Macron government opposes full lock-down as coronavirus deaths climb

Will Morrow

Hundreds of people are continuing to die every day in France as tens of thousands of new coronavirus infections are being reported.

Another 302 people died in hospitals on Sunday, bringing the total number of deaths in the country to 44,548 since the beginning of the pandemic. Approximately two thirds (30,785 people) have died in hospitals, and almost 13,379 in aged care homes and other social service providers, where the virus is continuing to circulate.

On Saturday, a staggering 932 new deaths were recorded, approximately half of them from uncounted deaths in aged care facilities over the previous four days. Daily deaths in France have averaged over 500 throughout the past week, equivalent to roughly 2,500 per day in a country the size of the United States.

French soldiers discuss inside the military field hospital built in Mulhouse, eastern France, to treat coronavirus patients (AP Photo/Jean-Francois Badias)

Another 27, 228 cases were recorded yesterday, though the count is always lower due to reduced reporting on Sundays. On Saturday, more than 33,000 people tested positive for the virus. While these represent a reduction from the peak of more than 60,000 daily cases a week ago, likely due to the impact of limited lock-down restrictions from the beginning of November, the virus is continuing to spread rapidly through the population. Within the next 24 hours, the country will surpass two million total cases, the fourth highest in the world.

The hospitals in many regions are at or approaching breaking point. Last Thursday, hospitalizations surpassed the maximum reached during the height of the first wave of the virus in April. The total number of people hospitalized now stands at 33,081. Another 270 people went into intensive care units yesterday, bringing the total to 4,896.

Up-to-date coronavirus case numbers from retirement homes are not readily available, indicating that the extent of the spread is still unknown.

The hospitalization totals are particularly concentrated in the Île-de-France region around Paris, and in Lyon. In Île-de-France, the portion of occupied ICU beds increased from 92.7 percent last week to 99.7 percent as of Friday.

Other critical surgeries are being cancelled or postponed to free space for coronavirus patients. In Lyon, France Info reported yesterday that nurses in the neurosurgery department have created place for 16 beds for coronavirus patients. “These are people with serious respiratory problems, such as we rarely see in the surgical department. Some of them have died… It’s an atmosphere of permanent crisis,” Pascale, a nurse of 19 years, told the news outlet.

The massive and rising death toll was not inevitable. The Macron government deliberately prepared the way for a second wave of the virus with its reopening policies aimed at protecting the profits of French corporations. As early as July, the World Health Organization was already warning that a new second wave could be seen in Europe. Prime Minister Castex insisted that a new lockdown as in March and April would “stop the spread of the virus, of course, but from an economic and social standpoint it’s a disaster.” In other words, nothing could be done that would impinge upon the profit interests of the super-rich.

Even as hundreds of deaths occur each day, the Macron government has rejected the closure of schools and non-essential workplaces. Thousands of teachers have struck in the past two weeks to demand social distancing measures. Schools are packed with anywhere up to 35 students in a classroom, with up to 500 students in canteens, and public transportation at standing room only.

The government is consciously working to conceal the impact of its school openings on the spread of the virus. On November 6, the government’s official count of infected students was 3,528. Over the same period, official statistics from the public health agency revealed that more than 25,000 young people under 19 years old had tested positive. The government made no attempt to explain the contradiction between these figures. Last Friday, the government revised upwards its figure of positive students to more than 12,000, including more than 2,500 who tested positive in only the previous 24 hours.

The maintenance of open schools is intended solely to ensure that parents can continue to go to work while their children are in classrooms.

The Macron administration is not attempting to prevent all coronavirus infections and deaths, but only limit the extent of deaths and hospital breakdown to a point that can be maintained without threatening an explosion of anger and opposition in the working class. That is to say, Macron is pursuing a policy of “herd immunity” in all but name.

In announcing the limited lock-down of restaurants, cafés and some retail at the beginning of the month, Macron stated that the best-case scenario target was for the virus to infect 5,000 people every day. In a press conference last Thursday, Castex maintained this goal, and insisted that no further lock-down measures would be announced.

This is despite the latest indications that an effective vaccine is likely to be completed and available in the course of 2021. Last Monday, pharmaceutical company Pfizer revealed that its trial had been 90 percent effective in preventing the contraction of the virus. As the WSWS explained in its Perspective column published November 10, the development “makes all the more necessary urgent measures to contain the spread of the virus and save lives until a vaccine is widely available.”

In an interview with Le Monde on Saturday, Castex insisted that the likely availability of a virus would have no impact on the government’s response. Castex stated that the government’s policy was still based on the principle of “living with the virus for a long period,” and “as long as we don’t have a vaccine, we must give a perspective for the rules of the game.”

This is the rationale for the government’s policy of keeping schools and non-essential workplaces open, deliberately allowing the virus to spread, and ensuring that thousands will die unnecessarily before a vaccine is available.

Johnson government in meltdown after Biden US election victory

Robert Stevens

Boris Johnson’s Conservative government is in meltdown as the Brexit crisis reaches its endgame and the Tories prepare to end the limited one-month national lockdown put in place on November 5.

Every political calculation of Johnson’s is being ripped asunder by the victory of the Democratic Party’s Joe Biden in the US presidential election. The UK prime minister’s entire Brexit strategy was largely reliant on the continued occupation of the White House by the pro-Brexit Donald Trump.

On Sunday, Johnson was forced to go into self-isolation after the National Health Service Test and Trace system informed him that he had been in contact with someone who had since tested positive for COVID-19. This was Tory Ashfield MP Lee Anderson, who Johnson spent around 35 minutes with last Thursday. By Monday evening it was revealed five other Tory MPs who were present at the Downing Street meeting with Johnson and Ashfield were also self-isolating. Another five Tory MPs beyond them are likewise in self-isolation.

Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson joins in the applause on the doorstep of 10 Downing Street in London during the weekly "Clap for our Carers" Thursday, May 7, 2020. (AP Photo/Alberto Pezzali)

In April, Johnson nearly died after being hospitalised with COVID-19 and spending three nights in intensive care.

