Washington rebuffs Maduro’s bid for US-Venezuela rapprochement

Bill Van Auken

The Biden administration this week delivered a swift rejection of an appeal from Nicolas Maduro for the lifting of unilateral US sanctions and the pursuit of what Venezuela’s president termed a “win-win” policy to benefit US transnational banks and oil corporations.

A State Department spokesman told the Bloomberg news agency that there would be no change in US policy as long as the Maduro government continued its “repression and corrupt practices” and until it negotiated a deal with the US puppet and self-proclaimed “interim president” Juan Guaidó to “restore democracy” and organize “free and fair elections.”

Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro

It is worth noting that Washington has issued no such declarations demanding an end to “repression and corrupt practices” by the narco state headed by President Ivan Duque in neighboring Colombia as it murders, disappears and tortures protesters. Instead, it sent its top military commander in the region, US SOUTHCOM chief Adm. Craig Faller, to the country this week in a gesture of solidarity with Bogota’s murderous military apparatus.

The Biden administration has kept in place both a “state of national emergency” initiated by the Obama administration in 2015, branding Venezuela “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States” and the escalating regime of “maximum pressure” sanctions imposed by the Trump administration beginning in 2017. These include a de facto blockade of Venezuela’s oil exports and a ban on the country’s access to US financial markets.

The US economic and financial blockade has dramatically deepened the worst depression in Venezuelan history, condemning millions of working people to poverty and hunger, while triggering a mass emigration of more than 5 million Venezuelans abroad.

The country’s economy is estimated to have shrunk by 80 percent since 2012, while real wages of Venezuelan workers have been decimated by an inflation rate that is now averaging 25 percent a month. Oil production, the main source of the country’s income, stands at 500,000 barrels a day, up slightly from the low of 310,000 last year, but a fraction of the 2.5 million barrels produced before the collapse of oil prices and the imposition of US sanctions.

The Biden administration, like its predecessor, is intent on using hunger and disease as weapons in its campaign for regime change and the imposition of a reliable US puppet in Venezuela, the country with the largest oil reserves on the planet.

While Washington routinely claims that its illegal sanctions exempt humanitarian supplies, the reality is that the threat of secondary sanctions against financial institutions doing business with the Venezuelan government has made it virtually impossible to finance purchases of vitally needed food and medical supplies. A study done by the Center for Economic and Policy Research think tank in 2019 estimated 40,000 excess deaths as a result of the US sanctions regime, a toll that has no doubt escalated sharply since then.

The deadly impact of Washington’s sanctions is now posed even more sharply by the increasing spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. According to government figures, Venezuela has suffered 265,000 COVID-19 cases and over 3,000 deaths, with the number of infections doubling since February, and the number of deaths doubling over the past three months.

Hospital records, however, indicate that the real numbers of infections and deaths are four times higher than the official figures, and the growing number of COVID-19 cases has brought the impoverished country’s health care system to the brink of collapse.

“We are in the peak of the second wave right now and it has been 25 percent bigger and 40 percent longer than the first wave,” Julio Castro, a Venezuelan doctor and expert in infectious diseases told The BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal).

Only 0.5 percent of Venezuelans have been fully vaccinated, and just 1.5 percent have received a single dose so far.

The Venezuelan government protested earlier this month that its attempt to receive vaccines from the WHO-affiliated COVAX international vaccine program had been stymied after a last installment of a $120 million payment to the agency had been blocked as a result of US sanctions.

“The financial system that also hides behind the US lobby, has the power to block resources that can be used to immunize the population of Venezuela,” Venezuela’s Vice President Delcy Rodriguez said.

The Maduro government had attempted to induce “interim president” Guaidó to use some of Venezuela’s hundreds of millions of dollars in frozen overseas assets over which he has ostensible control to buy vaccines. However, the puppet, like his master, is apparently content to exploit COVID-19 deaths as one more weapon in the war for regime change. Having no significant base of support in Venezuela, and with his attempts at fomenting a military coup and organizing a mercenary invasion having ended in fiasco, his options are limited.

The response of the Venezuelan government to the country’s increasingly desperate crisis has been to plead for a rapprochement with US imperialism and to accommodate its policies to the interests of both foreign capital and the national bourgeoisie.

This reactionary strategy found its most naked expression in an interview Maduro granted earlier this month to Bloomberg at the Miraflores presidential palace in Caracas. He insisted that his aim was to “regularize” US-Venezuelan relations in order to pave the way for an influx of foreign direct investment.

“Venezuela is going become the land of opportunity,” he said. “I invite US investors, don’t get left behind.” He went on to state that foreign capital was aware of the potential for profit. “The financial sector, the bondholders, with whom we had an impeccable relationship know it is possible to invest in Venezuela and have a ‘win-win.’ The petroleum sector, which has invested in Venezuela and still maintains investments, knows it.”

While Maduro has made various gestures of accommodation toward US imperialism—releasing six CITGO executives, including five Americans, from prison to house arrest and giving the right-wing opposition five seats on the national Election Board—he acknowledged that from Biden, “There has not been any signal. Nothing.”

