Tens of thousands protest new restrictions on abortion in Poland

Martin Nowak & Bartosz Wyspiański

Since the end of last week, tens of thousands have been protesting in Poland against new restrictions on abortion. In the capital Warsaw alone, 10,000 took to the streets Friday evening. In Poznan, Wroclaw, Krakow and more than 60 other cities, thousands more demonstrated. Protests were also held yesterday.

Although the state authorities are taking action against the demonstrations with a large deployment of police officers, and have brutally used tear gas against peacefully demonstrating women in Warsaw, the protests have been continuing now for seven days. Due to the coronavirus restriction, they take on spontaneous and diverse forms.

Police use tear gas against demonstrating women in Warsaw (Twitter-Video)

Online, too, discontent is being expressed on a large scale. For example, a petition on avaaz has been signed by over 1.5 million to date and shared 300,000 times on Facebook alone. Demonstrators told reporters that the country has been set back 200 years and that there should be no such attack on human rights in 2020.

On Monday in Warsaw, numerous intersections and squares were blocked, bringing traffic and public transport to a standstill in many places. The group “Women’s Strike” planned a “general strike” of all women for Wednesday.

The mass protests were triggered by the decision of the Polish Constitutional Court to declare the country’s abortion regulations unconstitutional. The judges ruled that abortion violates the protection of life guaranteed by the constitution. Abortion will only be legal if the woman’s health is in danger or if the pregnancy is the result of a criminal act. As 98 percent of the approximately 1,000 legal abortions performed annually in Poland last year were justified by the foetus suffering an incurable disease, this is tantamount to a total ban on abortion.

Poland already had one of the strictest abortion laws in the European Union (EU), which is why many Polish women choose to go abroad or attempt a life-threatening home abortion. A “vacation in Slovakia” is a well-known euphemism for an abortion. Human rights activists assume that there are more than 100,000 unreported abortions every year in Poland, which is about the number of legal abortions in Germany every year.

As early as 2016, the ruling PiS party had proposed a change in the law to parliament, the Sejm, which provided for a similar restriction on abortions. At that time, too, anger at the reactionary move exploded into mass protests. At the height of the first wave of the “Czarny Protests” (Black Protests), more than 20,000 demonstrated in Warsaw alone. The government backed away when confronted by this mass movement, and some sections of the PiS voted against the law.

This time, the PiS bypassed parliament. Instead of debating and voting in parliamentary bodies on the draft law introduced after the 2019 elections, 119 PiS members of parliament and other right-wing factions submitted a motion to the Constitutional Court.

The PiS could be sure that the Constitutional Court would decide in its favour. After its election victory in 2015, the PiS began a multi-year campaign to ensure the conformity of the judicial system. As a result of its attacks on the constitutional separation of powers, there is virtually no independent judiciary in Poland any longer. The president enjoys extensive powers to intervene in the work and staffing of the courts.

With the almost complete abortion ban, the PiS is intensifying its attack on human rights and its authoritarian, extreme right-wing course. However, it is acting from a position of weakness.

In the last elections in 2019, the PiS was able to expand its majority in the Sejm but lost the majority in the Senate (upper house). Even the re-election of PiS President Andrzej Duda was only narrowly successful.

Demonstrators block roads in Warsaw on Sunday (Twitter video)

The fact that the PiS government has staggered from crisis to crisis since its re-election is also shown by the large number of cabinet reshuffles. Head of government Mateusz Morawiecki has already replaced ministers individually or severally or changed their portfolios. In August of this year, for example, the foreign and health ministers were replaced, and in October the education and agriculture ministers along with several other ministers.

Also noteworthy is the entry of Jarosław Kaczyński into the government, where he holds the office of deputy prime minister without portfolio. Since the end of his one-year term in 2007, Kaczyński had not held a state office and had guided the work of the government and the president from the background as the é minence grise of the PiS.

The coronavirus pandemic and the government’s negligent policy of opening up the country have further exacerbated the crisis. Infections are escalating in Poland. In the last few days, more than 10,000 new infections have been added daily, reaching a new peak on Tuesday at over 16,000. Two members of government, former Health Minister Lukasz Szumowski and the newly appointed Education Minister, have also become infected with the virus.

Epidemiologist Tomasz Oszorowski has warned that hospital capacity is quickly approaching collapse. His colleague Robert Flisiak compared the situation in Poland with that in Italy in the spring, when pictures of coffins being transported away in military trucks went around the world.

The Polish government has consciously accepted the increase in infections in order not to endanger the profits of big business. In the summer, the rampant number of cases in the Silesian mining region revealed its contempt for human life. While still locally limited at that time, the number of new infections exploded nationwide when school reopened in September. While the daily number of infections never exceeded the 1,000 mark until September, it has increased tenfold since then.

This reactionary policy has already met with mass protests by students, which now coincide with the protests against the abortion ban. The government’s indifference towards the dangers of the pandemic also shows that the claims of the anti-abortion opponents that they are concerned about protecting life are pure hypocrisy.

Whereas in the past, the PiS had secured its power with a mixture of right-wing populism and social handouts, in particular paying a child benefit of 500 zloty ($127) per month, the worsening global economic crisis is removing the basis for such limited reforms.

According to World Bank estimates, Poland’s economic output slumped by 8 percent in the second quarter of this year alone, and the national debt rose by 160 billion zloty (around $40.6 billion). Given the worsening crisis, this is only a foretaste of what is to come.

At the same time, international tensions between the major powers are intensifying, above all between the US and the EU, headed by Germany and France. Warsaw is trying to manoeuvre back and forth between these camps. Recently, PiS threw its support behind US President Donald Trump in the presidential election campaign.

As in the past, the PiS is stepping up its extreme right-wing rhetoric. Openly fascist and anti-Semitic tones are becoming openly louder. Like last year’s “war” against the LGBT community, the campaign against abortion is characterised by fascist tones that present it as a fight against “cultural-” or “neo-Marxism.”

The PiS has sought for a long time to cultivate a fascist milieu and harness it for its own purposes. In 2018, both Duda and Morawiecki participated in the “ March of Independence ,” dominated by extreme right-wing organisations such as the National Radical Camp (ONR) and the All-Polish Youth.

Now the same right-wing extremists are once again working closely with the state apparatus to counter the protests. In Warsaw last Sunday, the fascist ONR positioned itself in front of the church doors of the Holy Cross Basilica and denied access to the protesters. Under the eyes of the police, it attacked demonstrators, dragging them away by force.

