Spain’s PSOE-Podemos government to ban Castilian nationalist party

Alejandro López

The Socialist Party (PSOE)-Podemos government is moving to ban Izquierda Castellana (Castilian Left), a separatist-nationalist party active in central Spain.

The outlawing of a political party claiming to be socialist, republican and internationalist is part of an escalating campaign by the European ruling class on free speech and democratic rights, intensified with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Terrified at growing social opposition to “herd immunity” policies and bank and corporate bailouts which have left over 1.1 million dead across Europe, the ruling class aims to suppress all forms of opposition.

Podemos is playing a leading role in this attack on democratic rights. Drawn from the affluent middle class and based on the anti-Marxist postmodernist identity politics of race and gender, it is entirely devoted to protecting the privileges its members enjoy in the existing order. Podemos will use all means at its disposal to crush social opposition, as it carries out policies of austerity, war, and police repression, as well as the criminal “herd immunity” policy which has already led to the deaths of over 100,000 people in Spain of COVID-19.

Spain's Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez (PSOE), second left, walks next to Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias, second right, and First Deputy Prime Minister Carmen Calvo, left, at the Moncloa Palace in Madrid, Spain, Tuesday, Jan. 14 2020. (Image Credit: AP Photo/Manu Fernandez)

This also constitutes a warning on the reactionary role that Podemos’ international allies like the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), Unsubmissive France (LFI) and the German Left Party will play. Were they to come to power, they would implement the same anti-democratic policies as Podemos.

The International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) opposes the persecution of Izquierda Castellana (IzCa). It has unbridgeable political differences with IzCa, which promotes Castilian nationalism, seeking a “united Castille” involving Cantabria, Castile and León, Madrid, La Rioja and Castile-La Mancha. This works to divide workers along national lines, amid a decades-long promotion of Basque, Catalan and Galician separatism, and the whipping up of Spanish chauvinism.

Nonetheless, IzCa’s persecution is an attempt by the Spanish bourgeoisie to intimidate political opposition, set a precedent of groundless bans of political parties, and install a police-state climate.

On Friday, IzCa published a statement describing the attempted ban. It explains that the National Court, descended from the Public Order Court set up under the fascist Franco regime to punish “political crimes,” has notified them about a resolution sponsored by the PSOE-Podemos Ministry of Interior, through the Solicitor General of the State. The resolution “calls for the ‘extinction’ of Izquierda Castellana, that is, its disappearance as a legal political organisation.”

IzCa explains that the Ministry of Interior “is resorting to administrative tricks, arguing that IzCa’s statutes do not comply with the changes introduced by the Organic Law 3/2015 legislative reform of March 30, on the control of the economic-financial activity of Political Parties.”

Such tricks are ludicrous. Spain’s main opposition party, the conservative Popular Party, has been illegally financed by corrupt deals with big business for over two decades, and has never been threatened with a ban. In 2018, the Gürtel case demonstrated that the PP kept off-book accounts, stemming from a sweeping kickbacks-for-contracts scheme affecting scores of local and regional PP officials who awarded no-bid contracts to business networks. This money was then used to finance political campaigns and provide a lavish lifestyle to select politicians.

According to an official investigation, the PP had “a financing system outside the legal economic circuit” between 1990 and 2008.

“It is paradoxical,” IzCa states, “that a political organisation that … never in its entire history requested or received any subsidies from the state, will be outlawed based on such reasons, especially when most of the political parties that ostensibly breach the law and regulations on such matters are not even warned of such a possibility.” The ban, IzCa adds, is part of an increasingly repressive policy of the Interior Ministry, “accentuated since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic.”

IzCa is an alliance of Stalinist, feminist and petty-bourgeois Castilian nationalist groupings founded in 2002, including Comunero Left, Popular Castillian Unity, Revolutionary Castillian Youth, Castillian Women and a hard-line Stalinist group, the Communist Party of the Castilian People, which left soon afterwards.

An earlier attempted ban on IzCa was closed by the National Court in 2008. Its leaders, now-deceased former leader Doris Benegas and current general secretary Luis Ocampo have repeatedly been targeted. In 2012, Benegas was arrested on suspicion of organising an anti-government demonstration, the so-called Surround the Congress protest. In October 2014, Benegas was arrested at an anti-monarchy protest in Madrid, held for 24 hours and prosecuted. In that trial, prosecutors requested a year and a half in prison. Finally, Benegas and two others were acquitted.

The principal target of the PSOE-Podemos government’s groundless threat to ban IzCa, a bankrupt organisation that poses no threat to Spanish capitalism, is not so much IzCa as the broader rise of political opposition in the working class. IzCa serves only as a pretext to try out methods of political repression as strikes, protests and broader opposition to “herd immunity” policies and bank bailouts mount among workers.

Podemos has stepped up its efforts to create not the “radical democracy” it promised, but a police state. The threat to ban IzCa takes place on the six-month anniversary of the jailing of Stalinist rapper Pablo Hasél on charges of insulting the Spanish state and the Bourbon monarchy. Hasél is the first musician imprisoned in Spain since 1978 and the fall of the fascist regime led by Francisco Franco.

Podemos has escalated internet censorship, whipped up a MeToo witch hunt against opera singer Plácido Domingo and implemented a fascistic anti-migrant policy. This has led to the drowning of over 2,000 migrants off the Canary Islands, a surge in violence against migrants across Spain and reports of sexual abuse of dozens of minors at PSOE-Podemos government-run migrant concentration camps.

The working class must oppose these authoritarian moves, beginning by opposing those who are ramming them through: Podemos and its pseudo-left hangers, which while posting solidarity statements with IzCa, continue to provide Podemos with a “left” cover.

