UK rail workers vote overwhelmingly for strike action

Laura Tiernan

Rail workers at 15 train operating companies and Network Rail infrastructure have voted for industrial action in defence of jobs, pay and conditions.

Around 40,000 members of the Rail, Maritime and Transport union (RMT) were balloted, with 89 percent voting to strike off a participation rate of 71 percent. Guards, platform and ticketing staff, track maintenance workers and signal crews were among those balloted.

Rail workers face a historic assault on jobs, terms and conditions, with £2.5 billion in cuts being rolled out. 2,500 jobs have already been axed through a “voluntary” severance scheme, with thousands more slated for destruction as the Johnson government proceeds with its plans for Great British Railways.

Despite an unambiguous strike vote by rail workers—the biggest since the railways were privatised in 1994—the RMT has once again handed the political initiative to the government, appealing for negotiations.

In a statement issued Tuesday night, the RMT announced, “The union will now be demanding urgent talks with Network Rail and the 15 train operating companies that were balloted to find a negotiated settlement to the dispute over pay, jobs and safety.”

Mick Lynch (WSWS Media)

Mick Lynch, RMT General Secretary, declared, “we sincerely hope ministers will encourage the employers to return to the negotiating table and hammer out a reasonable settlement with the RMT.” Handed a mandate to set strike dates, the RMT’s National Executive Committee (NEC) has postponed any decision on limited strike action until its next meeting on May 31.

The RMT is using the strike vote as a bargaining chip, with the stated aim of pressuring the government and employers to resume their collaboration with rail unions. The NEC announced, “We note that prior to the ballot there were regular meetings at an industry-wide level, therefore we call for the convening of an industry-wide forum of the employers, Rail Industry Recovery Group (RIRG—the employers' umbrella group), Department for Transport and the rail trade unions to address the issues in this dispute.”

This must serve as a sharp warning to rail workers. The RIRG was initiated by Transport Secretary Grant Shapps in December 2020 to begin sweeping pro-market restructuring. Seizing on the collapse of fare revenues during the pandemic, the government unveiled a massive program of “efficiencies” as a prelude to re-privatising rail companies taken back into state ownership in 2020.

The RMT, ASLEF, Unite and TSSA joined the RIRG, signing up to its Enabling Framework Agreement that committed “to address efficiency and cost savings” as part of industry-wide plans by the Tory government to “rebuild and modernise” the railways.

Speaking to the Mirror following Tuesday’s results, amid newspaper headlines warning of a national strike, Lynch declared, “This is a regular industrial dispute. It’s not one with a political agenda. The only political agenda that’s been put there is by this government. And their agenda is to keep people low paid and impoverished to deliver austerity.”

Lynch’s statement confirms the RMT will mount no political fight against the Johnson government’s plans. Indeed, the RMT’s ballot of rail workers made no mention of GB Railways, despite its role in spearheading the government’s privatisation agenda.

While Lynch declares the RMT has no political agenda, the Johnson government is making no secret of its own plans. Over the weekend, Shapps warned his government would legislate to ban rail strikes unless minimum service levels are maintained. He told the Sunday Telegraph, “If they really got to that point then minimum service levels would be a way to work towards protecting those freight routes and those sorts of things.”

The Tories’ pledge to ban rail strikes is modelled on Spain’s “essential services” anti-strike legislation that was inherited from Franco’s fascist dictatorship.

With inflation at its highest level in 40 years, the British ruling class has responded nervously to the prospect of a national rail strike. Dozens of newspaper articles and editorials have warned such strikes must be prevented at all costs, pointing to the already perilous supply chain crisis. The Telegraph, Times and Financial Times have all invoked the precedent of the 1926 General Strike.

TSSA union General Secretary Manuel Cortes has been widely quoted, asserting, “The disruption will be unparalleled. I don’t think we will have seen anything like it since the 1926 General Strike. That’s the last time the three unions came out together. And we will co-ordinate our action. It’ll be a summer of discontent.”

The British General Strike of 1926 encompassed 1.5 million workers who came out in support of the miners’ fight against pay cuts and longer hours. It assumed an insurrectionary character, threatening capitalist rule in Britain but was betrayed by the Trades Union Congress General Council which called off the strike after nine days. The general strike took place less than 10 years after the Russian Revolution and was led by socialists. But the Communist Party under the political direction of Joseph Stalin played a critical role in the strike’s defeat by promoting illusions in the “left” union leaders who strangled the strike.

With millions of workers struggling to survive, the Tory and “liberal” press are right to fear the emergence of a unified mass movement of the working class. But almost a century after the 1926 strike, the idea that Cortes, Lynch and company would organise such an offensive is laughable. Heading corporatist organisations wholly integrated into the structures of management and the state, these well-paid functionaries are implacable opponents of the working class. A general strike will only develop in political opposition to the trade unions and through an organisational break from them.

While Lynch claims to have “no political agenda”, the RMT is suppressing rail workers’ opposition and channeling it behind the Labour Party. On the London Underground, Lynch has promoted Labour as an ally of rail workers, inviting its MPs to speak at rallies and calling on Labour Mayor of London Sadiq Khan to “decide which side you’re on”. Khan is implementing £400 million worth of cuts on behalf of the Tories and has denounced strikes on the London Underground.

Labour’s support for the Tory government’s rail agenda is an open secret. During last year’s House of Commons debate on the GB Railways white paper, Shapps thanked Labour MPs for their “tacit support” and “partial welcome” of the government’s proposals.

The government's Great British Railways white paper (Credit: gov.uk)

The RMT is calling for an end to the pay freeze, a ban on compulsory redundancies, and a commitment that “no detrimental changes will be made to working practices and/or terms and conditions”. But such commitments are incompatible with Johnson’s GB Railways project, which is premised on the evisceration of safety, jobs, wages, conditions and pensions.

As the government proceeds with its plans, including the establishment of a GB Railways Transition Team headed by Network Rail boss Andrew Haines, the RMT’s overriding concern is to retain their corporatist partnership with the government and rail employers. Hence their central demand for negotiations via the RIRG.

