Train drivers began nationwide strike in Germany

Marianne Arens

Engine drivers, train conductors and workshop engineers at railway company Deutsche Bahn (DB) have begun a nationwide strike to defend themselves against wage cuts and growing work stress. A ballot showed 95 percent of its members in favour of strike action, the German Train Drivers’ Union (GDL) announced on Tuesday. Turnout was 70 percent. A 48-hour strike started Wednesday morning at two o’clock and ends Friday morning. In freight traffic, the strike already began on Tuesday evening at 7 p.m.

Striking train drivers at Berlin Ostbahnhof in 2015 (Photo: WSWS)

The strike is of great significance for workers in Germany and around the world, because railway workers are resisting DB management’s attempts to pass on the costs of the coronavirus pandemic to them. DB is determined to impose a pay freeze for 2021—while management bonuses will rack up €500 million—something it has already stipulated in agreements with the much larger railway workers’ and transport union (EVG).

DB’s offer to GDL members only provides for a wage increase of 1.5 percent from January 2022, with a further 1.7 percent from March 2023, and a contract term of 40 months. Given the current inflation rate of 3.8 percent, this means a massive reduction in real wages. Inflation is predicted to rise further, with Bundesbank President Jens Weidmann expecting it could be as high as 5 percent by the end of the year.

Company pensions are also to be cut by up to two-thirds and duty rosters made more flexible in order to deploy staff on irregular shift work at even shorter notice than before.

As “essential” workers, train drivers, conductors, engineers and other rail workers have had to bear the full brunt of the pandemic for 18 months already. They can neither isolate themselves nor protect themselves reliably. This was also revealed by a study commissioned by DB and carried out by the Berlin Charité hospital.

DB and the media reported the study using misleading headlines such as “No sign of increased coronavirus risk among train staff.” In reality, the study only shows that train conductors are not exposed to a higher risk of infection compared to train drivers or railway engineers. But overall, the infection rate is enormously high. According to the study, among a total of 944 railway employees tested, 80, or 8.5 percent, were found to have had an acute coronavirus infection within eight months!

Although railway workers are among the main victims of the virus, the DB Executive Board is cynically using the pandemic to denounce the strikers as “lacking solidarity.” The strikes are “completely unnecessary and excessive,” commented Martin Seiler, DB board member for human resources and legal affairs. “As Deutsche Bahn, we are in the midst of the company’s biggest economic crisis and have suffered additional damage in recent weeks.”

“The room for manoeuvre in this round of collective bargaining is set by the pandemic,” stated Florian Weh, chief executive of the German Railway Employers’ Association (AGV Move), which is leading the collective bargaining.

As usual, the right-wing tabloid Bild-Zeitung was particularly blatant with its lurid headlines: “Travel chaos looms!” and “An attack on the whole country.” In a lying appeal, it attacked GDL leader Claus Weselsky from the right: “This strike is lacking solidarity, Mr. GDL boss!”

“In the midst of the pandemic and in the middle of the holiday season,” train drivers could not expect any sympathy, and the health of travelers was “more important than quick wage increases,” Bild wrote. “The strike comes at the wrong time and is becoming a health risk”; it meant “danger from contagions shortly before a possible fourth wave.”

Such statements reek of boundless cynicism. Since the beginning of the pandemic, Bild-Zeitung has been the loudest proponent of the official herd immunity policy and of placing profits before lives. It has organised a veritable smear campaign against serious virologists such as Dr Christian Drosten.

The GDL strike is meeting with great sympathy among all railway workers and throughout the working class. As Weselsky reported at the press conference on Tuesday, “even many civil servants and colleagues from DB companies where the GDL has not even held a strike ballot have expressed their solidarity”.

A train driver taking part in the strike said on twitter that the opposition of the political establishment to a halt in rail traffic during the “lockdown” indicates that it is “an essential job that I am doing. ... But now to strike for at least inflation compensation? No, that’s taking hostages and being anti-social.”

He spoke for many workers when he added, “A large part of the net wage is tax-free supplements. Sick leave? Holidays? Then it all falls away. If I become unemployed or long-term sick tomorrow, I go home with a triple digit [pay check].”

The reason for the barrage in the bourgeois media against the strike is the great sympathy for the strike in the working class. Any industrial action against the austerity dictates of DB, the government or corporations could send a signal and set off a chain reaction.

The pandemic has already caused more than 92,000 mostly preventable deaths in Germany. But governments at the federal and state level and business leaders have not only continued their profits-before-lives policies, but are using the pandemic as a pretext to step up attack on wages and jobs everywhere—at schools, day-care centres, hospitals, bus companies and airports, in the auto and metal industries.

Railway workers face a struggle on several fronts. They face not only DB management and the federal government, which owns 100 percent of Deutsche Bahn, but also the main EVG trade union, which is in the pocket of management and functions as a company union.

To successfully oppose the dictates of DB, railway workers must understand that the GDL too does not represent their interests. To make the strike a success, they must organise themselves into independent rank-and-file committees, reaching out to other transport workers and the whole German and international working class to wage a common struggle against job insecurity, wage theft and job cuts.

The GDL in its present form emerged from a factional conflict with the EVG. To fight against the endless spiral of wage and staff cuts that the EVG helps organise, more and more train drivers and then train conductors and other railway workers have joined the GDL since 2008. The GDL organised several rail strikes, in 2008 and 2014–2015.

However, the GDL is not prepared to launch an all-out strike and take up the necessary political fight against the government, which cannot tolerate a major rail strike, especially during the present election campaign. Claus Weselsky, himself a Christian Democrat (CDU) member, appealed to Federal Transport Minister Andreas Scheuer (Christian Social Union, CSU) at Tuesday’s press conference to relent with an “improved, negotiable offer.” Now was “the time to scrap the sham offers and put your money where your mouth is.”

Weselsky assured Tagesspiegel: “Of course, we would not close our minds to restructuring,” and linked this to the proposal to lay off half the administrative staff. Thus, instead of uniting all railway employees, the union is playing off one section of workers against another.

