Sri Lankan big business reaps huge profits during pandemic

Saman Gunadasa

Sri Lanka’s nine top companies amassed 364 billion rupees ($US1.8 billion) in earnings between April and June, collectively pocketing 21 billion rupees profit in the first quarter of their financial year. This amount is only a fraction of the wealth secured by the super-rich and also seen in rising profits for the banks and other big companies so far this year.

In the first three months of 2021, listed companies on the Colombo Stock Market recorded a 189 percent growth increase compared to the same period last year, with the largest earnings made by companies involved in finance, exports, logistics, liquor, health and stock trading.

Companies allowed to keep operating during the COVID-19 pandemic were some of the highest profit makers, in stark contrast to the devastating economic impact on workers, small entrepreneurs, self-employed and the poor who suffered sharp losses of income and jobs. As of yesterday, COVID-19 has taken the lives of more than 8,500 people in Sri Lanka with total infections climbing to over 425,000.

Uda Rathalla Estate workers picketing last September against austerity measures (WSWS Media)

Among the top nine earners was Expolanka, a major logistics company with branches in 20 countries. It had a turnover of 95 billion rupees and 6.3 billion rupees net profit in the quarter.

In second place was LOLC, a leader in leasing, hire purchase, insurance and other financial activities. It earned 55 billion rupees with a 4 billion rupees net profit. Last year, LOLC pocketed 53 billion rupees after tax profit, the highest ever recorded by a Sri Lankan company. Its owner, Ishara Nanayakkara is one of the country’s top billionaires.

Hayleys and Vallibel One, a finance house owned by Dammika Perera, Sri Lanka’s richest individual, earned almost 90 billion rupees with combined net profit of 6.4 billion rupees in the April to June quarter.

The Hayleys conglomerate is involved in import-export industries related to rubber production and plantations with over 30,000 employees. Last year it generated 242 billion rupees in revenue and 14 billion rupees net profit, the highest ever during the company’s 143 years of existence.

John Keells, another top business firm, earned 38 billion rupees with 1.2 billion rupees net profit in the quarter. Tourism was the only component of the company impacted by the pandemic.

In addition to the top nine conglomerates, NDB, the country’s fourth largest private commercial bank, reported a net interest income of 5 billion rupees—a 15 percent increase from April to June compared to the same time last year. Sampath Bank reported a 34 percent rise in net interest income to 10.8 billion rupees in the same quarter.

Billionaire Dammika Perera was featured in the media last week, arrogantly declaring that Sri Lanka should not be locked down under any circumstances.

President Gotabhaya Rajapakse [Credit: AP Photo]

“A government cannot run the country in a complete lockdown, can it?” he said, adding that without “dollar income via exports,” it could not import petrol, medicine, milk powder and other necessities. Perera said nothing about the massive export profits being amassed by his companies and other businesses.

Over the past month Sri Lankan President Gotabhaya Rajapakse, speaking on behalf of big business, opposed any lockdown amid rising COVID-19 infections and deaths and urgent calls of independent health experts for stringent health measures.

Limited lockdown restrictions reluctantly imposed on August 20 by Rajapakse, still allow big business to keep operating as essential services. Health experts have voiced their concerns about effectiveness of the government’s restrictions.

Last year President Rajapakse ordered the Central Bank to provide massive concessionary funds—a total of 230 billion rupees—to big businesses. Other financial facilities and more tax concessions were also handed out. Most corporate taxes, for example, were reduced to 14 and 18 percent, the lowest rates in South Asia.

Last December, Rajapakse told a Ceylon Chamber of Commerce conference that investors should “take up the opportunities” provided by the coronavirus pandemic.

Early last year the government, backed by the trade unions, gave businesses the right to retrench workers arbitrarily, ignoring the country’s existing, but limited, labour laws. Under the banner of dealing with the pandemic, employers were also allowed to impose wage cuts, increase workloads and slash working conditions.

Announcing his limited lockdown measures on August 20, Rajapakse called on the population to be prepared to make “more sacrifices.” Government ministers are already campaigning for the salaries of about 1.4 million of state sector workers to be cut by 50 percent.

Last week, the cabinet of ministers announced that they would donate a month’s salary to the COVID-19 Health Care and Security Fund. The “donation,” which has been embraced by government and opposition Samagi Jana Balavegaya MPs, is a media stunt by the ministers who receive more in perks than their monthly salaries. It is a public relations exercise in preparation for the slashing of state employees’ salaries.

The government has said it would provide 2,000 rupees for low-income families to cover the two-week lockdown. This is not even enough for one meal a day during the lockdown.

While big business is thriving, working people are being impacted by increasing prices for essential items. Inflation rates have been climbing since January and, on a year-on-year basis, were 6.1 percent in June and 6.8 percent in July. Food inflation was 11 percent in July, with non-food items 3.2 percent.

The Rajapakse government, which confronts falling foreign reserves—it only has enough for two months of imports—has banned the import of many essential food items and other goods.

Sri Lanka, according to a recent global survey by the Institute of Development Studies , is fourth in a list of countries—after Syria, Nigeria and Ethiopia—where basic food is the least affordable.

Last week, Health minister, Keheliya Rambukwella issued a gazette announcing a maximum price for 60 essential medical drugs.

Ceylon Private Pharmacy Owners ’ Association president Chandika Gankanda, however, told the media that t he gazette was used to increase the price of many drugs by 9 percent. The drugs listed in the gazette include painkillers given for those infected with COVID-19 or suffering with diabetes and high blood pressure.

