Deadliest week since COVID-19 pandemic began in Germany

Gregor Link

Last week was by far the worst in the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany, with officially 175,314 infections and over 4,300 deaths (against 3,050 the previous week). Across Europe, the death toll exceeded the catastrophic half-million mark on Tuesday. After reports of deadly mass outbreaks in old people’s homes dominating the headlines in recent weeks, the “profits before lives” policy of recent months is now revealing its murderous consequences more and more clearly in hospitals.

Central train station in Frankfurt, Germany, Thursday, Oct. 8, 2020. (AP Photo/Michael Probst)

According to the Pforzheimer Zeitung, a hospital in Tettnang on Lake Constance halted admissions on December 10 because the virus had been detected in 34 people. Three infected patients had to be taken to Friedrichshafen, 13 kilometres away, due to severe symptoms. In the meantime, 84 staff and 26 patients have been infected—only five of the remaining patients tested negative.

At the hospital in Wangen im Allgäu, which is currently treating 18 COVID-19 patients, 28 staff members—including eight doctors—are infected and in quarantine. In addition to COVID-19 cases, the clinic only treats emergencies and performs deliveries—although the virus is also particularly deadly for pregnant women. The hospital in Pfullendorf reports three infected staff members and has also imposed an admission ban.

Meanwhile, in Saxony, the shortage of intensive care beds for COVID-19 patients is “significantly larger than officially reported,” broadcaster MDR reports. While the DIVI intensive care register shows 50 free intensive care beds for the districts of Bautzen, Dresden, Sächsische Schweiz Osterzgebirge, Görlitz and Meißen, according to the hospital control centre’s bed lists there are only about 20 available—less than half. One reason for this, according to the Görlitz hospital, was “staff who are ill or in quarantine, which means that free beds cannot be occupied.”

According to a report by dpa press agency, the high death toll means corpses must now be stored temporarily in Zittau in eastern Saxony. The dead are being warehoused “in the flood support base” and will only be brought to the crematorium “when they are released for cremation,” the city of Zittau reported on Tuesday evening. In Hanau, Hesse, a refrigerated container for coronavirus corpses had already been put into operation last week at the city’s main cemetery to store bodies from the completely overloaded hospitals.

In addition to the virus hotspots in Saxony, which have been overwhelmed by the pandemic, there are now districts in Bavaria, Thuringia and Brandenburg with 7-day incidences of between 500 and 680 cases per 100,000 inhabitants. In Bavaria, all intensive care beds are occupied in eight cities and districts.

Since the devastating lack of staff there is exacerbating the situation, in a “cry for help” to the population, the counties in the metropolitan region of Nuremberg/Fürth/Erlangen are now looking for helpers to relieve the staff in hospitals. As reported by the Münchner Merkur, the “excess mortality due to coronavirus” in Bavaria was so great that “the population is shrinking for the first time in a long time.” Depending on the region, the death figures are on average between 6 and 18 percent higher than 2016 to 2019, the paper said.

Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, a federal state with a low population density, which has not been at the centre of the pandemic so far, is also expecting the health system to collapse soon. As broadcaster NDR reports, five rehabilitation clinics there are currently being converted into relief facilities where patients with waning COVID-19 symptoms and other illnesses will be cared for.

At the weekend, the death of a 38-year-old teacher at a comprehensive school in Berlin’s working-class Kreuzberg district triggered a wave of anger and bewilderment. Soydan A., who according to Tagesspiegel had previously been in perfect health, fought the fatal disease over 32 days, before he finally succumbed. He was one of the thousands of educators infected with the virus because of forced unsafe face-to-face teaching.

According to the official figures of the Berlin Ministry of Education, 370 staff members in general education schools in the capital are coronavirus-positive, as well as 988 pupils. Statistics from the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) show that three educators infected with COVID-19 died last week.

In North Rhine-Westphalia, calculations have shown that the seven-day incidence rate among teachers compared to the total population exploded in October and November: from 183 in calendar week 44 (NRW-wide average: 162) to 280 in week 45 (average: 175), to 368 in week 46 (average: 171) and finally 361 in week 47 (average: 159). According to these official figures from the state school authorities, teachers were more than twice as at-risk of infection in November than the general population.

Nevertheless, the full reopening of schools after the end of the Christmas holidays and the official “lockdown” on January 10 is already being intensively prepared behind the backs of the population. “Within the Conference of State Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs,” there is “agreement” that “there is no substitute for personal contact between teacher and pupil,” newsweekly Der Spiegel quotes Brandenburg’s Minister of Education and Cultural Affairs Britta Ernst, who is to take over the chair of the conference from January. In particular, “the SPD-led states,” according to the news magazine, want to “reopen their schools or have not closed them at all” from January 10.

This murderous policy meets with overwhelming rejection among the population. For example, a survey by broadcaster ARD’s Deutschland-Trends has again shown that 85 percent of eligible voters consider the current containment measures “adequate” or “not extensive enough.” Although one in two parents complain of “heavy burdens,” two-thirds of those surveyed support the closure of schools or the suspension of compulsory attendance.

In face of this massive opposition, education ministers and state governments are increasingly openly resorting to pseudo-scientific propaganda and lies in their efforts to justify the return to compulsory attendance as soon as possible. For example, at the end of November, Hamburg’s schools’ senator (state minister), Ties Rabe, announced, “together with the Standing Conference of the State Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs (KMK), a new study” on the incidence of infections in schools, which was to be carried out “based on Hamburg’s school data.”

As the ARD magazine programme Panorama reported on Thursday, “the Hamburg school authority” should also “take care of the preparation” for the study. To this end, Rabe said, “all our Hamburg data has been processed”—but without any involvement of epidemiological or virological experts.

SPD politician Ties Rabe is known as a hardliner on the issue of school reopenings, whose authorities have systematically covered up coronavirus infections in schools since the very beginning. Based on his authority’s fudged figures, Rabe had recently presented the results of an internal “numerical analysis,” according to which 80 percent of infected pupils had “probably not been infected at school at all.”

“The fall from grace of German education policy in the pandemic began at the moment when scientific findings were denied, ignored or reinterpreted,” says education journalist Andrej Priboschek, editor of the online magazine News4Teachers, in an interview with the World Socialist Web Site. “The talk of non-infectious children is always fuelled by education ministers.”

Priboschek wrote an open letter to the state premiers a few weeks ago, in which he harshly condemned the policy of operating unsafe schools. “I also wrote this letter because, as a self-employed journalist and family man, I am directly affected by this policy myself. If I were to contract COVID-19 and become ill for a fortnight or even months, the consequences would be devastating.”

