Indian government and big business fear farmers’ protest could trigger eruption of working class opposition

Wasantha Rupasinghe

In the face of mass and escalating opposition from farmers, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his far-right Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government are doubling down on their drive to implement a raft of pro-corporate agricultural “reforms.”

Farmer leaders have vowed that as of today, the 22nd day of their Delhi Chalo (Let’s go to Delhi) protest, they will block the Chilla border between the Delhi National Capital Territory and Noida in Uttar Pradesh (UP). They have also announced they will hold rallies in major cities across the country, beginning in Kolkata today and Mumbai on December 22.

More than 300,000 farmers, their wives and children are currently camped on the outskirts of Delhi. Many have been there since November 27, when the BJP government deployed paramilitaries, tear gas and water cannon to prevent them from bringing their protest to India’s capital and largest city.

Police in Haryana, which borders Delhi on three sides, say the situation is becoming increasingly “unsustainable,” indicating preparations are underway for a possible further violent state assault.

Clashes erupted on the Delhi-Jaipur highway on Monday when police tried to stop some farmers from Haryana from making their way to the national capital on tractors. NDTV reported around 20 people were briefly detained by police before being released.

The agitation has been spearheaded by farmers from Punjab, Haryana, and western UP. But the longer it has continued, the more their ranks have been swelled by farmers from Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and even more far-flung states.

Under conditions in which COVID-19 continues to spread widely throughout India, the Modi government has intentionally created a hygiene crisis at the protest sites, by reducing the water supply for washrooms and toilets.

Big business, meanwhile, is becoming increasingly impatient for the protests to end. A number of important business organizations are complaining that the agitation has disrupted shipments of raw materials and finished goods, and forced production cuts in Haryana.

The determination among the farmers and their supporters to force the repeal of the three pro- agribusiness laws that the BJP government rammed through Parliament in September is strong. According to press reports, a leader of the All India Kisan Sangharsh Coordination Committee (AIKSCC), one of the principal farm groups leading the protests, was forced to resign this week after he advocated farmers accept a settlement under which the laws would remain, in exchange for a government commitment to maintain the minimum price support system.

Mirchilal Saroj, a 32-year-old Dalit farmer from Madhya Pradesh, told Firstpost.com, “The farmers’ protests are completely justified. The government,” he continued, “will have to take these laws back. The crop that we sow and reap with our blood, sweat and tears, we don’t get the right price for it even now. But at least earlier, there was the guarantee of a minimum price.”

Modi and his BJP government are determined to enforce the legislation so as to open up India’s farming sector to major domestic and international agribusiness interests.

However, the greatest concern and fear of the government and the Indian ruling class, at this point, is that if the BJP is perceived to have backed down before the farmers it will serve to intensify and broaden the already swelling working class opposition to the Modi government and its “pro investor” agenda.

On November 26, tens of millions of workers across India joined a one-day general strike to oppose the BJP government’s social incendiary big business policies and demand emergency support for the hundreds of millions the government has left to fend for themselves amid the COVID-19 pandemic and the severest ever contraction in the Indian economy. In the southern state of the Karnataka, recent days have seen an eruption of working class anger. This includes strikes by auto workers employed by Toyota’s Indian subsidiary and public sector bus drivers and conductors. Last Saturday, workers angered by months of unpaid wages and savage pay cuts of up to 45 percent rioted against Taiwan-based manufacturer Wistron.

Yesterday, more than 5,000 nurses and paramedic staff at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences’ Delhi campus, one of India’s premier medical institutes, launched an indefinite strike to protest the government’s failure to address “long pending” complaints over wages and working conditions. They returned to work Tuesday after the Delhi High Court ruled their action illegal.

Speaking last Saturday to the annual general meeting of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI), India’s premier big business association, Modi insisted that the farm laws will not be repealed. The ardent Hindu supremacist and would-be authoritarian despot said he leads a “strong government” with a “mandate” for the measures.

The reforms, Modi cynically claimed, are aimed at helping the farmers. “All this is directed,” he declared, at making “the farmer prosperous, as prosperous farmer(s) means (a) prosperous nation.”

This is a pack of lies. The same rhetoric about “prosperity” has been used by governments for the past thirty years, including those led by the opposition Congress Party, to justify the implementation of pro-investor policies that have turned India into one of the most unequal countries in the world. For farmers and the landless rural poor, this has resulted in mounting indebtedness, poverty, and joblessness.

The farm bills are just one element in what Modi has termed a “quantum jump” in further “pro-investor” reforms. These include plans to privatize most Public Sector Units, including much of India’s coal industry and railway network; the pro-corporate farm laws; and a “labour reform,” also passed in the Monsoon session of Parliament. The latter further expands precarious contract labour employment, enables large employers to dismiss workers and close plants at will, and makes most worker job action illegal.

This onslaught is hitting workers, farmers, and the rural poor amid an unprecedented social crisis triggered by the government’s disastrous handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. India has registered over 140,000 deaths from the virus, and hundreds of millions have lost their jobs or had their wages or, in the case of hawkers and artisans, their meagre earnings slashed.

The talks the government has held and continues to hold out to the farmer organisations are a charade. The BJP leadership and big business are adamant that capitalist restructuring must be accelerated.

Modi hopes to dissipate the protests by concocting a deal that can win over a portion of the farmer groups, whose leadership is primarily drawn from the better-off farmers. At the same time, the government continues to prepare for ruthless repression behind the scenes. Defence Minister Rajnath Singh has been conspicuously present at all meetings of the most senior BJP leaders on the farmers’ agitation.

With the aim of justifying future repression, government representatives continue to malign the protesting farmers, with claims that their agitation has been inspired by China and Pakistan, or has been infiltrated by Naxhalites (Maoists) and other “anti-national” elements.

A senior government source told the Indian Express December 15 that “back-channel talks” are ongoing with some of the farmers’ groups. “Some leaders are willing to understand the need for arriving at a middle path,” the source told the Express. Adding that others are sticking to a “maximalist position,” he said, “but a solution may be in the offing.”

After meeting with 10 right-wing farmers’ organizations that have indicated their support for the government’s laws in a memorandum, Agriculture Minister Narendra Singh Tomar stated Monday the government is ready for clause by clause discussions of the farm laws with “genuine” farmers’ organizations.

