Pandemic profiteers prey on the crisis in education, while US schools are increasingly riven by class divide

Nancy Hanover

Children and their caregivers arrive for school in New York, Monday, March 7, 2022. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

American educators and students now commonly describe their schools as “falling apart.” There is an unprecedented exodus of teachers leaving the profession. The shortage of educators, bus drivers, and support staff has left districts reeling—cutting schools to four days a week, overstuffing classes, cutting programs and making parents responsible for their child’s transportation.

Decades of austerity have left most US school buildings antiquated, unsafe and poorly ventilated. The spread of COVID-19 is an everyday concern. Years of inadequate pay and rising healthcare costs have left educators struggling to put gas in their vehicles and keep the lights on. A new round of budget cuts and school layoffs is beginning as CARES money dries up and the US government diverts trillions of dollars for war.

If this “perfect storm” was not enough, students and educators are traumatized by the rise of school shootings and the wall of official indifference to their very lives.

But to Wall Street profiteers, these are not problems but opportunities.

The financial elites have seized upon the conditions created or exacerbated by the pandemic to reap record-breaking returns. Among them is a plethora of edubusinesses, charter schools (taxpayer-financed but privately run schools often run by for-profit businesses), the educational technology industry and associated hedge fund investors.

Profit interests have set their sights on the national K-12 education annual spending, estimated between $800 billion and $3 trillion. A bullseye has been placed on the American public education system. Every dollar paid to teachers and school workers (the vast bulk of the education budget) is viewed by this parasitic cabal as a deduction from potential profits.

Businesses are now taking advantage of an educational breakdown, not just in the US but throughout the world, where a parallel crisis is unfolding. The pandemic did not need to lead to such a state of collapse, as seen in China. But the policy of the financial elites is to let the virus rip throughout the population and refuse to close schools (identified as early as the influenza pandemic of 1918 as a nerve center of community transmission for disease) to keep parents at work.

This bipartisan policy, implemented in the US by Donald Trump and even more ferociously by Joe Biden, was reinforced by the unions’ willing partnership. While the ruling elites insisted on face-to-face instruction for the working class to keep parents on the job, they sent their own children to far safer, smaller schools with the most up-to-date COVID protections. 

In other words, the COVID protocols followed by public school districts were dictated not by the preservation of life but by the political interests of Democrats, Republicans and unions, answering to Wall Street. 

The refusal to implement targeted lockdowns, mass community-wide testing and contact tracing has resulted in chaotic patterns of schools opening and closing, unreliable transportation, children warehoused in auditoriums without teachers, unqualified substitutes, thousands of unreported cases, lots of sick children, parents and family members, and tragically unnecessary deaths. All of this has accelerated the growing privatization of American education. 

Jumping in to entice harried parents were charter schools, parochial schools, and especially all-virtual cyber charters—70 percent of which are for-profit businesses. Between 2020 and 2021, 1.5 million students left their public schools, a drop of 3.3 percent of the total US enrollment. During the same period, charter schools added more than a quarter of a million new students, a seven percent year-over-year increase between 2020 and 2021.

For example, the virtual charter school enrollment in Oklahoma more than doubled, adding more than 35,000 new students. According to the Washington Post, most signed up with the for-profit EPIC, which has been repeatedly investigated for misreporting costs to state officials, improper financial transfers and more. Similarly, Pennsylvania saw a growth of 99.7 percent in virtual charter schools. Cyber charters accounted for over 131 percent of the charter school increase in Utah. 

In other words, thousands of families were forced to migrate to substandard for-profit cyber charter schools in the hope of protecting themselves or their families from COVID-19.

These schools, established before the pandemic, were so notorious for their poor outcomes that even the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, a pro-charter lobbying group, published a study calling for reform. According to Forbes, online charter schools have a “uniformly negative” track record for every demographic subgroup of students.

But the business model of the cybers was the most lucrative. Without the costs of buildings, lunch service or busing, these business owners pay themselves hefty salaries and still rake in double-digit profit margins. For example, Stride, the US’s largest Education Management Organization, running cyber charter schools across the US, tripled its net income posted in the quarter ending March 2021 and doubled its earnings before taxes. 

Given financial reports like Stride’s, it’s no wonder Wall Street is backing the breakup of the public school system. Former NY City mayor and billionaire Michael Bloomberg has donated $750 million effort to expand enrollment in charter schools, pay for new charter facilities and train charter teachers and principals. His efforts aim to increase charter enrollment in 20 metro areas by 150,000 students. Bloomberg, who last year denounced public school teachers opposed to school reopenings and told them to “Suck it up and go to work,” justified the initiative citing “traditional public schools’ failures since the pandemic began.” 

Private schools also took advantage of the crisis. A series of initiatives were mounted nationally during the pandemic to resuscitate voucher schemes. Vouchers use various means, including so-called “opportunity scholarships,” to transfer state monies to private schools. Most of these recent attempts failed to get the necessary support, including the lavishly funded “Let MI Kids Learn” petition drive sponsored by Betsy DeVos, Get Families Back to Work and the Republican Governors Association. 

California voucher proponents petitioned, also unsuccessfully, to force their private school scheme onto the 2022 General Election ballot. In Nevada, a judge blocked petition wording halting a proposed pro-voucher petition drive for 2022.

But the well-heeled proponents of private schools are continuing their efforts by other means. For example, Governor Greg Abbott and the Texas Public Policy Foundation launched a statewide Parent Empowerment Tour in May to push for school vouchers.

The accelerated drive for school privatization, however, is not only mercenary. A fascistic cabal is spearheading the growth of religious schools and promoting right-wing, nationalist curricula.

The right-wing-dominated Supreme Court is expected to rule imminently on Carson v. Makin, that could further roll back restrictions on the use of public taxes for religious and private schools. It follows that body’s reactionary July 2020 decision in Espinoza v. Montana which opened the door to government subsidies for religious schools.

