Large-scale police deployment evicts alternative housing project in Berlin, Germany

Justus Leicht & Peter Schwarz

The Berlin Senate mobilized over 2,500 police officers from across Germany to carry out evictions from a residential building on behalf of one of the capital’s most infamous real estate speculators last week.

The forceful evictions from the alternative housing project “Leibig 34” last Friday shows that the supposedly left-wing parties of the city government—the SPD, the Greens and the Left Party—defend capitalist interests no less viciously than the conservatives, despite presenting themselves as defenders of renters and wage earners at election time.

Building at number 34 Liebig Street (Photo: St. Krug/CC-BY-SA 3.0)

The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) for years has demanded a renunciation of “left-red-green contaminated ’68 Germany,” by which it means a return to police state authoritarianism. The red-red-green Berlin Senate is now putting the AfD’s perspective into practice.

The Berlin Senate’s massive police deployment to evict the “anarcho-queer-feminist housing project” at number 34 Leibig Street in the Friedrichshain neighborhood was reminiscent of a scene of civil war. Even the Green-associated taz newspaper wrote that the police engaged “as if tasked with putting down an armed insurrection.”

According to the taz, up to 5,000 officers were on standby to ensure the eviction, among them 19 100-man teams from other states. There were even reports of threats to deploy a heavily-armed Sondereinsatzkommando (SEK, equivalent to a SWAT team).

Ultimately, 2,500 armored police officers moved in, accompanied by an armored bulldozer, an excavator, a ladder truck and a helicopter, to evacuate the roughly 40 female residents in the house, who offered little resistance. The 1,500 protesters reported by police to have gathered in opposition to the eviction likewise remained largely peaceful.

Immediately following the eviction, police led journalists through the private rooms of the displaced to provide right-wing propaganda about filth and neglect—as if the residents had the chance to tidy up during the forceful eviction.

A protest, hours later and far from the evacuated house, was exploited for propaganda purposes. The Berlin press was in a tizzy over broken windows and burning cars, for which the autonomous Black Bloc—permeated with police provocateurs—was responsible. The police engaged the demonstrators with drastic violence, arresting 132 people by day’s end.

The building at number 34 Liebig Street was more than a mere alternative housing project. It stood in symbolic opposition to the gentrification and real estate speculation that has made Germany’s capital increasingly unaffordable for average workers, retirees and students. Housing and rental prices have exploded in recent years. The price of a rental apartment in Neukölln, part of the same district as Friedrichshain, for example, has risen nearly 150 percent in the past decade.

Big real estate enterprises, such as Deutsche Wohnen and Vonovia, which together own over ten percent of the 1.5 million rentals in Berlin, have earned billions in the last two decades.

The two companies purchased tens of thousands of publicly owned buildings for a song in the early 2000s and have been cashing in ever since, without need of significant investment in the properties themselves. The Senate, led by Klaus Wowereit, an alliance of SPD and the Left Party, sold the state-owned properties to satisfy the debts of the city and the bankrupt bank Bankgesellschaft Berlin. The Senator of Finance at the time was Thilo Sarrazin (SPD), who subsequently helped pave the way for the AfD with his publication of racist literature.

Opposition is growing among Berliners to high rents and the real estate companies. As one indication, the initiative “Deutsche Wohnen & Co. enteignen” (expropriate Deutsche Wohnen & Co.), demanding a referendum for the public takeover of 240,000 apartments from real estate companies, quickly garnered 77,000 signatures. This initiative, however, is a fraud aimed at dissipating popular anger: its initiators are associated with the Left Party, which has again demonstrated where it stands in questions of housing by the vacating of Liebig 34.

Smaller “real estate sharks” like Gijora Padovicz, owner of the Liebig 34, play a key role in countering this opposition in the population. While the big conglomerates pull their political strings behind the scenes, Padovicz acts as the bulldog on site.

The dubious machinations of his intricate family empire, which owns at least 200 properties in Berlin, have repeatedly come to light: extortionate rent for refugees, unfounded lease terminations, forced evictions, speculative vacancies, etc. Afflicted tenants have founded the Padovicz WatchBlog, which critically tracks his corporate network and practices.

One of Padovicz’ specialties is the destruction of left-wing housing projects. Before Liebig 34, projects such as 29 Scharnweber Street and 12 Kreutzig Street suffered similar fates. Tellingly, the state association of the extreme-right AfD, which had difficulty finding a landlord in Berlin, is located in an office building on Kurfürsten Street belonging to the Padovicz company network.

Padovicz acquired the property at number 34 Liebig Street in 2007. At that time, the building had already been an alternative housing project for 27 years. Like 130 other buildings in Berlin, it was occupied in 1990 as speculators and former owners swarmed like locusts to enrich themselves on the lucrative real estate of the dissolving German Democratic Republic (GDR). The tenancies were legalized soon thereafter.

Padovicz was able to buy the property cheaply because the previous owners had a falling out and auctioned off the building. Residents of the house, who offered to buy it, were outmaneuvered by various tricks. In 2008, the new owner concluded a 10-year commercial lease with the residents through the association “Raduga,” which, unlike a residential lease, does not protect tenants against arbitrary eviction. Ten days after the contract expired, Padovicz gave notice to all residents of the building.

This sparked protests that extended well beyond those directly affected. Eighty-five prominent leaders of Berlin’s cultural life signed an appeal stating: without its alternative housing and cultural projects, Berlin would be “socially, politically and culturally significantly poorer.”

The signatories included director Leander Haußmann; the artistic directors of the Berlin Ensemble, the Berlin Festspiele and the Volksbühne Oliver Reese, Thomas Oberender and René Pollesch; the artistic director of the Schaubühne Thomas Ostermeier; the director of the Berlin State Ballet Sasha Waltz; the literature Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek as well as authors Cornelia Funke, Wladimir Kaminer, Marc-Uwe Kling, Günter Wallraff and Didier Eribon.