On Monday, also in Warsaw, a BMW drove into a demonstration injuring a woman so badly she had to go to the hospital. The incident was reminiscent of Charlottesville, Virginia, where, in 2017, a right-wing extremist drove at a demonstration against the far-right, killing one participant; since then, such attacks on demonstrators have become more frequent in the US.

Since the Catholic Church is one of the main supporters of the anti-abortion campaign, symbolic protests were carried out in churches in many places. While right-wing extremist thugs go undisturbed, Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro condemns the non-violent anti-abortion protests. He tweeted on Monday, “Given the unprecedented escalation of criminal behaviour against believers, including intimidation, destruction and desecration of religious sites, I have instructed state prosecutors to monitor these cases.”

Prime Minister Morawiecki sang the same song on Tuesday. He condemned the “acts of vandalism, aggression and barbarism...on churches, on our holy places, on people and their rights” and announced the deployment of military police on the streets starting Wednesday.

Małgorzata Tracz, leader of the Green Party and part of the Citizens Coalition led by Platforma Obywatelska (PO), spoke of a “war” for which Kaczyński was responsible and which he would lose.

Behind the militaristic and in part hyperbolic language of both government and opposition lies the fear of the ruling class of a revolutionary uprising. The massive protests, which have spread to rural areas, the traditional base of the PiS, are fed by the general social anger against the ruling class.

In a commentary in Rzeczpospolita, Michał Szułdrzyński explicitly warned that the PiS had “released an element that it may no longer be able to control” and that the opposition “will not benefit most from the protests.” On Sunday, Szułdrzyński, together with editor-in-chief Bogusław Chrabota, declared that the verdict of the Constitutional Court was the spark that set Poland on fire and demanded, “This fire must be extinguished immediately.”

The opposition parties of the Left Bloc play a key role in controlling and strangling the protests and preventing an independent mobilisation of the working class against the far-right course of the PiS.

The feminist group Women’s Strike (Ogólnopolski Strajk Kobiet, OSK), which is organising the protests in many places, was initiated by the pseudo-left Lewica Razem party. The OSK spokesperson is Marta Lempart, who in 2019 ran for the liberal party Wiosna (Spring), then newly founded by Robert Biedroń. In the parliamentary elections last year, Razem and Wiosna ran on a joint electoral list with the social-democratic SLD. The SLD is the official successor party to the former Stalinist state party and, as a long-running party of government after the restoration of capitalism, has, like the PO, launched fierce social attacks.

US threatens military strikes against Iran and Venezuela

Bill Van Auken

A senior Trump administration official threatened this week that Washington would carry out military action to prevent Iran’s sale of missiles to Venezuela, either by means of confiscating the weapons on the high seas or destroying them with air strikes if they were to reach the South American country.

President Donald J. Trump displays his signature on an Executive Order to place further sanctions on Iran Monday, June 24, 2019, in the Oval Office of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian)

The threat was issued by Elliott Abrams, who holds the combined posts of US special envoy for both Venezuela and Iran. A veteran right-wing operative, Abrams was convicted in connection with the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s, when he played a central role in creating a covert and illegal network for funding the terrorist “Contra” forces organized by the CIA to attack Nicaragua. He has remained a thuggish defender of every crime carried out by US imperialism internationally.

“The transfer of long-range missiles from Iran to Venezuela is not acceptable to the United States and will not be tolerated or permitted,” Abrams said. “We will make every effort to stop shipments of long-range missiles, and if somehow they get to Venezuela they will be eliminated there.”

He added, “Every delivery of Iranian arms destabilizes South America and the Caribbean, and is especially dangerous to Venezuela’s neighbors in Brazil, Colombia, and Guyana.” The three named countries were visited last month by US Secretary Mike Pompeo in an anti-Venezuela, anti-China tour of Latin America that was accompanied by threatening joint maneuvers by US troops and the Colombian armed forces.

While Abrams presented no evidence of any imminent missile deal between Tehran and Caracas, his threat follows the October 18 lifting of a United Nations ban on Iran’s purchase or sale of conventional weapons that had been imposed in 2007. The restriction was ended as part of the 2015 nuclear deal struck between Tehran and the major powers, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA. Under the JCPOA, Iran agreed to restrictions on its civilian nuclear program in exchange for the lifting of sanctions.

While the Trump administration unilaterally abrogated the accord in 2018, imposing a “maximum pressure” sanctions regime tantamount to an act of war, it nonetheless arrogantly demanded that the UN invoke a “snapback” provision to reimpose international sanctions and, in particular, the arms embargo. The proposal found no support from the other signatories of the deal—China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom and the European Union—and was rejected by the UN Security Council.

In response, Washington has intensified its own regime of punishing international sanctions. In addition to imposing secondary sanctions against any entity trading in arms with Iran, it extended its financial blockade of the country to virtually every Iranian bank, even further hindering Iran’s importation of vitally needed food, medicine and other humanitarian supplies.

On Monday, US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin announced yet another round of sanctions, targeting the Iranian Ministry of Petroleum, the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC), and the National Iranian Tanker Company (NITC) effectively as terrorist entities on the grounds that oil revenues have funded Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Washington has also branded the IRGC as a terrorist organization, the first time that such a designation has been employed against any country’s armed forces.

Iran’s Foreign Ministry denounced the unrelenting escalation of US sanctions in the midst of the global coronavirus pandemic. “Corona’s proven deadly, vicious & brutal everywhere, but it’s worse in Iran as it has a cruel collaborator: [the] U.S. regime,” the ministry tweeted. It added, “U.S. has elevated maximum pressure to Health Terrorism & targeted Iranian people with inhuman sanctions while they’re fighting the pandemic. We’ll overcome but NEVER forget.”

On Wednesday, Iran reported 415 COVID-19 deaths, the highest one-day total since the pandemic began. This brings the country’s official death toll to 33,714. It also reported another 6,824 confirmed coronavirus infections, bringing the total number to 558,648. Iran has been the country hardest hit by the coronavirus in the Middle East. Even before the pandemic, unilateral US sanctions blocked Iran’s access to medications, leading to numerous preventable deaths from cancer and other diseases.

Now, Iranian hospitals are reportedly overwhelmed and undersupplied, with ambulances driving patients to one facility after another searching for available beds. In addition to the US sanctions regime, the pandemic has been exacerbated by the policies of Iran’s bourgeois government, which recklessly sought to reopen schools and the economy with the spread of the virus still out of control.