The GDL ended the dispute in 2015 by signing a four-year sellout agreement, and then agreed to a contract at the beginning of 2019 with a duration of 29 months, which barely compensated for the rate of inflation.

Its current demands are also not likely to improve the situation of railway workers. Its wage demand, like DB’s offer, is far below the rate of inflation. The GDL is demanding an increase of 1.4 percent from retroactive to the beginning of April, with a minimum increase of at least €50, a coronavirus allowance of €600 in 2021, and a further across-the-board wage increase of 1.8 percent on April 1, 2022, with a 28-month contract term instead of 40.

The GDL’s fight against the EVG is not progressive. Much of its “militancy” is because DB has been competing for membership with the EVG by applying the so-called Contract Unity Law (TEG). This was introduced by the grand coalition under the auspices of the SPD to protect the major unions against competition from sectoral unions such as GDL, or UFO and Vereinigung Cockpit in air travel, Marburger Bund (doctors), etc.

The TEG stipulates that in a company with several trade unions, only the collective agreement reached by the trade union with the largest membership is applicable. The GDL is fighting for a majority of members in 71 out of 300 railway companies, and as Weselsky explained, it has gained over 3,000 new members in the last six months. But DB will only grant it collective bargaining rights in 16 companies. It is taking legal action in another 18, but four of the actions have so far failed in court.

Like the EVG, the GDL is expressly committed to the corporatist policy of “social partnership.” If it is recognised as a “social partner,” it is prepared—like the EVG—to agree any shabby deal, as the 2015 and 2019 contracts have shown. It is also prepared to reach an accommodation with the EVG, as Weselsky made clear in an interview with the organisation “arbeitsunrecht.”

He promised that the GDL explicitly only wanted to represent “direct railway staff.” He said: “We are not talking about companies that are outside railway segments, we are not talking about [logistics arm] DB Schenker, for example. That is clearly the territory of our colleagues from Verdi, with whom we have no stress and no quarrel and do not hunt each other’s members, but maintain a peaceful coexistence.”

Democrats begin budget “reconciliation” process with Senate vote

Patrick Martin

The US Senate voted early Wednesday morning to adopt a budget resolution that purports to allow up to $3.5 trillion in social spending, backed by the Biden administration and the Democratic leadership in Congress.

Despite the Republican howls about massive spending and even “socialism,” the blueprint is highly unlikely to be enacted in anything like the form outlined by Senator Bernie Sanders, the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, who took the lead role in the debate on the resolution.

Sanders mocked the Republicans, saying they were “finding it hard to believe that the president, the Democratic caucus, are prepared to go forward in addressing the long-neglected needs of working families and not just the 1 percent.”

He continued with more “left” phrases, claiming, “This legislation will not only provide enormous support to the kids of this country, to the parents of this country, to the elderly people of this country,” but then reached the real purpose of the resolution: “It will also, I hope, restore the belief that in America we can have a government that works for all, not just the few.”

In other words, the purpose of the budget resolution is to spread illusions among working people in the viability of the corporate-controlled political system. It seeks to put a “left” face on an administration that just concluded a deal with Senate Republicans on an infrastructure bill that is tailored to their demands—and backed by Republican leader Mitch McConnell. And Sanders is given a leading role in order to sustain the pretense of what even the New York Times called, in its headline, “Budget Political Theater.”

The budget resolution passed on a 50–49 vote, with all Democrats supporting it and every Republican in attendance voting “no.” Vice President Kamala Harris chaired the session but her tie-breaking vote was not needed because one Republican was absent because his wife is severely ill.

The Senate action sets in motion an extremely convoluted procedure. The resolution must be passed by the House of Representatives, but it does not then go to the White House and it does not become law. It is essentially a procedural motion that sets the terms for subsequent congressional action in which the Senate waives the 60-vote requirement in effect for most legislation, and only a simple majority is required.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer announced Wednesday that the House would be recalled from its summer recess to meet August 23, presumably to approve the same resolution, setting the stage for further action in September. Democratic leaders have suggested that all committee action on the components of the actual spending bill should be completed by September 15.

This budget procedure, known as “reconciliation,” would allow the passage of the actual spending legislation without any Republican support in the Senate, provided all 50 Democrats vote as a bloc. But that is highly unlikely, as two of the most right-wing Senate Democrats, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, have already announced their opposition to the $3.5 trillion top number for total spending.

Only hours after he voted for the budget resolution, Manchin made it clear that this was support only for starting the process, not for the outcome, and that he had “serious concerns about the grave consequences facing West Virginians and every American family if Congress decides to spend another $3.5 trillion.”

He added, “Given the current state of the economic recovery, it is simply irresponsible to continue spending at levels more suited to respond to a Great Depression or Great Recession—not an economy that is on the verge of overheating.” A drive through the devastated former coal mining regions of his state would suggest that West Virginia is undergoing an economic collapse of comparable dimensions, but Manchin is doing the bidding of Wall Street and the energy conglomerates.

Kyrsten Sinema said last month, “while I will support beginning this process, I do not support a bill that costs $3.5 trillion.” She also cited the need for working with “my colleagues” (i.e., Senate Republicans) and the Biden administration going forward.

In the hours preceding the final vote, both Manchin and Sinema and several other Senate Democrats indicated their willingness to break ranks and torpedo an eventual spending bill by voting for Republican-backed amendments to the resolution.

These amendments, under a special procedure that allows rapid-fire introduction and consideration and requires only 50 votes for passage, do not have any legal force, since the resolution is not a law. But they serve as political litmus tests for the two parties and for individual senators in their reelection campaigns.

Manchin supplied that 50th vote for two of these amendments, one supporting funding for health care providers that refuse to participate in abortions, the other banning any spending that supports the teaching of “critical race theory” in the schools.

Sinema sided with Republicans in voting down an amendment proposed by another Democratic senator that called for “protecting family farms, ranches, and small businesses while ensuring the wealthy pay their fair share.” The objection was to the “fair share” language.

A similar Democratic amendment, which backed raising taxes on the wealthiest 0.1 percent of Americans, was defeated when Sinema and the two Democrats from New Hampshire, Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hassan, voted against it.