Keeping schools open during the pandemic is causing a mental health crisis for US teachers

Harvey Simpkins

The continuing uncontrolled pandemic is having a devastating impact on the mental health of teachers in the US. Overworked and severely underpaid, many teachers are leaving the profession, deepening the crisis in public education.

According to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), there are almost seven percent fewer K-12 public school teachers now than at the start of the pandemic. Between February 2020, before the pandemic took hold in the United States, and December 2021, the EPI found that total public school employment, including support staff, was down 376,300 positions, a 4.7 percent decline.

At least 2,000 striking Minneapolis teachers, support staff and their supporters rallied outside the State Capitol in St. Paul, Minn., on Wednesday, March 9, 2022. (AP Photo/Steve Karnowski)

The pandemic only accelerated the long-standing trend of declining public school employment. In the years following the 2008 financial crisis—caused by rampant speculation and outright fraud by the capitalist ruling class—states made huge cuts to public education. These cuts were not fully restored by the time the pandemic hit. The EPI determined that if school staffing had kept pace with student enrollment growth since the 2008-2009 school year, public school employment would be 658,000 higher than it was in December 2021, or 8.6 percent higher than the actual employment levels.

These downward trends are also reflected in college teacher preparation programs. In 2019, prior to the pandemic, the number of students graduating with teaching degrees was 25 percent fewer than in 2009.

Many teachers are leaving the profession because of incredible workloads, only exacerbated by the pandemic, causing unsustainable stress and burnout. In a June 2021 RAND survey, 78 percent of teachers reported experiencing frequent, job-related stress, compared to 40 percent of employed adults overall. Twenty-five percent of teachers reported symptoms of depression, compared with 10 percent for the adult population as a whole. As a result, nearly a quarter of teachers said they were likely to leave their jobs by the end of the 2020-2021 school year, compared with one in six teachers who reported being likely to leave prior to the pandemic.

The National Education Association (NEA), the largest teachers’ union in the country, conducted a January survey of 3,621 of its members. The results paint a devastating picture of working conditions in schools and stand as an indictment of the NEA for its failure to take any meaningful measures to improve the lives of their members during the worst public health crisis in at least a century. Instead, the NEA, along with the American Federation of Teachers, has snuffed out every strike waged by teachers since a wave of walkouts began with a wildcat strike by West Virginia teachers in 2018. Since the start of the pandemic, the NEA and AFT have functioned as the most reliable enforcers of the criminal back-to-school, back-to-work policies first of Trump, then Biden.

An astounding 91 percent of teachers responding to the NEA survey reported that stress from the pandemic was either very serious (61 percent) or somewhat serious (30 percent). As a result of this stress, 90 percent reported that burnout among teachers is either very serious (67 percent) or somewhat serious (23 percent).

More than 55 percent of respondents to the NEA survey now have plans to leave teaching earlier than expected due to the pandemic. When the NEA first asked this question, in July 2020, near the beginning of the pandemic and when most schools were closed for in-person learning, only 28 percent said they planned to leave the profession early. While that percentage increased slightly to 32 percent in March of 2021 (when a majority of school districts were still providing a remote option and vaccines were beginning to provide some protection), it shot up 18 percentage points between July of 2021 and January 2022, corresponding to the 2021-2022 school year when nearly every school district in the country was fully open for in-person learning and virtual options were almost completely eliminated. 

In the NEA survey, 95 percent of teachers identified improved ventilation as the most pressing issue to mitigate the effects of the pandemic in schools, but only 38 percent reported having adequate systems in place, and only 28 percent reported that their ventilation system provided sufficient protection to feel safe working in-person.

Responsibility for the full reopening of schools, with completely inadequate safety measures, lies with President Biden, whose stated goal even before taking office was to force open schools throughout the country. Within weeks of taking office, Biden also infamously lied on CNN about the dangers of COVID to children, telling a second grader that “You’re not likely to be able to be exposed to something and spread it to mommy or daddy.”

In fact, with schools serving as a major vector of transmission, the Biden administration’s policy has led to tens of millions of children becoming infected with COVID. Many children have then unwittingly infected their parents, leading in many cases to their deaths. In the United States, at least 215,000 children have lost at least one parent or caregiver to COVID, leaving the survivors with incalculable trauma and potentially long-lasting mental health issues. Dr. Julie Kaplow, executive director at the Trauma and Grief Center at Children’s Hospital New Orleans, has even warned of an epidemic of “psychological long COVID” for these children.

In addition, while politicians and well-heeled pundits continuously claimed, without evidence, that schools had to be reopened for the sake of mental health, in fact, as the NEA and RAND surveys show, the mental health of teachers has been completely sacrificed to reopen schools.

A Baltimore teacher told the World Socialist Web Site that she is leaving a classroom position to become a literacy coach next school year because of the high stress levels, which have only intensified during the pandemic. 

“The amount of extra tasks teachers have been expected to take on because of COVID has been exhausting,” she said. These include, “COVID testing every Monday, reaching out to families whose students test positive (and close contacts for the first part of the year), maintaining seating charts, regulating mask wearing (while it was still required), creating assignments for students to complete in quarantine, communicating with families about assignments and quarantine situation, extra SEL [social-emotional learning] lessons because of [student] social delay, and after school tutoring every Monday and Wednesday to ‘catch kids up.’”

Teachers in the NEA survey identified many easy-to-implement solutions to the crushing stress that threatens to drive tens of thousands of teachers out of the profession, including raising salaries, providing additional mental health support for students, hiring more teachers, hiring more support staff, reducing paperwork load, reducing standardized testing, and hiring more counselors and school psychologists.

But federal, state and municipal governments are cutting school funding, not increasing it. School officials in New York City, San Francisco, Oakland, Minneapolis, Detroit and other cities are using the decline in student enrollment during the pandemic to close schools, lay off educators and slash programs. This is driving educators into new struggles, which will necessarily involve a revolt against the AFT and NEA and its local affiliates and demands for a radical redistribution of society’s resources.

“Part of the solution to me is more positions in schools for nurses or other qualified professionals to take on the task of managing COVID in a school setting,” the Baltimore teacher said. “And paying teachers more. Teacher pay doesn’t justify the amount of work teachers do on a daily basis. It’s insulting.”

