect on the grounds of redundancy.”

In its later statement, P&O said, “We have made a £100 million loss year on year, which has been covered by our parent DP World. This is not sustainable. Our survival is dependent on making swift and significant changes now. Without these changes, there is no future for P&O Ferries.”

This from a firm owned by DP World that has awarded hundreds of millions of pounds in bonuses to its directors during the course of the pandemic, while helping themselves to taxpayer-funded bailouts. DP World is owned by Dubai’s sovereign wealth fund and chaired by billionaire Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem. It reported a profit of $896 million (£683 million) last year.

The sackings are the second massive tranche since DP World took over P&O and puts the remaining 2,200 staff on notice. DP World bought P&O Ferries for £322 million in 2019, just months before the pandemic struck. Its first move as it paid a £270 million dividend to shareholders at the end of April 2020 was to fire, with no opposition from the trade unions, 1,100 of P&O’s workforce insisting this was necessary to keep it “viable and sustainable”.

P&O’s owners applied for a £150 million bailout from the government. This was refused but DP World received an undisclosed figure from the taxpayer to keep freight routes from the UK running and almost £15 million to pay 80 percent of the wages of 1,400 furloughed staff.

Workers on P&O ships did whatever they could to oppose their removal from vessels. At Dover, numbers refused to leave ships as others gathered at the port and confronted security staff and police backing the company operation. Workers blocked the road and told lorry drivers and others trying to enter the port that “we’re not moving”. The Daily Mail reported one sacked worker saying, “I refuse to move from this road, all this service for nothing. The police will have to take me away.”

In Hull, the captain of the Pride of Hull ferry, after hearing of the redundancies, drew up the gangplanks refusing to allow police or scabs on the ship. According to reports, the ship had enough supplies to feed the crew for as “long as it takes.”

At Larne in Northern Ireland, staff staged a sit-in before eventually departing the vessel.

The trade union bureaucracy and Labour Party moved immediately to assert a nationalist response to P&O’s actions. Neither the Rail, Maritime and Transport union (RMT), nor the small Nautilus International professional body called industrial action in response to a brutal dismissal of their members, even though reports suggested that the company may have acted illegally on several grounds.

RMT General Secretary Mick Lynch said, “We are deeply disturbed by growing speculation that the company are today planning to sack hundreds of UK seafarers and replace them with foreign labour.”

The general secretary of the Nautilus International maritime union, Mark Dickinson, said, “The news that P&O Ferries is sacking crew across its entire UK fleet is a betrayal of British workers. It is nothing short of scandalous given that this Dubai-owned company received millions of pounds of British taxpayer's money during the pandemic.”

In Parliament, Labour Shadow Transport Secretary Louise Haigh described the sackings as a “national scandal” which is “beneath contempt”, before calling on the Conservative government to intervene to save the jobs. The government put on a show of concern but offered nothing more than a pledge to speak to employers and the unions.

Ferry workers cannot look to the nationalist and pro-capitalist trade unions, or any section of the ruling elite to defend jobs. They are up against a global company, with massive resources employing 50,000 workers in 40 countries worldwide. In addition, as has already been made clear, ferry workers will be confronted with police attacks as the state is mobilised against them.

Under a strict Zero-COVID strategy, new infections in China turn sharply lower

Benjamin Mateus

The Western media has suddenly shown interest in the experience of China in the coronavirus pandemic, with the first significant surge in infections, due to the Omicron variant, since the February days of 2020. But this press campaign hypes the casualties (far lower than the grim daily death toll in country after country around the world, and not a single death ) and ignores the effectiveness of China’s application of “dynamic zero-COVID policy,” which has had immediate success in stemming infection.

A health worker in protective suit takes a throat swab sample from a worker at a COVID-19 testing site inside a hotel used for people who worked at the 2022 Winter Paralympics to stay during a period of health quarantine, Thursday, March 17, 2022, in the Yanqing district of Beijing. (AP Photo/Andy Wong)

In the first two weeks of March, over 15,000 domestically transmitted cases had been identified across 28 provincial-level regions, with the epicenter of the wave centered on Jilin province in the northeast. The exponential rise in cases propelled authorities to implement the current strict measures that have repeatedly proven successful—a simple matter of denying the virus the necessary human fuel.

