Record-breaking heatwave results in over 486 deaths in British Columbia

Alexandra Greene

The prolonged and deadly heatwave that is scorching Western Canada and the Pacific Northwest in the US has at the time of this writing resulted in more than 486 deaths in British Columbia (BC) alone. The “sudden and unexpected” deaths, reported over the five-day period between Friday and 1 p.m. on Wednesday, account for a staggering 195 percent increase in the usual number of deaths reported in such a time frame.

While the death toll is the direct product of unprecedented temperatures due to climate change, the devastating loss of life is also the result of the savage attacks on social infrastructure and public services implemented by governments of all political stripes at the federal and provincial level going back decades.

The village of Lytton, British Columbia—where on three successive days this week all-time Canadian record high temperatures were set—has now largely been destroyed by a forest wildfire. (Photo Credit: Facebook/2 Rivers Remix Society)

British Columbia Emergency Health Services (BCEHS) ambulances responded to 187 heat exhaustion and 52 heatstroke calls between June 25 and 28. A staggering 15,300 911 calls were taken in the province between June 26 and 27.

The emergency services were overwhelmed. There is a major backlog in calls and delayed response times, with some emergency services forced to leave behind the bodies of victims as police and ambulances continued to respond to other calls. Due to the horrifyingly high death count, even the response times of coroners is being severely delayed.

“We’ve never experienced anything like this before in Vancouver,” Vancouver Police Department Sergeant Steve Addison told reporters in a Tuesday press conference.

Addison said that a surge in calls occurred on Tuesday morning as “people are showing up in their parents’ house or relatives’ house and finding them deceased.”

The abnormally intense weather is the result of a “heat dome,” which is a large area of high pressure that extends well up into the atmosphere. The high-pressure system traps sinking air that becomes hotter as it lowers and approaches the ground. This is compounded by heat becoming trapped within the dome, resulting in a “bubble” that prevents rain and cold fronts from entering and cooling down the temperature.

East of BC, Alberta Health Services have also reported an increase in heat-related emergency calls, with about six calls per day in Edmonton and 10 in Calgary.

BC’s Chief Coroner Lisa Lapointe stated in a press release that the number of deaths will increase as the data continues to be updated. “It is important we do not lose sight of the fact that each reported death is a person with a family and people who cared about them,” Lapointe said at a press conference on Wednesday.

Across BC, Alberta, Yukon and the Northwest Territories, over 103 heat records were shattered on Monday alone.

The village of Lytton, located at the north end of the Fraser Canyon, broke the all-time record for the highest temperature ever recorded in Canada for three straight days in a row. At 5 p.m. on Tuesday, the Lytton Climate Station reported an astounding temperature of 49.6 degrees Celsius (121 degrees Fahrenheit). This surpasses any temperature ever recorded in Las Vegas, Nevada, located in the Mojave Desert some 1,300 miles to the south in the United States.

At 6 p.m. on Wednesday evening, the village’s population was forced to evacuate without warning as a fast-moving wildfire was driven towards residences by winds of up to 71 kilometres per hour. People were forced to immediately flee the small town in all directions. Around 90 percent of the village’s buildings have been destroyed in the fire.

“It's dire. The whole town is on fire,” Lytton mayor Jan Polderman told CBC News. “It took, like, a whole 15 minutes from the first sign of smoke to, all of a sudden, there being fire everywhere.”

Lytton’s fire joins 9 other newly reported wildfires that have been sparked in recent days, bringing the total number of active provincial wildfires to 26. An abnormally dry spring and low humidity levels have primed the forests for such an occurrence, and the never-before-seen temperatures have set alight portions of the tinder-dry land.

In southern Alberta, the heat has set fire to the wheat fields in some places and is compounding a severe drought in the province. The result is a jeopardized harvest and major agricultural losses.

As well as wildfires, the heat is causing rapid glacier melting and massive snowmelt from the Canadian Rocky Mountains. Flood warnings are now in effect for the upper Fraser Valley area, and homes in the Pemberton Valley have already been evacuated due to the fast-rising river waters.

