Housing crisis fuels poverty and inequality in New Zealand

Tom Peters

For hundreds of thousands of families in New Zealand, the holiday period this year will be one of the hardest in living memory.

Like other countries, the working class is bearing the full brunt of the most severe global economic crisis since the Great Depression, triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. Although New Zealand has, so far, experienced only 25 deaths from the virus, the social impact has been devastating.

The Labour Party-led government, which was re-elected in October and formed a coalition with the Green Party, is presiding over soaring social inequality and poverty. Its main response to the crisis was to hand out tens of billions of dollars in subsidies, mostly to large businesses. The Reserve Bank is making more than $100 billion available to the commercial banks, to prop up their profits and ensure unlimited cheap cash for big investors. Meanwhile tens of thousands of people have lost their jobs and 30 percent of households have reported a drop in income this year.

A typical Porirua street (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

In a December 7 interview with Stuff, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said her priorities remained to fix “housing, child poverty and climate change… Child poverty really motivates me, it’s one of the reasons I wanted to be in politics.”

During the election campaign Ardern falsely claimed that child poverty had reduced since she became prime minister in 2017. In fact, more than one in five children are still living in poverty.

A post-election briefing to Ardern from her Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, which was only made public on December 15, revealed it expects the number of children living in “material hardship,” i.e., lacking basics such as adequate clothing, shelter and food, to “rise strongly” in the coming period.

Demand for food parcels from charities is at record highs. On Christmas Eve, the Press newspaper reported that queues outside the Christchurch City Mission were causing “traffic chaos.” It noted that “Auckland City Mission has doubled the number of food parcels it makes available” after its phone lines crashed when it “received 42,000 calls in one day.” The charity estimates the level of “food poverty” has doubled from one in 10 to one in five people.

Housing costs are a major factor fueling the crisis. According to the Ministry for Housing and Urban Development, in 2019, 320,000 households were paying 40 percent or more of their income on housing. This has undoubtedly worsened in the past year, as house prices have soared by 11 percent, driven by out of control speculation by wealthy investors. Even in poor suburbs like Otara, South Auckland, modest houses are selling for more than $1 million.

Tee, Porirua emergency housing resident (Source: WSWS Media)

The number of mortgages in arrears increased to 15,000 in November, 2,000 more than in September, as people who have been made unemployed struggle to meet their payments.

As of September, there were 22,000 families waiting for public housing subsidised by the government, up from 6,000 in 2017. These people are basically homeless, living with relatives, in overcrowded conditions, or in caravans, garages, or motels that are serving as “emergency” public housing.

Figures from Trade Me, the main website listing rental properties, show that the national median weekly rent is now $520—21 percent higher than in 2015. In working class Porirua, north of Wellington, the figure is now $595, not much less than the median weekly income.

A 2018 report found that 20 percent of children in Porirua lived in overcrowded houses and a quarter were in damp and mouldy conditions. Porirua Mayor Anita Baker told Newshub on December 19: “This is already a crisis that demands an urgent policy response.”

Tee, a construction worker in Porirua, told the World Socialist Web Site that he and his partner, who is pregnant, were forced to live in emergency housing at a motel. The couple left their old flat in Hamilton when the landlord increased the rent from $350 to $550 “all in one go” after discovering that Tee had got a job.

“I am on $20 an hour, about $680 a week,” he said. This is just above the legal minimum wage. “It’s sad for us to watch on TV that there are kids and parents sleeping in their cars. It is heartbreaking.

“I voted for Labour, my whole family did. We were all thinking that the government was going to make a change. But by the looks of it, they are bringing more people down, not giving them places to live,” Tee said. “I hope that the government does hear us. To be honest, they are only sitting behind their desk and not realising how many people are actually struggling out here on the streets.”

A cleaner in Porirua, who asked to be referred to as Waha, had seen appalling conditions in some of the flats she cleaned. She told the WSWS some people paid $500 or $700 a week for “dumps.”

“I know when the windows don’t shut properly because you get a hell of a lot of mould and grime, and it doesn’t hold the heat in. The tenants are paying astronomical rents and the landlords and real estate agents say it’s a fair trade, when it’s not. If these houses were in better nick, people wouldn’t be spending a lot more money on heating, clothing, firewood, carpets, thermal curtains.

“All the people I know work bloody hard and usually both parents are working. Twenty-five dollars an hour is supposedly good money, but it’s not. As soon as the money hits their bank account it’s gone on power, rent, tax, petrol,” Waha said.

Fifteen years ago, she continued, it was possible to pay $520 a week for a large four-bedroom house, but since then the cost of living has soared, while wages remained stagnant. It was now impossible to save for anything.

Waha asked: “Why is the government allowing landlords to have rents at such astronomical prices? They have to do something. It’s their fault and only their fault. You cannot blame low-income people or unemployed people.” She said her attitude to politicians was the same as Jamaican singer Bob Marley, who once said: “It doesn’t matter to me, because they’re all the same.”

She said Prime Minister Ardern “plays the game very well” and was good at making speeches, but had done nothing for working people. “The working class is very anxious, there’s a lot of worry and stress, and at this time of the year a lot of financial drama. It’s been a hard year for them.”

Active-duty Spanish officers hail retired officers’ fascist calls for mass murder

Alejandro López

Spain’s online daily Público has released fascistic chat messages from a WhatsApp group of 121 active-duty officers from the IX Artillery Promotion. These messages support fascist retired officers who on WhatsApp hailed Spain’s fascist dictator, Francisco Franco, and called for a political genocide of 26 million people—anyone related by blood to voters for the ruling social-democratic Socialist Party (PSOE) and “left populist” Podemos party. This comes as videos emerge of Spanish soldiers singing fascist and neo-Nazi songs and making the fascist salute.

These chats also expose the false claims of Podemos general secretary and Deputy Prime Minister Pablo Iglesias as he downplays and covers up fascist sentiment in the officer corps. After the retired officers’ WhatsApp chats were revealed, Iglesias gave a prime-time television speech dismissing the chats as irrelevant, since they came from non-active-duty personnel: “What these gentlemen say, at their age and already retired, in a chat with a few too many drinks, does not pose any threat.”

