As 2020 draws to a close, the essential class dynamic and objective logic of the global capitalist system have never been more starkly revealed.
Billions of people around the world confront the escalating effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, the destruction of millions of jobs, impoverishment, including in some cases the threat of starvation, and the destruction of a viable future for a whole generation of youth. Yet the ruling financial oligarchy is benefiting to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.
Trader on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (AP Photo/Richard Drew)
The year is ending amid the greatest economic contraction since the Great Depression of the 1930s. But Wall Street, leading the way for stock markets around the world, is finishing the year at a record high.
When the economic and financial effects of the pandemic began to become apparent in March, Wall Street and global markets plunged. But the US Federal Reserve and the government, together with central banks and governments around the world, stepped in to organise the greatest bailout of the financial oligarchy in history, pumping more than $10 trillion into the financial system.
In the US, the Fed issued a virtual blank cheque to Wall Street, committing itself to purchase all classes of financial assets so that the siphoning of the wealth of society into its upper echelons could continue unabated.
Since its fall in mid-March, the S&P 500 index has risen by 66 percent. But this is only a partial expression of what has taken place, as the stocks of dozens of companies have risen at a much faster rate. Tesla shares are up by 691 percent so far this year; fuel-cell company Power Plug shares have increased by more than 1,000 percent. Zoom Communications is up 451 percent.
Vaccinations for COVID-19 are underway in the US and Britain, which could provide important breakthroughs in the medical fight against the virus. But the rollout in the US is already being described as a “mess.”
At the same time, a new class of billionaires is emerging, their fortunes propelled by the rise in the stocks of companies associated with the development of vaccines and their utilisation. Shares of Moderna, one of the companies involved in the development of a vaccine, have risen by 532 percent.
When governments and central banks launched their multi-trillion-dollar bailout operations, they claimed the extraordinary measures were necessary to save the economy. This fraud has been exposed. The sole concern of the ruling oligarchy was not the health and economic well-being of the mass of the population, but that of the financial markets.
Consequently, no effective measures were taken to deal with the pandemic, which would have involved the lockdown of non-essential businesses and the payment of income to workers and their families, coupled with the application of stringent safety measures at essential businesses that remained open.
Rather, the commencement of the bailout operation was accompanied by a homicidal return to work drive amid the open advancement of the policy of so-called “herd immunity,” ensuring the spread of the virus, so as to ensure that the supply of surplus value from the labour of the working class was not interrupted. This entailed the normalisation of mass death under the slogan coined by the New York Times’s Thomas Friedman, that “the cure can’t be worse than the disease.”
There is no limit to the supply of money to financial markets, but even meagre assistance to workers and their families is the subject of debate and delays in the US. Elsewhere, even limited emergency measures are now being withdrawn.
The provision of money by the Fed and other central banks to provide the backing for corporate debt has provided a bonanza for major banks. The largest banks around the world have raked in close to $125 billion in fees for underwriting corporate debt and the raising of new equity, as companies seek to raise cash in order to ride out the effects of the pandemic.
What has been described as a “very robust year for underwriting of both debt and equity” has been possible only because of the knowledge that the Fed and other central banks are ready to step in with further assistance should this prove necessary. This has already been factored in, with JPMorgan’s strategy team expecting the provision of a further $5 trillion in 2021.
The guarantee by the Fed that it will do everything in its power to ensure the continued rise of Wall Street has led to an orgy of speculation, via so-called margin debt, in which affluent investors borrow money against their existing holdings to buy more shares of stock.
Last month investors borrowed a record $722.1 billion against their investment portfolios, beating the previous high of $668.9 billion recorded in May 2018. Margin debt is regarded as risky because if stock prices fall the investor must meet a margin call from the brokerage firm from which he has borrowed, either by supplying cash or by selling the stocks underlying the loans, with the potential to trigger a broader sell-off.
Reporting on this milestone, the Wall Street Journal warned it was an “ominous one” because margin debt records were followed by the stock market crashes of 2000 and 2008. But notwithstanding the warning signs, the speculation continues because of the well-founded belief that the Fed stands ready to intervene.
As the chief global investment officer of Guggenheim Partners, Scott Minerd, recently commented to the Financial Times, the pandemic has “completely reworked” the so-called “free market” economic system, replacing it with cycles of “increasingly radical monetary intervention” and the “socialisation of credit risk.”
In other words, the capitalist state has emerged front and centre as the guarantor and facilitator for the looting of society by the financial oligarchy, whose interests it defends.
The present social order resembles nothing so much as the Ancien Régime of France on the eve of the revolution of 1789. Confronted with a deep-seated crisis rooted in the irresolvable contradictions of the economy over which it presided, the ruling elite, organically incapable of reform, had to be swept away in order for society to progress.
Likewise, the present situation has created the objective conditions for a massive class confrontation in which the working class is posed with the task of abolishing the reactionary and outmoded capitalist order and establishing a socialist system, in which human need, not profit and greed, forms the foundation of the economic order.
But that outcome, necessary for human progress, depends on the decisions made by workers and youth to take up the challenge before them by joining and building the revolutionary party to lead the struggles now about to explode.
Amidst an unprecedented transfer of wealth from the working class to the billionaires this year, sections of the bourgeoisie have decided to “donate” a small fraction of these ill-gotten gains to philanthropic causes.
These donations have been prominently covered in the American media as though the billionaires have been visited by the Spirits of Christmas, like Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, and decided to rededicate their lives to universal love and the welfare of their poorer brethren.
In reality, these two phenomena—increasing social inequality alongside the increasing social role of “charitable” handouts from the super-rich—are closely intertwined. Without extreme levels of social inequality, with vast fortunes piling up in the coffers of the tiny few while tens of millions sink into poverty, it would not be necessary to rely on the largesse of the billionaires to “donate” the funds back to society that are necessary to meet critical social needs.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos during the JFK Space Summit at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)
Last month, the initial disbursement of grants took place for the Bezos Earth Fund, named after and financed by the world’s wealthiest individual, Jeff Bezos, who presides over the Amazon conglomerate, which has a total market capitalization of $1.5 trillion.
