Thai court to hear petition to dismiss prime minister

Ben McGrath

Thailand’s Constitutional Court last Thursday accepted a petition from 40 members of the National Assembly’s military-appointed Senate, accusing Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin of ethics violations and seeking his removal from office. The case demonstrates the fragility of the unstable coalition government between the Pheu Thai party and military-backed parties and the fraud of Thailand’s “return to democracy.”

Thailand's Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin, center, at government house in Bangkok, Thailand, April 17, 2024. [AP Photo/Sakchai Lalit]

The ostensible reason for the petition is Srettha’s appointment last month of Pichit Chueban as the prime minister’s Office Minister, a cabinet-level position responsible for managing and coordinating the government’s work. Pichit, an advisor to Srettha, had previously served six months in prison for attempting to bribe the Supreme Court in 2008 while working as a lawyer.

At that time, Pichit represented former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, accused of abusing his power to purchase land for his then-wife, Potjaman na Pombejra. Thaksin was toppled in a military coup in 2006 and went into self-imposed exile in 2008 before being sentenced to two years in prison in the case.

The senators who submitted the petition argued that Srettha violated ethics standards and therefore sections 160 and 170 of the constitution, which state that a minister must “be of evident integrity” and not be guilty of “behavior which is a serious violation of or a failure to comply with ethical standards.” The Constitutional Court voted to accept the petition by a 6-3 margin though they voted 5-4 against suspending Srettha from his position while the case is heard.

In response, the prime minister stated, “I respect the court’s decision. When I entered politics, I was ready to be scrutinized.” He has 15 days to submit evidence in his defense.

That Pichit is connected to Thaksin Shinawatra is not unimportant nor coincidental. The reshuffle of Srettha’s cabinet last month that led to Pichit’s appointment also included other key officials close to Thaksin. Maris Sangiampongsa, who previously served as a secretary to Thaksin while prime minister, is now the foreign minister. The new finance minister, Pichai Chunhavajira, has been described as Thaksin’s former lieutenant.

Thaksin is the de facto head of Pheu Thai, the party he founded in 1998 as Thai Rak Thai. From 2001 to 2006, he served as prime minister and through populist measures and limited handouts, gained a following among Thailand’s poor. This cut across the interests of the country’s traditional elites in the military, bureaucracy, and monarchy.

The military overthrew Thaksin in 2006 and banned his party, which first regrouped in the People’s Power Party and then in Pheu Thai in 2008. The military overthrew the Pheu Thai government of Thaksin’s sister Yingluck in 2014, rewrote the constitution and stacked the Senate and the Constitutional Court with its own appointments.

One of the senators involved in the petition against Srettha, Direkrit Janekrongtham, claimed the case was not directed at any specific figure: “We have no intention to act against anyone or treat unfairly anyone or any party in particular. What we are trying to do is to protect the public interest as stipulated in the constitution.”

These claims are patently absurd. The military-appointed Senate has used its powers to block last year’s general election winner, the Move Forward Party (MFP), from forming a government. The senators behind the Srettha petition are also close to the 2014 coup leaders, Prayut Chan-o-cha and Prawit Wongsuwon. Prayut, the former prime minister, is now a member of the king’s Privy Council while Prawit leads the Palang Pracharath Party (PPRP), the ruling party until last year. Both claimed not to be involved in the push to remove Srettha.

The petition also came on May 17 after the Senate’s five-year term came to an end on May 10. The senators who submitted the petition are acting as “caretakers” until a new senate is chosen in an upcoming, indirect election taking place in the coming weeks.

In addition, the Constitutional Court is not only hearing a case to remove the prime minister, but will also decide in a separate case whether or not to dissolve the MFP, the largest party in parliament. At the beginning of April, the court accept a petition against the MFP, which claimed that it had violated the constitution by making pledges to reform Thailand’s draconian lèse-majesté law. The party has until June 2 to submit evidence in its defense.

Thitinan Pongsudhirak, a professor at Chulalongkorn University’s Faculty of Political Science and a senior fellow at its Institute of Security and International Studies in Bangkok, described the petition against Srettha as a “show of force from unelected powers.” He continued: “We have a government but actually we are ruled by the judiciary... or the military. The military takes over directly and the judiciary derails whoever is in power.”

In fact, Pheu Thai only managed to form a government last August after it agreed to a coalition that excluded the MFP and included the two main military-backed parties, the PPRP and Prayut’s United Thai Nation Party. The result was an unstable alliance under worsening economic conditions and growing unrest in the working class, with the military attempting to rule from behind the scenes rather than openly rig the election results as it had done in 2019.

The petition against Srettha points to this alliance coming apart. No doubt sections of the military establishment are not satisfied with Thaksin’s return to Thailand last August and involvement in politics behind the scenes. His return and avoidance of a lengthy prison term was arranged as part of the coalition agreement between Pheu Thai and the military.

At the same time, the ruling class is sitting on a social powder keg with disputes taking place within the ruling elite over how to prevent an eruption of working-class anger. Wages are low, with the average daily minimum wage only 350 baht ($US9.55). On May 1, the Pheu Thai government pledged to raise the minimum wage to a paltry 400 baht ($US10.91) in October, but even this is seen as too far for big business. The Joint Standing Committee on Commerce, Industry and Banking, for example, denounced this proposed increase as “unrealistically high.”

