Berlin Senate imposes education cuts and encourages the contamination of the city schools

Carola Kleinert & Markus Salzmann

Having already drastically slashed financing for the capital’s schools and left pupils completely exposed to the coronavirus, the Berlin Senate, a coalition of the Social Democratic Party, the Left Party and the Greens, is now planning further cuts in the education sector. The latest austerity measures reveal the contempt on the part of the “red-red-green” Senate for the fate of children and young people.

Vitally needed school expansion and renovation measures already planned for implementation by 2026 are to be postponed by up to five years in order to achieve the savings target set by the Senate. In effect, this means further cuts that will worsen the already catastrophic conditions in Berlin’s schools.

Over this period some districts will have to accept cuts of several hundred million euros. This means that not only will urgently needed additional school places not be available, but the failure to renovate dilapidated buildings will result in the loss of existing places. Many children are already unable to attend their local primary schools due to building deficiencies and lack of renovation. Long distances to school, overcrowded classrooms, alternative lessons in small consultation rooms or fabricated containers are a sad fact of life for more and more pupils and teachers.

Children returning to school in Germany in 2020 (AP/Michael Sohn) [AP Photo/Michael Sohn]

During the last election campaign, the SPD, the Greens and the Left Party declared that the education system in the city was a priority concern and would be expanded. In the COVID-19 crisis, the various parties justified the return to face-to-face teaching by expressing their concern for pupils’ education, stating that children and young people lacked opportunities for proper education at home. The Senate’s current policy makes clear that these promises were brazen lies.

In March, the Berlin Senate passed its budget for 2022 and 2023 and agreed on massive cuts. It reduced the two-year budget from more than 78.3 billion euros to 76.6 billion (38.7 this year and 37.9 billion next year). The focus of the savings was, among other things, on the education system.

Initially, the annual disposition fund for individual schools was to be cut to 3,000 euros. Due to massive protests by school headmasters and parents’ associations, the Senate had to withdraw its plan.

Now, however, cuts amounting to around one billion euros will be enforced within five years. These cuts result from the commitment agreed by the Berlin Senate to interdepartmental “lump-sum reduced expenditure of more than four billion euros,” according to the finance department headed by Senator Daniel Wesener (Greens). When the budget was passed, Wesener had already announced that “it was not possible to include war in the budget,” intimating that funds for the proxy war against Russia could entail further cuts in the city’s education, health and social services.

The city’s schools are already in a deplorable state. Last Thursday, less than two days before the start of the new school year, it was announced that the Anna Lindh Primary School (one of Berlin’s largest primary schools with 700 pupils) would remain closed due to mould infestation that had already appeared in 2017. All of the school’s pupils and 100 members of staff have been forced to move to an office building more than three kilometres away.

In the densely populated districts of Berlin-Lichtenberg, Reinickendorf, Marzahn-Hellersdorf and Berlin-Mitte there are no more free school places. In the borough of Pankow, pupils were accommodated only by “moving closer together” (Education Councillor Dominique Krössin, Left Party). In Berlin-Mitte and Marzahn-Hellersdorf, pupils have had to move into containers. According to the district councillor, Torsten Kühne (CDU), there is a shortage of places totaling 15 primary school classes, i.e., equivalent to four entire primary schools. There is also a shortage of places at secondary schools, which is why pupils are distributed to other districts.

In the district of Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg there is a shortage of 1,000 primary school places. Here the problem will become even more acute, according to district councillor Andy Hehmke (SPD), because the partial closure of three schools is imminent. In addition, not a single new school place is planned for the 7th to 10th grades in the next few years. Berlin’s grammar schools also have no more leeway. In many schools, pupils from refugee families in initial “welcome classes” have had to move out of their previous premises.

It is already clear that children and young people will freeze in schools this winter. The education senator explicitly ruled out “the little ones freezing,” but in order to save energy at schools, the administration announced a “tight energy management” to “limit the costs to some extent.”

The education administration left unanswered questions about whether heating and the supply of hot water will be cut back in the midst of the pandemic: “The Senate is currently examining various energy-saving options in order to be prepared in the event of a restricted energy supply. At this stage, no statements can be made on individual measures.”

The shortage of qualified teaching staff, which goes back many years, continues to worsen. In addition to the massive recruitment of untrained personnel in the last two years, retired teachers have been rehired to replace missing teachers. Some 325 retirees have already returned to school. Nevertheless about 1,000 teaching positions remain unfilled.

Lykka, a secondary school pupil in Kreuzberg, told the Tagesspiegel newspaper: “Over the whole year, about a third of my German lessons have been cancelled!” and “some take private tuition because of the many lesson cancellations.” Less able pupils and children from low-income families are particularly hard hit by the teacher shortage. She continued, “Actually, our school would like to enable learning in different groups but that would require two teachers per course. That is almost never possible.”

Every fourth child in Berlin comes from a household affected by poverty or at risk of poverty. At the beginning of the year, the poverty rate in Germany’s capital was 16.4 percent. In view of soaring inflation as a result of the pandemic policy, the country’s participation in the NATO proxy war in Ukraine and the resulting energy emergency, the poverty rate will increase drastically.

Primary schools are particularly affected by staff shortages. For the 37,000 school beginners expected at the start of the school year (the largest increase in first graders since 2005), 1,415 new teachers are needed, but there are currently just 180 newly trained primary school teachers and 400 untrained entrants.

This means that the proportion of qualified teachers at primary schools is falling once again. Last school year, this proportion was already precarious, for example at the Hans Rosenthal Primary School in Berlin-Lichtenberg, where there were only 12 colleagues with full pedagogical training for every 34 teachers.

Added to this are poor sanitary conditions—missing soap dispensers, broken washbasins, unusable toilets—as well as windows so dilapidated that they threaten to fall on the pupils’ heads and cannot be opened properly. Due to the financial situation, schools are likely to have “prioritised” only the worst defects during the summer holidays.

