Divisions emerge over central bank policies

Nick Beams

Divisions are starting to emerge in the policy-making bodies of the world’s two major central banks, the European Central Bank and the US Federal Reserve, over the future direction of monetary policy.

The combined actions of the ECB and the Fed have pumped trillions of dollars into the financial system since the onset of the pandemic last year, but amid increasing signs of inflation and rampant speculation in commodities and financial assets there are concerns over where this is heading.

Federal Reserve Board chairman Jerome Powell testifies on the Federal Reserve's response to the coronavirus pandemic during a House Oversight and Reform Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, June 22, 2021. (Graeme Jennings/Pool via AP)

Long-simmering differences in the ECB came to the surface again this week as two leading members of its governing body put forward opposed assessments as to where the central bank should go.

On Monday ECB executive board member Fabio Panetta, who is aligned with the bank’s president Christine Lagarde, said monetary officials should retain the “unconventional flexibility” developed during the pandemic crisis and keep interest rates low.

Dismissing the prospect of rising inflation in an address to a conference of central bankers from Mediterranean countries, he said: “We do not seem to be on track to ‘run the economy hot’” and that the “slack in the economy was likely to remain large for some time.”

Governments and the public, he continued, should recognise that the present monetary and fiscal policies, aimed at providing a stimulus, were “clearly superior” to those in force before the pandemic when the focus was on reducing debt.

His remarks echoed those of Lagarde who said last week to European Union leaders that they needed to “water the green shoots” of economic recovery and it was too early to even begin talking about ending the central bank’s crisis measures.

In March 2020 the ECB launched a €1.85 trillion pandemic emergency program to support financial markets and still has just over €700 billion left to spend before it expires in March 2022.

Just hours after Panetta’s remarks, the head of Germany’s Bundesbank, Jens Weidmann advanced an opposed perspective in a speech.

Weidmann, who leads a group of northern European representatives in the ECB who have been critical of the ultra-loose monetary policies, said there were “upside risks” for the inflation outlook and the central bank’s stimulus program should end “as soon as the emergency situation has been overcome” and 2022 will not warrant designation as a “crisis year.”

As the Financial Times noted: “His remarks set up a clash with other members of the central bank’s governing council about the future path of its policy.” The ECB is set to announce the future direction of its policies in September.

On the other side of the Atlantic there are also signs of divisions in the leading bodies of the Fed over whether the present level of financial asset purchases, running at $120 billion a month, should be eased back.

Despite the predictions by some Fed members that interest rates should start to rise in 2023, as opposed to previous forecasts of 2024, Fed chair Jerome Powell has insisted that the present policies will remain in place until there is “substantial further progress” in meeting the Fed’s goals. He has maintained that the spike in inflation, which saw prices rise by 5 percent year-on-year in May, after a 4.2 percent rise in April, is “transitory.”

But the escalation in house prices in the US has led to calls from some Fed members that the purchasing of mortgage-backed securities (MBS), running at $40 billion per month, should start to be wound back.

On Tuesday it was revealed that house prices had risen by a record amount. The S&P CoreLogic Case Shiller national home price index, which measures house prices in major metropolitan areas rose 14.6 percent in the year ending in April, the highest level of annual growth since the index was started in 1987. This followed a report by the National Association of Realtors that the median price for an existing house had risen by 23.6 percent in May from a year earlier.

In an interview with the Financial Times published on Monday, Eric Rosengren, the president of the Boston Fed, expressed concerns about the implications of the boom in house prices.

“It’s very important for us to get back to our 2 percent inflation target but the goal is for that to be sustainable. And for that to be sustainable, we can’t have a boom and bust in something like real estate.”

The house price boom, which is reflected in Europe, as well as in Australia and New Zealand and elsewhere, has been fueled in large measure by the ultra-low interest policies of all central banks.

With the subprime crisis of 2007–2008 no doubt in mind, Rosengren recalled that “boom and bust cycles in the real estate market have occurred in the United States multiple times, and around the world, and frequently as a source of financial stability concerns.”

Rosengren said that when the purchasing of securities was eased, mortgage-backed securities would have to be included in the reduction.

Others have gone further. Dallas Fed president Robert Kaplan has said that MBS purchases should end “sooner rather than later” because of the rise in the housing market, and the St Louis Fed president James Bullard has also called for the Fed to re-evaluate its support for the housing market because of concerns that a bubble was developing.

While Powell has not entered the debate some of his supporters have. San Francisco Fed president Mary Daly told reporters that MBS purchases were “not directly affecting” the interest paid on mortgages.

According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, Powell and other Fed officials are reluctant to specifically target the MBS market for a reduction in purchases because it would “suggest the Fed is using monetary policy to address a concern about the stability of the financial system arising from elevated house prices.”

In May, a key Powell supporter, New York Fed president John Williams pointed to the broader effects of the MBS program which had “pretty powerful spillovers into other financial conditions such as corporate bond rates and other similar kinds of securities.” He underscored that assessment in further comments last week that Fed MBS purchases are not “specifically tied to the housing market.”

Another aspect of the speculation set off by the ultra-cheap monetary policies of the Fed and other central banks is evident in commodities markets.

Bloomberg has reported that its Commodities Spot Index, covering 22 raw material processes is up 78 percent from its March 2020 low. The price of oil is now $75 a barrel amid predictions it could return to $100.

Bloomberg reported that commodity traders who poured in cash had been “showered” with money. Cargill, the world’s largest trader in agricultural products “made more money in just the first nine months of its fiscal year than in any full year in its history” with net income going over $4 billion. The Trafigura Group, a major oil trader, posted a net profit of $2 billion in the six months to market, nearly as much as it had made in its previous best-ever full year.

