Protests against the draconian Police, Crime Sentencing and Courts Bill took place this weekend in more than 25 towns and cities in Britain.
The Police Bill, which effectively criminalises protest, is making its way through Parliament after passing its first two readings. It is expected to return to Parliament in June and be passed due to the Conservative government’s 80 seat majority.
The protests were relatively small, with the largest held in London where several thousand people marched from Hyde Park to a rally in Parliament Square. Among those attending were supporters of Extinction Rebellion and Black Lives Matter.
Demonstrators holding posters and flags gather at Parliament Square during a 'Kill the Bill' protest in London, Saturday, April 3, 2021. The demonstration is against the contentious Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, which is currently going through Parliament and would give police stronger powers to restrict protests. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham)
Two protests were held in Bristol this week ahead of the main one Saturday, which around 1,500 attended. Over the last few weeks, police have brutally attacked Police Bill protesters in the city. Avon and Somerset police, backed by “public disorder officers” from neighbouring forces, were mobilised against protesters on Saturday. During the evening, Avon and Somerset police enforced a Section 35 dispersal order over the entirety of Bristol city centre and arrested seven protesters.
Demonstrations numbering between a few hundred and up to 1,000 were held Saturday in Birmingham, Sheffield, Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle, Northampton, Norwich, Nottingham, Oxford, Cambridge, Plymouth, Portsmouth Aberystwyth, Bath, Bournemouth, Brighton, Cardiff, Derby, Exeter, Folkestone, Kendal, Lancaster, Lincoln and Luton. The mainly young protesters chanted “Kill the Bill!” and Whose streets? Our streets?”. There was a proliferation of homemade banners including, “No more police powers”, “It’s our right to protest”, Defend your human right to protest”, “No to a police state: Yes to democratic rights,”, “I’m not giving up on our rights” and “No protest? No Democracy.”
Protesters marching down Peter Street in Manchester against the Police Bill on Saturday (credit: WSWS media)
In London, demonstrators proceeded past Buckingham Palace before arriving in Westminster. The Metropolitan Police presence was significantly larger around Whitehall, where Downing Street and some of the main government ministries are located. Later in the day, riot police were sent in to disperse a small number of protesters who remained in Parliament Square. The Metropolitan Police announced Sunday it had made 107 arrests for offences including breach of the peace, violent disorder, assault on police and breaches of Covid legislation.
At the Manchester protest, attended by around 400 people, Socialist Workers Party (SWP) members who spoke called on attendees to join and support the unions as the basis for opposing the Bill. Protesters marched around the city centre, temporarily blocking the main Deansgate thoroughfare with a sit-down protest—and ending with a rally. At around 5.30pm dozens of police officers moved in to disperse people sat on tram lines and made several arrests.
Protesters demonstrate on Saturday in Devonshire Green, Sheffield (credit: WSWS media)
The organisers of the protests placed the political focus on identity politics, with the fight against the Bill conducted by a “coalition of minorities”.
A supposed appeal based on “class” took the inevitable form of a glorification of pro-capitalist trade unions, which will do nothing to oppose the Police Bill, as they have done nothing to oppose any attack on the social and democratic rights of their members. For decades, as a critical bedrock of their suppression of every significant struggle by workers, the unions have faithfully enforced the raft of anti-strike laws that were legislated by the 1980s Tory government and kept in place by the 1997 Labour government throughout its 13 years in office.
There was no organised trade union presence at any of the anti-Police Bill demonstrations, with the odd trade union banner on display brought along by members of various pseudo-left and Stalinist groups.
A protester in Cambridge with a homemade banner reading "Police Bill: A monstrous assault on our civil liberties--Kill the Bill" (credit: WSWS media)
A number of those speaking at protests condemned the Labour Party, its support for the Tory government during the pandemic and its complicity in the attacks on protesters. Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer’s name was booed at number of the weekend’s protests. Labour had originally planned to abstain on the Bill and supports several of its provisions—particularly stiffer sentences for a number of crimes. It only reversed its support following the widespread protests at the police for the brutal attack on the vigil held on London’s Clapham Common following the murder of a young woman, Sarah Everhard. A serving Met Police officer was arrested and charged with her murder.
Under conditions in which Labour is widely discredited as a pro-capitalist party of state, Labour’s Socialist Campaign Group (SCG), a rump of around 30 “left” MPs, is seeking to provide a political cover. At the London protest, SCG MPs Bell Ribeiro-Addy, Apsana Begum, Clive Lewis and Zarah Sultana spoke. They were joined by Starmer’s predecessor as leader, Jeremy Corbyn, who had the party whip removed as part of the right-wings’ anti-Semitism witch-hunt.
Corbyn made only the timidest pose of opposition in his speech, standing next to the statue of the pacifist leader of India’s independence movement Mahatma Gandhi. Corbyn said, “I want to live in a world of peace and justice, I want to live in a world of human rights and democracy, and I’m prepared to make people feel uncomfortable in the process of defending and advancing our human rights and our justice.”
Corbyn’s opposition to any struggle based on the mobilisation of the working class was evident in a proposal he made Saturday. In reference to measures in the Police Bill that noise restrictions be placed on demonstrations in the vicinity of parliament, he said to attendees, “Within the privacy of the small number of people in this square can I share an idea with you. How about come Christmas time, if we haven’t defeated the legislation by then, a whole bunch of us meet here in Parliament Square, and beautifully and in tune sing Silent Night, to see what happens then.”
Corbyn stated that the Police Bill should be taken in the context of a “series of legislation that this government is trying to push through that place [pointing at Parliament] over there: the Spycops Bill; the Overseas Operations Bill.”
