European states commit to climate inaction as heat wave begins to recede

Samuel Tissot

The heat wave devastating southern and western Europe gradually began to recede yesterday, as violent storms brought cooler weather across parts of France and Britain. The heat wave continued in southern Europe, with temperatures close to 40°C across much of southern Spain and Italy, and wildfires are still burning across the region.

Already, the horrific impact of European heat waves caused by global warming is apparent. Health officials confirmed over 1,700 deaths in Spain and Portugal alone, as workers labor in sweltering heat and large numbers of the elderly live without air conditioning. While Spain has lost 15,000 hectares of forest to fire in the last week, Europe’s largest forest fires have been in France’s Gironde, where over 20,000 hectares of forest has been destroyed so far and 40,000 people evacuated.

While the worst of this heat wave may have passed, much of Europe remains in drought conditions. Cities and towns in Italy’s Po Valley region are rationing water. River levels are so low in Southern Germany that river-based transport has been suspended. With several weeks of summer to come, more extreme heat waves, continued drought and larger wildfires are highly likely.

Yet already, top officials across Western Europe are signaling that no substantial action will be taken to halt emissions that are fueling global warming, or build the necessary infrastructure to deal with growing droughts, rising ocean levels, and intensifying wildfires.

In Britain, the Tory government, which has cut 11,500 firefighters since 2010, did not even make a pretense of action in response to the heat wave. Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab blithely told Britons to “enjoy the heat” on Sunday. Yesterday, cabinet minister Kit Malthouse declared: “Britain may be unaccustomed to such high temperatures but the UK, along with our European neighbors, must learn to live with extreme events.”

These comments mimic European governments’ insistence that the population must “learn to live with COVID-19,” which has become a euphemism for mass death and infection without any measures to prevent contagion.

This came after London’s fire brigade experienced its busiest day since World War II on Tuesday, as fires spread around the British capital on the country’s hottest day on record. London mayor Sadiq Khan told Sky News: “It was the busiest day for the fire service in London since the second world war. They received more than 2,600 calls— more than a dozen simultaneous fires requiring 30 engines, a couple requiring 15, and some requiring 12.”

While other European governments’ statements were less provocatively worded, all of them laid out the same policy of inaction and indifference.

Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, who rules in coalition with the pseudo-left Podemos party, tried yesterday to adopt a pose of concern. He announced that over 500 Spaniards had died from the heat, though Spain’s Carlos III Institute had confirmed 678 heat-related deaths the day before. Sanchez concluded by asking “citizens to exercise extreme caution” and to recognize the blindingly obvious fact that “climate emergency is a reality.”

On Wednesday afternoon, French President Emmanuel Macron travelled to La Teste-de-Buch in Gironde to meet with firefighters who have been fighting to contain blazes in the region since July 12. He remarked, “We are at the beginning of the season… We know that it will take several weeks to completely stabilize the situation.'

Trying to put the best face on the situation and look forward to the future, Macron added: “There is the day after. After [the fire is extinguished] we will have to replant and rebuild … We are going to launch a major national project to replant this forest and prevent the risks of today and tomorrow.”

These vague remarks, void of any concrete proposals beyond replanting trees, signal that there will be no real change to his government’s approach to global warming and extreme weather. Indeed, in 2019 French fire-fighters threatened to go on strike against low staffing levels and poor equipment. Though France has among the larger fleets of water-dropping planes in Europe, it is too small, concentrated around the city of Nîmes, and arrived too late to prevent the blazes in Gironde from escalating beyond a size the planes could put out.

The decisive question in addressing climate change and its impact is the mobilization of the working class and youth in a political struggle, taking as its point of departure that fighting climate change requires fighting the capitalist system. It is apparent that Europe’s capitalist governments have no plans to make the vast investments in research and infrastructure that are necessary to protect the population from deaths in future heat waves and wildfires, or halt greenhouse gas emissions that are driving global warming.

Despite differences in presentation, Macron, Sanchez and the Tories follow the same fundamental policy toward global warming and resulting extreme weather events. While they hand out trillions of euros to the banks and corporations and pour hundreds of billions into NATO’s war against Russia in Ukraine, no resources are left to take meaningful action on climate change. It is impossible, as Europe descends into war, for capitalist governments to internationally coordinate such action. As a result, nothing is done.

This has had disastrous consequences. Since the pre-industrial era the world’s temperature has risen 1.1 degrees Celsius. The 2015 Paris Accords, hailed by world governments as the solution to global warming and its effects, seeks to limit this rise to 2 degrees Celsius. Even if one were to suppose that capitalist governments were to stay within this limit, the consequences of just half the target level are already proving to be deadly.

The last five years have already seen unprecedented wildfires in Australia, Portugal, Greece, Russia and the US, wiping whole towns off the map. In the last year, flash floods, another consequence of global warming, have killed thousands in Australia, India, Bangladesh, Germany, the US and Turkey.

Despite scores of deadly wildfire events throughout the Mediterranean in recent years, including 66 deaths in Portugal in 2017 and 90 deaths in Algeria last year, neither the EU nor national governments made any major changes to prepare for wildfires like the current ones.

In Greece, which experienced its worst wildfire season on record last year, evacuations are continuing on Mount Penteli just north-east of Athens. 80 kilometer per hour winds are driving a rapid expansion of the wildfire burning in that area. The localities of Drafi, Anthousa, Dioni and Dasamari have all been evacuated, including a hospital. Emergency firefighters have been called in from Romania to assist in the battle against the blaze.

