9 May 2022

UK government military spending for Ukraine reaches almost £3 billion

Robert Stevens


Britain’s Conservative government is ramping up military spending for NATO’s proxy war against Russia.

Last week Prime Minister Boris Johnson addressed Ukraine’s parliament by videolink, pledging the dispatch of an additional £300 million of military equipment. Within days that has been increased by a further billion pounds to £1.3 billion.

This followed the previous week’s announcement that, in one of the largest deployments since the Cold War, it was sending, from May, 8,000 army troops across Europe to participate in a slew of military exercises.

Tanks uploaded on military truck platforms as a part of additional British troops and military equipment arrive at Estonia's NATO Battle Group base in Tapa, Estonia, Friday, Feb. 25, 2022. (AP Photo/Sergei Stepanov)

The new funding brings the UK’s financial commitment to nearly £3 billion. It comes on top of the existing £1.5 billion support to Kyiv, which included at least £200 million of military equipment, around £400 million in aid and grants to the Ukrainian government and unlocking over £700 million in additional World Bank lending through loan guarantees.

Announcing the funding in a Mail on Sunday article, Chancellor Rishi Sunak said, “We are unwavering in our support for the people of Ukraine—and this extra £1.3bn will ensure we continue to provide the necessary military and operational support they need to defend themselves against Putin.”      

Speaking for one of the main powers enabling the 30-year NATO encircling of Russia which provoked the war, he added cynically, “we are working tirelessly to bring an end to this conflict.”

With millions thrown into poverty after over a decade of austerity, and a cost-of-living crisis fueled by the pandemic and war in Ukraine, Sunak offered no respite. The priority was militarism and the defeat of Russia. Sunak boasted, “This new funding means that the scale of our support for our Ukrainian friends is now second only to the United States. It also means that the rate of our spending on a military conflict is now as high as it was in 2009 at the height of Iraq and Afghanistan when we had 43,000 troops actively deployed in combat.”

Over a million people were killed in those wars, as well as hundreds of UK military personnel. According to the Ministry of Defence, by 2015 these illegal adventures had cost over £21 billion—paid for by crushing austerity measures, the slashing of health and education budgets and gutting of public services.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson (left) listens as Chancellor of Exchequer Rishi Sunak briefs the Cabinet at the Prime Minister’s weekly Cabinet meeting before delivering his Spring Statement to the House of Commons. 23/03/2022. (Picture by Andrew Parsons/No 10 Downing Street/Flickr)

The UK’s arms firms are licking their lips in anticipation of war profits. Sunak announced, “The funding will also help drive a major boost in the UK’s cutting-edge defence industry, creating high-quality jobs across the country.” He continued, “The Prime Minister and Defence Secretary will host a meeting of arms manufacturers this month to discuss ramping up production in response to the increased demand created by the conflict.”

The vast upscaling of spending on the war follows concerted lobbying by MPs.

This week the Times revealed that Defence Secretary Ben Wallace demanded that Sunak increase the military budget in his March “spring statement”. It reported, “Wallace told Sunak earlier this year that inflation and the expense of sending arms to Ukraine meant that Britain risked falling short of its Nato spending commitments by 2025, according to a leaked letter. Sunak did not treat Wallace’s letter as a formal request for additional defence spending.”

This prompted Tobias Ellwood, chairman of Parliament’s defence select committee and one of Johnson’s main Tory critics from the right to intervene in the pages of the newspaper. Last Friday, just days after Johnson announced the additional £300 million in Ukraine war spending and before Sunak announcing the extra £1 billion, Ellwood told the Times, “It should not take a memo from the Ministry of Defence to appreciate how European security is deteriorating… The swathing cuts made to our troop numbers as well as our tanks, fighting vehicles, ships and planes need to be reversed if we are to play any serious role in bolstering Nato’s eastern flank.”

Ellwood, along with Wallace and other senior Tory figures closely connected to the military top brass, have demanded that Johnson increase defence spending to 3 percent of GDP from the current 2 percent.

Wallace’s and Elwood’s interventions were a barely disguised bid for Johnson’s job, should he be forced to stand down prior to the Tory Party’s conference in October. Another leadership contender, Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, declared that the 2 percent target should be a “floor, not a ceiling”.

These concerns are shared throughout the ruling elite. A Financial Times reporting team asked in March, “Does the UK need to change its defence strategy after the Ukraine war?” They noted, “The army is set to lose its entire fleet of more than 700 Warrior infantry fighting vehicles earlier than planned and a third of its Challenger II main battle tanks. Operationally, British land forces are now their smallest since the 18th century, with just 72,500 regular soldiers.”

The Times reported, “Johnson is said to have spoken repeatedly to Wallace about the letter and argued that it was the wrong time to increase defence spending. He highlighted the fact that the Ministry of Defence had received a significant settlement in the spending review five months earlier.”

Sunak has already handed over £24 billion over four years in extra military spending, the largest increase by any government since the end of the Cold War. Johnson is also committed to building four new submarines to carry the UK’s nuclear weapons at a cost of £31 billion.

When Sunak announced his spring statement with no new military spending, it was amid speculation that he had as much as £10 billion in spending reserves being primed for the military. The WSWS noted, “With the corporate media and retired senior figures in the armed forces demanding a rapidly expanded military force, the only conclusion that can be drawn is that the Tories are preparing for a seismic uplift in money spent on preparations for war in Europe with Russia in the immediate future.” This assessment has been confirmed.

Those within government circles insisting that militarism and war must be prioritised find their foremost allies in the Labour Party. Advancing itself as the “party of NATO” Sir Keir Starmer’s MPs stand in alliance with the Tories as a single party of war. Last week Labour’s Shadow Defence Secretary John Healey told the news web site, “When [Labour MP] David Lammy and I went to Kyiv, ahead of the Russian invasion, we were able to say there is united UK support and solidarity for you in the face of this build-up of Russian aggression.”

