Japanese prime minister declares state of emergency amid rapid spread of COVID-19

Ben McGrath

The Japanese government of Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga declared a state of emergency last Thursday in response to the raging COVID-19 pandemic. It is being applied to the Tokyo, Chiba, Kanagawa, and Saitama Prefectures. The governors of Osaka, Kyoto, and Hyogo have asked to be included.

Tokyo witnessed 2,447 COVID-19 cases on Thursday, setting a record high. The Tokyo metropolitan area is a densely packed city of more than 38 million where social distancing is difficult, especially for workers and students relying on packed public transport. On Saturday, the number of daily new cases nationally reached 7,855, also a record high.

Pedestrians walk past a public TV with a live broadcast of a news conference by Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga after he declared a state of emergency Thursday, Jan. 7, 2021 in Tokyo. (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko)

Japan’s state of emergency law, which was revised last March, allows the government to order people to stay home, close schools, and cancel events. It can also request businesses shorten their hours. Tokyo is asking people to remain at and work from home when possible and for restaurants to close by 8pm.

While restrictions are necessary to combat the spread of the virus, the government is exploiting the crisis to push forward its law-and-order agenda.

Currently, government’s COVID-19 orders are not enforceable with penalties. As such, Tokyo has argued for inserting the law into the constitution. This is not a response to the pandemic, but instead has long been part of the agenda of the right-wing nationalists who want a complete revision of Japan’s post-war constitution, including the further restriction or elimination of democratic rights.

Indicating the political nature of the government’s restrictions, schools are being kept open, despite the danger, in order to ensure parents can still go to work.

A Tokyo resident explained to the World Socialist Web Site the danger students, teachers, and their families are being placed in to ensure schools remain open, saying, “There was a COVID case in my daughter’s school. They only had those classes of the same grade rest for a day, and everything was back to normal already from the following day. There was no testing either. They require someone to have spent more than 15 minutes and had been within a meter or so of the confirmed case, without a mask on, in order for someone to receive a test. It is ridiculous.”

The healthcare system is severely strained. Fumie Sakamoto, who works as an infection control manager in Tokyo’s St. Luke’s International Hospital, told the New York Times, “We are having too many cases to trace right now, and the state of emergency is coming too late.” She added, “We can’t take any more patients at this time. I think a lot of hospitals that take in COVID patients are in the same situation right now.”

This also means that COVID-19 patients may not be able to access care, but others suffering from separate illnesses and injuries could be denied treatment. This is an indictment of the entire political establishment in Japan. The pandemic has been raging globally for a year now, yet Tokyo and the regional governments allowed the situation in the country to get out of control, while doing little to nothing to prepare for a surge in COVID-19 cases.

Instead, the Suga government and that of his predecessor, Shinzo Abe, have prioritized keeping the economy open and workers on the job in order to allow big business to continue to extract surplus value from the working class.

The government promoted its “Go to…” campaigns, which include “Go to travel” and “Go to eat,” beginning in July and October respectively. People, backed by government subsidies, are encouraged to travel domestically and eat out at restaurants, so as to boost the economy. “Go to eat” was suspended on December 18, but “Go to travel” was only halted on December 28, weeks after the pandemic was growing out of control.

Furthermore, when the pandemic first began, former Prime Minister Abe downplayed the danger, hoping to still hold the Summer Olympic Games slated to take place in Tokyo, which the government sees as a boon for the economy.

While the Olympics were eventually postponed, Suga pledged in a New Year statement to hold them this year, claiming his government was making “preparations to realize a safe and secure tournament.” His government’s handling of the pandemic belies this statement.

The Olympics could easily become a series of “superspreader” events. Japan may not begin to distribute the COVID-19 vaccine until the end of February at the earliest, and undoubtedly there will be many people coming from overseas without being vaccinated. Tokyo and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) are downplaying the danger, and presenting the games as the “light at the end of the tunnel,” in the words of IOC President Thomas Bach.

The pandemic, however, is far from over. Globally, there have been more than 90 million COVID-19 cases and more than 1.9 million deaths. The danger is compounded by the total lack of preparation in countries to acquire the necessary amounts of vaccines to give to their entire populations and to prepare proper distribution methods.

In the United States as of Friday, for example, only about 6.7 million people had received at least one dose of the vaccine, falling far short of Washington’s pledge to inoculate 20 million people by the end of December. Only about 151,000 people had received the two shots that are necessary.

Tokyo claims it has secured the rights to enough vaccines for its entire population of 126 million. However, the vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech is currently the only one under regulatory review, with others only in domestic trial phases or yet to begin local trials. Significantly, the vaccine being developed by Japan’s Novavax, from which Tokyo intends to acquire 250 million doses, has not yet entered clinical trials.

Masayuki Imagawa, the head of the Japan Vaccine Business unit at Takeda Pharmaceutical, told Reuters last week, “To achieve the needed production volume, there are various factories to be contracted and tech transfers to be done all over the world. And whether that can all really come together to secure enough supply is a remaining challenge.”

All of this casts doubt on the ability of Tokyo to provide its population with a vaccine in a timely manner. It further exposes the irrationality of the capitalist system, which places barriers to international cooperation as rival nation states pursue their economic and strategic interests at the expense of the majority of the world’s population.

Bolsonaro endorses Trump coup, threatens to do same in Brazil’s 2022 election

Miguel Andrade

Brazil’s fascistic President Jair Bolsonaro, one of Donald Trump’s most fervent international supporters, has unequivocally endorsed the January 6 coup attempt in Washington. He has already announced his intention to use the same lies about electoral fraud in Brazil to mobilize his supporters in a bid to remain in power, whatever the results of the 2022 presidential elections.

Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro (Credit: Agência Brasil)

In his typical contemptuous fashion, Bolsonaro declared on the evening of January 6, in response to the US developments: “I followed everything. You know I’m connected to Trump. You know my answer. Now, [there have been] a lot of fraud charges, a lot of fraud charges.” He then repeated his own unsubstantiated claims about the 2018 election in Brazil: “Mine was defrauded. I have proof of it. I should have won in the first round.”

