UK energy price hikes threaten half of small businesses with collapse

Paul Bond

More than half of small companies in Britain fear that rising energy costs coupled with crippling inflation will force them to close. The Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) reports that 53 percent of firms expect to collapse, shrink or, at best, stagnate over the next year. The FSB has warned of “a generation of lost businesses, jobs and potential.”

The FSB estimates that between February 2021 and August 2022, electricity bills have risen by 349 percent, gas bills by 424 percent.

A corner shop in Manchester, UK [Photo: WSWS]

Staggering energy price rises threaten pauperisation and catastrophe for many. Soaring domestic bills will plunge individuals and households into poverty, but the rises will also wipe out many of the small businesses on which those households depend for work and provisions.

Alarm bells are also ringing over the impact on health. NHS bosses have warned that thousands will die this coming winter in a “humanitarian crisis” caused by fuel poverty. A crisis is also developing in the heavily privatised care sector. Between August 2021 and August 2022, annual energy costs per bed rose 683 percent, from £660 to £5,166.

The price rises represent a social and economic disaster. There were already 20,200 fewer businesses between April and June this year than during the same period last year, the largest loss recorded by researchers in five years. The FSB also reports rising applications for credit. Some 11.5 percent of companies made credit applications between April and July this year, up from 9.1 percent in the first quarter. With empty shops accounting for up to one-fifth of some high streets, there have been warnings that this latest development could see the end of many high streets along with family-owned corner shops.

The Association of Convenience Stores (ACS) represents 48,000 local shops employing 405,000 workers. In a letter to Chancellor Nadhim Zahawi it explained that energy bills had surged to an average of £45,000 for smaller members, as “Even a very small store at 1000 sq ft can have annual electricity usage of around 80,000 kWh”. The ASC said, “Energy costs in the convenience sector are set to top £2.5bn by the end of this year, more than doubling from previous levels in 2021.” The letter warned, “Many convenience store retailers, both small and large businesses, are reporting that they are not viable with the increased energy costs they are now facing, and without action to mitigate this we will see villages, housing estates, neighbourhoods and high streets lose their small shops”

Businesses, which may pay 20 percent tax on their energy bills as opposed to the five percent paid by individual households, have faced crippling rises without even the nominal protection of a regulatory price cap.

Domestic bills are nominally capped by the energy regulator Ofgem, which puts an upper price limit on the price per kilowatt hour (kWh) used. This has doubled, from 28 pence to 56 pence per kWh and the cap sets no limit on the actual amount billed. Millions face poverty even under this supposed limitation.

No such regulatory cap exists for businesses and there have been warnings that shop owners and others could face energy bills higher than their mortgage repayments. On current forecasts, some businesses have talked about energy bills four times higher than mortgage repayments on their properties.

Businesses are already reporting astronomical increases in their energy bills. The impact has been staggered, even as businesses work out the remainder of existing contracts with suppliers. While this initially delayed the full extent of the catastrophe from becoming apparent, it has only worsened its impact, allowing the energy companies to hike prices even further during contract renegotiations.

The rises are unsustainable even in the short term. Initial focus on the impact of the rises fell on the hospitality sector, where kitchen and storage costs are an unavoidable outlay. Around 70 percent of pubs surveyed by The Morning Advertiser said they would go bust this winter without support. As one licensee, forced to quit by rising costs, put it, “The cost of everything is rising and we can’t keep passing that on to the customers because people are already suffering. In a cost-of-living crisis, the first thing to go is going to the pub and going out to eat.”

Jonathan Greatorex cut opening hours at the Hand Hotel in Llanarmon, north Wales, when running costs rose from £1,900 to £9,500 per month. Some restaurateurs are now even talking about having to close over Christmas. Greatorex warned that this crisis “will affect the very fabric of society once food shops and petrol stations start to close… And how are households going to manage their bills if people are losing their jobs?”

Andrew Crook closed his fish and chip shop in Coppull, Lancashire after being quoted electricity prices of 80 pence per kWh for daytime usage, nearly eight times the 11.5 p/kWh he pays under contract at another premises. The Coppull shop employed four and a delivery driver.