This alone shows the Senate’s complete contempt for pupils and teachers. The expected autumn wave of coronavirus infections as well as the growing spread of monkeypox viruses will once again find an ideal climate to proliferate in schools. The Senate was not even willing to install air filters across the board. Only “statistically” does every class have a filter, according to the Senate. Often, however, these are not installed or in use for construction, personnel or financial reasons.

In the face of growing criticism of the Senate’s irresponsible policy, Education Senator Astrid-Sabine Busse (SPD) and the city’s mayor Franziska Giffey (SPD) confront pupils, parents and teachers with outright hostility.

Arrogantly rejecting the criticism of teachers and parents, Busse declared in an interview with the Tagesspiegel: “Of course, you can always focus on deficits. There will always be deficits”, but “not everyone” is affected. “Individual fates are often looked at. But I have been working in ‘school’ for far too long to know that not everyone can be satisfied, as pupil and teacher, and well as experience good learning successes,” Busse said.

She added: “Education is a topic where everyone thinks they have a say. No one would discuss an upcoming operation with surgeons like that” and also “not scold them so much. In the field of education, people do that 24 hours a day,” the SPD politician stated.

Children crammed back into Philippine schools amid COVID-19 surge

Isagani Sakay

On Monday August 22, the Marcos government in the Philippines re-opened schools for in-person education, herding over 27 million children back into dilapidated and unsafe public schools nationwide after more than two years of closed classes. The COVID-19 pandemic continues to rip through the population.

Kindergarten students return to in person learning on the first day of classes at the Comembo elementary school in Makati city, Philippines on Monday, Dec. 6, 2021. (AP Photo/Aaron Favila)

The criminal policies of the Marcos administration, prioritizing profit over the lives of working families, follow the pattern established by the major capitalist powers, above all the United States. Disregarding science and even the most basic public health measures, the government is forcing the re-opening of schools to cut costs and ensure that businesses are able to function fully and resume the full-throttle production of profit.

Only 19 percent of the children returning to the classrooms are fully vaccinated. The same day that schools reopened, the government published a seven-day tally of 23,403 new infections, including 308 COVID related deaths, raising the country’s official COVID death toll since 2020 to 61,386. These figures drastically underestimate the actual spread of the pandemic which has been systematically under-tested and underreported.

Only the most minimal of mitigations are in-place including a mask mandate, temperature checks, handwashing, and, when the government deems there is enough space, physical distancing. In the inevitable event of outbreaks in the education system, there will be no quarantines or lockdowns. These policies stand in marked contrast to the measures taken when the health of the ruling class is imperiled. In early August, the Philippine Senate imposed an immediate lockdown when seven senators out of the 24 were tested positive for the COVID-19 virus.

The conditions to which students are being returned are appalling. Pictures and videos published in the news and widely circulated on social media showed scenes of students walking down flooded roads to reach schools, students in flooded classrooms diligently studying, students without chairs or desks, and overcrowded classrooms.

The Rappler news website reported class sizes of 50 to 60 students in seven schools within the National Capital Region. In the province of Pampanga, one school was reported flooded by heavy rains and in the Camarines province, nine classes were without classrooms according to Business World and were likely assembled together in the school gym.

The lack of classrooms is no surprise. Two days before the opening, speaking to a budgetary congressional committee, Education Undersecretary Epimaco Densing III admitted that the country confronted a deficit of 91,000 classrooms or 10 percent of the classroom requirement nationwide.

The overcrowding of classes is further exacerbated by the more than 26,000 teaching positions reported vacant in the public school system as of 2021. Entry level teachers are paid a mere $US452 a month, while the most senior level positions receive just over $US1,100.

The return to in-person instruction was the first order issued by Vice President Sarah Duterte, the daughter of previous President Rodrigo Duterte. She is secretary of the Department of Education. On opening day, speaking at an elementary school in Bataan province, Duterte declared the resumption of in-person classes a “victory” for basic education.

“We can no longer make COVID-19 as an excuse to keep our children from their schools. The Philippines has been reopening just like the rest of the world reopens,” Duterte announced. “We cannot make the lack of educational infrastructure or the inadequate number of classrooms in certain provinces another excuse to keep our children from schools,” she added.

Duterte mocked the desperate and often valiant efforts of parents over nearly three years to teach their children at home despite the grossly underfunded distance learning conducted by the teachers and schools. She threatened that she would send children back to their parent’s teaching as punishment if they were not diligent in the classroom.

Children are being forced back into crowded classrooms without any regard for their health or safety, or for that of their families. More than half of all schools, 29,721 schools, still adhere to a so-called blended modality, with in-person classes at least three days a week while the rest of instruction days are being conducted online or through learning modules. By November, however, full in-person classes will be mandatory for all primary and secondary levels “regardless of the COVID-19 alert level imposed by the Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases or the Department of Health in areas where schools are located.”

The drive to herd children back into classrooms has been demanded by businessmen and international financial institutes from as far back as late 2020. The effort to keep children safe from a deadly virus was seen from the onset as an unacceptable cap on the production of profits in the country. In December 2020, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) released a report claiming the cost of school closures to save lives was too high for the benefit gained.

The cost of saving a life, according to the ADB, “equates to ₱768 million per life saved for closure at all levels, ₱366 million per life saved from closure for 15+ year olds, and ₱1.38 billion per life saved from closure for those under 15 years of age. These costs are far higher than is typically considered acceptable for public policy.” The figures are absurd, but the calculations demonstrate with their cold remorseless logic precisely what is at stake for world capitalism: children’s lives are not as valuable as profit margins.

The return to in-person schooling is being presented as an urgent measure to address the over 90 percent learning poverty rate reported by the World Bank in 2022. Learning poverty is defined as the inability of a 10-year-old to read and comprehend a single line of text or sentence.

That figure for learning poverty in the Philippines stood at already appalling 70 percent in 2019 prior to the pandemic lockdown. Education in the country has never been funded at a rate that would even remotely meet the needs of children. The lockdown exacerbated this crisis, not because it ended in class education, but because alternative forms of instruction received little funding and parents received no aid. 