In a further disturbing development, Michigan’s Hillsdale College has announced a partnership with Tennessee Governor Bill Lee to open 50 charter schools in the state. $32 million in public funding will support the effort. Hillsdale is known as a “conservative,” if not fascist, ideological center. It developed the Trump 1776 curricula, endorsed the Great Barrington Declaration, and is closely tied to Trump’s education secretary Betsy DeVos, Clarence and Ginni Thomas. Lee emphasized that the schools would be devoted to “preserving American liberty” and opposed to so-called critical race theory.

Behind the scenes among all forms of education stands the Education Technology sector. It has  amassed record profits during the pandemic. With school districts desperately trying to accommodate in-person, online, and hybrid options, technology and software purchases were off the charts.

Technology proliferated for tutoring systems, augmented learning, adaptive technologies, enhanced curricula, classroom management, Social and Emotional Learning, student engagement solutions, professional development, and applications for endless communications and testing regimes.

The five tech superpowers—Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Google and Facebook—saw their combined revenue shoot up by more than $1.2 trillion, a one-year pandemic increase of 25 percent. Of course, businesses also contributed to the surge of technologies, but schools had the slimmest budgets and were the most vulnerable.

The size of the global education technology market size is staggering. As of 2021, it was valued at $106.46 billion, with predicted annual gains of 16 percent. Tech businesses, flush with profits, have repeatedly indulged in stock buybacks, enriching their key stockholders even further. Of the ten richest people in the world during the pandemic, eight made their money from tech, the New York Times has pointed out.

In sum, the looting of public education, schooling’s increasing social stratification by class, and the attempts to promote for-profit, pro-capitalist propaganda mills are another side of the ongoing destruction of democratic rights. The ruling elites seek to reorganize education and place it entirely on the basis of the capitalist market. 

The Demons of War Hunker Down in Ukraine

Ron Jacobs

Image by Gayatri Malhotra.

As the war between Russia and Ukraine heads into its second hundred days, the information we are getting regarding it is less clear and less likely to be the truth. This seems especially true in the US media, which contradicts itself in this regard with greater and greater frequency. As for what the Russian media is reporting, that is becoming almost impossible to discover given the expanding censorship of news source that Washington or London considers linked to Moscow. Of course, this censorship is structured different than the censorship in Ukraine and Russia, where much of it is government-imposed. Here in the land of the free, censorship takes the shape of corporate de-platforming of various podcasts, websites and video programming. In addition, corporate payment apps (Pay Pal, etc.) cancel the censored entities accounts, thereby defunding them.

Given the growing amount of disinformation, misinformation and censorship, those leading the charge from Washington, London, Brussels and Kyiv can pretty much write and say whatever they want and no one can prove otherwise. Those who challenge their narrative are often characterized as a Russian asset. This typecasting has expanded so deep and wide that even long-time pacifist groups decrying the war (like they have every other war) are being painted as Russian sympathizers. Indeed, certain segments of the US Left that support Kyiv have come perilously close to identifying pacifists and others opposed to this war in this manner.

One of the newer chapters in this relatively brief conflict concerns a “growing” partisan resistance movement. Some of the same leftists mentioned above have been talking up this resistance for a while, now. Recently, the New York Times published a fairly long article on it. (6/10/2022) The article read much like a press release from the CIA and was dutifully vague in its description of this resistance. For various reasons, there were no numbers discussed. However, neither were the politics of the members discussed; something that raised a few flags in this observer’s mind. It’s legitimate to wonder if these resistance cells are actually made up of ultra-right Ukrainians associated with various neo-nazi organizations or perhaps they are sponsored by the Ukrainian Catholic Church or some other conservative faction identified with the uglier side of Ukrainian nationalism. I’m fairly certain that those on the Left urging others to support them believe these partisans are mostly communist and socialist, while the New York Times prefers to believe they are all pro-capitalist liberals. Given the fact that, according to the Times article, most if not all of these groups are in fairly constant contact with the CIA-organized Ukrainian Center of National Resistance which was formalized last July 2021, it seems pretty reasonable that the bulk of this resistance is made up of far-right and pro-Zelenskyy Ukrainians. Assuming these groups do exist, whether or not they will make any real difference in the war remains to be seen.

Besides Ukraine’s internal situation there is also what Washington and Moscow want this conflict to mean for the future of the world. It seems fairly clear that Moscow’s primary hope is that it can halt the bulldozer that is Washington and NATO. Stating this fact is not an endorsement of Moscow or its aggression. Once again, we have no real idea about Moscow’s intentions because most of what gets to the United States in that regard has been filtered through the consent manufacturing department of the US media or is just plain fiction. On the other hand, Washington has no bones about making its desires clear. For example, on June 10, 2022 President Zelenskyy told a group of pro-US rulers meeting in Asia: “It is on the battlefield in Ukraine that the future rules of this world are being decided,” he said. “So let us save the whole world from coming back to the times when everything was decided by the so-called right of might.” The fact that this was said without any irony dismisses the history of the US/NATO war machine of the last several decades. After all, if NATO had not spent the last twenty-five or so years assimilating nations of eastern Europe like the Borg in Star Trek and had instead decided on a different cooperative security mechanism that included Moscow after the end of the USSR, Ukraine would probably not be in the straits it is in. Washington rejected the overtures made by Moscow regarding a cooperative security arrangement and intentionally chose a path that emphasized its military might to further its hegemonic agenda. This “right of might” Mr. Zelenskyy refers to remains Washington’s standard operating procedure and is a major reason why it dominates so much of the world.