Mired in huge foreign debts and falling export income, the Rajapakse regime has turned to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and will receive a loan of about $800 million under the bank’s $650 billion program for member states.

Ajit Nivard Cabraal, the state minister for money and capital markets, jubilantly declared last week, that “the inflows we predicted are coming one by one,” adding that a $300 million loan was also being provided by China.

The IMF has insisted that any country receiving its loans must implement “restructuring programs” to overcome its economic difficulties. In other words, these loans will be paid for by even more ruthless austerity attacks on the working class and the poor by the Rajapakse government.

Brazil’s Bolsonaro seeks ouster of chief election official amid coup threats

Miguel Andrade

On August 20, Brazil’s fascistic President Jair Bolsonaro took another step in his preparations for an overthrow of the 2022 elections, in which he faces an ever-growing prospect of defeat. Bolsonaro sent the Brazilian Senate a petition to remove Supreme Court (STF) Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who has been chosen by the Electoral Court (TSE) to oversee next year’s general elections.

As widely anticipated, the petition was repealed by the president of the Senate days later, a fact entirely secondary to Bolsonaro’s plans.

Brazilian Army commandos. (Credit: Marcos Corrêa/PR)

Moraes is not only the next chief election official, but also the leading judge in an investigation targeting organizers of demonstrations calling for the army to shut down the STF as well as Congress. This probe recently moved a step closer to Bolsonaro himself.

Bolsonaro charged Moraes with curbing the fascist organizers’ “freedom of speech.” Among them is the head of the right-wing Brazilian Labor Party (PTB), who had recently organized the mass entry of the traditional fascist Integralista movement into the party’s ranks. On August 20 itself, the Federal Police (PF) carried a search-and-seizure operation against Bolsonaro supporters, who had called for an armed invasion of the STF and Congress on Brazilian independence day, September 7.

Bolsonaro’s charges against Moraes are aimed at turning the TSE into a target of violence by his most loyal supporters, including a number of active-duty military officers and fascistic mobs, in the run-up to the October 2022 elections.

He is studiously following the playbook of Donald Trump. His son, Eduardo, has been in constant consultation with Trump’s extreme right-wing allies, including Steve Bannon. The goal is to provoke enough violence and chaos to sway the armed forces into intervening in support of his allegations that the elections are being actively manipulated against him. Bolsonaro counts on the bloody history of the Brazilian armed forces, which barely four decades ago were at the helm of a 21-year blood-soaked dictatorship backed by US imperialism. This regime served, from the 1964 coup on, as an operational and political bridgehead for the imposition of even bloodier fascist-military dictatorships across the region.

At the heart of the coup plotting is an all-out attack on Brazil’s electronic voting system. Bolsonaro relentlessly claims the system is an “unverifiable” black box, and only a backup printer attached to every electronic ballot box could make it trustworthy. He also claims that the 2014 elections were rigged to guarantee the victory of the Workers Party (PT), a claim denied by the runner-up Aécio Neves and every significant political force, and that in 2018 he was robbed of votes in order to force a second round contest with the PT. His claims have been vehemently and repeatedly denied by every concerned party, including the TSE, the Federal Police and all congressional parties.

In order to press ahead with his plans to overturn the coming election, Bolsonaro sent to Congress a constitutional amendment mandating the use of “printed ballot” backups for 2022, which failed to pass the House threshold of 60 percent required to make constitutional changes. However, 40 percent of deputies cast ballots in favor of the proposal just hours after Bolsonaro ordered a column of tanks to roll past Congress and the STF in what was widely recognized as a threat.

The substantial support for the measure, despite every congressional party taking a position against it, was claimed by Bolsonaro as a moral victory. After the vote, he claimed that the House vote was illegitimate because deputies voting against his proposal did so out of fear of retribution by the TSE and the STF.

The timing of the action against Moraes, coming barely hours after the September 7 demonstration’s organizers were targeted by investigators, has been seen—correctly—by the fascists as a presidential endorsement.

According to political pundit Guilherme Amado of Metrópoles, Bolsonaro himself has shared on WhatsApp groups a fascistic call for demonstrations as preparation for a “counter-coup,” making a reference to the 1964 coup, which the military still describes as a “revolution” and a “reaction” to supposed plans to install a communist dictatorship.

In the calls, the actions of Congress, the TSE and the STF are described as illegal, and the case is made that demonstrations are needed to guarantee the armed forces “popular support” for a “reaction” against electoral fraud.

The call has gained support from a number of deputies of the so-called “bullet caucus” of retired Military Police (PM) officers, who are specifically calling for soldiers to attend. At least one PM commanding officer, Col. Aleksander Lacerda, head of seven battalions policing the Sorocaba metropolitan region in São Paulo with a total of 5,000 soldiers, has explicitly endorsed the calls for soldiers to attend the demonstration.

In extraordinary remarks a day after relieving Lacerda of his command, São Paulo Governor João Doria of the Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB), warned a meeting of 24 governors of the “danger of Bolsonaro loyalist infiltration” of Military Police battalions, stressing that his government’s intelligence branch was seeing the growth of movements proposing to “put governors against the wall.”

Doria’s talk of “infiltration” is an almost delusional understatement. Soldiers with Brazil’s 27 state-controlled Military Police corps are widely known to overwhelmingly support Bolsonaro. Created by the 1964-1985 dictatorship, the PMs have 500,000 soldiers in their ranks and their own military justice system, through which soldiers routinely escape punishment for the 6,000 yearly deaths at their hands. The PMs are headed by governors in peace time, but immediately transferred to the army chain of command in case of war or a state of siege. With their daily practice of murder and torture throughout Brazil, the PMs constitute the most fertile breeding ground for Bolsonaro’s fascistic agitation.

