South Africa’s top court sentences former ANC President Jacob Zuma to 15 months

Jean Shaoul

South Africa’s Constitutional Court has sentenced former African National Congress (ANC) President Jacob Zuma to 15 months imprisonment for contempt of court. He was convicted for defying its order to appear at an inquiry into corruption during his presidency.

Should Zuma fail to hand himself in to police within five days, the police minister must order his arrest.

The pending imprisonment of the former president some 30 years after the end of the hated apartheid system and the rise to power of the ANC expresses the protracted crisis gripping the entire South African bourgeoisie. It takes place as public anger mounts over the ANC’s handling of the public health crisis and vaccine rollout, systemic corruption within the ruling party and the escalating economic crisis.

Jacob Zuma in 2017 (Credit: Kremlin.ru)

The 79-year-old Zuma has denied any wrongdoing. Apart from one brief appearance when he left before being questioned, he not only refused to attend the inquiry led by Deputy Chief Justice Raymond Zondo examining corruption allegations relating to his period in office, but also failed to mount a defence. Instead, he wrote a 21-page letter to the chief justice, accusing the court of bias and Zondo of conducting a personal vendetta against him. This prompted the inquiry's lawyers to seek an order from the constitutional court for his imprisonment.

In an hour-long speech setting out the court’s decision, Justice Sisi Khampepe criticised Zuma, saying that his attacks on the court were unprecedented and that “Never before has the judicial process been so threatened.” She added, “If his conduct is met with impunity, he will do significant damage to the lost rule of law.”

It was Zuma who had set up the inquiry into “allegations of state capture, corruption, fraud” that focused on the Gupta family and its associates who won lucrative government contracts and were allegedly even able to choose cabinet ministers.

A longstanding member of both the Stalinist South African Communist Party (SACP) until 1990 and the ANC that has ruled South Africa since the end of apartheid in 1994, Zuma has for years being mired in scandals and corruption. He served as Deputy President of South Africa under President Thabo Mbeki from 1999 to 2005, when he was fired after his financial adviser was convicted of bribery. This was amid a bitter struggle within the ANC between the factions around Mbeki and Zuma, who was backed by the SACP and the trade union federation COSATU.

Elected president of the ruling ANC in 2007, Zuma became President of South Africa after winning the 2009 elections. His government was characterized by corruption and nepotism with some $32 billion reportedly stolen during his period in office. At the same time, Zuma presided over a sharp decline in the nation’s economy, conditions that made international capitalists nervous about investing in South Africa, as unrest grew over rising unemployment and poverty and a strike wave spread across the country.

This flowed inexorably from the ANC’s agreement with the white South African elite to preserve capitalism while empowering a wealthy black elite, under the mantle of programmes like “Black Economic Empowerment,” —a political arrangement that significantly benefitted both Zuma and current President Cyril Ramaphosa, and the rest of the ANC’s leaders at the expense of the working class. South Africa became one of the most socially polarized countries in the world, worse even than under apartheid.

Cyril Ramaphosa [Credit: Tasnim News Agency]

In December 2017, amid mounting corruption scandals and bitter in-fighting, he lost the ANC presidency to former trade union leader and multi-billionaire businessman Ramaphosa. Two months later, the ANC forced Zuma to resign as State President, fearing it would lose support in the 2019 elections. While Ramaphosa made pro-forma statements about rooting out corruption, he has largely targeted his political rivals.

Last November, Ramaphosa’s main rival, ANC secretary general Ace Magashule, appeared in court charged with corruption, money laundering and fraud in relation to the looting of public funds under Zuma. Last month, Health Minister Zweli Mkhize was forced to resign as an investigation into his alleged “impropriety” in the awarding of Covid-19 contracts gets under way.

Zuma faces another trial, which has been repeatedly postponed, on 16 charges of fraud, corruption and racketeering relating to a 1999 $5 billion purchase of fighter jets, patrol boats and military gear from five European arms firms, brokered when he was Mbeki’s deputy. The charges, that he accepted $34,000 annually from the French arms company Thales in return for protecting the company from an investigation into the deal, were reinstated after the ANC forced him out of office. The alleged bribe was part of a broader corrupt relationship between Zuma and one of the consortium members that won a major bid to provide combat suites for new navy frigates.