Iran has defended its right to sell arms in defiance of Washington’s unilateral sanctions. Iran’s Defense Minister Brig. Gen. Amir Hatami said last Sunday that Tehran was prepared to sell weapons to countries under attack by Washington.

“Many countries have already talked to us; we have held negotiations with some countries, and the grounds are totally prepared for exchanges [of weapons], both for selling and for supplying certain needs” of the Iranian military, Hatami said.

Iran and Venezuela have conducted trade, particularly in terms of Iranian shipments of gasoline and oil products, despite US threats to seize such shipments on the high seas. A seizure of an Iranian vessel shipping arms to the South American country would have the potential of triggering retaliation and the eruption of a wider war throughout the Middle East.

Washington came to the brink of provoking such a conflict at the beginning of this year with its drone missile assassination of one of Iran’s top officials, Gen. Qassem Suleimani, after he arrived at Baghdad’s international airport for an official state visit.

Since then, the US has steadily escalated both sanctions and military provocations, including the dispatch of a US Navy carrier strike group to the Persian Gulf for the first time in a year, along with open threats to carry out military strikes against Iranian-aligned militias in Iraq.

A similar escalation of military threats has been carried out against Venezuela, with the deployment of the largest US force in the region since the Panama invasion of 1989 under the phony pretext of interdicting drugs. Despite the abject failure of Washington’s puppet, self-proclaimed interim president Juan Guaidó, to overthrow the government of President Nicolas Maduro, including through an attempted military putsch and an invasion by US mercenaries, the Trump administration remains committed to regime change.

According to Bloomberg, it sent its former ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell to meet Venezuelan Vice President for Communications Jorge Rodriguez in Mexico last month with the aim of brokering Maduro’s ouster. The talks reportedly went nowhere. The Trump administration had hoped to pull off a foreign policy coup, particularly with an eye to Cuban and Venezuelan exile voting blocs in Florida.

With the US election barely a week away and Trump’s campaign in crisis, there is a clear and present danger that his administration may deliberately provoke a war. While such an action has been generally referred to in American politics as an “October Surprise,” with Trump threatening to reject the results of the election if he loses, such a deadly “surprise” could well be staged in December or January to derail a transfer of power and create the pretext for martial law. Such a political maneuver would count on the Democrats subordinating themselves to the military under conditions of war.

Nearly 10,000 eviction actions filed across the US since September despite CDC moratorium

Aaron Murch

According to a recent report by NBC News, some 10,000 families face eviction from their homes due to a surge in filings by big residential landlord companies since the beginning of September.

If approved, these evictions will be carried out across the country in several states hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic and despite a federal moratorium on evicting those affected by the virus.

In Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee and Texas, large corporate landlords such as Progress Residential, have filed eviction proceedings for thousands of residents as a dramatic explosion in the homelessness crisis looms due to the devastating economic impact of the pandemic and the expiration of local, state and federal restrictions put in place earlier this year.

Homeless camp in San Francisco. (Image Credit: Envato)

Millions of American workers have lost their jobs and some 12.6 million have suffered heavy cuts in income since March, resulting in millions of families falling behind on monthly rent.

One worker interviewed by NBC News, Cristina Valez, lost her job and was facing an over $2,000 rent bill she could not afford. Her landlord, Progress Residential, she says was unsympathetic and uncooperative in working with her considering her economic situation.

Landlords are not required by law to inform tenants of any protections they may have and can proceed with evictions when rent is late.

“There’s got to be something for people affected by COVID and being furloughed,” Valez told NBC. A representative for Progress replied, “There’s nothing we can do” and served Valez with a bill for over $4,000 in rent and legal fees or else an order to vacate the premises. “I told them I was affected by COVID, but it didn’t matter to them. They are not very patient,” Velez said.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) moratorium on evictions, which went into effect in early September and expires at the end of December, landlords cannot evict tenants affected by COVID-19 as long as they can show that the pandemic has negatively impacted their ability to pay rent.

In order to be protected, the CDC stipulates the tenant must prove that they meet 5 criteria: that they sought government assistance, make less than $99,000 a year, have suffered a “substantial loss of income” due to the pandemic, they must show they are making an effort to pay as much of the rent as they can, and that eviction would leave them homeless.

However, according to a clarification by the CDC, landlords can proceed with the legal procedures of an eviction as long as tenants are not forced out before the end of the year and landlords are also not required to tell residents of the federal ban.

Landlords can also challenge their tenants’ claims of COVID-19 impact and deny their claims without an appeal process in place. This caveat was implemented in part due to landlord lobbying groups directly appealing to the Trump administration.

This whittling down of the formerly broad-based ban on evictions by the CDC has essentially placed all the power in the hands of landlords, resulting in the current deluge of evictions.

Diane Yentel of the nonprofit National Low Income Housing Coalition told NBC News the whittling down of the formerly broad-based ban on evictions “puts more power back in the hands of landlords at the expense of low-income renters.” Yentel said of the CDC’s clarification, “It creates new burdens for renters and creates new holes in protections for renters.”

The clarification was posted on October 9 and almost immediately there was a jump in eviction proceedings with some 2,000 having been filed across five states during the week of October 12.

For their part, the landlord companies carrying out these evictions have told reporters that they are doing everything according to the law and the rules of the CDC moratorium.

Landlord lobbying groups have fought such bans since the beginning of the pandemic, calling them an overreach and an obstruction on landlords’ ability to make profits. In September, according to a recent report, some 6 million households were unable to make rental payment.

Many of the largest landlord companies are controlled by private equity firms whose stock holdings have soared in value since the beginning of the pandemic. One of these big firms, Invitation Homes, owns some 80,000 homes across the country and has filed 122 evictions over the last six months while its stock has climbed 80 percent according to the nonprofit Private Equity Stakeholder Project which has compiled statistics on private equity firms buying up community properties across the country.

Progress Residential has filed 97 evictions since the beginning of the CDC moratorium. The company is itself owned by an equity firm called Pretium which is run by former Goldman Sachs partner David Mullen, a credit and mortgage manager who was investigated by a Senate committee following the housing crisis of the late 2000s.

Progress Residential defends its actions as being fully within the law while at the same time many of the actual evictions do not comply even with the laws as favorable as they are for the landlords.

According to renters’ advocacy groups, most judges accept the terms of an eviction even if it technically falls within the stipulations for protection. For the vast majority of those facing eviction finding a new home will be increasingly difficult as evictions often appear on the resident’s credit report and landlords often use such black marks to refuse to rent.

