Bolsonaro sacks military command to consolidate authoritarian rule in Brazil

Tomas Castanheira

In an action without precedent in the history of Brazil, the country’s fascistic President Jair Bolsonaro has fired his defense minister along with the uniformed commanders of the Army, Navy and Air Force. His unconcealed aim is to secure a total grip over the state in preparation for dictatorial measures against the working class under conditions of a catastrophic worsening of the COVID-19 pandemic and a deepening social and political crisis in Brazil.

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonao and Army commander Gen. Edson Pujol (Credit: AgênciaBrasil)

Bolsonaro’s conflict with the top echelons of the military has emerged in the context of his increasingly strident demands for a complete subordination of the Armed Forces to his government’s political agenda, in particular his genocidal herd immunity policy in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic. On the same day as the wholesale change in the senior command of the armed forces, Brazil set a record of 3,668 COVID-19 deaths, as its health care system confronts a nationwide collapse.

On different occasions in recent weeks, Bolsonaro has promoted a confrontation with any social distancing measures implemented by state and municipal governments in response to the record rise in COVID-19 infections and deaths. “My Army is not going into the streets to force people to stay at home,” he declared

On Monday, the government announced a cabinet reshuffle affecting six ministries, including the Government Secretariat, the Chief of Staff, Foreign Affairs, Defense, Justice, and the Office of the Attorney General. Defense Minister Gen. Fernando Azevedo e Silva was replaced by Gen. Braga Netto, who previously served as Bolsonaro’s chief of staff. After a brief meeting with Bolsonaro, Azevedo e Silva agreed to resign, although he was in fact fired by the president.

In his resignation letter, the general stated that as head of the defense ministry, “I preserved the Armed Forces as state institutions,” suggesting that after his removal, this may no longer prove the case.

Brazil's ousted military chiefs: Edson Pujol (Army), Ilques Barbosa (Navy) and Antônio Carlos Moretti Bermudez (Air Force) (Credit: AgênciaBrasil)

The commanders’ resignations were announced by Braga Netto as soon as he took over the defense ministry on Tuesday morning. The former commander of the Air Force, Antonio Carlos Moretti Bermudez, published a video following the meeting, with a statement that adopted the same theme as Azevedo e Silva. Bermudez declared that he worked for the Air Force as a “state institution” and for the “sovereignty of what is ours: the airspace.”

Tuesday was also marked by an offensive on the part of Bolsonaro’s allies in the House of Representatives. The leader of the Social Liberal Party (PSL) in the House, Major Vitor Hugo, tried to force a vote on a bill that defines public health emergencies—such as the COVID-19 pandemic— as a motive for decreeing a National Mobilization.

National Mobilizations, which today can be decreed in cases of war, allow the president to intervene in production at public and private companies and subject both civilians and military personnel to his orders. It represents a major concentration of power in the president’s hands. Even right-wing figures within the House defined the proposal as a “coup” attempt.

Bolsonaro’s unprecedented shakeup of his cabinet and the military high command was carried out on the eve of Wednesday’s 57th anniversary of Brazil’s 1964 US-backed military coup. Braga Netto’s first act as defense minister was to publish a military order of the day calling for the celebration of that political crime, which ushered in two decades of brutal dictatorship.

The order promoted the lie that the military coup was part of a “1964 movement” in response to a “real threat to peace and democracy.” This cynical “Bolsonarite” fantasy casts the coup as beginning with a popular movement in the streets that ended up being supported by the Brazilian ruling class and its state, with the armed forces “facing wear and tear” to “guarantee the democratic freedoms we enjoy today.”

In fact, the 1964 coup was directly engineered and promoted by US imperialism and the Brazilian ruling class. It was not the military that suffered “wear and tear,” but rather the tens of thousands of workers and students that it killed and tortured during the bloody dictatorship that lasted 21 years.

The order, which was read aloud to military personnel in barracks across Brazil on Wednesday morning, is directed at drawing fascistic lessons from this history. It states: “The current geopolitical scenario presents new challenges, such as environmental issues, cyber threats, food security, and pandemics. The Armed Forces are present, on the front lines, protecting the population.”

It is urgent that the Brazilian working class draw its own political lessons from this defeat. Arming itself politically against the increasingly dictatorial methods of the capitalist class is a matter of life and death.

In 1964, the political subordination of the workers to the bourgeois nationalist government of João Goulart, promoted by the Stalinist Communist Party, was instrumental in disarming working class resistance to the coup.

In 1985, when the dictatorship was officially ended, the political forces linked to the Workers Party (PT) worked for a smooth transition to a civilian bourgeois regime, opposing the “persecution” of the military and civilian officials responsible for the barbaric crimes committed against the working class. The political lie that this path represented a settling of accounts with the legacy of military dictatorship has been laid bare by Bolsonaro’s emergence from this political setup.

Today, the same forces historically behind these political betrayals seek to blind the working class to the imminent dangers of the current situation.

Different pseudo-left groups, especially the political heirs of Argentine revisionist Nahuel Moreno, have drawn the same conclusion from the events of the past week: “nothing to see here, move along.”

One of the most grotesque formulations was drawn by Valerio Arcary, one of the main leaders of the former Morenoite organization Convergencia Socialista, who held leading posts in the PT. Today, at the head of the “Resistance” tendency within the Socialism and Freedom Party (PSOL), Arcary ridiculed those who are “on the verge of a nervous breakdown” over Bolsonaro’s dictatorial actions, bluntly declaring: “What happened with the ministerial reform is not the antechamber of a self-coup in preparation. ... Big capital does not support a subversion of the regime.”

The same essential political view is held by the Morenoites of the Revolutionary Workers Movement (MRT), linked to the Argentine Socialist Workers Party (PTS). On their website, Esuqerda Diário, they describe Bolsonaro as without support within the military and “harried” by the center-right parties. The site advocates “a more sober conclusion than the analyses that exaggerate Bolsonaro’s coup plot at a moment of clear weakening and disintegration of his bases of support.”

The middle class complacency of these pseudo-left groups, stemming from their unshakable confidence in the eternal stability of the capitalist state, merit only contempt. Bolsonaro’s threats should be taken with the utmost seriousness by the Brazilian working class.

The political reality in Brazil is determined by the profound crisis of the world capitalist system, which is causing the breakdown of bourgeois democracies all over the world, and pushing the ruling class in every country toward dictatorial methods. The January 6 coup in the United States, openly hailed by Bolsonaro and closely followed by his son, Eduardo Bolsonaro, is the most acute expression of this international political shift.

