Sri Lankan president reshuffles cabinet amid sharpening political crisis

Pradeep Ramanayake

Last Monday, Sri Lankan President Gotabhaya Rajapakse announced six changes to his cabinet, appointing new heads to the foreign affairs, health, education, transport, mass media and power ministries. A new “development coordination and supervision” ministry was also created.

Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, attends an event to mark the anniversary of country’s independence from British colonial rule [Credit: AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena]

Rajapakse’s sudden cabinet reshuffle came amid an escalating economic and political crisis, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, and intensifying pressure from the US and India that Colombo distance itself from China.

The most significant change was the appointment of Professor G.L. Peiris, who previously headed the education ministry and is now Sri Lanka’s external affairs minister. Peiris replaced Dinesh Gunawardena who becomes the education minister.

Peiris, who is chairperson of the ruling Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna, has held key ministerial portfolios in successive regimes since 1994, including as foreign minister in the government of former President Mahinda Rajapakse. His latest appointment is in line with backroom moves by senior government leaders to appease Washington.

According to an August 15 Sunday Times column, Peiris attended a dinner hosted by the US ambassador Alaina B. Teplitz at her Colombo official residence five days ahead of his new appointment. Finance minister Basil Rajapakse, one of the president’s brothers, reportedly “encouraged” Peiris’s attendance at the dinner. The only other individual invited was parliamentarian M. A. Sumanthiran, a spokesman for the pro-US Tamil National Alliance (TNA).

While no details have been revealed about the dinner discussions, the Times said it focused on a “political solution to the ethnic conflict.” This is diplomatic language for “the devolution of power” to the Tamil elite in the North and East in Sri Lanka and is used by the US to enlist the support of the Tamil parties for Washington’s buildup against China.

In early May, the Times reported that Basil Rajapakse had held “informal” meetings with the State Department officials during a US visit for medical treatment. The newspaper noted that he met with Ambassador Teplitz before leaving for the US. Citing government sources, the Times said that he met with Lalith Chandradasa, Sri Lanka’s consul general in Los Angeles, and travelled with him to Washington for the State Department talks.

The visit, according to the Times, was “to explore opportunities to improve relations with the US and to convey the government’s stated position that it takes a neutral stand on international issues.” The perception in Washington is that Colombo “has tilted very heavily in favour of China,” the newspaper noted.

President Rajapakse has also reportedly met with two senior US embassy officials on separate occasions. No details, however, have been revealed about their discussions.

The US and India, Washington’s main regional partner in its military preparations against China, are hostile to the Rajapakse regime’s relations with Beijing. The COVID-19 pandemic has battered the Sri Lankan economy and seen the cash-strapped Colombo government turn to China for increased investments and loans.

In April, Colombo opened the China-funded Colombo Port City (CPC), which is a significant component of its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The BRI is part of Beijing’s geo-strategic plan to ensure the free movement of its imports and exports via the Indian Ocean and Central Asia. It is in response to the US-led efforts to militarily encircle China.

Washington’s attempts to pressure the Rajapakse regime to distance itself from Beijing are also being pursued in the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC). In March, the US, UK and other major powers passed a UNHRC resolution for an investigation into war crimes and human rights violations committed during the final years of Colombo’s war against the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). The war, which ended with LTTE’s defeat in May 2009, saw the killing of tens of thousands of Tamil civilians and hundreds of others, including LTTE leaders, who surrendered to the military.

The resolution empowered the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights to “consolidate, analyze and preserve information and evidence” for “relevant judicial proceedings.” The resolution also called for the involvement of Tamil parties in the “reconciliation process.”

In her report to the UNHRC, High Commissioner Michel Bachelet called for a war crimes investigation by UNHRC member states and the imposition of targeted sanctions on those guilty of war crimes.

Washington has no interest in defending the rights of Sri Lankan Tamils. The US supported Colombo’s war and former President Mahinda Rajapakse’s authoritarian regime and only began raising human rights issues when Beijing emerged as the main provider of financial assistance and military hardware for Colombo.

The US sponsored various UNHRC resolutions to force Mahinda Rajapakse to break relations with China. When these failed to produce a shift, Washington, backed by New Delhi, orchestrated a regime-change operation replacing Mahinda Rajapakse with pro-US Maithripala Sirisena as president in January 2015. The TNA fully endorsed the political shift.

President Gotabhaya Rajapakse’s appointment of Gunawardena as education minister is highly significant and occurs as almost 250,000 teachers and principals continue their now seven-week online learning strike. Sri Lankan media outlets claim that the new minister will be able to deal with the striking teachers. President Rajapakse has repeatedly declared that his administration confronts a major economic crisis and cannot grant the teachers’ demands.

The removal of Pavithra Wanniarachchi as health minister and his replacement with Keheliya Rambukwella is an attempt to find a scapegoat for the government’s catastrophic response to COVID-19. While the opposition parties and the media have denounced Wanniarachchi, the escalating infections, deaths and collapsing health system are the direct responsibility of the Rajapakse regime and the entire ruling class.

Last week’s cabinet reshuffle was also occasion for the Rajapakse clan to further expand and consolidate its rule. Namal Rajapakse—President Rajapakse’s nephew and Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapakse’s son—was made the minister for coordination and supervision, a newly created position. The appointment is in addition to him being the sports minister and holding other state ministerial portfolios.

These cabinet changes will not resolve the deepening crisis of the Rajapakse regime or satisfy Washington, which is demanding Colombo break its ties with Beijing and fully embraces its war plans against China.

Australian governments proclaim need to “live with the virus” amid record infections

Oscar Grenfell

The more Australia’s COVID crisis spirals out of control, with increasing infections, hospitalisations and deaths, the more vehemently are state and federal government leaders insisting that the population must “live with the virus” and its continuing spread.

Long lines of cars at inner-west Sydney COVID-19 testing station [Photo: WSWS Media]

This policy, identical to that being advanced by governments in Britain, the US and elsewhere, is a declaration that working people must accept death and illness on a mass scale in the interests of corporate profit.