By Monday, March 14, China’s National Health Commission reported 5,154 new COVID-19 cases (143 percent rise from the day before), the highest single-day figure. On March 15, cases across China had dropped 41 percent to 3,054, and the cases in Jilin appeared to stabilize. On March 16, national numbers continued their decline to 2,432.

Yesterday, the Commission reported there had been only 1,317 new COVID-19 cases, of which 91 were imported, and 1,226 were indigenous cases. This corresponds to a decline of 75 percent over four days. Additionally, new cases in Jilin province have also turned downwards.

In their summary of cases to date, the National Health Commission wrote, “[Over the last 27 months we] had received reports of 123,773 confirmed cases and 4,636 deaths [ no additional deaths ] in 31 provincial-level regions and the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps on the Chinese mainland, and in all 104,287 patients had been cured and discharged from hospitals. There still remained 14,850 confirmed cases (including 16 cases in serious condition) and 14 suspected cases. [Additionally,] 1,919,136 people had been identified as having had close contact with infected patients, and 244,428 were still under medical observation.”

Instead of congratulating China’s massive effort and calling on their own countries to emulate these comprehensive public health measures and bring the pandemic to an end once and for all, the main concern of the international press is the potential ripple effect China’s efforts will have on the complex international supply chain that capitalist production depends on. It is the state of the global financial system and capitalist profit that they lament. The countless lives saved and livelihoods spared in the world’s most populous country do not enter their calculations.

The Financial Times wrote, “China’s latest attempt to suppress an outbreak of COVID-19 with lockdowns in several cities has disrupted global supply chains, which is likely to lead to lower growth and profitability across the technology industry. Apple supplier Foxconn said on Wednesday its revenue could contract by up to three percent this year, and it might struggle to raise its operating profit margin as component costs rise and the pandemic persists.” Notably, Apple was the first US company to reach a market value of three trillion dollars on the first trading day of 2022.

Shenzhen is the third most populous city in China. It is in the southern province of Guangdong and one of China’s special economic zones. The local government ordered all but essential factories in the technology manufacturing district to halt production for one week. The city will conduct three rounds of mass testing of the entire population during the one-week shutdown with the hope of lifting restrictions by March 20.

In an announcement by the local government to the city’s populace, they request, “All government agencies and institutions at all levels in the city, except for the staff who undertake epidemic prevention tasks, work from home, or become community volunteers, report to the community where they live, and fully participate in community epidemic prevention work and community services.” They added, “Market supervision, commerce, and other relevant departments and supply guarantee companies ensure sufficient supply of daily necessities and stable prices.”

The measures being taken in Shenzhen exemplify the efforts being taken across the entire country. Fundamental to the success of China’s zero-COVID policy is the “dynamic” interaction that takes place between the local governments and the population in enlisting their cooperation to ensure infections are stopped in their tracks and chains of transmissions broken permanently. It is precisely this symbiotic relationship that the bourgeois press has failed to grasp in their constant carping at the country’s monumental efforts.

They prefer to cite comments by the likes of Olaf Schatteman, a 20-year consulting veteran and supply chain expert at Bain & Company, to substantiate their criticism of China’s policy. Schatteman told the Times, “China is digging itself into a deep hole with its zero-COVID policy. As the restrictions are hurting suppliers and logistic operations, companies are moving beyond containing the current crisis and towards diversifying production locations, undermining China as the supply chain hub of the world.”

Heeding the disastrous lessons offered most recently in Hong Kong, the most recent territory laid waste by the global pandemic, where the per capita daily death toll is reaching 40 per million and morgues are filled to the brim with corpses, the Chinese health authorities reissued city-wide lockdowns affecting more than 52 million people.

The whole province of Jilin, with 24 million people and the hardest-hit region by COVID-19, has been isolated. The industrial city of Dongguan, with 10.4 million people, has locked down. Langfang, which borders the capital Beijing, has closed all non-essential businesses. Schools in Shanghai have returned to online classes, and residents have been asked to shelter in place unless absolutely necessary.

