Struggle against Macron continues as strikes break out in multiple French industries

Samuel Tissot

After months of bitter struggle by millions of workers against President Macron’s pension cuts, the French press and union bureaucracies are desperate to put the workers’ struggle against Macron and the capitalist state behind them.

After May Day, the union bureaucracies put off all further action until a June 6 “day of mobilization” against Macron’s pension cuts. In the meantime, they returned to “business as usual,” which consists of negotiating new social cuts with Macron’s government.

The mood in the working class could not be more different. After Macron forced through his law in March without a vote in the parliament, 62 percent of the population supported a general strike to block the economy and defeat Macron. At over a dozen strike days, millions of workers marched. As the cost of living continues to rise, the majority of the population remains determined to defeat the “president of the rich.”

French workers protest President Emmanuel Macron's pension attacks during the 76th edition of the Cannes Film Festival in Cannes, Sunday, May 21, 2023. [AP Photo/Daniel Cole]

In a wave of strikes in multiple industries across France, workers are seeking to continue their struggle against Macron, the banks and the corporations. In the last week, strikes have broken out or continued amongst postal workers, bus drivers, textile workers and at Disneyland Paris.

At Disneyland, between 1,500 and 1,800 workers went on a one-day strike on May 30, according to the unions.

Disneyland workers are demanding a €200 monthly wage increase, double pay for Sunday shifts, a review of the travel allowance and the end of adapted hours (where workers must take shifts either much shorter or longer than 8 hours). According to Glassdoor, waiters, performers and stall sellers at Disneyland Paris make around €16,000 a year. Last year, Disneyland Paris made an operating profit of €47 million.

In a meeting on March 26, Disneyland told union officials that they refuse to make any concessions. Nevertheless, imitating union tactics at the national level, the four unions at Disneyland Paris (the CGT and UNSA national unions, and the SIT77 and SNS local unions) are holding one-day marches to pressure the company into continuing talks with the unions.

Rank-and-file workers initiated the Disneyland struggle before the unions were mobilized to rechannel it into less threatening channels. Indeed, Damien Catel, a representative from the SIT77 union, told Actu.fr, “It was a movement started by the workers and accompanied by the unions, not the inverse.”

Ahmed Masrour, a representative from the UNSA union, added that after the May 30 action, “The ball is in the court of management. We are waiting for them to reopen the dialogue, this time with serious propositions.”

In southern France’s Aveyron region, postal workers are engaged in an indefinite strike against the publicly owned postal service that began March 31. After a reorganization of the region’s postal service on April 26, workers have been forced to work longer rounds and are continuously understaffed. This led to large numbers of parcels never being delivered.

Union officials have called for a new reorganization to address the issues. However, it is clear that without a major mobilization of the wider working class, such an organization will still be carried out on the government’s terms: with staff cuts, longer shifts and under-inflation wage raises.

In Toulouse, Tisseo transport workers are on a four-day strike, which started on May 30 and will finish today. During strike days, 12 bus routes are not running and dozens more will run with reduced service. The Toulouse tram service will also be significantly disrupted. Workers have been offered a 2.8 percent pay rise by the company, well under the 5.9 percent annual inflation rate recorded in April.

Before this year, Tisseo workers had a safeguard clause, which essentially meant their wages were adjusted for inflation. Strikers are demanding a wage increase and the reinstatement of the clause.

In Lille, a strike of 72 workers at the Vertbaudet factory in Marquette has been ongoing since March 20. Vertbaudet is a children’s clothes maker; in 2022, it made a profit of €27 million. The workers on strike make just €1,500 a month, though many of them have over 20 years’ seniority. The strikers’ main demands are a €150 wage increase and a stop to temporary hiring.

On May 16, police assaulted the workers’ picket at the Vertbaudet factory, leading to two arrests and the hospitalization of one striker. Vertbaudet has close ties to the French political elite: it is owned by a holding company run by Édouard Fillon, the son of ex-Prime Minister François Fillon. After the police assault, a CGT delegate supporting the strike was assaulted near his home by masked thugs, who also threatened his wife and son.

These incidents led to the intervention of Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne to call for renewed talks between the company and strikers. However, with the company refusing any wage rise, any such talks have so far not materialized.

The fact that most workers involved are women has been seized upon by the psuedo-left to promote this struggle as a primarily “feminist” issue. A tribune on the strike published by various feminist groups and individuals in Le Monde stated: “Vertbaudet workers are like millions of women, glued to a sticky floor that keeps them in devalued and underpaid jobs because of sexist management.”

Signatories included CGT chief Sophie Binet, La France Insoumise deputy Mathilde Panot, Greens National Secretary Marie Tondelier, and actress Adele Haenel, affiliated with the Morenoite Révolution Permanente website.

In reality, workers at Vertbaudet, like millions of other women in France, are under attack by employers and the state not because they are women, but because they are workers, from whom the bourgeoisie intends to squeeze massive profits. Their allies in this struggle are not the privileged middle-class feminists of the French pseudo-left and union bureaucracy, but all working men and women internationally who face the same capitalist crisis and danger of world war.