His hopeless appeals for governors to root out “infiltrators” exposes both the extraordinary crisis facing Brazilian capitalism and the fecklessness of the bourgeois opposition, led by the PT, which had Doria’s PSDB as a traditional right-wing opponent before the rise of Bolsonaro.

Bolsonaro is haunted by multiple corruption scandals, tying his family to money laundering, the Rio de Janeiro crime underworld and a multibillion-dollar kickback scheme within the Health Ministry in the purchase of COVID-19 vaccines.

At the same time, the 2022 elections will be held under the shadow of what the army has already termed a “social bomb” of rising unemployment, poverty, inflation and an uncontrolled pandemic that has inflicted, so far, 20 million cases and 577,000 official COVID-19 deaths. The containment of such a “social bomb,” for which the ruling class has no progressive solution, is the objective root of the authoritarian drift of the Brazilian political system as a whole, of which Bolsonaro’s ultimate rise and coup preparations are the most advanced expression.

Under such conditions, the bourgeois opposition, even facing the threat of being itself “put against the wall,” as stated by Doria, places its entire hopes at the hands of the military command. On Sunday, two days after the action against Moraes, the conservative Estado de S. Paulo ran as its main headline “Five former presidents consult with generals about coup threats.”

In the report, the newspaper’s military correspondent Marcelo Godoy recounted the frenzied palace intrigue behind endless declarations in the press that “there will be no coup” in 2022. In fact, such reassurances are belied by the fact that not a week goes by without a newspaper headline recounting a given governor, judge or reporter being informed by “unnamed” generals, once again, that democracy is safe.

The real meaning of these “democratic reassurances” can be grasped from the candid remarks of Senator Alessandro Vieira, who is a member of the Senate’s inquiry commission (CPI) on Bolsonaro’s handling of the pandemic, on August 17. Vieira told El País about Bolsonaro’s former chief-of-staff and now Defense Minister Gen. Walter Braga Netto: “[I]t is clear that if we are a serious country, we need him to testify.” That was not possible, he said, because “senators fear an armed reaction,” concluding “when you get to this point, maybe you don’t have a democracy anymore.”

As Vieira was interviewed by El País, Braga Netto was speaking to a joint session of the Senate’s Finance, Defense and Administration committees, where he denied that the military had imposed a dictatorship through the US-backed coup of 1964. He continued with a barely veiled threat against the senators, “[I]f we had had a dictatorship, many wouldn’t be here, executions” would have taken place. Before his presidency, Bolsonaro repeatedly claimed that the military should have “killed 30,000.”

Bolsonaro’s herd immunity policy was coordinated by senior military officers, with an active duty general at the head of the Health Ministry, for most of the pandemic. While divisions remain high over support for Bolsonaro and growing sections of the political establishment are turning against him, seeing his provocative policies as a liability for Brazilian capitalism, the free rein given to the likes of Braga Netto is a sharp warning of the dangers confronted by workers, whatever Bolsonaro’s immediate fate.

Lockdown continues amid New Zealand’s Delta outbreak

Tom Peters

Yesterday Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced that New Zealand’s strict “level 4” lockdown will continue nationwide until Wednesday, September 1. After that, the biggest city, Auckland and the Northland region will “likely” remain in level 4 for another two weeks, while restrictions in the rest of the country will be reduced to level 3.

The Labour Party-led government says it is seeking to eliminate community transmission of the highly-infectious Delta variant of COVID-19. On Friday there were 347 active cases, the vast majority in Auckland, except for 14 in Wellington. In addition, there are 37 positive cases among travelers recently returned from overseas. The outbreak has more than doubled in size in just a few days, from 148 known cases on Tuesday. Seventeen people are in hospital with the virus, one in intensive care.

When the country went into lockdown on August 18 only one community case had been identified. The outbreak is thought to have originated with a person who returned from Australia on August 7.

Under level 4, schools and almost all businesses are closed, including cafes, restaurants and other retail outlets except supermarkets, pharmacies and corner stores. At level 3, many restrictions will remain in force: schools and universities will be mostly shut, but exemptions will be made for children whose parents are unable to work from home. Cafes and restaurants will be reopened only for take-aways.

In an article for the Conversation on Thursday, scientists Rachelle Binny, Siouxsie Wiles, Shaun Hendy and Michael Plank estimated that “upwards of 200 people” had been infected before the lockdown in “several superspreading” events, including a church service on August 14. They said “it’s likely that at least Auckland will need several more weeks at alert level 4 to stamp out community transmission.” Hendy has estimated the outbreak could be as large as 1,000 cases.

The four scientists said the “elimination strategy,” squashing outbreaks by means of lockdowns, was the best option to deal with the virus, “simply because the alternatives are grim.” The US, UK, Brazil, India and many other countries are seeing a major resurgence of cases and deaths due to governments reopening schools and workplaces and asserting that the population must “live with” the virus so that businesses can avoid disruptions. These homicidal policies are being enforced by the corporatised trade unions.

Despite New Zealand’s relatively stringent measures, some workers remain at risk. Although the government says most of the new Delta cases since the lockdown have been due to transmission within households, some frontline workers have been infected, including nurses, at least one supermarket employee and food production workers. Stuff reported that a worker at a Tegel chicken factory in West Auckland has tested positive. As a precaution, 50 workers have been sent home and will be tested. Meat-processing factories are still operating, despite the industry being a major source of infections internationally.