The chief concern of the central banks and governments around the world, as these price hikes are already being translated into high consumer prices, is that inflation will fuel the drive of the working class for higher wages. Consequently, while continuing to pump money into the coffers of the financial elites and promoting speculative bubbles, they will be ever more directly relying on the trade union apparatuses to suppress this movement.

New Zealand government “complacent” over deepening COVID-19 danger

John Braddock

Several New Zealand health experts have warned that Jacinda Ardern’s Labour Party-Greens coalition government has become “complacent“ over COVID-19 and didn’t act fast enough to suspend travel with the Australian state of New South Wales after a positive case from Sydney surfaced in Wellington last week.

The New Zealand capital went from alert level 1 to 2, which mandates some social distancing measures, on June 23 after an Australian visitor who spent the previous weekend in the city tested positive on his return to Sydney. That city had been under limited restrictions following an outbreak that began on June 16.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Arden speaking at a press conference in September 2020. (Image Credit: Jacinda Arden/Facebook)

Governments on both sides of the Tasman Sea ignored the dangers as the highly infectious Delta variant spread from a cluster in Sydney’s eastern suburbs throughout much of the city. Despite concerns among health experts, the New Zealand government took no action to suspend flights from Sydney after previously halting them from Melbourne during an upsurge in cases there.

Despite the Ardern government’s international reputation as a “success” story for its control of the spread of COVID-19, the country’s systems are severely compromised. Relatively low case numbers have been used to justify relaxing restrictions in the interests of “the economy.” In April, borders were recklessly opened for quarantine-free travel with Australia, at the expense of public health safety, after a clamour by the tourism industry and other businesses.

Auckland University Professor of Medicine Des Gorman told Radio NZ on June 23 that the government was tardy in “pausing” the travel “bubble,” even after the Delta variant was identified in the Wellington case. “What a shame they didn’t close the bubble several days earlier when it was clear Sydney was dealing with a Delta outbreak and there were loose ends,” he said.

The tourist visited a series of restaurants, bars and tourist attractions over two days, leaving behind 20 “locations of interest” and 420 people identified as close contacts. At this point there are 950 people self-isolating but no further positive cases have been uncovered. The fact that the man had received his first vaccine shot prompted speculation that he may have been, somewhat fortuitously, less contagious.

The man reported feeling unwell on his return flight on the morning of June 21, indicating he had been infectious during the visit. However, it took most of last week before authorities confirmed that he had the highly virulent Delta variant. Last Sunday it was revealed that his partner had also tested positive, prompting NZ officials to impose a further 48 hours under Level 2 restrictions in the capital.

Warning that “we are not in the clear yet,” epidemiologist Michael Baker described the episode as “a close call.” With the visitor attending multiple indoor venues alongside hundreds of others his trip “could have turned into multiple super-spreading events,” Baker said.

The case had exposed “major gaps” in the system and New Zealand needed to upgrade its approach to dealing with COVID-19, Baker warned. “The virus has changed markedly and our response needs to change with it,” he added.

Public health Professor Nick Wilson also told Radio NZ “the government has missed things.” It had been a mistake not to make indoor mask-wearing mandatory as well as the use of QR scanning in higher-risk settings as Wellington went into alert level 2. A review of the trans-Tasman “travel bubble” settings was needed, and an urgent upgrade of New Zealand’s alert-level system.

Virologist Jemma Geoghegan emphasised that people who have not been vaccinated were “up to twice as likely to be hospitalised if they’ve been infected with the Delta variant, compared to the other variants.”

While the government claims its vaccine rollout is “ahead of schedule,” according to OECD figures New Zealand ranks with Australia among the slowest in the developed nations. As of June 24, among 4.2 million people aged 16 and older, just 9.08 percent were fully vaccinated and a further 6 percent had received one dose. The low numbers are attributed to “constrained” supply issues with the imported Pfizer vaccine, which will continue until late July.

Each of the 20 District Health Boards are left mostly to their own devices. In Wellington, a cohort of over 65-year-olds and people with underlying health conditions is still waiting for a call-up after previously being scheduled for vaccination in May. Had the Delta variant grabbed hold in the capital last week, thousands would have been left dangerously exposed.

When trans-Tasman travel was opened up on April 18, and with the Cook Islands in May, Ardern boasted that it was “a new chapter in our recovery.” “We are world-leading ... We are opening at exactly the right time,” she declared. COVID Response Minister Chris Hipkins falsely maintained that the risk of transmission between the two countries was deemed to be “low.”

In fact, the risk to public health was completely over-ridden. The policy was imposed in the midst of a renewed surge of the virus across South Asia and with Australia’s own vaccine rollout especially shambolic. Flights have repeatedly, but only reluctantly, been suspended as COVID-19 flare-ups have occurred in Australian cities. Many travelers have been left stranded due to sudden border closures, often being forced into quarantine at their own expense.

The last Wellington scare has proven how ill-prepared the authorities are for a major outbreak. Testing facilities in the capital were quickly overwhelmed as thousands of concerned people queued up over several days to get COVID tests. Healthline telephone enquiries were backed up for hours. Fewer than 10 percent of possible contacts could initially be found through the QR scanning system, which has not been made compulsory.

Microbiologist Siouxsie Wiles warned that New Zealand will have to take “different and more extreme measures to stop it [the Delta variant] from taking off.” The earlier Alpha variant had “stress tested” the country's systems and exposed “shortfalls” in several aspects, such as ventilation in hotels used as quarantine facilities and Delta is even more infectious, Wiles said.

Hipkins announced on Tuesday that the Level 2 restrictions in Wellington would be ended that evening. Gorman, however, insisted the city should stay in level 2 for another two weeks. “That gives you some confidence there’s not going to be a tail that’s going to come back and bite you,” he said. Business owners would not want to hear this, he added, but with “one or two smouldering cases” possible, an outbreak would require a return to level 3 or 4 restrictions.

