Global Billionaire Pandemic Wealth Surges to $5.5 Trillion

Chuck Collins

The world’s billionaires have seen their wealth surge by over $5.5 trillion since the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020, a gain of over 68 percent.  The world’s 2,690 global billionaires saw their combined wealth rise from $8 trillion on March 20, 2020 to $13.5 trillion as of July 31, 2021, drawing on data from Forbes.

Global billionaire total wealth has increased more over the past 17 months of the pandemic than it did in the 15 years prior to the pandemic. Between 2006 and 2020, global billionaire wealth increased from $2.65 trillion to $8 trillion, a gain of $5.35 trillion.

Billionaires have reaped an unseemly windfall at a time when millions have lost their lives and livelihoods.  The pandemic has supercharged existing global inequalities, with the wealthy profiteering from the shuttering of the main street economies around the world.

Global equality advocates are calling on national governments to levy a one-time 99 percent tax on these billionaire windfall pandemic gains, to pay for everyone on Earth to be vaccinated against COVID-19 and provide a $20,000 cash grant to all unemployed workers.  The analysis and proposal were released today by Oxfam, the Fight Inequality Alliance, the Institute for Policy Studies, and the Patriotic Millionaires. The organizations are calling on governments to tax the ultra wealthy who profited from the pandemic crisis to help offset its costs.

The one-time emergency Covid-19 billionaire tax would raise $5.445 trillion and still leave the world’s 2,690 billionaires $55 billion richer than before the virus struck (an average of $37 million per billionaire). Governments across the world are massively under-taxing the wealthiest individuals and big corporations, which is undermining the fight against Covid-19 and poverty and inequality.

 Amazon’s Jeff Bezos’ wealth increased by $79.4 billion during the pandemic, rising from $113 billion in March 2020 to $192.4 billion on July 31, 2021. An estimated 325 new billionaires joined the ‘3-comma club’ since the pandemic began ―equivalent to roughly one new billionaire minted every day.

Less than one percent of people in low-income countries have received a vaccine, while the profits made by Big Pharma have seen the CEOs of Moderna and BioNTech become billionaires. The Covid-19 crisis has pushed over 200 million people into poverty and cost women around the world at least $800 billion in lost income in 2020, equivalent to more than the combined GDP of 98 countries. At the same time,11 people are now dying of hunger and malnutrition each minute, outpacing Covid-19 fatalities.

“With a 99 percent tax on billionaires’ Covid-19 wealth gains we are calling time on this age of greed,” said Njoki Njehu, Pan Africa coordinator of the Fight Inequality Alliance. “Billionaire wealth is not earned. Billionaires are profiting from working people’s hard graft and pain. It’s their money ’earned’ by your sweat ―and it’s high time that sweat began to pay off. Governments need to tax the rich for us to stand any chance of reversing the inequality crisis we’re in.”

The Fight Inequality Alliance are convening the Festival to Fight Inequality, a two-day virtual gathering of thousands of activists from nearly 30 countries, will take place 13-14 August. They will discuss solutions to the worsening global inequality crisis, including taxing the rich.

“The surge in global billionaire wealth as millions of people have lost their lives and livelihoods is a sickness that countries can no longer bear,” said Morris Pearl, former managing director at Blackrock and chair of the Patriotic Millionaires. “Rich people getting endlessly richer is not good for anyone. Our economies are choking on this hoarded resource that could be serving a much greater purpose. Billionaires need to cough up that cash ball ―and governments need to make them do it by taxing their wealth.”

Governments have in the past turned to the wealthiest in response to major crises. After World Wars I and II, one-off wealth taxes were levied in European countries and Japan to fund reconstruction. France, for example, taxed excessive wartime wealth gains at a rate of 100 percent after the Second World War. More recently, following the global financial crisis of 2008, countries including Iceland introduced temporary wealth taxes to help refill public coffers.

Policymakers, leading economists, civil society organizations, the UN, IMF and the World Bank are calling for one-time ‘solidarity taxes’ and longer-term wealth taxes targeted at the super-rich to mitigate the economic impacts of the pandemic and reduce inequalities. In December 2020, debt-saddled Argentina adopted a one-off special levy dubbed the ‘millionaire’s tax’ that has brought in around $2.4 billion to pay for pandemic recovery.

“Billionaire Jeff Bezos could personally pay for enough vaccines for the whole world, yet he would rather spend his wealth on a thrill ride to space,” said Max Lawson, Oxfam International’s Global Inequality Policy Lead. “Covid-19 is turning the gap between rich and poor into an unbridgeable chasm. The obscene levels of wealth gained from the pandemic by a handful of mega rich individuals should immediately be taxed at 99 percent ―enough to fully vaccinate everyone on Earth and help millions of workers who lost their jobs due to Covid-19. Only with this kind of radical and progressive policy making will we be able to fight inequality and end poverty.”

A Global Movement to Tax the Wealthy

The cost of vaccinating the world’s adult population was calculated as follows: two doses at $7 per dose for 5 billion people, for a total of $70 billion. This is based on the average cost per dose. Oxfam, The Fight Inequality Alliance, the Patriotic Millionaires and IPS do not endorse such high prices for vaccines and are campaigning for patent-free access to allow generic manufacturers to produce Covid-19 vaccines to drive down prices.

According to the ILO’s World Employment and Social Outlook 2021 Flagship Report, 220 million people are currently unemployed. Of these, 114 million people were made jobless by Covid-19. To give a one-off $20,000 cash grant to all workers currently unemployed would cost $4.4 trillion dollars.