On the next day, he vowed to attempt his own putsch in 2022, should he lose the presidential elections. He told his supporters: “What was the problem [in the US]? Lack of trust in the vote. So there, the people voted and the mail vote was boosted because of the so-called pandemic, and some people voted three, four times, dead people voted.” He concluded with a roadmap for his coup: “If we don’t have printed ballots in 2022, some means to audit the vote, we are going to have a problem worse than in the United States.”

His reaction to the events in Washington contrasted with the condemnations issued by the leaders of the Brazilian Congress and Electoral Court, whose head, Supreme Court Justice Luís Roberto Barroso, was an observer of the US elections. Outgoing House Speaker, Rio de Janeiro representative Rodrigo Maia, tweeted: “The invasion of the US Congress by extremists represents a desperate act by an antidemocratic tendency which lost the elections. It is ever more clear that the only path is democracy, with dialogue and respecting the Constitution.” Justice Barroso struck a stronger tone: “In the sad US episode, fascist supporters showed their true face: antidemocratic and violent. Good people, regardless of ideology, don’t support barbarism. I hope the American society and institutions react with vigor to this threat to democracy.”

In an ominous indication that preparations for a coup in Brazil are well advanced and count with the support of the US far-right, Brazil’s ambassador to Washington, Nestor Forster Jr., took Bolsonaro’s son Eduardo, the head of the House Foreign Relations Committee, to the White House on the evening of January 5. Eduardo took a picture of Trump’s daughter Ivanka holding his newborn daughter Georgia.

Eduardo is a close associate of American fascist ideologue Steve Bannon. As for Forster, he has worked as a bridge between Bolsonaro and Trump loyalists. The conservative daily Estado de S. Paulo revealed that the ambassador has fed the Brazilian cabinet fabricated reports from the far-right, pro-Trump US media about fraud in the US elections in order to support Bolsonaro’s alignment with Trump.

Bolsonaro was the last of the G20 leaders to recognize the victory of Democratic candidate Joe Biden. He waited until the Electoral College cast its votes on December 14 to congratulate Biden.

Bolsonaro is repeating allegations he has made for several years now that the Brazilian electronic voting system is unverifiable and inherently unsafe. These claims have been debunked several times by computer experts, with the Brazilian Army itself promoting “hacking competitions” to test the safety of the system. They found no security breaches enabling massive fraud.

Bolsonaro’s main argument, made in outright bad faith, is that, by virtue of being electronic, the votes are not verifiable and cannot be recounted, and Brazil should adopt some sort of complementary print ballot to prevent fraud. Ignored in his allegations is that the ballot boxes are not connected to the internet, with votes being uploaded to the Electoral Court’s internal server through private connections. Any breach of this system would require a massive attack on government servers which would be impossible to hide. Predictably, Bolsonaro has so far been unable to present a shred of evidence of what he claims was electoral fraud in 2018.

There was no doubt that, as the events at the US Capitol unfolded, the chief representatives of the Brazilian ruling class were reacting with nervous uncertainty about their own future. The preparations for a coup by Bolsonaro are no secret at this point to anyone. On January 7, as Bolsonaro doubled down on his support for Trump’s coup, Maia made clear his full knowledge of the implications of Bolsonaro’s remarks. He told the media that “Like Trump, it seems to me that Bolsonaro is a player who doesn’t admit defeat and is now organizing an array of threats two years in advance.”

These grave dangers notwithstanding, the overriding concern within the ruling class in Brazil is the same as that of its counterparts in the Democratic Party in the US and the governments of Europe, Asia and internationally: to prevent workers from drawing the necessary conclusions from Bolsonaro’s and Trump’s threats to democracy and acting to fight against the system of which they are the necessary product, capitalism.

Like the representatives of the ruling class internationally, Brazil’s political parties and corporate media are bending over backwards in singling out Trump and Bolsonaro as solely responsible for the massive crises engulfing the US and Brazil, effectively telling the public that “there is nothing to see here.”

Estado de S. Paulo summed up the attitude of the ruling class towards the January 6 coup attempt in an editorial the next day: “The responsibility for what happened in Washington falls exclusively on Trump,” concluding, “In the end, American democracy resisted the infamous attempted uprising encouraged by Trump.” Its “progressive” rival Folha de S. Paulo also reassured its readers about Brazil on the next morning: “Also in Brazil, the system of checks and balances is containing a populist of authoritarian inclinations who sees in Trump an obvious source of inspiration.”

In Rio de Janeiro, the mouthpiece of Brazil’s largest media group, Globo, backhandedly admitted that the future of Bolsonaro’s coup rests not with the “checks and balances” of Brazilian democracy, but rather with the Army. Its editorial stated: “The Constitution has already guaranteed us 33 consecutive years of democracy, a record in our Republic. One does not imagine that the Armed Forces as an institution will accept its shredding and going back to a distant past. On the contrary.”

The three papers were enthusiastic collaborators of the blood-soaked 1964–1985 US-backed military dictatorship, and speak for a ruling class which has absolutely no interest in democratic rights, be it in Brazil or elsewhere. Their chief concern is to chloroform the public about the dangers of the present situation, and warn the ruling class not to allow its rifts with Bolsonaro, driven almost exclusively by differences over foreign policy, to spiral out of control.

Like Trump himself and another of their close allies, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, Bolsonaro faces the immediate threat of arrest for many corrupt practices as soon as he leaves office. These range from corruption schemes as a House member before becoming president, to possible involvement in the death squad murder of Rio de Janeiro Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL) city councilor Marielle Franco in 2018.

The abortive coup of January 6 in Washington, and the social crisis shattering the social basis for democratic forms of rule in the US, are mirrored in Bolsonaro’s own sadistic reaction to the social crisis in Brazil, which has entered an even more explosive phase with the new year.