Workers and farmers also face huge amounts of debt, in part due to low wages. According to the Thai economic think tank TTB Analytics, household debt could reach 16.9 trillion baht ($US461.2 billion), or 91 percent of GDP.

Economic growth is also low. In the first quarter of 2024, GDP grew by only 1.5 percent, less than expected. In April, the World Bank revised its growth projection for 2024, down from 3.2 percent to 2.8 percent. The economy grew by only 2.5 percent last year, the second lowest in Southeast Asia.

Bust UK councils allowed to sell public assets to cover increasing deficits

Ioan Petrescu

The Conservative government is permitting 19 financially devastated English councils to sell property and other assets to fund services next year. Normally, councils are prohibited from selling assets for day-to-day expenses, but this rule is being relaxed for authorities facing severe financial difficulties.

This directive follows a recent consultation conducted by the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC) with councils, which concluded that some of the £23.2 billion in property assets owned by councils should be sold. The government described this as an “exceptional” measure to help maintain services.

Birmingham City Council House [Photo: G-Man]

Local government is in dire financial crisis, with many councils warning of potential cuts to parks, leisure facilities, and cultural services, alongside potential council tax hikes of up to 5 percent.

Eight councils have already declared effective bankruptcy since 2017, with Birmingham (population 1.1 million) being the most prominent. Six of them, Birmingham, Woking, Thurrock, Slough, Nottingham, and Croydon, are among the 19 councils allowed to sell their assets.

In March, the Labour-run council of Birmingham, Britain’s second largest city, approved a further £300 million in cuts to key services—the largest cut ever imposed in the history of local government.

In a city where nearly half of its children are growing up in poverty, 600 council workers will lose their jobs and £75 million will be cut from adult social care and the children, young people, and families department. A 21 percent council tax increase will be imposed over the next two years, with Birmingham granted permission by the government to exceed the 5 percent limit without a referendum as normally required.

Birmingham Council must also sell off a staggering £1.25 billion in historic assets, land, and property to repay a government bailout loan. The Business Desk website noted of the council’s property portfolio: “It’s the largest land estate of any UK local authority, extending to 26,000 acres, and attracts on average £34m of revenue per year from more than 6,500 property assets and over 300 of these have historic interest.”

Dozens of other councils have already earmarked assets for sale to raise hundreds of millions of pounds. They include public facilities built up over decades like libraries, civic halls, swimming pools and community centers.

While this is the first time councils have been allowed to sell assets to cover day-to-day expenses, local authorities have previously been permitted to sell public assets to raise money to “reinvest” in new assets and, since 2016, to cover expected future funding gaps.

Research by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) think tank revealed that, between 2010-2022, English councils sold about 75,000 public assets worth £15 billion to mitigate budget deficits, with approximately 6,000 assets such as playing fields, community centers, and libraries sold. In the same period, only about 2,500 assets were transitioned into community ownership.

The fire sale is a boon to financial speculators and property developers who will be able to buy council properties at meager prices. Rising interest rates and a stagnant economy have resulted in a slump in the property market—especially in the commercial market given the increase in working from home prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Zoë Billingham, director of the IPPR North think-tank, told the Guardian, “It’s also a one-way street. Once public assets have been sold, I would be shocked to hear at a future date any council or government will buy them back. It’s a temporary fix for a difficult time. It’s not sustainable.”

Workers who rely on social care and other public assistance programmes will experience diminished services, longer wait times, and reduced access to essential care. Already a third of all councils are not confident of being able to meet all their legal duties under the Care Act by next year.

In a survey at the beginning of the year, two-thirds of local councils said they plan on cutting services, including parks, leisure facilities, arts, and culture. All of this will be accompanied by job losses in already impoverished communities.

The burden of making up for years of budget cuts also falls disproportionately heavily on the working class. Ninety percent of local authorities plan to raise council tax and increase fees and charges for things such as parking and environmental waste.

Many councils have virtually nothing left to cut, with local authorities collectively facing a £4 billion funding gap. They have suffered savage cuts to budgets since the 2007-8 financial crisis, first under the Brown Labour government (2007-10) and then accelerated by the Tories for the past 14 years.

While the government’s funding package for councils for 2024 increased by 7.5 percent to £64 billion, it is still 10 percent less compared to the inflation-adjusted package for 2010. It has sought to cover for its deliberate starving of local services by blaming any financial crisis on public sector mismanagement and incompetence.

Labour is a whole-hearted partner of the Tories in these attacks on the working class. Ten of the 19 councils being allowed to sell their assets have Labour majorities. Labour councilors have played full part in scandals of financial skullduggery, rampant property speculation, and the sell-off of public assets, as in Croydon in south London.

In 2018, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and his Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell instructed Labour-run councils to abide by the austerity budgets set by the Tory government, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of jobs and the decimation of vital services.

Under new leader Sir Keir Starmer, Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves has been pledging for years that she will demonstrate “ironclad discipline” in restricting social spending. She told the Sunday Telegraph last year that “the money is simply not going to be there.”

Asked in response to Birmingham City Council’s bankruptcy if a Labour government would bail out bankrupt councils to protect vital services, Reeves demurred, stating, “I’m not going to be able to fix all the problems straightaway… I’m under no illusions about the scale of the challenge that I will inherit if I become chancellor later this year and I need to be honest with people.”

