With new COVID-19 outbreak in Latin America, governments let virus rip

Eduardo Parati

After a brief period of decrease in new COVID-19 cases since the devastating wave of the Omicron variant, Chile, Argentina, and Brazil are again recording new outbreaks of the pandemic. Chile has recorded 18,060 and 26,780 new cases in the past two weeks, respectively, a 48 percent increase in one week. Although the number of ICU beds occupied by COVID-19 patients in Chile has not yet increased, the other waves of the pandemic have shown that hospitalizations and deaths follow case outbreaks with a delay of a few weeks.

In Argentina, cases increased by 92 percent in one week, and in the capital, Buenos Aires, by 128 percent. Four weeks ago, the country recorded 8,387 new cases, but that number rose to 33,989 last week, an increase of 305.2 percent. Between the first week of the month and last week, the number of patients hospitalized in moderate to severe condition in Buenos Aires increased 64.5 percent, from 237 to 390.

COVID-19 ICU patient in São Paulo, Brazil (Credit: Gustavo Basso)

In Brazil, the moving average of cases is registering an increase, driven by outbreaks in the southern region of the country. On May 19, it reached an average of 19,128 daily new cases, a 46.7 percent increase over the previous month. Given the large under-reporting of the infections in the country, it is difficult to know the real trajectory of the pandemic. However, data from hospitalizations, pharmacy tests, and school reports indicate that the virus is spreading much faster than the official figures show.

According to data from the Brazilian Association of Pharmacy and Drugstore Chains (Abrafarma), the number of positive tests increased 56 percent between the week of May 2-8 and the week of May 9-15. In the same period, the total number of tests performed increased from 89,236 to 121,272.

The number of hospitalizations in the state of São Paulo is growing, from 1,253 in the first week of this month to 1,666 last week, an increase of 33 percent. At the same time, the total number of patients in ICU beds has increased 11.2 percent since May 1, from 3,179 to 3,536 on May 20.

Last week, classes were suspended in at least four classrooms at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) after 17 medical students tested positive for COVID-19 in just seven days. In the ABC industrial region of São Paulo, several reports are coming in from parents about infection outbreaks in schools. The mother of a student at the vocational school ETEC Jorge Street told Repórter Diário: “As far as we know, there were 12 cases in his classroom. And also, in other classrooms of the mechatronics, electronics, and administration courses, there are teachers who are out sick.”

The response to the signs of a new wave of the pandemic by Latin American governments is essentially the same, from self-declared “left-wing” governments such as that of Gabriel Boric in Chile and Alberto Fernández in Argentina, to that of fascistic President Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil.

The surge of infections in Chile is occurring at the same time as COVID-19 testing has reached its lowest rate in more than a year and a half. Tests for entering the country have not been required since March, and, in April, land borders with Argentina, Bolivia and Peru were reopened. On April 14, the Chilean government removed mask mandates in open places, including mass gatherings such as concerts and soccer stadiums.

Boric’s government is adopting a pandemic severity warning criterion based solely on the transmission of “new variants” among the population. In March, with the emergence of the BA.2 subvariant, experts said that this version of the virus has sufficient mutations from the original Omicron variant to give it a new Greek letter. However, admitting the severity of BA.2 would cause alarm in the population and force the government to halt its campaign for ending the remaining mitigation measures. Following the position that “the cure cannot be worse than the disease,” the criteria adopted by the Chilean government allows it to keep the economy open indefinitely during a next wave.

This indifferent and criminal policy in response to the pandemic is one component of the reactionary response of the Chilean pseudo-leftist government to intensifying workers’ struggles, with Boric having sent the Carabineros special forces to violently suppress a strike by oil refinery workers on May 9. The aim is to ensure that workers remain on production lines, in warehouses, and other workplaces generating profits for the capitalists even as the prices of basic products continue to rise, and the spread of the virus continues to hit thousands of people every day.

As of April 6, continuing the policy adopted during the January-February Omicron wave, Alberto Fernandez’s Peronist government in Argentina removed the mandatory wearing of masks in schools and workplaces in Buenos Aires province, where more than a third of the country’s population lives. The end of mandatory use was implemented a few days after the nationwide suspension of the obligation to report positive self-tests to the government and mandatory two-meter social distancing.

In response to the rapid increase in new cases in recent weeks, Argentine Health Minister Carla Vizzotti signaled over the weekend that the new outbreaks will not be met with any public health measures, which are already almost exclusively limited to vaccination. Vizzoti stated, “We begin today in Argentina the fourth wave of COVID-19, in a totally different situation,” adding that the increase in cases has not had a corresponding strain on the Argentine health system because of vaccines.

In late March, Vizzotti declared that “we are in the transition from pandemic to endemic,” almost at the same time as the Bolsonaro government declared the end of the health emergency in response to COVID-19 in Brazil, called ESPIN. The end of ESPIN was announced in April by Brazilian Health Minister Marcelo Queiroga, in the face of criticism from several public health and health professional associations. The decision officially went into effect on Sunday, as the number of hospitalizations accelerates.