In February 2020, Bezos announced the launch of his climate change initiative on Instagram, writing: “Today, I’m thrilled to announce I am launching the Bezos Earth Fund... Climate change is the biggest threat to our planet. I want to work alongside others both to amplify known ways and to explore new ways of fighting the devastating impact of climate change on this planet we all share... I’m committing $10 billion to start and will begin issuing grants this summer.”
The donations by Bezos towards climate change have been supplemented by his $100 million donation to Feeding America’s COVID-19 response fund in March. These sums, however, pale in comparison to the wealth which Bezos has accumulated this year alone, more than $70 billion.
A similar trend is reflected among the other American oligarchs. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is now worth $12.7 billion, a massive jump from his wealth of $2.6 billion in April. He pledged $1 billion for COVID-19 relief, or about 10 percent of his earnings this year. Microsoft founder Bill Gates donated at least $350 million to COVID-19 relief through the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation. However, he has seen his wealth balloon from $98 billion in April to $120.1 billion at present, according to statistics maintained by Forbes. Meanwhile, Bezos’s ex-wife, Mackenzie Scott, was reported to have donated $6 billion to charitable causes.
The pandemic has dealt an incalculable blow to the vast majority of humanity. According to the non-profit Save the Children, 5.25 billion people were substantially poorer in November than they were in January. The United Nations’ World Food Program issued a report in April that stated “an additional 130 million people could be pushed to the brink of starvation by the end of 2020. That’s a total of 265 million people.”
The charitable activities of the oligarchs have to be understood in this context. From March to June 2020, 209 billionaires gave away $7.2 billion in funds and equipment for COVID-19 assistance, with Pricewaterhouse Coopers researchers suggesting “this is the greatest amount billionaires have given in a short space of time ever, even after allowing for inflation.” This is barely one percent of the more than $600 billion which US billionaires alone gained between May and June of this year. These billionaires have gained over $1 trillion over the course of the entire year.
The pandemic has accelerated the processes of monopolization and concentration of wealth already well apparent before the mass outbreak of the virus in February. The state response to the pandemic forced countless small businesses to shut their doors and lay off workers. Around the world, massive growth in unemployment and lack of government assistance is leading workers to pursue low-wage and strenuous jobs for survival despite the direct risk of infection and death. As part of this trend, Amazon itself saw extremely rapid growth in its workforce, from 798,000 at the end of 2019 to over 1.4 million today.
The increased demand for home delivery in the midst of an unmitigated commercial catastrophe for its brick-and-mortar competitors sent Amazon’s stock price soaring, and Bezos’s own net worth climbed to roughly $186.7 billion.
While refusing to take effective action to combat the spread of the coronavirus and secure the livelihoods of the vast majority, governments the world over placed vast financial resources at the disposal of the ultra-rich through trillion dollar fiscal bailouts like the CARES Act, together with several trillion dollars of monetary bailouts through central banks. Meanwhile, the capitalists refused to halt non-essential production, sacrificing workers’ health and lives in the pursuit of profits and accelerating the spread of the deadly pandemic. It is from these social crimes that the billionaires have accumulated the fortunes from which they now dispense their charitable donations.
The sheer scale of the hypocrisy of billionaire “charity” during the pandemic calls to mind what Frederich Engels wrote about capitalist philanthropy in The Conditions of the Working Class in England(1845):
What? The wealthy English fail to remember the poor? They who have founded philanthropic institutions, such as no other country can boast of! Philanthropic institutions forsooth! As though you rendered the proletarians a service in first sucking out their very life-blood and then practicing your self-complacent, Pharisaic philanthropy upon them, placing yourselves before the world as mighty benefactors of humanity when you give back to the plundered victims the hundredth part of what belongs to them! Charity which degrades him who gives more than him who takes; charity which treads the downtrodden still deeper in the dust, which demands that the degraded, the pariah cast out by society, shall first surrender the last that remains to him, his very claim to manhood, shall first beg for mercy before your mercy deigns to press, in the shape of an alms, the brand of degradation upon his brow.
But the “pharisaic philanthropy” of British capitalism in Engels’ day, which was scathingly portrayed in Oliver Twist and other works by Charles Dickens, pales in comparison to the present. In more recent times, philanthropies and charities have been transformed in many cases to resemble business operations in themselves: adopting organizational structures resembling that of venture capital groups, recruiting business managers to leadership positions, and courting venture capitalists as investors.
In many cases, what are presented as “philanthropic” organizations function as little more than adjunct vehicles for the prosecution of the interests of their mega-rich donors. This is known within the nonprofit sector as “venture philanthropy.”
In 2007, The World Socialist Web Site reported a study by the Los Angeles Times which found that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the largest “charitable” organization in the world, had 41 percent of its holdings invested in corporations whose policies “countered its charitable goals,” as well as holdings in over 60 of the highest-polluting companies in the US. A separate report referenced in the article found that the foundation’s healthcare work may have “diverted medical staff from overseeing births and battling childhood diseases” due to the more lucrative pay for the Foundation’s high-profile initiatives battling infectious diseases.
Under its charitable auspices, this foundation has waged unrelenting warfare against public education in the United States, investing millions in private charter schools and pro-charter lobbyists. The Clinton Foundation is another infamous example of bourgeois philanthropy in practice. A particularly devastating memo in the tranche of emails published by Wikileaks in 2016 “detailed a circle of enrichment,” according to the Washington Post, in which a top aide “raised money for the Clinton Foundation from top-tier corporations such as Dow Chemical and Coca-Cola that were clients of his firm ... while pressing many of those same donors to provide personal income to the former president.”
In November, Bezos announced the initial disbursement of the $10 billion fund: $791 million dollars went towards 16 groups, with the largest grants going to the most “established” environmental charities. The Nature Conservancy, the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the World Wildlife Fund each received $100 million with 11 other groups receiving grants between $5 and $50 million each.
The funds so far, according to the large non-profits receiving grants, will go to creating “mangrove development and seaweed farms,” launching satellites that track greenhouse gas emissions, reducing the “carbon footprint of farming practices in Northwest India,” and funding lobbyists to “build the political will for climate policies.”
While the funds disbursed by Bezos may find their way into the hands of scientists and specialists who will use them to the best of their abilities, the fact that so much important scientific research relies so heavily on billionaire oligarchs parting with a small portion of their fortunes is not a healthy social phenomenon.
