On November 26, the royal commission of inquiry into the March 15, 2019 Christchurch terrorist attack delivered its final report to the New Zealand government. Fascist gunman Brenton Tarrant carried out mass shootings at two Christchurch mosques, killing 51 people, including children, and injuring 49 more. He was arrested while driving towards a third mosque. The horrific massacres were filmed and live-streamed online by Tarrant himself.
Al Noor Mosque, Christchurch
The deadline for the report to be completed has been repeatedly pushed back, which prevented any discussion of its contents prior to the October 17 election. The Labour Party-led government is expected to make the 792-page report public next week, although it has the power to delay publication and to suppress any parts of the document.
The commission’s web site says it investigated “what state agencies knew about” Tarrant prior to his attack and whether he could have been stopped. Its findings will inevitably be a whitewash, aimed at protecting the police and intelligence agencies, which turned a blind eye to the clear danger of fascist violence in both Australia and New Zealand, and ignored specific warnings about Tarrant.
The commission will also cover up the responsibility of successive Australian and New Zealand governments, along with the corporate media, for stoking Islamophobia to justify participation in the criminal US-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Ever since the attack, the political establishment and media have suppressed discussion about the political roots of the atrocity. New Zealand’s chief censor banned possession of Tarrant’s manifesto, which expressed admiration for US President Donald Trump and contained racist, anti-immigrant and anti-socialist statements which resemble those made by capitalist governments and parties throughout the world.
In New Zealand, the right-wing populist NZ First, which played a major role in the 2017–2020 Labour-led coalition government, has repeatedly denounced Muslims as potential terrorists and opposed immigrants from Asia, using language similar to Tarrant’s.
Following a request from Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand’s major media organisations agreed not to report on Tarrant’s statements about his fascist motivations during his trial. In the event, Tarrant pleaded guilty, meaning that he did not face trial and has never been questioned publicly.
Even if the government releases the royal commission’s report without redactions, the document cannot be checked against the evidence submitted to the inquiry, which is being kept secret. This includes more than 400 interview transcripts and more than 1,000 public submissions. Only a few submissions, including by Muslim community groups, have been publicly released.
The commissioners, Supreme Court Judge William Young and former diplomat Jacqui Caine, announced that, for reasons of “national security,” submissions by government ministers and senior public servants will be suppressed for 30 years.
This includes testimony given by the police, who granted Tarrant a firearms license despite the fact that he did not have appropriate referees. Police also dismissed a warning from a member of the public about racist and violent language overheard by members of the Bruce Rifle Club, where Tarrant trained for his deadly attack. Tarrant had also been reported to Australian police in 2016 for threatening to kill an anti-fascist protester; police dismissed the complaint.
The intelligence agencies, supposedly subjects of the inquiry, helped to write its report. The commissioners said they received a “substantial amount” of “Restricted, Confidential, Secret, and Top Secret” material. The commission “undertook a process, with the assistance of intelligence and security agencies, to ensure it could include relevant material in the report without damaging New Zealand’s national security interests.”
An interview conducted with Tarrant during the inquiry will be permanently kept secret. The commissioners say this decision was taken so as “not to provide a platform for the dissemination of the individual’s views.” The real aim, as with the censorship of Tarrant’s manifesto, is to prevent public discussion about his fascist views and to suppress information concerning his activities and connections in Australia, New Zealand and internationally.
Muslim community organisations have criticised the extraordinary secrecy. Foundation Against Islamophobia and Racism spokesperson Azad Khan told TVNZ: “We don’t know what information is being suppressed, to whose benefit it is being suppressed. We definitely know it is not going to be to the benefit of the Muslim community,” he said.
Khan said the commission’s statement that evidence had to be suppressed because it could be used as a how-to “manual” by other terrorists was “the lamest excuse I’ve heard.” He noted that anyone “intent on causing maximum carnage” could find “heaps of material online.”
The Islamic Women’s Council released its submission to the royal commission, which stated that police, the Security Intelligence Service (SIS) and other state agencies had ignored multiple warnings of escalating fascist violence and threats against Muslims.
The Council has criticised the royal commission’s secrecy and expressed concern that no one within the state apparatus will be held accountable for the failure to prevent the attack. Spokesperson Anjum Rahman told Radio NZ, “We weren’t able to be present when agencies were being questioned, nor able to see their evidence and respond to it.”
Nearly two years after the Christchurch terrorist attack, almost nothing has been made public about how it was prepared and who else knew about Tarrant’s activities. The media has continually presented him as a reclusive “self-radicalised” terrorist, despite his known contacts with fascist groups in Australia such as the Lads Society, which tried to recruit him.
In New Zealand, the far-right Action Zealandia (previously called the Dominion Movement) expounds the same white supremacist views as Tarrant. One of its founding members, a soldier in the army, was charged with espionage last month for allegedly releasing classified information to an unnamed organisation. The soldier’s name and other details have not been made public, including whether he had any contact with Tarrant, whose manifesto mentioned that there were large numbers of fascists in the armed forces internationally.
Ardern’s main response to the March 15 attack has been to strengthen the powers and resources of the state censor to suppress online content that authorities deem “extremist.” Ardern has been at the forefront of a global push for internet censorship. Her government has also poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the SIS, the Government Communications Security Bureau, and the police, to significantly boost their recruitment.
The target of these measures is not the extreme right. The state apparatus is being strengthened in preparation to confront a resurgence of working-class struggles against austerity, unemployment and poverty. Meanwhile, the far-right is being emboldened by the Labour government’s promotion of militarism and its draconian anti-immigrant policies, designed to scapegoat foreigners for the economic and social crisis triggered by the pandemic.
A Federal Court judge last week set a chilling and far-reaching precedent for the further overturning of basic democratic rights and academic freedom, especially to express political or other dissenting views.
The ruling backed the University of Sydney’s February 2019 dismissal of Dr. Tim Anderson, an economics department senior lecturer, primarily on the basis of allegations that his criticisms of US militarism and Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people were “offensive.”
