Thousands of demonstrators from across Peru march “to take Lima”

Andrea Lobo

Protests in Peru have escalated continuously in tandem with the murderous repression unleashed by the US-backed Dina Boluarte regime. Demonstrations, strikes and roadblocks have led to calls and preparations for a “march to take Lima,” the country’s capital.

Demonstrators in Lima denounce Army and police massacres [Photo: Mayimbú] [Photo by Mayimbú / CC BY-SA 4.0]

Demonstrations rapidly expanded in the southern Puno region in the Andes, whose population is predominantly Quechua and Aymara-speaking. Puno is also one of the poorest regions in the country, with nearly half of the population living under the official poverty line.

On January 9, in response to the blocking of all roads to Juliaca, the region’s main commercial center, the police used live ammunition against demonstrators, killing at least 18.

The ashes of a policeman and his vehicle were found the following morning in the city, bringing the total number of confirmed deaths in the protests to 49. At least 41 demonstrators have been killed and about 600 have been wounded by gunfire.

The Juliaca massacre has unleashed an escalation of the protests, which erupted one month ago in response to the December 7 coup against President Pedro Castillo. Protesters have demanded the resignation of Boluarte and the Congress, immediate general elections and a constituent assembly.

Last week, roadblocks gradually spread from the southernmost Puno region to the rest of the country, including important economic chokepoints at the Bolivian border in Puno and the Chilean border in Tacna, as well as the northern Amazonian region.

Despite violent efforts by security forces to reopen the roads, gas and food shortages have already been reported in the southeast, while inter-provincial and local public transportation has shut down in Arequipa, Puno and other parts of southern Peru.

Flowing from the logic of the struggle, protesters are increasingly targeting the economic and political centers of the country, and an “indefinite strike” has been called, arising out of the impromptu discussions in plazas, community halls and the roadblocks themselves. Local mayors, other political officials and leaders of trade unions have been compelled to go along for now, while attempting to raise the prospect for dialogue with the regime.

The national leadership of the General Confederation of Peruvian Workers (CGTP) was further discredited for acknowledging Boluarte after the coup and holding talks with her. The bureaucracy, which is nothing but an appendage of the corporations, has since sought to distance itself from Boluarte.

In an interview with Reuters, José Luis Chapa, secretary of the Arequipa Workers Federation, suggested that the government needs to convoke elections this year “if it wants dialogue.”

While demanding his liberation from prison, nowhere are demonstrators even raising the restoring of Castillo to the presidency. His record as another bourgeois politician subordinated to the oligarchy and the mining corporations, including his deployment of troops against demonstrators, is undebatable. Nonetheless, local leaders of so-called Defense Fronts and the pseudo-left in Peru and internationally have sought to exploit the anger and political confusion to again promote illusions in Castillo.

Most recently, demonstrators in the towns and the indigenous Aymara and Quechua communities in the south have called for a march to “take Lima” and forcibly oust Boluarte and Congress. Since Sunday, thousands have joined caravans from across the country and are heading to the capital, as the police and military seek to intercept them with checkpoints.

Demonstrators north and south of Lima have also established roadblocks along the Pan-American highway, but have not so far tried to systematically surround the city.

Local indigenous leaders have called the caravans the “March of the Four Corners,” which was the name of mass demonstrations in Lima in the year 2000 against the authoritarian regime of Alberto Fujimori. While triggered by electoral fraud that year, social anger had accumulated against Fujimori over the privatization of the mines and other public enterprises, social cuts and his use of massacres to suppress social opposition.

The present eruption in Peru is driven by rampant social inequality and hostility to the ruling oligarchy and the mining corporations. Alongside a growing number of dollar billionaires and some of the largest mineral deposits in the world, 51 percent of the population suffers from food insecurity, according to the UN.

“They want to sell us to the transnational corporations. We will not allow this. We are fighting for our children and grandchildren,” a caravan participant in Arequipa told Telesur.

Production in the key mining region around Arequipa, an epicenter of the protests, has already seen disruptions. Last week, the road to Cerro Verde, the largest copper mine in the country, owned by US-based Freeport, was blocked at intervals.

On Thursday, Swiss-based Glencore said that it had evacuated its Antapaccay copper mine, the fifth largest in the country, after demonstrators invaded it and set fire to two vehicles. Communities near the Las Bambas mine, the third largest, have threatened to disrupt its activities.

Fearing an offensive against the mines, most of which are located in some of the poorest regions of the country, like Cajamarca, Apurímac, Pira, Cusco, Junín and La Libertad, the companies are calling for a harsher crackdown.

The National Association of Mining, Oil and Energy (SNMPE) released a statement last Friday ranting about “blackmail and anarchy” and an “escalation of vandalism and terror that has forced Peru to mourn.” The employer group demanded a return of the “rule of law, the principle of authority and rules, in an environment of social peace,” as well as an end to the “impunity under which the violent groups operate.”

Behind these hysterical calls for repression lies the high demand for metals and minerals, intensified by supply chain disruptions caused by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the US-NATO war in Ukraine against Russia, and labor shortages. Peru is the second-largest producer of copper, and a major producer of key minerals like silver, gold, zinc, lead and tin.

Responding to these demands, the Boluarte regime extended the state of emergency for another month in the departments of Lima, Cusco, Callao and Puno, suspending democratic rights and authorizing military repression.