Although Queiroga points out that the emergency purchase of vaccines and medicines will continue, experts are warning that the end of the decree could mean an even deeper cut in pandemic testing and surveillance systems. Fiocruz Foundation epidemiologist Ethel Maciel pointed out that deadlines for contracting services and personnel are put in limbo with the end of ESPIN. Maciel said: “Services will be discontinued. Professionals who are hired via decree will have their contracts terminated and this will be quite detrimental to the population.”

The policy of letting the virus spread through the population in the most populous countries in the region threatens to cause a new devastating wave of cases throughout Latin America and creates the conditions for a new collapse of its health care systems, as during previous waves.

In Colombia, which has not yet registered an increase in new cases, Health Minister Fernando Ruíz pointed on May 14 to the “clear probability of negative and highly contagious events in the coming days” and made reference to the serious increase in infections in the US. However, following the line of all governments in the region, Ruíz ruled out any response to the threat of new waves, saying that a “slight increase in [the] positivity [rate] is not worrisome.”

In Bolivia, the health minister of Luis Arce’s pseudo-left government stated, “In the last epidemiological surveillance report we detected the BA.2 variant of Omicron in the country.” The health ministry stated that an increase in cases had been recorded and that the population should prepare for a new wave. Last week, 718 new cases were reported, more than double the previous week with 331 cases.

In addition, the vaccination-only strategy adopted by governments in the region allows the virus to continue spreading and developing new, potentially more transmissible, and virulent variants.

Earlier this month, the first cases of the XQ subvariant of COVID-19 were confirmed, a combination of the BA.1.1 and BA.2. In March, cases emerged of the so-called “Deltacron,” a recombinant version of the Delta and Omicron variants. The emergence of new, more transmissible and aggressive variants points to the risk of versions with greater vaccine escape, transmissibility, and virulence than previous versions. A study by American experts and researchers published this month showed that the Omicron variant was as aggressive as previous strains. The work exposes the false narrative that was propagated in the corporate media and by governments over months that Omicron was “mild.”

At the same time, the indifferent and criminal response of governments to public health issues is being exposed by their attitude toward monkeypox cases on several continents. The WHO has held emergency meetings in response to the disease, which has possibly been spreading for some time without being detected. On May 22, the first case of monkeypox was reported in Buenos Aires.

A global response to the new outbreaks of COVID-19 is needed, using all necessary public health measures, including distribution of high-quality masks, universal vaccination, travel control, temporary lockdowns, testing, and contact tracing, which will eliminate the virus in increasingly large regions of the world.

Grim 2022 Drought Outlook for Western US

Imtiaz Rangwala

Mesquite Flat Dunes, Death Valley National Park. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Much of the western U.S. has been in the grip of an unrelenting drought since early 2020. The dryness has coincided with record-breaking wildfires, intense and long-lasting heat waves, low stream flows and dwindling water supplies in reservoirs that millions of people across the region rely on.

Heading into summer, the outlook is pretty grim. The National Weather Service’s latest seasonal outlook, issued May 19, 2022, described drought persisting across most of the West and parts of the Great Plains.

One driver of the Western drought has been persistent La Niña conditions in the tropical Pacific since the summer of 2020. During La Niña, cooler tropical Pacific waters help nudge the jet stream northward. That tends to bring fewer storms to the southern tier of the U.S. and produce pronounced drought impacts in the Southwest.

The other and perhaps more important part of the story is the hotter and thirstier atmosphere, caused by a rapidly warming climate.

As a climate scientist, I’ve watched how climate change is making drought conditions increasingly worse – particularly in the western and central U.S. The last two years have been more than 2 degrees Fahrenheit (1.1 Celsius) warmer than normal in these regions. Large swaths of the Southwest have been even hotter, with temperatures more than 3 F (1.7 C) higher. Studies suggest the Southwest’s ongoing 20-year drought is the most severe in at least 1,200 years, based on how dry the soils are.

A hotter atmosphere sucks more moisture from the soil

A thirstier atmosphere tends to extract more water out of the land. It exacerbates evaporative stress on the land, particularly when a region is experiencing below-normal precipitation. High evaporative stress can rapidly deplete soil moisture and lead to hotter temperatures, as the evaporative cooling effect is diminished. All this creates hydroclimatic stress for plants, causing restricted growth, drying and even death.

As a consequence of a warming climate, the U.S. Southwest has seen an 8% increase in this evaporative demand since the 1980s. This trend is generally happening across other parts of the country.

The thirstier atmosphere is turning what would otherwise be near-normal or moderately dry conditions into droughts that are more severe or extreme. As the climate heats up further, the increasing atmospheric thirst will continue to intensify drought stress, with consequences for water availability, long-lasting and intense heat stress, and large-scale ecosystem transformation.

Climate models project ominous prospects of a more arid climate and more severe droughts in the Southwest and southern Great Plains in the coming decades.