The renewed wave of strikes in France, after the union bureaucracies’ efforts to suffocate the struggle against Macron, once again exposes the role of the union bureaucracy and its supporters in the pseudo-left.

Funded with billions of euros by the government and corporations, the union bureaucracies do not oppose cuts and attacks on wages. Instead, they work to subordinate all opposition to the government and companies behind the bankrupt framework of “social dialogue” with the capitalist state—a euphemism for helping them enforce their will on the workforce.

This process is also playing out in local disputes, as can be seen in the union bureaucracies’ role in subordinating the struggle to state-led talks between the companies and union bureaucrats at Disneyland and Vertbaudet. Whenever strikes do break out, such as at Vertbaudet, the union bureaucracies refuse to pay a penny of strike pay to their members in struggle.

The ongoing struggles of French workers against the increasing cost of living is inextricably linked to the struggle against Macron’s pension cut and war. The whole of French society is being reorganized as a “war economy,” as French and European imperialism prepare for escalation in the NATO-Russia war in Ukraine. For the ruling class, this requires savage attacks on wages and social rights, like Macron’s pension cut.

Escalating assault on jobs and living standards in New Zealand

John Braddock

Following international trends, New Zealand’s Reserve Bank (RBNZ) on May 24 raised the official cash rate by 25 basis points to 5.5 percent. The decision was seen as “finely balanced” between a rise of either 25 or 50 basis points.

New Zealand Finance Minister Grant Robertson outside parliament on May 18, 2023. [Photo: Grant Robertson Facebook]

The lesser rise is regarded as favourable to the Labour government as it faces an election in October. “Labour feared the worst but got the best it could hope for,” Stuff reported.

The bank’s Monetary Policy Committee assessed that its 12 consecutive rate rises since October 2021 had taken the “sting” out of inflation. It falsely claimed inflation pressures, including internationally, have been easing. New Zealand’s official annual rate slowed to 6.7 percent in the first quarter, but food inflation, particularly hitting the working class, has ramped-up to 12.4 percent.

The RBNZ is positively glowing about the success of its purported “anti-inflation” agenda. Last November, RBNZ governor Adrian Orr was asked in parliament whether he was “deliberately engineering a recession.” He replied: “I think that is correct. We are deliberately trying to slow aggregate spending in the economy.”

The RBNZ pointed to slowing consumer spending and a falling housing market and took indications of deteriorating business conditions as “positives.” It forecast the official cash rate would stay at 5.5 percent until the end of next year, with no prospect of a rate cut before early 2025, and also forecast two quarters of negative growth, i.e., a recession, in the middle of the year.

No sooner had the announcement hit the media than one of the major banks, the ASB, lifted its mortgage rates. The bank’s housing variable rate shifts from 8.39 to 8.64 percent and another rate will rise from 8.49 to 8.74 percent. The average monthly mortgage repayment in Auckland, the country’s major city, is already $NZ4,425.

Orr has predicted that homeowners can expect to be paying an average 22 percent of their income in interest payments by the end of the year—up from 9 percent in 2021. Meanwhile, banks are creaming profits. Westpac’s income interest spiraled to $2.85 billion​​ in the six months to the end of March, compared to $1.61b​ for the same period a year ago. ANZ Bank collected $4.67b​ over the same six months, up from $2.454b the previous year.

With the cost of living crisis battering working people, more and more are sinking into debt. The use of “buy now pay later” (BNPL) schemes and credit cards for basic items is escalating.

According to Consumer NZ over 25 percent of the population have a BNPL account, with 20 percent accumulating debt on groceries, bills and fuel, while 35 percent of credit card users are doing the same. Charity organisations including food banks have seen a tripling of demand compared with three years ago when COVID first hit.

The Labour-led government has responded with a campaign offering tips on how to save money. Titled “Find Money in Weird Places,” it focuses on energy costs with suggestions such as changing washing machines to cold wash and shortening showers to five minutes. The campaign, costing $2.8 million, will feature on television, social media, in print and on bus stops and malls throughout winter.

A fresh onslaught against jobs is meanwhile underway. On May 25, Victoria University of Wellington (VUW) announced that over 200 academics, 10 percent of its 2,468 staff, will lose their jobs with nearly 60 teaching programs up for “review.” Vice Chancellor Nic Smith said the university is in “survival mode,” facing a $33 million deficit for 2023. It is predicted to run out of money completely by the end of next year.

Falling enrolments see the university only holding a 13.9 percent share of domestic students. Chronic government underfunding has not met inflation “for the better part of 15 years,” Smith said. In 2021 large-scale sackings at VUW were only avoided when a “voluntary” redundancy scheme, which around 60 staff took up, was used to reduce debt.