The COVID-19 pandemic has raised the fundamental contradictions of capitalism to an explosive level. The brutal increase in social inequality, the devastating effects of the coronavirus throughout Brazil and the dead-end crisis of Brazilian capitalism are the objective driving forces of Bolsonaro’s coup plotting.

However, these same objective factors are creating the conditions for a powerful revolutionary movement of the working class in Brazil and around the world. The working class in Brazil cannot allow another fascist military coup. It must arm itself politically to prevent one.

Obscene global vaccine profiteering by pharmaceutical companies

Jean Shaoul

Last week, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson told a private Zoom meeting of backbench Tory MPs, “The reason we have the vaccine success is because of capitalism, because of greed my friends… It was giant corporations that wanted to give good returns to shareholders. It was driven by big pharma.”

His obscene comments sum up the response of the ruling elite to the pandemic—an opportunity for profiteering on a huge scale, aided and abetted by imperialist governments that have protected Big Pharma’s monopoly profits.

The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine (credit: WSWS media)

The reality is that the pharmaceutical companies were initially not interested in vaccine development. Zain Rizvi of the advocacy group Public Citizen told the Financial Times that the “immense scarcity” of vaccines was directly attributable to Big Pharma being “missing in action” as the coronavirus pandemic took off. The drug companies had years ago cut back on vaccine research and development in favour of blockbuster drugs to treat cancer and rare diseases, though the likelihood of a pandemic had long been discussed.

Even after the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared COVID-19 a pandemic on March 11 last year, three of the largest corporations, GSK, Sanofi and Merck, that dominated the vaccine market, were reluctant to get involved. They calculated that the pandemic would have run its course before a vaccine was ready and demonstrating once again the degree to which public health needs take second place to profits.

As the BBC reported in December, “Initially firms didn't rush in to fund vaccine projects. Creating vaccines, especially in the teeth of an acute health emergency, hasn't proved very profitable in the past.”

It was only after the governments of the European Union (EU), UK and US and agencies offered funding, including the main cost of running the “Phase 3” trials, assuming most of the risk in the process, that the industry started work on vaccine development, making rapid progress.

The profit gouging also began in earnest.

The US alone poured in an unprecedented $14 billion via Operation Warp Speed even though six of the Big Pharma, excluding Moderna, had combined revenues last year of $266 billion and profits of $46 billion, an 18 percent profit margin, and could easily have funded it themselves.

While GSK, Sanofi and Merck received over $2 billion from the US government to support the production of vaccines, Merck pulled out after disappointing early test results. GSK and Sanofi are working jointly on a vaccine. According to the People’s Vaccine Alliance, they are largely sitting on the sidelines, planning to produce Covid-19 vaccines for only 1.5 per cent of the global population in 2021.

Of the major vaccine producers, only Pfizer has a successful vaccine, produced jointly with the German company BioNTech using the new messenger RNA technology that requires storage at ultralow temperatures. The other major producers are new entrants to the field, the US-based biotech companies Moderna, whose vaccine also uses the RNA technology, and Novavax, whose vaccine can be stored in a normal refrigerator.

Moderna, the most expensive vaccine, received $2.5 billion from the US government. The campaigning group Public Citizen argues that this means, “Taxpayers are paying for 100 percent of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine development. All of it.” With the US government subsequently buying or reserving up to 500 million doses, Moderna is likely to make a whopping $8 billion profit.

While BioNTech/Pfizer’s vaccine was privately funded, the company received a €100 million development loan from the European Development Bank as well as a €365 million euro grant from the German government to help with manufacturing costs.

Public monies funded not only the development of the vaccines but also, via the universities and public laboratories, much of the science underpinning the vaccines. Crucially, all the vaccine development teams benefited from the initial research carried out by Professor Zhang Yongzhen at the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Centre where he had sequenced thousands of previously unknown viruses. The Centre made the first genomic sequencing of the COVID-19 virus freely available on the open-source site virological.org on the very day that Wuhan recorded its first Covid death. It was the release of Covid’s genetic code that allowed University of Oxford, Moderna and BioNTech to design their vaccines in short order.

The companies have made a killing from massive pre-orders by governments, far larger than their population requirements, even before their vaccines had obtained regulatory approval. The US government made $1.95 billion and $1.53 billion pre-payments for the BioNTech/Pfizer and Moderna vaccines respectively through Operation Warp Speed, in effect an interest free loan.

But that was not enough for Big Pharma. They lobbied hard to guarantee monopoly profits by insisting the World Trade Organisation reject India and South Africa’s call to waive patent protection for the vaccines and to allow developing countries to manufacture or import generic versions. Pfizer boss Albert Bourla said, “At this point in time, I think it’s nonsense, and… it’s also dangerous”.

The US, the EU and the UK fell in line. Similarly, the companies sought and got legal indemnities from the governments protecting them in the event of problems with the vaccine, while ensuring that their contracts remained secret.

All this translates into massive profits for the pharmaceutical corporations. BioNTech/Pfizer is expected to make $4 billion profit on $15 billion sales at around $19 a shot, a profit margin of nearly 30 percent according to the Financial Times, as the company strikes hard bargains with rich and poor countries alike. Moderna is projected to make $8 billion profits on sales of $18.4 billion with at least 700 million pre-ordered vaccines in 2021 at between $25 to $37 a shot. The company says production costs are just 20 percent of sales revenues. The ultimate beneficiaries are the giant investment funds that hold the companies’ shares.

As well as profits, the companies have had a massive free advertising campaign as their jabs have made them household names, while the science underpinning the vaccines can be put to treating and profiting from other diseases. Furthermore, according to figures from Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse, should the advanced countries decide to offer annual booster jabs to cope with new, more resistant variants, as they do for flu, the pharmaceutical companies are set to rake in a further $10 billion or more a year.

The one company that bucked the trend was AstraZeneca, which is selling its jab at between $2 and $4 a dose after entering into an agreement with the University of Oxford that restricted its prices. Not having developed a vaccine of its own, it bought the rights to the jab developed by the university’s Jenner Institute, paying the university $90 million and a 6 percent share of future royalties. The university’s spinout company, whose directors include the leaders of the vaccine development team Professors Sarah Gilbert and Adrian Hill, will get 24 percent of the university’s share.

The scientists had initially wanted their vaccine to be produced on a non-exclusive, royalty-free basis, with the director of the Jenner Institute telling the media, “I personally don’t believe that in a time of pandemic there should be exclusive licenses.” He was echoing the words of Dr Jonas Salk, the inventor of the polio vaccine, who refused to patent the jab. When asked, “Who owns this patent?”, Salk famously replied, “Well, the people I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?”