Meanwhile flights to and from the states of Victoria, South Australia, ACT and Tasmania are set to resume on July 4, even though the Sydney cluster has spread across Australia. Pre-flight testing is now required, but Wiles has warned “it’s not the silver bullet.” She said this has been proved by travelers who tested negative before their flights but were later found to have COVID-19 while in quarantine.

The gathering crisis, which was preventable, is an indictment of the corporate profit-driven response of governments everywhere which have failed to implement effective lockdown, quarantine and vaccination measures. The entire Asia-Pacific region is now seeing a renewed surge of infections based on the Delta variant with Australia, Taiwan and Fiji, all previously considered “safe,” struggling to contain serious outbreaks.

Hundreds die in Pacific Northwest heat crisis

Patrick Martin

Hundreds have died of heat stroke and hyperthermia in British Columbia and an unknown number in the US states of Washington and Oregon in a five-day heat wave that began to subside on Wednesday—or rather, to pass further east into the less populous mountain areas of Idaho, Montana and eastern B.C.

The chief health officer of British Columbia put the death toll from the first four days of the heat wave at 233, the bulk of them in the Vancouver metropolitan area. The death toll in Oregon was estimated at 60, including a farmworker, a recent immigrant from Guatemala, who died working outdoors on Saturday at a plant nursery north of the state capital at Salem. The state of Washington, with the largest number of people exposed to the lethal temperatures, did not even bother to issue an official estimate of the death toll.

Paramedics Cody Miller, left, and Justin Jones respond to a heat exposure call during a heat wave, Saturday, June 26, 2021, in Salem, Ore. (AP Photo/Nathan Howard)

As temperatures mounted over the weekend, newspapers in Portland, Seattle and Vancouver displayed an almost schizophrenic character. One side of their front pages carried dire warnings about the heat wave and the need for precautions to stay cool. The other side carried celebratory reports of the end of COVID lockdowns and the “reopening” of the local economies—meaning that tens of thousands of workers are being forced back into workplaces that are little more than ovens.

The Boeing factory in Everett, Washington, where jumbo jets are assembled, is reputedly the largest building in the world. It is also entirely without air conditioning. When the weather is hot, management orders the doors opened, which meant on Monday, letting in 108-degree air. International Association of Machinists District 751, which “represents” the workers at Everett, issued a one-paragraph statement urging workers to take more water breaks and linking to “Boeing documents dealing with high temperatures,” in other words, health and safety information provided by the company.

The tragic events of June 25-29 are the product of two interrelated processes: the formation of a “heat dome” over the region, due to instabilities in the movement of the jet stream in the upper atmosphere; and the systematic neglect of critical infrastructure and public services by capitalist governments in both the United States and Canada.

The heat dome is itself not primarily a “natural” process but rather a byproduct of climate change, a man-made process, which, in addition to raising the overall temperature of the atmosphere, also facilitates extreme weather phenomena of all kinds, including tornados, hurricanes, floods and more violent erosion of coastlines.

This is the underlying connection between such disparate events as the early start to the Gulf hurricane season (four “named” storms before the official July 1 starting date); the collapse of a 12-story residential building in Surfside, Florida (due in part to rising sea levels, undermining the soil of the former sandbar on which the high-rise was built); the flooding of highways, homes and factories in Detroit (a sudden rainstorm dumped as much as seven inches in a 12-hour period); and the heat dome over Oregon, Washington and British Columbia.

The heat dome is perhaps the most obvious byproduct of climate change, although according to meteorologists the connection is not a straight line. Warmer atmospheric currents did not directly and immediately produce temperatures that reached 116 degrees Fahrenheit (46.7 Centigrade) in Portland, Oregon, on Monday, 108 degrees (42.2 C) in Seattle, and 121 degrees (49.4 C) in the village of Lytton in central B.C., the hottest temperature ever recorded anywhere in Canada.

Rather, global warming produced an indirect result, through a process described as the creation of an “omega block,” as powerful currents of air, the jet stream in the upper atmosphere, wobble under the impact of warming air in the north polar region, allowing a north-south flow of air which then loops back, in the shape of the Greek letter. The air in the nearly closed circle sinks towards the surface, trapping heat for a period of time (the heat dome). Temperatures rise far more sharply than would be expected based on previous weather patterns.

At its worst, portions of British Columbia, usually temperate, forest-covered and ocean-cooled, were hotter for several days than Las Vegas, Nevada, nearly 1,500 miles to the south, and located in the Southwestern desert, without either significant vegetation or much cloud cover.

Climate change is a byproduct of human activity, particularly the burning of fossil fuels and other processes connected with industrialization. Alleviating it requires coordinated action on a global scale, action that would introduce the necessary changes into economic life. These are completely feasible from a technical standpoint and would not require any reduction in the standard of living of the great mass of the population. They would, however, impact on the profits and wealth of the capitalist class.

Global warming, like COVID-19, pays no attention to national borders. The global coordination needed to fight climate change collides with the framework of the capitalist nation-state system and, above all, with the drive by American imperialism to maintain its world domination against both its main rivals, China and Russia, and lesser imperialist powers like Germany, Japan, France and Britain.

The venality and incompetence of the financial elite is demonstrated in their response to the heat dome. Neither state and federal governments in the US nor provincial and federal governments in Canada have mobilized the necessary social resources to prepare for the type of extreme climate event seen over the past week or to alleviate its impact.

Washington and Oregon are under Democratic Party rule, as is the US federal government. These Democratic administrations have done little or nothing to safeguard their populations. Washington Governor Jay Inslee, who based his abortive presidential campaign on a single-issue emphasis on climate change, cannot even provide a count of the number of heat-related deaths in his state.