“Amid the pandemic, if educational equity is suddenly brought into the discussion,” Priboschek said, this was “gross hypocrisy—no one has cared about that in past decades. The fact that socially disadvantaged families are much more threatened by coronavirus because they live in cramped conditions and depend on using public transport is simply ignored. In effect, you’re sending these people into the fire—this is especially true of SPD-led state governments.”

“It must also be said that not much information is published on deaths in schools and day-care centres,” the News4Teachers editor said. What was also necessary in this context, was a “criticism of my colleagues in the media.” Apart from “us and you [WSWS], there is not a single media outlet that criticises the schools’ policy or even tries to systematically present the facts.”

In November, the Münster district administration distributed a “handout” to all schools, encouraging school administrators to cover up information about any outbreaks and to gloss over the risk of infection in schools. The letter states, among other things, “If possible, do not provide identifying information about suspected or infectious cases at all!” The public, according to the district authority, “doesn’t want to hear that you have doubts—but that your school is a safe place!”

Back in September, the Conference of Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs commissioned a “handout for all schools” from the Federal Environment Agency. It concluded that “regular ventilation” in winter had “an important influence on the reduction of the virus load” and that the “use of mobile air purification devices in school rooms” was, therefore “basically not necessary.” The then-KMK chairwoman Stefanie Hubig (SPD) subsequently used this so-called expert opinion to justify in-person teaching and to reject the installation of air filters in the face of protesting parents.

On Friday, leading scientists published a joint appeal in the medical journal The Lancet for “a pan-European commitment for rapid and sustained reduction in SARS-CoV-2 infections.” The authors include Viola Priesemann, Melanie Brinkmann, Sandra Ciesek and 17 other researchers from across Europe.

The paper, published in 12 languages, calls for “a target of no more than ten new COVID-19 cases per million people per day” for the entire continent. This corresponds to a seven-day incidence of seven cases per 100,000 inhabitants, or a maximum of 830 new infections per day in Germany. This was the only way to contain the spread of the virus in a sustained manner, the authors explain.

“The virus does not respect borders,” initiator Priesemann (Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organisation Göttingen) justified the demand in a press release. “Not least to avoid a ping-pong effect [of case numbers],” “all European countries must reduce case numbers simultaneously and as quickly as possible.” This would require “radical interventions such as lockdowns.” It was not a matter of “discussing individual measures such as school closures or restrictions in the work environment, in the private sphere or public transport, but of implementing all measures,” says Priesemann.

More than 300 other scientists have signed the paper. The German signatories include Max Planck President Martin Stratmann, RKI President Lothar Wieler, virologists Sandra Ciesek and Christian Drosten, Michael Meyer-Hermann of the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research, as well as Gerald Haug, president of the German National Academy, and the presidents of several research organisations.

The implementation of these measures requires the independent intervention of the working class based on an international socialist programme. The European governments have already sacrificed hundreds of thousands of lives in the interests of German and European capitalism and are willing to continue this course in the New Year. This must be prevented at all costs.

Germany: Coronavirus outbreaks turn Berlin elderly care homes into death traps

Katerina Selin

In the German capital, which is governed by a coalition of the Social Democrats (SPD), the Greens and the Left Party, more and more nursing homes are becoming death traps for the elderly and people in need of care. Numerous coronavirus outbreaks in Berlin care homes only came to light because relatives and journalists made them known. The nursing homes’ management, as well as the senate and district administrations cover up the cases and give only reluctantly or no information at all.

According to the newspaper Tagesspiegel, which cites information from the Berlin Senate, at least 295 nursing homes have been affected by outbreaks since the start of the pandemic. Already from mid-November to early December, the number of infected nursing home residents in Berlin had doubled to 2,050. Now, at least 1,400 more have been added since the beginning of December. Since the start of the coronavirus crisis, more than 3,400 residents and more than 1,600 caregivers in Berlin homes have been infected with COVID-19. The WSWS reported on multiple outbreaks in the spring.

Nurse Jean-Claude Feda, right, and trainee Lyson Rousseau, center, both wearing face masks, to protect against the spread of coronavirus, measure the blood pressure of resident Odette Defraigne-Schmit at CHC Liege Mativa home for elderly people in Liege, Belgium, Thursday, July 9, 2020. While no coronavirus, COVID-19 patients, have been reported at this particular home, Belgium has been hard hit by the deadly virus. Elderly people living in retirement homes have accounted for nearly half of the total deaths in this small country with 11 million inhabitants. (AP Photo/Francisco Seco)

On December 15, Berlin reported a record 53 new COVID-19 deaths within one day. Yesterday, 39 people died, and 1,593 new infections were registered in Berlin. More than every second death takes place in a nursing home, according to the Tagesspiegel. Almost 500 care home residents have died from the virus so far. The total number of COVID-19 victims in Berlin has now reached 1,105 deaths.

On Tuesday alone, three deadly outbreaks in care homes came to light. In a care home in Mariendorf, southern Berlin, eight residents died of COVID-19 and 64 out of 79 elderly people and 22 out of 72 workers in the facility have been infected. In a care home in Wilmersdorf nine residents have died and more than 30 people are infected. Seven residents died after an outbreak in a care home in Biesdorf in the Eastern district of Marzahn-Hellersdorf, where the Left Party is responsible for the district health council and holds the position of district mayor since 2016.

In the private Goldenherz care home in the middle of Berlin’s working-class district Wedding, the largest outbreak in the capital so far was reported on December 14, with more than 150 infections. Twenty-two residents and one 48-year-old employee had died from COVID-19. In fact, the outbreak had already been registered by authorities in November but had not been made public. The Tagesspiegel reports that it only learned about it in the middle of December via an “insider” and that the home’s management did not want to provide any information.

In the meantime, a nurse had contacted the Tagesspiegel to expose the disaster at the facility. She said, “No hygiene measures were enforced before the outbreak until November 20, and no other measures such as mandatory masks were consistently monitored by management. Employees worked without protective clothing or gloves and went on duty despite having a cold, by order of the home’s management.”

A nursing home in the northern Berlin district of Reinickendorf has also become a hotspot of the virus. At the Domicil retirement home on Techowpromenade, 80 residents and 30 staff members tested positive in the middle of December; 14 people succumbed to the virus.

COVID-19 has been spreading there since November 20, but the case has only now become public because a relative of a victim informed the Tagesspiegel. His previously healthy father-in-law had died of an infection in only ten days.

Conditions at the Domicil facility have facilitated a rapid spread of the virus. The home was understaffed, and workers had to move back and forth between floors. Residents in double rooms who tested positive were not separated from their room neighbors, which the home’s management justified by referring to lack of space.

Showering had been stopped “because the water vapors including the viruses can penetrate the FFP2 masks,” the Tagesspiegel quotes. The food was apparently reduced to ready meals with disposable dishes. Many dementia patients refused to eat and were completely emaciated.