While saying that he (who remains free of the Labour whip) and the SCG MPs on the platform would vote against the Police Bill and had voted against the Spycops and the Overseas Operations Bill, Corbyn said nothing about Labour’s role in supporting the Spycops Bill, voting for the continuation of the authoritarian Coronavirus Act, and backing Boris Johnson’s “herd immunity” government to the hilt during the pandemic.
In allying with the Johnson government, Starmer only took over where Corbyn left off. Before handing the leadership of the party over in March 2020 in his last parliamentary appearance as leader, Corbyn said of Labour’s approach to the pandemic, “Our immediate task as the Opposition is to help arrest the spread of the coronavirus, support the government’s public health efforts while being constructively critical where we feel it is necessary to improve the official response.”
In a report made public last week, the United Nations has revealed that the French military launched an airstrike on a wedding ceremony in Mali at the beginning of the year, slaughtering at least 22 people.
The airstrike took place at 3:00 p.m. on January 3, near the town of Bounty in the center of the country. According to the report by the United Nations Mission in Mali (MINUSMA), the religious ceremony for the marriage had taken place the evening before in Gana, approximately seven kilometers away.
The following morning, approximately 100 people came from their homes in Bounty and smaller surrounding settlements to celebrate the marriage. As is normal in the local custom, the men were gathered in a separate area from the women and children. The French airstrike hit the gathering of men, killing 22.
French soldiers of the 126th Infantry Regiment and Malian soldiers, March 17, 2016. (Wikimedia Commons)
Little has been publicly reported about the victims, except that they were aged between 23 and 71. The report states that 19 of the victims were civilians, and three were members of an armed Islamist group named Katiba Serma. However, it makes clear that there is no evidence that any of them were involved in any ongoing military operations against French armed forces and were therefore also protected under international law.
The MINUSMA report is the product of a weeks long investigation on the ground by a team of 19 UN staff, including two police science investigators. From January 4 to February 20, they traveled to the towns of Bamako, Sévaré, Douentza and Bounty. They conducted interviews with more than 115 people individually and another 200 people in groups, including family members of the victims, witnesses, and representatives of local community associations and medical responders.
Their report exposes the lies of the French army and the Macron government following the attack. Immediately after the airstrike, the Macron government insisted that it had hit a gathering of 30 members of an “armed terrorist group.” On January 20, Minister for the Armed Forces Florence Parly was questioned about the attack during a hearing before the Senate Commission for Foreign Affairs. Parly called reports of an attack on civilians as an example of “information warfare” and “rumours” being used to discredit the French occupation of the Sahel.
“We have seen this again recently when on all sorts of social media networks, France has been accused of being at the origin of a strike having supposedly killed civilians,” she said. “It is not necessarily a question of rumors spread by local actors, but also a game of powers, competitors who see only advantages in Europeans leaving this theater, to be able to better deploy there themselves…”
French Minister of Armed Forces Florence Parly (Source: US Secretary of Defense - photo by Lisa Ferdinanho)
Asked why the French army had not made public its evidence supposedly proving that the victims were members of an armed terrorist group, Parly claimed that this was impossible because it would show “our enemies what we know about them.”
All of these statements have been exposed as hollow lies. The report constitutes clear evidence of a French war crime. The massacre makes clear the criminal and neocolonial character of the entire military operation led by France in the Sahel. How many other similar attacks, attributed by Paris to the killing of “armed terrorist groups” have taken place but gone unanswered?
The civilian casualties of this war are systematically covered up by the occupiers. Parly’s denunciations of “social media networks” testifies to the acute consciousness in the French military brass and Macron government of the enormous popular opposition in the French and African working class to the operations of French imperialism in the Sahel, and their determination to conceal the nature and victims of the occupation.
Even in the wake of the UN report, Paris has doubled down on its lies. On March 30 the armed forces published a statement, “Reaction to the MINUSMA report on the January airstrikes in Mali.” It makes no attempt to answer the substantial evidence provided in the 36-page report. It simply asserts in a gangster-like manner that “the only concrete sources that the report is based on come from local testimony. … It is impossible to sympathisers or individuals under their influence.”
Aerial view of the site of the French airstrike in Bounty. [Credit: MINUSMA]
In reality, the report provides ample and detailed evidence to substantiate its conclusions. Throughout its investigation, the MINUSMA team maintained correspondence with the French army.
A January 7 army communiqué claimed that “the totality of intelligence information in real time permitted [French forces] to characterise and formally identify the gathering as belonging to GAT [armed terrorist group].”
The MINUSMA report states: “No information on the elements or probatory intelligence that the [French] Barkhane forces disposed of has been communicated to MINUSMA.”
According to the army’s own version of events, it monitored the group for one hour and a half before launching the airstrike.
The UN report comments: “It appears difficult in the circumstances (one hour and a half of observation) that the party responsible for the attack could have determined that all the participants in the gathering [almost 100 people] were members of an armed terrorist group. … The characterisation of an entire gathering of people as members of an armed group, excluding de facto the presence of civilians, in such a period, and in such proximity to inhabitated areas, raises significant concerns.”
It notes that a forensic examination of the scene of the airstrike found no evidence of destroyed arms, munitions or motorcycles that are typically used as means of transport by militia.
The French media has largely passed over the revelations of the French war crime. Le Monde devoted two news articles to the event and moved on. One can only imagine the wall-to-wall media reports, editorials and news columns that would follow were a similar report produced about the operations of a major rival of French and European imperialism, including China or Russia.
In its concluding segments, the MINUSMA report calls for the French and Malian governments to conduct an investigation into themselves, including an “independent and transparent investigation to examine the circumstances of the attack and its impact on the civilian population in Bounty.”
The response already made by the French government to the latest revelations makes clear the illusory character of any such appeals. In fact, the latest massacre is the inevitable outcome of the neocolonial character of the war itself, which is aimed at the subjugation of the resource-rich region and where the entire population is therefore viewed as enemies.