Dr. Tim Anderson (Photo source: Facebook)
The court decision is another warning of the poisonous and repressive atmosphere being whipped up to silence opposition to the preparations for Australian involvement in potentially catastrophic US-led wars against China or other perceived threats to the global hegemony asserted by Washington since World War II.
Significantly, the University of Sydney hosts the US Studies Centre, which was established in 2006, with US and Australian government funding, for the express purpose of overcoming popular hostility to US militarism after the massive protests against the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
The court’s judgment also exposed the fraud of claims by the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) that its enterprise bargaining agreements (EBAs) with universities protect the essential principle of academic freedom.
Justice Thomas Thawley ruled that the university’s EBA with the union, which is similar to those at most universities, “does not recognise the existence of, or give rise to, a legally enforceable right to intellectual freedom.”
In particular, Thawley declared that EBA “academic freedom” clauses do not protect university workers from being sacked for making comments—even on their private social media accounts—that managements deem in breach of their employee codes of conduct. Instead, EBA commitments to academic freedom were “purely aspirational.”
University of Sydney Institute Building, where United States Studies Centre is located (Photo source: Wikipedia)
This thoroughly anti-democratic decision comes on the back of a similar result in another case taken to the courts by the NTEU. In July, the Full Federal Court upheld the dismissal of James Cook University academic Dr. Peter Ridd, for expressing his views, as a climate-change sceptic, that cut across the university’s reputation.
Anderson’s case demonstrates how far university managements, working in league with governments and the corporate media, can victimise academics, especially those who oppose the wars of US imperialism and its allies, including the Zionist regime in Israel.
Among the charges the University of Sydney made against Anderson was that he tweeted, on his own Twitter account, criticism of the university hosting an address by US Senator John McCain. Anderson described McCain, a backer of every US military intervention for the past three decades, including the brutal neo-colonial wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as “a key US war criminal.”
Other allegations included Anderson posting on his personal Facebook account a photograph of a group of friends eating lunch, one of whom wore an anti-Israel badge. Anderson was accused of “promoting racial hatred and/or racism” and charged with violating the university’s Code of Conduct even though he was on leave from the university at the time.
Anderson was further charged with posting to his Facebook and Twitter accounts a denunciation of a video news report by Channel 7 reporter Bryan Seymour that insinuated that Anderson supported racism and the North Korean regime. Anderson’s comment that “Colonial media promotes ignorance, apartheid and war” was declared “derogatory” toward Seymour.
Anderson was also cited for giving a lecture that allegedly featured an Israeli flag with the Nazi swastika superimposed on it, examined media coverage of Israel’s attack on Gaza in 2014, and encouraged students to seek independent evidence of claims of “moral equivalence” between Israel’s deadly aerial bombardments and primitive Palestinian rocket attacks.
This was judged to be “derogatory and/or offensive” and as “reasonably seen as racist towards or seeking to target and/or offend Israelis and/or Jewish people and/or Jewish victims of the Nazi regime.” Yet, critics of the Israeli government, including anti-Zionist Jews, have often compared its persecution of the Palestinian people to the actions of the fascist German regime.
Finally, Anderson was accused of breaching confidentiality orders barring him from even telling anyone that he was facing dismissal, and of failing to comply with “a lawful and reasonable direction” to delete his social media posts.
The judge agreed with the university management’s determination that Anderson’s posts and efforts to fight his dismissal amounted to “serious misconduct” under both the NTEU’s EBA and the university’s Code of Conduct, thus justifying his sacking.
Anderson’s dismissal followed a protracted campaign by senior figures in the federal Liberal-National Coalition government, the corporate media and university management, to demonise Anderson because of his denunciations of wars and military interventions by the US, Israel and other major powers.
In April 2018, Education Minister Simon Birmingham, who was in charge of university funding, demanded an investigation into Anderson for comments he made questioning US claims that the Syrian government was responsible for a sarin gas attack in the town of Khan Sheikhoun.
The Murdoch-owned Sydney Daily Telegraph hysterically denounced Anderson as a “sarin gasbag” and the Sydney Morning Herald later reported that the university was taking disciplinary action against Anderson—a media disclosure that violated its own confidentiality regime.
Justice Thawley found Anderson’s dismissal as justified by the university’s Code of Conduct, which imposes requirements such as “the exercise of the best professional and ethical judgment,” “integrity and objectivity,” being “fair and reasonable” and treating “members of the public with respect, impartiality, courtesy and sensitivity.” The university’s employees must also “uphold the outstanding reputation of the University in the community.”
These formulations are so vague and value-laden that they could provide a pretext for sacking academics or other university workers for condemning government policies, denouncing corporate greed or accusing the US and Australian governments of military aggression or war crimes. Employees could be dismissed for criticising university policies, such as hosting pro-military think tanks.
Virtually every university campus across the country now participates in government-funded programs to tie academic research to the development of new military technologies. Australian universities are being integrated into a vast US-led military build-up, aimed at preparing for war with China and other powers.
The NTEU’s response to the court ruling, as it was to Anderson’s sacking itself, and the massive job cuts ravaging universities, is to oppose any mobilisation of university workers and instead appeal to the employers for a deal.
In a union media statement, NTEU New South Wales division secretary Michael Thomson said: “We call on all Vice Chancellors to come to the table to talk about how we can formulate a legally enforceable right, to provide the appropriate protections for university staff and to avoid these circumstances occurring in the future.”
The Federal Court’s support for Anderson’s victimisation is part of a deeper attack on fundamental democratic rights. It widens the impact of a High Court 2019 ruling that essentially abolished freedom of speech for workers, whether in government or corporate employment. With no dissent, the judges endorsed the sacking of a federal public servant for criticising—even anonymously—the country’s brutal refugee detention regime.
A warning must be sounded. The ruling class and its agencies, including university managements, are seeking to suppress dissent amid mounting social inequality, war preparations and deepening political discontent.