The claim that children are being forced back into dangerous, overcrowded and dilapidated classrooms for their own good is a lie. The concern of the Marcos government, like its counterparts around the globe is profit, ensuring above all that parents are in factories and workplaces, and not at home caring for their families.

US life expectancy continued to decline in the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic

Emma Arceneaux

A provisional report from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that life expectancy dropped for the second year in a row, falling by 0.9 years in 2021. In 2020, the decline was 1.8 years, making the two-year total 2.7 years. The COVID-19 pandemic has reduced US life expectancy at birth to 76.1 years, the lowest level since 1996 and the largest two-year reduction since 1923. Such is the result of “learning to live” with COVID-19.

The report is a damning indictment of the homicidal response to the pandemic that has characterized the Trump and Biden administrations. Biden—who was elected in large part because of popular revulsion at Trump’s callous and anti-scientific response to COVID-19 and who was armed with effective vaccines from the beginning of his term—stands thoroughly exposed. He is a ruthless representative of the ruling class in its war against the working class. If the profit interests of corporate America and the financial markets require the subordination of all considerations of protecting human life from a deadly virus, Biden is more than willing.

John McClung sits in a break room where his wife, Jennifer, is remembered on a bulletin board on the floor where she worked as a nurse at Helen Keller Hospital in Sheffield, Alabama, on March 7, 2022. [AP Photo/David Goldman] [AP Photo/David Goldman]

Had the pandemic been brought to an end as Biden promised and had even basic mitigation measures been enacted and maintained, life expectancy in 2021 should have begun to recover from its devastating decline in 2020. 

However, in 2021, when Biden had at his disposal not only life-saving vaccines but also a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress, as well as the support of much of the population who elected him on the promise of “following the science,” 460,000 people needlessly died, a 20 percent increase from 2020. In 2022, 220,000 people have died so far, bringing the cumulative official death toll in the United States to 1.07 million.

The report was published against the backdrop of the Democratic administration’s systematic dismantling of all remaining mitigation measures, including the ending of free COVID-19 testing, as part of its “forever COVID” policy.  This agenda has been critically aided by the CDC itself, most recently with its latest COVID-19 guidelines, which removed quarantine, testing and contact tracing recommendations in most settings, creating the conditions for widespread transmission as tens of millions of children across the US return to schools with virtually no mitigations in place.

COVID-19 was the single greatest contributor to the decrease in life expectancy, accounting for 50 percent of the untimely deaths. The second greatest contributor was “unintentional injuries” at 15.9 percent, about half of which was attributable to overdose deaths, according to Robert Anderson, the chief of the mortality statistics branch of the National Center for Health Statistics, speaking to STAT news. Heart disease (4.1 percent), chronic liver disease and cirrhosis (3.0) and suicide (2.1) were other contributing factors. As a reflection of the deepening social immiseration of the population, overdose deaths rose dramatically in both 2020 and 2021, by 30 and 15 percent respectively, with a record 108,000 people dying in 2021.

Horrific in and of itself, the decline by 0.9 years was actually moderated by a decrease in deaths attributed to a number of other causes, most significantly “influenza and pneumonia” and other “chronic lower respiratory diseases,” which declined by 38.5 and 28.8 percent, respectively. These decreases are largely the result of the limited public health measures that were in place in 2021, including what remained of mask mandates, social distancing measures and remote learning options. As these measures are universally abandoned, respiratory viruses such as influenza will be able to more freely circulate, and deaths in these categories could very well climb again, leading to what some are calling a “double-whammy” of flu and COVID-19.

It is revealing that the report is presented entirely in race and gender terms, with no analysis of the impact of socio-economic factors. The most precipitous drop by racial group occurred among non-Hispanic American Indians or Alaskan Natives, whose life expectancy fell 1.9 years in 2021. Since 2019, life expectancy for this demographic fell by a catastrophic 6.6 years, from 71.8 to 65.2. In this group, COVID-19 and unintentional injury each accounted for roughly 21.4 percent of contributing causes, while “residual” causes [other factors] accounted for the largest portion, at 29.9 percent.

The omission of socio-economic factors is all the more glaring given that for the population as a whole, one-quarter of the decline in life expectancy was attributed to such “residual” causes without any explanation. One can assume, given the impact on the job markets, loss of wages, and intensification of the class struggle, that poverty and such social factors weighed heavily in the residual column.

Refuting the narrative pushed by the petty-bourgeois purveyors of identity politics, for 2021, the second greatest decrease in life expectancy by racial group was the 1.0 year lost by the non-Hispanic white population. Indeed, a number of important reports that have examined the relationship between socio-economic status and COVID-19 mortality demonstrate clearly that the pandemic is fundamentally a class issue affecting workers of all racial backgrounds.

A pre-print epidemiological study released in April by researchers in California reviewed US COVID-19 mortality data from 2020 by industry and occupation. They found that essential workers died at nearly twice the rate (1.96 times) of non-essential workers, with the highest death rates among workers in accommodation and food services; transportation and warehousing; agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting; mining; and construction.

Another study published in the Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health by researchers in Florida analyzed the deaths of 70,000 working age adults (25 to 64) from COVID-19 in the US in 2020. They found that 68 percent of deaths occurred among those defined as having a “low socioeconomic position (SEP),” namely those employed in labor, service and retail jobs. Further, the death rate among the low-SEP population was five times higher than among the high SEP population.

Finally, a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in July examined specifically the relationship between life expectancy and income over the course of the pandemic among residents of California. Already before the pandemic, in 2019, there was an 11.52-year gap in life expectancy between the highest and lowest income percentiles. This gap widened dramatically during the pandemic, to roughly 15.51 years in 2021.

The decrease in life expectancy is part of an international trend, with global life expectancy estimated to have dropped by 1.64 years since the beginning of the pandemic, the first decline since the United Nations began tracking this figure in 1950. Almost universally, capitalist governments throughout the world have pursued the “herd immunity” strategy of mass infection. Those that initially adopted a “mitigationist” approach based on minimal and inadequate measures to slow transmission, including the Biden administration, abandoned even the pretense of infection control during the Omicron surge last winter. 