In the event, the University of Oxford, stating that it needed to organize a massive global roll-out, entered into an exclusive deal with AstraZeneca, which agreed to sell the vaccine on a not-for-profit basis, claiming “We are absolutely committed to make the vaccine available to as many countries as possible at no profit during the period of the pandemic to support broad and equitable access around the world.”

Forgoing profits in the short term was viewed as good public relations and in any event ran counter to the terms of the deal that were not made public. According to the Financial Times, the contract allows the company to make 20 percent above the cost of manufacturing the vaccines and can raise the price when it deems the pandemic to be over, any time after the end of July. While these conditions appear to apply to the UK and EU, the company is also selling the vaccine to poorer countries, including Bangladesh, South Africa and Uganda, at higher prices.

Nevertheless, the AstraZeneca jab is the cheapest on the market, with the US corporation Johnson & Johnson more expensive despite also selling its vaccine at “cost price” during the pandemic, which is why the AstraZeneca vaccine has far larger shots under contract than any other vaccine producer. Its vaccine became the vaccine of choice for the world’s poorest countries and the WHO’s Covax scheme, particularly since it does not require storage at low temperatures.

Their prices at $2-$4 are far lower than Sanofi/GSK’s vaccine at $9.19, Pfizer/BioNTech’s at $14.59 and Moderna’s at $18, according to the pricelist negotiated by the EU. Other countries, including the US, are paying far higher prices, with the Pfizer jab reportedly costing $39 per person. While AstraZeneca’s expected profits are unknown, sales of $6.4 billion in 2021 and a 20 percent profit margin implies profits approaching $1.3 billion.

Unquestionably, AstraZeneca’s undercutting of the market has incurred the wrath of its rivals, causing uproar in France, Germany and the US. The EU threatened a ban on the export of the vaccine, yet another instance of the vaccine wars fueled by the conflicting interests of the rival companies, the major imperialist countries, as well as their rivals and client states.

The unrestrained drive for profits has put vaccines out of reach for most of the world’s population and will serve to massively increase global death rates as more virulent mutants proliferate.

The disastrous response of all the major capitalist powers and the pharmaceutical industry to the global COVID-19 pandemic confirms the necessity of abolishing the capitalist system that subjugates human health and every other basic need to private profit. The international working class must intervene to expropriate the pharmaceutical giants and every major industry sector, transforming these monopolies into publicly-owned and democratically-controlled utilities to serve the needs of humanity.

Pakistan government allows new wave of COVID-19 pandemic to run rampant

Sampath Perera

Fueled by new more contagious and lethal variants of COVID-19, a third wave of the pandemic is rapidly developing in Pakistan, leading to a surge in infections in the country’s densely populated cities. Despite the gravity of the situation, Prime Minister Imran Khan and his Islamist populist Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (Movement for Justice) government continue to adamantly rule out taking the social and public health measures necessary to prevent mass infections and deaths.

Two weeks ago, the government was forced to admit that the more contagious B.1.1.7 or British variant was dominant in the country amidst a surge of new cases, and that the country was facing a “dangerous” situation.

A man holds his 10-month-old baby daughter who suffers from polio, in Suleiman Khel, Pakistan, May 6, 2020 (AP Photo/Muhammad Sajjad)

Since last week, new COVID-19 cases have remained above 4,000 a day for the first time since June, while the test positivity rate remains above 10 percent—an indication that only a fraction of the infections are being officially identified.

Those who have been infected during the current surge, which began in early March, include Khan himself, the country’s president, Arif Alvi, and Defense Minister Pervez Khattak.

Khan, who throughout the pandemic has sought to downplay the threat from the virus, has previously been criticized in the media for appearing in public without a mask. Unsurprisingly, with callous disregard to the personal health of his own media team, Khan convened an in-person meeting at his palatial residence just days after testing positive.

Khan’s refusal to adopt measures to curb the latest wave of infections is in line with his opposition all along to any measures to suppress the spread of the virus.

Islamist right-wingers seized upon the reports of Khan’s infection to escalate their “anti-vaccination” campaign, deliberately misconstruing the significance of Khan having tested positive for COVID-19 just two days after he received the first dose of a two-dose vaccine.

Islamic fundamentalists have long campaigned against vaccinations. But they have become further emboldened in recent years, because Khan and the entire Islamabad establishment have repeatedly made concessions to them so as to cultivate a reactionary bulwark against the working class. Health workers administering the polio vaccine have repeatedly been targeted for assassination in recent years.

Prime Minister Khan, the president and defence minister are all reportedly in stable condition with ample medical care and facilities available to them. However, for the vast majority of the impoverished Pakistani population, it is an entirely different story. The new wave of the pandemic presents them with a health and economic catastrophe. Many households have only one breadwinner, meaning that they must make the choice between risking their health under dangerous working conditions or putting food on the table for their family. There is no space to quarantine in these crowded dwellings. Getting tested for coronavirus is virtually impossible, as is access to adequate health care in general.

Asad Umar, the minister leading the PTI government’s response to the pandemic, has ruled out implementing a “complete lockdown” to contain the virus’ spread. He announced the government’s decision after convening a meeting of the National Command and Operation Centre (NCOC) last week. Provincial governments and local authorities are continuing with haphazard and insufficient measures, including “smart” and “micro-smart” lockdowns in localities where the test positivity rate is higher than 8 percent. Businesses in some areas have been asked to shut down by 6 p.m.

The government also has no serious vaccination plan. Initially it allotted no money for procuring vaccines and relegated all responsibility for supplying the Pakistani people with vaccines to COVAX, a vastly underfunded World Health Organization (WHO) initiative tasked with providing free vaccines to poor countries.

With the delivery of doses from COVAX delayed due to production mishaps and the vaccine nationalism of the major capitalist powers, the government with much fanfare launched a “vaccination program” for health workers after China donated 500,000 doses of its Sinopharm vaccine and pledged an additional 500,000.

Sinopharm, like the majority of COVID-19 vaccines, requires that recipients receive two doses to be fully effective. Facing widespread criticism, the government subsequently announced that it would purchase 7 million additional doses from China. This would be enough to fully vaccinate 3.5 million of Pakistan’s 216 million people or less than 1.5 percent.

The government has also now set price caps for commercial vaccine imports, reversing an earlier decision to exempt COVID-19 vaccines from the country’s vaccine-price regulatory regime. However, the price remains prohibitive for the vast majority of the Pakistani population. Thus the commercial imports will benefit only a tiny minority comprised of the elite and more affluent.

The underlying thrust of the government’s policy was made clear when Umar blamed the poverty of the population for the government’s inability to enforce a “complete lockdown.” It is “not the solution,” the former business executive said, cynically adding, “You cannot shut down the entire country and steal people’s livelihoods.”