Energy hikes are an additional burden on top of rising supply and transport costs. Bristol butcher T.& P.A. Murray pointed to rises of 15 percent in the costs of beef and cheese, coupled with an anticipated rise in the shop’s business rates bill, currently £11,000. A tripling of the annual energy bill, from £7,000 to £22,000, was the final straw.

Lily Beaton, who ran a family farm shop in North Yorkshire, told the Daily Mail, “Most small businesses don’t run on big margins.” When the shop’s current energy deal ends this month, their annual bills will rise from £20,000 to £76,000. They realised as soon as they received their first bill that they would be operating at a loss. It was not viable to pass on the cost increases to their customers.

The energy suppliers are raking in immense profits more than £15 billion already this year—and the Conservative government’s sole concern has been that this naked plunder should not trigger a reaction. A Treasury spokesperson told the Guardian that a government round table last month had advised energy bosses that “extraordinarily high bills will ultimately damage energy companies.”

That was simply friendly advice. Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak and their government have dressed up the misery of millions as a contribution to NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine. Armed Forces Minister James Heappey said backing the war against Russia meant “a really expensive winter lies ahead,” which had to be endured by working people “whatever the short-term pain and cost might be.”

This is clearly not being accepted. Hotelier Jonathan Greatorex said, “We can’t just blame this on Russia, energy companies are making billions of pounds of extra profits this year. This is not a luxury item and they have a moral responsibility to do more to help.”

Small businesses are looking in vain to the government for support and assistance. Lily Beaton said, “You watch the news and hope that somebody is going to step in and do something about the energy crisis, but nobody has.” Small business owners that historically may have looked to the Tories as supporting their small-scale free enterprise are now finding themselves the victims of capitalism, which in its systemic crisis is pauperising large sections of the middle class.

The raid against Bolsonaro coup backers and the fight against authoritarianism in Brazil

Tomas Castanheira

A group of eight businessmen backers of Brazil’s fascistic President Jair Bolsonaro became the target, on August 23, of a search and seizure warrant issued by the Supreme Court (STF) Justice and current president of the Superior Electoral Court (TSE), Alexandre de Moraes.

The judicial action was motivated by messages exchanged in a private WhatsApp group and leaked by Metrópoles, in which the businessmen openly defended the establishment of an authoritarian dictatorship led by Bolsonaro in Brazil. In addition to the searches, the warrant ordered the breaking of bank secrecy and the blocking of social networks of its targets.

Marines display military hardware in the streets of Brasilia in run-up to Independence Day. (Credit: Fabio Rodrigues-Pozzebom/ Agência Brasil)

One month before the presidential elections in the country, this episode has laid bare the high degree of political crisis within the Brazilian ruling class.

Moraes’ action represents a nervous response by a section of the ruling elite to Bolsonaro’s ongoing plans to overturn the election. Despite endless assurances in the bourgeois media that these open threats and systematic preparations are unrealizable boasting, an electoral coup attempt is undeniably underway.

The response of the bourgeois opposition to the authoritarian attacks of the president does not imply any revival of democracy in Brazil. On the contrary, based on the need to suppress the unstoppable class conflict in the country, the political forces behind the actions taken by Moraes seek to oppose Bolsonaro’s openly fascist attacks by strengthening the bourgeois state apparatus at the expense of democratic freedoms and the right to political opposition.

Moraes’ decision against the businessmen, released to the public earlier this week, was based on a request made by senator Randolfe Rodrigues (Rede) and other requests signed by the Workers Party (PT) president, Gleisi Hoffmann, and congress members from the PT and the Socialism and Freedom Party (PSOL). These documents make explicit the degree of submission of these pseudo-left political forces to the reactionary Brazilian bourgeois state.

It was on the request of Randolfe, also a coordinator of Lula’s presidential campaign, that Moraes decreed the breaking of bank secrecy and blocking of the social media of those being investigated. He based his request solely on the “facts reported... in Guilherme Amado’s column” in Metrópoles, i.e., on leaked messages that express clear support fora coup d’état, but no concrete evidence of involvement in the preparations of such coup.