The current threat to China’s zero-COVID policy commenced in February when daily cases began to grow in line with the spread of the Omicron subvariant in Southeast Asia and Oceania. South Korea, Vietnam, Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, Australia and New Zealand were also experiencing a rapid rise in community transmission as they moved away from policies that would contain infections.

The Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation estimated that on January 10, 2022, the global daily COVID-19 infection rate had reached almost 50 million per day. And country after country where Omicron arrived saw a massive surge in cases that disrupted every aspect of social life for several weeks while taking another 600,000 lives since the New Year. And, once more, due to efforts to completely abandon any meager mitigation measures, the BA.2 version of Omicron has reignited a new surge in cases across Europe.

Indeed, one must ask, which policy, “let it rip” or “dynamic zero,” has served the planet’s population better? The coordinated, streamlined measures employed in China are a far different approach than the initial chaotic days when the novel virus first emerged in the population in December 2019. These efforts have paid dividends as the Chinese population—despite the police-state rule of the Stalinist regime—have had much more freedom in their everyday life over the past 2+ years, compared to the working people of Europe, the US, Latin America, and the rest of the world.

What is proven in China is that a dynamic zero-COVID strategy is not only feasible, even with Omicron, but necessary. What has threatened the world economy—in the sense of the development of the productive forces, not the short-term financial interests of the billionaire parasites—has not been the adherence to a zero-COVID policy, but rather, the short-sighted and criminal policy of living in permanence with the virus that has created so much misery and death.

Spain mobilises 23,000 police in bid to crush nationwide truckers strike

Alejandro López

Spain’s Socialist Party (PSOE)-Podemos government announced yesterday it is mobilising over 23,000 police to an estimated 75,000 striking truck drivers. The truckers have been on an indefinite nationwide strike since Monday, protesting rising fuel prices amid the NATO war drive targeting Russia and its energy exports over the war in Ukraine.

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)

Yesterday, Transport Minister Raquel Sánchez dropped the pretence that the strike was not having a major impact and announced a massive police mobilisation. She said the Interior Ministry had told all Spanish regions to prepare police assault squads tasked with “organising and securing convoys of carriers of essential goods.”

Hysterically denouncing striking truckers on the picket lines as violent criminals, she said: “We cannot allow them to subject that country to arm wrestling that we will not tolerate, we are working with the Interior Ministry to mobilise more than 15,000 officers to repress these violent actions that do not represent the industry. We are sensitive but we are not going to give into this blackmail, sabotage and boycott.”

The police deployment prepared by the PSOE-Podemos government totals over 23,500 officers, including 7,122 National Police and 16,476 paramilitary Civil Guards. Regional police forces like the Basque Ertzaintza, the Catalan Mossos d'Esquadra and the Navarre Foral Police will also be mobilised.

It is critical to politically mobilise workers across Spain and internationally to defend truckers against the police onslaught being prepared by this pseudo-left and social-democratic coalition government. The deployment of unprecedented numbers of police is a desperate threat against this strike, which has had a powerful impact across Spain. It comes two days after an undercover cop shot a striking trucker on a picket line near Madrid.

The strike was called by the Platform for the Defense of Road Transport of Merchandise, which accounts for account for 85 percent of smaller truck companies and self-employed truckers, to protest rising fuel prices and poor working conditions after decades of rampant exploitation. Although numbers are not clear, an estimated 25,000 to 85,000 truckers are joining the strike. The government claims that only 1,000 are involved, which is absurd. It would mean they have mobilised nearly three policeman for each striker.

The strike, consisting of pickets, multiple roadblocks and go-slow trucker convoys, mainly in the country’s major cities and ports as well as industrial and commercial zones, is severely starting to affect supplies of agricultural and industrial products to the national and international markets.

Spain’s CEOE and CEPYME business lobbies, representing big and small business, respectively, said the strike was “causing serious harm to the supply chain in industry, business and the food sector.” Spain’s national federation of dairy industries, FENIL, announced that some of its members had to halt production. Mercamadrid, Spain’s largest wholesale market and produce distribution centre, received half the volume of fruit and vegetables yesterday of a normal day.