The assault at VUW follows similar cuts at Otago University, hitting over 200 staff, and between 200 and 1,000 jobs under threat at the national polytechnic, Te Pūkenga. Auckland University of Technology is currently working through 170 “voluntary” and compulsory redundancies announced late last year.

While falling enrolments related to COVID, particularly among high fee-paying international students, is being blamed, prime responsibility lies with the 1984–90 Lange Labour government’s “Learning for Life” agenda. This opened the door to waves of government funding cuts, abolished free tertiary education, introduced student fees and forced universities to run as competitive businesses. Subsequent governments have all followed suit.

Last week a swathe of job cuts was also announced by the Auckland Council. More than 500 job losses have been confirmed as part of right-wing Mayor Wayne Brown’s cost-cutting to address a $325 million budget shortfall. Another 200 more jobs could go once the budget is finalised next month.

Deputy mayor Desley Simpson declared that Auckland must “trim the fat” to balance its books, falsely claiming this would simply mean losing some “nice-to-have” services. Elected councillors had left it up to each organisation’s executive to decide where the savings required of them would come from, she said. 

Preparations are being made to sell the council’s 18 percent stake in Auckland Airport, the country’s largest. International investment banks will be interviewed and assessed over coming weeks for the role of “adviser” in the sale process, which would attract significant attention. However, Brown reportedly does not yet have sufficient votes on the council to proceed with the sale.

The RBNZ’s imposition of recessionary conditions is hitting private sector employment hard. According to the New Zealand Herald on May 10 economists are tipping that the unemployment rate will start escalating from here. BusinessDesk deputy head Rebecca Howard said forecasts predict up to 80,000 people could lose their jobs. The RBNZ has unemployment “peaking” at 5.7 per cent in the March quarter of 2025.

The Master Builders Association notes construction is entering a “bust cycle” as the easy credit of the COVID era dries up, and the cost of materials and labour increases. According to the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE), 183 construction companies had already gone bust between last August and the end of January.

One liquidator told Stuff that in 2019 construction industry failures made up about a quarter of his firm’s insolvency work. Today, they account for around 70 percent. In March, Construct Civil with 75 staff went into liquidation, along with A H Construction, which went into voluntary administration in February with over 100 staff, and Jacksco Civil with another 100 workers.

The Labour government is depending on the trade unions to keep emerging working class resistance in check. On the Auckland Council cuts, a Public Service Association spokesperson declared that the union was “concerned for the livelihoods of members who will lose their jobs. And we’re concerned for the livelihood of members who will now have to do even more work with even less support”—but made no commitment to fight for anything.

Tertiary Education Union (TEU) branch president at VUW Dougal McNeill, a leading member of the pseudo-left International Socialist Organisation (ISO), said: “We will campaign hard to stop these cuts. University management, government ministers and MPs should be on notice that our members are not about to go quietly.”

In fact the TEU, in which the ISO is embedded, has already presided over more than a thousand job cuts nationwide since the onset of the pandemic, seeking only to be involved in “consultation” over how to best implement them. The union has only requested that Labour and the VUW vice chancellor “think very carefully about the implications of these cuts and rethink their plans.”

UK’s BAE Systems announces plan to produce armaments in Ukraine

Robert Stevens

Following months of talks, BAE Systems, the UK’s main weapons manufacturer, confirmed on Tuesday that it will establish an office in Ukraine, as the precursor to building weapons inside Ukraine.

The Telegraph reported the major escalation of NATO’s war against Russia late Tuesday following a video call between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and BAE chief executive Charles Woodburn, Managing Director Gabby Costigan and Director for Cooperation with Ukraine Christian Seear.

The newspaper said “the FTSE 100 maker of Challenger 2 tanks, artillery pieces and ammunition crucial to the war against Russia” holding “direct talks with the country’s president” was “a further sign of Britain’s central role in arming Ukrainian forces.”

Zelensky said on Telegram, “We discussed the localization of production in Ukraine. We agreed to start work on opening a BAE Systems office in Ukraine, and subsequently repair and production facilities for the company’s products.

“We are interested in direct relations with your company, without any intermediaries, not only now, but also in the long term. We are ready to become a major regional hub for the repair and production of various types of products of BAE Systems and are interested in making our relations more global.”

Woodburn said, “We’re proud to be working with our government customers to provide equipment, training and support services to the Ukrainian armed forces. We’re also exploring how we could support the Ukrainian government as it revitalises the country’s defence industrial base to ensure their long-term security.”

The video conference took place following the May 24 visit by UK Defence Minister Ben Wallace to Kiev to meet his counterpart Oleksii Reznikov. A Ministry of Defence (MoD) statement said the visit followed the UK becoming “the first country to provide Ukraine with long-range precision strike capability this month… Defence Secretary, Ben Wallace said the meeting was ‘to discuss the next stages of Ukraine’s fight against Russia’s illegal invasion. The UK continues to offer both equipment, training and advice to Ukraine’s armed forces.’”