Across British Columbia’s mainland and gulf islands alike, cooling centres and spray parks offering shade, water, misting fans and cooling supplies have been established to keep community residents cool. Schools across the province were forced to close due to insufficient ventilation and cooling infrastructure. Many COVID-19 vaccination sites have also closed.

The World Socialist Web Site has reported on the heatwave’s devastating effects in the states of Washington and Oregon, where some 20 million people have been affected. As in BC, these regions are usually temperate and rainy, meaning that many residents do not have air conditioning in their homes.

The British Columbia Hydro and Power Authority reported that the rate of air-conditioned households is even lower in British Columbia than in Seattle and Portland, which have, respectively, the first and third-lowest percentage of air-conditioned households among major metro areas in the United States.

Despite marked increases over recent years, it is estimated that only 34 percent of households in BC had cooling appliances. The most recent data available for Vancouver indicates that just 19 percent of households are equipped with air conditioning. Hotels in the city are currently booked to capacity with people paying for rooms to escape the heat of their own homes.

Working class people and the poor are placed at especially high risk, as lower-income households are far less likely to have air conditioning. Workers are often forced to work in conditions that make it impossible to escape the heat, especially in labouring jobs that may require them to endure hours of blistering heat outdoors.

The contempt felt by the political establishment towards the most vulnerable sections of the population hit hard by the heat wave was summed up Tuesday by BC Premier John Horgan of the New Democratic Party (NDP). The social democrat Horgan callously stated during a press conference that “fatalities are a part of life.”

Horgan added that the public was “acutely aware” of the imminent period of extreme heat, and remarked that “it was apparent to anyone who walked outdoors that we were in an unprecedented heatwave and again, there’s a level of personal responsibility.”

A backlash followed, with many residents of the province taking to social media to express their shock and disgust that an elected official would make such brazenly insensitive remarks during the overlapping crises of both the pandemic and the deadly heatwave.

Horgan’s outrageous words are of a piece with his government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which was to keep workplaces and schools open while blaming working people for spreading the virus. His total indifference to the significant loss of human life is reminiscent of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who infamously declared in face of a surging pandemic, “No more f***ing lockdowns, let the bodies pile high!”

The devastating developments in BC this week are only a foretaste of what is to come over the years ahead if serious action to combat climate change is not undertaken. Canada’s Changing Climate Report, published in 2019, warned that the effects of climate change were set to intensify over the coming years. “These effects include more extreme heat, less extreme cold, longer growing seasons, shorter snow and ice cover seasons, earlier spring peak streamflow, thinning glaciers, thawing permafrost, and rising sea level,” the report noted.

Despite innumerable climate pledges made by governments at the provincial and federal levels in Canada and their counterparts across the world, the capitalist system is wholly incapable of resolving the imminent threats faced by the planet and its population. Whether it is Horgan’s NDP in BC, Justin Trudeau’s federal Liberal government, or the Democratic Biden administration in Washington, they all place the accumulation of corporate profits ahead of any genuine attempt to protect working people from the social and environmental ravages of climate change.

Young Americans are dying at rates not seen since 1953

Trévon Austin

A new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that approximately 19 percent more Americans died in 2020 than in 2019. Researchers also discovered that mortality rates for young adults aged 25 to 34 have skyrocketed in the last decade, reaching levels not seen since 1953.

The year-on-year increase in the mortality rate among young Americans is the largest since 1918, when deaths rose by 30 percent amid the Spanish Flu pandemic. Mortality rates for children and those 65 and older had been in steady decline for the last century until the COVID-19 pandemic, which halted this progress. The mortality rates for those aged 55-64 rose slightly before the coronavirus pandemic, but the 45 to 64 age group still saw a general decline in mortality rates until 2020.

A man walks past a mural in the Hollywood section of Los Angeles, Thursday, Nov. 12, 2020 (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

Due to improvements in medical science, the mortality rates for infants have declined spectacularly in recent decades, with infant deaths moving from the group with the highest mortality rate toward the middle of the pack. However, infant mortality in the US has not fallen as quickly as rates in other developed countries. Children aged 5 to 14 have always regularly held the lowest mortality rate, but the decline has stalled in the last decade.

