Fifteen million more people have died during the COVID-19 pandemic compared to historical norms, according to a recent report by the Economist. This figure is more than three times the reported COVID-19 deaths, which stands at 4.6 million people.
“Many people who die while infected with SARS-CoV-2 are never tested for it, and do not enter the official totals,” the editors write. “Conversely, some people whose deaths have been attributed to COVID-19 had other ailments that might have ended their lives on a similar timeframe anyway. And what about people who died of preventable causes during the pandemic because hospitals full of COVID-19 patients could not treat them? If such cases count, they must be offset by deaths that did not occur but would have in normal times, such as those caused by flu or air pollution.”
A patient carried on a stretcher in Rome, Italy (Photo: Alessandra Tarantino / AP)
The capitalist nations were warned repeatedly by scores of national and international public health agencies that such an event was more than certain. Every means was within their capacity to employ all resources to have checked the spread of the infection in its initial phase and brought the pandemic to an abrupt end.
Instead, the financial oligarchy have squandered every opportunity to end the suffering of billions of people by further enriching themselves through massive transfers of wealth only to force workers back to workplaces. This policy has given free rein to the virus to not only spread into every corner of the planet, but to constantly mutate into more virulent forms. It has been the policy of herd immunity that has culled such a massive number of people under the false auspices of “the cure can’t be worse than the disease.” In fact, as the Economist report indicates, the disease has taken a horrific toll on the international working class, orphaning and impoverishing untold millions.
As the Economist report states, the wide range in figures stems from the complex nature of ascertaining data from national and subnational levels. Delays in reporting deaths, specifically confirming COVID-19 and COVID-related deaths and attributing the cause of death, make the statistics imprecise but offer an appropriate ball-park figure. Among the globe’s 156 countries with one million or more people, the Economist only managed to obtain data on total mortality from 84. Among these, some have only reported these figures once to their national registries.
Table 1 - COVID-19 deaths vs Excess deaths by global region. Data was sourced from the report in the Economist.
As the table above indicates, the estimate of excess deaths in regions like Asia and Africa are 700 to 800 percent over official COVID-19 deaths. This stems from the implementation of herd immunity policies while lacking the resources to care for the infected. Additionally, lack of reliable reporting of COVID-19 cases and delays or the omission of tracking of those that have died has led to this stark disparity in figures.
The impact of the pandemic on India has been, by far, most calamitous. The surge of the Delta variant in the spring across the country accounts for a significant number of excess global deaths over the last five months. Although there had been only 171,000 COVID-19 deaths reported in mid-April, the excess deaths at the time were ten times higher, at 1.6 million. Since then, even though only 270,000 additional COVID-19 deaths have been reported, the excess deaths have climbed 2.7 million, reaching 4.3 million.
Additionally, countries like Indonesia had very deadly forays by the virus, seeing the reported COVID-19 death toll surge as health care systems became inundated in a matter of days. With supposedly 135,500 COVID-19 deaths, the excess deaths stand at 500 percent higher, with 800,000 estimated deaths.
South Africa has been pummeled by repeated waves of infections. After having faced the Beta variant of the coronavirus, they are now dealing with another strain designated as C.1.2, which is demonstrating an unusually high number of mutations and mutation rate. Though the officially-reported number of COVID-19 deaths is over 80,000, there have been close to a quarter-million excess deaths, a figure three times higher. However, the excess deaths compared to COVID-19 deaths across many nations in Africa indicate a severe undercounting. Excess deaths in Nigeria are 6,400 percent higher. In Ethiopia, it is 3,500 percent. Egypt’s is 1,400 percent, and in the Congo, a little more than 1,000 COVID deaths have been reported. However, the excess deaths are above 130,000, or more than 12,000 percent. Despite reports of Africa being spared during the pandemic, this critical analysis suggests otherwise.
Estimated economic cost of COVID-19 Crisis. Source JAMA.
Even in regions like Europe and the US with more robust reporting systems and detailed documentation of death certificates, because of the social crisis and ensuing chaos created with overburdened health systems during repeated waves of infection, excess death estimates are far above official COVID-19 deaths reported.
By the end of July, excess deaths in the United States had plummeted even below their historical norms, and cases of COVID-19 and deaths had approached lows not seen since March 2020, when the pandemic first surged across the country.
But as the US state and federal governments implemented a bipartisan policy of reopening schools, COVID-19 cases have rapidly climbed, with COVID-19 deaths having most recently exceeded the seven-day average of over 1,500 per day. Excess deaths, too, have catapulted, reaching 3,000 per day. That means that excess deaths are now twice those of the official COVID-19 death tolls. In all, the cumulative COVID-19 deaths, according to their tracker, currently have reached close to 650,000, and excess deaths are 820,000, or 30 percent higher.
It is staggering to conceive that when in July the country could have heeded the warnings made by epidemiologists about the deadliness of the Delta variant and imposed a comprehensive elimination strategy to prevent any further COVID-19 related illnesses, instead, in one short month it is facing, perhaps, its worst ordeal with the virus.