France launched its intervention in Mali in 2013, after its overthrow of the Gaddafi regime during the 2011 NATO war in Libya that destabilized the entire Sahel. It has maintained a permanent occupation of between 4,000 and 5,100 troops, alongside Reaper drones and manned bombers.
While it is waged under the banner of combating separatist and Islamist terrorist groups, its real aim is the assurance of French neocolonial control over the resource-rich and strategically important region, which includes uranium supplies used for French energy production and neighbors what is believed to be the third largest gold supply in the world.
For a number of weeks, doctors and scientists in Germany have been calling for a complete public lockdown to prevent a third pandemic wave and the prospect of more than 100,000 infections per day. Their appeals have been roundly rejected by both the federal and state governments.
In particular, no consideration has been given to shutting down businesses, even though the incidence of infections is increasing rapidly in companies and factories, as well as on construction sites.
The spread of the pandemic in workplaces is largely ignored in the national media and public discourse. Company management, the trade unions and their affiliated works councils are doing everything they can to keep infections secret and under wraps. On a regional level, however, local media outlets have repeatedly reported on outbreaks that endanger the lives and health of workers and their families.
Construction site of the Tesla factory in Grünheide (Photo: Ralf Roletschek / CC BY-SA 1.0)
On March 28, the Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland (RND) reported a sharp increase in coronavirus infections at the German Railways (Deutsche Bahn, DB). “The infection figures among DB Regio workers are currently going through the roof,” declared Ralf Damde, the managing director of the joint works council at DB Regio.
The works council has called for all railway employees with contact to customers to be vaccinated as soon as possible. The council has also requested that the company issue workers a certificate confirming they are part of critical infrastructure and should be classified in priority Group 3 for vaccination. However, in many regions vaccination of priority Group 2 has only just commenced, and there is a shortage of vaccine shots. This means many weeks could pass before vaccinations for Group 3 are possible.
According to RND, one week ago DB Regio had confirmed 87 infections in rail transport and 44 in bus transport. With numbers rising rapidly, however, many more cases are expected. At regional bus depots in Brandenburg (Oder-Spree), which belong to DB, workers from other companies have been called to work because so many local drivers are infected. In any event it is likely that the figures given are only the tip of the iceberg.
A major outbreak of COVID-19 has occurred at the huge Tesla construction site in Grünheide near Berlin, according to a report in the Tagesspiegel on March 26. According to the newspaper, the number of workers infected with COVID-19 has risen to between 80 and 100. Around 1,000 people work on the site. On March 22, there were reports of just 20 infected and 40 employees under quarantine.
Local authorities and Tesla have refrained from providing any information about the extent of the outbreak, leading to speculation that the number of those infected could be much higher.
When asked, the Brandenburg Health Minister, Ursula Nonnenmacher of the Green Party, replied that the Oder-Spree district was responsible for “local outbreaks.” The district announced that the outbreak at the Tesla construction site was of a “double-digit magnitude.” The health department declared it was in close contact with the company and saw no reason to intervene.
The subservience on the part of the authorities to Tesla CEO Elon Musk, one of the richest and most ruthless entrepreneurs in the world, was also expressed in their response to questions from the press. “Please understand that with regard to a private company we cannot go into the details of how infections arose, the company’s hygiene concept and its implementation.”
Despite the outbreak at the construction site and many other issues, Tesla plans to have its first vehicles rolling off the production line in Grünheide in July 2021—whatever it takes. At the moment a large contingent of engineers and fitters from a company in Poland are working on the construction site, carrying out key electrical work.
Just over 10 months ago, Musk insisted on the reopening of his Tesla plant in Fremont, California, even though state guidelines called for factories to be closed at the end of May due to the pandemic. Workers there were forced to risk their health at work or lose their jobs.
For months, Tesla, local and California authorities claimed there had been no coronavirus infections at the Fremont plant after its reopening. In fact, it is now clear that up to 440 workers were infected with COVID-19 between May and December 2020. Figures on the severity of the cases and/or possible deaths have still not been published.
At the Meyer shipyard in Papenburg, Lower Saxony, 214 workers have been infected with coronavirus. Forty-nine are part of the permanent workforce; the rest are employed by six subcontractors. As is almost always the case in this sector, they work under difficult conditions with low wages and are crowded into collective accommodations. All of these conditions are conducive to the spread of COVID-19.
Due to the infections, the shipyard, which builds cruise ships, was due to start a two-week break from March 29, with the workforce receiving short-time working payments. Each day, 2,600 tests were planned for the workforce, and the two-week break was to be used to improve infection control at the shipyard and reduce the very high incidence rate of infections of over 500 (per 1,000 inhabitants) in Papenburg. A night-time curfew has been in place since March 20 due to the high rate of infection.
Shortly after being announced, however, the planned break in operations was once again cancelled. Instead, work at the yard is to continue with half of the workforce, who are to be tested two to three times a week at a test centre on the shipyard premises. The Meyer shipyard agreed to the work continuation with the district of Emsland and the local health authority.
At the Lürssen shipyard in Bremen, more than 100 workers from various subcontractors have also been infected with coronavirus. The Bremen health authority has had more than 1,000 workers tested. Almost all of the cases detected are the more contagious British variant of the virus. Nevertheless, operations are also continuing at this shipyard.
Workers have also tested positive at the DM drug store logistics centre in Weilerswist in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. In the middle of last week, a total of 94 positive cases had been confirmed. All of the cases involved the British virus mutant, and 800 employees have been sent into quarantine.
This is the second major outbreak at DM in Weilerswirst within a short period of time. Nevertheless, the authorities claim they have investigated the latest outbreak and found that the company has maintained “all hygiene standards in an exemplary manner.”
These cases reflect only a small percentage of those affected by the pandemic in German industries and companies. They make clear that nothing of substance is being done by the government, trade unions and local authorities to protect workers.