Another Republican amendment, although defeated, underscores the right-wing character of the entire debate. Mitt Romney of Utah, one of the wealthiest members of the Senate, proposes to ban any tax increases at all, excluding both corporations and the wealthy from paying for social improvements. This was defeated on a 50–49 party-line vote.

Some of the right-wing amendments passed by overwhelming votes after they were embraced by the Democratic leadership. The Senate voted by 88–11 to bar transporting immigrants in federal custody away from the border area unless they test negative for COVID-19.

By a 96–3 vote, the senators voted in support of an amendment by Josh Hawley of Missouri—who by rights should be arrested for his role in the January 6 attack on the Capitol—endorsing the hiring of an additional 100,000 police.

Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., thanked Sen.Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., on Tuesday, Aug. 10, for a political “gift.” (AP Photo/Amanda Andrade-Rhoades, File)

Most revealing of all was the response of the Democrats to an amendment by Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama to withhold federal funds for any local governments that “defund the police.” Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey called the amendment “a gift” that would allow the Democrats to “put to bed this scurrilous accusation that somebody in this great esteemed body would want to defund the police.” He said he wanted to “walk over there and hug my colleague.” The amendment then passed by a vote of 99–0.

Schools across Southern US reopen as COVID patients flood hospitals

Emma Arceneaux

School districts across the Southern United States have reopened against the backdrop of a widening coronavirus pandemic that has infected tens of thousands, filling hospitals to capacity and leaving them in desperate need of emergency personnel and equipment. This includes pediatric hospitals, which in many areas have more patients than at any other time during the pandemic.

Within days of reopening, school districts across the region reported thousands of COVID-19 infections and many reverted to short-term virtual instruction. Nevertheless, the ruling class, spearheaded by the Biden administration and Republican-controlled state governments, remains steadfast that in-person schooling must resume, sacrificing children’s lives for corporate profit as their parents go back to work.

Middle school student Elise Robinson receives her first coronavirus vaccination on Wednesday, May 12, 2021 in Decatur, Georgia. (AP Photo/Ron Harris)

Educators and parents are irate and desperate as they watch children subjected to dangerous conditions. On social media, teachers have circulated petitions in an attempt to pressure politicians and superintendents to enforce mitigation strategies at the least or shut down in-person learning altogether.

In the comments section of these petitions, many parents plead desperately for virtual learning options, which have been almost totally scrapped across the country.

One signer wrote on a Texas petition, “Governor Abbott is putting future Texans in danger. He claims to be pro life and care about children. I guess that only applies to unborn children. Many kids that are here now will die because of his direct actions. He should be held accountable for any deaths that occur under his failures.”

Another commented, “What will happen in public schools in Texas during the next Covid outbreak after Governor Abbott says there will be no virtual classrooms? And will he and others be held accountable for the carnage?”

It must be stressed that the policies of the Democratic Party led by President Biden are responsible for emboldening the right-wing attacks on science and public health measures being carried out in Republican states.

Biden’s economic adviser Brian Deese admitted that the real priority in reopening schools is the “labor shortage” due to a lack of “child care and school.” It was under Biden’s administration that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention called for vaccinated people to throw off their masks, despite having definitive proof that vaccinated people contract and spread the virus.

Within days of reopening, districts in the region reported hundreds of cases, outbreaks and school closures. In New Orleans, where masks are required, 116 active cases were reported on Monday, and 638 students and staff were quarantined, even before all campuses have opened. Despite school being in session, the Louisiana Department of Health has yet to resume its weekly K-12 COVID-19 case tracker.

In Mississippi, with many districts not reporting, 841 students and 347 staff have tested positive since August 1. For the week ending August 6, 4,435 students were quarantined.

In Georgia, districts across metro Atlanta reported hundreds of cases only days after school started. Gwinnett County Schools reported 166 cases in just two days. Dr. Cherie Drenzek, an epidemiologist with the Georgia Department of Public Health, told 11Alive that there has been a 100 percent increase in cases of children ages 5-17 over the past two weeks.

As the petitions by educators and parents indicate, there is widespread hostility to reopening schools. In Duval County, Florida (Jacksonville) 96 teachers were absent on the first day of school, up from the 80 that were absent on the first day in the last school year.

Throughout the South, hospitals are overwhelmed. Mississippi, Georgia, Florida and Louisiana accounted for more than 40 percent of all hospitalizations nationwide on August 5, according to the Associated Press. In New Orleans, a heart attack victim was “bounced from six hospitals before finding an emergency room that could take him,” reported National Public Radio.

Mississippi State Health Officer Dr. Thomas Dobbs warned on Twitter on Monday that the state expects 500 new hospitalizations in the coming days but that there will be no room for these patients: “we have ZERO ICU beds at Level 1-3 hospitals, and we have > 200 patients waiting in ERs for a room.” Similarly, Florida surpassed 15,000 hospitalizations on Tuesday, the highest number to date during the pandemic.

Supplies are low in Florida, which requested 300 ventilators from the federal government this week after the state stockpiles were exhausted, according to a Department of Health and Human Services document obtained by ABC. Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, who claimed to be unaware of the request, has banned mask mandates in schools and threatened to withhold funds from school districts which defy him. Florida currently has the highest number of children hospitalized from COVID of any state.

In Texas, while pursuing a similar policy of banning school mask mandates, Republican Governor Greg Abbott pleaded for out-of-state personnel assistance as hospitals are overwhelmed. He also requested that the Texas Hospital Association postpone elective medical procedures. School districts across the state are defying his mask ban, and he faces multiple lawsuits to overturn the ban.

Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson was forced to backtrack after signing a bill into law banning state and local mask mandates. Now that it is enacted, he must wait on the bill to be amended or for the courts to rule the ban unconstitutional. On Tuesday, only eight ICU beds were available across the state.

The Southern US has some of the lowest vaccination rates in the country. According to Our World in Data, less than 40 percent of the population in the states of Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Arkansas and Georgia are fully vaccinated. Florida and Texas have slightly higher rates with 49 percent and 46 percent fully vaccinated, respectively. In Louisiana, only 13 percent of eligible children (12- to 17-year-olds) are vaccinated. Just 25 percent of eligible 12- to 15-year-olds nationwide have been fully vaccinated, according to CDC data.