At long last, calls for a negotiated peace are beginning to be heard from sections of the ruling elites in the US and the west. At the same time, Kyiv is awaiting $45 billion dollars of US military aid while aggressively demanding that other nations replenish its supplies of military hardware. Not all of those nations are responding positively. Germany and Bulgaria have both shown some reluctance to continue a war they seem to understand needs to end before it takes down the US-dominated sectors of the world economy they are tied to and creates a situation that could make the recent pandemic seem like a lark.

Indeed, it is the economic factor which may very well determine the course of the Russia-Ukraine war. Washington’s rush to impose sanctions and its cessation of trade with Moscow exacerbated an economic situation that was tenuous at best for the majority of US residents, not to mention even more dire situations elsewhere. As Beijing, Moscow and some of the non-aligned nations (Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, for example) continue to broaden their economic cooperation, the possibility that an alternative global trading project could evolve increases. This would force Washington and its clients and allies into actually competing on equal ground with its capitalist rivals. Of course, this scenario is as potentially dangerous as it is positive. Troubled empires have been known to escalate such rivalries into world wars. In June 2022, Washington certainly qualifies as a troubled empire. If history is a guide, this means that in order for a greater war to be avoided, the power of the non-US-based trading system would have to project enough threat to require diplomacy and detente over war and apocalypse; a balance of terror, so to speak.

The trade unions in Germany act as wages police

Peter Schwarz

Despite the skyrocketing cost of living the head of the German IG Metall union has publicly pledged to demand only a maximum 7 percent wage increase spread over two years in the autumn collective bargaining round for the metal-working industry’s 4 million employees. That would amount to the biggest real wage in Germany cut since the economic crisis of the 1930s.

IG Metall boss Jörg Hofmann [Photo by IG Metall]

In an interview with the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Jörg Hofmann assured that his union would follow the European Central Bank’s inflation target of 2 percent “and not the current inflation rate of almost eight percent” as the benchmark for its wage demands.

“According to the proven wage formula, we follow the estimated two percent target inflation of the European Central Bank and the increase in productivity, which is 1.1 percent. And that’s for two years,” the IG Metall (IGM) leader said. “So, only based on this formula do we come to a demand for six percent more wages. On top of that, there is necessarily a redistribution component, because the companies are making such high profits right now.”

Even if the union follows through on this demand—and it usually accepts just half at most—this would still result in a dramatic loss of income. Collectively negotiated wages in the metal-working industry have not increased since 2018. Since then, IGM has only agreed to one-time payments, which, although they dampened the loss of purchasing power in the short term, have not counted toward basic wages on which future increases are based.

Assuming 8 percent inflation for both this year and next—and many experts expect it to reach double digits—the official consumer price index at the end of 2023 would be around 23 percent higher than in 2018. Collectively agreed wages, however, would only have risen by 7 percent even if the IGM demand were fully implemented. The real wages of a metal worker would therefore be 16 percent lower than five years ago!

However, the official inflation index does not adequately reflect the actual increase in prices. Above all, prices for food, heating, rent and energy, which place a particularly heavy burden on lower and middle income earners, have risen several times over. The World Bank expects international food prices to rise by 22.9 percent this year. For many workers and their families, this is threatening their very existence. They are simply no longer able to make ends meet on their monthly salaries.

Add to this unbearable work stress, the threat of job losses and the consequences of a homicidal coronavirus policy that has claimed 140,000 lives and infected 3.6 million in Germany alone, with 1 in 10 suffering long-term health effects.

All over the world, workers are reaching the conclusion that they must fight to defend their rights and past gains. The number of strikes and protests around the world have increased significantly—from the US to Europe, Asia and Africa. However, Hofmann and his bureaucrats are responding by collaborating even more closely than before with the corporations and government.

In the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Hofmann justifies his rejection of seeking adequate compensation for inflation by saying that IG Metall was acting “sensibly” and had “the good of the whole country in mind.” “We are not triggering a wages-prices spiral,” he added, completely accepting the lying claim that workers’ wages are somehow responsible for massive price rises.

When he talks of the “good of the whole country” he really means the ruling elites and their stock market values and profits. In this he speaks for not only IG Metall, but for all the German unions and trade unions internationally.

In Germany alone, contract talks are set to take place this year covering 10 million employees. In addition to the almost 4 million workers in the metal and electrical industries, this includes 92,000 in the iron and steel industry and 580,000 in the chemical and pharmaceutical industries. Here, the IG BCE has postponed collective bargaining from April to the autumn and agreed on a one-time bridge payment of €1,400, which can be reduced to €1,000 by the companies.

The service sector union Verdi has already signed collective agreements for the printing industry, the insurance industry, the private banking sector and daily newspapers that are far below the demands of IG Metall. The agreements will each run for two years and consist of one or two single payments of €500 and annual pay rises of just 1.5 to 3 percent.

At the end of the year, the collective agreements for 2.7 million employees in the federal and local government sectors, retail trade, the motor vehicle industry and the construction industry expire.

In the past, unions that represented the interests of the bosses and stabbed workers in the back were called “yellow unions.” Today, all unions are yellow. They have become a wages police force working for the corporations.

Every day, they try to prove anew to the transnational corporations and financial investors that production can be more cost-effective and profitable in “their” country rather than elsewhere. To do so, they sacrifice the wages, working conditions and social gains of the workers. In exchange they receive lucrative handouts from management as supervisory board members and works council representatives.

The “wages-prices spiral” that Hofmann cites to justify wage restraint is simply an obscene lie propagated by the capitalists and their union flunkeys. According to this, it is workers’ wage demands that are responsible for rising prices. To stop price increases, workers have no choice but to sit back and watch inflation rip up their incomes.

In fact, inflation is the form in which vast sums are being recouped from the working class that governments have pumped into the pockets of the rich.