In addition to direct impacts of increasing temperatures on future droughts, these regions are also expected to see fewer storms and more days without precipitation. Climate models consistently project a poleward shift in the midlatitude storm tracks during this century as the planet heats up, which is expected to result in fewer storms in the southern tier of the country.

Expect flash droughts even in wetter areas

The changing nature of droughts is a concern even in parts of the U.S. that are expected to have a net increase in annual precipitation during the 21st century. In a hotter future, because of the high evaporative demand on the land, prolonged periods with weeks to months of below normal precipitation in these areas can lead to significant drought, even if the overall trend is for more precipitation.

Large parts of the northern Plains, for example, have seen precipitation increase by 10% or more in the last three decades. However, the region is not immune to severe drought conditions in a hotter climate.

At the tail end of what was the wettest decade on record in the region, the northern Plains experienced an intense flash drought in the summer of 2017 that resulted in agricultural losses in excess of $2.6 billion and wildfires across millions of acres. Record evaporative demand contributed to the severity of the flash drought, in addition to a severe short-term precipitation deficit. A flash drought is a drought that intensifies rapidly over a period of a few weeks and often catches forecasters by surprise. The likelihood of flash droughts that can cause severe impacts to agriculture and ecosystems and promote large wildfires is expected to increase with a warmer and thirstier atmosphere.

Flash droughts are also emerging as a growing concern in the Northeast. In 2020, much of New England experienced an extreme hydrologic drought, with low stream flows and groundwater levels and widespread crop losses between May and September. Aided by very warm and dry atmospheric conditions, the drought developed very rapidly over that period from what had been above-normal wet conditions.

As humanity enters a hotter future, prolonged periods of weeks to months of below-normal precipitation are going to be of a greater concern almost everywhere.

Heading into unfamiliar territory

Other forms of droughts are also emerging.

Atmospheric heating is causing snow droughts as more precipitation falls as rain rather than snow and snow melts earlier. Shorter snow seasons and longer growing seasons because of warmer temperatures are changing the timing of ecological responses.

Land is greening up earlier and causing an earlier loss of water from the land surface through evapotranspiration – the loss of water from plants and soil. This could result in drier soils in the latter half of the growing season. As a result, parts of the central and western U.S. could see both increased greening and drying in the future that are seasonally separated across the growing season.

With a rapidly changing climate, we are entering unfamiliar territory. The world will need new ways to better anticipate future droughts that could transform natural and human systems.

UK plans naval intervention against Russia in the Black Sea

Thomas Scripps

Britain is again putting itself at the forefront of NATO’s escalation of the war with Russia over Ukraine. On Monday the Times reported, “Britain is in discussion with allies about sending warships to the Black Sea to protect freighters carrying Ukrainian grain.”

Foreign Secretary Liz Truss has discussed the plans with Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis. He explained that participating countries “could provide ships or planes that would be stationed in the Black Sea and provide maritime passage for the grain ships to leave Odesa’s port and reach the Bosphorus in Turkey”.

British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, right, is greeted by NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg prior to a meeting at NATO headquarters in Brussels, January 24, 2022. (AP Photo/Olivier Matthys, Pool)

Landsbergis said of Britain’s response to this proposal, “From my perspective the British government is interested in assisting Ukraine in any way it can.”

A diplomatic source confirmed that Truss is in favour once the practicalities are agreed, including “demining the harbour and providing Ukraine with longer-range weapons to defend the harbour from Russian attack,” according to the Guardian.

These plans are already in motion. US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin announced Monday that Washington would be supplying Ukraine with Harpoon anti-ship missiles, via a deal with Denmark. The Daily Mail reports that “a handful” of countries are willing to do the same, according to US officials and congressional sources.

Earlier this month, former senior NATO commander Admiral James Stavridis wrote for Bloomberg on May 6,“It’s worth considering an escort system for Ukrainian (and other national) merchant ships that want to go in and out of Odesa … The vast Black Sea is mostly international waters. Nato warships are free to travel nearly wherever they want, including into Ukraine’s territorial waters and its 200-mile exclusive economic zone. Conceding those waters to Russia makes no sense. Instead, look for them to become the next major front in the Ukraine war.”

The Lithuanian foreign minister claimed, “This would be a non-military humanitarian mission and is not comparable with a no-fly zone… We would need a coalition of the willing—countries with significant naval power to protect the shipping lanes, and countries that are affected by this”.

The “coalition of the willing” is the formulation used to describe the imperialist-led alliance which carried out the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003. A NATO-led naval intervention would be a deliberate military provocation, designed to create a pretext for a direct clash with Russian forces, carried out under the cover of a “humanitarian mission” to avert a global hunger crisis over which the imperialist powers do not lose a wink of sleep.

Strategic analysts have been more honest about what is involved. Sidharth Kaushal of the Royal United Services Institute military think tank told the Financial Times, “To maintain a functional convoy system, you’d have to have a huge western fleet stationed in the Mediterranean to rotate through the Black Sea” and risk “escalatory confrontation with Russian warships”.