BAE supplies the bulk of the £2.3 billion in military equipment sent to the Ukrainian battlefield by the UK. It makes the Challenger 2 Main Battle Tank, Warrior infantry fighting vehicle, Terrier combat engineer vehicle and military bridging systems. It has a £2.4 billion contract with the MoD to provide all its munitions for the next 15 years. One of its factories in Cheshire, England alone can churn out 1 million munitions a day.

In an evening video address Zelensky said of BAE Systems, “It is indeed a massive manufacturer of weaponry, the kind of weaponry that we need now and will continue to need. We are working on establishing a suitable base in Ukraine for production and repair. This encompasses a wide range of weaponry, from tanks to artillery.”

BAE is central to Britain’s role as one of the world’s leading sellers of arms. Fueled by demand for its weapons in Ukraine and other war zones, the value of UK arms export licenses more than doubled to £8.5 billion in 2022. This included the £2.4 billion sale of Eurofighter Typhoons and related military equipment to Qatar. The biggest manufacturer in Britain, BAE operates in 40 countries employing 93,000 people. Valued at £27 billion, it is Europe’s largest defence contractor and was the seventh largest in the world based on now hugely surpassed 2021 revenues.

On February 23, almost one year to the day since Russia’s invasion, BAE celebrated its surge in sales and profits for 2022. It took in a record £37 billion in new orders, propelling its order backlog to £58.9 billion. It had already announced in a trading update last November that it had secured £28 billion of orders so far in 2022. Underlying operating profits were £2.5 billion—up 12.5 percent on 2021

In the foreword to its annual report, Woodburn commented, “While it is tragic that it took a war in Europe to raise the awareness of the importance of defence around the globe, BAE Systems is well positioned to help national governments keep their citizens safe and secure in an elevated threat environment.”

The report declared that “we expect the renewed importance of armoured combat vehicles in the Ukraine conflict to benefit our combat vehicles business.” So large were sales and profits that the statement declared, “This has enabled the Board to reward shareholders through the buyback of £788m of our own shares.”

Woodburn received pay and bonuses totaling more than £10.6 million last year. Commenting on the rocketing in BAE’s share value by 50 percent over the previous year to an all-time high, Chairman Sir Roger Carr stated that “it should not have taken a war for the investment community to reassess the value of BAE Systems shares, but it has.”

Among the many BAE manufactured weapons supplied by countries internationally to Ukraine is the M777 howitzer gun, which has a firing range of 14 to 24 miles, and is able to fire precision GPS-guided rather than unguided shells. Last October the Wall Street Journal quoted Mark Signorelli, a vice president of business development at BAE, declaring, “The demonstration of the effectiveness and utility of a wide variety of artillery systems is what is coming out of the Ukraine conflict.”

Ukrainian Army firing a US donated M777 howitzer, May 2022. The M777 howitzer is manufactured by BAE Systems [Photo by www.mil.gov.ua. / CC BY 4.0]

The newspaper reported, “BAE said that if inquiries from prospective M777 buyers, which include countries in Central Europe, turned into actual orders, it could lead to up to 500 new howitzers.”

Earlier this month, BAE announced it “will play a key role in helping Australia to acquire its first nuclear powered submarines”. They will be built as part of the US-UK-Australia (AUKUS) military pact, aimed at ramping up military confrontation with China. BAE said, “The three nations will deliver a trilaterally developed submarine, based on the UK’s next generation design, incorporating technology from all three nations. Australia and the UK will operate SSN-AUKUS, as their submarines of the future, with construction expected to begin this decade.”

The decision to locate armament production in Ukraine is seen as vital for British imperialism. In February the Telegraph reported, “Other European defence companies are also in talks with Ukraine, with British companies keen not to be beaten to the punch by French and German rivals. A race is on to put the UK ‘at the front of the queue’, one [defence company] executive told The Telegraph.”

In May the World Socialist Web Site noted that Germany’s “Rheinmetall has established a joint venture for the repair and construction of tanks with the Ukrainian state-owned company Ukroboronprom. The cooperation on tanks is ‘only the first step on the way to comprehensive cooperation,’ writes the Handelsblatt newspaper.”

BAE’s plans to produce weapons in Ukraine is confirmation of the fact that Britain, as the WSWS warned, is in an undeclared war with Russia.

Tensions with Russia were heightened again with the comments of Foreign Minister James Cleverly in Estonia, Wednesday. Speaking about Ukraine’s drone strikes on Moscow the previous day, he said, “Ukraine does have the legitimate right to defend itself. It has the legitimate right to do so within its own borders, of course, but it does also have the right to project force beyond its borders to undermine Russia's ability to project force into Ukraine itself.

“So legitimate military targets beyond its own border are part of Ukraine’s self-defence. And we should recognise that.”

Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chair of the Security Council of the Russian Federation and a former president, responded, “The goofy officials of the UK, our eternal enemy, should remember that within the framework of the universally accepted international law which regulates modern warfare, including the Hague and Geneva Conventions with their additional protocols, their state can also be qualified as being at war.