The resources certainly exist to easily implement all of these measures. Last week, President Biden signed a bill authorizing another $40 billion for the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, on top of $13 billion approved in the last few months. As the World Socialist Web Site recently noted, if this $53 billion were directed to the needs of the working class rather than war, 500,000 teachers could be hired at $106,000 a year in salary and benefits. Alternatively, this sum could “provide a $6,000 raise to every nurse, teacher and nursing home worker in America (9.25 million workers).” 

In fact, $53 billion represents a drop in the bucket of the annual American war budget, which amounts to at least $782 billion for the current fiscal year.

The Uvalde massacre and the tragedy of school shootings in America

Niles Niemuth

On Tuesday, Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, joined the long list of names which have been violently inscribed on the collective consciousness: Columbine, Newtown, Parkland, Blacksburg and many more over the last 25 years.  

[AP Photo/Jae C. Hong]

For reasons which may never be known, the shooter, 18-year-old high school student Salvador Ramos, first shot his grandmother before driving to the elementary school. Dressed in all black and armed with an AR-15 assault rifle and a handgun, Ramos shot his way past an armed school district police officer and made his way into the school. Within two minutes 19 children and two teachers were dead—making it the deadliest school shooting in Texas history and third in the US surpassing Parkland and Columbine. Ramos was killed in a shootout with police. 

Grieving parents were taken to the local Civic Center, where they were swabbed for DNA. The bodies of the children, between the ages of seven and 10, were in some cases so mutilated by AR-15 fire that they can only be identified through genetic testing.

A few details are beginning to emerge. According to media reports, Ramos, born in North Dakota, was bullied in school for a stutter and lisp, frequently getting into fist fights with classmates. He apparently had few friends and kept to himself and often missed class. He made posts on social media about guns, including posting images of his two legally purchased semi-automatic rifles just three days before the attack on Robb Elementary. 

Whatever the individual psychological issues involved, however, they do not explain the routine outbursts of mass violence that plague American society. The problem is much deeper.

Little exposes the pretense of the US as the land of milk and honey as much as the regularity of such horrors. The massacre at Robb Elementary was the 19th school shooting so far this year. According to the Gun Violence Archive, there have been more than 17,000 gun deaths so far this year, the majority by suicide. There have been 213 mass shootings where four or more people were killed or injured. Of these, 10 have been mass murders with four or more killed.  

The politicians in both the Democratic and Republican parties have responded to Uvalde with their typical trite and empty platitudes that explain nothing. President Joe Biden gave a perfunctory nine-minute speech Tuesday night where he postured against the gun lobby while calling on the country to do nothing but pray. On Wednesday, Biden called for “action” on gun laws. 

On Wednesday, Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer threw cold water on the president’s pretenses, noting that the prospect of any new federal gun laws was “all too slim,” even though the Democrats control both houses of Congress and suggested that horrified Americans should vote in the November midterms.

The Republicans meanwhile, while offering up hollow concerns about mental health, insist that the solution is more guns and brute violence, so that the good guys” can kill the “bad guys” before they carry out their attacks. They also argue for turning schools into armed garrisons more akin to maximum security prisons than institutions of learning. These fascistic “solutions” are the rhetoric and justifications of the so-called “war on terror”—which resulted in the operation of torture chambers, drone assassinations and the destruction of entire societies in the Middle East—brought home. 

Nowhere from within the political establishment and the media, however, is there any serious examination of the underlying social and political conditions that find expression in the homicidal actions of individuals. American capitalism, in fact, is suffused with violence, promoted by a ruling class that normalizes death and trivializes life.

The attack on Columbine High School on April 20, 1999, in which Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold murdered 12 of their classmates and one teacher shocked the world and was seen as a significant turning point. At the time it was the fifth deadliest act of mass murder in the US since World War II. The WSWS drew attention to the social factors ignored and covered up at the time:

... the concentration on individual warning signs will be of little help in preventing further tragedies. Attention should be focused, rather, on the social warning signs, that is, the indications and indices of social and political dysfunction which create the climate that produces events like the Columbine HS massacre. Vital indicators of impending disaster might include: growing polarization between wealth and poverty; atomization of working people and the suppression of their class identity; the glorification of militarism and war; the absence of serious social commentary and political debate; the debased state of popular culture; the worship of the stock exchange; the unrestrained celebration of individual success and personal wealth; the denigration of the ideals of social progress and equality.

Since then mass shootings have become more common and more deadly. Columbine now ranks as only the sixth deadliest school shooting in American history. The students who survived that shooting now have children of their own who must deal with the prospect of being victims themselves. Across the country children are put through active shooter drills where they are taught to “run, hide, fight.”

The social, political and cultural factors underlying the growth of malignant tendencies, including school shootings, have only grown more extreme. Social inequality has grown to almost incomprehensible levels, with the 400 richest Americans claiming more than $3 trillion in wealth, while half of adults report they would have difficulties covering a $400 emergency.

The Republican Party, one of the two principal parties of the ruling class, has been transformed into a semi-fascistic organization which sought to overturn the Constitution through a violent coup on January 6, 2021. The massacre in Texas came only 10 days after a gunman, politically and ideologically inspired by the fascistic conceptions promoted by significant factions of the Republican Party, murdered 10 people in Buffalo, New York.

The growth of school shootings and mass shootings in general is a symptom of the advanced decay and breakdown of American society. Life has become exceedingly cheap under capitalism. 

The United States is now in the third year of the COVID-19 pandemic that has already claimed the lives of more than 1 million people. Children and educators have been forced back into schools that are known to be primary vectors for the disease, offered up as sacrifices for profit. More than 1,500 children have died from COVID-19 as a direct result of the homicidal “herd immunity” policy pursued first by Trump and now Biden. 

At the same time, the Biden administration is pursuing a reckless and aggressive foreign policy that has opened up a war against Russia in Ukraine, pouring billions of dollars worth of guns, ammunition and missiles into that country. Biden made his remarks about the Uvalde shooting on Tuesday after returning from a trip to Asia where he threatened to wage war against China. A direct conflict between the US, Russia and China would inevitably result in nuclear war, killing millions, a prospect that the American ruling class is clearly prepared to accept. 