The relative told the Tagesspiegel, “We are shocked that such conditions can exist in a country like Germany.” The man, in tears, denounced the silence of the authorities. He said he was sure that the “number of unreported cases is much higher in the city.”

A similar case occurred at the Rosenhof housing complex for elderly people in the southwestern district of Zehlendorf. Eleven people died of coronavirus there in October, which only became public after a reader contacted the Tagesspiegel.

The district councilor for health, Carolina Böhm (SPD), justified the authorities’ cover-up policy. It was about “protecting the facility” from press calls and distorted reporting, she claimed. Böhm did not give precise details about the current situation of nursing homes in her district, but admitted that there are cases every day, which is now part of the “sad everyday life.”

The same argument was repeated by the health councilor in the district of Friedrichshain, Knut Mildner-Spindler from the Left Party. There, in the Haus an der Spree nursing home, more than 80 residents and employees are now infected. Coma patients already had to be transferred to the hospital because they had not enough staff to care for them. Nevertheless, Mildner-Spindler downplayed the situation as “not that dramatic.” It was “all clear and under control,” the Left Party politician told the Tagesspiegel newspaper two weeks ago. He also waved away the seriousness of the situation by declaring that the outbreaks were now part of everyday life.

What Berlin politicians refer to as “sad everyday life” is the result of their deliberate policies. The mantra of recent months that one must “learn to live with the virus” is now showing its cruel logic. The federal government and all state governments, whether under Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU), SPD, Greens, Left Party or the Liberals (FDP), have prevented a containment of the pandemic and thus dramatically accelerated the spread of the virus into vulnerable population groups. In Berlin, the SPD and the Left Party in particular have implemented social cuts for decades and pushed the drive for profits in the care homes.

Media reports about seniors who perish in care homes are unwanted because they throw a spotlight on the “new reality” enforced by the German ruling elite in the interests of profit: the premature death of grandparents and parents and the selection and “triage” of people who, from the point of view of the capitalist profit economy, no longer have any value and are a burden for the health care system.

For cost reasons, testing and hygiene measures are enforced only hesitantly or not at all. According to the Berliner Zeitung, the Berlin health administration justified the lack of a testing strategy by pointing out that the tests were “basically only a snapshot” and therefore “only conditionally suitable for protecting facilities against the entry of the virus by visitors.”

According to official figures, around 62,600 tests were carried out in Berlin in the week December 7–13. This was about 16,000 fewer than six weeks before. The reason is said to be fluctuating laboratory capacities, although the Senate, referring to the “business secrets” of the private laboratories, does not reveal why this is the case. The fact is that in Berlin, in many suspected COVID-19 cases, no tests are carried out or those tested had to wait several days for their results.

At the same time, Berlin’s hospitals are increasingly overstrained. The head of Charité, one of Europe’s largest university hospitals, sounded the alarm in the beginning of December. Speaking in the news Tagesthemen, he said, “We will very soon be at the limit of what we can do.”

Capacity in intensive care units is running short. According to the DIVI Intensive Care Register, which documents intensive care treatment capacities in Germany on a daily basis, Berlin has the lowest proportion of vacant intensive care beds in a nationwide comparison. On Wednesday, only 140 of a total of 1,134 ICU beds for adults were vacant.

As anger among the working class about the devastating crisis is growing, the political parties are trying to wash their hands of the matter and divert attention from their responsibility. SPD politician Ephraim Gothe, city health councilor in Berlin-Mitte, claimed to the Tagesspiegel that there was no capacity to reconstruct the individual cases in nursing homes and discuss them publicly. “This is not the time to ask the question of guilt,” Gothe said.

In fact, the “question of guilt” is already posed and answered. The SPD-Left Party-Green Senate is responsible for this disaster and now continuing on the same course. The Berlin Senate’s new pandemic ordinance of December 14 reveals that the supposedly “tough” nationwide lockdown, in place only until January 10, is woefully inadequate and, because of exceptions and loopholes, not even remotely aimed at bringing the pandemic under control.

Events with up to 100 people outdoors and up to 50 people indoors are still allowed. The alleged closure of kindergartens is lifted through the back door because parents can still put their children in “emergency care” if they have no other solution. Since there is no closure of the factories or relief for the parents, the daycare centers are automatically filled. “In these cases, the [Berlin] Senate Department for Youth trusts in the solution and action competence of facilities and parents,” it said in a press release. In other words, the Senate shifts responsibility to the working class, which continues to be forced to choose between their health and their jobs.

Other educational institutions also allow face-to-face teaching formats despite “lockdown.” At Berlin universities, “practical formats that cannot be carried out digitally as well as exams” may take place in person; the number of students “shall” not exceed 25. Tests and exams at schools will not be postponed in view of the health catastrophe but may be conducted in person; teachers and school staff must be on duty. Berlin’s Education Senator Sandra Scheeres (SPD) has announced that there will be emergency care for younger children even during the Christmas vacations. From January 11, schools should then reopen completely and resume in-person teaching.

Canada’s health care system buckling as governments reject measures to contain COVID-19

Roger Jordan

As COVID-19 infections continue to rise across Canada, dire warnings about the health care system’s inability to cope are growing. The number of intensive care patients in Ontario’s hospitals surpassed the peak of the first wave of the pandemic Monday and is fast approaching the level at which Doug Ford’s provincial government has acknowledged that it will be impossible to maintain adequate health care for those suffering from other illnesses or injuries.

There were 285 COVID-19 patients in Ontario intensive care units as of December 21, more than the 283 recorded at the high point during the spring. When COVID-19 intensive care patients surpass 300, which is set to occur within the next 10 days, health authorities say that they will no longer be able to guarantee regular levels of care for other patients.

The crisis is particularly stark in Peel Region, where approximately half of all intensive care patients at two hospitals in Brampton and Mississauga have COVID-19.

Although the province claims 400 intensive care beds remain available for patients, health care professionals point out that not all of these can be used due to staff shortages. “Only 15 per cent of the work that we do is elective. 85 per cent of the stuff that comes to our door we can’t alter. That is traumas, cardiac surgery, cancer surgery, transplants and we can’t cancel those,” explained Dr. Michael Warner, the medical director of critical care at Michael Garron Hospital. “So our ability to flex up is limited primarily by the number of highly trained nurses we have and those nurses are in critically short supply right now. We have to get this thing under control.”

The situation is equally serious in Alberta, where the United Conservative Party government announced earlier this month plans to establish field hospitals capable of treating up to 750 patients. In Edmonton, the intensive care unit at the Stollery Children’s Hospital has been transformed into a unit caring for adult patients with COVID-19, with the children moved to a cardiac intensive care unit. Alberta Health Services also reported that four COVID-19 outbreaks are ongoing at hospitals in the Calgary zone, and that Fort Saskatchewan Community Hospital will close its labour and delivery unit to free up bed space. Pregnant patients will have to travel over 30 kilometres to the nearest health care facility.