“Today, the UK acts as Ukraine’s ally providing it with military aid in the form of equipment and specialists, i.e., de facto is leading an undeclared war against Russia. That being the case, any of its public officials (either military, or civil, who facilitate the war) can be considered as a legitimate military target.”

Growing number of elderly homeless in the US

Chase Lawrence

Nearly a quarter of a million people 55 or older are estimated by the government to have been homeless for at least part of 2019.

According to the Washington Post, “People 55 and older represented 16.5 percent of America’s homeless population of 1.45 million in 2019, according to the most recent reliable data.”

According to a 2022 University of Pennsylvania Study by Rebecca Brown, an Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Division of Geriatric Medicine at the Perelman School of Medicine, and several coauthors from the University of California San Francisco, over one-third of the homeless population are now single adults over 50, triple the figure in 1990 when it stood at 11 percent.

The government makes little effort to count the homeless. The Department of Housing and Urban Development, the only federal source of information on homelessness disaggregated by age, delayed its release of the second part of their Annual Homeless Assessment Report to Congress by two years, making it difficult to get an idea of the scale of homelessness among the elderly in real time.

The latest information on homelessness with respect to the elderly is from 2019, though advocates of the homeless have noted that there is evidence that it is growing, pointing to numerous examples.

The largest shelter provider in Arizona, Central Arizona Shelter Services (CASS), is rushing to open an over-55 shelter in a former Phoenix hotel this summer with “private rooms and medical and social services tailored for older people.” The provider says that it served 1,717 elderly in 2022, a 43 percent increase compared to 2021.

In Orange County, California, a Medicaid plan, CalOptima Health, is creating a 119-bed shelter which will serve as an assisted-living facility for the elderly, according to Kelly Bruno-Nelson, executive director for the plan. Bruno-Nelson stated that the current shelter system “cannot accommodate the physical needs of this population.” Seniors are staying in respite centers for months in San Francisco, California, Portland, Oregon, and Anchorage, Alaska, that were intended for a short-term stay only. In Boise, Idaho, shelter operators are hiring staff with backgrounds in long-term care to help elderly homeless living for long periods in hotels.

“It’s just a catastrophe. This is the fastest-growing group of people who are homeless,” said Dr. Margot Kushel, a professor of medicine and vulnerable populations researcher at the University of California at San Francisco.

Elderly homeless contract chronic diseases much earlier than younger people, as well as suffering from geriatric problems. Poor access to care due to homelessness, and the threat of having their medications stolen or going bad outside, stress from having to weather the outdoors, as well as generally unsanitary conditions, and the difficulties created by the anti-homeless laws being passed around the country, all contribute to poor health outcomes.

A Journal of the American Medical Association study titled, “Factors Associated With Mortality Among Homeless Older Adults in California: The HOPE HOME Study,” detailed how, over an average of 55 months, unhoused people over 50 years died at a rate 3.5 times greater than their housed counterparts. The findings are consistent with previous studies in other parts of the country.

Dennis Culhane, a professor and social science researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, said that the population of homeless seniors 65 and older would double or even triple from 2017 before peaking around 2030.

This increase is driven by poverty. One half of renters over 50 spend more than 30 percent of their household income on rent, according to the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University.

As the American Society on Aging Generations journal noted, “Low-income people who spend more than 30 percent of their income on rent are unable to save money, leaving them vulnerable to losing their housing when they face setbacks, such as a job loss, sickness, or death of a spouse or partner.”

In other words, homelessness is a class issue. The financial elite that both parties represent, and the upper middle class have no reason to worry about becoming homeless. The workers on the other hand, such as the homeless former autoworker that the Post interviewed, are the ones which this malady overwhelmingly affects.

Poverty, combined with the bipartisan destruction of the social safety net, spiraling inflation driven by profit-gouging (not wages) and the US-provoked war with Russia, as well as extortionary rent, are leading to thousands of the elderly being kicked out onto the streets.

The ruling class has no response to the increase in homelessness among the elderly. Indeed, hardly any media coverage is to be found on the topic. As it doesn’t fit into the categories of race or gender, the Democratic Party wing of the political establishment finds it more convenient to merely remain quiet on the topic.

The plans to attack Medicare and Social Security under the phony pretense of fighting debt, while dumping literally over a trillion dollars into American imperialism’s war machine—not to mention the nearly unlimited bailouts sunk into the pockets of the financial elite—shows the real disdain for the elderly.

If anything, the response given by the ruling elite is to step up the attacks on the elderly, foster reactionary sentiments against them (as a burden to society and the young), and ultimately to reduce life expectancy.

The corporate media has railed against the elderly, endorsing dying early. This was visible in the campaign for the pro-corporate health plan Obamacare (the Affordable Care Act) in which the New York Times spearheaded this narrative. The result of Obamacare was to contribute to a decrease in life expectancy. One of the chief architects of Obamacare, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, openly advocated for a reduction in life expectancy.