This includes Izquierda Revolucionaria (Revolutionary Left), formerly affiliated with the Committee for a Workers’ International, which posted a statement against the “antidemocratic action,” one more “proof of the authoritarian and reactionary character of the regime of 1978, but also of the drift to the right of the current Executive.” It forgot to add that IR acts like a faction of Podemos. In last May’s elections in Madrid, it proudly stated it distributed 120,000 leaflets, organised 70 campaign tables and produced 80 large banners calling for a Podemos vote.

Anticapitalistas, which left the PSOE-Podemos government last year to better suppress social opposition from the outside, has yet to publish a statement, or even an article on its online paper Poder Popular. Instead, it posted an empty, one-sentence tweet from its regional branch of Castilla y León, stating: “The Regime of [19]78 will not be able to bend the will of the people who take control of their future… We are still together, not a step back.”

The Morenoite Revolutionary Workers Current posted a statement criticising the ban and calling for a “united front in defence of democratic rights and against the repression by the self-named ‘progressive’ government and the Monarchical regime.” It did not mention whom this united front would include. However, the Morenoites have a long record of seeking alliances with satellites of Podemos like the Revolutionary Left and Anticapitalistas.

COVID catastrophe fuels unrest in Southeast Asia

Mike Head

Popular disaffection is rising across Southeast Asia as millions of people, mostly impoverished, suffer the worsening impact on lives and livelihoods of the failure of capitalist governments throughout the region and worldwide to protect society from COVID-19.

Home to more than 650 million people, Southeast Asia has become an epicentre of the global Delta surge that has resulted from the corporate profit-driven policies by which governments have refused to impose, or prematurely lifted, safety restrictions, allowing more virulent mutant strains to spin out of control.

Across the region, the disaster has been compounded by the near-collapse of chronically underfunded health care systems, lack of access to vaccines and widespread losses of jobs and incomes.

People wait to have medical oxygen tanks refilled outside the Naing oxygen factory at the South Dagon industrial zone in Yangon, Myanmar, Wednesday, July 28, 2021. (AP Photo)

One of the most severely affected countries, Indonesia, last week passed a damning milestone—100,000 officially confirmed COVID-19 deaths.

Just days earlier, President Joko Widodo eased restrictions on July 29, allowing small businesses and some shopping malls to reopen. To appease the financial elite, Widido lifted the already limited lockdowns, even in the worst-hit areas, such as Jakarta and Bali, despite warnings by health experts that this would lead to a resurgence of infections.

Virologists also warned of the potential for new variants to emerge, which has occurred when the virus has been allowed to run rampant in countries with large populations. “The decision doesn’t seem to be related to the pandemic, but to economics,” Pandu Riono, an epidemiologist at the University of Indonesia, told Reuters.

It took 14 months for Indonesia to exceed the 50,000-death mark at the end of May, and just over nine weeks to double it. Despite a fall from July’s peak of more than 57,000 new daily infections, the Health Ministry is still recording more than 1,700 new deaths of COVID-19 every day.

As in other countries, these figures are believed to be a substantial undercount. Low testing rates and a lack of contact tracing means many thousands of deaths are going unrecorded.

Since the beginning of June, more than 2,800 people have died at home, according to LaporCOVID-19, a non-government virus data group. Some of those deaths were counted in official figures but others were not.

“They were rejected by the hospitals, so they went back home and did the self-isolation at home with limited access to medicine, no oxygen and no monitoring from doctors until they died,” Ahmad Arif, one of LaporCOVID-19’s founders, told Associated Press (AP).

The World Health Organisation said hospitals remained in need of isolation rooms, oxygen supplies, medical and personal protective equipment, as well as mobile field hospitals and body bags. Indonesia’s vaccination rate remains at less than 8 percent.

The world’s fourth most populous country has now recorded more than 3.6 million COVID-19 cases since March 2020. An immense social crisis is developing. East Java’s child protection agency revealed last week that 5,082 children in that province alone had lost one or both parents to the virus. Some estimates suggest that figure nationally could be as high as 35,000.

About 30 percent of Indonesia’s 277 million people are officially regarded as living in poverty as a result of the pandemic, soaring from less than 10 percent in 2019.

In Thailand, facing a rising tide of opposition to its calamitous pandemic response, the military regime of Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha is trying to use emergency decrees to outlaw dissent.

Last week, as the country’s confirmed infections and deaths hit record highs, the regime moved to block online reports that may “instigate fear,” even if true. Alleged offenders could be jailed for up to two years.

The health ministry said the new cases had exceeded 20,000 per day for the first time, with deaths nearing 200 daily. By last Wednesday, total cases had reached 672,385 and 5,503 deaths.

The public healthcare system is breaking down. As hospitals filled up, the authorities scrambled to set up ad hoc isolation wards in airport terminals, warehouses and decommissioned railway carriages. One hospital resorted to renting freight containers to store dead bodies after its morgue ran out of room.

Only about 6.5 percent of Thailand’s 70 million people were fully vaccinated as of Thursday. In recent weeks, protests have demanded Prayuth’s resignation. In July, police used rubber bullets, tear gas and water cannon against demonstrators in Bangkok.

The regime last week tightened partial containment measures in the capital Bangkok and several high-risk provinces, and said the rules were likely to remain in place until the end of August.

There is a political crisis in Malaysia, which reported 20,889 new COVID-19 cases last Friday, breaking its record for daily infections for a third consecutive day. The cumulative total number of infections now stands at 1,224,595, according to the health ministry.

This figure is also far below the reality. Deputy health director-general Chong Chee Kheong said 80 percent of COVID-19 cases who were “brought in dead” were never diagnosed with the disease. Out of the 1,000 deaths reported weekly, about 80 to 100 were “brought in dead” and the number of such cases had been rising over the past few weeks.