In Seattle, the largest city in the state, paramedics responded to 165 emergency heat-related calls on Monday alone, overwhelming the system, which handled only 91 such calls in all of 2020. As the heat wave moved east, driving temperatures to 109 degrees in Spokane on Tuesday, and 115 degrees in Lewiston, Idaho, the power company in that region, Avista, began “rolling blackouts” because its system could not handle the demand.

President Biden, at a previously scheduled meeting with Western state governors to discuss the upcoming wildfire season Wednesday, made only a passing reference to the heat crisis in those states. He announced, as his major initiative, raising the starting pay for those fighting forest fires to a miserable $15 an hour—the same as his proposed minimum wage.

Things are no better on the Canadian side of the border. British Columbia Premier John Horgan aroused widespread popular outrage when he commented, in response to the hundreds of heat-related deaths in the province, “Fatalities are part of life.” He went on to suggest that the danger of the heat wave was well known, and that people had to exercise “a level of personal responsibility” to stay safe—this in a region where relatively few people have home air conditioning.

Horgan heads a government of the New Democratic Party, the union-based social democratic party that has long abandoned any support for actual progressive reforms and competes with the Liberal and Conservative parties for the favor of big business. His remarks are just as crude and callous as the notorious statement by British Tory Prime Minister Boris Johnson, opposing any new lockdowns: “let the bodies pile high in their thousands.”

No section of the ruling class, or any of its political servants, has any solution to the crisis of world capitalism, which underlies global warming and such catastrophes as the heat dome, which are a warning of things to come. Extreme weather phenomena, like the coronavirus pandemic, demonstrate the completely outmoded character of world capitalism, and the necessity to put an end to this bankrupt system and its insatiably corrupt ruling class, and replace them with world socialism.

Can Civilization be Regenerated?

Evaggelos Vallianatos

In its simplest meaning, regeneration is about recreating something useful and vital, including civilization, that humans or unknown forces have diminished or destroyed.

The Atlantis

Plato, 427 – 347 BCE, lived at a time of peril. He grew up in Athens during the last twenty-three years of the Peloponnesian War. Things did not look good. He tried to find out why Athens was part of a Greek fratricide. He studied why civilizations often decline, even disappear. His fertile mind examined historical experience, seeking clues and examples of regeneration. Book 7 of his Republic and his dialogues, Timaios and Kritias, offer valuable insights into how humans can sometimes dig in the rubble in order to reinvent civilization. His story of the lost world of the Atlantis has mesmerized countless people throughout the ages. The dialogues Timaios and Kritias explain the rise and fall of the giant island empire of Atlantis.

Atlantis was inhabited by people of extraordinary versatility and intelligence. The excavated region of the Greek Aegean island of Thera reveals a very sophisticated civilization resembling the dominant Minoan culture of the large Greek island of Crete in the second millennium BCE. In 1650 BCE, a volcano exploded in Thera, destroying most of the island and Crete. Could Thera have been at the center of Atlantis?

Satellite image of Thera, NASA. Public Domain.                                                                 

It’s possible, but we don’t know. Plato said Atlantis came to an end because of anthropogenic causes. The citizens of Atlantis embarked on a campaign of conquest. They attacked Athens and Hellas. Athenians led a united Greek force and defeated the Atlantis invaders. But during the war cataclysmic fires and earthquakes swallowed the island empire, including the Athenian-led Greek army — 9,000 years before Plato’s time.

After Plato, civilization was driven to near extinction, this time by the fanaticism of the new masters of the Mediterranean: Christian and Islamic monotheists.

By some extraordinary reason, the Baghdad califs embraced Hellenic philosophy and science in order to build Moslem culture. Centuries eighth to tenth date the Moslem Renaissance. Greek learning leaked to Europe from Moslem Spain. But, eventually, the wars between Christianity and Islam turned Islam to its monotheistic roots. Moslem Turks captured Christian and Greek Constantinople and Greece in 1453.

The Regeneration of the Renaissance

It took the fifteenth-century Renaissance to revive civilization. That unprecedented experiment in the regeneration of civilization was the  concerted effort of Greek and Latin scholars and politicians. Greek scholars brought to the Italian city states most of the surviving works of science and civilization of their ancient ancestors. These included the immortal poetry of Homer, Hesiod, Aischylos, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes; the histories of Herodotos and Thucydides; and the philosophy and science of Thales, Anaximander, Pythagoras, Parmenides, Demokritos, Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, Apollonios of Perga, Aristarchos of Samos, Ktesibios,  Archimedes and Hipparchos.

However, starting in mid-nineteenth century, those who had benefitted from the Renaissance, Europeans and Americans, were caught in a frenzy of mechanizing their societies and civilization.

This machine-mania made people less human, more violent, and less respectful of the natural world, the fountainhead of all life.

Factory agriculture

A century-and-a-half later, our time of the third decade of the twenty-first century, we are observing an anthropogenic decline of civilization, not much different from the decline Plato decried nearly two-and-a-half millennia ago.

Our decline includes the loss of too many species and the beginnings of the breakdown of ecosystems. We seem to be oblivious to the corruption that allows, for instance, large farmers of California to use tremendous amounts of drinking water for the growing of almonds, which are primarily exported. In addition, the Democratic administration of Joe Bidden and the Democratic politicians of California are giving so much water to the Republican growers of the Central Valley that is catastrophic to the Salmon.

Salmon and steelhead used to connect the mountains of California to its coast, being a mirror of a healthy ecosystem and society. “Now Southern California’s steelhead are almost entirely gone, and our salmon populations are collapsing with astonishing speed.”