The European Central Bank alone has invested €5.1 trillion in public and private bonds in the last seven years. This unimaginable sum would be enough to pay out €15,000 in cash to each of the eurozone’s 342 million inhabitants, from infants to the elderly, not to mention the countless hospitals, schools and infrastructure projects it could finance. Instead, those trillions have funded an orgy of enrichment, which according to Oxfam, produced a new billionaire every 30 hours during the pandemic.

The disruption of supply chains during the pandemic and the repercussions of the Ukraine war and the sanctions against Russia have shaken this massive speculative bubble. Now, everything is being done to make the working class foot the bill.

Added to this are the huge costs of military rearmament as all imperialist powers—above all Germany—prepare for a violent re-division of the world, which has already begun with NATO’s proxy war against Russia and the increasingly bellicose threats against China. It is an open secret that the €100 billion “Special Fund for the Bundeswehr” is only the beginning. The working class is to bear the costs for all of this.

The interest rate hikes by central banks serve to further increase the pressure on the working class, which is to be hammered by rising unemployment. Meanwhile, profits continue to rise ever upward.

In the second half of 2021, despite growing crises, corporations in the US recorded their highest after-tax profit rate since the early 1950s—almost 15 percent. German Dax-listed companies also set new records; in the first quarter of 2022, their profits were 21 percent higher than in the same quarter the previous year. Nevertheless, the working class is being made to bleed.

University of Tel Aviv study points to COVID as cause of recent unexplained acute liver failure among children

Benjamin Mateus

On June 7, 2022, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Hepatitis Alliance, at their World Hepatitis Summit 2022, released a joint news statement in which they also briefly addressed the current cases of unexplained acute hepatitis (liver inflammation) among young children. There have been some 700 such cases in the last five months, spanning 34 countries, coinciding with the Omicron phase of the pandemic. The United Kingdom and the United States lead in the number of cases, each with more than 200.

Israelis receive a COVID-19 vaccine from medical professionals at a coronavirus vaccination center set up on a shopping mall parking lot in Givataim, Israel [Credit: AP Photo/Oded Balilty]

The clinical signs of the disease come on suddenly, with a high proportion of children developing liver failure and around six percent needing a liver transplant. Nine have died. The most common symptoms are vomiting and jaundice, the yellowing of the skin and the sclera of the eyes. 

Many in the scientific community speculated that the disease fell into the spectrum of the multisystem inflammatory syndrome-children (MIS-C) arising from a previous COVID infection, which can afflict a minority of children and adolescents after the acute phase of COVID has passed and their infections have already cleared, meaning that once acute hepatitis manifests, their COVID tests are negative. Many have also not had antibody tests conducted to confirm previous COVID infections.

Speaking with New Scientist, Dr. Deepti Gurdasani of Queen Mary University of London said, “I think we have seen hepatitis as part of MIS-C before, but not in the numbers that are being seen now.” She explained that the rise could be because Omicron has infected millions of children in a few short months.

Many public health officials, including the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the WHO, have placed undue emphasis on adenovirus infections, which commonly cause colds and flu-like symptoms in the population. However, they almost never cause liver failure among previously healthy children, or even the immuno-compromised, for that matter. 

Despite experience with adenoviruses and ample expertise on viral infections and liver injury that have been amply documented in the literature, this didn’t stop the CDC from writing on May 6, 2022, “This cluster [in Kentucky], along with recently identified possible cases in Europe, suggest that adenovirus should be considered in the differential diagnosis of acute hepatitis of unknown etiology among children.” 

But in their report they clearly stated that on liver biopsies no [adenovirus] viral infections were ever observed. Even with the use of the electron microscope, no viral particles were evident. In the very rare instances where adenoviruses have caused liver failure among immunocompromised children, in 100 percent of cases the adenovirus was detected in liver cells.

On May 22 the WHO provided a more nuanced perspective, writing, “While adenovirus is a plausible hypothesis as part of the pathogenesis mechanism [the manner of development of disease], further investigations are ongoing for the causative agent; adenovirus infection (which generally causes mild self-limiting gastrointestinal or respiratory infections in young children) does not fully explain the more severe clinical picture observed with these cases.”

Dr. Farid Jalali, a gastroenterologist, has emphatically denounced the claim that these recent unexplained pediatric acute liver failures are associated with the detection of adenovirus in the patients, especially in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and recent massive waves of Omicron infections. Adenoviruses are common and can colonize the areas of the respiratory and intestinal tracts. Finding them doesn’t necessarily indicate they were the cause of the disease.

He emphasized that public health institutions are doing a disservice to the children and families of the afflicted by suggesting such an association and are only minimizing the dangers posed by the current policies that allow SARS-CoV-2 to persist in human communities. 

The debate in the scientific community has been ongoing. However, a recent study from Tel Aviv University has provided new evidence that COVID is indeed responsible for these acute liver failure cases. Lead author Dr. Shiri Cooper and colleagues submitted a report last Friday to the Journal of Pediatric Gastroenterology and Nutrition on five pediatric cases that had recovered from asymptomatic or mild COVID and later suffered acute liver injury.

They distinguished two patterns of liver involvement after COVID-19: acute liver failure that required transplantation and acute hepatitis with injury to the bile system. Interestingly, the two patients with liver failure were aged only three and five months, and those older, aged eight to 13, developed a disease pattern similar to their adult counterparts. 

In adults, post-COVID liver injury has been described in the medical literature but usually as a late complication of severe COVID and hospitalization that leads to progressive liver failure. 

Cooper and colleagues in the current study from Tel Aviv University wrote, “The clinical manifestation of the pediatric patients suggests that the pathogenesis is not related to the severity of acute [COVID] disease” as it is in adults. The disease among children frequently presents several months after the diagnosis of COVID-19. In their study, the mean time from COVID to liver failure was 75 days, which explains why so many of these cases were missed as Long-COVID complications, because children are routinely missed in diagnosing the milder form of acute disease. 