On May 17, NATO began a “vigilance activity”, Neptune Shield, involving 19 nations and centred on the USS Harry S. Truman Carrier Strike Group in the Mediterranean. The strike group includes the Harry S. Truman aircraft carrier, the USS San Jacinto cruiser, five US destroyers and a Norwegian frigate.

The eastern Mediterranean is a permanent home to NATO’s Standing Maritime Group 2, composed of 14 ships including 10 frigates and the UK’s HMS Diamond destroyer.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba bellicosely announced the war plans being discussed behind the scenes, saying of the Russian presence in the Black Sea that there was “a military solution to this: defeat Russia.” He continued, “If we receive even more military support, we’ll be able to throw them back… defeat the Black Sea fleet and unblock the passage for vessels.”

A defence advisor explained to the FT the aggressive operations being considered, noting, “Russia’s diesel-powered submarines also have to resurface regularly, which makes them vulnerable to attack” and adding, “Destroying the Kerch Strait Bridge that Russia uses to supply Crimea could also leave Putin’s forces struggling with the same kinds of logistical problems it has faced elsewhere.”

The incendiary character of the plans being discussed is prompting nervous responses. Kaushal asks, “How many countries would want to risk their ships going cheek by jowl with the Russian navy?” The Daily Mail cites a US official who “said no nation had wanted to be the first or only nation to send Harpoons, fearing reprisals from Russia if a ship is sunk with a Harpoon from their stockpile.” The Daily Telegraph quotes foreign office sources saying, “current discussions don’t go ‘as far as using warships’ to help unblock the war-torn country’s ports.”

But the trajectory of the NATO-Russia conflict is towards such confrontations. Lawrence Freedman, an emeritus professor of war studies at King’s College London, writes in the New Statesman, “The view up to now has been that this would be an unduly provocative move, subject to the same misgivings that led Nato to reject calls for a ‘no-fly zone’ above Ukraine.” But the Russian naval operation is an “aspect of this war… now coming into focus—where pressure could build for a Nato operation.” If the war “drags on, this is an issue that will not go away… The major naval powers need to be thinking ahead.”

A NATO offensive in the Black Sea has been long in the making, with the UK playing a prominent role.

In June 2021, NATO carried out its largest ever operation in the region, Sea Breeze, involving 32 countries, 5,000 troops, 32 ships, 40 aircraft and 18 special operations. The exercise was hosted jointly by the US and Ukrainian navies and directly targeted Russia, with NATO’s statement announcing the operation reading, “NATO supports Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity within its internationally recognized borders, extending to its territorial waters. NATO does not and will not recognize Russia's illegal and illegitimate annexation of Crimea and denounces its temporary occupation.”

Just days before Sea Breeze 2021 began, British destroyer HMS Defender engaged in a major provocation by entering waters off Crimea claimed by Russia. The Russian armed forces fired warning shots and dropped a bomb in the path of the warship, later threatening that if something similar happened again they could bomb “on target”.

The Type 45 destroyer HMS Defender leaves the naval base in Portsmouth harbour for exercises in Scotland, prior to deployment to the Mediterranean, Black Sea and Indo-Pacific region as part of the UK's Carrier Strike Group 21. May 1, 2021 (WSWS Media)

Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed the UK ship was acting in coordination with a US reconnaissance aircraft, “trying to uncover the actions of our Armed Forces to stop a provocation.”

The region has clearly been extensively prepared as a theatre for combat with Russia. American media reported that the US was critically involved in the Ukrainian strike that sunk the Russian flagship the Moskva on April 14.

That these moves are now being made under the banner of alleviating a world hunger crisis is grotesque hypocrisy. This was underscored by former UK Foreign Secretary/Conservative Party leader William Hague in an opinion piece for the Times Tuesday, “Putin’s next move? A truce to split the West”.

Hague urges NATO powers not to accept any Russian proposals for peace talks, explicitly deriding calls to do so to avert a further catastrophic escalation of either the war or global price rises.

“Ideally for you,” Hague writes of Putin, “western commentators will say, ‘Hurray, we always knew he wanted an off-ramp’, and, ‘All wars end in agreement’ and discuss how the cost-of-living crisis could be helped by your very generous offer to desist from the war you started.” This is unacceptable to Hague. What matters is not peace or hunger but pursuing NATO’s war aims.

US aligns with European Union against the UK on Northern Ireland Protocol

Chris Marsden

The Biden administration has come out strongly against Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government in the deepening row between the UK and European Union over the Northern Ireland Protocol.

The protocol governs post-Brexit trade. It was ostensibly designed to prevent the return of a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, a European Union (EU) member state. However, it did so by effectively creating an EU border in the Irish Sea, which is anathema to the north’s unionist parties and, especially on account of its substantial bureaucratic obstacles to trade, to the majority of the UK Conservative Party.

