Hunger Stalks Central Asia as the Ukraine War Unfolds

Vijay Prashad

Almaty, the largest city in Kazakhstan. Photograph Source: Michael Grau – CC BY-SA 3.0

On March 16, 2022, Kazakhstan’s President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev delivered his State of the Nation address in Nur-Sultan. Most of Tokayev’s speech was about the political reforms in Kazakhstan he had either accomplished or planned to advance, after he had promised them as redress to January’s political unrest and protests against the Kazakh government. He also addressed the impact of the Russia-Ukraine war on Kazakhstan during his speech and pointed to the spikes in food prices and currency volatility as some of the worrying economic consequences being faced by the country as a fallout of this conflict.

The address by Tokayev was made four days before the holiday of Nauryz, which fell on March 20 and is a new year festival celebrated by people in the belt that runs from the Kurdish lands to the Kyrgyz lands. Households across Kazakhstan were preparing for this celebration, although inflation of food prices—which predated the Russian intervention in Ukraine and the resulting Western sanctions imposed on the Kremlin—had already dampened the mood of the festivities in the country; by mid-March, the National Bank of Kazakhstan had reported that prices of food products such as baked goods, cereals, vegetables and dairy—the important components of a Nauryz meal—had increased by 10 percent.

“Kazakhstan is facing unprecedented financial and economic difficulties in our modern history due to the escalation of the geopolitical situation,” President Tokayev said. The “harsh sanctions” imposed on Russia by the West are already impacting the global economy, he said, adding, “Uncertainty and turbulence in the world markets are growing, and production and trade chains are collapsing.” Rising food prices and financial turbulence—a result of both the Western sanctions on Russia and of the integration of national economies—have set the alarm bells ringing and seem to have heightened the urgency to resolve these issues in Central Asian countries like Kazakhstan.

Famine and Hunger

Tokayev spent part of his State of the Nation speech speaking about the inflation of energy and food prices. He spoke about the need for the government to oversee the production of agricultural equipment, fertilizers, fuel and the stocks of seeds. Tokayev’s remarks are not novel. Other heads of governments in Central Asia have similarly expressed the need for their governments to enter the food production arena, since both the COVID-19 lockdown and the current Russian war in Ukraine have demonstrated the enormous vulnerabilities in the global food chain, exacerbated by the privatization of food production.

Food prices in the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU)—comprising Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic and Russia—continue to rise, as a result of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, outpacing world food prices. While these countries are “strongly dependent on imports from Russia,” they are now facing a temporary ban on exports of wheat and sugar from Russia owing to the conflict.

On March 11, 2022, the United Nations World Food Program (WFP) released a report on the “Food security implications of the Ukraine conflict.” The conflict, says the WFP, “comes at a time of unprecedented humanitarian needs, as a ring of fire circles the earth with climate shocks, conflict, COVID-19 and rising costs driving millions closer to starvation.” Russia and Ukraine produce and “supply 30 percent of wheat and 20 percent of maize to global markets,” according to the WFP report, and these two countries also account for three-quarters of the world’s sunflower supply and one-third of the world’s barley supply. Meanwhile, the Black Sea ports have largely been dormant since Russia has blocked any exports from these ports due to the ongoing war. This has led to “[a]n estimate of 13.5 million tons of wheat and 16 million tons of maize” being “frozen in these two countries” since these grains cannot be transported out of the region. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s Food Price Index reached “a new all-time high in February.”

The International Fund for Agricultural Development President Gilbert F. Houngbo warned that the continuation of the Russia-Ukraine war “will be catastrophic for the entire world, particularly for people already struggling to feed their families,” according to a UN report. “This area of the Black Sea plays a major role in the global food system, exporting at least 12 percent of the food calories traded in the world,” Houngbo said.

One of the great problems of globalization has been that the vulnerabilities in one part of the world almost immediately impact other parts of the world. In 2010, droughts in China, Russia and Ukraine raised the price of food grains, which then “heightened” the Arab Spring. Ideas of “food security,” a phrase used by Tokayev during his State of the Nation speech, have been around since the first World Food Conference in 1974; at that meeting in Rome, the member states of the United Nations reflected on the famine situation in Bangladesh and called for measures to ensure international stability of food prices and to make governments responsible for the abolition of hunger in their respective countries. The current situation of food inflation and of food instability in the global commodity chain has refocused attention on the need for ensuring enhanced domestic and regional production rather than placing reliance on distant producers and unstable international markets.

Domestic Food Production

In October 2021, the Central Asian Bureau for Analytical Reporting (CABAR) held an expert meeting on the problem of food production in the region. Nurlan Atakanov of the Food Security and Nutrition Program of the Kyrgyz Republic said that local farmers were unable to grow sufficiently high-quality wheat “due to limited cultivation areas and climatic conditions.” His country imports a third of its wheat from neighboring Kazakhstan. Daulet Assylbekov, an expert from Kazakhstan who is a senior analyst with the BLM Group, meanwhile, said that wheat harvests in Kazakhstan decreased by 30 percent due to the pandemic restrictions. This has had an impact on food prices within Central Asia.