Since the CDC now allows landlords to file eviction proceedings, they are able to use this as an intimidation tactic, forcing residents to move who may otherwise have been protected by the moratorium without going through the full eviction process.

For millions of workers across the country the threat of homelessness is ever present and with the moratorium set to expire at the end of the year the crisis is set to explode even further. For many workers even the threat of an eviction represents a plunge into deeper poverty as landlords are free to pile on late charges and legal fees in addition to the past due rent.

The housing crisis and spike in poverty are only exacerbated in the backdrop of a pandemic that has shown no sign of slowing as the current “third wave” of infections wreaks havoc leading to deeper strains on an already brutalized working class facing sickness and job loss and homelessness, while the big banks and corporations were handed trillions of dollars in bailout funds.

Johnson government’s war on migrants turns English Channel into a “graveyard for children”

Laura Tiernan

Two children, aged 9 and 6, were among up to seven asylum-seekers who drowned on Tuesday trying to cross the English Channel. A baby on board the capsized dinghy is missing, distressed survivors reported yesterday, with search efforts ended.

The bodies of Rasoul Irannazhad a 35-year-old construction worker, his wife Shiva Mohammad Panahi, and their children Anita, 9, and Armin, 6, have been identified. The couple's 15-month-old son Artin is presumed drowned.

Armin

The Kurdish family were from Sardasht, Iran. Yesterday, Rasoul’s brother Khalil told the Daily Telegraph, “We begged him to not try to cross by boat. He insisted on going… It was the third time that they had attempted to cross to the UK. Two times they wanted to cross via train and the last time they wanted to cross by boat.”

The small inflatable dinghy capsized in rough seas just a few kilometres from the French port of Dunkirk at around 9.30am. Those on board sent a desperate Mayday call, begging, “Help us, we’re sinking!”

A 40-foot “pleasure craft” Marbuzet reportedly received the distress call, relaying it to French coastguard authorities. But a map published by the Daily Mail shows the Marbuzet ’s course tacking away suddenly near the site of the capsized vessel, raising questions about its failure to assist.

Anita

Rescuers, including a fishing vessel, a pilot boat from Dunkirk and a lifeboat from the French commune Gravelines, joined French and Belgian helicopters pulling around 15 people from the water.

Survivors were taken to hospital suffering from hypothermia and cardiac arrest, but six-year-old Armin could not be revived, and nine-year-old Anita died later in hospital.

Tuesday’s horrifying events mark a new daily record for asylum-seeker drownings in the English Channel, with 11 deaths recorded there since December 2018—a figure that almost certainly understates the real death toll.

The 20 asylum seekers who left the coastal area of Loon-Plage on Tuesday morning are reportedly Iranian and Iraqi Kurds. Driven from their homes by British imperialism’s wars of aggression across the Middle East, these persecuted people have become the latest victims of the Johnson government’s xenophobic “deterrence” regime against immigrants and refugees.

Farhad Shekari, 28, told the Telegraph he had been due to leave on the same boat as Rasoul’s family but refused to board when he saw how risky it was. "There were 22 people in the boat and I said there are too many people and I didn't want to go… I told people not to get in the boat. I said it was too dangerous.”

Artin

The boat set off despite rough seas and wind speeds of 48 miles per hour, with French coastguard officials describing the dinghy as a “death trap”.

Another Kurdish refugee told the Telegraph the family had travelled from Turkey, forced on from Italy and Greece, before ending up at the migrant camp in Calais and then Puythouck camp in Dunkirk.

“The family were so frustrated by their treatment in Greece and France that they were desperate to get to the UK. They knew it was dangerous but were prepared to take the risk. The mother said my future is lost because my fingerprints were taken in Italy, as were my husband's, but I hope my children can have a future in Britain."

In September, the Macron government razed the Calais migrant camp, leaving 700 refugees without shelter. It was the biggest police operation in Calais since the Socialist Party government bulldozed “the Jungle” in 2016, evicting all 6,400 inhabitants.

Care4Calais founder Clare Moseley said that refugees in Calais were “utterly devastated” by Tuesday’s drownings. “This unnecessary loss of life has to stop. No one should ever feel they have to get into a fragile craft and risk their lives crossing the Channel, least of all vulnerable children.”

A spokesman for charity Save the Children said: “The English Channel must not become a graveyard for children.”

He continued, “Today's tragic news must be a wake-up call for both London and Paris to come up with a joint plan that ensures the safety of vulnerable children and families.” But the entire political establishment on both sides of the Channel are fully committed to the war on refugees and migrants.

In Britain, the drownings were seized on by the Tories and Labour to call for stepped up attacks on the “people smugglers who organise migrant crossings”. Prime Minister Boris Johnson stated, "We have offered the French authorities every support as they investigate this terrible incident and will do all we can to crack down on the ruthless criminal gangs who prey on vulnerable people by facilitating these dangerous journeys."

Johnson’s ghoulish Home Secretary Priti Patel declared she was “truly saddened” to learn of the “tragic loss of life”. Patel has led the government’s fascistic military campaign against migrants, appointing Dan O’Mahoney, a former Royal Marine who served in Kosovo and Iraq, to the newly created post of Clandestine Channel Threat Commander, tasked with making the “Channel route unviable for small boat crossings.”

Labour MP Yvette Cooper described the drownings as an “awful tragedy”. The leading Blairite immediately called for measures to stop migrants “getting sucked into the arms of criminal gangs or making such desperate journeys".

The mounting death toll among asylum seekers is not caused by “people smugglers”, but by British imperialism’s “hostile environment” against asylum-seekers that effectively overturns the right to asylum under international law. This includes the adoption of “deterrence” measures in which refugees are left to drown as an example to others. In recent months, the Johnson government has unleashed Britain’s armed forces, including RAF Atlas A-400M, Shadow R1 and P-8 Poseidon aircraft, Royal Navy vessels and drones against defenceless refugees in the Channel.

At the same time, the Tories are busy putting together plans to deport migrants as soon as they arrive. Proposals include the detention of migrants on disused ferries, abandoned North Sea oil platforms, and remote islands. Earlier this month, Labour peer Lord West, Baron West of Spithead, a retired Royal Navy Admiral, called for the construction of migrant concentration camps.

In September, the first such camp was opened by the Home Office at the Folkestone Army Barracks in Kent. The facility will hold up to 400 “Channel arrivals” with similar military sites being established in Wales and Dover.