According to the report, those aged 25 through 34 have seen the least improvement of all age groups in recent decades, dying at about the same rate in 2020 as they did in 1953. From 2010 through 2019, death rates among this age group rose by 25.2 percent. This increase, already far worse than that of any other age group in that period, was followed up in 2020 by a staggering 24.5 percent one-year increase, which made for a 55.8 percent rise since 2010.

Based on data going back to 1990, the report documents a public health crisis sweeping the American workforce. The downward trend was prevalent before the pandemic arrived, but working-age Americans have been deeply affected by the pandemic, the report noted.

“We’re losing more and more Americans in the prime of their lives, in their most productive years, and in their parenting years,” wrote Kathleen Mullan Harris, a sociology professor at the University of North Carolina and chair of the committee that wrote the report.

“Our committee was stunned by this mounting crisis, which will only get worse. The most troubling themes in our report—higher mortality than our peer countries; major racial and ethnic, socio-economic, and geographic disparities; lack of access to health insurance and care—have all been exacerbated by the pandemic” Harris said.

Researchers determined the rising death rate for adult workers was driven by a sharp increase in deaths from drug overdoses, alcohol, suicide, and cardiometabolic conditions. Drug overdoses have been the primary driving factor, with researchers attributing most of the increase in overdose deaths since 2013 to the ongoing opioid pandemic that claims the lives of thousands each year. However, suicide rates also rose from the mid-2000s to the mid-2010s at a concerning rate.

These “deaths of despair” are inextricably linked to the malignant growth of social inequality in American society in the last few decades. Americans under 40 saw their share of US household wealth fall to a record low of 4.3 percent in 2009. Although the current rate increased to 5.9 percent, young adults’ share of wealth is still lower than any time before 2008.

Previous studies reported rising death rates among those with a high school degree or less, and those living in rural areas. The March report indicated the increase in premature death is more widespread, striking working-age adults in all racial and ethnic groups, and in both rural and metropolitan areas.

The report noted that death rates among black working-age adults have been disproportionately high for years because of inequalities in socioeconomic status, health care, housing, education and other factors. Although progress occurred at the turn of the century in reducing the mortality gap between black and white Americans, death rates in working-age black people are now increasing, effectively erasing that progress.

Drugs and alcohol are major contributors to the rise in working-age mortality. From 1990 to 2017, fatal drug overdoses in working-age Americans increased in every state, but increases were particularly sharp in Appalachia, New England, and the industrial Midwest. The report described the opioid epidemic as a “perfect storm” created by pharmaceutical companies flooding the market with highly addictive and deadly prescriptions, combined with a growing demand for substances to bring relief from physical, mental and psychological pain.

American capitalism has devastated the American working class. Even before the pandemic, young adults in the US experienced much higher mortality rates than their peers in most other wealthy countries.

The increase in deaths, which began in the 1990s, coincides with the ferocious social counterrevolution waged against the American working class over decades. Since the 1980s, workers have seen their real wages steadily decline, and rapid changes in the US economy have devastated families and communities, especially in areas like the Rust Belt and Appalachia where working-age death rates increased the most.

Now, the arrival of the pandemic has exacerbated the social crisis facing American workers. The homicidal pandemic policies of the ruling elite have had severe consequences for workers. Meanwhile, the upper echelons of society have seen their wealth skyrocket during the pandemic, gorging themselves from the deaths of workers like vultures.

World Health Organization warns of new pandemic wave as cases surge in Europe and US

Benjamin Mateus

The number of daily new cases of COVID-19 has surged over the past week in the United States, as the government eliminates all remaining restrictions on the spread of the disease even as the dangerous Delta variant becomes prevalent.

In the United States, where the Delta variant has been detected in all 50 states, daily cases have turned upwards, having risen 14.8 percent compared to the previous week.

In this June 11, 2021, file photo, healthcare workers administrate a dose of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine to students during a vaccination clinic hosted by Jewel Osco in Wheeling, Ill. The latest alarming coronavirus variant, the delta variant, is exploiting low global vaccination rates and a rush to ease pandemic restrictions. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh, File)

In Europe, COVID-19 cases have surged 29 percent higher than the previous week.