Johnson’s inner circle was blown apart last week, as the pro-European Union (EU) Biden’s victory resulted in the departure from Downing Street of the prime minister’s chief adviser Dominic Cummings and Director of Communications Lee Cain. Cummings was the head of the Vote Leave campaign in the 2016 referendum, which Johnson backed, and was then brought into Downing Street after Johnson replaced the pro-Remain Theresa May as party leader and prime minister. Cain was headhunted by Cummings and it was understood that Cain would eventually take on the position of Downing Street Chief of Staff post-Brexit.

The Brexiteers’ strategy was based on the UK reaching a trade deal with the US, under Trump, and using this as leverage in negotiations with the EU. Johnson had no allies for this plan internationally, with the exception of the fascist in the White House.

As a Biden victory looked more and more likely in the run-up to the US elections, Johnson’s government was thrown into crisis. The Times reported in October that Cummings had to make a sharp about-turn, instructing Tory MPs to begin a charm offensive with the pro-EU Biden.

Johnson’s Brexit negotiator Lord Frost continued talks with the EU yesterday, with no sign that any agreement on a post-Brexit trade pact forthcoming. Already this year a number of “deadlines” for an agreement to be made have come and gone, the latest at the end of October. This Thursday’s European Council online summit is touted as the new deadline for a draft deal, even though Brexit is not formally on the agenda.

Any deal must be reached before the end of the post-Brexit transition period on January 1. It requires ratification by the EU and UK parliaments. To enable this, the European parliament has scheduled a vote during the last session of the year, in the week of December 14.

It is widely reported that the departure of Cummings is seen in European ruling circles as proof Johnson is shaping up to conclude some kind of agreement, in order to avoid an economically disastrous “no-deal Brexit”.

Manfred Weber, the head of the conservative parliamentary group in the European Parliament, who is politically close to Angela Merkel, told the BBC, “I see what is happening now in Downing Street. We can see this as a quite chaotic situation where we don’t have any idea what is really the line. I think it’s now time for leadership, having all the developments in America in mind, where London has understood it will be not so easy for Boris Johnson to achieve an easy trade deal. Now it’s time to take responsibility and come to a common understanding.”

Philippe Lamberts, a Belgian Greens MEP who sits on the European parliament’s Brexit committee, said that Cummings’s departure was “probably the sign that Johnson has begun his U-turn and will in the end accept EU conditions”.

But ahead of the talks with his EU counterpart Michel Barnier, Frost played down any suggestion of a possible agreement this week. “We also now largely have common draft treaty texts, though significant elements are of course not yet agreed.” Among the areas of disagreement are fishing rights in British waters and “level playing field” conditions for businesses operating in the UK and EU. He added, “We will work to build on these and get an overall agreement if we can. But we may not succeed. Either way, as the Prime Minister Boris Johnson made clear on 16 October, people and businesses must prepare for the change that is coming on 31 December, most of which happens whether there is a deal or not.” He warned that a deal must be “compatible with our sovereignty” and take back control of “our laws, our trade and our waters”.

It is indicative of the crisis overwhelming the Tory government that none of this is particularly different from the strategy advanced by Cummings, yet it is now considered essential that he is no longer running Downing Street given events in the US and the need not to alienate Biden.

Britain and the EU remain at loggerheads over Johnson’s plans to tear up the existing Brexit Withdrawal Agreement. The Conservative government is being threatened with legal action by the European Commission over Johnson’s Internal Market Bill, which aims to use domestic law to overwrite the Withdrawal Agreement. The Bill makes it illegal for the EU to impose controls on trade between Northern Ireland and Great Britain. The Irish trade elements were a key component of the deal that took three years to agree and which was signed by Boris Johnson only at the start of this year—allowing the current trade talks to begin.

On Sunday, Irish foreign minister Simon Coveney insisted there was "no way" the EU would ratify a free trade agreement and allow the UK to break the previous deal. Coveney told Sky News, “Even if we do get a new trade deal negotiated on both sides, if the British government is determined to continue with their internal market bill, to reintroduce parts of that bill that were removed by the House of Lords this week, then I think this is a deal that won't be ratified by the EU.” To do so “would be breaking international law… So there are real obstacles to getting this deal done."

Last week, the largely pro-EU House of Lords defeated the government by a large majority to amend the bill and remove the offending clauses. Johnson leads a rabidly pro-Brexit parliamentary party and was forced in response to the Lords vote to immediately placate the Brexiteers and pledge to re-insert the clauses.

Whatever happens regarding the Brexit talks, the government is committed to its central programme of defending the interests of the corporations and financial oligarchy and escalating its offensive against the working class. The Financial Times reported Monday that Johnson held talks with Tory Party donors the previous evening and that Johnson assured one of them “that further coronavirus lockdowns could be avoided.”

The FT reported that Cummings/Cain’s departure will see the “dead-cert” return to the Cabinet of the Thatcherite multi-millionaire former city banker, Sajid Javid. Javid was forced to stand down as chancellor in February after being instructed to sack all five of his advisers and replace them with ones recommended by Cummings. Prior to that, Johnson had agreed with Javid that austerity had to be continued, with ministers required “to go through every line of departmental budgets assessing value for money…” and present “radical options” to cut spending.

Johnson’s dysfunctional government is only able to remain in office because it is propped up by the Labour Party and trade unions who are smothering all opposition to it.

They are allowing the government to stagger on despite its own heavily manipulated COVID-19 death tally passing, last week, the grim milestone of 50,000 fatalities—with hundreds more dying on a daily basis. In the week to November 6, an estimated 654,000 people had Covid-19 in the UK, with 12,033 people in hospital by November 10, with 1,010 of them on mechanical ventilation. Much of the transmission is through workplaces, schools, colleges and universities which remain open only due to the collaboration of Labour and the unions.

Australian governments impose wage freezes on public sector workers

Mike Head

COVID-19 infections may have been contained to a certain extent in Australia—although new outbreaks are emerging as safety restrictions are recklessly lifted for the sake of corporate profit. But the country is certainly no exception when it comes to the ruling class ramping up its drive to impose on workers the full cost of the deepening global economic breakdown triggered by the pandemic.