Kremlin prepares for mass repression

Andrea Peters

Russian President Vladimir Putin signed legislation last Thursday that dramatically increases the repressive power of the state. The law allows the government to label virtually any organization or individual a “foreign agent” on the grounds that they receive support from, or are even just influenced by, outside forces deemed hostile to Moscow.

The law “On control over the activities of people under foreign influence,” which will take effect on December 1, states that any organization, whether constituted as a legal entity or not, as well as any person, whether a Russian citizen or not, may be considered a “foreign agent” if they receive financing, property, organizational-methodological support, scientific or technical advice or “other assistance” from any foreign state, foreign organization, foreign “structure,” foreign person, or “legal Russian entity or citizen” who are themselves viewed as being aided from the outside.

The “foreign agent” label applies when these people or entities are engaged in “political activity in Russia,” the “purposeful collection of information in the areas of military, military-technical activities of the Russian Federation” or “the dissemination of messages and materials to an unlimited audience.”

The extremely broad definitions mean that anyone and any organization which the Russian state decides to target can fall victim to the “foreign agent” law. Whether it be a young person who posts an article published by the Associated Press on her social media, a worker who issues a public call for a demonstration in solidarity with the oppressed people of Sri Lanka, or a teacher who speaks with students about the writings of German revolutionary Karl Marx, all can be accused. Were it not for the exceptions granted to religious organizations, political parties, employer and industry associations, chambers of commerce, the institutions of the Russian state, Russian state companies and the people under the direction of the latter two, Vladimir Putin himself might be a “foreign agent.”

“Foreign agents” must identify themselves as such to the state and label any public materials they release as those of a “foreign agent.” They cannot work at any level of federal, municipal or local government or invest in any “strategic enterprise.” They cannot work in the educational system, have any connection to anything having to do with the education of minors or be involved in the production of information for minors. They cannot organize public events, serve on election commissions or make donations to elections or political parties. They cannot receive any form of state financial support. They cannot be involved in the “procurement of goods, work and services” to meet state and municipal needs—in other words, they are cut out of all government contracts. They cannot be involved with infrastructure tied to information systems and security. They cannot participate in state environmental reviews.

Russian workers—teachers, doctors, civil servants, postal employees, garbage collectors, municipal workers and on and on—will find themselves immediately out of work and worse, if they are deemed “foreign agents.” Violations of the law can result in administrative or criminal charges or “other liability,” which will be imposed “in accordance with the established procedure,” says the website of the State Duma, Russia’s parliament. What fate awaits people is unclear.

The Ministry of Justice, whose head is appointed by the Russian president, will maintain and publish a list of “foreign agents” and “individuals affiliated with them”—in short, the list will metastasize. It will become a blacklist.

Removal of the “foreign agent” designation is only possible at the whim of the state. For non-profit organizations to be relieved of the label, they must prove they are no longer receiving money from foreign sources, halt all political activity or both. There is no clear definition for either of these requirements. For individuals to get off, they must fill out on an application and “attach documents confirming the termination of the circumstances that served as the basis for inclusion in the register.”  In short, they must denounce themselves or provide proof that they have stopped doing something that they were never doing in the first place.

In a country in which millions were rounded up, imprisoned, and killed during the Stalinist Great Terror, this law has vast and sinister implications. During the 1930s, the charge of “counter-revolutionary Trotskyist activity,” a death sentence for tens of thousands, was connected to accusations of treasonous collaboration with foreign states. The violent and reactionary nationalism of the Soviet bureaucracy is finding modern expression in today’s oligarchy, which emerged out of the Stalinist destruction of the Soviet Union and the restoration of capitalism.

The current “foreign agents” law was preceded in March by legislation outlawing anti-war demonstrations and statements, with nearly 200 people, according to official records, now having been charged with various offenses such as the spreading of “false facts” about the war or negative comments about the Russian military. Penalties include fines and prison time, with the most severe punishments resulting in many years behind bars. An artist in Yekaterinburg was sentenced on Tuesday to two weeks confinement in a psychiatric ward for posting anti-war stickers around the city. Numerous media outlets have been shut down and access to Twitter, Facebook and other global social media platforms ended.

The parliament is preparing a new labor code that will give the state the power to “establish the legal conditions of labor relations in individual organizations,” including determining “the conditions of employment at work outside of established hours, at night, on weekends and holidays, and the provision of paid annual leave.” In short, the Russian working class is meant to labor at the order of the state under the terms that it establishes. Those who dare to strike will be confronted with the full repressive powers of the state.

Sri Lankan parliament elects rightwing, pro-US Ranil Wickremesinghe as president

Saman Gunadasa

Yesterday, the Sri Lankan parliament installed Ranil Wickremesinghe as the country’s president by a vote of 134 out of the 223 cast by parliamentarians. The other candidates, Dallas Alahapperuma, an MP from the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP), and Anura Kumara Dissanayake, the leader of Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), received 82 and 3 votes respectively.

Ranil Wickremesinghe [Source: United National Party Facebook]

Wickremesinghe assumes the executive presidency with its sweeping powers amid an unprecedented economic, political and social crisis. He will serve out the remaining two years of the term of Gotabhaya Rajapakse, who fled the country and then resigned following massive anti-government protests on July 9.

It is a ruling class under siege. Working people not only had no say in selecting the president but were completely excluded. The vote was held behind closed doors in parliament that had been turned into a fortress surrounded by heavily armed soldiers, police and barricades.

