The Delta variant of coronavirus is a Frankenstein produced by capitalism

Benjamin Mateus & Norisa Diaz

It is well understood that human activities in the conduct of commerce and the prosecution of wars have been the primary causal factors for zoonotic spillovers that have led to large outbreaks of deadly contagions. Pandemics are entwined with world history, and the COVID pandemic is no different in this regard.

The evolution of the virus that has produced the Delta variant in the span of only 18 months since the declaration of the pandemic, in the final analysis, is a byproduct of the ruling elite’s utter incompetence and malign neglect in responding to the threat.

The virus’s evolutionary adaptations have been greatly aided by policies that have placed profits above the well-being of the population by allowing schools and businesses to remain open, giving the virus free rein to circulate across the globe.

(AP Illustration/Peter Hamlin)

Dr. Yaneer Bar-Yam, head of the New England Complex Systems Institute, who has been modeling pandemics in the context of a complex global network for close to two decades, has warned that the ease of global travel, where every region of the world is connected in a matter of hours to every other place, could allow the propagation of deadlier diseases which quickly grow to pandemic proportions.

In a report from 2016, titled “Transition to Extinction,” he writes, “When we introduce long-range transportation into the model, the success of more aggressive strains changes. They can use the long-range transportation to find new hosts and escape local extinctions ... the more transportation routes introduced into the model, the more highly aggressive pathogens are able to survive and spread.”

Clearly, in the present chapter of the pandemic, the United States has emerged again as the pandemic’s epicenter primarily due to lack of comprehensive global strategies that could eradicate the virus. After the spring surge through India, which killed a reported 400,000 people, a figure believed to be an underestimate by a factor of ten, the Delta variant quickly spread across the globe becoming the dominant strain by mid-summer. That means in only three months’ time the world was facing a new pandemic of the Delta strain. In the span of that time, the US had essentially returned to business as usual, leading to the present catastrophe.

Last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that the Delta strain accounted for more than 97 percent of all cases in the US. On August 13, there were more than 720,000 new cases of COVID-19 reported worldwide. Of these, more than 155,000 were in the United States, nearly five times the number of cases reported in India, which ranked second.

And with the sudden rapid rise in COVID cases, the US death toll is once again inching upwards, with 769 deaths registered for the same date. The seven-day moving average for reported deaths has doubled since last month, standing at over 650 per day, or more than 4,500 per week.

These deaths are preventable, and the country has every means in its capacity to ensure not one more person dies from COVID. The blood of these victims is on the hands of the White House occupant despite concerted efforts by both Republican and Democratic politicians to sow discord and animus in the population based on issues of vaccine and mask mandates.

The real issue is not mask mandates, a totally inadequate measure given the threat of Delta, but the refusal of the Biden administration, the CDC, and state and local governments of both parties to immediately enforce a wide-scale lockdown.

Under these conditions, the bipartisan call by the ruling elites to open schools for in-class instruction is sheer insanity, which places in danger the health and well-being of 75 million plus children and adolescents of whom the vast majority remain unvaccinated.

In a month, the country has seen a dramatic rise in the number of children becoming infected. Last week, the American Academy of Pediatrics reported that nearly 94,000 children had been infected. On Saturday, August 14, 2021, just over 1,900 children were reported admitted to hospitals with COVID, the highest ever recorded. The current COVID-19 disease ravaging the youngest in the population has been described aptly as the “pandemic of the innocent” considering continued attempts to minimize the impact of the more severe Delta variant.

As Professor Amber Schmidtke, a renowned science communicator who teaches at the University of Saint Mary in Leavenworth, Kansas, noted, “Not only are these kids sick, but every age group has met or exceeded previous maximums for ER visits for COVID-19 illness. It’s not correct to say that kids don’t get sick from COVID-19. That is disinformation. Call it when you see it.” [Emphasis added]

If that were not enough, further concerns are emerging by frontline health care workers who are reporting a surge in children diagnosed with a both COVID-19 and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). Dr. Pia Pannaraj, an infectious diseases specialist at Children's Hospital in Los Angeles, told NPR this concerning phenomenon is putting 'babies up until about a year and a half or two years of life” at risk.

Attempts have been made throughout the pandemic by the ruling class to suggest that schools are islands where the virus does not spread, or that they are separate entities that play no role in community spread. In a recent conversation, Dr. Bar-Yam affirms that the relationship between infections in schools and high transmissions in households has been strongly established. It is impossible to separate the issue of infections at schools from infection in homes and, more broadly, in the community. Schools must be closed to stop Delta’s continued spread.

As of Friday, the World Health Organization reported that there have been 205,338,159 confirmed cases of COVID-19, including 4,333,094 deaths globally. This ghastly figure is an undercount by at least a factor of three as analysis of excess deaths suggest the human catastrophe is far higher than reports would indicate.

Unchecked, the SARS-CoV-2 has been allowed to disseminate into every community, leading to more virulent and deadly variants. Unfortunately, the Delta variant will not be the last.

What is most striking about the Delta strain has been its ability to evade immunity and transmit so much faster than its predecessors. It also replicates with tremendous efficiency, creating copies of itself at a rate thousands of times higher than when the “wild” version first emerged less than two years ago.

Within each infected person, the virus invades living cells and makes billions of copies of itself by transforming cells into virus-making factories. Each of these replicated copies has the potential for mutation within each person—vaccinated or not—that continues the spread and further mutation of the evolving virus.

What policy makers and governmental officials are ignoring, as they pursue reopening schools and forcing parents back into the workplace, is that the limited measures that had proven only partly effective against the spread of the coronavirus previously may be completely futile given the more virulent biological properties of the Delta variant.