The Rede senator concluded that to “establish the group’s relationship with antidemocratic acts, especially their financing.... [the] present Inquiry, which investigates the attacks on the democratic regime, is the best instrument.”

A similar opinion was expressed by PSOL congresswomen Fernanda Melchionna, Sâmia Bomfim and Vivi Reis, all belonging to the Morenoite current Socialist Left Movement (MES). They wrote to Moraes as follows: “Considering the content of Inquiry 4.874/DF, of your responsibility ... we request you to consider adding the investigative procedure in order to verify the probable criminal practices of the businessmen cited in its core, taking all the necessary steps not only to establish due criminal responsibility, but to take all the measures you deem appropriate to ensure that the result of the 2022 election is fully respected and fulfilled”[our emphasis].

The confidence placed by these sections of the pseudo-left in Moraes is striking. The inquiry hailed by them on the pretext of confronting “fake news” and “anti-democratic attacks” is being conducted behind the closed doors of the judicial system and behind the backs of the people. Its results include authoritarian attacks, such as the banning of the Workers Cause Party (PCO)on social media for questioning the STF and Moraes’ own attacks on free speech, and advances toward internet censorship.

Moraes’ background is definitely not that of a champion of democracy. He was the head of the Security Secretariat of the São Paulo state government under Geraldo Alckmin, now Lula’s vice-presidential candidate. Moraes has been an open advocate of the brutal use of military-police force, and his tenure as Security secretary was marked by intensified violent repression of political demonstrations along with a sharp rise in police killings. He briefly assumed leadership of Michel Temer’s Justice Ministry in 2016, after the impeachment of the PT’s Dilma Rousseff, before being appointed as an STF Justice.

By trying to get rid of Bolsonaro by means that exclude the political participation of the working masses and relying on backroom maneuvers to confront the fascistic threats, the pseudo-left reveals its aversion not only to socialist but to basic democratic principles.

But there is also an element of self-deception in these measures, an attempt to cover up the inconvenient truths that have come to light. The leaked messages from the pro-coup businessmen’s group revealed the falsity of the illusions promoted by the PT and the PSOL with their “Letters for Democracy” signed together with union bureaucrats and capitalist organizations. These letters preach the complacent idea that Bolsonaro’s coup maneuvers have no real backing from within the Brazilian bourgeoisie and military and are opposed by US and world imperialism.

In the leaked messages, one businessman exclaimed, “I prefer a coup to the return of the PT. A million times. And for sure nobody will stop doing business with Brazil. Like they do with many dictatorships around the world.” Another said: “September 7th is being programmed to unite the people and the Army and at the same time make clear which side the Army is on. Great strategy and the stage will be Rio. The iconic Brazilian city internationally. It will make it very clear.”

The aforementioned September 7 demonstration, commemorating the 200th anniversary of Brazil’s independence, is being prepared as the first act of Bolsonaro’s coup attempt. The president and his supporters have called on their fascist ranks to take to the streets “for the last time,” with a main march organized in Rio de Janeiro to coincide with a massive military parade. Billboards in Brasilia are promoting the protests with the phrases it “is now or never” and for a “second independence of Brazil,” a reference to the overthrow of the current regime.

Notably, the United States accepted an invitation to join the Brazilian Navy parade in Copacabana. Three days later, the US military will participate in the Unitas naval exercise with 20 other countries in Rio de Janeiro and will send in advance two warships for Brazil’s Independence Day.

The presence of the American warships inevitably evokes the memory of the US support for the 1964 military coup in Brazil. It included Operation Brother Sam, through which the United States planned the sending of a Navy fleet to the Rio de Janeiro coast to back the Brazilian military’s insurgency against President-elect João Goulart.