Wickremesinghe has no popular base and is widely despised among the masses. He is the only parliamentary representative of the rump United National Party (UNP) that was all but obliterated in the 2020 election. Nevertheless, he was installed as prime minister in May when Mahinda Rajapakse was forced to step down, as acting president when Gotabhaya Rajapakse fled, and now president. Already protests and protest sites in Colombo and regional cities are demanding he resign.

Wickremesinghe has been selected to ruthlessly impose the austerity dictates of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and to strangle the popular uprising that has erupted over the past three months. He made his pitch for the presidency, not to the mass of working people with promises to alleviate their suffering, but to the Sri Lankan ruling class, international finance capital and US imperialism as the candidate able to reestablish capitalist “order.”  

Wickremesinghe’s first acts as acting president were to declare a state of emergency, impose a curfew and give a free hand to the military and police to suppress protesters, who he denounced as “fascists.” After being installed as president yesterday, he, in effect, declared war on the popular uprising, saying: “If you try to topple the Government, occupy the President’s office and the Prime Minister’s office, that is not democracy, it is against the law.” To underscore the message, he then went to personally thank the police and military personnel guarding the parliament building.

Wickremesinghe also made a plea to all the establishment parties to close ranks around him against the working class and rural masses. “Sri Lanka is in a very difficult situation… There are big challenges ahead,” he declared, making a special appeal to Sajith Premadasa, leader of the opposition Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB), and former presidents Mahinda Rajapakse and Maithripala Sirisena to work together with him. The opposition parties have been pressing for the formation of an all-party interim government to provide a threadbare charade of “democracy” while the bourgeoisie prepares a ruthless crackdown.

Premadasa, who had backed Alahapperuma for the presidency, immediately indicated his willingness to work together, saying “the opposition will give our utmost support… to put the economy on track and save this country.” Alahapperuma added his voice, cynically declaring: “My effort was to support consensus-based policy-making to provide solutions to a deeply suffering population.”

The entire anti-democratic parliamentary cabal is committed to implementing IMF austerity and police-state repression against the masses. Wickremesinghe was selected for the presidency because of his decades-long political record as an IMF enforcer, a stooge of US imperialism and his support for bloody state violence against workers and the rural poor.

Wickremesinghe was first elected to the parliament in 1977. As the nephew of the right-wing President J.R. Jayawardene, he was quickly handed the portfolios of youth affairs and employment in the UNP government as it rewrote the constitution to establish an executive president with extensive autocratic powers and implemented sweeping open market restructuring that devastated the living conditions of working people.

When mass opposition erupted, he was part of the Jayawardene cabinet that sacked over 100,000 striking public sector workers in 1980. As the education minister he brought down the notorious White Paper on Education in 1981, which was the blueprint for slashing the government spending on public education.

To drive a wedge into the continuing opposition to the impact of its pro-market policies, the UNP resorted to foul anti-Tamil propaganda and provocations that culminated in the savage anti-Tamil pogroms in July 1983. Hundreds were killed by UNP-organised thugs, businesses and homes were burnt to the ground and forced tens of thousands of Tamils to flee. The pogrom marked the start of the reactionary communal war prosecuted by the UNP and subsequent Colombo governments against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam that cost hundreds of thousands of lives and laid waste to large areas of the island.

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, the UNP government under President Ranasinghe Premadasa, the father of the current opposition leader, unleashed a wave of unrestrained violence directed at crushing rising discontent among unemployed rural youth in the south of the island. The armed forces and their associated death squads indiscriminately killed at least 60,000 youth.

At the time, Wickremesinghe, who now postures as the defender of democracy and rule of law, was publicly accused of overseeing the torture and murder of youth in the infamous Batalanda torture chambers. It is precisely because he has been so closely associated in carrying out the dirty work for the ruling class that he has been chosen to defend capitalist rule through every means including another bloody crackdown.

Like J.R. Jayawardene, Wickremesinghe is also a long-time lackey of US imperialism. He played a key role in the regime-change operation orchestrated by the US in 2015, to oust Mahinda Rajapakse as president and install Maithripala Sirisena. Washington was hostile to Mahinda Rajapakse, not because of his responsibility for the war crimes carried out by the military in crushing the LTTE by 2009, but because of his close ties to Beijing. As prime minister under Sirisena, Wickremesinghe was instrumental in dramatically realigning foreign policy towards the US and integrating Sri Lanka into US war planning against China.

Wickremesinghe is already broadly despised and hated. Whatever the exact composition of the government he installs, its agenda is clear: to defend the interests of the wealthy corporate elite and international financiers at the expense of the working class and rural masses. The ruling class has no money to offer any concessions of any substance. The next government will only heap more hardship and suffering on top of the chronic shortages and skyrocketing prices of essentials that have already created widespread misery.

European Central Bank to make crucial interest rate decision

Nick Beams

The eyes of the financial world today are firmly fixed on Europe as the European Central Bank meets to decide how much to lift its base interest rate.

At the same time, there have been concerns over whether Russia would fully restore gas supplies to Germany, the euro zone’s largest economy following the closure of the Nord Stream 1 gas pipeline for maintenance. At this point it seems likely the gas flow will resume but there are no guarantees for the future.

Christine Lagarde, President of the European Central Bank [Credit: Bernd Hartung/European Central Bank]

ECB president Christine Lagarde has said the central bank will lift its base interest rate by 0.25 percentage points (25 basis points) in a gradual move back to the “normalisation” of monetary policy following years of negative rates.

The ECB then pumped hundreds of billions of euros into the financial system.