It is now clear that the retired officers spoke for fascist sentiment that is rife within the entire officer corps, including among those on active duty. The latest chat leaked by Público starts with officer Alberto Vázquez sending an article from far-right online daily esdiario.es. The article accuses Colonel José Ignacio Domínguez, a former participant in the retired officers’ chat group, of having leaked the chats to Infolibreand being related to Iglesias.

Spanish army members pause during a rehearsal prior celebrations of the Spanish Constitution day at the Colon square in Madrid, Spain, Friday, Dec. 4, 2020. (AP Photo/Bernat Armangue)

Vázquez adds, “I trust that in this chat there is no S.O.B. traitor who denounces his colleagues in the worst manners like this chequista [fascist term for communist], without values or camaraderie. A private chat is private, in which you can say whatever you want, without anyone having to wait for a favour or fear of arbitrariness from anyone. We use our individual rights and freedoms, which have nothing to do with the respect that as military men we have for the constitution and the laws, unlike this mob that twists them at will to terminate the nation and the King.”

An officer identifying himself as Membrilla responds with a sticker of a gunner with his thumb raised, to which Vázquez responds, referring to Colonel Domínguez: “I wonder how this guy who is in the military, high ranking, minimally educated and cultured, at seventy years old, can be a communist? Communism is the most genocidal political system invented by man, the most annihilating of human freedom, the [system] most against God and men that we have ever seen.”

After this anti-communist rant, other active soldiers intervene to show their support for the fascist retired officers, the content of their chats and attacking the alleged whistle-blower Domínguez.

Burgos cynically asks, “where is the data protection law, if a private chat can be violated?” Albert Vázquez replies, “Under the rat’s hair bun.” Iglesias is well known for wearing his long hair in a bun, and Público notes that far right groups have manipulated social media links so that searches for “hunchbacked rat” in Spanish return Iglesias in the top search results.

Burgos—whom Público identifies as Second Lieutenant Gabriel Burgos Sánchez, currently in reserve but not retired—then supports the retired officers’ fascist WhatsApp messages, issuing a series of attacks on the Podemos-PSOE government typically used by fascist Vox party in parliament.

He accuses the Spanish government of overstating the COVID-19 pandemic, bemoaning “a Prime Minister [Pedro Sánchez] lying with death figures,” and denounces Podemos: “Pablo Iglesias allows himself the luxury of attacking the Monarchy, rejoicing the beating up of a policeman …” Burgos adds: “And they dare to attack a chat group when they ignore the feelings of many facing this attack and a world turned upside down by the evil ones? Gentlemen, ...... this was always Communism!!!”

Burgos added, “I consider everything to be an insult to all of us. They are coming to tell us: ‘you’re stupid …. Giving your whole life to defend your country when we don’t care.’”

Eventually, the chat members became concerned that these messages might be leaked publicly, as their fascist rants are opposed by the overwhelming majority of workers and youth. Garcia wrote, “we have to be more careful,” accompanying his text with the fascist salute and a cuff bearing the Francoite flag with the imperial eagle.

According to Público, this chat group is just “one of many other chats with a marked extreme right-wing bias and links shared with calls to overthrow the current government”. Público said it would publish more such chats in coming days.

These reports confirm the warnings of the WSWS: amid mounting social inequality and the political crisis triggered by the pandemic, powerful forces in European bourgeois politics are spreading and legitimizing fascism. Terrified by rising anger, protests and strikes against “herd immunity” policies and trillion-euro bailouts for corporations and banks, the ruling class is cultivating these forces against the mounting radicalisation of the working class.

The fact that Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias is hated by the fascists does not make him any less hostile to the working class. Aware that mobilising workers against the threat of a fascist coup would also lead them into struggle against his own pro-austerity and militarist government, Iglesias prefers to downplay its significance.

In a recent book presentation, Iglesias once again downplayed the significance of the chats, stating that to claim that the military could repeat a coup like in 1981 “means not understanding this country.” He criticized attempts to “distract ourselves with the chats of old former soldiers; instead we should focus on those narratives which seek to delegitimise” the PSOE-Podemos government.

Iglesias’ argument that pro-Francoite sentiment in the officer corps and calls for mass murder are irrelevant—in a country where Franco’s fascist military coup in 1936 led to a nearly forty-year fascist dictatorship from 1939 to 1978—is politically criminal. In reality, the Francoites in the officer corps, both active-duty and retired, speak for powerful sections of the entire Spanish ruling class. Their demands for deep social austerity, imperialist war, and “herd immunity” policies on COVID-19, and their coup plotting, proceed under political cover provided by Podemos.

This is because Iglesias is far more afraid of mass opposition among workers and youth to his own herd immunity and austerity policies than he is of a fascistic coup.

Sweden records deadliest November since 1918 Spanish flu pandemic

Jordan Shilton

Sweden recorded last month its deadliest November since the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918. With 8,088 deaths registered in the country, the excess mortality was 10 percent compared to average deaths in the same month between 2015 and 2019, according to Statistics Sweden.

These figures are a damning indictment of the ruling elite’s criminal response to the coronavirus pandemic, which has consisted of a refusal to take any serious measures to curb the spread of the disease. Sweden’s Social Democrat-led government’s refusal to impose even the limited lockdowns enacted in other European countries, together with its decisions to keep primary and lower secondary schools open and place no restrictions on economic activity, has produced a disastrously high death total and brought the country’s chronically underfunded health care system to the brink of collapse. Leading public health officials, including state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell, openly acknowledged in the spring that they were pursuing a policy of “herd immunity.”

Last week, the official COVID-19 death toll in Sweden surpassed 8,000. In a country of just 10 million people, over 400,000 infections have been recorded. Around 100 people are dying on a daily basis, the equivalent of over 3,000 in the United States population. Conditions are especially dire in the Stockholm region, where ICU capacity is over 100 percent and nonessential treatments are being cancelled. Patients must now be transferred to other regions of the country, and the possibility of seeking help from neighbouring Finland and Norway is even being discussed.