He went on to complain that the sanctions were “irrational.” He told Bloomberg: “If Venezuela cannot produce petroleum and sell it, cannot produce and sell its gold, cannot produce its bauxite and sell it, cannot produce iron, etcetera, and cannot earn revenue in the international market, where is it going to be able to get what it needs to pay holders of Venezuelan debt?”

That paying off bondholders and foreign bankers is the driving motivation for lifting sanctions is telling in a country plagued by blackouts, water shortages, breakdowns of every essential service and with two-thirds of the population living in poverty.

Within Venezuela, the Maduro government has introduced what amounts to an IMF-style “structural adjustment program” that includes slashing of state subsidies, scrapping price controls, eliminating import restrictions and effectively dollarizing the economy.

According to government documents cited by Bloomberg, private companies accounted for 92 percent of imports of food and raw materials in 2020, compared to just 25 percent a year earlier, a graphic indication of the government ceding control to big business interests.

Meanwhile, the Maduro government has pushed through a series of legislative packages designed to attract foreign direct investment and pave the way for the privatization of public enterprises, up to and including the state-owned oil corporation PDVSA. An “Anti-blockade Law” enacted last year offering tax and labor incentives to “stimulate and favor” the private sector, has been followed by a Law on Foreign Investments and now a Law on Special Economic Zones, which is being rubber-stamped by the National Assembly

The aim of these laws is to auction off Venezuela’s resources to foreign transnationals that are being invited in to exploit the country and its workforce with a host of incentives including a 10-year moratorium on taxes, suspension of import-export duties, guaranteed repatriation of invested capital and a pledge that foreign companies will be fully compensated for any losses incurred as a result of government actions.

The measures are supported by Maduro’s two key constituencies, the military command and the so-called boliburguesia, the layer of capitalists which has enriched itself off of speculation and corrupt ties to the state, even as the rest of the population has faced immiseration. These layers are anxious to solidify their control and expand their wealth through reforging ties to US imperialism.

Social inequality has risen to unprecedented levels, with the Venezuelan Central Bank reporting that in 2017, just 18 percent of the gross domestic product went to the country’s 13 million workers, while fully half was directly pocketed by its capitalists. This yawning divide has only widened since. The result has been a growth of popular protests and class struggle, which the government has met with repression and arrests.

The right-wing evolution of the Maduro government has put paid to the illusions promoted by the pseudo-left in the “21st Century Socialism,” touted first by Hugo Chávez, along with similar nationalist and “anti-imperialist” pretensions of other representatives of the so-called Pink Tide in Latin America.

Corporate Canada used government’s pandemic emergency wage subsidy as slush fund

Omar Ali

Recent weeks have seen further revelations as to how corporate Canada, with the blessing of the federal Liberal government, has used the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy (CEWS) program to enrich itself to the tune of billions of dollars.

Since last fall, a spate of media reports has detailed how some of Canada’s largest companies have used the CEWS to pad their bottom lines, even as they bounce back from any pandemic-related revenue losses and reap sizeable profits.

Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland has lied brazenly about the wage-subsidy program, in an attempt to cover-up the Liberal government’s complicity in the corporate profiteering. (Photo: Wikipedia)

The CEWS was created in the spring of 2020 as part of the emergency bailout programs that Ottawa put together after working class protests in the auto sector over the lack of protections from COVID-19 forced the ruling elites in Canada and the US to implement temporary lockdown measures. The CEWS allows companies that show a decline in revenue to have the government cover up to 75 percent of their employees’ wages. While other pandemic relief programs, including the more than $650 billion the federal government and Bank of Canada poured into the markets or handed over to the banks and major corporations with no strings attached, openly shoveled public funds into the hands of the rich and super-rich, the wage subsidy was ostensibly designed to keep workers on the job. However, it has proven to be a blank cheque for the corporate elite to boost profits and shareholder payouts while most Canadians have suffered the ravages of the economic downturn. One academic has rightly described the CEWS as a business expense subsidy masquerading as a wage subsidy.

The latest round of exposures of companies profiteering from the CEWS program was kicked off by reports in the Globe and Mail in April. The Globe noted that the wage subsidy has now swelled into Ottawa’s biggest-ever spending program, with costs expected to reach $110 billion over two years, outstripping the now-defunct Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB), which was derided by much of Canada’s ruling elite as an “overly-generous” handout to those unable to work due to the pandemic.

In preparing its report, the Globe used information on publicly-traded firms and a partial list of companies receiving government CEWS funds to examine how 389 companies, including some of Canada’s biggest, benefited from the program. It found that many companies continued to pay out and even boosted dividends while tapping into the CEWS. Some raised executive compensation, and many laid off workers en masse, as participation in the program did not require any commitment to preserve jobs or impose any limitations on how recipients managed their businesses.

The Globe cited the case of TFI International, a Montreal-based transport company. TFI International saw its profits rise as it cut labour costs and moved to acquire other companies, all the while receiving $75 million in wage subsidies. It subsequently enriched its shareholders by handing out dividends in the last three quarters of 2020 that were greater than in 2019.