A Viable—and Perhaps the Only—Path to Lasting Peace in Afghanistan

Vijay Prashad

As each day goes by, the Taliban’s forces edge closer to controlling all of Afghanistan. In the first week of August, the Taliban swept through the northern provinces of the country—Jawzjan, Kunduz, and Sar-e Pul—which form an arc alongside the borders of the Central Asian states of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan. The violence has been severe; the pain inflicted upon civilians by the intensity of the fighting has been terrible. Having withdrawn its ground forces, the United States sent in its B-52s to bomb targets in the city of Sheberghan (capital of the province of Jawzjan); reports suggest that at least 200 people were killed in the bombings. It shows the weakness of the government in Kabul that its Ministry of Defense’s spokesperson Fawad Aman cheered on the bombing.

It’s unlikely that the Afghan government of President Ashraf Ghani will outlast the Taliban’s lightning strikes. The U.S. bombing will slow the advance, but it will not be able to reverse the tide. That is why regional powers in Asia have deepened contacts with the Taliban’s leadership, whose governance of the entire country seems inevitable.

‘Moderate’ Taliban

“The Taliban is not an entity by itself,” Heela Najibullah said when I spoke to her during the second week of August. “It is made up of groups of extremists and militants who use the rhetoric of jihad to achieve power.” Najibullah, author of the important book Reconciliation and Social Healing in Afghanistan (2017), is the daughter of Mohammed Najibullah, the president of Afghanistan from 1987 to 1992. Since the Doha Agreement (2020), Heela Najibullah said, “the Taliban has demonstrated in action that it is not moderate but has become even more extreme in the type of violence it is carrying out against the Afghan people and state.” The Taliban has rejected every overture of a ceasefire from Afghan peace organizations.

A close look at the Taliban leadership reveals little change since its founding in September 1994. The public face of the Taliban—Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar—founded the Taliban and was a close associate of the first emir of the movement, Mullah Omar. After the United States attacked Afghanistan in October 2001, it was Baradar who took Mullah Omar on the back of a motorcycle to their refuge in Pakistan. Baradar, trusted by Pakistani intelligence, puts no daylight between himself the current leader of the Taliban—Mawlawi Haibatullah Akhundzada—and his two deputies—Mullah Yaqoob (son of the late Mullah Omar) and Sirajuddin Haqqani (leader of Pakistan’s Haqqani network). Akhundzada ran the Taliban’s judicial system from 1997 to 2001 and was responsible for some of the most heinous of its judgments. When COVID-19 infected most of the leadership, decision-making fell to Baradar.

At the March 2021 international peace conference in Moscow, the entire 10-person Taliban delegation—led by Baradar—was male (to be fair, there were only four women among the 200 Afghans in the process). One of the four women at the table was Dr. Habiba Sarabi, who was appointed as minister of Women’s Affairs in 2004 and then became the first female governor of an Afghan province in 2005. It is important to note that she was the governor of Bamyan, a province where the Taliban had blown up two sixth-century statues of Buddha in March 2001. In October 2020, Dr. Sarabi pointed out that Afghan women are “more mobilized,” although Afghanistan now faces “a crucial moment in our fight.” Reports have already appeared of forced marriages and public floggings of women in Taliban-controlled areas.

National Reconciliation

Women are more mobilized, says Dr. Sarabi, but they are not a powerful social movement. Afghanistan’s more liberal and left social forces “are active underground and are not an organized force,” Najibullah tells me. These forces include the educated sections, who do not want “extremist groups to drag the country into another proxy war.” That proxy war would be between the Taliban, the U.S.-backed government in Kabul, and other militant groups that are no less dangerous than the Taliban or the U.S. government.

Najibullah reaches back to the time when her father proposed the Afghan National Reconciliation Policy. A letter President Najibullah wrote to his family in 1995 could have been written today: “Afghanistan has multiple governments now, each created by different regional powers. Even Kabul is divided into little kingdoms… unless and until all the actors [regional and global powers] agree to sit at one table, leave their differences aside to reach a genuine consensus on non-interference in Afghanistan and abide to their agreement, the conflict will go on.”

Heela Najibullah says that the National Reconciliation Policy would require the political participation of a range of actors in an international and a regional conference. These actors would include those who have used Afghanistan for their own national agendas, such as India and Pakistan. At such a conference, Najibullah suggests, Afghanistan needs to be “recognized officially as a neutral state,” and this “neutral state” should be endorsed by the UN Security Council. “Once this is achieved, a broad-based government can be in charge until elections are held, reforms are discussed, and mechanisms are drawn for its implementation,” Najibullah says.

Proxy Politics

In the 1990s, President Najibullah’s policy was hampered by the deepening of proxy politics. Foreign powers acted through their armed emissaries—people such as Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, Burhanuddin Rabbani, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and Sibghatullah Mojaddedi—to cause mayhem in the country. They opened the door to the Taliban, which swept out of northern Pakistan across Afghanistan. Najibullah took refuge in the UN compound in Kabul, and then was killed mercilessly by the Taliban inside that compound in September 1996. Neither the U.S.-Saudi-Pakistani-backed forces (from Rabbani to Mojaddedi) nor the Taliban were interested in any kind of reconciliation policy.