Vehicles at the port of Larne, Northern Ireland, Tuesday, Feb. 2, 2021. (AP Photo/Peter Morrison)

The Irish nationalist Sinn Féin for the first time secured the most votes of any party in the May 5 Northern Ireland Assembly elections, while the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) suffered heavy losses. The DUP responded by continuing to block the power sharing executive from meeting, by refusing to support the election of a new speaker. The Johnson government has used this to threaten a unilateral rewriting of the protocol, including by targeting the role of the European Court of Justice in overseeing disputes and restoring Westminster’s power to decide VAT sales tax rates. Last week Foreign Secretary Liz Truss proposed a bill to these ends, without releasing its contents, that could be adopted as early as next month.

This has raised genuine fears among many workers that the constitutional arrangements that ended the civil war in Northern Ireland, embodied in the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, could unravel—bringing a return to sectarian conflict led above all by the hardline Unionists.

For British imperialism, the Tory/Unionist response not only threatens trade war with the EU but open conflict with the Biden administration. The US, which presided over the 1998 agreements, holds a dominant position in the Republic’s economy which it uses as a staging ground for accessing the Single European Market and as a tax shelter for its major corporations. But the threat to US operations in Europe is now meeting up with concern that the UK is endangering the coalition Washington has assembled to pursue military hostilities against Russia.

A delegation of US politicians this weekend began a tour of Europe and the UK, which continued Monday in Dublin and now moves on to Belfast. It is led by Richard E. Neal, the Democrat chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. On Friday Congressman Brendan Boyle announced that a statement had been agreed with members of the European Parliament declaring that “renegotiating the protocol is not an option.” Speaking from west County Kerry in Ireland Sunday, Neal told RTÉ, “President Biden, Speaker Pelosi and I have made our position known that nothing can jeopardise the Good Friday Agreement.”

He referred to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s tweets Thursday repeating the warning by Biden that there would be no chance of Congress supporting a US/UK free trade pact if the Good Friday Agreement is undermined. She wrote, “As I have stated in my conversations with the Prime Minister, the Foreign Secretary and Members of the House of Commons, if the United Kingdom chooses to undermine the Good Friday Accords, the Congress cannot and will not support a bilateral free trade agreement with the United Kingdom.”

In some ways more damaging still for Johnson, who has positioned himself as the number-one military ally of the US, Derek Chollet, the senior adviser to Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, told the BBC that “a big fight between the UK and the EU” was “the last thing” Washington wanted. Speaking after meetings in Downing Street Friday, he said Russian President Vladimir Putin would “use any opportunity he can to show that our alliance is fraying… We want to see this issue resolved and we want to see the temperature lowered and no unilateral acts.”

It is a measure of the crisis gripping the Johnson government that the threats from the US met with an overtly hostile response. After what were described as “frank” talks with the US delegation at her country retreat of Chevening on Saturday, Truss tweeted that the UK is “defending the Good Friday Agreement” and warned that she would not let the “situation drag on”.

Liz Truss (fifth from left) meeting members of the US delegation in London (Credit:Liz Truss/Twitter)

Former Brexit minister Lord Frost, who negotiated the protocol, told BBC Radio 4 that Pelosi’s intervention was “ignorant” because “It is the protocol itself that’s undermining [the Good Friday Agreement] and people who can’t see that really shouldn’t be commenting on the situation in Northern Ireland.”

In the Daily Telegraph, Conor Burns, a Northern Ireland minister and Johnson’s special Brexit envoy to the US, said, “We seek an ambitious [free trade agreement] with the US. But there can be no connection between that and doing the right thing for Northern Ireland. None.'

One reason for the UK’s intransigent pose is that many Tories have already given up on any prospect of a US trade deal, despite this being placed at the centre of the argument for a post-Brexit economic policy that would compensate for lost European trade. The New York Times commented that “it is no longer clear how much leverage” Pelosi’s threat has in the UK. “The White House has signaled that striking a deal with Britain is not high on its list of priorities, anyway.”

Such is the international isolation and emphasised weakness of British imperialism post-Brexit that the Tories are extraordinarily reliant on the Unionists, with all the dangers this entails. On Friday, DUP leader Sir Jeffrey Donaldson warned, “You cannot have power-sharing without consensus in Northern Ireland”, describing Pelosi’s “contributions” as “entirely unhelpful” and repeating “a mantra that frankly is hopelessly out of date.” DUP Economy Minister Gordon Lyons described Neal as a supporter of Irish unification who had worked closely with Friends of Sinn Féin. Traditional Unionist Voice party representative Stephen Cooper denounced “the interference of foreign figures” and said that the Stormont parties should treat the “belligerent meddling” of Irish premier Micheál Martin “with the contempt it deserves”.

This right-wing political block is facing off against an emerging alliance led by the US and encompassing the European imperialist powers, the Republic of Ireland, Sinn Féin and the pro-EU Alliance Party in the north, as well as Britain’s Labour Party and the Scottish National Party (SNP).

Underscoring the prospect of the break-up of the UK, SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon met with Sinn Féin’s deputy leader Michelle O'Neill Saturday at her official Edinburgh residence. Sturgeon linked separatism to Brexit, telling the media that Scotland and Northern Ireland “both voted against Brexit,” bringing “to the fore” a “system of government that’s been at play in the UK for some time now” that is “not serving all of our interests.”