Over the past three days, as daily Australian infections have approached 1,000 for the first time since the pandemic began, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison and New South Wales (NSW) Premier Gladys Berejiklian have stepped up a campaign for the imminent lifting of safety restrictions and an end to lockdowns for all time.

Both have described a “roadmap” to “reopening” the country as an unbreakable “pact with the Australian people.” In reality, it was worked out behind closed doors, without any public discussion, and was adopted in July by the national cabinet, composed of the state and territory leaders, most of them from Labor, and the federal Liberal-National Coalition government, in meetings whose content remains secret.

According to the “roadmap,” lockdowns will become “highly unlikely” once 70 percent of the adult population is fully vaccinated. In phase three, triggered by an 80 percent rate, COVID will be treated like the flu in preparation for a “return to normal.” The modelling upon which the plan is based acknowledges that it will result in mass infections, as high as the hundreds of thousands, along with thousands of hospitalisations and deaths.

This was all known when the state and territory leaders signed off on the program.

As the current outbreak has worsened, however, some Labor premiers and chief ministers have made mealy-mouthed criticisms of the Berejiklian government, which has allowed the unchecked spread of Delta in Sydney, the country’s most populous city. They have warned that a full reopening, with case numbers rapidly increasing, could result in a health catastrophe.

The comments are motivated, above all, by fear of the growing opposition among working people to the subordination of their health to corporate profit interests.

In response, Morrison has given his most explicit statements outlining the federal government's homicidal “herd immunity” policy. In a press conference this morning, he declared that “our goal is to live with the virus, not to live in fear of it.” It was necessary for the population to “adjust its mindset,” and to recognise that infection numbers would “not be the issue once we get above 70 percent” vaccination.

Morrison warned against those who would “seek to undermine the national plan,” as well as those who “may fear it and have concerns.’ “Our goal must be to help people overcome these fears and not give in to them,” he said. They could not be allowed to obstruct the immediate lifting of lockdowns once the 70 percent target was reached.

These comments are nothing short of a declaration of war on all workers and youth seeking to protect their health and lives, from nurses and doctors, to factory workers, postal staff, teachers and students. Already, there is mass opposition to the criminally-negligent response to the Sydney outbreak, widely-reflected on social media.

Morrison and the other government leaders know that this will grow. The prime minister today said that infections would increase substantially, once the “roadmap” began to be implemented. He and federal Health Minister Greg Hunt chillingly stated that they had ensured intensive care capacity would be sufficient to cope with the surge in hospitalisations that would result.

Virtually identical statements have been made each day by Berejiklian and other representatives of the NSW state government. When NSW cases exceeded 800 on Saturday, the first time that benchmark had been reached by any Australian jurisdiction, Berejiklian said that of greater significance was the uptick in the rate of vaccination, because this was the path to “freedom.”

The government is predicting that vaccination targets for the lifting of the lockdown will be met in early October. It has dispensed with any pretence of seeking to curb transmission, much less end the present outbreak, which Berejiklian and other ministers now state is impossible.

In the space of the past three days, almost 2,500 infections have been reported, the vast majority in the working-class areas of western and south-west Sydney. The bulk of the cases are being reported each day as unlinked, meaning the authorities do not know the source of transmission, while most of the COVID-infected individuals have been in the community for all or part of their contagious period.

Outbreaks are also occurring in regional and rural areas, including in the western NSW town of Wilcannia, one of the poorest in the state, with a population that is primarily indigenous and at high-risk of succumbing to the disease.

The state is on track to exceed one thousand daily infections by the end of the month, while some epidemiologists have warned of cases reaching three to four thousand in September. On July 31, there had been 3,190 infections since the beginning of the outbreak on June 16. Less than a month later, the figure now stands at 13,022.

Under these conditions, the state government is foreshadowing the lifting of some of the inadequate restrictions next month, based on the arbitrary figure of six million vaccine doses having been administered. This would be followed by the beginning of stage two of the “roadmap” in October, including a possible full resumption of face-to-face teaching when term four begins.

Year 12 students outside of 12 local government areas in the west and south-west of Sydney are already permitted to attend school for two hours per day, four days a week, in preparation for a broader reopening.

As has been the case internationally, a complete resumption of in-person teaching threatens a health catastrophe. Over the weekend alone, 204 children under the age of nine contracted the virus in NSW, along with 276 aged between ten and nineteen. Throughout the outbreak, children and teenagers have accounted for at least a third of all cases. There is not yet an approved vaccination for children, meaning they would be completely unprotected in the event of a return to classroom learning.

Berejikian has blithely dismissed the dangers. This morning, she was asked by a journalist if her government had factored the situation in Israel into its reopening plans. There, almost 80 percent of the population is inoculated, but a reopening has resulted in a surge of infections, which stand above 6,000 per day in a country whose population size is comparable to NSW. Hospitalisations are also rising. The premier brushed the question aside, and later insisted that there was no ceiling of infection numbers that would overwhelm the state’s health system.

Hospitalisations are already increasing rapidly. At the end of July, there were 203 COVID patients in NSW hospitals, 53 in intensive care. The number has grown to 586 COVID-19 cases admitted to hospital, with 100 people in intensive care, 32 of them requiring ventilation. All of Sydney’s major hospitals are reporting intense strains on capacity, with over a thousand staff in the city isolating at any given time due to potential COVID exposure.

A health worker at Westmead Hospital, one of the largest in the country, informed the WSWS that as of today, the facility has 166 COVID patients, accounting for 17 percent of available bed space. The hospital is treating 41 pregnant women, eight of them as inpatients, who are COVID-positive.

As case numbers continue to rise, this is what the ruling elite has in store for millions of workers and young people. That is why the police and the military are being brought to the centre stage. A major state mobilisation is underway against residents of the working-class suburbs of western and south-western Sydney where conditions increasingly resemble martial law.

Anti-lockdown rallies were met with a massive show of police force over the weekend, including a complete shutdown of the central business district. The target of this operation was not the handful of right-wing agitators spouting similar talking points to Berejiklian and Morrison. Rather, the events were seized upon as a dry-run for a police confrontation with a movement of the working-class.