Tajikistan’s wheat yield is currently 27-30 hundred kilograms per hectare, far short of the yield in Russia’s Rostov region of 67-70 hundred kilograms per hectare, according to CABAR. Economist Khojimahmad Umarov said during the CABAR meeting that if Tajikistan had access to mineral and organic fertilizers and if it improved its agricultural knowledge, yields could rise to 90 hundred kilograms per hectare. But agriculture has been neglected, and countries like Tajikistan have been encouraged by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to import food and export cotton and aluminum.

Uzbekistan’s Ministry of Agriculture has now urged its farmers to increase production of wheat from 6.6 million tons of grain in 2021 to 7.6 million tons this year as well as to enhance the domestic production of sugar to meet the country’s internal demand despite the temporary ban on exports by Russia; Uzbekistan has traditionally relied on Russian wheat and Brazilian sugar.

Meanwhile, like Uzbekistan, the government of the Kyrgyz Republic imports sugar, vegetable oil and wheat each year from other countries, and the current Russia-Ukraine war could result in a bleak situation in terms of ensuring food security and curbing inflation of food prices in the Kyrgyz Republic. At the start of the war in Ukraine, the poorest households in the Kyrgyz Republic—the second-poorest country in Central Asia after Tajikistan—spent 65 percent of their income on food; the current inflation will be catastrophic for them. The Kyrgyz Republic’s Cabinet of Ministers, led by Akylbek Japarov, held an emergency meeting with food processing companies in Bishkek to discuss how to increase food production and prevent increased levels of starvation in the country.

At the Antalya Diplomacy Forum, leaders of the Central Asian countries called not only for a cessation of hostilities in Ukraine, but also for regional integration of their countries with South Asia. Uzbekistan’s Foreign Minister Abdulaziz Kamilov said that his country is eager to play the role of a bridge to unite these areas. The general verdict among countries in Central Asia is that greater self-sufficiency is important—particularly in food production—but also that regionalism needs to be emphasized. One of the problems with regional integration in Central Asia is that there are very poor options for the transport of goods from one country to the other—Kazakh wheat travels by train to the Kyrgyz Republic, and then is transferred onto trucks to traverse tough mountain roads. Regionalism is not simply a concept. It had to be realized through the creation of food processing plants, better transport systems and easier cross-border trade rules.

The COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s war on Ukraine have alerted the governments of Central Asia to pay much more attention to the question of food security. What the IMF says about liberalization of food chains makes little sense these days. Worries of starvation and bread riots resulting from the Russia-Ukraine conflict and the ongoing pandemic are a good wake-up call for countries to focus on finding more sustainable local and regional solutions and to solve problems that have been part of the economic, social, and political fabric of Central Asia for decades.

The homicidal irresponsibility of the German government’s coronavirus policies

Peter Schwarz

Every day, 200 to 300 people die of COVID-19 in Germany. The number of new infections registered daily is 300,000. According to Health Minister Karl Lauterbach, the real number is twice as high. Since the beginning of the pandemic, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) has recorded 20 million infections. This sad record was reached on Saturday.

Two-thirds of these infections have occurred under the “traffic light” coalition. Since the Social Democratic Party (SPD), Greens and Liberal Democrats (FDP) took over the government on December 8, 2021, 13 million people have been infected, twice as many as since the pandemic began. The new government is also responsible for one-fifth of the 128,000 deaths in Germany.

A woman walks past an abandoned coronavirus test center in Frankfurt, Tuesday, Nov. 2, 2021. Despite the ongoing BA.2 wave, Germany has lifted almost all protective measures. (AP Photo/Michael Probst)

And what is it doing to contain the disaster? It is abolishing all protective measures. Like a fireman dousing a fire with petrol instead of water, it is fueling the pandemic.

Last week, the government passed the new Infection Protection Act, which should rather be called the Deliberate Mass Infection Act. It abolishes almost all previous protective measures and delegates responsibility to the Länder (federal states). Although these can introduce mandatory mask wearing, social distancing rules and similar measures in “hotspots,” the threshold for doing so far exceeds the previous ones. The fragmentation of responsibility to the federal states is further heightened by the fragmentation into districts.

Public appearances by Health Minister Lauterbach (SPD) are increasingly taking on a schizophrenic character. On Friday, he appeared at the Government Press Conference flanked by the head of the RKI, Lothar Wieler, and the chairperson of the doctors’ Marburger Bund, Susanne Johna, and sounded the alarm.

Unfortunately, the situation was not good, Lauterbach complained. Three hundred deaths a day was intolerable and there had to be immediate and swift reactions. Since the federal government’s hands were tied, he said, he directed his appeal to the federal states to do something. It was not enough to hope that the incidence level would fall with the improvement in the weather, he declared. But Lauterbach himself is responsible for the law that ties the hands of the federal government and takes away all effective instruments from the states.

RKI head Wieler also emphasised the desperate nature of the situation. Within a week, 3 percent of the population had tested positive, he said. More than 4 million people were currently infected, which increased the risk of infection. The pandemic was far from over. “This wave will not be the last wave,” he warned.

Doctors’ representative Johna described the catastrophic situation in hospitals, three-quarters of which had had to restrict their services. The reason was the costly care of coronavirus patients and the high absence of doctors and nurses who have contracted COVID-19 or resigned because of the unbearable workloads.