January has seen the end of the emergency relief of R$300 (US$60) paid monthly to 68 million unemployed, informal sector and poor Brazilian workers, as well as the end of furlough schemes covering some 10 million workers employed in small, medium and large companies under the Brazilian Labor Code. Poverty is expected to immediately engulf 20 million Brazilians as of this month, with a total of 24 percent of the population falling below the poverty line as of January, up from 15 percent last year. The ranks of the unemployed, already consisting of 14 million workers, are expected to double, as the jobless are forced to search for work with the end of emergency relief.

Meanwhile, Brazil is back to August levels of COVID-19 deaths, over a thousand a day, with ICU units filled to capacity in major cities and a new collapse of the mortuary system in the epicenter city of Manaus, capital of the state of Amazonas.

On December 2, sociologist Roberto Barbosa of the Rio de Janeiro-based Instituto de Estudos Sociais e Políticos (Iesp) made the headlines of Brazilian papers with a warning that “levels of social inequality will return to the figures of the 1980s,” the decade that saw the industrial working class bring down the military dictatorship. In 1989, the decade closed with over 1,900 strikes, the largest number until 2013, when more than 2 million workers engaged in 2,057 strikes, marking the beginning of the decline of the then-ruling Workers Party (PT).

In response to such a situation, Bolsonaro is cultivating an ever more brazen indifference to the mass suffering of workers, canceling the purchase of syringes for COVID-19 vaccinations for being “too expensive,” declaring publicly that the country is broken and he can’t do anything about it, and that the unemployment figures are caused by “a good part of Brazilians not being prepared to do almost anything.”

Under such conditions, mirroring the significant support for Trump’s coup within the ruling class, even the unsubstantiated election fraud allegations by Bolsonaro may be viewed by the ruling class as a means of furthering a Bolsonaro coup. A recent PoderData survey showed that less than 15 percent of Brazilians believe the electronic ballot boxes are subject to fraud. Nonetheless, opposition candidate and frontrunner to succeed House Speaker Maia with the support of the PT, Luiz Felipe Baleia Rossi of the Brazilian Democratic Movement (MDB), declared on January 9 that the discussion over print ballots “will have to be held,” providing a “democratic” cover for Bolsonaro’s conspiracy theory.

It is urgent that Brazilian workers assimilate the lessons of the January 6 putsch in Washington and its global implications in order to prepare for coming struggles.

German schools and day-care centres to reopen despite record death rates and new infections

Gregor Link

At the end of last week, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) reported 31,849 new infections and another 1,188 COVID deaths in Germany, more than ever before. As a proportion of population, the death rate in Germany is now higher than in the US, where more than 4,000 deaths were registered on Friday. The Washington-based Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) estimates that the German government’s current pandemic policy will have cost more than 91,000 lives by April 1.

Classroom in Dortmund, Germany, August 13, 2020 (AP Photo/Martin Meissner, File)

The rate of those testing positive is 16 percent, more than three times the World Health Organisation threshold beyond which a pandemic is considered “out of control.” While crematoria often cannot keep up with the burial of corpses and hospitals throughout the country are on the verge of collapse, the education ministers in Germany’s federal states have decided on a “resumption of face-to-face teaching” as soon as possible, even though schools are central drivers of the pandemic.

The systematic reopening policy was reaffirmed on Tuesday by the Conference of the Federal and State Governments, whose decision does not envisage a single closure of offices and factories, and decrees “emergency childcare” in day-care centres and schools, which is supposed to make it impossible for workers to obtain leave of absence from their managers.

This policy is being enforced particularly aggressively in the states governed by the Social Democrats (SPD), the Greens and the Left Party. The Berlin Senate (state executive), a coalition of the SPD, Greens and Left Party, had initially planned to send all graduating classes back to face-to-face classes as early as this week, and the first to third-grade classes a week later. “I want to get into face-to-face teaching as urgently as possible,” Michael Müller, Berlin mayor and chairman of the Conference of State Premiers, said yesterday in the Berlin House of Representatives (state legislature).

Due to overwhelming opposition among parents, teachers and school directors, the state government was finally forced to postpone the reintroduction of general compulsory attendance until January 25. Meanwhile, however, schools and day-care centres are to remain open to provide childcare so that parents can be forced to work. Examinations are also to be “carried out on-site in all types of schools,” Education Senator (state minister) Sandra Scheeres (SPD) declared.

Only a few hours earlier, the education administration had rejected an urgent application by several Belin school heads who had requested a postponement of the school openings. An online petition launched by teachers titled “No face-to-face teaching in Berlin as long as COVID-19 is not under control” had garnered 40,000 signatures within a few days.

The petition states that with its policy, “the Berlin Senate is prolonging the course of the pandemic in length and extent in an unforeseeable way. [Mayor Müller and Minister Scheeres] are pouring oil on the fire where containment is needed. They are making a mockery of the efforts of society as a whole to survive the pandemic as unscathed as possible.”

Those affected, according to the authors of the petition, were lonely home residents, tradespeople threatened with bankruptcy and “patients in hospitals who suffer and die alone.”

While the herd immunity policy has already led to mass deaths, especially in intensive care units and old people’s homes, reports of fatally ill educators, transport workers and even children are also increasing. According to the official figures, around 800 children suffering from COVID-19 had to receive intensive medical treatment in Germany between March and the end of December. In Berlin alone, 12 children are currently in the coronavirus intensive care unit.

According to data from the health insurers Barmer and AOK, educators, followed by caregivers and teachers, are by far the most at risk of contracting COVID-19.

Most recently, a 44-year-old nursery schoolteacher in Kamen, Westphalia, died. At the “showcase facility” nominated for the German Day-Care Award 2021, the largest officially confirmed day-care outbreak to date occurred in December, with 41 infected children and employees, despite “all hygiene rules [being] observed.” The RKI currently lists 19 educators who died from coronavirus in its statistics. Five hundred others have had to be hospitalised.

“Pupils, teachers and educators are not being protected,” educator Eileen T. from Saxony told the World Socialist Web Site. “The winter holidays have been shortened by one week and brought forward to guarantee seven weeks of face-to-face teaching afterwards. Graduating classes are to return to classrooms in groups as early as January 18.” The Saxony state government’s policy has meant that crematoria across the region have been overwhelmed by incoming coronavirus bodies for weeks, with corpses piling up in hospital cold stores, some as high as six feet.