Patient in an Intensive Care Unit (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

Official figures indicate that large numbers of those infected never receive medical care. Just 3,815 people have received treatment in intensive care since the pandemic began, a figure that includes survivors and people who have died. In other words, only a fraction of the 8,167 people confirmed to have died from coronavirus as of December 22 received intensive care treatment.

The denial of care to certain sections of the population, especially those in care homes, has been even more dramatic. According to a report released earlier this month by the health and social care inspectorate, one in 20 suspected COVID-19 patients in some regions physically saw a doctor. Other regions issued explicit instructions denying all hospital care to care home residents for any illness or injury.

The crisis in the health system is compounded by the exodus of nurses and other health care professionals triggered by appalling working conditions. According to a survey by broadcaster TV4, nurses are leaving the profession in record numbers across the country. Resignations are up in 13 out of Sweden’s 21 regions compared to a year ago, reaching up to 500 a month. A report by Swedish Radio revealed that all of the country’s regional university hospitals, apart from Norrland University Hospital in the far north, no longer have adequate staffing levels to provide care to all COVID-19 patients.

In a desperate attempt to locate staff to treat ICU patients, authorities in Stockholm announced the redeployment of 100 staff from a children’s hospital to work in ICUs.

Sineva Ribeiro, head of the Swedish Association of Health Care Professionals, told Bloomberg that the crisis facing hospitals is “unprecedented.” The main challenge is no longer ICU beds but finding the staff to provide an adequate level of patient care. “In a work environment where you are so tired, the risk of mistakes increases,” she said. “And those mistakes can lead to patients dying.”

The mass death produced by the ruling elite’s policies will result in the largest decline in life expectancy in Sweden since 1944, according to separate figures from Statistics Sweden released in late November. Life expectancy for women will fall from 84.7 last year to 84.4 by the end of 2020, and from 81.2 to 80.7 for men. Researchers warned that these staggering declines in just one year could prove to be even larger, since the number of deaths for the months September to December were estimates based on data from previous years.

While the Social Democrat/Green government’s reckless policies enjoyed the support of the entire political establishment from the outset, popular anger is mounting. This has been further fueled by the release of the official coronavirus commission’s initial report, which sharply criticised the government’s poor handling of the pandemic and pointed to “structural” problems caused by decades of austerity and privatisation as being responsible for the disaster. Prime Minister Stefan Löfven was forced to appoint the commission, which is led by Mats Melin, a former judge on Sweden’s top administrative court, after the government’s failure to protect elderly residents in care homes provoked widespread outrage.

The commission wrote in its preliminary report released December 14, “Apart from the general spread of the virus in society, the factor that has had the greatest impact on the number of cases of illness and deaths from COVID-19 in Swedish residential care is structural shortcomings that have been well-known for a long time. These shortcomings have led to residential care being unprepared and ill-equipped to handle a pandemic. Staff employed in the elderly care sector were largely left by themselves to tackle the crisis.”

The commission noted that one of the shortcomings was the widespread use of zero hours contracts, which forced low-paid and precariously employed care staff to continue coming to work, even if they felt sick, for fear of losing their job. In addition, it criticised low staffing levels, an issue raised by the World Health Organisation prior to the pandemic, and the failure to supply adequate levels of personal protective equipment (PPE). Even though two government agencies acknowledged in early February that problems existed in securing adequate quantities of PPE, the National Board of Health and Welfare only began compiling an overview of the situation in Sweden’s 290 municipalities in April, when the virus was already running rampant.

In unusually sharp terms for a bureaucratic report, the commission placed ultimate responsibility for the catastrophic response on successive governments of all political stripes. “The ultimate responsibility for these shortcomings rests with the government in power—and with the previous governments that also possessed this information [about structural shortcomings in elderly care),” wrote the commission, which is not due to present a more comprehensive report on all aspects of the pandemic response until early 2022.

The right-wing opposition Moderate and Christian Democrat parties, together with the far-right Sweden Democrats, have seized on the commission’s report to intensify pressure on Löfven’s minority Social Democrat/Green coalition. Despite having fully endorsed the rejection of lockdowns and other measures to contain the virus, Moderate leader Ulf Kristersson has attacked the government for delays with testing, the provision of PPE, and contact tracing. Figures within the Moderates are calling for resignations, including by Health Minister Lena Hallengren.

Löfven, whose government relies on support from the Centre and Liberal parties for a parliamentary majority, declared last Friday that he has full confidence in Hallengren and suggested that the opposition parties could table a vote of no confidence in his government.

However the immediate political crisis develops, it is clear that the entire political establishment is complicit in Sweden’s disastrous pandemic response. Successive Social Democrat- and Moderate-led governments have systematically cut spending for health care, social services and education, while privatising large chunks of Sweden’s once much-vaunted public services. Under Prime Minister Göran Persson from the mid-1990s to 2006, the Social Democrat government relied on the support of the ex-Stalinist Left Party to carry through this agenda, which paved the way for Moderate Prime Minister Frederick Reinfeldt to launch a sweeping privatisation drive and major tax cuts when his right-wing Alliance government took power in 2006.

Löfven, who returned the Social Democrats to power in 2014, has continued the rightward shift within Swedish politics, including by imposing drastic hikes in military spending while starving health care and critical social services. The Social Democrat/Green coalition is kept in power by the votes of the Left Party, which occasionally issues hypocritical attacks on the government’s right-wing policies while continuing to provide the votes necessary to keep the Social Democrats and Greens in power.

Unanswered questions in the SolarWinds Orion hack

Kevin Reed

On December 14, the IT infrastructure company SolarWinds confirmed that hackers had embedded malware into software updates for its flagship Orion platform and the malicious code had been pushed out to as many as 18,000 of its customers.

The hastily issued announcement from the Austin, Texas-based company said, “This attack was a very sophisticated supply chain attack, which refers to a disruption in a standard process resulting in a compromised result with a goal of being able to attack subsequent users of the software.”