All three agreed on the need to increase vaccination coverage. But there is nothing left of the vaccination campaign that the coalition loudly announced when it took office. Of the particularly vulnerable over-60s alone, 2.2 million are still not vaccinated. The planned vaccine mandate is talked to death in endless parliamentary committees and will probably never come into force.

There is a method behind the irresponsibility of the federal government. It is not limited to Germany but characterises the coronavirus policies of almost all governments in the world, with the exception of China. They have abandoned all responsibility for the health and lives of their own populations, even though the social and health consequences of the pandemic are devastating.

In the first two years, taking into consideration excess mortality, 18 million people worldwide have died because of the pandemic. This is roughly equivalent to the number of soldiers and civilians who died due to combat during the four years of the First World War. Most of these deaths could have been avoided with a consistent COVID elimination strategy. Behind each death remain those who lost a relative, a friend, a breadwinner, or a child.

There are still no reliable statistics on the health and social consequences of Long COVID. But numerous studies show it is being completely underestimated. The WSWS has repeatedly warned of this danger and interviewed renowned scientists about it.

An article that appeared in the science section of the FAZ on March 8, providing an overview of the current state of scientific research, concludes: “It is now clear that Long Covid, or—as it is often called in medical terms—‘post-covid,’ is, for all the difficulty of defining the disease precisely and narrowing down the dozens of possible symptoms as well as the heterogeneity of the duration of suffering, virtually a mass inheritance of the coronavirus infection waves.”

According to a Danish study based on 150,000 respondents, “more than a third of those infected still complained of at least one Covid problem six months to a year after infection, half of them reporting exhaustion, persistent memory problems and/or great difficulty in concentrating. Brain fog, anxiety and other mental health problems also seem to be particularly persistent.”

Medical studies found that even mild coronavirus infections can lead to a reduction in the density of grey matter in the brain, severe cardiovascular disease, and a weakening of the immune system. Children are also affected. Cardiovascular conditions such as heart attacks, heart inflammation, strokes, pulmonary embolisms, and leg vein thrombosis often occurred months after infection.

A social system whose governing layers are neither willing nor able to protect the lives and health of their populations has lost any reason to exist. There is a direct link between the deep, global crisis of capitalism and the irresponsible coronavirus policies being pursued.

Social inequality, which has been increasing for decades, has rapidly worsened in the pandemic. While—in the words of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson—“the bodies are piled high,” stock market prices are reaching new highs. Wall Street banks made record profits of $45 billion in the first three months of last year. The 180,000 workers in the industry received an average annual bonus of $257,500, while a large section of the American working class is sinking into poverty.

The situation is no different in Germany and other capitalist countries. The orgy of enrichment of a tiny minority is maintained by the central banks, which pump huge sums into the economy in the form of bond purchases and interest-free loans. This speculative bubble is in danger of bursting if the exploitation of the working class is not constantly intensified. This is the main reason for the removal of all coronavirus protections. Profits take precedence over human lives.

The Ukraine war has further aggravated the crisis of capitalism. Russia’s reactionary attack on Ukraine was systematically prepared and deliberately provoked by NATO’s expansion to the east.

NATO’s goal is not only the integration of Ukraine into its sphere of influence, but regime change in Moscow and the subjugation of Russia and China, as well as control over their rich mineral resources. The weekend edition of Handelsblatt appeared with a picture of Putin and Chinese leader Xi in the crosshairs. Underneath, the headline runs, “The great battle for raw materials.” It goes on to say, “The war shows the dependence on a few producing countries. This is only the beginning: China is establishing monopolies on all important materials—at the expense of the German economy.”

The war is serving as a pretext for a huge rearmament offensive. The German military budget is being tripled this year from €50 billion to €150 billion, whose costs are to be imposed on the working class.

The war course, like the reckless coronavirus policy, is supported by all parties—from the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) to the Left Party. The demands of the ultra-right coronavirus deniers and anti-vaxxers who rioted in the streets last year now form the basis of government action.

The offensive against Russia is characterised by the same contempt for human life as coronavirus policy. Politicians and the media now openly discuss the pros and cons of a nuclear war that would mean the end of humanity.

Typical is a comment by FAZ editor Berthold Kohler, who writes that the concerns “Putin could use biological, chemical or even nuclear warheads” were “not unjustified.” Nevertheless, he rejects considering any concession or brokering a diplomatic solution. “Even if Russia withdrew from Ukraine immediately, there would be no return to the pre-war relationship for the West, either politically or economically.”

The danger of a nuclear world war must be taken seriously. Confronted with a global crisis of the capitalist system and fierce class tensions—a “turning point in history,” as Chancellor Olaf Scholz puts it—Germany’s ruling class is again resorting to war and authoritarian forms of rule. It already proved 80 years ago, under Hitler, what desperate acts and crimes it is capable of in doing so.

Millions of Indian workers to join two-day general strike against Modi’s ruinous pro-investor policies

Deepal Jayasekera

Millions of workers across India are mounting a two-day general strike this Monday and Tuesday to oppose the ever-escalating assault of the Narendra Modi-led, far-right Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government on their social and democratic rights.