Daily global estimated excess deaths and official COVID-19 deaths. Source: The Economist
In summing up their analysis, the Economist report states, “Measured by excess deaths as a share of the population, many of the world’s hardest-hit countries are in Latin America. Although Russia’s official death tally suggests that it has protected its citizens tolerably well, its numbers on total mortality imply that it has in fact been hit quite hard by COVID-19. Similarly, we estimate that India’s death toll is actually in the millions rather than the hundreds of thousands. At the other end of the table, a handful of countries have actually had fewer people die during the pandemic than in previous years.”
Even as the pandemic surges to new heights, capitalist governments have no intention to raise a single finger to bring this pandemic to an end. The present course they have set the world on will also see new and more deadly strains of the coronavirus emerge that will perpetuate the pandemic, leading to untold millions more deaths. Avoiding this catastrophe requires a political intervention by the working class, armed with the demand for the complete and total eradication of COVID-19.
Last week’s humiliating departure of the remaining western troops from Kabul’s “Hamid Karzai International Airport” brought an ignominious end to the two-decade-long American imperialist conquest and occupation of Afghanistan. The US and its NATO allies spent well over $2 trillion on propping up Washington’s puppet regime in Kabul, yet once deprived of Pentagon combat support it collapsed like a house of cards before the Taliban advance. This was because the Afghan masses identified it with all the venality and brutality of the neocolonial subjugation of their country—torture and dragnet arrests; government of, by, and for a corrupt elite; the wanton killing of civilians in drone and other air strikes.
Bitter recriminations have erupted in the US political and military-security establishment over “who lost Afghanistan.” In Berlin and Paris, the US defeat in Afghanistan is being marshalled as a fresh argument for why Europe’s imperialist powers must expand their military might and gain the means to act independently of and, if need be, in opposition to Washington.
However, outside Washington and Wall Street, the collapse of the Kabul regime has arguably dealt no imperialist ruling elite a bigger blow than Canada’s.
Canadian soldiers fire an M777 155mm Howitzer field artillery gun (Image Credit: Wikipedia/Spc. Keith D. Henning Public Domain
Given Canadian imperialism’s dependence on the eight-decade old, Canada-US military-strategic alliance to pursue its own global interests and ambitions, any serious geostrategic, military or economic reversal for Washington would roil it. But if America’s Afghan debacle has delivered so smarting a blow to its junior partner to the north, it is because the Canadian ruling class—with the support of the entire political establishment, whether avowedly “left” or “right,” federalist or Quebec sovereignist—was itself heavily invested in the Afghan war.
Over the course of two decades, Canadian imperialism expended vast amounts of “blood and treasure” in waging war in Afghanistan and sustaining the neo-colonial Kabul regime.
The Afghan war was the largest Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) military deployment since the Korean War, and ultimately became its biggest and longest since World War Two. Some 40,000 Canadian troops served in Afghanistan, 158 CAF personnel were killed, and more than 100 subsequently committed suicide. Among the foreign occupiers, only the United States and Britain lost more troops in the Afghan war than Canada. Government estimates place the total cost of the 12-year Canadian military intervention in Afghanistan, which began in 2001 and concluded only in 2014, at more than $18 billion. Ottawa provided the Kabul regime a further $3.6 billion in “international assistance” during the two-decade US occupation, with Afghanistan remaining the largest or one of the largest recipients of Canadian aid in every year since 2014.
Reviving militarism and putting paid to the myth of Canada’s “peacekeeping” vocation
US imperialism seized on the 9/11 terrorist attacks as a pretext to launch a war in Afghanistan for which plans were already far advanced. Its goal was to stake claim to the immense oil and gas reserves of Central Asia, which prior to the dissolution of the Soviet Union had been off-limits to the US oil giants, and to establish new military bases from which to project US power in Asia, above all against Iran, China and Russia.
In joining and assuming a major role in the Afghan war Canada’s ruling elite had two aims.
First, it wanted to demonstrate to Washington that Ottawa remained a reliable partner under conditions where American imperialism was unleashing unprecedented levels of military violence around the world in a desperate bid to offset the erosion of its economic predominance. Fears within the Canadian ruling class that China and Mexico were rapidly diminishing Canada’s hitherto unchallenged role as America’s foremost economic partner were compounded by the actions Washington took after 9/11 to “thicken” the Canada-US border, thereby threatening the enhanced economic ties that had developed under the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement.
Canadian big business and its political representatives also seized on the Afghan war as a means to adopt and overcome popular opposition to a more aggressive and militarist foreign policy. Since the 1960s, successive Canadian governments had cast Ottawa as a peaceful force on the world stage, focused on multilateral diplomacy and its “special vocation” for “peacekeeping.” This was always a fraud. Canada was a premier member of NATO and NORAD, a frontline state in the preparation for nuclear war with the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War, and readily joined the US-led wars against Iraq and Yugoslavia in 1991 and 1999. The UN “peacekeeping” missions the Canadian Armed Forces led or staffed were all sanctioned by Washington in furtherance of imperialist interests.