Thousands of contract doctors staged a walkout on July 23, demanding permanent postings and better pay. “Almost 150 medical staff have resigned this year because they are fatigued with the current system,” a doctor told Reuters at a protest in the capital Kuala Lumpur. The doctors said an offer by Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin to extend their contracts did not go far enough.

Facing growing unrest, the government last week said it would no longer use the number of recorded daily infections as a metric to ease safety curbs for states once they entered the second phase of a “national recovery plan.”

Muhyiddin has refused to quit, despite losing the support of some members of the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), the biggest bloc in his unstable ruling alliance, and faces a no-confidence vote in parliament next month.

The Delta variant is also ravaging Myanmar. Daily cases, taken as an average over seven days, have risen from around 5,000 to 6,000 over the past month, and deaths have reached about 350 a day, but limited testing indicates that this is a gross underestimate. The share of tests that return positive results has exceeded 35 percent since mid-July, which suggests widespread, uncontrolled transmission.

Officially, just over 7,500 people have died from COVID-19 since the February 1 military coup, but few people are treated at public hospitals, so the real death toll is unknown. In recent weeks funeral homes and crematoriums have been overwhelmed.

The inability of many people to work safely, coupled with a shortage of oxygen, medicine and a properly functioning hospital system, is fueling the health crisis. Exacerbating it is the arrest of more than 150 doctors and nurses, who have been at the forefront of a civil disobedience movement. Another 600 medics are estimated to have stopped working after the junta issued warrants for their arrests.

After having contained the virus for much of the pandemic, Vietnam is facing its worst outbreak, with Ho Chi Minh City and surrounding provinces accounting for most new infections.

The government reported 8,324 new infections last Friday, up from 7,244 cases on Thursday, taking the pandemic total above 193,000. It reported 296 additional coronavirus deaths on the same day, raising the country’s death toll to 3,016.

Only 820,000 people have been fully vaccinated, or less than 1 percent of the country’s 98 million population, according to official data.

About a third of Vietnam’s 63 cities and provinces are under coronavirus restrictions. The capital Hanoi will extend them until August 22, its health ministry said last Friday, warning of new clusters of infections detected in the city of more than 8 million people.

In the Philippines, cases are now averaging about 8,000 a day, with deaths rising to around 200 a day. Chaos overtook several COVID-19 vaccination sites in Manila last Thursday as thousands of people tried to receive a shot before the capital headed back into a partial lockdown for two weeks.

With around 1.6 million COVID-19 cases and more than 28,000 deaths, the country has the second-worst record in Southeast Asia after Indonesia. Just 9.3 percent of the 110 million population have been fully vaccinated. In an attempt to divert blame from his government, Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte has threatened to arrest people who do not get a vaccine.

Many people are out of work, unable to buy food and other essential items to survive, but the government has offered only paltry support payments of $US20 to $80 per fortnight to low-income households.

The utter indifference and nationalist program of governments in the imperialist centres has been epitomised by the Australian government’s offer of limited assistance to neighbouring Indonesia. Canberra has promised just 2.5 million vaccine doses and $A12 million worth of ventilators, oxygen cylinders and testing kits. During the past five years, Australia’s development budget to Indonesia has more than halved, from around $600 million in 2014–15 to less than $300 million this year.

Australia: Major hospitals cancel surgeries as they strain under Delta outbreak

Gary Alvernia

As Sydney’s population faces around 300 new daily cases of the COVID-19 Delta variant, actions by major hospitals to cancel surgeries reflect the rapidly rising burden on the public hospital system in Australia’s largest city.

Last week the Royal Prince Alfred, St. Vincent’s and Liverpool hospitals all suspended category 3 surgeries, considered “non-urgent/elective” by New South Wales (NSW) Health, the state authority responsible for managing Sydney’s public system. The measures were required due to an increasing proportion of intensive care unit (ICU) beds being occupied by COVID patients, and a loss of available staff from COVID exposures.

Hospitals in southwest Sydney have been particularly affected, as the working-class region of over one million inhabitants bears the brunt of the current outbreak. As well as Liverpool Hospital, nearby Campbelltown Hospital suspended elective surgeries three weeks ago after hundreds of staff were forced to isolate.

People queuing for coronavirus tests at Royal Melbourne Hospital last year(Credit: WSWS)

Additionally, Fairfield and Bankstown-Lidcombe hospitals have similarly confronted a loss of 400 healthcare workers, and concerns now exist for the biggest hospital in Sydney’s west, Westmead Hospital, which reported a positive case among a member of staff. While the Westmead worker was fully vaccinated, transmission risks mean that 36 other staff have been required to isolate.

NSW Ambulance has been reported to be at breaking point due to the increased workload. Hundreds of paramedics are in isolation. Last week, a lack of available beds resulted in ambulances containing COVID patients ramping outside Westmead Hospital.

The Delta mutant that is driving the outbreak in Sydney, as well as smaller outbreaks throughout Australia, is deadlier and more contagious than previous COVID variants. It is particularly dangerous in Australia because of its disastrous vaccination program. The country has among the lowest rates of inoculation for the advanced capitalist countries, with many healthcare workers unvaccinated.

By August 8, the NSW outbreak had already caused 28 deaths, including a man in his 20s, and a woman in her 30s, both reported as previously healthy. Due to inadequate protective equipment and a lack of isolation rooms, hospitals are serving as sources of transmission, with tragic consequences. Five deaths were attributed to an outbreak at Liverpool Hospital. One health worker told SBS news: “A lot of nurses [are] refusing to go to the COVID wards or just calling in sick, non-stop.”