COVID-19 infection rates are once again rising dramatically across Canada driven by new, more contagious and lethal variants. Yet all levels of government are prioritizing corporate profits over human lives and adamantly refusing to take the urgent public health measures needed to prevent a catastrophic third wave of the pandemic and mass death.
Last Thursday, Ontario Conservative Premier Doug Ford ordered a totally ineffectual 28-day “shutdown” that has been denounced by health experts and even sections of the corporate media as too little, too late. Similar “shutdowns” were announced last week in British Columbia, Quebec and in the Atlantic provinces, while doctors in Alberta have unsuccessfully implored Premier Jason Kenney and his United Conservative Party government to apply an “emergency brake” to its reckless re-opening policies.
What all of the new “shutdown” announcements have in common is that they are designed to keep industrial workplaces and in-school instruction—that is the main, or at the very least two of the principal, vectors of the current upsurge in COVID-19 infections—fully operational.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford has adamantly opposed shutting down schools and non-essential workplaces. (Photo credit: Ontario government)
Unlike the two previous waves of the pandemic, in spring 2020 and last December-January, which saw intensive care referrals and deaths heavily weighted towards the elderly and less healthy, hospital staff in Ontario have reported a significant increase in younger, healthier patients from working class neighbourhoods and occupations.
Canada officially surpassed one million COVID-19 cases Saturday. The total case count has risen more than seven-fold since last September, when the campaign to reopen the economy went into high-gear with the reopening of schools for in-class teaching. Ontario’s hospitals are already treating 50 percent more patients under the age of 60 than they were at the peak of the second wave.
The B.1.1.7 variant, which is at least 75 percent more transmissible, is rapidly becoming the most common version of the virus in Ontario. The variant has been spreading as Ford has reopened the schools and continued with the designation of virtually every industrial and logistics enterprise as essential. In the factory belt in Peel Region immediately to the west of Toronto, public health authorities have recorded over 300 outbreaks at industrial sites. Variants are also running rampant in British Columbia and Alberta, including the potentially even more hazardous P1 Brazilian variant.
A review of the workplace outbreaks added to Toronto’s official list on just one day last week illustrates the brutal policy of mass infection that all levels of government and every establishment political party are supporting. On April 1, 28 separate workplace outbreaks were added to the city’s list, including 16 infections at an Amazon fulfillment centre, and eight at a Hudson’s Bay warehouse. Four cases at Maple Leaf Foods and 11 among City of Toronto employees were also recorded. Five people were infected at a Tim Hortons coffee shop, and seven each at a Metro store and a Real Canadian Superstore outlet.
This follows the recent mass infection of over 900 workers at a Brampton, Ontario Amazon warehouse, 300 infections (not properly reported) at a Canada Post sorting plant in nearby Mississauga, and outbreaks at 225 schools in the Greater Toronto-Hamilton industrial corridor.
As the intensive care units begin to reach capacity, the rollout of vaccines in Ontario, as across the country, continues to lag far behind the rates achieved in many other countries, because of vaccine shortages, supply bottlenecks and insufficient distribution networks. To date, vaccine distribution has targeted older age groups and people with serious health conditions. Workers in high-risk virus hotspots such as factories, warehouses and schools, and those living in high-density public housing, are not being prioritized.
The severity of the crisis is not the consequence of the unexpected nature of the pandemic, which was both foreseeable and foreseen, but of the disastrous response of government authorities. They have refused to funnel the requisite resources into a health care system that was already ravaged by decades of budget cuts, thus ensuring its inability to carry out systematic mass testing, contact tracing and vaccine rollout.
Added into this rotten bargain has been the criminal disregard for human life exhibited by the provincial governments in concert with the major corporations and trade unions. With the full blessing of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his federal Liberal government, they have all connived since last April to convince the population that reopening nonessential businesses, factories and schools is desirable, even as the virus continues to run rampant.
Two incidents over the past week show how the mantra of profit over people is being implemented by the institutions of the ruling class.
At Toyota auto assembly plants in Cambridge and Woodstock, Ontario workers were sent letters from the Southwestern Public Health Unit saying there is a high probability that they have been exposed to COVID-19 and should self-isolate from March 25 to April 8. At one of the plants, an employee told the press that at least 150 workers could have been exposed to the virus.
Nonetheless, despite being identified by public health as “high risk close contacts” of infected employees, workers were advised to continue to clock in to the job. “During your self-isolation, you may continue to go to work but you must go directly to work and home again. While you are at work it is important you maintain your isolation, meaning you avoid any close contact (within 6 feet) of any co-workers until your isolation period is over,” stated the letter. The public health officials continue to “work closely” with Toyota management to continue production at the two plants. Cynically invoking “privacy issues,” they refused to release the number of infected workers and details about where they were infected.
Also last week, CBC reported on hundreds of pages of documents and an audio recording detailing the Alberta government’s ruinous response to a massive outbreak last spring at a Cargill meat processing plant in High River. They showed that at a “town hall meeting” with workers meant to discuss safety at the facility, provincial Labour Minister Jason Copping, Agriculture Minister Devin Dreeshan and public health officials, including Chief Medical Officer Deena Hinshaw, deliberately concealed from the assembled workers the ongoing danger.
“If you look at this evidence in its totality, it is clear that keeping the plant open is more important than worker safety,” stated University of Regina professor of occupational health and safety, Sean Tucker. “I think there is enough evidence to show that there was a regulatory breakdown in the case of Cargill’s High River, Alberta plant, that people knew about problems but were not empowered to share them with workers.”
The April 2020 Cargill outbreak was the largest single localized COVID-19 outbreak in North America at the time. Almost 1,000 of the plant’s 2,000 workers were infected. Over six hundred close contacts of the meatpackers also tested positive. Three workers died. Infections continue throughout the Canadian meatpacking industry. In February, an outbreak at Olymel’s pork processing plant in Red Deer, Alberta infected 515 workers and killed three.