At the same time, more than 40,555 migrants have died since 1993 due to the European Union’s Fortress Europe restrictions. This includes 11,421 migrants who drowned in the Mediterranean between 2016 and 2019.

Health systems in the United States are facing growing strains with the surge in COVID-19 cases

Benjamin Mateus

With the winter flu season looming in the northern hemisphere, the global COVID pandemic health crisis is unraveling ever faster, exacerbating the political and economic crisis of world capitalism. As profit-driven health care systems prove incapable of meeting the acute human needs generated by the public health catastrophe, pressure on the political turmoil that is seizing the national and global conscience.

France and Germany have announced partial nation-wide lockdowns in response to an exponential growth in cases. And as in Europe, health systems in many US states have reached critical capacity, as the number of cases across the country continues to skyrocket, surpassing their previous highs in the spring and summer.

The number of US COVID-19 cases surpassed nine million yesterday, with 500,000 of these cases added to the ledger just in the last week. In an indication of the acceleration in the crisis, the seven-day moving average of new daily cases has climbed from a low of 43,106 on October 1 to 75,072 on October 28, a 75 percent rise in only a month. At the same time, the positivity rate in testing has climbed from 4.3 percent to 7.3 percent.

People wait in line at a free COVID-19 testing site at the Mexican Consulate in Houston, Texas. (Image credit: David J. Phillip/AP)

The death rate began to see its initial uptick on October 17. This is a 16-day lag from the initial rise in cases in this third wave in the US, after remaining at in a range of 700 deaths per day for several weeks. The rate has now reached 842 per day, with more than 1,000 deaths on Wednesday. However, as health systems begin to reach capacity, the point where urgent and early interventions become impossible to administer and emergency rooms are again flooded with patients, experience has shown that more will die.

In an impassioned press brief on Monday, the Director-General of the World Health Organization, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, called for world leaders to heed the dangers associated with this tremendous new surge of cases.

“Last week saw the highest number of COVID-19 cases reported so far. Many countries in the northern hemisphere are seeing concern rise in cases and hospitalizations, and ICUs are filling up to capacity in some places, particularly in Europe and North America.

“The fatigue is real, but we cannot give up. We must not give up. Leaders must balance the disruption to lives and livelihoods with the need to protect health workers and health systems as intensive cares fills up. Many of those health care workers who have themselves gone through immense stress and trauma are still on the frontlines facing a fresh wave of new patients. We must do all we can to protect health workers.”

The hospitals’ strain is real, despite President Trump’s insistent and incessant claims that “fake news” media conspiracies and too much testing are responsible for the rise being reported across the country. Twenty-nine states have posted record highs as hospitals across the heartland are flooded with new patients. According to the COVID-19 Tracking Project metrics, there are presently 44,212 patients hospitalized in the US for COVID-19, a 46 percent spike since the lows in mid-September. Of these, 8,909 are in intensive care units, and 2,287 are on ventilators.

The twin cities of El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, which comprise a tightly knit metropolitan area home to three million people, are confronting record surges in cases that are hindering health delivery, reaching 100 percent capacity Sunday. On Monday, El Paso County saw a record number of 1,443 cases. Over 850 people are hospitalized, with 180 in the ICUs and 99 on ventilators. A curfew was placed into effect on Sunday evening from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. The civic center is being converted into an overflow site for patients. Presently, 41 percent of all hospitalizations are due to COVID.

At the opposite side of the country, in Wisconsin, according to the state health department, hospital bed capacity reached 82 percent on Sunday. Twenty-five percent of the 1,385 COVID-19 patients are in the ICU. Yesterday, the state reported 3,815 new cases and 45 deaths. The outbreak in the state, which started rolling two months ago, is among the worst in the nation, lagging only the much more populous states of Texas, Illinois, and California in terms of the average number of new daily cases. The positivity rate has reached 27 percent.

Ryan Westergaard, Department of Health Services chief medical officer, noted at a local press brief9ng, “It's a nightmare scenario, frankly, that this could get quite a bit worse in the next several weeks or months before it gets better.” Dr. Gregory Poland, director of the vaccine research group at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, described it sharply as “a disaster in warp speed.”

The daily case rate across the state of Utah has tripled in one month, currently with 1,500-plus cases a day. There are currently 309 patients in hospitals with COVID-19, with 111 in the ICUs. The University of Utah Health hospital in Salt Lake City reported having reached a 104 percent capacity. Additional ICU beds had been set up to accommodate the rising tide in cases. The hospital is a critical resource for “Utahns and residents of five surrounding states in a referral area encompassing more than 10 percent of the continental United States,” according to their website.

The President of the Utah Hospital Association, Greg Bell, warned that if trends continue they may reach the limits of their contingency plans for ICUs and would need to consider resorting to “crisis standards of care guidelines,” which allow hospitals to assess who would be denied care.

Cases across North Dakota continue to climb, which has stressed the state’s hospital capacity, with only 14 percent of 1,851 total staffed beds available for patients. As of Monday, there are 173 COVID-19 patients admitted, with 29 in the ICU. In South Dakota, there have been 1,270 new infections, with 412 hospitalizations.

Tulsa’s largest hospital system, Saint Francis, sees a growing number of patients with critical care needs. CEO Jake Henry said, “Hospitalizations have spiked … deaths from COVID-19 continue, and the rural areas have begun to surge.” Saint Francis is dealing with severe staff shortages and anticipating more cases compounded by the flu season. The hospital took out an ad to plead with the community to turn the tide.

According to the Washington Post, Ohio set a new high on Monday for hospitalizations, joining seven other states—Iowa, Kentucky, Minnesota, New Mexico, South Dakota, West Virginia and Wisconsin—that have set records. Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, critical states for President Trump’s reelection bid, are all states where cases and hospitalizations have risen sharply.

Despite the flood of cases and the accompanying misery that seems to have no end in sight, Trump has recently and unabashedly claimed that one of his significant accomplishments had been the “ending the COVID-19 pandemic.” The statement was released as a White House Office of Science and Technology Policy news release. Additionally, Trump told an audience at a Wisconsin campaign rally that case numbers are high because physicians are incentivized to falsely attribute deaths to COVID-19, to gain increased reimbursements.

Such brazen and provocative lies demonstrate that the ruling elite as a whole have no intention of controlling the pandemic or alleviating the conditions facing working people, who bear the brunt of this health emergency.