Hence the federal police raids on journalists for publishing leaks exposing government and military crimes, the prosecution of the whistleblowers involved and the bipartisan backing for the persecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
With Canada in the grips of a “second wave” of the COVID-19 pandemic far larger than the first, Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government presented its fall 2020 fiscal update to parliament on Monday. The update was aimed at reassuring corporate Canada of two things—that the federal government is determined to keep the economy “open” so as to ensure their profit-making continues unimpeded and that it will provide them with tens of billions in state funds in 2021 and 2022 to boost the global “competitiveness” of Canadian capitalism.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, on screen, participates in a video linked media conference after an EU-Canada summit via video conference at the European Council building in Brussels, Thursday, Oct. 29, 2020. (Olivier Hoslet, Pool via AP)
On a day which saw over 6,100 new infections across Canada and 98 further deaths, not a single measure was introduced to curb the spread of the deadly virus. Even as government ministers and opposition politicians alike enthused over the news that mass distribution of vaccines is only a few months away, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland insisted that everything must be done to avoid lockdowns, regardless of the cost in human life.
Implicitly acknowledging that the ruling elite has fully embraced the homicidal policy of allowing the virus to spread unchecked through the population, Freeland told parliament, “We know how to keep most of our economy—from manufacturing, to mining, to jobs that can be done remotely—operating safely, even while the virus is still circulating in our communities. We have learned how to keep many of our children in school.”
There is nothing “safe” about how Canada’s economy is “operating.” While the country’s richest 20 billionaires have increased their obscene levels of wealth by more than $37 billion since the onset of the pandemic, infections and deaths among workers continue to grow at a rapid pace. Just last week, a report revealed that over 26,000 workers have filed workers’ compensation claims because they were infected by COVID-19 at work.
Freeland’s mantra, shared by the entire ruling class, of keeping the economy “operating safely” while the virus runs rampant has led to mass infections and death. In Quebec, more than half of all new infections are work-related, according to the province’s public health authority. In Ontario’s Peel Region, which is dominated by overwhelmingly working class cities like Brampton, the infection rate over the past seven days has reached a staggering 1,200 per 100,000 inhabitants. There have been 116 workplace outbreaks in Peel, which lies directly east and north-east of Metro Toronto, predominantly among low-paid workers in large warehouses and distribution centres.
Schools have also emerged as major vectors for the spread of the virus. Two weeks ago, the dangerous conditions created by the reopening of schools led to the death of a 67-year-old child and youth support worker at a Toronto-area school. Nevertheless, governments at all levels are insisting schools remain open so that parents are available to go to work to generate profits for big business.
As intensive care units across the country approach capacity, the Trudeau government has no intention of changing course. Spurning calls for extra funding for health care, Freeland announced no increases in federal health transfers to the provinces, which have been significantly cut in real terms since the Trudeau government came to power in 2015, and have been falling as a proportion of total state health expenditure for decades.
Instead, the Trudeau government, to use Freeland’s words, is focused on how to “bring our economy roaring back, once this pandemic is beaten.” The centrepiece of this agenda is a $70-100 billion stimulus program that the government claims will establish a “greener, more inclusive, more innovative and competitive economy.”
What Trudeau and Freeland are planning is to provide massive subsidies to the corporate oligarchy, while relying on their close ties with the trade union bureaucracy to restructure class relations to the detriment of working people. A foretaste of what they intend has been provided by the recent negotiations between Unifor, the country’s largest industrial union, and the Detroit Three automakers. After months of backroom talks involving the automakers, Unifor, government representatives, and other corporate interests, the federal Liberal and Ontario Conservative governments agreed to hand Ford and Fiat-Chrysler close to $1 billion in subsidies to convert some of their facilities to electric vehicle production. To consolidate the companies’ “business case for the conversion,” i.e. ensure that it will result in bumper profits and lavish shareholder payouts, Unifor agreed to the gutting of work rules and to allow the automakers’ to flood their plants with low-paid two-tier and temporary workers.
Similar plans for other sectors of the economy are undoubtedly already being negotiated behind the scenes, following on from the close tri-partite collaboration the Trudeau government established with business lobby groups and the trade union bureaucracy at the beginning of the pandemic.
The unions supported the Trudeau government’s $650 billion bailout of the banks, big business and the financial oligarchy and its makeshift ration-style assistance for those unable to work during the pandemic. Then in early April, they began conspiring with Ottawa and the corporate elite on forcing workers back on the job amid the raging pandemic. In May, Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) President Hassan Yussuff and Canadian Chamber of Commerce head Perrin Beatty issued a joint call for the creation of a national economic task force to discuss how to confront “transformational changes,” including high levels of public debt and a rollback of economic globalization, and “avoid stakeholders going off in different directions,” i.e. stop the emergence of working class opposition.
Since then, the unions have collaborated with business and governments of all political stripes to reopen the economy and schools, and suppress all working class opposition. This criminal back-to-work drive has also been backed by their unions’ New Democratic Party allies. The NDP has repeatedly propped up the Liberal minority government in parliament, including by voting for its September throne speech. For its part, British Columbia’s NDP government has presided over one of the most comprehensive reopening campaigns, creating conditions for a dramatic resurgence of the pandemic. In the six weeks since Oct. 20, BC’s seven-day rolling average of daily new cases has risen from 160 to 750, hospitalizations have risen five-fold, and deaths almost doubled.
A critical element in the Trudeau government’s plan to “revive” the economy, and one that enjoys the full support of business organizations and the union bureaucracy, is the provision of “affordable childcare” across the country. This has absolutely nothing to do with ensuring the social and pedagogical wellbeing of young children and their families, which would require the investment of tens of billions of dollars in public education and social services to make up for decades of austerity and the devastating impact of the pandemic.
“Affordable childcare” is a euphemism for the creation of low-cost holding pens for the children of working class parents staffed by precariously employed workers earning poverty wages. Its chief purpose, openly admitted by Freeland and business organizations, is to force working parents to return to their low-paid jobs as quickly as possible.