Moreover, it is important to note that the EDF calls for “market-based” solutions to climate change and will use Bezos’ money to “build confidence in carbon-credits,” which are credits that allow companies to pollute and further function as speculative assets. The NRDC will use the $100 million to “build the political will for climate policies” by funding lobbyists and campaigners to push through market reforms.
Bezos has also gifted $43 million to efforts to promote identity politics in the form of funding to the Solutions Project, which gives grants to fund “local and state policy work” through the use of “a frontline leadership of color, with at least 80 percent going to organizations led by women.” In this way, Bezos’s charitable gifts will be used to divert public attention towards questions of race and gender identity and away from the fundamental class division of society, a diversion which has long been deliberately promoted by the corporate media and the Democratic Party in the interests of oligarchs like Bezos.
It is worth noting that Amazon itself is a significant world polluter. Its total environmental impact increased over 15 percent from 2018 to 2019 due to rising sales, according to its own reports. This was a record year in sales for the company, which means its impact on pollution has most likely significantly increased.
Meanwhile, the Thomas Reuters foundation recently reported that the emission reductions goals set by governments around the world in the Paris Accords in 2015, based in part on carbon credits, is set to fail. A major reason for this is that cement, steel and agricultural production were suggested to be curbed, but due to the profit motive, production has instead increased, contributing to a rise in global temperatures. The 2017 Carbon Majors Report showed that 70 percent of all greenhouse gases released from 1988 to 2015 came from just 100 major companies.
Charity and philanthropic patronage are aristocratic forms. They are a symptom of an unequal society in which resources have pooled to an irrational degree at one pole of society. It was Andrew Carnegie, a class-conscious representative of the American bourgeoisie, who pointed to the social role of charity in bolstering capitalist rule in The Gospel of Wealth (1889): “We accept and welcome therefore...great inequality of environment, the concentration of business, industrial and commercial, in the hands of a few, and the law of competition between these, as being not only beneficial, but essential for the future progress of the race.”
He posed the question, “What is the proper mode of administering wealth after the laws upon which civilization is founded have thrown it into the hands of the few?” The answer: the “men of wealth” have a duty of “becoming the mere agent and trustee for his poorer brethren, bringing to their service his superior wisdom, experience and ability to administer, doing for them better than they would or could do for themselves.”
In similar fashion, the charitable donations of Bezos are designed to promote illusions in the “social responsibility” of the oligarchs. Such donations function to placate hostility against the rapacious activities of the capitalist class as a whole, which has refused to curb its profit drive even as its activities jeopardize the stability of the planet’s climate and have contributed to the runaway spread of a pandemic that was otherwise entirely preventable.
In order to combat climate change, fight infectious diseases, and cure other social ills, it is necessary not to rely on the relatively small scraps donated by the oligarchs, to be used as the oligarchs dictate according to their own individual whims and prerogatives, but by the expropriation of all of the ill-gotten wealth of the capitalist class by the working class, to be utilized democratically and scientifically to meet social needs worldwide.
With their army destroyed and their last, best troops wiped out in one morning on the outskirts of their capital Mekele the last remnants of the leadership of Ethiopia’s TPLF regime were forced to retreat to the secret Hagarasalam underground bunkers near the capital. Built by the notoriously paranoid and cowardly TPLF godfather Meles Zenawi, the Hagarasalam bunkers were the bolt hole of desperation, a place to hide through thick and thin of warfare in safety. No engineer that helped build this secret underground bunker system lived to tell the story.
When their enemies, the Ethiopian army, surrounded them there the TPLF mafia capos escaped through a secret 300 meter long tunnel and literally headed for the hills, the nearest mountainside, to hide. They broke up into two groups and tried to find what shelter they could. Old, fat and desk bound for the past 30 years, they’re fighting fit days of the 1980s guerrilla war were long gone. Without access to food or water it was only a matter of time before their jig was up.
They were quickly spotted, surrounded and offered a safe surrender which they spurned repeatedly. Then the onslaught started, first heavy artillery bombardment, then worked over again by helicopter gunships.
When the final assault was done all that was left of the TPLF leaders on that mountainside were pieces of bones and body parts.
As happened so often in the past the acrid odor of high explosives had hardly settled when the winds carried the smell of fresh kill to their dens where the hyenas had taken shelter from shot and shell. With smoke still rising from craters in the mountainside, the hyenas, “zibee” in Tigrinia, mother tongue of the TPLF, were out hunting their dinner. Within a few days the site of the final hours of the TPLF regime was picked clean and the only thing left of the bane of modern Ethiopia was hyena skat spread across the mountainside.
This is no rumor, no “what might have happened”. This is what actually took place and is an open secret here in Asmara and confirmed by first hand accounts. I guess you could say this is the “unofficial” official story. Or maybe it’s the official “unofficial” story?
What really matters is that the CIA’s oldest. largest, most successful criminal operation in Africa came to its well deserved end. With the TPLF, the most feared regime in eastern Africa, now gone for good peace can break out and the long over due rebuilding of a independent, self reliant, eventually prosperous Ethiopia can begin.
Once the Ethiopian people are free to raise their heads in pride and start the hard work of feeding, housing and educating their people, and their lives begin to finally improve, the rest of Arica will have to take notice.
Ethiopia is potentially a wealthy country with trillions of m3 of natural gas, billions of barrels of oil, rich deposits of minerals lying in the pretty much unexplored Arab-Nubian geological shield and rich agricultural lands and lots of water.
When a people who were once best known for famine and war better their lives the rest of Africa have a “threat of a good example” that can’t be ignored. Then the neo colonialists who dominate Africa under the cover of the EU will no longer be able to plunder and loot our continent, no longer be able to buy the support of their populations with a rich lifestyle by bleeding Africa dry.
As Ethiopia begins to break the modern day chains of neocolonialism expect their leader, Nobel Laureate Abiy Ahmed to be continuously demonized in the western media. To see Africa’s sickest nation become a modern successful example of African independence and self reliance those bloodsucking western banksters and their lackey at the UN will be hard put to stand aside and let their system inevitably come crumbling down about them. For how can they continue as they have without the stolen wealth of Africa, to bribe their people and prop up their increasingly challenged regimes?
There has been an increasing tendency worldwide to divert a lot of high-nutrition food crops to industrial uses. In addition many other food crops are not being used as staple foods but instead are being processed in many complicated ways to serve as raw materials for food industry in very different forms. What impact will this have on food security and food safety?