New spike of COVID in Australia, highest deaths since February

Oscar Grenfell

All available indicators show that Australia, like many other countries, is in the midst of a new spike of coronavirus transmission. Infections, hospitalisations and deaths are rising. The increase follows what the federal Labor government belatedly acknowledged was the most protracted surge of the entire pandemic, in late 2022 and the opening months of this year.

[Photo: WSWS]

The most remarkable feature of the current uptick is that it has gone almost universally unremarked. Government leaders, at the state and federal levels, have said nothing about it. The official media, including the state-funded Australian Broadcasting Corporation, has shown a complete indifference.

This is the practical application of the “forever COVID” policy adopted by capitalist governments around the world. When they were lifting what had been highly successful virus suppression measures in December 2021, Australia’s governments and official medical authorities claimed that the pandemic would somehow end, and the impacts of the virus would taper off.

All these assertions have been exposed as lies. The pandemic has ended, only in the sense of the proverbial wise monkeys who see, hear and speak no evil. Effectively, what has been established is a new and highly regressive public health doctrine, where the continuous mass circulation of a deadly virus is ignored and treated as a non-event.

In the week ending May 26, the most recent figures available, there were 184 COVID deaths across the country. That is the highest level of mortality since the week ending February 17, when 195 fatalities were reported. Last week’s tragic toll was more than double the relatively recent lows of 70 deaths in the week to March 24 and 77 in the seven-day period ending April 7.

Deaths are a lagging indicator, showing up in statistical reports weeks after the transmission that caused them. With infections and hospitalisations continuing to increase, the fatalities will unfortunately only increase.

Last week, the national tally of confirmed COVID infections reported over the seven-day period was 41,399. That is the highest level since January 6 and the second-highest of the entire year. It is also well over double the figures that were being registered in a number of weeks of February and early March.

The official infection figures have been completely unreliable since at least early 2022. All of the data sets for 2023 cover a period well after the Labor government removed any requirement for infected individuals to notify health authorities that they have a confirmed infection.

The recent increase, however, is notable, because the authorities have, over the very recent months, gone even further in dismantling access to testing. In line with federal guidelines unveiled late last year, the states and territories are shutting down the remnants of the Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing network.

While such exams can still be obtained in certain pathology offices and public hospitals, the PCR set-up that was purpose-built for COVID is largely being ended. In April, the newly-elected Labor administration in New South Wales, the country’s most populous state, suddenly announced that it was shutting 164 PCR testing facilities. It claimed that these services would be ended within 24 hours of the announcement.

But despite this, the infection count is growing. So are hospitalisations, with 2,555 people currently admitted to a medical institution for treatment required by a COVID infection. That tally is the highest since the second month of January. During an apparent ebbing of the virus, there were as few as 1,288 COVID patients in the last weeks of February.

Ominously, the hospitalisations are beginning to approach the peaks of the last surge, when more than 3,500 people were in hospital for COVID treatment during parts of December, 2022. Those levels of hospitalisation were associated with massive deaths, in the hundreds a week, with a high of 523 in the week ending January 27.

ICU nurses protesting outside Westmead Hospital on January 19, 2022. [Photo: NSW Nurses and Midwives' Association]

With the end of all safety restrictions, including masking, the virus is no doubt virtually everywhere. But once again, it is the most vulnerable sections of the population who are being hit the hardest.

According to the federal Department of Health, in the week to May 26 alone there were 482 COVID outbreaks in residential aged-care facilities. There were 2,755 active cases among residents, including 603 confirmed over the preceding seven days. That is an almost six-fold increase on the 102 positive COVID tests among aged care residents in the period covering the first week of May.

In the city of Newcastle, about two hours north of Sydney, there are at least 10 aged care facilities in lockdown due to COVID outbreaks. As the reporting of such events is non-existent and such knowledge is the result of anecdotal evidence, it must be concluded that there are dozens of nursing homes similarly impacted.

The dangers were hardly unknowable. In every single outbreak of the more than three-year pandemic, the aged care facilities have been transformed into killing fields. But governments have done nothing.

In comments cited by the NCA Newswire last week, University of South Australia Professor Adrian Esterman said there were “obvious signs” that a new COVID wave was beginning. Easterman warned of a “triple whammy,” with a spike of influenza, Respiratory Syncytial Virus and the country’s fifth Omicron wave since the “reopening of the economy” at the end of 2021.

The Newswire noted: “Flu cases are 100 times higher than last year, with over 40,000 laboratory-proven reports since the start of 2023.” Substantial outbreaks have been recorded in Queensland and Western Australia, while transmission is being recorded in every other state.

In what should be a national outrage but has largely passed without comment, federal figures released on May 24 showed that just 42.9 percent of eligible aged-care residents had received their latest COVID booster vaccine dose.