Nor are they now invested in a genuine peace. The Taliban have shown that they can make significant advances and that they will use their territorial gains for political advantage; nonetheless, pragmatic members of the Taliban say that they just do not have the resources and expertise to govern a modern state. President Ashraf Ghani barely controls his own government, largely defenseless without U.S. air power. Each could bring something to the table in a reconciliation process, but its likelihood is low.

Meanwhile, foreign powers continue to treat Afghanistan as a battlefield for their regional ambitions. Blindness to history governs the attitude of several capitals, who know from previous experience that extremism cannot be contained within Afghanistan; it devastates the region. Heela Najibullah’s call to consider her father’s National Reconciliation Policy is not merely a daughter’s hope. It is perhaps the only viable path for peace in Afghanistan.

Google to cut the pay of employees who continue to work remotely

Kevin Reed

Google and its parent corporation Alphabet, Inc. have unveiled a compensation calculator called the “Work Location Tool” that uses an employee’s residence location to impose pay cuts on tech workers who choose to continue working from home.

Googleplex is the corporate headquarters of Google and its parent company Alphabet in Mountain View, California

According to a Reuters report on Tuesday, Google employees who still work for the company at the same location where they were employed prior to the pandemic could see a dramatic reduction in their pay if they choose to work from home permanently.

Recognizing the policy as a bellwether for corporate America, the report says, “Google stands out in offering employees a calculator that allows them to see the effects of a move. But in practice, some remote employees, especially those who commute from long distances, could experience pay cuts without changing their address.”

Reuters spoke with Google employees in different cities and discussed how the calculator will impact their compensation. For example, an employee that was hired in San Francisco but decides to relocate and work from home in Lake Tahoe will experience a pay reduction of 25 percent. This is despite the fact that the cost of living in Lake Tahoe is almost as expensive as San Francisco.

In another instance, a New York City employee deciding to work from home in Stamford, Connecticut—a commuting distance of approximately one hour—would have to take a 15 percent pay reduction while another employee living in the city and working from home would have no pay cut.

The Reuters report also said, “One Google employee, who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation, typically commutes to the Seattle office from a nearby county and would likely see their pay cut by about 10 percent by working from home full-time, according to estimates by the company’s Work Location Tool launched in June.”

Reuters interviewed Jake Rosenfeld, a sociology professor at Washington University in St. Louis who specializes in pay determination. Rosenfeld pointed to the real purpose of Google’s new pay structure system that is raising alarms over who will feel the impacts most acutely, including families. “What’s clear is that Google doesn’t have to do this. Google has paid these workers at 100% of their prior wage, by definition. So, it’s not like they can’t afford to pay their workers who choose to work remotely the same that they are used to receiving.”

When asked about the policy, a Google spokesperson defended it, saying, “Our compensation packages have always been determined by location, and we always pay at the top of the local market based on where an employee works from,” adding that pay will differ from city to city and state to state.

The Google Work Location Tool specifies that it uses US Census Bureau metropolitan statistical areas known as CBSAs and locations such as Stamford, Connecticut, for example, are not included in the New York City CBSA.

According to CBS News, Google developed the compensation calculator in June in order to “help employees make informed decisions about which city or state they work from and any impact on compensation, if they choose to relocate or work remotely.” It was a response to the fact that approximately 10,000 of the company’s 135,000 employees requested permission “to work remotely on a full-time basis or to relocate to a different office once COVID-19 subsides.”

There is no question that the Google remote employee compensation plan is part of a broader attack by the corporate establishment to both beat back the demands of workers for increased wages as well as an attempt to force employees back into the office despite the unsafe health conditions arising from the ongoing pandemic.

The move no doubt also reflects calculations by major corporations that they can use remote work, which effectively separates labor from any particular physical location, to drive down wages, using workers in cheaper areas of the country or overseas as a cudgel against workers living in more expensive urban areas.

In a cryptic reference to the intensification of the class struggle that has been evident throughout the pandemic, Julia Pollak, a chief economist at ZipRecuiter, told USA Today that companies cutting wages for remote workers “may see a decrease in employee retention.” Pollack also added that workers are demanding economic equality: “Culturally, we’re seeing a rise in pay transparency, and people feel very strongly that it’s not fair to be paid different amounts for the same work and for the same quality output of work.”

The position of the ruling establishment was articulated openly by Catherine Merrill, CEO of the monthly magazine, The Washingtonian, who wrote in an Op-ed in the Washington Post in May that people who work from home should have their status modified to hourly contractors and not full-time employees. “I am concerned about the unfortunately common office worker who wants to continue working at home and just go into the office on occasion,” Merrill wrote, adding, that such workers should be “paid only for the work they do” and have their health care insurance, 401K and other benefits eliminated.

In response, the staff of The Washingtonian took a one day work stoppage, refusing to publish on May 7 and retweeting a group statement that said, in part, “We are dismayed by Cathy Merrill’s public threat to our livelihoods. We will not be publishing today.”

A similar outlook was articulated by Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman who denounced employees for wanting to continue working remotely during the pandemic, saying in June, “If you want to get paid New York rates, you work in New York. None of this, ‘I’m in Colorado ... and getting paid like I’m sitting in New York City. Sorry, that doesn’t work.” Gorman increased his compensation in 2020 by 22 percent, earning a whopping $33 million.

The position of Merrill and Gorman expresses the overall contempt within the financial elite for the health concerns of workers and their families throughout the pandemic in which corporate profits on Wall Street and wealth accumulation by the super-rich have been placed above the lives of working people.