But by the early 2000s, with the US intent on establishing a “new world order” and tensions deepening between the major powers, the “pacific” claims that the Canadian ruling elite used to cloak its predatory interests and ambitions came to be seen as a hindrance. As John Manley, then the Foreign Minister in the Chrétien Liberal government and now the chairman of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, remarked in 2001 at the outset of the CAF’s assault on Afghanistan, “If you want to play a role in the world, there’s a cost to doing that.” General Rick Hillier, who commanded NATO forces in Afghanistan in 2004 then served as Canada’s Chief of Defence Staff for three years, was blunter still. “We’re not the public service of Canada,” he declared. “We are the Canadian Forces, and our job is to be able to kill people.”
And kill people they did. Canadian Armed Forces personnel participated in the fall 2001 invasion of Afghanistan; fought alongside US forces in southern Afghanistan in early 2002; helped guard Kabul for several years; then as Taliban resistance hardened, fueled by popular anger over the occupation forces’ slaughtering of thousands of civilians in air raids and the malevolent character of the US-installed neo-colonial regime, assumed a major role in fighting the US-NATO war.
In 2005, the Canadian intervention escalated dramatically, when Liberal Prime Minister Paul Martin agreed to double the troop deployment to Afghanistan to 1,200 and that the CAF would assume command of the counter-insurgency war in Kandahar province, a centre of Taliban resistance. This was part of a quid pro quo with Washington that freed up more US troops to fight in Iraq and was meant to make amends for Chretien’s eleventh-hour decision to not join the 2003 invasion of Iraq—although, as George W. Bush’s Canadian emissary, Paul Cellucci, would subsequently admit, Canada would do far more militarily to support the US war in Iraq than most members of the “coalition of the willing.”
The CAF’s Kandahar campaign featured house to house raids, and the capture and detention of “suspected militants.” In reality, Canadian troops swept up anybody they came across and brutalized them. In May 2006, the newly elected, Stephen Harper-led Conservative government extended the Kandahar combat operation to 2009. In early 2008, it prolonged it again through 2011, and would continue to deploy hundreds of troops to Afghanistan to train Afghan army and national police forces till 2014.
While Canadian forces engaged in bloody combat and perpetrated war crimes in Afghanistan, the political establishment used the war as the backdrop to promote militarism and reaction, issuing declarations of bloodlust and whipping up of Islamophobia in the name of the “war on terror.” Meanwhile, the Toronto Star’s Rosie DiManno, Christie Blatchford of the National Post, and a host of other “embedded journalists” churned out reports celebrating the “valour” and “self –sacrifice” of the CAF. This thuggish imperialist propaganda was aimed at acclimatizing the population to war and, above all, at intimidating the war’s opponents into silence.
In 2007 at a ceremony commemorating the World War I Battle of Vimy Ridge, Harper declared, “Canadians did not go to war then, nor will we ever, to conquer or to enslave.” Canadian soldiers were simultaneously proving him a liar, delivering captives to be tortured by Afghan security forces and committing other crimes which Harper would later stop at nothing to conceal.
As its role in the Afghan war expanded, so did Canadian imperialism’s ambitions, its appetites whetted by the possibility that it could gain access to Afghanistan’s abundant resources for Canadian energy and mining companies. Canada placed more than 15 “advisors” in various offices of the Kabul government, including the office of President Karzai. In an action that attested to the military’s growing reach and power, this “Strategic Advisory Team” (SAT) was established by the CAF, not the civilian federal government. Bragging about the influence they had, Rob Ferguson, one of the SAT’s members, asserted at the time, “No other country is as strategically placed as Canada with respect to influencing Afghanistan’s development.” These “advisors” reported directly to Ottawa, directing Afghan government policy in its dealings with other states, the World Bank and aid agencies.
Canada’s Afghan war crimes and the crisis of Canadian democracy
The imperialist subjugation of Afghanistan entailed horrific, criminal violence. Crimes had to be covered up with lies. For these lies to stand unchallenged, basic bourgeois democratic norms had to be subverted.
In 2009, Richard Colvin, a Canadian diplomat formerly posted to Afghanistan, revealed that from at least 2006 Canadian troops had handed over hundreds of Afghans to the puppet state security services, the NDS, or to American forces, who subjected them to torture “as standard operating procedure.” This included rape, electric shock, beatings and sleep deprivation.
The extent of these crimes remains shrouded in secrecy to this day, thanks to the sabotaging of their investigation by the Harper Conservative government, on the one hand, and the fecklessness of the parliamentary opposition on the other. Harper prorogued parliament for the second time in a year in December 2009 for the explicit purpose of preventing information discovered by Colvin from reaching the public. When the government was forced to release documents pertaining to the CAF’s mistreatment of Afghan detainees, in response to the Speaker’s ruling that it had violated parliament’s core constitutional rights, it conducted a massive document dump and otherwise took steps to subvert a serious investigation.
The Tories’ brazen cover-up was facilitated by the connivance of the opposition parties, who agreed to farm the issue out to a specially vetted committee with only limited access to the documents and whose members were legally barred from say anything about their contents without the consent of the government, senior bureaucrats and the military.