These exposures are just the tip of the iceberg of the corrupt operations of the ANC government, which has used programmes like Black Economic Empowerment to turn party officials and their business cronies into multi-millionaires.

While the Zuma ruling is expected to strengthen Ramaphosa’s faction, it will not end the corruption or lessen the crisis within the ANC which is haemorrhaging support. The Ramaphosa government’s handling of the pandemic has only intensified the bitter class divisions, as, like its counterparts around the world, the ANC has sought to place the full burden of the global recession that has hammered the mining and manufacturing sectors of the working class.

The economy contracted 7 percent last year amid the impact of the global recession, the fall in demand for minerals and raw materials—South Africa’s main exports—and lockdown restrictions. It follows a years-long decline in GDP per capita as growth failed to keep pace with the increasing population. The government’s budget deficit for 2020-21 reached 11 percent of GDP, with more than a fifth of the budget going to servicing debt that has reached nearly 65 percent of GDP. According to official statistics that are a vast underestimate of the real situation, around one third of South African workers are now unemployed, trapping millions in poverty and contributing to the obscene levels of inequality that persist nearly three decades after the end of apartheid in 1994.

Petrochemical workers in Iran strike over pay and conditions

Jean Shaoul

Petrochemical workers across Iran have been waging strikes since June 19 to demand higher pay, the payment of back wages, the elimination of intermediary contractors and better health and safety conditions.

Thousands of workers in Iran’s vast energy industry have gone on strike over the past week to press demands for better wages and conditions at oil facilities, Iranian media reported Wednesday, June 30 2021. (AP Photo/Vahid Salemi, File)

The workers, mainly technicians and tradesmen such as scaffolders, fitters, welders and electricians, want monthly wages increased from $300 to $500 to keep up with Iran’s soaring inflation rate, which has reached 50 percent. They are also calling for the implementation of 2010 labour law provisions that give fixed-term contract workers 10 days off for every 20 workdays. This would allow them to return from oil rigs and offshore facilities to their homes often far away. Currently, only permanent workers—whose numbers have fallen precipitously in recent years due to contracting out—are given the legally mandated time off.

The strike is part of a broader movement of opposition among workers across the country to the decades-long assault of Iran’s bourgeois-clerical regime on their economic and social conditions. This assault has continued and deepened amid the coronavirus pandemic, which is now surging for the fifth time in Iran, as the new more transmissible and deadly Delta variant takes root.

According to a recently published Interior Ministry report, there were around 43,000 protest demonstrations in Iran between 2013 and January 2018, or 30 protests per day. The protests in November-December 2019, triggered by an overnight hike in gas prices and widespread economic hardship, were only suppressed by the security forces’ use of extreme lethal force. At least 1,500 people were killed, 2,000 wounded and 7,000 arrested during the government crackdown.

The strike, the oil workers’ most extensive industrial action to date, was called by the Coordination Council of Oil Industries Contract Workers, an advocacy group for 41,000 contract workers in the oil industry. It has spread to at least 70 oil and gas installations and refineries and petrochemical plants, with tens of thousands of workers reportedly staying at home or in their dormitories.

Most of the strikers are employed as casual labourers or on short-term contracts by contractors and sub-contractors of the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC), National Iranian Gas Company (NIGC), and National Iranian Oil Refining and Distribution Company. Workers claim that around 154,000 temporary workers or 80 percent of those employed in the sector do not have regular contracts.

Over the last twenty years, the government-owned INOC stopped employing workers on regular contracts as older workers retired, turning thousands of new hires into short-term contract employees. This practice spread among smaller, newly emerging companies in the sector, as the INOC, like its counterparts internationally, moved to access lower-waged workers by outsourcing many of their operations.

The Contract Oil Workers Council issued a statement on June 26 saying, “We want to be involved in the decision-making process that helps to realize our demands,” adding “We have seen that sometimes, the management of some companies has ruthlessly fired the striking day-workers and replaced them immediately.” There are reports that 700 workers employed by contractors at the Tehran Refinery have been fired.

The Iranian Labour News Agency (INLA) cited one worker as saying that contractors in southern oil projects such as Asalouyeh, in Bushehr province, had cut salaries to levels in the rest of the country where working conditions are not as harsh as in the oil and gas fields. Temperatures at remote oil fields in the south of Iran can exceed 50 degrees centigrade (122 Fahrenheit) in the summer. Other workers said that contractors frequently paid wages late and only “every few months.”