By the same day, 362 COVID-19 patients had been admitted to hospital, with 58 people in intensive care, 24 of whom require ventilation. This already represents a significant strain on existing ICU capacity in the state, which has only 930 beds for a population of over eight million people. As noted by Australian and New Zealand Intensive Care Society vice-president Dr Mark Nicholls in comments to the Sydney Morning Herald: “Intensive care is a finite resource, and even under normal circumstances, it’s almost full.”

ICUs are necessary for managing the sickest patients with life-threatening medical conditions, including (among others) post-surgical patients, victims of traumatic injuries, cancer patients, and organ transplant recipients. Any substantial increase in COVID patients needing ICU beds will divert critical resources from these patients.

Nor is the cancellation of elective procedures a trivial matter. While not required immediately to save a person’s life, category 3 surgeries include joint replacements for mobility, eye surgeries to prevent blindness, and even certain cardiac surgeries to prevent heart attacks. As a result of COVID outbreaks in the past 18 months, elective surgery waitlists have already been prolonged. These delays most severely impact the working class, as many cannot afford to pay exorbitant costs for private treatment and must rely on the increasingly beleaguered public system.

The developing hospital crisis, in what may yet be an early stage in this current outbreak, exposes the criminal character of calls to “live with virus,” championed by the Australian ruling elite. When asked at a media conference about the dangers, NSW Health Minister Brad Hazzard replied “of course” the system was under stress, but claimed it was being managed.

Hazzard sought to blame members of the public “not complying with the public health orders.” No evidence has been provided for allegations of widespread “non-compliance.” However, NSW Chief Medical Officer Kerry Chant admitted that workplaces are the main source of transmissions in Sydney. Those infections are inevitably spread to workers’ families in the highest density working class areas of the western and southwestern suburbs.

Blame can squarely be placed on the Liberal-National Party Coalition state government of Premier Gladys Berejiklian. It has pursued a policy of only limited lockdowns, with the overt support of Prime Minister Scott Morrison, and tacit backing of the opposition parties, Labor and the Greens.

Rejecting hard lockdowns called for by epidemiologists and infectious diseases experts in order to protect business interests, Berejiklian allowed the present outbreak to spread, allowing factories to continue operations and construction work to resume, despite workplaces fueling community transmission.

The dangerously inadequate lockdown, accompanied by only paltry support for unemployed workers facing financial ruin, has been maintained with the support of the opposition Labor Party and the trade unions, which have joined hands with employers to demand further exemptions from workplace closures.

A similar hospital crisis is developing in Brisbane, the capital of the northern state of Queensland. With just over 100 cases over the past week from its Delta outbreak, the state Labor government of Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk has conceded that the health system is buckling, even as it ends a week-long lockdown with active cases present.

Hundreds of health workers are in self-isolation, including the entire cardiac surgery department at Queensland Children’s Hospital. This is due to the majority of infections being among school children, causing a risk to their parents, many of whom are health workers.

Queensland’s Labor government is aware of the crisis it has created. In June the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported that the largest hospital network in Brisbane was forced to cancel elective surgeries for two weeks due to bed shortages, despite no significant COVID outbreaks at the time.

Even before the COVID crisis, public hospitals were at the breaking point, a product of decades of cuts to public healthcare by both Liberal-National and Labor governments. Waiting lists for most category 3 surgeries were one year or greater, and hospitals, particularly in rural and remote regions, were understaffed and underfunded, resulting in a greater number of preventable deaths.

These conditions have sparked stoppages by hospital workers. Last year, nurses and midwives took strike action at Blacktown Hospital, in Sydney’s west, and senior obstetricians threatened mass resignations over serious deficiencies in obstetric services, leading to the avoidable deaths of 4 new-born babies in just 18 months.

In June, hundreds of nurses and midwives in Sydney and across NSW walked off the job over ongoing staff shortages, excessive overtime and lack of clinical staff, as well as the state government’s cap of 1.5 percent on public sector pay increases this year—a real wage cut.

Yet the NSW Nurses and Midwives Association, refused to mobilise its 72,000 members across the state in a united struggle, and has instead ensured that industrial action has remained confined to individual hospitals, across different days and for different lengths of time.

Health workers cannot leave their protection, or that of their patients, in the hands of the unions or governments. They must form rank-and-file action committees, independent of the unions, to fight for the necessary safety measures and for the urgent pouring of funds into the public hospital systems.

Russian flight attendants carry out sickout against dangerous working conditions at Rossiya Airlines

Clara Weiss

Flight attendants in Russia took part in a series of sickouts in late July and early August at the Rossiya Airlines, forcing the cancellations of dozens of flights. In Russia, airline workers are by law prohibited from officially going on strike.

Workers are infuriated over miserable pay, woeful understaffing and the massive spread of the coronavirus exacerbated by company policies. Flight attendants are forced to fly for weeks on end without a break, with one flight attendant passing out on the job because of extreme exhaustion. Because of the insufferable conditions, an average of 20 flight attendants are quitting their jobs every day.

Rossiya, a subsidiary of Russia’s state-owned Aeroflot company, refuses to acknowledge that a strike took place. However, in a sign of extreme nervousness, on Thursday it announced “loyalty premiums” of 25,000 rubles (about $340) for its employees, provided they are fully “available for scheduling” between August 5 and September 10.

Rossiya Airlines Airbus A319-100 (Image credit: Marvin Mutz/ Wikipedia CC2.0)

Aeroflot kukhnia (Aeroflot kitchen), a popular channel for airline workers on the Russian social media site Telegram, which has covered the strike and published information on working conditions, has called upon workers to reject the offer and on passengers to boycott the airline. It also called for the removal of responsible managers whom it described as “potential murderers.”