The reality is that none of the parliamentary parties wanted the truth about Canadian war crimes to see the light of day. The Liberal Party, having launched the Afghan bloodbath, continued to support the brutal occupation throughout. The Quebec sovereignist Bloc Quebecois was also a full-throated supporter of the Afghan war, as it has been of all Canadian imperialism’s foreign interventions since its founding in 1991, and joined with Harper and his Conservatives in exploiting it to promote Islamophobia.
The trade union-backed NDP, which voted in favour of the war but uttered rhetorical criticisms of the conflict from time to time, showed where its loyalties really lay in the fall of 2008, when it agreed to serve as junior partners in a Liberal-led coalition government committed to waging war in Afghanistan through 2011. The coalition was ultimately aborted because Harper, supported by the most powerful sections of Canadian capital, staged a constitutional coup, shutting down parliament, via prorogation, to prevent the opposition parties from exercising their right to bring down the government.
On August 27, NDP leader Jagmeet Singh issued a statement lamenting the “heart-breaking loss of life” and calling on the Trudeau government to work with its “allies” in “support of peace, women, and security in Afghanistan.” Yet the NDP, like the Canadian imperialist bourgeoisie it serves, has a highly selective concern for “women’s rights” and “peace.” It was, after all, this very same NDP that voted unanimously in 2011 to back NATO’s savage air bombardment of Libya, an operation that claimed tens of thousands of civilian lives. The top Canadian military commander of that mission frankly acknowledged that Canadian fighter jets functioned as “al-Qaida’s air force.”
This savage record of Canadian imperialism is a taboo subject in the current federal election campaign. To discuss Canada’s real role in the wars of the past quarter century would expose the responsibility it shares with the US and its European NATO allies for the destruction of entire societies and promotion of Islamist forces that have produced disaster for the peoples of Central Asia and the Middle East. Even the Taliban, which is now pilloried by the entire Canadian political establishment as beyond the pale, emerged out of American imperialism’s criminal use of the Afghan people in the 1980s as cannon fodder in its drive against the Soviet Union—operations which entailed mobilizing and arming Islamist forces, al-Qaida included, and which Ottawa fully endorsed.
The determination of all the establishment parties and the corporate media to cover up Canada’s war crimes in Afghanistan, and its decades-long record of imperialist savagery and criminality is not just a matter of burying past crimes. It is part of the preparation for new ones.
Leading strategists for Canadian imperialism are already penning op-eds and policy papers arguing that the “lesson” of Afghanistan is that Canada must become more active and aggressive on the world stage. Bemoaning the US retreat from Afghanistan, Hugh Segal, former chief of staff to Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, argued in an August 24 Globe and Mail column that Canada must seek to lessen the impact of American “caprice” by “exapand(ing) the size of our military” and “combat deterrence” against “potentially hostile powers such as Russia, China, Iran or North Korea.”
Canada’s ruling elite is intent on maintaining the fiction that the Afghan intervention was motivated by a fight for “democracy” and the protection of “women and girls” because these threadbare arguments will be required to promote further imperialist aggression in the not-too-distant future. In this regard, one only needs to point to the incessant anti-China propaganda campaign in the Canadian media and political establishment, which portrays Beijing as a threat to the “liberal world order” and serial violator of “human rights” and “freedom of speech.” Irrespective of which party or coalition of parties holds power after the September 20 election, Ottawa is committed to lining up squarely behind the Biden administration’s bipartisan diplomatic, economic, and military-strategic offensive against Beijing, an offensive whose logical culmination is a catastrophic global conflagration.
Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga announced Friday that he will not run for re-election as president of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), meaning his term as premier will come to an end when a new party leader is chosen on September 29. The Suga government’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic by defending the interests of big business has generated widespread anger in Japan, reflected in its approval rating hovering around 30 percent.
While announcing his decision, Suga claimed he would put his energies into responding to the pandemic, saying, “The campaign for the LDP presidential election officially kicks off on the 17th, but I realized it would take up enormous energy working on the coronavirus measures and campaigning—it’s impossible to do both.”
Suga’s term comes to an end a year after he was selected as LDP president last September, succeeding Shinzo Abe, who stepped down as prime minister citing health reasons. His tenure in office was marked by a continuation of the right-wing policies of his predecessor, which includes the growing war drive aimed at Beijing and provocatively developing relations with Taiwan alongside the United States. A general election must be held by November 28, meaning whoever takes over for Suga may be in office for barely two months.
Yoshihide Suga (Source: Wikipedia)
A number of prominent LDP figures have announced their intention to run for party leader, including former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida, current Minister for Administrative Reform and Regulatory Reform Taro Kono, who has handled Japan’s vaccination program, and former Minister of Internal Affairs Sanae Takaichi. Former Prime Minister Abe, who remains influential in the LDP, will reportedly back Takaichi. Former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba is considered another potential rival.
Suga’s unpopularity stems from his government’s disastrous handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, which included hosting the Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games in Tokyo. Despite widespread opposition to holding the events and warnings from medical experts, Suga’s Cabinet pushed forward with the Games in order to protect the profits of big businesses that are connected to the Olympics. The International Olympic Committee generates nearly 75 percent of its profits from selling broadcasting rights.
