Far-right thugs attack prominent Ukrainian journalist Ruslan Kotsaba

Jason Melanovski

In another of many recent assaults on the press in Ukraine, pacifist journalist Ruslan Kotsaba suffered a chemical attack from far-right thugs on June 25 while exiting from a train in the Western city of Ivano-Frankivsk, Kotsaba's hometown.

Ruslan Kotsaba posted this picture of himself on his Facebook account after the far-right attack

Kotsaba was later treated for extensive chemical burns to his eyes and doctors warned he may suffer permanent vision loss as a result of the attack.

Among the 15 suspected attackers who threw a green chemical substance at Kotsaba and yelled “Glory to Ukraine!,” Kotsaba recognized one as leader of the infamous neo-Nazi Right Sector paramilitary group. The Right Sector was prominently involved in the US- and EU-backed coup in Kiev in February 2014, which toppled the pro-Russian government of Viktor Yanukovich.

Following the attack, another far-right paramilitary group called “Trident” claimed responsibility for the attack. Members of the country's numerous other fascist gangs expressed support for the assault.

The attack in many ways resembles the 2018 killing of Ukrainian activist and politician Kateryna Handziuk. Handziuk was horribly burned with acid by members of the Right Sector and ultimately died from her injuries.

Despite the horrific nature of Handziuk's murder, her killers have never been convicted.

In almost all cases involving such fascist elements in Ukraine, the culprits are rarely prosecuted or receive light sentences due to their usefulness to the right-wing Ukrainian government in carrying out the war in Eastern Ukraine and crushing political opposition.

Since the installation of a pro-NATO government in Kiev in 2014, eleven journalists have been killed according to International Press Institute (IPI) data.

The fact that Kotsaba's attackers were waiting on the train platform suggests that his attackers had either trailed Kotsaba or were tipped off by elements within the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU), which is controlled by Interior Minister Arsen Avakov who himself is notorious for his ties to Ukraine’s neo-Nazis.

Previously, Kotsaba had been targeted several times by right-wing thugs due to his well-known pacifist stance towards the ongoing civil war in eastern Ukraine that has killed 14,000 and displaced tens of thousands. In addition, Kotsaba opposes Ukraine’s accession to NATO, a goal which is now central to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

In 2015, Kotsaba was arrested and imprisoned for “treason” after he posted a YouTube video opposing the war mobilization initiated by former President Petro Poroshenko against the breakaway provinces of Donetsk and Lugansk in the eastern Donbass region of the country.

“I would rather go to prison than go into civil war now and kill my compatriots who live in the East. I will not take part in this fratricidal war,' Kotsaba declared in the video that was viewed over 500,000 times at a time when opposition to war was virtually outlawed by the capitalist Ukrainian media.

Kotsaba himself had previously been a right-wing Ukrainian nationalist and supported the 2004 US-backed “Orange Revolution”. On videos on his YouTube channel, he has made blatantly anti-Semitic and anti-Communist statements. In one of them, he described the Holocaust, which claimed over a million lives in Ukraine alone, as “punishment” for “the Jews” allegedly having brought forth “Trotsky, Kamenev, Zinoviev” as well as Nazism, indicating his far-right political orientation at the time.

Today, he describes himself as a libertarian. Following the outbreak of the civil war in the East in 2014, he became an outspoken and prominent opponent of the Ukrainian government’s military action against the Russian-backed separatists and civilian population.

While working as a national TV correspondent in 2014, Kotsaba reported on the escalating hostilities in the Donbass region and was horrified by the seemingly wanton violence carried out by the Ukrainian army against civilians in Eastern Ukraine. “The smell of rotting human flesh haunts me from the beginning of summer when my first trip to the area of hostilities began. I spent too many sleepless nights and saw too many smoldering corpses to be silent after that,” Kotsaba wrote while behind bars awaiting trial.

Kotsaba would ultimately spend 524 days in jail awaiting trial before being acquitted in 2016 and then retried and acquitted again in 2017.

In January this year, Kotsaba was attacked by a far-right mob and sprayed with a fire extinguisher while attending yet another hearing in the still unresolved case against him by the Ukrainian government.

Unlike the case of the extremely right-wing anti-Putin oppositionist Alexei Navalny in Russia, who receives near weekly coverage from the New York Times, Kotsaba’s case is almost unknown outside of Ukraine as it is being purposefully ignored by the bourgeois press.

Within Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky has notably failed to comment on the attack. Instead, he has spent the past week sending out tweets supporting the Ukrainian national soccer team in this year's European Championships. Apart from their on-field performance, Ukraine's national team made international news by jingoistically placing a map of Ukraine on their jersey that includes Crimea, a peninsula in the Black Sea that Russia annexed in March 2014, following the far-right coup in Kiev.

The attack on Kotsaba takes place as the Zelensky government continues to engage in blatant jingoism and provocative moves towards Russia in the wake of the confrontation between a British destroyer warship HMS Defender and Russian patrol ships in the Black Sea. At the time when the attack occurred, the US and Ukraine were also in the middle of co-hosting the massive Sea Breeze naval exercise in the Black Sea despite official requests by Russia to cancel it.

While the government of Zelensky was elected above all because of popular opposition to the nationalist, militaristic regime of former President Poroshenko that had come to power after the 2014 coup, Zelensky has in many ways gone even further than Poroshenko in bringing Ukraine to the brink of war with Russia.