New Zealand’s vaccination program is only now starting to ramp up, and just 25 percent of the population is fully inoculated, making the country highly vulnerable. Moreover, vaccines, while essential, are no panacea. Epidemiologist Michael Baker warned during the World Socialist Web Site ’s recent panel discussion on how to eradicate COVID-19: “Even if we had global vaccine access and high coverage, we would still have circulating virus. So, we need to combine vaccine with public health measures.”

Since the beginning of the pandemic last year, the New Zealand government’s main priority, like governments throughout the world, has been to protect corporate profits at the expense of the working class. Businesses that expect to experience a decline in revenue of 40 percent due to the level four lockdown can apply for government subsidies of $600 a week per full time employee.

The Spinoff economics commentator Bernard Hickey wrote that by September last year $13.8 billion in wage subsidies had been distributed to 900,000 businesses. While this included 240,000 sole traders and many small businesses, several large corporations received tens of millions from the scheme. Fletcher Building, which sacked 1,000 staff last year, received $67.7 million in public money. The construction giant posted a $305 million profit for the year ended June 2021.

The corporate handouts and the Reserve Bank’s quantitative easing program, which printed $53 billion to buy bonds from the commercial banks, helped to inflate asset values by $400 billion. House prices increased by nearly 30 percent in a single year. The government’s policies, Hickey said, “dramatically widened inequality and… sent tens of thousands more children into poverty and homelessness.”

The Labour government now claims it cannot afford to fix a crisis of understaffing, under-capacity and low pay in the country’s public hospitals, which are completely unprepared for an uncontrolled outbreak of COVID-19. Shortly before the latest outbreak, tens of thousands of nurses, and thousands of midwives held nationwide strikes to oppose the austerity measures.

The government’s elimination strategy for COVID-19 has overwhelming support. According to a poll of 629 people published by the Spinoff this week, 69 percent agreed with the strategy, only 10 percent opposed it and 21 percent were unsure.

Business representatives, however, have criticised the strategy. Canterbury Employers’ Chamber of Commerce chief executive Leeann Watson told the New Zealand Herald the extension of “level 4” until Wednesday for the South Island was “disappointing” and said “ongoing lockdowns cannot be part of our long-term future.”

Right-wing columnist Matthew Hooton lashed out at what he called a “handful” of “loons [who] argue that New Zealand should maintain the current elimination strategy whatever happens.” He hoped that the government would move away from this policy “in the new year once everyone has had a chance to be vaccinated.”

Speaking to Nine News on Tuesday, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison denounced New Zealand’s elimination strategy as “absurd.” He advocated reopening once vaccination rates have reached 70 to 80 percent and then treating coronavirus like the flu. The policy of “living with the virus” has already produced a worsening disaster in the state of New South Wales, where around 900 cases are being detected every day.

Prime Minister Ardern’s response to Morrison’s provocative comment was muted. She told Coast FM she was “not fussed” about it and that New Zealand did not intend to “lock down forever.” Finance Minister Grant Robertson diplomatically told Newstalk ZB, “All of the experts continue to tell us the best strategy that we can take at the moment is elimination.”

On Friday, Ardern stated that “our number one strategy right now is elimination and vaccination,” but again left the door open for a change of direction, stating that over the coming months the government would “consider” its strategy for 2022. The government has already indicated that it wants to loosen border quarantine requirements for some people entering the country from next year, to accommodate the demands of big business.

COVID-19 spreads rapidly among children in India

Athiyan Silva

The spread of the delta variant in India is sickening ever-larger numbers of adolescents and children who had been less affected in the previous wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Hundreds are being hospitalized with serious illness in cities across India.

Children attend online classes in a slum on the outskirts of Jammu, India on June 14, 2021. (AP Photo/Channi Anand)

In Bangalore, corona infections were confirmed in 543 children between the 1st and 10th of this month, according to the Karnataka Health Department. In the Union Territory of Pondicherry, 20 children were confirmed to have a COVID-19 infection. In Kanchipuram, in the state of Tamil Nadu, 33 children testing positive with COVID-19 infection have been admitted to hospital. Health officials in the state of Telangana said 37,332 children aged 0-19 were confirmed infected with the coronavirus between March and May this year.

Doctors are stressing the danger to children from the more virulent variant. Dr. Anjan Bhattacharya said: “The double mutant variant has immune escape phenomena. It masquerades as our own body system and then escapes our immunity protection. This is why more children are contracting COVID-19.” He pointed to a large rise in reported cases: “If COVID-19 affected 1 percent of children last year, it is about 1.2 percent now. But it is a huge increase in terms of numbers in India.”

Not only are more children contracting the virus, but the resulting illness is often more severe. Dr. Jaydeb Ray in Kolkata explained that before the emergence of the Delta variant, most COVID-19 cases were asymptomatic: “But now, we are seeing kids coming to hospitals with MIS-C (Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children). This time it is showing parallel to an active infection.”

Such diseases are now leading to severe illness and deaths in children across India. Eighteen children have died in the Indian state of Rajasthan of a rare inflammatory disease amid the second wave of COVID-19. Similarly, 155 children have been admitted in the Jaipur hospital. Four children have been admitted to a hospital in Maharashtra with shortness of breath and low blood pressure.

Dr. Thiren Gupta, an intensive care pediatrician at Kangaram Hospital in Delhi, has treated more than 75 patients between the ages of 4 and 15 for MIS-C. He estimates that there are more than 500 such cases in Delhi and its suburbs. Gupta told the press that 90 percent of the children treated at the hospital were suffering from COVID-19 without showing any symptoms. There were 30 such cases in Pune and 20 in Solapur in children between the ages of 10 and 15.