If the government retains the ability to maneuver in the face of an explosion of popular opposition, it is above all due to the actions of the organizations that claim to speak in the name of the working class—the pro-capitalist trade unions and the Stalinist parliamentary parties, the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM) and Communist Party of India (CPI).

The Stalinists are doing everything they can to demobilise the working class, while using the influence they have among a section of the farmers to urge them to limit their opposition to vain appeals to the BJP to change course, as exemplified by the declarations issued by the heads of the CPM and CPI last week that “politics” should be kept out of the movement. This goes alongside the CPM and CPI’s efforts to divert the mass opposition to Modi and the BJP behind the Congress Party, long the Indian ruling class’ preferred party of government, and various right-wing regional chauvinist and caste-ist parties like the Tamil Nadu-based DMK and the UP-based Samajwadi Party.

Above all the Stalinists are determined to prevent the working class from intervening in the social-political crisis as an independent political force, so as to provide leadership to the farmers and impoverished rural toilers and mobilize them in a political struggle against the Modi government and the capitalist profit system. The potential for such a development has been underscored by the rising tide of worker struggles.

On December 11, a joint platform of central trade unions, including the Congress Party-aligned Indian National Trade Union Congress and Stalinist-led All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC) and Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU), issued a statement reiterating their “rock-like solidarity” with the farmers’ struggle.

This is a fraud. The Congress and the Stalinists are collaborating to keep the workers away from the farmers’ protests. They instructed workers to remain on the job during the Bharat bandh, the all-India shutdown the farmers’ organisations called last week.

The isolation of the farmers will only embolden the most right-wing forces in demanding that their agitation be put down. In a December 12 editorial entitled “For farmers’ future: India’s big ticket dreams all hinge on reforms. Government must stay the course,” the Times of India sought to paint the protesters as an insignificant minority from the Punjab. Expressing the fear that ceding ground to the farmers would encourage worker struggles against the government’s pro-investor reforms, the editorial stated, “If the government backs down, then, it would signal that any reform effort in India can be sabotaged by some interest group’s opposition.”

Brexit Bluster Exposes the Waning of English Power

Patrick Cockburn

I met pleased and gloomy people in the first half of last year when I travelled around the UK writing about the potential impact of Brexit. But by far the happiest of those I interviewed were veteran Irish republicans in Belfast, mostly present or past members of Sinn Fein, who had devoted their lives to opposing British rule.

They grasped that Brexit had made the question of the Irish border a live political issue by turning it into an international frontier. This was no longer just a 310-mile-long dividing line between the UK and the Irish Republic but the border between the UK and the EU.

Irish nationalists had been trying to interest the rest of the world in the partition of Ireland since it happened in 1921 but had failed dismally. Now the British government was self-destructively doing their work for them, significantly eroding the status of Northern Ireland as part of the UK.

Unionist fears that they would be sold out have been amply fulfilled, an outcome confirmed this week by the EU-UK government deal on the Irish Sea border, which is complicated and confusing – perhaps deliberately so – but means in practice that there will be trade barriers between Northern Ireland and Britain, though not between the Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. Unionist papers now refer to an “Irish Sea border” as a done deal. At the same time, Boris Johnson dropped the much-criticised clauses in the Internal Market Bill that would have enabled his government to renege on the sea border.

Former leaders of the Brexiteers, propelled into power by claiming to be “taking back control”, are coy about what they have done, but the British state is ceding a large measure of authority over part of the UK. Northern Ireland will in future abide by EU customs regulations and “single market” rules and the rest of the UK will not. Unsurprisingly, the pro-Brexit British media that has been booming defiance towards Brussels in the last few days and telling Johnson to stand firm is largely mute about this diminution in the real power of the British government.

The unionists in Northern Ireland are not so shy in expressing their sense of betrayal. “The prime minister will always do what is right for him personally, then for his party, then for England,” says a bitter editorial in the unionist News Letter quoted by The Irish Times. “He showed pure cynicism when he came to Northern Ireland to denounce Theresa May’s border backstop … Within months he had the premiership he had spent a lifetime coveting, and within weeks of achieving that goal he was cutting the province adrift.”

Of course, anybody putting their trust in anybody so openly duplicitous as Johnson does not deserve much sympathy. Arlene Foster and the Democratic Unionist Party, for all their reputation for ruthless pragmatism, showed child-like naivety in imagining that the Conservative Party’s embrace would last a second longer than its dependence on the DUP for its majority in the House of Commons.

But the tortured emergence of the “Irish Sea border”, together with the dropping of the disputed clauses in the Internal Market Bill, does more than provide further example of Johnson’s untrustworthiness. They are the outcome of changes in the balance of power on a number of fronts, all negative for Britain. The first is between Protestants/unionists and Catholics/nationalists in Northern Ireland. The dominance of the former has been slipping away since the start of the Troubles in 1968, a decline recognised and institutionalised by the Good Friday Agreement 30 years later.

The balance between the two communities will change further as the unionists/Protestants lose their demographic majority in the upcoming census.

The outcome of the struggle over the location of the Irish border is more than just an Irish issue; it has been a crucial test of strength between post-Brexit Britain and the Irish Republic, the EU itself, and the US as Joe Biden becomes president. The result of the test is to show that global Britain is a shrunken power, regardless of the outcome of the current trade talks.

This does not mean that Irish unity is around the corner. The unionists are just as tough as the nationalists. Not many of them think that they would be better off in the Irish Republic, but what has changed is that a large chunk of the nationalist community who previously thought they were better off in the UK no longer do so. “You would not find many nationalists post-Brexit who would not vote for a united Ireland in a new border poll,” one commentator told me last year.

What was true then is even more true now. I was struck at that time by the cavalier ignorance of the Brexit leaders about the Irish border issue. They spoke of it being policed by technical means, failing to note that most of it runs through nationalist areas and any device monitoring it would be smashed within minutes of being installed. A year later I witnessed the same blend of ignorance, poor judgement and incompetence at work as Johnson’s government grappled with the coronavirus epidemic.

There is something darkly comic about Britain under a leadership of proven ineptitude, and deliberately shorn of allies, planning to outcompete the rest of the world. The problem is that the Conservative Party, as it transforms into an exclusively English nationalist party, has the virtues and vices of nationalist movements everywhere. There is nothing peculiarly British about this: most people in the world see the nation state as the best vehicle for their loyalties, something exemplified by the response to the pandemic when every nation – including the 27 members of the EU – consulted their own interests first and last.