The Crimes of the West in Afghanistan and the Suffering That Remains

Fabian Scheidler

As in Iraq, as in Libya, as in Mali. It is time to finally bury the doctrine of the so-called “responsibility to protect”, which was coined at the time of the beginning of the Afghan war, and to brand it as what it was from the beginning: a neocolonial project.

The headless flight of NATO troops from Afghanistan and the havoc they leave behind are only the last chapter in a devastating story that began in October 2001. At that time, the US government, supported by allies including the German administration, announced that the terror attacks of September 11 should be answered by a war in Afghanistan. None of the assassins were Afghan. And the Taliban government at the time even offered the US to extradite Osama bin Laden—an offer the US did not even respond to. Virtually no word was said about the country of origin of 15 of the 19 terrorists—Saudi Arabia. On the contrary: members of the Bin Laden family were flown out of the USA in a night-and-fog operation so that they could not be interrogated. After classified parts of the 9/11 commission report were released in 2016, it emerged that high-ranking members of the Saudi embassy in Washington had been in contact with the terrorists before the attacks. Consequences? None. They are our allies.

So Afghanistan was attacked. Already during the Cold War, the US and Saudi Arabia had supported Islamists there on a large scale against the Soviet Union. Now the Islamist warlords of the “Northern Alliance” were the new allies. The German Armed Forces flanked the US troops. While their deployment was shrouded in the narrative of a “humanitarian intervention”, the Bundeswehr in fact worked hand in hand with the warlords, as investigative journalist Marc Thörner reported. (He was the only German reporter on site who was not embedded in the military.) Thörner predicted that the complicity of the NATO troops in the war crimes and the “counterinsurgency methods from the colonial era” would turn the population more and more against the West and strengthen fundamentalism. We see the result today: the triumph of the Taliban across the country.

The US troops as well as the Bundeswehr and other allies not only supported war criminals on the ground, they also committed serious crimes themselves. None of the perpetrators was ever convicted in court for this. Take Kunduz, for example: in September 2009 the Bundeswehr bombed a mainly civilian trek here, with over one hundred dead or seriously injured, including children. The proceedings against those primarily responsible, Colonel Georg Klein and Defense Minister Jung (CDU), ended with acquittals. In 2010, WikiLeaks published 76,000 previously classified documents about the war, containing references to hundreds of other war crimes. But instead of investigating these cases and bringing the guilty to justice, the messenger, Julian Assange, was pursued. Today he is sitting, critically ill, in a British high-security prison and has to fear being extradited to the USA, where he is threatened with life imprisonment under inhumane conditions. The UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Nils Melzer, came to the conclusion, after an in-depth investigation of the case, that Assange had been and is systematically tortured by Western authorities. Most of the big media, which got a lot of attention and made money with the leaks of their journalist colleague, have now largely dropped him. And with it the defense of the freedom of the press, which is especially crucial when it comes to questions of war and peace. So Assange is on trial—and not the war criminals.

All those who warned against the Afghanistan war were ridiculed from the start as naïve pacifists or even accused of evading humanitarian responsibility and thus playing into the hands of the Islamists. But today it is finally clear: the alleged humanitarian operation only plunged the country further into misery and strengthened the Islamists. As in Iraq, as in Libya, as in Mali. It is time to finally bury the doctrine of the so-called “responsibility to protect”, which was coined at the time of the beginning of the Afghan war, and to brand it as what it was from the beginning: a neocolonial project.

Instead of military interventions, one could, for example, begin to drain the terror sponsor Saudi Arabia financially and stop all arms exports there. It would also be worthwhile to advance the project of a Conference for Security and Cooperation in the Middle East, which—based on the model of the détente policy of the OSCE in Cold War Europe—could be working on a new civil security architecture for the region.

The Afghanistan debacle should also be an occasion to question the enormous expansion of Western military budgets in recent years, which was justified not least of all by deployments abroad. German military spending went up from € 40 billion to € 52 billion from 2015 to 2020, an increase of a whopping 30 percent. The US military budget is at $ 778 billion, about twelve times of what Russia spends for its army. This money is urgently needed for tasks that really move the world forward, especially for countering the climate urgency and for a socio-ecological transition. The US military not only has a gloomy balance sheet in terms of peace policy, but is also THE largest greenhouse gas emitter on Earth. It is time for a slimming cure.

UK: How was the Plymouth mass shooting made possible?

Julie Hyland

The inquest into the murderous shooting rampage in Plymouth, southwest England opened Thursday.

Jake Davison, 22 years old, killed five people on August 12, before turning the gun on himself. It is the first mass shooting in England since 12 people were killed in Cumbria in 2010.

A Devon & Cornwall Police car (Credit: Lewis Clarke/Creative Commons)

The inquest heard that this followed an argument between Davison and his mother. Maxine Davison, who had been treated for cancer, was his first victim. Within 12 minutes, Davison had shot and killed four others: Sophie Martyn, just three years old, her father, Lee, Stephen Washington and Kate Shepherd. Two others, a mother and her son, were shot through their front door but survived. All were strangers to Davison.

Much of the media coverage has centred on Davison’s links to the “incel” or involuntarily celibate movement. Overwhelmingly young men, it combines self-loathing with misogyny, blaming women for the lack of sexual and social status. It came to prominence in 2014, when avowed incel Elliot Rodgers, also 22 years old, killed seven people in California including himself. Since then, several self-proclaimed incels have been responsible for a spate of killings in America, Canada and Germany.

Socially isolated, with long standing mental health problems, Davison posted videos of himself weightlifting in his mother’s front room and was reportedly using steroids and amphetamines. His videos on YouTube under the name Professor Waffle refer to “inceldom” and rage about his virginity and lack of attractiveness to women.

In his last video, Davison described himself as “beaten down and defeated by life” and said, “I wouldn’t clarify [sic] myself as an incel but have talked to people similar to me who have had nothing but themselves.”

The nihilism of the incel movement means it is associated with alt-right groups. So far there is little evidence that this motivated Davison, although internet posts indicate he was a supporter of former US President Donald Trump and had a fascination with guns.