Meanwhile police roam the streets of America harassing, beating and killing workers with impunity. An average of three people are killed every day by the police, adding up to more than 1,000 deaths every year, far above the total from school shootings in even the deadliest years. 

Hundreds of thousands of students, educators and parents participated in walkouts and protests after the Parkland, Florida, shooting in 2018, demanding that action be taken to end school shootings. However, this mass outpouring of anger and determination was subordinated to the Democratic Party and illusions in gun reform legislation through the March for Our Lives organization. Millions continue to look for a way forward, with students and educators discussing the possibility of walkouts on social media in the aftermath of Uvalde.

Finding a solution must begin with identifying the cause. Any explanation of the massacre at Robb Elementary that does not point to the ruling class, its political leaders, its military-police machinery, its homicidal policies and, above all, the socio-economic system of capitalism over which it presides, is nothing more than a cover-up that prepares the way for the next horror.

The global monkeypox outbreak and its implications

Benjamin Mateus

Since the first case of monkeypox infection was confirmed on May 7, 2022, by the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) in a British citizen returning from Nigeria, the epidemic of community acquired cases has rapidly climbed into the hundreds, spanning multiple countries in Europe, Americas, Middle East and Oceania.

By May 21, 2022, 92 laboratory confirmed cases and 28 suspected cases across 12 countries had been reported to the World Health Organization (WHO). By May 24, 2022, the geographic span of monkeypox infections had increased to at least 20 non-endemic countries and at least 300 confirmed and suspected infections. The current epidemic is the largest outbreak of the virus outside of sub-Saharan Africa ever reported. Fortunately, no deaths have occurred up to now.

The monkeypox virus has been endemic to Central and West Africa since the first human infection was reported in 1970 in the Democratic Republic of Congo in a young boy. The virus was first isolated in 1958 by virologist Preben von Magnus in Copenhagen, Denmark, from macaque monkeys that were used as laboratory animals.

The double-stranded DNA monkeypox virus, one of four human orthopoxviruses that include variola, the virus that causes smallpox, is endemic to 11 African countries, including Benin, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Gabon, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Nigeria, the Republic of the Congo, Sierra Leone and South Sudan.

This 2003 electron microscope image made available by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows mature, oval-shaped monkeypox virions, left, and spherical immature virions, right, obtained from a sample of human skin associated with the 2003 prairie dog outbreak. [AP Photo/Cynthia S. Goldsmith, Russell Regner/CDC]

In the last several months, the WHO has documented 77 cases in Cameroon, Central African Republic, and Nigeria, with fewer than ten deaths. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, from January to May of this year, 1,238 cases with 57 fatalities where the more deadly Congo-basin clade (a subdivision based on genetic ancestry) of the monkeypox virus is endemic. Unlike the human-to-human transmissions in the current outbreaks in non-endemic countries, the typical pattern of spread in these endemic regions is spillover from infected wild rodents and primates into people.

As of Wednesday, May 25, the following countries have reported confirmed cases thus far: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada (23), Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Israel, the Netherlands, Portugal (37), Scotland, Slovenia, Spain (101), Sweden, Switzerland, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the UK (57 in England), and the US (7). The case from the UAE was from a woman traveling there from West Africa.

Argentina has one suspected case. Pakistan’s National Institute of Health in Islamabad clarified that no cases of monkeypox had been diagnosed though the Economist noted there were two cases there. Though it remains unclear if there is a suspected case, health officials issued a health advisory.

On May 19, 2022, Portugal released the first partial sequence of the monkeypox virus from an infected patient, followed by Belgium the next day releasing the full sequence. Based on an analysis of the viral DNA extracted from skin lesions it appears the virus causing the current epidemic is identical to the genome that was sequenced in 2018 from the UK, Singapore, and Israel, linked to cases exported from Nigeria.

The analysis also confirms the virus belongs to the clade from Western Africa which carries a lower mortality risk of around one percent, compared to the more virulent clade from the Congo basin, with an infection fatality rate of ten percent.

A report published in New Scientist this week said, “What isn’t clear is whether this virus has any changes that make it more transmissible in humans, which would explain why the current outbreak is so widespread and by far the largest seen outside of Central and West Africa, where the virus spreads in monkeys. This could take some time to establish, given the monkeypox has a large complex genome.”

The monkeypox virus genome is 200,000 DNA letters long compared to SARS-Cov-2’s 30,000 RNA letters.

Sylvie Briand, WHO director for Global Infectious Hazard Preparedness, speaking at the recent World Health Assembly that voted Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus a second term as WHO Director-General, assured the press that it was unlikely for the virus to have mutated. Instead, the current driver of transmission is being linked to “human behavior.” In other words, the complete lifting of all social restrictions that has allowed people to socialize more widely has contributed to the monkeypox outbreak.

David Heymann, an American infectious disease epidemiologist and professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, speculated that monkeypox may have been present at low levels in the UK or Europe for several years.

He said, “If you look at what’s been happening in the world over the past few years, and if you look at what’s happening now, you could easily wonder if this virus entered the UK two to three years ago, it was transmitting below the radar screen, with slow chains of transmission. And then all of a sudden everything opened up and people began traveling and mixing.”

Heymann explained that the “leading theory” links the outbreaks to large parties held in Spain and Belgium where intimate contact between people has amplified the current transmission. Many have observed that most of the infected are among men who have sex with men. However, monkeypox is not a recognized sexually transmitted disease, as close contact with an infected individual, including their clothes or bedding, can spread the infection.

This hasn’t prevented the ultra-conservative and reactionary Brownstone Institute for Social and Economic Research to write that the monkeypox virus “is only spreading within the gay community.” Brownstone has strong ties to the group that issued the Great Barrington Declaration, calling for the lifting of all restrictions on the young and healthy and promoting herd immunity of the population. Such statements are odious and completely unfounded, and attempt to stigmatize a particular group for political purposes.

Meanwhile, President Joe Biden has downplayed the global outbreak by indicating that smallpox vaccines have proven effective at preventing severe cases and therefore there was no need for a stronger reaction.