Nationalists suffer from two weaknesses in particular: they blame everything that goes wrong on an external oppressor, such as, in Britain’s case, Brussels. Second, they are blind to the nationalism of others, seeing it as phoney and inspired by base motives like economic greed, and entirely different from their own pristine patriotism. The Brexiteers never considered how their own English nationalism would affect Ireland and Scotland. Yet the last 15 opinion polls in Scotland show that a majority of Scots now favour independence. Even if this does not happen soon, the “Scottish question” is going to be a dominant theme in British politics in the coming decades, just as the “Irish question” once was.

We are not yet seeing the final break-up of the UK, but the ebbing of English power within the British Isles as a whole is becoming ever more visible. Ireland has a thirteenth of the population of the UK but has become a political rival to be taken seriously because it is backed, at least for the moment, by the EU and the US. No wonder those Sinn Fein leaders in Belfast were looking so happy.

Break the silence: Ending gender-based violence is a human rights imperative

Shobha Shukla

“There is a global epidemic of violence against women – both within conflict zones and within societies at peace – and it is still treated as a lesser crime and lower priority” had said Angelina Jolie, actress and then UN Ambassador for refugees more than five years ago. With the onslaught of the pandemic and global public health emergency and cascading humanitarian crises, these words have only become even more relevant today.

The Asia Pacific region presents some very challenging development indicators for women and girls and socially excluded and marginalized populations. There are deep rooted gender inequalities and discriminatory socio-cultural norms and practices arising out of patriarchal systems and structures, and sexual and other forms of gender-based violence continues to remain pervasive in the region.

According to latest statistics, the proportion of women in Asia Pacific who have experienced physical or sexual violence by an intimate partner in their lifetime ranges from 15% in Bhutan, Japan, Lao PDR and Philippines to 64% in Fiji and Solomon Islands. Also 4% (in Japan) to 48% (in Papua New Guinea) of women have experienced intimate partner violence in the last 12 months.

Also, in most countries of the region, women are much more likely to have experienced physical or sexual violence at the hands of intimate partners, rather than by other perpetrators. Thus women who are experiencing violence are unable to find ways to stop the violence or to leave the violent relationship. Moreover, many communities often stigmatise the survivors and perceive some practices, like domestic violence, as acceptable.

Several studies have proven that sexual and other forms of gender-based violence, which is perpetuated by poverty and various gender-biased sociocultural norms and values, escalates in crises situations. The findings of one such study conducted in Central Sulawesi, Indonesia, as shared by Melania Hidayat, National Programme Officer on Reproductive Health, UNFPA, Indonesia, reveal that incidents of sexual and other forms of gender-based violence, sexual harassment, rape and domestic violence increased in the aftermath of a natural disaster (earthquake followed by landslide). However, the general reaction of the survivors was to remain silent due to fear (of the perpetrators), shame and lack of support from immediate family members. They often have to bear the double burden of sanctions and blame from the community as well.

Hidayat rues that even humanitarian workers, programme managers or service providers do not see prevention and management of sexual and other forms of gender-based violence as a priority in emergency humanitarian responses and the mechanism for reporting and management of sexual and other forms of gender-based violence does not exist. At the same time, community awareness and understanding is also low that tends to put the survivor to further risks of violence.

Then again, as the UN Secretary General has very rightly and repeatedly said, the global lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic have resulted in a “horrifying surge” in the already existing gender-based violence, further deepening gender inequalities.

The heightened risk of sexual and other forms of gender-based violence for women and girls due to the pandemic has deeply affected the Asia Pacific region as well. It has placed additional barriers to operationalize many of the existing prevention strategies, thus limiting the ability of survivors of sexual and other forms of gender-based violence to distance themselves from their abusers and/or access life-saving services related to sexual and other forms of gender-based violence.

But there have been some promising adaptations, as shared by Sujata Tuladhar, Technical Specialist (gender-based violence) UNFPA Asia Pacific. She gives the examples of several countries where a variety of digital tools, including community based radios and televisions, are being used to continue with community engagement and mobilization programmes, in the face of the pandemic.

In Philippines, social media and other online platforms, including text messaging via phone, are being used to raise visibility of violence against women, challenge the stereotypes, and share information about existing services. Where these are not possible, countries are adapting to spread the messages through loudspeakers or in moving vehicles.

In the Pacific Island countries messages around gender-based violence are being included in emergency cards that are given to communities to provide COVID-19 related information.

In Pakistan, Mongolia, Indonesia and some other countries tele-counselling modalities have become very commonplace.

In Nepal trained community based psychosocial workers have been equipped with cell phone credits, so that they can continue to reach out and respond to women at risk of violence in their communities telephonically.

Some countries are also exploring the concept of creating shelters through partnerships with Airbnb, hotels or university dorms that make rooms available for gender-based violence survivors in a safe way.

Service providers are also connecting to gender-based violence survivors via mobile safety apps and other online resources. One such example is a mobile app ‘Her Voice’ that was recently launched in the Philippines.

Community-based health workers, like midwives and female health workers, are being further supported to safely identify cases of gender-based violence, provide first line support and facilitate referrals. A case in point is in Cox’s Bazaar, Bangladesh, where midwives sit in women-friendly spaces and provide support to gender-based violence survivors, despite COVID-19 related restrictions in place.

COVID-19 has forced many of the capacity building initiatives to move online and become virtual. Tuladhar says that it has been quite a realization that this modality can work even for very specific gender-based violence related areas – like trainings for case management and for hotline operators – which can be made available online for more participants in far off areas at no extra cost, thus bridging many financial and geographical barriers. While the effectiveness of these virtual modalities of capacity building will need to be evaluated, they seem to hold a lot of promise.

Despite all these efforts, several challenges remain. In most contexts, gender-based violence services and responses are still not considered as part of essential COVID-19 response and remote delivery of gender-based violence services continues to be difficult.

We are also seeing new emerging forms and means of perpetrating violence. Digital technology facilitated gender-based violence, is the new demon on the block. Victim-survivors have little recourse against the many forms of online gender-based violence where the perpetrators use the internet to remotely resort to blackmail, release of personal information and private photos without consent, online stalking and threats of harm, that has devastating effects on the psyche of their targets and often forces them to move out of online spaces.