This shameful political negligence and undemocratic practice is taking place at a time of severe drought, itself a sign of an angry natural world. Knowledge and interests crucial to the survival of democratic and ecological institutions seem to be waning. Yet those institutions have been pillars of human and natural survival and flourishing.

Agriculture is one of those institutions. It has been the very foundation of civilization and life, nearly forever. But like other important forms of human culture, agriculture has been drenched of its ancient core mission of being part of nature, while nailed with machines and flooded with chemicals. The result is a factory in the fields that is divorced from its original purpose, raising healthy food and working with nature.

This civilization subversion has raised anxieties about the quality and purity of food, drinking water, air, and the integrity and health of the natural world. All these worries have been manifesting themselves with clear signs depicting humans erring to the point of promoting their own decline and destruction.

Heatwaves, hunger and drought

As if these human woes were not dangerous enough, climate change becomes the icing on the mechanical and poison cake. It engulfs humans, good and bad, and the natural world in a dance of a potential catastrophe.

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been informing policy makers the world over of the existing and worsening climate conditions of the planet. In a leaked draft report this group of international climate experts “paints the starkest picture yet of the accelerating danger caused by human use of coal, oil, and gas. It warns of coming unlivable heat waves, widespread hunger and drought, rising sea levels and extinction.”

Machine agriculture is a major contributor to this life and death climate threat. It exists primarily because of petroleum, natural gas, and coal, key ingredients fueling climate change.

It is this dire condition of nearly total human dependence on fossil fuels warming the Earth that is tearing societies apart. Those who profit from fossil fuels have purchased policy makers, businesses, many scientists and the mass media.

But keeping secret or ignoring climate change does not make any difference to the fury of a perpetually warmer planet. The longer presidents and Congress do nothing to end the reign of these heat trapping fuels, the worse the outcome. The leaked UN report is not exaggerating. Heatwaves, massive forest fires, droughts, hunger – and migration wars are already with us.

Those who see or study the degeneration of agriculture and civilization are often polite and politically correct to the point of becoming irrelevant.

Where’s ecology?

During the Clinton administration in the 1990s, there was talk among senior government officials of making agriculture “sustainable.” I thought this was a cause for celebration. However, officials of the US Department of Agriculture were concerned. They torpedoed the idea and nothing really happened.

Nevertheless, a few decades ago, a handful of Americans warned us of our abandonment of civilization. Ecology has been the voice of regeneration and the defining science for that metamorphosis.

The course of rising ecological consciousness in the United States has been painful and slow. The failure of the country to take adequate measures to protect its unparalleled natural riches did not make matters easier. Physicians and scientists have largely failed to take the carcinogenic and neurotoxic poisons of farmers seriously. Their silence adds legitimacy to the perpetuation of a catastrophic practice.

The integrity of land

However, the thought of the American visionary Aldo Leopold broke the silence. In an original essay he wrote in 1933 in volume 31 of the Journal of Forestry, Leopold connected policy and the survival of America to an abiding respect to nature, especially to the integrity of the land.

Leopold was professor at the University of Wisconsin. He was disturbed by America’s careless use and misuse of its forests, land, and wildlife. He drew an intimate connection between land and civilization, insisting that civilization “is a state of mutual and interdependent cooperation between human animals, other animals, plants, and soils, which may be disrupted at any moment by the failure of any of them.”

Disruption on a huge scale did take place in the United States in the 1930s, in Leopold’s time, just like he predicted. He likened the United States to “a hypochondriac, so obsessed with its own economic health as to have lost the capacity to remain healthy.” In fact, Leopold saw the American obsession spreading throughout the world. In his Sand County Almanac, he lamented: “The whole world is so greedy for more bathtubs that it has lost the stability necessary to build them, or even to turn off the tap.”

Regeneration and goodness

The other American who warned the country of its self-defeating machine and chemical agriculture was a gardener named J. I. Rodale in Emmaus, Pennsylvania. He spoke ceaselessly about farming with nature, by which he meant no pesticides and lots of biodiversity to complement and enrich the raising of food.

He coined the word “organic” for farming, to differentiate farming with nature from the industrialized agriculture that lived or died from the presence or absence of pesticides, dope drugs of the giant growers / agribusinesses.

In his Our Poisoned Earth and Sky, he borrowed from Aristotle the concept of the golden mean in order to illustrate that organic farming is the golden mean, avoiding the two extremes of excess and deficiency of industrialized agriculture. He said the idea of the organic “means that we must be kind to the soil, to ourselves and to our fellow man. Organic means goodness.”

Leopold and Rodale addressed regeneration. Leopold meant changes in our way of life, our civilization. Rodale, too, was practical and philosophical. He started organic gardens, magazines, and research institutes to find out. In a sense, Rodale’s experiments in soil health and the growing of healthy food added another layer of scientific credibility to millennial-old traditional farming.

Organic farming was the antithesis of machine agriculture. It was applied regeneration. It sparked the science of agroecology. It gave Americans a taste of what good food was all about, its taste, aroma, and satisfaction. At the same time, organic farming revealed the poisons behind the science façade of agribusiness and government regulatory agencies and departments. It was a dream of bringing back to life the family farming traditions and practices of rural America, while confirming the bad intent and deleterious effects of the agricultural chemistry of the land grant universities and large farmers.

Regeneration works. In fact, at a time of climate emergency, it may turn out to be our most valuable asset for restoring agriculture, and, in so many other ways, helping us to revive our civilization.

Regeneration is like the Greek manuscripts in the fifteenth century Venice and Padua. In either way, we are discovering wisdom. Like Plato, we all see another potential Atlantis in the horizon. Political, corporate, and scientific corruption in 2021 matches the corruption at the end of the Atlantis. Now we have climate change instead of tyrants and angry gods.