On the one hand if a lot of staple food crops are diverted to industrial use then there can be a shortage of staple food despite increase being reported in this crop production. On the other hand food safety can be compromised by highly complex processing, involving many chemicals, whose health impacts are not realized , or else are actively hidden or understated.
To give one example, a significant amount of corn has been steadily shifted to high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) which has several uses in food industry and other industrial uses as well. How is HFCS obtained from corn? Raj Patel has described this in his widely acclaimed book ‘Stuffed and Starved’, “Through a process known as wet milling, corn is first dried, sorted and dipped in sulphurous acid; the germ of the seed is removed, washed, filtered, spun and then heated with weak hydrochloric acid to make corn syrup. At this point, the resulting mixture, once cleansed and treated, is about three-quarters as sweet as sugar. To raise the sweetness level, the amount of fructose is raised by reacting it with enzymes, and then it is made sweeter still by distilling and concentrating it. The resulting 80-90 per cent fructose is then diluted to get the industry standard 55 per cent high-fructose corn syrup.”
We leave it to the readers to decide how proper and safe it is to process a high nutrition staple food-crop in this way. An additional issue is that once such industrial uses become more important, crop-breeding is increasingly used to switch over to those varieties of food crops which are more amenable to industrial processing, and hence availability of nourishing, healthy, safe food suffers at several levels.
There is a fast growing worldwide trend towards very heavy diversion of food crops for use as bio-fuels. While on the one hand there is a big diversion from food to fuel in this, the actual loss to food security can be even more if more fertile lands suitable for food are diverted to bio-fuel and are used in unsustainable ways for monocultures of bio-fuel crops on a large scale, using high external, chemical inputs. While bio-fuels can contribute to reducing use of fossil fuels, if fossil-fuel intensive inputs are used to produce bio-fuels, abandoning organic production of food in ways which reduce or absorb GHG emissions, then the net result may not be useful from the point of view of checking climate change.
Writing about trends and prospects in bio-fuel in India, the Petroleum Minister Mr. Dharmendra Pradhan recently wrote in The Hindustan Times ( article titled How Biofuels Can Double Farm Incomes published on December 28), “Ethanol supplies have improved from 380 million litres in 2013-14 to 1.89 billion litres (1890 million litres) in 2019. Offers of about 3.5 billion litres from both sugar/molasses and grain-based distilleries are expected this year.” In addition this article refers to a recent decision to “utilize surplus rice available with the Food Corporation of India and maize as an additional source of feedstock for ethanol production.”
Hence clearly there is need for concern, at a time of widespread hunger and malnutrition among the people, regarding the transfer of staple food crops to industrial uses and related factors.
In his Christmas address, President Frank-Walter Steinmeier (Social Democratic Party, SPD) shed a few crocodile tears on behalf of the ruling class. But this cannot disguise the fact that governments at federal and state level bear full responsibility for the greatest mass deaths since the end of World War II.
For countless families, this year’s Christmas was not a happy, but a deadly one. Thousands of people are gasping for breath in intensive care units, and many families have already lost parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters and even children.
Frank-Walter Steinmeier, President of Germany, 2018 (Wikimedia Commons)
On Christmas Eve, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) reported 24,470 new infections and a record number of coronavirus deaths in Germany in one day, 962. This already makes December by far the deadliest month since the outbreak of the pandemic. In the first 27 days of the month, 13,667 people died, more than 500 a day. In the 10 days before Christmas, the average was more than 680. Since the death toll reflects the infections four to five weeks ago, it is already clear that thousands more people will die from COVID-19 in the coming weeks.
The explosive spread of the virus is the direct result of the ruthless “profits before lives” policy of sending people into workplaces in unsafe conditions and keeping schools and day-care centres open at all costs. In doing so, the ruling class has provoked a situation like the one in Italy in the spring, when the health system collapsed due to exploding case numbers and tens of thousands died in terrible conditions.
In numerous German cities and regions, hospitals are completely overloaded. Due to the high death toll, bodies are kept in temporary storage. The dead would be stored “in the flood defence facility” and only brought to the crematorium “when released for cremation,” the city of Zittau in Saxony announced before Christmas. In Hanau, Hesse, the bodies of coronavirus victims are stored in a specially erected refrigerated container at the city’s main cemetery.
While politicians and the media had expressed shock at the pictures from Bergamo, Italy, in March, now, they play down the mass deaths. The RKI’s grim statistics can be read daily in the media, however, there are hardly any depictions of the terrible situation in hospitals or serious reports about the tragic fates suffered by so many individuals. Above all, the fact that measures could be taken to stop the catastrophe is kept completely out of the picture. The avoidable deaths of almost 1,000 people every day in Germany alone is now considered “normal.”
“All quiet on the Western front,” states the army report in Erich Maria Remarque’s world-famous novel of the same name on the day when the 19-year-old protagonist Paul Bäumer falls at the front towards the end of the mass deaths in World War I. Today’s indifference of the ruling class to the fates of individuals, such as the death from COVID-19 of the young teacher Soydan A. in Berlin a few days ago, can be summed up in the sentence: “All quiet in the pandemic.”
With the normalisation of death, the ruling class is pursuing definite social and political interests. In April, the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality Party) had already warned in a statement :
The ruling class aims to make the pandemic the “normal state of affairs,” i.e., to accustom the population to the idea that death will continue for the foreseeable future. Workers are supposed to accept this as inevitable. That is why reports about the number of deaths in the news are increasingly shifting into the background.
There is a vicious class logic behind these efforts. Workers are treated as a kind of disposable commodity. Their deaths are regarded as a normal part of the generation of profits. Those who succumb to the virus can be replaced.
And a few days ago, the World Socialist Web Site stated in a perspective :
Under capitalism, what is meant by “the economy” is the exploitation of the working class. To the extent that the “cure”—that is, the most elementary measures to save lives—impinges on the process of profit accumulation, it is unacceptable. Anything that undermines the extraction of surplus value from the working class, or diverts this surplus value from the capitalists through emergency measures and social services, must be rejected.
Governments worldwide have already sacrificed more than 1.7 million lives to their capitalist and imperialist interests and are willing to continue this course in the new year. The ruling class in Germany openly says this.