The way forward

Perhaps the COVID-19 pandemic has provided an opportunity to further evolve and innovate approaches to ensure long term transformative changes to end sexual and other forms of gender-based violence, which is probably going to outlive the pandemic. We will have to take concrete steps to be able to prevent the pandemic’s longterm impacts on gender equality and women’s empowerment after it is over.

One point that emerged strongly during a virtual session of the ongoing online 10th Asia Pacific Conference on Reproductive and Sexual Health and Rights (APCRSHR10) was that it is important to engage and empower men and boys, and not just women and girls, for prevention of violence. We cannot solely look into the women and girls. For gender equality we also need to work hand-in-hand with the men’s crew, said Professor Thein-Thein Htay, former Deputy Health Minister of Myanmar and noted public health expert.

But Hidayat cautions that while it is good to have initiatives from male groups to work together and fight to end gender-based violence, one needs to be careful to not put male involvement as an area for males to dominate the women more. The intention is to safeguard the women without limiting their activities or work.

Sagar Sachdeva, Programme Coordinator at The YP Foundation, India, blames the growing religious fundamentalism and right wing nationalism in countries like India, which is also getting legally codified and thus having serious impacts in the context of gender-based violence as well as masculinities. It has also resulted in a general increase in violence against minority communities.

Tuladhar calls for continued investment in prevention and social norm changes – whether through parenting programmes, or life skill programmes, or comprehensive childhood education that addresses young girls and boys in their gender norms formative years.

The UN Secretary-General’s UNiTE to End Violence against Women campaign, is one such multi-layer effort aimed at preventing and eliminating violence against women and girls. It amplifies the call for global action to bridge funding gaps, ensure essential services for survivors of violence, even during crises, focus on prevention, and collection of reliable data to develop evidence based policies and programmes to end all kinds of violence against women-be it sexual, physical or emotional.

Surge in “excess deaths” points to broader impact of COVID-19 pandemic

Benjamin Mateus

Even as the death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States cases surges over 300,000, it is becoming clear that the actual toll of the pandemic is much greater than even those shown by the official death count.

According to a New York Times report, 356,000 excess deaths occurred nationwide from March 15 to November 21, which is 19 percent higher compared to previous years. Even this figure may be an undercount since recent death statistics have to be updated and the Centers for Disease Control’s archaic system is lagging in actual numbers. If the current estimates hold, the total deaths by the end of December will be a staggering 401,000.

Excess mortality all ages in the US 2020—March to November

Excess deaths, also known as mortality displacement, refer to a temporary increase in the mortality rate in a given population attributed to environmental problems, wars or epidemics. Epidemiologists calculate these by determining the difference between the observed and expected numbers of deaths. They are considered a better measurement of total mortality, whether caused by the pandemic or its consequences. According to the Health Foundation, “It measures the additional deaths in a given period compared to the number usually expected and does not depend on how COVID-19 deaths are recorded.”

Last spring, New York City had the highest per capita excess deaths during the first wave, with 320 people per 100,000. Approximately 27,000 excess deaths were calculated, 75 percent above average. New Jersey saw 19,300 excess deaths. Louisiana, Michigan, Massachusetts, Maryland and Connecticut saw a more than 20 percent rise in excess deaths.

During the summer wave, the shift in excess deaths impacted states like Arizona, Mississippi, Texas, South Carolina, Georgia and Alabama. Florida saw 26,500 excess deaths, while California had 31,100. In the current early winter surge that has seen the virus run rampant throughout the nation, Illinois ranks highest with 18,200 excess deaths, 25 percent above normal levels. Indiana, South Dakota, Arkansas and Missouri have also been devastated. Presently, the pandemic is moving swiftly towards the coasts where population densities are most significant.

It is difficult to determine to what extent deaths are directly or indirectly related and attributable to COVID. More than 25 percent of these “above normal” deaths have been chalked up to diseases like diabetes, Alzheimer’s, hypertension and pneumonia. Regardless, with hospitals throughout the nation seeing admissions for COVID-19 soar, many people are once again deferring their health maintenance or prefer not to brave a trip to the emergency room out of fear of contracting the coronavirus. This very same population of high-risk individuals is also at increased risk of suffering from the coronavirus's consequences.

Adding insult to injury, the economic stress of unemployment, overdue rent, and rising debt has forced millions of families to make the difficult choice of paying for prescription medications, getting groceries or paying their mortgages and credit card bills. The Washington Post noted that almost 12 million renters would owe an average of nearly $6,000 in back rent and utilities come January. Job opportunities remain scarce as small businesses are facing closure with the surge in cases. These same millions will be pushed into poverty, which will claim an untold number in years to come.

The scale of the health crisis in the US due to the COVID-19 pandemic is unprecedented. The only comparison to this event would be the “Spanish flu” of 1918 at the end of World War 1 that killed approximately 675,000 people. In modern times, not even previous wars have kept pace with the death caused by the coronavirus, which has become the leading cause of death in the US, far outpacing even heart disease.

However, even the present coronavirus dashboards being used to track the social impact of the pandemic do not wholly capture the real devastation being wrought on the population. The blame is entirely attributable to the utter disregard of local, state, and national authorities to the consequences of this health crisis, preferring to chastise individual behavior rather than the policies implemented by authorities to keep workplaces and schools open.

A health care worker wears personal protective equipment as she speaks to a patient at a mobile testing location for COVID-19 in Auburn, Maine. (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty, File)

All this is being compounded by the continuing rise in hospitalizations, which have now reached 110,000 nationwide. One in two patients admitted to intensive care units (ICUs) is for COVID-19. As these facilities are reaching capacity, the need to ration care is being openly discussed. The eldest and sickest may be turned away.

Exhausted nurses and health care workers have turned to social media to share their horrific experiences.

One nurse from Huntsville, Alabama, wrote, “We are canceling all elective and urgent procedures and converting inpatient holding and PACU to ICU’s … we have a makeshift ER pod in the ambulance bay, holding patients on stretchers because we have nowhere to put them!”

A nurse from Warrick County, Indiana said, “Our ICUs are maxed out, and our CV [cardiovascular] ICU is now having to fill with COVID and MS [med-surg] ICU instead of surgical because of need. They filled our pediatric ICU with adults. And that’s four full ICUs with RNs having to work four and five shifts trying to make staffing better. They had to intubate and hold a patient on a regular floor till our ICU could make room for them.”