Factories are shutting down due to missing components. Multinational steel company ArcelorMittal is stopping production in Asturias. The Ford factory in Almussafes (Valencia) has had to stop vehicle production. Azucarera, the only sugar factory operating year round in Spain, has stopped its plant in Jerez de la Frontera.

The struggle erupted as a rebellion against the large truck drivers’ associations and union bureaucracies organised in the National Committee for Road Transport (CNTC). The CNTC, the only state-recognized truckers organisation, has opposed the strike throughout. The strike is now developing into an open clash with Spain’s PSOE-Podemos government, backed by the NATO military alliance and the banks.

This comprehensively exposes the PSOE-Podemos government. It has already proved its visceral hostility to the workers, imposing social austerity, slashing COVID-19 health measures, inciting militarism and anti-Russia hatred, and implementing violent anti-migrant policies.

The size of the police force mobilised by Podemos and the PSOE is historically unprecedented. Madrid mobilised around 12,000 police and Civil Guards to crack down on the 2017 Catalan independence referendum, wounding over 1,000 people as voters responded to police beatings at polling stations with mass civil disobedience. Prior to that, 18,000 troops and police were sent in October 1934 to crush the armed miners revolt in Asturias, two years before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War.

Continuing the Stalinist tradition of slandering all their opponents as fascists, the PSOE-Podemos government is attacking the truckers as a far-right movement, though the Platform that is leading the strike has denied any link with the far-right and the neo-fascist Vox party.

After a meeting with the unions and members of the CNTC, Sánchez said she refused to meet the strikers, stating: “It is a boycott encouraged by violent positions of hatred, of the far-right, of the extreme right. It has nothing to do with the right to strike.”

Leading Podemos members like Deputy Prime Minister Yolanda Díaz, ministers Ione Belarra, Alberto Garzón and Irene Montero, and former Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias have said nothing. This deafening silence on the strike, which amounts to a blank cheque to the riot police, is shared by the various pseudo-left satellites of Podemos. The Morenoite Revolutionary Workers’ Current (CRT) has written literally nothing on it in its web publication, Izquierda Diario.

The response of Podemos came, however, through its affiliated union, the Stalinist Workers Commissions (CCOO), which is denouncing the strike. “There is no strike,” CCOO leader Unai Sordo said, denouncing the strikers for allowing self-employed truckers and the owners of small trucking businesses to join the strike. Sordo added, “they are the same ones who do not want to pay their drivers a salary, but rather by mileage.”

The social-democratic General Union of Workers (UGT) shamelessly appealed to police to repress the strikers the same way they repress the UGT’s own members. UGT officials told El Periódico de España that police action should be intense, “just like what they exercise against us in our protests.”

They continued by denouncing self-employed strikers for not contributing union dues to the UGT bureaucracy, declaring: “They should ask companies to put them on the payroll, because then they would be wage earners. Then they could go on a legal strike.”

This is another lie. The UGT and CCOO are determined to prevent the truckers strike from spreading to larger trucking companies and other layers of workers. Two days ago, they called off a freight transport strike by 3,000 wage-earning truck drivers in Cádiz province, cynically claiming employers were close to an agreement.

Australia’s rising cost of living outpacing official inflation

Oscar Grenfell

As is the case internationally, a surging cost of living in Australia is finding only a pale reflection in rising official inflation figures. The increasing price of basic goods, including essentials such as food and petrol, along with housing costs, is deepening a social crisis amid an ongoing suppression of wages.

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

The fears within the political and business establishment that this will fuel struggles by the working class have found expression over the past week with a host of official publications declaring that May’s federal election will be “dominated” by the cost of living.

The Liberal-National Coalition government and the Labor opposition have described it as a “big issue” in their campaigns. Both, however, are pitching themselves to the ruling elite as being best able to oversee sweeping pro-business restructuring, as well austerity measures to pay for the billions handed to the corporations during the pandemic.

In other words, whichever party forms government, the onslaught on living conditions will deepen.

The official inflation rate increased by 3.5 percent in 2021, on top of a 21 percent rise over the decade prior. According to the Consumer Price Index (CPI) figures the cost of non-discretionary items went up by 4.5 percent over that period. Goods, which outstripped inflation, were the most expensive they have been since 2008 in adjusted terms.