The media have led demands for the shooting to be categorised as terrorism and for a clampdown on incel sites and chatrooms. Leading the way is the Guardian, with Laura Bates, founder of the Everyday Sexism Project, insisting, “The incel movement is a form of extremism and cannot be ignored anymore”, and linking it to “the everyday sexism that is rife in our society”.

The government is pressing for social network providers to collect the real identities of their users and make them available to police. This is supposedly to address the issue of how Davison was given a gun licence, despite the UK having among the strictest firearms regulations in the world.

This law-and-order approach, aimed at further eroding democratic rights, will do nothing to prevent such atrocities. Quite the reverse. It is an integral part of the reactionary climate in which disassociated and dysfunctional personalities can become mass shooters.

The “incel” movement is undoubtedly a particularly poisonous and violent outcome of the “culture wars” championed by both the right and “liberal” proponents of identity politics in its various guises.

Many of Davison’s internet posts refer to the incels he has engaged with as “similar to me, they’ve had nothing but themselves. And then they’ve socially had it tough, probably grew up in a s*** background.” He complained of “fighting an uphill battle with a big f**cking rock on my back”, while others get “a free ride to the top”. “Everything is rigged against you”, “imagine failing at everything in life and having absolutely no support whatsoever”, he says. “How can you have drive and willpower, you know, when you’ve been defeated a million times?”

This situation he blames entirely on women. There is a complete absence of awareness of any broader socio-economic context.

Then there is his fascination with guns, which has largely passed without comment in the media. At 22 years of age, Davison was born at the height of capitalist triumphalism, and its accompanying outburst of imperialist militarism. In that timeframe, the UK has been involved in 11 wars (out of the 36 since 1900). Three of them cover almost all of Davison’s short life-span—the bloody neo-colonial ventures in Iraq and Afghanistan and the open-ended “war on terror”. Those now demanding the state accrue even greater powers to “protect” women against misogyny are among the same forces that champion imperialist intervention into these countries on the grounds of defending “women’s rights”.

Davison was reportedly an apprentice crane operator at the defence and security company Babcock, one of Plymouth’s major employers. The port city is at the centre of the UK’s defence industry, with Devonport Dockyard the country’s only naval base to refit nuclear submarines. The south west is responsible for more Ministry of Defence employment and spending than any other region, with the dockyard accounting for 10 percent of Plymouth’s income.

At the same time, Plymouth has higher than average levels of poverty and deprivation. Life expectancy, even before the pandemic, was the lowest of any area in the south west, and it is no coincidence that cases of COVID-19 have risen exponentially.

Davison’s misanthropy mirrors that of Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who proclaimed regarding the pandemic that he would rather “let the bodies pile high in their thousands” than impose a further lockdown. More than 150,000 people have died from COVID-19 due to the government’s “herd immunity” policy, one of the highest death rates in the world. Strikingly, Davison and Johnson both used film characters to represent their actions—Davison describing himself as the Terminator, while Johnson compared himself with Larry Vaughan, the mayor of Amity in Jaws who orders the beaches to stay open despite shark attacks.

Davison’s mental health problems were well known. He had attended a special needs school due to autism and other conditions. His former teacher, Jonathan Williams, told the media, “For me, having spent so much time with him and done all I could to help him, for it to end like this is heart-breaking. Jake would have had an education, health and care plan, which means the state would be required to provide support up to the age of 25. Was he really receiving the support needed?”

Relatives have said Maxine tried repeatedly to get help for her son for years, but “she was let down by the adult social care”. A family friend said Maxine “begged for mental health support”, but the National Health Service “said they are short staffed and that was it. The family even asked the police to come out to see him as he was talking and acting strange—they didn’t do a welfare check. And now six people are dead.”

Plymouth’s health and social care service, Livewell Southwest, confirmed they had been in contact with Davison during the pandemic by telephone but gave no further details.

Livewell Southwest has been described as a “pioneering social enterprise”, one of a number carved out of the privatisation of the NHS. A “community interest company”, created under the then Labour-controlled local authority, it took control of much of the city’s social and mental health provision. Last year, the “not for profit” enterprise made a £970,000 surplus, enabling it to hike the salary of its highest-paid director to £180,000 from £153,000.

Such moves are part of the systematic running down of social provision, especially after the 2008 financial crash and the imposition of austerity, with expenditure on public services as a share of GDP slashed to its lowest levels since the 1930s. COVID-19 has been used as the pretext for transferring even greater amounts of social wealth to the super rich, while public provision, especially in health care, is collapsing.

Finally, there is the question as to how Davison was able to hold a gun licence, despite his mental health diagnosis and previous violent incidents.

Devon and Cornwall Police has referred itself to the Independent Office for Police Conduct. Local police oversee the issuing of shotgun and firearm certificates on the grounds that they are more aware of mitigating circumstances.

Gun licences are extremely hard to obtain. Recent figures show 567,358 people licenced to hold firearm/shotgun certificates, broadly unchanged over the last decade. Those applying need to show “good reason” for their request and must prove that they “pose no danger to public safety or the peace”. Independent referees must provide character references, criminal records are searched, and an applicant’s doctor is approached for evidence of alcoholism, drug abuse or signs of a personality disorder.

Yet Davison had a history of anger-related mental health issues. In 2016, he beat up a teenager and his girlfriend. In September 2020, he assaulted two teenagers in a skate park. His gun was taken away from him by police following that incident but returned to him just months later after he apparently attended an anger management course. He had reportedly beaten up his father around the same time.

Relatives of Davison’s victims have spoken of their anger that a young man with such a history was considered a suitable candidate for a shotgun. Williams asked, “How is it possible that a police officer read Jake’s history of obsessive compulsive disorder, anger issues and depression and concluded he should be allowed to own a firearm?”

It is a further tragedy that the victims and their families are unlikely to receive any satisfactory answer to their questions because that would mean the ruling elite admitting to the malignant tendencies they are responsible for incubating and encouraging.

Reopening of French schools threatens children’s lives

Samuel Tissot

Amid the surge of the Delta variant in France, the Macron government plans in less than two weeks to crowd millions of children back into schools. Starting on September 2, millions of French students will return to lecture halls and student canteens, regardless of their vaccination status.