The corporate media and the ultra-right Fujimoristas in Congress and the state apparatus, who are dictating the policies of the regime, have ramped up their denunciations of demonstrators as “terrorists,” “communists,” and minions of Bolivian ex-president Evo Morales, whose entry into the country was denied. Without presenting any evidence, Boluarte and the far right have claimed that Morales is helping funnel weapons to demonstrators and fomenting “separatism.”

Hundreds of arrests of alleged leaders of the protests and raids of local organizations have taken place on the basis of these fraudulent accusations. Books of Marx, Lenin and Mao have been cited as “proof” of ties to terrorism.

In reality, the protests remain largely uncoordinated and leaderless. As reported recently by La Jornada, Boluarte’s former intelligence chief, General Wilson Barrantes Mendoza, said that “the intelligence agencies never identified any party or Senderista [Maoist guerrilla] movement or any central organization that was coordinating the demonstrations.” There are also no indications that demonstrators anywhere have been armed.

The bloodthirsty frenzy of the ruling elite is a sign of weakness and desperation under conditions in which all of its political parties and institutions, including the trade union bureaucracy, are totally discredited, and Peruvian capitalism offers nothing to the impoverished urban and rural masses but hunger, disease and militarized repression.

The Boluarte regime has offered not even a hint of democratic or social reforms. Instead, the Peruvian ruling class and US imperialism are following a similar script to that of the 2019 coup against Evo Morales in Bolivia.

Concluding that Morales and his Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) party had become discredited and were increasingly unable to contain social opposition, Washington set out to overthrow them. The Organization of American States (OAS), an appendix of the State Department, claimed that Morales had perpetrated electoral fraud, which led to demands by the right-wing parties, the military and even the pro-MAS Bolivian Workers Central (COB) for his resignation.

The resignation of Morales, who escaped to Mexico, set the stage for brutal massacres with the use of live ammunition, and mass arrests against demonstrators under the US-backed coup regime of Jeanine Áñez. Eleven months later, in the face of mass demands for new elections, the MAS was restored to power under Luis Arce in October 2020. Little more than two years later, he now faces renewed coup threats from the far right, while popular support for his government has recently fallen from 47 to 40 percent, according to a poll that cites inflation and “instability” as the main reasons.

In Peru, days before the December 7 coup, the OAS explicitly rejected giving any support to Castillo against a trumped-up impeachment drive. The US Embassy then took the initiative, denouncing Castillo’s preemptive attempt to dissolve Congress, while signaling to the military and police to oppose Castillo. Congress, Washington and the European Union then swiftly acknowledged Boluarte as the new president.

The experience with Castillo in Peru, just as with the MAS in Bolivia, Gabriel Boric in Chile and their counterparts elsewhere, demonstrates that the second “Pink Tide” in Latin America is nothing but a card being played by the capitalist ruling elites to buy time and prepare for dictatorship as they continue to impose the deepening crisis of global capitalism onto the backs of workers.

Capitalism can provide no progressive way out of the present crisis. Despite Peru’s enormous mineral and agricultural wealth, the COVID-19 pandemic, inflation and the crisis of grains and fertilizers due to the war in Ukraine have demonstrated the country’s dependence on the global economy.

US Department of Education publishes plan to revise income-based student loan payments

Alex Findijs

The Biden administration and the Department of Education (DOE) have released a proposal to overhaul student loan payment plans. The Revised Pay As You Earn (REPAYE) program would be extensively restructured to reduce monthly payments for student loan borrowers as well as the time needed to qualify for loan forgiveness for some.

The proposal comes as the Biden administration’s much-touted plan to forgive a portion of the massive debt burden on students remains blocked in the courts, a situation accepted by the Democratic Party without any opposition. It also coincides with a mounting crisis in the vast student loan market that is placing severe strains on the financial system.

The current REPAYE plan requires borrowers to pay 10 percent of their discretionary income each month, defined as income minus 150 percent of the poverty line ($20,400 a year), with the possibility of qualifying for forgiveness of the remaining amount after 20 years for undergraduate loans and 25 years for graduate loans.

Under the proposed revisions, the monthly payments would be reduced to 5 percent of discretionary income for undergraduate and 10 percent for graduate loans. Any combination of both would result in a percentage based on a weighted average of the two.

In addition, the discretionary income adjustment would be raised to 225 percent of the federal poverty line ($30,500), and those making less than $30,500 as an individual or $62,400 as a family of four would not have to pay any money towards their loan.

Any borrowers at least 75 days in delinquency on their loans would be automatically enrolled in the program and borrowers who have defaulted on their loans would be eligible for the first time to enroll in REPAYE.

President Joe Biden with Education Secretary Miguel Cardona [AP Photo/Susan Walsh]

The most significant changes to REPAYE will be in the time it takes to qualify for forgiveness and in regards to interest payments on loans.

Those with $12,000 or less in loans would be granted an expedited path to loan forgiveness after 10 years instead of 20. Every $1,000 dollars above $12,000 would add an extra year to the qualification requirement, capping out at the current maximum of 20 years for undergraduates and 25 years for graduates.

Arguably the most notable change is in interest payment requirements. A common complaint of issuers of income-based payment plans is that the monthly payment often fails to cover the interest on the loan, which typically runs around 5 percent, but can reach as high as 6.54 percent for graduate loans and 7.54 percent for parent PLUS loans.