The struggle over the protocol has become the focus of extraordinary inter-imperialist and national tensions, in which the essential concerns of the working class find no genuine expression. For workers the only outcome of such conflicts in ruling circles, whatever democratic rhetoric is utilised, will be an escalation of already crushing levels of austerity as all sides seek competitive advantage at their expense while the availability of essential goods is jeopardised and prices go through the roof. Meanwhile all sides will continue with the war drive against Russia, even as they employ sectarianism and nationalism to and divide and politically demobilise the working class.

Steel tube manufacturer Vallourec closes plants in Germany, France and the UK

Elisabeth Zimmermann

Last Wednesday, the Vallourec steel pipe manufacturer announced what thousands of its workers had long feared. The multinational, which produces seamless tubes mainly for the gas and oil industry, is closing its plants in Düsseldorf-Rath and Mülheim/Ruhr, destroying about 2,400 jobs at these two sites alone.

Production of seamless pipes in Western Europe is to be halted completely. About 1,650 workers are affected in Düsseldorf and 750 in Mülheim. In addition, the closings will hit the many employees in subcontracting firms.

Seamless steel tubes from Vallourec [Photo by Mouliric/wikimedia / CC BY-SA 4.0] [Photo by Mouliric/wikimedia / CC BY-SA 4.0]

The two plants being closed in Germany used to belong to the Mannesmannröhren-Werke, which has a long history. The Düsseldorf plant in the Rath district has existed since 1899, while the Mülheim plant has existed since 1966 and is the second largest industrial employer in the city after the Siemens Energy plant.

The Mannesmann Group was taken over and broken up by Vodafone in 2000. A cooperation between the tube works and Vallourec has existed since 1997, when the joint venture Vallourec & Mannesmann Tubes (V&M Tubes) was formed. In 2005, Vallourec acquired the Mannesmann shares. In 2013, the German corporate unit became Vallourec Deutschland GmbH.

Vallourec is a classic multinational. The corporation owns 50 production facilities in over 20 countries with 20,000 employees; its headquarters are in France.

The closure of the factories and the destruction of many thousands more jobs in subcontracting firms are part of a worldwide rationalisation programme, as is currently being prepared and implemented in many corporations. Global corporations are reacting to the international economic crisis and the growing competition on the world market by lowering labour costs or relocating production to low-wage countries with the lowest social standards.

In the process, the international banks and big investors set the tone. Production is trimmed for profit and increasing shareholder value. The pandemic and NATO’s proxy war against Russia serve as a pretext for a frontal attack on the rights and living conditions of workers, who are paying with job losses and inflation for massive rearmament spending, war and the enormous enrichment of the corporations and the super-rich.

The trade unions have nothing to counter this attack except feigned indignation and toothless protests. They act as accomplices of corporate management and offer them “alternative rationalisation programmes.” They want to prove that, with their help, exploitation can also be drastically intensified on the home soil.

This can be seen all too clearly in the case of Vallourec. The closure of factories in Germany also means the closure of the plant in Saint-Saulve in northern France, with 100 jobs, where the tubes produced in Düsseldorf and Mülheim are reworked. Ten years ago, there were 1,000 jobs there, which were gradually cut with the help of the trade unions, employing the usual salami tactics.

One of the group’s sites, in Bellshill, Scotland, with 70 jobs, will also be closed. Production there is to be moved to Aulnoye in France, on condition that the company is then profitable and that appropriate sales markets are developed. Secondly, the company wants to introduce “additive manufacturing” and install robots to produce steel parts in small batches or, as with 3D printers, on a custom basis.

According to the French press, Vallourec also wants to rationalise its research and development department by merging it into one site in Aulnoye, cutting 100 jobs. About 60 other jobs are to be cut at the group’s headquarters near Paris. In total, 300 jobs will go in France as part of a plan to “safeguard employment.”

Worldwide, 2,950 jobs will be lost because of the measures now decided by the Vallourec board, mainly in Europe. The number of employees will drop from 17,000 to 14,000. In France, about 1,300 jobs will remain at Vallourec.

At the same time, the company is building a new production facility in Brazil to supply markets in the Middle East and a plant in Ohio in the US to supply drilling sites for the extraction of shale oil and gas (fracking) in the North American market.

Workers at the Vallourec plants have been concerned about their jobs and livelihoods for months. In November last year, management had announced the sale of the tube plants in Mülheim and Düsseldorf, which had accumulated losses of €700 million since 2015. Some financial investors had showed interest in the plants but did not want to pay anything for them. Instead, they demanded sums running into hundreds of millions of euros for the takeover, for example, for company pensions and other company commitments.

Vallourec CEO Philippe Guillemot justified the closures by saying they had not found a buyer for the plants with a sustainable plan; to avoid further losses, they therefore had to be closed. He claimed that sites in Western Europe were no longer profitable in the face of competition from Eastern European countries with much lower wage and production costs in the manufacture of pipes for the Middle East or other regions.