SolarWinds Orion is used widely by US government agencies and Fortune 500 corporations, as well as small to medium-sized companies, to perform basic information system and networking duties such as user accounts administration and performance monitoring, reporting and alerting. According to company marketing literature, Orion is sold as a “scalable architecture that reaches across your physical, virtualized, and cloud IT environments.”

The United States Chamber of Commerce building in Washington [Credit: AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta, File]

Once the software update containing the malware—now known as Sunburst or Solorigate—is installed on a host system, it creates a backdoor that reveals itself to the hackers after lying dormant for 12 to 14 days. SolarWinds said the Trojan-horse malicious code had been present in updates that were distributed between March and June of this year.

Reuters reported a day after the SolarWinds announcement that “the hackers have already parlayed their access into consequential breaches at the U.S. Treasury and Department of Commerce.” The news agency said that “multiple criminals have offered to sell access to SolarWinds’ computers through underground forums, according to two researchers who separately had access to those forums.”

The US Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) of the Department of Homeland Security responded to news of the hack with an emergency directive that said, “Affected agencies shall immediately disconnect or power down SolarWinds Orion products, versions 2019.4 through 2020.2.1 HF1, from their network. Until such time as CISA directs affected entities to rebuild the Windows operating system and reinstall the SolarWinds software package, agencies are prohibited from (re)joining the Windows host OS to the enterprise domain.”

While the information published about the Sunburst malware by SolarWinds and the CISA made reference to “threat actor activity” and that it “may have been conducted by an outside nation state,” neither gave a specific national origin or a verified identity of the cyber attacker.

The corporate media sprang immediately into action to claim that Russia was responsible for the breach. On the same day that the SolarWinds acknowledgment was released, for example, the New York Times published an article entitled, “Scope of Russian hacking becomes clear: Multiple US Agencies were hit,” co-authored by David Sanger.

For its part, the Washington Post published an article on December 14, “Russian government hackers are behind a broad espionage campaign that has compromised U.S. agencies, including Treasury and Commerce,” that included the following: “The Russian hackers, known by the nicknames APT29 or Cozy Bear, are part of that nation’s foreign intelligence service, the SVR, and they breached email systems in some cases, said the people familiar with the intrusions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.”

Over the next several days, representatives of the US political establishment—both Democrats and Republicans—began repeating the assertion that the Russian government was behind the SolarWinds hack, some calling it an “act of war.”

On December 16, Democratic Party Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois, told CNN, “This is virtually a declaration of war by Russia on the United States and we should take that seriously.” Two days later, Marco Rubio, Republican Senator of Florida, tweeted, “The methods used to carry out the cyberhack are consistent with Russian cyber operations,” and he told Fox News the attack was “almost, I would argue, an act of war, absolutely.”

On December 19, during an interview with the right-wing talk radio host Mark Levin, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo—departing from the position of President Trump—said, “This was a very significant effort and I think it’s the case that now we can say pretty clearly that it was the Russians that engaged in this activity.”

Both the corporate media and members of the US political establishment are making the assertion that Russia was responsible for the breach despite the lack of any evidence to support their claims.

On the other hand, new details about the hack of the widely used SolarWinds Orion platform raise serious questions about the events of the past three weeks.

According to security experts and former employees, SolarWinds was extremely vulnerable to an intrusion like Sunburst—not only because of the widespread government and corporate use of its software—but for its own slipshod security practices.

The New York Times reported, for example: “The company did not have a chief information security officer, and internal emails shared with The New York Times showed that employees’ passwords were leaking out on GitHub last year. Reuters earlier reported that a researcher informed the company last year that he had uncovered the password to SolarWinds’ update mechanism — the vehicle through which 18,000 of its customers were compromised. The password was ‘solarwinds123.’ ”

Meanwhile, Robert K. Knake, a senior Obama administration cybersecurity official, asked on Twitter, “I’m struggling with what the SolarWinds incident means for defending forward. How is this not a massive intelligence failure, particularly since we were supposedly all over Russian threat actors ahead of the election?” and “The IC [Intelligence Community] kept reporting that the Russians were targeting the election. That didn’t happen but was the evidence that they were planted? Did NSA fall into a giant honeypot while the SVR [Russian intelligence agency] quietly pillaged the USG and industry?”

The truth is that the United States runs what is by far the world’s most expansive and sophisticated cyberespionage operation. As revealed by former CIA office and National Security Agency (NSA) intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, there is well-documented factual evidence that the US government has engaged in warrantless surveillance of the public on a massive scale—with the PRISM and XKeyscore systems—and infiltrates and gathers intelligence on the computer systems of foreign entities through the Office of Tailored Access Operations of the NSA.

As was revealed by WikiLeaks in 2015, the US government tapped the phone calls of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and her closest advisers for years and spied on the staff of her predecessors Gerhard Schroeder and Helmut Kohl.

Last July, hackers breached security at Twitter and took control of dozens of high-profile accounts, including those of Joseph Biden, Barack Obama, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates. During the Twitter hack, the intruders gained control of a control panel used by administrators at the micro-blogging social media platform to blacklist and censor content down to the level of specific users and their individual tweets.

Although two teenagers—one from Florida and the other from Massachusetts—were charged with breaching Twitter’s security, one of them by pretending to work for the company’s IT department, nothing has been said about the exposure of the blacklisting dashboard.

Lastly, the SolarWinds hack announcement was preceded by a report by the private cybersecurity and US intelligence consulting firm FireEye on December 8 that the firm was, “attacked by a highly sophisticated threat actor, one whose discipline, operational security, and techniques lead us to believe it was a state-sponsored attack.”

CEO Kevin Mandia published a blog post that the hackers had used “a novel combination of techniques not witnessed by us or our partners in the past” to gain access to FireEye’s “Red Team assessment tools that we use to test our customers’ security.” Although Mandia did not report precisely when FireEye’s testing software had been compromised, he wrote that “we are proactively releasing methods and means to detect the use of our stolen Red Team tools.”