As in the September 2020 school reopening in France (when daily cases averaged just 5,407), this will lead to a new surge of COVID-19 cases and the propagation of new variants in a population where only 56 percent are fully vaccinated. Daily cases in France have averaged 23,279 over the last seven days. The 145 deaths recorded on August 17 was the highest total since May.

Despite widespread anti-scientific claims by the capitalist media that the virus isn’t dangerous for the young, as of July 2021, at least 16 school-aged children had died from COVID-19 in French hospitals. University-age students have also suffered severely throughout the pandemic. In the 20-29 age group, there have been 81 recorded COVID-19 deaths in hospitals. These deaths occurred before the propagation of the Delta variant, which now accounts for over 90 percent of France’s cases and is much more deadly and damaging for children and youth.

Furthermore, the Delta variant is more infectious, deadly, and extremely dangerous for children. Its spread has been associated with record child hospitalizations and deaths in India, the United States and Indonesia. Since the beginning of July, over 100 child deaths every week have been recorded each week by the Indonesian Pediatric Society. This August, at least four children have died in the United States from COVID-19 following infection at school.

As in the United States, the reopening of French schools, even as tens of thousands of infections are recorded daily, will accelerate the spread of the virus and lead to more tragic, preventable deaths.

In late July, French Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer unveiled a four-tiered plan that amounted to a commitment to avoid suspending in-person education, no matter the human cost. The green, amber, orange, and red levels are a hodgepodge of partial measures, including mask-wearing, group mixing and the cancellation of certain sports. In the context of mass community transmission these rules will not be enough to protect children, teachers or families.

Only at orange and red level is there any return to online education. In a “red” alert level, 15- and 16-year-olds will have hybrid classes at 50 percent capacity and lycée (high school) students will also have hybrid classes. Though vaccinated individuals can infect others with the virus, if a secondary school class member tests positive, then only those unvaccinated students will be sent home. Primary school classes will continue with in-person education, regardless of alert levels.

Part of the government’s plans to ensure in-person education continues is the vaccination of 12- to 18-year-olds, if parental permission is granted. At the end of September, the vaccine passport for social and cultural events will also be extended to all adolescents over age 12, although it will not apply to schools. Blanquer also said that 600,000 tests will be performed a week. However, since over 12.4 million children and 821,000 teachers attend schools in France, this will be nowhere near sufficient to prevent major outbreaks.

Moreover, the alert level is arbitrarily set by the government, meaning that the implementation of these limited rules will be made in line with the level of death the government thinks it can get away with, rather than any objective scientific criteria. The deadly implications of this can already be seen on the French island of Réunion in the Indian Ocean. Despite a record 3,590 cases last week, the equivalent of nearly 275,000 weekly cases in mainland France’s population, 220,000 school children returned to classrooms there last Monday.

The Macron government’s plan has nothing to do with defending children’s health or education, but seeks to reduce disruption to profit extraction from working families as much as possible. Only children old enough to stay at home while their parents go to work are to receive online education. Regardless of how many are dying, children too young to stay at home without parental supervision and who are totally unprotected against the virus are to be forced to stay in school.

Ruling circles are well aware of the danger posed by variants to children and the potential for a wave of children’s deaths and serious illnesses provoking explosive outrage among workers. Last month, High Commissioner for Planning, François Bayrou said: “I live with a fear of this virus, that one day a mutation will make the virus extremely harmful to children. … If it affected children, especially young children, then I think we would be faced with waves that would call into question the very stability of society.”

Yet this is precisely the scenario that the government’s own policy is setting into motion. The coronavirus, and particularly its delta variant, is a deadly virus capable of causing severe disease and death in all layers of the population. As it rips through the body, even in non-fatal cases, it causes severe inflammation of vital organs, including the brain and heart.

Allowing mass infection of children could not only cause deaths and a surge of infections in the coming weeks and months, but plague entire generations with life-long consequences. Even less potent variants have left many in these age groups plagued by the effects of Long COVID, including the devastating impact of COVID-19 infection on cognitive development.

The Macron government knows this very well, but it is preparing a mass slaughter and long-term damage to the young—yet again accepting mass infection and death to protect corporate profits.

Macron’s “herd immunity” policy has been supported by the union bureaucracies and pseudo-left parties during the pandemic. Nowhere has this been more explicit than their support for the government’s deadly policy of keeping schools open no matter the cost. The Stalinist General Confederation of Labour (CGT) and the Unitary Union Federation (FSU) have explicitly backed reopening schools since the summer of 2020—isolating teachers and students striking against a return to in-person learning last year, even as Macron’s policemen violently attacked them.

Moreover, pseudo-left groups like the Morenoite Révolution Permanente have anti-scientifically insisted that schools can be reopened safely by marginally changing security protocols, while denouncing health measures necessary to contain the deadly virus as “authoritarian.”

This treachery even allowed Blanquer to boast that France has kept its children in school longer than any other European nation. It is impossible to negotiate with the murderous representatives of the ruling class or to appeal to them to see sense. A movement must be built to oppose them.

Under conditions of the rapid spread of the Delta variant internationally, Macron’s deadly school opening must be opposed. Teachers and parents must prepare mass strike action independently of the corrupt unions, coordinated with teachers and workers across Europe and beyond. They must demand the suspension of in-person schooling, all non-essential production, and a policy of social isolation with full compensation until the virus is brought under control and the population is fully vaccinated.

Australia: More job cuts as Telstra divides business

Noel Holt

The Communications, Electrical and Plumbing Union (CEPU) has begun negotiations with Telstra over a new enterprise agreement (EA) covering thousands of technicians at Australia’s largest telecommunications corporation.

The formerly government-owned entity announced plans in March to split the company into four business units, InfraCo-Fixed, InfraCo-Towers, ServeCo and Telstra International.

Telstra is aiming to establish separate EAs in each of these business units, atomising the workforce and further constraining workers’ already limited rights to oppose attacks on their jobs, pay and conditions. Under Australia’s draconian Fair Work Act, Telstra workers will be barred from defending the rights of their colleagues in other business units.