“There will be a new wave in the WHO European region unless we remain disciplined,” warned WHO Regional Director for Europe Hans Kluge.

The Delta variant of the coronavirus (B.1.617.2), which ravaged India in May, has now rapidly swept across more than 85 countries, frustrating many countries that had planned to lift restrictions and reopen their economies before the summer tourist season. Only in South America has the Gamma variant, also known as P.1, remained dominant and is ravaging the continent.

Presently, according to Worldometer, there have been over 183 million cases of COVID-19 worldwide. The death count is fast approaching 4 million. However, this is known to be a gross underestimation, with modeling studies suggesting the death toll could be a magnitude of three times higher.

Despite the weeks of declines beginning in the early part of April, the global incidence of cases is again rising. Yesterday, the seven-day average stood at 378,000 COVID-19 cases. The seven-day moving average for deaths continues to remain high at over 8,000 per day. Though deaths continue to decline, they lag the trends in COVID cases and are expected to follow in step in the next week or two.

In the United States, increases have been most prominent in Southern and Western states, where vaccination rates are below the national averages, according to the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy.

Dr. Anthony Fauci said this week: “I’m very concerned about the stark disparity between places with low and high vaccination rates. When you have such a low level of vaccination superimposed upon a variant that has a high degree of efficiency of spread, what you are going to see among under-vaccinated regions—be those states, cities or counties—you’re going to see these individual types of blips. It’s almost like it’s going to be two Americas.”

The highest case rates were in Nevada and Arkansas, with a 55 percent increase over the past seven days. Missouri and Wyoming saw almost a 20 percent rise over a week. In all, the United States reported more than 14,000 new cases and 249 deaths yesterday. There have been more than 34.5 million COVID-19 cases and over 620,000 deaths during the pandemic.

Indeed, the Independence Day weekend will add fuel to the fire. The holiday is expected to be the busiest travel period since the pandemic. Approximately 48 million people are planning to travel, primarily by car. AAA (American Automobile Association) forecasted that 3.5 million people would be flying, “bringing airlines back to 90 percent of pre-pandemic traffic.”

Eric Topol, professor of molecular medicine at the Scripps Research Institute, said of the Delta variant: “It is the most hyper-transmissible, contagious version of the virus we’ve seen to date, for sure—it’s a superspreader strain if there ever was one.” Also, recent studies indicate that the Delta variant may produce more severe disease. A recent study published in The Lancet on June 14, noted that hospitalization rates of patients with the Delta strain were about 85 percent higher than those that were infected with the Alpha variant.

Despite the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) recommendation that vaccinated individuals need not wear masks, health officials in Los Angeles strongly encouraged everyone, regardless of their vaccine status, to wear them indoors due to the threat posed by the highly transmissible strain of the coronavirus. During their last press briefing on COVID-19, the World Health Organization also recommended that all people wear masks indoors, including fully vaccinated people.

The United States’ vaccination campaign has stalled, remaining precariously at around 1 million vaccinations per day. Only 46.7 percent of the population has been fully vaccinated, with 54.4 percent having received at least a single dose. The current projections place August 2 as the estimated date when at least 70 percent of all adults in the US will have received at least one dose of the COVID vaccines, far behind the White House’s estimations.

The situation in Russia is growing direr by the day as deaths have surpassed the winter highs. Yesterday, 672 had succumbed to the infection, with 124 deaths in Moscow and 110 in St. Petersburg. Still, thousands of supporters were permitted to view the games as the quarter-final matches between Spain and Switzerland were given the go-ahead as planned. Meanwhile, Moscow’s Mayor Sergei Sobyanin confirmed that nearly 2,000 people are being hospitalized daily.

Sixty-five percent of the population have received at least one dose of the COVID vaccines in the UK. Still, there has been a 67 percent increase in cases of COVID-19 from a week before. The Delta variant now accounts for 97 percent of all COVID cases. Yesterday, they reported close to 28,000 new infections in contrast to just 3,165 on June 1. The epidemiological curves are rising exponentially.