After handing hundreds of billions of dollars to big business and high-income recipients via “stimulus packages” and tax cuts, the federal, state and territory governments are inflicting wage freezes or below-inflation “caps” on public sector workers, including frontline health workers and teachers.

Liberal-National Coalition and Labor Party governments alike are exploiting the pandemic to deepen a decades-long attack on working class pay and conditions. Real wages had fallen for six years even before the pandemic, taking the wages share of national income to the lowest level since the 1950s.

Last Friday, the federal Coalition government followed the lead of several state and territory governments, notably the Labor governments in Queensland and the Northern Territory, which have both announced protracted wage freezes.

Ben Morton, an assistant minister to Prime Minister Scott Morrison, unveiled an across-the-board restriction on public sector pay rises. He said pay rises for federal public servants would be kept below the increasingly depressed level of private sector wages.

The new policy caps wages for 150,000 federal workers at the level of the private sector Wage Price Index, replacing the existing 2 percent annual limit. This is on top of what will become a year-long outright wage freeze by next April.

That means a real wage cut for the foreseeable future. In the June quarter of 2020, private sector wages grew by just 0.1 percent, or 0.4 percent annually, Australian Bureau of Statistics data showed. That is far below the annualised official inflation rate, which was running at 1.6 percent during the September quarter.

The wage-cutting is set to worsen next year. Just days earlier, the government had declared it would cut the JobSeeker unemployment benefit rate to the sub-poverty level of around $51 a day for single adults at the end of December, in a deliberate move to further drive down all wages by forcing millions of jobless workers into low-paid employment.

Friday’s announcement also foreshadowed more cuts to essential social spending, accompanied by the further evisceration of public sector workers’ basic workplace rights and conditions.

The Public Sector Workplace Relations Policy 2020 released by Morton specifies that any, even slight, pay rise must be “affordable and funded from within existing agency budgets, without the redirection of programme funding.” That is, any rise will mean cutting spending.

The policy further dictates that “enterprise agreements and other workplace arrangements are not to contain restrictive work practices, unduly limit flexibility, or otherwise impede workplace reform.” These are code words for scrapping working conditions, ratcheting up workloads and imposing restructuring, inevitably at the expense of jobs.

Over the past seven years, the Coalition government has slashed public sector jobs, intensifying the damaging impact of the previous Labor government’s cuts, which were inflicted via annual “productivity dividends.” As of last month, there were 12,100, or 7.3 percent, less public sector employees than there were in 2013.

In effect, Morton endorsed pay-cutting for all workers, saying the new policy would see federal employees paid “in step with their fellow Australians.” To try to head off workers’ outrage, Morton announced a vague internal review of the now-notorious “performance bonuses” for high-ranking public sector executives.

Far from opposing the lowering of workers’ living standards, the opposition Labor Party’s only criticism was that the move would undercut efforts to stimulate the economy. Shadow finance minister Katy Gallagher pointed to close collaboration with the trade unions to contain workers’ anger. “Labor will work through the implications of this announcement and will consult with the unions which represent the workers who stand to be affected,” she said.

The wage cuts will start to flow through in 2021 as existing department and agency enterprise agreements (EAs) expire. It is now three years since the Community Public Sector Union (CPSU) and other unions finally wore down widespread opposition among federal public servants to the last round of union-negotiated EAs.

These 2017 EAs themselves amounted to a three-year wage freeze, having been delayed since 2014. They also set the current 2 percent annual pay ceiling, designed to keep wage increases below the inflation rate.

Throughout that dispute over the EAs, the unions kept workers divided department-by-department and confined them to limited stoppages and protests. After workers in key departments like the Australian Tax Office rejected union proposals, the unions subjected them to ballot after ballot on offers that contained inconsequential changes, until they finally got votes through.

The CPSU and other unions will do everything they can to again bulldoze over the resistance of workers to the new and even-greater government offensive. CPSU national secretary Melissa Donnelly echoed the pro-business concerns of the Labor Party. “If the government wants to stimulate the economy and keep consumer spending up, this is not the way to do it,” she pleaded.

The federal government move is part of a bipartisan austerity assault on the working class, with all the country’s governments collaborating in a self-proclaimed “national cabinet” that is seeking to fully reopen the economy, regardless of the global COVID-19 resurgence.

Last week, the New South Wales Coalition government said it would reduce the annual pay rise cap for its 410,000 public sector workers from 2.5 percent to 1.5 percent for the next three financial years. That followed an Industrial Relations Commission ruling that the workers, including nurses, paramedics and teachers, would receive a mere 0.3 percent pay increase this year, not the 2.5 percent that was due on July 1.

Also last week, the Northern Territory Labor government unveiled a four-year pay freeze—an attack it kept well hidden during the territory’s August election. Chief Minister and Treasurer Michael Gunner said the “pause” would save $424 million to help reduce the record debt forecast in his government’s delayed November 9 budget.

Various unions, notably those covering teachers and nurses, accused the government of duplicity for not consulting with them first. Gunner insisted that the unions had been advised of the government’s plans and said he was sure they would negotiate EAs in line with the freeze.

Gunner’s confidence, based on decades of union betrayals, might have been fortified by the agreement struck between the unions and Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk’s Labor government in Queensland, which was the first in the land to declare such a pay freeze. In June, in defiance of widespread anger among teachers, nurses and other workers, the unions in Queensland helped that government push through legislation for a freeze, thinly disguised as a two-year “deferral.”

As the WSWS warned in June, the Queensland deal, cynically portrayed as a temporary measure to pay the cost of the COVID-19 pandemic, set “a new precedent for exploiting the health emergency to intensify the ongoing corporate and government attack on the living and working conditions of workers.”

German federal government demands faster destruction of Lufthansa jobs

Ulrich Rippert

In spring of this year, the German airline Lufthansa received government aid to the tune of €9 billion, to the adulation of the unions. However, it quickly became clear that these funds were being used to streamline the company, trimming it for profit at the employees’ expense.