Specifically, earlier in the week while at a press conference in Tokyo, he was asked if Americans infected with monkeypox could expect to quarantine for 21 days. He replied, “No, I don’t think so. I just don’t think it rises to the level of the kind of concern that existed with COVID-19, and the smallpox vaccine works for it. But I think people should be careful,” meaning individuals should make these choices.

Because of the similarity to variola virus, which causes smallpox, vaccines against smallpox are around 85 percent effective against severe monkeypox infections, based on observational data from Africa. Because of the eradication of smallpox in 1980, a significant proportion of the population posses no antibodies. Those that had received their smallpox vaccine as children more than 40 years ago can assume that they have had significant waning of their previous immunity.

As countries begin to reassess their smallpox vaccine reserves, the US emergency stockpile is holding on to 100 million doses of the original vaccine. However, the side effects of these vaccines and the risks associated with using them on immune-compromised individuals mean they will need to be used judiciously in a ring vaccination approach where the confirmed contacts of monkeypox patients would receive the vaccine in order to eradicate the virus.

Since 2010, Bavarian Nordic, a Danish pharmaceutical company, has been manufacturing its liquid-frozen MVA-BN smallpox and monkeypox vaccine based on a live, attenuated vaccinia virus (thought to represent a hybrid of the variola and cowpox viruses.) In 2019, the FDA approved the vaccine, under the brand name of Jynneos, for the prevention of both smallpox and monkeypox.

The company said on May 18, 2022 that BARDA, a unit of the US Department of Health and Human Services, had exercised the first options (119 million doses) under a ten-year contract awarded in 2017. According to the CDC deputy director Dr. Jennifer McQuiston, more than 1,000 doses are currently being held in the stockpile. “We expect that level to ramp up very quickly in the coming weeks, as the company provides more doses to us,” she told the New York Times.

Given that the monkeypox virus spreads through contact and respiratory droplets (with a theoretical risk of airborne transmission) health authorities have assured the public that despite the unprecedented global nature of the outbreak it would be limited and quickly contained.

Dr. Scott Gottlieb, speaking on CNBC, said more bluntly, “I don’t think this is going to be uncontrolled spread in the same way that we tolerated COVID-19 epidemic. But there is a possibility now this has gotten into the community, if in fact it’s more pervasive than what we’re measuring right now, that becomes hard to snuff out.”

Yet, few have asked what the implications of the current outbreak of monkeypox virus are. John Vidal, an environmentalist and editor for the Guardian, observed that alongside COVID and HIV, which are prevalent globally, several animal pandemics are occurring in parallel.

African swine fever continues to affect the world’s pig population. Several outbreaks of avian flu have led to the culling of hundreds of millions of poultry. Fungal disease is being found among marine life in Australia. He wrote, “We live uneasily with many thousands of potentially fatal viruses circulating in other species, but what is remarkable is that most of those that affect humans today were unknown just 70 years ago. Not only are new pathogens jumping from animals to humans more often, but an increasing number are linked to the changes in the global and local environments.”

The sudden appearance of a monkeypox global outbreak is an objective verification of these concerns. Though less lethal and transmitting much more slowly than COVID-19, it must be seen as a cautionary note about the impact of globalization that the corporate oligarchs do not care to address.

Vidal warned, “The big lesson of COVID—and now of monkeypox—is that much infectious disease has its roots in ecological change. That means the health of the planet and the health of humans and must be considered alongside that of animals. It also means we should prepare now for the unexpected, invest in public health as never before, stop cutting down forests, address climate change and phase out intensive farming. A ‘one health,’ planetary approach to health is the best—and possibly the only—hope we have.” It is precisely in this formulation of the solution that capitalism cannot address despite ample warnings for decades by scientists on the gravity of these for human civilization. 

Ford Europe prepares job cuts with union support in Spain, Germany

Santiago Guillen

Ford Europe has announced it will impose savage attacks on workers’ wages and conditions irrespective of which plant—Almussafes in Spain or Saarlouis in Germany—“wins” the inter-company bidding war supported by both German and Spanish trade unions.

The announcement confirms the warnings of the WSWS. Since Ford announced the bidding war in December 2021, the WSWS has called on workers to reject the blackmail and brutal competition being instigated by the trade unions between workers in different plants, insisting that playing one off against the other would only lead to disaster and open the door to a downward spiral without end. In the end, there will be no “winning” factory.

The WSWS has insisted that the only way workers in Germany, Spain and internationally can defend jobs is through a common struggle together against the trade unions and works council representatives, who have pushed through all the corporation’s attacks against the workforce in recent years with their nationalistic divide-and-rule policies. The warnings of the WSWS have been fully substantiated.

In an open letter addressed to the workforce, the president of Ford Europe, Stuart Rowley, warned that “it is foreseeable” that both plants “must undergo a resizing of their current structure,” irrespective of which factory produces the new electric cars for Ford Europe. “Both Saarlouis and Valencia are expected to undergo downsizing from their current structure. Exact details will not be available until we have selected a preferred plant,” added Rowley. That date is June 2022.

Rowley cynically stated that winning a factory will not mean “a decision to close” the losing plant, since the multinational is “actively looking for future opportunities for the plant that is not selected,” something that will require “an effort that includes multiple parties, including local and national governments.” Rowley also noted that job cuts “will be a difficult process for many employees involved.”

In other words, Ford Europe will implement massive job cuts on the losing plant, while the winning one will have “won” thanks to the union-sponsored wage slashes and worsening of work conditions. Rowley’s claims that plant closure is not on the table must be taken with a grain of salt. Over the past decade, production has already been halted in Belgium, France and Wales, and four plants have been closed in Russia. Just recently, Ford announced it was ending production in India and Brazil.

Rowley also noted that “regardless of the plant that is ultimately selected, it is important to remember that it is not yet a product investment decision” and that after the selection of the plant it will be “a lot of work to be done to secure the product for Europe.” This means that even the winning plant will be called upon to make additional cuts to secure Ford’s investments in the factory.

Rowley’s letter underscores the reactionary role of the trade unions and the dead end of a national perspective for struggle. Both IG Metall in Germany and the General Union of Workers (UGT) in Spain have collaborated with the company’s plans, supporting Ford’s bidding war. The unions’ strategy has meant that not only one of the factories may close, but the “winning” one will fire additional workers in addition to suffering other labor and salary cuts on top of those previously agreed with those same unions.