Hans Kluge, Europe’s regional director for the WHO, has blamed these reversals in trends in relaxing restrictions and increased travel as the tourist season gets underway. Additionally, the Euro 2020 soccer tournament has drawn huge crowds of spectators from numerous countries mixing in crowded surroundings. Restaurants, pubs and bars are filled with patrons. Public transportation is brimming with fans and spectators. Reuters reported that this week almost 2,000 people from Scotland traveled to London for their game against England while infected with COVID-19.

“I am not here to pour cold water on any EURO 2020 fan of anyone’s holidays,” Kluge said. “But before we watch our players, and before we all pack and go for some well-deserved rest near home or far away, it is my imperative to give [some]messages. If you decide to travel and gather, assess the risks and do it safely, keeping all life-saving reflexes of masks and self-protection, especially indoors and in crowds.” He warned that Europe would be Delta dominant by August. He also noted that vaccination rates remain too slow.

Germany’s Interior Minister Horst Seehofer had more choice words for the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA), calling them “absolutely irresponsible” for allowing 40,000 fans to watch the match between Germany and England at Wembley Stadium on Tuesday. “I have the suspicion that this is about commerce again,” he said. “And commerce must not outshine the protection of the population against infection.”

Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding, who has been prominent in educating the public on the pandemic and the science behind the SARS-CoV-2 virus, tweeted: “Anyone who doubts the delta variant wave is coming only needs to look at Israel and the UK—two of the most heavily vaccinated countries in the world.”

From Neoliberalism’s Old Normal to the 21st Century New Normal

Colin Todhunter

Sold under the pretence of a quest for optimising well-being and ‘happiness’, capitalism thrives on the exploitation of peoples and the environment. What really matters is the strive to maintain viable profit margins. The prevailing economic system demands ever-increasing levels of extraction, production and consumption and needs a certain level of annual GDP growth for large firms to make sufficient profit.

But at some point, markets become saturated, demand rates fall and overproduction and overaccumulation of capital becomes a problem. In response, we have seen credit markets expand and personal debt increase to maintain consumer demand as workers’ wages have been squeezed, financial and real estate speculation rise (new investment markets), stock buy backs and massive bail outs and subsidies (public money to maintain the viability of private capital) and an expansion of militarism (a major driving force for many sectors of the economy).

We have also witnessed systems of production abroad being displaced for global corporations to then capture and expand markets in foreign countries.

The old normal

Much of what is outlined above is inherent to capitalism. But the 1980s was a crucial period that helped set the framework for where we find ourselves today.

Remember when the cult of the individual was centre stage? It formed part of the Reagan-Thatcher rhetoric of the ‘new normal’ of 1980s neoliberalism.

In the UK, the running down of welfare provision was justified by government-media rhetoric about ‘individual responsibility’, reducing the role of the state and the need to ‘stand on your own two feet’. The selling off of public assets to profiteering corporations was sold to the masses on the basis of market efficiency and ‘freedom of choice’.

The state provision of welfare, education, health services and the role of the public sector was relentlessly undermined by neoliberal dogma and the creed that the market (global corporations) constituted the best method for supplying human needs.

Thatcher’s stated mission was to unleash the entrepreneurial spirit by rolling back the ‘nanny state’. She wasted little time in crushing the power of the trade unions and privatising key state assets.

Despite her rhetoric, she did not actually reduce the role of the state. She used its machinery differently, on behalf of business. Neither did she unleash the ‘spirit of entrepreneurialism’. Economic growth rates under her were similar as in the 1970s, but a concentration of ownership occurred and levels of inequality rocketed.

Margaret Thatcher was well trained in perception management, manipulating certain strands of latent populist sentiment and prejudice. Her free market, anti-big-government platitudes were passed off to a section of the public that was all too eager to embrace them as a proxy for remedying all that was wrong with Britain. For many, what were once regarded as the extreme social and economic policies of the right became entrenched as the common sense of the age.

Thatcher’s policies destroyed a fifth of Britain’s industrial base in just two years alone. The service sector, finance and banking were heralded as the new drivers of the economy, as much of Britain’s manufacturing sector was out-sourced to cheap labour economies.