“Canada will not be truly competitive,” declared Freeland Monday, “until all Canadian women have access to the affordable child care we need to support our participation in our country’s workforce.” The Business Council of Canada responded with enthusiasm to her announcement, noting that it has been advocating just such a policy “for many months.”
The Liberals and their trade union allies are attempting to dress up their anti-worker agenda with propaganda about more “inclusiveness” and “numerous commitments towards workers.” A typical example of “inclusion” was the creation of a $93 million Black Entrepreneurship Program to provide “equitable access” to government procurement programs for “black business owners,” a measure that will no doubt meet with approval among the identity politics-obsessed sections of the privileged middle class.
The CLC—whose website is emblazoned with the heading “In Canada, we’ve weathered the pandemic by sticking together and supporting each other”—waxed lyrical about how the Liberals’ fiscal update gave workers “assurances that their government will help them make ends meet and safeguard their health and wellbeing.”
To the extent that there was any criticism within the political establishment of the Liberals’ pro-corporate agenda, it came from the right. The Conservatives and the Business Council of Canada complained that too much government spending is being planned, and said that a “fiscal anchor” is required to impose spending cuts over the long-term. Underscoring that the disagreement revolves purely around the timing of austerity measures, the Liberals stressed in response that as soon as employment levels rebound, Canada will return to “fiscal responsibility.”
Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer in a joint press conference on Wednesday released a statement signaling their support for a bipartisan $908 billion “emergency relief framework” proposal that was first revealed by Republican and Democratic members of the Problem Solvers Caucus on Monday. The caucus includes Democratic senators Joe Manchin (West Virginia), Mark Warner (Virginia), and Jeanne Shaheen (New Hampshire), and Republican senators Susan Collins (Maine), Bill Cassidy (Louisiana), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Angus King (Maine), and Mitt Romney (Utah).
The proposed four-month “emergency relief package” is another gift to big business and Wall Street and is less than half of the $2.2 trillion package the Democrats had passed before the November election and roughly $800 million less than the $1.7 trillion deal previously offered by the White House. Most important for the ruling class is the bill’s “temporary” liability shield for businesses and other organizations against COVID-19–related lawsuits brought against them by workers or customers who fell ill due to inadequate safety measures.
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, left, and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin arrive to testify before a House Financial Services Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, Dec. 2, 2020. (Jim Lo Scalzo/Pool via AP)
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell however has already poured cold water on the proposal, instead sticking to the $550 billion package he has been pushing for and that has already been agreed upon by President Donald Trump.
“In the spirit of compromise we believe the bipartisan framework introduced by Senators yesterday should be used as the basis for immediate bipartisan, bicameral negotiations,” Schumer and Pelosi said in their joint statement Wednesday, signaling their support for the bill.
The announcement of the proposal came Tuesday during testimony by Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin before the Senate Banking Committee. Both Powell and Mnuchin expressed support for the proposal, with Powell stating that it “sounds like you’re hitting a lot of the areas that could definitely benefit from the help.” Mnuchin stated he looked “...forward to reviewing with you the overall package. I do think that more fiscal response is needed.”
Five months after both political parties allowed enhanced unemployment benefits and housing protections within the misnamed $2.2 trillion CARES Act to expire, leading to food lines, evictions, and death, and less than four weeks until some 12 million lose federal pandemic benefits, the latest murmurs of a possible agreement that leaves out much-needed aid for millions of workers, while protecting businesses from COVID-19–related lawsuits, epitomizes the bipartisan disdain the ruling class has for the lives and safety of workers and their families.
As with the CARES Act in March, the preliminary details reveal a windfall for the financial oligarchy while a pittance is made available for the majority of the population. The framework does not include another round of $1,200 stimulus checks and reduces the enhanced $600 unemployment benefit, which expired at the end of July, to a miserly $300 week.
Left unmentioned in the proposal is the fate of two key emergency economic relief programs—the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program, which provides benefits to so-called “gig” workers and the self-employed, and the Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC) program, which provides benefits to those who have already exhausted their state benefits. Combined, the two programs account for nearly 13 million of the over 20 million people currently receiving some unemployment compensation, and both expire on December 26, the day after Christmas.
The legislation also does not include any renter or mortgage protections, leaving some 30 million people in the US facing eviction in the next two months. The eviction of millions of people and their families with the virus spreading out of control will lead to hundreds of thousands of infections and tens of thousands of additional deaths, with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Robert Redfield already predicting that the US COVID-19 death toll could reach 450,000 by February. Redfield warned that this winter could be “the most difficult time in the public health history of this nation”
Hailing the $908 billion figure as a “good middle ground” that “hits the major elements,” Democratic Illinois Senator Dick Durbin lent his support to the bill while offering mild criticism of the immunity from liability protections included in the bill, before adding that he didn’t want the liability issue to hold up the bill: “I want to make sure that we pass this COVID-19 bill, as the group has brought together, or something like it, for $908 billion, we shouldn’t be delayed or diverted from this effort over a debate for immunity for liability. It’s an important issue but 38 states have already enacted laws related to COVID-19 liability, the others can certainly do it if they wish.”
Of the proposed $908 billion, the bulk of the money in the proposal, $288 billion, is earmarked to the Small Business Administration, primarily to refill the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP).
The PPP was created as part of the CARES Act and was sold as a method for paying businesses through forgivable loans in order to keep workers employed through the pandemic. Instead, it has served primarily as a slush fund for big business and a money-printing service for the large banks that service the loans, with previous disclosures revealing millions handed out to major sports teams, multimillionaires and religious institutions, while millions of workers were still laid off. For small businesses that attempted to obtain a loan, the shifting guidelines and paperwork proved a hurdle too high for many, unlike major corporations with dedicated teams of lawyers and accountants who were able to navigate the government bureaucracy.
On Tuesday, the Washington Post revealed through a Freedom of Information Act request and lawsuit against the Treasury Department, that of the more than 5 million loans that have been processed so far under the PPP, more than half of the $522 billion allocated went to just 5 percent of the recipients. The top 1 percent of loans accounted for more than a quarter of all the loan value, approximately 28 percent.