Now the German government is demanding these measures be expanded and the axing of jobs accelerated. Lufthansa is to be made more competitive in relation to other European airlines and prepared for a worldwide trade war. The pandemic is being used to accelerate the implementation of the industrial policy goals set out by the Grand Coalition government of the Social Democrats (SPD) and the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). This policy was dubbed earlier this year by Economics Minister Peter Altmaier (CDU) as the “National Industrial Strategy 2030.”

In its most recent issue, the leading German news magazine Der Spiegelpublished a detailed background article on the matter. Under the headline “Lufthansa nosedives despite billions in aid,” the magazine first reports the dramatic decline in Lufthansa’s passenger count and flight hours. “The numbers are scary: the airline is burning 350 million euro per month. Losses reached 5.6 billion euro in the year to September; 410 of the 763 Lufthansa planes are mothballed on the ground.”

Lufthansa airplanes parked at the Willy Brandt Airport (AP Photo)

The article then quotes from an ostensibly secret Ministry of Economics document. Government officials are said to be dissatisfied with the company management. The board of directors must take much tougher measures, otherwise the company will run out of money in the coming year, it states. The “directive from Berlin” is that the company must “downsize as quickly as possible: fewer planes, fewer employees.” Personnel costs would “eat the company up if nothing is undertaken to prevent it.”

The Spiegel authors write that the government is dissatisfied despite Lufthansa CEO Carsten Spohr’s announcement of 26,000 job cuts and the ongoing restructuring program, called “Lufthansa-New-Tomorrow,” which includes drastic reductions of jobs in the cities of Bremen, Dresden, Cologne, Leipzig and Nuremberg, including the closure of the Bremen flight school.

So far, these were just “pieces of the mosaic, not yet a real restructuring concept.” Officials and politicians in Berlin are “losing patience with Spohr,” casting doubt on his being “the right man for tough cuts.” “If Lufthansa were flying at 10,000 meters, the trained pilot Spohr would be the right man,” says a “high-ranking government official.” But currently, Lufthansa is only at 2,000 meters, “and the mountain tops are damned close.”

The German government is supporting the demands of major stakeholder Heinz Hermann Thiele, who in March increased his share of Lufthansa to 15 percent and is now calling for a “viable restructuring program ... that’s deserving of its name.” According to Thiele, most important is that costs are immediately and enduringly reduced through “comprehensive job cuts.” At least 30,000 jobs must be cut and as quickly as possible.

Thiele is known for his ruthless capitalist methods. The 79-year-old multi-billionaire, who according to Forbes is one of the 100 richest men in the world with assets of €13 billion, grew his company, Knorr-Bremse, to become the world market leader in brakes for trains and commercial vehicles. He left the employers’ association in 2004. He demands 42-hour workweeks from his employees, seven hours longer than the collective agreements of the metalworking industry allow. He is partial to stashing his billions in tax havens.

Even now Thiele is demanding the dissolution of collective agreements, which he calls out of date and untenable “in light of the catastrophic situation.” Either the executive board and the unions must renegotiate these deals and accept significant reductions in pay and social contributions, “or Lufthansa must terminate the agreements,” he says.

Thiele is “a tough guy,” writes Der Spiegel, but adds, “However, the federal government sees the situation very similarly.”

At the end of the Spiegel article, another approach is suggested, a “radical move” to get rid of all collective agreements and pension costs in one fell stroke: The “protective shield procedure,” an insolvency in self-administration. Der Spiegel writes: “Some influential managers in the aviation group are already playing out what advantages a protective shield procedure would yield: After three months, any employment contract could be terminated. Collective agreements would be null and void.”

This threat is primarily intended to help the unions push through further wage reductions, job cuts and worsened working conditions over the objections of the workforce.

The three trade unions represented in the company already play a key role in making the draconian austerity measures possible. These are the Independent Flight Attendants Organization (UFO), the Vereinigung Cockpit (VC) and, of course, Verdi, which has always functioned as the house union at Lufthansa. All three are represented on the Supervisory Board, with Verdi functionary Christine Behle holding the influential and lucrative position of deputy chairwoman of the Supervisory Board.

The trade unions are deeply involved in all strategy debates. Many austerity measures and cutback programs were and are conceived and elaborated directly by the trade union. All three unions agreed to the government’s multi-billion-euro rescue package and even called for rallies in support of it.

The trade unions continue to support the government and criticize the company board around CEO Spohr from the right. They denounce his restructuring concept as insufficiently far-reaching and consistent.

With Christine Behle, who has been a member of the governing SPD for 27 years, Verdi was directly involved in the negotiations with the government on the Lufthansa rescue package. Behle assured the Executive Board and the shareholders that Verdi was prepared to make massive cuts, but that a restructuring concept would have to be presented that would make Lufthansa competitive in the face of the crisis and growing competition on the international market.

In an earlier interview with Der Spiegel, Behle emphasized that the union had always been and continues to be prepared to negotiate and make concessions. “That capacities have to be reduced is an economic decision that is not inherently false.” She firmly rejected strikes and industrial action.

When asked by Der Spiegel whether there was “any chance at all” of “preventing or even striking against large-scale job cuts,” not only at Lufthansa but also at other European airlines, Behle replied: “In such a situation, strikes make no sense.” What is needed is “simply reasonable cooperation.”

The two other unions likewise support the government’s demands for restructuring, trying to outbid each other with savings proposals at the expense of the workforce.

UFO already signed an agreement with Lufthansa this summer to save the company half a billion euros by the end of 2023. Considering the 22,000 cabin employees of the parent company to which the agreement applies, this means an average loss of income of €23,000 over three-and-a-half years.

The savings will be realized by suspending wage increases, shortening working hours with a corresponding reduction in wages, reducing contributions to the company pension scheme and cutting jobs. In addition, there will be “voluntary” measures, such as unpaid leave, further reductions in working hours and early retirement. Those affected will thus lose not only a large portion of their current income, but also their future pension provision.