Although Washington does not intend to send representatives to Bolsonaro’s platform, the US participation in the military parade will provide critical legitimacy to the pro-coup demonstrations. As admitted by Brazil’s Eastern Military Commander, Gen. André Luis Novaes de Miranda, the separation of the military event from the Bolsonaro supporters’ protest is “unfeasible.”

According to Folha de São Paulo, “American diplomacy feared the association between their presence and the president’s coup speech against the electoral system,” but they agreed to participate out of “diplomatic embarrassment.” The newspaper continues to assure, however, that “the fact is that the US gave unequivocal signs of disapproval of the president’s campaign against the electoral system.”

But if the United States could be “constrained” to participate in act that it acknowledges will be channeled behind Bolsonaro’s coup threats, the businessman’s claim that “for sure nobody will stop doing business with Brazil, as they do it with several dictatorships around the world” is being significantly substantiated.

The attitude of the pseudo-left towards the threats posed by the Independence Day events is again that of criminal complacency. Dismissing the grave anti-democratic attacks as mere fodder for the PT’s electoral “opportunities,” Randolfe declared, according to Folha, that “September 7 could be a watershed in the electoral campaign, should ‘Bolsonaro’s coup intentions’ be confirmed, because the PT campaign could attract votes from candidates like Ciro Gomes (PDT) and Simone Tebet (MDB).”

Unsealed list shows thousands of government documents seized by FBI from Trump’s Florida compound

Barry Grey

On Friday, US District Judge Aileen Cannon released a previously sealed court document giving a more detailed list of government documents seized by the FBI in the August 8 search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago private residence and resort.

The seven-page list shows that the ex-president was illegally holding more than 11,000 government documents at his private club, including over a hundred marked “secret,” “top secret,” “confidential” or “classified.” The document also listed scores of empty folders marked either “classified” or “return to staff secretary/military aide.”

Marine One lifts-off after returning President Donald J. Trump to Mar-a-Lago Friday, March 29, 2019, following his visit to the 143-mile Herbert Hoover Dike near Canal Point, Fla., that surrounds Lake Okeechobee (Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian)

Significantly, many state secret documents, as well as non-classified government records, were recovered from Trump’s office at Mar-a-Lago, in addition to the many more found in the basement storage room of the compound. According to the unsealed list, seven “top secret” documents, 17 “secret” documents and three documents marked “confidential” were taken from the office, as well as 43 empty folders marked “classified” and 28 folders with the marking “return to staff secretary/military aide.”

This confirms the claim by Department of Justice (DOJ) prosecutors included in their August 30 brief to Judge Cannon that Trump and his lawyers lied to the DOJ when they handed over a packet of classified documents in early June and claimed to be in compliance with a subpoena issued the previous month demanding the return of all classified presidential records being held at the Trump compound. A Trump lawyer issued a sworn affirmation that the compound had been diligently searched and all classified documents had been removed, and any remaining government records were securely stored in the basement storage room.

As documented in the unsealed list released Friday, highly classified documents were scattered among boxes of assorted government records, photographs, news articles, magazines, etc. From the standpoint of the capitalist state and its intelligence agencies, such treatment of sensitive material, possibly including “signals intelligence” on foreign leaders and reports from spies, is anathema.

The Presidential Records Act passed in 1978 following the Watergate crisis declared that presidential records were the property of the US government, and not the personal property of the individual occupying the White House, either during or after his or her tenure.

In the affidavit submitted last month to US District Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart arguing for the search warrant that was used in the August 8 raid, the DOJ cited Trump’s months-long delay in handing over documents requested by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and other evidence to claim probable cause to prosecute for violations of the Espionage Act and obstruction of justice. In the August 30 brief to Judge Cannon, the DOJ brought forward the obstruction charge, reviewing Trump’s record of non-compliance with subpoenas and false statements to government agents about the documents.

Justice Department lawyers made this argument in opposition to filings by Trump lawyers urging Cannon, a Trump appointee, to appoint a third-party “special master” to review all seized documents over the ex-president’s claims of executive privilege and/or attorney-client privilege and, in the interim, halt the government’s review of the documents.