Ostermeier told the taz that “these centers of counterculture give Berlin its identity as an alternative, artistic metropolis.” Margarita Tsomou from Hebbel am Ufer added that “the most interesting and novel cultural impulses originate in these spaces.” Without them, Berlin runs the risk of becoming a “desolate cultural landscape because only well-heeled pseudo-creatives can afford these spaces.”

Representatives of the Green and Left parties hypocritically feigned sympathy. Senator for Culture Klaus Lederer told the taz that such projects are “an integral part of what make up Berlin, its reputation and its cultural scene.” In fact, Lederer, as a member of the Berlin Senate, is personally responsible for the brutal destruction of the housing project.

On the other hand, the Liebig 34 has received support from its neighborhood. Many local residents interpret the destruction of the project as a significant step toward further gentrification of the quarter, which will result in unpayable rents.

In the end, however, Padovicz was given cover by the judiciary. Although the property was primarily used as a residence, as reflected in the rental contract, the Berlin State Court sustained the argument of the real estate speculator that commercial law was nevertheless applicable, under which the residents were not considered people in need of shelter, rather as a company with a limited need of an office or warehouse. On June 2, 2020, the regional court granted the landlord’s case for eviction.

The Berlin Senate, which supposedly has “no money” for elementary measures against the coronavirus in schools and public transport, spared no expense to help a shady speculator maintain his “rights” and to put several dozen women out on the street.

The mobilization of thousands of police officers to evict an alternative housing project must be understood as a serious warning. In the face of social tensions and the catastrophic consequences of the coronavirus pandemic, the ruling class is preparing to violently suppress any opposition from below. All of the parties in Parliament—from the AfD to the Left Party—are in full support of this course of action.

Unifor deal gives FCA Canada green light to cut jobs

Roger Jordan

Just minutes before Wednesday’s 11:59 p.m. deadline, Unifor announced that it had reached a tentative agreement for a new three-year agreement covering 9,000 Fiat-Chrysler (FCA) Canada workers. Presented at a press conference by Unifor president Jerry Dias as a great victory, the deal is based on the continued shrinking of the workforce and the further entrenchment of a multi-tier wage system that will allow FCA to significantly reduce labour costs.

The centrepiece of the agreement touted by Dias was a commitment by FCA to invest between $1.35 billion and $1.5 billion to transform its Windsor assembly plant into a facility capable of building hybrid and electric vehicles. However, the investment is dependent on the federal and Ontario provincial governments providing the automaker with hundreds of millions in subsidies, and on Unifor’s complicity in shrinking the workforce at Windsor, at least temporarily, by over 1,000 workers.

FCA workers at Windsor plant

At the press conference, Dias boasted that out of the 1,500 workers who were laid off following the elimination of the third shift in Windsor in July, only 425 retained their right to be recalled under the new agreement. On the basis of early retirement plans and other “incentives,” FCA and Unifor have combined to persuade or bully the remaining 1,050 to leave. Dias added that even this vastly reduced number of workers will only be recalled sometime in 2023, more than two and a half years from now.

As talks got under way, Dias stated that two new products were needed for the Windsor plant in order to recall the third shift. The tentative agreement sees FCA commit to only one new product after 2023. Nonetheless, Dias argued that the third shift will return because the plant’s new production capabilities will enable it to build a range of hybrid and electric vehicles. His bluster about returning the third shift was dampened when he was forced to concede in response to a journalist’s question that this would take place only in 2024.

Even this latter pledge must be viewed critically by autoworkers. Dias stated that the Unifor deal with FCA follows the Ford pattern. This means that various early retirement and buyout mechanisms will be included to force higher-paid legacy workers out of the plants in Windsor and Brampton, and the multi-tier wage system will be further entrenched. This will allow FCA to hire lower-paid second-tier workers if they expand their operations in Windsor in 2024 or flood their plants with temporary part-time (TPT) workers with virtually no rights.

If the agreement follows the Ford deal, it will also presumably permit FCA management to institute the hated alternative work schedule (AWS), which is currently being used in the United States to regularly work production employees for 10 or more hours a day and to compel skilled trades workers at FCA’s Sterling Heights Assembly Plant north of Detroit to work 12-hour shifts for seven days in a row.

Dias also acknowledged that FCA has the right to revise its investment pledge based on a “market conditions” clause in the agreement. This was the justification employed by General Motors when it reneged on previous commitments and shuttered its Oshawa truck and car assembly plants.

Dias’ remarks on the future of the Brampton plant were, if anything, even less reassuring. With some 3,400 workers currently employed at the Toronto area facility, which is operating well below capacity, all the Unifor president could offer were promises for the introduction of three derivative vehicles during the life of the agreement. No production guarantees for the Dodge Challenger, Dodge Charger, and Chrysler 300 sedan, the three models currently built there, exist beyond 2023.

One autoworker wrote in response, “Jerry Dias needs to be out... I think he’s getting paid under the table. You guys should all vote no. Nothing for Brampton Assembly, mark my words this will probably be the last 3 years for Brampton.” Another added, referring to the prospect of the AWS, “Like Ford contract we will be doing AWS. Which means working 10 hours a day for 4 days and Friday 8 and maybe Saturday.”

Unifor also agreed to a significant reduction of workers at FCA’s Etobicoke casting facility just outside of Brampton. While 500 were employed there at the beginning of the previous contract, this number has been steadily reduced to just over 100 today. Dias indicated that the return of 80 jobs previously shifted to Brampton could help the Etobicoke facility employ slightly over 200 workers, i.e. less than half as many in 2016, by 2022.

At the press conference, Dias spoke like a corporate consultant or partner offering his services to big business investors. He enthused at the prospect at developing a “national auto strategy” in partnership with the Trudeau Liberal government and the right-wing provincial government of Doug Ford based on state handouts to the corporations to guarantee lucrative shareholder payouts, and Unifor’s complicity in reducing wages and benefits. He also advocated the development of a national economic strategy for corporate Canada based on the exploitation of its natural resources and the working class, with the union serving as a police force in plants and other work sites to enforce low wages and block strikes.