John Healey, Labour’s Shadow Defence Secretary, tells the RUSI think tank in March 2021, “Labour’s support for nuclear deterrence is non-negotiable. The matter is settled. From Kinnock to Corbyn—with Blair, Brown and Miliband in between—this has been, and will remain, Labour policy.” (Credit: John Healey-Facebook)

Healey, wrote the i, “is calling for a rapid rewrite of [the governments’] defence and foreign policies known collectively as the Integrated Review (IR) that was published only last year.” The IR was now getting in the way of Russia’s defeat said Healey, “It was meant to be threat-led but made no mention of the Taliban taking over in Afghanistan or of the Russian threat to Ukraine. It largely overlooked Europe. And it got carried away with itself, with Boris Johnson trumpeting this tilt to the Indo-Pacific...

“It’s fine to send a new aircraft carrier on a gap-year tour of the Pacific. But its real job has got to be in the Atlantic and in the Med. It’s marginal to any balance of power in the Indo Pacific, in the Atlantic, in the Arctic, as far as the northern European security is concerned it’s pivotal,” Healey stated.

He boasted of Tony Blair’s Labour government, “We delivered the largest sustained increase in defence spending for two decades after the Twin Towers. [The Ukraine invasion] requires that sort of response from government. If they’re willing to do that they will have our support.”

The i commented, “Labour is also writing the Government what amounts to a blank cheque on political support for new defence spending if the review that he wants to be completed by July identifies a need for it.”

Serological testing suggests nearly half of Canadians and two-thirds of children under 10 have had COVID-19

Malcolm Fiedler & Roger Jordan


Serological testing by the British Columbia Centres for Disease Control (BC CDC) and Life Labs revealed that over 40 percent of the province’s population tested positive for COVID-19 antibodies in March. This staggering figure, up from 10 percent during a previous study in October, underscores how the more infectious Omicron variant and the ruling elite’s deliberate policy of letting the virus run rampant produced mass infection on an unprecedented scale.

Perhaps the most concerning finding was the widespread infection of children. It found that over 60 percent of children surveyed tested positive for COVID antibodies, discrediting the often repeated lie that schools aren’t drivers of transmission. This lie, coupled with fraudulent claims that children are less likely to get infected, was used to keep schools open through successive waves of massive infection and death over the past two years, so parents could be freed from child care responsibilities and forced to work pumping out profits for big business.

August 2021 protest against the Alberta UCP government's attempt to scrap virtually all anti-COVID measures, an action that made the province the centre of Canada's fourth wave of the pandemic. (Twitter)

British Columbia, together with Alberta and Manitoba, are the three provinces with the highest serological test positivity rates, according to separate figures released last month by the Canadian Blood Service and Canada’s COVID-19 Immunity Task Force. The data showed that over 36 percent of young people aged 17 to 24 had had a COVID-19 infection by the end of February. These figures are revealing in that they show how British Columbia, a province governed by the supposedly “left” NDP, and Alberta, led by hard-right Premier Jason Kenney, who as late as June 2020 was describing COVID-19 as “the flu,” have pursued similar ruthless policies of mass infection and death throughout the pandemic.

Given the continuing rampant spread of the virus in the two months since these figures were gathered, it is reasonable to assume that the true rate of infection is now approaching 50 percent. As Danuta Skowronski, an epidemiologist at the BC CDC who led its research, told CBC in late April, “It’s about one in two, almost, of our population that have had evidence of infection.”

Official figures from Ontario suggest that 40 percent of the population was infected by COVID-19 since December. Meanwhile, Quebec’s hard-right Coalition Avenir Québec government recently admitted that the initial Omicron wave infected some 3 million of the province’s 8.5 million people.

In the six months since December 1, 2021, Canada has officially recorded nearly additional 10,000 COVID-19 deaths in two waves of Omicron, bringing the total since the pandemic to more than 39,800.  

CIDRAP, an internationally renowned center for infectious diseases based in Minnesota, recently conducted a meta-analysis of 31 independent studies and found that upwards of 49 percent of COVID-19 survivors experienced persistent and lingering illness from a variety of symptoms four months after their diagnosis. Assuming that close to 19 million people in Canada, approximately half of its 38 million population, have suffered a COVID-19 infection, this study suggests that over 9 million people could have suffered, or are now suffering, from Long COVID.

This mass tragedy was not principally due to Omicron’s unprecedented infectiousness and immune-evasive capabilities. Properties the virus was able to develop only because the ruling elites of every country, outside China, refused to pursue an elimination strategy, thus allowing the virus to continue to propagate and mutate spinning off new variants.

If millions of Canadians have been infected with COVID-19 just since last December, it is above all because the federal Liberal government and its provincial counterparts have abandoned all efforts to contain the pandemic’s spread. Indeed, in Canada, as elsewhere, the advent of the more infectious Omicron variant was used to declare that attempts to stop the virus’ spread were futile.

In line with this, the devastating increase in COVID infections over the past six months and the nearly ten thousand additional needless deaths have been positively welcomed by the political establishment and its media hangers-on as part of their homicidal campaign to make COVID-19 “endemic.”

When Omicron was first detected in southern Africa in late November 2021, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau waited three weeks before bothering to address the population on what his government planned to do about it. By then, Omicron was already spreading rapidly across the country, breaking daily infection rates. Rather than investing social and financial resources to combat the looming disaster, Trudeau and the provincial premiers allowed the testing and contact tracing systems to all but collapse. As of late April, just 3.7 million infections had been officially recorded in Canada since Omicron’s advent, approximately one-fifth of the total suggested by serological research.

Following the emergence of the far-right Freedom Convoy in late January, which was incited and built up by the Conservative Party to break popular support for COVID-19 protection measures, the Trudeau government, with the support of the NDP, oversaw the implementation of the Convoy’s fascistic pandemic program in all but name. Mask mandates, test requirements, limits on social gatherings, and all other remaining public health measures were scrapped in the weeks following the occupation of downtown Ottawa by far-right thugs threatening political violence.