However, countries in the Asia-Pacific region which sought to eliminate the virus, including China, experienced a growth in life expectancy during 2020 and 2021. These “positive experiences” underscore the immediate benefit of an elimination-eradication strategy, which only the International Committee of the Fourth International has continued to demand.

Even before the pandemic, advances in global life expectancy began to slow as a result of the decades-long social counter-revolution following the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, which saw the vast eruption of American imperialist war abroad and class war at home. The COVID-19 pandemic, which the World Socialist Web Site has analyzed as a trigger event, rapidly exacerbated the underlying contradictions of the world capitalist system and has led to a social and political crisis of historic proportions. This crisis is expressed not only in the pandemic but also in deepening attacks on democratic rights, the reckless war provocations against Russia and China, and finally the upsurge of the class struggle in the US and globally.

As Robert Hummer of the University of North Carolina commented to the Associated Press, life expectancy is “the most fundamental indicator of population health in this country.” That the wealthiest country in the world, which saw the enrichment of its billionaires by over $2 trillion during the pandemic, has been incapable of providing the resources to protect the population from preventable disease and death, proves that this rotting social economic system has reached the end of its rope.

The grave implications of the ruling class’ demand that the population be forced to accept perpetual mass infection and death cannot be overstated. What has taken place is the start of a catastrophic reversal of nearly 80 years of progress in public health, not just in the United States but internationally.

Sri Lankan president deepens social attacks in interim cost-cutting budget

K. Ratnayake

On Tuesday, Sri Lankan President Ranil Wickremesinghe, who is also the finance minister, presented parliament with an interim budget to cover the rest of the year.

Sri Lankan President Ranil Wickremesinghe arrives at the parliamentary complex in Colombo, Sri Lanka on Aug. 3, 2022. (AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena) [AP Photo]

The budget, which heaps even greater burdens on the already suffering working people, will cut government expenditure, impose more taxes and speed up the privatisation of state-owned enterprises (SOE) in line with International Monetary Fund (IMF) demands.

Government negotiations with the IMF delegation, which concluded this week in Colombo, had “successfully reached the final stage,” Wickremesinghe said, indicating that even more savage social attacks are being prepared.

Amid the popular anger over the unbearable cost of living, Wickremesinghe contemptuously proposed a cosmetic increase in welfare allowances for the poor, a measure that will do nothing to alleviate their plight.

The interim budget includes:

* An additional 3 percent increase in the value added tax (VAT), lifting it from 12 to 15 percent on all goods and services, effective this week. This comes on top of an increase from 8 to 12 percent in VAT and other tariffs announced on May 31. In August, the government increased electricity charges by about 75 percent, with water tariffs rising by 127 percent for 2 million families this month.

* Restructure of SOEs will be stepped up, beginning with Air Lanka, the Ceylon Electricity Board and the Ceylon Petroleum Corporation. On Monday it was announced that 49 percent of Air Lanka ground-handling and catering will be privatised, with 50 other SOEs targeted for future “restructuring.”

* Twenty percent of shares in state banks will be distributed among depositors and bank employees as a first step in the privatisation of these banks.

* The private sector will also be brought into the country’s railways, long-targeted for privatisation by Colombo.

* In line with the planned destruction of hundreds of thousands of public sector jobs, the retirement age of employees in government and semi government institutions was reduced to 60 years, down from 65 and 62 years, respectively. Those who have already reached the new retirement age must leave at the end of this year.

Wickremesinghe’s so-called concessions to the poor consist of a miniscule lift in monthly Samurdhi payments ranging from 5,000 rupees ($US14) to 7,500 rupees. The pitiful welfare payments are currently received by 1.7 million families. Around 726,000 families already on the Samurdhi waiting list will be temporarily paid 5,000 rupees per month.

Allowances for the elderly, disabled, kidney patients and pregnant mothers were also slightly increased from 5,000 rupees to 7,500 rupees. About 61,000 low-income families will receive a monthly allowance of 10,000 rupees for four months.

These rises will add little to the existing meagre allowances which have been drastically eroded by skyrocketing inflation, officially reported to be 64 percent and food inflation 94 percent in August.

Wickremesinghe proposed to write off 688 million rupees in defaulted farmers’ loans to the banks. This will not alleviate the difficult economic problems confronting farmers who still have to pay interest to the banks and have faced massive increases in the cost of fuel, fertilizers and agricultural inputs over the past five months.

He told parliament that the 2021 budget deficit was 12.2 percent of the GDP but that this would be reduced to 9.9 percent this year, 6.8 percent in 2023 and zero in 2025. These figures point the unprecedented and brutal character of the government social assault on the public sector and the masses.

Addressing a Colombo seminar yesterday, Central Bank Governor Nandalal Weerasinghe praised the president and the finance ministry secretary. The interim budget, he said, was “farsighted,” adding, “in order to come out of this crisis, we have to go through this painful process.” This “painful process,” of course, will not be endured by the rich, but only by workers and the poor, who are being made to pay for the deep crisis of Sri Lankan capitalism.

“[O]ur aspiration is to establish a solid economic foundation by the year 2026,” Wickremesinghe declared. His projection to place the economy on a “solid economic foundation,” mitigating the crisis by 2026, is a sheer fantasy.

Sri Lanka’s economic collapse is the sharpest expression of the global capitalist crisis, set off by the COVID-19 pandemic and intensified this year by the US-NATO proxy war in Ukraine, that is now impacting on the major imperialist centres and backward countries alike.

Wickremesinghe told the parliament that the economic miracle he proposed would only occur, “if we work together in unity with common consent.” He called on MPs to join an all-party government because “this unprecedented situation is the responsibility of us all.” 

The devastating conditions facing millions of Sri Lankans were not created by the working class or the urban and rural poor but are the direct responsibility of Sri Lanka’s ruling elite and its capitalist parties.

Acutely aware that masses will resist the planned social attacks, Wickremesinghe’s appeal for an all-party government is to mobilise Colombo’s entire political establishment to suppress the mass opposition.