Regeneration is an inspiration and a solution for no more fossil fuels, the expansion of organic farming, the replacement of fossil fuels electricity with solar energy, and the abandonment of petroleum transportation for electric transport.  In other words, regeneration is a key to a solar America and world.

Regeneration should become an organizing principle and policy for fighting climate change and recovering our Western civilization.

UK teachers with Long COVID face victimisation

Margot Miller

Latest government data from a React-2 study by Imperial College London found there are two million cases of Long COVID among England population of around 56 million. Long COVID covers those people still suffering symptoms more than 12 weeks after infection.

The UK’s COVID-19 death toll has passed 152,000, but the Conservative government lifted most safety restrictions on May 17. Cases since then have surged, fueled by the spread of the highly transmissible Delta variant.

This has allowed the virus to spread among young adults and school children in particular, and others who are either unvaccinated or have not received the two required jabs.

Yet, despite scientists predicting a catastrophic rise in hospitalisations and deaths without the strictest public health measures, the government is intent on lifting all measures to mitigate the virus, including mask wearing, by July 19. It is impervious to the suffering inflicted, including the long-term effects of the disease.

The React-2 study found that women and those admitted to hospital were at greater risk of Long COVID, and the prevalence of symptoms increased with age. It also found a correlation between deprivation and the risk of developing Long COVID.

University College London and King's College London carried out a separate study which found that symptoms persisted long after the initial infection in one in six middle-aged people, falling to one in 13 among younger adults.

A survey in Norway published in Nature magazine found that out of 312 patients, 61 percent had persistent symptoms after six months—including 52 percent of 16-30-year-olds.

A brain imaging study conducted by the University of Oxford and Imperial College London found damage to brain tissue in COVID patients, suggesting a possible a predisposition to dementia and Alzheimer’s at a future date.

A socially distanced assembly takes place at a school in in Manchester, England, Monday March 8, 2021. (Jon Super/PA via AP)

Despite this, teachers and other workers who fight for health and safety face victimisation from employers. Several National Education Union representatives were sacked during the pandemic for invoking the right to a safe workplace under Section 44 of the Employment Rights Act, leading to walkouts.

The education unions have done nothing to defend their victimised members and have abandoned those with Long COVID to their fate, prompting them to take matters into their own hands. Part-time Media studies and Photography teacher Kodoma founded Facebook support group Teachers With COVID UK. Aged 52, she has been suffering from Long COVID since March 2020, and said it was “a disease I caught at work which could easily have been prevented.”

Kodoma told a WSWS reporter that by the end of May, “I was really ill for weeks. I can’t really remember it. I slept. My two adult children had to check my SATS [oxygen saturation levels] a few times a day. It feels like your lungs are on fire, like someone is leaning on your chest; every breath is a real effort. I knew I was fighting for my life.”

Kodoma was not just fighting the disease but her employers, with virtually no help from the National Education Union (NEU). She explained how at some schools like her own, teachers with Long COVID are bullied by management to return to full-time work over a phased four-week period before they are fit, with no support in place. Many return due to financial pressures as their sickness pay diminishes, which, coupled with the stress of it all, exacerbates the illness and leads to relapses. If they do not comply they are forced to resign.

“I went back to school in September,” said Kodoma, “walking on a frame, though doctors said I was not ready to go back. I lasted a couple of days. Towards the end of December, I had a formal absence meeting. When you get to the third formal absence meeting, you either have to accept ill health retirement or lose your job. They said I couldn’t have more than 10 days off sick over two terms, then I could have gone to the second stage. I was saved by lockdown.”

“I’ve sent the NEU so many emails, saying I’m really struggling, I’m frightened, please help, but got no reply.”

Kodoma decided to take matters into her own hands and founded the Facebook group. “It’s much more help than the unions,” she said.

She noticed that some teachers in the group were “getting better and better and others got worse and worse. “Some schools get taxis for staff, so they don’t have the commute to work, flowers, mobility equipment, a gradual phased return and remote teaching, even paying for two members of staff. One in the group, a head of year, highly qualified and experienced, she had a short-phased return [to work], with no accommodation timetabled, she had to work upstairs. I think she got fired.

“We are passionate about our courses and want to be doing our jobs. It’s crazy that we are not being accommodated for.”

As the only media and photography teacher in the sixth form, Kodoma had to set and mark this year’s exams. “Because we have teacher assessed grades this year, I had to do all the marking and create my own exams. It set my health back. The school environment is just not safe.”

Before being forced to resign last Saturday from his post as health secretary for abusing the government’s own advice on social distancing, Matt Hancock responded to the latest data by acknowledging, “Long COVID can have a lasting and debilitating impact on the lives of those affected.” But in the face of what is a growing health time-bomb, the government has pledged only £50 million into Long COVID research. This is a pittance compared to the £37 billion squandered mainly on the private sector to develop its failed track and trace system, or the £17 billion given to Tory cronies to provide personal protective equipment.

Trades Union Congress General Secretary Frances O’Grady stated that Long COVID should be recognised as a disability. “It’s time to recognise this condition properly—and make sure workers who are living with Long COVID get the support they need to do their jobs,” she said.

This conceals the fact that it was only with the support of the trade unions and the Labour Party that the government was able to keep much of the non-essential economy open for business during the pandemic and has done nothing to mobilise their millions of members against an unsafe reopening. Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer insisted last summer that schools be reopened, “no ifs, no buts, no equivocations”.

Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer's tweet of August 16, 2020 demanding the government reopen schools.

The education unions have played a pernicious role, maintaining the fiction that schools can be made COVID safe while suppressing opposition by parents and teachers who favour remote learning until schools are safe.