Although the situation in the neighbouring states of Brandenburg and Thuringia is similarly devastating, the reopening of schools and day-care centres there is also being pursued with the same intransigence in the interest of big business. In Brandenburg, all final-year classes and special schools are undertaking in-person teaching and day-care centres are open. The Education and Science Union (GEW) in Potsdam backed this policy and declared that further “opening” must be “thoroughly prepared.”

In Thuringia, State Premier Bodo Ramelow (Left Party) called Friday for a “lockdown for the whole economy,” after having decided the exact opposite only a few days earlier, together with Chancellor Merkel and the heads of the Länder (federal states). Ramelow has strictly rejected all—even local—lockdown measures since the beginning of the pandemic and has publicly embraced the “herd immunity” policy advocated by the Swedish government. As a result, Thuringia has the second-highest seven-day incidence (297) and the lowest vaccination rate (3.7 doses per 1,000 inhabitants) nationwide. In many districts, up to 35 percent of all day-care children are in so-called “emergency childcare” without staff being adequately protected.

“Various recent studies show that day-care centres are among the high-risk areas,” said educator Elli F. in an interview with WSWS. “The health insurance companies confirm a high COVID risk among educators and the number of children in day-care with antibodies is six times higher than reported cases. Instead of following the motto ‘AHA+L’ [keep your distance, observe hygiene, wear a mask and ventilate], we tend to follow HLH: wash your hands, ventilate and hope it goes well.”

Elli strongly opposes the herd immunity policy of opening schools, day-care centres and businesses amid the pandemic. “I’m a high-risk patient—heart, diabetic, pulmonary. If I get COVID-19, I will suffer severe consequential damage or die. Every time I go to work in the morning, I’m playing Russian roulette. I receive no protection from the employer and receive no help from the GEW. My fundamental right to the inviolability of the person is obviously opposed to the economic interests of the employer, Senate and state. This is a way to save pension benefits by sacrificing the elderly. Yet I am only 53 and actually wanted to live a little longer.”

An additional threat to the working class brought about by official pandemic politics is the coronavirus mutant B.1.1.7, which is now responsible for one in two new infections in Britain. Although the federal and state governments only analyse the genome of the virus in every 900th case, the virus strain has also been detected in Germany since Christmas Eve. According to British researchers, it is up to 70 percent more contagious than all other variants of SARS-CoV-2 detected so far.

The variant had spread in Britain under conditions of a supposed “lockdown,” especially in schools that remained open. According to virologist Christian Drosten of Berlin’s Charité hospital, the whole thing started “with a lot of tailwind in the schools” and from there “spread on to the normal population.”

Virologist Isabella Eckerle, a professor at the Centre for Emerging Viral Diseases in Geneva, made a gloomy prediction to news website Zeit Online earlier this week, “I think the variant will spread in the rest of Europe just as it has in Britain.” This, Eckerle said, worried her “a lot.” The “idea that you can specifically contain this one variant, while you haven’t been able to get a grip on the previous incidence of infection for months already, is completely illusory.”

If it is confirmed that the new variant is much more contagious than the previous ones, the danger of even worse mass deaths in Europe and around the world looms. Mathematician and epidemiologist Adam Kucharski of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine points out on Twitter that easier transmissibility, as opposed to an increased fatality rate, exerts an exponential effect on the rise in deaths.

On Friday, the Tagesspiegel reported the first case of the new variant in Berlin. In the affected family from Steglitz-Zehlendorf, it had only taken one day, “then everyone was sick.” Although a positive PCR (Polymerase chain reaction) test was already available on Christmas Eve, the health department has still not managed to identify all contacts. The time delay over the holidays, according to the newspaper, made contact tracing now additionally “difficult.”

In countries bordering Germany, the virus is also already rampant. Dutch health authorities, for example, reported 50 cases of the new virus variant on Wednesday—30 of which were linked to a single primary school. In Denmark, where 11 percent of all positive coronavirus cases are sequenced, the proportion of B.1.1.7 rose from 0.2 to 2.3 percent between calendar weeks 49 and 52. Austria recently announced that three of the five detected infections with B.1.1.7 were children.

On the “Heute-Journal” news broadcast, Isabella Eckerle added that it would be “much more difficult in the future to contain the incidence of infection with existing measures” and warned of a “big third wave.” It was known “from RNA viruses that they can adapt relatively quickly. This means that if you put pressure on them—for example, with antibodies—then variants can prevail that are perhaps slightly less attacked by our immune response.”

Against this background, the virologist warned of the high evolutionary selection pressure that the wrong vaccination strategy could exert. “The discussion that you might only give one vaccine dose I personally think is dangerous because you will then have a large population that only has weak immunity and thus open the door for this virus to continue to develop such mutations.” Already, she said, one observes “variants that have opened the door a bit to mutate under this vaccine.” The scientist concludes that “The whole of Europe would need a coordinated lockdown.”

This demand, supported across Europe by more than 1,000 scientists and researchers, is diametrically opposed to the policies of Germany’s federal and state governments. While day-care centres and schools are being forced to open, and not a single industrial enterprise is being closed, a representative survey by the Hans Böckler Foundation showed that in November, only 14 percent of all employees were mainly working from home.

Under these conditions, everything depends on establishing action committees of teachers, students and workers to intervene independently of the establishment parties and trade unions to put an end to the politics of death. All the parties in the Bundestag (federal parliament) and governments of all colours are equally pursuing such a policy and are supported in this by the trade unions.

To enforce the closure of schools and non-essential businesses, it is necessary to organise a European-wide general strike and fight for a socialist programme. Demands that must be raised include providing billions of dollars of investment into safe education, full replacement income for parents who must stay at home to look after their children and full protection for those in high-risk groups and all essential workers on the front line of the fight against the pandemic.