Earlier this year, Zelensky announced an overtly aggressive policy to retake Crimea, undemocratically cracked down on the press and sanctioned and prosecuted pro-Russian oligarch and opposition politician, Viktor Medvedchuk.

Recently, Zelensky acknowledged that peace negotiations over the breakaway provinces were going nowhere and floated the idea of totally blockading the seperatist regions and cutting off all ties. He spoke of a necessary “Plan B” that “we are in,” and threatened to build a “wall in all relations,” including communications and cutting off waters supplies to cities like Mariupol.

Zelensky is well aware that in order to enforce such a blockade, he would need the backing of both NATO and the far-right, who continue to play an oversized role in conducting the war against Donbass and in crushing any potential political opposition by the working class.

Official COVID-19 death toll worldwide reaches four million

Benjamin Mateus

Since the first confirmed death from COVID-19, a 61-year-old man who frequented the Hunan wet market in Wuhan, that occurred on January 11, 2020, as of this writing, 541 days and 3,996,185 lives (according to the Worldometer dashboard) have passed, a rate of almost 7,400 lives per day.

By the time the extended July 4 weekend will have concluded, the number of lives lost will have exceeded 4 million confirmed deaths, with the highest death toll in the United States at 621,300 lives, of which almost 200,000 have taken place since Joe Biden became president.

A health worker records the information of patients who died of complications related to COVID-19, at the morgue of the Regional Hospital in Zipaquira, Colombia, Monday, June 28, 2021. Colombia has become a pandemic hotspot as it experiences a third wave of COVID-19 infections and a surge in deaths. (AP Photo/Ivan Valencia)

According to a report published in June 2021 by Think Global Health, COVID-19 was the fourth leading cause of death globally. It accounted for 1 in 20 deaths (5 percent) of all deaths worldwide since the pandemic erupted in early 2020. If excess death estimates are employed, it would become the third leading cause of death in the world, ahead of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and just behind stroke and heart disease, with “an estimated 7.5 million deaths, or one out of every ten deaths.” (Estimates are based on revised data published by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation)

The report continues, “According to official statistics, COVID-19 was the leading cause of death in France, Spain, England, and several US states. But after accounting for undercounting of COVID-19 deaths, it was the leading cause of death in the United States, Iran, and Italy...”

There have been almost 185 million COVID-19 cases reported globally. Weekly statistics tracked by the World Health Organization (WHO) have seen a rise in COVID-19 cases for two consecutive weeks as Delta variant cases have been detected in almost 100 countries and climbing. It is rapidly supplanting all previous coronavirus strains except across South America, where the gamma variant (or P1, first detected in Brazil) continues to batter the continent with high case and death rates.

As Figure 1 demonstrates, week on week, the most significant burden of death, throughout most of the pandemic, has been carried by the high-income countries. Up to the beginning of April 2020, the US, Europe, and Brazil were considered the COVID-19 pandemic epicenters. Since the initiation of the COVID-19 vaccination campaign, new cases across Europe and the US have been trending rapidly down, consistent with the benefits afforded by the COVID-19 vaccine’s life-saving effects.

Figure 1 - Weekly death rates by WHO region

There has been a discernible shift in the pandemic, with middle- and low-income nations, where vaccination rates remain abysmally low, now becoming the main epicenters of the pandemic.

Over 3.2 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered worldwide, equating to 42 doses for every 100 people. Africa has only been able to provide 3.8 doses per 100 people so far. According to the COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access initiative (COVAX), they have only delivered 95 million doses of vaccines to 134 participating countries.

Commencing in April and then through June, India faced a blistering high case and death rate, ushering in the pandemic’s shift from the wealthier to the poorer countries. In those three months, India reported 18.2 million COVID-19 cases and 235,000 COVID-19 deaths, a byproduct of the reckless and criminal policies implemented by Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party. For the entire pandemic, India has reported 34.6 million COVID-19 infections and over 400,000 deaths.

The continued high the death toll in the Americas, as demonstrated by Figure 1, masks a shift away from the US and towards the countries of Latin America. Though these reported figures are underestimates, South America has thus far reported over 33 million COVID-19 cases and over 1 million deaths. Brazil has claimed the lion’s share of these numbers with 18.8 million COVID-19 infections and over half a million deaths. However, Colombia, Argentina, Chile, and Peru also have faced recent catastrophic surges.

Figure 2 - Weekly case and death rates across the African continent

However, it is the shift of the pandemic to the African continent, home to 1.2 billion people, nearly all unvaccinated and previously unexposed to the virus, that has many international public health agencies extremely anxious. The WHO regional office for Africa has reported that cases have been rising by 25 percent every week for more than six weeks. Deaths due to COVID-19 are climbing exponentially.

Matshidiso Moeti, the regional director for the WHO, said, “The speed and scale of Africa’s third wave is like nothing we have seen before. Cases are doubling every three weeks, compared to every four weeks at the start of the second wave. Almost 202,000 cases were reported in the past week, and the continent is on the verge of exceeding its worst week ever in this pandemic.” She explained that there are more people falling ill who require hospitalization, including those younger than 45 years. Additionally, the Delta variant appears to be causing a more severe and a more extended period of illness. She made an urgent appeal for countries to share their excess vaccine doses to shore up the languishing vaccine gap amid the pandemic’s worst wave.