Dr. Deepti Gurdasani recently warned that this is not a virus we can learn to live with: “Over time we’ve had many new variants arise in different parts of the world and they have shown a level of escape from previous immunity, which means that if you’re immune against a previous variant of the virus, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re immune against a new strain. What that means is that even if you have a level of immunity against previous variants, you may not be able to reach the herd immunity threshold because this virus is constantly evolving.”

Even breakthrough infections are becoming more commonplace with Delta among those fully immunized. This is partly a product of the biology of the virus, but more the result of the natural waning of the immunity generated by the vaccines, after the passage of time.

Most of those infected after vaccination will be spared a severe course of infection. Yet a growing number of the victims of such post-vaccination infections are finding their way into hospital beds, intensive care units, and even the grave. More worrisome is that people with breakthrough infections can transmit the virus as effectively as those who become infected without having ever received the vaccines.

Many scientists and doctors are even beginning to refer to the Delta strain as an entirely different virus. “The delta variant is almost like a whole new COVID virus, as it behaves very differently from the previous COVID strains,” reported Dr. Mike Hansen, a pulmonologist and critical care physician, on his educational public website, explaining that the variant’s multiple spike protein mutations allow it to enter the body’s cells with greater ease and evade the body’s immune system.

In a manner of speaking, Delta is a Frankenstein virus that has been allowed to emerge by the inaction of capitalist governments around the world. And it is currently filling hospitals, in the worst conditions witnessed since last winter, and taking an unprecedentedly heavy toll on children. Just this weekend Dallas, Texas, reported that all ICU beds for children were fully occupied.

Despite these dangers, the ruling elite have continuously employed every conceivable measure to prevent any effective comprehensive public health strategy that would place eradication of the virus on their agenda. And subordinated to the diktats of the financial markets, public health efforts have given the coronavirus ample room to develop and spread, in direct contradiction to scientific principles.

In short, the Delta variant is the product of capitalism's complete disregard for human life. With less than one-fifth of the world’s population vaccinated and a significant portion immunologically naive to the virus (with no prior infections), it is safe to assume we are still at the early stages of the pandemic whose final outcome, as a social and political event, not just a medical one, remains to be decided.

Global eradication using all resources and capacity must be the primary objective of the world’s people. All other issues must be subordinated to the full support of the populations, including financial, job, and food security as well as isolation and medical facilities to treat and care for the population until the coronavirus has been eliminated from every region of the planet.

Delta variant fuels rapid surge of COVID-19 cases across southern US

Trévon Austin

The rapid spread of the coronavirus across the southern US has caused growing concern among public health experts. During a press briefing last Thursday, White House COVID-19 response coordinator Jeff Zients noted that Texas and Florida accounted for nearly 40 percent of new COVID-related hospitalizations in the US over the past week.

In Texas, cases and hospitalizations are reaching heights not seen since February. According to the Texas Tribune, hospitalizations in the state have skyrocketed by 400 percent within the last month. The increase in cases has been fueled by the criminal policies spearheaded by Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who recently declared Texas is “past the time of government mandates.”

Elementary school students on the first day of classes in Richardson, Texas, August 17, 2021. (AP Photo/LM Otero)

“Going forward, in Texas, there will not be any government-imposed shutdowns or mask mandates,” Abbott said. “Everyone already knows what to do.”

After lifting statewide mask mandates earlier this year, Abbott claimed personal responsibility and vaccinations would sufficiently contain the pandemic. However, the numbers are so staggering that the state health department was forced to admit in a tweet Wednesday that Texas is “facing a new wave” and the variant “has erased much progress to end the pandemic.”

Abbott himself was reported Tuesday to have contracted coronavirus, in a breakthrough infection, since he has been vaccinated. At his age, 63, and physical condition—he has been paralyzed from the waist down since 1984, due to an accident—the governor would be considered at higher risk from the virus.

Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton have focused on blocking local masking mandates and eviscerating public health and safety measures. On Sunday, the Texas Supreme Court sided with Abbott and reversed a ruling that prevented him from enforcing a ban on local mask mandates in workplaces and schools.

Texas’ vaccination rate has consistently lagged behind other states. Its 44 percent full vaccination rate as of Tuesday ranks 36th nationally. The state’s positivity rate—the percent of virus tests coming back positive—was 17.7 percent on Tuesday, well above the 10 percent threshold that Abbott has previously identified as a danger zone. Furthermore, several of the state’s hospital regions have seen the percentage of COVID patients in their care rise about 15 percent.

Texas now has 11,552 people being treated in hospitals for COVID-19, according to the latest data provided by the state health department. The number of available ICU beds across the entire state has dwindled to 322, with some regions having none at all. According to state officials, 12 of 22 hospital regions in the state have 10 or fewer available ICU beds.

“I think it’s pretty clear in the data that Texas is in the middle—or beginning, depending on how you look at it—of a really major pandemic surge, and not just in case counts but particularly in looking at health care needs across the state,” said Spencer Fox, associate director of the COVID-19 Modeling Consortium at the University of Texas at Austin. “Many regions are now facing numbers that we haven’t seen since the winter,” he told the Texas Tribune.

Public health experts say the pandemic will only be exacerbated by the coming school year, especially after Abbott declared no district can require students to wear masks or get vaccinated. This is particularly problematic because many of those who are unvaccinated are children under age 12, who are not eligible for a vaccine.

Researchers have recorded higher vaccination rates in urban areas, but the cities’ poorer neighborhoods and minority neighborhoods tend to have drastically lower rates. A CNBC analysis of state data found just 37 percent of people in Dallas County neighborhoods that are majority black and Hispanic have been fully vaccinated as of July 26, compared to 58 percent of people in majority-white neighborhoods. Overall, black and Hispanic Texans hold the lowest vaccination rates among racial groups statewide, at 28 percent and 35 percent respectively.