Australian university union runs limited “wage theft” campaign

Gabriela Zabala

Having allowed—by its own estimates—the destruction of up to 90,000 university jobs across Australia since March, the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) is conducting an online campaign to supposedly halt “wage theft.”

According to the union, up to a quarter of the country’s universities are suspected of underpaying wages, superannuation, leave entitlements and penalty rates for casual staff, sometimes dating back more than a decade.

That is, casuals are being paid even less than the low wages permitted by management enterprise agreements with the NTEU.

These abuses are bound up with the dramatic casualisation of the tertiary education sector as a result of gross underfunding by successive Labor and Liberal-National governments, which has all also occurred via the NTEU’s own enterprise agreements.

Several prestigious universities, such as the University of Sydney, University of New South Wales and University of Melbourne, are repaying millions of dollars to thousands of academics for underpaid wages after whistle-blowers exposed them.

The most common forms of super-exploitation include being paid at the incorrect rate or payment at a “piece rate” for student papers graded, instead of actual hours worked.

According to an Australian Broadcasting Corporation report on August 5, the faculty of arts and fine arts at the University of Melbourne allocated only three minutes for casuals to mark each student paper. Some casuals said they were encouraged to “skim” papers to comply with the piece rates for marking.

Other cases include non-payment for essential work such as attending lectures or meetings and rebranding tutorials to avoid paying the award rates. For instance, the faculty of science at the University of Melbourne renamed tutorials “practice classes” or “information sessions” so it could pay tutors a third of the usual rate, while the engineering faculty claimed that academics could do marking during tutorials.

Those worst affected are casual or short-term contract academics, who do more than half of the teaching and research in most universities. There has been an increase in university workers employed on a casual basis to 43.8 percent in 2018, up from 40 percent in 2016. Over 20 percent are on fixed-term contracts, leaving only about 35 percent of university employees in continuing employment (Kniest, P. 2018, ‘The flood of insecure work’, Connect, vol. 11, no. 2, August, pp. 24-5).

At some so-called elite institutions, the situation is even worse. Almost 73 percent of employees at the University of Melbourne and Monash University are employed as either casuals or on short-term contracts.

Due to the job insecurity in the sector, many academics fear speaking out about the conditions. However, comments on the NTEU’s website indicate the level of anger and frustration.

One academic wrote: “We have the same trick at Macquarie, as is used at UWA (University of Western Australia). With the names of tutorials changed to small group teaching activities (SGTA), we can evade the minimum hourly rates set in the Enterprise Agreement.”

Another said: “At UWA, specifically the Schools of Design and the School of Engineering, tutors were paid at an ORAA (other required academic activity) rate which was unethical and unacceptable… One year, the course reader of a unit in Engineering was changed on purpose and the word ‘tutor’ was replaced by ‘facilitator’.”

Another commented: “It is common for casual staff to presume they will have to work for nothing to complete all tasks associated with their work.”

Such under-payments add to the pressures on the already poorly-paid casuals, many of whom are post-graduate students, both domestic and international. One said:

“As a full-time PhD candidate, sessional teaching is not only expected work experience as an academic but a financial necessity. My full time scholarship amount falls below the Australian minimum wage at $30,000 net per annum. This amount puts me in housing stress. Despite the much-needed additional income sessional teaching provides, tutoring work creates an added financial burden due to implicit and overt underpayment.”

These conditions are systemic because successive governments have transformed universities into businesses, with the help of the NTEU. The union backed the last Greens-supported Labor government as it initiated the “education revolution.” This program drove a sharp increase in the exploitation of casual academics and imposed market-style competition among universities, while slashing nearly $3 billion from university budgets.

Under-funded universities fight each other for student numbers and seek to continually cut costs as well as increase workloads and class sizes. Compelled to seek funds elsewhere, the universities have become reliant on international students, who pay exorbitant fees.

Now that the extent of the underpayment has been exposed, the NTEU is opposed to any unified mobilisation of university workers, both permanent and casual, against these abuses and the entire offensive on jobs and conditions. Instead, it is seeking to channel the outrage into a judicial and parliamentary framework.

The union’s perspective is to initiate a class action against the universities, while supporting recommendations made by the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) to a Senate inquiry, in particular to facilitate the capacity of unions to inspect wage records and increase penalties for under-payment.

The NTEU’s additional recommendations to the inquiry include that universities be required to “accurately report the actual numbers of causal staff they employ.”

NTEU national president Allison Barnes said: “Unions need far better access to records, including for former employees and non-members. And we need the right to inspect those records quickly, without having to wait 24 hours.”

Barnes’ claim is, in the first place, disingenuous. How is it possible that the union, which boasts of 28,000 members, was unaware of the exploitation and underpayment?

Secondly, such recommendations are designed to enhance the unions’ role as partners with the employers.

The reality is that universities have been corporatised with the essential assistance of the NTEU, which has sought to subordinate university workers to the financial dictates of each individual university management.

Enterprise agreements, introduced by the Keating Labor government and the unions in the 1990s, have been used to split workers enterprise-by-enterprise, suppress industrial action and tie workers to their employers’ profit demands.

To stop the exploitation of casuals and the decimation of jobs, pay and conditions requires a unified struggle on the basis of an opposed political perspective. University workers and students need to form rank-and-file committees, totally independent of the NTEU, and link up with the struggles of educators throughout the country and internationally.

Among the demands of these committees should be that, instead of big business being bailed out with billions of dollars in subsidies and tax cuts, and billions more being handed to the military to prepare for war, resources be poured into healthcare and education funding.

That is essential to protect the population from COVID-19 and guarantee the basic social right to free, first-class education for all students, including international students, and full-time jobs for all university workers.

These demands require the transfer of society’s wealth from the financial elites. They are bound up with the fight for the complete reorganisation of society globally along socialist lines.

Wealthy areas switched support to Labour Party in New Zealand election

John Braddock & Tom Peters

After being re-elected on October 17 with 49.1 percent of the votes, the New Zealand Labour, led by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, is the first party able to govern alone since 1996. An estimated 480,000 special votes (from overseas voters and late registrants), accounting for about 17 percent of all ballots, are still to be counted. The final tally will be known on November 6.

Despite the Labour Party being expected to get at least 64 seats in the 120-seat parliament after its best result since 1946, the formation of the new government has been delayed for two weeks to accommodate negotiations between the Labour Party and the Green Party to secure its ongoing support.