Furthermore, Mandia added, “We have seen no evidence to date that any attacker has used the stolen Red Team tools” and “we have seen no evidence that the attacker exfiltrated data from our primary systems that store customer information from our incident response or consulting engagements, or the metadata collected by our products in our dynamic threat intelligence systems.”

The FireEye CEO did not attribute the hack to any particular Advanced Persistent Threat actor or state sponsor, nor did he identify SolarWinds Orion platform as a potential target of the intrusion.

On that same day, the Washington Post published an article, based upon the FireEye disclosures, that “Russian spies” had “carried off another brazen hack” of the cybersecurity firm and stolen its Red Team tools. The Post report carefully stated, “though the firm did not attribute it to Russia’s foreign intelligence service,” the Russians were responsible “according to people familiar with the matter.”

The next day, on December 9, the New York Times published an article about the FireEye hack that stated, “The Silicon Valley company said hackers—almost certainly Russian—made off with tools that could be used to mount new attacks around the world.” Neither the Post nor the Times provided any specific facts or evidence connecting the FireEye hack to Russian intelligence agencies.

One year into the pandemic, 65,000 deaths in the US in one month

Andre Damon

One year after the first cases of COVID-19 were identified in China, December was the deadliest month of the pandemic both in the United States and throughout the world.

More than 65,000 Americans lost their lives to the virus over the past 28 days. At the present rate, deaths in December will be double what they were in November, when nearly 37,000 people died. The United States accounts for about a third of the global death toll of 175,000 over the past month.

Medical personnel work in the intensive care ward for Covid-19 patients at the MontLegia CHC hospital in Liege, Belgium, Friday, Nov. 6, 2020 [Credit: AP Photo/Francisco Seco]

By the end of this week, total deaths in the US will surpass 350,000, and the number of people who have tested positive for COVID-19 will reach 20 million. Another 193,000 people could die in this country over the next two months, according to predictions from the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.

Experts have warned that even this scenario may be optimistic. “We very well might see a post-seasonal—in the sense of Christmas, New Year’s—surge,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, on Sunday. “The projections are just nightmarish,” Peter Hotez, an infectious disease specialist at the Baylor College of Medicine, told CNN.

In a warning to the rest of the world, the number of daily new cases hit an all-time record of 42,000 in the UK yesterday, driven by the emergence of a new strain of the disease that medical experts estimate is 56 percent more transmissible than the original.

US Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary Brett Giroir said Monday that the new and more dangerous strain of the virus is “likely” already present in the United States. He was left to speculate because, unlike the UK, the US does not have a genetic surveillance system in place to ascertain the presence of different strains of the disease.

Meanwhile, the COVID-19 continues to surge throughout the country. “California is now the only place (state or country) in the world” with more than 1,000 new COVID-19 cases per million people, noted physician Eric Topol.

Southern California, the state’s most populous region, as well as San Joaquin Valley, in the state’s center, have 0 percent ICU bed capacity. On Sunday Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center Chief Medical Officer Dr. Brad Spellberg said that the hospital faced a “massive crisis.” Another hospital in the region has begun issuing guidelines for patients and families as to how the hospital will make decisions on who will live and who will die in the case that care has to be rationed.

In the midst of this disaster, no section of the US political establishment is calling for emergency measures to contain the pandemic. Last week, President-elect Joe Biden warned that the “darkest days are ahead of us, not behind us.” And yet he has rejected the demand by Dr. Michael Osterholm and other scientists for an emergency shutdown of nonessential production, declaring, “I am not going to shut down the economy, period.”

Despite campaigning in opposition to Trump’s handling of the pandemic, Biden has adopted Trump’s signature policy demands: “open the schools” and “open the businesses.”

This is despite the influx of scientific data proving the importance of closing schools and businesses in containing COVID-19. A study published this month in Science found that closing schools and universities reduces the spread of COVID-19 by 38 percent, and closing nonessential face-to-face businesses reduced transmission by 18 percent.

In the media, the scale of the catastrophe unfolding in the United States is less and less reported. A deliberate decision has been made to focus attention not on mass death and the overwhelming of the US health care system, but on the initial production and distribution of vaccines.

But as the federal government begins distributing vaccine doses to states, the US has inoculated just one-tenth of the number of people it had planned—just 2 million of the 20 million people health authorities said would be vaccinated by the end of the year. Images emerged yesterday of lines of hundreds of elderly patients lining up outside for limited doses.

A report in Kaiser Health News called the US vaccine rollout a “mess,” noting that many states have not received close to the number they were promised. “Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the US health-care system has shown that it is not built for a coordinated pandemic response (among many other things) … Why should vaccine distribution be any different?”

Even in the best of circumstances, the vaccine will not be broadly available until sometime in the spring or summer of next year. Moreover, scientists have warned that the emergence of the new, more infectious strain of the virus means that a higher percentage of the population will have to be vaccinated to stop community spread of the coronavirus.

The refusal of the entire political establishment to take the necessary measures to save lives is a continuation of its policy throughout the pandemic. No measures will be taken that contravene the interests of the financial oligarchy. To this end, governments around the world deliberately embraced the doctrine of “herd immunity”—calling for the mass infection of the population, with one White House official declaring, “We want them infected.”

This has led to the uncontrolled spread of the pandemic, with hundreds of thousands of dead, together with the greatest surge of hunger and unemployment since the Great Depression. On the other hand, this same policy has produced the massive enrichment of the financial oligarchy, whose wealth has soared as the US central bank pumped trillions of dollars into the financial markets.

And the markets continue their relentless rise. The Dow Jones Industrial Average increased 200 points to a new record yesterday, leading the wealth of the US’s billionaires to rise even further. Over the past year, Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man, saw his fortune grow by $77 billion, hitting $192 billion on Monday. The wealth of Elon Musk, now the second richest man in the world, has surged from $28.5 billion to $160 billion.

Urgent measures must be taken to prevent mass death! But this requires that the working class intervene independently, in opposition to the pandemic profiteers and their political representatives.