The strike will be joined by government workers, coal and copper miners, steel, oil, telecom, postal and rural health (ASHA) workers. Particularly strong participation is anticipated from workers at public sector enterprises targeted for privatization like Coal India, the Life Insurance Corporation of India and the state-owned banks.

The strike will cut across the caste and communal divisions that are systematically promoted by India’s ruling elite and its political representatives, providing a powerful demonstration of the objective unity of the working class.

Across India there is immense social anger over mass joblessness, sharply rising food and fuel prices, endemic poverty, and the lack of basic public services, including health care and education. All of these social ills have been enormously exacerbated by the ruinous response of the ruling class, led by Modi and implemented by all the opposition-led state governments, to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Over the past year, workers have sought to assert their class interests through a mounting wave of strikes and protests. Last May, autoworkers forced the temporary closure of Ford, Hyundai and Renault-Nissan plants on the outskirts of Chennai, Tamil Nadu, over the lack of COVID-19 protections. Particularly important is the strike 75,000 Maharashtra State Road Transport Corporation workers (MSRTC) have been waging since last November to thwart plans to privatize the intercity bus service and secure regular payment of their wages. The workers have persisted in the face of savage management reprisals and government threats, and the sabotage of the more than two dozen unions that claim to represent them. Even before the strike began, the latter ordered the MSRTC workers to obey a court injunction declaring it illegal.

Protesting MSRTC workers in Nagpur, Maharashtra's third largest city. (Workers' Unity)

Conditions are more than ripe for unifying the disparate struggles of workers against precarious contract-labour jobs, privatization and poverty wages and for social and health protections against the pandemic and joblessness into a working class counteroffensive, and for rallying the rural toilers and urban poor behind such an offensive.

However, for the 10 trade union federations that have called the two-day all-India strike, it is not a stepping stone toward the mass industrial and political mobilization of the working class against the Modi government and Indian capitalism. Rather they have called the strike, as they have similar protest strikes more or less every year for the past decade, with the aim of suppressing, not developing, the class struggle. They seek to channel workers into futile attempts to pressure the Modi government to adopt “pro-people” policies and behind their own efforts to bring to power an alternate right-wing capitalist government at the next general election in 2024.

This is true of the Indian National Trade Union Congress (INTUC), the trade union arm of the Congress Party, till recently the Indian bourgeoisie’s preferred party of national government, and the Labour Progressive Front (LPF), which is aligned with the right-wing, regional-chauvinist DMK, the governing party in Tamil Nadu. It is especially true of the Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU) and the All-India Trades Union Congress (AITUC) the trade union affiliates of the twin Stalinist parliamentary parties, respectively, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPM and the Communist Party of India (CPI).

Profits before lives

Like the imperialist rulers of North America and Europe, India’s governments have at every point during the pandemic prioritized protecting big business profits and investor fortunes over saving human lives. A brief, ill-prepared national lockdown in the spring of 2020—during which the mass of the population, stripped of all income overnight, were effectively left to fend for themselves—has been followed by a homicidal drive to keep the “economy open” at all costs. Last spring, as India was being ravaged by its catastrophic Delta-driven second wave of mass infections and death, Modi publicly avowed that he would “save” India from lockdown, not the deadly virus.

Officially, India has reported 521,000 COVID-19 deaths. But everyone apart from the Modi government and their shills in the corporate media acknowledge this to be a gross undercount. Numerous studies of excess mortality have placed the true number of India’s COVID deaths at four million or more.

The pandemic has been accompanied by a pandemic of joblessness and hunger.

Many of the tens of millions of jobs that were eliminated in the worst phases of the pandemic have not been restored. According to the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy, 8 percent of Indian households have no member that is “economically active” (whether as a worker, farmer, hawker or business person) and 68 percent just one person. This in a country where most people live in extended, multigenerational households and there is no state aid for the jobless.

During the first year of the pandemic, 230 million more Indians had to live on 375 rupees (US$5) or less per day, found an Azim Premji University study. Those hardest hit have been the poorest sections of the working class. A People’s Research on Indian’s Economy survey found that between 2015–16 and 2020–21, the poorest 20 percent of Indian households suffered a more than 50 percent decline in their income, on average.

The wealth of India’s rich and super-rich on the other hand has swelled, and never more so than during the pandemic. In 2021, the number of Indian billionaires increased from 102 to 142 (Forbes) or by 51 to more than 250 (Harun Global Rich List). The 98 richest of these billionaires, observed the recent Oxfam report “Inequality Kills,” have wealth equivalent to that of the poorest 40 percent of all Indians, 555 million people.

The Modi government’s ruinous “profits before lives” pandemic policy has been the cutting edge of an intensified class war assault on the working class. In the name of promoting India’s post-pandemic economic recovery, it has implemented a raft of “big bang” economic “reforms” aimed at dramatically increasing investor returns and worker exploitation. These include: further tax cuts and subsidies for big business; a labour law “reform” that promotes contract labour and “hire-and-fire” employment and makes most worker job action illegal; and a massive fire sale of government assets, which will see all but a handful of firms in a few “strategic sectors” privatized.