The danger of serious illness comes atop the other burdens the COVID-19 pandemic has imposed on India’s children. Many are orphaned. A study in The Lancet found that 119,000 children and adolescents in India lost their primary or secondary caregivers to COVID-19 in the first 14 months of the pandemic. Currently, this number has increased further, leaving 43,139 children orphaned. In Tamil Nadu alone, more than 3,600 children have lost a parent to COVID-19.

Chronic poverty in India further exacerbates these intolerable conditions. A 2016 National Family Health Survey (NFHS) report, prior to the pandemic, found that a staggering 38.4 percent of Indian children suffer from stunting due to malnutrition. This has been exacerbated during the pandemic, together with child labor, which affected 11 million children in India before the pandemic. The proportion of children aged 6 to 10 out of school rose by 1.5 percent in 2017 to 5.3 percent in 2020.

These reports expose as politically criminal the attempts by governments in India and around the world to force children back to school for in-person learning, so their parents can be kept at work generating profits for the banks and major corporations. Hundreds of children are dying or becoming seriously ill in Indonesia and in the United States, as well as in India. Yet capitalist governments are responding only by escalating their war on children.

Given the massive under-reporting of COVID-19 cases in India, any increase in the rate of serious illness could have devastating consequences for India’s 1.37 billion population.

The COVID-19 pandemic utterly swamped India’s poor health care infrastructure. Officially, the total number of COVID-19 cases in India is 32.6 million and the death toll is 437,400. However, a July 2021 study by the US-based Center for Global Development estimated that the true COVID-19 death toll in India is between 2.9 and 5.8 million. Of these deaths, half had come just in the period since March 2021 and the emergence of the Delta variant.

All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) director Randeep Gularia said 50 percent of Indian children had been exposed to COVID-19 and would test positive in antibody tests. Nonetheless, he said, they are still vulnerable to the more virulent Delta variant: “The general feeling is that adults are getting vaccinated, children are not being vaccinated and therefore if there is a new wave it will affect those who are more susceptible. Children will be more susceptible.”

These reports underscore the necessity, as the World Socialist Web Site has explained, of imposing strict social distancing and lockdown measures to halt the contagion, end the spread of COVID-19, and fight for the global eradication of the coronavirus.

In India, there currently is no vaccination program for children and adolescents. Although the vaccine is free only for those over 45 years of age, others must spend money out-of-pocket to get vaccinated. This is only possible for those who are rich.

In fact, only 10 percent of India’s population is fully vaccinated, and only 34 percent have had any vaccine doses at all. This means that broad layers of workers as well as school-aged youth are desperately vulnerable to contracting the disease.

Moreover, when the second wave of COVID-19 peaked in the state of Maharashtra in May and June, it was revealed that nearly 2,500 people in several places, including Mumbai, had been injected with ordinary salt water. This led to charges that officials, including doctors, had embezzled a total of $28,000. Similar fake vaccination scams have been reported elsewhere in India over the last two months.

Indian scientists are warning of a new catastrophe, particularly if the vaccination campaign is not accelerated. A study by Pandit Deendayal Upadhyay Energy University and Nirma University has found that India could see as many as 600,000 new COVID-19 infections a day. Other studies have projected a third wave that is expected to increase to 100,000 to 150,000 recorded infections per day by October with a peak of cases expected in November.

Despite warnings from leading epidemiologists, microbiologists and other scientists, several state governments, including the states of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, have decided to open all business premises, including schools and cinema, from early September. They are pursuing a ruthless policy of sacrificing human lives to protect the financial, commercial, and geopolitical interests of the ruling elites. This will lead to further spread of the pandemic and to millions of deaths.

Russia reports a daily record of 820 COVID deaths as schools are set to reopen

Clara Weiss

The official number of COVID-19 deaths in Russia on Thursday was 820, more than at any other point in the pandemic. While daily new infections are slowly declining, the country is still recording over 19,000 new cases a day, almost all of them driven by the highly contagious Delta variant.

A gets a shot of the one-dose Sputnik Light vaccine at a mobile vaccination station in St. Petersburg, Russia on August 11, 2021. (AP Photo/Elena Ignatyeva)

Cases have declined mostly in Moscow, long the center of the pandemic, where a spike in vaccination and more stringent public health measures at the beginning of the third wave helped curtail the spread.

The grim record comes as schools across the country are set to reopen on September 1, herding 17 million school children and thousands of teachers into what are largely dilapidated buildings that serve as vectors for the Delta variant. The Russian education minister Sergei Kravtsov announced that no social distancing measures or masks will be required on a federal level. There will also be no federal vaccine mandate for teachers. Regions have the authority to impose public health measures on there own and in some cases schools can issue their own mandates.

While some schools and regions are seeking to mandate vaccines to their staff, the trade unions, which fully support the reopening, are campaigning against any vaccine mandates. Many regions, including Moscow, have issued a requirement for at least 60 percent of the school staff to be vaccinated. The Russian vaccine, Sputnik V, is expected to be approved for children on September 15.

The criminal reopening of the schools in Russia mirrors reopenings across Europe, Latin America and the United States. It will inevitably lead to a renewed spike in cases and deaths, including among children who have suffered record rates of hospitalization and deaths from the Delta variant.

As has been the case throughout the pandemic, the Russian government is refusing to enforce even the most minimal public health measures, leaving it to regional jurisdictions to impose limited, if any, measures on an ad hoc basis. Major production facilities in the country have remained open for almost the entirety of the pandemic.