Public health experts repeatedly mentioned health system capacity as a milestone of last resort. As they begin to collapse under the weight of rising admissions and understaffing, the case fatality rate will edge upwards, meaning preventable COVID-19 deaths will be added to these grim statistics. These same concerns will impact those seeking medical attention for ailments other than COVID-19, which will further contribute to excess deaths.

However, establishment politicians and scientists would prefer to downplay the death toll as they begin to shift their rhetoric with the vaccine’s rollout. All agree that not much will change until the next few months when the vaccines are manufactured, distributed and administered broadly to the population.

That there are no serious questions raised as to how to stem the present mortality rate points to an acceptance that nothing can be done to stop the parade of death. Meanwhile, the rollout will cost states and taxpayers billions in revenue, impacting poorer states the most. Though the vaccine is being provided to states by the federal government, states will have to hire medical workers, establish storage facilities, conduct educational and community outreach initiatives, and set up vaccine clinics.

According to the Wall Street Journal, “Officials in several states said they would spend whatever is needed to get residents vaccinated. Some said that might force spending cuts in areas like education unless Congress provides additional funding, or the federal government reimburses a large chunk of their rollout costs.”

Bipartisan congressional group reveals threadbare stimulus plan

Jacob Crosse

On Monday, Republican and Democratic congressional members of the Problem Solvers Caucus released further details on the so-called “emergency relief framework” that was unveiled two weeks ago, with the full text of the bill slated to be released on Wednesday.

At a time when some 54 million people are food insecure, catastrophic job losses continue to climb, with over 1.3 million state and federal first-time applicants last week, and millions of people are behind on rent and mortgages, with between 2.4 and 5 million households facing eviction January 2021, according to Syracuse University professor Gretchen Purser, the so-called “emergency” relief is woefully inadequate to deal with the present crisis.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Chuck Schumer at the Capitol (Credit: Flickr.com/AFGE)

The insulting measures were described at various points by multimillionaire politicians Joe Manchin, (D-W. Va.) Mark Warner (D-Va.) Mitt Romney (R-Utah) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) as a “gift,” a “Christmas miracle” and a “ray of hope” to the population, with Manchin remarking that “cooperation and bipartisanship are alive and well in Washington.”

While there are plenty of “gifts” to businesses and banks in the proposed legislation, for students, jobless workers, and those facing eviction and their families, the bill provides lackluster support, if anything at all.

Due to alleged disagreements between the big-business parties, the $908 billion package has been split into two separate bills, a smaller $160 billion bill which includes funding for state, local and tribal governments as well as a coveted “liability shield” that would relieve business of responsibility for any COVID-19-related injuries suffered by workers or patrons.

The sweeping language provided in previous iterations of the liability shield, and what appears to be in the new bill, would give companies a blank check to continue forcing workers to toil in dangerous, coronavirus-infested workplaces as long as the employer could prove they were “trying” to be “generally following applicable government standards and guidance.”

US “government standards and guidance” throughout the pandemic have been criminally insufficient, leading to over 305,000 deaths since February 6, or approximately one COVID-19 fatality every 40 seconds. It would also shield for-profit nursing homes that have been home to thousands of preventable deaths. The liability shield would last for approximately two years, a reduction from the five years in previous iterations of the bill.

Of the $160 billion allocated for state, local and tribal funding, approximately $91.2 billion would be for the states, $60.8 billion for counties and municipalities, with roughly $8 billion for tribal governments. Each state would get a minimum of $500 million. However, none of the funds could be used to pay for worker pension programs.

The second bill is a $748 billion package featuring $300 billion for the Small Business Administration (SBA), including a reported $288 billion for the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). The PPP has been a financial windfall for the well-off, politically connected, and large Wall Street banks, which, according to a recent investigation by the Miami Herald, have collected over $18 billion in fees. JPMorgan Chase leads all banks in profiting off the PPP, with over $1 billion generated in fees from PPP loans.

Should the second bill come to pass, it is nowhere near enough to address the catastrophic social, economic and medical crisis befalling the population, reflecting the ongoing indifference of the ruling class to the suffering of millions of workers and their families.

Funding for the $748 billion bill could be pulled from previously passed CARES Act legislation, which, according to testimony from Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin last month, would amount to approximately $580 billion, meaning less than $200 billion of the bill is actually “new” funding.

After $300 billion is allocated to the SBA, the remaining $448 billion in the bill is to be split among unemployment benefits, education, food assistance, healthcare provider relief, rental assistance, substance abuse prevention, broadband internet, transportation, testing, tracing and vaccine distribution.

For unemployed workers, the miserly federal unemployment benefits are to be extended for only 16 weeks at $300 a week, less than half of what was included in the CARES Act. While there have been “rumors” from anonymous congressional aides of a stimulus payment being added to the larger bill, at the present it does not contain $1,200 direct payments to people like the previous $2.2 trillion CARES Act, passed nearly 9 months ago.

Of the $82 billion directed towards education, $54 billion is allotted for K-12 funding, with $20 billion dedicated to higher education. A summary of the “Bipartisan Emergency COVID Relief Act of 2020” notes that “targeted aid” will also be given to private and religious schools as well out of the education funding. The distribution of these funds is a key element in the ruling class “back to school” drive, which President-elect Joe Biden has promised to initiate within the first 100 days of his administration.

Funds to actually fight the virus and distribute the vaccine total about $48 billion, with $35 billion going to health care providers, $2.6 billion allocated to the Centers for Disease Control vaccine distribution and infrastructure. Another $3.4 billion would be provided in the form of “grants” to cities and states for storing and transporting the vaccine with another $7 billion allocated to states for COVID-19 testing and contact tracing.

The package extends the federal eviction moratorium, but only until the end of January 2021, leaving it up to the incoming administration to enact an executive order to extend it at the end of the month if another deal is not reached in time. In leaked audio reported by the Intercept last week, Biden shot down proposals from supporters in a closed-door meeting requesting that he use the executive branch to carry out limited criminal justice reform, citing his alleged respect for “the Constitution.”

The $25 billion allotted for rental assistance comes with strings attached, including the stipulation that someone cannot receive more than 12 months’ worth of assistance. Considering that some 10 million jobs have yet to return since March, and for those workers who have found work, it has generally been for fewer hours and less pay, millions of people will likely require more than 12 months of assistance.