To implement these socially incendiary measures, Modi and his Hindu supremacist BJP foment communalism to split the working class, and increasingly resort to authoritarian measures. This was exemplified in their August 2019 constitutional coup against Jammu and Kashmir. It stripped India’s lone Muslim-majority state of its special constitutional status, and reduced Jammu and Kashmir to a Union Territory, thereby placing it under permanent central government rule. Last August, the Modi government rammed the Essential Defence Service Act through parliament without debate, so as to illegalize all strikes in the defence production sector.

The union federations that have called the March 28–29 general strike are raising various demands that speak to workers’ grievances such as repeal of the new labour laws, the regularization of all contract workers, the provision of proper protective gear and health and life insurance to all frontline pandemic workers, and universal social security for the 90 percent of workers employed as day-labourers or by small businesses in the so-called informal sector.

But the unions and the Stalinist “left” parties raise these demands as part of their efforts to keep the working class trapped within the confines of protests to the establishment and parliamentary politics. The Stalinists, in particular, rail against the BJP, labeling it “Hindu fascist.” But they do so not to summon the working class to struggle, but rather with the aim of tying it to the state and the corrupt and thoroughly right-wing “secular” big business parties, beginning with the dynastic Nehru-Gandhi family-led Congress.

India and the US-NATO war on Russia

Tellingly, the unions, including the Stalinist aligned CITU and AITUC, are entirely silent on the war that the NATO powers, led by US imperialism, goaded Russia into launching in the Ukraine, and which they are now recklessly escalating with the aim of subjugating Russia and intensifying military-strategic pressure on China.

The NATO proxy war against Russia is a double threat to the Indian working class, and the people of South Asia and the world.

First, the all-out economic war that the imperialist powers are waging against Russia is having a devastating impact on the world economy, fueling sharp spikes in the price of energy, fertilizer and basic foodstuffs.

Second, the war, long-planned by the US and its NATO allies, is being pursued by them as a global strategic conflict aimed at initiating a repartition of the world. US President Joe Biden openly admitted this last week when he compared the current crisis to the two world wars of the last century, adding “There’s going to be a new world order out there, and we’ve got to lead it.”

Unless prevented through the revolutionary intervention of the world working class, the imperialist war drive will end in a catastrophic conflagration among the great powers, in which South Asia and the Indian Ocean will be key battlefields.

The Indian bourgeoisie has encouraged and emboldened American imperialism in its pursuit of global hegemony. Continuing on the path blazed by the Congress Party government that preceded it, the Modi government has transformed India into a US frontline state against China, forming an ever-expanding web of bilateral, trilateral and quadrilateral military-security ties with Washington and its chief Asia-Pacific allies, Japan and Australia.

Modi has thus far resisted pressure from the US and the other imperialist powers that New Delhi label Russia the “aggressor” and downgrade its longstanding military-security ties with Moscow. This is based, however, only on crude calculations as to how the Indian bourgeoisie can best pursue its own predatory interests. Moreover, Modi, with the support of the Indian bourgeoisie, is trying to offset the pressure from the US, Japan and the EU powers over Russia by proving even more supportive of Washington’s belligerence against China.

The privileging of profits over saving lives during the pandemic—leading to successive waves of mass death and the ever-present threat the virus will take more virulent forms, like the rapidly spreading BA.2 Omicron sub-variant—and now the eruption of war in Europe demonstrate that capitalist rule is in incontrovertible conflict with the most basic needs of working people in India as around the world.

CDC remains silent on unexplained 25 percent cut in child COVID-19 deaths

Emma Arceneaux

On March 16, 72,277 deaths, including 416 pediatric deaths, disappeared from the age demographics section of the COVID Data Tracker website run by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). This resulted in the CDC’s official COVID-19 pediatric death count dropping by nearly 25 percent. No substantive explanation has been given by the agency for this drastic reduction of age-demographic data.

CDC′s Roybal campus in Atlanta, GA (James Gathany/Public Domain)

The CDC gave an evasive reply to an initial inquiry by the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS), which was reported last week. The WSWS explained that this incident comes at a time when there is a concerted effort at the federal, state and local levels to reduce COVID-19 surveillance and data reporting and to hide the impact of the disease by differentiating between deaths and hospitalizations “with COVID-19” versus “from COVID-19.”

In a brief reply to the WSWS, CDC Public Affairs Specialist Jasmine Reed stated, “An adjustment was made to COVID Data Tracker’s mortality data on March 14 involving the removal of 72,277—including 416 pediatric deaths—deaths previously reported across 26 states because CDC’s algorithm was accidentally counting deaths that were not COVID-19 related.”

The WSWS has sent three subsequent inquiries to the CDC over the past week and a half and has not received a reply.

The CDC has not addressed the following pertinent questions asked by this reporter:

1. How was the algorithm accidentally counting deaths that were not COVID-19 related?
2. Why did this affect only 26 states, and which states were involved?
3. Did the 72,277 deaths occur during a specific range of dates or across the duration of the pandemic?
4. Were these deaths among patients who were diagnosed with COVID-19? In other words, were their deaths re-classified despite a COVID-19 diagnosis?
5. Why weren’t the 72,277 deaths that were removed from the age demographics section also removed from the “Deaths Total” tally at the top of the Data Tracker webpage?