The CEPU, which backs the entire Fair Work framework, is also facilitating this attempt to divide workers. It stated on July 23: “The Union bargaining team has not yet had time to consider this issue in any great depth, but at this stage, our position remains that—we still prefer one agreement for the Telstra group workforce.”

These assertions have no credibility whatsoever. Telstra is in the final stages of a four-year restructure that the unions have enforced. The company first indicated its plans to split the business late last year, and confirmed them in March. The union does not want to openly endorse the carve-up, because of widespread opposition among workers, and so, instead, claims that it is still “considering” the issue. In the weeks since, no further statement has been issued.

The CEPU has not opposed any of Telstra’s other flagged demands, and has informed members it is willing to negotiate on “all matters.” The union has not yet issued any log of claims. In other words, everything is on the table, and the starting point of negotiations is what cuts to pay, conditions and jobs the CEPU is able to ram through.

Telstra is angling for increased “flexibility,” including split shifts and work outside of normal hours. The company claims that some basic conditions, in the existing agreement, such as 36.75-hour weeks, 15 weeks’ sick leave and its “above industry standard” redundancy package will be retained.

Telstra indicated it would also be seeking to have the changes included in a variation to the “Telstra Award 2015,” which can only be altered by application to Australia’s pro-business industrial court, the Fair Work Commission.

In negotiations for the current EA, the CEPU agreed to meagre pay “increases” of just 1.8 percent in 2019-20, and 2 percent in 2020-21, less than the annual increase in the cost of living at the time.

As the final touches are put on the union-management agreement, around 2,000 Telstra workers stand to lose their jobs before the end of the year. A further 1,600 workers, indirectly employed by the company, also face the scrapheap.

These cuts are the final stage in Telstra’s three-year $1 billion “T22” cost-cutting program, which has destroyed at least 8,000 jobs since it was announced in June 2018.

While the CEPU has bemoaned the cuts, it has ensured that they proceed without opposition. The union has suppressed widespread anger among workers, ensured that no action has been carried out against the cuts, and has promoted the company’s bogus “employee assistance” and “career transition” programs, as well as vague promises of possible redeployment for some laid-off staff.

Telstra’s T22 cost-reduction plan followed a $3 billion restructure investment announced in 2016, which was the first stage in preparing Telstra for its expansion into Australia’s $50 billion government-funded monopoly National Broadband Network company (NBN Co). The restructure involved creating a wholly-owned infrastructure business unit, Telstra InfraCo, with the plan that this would allow Telstra to incorporate NBN Co into its business.

Under the plan, all of Telstra’s infrastructure assets, along with close to 3,000 employees, were transferred into Telstra InfraCo, which then sold its services to Telstra, to wholesale customers and to NBN Co. Rather than transferring employees across to the newly formed Telstra InfraCo, Telstra intended to terminate current employees, forcing them to re-apply for their old jobs in the new business unit. This was eventually abandoned amid widespread opposition.

Telstra’s move to use Telstra InfraCo to buy into NBN Co was dealt a blow in 2019. Federal Communications Minister Paul Fletcher made it clear that Telstra’s vertical structure, including retail, as well as Telstra InfraCo, meant it could not legally own the NBN wholesale network. This meant that Telstra needed to carry out further restructuring, to fully decouple its non-retail and infrastructure business.

In March this year, Telstra announced that it had begun the process of splitting its business operations into four subsidiaries, under a holding company called Telstra HoldCo, in which shareholders will hold assets. The four subsidiaries are InfraCo-Fixed (the physical infrastructure assets including the fibre and exchanges that form Telstra’s fixed telecom network), InfraCo-Towers (mobile network tower assets), ServCo (the customer-facing side) and Telstra International (international business including undersea cables).

In June, Telstra announced the sale of 49 percent equity in InfraCo-Towers, to raise $2.8 billion, half of which was returned to shareholders in dividends. The sale boosted Telstra’s stock by 25 percent, compared with the beginning of 2021.

This sale of Telstra’s mobile towers to a well-heeled consortium, consisting of the Future Fund, the Commonwealth Superannuation Corporation and Sunsuper, was aimed at putting InfraCo-Towers in a strong position to raise the investment capital needed to expand the mobile phone infrastructure network.

Telstra CEO Andy Penn said he intended “going the same way” with InfraCo-Fixed. This would better position the subsidiary to independently raise investment capital to make a strong bid for a stake in NBN Co.

These major restructure developments will inevitably mean further attacks on the jobs and working conditions of Telstra employees. The record of the CEPU demonstrates that it will seek to impose every demand of Telstra and its ultra-wealthy shareholders. Over the last decade, the union has overseen and enforced the destruction of tens of thousands of permanent jobs, and the massive growth of insecure contract positions.

Pregnant women succumbing to Delta variant in the US, leaving behind scores of broken families

Norisa Diaz

Another cruel aspect of the virulent Delta variant is the rate at which pregnant women, largely unvaccinated, are giving birth to their newborn babies desperately ill or as their final act before succumbing to COVID-19.

A number of counties and hospital systems throughout the country are reporting concerning spikes in the numbers of pregnant women admitted to hospital and growing numbers of deaths. Pregnant women infected with the virus have an increased risk of progressing to a more severe illness.

A pregnant woman waits in line for groceries with hundreds during a food pantry, sponsored by Healthy Waltham for those in need due to the COVID-19 virus outbreak, at St. Mary's Church in Waltham, Mass. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)

The virulent Delta variant which is spreading quickly throughout the globe is putting increasing numbers of pregnant women in the ICU. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as of Friday August 20, a total of 18,262 pregnant women have been hospitalized from a known 107,532 total cases. More than 14,500 have been placed in intensive care and 10,003 of those have been ventilated. The total number of confirmed COVID-19 deaths among pregnant women stands at 128.

Vaccination rates among pregnant women are alarmingly low with the CDC reporting on August 11 that only 23 percent have received at least one dose and some 77 percent of expecting women remain un-vaccinated.