Under Thatcher, employees’ share of national income was slashed from 65% to 53%. Long gone are many of the relatively well-paid manufacturing jobs that helped build and sustain the economy. In their place, the country has witnessed the imposition of a low taxation regime and low-paid and insecure ‘service sector’ jobs (no-contract work, mac-jobs, call centre jobs – many of which soon went abroad) as well as a real estate bubble, credit card debt and student debt, which helped to keep the economy afloat.

However, ultimately, what Thatcher did was – despite her rhetoric of helping small-scale businesses and wrapping herself in the national flag – facilitate the globalisation process by opening the British economy to international capital flows and allowing free rein for global finance and transnational corporations.

Referring back to the beginning of this article, it is clear whose happiness and well-being counts most and whose does not matter at all as detailed by David Rothkopf in his 2008 book Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making. Members of the superclass belong to the megacorporation-interlocked, policy-building elites of the world and come from the highest echelons of finance, industry, the military, government and other shadow elites. These are the people whose interests Margaret Thatcher was serving.

They set the agendas at the Trilateral Commission, Bilderberg, G-7, G-20, NATO, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization.

And let us not forget the various key think tanks and policy making arenas like the Council on Foreign Relations, the Brookings Institute and Chatham House as well as the World Economic Forum (WEF), where sections of the global elite or their representatives forge policies and strategies and pass them to their political handmaidens.

Driven by the vision of its influential executive chairman Klaus Schwab, the WEF is a major driving force for the dystopian ‘great reset’, a tectonic shift that intends to change how we live, work and interact with each other.

The new normal

The great reset envisages a transformation of capitalism, resulting in permanent restrictions on fundamental liberties and mass surveillance as livelihoods and entire sectors are sacrificed to boost the monopoly and hegemony of pharmaceutical corporations, high-tech/big data giants, Amazon, Google, major global chains, the digital payments sector, biotech concerns, etc.

The great reset is being rolled out under the guise of a ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ in which smaller enterprises are to be driven to bankruptcy or bought up by monopolies. Economies are being ‘restructured’ and many jobs and roles will be carried out by AI-driven technology.

The WEF says the public will ‘rent’ everything they require: stripping the right of ownership under the guise of a ‘green economy’ underpinned by the rhetoric of ‘sustainable consumption’ and ‘climate emergency’.

At the same time new (‘green product’) markets are being created and fresh opportunities for profit extraction are opening up abroad. For instance, World Bank Group President David Malpass has stated that poorer countries will be ‘helped’ to get back on their feet after the various lockdowns that have been implemented in response to the Covid-19 crisis. This ‘help’ will be on condition that neoliberal reforms and the undermining of public services are implemented and become further embedded.

Just a month into the COVID crisis, the IMF and World Bank were already facing a deluge of aid requests from developing countries. Scores of countries were asking for bailouts and loans. Ideal cover for rebooting the global economy via a debt crisis and the subsequent privatisation of national assets and the further ‘structural adjustment’ of economies.

Many people waste no time in referring to this as  some kind of ‘Marxist’ or ‘communist’ takeover of the planet because a tiny elite will be dictating policies. This has nothing to do with Marxism. An authoritarian capitalist elite – supported by their political technocrats – aims to secure even greater control of the global economy. It will no longer be a (loosely labelled) ‘capitalism’ based on ‘free’ markets and competition (not that those concepts ever really withstood proper scrutiny). Economies will be monopolised by global players, not least e-commerce platforms run by the likes of Amazon, Walmart, Facebook and Google and their multi-billionaire owners.

Essential (for capitalism) new markets will also be created through the ‘financialisation’ and ownership of all aspects of nature, which is to be colonised, commodified and traded under the fraudulent notion of protecting the environment.

The so-called ‘green economy’ will fit in with the notion of ‘sustainable consumption’ and ‘climate emergency’. A bunch of billionaires and their platforms will control every aspect of the value chain. Of course, they themselves will not reduce their own consumption or get rid of their personal jets, expensive vehicles, numerous exclusive homes or ditch their resource gobbling lifestyles. Reduced consumption is meant only for the masses.