The release of the damning documents served as the occasion for trade union bureaucrats to denounce the provincial government in sharp terms. United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 401 president Thomas Hesse described the government’s handling of the outbreak as “not just negligence, it is worse than negligence.”
This is no doubt true, but the fact is that these same unions have been telling workers for over a year to rely on the very same “negligent” government to protect their health and safety. During the Cargill outbreak, the UFCW repeatedly insisted that the pro-employer labour and health and safety boards of Alberta, overseen by the pro-big business, hard-right United Conservative Party government, would protect workers’ health and well-being on the job. Hesse summed this up last spring, when he categorically ruled out any job action by workers, who were opposed to a precipitous return to the plant due to the deaths of their colleagues. “We are looking at legal options,” Hesse asserted at the time. “We are not asking for a work stoppage. A work stoppage would not be legal.”
Hesse’s statement exemplifies the outlook and role of the unions across Canada and internationally. They prioritize the upholding of the pro-corporate collective bargaining and labour relations “legal” framework, which exists to protect the interests of the bosses at the expense of workers. The unions are bitterly opposed to challenging it because it is this system that underpins their perks and privileges, including six-figure salaries for top officials and prestigious positions on various tripartite corporate-government-union committees.
The argument that workers must abide by “legality” has been used by the unions in every province to sabotage worker opposition to the reopening of schools and workplaces, and their continued operation even as infections skyrocket. When the blatant indifference of the ruling elite and its state structures towards the lives of workers has been spelled out in flesh and blood, as in the case of Cargill, bureaucrats like Hesse seek to cover their tracks with radical bluster and feigned shock at government “negligence.” But they continue to corral workers into unsafe workplaces, risking their health and lives.
As the World Socialist Web Site has long insisted, until the pandemic is over, “Schools must be closed, and millions invested in e-learning. All non-essential economic activity must be shut down. PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) must be made available to all those workers who must stay on the job for essential production and services. And full financial compensation must be provided to all workers and small businesses affected by lockdown measures.
“The resources to finance such measures exist in abundance, but they are monopolized by the billionaires and multimillionaires, whose grip on society can only be broken by the independent political mobilization of the working class.
Leading US epidemiologist Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy in Minneapolis, gave a stark warning of a devastating new stage of the COVID-19 pandemic in interviews Sunday on two national television networks.
Dr. Osterholm explained the context and real dangers hinted at in the statement by Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, when she declared last Monday that she was afraid and felt a sense of “impending doom” about the pandemic.
Medical personnel watch over COVID-19 patients at DHR Health, Wednesday, July 29, 2020, in McAllen, Texas [Credit: AP Photo/Eric Gay]
On Sunday, speaking with host Chuck Todd on “Meet the Press,” Osterholm said, “At this time, we are in a category five hurricane status with regard to the rest of the world. At this point, we will see in the next two weeks the highest number of cases reported globally since the beginning of the pandemic … I think it was a wake-up call to everyone yesterday when Michigan reported 8,400 new cases and we are now seeing increasing numbers of severe illnesses, ICU [cases] and hospitalizations in individuals who are between 30 and 50 years of age who have not been vaccinated.”
After discussing the concerns posed by the rise in more virulent and immune-evading variants, Osterholm explained, “Chuck, I’m even more worried what’s coming down the pike over the next several years. Right now, if you look at vaccine distribution around the world, ten countries have received about 80 percent of the vaccines. Thirty countries haven’t seen even a drop of it. If we continue to see this virus spread across low- and middle-income countries unfettered, they are going to spit out variants over the course of the next years that can in every and each instance challenge our vaccines. This is why we need not only a US response, but we also need a global response to get as many people vaccinated.”
Globally, the number of cases of COVID-19 is approaching 132 million, and the number of deaths over 2.8 million. The seven-day average in daily cases and fatalities has climbed to 581,000 and more than 10,000, respectively. With 40 million total cases, Europe sees more than 3,000 deaths per day with the total number of fatalities approaching one million. Poland, Turkey, and Ukraine face severe struggles as they are in the worst phase of their surges. India’s COVID-19 cases are rapidly accelerating and will exceed 100,000 new cases per day this week, the country's highest total during the pandemic. Brazil appears to have reached its peak with 3,000 deaths per day.
Meanwhile, the US seven-day average has been slowly rising, with over 66,000 new cases per day. Cases in the upper Midwest and Northeast have public health officials worried. Speaking on Fox News, Osterholm was blunt in dismissing the actions of state and federal governments in relaxing restrictions and reopening schools, particularly in light of the spread of new variants like B.1.1.7.
“We are the only country in the world right now experiencing this increasing number of cases due to this variant and at the same time, opening up, not closing down," he told host Chris Wallace, who seemed taken aback by the forthright warning. “The two basically are going to collide, and we are going to see a substantially increased number of cases.”
Osterholm continued, “I understand the absolute resistance in this country even to consider that and you know—it's kind of like trying to drink barbed wire—but the bottom-line message of the virus is it’s going to do what it’s going to do, and we are going to have to respond somehow.” He added that this might involve pulling “back on some of the restrictions that we’ve loosened up on.”
This resistance derives primarily from the drive by the US ruling elite, backed by both capitalist parties and the corporate media, to force children back to school and their parents back to work, in order to produce profits for the capitalist class.
Osterholm, who served as a member of President Biden’s COVID-19 transition advisory board, has been phased out since his blunt warning in January that the drop in coronavirus cases was “the eye of the hurricane” and not genuine progress. This warning is now being tragically confirmed.