“This pandemic is indeed something that is first of all reordering the balance of power in the world economically, but perhaps also socio-politically,” emphasised Chancellor Angela Merkel (Christian Democratic Union, CDU) in her last government statement in the Bundestag (federal parliament). Germany must “look at how we are embedded in the global context” and “do everything possible to ensure that the path of recovery we have taken in the third quarter, after a massive slump in the second quarter, can be continued.”
In other words: there must not and will not be any measures that endanger the profits of the German economy and the orgy of enrichment on the stock exchanges. On the contrary, the hundreds of billions of euros that have flowed to big business and the banks in the course of the coronavirus bailouts are to be extracted from the working class again. “Public debt means ... of course, a burden on future budgets” and “the need to pay that back,” Merkel stressed.
With next year’s budget, the government has also underlined its determination to tighten its political trajectory, the basic direction of which is supported by all parliamentary parties as well as the trade unions. While the budgets for health, education and social affairs will be cut by a total of almost €12 billion compared to this year, spending on the military and domestic security will increase by more than €4 billion. This is a warning: instead of emergency measures to save hundreds of thousands of lives, the ruling class is setting its course on dictatorship and war.
Far-reaching political and historical conclusions must be drawn from this at the end of the first year of the pandemic, which has so far claimed half a million lives in Europe alone. The carnage of World War I was ended by the October Revolution in Russia in 1917 and a wave of revolutionary struggles throughout Europe and the world. Today, too, the struggle against mass death, social inequality, war and dictatorship requires a revolutionary struggle against the social system that has brought about the catastrophe. Capitalism, which has discredited itself in the eyes of millions, must be replaced by socialism.
Israel goes to the polls on March 23, following the failure of the seven-month-old national emergency coalition government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party and its allies and Benny Gantz’s Blue and White electoral bloc, to set a budget.
Three previous inconclusive elections in the past two years pitted Netanyahu against Gantz’s so-called “centre-left” bloc, which fought on an “Anyone but Bibi” [Netanyahu’s nickname] slogan without putting forward any alternative or progressive policies.
This time Netanyahu faces a strong challenge from the far right, his former colleagues. These forces have gained strength and moved to fill the vacuum left after Gantz joined and served as Netanyahu’s political accomplice in imposing the government’s “herd immunity” policies that have created a healthcare and social disaster for Jewish Israelis and Palestinians alike. Having lost all credibility, the centre-left is disintegrating and faces electoral wipeout.
Benjamin Netanyahu [Photo: Office of the Israeli Prime Minister]
Essentially a ferocious contest between far right parties, the election paves the way for ever escalating militarism abroad and social reaction and repression against the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, its own Palestinians citizens within Israel, and the Jewish working class at home.
Netanyahu’s political strategy is dominated by his determination to avoid trial—the evidence sessions are due to start in February when he will have to appear in court--and conviction for corruption, bribery, and breach of trust in three separate cases. This means retaining the premiership at all costs, since a legal quirk allows an indicted prime minister but not a cabinet minister to remain in office and to introduce legislation preventing his trial from going ahead.
He agreed a coalition with Blue and White, promising to introduce a two-year budget and rotate the premiership with Gantz after 18 months, a pledge that everyone knew he had no intention of honouring. From the start, he had the measure of Gantz and his political allies, who even before the government was assembled abandoned their efforts to introduce legislation to stop Netanyahu from heading a government while under criminal indictment and limit a prime minister’s term to a maximum of eight years.
He excluded Gantz and his party from all the major decisions, including the recent normalization agreements with the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco, so that he could posture as a world statesman and a master foreign policy strategist. He used the pandemic to give himself unprecedented airtime, while taking the credit for obtaining the vaccine and inaugurating a speedy rollout programme that envisages inoculating two million of Israel’s nearly 10 million population by the end of January, including all of Israel’s over 60s.
The pandemic has thrown a million Israelis out of work, even as business leaders warn that thousands of companies are likely to close and a third partial lockdown has been imposed as the number of cases soar. Israel has reported more than 400,000 infections and 3,226 deaths, the vast majority since August, after the government lifted an early lockdown without adequate safety precautions and in defiance of recommendations by the country’s health experts. As cases began to rise, a second, partial lockdown was imposed in September and then lifted a few weeks later.
The situation is far worse in the Palestinian territories, for which Israel is legally responsible. The West Bank has recorded around 134,000 COVID-19 cases and 1,332 deaths, mostly in the last few months. The besieged Gaza enclave has run out of testing kits and the healthcare system is on the point of collapse, as more than 210 people have died.
Netanyahu’s fractious cabinet rarely met. Citing the pandemic as an excuse, he refused to set a two-year budget, prompting three senior finance ministry officials to resign over the political infighting, and precipitating the automatic dissolution of the Knesset on December 23. The government, which has been without a budget, has been operating under a pro-rated 2019 budget.
Gantz nevertheless did everything he could to keep the coalition afloat, agreeing to a three-month budget postponement until December. He reportedly agreed to limit the powers of Justice Minister Avi Nissenkorn, a member of his own party, as a concession to the prime minister’s Likud party that was seeking to fire Nissenkorn to prevent him from appointing a state attorney and attorney general, whose roles are critical to Netanyahu’s criminal trial.
For Netanyahu, precipitating fresh elections before a new budget enables him to continue as caretaker prime minister, whereas a collapse of the coalition after an agreed budget would have given the rotating premiership to Gantz.
Netanyahu had hoped to profit from the latter’s vanishing popularity and form a more sympathetic coalition that could ensure his immunity from prosecution. But that hope has now been upended by his two former proteges turned rivals: Gideon Sa’ar and Naftali Bennett. Seizing the opportunity presented by the discrediting of Gantz’s bloc, right-winger Sa’ar, who last year challenged Netanyahu in a Likud leadership contest, established New Hope as his own political vehicle. He has stated his refusal to sit with Netanyahu in a future coalition. Sa’ar has the support of several Likud ministers, including Netanyahu’s key political ally, the far right, religious and pro-settler Ze’ev Elkin, who is committed to a Greater Israel policy, as well as other Likud legislators and members anxious to see the end of Netanyahu’s reign.