In Germany, IG Metall has not provided any details of its offer. It is known that it has offered to include all workers in Germany in the cuts, including, besides those in Saarlouis, at the main plant in Cologne that employs 21,000.

In Spain, the UGT, the majority union in the Valencian factory, signed the so-called electrification agreement with Ford management by which it agrees to reduce wages, make work shifts more flexible and increase the working day by 15 minutes. With the current inflation rate, workers could lose €4,000 this year alone with the application of the electrification agreement.

The union has refused to hold a vote on the agreement, fearing mass opposition. To save face, the UGT organised a fraudulent consultation where the workers had to register with their name and ID to vote electronically through an application controlled by the union itself so that their vote would be known to the union bureaucrats, exposing them to possible future retaliation.

The agreement has been denounced by the local metalworkers union STM together with the other two minority unions, the General Confederation of Labor (CGT) and Workers Commissions (CCOO). However, these unions don’t oppose the bidding war. STM said, “we ask that the parties sit down again to have another agreement that does not leave the workers so badly off.” That is, they accept the framework of the attacks—the bidding war with Saarlouis—but are hoping for marginally better terms.

Since Rowley’s letter, the unions have continued shamelessly serving business interests. The European Works Council run by the UGT and IG Metall have ludicrously called for 30-minute stoppages to let off steam.

These stoppages are not even meant to oppose the announced job cuts but to “alert the local and European Ford management before resorting to the current legislation in each country [to enforce job cuts] to commit to seeking all possible solutions and on a voluntary basis.” The unions state they are “aware” that “once the transformation towards electrification begins, a high surplus of personnel will be generated throughout Ford Europe.”

That is, they support the measures proposed by Ford and only ask that before dismissing workers, they make the cuts in staff through voluntary redundancies if possible.

None of this is new. The trade unions have been preparing these cuts together with the company management for a long time. In November 2020, the European Works Council already signed a declaration with Ford committing “wherever it is necessary to make staff adjustments,” but “to the extent possible, apply a voluntary approach.”

But voluntary dismissals, if they finally occur, are not a solution and will hardly limit the broader catastrophe. A 2016 study by the European University of Valencia indicated that for every job created at the Almussafes plant, another 5.8 are created in the Valencian Community and 11.7 in Spain as a whole. Thus, the 6,038 Ford Almussafes workers generate some 70,644 jobs in Spain. Thus any reduction in the workforce will have a significant impact on Valencia, just like closures or job cuts in Saarlouis would devastate the working class in Germany.

Last March, the Economia Digital newspaper published leaked information from the company indicating that, although Almussafes would manufacture the new Mustang electric vehicle model from 2026, 3,000 jobs—half the workforce—would be lost.

Ukraine sentences Russian soldier to life in prison

Jason Melanovski & Andrea Peters

A Ukrainian court sentenced a Russian soldier to life in prison on Monday in what can only be described as a politically motivated show trial conducted by Kiev for its propaganda value.

Twenty-one-year-old Russian tank commander Vadim Shishimarin pled guilty to the killing of 62-year-old civilian Oleksandr Shelipov, but said he was ordered to carry out the shooting. The soldier claims that his commander was worried that the man, who was talking on his cell phone, was reporting the position of Russian forces to Ukraine’s military. 

The trial was not intended to, nor could it have, established the real guilt or innocence of the young soldier. The Ukrainian regime, nationalist and ferociously anti-Russian, is dominated militarily by far-right forces that have been tormenting Russian soldiers and Russian Ukrainians they accuse of aiding the enemy. It is carrying out its own war crimes, which, while receiving little coverage in the Western press, are documented.

There is no reason to believe that Shishimarin’s confession was given voluntarily, as the Ukrainian state is known for systematically violating prisoners’ rights and subjecting them to cruel treatment. A 2015 report by Amnesty International about the torment of detainees by Kiev as well as separatists in the Donbass, reported, “Former prisoners described being beaten until their bones broke, tortured with electric shocks, kicked, stabbed, hung from the ceiling, deprived of sleep for days, threatened with death, denied urgent medical care and subjected to mock executions.” It made clear that Kiev was as guilty as its opponents of the brutality.

While Shishimarin appeared to be in decent health at the trial, the psychological and physical treatment he was subjected to beforehand and the threats made against him are completely unknown. There would have been no way for him to bring such evidence into a courtroom stacked with prosecutors, judges, government officials and witnesses seeking only one outcome—a guilty verdict.

Even if he was not mistreated, he would have no doubt been terrified, locked up in a Ukrainian prison without any access to Russian diplomatic officials or human rights monitors. Under these conditions, he would have been unable to resist the self-declaration of guilt expected of him.

That Shishimarin’s trial took place in a totally undemocratic and partial forum was made clear by his attorney, Viktor Ovsyannikov, who himself is hated by Ukraine’s far right because he defended former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych against charges of high treason leveled against him in absentia.

Ovsyannikov noted to the Guardian that Shishimarin was already widely presumed to be a war criminal before the trial. The attorney said that he was threatened for representing the Russian soldier.

“How can you defend a war criminal?” Ovsyannikov says he was repeatedly asked, adding, “My family, friends and colleagues support me. They know someone has to do it. But there are other people who ‘invited’ me to go to Moscow or Donbas [the area in eastern Ukraine claimed by Russia-backed separatists].”

Furthermore, the trial itself was of highly questionable legality under international law. First, the Geneva Conventions state that “in no circumstances whatever shall a prisoner of war be tried by a court of any kind which does not offer the essential guarantees of independence and impartiality as generally recognized.” This was clearly not the case in Shishimarin’s trial.

Second, according to the third Geneva Convention, prisoners of war like Shishimarin should be tried in a military court and not a civilian one. The reason for this, according to American University Law Professor Robert Goldman, is that the laws governing these issues are highly complex and specialized, and only military courts are trained in this area. Holding war crimes trials in civilian courts is “unprecedented.”