A critical role in facilitating this bonfire of COVID-19 regulations was played by the New Democrats and trade unions. They responded to the emergence of the Freedom Convoy by using their vast resources to block any independent protests by workers to oppose the Convoy’s fascistic agenda, instead underscoring their firm loyalty to the Canadian capitalist state. The unions applauded Trudeau’s invocation of the draconian Emergencies Act to break up the Convoy, while the NDP ensured Trudeau got a parliamentary majority to confirm and extend the Act’s enforcement. One month later, with the vast majority of COVID-19 protections already scrapped by the provinces with the approval of the federal government, the NDP concluded an alliance with the Liberals to keep Trudeau in power through June 2025.

The initial Omicron wave, which claimed close to 6,500 lives in Canada, has since given way to a sixth deadly wave of the virus. Infections and deaths have skyrocketed across the country, with many hospitals once again overwhelmed. Children’s hospitals are facing a particularly drastic crisis due to COVID-19’s ravaging of schools.

Governments at all levels are doing even less to fight the sixth wave than all previous ones. On Saturday, May 14, Quebec will become the last province to abolish its indoor mask mandate, creating a situation where essentially no pandemic public heath restrictions will remain in force anywhere in Canada.

Last Saturday, the Trudeau government, again with the support of the trade union-sponsored NDP, allowed the few remaining COVID-19 financial supports available for working people to expire. Consequently, workers will no longer receive financial aid if they need to self-isolate after a positive test or to take time off to care for an infected child or relative. As well as underscoring the indifference of the Liberal government to the well-being of working people, the decision will further accelerate COVID-19 transmission, as infected workers will be forced to choose between remaining on the job or facing increased financial distress, even ruin.

Germany supplies self-propelled howitzers to Ukraine for war against Russia

Johannes Stern


Just days after the official decision by the German government to supply “heavy weaponry” to Ukraine, Germany is massively expanding its support for the war.

On Friday, the Ministry of Defense announced via Twitter that Germany will supply seven self-propelled 2000-model howitzers to Kiev. This was “determined” by Defence Minister Christine Lambrecht (Social Democrats). With the addition of five Dutch self-propelled howitzers, the total delivery will amount to a dozen. Training for the use of the howitzers in Germany is also “ready” and will begin “next week,” the Ministry confirmed.

The self-propelled howitzer is an extremely destructive weapon. “Nobody survives within 50 metres” of the impact point of its shells, writes the Süddeutsche Zeitung in an article with the militarist headline “The Fist That Strikes.”

Several thousand fragments “would destroy everything,” and the soldiers can “set the projectiles to explode over the heads of the enemy.”

“The crews can use special ammunition against” enemy tanks, “which automatically detects the vehicles with its sensors and is able to break through their steel.”

With the delivery of howitzers and the training of Ukrainian soldiers in Germany, Berlin is now clearly an aggressive party to the US-NATO war against Russia.

According to an opinion released by the Scientific Service of the German parliament on March 16, the training of Ukrainian soldiers on German soil constitutes participation in the war under international law. “Only if, in addition to the supply of weapons, the briefing of the conflicting party or training in such weapons were also in question, would one leave the certain ground of non-warfare,” it stated.

In other words, 81 years after the German war of extermination against the Soviet Union, in which nearly 30 million people died, the ruling class is once again waging war against Russia. Putin’s reactionary invasion of Ukraine and the official propaganda do not change the fact that German foreign policy is again developing along similar lines as in 1941.

Significantly, the ruling class did not use the anniversary of the surrender of the Wehrmacht on May 8-9, 1945 to commemorate its terrible crimes but to dispatch tanks and other heavy weaponry to the East again. In doing so, it is pursuing the declared goal of defeating the Russian army militarily.

On Wednesday, Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) announced after a government conference at Schloss Meseberg that the issue now had to be to repel the Russian offensive in the Donbas and equip the Ukrainian army accordingly. “That’s why it was said that we will supply up to 50 suitable Cheetah tanks. We have also said that together with our allies we want to provide support for the use of artillery.”

Since then, one announcement has followed another. On Thursday, at a joint press conference with Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala, Scholz announced a so-called “ring exchange” of heavy weapons. Specifically, this means that the Czech Republic is supplying weapons of Soviet design, including tanks, to Ukraine. In return, Germany undertakes to replace the weapon systems of the Czech army with corresponding modern Western weapon systems.

Scholz said that as far as support with weapons is concerned, “we will work closely together and cooperate.” He added, “The Czech Republic can provide weapons that originate in Russian production and are directly useful for Ukraine. We can help ensure that the Czech army retains the necessary strength that it requires.”

A similar “ring exchange” is being prepared between Germany and Slovakia. This was confirmed by Minister of Defence Christine Lambrecht during a visit to the Slovakian airbase Sliac on Friday. The base is less than 300 kilometres from the Ukrainian border and is currently undergoing major upgrades by the German army.

According to a report on the official website of the Ministry of Defence, Germany has moved Patriot anti-aircraft systems to the base with FlaRak Group 1 from Husum “within a very short time.”

“Together with the US and the Netherlands,” the report said, “Germany is now taking over the protection of Slovak airspace at the invitation of Slovakia within the framework of NATO’s Integrated Air Defence.” Germany is “the lead nation” in this operation.

Currently 240 German soldiers are stationed in Slovakia. But that is just the beginning. “On 4 May, the Slovak Parliament approved an interim increase in NATO troops from 2,100 to 3,000,” the Ministry of Defence’s report states. “A total of up to 1,200 German forces can now be transferred to Slovakia. This makes Germany the largest troop deployer in the country.”

German tanks arriving at Sestokai station, Lithuania, Feb. 24, 2017, for the deployment of the German-led NATO battlegroup (AP Photo/Mindaugas Kulbis)

Germany has been leading the NATO Battlegroup in Lithuania since 2017, which originally comprised 1,000 soldiers. In March, 350 additional German soldiers were sent to Lithuania with heavy military equipment. With the transfer of more soldiers and the formation of a new NATO battlegroup in Slovakia, Germany will become one of the largest NATO troop deployers in Eastern Europe after the US.

The federal government is well aware that with the massing of German troops in Eastern Europe and the delivery of heavy weapons and the training of Ukrainian soldiers in Germany, it is increasing the risk of a nuclear Third World War. As late as April 22, Scholz stated in a Der Spiegel interview that everything had to be done “to avoid a direct military confrontation between NATO and a highly armed superpower such as Russia, a nuclear-armed power.” The issue is “preventing an escalation that leads to a third world war.”