In the midst of the worst public health crisis in over 100 years, the public has a right to accurate, timely and uniform data. The CDC must answer the questions raised by the WSWS and thoroughly explain what happened.

Following the adjustment on the Data Tracker, multiple physicians, anti-COVID activists and journalists retracted their previous citations of the official pediatric death toll and accepted the CDC’s explanation.

The major broadcast news and print publications, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, have not reported this development, nor have they reported on the rise in pediatric COVID-19 deaths during the Delta and Omicron waves. The handful of outlets that did report the changes to Data Tracker had also previously ignored the rising child death toll.

The WSWS has reported the record infections and deaths among children nearly every week since the disastrous reopening of schools during the Delta surge last fall. The COVID-19 impact on children escalated further, and dramatically so, during the surge of the Omicron variant. The UK-based Guardian was the only other publication to devote an article, on March 11, to the significant increase in pediatric deaths in the wake of the Omicron surge.

Following the change on Data Tracker, The Guardian revised its March 11 article and published a separate article on March 24 about the data “error.”

In addition to former CDC Director Tom Frieden and former CDC Media Relations Director Glen Nowak, the article quotes Jasmine Reed, who evidently sent the same automated message to multiple reporters, including those from the WSWS, The Guardian and Reuters.

The article also cites an anonymous “source familiar with the issue” and claims that the error was due to two questions asked of states and jurisdictions when they report fatalities to the CDC.

The article states:

One data field asks if a person died “from illness/complications of illness,” and the field next to this asks for the date of death. When the answer is yes, then the date of death should be provided.

But a problem apparently arose if a respondent included the date of death in this field even when the answer was “no” or “unknown.” The CDC’s system assumed that if a date was provided, then the “no” or “unknown” answer was an error, and the system switched the answer to “yes.”

Aside from this statement being unattributed and not publicly confirmed by the CDC, it raises its own questions, most importantly whether or not the fatality report is specific to COVID-19. If it is, the question about whether the person died from “illness/complication of illness” is redundant.

It appears that the system was originally programmed to assume that a “no” or “unknown” entry into the first field was an error. If so, why and when was the decision made to change this assumption? Did the CDC make an effort to verify whether “no” and “unknown” entries were in fact errors before removing the deaths from Data Tracker? If not COVID-19, what caused the deaths of these 72,277 people?

In the absence of a transparent clarification, the far-right and COVID-minimizers have seized upon this incident to push forward their own reactionary agenda and claim that the danger of COVID-19 to children is overblown. But even if one accepts as accurate the reduced pediatric death toll, over 300 child deaths have been recorded on Data Tracker since January 1.

Since the revision on March 16, more deaths have been added to the Data Tracker, including 35 child deaths, bringing the tally to 1,374 as of March 26. Currently, age information is only available for 790,985 deaths, while the total death toll, according to the Data Tracker, is 974,277.

The agency’s lack of transparency falls in line with systematic efforts by the political establishment in the US and internationally to blind the population to the spread of COVID-19, while funding for essential surveillance and treatment programs runs dry, and the BA.2 subvariant of Omicron has initiated another surge of the pandemic across Europe and other parts of the world.

Across the US, the decline in cases since the peak of the Omicron wave in January has plateaued, and cases are rising in multiple areas where the BA.2 subvariant has gained a foothold, including in New York, Texas, Kentucky and most of New England. It is expected that BA.2 will become the dominant variant in the US within the next two weeks.

Meanwhile, cuts to various federal COVID-19 programs have already begun after Congress failed to approve $15.6 billion in funding. This includes the ending of federal reimbursements to health care providers for testing and treating uninsured patients, which went into effect on March 22. The White House has stated that domestic testing capacity will be severely diminished by June, if more funding is not secured.

On March 23, Nature magazine published an editorial warning that the international cutbacks to surveillance and reporting in many countries are “not based on evidence. They are political, and they could have disastrous consequences for the world.” It notes that in the US, “All but eight states have scaled back to reporting data five or fewer days per week,” and Florida has reduced its reporting to every other week.

The fight to end the pandemic requires a robust system for monitoring, reporting and publicizing information on the spread of COVID-19. The necessary resources must be provided to ensure that all data collection systems in the US are greatly expanded, streamlined and presented to the public in a clear manner.

Within the context of an international, politically motivated cover-up of the pandemic, it is unacceptable for the CDC to fail to publicly and comprehensively explain what happened with its Data Tracker.

How the anti-Russian sanctions were planned

Nick Beams

Within days of the Russian invasion of the Ukraine, the US and the European Union imposed a series of sweeping sanctions on Russia aimed at crippling its economy by cutting off major banks from the SWIFT international financial messaging system and preventing the Russian central bank from using its foreign currency reserves to prop up the rouble.

The rapid action was the outcome of planning that had been developed for at least three months. The expectation was that the refusal of the US and NATO to even consider Russian demands for an end for NATO’s continued expansion to the east and engage in negotiations to address its legitimate security concerns would soon provoke military action.