Labour and the Tories both defend the capitalist system where trillions of pounds are quickly and easily found to feed the financial oligarchy and finance its murderous wars, but services on which millions of people depend are left to waste away due to “lack of funds”.

A case in point: the recent £600 million support package for councils across England is just one fifth of the £3 billion in UK military aid for Ukraine this financial year. The £600 million is just 0.8 percent of the £75 billion which Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has just allocated in extra military spending up to 2030.

After closing restaurants and terminating workers without notice, Red Lobster files for bankruptcy

Barry Grey

On Sunday, May 19, the Red Lobster restaurant chain filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, having the previous Monday closed 99 of its 551 seafood restaurants across 27 states and terminated without notice thousands of employees.

Signage at a Red Lobster restaurant on Monday, May 20, 2024, in Lincolnwood, Illinois [AP Photo/Teresa Crawford]

While the shuttered locations were listed as “temporarily closed” on Red Lobster’s website, the seafood giant, the largest casual dining seafood restaurant chain in the US, immediately began auctioning off equipment at some of the closed sites.

In the Chapter 11 petition filed with a federal bankruptcy court in Orlando, Florida, where the $2 billion-plus revenue company is headquartered, recently appointed CEO and bankruptcy overseer Jonathan Tibus outlined plans to cut the chain’s locations by up to 50 percent. This is to be the centerpiece of a massive cost-cutting operation aimed at generating cash to pay down the firm’s multi-billion-dollar debt load. The plan includes the sell-off of virtually all of the chain’s assets.

As part of the filing, Red Lobster entered into a so-called “stalking horse” agreement, whereby it plans to sell its business to an entity formed and controlled by its lenders.

If the company’s Chapter 11 petition is approved, a much smaller Red Lobster chain will continue operating under bankruptcy court protection designed to shield the bulk of the creditors’ loans and the stakes of Wall Street and international investors.

The full burden of the downsizing and cost-cutting process will be imposed on the company’s pre-bankruptcy 36,000-strong workforce, the “vast majority” of whom, according to the bankruptcy petition, are part-time.

The Orlando Business Journal estimated that 6,500 workers have already lost their jobs in the initial wave of closures, but this number will climb dramatically as more locations are shut down over the coming weeks and months.

Angry workers took to social media to express their disgust at the company’s ruthless and contemptuous treatment of its employees.

One worker posted on X, “Red Lobster just laid all of us off without notice,” adding that even the restaurant managers weren’t told in advance. They only found out at 8 a.m. Monday morning, May 13. The worker said they were informed through a notification from their shift-scheduling app.

A laid-off employee posted on Reddit: “We didn’t even get an email, we checked our scheduling app and it just said we were closed and a number to call for benefits.”

Another terminated worker posted on X: “What Red Lobster did in New York is illegal. They closed their doors with no warning. So now we are unemployed.”

Adding insult to injury, the company waited until the day after Mother’s Day (Sunday, May 12), a big revenue day, to close the locations. A worker posted, “I lost my job today without warning and working Mother’s Day yesterday.”

Another worker wrote: “I’m one of the lucky ones who don’t have kids or a house to pay off. Just so terrible leaving all those employees with nothing, no notice, anything.”

A former Red Lobster manager wrote on Reddit: “To do it after Mother’s Day was probably the slimiest thing they could have done. Squeezed every last dime out of all of us. Shame on them.”

In its bankruptcy filing, Red Lobster boasted of its supposedly humane treatment of its workers, touting the fact that it has established an Employee Emergency Assistance fund, known as “Red Lobster Cares,” in which “the company and its employees help fellow employees facing financial hardship.” It noted that in recent years, it has “made the Forbes list of America’s Best Large Employers.”

Sarah Foss, global head of legal at Debtwire, told Newsweek:

By shutting its doors without any advance warning to its employees that the company was shutting down, Red Lobster could face litigation related to purported failures to properly notify employees of closures or layoffs under the Workers Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act.

The WARN Act requires employers with 100 or more full-time employees to give workers a minimum of 60 days’ notice for planned mass layoffs or closings. In fact, such a lawsuit has now been filed. Donna Lowe, the lead plaintiff for the suit, claims she was terminated without notice on or around May 14.

According to Bloomberg Law, the filing alleges that Red Lobster violated the WARN Act and the New Jersey WARN Act and seeks declaratory and injunctive relief, damages, attorneys’ fees, and costs.

The Red Lobster chain, founded in Florida in 1968, has been undermined fundamentally by the ever-greater financialization of the US and global capitalist economy, which has seen the domination of economic life by huge private equity firms and oligopolies, which exert a parasitic and destructive influence on the productive forces—above all, on the working class.

Prior to last week, the 56-year-old firm operated some 551 restaurants across 44 states in the US as well as 27 locations in Canada. In addition, it had 28 franchised restaurants outside the US, including in Mexico, Ecuador, Japan and Thailand.

Offering a varied menu of seafood, including promotions such as unlimited shrimp, at relatively moderate prices, Red Lobster was popular among working class families and those in the lower and mid-income ranges. The chain has been stagnating for the past two decades, roughly in tandem with a series of financial crises in the US that have left working class families poorer and less economically secure.