US sending 3,000 troops to Afghanistan as major cities fall to Taliban

Bill Van Auken

The Pentagon announced Thursday that the US is sending 3,000 US soldiers and Marines into Afghanistan with the ostensible mission of securing US diplomatic facilities in Kabul and organizing the evacuation of American civilians. Britain is sending 600 soldiers for the same purpose. The US deployment of one Army and two Marine infantry battalions has been ordered as the lightning offensive of the Taliban—and the unmitigated rout of the US-backed Afghan security forces—has steadily tightened a noose around the Afghan capital.

Taliban in Kunduz city, northern Afghanistan on Aug. 9, 2021. (AP Photo/Abdullah Sahil)

The collapse of security forces loyal to the US puppet regime in Kabul accelerated exponentially on Thursday with the Associated Press reporting the Taliban’s conquest of Afghanistan’s second largest city, Kandahar, in the south. It came on the heels of the fall to the insurgency of Herat in the west.

Both cities have populations of approximately 600,000. Kandahar is the historic birthplace of the Taliban and constituted a major military center for both the US-led occupation and the Afghan regime. Herat, a predominantly Persian-speaking city, is the strategic gateway to Iran.

These defeats leave the government of President Ashraf Ghani in control of little outside of Kabul. He staged an emergency trip to Mazar-i-Sharif, a besieged city of half a million in the north, in an attempt to mobilize forces loyal to Afghan warlords responsible for some of the worst crimes of the country’s bloody civil war of the 1990s.

In southern Helmand province, the capital city of Lashkar Gah has nearly fallen to the insurgency, with the Taliban capturing the police headquarters Thursday. US warplanes have carried out airstrikes in an attempt to halt the Taliban advance, killing and wounding civilians in the city.

The heavily armed US troops being dispatched to Afghanistan will reportedly be deployed to Kabul’s international airport. Another Army brigade combat team of between 3,500 and 4,000 US troops is being sent to Kuwait to be on “standby” for a possible rapid deployment to Afghanistan.

With some 4,200 employees, the US Embassy in Kabul is one of the largest in the world. State Department spokesman Ned Price said Thursday that it would be drawn down to a “core diplomatic presence.”

US President Joe Biden had initially announced that all US troops would be withdrawn from Afghanistan by September 2011, in fulfillment of an agreement negotiated between the Trump administration and the Taliban in Doha in February 2020. While the overwhelming majority of US troops and military contractors have already left Afghanistan, the official day for the completion of the pull-out was moved up to August 31. Washington stated that it was leaving a force of 650 soldiers and Marines behind to guard the US Embassy and the Kabul airport.

The Pentagon has been providing armed support for the puppet regime’s security forces in the form of “over the horizon” airstrikes, including by B-52 strategic bombers, and drone attacks which have led to an escalation of civilian casualties and destruction in urban areas under siege by the Taliban.

US military and intelligence officials have been cited by the Washington Post as predicting that Kabul could fall to the Islamist insurgency in 30 to 90 days. Previously, these same sources had assumed that no provincial capitals would be taken before the fall. Their latest predictions were made, however, before the stunning defeats suffered by the Kabul regime over the last 48 hours.

There is every reason to believe that the new US deployments are aimed not merely at evacuating US personnel, but at forestalling, at least temporarily, the precipitous overrunning of Kabul by the Taliban and a humiliating spectacle like that in South Vietnam in 1975, with US personnel fleeing from the Saigon embassy rooftop. Whether they are merely the advance guard of another US military intervention in a war that has killed hundreds of thousands of Afghans remains to be seen.

The fall of Kandahar and Herat on Thursday evening followed that of Ghazni, a strategically important provincial capital that straddles the main highway linking the capital of Kabul to the country’s south. Qala-i-Naw, the capital of Badghis Province, in northwest Afghanistan, was also taken by the Taliban Thursday night, leaving it in control of 12 of the country’s 34 provincial capitals.

In one city and district after another, Afghan national security forces have either surrendered without a fight or merely stripped off their uniforms and melted into the general population. Taliban fighters captured the headquarters of the Afghan army corps in Kunduz in charge of the north of the country Wednesday without a struggle, taking control of large stocks of arms, Humvees and a military helicopter.

Washington is desperately trying to broker a deal with the Islamist movement. The perpetual US envoy to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, formerly the representative of Unocal oil company’s interests in the country, was dispatched to Doha for talks that have included China, Russia, Pakistan, the European Union, Germany, the United Nations and the former Soviet republics of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.

Also present was Abdullah Abdullah, chairman of Afghanistan’s High Council for National Reconciliation and President Ghani’s electoral rival in elections that he and his supporters claimed were rigged.

The talks in Doha reportedly produced an offer to the Taliban of a power-sharing agreement in exchange for a cease-fire. Iran declined to take part in the negotiations.

Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan told the media that any such deal hinged on the removal of US-backed Afghan President Ghani. Khan has bitterly denounced Washington, charging that the US only wants Pakistan to clean up the “mess” Washington has created in Afghanistan. He added that his government, faced with US alignment with India, has “options” in terms of its relations with China.

Washington’s determination to broker a “political settlement” in Afghanistan is driven not by concerns over terrorism or the rights of women, but rather US imperialism’s interests in preventing China, Russia or Iran from expanding their influence in the country.

It is to that end that US troops are once again being deployed in the longest war in American history.