But Dias’ style is not simply a personal matter. Rather, it expresses the role of Unifor and the trade union bureaucracy as a whole, which is to boost the competitive position of the automakers’ Canadian operations by reducing labour costs and increasing the exploitation of the workers that Unifor falsely claims to represent.

Unifor’s promotion of Canadian nationalism is aimed at pitting Canadian, US and Mexican autoworkers against each other in a race to the bottom on wages and working conditions. Its pro-capitalist corporatism accepts without question the claim that autoworkers’ jobs must be subordinated to investor profit and lavish payouts to corporate CEOs. On this basis, Unifor, its predecessor, the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW), and its US counterpart, the United Auto Workers (UAW), have presided over the whipsawing of jobs and benefits back and forth across national borders over the past three decades, while defending the profitability of the auto giants.

Unifor’s contempt for autoworkers was shown recently at Ford, where similar promises of major investments were used by Dias to conceal massive attacks on working conditions. The union deliberately suppressed the fact that it had agreed to the AWS until after the ratification vote. It also buried its acceptance of a reduction of the Oakville assembly plant’s workforce by over 10 percent within a year in the small print of its “highlights” brochure.

FCA workers should expect Unifor to attempt similar trickery as it seeks to smuggle through the deal in an online ratification vote scheduled for this Sunday. They should decisively reject this by demanding that the agreement be released in full prior to the ratification vote, and that they be given at least one week to study its details and discuss it with their colleagues. If Unifor refuses these legitimate demands, which have been endorsed by over 1,800 rank-and-file workers in an online petition, FCA workers should automatically vote “no” on the deal.

But a rejection of this sellout is only the first step because Unifor would not come back with anything different. That is why the fight for decent-paying, secure jobs requires the formation of rank-and-file factory committees that are independent of Unifor. These committees should take up workers’ key demands, like the rank-and-file safety committee at FCA’s Sterling Heights Assembly Plant (SHAP), which is waging a struggle against the imposition of 12-hour shifts on skilled trades workers and dangerous conditions during the pandemic.

The job actions in March by Windsor workers against the spread of COVID-19 helped spark wildcat strikes at struggles at SHAP and other plants in Michigan and Ohio, ultimately forcing the closure of the North American auto industry in mid-March. This was done by the workers themselves, not Unifor or the UAW. Whether it is defending lives or the right to a secure job and a decent living standard, everything depends on the independent initiative of workers themselves.

The rank-and-file committees should also unite autoworkers in a common fight across all of the Detroit Three’s operations in Canada and throughout North America. In opposition to the nationalism incited by the unions, their guiding program should be the unification of Canadian, US, and Mexican autoworkers in a counteroffensive against all job cuts and concessions.

Global surge in COVID-19 cases as governments abandon efforts to contain the pandemic

Benjamin Mateus

Global coronavirus cases will top the 40 million mark sometime this weekend, and the number of new cases is approaching 400,000 a day. The grim progression of the pandemic can be charted in these numbers: new cases first reached 100,000 a day on May 20; they hit 200,000 a day on July 1; 300,000 a day on September 4, and reached 398,609 on Wednesday, October 14.

There are already more than 1.1 million deaths. The daily number of fatalities has also started turning upward with a seven-day moving average of 5,200 deaths. Two days running, the number of deaths has exceeded 6,000. The current projections by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation place estimates of global COVID-19 deaths at 1.9 million by January 1, 2021.

A health care worker pushes the body of a man who died of COVID-19 to the spot where his family will wait for a funeral home to take him away, outside the General Hospital in La Paz, Bolivia, Thursday, July 23, 2020. (AP Photo/Juan Karita)

Whereas during the summer, Brazil, India and the United States were at the center of the pandemic, with the turn to fall and colder temperatures in the northern hemisphere, where the majority of the world’s population lives, cases across Russia, Europe and North America have seen a dramatic upward shift, as predicted by modelers and epidemiologists.

On Thursday, the United States, with 65,000 new cases of COVID-19, surpassed India for the first time in several weeks. Twenty-six states have posted more than 1,000 new cases. Wisconsin shattered its previous high with more than 3,700 new cases. Though the Midwest and rural communities face the brunt of the current surge, cases are trending upward in 44 states. Nearly 900 people died yesterday.

Caitlin Rivers, a Johns Hopkins University epidemiologist, painted a bleak picture. “We are headed in the wrong direction, and that’s reflected not only in the number of new cases but also in test positivity and the number of hospitalizations. Together, I think these three indicators give a very clear picture that we see increased transmission in communities across the country.” Hospitalization across the country for COVID-19 stands at 37,308, a 30 percent rise since the last week of September.

The surge across Europe has been catastrophic, with the United Kingdom, France and Spain each having surpassed the United States on a per capita basis as Germany begins to see a similar steep climb. Some 35 percent of France’s outbreaks of three or more cases occurred in schools or universities. More than a third of UK outbreaks in September were in educational settings. The incidence rate of COVID-19 among children and youth since returning to school has been astronomical.

Daily new cases per capita US vs Major European nations

Placing it in context, in early August, the number of daily new cases across Europe dropped under 20,000. On October 15, there were 131,726 new cases, a more than sixfold increase. Over the next few weeks, these current highs will be quickly outstripped as no real measure is being employed to stem the deluge.

France saw an unprecedented 30,621 cases yesterday. It is estimated that 90 percent of their intensive care units will be filled by the end of next week. Yet, President Emmanuel Macron has announced rhetorical measures that will do little to stem this tsunami of cases. The political crisis in the United Kingdom is unraveling rapidly, with Prime Minister Boris Johnson resisting lockdown as new cases approach 20,000 per day. With over 7,074 new cases Thursday, Germany surpassed its peak highs from the spring and is also seeing hospitals filling rapidly.

Hospital beds in Central Europe are quickly filling with COVID patients. Many of these countries are short of critical equipment as well as nursing and physician staff, as many are falling ill attempting to care for their patients. The public health infrastructure is collapsing under the impact of the pandemic. The Czech Republic, with close to 10,000 new cases yesterday, has the highest per capita infection rate in the world. It is issuing a perfunctory partial three-week lockdown closing schools, bars, and clubs. The positivity rate has reached 30 percent, and the health officials are warning that hospitals will soon be overwhelmed.