The impact of interest on loan payments is so onerous that many borrowers, even after years of regular payments, still have tens of thousands of dollars in outstanding loans, or even owe more than when they took out the loan.

Under the proposed changes, if an income-based payment is not sufficient to cover the monthly interest, the federal government will waive the interest payment and take on responsibility for it. If implemented, this policy would prevent interest from accruing and help reduce the burden of loan payments for participants.

In its proposal document, the DOE explains that it hopes the plan will help ease the financial strain that student loan payments place on millions of Americans. Student loan debt in the United States has surpassed $1.7 trillion and continues to grow, as the cost of higher education increases every year.

The proposed changes to the REPAYE program touch on issues that student loan borrowers have raised for years. However, the real impact of the program is far less than it promises.

The DOE claims the $12,000, 10-year plan will benefit low income and minority populations. However, according to the DOE’s proposal, only 8 percent of borrowers would become eligible for the 10-year expedited forgiveness. More than 42 percent of borrowers would still not become eligible for forgiveness until after 20 years of payments, and a further 38 percent only after 25 years.

There are doubts about how many people will actually see any forgiveness at all, even under the more relaxed program. An investigative report by National Public Radio last year found that the number of people ever approved for forgiveness totals just 32!

NPR’s investigation also found that three companies with contracts to manage federal student loans—PHEAA, CornerStone, and MOHELA—were not keeping track of borrowers’ payments. This meant that borrowers would have to request the company in charge of their loan to conduct an intensive review of payment records just to determine how much money was actually still owed.

Roughly 4.4 million people have been paying off Income Driven Repayment plans for over 20 years, and errors in payment accounting mean that many may be making payments on debt that they do not even owe.

The Biden administration has issued plans to reform the amount of paperwork in loan processing, but no real efforts have been made to correct the vast failures in student loan payment tracking.

Without substantial changes to the way student loan payments are accounted for it is impossible to place trust in the proposed changes to REPAYE. Even with payments and interest relaxed, there is little reason to believe that the new rules will lead to greater rates of student loan forgiveness and lower total payments. Amidst the numerous issues with student loan debt and payments, a promise of “eligibility” for debt forgiveness rings hollow.

An additional detail of note that has largely been ignored by news coverage is that the DOE’s release of the formal proposal included references to future plans to slash federal funding to education programs with low “financial value.”

The DOE statement declared that is is “currently working on a proposed gainful employment regulation that would cut off federal financial aid to career training programs that fail to provide sufficient financial value and require warnings for borrowers who attend any program that leaves graduates with excessive debts.”

It added that the department is taking steps to “publish a list of the programs at all types of colleges and universities that provide the least financial value to students,” and that it will take public comment how best to determine which programs provide the “least financial value.” Once produced, “institutions with programs on this list will be asked to submit improvement plans to the Department to improve their financial value.”

This is a thinly veiled attack on higher education in the arts and humanities. “Low financial value” is a dog whistle from the Biden administration and a capitulation to the far right’s decades-long attack on education.

Programs that have “low financial value” will be in theater, music, literature, history, philosophy, social work, education, psychology, sociology and other fields in the social sciences and arts. Such fields of work and study do not necessarily offer high “financial value” to students, but are a critical part of any functioning society.

China’s abandonment of Zero-COVID and imperialist hypocrisy

Niles Niemuth

A medical official from China’s National Health Commission (NHC) reported Saturday that China had recorded nearly 60,000 fatalities linked to COVID-19 between December 8 and January 12, the month since the country completely lifted its strict “Zero-COVID” policy, accelerating an outbreak that is believed to have infected millions of people. 

The disclosure by Jiao Yahui, head of the NHC’s medical affairs department, was the first time the Chinese government has provided an official measure of the COVID wave now sweeping the country.

By itself, the figure of 60,000 dead in a few weeks is a staggering sum, 30 times greater than the reported COVID-19 deaths for all of China since the start of the pandemic. However, the real death toll is likely to be much higher.

Reliable infection and fatality reporting in China has been abandoned over the past several months. Even the figure given by Jiao was broken down between those who died “with” and “from” COVID, a false distinction with no scientific medical basis pioneered by the far right in the United States.  

This death toll is an indictment of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) abandonment of its Zero-COVID policy, which had proven effective in suppressing the spread of the coronavirus. While most governments adopted a homicidal “let it rip” approach to the pandemic, resulting in more than 6.7 million reported deaths globally, billions in China were able to live relatively free from the virus. 

Now, reports of the virus ripping through workplaces, long lines at hospitals and overwhelmed morgues are spreading through social media. Health officials in Henan Province announced that 90 percent of the region's nearly 100 million residents had been infected as of January 6. With an expected 2.1 billion trips by travelers crisscrossing the country during the Chinese New Year holiday, which begins on January 22, COVID-19 will rip through every neighborhood, city and village.

While the CCP bears responsibility for this disaster, the mass infection policy was implemented under the demands of the US and the other imperialist powers.

The underlying driving force behind the reopening was on display this week, with China’s Vice Premier Liu He addressing the gathering of billionaires at the World Economic Forum in Davos, proclaiming the end of Zero-COVID and that China would be fully open for business. “China is pursuing common prosperity … opening up to entrepreneurs,” he reassured his audience.