These warnings are now being ignored by the government. In a recent interview with Die Zeit, the Green Minister for Economic Affairs, Robert Habeck, replied dismissively to the question of whether he was “actually not afraid of a third world war.

“No, I’m not,” he said. “We are at a time when you can have a lot of worries. But the fear of the Third World War, which is haunting some, is also fueled by the fear that Germany will become a war party.”

In fact, Germany is a war party and Habeck and the Greens are among the leading warmongers. He defended the delivery of deadly weapons by the German government with the comment: “With the weapons that I, Robert Habeck, have sent to Ukraine ... people will most likely be killed.” The decision was “nevertheless necessary compared to the alternatives.”

The next arms deliveries are already being prepared behind the backs of the population. The chairman of the parliamentary Committee on European Union Affairs, Anton Hofreiter (Greens), demanded on the TV station Welt that after the howitzers Germany must “also supply Leopard 1 and Marder tanks.” Industry applications for this need to be “approved quickly.”

One hundred million coronavirus cases in the US predicted for fall and winter surge

Bryan Dyne


The Biden administration announced Friday that it expects the US to record 100 million new cases of COVID-19 during the coming fall and winter months. According to the Washington Post article that broke the story, the administration also warned of a “significant wave of deaths.”

The projections came from a currently unnamed White House official at a private press briefing, the details of which have yet to be made public. The most the Post states is that the administration made its estimate based on “outside models of the pandemic,” all of which assume that Omicron and its subvariants continue to remain dominant.

The projections become even more dire if new and more virulent variants emerge, as has happened repeatedly since the Alpha variant was first detected in the United Kingdom in late 2020.

The implications of such a level of mass infection are staggering. One hundred million new cases would more than double the official case count of the pandemic, which stands at more than 83 million. One hundred million new cases suggests, based on a study published in April by the Oxford University Press, 43 million new cases of Long COVID. One hundred million new cases implies, using the accepted infection fatality rate of the virus of 0.5 percent, 500,000 new deaths.

Registered nurse Bryan Hofilena attaches "COVID Patient" stickers on a body bag of a patient who died of coronavirus at Providence Holy Cross Medical Center in Los Angeles, Tuesday, Dec. 14, 2021. [AP Photo/Jae C. Hong]

A report by ABC News on the projections, which included an interview with White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Ashish Jha, painted a dire picture. Jha confirmed to ABC’s David Muir that “between now and the fall and winter, [it is] very possible we’re going to see new variants” that will be more contagious. At the same time, he noted that when the new wave hits, “we’re not going to have vaccines … we’re going to run out of treatments … we’re not going to have diagnostic testing.”

Jha, however, had nothing to propose aside from the White House mantra that vaccines are the panacea to end the pandemic. “If you’ve been vaccinated and boosted, you have a very high degree of protection against severe illness,” said Jha, making no mention of even basic mitigation measures such as masks.

Vaccines are one of the necessary tools to fight the pandemic. Vaccination rates in the US, however, have stalled out with only 67 percent of the population having gotten a full initial course and less than 31 percent having received a booster shot. Such low rates are only possible in an antiscientific social and cultural climate promoted by both the Republicans and Democrats. As a result, the Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker estimates that at least 234,000 people have died since June 2021 that would have otherwise lived if they had been fully vaccinated and boosted.

Moreover, the coronavirus variants have proven increasingly capable of evading immunity granted by the vaccines, especially the Omicron variants. In January and February, 42 and 40 percent, respectively, of all deaths from COVID-19 in the US were among fully vaccinated people, including 12 and 15 percent who were boosted with a third shot.

This means that if there are 500,000 deaths from COVID-19 this year, more than 200,000 will be among those who have had at least two shots of the vaccine. And with every passing month, the effectiveness of vaccines already administered diminishes.

There is also every possibility that the prediction by the Biden administration proves to be an underestimation of the coming waves of the pandemic. While the official case counts stand at an average of nearly 70,000 a day, the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington estimates that there are currently more than 492,000 new infections each day, the vast majority of which go undetected amid the lack of testing and ongoing massive coverup of COVID-19 data.

At such a rate, there will be more than 115 million new infections by year’s end, even without another surge. The threat posed by the pandemic continues to be so dire that even one of the leading representatives of capitalism, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, commented to the Financial Times, “We’re still at risk of this pandemic generating a variant that would be even more transmissive and even more fatal.” Gates continued, “It’s way above a 5 per cent risk that this pandemic, we haven’t even seen the worst of it.”

The Biden administration now openly acknowledges that the coronavirus pandemic is not “over” or “endemic,” as has been presented by ranking officials and the corporate media. Rather, it is developing into a tsunami of new cases and deaths that has the potential to exceed even the colossal scale produced by the Omicron wave in December, January and February.

The media, however, is treating this largely as a nonissue. The pandemic has been largely dropped from the television news and print media. The ABC News report was more notable for being the network’s first significant report on the pandemic in months than for any new details presented on the looming public health disaster.

As for the White House, it has announced its projections but proposes no measures to stop it. It has not held a press conference to warn the American people of the looming danger or provide any guidance on what must be done to avert it. On the contrary, the Biden administration has overseen the elimination of virtually every even minimal mitigation measure to lower transmission, including mask mandates.  

The policy of mass infection is alive and well under the Democrats, just as it was under the Republicans. One hundred million cases and the resultant hundreds of thousands of deaths and millions of cases of Long COVID are seen as merely the cost of doing business to keep Wall Street coffers overflowing.

The White House briefing again makes clear that any level of death is acceptable to the American ruling elite so long as it does not impinge on its ability to extract surplus value from the working class. Various pandemic trackers continue to surpass an official death count of 1 million and barely a mention has been made of such a colossal loss of life in the press. Now the federal government has admitted that deaths will rise to at least 1.5 million.