The epidemiologist focused much of his discussion on the danger that B.1.1.7 was more dangerous to children than the initial form of the virus. “They are now, as kids, getting infected at the same rate that adults do,” he explained. “They’re very effective at transmitting the virus. Just in Minnesota in the last two weeks we’ve had 749 schools with cases.” he said.
According to the Washington Post’s vaccination tracker, approximately 106 million people have received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, accounting for just 32 percent of the population. Seventeen percent have been fully vaccinated. By comparison, Europe has barely vaccinated ten percent of its people.
The steep rise in cases in the Midwest and Northeast is predominately being driven by COVID-19 cases in children, which has been driven by the rabid school reopening campaign.
According to the Michigan Department of Health and Humans Services, cases among younger children have increased by 230 percent since February 19. Minnesota’s state epidemiologist Dr. Ruth Lynfield confirmed that the B.1.1.7 had a higher attack rate among children compared to earlier versions. “We certainly get the sense that the youth is what we might refer to as the leading edge of the spread of the variants,” she said.
The Massachusetts health department reported that the most significant number of new COVID-19 infections in the last two weeks were among children and teens. Concerns are also being raised that the infections with the B.1.1.7 variant lead to a higher burden of illness among children.
There are now 12,505 cases of B.1.1.7 variants detected across all US states and territories (this refers only to cases identified through genetic testing, which accounts for only a tiny fraction of total cases. The CDC now estimates that the B.1.1.7 version of the coronavirus is the predominant strain across areas representing two-thirds of the US populace.
Bloomberg stated on Friday, “The CDC identified five of 10 regions Friday, saying they include much of the Eastern seaboard, from New York south to Florida, as well as the Midwest and most of the sunbelt. About 220 million people, or two-thirds of the US population, live in those five regions.” This makes up 26 percent of cases nationally. Additionally, it should also be noted that 353 cases of the B.1.351 variant first seen in South Africa have been detected across 31 states, while the P.1 variant first seen in Brazil has rapidly spread across 22 states with 224 cases detected.
Throughout the month of March, Osterholm was warning that the American people “are walking into the mouth of this virus monster as if somehow, we don’t know it’s here, and it is here.” This is an apt description of an historic crime, one being committed against the American people by the US ruling class and its political servants.
The coronavirus is an existential threat that brings with its dire consequences to the working class. It is critical to appreciate that the emergence of the new variants is not merely the escalation of the present pandemic but the rise of a new pandemic with the more dangerous characteristics.
The ruling elites have repeatedly shown that their concerns for profits determine their response to the pandemic. They care nothing for the life of working people.
It is critical that working people assimilate the lessons and experiences gained over the last year and recognize that they are the only force capable of bringing this pandemic to an end, by casting off the shackles of the capitalist mode of production, which is ultimately the cause of this present pandemic. This means the building of an independent movement of the working class for socialism.
The Operational Command East with the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) provocatively announced Saturday that it will hold joint military exercises known as “Exercise Cossack Mace” with NATO forces later this year. The statement comes as violence continues to escalate between Ukrainian forces and Russian-backed separatists in the eastern Donbass region of the country.
SSO fighters of the Armed Forces of Ukraine during training [Credit: Wikipedia/ArmyInform]
While joint Ukrainian-NATO drills are often announced with clarifying statements that they are purely “defensive” operations, the AFU’s statement differed in that it made clear that it would simulate an offensive attack against not only separatist-controlled Donbass but Russian forces as well.
“In particular, defensive actions will be worked out, followed by an offensive in order to restore the state border and territorial integrity of a state that has been subjected to aggression by one of the hostile neighboring countries,” the statement said, clearly referring to Russia.
Saturday’s statement was followed up on Sunday with the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine ominously posting a video to its Facebook page, celebrating the 72nd anniversary of NATO, along with the hashtag #WeAreNATO.
For over six years, Ukraine has been mired in an ongoing civil war in eastern Ukraine between government forces and separatists that has claimed the lives of approximately 14,000, displaced 1.4 million and left 3.5 million in need of humanitarian assistance. For much of the six years, the fighting has remained at a relatively low level of persistent shelling and shootings back and forth, while avoiding a full out war. The Ukrainian government’s recent statements and actions show that is now planning for such a scenario, and is expecting NATO-backing.
NATO was founded as a military alliance in 1949 by the United States and eleven other European countries to carry out war against the numerically superior Soviet Union’s military. Despite the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the alliance has continued to exist as an instrument of Western imperialism aimed against countering now capitalist Russia.
While the Stalinist bureaucracy was preparing to dissolve the Soviet Union and fully restore capitalism, working hand in glove with US imperialism, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev was given assurances that NATO would not expand its borders in a post-Soviet world. Yet it has done precisely that, adding Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic just eight years later in 1999. NATO has continued to expand eastward and most recently added Montenegro and North Macedonia, both formerly part of Yugoslavia.
Prior to the 2014 United States-backed coup that installed the right-wing anti-Russian government of Petro Poroshenko, Ukraine had maintained a non-aligned status in regards to NATO. In 2014, it embarked on a course of integration with NATO. In February 2019, the Ukrainian government passed a constitutional amendment, stating its commitment to join both NATO and the EU and in June of this year became a member of NATO’s Enhanced Opportunities Partnership program.
While current Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was previously ambiguous on his stance towards NATO during his election campaign in 2019—proclaiming his support for EU membership while saying little about the Western military alliance—he now regularly begs for his country’s full inclusion in NATO. In 2020, Ukraine was granted enhanced status with NATO, granting it “access to interoperability programs and exercises, and more sharing of information.”
Speaking to HBO earlier this year, when asked what he would say to the newly-elected United States President Joe Biden if given the chance to speak with him, Zelensky quickly replied “I have a very simple question: Mr. President, why are we still not in NATO?”