The role of the IG Metall union

Just two days before the closure was announced, IG Metall organised a convoy of about a thousand workers from Germany to Paris to protest in front of Vallourec headquarters.

Instead of organising joint action with French workers who are also losing their jobs, IG Metall officials delivered pathetic funeral speeches and bemoaned the owners’ profit lust and the king-of-the-castle stance of the decision-makers, with whom they closely collaborate. The union bureaucrats’ cowardly prattle is designed to spread hopelessness and demoralisation.

The globalisation of production and the systematic division and blackmail of the workers means the trade union policy of “social partnership” (i.e., collaborating with the employers) is proving completely bankrupt. To prevent the relocation of production, the works councils and trade union officials try to undercut the extreme exploitation in the low-wage countries by proposing their own rationalisation measures and social cuts. In this way, they set in motion a downward spiral in which the corporations and their shareholders earn handsomely.

At Vallourec, too, IG Metall and the works council had actively supported the downsizing plans from the start. They even commissioned a consultancy firm to draw up their own continuation concept for the plants, which they presented as an alternative to the sale planned by management. According to this concept, production at the German plants was to be oriented towards future markets around hydrogen, geothermal energy, offshore wind plants and solar technology.

This concept, which was also supported by the German management, as Labour Director Herbert Schaaff told the WAZ, still envisaged the elimination of 700 to 800 jobs, while at the same time increasing turnover by 10 percent within the next five years!

The whining of the works councils, that “even this plan is now wastepaper,” is pure hogwash. It merely served as a stalling tactic to prevent a fight for the unconditional preservation of jobs. This is known from numerous similar cases in the past. The Opel plants in Bochum, which at their peak employed 20,000 workers, were shut down in a similar step-by-step method with the collaboration of IG Metall.

Anger boiled over at a works meeting of both plants held on Friday in the ISS Dome in Düsseldorf. The Vallourec management, which had travelled from Paris to justify the closure decision, was greeted with a sustained shrill chorus of whistles; the CEO’s speech was constantly interrupted by boos and heckling. Finally, the event was abandoned, and the management left the hall through the back exit under police protection.

“At the moment, it is completely unclear how production will continue at the two sites until the end of next year in this emotionally charged situation,” commented broadcaster WDR. “It seems possible that there will be a strike.”

Industrial action—a strike or occupation of the plants—is indeed the only way to defend jobs. But that requires a complete break with IG Metall and its works council representatives. Even if they feel forced to organise a few more symbolic protests, they will do everything to stifle any serious fight.

The Ruhr area—from Dortmund (Hoesch) to Bochum (Opel) to Duisburg-Rheinhausen (Krupp)—is full of industrial ruins where tens of thousands once worked. Many had fought bitterly to defend their jobs, but the IG Metall and its works council representatives sabotaged workers’ resistance each time.

For this they were handsomely rewarded. The most famous case is that of Oliver Burkhard, who headed the IG Metall district of North Rhine-Westphalia from 2007 to 2013 before moving to the board of steelmakers thyssenkrupp as personnel director on a salary of millions. Since May 1 this year, Burkhard has had another job: he remains a board member of thyssenkrupp and additionally now heads the defence company thyssenkrupp Marine Systems, Europe’s leading systems supplier for submarines and naval vessels, as CEO.

While workers were raging with anger, all that could be heard from union officials and politicians was the usual demoralised whining. The director of IG Metall Düsseldorf-Neuss, Karsten Kaus, told dpa that they had tried everything to follow the sales process. A continuation concept had also been developed with the works council and a consulting firm. “In the end, none of this came to fruition.”

The IG Metall secretary in Mülheim, Dirk Horstkamp, told WAZ: “There is a lot of consternation here. It’s really hard how Vallourec treats the people here,” he said, and the workforce had put everything on the line.

Germany’s Dax 40 companies enjoy record profits, while workers face record inflation

Ela Maartens

Despite the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, Germany’s largest companies listed on the Dax 40 share index enjoyed massive growth in the first quarter of 2022 alone, raking in whopping record profits. Both turnover and profits were higher than ever before, according to the auditing and consulting firm Ernst & Young (EY).

Overall, the turnover of the DAX companies rose by 14 percent to €444.7 billion compared to the same period last year. Operating profits also improved by 21 percent and totaled €52.4 billion. This is the highest profit level ever measured within a first quarter.

Compared to 2019, before the start of the coronavirus pandemic, there was a 27 percent increase in sales and profits were up 85 percent so far this year.

VW main plant in Wolfsburg

The “winners” are first and foremost the German auto manufacturers: with €8.3 billion, Volkswagen was able to generate the largest profit of all listed companies, about 73 percent more than in the same period the previous year. This is followed by Mercedes-Benz with €5.2 billion (in third place) and BMW with around €3.4 billion. Due to the microchip and parts shortages, many car manufacturers concentrated on the luxury segment, which is most lucrative for them, and were able to sell their cars at significantly higher prices.