WHO Regional Director of Africa, Matshidiso Moeti

Yet, despite the gains seen in the last few months across Europe and the US, case numbers have turned upward again, including now the death count in Europe (a lagging indicator). With tourism and the opening of economic activities well under way, these initiatives will further fuel the spread of the virus deep into every corner of the planet.

Instead of heeding the implications of these statistics and calling for public health measures to remain in place or be resumed, especially in the context of the highly transmissible Delta variant that is rapidly dominating all other strains, President Biden and his counterparts in Europe have in all essence declared the pandemic officially over.

Mark Honigsbaum, author of the recent volume on mass disease outbreaks, The Pandemic Century, has remarked, “Few events are as compelling as an epidemic. When sufficiently severe, an epidemic evokes responses from every sector of society, laying bare social and economic fault lines and presenting politicians with fraught medical and moral choices. In the most extreme cases, an epidemic can foment a full-blown political crisis.”

Unlike previous global scourges that afflicted human civilizations, the COVID-19 pandemic is unique because the world possesses the science and technology necessary to track and eradicate the virus. At the same time, resources can be provided to everyone to endure the essential inconveniences such as school closures, lockdowns, restrictions in movement, travel mitigation, and social distancing, necessary public health measures to bring the number of infections down to zero.

The ruling classes have openly and insidiously promoted a policy of mass infection at every turn in the pandemic, only pausing through limited or brief lockdowns when health care systems became so inundated that no other recourse would suffice. They ignored the science that demonstrated schools and children were critical vectors of the pandemic. And have used vaccine nationalism to substitute for necessary public health policies to protect lives.

The pandemic has claimed at least 4 million lives that should have never been lost, had the ruling elites of the major capitalist countries placed lives and livelihoods ahead of their profit interests and used their trillions in resources to end it. Their failure to do so demonstrates the utter bankruptcy of capitalism and the historical necessity for socialism.

Washington’s Afghanistan debacle deepens after troop withdrawal

Bill Van Auken

In the wake of last week’s withdrawal of the great bulk of US troops from Afghanistan after 20 years of occupation and war, the US military and intelligence apparatus is scrambling to set up means for continuing attacks inside the country.

An Afghan army soldier walks past Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles, MRAP, that were left after the American military left Bagram air base, in Parwan province north of Kabul, Afghanistan, Monday, July 5, 2021. The U.S. left Afghanistan's Bagram Airfield after nearly 20 years. (AP Photo/Rahmat Gul)

Last Friday, the Pentagon abandoned the sprawling Bagram Air Base, long the center of US military operations in the country. Reports have since emerged from Afghanistan that the American forces departed like thieves in the night, failing to notify the new Afghan commander that they were leaving, and plunging the facility into darkness by cutting power on the way out. Their departure was followed by the invasion of the base by an army of looters who grabbed everything they could of supplies abandoned by the US military.

This ignominious end to the longest war in US history is emblematic of the unmitigated debacle of the US intervention in Afghanistan, which claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of Afghans, along with those of more than 4,000 US troops and military contractors, while costing trillions of dollars.

The depth of this debacle has been further demonstrated by the ever-worsening rout of the US-trained Afghan security forces ostensibly loyal to the puppet government of President Ashraf Ghani in Kabul. The Taliban insurgents have overrun fully a quarter of the country’s district centers in recent weeks, on top of territory the Islamist movement already controlled.

On Monday, the Tolo news agency reported that 13 districts had fallen to the Taliban in the space of 24 hours—11 in the northeast, one in the east and one in the south—the highest number of areas taken thus far by the insurgents in a single day.

In many cases, the Afghan troops have fled or surrendered their positions as well as their US-supplied weapons without putting up any resistance, and a number of soldiers have gone over to the Taliban. Morale within the Afghan army is low, with troops well aware that their commanders have subordinated their welfare to a host of corruption schemes that have enriched the senior officer corps. In some cases, soldiers may have concluded that they are more likely to be paid by the Taliban than by an army in which commanders routinely steal the salaries of their troops.

On Monday, the government of Tajikistan’s national security committee reported that 1,037 Afghan government troops had fled across Afghanistan’s northeastern border into the former Soviet republic to escape the Taliban offensive.

“Taking into account the principle of good neighborliness and adhering to the position of non-interference in the internal affairs of Afghanistan, the military personnel of the Afghan government forces were allowed to enter Tajik territory,” said the statement, published by Tajikistan’s state information agency.

In the north, the Taliban has taken over key border crossings as well as entire districts that it was unable to even enter when it constituted the national government between 1996 and 2001. While emerging from the predominantly Pashtun areas of eastern and southern Afghanistan, the Taliban has in recent years recruited fighters from among ethnic Tajiks, Hazaras and other minority populations.

Developments on the ground are seeming to confirm the reported worst-case scenario presented by US intelligence analysts that the government could fall to a resurgent Taliban within the space of six months.

In an attempt to prop up the Afghan puppet forces, the Pentagon has announced changes to the withdrawal schedule, which has already seen virtually all of the allied NATO forces leave the country and all but a small residual contingent of US troops. Some 650 American soldiers are reportedly being left behind to secure the massive US embassy in Kabul as well as the Afghan capital’s airport. Another force of 300 troops is being placed on standby for a possible crisis evacuation of US personnel, along the lines of the evacuation of Saigon in 1975.