In Quebec, Health Minister Christian Dubé announced that beds are being added in “non-traditional” settings, including hotels, to cope with an increase in demand that has seen coronavirus patients rise by 50 percent over the past three weeks. With the number of COVID-19 patients receiving hospital care now exceeding 1,000, ten of the province’s hospitals are on the verge of overflowing, Dubé said.

In British Columbia, the government is sending three “alternative care units” to the Vancouver Island, Northern Health, and Fraser Health regions to cope with the crushing demand for hospital beds. The units are shipping containers comprised of 40 beds that can be used to establish basic emergency care centres in gymnasiums, community centres, and other buildings. Last week, the province registered a new high of 361 patients in hospital, 93 of whom were in intensive care, another tragic record.

As horrendous as the health care crisis is, estimates suggest that the situation will deteriorate drastically in coming weeks. New modelling from Ontario shows that by January 24, Ontario will have 5,000 daily COVID-19 infections per day, more than double the current 7-day average of 2,100, if infections continue to increase by on average 1 percent per day. A 5 percent increase, which epidemiologists are warning is highly possible absent urgent action, would result in a staggering 14,000 new daily infections by late January.

Given that a delay of several weeks is usually observed between infection and hospitalization, the demands on already overstretched hospitals are all but certain to increase.

These developments are not inevitable. Rather, they are the direct product of the criminal policies that the entire political establishment are pursuing. From Justin Trudeau’s federal Liberal government on down, the main concern of Canada’s ruling elite has been to protect the profits of big business and the wealth of the super-rich, while forcing workers to remain on the job amid a raging pandemic.

After the Liberals engineered vast bailouts for the banks and financial oligarchy in the spring totaling more than $650 billion, Trudeau worked closely with big business lobby groups and his allies in the trade unions to enforce the reckless reopening of the economy. He was supported in this homicidal endeavour by the hard-right provincial governments of François Legault in Quebec, Ford in Ontario, and Jason Kenney in Alberta, as well as the New Democratic Party-led government of John Horgan in BC. A critical part of reopening the economy was ensuring that schools were opened for in-person classes so they could function as child minding services for parents, who were forced back into dangerous workplaces.

Provincial governments are continuing this policy of placing profits before human lives even as the terrible consequences, expressed above all in the mounting death toll and threatened collapse of the health care system, become ever clearer. On Monday, the Ford government announced what it termed a “lockdown” for the whole of Ontario, as of December 26. Yet the lockdown order contained so many loopholes and exceptions that Globe and Mail health correspondent André Picard aptly characterized it as a “mockdown.” The exemptions will above all impact large worksites, which have been one of the main vectors for transmission of the virus.

Many workplaces that have experienced major outbreaks, including food processing plants and warehouses, will remain open. Businesses allowed to continue operating include “all construction activities and services,” “supply chains, including businesses that work in processing, packaging, warehousing, distribution, delivery, and maintenance,” “manufacturing,” “courier, postal, shipping, moving and delivery services,” “staffing services including providing temporary help,” and “hotels, cottages, resorts and motels.” Large retail stores like Costco and Walmart will also be allowed to remain open because they stock groceries or pharmacy products.

The “lockdown” order fixes January 11 as the date when elementary schools will reopen. Secondary schools will follow two weeks later. An earlier version of the order which included the restricting of childcare services to essential workers was scrapped so as to ensure childcare remains accessible to all. Given that virtually all businesses outside of the retail sector remain open, the vast majority of parents will continue to send their children to daycare in order to continue going to work.

Health experts have attacked the Ford government’s decision to delay the imposition of the lockdown until December 26. This means that family gatherings over Christmas can take place before the restriction on social gatherings to members of the same household comes into force. Anthony Dale, president of the Ontario Health Association, said that hospital directors and health care leaders were “shocked” that the restrictions have been delayed until after Christmas.

A similar process is under way in neighbouring Quebec. In mid-November, Legault announced with great fanfare that family gatherings of up to three households and 10 people would be permitted for a four-day period around Christmas. As the devastating consequences of the province’s back-to-work and back-to-school policies became clear, however, the government was forced to perform an about-face and abandon the planned relaxation of social distancing measures.

At a joint press conference with opposition leaders Tuesday, the same day as the province announced a record daily high of 2,183 new infections, Legault sought to blame the population at large for the catastrophe produced by his government’s policies. “It’s time to be responsible,” he lectured Quebec residents, insisting that they should limit gatherings to members of their own household. Manon Massé, co-leader of the pseudo-left Quebec Solidaire, declared at the joint press conference that she was putting aside her “political differences” with Legault to ensure that Quebecers “work together.”

While the restrictions on social gatherings are necessary, the Legault government’s determination to reopen schools on January 11 will contribute to a further escalation of infections. The entire manufacturing sector will also be allowed to operate normally between December 25 and January 10.

The disastrous conditions produced by the ruling elite’s criminal mishandling of the pandemic underscore the urgency of the working class intervening with its own solution to the crisis. If thousands of lives are to be saved and the collapse of the health care system averted, workers must mount a political struggle for the complete shutdown of all nonessential production with full pay for all workers affected, the closure of in-person learning at all schools until the pandemic is brought under control, and the provision of tens of billions of dollars for health care and social services. These measures are all the more necessary given that the successful development of a vaccine means that the vast majority of the population could be immunized in a matter of a few months.

To fund the measures needed to halt the spread of COVID-19 and save lives, the ruling elite’s vast wealth must be impounded and the hundreds of billions in bailout money the federal government and Bank of Canada funneled into the banks and financial markets redirected into protecting workers’ incomes and providing quality health care to all. This can only be realized as part of the mass mobilization of the working class in the struggle for a workers’ government committed to the socialist reorganization of socio-economic life.

Canadian Cargill plant closed after more than 80 employees test positive for coronavirus

Cordell Gascoigne

Last week, on Thursday, December 17, a Cargill meat-processing plant in Guelph, Ontario, was forced to close after a major outbreak of coronavirus. Wellington-Dufferin-Guelph (WDG) Public Health announced that day that 87 cases had been confirmed, concentrated to the Guelph facility, while an additional 42 were considered to have been exposed and instructed to self-quarantine.

According to the WDG Public Health website, there have been 2,175 confirmed cases and 44 fatalities in the WDG area, a population of approximately 272,000. The area was moved into the “red zone” by the government of Ontario on December 11, triggering stricter social distancing protocols, including limiting large gatherings.