The Globe observed that even executives have had their salaries partially covered by CEWS. (The average CEO makes in 4 days what the average Canadian does in a year).

While many companies remained profitable throughout the pandemic, and in some cases didn’t even experience a drop in revenues, they were nonetheless able to claim CEWS funds through subsidiaries that did suffer temporary losses. Overall, despite the unprecedented drop in GDP in the second quarter of 2020 and mass joblessness, only a small majority of the 389 businesses analyzed by the Globe saw their profits suffer any decrease from the previous year.

The Globe also pointed to the government’s brazen lying in response to public criticism over corporate profiteering. This includes Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland’s claims that CEWS funds can’t be used for purposes other than wages, and that companies that increased their executives’ compensation could have the CEWS payments clawed back. In fact, companies were and are free to use the subsidies to pad their bottom lines. As for the claw-back, it was only announced in the April 2021 budget, won’t take effect until July, and is not retroactive.

The Globe stressed that it could only provide a partial picture of how businesses have exploited the CEWS, since the government has refused to provide a full list of recipients. In fact, the partial online list the government previously provided has now been taken down.

The Globe articles were just the latest in a long list of reports depicting how the government has plied the corporate elite with easy money during the pandemic via the wage subsidy. The CBC highlighted the case of Yellow Pages, which received $7.3 million from CEWS, while paying out more than $8.8 million in dividends and spending $3.3 million on share buybacks. Earlier this year, the Toronto Star reported that the country’s three largest telecommunications firms, Rogers, Bell, and Telus, received upwards of $240 million in CEWS money. They managed to do this while paying out a combined $5.5 billion in dividends last year, with Bell and Telus actually increasing the amount paid out compared to 2019.

In another highly revealing example of the wage subsidy’s class purpose, it was revealed that Saskatchewan-based Federated Cooperatives Ltd. received millions in CEWS payments to cover the wages of the scabs it employed while locking out over 700 Regina oil refinery workers so as to impose massive contract concessions.

The media revelations and recriminations over the wage-subsidy program reflect tensions within the ruling class over how best to defend the interests of Canadian capitalism in the midst of the socio-economic and political crisis triggered by its ruinous response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Globe has used the CEWS revelations to attack the Trudeau Liberal government, complaining that the Liberals have thrown the “door to the federal treasury wide open.” For its part, the opposition Conservative Party has denounced “reckless” Liberal spending. After it emerged that all three major federal parties had received wage subsidies, the Tories made a show of pledging to pay back what they received. While there are undoubtedly tactical divisions between the Tories and Liberals on how best to safeguard the profits of big business, one of the main concerns motivating Trudeau’s critics is that the shameless enrichment of the wealthy—summed up by the fact that Canada’s 48 billionaires have gained more than $78 billion in wealth since the beginning of the pandemic—could become a lightning rod for popular anger.

Other sections of the ruling elite, no doubt motivated by the vast swelling of their stock portfolios during the pandemic, have been equally vociferous in defending the CEWS. The hard-right Financial Post published an editorial denouncing the mild criticisms of the Globe and the Star, writing in defence of the nation’s corporate elite that “bus drivers, software engineers, accountants, and shoe salesmen are greedy, too. Also, gardeners, plumbers, librarians, and zookeepers.” Citing the needs of business competition, it added, “It makes no sense to say that all these companies should have cut everything else before touching employee compensation. When faced with a choice between paying dividends or keeping all employees on payroll, it may well make sense for many companies to pay the dividend.” The Post ’s own parent company Postmedia has been a beneficiary of the wage subsidy, receiving tens of millions of dollars in state support.

If such shameless endorsements of capitalist exploitation can be published, it is in no small part because the ruling class knows it has the support of the trade unions and ostensible “left” in diverting working class anger into a blind alley. The New Democrats have made much of their opposition to “abuses” of the CEWS program. However, they have steadfastly kept the minority Liberals in power and supported all the bailout measures, including the hundreds of billions poured into the markets to prop up investor wealth. They have complained instead, to cite the words of the party’s finance critic, that companies are “breaking the spirit of why CEWS was put into place.” The reality is that the CEWS is being used exactly as its drafters among the political elite and corporate lobbyists intended it to be.

The trade union bureaucracy, with the Canadian Labour Congress in the lead, has supported the ruling elite’s unprecedented bailout packages for the super-rich, banks, and big business from the outset. Early on in the pandemic, then-CLC president Hassan Yussuff appealed for a “collaborative front” with the major employers’ organizations, and was intimately involved in government consultations to draw up the CERB and CEWS.

Last month, Yussuff defended the CLC’s partnership with big business, and specifically the CEWS, as “pro-worker” in a column co-authored with Perrin Beatty, the CEO of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce. Yussuff and Beatty dismissed the reports of many of Canada’s biggest companies using the program as a slush fund, with the argument that speedy action to “save” the economy necessitated giving employers free rein until a “recovery” set in—that is, until workers could be forced back on the job amid the pandemic. “While we still haven’t recovered the growth lost in the pandemic,” wrote Yussuff and Beatty, “the rebound effect after each lockdown was stronger than expected. This is a good thing, fueled in large part by the fact that Canadians could quickly go back to work in a business that had survived. In other words, CEWS did its job.”