In other words, the government will not attempt to suppress the third wave of the pandemic because it does not want to incur any cost doing so. It has refused to provide any economic assistance to those in need and intends to wait for someone to supply vaccines free of charge to the vast majority of Pakistanis. Khan’s main concern remains averting any impact on business profits and the wealth and investments of the capitalist elite, regardless of the cost to the lives and wellbeing of the working class and rural poor.

Umar, as the minister for Planning, Reforms and Special Initiatives in Khan’s cabinet, plays a key role in the government’s implementation of International Monetary Fund-championed pro-market “reforms.” These include the elimination of subsidies, tax increases, the sell-off of publicly owned enterprises, and restrictions on borrowing from the country’s central bank. These measures had drastically increased poverty among the masses even before they were hit by the pandemic. Vastly underestimated official figures show that 60 million people live in poverty, an increase of 10 million from prior to the pandemic.

According to Sania Nishtar, a special assistant to Khan, the pandemic affected the livelihoods of 24.9 million last year. Yet, when the government announced an emergency assistance program, 139 million people applied for support.

Concerned only with averting mass social unrest, the government ultimately provided a meagre sum of roughly 12,000 rupees per head (about US$75) to 16.9 million people. In total, it spent 203 billion rupees or $1.2 billion, leaving tens of millions to suffer in destitution.

The amount it spent was even less than the $1.4 billion it borrowed from the IMF in April 2020 under an emergency financing program the agency established to mitigate the pandemic’s economic fallout. In comparison, Pakistan’s overall defense related expenditure last year was estimated at $11 billion, which represented an increase of at least 12 percent over the previous year.

Khan and his government similarly resisted any measures to contain the pandemic last year. As the social crisis intensified due to the government’s refusal to provide adequate financial support, the PTI government seized on the distress and misery of wide layers of the population to intensify its campaign against any economic shutdowns. It demanded the reversing of limited lockdown measures enforced by local governments, and the reopening of factories and other economic activities regardless of the spread of the virus.

For the impoverished population, the basic necessities for any effective response to the pandemic—such as decent housing, running water and free access to well-equipped health facilities—are luxuries beyond imagination. In 2014 an estimated 32 million people lived in slums in the nuclear-armed South Asian nation, a figure which must have increased substantially over the past seven years given the country’s rapid urbanization and population growth.

For the vast majority of the poor, health facilities are abysmal. A UNICEF report in 2020 provided a bleak picture of the health of slum dwellers in Pakistan’s largest cities. Its “in-depth study” to determine the vaccination coverage against childhood diseases for children aged between 12 and 23 months revealed that only 53 percent were fully vaccinated. Fully 33 percent of mothers did not know that vaccinations protect their children from diseases, and 44 percent were unaware of the vaccination services provided in their neighborhood, if any.

In the past 12 months, Pakistan conducted just over 10 million tests for COVID-19, with the daily test rate currently hovering around 40,000. The severe lack of testing and reporting, combined with the lack of access to health care, have led to Pakistan having comparatively “moderate” and undoubtedly vastly undercounted “official” figures for COVID-19 infections and deaths—663,200 and 14,356 respectively.

Google shuts down a hacking operation being conducted by ally of the US government

Kevin Reed

Two of Google’s anti-hacking teams uncovered and unilaterally took down a malware distribution operation that was being run by an undisclosed US ally, according to a report last Friday in MIT Technology Review.

The report, written by the publication’s cybersecurity senior editor Patrick Howell O’Neill, says that the Google teams—Project Zero and Threat Analysis Group—“caught an unexpectedly big fish recently: an ‘expert’ hacking group exploiting 11 powerful vulnerabilities to compromise devices running iOS, Android, and Windows.”

O’Neill also wrote that MIT Tech Review “has learned that the hackers in question were actually Western government operatives actively conducting a counterterrorism operation” and that Google’s decision to shut down and publicly expose the hack caused internal divisions and “raised questions inside the intelligence communities of the United States and its allies.”

Google's office in Toronto, Canada (Wikipedia photo)

Google’s Project Zero specializes in finding what are known among cybersecurity experts as zero-day vulnerabilities, i.e., flaws in software that developers are aware of but have not yet been able to fix. These unintended weaknesses are called zero-day because they can be exploited by cybercriminals and hackers while developers have “zero days” to patch the software.

According to Google’s website, the Threat Analysis Group is responsible for countering targeted and government-backed hacking against the company’s products and users. Much of TAG’s previous actions have been taken against “influence operations” reported to have government backing from North Korea, Russia or China, for example.

The hacks in question were discovered by Google’s teams as far back as February 2020 and were reported on in a blog post published by Project Zero on March 18. The post entitled, “In-the-Wild Series: October 2020 0-day discovery,” detailed seven instances of zero-day exploits within Apple, Google and Samsung browsers running on iOS, Windows and Android operating systems.

The malware was delivered using mechanisms referred to as “watering hole” attacks, which pointed a handful of websites to two exploit servers that hosted the malware for each of the operating systems. The attack name is derived from predators in the natural world who wait around watering holes to attack their prey.

In his MIT Tech Review story, O’Neill explains that Google omitted details, such as specifically what country was responsible and who was targeted, as well as “important technical information on the malware or the domains used in the operation.” He also said that these kinds of details would typically be made available to the public, but in this case, they were withheld.

While it is not unusual for cybersecurity firms to shut down exploits being used by “friendly governments,” it is rare that the action is made public. As O’Neill points out, this was the source of the internal conflict over the disclosure by Google, with some employees arguing “that counterterrorism missions ought to be out of bounds of public disclosure” and others believing “the company was entirely within its rights, and that the announcement serves to protect users and make the internet more secure.”

While Project Zero does not research the source or national origin of the exploits it finds, this is a regular part of the TAG’s reporting. O’Neill says, “Google omitted many more details than just the name of the government behind the hacks, and through that information, the teams knew internally who the hacker and targets were. It is not clear whether Google gave advance notice to government officials that they would be publicizing and shutting down the method of attack.”

O’Neill interviewed an unnamed former US intelligence official, who sought to justify the hacking operation, saying, “There are certain hallmarks in Western operations that are not present in other entities … you can see it translate down into the code. And this is where I think one of the key ethical dimensions comes in. How one treats intelligence activity or law enforcement activity driven under democratic oversight within a lawfully elected representative government is very different from that of an authoritarian regime.”

In other words, when the Russians or the Chinese are blamed for hacking, it is illegal, but when the US and its allies engage in cyberwarfare, it is permitted because “oversight is baked into Western operations at the technical, tradecraft, and procedure level.”