As of Saturday, the seven-day moving average for daily cases in Japan officially stood at 18,481 while there have been well over 1.5 million total cases. More than 16,300 people have died including 82 on Thursday, the highest since June. This is, however, a drastic undercounting of the real situation. The testing program remains slow and inefficient, with health experts warning that this and a high positivity rate of 20 percent indicate that the true number of positive cases is much greater than the government’s numbers indicate.
As a result, Japan’s hospitals have been overwhelmed, with the government forcing people with so-called mild cases of COVID-19 to self-quarantine at home, rather than seek medical help. People in critical condition are being driven around for hours in ambulances as they seek a hospital that will admit and treat them.
The Asahi Shimbun reported that between August 16 and 22, there were 250 patients in Tokyo forced to wait more than three hours in ambulances, or 30 percent of the total number of people seeking medical assistance. However, an additional 1,160 people were told to go home and self-isolate or the patients simply gave up looking for a hospital.
All of this has had deadly consequences. In a story that has generated widespread anger in Japan, a pregnant woman in her 30s from Kashiwa City, Chiba Prefecture and infected with COVID-19 was forced to give birth prematurely at home on August 17 while self-isolating. She had been unable to find a hospital that would admit her. The baby did not survive.
Young people are also being affected. A man in his 20s with no underlying health condition was found dead while forced to self-isolate at home in Chiba Prefecture in mid-August. He tested positive with a fever of 40 degrees C (104 degrees F). The medical facility explained that because the duration between his diagnosis and his death was so short, they did not have the time to make initial contact with him. This was the second case of a COVID-19 patient in their 20s dying in Chiba prefecture.
With increasing reports of COVID-19 patients dying at home, the main opposition party in the National Diet, the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan (CDP), requested the government release information on the total number of deaths among those self-isolating. The Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare responded by saying, “There are many cases that we do not have a grasp on, so we do not have a comprehensive grasp of the situation.”
However, there is no genuine opposition to the government’s policies from the CDP, or any other party in the Diet. With an eye towards the upcoming general election, Yukio Edano, leader of the CDP, criticized the Suga government at the beginning of August, saying, “If the current administration continues to be in charge of crisis management, people’s lives can’t be protected. We, the largest opposition party, can only replace it.” Edano did not offer any concrete solutions to the pandemic.
A number of CDP politicians told the Asahi Shimbun after Suga’s announcement he would step down that they preferred the prime minister to stay in office. “If the (upcoming general) election were being held with Suga at the helm, we would have said, ‘Thank you very much,’” according to a high-ranking CDP official. “But now that there will be a change in prime minister, it becomes less clear if voters will still be clamouring for the opposition or whether they will simply welcome a ‘quasi-change in government.’”
In other words, the CDP’s opposition to Suga and the LDP is not based on a desire to stop the pandemic, but merely to score political points at the expense of people’s lives. If elected to power, the CDP will follow in the footsteps of its predecessors in the Democratic Party of Japan when it held power from 2009 to 2012; pledges will not be honoured as the party bends over backwards to meet the demands of big business.
In the aftermath of the Tokyo Summer Olympics, a predictable COVID-19 disaster continues to unfold in Japan, demonstrating the Japanese government’s complete indifference to containing the virus. As of August 30, 2,075 COVID-19 patients nationwide are in critical condition. The number of patients on respirators nationwide exceeded 900, far exceeding the numbers in the third and fourth wave of infection. More than 118,000 people are self-isolating at home.
In Tokyo alone, 4,351 people are currently hospitalized with COVID-19, 267 of them critically ill. Some 17,603 people self-isolate at home, 2,126 in hotels, and 6,254 people are wait-listed to be admitted into a hospital. Even with these horrific numbers, experts warn that the official number of confirmed cases is significantly underestimated due to the slow and inefficient testing system, citing a high positivity rate of over 20 percent. They warned at the Tokyo COVID-19 Monitoring Committee Meeting on August 20 that “infection will rampage through the nation to a disastrous level. This is an emergency.”
This disaster in Japan is a direct result of a series of decisions made by the government of Yoshihide Suga and his predecessor Shinzo Abe, whose sole objective has been to maximize profit for the ruling class, not to save lives. They proceeded to hold the Tokyo Olympics Games, ignoring the countless warnings from scientists, criticism from the medical workers, and mass opposition from people all over the world. Thousands of workers and youth protested to stop the tidal wave of infections and death pummeling the hospitals. During the Games, Tokyo recorded its highest number of daily cases, at over 5,000.
People walk by posters to promote the Olympic Games planned to start in the summer of 2021, in Tokyo, Wednesday, June 16, 2021. (AP Photo/Koji Sasahara)
Despite the state of emergency that persisted throughout the Olympic Games, the Suga administration has criminally proceeded to hold the Paralympics Games as well and has invited more than 130,000 elementary school students as spectators into the stadiums in what can only be described as an effort mirroring the Swedish herd immunity model to purposefully infect masses of children.