Pediatric hospitals are also at a breaking point. Dr. Mark Kline, physician-in-chief of Children’s Hospital New Orleans, which serves patients from across the Gulf Coast, told Good Morning America that the hospital is awaiting federal medical personnel to assist with a staffing shortage: “We were thin already, having lost a number of staff over the course of 2020. … Louisiana and the region as a whole have a real dearth of professionals.”

Speaking to WDSU, Dr. Kline said that half of the 18 children currently admitted in his hospital are under two years of age. The test positivity rate for Louisiana children is 25 percent. He noted that he was “very concerned” that schools are opening now and feared “the mitigation measures we have used in the past, including masking, social distancing and hand-washing, aren’t going to be as effective for this virus.”

Nationwide, 93,824 child COVID-19 cases were reported for the week ending August 5, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics, and children represented 15 percent of all new cases.

Exposing the lie that reopening schools during a pandemic is in the best interests of children’s mental and social well-being, data continues to pour in about the long-lasting effects of even “mild” or asymptomatic COVID-19 infections. Speaking on the effects on children of Long COVID, including on school performance, Dr. Avindra Nath, chief of infections of the nervous system at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, told the New York Times, “I mean, they’re in their formative years. Once you start falling behind, it’s very hard because the kids lose their own self-confidence too. It’s a downward spiral.”

Additionally, recent data published in The Lancet indicates that brain damage due to COVID-19 infections can be comparable to stroke for hospitalized patients or lead poisoning for those who have respiratory difficulty but do not require hospitalization.

In the coming weeks, as districts continue to reopen in the South and across the US, educators will once again be thrust into struggle—against the Biden administration that insists schools must be open, against Republican politicians who outlaw mitigation strategies in schools and against the fraudulent organizations that claim to represent educators.

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten and National Education Association President Becky Pringle have insisted that schools reopen fully in-person. Last year, as teachers across the country died in the hundreds, if not thousands, neither organization lifted a finger to mobilize their millions of members in a nationwide strike to prevent school reopenings and needless death. The hundreds of wildcat walkouts and protests across the US were systematically isolated, while local chapters worked diligently to pressure and demoralize teachers who sought assistance. No confidence or hope can be placed in these organizations.

US intelligence warns Kabul could fall within one month

Bill Van Auken

The collapse of US-backed Afghan security forces in the face of a nationwide offensive by the Taliban insurgency has led US military and intelligence officials to warn that the fall of Kabul could come within one month to 90 days, the Washington Post reported Wednesday.

The new estimate represents a change in the already grim projection that the US-backed puppet regime of President Ashraf Ghani could be brought down in six to 12 months after the withdrawal of US and NATO troops, which is to be formally concluded within less than three weeks.

Afghan children on a captured Humvee (Twitter)

“Everything is moving in the wrong direction,” a “person familiar with the military’s new intelligence assessment,” told the Post .

The report of the new assessment came as the Taliban increased to nine the number of provincial capitals under its control. According to Western estimates, in addition to now holding more than one-quarter of the country’s capitals, the insurgency controls 65 percent of its land mass. Taliban forces are already besieging and occupying areas of major cities, including Kandahar and Lashkar Gah in the south, Ghazni in the east and Herat in the west.

On Wednesday, the insurgency captured Faizabad, the capital of Badakhshan province in the far northeast of the country. The province, which shares Afghanistan’s 57-mile border with China, was the only one that the Taliban failed to conquer when the Islamist movement ruled the country from 1996 to 2001. The fall of Faizabad brings seven of Afghanistan’s nine northern provinces under Taliban control.

In the most important of these capitals, Kunduz, with a population of nearly 375,000, remaining Afghan government forces, which were still holding a fortified base near the airport outside the city, surrendered en masse Wednesday. The surrender deal had been brokered with Afghan army commanders by local elders, who asked them not to resist the Taliban.

At least 2,000 Afghan government troops were at the base, the headquarters of the 217th Pamir Army Corps, one of seven army corps in the country, which was responsible for security in the country’s north. The Taliban captured large stocks of US-supplied weapons and Humvee armored vehicles, as well as a helicopter in the surrender.

The continuing rout of the Afghan national security forces came as US-backed President Ghani made an emergency trip to Mazar-i-Sharif, a city of half a million that is one of the last areas still under government control in the north. Ghani used the trip to promote his government’s desperate policy of banking on the arming of so-called “uprising forces,” comprised of militias loyal to local and regional warlords.

In Mazar-i-Sharif, Ghani held meetings with infamous Uzbek warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum and Tajik warlord Atta Muhammed Noor. While the two men fought each other in the bloody civil war that followed the CIA-orchestrated war in the 1980s against the Moscow-backed government and Soviet forces in Afghanistan, they united in the so-called Northern Alliance that opposed the Taliban after it took power in 1997. Dostum, who carried out some of the worst war crimes during the civil war, was a key US ally following the October 2001 invasion of Afghanistan. Together with US special forces, he organized the massacre of some 2,000 Taliban prisoners, who were suffocated or shot to death after being stuffed into metal shipping containers near Kunduz.

Ghani had previously attempted to sideline figures like Dostum and Noor, both because of their bloody history and the challenge they posed to his government’s authority. Now that he is appealing to them to mobilize forces to defend his regime against the Taliban, it is by no means clear that they can do so.

Both Dostum and Noor have become immensely wealthy off the corruption that is the lifeblood of the Afghan regime. While they had based their authority on their records as “mujaheddin” leaders in the US-backed war against the Soviet-backed government and Soviet troops in the 1980s, they are now seen as collaborators with the US occupation.

The Taliban’s ability to consolidate control over much of the country’s north, which was the center of opposition to their rule in the late 1990s, is a measure of the overwhelming popular hostility to the puppet regime in Kabul and its masters in Washington.

Among the defections to the Islamist insurgency over the past week was that of Asif Azimi, a former senator from Samangan and a major warlord in Jamiat-e-Islami, a predominantly Takij party that was the backbone of the Northern Alliance led by Ahmad Shah Massoud, who was assassinated in 2001.