UK rail workers strike against pay restraint and inferior terms and conditions

Tony Robson

A series of strikes have been called across the rail network in the past few months involving conductors, ticket examiners and maintenance engineers in the Rail, Maritime and Transport union (RMT).

Taken against the private operators, the disputes are primarily in opposition to pay restraint—an attack facilitated by the RMT’s participation in the Rail Industry Coronavirus Forum (RICF) with the government, alongside the other rail unions, at the start of the pandemic.

Caledonia Sleeper service strikers on the picket line in Inversness this month (credit: RMT Twitter)

In the name of “Working Together”, the trade unions agreed to the suppress any expression of workers independent interests based on the claim that they would be upheld through collaboration with the private operators.

Instead throughout the pandemic rail workers have been subjected to an ever-present threat to their safety due to the combined impact of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative government abandoning lockdowns early to reopen the economy and the private operators’ drive to restore revenue collection under the most hazardous conditions. At Christmas time, Great Western Railway (GWR) and South Western Railway were forced to cancel train services due to the shortage of rail staff resulting from workplace outbreaks of the virus, with GWR reporting one in four drivers having to self-isolate and 10 percent of staff affected at its depots in south west England.

In January, the government announced a two-year pay freeze for 62,000 rail workers across 22 operating companies under conditions in which inflation has continued to rise—especially for food and other essentials.

While rail workers safety and pay is sacrificed, the private operators have received full protection from the economic fallout of the pandemic through reduced passenger usage by a huge government hand out estimated to now stand at £12 billion.

The RMT has set out to build a reputation as the most militant of all the trade unions, but during the pandemic it has proven to be no less subservient to the demands of the government and private operators. It has been forced into strike action only because the toleration of rail workers of its partnership with the train companies and government has been exhausted.

The union is working to ensure that numerous disputes remain isolated and prevented from spreading. While from the standpoint of rhetoric the RMT has denounced the profiteering of the private operators, its overarching concern is to preserve and deepen its working relations with management and company shareholders as guarantors of “industrial peace” and corporate profits.

This led to the pathetic spectacle at East Midlands Railway (EMR) of the RMT setting up a negotiating table outside the headquarters of the company in Nottingham on June 20, ahead of consecutive 24 hour strikes on Sundays that commenced from June 27 and are due to continue until mid-August. RMT General Secretary Mick Lynch stated, “To make things easier for the company to make genuine proposals to end this dispute we will be bringing the negotiating table to them this Sunday.”

Mick Lynch (source: RMT)

The RMT preaches conciliation with EMR when the strike has been provoked by the company imposing inferior terms and conditions on some conductors including a reduction of £5,500 during the first year of employment, as well as being forced to work additional hours that are not part of current terms and conditions.

EMR is owned by Netherlands-based transnational Abellio, which also operates ScotRail running 95 percent of rail services in Scotland. ScotRail has been hit by strike action over demands by conductors and ticket examiners for rest day payments on equal terms to train drivers. The strike on Sundays was started by conductors in late March and was joined by ticket examiners in June, which has led to a reduction in services operated by the company to just 15 percent.

The company came to a separate agreement with train drivers who are members of the ASLEF union and have received enhanced payments for rest day working. The company has denied this to the conductors who perform up to 32 safety critical tasks on board the train. The agreement for drivers signed by ASLEF includes an additional payment of £375 and has been extended from its initial expiry date of January, but only until October. It is a policy of divide and conquer that relies entirely on the trade union bureaucracy collectively maintaining divisions among rail workers.

The RMT has decried rail drivers being given a “bung” and denounced their “preferential treatment”. But it will not challenge the ASLEF leadership’s betrayal and never has.

ScotRail fleet maintenance staff also took strike action for two days from June 15 at its depot in Perth, which is used to refuel and store trains overnight. The strike was backed by 80 percent of (RMT) members after a manager who was the subject of a collective grievance by 16 workers was promoted, after having been found guilty of bullying and harassment.

The RMT is also focusing its efforts on appeals to the Scottish National Party (SNP) government to commit to ending the franchise with Abellio and take the service back into public control. Its attempt to present the SNP government as an ally is bogus. As has been the case throughout the UK, the rail franchises have been effectively taken back under government control through the Emergency Measures Agreement (EMA), which shielded the private operators from financial losses. It is estimated that the Scottish government has pumped a total of £452 million into the coffers of Abellio and Serco, which runs the Caledonia Sleeper service. The Scottish government is, moreover, just as committed to opposing pay rises as Abellio when it takes over as the “Service Operator of last resort” and has refused invitations to meet with the RMT over a wage agreement for 2021.

The Caledonia Sleeper service has also been hit by a strike against the pay freeze after RMT members voted by an 85 percent majority for action. An eleven-day strike by RMT members between June 15 and June 26 led to the full cancellation of the overnight service between London and the Scottish Highlands. The RMT attempted to neuter the strike through calls to Serco to attend arbitration talks, which the company refused. The strike has been followed by a ban on overtime and rest day working.

On June 17, the RMT issued a press release stating that it was launching a “Bust the transport worker pay freeze” campaign, almost half a year after it was announced by the government. It issued no dates for strike balloting or any demands of its own in terms of wage increases.

While the RMT claims to be preparing for “a summer of strikes” over pay, it continues its corporatist collusion with the Johnson government to tie workers hand and foot to the restructuring of the rail system in the form of the Rail Industry Recovery Group (RIRG).

The RMT has taken its place alongside the other unions represented on the rail network, together with the private operators and government infrastructure agency, Network Rail, in a body that will report directly to the government on a £2 billion cost cutting agenda.