Consumer prices continue to rise, with inflation rate at 13-year high

Trévon Austin

Rising prices on essential goods and services have erased the meager wage gains American workers have seen since the start of the year, resulting in most Americans earning less than they were before the coronavirus pandemic began.

Trader Robert Arciero works on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, Tuesday, Aug. 10, 2021. (AP Photo/Richard Drew, File)

The pace of inflation slowed somewhat in July but remained elevated, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Wednesday. Despite reassurances from the White House and corporate media that the inflation is “transitory,” prices continue to rise rapidly, although at a slightly slower pace than in May and June. Last month’s increase still held inflation rates at a 13-year high.

A major driver of July’s moderation was an easing in the rise of used-car prices, which had been a significant driver of inflation over the past few months. According to the Labor Department, used car prices rose just 0.2 percent from June to July, compared to an earlier month-by-month surge of 10.7 percent in June.

Over the past 12 months, the used car index is still up nearly 42 percent, a gain matched only by gasoline prices. Fuel prices have risen sharply in the past few weeks, reaching a national average of $3.19 as of Thursday, the most expensive average of the year and $1.01 higher than the same time last year.

The Consumer Price Index, used to gauge the average rise in the price of goods, rose by 5.4 percent in the year through June. It’s the second straight month of year-over-year increases at that level, a trend not seen since 2008. According to Labor Department data, prices rose 0.5 percent from June to July, a milder increase than in recent months but enough to outpace recent wage gains and drop real wages by 0.1 percent over the month.

The data marks the latest month rising prices have continued to eclipse wage gains as the cost of groceries, gasoline, hotels, restaurant dinners and other items increased. Much of that gain was driven by price increases in food and fuel. Labor Department statistics show core prices, which excluding more volatile commodities like food and energy, rose 0.3 percent in July from a month earlier after rising 0.9 percent in June. Over the course of the year ending in July, core consumer goods rose an average of 4.3 percent.

The Personal Consumption Expenditures index, which tracks changes in prices for goods and services targeted towards and consumed by individuals, climbed by 3.9 percent through May. Producer price inflation, another metric used to track prices, rose 7.8 percent over the year leading up to July. This exceeded the expectations of economists and marked a record high since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began calculating the index in 2010.

Meanwhile, the cost of dining out jumped 0.8 percent, registering its largest monthly gain since February 1981, the Labor Department reported. Home dining also got costlier, as the price index for food consumed at home like meat, poultry, fish, and eggs rose 0.7 percent. Personal services costs, including the price of haircuts, rose 1.2 percent between June and July for a year-on-year increase of 3.1 percent.

Another worrying trend is rising housing and rent costs. Average housing prices increased another 0.3 percent in July, building on similar gains in previous months. From the same time last year, housing prices have risen by 2.4 percent.

The broad surge in the cost of living points to growing hardship and demonstrates the severe impact inflation is having on the livelihoods of American families, amid the most destructive pandemic in a century.

According to Harvard economist Jason Furman, workers’ compensation rose at a 2.8 percent annual rate from April to June. However, prices rose faster, leaving inflation-adjusted real wages 0.7 percent lower than they were in December 2019 and 2 percent below their pre-pandemic trend. In June, economic historian Dr. Tyler Goodspeed calculated that real wages have declined every month in the last year, due to the significant month-over-month increases in overall prices.

While workers increasingly find it more difficult to make ends meet, the wealthiest layers of society continue to amass obscene amounts of wealth. According to a recent Oxfam report, the world’s 2,690 billionaires added around $5.5 trillion to their wealth during the pandemic, bringing their collective net worth to $13.5 trillion, an increase of almost 69 percent. The wealthy have seen their fortunes grow more since March 2020 than in the previous 15 years.

Much of this growth was fueled by the injection of trillions into the financial markets, on a much larger scale than was carried out in the 2008–09 bailout. Since the beginning of the pandemic, capitalist governments around the world have subordinated societal health to the pursuit of profit.

The Biden administration has demanded the reopening of schools, even as the Delta variant of the coronavirus spreads rapidly, so parents can continue to produce profits for the capitalist class. Meanwhile, workers are faced with an increasingly desperate situation. The Century Foundation estimates roughly 7.5 million workers who’ve relied on pandemic-era unemployment benefits will be cut off from jobless aid altogether when these benefits expire on September 6.

Federal corruption probe of UAW officials continues

Marcus Day

The federal investigation into corruption by officials in the United Auto Workers union (UAW) is continuing, according to a report earlier this week by the Detroit News, despite the settlement reached between the US government and the UAW last December.

The UAW’s “Solidarity House” headquarters, undergoing renovations (WSWS)

The years-long investigation has revealed widespread criminality among the top echelons of the UAW, including bribe-taking in exchange for company-friendly agreements, embezzlement of union dues, and kickback schemes with vendors. The illicit funds were used to pay for lavish lifestyles for UAW executives, such as months-long getaways at Palm Springs, endless golf outings, luxury goods and high-priced meals. While the incomes of UAW officials swelled though both illegal and “legal” means over the last 40 years, workers’ jobs and livelihoods have been decimated in one sellout contract after another.

To date, 12 UAW officials, including two of the last four union presidents, and three Fiat Chrysler employees have pleaded guilty to various charges stemming from the investigation.

In December, the UAW and federal prosecutors settled the government’s case against the union itself. Neil Barofksy, a former regulator of the bank bailouts during the Bush and Obama administrations, was selected in April by the US Attorney’s office as the independent monitor tasked with overseeing and enforcing the terms of the six-year consent decree established by the settlement.