Explaining his decision to support the Taliban, Azimi told the Wall Street Journal, “We want an Islamic government. This government is a puppet of America. Anyone who stands against it, we will support it.”

The terminal crisis of the puppet government headed by Ghani has found expression in a wholesale reshuffling of the command of its security forces and the sudden resignation Wednesday and flight from the country of its acting Finance Minister Khalid Payenda. He deserted his post as the regime faced the cutoff of fully 50 percent of its revenues as a result of the Taliban seizing control of the majority of the country’s border crossings, taking over the collection of taxes and customs duties. Payenda has also been charged with unreported foreign income, emblematic of the pervasive corruption of the US-backed regime.

Nearly 390,000 Afghans have been internally displaced by the fighting since the beginning of the year, with many of them fleeing to the already seriously overcrowded capital of Kabul. Encampments of these internal refugees have proliferated in parks and city streets, while Kabul’s mosques have been converted into shelters. Refugees have charged that the government has failed to provide them with food and other vital assistance.

The growing crisis in Kabul could lead to social unrest, Qais Mohammadi, a lecturer in economics at Kardan University, told Foreign Policy, pointing to the breakdown of essential services, including electricity, and an inflation rate of between 10 and 20 percent, with gasoline prices doubling since May.

Speaking to reporters in Washington on Tuesday, US President Joe Biden said he did “not regret” his order to withdraw all US troops from Afghanistan by the end of the month.

“We spent over a trillion dollars over 20 years, we trained and equipped with modern equipment over 300,000 Afghan forces, and Afghan leaders have to come together. We lost thousands … of American personnel,” Biden said.

Why the trillion dollars—the training and equipping of 300,000 Afghan troops (a vastly inflated number, given wholesale desertions and commanders’ listing of “ghost soldiers” whose salaries could be pocketed) and the blood spilt by US forces, not to mention the killing of hundreds of thousands of Afghans—have yielded the worst debacle for US imperialism since the fall of Saigon 46 years ago, Biden made no attempt to explain.

Eleven COVID-19 patients die in Russian hospital after oxygen pipe bursts

Clara Weiss

The bursting of an underground oxygen pipe has killed nearly a dozen COVID-19 patients in the ICU unit of a hospital in Russia’s North Ossetia province. While the hospital staff could use two oxygen cylinders to hook up many of the most severely ill patients to a ventilator, it took up to an hour to fully restore oxygen supplies, far too long for nine of the patients.

Two more patients died the following night. It is not clear whether there was a direct relationship between their deaths and the disruption of oxygen supplies the day before. All the patients had reportedly been in serious condition and hooked up to ventilators, with up to 90 percent lung damage. Overall, the hospital in Vladikavkaz had some 71 patients in its ICU unit at the time of the incident.

A medical worker measures the temperature of a homeless man prior to giving a shot of the one-dose Sputnik Light vaccine at a mobile vaccination station in St. Petersburg, Russia, Wednesday, Aug. 11, 2021. (AP Photo/Elena Ignatyeva)

An unnamed source told Interfax that the “deterioration of equipment” had caused the pipe to burst. A preliminary report by local authorities found that technical deficiencies and negligence contributed to the disaster. The oxygen tanks that the hospital received five or six years ago were apparently acquired without the proper legal documentation. As is often the case in such incidents, the hospital’s chief physician has now been made the scapegoat. He was arrested on Tuesday and is awaiting criminal charges.

The horrific incident in Vladikavkaz, a city in the deeply impoverished Caucasus region, gives a sense of the large number of preventable deaths that are the direct result of the disastrously underfunded and run-down social infrastructure. While the official number of COVID-19 deaths in Russia stands at 164,000, the real death toll is believed to be higher by a factor of at least five.

The country has had an official total of more than 6.5 million coronavirus infections. While a summer surge, driven by the Delta variant, peaked in July, there are still well over 20,000 new cases recorded every day. For over a month now, well over 750 people die every day from COVID-19.

Monday’s incident was one of the deadliest in a series of fires and oxygen-supply disruptions at Russian hospitals that have claimed dozens of lives since the beginning of the pandemic. Last May, several people died in Moscow and St. Petersburg hospitals after ventilators went up in flames. The deaths of up to 13 patients at a hospital in Rostov-on-Don have been linked to the explosion of an oxygen tank in October. Three patients died at a hospital in the Moscow region in February after oxygen supplies were cut off. Another fire in June in a hospital near Moscow claimed three lives.

Understaffed and underfunded hospitals in Russia have operated on the brink of collapse for the entire pandemic, with many buildings completely dilapidated and in unhygienic condition.

Speaking on the state of Russia’s hospitals, a doctor at a regional hospital in St. Petersburg angrily stated last October, at the height of the second wave, “There is a constant feeling that there is a shortage of everything: supplies, personnel, even elementary new buildings. Patients are treated in hospitals built in the middle of the last century. You can’t even take a normal shower there. So how can you speak of medical treatment [under these conditions]?”

The disastrous state of Russia’s health care system is a direct result of the restoration of capitalism in the former Soviet Union. Despite the Stalinist degeneration, the Soviet health care system was one of the best in the world, and Soviet scientists contributed significantly to the eradication of diseases such as polio. With the restoration of capitalism, previously suppressed diseases such as tuberculosis made a comeback, while the worst HIV epidemic outside of Africa has ravaged the country for years.

Over the past 20 years, the Putin government has implemented further devastating cuts, under the pretext of the “optimization” of health care. Between 2000 and 2020, the number of hospital beds was cut by 35 percent, from 1.6 million to 1 million. If in 2000, there were 116 beds per 10,000 people, in 2020, there were only 70. The situation is particularly bad in rural areas, where 40 percent of hospital beds were cut. At the height of the COVID surge this summer, images of COVID patients lying on the floors of hospitals that had run out of beds circulated widely on social media.

The number of doctors declined by 8 percent over the past two decades and the overall number of nurses by 14 percent. The exodus of medical personnel has been caused by both layoffs and extremely poor working conditions. Even highly qualified medical personnel often only earn salaries of just a few hundred dollars a month.