UK imaging study reveals loss of brain’s grey matter in patients infected with COVID-19

Benjamin Mateus

One of the most recognizable features of the COVID-19 infection is the loss of smell and/or taste, disturbances that often precede respiratory symptoms affecting upwards of 80 to 90 percent of those infected. Early in the course of the pandemic, clinicians began to associate the sudden onset of these symptoms without an underlying cause as indications of infection with the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

CT image of a normal brain (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Additional neurological symptoms include headaches, fatigue, nausea and vomiting in many infected individuals. In severe cases, strokes or impairment in consciousness can occur. Viral neurotropism, a term that describes the ability of viruses to infect nerve tissue, has been hypothesized as possibly the cause for some of these symptoms. Still, evidence for direct invasion by the virus into the central nervous system (CNS) has been limited.

In the course of the pandemic, there has been an intense investigation into the neurotropic ability of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Given the neurological manifestation of Long COVID symptoms and its impact on cognition, it is critical to understand if the CNS is directly affected by the live virus or if these symptoms are a secondary byproduct of our immune system’s response to the infection.

Often, the current literature on this topic is based on only a small series of cases, which can be confounded by a lack of comparisons to uninfected individuals, leading to conflicting results and conclusions. Even many of the neuro-imaging reports published have been performed in people with acute symptoms revealing a broad range of findings but without consistent patterns to elucidate the impact of the infection on the brain in general.

For instance, in an intriguing report published in Nature in November 2020, the authors from Charité University of Medicine, Berlin, summarized their findings after conducting a careful postmortem evaluation of the “olfactory mucosa, its nervous projections, and several defined CNS (central nervous system) regions” in 33 individuals, who died from COVID-19. According to the study, one-third had severe neurological symptoms before succumbing to their infections. The olfactory system is the structure that makes up the nose, nasal cavities and the nerves that carry the sense of smell to the regions of the brain where it is perceived.

The authors wrote: “Taken our findings together, we provide evidence that SARS-CoV-2 neuro-invasion can occur at the neural-mucosal interface by trans-mucosal (nasal passages) entry via regional nervous structures. This may be followed by transport along the olfactory tract of the CNS, thus explaining some of the well-documented neurological symptoms in COVID-19, including alterations of smell and taste perceptions.”

The olfactory mucosa is situated under a thin strip of perforated bone called the cribriform plate.

Head anatomy with olfactory nerve, including labels for the nasal cavity, olfactory nerves, cribriform plate, olfactory bulb, and olfactory tract. Source, Wikipedia.

The sensory neurons that detect smells are threaded from these holes leading to the brain just above it. Additional study findings included microscopic blood clots in six cases with recently localized infarction of the brain.

Dr. Kiran T. Thakur, a neurologist at Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York, speaking with the Washington Post, explained that the ability of the virus to penetrate deeper into the brain tissue has critical consequences. “A person who has a virus in their brain can have symptoms related to brain involvement. Viruses that invade the brain are tough to eradicate because a barrier protects the brain from the rest of the body. Once viruses enter the brain, the organ can become a refuge for stowaways.”

However, countering the findings in the Charité study, he and his colleagues recently published a study that found levels of the actual virus in the brain, compared to the nasal cavities, were very low. This was corroborated by neuropathologist Frank Heppner of Charité, who has studied the brains of over 100 COVID-19 victims. In their not yet published findings, he told the Post, “[Our] investigations show low amounts of virus in the brain.”

Precisely because there is an urgency for large, well-designed trials to address these questions, the findings of a new UK brain imaging study are fairly important.

Before the onset of the pandemic, UK Biobank, a long-term 30-year study established in 2006 to follow 500,000 volunteers ages 40 to 69 to investigate the contributions from genetics and environmental exposure to disease development, had already conducted 40,000 brain scans. In the context of COVID-19 and its association with the brain, serendipitously, the scientists from the University of Oxford and Imperial College London invited hundreds of these volunteers to participate in a second imaging visit in 2021 to investigate the correlation.

As the authors noted, this was the first large-scale longitudinal imaging study in COVID-19 patients whose brain scans were compared to before the pandemic and with well-matched controls (for age, sex, ethnic background, and the interval between the two scans) and comparing people who were positive and negative for COVID-19 infection. There were 394 COVID patients and 388 controls. The concluded study was posted on the preprint server medRxiv.

The authors wrote their findings “revealed a significant, deleterious impact of COVID-19 on the olfactory cortex (region of the brain responsible for smell perception) and gustatory cortex (taste and flavor), with a more pronounced reduction in grey matter thickness and volume in the left para-hippocampal gyrus, the left superior insula and the left lateral orbitofrontal cortex in COVID patients.” It should be emphasized that this study provided objective evidence of the destructive impact of COVID on the brain.

Grey matter is distributed at the brain’s surface, containing most of the brain’s neuronal cell bodies and essentially controls all our brain’s functions. Besides involving people’s sense of smell and taste, the mentioned areas play a role in memory and emotional reactions. The study findings were troubling because the brains of those with mild cases of COVID-19 infection were similar to a small number of hospitalized patients with severe disease, hinting that the impact on the brain is not predicated on the severity of the condition.