The data showed that roughly 600 large companies received the maximum loan amount allowed under the program, $10 million. Some of the companies that received $10 million loans were the parent companies of major restaurant chains such as Uno Pizzeria & Grill, Boston Market and Legal Sea Foods.
Following the nearly $300 billion earmarked for the PPP, the next largest item in the framework is the estimated $180 billion for additional unemployment insurance. Under the current proposal, which is unsettled, the unemployment eligibility window would be increased by 13 weeks, allowing workers to claim through March 31, although it is unclear if they would be able to backdate claims.
The third highest figure—an estimated $160 billion—is reserved for state, local and tribal governments, which have seen their tax revenues evaporate due to pandemic-induced lockdowns and restrictions. The funding is more than $270 billion less than the $436 billion Pelosi had previously demanded in the $2.2 trillion package.
Another notable figure in the bill is the $45 billion set aside for transportation. The pandemic has decimated public transit, leaving several major cities to consider, or already implement, drastic cuts, including the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which is threatening to lay off 9,300 workers.
The Chicago Transit Authority is also facing a $375 million budget shortfall in 2021, while Denver’s Regional Transportation District passed a budget in mid-November that included $140 million in spending cuts and the elimination of 400 jobs through layoffs and attrition, along with wage reductions and furloughs.
However, according to Senator Warner’s office, of the $45 billion earmarked for transportation, only $15 billion is for mass transit, with $1 billion for Amtrak and $8 billion for the bus industry, leaving $21 billion for the airlines, which already received $25 billion through the CARES Act and still went ahead with furloughing more than 40,000 aviation industry workers.
A full year has passed since the SARS-CoV-2 virus first emerged in China’s Hubei province—sometime between mid-October and mid-November of 2019, according to a recent collaborative study from the University of California San Diego and the University of Arizona posted to a preprint server this week.
While the public health response to the spread of the coronavirus has shown the complete incapacity of the capitalist system to safeguard the lives and health of the people, the effort to develop a vaccine—where the drive for profit was focused—has borne fruit relatively quickly.
In part this is due to the unprecedented speed and energy that characterized the initial work of scientists to discover the genetic code of the novel virus, the necessary precondition for developing a vaccine using a biochemical process involving messenger RNA (mRNA).
By the end of December, Wuhan’s health systems had begun to identify a series of concerning pneumonia cases of an unknown cause whose clinical picture resembled viral pneumonia. On December 26, 2019, an elderly couple with high fevers and cough was admitted to a local Wuhan hospital. A chest CT scan demonstrated findings completely different from other viral types of pneumonia. Their asymptomatic son had similar findings on his chest CT. The common viral pathogens, such as influenza and syncytial virus, were ruled out on tests.
With clinical and radiological information on other recently admitted patients, Dr. Zhang Jixian, director of the department of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine at Hubei Hospital of Integrated Traditional Chinese and Western Medicine, suspected they were confronting an as of yet unidentified pathogen with epidemic potential. Because of its connection with many that were infected, the seafood market was shuttered for cleaning and disinfection on January 1.
Outbreak in Wuhan China (Source: Kin Cheung/Reuters)
On January 3, Professor Zhang Yongzhen of Fudan University at the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Centre received test tubes of swabs taken from some of the patients admitted in Wuhan. In less than 48 hours, he had mapped the first complete genome of the virus, now better known as SARS-CoV-2. Over the next several days, they had confirmed that the recent respiratory illnesses were caused by a novel coronavirus, sending shock waves within the small niche in the scientific community and public health departments.
Over the potential for a public health crisis from a SARS-like novel coronavirus, on January 11, Professor Yongzhen instructed his associate, Professor Edward Holmes of University of Sydney, to upload the sequence to the website Virological.org which allowed the outside world access to the complete genetic code. Interestingly, in response to his critics about a cover-up, as reported in Time, he explained that they had uploaded the genome sequence to the US National Center for Biotechnology Information on January 5 after mapping the coronavirus.
Patient being treated for COVID-19 (Source: WSWS)
The race to develop a vaccine took on an immediate urgency over the next few weeks as news of Wuhan’s outbreak began to spread. The earliest report was provided by Dr. Anthony Fauci who had told CNN on January 20 that the National Institute of Health (NIH) was in the process of taking the first steps towards the development of a vaccine in collaboration with then relatively unknown biotech company named Moderna. Soon many large biotechnology companies and pharmaceuticals worldwide had turned their attention to making a vaccine against the coronavirus. There are, as of this writing, 13 vaccines in phase three, 17 in phase two, and 40 in phase one human trials. Numerous others remain in the preclinical phases.
The centuries-long history of human experiences with pandemics has frequently been catastrophic. Out of the study of many tragedies and the comprehension of the natural world, which included understanding the microscopic nature of these pathogens and the immune system’s response, has come the discovery of many lifesaving vaccines.
Still, processes that require the injection of weakened or inactivated viruses, as with smallpox, tend to be laborious, taking several years of investigation and research to realize a potential candidate. In the face of a pandemic, however, time-sensitive therapeutics becomes essential, and non-pharmaceutical interventions such as public health measures remain the mainstay in responding to these health crises.
But more recently, with advances in genetics and bioengineering, the approach to vaccine development has also undergone a paradigmatic shift that can possibly provide such treatments in real time. As described in the New York Times, “Moderna and other companies created platforms that work like the operating system on a computer, allowing researchers to quickly insert a new genetic code from a virus—like adding an app—and create a new vaccine.” This means that by providing a person with the appropriately constructed genetic material, their cells can take these “synthetic genetic codes” and translate them into harmless mimic viral proteins that will stimulate their immune system and generate antibodies to protect them against the real pathogen.