Among the loudest in beating the drum for the abandonment of public health measures was the Washington Post, which published an editorial board statement in early November 2022 demanding that China abandon Zero-COVID, claiming, “It isn’t working.” Small middle class protests later that month against COVID lockdowns trumpeted by the western media were seized on by the CCP bureaucracy to do just that. 

However, having adopted the mass infection policies demanded by global finance capital, the Chinese government is being further attacked and denounced by the US media. If President Xi Jinping and the CCP leadership thought their acquiescence would win them any breathing space, they were wrong.

The United States and a number of other countries have responded by placing new testing restrictions on travelers from China, even as they allow the more infectious XBB.1.5 subvariant of Omicron to spread unimpeded.

Dripping with hypocrisy, the same editorial board that demanded China let the virus rip now denounces Beijing for undercounting infections and deaths. The Washington Post wrote on Monday: 

Dishonesty about the true breadth of the pandemic in China constitutes a threat to public health worldwide. Scientists need to know whether transmission patterns have changed, new variants have emerged or the incidence of long covid has increased. Epidemiologists must be able to assess whether the world should prepare for a new global outbreak. And the people of China deserve to know the true scale of the calamity descending on their country.

This entire paragraph would apply with even greater force if references to “China” were replaced with “United States.”  Under the policy advocated by the Washington Post more than 1.1 million have unnecessarily died. It has resulted in an overwhelmed health care system with burned out medical workers, bodies piling up in refrigerator trucks and a mass grave on New York City’s Hart Island.

The Post complains that China’s reported death toll under Zero-COVID of 5,200 was “absurdly low.” However, this low death toll, which was highly accurate until the abandonment of Zero-COVID, was the outcome of the comprehensive measures taken to prevent the population from becoming infected en masse with a deadly virus, something which was never attempted in the US or in much of the world.

The editorial board then declares that “zero covid could not go on indefinitely,” this despite its effectiveness and the policy’s popularity among the Chinese population.

In fact, the Post has played a critical role in promoting the policy of “forever COVID” pioneered in the US which is now having such a devastating impact in China.

Just three days before their editorial denouncing China, the Post published an article by Dr. Leana Wen, a favorite of the Biden administration who paved the way for the premature reopening of schools and lifting of mask mandates, which called for the US to count fewer deaths and cases, absurdly claiming that cases are being overcounted. In reality, only about 1 in 10 positive rapid test results are confirmed by PCR tests, which is the only way for an infection to be officially counted. 

In March, the Post endorsed the call for a “new normal” promoted by former Biden and Obama advisers led by eugenics advocate Ezekiel Emanuel. Emanuel called for the dismantling of daily reporting of COVID-19 infections, a proposal that has been implemented over the subsequent year, with nearly all states and the federal government switching to weekly reporting of infections and deaths.

Furthermore, the Post has played a key role in promoting the far-right conspiracy theory that the COVID-19 virus had been developed by scientists in a Wuhan laboratory from which it leaked, despite clear evidence that it first emerged in a food market in that city. The editorial board continues this campaign in its latest statement, darkly declaring, “the Chinese government has relied on secrecy, obfuscation, intimidation and fabrication to draw a veil over the origins of the virus.” They make this claim in the face of international scientific investigations which have made clear its natural origin.

The 60,000 confirmed deaths in China is only the beginning. The policy of mass infection implemented by the CCP and demanded by finance capital has already produced a medical disaster whose real scope will become clearer with time. The infection of billions of people will inevitably produce new strains of COVID-19 which will spread globally.

The successful implementation of a Zero-COVID elimination strategy in China for the first three years of the pandemic makes clear that it is possible through widespread masking, testing and contact tracing, the temporary closure of schools and nonessential businesses, and mass vaccination to stop the pandemic in its tracks. However, the abandonment of Zero-COVID by the CCP and the continued spread of the virus underscores that there is no national solution to the pandemic.

New German defense minister plans major escalation of NATO war with Russia

Johannes Stern

The new German Minister of Defence will be the former Interior Minister of the state of Lower Saxony Boris Pistorius (Social Democrats, SPD). He succeeds Christine Lambrecht, who resigned from her post on Monday. According to media reports, Pistorius will be sworn in on Thursday in Berlin.

Boris Pistorius [Photo by Wolfgang Wilde / CC BY 3.0]

The change at the top of the Ministry of Defense will initiate a massive escalation of German militarism and the NATO war in Ukraine against Russia. Before the next meeting of the so-called Ukraine Contact Group in Ramstein on January 20, the NATO powers are preparing, among other things, the delivery of main battle tanks to Ukraine. Pistorius will meet US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin in Berlin the day before the Contact Group meeting, immediately after his inauguration.

On January 6, the German government, together with the United States, announced the delivery of Marder and Bradley armored vehicles to Kiev. The decision appears already to have been taken for Berlin to send Leopard-2 battle tanks. Eighty-two years after the Nazi war of annihilation against the Soviet Union, which killed almost 30 million people, German tanks are again rolling against Russia.

As Minister of Defense, Pistorius has the task of enforcing the war and rearmament plans against the enormous opposition in the population. At his announcement of Pistorius’ appointment, Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) stated: “Pistorius is an extremely experienced politician who has proven his administrative skills, has been involved in security policy for years and, with his competence, his assertiveness and his big heart, is exactly the right person to lead the Bundeswehr (German army) through this epochal shift.” 