Dr. Hans Kluge, the World Health Organization’s regional director for Europe, said that Europe had recorded its highest weekly number of COVID-19 cases on Thursday. “The evolving epidemiologic situation in Europe raises great concern,” he said. “Daily cases are up; hospital admissions are up, and COVID is now the fifth leading cause of deaths in the region.” Despite attempting to strike an optimistic note that compared to the number of cases, deaths were down, he admitted that there was “a realistic potential” for the situation to worsen dramatically, specifically if the contagion began to creep back into older and more vulnerable groups.

Drs. Martin Kulldorf, Sunetra Gupta, and Jay Bhattacharya at the American Institute for Economic Research, photo courtesy of American Institute for Economic Research.

Capitalist governments worldwide, under pressure from their bosses in the financial markets, are resisting further lockdowns, recognizing that any such restrictions would have significant consequences on an already shaky economic situation.

The homicidal policy of “focused protection,” as formulated in the Great Barrington Declaration, is now the stand-in nomenclature for the discredited policy of “herd immunity” that has been pursued by the ruling class in its response to the pandemic.

These terms are applied to cover up what is in every sense of the word a policy of social euthanasia: abandoning any effort to suppress the virus, regardless of the consequences for the elderly, those with compromised immune systems, and countless others. Simply stated, this policy will see millions die to protect the profits of the corporate elite.

In opposition to the Great Barrington Declaration, 80 renowned researchers published a letter in the Lancet stating, unequivocally, that a strategy of herd immunity (forced protection) is a “dangerous fallacy unsupported by the scientific evidence … it is critical to act decisively and urgently. Effective measures that suppress and control transmission need to be implemented widely, and they must be supported by financial and social programs that encourage community responses and address the inequities that have been amplified by the pandemic.”

Ahead of New Zealand election, PM Jacinda Ardern lies about reducing poverty

Tom Peters

New Zealand Labour Party leader and incumbent Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern participated in a final televised debate on Thursday against opposition National Party leader Judith Collins, ahead of tomorrow’s election.

The debate, like the entire election campaign, underscored the lack of meaningful differences between these two parties of militarism and big business. Neither has put forward any significant election policies. Radio NZ’s Kathryn Ryan commented on Monday, “I don’t think I have ever seen a campaign so void of substantive policy debate and discussion.”

Final New Zealand leaders election debate: Jacinda Ardern v. Judith Collins (Photo: 1 News)

This is because the entire political establishment is conspiring to hide the real agenda of the ruling elite from the working class. The election takes place in the context of an unprecedented global economic crisis triggered by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The next government, whoever leads it, will be tasked with ramping up the assault on workers’ living standards, enforcing mass redundancies and wage cuts, while further integrating New Zealand into US war plans against China. To suppress opposition, the police and intelligence agencies, and the powers of the state censor, will continue to be strengthened.

There has been zero discussion by the established parties, including in the four televised debates between Ardern and Collins, about the danger of world war and the threat of dictatorship and fascism in the United States, New Zealand’s military and intelligence ally.

When the two leaders were asked in one debate for their views on Donald Trump, Collins praised him and Ardern pledged to continue to work with him if he is elected—remaining silent on Trump’s threat to stay in office regardless of the US election outcome. After Trump got infected with COVID-19, as a result of his administration’s homicidal “herd immunity” policy that has killed more than 200,000 people, Ardern extended to him “New Zealand’s best wishes for a speedy recovery.”

Neither candidate or any other politician in the election campaign commented on the Trump-inspired plan of fascist forces to kidnap and execute the Democratic governors of Michigan and other states as a means to enable his theft of the election.

Ardern’s government was formed in 2017 with support from the Trump administration, which opposed the previous National Party government’s reluctance to fully align with the build-up to war against North Korea and China. The viciously anti-Asian NZ First Party, which was in the position of choosing who would govern despite only receiving seven percent of the votes, decided to form a coalition with the Labour Party, which shared its overtly anti-Chinese stance, supported by the Greens.

While New Zealand, with 25 deaths, has so far escaped the worst effects of the coronavirus, the working class is experiencing the sharpest social crisis in the post-World War II period after the collapse of the tourism industry, and mass job losses in retail, manufacturing and other sectors.

In last night’s debate and subsequent interviews Ardern asserted, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that her government had fulfilled its promise to reduce child poverty and just needed more time to finish the job.

The most recent official figures, from 2019, show a statistically negligible reduction of about 2 percent in the number of children in households below the poverty line of 50 percent of the median income. After housing costs are accounted for, almost one in four children continue to live in poverty. As Collins pointed out, the number of children living in “material hardship,” meaning the poorest of the poor, actually increased between 2018 and 2019 by 4,100, from 13.26 to 13.42 percent.

The government’s pro-business response to the present crisis has made the situation far worse.

The Ardern government, with the full support of its coalition partners, the Green Party and NZ First, and the opposition National and Act Parties, has prioritised the interests of the financial elite. It has handed out tens of billions of dollars in bailouts, loans, subsidies and tax concessions to major corporations. The Reserve Bank’s quantitative easing operation is propping up the profits of the banks by printing up to $100 billion to buy back government bonds.

The same corporations that have been bailed out have carried out mass redundancies, with the collaboration of the trade union bureaucracy which has suppressed any resistance in the working class.

By June, median incomes had fallen by 7.6 percent from last year—the first decline ever recorded. Figures released today show the number of people on the Jobseeker (unemployment) benefit has risen by 61,000 people or 43 percent in the past year. Almost 12 percent of the working age population is on welfare. More redundancies are looming as 95,000 people are in jobs supported by the government’s temporary wage subsidy scheme.

In one of the few heated exchanges in last night’s debate, Collins warned that a Labour-Greens coalition would implement the Green Party’s proposed “wealth tax.” This extremely modest policy, part of the Greens’ attempt to posture as a “left” alternative, would tax assets worth over $1 million at just 1 percent, and assets over $2 million at 2 percent.