An analysis this month by One Big Switch of shelf price increases at supermarket giants Woolworths and Coles over the past 12 months pointed to the understated character of the official figures.

On average, the supermarket chains had hiked the price of fruit, vegetables and pantry items by five percent and drinks by seven. Some increases were far higher, with cooking oil up 19 percent, branded canned fruit 17 and baked beans and tinned spaghetti 21 percent.

The CPI excludes a number of housing costs, including the purchase of existing dwellings, meaning the official increase for the sector was just four percent over 2021. In reality, residential property prices rose nationally by an average of 23.7 percent, the biggest increase on record.

In the capital cities, the growth was even greater, at 30 percent in Hobart, 29 percent in Canberra, 28 percent in Brisbane and 27 percent in Sydney. Nationally, rents increased by at least nine percent, but were far higher in some areas. In regional Australia, where incomes are generally lower, rental increases were an unprecedented 12 percent.

The rising inflation in Australia is part of a global trend. It is driven by the monetary policies of the central banks, led by the US Federal Reserve, which have poured trillions of dollars into the financial markets. This has fueled a massive growth of speculation and debt, including in housing markets.

The longer-term trends have been compounded by the breakdown of supply chains, caused by the “let it rip” pandemic policies of governments everywhere and the resulting COVID surge of the past three months. The outbreak of war in Ukraine, provoked by the US and NATO, and the sweep of economic sanctions implemented against Russia by the Western powers, is further driving up prices.

Average daily petrol prices are already surging. They reached an average of 182.4 cents a litre in the major capital cities by the end of February according to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission and have since exceeded 225 cents in some areas. These are the highest prices in eight years.

CommSec has estimated that the ongoing fuel rise will result in households spending an average of $257 a month, on top of other price increases. That would amount to an estimated $670 more in fuel costs this year than last.

Already, the prices are too great for growing numbers of ordinary people. Foodbank chief executive Kata O’Hara told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation this week that the charity was receiving “calls we’ve never had before and people are referring to the fact they just can’t afford to get their car out on the road. They’ll be making a decision about do I fill up the car or do I get food this week?”

A survey by RAC, a Western Australian motoring association, found that 25 percent of people would struggle to afford petrol if prices remained at current levels. Some 40 percent said they were looking to cut down on driving.

The flow on effects in a range of industries are vast. Paul Zahra, the chief executive of the Australian Retailers Association, warned this week of a “tsunami” of price increases on the back of the fuel increases.

“When you’re looking at fuel prices, it’s not just about transportation,” Zahra told the Sydney Morning Herald. “The machinery that’s used to manufacture products or harvest fruit and vegetables—that uses fossil fuels of some sort. It touches so many points. I’m not sure if there’s any category or factor it doesn’t affect. It goes across the board.”

Businesses will pass their own mounting costs on to consumers and will seek to offset them with further attacks on workers’ wages and conditions.

Financial commentators have warned that headline inflation could increase to five percent by mid-2022, while manufacturers and major retailers have foreshadowed further widespread price increases of up to 20 percent in many sectors.

The Reserve Bank of Australia last week kept interest rates at record lows of 0.1 percent, citing the uncertainty caused by the Ukraine crisis. It is tipped, however, to increase rates, in line with the actions of the US Fed. Having promoted a speculative frenzy and driven up inflation with loose monetary policies, the central banks are moving to tighten lending. The main impetus is fear that growing inflation will provoke a major wages push by the working class.

Any increase in rates will hit the working class the hardest. Loans and advances across the economy stand at $2,966.1 billion, or around 150 percent of GDP. Hit by declining incomes, ordinary people have gone into ever greater debt, much of it in housing costs.

According to the Australian Prudential and Regulation Authority, almost a quarter of mortgage loans in the December quarter were to households with debt six times greater than income. With wages forecast to remain stagnant at less than 3 percent this year, any interest rate rise could push hundreds of thousands of households over the financial cliff. A possible fall in house prices could also leave them with a mortgage greater than the value of the property it secures.