The DOJ argued that executive privilege did not apply, since both Trump was and the Justice Department is part of the executive branch and executive privilege is traditionally invoked against claims by Congress on the president.

As for attorney-client privilege, Justice Department official Jay Bratt told Judge Cannon at a closed-door hearing Thursday that 64 sets of documents, comprising some 520 pages, had already been separated out as possibly protected by that provision, and in any event the DOJ had already reviewed the documents seized on August 8 during the two weeks before Trump filed his brief for a special master.

In their brief to Judge Cannon, the DOJ lawyers said they would have no objection to having the more detailed list of documents seized from Mar-a-Lago unsealed, evidently believing it would help their case.

Trump’s legal team submitted an 18-page filing to Judge Cannon Wednesday night, flatly asserting that the contested documents were Trump’s “own presidential records” and denouncing the August 8 raid on Mar-a-Lago as “illegitimate.”

In the course of the two-hour hearing on Thursday, one of Trump’s lawyers compared his client’s repeated failure to return government documents to NARA or fully comply with the grand jury subpoena for classified documents with holding onto an “overdue library book.”

Judge Cannon indicated she was inclined to grant some form of third party review to Trump’s legal team and challenged the DOJ’s categorical rejection of executive privilege, but said she would issue a written decision some time in the future and that, in the meantime, the Justice Department’s review of the documents could continue.

The Republican Party leadership continues to seize on the August 8 raid to incite the fascistic layers in the party’s base, citing it as proof that it is the “radical left” Democratic Party, not Trump and Republicans, who are attacking democracy. Speaking in a contested congressional district in Scranton, Pennsylvania Thursday in a prebuttal of Biden’s nationally televised speech later that evening, Republican House Leader Kevin McCarthy said, “Joe Biden and the radical left in Washington are dismantling Americans’ democracy before our very eyes.”

Meanwhile, the Democrats are lurching ever further to the right, seeking to unite with Republicans to impose the full burden of the economic crisis, runaway inflation and the cost of the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine on the working class. Democrat Matt Castelli, running for US Congress in New York state against Trump acolyte and House Republican Chair Elise Stefanik, is touting the campaign slogan “Country before Party” and boasting of his years with the CIA and his military tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. His campaign site features his tenure as counterintelligence head of the National Security Council under first Obama and then Trump.

Democratic Ohio Congressman Tim Ryan, running for Senate against Trump fascist J. D. Vance, is emphasizing his votes for Trump’s trade war measures and anti-China tariffs.

Hong Kong PhD Fellowship Scheme 2023/2024

Application Deadline: 1st December 2022 at Hong Kong Time 12:00:00

Offered Annually? Yes

About Hong Kong PhD Fellowship Scheme: The Hong Kong PhD Fellowship Scheme (HKPFS), established in 2009 by the Research Grants Council (RGC), aims at attracting the best and brightest students in the world to pursue their PhD programmes in Hong Kong’s institutions. About 300 PhD Fellowships will be awarded this academic year. For awardees who need more than three years to complete the PhD degree, additional support may be provided by the chosen institutions. The financial aid is available for any field of study.

Eligibility: Candidates who are seeking admission as new full time PhD students in the following eight institutions, irrespective of their country of origin, prior work experience, and ethnic background, should be eligible to apply.

• City University of Hong Kong
• Hong Kong Baptist University
• Lingnan University
• The Chinese University of Hong Kong
• The Education University of Hong Kong
• The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
• The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
• The University of Hong Kong

Applicants should demonstrate outstanding qualities of academic performance, research ability / potential, communication and interpersonal skills, and leadership abilities.

Selection Criteria: While candidates’ academic excellence is the primary consideration, the Selection Panels will take into account factors as follows:

• Academic excellence;
• Research ability and potential;
• Communication and interpersonal skills; and
• Leadership abilities.