With the surge in cases and the sharp increase in serious cases from the spread of the Delta variant, the healthcare system in Japan has been in a deep crisis for months. There is a serious shortage of all resources, beds, staff and respirators. The bed occupancy rates for critically ill patients and ICU beds are 97 percent in Tokyo, 91 percent in Kanagawa, 82 percent in Chiba, 69 percent in Saitama, and 89 percent in Okinawa. On August 27, one of the major hospitals accepting COVID-19 patients in Osaka declared bankruptcy.
The crisis in the hospitals is catastrophic. Between August 16 and August 22, 250 patients spent more than three hours in the ambulance before reaching a hospital that would accept them in Tokyo. This is more than 30 percent of all patients taken by the ambulance. There were 121 instances in which patients were required to wait longer than five hours.
Additionally, 1,160 instances occurred in which the ambulance did not transport the patient to a hospital at all, meaning ambulances and first responders are being asked to make life-and-death decisions. These cases include cases where the health center decided the patient should self-quarantine, as well as those in which patients gave up looking for a hospital and requested to be taken home. A tragic case was reported where a woman in her twenties was rushed to the hospital in Tokyo after her blood oxygen level fell below the critical condition threshold. She waited hours in an ambulance while the staff looked for a hospital willing to accept her. Devastated by the situation, she told the staff, “I have no choice; I am going to give up,” and returned home despite her worsening condition.
With the critical shortage of hospital beds, an increasing number of people are being forced to remain at home and are denied medical care. Currently, over 118,000 people nationwide are self-isolating at home. Health centers are stretched to their limit and are often unable to monitor the self-isolating patients.
Self-isolating COVID-19 patients dying alone at home have become a frequent story in the media. On August 30, a self-isolating patient in her sixties in Chiba Prefecture was found dead approximately three days after her death. The health center classified her as low priority because she was diagnosed as having a mild condition and lived with her husband. However, her husband was hospitalized with a critical injury and was not present with her. His speech was impaired, and he could not be identified by the hospital. The health center was unable to contact the woman about her husband and thus visited her home, where they found her dead.
According to NHK, a man in his twenties was also discovered dead in his home in the Chiba prefecture while self-isolating. He tested positive and had a fever of 104 degrees. However, the doctor advised him to self-isolate at home. The health center explained that, due to the short time period between his diagnosis and death, they did not have time to initiate contact with him. This is the second death in the Chiba prefecture of COVID patients in their twenties. The young man’s daughter found her father dead.
Another man in his sixties who was self-isolating at home was discovered dead. Even though the man had a preexisting medical condition (diabetes), he was denied hospitalization and told to self-isolate at home after the Saitama Prefecture determined his symptoms were “mild.” His case was transferred to a ‘self-isolating patient care center.’ For 10 consecutive days, the center was unable to contact him. His wife, who was also COVID-19 positive, was self-isolating with him. However, her health was worsening, and she was unable to call for help for her husband.
On August 19, a self-isolating pregnant woman lost her baby after being forced to deliver prematurely at home alone without any medical assistance. She was classified as low priority by the Chiba prefecture and therefore was denied in-patient care.
Healthcare workers are continuing to fight against the criminal policy of the Suga administration and are voicing their criticism on social media. A nurse declared on social media, “Many people are dying. They could have been saved if we had proper and sufficient resources. It is wrong to reduce the number of beds and health care workers,” criticizing the Japanese government’s decades-long plan to reduce health care costs. Another explained the situation at the front line stating, “We did not have enough resources to begin with. With the COVID-19 pandemic, it is impossible. We do not have enough beds. We do not have enough nurses.”
A number of health care workers on Twitter spearheaded a social media strike using the hashtag #国会ひらき医療崩壊を防げ meaning “open an Extraordinary Diet [Parliament] session and avoid health care crisis.” One declared, “There are more than 135,000 COVID patients left at home. Every day we have self-isolating patients die alone at home. It is clearly an emergency, and we shouldn’t be demanding an Extraordinary Diet session,” questioning the government’s complete indifference to human lives. Another stated, “They reduced workers at health centers to half and don’t pay even 1 yen. This is what the LPD did to us,” expressing her anger towards not only the Suga administration but all the previous administrations. Another expressed her criticism of the government: “People cannot get tested. They can’t connect to the Health Center. Can’t be admitted to a hospital. No contact tracing is done. This is all because the government reduced the funding for health centers. The government must take responsibility for reducing the number of health centers to one per designated city.”
With increasing reports of self-isolating COVID-19 patients’ deaths, the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan asked the government to release information on the total number of deaths among those self-isolating. The Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare official answered, “There are many cases that we do not have a grasp of. So, we do not have a grasp of the comprehensive situation.”
The Japanese government and mass media have been relentless in their efforts to blame young people, who they claim do not take the pandemic seriously, for the spread. This has been bound up with a cynical media campaign urging young people to get vaccinated. In reality, for young people to receive the limited number of vaccines, workers and youth must enter into a lottery. On August 28, Tokyo set up a walk-in vaccination lottery site. More than 2,200 people, primarily young people, lined up hoping to get vaccinated. Of the 2,200, only 354 “won” the vaccination ticket.