Sa’ar is to the right of Netanyahu, having openly opposed the 1982 evacuation of Israeli settlements in Sinai as part of the peace deal with Egypt, the so-called “two-state” solution, and Israel’s unilateral pullout from Gaza in 2005 and supported the annexation of the West Bank which Israel has illegally occupied since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. As Interior Minister, he oversaw the deportation of more African asylum seekers than any other official.
Bennet, another former Likud member who now heads the religious Yamina Party, has now announced his intention to seek the premiership. Together with Avigdor Lieberman’s nationalist Israel Beiteinu, the ultra-religious parties and defectors from Gantz’s Blue and White Party, they have the potential to unseat Netanyahu.
In the meantime, Netanyahu is constantly provoking Iran ahead of US President-elect Joseph Biden’s inauguration and the possible resumption of talks to revise the nuclear agreement. It is widely accepted that Israel’s Mossad was behind the assassination of Iran’s chief nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh earlier this month. It comes in the wake of the much-publicized US-brokered “peace deal” with several Arab states that is part of the Trump administration’s broad anti-Iranian axis being formed in preparation for a potentially catastrophic war aimed at regime-change in Tehran, and rolling back Chinese and Russian influence in the resource-rich Middle East and North Africa.
The normalization of commercial and diplomatic relations with Israel, including the first direct flights to the UAE and the right to use Saudi airspace, has prompted increasing concerns in Tehran of Israeli encirclement. It fears that the petro-state will provide Israel with a secret forward base for use against Iran amid Israel’s close cooperation with Azerbaijan, Iran’s neighbour on the Caspian Sea, where Israeli weaponry played a key role in the recent fighting against Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh.
Israel has stepped up its provocations against Iran after Tehran blamed Israel for Fakhrizadeh’s assassination and warned that it would not stay idle while its neighbours build up their military strength. A few days ago, an Israeli submarine passed through the Suez Canal in coordination with Egypt en route for the Persian Gulf. Speaking at a military ceremony, Israel's army chief of staff General Aviv Kochavi threatened a stiff response against Iran and its allies. This was followed two days later by Netanyahu insisting that Israel would not allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons. Israel continues to bomb Iranian-linked targets in Syria, while the Israel Defense Forces have been placed on a state of high alert, reportedly because of a possible US attack on Iran.
As the coronavirus pandemic accelerates across Europe, several governments announced over the holidays that they had detected cases of the new, even more infectious strain of the virus, currently believed to have originated in England.
Yesterday, Britain reported more than 40,000 cases—a record since the beginning of the pandemic. Most new cases in at least southern England are believed to be due to the new strain of the virus. The seven-day average is also at an all-time high of more than 36,000, equivalent to almost 180,000 daily cases in a country the size of the United States.
The strain has now been detected on every continent. Its spread is intersecting with the criminal policy of European governments, refusing essential measures to stop the pandemic’s spread that would threaten corporate profits, including the closure of non-essential workplaces and schools and provision of a decent income to the population.
Health care workers transport a COVID-19 patient from an intensive care unit (ICU) at a hospital in Kyjov to hospital in Brno, Czech Republic, Thursday, Oct. 22, 2020. (AP Photo/Petr David Josek)
On December 26, the French health ministry published a notice announcing the first confirmed case involving the new strain in France. The patient was a French national residing in England who returned from the UK on December 19. It was only detected because the patient, who was asymptomatic, went to the hospital to be treated for a different illness on December 21, and was tested according to standard procedures.
Also on Saturday, Spain announced four confirmed cases of the new strain, all among people recently arrived from the UK. Madrid deputy health chief Antonio Zapatero reported that three other suspected cases could not be confirmed until Tuesday or Wednesday.
Italy registered its second confirmed case of the new strain on December 21. In Europe it has also been detected in the Netherlands, Denmark and Germany. Yesterday, Canada announced that it had detected two cases, and on Friday Japan announced that it had found five cases, all in people recently arrived from the UK. Finland reported yesterday that two people arriving from abroad had tested positive for the new strain, and another for a variant recently detected for the first time in South Africa. It has also been detected in South Korea, Lebanon and Australia.
There is currently no indication that the more recent strain is more deadly, or resistant to recently developed vaccines. However, it is significantly more contagious, threatening to flood hospitals more rapidly with critically-ill patients, and cause a large increase in deaths.
On December 23, researchers at the Centre for Mathematical Modelling of Infectious Diseases, at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, released preliminary results of new research on the transmissibility and severity of the new strain. The group fitted a two-strain model of the virus to COVID-19 hospital admissions, ICU and hospital bed occupancy, and deaths in the three most heavily affected National Health Service regions of England.
They estimate that the strain is 56 percent more contagious, with a 95 percent confidence interval between 50 and 74 percent, consistent with previous estimates that the strain is 70 percent more contagious.
The group conclude that “the increase in transmissibility is likely to lead to a large increase in incidence, with COVID-19 hospitalisations and deaths projected to reach higher levels in 2021 than were observed in 2020.” They state that this would be the case even if current lock-down restrictions introduced on December 19 are maintained.
The researchers call specifically to close schools: “Our estimates suggest that control measures of a similar stringency to the national lockdown implemented in England in November 2020 are unlikely to reduce the effective reproduction number R to less than 1, unless primary schools, secondary schools, and universities are also closed.” At the same time, they call for an increase of the vaccine roll-out to more than 2 million cases per week, approximately 10 times the number currently being carried out.
Across Europe, official policy is dictated not by the scientific requirement to combat the virus, but the economic imperatives of the financial elite and the protection of corporate profits. The lock-downs implemented in France, Germany, the UK, Italy and elsewhere beginning in October kept schools open, so parents could be kept at work. Their policies have caused a second wave that is killing hundreds of thousands across Europe.
The official death toll in Europe (including Russia) now stands at 525,000, but the real figure is far higher. Yesterday, the Rosstat national statistics agency announced that an estimated 186,000 Russians have died from the virus this year—more than three times higher than the number previously maintained by the Russian government. The figure is based on an analysis of the excess mortality rate; from January to November 2020, the death toll in Russia from all causes increased by over 229,000 compared to the previous year.