People look at a screen displaying exchange rate at a currency exchange office in St. Petersburg, Russia, Tuesday, March 1, 2022. (AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky)

Details of the considerable planning that went into the sanctions, involving the US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and top intelligence and military personnel, together with EU officials, were revealed in an article published in the Wall Street Journal on March 18.

According to the article, the planning began shortly before Thanksgiving (the last Thursday in November) when Yellen met with senior officials and said she would contact her counterparts in Europe and elsewhere “to urge them to begin preparations for an economic response” to a Russian invasion.

The meeting was the launch of “an unprecedented financial sanctions program by the West aimed at a major economy” and “that program, along with [a] massive arms shipment, were the front lines of the West’s engagement.”

The senior Treasury officials involved in the planning were Yellen, her deputy Wally Adeyemo, who oversees sanctions operations, and Elizabeth Rosenberg, assistant secretary on terror financing issues.

Contact with the White House was through Daleep Singh, a former Federal Reserve and Treasury official who is now at the National Security Council. He was in constant touch with Björn Seibert, a former German defence official, who is head of cabinet to the European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.

The working out of an agreement with the EU was crucial to the implementation of the sanctions because of the impact they would have on the EU economy—particularly for Italy and Germany that are heavily dependent on natural gas supplies from Russia. Singh and Seibert began discussions on the effects of any blowback in December.

According to the WSJ article, citing several of the participants, there was an “unprecedented level of co-operation and scope between the Treasury, the White House, the Commerce Department and the European Commission.”

The US was able to bring to the table its experience in imposing sanctions and other measures directed against Iran, North Korea and Venezuela, as well as the action it has taken to cripple the giant Chinese telecommunications maker Huawei.

However, the action against Russia, the world’s 12th largest economy, and a major supplier of oil, gas, grains, and many important industrial metals, took these operations to a new level.

In early February, several weeks before the Russian invasion, key US officials went to Brussels where they “spent hours at European Commission headquarters thrashing out the plan.”

Throughout this period, the White House insisted that Russia was set to invade based on “intelligence” reports.

But the certainty with which these pronouncements were made was not the result of any advanced spying operations. It was grounded on the understanding that the US refusal to entertain any diplomatic negotiations had backed Russia into a corner. As Biden said on January 20, Putin would have to “do something.”

Further plans are now being made to extend the sanctions both against Russia and more broadly.

Yellen said earlier this month that it was “certainly appropriate for us to be working with our allies to consider further sanctions.”

China is coming into the firing line. Last week US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said the US was considering “secondary” sanctions directed against countries deemed by the US to be providing aid to Russia by assisting it to circumvent the measures applied to it. In effect, this means the US can interpret normal trade and financial dealings as providing such assistance if it chooses to do so.

“We have a number of tools to ensure compliance, and one of those tools is the designation of individuals or entities in third-party jurisdictions who are not complying with US sanctions or are undertaking systematic efforts to weaken or evade them,” he told reporters.

Secondary sanctions are a controversial subject in the EU because it opposed their imposition on European companies dealing with Iran after the Trump administration had sanctioned it. However, the EU was not able to do anything about it.

Asked about the issue on Friday, von der Leyen said the allies were looking “deep” into the sanctions regime to see if there were any loopholes. Action would be taken to close them, she added, making circumvention impossible.

On the issue of China, the US President Biden has said Beijing will face “consequences” if it were to assist Russia.

Speaking to the business channel CNBC on Friday, Yellen said it was premature to impose sanctions on China and it would be inappropriate at this point. But her remarks carried an implicit threat.

“We, as senior administration officials, are talking privately and quietly with China to make sure they understand our position,” she said.

In other moves, the G7 grouping of major imperialist powers has said it will act against any sale of Russian gold reserves aimed at supporting its currency.

A statement from the White House said G7 leaders and the EU would work jointly to blunt Russia’s ability to deploy its international reserves to prop up its economy. It made clear that “any transaction involving gold related to the Central Bank of the Russian Federation is covered by existing sanctions.”

The sanctions regime imposed by the US has implications that go far beyond Russia.

The measures imposed so far make clear that any country, including major powers, that crosses the path of US imperialism in its drive to open new regions of the world for plunder can be immediately excluded from the global financial system based on the US dollar.

In a significant comment in his letter to shareholders last week, Larry Fink, the head of the giant investment fund BlackRock, said: “The Russian invasion of Ukraine has put an end to the globalization we have experienced over the last three decades.”

In other words, the period that followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union, supposedly based on market mechanisms and the free movement of finance, is over and a new situation is emerging.

Fink said companies and governments would be looking to onshore or nearshore more of their operations. As it did in the 1930s, this movement back to the “national hearth” has geo-economic and strategic implications.

The US actions against Russia constitute a major blow to the international financial system. Henceforth every country must consider that its foreign reserves, denominated in dollars, can be rendered essentially worthless overnight.

The outcome will not be the establishment of a new global financial system based on another currency such as the euro, let alone the Chinese yuan.

Rather the tendency will be towards the division of the world into conflicting currency and economic blocs, akin to those of the 1930s, which played a significant role in creating the conditions for World War II.