Australia hit by more infectious coronavirus strains, B117

Patrick O’Connor

More infectious strains of coronavirus have reached Australia, including the B117 variant that was first detected in Britain.

Brisbane, Australia’s third largest city, was placed under a three-day lockdown, from last Friday to 6 p.m. today, after a positive test for the B117 strain was confirmed for a cleaner who had been working at a hotel for quarantined people returning from overseas. The case represented yet another failure of the hotel quarantine system.

COVID-19 testing site in the Melbourne suburb of Fawkner (Photo: @JoanWil85024201, Twitter)

Failures to enact basic preventive measures, such as the proper provision of personal protective equipment (PPE), have triggered multiple COVID-19 clusters spilling out of several states’ quarantine hotels and into the population.

The Brisbane lockdown demonstrated some of the calculations being made within Australian ruling circles in the face of the now even deadlier coronavirus threat.

When the global pandemic first emerged last year, state and federal governments initially opted for a “suppression” strategy, based on managing a supposedly steady level of infection. Labor and Liberal leaders rejected an elimination strategy, on the explicit basis that this would prove too costly for corporate interests. The criminally negligent approach saw the premature lifting of initial restrictions, leading to the “second wave” in Melbourne.

The B117 variant, which has engulfed Britain in the past weeks and reportedly is 1.7 times as contagious as other strains, poses an even greater danger. Similarly infectious strains, including one from South Africa, have also been detected. Despite this, state and federal governments are continuing to resist imposing preventive measures that impinge on profit-generating business activities.

The three-day Brisbane lockdown was held over the weekend to limit even minimal adverse effects for corporate retailers, construction companies, and other business interests. Coronavirus has a 14-day incubation period, yet the Queensland state Labor government of Premier Anastasia Palaszczuk has insisted that a lockdown covering this period was not necessary. The premier today announced that only minimal mask wearing and indoor venue capacity restrictions would be in place for the next 10 days.

Whether these limited measures will prove effective remains to be seen. There were no additional coronavirus infections detected since Saturday, but this is from daily test numbers below 20,000, a small fraction of greater Brisbane’s population of 2.4 million.

The state Liberal government in New South Wales is taking a similarly complacent approach. Premier Gladys Berejiklian yesterday lifted a very limited local lockdown in the Northern Beaches area, the site of a significant cluster of infections that emerged in mid-December. The premier declared that “the main threat has to some extent subsided” and that “we’re still mopping up.”

The state government is covering up the reality that significant community transmission of COVD-19 may be underway in Sydney’s working-class western suburbs.

Another positive case was registered on Saturday in a patient at Mt Druitt Hospital. The facility’s emergency department was subsequently closed for cleaning, with ambulances diverted to other hospitals. The case remains under investigation, with a connection to a known cluster yet to be established. A cluster tied to a bottle shop in the suburb of Berala has now been linked to 26 infections, of which 3 were reported today. There are numerous exposure sites across the western suburbs, including for multiple shops in Bankstown Central Shopping Centre across two days.

Another demonstration of official negligence came with the Daily Telegraph ’s publication of photographs of private security guards without any PPE in one of Sydney’s hotel quarantine sites. A woman arriving from New York for a mandatory 14-day quarantine at the InterContinental hotel captured images of the man sitting in the corridor outside her room without a mask or any other protections. The guard reportedly said that he did not need a mask if he kept 1.5 metres away from quarantined guests. This is contrary to scientists’ understanding of how coronavirus is easily transmitted via aerosols within enclosed indoor spaces.

Nearly twelve months into the global pandemic, the failure of state and federal governments to enact the most basic of precautions continues to be exposed.

Measures agreed to at a meeting on Friday of the national cabinet—the de facto national unity administration of Prime Minister Scott Morrison and the Labor and Liberal state premiers—ought to have been put in place months ago. Only now will people returning to Australia from overseas receive a coronavirus test before travelling, and then be required to wear a mask on the airplane. Similarly, only now will workers in quarantine hotels receive daily virus tests.

The national cabinet also cut in half the number of people allowed to return to Australia. This measure will adversely affect thousands of Australian citizens working and studying overseas, many of whom have been trying for months to return home but have confronted exorbitant airline charges and limited quotas for returnees. The national cabinet announced no additional financial or other support for stranded people overseas.

Morrison was keen to use the national cabinet meeting to promote a changed mass vaccination schedule. The government had previously insisted that vaccines would first be released in March, due to local safety approval procedures, making Australia among the last of all advanced capitalist countries to begin using coronavirus vaccine.

This will now be brought forward to mid-February, Morrison announced last Thursday. The prime minister explained that he anticipated that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine would be approved by the end of January. The government has purchased 10 million doses of this vaccine, for the inoculation of up to 5 million people, with 54 million doses of the University of Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine purchased for later deployment.

The about-face on the vaccine schedule points to growing fears within the government of escalating hostility within the working class. Coming immediately after the national bushfire disaster last year, the coronavirus pandemic has exposed the entire political establishment and its prioritising the accumulation of corporate profits over public health and safety.

Spain passes two million coronavirus cases as infection rates surge

Alice Summers

Coronavirus cases and deaths are once again rapidly rising in Spain. After a brief lull in new daily infections in late November and early December, the holidays saw a renewed surge, with cases returning to levels last seen at the height of the second wave in late October.

Last Thursday, Spain passed the grim threshold of 2 million coronavirus cases, recording 42,360 new infections since Tuesday. Wednesday, 6 January is a public holiday in Spain, so case figures were not announced on this day. Over 25,000 new infections were recorded on Friday—the second highest figure of the whole pandemic. As of that day, Spain had officially registered a total of 2,050,360 cases and 51,874 COVID-19 deaths.

Public broadcaster RTVE reported that a staggering 8 percent of all residents in care homes for the elderly died of confirmed or suspected COVID-19 in 2020. This is 24,933 of the 312,753 who had been living in these facilities last year. These deaths make up around half of all recorded coronavirus fatalities in Spain, as these homes became killing fields due to the Socialist Party (PSOE)-Podemos government’s inadequate measures to contain the contagion.