The opposition parliamentary parties have not accepted the all-party government invitation from the widely despised Wickremesinghe, not because they disagree with the IMF’s demands, but because they fear he will not be able to suppress the mass resistance.

Wickremesinghe continues to mobilise state forces in an attempt to intimidate ongoing mass struggles.

Yesterday, the government unleashed the police to arrest 28 people attending a student demonstration called by the Inter-University Student Federation. The students were demanding the release of three student leaders detained by police last week under anti-terror laws. The three activists were arrested during a student protest against the government repression, attacks on free education and worsening living conditions.

Students protesting in Colombo on 30 August 2022 [Photo: WSWS]

This week the IMF negotiating team met in Colombo with opposition Samagi Jana Balavegaya (SJB) leader Sajith Premadasa and his allies. Far from disagreeing with the IMF’s austerity plan, Premadasa was demanding from the beginning of last year that the former Rajapakse government seek IMF assistance. The SJB is now campaigning for an election, hoping to come to power and implement the IMF program.

Following Wickremesinghe’s budget speech, Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP)-led National People’s Power (NPP) parliamentarian Professor Harini Amarasuriya declared that the economic crisis could only be solved by a “stable government.”

Like the SJB, the JVP/NPP is demanding a general election and a new capitalist government to impose the IMF’s measures. Other parliamentary opposition parties, including the Sri Lanka Freedom Party and the Tamil National Alliance, fundamentally agree, insisting that the only solution is drastic austerity.

The main props of the Wickremesinghe regime and Sri Lankan capitalism are the trade unions, who over the previous four months diverted the mass opposition of millions of workers into one-day general strikes in April and May and politically backed the parliamentary opposition. They support the SJB and JVP calls for the interim capitalist government and oppose any independent mobilisation of the working class against the Wickremesinghe regime.

Protest march by Petroleum Corporation workers in Colombo on 22 August 2022 [Photo: WSWS]

Working-class resistance, however, is developing. Last week petroleum, state engineering corporation, government press, and health sector workers began taking industrial action. Fishermen held protests in opposition to oil price hikes, while students held repeated demonstrations in defiance of brutal police measures.

One year since the US military's withdrawal from Afghanistan

Jordan Shilton

Tuesday marked exactly one year since the last detachment of American troops skulked out  of Kabul aboard a C-17 military transporter, bringing to an end close to two decades of US imperialism’s brutal neocolonial occupation of Afghanistan. The weeks leading up to the unceremonious departure, which resembled the flight from the roof of the US embassy in Saigon in 1975, saw Washington’s puppet regime in Kabul disintegrate amid an advance by the Islamist Taliban.

One day after the last American military flight out of Kabul, US President Joe Biden delivered a speech in which he declared, “We’ve been a nation too long at war. If you’re 20 years old today, you’ve never known an America at peace… It’s time to end the forever war.”

The “forever war” Biden was referring to consisted of two decades of bloody counterinsurgency warfare and occupation, during which US imperialism and its NATO allies laid waste to an entire society. The imperialist forces left the country in ruins, with a conservative estimate of between 175,000 and 250,000 Afghans killed during the conflict. These deaths included thousands massacred at wedding parties, in their homes, and in hospitals by barbaric drone strikes. Washington’s corrupt puppet regime, built up with some $80 billion in financial aid, proved to have absolutely no popular support as its leading representatives fled the country.

The Afghan withdrawal represented a debacle for US imperialism, which based its policy throughout thirty years of uninterrupted wars, beginning with the first Gulf War in 1990-91, on the conviction that military force could overcome Washington’s precipitous economic decline. The establishment of puppet governments in “regime change” operations throughout Central Asia and the Middle East was seen as essential in the consolidation of American imperialist hegemony over the Eurasian landmass, which had been opened up for ruthless capitalist exploitation through the Stalinist dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the restoration of capitalism in China. These aims of imperialist geostrategy were concealed from the public with bogus propaganda claiming that the US and its allies were waging a struggle for “democracy” and the “rights of women” in Afghanistan.

The World Socialist Web Site recognized at the time that far from representing a retreat from large-scale military conflict and an end to “forever wars,” as Biden asserted in his 31 August speech, the withdrawal from Afghanistan marked a shift in imperialist strategy to confront much greater foes. As the WSWS wrote in an initial analysis of the implications of the Afghan debacle: “This has not lessened the danger of war in the least. Indeed, Biden used his speech to insist on US imperialism’s ability to continue murderous ‘over-the-horizon’ attacks on Afghanistan or any other country in the world, while shifting its military might toward far more dangerous confrontations with China and Russia, both nuclear-armed powers.”

Less than two weeks later, in an article marking the 20th anniversary of the still unexplained 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington D.C., we stressed: “The debacle of the ‘war on terrorism’ signals no end to US militarism. Rather, as Biden has made clear, the withdrawal from Afghanistan is aimed at shifting US military power toward confrontation with what the Pentagon describes as ‘strategic competitors’ or ‘great power’ rivals, i.e., nuclear-armed China and Russia. In other words, there is a growing threat of a third world war.”

Twelve months on, the correctness of this evaluation of US imperialist policy has been proven beyond doubt. Less than six months after the withdrawal from Kabul, the Biden administration and its European and Canadian allies succeeded in provoking the Russian nationalist regime of Vladimir Putin to launch an invasion of Ukraine, triggering a war for which the NATO powers had been preparing for almost a decade. The Ukrainian army, whose backbone consists of neo-Nazi forces trained and equipped by NATO since the fascist-led 2014 coup in Kiev, has received tens of billions of dollars of high-powered weaponry since February. The Biden administration’s goal is to recklessly escalate the war with Russia, even at the risk of a global conflagration fought with nuclear weapons, with the aim of seizing control of its substantial deposits of natural resources and critical minerals. To this end, the imperialists intend to subjugate Russia to the status of a semi-colony by carving up its vast territory into statelets under the jackboot of imperialist plunder.