This statement is unambiguous. Already under Lambrecht, the biggest rearmament program since Hitler was launched under the slogan “epochal shift” and a €100 billion special fund for the Bundeswehr was adopted. Lambrecht stated in public speeches that Germany had to become a “military leader” again due to its “size, its geographical location and its economic strength.” Ultimately, however, she was not deemed capable of achieving this goal.

The task will now be taken over by Pistorius, who, as Interior Minister in Lower Saxony, has distinguished himself above all by an aggressive “law and order” policy and extreme right-wing agitation against refugees. His demands in the past included the establishment of concentration camps for refugees in Libya, deportations even to war zones, the massive rearmament of the security forces and the deployment of the Bundeswehr domestically. The media is celebrating him as a “red general.” The ruling class knows that the return of German militarism, as in the past, also requires the return of authoritarianism and dictatorship.

Immediately after his appointment, Pistorius openly stated that Germany is a party to the war in Ukraine—which the German government has always denied. “The Ministry of Defense is already a great challenge in civilian times, in peacetime,” he said, “and in times when one is involved in a war as the Federal Republic of Germany, indirectly, even more so.”

He promised to make the Bundeswehr “strong for the period that lies ahead.” This is a “tremendous task.” The troops can count on “me to stand in front of them whenever necessary,” he said.

The World Socialist Web Site already explained in an article on Lambrecht's resignation how far-reaching the plans currently being worked out behind the backs of the population are. For example, the current Der Spiegel cover story, citing leading military figures, calls for a tripling of the Bundeswehr’s special fund to €300 billion, an increase in the annual military budget to €120 billion, the introduction of a general staff and the elimination of civilian control over the Bundeswehr, the strengthening of the armaments industry, an increase in the number of troops and the reactivation of conscription. 

Other media and representatives of foreign policy think tanks are formulating similar goals and pressing for their rapid implementation. Shortly after Pistorius’ appointment, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) published a guest contribution by Christian Mölling, the deputy director of the DGAP think tank and head of the Center for Security and Defense. His “Ten Points for the New Minister of Defense” pursues one goal: Germany's transformation into a strong war power. 

Despite the “most threatening situation since the Cuban missile crisis,” the Bundeswehr is “in a desolate state,” Mölling complained. The “epochal shift” was “so far little more than lip service on a special mountain of debt.” “Germany has lost a crucial year to modernize the Bundeswehr,” he added. He went on to raise similar demands to Der Spiegel, “in order to get the epochal shift moving, to get the Bundeswehr back in shape in the long term and also to support Ukraine.”

All of this requires the complete militarization of society. Mölling wrote: “If one considers the defence sector as a picture, it is important to think and describe defence as an ecosystem, not as mechanical pillars. This system is open at its edges and connected to many other areas of security and public life. The more closed the system is, the more it remains a specialised organisation in life.”

This is the old, deadly spirit of German militarism, articulated in modern think tank German. The military must penetrate all the pores of society. It must not remain a “special organization in life”—it is life.

It is not merely these concepts that remind one of the darkest times in German history. The entire foreign policy is being conducted along similar lines as in the First and Second World Wars. In the statement No tank deliveries to Ukraine! Stop the threat of a third world war!, the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality Party, SGP) declared:

Since reunification, the ruling class has been systematically working to organize Europe under German leadership in order to advance its geostrategic and economic interests worldwide. … Now it is using Russia’s reactionary invasion of Ukraine as a pretext to launch the biggest rearmament since Hitler and to strike again against Russia. German imperialism is concerned not only with geostrategic interests and Russia’s vast reserves of raw materials, it is also driven by the desire for retribution for its war defeats in the 20th century.

The imperialist offensive increasingly raises the danger of a direct war with a nuclear-armed power, Russia. The Bundeswehr is currently relocating Patriot missile systems to Poland. A total of three squadrons with 600 soldiers will be stationed in the neighbouring country during the course of this week. 

At the Zamość freight yard, the Patriots are to “protect an important transshipment yard for Ukraine aid,” writes Der Spiegel. At the station, located 30 kilometers from the Polish-Ukrainian border, “both relief supplies and military equipment will be loaded for Ukraine.” The Air Force’s task is to “protect the station from possible attacks from the air.”

In other words, the Bundeswehr will ensure that the planned tank deliveries reach the front safely. Germany is thus becoming an increasingly direct war party on the battlefield. The deputy head of the Security Council of the Russian Federation and former president of Russia Dmitry Medvedev has threatened to turn Western tanks into “rusty scrap metal.” He described NATO countries involved in the war as legitimate targets. Nevertheless, Berlin is recklessly driving the escalation.

In his inaugural address, Pistorius should explain the consequences of this policy. How many millions of people does the ruling class intend to sacrifice this time to defeat Russia militarily and put their world power plans into action? What is the Federal Government’s scenario if the war escalates to a nuclear exchange? It is clear that even in a “conventional” war with Russia, millions of people across Europe would lose their lives.