After zeroing in on the coronavirus’s spike protein for their vaccine target, Moderna had only to input the necessary genetic sequences into their computer programs. Within two days, it had designed a messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccine candidate. In 25 days, the prototype of the vaccine had been manufactured, and in just 42 days, on February 24, it had been shipped for testing.
Moderna company (Source: Moderna)
Up to then, Moderna had never produced an approved drug or vaccine. Its finances relied solely on the potential for its genetic platform to create these therapeutics. Previous efforts to test new vaccines when the SARS, MERS, and Zika outbreaks occurred were thwarted as the threat receded too quickly for large human clinical trials to be conducted. The scale and duration of the COVID-19 pandemic, raging across densely populated regions of the world, were critical in proving that these concepts could be applied in practical terms. But, given its limited resources, Moderna’s successes over the intervening months were highly dependent on the critical collaboration with NIH investigators and funding support from the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations.
By comparison, the behemoth drug manufacturer, Pfizer, was a late starter in the vaccine race. On March 1, they were approached by their collaborative partners Dr. Ugur Sahin and Dr. Özlem Türeci. This couple owns the German biotechnology company BioNTech, which manufactures immunotherapies and messenger RNA therapeutics as means of individualized cancer treatments. However, Dr. Sahin also recognized its immense potential in vaccinating against epidemic potential pathogens. At an infectious disease conference in Berlin two years prior, he had even predicted that messenger RNA technology could rapidly develop new vaccines in the event a global pandemic was to strike.
Both Moderna and Pfizer have banked on a genetic technology that uses synthetic messenger RNA which turns a person’s cell into a vaccine manufacturing machine producing mimic proteins. The immune system can recognize and form antibodies to protect itself against future exposure to the actual pathogen.
Briefly, one of the DNA’s primary functions, which resides in a cell’s nucleus, is to produce proteins. The appropriate portion of the DNA is unwound, and a single strand of messenger RNA is transcribed. It undergoes further processing into its mature form and is then transported to the cell’s cytoplasm, waiting to be read. Ribosomes, proteins that can decode the “message” contained in the mRNA, utilizing amino acids carried by transfer RNA (tRNA), then set to build the protein according to specification, after which they are presented to the immune system. Because the spike proteins are only one small component of the entire virus, these mimics are harmless.
mRNA Vaccine (Source: Wikipedia)
Previous vaccines have used attenuated or devitalized viruses or specific peptides and proteins derived from these pathogens to create vaccines. In contrast, mRNA vaccines use a person’s cells as manufacturing sites. This has practical importance in reducing the scale and time for developing the vaccines.
The potential for mRNA therapeutics goes beyond that of vaccines. For decades, scientists have pondered the potential role of synthetic mRNA technology in treating various diseases such as mending damaged hearts, defective enzymes that cause rare diseases, or cancers. It was back in 1990, for the first time, researchers at the University of Wisconsin working with mice injected RNA and DNA “expression vectors” into skeletal muscle that resulted in new protein expressions.
A Hungarian biochemist named Katalin Karikó decided to push the envelope in this field. Synthetic RNA is readily vulnerable to a human’s natural defenses and can elicit a massive immune response making the therapy a health hazard. After a decade’s work with multiple trials and errors, she and her collaborator at Penn, Drew Weissman, an immunologist, recognized that by modifying the mRNA’s building blocks, they could deliver it into cells without the immune system becoming alerted to these intruders and attacking them.
Though their studies went unrecognized back in 2005 by the scientific community at large, they were of immense significance that would provide a practical solution to discovering novel therapies for diseases that hitherto had no treatments. However, they did catch the attention of a select few scientists who would go on to found the biotechnology firms Moderna and BioNTech.
In a similar vein, the husband-and-wife team of Dr. Sahin and Dr. Türeci were enticed by the concept of personalized immunotherapies that could teach a person’s immune cell to fight cancer cells. With financial support from German sources, BioNTech was formed with its headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts, just a few miles from Moderna.
Though both companies are using an mRNA vaccine, the vaccines’ chemical structures, how they are produced, and how they are delivered into cells are different. Both also require stringent temperature requirements due to their sensitivity to degradation. Pfizer’s needs to be stored at minus 94 degrees Fahrenheit, which makes the logistics of transporting the vaccine, storing, and administering a daunting task.
This gives an edge to Moderna’s vaccine, which requires long-term storage at only a modest minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit and can remain stable for a month at 36 degrees to 46 degrees Fahrenheit. The Moderna vaccine’s stability is attributed to its special membrane made of lipid nanoparticles (tiny oily spheres) surrounding and protecting the mRNA from degradation at higher temperatures. Both vaccines require two injections to complete the series, 21 days apart for Pfizer and 28 days for Moderna.
A week after Pfizer emerged as the first vaccine candidate to show a dramatic 90 percent efficacy against the virus in randomized phase three clinical trials, on November 16, Moderna’s much-awaited announcement on results from their interim analysis corroborated the mRNA technology as a powerful tool. Moderna initially bested Pfizer with a show of 94.5 percent until revised and updated results show the two vaccines virtually equal in efficacy.
Moderna disclosed that their data included people in high-risk groups, such as those over 65. There were 90 cases of COVID-19 in the unvaccinated group, with eleven severe cases in their interim analysis. In the five infections among those that received the vaccine, no severe symptoms developed. Pfizer’s recent updated analysis revealed that out of 170 COVID-19 infections, only eight had taken the vaccine. Additionally, in a review of 8,000 subjects, no serious safety issues were encountered; 3.8 percent had reported severe fatigue and 2 percent headaches. The transient adverse effects for Moderna’s vaccine include the report of 9.7 percent fatigue, 8.9 percent muscle pain, 5.2 percent joint pain, and 4.5 percent headaches.
Arnold Monto, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, explained, “this is higher reactogenicity than is ordinarily seen with most flu vaccines, even the high dose ones.” Vaccine experts are concerned this will have considerable impact on how these therapeutics are received by the population.
On November 20, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla announced that their vaccine had sufficient safety data and had filed an emergency use authorization (EUA) with the US Food and Drug Administration. Moderna filed for its own EUA ten days later.