According to a CNBC analysis of data compiled by John Hopkins University, five states broke records for the average number of daily new COVID cases over the weekend. Florida, Louisiana, Hawaii, Oregon and Mississippi all reached new peaks in their seven-day average of new cases per day as of Sunday. Even more, Louisiana, Mississippi and Florida are suffering from the three worst per capita outbreaks in the country.

Florida reported a whopping 151,764 new COVID-19 cases for the week on Friday, marking a record seven-day average of 21,681 new cases per day, more than any other state. According to Florida’s health department, more than half of the ICU beds in the state are occupied by COVID patients.

Florida’s surge comes as Republican Governor Ron DeSantis refuses to enforce mask mandates and other pandemic policies to combat the massive outbreak. In May, DeSantis signed an executive order that permanently lifted all COVID-19 restrictions and banned local officials from enacting new pandemic policies.

Louisiana recorded a record seven-day average of more than 5,800 new COVID cases on Sunday, an increase of more than 26 percent from the previous week. The state also reported a seven-day average of 44 COVID-related deaths, a spike of over 46 percent compared to a week ago. Almost half of the state’s 882 reported ICU beds were occupied by coronavirus patients as of Monday, compared with a nationwide average of 25 percent, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.

Louisiana has the fifth-lowest vaccination rate of any state in the US, with only about 38 percent of its population fully vaccinated against COVID-19, government data shows.

As of Monday, Mississippi reached a seven-day average of nearly 3,300 new coronavirus cases, an increase of 57 percent from a week ago. The state’s death toll also hit a seven-day average of 20, up almost 80 percent from a week ago. Mississippi has the nation’s second-lowest vaccination rate, with 35.8 percent of its population fully immunized as of Sunday. State officials reported Monday that almost 55 percent of Mississippi’s ICU beds were being used for COVID patients.

COVID-19 pandemic worsens in South Korea

Ben McGrath

The COVID-19 pandemic is intensifying in South Korea because the Moon Jae-in government refuses to take the necessary measures to stop the spread of the virus.

The daily number of cases reached a national all-time high of 2,222 on August 11. As of Monday, there have officially been 226,854 cases and 2,173 deaths, including six people who passed away that day.

Healthcare workers in Seoul, South Korea, call for increased staffing at a demonstration on August 5, 2021. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)

The seven-day moving average for daily new cases stood at 1,871 as of Saturday, having almost quadrupled in a month.

The Seoul metropolitan area, the southern city of Busan and Jeju Island are under Level 4 restrictions in the government’s four-tier system. This limits the number of people allowed to gather in groups, but allows businesses and private study academies to remain open, contributing to the spread of the virus. The other regions of the country are under Level 3 restrictions.

A major reason for the sharp eruption of the virus in recent weeks is the slow rollout of vaccines, compounded by the spread of the Delta variant. Only 43.6 percent of people have received one dose of the vaccine, while 19 percent have been fully vaccinated. The situation has been worsened by glitches in the online reservation system, as well as a delay in vaccine delivery from US drug maker Moderna.

Despite this, schools are set to re-open this month following the summer break, with students attending on a rotational basis. This means the virus could spread even more quickly.

Under Level 4 restrictions, all classes should be online. But the Education Ministry absurdly stated on August 9: “Only 16 percent [of students] contracted the virus at school, meaning that schools are the least common place for transmission.”

The government consciously ignores the fact that students may contract the virus from school-aged siblings at home or from parents forced to go to work. Moreover, new studies demonstrate that infection can lead to cognitive impairment worse than that from lead poisoning or from a stroke.

Students, teachers, and parents are speaking out against school reopenings. A student wrote in an online petition to halt the return to in-person classes: “It is difficult for all schools to thoroughly control students’ wearing of masks. And especially during physical activities, the frequency of students’ contact is very high and there is no way to deal with it.”

The drive to force students and teachers back into dangerous classrooms is fueled by the same interests as in other countries: the demand from the capitalist ruling class to keep workers on the job. Since the start of the pandemic, the Moon administration has sought to avoid restrictions on big business as much as possible to meet this end.

When the government introduced its multi-level restriction system in June 2020, daily cases stood at around 50. The system initially had three levels, with the third and highest being implemented if daily cases rose above 100 for 14 straight days. This required the government to close schools and ban gatherings of ten or more people.

By the end of August last year, cases had spiked to well over 200 per day, including 441 new infections on August 27. At the time, schools and private study academies were closed, while other public facilities were either shut or had their hours reduced. The Moon government, however, refused to implement the highest tier restrictions, instead creating a “Level 2.5.” Moon said he wanted to avoid “a huge economic blow,” which in fact meant protecting corporate profits.

In November 2020, the administration formalized this new level and added a “Level 1.5” as well, creating a five-tier system until June this year. The lowest tiers required businesses like restaurants and entertainment facilities to do little more than ask customers to maintain social distancing and to wear masks. Stricter limits were only implemented after daily cases exceeded 400 for Level 2.5 and 800 for Level 3.

The authorities stated last November that their goal was no longer to eliminate COVID-19, but to live with the virus. Then-Prime Minister Jeong Se-gyun stated: “The latest reorganization [in the levels] is aimed at settling a sustainable quarantine system.” That is, the government would do little more than quarantine cases, not try to actively prevent them.

Winter saw a then record-high in total daily cases of 1,240 on December 25. While conditions were met to go to Level 3, the government kept the Seoul metropolitan area at Level 2.5 and the remaining regions at Level 2. Prime Minister Jeong sought to blame ordinary people for not following the rules, saying on December 27: “The key in controlling the spread of the coronavirus is whether we actually carry out the rules in place ourselves.”