People walk along a boulevard in Barcelona, Spain, earlier this year. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)

Also on Friday, government figures showed that the accumulated incidence rate per 100,000 people had risen to 350.48—a rapid increase from 321 a day earlier. This figure has nearly doubled in a month, having stood at 180-190 per 100,000 in early December.

In the western region of Extremadura, this indicator shot up to 803 per 100,000 by Friday, with the Balearic Islands, Madrid, Castilla-La Mancha, Catalonia and La Rioja provinces all recording rates of 400 to 525. The Spanish government considers an incidence rate of less than 25 per 100,000 to be a sign that the pandemic is under control, and 250 or more to indicate “extreme risk.” By this measure, every region in Spain bar the Basque Country, Andalucía, Asturias and the Canary Islands are currently in or nearing extreme risk.

In a sign that many cases still go undetected, official figures show that around 14 percent of coronavirus tests return positive results across Spain. This figure rises to a huge 25.89 percent in the Community of Valencia, 23.4 percent in Castilla-La Mancha, 20.91 percent in Extremadura and 17.73 percent in Murcia. World Health Organisation (WHO) criteria state that a positivity rate of above 5 percent indicates that the virus is out of control.

Meanwhile, the vaccine roll-out in Spain has proceeded at a glacial pace, with only 277,976 having received at least one dose of the vaccine—or 0.6 percent of the Spanish population.

While many European countries imposed certain limited lock-down restrictions as cases rose in November and December, the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE)-Podemos government refused to do so. It left it up to the 17 different autonomous regions to decide which measures should be implemented. Many regional governments imposed limited restrictions, like night-time curfews and curbs on travel between regions. However, schools and workplaces stayed open, continuing to spread the virus.

In response to the rising infection rates in recent weeks, several regions have been compelled to introduce new, limited restrictions to contain the virus—though all are far short of full lock-down measures. In Andalucía, bars and restaurants must now close at 6 p.m.; travel into or outside of the region is restricted.

The Balearic Islands regional government closed bars, shopping centres and gyms on the island of Mallorca. Galicia extended current restrictions on travel in and out of the area until the end of January and decreed that hospitality must close at 6 p.m. in the cities of Ourense, Santiago and A Coruña. The Madrid region also limited travel between several municipalities inside the region.

On January 5, the Castilla y León regional authority requested that the PSOE-Podemos central government grant permission for a stay-at-home lock-down similar to that imposed last March. On Friday, this region had an incidence rate of 326 per 100,000 people, and 32.1 percent of the intensive care beds in this area were occupied—one of the highest figures in Spain. Test positivity rates also increased to 12.2 percent in the week ending 4 January, up from 6.91 percent only the week before.

Despite the region’s grave situation, the PSOE-Podemos government refused the local authority’s request. Health Minister Salvador Illa declared on Thursday that the measures currently in place provide “sufficient scope for action.”

Echoing Illa’s comments, Deputy Director of the Centre for the Coordination of Health Alerts and Emergencies (CCAES), Maria José Sierra Moros, declared in a press conference the same day that “there is no need for a hard lockdown, but [we should] take serious measures around some of the activities which we clearly know are a risk.”

Sierra Moros, along with CCAES Director Fernando Simón, was one of 13 signatories of a lying letter to medical journal The Lancet in early December, in which health officials defended the government’s politically criminal handling of the pandemic.

“There are many measures to take before another hard lock-down. Measures that have also proved to be effective,” Sierra Moros continued in Thursday’s press conference. Explicitly rejecting measures to close education centres, she declared: “At the moment, we do not have a recommendation from the Ministry [of Health] to close schools … In reality, there have not been major outbreaks in schools … there have been isolated cases that have immediately been controlled and confined.”

Schools staying open “is important for children’s development, including to [overcome] the social divides in this country,” she said. “There are many more measures that can be taken … before closing schools.” She added, “Obviously everything helps, but we don’t believe that now is the moment to make a broad decision like that.”

This feigned concern for children’s educational prospects aims to obscure the real class interests behind maintaining in-person education during a deadly pandemic. Schools are being used as glorified child-minding services, to ensure that parents can continue going to work and generating profits for the financial aristocracy.

The government’s refusal to take serious action to curb the spread of the disease is meeting with broad popular opposition.

Nearly 60 percent (59.2) of Spaniards believe that the government should have taken stricter measures to control the virus, according to a survey conducted in early December by the state-funded Centre for Sociological Research (CIS). Only 25.8 percent of Spain’s population believed that the PSOE-Podemos government had done enough to combat the virus. The study also revealed that more than a quarter (27.9 percent) of Spain’s population knew someone who had died from the virus.

Strikes are breaking out across Spain against official “back-to-work” policies and the attacks on workers’ living conditions in recent years. Strikes have been called on every Monday this month by call centre workers at Konecta, a company providing telephone contact services to major firms including Santander Bank, Openbank, Bankia, Vodafone and Orange.

Hundreds of workers at the call centre company, based on Spain’s north coast, are protesting the enforced return to in-person working, after having spent the last months working remotely to protect themselves against COVID-19. Workers spend hours speaking on the phone in enclosed, overcrowded offices—perfect conditions for airborne transmission of the virus.

Workers must take matters into their own hands to protect themselves from the disease. This necessarily entails a break with the trade unions and the PSOE-Podemos government—which knowingly implemented a policy leading to mass deaths—as part of a broader movement of workers across Spain and internationally.

Boeing 737-500 crashes after takeoff from Jakarta, Indonesia

Bryan Dyne

Contact was lost on Saturday with a Boeing 737-500 jet, Sriwijaya Air flight SJ-182, four minutes after takeoff from Jakarta, Indonesia. Recovery teams have begun to recover wreckage, including the plane’s two black boxes.

Rescue divers have also started bringing body bags to the surface. It is expected that DNA sampling will confirm that all 62 passengers and crew of the flight were killed in the crash.

Initial witness reports indicate that part of the jet exploded. These reports coincide with a sharp turn by the plane followed by a plunge of more than 10,000 feet in the span of some 60 seconds, recorded by the air traffic tracking website Flightradar24.