The strike movement, dubbed “Campaign 1400,” as the year 2021 is known in the Iranian calendar, and launched under the banner “We Do Not Give Up Our Rights,” is the continuation of a struggle that began in July 2020, when workers at 15 refineries, petrochemical companies and power plants took part in a nationwide protest. Days later, workers from other industries, including auto manufacturing and power generation, joined the “1400 Protest” campaign, with permanent workers in the oil industry saying they would join the strike on June 30. Last Wednesday, permanent NIOC employees held rallies at refineries and petrochemical plants in Abadan, Ahwaz, Mahshahr, Damavand and Asalouyeh, in support of their demands for higher wages and better retirement conditions.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s Shiite populist president from 2005 to 2013, issued a statement Sunday voicing support for the contract petrochemical workers and warning the government about the implications of a strike by such a key section of the working class. It was the oil workers’ strike that erupted in late 1978, amid a wave of mass protests by workers, students and the urban poor, that broke the back of the blood-soaked US-backed regime of Shah Reza Pahlavi. Ahmadinejad described the energy workers as among the most committed and technically qualified group of workers in the country, and said they are right to demand they be treated like regular employees.

The strike has clearly roiled the authorities. The government, led by President Hassan Rouhani, whose second and final term ends in August, has called on the workers to end their strike in view of the importance of the oil industry and Washington’s continuing efforts to strangle Iran’s economy through punitive sanctions. It has promised a review of their demands. The Iranian Parliament’s Energy Committee held an extraordinary session with Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zaganeh on Sunday June 27 to discuss the strikes and find ways to end the unrest in the oil sector.

According to Parvin Mohammadi, the Deputy Secretary of the Iranian Independent Workers Union, strikes in the oil sector have spread to 70 companies in eight provinces. She told London-based Iran International TV that the authorities had not addressed the workers’ demands, while adding that they have made empty promises and arrested workers for refusing to end protests or strikes. Independent unions and workers organizations are not recognized by the government and have been repressed, often savagely, since the bourgeois-clerical regime consolidated its rule in the early 1980s.

The contract oil workers’ strike started the day after Iran’s presidential elections, which saw a record abstention rate. Ebrahim Raisi, Iran’s chief justice and a prominent conservative connected to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, prevailed in a race from which all but a handful of candidates were arbitrarily excluded. According to Kahyan.London, a right-wing opposition newspaper, workers delayed the start of the strike until after the elections because “security and judiciary authorities [always target] striking workers with security charges and prosecute them” as part of heightened pre-election security measures. They had also avoided slogans that would lead their actions to be interpreted as a political protest.

The Iranian-focused Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA), which is part funded by the US-sponsored National Endowment for Democracy, a notorious locus of imperialist intrigue, claims that in the week since the start of the strike there have been a number of protests against the results of some of the municipal elections held in conjunction with the June 18 presidential election, as well as actions by other workers protesting poor labour conditions.

The growing support for the strike testifies to Iran’s deep-going political, social, and economic crisis. The Iranian bourgeoisie fears an eruption of class struggle driven by declining living standards and a dramatic increase in social inequality, as those at the top have sought to place the full burden of the US sanctions on the working class. Some 1,600 US sanctions targeting Iran’s oil and gas exporting sectors as well as its banks and financial institutions were imposed and/or reimposed after President Donald Trump unilaterally abrogated the 2015 Iran nuclear accord in May 2018, costing the country between $300 to $400 billion, as part of Washington’s “maximum pressure” campaign for regime-change in Iran.

In the process, Iran’s corrupt elite have continued to enrich themselves, while working people have faced death, disease, unemployment and impoverishment. According to a parliamentary report, Iran’s super rich, who account for just 0.1 percent of the 82 million population, have over 5,000 trillion rials ($20 billion) stashed away in their bank accounts that earn them a whopping annual income of 1,000 trillion rials ($4 billion) in interest. The report suggests that even a 10 percent tax take from the 83,000 super rich would make up for the financial shortfall in the lives of low-income Iranians. At least 60 percent of Iranians live in poverty, many in extreme poverty.

Adding to the crisis, the rial fell further following the election of Raisi, trading at more than 250,000 to the US dollar in Tehran’s unofficial exchange market as the likelihood of Tehran reaching a deal with Washington to revive the 2015 nuclear accord recedes.

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.