Ardern denounced Collins for running “a blatant campaign of misinformation,” and stated that she would never introduce such a tax, which in any case would not meaningfully reduce inequality. The Greens, for their part, say the policy is not a “bottom line,” meaning it will be abandoned in any coalition deal with Labour.

Ardern and Collins both refused to commit to any policies to bring down the cost of housing, which is a major source of wealth for speculators. In the past three years, house prices have risen by more than a quarter and homelessness is deeply entrenched. Ardern’s promise in 2017 to address the housing crisis by building thousands of affordable houses proved to be another fraud. The number of people on the public housing waiting list has nearly quadrupled to 20,000.

Based on the polls, the Labour Party is widely expected to be re-elected either with an absolute majority, or with just under 50 percent of the votes, in which case it will need to form a coalition, most likely with the Green Party (polling between 6 and 8 percent). NZ First, which has made numerous racist anti-immigrant statements resembling the words of Christchurch terrorist Brenton Tarrant, is deeply unpopular with only 2 percent support and is unlikely to return to parliament.

This does not indicate any let-up in the shift to the right by the political establishment. Labour and National have essentially adopted NZ First’s anti-immigrant policies. Both Ardern and Collins indicated that they want to see a reduction in immigration once the borders are reopened, while refusing to give a specific number. The Ardern government is seeking to scapegoat migrants for the social crisis and has refused to give welfare payments to non-residents made redundant.

The National Party polled at just 31 percent in TVNZ’s poll last night. The party is in turmoil with two leadership changes in recent months and several prominent members announcing their retirement after the election. Some of National’s support appears to have gone to the far-right Act Party, which has benefited from positive media coverage and polled about the same as the Greens.

In opposition to the pseudo-left groups, which falsely portray a Labour-Greens government as “reformist” or progressive, the Socialist Equality Group warns that the next government, whichever party leads it, will continue the pro-capitalist onslaught. The policies of the Ardern government have already provoked mass nationwide strikes by nurses, doctors and teachers in 2018 and 2019, which were strangled and betrayed by the unions. The deepening austerity, however, will bring even broader layers of workers into conflict with the government and big business.

IMF reports on global economy: Political conclusions

Nick Beams

One of the most significant issues to emerge from the reports prepared by the International Monetary Fund for its semi-annual meeting conducted from Washington this week is the total dependence of the global capitalist economy and its financial system on the state.

It was not the intention of their authors, but these reports, revealing the extent of state intervention by governments and central banks, blow apart for all time the nostrums of the so-called “free market,” which lie at the centre of the various forms of bourgeois ideology and mystification.

Kristalina Georgieva, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, in Munich, Germany, February 14, 2020. (AP Photo/Jens Meyer, File)

When the pandemic initially struck, the air was filed with talk of “snap backs,” “rebounds” and “V-shaped” recoveries as the proponents of the “free market” sought to promote the resilience of this system.

But facts, as the saying goes, are stubborn things and they speak to the far-reaching and deep-going nature of the crisis.

The headline figure to emerge from the IMF reports was a 4.4 contraction in the world economy this year followed by a 5.2 percent rebound next year and a return to growth of 3.5 percent thereafter.

But even on this best-case scenario, based on the assumption that the virus can be brought under control, either via a vaccine or other measures, the cumulative loss of global output compared to the pre-pandemic path is forecast to grow from $11 trillion in 2020–21 to $28 trillion in the period 2020–2025. At least 90 million people, and most likely many more, are expected to fall into “extreme deprivation” this year alone.

The total intervention by governments around the world amounts to what the IMF “Fiscal Monitor Report” describes as a “staggering” $12 trillion, close to 12 percent of global GDP. Total government debt is expected to rise to a record high of 100 percent of global GDP.

On top of this there is the $7.5 trillion which has been pumped into the financial system by the world’s central banks, with the US Federal Reserve leading the way.

In his foreword to the “Global Financial Stability” report, its chief author Tobias Adrian notes that as a result of these actions, “the adverse macro-financial feedback loops that were so prevalent and pernicious in the 2008 crisis have largely been contained.”

That is, at least for now. Because, as the report makes clear, the emergence of a “feed-back loop” in which a crisis in the financial system leads to a collapse in a real economy that in turn feeds into the financial system, has only been pushed down the road and remains an ever-present threat.

According to Adrian “financial vulnerabilities are rising, putting medium-term financial stability and growth at risk.”

Commenting in a blog post on the divorce between the elevation of stock markets in the US to near record highs, in the face of the deepest economic recessions since the Great Depression, he noted: “As long as investors believe that markets will continue to benefit from policy support, valuations may stay elevated for some time.”

In other words, all the calculations used in the past, such as price-earnings ratios and the relationship between the stock market and the underlying economy, are out the window. The rise of the stock market, which has seen the funneling of trillions of dollars into the coffers of the financial oligarchy, is totally dependent on the provision of money by central banks.

But such a situation cannot continue indefinitely and the very measures taken today to avert a collapse only prepare the way for an even bigger crisis in the future.

According to Adrian, while additional borrowing helped avoid a wave of bankruptcies in the early stages, it has led to a further rise in corporate debt. “But many of these firms already had very high levels of debt before the crisis, and now indebtedness in some sectors is reaching new highs. This means that solvency risks may have shifted into the future and renewed liquidity pressures could easily morph into insolvencies.”

The threat of a crisis goes across, the board. Having already run up large deficits, the fiscal capacity of governments “to provide further support may become more limited.” Non-bank financial institution such as insurance companies and asset managers now play “an important role in credit markets, including in its riskier segments.”

So far they have managed to cope with market turbulence because of “policy support” but at “some point, fragilities could spread through the entire financial system.” As well, “some low-income countries are so heavily indebted that they face imminent debt distress, because of borrowing costs at prohibitive levels.”

The facts and figures presented by the IMF on the global economy and the extent of massive state intervention raise fundamental issues of political perspective before the international working class.