In a letter to the RMT membership this month, the union’s National Executive Committee claimed it was participating in the RIRG to protect workers’ interests. But the letter admitted, “Your NEC has noted that the basis of the agreement has the objective of reducing the overall operating costs of the railway as the Government wants to reduce its subsidy. This will affect the overall number of jobs, working practices and roles and other arrangements.”

Fiji overwhelmed by spiralling COVID-19 outbreak

John Braddock

The Pacific island nation of Fiji has, for the second week in a row, recorded spiraling daily cases of COVID-19 as the outbreak that began in April continues to spread unabated. Infection and death rates have been rising rapidly since the first registered daily total of 100 on June 13.

Fiji recorded 312 new COVID-19 cases and four deaths in 24-hours to Tuesday, June 29. This followed 241 cases and two deaths reported Monday, 266 cases and one death on Saturday, 215 cases and three deaths Friday, a previous record of 308 cases and one death Thursday and another 279 cases and four deaths last Wednesday.

A family sells produce in front of their home in Suva, Fiji on June 24, 2021. (AP Photo/Aileen Torres-Bennett)

Fiji’s count in the current outbreak stands at 3,306 active cases in just eight weeks. A total of 4,074 cases have been recorded since March 2020, with just over 800 people recovered.

The death count is shrouded in confusion. While the official toll stands at 21 deaths, New Zealand correspondent Barbara Dreaver told Radio NZ at least nine more people had actually died but authorities were not counting them, claiming they died from other conditions.

Dreaver added, “Officials are saying it’s going to get worse, and the reason that they know that is because people who are turning up positive come from really crowded settlements. And so there is this huge fear, and rightly so, that there’s just so many more people who are infected.”

The Fiji Times speculated on June 24 that the looming COVID-19 disaster could be the largest public health crisis in the Pacific since a New Zealand ship introduced influenza into Samoa in 1918, resulting in 9,000 deaths, or six percent of the population.

Fiji’s Medical Services’ Head of Health Protection, Aalisha Sahukhan, expressed alarm that government leaders knew what was coming but warnings were not listened to. “What we are most concerned about is the next wave, the wave of people with severe illness requiring hospitalisation and the deaths that will come with it,” she said.

Fiji’s test positivity ratio is running at 7.4 percent. This figure, which is also rising every day, measures the number of positive results for every 100 tests and gives an indication of community spread. According to the World Health Organisation, a threshold of 5 percent indicates widespread community transmission. Some medical authorities are warning of 600 deaths and over 50,000 active cases by early August.

The country’s vaccination program is insufficient to contain the outbreak. On Friday one centre had less than 200 vaccine shots to administer. While 28.8 percent of the population has received their first dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine but only about 2 percent are fully vaccinated.

New Zealand epidemiologist Michael Baker has made repeated warnings about the “grim” situation in Fiji and advised a full lockdown. “If you don’t do this you are left with basic measures focusing on cases of testing, contact tracing. That capacity looks like it’s completely overwhelmed already in Fiji so that really isn’t effective anymore, so you are really running out of choices at the moment,” Baker said.

Despite the increasingly disastrous surge, Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama continues to resist calls for the government to impose a full lockdown of either the main island Viti Levu, where the outbreak is centred, or across the entire country. Bainimarama said a complete shutdown would “cripple the economy.”

Radio NZ reported last Friday that Bainimarama appears to be “missing in action,” and is leaving Health Secretary James Fong to front the crisis. Bainimarama has only given one public address since April. He used that speech, given nearly two weeks ago, to reiterate that going into a full lockdown would be “too drastic” and lead to higher unemployment.

Targeted containment areas have been put in place in lieu of strict lockdown measures, with curfews for a limited number of areas on Viti Levu. The government has restricted movement to essential purposes only—to obtain food and medicine, and for authorised work.

However, the list of workplaces that can operate increases. Minister for Employment Parveen Bala has said being vaccinated will become mandatory for those wanting to travel between regions, including for work. Bala said once the country’s population of 889,953 had been vaccinated, steps such as containment areas and potential lockdowns would “not be needed.”

Fong’s statements are a dangerous mix of complacency, willful denial and finger-pointing. Last Thursday he told the media: “If I believed there was a medical case to be made for a 24-hour curfew for 28 days for all of Viti Levu, I’d advise the prime minister directly. I have not done that because, medically, we do not believe a 24-hour curfew for 28 straight days would work.”

Fong blamed ordinary people for the situation, declaring that “compliance, not lockdowns” was the way out of the alarming outbreak. He claimed that given the “track record” of poor public compliance there was no guarantee there would be compliance with further restrictions and the government “simply does not have the capacity to enforce such a strict lockdown” everywhere.

The UN resident coordinator for Fiji and the Pacific, Sanaka Samarasinha, repeated the same line, telling the pro-government Fiji Sun “not enough Fijians are taking the risks of Covid-19 seriously enough.”

The government, which came to power in a coup led by Bainimarama in 2006, is a brutal authoritarian regime with a long history of suppressing the working class and rural poor. It is pursuing the same strategy as governments elsewhere of “herd immunity,” i.e. letting the disease run rampant on the basis that ordinary people have to learn to “live with” it.

Fong has declared that the government’s strategy has moved from “containment” to “mitigation,” particularly in hard-hit areas. He falsely claimed the “global expert consensus” was that COVID-19 is likely to become an endemic disease, which continues to circulate indefinitely internationally. Fong said it was “too early” to say if that would be the case in Fiji, but regardless, the government's strategy would “remain the same.”

The response of the local imperialist powers to the crisis erupting in their own backyard remains extremely limited. Last week, the New Zealand government announced an extra $NZ10 million to help with Fiji’s response to the pandemic. Small teams of medical specialists from New Zealand and Australia have also been sent to assist, a totally inadequate contribution to the impoverished country facing the collapse of its health infrastructure.