Austerity measures have been particularly severe in emergency services, where the number of employees has been cut in half since 2000 to just 9,000 in 2020. A recent investigative report by Istories found that 20 million people in Russia, or one in seven inhabitants, have had to wait over 35 minutes for an ambulance. Some 650,000 people have had to wait for more than two hours. Even an official report recently acknowledged that emergency services provided for the population of 140 million were “insufficient.”

Further cuts were imposed even as the coronavirus pandemic has been mercilessly ripping through the population.

Apple to work with law enforcement to scan personal photo libraries for child abuse content

Kevin Reed

In a significant encroachment on civil liberties, Apple announced on August 5 that it plans to begin scanning the photos on all of its personal computing devices and iCloud storage content for the presence of known images of “sexually explicit activities involving a child.”

In a statement published on its website entitled “Expanded Protections for Children,” Apple said that it wants to “help protect children from predators who use communication tools to recruit and exploit them and limit the spread of Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM).”

Source: appleprivacyletter.com

The statement said that Apple had created “child safety features in three areas, developed in collaboration with child safety experts” and that these features would be “coming later this year” in the new releases of its operating systems “iOS 15, iPadOS 15, watchOS 8, and macOS Monterey.”

The three areas where the expanded features will be implemented are in its text messaging app, such that children and their parents will be warned “when receiving or sending sexually explicit photos,” in on-device scanning of images “to detect known CSAM images stored in iCloud Photos” and in expanded guidance in Siri (Apple’s virtual assistant) and Search “to help children and parents stay safe online and get help with unsafe situations.”

Apple’s statement says, “This program is ambitious, and protecting children is an important responsibility. These efforts will evolve and expand over time.” The company also says that the program will be implemented only in the US.

The implementation of the on-device image scanning will be integrated with a reporting system that sends data to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) and Apple says that “NCMEC acts as a comprehensive reporting center for CSAM and works in collaboration with law enforcement agencies across the United States.”

Notably, the company says that it will scan the personal photo libraries of iPhone and iPad users “with user privacy in mind.” It claims that on-device matching of images to a “database of known CSAM image hashes provided by NCMEC and other child safety organizations.” The other organizations are not named.

In a strained effort to explain how user privacy will be protected with the new invasive system, the company statement goes into the technical details. It says that Apple transforms the database into “an unreadable set of hashes that is securely stored on users’ devices.” An image hash is a kind of digital fingerprint of a specific photo such that copies of it are easily identifiable.

The explanation says that the matching to the database of image hashes is performed on the device before the images are synchronized with iCloud and “is powered by a cryptographic technology called private set intersection, which determines if there is a match without revealing the result. The device creates a cryptographic safety voucher that encodes the match result along with additional encrypted data about the image. This voucher is uploaded to iCloud Photos along with the image.”

Furthermore, Apple says that another technology called “threshold secret sharing” ensures that the content of the “safety vouchers” cannot be interpreted by Apple “unless the iCloud Photos account crosses a threshold of known CSAM content.” While Apple does not specify what the threshold is, it says it is “set to provide an extremely high level of accuracy and ensures less than a one in one trillion chance per year of incorrectly flagging a given account.”

According to the statement, once the threshold has been breached, Apple then “manually reviews each report to confirm there is a match, disables the user’s account, and sends a report to NCMEC. If a user feels their account has been mistakenly flagged, they can file an appeal to have their account reinstated.”

Apple’s announcement was immediately denounced by technology, cybersecurity and privacy advocates. Matthew D. Green, a cryptography professor at Johns Hopkins University, told the New York Times that Apple’s new features “set a dangerous precedent by creating surveillance technology that law enforcement or governments could exploit.” Green went on, “They’ve been selling privacy to the world and making people trust their devices. But now they’re basically capitulating to the worst possible demands of every government. I don’t see how they’re going to say no from here on out.”

Greg Nojeim, co-director of the Security & Surveillance Project at the Center for Democracy & Technology, told CNN, “Apple is replacing its industry-standard end-to-end encrypted messaging system with an infrastructure for surveillance and censorship, which will be vulnerable to abuse and scope-creep not only in the US, but around the world. Apple should abandon these changes and restore its users’ faith in the security and integrity of their data on Apple devices and services.”

In a lengthy statement, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) said, “All it would take to widen the narrow backdoor that Apple is building is an expansion of the machine learning parameters to look for additional types of content, or a tweak of the configuration flags to scan, not just children’s, but anyone’s accounts. That’s not a slippery slope; that’s a fully built system just waiting for external pressure to make the slightest change.”

Whistleblower and former intelligence analyst Edward Snowden tweeted, “No matter how well-intentioned, @Apple is rolling out mass surveillance to the entire world with this. Make no mistake: if they can scan for kiddie porn today, they can scan for anything tomorrow. They turned a trillion dollars of devices into iNarcs—‘without asking.’”

In response to the deluge of opposition and denunciations, Apple issued on Friday a Frequently Asked Questions document that only served to further expose the bundle of contradictions that the tech monopoly is embroiling within. To the question, “Does this mean Apple is going to scan all the photos stored on my iPhone?” the company responded, “No. By design, this feature only applies to photos that the user chooses to upload to iCloud Photos. ... The system does not work for users who have iCloud Photos disabled. This feature does not work on your private iPhone photo library on the device.”

Apparently, Apple is telling customers concerned about privacy invasion that they should not use one of the key features of its platform: the ability to take photos on one device and store them in the cloud such that they can be viewed and accessed by all other devices. In other words, with their CSAM initiative, Apple is destroying its own technology.

Meanwhile, in an internal memo leaked to the news media, Apple defended its plans saying that the widespread opposition was the result of “misunderstandings.” While claiming that there have been many “positive responses,” the memo included a note from the NCMEC that said, “We know that the days coming will be filled with the screeching voices of the minority.”

Beyond the technical and user aspects, the political content of Apple’s invasion of privacy initiative dovetails entirely with a right-wing bipartisan bill introduced by the Senate Judiciary Committee in March 2020 aimed purportedly at stopping “online child exploitation.”