For long decades, the ideologists of the ruling class have maintained that the market system, based on the private ownership of the means of production and finance, is the only viable, the only possible, form of socio-economic organisation.

They have, of course, at times added that there needs to be state intervention to iron out problems that emerge in its functioning. But a qualitative transformation has taken place in the past period.

The 2008 crisis saw the institution of a series of measures described as temporary to be withdrawn once “normal” conditions had returned. But that never happened and the process of quantitative easing, in which central banks bought trillions of dollars of financial assets, became permanent and has been extended in the COVID crisis such that banking and financial systems could not continue a day without it.

The COVID-19 pandemic did not create this tendency but accelerated it, revealing its essential content as the capitalist state steps forward to now play the central and directing role in every area of the economy and the financial system.

The World Socialist Web Site has previously pointed to the prescient analysis made by Leon Trotsky in the aftermath of World War I as capitalist governments in Europe created massive amounts of paper money to cover the debts they had incurred as a result of wartime spending.

Drawing out the historical implication of these actions, Trotsky wrote:

The state-isation of economic life, against which capitalist liberalism used to protest so much, has become an economic fact of life. There is no turning back from this fact—it is impossible to return not only to free competition but even to the domination of trusts and other economic octopuses. Today the one and only issue is: Who shall henceforth be the bearer of state-ised production—the imperialist state or the state of the victorious proletariat?

Trotsky drew out that the urgent task confronting the working class was to seize state power, the establishment of a workers’ government, as the first necessary step to take control of “the disrupted and ruined” economy and regenerate it on socialist principles. This task now rises before the working class even more directly today.

The issue is not state intervention per se—the economic necessity of which has been established by capitalist agencies such as the IMF—but which class directs the social, economic and political power of the state.

If state power is left in the hands of the capitalist class and the financial oligarchs at its pinnacle, then the only outcome of state intervention will be growing poverty and misery for the mass of the population.

This is not a matter of conjecture but a fact of economic life. It has been demonstrated by the experience of the past six months in which state intervention has seen the transfer of trillions of dollars into the hands of the ruling elites as the mass of the population confronts the worst conditions since the Great Depression and a pandemic that continues to rage out of control.

This situation is not simply the product of the policy decisions taken by a Trump, a Johnson, a Macron or any of the other government leaders around the world. Of course, their policies—to carry out a murderous return to work policy so that profit flows may continue or to hand over billions of dollars to the banks and major corporations while cutting assistance for workers—have played a decisive role.

But in the final analysis the decisions they make are the translation into politics of objective economic impulses emanating from the very structure of the capitalist system over which they preside.

These impulses arise from the very nature of the capitalist economy based on the production of commodities, not for their use value in increasing the material well-being of the population or ensuring their health, but to ensure the extraction of surplus value through the exploitation of the working class.

It is this entire system of production that must now be overturned through the seizure of the political power by the working class as the first step in establishing a new economic order.

While they certainly did not intend it, the necessity of this perspective leaps out from the pages of the reports by the IMF on the state of the world economy after just more than six months of the pandemic experience.

UK at “perilous moment” with NHS unable to cope

Rory Woods

Health Secretary Matt Hancock told the annual conference of National Health Service Providers last week that the UK faces a “perilous moment” in the fight against COVID-19. But once again nothing is being done to avert the looming disaster.

The Johnson government has based its actions on a pseudo-scientific and homicidal herd immunity policy from the very beginning of the pandemic, ignoring and downplaying the warnings of scientists, experts, and the World Health Organisation (WHO). The catastrophic result so far has been more than 634,000 cases of COVID-19 and over 65,000 deaths.

Last week saw the tripling in a fortnight of the number of people tested positive. By Saturday, there were already 3,660 patients in hospitals with 436 patients occupying ventilator beds. 623 patients with symptoms were admitted to hospitals across the UK in a single day last Friday.

Clinical staff care for a patient with coronavirus in the intensive care unit at the Royal Papworth Hospital in Cambridge, England, May 5, 2020 [Credit: Neil Hall Pool via AP]

Treatment and care for the victims of the government’s strategy is under threat, with the NHS facing a “triple whammy” of staff burnout, a massive backlog of treatment built-up during the pandemic, and a huge surge of COVID-19.

As Hancock spoke, junior health minister Nadine Dorries predicted hospitals would reach a "critical" point within 10 days.

Government claims that they were going to look after coronavirus patients and other patients simultaneously in hospital settings have been refuted. Hancock admitted that the ability of the NHS to treat non-COVID patients is under threat.

Last week, the Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM) issued a dire warning that hospitals are near full and that continued rapid spread of the virus would force the NHS “to scale back other routine activity to focus on the fight against it.” Highlighting data for September they pointed out that it shows “total beds occupied by confirmed COVID-19 patients has quadrupled over the past month” and “five times as many patients are on ventilators than the previous month.”

RCEM President Dr Katherine Henderson warned, “We need to be clear about the scale of what we face as we go into winter. If we do not come together and take effective precautions, COVID will continue its explosion across the country; a devastating consequence of which could be the implosion of our NHS this winter.”

The annual survey carried out by NHS providers confirms the impending implosion. Executive directors at 199 NHS hospitals, mental health, community, and ambulance trusts provided responses.

Among the key findings are:

* "Trust leaders are particularly concerned about the resilience and wellbeing of their staff after the first wave, with 99 percent either extremely or moderately concerned about the current level of burnout across the workforce.

* 94 percent of trust leaders are extremely or moderately concerned about the impact of seasonal pressures over winter on their trust and local area.

* 83 percent of trust leaders are worried or very worried that sufficient investment is not being made in social care in their local area.

* In response to the uncertain external environment, trust leaders said the biggest risk is the 'perfect storm' of workforce shortages, staff burnout, a second wave of coronavirus and a potentially difficult winter."