Map showing which party got most votes in each electorate (Source: Wikipedia)

Pseudo-left groups including the International Socialist Organisation, the trade union funded Daily Blog, and Jacobin magazine in the US, falsely claim that the election result is a victory for “the left” and that workers stand to win significant gains. In reality, the ruling elite is demanding drastic austerity measures to pay for historic bailouts of big business and the banks, as well as increased military spending.

The Labour Party's election campaign, which was predominantly conducted by Ardern alone, announced no significant new policies, with the party claiming the pandemic made it too difficult to plan ahead. This was to provide free reign to implement the demands of business onto a population already significantly impoverished as a result of Labour's previous three years in office. Labour’s promises in 2017 to address child poverty and homelessness have been exposed as lies, with poverty and unemployment skyrocketing.

In the 2017 election, despite winning just 36.9 percent of the votes—well below the rival National Party’s 44.4 percent—Labour was chosen by the right-wing nationalist NZ First Party to join it in a coalition. The Labour-NZ First deal, supported by the Greens, was backed by the United States, which saw these parties as more reliable instruments to strengthen New Zealand’s alliance with Washington as it prepared for war against China. Labour and NZ First had for years sought to demonise Chinese immigrants and attacked the 2008-2017 National Party government for building closer business ties with China.

In 2020, the Labour Party benefited significantly from the crisis in the National Party, which has been profoundly destabilised by the US and media anti-China campaign. This year, the conservative party had two leadership changes in four months and multiple senior MPs have resigned. Its support collapsed to 27 percent, its second-worst result ever.

Labour gained votes at the expense of National, which was not seen as a viable alternative either by workers or among its own core supporters including large sections of the upper middle class and businesses.

Both National and NZ First also bled votes to the far-right ACT Party, which has gone from 1 MP to 10. NZ First only got 2.7 percent, below the 5 percent threshold needed to re-enter parliament. The Greens increased their share of votes from 6.3 to 7.6 percent, giving the party 10 seats. The Greens’ support largely came from middle class electorates such as Wellington Central and Auckland Central.

There are undoubtedly illusions in Labour among workers, reinforced by a barrage of media propaganda praising Ardern as the embodiment of compassion who purportedly defeated COVID-19. New Zealand implemented a relatively strict lockdown in late March and has so far not experienced deaths on the catastrophic scale seen internationally. This was not due to Ardern’s foresight or benevolence, however, but because the government feared a mass movement beginning to develop in the working class demanding a lockdown.

The support for Labour is being significantly exaggerated in the media. One important fact buried in the coverage is that, according to preliminary figures, almost one in four people, 877,674, did not vote for any party. The Electoral Commission estimates the turnout to be 82.5 percent of those enrolled, compared with 79.8 percent in 2017. However, when one accounts for 7.5 percent of eligible people who were not enrolled as of October 16, and 15,645 informal ballots in which the voter’s choice of party is “unclear,” the turnout drops to 75.89 percent.

This reflects widespread hostility towards the entire political establishment. Large numbers of workers and young people correctly see Labour and National as two parties of big business and war.

Under New Zealand’s mixed member proportional system, voters have a party vote and a candidate vote. The party vote determines the overall proportion of seats held by each party, while the candidate vote decides which MP represents an individual electorate. People who identify as Maori can choose to vote in one of the seven Maori electorates instead of the general electorates.

Particularly low voter turnout has been reported in the Maori electorates of the East Coast with 71 percent, and Waiariki with just 54 percent. In the latter seat, Labour’s sitting member lost to Rawiri Waititi from the right-wing Maori Party, which represents indigenous business interests and wants a complete end to immigration. Working class Maori are among the most exploited in society, disproportionately affected by homelessness, incarceration, poor health and lack of education.

Of the 72 electorate seats, Labour won the party vote in all but four. Across the South Island Labour won the party vote for every single electorate, with only a few seats retained by individual National MPs. Labour swept all electorates in both Wellington and Christchurch.

In a breakdown of voting published by Stuff, which divided the country into 1,635 localities each with one or two polling booths, Labour got more votes than any other party in 77 percent of neighbourhoods.

In many working class suburbs, Labour increased its majority significantly. In Aranui, Christchurch, Labour’s winning margin increased from 46.76 percent to 63.09 percent. In Porirua East, north of Wellington, Labour won by 62.39 percent, up from 33.55 percent. In South Auckland, Labour’s margin in Mangere Bridge increased from 13 to 29.3 percent, Manukau Central from 15.7 to 51.8 percent, Manurewa Central from 21.7 to 46.9 percent and Onehunga Central from 10.6 to 37.2 percent.

At the same time, in 663 areas including wealthier suburbs and conservative regions, Labour overturned previously comfortable National Party majorities.

National Party leader Judith Collins notably lost the party vote in her “safe blue” electorate of Papakura, where Labour won 40.3 percent to National’s 38.7. National’s deputy leader Gerry Brownlee lost his Christchurch seat of Ilam after 25 years, by over 2,000 votes. In Ilam North, a National margin of 27.9 percent in 2017 switched to Labour by 4.2 percent.

In Seatoun, Wellington’s second most expensive suburb, Labour won by a margin of 18.12 percent—in 2017 National won by 19.32 percent. In Herne Bay, which according to the New Zealand Herald has Auckland’s most expensive houses with a median price of $2.56 million, the National Party got 35.89 percent of the votes, which was only 0.76 percentage points ahead of Labour, compared with a 28.14 percent lead in 2017.

The bloodbath recalls a previous swing by layers of the business elite and upper middle class to Labour in the 1987 election. The Labour government that came to power in 1984, led by Prime Minister David Lange, launched a sweeping program of market liberalisation, including tax cuts for corporations and the rich, the privatisation of public assets and mass redundancies for the working class.

Like the Lange government, the Ardern government is carrying out a brutal redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich. The social layers that benefited from Labour’s right-wing policies over the past three years include share market players, landlords and property investors. In August, a survey by MYOB found that for the first time Labour was the preferred party of small and medium business owners, with 38 percent indicating support for Labour and 35 percent for National.

According to financial analyst Frances Sweetman, the NZX 50 gross index rose 53 percent during the three years of the Labour-led government, compared with a 36 percent rise for the US S&P 500. Property values have skyrocketed, fuelled by record low interest rates and the Reserve Bank’s quantitative easing policy. House prices escalated by 27 percent during Labour’s term, vastly exacerbating inequality and social hardship.