Many of the findings in the children with liver failure have also been seen in adults, such as the swelling and enlargement of the liver. The walls of the gallbladders were thickened, and the bile ducts were dilated. Biopsies of the liver showed extensive inflammation. In other words, the disease process that has been attributed to adults after their COVID infection has distinct parallels with these children and their acute liver inflammation.

Because of the claimed association with adenovirus, the authors of the Israeli study also attempted to investigate this hypothesis. 

First, they commented on published results by the European CDC on 14 cases. None showed adenovirus in any residual liver cells, called hepatocytes: “One case underwent adenovirus PCR of liver tissue which was negative.” In another case series of six patients, none of the liver biopsies showed the presence of any adenovirus particles. But as already noted, in rare cases of adenovirus-induced liver failure, liver biopsies in all the cases showed viral particles were present. 

In the five patients in Israel, “The adenovirus stain was negative in all, and the histologic features [under the microscope] were not suggestive of adenovirus hepatitis. Three patients had adenovirus PCR performed from whole blood, and in one, it was positive. However, as the liver histology was not suggestive of adenovirus infection, we did not consider it as the culprit for the hepatitis.”

As to the mechanism of injury, the authors suggested that damage to the immune system from COVID is likely the cause, and considerable effort is needed to understand these complex processes. It is all the more necessary that public health authorities stop being obstructionists, heed the weight of the evidence that has already been presented, and acknowledge the dangers posed by COVID and the reckless “herd immunity” policy that exposes children to unnecessary harm. 

Dr. Lisa Iannattone stated bluntly on Twitter, “Anyone putting forth the hypothesis that there are two novel pediatric liver failure outbreaks caused by two different viruses happening at the same time is not someone to be taken seriously. I don’t care what ‘very serious institution’ they work for. This is absurd. It’s COVID.”

South Korean truckers continue indefinite strike against soaring fuel prices

Ben McGrath

An indefinite strike of South Korean cargo truck workers continued into its second week on Tuesday, as they struggle against high fuel prices and the tearing up of safety measures.

Striking truck drivers in South Korea, June 7, 2022 (Photo: Facebook / Korean Confederation of Trade Unions)

The strike, which is having an impact on other industries, including steel making and automotive manufacturing, is part of a growing upsurge of working class action around the world against inflation and other attacks on living and working conditions.

Workers in the 25,000-member Cargo Truckers Solidarity (CTS) union are demanding a rise in freight prices to cover soaring fuel costs as well as the extension of the Safe Trucking Freight Rates System, which is due to expire at the end of the year. The system sets a legal minimum for freight fares, so workers do not feel forced to drive unsafely to make ends meet. Cargo drivers are also demanding an expansion of the goods covered under the system.

In recent months, the cost of diesel fuel has skyrocketed to a national average of 2,008 won ($US1.56) per liter. Drivers reported spending as much as 100,000 won ($US77.50) or more to fill up their gas tanks. Cargo drivers are considered self-employed contractors, so fuel costs are passed on from the companies to the workers.

CTS is negotiating with South Korea’s Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy. CTS is affiliated with the so-called militant Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU), which claims to have more than 1.1 million members.

The Trade Ministry has estimated that in steel, automotive and other related industries, the strike so far has resulted in disruptions to production and distribution worth 1.6 trillion won ($US1.24 billion), as companies cannot receive materials or ship finished products. Workers’ pickets have obstructed roads leading to facilities, in addition to drivers refusing to haul goods.

As of Monday, police have detained at least 44 union members for supposedly obstructing business operations.

The country’s two largest steelmakers, POSCO and Hyundai Steel, have reported disruptions to their operations. POSCO stated that as of Monday morning, production at its Pohang steel complex in North Gyeongsang Province had halted at several facilities, with daily production of wire rods dropping by 7,500 tons and that of cold-rolled steel declining by 4,500 tons. The Pohang steel complex typically produces 20,000 tons of steel per day. While production has not been halted at Hyundai Steel, an official from the company told the media: “If the strike is protracted, we may have to adjust our production.”

Drivers on picket lines at companies like Hyundai Motors and Kia Motors have also caused disruptions to production. Hyundai claimed last week that the strike forced the company to halve production at its Ulsan factory, the largest auto facility in the country. The company normally produces about 6,000 vehicles per day at the plant.

Major ports like Busan, Incheon, and Pyeongtaek are seeing disruptions as drivers demonstrate at the facilities, refuse to move shipping containers and call on non-union drivers to join the strike. At Busan, the largest port in the country, the transportation of containers has fallen to approximately 25 percent of normal activity.

Reflecting the growing concerns of the ruling class about rising workers’ struggles internationally, the New York Times referred to the strike as “the latest headache for a global supply chain already reeling” from the COVID-19 pandemic and the US/NATO-instigated war against Russia in Ukraine. South Korea is a major manufacturer of semiconductors, steel, and automobiles.

As in Korea, there is a growing strike wave globally. Millions of workers in the United States, Europe, Asia and throughout the world face huge fuel costs, soaring food prices and other attacks on their wages and living conditions. In this, Korean truck drivers have powerful allies in their class brothers and sisters internationally.

The drivers also face the same enemy: the capitalist system itself. This includes all elements of the ruling elite, from the right-wing government of President Yoon Suk-yeol and the companies to the trade union bureaucracies.

Speaking through administration officials, Yoon told reporters on Monday that he had instructed his government to “come up with solutions from various angles, as the damage to industries could increase this week.”

Already, the government is using the military to serve as strikebreakers and scabs. The Transport Ministry has deployed at least 100 military cargo trucks and dozens of others from local governments to move goods at ports.