The British Medical Association (BMA), representing 159,000 doctors and 19,000 medical students, has warned that a possible no-deal Brexit—in which the UK departs the European Union with no trade agreement—would cause uncertainty for NHS workers who have come to work in Britain. Such a situation would also curtail the supply chains of vital supplies, such as pharmaceuticals, medical devices, and protective equipment.

None of the government policies on personal protective equipment, imposed during the first wave in contravention of World Health Organisation (WHO) guidelines, have been changed, even after the deaths of 650 health and social care workers from COVID-19. Many health workers are still struggling to receive basic protection from the deadly virus according to surveys carried out by their professional bodies. No routine tests are carried out among NHS staff. The Tory government voted down a motion in parliament to carry out weekly tests in hospitals.

As a result of four decades of Thatcherite measures carried out by successive Conservative and Labour governments, the NHS is dilapidated to such a state that it cannot not fulfil its day-to-day functioning, let alone deal with a major pandemic.

According to NHS England data, in 1987 the average available daily number of beds for all specialties stood at 297,364 in England. By 1997, this was slashed by Conservative governments to 193,625. Tony Blair’s Labour governments cut down the bed capacity in England by another 35,000 over their 13 years in power, to 158,461.

The NHS was starved of funds, with privatisation accelerated under the Health and Social Care Act made law in 2012. Bed capacity has been reduced to 118,451 according to NHS England data. Even before the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic hit, UK bed occupancy was running at very unsafe levels of above 90 percent—with the safe level considered 85 percent. According to RCEM’s Dr Henderson, on “1 October, 96% of these beds were occupied.”

Before the pandemic hit the UK, there were around 4,200 Intensive Care Unit (ICU) and High Dependency Unit (HDU) beds. The UK ranked 24th out of 31 other European countries in terms of ICU beds per head of population and ranked 29th of 31 for all hospital beds. ICU bed capacity has slightly improved since the first wave of COVID-19, but in many hospitals this was achieved at the expense of shutting down wards and other important units.

A health professional in Royal Bournemouth Hospital told the WSWS that they had increased their ICU capacity by taking over the Coronary Care Unit (CCU). Ward 23, a cardiology ward which had 15 beds, has subsequently been shut down to accommodate running the CCU.

Seven Nightingale field hospitals were erected in England during the first wave, some of which have already been repurposed or mothballed. Faced, with an explosion of new infections, several of the Nightingales have been placed on standby. But there are not enough staff to maintain safe treatment and care.

Staffing shortages in the NHS are such that there are more than 110,000 unfilled vacancies, including more than 40,000 nursing posts.

By end of August, there were 4.3 million patients waiting to have elective procedures done after a referral. Only just over half were able to get treatment within 18 weeks, although the NHS Constitution states that “patients have the right to start non-emergency consultant-led treatment within 18 weeks of referral, unless they choose to wait longer or it is clinically appropriate that they wait longer.” A staggering 111,026 patients were waiting more than 52 weeks.

The Tory government is utilising the public health disaster to further accelerate the privatisation process. One of the first actions of the government, using emergency powers, was to suspend regulations requiring it to advertise for new contracts over £100,000. Billions of pounds of public money is being plundered by outsourcing services, filling the coffers of private corporations and their shareholders—mainly backers of the Tory Party.

So far £12 billion—a tenth of the annual NHS budget—has been handed over to private companies like Deloitte, Serco, Sitel, Mitie, Amazon, G4S, Sodexo, Boots and Randox for a Track and Trace system that still does not work! The scale of this raid on public funds is revealed in figures released by the Department of Health and Social Care. It shows there are currently 1,114 consultants from Deloitte being paid up to £2,300 per day to work on the Track and Trace scheme. Sky News noted that based on “Deloitte's charge sheet, and presuming those consultants have been working since April, the cost could run as high as £200m to £300m.”

Former Chilean Health Minster charged with falsifying COVID-19 figures

Mauricio Saavedra

Charges that Chile’s former health minister, Jaime Mañalich, manipulated the data on coronavirus infections and deaths have deepened the profound crisis of political rule that has gripped the country since the end of last year. They further confirm that the ultra-right government of billionaire President Sebastian Piñera criminally mishandled the pandemic, inflicting disproportionate suffering upon the most oppressed layers, including the working class, the elderly and the indigenous population.

This criminal negligence is graphically illustrated by a recent report revealing that one quarter of those who have died from COVID-19 did so without ever being hospitalized. A total of 3,491 mainly elderly citizens who, although developing serious conditions due to COVID-19, were never admitted to hospital, and died outside the health system.

Health care workers confront Mañalich, sign reads, "Assassin in a lab coat". (Credit: D.Alcaino/ANRed)

Investigative news site CIPER published last week a detailed account of affidavits submitted to public prosecutors by Health Ministry employees at the end of September. In damning testimony, Johanna Acevedo, the head of the ministry’s Health Planning Division (known as DIPLAS) and Andrea Albagli from the Department of Epidemiology, substantiated accusations that Mañalich consciously and deliberately manipulated figures and lied to the public. They also affirmed that his cabinet advisors—Paula Daza, the present under-secretary of public health, and Itziar Linazasoro, former Health Ministry chief of staff—were aware of the alterations.

Acevedo told public prosecutors that, at the request of the ministry, her department’s epidemiological reports had to be “adjusted” to match those reported daily by Mañalich who had his own parallel tallying system.

“I had to... adjust the data from the epidemiological reports to what (the ministry) announced,” Acevedo told the prosecutors. DIPLAS’s public reports “had to be consistent with what was reported by the authority. I always reported everything to the authority, internally, but the published epidemiological reports had to be consistent with the information that the minister announced in the public account.”

Acevedo explained that DIPLAS records are based on Epivigila—the health ministry’s software that records infections reported by doctors and that of the country’s regional ministerial health secretariats—and the databases of the laboratories reporting positive PCR tests. DIPLAS works on the basis of criteria set down by international bodies such the Pan American Health Organization and the World Health Organization, whereas the former minister used an unknown and unrecognized tallying system.