According to the Detroit News, federal prosecutors requested last month that Barofsky be granted access to search warrants and related documents from earlier in its investigation. As monitor, Barofsky is nominally tasked with continuing to investigate corruption within the UAW and has the ability to initiate disciplinary proceedings against UAW officials for criminal behavior or for associating with “barred persons,” including those indicted in the corruption probe.

Significantly, the US Attorney’s court filing states that “[s]ome of the overall investigation remains pending,” and asked that the search warrant documents remain sealed and unavailable to the public. Federal prosecutors had indicated in a filing earlier this summer that the government had “not yet completed its criminal investigation of all targets of the UAW corruption investigation.”

Additionally, Barofksy is reportedly set to meet with former UAW President Gary Jones, who oversaw the sabotage and betrayal of the 40-day General Motors strike in 2019. Jones was indicted and pleaded guilty for his role in a scheme to embezzle over $1 million in workers’ dues.

Clearly desperate to serve as little as possible of his slap-on-the-wrist sentence of 28 months in a white-collar prison, Jones may well be seeking to rat out more of his fellow gangsters. The Detroit News reported that Jones aided federal prosecutors in securing the indictment of Dennis Williams, Jones’s predecessor as UAW president. Williams also pleaded guilty to his role in the embezzlement scheme and received a similarly light 24-month sentence.

UAW Vice Presidents Joe Ashton, Jimmy Settles, Cindy Estrada and General Holiefield stand with President Bob King and Secretary Treasurer Dennis Williams after their election in Detroit, on June 16, 2010. Ashton and Williams have both been indicted and pleaded guilty in recent years, while Holiefield died before charges could be filed. (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio)

The News points to one current UAW vice president, Cindy Estrada, and one former, Jimmy Settles, as potential targets of the ongoing federal investigation.

Settles oversaw the UAW’s Ford department until his retirement in 2018, after which he received a lucrative appointment from Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan as head of the city’s Department of Neighborhoods. According to the News, members of Settles’s staff were previously questioned by federal investigators, who also issued grand jury subpoenas, as part of their probe of his ties to a top union vendor.

Estrada, for her part, currently oversees the UAW’s Stellantis department, as well at its department of higher education, having previously led the union’s GM department. Estrada is particularly despised among autoworkers for her role in negotiating secret agreements with GM to outsource jobs at its Lake Orion and Lordstown Assembly plants, which in the latter case was the prelude to the shutdown of the plant.

Like her fellow top UAW executives, Estrada has seen her pay rise dramatically over the last decade, taking in $220,506 in compensation in 2020, up from $167,000 in 2015, while autoworker pay has consistently failed to keep up with inflation. UAW tax filings also show that the union paid more than $7,000 in legal fees for Estrada between 2019 and 2020. Estrada had previously been vying earlier this year for the position of UAW secretary-treasurer but withdrew from the running.

Charities run by Estrada and Settles were reportedly the subject of earlier investigations by federal prosecutors. A charity run by then-UAW Vice President for Chrysler General Holiefield, the “Leave the Light on Foundation,” was found by prosecutors to be the conduit for payouts from company executives. Holiefield died in 2015, before he could be indicted.

While the Detroit News, which has maintained close ties to federal officials throughout their investigation, pointed to Estrada and Settles as targets, they are by no means the only possibilities. Rory Gamble, who retired as UAW president at the end of June, was previously cited as the subject of investigations by the News. Current UAW President Ray Curry, who was union secretary-treasurer from the beginning of the federal corruption probe, has also had legal fees paid for by the UAW for unexplained reasons over recent years.

As the WSWS Autoworker Newsletter previously explained, Barofsky’s powers as independent monitor are limited to responding to only the most egregious misconduct within the union, and he does not have oversight over contract negotiations between the companies and the UAW, which will retain their pro-corporate character.

At the same time, the selection of Barofsky—a prominent critic of the Wall Street bank bailout program following the 2008 economic crisis—is an indication of the seriousness with which the government continues to view the question of the UAW’s stability. The Biden administration and broader sections of the state are no doubt concerned that the UAW’s credibility among workers continues to disintegrate despite the years-long effort to “clean up” the most blatant criminality by union executives.

Reopening schools poses major risks to children's lives

Bryan Dyne

The accelerating coronavirus pandemic is a clear and present danger to children in the United States and around the world. Cases have spiked, and pediatric hospitals are increasingly overwhelmed.

Teddy bears are placed on the bed of a child at the pediatric unit of the Robert Debre hospital, in Paris, France, Wednesday, March 3, 2021. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)

In the US, again the world epicenter of the virus, an estimated 14.3 percent of all coronavirus cases have occurred in children, a percentage which has steadily increased since the beginning of the pandemic. Last week there were more than 93,000 new pediatric cases in the US, including nearly 1,000 in Mississippi schools alone, a massive jump from the 72,000 new child cases recorded during the last week of July.

Child hospitalizations are also on the rise. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has reported that more than 1,400 children were hospitalized for COVID-19 over the past week, setting a new record of 239 child admissions each day. In total, 4.3 million children have been infected. The most tragic cases have been the estimated 445 who have died from the disease.

In addition, estimates from studies conducted in the US and United Kingdom show that tens or hundreds of thousands of those infected also have, or will have, long-term symptoms. Reports have emerged of complete short-term memory loss, extreme fatigue, insomnia and continued changes in smell and taste.