From development to mass vaccination
The FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee will meet from December 8 through 10 to review the Pfizer application, and then a week later for Moderna. Decisions may be forthcoming immediately. By all accounts, both vaccines will most likely be granted approval as they both use an mRNA vector that appears to have similar safety and efficacy results.
Then follows a review by the CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices that will issue guidance on who can receive the vaccine and which groups will be prioritized. The consensus among public health experts is to allocate an initial lot of vaccines to immunize health care workers. Other groups to be given priority include the elderly and essential workers, such as police officers, who are classified as first responders.
However, the task of manufacturing, delivering, and immunizing the entire planet with the same speed with which these lifesaving treatments have been developed is, literally, unprecedented. Significantly, the Information Technology infrastructure is lacking to track who has received which vaccine and how side effects and reactions are reported. Science has been able to penetrate into nature’s most compelling secrets, but the capitalist mode of production—along with the outmoded system of nation-states—constitute the main barriers to saving millions of lives.
The executives and shareholders of the Moderna, Pfizer, BioNTech and other vaccine manufacturers will undoubtedly grow rich—and from the standpoint of the profit system, that is the only concern—but a return to normal conditions of life for the great mass of humanity remains in considerable doubt.
Operation Warp Speed (Source: Wikipedia)
On May 15, the Trump administration launched Operation Warp Speed as a public-private partnership to “facilitate and accelerate the development, manufacturing, and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics.” In effect, drug companies are using public funds to ensure the profitability of their development and manufacturing, the US military has been assigned the task of wholesale distribution, from the manufacturers to the various states, and state governments will oversee the retail distribution and mass vaccination, including deciding who gets the vaccine and when. To call this arrangement a Rube Goldberg device would be to give it too much credit. It is a disaster waiting to happen.
And then there is the critical question of global distribution, particularly in poor nations which lack the health care infrastructure even to distribute childhood vaccinations that are commonplace in the advanced countries, let alone deliver two shots, weeks apart, to every single person in the country.
In a press release published on September 17, OXFAM International reported that wealthy nations representing just 13 percent of the world’s population had monopolized more than 50 percent of all future doses of COVID-19 vaccines. They warned that even if the five leading vaccines (there are presently 12 in phase three) prove successful, 61 percent of the world’s population will not see a vaccine until 2022. Currently, the WHO COVID vaccine global initiative is struggling to raise the necessary funds to distribute these vaccines to the worldwide population equitably.
Coronavirus deaths in the United States are expected to surpass 3,000 per day this month, with the spread of the virus completely out of control and cases rising rapidly in the aftermath of the Thanksgiving holiday. Wednesday marked a new high with 2,831 recorded deaths, raising the seven-day average to 1,658, while hospitalizations nationwide surged past 100,000.
The case fatality for the US, according to John Hopkins University of Medicine, stands at two percent, though this is likely to rise as hospitals are overwhelmed with patients. The cumulative death toll across the country stands at nearly 280,000 as of this writing, with over 14.3 million total cases.
Nurse Debbi Hinderliter (left) collects a sample from a woman at a coronavirus testing site near the nation’s busiest pedestrian border crossing, in San Diego. [Credit: AP Photo/Gregory Bull]
Speaking before the US Chamber of Commerce Foundation on Wednesday, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield ominously warned, “We really have a pandemic that is throughout the nation. … right now it is important that we recommit ourselves to this mitigation as we now begin to turn the corner with the vaccine. But the reality is December and January and February are going to be rough times. I actually believe they’re going to be the most difficult time in the public health history of this nation, largely because of the stress it’s going to put on our health care system.”
Pointing to the alarming number of deaths daily in the US, a Bloomberg opinion piece aptly titled “Covid-19 Will Soon Be Like Another 9/11 Every Day” makes the obvious connection between the death rate and the case number. “So of the 140,000 getting sick every day, eventually about 2,800 will die,” the article notes. “That’s nearly as many as on 9/11, for each day that new infections remain at about 140,000—and we’ve already been at that level for 21 days.”
The article also points to those who will experience long term and, in many cases, debilitating symptoms, stating that half or more of hospitalized cases will become long-haulers as evidenced in multiple studies, accounting for 3,300 to 15,000 people per day.
A study published in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report explains, “In a multistate telephone survey of symptomatic adults who had a positive outpatient test result for SARS-CoV-2 infection, 35% had not returned to their usual state of health when interviewed 2–3 weeks after testing. Among persons aged 18–34 years with no chronic medical conditions, one in five had not returned to their usual state of health.”
The explosion in cases is a consequence of the criminal “herd immunity” policy pursued by both Democrats and Republicans which has entailed the reopening of schools and nonessential production in order to maintain profit making and ensure a continued rise in the stock market. Both President-elect Joe Biden’s administration and President Donald Trump have repeatedly stated their commitment to oppose lockdowns to control the pandemic no matter the cost in lives.
Contradicting the severity of the virus and basic scientific facts, the CDC has decreased the recommended quarantine time to 10 days for those with symptoms, and seven days without symptoms and a negative test in order to get workers back on the job faster.
In contradiction to the politically motivated revision by the CDC, the WHO in a paper on the criteria for releasing COVID-19 patients from isolation the states that the minimum time for isolation is 13 days.
The change in the CDC’s recommendations will lead to a significant increase in cases and deaths, as employers can force infected workers back on the job and still claim to be following federal guidelines, necessarily leading to an increase in cases as asymptomatic individuals continue to spread the virus at workplaces.
In an exposure of the crass profiteering of US corporations, a recent Reuters investigation revealed that nearly half of the 140,000 ventilators in the US Strategic National Stockpile “don’t meet what medical specialists say are the minimum requirements for ventilators needed to treat Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome, the main cause of death among COVID-19 patients, according to a Reuters review of publicly available device specifications and interviews with doctors and industry executives.”