The other aspect of the study that makes it compelling is the longitudinal nature with matched controls that assured the researchers that these findings were free of substantial interpretational bias from case studies. However, what remains to be better elucidated is if these findings are a byproduct of a direct infection by the virus or immune/inflammatory changes caused by the disease.

They summarized that “the limbic nature of the regions of the olfactory system, and their physical proximity to the hippocampus, in particular, raise the possibility that longer-term consequences of SARS-CoV-2 infection (for which some suggest that the coronavirus itself enters the brain via the olfactory route) might in time contribute to Alzheimer’s disease or other forms of dementia.”

MRI imaging of the Olfactory nervous system. a: frontal view - white arrow pointing to cribriform plate and white tip showing the olfactory bulb. b: side view - image of the olfactory bulb placed on the cribriform plate. c: front view - olfactory tract between the right gyrus and the medio-orbital gyrus. d: Side view - olfactory tract under the frontal lobe (tip of white arrow). Source - diagnostic and interventional imaging.

The compelling evidence between COVID-19 and the long-term effects on the brain and nervous system led to the initiation in January 2021 of a large international study investigating the correlation between the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the issues behind the cognitive decline, Alzheimer’s disease and other dementia that afflict the elderly.

For decades, evidence has been accumulating that respiratory viruses, including coronaviruses, may potentially increase a person’s risk for these neurological diseases. Circumstantial evidence for this exists after the Spanish flu. Researchers from almost 40 countries will enroll and follow 40,000 participants aged over 50 who have survived COVID-19 infections to answer these critical questions.

One of the lead authors of the international study, Dr. Gabriel A. de Erausquin from Glenn Biggs Institute for Alzheimer’s and Neurodegenerative Diseases at UT Health San Antonio, explained: “When the trail of the virus, when it invades the brain, leads almost straight to the hippocampus. That is believed to be one of the sources of the cognitive impairment observed in COVID-19 patients. We suspect it may also be part of the reason why there will be an accelerated cognitive decline over time in susceptible individuals.”

Given that estimates of the global burden of COVID-19 infections are in the hundreds of millions if not billions, the social and economic implications of the pandemic’s impact will be considerable, especially in the decades that will proceed the eventual end of the pandemic.

Dr. Erausquin added: “It really worries me, because if you think that we are already, in developed countries at least, an aging population, and the rate of dementia and diseases of the brain is already likely to increase, the impact of an additional hit on the brain that can accelerate or precipitate the disease without any additional risk factors, that’s scary to think about.”

The more transmissible Delta variant is well underway to becoming the dominant strain in the US and throughout Europe before the summer’s end. In the context of the complete abandonment of all public health measures and school reopenings, school-age children and young adults, who have for the most part still to be vaccinated, face considerable consequences to their long-term neurological health. Most of the planet’s population remains naïve (unexposed) to the virus. Should they survive the infection, as most will, how has the criminal response to the pandemic, which continues to place profits over lives and livelihoods, impacted their lives that are still unlived?

Indonesian COVID infections surge past two million

Robert Campion

Indonesia’s daily cases reached a record high on Monday as the country passed the mark of two million cases since the pandemic began.

There were 14,536 infections recorded on Monday, mostly centered in the most populous island of Java, where the capital city of Jakarta is located. High case numbers, however, were also registered in Aceh, Riau Islands and Central Kalimantan. Monday’s infection tally is more than double the typical daily figure at the start of June.

UNICEF aid workers in Indonesia (Credit: UNICEF)

According to the COVID tracking website worldometers, there have been 2,018,113 cases and 55,291 deaths in Indonesia, the highest figures in South East Asia, and third in all of Asia behind India and Iran.

A major reason behind the increased spread has been the emergence of the Delta variant, first recorded in India, which has now spread to over 74 countries worldwide. Scientists have stated that the variant, which is driving an international resurgence of the pandemic, is likely twice as infectious as the initial coronavirus.

According to epidemiologist, Dicky Budiman, from Australia’s Griffith University: “This Delta variant nearly meets the criteria to be a super-variant as it is very conteconomagious, it can clinically worsen the patient’s condition, and it can reduce the efficacy of antibodies, which means that vaccinated people can be infected, as well as COVID-19 survivors.”

Budiman warned there is a “big probability” that Indonesia may face a similar situation as in India, where, at its height, an outbreak of Delta was resulting in up to 400,000 cases per day and thousands of deaths.

Indonesian health officials report that Delta is now the dominant strain in the densely populated areas of Jakarta, as well as Central and East Java.

The rise in cases has also been reflected in an increase in hospital occupancy rates, which shot up from 45 percent in Jakarta over a week ago to 90 per cent, according to government data. In the central Java district of Kudus, bed occupancy rates also exceeded 90 percent last week. There have been reports of sick people forming queues lining the corridors outside the hospitals.