While the number of daily cases fell, they remained in the hundreds, even as children returned to schools for the start of the new academic year in March. The same number of cases that had led to school closures the previous August, now was met with little more than a few perfunctory statements from government officials about social distancing.

Throughout the spring months and into summer, daily cases stood at between 500 and 800, with the seven-day average on June 30 sitting at 631. At this point, the government introduced its current four-tier system, which went into effect on July 1, in order to further remove restrictions on big business. As cases surged, the new system was postponed for the Seoul area, while the rest of the country was initially placed under Level 1, the lowest tier.

Since then, the spread of COVID-19 has exploded, producing the worst situation since the pandemic began. Yet the Moon administration is downplaying the danger as much as possible, continuing the drive for profits at the expense of lives.

New Zealand locked down after Delta cases identified

Tom Peters

On Tuesday evening, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced that Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city, and the Coromandel region, will be placed in lockdown for seven days, and the rest of the country for three days, after a 58-year-old Auckland man tested positive for the highly-infectious Delta variant of COVID-19. Six more people, all linked to the man, have since tested positive. The lockdowns could be extended depending on the scale of the outbreak.

The positive cases include a nurse at Auckland Hospital, who is fully vaccinated, and a teacher from Avondale College. Most of the infections are among people in their 20s, who are not yet eligible for vaccinations. The original source of the cluster has not been identified, but genomic testing shows it is linked to the outbreak in the Australian state of New South Wales.

A COVID-19 testing centre in Wellington, May 2020. (Image credit: Wikimedia Commons)

More cases are likely to be found. The 58-year-old man was reportedly infectious since August 12. Health authorities are identifying locations of interest visited by the cases in Auckland and the Coromandel. The list so far includes dozens of shops, bars, cafes and nightclubs, a church and the SkyCity casino.

Schools and universities, many manufacturing businesses, cafes and restaurants have been closed, along with almost all retail outlets except supermarkets and petrol stations. Masks are mandatory on public transport and in shops.

This is the second time the entire country has been placed in a lockdown at level 4, the strictest level. The government was forced to impose a lockdown in late March 2020. Tens of thousands of workers, led by healthcare staff and teachers, had demanded a lockdown in 2020, independently of the teachers’ and nurses’ unions which opposed the measure until the day Ardern announced it.

New Zealand has so far not experienced the same level of deaths as other countries. It has recorded 26 fatalities and just under 3,000 cases of the coronavirus since the pandemic began. The population is extremely vulnerable, however, as only around 17 percent are fully vaccinated. Small outbreaks triggered lockdowns in Auckland in August 2020 and February 2021.

In announcing the new lockdown, Ardern alluded to the disaster that is unfolding in Australia. “We’ve seen the dire consequences of taking too long to act… We’ve seen what happened in Sydney, we don’t want that experience here,” she said.

For weeks, the New South Wales state government refused to impose a statewide lockdown in response to the recent Sydney outbreak, allowing the virus to spread completely out-of-control. So far, 60 people have died in the outbreak. NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian has declared that the government will no longer aim to completely eliminate the virus before reopening the economy—a position that guarantees continued deaths and hospitalisations.

Even under New Zealand’s level 4 lockdown, significant sections of workers remain at risk. Meat processing workers have not been given priority for vaccination, despite being classified as essential workers. They will continue to work in an environment that has been proven internationally to be a major source of COVID-19 infections.

During the first 2020 lockdown, the Meat Workers Union refused to take strike action to protect workers and ignored a petition by workers demanding the shutdown of the industry.

Internationally, governments have responded to the pandemic by placing the interests of big business ahead of the health and lives of the working class. They have been assisted by the trade unions, which act as adjuncts to the corporations and the state.

The Ardern government has been glorified in the international media for its approach to the virus, but it shares the same basic pro-business priorities. The initial restrictions were lifted earlier than the government’s own medical advisors had recommended, with Ardern declaring that public health considerations had to be “traded against the huge economic impact” of the lockdown. This decision, combined with a sharp drop in community testing, produced another outbreak in Auckland in August 2020.

Tens of billions of dollars have been given to businesses, in the form of bailouts, tax breaks and subsidies, and the Reserve Bank has printed billions more for quantitative easing to prop up the banks.

Meanwhile, the government is imposing austerity across essential services. The healthcare system is dangerously under-staffed and underfunded; hospitals throughout the country are already overwhelmed with patients affected by seasonal diseases and respiratory illnesses exacerbated by poor housing conditions.

College of General Practitioners medical director Dr Bryan Betty told Radio NZ on August 11: “We couldn’t afford a situation in New Zealand to have [Delta] out of control in the community because it would risk collapsing or compromising our health system.”

Alarmingly, College of Intensive Care Medicine chair Dr Andrew Stapleton said New Zealand’s intensive care capacity per capita was similar to India’s—where hospitals have been completely unable to cope and millions of people have died of COVID-19. On a normal day only about 25 of the country’s 220 ICU beds are free. He called for greater staffing, and a doubling of capacity.

More than 30,000 nurses and healthcare workers and 1,500 midwives were due to strike this Thursday, for the second time this year, over low pay and the staffing crisis. The New Zealand Nurses Organisation (NZNO) and the midwives’ union MERAS promptly seized on the lockdown announcement to cancel the strike. Many health workers commented angrily on Facebook, with some saying the stoppage ought to have been postponed instead of cancelled outright.

New Zealand has experienced a number of near misses that could have resulted in a major outbreak.