They will not only control and own data about consumption but also control and own data on production, logistics, who needs what, when they need it, who should produce it, who should move it and when it should be moved. Independent enterprises will disappear or become incorporated into the platforms acting as subservient cogs. Elected representatives will be mere technocratic overseers of these platforms and the artificial intelligence tools that plan and determine all of the above.

The aim here is not to discuss COVID-19 as a public health issue and the lockdowns and restrictions we have seen since March 2020. But it is clear that the lockdowns, restrictions and ‘relief packages’ doled out have helped boost the bottom line of global chains and the e-commerce giants and have cemented their dominance. Many small and medium-size independent enterprises have been pushed towards bankruptcy. At the same time, fundamental rights have been eradicated under COVID19 government measures.

Politicians in countries throughout the world have been using the rhetoric of the WEF’s great reset, talking of the need to ‘build back better’ for the ‘new normal’. They are all on point. Hardly a coincidence. Essential to this ‘new normal’ is the compulsion to remove individual liberties and personal freedoms given that, in the ‘green new normal’, unfettered consumption will no longer be an option for the bulk of the population.

It has long been the case that a significant part of the working class has been deemed ‘surplus to requirements’ – three decades ago, such people were sacrificed on the altar of neo-liberalism. They lost their jobs due to automation and offshoring. They have had to rely on meagre state welfare and run-down public services.

But what we are now seeing is the possibility of hundreds of millions around the world being robbed of their livelihoods. Forget about the benign sounding ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ and its promised techno-utopia. What we are witnessing right now seems to be a major restructuring of capitalist economies.

With AI and advanced automation of production, distribution and service provision (3D printing/manufacturing, drone technology, driverless vehicles, lab grown food, farmerless farms, robotics, etc), a mass labour force – and therefore mass education, mass welfare, mass healthcare provision and entire systems that were in place to reproduce labour for capitalist economic activity – will no longer be required. As economic activity is restructured, labour’s relationship to capital is being transformed.

In a reorganised system that no longer needs to sell the virtues of excessive individualism (consumerism), the levels of political and civil rights and freedoms we have been used to will not be tolerated.

Neoliberalism might have reached its logical conclusion (for now). Making trade unions toothless, beating down wages to create unimaginable levels of inequality and (via the dismantling of Bretton Woods) affording private capital so much freedom to secure profit and political clout under the guise of ‘globalisation’ would inevitably lead to one outcome.

A concentration of wealth, power, ownership and control at the top with large sections of the population on state-controlled universal basic income and everyone subjected to the discipline of an emerging biosecurity surveillance state designed to curtail liberties ranging from freedom of movement and assembly to political protest and free speech.

Perception management is, of course, vital for pushing through all of this. Rhetoric about ‘liberty’ and ‘individual responsibility’ worked a treat in the 1980s to help bring about a massive heist of wealth. This time, a public health scare and ‘collective responsibility’ for the well-being of others is being used to help move towards near-monopolistic control over economies by a handful of global players.  

And the perception of freedom is also being managed. Once vaccinated many will begin to feel free. Freer than under lockdown. But just how free remains to be seen.

Nationalism on the Decline

Lawrence Wittner

Although, beginning in about 2015, nationalist political parties made enormous advances in countries around the world, more recently they have been on the wane.

The nationalist surge was led by a new generation of rightwing populist demagogues who, feeding on public discontent with widespread immigration and economic stagnation, achieved startling political breakthroughs. Matteo Salvini of Italy, Geert Wilders of the Netherlands, and Marine Le Pen of France catapulted their fringe political movements into major party status. In Britain, Nigel Farage’s United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) startled mainstream parties by winning a referendum calling for Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union. Donald Trump, championing an “America First” policy, shocked political pundits by emerging victorious in the 2016 U.S. presidential race. Two years later, in Brazil, the flamboyant Jair Bolsonaro, campaigning under the slogan “Brazil Above Everything,” was easily elected president of his country. In May 2019, Narendra Modi’s BJP, a Hindu nationalist party, won a landslide election victory in India.