In April, Cockpit offered up annual savings of €350 million in compensation to pilots at Lufthansa, Germanwings, Lufthansa Cargo and Lufthansa Aviation Training. A 45 percent salary cut was on the table. In the meantime, the pilots’ union has negotiated a crisis package with cuts totaling €850 million through June 2022.

We wrote this summer on the WSWS: “The events at Lufthansa unequivocally show the bankruptcy of the unions and their perspective.” This is being demonstrated anew every day.

For decades, the trade unions have subordinated the interests of the workers to the profit interests of the corporations. In Germany and in most other countries, there is no mass layoff or plant closure that does not bear the signature of the unions and their works councils.

At Lufthansa, the unions are now going so far as to support the destruction of tens of thousands of jobs and massive wage and social cuts in the name of “rescuing the company.” They are working closely with the Grand Coalition and supporting the “National Industrial Strategy 2030.” Just like the government and the business associations, the trade unions are of the opinion that both the coronavirus pandemic and the US election must be seen as an opportunity to make German companies competitive and prepare them for global economic war.

The crisis in the aviation industry—as in all other sectors—cannot be addressed on a capitalist basis nor within a national framework. It requires the expropriation of the corporations and their transformation into democratically controlled, public institutions that serve the needs of society rather than profit.

US food banks and homeless shelters struggle to meet record demand ahead of Thanksgiving

Alex Findijs

With the Thanksgiving holiday less than two weeks away, food banks and homeless shelters across the United States are struggling to meet the growing demand caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

In Dallas, Texas, thousands of people lined up in their cars in what has been described as the largest mobile food distribution in history. The North Texas Food Banks handed out 7,000 turkeys and 600,000 pounds of food on Saturday. Organizers said it was enough to feed 25,000 people.

The state of Washington has seen the number of people who rely on food banks double from one million to 2.2 million this year. Linda Nageotte, the CEO of Food Lifeline, told the Seattle Times that she expects that “by the end of this year one in five Washingtonians could be facing hunger.”

People line up and check-in for a food giveaway at Harlem's Food Bank For New York City, a community kitchen and food pantry, Monday, Nov. 16, 2020, in New York. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews)

The pandemic has also placed an extra burden on food bank workers, who now need to prepare and box food packages together before they can be distributed. It is labor intensive work that is even more difficult during a health crisis. In an attempt to lighten the load on food banks, the Washington National Guard has sent 550 soldiers to 26 distribution sites to help.

In Rochester, New York, the food bank Foodlink is working to feed a line of 50-100 people on any given day. The organization Dimitri House, which operates a food pantry and homeless shelter in Rochester, has had similar issues and has also decided to prepare meals ahead of time and distribute them to families for pick up.

Laurie Prizel, the executive director for Dimitri House, told ABC13 WHAM that “we’re getting a large number of working poor individuals coming through as well, not just the typical somebody on a fixed income trying to survive. It’s people who are holding down two jobs or lost their jobs. We’re saving the average family at least $100 on a Thanksgiving meal, and it’s allowing at least the families to come together.”

Every year, thousands of volunteers in Albany, New York work to feed thousands of people in need. This year, however, the Equinox Thanksgiving Day Community Dinner has found a creative solution to the problem of social distancing. Instead of hosting a large event, the organization raised $100,000 to deliver meals directly to the homes of people in need. To accomplish this the organizers will work with restaurants to purchase and prepare food, enabling them to feed needy people and support local businesses in the process.

In Santa Rosa, California, the Redwood Empire Food Bank has done what it can to keep up with the significantly higher demand than usual. During a normal year, the food bank would hand out around 11 million meals. This year, however, Redwood has already produced 22 million meals.

The wealth disparity in Santa Rosa, 55 miles north of San Francisco, in California’s wine country, has been rising for years, resulting in a poverty rate of 11.5 percent. According to the Census Bureau, the top 5 percent of households make an average of $331,000 a year, with the bottom 20 percent making just $16,000. It is no wonder that food banks in this area would see such high demand for food assistance.

The San Francisco Bay Area has some of the highest levels of income inequality in the country. In San Francisco County the top 5 percent earn an average of more than $800,000 a year while the bottom 20 percent average just over $16,000. The San Francisco-Marin Food Bank is currently providing food aid to 55,000 households—nearly double its pre-pandemic total—and is planning to give away 1,000 turkeys to families in need on Thanksgiving.

Similarly, the Food Bank of the Hudson Valley has reported a 53 percent increase in demand in Westchester County, New York. Food shipments used to arrive twice a month, now they come once a week and are still barely keeping up with the need.

Westchester is often mistaken as a wealthy county with pockets of poverty, but it is actually the opposite. Islands of ultra-wealthy neighborhoods inflate the general cost of living, making otherwise typical working class wages barely enough to survive on.

The pandemic has made it especially difficult to operate homeless shelters and offer large communal Thanksgiving meals for the homeless. Restrictive capacity requirements to limit the number of people interacting indoors have forced shelters to limit the amount of beds they can fill.

In many cases, shelters and food aid organizations have moved their events outdoors to compensate for the restrictions on indoor events. In Charlottesville, Virginia, the organization Volunteers from Charlottesville is making “blessing bags” that will include a Thanksgiving meal and materials to help people survive the winter.

After almost canceling the event, the organizers decided to push through and host it outdoors at Washington Park, where they plan to hand out 100 bags the Sunday after Thanksgiving.

Albany’s Capital City Rescue Mission in New York has done its best to continue with indoor activities throughout the pandemic. Doing its best to maintain social distancing and mask wearing, the organization has continued sheltering and feeding those in need and expects to feed thousands this holiday season.

The need to provide meals to struggling families and the homeless grows every year, but the economic crisis triggered by the pandemic has placed a demand on charity organizations that can barely be kept up with. Such immense social distress, even as Wall Street soars to record highs and trillions in bailouts have been handed over to the banks and corporations, is a damning indictment of the capitalist system and the two parties who represent it, the Democrats and Republicans.