Jointly introduced by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (Republican of South Carolina), US Senators Richard Blumenthal (Democrat of Connecticut), Josh Hawley (Republican of Missouri) and Ranking Member Dianne Feinstein (Democrat of California), the Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies Act (EARN IT Act) demanded that online service providers monitor and censor all content on their systems for CSAM in order to qualify for the Section 230 provisions of the Communications Decency Act of 1996.

The going over of Apple to the undemocratic policies of the entire American political and law enforcement establishment is predictable. The massive corporate monopoly and number one entity on Wall Street—with a staggering $2.4 trillion market valuation—is incapable of maintaining even a fig leaf of adherence to democratic rights and defending the Fourth Amendment guarantee against unreasonable searches and seizures.

Sri Lankan president opposes lockdowns, as Delta variant spreads

Sakuna Jayawardana & K. Ratnayake

Sri Lankan President Gotabhaya Rajapakse has rejected increasingly strident calls, by medical experts for lockdowns, to deal with rapidly rising COVID-19 deaths and infections, and an impending breakdown of the health system.

On July 5, Rajapakse removed many coronavirus travel restrictions, and on July 28, directed all state employees working from home to return to their workplaces. The government’s removal of virtually all remaining limited restrictions has added fuel to the pandemic, which is now accelerating, with the highly-infectious Delta variant.

Elderly Sri Lankans queue up to receive their second dose of Covishield, Serum Institute of India's version of the AstraZeneca vaccine during a public vaccination drive against the coronavirus in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Monday, June 28, 2021. (AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena)

Addressing the media last Friday, following a high-level meeting to review the health emergency, Army chief General Shavendra Silva declared: “The president is not in favour of [a] countrywide lockdown.” Silva is the head of the National Operation Centre for Prevention of COVID-19.

Rajapakse, who attended the meeting, reportedly only offered advice on how to “solve” hospital congestion. The meeting decided to reduce the number of people allowed to attend weddings and funerals, and postponed state functions.

Rajapakse has flatly rejected urgent appeals by medical experts for lockdowns and stricter safety, amid a rapidly increasing daily death toll, with 656 deaths reported in the past six days. Yesterday, the total number of deaths hit 5,464, up from 3,268 on July 5, and the total number of infections rose to 342,079, an increase by 83,380 during the same period.

These figures, however, are not an accurate reflection of the real situation, because the government has deliberately limited testing and tracing. While medical experts are demanding at least 40,000 daily PCR (polymerase chain reaction) tests per day, health officers in the past month have only been able to conduct less than half that number.

Immunologist Dr. Chandima Jeewandara revealed last week that 19.3 percent of those testing positive for COVID-19 in the Colombo district, during the first week of July, were infected with the Delta variant. In the last week of July, the figure increased to 75 percent. In a Twitter message on August 4, he warned that 56 of 94 random samples, analysed from across the island, were infected with the deadly variant.

Last week, Sri Lanka Medical Association President Professor Padma Gunaratne insisted on the urgency of imposing travel restrictions. She is one of many medical experts that have consistently called for lockdowns.

“Two weeks ago, we said that a surge had begun with the Delta variant. Now, after two weeks, we are warning about what could happen in two weeks,” she said. The variant was spreading fast in the heavily-populated Colombo and Gampaha districts, she added, and warned that unless travel restrictions were imposed the situation would escalate out of control.

Sri Lankan hospitals are being overwhelmed. Last weekend, the National Hospital of Sri Lanka in Colombo was treating around 500 patients, up from about 200 the previous week. Additional wards have been allocated to deal with the increase, limiting hospital treatment for other patients.

The bodies of COVID victims placed on stretchers (Facebook)

Colombo South Hospital in Kalubowila is at capacity, with grim images of infected patients sitting in plastic chairs, surrounded by their belongings, on the lawns of the facility and others lying on ward corridor floors.

Colombo South Hospital director Dr. Sagari Kiriwandeniya told Derana TV on Saturday that the facility had stopped routine surgeries, in order to deal with the flood of COVID-19 patients. Asked what would happen if more wards were allocated for coronavirus cases, she bluntly stated: “Then not only COVID-19 patients, but others, will die.”

About 45,000 children under 18 years have been infected, and 14 have died in Sri Lanka since the outbreak of COVID-19 early last year, Dr. Deepal Perera, from the Lady Ridgeway Hospital for children, told the Daily Mirror. The facility, which is being overwhelmed, has been forced to send many of the children to other hospitals.

COVID patients in the crowded corridor of Ragama Hospital (Facebook)

Hospital mortuaries have reached capacity and are storing bodies in outside freezers. The Colombo North Ragama Hospital management told the Director General of Health Services last week that the facility faced an unbearable situation, warning that dead bodies in outside freezers would decay, creating other health problems.

External freezers storing bodies at the Kalutara and Panadura hospitals are also full. Panadura’s mayor told the media that the city had increased its cremations from two to six per day, but did not have the capacity to cremate corpses from Kalutara hospital. Concerns are also being raised that some crematoriums, which are working round the clock, could break down.

Upul Rohana, head of the public health inspectors’ union, told the media that one of the union’s members telephoned to complain that he had spent a whole night near a crematorium. This meant that many health inspectors were not available for contact tracing, because they had to supervise bodies until they were cremated.

Government ministers and parliamentarians, in a desperate attempt to show that the situation was under control, are visiting hospitals, arranging cremations in some areas and asking hospital administrations to allocate more wards for COVID-19 patients. Health authorities have also begun making arrangements for so-called home-based COVID-19 treatment. The result, however, will be more infections and deaths.

Addressing a press conference, Deputy Director General of Health Services Dr. Hemantha Herath denied that the situation in hospitals was dire. He was asked by one journalist to “comment candidly on the situation Sri Lankans would face in the coming days.” He refused to provide any detailed information and, according to a report in the Island, responded that “he might not be allowed to speak to the media again if he spoke candidly about the trajectory of the pandemic in the coming days.”

President Rajapakse, in fact, had previously warned health ministry officials and medical experts not to “panic” people about the pandemic, but directly inform him of any problems.