The crisis was sparked by so-called fragmentation as the interest rates on the government bonds in the more indebted southern countries diverged from those issued by the stronger economies in the north, threatening the stability of banks and the governments that stood behind them.

Fragmentation is again a threat, and the ECB is set to announce a new scheme to buy bonds which it dubs a transmission protection mechanism at today’s meeting. The central bank is grappling with a situation that goes well beyond the problems it faced a decade ago, due to the escalation of inflation, which now hit 8.6 percent across the euro zone.

But this overall figure hides the worsening inflationary situation in a number of countries in the 19-member bloc.

In nine of the member countries inflation has already hit double digit levels and in the Baltic countries it is almost 20 percent. The inflation situation has been worsened by the fall of the euro against the dollar—at one stage last week it went below parity – which is pushing up the price of imports.

Worsening inflation numbers have prompted calls that the interest rate hike must be 50 basis points and that the 25-basis point rise foreshadowed by the ECB at the last meeting of its governing council, with the possibility of a further increase in September depending on inflation numbers, is too slow and too late.

A “more hawkish” member was cited anonymously by the Financial Times (FT) as saying: “It is like antibiotics, it doesn’t help if you take them in September if you are ill now. Interest rates are our medicine and the timing and size of the dosage are of utmost importance.”

The so-called “fragmentation” problem is an expression of the fundamental contradiction that lies at the very centre of the euro zone—that is, the integrated character of production and finance across the continent, and the division of Europe into nation states.

The ECB sets financial conditions across the euro zone but each of the 19-members has its own government and fiscal policy.

On top of this there is growing political instability. The government of Italian president Mario Draghi basically collapsed earlier this month when the Five Star Movement, anxious to hold on to its electoral standing, withdrew its support saying not enough was being done to offer protection for the population against rising inflation.

If a new government cannot be cobbled together, and if elections are called, this will raise concerns in financial markets about the capacity of Italy to finance its government debt, now running at more than 150 percent of gross domestic product (GDP).

There is also political instability in France following the failure of President Macron to win a parliamentary majority at the elections last month.

And hanging over the ECB decision is the uncertainty over gas supplies that could be cut or significantly reduced at some point in retaliation for the sanctions imposed by the European powers as part of the NATO proxy war in the Ukraine.

In remarks to the FT, Petr Cingr, the chief executive of Germany’s largest ammonia producing company, and a key supplier of fertilisers and exhaust fluids for diesel engines, warned of the devastating consequences of the ending of Russian gas supplies.

“We have to stop [production] immediately,” he said, “from 100 to zero.”

If gas cannot be stored for the winter months, Germany will experience a major economic contraction.

According to UBS analysts, no gas for the winter will result in a “deep recession” with GDP contracting 6 percent by the end of next year. Problems are already appearing. German economic growth has always been export dependent but the latest data have revealed that its balance of trade has turned negative.

It has been estimated that the rising price of food and energy will deliver a negative blow of €400 billion to the euro zone’s balance of trade this year.

Germany’s Bundesbank has warned that the effects on global supply chains of any Russian cut-off would “increase the original shock effect” by two and a half times.

ThyssenKrupp, Germany’s largest steelmaker, has said that without natural gas to run its furnaces “shutdowns and technical damage to our facilities cannot be ruled out.”

Other major companies, including BASF the world’s largest chemical company, have warned of similar effects.

Continuity of supply is not the only issue. The question of price also looms large. Natural gas prices have increased eight-fold in the past 18 months rising from €20 per megawatt hour to €160, with the price doubling over the past month. Many companies have said they cannot operate with prices at this level.

The deputy head of the Brussels-based Bruegel economic think tank, Maria Demertzis, told the FT, there was an “almost impossible situation.”

“The risk ahead of us is that because of the energy crisis, the euro area could end up in recession, while at the same time the ECB will have to keep raising rates if inflation does not come down.”

Albert Ludwigs, an economics professor at the University of Freiburg and an adviser to the German finance minister, has said policymakers face a “nightmare scenario.”

“It is more difficult than in the 2012 debt crisis, when we have a clear choice between monetary policy or fiscal policy solutions, but now both are much less clear.”

US plans to send NATO-made jets to Ukraine to fight against Russia

Andre Damon

In a massive expansion of US involvement in the imperialist proxy war in Ukraine, the Pentagon is actively preparing to send new, modern military aircraft made in NATO countries to fight against Russian forces in Ukraine, the Washington Post reported Wednesday.

Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force, told the newspaper that “discussions are ongoing” to send the fighters to Ukraine. Speaking at the Aspen Security Conference, Brown was asked, “[i]s it possible the U.S could sell or provide Ukraine more U.S fighter platforms?”

To this, Brown replied, “[i]t'll be something non-Russian, I could probably tell you that.”

By “non-Russian,” Brown was referring to an earlier proposal by Poland to send Soviet-made MiG fighters to Ukraine which was rejected by the Biden administration on the grounds that it was too likely to escalate the war.

At the time, Biden declared that the move could start “World War III,” saying, “The idea that we’re going to send in offensive equipment and have planes and tanks and trains going in with American pilots and American crews — just understand, don’t kid yourself, no matter what y’all say, that’s called World War III.”

Brown’s proposal is, however, a far more provocative move than the earlier plan to send aging and semi-obsolete Soviet aircraft.

His comments came the same day that the Pentagon announced that it would send four more HIMARS long-range missile systems to Ukraine, bringing the total deployed in the country to 16.