Without the intervention of the working class to shut down non-essential production and demand full pay for workers to stay home in order to suppress the pandemic, the need will only grow as the ruling class continues to pursue its murderous “herd immunity” policy, which has already killed more than 250,000 Americans and pushed millions into poverty.

Second major hurricane hits Central America in two weeks

Andrea Lobo

Hurricane Iota reached eastern Nicaragua on Monday night as a Category 5 storm with sustained winds of 160 mph. Less than two weeks after Hurricane Eta made landfall in the exact same location and caused widespread devastation across Central and North America, the US National Hurricane Center is forecasting “catastrophic impacts” from another record-setting storm.

From Panama to North Carolina, Eta left at least 178 dead and 120 missing. The UN has estimated that over 2.5 million people were affected, including 1.3 million in Honduras, 640,000 in Guatemala and 180,000 in southern Mexico.

Ahead of the arrival of Iota, the UN International Organization for Migration (IOM) reported that 358,000 people remain in shelters in Central America.

“What Hurricane Eta left is not just a humanitarian catastrophe that requires immediate attention, but it has seeded future migration crises that we must seek to prevent,” warned regional IOM director Michele Klein-Solomon.

According to hurricane specialist Philip Klotzbach at Colorado State University, Hurricane Iota marks the first time the Atlantic has seen two major hurricanes in November. Amid a long list of records, Iota is the first Category 5 hurricane of the 2020 hurricane season in the Atlantic and is stronger, quantified by its lower pressure, than Hurricane Katrina when it destroyed New Orleans in 2005.

San Pedro Sula flooded after Hurricane Eta, November 5 (Credit: Facebook @ManuelPortilloVisual)

For the first time on record, Iota is the third storm in a single season to intensify at or above 60 knots (nautical miles per hour) in 24 hours, according to Tomer Burg, a PhD meteorology student at the University of Oklahoma.

Iota is expected to continue westward and impact the largest city and capital of Honduras, Tegucigalpa, potentially with tropical storm intensity, before reaching El Salvador.

From the storms being intensified by higher sea surface temperatures due to global warming—on top of five years of crops damaged by droughts in the region—to the “herd immunity” policy of governments leaving the impoverished masses to fend for themselves against the COVID-19 pandemic, Central America is confronting a catastrophe created by the capitalist subordination of every concern to private profit.

Before the hurricanes saturated the soil and the pandemic tipped over an already collapsed health care system, the stage had been set by Wall Street’s imperialist plunder and the concentration of the remaining resources in the hands of a tiny oligarchy.

Two members of the Miskito community in Nicaragua’s Puerto Cabezas, which was directly impacted by Hurricane Eta and was about to be hit by Iota, spoke to the WSWS on condition of anonymity. They explained that the government of Daniel Ortega was able to evacuate those in the most vulnerable areas ahead of Eta and provided shelter and “some food” to most, mainly in schools.

However, having lost the roof of his home, one of them explained, “Aid for reconstruction is only being provided to [Sandinista] party members.”

Before the connection was lost due to worsening weather, the other man explained, “Ninety-five percent of our community was destroyed, and we still have no power. The generator at this place [shelter] was also damaged.”

The shelter of a family in Honduras, November 7 (Credit: Facebook @ManuelPortilloVisual)

Both are survivors of Hurricane Mitch, which killed about 7,000 people in Honduras and nearly 4,000 in Nicaragua, becoming the deadliest Atlantic hurricane on record. While never recovering, the primarily indigenous communities in the Northern Caribbean Coast Autonomous Region of Nicaragua have endured further shocks from the economic crisis and state repression following the wave of anti-austerity protests in 2018. This has been compounded by the coronavirus pandemic.

While the Nicaraguan authorities have not given a general estimate of the damage from Eta, the emergency agency Sinapred has warned that 80,000 families will be directly affected by Hurricane Iota and that evacuations have been underway since Friday in coastal communities.

Photographer Manuel Portillo, who is documenting the devastation caused by Eta in Honduras, described widespread “dismay, uncertainty and trauma” to the WSWS on Monday. “Again after 1998 with Hurricane Mitch, we see a major hurricane that clearly exposes the vulnerability of the country and our authorities.”

“The crux of the matter is the lack of an evacuation plan. People have not been provided with decent shelters. A place with drinking water, bathrooms, basic needs does not exist. People left on their own vehicles, some on foot, some on motorcycles, carrying whatever few belongings they could salvage.”

Portillo explained that most survived because of the help from fellow Hondurans. “Only thanks to the help from the people have most been rescued, have most of those affected received food. There have been hundreds and hundreds of donations,” he said.

“For years, thousands of families have emigrated due to the socio-political situation in the country, and this is leaving thousands of families literally on the street,” he added. Citing a report that up to 25,000 jobs will be lost in the Choloma municipality, he concludes: “Many transnational factories there were flooded, losing everything in the workplaces, and are planning on leaving. Where will those families work? ... This affects the poorest of the people, the most exposed families that find no other solution than leaving the country.”

Speaking to EFE, Honduran economist Alejandro Sikaffi estimated that Eta caused about $5 billion in damages, much more than Hurricane Mitch. Together with the economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, Sikaffi estimates $12.5 billion in economic losses or half of the country’s yearly production.

The record 31 named storms of the 2020 Atlantic Hurricane Season (Credit: Twitter @Ben McNoldy)

Despite its growing vulnerability, Honduras does not have any fund designated to deal with natural emergencies.

The 2009 military coup backed by the Obama administration to install a puppet regime was followed by a wave of privatizations, tax cuts and social austerity. Debt servicing to financial vultures has risen to nearly a third of the government budget. The defense budget tripled. Former vice president and President-elect Joe Biden was Obama’s main envoy to the region during this period.

Now, ahead of an historic wave of migration from Central America to the United States, the Biden transition team has named as its top immigration adviser Cecilia Muñoz, who defended the separation of migrant families and massive deportations under the Obama administration, which deported nearly 217,000 Hondurans.