7 May 2022

German federal and state governments cut quarantine period to five days

Tamino Dreisam


Despite official propaganda about the “end of the pandemic,” 1,500 people are falling victim to the coronavirus every week in Germany. New strains are spreading that are even more infectious than the BA.2 Omicron variant.

Nevertheless, all the parties in the Bundestag (federal parliament) are removing the last remaining protective measures and are prepared to accept tens of thousands more deaths. This is illustrated by the recent decisions of the federal and state governments to shorten the isolation period to five days.

The new Infection Protection Act passed in mid-March reduces coronavirus measures to “basic protection”—mandatory mask-wearing on short- and long-distance transport, as well as in nursing homes and hospitals. At the beginning of April, Federal Health Minister Karl Lauterbach (Social Democratic Party—SPD) also tried to completely lift the quarantine requirements but had to withdraw this proposal just one day later due to public anger.

People wait to make a corona test in the city center of Essen, Germany, Wednesday, Jan. 12, 2021. (AP Photo/Martin Meissner)

On 28 April, the federal and state governments nevertheless decided to shorten the isolation period to five days. On 2 May, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) updated its guidelines on isolation and now recommends a quarantine period of only five days. A negative test after the five days is only a recommendation. Previously, a quarantine period of 10 days applied, with the possibility of release after seven days.

The concrete implementation of these guidelines is left to the individual federal states. In Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria, Bremen, Hesse, North Rhine-Westphalia, Rhineland-Palatinate, Saxony, Schleswig-Holstein and Thuringia, the quarantine period has already been reduced to five days. Berlin, Brandenburg, and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania follow on 6 May. What is also new is that quarantine is completely waived for all contact persons—even if they are unvaccinated and live in the same household as an infected person.

The cut in the quarantine period is emblematic of the profits-before-lives policy of the ruling class. Following the lie of the “end of the pandemic,” coronavirus protective measures have been all but abandoned. As a result, infections have spread massively in the population, causing a loss of working hours due to illness that threatens to reduce the profits of the banks and corporations. Therefore, even potentially infectious people must be forced to continue working.

By spreading mass infection in workplaces, the government is putting the health and lives of tens of thousands of workers at risk. Yet it is fully aware of the consequences of its policy.

Lauterbach himself regularly warns on Twitter of the effects of a COVID infection. On 1 May, for example, he wrote, “Even if you are in top shape, a coronavirus infection can change everything for you. A well-trained body usually protects you from severe COVID disease. Unfortunately, not nearly as well from Long Covid.”

That does not stop him from immensely increasing everyone’s risk of COVID by shortening the quarantine period.

The federal government is still pursuing the plan to abolish quarantine altogether. Liberal Democrat (FDP) parliamentary group leader Christian Dürr, for example, told the Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland that the rules on isolating infected people should be lifted completely. “Anyone who has tested positive but is symptom-free should be allowed to leave the house with a mask while observing social distancing,” he said. “I am firmly convinced that people can make a decision on this issue on their own responsibility. There is no longer a need for government regulation for this.”

In addition to cutting back quarantine, other pandemic measures were dropped in numerous German states on 1 May. In Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria, Brandenburg, Bremen, Hesse, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Lower Saxony, North Rhine-Westphalia, Rhineland-Palatinate, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Schleswig-Holstein, testing is no longer mandatory at schools.

In Saarland, the number of tests was reduced from three to two per week. Berlin follows on 9 May. Thuringia even plans to test only once a week from 6 May. There is no longer a mask-wearing requirement for schools in any of the federal states. Hamburg and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania are also no longer considered hotspots, so wearing a mask is no longer compulsory in retail outlets there.

Contrary to the claims of politicians and the media, however, the pandemic is far from over. Although the number of registered infections has fallen—after testing capacities were reduced and compulsory testing was abolished in almost all areas—it is still at a very high level. The seven-day incidence rate per 100,000 inhabitants is close to 600, with more than 750,000 infections reported in one week.

In medical treatment facilities, as well as old people’s homes and nursing homes, the number of outbreaks increased compared to the previous week—from 94 to 101 in medical treatment facilities and from 314 to 368 in old people’s homes and nursing homes. Between 35 and 160 people died in each of these outbreaks.

However, due to overburdened health authorities and because not all infected persons have a PCR test—only those tested appear in the statistics—experts assume a very high rate of under-reporting. This is underlined by the figures of the RKI. According to the institute, 55 percent of all transmitted test results are positive.

The situation at hospitals also remains extremely fraught. The adjusted number of hospitalised COVID-19 patients is about 7,000 per week, with 1,446 people currently needing intensive care.

The number of deaths is particularly alarming. Since the reduction of coronavirus measures to the level of so-called “basic protection” in March, 12,000 people have already died. Every week, about 1,500 people fall victim to the virus.

Numerous scientists warn that the situation is getting worse. Lars Kaderali, a bio-informatician and member of the Coronavirus Experts Council, believes it is possible that the Delta variant could return in autumn. “That would be problematic because Omicron infection does not protect well against an infection with Delta—unlike vaccination. So there really is an immunity gap.”

The recombination of Delta and Omicron strains and the emergence of new variants are also a danger, he said. “It could be that we get another Omicron variant or even a completely new variant. I think the only thing that can be said for sure is that by autumn the coronavirus pandemic will not be over.”

In South Africa, Omicron mutations BA.4 and BA.5 are already causing a rapid increase in infections. According to current information, the two variants are considered significantly more contagious than their Omicron siblings.

Labour’s party of NATO and austerity tanks in UK local elections

Robert Stevens


Thursday’s local elections saw Boris Johnson’s Conservative government lose hundreds of council seats as expected. But the real disaster was the Labour Party’s total failure to muster significant popular support out of this sea of opposition to Johnson and the Tories, such is the hostility to Sir Keir Starmer’s equally right-wing party.

Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer visits Barnet after his party won the London borough in the local elections (Credit: KeirStarmer/Twitter)

Councils were contested across the UK, including in most major cities. By the end of counting Friday evening, the Tories had lost 397 council seats across England, Wales and Scotland and Labour had picked up just 252. The Liberal Democrat’s gained 189, won mainly at the expense of the Tory Party in the South of England. The Green Party gained 81, taking from both the Tories and Labour.