• First time Florida mother Kristen McMullen, 30, began developing symptoms 3 weeks prior to her due date. After a four-day hospital stay she was sent home with antibiotics but would return within 48 hours unable to breath. Upon admittance doctors performed an emergency C-section as her husband Keith was forced to wait at home. McMullen was able to hold her newborn daughter Summer Reign once before being moved to the ICU moments after giving birth. She then saw her daughter only through FaceTime before dying ten days later on August 6. She leaves behind her husband Keith and newborn daughter.
• Greyzie Miller, a young Jacksonville mother died August 15 after battling COVID-19 for weeks after giving birth to her baby girl. A fundraiser for her family said Greyzie was 31 weeks pregnant when doctors suggested an emergency cesarean section. Evie Aura Miller was born nine weeks prematurely and placed in the NICU. Greyzie was put into an induced coma with a ventilator which she was on for 17 days before her left lung and then right lung collapsed, and eventually her heart gave out, according to the GoFundMe page. She leaves behind her newborn baby girl, Evie, her two-year-old son, Silas, and her fiancé, David Miller who was able to take his newborn daughter home the day after he lost his wife.
• An anonymous newborn girl was left orphaned in Mississippi when both the baby’s parents died of COVID-19. WBRC Birmingham reported that the unnamed mother was 32-years-old and in good health. She was admitted to a Mississippi hospital with COVID-19 complications and died within one week. Her last act was giving birth to her baby girl. The young mother was one of two pregnant women who passed away from COVID-19 in Mississippi last week. The child is receiving emergency pediatric care at University of Alabama at Birmingham. The baby’s father also tragically died of the virus, leaving her a ward of the state.
• Pregnant Louisiana mother Lacresanna Williams, 21, of Shreveport, and her 42-year-old mother Victoria Williams died of COVID-19 just one day apart. Lacresanna tested positive for the virus during a routine checkup. The very next day, she died after delivering her baby via emergency C-section. Her aunt Cassandra Martin told TV station KSLA that the news sent Williams’ mother, Victoria Williams, into a panic. Victoria Williams did not tell her family that she had also contracted COVID-19. The 42-year-old woman died the following day. The infant is Lacresanna’s second child, in addition to a 1-year-old baby. Her grandmother, Earlie Williams, told KSLA: “She loses her life and leaves two precious babies here. And right behind her she loses her momma. She left five kids.”
• Paige Ruiz, a 32-year-old Fort Worth, Texas mother of two died on August 15. Ruiz was the coordinator of student learning outcomes and federal programs for the Joshua Independent School District. She was due to have her baby on July 30 and she tested positive for COVID-19 just days before, on July 24. Ruiz had to go to the emergency room with difficulty breathing. Doctors performed an emergency C-section on August 2. She was taken off intubation and began to recover—before having complications that took her life August 15. Ruiz’s mother Robin Zinsou noted to WFAA “I kept asking her, ‘Have you talked to the doctor about getting the vaccine?’ and she said, 'No, mom. I’m going to wait until after I have the baby.’” In the two weeks before Ruiz took a turn for the worst, Zinsou recalled that, “She texted me and said, ‘Mom, I wish I got vaccinated’...She was texting her friends and her sisters and said, you know anyone who isn’t vaccinated, beg them to get vaccinated.” She leaves behind her husband Daniel, two-year-old daughter Joanna and newborn Celeste.
• Young 24-year-old North Kansas City mother Braxten Goodwin died of COVID-19 two weeks after going into emergency labor. Goodwin’s family stated that she had planned to get vaccinated after giving birth. Goodwin leaves behind her 22-month-old daughter Nova and newborn son Levite. Her mother Tamika Horton told Fox4 Kansas City, “She wanted to go home. She said I want to go home and before she went to the ICU she was like, she was kind of scared she said. She was scared.” Goodwin never got to meet Levite. Soon after he was born she was put on a ventilator and died August 2. Horton said her daughter’s last words to her were calling for her daughter Nova.

In Palm Beach, Florida a group of concerned obstetric and gynecological physicians held a rare press briefing on Thursday at the Jupiter Medical Center to urge vaccinations of pregnant women as the hospital has seen anywhere from two to five pregnant patients being admitted to the hospital daily. The physicians, who represented nine practices in the area, reported pregnant or post-partum patients in the ICU over the last six to eight weeks.

Dr. Dudley Brown, Chairman of the Obstetrics and Gynecology Department at Jupiter Medical Center told the Palm Beach Post, “Given that, my colleagues and I decided we needed to speak to the public on a larger and bigger platform to inform the community about the dangers and about what we are seeing at the hospital affecting our pregnant and non-pregnant patients.”

Doctors in Minneapolis, Minnesota, are also reporting concerns of a rise in pregnant women becoming critically ill with COVID-19. Dr. Sarah Cross with University of Minnesota’s Masonic Children’s Hospital reported to CBS Minnesota that she has seen a marked increase in recent weeks with pregnancy creating a high-risk condition for COVID-19 patients.

Cross emphasized the dangerous situation pregnant mothers are in, noting that “There are a lot of exposures, and pregnant women don’t have the luxury, in general, usually, of being able to really isolate themselves.”

Dr. Ryan Loftin who specializes in obstetrics and gynecology, and maternal fetal medicine at Allina Health also expressed concern to CBS Minnesota over a number of break-through cases in vaccinated mothers but noted, “What we are seeing in our numbers is that about 86% of COVID cases that we’re seeing in pregnant women are women who are unvaccinated, which fits with what we’re seeing nationally.” Loftin warned about the danger COVID-19 poses to expectant mothers, “It can be as severe as it is in anyone else, requiring intubation, mechanical ventilation and even including deaths of pregnant women because of severe illness.”

Dr. Mark Turrentine, an obstetrics professor at Baylor College of Medicine, who is also the co-chair of a COVID-19 work group for the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) told NPR, “We have a highly infectious variant of COVID-19 virus in a group of individuals that the majority are not immunized. So yeah, we are seeing a lot of sick people...There is a threefold increase of intensive care unit admission,” a “two-and-half-fold increase risk of being put on mechanical ventilation or bypass support, and there’s even, you know, a little over a one-and-half-fold increased risk of death.”

“I have seen some pregnant women get really sick. I mean, I have seen some die,” said Turrentine. “And you know, you go into this business as an obstetrician gynecologist because patients are young and they are healthy. And most of the time you have great outcomes. This is a bad virus.”