The Socialist Equality Party demands the immediate closure of all nonessential businesses and schools. This must be accompanied by full compensation for lost wages and small business income, paid for through the expropriation of the vast sums hoarded by the rich. Trillions of dollars must be invested in health care infrastructure to treat, contain and eradicate COVID-19, and ensure society is protected from the threat of infectious diseases in the future.

Pandemic profiteers: Forbes adds 50 health care moguls to its list of global billionaires

Genevieve Leigh

For the richest layer of society, the year 2020 has proven to be one of soaring profits and the accumulation of personal wealth on a scale never before seen. The world’s billionaires collectively increased their already massive fortunes by more than a quarter (27.5 percent) from April 2020 to July 2020 alone, reaching a record total of $10.2 trillion.

Billionaire Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos talks about the history and character of the Post during a dedication ceremony for its new headquarters in Washington [Credit: AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File]

According to a new report by Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) and the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), the total wealth of US billionaires grew by $1.064 trillion during the first nine months of the coronavirus pandemic, a 36 percent increase. For context, this increase in wealth—that is, not the total wealth of these individuals, but only the money they made in the first nine months of the year—is more than it would cost to send a stimulus check of $3,000 to every one of the roughly 330 million people in America.

Among the most profitable sectors has been the health care industry. A report released in October by wealth manager UBS and professional services firm PricewaterhouseCoopers notes that the billionaires in the health care industry increased their wealth by 36.3 percent between April 7 and July 31, from a total of $402.3 billion to $548 billion. The health care industry is second only to the tech industry in total increase in billionaire wealth.

Just before Christmas, Forbes magazine released a new survey revealing that at least 50 health care capitalists hailing from 11 different countries entered the ranks of the world’s billionaires in 2020.

Who are these newly minted billionaires and just how much wealth are they hoarding?

* Uğur Şahin is a Turkish citizen and CEO of BioNTech, the German biotech firm that is partnering with Pfizer on the latter’s vaccine. Şahin’s net worth is now $4.2 billion. BioNTech shares now trade at $101.63, up 614 percent since the close of the first trading day last year. The company is worth more than $24 billion.

Even with his $4.2 billion, Şahin was not the main beneficiary of BioNTech’s surge in the markets. Thomas and Andreas Strungmann, German twins and early investors in the company, have each added $8 billion to their net worth this year from their holdings in the firm. Already billionaires to begin with, they are each now worth about $12 billion.

* Stéphane Bancel is a French citizen and CEO of the Massachusetts-based biotechnology company Moderna. Bancel has gained $4.8 billion in wealth this year, giving him a net worth of $5.3 billion.

At the start of 2020, when he first became a billionaire, Bancel owned about nine percent of the company. As the firm’s stock surged by more than 550 percent with news of the company’s contract for a vaccine, he sold roughly $40 million worth of Moderna stock held by himself or associated investment funds.

Chief Medical Officer Tal Zaks has sold around $60 million worth of stock and President Stephen Hoge has sold more than $10 million.

* Moderna’s skyrocketing stock price also lifted two others into the health care billionaire club: Harvard Professor Timothy Springer (net worth $2 billion) and MIT scientist Robert Langer (net worth $1.5 billion). Springer and Langer were founding investors in Moderna , whose rise has turned Springer’s initial $5 million investment into roughly $1.6 billion.

* Sergio Stevanato is a new billionaire hailing from Italy. He has made his fortune as the majority shareholder in the privately-owned Stevanato Group, which is making glass vials for several dozen vaccines around the world.

The common feature in almost all of the health care billionaire fortunes has been the massive surge in stock prices. As the virus quickly became global, investors flocked to companies involved in the development of vaccines, treatments, medical devices and related fields. At the same time, the Federal Reserve in the US and central banks in Europe and around the world ensured the rise in stock prices by pumping trillions of dollars into the financial markets.

The speculators’ wealth ballooned as the market continued to rise despite, or rather because of, the dire state of affairs for workers. The capitalist economy was only able to produce the historic rise in the markets on the backs of millions of workers, forced back into factories and workplaces under unsafe conditions.

It did not take long for investments to pay off for health care executives. According to a Business Insider investigation, executives in charge of biotech and pharma firms working on COVID-19 treatments and vaccines have raked in more than $1 billion by selling stocks.

Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla sold 60 percent of his stock on the same day the company announced the high success rate of its vaccine. The stock-selling bonanza was denounced as “unethical” at the time by some media outlets. However, most concluded that the action was completely legal.

The financialization of the health care industry, leading to the creation of this growing class of health care billionaires, was in the making long before the COVID-19 pandemic.

The spike in wealth among health care billionaires widens when one compares the health care sector from the beginning of 2018 to the end of July 2020. Over that period, the total wealth held by 1,690 health care billionaires increased by 50.3 percent, to $658.6 billion.

An even wider view reveals profound levels of inequality in the world’s richest capitalist country: US billionaires’ total wealth in March 2020 was 12 times greater than their total wealth in 1990.

For these billionaires and multi-millionaires, the year 2020 will be remembered as the year they could finally afford that private island they had been dreaming about. But for billions of workers and youth throughout the world, 2020 was a year marked by mass death, social misery and suffering.

Hundreds of millions lost loved ones to the virus this year. Most of those families said goodbye to mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, spouses or children over the phone, unable to be with their dying family member. Millions more lost their jobs, health insurance and ability to provide for their families. For many, the year will be remembered as the first time they waited in a food line, depended on an unemployment check or were evicted.

As 2020 comes to an end, the attitude of the ruling elite to the plight of the working class is starkly revealed in the so-called stimulus bill just signed by Trump: a pittance of $600 to the workers.

It is becoming all too clear to millions of workers that their lives and well-being have been, and continue to be, deliberately sacrificed in the interests of Wall Street. Immense anger is building up. Nothing has been done to control the pandemic. In the coming months, the virus is predicted to kill hundreds of thousands more.

In some ways, the ballooning profits of the health care giants and the exploding personal wealth of their top executives and investors demonstrate most starkly the incompatibility between a system based on private ownership of industry and finance and production for profit and the well-being and very lives of the vast majority of the population.