Number of Awards: 300

Value of Hong Kong PhD Fellowship Scheme:

The Fellowship provides an annual stipend of HK$325,200 (approximately US$41,690) and a conference and research-related travel allowance of HK$13,600 (approximately US$1,740) per year for each awardee for a period up to three years. 300 PhD Fellowships will be awarded in the 2023/24 academic year*. For awardees who need more than three years to complete the PhD degree, additional support may be provided by the chosen universities. For details, please contact the universities concerned directly.

Selection Panel: Shortlisted applications, subject to their areas of studies, will be reviewed by one of the following two Selection Panels comprising experts in the relevant board areas:

• sciences, medicine, engineering and technology
• humanities, social sciences and business studies

Application Process for Hong Kong PhD Fellowship Scheme:

• Eligible candidates should first make an Initial Application online through the Hong Kong PhD Fellowship Scheme Electronic System (HKPFSES) to obtain an HKPFS Reference Number by 1 December 2022 at Hong Kong Time 12:00:00 before submitting applications for PhD admission to their desired universities.
• Applicants may choose up to two programmes / departments at one or two universities for PhD study under HKPFS 2023/24. They should comply with the admission requirements of their selected universities and programmes.
• As the deadlines for applications to some of the universities may immediately follow that of the Initial Application, candidates should submit initial applications as early as possible to ensure that they have sufficient time to submit applications to universities.

Visit Scholarship webpage for more details

Mexico’s “Truth Commission” on 43 disappeared Ayotzinapa students—what it does and does not reveal

Don Knowland

On August 18, to considerable fanfare, the Mexican government released the report of its “Truth Commission” concerning the disappearance of 43 Ayotzinapa rural teaching students in the southern state of Guerrero in September 2014.

The report concedes that the persecution and disappearance of the Ayotzinapa 43 was a “state crime,” involving local officials and military units, and that the government of then President Enrique Peña Nieto pursued a deliberate policy of concealment of the crime and obstruction of justice.

But the report fails to address the roles in the cover-up of the Mexican Secretariat of National Defense, the military brass, and the national intelligence agency, then known as CISEN.

On September 26, 2014, the students left Ayotzinapa to take part in a demonstration in Mexico City to commemorate the October 2, 1968 massacre of students by military and federal police and paramilitary units. Their progress was monitored by federal and state police, and an informant infiltrated into their school by the military was along for the journey.

When the students reached the City of Iguala, they borrowed a local bus for the rest of their journey, a common occurrence. It appears the bus had drugs of a local gang on it, the Guerreros Unidos. Municipal police rounded up and arrested the students. This much is agreed upon.

A handful of the students were killed in the city, and the rest were handed by police over to the gang, who burned their bodies at a landfill site near the neighboring town of Cocula. At least this was the version of events promoted by the Peña Nieto government, which it dubbed the “historical truth.”

In fact, the investigation at the time was plagued by irregularities and human rights violations. Instead of seeking the truth, the federal investigation sought to conceal it, and particularly the role of the military and federal police in these events.

An Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI) was appointed by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in 2015, which questioned the official version of events from its inception, and presented exhaustive criticisms of the investigations carried out. Based on forensic analysis, the GIEI flatly rejected the theory that the students had been cremated, on the grounds that it was impossible in the circumstances described by the Mexican authorities.

The GIEI’s efforts in 2015 and 2016 also revealed the Mexican government’s falsification of records, destruction of evidence, and systematic use of torture against detainees and suspects throughout the official investigation.

For years, the parents of the Ayotzinapa 43 pursued the truth, while holding onto slim hopes that some of the students might still be alive. They staged continuous marches and protests, and the Mexican population overall supported their quest for justice.

Shortly after he came into office in December 2018, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, known as AMLO, announced the formation of the “Commission for Truth and Access to Justice.” A special unit in the federal Attorney General’s Office was set up to manage the investigation.

The Truth Commission proceeded at a tortoise pace over the next three and a half years, reflecting continued resistance in the higher echelons of the state. This pace and lack of results further frustrated the Ayotzinapa parents, extending their grief.