The South China Morning Post stated on Monday that the intensive care ward at Persahabatan hospital in Jakarta is now full, and the emergency ward too overwhelmed to accept new patients. Indonesian lung specialist Erlina Burhan added that supplies of oxygen tubes are dangerously low, and that doctors are begging for beds to be made available for sick relatives.

According to Reuters, hundreds of health care workers have also contracted the virus. The number of health employees dying from the virus has reportedly dropped from the highs of 158 in January to 13 in May, according to independent research group LaporCOVID-19. It states that this is a product of the vaccination of workers in the sector, which began early this year.

Large scale infections of doctors and nurses, however, are compromising the ability of major hospitals to treat those requiring urgent care. Laura Navika Yamani, an epidemiologist from Airlangga University in Surabaya, East Java, stated: “We need to brace for a collapse in our health system, if we don’t take the necessary precautions.”

The positivity rate, indicating the percentage of all tests that return with a confirmation of infection, is at the shocking level of 41.1 percent. This value, far higher than the level advised by the World Health Organisation (WHO) of 5 percent, indicates that the virus is running rampant and many cases are not being identified.

“With increased transmission due to variants of concern, urgent action is needed to contain the situation in many provinces,” the WHO warned Thursday last week.

The Indonesian government, however, like many of its counterparts internationally, has rejected calls for a comprehensive lockdown to contain the spread.

Instead, 29 “red zones” have been announced, where two-week partial lockdowns have been instituted. Restaurants, cafes and malls are limited to 25 percent capacity and religious activities at houses of worship have also been suspended.

Offices outside the red zone areas have also been instructed to operate at 50 percent capacity.

The governor of Jakarta, Anies Baswedan, has resisted demands for a full lockdown, opting for the closure of non-essential businesses at 8 p.m. Curfews have been imposed between the hours of 9 p.m. and 4 a.m. in 10 locations including Gunawarman and Senopati roads in the central business district.

Speaking on the spread of the virus, Coordinating Minister for Maritime Affairs and Investment Luhut Pandjaitan attempted to blame it on the population itself for participating in last month’s celebration of the Islamic holiday of Ramadan, when millions visited their hometowns in spite of a government ban.

In a virtual conference, Pandjaitan stated: “It’s all our fault. The government went all out to remind us to stay at home, not to mudik [travel to your hometown ], but we still went ahead. This is the consequence.”

This is a cynical attempt to deflect from the government’s own responsibility. It has consistently sought to downplay the extent of the coronavirus crisis, in order to justify the refusal to implement full lockdown measures when required. This has inevitably undermined the hastily-announced, and partial restrictions that the government has occasionally introduced, when it has been threatened with an explosion of the pandemic and a collapse of the health system.

The circulation of the Delta variant in the world’s fourth-most populous country poses the risk of further mutations, including those that may limit the efficacy of vaccinations.

Speaking outside a vaccination centre near Jakarta, President Joko Widodo called for the acceleration of vaccination efforts last week. “We need vaccination acceleration in order to achieve communal immunity, which we hope can stop the COVID-19 spread,” he said. Widodo said that local governments and cabinet ministers should work to increase vaccinations next month to one million each day.

The inoculation campaign, largely using Sinovac’s CoronaVac vaccine, which is the least effective against the Delta variant, has been consistently behind schedule. The government has aimed for 181 million of its 270 million population to be vaccinated by March 2022, but currently only 11.8 million are fully vaccinated.

Whilst Bali plans to have fully vaccinated 3 million of its 4.36 million population by the end of this month, so far only 1.9 million residents have received their first dose. In Riau, population 6.83 million, a little more than 490,000 have received their first jab.

Along with the risk that it is posing to the health and lives of ordinary people, the expanding coronavirus crisis is intensifying the social hardships facing workers and the poor. Reports prior to the pandemic consistently recorded rising social inequality. In 2017, Oxfam ranked Indonesia the sixth-most unequal country in the world. In a country of some 264 million people, the four richest individuals have a combined wealth greater than the poorest 100 million.

Australia’s official jobless statistics mask wage-cutting push

Mike Head

Government and media declarations of an extraordinary “recovery” greeted last week’s drop in Australia’s official unemployment rate from 5.48 percent in April to 5.07 percent in May, just above its pre-pandemic level.

Among the boasts were that Australia had outperformed virtually every comparable country, as if it were an exception to the fallout from the COVID-19 disaster.

Unemployed workers outside an inner-western Sydney Centrelink office in March 2020 [Source: WSWS Media]

These claims deliberately hide the reality—that the corporate elite and its political servants, no less than their counterparts globally, are exploiting the pandemic to coerce unemployed and under-employed workers, especially young workers, into lower-paid and insecure employment.

As a result, wages are continuing to fall compared to inflation, deepening the cut in average real pay since the 2008–09 global financial crisis, and the widespread collapse of the mining boom from 2012.

At the same time, the wealthiest layers of society are, as a result, reaping an unprecedented boost to their fortunes. Their gains have been further inflated by near-zero interest rates, multi-billion dollar business subsidies and incentives, an ongoing $200 billion injection of funds into the financial markets by the Reserve Bank of Australia, and record prices for iron ore exports, mainly to China.