Aeroflot kukhnia, apparently run by flight attendants, obtained the internal document outlining the new policy, which is circulating with no signature, no stamp, and “not even the name and position of those who worked it out and confirmed it,' according to the channel. “Overall, it does not have any legal legitimacy and not a single flight attendant will be able to contest or demand anything on this basis.”

Based on the document, workers would only receive the sum if they are fully “available for scheduling” regardless of their state of health, in other words, even if they are infected with COVID-19. Thousands of Russian airline workers have fallen ill during the pandemic, especially over the summer, when the country experienced a massive surge caused by the highly infectious Delta variant.

According to the aviation workers union, a staggering one third of the total workforce of flight attendants have either been infected or are recovering from COVID-19. Russia is still recording an average of well over 20,000 new cases per day, the fourth highest number in the world. In spite of this, virtually all public health measures have been lifted as vaccination rates stall, as is the case in western Europe and the United States.

“How dangerous will it be for the average passenger to fly with Rossiya, especially for those who are immuno-compromised?” Aeroflot kukhina asked. “This is not even manslaughter, but an entirely different article of the criminal code.”

In an earlier post explaining the reasons for the strike, the channel noted, “Not a single flight attendant has seen the salary that management has now been promising for five years. 80,000 rubles [$1,089] is a fairy tale even for those flying more than 100 hours. For 70 hours of flight time, you’ll get 50,000 rubles [$680] and even that is not guaranteed.” Instructors who have to teach new flight attendants are paid only for 40 hours of work but often work up to 80 hours or more. The channel added that workers were subject to “constant slander by management. You are no one, you are meat.”

A central grievance of flight attendants is also that the company routinely forces them to work in violation of safety rules, endangering their own lives and those of passengers. But in the case of accidents, it is the workers who face legal repercussions.

On social media, the sickouts won significant support. One airline worker wrote, “Great job. That’s what needs to be done, it cannot be everyone by themselves, but we must act together as united brothers in aviation. To hell with all those who scare and insult you. The fight is now in the open, fear nothing, you are correct. Period.”

Russia’s airline industry is notoriously unsafe, and plane crashes that kill hundreds of people are a regular occurrence. The unsafe conditions in the airline industry are stark example of the consequences of the Stalinist dissolution of the Soviet Union and the restoration of capitalism.

Nationwide, Even before the pandemic, more than four workers died on average in work-related accidents each day, for a total of 1613 deaths in 2019, one of the highest industrial mortality rates in the world. The official figure for work-related, non-fatal accidents is 23,000. However, a recent investigation by investigative journalism outlet Istories found that the real number of safety-related accidents in Russian industries are between 22 and 44 times higher than officially reported.

The flight attendants’ strike no doubt has provoked enormous concerns in the ruling oligarchy. It is a clear indication of growing social and political opposition in the Russian working class amidst an upsurge of working class struggles internationally. In late June, autoworkers at the PSMA Rus’ plant in Kaluga engaged in a work stoppage to protest the unbearable heat at the factory.

The flight attendants’ strike comes just a few weeks before Russia’s parliamentary elections in September. Well aware of the explosive conditions created by the pandemic, the Kremlin has worked out an agreement “For safe elections,” according to which candidates are not allowed to address the pandemic. The agreement was signed by the ruling United Russia party, the Greens, the far-right Rodina and Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR) and a few other parties.

As it has around the world, the pandemic, which has cost hundreds of thousands of lives in Russia, has played a catalyzing role in fueling the class struggle. And, as everywhere, the unions are playing a critical role in suppressing any struggles by the working class in defense of their interests and their lives.

The Russian unions across aviation and other industries have maintained conspicuous silence about the sickouts, seeking to isolate the strikers. The union of flight attendants has not even condemned the “offer” by the company for workers to endanger their own lives and those of passengers for a miserable 25,000 rubles.

The trade unions in Russia have all emerged either directly out of the Stalinist bureaucracy’s official unions or out of attempts by layers of the bureaucracy and middle class to set up so-called “independent” unions to gain a larger share of the spoils in the process of privatization. They are complicit in the social catastrophe that capitalist restoration has wrought and are integrated into the state and various oligarchy-controlled political parties.

IMF offers crumbs to poorer countries

Nick Beams

To the accompaniment of overblown rhetoric and after months of haggling, the International Monetary Fund has agreed to try and boost the finances of low- and middle-income countries as they struggle to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic amid lack of access to vaccines and already inadequate public health services.

Last week it signed off on a $650 billion expansion of its Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) program. SDRs have no conditions attached and do not have to be repaid, enabling countries to employ them without making compensatory cuts to public spending. But the decision will make little difference to the worsening situation confronting many countries as they face a continuing slowdown in the growth of their national income.

This was acknowledged, at least indirectly, by the IMF itself in its latest update to its world economic outlook. It cut the forecast for growth for emerging-market and less-developed countries, reversing the trend that has prevailed over the past two decades and more.

Kristalina Georgieva of the International Monetary Fund (Source: imp.org)

However, this did not stop IMF managing director Kristalina Georgieva from talking up the SDR expansion when she announced it.

She said it was a “historic decision—the largest SDR allocation in the history of the IMF and a shot in the arm for the global economy at a time of unprecedented crisis.

“The SDR allocation will benefit all members, address the long-term global need for reserves, build confidence and foster the resilience and stability of the global economy. It will particularly help out most vulnerable economies struggling to cope with the impact of the COVID-19 crisis,” she continued.

These claims are contradicted by the very structure of the allocation. The expansion of SDRs, the equivalent of newly printed money, will be allocated to the IMF’s 190 members in proportion to their share of the global economy. This means that only $275 billion will go to emerging and developing economies, with the rest allocated to the world’s major economies.