With a profit of €6.3 billion, Deutsche Telekom landed in second place in the ranking behind Volkswagen. The pharmaceutical giant Bayer was also able to bring in a gain of €4.2 billion, putting it in fourth place. Airbus achieved the best result in percentage terms: the aerospace company tripled its profits compared to the same period last year to €1.4 billion.

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) commented: “Losses due to the pandemic and Ukraine war? Not for large German companies.” Whether the author is aware of the cynicism of his statement or not, he nevertheless gets to the heart of the contradictory developments.

While massively rich shareholders are raking in profits at dizzying levels, the pandemic has been raging worldwide for almost three years. In Germany alone, the virus will have claimed some 138,000 victims by the middle of this week. This is the result of the unscrupulous profits-before-lives policy of all the bourgeois parties, from the Social Democrats (SPD) to the Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU), Greens, Liberal Democrats (FDP), the Left Party and the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD).

The new Infection Protection Act, passed in mid-March, reduced public health protection to a minimum. The 7-day incidence rate is still over 350 per 100,000 inhabitants, but this is deceptive since testing capacities have been systematically reduced and compulsory testing largely abolished. Now, the same politicians responsible for the deaths of countless people are demanding society prepare for another coronavirus wave in the autumn.

At the end of February, Russian President Vladimir Putin responded to the provocations of NATO, led by the US, with a reactionary invasion of Ukraine. The Ukrainian working class has become a pawn of the imperialists’ geostrategic interests, with Germany playing a central role in the NATO offensive against Russia. Berlin is now also supplying heavy weapons to Kiev. The war in Ukraine looks to escalate further and threatens a world war. Even the use of nuclear weapons is not ruled out by Germany’s ruling class.

Chancellor Scholz (SPD) held out the prospect of a gigantic increase in the German military budget and announced a “special fund for the Bundeswehr” amounting to €100 billion at the end of February. If the government has its way, the working class will pay for the biggest rearmament programme since Hitler with mass poverty and the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs.

Here, too, shareholders are cashing in. The share price of Rheinmetall, Germany’s biggest arms manufacturer after Airbus, has risen from €83 to €200 since the beginning of the year. Workers in Germany and around the world, on the other hand, are feeling the dramatic effects of the growing global crisis more and more directly.

Germany’s annual inflation rate rose to 7.4 percent in April. Georg Thiel, president of the Federal Statistical Office, said in a press release, “The inflation rate thus reached a new high in united Germany for the second month in a row.” Compared to the previous month, inflation increased by 0.8 percent.

According to the Federal Statistical Office, the “above-average price increases for food” are particularly striking. In April they were 8.6 higher than a year ago. Price increases run through all food groups: edible fats and oils are 27.3 percent more expensive, prices for meat and fish products have risen by 11.8 percent. Dairy products and eggs are up by 9.4 percent and fresh vegetables by 9.3 percent.

The drastic nature of the situation is also expressed by the enormous demands that charity organisations are currently experiencing throughout Germany. In particular, “people who previously just managed to make ends meet now can no longer afford the high prices for food, fuel and energy,” according to tafel.de, and refugees from Ukraine are increasingly turning to these non-profit organisations for the first time.

Energy prices have also increased enormously: Within one year, there was a 35.3 percent increase with a 39.5 percent increase in March 2022 alone. Prices for heating oil almost doubled in April 2022 with a 98.6 percent increase, motor fuels saw a 38.5 percent increase and natural gas a 47.5 percent rise, making them barely affordable for many. Electricity saw a 19.3 percent price hike.

Many workers, especially those with families, can no longer cope with the supermarket price increases or those for energy and must choose between eating, heating or travelling to work.

At the same time, Henrik Ahlers, managing director of EY Germany, declares, “So far, Germany’s top corporations have been remarkably good at cushioning the impact of these various crises.” But, Ahlers continues, the general conditions remain extraordinarily difficult.

“Germany as an industrial location is faced with the major challenge of avoiding any serious consequences for industry when gas and oil supplies are restructured,” he continued. In addition to the effects of the war in Ukraine on the German economy, Ahlers particularly highlighted the coronavirus measures in China, which had “significantly dampened” economic expectations.

The experiences in China and other Asia-Pacific countries have shown that millions of lives could have been saved worldwide through a consistent zero-COVID strategy. Now, representatives of international corporations and their mouthpieces in the media are placing enormous pressure on China to lift its safeguards—at the cost of millions of lives.

Undoubtedly it will be the working class, not German industry, that will be the first to feel the effects of energy shortages: if not through cold apartments, then through being put on short-time working or job cuts.

Auditor Mathieu Meyer, a partner at EY, added this in the FAZ: “It is quite possible that things will get even more difficult for Germany’s top companies in the coming months.” More difficult? While workers are being forced to subsist, shareholders’ only concern is that their profits in the coming months and years might be smaller than they have been so far.

The record profits of the Dax 40 companies in Germany reveal what has become apparent, especially since the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, and have gained further momentum through the war in Ukraine. The financial oligarchy will continue to revel in its increasing wealth regardless of losses and will not shy away from imposing further suffering or death to ensure profits rise.