When they were abolishing all other public health measures, governments proclaimed the vaccine to be a silver bullet, justifying an end to safety restrictions and creating the conditions for the pandemic to be overcome. Vaccination is crucial, but all experience has demonstrated that separate from other public health policies, such as mandatory indoor masking, air filtration, and where necessary lockdowns, inoculation alone cannot halt transmissions, illnesses and deaths.

However governments now are not even attempting to ensure the vaccine protection of the cohort that is most vulnerable to COVID illness and death, the elderly in aged-care facilities. This goes beyond indifference and negligence. Amid ongoing commentary about the fiscal burden of an aging population, it amounts to a eugenicist cull.

Children, the other most at risk demographic, are also being hammered by the virus. As the WSWS recently reported, numbers of schools have been compelled to institute temporary online learning arrangements. Far from reflecting a concern on the part of governments and the health authorities over transmission among kids, the temporary shutdowns are being caused by the fact that all available teachers are contracting the virus, amid a major staffing crisis in the sector.

The relative prevalence of different variants of the virus is unknown, because there is no government body that is actively tracking the spread. Much of the sampling is based on tests from overseas visitors, which says little about community transmission. The limited data, however, indicates that different variants are predominating in different states.

Essentially, the country, together with the rest of the world, has been transformed into a petri dish, all but guaranteeing the emergence of new variants. Experts have warned it is only a matter of time before an even more transmissible and even more deadly iteration of the virus is identified.

More critical epidemiologists, who were once regularly cited in the official media, have been “deplatformed.” Their voices can be heard only on social media sites such as Twitter. In effect, authoritative and scientifically based public health advice has been forced underground.

One such expert recently noted that federal Labor Health Minister Mark Butler has presided over more mass death than any of his counterparts since World War II. Butler, and federal Labor, have been in office for just over 12 months.

There is a degree of shock and anger among those who follow the pandemic, that Labor’s election, at both the federal level and in almost every state and territory, has not altered the course of COVID policy in the slightest. More than that, the federal Labor government has gone further in dismantling any coordinated public health response than its conservative predecessor was able to.

That underscores the fact that Labor is a party of the ruling elite, committed to enforcing the dictates of the corporate elite against the working class, even if it means levels of preventable death not seen outside of war time.

As attacks inside Russia continue, Macron calls for NATO membership “path” for Ukraine

Andre Damon

As Ukraine continued drone strikes and artillery bombardments of Russian territory for a second day in a row Wednesday, French President Emanuel Macron said he supports a “path” for Ukraine to join the NATO military alliance.

On Tuesday, eight explosive drones were launched at Moscow, the capital city of Russia, damaging an apartment complex. It was the second Ukrainian drone strike on Moscow since the start of the war.

The attacks continued Wednesday with a series of drone strikes against two oil refineries in the region of Russian Krasnodar and the shelling of the Belgorod region of Russia near the Ukrainian border. On Tuesday, Belgorod Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said shelling had killed one person and injured four. Shelling in the region continued Wednesday.

In response to Tuesday’s attacks, both US and UK officials pared back their previous claims that they did not support Ukrainian strikes inside Russia.

UK Foreign Minister James Cleverly said that Ukraine had “the right to project force beyond its borders,” and that such attacks are “internationally recognized as being legitimate as part of a nation’s self-defense.”

Commenting on the US and UK response, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said that Russia “would have preferred to hear at least some words of condemnation” of the attacks.

The attacks inside of Russia follow the announcement at the G7 Summit on May 19 that the US would allow its NATO allies to send F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine, and the announcement earlier this month by the UK that it would send long-range missiles to Ukraine.

While the US had previously claimed that it did not “encourage or enable” strikes inside of Russia, it is becoming increasingly clear that the fighter jets and long-range missiles are being provided with the aim of striking deep inside Russian-held territory, or even inside Russia itself.

The attacks follow last week’s incursions launched by far-right forces aligned with Ukraine, which carried out raids inside of the Belgorod territory using US-supplied vehicles.

Speaking Wednesday in Slovakia, French President Emanuel Macron called for Ukraine to be provided with “tangible and credible” security guarantees.

Macron said that “if we want to hold our own against Russia… we must give Ukraine the means to prevent any new aggression and to include Ukraine in any new security architecture.”

The French president said he favored a “path” to NATO membership for Ukraine.

Commenting on the announcement, the Financial Times wrote that Macron’s “call for a ‘path towards’ NATO membership for Ukraine also represents a change in position for France, which alongside Germany and the US had earlier this year pushed back against demands from the UK, Poland and other eastern European members to offer Ukraine some form of tangible ‘path’ to membership at the July summit.”

Macron said that discussions on Ukraine’s membership were ongoing and would be a major theme at the NATO summit in Lithuania in July.

In April, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg declared that “Ukraine’s rightful place is in NATO,” adding, “All NATO Allies have agreed that Ukraine will become a member.”