The official jobless rate estimate produced by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) masks the reality by not counting anyone employed for more than one hour per fortnight. It also excludes non-resident workers on temporary visas, whose numbers had grown to around 880,000 before the pandemic.

The ABS publishes a broader measure of employment, called the labour market account, which includes these non-resident workers. It indicates that their numbers slumped by 333,900 between December 2019 and March 2021.

If non-resident workers returned to take these jobs, the unemployment rate would increase from 5.1 percent to 7.5 percent, giving a truer picture of the real conditions facing workers.

Instead of the total number of employed people in Australia being one percent above its pre-coronavirus 2020 peak, as the political and media establishment maintains, the broader labour market account shows that in March 2021, employment was 2.1 percent below its level, one year earlier.

This helps explain the sharp reduction in the official unemployment rate. Many local workers have been pushed by financial stress—and the cutting of welfare payments back to poverty-levels—into taking jobs previously filled by temporary visa holders, often on poor pay and conditions.

This is one major reason why the drop in the official jobless rate is generating no increase in wages, despite the government’s mantra that “job creation” and workforce shortages would automatically drive up workers’ pay levels through the operation of supply and demand on the labour market.

In fact, the Liberal-National Coalition government’s latest federal budget, handed down last month, forecasts that record-low wages growth will continue over the forward estimates, that is, until at least 2024–25. For the foreseeable future, the Consumer Price Index will outpace the Wage Price Index.

Last week, Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) governor Philip Lowe delivered a speech in which he said that despite the “recovery” being “much stronger” than the RBA had anticipated, “wages growth” remained “subdued.”

“The Wage Price Index increased by just 1.5 percent over the past year, with wages growth slow in the private and public sectors,” Lowe said. “And it is noteworthy that even in those pockets where firms are finding it hardest to hire workers, wage increases are mostly modest.”

Lowe presented this pattern as a quandary, and again repeated the line that strong employment growth would eventually push up wages. But employment has actually fallen, and employers are seizing on these conditions to suppress wages further.

In the budget, the government also allowed impoverished international students “to work unlimited hours” in agriculture, aged care, hospitality and tourism, adding to the downward pressure on wages produced by the scrapping of JobKeeper wage subsidies and the slashing of JobSeeker dole payments, at the end of March.

The pandemic is being used to intensify the protracted corporate-government offensive on wages. According to a report released this week by the McKell Institute, a Labor Party-linked think tank, the average Australian worker would be earning $254 more per week if wages growth had continued at the rate before the Liberal-National government took office in 2013.

That estimate, however, obscures the extent and underlying causes of the wages loss. The marked slowdown actually began under the previous Labor government of 2007–13, first during the 2008–09 crisis and then after the mining boom imploded from 2012.

In fact, the past four decades have seen an historic transfer of income and wealth from the working class to the ruling elite. A report released earlier this year by the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) calculated that if workers’ share of gross domestic product had remained at the levels recorded in 1970, total wages would have been $200 billion higher in 2019. Workers would have received, on average, $15,000 each in additional annual income.

What the ACTU report sought to cover up is that this historic reversal is the product of decades of the strangling of the class struggle by the trade unions themselves, especially since the Hawke and Keating Labor governments of 1983 to 1996, which struck a series of Accords with the ACTU that drove down real wages, and devastated working conditions, under the banner of making Australian capitalism “internationally competitive.”

During this period, the trade unions, like their counterparts worldwide, underwent a transformation. From organisations that once fought for limited improvements in workers’ pay and conditions—always within the framework of capitalist wage labour—they became the police force of the endless “restructuring” demanded by big business, whether under Liberal-National or Labor governments.

Now, the country’s richest billionaires have doubled their worth during the pandemic, and this enrichment is set to keep growing.

In last week’s speech, Lowe also signaled the continuation of the RBA’s “quantitative easing” (QE) bond purchases, which are funneling $100 billion into the money markets every six months. “The RBA’s bond purchase program is one of the factors underpinning the accommodative conditions necessary for our economic recovery,” he said.

It would be “premature” to consider curtailing these purchases when peer central banks, like the US Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank, were expected to continue their own QE programs through 2022.

As well as pouring money into the share and property markets, resulting in soaring house prices and other speculative activity, the RBA’s bond purchases place downward pressure on long-term interest rates and curb the price of the Australian dollar, despite elevated iron ore and other export commodity prices, further benefiting the financial elite.

According to Westpac bank’s Bill Evans, the Australian dollar should now be trading between US85 cents and US90 cents, based on the bank’s exchange rate model. “The only thing we can figure that explains the gap between the Aussie dollar’s fair value and its current level around US75 cents is the RBA’s QE program,” Evans told journalists last week.

Far from being an exceptional “success” story, however, Australian capitalism is extremely dependent on this greatest-ever financial stimulus, alongside currently booming iron ore sales to China. But it depends, above all, on the capacity of the increasingly discredited Labor Party-affiliated trade union apparatuses to suppress mounting discontent in the working class.

Sri Lankan government deploys police to crack down on social media

Sakuna Jayawardana

The Sri Lankan government has announced new anti-democratic measures and mobilised police to suppress so-called fake news on social media.