In each case, the government has spent trillions to bail out the banks, the hedge funds and the super-rich, driving up the national debt and fueling price inflation on the one hand and social cuts on the other. More recently, the pressure on working class budgets has been compounded by record spending on the military and the expanding wars in Central Europe and the Middle East and the feverish war preparations against China.

The restaurant chain began to go into a tailspin in 2014 when it was sold to Golden Gate Capital, a San Francisco-based private equity company. Golden Gate loaded the company up with debt and sold off the property on which the restaurants were located, entering into a leasing arrangement that forced Red Lobster to pay above-market rents that ravaged its declining revenue base. By the time of its bankruptcy filing, the company was paying half of its operating earnings in cash rent.

The eruption of the COVID-19 pandemic in late 2019 and early 2020 was the death blow. The multi-trillion-dollar bailout of the ruling class by the Trump and Biden administrations exacerbated the debt crisis and inflation, pricing millions of working class families out of the restaurant market.

Golden Gate pulled out of the company and, in 2020, the massive seafood conglomerate Thai Union, which owns the Chicken of the Sea tuna brand and controls much of the global market for shrimp, bought a controlling share. Thai Union proceeded to use the restaurant chain as a dumping ground for its bloated supplies of shrimp, forcing it to make its unlimited shrimp option a permanent fixture on its menu, at the cost of $11 million in losses in one quarter alone.

In its court filings, Red Lobster said its annual guest counts were down 30 percent from 2019. The chain lost $76 million in 2023.

As Michael Hiltzik, the business columnist of the Los Angeles Times, wrote last week:

The leases at above-market rents were the result of a financing deal entered into by Golden Gate. Thai Union pressured the company into “burdensome supply obligations” that had little to do with the restaurants’ actual needs.

Put all this together, and it becomes clear that a major cause of Red Lobster’s financial collapse was the machinations of its owners.

Indeed, the chain got flipped several times among owners looking for a big payoff; when their expectations were disappointed, they sold it off.

Revealing data on escalation of income inequality in Australia

Nick Beams

The snapshot report on income inequality published by the Productivity Commission this week provides some significant information on the effect of policy decisions by the Labor government to continually suppress Jobseeker and Youth Allowance payments, keeping the recipients in poverty-level conditions.

Unemployed workers outside an inner-western Sydney Centrelink in 2020

They were highlighted by Guardian economics correspondent Greg Jericho in a comment published yesterday.

The Productivity Commission began by noting that the “initial period of the pandemic saw an unprecedented fall in income inequality,” which was the result of the “significant increases in support payments from the Australian government.”

The government of the day, under former Prime Minister Scott Morrison, increased welfare payments by $550 a fortnight. But according to the Productivity Commission such payments were “not fiscally sustainable in the long term”—a directive followed by the Albanese government.

Jericho took issue with this assertion, characterising it as “flat out wrong” and producing facts and figures refuting the claim that maintaining Jobseeker and other payments at the increased level was “not fiscally sustainable.”

He noted that in 2024–25 the government would forgo $28 billion in revenue due to tax concessions on superannuation contributions, of which $15.2 billion would go to the top 20 percent of income earners.

It also cost the government $15.5 billion to provide a 50 percent capital gains tax discount, of which $13.6 billion goes to the richest 20 percent.

Then there is $10.2 billion in fuel tax credits, most of which goes to mining companies.

Jericho wryly commented that he awaited the suggestion by the Productivity Commission that such payments were “fiscally unsustainable.” He noted that lifting the JobSeeker payment by $550 a fortnight would cost $9.7 billion next year—far less than the tax concessions given to wealthy individuals and corporations he listed.

He noted that the Productivity Commission report revealed that, while income inequality fell during the pandemic because of increased government payments, “it has risen quickly since then.

“Even taking into account the increased assistance during the pandemic, the richest 10 percent did best over the three years from 2018-19 to 2021-22.”

This could be seen in the Gini coefficient, which measures inequality. It was at its lowest level this century in 2020–21 and its highest level in 2022–23.

Australia has the lowest level of relative unemployment assistance in the OECD, a grouping of more than 30 major economies, and even increasing it by $550 per fortnight would not lift it to the average for the group. Since 1996, governments (both Liberal and Labor in that period) have “chosen to make life relatively harder for the unemployed than in other rich economies.”

While he points to important data and provides some insights, Jericho approaches these issues from the standpoint of a would-be reformist, maintaining that poverty could be alleviated if other choices were made when drafting government policy.

But such an approach does not address the question of why the imposition of sub-poverty payments for the unemployed, youth allowances and also pensions, has been such a persistent trend, which continues unabated whatever party of the political establishment holds the reins of government.

The driving force of this phenomenon is not “choices” as such. Decisions are made, but various governments are in essence the executors of the decisions handed to them by finance and corporate capital, arising from the relationship of Australian capitalism to the global economy.

Under conditions of the ever-increasing globalisation of production and finance over the past four decades, the concern of all governments, starting with the Hawke-Keating Labor government of 1983–1996, has been to ensure that Australian capitalism remains “internationally competitive.”

This dictate is enforced with the threat that, if they do not, then international money markets will discipline them with a sell-off of the Australian dollar and a possible financial crisis.

Of course, no government can say openly that it is acting on the orders of international finance capital—that would be too clear a revelation of the real class nature of economic relations and policy. Therefore, governments and state organisations, such as the Productivity Commission, as well as financial commentators, insist on the need for policies that are “fiscally sustainable.”