As XBB.1.5 variant spreads across Canada, COVID-19 deaths hit 11-month high

Malcolm Fiedler

As the COVID-19 pandemic enters its fourth year, the virus continues to take an immense toll on the health of the population across Canada. This state of affairs has been enabled by the capitalist ruling class’ homicidal “forever COVID” policy, which has been overseen by the Trudeau Liberal government and enforced by all provincial governments irrespective of their political affiliation.

According to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University published on the Our World in Data website, the rolling seven day average of COVID-19 fatalities in Canada reached 78 per day on January 12, the highest since February 28, 2022, when the Omicron first wave was cresting.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford promoting an end to all remaining anti-COVID public health measures, March 2022 [Photo: CUPE]

Provincial government figures show that the XBB.1.5 Omicron subvariant, which has spread rapidly in the North Eastern region of the United States, particularly New York City, is now showing signs of community transmission across the country. On January 4, Alberta announced that it had identified four cases of the variant, alongside rising viral detection rates in the city of Calgary’s wastewater. Quebec announced that 2.4 percent of the infections sequenced for the last week of December were positive for the variant, while Saskatchewan found two cases in its sequencing during the same time period. British Columbia announced on January 13 that the variant now accounted for 5.6 percent of all samples sequenced.

At the same time, over 5,500 Canadians continued to be hospitalized per day, a staggeringly high number that has stayed relatively constant over the past year. Health care systems continue to buckle under the weight of this increased burden, with emergency rooms hit especially hard.

Figures released by the province of Quebec show that more than a fifth of emergency rooms in the province are currently exceeding 150 percent capacity. The average length of time a patient waited on a stretcher was between 18-20 hours, and over 5 hours in the waiting room. The head of emergency medicine for Halifax, capital city of the Atlantic province of Nova Scotia, recently told the Toronto Star that ER deaths in the province were up 10 percent in 2022 compared to 2021, and that emergency care was “in a state of crisis.”

The comments came in the wake of the death of 37-year-old Allison Holthoff in the emergency room at Cumberland Regional Health Care Centre in Amherst on December 31. Holthoff waited for seven hours in excruciating pain to receive any primary care, according to her husband.

Charlene Snow, aged 67, died one day earlier after returning home following a seven-hour wait in the emergency room at the Cape Breton Regional Hospital. Snow’s tragic death prompted her daughter-in-law, Catherine Snow, to set up a website entitled Nova Scotia Health Care Crisis to gather similar stories. “We understand that the staff that work within the health care system are suffering as much as the patients that need to take advantage of it,” she told Global News. “We in no way want any anger or bad thoughts directed at staff members who are already working under such challenging conditions.”

As of January 17, Snow’s website had logged 559 ER deaths and received 1,100 stories about the impact of the health care crisis.

Health care workers across the country are expressing increasing concern that the situation could deteriorate rapidly in the event of a surge in COVID cases produced by XBB.1.5 or another variant. Dr. Melissa Yuan-Innes, an emergency physician at Hôpital Glengarry Memorial Hospital in Alexandria, Ontario, stated that there are no preparations “in a meaningful way” for a renewed surge because the health care system has no remaining capacity to deal with one. “We don’t have the capacity. Our health care system is starting to look like a set of dominos that you’re starting to knock over,” she commented to Global News. “It’s not a question of do we have enough experience with it, it’s do we have enough personnel. And we don’t.

“We want you to stay healthy and you want to stay healthy. So please don’t count on the system. We don’t have any magic.”

Dr. Brian Conway, medical director of the Vancouver Infectious Disease Centre, also speaking to Global News, explained his growing concern about the danger of a surge in Long COVID cases due to XBB.1.5. “It may spread more easily, it may attach to cells more easily, it may not be as susceptible to protection by vaccination as the original Omicron (variant) or as some of the other variants, so we need to keep an eye on this going forward,” he said, adding the crucial point that every infection compounds an individual’s risk of contracting Long COVID.

On January 6, BC Health Minister Adrian Dix announced that he was activating Emergency Operations Meetings protocols at 20 hospitals throughout the province as of January 5. The measure, a tacit admission that the health care system was already reaching over-capacity, aims to discharge patients earlier.

In Ontario, hospitals in Ottawa and Kitchener recorded the highest number of emergency room patients in a single day in their history last week. Yvonne Wilson, vice president of patient care at Queensway Carlton Hospital in Ottawa, told the Canadian Press that the main drivers of the increased admissions were influenza, COVID, RSV, mental health issues, and chronic illnesses. Commenting on the daily number of patients, she said, “We’ve been seeing about 240 to 250 patients coming through our (ER), and pre-pandemic we averaged around 200 to 220. So that makes a big difference, having that extra volume.”

Despite these grim statistics, provincial and federal public health agencies across the country show no indication that they are considering any mitigation measures whatsoever to slow the continued spread of disease and death. All remaining mask mandates, vaccine mandates, and other substantive public health measures were eliminated last spring when the Trudeau Liberal government and all provincial governments embraced wholesale the demands of the far-right “Freedom” Convoy. The results were disastrous, with 2022 becoming Canada’s deadliest year of the pandemic to date with close to 20,000 official COVID-19 deaths.