However, anyone familiar with the mass surveillance operations of the National Security Agency (NSA) exposed by Edward Snowden in 2013—which were built upon sophisticated hacking and malware implementations—knows that the US government and its “Five Eyes” allies have no problem “baking in” hacking and spying operations that dispense entirely with fundamental democratic rights. The “Five Eyes” intelligence alliance is made up of the US, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

This is not the first time a tech firm inserted itself into a US-related cyber-intelligence operation. In 2018 the Moscow-based global cybersecurity company Kaspersky Lab exposed an active US-counterterrorism operation it called “Slingshot” that had penetrated thousands of devices in Africa and the Middle East. Although Kaspersky did not attribute Slingshot to a country or government, US intelligence officers later admitted that the program had been run by the US military for six years, and the highly intrusive malware could “siphon large amounts of data from infected devices.”

The Kaspersky exposure caused the US military to abandon the program—reportedly used to locate and monitor the activity of ISIS and al-Qaeda targets—and “burn” some of the digital infrastructure that the Pentagon Special Operations Command was using to manage the surveillance operation. This and several other developments led to Kaspersky Lab being placed on a list of organizations that pose a national security risk to the US.

While MIT Tech Review defended Google’s exposure on the grounds that the company has an obligation to customers to protect them from hacking, it also studiously avoided pointing a finger at the specific “Western government” engaged in the malware operation. O’Neill declared that “some argue that counterterrorism operations are different, with potentially life-and-death consequences that go beyond day-to-day internet security.”

In any case, the exposure by Google of a nine-month-long hacking operation by a global state partner of US imperialism—regardless of the limitations of the information that has been disclosed—indicates that there are employees within the giant tech company who want these activities stopped and publicly exposed.

This development takes place in the context of growing political activism within the tech corporations, including staff opposition at Google in 2018 which ended the Pentagon artificial intelligence-related technologies contract used for warfare purposes called Project Maven.

MAN Steyr plant facing closure, threatening 2,300 jobs

Gustav Kemper

The supervisory board of truck manufacturer MAN Truck & Bus has decided to close down its plant in Steyr, Austria. The traditional plant with over a hundred years of history is to be shuttered if the workforce does not accept the terms of a sale to investor Siegfried Wolf.

The board of Volkswagen subsidiary MAN had negotiated these conditions with Wolf over the previous months, by which only two-thirds of the core workforce, about 1250 workers, are to retain their jobs. More than 1,000 workers, including about 400 temporary workers, are to be laid off. Investor Wolf will deny those remaining the current piecework bonus, which corresponds to a wage reduction of 15 to 30 percent. Further company agreements favorable to workers are also to be cancelled.

5000 people protest on October 15, 2020 against the closure of MAN in Steyr (Image: PRO-GE / CC0)

The Steyr workforce is being openly blackmailed by the MAN Executive Board and the Supervisory Board, on which 10 representatives of the German IG Metall union and the works councils sit, including Steyr works council leader Erich Schwarz.

Wolf was in the top management of the Canadian automotive supplier Magna International until 2010 when he then took on a series of board positions, including at the construction company Strabag; Porsche SE; Österreichische Industrieholding AG; and Sberbank Europe AG, a European subsidiary of Russia’s largest bank. Significantly, in this context, he became chairman of the supervisory board of the Russian company JSC Russian Machines, owned by oligarch Oleg Deripaskas. The latter company is involved in the manufacture, sale and maintenance of automotive equipment for the GAZ Group, Russia’s largest automobile group. Wolf holds 10 percent of the GAZ shares.

Wolf’s concept for the Steyr plant is to produce and supply 10,000 to 12,000 truck cabs annually to the Russian GAZ company. Europe’s largest paint shop for truck plastic add-on parts was built in Steyr just a year and a half ago at a cost of €60 million. The company will continue to produce vehicles for MAN until the end of 2022 and four of the company’s own vehicle models under the Steyr name thereafter.

At a works meeting last Friday, investor Wolf, as well as the MAN Executive Board and the Austrian trade union PRO-GE (production trade union), explained their concepts to the workforce.

The union favours a second purchase offer received a few weeks ago from Linz-based entrepreneur Karl Eggers, whose family business KeKelit manufactures plastic pipes and air conditioning systems. He has formed the “Green Mobility” consortium with other companies, including the Czech Tatra Group and an automaker from Southeast Asia.

Union officials prefer Eggers’ offer because he promises to keep 1,850 regular workers on the payroll. General Works Council Chairman Erich Schwarz even claims that this consortium’s plans have a potential of providing 10,000 jobs in future. Nevertheless, Schwarz and his union officials have been negotiating behind closed doors with MAN management and Wolf for months. “He did not want to reveal details. It had been agreed that negotiation results on which there was no agreement would not be disclosed,” the Austrian Kurier quotes him as saying.

The MAN supervisory board, including the German IG Metall union, has already committed itself to Wolf’s offer. This is despite the fact that the GAZ Group and its owner are subject to US sanctions that prohibit companies from doing business with GAZ under threat of economic penalties. The cooperation between Volkswagen and GAZ for the production of vehicles in Russia plays a role in this.

In order to gain the approval of the workforce for the sale, the MAN Group has promised each worker a bonus of €10,000, regardless of whether or not they keep their job.

MAN workers are to decide in a secret mail-in ballot in just one and a half weeks’ time. It is like choosing between plague and cholera. Either they decide to sell the plant with the associated wage cuts and uncertainty of being taken on at all, or they accept the plant closure. Counting employees of the supplier industry, more than 5,000 families would be affected by such a closure, a catastrophe for the town of 39,000 and for the entire region.

The trade unions and their works councils in Germany and Austria play a key role in this cynical game. MAN Truck & Bus Austria is part of the Traton Group (formerly Volkswagen Truck & Bus), the majority of which belongs to the VW Group and produces vehicles of the MAN, Scania, Volkswagen Caminhões e Ônibus and RIO brands. VW Group management is taking advantage of the coronavirus crisis to carry out long-planned restructuring aimed at strengthening the position of the group and, in this case, of the truck and bus division on the world market.

The Traton Group still reported earnings after tax of €1,561 billion in fiscal year 2019. The current job cuts and plant closures are aimed solely at increasing the profit margin in international competition.

For this reason, the MAN Trucks Executive Board presented a restructuring program on September 11, 2020, which included the slashing of thousands of jobs. It was already clear at that time that the Steyr site was to be closed completely.