Furthermore, it is estimated that only 8 percent of the new money will go to countries that are classified as “highly debt vulnerable.”

Debt is a problem across the board. According to the Institute of International Finance, average government debt in large emerging market economies rose from 52.2 percent of gross domestic product to 60.5 percent in 2020—the largest increase on record.

The IMF itself has reported that more than half of emerging and developing countries had inadequate finances to meet the pandemic and had been forced to deplete their foreign currency reserves to combat it.

Many of these countries operate under the threat that a tightening of financial conditions in the US and other major economies would see the reversal of capital inflows, further escalating their economic and financial problems.

There have been calls for richer countries to channel their allocation of SDRs to poorer countries and Georgieva said the IMF was seeking to advance those efforts. But given the record on the allocation of vaccines against the coronavirus, which shows that poorer countries have received only a tiny fraction of what is needed, there is little prospect of any meaningful movement on this front.

One of the most significant effects of the pandemic on less developed countries is in the tourist industry.

According to the UN’s World Tourism Organisation, global international arrivals for the first five months of this year were, on average, 85 percent down from their levels in 2019, compared to a reduction of 65 percent for the same period in 2020.

In the Asia-Pacific region, now being hard hit by the Delta variant, there has been a 95 percent fall in arrivals compared to 2019 levels. Chinese tourism to the region has virtually ceased. The dependence of many of these countries on foreign visitors is exemplified by Thailand where 20 percent of GDP and employment is generated by tourism.

Luiz Eduardo Peixoto, an emerging-markets economist at BNP Paribas in London, told the Financial Times that the situation this year was worse than predicted.

“Last year, there was an assumption that in 2021 we would see a rebound,” he said. But the drop in number last year was close to the most pessimistic scenario because “we didn’t get a recovery during the [northern] winter—quite the contrary. This year, things are not recovering as expected.”

Viewed within a longer term historical perspective, the IMF’s latest intervention via SDRs could well be described as the case of a criminal returning to the scene of the crime and seeking to expunge vital evidence.

One of the main reasons health services in less developed countries are in such parlous condition and why debt levels are so high—constricting the spending on vital health services—is the impact of so-called “structural adjustment” programs imposed on them in an earlier period by the IMF.

First imposed in the 1980s and then continuing into the 1990s and the present century, countries that sought assistance from the IMF were required to meet strict conditions including the privatisation of public services, deregulation of financial markets and reduction of social spending, including on health.

Between 1980 and 2014, 109 out of 137 developing countries had to enter at least one structural adjustment program.

A recent article by Adele Walton in the UK Tribune magazine pointed out that some 25 countries were spending “more on debt than healthcare, education, and social protection combined in 2019, meaning the intense strain of an international health care crisis has left swathes of populations without access to essential services and resources.”

The measures imposed by international finance capital via the IMF have had a particularly significant impact on two of the countries that have been hardest hit by the pandemic, South Africa and India.

According to Walton’s article a study in South Africa has found “privatisation to be the primary cause of deprivation of most of the population’s access to health care.”

In India, privatisation of health care “significantly reduced the government’s capacity to prioritise public health needs over private profit interests.” And the lack of resource coordination had “cataclysmic consequences for the country when it experienced oxygen shortages at the height of its second wave.”

Facebook Fellowship Program 2022/2023

Application Deadline:

20th September 2021 11:59pm PST

Eligible Countries:

Any

To be taken at (country):

Any country (excluding US embargoed countries)

Research Areas:

• CommAI
• Computational Social Science
• Compute Storage and Efficiency
• Computer Vision
• Distributed Systems
• Economics and Computation
• Machine Learning
• Natural Language Processing
• Networking and Connectivity
• Security/Privacy
• Research Outside of the Above: relevant work in areas that may not align with the research priorities highlighted above.

About the Facebook Fellowship: 

The Facebook Fellowship is a global program designed to encourage and support promising doctoral students who are engaged in innovative and relevant research in areas related to computer science and engineering at an accredited university.

The program is open to students in any year of their PhD study. We also encourage people of diverse backgrounds and experiences to apply, especially those from traditionally under-represented minority groups. Applications are evaluated based on the strength of the student’s research statement, publication record, and recommendation letters.

Winners of the Fellowship are entitled to receive two years of paid tuition and fees, a $42,000 annual stipend to cover living and conference travel costs, a paid visit to Facebook headquarters for the annual Fellowship Summit, and various opportunities to engage with Facebook researchers.

Giving people the power to share and connect requires constant innovation. At Facebook, research permeates everything we do. We believe the most interesting research questions are derived from real-world problems. Our engineers work on cutting edge research with a practical focus and push product boundaries every day. We believe that close relationships with the academic community will enable us to address many of these problems at a fundamental level and solve them.

Type:

PhD, Fellowship

Selection Criteria and Eligibility

• Applicants must be full-time PhD students who are enrolled in an accredited university (in any country) by the start of the Fellowship (i.e., Fall 2021)
• Students must be involved in ongoing research related to one or more relevant disciplines (see available fellowships below)
• Students must remain enrolled full-time for the duration of the Fellowship to receive program benefits
• Students should not apply for Facebook Fellowships if they are actively being funded by Facebook through some other sponsorship or collaboration and/or if they are actively being supervised (or co-supervised) by a Facebook researcher. If in doubt, please email academicrelations@fb.com.

Number of Awards:

Not specified

Value of the Facebook Fellowship:

Each Facebook Fellowship includes several benefits:

• Tuition and fees will be paid for the academic year (up to two years).
• A $42,000 annual stipend to cover living and conference travel costs
• Paid visit to Facebook HQ to present research.