Radio NZ reported that as of August 11, 32 percent of port workers had not received even one dose of the vaccine, and just 58 percent were fully vaccinated—despite border workers supposedly being prioritised. The Port of Tauranga had a COVID-19 scare earlier this month after 11 crew members on the visiting container ship Rio de Plata tested positive. About 94 port workers who had been in contact with the ship had to be tested; only nine had been vaccinated.

Experts have also raised concerns about breaches at the country’s managed isolation and quarantine (MIQ) facilities. These are repurposed hotels, where people returning from overseas are required to spend two weeks. A recent investigation found that Delta transmission had occurred inside the Jet Park Hotel isolation facility in Auckland, when hotel room doors were opened simultaneously for just a few seconds.

The government only belatedly ended quarantine-free travel with Australia in June, after a man who visited Wellington from Sydney later tested positive. New Zealand businesses have continually agitated for the relaxation of border quarantine rules.

Despite the clear risks posed by Delta, on August 12 Ardern announced that the government intends to allow some returning travelers to self-isolate at home rather than in MIQ, if they are fully vaccinated. A trial of the scheme will begin in October.

Next year, the government plans to remove restrictions on travel from “low-risk” and “medium-risk” countries. Ardern did not say which countries she considered “low-risk,” claiming it could change. The announcement was praised by tourism and business lobby groups.

The reality is that the coronavirus pandemic is surging throughout the world and killing more people than ever before. The latest outbreak in New Zealand demonstrates, yet again, that no single country can be considered safe. The pandemic requires an internationally coordinated and properly resourced healthcare response.

Such a science-based public health response, however, is incompatible with capitalism, in which policies are dictated by the profit interests of the super-rich. Governments are recklessly ploughing ahead with reopening schools and businesses, placing millions more lives in mortal danger.

Greed and Consumption: Why the World is Burning

Ramzy Baroud

Rome is scorching hot. This beautiful city is becoming unbearable for other reasons, too. Though every corner of the beaming metropolis is a monument to historical grandeur, from the Colosseum in Rione Monti to the Basilica of Saint John Lateran in San Giovanni, it is now struggling under the weight of its own contradictions.

In Via Appia, bins are overflowing with garbage, often spilling over into the streets. The smell, especially during Italy’s increasingly sweltering summers, is suffocating.

Meanwhile, many parts of the country are literally on fire. Since June 15, firefighters have reportedly responded to 37,000 fire-related emergencies, 1,500 of them on July 18 alone. A week later, I drove between Campania, in southern Italy, and Abruzzo, in the center. Throughout the journey, I was accompanied by fire and smoke. On that day, many towns were evacuated, and thousands of acres of forests were destroyed. It will take months to assess the cost of the ongoing destruction, but it will certainly be measured in hundreds of millions of euros.

Additionally, the entire southern Europe is ablaze, as the region is experiencing its worst heat waves in many years. Greece, Spain, Turkey, and the Balkans are fighting fires that continue to rage on.

Across the Atlantic, the US and Canada, too, are desperately trying to battle their own wildfires, mostly direct outcomes of unprecedented heat waves that struck North America from Vancouver to California, along with the whole of the American northwest region. In June, Vancouver, Portland and Seattle all set new heat records, 118, 116 and 108 Fahrenheit, respectively.

While it is true that not all fires are a direct result of global warming – many in Italy, for example, are man-made – unprecedented increases in temperature, coupled with changes in weather patterns, are the main culprits of these unmitigated disasters.

The solution is more complex than simply having the resources and proper equipment to contain these fires. The impact of the crises continues to be felt for years, even if temperatures somehow stabilize. In California, for example, which is bracing for another horrific season, the devastation of the previous years can still be felt.

“After two years of drought, the soil moisture is depleted, drying out vegetation and making it more prone to combustion,” The New York Times reported on July 16. The problem, then, is neither temporary nor can be dealt with through easy fixes.

As I sat with my large bottle of water outside Caffettiamo Cafe, struggling with heat, humidity and the pungent smell of garbage, I thought about who is truly responsible for what seems to be our new, irreversible reality. Here in Italy, the conversation is often streamlined through the same, predictable and polarized political discourse. Each party points finger at the others, in the hope of gaining some capital prior to the upcoming October municipal elections.

Again, Italy is not the exception. Political polarization in Europe and the US constantly steers the conversation somewhere else entirely. Rarely is the problem addressed at a macro-level, independent from political calculations. The impact of global warming cannot and must not be held hostage to the ambitions of politicians. Millions of people are suffering, livelihoods are destroyed, the fate of future generations is at risk. In the grand scheme of things, whether the current mayor of Rome, Virginia Raggi, is elected for another term or not, is insignificant.

Writing in the Columbia Climate School website, Renee Cho highlights the obvious, the relationship between our insatiable appetite for consumption and climate change. “Did you know that Americans produce 25 percent more waste than usual between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day, sending an additional one million tons a week to landfills?,” Cho asks.

This leads us to think about the existential relationship between our insatiable consumption habits and the irreparable damage we have inflicted upon mother earth.

Here in Via Appia, the contradictions are unmistakable. This is the summer sales season in Italy. Signs reading “Saldi” – or “Sale” – are everywhere. For many shoppers, it is impossible to fight the temptation. This unhinged consumerism – the backbone and the fault line of capitalism – comes at a high price. People are encouraged to consume more, as if such consumption has no repercussions for the environment whatsoever. Indeed, Via Appia is the perfect microcosm of this global schizophrenia: people complaining about the heat and the garbage, while simultaneously consuming beyond their need, thus creating yet more garbage and, eventually, worsening the plight of the environment.