Just like at MAN plants in Germany, where IG Metall organised protest rallies after the bad news, PRO-GE called for a rally in Steyr on October 15 of last year, which was attended by 4,000 workers and their families.

Union officials and politicians invoked the Group’s social responsibility but also made it clear that they would not organise any fighting measures apart from appeals. PRO-GE Federal Chairman Rainer Wimmer wiggled around this point saying, “[M]aybe we have to think about it [industrial action] … if they really take away our livelihoods, that maybe we have to throw down the gauntlet, at a time when we still can.”

Wimmer reassured the workforce by pointing to a “watertight” site continuation agreement signed at the end of 2019, under which operations are secured until 2030. Like all such contracts, it is not worth the paper it is written on. MAN cancelled it without further ado.

Meanwhile, IG Metall and works council leaders began negotiations behind closed doors to present a “key points paper” at the end of January that includes the elimination of 3,500 jobs and is intended to achieve an “earnings improvement of up to €1.7 billion.”

The head of the MAN Works Council, Saki Stimoniaris, proudly declared: “We bear responsibility for our MAN.” In addition to his six-figure annual salary, Stimoniaris also receives almost half a million euros for his Supervisory Board activities, exactly €482,040 in 2019.

These well-to-dos have prevented the workforce from revolting against the looming layoffs from the very beginning. The works council in Steyr reassured the workers with financial arguments. The large investment in the modern paint shop and the annual transfer of profits to the parent company were supposed to guarantee a secure future for the plant. The union support for the “Green Mobility” purchase offer has further confused the workers. Now they are being asked to hand themselves over to a pompous investor and a Russian oligarch.

While IG Metall was drawing up plans at its Munich headquarters for the closure of the Steyr plant, PRO-GE sabotaged any resistance to it. In multiple interviews, works council Chairman Schwarz and PRO-GE head Wimmer stressed that staff would have to be cut regardless due to the conversion to electric drive technology and EU directives limiting carbon dioxide and nitrogen emissions.

As coronavirus cases explode, French teachers demand closure of schools

Will Morrow

While the number of coronavirus cases is rising rapidly in France, and the health care system risks being completely overwhelmed, there is a growing movement among teachers for the closure of schools and the adoption of a lockdown policy opposed by the Macron government.

Yesterday, more than 30,000 coronavirus cases were reported across France. The seven-day average for cases is now 33,500, but is rising rapidly. For three days last week, the number of reported cases was between 40,000-45,000. On average, almost 300 people die every day.

There is every indication however that the death toll is on the verge of a major increase. The hospital system is already at a critical point. Yesterday, the total number of patients in intensive care surpassed 5,000, eclipsing for the first time the peak set during the second wave in November last year.

Students leave their school in Cambo les Bains, southwest France, Thursday November 5, 2020 (AP Photo / Bob Edme)

In the Ile-de-France region around Paris, the number of patients in intensive care units is 1,484. Yesterday, however, the Public Assistance of Paris Hospitals (AP-HP) warned that, based on the accelerating hospitalisation rate, even assuming a strict lockdown is imposed beginning April 1, the number of ICU patients will more than double to 3,470 in the Paris area within three weeks. If the government waits an additional week to order a lockdown, this would rise to 4,466 by April 29.

In an interview last week with the Journal du Dimanche, President Macron defended his government’s refusal to impose a lockdown to prevent the spread of the virus. Behind the homicidal policy of allowing the virus to spread through the population stand the interests of the French financial elite, which rejects any restriction on non-essential production or schools that would threaten the flow of corporate profits. Faced with a wave of denunciations by scientists and doctors, Macron is due to deliver a national televised address this evening.

The sharp edge of Macron’s “herd immunity” policy has been the policy of open schools. Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer boasts continuously that France has kept schools open longer than any other country in Europe throughout the pandemic. In truth, schools are being used as child-minding services so that parents can be kept at work.

This has now produced a catastrophe. An unknown number of friends and family members of teachers and students have died due to Macron’s policy. Its impact is systematically covered up by the lack of official data on deaths attributable to cases occurring in schools.

The case of the Eugène Délacroix high school in Seine Saint-Denis, the working class suburb north of Paris, is a horrific demonstration of the homicidal character of French policy. Between the beginning of the pandemic and December last year, 20 parents of students died from coronavirus. The spread of the virus in the school is continuing. Since the beginning of the month, almost 60 students and 20 teachers have contracted the virus.

The staff at the school have gone on strike to close the school, exercising their right protected under French law to refuse to work under conditions placing their life in danger. On Friday, the staff addressed an open letter to President Macron, denouncing an “alarming health care situation.” They state: “We demand the urgent and temporary closure of the school, with a complete transition to online teaching in order to ensure continuity of learning.”

Other schools are also being either fully or partially closed by strike action by teachers. At the Blaise-Cendrars in Sevran, also in the Seine-Saint Denis region, 20 teachers have refused to work.

Opposition among teachers is mounting rapidly as the number of infections in schools is exploding throughout the country.

Throughout the month of March, the number of classes closed jumped from week to week because more than three coronavirus cases had been detected within the same class. On Friday, March 26, the education ministry revealed that 3,256 classes were closed, up by 1,238 within the space of a week, a rise of 60 percent.

The highest concentration of closed classes is in the Academy of Créteil, which encompasses Seine-Saint Denis, Seine-et-Marne and Val-de-Marne. More than 536 classes have been closed in these areas alone. In the Academy of Lyon, 177 classes were closed last week, up from 24 the week before, a rise of 640 percent.

On Friday, Blanquer announced a change in the health protocol, ordering a class to close upon the detection of a single case, rather than three, as previously.

This is an acknowledgement that the government’s policy has contributed to a massive spread of the virus among youth. Yet the government is determined to keep schools open as long as possible.

Blanquer stated that he was opposed to bringing forward the beginning of holidays in April, absurdly claiming that “it has not been demonstrated that the holiday period,” i.e., with schools closed, “lead to fewer contaminations than during the school period.”

On Monday, a group of 56 educators as part of the Stylos Rouges collective filed a suit against Blanquer, accusing him of “not protecting staff in contacting with children,” who “are spreading the virus.”

The Macron government is widely accused of covering up the true extent of cases in schools. There is a continuous disparity between the official number of student coronavirus infections with those of school-aged children. On March 26, for example, the education system counted 21,183 positive cases from pre-school to high school in a week. However, Public Health France reported 57,000 cases among those aged under 20, with approximately 80 percent of these cases (or 45,600) estimated to be minors aged under 18.