Health care infrastructure is decayed and under-funded. Health care workers—nurses, aides, technicians—are woefully underpaid and overworked. Hospital workers get sick and die because of inadequate personal protective equipment and overwhelmed hospitals, the lack of testing and tracing, the homicidal herd immunity policies of governments dictated by the profit interests of big business.

The drive for private profit at every point cuts across the need for a rational, nationally and internationally coordinated effort to vaccinate every man, woman and child worldwide at no cost and as rapidly and safely has possible.

Meanwhile, the health care capitalists rake in money hand over fist. The working class must take action to save lives, including the expropriation of the fortunes of the health care billionaires and transformation of their private companies into publicly owned and democratically controlled utilities. Only in this way—in the fight for socialism—can the full potential of science and technology be harnessed in the interests of humanity.

House overrides Trump veto of military spending bill

Patrick Martin

By a huge bipartisan margin, the House of Representatives voted Monday evening to override President Trump’s veto of the National Defense Authorization Act. The vote was by 321 to 87, with Democrats voting to override by 211–20, and Republicans by 109–66. Two independents, both anti-Trump former Republicans, split their votes.

The veto override was the first of Trump’s presidency, an indication of the slavish subordination of House and Senate Republicans to the ultra-right president. It came only 23 days before Trump is scheduled to leave office, when his successor, Democrat Joe Biden, is to be inaugurated on January 20, 2021.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, of Calif., speaks during her weekly briefing, Friday, Nov. 20, 2020, in Washington [Credit: AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin]

It is no accident that the veto override came on the bill that sets policy for the Pentagon and authorizes $740 billion in military spending. A National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) has passed Congress for 60 consecutive years and has never before been vetoed, as both capitalist parties and all previous presidents are on their knees before the US military-intelligence apparatus.

Trump vetoed the legislation only because of disagreements on secondary issues, and because he had been privately informed that his veto would be overridden in both the House and Senate and the bill would become law without his signature.

The objections voiced by Trump were entirely irrelevant to the main thrust of the legislation. He objected to provisions that allowed the Pentagon to review the naming of military bases after Confederate generals and rescind those names over a three-year period. This is expected to take place quickly and include Fort Bragg in North Carolina, Fort Hood in Texas, and Fort Benning in Georgia, three of the most prominent US military compounds.

Trump also insisted that the NDAA be the vehicle for rescinding Section 230 of to the Federal Communications Act, which exempts internet platforms and internet service providers from liability for the contents of postings by their users. Section 230 has also been cited by platforms like Facebook and Twitter as giving them authority to apply labels to tweets and postings by Trump that are obviously false, inflammatory or direct incitements to violence.

There is no connection between section 230 and the Pentagon budget, except in Trump’s mind. Since the NDAA was certain to pass, the president sought to add a measure directed against the social media companies that were balking at his most outrageous and provocative postings. In reality, the bulk of the censorship by social media companies is directed against left-wing, antiwar and socialist groups, not the racist and fascist right.

None of these issues was discussed in the brief debate in the House of Representatives before the vote to override, which was almost perfunctory.

Representative Mac Thornberry of Texas, the ranking Republican on the House Armed Forces Committee, was the only Republican to speak. His name is in the title of the NDAA this year, a tribute from both parties on the occasion of his retirement after a long career carrying water for the military and defense contractors.

Thornberry thanked his Democratic partners, saying that the bill before House was the “exact same bill. Not a comma has changed” from the bill passed only three weeks earlier. He hailed the legislation for providing “new tools to deal with a newly aggressive China” and maintaining US support to Israel, as well as providing for cyberwar efforts to be directed against Russia. He urged an override of the Trump veto.

The Democratic chairman of the same committee, Adam Smith of Washington, also urged an override of the veto. He declared, “It is enormously important to give our troops the support that they need to carry out the job that we all are asking them to do.” Echoing Thornberry, he cited the supposed Russian cyberattack on US government facilities, heavily publicized—without any underlying evidence—over the past two weeks, as a particularly important reason for passing the legislation with or without Trump’s support.

The veto override, which has the effect of approving a record outlay for the US military machine, had the support of the entire Democratic leadership, from Speaker Nancy Pelosi on down. While Trump had claimed that China would applaud passage of the NDAA, this was simply more racist demagogy from the White House. The actual substance of the legislation is to arm American imperialism to the teeth against both major rivals, China and Russia, and against any other country, such as Iran, that might become a target.

The number three House Republican, Liz Cheney of Wyoming, daughter of the former vice president and arch-warmonger, supported the override vote, citing particularly the increase in pay for the military. “Congress must uphold its highest responsibility—providing for the defense of this nation—and ensure this bill becomes law,” she declared.

Only two Democrats had opposed the NDAA three weeks ago when it passed the House—Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii. Several other Democrats seeking to strike a “left” or “antiwar” posture chose to vote against the bill and uphold Trump’s veto this time around. These included Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar, Jesus “Chuy” Garcia of Chicago and the co-leaders of the House Progressive Caucus, Mark Pocan and Pramila Jayapal.

But the total of 20 Democrats opposing the NDAA were safely short of having any impact. While the Republicans failed to muster the two-thirds needed to override, instead marshaling a narrow majority, the 10-1 margin among Democrats was more than enough to ensure that the record spending for the military would move one step closer to enactment.

The Senate is expected to take up the veto override on Tuesday, with Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman James Inhofe of Oklahoma strongly urging a vote against Trump. “The NDAA has become law every year for 59 years straight because it’s absolutely vital to our national security and our troops. This year must not be an exception,” he said in a statement after Trump’s veto.

Millions in US face weeks without income due to delay in paltry “relief” bill

Jacob Crosse

On Sunday night, President Donald Trump signed a $2.3 trillion bill that combines a $900 billion bipartisan coronavirus “relief” package with a $1.4 trillion omnibus spending bill. Trump had been withholding his signature, claiming to oppose the minuscule size of the $600 direct payment included in the bill.