A worker sprays disinfectant at body bags containing human remains recovered from the waters where Sriwijaya Air passenger jet crashed, at Tanjung Priok Port in Jakarta, Indonesia, Sunday, Jan. 10, 2021 (AP Photo/Tatan Syuflana)

The crash is the third of a Boeing 737 class aircraft in 27 months. While there is as yet no definitive information on what caused the most recent crash, it is possible that the age of the Boeing 737 model played a significant role. The 737 airframe is 50 years old. As a cost-cutting measure, Boeing continues to add new features to this model instead of designing and producing a new aircraft.

The tragedy coincides with a $2.5 billion legal settlement between Boeing and the US Department of Justice over two recent crashes of 737 Max 8 planes. The first, Lion Air Flight 610, occurred in October, 2018, also outside of Jakarta. The second, Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, crashed in March of 2019. Both 737 Max crashes occurred several minutes after take-off, killing a combined total of 346 men, women and children.

The settlement in the 737 Max crashes involves the dropping of criminal charges alleging that Boeing defrauded the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and worked throughout the development and production of the Max 8 to conceal deadly design flaws. The most infamous of these involves the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) software, which was installed to compensate for the Max 8’s tendency to stall, an inherent flaw caused by adding new and larger engines to an outdated airframe.

The settlement is part of a massive whitewash and coverup of criminal negligence on the part of the company and its top executives, aided and abetted by the FAA. The lives of hundreds of passengers and crew were sacrificed to the drive of the giant airplane manufacturer and defense contractor to cut corners on safety for the sake of market share and profits.

The settlement, however, does allow for criminal charges to be brought against Boeing employees. David Burns, an acting assistant attorney general, claimed that “This resolution holds Boeing accountable for its employees’ criminal misconduct, addresses the financial impact to Boeing’s airline customers, and hopefully provides some measure of compensation to the crash victims’ families and beneficiaries.”

Federal prosecutors issued summonses early last year to several Boeing employees to appear before a grand jury on charges of lying to the FAA about the MCAS software. These employees may include Mark Forkner, Boeing’s chief technical pilot at the time, who called MCAS “egregious,” and said it was “running rampant” in Boeing’s simulators, causing crashes.

Many others, including Forkner’s colleague Patrick Gustavsson, were aware of the flaws in the design of the aircraft. In internal messages, one worker proposed darkly that one could avoid the dangers of the Max 8 by committing suicide. He wrote: “Get silencer, put on end of gun, place adjacent to temple, and pull trigger—the problems stop. At this point, how can they consider continuing?”

Any guilt on the part of Boeing’s lower echelon employees pales in comparison to that of the company’s top executives, up to and including ex-CEO Dennis Muilenburg, who oversaw the final development and initial production of the Max 8. Documents that have been revealed through internal leaks and congressional hearings indicate that Muilenburg was very aware of the fatal design flaws of the Max 8, and did everything he could to keep the FAA, pilots and the general public in the dark about these dangers.

Instead of jail time, Muilenburg was rewarded for his time at Boeing with $80.9 million in salary and bonuses. He has since joined the Silicon Valley startup Monarch Tractor as an adviser and investor.

The Justice Department will not impose an independent monitor to ensure that Boeing adheres to the terms of the agreement. It claims that “the misconduct was neither pervasive across the organization, nor undertaken by a large number of employees.”

This free pass for the entire upper echelon of Boeing executives, most of whom are still with the company, speaks to the importance of Boeing to American capitalism. The company is one of the world’s largest aerospace manufacturers and America’s second largest defense contractor. It also plays a leading role in securing the interests of the American ruling elite abroad through its competition with European-based rival Airbus.

The dropping of criminal charges underscores as well the criminality that pervades the operations of American capitalism and its oligarchic ruling class.

The monetary penalty is a slap on the wrist for the aerospace giant. Of the $2.5 billion it will be forced to pay, $244 million will be paid to the federal government as a fine. Only $500 million will go to the families of those who died, a mere $1.4 million per person. Boeing will pay more than three times that amount, $1.77 billion, to the airlines that were unable to use or take deliveries of the Max 8 during the plane’s grounding, which began in March 2019 and lasted until November.

The cost of the settlement to Boeing is in addition to more than $18 billion in losses caused by the 737 Max 8 grounding. The company is expected to lose even more due to the impact on the airline industry in 2020 of the coronavirus pandemic. Boeing lost more than 1,000 orders for the Max 8 last year, though it still has more than 4,000 orders outstanding.

However, the US government and the Federal Reserve have handed Boeing many billions of dollars in the form of subsidies and low-interest bond purchases as part of the multi-trillion-dollar CARES Act corporate bailout.

The settlement does not resolve claims brought by the families of those aboard Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, who have stated that the agreement between Boeing and the US government represents only “the tip of the iceberg of Boeing’s wrongdoing.”

Communist Party of the Philippines resurrects urban hit squads

John Malvar

During an online event on December 26 celebrating the 52nd anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), founder and ideological leader of the party, Jose Maria Sison announced that the CPP would be resurrecting its old practice of employing armed city partisans, known as Sparrow Units, after three decades of dormancy.

Screenshot of video showing the Communist Party of the Philippines (Credit: YouTube, Rappler)

Sison presented the party policy as responding to “demands” from “middle forces”—a much used term drawn from the phrasebook of Stalinism to refer to its allies in the bourgeoisie and the middle class.

The crisis of capitalism, heightened to unprecedented levels by the global pandemic, has created explosive social tensions in every country. The ruling class around the world, frantic to retain its hold on power, has turned to authoritarian forms of rule, coups and insurrections, and the creation of fascist movements.

The Philippines is no exception. The working population of the country confronts skyrocketing unemployment, dismal medical care in the midst of pandemic, and the worst mass hunger since the Japanese occupation. As in the past, the CPP’s resurrection of Sparrow Units is bound up with its efforts to seek bourgeois allies even as the ruling class as a whole is seeking the means to suppress unrest and secure a firm hold on power.