On Sunday, Zelensky likewise congratulated NATO on its anniversary tweeting “Congratulations to NATO partners on the anniversary of The North Atlantic Treaty! Look forward to extending our practical cooperation to strengthen Euro-Atlantic security. Count on support of Allies in granting MAP to #Ukraine. The Army of Ukraine is strong & continues needed reforms.”
Throughout 2021, a ceasefire negotiated between Russia, Ukraine and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) has fallen apart with increasing attacks and killings on both sides.
At the same time, the Zelensky administration has step-by-step ramped up anti-Russian hysteria by sanctioning pro-Russian opposition leaders, shutting down pro-Russian media outlets and adopting a controversial language law aimed at limiting Russian language use in the country. Most recently, the Ukrainian government announced a strategy aimed a full mobilization of the country for war and the retaking of Crimea.
For its part, the oligarchic capitalist government in Moscow, which has emerged out of the Stalinist destruction of the USSR, has continually sought to make a deal with Western imperialism. Last week, Putin held talks with the heads of state of France and Germany, conspicuously without the involvement of either Kiev or Washington DC.
However, short a deal with NATO members France and Germany, the Putin government has now also resorted to saber-rattling and is preparing itself for a potential war. This weekend videos appeared of tanks moving towards the country’s borders with Ukraine increasing the chance of an accidental outbreak of hostilities between Ukrainian forces across the border.
Berlin and Paris released a joint statement on Saturday night, stating, “We are closely monitoring the situation and in particular Russian troop movements, and call on all sides to show restraint and to work towards the immediate de-escalation of tensions.” Also on Saturday, Boris Ruge, the vice chair of the Munich Security Conference, threateningly declared that “there will be a price to pay” if Russia escalates, alluding that there would be “consequences” for the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which is set to deliver gas from Russia to Germany.
The United States meanwhile has continued to back its military protégé in Kiev, with U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin reassuring his Ukrainian counterpart, Defense Minister Andrii Taran, that Washington will not give up on Ukraine in case of war in a phone call held on April 1 at the initiative of the American side. In a meeting on April 2, Joe Biden pledged Zelensky “unwavering support” against Russia.
The Western bourgeois press has paid little attention to the growing danger of war in East Ukraine. In the few reports that have emerged, Russia is universally blamed for “aggression”, putting reality on its head.
At the same time, the crisis is increasingly described as a “test” for the Biden administration, which has signaled since its inauguration that it would pursue an extremely aggressive course against both China and Russia. Speaking to Foreign Policy, Jim Townsend, a former U.S. deputy assistant secretary for Europe and NATO, dismissed the escalating tensions as simple gamesmanship between Russian President Vladimir Putin and United States President Joe Biden.
“They’re probing, they’re trying to see what [the U.S.] is going to do, what NATO would do, what the Ukrainians would do. Is this a jumpy administration, or is this an administration that’s going to act with resolve? They’re doing all these things to assess where the new administration is.”
Anne Applebaum, a right-wing media pundit who is married to a former Polish foreign minister, described the situation in Ukraine along with a possible “Chinese invasion of Taiwan” as one of “two crises the Biden administration needs to be prepared for.”
“What has become of art, poor art, amidst these disorders?”—painter Eugène Delacroix, July 1832 (in quarantine)
The COVID-19 pandemic has acted on the art world as it has in every other important sphere of life, to accelerate or amplify processes already well under way. By and large, global ruling elites view any activity not directly and immediately related to amassing profits or driving up share values as useless and counterproductive. Worse still, as social tensions mount, there is always the danger that artists may speak impermissible truths and gain a significant public hearing.
Art auction at Christie’s [Credit: Daniel Pett]
Decaying capitalism, as we have noted, has proven during the pandemic to be the deadly enemy of art and culture. Everywhere the powers that be fear “superstitiously every new word.” As far as they are concerned, the artists can go hang themselves.
This essential truth is not controverted by the empty public relations efforts and occasional government handouts designed to allay or subdue opposition for as along as possible. The various studies pointing to the devastation in the arts often have as their subtext a concern—with explosive developments that took place during the Great Depression and similar episodes in mind—that the official indifference or hostility may have a radicalizing impact on writers, actors, painters, musicians, photographers and others—the younger and more disadvantaged ones in particular.
An aspect of the authorized public relations campaign in the US in particular is the miserable attempt to prove to recalcitrant sections of the corporate oligarchy that art work is both “respectable” and socially “positive” and that, in the final analysis, financial support for artists is “cost-effective.”
Along these lines, an analysis put out earlier this year by the Recovery Support Function Leadership Group (RSFLG), a bureaucratic mouthful “made up of multiple departments and agencies across the [US] federal government that work together to help communities recover from a disaster,” argues that the arts are “integral to the social, civic, and economic wellbeing and vitality of our nation.”
The RSFLG asserts that “arts and culture” contribute 4.5 percent of American gross domestic product, “an amount larger than the share contributed by industries as diverse as construction, agriculture, and transportation.” The language is barren throughout, but the concerns are real. The “devastating toll” of the pandemic on artists, the study observes, “has potential repercussions for other segments of the U.S. economy … and society as a whole.”
The bare facts alone don’t begin to convey the degree of devastation, but they are a starting point.
Providing a small but telling glimpse into the depth of the crisis in the US, the Artist Relief Fund, established by a coalition of organizations last year, has received over 130,000 applications from artists in every state and territory in 10 fields: “Craft, Dance, Design, Film, Media, Music, Theater & Performance, Traditional Arts, Visual Art, and Writing. Applicants demonstrating the most severe needs in four categories—rent, food, medical, and dependent care—have been prioritized.”
Stating the obvious, Jennifer Benka, president and executive director of the Academy of American Poets, a coalition partner, noted that as the pandemic “continues to rage, it has become clear that there is no real safety net for artists”—or for any other vulnerable social layer, she might have added. As institutions reopen, Benka continued, “they do so without their education departments, positions once filled by artists. Musicians have seen their gigs vanish, and poets and writers who lack healthcare find themselves more vulnerable than ever before.”