These policies have led, officially, to 179,000 deaths, but studies indicate that the real death toll may be higher by a factor of five. Dozens of patients have died because ventilators have gone up in flames and oxygen pipes have exploded in hospital buildings that run on decades-old equipment and have been systematically starved of funds. Almost 7 million people out of a population of 142 million have officially contracted the virus, no doubt an underestimate.

In a stark example of the open criminality of how businesses and the government handle the pandemic, the Russian airline Rossiya, a subsidiary of the state-owned Aeroflot, forced its flight attendants to report for work, even if they are sick, for the past month. This was under conditions where about a third of all flight attendants in Russia reported sick this summer, many of them because of COVID-19.

These criminal policies have had global implications. The recent Delta outbreak in China was triggered by a flight that came from Russia, which carried at least one infected passenger who infected the cleaning crew.

Russia is also about to hold parliamentary elections on September 19. Several parties, including the ruling United Russia party, have signed a memorandum according to which their candidates are not allowed to speak about COVID-19 or vaccinations, under the pretext that only medical experts could speak about these issues.

Vaccination rates in Russia remain extremely low, even though five Russian vaccines have now been approved. Only 29 percent of the population have received at least one jab, mostly of Sputnik V, and only 24.5 percent are fully vaccinated. This is well below the 60 percent vaccination rate that the government aimed to reach by the fall, much less than in countries like China, the US or Western Europe, and even below the worldwide average of 25.1 percent. Over half the population have indicated in polls that they do not intend to get vaccinated.

Vaccine hesitancy is driven by great popular distrust in the Russian government and state. Both are associated with the rule of the criminal oligarchy that has emerged from the Stalinist-led destruction of the Soviet Union in 1991 and has engaged in major assaults on the living standards of the working class and endless lies.

For decades, particularly since 1991, there have also been state-backed, systematic attacks on science and a promotion of religion, various forms of pseudo-medicine and irrationalism. At the beginning of the pandemic, much as in countries like the US or Brazil, Russian government officials routinely ridiculed the virus, comparing it to the flu, and crazed representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church who declared the pandemic a hoax were paraded on the media.

While there have been fewer studies of Sputnik-V than of other vaccines, all indicate a high efficiency of the drug. Several studies suggest that the vaccine was 91 to 97.6 percent effective in preventing severe illness and death in earlier variants of the virus. A new pre-print study, that has yet to be peer-reviewed, found that full vaccination with Sputnik-V is also very effective against severe disease resulting from the Delta variant.

The study analyzed the outcomes for almost 14,000 COVID-19 patients in St. Petersburg during the third wave of the pandemic, when over 90 percent of cases were Delta cases. According to the study, adjusting for age and sex, the vaccine’s effectiveness at preventing hospitalizations among those infected with COVID-19 was 81 percent. However, it was only 35 percent among those who had received just one jab of the vaccine 14 days prior. The Russian Health Ministry had previously indicated that Sputnik V is 83 percent effective against contracting the Delta variant.

Reports indicate that the WHO is planning to grant emergency use approval to Sputnik-V this fall. While it is not clear what has caused the delay in the granting of the authorization, according to Nature magazine, experts assume that concerns about possible side effects and the state of Russia’s manufacturing sites play a role. For reasons that remain unclear, the documentation submitted by the Russian side is still incomplete, about one year after the Kremlin itself authorized the use of the vaccine ahead of the completion of the third phase of the trial.

Russia also struggles with the production of the vaccine. Like the Astra-Zeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines, Sputnik V uses an engineered adenovirus (a family of viruses that cause only mild illness) as a mechanism for inserting the genetic code for the SARS-CoV2-spike protein into human cells. However, unlike the Astra-Zeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines, the two Sputnik-V jabs are based on two different adenoviruses to increase the vaccine’s efficacy. This means that two effectively different drugs have to be produced for one full vaccination, often in two different facilities.

After decades in which the Soviet industrial and scientific infrastructure was systematically destroyed, Russia had only few pharmaceutical plants when the pandemic began and desperately scrambled to turn Soviet-era auto plants into vaccine manufacturing sites, with limited success. There is also an acute shortage of highly trained workers in biotechnology.

As a result, Russia has fallen significantly behind the production of the 1.6 billion doses that is so far contracted. Sputnik-V has been approved in 69 countries and especially poorer countries in Africa, Latin America and Asia have bought the vaccine as an alternative to the Pfizer/Biontech and Moderna vaccines. However, according to a recent report by the Council of the Americas, by August 12, Russia had exported just under 20 million doses of Sputnik-V to Latin America, out of at least 95 million doses that had been ordered by Argentina, Bolivia, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Peru, and Venezuela.

UK government: 50,000 annual COVID-19 deaths are “acceptable”

Chris Marsden

Britain’s i newspaper has revealed that Prime Minister Boris Johnson has conducted “a cost-benefit analysis” to determine whether “saving lives” through further lockdowns can be justified based on the “effect of deaths on the UK economy.”

Two government advisors told the i that closed-door discussion had established an “acceptable level of Covid-19 deaths” at around 1,000 deaths a week.

Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson pauses during a coronavirus briefing in Downing Street, in London, Monday April 5, 2021. (Stefan Rousseau/Pool via AP)

According to one adviser, Johnson had privately accepted that there would be at least a further 30,000 deaths in the UK over the next year, and that he would “only consider imposing further [COVID-19 safety] restrictions if that figure looked like it could rise above 50,000.”