Collective problems require collective solutions. Italy’s heat cannot be pinned down on a few arsonists and California’s wildfires are not simply the fault of an ineffectual mayor. Global warming is, in large part, the outcome of a destructive pattern instigated and sustained by capitalism. The latter can only survive through unhindered consumption, inequality, greed and, when necessary, war. If we continue to talk about global warming without confronting the capitalist menace that generated much of the crisis in the first place, the conversation will continue to amount to nil.

In the final analysis, all the conferences, pledges and politicking will not put out a single fire, neither in Italy nor anywhere else in the world.

It is Government Weakness, Not Taliban Strength, That Condemns Afghanistan

Patrick Cockburn

The victory of the Taliban in Afghanistan is looking unstoppable as they capture the big provincial cities of Kandahar, Herat and Ghazni without meeting effective resistance from Afghan government forces. Afghan soldiers and security forces are fleeing, surrendering or changing sides as they see no point in dying for a lost cause.

The speed of the Taliban success has caught the world by surprise – as no doubt it was intended to do. There has been no “decent interval” between the US departure and the Taliban attack, as there was in South Vietnam between the final US withdrawal in 1972 and the defeat of the South Vietnamese government by the North Vietnamese army in 1975.

The fact that everything the US and Britain fought for in Afghanistan over two decades is collapsing at such a pace underlines the extent of the Western defeat and will reinforce the belief that the era of the US as the sole super power is coming to an end. As with the Soviet Union in the 1980s, failure in Afghanistan has global implications far beyond the country where the war is being waged. In fact the defeat is more complete than that suffered by the Soviet Union in the 1980s, but after Soviet withdrawal the Communist government in Kabul survived for several years, in sharp contrast to the present debacle.

President Joe Biden may have expected the Kabul government ultimately to lose the war against the Taliban, when he announced the full US pull-out on 14 April, but not so swiftly or decisively. It was President Donald Trump who put in motion the final stages of the US pull-out, but it will be Biden who will pay the political price for the American failure.

Western generals have the gall to say the US retreat was too precipitate and they needed more time to train and prepare the Afghan armed forces. But after 20 years and the expenditure by the US of of $2.3tn in Afghanistan, the claim that the military lacked time or resources is an absurd evasion of responsibility.

Kabul, with a population of 4.5 million, has yet to fall but the lack of resistance elsewhere in the country suggests that it will not hold out for long. The overall failure of the Western-supported regime in Kabul is not difficult to explain. The Taliban defeat back in 2001 was not as decisive as reported at the time because their forces simply went home to their villages or crossed the border into Pakistan where they and their leadership were safe.

The role of Pakistan is a key factor in the US and the Afghan government defeat and follows America’s failure over 20 years to confront the Pakistani authorities. This was understandable since Pakistan has a powerful army, a population of 216 million, and a common border with Afghanistan stretching for 1,616 miles. The Pakistani ISI intelligence service not only supported the insurgents, but directed them strategically and tactically. This was the case when the Taliban first captured Kabul in 1996 and it is likely to be still true as they prepare to take the capital again in the coming days.

Yet there is far more to the Taliban victory than a strong foreign backer. Their commanders could recruit fighters willing to withstand devastating US air strikes in support of American ground forces which numbered 100,000 soldiers at their peak strength. The Afghan armed forces never had a similar core of fighters willing to die for a cause.

In visits to Afghanistan over the years, I have been impressed less by Taliban strength than by the government’s weakness and unpopularity. Friends and casual acquaintances would denounce it as no better than a gang of racketeers gorging themselves on US aid money or on juicy supply and construction contracts.

Western governments were in a state of denial over this. When Peter Galbraith, a senior UN official in Kabul, said that the US and its allies had no credible local partner – referring to the Afghan government of the day – he was promptly sacked. The blindness was willful, with Western diplomats visiting Western and Afghan military strongpoints in rural areas politely averting their eyes from the Taliban flags flying from trees and poles in nearby villages.

At one time in Kabul, I spotted a notice board beside a police post reading in English capital letters “RING OF STEEL”, but the post was entirely empty. I wondered if the sign could be an Afghan joke, but decided that the slogan, and the absent security forces told one a lot about the capabilities of the Afghan regime.

Trillions of dollars were spent by the US in Afghanistan, but Afghan soldiers were often short of food, ammunition, fuel and could not even get defective weapons replaced. These failings were blamed by Westerners on the corruption of the Afghan state and society, but much of the American aid money never made it past the sticky fingers of US consultants and security companies. Wherever this largesse was going, it was not into the pockets of the 54 per cent of Afghans living below the poverty line of $1.90 a day.

Deeply cynical though I have been about the strength of the Afghan army and government, I am still surprised by the sheer speed with which they have disintegrated in the last few weeks. Weaker than even their critics supposed, their final implosion was brought about by a well-planned Taliban military offensive, which focused from an early stage on the north of the country. The dominant ethnic groups here are the Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazara – in contrast to the largely Pashtun Taliban – who were the core of anti-Taliban resistance before 2001.

By striking in these northern areas first, the Taliban presumably hope to prevent opposition to them coming together to recreate the Northern Alliance, the old anti-Taliban coalition of warlords, which held northeast Afghanistan before 2001.

War in Afghanistan is often not what it seems to the outside world. More than in most civil conflicts, leaders, tribes, militias, cities, villages and individuals change sides to join the likely victor. An old saying declares that Afghans never lose a war – because they always join the winner before it comes to an end. Thus Ismail Khan, a powerful warlord in Herat is reported by the Taliban to have joined their forces, though the government sources say that he was captured.

Such switches of allegiance explain the momentum of the Taliban advance. Twenty years ago, I saw the Taliban likewise abandon Kabul, Kandahar, Herat and Ghazni without a fight. But consolidating these successes may prove difficult because the Taliban are either hated or disliked in much of the country, particularly in the cities, where they will only be able to rule by the use or threat of violence.