On Wednesday, the United States announced another $300 million arms spending for the Ukraine war, including artillery and long-range missiles. Germany, meanwhile, announced on Wednesday that it would shut down four of Russia’s five consulates in Germany.

On Wednesday and Thursday, NATO foreign ministers are meeting in Oslo, Norway to discuss moving forward with the accession of Norway to the military alliance. Earlier this week, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Sweden to call for its entry into the alliance as well.

The accelerated pace of attacks inside Russia, the increasing openness with which these attacks are welcomed by the US and other NATO members, the rapid expansion of NATO to Russia’s borders and the open talk of Ukraine joining NATO point to the escalation and transformation of the war into a direct conflict between NATO and Russia.

UN Agencies Warn ‘Acute Food Insecurity’ Likely to Worsen in 18 Hunger Hot Spots

Jessica Corbett

As El Niño looms and fighting in Sudan rages on, a pair of United Nations agencies on Monday warned that “acute food insecurity is likely to deteriorate further in 18 hunger hot spots” across 22 countries from June to November.

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Food Program (WFP) delivered that warning in a joint report.

“Afghanistan, Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan, and Yemen remain at the highest concern level,” the report states. “Haiti, the Sahel (Burkina Faso and Mali), and the Sudan have been elevated to the highest concern levels; this is due to severe movement restrictions of people and goods in Haiti, as well as in Burkina Faso and Mali, and the recent eruption of conflict in the Sudan.”

“Pakistan, the Central African Republic, Ethiopia, Kenya, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the Syrian Arab Republic are hot spots with very high concern, and the warning is also extended to Myanmar,” the publication continues. “Lebanon, El Salvador, and Nicaragua have been added to the list of hunger hot spot countries, since the September 2022 edition. Malawi, Guatemala, and Honduras remain hunger hot spot countries.”

The document stresses that worsening conditions in the hot spots occur in the context of a “global food crisis,” so “the countries and situations covered in this report highlight the most significant deteriorations of hunger expected in the outlook period” but do not represent all nations facing high levels of acute food insecurity.

“Conflict will disrupt livelihoods—including agricultural activities and commercial trade—as people are either directly attacked or flee the prospect of attacks, or face movement restrictions and administrative impediments,” the report states. “New emerging conflicts, in particular the eruption of conflict in the Sudan, will likely drive global conflict trends and impact several neighboring countries.”

“The use of explosive ordnance and siege tactics in several hunger hot spots continues to push people into catastrophic levels of acute food insecurity,” the document adds, “highlighting the critical role of humanitarian access in preventing the worst outcomes of hunger.”

The new report notably came as the WFP announced that on Saturday, six weeks since the fighting broke out in Sudan—displacing nearly 1.4 million people—the U.N. program was able to begin distributing food assistance to the thousands affected by the conflict in and around the capital Khartoum.

“This is a major breakthrough. We have finally been able to help families who are stuck in Khartoum and struggling to make it through each day as food and basic supplies dwindle,” said Eddie Rowe, WFP’s country director in Sudan, in a statement.

“We have been working round-the-clock to reach people in Khartoum since the fighting began,” Rowe added. “A window opened late last week which allowed us to start food distributions. WFP must do more, but that depends on the parties to the conflict and the security and access they realistically guarantee on the ground.”

Along with armed conflict, drivers of the deterioration in the report’s focal regions include economic issues and the climate emergency. The publication points out that last year, “economic risks were driving hunger in more countries than conflict was,” and “the global economy is expected to slow down in 2023—amid monetary tightening in advanced economies—increasing the cost of credit.”

“Weather extremes, such as heavy rains, tropical storms, cyclones, flooding, drought, and increased climate variability, remain significant drivers in some countries and regions,” the document explains, noting that experts anticipate El Niño conditions—or the warming of sea surface temperatures across the tropical Pacific Ocean—in the months ahead, “with significant implications for several hunger hot spots.”

The report emphasizes that “urgent and scaled‑up assistance” in all hot spots “is essential to avert a further deterioration of acute food insecurity and malnutrition,” and in some cases, “humanitarian actions are critical in preventing further starvation and death.”

Agency leaders echoed the publication’s call to action. Cindy McCain, WFP’s executive director, said in a statement that “not only are more people in more places around the world going hungry, but the severity of the hunger they face is worse than ever.”

“This report makes it clear: Ae must act now to save lives, help people adapt to a changing climate, and ultimately prevent famine,” McCain declared. “If we don’t, the results will be catastrophic.”

FAO’s director-general, Qu Dongyu, stressed that “business-as-usual pathways are no longer an option in today’s risk landscape if we want to achieve global food security for all, ensuring that no one is left behind.”

“We need to provide immediate time-sensitive agricultural interventions to pull people from the brink of hunger, help them rebuild their lives, and provide long-term solutions to address the root causes of food insecurity,” he said. “Investing in disaster risk reduction in the agriculture sector can unlock significant resilience dividends and must be scaled up.”