Washington has orchestrated a no less provocative escalation of tensions with China over the question of the status of Taiwan, which Beijing considers a province of China and the US wants to transform into an American military base for war with Beijing. The admission by Washington that it is training Taiwanese military forces and the visit of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi to Taipei in early August have shattered Washington’s long-standing policy of “strategic ambiguity,” which was based on an agreement with the Chinese regime not to explicitly commit to the defense of Taiwan in the event of a military conflict between Beijing and Taipei. Pelosi’s visit was accompanied by an unprecedented escalation of tensions, as a US navy aircraft carrier and strike group sailed into the region, and the Chinese navy responded by conducting live fire exercises off the coast of Taiwan.

Washington and its European allies, together with their accomplices in the media, never tire of proclaiming their devotion to the cause of “democracy” in Ukraine, the need to protect “human rights” against “Russian aggression,” or the necessity to defend Taiwan against the “authoritarianism” of China. This propaganda onslaught has reached a deafening crescendo over the past six months, with Western political leaders and media outlets desperately trying to portray the corrupt oligarchic regime in Kiev, backed by American and European intelligence and military forces, as the embodiment of democratic values. In a major speech delivered in Poland in March, Biden committed the US and its allies to “decades” of war with Russia, declaring that the Ukrainian regime was engaged in a “great battle for freedom.” German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, speaking one week after the Russian invasion and just days after the German government tripled its military budget in the largest rearmament program since Hitler, stated, “We must stand up to this attack. Human rights are universal.”

The social and economic calamity facing millions of Afghans after two decades of rapacious plunder by US imperialism and its European allies, among them Germany and Britain, provides the best refutation to such fatuous claims. Fully 40 percent of the Afghan population presently lives on less than $1 per day, while a staggering 97 percent have fallen below the poverty line. Wide swathes of the population have been mentally traumatized and thousands physically maimed by the reign of terror experienced by impoverished Afghans at the hands of their US and NATO occupiers between 2001 and 2021.

The history of the Afghan population’s disastrous encounter with American imperialism proves that “human rights” and “democracy” concern the imperialist powers only to the extent that they justify the pursuit of their predatory geostrategic and economic ambitions. The US involvement in Afghanistan began over four decades ago in 1979, when the Carter administration facilitated the arming of Islamist fighters against the Soviet-backed regime in order to plunge the country into a civil war and create the USSR’s “own Vietnam.” The arming of these mujahideen created the conditions for the rise of Osama bin Laden and Islamic fundamentalism across the region, with Washington encouraging Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to train and funnel Islamist fighters into Afghanistan. Even after 9/11, these Islamist fighters were used as proxy forces by the imperialist powers to advance their interests, including during the bloody onslaught on Libya and the war in Syria and Iraq.  Military planners have openly compared the current conflict with Russia in Ukraine with Afghanistan in the 1980s, demonstrating that the imperialists today are no less indifferent to the horrendous consequences of a years-long war on ordinary Ukrainians and Russians than they were about its devastating impact on the Afghan population.

The terrorist attacks of 9/11 were seized upon to justify the launching of the Afghanistan war, which had been planned years in advance of 2001. Pro-war propaganda legitimizing the neocolonial occupation as necessary to bring “democracy” to the Afghan people, defend “women’s rights,” and “fight terrorism” was thoroughly exposed over the subsequent two decades. It was the occupying forces who terrorized the population with counterinsurgency warfare, tortured thousands at Bagram Air Base and other “black sites,” and built a puppet regime based on corruption and self-enrichment.

Even after the withdrawal, US imperialism and their allies continued their vendetta against the Afghan people, whom they blamed for the failure of their efforts to establish a sustainable neocolonial regime in Kabul. In an act of brazen theft, the Biden administration announced in February its decision to steal $7 billion in financial assets belonging to the Afghan Central Bank that were deposited at the Federal Reserve of New York. This action came as the UN warned that up to 23 million Afghans face malnutrition and starvation this year, and up to a million children could die.

The two decades of brutal neocolonial occupation in Afghanistan also produced disastrous social and economic consequences for working people in the US and Europe. The war was used to justify a savage assault on core democratic rights, as intelligence agencies were granted virtually unlimited powers to spy on the population. The brutalization of society, including through the impact on the mental health of thousands of veterans and millions of young people whose entire conscious lives were overshadowed by never-ending wars, has witnessed a surge in gun violence, suicides, drug overdoses, and other social ills. It has helped create the political conditions under which a fascistic figure like Trump could openly plot with broad sections of the Republican Party to overthrow the democratic outcome of a presidential election and establish a personalist dictatorship.

Above all, the ever-more reckless resort to military violence by the ruling elites of North America and Europe expresses the intractable global crisis of capitalism. Decades of uninterrupted wars have exacerbated social inequality as social services and workers’ wages are slashed to cover bloated military budgets. The same indifference shown by ruling circles to human life in the brutal occupation of Afghanistan has found expression in their homicidal policy of mass infection and death during the COVID-19 pandemic. Decades of unending wars have also discredited all institutions of the capitalist state, from the official political parties who supported the wars, to the media who propagandized for them, and the judiciary who allowed war crimes to go unpunished. These processes have revolutionary implications.

Routine COVID testing ended in English hospitals, care homes, prisons and homeless shelters

Robert Stevens

All routine testing for COVID-19 was ended in England at the end of August, even as the disease continues to claim hundreds of lives weekly with tens of thousands of new cases.

The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) declared August 24 that all asymptomatic testing in high-risk settings including hospitals, care homes, prisons and homeless shelters would end on August 31. In line with its “Living with COVID-19 strategy, the government’s objectives in this phase of the coronavirus… response are to increasingly enable the management of COVID-19 in line with other respiratory illnesses…”

Free general testing for the entire population ended April 1, but asymptomatic testing remained in place for particularly vulnerable people. The continually evolving virus is now free to circulate in these settings as it is throughout the general population.

The COVID alert system being used by the UK government. Under Level Two, there are ”No or minimal social distancing measures; enhanced testing, tracing monitoring and screening”.