On June 7, police media spokesman Senior Deputy Inspector General Ajith Rohana declared that the criminal investigation department has established a special team to “patrol in the cyber space” and trace “false news related to COVID-19 or any other sensitive issues.”

Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, attends 2020 event to mark the anniversary of country’s independence from British colonial rule. [Credit: AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena]

It was an offence, Rohana said, “if a person created a panic situation by spreading fake news.”

The following day, a police media statement detailed the new measures. Persons who propagate false information, photos or video, it said, could be arrested without a warrant for disrupting public order, creating ethnic or religious disharmony or contributing to the sexual harassment of women and children.

Those arrested could be charged under any of the country’s harsh laws, including the Penal Code, the Computer Crimes Act, the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) and the Pornography Act.

These laws can be used to punish anyone opposing or criticising the government and the capitalist state. Those arrested under the draconian PTA can be detained for up to 18 months, with any confessions obtained during this time used as evidence.

Addressing parliament on June 8, Public Security Minister Sarath Weerasekara repeated the police statements, indicating that the decision to clampdown on social media was taken at the highest levels of President Rajapakse’s government.

Government claims to be defending religious and ethnic harmony or curbing misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic are outright lies.

Successive Sri Lankan governments, including the current regime, are responsible for countless anti-Tamil and anti-Muslim provocations, most notably the nearly 30-year anti-Tamil civil war against the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.

Likewise, the government is responsible for circulating misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic. Medical experts have repeatedly voiced concerns that the number of infections and deaths are greater than those recorded by Sri Lankan health authorities, especially under conditions of very low testing rates. As has been the case internationally, moreover, the Sri Lankan government has sought to downplay the severity of the pandemic, to justify its profit-driven and inadequate response.

In reality, the Rajapakse regime’s moves to criminalise so-called fake news on social media are a response to the deepening political and economic crisis of the Sri Lankan capitalist class and rising social opposition to Colombo’s criminal mishandling of the now worsening pandemic.

Government and big business-imposed wage and job cuts, along with the rising cost of food and other essentials, is provoking working-class resistance with strikes and protests by health, education, railway, electricity and water board state sector workers.

Nervous about this developing opposition, President Rajapakse on May 27 and June 2 used the essential public services act to impose strike bans on virtually all state sector workers. Colombo has also been systemically militarising the state apparatus, appointing senior in-service and retired officers to key positions in the administration. The government’s attack on social media is part and parcel of these repressive preparations.

On June 13, five days after the police announcement, Mass Media Minister Keheliya Rambukwella told Sunday Morning that the sharing of fake news on social media had seen some people “pushing the country towards re-enactment of the criminal defamation law.”

The notoriously anti-democratic, criminal defamation law (previously repealed in 2002) was initiated during British colonial rule, but retained after Sri Lanka was granted formal independence in 1948. The law was used by successive governments to intimidate and censor the media.

In April, the cabinet office announced that it had approved a paper, presented by Justice Minister Ali Sabry and the media minister, for new laws to “protect society” from “the harm caused by false propaganda on the internet.”

Sabry said the cabinet was discussing the introduction of laws similar to Singapore’s punitive “Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act,” which carries fines of nearly $US750,000 and imprisonment of up to 10 years.

In a statement condemning Colombo’s anti-democratic measures against internet users, the Journalists for Rights in Sri Lanka group said that the government was “trying to intimidate social media users.”

On June 11, the Bar Association of Sri Lanka issued a statement, voicing its concerns about police being allowed to arrest without warrant anyone accused of publishing fake news. It warned that the new measures meant that “police are allowed to decide on what is or is not fake news and, based on their subjective decisions, arrest and detain those persons.”

The parliamentary opposition parties and the unions do not oppose these repressive measures. The Samagi Jana Balawegaya, the main opposition party, attempted to disguise its support by declaring that its youth wing would provide legal support to anyone arrested for holding views opposing the government.

The Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, the Tamil National Alliance and the United National Party, along with the unions, have not said a word about the new measures. Nor have they opposed the government’s anti-strike essential service orders. Like the government, these organisations are terrified of the rising working-class opposition.

These attacks on social media in Sri Lanka are part of an escalating assault on freedom of speech and expression, underway on every continent.

In the US, Twitter suspended the account of data scientist Rebecca Jones in early June, because she published real information about COVID-19 infections in Florida. Jones opposed the reopening of schools during the pandemic last year and refused to alter infection and death counts on the state’s coronavirus dashboard.

In April, Twitter removed over 20 accounts in India at the request of the Modi government, because they had made critical comments about New Delhi’s pandemic response.

The World Socialist Web Site also continues to be censored by Google search engines, and on social media platforms.

Galle Face Green protest in 2018 supporting plantation workers' wage demands (Source: WSWS Media)

In every country, social media provides a powerful weapon for workers to organise their struggles. In Sri Lanka, its use has grown exponentially in recent years. According to the Asia Pacific Institute for Digital Marketing, 63 percent of Sri Lanka’s 10.1 million internet users were active on social media in 2020.