Quantitatively, these cognitive deficiencies have been measured as a loss of between two and seven IQ points. A loss of two IQ points is the equivalent of lead poisoning. A loss of seven IQ points is worse than a stroke.

Moreover, such symptoms are becoming more widespread. Data collected in the UK from last year indicated that between 2 and 4 percent of children experienced some subset of these symptoms, and that these symptoms have in some cases persisted for over a year.

After the emergence of the Alpha variant and the now dominant Delta variant, those percentages increased substantially. Dr. Francis Collins, director of the US National Institutes of Health, noted during a congressional hearing in April that up to 15 percent of young people infected could “end up with this long-term consequence, which can be pretty devastating in terms of things like school performance.”

In the context of school reopenings, such figures are nothing short of horrific. There are roughly 50 million K-12 students in the US, along with a further 20 million college students. In the world in which they live, where federal and state governments are forcing them back to in-person learning, some 49,000 youth are threatened with death, while more than 10 million are threatened with the equivalent of lead poisoning or worse. It is as if the poisoning of Flint, Michigan is being repeated in every state.

The magnitude of what has already occurred was acknowledged by Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the US CDC. She stated before the US Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions last July that, “One thing just I want to note with the children is: I think we fall into this flawed thinking of saying that only 400 of these 600,000 deaths from COVID-19 have been in children. Children are not supposed to die, so 400 is a huge amount.”

At the same time, Walensky made no attempt to square these remarks with the fact that the Biden administration is still planning to send kids back to schools. That same week, Walensky asserted in an interview that “I remain emphatic that our schools need to open in the fall. They need to open for full, in-person learning.”

The head of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, has joined Walensky in demanding the reopening of schools, declaring that “The number one priority is to get kids to be back in school.”

Such policy statements are rank insanity. Sending students back to schools by the Trump administration last fall, and the inevitable mixing and transmission that occurred among students, staff, teachers and parents, helped trigger the colossal surge in infections that led to a quarter million infections each day last January.

Now, before schools are fully open, new cases are already more than double what they were a year ago, setting the stage for a wave of cases and deaths unlike any experienced so far.

Schools also present a unique opportunity for the virus to mutate beyond the already immensely infectious Delta variant. As children are not yet able to get vaccinated, and because the dominant Delta variant is able to infect both vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals, it will be able to pass freely and frequently between the two populations. This raises the likelihood that a new variant will emerge that, as Dr. Anthony Fauci noted, “has an equally high capability of transmitting but is also much more severe,” one which may escape current vaccines all together.

The situation is the exact same or worse in countries around the world. In Indonesia, children make up an estimated 12.5 percent of new cases while hundreds die each week. In Brazil, recent excess death estimates have found that the number of children who have died from the pandemic is 2,975, almost triple the official number of 1,122.

The drive by government officials to reopen schools is not, however, simply a matter of individual irrationality. The international character of this drive is based on the need of the capitalist class to do everything they can to get parents back to unsafe working conditions to further extract surplus value from the working class and pay for skyrocketing corporate profits.

And while this drive is certainly propelled by various financial oligarchs, it is more fundamentally an objective process bound up with the laws of capitalist development. The rate of profit must increase, under capitalism, and for these reasons children must be sent back to school and parents sent back to work.

It is also for these reasons that capitalism as a socioeconomic system must be abolished. In a rational society, school and non-essential business closures would be implemented immediately as a measure to stop the spread of the disease, with full financial compensation to workers and small businesses impacted by the closures. Lockdowns would be combined with the massive expansion of testing, contact tracing and necessary health care facilities to care for those infected.

Wall Street instead declares that there is “no money” to save lives while gorging itself on trillions of dollars generated off the backs of the working class. Workers must take the opposite view, that there is “no money” for capitalists and every resource necessary directed toward saving lives.

Sixty nine dead in Algeria as forest fires devastate the Mediterranean region

Alex Lantier

At least 69 people have died in Algeria, according to the latest reports, as forest fires and record temperatures ravage the north of the country and the entire Mediterranean basin. It is the greatest loss of life in this series of wildfires which now stretch from Turkey and Greece across the Balkans, Italy and Spain to Algeria.

In this photo taken Wednesday, Aug.11, 2021, smoke invites the mountains after wildfires in the village of Larbaa Nath Irathen, neat Tizi Ouzou, in the mountainous Kabyle region, 100 kilometers (60 miles) east of Algeria's capital of Algiers. Wildfires in Algeria that already have killed at least 69 people burned through the mountainous Berber region as the North African country contended Thursday with a heat wave like the ones fueling fires in Southern Europe. (AP Photo/Fateh Guidoum)

In Algeria, the fires are concentrated primarily in Kabylia, east of the capital, Algiers. The Algerian regime has given partial details on military losses, while many villages are surrounded by vast walls of flame in the mountains.

“It is with great sadness that we learned of the deaths of 25 members of the National Popular Army (ANP), after they managed to save over 100 citizens from forest fires in the Béjaïa and Tizi Ouzou areas,” Algerian President Abdelmajide Tebboune declared Tuesday. The National Defense Ministry added that 18 of the deceased soldiers and six other badly burned soldiers came from the 57th Light Infantry Battalion stationed at Ichelladhen. Seven other wounded soldiers, four of whom are severely burned, are of the 4th Independent Infantry Battalion.