In this July 15, 2020, file photo, job seekers exercise social distancing as they wait to be called into the Heartland Workforce Solutions office in Omaha, Neb [Credit: AP Photo/Nati Harnik, File]

The delay in signing the bill has already caused confusion regarding the resumption of unemployment payments to some 14 million people. On Saturday, two programs created by last March’s CARES Act, the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program and the Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC) program, expired. PUA was designed to provide relief for workers who wouldn’t normally qualify for state benefits, such as contractors, the self-employed and so-called “gig” workers. PEUC provided up to 13 weeks of unemployment aid to workers who had exhausted their state benefits, which for most last 26 weeks, but for others, depending on the state where they reside, can last a mere 12 weeks.

The legislation specifies that payments are to begin after December 26, 2020 and end no later than March 14, 2021. States are not allowed to begin disbursing the $300 weekly unemployment payments until the bill becomes law, and with the one-week delay, millions may be receiving only 10 weeks’ worth of payments instead of 11, beginning in 2021.

In an email to the Hill, Elizabeth Pancotti, a policy adviser at Employ America, estimated it could take up to six weeks for jobless workers to begin receiving payments again. “Some states may be able to stand this up in a week or two if we get guidance quickly from [the US Labor Department] but allowing the programs to lapse has created such a mess at many state UI [unemployment insurance] offices, so it could be 4-6 weeks before workers receive payment,” Pancotti wrote.

This means that some 14 million unemployed workers will not be receiving anything for at least a week and perhaps considerably longer. Among them are millions who will be unable to put food on the table or pay for needed health care, prescription drugs, gasoline, cell phone bills and other basic necessities.

Last Tuesday, Trump posted a video in which he denounced the bill he had previously promised to sign, calling it a “disgrace” for the paltry size of the direct payment it provides—$600 as compared to the $1,200 provided under the CARES Act. He demanded that the stipend be raised to $2,000—itself totally inadequate to offset the loss of income suffered by working-class families and small business owners during the pandemic and the accumulated debt from unpaid rent, car payments, student debt, mortgage payments and other obligations.

After a weekend of uncertainty, Trump released a statement on Sunday night advising that he had signed the legislation and that the House of Representatives would take up a measure to increase the direct payment from $600 to $2,000 for single adults who made under $75,000 in 2019, or $4,000 for couples who reported earnings under $150,000. On Monday, the House, in a 275–134 vote, passed the measure. However, it is not expected to pass in the Republican-controlled Senate.

According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, approximately 9.2 million renters who have lost employment income during the pandemic are behind on rent, while the Census Bureau estimates that more than 11.3 million households are behind on rent or will not be able to meet rent obligations next month. Overall, Moody’s Analytics estimates that renters collectively owe some $70 billion, with 12 million owing an average of nearly $6,000.

On Monday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average surged by more than 200 points, setting a new record, buoyed by the miserly scale of the “relief” and repeated assurances from the Federal Reserve that it will continue to pour billions into the financial markets every day to keep stock prices rising and the personal fortunes of the rich and the super-rich expanding at a near-exponential rate. The so-called relief bill provides generous “extender” tax breaks to major companies such as NASCAR and Anheuser-Busch, and increases the deduction executives can claim on “business” lunches from 50 percent to 100 percent.

The bill continues the bipartisan war on immigrants with $15 billion set aside for Customs and Border Protection, nearly $8 billion allotted for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and an additional $20 million for “border processing coordinators.”

On the same day the House Democrats voted for the measly increase in the stipend to $2,000—expecting the measure to die in the Senate—they voted overwhelmingly to overturn Trump’s veto of the defense authorization bill, which provides $740 billion for Washington’s war machine. Even if the $2,000 stipend does make it through the Senate, it will do little to alleviate the social catastrophe that has left over 330,000 people in the US dead from COVID-19. Other indices of the social disaster include:

• Over 73 million unemployment claims since mid-March

• 50 million people facing food insecurity, according to Feeding America

• Over 162,000 evictions in 27 US cities, according to the Eviction Lab at Princeton University On Sunday evening, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi hailed Trump’s signing of the bill as a “down payment” to help “struggling Americans stay afloat.” One social media user responded to Pelosi by writing:

“To stay afloat many people are homeless right now, kids are hungry. My child can have a Xmas [because] I had to choose between food or a place to stay. You guys keep saying you care about Americans but it does not show. Because 600 would have never been an option if any of you guys cared.”

Justin Saboo wrote to Pelosi on Twitter that it was “... very amusing to all of us that you think $600 will help struggling Americans ‘stay afloat.’ $600 won’t even pay one month of rent. Yet, somehow, you think $600 will ease everyone’s pain. You wouldn’t know anything about that with your $114 million wealth would you?”

In the $900 billion “relief” bill, only $166 billion is earmarked for $600 direct payments to US citizens and their children, while $120 billion is allocated for the extension of federal unemployment benefits through mid-March.

Over a third of the bipartisan relief bill is dedicated to the Small Business Administration, including $284 billion for the misnamed Paycheck Protection Program, which was ostensibly created to provide low-interest grants and loans to small businesses, but has instead been used by large corporations, sports teams, the politically connected and wealthy landlords to enrich themselves while laying off thousands of workers. The program has generated nearly $3 billion in revenue through fees for large US banks such as JPMorgan and Citibank.

The bill contains only $20 billion for the purchase of vaccines, with an additional $22 billion to help states with testing and contact tracing. Only $9 billion is earmarked for vaccine distribution, which is already well behind intended benchmarks, with less than 2 million vaccines administered in the US thus far.

The $25 billion in rental assistance is several factors lower than what is needed, meaning that millions of families will face eviction in roughly one month, pending further congressional action. Another $15 billion was provided to the major airlines, which already received $25 billion earlier this year and still proceeded to lay off over 90,000 workers.

The $1.4 billion set aside to continue the construction of Trump’s border wall is slightly less than the $2 billion set aside for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, to be distributed to states in order to assist the hundreds of thousands of families that will be paying for coronavirus-related funeral expenses.