One of the few remaining reliable indicators of the pandemic’s impact is the tracking of excess deaths in the country by University of Toronto Medicine’s Dr. Tara Moriarty. Dr. Moriarty’s weekly updated tracking of excess deaths nationally shows that they have continued to trend at about 10 percent higher than the pre-pandemic baseline, a number that translates into almost 20,000 more deaths nationwide than we would have seen before the pandemic. The corporate-controlled media and political establishment have tried to pin such discrepancies on absurd pseudo-scientific claims, such as the supposed detrimental effects of lockdowns and “immunity debt.” But as Dr. Moriarty has noted, the most likely culprits for the rise in excess deaths are an over-burdened health care system and repeated COVID reinfections.

Public health agencies across the country speak openly the same language as the demands of the “Freedom” Convoy. This is not an accident. The convoy movement has been used as a battering ram by influential sections of the ruling class against the implementation of any public health mitigations. Provincial governments of all political stripes, from Danielle Smith’s right-wing United Conservative Party government in Alberta, to the “Quebec first” CAQ Legault government in Quebec, to the social democratic NDP government in BC, all now speak the language of the “Freedom” Convoy, claiming that the pandemic is over, public health mitigations harm the public and that there is no public support for any new mitigations.

Turning Influence Into Money in the EU Parliament

Patrick Cockburn

Photograph Source: Diliff – CC BY-SA 3.0

The spectacular unmasking of alleged bribery in the EU Parliament has attracted limited attention in Britain, despite police in Brussels discovering suitcases stuffed with hundreds of thousands of euros in cash and a vice president of the Parliament landing in jail.

Qatar and Morocco are accused of buying up Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) in a scandal that revolves around a vote on a resolution criticising Qatar during the World Cup. The Greek MEP Eva Kaili is now suspended as vice president of the Parliament with many pointing derisively to a speech she made last year, saying “the World Cup in Qatar is proof actually of how sports diplomacy can achieve a historical transformation of a country with reforms that inspired the Arab world”.

She added that Qatar was a frontrunner in labour rights and that some members of the European Parliament were bullying and discriminating against the country.

Reforms are promised in the wake of the scandal but tighter regulations have been successfully resisted in the past. Damagingly, the latest scandal is assumed to be only the tip of a giant iceberg of corruption in the Parliament which has long been targeted by Transparency International, the anti-corruption watchdog, which has identified some of the Parliament’s more blatant boondoggles.

British disinterest in the scandal is not so surprising since a curious feature of the Brexit “debate” that raged before and after 2016 was that the actual workings of the EU never attracted much interest. Leavers ludicrously scapegoated all the EU institutions as bureaucratic monsters trampling on British freedoms and thwarting its global ambitions. Remainers portrayed the EU as a sort of warm and cuddly Paddington Bear-like institution, operating much like a UN agency.

The denouement was inevitable since MEPs made little secret of their willingness to turn their influence into money, something which they could generally do without breaking the law. One German MEP who wrote to companies in 2018 to advertise his services was not even reprimanded. Another declared earnings of €40,000 a month for business consultancy and other activities, though later he modified this figure down to a measly €5,000-€10,000 monthly.

Rules forbidding MEPs from selling their influence to the highest bidder are lax and are, in any case, little enforced. “Time and time again,” explains the online magazine Politico, “members of the [EU] Parliament have resisted proposals to shine more light on their work and shrugged off the lack of enforcement of rules already in place – all the while taking advantage of perks and privileges that would make a member of the Borghese family blush.”

It is not as though MEPs are poorly remunerated to begin with, each of them earning about €9,400 a month as well as €4,800 general expenses for which they need not produce receipts. In addition, they are allowed to hold as many other jobs as they want with the nature of their activities often declared in the most general and untransparent way.

The known rewards of MEPs through what Transparency International politely calls “moonlighting” are excessive, but these are only known about because of voluntary declarations. An analysis by Transparency International suggests, the true extent of MEPs being bought up is far greater: “The findings demonstrate once again the prevalence of ‘moonlighting’ among elected members in Brussels,” reads the TI analysis. “The actual figures may be even higher, given that MEPs self-declare their earnings and their declarations are not subject to institutional checks.”

Beneath the Radar

Is the age coming to an end when companies claiming to be delivering greater “efficiency” simply sack their experienced work forces and outsource their services to whoever makes the cheapest bid? The “more efficient” enterprises cruise along for years until a crisis or disaster capsizes them. Something like this happened to Southwest Airlines in the US during the storms.

UK recorded 50,000 more excess deaths in 2022 than in 2019

Robert Stevens

There were more excess deaths in Britain in 2022 than almost all of the past 70 years. According to an analysis by the Times, more than 50,000 more people died last year than in 2019.

Excluding the first two years of the pandemic (2020/21), this was the highest excess death toll since 1951.

Citing data from the statistics offices of the countries of the United Kingdom, the newspaper reported, “Overall the 656,735 UK deaths last year were 51,159 above the pre-Covid five-year average. The figure was exceeded only in four years prior to 1951 since records began 130 years ago.”

It reported 1,600 more deaths than usual during Christmas week, due to “long waits for ambulances, cold weather and surging flu infections” that “increased mortality rates by a fifth.

Ambulances wait outside the Royal London Hospital in east London, January 4, 2023. Ambulance staff are set to strike again on January 11 and 23, while nurses will do the same January 18-19. [AP Photo/Alastair Grant]

“Figures from the Office for National Statistics yesterday [January 11] showed the third consecutive week of more than 1,000 excess deaths in England and Wales and confirmed that last year one of the highest death totals in Britain was recorded.”