To enforce its homicidal policy of keeping schools open, however, the Macron government has depended entirely upon the complicity and active support of the education trade unions. These unions helped organize the school opening policy with Macron, opposing calls for closure of schools and a transition to online learning. Even amid the explosion of cases in schools and widespread demands among teachers for their closure, the National High School Teachers Union (SNES-FSU) is continuing to demand only a reduction of class numbers in half.

In November, strikes broke out organised by teachers in schools across the country to oppose the reopening of classes after the holiday break amid a surge in cases. The national union federations, including the Stalinist General Federation of Labour (CGT), intervened to shut down the strike action and oppose calls for the extension of the strike and closure of schools.

Against this policy, teachers should form their own independent rank-and-file safety committees in every school. These would provide a basis for organising a nationwide strike to enforce the closure of schools. An appeal must be made for the development of European-wide strike action to impose a lockdown across the continent. Families must be provided with a comfortable income so that a parent can remain at home with their child and all non-essential production must be stopped.

Big banks hit by investment fund collapse

Nick Beams

Wall Street has been shaken by an event which illustrates the precarious nature of the financial boom fueled by the provision of ultra-cheap money by the Fed and the willingness of banks to fund ever-riskier operations.

Last Friday there was a massive sell-off in stocks in US media companies, including ViacomCBS and Discovery and Chinese tech stocks, including Baidu and Tencent, amounting to around $20 billion.

Credit Suisse, Paradeplatz in Zürich, Switzerland (Photo credit: Roland zh)

The stocks in the media companies had been falling during the week, but on Friday there was a rush for the exits as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley unloaded blocks of shares. Goldman began with a sell-off of $6.6 billion in the morning and then followed it with sales of $4 billion in the afternoon. Morgan Stanley sold off $4 billion worth of shares in the morning followed by another $4 billion worth in the afternoon.

The sales knocked off about $33 billion of the shares of the companies involved.

It quickly emerged that the sales were part of a “forced deleveraging” by Archegos Capital, a private investment firm owned by its founder Bill Hwang. With the fall in the media stocks earlier in the week, Hwang had been subject to a margin call by the major banks that had financed his highly-leveraged bets. It turned out to be possibly the biggest margin call in history.

A margin call is made when banks demand more money as collateral when the price of the asset, in this case shares, begins to fall. If the margin call cannot be met, then the lender sells the securities to try to recoup what it is owed.

On Monday it emerged that the financial backers of Archegos Capital included two of the biggest names in global finance—Credit Suisse and Japan’s largest investment bank, Nomura.

Nomura announced at the start of trading this week it was facing a potential loss of $2 billion and that its profits for the second half of the financial year could be wiped out. Credit Suisse, which was heavily involved in the recent collapse of the UK firm Greensill Capital, said its potential losses could be “highly significant and material to our first quarter results.” The estimate of the total loss is between $3 billion and $5 billion.

The announcement of the extent of their losses sent the shares of both banks tumbling. The shares of Nomura plunged by 16 percent in Tokyo on Monday, its biggest one-day fall ever, and dropped a further 4 percent on Tuesday. The shares of Credit Suisse dropped by 13.8 percent in the biggest decline since the March 2020 market plunge at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The seriousness of the issue was underscored by a report in the Financial Times that prior to making an announcement of its losses Nomura had held “emergency talks with Japan’s Financial Services Authority.”

The newspaper reported that bankers in Tokyo had described the sell-off of Archegos assets as a possible “Lehman moment”—a reference to the collapse of the US investment bank that triggered the global financial crisis of 2008.

At this stage that appears to be something of an overstatement, although there may be further shocks in store. There is no question, however, that it is the most serious blow-up of an investment fund since the collapse of the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management in 1998. LTCM had to be bailed out in a $3.6 billion operation organised by the New York Federal Reserve in order to prevent a broader market collapse.

While recent events are not on the scale of 2008, they do recall one of the central aspects of that crisis—the connection of the major banks with outright financial criminal activity.

Bill Hwang, the founder-owner of Archegos, has a record of financial criminality. He previously ran the Tiger Asia hedge fund and in 2012 was forced to return cash to investors when he admitted to fraud in relation to Chinese bank stocks. He paid $44 million in fines to the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2012 over insider trading activities and in 2014 was banned from trading on the Hong Kong exchange.

However, within a year of paying back money to investors, he was back in business, setting up Archegos.

One might have expected that the world’s major investment banks would have not touched him with a barge pole. But barge poles appeared from everywhere because of the huge profit opportunities.

With Hwang described as an “aggressive, moneymaking genius,” the assets of Archegos grew from $200 million at its launch in 2012 to $10 billion over the course of nine years.

As the Financial Times noted: “The fee-hungry investment banks were ravenous for Hwang’s trading commissions and desperate to lend him money so he could magnify his bets.”

Hwang was able to mask the extent of his dealings through use of a derivative known as total return swaps. These allow investors to pay a fee and in return obtain cash based on the performance of the underlying asset, which is owned by the bank. The use of these swaps enables the investor to expand their holdings in companies without disclosing them which they would have to do if they held equities outright.

Hwang expanded his operations by holding swaps with numbers of banks. The extent of the leverage provided was such that for every stock Archegos bought the bank would lend it seven more. In some cases, the ratio may have been as high as 20. The result was that Archegos did not have to publicly disclose the extent of its indebtedness.

“If you’re holding everything as swaps, the reality of what you have to declare to your banks is very little,” one hedge fund executive told the Financial Times.

There have been claims that banks did not know the extent of the indebtedness of Archegos, but others have dismissed this as “inconceivable.” The most likely explanation is that if the banks did not know it was because they did not want to know, as long as the fat fees kept rolling in.

Once the fall in the stocks held by Archegos began there was a rush for the exits. Last Thursday Hwang brought together his major backers, Goldman, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo as well as Credit Suisse and Nomura to try to organise an orderly sale. But Goldman, described as being “very exposed,” did not commit itself and initiated a sell-off the next morning.

The consensus in financial circles, at least at this stage, is that the effects of the Archegos collapse can be contained. However, there are broader implications. The share market bubble has been made possible by the provision of ultra-cheap money. Notwithstanding the assurances of the Fed that this will continue, financial conditions are shifting.

Yields in the bond markets, which form the base for interest rates in financial markets, are rising on the back of inflation fears and concerns that the market will not be able to absorb all the new US government debt being issued. This has led to a fall in the market value of the high-tech stocks that have been at the centre of the debt-fueled speculation over the past year.

As the Sydney Morning Herald columnist Stephen Bartholomeusz noted in a comment published on Tuesday: “The degree of leverage—indeed the apparent scale of it—inherent in margin calls of such magnitude is by itself disturbing and raises the question of how much more there might be, and where it might lie, within the shadows of the global financial system.”