$450 million was handed over to giant corporations like GE, Ford Motor Company and others by the Department of Health and Human Services for the roughly 66,000 sub-par ventilators. These ventilators are acknowledged by health professionals, and even some of the manufacturers themselves, such as Hill-Rom Holdings Inc and ResMed Inc, to be inadequate as per WHO standards set in March for treating COVID-19.
Richard Branson, a professor at University of Cincinnati, speaking on the pNeuton ventilator that GE and Ford manufactured, told Reuters that the sub-par ventilators are “a risk because if they get something they are not expecting and it isn’t capable of meeting the patients’ needs, then that puts the patients at risk” simply stating that without the right equipment “the patient won’t survive.”
According to the investigation, of the half of ventilators considered adequate, only 10 percent are full intensive care unit type ventilators that doctors and ventilator specialists would normally use, while 40 percent are transport ventilators that are not normally used for longer periods for treating ARDS but are “considered sophisticated enough” for patients to recover.
The absolute hostility of the political establishment to any efforts to fight the spread of the virus necessitates action by the working class to stop nonessential production and close schools. This fight must necessarily be organized on a socialist basis, and be politically independent from and irreconcilably opposed to the twin parties of the US financial oligarchy, who are jointly responsible for the hundreds of thousands of deaths in the country from the pandemic. The trillions in bailouts, along with the profits raked in from the pandemic by giant corporations like Ford and General Electric must to be seized in order to pay workers to stay home until a vaccine is freely distributed and the pandemic is brought to an end.
The pestilence of COVID-19 has not only revealed the failures of capitalism but also exuberated over all institutions of capitalism. The culture of crisis and conflicts are organic to capitalism. Capitalist systems are antithetical to the idea of peace, prosperity and stability. The Coronavirus infused lockdown is a time to reflect on emanating crisis and conflicts across the world. Some capitalist predicaments are temporary, but most of them are annihilating for people and the planet. The capitalist crisis is producing meaninglessness of life and alienating environment, which treats people and planet as orderly objects to consolidate and expand the empire of profit. The profit driven economy produces compliance culture of politics that destroys the idea of democracy and individual freedom to uphold the interests of the market forces.
The assaults on democracy, secularism, multiculturalism, reason, science, peace and stability have become everyday affairs within capitalism. The clients of Davos priests and capitalist powers led by Brussels, Westminster and Washington are on overdrive to reverse the trend, but they have failed to provide basic health, education, employment and food as fundamental rights. The dignity of life and citizenship rights are in shatters under capitalism. Capitalism and all its institutions are trying to recover from the crisis by expanding its support for imperialist wars, neo-colonial modes of resource exploitation, authoritarian politics and reactionary religious forces in the society. These capitalist methods of survival put people and planet in danger. It diverts progressive nature of class conflicts with reactionary nationalist and religious forces. It obscures the future of humanity.
The world is facing major humanitarian crises today due to wars, global warming, pandemic and loss of sources of livelihoods for the survival of the masses. These crises owe its origin within capitalism as a result of over exploitation of nature and human beings. Scarcity, famine, natural disasters are natural outcomes of profit fetishized capitalist system, which reproduces crises and accelerates hunger, homelessness, poverty, inequalities and exploitation in world scale. Capitalism survives by destroying the creative abilities of individuals and regenerative abilities of nature. Therefore, capitalism cannot offer any form of alternatives for sustainable future of humanity.
As advanced capitalist countries in Europe and America suffer under capitalism and the pandemic of Coronavirus, the countries like; China, Cuba and Vietnam show their commitments and abilities to contain Covid-19 and ensure public health, security and safety of human lives. Socialist experiments with all its limitations show that people’s lives are more important than profit driven economic system. Therefore, it is time to revive alternative politics by expanding working class struggles by forming local, regional, national and international alliances with all democratic, liberal and progressive forces all over the world. The sustainability of working-class struggle within a progressive path depends on the quality and size of the communist parties to guide them. History of working-class struggles reveal that only communist parties can transform class consciousness into class organisations and class struggles.
The future of people and survival of the planet depends on our abilities to organise people and communities under the red flag to overthrow capitalism. Communism is the only alternative to celebrate democracy and individual freedom in real sense whereas capitalism promotes fictitious freedom and market democracy. It is only communists who can overcome narrow silos and develop class unity of intersectionality to fight different layers of exploitation and inequalities based on gender, race, caste, religion and sexualities. The class unity and struggles acknowledge individual differences and uniqueness. It is only communists who fight for a nuclear free world. Communists fight for a world free from war, exploitation and inequalities. There is no other party, group or ideology but communists who talks about humanism, peace, prosperity, people and planet without borders. The current crisis is an opportunity to campaign for a bigger communist party based on mass struggles to ensure an alternative to capitalism. Peace within a communist society or perish within capitalism are two available paths. The choice is clear before us. There is no future within capitalism.
The 20th century experienced the sparks of alternatives to capitalism with the rise of anti-colonial, anti-capitalist, anti-fascists and anti-war working class struggles for peace and democracy. Each of these struggles were organised and led by the working classes in Asia, Africa, Americas, Europe and Oceania. The 21st century is the time to demand and reclaim the ideological perspectives and historical legacies of working class struggles often led by the socialists and communists all over the world. The forward march of equality, liberty, fraternity and justice depends on our abilities to organise ourselves and fight against all forms of reactionary ideas and institutions established by capitalist system.
From the rice fields of Asia and Africa to the supermarket shop floors of America and Europe, it is only the working classes work and ensure all the pain within the bondages of capitalism. The working classes can also organise themselves for their own freedom from capitalism that exploits them. The working-class consciousness, courage, discipline, endurance, morality, and understandings are exceptional qualities in human history. Therefore, it is only the working classes, who can establish a just world free from exploitation and inequalities. A consistent, continuous and strong working-class struggle and a bigger communist party are twin necessities of our time. There is no other way but to fight locally, provincially and nationally to reclaim lost working-class glories of internationalism based on peace, solidarity and prosperity.