However, CTS and the KCTU are attempting to isolate the strike and allow workers to burn themselves out. Kim Gyeong-dong, a CTS official, told the media last week that the union had run out of funds to conduct the strike as of Thursday and it was unlikely that it could continue for another ten days after that.

This is an admission by the union that it is looking to wrap up the strike as quickly as possible. For all the KCTU and its affiliates’ posturing as militant organizations, their goal from the start has been to allow workers to let off steam before sending them back to work without their demands being met, or with vague false promises from the government to address their concerns.

Furthermore, the union is keeping the number of drivers participating in the strike to a minimum. According to the Transport Ministry, only 6,600 drivers were involved in strike action on Monday, though CTS claims that the government is underestimating the number of strikers.

This may be true, but the union itself claimed that only 15,000 drivers went on strike on the first day, leaving another 10,000 drivers on the job to minimize as much as possible the impact of the stoppage. In total, there are 420,000 truck drivers throughout the industry and while union officials pay lip service to encouraging non-union drivers to join the strike, there has been no genuine effort from the bureaucrats to broaden the struggle.

United Nations report reveals worsening social catastrophe in Sri Lanka

N. Ranges

A UN survey entitled “Humanitarian Needs and Priorities—Food Security Crisis Sri Lanka” issued on June 9 painted a tragic picture of the social devastation being inflicted on workers and the poor by Colombo’s ruling elite and the capitalist system.

“Sri Lanka is experiencing a multidimensional crisis, compounded by food insecurity, threatened livelihoods, shortages of essential medical items and rising protection concerns,” the 39-page report stated.

Long queue for cooking gas at Mahabage, 5 May 2022 (WSWS Media)

After months of strikes and protests over shortages of essential items, escalating inflation and extended power cuts, mass demonstrations erupted in early April across the island demanding the ouster of President Gotabhaya Rajapakse and his government. These were followed by one-day general strikes on April 28 and May 6.

In her foreword to the report, UN Residential Coordinator in Sri Lanka Hanaa Singer Hamdy revealed that about 5.7 million people, or around 22 percent of the total population, needs urgent humanitarian assistance. There is an “unfolding multi-dimensional food security crisis,” she wrote, with “many families unable to afford basic food commodities,” and “up to 70 percent of households having to reduce food consumption, including by skipping meals.”

Inflation and a sharp decline in the country’s agricultural products means that “low-income families face severe threat of food security.” This has worsened over the last two years with a 73 percent increase in the cost of food items. The annualised food inflation rate climbed steeply last month to 57.4 percent, Hamdy said.

Unable to afford the rising prices, people have resorted to various “coping mechanisms,” such as borrowing money, withdrawing savings, pawning belongings and selling property to make ends meet. “The number of households that borrowed money has significantly increased, from 40 percent in August 2021 to 68 percent in April 2022,” Hamdy stated. Such mechanisms, she added, “are not sustainable over the long term and will lead to greater losses in the future.”

Citing a World Food Program assessment, the UN report said that the highest risk of food insecurity is in households relying on “unskilled casual labor, fishing, and those without home gardens and livestock. Estate and urban poor, including migrants, are considered disproportionately affected.”

The report indicated that 73 percent of households surveyed had seen a reduction in income over the past two years, including 11 percent who had received no income over that period.

The UN report stated that the health sector is among the most severely impacted. Sri Lanka imports about 80 percent of its medicines, but depleted foreign reserves have prevented many vital medicines being imported. “The shortage of medicines has paralysed about 50 percent of medical operations in the country. Only urgent surgeries are performed, as some of the medical equipment and anesthesia are quickly running out,” the report said.

According to surveys cited in the report, stocks of about 200 essential drugs, including blood-thinners for heart attacks, antibiotics, vaccines and cancer chemotherapy, will be depleted in the next three months. Over 2,720 essential surgical consumables and more than 250 regular laboratory items are already out of stock. It warned, “There is an urgent need to replenish essential medicines and medical supplies” in order to protect lives and prevent more deaths. The crisis has been exacerbated by the lack of fuel and extended power cuts.

“The shortage of essential medicines is also limiting the availability and access to life-serving sexual and reproductive health services,” the UN report stated, under conditions in which there will be an estimated 72,000 births in the next three months.

The poor nutritional situation in Sri Lanka has deteriorated as a result of high food costs, the breakdown of supply chains and consequent disruptions in government nutritional support programs. The purchase of diverse food groups, the report stated, “is becoming increasingly unaffordable and out of reach for most low-income households. Pregnant and lactating women are particularly at risk because the majority cannot purchase the required nutritious food.”

Citing other surveys, the UN report stated, “Low-nutrition diets among children under-five places Sri Lanka among the ten worst low- and middle-income countries in the world.”

Slum housing at Kajeemawatha in Colombo (Image: WSWS Media)

Prior to COVID-19, Sri Lanka recorded stunting rates of 17.3 percent, wasting of 15 percent and under-weights of 20.5 percent among children under five years of age. The UN report revealed that as of April 2022, the monthly costs of a nutritious diet per household had increased by 156 percent and that at least 56,000 children under 5 are suffering from severe acute malnutrition.

The number of children going to school without breakfast has also considerably increased this year and schools, due to lack of funds, are unable to provide free, nutritious meals.

Other indices of the catastrophic situation showed that 66.3 percent of households in plantation estates do not have safe drinking water and over 48.5 percent of households in Sri Lanka do not practice any water treatment methods, such as boiling or chlorinating. Limited fuel supplies to cook food means many households have stopped treating water at their homes.

Rural areas are facing serious crop failures caused by the Rajapakse government’s bans on imported chemical fertiliser due to the lack of foreign exchange. Paddy production has fallen by about 50 percent and maize by 35 to 70 percent leading to major financial problems for the rural masses, pushing up prices and causing food shortages.