The Houses of Dead and Crooked Souls

Edward Curtin

“A house constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability.”      – Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

There is a vast and growing gulf between the world’s rich and poor.  An obscene gulf. If we can read houses, they will confirm this.  They offer a visible lesson in social class.

Houses stand before us like books on a shelf waiting to be read, and when the books are missing, as they are for a vast and growing multitude of the homeless exiled wandering ones and those imprisoned, their absence serves to indict the mansion-dwelling wealthy and to a lesser extent those whose homes serve to shield them from the truth of the ill-begotten gains of the wealthy elites who create the world’s suffering through their avarice, lies, and war making.

Many regular people want to say with Edmund in Eugene O’Neill’s play, Long Day’s Journey into Night:

The fog is where I wanted to be. Halfway down the path you can’t see this house. You’d never know it was here. Or any of the other places down the avenue. I couldn’t see but a few feet ahead. I didn’t meet a soul. Everything looked and sounded unreal. Nothing was what it is. That’s what I wanted – to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself….Who wants to see life as it is, if they can help it?

Yet the rich don’t hide or give a damn. They flaunt their houses.  They know they are crooks and creators of illusions.  Their nihilism is revealed in their conspicuous consumption and their predatory behavior; they want everyone else to see it too.  So they rub it in their faces.  Their wealth is built on the blood and suffering of millions around the world, but this is often hidden knowledge.

For many regular people prefer the fog to the harsh truth.  It shields them from intense anger and the realization that the wealthy elites who run the world and control the media lie to them about everything and consider them beneath contempt.  That would demand a response commensurate with the propaganda – rebellion.  It would impose the moral demand to look squarely at the houses of death with their tiny cells in which the wealthy elites and their henchmen imprison and torture truth tellers like Julian Assange, an innocent man in a living hell; to make connections between wealth and power and the obscene flaunting of the rich elite’s sybaritic lifestyles in houses where every spacious room testifies to their moral depravity.

The recent news of Barack Obama’s vile selfie birthday celebration for his celebrity “friends” at his 29-acre estate and mansion (he has another eight-million-dollar mansion in Washington, D. C.) on Martha’s Vineyard is an egregious recent case in point.  If he thinks this nauseating display is proof of his stability and strength – which obviously he does – then he is a deluded fool.  But those who carry water for the military-intelligence-media complex are amply rewarded and want to tell the world that this is so.  It’s essential for the Show.  It must be conspicuous so the plebians learn their lesson.

The Obamas’ new house on Martha’s Vineyard

Obama’s Vineyard mansion stands as an outward sign of his inner disgrace, his soullessness.

Trump’s golden towers and his never-ending self-promotion or the multiple million-dollar mansions of high-tech, sports, and Hollywood’s superstars send the same message.

Take Bill Gates’ sixty-three-million-dollar mansion, Xanadu, named after William Randolph Hearst’s estate in Citizen Kane, that took seven years to build.

Take the house up the hill from where I live in an erstwhile working-class town that sold for one million plus and now is being expanded to double its size with a massive swimming pool that leaves no grass uncovered. Every week, three black window-tinted SUVs arrive with New Jersey plates to join two white expensive sedans to oversee the progress in this small western Massachusetts town where McMansions rise throughout the hills faster than summer’s weeds.

Take the blue dolomite stone Searles Castle with its 60 acres, 40 rooms, and “dungeon” basement down the hill on Main St. that was recently bought by a NYC artist who also owns seven grand estates around the country that he showcases as examples of his fine artistic taste.  “All these houses have endless things to do — it’s just mind-boggling,” he has said. The artist, Hunt Slonem, calls himself a “glamorizer,” and his “exotica” paintings, inspired by Andy Warhol’s repetition of soup cans and Marilyn Monroe, hang in galleries, museums, cruise ships, and the houses of film celebrities.  Like his showcase houses, his exotica must have endless things to do.

What would Vincent van Gogh say?  Perhaps what he wrote to his brother Theo: that the greatest people in painting and literature “have always worked against the grain” and in sympathy with the poor and oppressed.  That might seem “mind-boggling” to Slonem.

Such ostentatious displays of wealth and power clearly reveal the delusions of the elites, as if there are no spiritual consequences for living so.  Even if they read Tolstoy’s cautionary tale about greed, How Much Land Does A Man Need?, it is doubtful that its truth would register.  Like Tolstoy’s protagonist Pahόm, they never have enough.  But like Pahόm, the Devil has them in his grip, and like him, they will get their just rewards, a small room, a bit of land to imprison them forever.

His servant picked up the spade and dug a grave long enough for Pahóm to lie in, and buried him in it. Six feet from his head to his heels was all he needed.

Where does the money for all these estates, not just Slonem’s, come from? Who wants to ask?

Getting to the roots of wealth involves a little digging.  Slonem’s castle was originally commissioned in the late 1800s by Mark Hopkins for his wife.  Hopkins was one of the founders of the Central Pacific Railroad, which was built by Irish and Chinese immigrants.  Labor history is quite illuminating on the ways immigrants have always been treated, in this case “the dregs of Asia” and the Irish dogs.  Interestingly enough, the great black scholar and radical, W. E. B. Du Bois, a town native, worked at the castle’s construction site as a young man.  No doubt it informed his future work against racism, capitalism, and economic exploitation.

Wealthy urbanites flooded this area after September 11, 2001, and now, in their terror of disease and death, they have bought every house they could find.  Their cash-filled pockets overflow with blood-money and few ask why. To suggest that massive wealth is almost always ill-begotten is anathema.  But innocence wears many masks, and the Show demands washed hands and no questions asked.