ANP and local authorities are finding many civilian victims, often rural laborers who died while trying to protect their crops and livestock. Yesterday, 26 people were found dead in the village of Agulmim.

Wednesday morning, Algeria’s General Directorate of Civil Protection counted 69 active fires in 14 wilayas (police prefectures) of the country. The Tizi Ouzou wilaya, the worst-hit, had 24 of these fires; since August 9, it has seen 116 forest fires in total.

Already staggered by the 2019 hirak protests, a mass movement of youth and workers against the military regime, the Algerian ruling class felt forced to criticize the lack of equipment and preparation to fight the fires. The Berber-nationalist Rally for Culture and Democracy (RCD) and the Workers Party (PT), close to the Algerian regime, both criticized the lack of firefighting planes. Already in June, forest fires in the Khenchela areas had underscored the urgent necessity to acquire such aircraft.

Yesterday, in a nationally-televised speech, Tebboune announced that aircraft had arrived that could bring the fires under control. Until then, Algerian authorities were forced to rely on military helicopters to drop water on the fires.

Tebboune declared, “I instructed the prime minister, as the fires began, to request aircraft from our European partners, but unfortunately no country responded favorably to our requests, as all the aircraft were already deployed to fight fires in Greece and in Turkey. But two French aircraft have arrived today, two Spanish aircraft are due to arrive tomorrow, and a further Swiss aircraft should arrive in the next three days. With all these planes, it will be possible to get the forest fires under control.”

Tebboune added that the military had been designated to coordinate the purchase by the Algerian state of firefighting aircraft from international aircraft manufacturers.

Yesterday, French firefighting aircraft began operations, dropping loads of water on the region of Béjaïa. French President Emmanuel Macron tweeted: “In the face of the tragedies facing the friends of France, our solidarity is without limit. To the Algerian people, I would like to bring all our support. As soon as tomorrow, two firefighting aircraft and a command airplane will be deployed to Kabylia, which faces violent fires.”

In fact, the fires devastating Algeria and the entire region expose above all the lack of international preparation and coordination in the face of climate change. Responsibility for this lies above all with the European imperialist powers. While European countries are spending billions of euros on military spending increases, and while Paris sends fighter-bombers and drones to wage war in Mali and across the Sahel region south of Algeria, the most essential equipment and infrastructure for fighting fires is lacking.

Extreme heat and drought are affecting large parts of the Mediterranean basin. A heat wave is beating all record temperatures, with Sicily, Turkey and Tunisia all recording temperatures of 49°C (120°F).

These conditions facilitate the eruption of gigantic fires. In eight days, Greece has seen 586 fires that claimed three lives. Hundreds of fires in Turkey have claimed at least eight lives, and over 500 fires in Italy have claimed four lives and led to the declaration of a state of emergency in Sicily. In the former Yugoslavia, North Macedonia has also declared a state of emergency due to fires, which are also devastating the border region between Bosnia and Croatia.

In the final analysis, the cause of these disastrous events is the incapacity and the refusal of the capitalist classes around the world, over several decades, to plan an environmental policy that could halt global warming. According to several investigations and environmental models produced by climate scientists, this warming will violently impact the Mediterranean.

“It’s going to be a desert climate all around the Mediterranean by the end of the century,” Levent Kurmaz, of Istanbul’s Bogazici University, told the British Independent. The newspaper added that by then, “the climate in southern Turkey, southern Greece and southern Italy will be similar to that of Cairo and the southern Iraqi city of Basra now.”

Tebboune and other Algerian officials are claiming that all the forest fires are the work of criminals and have launched a wave of arrests, supposedly to identify the arsonists. Djamel Bensmaïl, aged 35, died in a lynching in Larbaâ Nath Irathen on Tuesday, after a crowd falsely identified him as an arsonist while he came from the city of Miliana to help fight the fires. Yesterday, inhabitants of the town presented an apology to his father.

In reality, it is apparent that the fundamental cause of these fires, and especially of their massive scale, is global warming and the disastrous oversight of the economy by the ruling class.

Yesterday, Abdelkader Benkheira, the former Director for Fauna and Flora of Algeria’s General Forestry Directorate, explained to Middle East Eye the vulnerability of Mediterranean forests to fire and its link to global warming. He said, “The forest materials have a great deal of resin and are very flammable. There is also a great deal of other living material such as underbrush and scrub in which there are trees, including oak and olive trees.”

Weather conditions like the current ones, he added, provoke fires and even explosions in such areas. “Forests are living environments, trees and resin in particular sweat and give off gases called terpenes. These virtually inflammable gases play a major role in propagating such fires and are even capable of provoking explosions inside large forest bodies, especially in uneven terrain, when proper air circulation is lacking. Then one has a process of gas concentration that can lead to spontaneous explosions.”

Global warming, which also intensifies conditions of drought in the region, can set off mega-forest fires, Benkheira explained.

He said, “Caused by global warming, water stress is bearing down with enormous force on Mediterranean forests, reinforced by rising temperatures and growing frequency and strength of heavy winds. … This water stress leads to a reduction of humidity in the soil. This unwatered soil leads to stressed vegetation, which is almost completely dry, and so is easily flammable. And then there are the periods of violent winds.”

As the deaths of millions of people worldwide in the COVID-19 pandemic points to the failure and the political criminality of capitalist ruling elites, the Mediterranean forest fires again show the urgent necessity for workers to overthrow them in an international socialist revolution that can impose rational health and environmental policies.