Residential Coordinator Hamdy said that while 5.7 million people need humanitarian assistance in Sri Lanka, the UN program would only target 1.7 million of the most vulnerable, and that it needed $US47.2 million. The UN Humanitarian Country Team has appealed to international organisations to donate funds.

“If we don’t act now—we will see Sri Lanka slide into a humanitarian crisis,” Hamdy added. She said the UN was responding swiftly in response to requests from Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe for “multi-sectoral international assistance.”

Wickremesinghe’s appeals to the UN are a cynical attempt to politically hoodwink the population. President Rajapakse appointed Wickremesinghe as prime minister in early May in order to implement International Monetary Fund (IMF) austerity measures.

Last week, Wickremesinghe telephoned IMF managing director Kristalina Georgieva to finalise talks for a bailout loan. The IMF has insisted that any loan program is dependent on Colombo imposing harsh austerity measures. These include increasing taxes, downsizing and privatisating the state sector, slashing social programs, cutting public education and health and other regressive policies, some of which have already been implemented.

While the masses are suffering, big business and banks are reaping profits. This includes Hatton National Bank Finance, which at the end of May recorded net profits of 515.6 million rupees from a loss last year; the blue-chip Aitken Spence conglomerate that announced a before-tax profit of 14.2 billion rupees; and Softlogic Holdings which reported a 35 percent annual revenue surge and gross profit of 39 billion rupees, a 52 percent increase.

At the same time, Wickremesinghe told parliament last week that one of his priorities is repayment of $5 billion in loans due to international finance institutions. All of Sri Lanka’s capitalist parties, including the Samagi Jana Balawegaya and the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, as well as the trade unions endorse the IMF’s demands and defend the profit system.

Contrary to the illusions promoted by the opposition parties, the trade unions and pseudo-left formations, there is no national solution to the deepening economic collapse in Sri Lanka, which is inseparably connected to the global crisis of the capitalist profit system. Since 2020, the Sri Lankan economy has been battered by the COVID-19 pandemic and then heavily impacted by the US-led NATO war against Russia in Ukraine which began in February. This resulted in spiraling oil prices, food shortages, supply-chain disruptions and, like in every other country, skyrocketing inflation.

COVID denial vs. reality: The growing threat of Omicron subvariants

Evan Blake

Contrary to the relentless propaganda from the political establishment and corporate media of nearly every country, the COVID-19 pandemic is not over and will worsen in the coming weeks and months.

The highly infectious, vaccine-resistant and pathogenic Omicron BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants are quickly becoming dominant globally and threaten another surge of infections and deaths from COVID-19. This is taking place under conditions in which almost every world government outside of China has dismantled the infrastructure that had been in place to track and slow the spread of the virus.

In a process analogous to the captain of a sinking ship demanding that all life vests be thrown overboard, since the start of this year mask mandates have been lifted, testing drastically curtailed, contact tracing programs scrapped, and guidelines on isolation, quarantine and travel have been tailored to suit the needs of the major corporations. The ruling elite’s motto has become “Hear no COVID, see no COVID, and do nothing.”

There is now an incredible chasm between this fictional world of corporate myth-making, where COVID-19 is supposedly gone, and the real world, where millions of people are infected and thousands die globally each week and an untold number become debilitated by Long COVID. This conspiracy of world governments and the media has degenerated into a massive cover-up, involving systematic efforts to manipulate data and stop reporting on COVID-19. Tragically, the propaganda has misled millions of people to now walk around without masks, as if the virus can simply be wished away.

A COVID-19 patient in Paris, France, in 2021. (AP Photo/Lewis Joly)

The criminal policies implemented by capitalist governments over the past seven months have set the stage for COVID-19 to become a permanent feature of global society, with recurring waves of infections, deaths and mass debilitation from Long COVID to be accepted as the “new normal.” It has become nearly impossible to prevent infection, and many of our readers likely know multiple friends, family members, coworkers or neighbors who are presently suffering or have died from COVID-19.

To put the pandemic in perspective, it is even more terrible than the school shootings that have provoked such immense outrage in the US and internationally. While this goes unreported in the media, it is a fact that far more young people are dying of COVID-19 than die from school shootings.

Outrage was felt over the horrific massacre in Uvalde, Texas, where police stood by and did nothing. But the same basic policy is being conducted on a mass scale by world governments and health officials, as they have consciously implemented school reopening policies that have infected hundreds of millions of children with COVID-19 globally, killing over 1,500 children in the US and tens of thousands internationally.

In order to stop this deepening catastrophe, the international working class must assimilate the political lessons of the pandemic and understand the ongoing dangers posed. Only through the development of a unified mass movement of workers in every industry will it be possible to eliminate SARS-CoV-2 globally, stop the pandemic and lay the foundations for a vast expansion of public health.

The dangers of the Omicron BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants

There are now five Omicron subvariants which have become dominant in different countries around the world since last November. Since late December, the BA.1 and BA.2 subvariants have caused an estimated 3.6 million excess deaths worldwide, according to The Economist.

In early March, the Omicron BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants quickly became dominant in South Africa, causing another wave of infections and deaths despite the fact that 98 percent of the population had antibodies from infections or vaccinations. Significantly, a higher percentage of children than elderly people were hospitalized during this surge.

The Omicron BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants are either dominant or becoming dominant in nearly every country that tracks variant prevalence, including throughout Europe, North America and Australia, as well as many countries in South America, Africa and Asia. This takes place under conditions where global vaccination rates have plateaued and antibodies have waned for the majority of the world’s population.

A recent study from the Sato Lab in Japan, one of the top virology labs in the world, found that BA.4 and BA.5 are more pathogenic than BA.1 and BA.2, and that vaccinations or previous infections with BA.1 or BA.2 provide very little protection against infection from BA.4 or BA.5. The implication is that most of the billions of people who were just infected with BA.1 or BA.2 are now susceptible to reinfection with BA.4 or BA.5 and that these reinfections will likely be more severe.