There are two macro-economic prongs to this program: the suppression of wages and the continued downward pressure on social spending, not just in the sphere of unemployment benefits, youth allowances and pensions, but on health and education outlays and housing, which have been steadily eviscerated.

The suppression of wages, in which the trade union bureaucracy has played the key role under every government since Hawke and Keating through its imposition of sub-inflationary pay deals and its overseeing of job cuts through countless “orderly closures,” is expressed in the data.

As Jericho noted in another recent article, according to figures released in March, the value of Australian wages was equivalent to that of September 2010.

“In effect you can now only buy the same amount of things with your wage as you could 14 years ago,” he wrote.

And the situation has worsened markedly over the past four years because, as he continued, “the average wage now buys 5 percent less than it did in March 2020 before the pandemic hit.”

Other figures contained in the Productivity Commission’s snapshot show that between the 2020–21 and 2021–22 financial years, household disposable income declined for 90 percent of the population, with the poorest hit the most, as incomes dropped by 8 percent on the back of a 6 percent decline the previous year.

On the other hand, the wealthiest 10 percent saw their incomes in 2021–22 increase by 10 percent over the previous year.

But even these figures do not tell the full story. They do not take into account the cuts in disposable income over the past two years as a result of inflation, skyrocketing rents, repeated interest rate rises—which have added many hundreds of dollars a week to the mortgage repayments of households—and other cost-of-living increases.

Calculations conducted in March by Peter Martin, economics editor of the Conversation and a visiting fellow of the Australian National University, showed that the two-year drop in household disposable income from 2022 was the biggest in 50 years.

But more is being demanded. This is expressed in the Productivity Commission’s insistence that the 3.7 percent decline in productivity over 2022–23 must be halted and reversed, and its mantra, echoed and implemented by the Labor government, that all social spending—not tax breaks for business and the wealthy, subsidies for corporations and spending on the military—must be “fiscally sustainable.”

Chinese study finds association between viral persistence and Long COVID

Bill Shaw

A study by Chinese researchers has found the strongest evidence yet of an association between persistence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and Long COVID. Not only was the presence of virus in tissues associated with the development of Long COVID, but the risk of Long COVID increased with greater quantities of the virus present.

Significantly, the study collected multiple, serial specimens from adult patients after a documented SARS-CoV-2 infection. This feature differentiates the study from prior work, providing the advantage of tracking viral presence and symptoms in individual patients over time. Prior studies were limited to assessing patients at a single point in time.

The study collected tissue specimens and data from 225 patients treated at the China-Japan Friendship Hospital in Beijing between January and April of 2023. Notably, this study occurred when the Omicron BA.5 variant was overwhelmingly predominant in China.

The patients all met the criteria for mild COVID and were seen at the hospital for other reasons besides COVID. Many patients were additionally scheduled for various procedures that either involved tissue sampling or provided easy ability to collect samples, including gastroscopy (examination of the stomach through a fiberoptic endoscope) and surgery.

Line-up for mass COVID testing in Shanghai before the abandonment of the Zero-COVID policy. [AP Photo/Chen Si, File]

The tissue specimens came from known sites of SARS-CoV-2 persistence based on prior studies. They included gastric mucosa samples and residual surgical samples from the lung, skin, intestine, blood vessels, kidney, breast, thyroid, liver, brain, pancreas, gall bladder, and appendix. 

Initial collection occurred one month after infection as determined by a positive polymerase chain reaction (PCR) or lateral flow test. Subsequent collection of the same tissues occurred at two months and four months after infection. 

Notably, the researchers excluded patients whose SARS-CoV-2 test remained positive at the time of first tissue collection at one month. This feature of the study ensured that symptoms were due to Long COVID and not an ongoing or repeat infection.

The World Health Organization defines Long COVID symptoms as new symptoms beginning three months after infection or later, or symptoms associated with the infection that increase in severity and persist for two months with no other explanation. Accordingly, the researchers assessed patients’ symptoms at four months post-infection by telephone.

Of the 225 patients initially enrolled, 213 (95 percent) participated in the four-month follow-up telephone survey and thus were included in the analysis. Of the 213, 72 (34 percent) had at least one Long COVID symptom. Of the 177 patients who received three doses of a COVID-19 vaccine, 56 (32 percent) had at least one Long COVID symptom at four months. Of the other 36 patients, 16 (44 percent) developed Long COVID. Consistent with previous research, fatigue was the most common symptom, afflicting 21 percent of patients with Long COVID. 

The percentage of tissue specimens testing positive for the virus progressively declined over time. At one month post-infection, 30 percent of specimens were positive, at two months 27 percent were positive, and at four months 11 percent were positive. The five tissues with the highest percentage of specimens testing positive, in decreasing order, were liver, stomach, intestine, brain, and kidney.

The study also quantified the amount of virus, or viral load, in tissues. Since many of the patients were cancer patients, the researchers compared the quantity of virus in tumor tissue and tissue surrounding the tumor or “paratumor” tissue. The hypothesis was that immune dysregulation in tumor tissues might result in higher viral load. However, the study found no difference in viral load between tumor and paratumor tissues.

Similarly, the researchers hypothesized that the quantity of ACE2 receptors in tissues—known to be significant binding sites on cells for viral entry—might be associated with viral load. And again, they found no significant differences.