This translated into an additional eight councils won for Labour, 12 lost for the Tories and five more won for the Liberal Democrats.

In Wales—a Labour stronghold—the party gained 62 new councillors and two councils. It lost control of Neath Port Talbot council as the nationalist Plaid Cymru (Party of Wales) gained seats there. Most of Labour’s gains in Wales were at the expense of the Tories. The Conservatives lost 67 councillors and lost control of the only council they controlled, Monmouthshire. While Labour became the largest party, their total in Monmouthshire of 22 seats was two short of a majority. Plaid Cymru lost three seats overall but took control of three more authorities in the process—Anglesey, Ceredigion and Carmarthenshire. The Greens won eight seats in Wales, their best ever result.

In Scotland, while Labour became the second largest party at the expense of the Tories, the Scottish National Party (SNP) easily maintained its position as the largest party in local government. Across Scotland’s 32 councils, the SNP increased its total number of councillors by 22. Labour gained 20 seats and one council, but finished 13 percentage points behind the SNP in the vote share.

Elections were also held to the Northern Ireland Assembly, where results so far suggest Sinn Féin will be the largest party. This would be the first time an Irish nationalist party has held the most seats in the parliament, allowing them to select the First Minister, and would likely produce a political crisis. The rival Democratic Unionist Party has already signaled its intention to refuse to nominate a Deputy First Minister if Sinn Féin win. If one is not in place after six months, the administration collapses.

According to a projected national share of the British vote released by the BBC on Friday afternoon, Labour’s share was 35 percent, the Conservatives’ 30 percent, and Liberal Democrats’ 19 percent.

Whatever spin is put on it, the results are an indictment of Labour who made the minimum gains possible under the circumstances. Starmer’s declared campaign to rescue the party from former leader Jeremy Corbyn’s electoral disaster in 2019—which he and his fellow Blairites were as much responsible for as Corbyn—has been a dismal failure.

Labour was up against a prime minister who has overseen the mass murder of almost 200,000 people in the pandemic at the head of an austerity imposing Tory party in power for 12 years; and now overseeing a price surge making life literally unaffordable for the working class. Prior to the election, the Labour supporting Mirror predicted that the Tories would lose up to 800 seats, sending the Tory Party into meltdown and leading to the possible resignation of the widely hated Johnson. Others like the Guardian suggested Tory losses of over 500 seats.

In the event, Johnson was able to brush off a “mixed set of results” and comment, “We had a tough night in some parts of the country but on the other hand in other parts of the country you are still seeing Conservatives going forward and making quite remarkable gains in places that haven’t voted Conservative for a long time, if ever ...”

According to a Sky News projection, based on local election results from 1,700 wards and an analysis of the change in vote share since 2018 across 87 local authorities, Labour would fail to win the next general election set for 2024. It projected a hung parliament with the Tories on 278 seats—seven more than Labour on 271.

In the so-called “Red Wall” of historically Labour strongholds in the north of England, Starmer’s party flopped entirely. In the 2019 general election, the Tories took many of these constituencies—whose working-class areas had been long abandoned by Labour—for the first time in decades, if not ever. There were no signs of this rot being reversed. In Hull, after being in power for a decade, Labour lost control of the council to the Liberal Democrats. Hull was one of the ports hit by the recent mass firing of 800 P&O ferry workers, which Labour and the trade unions did nothing to fight.

Where the Tories suffered heavy losses, Labour was far from harnessing or monopolising the opposition. Most workers simply voted with their feet and did not turn up to the polls. As for those who did cast a ballot, the Liberal Democrats and Greens between them gained more seats than Labour. The further lurch to the right under Starmer has been so extreme that these parties picked up many voters, predominantly from the middle class, repulsed by the reactionary stench of both the main parties.

Since being handed the reins by Corbyn in April 2020, with both professing that they would offer Johnson only “constructive” criticism during the pandemic, Starmer has moved ruthlessly to purge the party of any connection even with his predecessor’s watered down “left” policies.

The Labour leader has launched an extended audition for the role of British imperialism’s chief warmonger and the support of the City of London’s financial oligarchy. Starmer declared  “Labour is the party of NATO” and assured the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) last November, “As I said in my speech at Labour Party conference: Labour is back in business… Labour is also the party of business.”

The first fruits of his efforts were summed up by victories in Westminster council, held by the Conservatives since 1964, and Wandsworth council, in Tory hands since 1978—the year before Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher came to office. Wandsworth was the Tory flagship council, reputed to be Thatcher’s favourite, such was its commitment to her privatising, free market agenda.

Starmer pointedly chose to celebrate a stronger performance for Labour in London with a televised visit to newly won Barnet, where false accusations of Labour anti-Semitism have played a major role due to its high concentration of Jewish votes. He declared that his party had won there as a result of this rotten right-wing witch-hunt, which has seen Corbyn expelled from the Parliamentary Labour Party and countless others from the party altogether.

Even then, Labour group leader Barry Rawlings had to acknowledge of the party’s victory: “I’ll be honest, it’s not us being wonderful. I think a lot of Conservatives haven’t voted this time, I think they feel alienated from No 10… they’ve been disappointed with Boris Johnson”.

Two other London councils—Croydon and Tower Hamlets—will not declare results until Saturday morning and Saturday evening respectively. Labour is threatened with the loss of Croydon after declaring bankruptcy due to years of financial skulduggery, including the sell-off of public assets.

Financial Times columnist Camilla Cavendish delivered a blunt assessment: “If Starmer can’t enthuse voters now, he might never beat Johnson”. She writes, “The local elections, which Conservatives had feared would represent a huge backlash against the prime minister, have turned out to be just as much a verdict on Labour. Boris Johnson will be quietly concluding he is safe—and Keir Starmer still has a very long way to go if he wants to win the next election.”

Major swings on Wall Street as monetary policy tightens

Nick Beams


The move by the US Federal Reserve and other central banks to tighten monetary policies  and clamp down on workers’ wage demands in the face of rampant inflation is producing wild swings on Wall Street and raising major problems in financial markets in the US and around the world.

Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

On Wednesday, following the Fed decision to lift its base interest rate by 0.5 percentage points (50 basis points) and the remark by chair Jerome Powell that the central bank was not “actively considering” a hike of 75 basis points, Wall Street surged.

But the so-called rally lasted less than a day. On Thursday the market reversed all those gains and more, undertaking the biggest U-turn since the start of the pandemic in early 2020.

The Dow fell by more than 1000 points, 3.1 percent, to record its biggest decline this year after posting its biggest rise since 2020 the day before. The S&P 500 dropped 3.6 percent. The biggest fall was in the tech-heavy NASDAQ, the most sensitive to interest rate increases.

It dropped by 5 percent to record its largest one-day percentage loss since June 2020 taking its total loss from its record high in November last year to 24 percent.

Thursday’s selloff, which continued yesterday with smaller but significant losses, was a resumption of the trend since the start of the year which has seen more than $8 trillion wiped off the market value of stocks.

There was also another sell-off in the bond market which sent the yield on the 10-year Treasury note to more than 3 percent, its highest level since November 2018, with the rise continuing yesterday. (When bonds are sold off and their price falls the interest rate or yield rises.)

Besides lifting the interest rate by 50 basis points, with Powell stating there was a “sense” on the policy-making body that “additional 50 basis rises should be on the table at the next couple of meetings, the Fed also decided to start reducing its $9 trillion holdings of financial assets. They comprise Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities.

The Fed will start cutting its holdings of these assets by $47.5 billion for each of three months, starting in June, and then by $90 billion a month in September.

While the media coverage focused on the rate increases, the view of some analysts and commentators is that the balance sheet reduction is more significant. It has not been undertaken before, save for a brief period in 2018 when it was rapidly reversed after a violent response on Wall Street at the end of that year.

The Fed’s assets, which stood at under $1 trillion in 2008, have increased nine-fold as a result of the quantitative easing begun after the global financial crisis and the further injection of around $4 trillion into the financial system following the crisis of March 2020 at the start of the pandemic.

No one in the financial world, in the Fed and certainly not Powell has any real idea of what the consequences could be.

Asked at his press conference on Wednesday about the effect that balance sheet reduction might have for monetary policy, Powell replied: “In terms of the effect… I would just stress how uncertain the effect is of shrinking the balance sheet. You know, we run these models and everyone does in this field and make estimates… And you know, these are very uncertain. I cannot really be any clearer.… We don’t really know.”

This is a telling admission, puncturing the myth that the Fed, with its vast array of information and computer-based analysis, is, if not entirely in control, has at least some idea of where it is going. But after unleashing one of the most far-reaching monetary policy changes in history—the pouring of trillions of dollars into Wall Street to prevent a collapse of the financial system—it has no idea of what any reversal might produce.

However, others have issued a warning. This week the Economist noted that the Fed is now the largest single holder of US government debt with $5.8 trillion of Treasury bonds on its books, a quarter of the $23 trillion total. It also holds $2.7 trillion worth of mortgage-backed securities.

According to the article, the reversal of this “portfolio behemoth” through quantitative tightening “could spark a repeat of the temporary yet troubling breakdowns the world’s most important financial market has suffered in recent years—on a bigger scale.”

It was possible that “QT [quantitative tightening] will cause the Treasury to malfunction” and that its “smooth running matters well beyond America” because Treasury rates “are a crucial benchmark for pricing virtually all other financial assets globally.”

Recent history, it said, was not encouraging, recalling the crisis in the repo market, where Treasuries can be swapped for cash in short-term trades, in September 2019, and the COVID shock of March 2020 when the Treasury market ceased to function for several days. No buyers could be found for US debt, supposedly the safest financial asset in the world.

These crises were “temporary” but only because the Fed massively intervened becoming the backstop for the Treasury market and virtually all other areas of the financial system. The crisis was averted but, as various reports have made clear, the underlying issues that led to it have not been resolved.

The Economist noted the conditions for a new crisis are developing because there is a “thinning” of liquidity in the Treasury market. This refers to a situation in which trades can have an outsized effect on the market as a whole as opposed to a situation of ample liquidity in which their effect is small.

Pointing to this situation, the article said there was “the growing possibility of renewed dysfunction” that would make it “likelier that the market seizes up.”

Were that to take place the Fed would have to intervene with massive support, as it has in the past, but this time under conditions not of low inflation but in a situation where inflation is racing out of control.

The turn to higher interest rates is starting to impact on all areas of the financial system and the broader economy in the US and globally. Even before the latest Fed decision, interest rates were increasing across a range of US markets, from home mortgages to car loans.

The Financial Times has reported that the value of high-risk junk bonds in the US trading at 70 cents on the dollar—a level taken as a sign of distress—has risen to $27 billion compared to about $14 billion at the end of last year.

In Europe, even though the European Central Bank (ECB) has not increased its interest rate, borrowing costs are starting to rise, and investors are demanding higher interest rates when lending to more indebted euro zone countries.

This raises the prospect of a divergence between European countries of the north and the south which led to the crisis that threatened the continuation of the euro in 2012. That was only averted when the ECB president Mario Draghi said the central bank would do “whatever it takes.” But inflation, coupled with the turbulence resulting from the war in Ukraine, has vastly changed the situation from a decade ago.

In all the major economies the central aim of the higher-interest-rate regime is to batter down the wages struggles of the working class in the face of inflation.

Nowhere is this class-war agenda more clearly illustrated than in the UK. Announcing a further interest rate increase of 25 basis points on Thursday, the Bank of England said there would be a “very sharp slowdown” in the UK economy leading to a recession as inflation rose to 10 percent.

Unemployment would rise from 3.8 percent to 5.5 percent in the next three years and this would help moderate wage claims.

Three members of the Monetary Policy Committee who wanted a 50-basis point rise said they did so to prevent “recent trends in pay growth” from becoming more widely and deeply embedded. Under conditions where wages overall have not kept pace with price hikes, the interest rate increases are a pre-emptive strike to crush an emerging movement of the working class.