Meanwhile, as Donald Trump seeks to nullify his electoral defeat in the presidential elections and establish a presidential dictatorship, he has placed bigoted loyalists in the top offices of the Pentagon. Appointed as senior adviser to the secretary of defense, retired colonel Douglas MacGregor called for martial law on the US-Mexico border and the shooting of border crossers last year, claiming Central American migrants will cause the “collapse” of the nation and are a “human foundation for a permanent dictatorship of the left.”

Most Central American migrants are currently being rounded up in Mexico, whose President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has refused to recognize the Biden victory, citing his “friendship” with Trump. López’s administration has already turned the new National Guard into a key partner of Trump’s anti-immigrant forces and created what members of his own party have called “concentration camps” for immigrants.

All of the fundamental issues facing workers—the COVID-19 pandemic, the effects of climate change, the efforts of the ruling elite and trade unions to exploit the pandemic crisis to restructure the global supply chains and deepen the exploitation of workers, pitting them against each other along national lines, and the threat of world war and dictatorship—are shared by all workers regardless of nationality, race, ethnicity or gender.

Beyond a natural disaster, the plight of those in the paths of Hurricanes Eta and Iota is the result of the explosion of the contradictions of global capitalism and its nation-state system, which has opened up a decade of social revolution.

Student strikers in the Philippines demand government action on COVID-19 and typhoon devastation

John Malvar

Students at a number of leading universities in the Philippines are organizing academic strikes to demand that the national government adequately respond to the calamity caused by multiple recent typhoons. University administrations have responded by suspending all classes for a week, but the demands of the students are growing and taking on a more directly political character.

The Philippines, already dealing with the devastating impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, has been battered by a series of massive typhoons. The most recent, Typhoon Vamco, left a trail of devastation. The province of Bicol was ravaged and the northern province of Cagayan remains submerged. The city of Marikina in Metro Manila was likewise subject to massive flooding, and its densely populated streets are now clogged with thick mud and debris.

Residents try to salvage belongings after their homes were toppled from Typhoon Goni in San Andres, Catanduanes province, eastern Philippines on Monday Nov. 2, 2020. (Credit: Philippine Red Cross via AP)

Sixty-nine people have been reported dead as a result of the typhoon, a number that will doubtless rise, 22 of them in Cagayan. The flooding of Cagayan was a result of the release of water from Magat Dam to preserve the structural integrity of the aging facility.

Cagayan occupies a critical agricultural plain. The flooding has destroyed the region’s crops, which will produce massive economic dislocation for the farmers in the province and a sharp rise in food prices throughout the country.

More than 15,000 students are currently housed in evacuation shelters in eight regions throughout the country in the wake of the typhoon. Classes are being conducted online in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Even without the devastation wrought by the typhoons, the country’s dilapidated infrastructure and social inequality have made participation in classes nearly impossible for many young people. The situation has now become completely untenable.

The administration of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte responded to the typhoon with callous disinterest. For days, the president held no press conferences. His only public statement was a stupid remark that he wished he could go outside to swim but that his security would not let him.

The phrase #NasaanAngPangulo (where is the president?) began trending on social media. A spokesperson at the Presidential palace issued an instruction to reporters to stop asking “where is the president?”

On Monday, Duterte finally held a press briefing in which he occupied his time largely with telling sexist jokes. There were too many women in the province of Bicol, he declared, and local officials did not adequately respond to the typhoon because they were spending all of their time having sex. He went on in a similar vein.

The calls for a student strike originated on November 14 at Ateneo de Manila University, an elite religious university and one of the most prestigious in the country. The students wrote a petition, which they circulated online to the student body, declaring that they would withhold submission of school requirements until the “national government heeds the people’s demands for proper calamity aid and pandemic response.”

They stated: “We believe that things cannot continue business as usual. We can no longer stomach the ever-rising number of deaths due to the state’s blatant incompetence. We cannot prioritize our schoolwork when our countrymen are suffering unnecessarily at the hands of those in power.”

The petition declared, “We cannot sit idly by and do our modules, ignoring the fact that the Philippine nation is in shambles,” and concluded, “The national government must act now or step down from their positions. No compromises.”

Within 24 hours, nearly 600 students had signed the petition. It articulated the sentiments of a significant section of university youth throughout the country and within a day there were similar strike petitions circulating on a number of campuses. Students at La Salle, another elite religious school, announced their intent to strike, demanding that “either the national government act or step down.”

Students and faculty at the University of the Philippines Diliman, the flagship state university campus, staged a rally and announced plans to strike as well. The number of petitions and strike announcements grows on a daily basis.

Looking to stem the growing movement, presidential spokesperson Harry Roque issued a cynical threat to the Ateneo students that they would fail their classes and not be able to graduate. “If you don’t meet the academic requirements, you will lose your future, you won’t graduate from Ateneo,” he warned.

A number of university administrations have responded to the strike statements by issuing a one week suspension of classes, hoping that by the time they resume, some of the immediate problems might have been resolved and the stoppages would disappear. Classes at Ateneo have been suspended and the strike delayed until November 23.

Rather than backing down, the students have escalated their demands. Recognizing that they had become the central focus of a growing national movement, the students at Ateneo redrafted their strike declaration yesterday evening to incorporate specific political demands. These include the implementation of “free COVID-19 mass testing and proper contact tracing,” the “guarantee of safety, support and funding of local health workers,” the “cessation of military-centric solutions to medical problems,” the “reallocation of Intelligence funds towards relief operations,” aid measures for those affected by the typhoon, and demands for a “no fail” policy from university for all striking students.

They concluded that they would spend their time on strike organizing relief operations and protesting against the Duterte administration.

The student government of Ateneo de Manila University will be voting on the strike petition this afternoon.

Mass student strikes have a long history in the Philippines, and have often been the first indication of the eruption of broader social conflict. The social ills denounced in the petitions circulated by the students of Ateneo and other campuses are fundamentally the product of capitalism, and not simply the incompetencies and corruption of any particular administration. If the student strikes grow, there will be moves on the part of sections of the elite and their political operatives, to channel the unrest behind the removal of Duterte and the installation of Vice President Leni Robredo. The mass student strikes of 2000 were similarly diverted behind the installation of Vice President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, who proved to be every bit as repressive and tyrannical as her predecessors.