The party quietly initiated the creation of new Sparrow Units in December 2015 as a component of its support for the presidential candidacy of Rodrigo Duterte. It was seeking to integrate its hit squads into his ‘war on drugs,’ a campaign of mass murder targetting the country’s poor.

Having broken with the president, the CPP is now pursuing an alliance with coup-plotting sections of the military. The Sparrow Units are intended to serve as a component of this alliance.

The history of the CPP and its use of urban hit squads confirm this assessment. Sparrow Units have a bloody past and reveal the party’s integration into the ugliest aspects of Philippine politics.

The CPP was founded in December 1968 on the Maoist conception of protracted people’s war, armed struggle in the countryside to encircle the cities leading up to the seizure of power. The party was founded on the program of Stalinism, which seeks to subordinate the working class to a section of the capitalist class in the name of a “national democratic revolution.” The armed struggle was a means to achieving this political end.

In March 1969, the New People’s Army (NPA) was established, building on remnants from the suppressed Huk rebellion peasant uprising of the early 1950s. While the CPP leadership routinely announces that it is building up its forces in the countryside, it has gotten no closer to its goal over the last forty years. In fact, it has witnessed a slow attrition.

The function of the NPA is not to surround the cities from the countryside, let alone to aid the working class in the seizure of power, but to give political clout to the party leadership in its negotiations with the bourgeoisie. The rhetoric of protracted people’s war has enabled the CPP to retain its hold over the waves of radicalization in the country’s youth and workers. It has then instructed these layers to support and pressure the party’s bourgeois allies.

The 1980s were a decade of political upheaval in the Philippines. Long-time dictator Ferdinand Marcos was overthrown in 1986 by a popular uprising that was coupled with a military coup. A rival section of the bourgeoisie, represented by President Corazon Aquino, took power and suppressed mass unrest through the military and the use of paramilitary death squads.

The CPP formed a close alliance with the Aquino administration in 1986. The military, however, by means of coup threats pressured Aquino to break all ties with the party. Within three years, the CPP was working with rival sections of the military who were plotting by means of coup d’état to remove Aquino from office.

It was in this context that the party created its Sparrow Units. These units, which conducted urban assassinations of those deemed “enemies of the people,” were tools in the party’s growing alliance with various sections of the bourgeoisie, in the same fashion as its armed struggle in the countryside.

The urban hit squads first emerged in the southern city of Davao, where they played their most prominent role. Units of three assassins, who would often include young boys, would rapidly approach a target from behind, shoot him in the back of the head, and flee. The targets were often traffic cops who were killed for their pistols.

Over the course of the 1980s, the Sparrow Units fought for turf with fascist vigilante death squads. These deaths squads were eventually organized into Alsa Masa, whose core members had emerged out of the NPA in the wake of a series of murderous internal purges in the party. The turf war turned Davao into the murder capital of the Philippines, with an average of two people killed every day in the mid-1980s.

Rodrigo Duterte, an ally of Aquino, rose to prominence out of this chaos. He secured the loyalty of both Alsa Masa and the Sparrow Units, and effectively transformed them into paramilitary soldiers in his campaign of terror in Davao, as part of what he termed a war on drugs and criminality.

Sparrow units were formed in the capital region of Metro Manila and by the end of the 1980s, they were being used in the party’s tactical alliance with right-wing coup plotters in the military, organized in the Young Officers’ Union (YOU). The YOU supplied the CPP assassins with explosives which they used throughout the city as a part of a joint destabilization campaign. The party’s Manila hit squad took the name Alex Boncayao Brigade (ABB).

In the early 1990s, the CPP fragmented. Sison reestablished control over the fragment that retained the party’s name. Filemon ‘Popoy’ Lagman, head of the ABB, was among those who broke with Sison. Sison put an end to the Sparrow Unit policy, which he had previously supported, accusing it of political excesses.

It was in late 2015 that the party resurrected this long dormant tactic as a component of the party’s support for the candidacy of Duterte. Duterte made clear throughout his campaign that he would be pursuing a policy of mass murder, under the guise of a “war on drugs.” He infamously compared himself to Hitler, and stated that if elected a hundred thousand dead bodies would be floating in Manila Bay.

The majority of the murders in the war on drugs have been carried out by vigilante groups. As it did in the mid-1980s in Davao, the party attempted to cement its alliance with Duterte by integrating itself in this fascistic campaign.

As Duterte took office, the nationwide war on drugs rapidly ramped up, and hundreds of corpses began to appear in the streets of Metro Manila with cardboard signs attached declaring that the victims were drug users.

The CPP announced in multiple publications that it supported Duterte’s war on drugs. Duterte gave speeches in which he called on the NPA to join in the war on drugs. Sison responded in an interview on CNN welcoming the opportunity.

The Philippine military fiercely opposed Duterte’s intimate ties with the party. As it had done in the 1980s with Aquino, the military compelled Duterte to sever ties with the CPP, using the threat of a coup and the imposition of martial law on the southern island of Mindanao. By 2018, the falling out between the Duterte administration and the CPP was complete.

Sison and the CPP are now publicly calling on rival sections of the military leadership, who are disgruntled by Duterte’s close ties with Beijing, to withdraw support from the president and to assist in the installation of Vice President Leni Robredo, who is the head of the bourgeois opposition to Duterte.

It is the elements around Leni Robredo and the Liberal Party that Sison refers to when he speaks of calls from the “middle forces” for the return of the Sparrow Units.

There is nothing progressive in the strategy and tactics of the CPP. They have served for decades as a murderous appendage of bourgeois rivalries and have subordinated social unrest to the interests of their elite allies.

The working masses of the Philippines confront immense dangers in the fascism of Rodrigo Duterte and the coup-plotting of his bourgeois opponents. The CPP have allied with and assisted first one and now the other.

The only way the Filipino working class can oppose these dangers is through their own political independence in the fight for socialist revolution. This requires a complete break with the CPP, its Stalinist program of nationalism and class collaboration, and all of its political appendages.