Using the pandemic as a pretext, the government has handed tens of billions of dollars to corporations in so-called wage subsidies, tax concessions and bailouts. The Reserve Bank is printing up to $100 billion in a quantitative easing program, buying government bonds from private banks. The same businesses that benefited from these policies are making tens of thousands of people redundant, and slashing work hours and wages, with the collaboration of the trade union bureaucracy. This year has seen a drop in median incomes of at least 7.6 percent, and nearly 12 percent of the working age population is now on welfare.

Labour’s appeal to the more privileged was boosted by an election promise of a meagre rise in income tax for only the richest 2 percent of earners and Ardern’s insistence that Labour would not impose a wealth tax. The government last year abandoned a major promise to implement a Capital Gains Tax, previously declared necessary to tackle the overheated housing market.

In her election night victory speech, Ardern made a point of thanking former National Party voters “who may not have supported Labour before.” She promised Labour “will be a party which governs for every New Zealander.” This mirrors statements by US Democratic presidential contender Joe Biden, who has appealed for support from right-wing Republicans against Trump.

Labour returns to office under conditions of rapidly widening social inequality and class polarisation. In response to the growth of working class struggle, the political establishment in every country is lurching rapidly to the right and towards more brutal and authoritarian forms of rule.

New Zealand is no exception. Significant struggles have already taken place under the Ardern government in 2018-19 when nurses, teachers and thousands of other workers held nationwide strikes over pay and conditions, which were betrayed by the unions.

The economic crisis that now exists is far more acute than prior to the pandemic, requiring accelerated attacks on the conditions of workers. The next round of austerity, assaults on democratic rights and preparations for war will trigger broader and more sustained eruptions. Whatever illusions exist in Labour and Ardern will be shattered by these events.

Half of India’s population could be infected with COVID-19 by next February

Wasantha Rupasinghe

While the Indian government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the media are boasting of a “sharp fall” in the number of COVID-19 infections, a committee appointed by the government warned half of the population of 1.3 billion would be infected by February next year.

As of yesterday, India’s tally of coronavirus cases rose to 7.94 million with 36,370 new cases over the previous 24 hours. The total death toll rose to 119,502, with 488 deaths in the last 24 hours.

Health workers screen residents for COVID-19 symptoms at Deonar slum in Mumbai, India. (Image Credit: AP Photo/Rajanish Kakade)

A week before, the number of daily confirmed cases was 46,790 and at the beginning of October, the number of daily infections was 86,821. The fall has prompted the health ministry to declare that India was “fortunate to have the decline in numbers.”

However, India is currently the second worst impacted country in the world behind only the US. Moreover, the official numbers are highly understated.

Speaking to Reuters on October 19, Manindra Agrawal, a professor at the India Institute for Technology, said: “Our mathematical model estimates that around 30 percent of the population is currently infected and it could go up to 50 percent by February.” He is a member of a government-appointed, 10-member committee on the pandemic.

The estimate is much higher than the government’s serological surveys which showed that 14 percent of the population had been infected as of September.

The committee, headed by the government’s think tank NITI Aayog member V.K. Paul, was appointed to study the progress of the COVID-19 virus in India. Among its findings, it warned: “India may see an exponential increase of 260,000 cases in a month because of the festival season if precautions are not followed.”

Noting that Kerala, Karnataka, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and West Bengal are still seeing a rise in the number of cases, it stated: “A second wave of coronavirus can’t be ruled out in winter.”

At the same time, the committee report tried to downplay the disastrous situation for which the government is responsible. It declared that India had reached the peak in COVID-19 cases in September and “now is on the downward slope.”

It also claimed that the COVID-19 curve had “flattened” and the “early lockdown bolstered by better-equipped health care system helped in flattening the curve.” In fact, India’s highly under-funded public healthcare system has been overwhelmed by a rapidly increasing number of COVID-19 infections.

Trying to paint a rosy picture, Modi on October 26 tweeted: “We are seeing a decline in the number of cases per day and the growth rate of cases.” He boasted that India has “one of the highest recovery rates of 88 percent” because the country was “one of the first countries to adopt a flexible lockdown.”

Modi’s announcement is absurd given the obvious fact that India’s two months long lockdown was a disaster for hundreds of millions Indian workers and the oppressed who lost their jobs. Many millions were pushed into extreme poverty without any income and enough food.

Moreover, Modi’s lockdown has failed to control the pandemic as it was not implemented with mass testing, contact tracing and, most importantly, a massive financial boost to the public healthcare system. In response to demands from big business, the government eased the restrictions from the end of April leading to an exponential growth of COVID-19 cases and deaths.

Modi, following in the footsteps of his counterparts around world, including US President Donald Trump and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, has unofficially adopted the homicidal “herd immunity policy,” allowing the pandemic to run freely across the country.

In a televised address on October 20, Modi reiterated his claims saying that in comparison to the US and Brazil, India’s death rate of 83 per million persons was low. While the figure is lower, it may well be the result of a gross under-reporting of deaths due to COVID-19.

The apparent fall in COVID-19 cases is also likely to be an understatement due to a decrease in the number of tests. India is among the countries with the lowest levels of testing.

An article published in September by the Hindu noted: “In at least 10 states there was a sharp fall in the number of tests conducted in the last 10 days despite an increase in the share of people testing positive.” The worst hit is the state of Maharashtra.

According to the Times of India, daily testing has fluctuated widely—from a high of over 1.2 million to under 900,000. Ourworldindata.org shows a sharp decline by more than half in the testing rate—from 1.08 per 1,000 people on October 1 to 0.62 per 1,000 people on October 19.

While the government is downplaying the dangers, a BBC article on October 19 wrote: “[M]ost epidemiologists believe that another peak is inevitable and that northern India will likely see a rise in caseloads during a smog-filled winter that begins in November.”

“It is far too soon to say that the pandemic is receding,” Dr. Bhramar Mukherjee, a professor of bio-statistics and epidemiology at the University of Michigan, told the BBC. “[There] could be a rise in deaths in the winter due to pollution, which is especially bad for respiratory diseases.”

Exponential growth of infections beginning from May is related to Modi’s unstated policy of “herd immunity”—allowing the virus to run rampant—that will hit the most vulnerable layers of the population, particularly the elderly, the hardest. Acting on the demands of the business elite, Modi has reopened businesses and other institutions exposing many millions to the deadly virus.

Like its counterparts around the world, the Indian ruling elite is prioritising economic activity and corporate profits over the health and lives of workers and rural toilers.