The researchers were able to fully sequence the viral genome for a single specimen from the lung of a single participant. This result showed the virus to be SARS-CoV-2 variant BA.5.2, consistent with the vast predominance of Omicron BA.5 in China at the time.

Cells infected with SARS-CoV-2 [Photo: NIH]

The reason the researchers could sequence the genome of the virus from this specimen was that the viral load was particularly high. To investigate why, they performed analysis of the genome of the lung cells in the specimen, finding a mutation in gene DNAAF2. Although this mutation has not been previously reported, other mutations in DNAAF2 are known to be associated with ciliary dysmotility (inability of the cilia, the hair-like structures on the outside of cells, to move properly). 

Electron microscopy of the specimen confirmed abnormalities of the cilia. Thus, poor ciliary motility leading to poor viral clearance was a likely cause of this participant’s high viral load.

To investigate the hypothesis of other researchers that viral persistence occurs in blood in patients with blood cell disorders including hematologic malignancies, the researchers collected blood specimens from 9 participants with blood disorders and 10 volunteers (who were also study participants) at two-months post infection. In the participants with blood disorders, they found viral persistence in blood plasma in 3 (33 percent), in white blood cells in one (11 percent), and in peripheral blood mononuclear cells in one (11 percent). In the volunteers without blood disorders, the researchers did not detect any viral persistence. This result provides significant evidence for the hypothesis that individuals with blood disorders have difficulty clearing virus from their blood.

The researchers classified the participants with persistent virus into three categories based on viral load, high virus, medium virus, and low or no virus. Then they calculated a “positive ratio” as the number of tissues in each category from Long COVID participants by the total number of tissues in the category. Across all specimens, this ratio was considerably higher in the medium and high virus groups (60-100 percent) than the low or no virus groups (30-40 percent).

Finally, the researchers looked at gene regulation in lung and blood vessel tissues with viral persistence. They found that genes in lung tissues involved in immune response were downregulated, suggesting these patients had impaired immune response to clear the virus from their lungs. In blood vessels, they found dysregulation of genes involved in coagulation and lipid metabolism. 

Overall, the results provide significant new evidence that viral persistence is associated with Long COVID and that the quantity of virus remaining in tissues is associated with the risk of developing Long COVID. It is important to emphasize that the researchers studied patients with mild COVID-19 disease. These were not patients with severe symptoms or who died or who were hospitalized for COVID-19.

Despite having mild COVID-19 and an overall complete vaccination rate of 83 percent, 34 percent of patients developed Long COVID.

The study design addresses many limitations of prior studies, especially that most prior studies were conducted on autopsy specimens from patients who died from COVID-19. The prior studies that did include living patients recovered virus from respiratory and stomach specimens and thus were not able to look at the diverse array of solid organ specimens that this study examined.

The study was also able to address prior conjectures on blood disorders as well as identify potential mechanisms of how viral persistence leads to Long COVID symptoms. The mechanism appears to be disruption of host cell functions, although future research is needed to confirm this finding.

The study confirms the dangerousness of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and thus the criminality of the ruling class who made a conscious, deliberate decision to let the virus spread indiscriminately throughout the entire human population. The dereliction of duty to protect the public’s health by implementing well-known public health best practices developed over centuries is inexcusable.

Australia: Telstra slashes 2,800 jobs in latest profit-driven restructuring

Martin Scott

Australia’s largest telecommunications provider, Telstra, announced Tuesday that 2,800 jobs—9 percent of the workforce—would be slashed by the end of the year.

The first to go, in July, will be 377 workers in the company’s enterprise division, where 472 positions were already slashed last year, but the restructuring operation will destroy jobs throughout the organisation.

The sackings, along with other cost reduction measures, are expected to cut $350 million in yearly expenditure. This falls short of the company’s T25 restructuring target of $500 million in annual cost savings, leaving open the possibility of further cuts in the first half of next year.

Telstra store in Chadstone Shopping Centre, Victoria. [Photo by Wpcpey / CC BY-SA 4.0]

Telstra’s is the largest job cut announcement by an Australian company so far this year, but takes place in the context of a broader attack on working-class jobs and wages. This was reflected in an increase in the official unemployment rate to 4.1 percent last month, up from 3.9 percent in March.

Professor John Buchanan, from the University of Sydney’s business school warned that Telstra’s job cuts are a sign that “cracks” in the jobs market are becoming “more evident.”

Federal Labor Treasurer Jim Chalmers feigned concern over the cuts, declaring that Tuesday was “a very distressing day” for Telstra workers and their families. But the reality is that the company is carrying out the explicit policy of Labor and the Reserve Bank of Australia, which is to drive up unemployment in order to suppress workers’ demand for increased wages.

The latest cuts were announced by Telstra CEO Vicki Brady in a market update call on Tuesday. Brady said the “reset” of the enterprise unit was prompted by that division’s 66.7 percent drop in EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation).

However, the company as a whole was on track to meet previous EBITDA expectations of around $8.3 billion in 2023–2024, increasing to $8.7 billion in 2024–2025, Brady said. Financial results released in February show that Telstra’s net profit after tax for July–December was $1 billion, an 11.5 percent increase over the same period in 2022.

Having laid out this rosy outlook, the CEO offered no specific explanation for the other more than 2,400 job cuts, except that it was part of Telstra’s broader strategy of slashing costs to drive up profits and shareholder returns.