Gen. Scott Miller, the senior commander of US forces in Afghanistan, is remaining in the country for a few additional weeks to coordinate the post-withdrawal liaison between the Pentagon and Afghan puppet forces. He is set to travel to different areas of the country as well as to the NATO headquarters in Brussels and to what will now be the most forward US base for Afghan operations in Qatar in what one senior official described to the New York Times as “a hand-holding tour.”

General Miller gave a grim assessment of Afghanistan from the standpoint of US imperialism in an interview Sunday with ABC News.

“The loss of terrain and the rapidity of that loss of terrain has… has to be concerning,” he said, warning that the Taliban’s advance could lead Afghans to conclude that their victory is “a foregone conclusion.” He added, “I would like us not to just turn our backs on this.”

Perhaps of greater substantive significance for the Afghan security forces, the Pentagon is also extending the contracts for a few hundred of the 18,000 US military contractors deployed in Afghanistan in order to continue supporting Afghan warplanes and Black Hawk air assault helicopters, which have been the principal prop of the government’s security forces.

The Pentagon, the CIA and the White House are still working out command-and-control protocols for continuing US operations in Afghanistan following the troop withdrawal. The US military will retain the power to support Afghan puppet forces with airstrikes against the Taliban, according to CNN.

The CIA, however, may remain in charge of operations directed at assassinating alleged “terrorists” inside Afghanistan.

US President Joe Biden has spoken of Washington retaining an “over the horizon” capability for intervening in Afghanistan, which could include everything from US airstrikes carried out by warplanes flying from the Persian Gulf to drone missile strikes and assassination raids by CIA or special forces kill teams.

Japanese defense official questions the “One China” policy

Ben McGrath

Japan’s State Minister of Defense, Yasuhide Nakayama, has called into question the “One China” policy, which states that Taiwan is a part of China and has been the basis for Tokyo’s relations with Beijing for nearly 50 years. Nakayama, who serves as deputy to Defense Minister Nobuo Kishi, was taking part in an online event hosted by the rightwing Hudson Institute think tank in Washington on June 28.

Yasuhide Nakayama, State Minister of Foreign Affairs for Japan (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

Speaking in imperfect English, Nakayama, who serves as deputy to Defense Minister Nobuo Kishi, commented, “In the 1970s, the United States policy and also all over the world, [thought] China would become one, so it [tried] the ‘One China’ policy… The decision at that time and now since the 1970s…what happen[ed] and the results of the decision-making…Was it right? I don’t know.”

Nakayama’s challenge to the “One China” policy is in line with Japan’s efforts to remilitarize, and build up for war in alliance with the United States. The Japanese ruling class is attempting to abrogate Article 9 of the constitution, known as the pacifist clause, which bans Tokyo from waging war overseas. In doing so, the ruling class wants to be free to use military means to advance its imperialist interests and offset three decades of stagnant economic growth.

Nakayama justified Japan’s involvement in a future war with China over Taiwan, saying Okinawa Prefecture in the East China Sea would be impacted by events on the island. Tokyo claims that Beijing was acting aggressively in the region and represents a danger to Japan. In reality, Washington has steadily ramped up its confrontation with Beijing since the Obama administration, turning minor territorial disputes into flashpoints, is using Taiwan to further demonize China.

Tokyo is also using the supposed China threat to increase military spending, beyond the self-imposed ceiling of one percent of GDP. Echoing his remarks in May, Defense Minister Kishi stated on June 24, “Our defense spending should be based on what equipment and personnel the country needs for its defense, as well as the national security situation.” Tokyo’s military budget for 2021 is already a record high 5.34 trillion yen ($US51.7 billion).

China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin sharply criticized Nakayama on June 29, saying, “The politician in question flagrantly refers to Taiwan as a ‘country’ on multiple occasions, severely violating principles set out in the four political documents including the Japan-China Joint Communiqué (of 1972) and its solemn and repeated commitment of not seeing Taiwan as a country. We ask Japan to make crystal clarification, and ensure that such things won’t happen again.”

In his comments, Nakayama called Taiwan the “red line of the 21st century,” effectively threatening war over the island. Echoing Washington, Nakayama repeatedly claimed it was necessary to “protect Taiwan as a democratic country.”

Neither Tokyo nor Washington is concerned about democratic rights in Taiwan, which Japan ruthlessly ruled as a colony from 1895 to 1945. The characterization of Taiwan as “democratic” ignores the island’s history of military dictatorship, and is aimed at poisoning public opinion towards China, in preparation for war.

Taiwan first reverted to China’s control after World War II. Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang (KMT) then fled to Taiwan, following their defeat in the 1949 Chinese Revolution. As throughout China, the KMT was deeply unpopular on the island. As many as 28,000 people had already been killed by government troops two years earlier, in what became known as the February 28 Incident. Declining economic conditions and anger towards government corruption had erupted in mass protests, leading to the massacres.

These killings marked the beginning of a decades-long period known as the White Terror. In 1949, the KMT imposed martial law on the island, which would not be lifted until 1987. Some areas of Taiwan continued to be under martial law until the early 1990s. This was ignored by Washington, which saw the island as a bastion of anti-communism, and a base of operations against the People’s Republic of China.