Johnson, who has the social conscience of a Heinrich Himmler, put the acceptable cost of saving the life of a COVID-19 patient at £30,000. However, this proposed upper limit for treating a patient was then combined with a calculation of “how much each life lost costs the UK economy.”

According to the two sources, “the analysis shows that the cost of keeping the annual death rate below 50,000 would outweigh the cost to the UK economy of allowing it to rise above this level.” This translates to “deaths from Covid of 137 a day, or just under 1,000 a week.”

Professor Graham Medley, chair of the Government’s pandemic modelling group Spi-m and member of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), told the i by way of justification, “Measures such as vaccinating children against meningitis or imposing speed limits on roads reduce death and disease, but also cost money and limit freedoms.”

The i ’s sources stressed that “it won’t be an immediate reaction” and that only a “sustained rate of death of around a 1,000 a week for two or three weeks” would “lead to discussion on restrictions being reimposed.” Not even a “discussion” on lockdowns will take place. The proposed trigger for such a possible reconsideration was meant solely to legitimise the ending of lockdown and the removal of all measures of mitigation on July 19. It was never intended to be implemented.

Sympathising with Johnson’s supposed dilemma, the i ’s source states, “Unfortunately, prime ministers have to weigh up the cost of saving lives to the impact on the economy. No one wants to talk about that’s how it works.”

But Johnson has previously made clear exactly “how it works.” His embittered former adviser Dominic Cummings revealed WhatsApp messages sent by Johnson to his advisers last October, declaring of COVID fatalities, “The median age is 82–81 for men 85 for women… There are max 3m [million] in this country aged over 80. It shows we don’t go for nationwide lockdown.”

Events have moved on since these criminal calculations were made. Based on data over the past seven days in the UK, deaths from COVID-19 have already reached just under 800 a week or 110 every day. For three of those days the death toll exceeded the 137 figure. By next week, the death toll will almost certainly exceed 1,000 over seven days, an annual equivalent exceeding 50,000.

A month from now, predictions of 50,000 deaths a year will look wildly optimistic.

Next week will see all primary and secondary schools reopen in England and Wales, a super-spreader event of massive proportions. Since schools reopened in Scotland from August 16, daily cases have risen from 1,567 to 6,835, well over 300 percent. In the past week alone, they have risen by 114 percent.

Yesterday, the modelling group of SAGE warned that ministers must plan for a huge rise in COVID-19 cases as schools return “by the end of September 2021.”

That is why the government’s response to the leaks to the i newspaper was to state, “There is no set number of acceptable deaths from Covid.” This was not to deny the 50,000 figure being cited, but to make clear that no number of deaths will prompt a change in the government’s murderous policy of letting the virus rip through the population.

The citing of costs versus benefits is merely an alternative version of Trump’s insistence that “the cure must not be worse than the disease.” What “cost benefit analysis” means in the discussion on the pandemic is that working people will pay with their lives and health to preserve capitalist profitability.

The policy of the ruling class in Britain and internationally remains that which was so bluntly stated by Johnson after being forced to agree to a second truncated lockdown late last year: “No more fucking lockdowns—let the bodies pile high in their thousands.”

Ending this catastrophic situation demands the independent political intervention of the working class.

The pandemic has claimed over 155,000 lives in Britain and officially over 4.5 million worldwide. The true figure is more than 10 million. None of this needed to happen. A properly conducted policy of lockdowns, involving the closure of schools and the maintenance of only socially necessary production, combined with the use of track and trace technology and scientifically approved personal protective equipment, could have successfully eliminated the virus before its spread worldwide and before the emergence of more deadly strains, especially with the development of vaccines.

Instead, apart from occasional and limited lockdowns, the virus was given almost free rein as the capitalist class prioritised private profit over public health.

The political allies of the banks and corporations stretched across the official political spectrum, with Johnson and Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, Donald Trump and Joe Biden, and their counterparts internationally all united in opposition to the fundamental interests of working people and their families.

On August 20, the World Socialist Web Site issued a call for workers in every country to mount a strategic, life and death struggle for the eradication of COVID-19. We not only called for the rejection of the “herd immunity” agenda advanced by Johnson and his ilk, but also of policies limited to “mitigation” seeking only to limit the pandemic’s impact through vaccination, masking, social distancing and similar measures.

The rapid escalation and global spread of the highly infectious Delta variant have confirmed that “herd immunity” cannot be realised and that mitigation alone only allows the virus to spread, mutate and claim millions more lives. The WSWS concluded, “Therefore, the only viable strategy is eradication, based on the policies advanced by the foremost epidemiologists, virologists and other scientists throughout the pandemic. Eradication entails the universal deployment of every weapon in the arsenal of measures to combat COVID-19, coordinated on a global scale, to stamp out the virus once and for all.”

Millions face loss of their homes in wake of US Supreme Court ruling overturning eviction moratorium

Chase Lawrence & Barry Grey

On Thursday night, the US Supreme Court overturned the national moratorium on evictions of renters put in place as a pandemic relief measure. The six-to-three ruling, with the right-wing bloc solidly aligned against the nominally liberal minority, upheld an emergency petition brought by realtors’ groups in Alabama and Georgia to terminate an extension of the eviction ban enacted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) early this month following the July 31 expiration of a prior ban.

People from a coalition of housing justice groups hold signs protesting evictions during a news conference outside the Statehouse, July 30, 2021, in Boston. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer)

The right-wing majority on the court had already signaled its intention to terminate the eviction ban, which, in any event, was slated to expire on October 3. Under conditions of an out-of-control pandemic, surging housing costs and consumer prices, and the expiration of federal unemployment benefits set for early September, the ruling by the unelected court marks a dramatic escalation of the class war policies being pursued by the corporate-financial oligarchy and all of its official institutions and parties.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that the number of adults living in households that are behind on their rent could exceed 11 million.