Brady told Telstra workers in an all-hands meeting, reported by Nine media, “as we make difficult choices, we’re thinking about customers.”

This is a cynical fraud, starkly illustrated by the fact that the job cut announcement came the same day that Telstra customers were notified that the price of home internet service would increase by around 5 percent on July 1.

Brady also announced an end to the pegging of mobile phone plan price increases to CPI, established two years ago under conditions of soaring inflation. While this means there will not be an immediate price rise in July, it opens the door to larger and more frequent increases in future.

Brady also sought to spin the job cuts as being in the interest of “mum and dad” investors, telling workers, “About 80 per cent of Australians own an interest in Telstra, either directly in shares or through their superannuation. So there are a lot of people that also rely on Telstra to be sustainable and successful.”

The Communication Workers Union (CWU), which covers many Telstra workers, claims it was blindsided by Tuesday’s announcement. CWU national assistant secretary James Perkins said on 2GB radio he was “absolutely shocked and devastated” by the news.

It was clear from his comments, however, that the CWU has no intention of mobilising workers in defence of their jobs. Perkins’ central objection was that the union bureaucracy had not been given a seat at the table to plan the decimation of the workforce.

“[U]nions have great ideas about helping companies to be more efficient, to be more effective,” he complained, “but companies like Telstra don’t even want to engage in those conversations.”

In the unlikely event that “those conversations” are not already well underway, they soon will be. Brady flagged in her announcement that the job cuts would “require consultation” with the unions.

It is through such close consultation with the CWU and other unions that Telstra has carried out the mass destruction of its workforce over decades.

This process began in earnest under the union-backed Hawke and Keating Labor governments between 1983 and 1996, including with the 1991 transformation of Telstra (then called Telecom) into a profit-oriented company.

This, along with the refusal of the unions to fight the destruction of some 25,000 jobs under “Project Mercury,” paved the way for Telstra’s privatisation, started under the Howard Liberal-National government in 1997 and completed under the Gillard Labor government in 2011.

Since then, the company has carried out an endless series of cost-cutting restructuring operations, destroying jobs in order to boost profits and shareholder returns. The current T25 restructure was preceded by T22, launched in 2018, which axed more than 8,000 permanent positions along with around 1,600 indirectly employed workers.

In 1980, Telecom had a workforce of around 90,000. By 2015, this had been slashed to 36,000 full-time employees and 38,000 contractors. Prior to Tuesday’s announcement, Telstra’s direct workforce numbered just over 31,000.

None of this would have been possible without the total collaboration of the CWU and other union bureaucracies, which serve as an industrial police force, suppressing workers’ opposition to attacks on their jobs, pay and conditions and delivering everything management demands.

In mid-2022, in the wake of the T22 cuts, the CWU adopted a “neutral” position on a sub-inflationary enterprise agreement offer. This tacit endorsement from the bureaucracy ensured that workers were locked in to three years of real wage cuts.

The 2022 agreement also formalised the division of the company into four separate business units, atomising the workforce and further constraining workers’ already limited rights to oppose management attacks, under the draconian union-backed Fair Work Act.

Telstra workers should draw sharp warnings from these experiences. Again, enterprise bargaining is taking place under the shadow of mass job cuts. As long as the CWU and other union bureaucrats are in charge, this will be used to coerce the remaining workers to accept further cuts to their wages and conditions, based on phony promises that this will prevent the further destruction of jobs.

This bankrupt perspective must be rejected. The slashing of 2,800 jobs must be defeated as a first step in the fight for real improvements to wages and conditions for all Telstra workers. But this is impossible within the framework of the union bureaucracy.

Failed pro-imperialist coup targets Democratic Republic of Congo

Kumaran Ira

Early Sunday morning, several dozen heavily armed men attacked the Palace of the Nation, a presidential palace and home of the Minister of the Economy in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Men in fatigues opened fire, killing two of Economy Minister Vital Kamerhe’s 15 guards. The attack lasted about three hours before it was crushed.

Congolese security forces secure the streets after Congo's army said it has "foiled a coup" and arrested the perpetrators, following a shootout, in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, on Sunday May 19, 2024. [AP Photo/Samy Ntumba Shambuyi]

The spokesman for the Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of Congo said the “attempted coup d’état,” involving “foreigners and Congolese,” was foiled. It was “nipped in the bud by the defence and security forces,” General Sylvain Ekenge said in a short message on national television. He said several Americans, including “two whites” and a Congolese “naturalized British” citizen, were involved.

The leader of the attempted coup was identified as Christian Malanga, a Congolese naturalized American. Malanga and three other men were killed after resisting arrest, and some 50 people, including three US citizens, were arrested, according to a Congolese army spokesman. The arrested US citizens include Malanga’s 21-year-old son Marcel Malanga and Benjamin Zalman-Polun, a 36-year-old former cannabis dealer from Maryland.

The coup took place as Washington and its NATO allies wage a bitter struggle for influence in Africa with China and Russia, amid the NATO-Russia war in Ukraine. The NATO imperialist powers are dissatisfied with the current DRC regime’s development of economic ties with Beijing and Moscow.