London becomes epicentre of pandemic in the UK

Robert Stevens

London, the capital and most populated area in the UK with nearly 9 million residents, is now the epicentre of the pandemic.

Every one of London’s 32 boroughs is seeing an increase in COVID-19 cases. In the week to December 9, London recorded 242 cases per 100,000 people—the highest rate of any region in England. This represented a 40.5 jump in cases on the previous week. One London borough, Havering, recorded the fifth highest rate of all new COVID-19 cases in England. There are more than 2,000 patients with Covid in London’s hospitals--up from just over 1,000 a month ago.

On Monday, Conservative Health Secretary Matt Hancock announced that London, much of the adjacent county of Essex, and some of Hertfordshire, will be placed under the highest Tier 3 restriction level from midnight today. The Daily Telegraph cited a health ministry source who said that the latest data on infections in London was “terrifying,” and significantly worse than those of northern cities Liverpool and Manchester when they entered the highest tier. How catastrophic is the spread of the virus in the capital is clear in that Greater London’s population is over 3 times as large as Greater Manchester’s.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock speaking on Monday at the government's Covid-19 Press Conference inside No10 Downing Street (credit: picture by Andrew Parsons/No 10 Downing Street--FlickR)

The engulfing of London’s population by the virus is the direct consequence of the government’s homicidal herd immunity policy. On December 3, Prime Minister Boris Johnson ended a month-long national, albeit limited, lockdown, which did not include workplaces, schools or colleges, and brought in its ineffectual Tier system to “save Christmas”, i.e., the profits of the corporations at what is normally their busiest time of the year. This was accompanied by the criminal move, in the middle of a pandemic, to allow all shops nationally to open for 24 hours a day in December and January .

Shoppers were encouraged to flood the high streets, with the pro-Labour Party Daily Mirror's front page, “Go shop for Britain," typical. Encouraged by government propaganda and the media, for weeks London’s main shopping streets and shopping centres have been teeming with people packed together like sardines. London’s shops are national and international destinations. Nothing has been put in place to curtail the influx into London during the holiday season, enabling the disease to spread like wildfire and not just in the capital.

Keeping schools open since their re-opening in September, has had even more devastating consequences. Despite it being confirmed within days of this decision that schools were the cause of up to 50 percent of coronavirus infections in communities, they were kept open for the sole purpose of ensuring that parents were able to go to work.

After months of lies that schools were “Covid-safe” zones, the situation in London has blown these claims apart. On Sunday, the Royal Borough of Greenwich in the south east of the capital announced it was closing all its schools from the end of day on Monday and moving classes online. In an open letter the Greenwich’s Labour Party council leader Danny Thorpe declared that he had been briefed by “Public Health England that the pandemic in Greenwich is now showing signs that we are in a period of exponential growth that demands immediate action.” In just this one borough 90 schools, tens of thousands of children, and hundreds of thousands of people in their families are affected.

Greenwich’s infection rate shot up by 48.6 percent, from 151.4 per 100,000 to 225 cases per 100,000 people in the first week of December.

Greenwich is only the 14th worse borough in London for COVID infections. Havering, in the east of the city, recorded 1,314 new cases to December 9 and has over double the cases of Greenwich, with 470.8 per 100,000 people. Five London boroughs—Redbridge, Waltham Forest, Barking and Dagenham, Enfield, and Newham—are all in the top 25 areas with the highest rates in England.

On Monday, another London council, Islington, announced that it would close all the schools within its boundaries from the end of Tuesday and continue online learning until January 11. Islington Council leader Richard Watts, also Labour, said, "There is a serious and very worrying rise in coronavirus across London, with cases doubling every few days.”

Essex County Council announced that nearly all secondary schools in Basildon, just 26 miles from the capital, have moved to full remote education.

These measures are too little, too late. It is proven that the Tier system is inadequate to contain the virus. Under Tier 3, all shops are still able to remain open, with only pubs, restaurants and cafes having to close (except for takeaway services). Indoor entertainment venues such as cinemas, theatres and bowling alleys also close. Hancock confirmed that there is still no ban on people coming to London for pre-Christmas shopping, as he only advised that outside Tier 3 should not come to London for shopping.

The government is refusing to accept the move by the London councils to close schools. On Monday, Regional Schools Commissioner Claire Burton wrote to Greenwich and Islington councils threatening that, under schedule 17 of the Coronavirus Act 2020, the government “could make a direction to require schools to enable all pupils to attend full-time… I would ask you to reconsider your position immediately and retract your message to schools.”

The government has already used the extraordinary powers it has under the Coronavirus Act—that it passed in March and renewed in September with Labour backing—to ensure that schools were kept open in the north east of England.

Of all the UK’s cities the contrast between the richest and poorest is the starkest in London. Entire streets and gated communities are comprised of houses and mansions worth tens of millions, located just a stone’s throw from areas marked by entrenched poverty.

The central concerns of the Tories and Labour Party throughout the pandemic has been to ensure the profit interests of the capitalist class. In the lead-up to Hancock’s decision, former Tory leader and London MP, Sir Iain Duncan Smith, denounced to the Daily Mail any suggestion that London could be put into the highest tier as an “unmitigated disaster”. He insisted, “London is the powerhouse of the UK economy, we must not be moved into Tier Three”. Attacking the move in parliament after Hancock announced the measure, Felicity Buchan, Tory MP for Kensington, one of the most socially polarized areas on the planet and the location of the Grenfell Tower inferno, said in like fashion, “Whether this House likes it not, central London is the powerhouse of our national economy".

The main concern of Labour’s London Mayor Sadiq Khan ahead of Hancock’s announcement was not for the safety of millions of people, but that the impending move to Tier 3 was "catastrophic to our hospitality, to our culture and to retail."

Khan has played a criminal role in the spread of coronavirus. Speaking to LBC radio Monday he said that the move to Tier 3 was a “blunt instrument” as the main sources of infections were not hospitality venues, but schools and colleges (he never mentioned workplaces). Earlier Monday, Khan and Georgia Gould, the chair of London Councils, wrote to Johnson calling for the closure from Tuesday of secondary schools, sixth forms, and further education colleges, and an expansion of community testing. “The biggest spread of the virus in the capital is within education settings and specifically amongst the 10-19 year old age group.”