These numerous tragedies were entirely preventable. Public health experts have been warning about the risk of holding the Olympics Games, an event that catalyzed a massive surge of infection. The Games were highly unpopular, with more than 80 percent of the population opposing the event. More than 460,000 people all over the world signed a petition on Change.org calling to cancel the Tokyo Olympics to protect lives. Countless protests erupted all over Japan demanding to cancel the Olympics.
Health care systems are on the verge of collapse all over the world. The situation is particularly dire in the United States, the epicenter of global capitalism. As a direct result of the criminal campaign to reopen schools, pediatric intensive care units and hospitals across the country are filling up and reaching their capacity. Nurses are quitting and retiring as a result of exhaustion and demoralization caused by the crisis. Profit-driven policies allowed the virus to spread and mutate into more contagious, vaccine-resistant strains. All workers across the globe must join the struggle to reject the ruling class’s promotion of endemicity that we must “learn to live with the virus,” and demand a scientific approach to eradicate COVID-19.
On August 30, Sri Lankan President Gotabhaya Rajapakse suddenly announced a repressive national “state of emergency.” The new measures, he declared, were necessary “to ensure the public security and well-being, and maintenance of supplies and services essential to the life of the community” during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The official reason given for the proclamation was in order to deal with food shortages and massive increases in the cost of food, such as rice and sugar, which have doubled in price to 250 and 220 rupees per kilo respectively. Pro-government media outlets immediately hailed government seizures of hoarded food stocks and other measures that Rajapakse insisted would control the price of food and guarantees orderly supplies.
The new “state of emergency” measures, however, simply by-pass already existing laws to deal with hoarding and price increases. Rajapakse’s proclamation has nothing to do with providing services “essential to the life of the community” but is a far-reaching move for even-more draconian presidential powers.
The capitalist classes and their regimes internationally are rapidly embracing dictatorial methods in order to take on the working class and the oppressed masses resisting government attempts to impose the burden of the economic crisis produced by the coronavirus pandemic.
Gotabaya Rajapaksa (AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena)
Although the new measure is called the “Emergency (Provision of Essential Food) Regulation,” under existing state of emergency powers the president has the power of seizing property and for “amending any law, for suspending the operation of any law and for applying any law with or without modification.” It also allows censorship of the media.
Last week, Rajapakse renewed the “Essential Public Services Act,” originally imposed on May 27, which covers about one million public sector employees and bans strikes and other industrial action.
Anyone found guilty of “violating” the essential services laws, following a summary trial before a magistrate, faces rigorous jail terms, fines, seizure of their property and banned from employment in any profession. The same punishments can be inflicted on anyone prosecuted for “inducing” or “inciting” public sector workers to “violate” these regulations.
While Rajapakse’s newly-declared emergency regulations are being debated in parliament today, as required under the constitution, the ruling party has the majority to push through the law, notwithstanding submissive criticism from the pliant opposition.
Last week, the media launched an extensive propaganda exercise, suddenly “exposing” unnamed hoarders of sugar, rice and paddy stocks. This was followed by police raids on warehouses with officials from the government’s Consumer Affair Authority (CAA) sealing off the premises.
The seized stock, the CAA declared, would be purchased at a “reasonable” rate from the “illegal hoarders” by government authorities and distributed among consumers. Instead of seizing these food essentials without compensation, the “illegal hoarders” have been rewarded, in a clear signal to big business that the government’s actions are not directed against them.
In fact, the highly publicised raids and seizures were a public relations exercise to deflect rising anti-government sentiment over soaring prices, shortages and social devastation exacerbated by the pandemic. According to the latest figures, over 10,000 people, including children, have died from COVID-19, with 8,000 of these deaths in the last two months from the Delta variant which has overwhelmed the public health service.
In yet another elevation of a senior military figure into the government, President Rajapakse appointed Major General, D.S.P. Niwunhella as the Commissioner General of Essential Services to coordinate the essential food supplies.
Food shortages, however, are not caused by hoarding but are the result of government-imposed cuts to imports and rising inflation. Colombo, in fact, is preparing to ration the supply of essentials to the population.
The import curbs, including on milk powder, are in response to $4 billion in foreign debt repayments this year. Sharp declines in export, tourism and remittance earnings saw the state’s foreign reserves drop last month to just $2.8 billion. Sri Lanka’s energy minister is involved in discussions with United Arab Emirates officials to secure oil on credit.
The rupee has fallen dramatically against the US dollar with the Sri Lankan Central Bank reporting that the currency had dropped by about 13.5 percent between January 1 to August 30 while commercial bank exchange rates fell by almost 25 percent. The bond market has also dropped with the cash-strapped treasury only able to sell 4 billion rupees in bonds on August 30.
The Central Bank has printed billions of rupees to overcome government expenditure gaps, further increasing inflation and driving down the value of the rupee. The official inflation rate increased to 6 percent in August on a year-on-year basis.