In an email to Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) Kitchener-Waterloo, a Cargill spokesperson wrote, “We are taking this step out of an abundance of caution as our local workforce deals with the community-wide impacts of COVID-19. As we work in partnership with the union, our employees will be paid the 36 hours per week as outlined in our collective agreement.”

In a statement issued by the company, Cargill “stressed the importance” that “any employees who are sick or have been exposed to anyone with COVID-19 in the last 14 days to stay home.”

However, despite the outbreak in the plant and the spread of the virus in the community, Cargill has announced that it plans to reopen on December 29, less than two weeks after the shutdown began and well before the WDG area leaves “red zone” status.

Moreover, before shutting production Cargill required workers finish their shifts to process what unprocessed meats remained in the facility.

Tim Deelstra, spokesman for United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Locals 175 and 633, says the union has been speaking on a daily basis with Cargill about the coronavirus outbreak. “Employees are going to be covered as per the collective agreement for this week. And we’re having ongoing conversations with the employer about what the future will look like. Certainly, again, our role as the union is not only to protect their physical health and safety, but also to look after their economic health and safety, too.”

However, the UFCW allowed the plant to continue operating for weeks after the outbreak first became known. Two weeks prior to shutdown, 21 employees at the plant had already tested positive, along with approximately 80 additional workers who were exposed and sent home to self-quarantine, with no action being taken by the UFCW.

In fact, the Guelph plant experienced its first cases back in May. Deelstra feigned concern for the workers, saying, “It’s a big concern. People are trying to go to work, and we want them to be safe and we want them to go home safe.”

In reality, the UFCW on both sides of the US-Canada border has played a crucial role in allowing management to maintain production in the teeth of the pandemic. When JBS beef workers in Greeley, Colorado walked off the job in July after 6 of their co-workers had died, UFCW Local 7 responded by circulating a flyer instructing workers to remain on the job. It has limited itself to toothless publicity stunts, such as renting a billboard with the names and pictures of the dead JBS workers and driving a billboard truck with slogans demanding hazard pay around to local grocery stories.

The local union in Waterloo, Iowa even worked with management at a Tyson Foods pork plant to cook up an incentive program for perfect attendance even as managers took bets on how many workers would eventually become infected. Over 1,000 workers in the facility have fallen ill and five have died.

Jon Nash, Cargill Protein North America President, issued a statement claiming it was a “difficult decision” to idle production at the plant “because, as part of the food supply chain, it is an essential service.” In reality, what is “essential” for Cargill and other meatpacking companies is keeping workers on the job to continue producing profits. While the company has not released its financial results for 2020, the Minnesota-based company typically makes around $115 billion in revenue and $3 bill in profits annually.

Trump pardons Blackwater killers for Nisour Square massacre

Patrick Martin

President Trump’s pardon of four Blackwater mercenaries, tried and convicted of mass murder in Baghdad during the Iraq War, is a clear signal that American soldiers and the paramilitary thugs who assist them can kill with impunity in wars of aggression launched by US imperialism. And it sends a message about domestic as well as foreign policy. Trump is seeking to develop fascist forces, including sections of the police and military, who will be prepared to carry out similar massacres against American workers and youth.

Trump has been threatening to pardon the Nisour Square killers for several years, in the course of which he has pardoned several other convicted war criminals from Iraq and Afghanistan. The Blackwater guards have high-level support, both among Fox News pundits watched by Trump, and within his own cabinet—his billionaire Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos is the sister of Erik Prince, Blackwater’s founder.

Trump pardoned Blackwater ontractor Nicholas Slatten from life in prison for his role in the 2007 shooting of unarmed civilians in Iraq. (AP Photo/Cliff Owen, File)

The circumstances of the 2007 Nisour Square massacre are not in doubt, following exhaustive investigations by the US military, the FBI and the Iraqi authorities. A squad of Blackwater mercenaries, deployed as guards for US State Department officials, left their base in the Green Zone, the US government’s compound in central Baghdad, on the morning of September 16, 2007, equipped with heavy weapons. At the first city square they entered, the mercenaries halted traffic, then opened fire indiscriminately with automatic weapons and grenade launchers on cars, taxis and buses carrying hundreds of ordinary Iraqis going about their daily business. No Iraqis fired shots, displayed weapons, or in any way threatened the Blackwater agents.

When the bloodbath was over, at least 14 Iraqis lay dead and 17 were wounded. None of the Americans suffered so much as a scratch. The death list demonstrates the essentially random character of the victims, 10 men, two women, and two boys, hit in the hail of gunfire and explosives. There is no reference to these names in the pardon declaration issued by the White House:

• Ahmad Haitham Ahmad al-Rubai, 20, a medical student
• Mahassin Mohssen Kadhum Al-Khazali, 46, Ahmad’s mother and a dermatologist
• Ghaniyah Hassan Ali, 55, mother of eight, who died on a bus shielding her daughter Afrah from the bullets
• Ali Mohammed Hafedh Abdul Razzaq, 9, killed in the car his father was driving
• Mohamed Abbas Mahmoud, 47, a delivery truck driver
• Qasim Mohamed Abbas Mahmoud, 12, the truck driver’s son
• Mushtaq Karim Abd Al-Razzaq, 18, an Iraqi soldier standing at a military checkpoint
• Osama Fadhil Abbas, 52, a car dealer
• Ali Khalil Abdul Hussein, 54, a blacksmith commuting to work on his motorcycle
• Ibrahim Abid Ayash, 77, a gardener and passenger on a bus
• Mahdi Sahib Nasir, 26, a taxi driver
• Hamoud Sa’eed Abttan, 33, an unemployed job seeker, father of seven
• Uday Ismail Ibrahiem, 27, Hamoud’s cousin, also unemployed and a father of three
• Sa’adi Ali Abbas Alkarkh, 52, a businessman

The Nisour Square massacre came at the high point of the bloodletting in Iraq, when President George W. Bush had ordered a “surge” in troop deployments and operations throughout Iraq to forestall an impending disintegration of the Iraqi puppet regime established by the 2003 US invasion. The death toll skyrocketed with the ongoing clashes with Iraqi insurgent forces. It was impossible for US officials to move outside the Green Zone without heavily armed escorts, mainly provided by Blackwater, which held a $1 billion contract for guard services in the war zones. Mainly drawn from ex-military men turned highly paid mercenaries, Blackwater was characterized by a colonialist disdain for the “natives” and a penchant for shooting first and never asking questions.

The 2014 trial in the United States included 30 eyewitnesses flown in from Iraq to give testimony, the largest number ever to come to America for such a purpose. Their accounts were graphic and heart-wrenching. “Anything that moved in Nisour Square was shot. Women, children, young people, they shot everyone,” said Hassan Jaber Salman, a lawyer who survived the attack with his son. Blackwater claimed that the convoy had come under attack, that the witness accounts were fabricated, and the killings were justified. However, a congressional report found that in 80 percent of the cases where Blackwater guards used their weapons in Iraq between 2005 and 2007, they had fired first.