Parliamentary opposition parties, which from the outset have supported the Rajapakse government’s response to the pandemic, including its reopening of the economy, are now making hypocritical appeals to Colombo to impose a lockdown.

Parliamentarian Tissa Attanayake, from Samagi Jana Balawegaya, the main opposition party, has called on the government to “take proactive measures to lock down” and save lives.

Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) Politburo member Nalinda Jayatissa has called for a two-week lockdown to reduce hospital caseloads “to a manageable level.” Tamil National Alliance MP S.P. Rasamanickam declared, “If the health experts recommend a lockdown, the government should abide and comply.”

These parties are seeking to exploit and derail the growing mass outrage against the Rajapakse regime’s criminal indifference towards the health and safety of millions of Sri Lankans.

Last year, following the outbreak of coronavirus infection on the island, these parties participated in an all-party conference, called by the Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapakse, and extended their full support. The JVP-controlled trade unions and other unions attended meetings with employers, called by the labour minister to decide on wage and job cuts and extensions of working hours in the name of saving the big companies.

An editorial in last weekend’s Sunday Times reflected the nervous concerns of sections of the ruling elite to the worsening coronavirus catastrophe: “Some hotels are having functions with bands playing and air-conditioning blasting, while other hotels (used by private hospitals as intermediate care centres) are filled with COVID patients carrying saline bottles. It is almost like the sinking of the Titanic, while the band played on: A tale of two cities.”

The editorial blamed the Rajapakse administration for creating a false sense of security and for insisting “that the mass vaccination program will settle the spike of positive.” It concluded by declaring that the government “must act, and act decisively, to ensure the galloping new variant does not reach a tipping point, a point of no return, by its shortsightedness.”

These concerns are not animated by social health considerations, but fears that the policies of the Rajapakse government—for which the entire ruling class is responsible—will produce a social explosion.

Rajapakse’s insistence that “vaccination is the only solution to keep the economy open” is his response to the devastating economic impact of the pandemic, with a collapse of exports, tourist industry earnings and remittances, and $US4 billion in annual foreign debt repayments over the next four years.

The Rajapakse regime, like every government around the world, is sacrificing the lives of workers and the poor to boost big-business profits and maintain its commitments to international finance capital.

Pegasus and the Global Surveillance Business

Mel Gurtov

We have just learned about a powerful spyware known as Pegasus, manufactured and leased by the Israeli company NSO Group and capable of extracting just about every kind of data stored in a smart phone. The Pegasus Project, a consortium of 17 organizations and individuals, mostly journalists, has acquired a leaked list of 50,000 individuals around the world whose phones may have been hacked, though not necessarily penetrated.

Purportedly developed to track criminals and terrorists, Pegasus is also being widely used to hack into the smart phones of human rights activists, journalists, and their political opponents at home and even abroad.

Who is using Pegasus to track enemies? Only a fraction of the 50,000 hacked phone numbers so far obtained have been examined, but that’s enough to reveal that governments from left to right have made use of Pegasus. Among them: Saudi Arabia, India, and Hungary.

The two people closest to the murdered Saudi journalist Jared Khashoggi, including his widow, are among those whose phones were penetrated. The Modi government in India and the Orban government in Hungary have caused uproars over their use of Pegasus to spy on critics.

Pegagus is also being used against current high-level government officials. Among the people on the list: Three presidents, from France, Iraq, and South Africa; three current prime ministers, from Pakistan, Egypt, and Morocco; and one king (Morocco). That means all of them have been tracked and their private messaging probably collected—though exactly what was culled and who is doing the hacking are uncertain. All these officials refused to turn over their phones for forensic analysis.

There’s a connection between the surveillance industry and lobbying, which I examined a few weeks ago. NSO can only sell its technology with Israeli government approval, which means it must lobby Israel’s defense ministry. And that effort extends to the US. For while NSO maintains that Pegasus will never be used “to conduct cybersurveillance within the United States,” why has it retained a prominent Washington, DC law firm to lobby US officials about NSO’s technology?

It is entirely possible that Pegasus has been used or might yet be used against Americans who, for example, write from home about human rights abuses abroad.

The fact that nothing in a smart phone is safe from Pegasus makes it a weapon, another piece of infowar technology, and all the more insidious for being able to hide within the phone and, even if discovered, be difficult to track.

Just think of all the information a smart phone contains: contacts, passwords, text and email messages, videos, pictures. Planting bugs and wiretapping seem ancient by comparison. A technology like Pegasus conceivably can infect millions of phones anywhere, anytime, giving a government or a gang access to potentially lethal information.

We are nearing the point where technology is driving conflict rather than the other way around. Satellites, drones, spyware, malware, and other forms of cyber attacks—all these enable states to compete and fight at a distance, sometimes (as we have seen with Russian and Chinese hacking gangs) using nonstate actors.

They pose very difficult decisions for individuals on the receiving end. Unless they are government officials, there is no way to retaliate. In the case of Pegasus, its discovery may be sufficient this time around to bring that particular technology down. But it may only encourage others to make a new version that is less detectable.

The fairly obvious solution to cyber attacks is to ban the technology, somewhat the way land mines were banned. In that case, and perhaps in this one, citizen action may work better than relying on the technology’s producer or governments.

But at some point an international cyber security agreement will be necessary. Still, as the Pegasus case shows, you can’t prevent a powerful spyware from getting in the wrong hands and causing inestimable damage.

Consider what the CEO of NSO said: “We understand that in some circumstances our customers might misuse the system.” Surely the understatement of the year. Just recall China’s ubiquitous surveillance system. And the fact that democratic governments are fully capable of misusing the technology—recall that in 2013 the US hacked the phone of Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel—means that no government and no private company can really be trusted to prevent large-scale abuse.

About the only good news I can report is that management of the fund that controls NSO Group and therefore Pegasus is now being challenged. As The Guardian reports, “Public investors in the private equity firm that owns a majority stake in the Israeli spyware company NSO Group are in talks to transfer management of that fund to . . . a US consulting firm.” Interestingly, the largest of those public investors is the state of Oregon’s public pension fund. Stay tuned.