Turkish doctors mount nationwide strike as prices explode

Ulaş Ateşçi


Hekimsen, a Turkish doctors union with nearly 20,000 members, went on nationwide strike on Thursday and Friday, demanding better wages and benefits. This strike, held in all departments “except for Emergency Services and Polyclinics, Delivery Room, COVID, Oncology, Hematology Polyclinics and all inpatient services,” will be followed by strikes on May 17-18 and May 26-27.

Largely ignored in mainstream media, even in the pseudo-left press, this important strike is part of a larger international movement emerging in the working class and especially among health care workers.

Striking doctors at Topraklık Oral and Dental Health Clinics,in Ankara, Turkey on May 5-6. [Credit: @hekimsen on Twitter]

The wave of strikes against President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s failure to meet the demands of doctors and health care workers in Turkey continues to grow. National strikes had previously been held in December, January, February and March. The doctors strike also comes after a wave of wildcat strikes by various sections of workers in January and February 2022. There were at least 106 wildcat strikes in these two months alone.

The cost of living raised by the pandemic, the war in Ukraine and sanctions against Russia is increasingly driving workers into struggle in Turkey and internationally. According to the Turkish Statistical Institute, official annual inflation in Turkey reached 70 percent as of April, while this rate was 105 percent in transportation and 89 percent in food and non-alcoholic beverages. However, the real inflation rate has risen to 156 percent, according to a report by the Inflation Research Group, made up of independent economists and academics.

According to the pro-government Türk-İş union confederation, the poverty line for a family of four in Turkey reached 17,340 Turkish lira (currently $1,165) in April. The “hunger limit” (monthly food expenditures required for a family of four to have a healthy, balanced and adequate diet) rose to 5,323 Turkish lira ($360), 1,070 lira more than the minimum wage (4,250 TL, or $285).

Nonetheless, “specialist physicians receive a salary of 12,000-13,000 TL and other physicians 9,500-10,000 TL with a fixed additional payment,” according to Hekimsen. Doctors are protesting the government’s failure to keep its promise to pay them bonuses during the pandemic.

The doctors are demanding that COVID-19 be counted as an “occupational disease,” as health care workers have fallen ill with COVID-19 10 times more often than the broader population, and doctors have lost their lives four times more than the average. To date, over 500 health care workers in Turkey have died of COVID-19.

However, the Erdoğan government has lifted the latest measures to mitigate the spread of the pandemic. At the end of April, the obligation to wear masks in all indoor areas, except public transportation vehicles and health institutions, was removed.

The government, which has reduced the number of daily tests to 100,000, cites the official daily number of cases falling below 2,000 as proof that the “pandemic is over.” However, the rise of the pandemic in the US and European countries, which are lifting restrictions like the Turkish government, shows that a similar rise is virtually inevitable in Turkey.

Doctors are also demanding that “malpractice” decisions be stopped against them, stating: “Remove compensation penalties from physicians’ concerns. In the committee to be formed for malpractice decisions, there should be a sufficient number of physicians who have medical knowledge to make decisions in the relevant field and who are competent in health law.”

Also, doctors are against working over 36 hours non-stop. Hekimsen pointed out that the number of physicians in Turkey is one-third the average in OECD countries. Also, the physicians are also opposed to reducing the time to examine a patient to five minutes.

Besides better benefits, pension and working conditions, the doctors are demanding legal measures to deter assaults against them in the health care facilities. Each day there are 40 acts of violence against health care workers in Turkey.

The physicians who went on strike are calling for public support, stating: “Support us for your health. Say, ‘The perpetrators [of violence] are interfering with my health care, punish them.’ Say, ‘I do not want to get an operation from a doctor who has worked for hours and has not slept until the morning.’ Say, ‘Give the most distinguished people of the country, who have decades of labor, experience and knowledge, the wages they deserve.’ Say, ‘Increase our examination time.’”

The doctors struggle is part of the growing unrest among all workers due to increasingly unbearable living conditions amid rising inflation. According to the daily Karar, an Ipsos poll found that 82 percent of Turkish people say the Turkish economy is “bad.”

A total of 19,000 people in 27 countries were interviewed from March 25 to April 3, and 78 percent of the participants from Turkey said “the country is going in the wrong direction.” Moreover, 58 percent of the participants in Turkey said the biggest problem was inflation.

Growing discontent among broad sections of the population and the growing strike movement increasingly worry business leaders, who have amassed vast wealth in the past decades, especially during the pandemic. This is fueling tensions within the ruling elite itself.

Orhan Turan, president of the Turkish Industry and Business Association (TÜSİAD), representing the dominant sections of the Turkish bourgeoisie, criticized the government for “not struggling with inflation” at the end of April. “There is inflation in the world, but it is around 9-10 percent. Consumer inflation in Turkey has exceeded 60 percent,” he said.

Turan also gave a green light to raising the minimum wage again this year, to prevent the growth of a working class movement against ever-increasing inflation. Reflecting the bourgeoisie’s fear of a social explosion in the working class, he said: “We need to think about this [wage increase] for labor peace, and if possible, to pass this process without crushing them [workers] with inflation.”

President Erdogan reacted sharply to this. He declared: “TÜSİAD does not care about ‘How can we contribute to the future of the country?’ On the contrary, it cares about ‘How can we remove the current government? And how can we bring a government that we can use comfortably?’” Erdoğan also effectively admitted to having been in the service of the bourgeoisie for nearly 20 years, saying: “In the last 20 years in Turkey, they [TÜSİAD] earned money with us, they earned growth with us.”

The Banking Regulation and Supervision Agency (BDDK) testified to what Erdoğan said about the enrichment of the corporate and financial elite. It announced that the banking sector’s net profit increased by 295.1 percent over the previous year, reaching 63.25 billion TL as of the end of March. In 2021, the profit for the same period was 16.01 billion TL.

These enormous profits are a product of the “profit before lives” policy jointly implemented by the government, bourgeois opposition parties and the unions during the pandemic. As hundreds of thousands died in Turkey of a disease that could have been prevented by scientific public health measures, tens of millions were infected and now face long-term effects from the disease. This criminal policy has led to close to 20 million deaths worldwide.