“(We) will keep finding innovative ways to sustain our long-term support for the brave men and women of the Ukrainian armed forces, and we will tailor our assistance to ensure that Ukraine has the technology, the ammunition and the sheer firepower to defend itself,” US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Wednesday.

“Ukrainian forces are now using long-range rocket systems to great effect, including HIMARS provided by the United States and other systems from our allies and partners,” Austin said, adding, “[t]he international community has also worked hard to provide Ukraine with better coastal defense capabilities.”

Ukrainian and US officials are more and more openly discussing the details of a plan to amass an enormous stockpile of high-end US weapons systems, allowing Kiev to stage a major counteroffensive in the fall with the aim of sinking the Russian fleet and “retaking” the Crimean Peninsula in the Black Sea, which Russia annexed in the wake of the 2014 coup in Kiev.

During a visit to the UK, Ukraine’s Deputy Defense Minister Volodymyr Havrylov pledged to use US-supplied heavy weapons to mount an offensive against Crimea. “We are receiving anti-ship capabilities, and sooner or later we will target the fleet. It is inevitable because we have to guarantee the security of our people,” he said. “Russia will have to leave Crimea if they wish to exist as a country,”  Havrylov insisted.

On Saturday, Ukrainian military intelligence official Vadym Skibitsky said that Ukraine would use HIMARS missile systems to attack targets in Crimea, which he said “had to be destroyed for the safety of our citizens, our facilities and our Ukraine.”

The increasingly open talk of a Ukrainian offensive to retake Crimea has prompted extremely sharp warnings from Russian officials.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that Washington was seeking to provoke a “real war” with Russia, stating, “Our American counterparts … really want to turn this war into a real war and start a confrontation between Russia and European states.”

He warned, “[Ukraine is] not just [being] pumped with weapons. They are forced to use these weapons in an increasingly risky way.”

On Sunday, the former Russian president and deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council Dmitry Medvedev said that an attack on Crimea would pose a “systemic threat to Russia,” prompting a “Judgment Day” response from Russia.

In the event of a Ukrainian effort to retake Crimea, “Judgment Day will come very fast and hard,” Medvedev said.

Geopolitical commentators have warned that Russia views the defense of Crimea as a vital state interest and would use nuclear weapons to protect the territory.

Inviting US arms manufacturers to take part in this joint effort by the United States and the Kiev regime, Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov openly declared Wednesday that the country should be viewed as a “testing ground” for US defense contractors.

“We are inviting arms manufacturers to test new products here,” he said.

The enormously dangerous escalation of the war comes as the energy crisis triggered by the conflict is having increasingly devastating consequences for the population of Europe and the whole world. “We have to prepare for a potential full disruption of Russian gas,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said Wednesday, calling this “a likely scenario.”

On Wednesday, the US rolled out a plan for its member states to begin rationing energy supplies, in preparation for a full shutoff of gas supplies over the winter. That same day, the IMF warned that a total shutdown of Russian gas supplies could shrink the economies of some EU member states by 6 percent and send them into recession.

The revelation that the US plans to send NATO-made aircraft to Ukraine comes just two weeks after New York City’s Office of Emergency Management (OEM) released a 90-second public service announcement (PSA), giving instructions to city residents on what to do in the event of a nuclear attack on America’s largest city.

The video begins with the narration, “So there has been a nuclear attack. Don’t ask me how or why, just know that the big one has hit.”

The extraordinary recklessness with which the United States is escalating its war with Russia raises the very real danger of just such a disastrous outcome.

Right-wing ruling party wins Japanese upper house election

Ben McGrath

Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) secured a large victory in the July 10 election for the upper house of the National Diet, the country’s parliament. The LDP, together with its allies and like-minded right-wing parties, now has the two-thirds majority in each house required to push through pro-war and anti-democratic changes to the constitution.

Fumio Kishida in October 2017. (Photo: Wikimedia commons)

Of the 248 seats in the upper house, the House of Councillors, 125 were up for election. These lawmakers serve six-year terms and half face election every three years. The LDP took 63 seats, while its coalition partner Komeito took 13.

Other right-wing parties supporting constitutional revision, include the Japan Innovation Party (Nippon Ishin no Kai), which won 12 seats, and the Democratic Party for the People (DPP) which won 5. Including so-called independents, the pro-revision bloc took 95 seats, bringing its total to 179.

The main opposition party, the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan (CDP), won only 17 seats while the Japanese Communist Party (JCP) took 4, bringing their totals in the upper house to 39 and 11 respectively. Other minor parties won seats in the single digits.

Prime Minister Fumio Kishida made clear that his government would move quickly to revise the constitution, saying, “I would like to push forward efforts that would lead to the proposal [of a revision] as soon as possible.” Any revisions also have to pass with a majority in a national referendum.

The proposed amendments include, above all, altering Article 9, which formally bars Japan from fielding a military or sending it overseas and remains a barrier to Japanese imperialism’s full remilitarization. One proposal includes adding a paragraph that would explicitly recognize the legality of the Self-Defense Force (SDF)—Japan’s military. More extensive revisions are also under discussion, including the complete abolition of this so-called pacifist clause.

Another proposed change is to add a state-of-emergency clause that could be used to silence political dissent, including by banning political meetings or demonstrations. All four parties in the pro-revision bloc agree on allowing Diet members to extend their terms in office during a declared emergency—a step towards dispensing with parliamentary democracy and establishing autocratic rule.

A third proposal would alter Article 96, which deals with how the constitution is amended, requiring only a simple majority in both parliamentary houses to revise the constitution and opening the door for additional changes in the future.