As part of the program, current Fellows are invited to Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park for the annual Fellowship Summit. At the Summit, Fellows can engage with other winners, share their current research, speak with Facebook researchers and teams, and learn more about research at Facebook.

Duration of Award:

Facebook Fellowship Award to cover two years!

How to Apply for the Facebook Fellowship:

• 500-word research summary that clearly identifies the area of focus, importance to the field, and applicability to Facebook of the anticipated research during the award (reference the available fellowships below)
• Two letters of recommendation, including one from an academic advisor. You will be asked to provide your references’ contact information, and they will receive a corresponding form to submit their letters.

Available Fellowships

AI System HW SW Co-Design
Applied Statistics
AR/VR Computer Graphics
AR/VR Future Technologies
AR/VR Human Computer Interaction
AR/VR Human Understanding
AR/VR Perception, Cognition & Action
AR/VR Photonics and Optics
Audio Presence
Augmented Reality Audio
Blockchain and Cryptoeconomics
Computational Social Science
Database Systems
Distributed Systems
Economics and Computation
Networking
Privacy and Data Use
Programming Languages
Security and Privacy

The Application is now live. Go to the Site and enter your information.

Visit Facebook Fellowship webpage for details

Afghanistan: bullied, bombed, betrayed

Megan Cornish

The corporate media was forced to admit the obvious by early July. Even before U.S. troops left Afghanistan, the reactionary Islamist Taliban that their invasion overthrew had retaken huge swaths of the country. After 20 years and over $2 trillion spent, Washington faced a massive failure with nothing to show for it but death and destruction.

What apologists for U.S. barbarism avoided at all costs was a tally of the devastation or the lies used to justify it. Corrupt collaboration government officials and their allies have looted the country. Not only the Taliban, but also al-Qaeda and the Islamic State (ISIS or Daesh), are stronger than ever.

It will be up to the Left in Afghanistan, the U.S., and around the world to draw the lessons of this history and back the fight of the Afghan people for a better future.

Lies, corruption and imperial hubris.

The invasion of Afghanistan after al-Qaeda brought down the World Trade Center in New York City on Sept. 11, 2001, was always built on fabrications. The “war on terror,” like the “war on communism” before it, was a handy excuse for attacks on whatever targets served U.S. geopolitical interests.

The invasion was not to free the women of Afghanistan or install democracy, as advertised. It was about political hegemony over this key country at the crossroads of the Middle East, Central Asia and South Asia — and about war profiteering. Now Washington’s relations with countries surrounding the “Graveyard of Empires” are worse than ever. The only success was enriching the enormous military industry.

In late 2019, the Washington Post printed the Afghanistan papers, some 600 interviews with insiders to the occupation. They revealed how Republican and Democratic administrations alike systematically lied about the huge sums wasted on corruption and empty “development” schemes. The total failure to bring peace or prosperity was well known but covered up.

Throughout, war crimes were committed with impunity by U.S. and NATO forces and their installed government (See “War crimes and civilian casualties in Afghanistan,” by Left Radical of Afghanistan, or LRA, at socialism.com). Barack Obama explicitly declined to investigate George W. Bush’s policy of widespread prisoner torture. In November 2019, Donald Trump had the gall to pardon two soldiers for war crimes, one convicted in U.S. courts and another before even standing trial.

Devastation wrought.

According to the Costs of War Project at Brown University, some 241,000 people have died in Afghanistan and Pakistan due directly to the violence of the war. Several times that number have died from lack of food and water or other indirect causes. Among the dead are more than 71,000 civilians, 78,000 Afghan soldiers, and 84,000 opposition fighters. The deaths of U.S. and NATO troops and military contractors number 7,522. Tens of thousands on all sides have been wounded.

There are 2.7 million UN-registered Afghan refugees. Most are stuck in camps with no hope of permanent settlement. Over 2 million people are internally displaced within the country.

Eteraz monthly is a collaboration by Afghan radicals, including LRA. Recent journal articles, reprinted at socialism.com, describe dire conditions for women and youth. Violence against women is at an all-time high, not only in rural areas dominated by Islamist forces, but also in large cities under government control.

Women and girls are not allowed to go to school in Taliban-controlled areas. Media reports say that three female journalists, a woman physician and two female judges have been assassinated since the beginning of 2021. In May, a school bombing in Kabul killed 85 girls, most of them Hazara Shiites, an ethnic and religious minority.

As for youth, Eteraz reports that about 70% of the population is under the age of 22, and schools have been closed throughout the country during the war. Many Afghans are illiterate, and the numbers are much higher for women and young people. All the factions in conflict, including the government, target unemployed and impoverished youth for recruitment. With an unemployment rate estimated at 72%, options are few beyond taking up arms, getting into the opium trade, or attempting to flee the country.

A Taliban takeover or civil war seems imminent. Either way, women and religious and ethnic minorities are in serious peril.

Looking forward.

Even by the probably rosy estimates of the Pentagon, the Taliban took over a third of the country between the beginning of May and early July. The U.S. played a key role in creating the disaster it is backing away from. To engineer the overthrow of a Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan during the 1980s, Washington funded the mujahideen (precursors to the Taliban), spawning the spread of right-wing Islamic fundamentalism throughout the region. Now it and its NATO allies are cutting their losses and leaving Afghans to pick up the pieces.

In early July, defiant women took up that challenge. Demonstrations of hundreds of women armed with assault rifles broke out in the north and central areas where the Taliban have been conquering territory and reinstituting heavy misogynist restrictions. The Guardian quoted a marcher who is head of the women’s directorate of Ghor province saying that while some women’s protest may have been symbolic, others “were ready to go to the battlefields.”