Despite the US rapprochement with China in 1972, directed against the Soviet Union and its tacit acceptance of the “One China” policy in establishing formal diplomatic relations with Beijing in 1979, Washington maintained ties to Taipei and supplied it with arms against China.

Under martial law, the government suppressed free speech and the right to assembly. It strictly controlled newspapers, even down to the number of pages, with anti-government sentiment barred from publication. New political parties were also banned. The Taiwan Garrison Command, the island’s secret police until 1992, arrested at least 140,000 people, with many of them sentenced to long prison terms and tortured. Approximately 8,000 people were executed. The real totals are believed to be much higher.

In 2007, while marking the 20th anniversary of the lifting of martial law, Michael Hsiao, a sociology professor at Academia Sinica, and now senior advisor to current President Tsai Ing-wen, told the BBC that the KMT government “put a lot of effort to control people’s thinking, people’s reading. Economic and everyday social life wasn’t so tightly controlled, but in political life, things were strict. They put people in jail—there was no freedom of expression.”

Facing growing popular opposition, the government of Chiang Ching-kuo, the son of Chiang Kai-shek, who had died in 1975, lifted martial law in 1987, but the KMT ensured that many of the same restrictions and anti-democratic provisions were included in a new National Security Law, which remains in effect to this day.

The KMT turned to the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), illegally established in 1986, as a means of controlling popular discontent. However, the DPP, Taiwan’s current ruling party, does not speak for the democratic aspirations of the Taiwanese working class and youth, but instead for a layer of big business that seeks greater access to wealth, through the removal of restrictions imposed by the “One China” policy.

While the DPP and its supporters suffered under martial law, it follows in the anti-democratic KMT’s footsteps. In December 2019, Taiwan’s lawmaking body, the Legislative Yuan, controlled by the DPP, passed a so-called “anti-interference” law to heighten penalties for those accused of acting on Beijing’s behalf. The law focuses on political donations, lobbying, disrupting elections, aiding elections, or disrupting social order.

The anti-democratic framework established under the KMT dictatorship remains in place today, supported by the DPP. As workers in Taiwan and throughout the Asia-Pacific region increasingly move into confrontation with capitalism, these same anti-democratic laws will be used to clamp down on political dissent.

Israel faces new coronavirus outbreak due to the Delta variant

Josh Varlin

Israel, the world’s third-most vaccinated country by share of the population, is experiencing a new outbreak of COVID-19 due to the more contagious Delta variant. The Health Ministry reported 343 new cases on July 4, the most cases in three months. Since first being detected on April 16, the Delta variant now comprises 90 percent of coronavirus cases in Israel.

Israelis receive a COVID-19 vaccine from medical professionals at a coronavirus vaccination center set up on a shopping mall parking lot in Givataim, Israel. (AP Photo/Oded Balilty)

The outbreak is particularly concerning given Israel’s vaccination program. According to Our World in Data, Israel has currently given at least one dose to 65 percent of its population, bested only by the United Kingdom’s 67 percent and Canada’s 69 percent. Until early June, Israel was the most vaccinated country by this metric. About 56 percent of Israelis are fully vaccinated, most with the vaccine produced by Pfizer.

The Health Ministry expects new cases to increase to 500-600 per day this week, while a team at Hebrew University warn that daily cases could reach 1,000 in two weeks. Daily new cases peaked at an all time high on January 17 with a seven-day-average just over of 8,600 per day and fell to a low of less than 10 on June 9.

With the resurgence of the virus, the government has reinstituted some measures, including an indoor mask mandate, and has resumed meetings of the so-called coronavirus cabinet.

Not only is the Delta variant more contagious, but it also appears to partially evade immunity provided by the vaccines which had previously been regarded as the most effective, including the Pfizer-BioNTech mRNA vaccine. According to the Ynet news site, Health Ministry data show that the Pfizer vaccine is now 64 percent effective in preventing infection, whereas before the rise of the Delta variant in Israel it was 94.3 percent effective.

This is corroborated by a study from Hadassah University Medical Center and Hebrew University, which estimate the Pfizer vaccine’s effectiveness against the Delta COVID-19 variant at 60-80 percent.

However, the vaccines do seem to largely protect against severe disease, hospitalization and death. Ynet reports that recent Health Ministry data show 93 percent effectiveness against severe disease, whereas previously it was 98.2 percent. Given the delay between infection and hospitalization, and between hospitalization and death, the real effectiveness against the Delta variant may be slightly lower.

This is comparable to initial data from the UK and Singapore on severe illness.

It is clear that, by not isolating vaccinated travelers returning from overseas and lifting social distancing and masking measures, the Israeli government missed an opportunity to curtail the Delta variant before it became entrenched in the country. Haaretz reports: “More than half of the new coronavirus patients are vaccinated (51 percent), according to the health ministry. Only 15 were returning travelers. One third of the new patients were children under 11, and another 13 percent were aged 12 to 18. In 50,000 tests carried out, 0.7 percent returned positive results.”

Outbreaks in Israel have been traced back to vaccinated individuals, including 75 high school students who got infected at a party after it spread from a vaccinated tourist to a vaccinated relative.