Robredo, chair of the Liberal Party, represents the interests of Filipino capitalists who are closely tied to Washington and who oppose Duterte’s reorientation of Philippine foreign policy and economic ties toward Beijing. The Liberal Party has been a leading political vehicle of the Filipino elite, capitalists and plantation owners, since the end of World War II.

Removing Duterte and installing Robredo would serve the interests of a rival faction of Filipino capitalists and of Washington, but it would do nothing to alleviate the social inequality and poverty of the masses of Filipino workers and peasants.

The only way forward for the student strikes is to turn to the working class and to take up the political program of socialism, which requires independence from every section of the capitalist class and their political representatives.

New China-led trade bloc sets stage for further tensions with the US

Peter Symonds

Eight years after negotiations began, a regional trade and economic agreement—the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP)—was signed by 15 Asia-Pacific nations on Sunday, including China, Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand and all 10 members of the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN).

While relatively limited in scope, the deal is a further blow to US ambitions for economic domination of the region. After President Trump pulled the United States out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the world’s largest economy is not part of either of the two main economic blocs.

Chinese President Xi Jinping at a party function in 2018 (Crédit: Xinhua)

ASEAN, rather than China, initiated the push for the RCEP agreement, but the very size of the Chinese economy—the world’s second largest—ensures that it will be the predominant influence within the grouping. Whether Joseph Biden or Trump is finally installed as the next US president, both have signaled a further ramping up of Washington’s confrontation with Beijing, including in the economic sphere.

The agreement is being billed as the world’s largest trade deal, with the countries involved accounting for some 30 percent of global economic output. Even without the involvement of India, which pulled out of the talks last year, the region covered has a population of 2.2 billion. According to American-based professors, Peter Petri and Michael Plummer, cited by the Financial Times, RCEP will contribute $186 billion to the size of the global economy and 0.2 percent to the economies of its members.

The Asia-Pacific region is already covered by a multitude of bilateral and multilateral trade deals, which the RCEP arrangements will seek to rationalise. The agreement will broadly cover goods and services, investment, intellectual property and electronic commerce. It is regarded as a step towards creating a more coherent trading zone like the European Union or North America, but is not expected to result in large tariff reductions as many of the items are already covered by existing trade deals. It does, however, set standards throughout the region that at present vary considerably.

Currently, for instance, the rules of origin that determine where a product is considered to be made differ between the various trade agreements. An item produced in one country, containing components produced elsewhere, might be eligible under a free trade agreement with Japan, but not South Korea. Now if a product is eligible under RCEP, it will have the same status in all 15 members’ states.

RCEP is also the first time that the three major North East Asian economies—China, South Korea and Japan—are part of the same trading bloc. Previous attempts by the three governments to reach an accord had repeatedly failed. By Japanese government estimates, the new trade agreement will eliminate tariffs on 91 percent of goods between the three countries. Some 92 percent of Japanese items exported to South Korea will now be tariff-free, as compared to only 19 percent previously, as will 86 percent of items exported to China, up from 8 percent.

The limited character of the deal is underlined by the fact that it allows countries to keep tariffs on imports in sectors regarded as particularly important or sensitive. As a result, agriculture is for the most part not included in the agreement and the coverage of services is also restricted.

The underlying geo-political tensions remain.

Beijing no doubt regards the agreement as a welcome counter to the escalating trade war by the Trump administration, which has imposed tariffs on two thirds of Chinese consumer goods. China’s premier Li Keqiang described the agreement as “a victory of multilateralism and free trade.”

A comment in the hawkish state-owned Global Times was headlined “RCEP will end US hegemony in West Pacific.” The new agreement, it declared, “sends out the message that Asian countries do not want to choose sides between the US and China” and “represents the failure of the Trump administration’s attempted encirclement of China in the western Pacific.”

The presence of formal US military allies—Australia, Japan and South Korea—in the economic grouping underscores the fact that all three are heavily dependent on trade with China, and have attempted a precarious balancing act between Beijing and Washington.

The Australian government, which has backed Trump’s confrontational stance and increasingly whipped up anti-Chinese sentiment to justify draconian anti-foreign interference legislation, has faced Chinese trade measures in response. It welcomed the RCEP agreement as a means of warming frosty relations with Beijing.

India withdrew from the negotiations last year citing concerns that its manufacturers would not be able to compete with Chinese goods. India already has a $60 billion a year trade deficit with China. While the door remains open for India to join the agreement, relations with China have deteriorated further amid border clashes this year.

The next US administration will not simply accept a growth of Chinese economic influence in Asia. Biden was vice-president under President Obama who launched the “pivot to Asia” aimed at undermining China economically and diplomatically and preparing for war. The TPP was pushed by Obama as a means of isolating Beijing by establishing an exclusive economic grouping that included major Asian economies such as Japan but excluded China.

In the course of the US election campaign, Biden and the Democrats attacked Trump for being too soft on China. Asked at a press conference yesterday about the signing of the RCEP agreement, Biden declared that he would not discuss US trade policy because he had not taken office and “there’s only one president at a time.”

Nevertheless, in a comment aimed against China, Biden declared: “We make up 25 percent… of the economy in the world… We need to be aligned with the other democracies, another 25 percent or more so that we can set the rules of the road instead of having China and others dictate outcomes because they are the only game in town.”

Biden has not indicated whether he would seek to rejoin the TPP, which was renamed the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership after Trump withdrew the US. It is clear, however, that a Biden administration will continue the aggressive stance towards China initiated under Obama and escalated under Trump.

US imperialism is engaged in a desperate effort to stem its historic decline and is prepared to use all methods—military, as well as diplomatic and economic— to shore up its position against any potential rival, chief among them being China. As in the 1930s, the sharpening trade war is leading to military conflict involving nuclear-armed powers.