On August 31, the UK’s COVID alert level was downgraded from three to two, following a recommendation by the UK's four chief medical officers. The Level Two alert means that “COVID-19 is in general circulation, but direct healthcare pressures and transmission are declining or stable”. The previous threat Level Three denoted that “a COVID-19 epidemic is in general circulation”. Under Level Two, there are ”No or minimal social distancing measures; enhanced testing, tracing monitoring and screening”.

“The Department of Health said “Severe Covid cases, direct Covid healthcare pressures, direct Covid deaths and ONS [Office for National Statistics] community positivity estimates have decreased.”

The continued danger of danger of COVID to public health was underplayed by the Chief Medical Officers. Even as they declared, “COVID remains present in the community and we may see an increase in cases with BA 4.6 and BA.2.75 circulating”, they concluded, “but do not expect this to lead to an immediate increase in hospital pressures.”

This was said in the week that National Health Service bosses warned that already understaffed/underfunded hospitals would be unable to cope with the ill-health implications of “humanitarian crisis” they face within weeks due to the massive increase in household energy bills.

Due to vaccinations the numbers of deaths has fallen since the height of the pandemic, but hundreds are still dying from COVID with many left debilitated by Long Covid.

The Guardian noted August 24 that all testing was being halted “despite a near doubling in UK deaths from the virus this summer compared with the same period last year.” It reported, “The latest official figures indicate that deaths caused by the latest Covid wave are on the wane. But more than 5,700 Covid deaths have been registered since 8 June – a 95% increase on same period last year when there were 2,936 deaths involving Covid across the UK.”

It added, “Covid cases for the last seven days are running at 40,027, when there were 744 deaths and 6,005 hospitalisations.”

According to the ONS, in the week to August 16, one in 40 people in Scotland were infected with COVID; one in 45 people in England; one in 45 people in Wales; and one in 70 people in Northern Ireland. Things are likely much worse. The recording of daily COVID death tallies and infection numbers were done away with months ago in Britain, with government data on deaths and cases updated infrequently and often with incomplete data.

The UK hit the terrible milestone of 200,000 COVID deaths in July, with more than 3,000 dying in less than two months since. Latest ONS data shows 203,159 deaths, where COVID is mentioned on a victim’s death certificate. This catastrophic loss of life is almost identical per capita to the 1 million plus deaths recorded in the United States under the Trump/Biden administrations. The US population is approximately 333 million now, almost five times that of the UK’s 67.5 million.

Yet COVID is being treated as no worse than a mild seasonal cold, despite its long-term severely debilitating impact. An in-depth piece published by the Financial Times Wednesday was headlined, “The growing evidence that Covid-19 is leaving people sicker” and warned, “The potential impact on heart and brain disease poses challenges to healthcare systems globally.”

It cited the comments of Dr. David Strain, a geriatrician based at the University of Exeter. He had read a study published in Nature in March, which the FT noted, “identified significant brain shrinkage in a cohort of about 400 people aged between 51 and 81 who had recovered from coronavirus.”

Dr. Strain had treated a 64-year-old patient “Less than six months earlier… for Covid-19.” “Now, his deterioration was painful to witness. ‘He came in with a stroke and really bad delirium, a precursor of dementia,’ Strain says. ‘I saw the patient, recognised him [and] recognised the fact that his brain had dramatically aged.’”

The FT commented, “The encounter crystallised Strain’s belief that Covid generated a kind of epidemiological aftershock by leaving people susceptible to a huge range of other conditions, threatening global health systems already struggling with insufficient resources and ageing populations. ‘It made me realise that this is something that we’re going to be facing in a really big way in the near future,’ he says.”

In a stark comparison, Dr Strain said, “The level of damage that’s been done to population health [during COVID], it would be as if everybody suddenly decided to take up smoking in one go.”

Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government carried out one of the most brutal COVID policies of any government, epitomised by his infamous statement, at the height of the pandemic in October 2020, “No more f***ing lockdowns, let the bodies pile high in their thousands!”.

The Conservative Party leadership candidates: Foreign Secretary Liz Truss and former Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak [AP Photo/AP Photo, File]

With Johnson about to be replaced as prime minister by Liz Truss or Rishi Sunak, both have made it known to the Tory Party’s right-wing membership that they never wanted lockdowns and that Johnson badly erred in supposedly kowtowing to scientists!

Truss declared, “I didn’t actually sit on the Covid committee during that time, I was busy striking trade deals around the world.

She added, “My view is we did go too far, particularly on keeping schools closed. I’ve got two teenage daughters and know how difficult it was for children and parents and I would not have a lockdown again… I was very clear in cabinet, I was one of the key voices in favour of opening up.”

Sunak said that “lockdowns could have been “shorter, different, quicker… We shouldn’t have empowered the scientists in the way we did.”

He added that “you have to acknowledge trade-offs from the beginning. If we’d done all of that, we could be in a very different place.” Asked to elaborate, he replied, “We’d probably have made different decisions on things like schools, for example.” He told the Spectator that at one cabinet meeting his opposition to closing schools was voiced and he got “very emotional about it”.

Prominent scientists opposed Sunak’s lies that Johnson slavishly “followed the science”.

Clinical epidemiologist Dr. Deepti Gurdasani tweeted: “we weren’t empowered. The govt (which you are a part of) continued to make policies which had no basis in science, and killed >200,000 people & disabled hundreds of thousands while we screamed helplessly at every step.”

She described Johnson’s decision to delay the first lockdown for weeks as “an action that very likely cost tens of thousands of lives. That’s on you. Do you think SAGE [Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies] were ‘empowered’ then? They were dismissed. By you [Sunak].

“You can try to revise history all you like – because the dead can’t speak. But there are many who won’t let them be forgotten.”

As infections mount and the full, devastating long-term impact of COVID emerges, the ruling elite in Britain and their counterparts internationally celebrate “living with COVID” as they rip up every significant pandemic protection measure they were forced to enact. The interventions by Truss and Sunak are a sharp warning as to the savage anti-working class agenda of the incoming government.