Despite the danger, particularly to teenagers and children, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett declared, “We do not want to impose any limits—not on parties, or on trips, or on anything,” and urged those 12 and older to get vaccinated.

More stringent measures are reportedly under discussion, but have not been implemented. The Times of Israel reports, “Former Health Ministry deputy director-general Itamar Grotto said the country should consider returning to the ‘Green Pass’ system that differentiates between vaccinated and non-vaccinated citizens regarding access to certain venues and activities.”

The “Green Pass” system ended on June 1, and had allowed vaccinated or those who recovered from a COVID-19 infection to eat indoors and attend certain events earlier than the population as a whole.

The Times of Israel also reported that the Israeli “Health Ministry is also considering mandating vaccinated parents of children who test positive for COVID[-19] to remain in quarantine until they receive a negative test … though the health minister expressed reservations about the economic toll of such a step.”

Meanwhile, the Delta variant continues to spread internationally and has become or is rapidly becoming dominant in a number of countries, including the United States. With practically every country less vaccinated than Israel (the US has 54 percent of its population at least partially vaccinated, for example, and only 24 percent of people worldwide are at least partially vaccinated), the dangers are immense for the majority of the population.

Moreover, these developments underscore a number of conclusions about the available vaccines and the way forward against the pandemic: First, the vaccines are remarkably effective, even against the worst variants thus far. It is a remarkable achievement of the human ability to scientifically understand the world that highly effective vaccines have been developed and distributed rapidly against a novel virus.

Second, the vaccines are not a “silver bullet” against the pandemic. The COVID-19 virus, through selective pressure, has and will continue to evolve to evade immunity as long as it is allowed to spread anywhere. While current evidence indicates it is unlikely that the Delta variant will produce a wave of infections in Israel as deadly as earlier ones, future variants may well evade immunity more comprehensively.

Amid political and COVID crises, social inequality rises sharply in Peru

Armando Cruz & Cesar Uco

With Peru still gripped by a political crisis stemming from the month-long delay in announcing the winner of the June 6 second round of the presidential election, the masses of working people are confronting increasingly desperate conditions driven by the handling of the COVID-19 pandemic by the Peruvian and international ruling classes.

Supporters of presidential candidate Pedro Castillo gather near a ballot counting site, in Lima, Peru, Tuesday, June 8, 2021. (AP Photo/Martin Mejia)

While Peruvian workers have seen their living standards devastated, the bourgeoisie has been untouched by the same crisis or has, as in all other capitalist countries of the world, even increased its wealth.

The country is facing what has been described as a slow-motion coup, as the fujimorista Fuerza Popular (FP) party continues its bid to annul the recent presidential elections in which the candidate of FP, Keiko Fujimori, lost to Pedro Castillo of Peru Libre by a slim margin of 44,058 out of a total of 25,287,954 votes cast.

Whichever of the two candidates is sworn in as president on July 28, the crisis facing the working class will only deepen. In the final analysis, the two candidates offer the Peruvian ruling establishment alternative means of suppressing an eruption of social unrest in response to intolerable economic conditions. Fujimori represents the politics of authoritarianism and iron-fist repression; while Castillo offers a means of diverting the struggles of the working class by means of populist and reformist promises that he and his circle know he will not fulfill as they scramble to reassure Peruvian and foreign capital that they will defend their profit interests.

Economic inequality had been growing since 2014, when a 12-year run of sustained growth in the national GDP driven by a mining boom came to an end. The pandemic has dramatically worsened an already precarious economic situation for the working class.

Amid growing unemployment and poverty, the Peruvian bourgeoisie and the transnational mining corporations are determined to restart the process of extracting surplus value from the working class, regardless of the continuing sickness and death caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Peru has by far the highest per capita COVID-19 death toll in the world.

Even while demanding an economic reopening, companies and individuals are hedging their bets, transferring the enormous sum of US$ 17 billion abroad, fearing that a government headed by Pedro Castillo will prove incapable of disciplining the working class.

Living standards are being eroded by inflation, with consumer prices jumping by 3.2 percent compared to a year ago. The increase in prices mainly affects the “basic food basket” upon which working class families depend. According to the state statistics agency INEI: the price of butter has soared by 100 percent; flour, 30 percent; yeast, 20 percent; sugar, 115 percent, and salt, 25 percent. Also from INEI, the retail price of chicken increased by 9.7 percent from June 2020 to June 2021, but the wholesale price of chicken rose 122 percent in the same period.

As Peru produces only 9.5 percent of the wheat it consumes—the rest is imported from Canada, the US, Argentina and Russia—the rise in international prices has caused demand to fall by 50 percent. Thirty percent of bakeries that only sell bread are at risk of closing, and another 500 are expected to close by the end of the year.

The most telling figure in terms of escalating social inequality is that of the exponential growth of poverty. According to the INEI, the number of families declared poor in Peru has risen from 20 percent to 30 percent of the population. This figure means that poverty reduction over the past decade has been wiped out in a single year.

The real scope of poverty is far greater, given the shameful metrics employed by the government. According to the INEI, a family of five people is considered poor if its income is no more than 810 soles per month (US$210 per month), or US$2,520 annually. The depth of poverty in Peru is tied to the domination of the informal sector in terms of employment, which today accounts for 77 percent, up from 74 percent before the economic paralysis associated with the pandemic.