As the acknowledged leader of the rightwing, nationalist uprising in these and other nations, Trump forged close contacts with his overseas counterparts and pulled the U.S. government out of international treaties, as well as out of global institutions. “Wise leaders always put the good of their own people and their own country first,” he admonished the UN General Assembly in September 2019. “The future does not belong to globalists. The future belongs to patriots.”

But, even as he spoke, the nationalist momentum was beginning to falter. In Europe, every nationalist political success during 2019 was matched by a defeat. Although, in Spain, the small, anti-immigrant Vox Party gained seats, in Austria, the nationalist Freedom Party experienced major setbacks, while Britain’s once-powerful UKIP and Greece’s rabid Golden Dawn movement virtually disappeared. Meanwhile, in Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s nationalist party suffered stinging election defeats in the nation’s three largest cities.

Things went further downhill for the nationalists in 2020. A loss by Modi’s BJP in Delhi that February added to its string of regional election defeats. In Italy, Salvini’s Northern League suffered an election rout and the center-left Democratic Party replaced it in the coalition government. Meanwhile, in France, Le Pen’s National Rally party went down to a resounding defeat in the July 2020 local elections and, in November, Brazil’s Bolsonaro was humiliated when most of the candidates he campaigned for failed to win election. Perhaps the most significant nationalist defeat occurred that November in the United States, where Trump lost his presidential re-election campaign by 7 million votes and his radicalized Republican Party failed to recapture the House of Representatives, which it had lost in 2018.

This year, the nationalist defeats have turned into a rout. In January, Trump’s Republicans lost special Senate elections, ending their party’s control of the U.S. Senate. In March, Erdogan’s political control of Turkey crumbled still further, as polls found support for his nationalist party slipping dramatically. This May, Modi’s BJP lost another regional election.

Much the same occurred this June. In Germany, where the nationalist Alternative for Germany was projected to score an upset victory in a state election, it drew a disappointing 20.8 percent of the vote—not much more than half the percentage garnered by the Christian Democratic victors and considerably less than the total secured by the leftwing parties. In Brazil, clear signs emerged that the Bolsonaro regime, with record unpopularity, was tottering toward collapse. Finally, in France, where Marine Le Pen’s party was predicted to have a good chance of triumphing in six of the country’s 13 regional elections, it ended up defeated in every one of them.

As the nationalist tide has receded, governments have turned to reviving the international institutions and agreements battered during the previous years. These include the United Nations, the World Health Organization, the Paris Climate Accords, and key nuclear disarmament agreements. In another sign of their willingness to engage in global action, major governments have proposed a global minimum tax on corporations.

How can this change in the fortunes of nationalist parties be explained?

One factor behind the political turnabout is that the style, policies, and behavior of some of the leading nationalist politicians set off alarm bells in the minds of many people and political parties about authoritarianism, and even fascism. Some of these politicians, in fact, displayed fascist tendencies and, also, encouraged violent, right-wing action by their supporters. Consequently, uneasy voters and parties, anxious to preserve democracy and political freedom, were willing to make political compromises, such as uniting behind the most electable alternative to the nationalist candidate.

A deeper reason, though, is that, in a world faced with global problems such as a disease pandemic, climate catastrophe, a nuclear arms race, and economic inequality, a nationalist approach doesn’t make much sense. Recognizing this, most of the public gravitates toward global solutions. A Pew Research Center poll in the summer of 2020 found that 81 percent of the 14,276 people interviewed in 14 nations thought that “countries around the world should act as part of a global community that works together to solve problems.” Some 76 percent approved of the role of the United Nations in promoting human rights and 74 percent in promoting peace, while 63 percent said that the WHO had done a good job handling the COVID-19 crisis.

Of course, despite the recent setbacks experienced by nationalist parties, they are far from dead. They have succeeded in establishing themselves as part of the political landscape and today govern a variety of countries, including Brazil, Hungary, India, Poland, and Turkey. In the United States, the Trump-dominated Republican Party controls numerous state governments and stands a reasonable chance of recapturing control of the federal government.

Even so, the political tide has recently turned against nationalism and, consequently, possibilities have re-emerged for addressing global problems on a global basis.

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.