Eurowings pilots vote to strike as determination of German airline workers to fight grows

Marianne Arens

There is a large and growing willingness to strike among workers in the airline industry in Germany and internationally. At Eurowings, a ballot of Vereinigung Cockpit (VC) pilots’ union members ended Wednesday with an overwhelming vote of 97.7 percent in favour of strike action.

Eurowings is the Lufthansa subsidiary operating vacation flights and short- and medium-haul routes at lower costs than the core Lufthansa brand. The price for this is paid by the staff in the cockpits, cabins and on the ground in the form of significantly worse pay and working conditions.

But the approximately 5,000 pilots of the core brand are also ready to strike, as was demonstrated in a strike ballot at the end of July. At Lufthansa Frankfurt and Munich, 97.6 percent agreed to strike action. At Lufthansa Cargo, the figure was as high as 99.3 percent. VC has announced a 24-hour strike by pilots at Lufthansa and Lufthansa Cargo for today (Friday).

Striking Lufthansa pilots in Frankfurt [Photo: WSWS]

The discontent has very real grounds. In addition to the accumulated loss of wages due to the coronavirus pandemic, inflation has skyrocketed since the start of NATO’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. In Germany, inflation has already reached 8.5 percent, is much higher for gasoline and foodstuffs, and is increasingly threatening wages and salaries.

Lufthansa employees have already sacrificed large portions of their income and pension benefits since the beginning of the pandemic. In 2020, Vereinigung Cockpit expressly agreed to this and even proposed some of the sacrifices itself. Staff were placed on short-time work schedules for a long period and recorded salary reductions of up to 50 percent.

The other Lufthansa unions, Verdi, UFO, TGL-IGL and the Austrian ACA, also offered far-reaching concessions at the time—cancellation of vacation and Christmas bonuses, a wage freeze and the waiving of allowances. The givebacks added up to an income loss of no less than €1.3 billion for the Lufthansa workforce. At the same time, Lufthansa cut 32,000 jobs, many of them among pilots.

The same thing happened throughout the airports, at Frankfort Airport provider Fraport, ground services provider WISAG and other companies. Not infrequently, as at WISAG, it was precisely the longest-serving and experienced airport workers who were laid off. When flight operations restarted at the beginning of summer, unprecedented chaos ensued at the airports. Planes could not be checked in, lines formed for hours in front of security stations and hundreds of suitcases were left behind.

The chaos particularly affected Frankfurt Airport. In July, the number of passengers there rose above 5 million for the first time since the pandemic. But to prevent a collapse, Lufthansa was forced to cancel more than 3,000 flights.

To this day, crews and ground workers remain under great and growing work pressure and overtime is piling up. There is a shortage of staff everywhere; sickness levels are high and set to rise again as a result of COVID-19 infections.

The 24-hour warning strike on July 27, in which more than 20,000 Lufthansa ground workers took part, showed just how much things are boiling over. Just one week later, Verdi, the airport’s in-house union, agreed to a filthy sellout. Verdi signed a new contract, which effectively means a loss of real wages, and agreed to a truce preventing further industrial action for the 18-month term of the agreement.

Economically, the corporation has largely recovered from the coronavirus crisis. But the board is determined to ensure the savings from the pandemic become the norm, in the interests of its shareholders and at the expense of the employees.

“The measures, some of them drastic, [have] worked,” cheered the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on August 31. It added that the business community could “draw confidence” from the fact “that the company was able to return to profitability in the second quarter despite all the not insignificant adversities. The corporation is reducing debt, increasing its capital ratio, and the government’s stake is reportedly below ten percent.” Lufthansa was “moving in the right direction again,” it said.

For the Vereinigung Cockpit union, its first commitment is to the welfare of the company and its shareholders. The VC executive employed the word “strike” only once in its Wednesday press release announcing the results of the strike ballot. And it did this only when assuring the management that VC did not want a strike either. The union writes, “To make it clear: The result is not a decision to strike! It is [sending] a stronger signal, the yellow card, so to speak, to Eurowings.”

VC has been meeting with the company behind closed doors for four weeks, with the seventh round of negotiations being held this week. The union is doing all it can to either avoid industrial action by the pilots altogether, or to isolate it and keep it separate from other workers in the airline and other industries.

Despite inflation of more than 8 percent, from the outset VC has only called for a 5.5 percent wage increase for this year, which amounts to a de facto cut in real wages. It is not demanding “automatic inflation compensation” until next year.

VC has never seriously fought for its original demand for “uniform wage structures in all Lufthansa operations” in the sense that the top wages of long-serving Lufthansa employees should apply to all.

Instead, it has accepted that the number of aircraft guaranteed to be flown exclusively under the terms of the company collective bargaining agreement be limited to 325. At the same time, Lufthansa CEO Carsten Spohr is working to expand Lufthansa subsidiary CityLine2 as a so-called low-cost carrier in European traffic in order to drive budget carriers like Ryanair out of the market. The new Eurowings Discover subsidiary (formerly “Ocean”) is still flying entirely without a labour contract and is another attempt to undermine crews’ previous achievements.

Lufthansa is a complicated corporate entity with numerous subsidiaries that have increasingly poor pay structures and conditions for pilots and flight attendants. At Germanwings, for example, operations ceased two years ago, and employees were either laid off or taken over by Eurowings on worse terms. Other subsidiaries include Austrian Airlines, Air Dolomiti and SWISS.

Industrial action is also brewing at SWISS, which was taken over by Lufthansa after the Swissair bankruptcy in 2003. Pilots there have been working without a contract since April 2022. With a resounding no vote of 80.5 percent, at the end of July, SWISS pilots rejected a new draft contract which their union Aeropers had accepted and put to a vote. Some 1,150 SWISS pilots are Aeropers members and the turnout for the vote was 94.7 percent.

The great willingness to fight is evident everywhere, and, as at SWISS, is increasingly directed against the business-friendly unions. Not only at airports, but also in nursing, local and long-distance transport and at the ports, anger is growing about the untenable conditions. Recently, port workers in Germany went on strike, and like the Lufthansa ground workers, they demonstrated what power the working class could unleash if it united its struggles.