Meanwhile, according to the economic daily Gestión, 31 percent of companies say they will reach pre-COVID production levels by the end of 2022, but 30 percent say they will never return to the employment levels of 2019.

The WSWS spoke with two single mothers who explain how the pandemic has affected them economically.

A young woman who lives in the working-class and lower-middle-class neighborhood of Los Olivos, and who gave birth last May, said:

“A few months ago I lost my job because I was pregnant. It is a worker’s right to have maternity leave, but my boss is not interested in my rights. This is how informality works in Peru.

“In the end, I decided not to sue him. Justice in Peru is very precarious, especially when it comes to health and social issues. It has gotten worse given the political environment we live in.

“Food is very expensive due to the rise in the dollar. So I have no choice but to eat rice and eggs. I have no support from anyone, and the money I had saved to pay for college has gone to buy diapers.

“With my newborn baby and jobless, I have no choice but to leave my apartment in Los Olivos. I’m going to live with my sister in the hills of Ancón, which is very far away. There is no water or drainage, the hill is covered with sand, but I will have peace.

“Peru is very rich. There shouldn’t be so many poor people.”

Another woman ,who lives in San Juan de Miraflores in a southern cono —underdeveloped areas on the periphery of the capital—and who was recently widowed after her husband died of COVID-19, said:

“I am a mother of two children and I have not had a steady source of income since my husband died of COVID-19 more than a year ago, in the first wave.

“The rise in the dollar is affecting us all. Luckily my rent is in soles. But my landlord is shrewd. He says he understands my situation, but he doesn’t lower my rent. I have to borrow from my sisters so they don’t throw me out on the street.”

While these conditions are shared by millions of workers and poor, reports tell a very different story in terms of how the bourgeoisie and the well-to-do sections of the middle class have coped with the pandemic.

For example:

• Online and credit card transactions, reserved mostly for the wealthier layers of the population, have grown considerably.

• Supermarkets, which low-income people do not go to because they buy their goods in popular markets, have seen their sales grow by 13 percent.

• Demand for apartment improvements, decorative items and home repairs rose 39 percent annually, in part due to people with the highest-paying jobs working from home and stetting up rooms as offices.

The desperation of working people left without incomes has been expressed in the land invasions that have occurred in the poorest neighborhoods in southern Lima. Involved are both families that lost their homes, and people who have moved to the periphery of Lima in a desperate search for jobs. More than 10,000 families have been evicted from the informal settlements created in these land invasions in police in operations that, in many cases, have resorted to violence, using tear gas against defenseless families, including women and children.

According to Wood McKenzie, foreign investment in Peru’s mining sector, the main economic activity in the country, is expected to total US$34 billion over the next decade. Despite the international price of copper rising by 94 percent from May 2020 to May 2021, however, mining every day employs fewer personnel due to increasing automation in the mining sector. Currently, mining is not one of the main engines of employment growth.

The high international price of copper is generating super-profits. It is not surprising, then, that mining billionaires, such as the president of the Buena Ventura mining company, Roque Benavides, who is also the president of the association of the most powerful businessmen, CONFIEP, has stated his acceptance of president-elect Castillo’s proposal for a minor increase in taxes on mining. The thinking within at least a layer of Peru’s big business circles is that a small share of excess profits can be used in an attempt to assuage the growing unrest in the working class as well as the peasantry, which has seen agricultural and livestock lands devastated by large-scale mining.

Whatever measures are taken by a Castillo government committed to the defense of capitalist interests will prove too little, too late. The abrupt fall in living standards, combined with political instability and the corruption of the bourgeois state, have created the conditions for an explosive eruption of the class struggle in Peru.

Wall Street rise continues amid warnings of instability

Nick Beams

When the US jobs figures for June were issued on Friday, Wall Street’s S&P 500 and NASDAQ indexes both climbed to new record highs, because the jobs data were regarded as a “Goldilocks” moment—neither too hot, nor too cold.

A sign for a Wall Street building, Wednesday, May 19, 2021, in New York. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)

Coming in at 850,000, the jobs growth number—beating economists’ estimates of 720,000 and well above the figure of 583,000 for May—was regarded as a sign of recovery for the US economy, but not enough to push the Federal Reserve towards tightening its monetary policy, as the data showed there were still 9 million people unemployed, compared with 5.7 million in February 2020, before the pandemic hit.

As one analyst told the Financial Times, the jobs figures “couldn’t have delivered better news for Wall Street. Enough new jobs to confirm the economy is on a roll, [but] enough jobless to give the Fed’s current strategy a warm hug.”

Another part of the good news for Wall Street was that, despite evidence of labour shortages in parts of the US economy, and the payment of higher wages, the rise in average hourly earnings for the month was only 0.3 percent, down from the increases in April and May.

The significance of the wages, jobs growth and overall employment data for Wall Street is not so much what they signify in and of themselves—though that is factor—but their implications for the policies of the Fed.

Since the Fed’s massive intervention in March 2020, when it stepped in to halt a meltdown of the financial system with the injection of around $4 trillion, Wall Street has become ever more dependent on the flow of ultra-cheap money from the central bank.

This inflow is continuing at the rate of $120 billion a month—more than $1.4 trillion a year—through the purchase of Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities, and the financial markets are fearful that even a slight lessening of this support could have major effects.