According to data from a Census Bureau survey, 6 percent of renters nationwide—more than 3.5 million people—say they are unable to pay their full rent due to the pandemic and are “likely” or “very likely” to face eviction. In several Southern and Midwestern states, including Missouri, North Carolina and Louisiana, almost one in five renters say they are worried about getting evicted.

The Wall Street Journal bluntly summed up the situation in an article headlined, “Renters Prepare for Eviction After Supreme Court Ruling.” It explained that landlords, with the exception of those in a handful of states and cities that have their own restrictions, can immediately go to court to obtain evictions for unpaid rent. In most courts, delayed eviction cases will now go forward. In others, already approved evictions will now be carried out by marshals and sheriffs.

The savagery of the ruling was underlined by its being carried out under an expedited “shadow docket” procedure that omits oral hearings, does not require signed opinions and, in general, curtails standards generally associated with due process.

The majority opinion, unsigned, declared that the CDC was overreaching its legal powers by ordering the eviction ban on public health grounds, citing the increased risk of COVID-19 infections and deaths resulting from a surge in homelessness. The ruling said the moratorium could not be maintained without congressional action.

The dissent, authored by Justice Stephen Breyer, denounced the use of the “shadow docket” procedure to decide such a socially consequential matter and cited the explosive spread of the pandemic with the proliferation of the Delta variant. He essentially argued that it was an inopportune time to terminate the eviction ban, writing: “The public interest strongly favors respecting the CDC’s judgment at this moment, when over 90 percent of counties are experiencing high transmission rates.”

The Biden White House, which had been prepared to accept the expiration of the eviction ban at the end of July and has made clear it will not seek to extend the federal unemployment benefit, signaled that it would not fight the court ruling. It and the Democratic Party are focused on forcing millions of unvaccinated children and hundreds of thousands of teachers into unsafe schools, even as infections and deaths hit new highs, rising most rapidly among school-age children.

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told reporters on Thursday that the administration would not seek to pass legislation to block evictions, and instead would seek to facilitate the distribution of $46.5 billion that had previously been appropriated to aid distressed renters and homeowners. The Treasury Department reported on Wednesday that only some $5.1 billion of this money had actually been disbursed by states and localities as of the end of July. Entire states, including New York, have not distributed a penny in renter relief funds.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi similarly said the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives would seek to expedite the flow of rental-aid funds and said nothing about reinstituting a halt to evictions.

Even were the entire amount allocated to be immediately disbursed, it would be a drop in the bucket compared to the depth of the housing crisis. Responding to the court ruling, President and CEO of the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) Diane Yentel said the result would be “millions of people losing their homes this fall and winter, just as the Delta variant ravages communities and lives.” She added that “evictions further burden overstretched hospital systems and make it much more difficult for the country to contain the virus. Evictions have been shown to increase the spread of, and potentially deaths from, COVID-19.”

According to an NLIHC report released in July, titled “Out of Reach 2021: The High Cost of Housing,” in “no state, metropolitan area, or county can a full-time minimum-wage worker afford a modest two-bedroom rental home, and these workers cannot afford modest one-bedroom apartments in 93 percent of US counties.” The report continues: “Over 7.5 million extremely low-income renters are severely housing cost-burdened, spending more than half of their incomes on housing.”

“More than 226,000 people in the US experienced homelessness on sidewalks or other unsheltered locations on a given night in 2020,” the report notes, “and another 354,000 experienced homelessness in emergency shelters, with limited ability to self-isolate. In addition, more than 2.7 million renters live in overcrowded housing conditions.”

Another NLIHC report issued in July states that many who have remained caught up on rent “may have done so by unsustainable means,” such as “using credits cards or loans, selling assets or drawing down savings, or borrowing from friends and family…” Of those who had fallen behind in rent, a majority reported delaying bills and cutting back on food, while more than a quarter had forgone medical care.

Moreover, in much of the country, evictions continued even before the ending of the moratorium, which was poorly enforced and frequently defied by right-wing judges. The Princeton University Eviction Lab reported over 6,500 evictions last week in the six states and 31 cities it tracks. Since March 2020, 480,000 eviction cases have been filed. Some cities are already up to or above pre-pandemic levels of evictions, including Las Vegas, Nevada and Gainesville, Florida.

John Jopling, director of housing law at the nonprofit Mississippi Center for Justice, told the Washington Post, “You hear a lot of people talk about this cliff that we’re headed for as far as evictions, but really, I think, it’s more of a rolling tide—and we’re already in the middle of it.

“These tenants, they’re going to wind up in cars, they’re going to wind up on top of relatives, which is not what they need to be doing especially now in intergenerational households with all the variants of COVID that are spreading out there. They’re going to wind up on top of elderly relatives because of that immediate removal.”

The social and economic interests that dictate government policy were underscored by the concurrence of the Supreme Court attack on hard-pressed working-class families and the speech delivered the following morning by Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell. Giving the keynote address at the annual Jackson Hole, Wyoming meeting of Fed officials and world central bankers, Powell reassured Wall Street that the flood of money into the financial markets by means of zero interest rates would continue indefinitely, and any tapering of quantitative easing purchases of financial assets—currently at the rate of $120 billion every month —would be carried out slowly, despite the highest rates of US inflation in 30 years.

The result was a further surge in stock prices, with the Nasdaq and S&P 500 indexes closing at new record highs.