24 world leaders issue bogus call for pandemic treaty

Thomas Scripps

In an act of breathtaking hypocrisy, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron have led a call by 24 world leaders for nations to “work together towards a new international treaty for pandemic preparedness”.

World Health Organisation (WHO) director-general Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus is also a signatory.

The letter begins by invoking the post-Second World War period: “At that time, following the devastation of two world wars, political leaders came together to forge the multilateral system. The aims were clear—to bring countries together, to dispel the temptations of isolationism and nationalism and to address the challenges that could only be achieved together in the spirit of solidarity and co-operation, namely peace, prosperity, health and security.”

The Daily Telegraph front page article announcing the statement by the 24 world leaders

Warning, “There will be other pandemics and other major health emergencies”, the letter continues, “We are, therefore, committed to ensuring universal and equitable access to safe, efficacious and affordable vaccines, medicines and diagnostics for this and future pandemics.”

The letter concludes with the need for world governments to be “guided by solidarity, fairness, transparency, inclusiveness and equity.”

If this were not such a naked example of political showmanship, it would be necessary to ask on what planet these government leaders have been living this past year. The global response to the pandemic has been defined by the utterly destructive influence of geostrategic tensions and the selfish pursuit of national interests. All of which has found its most grotesque expression in the governments of Johnson, Merkel and Macron!

Since December, Britain and the European Union (EU) have been trading blows in a vicious conflict over the supply of vaccines.

After the UK stole a march on the EU in securing vaccine contracts, the EU briefly declared a ban of the export of vaccines to Northern Ireland, jeopardising the recently agreed Northern Ireland Protocol of the Brexit agreement. The ban was hurriedly withdrawn over the international consequences, but efforts to prevent exports from Europe have continued.

In recent weeks, the European Commission has updated its export powers to ban vaccine exports to countries with high vaccine coverage rates, or which restrict exports through law or contracts with suppliers. Although many European leaders were hesitant to endorse the new powers at a summit last Thursday, Macron declared afterwards, “I support the fact that we must block all exports for as long as some drug companies don’t respect their commitments with Europeans.”

On Sunday, Thierry Breton, the EU’s internal markets commissioner, threatened, “As long as AstraZeneca doesn’t make good on its obligations, everything that’s produced on European soil is distributed to Europeans.”

Merkel summed up the nationalist, protectionist framework for the distribution of vaccines in a statement to the Bundestag: “The problem at the moment with the vaccine supply isn’t so much due to the question how much was ordered, but more about how much can be manufactured on European soil.”

“Because we can clearly see: British manufacturing plants manufacture for Great Britain, the US aren’t exporting anything, and therefore we rely on what can be produced in Europe”.

One day before the letter was released, Johnson announced plans for GlaxoSmithKline to “fill and finish” 60 million doses of Novavax vaccine in the UK—work previously done in Germany. The Telegraph reports, “A Downing Street source said the move was motivated in part by a desire to pour investment into the UK's domestic vaccine manufacturing capability, while also making the nation’s vaccine supplies ‘more secure’.”

The conflict with Britain in no way implies unity within the EU, with other signatories to the call including António Luís Santos da Costa, prime minister of Portugal; Klaus Iohannis, president of Romania; Kyriakos Mitsotakis, prime minister of Greece; Mark Rutte, prime minister of the Netherlands; and Pedro Sánchez, Prime Minister of Spain.

When the pandemic first hit the continent and overwhelmed Italy’s healthcare system, the Italian government passed an urgent message to the European Commission’s headquarters and logged its needs in the EU’s Common Emergency Communication and Information System. As Janez Lenarčič, the European commissioner responsible for crisis management, later told the Guardian, “No member state responded to Italy’s request and to the commission’s call for help.”

Each country is now in a desperate race to reopen its economy, amid a surge of the virus and at the cost of thousands of lives, to seek competitive advantage over its rivals.

The other signatories and the countries they represent provide a picture not of international collaboration, but of a vaccine rollout undermined at every stage by imperialist rivalries, global inequality, and the profit motive.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky refused available doses of the Sputnik vaccine in line with his government’s ferociously anti-Russian foreign policy and had to resort to begging the EU for vaccines in January. So far, less than 1 percent of the population has received even one dose.

Cyril Ramaphosa, President of South Africa, is overseeing a catastrophe in the continent’s most developed country. His government has vaccinated just over 125,000 people—a tenth of its planned first phase of the rollout—due to a shortage of supply and critical infrastructure. The second phase is due to start in April.

Kenya, Rwanda, Tunisia and Senegal, whose leaders all signed the call, are dependent on the underfunded COVAX scheme, run by the WHO for low and middle-income countries. Senegal, population 16.3 million, is due to receive just 1.1 million doses by the end of May through COVAX. Rwanda (12.6 million) is due to receive around 800,000 and Kenya (52.6 million) is due 3.5 million.

In an earlier WHO statement, Ghebreyesus labelled the growing gap between vaccination rates in rich and poor countries “grotesque” and a “moral outrage”. Private pharmaceutical companies have refused to waive patents or share technologies to allow poorer countries to begin manufacturing their own vaccines. However, government leaders enshrined this criminal subordination of human life to corporate profit in a treaty, pledging to “work with heads of state and governments globally, and all stakeholders including civil society and the private sector.”

The signatories have the gall to promise “solidarity” the next time around, even as the current disaster is still unfolding. There is not a word about the massive increase in cases all over the world in the last month or measures to address this dire threat—only a stated belief “that nations should work together towards a new international treaty”.

The comparison drawn with the 1940s says something about the fears animating this piece of cynical propaganda. As in the aftermath of the Second World War, capitalism stands drenched in blood, thoroughly discredited and facing an upsurge of the class struggle. The government leaders hope that empty promises of a new start will stall the revolutionary consequences of this situation.

Unlike the 1940s, however, there is no power able to play the role of American imperialism in the post-war period, underwriting the capitalist world with its overwhelming economic and military strength. The order of the day is not stabilisation but escalating trade and military conflict, spearheaded by the US and directed above all against China.

This jingoistic agenda is reflected in the letter, which states that a pandemic treaty “should lead to more mutual accountability and shared responsibility, transparency and co-operation within the international system and with its rules and norms.” As the Telegraph, which ran the leaders’ letter as an exclusive in the UK, comments, Johnson called on the G7 to back a new pandemic agreement last month, emphasising the need for health data-sharing following “concerns about China withholding information and access from global health inspectors as they examined the origins and progression of Covid.”

The purpose of this narrative placing responsibility for the pandemic at China’s door is to whip up xenophobia in preparation for war.