Consequently, some analysts are issuing warnings that the present situation, in which markets continue to rise, based on continued economic growth, combined with monetary support from the Fed, is inherently unstable.

In a comment published in the Financial Times last week, Mohamed El-Erian noted that, as recorded by a recent Bank of America survey, markets were currently dominated by three core hypotheses: durable high economic growth; transitory inflation and “ever-friendly central banks.”

El-Erian wrote that while he did not have a serious quarrel with the higher growth scenario, he did “worry a great deal about the widespread conviction that the current rise in inflation will be transitory.”

He did not expect a return to the inflation levels of the 1970s, but “we have to respect the possibility of a shock to a financial system that has been conditioned and wired for the persistence of lower and more stable inflation.”

If inflation remains low, and present rises prove to be transitory, then the Fed will maintain low interest rates. But if that proves not to be the case, then “a late slamming of the brakes, rather than easing off the accelerator, would significantly increase the rise of an unnecessary economic recession.”

A much sharper warning about the state of the US and global financial system has been delivered by economist Nouriel Roubini, who came into public prominence because of his warnings prior to the financial crash of 2008.

In a comment in the Guardian last Friday, he warned that conditions were ripe for a repeat of the 1970s stagflation and the 2008 debt crisis.

He noted that debt ratios today were much higher than in the 1970s, while a mix of loose economic policies threatened to fuel inflation, rather than the deflation that occurred after the 2008 crisis.

“For now, loose monetary and fiscal policies will continue to fuel asset and credit bubbles, propelling a slow-motion train wreck,” he wrote, and pointed to the warning signs.

These included: high price to earnings ratios for shares, inflated housing and tech assets, irrational exuberance surrounding special purpose acquisition companies (firms that are floated on the stock market on a cash only basis, with the aim of taking over another firm seeking a public listing) the crypto-currency sector, the level of high yield corporate debt (junk bonds), collateralised loan obligations, the increased use of private equity, meme stocks and runaway retail daily trading.

At a certain point this would trigger a loss of confidence and a crash, but in the meantime, loose monetary policies will continue to drive inflation, creating the conditions for stagflation, when the next economic shock arrives.

He noted that central banks were in a “debt trap.” If they start to raise interest rates to combat inflation, they “risk triggering a massive debt crisis and severe recession” but if they continue on the present course, they risk double-digit inflation.

Roubini pointed out that the Fed was already in a debt trap, and its recent adjustment from an “ultra-dovish stance to a mostly dovish stance”—when its “dot plot” of interest rates at its June meeting showed a rise in 2023, rather than 2024—changed nothing.

The debt trap was in evidence at the end of 2018—more than a year before the onset of the pandemic—when the Fed dropped proposed interest rate rises and ceased its wind-down of asset holdings, because of the adverse reaction in financial markets.

In response to the Fed’s plan to continue interest rates in 2019, after four rises in 2018, Wall Street had its worst December since 1931, and Fed chair Jerome Powell reversed course and then began cutting rates in July 2019.

“With inflation rising and stagflationary shocks looming, it is now even more ensnared,” Roubini wrote.

There is also clear evidence that financial authorities are no better prepared to deal with a crisis than they were in 2008, or in the March 2020 meltdown, which triggered the latest round of massive financial support.

This was highlighted in a recent blog post by the Bank of England on the events of the spring of 2020. It was potentially more serious than that of 2008, because it centred on the $21 trillion US Treasury market—the bedrock of the global financial system, and supposedly a “safe haven” in times of stress, as investors buy government bonds. In the March crisis however, Treasuries were sold off.

The blog began by noting that while financial markets reflect changes in the economy, they can amplify them as well, and this was evident as the COVID-19 pandemic materialised.

It then drew attention to the role of margin calls in precipitating the crisis. Investors in financial assets use borrowed money at cheap rates to finance their activities, but have to place some collateral with the lender.

This enables them to make huge profits, so long as the underlying asset continues to rise in the market. But if there is a downturn, the lender demands more collateral, a margin call, to cover the fall and this can precipitate a “dash for cash,” leading to a negative feedback loop because the value of financial assets falls further as they are sold off.

The blog post noted that net outflows reached more than 5 percent of assets under management for corporate bonds in the March crisis—the highest since the global financial crisis of 2008.

The risks of a self-reinforcing spiral, inherent in the operations of highly leveraged hedge funds, “crystallised in the US Treasury market in March 2020. ... Notably, hedge funds unwound US Treasury positions following severe portfolio losses and margin calls, contributing to a sharp rise in yields [interest rates] and market illiquidity.”

As the blog noted “large-scale intervention by the Federal Reserve managed to restore market liquidity and break the self-reinforcing loss spiral.”

But as other reports on the March crisis have noted, none of the underlying issues that produced it have been resolved, and no solutions were advanced by the Bank of England blog to prevent a recurrence.

In fact, it concluded with a profession of ignorance, saying merely that it had identified “key questions, emphasised by the Covid-related financial stress in early 2020, that warrant further investigation” and that the authors would “welcome further engagement with the research community on these issues.”

Such a conclusion only emphasises the fundamental point that, in the final analysis, the destructive anarchy of the capitalist economy and its financial system, arising from the system of private ownership, is outside of conscious control and regulation.