It is rare that one becomes super-wealthy in an honest and ethical way.  The ways the rich get money almost without exception lead downward, to paraphrase Thoreau from his essay, “Life Without Principle.”

Since the corona crisis began, investment firms such as the Blackstone Group have been gobbling up vast numbers of houses across the United States as their prices have gone through the roof.  The lockdowns – an appropriate prison term – have set millions of regular people back on their heels as the wealthiest have gotten exponentially wealthier. Poverty and starvation have increased around the world.  This is not an accident.  Despair and depression are widespread.

There is a taboo in life in general and in journalism: Do not ask where people’s money comes from.  Thoreau was so advised long ago:

Do not ask how your bread is buttered; it will make you sick…

But the super-wealthy do not get sick.  They are sick.  For they revel in their depravity and push it in the faces of regular people, many who envy them and wish to become super-rich and powerful themselves.  Of course there are the blue bloods whose method is understatement, but it takes many decades to enter their theater of deception.  In many ways, these people are worse, for their personae have been crafted over decades of play-acting and public relations so their images are laundered to smell fresh and benevolent.  They often wear the mask of philanthropy, while the history of their wealth lies shrouded in an amnestic fog.

Yet soul murder includes suicide, and while the old and new moneyed ones smoothly justify their oppression of the vast majority, many regular people kill the best in themselves by envying the rich.

Years ago, I discovered some documents that showed that one of this country’s most famous philosophers, known for his lofty moral pronouncements, owned a lot of stock in companies that were doing evil things – war making, poisoning and killings huge numbers with chemicals, etc.  But his image was one of Mr. Clean, Mr. Good Guy. I suspect this is typical and that there are many such secrets in the basements and attics of the rich.

But let us also ask where the writers and presenters of the mainstream and alternative media get their money.  Although “to follow the money” is a truism, few do.  If we do, we will learn that money talks and those who take it toe the line, nor do they live in shacks by the side of the road or rent like so many others.  They invest with Black Rock and their ilk and have money managers who can increase their wealth while shielding them from the ways that money is made on the backs of the poor and working people.  And they lie about people like Assange, Daniel Hale, Reality Winner, Craig Murray, et al., all imprisoned for daring to reveal the depredations of the power elites, the violence at the heart of predatory capitalism.

Yes, houses speak.  But few ever speak of where their money comes from.  Those that are on the take – which has multiple meanings – always plead innocent.  Yes, I can hear you say that I am being too harsh; that there are exceptions.  That is obvious.  So let’s skip the exceptions and focus on the general principle. There is a Buddhist principle that right livelihood is a core ethic in earning money.  Jesus had another way of putting it but was of course in agreement, as were so many others whom people hold in highest esteem.

Thoreau wrote: “If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications.”

The truth is that for most people, work, if they can find it, is drudgery and hard, a matter of survival. The late great Studs Terkel called it hell and rightly said that most jobs are not big enough for people because they crush the soul, they lack meaning.  And behind all ledgers of great wealth lie crushed souls.  This reality is so obvious and goes by many names, including class warfare, that further commentary would be redundant.

A few years ago, I visited Mark Twain’s house in Hartford, Connecticut.  It is advertised as “a house with a heart and a soul.”  It is not a house but a mansion, and it was an ostentatious display in Twain’s time. Similar or worse than Obama’s mansion on Martha’s Vineyard today.  It has no soul or heart.  It was built with Twain’s wife’s family money.  Her father was an oil and coal tycoon from upstate New York.  Twain reveled in opulent respectability.  He lived the life of a Gilded Age tycoon, an American magnate. It is not a pretty story, but the Twain myth says otherwise.  Not that he catered to popular tastes to please the crowd and his domineering wife and that he lived in luxury, but that he was a radical critic of the establishment.  This is false.  For he withheld for the most part the publication of his withering take on American imperialism until after his death.  He committed soul murder.  But his mansion impressed his neighbors and his humor distracted from his luxurious lifestyle.  His house still stands as a cautionary tale for those who will read it.

Baudelaire once said that in palaces “there is no place for intimacy.”  This is no doubt why in people’s dreams small, simple houses with a light in the window loom large.  Bachelard says, “When we are lost in darkness and see a distant glimmer of light, who does not dream of a thatched cottage or, to go more deeply still into legend, of a hermit’s hut.”  For here man and God meet in solitude; here human intimacy is possible.  “The hut can receive none of the riches ‘of this world.’  It possesses the felicity of intense poverty; indeed, it is one of the glories of poverty; as destitution increases, it gives access to absolute refuge.”

He is not espousing actual poverty, but the oneiric depths of true desire, the dreams of hope, reconciliation, and simple living that run counter to the amassing of wealth to prove one’s power and majesty. A humble house of truth, not a mansion of lies. This, to borrow the title of William Goyen’s novel, is “the house of breath” where the spirit can live and pseudo-stability gives way to faith, for insecurity is the essence of life.

There is such a hermit’s hut where the light shines.  It is the tiny cell in Belmarsh Prison where Julian Assange hangs onto his life by a thread.  His witness for truth sends an inspiring message to all those lost in the world’s woods to look to his fate and not turn away.  To follow to their sources the money that greases the palms of all the so-called journalists and politicians who want him dead or imprisoned for life, who tell their endless lies, not just about him, but about everything.

The house of propaganda is built on unanimity.  When one person says no, the foundation starts to crumble.  The houses of the rich dead and crooked souls, erected to project the stability of their bloody illusions, start to crumble into sand when people dissent one by one.

Soon the fog lifts and there is no hiding any more.  At the end of the path, you can see the vultures circling overhead as their prey go running out of their mansions in terror.

Sing Hallelujah!