In March 2022, the GIEI presented its third report on the case, exposing in detail the involvement of high-level government officials and institutions in the cover-up. Its revelations included documentation of the Mexican military’s infiltration and surveillance of the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers College before, during and after the events in Iguala in September of 2014, as well as the manipulation of the alleged Cocula crime scene by members of the Mexican Navy, the branch of the military popularly considered as the least corrupt in Mexico.

The GIEI concluded that the military and police collaborated with gangs to kidnap and massacre the students; that “all information was obtained through torture” by the Ministry of Defense; and that the arrest warrants issued were “falsified.” It also found that 20 key witnesses, including several suspects, had been murdered.

Finally, this month, AMLO’s government belatedly released the report of its Truth Commission. The report conceded that the disappearance of 43 Ayotzinapa teacher training students was in fact a “state crime,” and its investigation was a deliberate cover-up.

Since the report was released, other grisly facts have emerged. For example, Human Rights Undersecretary Alejandro Encinas let slip that six of the 43 college students “disappeared” in 2014 were kept alive in a warehouse for days and then turned over to the local army commander, Col. José Rodriguez Pérez, who ordered them killed.

On August 19, at the request of the federal Attorney General, an arrest warrant was issued against the former federal Public Prosecutor, Jesus Murillo Karam, considered the architect of the initial investigation and its “Historical Truth” falsification.

Warrants were also requested and issued against 20 local military commanders and military personnel from the 27th and 41st Battalions in the city of Iguala, as well as five administrative and judicial officials from the state of Guerrero; 26 police officials from the nearby municipality of Huitzuco; six from Iguala and one from Cocula; plus 11 state police officials from Guerrero and 14 members of the criminal group Guerreros Unidos.

Apart from Murrillo Karam, a sacrificial lamb of sorts, the search warrants extend only to local officials and officers.

Despite subsequently calling for “patience,” AMLO declared that the findings of the commission don’t even “merit an investigation” of Peña Nieto himself. Moreover, no action has been hinted at against the head of security of the Mexico City government controlled by AMLO’s Morena party, Omar Harfuch. Implicated in the prosecution hearing against Karam for participating in the October 7, 2014 meeting with Karam and other top officials where the “historical truth” was born, Harfuch was also head of the Federal Police in Guerrero during the Ayotzinapa events.

Likewise, conspicuously absent from any scrutiny or prosecution are those who sat at the highest levels of the defense ministry, the military chiefs, and in the national intelligence agency. It would beggar belief to conclude that these layers were not fully informed of the true course of events in 2014, and particularly as to the role of the local military units in the murder of the students. At minimum, they covered up, but they retain impunity.

Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos, who was the Secretary of Defense under Peña Nieto, that is, during the time of the Ayotzinapa killings and cover-up, is one of them. In 2005-2007, Cienfuegos commanded the IXth Military Region, headquartered in Acapulco, Guerrero. He allegedly protected the Sinaloa Cartel (headed by “Chapo” Guzman) and the related Beltrán-Leyva Cartel (headed by Guzman’s cousins), which controlled the Guerrero region at the time.

In November 2020, AMLO pressured the US to release Cienfuegos, despite clear evidence that he was being paid to protect and directly facilitate drug shipments by the H-2 cartel, a Beltran-Leyva offshoot. Once the Trump administration dropped the charges and returned Cienfuegos to Mexico, AMLO exonerated him.

More generally, these layers are protected because AMLO’s rule increasingly rests upon the Mexican military. He created a militarized National Guard which he now seeks to move from the Public Security Ministry to the Defense Ministry. And he is seeking to extend the domestic deployment of the Army and Navy beyond the 2024 limit that he decreed in 2020.

These moves reveal an authoritarian course on AMLO’s part, and ultimately his reliance on the military to suppress any threat of working class unrest.

Ayotzinapa is a powerful symbol of state-sponsored criminality in Mexico, and a decades-long history of its government’s suppression of popular resistance to class oppression.

It reveals the injustice and impunity emblematic of the pervasive problem of forced disappearances that occur daily throughout the country, which exceeded 100,000 people under Peña Nieto, and have only increased under López Obrador.

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.