Despite repeated interventions on behalf of the Blackwater mercenaries by US politicians, and court rulings that overturned several guilty verdicts, four were finally convicted. Nicholas Slatten was the first to open fire, killing Dr. Al-Khazali and her son Ahmad, who was driving her to a medical appointment in a white Kia. Slatten was sentenced to life imprisonment. Three others, Dustin Heard, Evan Liberty and Paul Slough, joined in the killing. They received prison sentences ranging from 11 to 15 years.

At the time that the Blackwater killers were first convicted and sentenced, the WSWS wrote:

The Blackwater mercenaries were among the most flagrant killers in Iraq but hardly unique. There are numerous reported incidents of mass murder conducted by US soldiers, special forces operatives and private contractors. Many more such incidents are unrecorded because no victims survived. But some of these were among the hundreds of atrocities made public by Private Chelsea (Bradley) Manning, who released logs of military reports to WikiLeaks, some made public under the title “Collateral Murder.”

More importantly, the politicians and generals who organized and led the US war in Iraq have gotten off scot-free. Under the principles laid down by the Nuremberg Tribunal after World War II, the leaders of the US government during the Iraq War—George W. Bush, Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, George Tenet, Paul Wolfowitz—and top military commanders from Tommy Franks to David Petraeus are guilty of the crime of planning and executing a war of aggression. They are collectively responsible for all the deaths that ensued as a result of their actions.

Today, many more names would be added to that list, including all the leading personnel of the Obama administration: Obama, Biden (now the president-elect and future distributor of pardons), as well as those who supervised drone warfare and larger-scale acts of military aggression in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen and other countries.

There were perfunctory statements of outrage from congressional Democrats over the Trump pardons. “If you murder civilians while at war, you get a pardon,” said Representative Adam Schiff, chair of the House Intelligence Committee.

But Trump’s suppression of the Nisour Square convictions is only the crudest expression of a policy embraced by Democratic administrations as well as Republican. No one can forget that it was Obama who blocked all prosecutions of CIA officers for running secret torture chambers around the world, claiming that he wanted to “look forward, not backward.” What he looked “forward” to was using the CIA to carry out drone-missile assassinations all over the world, with American citizens among the victims.

President-elect Biden, who was Obama’s vice president, has already indicated that he will pursue the same policy, opposing prosecutions of Trump administration officials for such crimes as separating thousands of immigrant children from their parents, brutalizing and even killing migrants at the border, and carrying out flagrant violations of international law like the drone-missile killing of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani.

And while paying lip service to having learned the lessons of the bloodbaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, Biden has filled the national security positions in his cabinet and on his White House staff with advocates of and participants in these wars. He selected as his nominee to head the Pentagon, retired General Lloyd Austin, who was deputy to David Petraeus in 2008, during one of the bloodiest stretches of the war, and then held the top military command in Baghdad in 2010-2011, overseeing the final stages of the US withdrawal. Austin later headed the US Central Command as US troops poured back into Iraq to combat ISIS forces that were overrunning the Iraqi military.

The principal charge raised by the Democratic Party against Trump over the past four years was that he was insufficiently aggressive in prosecuting military operations in Syria and carrying forward the US military-intelligence onslaught against Russia initiated by the Obama administration. The replacement of Trump by Biden next month will not mean any lessening in the belligerence of American imperialism, only new dangers.

The struggle against imperialist war and barbarism requires the political mobilization of the working class, against both parties of imperialism, the Democrats as much as the Republicans, on the basis of a socialist and antiwar program.

Spain’s PSOE-Podemos government defends “herd immunity” policy in The Lancet

Alice Summers

At the start of December, as COVID-19 ravaged Spain, Fernando Simón, a top health official of the Socialist Party (PSOE)-Podemos government, wrote to the medical journal The Lancet defending his government’s politically criminal handling of the pandemic.

The signatories included Simón, the director of the Centre for the Coordination of Health Alerts and Emergencies (CCAES), his deputy María José Sierra Moros, and 11 other signatories from the CCAES.

The letter bemoans the fact that an “earlier start to the second COVID-19 epidemic wave in Spain compared with other European countries has raised overt criticism [of the] public health administrations’ response.” It seeks to dispel these criticisms, referring to the increased “response capacities” Spain supposedly developed after the first wave of the pandemic.

Podemos party leader Pablo Iglesias speaks as Spain's caretaker Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez looks on after signing an agreement at the parliament in Madrid, Spain, Tuesday, Nov. 12, 2019. (AP Photo/Paul White)

Simón’s apologia came as coronavirus cases surged once again, after a month in which positive test rates had been on the decline. After reaching a peak of roughly 25,000 daily infections in early November, positive cases fell to around 7,000 a day by the start of December, before sharply rising again over the last two weeks as limited restrictions were largely abandoned in the run-up to Christmas.

Spain is now the ninth-worst affected country in the world by officially recorded infection numbers, and tenth by total fatalities, with 1.8 million positive cases and 48,926 deaths. Across the globe, Spain ranks eighth for deaths per capita, with 104.71 fatalities per 100,000 people, according to John Hopkins University—roughly one death for every thousand inhabitants of Spain.

Alarmed at the growing political radicalisation produced by the pandemic, Simón’s letter is an abject attempt to cover up the government’s responsibility for the tens of thousands of deaths. The letter dishonestly asserts that “Spain greatly increased its response capacities after the first wave of this virus.”

“All strategies and protocols were integrated into an updated early response plan,” it continues, “… including provisions for increasing epidemiological surveillance, test-trace-isolate procedures, strategic reserves, and health-care capacity, among others, which was adopted in July.”

Simón’s self-congratulatory reference to measures introduced after the first wave of the pandemic sidesteps the contagion which ravaged Spain in the early months of 2020 and the consequent appalling loss of life. Hospitals were overwhelmed by the onslaught of the virus, as the elderly were left to die in care homes and morgues were overflowing with COVID-19 victims.

According to the government’s own figures, roughly 29,000 people died of the virus in the first five months of 2020 alone. These figures only include those who died after testing positive for the virus. With systematic coronavirus testing largely unavailable at the start of the pandemic, they are a significant and deliberate underestimate of the true scale of the catastrophe.

In fact, according to Spain’s National Institute of Statistics (INE), 45,684 people died from suspected or confirmed COVID-19 in the first wave of the pandemic alone, most between March and May this year.

INE data also revealed that a further 4,218 fatalities occurred during this period in which coronavirus was not the primary cause, but nonetheless contributed to death as a comorbidity. These include people who had suffered from conditions like cancer and ultimately died from complications linked to the coronavirus.