In a pre-budget address today, Treasurer Scott Frydenberg adopted a pose of concern over the cost-of-living crisis. But any, at this stage unspecified, government assistance would be “targeted and proportionate.” The central task was to transition to the “second phase” of the “economic recovery,” centered on “debt reduction.” These are code words for an onslaught on social spending, which will deepen the crisis afflicting working class households, to offset the billions given to big business during the pandemic.

Labor leader Anthony Albanese has denounced the government as “out of touch” on the cost-of-living question. Asked what policies a Labor government would implement, Albanese told reporters yesterday: “There’s a range of measures that could be looked at in terms of cost of living, we’ll wait and see.”

In reality, Albanese is making a pitch to the ruling elite to support the election of a Labor government, based on promises that it would “resume the reform project” of the Hawke and Keating governments. They deregulated the economy, presided over the destruction of whole sections of industry that were not sufficiently profitable and set in place the architecture for a decades-long suppression of wages.

Together with Labor, the unions have enforced the continuous onslaught on jobs, pay and conditions that have created the social crisis. Now, their aim is to divert widespread anger behind the election of yet another big business Labor government.

Three years since the Christchurch terror attack

Tom Peters

Wednesday marked three years since the March 15, 2019, terrorist attack in Christchurch, New Zealand. Fascist gunman Brenton Tarrant murdered 51 men, women and children at two mosques, and injured nearly 50 more. The attack, driven by racism and anti-Muslim hatred, was streamed on video over the internet by Tarrant.

A vigil in response to the Christchurch mosque shooting, located along the entrance to the botanical gardens on Rolleston Avenue. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

The horrific event, the largest mass shooting in New Zealand history, provoked widespread shock. Mass vigils were held in New Zealand and other countries in solidarity with the victims and their families, and in opposition to racism and bigotry.

To mark the third anniversary, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern moved a parliamentary motion to recognise the victims and “reassert the promise we made as a House to protect Muslim New Zealanders and their right to be safe from fear.”

She declared that the Labour Party-Greens coalition government had “made substantial progress” towards addressing “the underlying causes of terrorism and violent extremism,” without providing any evidence to back this up.

Internationally, the danger posed by the far-right is growing. Extreme right wing and fascist supporters of Donald Trump, who Tarrant admired as a “symbol of white renewal,” attempted a violent coup in Washington on January 6, 2021. At present, the US and its allies are backing fascist militias as part of the war against Russia in Ukraine.

The extreme-right is playing a leading role in rallies against COVID-19 public health restrictions, including in Australia and New Zealand.

The Ardern government’s main response to the Christchurch terror attack has been to strengthen the powers of the state. Ardern referred to legislation which removed 61,000 firearms from the community, and the “Christchurch Call” initiative, launched in collaboration with France and several other governments, ostensibly “to eliminate terrorist and violent extremist content online.”

Green Party MP Golriz Ghahraman also spoke in parliament, blaming the attack on online “hate speech,” and demanding stronger hate speech laws. The government has delayed a plan to introduce such laws, clearly concerned about public opposition.

As the crisis of capitalism deepens, internet censorship and “hate speech” laws will be used against working-class opposition to social inequality, militarism, and the criminal policies that have allowed COVID-19 to spread.

What counts as “extremism” will likewise be determined by the state. The French government and others supporting the Christchurch Call, such as the US, Hungary, India and Sri Lanka, routinely promote anti-Muslim chauvinism to divert social tensions, in the name of combating “extremism.”

The response of the Ardern government has been to use the massacre to censor freedom of speech of the population as a whole and to throw a veil of secrecy and silence around Tarrant’s methods, contacts and links prior to the attack.

Three years after the Christchurch attack, there are many unanswered questions about how Tarrant was able to plan and carry out his massacre. There were warnings made about Tarrant, including a report to Australian police of a death threat he sent online in 2016, and a report to New Zealand police about violent comments made by members of his gun club in Otago.

A royal commission of inquiry in 2020 whitewashed the actions of police. The commissioners asserted that the state agencies could not have done anything to prevent the terror attack. The inquiry was held behind closed doors and the evidence it examined has been kept secret, including interviews with police, intelligence officials and Tarrant himself.