In Los Angeles, County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer called on pregnant women to get vaccinated this past Monday after a recent 300 percent increase in weekly cases among pregnant women, noting that at least 27 cases of infection with COVID-19 were reported for the week that ended June 27, which jumped to 81 cases that were reported during the week ending July 25. Los Angeles County reported at least 11,264 confirmed COVID-19 cases among pregnant women as of August 10, twelve of whom have died.

Only as of last Wednesday, August 11 did the CDC update its guidelines to strongly recommend all pregnant women get vaccinated in light of rising numbers of unvaccinated pregnant women becoming seriously ill. The agency now warns that pregnant women who contract COVID-19 are more likely to have a severe infection, be hospitalized, and require a ventilator. The updated CDC guidance follows a recent analysis of data on 2,500 pregnant women who received at least one dose of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine prior to 20 weeks of pregnancy. It found no effect on miscarriages which remained within the normal range of 13 percent.

A week prior to the CDC announcement the two leading organizations representing physicians and scientists who specialize in obstetric care—ACOG and the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine recommended that all who are pregnant get vaccinated.

A number of families of the deceased report that the majority of the mothers who have passed were hesitant about potential dangers to their pregnancy since pregnant women were not included in vaccine trials. Additionally, families report that individual providers and national agencies have lacked uniformity in vaccine guidance prior to the recent ACOG and CDC recommendations.

Chicago Nabisco workers join strike in four US states

James Martin

Nabisco bakery workers in Chicago, Illinois, have joined a strike of plant workers across four states against brutal working conditions, low pay and a proposed two-tier health care system demanded by management even as the company rakes in record profits. They join workers on strike in Portland, Oregon; Richmond, Virginia; and Aurora, Colorado.

Nabisco workers on strike in Chicago (Credit: Jan Walker)

Over 1,000 workers are now currently on strike against Nabisco and its parent company, Mondelez International, Inc., part of a growing rebellion of workers in multiple industries. Over 200 workers in Portland were first to strike on August 10.

Workers at Frito-Lay and its parent company PepsiCo recently struck against low wages, “suicide” work shifts, and higher health care costs in Kansas and Indiana, only to have their struggles betrayed by the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers (BCTGM) and the Teamsters. The bakery workers on strike in Chicago also joined the strike of 800 mechanics in the Chicago metropolitan region.

Nabisco workers, who produce and bake Oreo cookies, Ritz crackers and other popular snacks, have been forced to work 12- to 16-hour shifts, sometimes seven days a week, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Mondelez is now proposing that workers accept an “Alternative Work Schedule,” widely hated and adopted in the auto industry, where workers take on up to 16-hour shifts without overtime pay. The company is also proposing a contract which creates a two-tier health care plan which costs more for all new hires.

While Nabisco workers toiled in gruesome conditions, Mondelez made record profits during the pandemic and made over $26.2 billion in revenue in 2020.

Worker Nathan Williams told Vice, “During the pandemic, we came in seven days a week. Some people worked every day—16 hours a day—for three months.” Nabisco demanded overtime hours and refused to hire more workers. Workers at Nabisco industrial bakery facilities in the United States and Mexico have faced a relentless assault on their living standards over the past decade, including cuts to pensions, mass layoffs and a constant threat of plant closures.

In 2016, Mondelez demanded that the BCTGM union, which covers the striking Nabisco workers, impose $46 million in concessions upon the Chicago workforce—equivalent to cuts of $23,000 per worker—or it would move production lines to Salinas, Mexico.

Mondelez also demanded an increase of 10 percent to the health care costs to replace the fully paid health care plan and replace the pensions with a 401(k) defined-contribution plan, offloading retirement costs onto workers. By 2018, Mondelez had eliminated the pensions of thousands of retirees and workers and moved them into 401(k) plans.

The BCTGM did nothing to oppose the assault on the Chicago workers, and Mondelez closed nine of 16 production lines at the Southside Chicago facility and laid off more than 400 out of nearly 1,000 workers. Workers making $26 an hour were escorted out of the plant by security guards during the layoffs which workers then described felt like a funeral procession. The company initially threatened to lay off nearly 600 workers. With the threat of layoffs, many higher paid workers at the plant retired early.

Michael, a former Chicago Nabisco worker, spoke out on social media in support of the striking workers. “I stand with you in your stand against corporate greed,” he said. “Please be aware that the current buildings you work in are old, and to reinvest in them might be the perfect excuse along with union negotiations that failed to set the ball in motion to let Mondelez close them!”

Michael noted that the company has kept the facility dilapidated for years to hang the threat of plant closure over the workers with the complicity of the union. He added, “The Chicago bakery went from 18 ovens to five back in 2017. This was their plan all along, and they are going to let your union leadership hang you all with it.”

Francesca, the daughter of a Chicago Nabisco worker, also said, “My dad told me stories of how back when he first started work at Nabisco in 1960 there were over 4,000 people. Now it’s just a few hundred.”

While Nabisco workers are seeking to fight for more, the BCTGM has sought to spread nationalist anti-Mexican poison, pitting American workers against their brothers and sisters south of the border. The most recent statement by the union states, “Nabisco has long profited from the loyalty and dedication of its U.S. workers and the exploitation of its employees in Mexico. By taking this action, Nabisco workers in all four locations are saying strong and clear: stop exporting our jobs to Mexico and end your demands for contract concessions.”

In fact, Nabsico workers in the US have more in common with their Mexican coworkers than the so-called “union” that claims to represent them.

Workers should put no trust in the BCTGM, which recently brought four consecutive sellout agreements to striking Frito-Lay workers in Kansas. Workers struck against poverty wages and had yet another sellout contract imposed on them after they were given meager strike pay and starved out.

At Nabisco, the BCTGM has worked to impose brutal working conditions on thousands of workers across the country and has overseen the layoff of hundreds of workers over the last decade. One laid off Chicago Nabisco worker, Tony, mockingly said that “[Mondelez] runs the union.” To which Henry, another former worker, respond, “What union?”