Contrary to claims in the establishment media, the election does not represent widespread support for the LDP and its agenda. The turnout barely passed half of eligible voters, reaching 52.05 percent, indicating broad dissatisfaction with the entire political establishment.

The election also took place two days after the assassination of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who was closely associated with the campaign for constitutional revision. As additional information emerges, it appears that Tetsuya Yamagami, the accused shooter, was motivated by Abe’s connections with the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, also known as the Unification Church, a cult begun in South Korea in 1954.

Yamagami was apparently angered by a 100-million-yen ($US725,000) donation his mother had given to the cult’s Japan branch, and had initially sought to shoot one of its leaders. Believing Abe to be involved with the group, Yamagami supposedly decided to target the former prime minister instead. According to Unification Church officials, Abe had sent a video message to a related group in September 2021, with Yamagami supposedly stating he saw the video this past spring.

Whatever Yamagami’s motivation, the LDP traded on public sympathy and will exploit the assassination to further its pro-war aims. Kishida and the LDP have backed the US/NATO-proxy war against Russia in Ukraine to justify constitutional change. The government has also used anti-Russia and anti-China propaganda to promote plans to double military spending to 2 percent of GDP. This would make Japan the world’s third-largest military spender.

In pursuing this agenda, it is the working class that will be forced to pay for it through increased attacks on job and social conditions. Inflation has grown by 2.5 percent, and while low compared to other countries, it has led to a 1.8 percent loss in real wages, compounding the impact of more than two decades of almost no wage growth.

At the same time, big business in Japan is enjoying record profits. In May, SMBC Nikko Securities reported that 1,323 major companies listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange had taken in 33.5 trillion yen ($US243 billion) in net profits for the 2021 fiscal year, surpassing the 30-trillion-yen ($US218 billion) record posted in 2018. Toyota Motor Corporation, for example, had an operating profit of 3 trillion yen ($US21.75 billion), an increase of 610 billion yen ($US4.4 billion) over the previous year. Profits for major companies are expected to continue growing this year.

This makes clear the reality of Kishida’s so-called “new capitalism,” which was touted as a plan to raise wages for workers. Instead, the government’s economic plan is a continuation of “Abenomics,” in which, low interest, monetary easing policies are kept in place while the workforce continues to be casualized, with approximately 40 percent of workers now considered to be in irregular employment.

The LDP’s ability to continue in office is a result of the political bankruptcy of the opposition parties, led by the CDP, which are widely distrusted by workers and youth. While the so-called “liberal” opposition postures as opponents of constitutional revision and war preparations, the reality is they have all embraced the remilitarization drive and the attacks on working conditions.

Hiroshi Yoshida, who leads the Research Center for Aged Economy and Society at Tohoku University, told Bloomberg that older voters especially were wary that the opposition parties could cut pensions to pay for election promises like reducing the sales tax. “Older people think it could be worse if others take over,” he stated.

During the election the attempts by the Stalinist JCP to direct widespread anti-LDP opposition behind the pro-capitalist Democrats failed, as they have in the past. Rather than work towards building a working-class movement, Chairman Kazuo Shii, demonstrating the JCP’s commitment to capitalism, begged the other opposition parties to unite, saying, “The only way to change Japan’s politics is [for the opposition] to fight together. I want to move forward on this decisively.”

Philippines government declares COVID-19 is “here to stay”

Dante Pastrana

COVID-19 infections are increasing again in the Philippines, six months after a massive January surge that peaked at 34,832 daily cases and left in its wake 3,145 dead.

From June 27 to July 3, the weekly officially reported infections totaled 7,398, a 60 percent jump from the previous week, and a sharp rise from three weeks earlier, when 1,675 cases were recorded.

The sign reads “It’s too much, we’re tired! We need mass hiring!” [Screen Capture from Alliance of Health Workers Facebook page]

From July 11 to 17, the country recorded 14,640 additional COVID-19 infections, or an average of 2,091 cases a day. The infections rose by 44 percent over the last seven days. Active cases now number 20,511. The total official death toll since 2020 stands at 60,641.

This is a vast undercount. According to a World Health Organisation report, excess deaths in the Philippines associated with COVID-19 from January 2020 to December 2021 were estimated to be as high as 208,000.

The test positivity rate nationwide is at 9.6 percent. According to a BusinessMirror report, a sustained case uptrend was observed in 91 percent of provinces and cities. In Metro Manila, the positivity rate was at 10.4 percent. Cavite province was at 16.2 percent, Capiz province at 17.8 percent and Antique province was at the highest, 18.9 percent.

Meanwhile, hospitals reported 16.13 percent of all COVID-19 dedicated ICU beds were already occupied and 228 COVID-19 ventilators were in used.

As with every other government internationally with the exception of China, the newly-elected government of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. is making no pretence of combating the pandemic, much less eradicating the virus. Marcos Jr. has not even appointed the health department secretary, who nominally leads the pandemic response.

Former President Rodrigo Duterte had already abandoned most of the public health measures, meagre and underfunded as they were. Mobility restrictions within and into the country were lifted, resulting in domestic and foreign tourism skyrocketing. According to the Philippine Tourism Satellite Accounts report, “domestic tourism tallied 37,279,282 trips in 2021” and foreign tourists totalled 163,879 that year.

All businesses are now in full operation. Last month, the biweekly testing mandated for unvaccinated workers were scrapped for businesses in areas under Alert Level 1, which is virtually most of the country.