In the UK, while the official death toll is now over 71,000, separate figures published by the national statistics agency, including all cases where COVID-19 is mentioned on the death certificate, place the number at 87,000. There have been over 72,000 deaths reported in Italy, 63,000 in France, 50,000 in Spain and 30,000 in Germany. Hundreds of deaths are being reported from all these countries every day.
There are clear warnings by scientists that a further acceleration has already been underway for several weeks. In France, the official case numbers reported over the holiday period have been below 10,000 since Sunday, due to the impact of reduced testing. But the real number is closer to that reported on Friday and Saturday, with more than 40,000 cases detected in 48 hours. The R rate is again above 1, denoting exponential spread of the disease.
Amid the expanding death toll, EU governments and media have focused almost exclusively on the first use of the COVID-19 vaccine on the continent. The Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines were approved by European regulatory authorities on December 21.
France administered the vaccine for the first time to aged-care residents in Sevran and Dijon on Sunday. Vaccines have been administered in Italy, Spain, Greece, Slovenia, Sweden, Finland and Denmark.
Billions of people worldwide rightly welcome the arrival of a vaccine as a means to eradicate the spread of the deadly virus. But the propaganda campaign of the European governments and media is aimed at covering over the policy of death that they are pursuing, which is allowing the virus to spread.
In France, for example, the official timeline for the roll-out of the vaccine estimates that it will not be administered to the 14 million most vulnerable people until at least the end of April, and possibly later. In contrast, experts give varying estimates of 85 percent or more of the population who must be immune to stop the spread of the virus. Yet nothing is proposed to prevent the spread of the virus in the interim period.
The EU declared December 27-29 to be “EU vaccination days,” and EU commission president Ursula von der Leyen tweeted that the vaccine had been “delivered to all European countries,” calling it a “touching moment of unity.” In fact, to the extent that there is “unity” among the European powers, it is that an untold number of lives must be sacrificed for the interests of the capitalist class.
Britain and the European Union (EU) are set to ratify the trade deal agreed on December 24. The deal between the UK and the EU’s 27 countries covers trade worth around £660 billion and preserves tariff and quota-free EU-UK trade for goods.
Agreement on the “EU-U.K. Trade and Cooperation Agreement as of January 1, 2021” formally concludes the Brexit process which began in June 2016, when the UK voted in a referendum by a slim majority to leave the EU.
The deal is being rushed through the UK parliament Wednesday, after just one day of debate on a 1,246-page document. Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson has an 80-seat majority and support for the deal from the main opposition Labour Party. Only the Scottish National Party (just 47 MPs) and Liberal Democrats (11) are pledged to vote against.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson signed the Withdrawal Agreement for the UK to leave the EU on January 31st. [Credit: U.K. Prime Minister]
EU ambassadors met in Brussels yesterday to approve the deal, initiating the process for adoption. The EU can provisionally implement it on January 1 with the approval of EU countries, but without the consent of the European Parliament. The European Parliament is expected to ratify it sometime in February.
The agreement was reached just days before the December 31 deadline. Britain left the EU in January, via its Withdrawal Agreement with Brussels, and entered a one-year transitional phase. Without the deal agreed last week, the UK would have left the EU in a “hard Brexit” and been forced to trade on World Trade Organisation terms and via a complex tariffs system.
The trade talks were fractious, with both sides engaged in grandstanding and threats up to the last minute. Both sides were forced to make concessions, particularly the UK on fishing rights.
As the talks concluded, Johnson was massively undermined by the November US presidential election victory of Joe Biden over Donald Trump. The victory of the Democrats, whose hostility to Brexit is well-known, was a boon to the EU. The Tory government’s Brexit strategy had leant heavily on a slavish adherence to Donald Trump’s “America First” agenda and his hostility to the EU.
With both sides wanting a deal, the agreement, with many issues left unresolved, was all that could be achieved in a global situation dominated by escalating trade conflicts between the major imperialist powers.
Ultimately, the deal does nothing other than set the short-term parameters of the ongoing conflict between the UK and EU. It is the fullest expression to date of the vociferous tensions that are tearing the EU apart, bringing into sharp relief global tensions that have erupted between the US and Europe, with the UK the main fault line.
It is inevitable that the issues the negotiations were unable to resolve will become the focus for major geo-political conflicts.
The document has nothing to say on foreign policy, defence and security. On many of these issues, the UK is aligned with the US, and Britain will continue to be pitted against the EU even as Biden seeks other allies on the continent. In the run-up to the agreement, the UK had already exited a raft of EU security and defence arrangements, including Galileo, its Global Satellite Navigation System.
There is nothing in the deal on financial services, an area where Britain is a global leader with a £132 billion industry that accounts for almost 7 percent of GDP. In 2018, financial services employed more than one million people, with London accounting for 49 percent of the sector's output.
The Financial Times reported that Brussels told London that it “will need to wait until after January 1 to learn what market access rights its financial services companies will have in future, warning that they will hinge on how far Britain diverges from EU standards.”
Agreement had been reached earlier that access to each other’s financial services markets will be based on an “equivalence” of regulatory systems. But Brussels is getting its retribution in first, fully aware of the inevitable moves by London to gain economic advantage by undercutting the EU on workers’ protection rights, environmental standards, and other regulations Britain is no longer tied to.
Announcing the deal, Johnson made clear his intention to establish a “Singapore-on-Thames” in direct competition with the EU. What “we’re jointly creating”, he declared in a speech on December 24, is a “giant free trade zone.” The UK would now “be able to decide how and where we are going to stimulate new jobs and new hope, with freeports and new green industrial zones.” Applications are already in for 10 freeports around the UK, based on offering corporations low taxes and a cheap labour force, including on the Thames in London.
Johnson gave his first post-deal interview to the Sunday Telegraph, with the newspaper noting how the prime minister signaled that “he would be ready to rip up the agreement should Brussels ‘regularly’ attempt to take retaliatory action.” Business taxes and regulations would be pored over, with Chancellor Rishi Sunak, the main proponent of freeports, “doing a big exercise on all of this”.
The Brexit deal pits the working class into conflict with the most ruthless and rapacious sections of the ruling elite, who view Brexit as their great opportunity to complete “the Thatcher Revolution”.