Taken together, these figures indicate that around 50,000 deaths can be linked to COVID-19 in the first five months of 2020 alone. This makes the virus the leading cause of death in Spain in this period. INE data shows it killed as many people in Spain as all types of cancers combined, caused twice as many deaths as respiratory diseases and roughly seven times the number of fatalities as those caused by external events such as murders, traffic accidents, suicides and accidental deaths.

As to the suggestion that Spain’s response since the first wave has been exemplary, this year the country suffered its deadliest autumn in over four decades. Across the months of September, October and November, Spain recorded over 110,000 deaths from any cause, the most fatalities in this period since consistent records began in 1975, with the end of the Franco regime. Spain has never registered more than 100,000 deaths in this period in the 45 years since the transition to democracy.

In fact, according to figures from state Mortality Monitoring System, of the 30 days with the highest total mortality since 1975, 28 of them have been during the coronavirus pandemic. Figures from the INE also show that across the year there have been over 75,000 “excess deaths” in Spain, compared to the average yearly deaths recorded across the 2016–19 period.

This is the direct product of the government’s refusal to enact any serious measures to contain the second wave of the pandemic. In early November, in a press conference for the Ministry of Health, Simón made this criminal policy clear: “What we have right now in Spain is not a [stay-at-home] lock-down, and this will probably not be necessary.”

He continued: “If we carry out a real and full confinement and nobody leaves their house for any reason, within around 15 days we would have this under control, or perhaps within a month. But this is impossible. There are people who need to work, to buy things, who need to leave… Total confinement is impossible.”

Simón’s December letter also praised the “[e]xtensive and transparent information for daily epidemic monitoring” made available by the Spanish government, which is “based on exhaustive individual case information received daily at the national level.”

Like those reported by its counterparts across Europe, Spanish government figures have been far from “exhaustive” and “transparent.” In fact, official statistics undercount total fatalities by a margin of tens of thousands. The government reports a total death toll of 29,000 in the first wave of the pandemic, against the roughly 50,000 fatalities estimated by the INE. While the INE puts excess deaths at over 75,000 in 2020, the PSOE-Podemos government acknowledged a total COVID-19 death toll of roughly 50,000.

Regional governments also obscured the scale of the catastrophe. Reports emerged in October that the Madrid regional government was tampering with daily figures. It omitted thousands of cases from its daily tallies, before retroactively modifying the infection figures as much as a fortnight later, without notifying the public.

Also, in October, professionals from Catalan research centres and the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Germany, wrote to The Lancet criticising the Spanish government for failing to provide detailed data on the pandemic, broken down by age, sex and area. “In Spain,” the letter stated, “COVID-19 data currently published at the country and regional levels are insufficient to understand the dynamics of COVID-19 and to take action.”

Later in his December letter, Simón admits: “However, weaknesses persist in the system, with chronic underinvestment in primary health care, public health, digitalisation, research and innovation, bureaucratic procedures, and with little availability of trained professionals.” Simón avoids mentioning that these “weaknesses” are the result of austerity policies pursued over decades by governments across the political spectrum, leaving Spain woefully ill-prepared to face the COVID-19 pandemic.

Concluding his letter, Simón attempts to shift the blame for Spain’s massive death toll onto the working class, claiming that the government’s failure to stem the pandemic is in fact due to the population’s “pandemic fatigue.”

“Politicisation and an unfortunate climate of confrontation permeating different sectors,” he writes, “makes effective crisis communication challenging and is likely to impair response efforts.” That is, the widespread, legitimate anger in the working class at a murderous “herd immunity” policy will not be tolerated. On this basis, earlier this year, the PSOE-Podemos government sent riot police to assault steelworkers striking for the right to shelter at home.

The letter to The Lancet is a foul attempt to let the PSOE-Podemos government of the hook for a criminal policy it has pursued.

Rubber glove factories become COVID-19 epicentres in Malaysia

Robert Campion

Workers are fighting the world’s largest medical glove manufacturer, Top Glove, over unsanitary working conditions that have led to the largest, active coronavirus hotspots in Malaysia. Damning exposures by workers have revealed sweltering and unsafe conditions, with lack of protections, no social distancing and packed dormitories.

According to statistics from Malaysia’s Ministry of Health, 5,700 of Top Glove’s 11,215 employees at just one of its manufacturing centres have tested positive for coronavirus since November. For a number of days, the company’s 21,000 employees accounted for over half of Malaysia’s new cases. The company was forced to submit to staggered shutdowns of its factories, largely in the Meru region.

Entrance to Top Glove Tower in Selangor, Malaysia (Photo: Wikimedia)

Responsible for 60 percent of the world’s disposable gloves, the company reported on December 16 that it had tested 10,000 employees, of whom 93 percent had recovered, but declined to specify how many had tested positive. It also announced the reopening of its factories despite days earlier confirming its first COVID-19 death, 29-year-old security guard Yam Narayan Chaudhary, who was based at a manufacturing facility in Klang, 40 kilometres west of the capital Kuala Lumpur.

Chaudhary died in a Selangor province hospital due to COVID-related pneumonia and lung fibrosis but was not admitted to the hospital for three days owing to the decisions of management. Why this occurred has not been explained, although it is of piece with Top Glove’s exploitative conditions.

No condolences or information were passed on to his family in western Nepal.

“Our whole family was very much shocked,” his brother Bhabindra told the New York Times. “He always tried to assure us that he is quite young and healthy, so nothing could happen to him with COVID. We feel it’s Top Glove’s failure that they are not able to protect their workers.”

The outbreaks emerged after months of the company posting record profits. Top Glove took advantage of being exempted from Malaysia’s lockdown earlier this year, at the insistence of European and other governments. From September to November, its net profits surged to 2.38 billion ringgit ($US584 million)—more than 20 times higher than the equivalent period last year.

Top Glove also became the second-largest listed company on the Malaysian stock market. Its share price rose 300 percent. Its shareholders include Malaysian and Norwegian state pension funds, as well as US-based Blackrock, the world’s largest asset manager.

This has come at the direct expense of its workers, who are subjected to low wages and long stretches of overtime. Collectively, Top Glove employees produce 200 million disposable gloves a day, but each receive roughly $300 a month in salary, and are forced to work 72-hour work weeks on occasion, making them tired and more vulnerable to the virus.

Employees reported becoming soaked in sweat after working only an hour due to the lack of air conditioning. Instead of being given replacement masks, they are supplied only with one a day.

Even to gain work at Top Glove in the first place, some migrant workers are forced into debt bondage by having to pay fees of $5,000, which can take months or years to recoup. Dormitories are crowded, with as many as 20 in one room on bunk beds.

Throughout the pandemic, the company has ignored safety protocols, suppressed information and intimidated its largely migrant workforce.