Afghan women, youth and poor people, and the Left that defends them, urgently require international solidarity, especially from socialists in the imperialist heartland. People in the U.S. can begin by demanding that their government pay war reparations and provide real reconstruction aid, no strings attached, to Afghanistan!

Cognitive impact of COVID-19 often worse than a stroke or lead poisoning

Thomas Scripps

Governments around the world are letting COVID-19 rip through their populations. Besides the terrible toll in deaths, which officially stands at over 4.2 million, this policy is condemning millions more to severe long-term health problems.

A scientist researching Covid-19 (credit: Creative Commons)

A growing body of research has pointed to the serious neurological impact of a COVID-19 infection. Last month, a major study led by Imperial College London, “Cognitive Deficits In People Who Have Recovered From COVID-19”, provided an alarming confirmation of these effects.

Published in The Lancet, the study reveals that people who recover from COVID-19 are more likely to score substantially lower on IQ tests than they were before they were infected, with the impact increasing with the severity of the illness.

Using records from the ongoing Great British Intelligence Test, the researchers analysed the cognitive test scores of 81,337 people, of which 12,689 indicated they had experienced or suspected they had experienced a COVID-19 infection. Forty-four were hospitalised on a ventilator, 148 were hospitalised without a ventilator, 173 received medical assistance at home, 3,386 had symptoms which they self-managed at home, 8,938 had no noticeable symptoms and 68,648 were not ill.

The study found that people hospitalised with COVID showed “substantial” cognitive performance deficits, with those placed on a ventilator losing roughly seven IQ points, and those not ventilated losing roughly four.

Putting this in perspective, the “score reduction for the hospitalised with ventilator sub-group was greater than the average 10-year decline in global performance between the ages of 20 to 70 within this dataset. It was larger than the mean deficit of 480 people who indicated they had previously suffered a stroke.”

Half a million people have so far been hospitalised with COVID-19 in the UK.

Even those who were not hospitalised showed “small” but “statistically significant” performance deficits in the Lancet study. People who experienced respiratory difficulty lost between one and two IQ points. This is roughly equivalent with the effects of lead poisoning.

A study of 24,000 COVID patients published last June found that breathing problems affected 23 percent of infected people, broadly confirmed across multiple sources. The UK has recorded close to six million COVID-19 cases. On this rough calculation, close to 1.4 million people have had their cognitive function significantly impaired.

Deficits were most pronounced for tests which “tapped cognitive functions such as reasoning, problem solving, spatial planning and target detection whilst sparing tests of simpler functions such as working-memory span as well as emotional processing.”

The researchers suggest, “recovery from COVID-19 infection may be associated with particularly pronounced problems in aspects of higher cognitive or ‘executive’ function, an observation that accords with preliminary reports of executive dysfunction in some patients at hospital discharge”.

These findings “accord with reports of long-COVID, where ‘brain fog’, trouble concentrating and difficulty finding the correct words are common.”

According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), 945,000 people in the UK are currently living with Long COVID, defined as persistent symptoms lasting more than four weeks after infection. This includes 11,000 children aged 2-11 and 23,000 children aged 12-16. There are 380,000 people who have suffered the effects of Long COVID for more than a year.

A link between severe respiratory disease requiring hospitalisation and negative cognitive effects is not new. The study’s authors explain: “previous studies in hospitalised patients with respiratory disease not only demonstrate objective and subjective cognitive deficits but suggest these remain for some at 5-year follow-up.” They describe the impact on ventilated patients as “not altogether surprising”.

However, they add, “the scale of deficits in cases who were not put on a ventilator, particularly those who remained at home, was unexpected”.

Addressing the rigour of their results, the scientists explain, “Our analyses provide converging evidence to support the hypothesis that COVID-19 infection is associated with cognitive deficits that persist into the recovery phase.” The observed deficits “could not be explained by differences in age, education or other demographic and socioeconomic variables, remained in those who had no other residual symptoms and was of greater scale than common pre-existing conditions that are associated with virus susceptibility and cognitive problems.”

Placing the findings in the context of the UK government’s policy of herd immunity by mass infection, lead researcher Dr. Adam Hampshire told psychology and neuroscience website PsyPost, “We need to be careful as it looks like the virus could be affecting our cognition. We do not fully understand how, why, or for how long, but we urgently need to find out…

“I think it is fair to say that those of us who have been analysing data such as this are somewhat nervous at the decision to let the pandemic run its course within the UK.”

The study’s authors collectively stress that these results “should act as a clarion call for further research… to plot recovery trajectories and identify the biological basis of cognitive deficits in SARS-COV-2 survivors.”

A recent review of such research by the journal Nature charts the growing biological evidence base for COVID’s neurological symptoms, which it notes “appeared in 80% of the people hospitalized with COVID-19 who were surveyed in one study”. Experiments and studies have demonstrated the virus’ ability to infect astrocyte cells which perform important functions in the brain and pericyte cells which are important to brain blood flow. COVID-19 can also prompt the production of “autoantibodies” which attack the body’s own tissues.

The Nature article refers to a preprint study led by the Welcome Trust, “Brain imaging before and after COVID-19 in UK Biobank”, which found a loss of grey matter in several areas of the brain among those who had recovered from COVID-19. The loss particularly affected the areas concerned with sense of smell and taste.

That the resources have not been made available for scientists to submit these questions to vastly more extensive research at this stage of the pandemic, as the basis for preparing effective treatments, is an abject failure of capitalist society. That reference to these grave health risks is largely suppressed in the media and political discussion, in service to the mantra of “learning to live with the virus”, is an immense social crime. To sustain profits, millions more people are being exposed to a virus whose known effects are frequently devastating and whose full consequences for a person’s health are still being explored.