The reactionary claims propounded by the Left Leave campaign in 2014—headed by the Socialist Workers Party and Socialist Party—that Brexit would ever be anything other than a Thatcherite nightmare for the working class have been exploded. As the deal was being finalised, the SWP commented pathetically in a Socialist Worker piece headlined, “Brexit could have meant more than this,” that the “Tories have come up with various versions of Brexit designed to make it even easier for the bosses to exploit people. They hanker after a Singapore on Thames’ where workers’ rights are shredded and racist laws are strengthened.”
Who would have thought that the Tories would consider such a thing?
The other great myth left shattered is the claim of the Remain section of the ruling elite and its supporters that the EU was or could ever be a restraining influence on the “free market” worshipping Brexiteers and offer a progressive way forward for workers. The entire European continent is wracked by social inequality, with far right forces being deliberately cultivated to wield as a weapon against the working class. Moreover, Brussels is a just as committed to trade war as London.
The vicious pursuit of the class interests of all the European powers was clear even in the timing of the agreement. This year has witnessed the largest preventable loss of life on the continent since World War II, with over 525,000 succumbing to a deadly disease. Over 71,000 officially and at least 80,000 according to other authoritative estimates have died in the UK alone from COVID-19. But at no point did anyone on either side suggest that perhaps the UK leaving the EU might be delayed, even though, as is confirmed by the chaotic scenes at the port of Dover, the distribution of food and medicines was threatened, including the vaccine for COVID-19.
Both South Korea and Japan have seen sharp increases in COVID-19 cases over the past several weeks, brought on by government neglect and a refusal to take any serious measures to prevent the spread of the virus. Instead, as in countries around the world, the responses of Tokyo and Seoul to the pandemic have been driven by concerns for big business.
South Korea reported 808 new COVID-19 cases for Sunday, down from a record number of 1,241 new cases on Friday. The decline, however, is attributed to fewer tests over the weekend. By 9.30 p.m. Monday evening, there were already 931 cases. The numbers have been growing by approximately 800 to 1,000 new infections per day since mid-December. In total, there have been 58,611 cases in the country while at least 819 deaths have occurred.
The densely populated capital of Seoul has overtaken Daegu as the epicenter of the pandemic in the country. The city continues to be the location of most new infections, with the surrounding metropolitan area of Gyeonggi Province close behind. In total, there were 485 new cases between the two areas on Sunday. The region is home to approximately half of South Korea’s population of 51 million.
People walking in Shibuya, 2 February 2020. (Wikimedia Commons/nakashi)
Under the central government’s five-tier social distancing scheme, the Seoul metropolitan area is under “Level 2.5” while the rest of the country is under Level 2. Level 3 is the highest. On December 21, the government announced that it would ban personal gatherings of five or more people from December 23 until January 3. This means that workers are still being kept on the job and most businesses can remain open, though with some restrictions.
Despite the skyrocketing numbers, the government of South Korean President Moon Jae-in has refused to implement enhanced social distancing measures. Moon stated earlier this month that doing so would cause too much “pain and damages” through the closure of stores and other facilities. In other words, the government has no intention of providing aid or assistance to workers or small businesses adversely affected by the pandemic.
The ban on personal gatherings is an attempt to shift blame onto individuals and away from the government. On Friday, Prime Minister Jeong Se-gyun, sounded a similar note, saying, “The vast majority of the nation is faithfully adhering to the government's antivirus measures despite the inconvenience and pain they entail, but if a few cheat for their own gains, it is difficult to expect results from participating in the antivirus measures.”
Seoul’s response to the pandemic has been reactive from the beginning, making decisions in response to new developments, rather than having any serious plan in place. Despite the nearly year-long pandemic and time to prepare, Seoul is now scrambling to find enough hospital beds to accommodate seriously ill patients. The Health Ministry stated Sunday that there were only 68 available beds in the capital region.
While workers and those without material means are being left out to dry, the government’s response in March demonstrates its true concerns. That month, the Bank of Korea stated that it had “decided to provide an unlimited amount of liquidity to financial firms to help minimise the economic fallout from the spread of COVID-19 and remove uncertainties in the financial market.” While workers suffer, the rich get anything they want.
It is a similar situation in Japan, which has also reported a record high number of new COVID-19 cases, with 3,841 new infections on Friday. There were 888 cases in Tokyo, which was also a record. In total, there have been more than 217,312 cases and 3,213 deaths.
The number of new cases is quickly putting a strain on the medical system. In seven prefectures and regions including Tokyo and Osaka, hospital bed capacity has surpassed 50 percent—the threshold for declaring the most affected regions to be at “Stage 4,” the highest level in a four-tier system indicating the most rapid growth of the virus.
The tier system was implemented in July as part of the government’s reckless “Go to Travel” campaign, designed to stimulate the economy and present a sense of normality to justify its own refusal to adopt safety measures. It has undoubtedly contributed to the proliferation of the virus. Even as cases spread, the program, which provides government subsidies for domestic travel, has not been halted, but only suspended from December 28 to January 11.
As of now, the government of Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga has denied the need for a state of emergency that would enable the government to implement limited lockdown measures. This is despite the fact that the Japan Medical Association and eight other healthcare organisations declared on December 21 that the country was facing an emergency. In a joint statement, the groups said: “The spread of the coronavirus infection shows no signs of stopping. Left unchecked, people in Japan will not be able to receive regular medical care, let alone care for COVID-19.”
Suga responded on Friday by appealing, “Please cooperate by refraining from gatherings as much as possible, so that we can stop infections from spreading.” In other words, just as the government in Seoul has claimed, spreading infections is the fault of individuals—many of whom are forced to go to work or school while taking overcrowded public transportation. The Tokyo metropolitan area is home to approximately 38 million people.
Suga’s refusal to implement a state of emergency demonstrates that the main concern is protecting big business and the extraction of profit from the working class. However, it also demonstrates the real nature of the state-of-emergency law that was passed in March. Rather than being a tool to protect the population, the government has used the pandemic as a pretext for strengthening laws that will be used to suppress political dissent.
On Friday, Japanese health authorities also confirmed the first cases of the new, mutated COVID-19 strain that is currently spreading in the United Kingdom. The strain was detected in five people who had recently arrived from the UK. The Health Ministry claims that none of the patients has had close contact with others since returning to Japan, but this is almost certainly not the case given the nature of travel.
The lack of preparation or regard for the health of the majority of the people in both countries demonstrates the need for a working class response to the pandemic.