On April 29, two months into the pandemic in Chile, Acevedo emailed Linazasoro and Daza about the discrepancy between her department’s records and the parallel count by Mañalich. Chile recorded its first case of coronavirus on March 3. On April 29, total cases recorded by DIPLAS reached 9,060 cases. Yet Mañalich had publicly reported that morning that Chile had a total of 8,869 coronavirus cases, a difference of 91.

By May 26, when total cases recorded by DIPLAS had reached 99,302, Mañalich reported in his daily address to the nation only 82,289 cases and on the eve of his resignation two weeks later, the gap had widened to a massive 30,000 cases. Acevedo again brought up the discrepancies with the ministry, but her reports fell on deaf ears. On June 7, however, Mañalich was obliged to publicly acknowledge that 653 deaths had not been accounted for in the official figures. Five days later he resigned.

Serious accusations of concealment of figures, lies and manipulation were brought up in testimony given to public prosecutors by Andrea Albagli, who during Mañalich’s tenure worked in the Department of Epidemiology, responsible for submitting reports on the progress of COVID-19.

Albagli is politically associated with the pseudo left parliamentary group Comunes, a permutation of Revolución Democrática (RD) which itself came out of the Frente Amplio (Broad Front) coalition. She worked in the RD’s health commission for the 2017 presidential election and entered the health ministry under Piñera’s presidency. She is closely aligned to the Mix siblings who belong to Comunes: Claudia Mix is one of the co-sponsors of the constitutional accusation raised against Mañalich in September and Thomas Mix is a union bureaucrat of the health ministry employees’ association of civil servants (Afuminsal).

The Chilean “left” that sits in the legislature and dominates the trade union apparatus initiated the criminal investigation against Piñera and his former Health Minister, Jaime Mañalich, who was forced to resign last June when it became known that he was providing two sets of figures for coronavirus infections and deaths, one to the WHO and a lesser figure to the Chilean public.

The Stalinist Communist Party and Progresistas and the pseudo left organizations Frente Amplio, Revolución Democrática and Comunes have spearheaded the investigation with a two-pronged goal in mind. Firstly, it is a cynical attempt to curry favor from the working class in the lead up to a referendum on the country’s constitution at the end of this month. Since last year’s explosive social convulsions revealed the extent to which Chile’s “left” political caste has lost all credibility and has suffered record low approval ratings, it is today desperate to retain its ideological stranglehold over the working class and the youth.

More significantly, as a longstanding essential prop of capitalist property relations and the nation-state system, the chief historic mission of the Chilean “left” has been to check the working class from turning to a revolutionary socialist alternative by channeling mass opposition back into the safe parameters of parliamentary politics. This is a case in point with Albagli and the Stalinists and pseudo left in general, who, far from using her damning evidence to educate the working class in the class nature of the capitalist state, is sowing further illusions in the state’s institutions and keeping the masses tied to them.

On September 30, Albagli told prosecutors she was, in several instances, given instructions on what to incorporate or what to take out of the epidemiological reports, to paint a “more favorable situation.” The deliberate obfuscation of information severely impacted working class communes. This is made clear in the following points that Albagli raised in testimony before public prosecutors:

• On April 24, her superiors asked her department to delete 30 records so her epidemiological report “matched” the minister’s. When they refused, they were then instructed to submit another report with the cutoff point “adjusted” so DEIS figures would be equal to or less than the Ministry’s tally. This continued during the following months as her department was obliged to shift the cutoff point by up to two days. Albagli stopped working on the epidemiological reports in June.

• In internal correspondence dated April 10, Albagli objected to the government’s deceptive characterization of “recovered” cases that did “not follow any indication from international bodies.” She warned that the “implications are not harmless: we are wrongly reporting that all the people who have been diagnosed a fortnight ago are no longer contagious and therefore are not “active cases” and, as this definition is not precise, we contribute to the spread of the virus in those people who continue to be contagious after the 14-day period.”

• In internal correspondence dated April 6, Albagli raised differences with the ministry in their use of incomplete data when reporting outbreaks at the regional and communal level. At the national level, two databases (Epivigila and the PCR test) were used while at the regional and local levels only the PCR tests were used. The PCR tests were giving significantly lower incidence rates especially in the working class and poor communes in Valparaíso, Santiago and the south, areas that suffered massive outbreaks due to tardiness in calling quarantining measures and lockdowns.

Perhaps the most significant evidence presented to the court was modeling which demonstrated that within the totality of confirmed cases, the probability of dying from COVID-19 is 86 percent higher in people assigned to the public health system as opposed to private health clinics, once adjusted for sex, age and presence of chronic diseases.

The current minister, Enrique Paris, was quick to dispute the evidence, stating that “the truth is that the more poverty there is, the greater the possibility of contagion, but not the greater the possibility of fatality. There is no relationship between fatality and poverty, as this would mean that patients are treated in a discriminatory manner.” This last point can in fact be demonstrated to be due in so many ways to Chile’s two-tiered health system. The almost 3,500 people who died outside the hospital system most likely experienced an agonizing death—COVID-19 attacks the respiratory system prompting a severe immune system reaction that wreaks havoc on the lungs and other organs and inflaming blood vessels.

The government’s response has been to stonewall the investigation. The request by the Public Prosecutor’s Office and police investigators for a warrant to search and seize documents and emails belonging to the former health minister was denied by Enrique Paris, the current Health Minister, citing special protection of the department’s communications and claiming that “national security” was at stake. His stonewalling has been defended by Piñera even after the Supreme Court ordered the release of the emails.

The conflict within the political establishment for control over the state will only intensify as the campaign for the referendum on changing the military-era constitution draws near. Much is at stake for the deeply discredited Chilean “left,” which, after almost a century of existence, finds that its grip over the masses is steadily weakening.

If there is a central lesson to be learned from this recent experience, it is that students, youth and workers need to take another step and break from the political, ideological and theoretical perspective of the national opportunists that make up the parliamentary and pseudo-left organizations and their promotion of the national reformism. The state cannot be reformed and must be overthrown by the working class and establish a genuinely democratic workers’ government as part of the fight for world socialist revolution.