Khan conceals the fact that he was instrumental in backing the government and opposition Labour Party’s back to school order in September. This led to over 250,000 school children in London being sent back to the classrooms, vastly increasing the spread of the virus.

London is the new epicentre of the virus, but it continues to spread nationally. Another 232 deaths were recorded yesterday with cases of COVID-19 increasing 14 percent in the last week. In the week to December 9, 208 out of 315 local authority areas recorded a week-on-week increase. With London’s population under Tier 3, this means that 34 million people will be in that tier and 21.5 million in tier two.

These appalling figures could be the tip of the iceberg, with Hancock announcing in parliament that a new variant of COVID-19 has been discovered that “may be associated with the fastest spread in the south-east of England.” He stated that “initial analysis suggests that this variant is growing faster than the existing variants. We’ve currently identified over 1,000 cases with this variant, predominantly in the south of England, although cases have been identified in nearly 60 different local authority areas, and numbers are increasing rapidly.”

New data expose catastrophe of Turkey’s “herd immunity” policy

Barış Demir

The record COVID-19 case numbers in Turkey reflect the results of the murderous “herd immunity” policy of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government, supported by the parliamentary opposition parties and trade unions. It shows that government “restrictions” on movement during the pandemic only aim to control the anger of the working class, not to halt the spread of the disease.

With nearly 30,000 daily cases, Turkey is in third place in the world after the United States and Brazil and now has risen to first place in Europe. The number of daily deaths—over 200 in recent days—is the highest since March 11, when the first case was detected in Turkey.

Until recently, the Turkish government has refused to announce real data over the pandemic so as to force workers back to work and contain public anger, making an arbitrary, unscientific distinction between “cases” and “patients.”

However, growing popular outrage against inadequate restrictions and figures announced by the Turkish Medical Association (TTB) and other institutions have forced the government to announce daily and total cases. On November 25, the Health Ministry announced 28,351 daily cases. The day before, it had announced only 7,381 “patients.”

Sources: Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering. Last updated: December 13, 2020

On December 10, the Health Ministry also announced that there had been 1,748,567 total cases since the pandemic began. Case and death figures are still not reliable, however, and are likely underestimates.

One of the world’s biggest cover-ups over the pandemic has taken place in Turkey as part of the criminal “herd immunity” policy implemented by governments all over the world in the interests of the financial aristocracy.

Turkish Medical Association (TTB) Chair Prof. Dr. Şebnem Korur Fincancı stated that the Health Ministry’s latest figures are not completely transparent: “The table mentions 20 million tests. We know that the positivity rates, which were around 10 percent in March and April, have increased to 30 percent since mid-November. ... [I]f there is a 15 percent average test positivity, the number of cases should be 3 million.” Experts also pointed out that it is unrealistic to record one-third of all cases in the last few weeks.

The Science Academy’s web site Sarkac.org reported that from March 12 to December 2 a total of 13.857 excess deaths occurred in Istanbul, compared to the 2015–19 average, based on Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality data. This number was almost equal to the number of total COVID-19 deaths (14,129) across Turkey announced by the Health Ministry. The number of deaths from COVID-19 in Istanbul has not been reported by the Health Ministry since October 25.

Head of Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality Cemeteries Department Dr. Ayhan Koç asked the following about rising deaths: “While there is an average of 200 funerals as daily every year, how did the number of funerals reach 400 in November this year, how will we explain this?” He added, “11,500 people lost their lives per month; the average of November of the previous years was 6,000. The excess 5,500 deaths compared to the previous years in November 2020 should also explain the doubling of funerals as well.”

Moreover, according to data from 20 municipalities accounting for 48 percent of Turkey’s population (nearly 41 million of 83 million people), the total death toll from infectious diseases was 21,084 as of November 23. However, Health Ministry figures on the same day gave only 12,511 official COVID-19 deaths for all of Turkey.

Last month, the Erdoğan government announced a nationwide curfew only for weekend nights; then the curfews were extended to weekdays, running from 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. Education is continuing online until the end of the year. Working hours for shopping centers, markets, barbers and hairdressers are limited to between 10 a.m. and 8 p.m. And restaurants and cafés are open only for takeaway and deliveries.

The banner reads “Enough is enough! Full lockdown is essential to stop deaths!” Doctors of the Istanbul Medical Chamber stand in homage to Dr. M. Mustafa Kartal who died of COVID-19, December 11, 2020, Istanbul. [Credit: Istanbul Medical Chamber

These measures, however, do not, aim to contain the pandemic and save lives. On the contrary, they aim to contain growing opposition in the working class to the government’s response and lies over the pandemic. The government’s priority was summed up by Erdoğan. He said the curfew had to be implemented “so as not to disrupt supply and production chains in the country.”

That is, the government is prioritizing capitalist profits over human lives. As a result of these token restrictions, there has been no serious decrease in the pandemic in Turkey.

The same reactionary calculations are apparent in the government’s vaccine policy. Turkey has a population of more than 83 million, but Health Minister Fahrettin Koca recently said that the first batch of 20 million doses from the Chinese-developed CoronaVac vaccine will be received in December and January. The second batch of 10 million doses will arrive in February. Since two doses will be used per person, sufficient vaccination will not take place in a short time.

Millions of people will be denied a vaccine for months, but Koca could not deny that the vaccine brought from China was privately purchased by wealthy people.

All over the world, experts warn that COVID-19 will continue to be a danger for a long time and it is necessary to take full lockdown measures to avert hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths before the vaccinations can take effect.

Moreover, Turkey’s health care system is on the verge of collapse. In a recent statement, the TTB’s Central Council stated: “In many metropolitan cities, information from hospital administrators, local administrators, medical chambers, health and labor-occupational organizations are shared with the public. They say that public hospitals are full and that there is no space in intensive care units due to the increasing number of patients.”

The total number of health care workers testing positive exceeds 120,000, and 249 health workers have lost their lives as of Monday. Every day four or five of them die. While there was no improvement in working conditions for health workers, the government ignored their demands for COVID-19 to be considered an occupational disease.