Six million students out of an estimated 27 million were herded back to school for 2021–2022. According to the education department, over 73 percent of public schools were opened. Vice President Sara Duterte, who has been appointed concurrent education secretary, announced she aimed to have full resumption of face-to-face classes in public schools by August.

Even the mask mandate, despite continued popular support, is being rolled back. The governor of Cebu Island, an ally of Marcos Jr, with a population of 3.3 million, declared masking as optional.

What remains of the government’s response is mostly a vaccination program that has stalled, with just over 70 percent of the population vaccinated and barely 13 percent having had their first booster shot.

There has been a campaign to shift the responsibility of dealing with the public health calamity to individuals. This has been sold on the basis that the Omicron variant’s high transmissibility and supposed mildness means that eradication is both impossible and unnecessary, and therefore the virus is to be treated as endemic so that people must learn to live with it.

The virus is “here to stay,” Health Undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire declared last month in a press briefing. “We’re already teaching our countrymen that we should live with this virus, they must protect themselves by receiving our vaccines and also doing and complying with our safety protocols like wearing face masks.”

However, cases are on the rise again due to mobility patterns, low vaccine uptake, especially for booster shots, and minimal public health standards. Vergeire insisted that as “long as it’s mild and moderate only and asymptomatic, we can survive this. What’s important now is to manage and maintain our hospitals, that the cases admitted won’t increase and we maintain low severe and critical cases.”

In a previous public briefing in June, Vergeire said daily infections could rise to as much as 4,600 by mid-July, citing projections by Australian Tuberculosis Modeling Network. The projections were based on assumptions that included increased mobility, reduced adherence to public health standards, and low uptake of boosters.

These are the very conditions that the ruling elite’s profit-first policy are creating.

With the health department remaining headless, the business elites are moving swiftly to essentially privatise the handling of the ongoing pandemic and thereby head off any re-imposition of mobility restrictions and other public health measures that could impinge on the production of profits.

Last month, Joey Concepcion, multimillionaire businessman and presidential adviser to Duterte, convened an Advisory Council of Experts, composed of medical advocates of vaccine-only and “herd immunity” strategies and economists with close links to international finance, to map out a transition to a “better normal, one that encourages economic activity and does not risk the public’s health.” More bluntly, this is a “normal” of repeated infections, mass debilitation and possibly death for millions of working people.

Concepcion stated: “The most important thing for our business leaders right now is to not lock down. We cannot lock down anymore as rising prices are a big issue for all manufacturers. We don’t want consumers to slow down their spending. This is not good for the economy.”

Concepcion has been spouting medical advice without the benefit of a medical degree. In 2020 as the pandemic surged, he suggested that the poor were naturally immune from the COVID-19 virus as they had long been exposed to viruses and germs because of living in poverty.

Last month, he claimed that Omicron was a blessing because it gave “natural immunity to our people.”

The council’s task, while dressed up in concern with public health, unsurprisingly, is a further doubling down on ending the “pandemic mindset”—the understandable public concern over a scientifically proven fact of an ongoing and uncontrolled pandemic.

A key step is ending the state of the public health emergency declared by Duterte in 2020. It is set to expire in September, unless prolonged by Marcos Jr. That would remove the legal basis of any government measures against the pandemic. It would mean dismantling the anti-pandemic task force, rolling back regulations against the pandemic and ending the government’s power to impose lockdowns and quarantines.

Critically, it would also end free vaccinations and the limited testing funded by local governments, available to those with symptoms or close contacts of COVID-19 victims.

The end of testing alone would be a massive blow to the ability of most workers to shoulder any responsibility for their own health amidst a raging pandemic. RT-PCR testing costs a minimum of PHP2,500, equivalent to a week’s pay for a daily wage worker. The cheaper but less effective alternative, the rapid tests, cost as much PHP900, nearly twice the minimum daily wage of a worker in Metro Manila.

The class interests being advanced by Concepcion and his cohorts are clear. According to Forbes, the wealth of Philippine tycoons surged by 30 percent in 2021. The heirs of the late SM Group founder Henry T. Sy Sr., with a $US16.6 billion fortune, gained a further $2.7 billion. Real estate tycoon and former Senate president Manuel B. Villar Jr. increased his worth by $1.7 billion to $6.7 billion.

Overall, the collective wealth of the 50 richest families and individuals in the Philippines surged by 30 percent to $79 billion, even as millions of workers lost their jobs and income, and many thousands got sick or died.

Australia’s COVID hospitalisations at record levels as Labor government rejects safety measures

Oscar Grenfell

It is now undeniable that the COVID pandemic is the worst it has ever been in Australia. Yet all of the country’s governments, led by the federal Labor administration, are rejecting even minimal safety measures, effectively consigning tens of thousands to serious illness and hundreds upon hundreds to death.

A man receives a COVID-19 test in the eastern suburbs of Sydney last September [Credit: AP Photo/Mark Baker]

The response takes to a new level the criminal reopening drive of last December, when the entire political establishment abandoned successful suppression measures and let the virus rip. Then, they peddled misinformation that Omicron was “mild” and that greater levels of infection would result in “herd immunity.”

Now those lies are in tatters. The new BA.5 variant results in rapid reinfections, provides no lasting immunity and is claiming lives more rapidly than the deadly Delta strain did in Australia. All that remains is the policy of mass illness and death, a pandemic in perpetuity and the naked subordination of public health to a corporate elite which rejects any measures that would impact on profits.