According to the aforementioned RSFLG study, the jobless rate for art directors, fine artists and animators increased from 2.1 percent in 2019 to 9.3 percent in 2020, for actors the rate went from 24.7 percent in 2019 to 52.3 percent in 2020, for dancers and choreographers from 10.7 percent to 54.6 percent and for musicians, singers and related workers from 1.1 percent to 27.1 percent. Much of this job destruction and structural “downsizing” will prove, in fact, to be permanent.
An update posted March 23, “COVID-19’s Pandemic’s Impact on The Arts,” based on material gathered by Americans for the Arts and others, reports that financial losses to nonprofit arts and culture organizations in the US stand “at an estimated $15.7 billion, to date.” Some 99 percent “of producing and presenting organizations have cancelled events—a loss of 490 million admissions and $15.5 billion in audience spending at local businesses (e.g., restaurants, lodging, retail, parking). The total economic impact of organizational and audience-spending losses is $5.3 billion in lost government revenue and 913,000 jobs no longer being supported.”
Artists “are among the most severely affected workers by the pandemic.” The update estimates that 63 percent of artists or creative workers “became fully unemployed in 2020 and have lost an average of $37,430 each in creativity-based income since the pandemic’s onset.” Ninety-five percent of artists report loss of income, while 78 percent have “no post-pandemic financial recovery plan,” 50 percent “have been unable to sell/distribute their creative product” and 74 percent “have had their events canceled.”
While the artists struggle for access to “rent, food, medical, and dependent care,” the world’s parasite-billionaires thrive and continue to swallow up a greater and greater proportion of the globe’s art and antiques.
“The Art Market 2021,” an Art Basel and UBS report prepared by Dr. Clare McAndrew of Arts Economics, makes eye-opening reading. In his introduction to the study, Noah Horowitz, Director Americas of Art Basel, the for-profit, privately owned and managed international art fair staged annually in Basel, Switzerland, Miami Beach and Hong Kong, suggests that, even while global arts sales fell by 22 percent, the “telltale finding of this year’s report is the tremendous ascent of online [art] sales, which doubled in value from 2019 to 2020, accounting for one quarter of total sales.”
The Art Market, 2021
In fact, Horowitz points to an even more “telltale finding” further on in the same paragraph, that while the pandemic created havoc for art fairs, galleries and auctions, and all those economically dependent on those events, “wealth gains at the highest end of the spectrum … bolstered the market, especially as confidence grew and global economies normalized in the second half of the year.”
Indeed, much of the “Art Market 2021” survey is taken up by a concern for and consideration of the state of economic health and well-being of the fantastically wealthy. The art market centers entirely on them.
Riches confer great powers on the inartistic and philistine, on the most arrogant and insensitive human beings. Money, as Marx explained in 1844, “is the general confounding and confusing of all things—the world upside-down—the confounding and confusing of all natural and human qualities.” In a rational world, if “you want to enjoy art, you must be an artistically cultivated person,” Marx pointed out. In the present social order, however, where the “extent of the power of money is the extent of my power,” that which “is for me through the medium of money—that for which I can pay (i.e., which money can buy)—that am I myself, the possessor of the money.” So for Dr. McAndrew and her colleagues, and logically so in the existing conditions, the moneyed are the only people possessed of “real powers and faculties.”
In the section on “Global Wealth and Collector Perspectives,” the report notes an accelerating trend has been the “crisis is wealth and income inequality,” adding that “the post-crisis world is predicted to be more unequal in terms of wealth distribution.” The pandemic has had “varying effects between different segments of society, with a higher burden on the most economically vulnerable people, including younger workers and women, those working in smaller companies and in less secure contractual arrangements and with lower wages, who were more likely to lose their jobs than those with higher wages and more secure conditions.”
The study reveals that in 2020, “millionaires accounted for just 1% of the adult population worldwide but owned 43% of the world’s wealth. The greatest adjustments year-on-year [2019 to 2020] were gains in the $100,000 to $1 million wealth tier, which saw an increase in both its share of the global adult population and their share of wealth of 2%.”
In contrast to the 2008–09 global financial crisis, the art market survey indicates, during which the number of billionaires worldwide fell by 30 percent and their wealth plummeted 45 percent, in 2020, the number of billionaires rose 7 percent and their wealth grew 32 percent over the year.
From The Art Market, 2021
We also learn:
The top three wealthiest billionaires increased their wealth by 113% (and 98% for the year from December 2019 to December 2020);
The top 10 billionaires increased their wealth by 65% (and 50% for the year);
The top 100 billionaires increased their wealth by 61%;
The top 500 billionaires increased their wealth by 50%; and
All billionaires … increased their wealth by 39%.
The report asserts that although “not all billionaires collect art, the preservation and enhancement of wealth in this segment globally is very likely to have been one factor that stopped the art market from having a worse recession than it may have done.”
Overall, surveys of 2,569 high-net-worth (HNW—worth at least $1 million in cash or assets) collectors “in 10 markets indicated active engagement in the art market despite the COVID-19 pandemic. 66% of those surveyed reported that the pandemic had increased their interest in collecting, including 32% who reported it had significantly done so.”
As for those who work in the global art market, an estimated 116,000 full-time, part-time and contracted workers lost their jobs in 2020. But, as the Art Basel/UBS study indicates, such calculations “regarding employment and business structures carried out at the end of 2020 are … likely to understate significantly the true impact of the crisis, with business closures only occurring after a period of time, particularly as some businesses have been maintained through public support programs. As these are phased out, it is likely that more businesses may not be able to continue to operate.”
This is the state and reality of the art world in 2021. Sharp conclusions need to be drawn.