One whistleblower, another migrant worker from Nepal, Yubaraj Khadka, took photos as far back as May of workers crowding into the factory. According to Reuters, photos show dozens of workers less than a metre apart waiting for their temperature checks before starting their night shifts.

“There was no one-metre distancing. That’s what I wanted to show,” Khadka told the New York Times, “even at the factory, after the first few months (of infections in Malaysia), the social distancing markers were thrown out.”

Khadka commented: “The Top Glove management’s mentality is that migrant labourers are very low. If I could talk to the bosses, I would say, ‘Treat us better, like humans.’”

Instead, Khadka was fired in September after the company scoured its CCTV footage for months. Upon his termination, the management confiscated his phone.

Workers also reported being denied the results from their COVID tests. According to the newspaper, six were not given their results this month, even though one of them was hospitalised for six days.

Malaysia is in the midst of its third and largest wave of coronavirus cases. There were 2,018 recorded infections on Monday—roughly double the daily average in November—bringing the total confirmed cases to 95,327. One death occurred, taking the toll to 438.

Top Glove is just the tip of the iceberg. Conditions are reportedly worse at smaller Malaysian glove makers. One company, Brightway Holdings, had its factory in Kajang district raided by government officials. They found workers living in cramped, dirty shipping containers stacked behind the premises. Most were migrant workers.

Smaller glove maker Kossan Rubber Industries this week announced the results of testing since December 4, which recorded 990 COVID-19 cases at a plant in Klang. Employees are now undergoing quarantine and the plant has been closed until December 30.

Along with factories, clusters are emerging in similar conditions in prisons and detention centres.

The Malaysian authorities have launched 19 investigations to determine whether Top Glove has violated labour standards, but this just an effort to save face and stifle popular discontent.

In neighbouring Singapore, the government announced last week that 47 percent of its migrant workforce, or 152,000 workers, had contracted the virus, as compared to about 4,000 of Singapore’s citizens.

The fight against the virus in Malaysia and internationally requires the ending of the unsafe and exploitative conditions that become vectors for the pandemic. This requires a globally unified struggle of the international working class, not just against individual companies but against the profit system itself.

US Federal Reserve backstops rising corporate debt mountain

Nick Beams

As the WSWS noted, there was one notable feature of the passage of the $900 billion relief bill through the US Congress earlier this week that demonstrated the absolute loyalty of the Democrats to the Wall Street financial oligarchy.

After abandoning aid for cash-strapped cities and states to provide services and agreeing to a grossly inadequate one-time payment of $600 to most working people, they rose up in arms against at attempt to restrict operations by the Fed to bolster major companies.

The Federal Reserve headquarters in Washington, DC (Source: Wikimedia/Rdsmith4)

Republican Senator Pat Toomey moved to prevent the Fed reviving an operation in which it receives money from the US Treasury, which it then leverages to make ultra-cheap loans to businesses and to buy corporate debt.

The Fed had raised objections when Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin called for the winding down of the program in November warning that it could impede its operations to sustain Wall Street and other financial markets.

The importance of that support, which was lifted to new heights following the market freeze in mid-March, has been underscored by data on the level of corporate borrowing this year compiled by the Bank of America and reported in the Financial Times earlier in the week.

US companies have borrowed a record $2.5 trillion in the bond market this year. This has meant that leverage—the ratio between debt and earnings—for investment grade companies has gone to new heights after reaching record levels in 2019.

The actions taken by the Fed in response to the March crisis have provided crucial support for these operations. The Fed took the unprecedented decision to buy investment-grade corporate bonds as well as buying exchange traded funds, including those that tracked riskier assets.

Unlike the purchases of Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities, which form the backbone of the Fed’s market intervention—currently running at $120 billion a month more than $1.4 trillion a year—the move into corporate bond purchases involved backing from the US Treasury, which the Toomey measure sought to restrict in the future.

The Fed’s corporate bond intervention after March had an immediate impact. As the Financial Times noted: “Without even purchasing a single bond, prices began to recover, bolstered by the Fed’s support. Investor confidence in corporate America returned and the floodgates opened to fresh corporate debt raising.”

Initially debt was raised to cover the loss of income due to the pandemic. But what the Financial Times called “the largest corporate borrowing spree on record” has developed as companies have used the ultra-low interest rates facilitated by the Fed to build up their cash holdings in order to take advantage of any favourable buying operations.

The significance of the Fed’s intervention into the corporate debt market, which the Democrats were so desperate to ensure continued unimpeded, was underscored by Jonny Fine, the USA head of debt syndicate at Goldman Sachs. He described it as “the most important piece of central bank policymaking I have seen in my career.”

Despite leverage ratios reaching record highs, indicating an escalation of risks, and the number of zombie companies—those where interest payments are higher than profits—climbing close to historic highs, the debt bubble has continued to inflate.

Rating agencies have downgraded ratings and a record number of firms have this year been rated at triple C, one of the lowest levels, and almost double the number last year.

They key factor at work in this extraordinary situation is the role of the Fed.

As Alex Veroude, chief investment officer at Insight Investment, commented to the Financial Times: “The Fed has created an expectation of a bailout.”

He said it almost did not matter “what other indicators or debt or leverage show” and that ‘if you think about it, it is insane. It’s exactly what critics would say capitalism has created. But it’s the reality.”

Increased Fed intervention has also aided the private equity market where vast profits are accumulated through takeover deals and buyouts. The value of private equity deals this year has risen to the highest levels since 2007. Buyouts were worth $559 billion this year, an increase of 20 percent over last year, according to figures compiled by Refinitiv.

When the pandemic struck at the beginning of the year it appeared that the mergers and acquisitions market was going to take a major hit. But the intervention of the Fed provided a boost to this form of financial parasitism, as it did to many others.

Commenting on a rise of private equity deals, Bryce Klemper at the consultant firm McKinsey noted: “Ultimately the lifeblood of private equity is cheap debt. When you have the Fed saying debt will stay cheap for years… the numbers look buoyant.”

There are a number of conclusions to be drawn from these developments.

On the economic front, the growth of debt parasitism makes clear what lies behind the bipartisan refusal in the US to implement the necessary measures to deal with the pandemic because of the impact they would have on the stock market and the financial system more broadly.

Politically, the events of this year have delivered the death blow to whatever remained of the doctrine of the “free market” which has functioned as one of the essential ideological pillars of the capitalist order.

The financial oligarchy has continued to prosper to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars, benefiting from death and destruction, through the direct intervention of the machinery of the capitalist state, of which the Fed is a crucial arm. And as events of the past week have revealed there is no greater supporter of the institutionalised mechanisms for siphoning wealth into the coffers of the financial oligarchy than the Democratic Party.