The danger of a social explosion is so great that even the bourgeois opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) recently called for at least a 14-day lockdown. In fact, the CHP and its allies have only raised tactical criticisms against the government and did not oppose the financial aristocracy’s “herd immunity” policy. Moreover, in the face of increasing public anger, especially among health care workers over the collapse of the health system, trade union confederations including Türk-İş, Hak-İş, DİSK and KESK, and professionals’ unions were forced call on December 6 for a “full lockdown” against COVID-19.

They proposed to “stop the production in all workplaces and businesses except health, municipality, cleaning, energy, food production and sales for 21 days; implementation of a full lockdown; free COVID-19 tests; forming of pandemic committees at the workplaces; the uninterrupted payment of the wages of all the workers; and humane living wages for the unemployed people.”

This “demand” is empty, however: they made no call for protests or strikes to force the government to immediately implement these measures. In fact, all the union bureaucracies have been complicit in the government response to the pandemic. Their main concern is the same as that of the ruling class: to contain and suppress the growing anger among workers.

The pro-opposition DİSK declared on March 30 that in 48 hours it might invoke the constitutional right to not work in unsafe conditions. Ultimately, however, it did not call strikes. The KESK, also controlled by bourgeois opposition parties and their pseudo-left accomplices, openly supported the government’s back-to-school campaign in September.

15-year-old is assassinated while being treated in hospital in Mexico as homicides reach record levels

Angel Andres

On Sunday, a 15-year-old youth was shot and wounded and later assassinated while being treated for his wounds at the General Hospital of Tecate in the Mexican state of Baja California. Tecate sits on the US border and is home of the internationally known Tecate beer.

This shocking incident has unfolded amid record levels of both coronavirus cases and homicides across the country, which are placing intolerable burdens on the already underfunded health care system. The response by local authorities and the federal government of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (known as AMLO), which inflexibly prioritize capitalist profits over the lives of workers and youth, has only exacerbated the twin crises.

Mexico's National Guard (gob.mx)

While minimizing the danger of COVID-19 and seeking to normalize mass deaths, the AMLO administration refuses to carry out any policies to counter the widespread conditions of poverty and social inequality that lie at the root of the homicide levels and the uncontrolled spread of COVID-19.

The government has projected that Mexico will reach 40,000 homicides by the end of the year, breaking 2019’s record of 36,476 killings. The bulk of the homicides are tied to organized crime and operations conducted by the Mexican police and military, ostensibly to combat the drug-trafficking cartels.

At the same time, Mexico has reported more than 1,250,000 coronavirus cases and 114,000 confirmed COVID-19 deaths, as hospitals in Mexico City, Ciudad Juárez and other cities begin to fill up. Hospital occupancy in Baja California has increased from 33 percent to 72 percent since early November.

At around 2 in the afternoon on Sunday, 15-year-old Martin W. was shot in the back. A local Facebook news service, CNR TECATE, reported the incident and showed the body of the young man being treated for a gunshot wound by the paramedics.

There was reportedly still hope that the youth would recover. After he was transported to the hospital and was being treated for his wounds, a gunman walked into the hospital with the sole mission of finishing him off. The gunman found the youth in the emergency wing of the hospital, where he delivered the coup de grâce as horrified medical staff looked on.

This sort of barbarism and unabashed act of criminality was once a rarity in the small city of 73,000 people. Nowadays, stories of execution-style murders are becoming ever more common. Organized crime is increasingly taking control of the city, even to the extent that cartel thugs can kill a young man in his hospital bed in plain view of the public.

These acts are already routine in large cities like Tijuana, which is located south of the border of San Diego, California, and 30 miles west of Tecate.

AMLO campaigned on the promise to solve the issue of violence, partly by removing the military from the streets, but homicides have kept increasing during the first two years of his tenure. While proclaiming a policy of “Hugs not Bullets,” he secured approval for a new National Guard, composed of military and former federal police, with total disregard for their long record of crimes, human rights abuses and involvement with the drug cartels themselves.

AMLO proved his salt by coming to the aid of General Salvador Cienfuegos, also known as the “Godfather,” by securing his return from the United States, where he was imprisoned and facing trial, and setting him free without charges. Cienfuegos was indicted by the US government on charges of providing the H-2 cartel with protection, taking bribes, and deploying the military against its rivals during his tenure as defense minister.

Mexican youth like Martin W. make up the vast majority of victims of organized crime and government operations in what constitutes a war against Mexican working class youth. Most homicide victims are young men under the age of 30 from the poorest layers of the population.

Recently, there have been protests by pseudo-left, anarchist and feminist organizations that have demanded that the authorities end the “femicides” in Mexico. In the capital of Mexico City, they occupied a Human Rights Commission building, chanting “Stop killing us.” AMLO criticized the protests as the wrong way to enact change. Last month, local police under AMLO’s Morena party in Cancún used gunfire to disperse a similar feminist protest as National Guard troops stood watch.

Pseudo-left organizations have focused their activism on the increased killings of women under the artificial label of “femicides” coined by the identity politics milieu. While there has been a horrifying increase in the killings of women, they form a small fraction of the overall homicides. Out of the 40,000 projected homicides, just over 3,000 of the victims will be women.

The bourgeois media and pseudo-left activists blame the homicides on a culture of violence in Mexico rooted in Machismo. Thus, they frame the problem as one of culture and identity. The enemy is not fundamentally the complicit government or organized criminal organizations with ties to the business elites and the state, but a long-ingrained hatred of women that supposedly lies deep within Mexican culture. This is patently false and hides the true causes of the homicide epidemic in Mexico, which are tied to Mexican capitalism under the auspices of U.S. imperialism.

The pseudo-left’s focus on “femicides” obscures the fact that the overwhelming majority of homicide victims, men and women alike, are drawn from the working class and the most impoverished layers of society. The immense inequality between the rich and poor in Mexico and oppressive poverty afflicting Mexican youth are creating conditions where organized crime thrives. It is a question of class and global capitalism.

This devastated environment creates the conditions in which both the cartels and state forces are able to recruit youth and send them to war against each other. The cartels have no respect for age or sex. They possess government-sanctioned impunity to dispose of Mexican working-class youth. Local, state, and federal authorities demonstrate complete indifference to the terrible conditions and suffering of the working class, which have now been vastly exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Mexican youth and workers need to join their international brothers and sisters to form their own independent political movement to get rid of the parasitic cartels and capitalists that are plundering their livelihoods and destroying their lives. Only an international socialist revolution can achieve this aim.