National hospitalisations on Tuesday reached 5,360, just 30 short of the record of 5,390 reached on January 25. They declined slightly yesterday, but will likely exceed the previous peak sometime this week. The number of COVID patients has increased by more than 2,000 in the first few weeks of July, and have doubled since the beginning of June when there were 2,570 receiving hospital treatment for a coronavirus infection.

Roughly half of the states and territories are at record COVID admissions, while the other half will exceed their previous peaks during the current surge.

Deaths are also increasing markedly. The past three days, including Friday, fatalities have stood at 89, 85 and 75. Over the past seven days, there have been 450 deaths, or an average of more than 64 every single day. That compares with average daily deaths of just over 40 throughout June.

Globally, Australia has gone from having one of the lowest per capita death tolls in the first two years of the pandemic, to now consistently being near the top of the seven-day rolling average of COVID fatalities per million people. Currently, Australia is sixth by that measure. The only advanced capitalist countries experiencing greater per capita losses are New Zealand and Taiwan.

The weekly fatalities are now well over double the death toll from the 2002 Bali bombings, the worst terrorist attack involving Australian citizens in modern history. Daily average fatalities are almost twice the number of those killed in the horrific Port Arthur massacre of 1996, when a crazed gunman opened fire on a crowd of defenseless civilians.

Those events, and others like them, were treated as major turning points in society. Now, however, far higher levels of death from the pandemic are minimised and downplayed, or simply ignored.

One needs to search aggregator websites, such as covidlive.com.au, to have any sense of the scale of death underway. Most days, the fatalities are not mentioned by the official politicians or even reported in the press. If they are, they are consigned to a line or two, with no sense of tragedy or loss.

There is a strong element of social eugenics in this response, dovetailing with previous complaints in ruling circles over the “aging population” and the costs associated with it. Almost 100 people are dying a week in aged-care homes according to official data, while there are some 700 active outbreaks in facilities across the country. Both are nearing record levels.

It is not only the elderly, however, who are becoming grievously ill. In comments to the Age this morning, Dr Marion Kainer, infectious diseases head at Melbourne’s Western Health, said that more people in their 30s, 40s and 50s were presenting to emergency departments with acute symptoms.

“What we are noticing is that they are sicker on the wards this time around and they are staying longer than they were during the last Omicron wave,” Kainer said. Like other medical professionals, she noted that some BA.5 symptomology resembled that of Delta, rather than earlier Omicron variants. The new strain, in addition to being the most infectious yet, appears to affect the lungs more severely than earlier iterations of Omicron, which primarily hit the upper bronchial tract.

The virus is spreading unchecked throughout hospitals, with well over 10,000 workers in the sector off sick at any one time. At some major Melbourne hospitals, a third of midwives are off sick or isolating, while growing numbers of pregnant women are contracting the virus, according to the Age.

The hospitalisations and deaths indicate that as in December–January, the virus is virtually everywhere. Official national case numbers exceeded 50,000 on Tuesday for the first time since May 19.

Government and health spokespeople have acknowledged that real infections are at least double the recorded data or more. Given the dismantling of the testing system and the absence of any, even nominal contact tracing, even that is likely a substantial underestimate. It is entirely possible that real infections are near or at the peak of 150,000 per day reached in December.

The response of government leaders to the unfolding disaster recalls a criminal who cuts a hose during a blazing inferno. Labor and Liberal-National alike, state and federal, none of them have announced a single measure aimed at cutting down transmission. Over the past two months, moreover, they have withdrawn the limited restrictions that were in place during the December–January wave, including virtually all indoor mask mandates.

A press conference on Tuesday by federal Labor Health Minister Mark Butler and the country’s Chief Medical Officer Paul Kelly summed up the official criminality. They declared that “millions” more Australians would be infected over the coming weeks. Even though hospitalisations are already at record levels, a peak in the outbreak would not be reached for four weeks, or maybe more.

Kelly stated: “In every state and territory, the number of cases according to those predictions are continuing to rise. So, we’re at the start of this wave, not the end. We know that that is associated with hospitalisations, and that what happens in the future really, very much depends on what we do today.”

And so what were the esteemed health bureaucrat and Labor minister proposing to do? Butler and Kelly “strongly recommended” masks, but dismissed out of hand suggestions of any reintroduced mandates. Corporate chiefs have laid down the law, declaring that widespread mask-wearing is unacceptable, because it is a reminder of the ongoing pandemic and could result in decreased economic activity, such as less retail shopping.

The schools would remain fully open, despite being key vectors of the virus, not a cent would be spent on bolstering the hospital systems. The essential elimination measures, such as lockdowns and the closure of non-essential businesses, were not mentioned by either. Nor were they brought up by representatives of a press corp that has uncritically cheered on the policy of mass infection.

That Kelly continues to dispense his pompous evasions as chief medical officer, rather than before a disciplinary board, is itself extraordinary. When the global Omicron wave began in December, he described the new variant as a “Christmas present” and publicly urged governments to allow its spread. As a consequence more than eight million people have been infected and almost 9,000 have lost their lives.

Labor’s retention of Kelly sums up the complete bipartisanship of the criminal pandemic response. Butler and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese are responding to the present crisis exactly as conservative Prime Minister Scott Morrison would have.

Dr David Berger (Image: Supplied)

Meanwhile, Dr David Berger is currently under disciplinary sanction from the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA). His offence has been to warn of the dangers of COVID, stridently condemn the “let it rip” policies and advocate the scientifically-grounded elimination measures that can end the pandemic.

AHPRA has declared that this principled service to the population risks undermining public health messaging.