In a recently published statement in The Conversation, Goldman explains, “[A]n issue central to the Russian soldier’s case—whether the civilian killed could be seen as a legitimate target—is a highly technical area that only an expert of the law of war will understand.

“Under protocol I of the Geneva Conventions, a treaty added in 1977, a civilian loses immunity when he or she directly participates in hostilities.

“And this is where it gets tricky. If the Russian soldier believed that the civilian he shot posed an immediate threat, say by reporting his position to Ukrainian military, then it would not be unreasonable for the defense to argue that the civilian was a legitimate target. Indeed, in the current trial, the court heard that the Russian soldier was ordered to shoot the man for that very reason—his superior believed the civilian may have been using a cellphone to give away their location.”

The International Committee of the Red Cross has also expressly warned against the holding of war crimes trials during hostilities, as an accused person like Shishimarin can be given no meaningful chance to “to prepare his defense.”

Moscow, for its part, called the charges “outrageous” and “staged.” Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov noted, however, 'We do not have many opportunities to protect his interests on the ground, as foreign institutions actually have no activity [in Kiev]. But this does not mean that we will not consider the possibility of making attempts through other channels.”

Shishimarin’s trial was entirely motivated by a political agenda. The US and NATO are preparing for all-out, direct war with Russia. Justifications have to be found, particularly under circumstances where 90 percent and more of the world’s population do not want a third world war and do not want to see all of Europe and beyond transformed into a killing field. Russia and its soldiers must be seen as war criminals and Ukraine’s forces must be viewed as virtuous defenders of freedom and democracy, or the war propaganda project falls apart.

Shishimarin’s sentence was announced as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was appearing virtually at the World Economic Forum in Davos. In his remarks, he accused Russia of “becoming a state of war criminals.” The world’s financial elites applauded.

Following the announcement of Shishimarin’s life-long imprisonment, Ukrainian Prosecutor Andriy Sunyuk made clear that the trial was carried out as part of Kiev’s ongoing military efforts and for its publicity value on the international stage.

Making clear that the authorities are preparing similar show trials in order to send a message, Sunyuk stated, 'I think that all other law enforcement agencies will move along the path that we have traveled.”

'This will be a good example for other occupiers who may not yet be on our territory but are planning to come, or for those who are here now and plan to stay and fight. Or maybe they will think that it's time to leave here for their own territory,” he said.

Kiev is moving quickly to charge other captured Russian soldiers with war crimes as it loses territory in the country’s eastern Donbass region. Ukrainian Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova said that this month she is preparing more than 40 cases for trial and that there are more than 11,000 ongoing investigations.

Shishimarin’s trial and sentencing has been celebrated in the Western media and subject to no criticism by press outlets housed in states guilty of the most savage brutalization of the innocent—Abu Ghraib; Guantanamo Bay; extraordinary rendition; the bombing of schools, hospitals, and civilian infrastructure, and on and on. Not a single high-level individual who ordered any of these crimes has ever been held responsible. When the working masses of the world take power, the court dockets will be filled not by 11,000 cases as in Ukraine today, but hundreds of thousands.

The only limited political objection raised in the press to Shishimarin’s trial is that holding it during wartime is of questionable strategical value, as Moscow will likely respond in kind by prosecuting Ukrainian soldiers. According to Goldman, Russia is now holding “around 2,000 Ukrainian soldiers.” Many of these are members of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, which has committed documented war crimes against both Russian forces and Ukrainian civilians.

As France’s Le Monde newspaper confirmed on May 16, in a video widely shared on social media, Azov members can be identified shooting the knees of defenseless Russian soldiers. Former French soldier Adrien Bocquet, who traveled to Ukraine to serve as a volunteer medic with the Azov Battalion in Kiev and then Lviv, has said that he witnessed Azov troops shelling civilian areas in Bucha, where Russian forces have been accused of killing ordinary people.

Civilians in the recently captured city of Mariupol have also accused Azov of deliberately shooting at fleeing cars and kidnapping residents in order to have them serve as human shields at the Azovstal plant.

The Ukrainian military broadcasts and celebrates its own violations of international law on social media. In a sympathetic report, the Washington Post recently revealed that Kiev is tormenting the families of dead Russian troops, with the aid of US-made facial recognition technology, by sending them photos of their sons’ blood-soaked bodies.

But should Russia prosecute captured Ukrainian troops as war criminals, the trials will be denounced. The hypocrisy of these objections will be so blatantly obvious that some, as expressed in the recent observations of American University Law Professor Goldman, are concerned. Nonetheless, the groundwork is already being laid for an attempted cover-up of the hypocrisy by the promotion of the line that while Russia’s courts are known for their violations of modern judicial standards, Ukraine’s are a shining example of a well-functioning liberal democracy.

This is completely untrue, and those painting this portrait know it. Western powers have long identified Ukraine’s judiciary as dishonest, crooked and dysfunctional, and demanded that Kiev clean up its act in order to receive foreign loans and make the country business-friendly.

In December 2020, the Atlantic Council published an editorial describing Ukraine’s “corrupt judiciary as a criminal syndicate.” In September 2021, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, hardly a pro-Russian outlet, published an article detailing the frustrations of Western diplomats over the Zelensky government’s failure to implement judicial reforms. In January 2022, Transparency International ranked Ukraine 123rd out of 180 countries on its corruption scale, giving Kiev a score of just 32 out of 100.

The grotesque character of Ukraine’s courts is a problem for the US and the EU only when it cuts across their financial interests. When it comes to preparing for war against Russia, it is highly useful.

It must be said, however, that the Russian government is also responsible for Shishimarin’s life-long imprisonment. The young man from Ust Illyinsk, a town of about 87,000 in Irkutsk Oblast in Siberia, was described by his Ukrainian attorney as “an ordinary person, just like you or me,” who “began to understand what he had done.”

“The only thing he desires now is to go back home. I am under this impression that he perceives this as some kind of a dream,” he added.

Shishimarin was sent by the Kremlin to kill or be killed in an invasion that, albeit provoked by the US and NATO, is itself a criminal act with no progressive content. It is serving only to further divide the working masses of the two countries, spreading death and destruction in the process. The Russian troops dying and being captured in Ukraine are cannon fodder in the desperate effort of the Russian capitalist elite to maintain its stranglehold over an important portion of the highly valuable Eurasian landmass.