Excess deaths are rising among all age groups. Stuart McDonald, a partner at LCP Health Analytics who works on the Faculty of Actuaries’ Continuous Mortality Investigation, commented, “Had we not just had two years of very extreme mortality, 2022 would really stand out… At the start of the year we were seeing fewer deaths among older people because a lot of those people had frankly already died [of COVID], but it was clear even then that we were seeing higher deaths among younger people. Since the spring and beyond we’ve had fairly consistently high levels at all ages.”

While the UK saw tens of thousands more deaths last year due to COVID (around 40,000), the excess deaths, concluded the Times study, were prominently not due directly to COVID.

Years of brutal austerity, including the slashing of the National Health Service (NHS) budget, which was underfunded by £400 billion over the last decade, have resulted in many people dying earlier. In December 2022, ambulance response times were the longest since new call categories were introduced in 2017.

Cambridge University statistician Professor David Spiegelhalter said it was “very difficult to divide up the causes of the excess, but I find evidence around delayed admissions compelling”.

The Times reported Speigelhalter saying that since the summer “there had been more than 40,000 excess deaths in England and Wales. Adjusting for an ageing population and subtracting Covid ‘still leaves an average of around 450 excess non-Covid deaths each week since June.’”

According to Spiegelhalter, “multiple factors will be contributing to this: early flu, Covid, the impact of disrupted care in the pandemic, and the acute crisis in the NHS”.

The excess death analysis of the Times backs up the recent estimation by the Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM) President, Dr. Adrian Boyle, who said that Accident and Emergency (A&E) delays and problems with urgent and emergency care are leading to 300-500 additional deaths per week.

NHS England said it did not accept the RCEM figures on excess deaths, but the BBC noted, “it's roughly what you get if you multiply the number of people waiting long periods in A&E with the extra risk of dying estimated to come with those long waits (of between five and 12 hours).”

Another study by the Economist magazine published last week concluded that hundreds of deaths per week were taking place, with extended waiting times a key factor. It concluded , “Our model suggests that an additional 3,400 A&E-associated deaths occurred between August and November 2022 compared with a scenario in which waiting times remained at 2019 levels. At around 260 per week, that number is below the ballpark figure from the RCEM, but would still account for one-quarter of the excess deaths in England over that period.”

The Financial Times provided further evidence of surging excess deaths in an analysis by chief data reporter John Burn-Murdoch in December. It noted, “Life expectancy has stagnated, with Britain arcing away below most other developed countries, and avoidable mortality — premature deaths that should not occur with timely and effective healthcare — rising to the highest level among its peers…”

The author found, “In the last decade Britain has dropped away from its peers on overall health spend, while investment in healthcare infrastructure halved between 2010 and 2013. This left the NHS with less spare capacity than any other developed country when the pandemic hit. This proved a huge drag on productivity, leaving UK health workers hamstrung by shortages of beds and equipment.”

He concluded, “The impacts have been stark, from ballooning waiting lists and worsening A&E performance to a rise in avoidable deaths and stalling life expectancy.” These were due to “The effects of the Conservative austerity programme during the Cameron-Osborne years,” that “have been steadily accumulating over the past decade, but this winter that trickle has become a torrent.”

The COVID pandemic is far from over, with even the Conservative government’s own manipulated measure of COVID deaths now passing 200,000 (202,157), due to a surge in winter deaths. In the last 14 days, according to Worldometers, and using government data, nearly 1,700 people have died in Britain from a disease that everyone is being told to live with and which is not being tested for or monitored.

That right-wing publications such as the Times, Economist and Financial Times cannot ignore the terrible impact of a decades-long social offensive by the ruling elite which was accelerated during the pandemic, attests to real state of class relations.

Their findings are in line with studies showing that hundreds of thousands of people have died since the onset of mass austerity imposed by successive governments following the 2008 global financial crash. A 2019 study, based on years of data before the pandemic, titled “Premature mortality attributable to socioeconomic inequality in England between 2003 and 2018: an observational study,” was compiled by the University College London and published in The Lancet Public Health. It found that between 2003 and 2018, there were 877,000 dead victims of rocketing social inequality. The authors concluded that “nearly 900,000 deaths in England could have been avoided in a more equal society, according to a UCL study of 2.5 million premature deaths over the last 16 years.” 

The ruling class has deliberately run down the National Health Service for decades. Their agenda now centres on using the crisis of their own creation to insist that nothing can be done to save the NHS, with privatisation and sell-off of its most profitable sectors the only option.

Last week’s Daily Telegraph comment by Fraser Nelson was indicative of the frothing response in ruling circles who have never reconciled themselves to the post-war consensus of a welfare state with the NHS its jewel in the crown. He declared, “the NHS is a central plank of our national secular religion. It goes to the heart of our modern understanding of Britishness, a symbol of the supposed ‘fairness’ of our social-democratic, post-war identity… this 75-year experiment in health socialism has failed appallingly, culminating in a surge in excess deaths, waiting lists that aren’t worthy of a civilised nation, inhumane strikes, intolerable delays for ambulances, explicit rationing and underpaid, demoralised, overworked staff.”

Nelson insisted, “We must move to a mixed public-private system, as in almost every other country, based around a competing social insurance model, a mix of for-profit and charitable ownership, some user charges to prevent abuse and waste…”