Australia: Major construction company Condev appoints liquidator

Terry Cook

In another example of the rapidly developing crisis engulfing Australia’s construction sector, Condev Construction announced on March 15 that it would appoint a liquidator. The Queensland-based company claimed it had been hit with a 25 percent leap in costs over 18 months. It specialises in multi-unit residential constructions, retail and commercial premises, industrial units and warehouses.

The announcement came after the company’s developer clients rejected an urgent request for around $25 million in assistance. Condev’s latest financial report revealed a loss of $358,772 in 2021, after a 2020 profit of $536,332. The loss last year came despite a revenue increase from $175 million to $181 million.

Condev’s Capital Court project on Queensland’s Gold Coast (Photo: Facebook / Condev Construction)

The Condev liquidation will add to already mounting job losses and contractor bankruptcies across the sector. While Condev employs only 128 people directly, like other major construction companies, the bulk of the work on its projects is carried out by numerous contractors and sub-contractors employing many hundreds of workers.

Condev currently has 18 projects in progress, 14 of which are on the Queensland Gold Coast, including the 17-storey Natura building at Burleigh Heads and Aria Property Group’s 124-apartment project at Kangaroo Point in Brisbane.

The Condev failure follows the collapse of major construction company Probuild, which was suddenly placed into administration in February after its parent company, South Africa-based Wilson Bayly Holms-Ovcon (WBHO), refused to continue bankrolling its troubled Australian operations.

At the time it went into administration, Probuild had $5 billion worth of unfinished projects across three Australian states and liabilities worth $401 million, $311.6 million of which were listed in its annual accounts as “trade and other payables.”

Condev had no direct commercial ties with Probuild. A Condev spokesperson, however, said numbers of the companies it relied on for labour and materials were hit by the Probuild collapse and left unable to trade, requiring Condev “to source alternate suppliers and sub-contractors at an increased cost which contractually cannot be passed on.”

Condev director Tracy Marais claimed the company had also been hit by labour shortages due to absences caused by COVID-19. In addition, recent floods in South East Queensland had delayed the completion of projects and was “the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

While Marais bemoaned the impact of the pandemic on labour supply, since March 2020 the Australian construction industry has continued to operate virtually uninterrupted. With the complete support of the unions, the major construction companies successfully lobbied Labor and Liberal-National state governments for the sector to be exempted from lockdowns.

In addition to direct appeals to government for the industry to be exempt from safety measures, the Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining and Energy Union (CFMMEU) and other building unions downplayed the deadly disease, covered up for the lack of preventative measures on job sites and ensured workers stayed on the job and kept revenue flowing.

The labour shortage caused by the rapid and ongoing mass spread of COVID-19 is a direct product of this reckless disregard for the health and lives of workers and their families.

The collapse of Probuild and now Condev follows a number of other failures across the building industry last year. Queensland-based home builder Privium went into administration in November, with $40 million in liabilities and around $17 million owed to sub-contractors and suppliers. In the same month, Sydney-based interior building specialist Cubic, whose projects included Campbelltown Hospital, went into liquidation with debts of over $10 million.

There are already signs of a wave of supplier and sub-contractor insolvencies in the wake of the Probuild and Condev collapses.

Less than two weeks after the Probuild failure, Queensland-based manufacturer of aluminium windows and doors, Hitec Glazing, entered administration. The company had a $20 million contract to supply materials to Probuild’s riverfront residential tower project in Brisbane, which was plagued with delays and was well behind on its late-2021 completion target.

Another ominous indication is contained in a 2021 Australian Tax Office (ATO) report showing construction-related businesses have built up a mountain of unpaid tax bills.

According to the report, outstanding debts to the ATO soared by almost one third to $58.8 billion over the two financial years affected by the pandemic, with a large portion of this owed by construction businesses. The ATO is now moving to recoup a large chunk of this debt, in a process that could push many businesses now teetering on the edge into bankruptcy.

Moreover, a recent report by the Housing Industry Association found that the current construction boom will likely end by the middle of 2022 and described the almost 33 percent rise in building projects since 2019 as unsustainable.

For decades, the CFMMEU and other building unions have worked to facilitate the destruction of working conditions and the massive increase of casual, labour-hire and sham contracting arrangements across the construction industry. The unions have justified this assault by parroting the phoney management line that it was necessary to ensure competitiveness and preserve jobs into the future.

Now, in the wake of recent company collapses and amid a growing crisis in the sector, the union is telling workers that they can do nothing but accept the inevitable further destruction of jobs.

Speaking after the Condev collapse, CFMMEU Queensland construction secretary Michael Ravbar declared there will “likely be more pain in the industry,” adding: “We're going to see a lot more job losses—unfortunately other builders and contractors will go bust because we'll see a knock-on effect.”

The crisis now engulfing the construction sector is a graphic expression of the irrationality of the capitalist system. While workers are being thrown to the wall and skills and resources squandered, there exists a desperate need for the construction of vital social infrastructure such as schools and hospitals. Also urgently required is a massive program to build public housing to tackle growing homelessness and the current lack of affordable accommodation.

But for the major financial investors that dominate the sector, production takes place for the realisation of profit and to enhance shareholder dividends. If sufficient returns are not made, then businesses are carved up and their assets sold off to pay down debt to major secured creditors such as banks and financial houses.