The royal commission also covered up the role of successive New Zealand and Australian governments in fostering anti-Muslim sentiment by joining the US-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A Coroner’s inquiry into the attack, the first public inquiry, began last month. At an initial hearing, lawyers for many of the victims’ families, and representatives of Muslim organisations, noted that they were shut out of the royal commission process. They raised questions about Tarrant’s connections to far-right groups internationally, how he had obtained a gun licence in New Zealand, why his online activity had not been detected, why he was not arrested sooner in his shooting rampage, and whether he had any accomplices.

The Australian government of Prime Minister Scott Morrison greeted the third anniversary of the Christchurch attack with total silence, despite Tarrant’s connections with the Australian neo-Nazi United Patriots Front and the Lads Society, which tried to recruit him. It remains unclear what these groups knew about his plans.

Research from Charles Sturt University has documented ongoing threats and attacks on Muslims. The “Islamophobia in Australia” report, released on the anniversary of the Christchurch attack, pointed to 247 verified incidents in 2018 and 2019, 138 physical and 109 online. This included vandalism of mosques, and harassment and physical attacks, mostly against Muslim women.

Report author Derya Iner wrote in the Conversation: “Incidents occurred in places including shopping centres, public transport, pools and playgrounds and education settings. This suggests there is no public space that is safe from Islamophobia.”

There was a fourfold spike in incidents of anti-Muslim hate following the Christchurch attack, and an 18-fold increase in online incidents, including posts glorifying the shooter and calling for more violence.

Despite Ardern’s claims of “substantial progress” in tackling far-right extremism, the situation is not fundamentally different in New Zealand. The Islamic Women’s Council’s (IWC) national coordinator Aliya Danzeisen told Radio NZ they had seen increased extremism online and in-person. She pointed to a recent assault by two teenagers on a Muslim schoolgirl in Dunedin.

The IWC also noted that far-right elements were involved in the three-week-long anti-vaccination protest outside parliament in Wellington. The anti-immigrant New Conservative Party and Destiny Church were among the organisers, and the event was promoted by the Counterspin media outlet funded by US fascist Steve Bannon.

Destiny Church notoriously responded to the Christchurch massacre by holding an anti-Muslim protest in the city, while Counterspin has promoted the conspiracy theory that the attack was a “false flag.”

The Wellington protesters’ demands—to remove all public health restrictions that impede profit-making, and normalise the spread of COVID-19—received support from sections of the media and the opposition National Party, the ACT Party and the right-wing nationalist NZ First Party.

The Ardern government is implementing the right-wingers’ agenda. It has promised there will be no more lockdowns and has allowed hundreds of thousands of people to become infected.

The Australian and New Zealand governments’ support for the US and NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine will further embolden the far-right. Both countries have imposed sanctions against Russia, and Canberra has committed $70 million to “lethal aid” for Ukraine’s armed forces. Powerful fascist militias, such as the Azov battalion, are integrated into Ukraine’s military and have received weapons and training from NATO.

Tarrant visited Ukraine in 2015, one year after the US supported a fascist-led coup, which toppled a pro-Russian government and sparked a civil war. Tarrant reportedly told his family that he enjoyed his time in Ukraine so much he wanted to live there.

According to the royal commission’s report, this alarmed Tarrant’s mother. She “emailed [her son] an article about extreme right-wing groups in Ukraine that groomed young men like him and she pleaded for him to come home to Australia. He never responded.”

In his manifesto, Tarrant, who travelled extensively in Europe, pointed out that the continent’s militaries include many far-right nationalists. The manifesto also revealed his support for Trump and the similarity of his racist views to those of far-right parties like NZ First and One Nation in Australia. Possession of the document was banned by New Zealand’s chief censor—an anti-democratic action aimed at curtailing public discussion of these issues.

Russians in New Zealand are now facing demonisation and abuse, which recalls the treatment endured by Muslims. TVNZ reported on March 9 that “a Russian Orthodox church was vandalised, a business in Christchurch had its window defaced, a Russian singer has had shows cancelled, and children have been bullied, made to feel ashamed of their cultural heritage.”

While the far-right forces do not have mass support, they are being promoted by the ruling class in every country. The aim is to divert working-class anger over rising social inequality by whipping up nationalism and xenophobia, and to intimidate opponents of war and the “let it rip” approach to COVID-19.