Figure 1: Virological features of BA.2.12.1 and BA.4 and BA.5 in vivo. (Source: Sato Lab)

Last month, BA.5 became dominant in Portugal and has caused a large wave of infections, hospitalizations and deaths nearing the level from BA.1 over the winter, despite the fact that Portugal has one of the highest vaccination rates in the world. Test positivity rates are now above 50 percent, indicating ongoing widespread transmission far above official figures.

One cannot predict precisely how many people will be infected or die from a given variant, but it is very likely that BA.4 and BA.5 will cause a substantial wave of infections and deaths throughout much of the world in the coming months. The general trend continues that more genetically diverse and dangerous variants are evolving, and the potential always exists that a new variant could evolve that retains the transmissibility and immune-escape capabilities of the Omicron subvariants while being far more pathogenic and lethal.

Long COVID and the pandemic as a “mass disabling event”

Beyond the horrific immediate impact of mass infections and deaths, the long-term health ramifications of the “endemic” strategy are nearly incalculable. The phenomenon of Long COVID was identified by patients over two years ago but has been almost entirely ignored by the corporate media and capitalist politicians. As with the science of the pandemic more broadly, there remains very little understanding in the general population of the profound societal risks posed by Long COVID.

Since 2020, Long COVID advocates have aptly characterized the pandemic as a “mass disabling event.” In recent months, research into Long COVID has expanded, firmly linking COVID-19 infection to increased risk of damage to nearly every organ in the body, as well as to risks of developing diabetes, several types of neurological disorders, several categories of cardiovascular disease and more.

Potential pathophysiological mechanisms implicated in the manifestation of acute and ‘long-COVID’ manifestations in the central nervous system (CNS) (Credit: study authors of "Neurological manifestations of long-COVID syndrome: a narrative review")

The risks for developing Long COVID are compounded with each reinfection and only slightly reduced by vaccination. Extrapolating on this in an interview with the World Socialist Web Site, scientist Arijit Chakravarty of Fractal Therapeutics noted, “If the whole world was vaccinated tomorrow, and we spent just three years ‘learning to live with COVID’ under the current strategy, we could well have over a billion people living with Long COVID.”

The initial societal impacts of this “mass disabling event” can be seen in a study from the Solve Long COVID Initiative, which estimates that through January 31, 2022, roughly 43 million adult Americans, or 13.4 percent of the adult population, were likely suffering from Long COVID. Of these, roughly 14 million were estimated to have debilitating Long COVID. They estimate that the total financial burden, including lost wages, lost savings and medical expenses, was roughly $511 billion. These estimates do not include Long COVID cases that have developed during the Omicron period.

The qualitative impacts of this scenario, including patients’ ability to function at work and enjoy leisure time, are unquantifiable. For more than two years, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other national health agencies have been fully aware of Long COVID and the enormous dangers it poses. Nevertheless, they have consciously chosen to pursue strategies of mass infection.

China’s Zero-COVID policy and the strategy of global elimination

The only country in the world which has maintained public health measures to prevent COVID-19 from running rampant is China, where a Zero-COVID policy has saved millions of lives since January 2020. Most recently, Chinese society defeated the Omicron BA.2 subvariant, which ripped through Shanghai and other parts of the country beginning in early March.

Graph showing the elimination of Omicron BA.2 outbreak in China (Credit: WSWS Media)

The key components of the Zero-COVID elimination strategy are the following:

1. Mass testing wherever outbreaks occur;
2. Rigorous contact tracing to identify all chains of transmission;
3. Safe isolation and treatment of all infected patients in medical facilities;
4. Quarantining of all people exposed to infected patients;
5. The temporary closure of all nonessential workplaces and switch to remote learning at all schools until the outbreak is contained;
6. The provision and mandating of masks in all public places;
7. Mass vaccination programs; and
8. Strict travel restrictions and border management to prevent the importing of new cases.

The fact that China suppressed the highly infectious Omicron BA.2 subvariant using these basic public health measures reaffirms in practice that elimination is both possible and necessary. If the above measures were implemented on a world scale, combined with the improvement of filtration and ventilation systems in all indoor spaces, SARS-CoV-2 could be eliminated globally in a matter of months.

Intranasal vaccines, which could potentially provide sterilizing immunity to fully prevent COVID-19 infection, could become another weapon in the arsenal of measures to stop the pandemic. Three of these vaccines are now in Phase 3 human trials. But if they are successful, they will be subordinated to the same profit interests that have prevented the global distribution of existing mRNA and other vaccines.

The elimination strategy must also be adopted to stamp out the unprecedented global outbreak of monkeypox, which has rapidly infected over 1,600 people in more than 40 countries throughout the world, as well as future pandemics. A major study published in April found that climate change will dramatically increase the potential for viruses that already exist among animal populations to spill over into human populations, as happened with SARS-CoV-2 and other viruses.

The fight to eliminate SARS-CoV-2 globally requires a massive social and political struggle of the international working class. Fundamentally, the fight against the pandemic and for public health is not simply a medical question but primarily a political, social and economic issue. Powerful financial interests are determined to block the implementation of paid lockdowns and all other measures necessary to stop viral transmission because this would impinge on their record profit-making.

Masses of workers throughout the world have been deeply impacted by the pandemic and a profound radicalization has taken place. In every country, workers are entering into struggle against the soaring cost of living and rising food prices, which were precipitated by the pandemic and exacerbated by the US-NATO war drive against Russia. In addition to the threat of infection, debilitation and death from COVID-19, hundreds of millions are now threatened with destitution and starvation on every continent, while the ever-present danger of nuclear holocaust looms over mankind.