The coup leaders made clear their support for the bloody imperialist-backed dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko, who ruled the DRC under the name Zaire from 1965 to 1997. In a livestream posted on Facebook during Sunday’s attack, Malanga threatened DRC President Félix Tshisekedi, shouting: “Felix, get out!” Surrounded by several dozen men dressed in fatigues, with some wearing red berets, Malanga claimed to have taken power and waved the flag of Zaire, saying in Lingala: “The time has come. Long live Zaire, long live Mobutu’s children!”

As his troops occupied the president’s offices, Malanga told the camera in Lingala: “We cannot drag on with Tshisekedi and Kamerhe, they have done too many stupid things in this country.”

Malanga, a US resident, reportedly had served in the DRC and US armies and was a well-known figure in the Congolese diaspora. He ran in the 2011 legislative elections and was arrested and detained for several weeks under former President Joseph Kabila. Upon his release, he went to the US and two years later founded the United Congolese Party. Al Jazeera reported, “over the years, Malanga campaigned for religious freedom in Africa and led anticorruption training initiatives for young Africans in Europe.”

US State Department Spokesperson Matthew Miller said he was aware of reports that two other US citizens are in custody after the failed coup. He refused to confirm whether US officials had contacted the Congolese government to be granted consular access to them. On X/Twitter, US Ambassador to the DRC Lucy Tamlyn said she was “shocked” by reports of the failed coup. She pledged to “cooperate with the DRC authorities to the fullest extent as they investigate these criminal acts and hold accountable any US citizen involved in criminal acts.”

In Paris, Le Monde tried to downplay the coup, claiming it was “far from being the most significant event.” However, about Malanga, it admitted: “He had hoped since 2015 to topple the Congolese regime, first of Joseph Kabila and then of Félix Tshisekedi. This man’s profile and the unfolding of the attack nonetheless raised questions, according to several observers contacted by Le Monde, about possible help the coup plotters could have had and what the real objectives were of what is officially being treated as a coup d’état.”

Whatever precise relations they had with the NATO imperialist powers, the coup plotters clearly decided to act amid the escalating global conflict of the NATO powers with Russia and China. As NATO wages war against Russia in Ukraine and backs the far-right Israeli regime of Benjamin Netanyahu in waging genocide against the Palestinian population in Gaza, conflict between the imperialist powers and Russia and China is intensifying in Africa.

The French war in Mali and the Sahel since 2013 has led to several military coups and, amid mass protests against the French army presence, demands by the military regimes in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger that France leave their territory. These regimes have then sought military collaboration with Russian instead of French troops.

In Congo, the imperialist powers are waging a bitter struggle for influence against Russia and China. There is deep anger among mining companies from the NATO countries at Tshisekedi’s “contract of the century” deal with Chinese mining companies. In exchange for purchasing the output of several key Congolese mines, Beijing agreed to invest $3 billion in mine infrastructure and $6 billion in infrastructure across the rest of the DRC.

The DRC has massive, strategic mineral resources including uranium, copper, gold, tin, cobalt, diamonds, manganese and zinc, with a value estimated in the tens of trillions of dollars. It is by far the world’s largest producer of cobalt, accounting for roughly 70 percent of global production. Cobalt is a key component in batteries for electric cars and mobile phones. The DRC is also the world’s third-largest copper producer.

Although Washington is distancing itself from the failed coup, the NATO imperialist powers are notorious for their clandestine military operations in Africa. In the DRC, US and Belgian imperialism conspired with forces of the Congolese bourgeoisie to assassinate Patrice Lumumba, the leader of the anti-colonial struggle in the Congo and its first democratically-elected prime minister. Lumumba was murdered in 1961. The Mobutu dictatorship that emerged after his assassination had close ties to the imperialist powers, in particular to France.

The US-backed takeover of neighboring Rwanda by President Paul Kagame’s forces in 1994-1995 against the French-backed Hutu government, during the Rwandan genocide, ultimately brought down Mobutu’s regime. After Kagame had consolidated his regime, Rwandan-backed forces attacked westwards into the eastern Congo. The DRC was ravaged by war from 1996 to 2008. It is estimated to have cost an estimated 5.6 million lives.

The eastern Congo is still to this day in a state of civil war, which has deepened since a rebellion, the March 23 Movement (M23), went on the offensive again two and a half years ago, backed by Rwanda. There are frequent clashes between Congolese security forces and armed groups, especially the M23 and the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF). In the recent period, these clashes have dramatically increased, provoking a humanitarian crisis. In October 2023, the UN announced that the number of internally displaced people in DRC had reached a record 6.9 million.

Tshisekedi, who has been in power since 2019, was reelected with 73 percent of the vote in December 2023. The failed coup hit the DRC as he intensifies ties with Russia and China. He recently said Eastern influence is outshining Western influence in Africa, rating Russia and China over Western countries in transparency and ease of doing business.

He said that his country has the right to deepen its ties with Russia: “In France, Israel was condemned for some actions in Gaza. Does this prevent France from maintaining its relations with Israel? Why do they want to judge us when it comes to Africans? One should not judge us. We have the right to the friends we want, and we are friends to all those who want to be our friends. … Russians want friendship with Africa and DR Congo, so why should we refuse?”

Whatever precise assistance they received from the NATO powers, it was amid NATO’s growing global conflict with Russia that the coup plotters in Kinshasa launched their failed bid to reimpose a regime in Congo harking back to Mobutu’s bloody, pro-imperialist regime.