US arms Taiwan to prepare a Ukraine-style quagmire for China

Peter Symonds

US President Biden’s trip to Asia has brought the mounting tensions with China over Taiwan into sharp focus. For a third time since taking office, Biden emphatically declared that the US had a “commitment” to back Taiwan militarily in the event of a conflict with China—overturning decades of US policy.

From left: Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, U.S. President Joe Biden, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida at the Quad leaders summit at Kantei Palace, Tuesday, May 24, 2022, in Tokyo. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

When the US established diplomatic relations with China in 1979, and ended all formal ties with Taiwan, it adopted the One China policy—de facto recognising Beijing to be the legitimate government of all China, including the island of Taiwan. The corollary was “strategic ambiguity”—refusing to categorically commit to siding with Taiwan in a war with China. That policy was aimed not only at warding off aggression by China, but also at blocking provocative actions by Taiwan.

While the White House has insisted that there has been no change of policy, the US, first under Trump and now under Biden, has been deliberately undermining the status quo over Taiwan, the most potentially explosive flashpoint in Asia. Top-level visits to Taiwan, the open presence of US military trainers on the island, stepped-up arms sales and increased transits through the Taiwan Strait amount to calculated provocations against China.

Now having transformed Ukraine into a military quagmire to weaken and destabilise Russia, US imperialism is deliberately setting and baiting a similar trap for China in Taiwan. Drawing on the Ukraine war, open discussion is taking place in the media and in strategic and military circles about arming Taiwan for a protracted conflict with China.

An article in the New York Times yesterday reported: “US officials are taking lessons learned from arming Ukraine to work with Taiwan in molding a stronger force that could repel a seaborne invasion by China, which has one of the world’s largest militaries. The aim is to turn Taiwan into what some officials call a ‘porcupine’— a territory bristling with armaments and other forms of US-led support that appears too painful to attack.”

As in the conflict between Russian and Ukraine, US war planning is dressed up as the defence of “democratic Taiwan” from Chinese aggression. While the Russian invasion of Ukraine is a reactionary response, the US armed Ukraine over years and then goaded and provoked a Russian attack. In the case of Taiwan, which Washington itself recognises as part of China, the US has any number of triggers that could provoke a conflict.

Any step by the government in Taipei to declare formal independence from China, and/or the growing incorporation of the island into the US sphere of influence poses a direct threat to Beijing. Taiwan is not only strategically located just off the Chinese mainland but its Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company has a virtual global monopoly on the production of high-end computer chips.

Buoyed by “success” in Ukraine, US plans for a protracted military conflict on Taiwan against the Chinese military are being rapidly advanced. As the New York Times explained: “American officials have been quietly pressing their Taiwanese counterparts to buy weapons suitable for asymmetric warfare, a conflict in which a smaller military uses mobile systems to conduct lethal strikes on a much bigger force, US and Taiwanese officials say.”

The article added: “The American-made weapons that it has recently bought—mobile rocket platforms, F-16 fighter jets and anti-ship projectiles—are better suited for repelling an invading force. Some military analysts say Taiwan might buy sea mines and armed drones later. And as it has in Ukraine, the US government could also supply intelligence to enhance the lethality of the weapons, even if it refrains from sending troops.”

Washington is not only “pressing” but insisting that Taipei buy weapons in line with the Pentagon’s war planning.

The Financial Times reported earlier this month that US deputy assistant secretary of state Mira Resnick told defence industry executives in March that the Biden administration wanted to “steer Taiwan more strongly” to buying weaponry for asymmetric warfare and would not allow US manufacturers to sell arms outside those parameters.

According to the article: “Washington has subsequently told Taipei that it would not approve the sale of 12 MH-60R anti-submarine helicopters if they were requested. The US has also blocked a Taiwanese plan to acquire E2-D early-warning aircraft.”

The mounting drumbeat in the US media and official circles over the acute “threat” of Chinese invasion speaks more to the timetable that the Pentagon war planners are working to than it does to any evidence of Chinese aggressive intentions. Taiwanese military analyst Su Tzu-yun told the Financial Times: “I believe that currently the possibility of China taking military action is very low.”

Nevertheless, war planning and debate is recklessly proceeding apace, not only on the military front but also for economic warfare against China. As the New York Times reported: “US officials are already discussing to what extent they could replicate the economic penalties and the military aid deployed in defense of Ukraine in the event of a conflict over Taiwan.”

The New York Times pointed out that the number of transits through the Taiwan Straits by US warships has increased to 30 since the start of 2020, supplemented by transits by allied warships from Australia, Britain, Canada and France. US arms sales to Taiwan also have increased, with more than $23 billion in purchases announced since 2010, including $5 billion in 2020 alone.

Those in US strategic circles are well aware that the steps taken by Washington over Taiwan are highly provocative and could precipitate conflict. In comments to the New York Times, analyst Bonnie Glaser, director of the Asia program at the US German Marshall Fund, in a convoluted way, admitted as much. “Are we clear about what deters China and what provokes China?” she asked. “The answer to that is ‘no,’ and that’s dangerous territory.”

In the words of the New York Times: “President Biden’s strong language during a visit to Tokyo this week tiptoed up to provocation, Ms Glaser and other analysts in Washington said.” In other words, it is well understood in Washington that overturning “strategic ambiguity” could tip Asia into a war that, as in the case of Ukraine, has the potential to blow up into a conflict between nuclear-armed powers.

Washington’s deliberate baiting of China over Taiwan is part of its escalating confrontation with China that began with Obama’s “pivot to Asia.” For over a decade the US has sought to undermine Beijing diplomatically and economically, hand-in-hand with a massive military build-up throughout the region in preparation for war.

In its historic decline, US imperialism is desperate to weaken and destabilise potential challengers to its global position—Russia and above all China—and gain unfettered access to the immense resources and strategic position of the Eurasian landmass. As is demonstrated in Ukraine, it is doing so with criminal indifference to the devastation and huge loss of life that the war has produced so far. Now the US is preparing to do the same in Taiwan.