Finance Minister Basil Rajapakse, who is preparing for another austerity budget in November, told cabinet ministers last week that “state revenue has decreased drastically… and that it was not sufficient even for recurrent expenditure.” His ministry has directed all other ministries to slash expenditure and halt all projects. Government ministers are already campaigning for cuts to state employees’ salaries and pensions as a “remedy.”
Even as it prepares to deepen its attacks on workers and the poor, the Rajapakse government has provided massive assistance to big business, kept all its debt commitments to international financial institutions and ordered employees to remain at work in export plants and other workplaces in unsafe conditions. Banks and other business have reaped massive profits during the pandemic.
The opposition Samagi Jana Balavegaya (SJB), United National Party, Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna and the Tamil National Alliance have timidly criticised the emergency laws. The SJB asked the government to “take steps to promulgate legislation to deal with the pandemic,” instead of imposing emergency measures. The TNA said the government should have “separate public health emergency laws instead of imposing an emergency.”
The JVP remains silent on the emergency regulations. Sunil Haduneththi, a JVP leader, called on the government on August 29 to implement effective price controls. When the emergency laws were imposed, JVP MP, Vijith Herath said they only benefited the traders. The pseudo-left Frontline Socialist Party has not said a word about the state of emergency.
The Rajapakse government, opposition parties, unions and the fake left groups, in fact, all fear the developing social opposition among the working class. As Rajapakse declared last month during his national speech reluctantly announcing a new lockdown: “This is not the time for strike actions.”
Ongoing strike action by almost 250,000 teachers and the eruption of strikes and protests by railway, postal, plantation and health workers in the past months has created a deep political crisis for the government and the unions.
On Wednesday, US President Joe Biden granted Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky a meeting for which the Kiev government had had to beg Washington for well over a year. Following the 1991 Stalinist dissolution of the Soviet Union, Ukraine became central to the US-led NATO encirclement of and war preparations against Russia. The US played the principal role in funding a far-right coup in Kiev in February 2014, which toppled the pro-Russian government of Viktor Yanukovych.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky [Credit: en.kremlin.ru]
After the two-hour meeting between Zelensky and Biden, the White House published a joint statement, confirming Washington’s support for Ukraine’s aggressive and provocative “Crimean Platform” and its military build-up against Russia in the Black Sea. The statement reiterated the lies of “continued Russian aggression” and pledged that Washington would retain its “commitment to Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.”
The “Crimean Platform” was announced by Kiev in March and involves a provocative strategy for Ukraine to “retake” Crimea, presumably by military means. The Crimea is a strategic peninsula in the Black Sea that was annexed by Russia in March 2014 following a US-backed coup in Kiev and a referendum on the peninsula. Crimea’s main city, Sevastopol is also the base of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. Ukraine’s highly provocative announcement of the strategy to “retake” Crimea earlier this year triggered a significant military crisis in the Black Sea region. The “Crimean Platform” initiative held its first summit with representatives from all NATO countries on August 23.
Biden also pledged an additional $60 million this year to deliver Javelin missiles to Ukraine, on top of $400 million that were already granted this year. By contrast, the US has so far provided only $55 million for just 2.2 million vaccine doses to assist Ukraine in vaccinating its population of 40 million people, and will provide an additional $12.5 million, a fraction of its support for the Ukrainian military.
The statement also insisted on ongoing “reforms” of Ukraine’s economy, which involve large-scale privatizations, as well as far-reaching cooperation between Ukrainian and US intelligence.
While the joint statement declared that the US continued “to oppose” the Russian-German Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, there was no indication that Washington would undertake any measures to revise its recent deal with Berlin, which effectively allows the pipeline to be completed and go into operation. The pipeline is expected to cost the Ukrainian economy billions of dollars annually because of lost revenue from transit fees. Both the joint statement and Biden also made but very vague statements of support for “Ukraine’s European and Euro-Atlantic aspirations,” that is, its repeated and insistent requests to be granted accelerated access to NATO.
Zelensky later said he had invited Biden to Ukraine, but that the US president said that he would “come when he can, he is a very busy man.” The Ukrainian president travelled on to California to meet with representatives of Apple and speak at Stanford University.
Prior to the meeting with Biden, Zelensky and his delegation had met with US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. Austin and the Ukrainian defense minister Andrei Taran signed a new strategic defense framework agreement. While details have not been revealed, the agreement reportedly focuses on deepening military cooperation in the Black Sea, reforms of Ukraine’s defense industrial sector, as well as cybersecurity and intelligence.
The Russian press has warned that the new agreements would be directed against Russia’s strategic nuclear forces. Most of Russia’s nuclear arsenal dates back to the Soviet period, when the Ukrainian Soviet Republic was the main manufacturer of weapons, including nuclear weapons. The closer cooperation between American and Ukrainian intelligence, the Nezavisimaya Gazeta wrote, could entail Ukraine providing intelligence about Russia’s nuclear weapons to the Pentagon.
Zelensky’s visit to the US was overshadowed by the staggering debacle US imperialism has just suffered in Afghanistan. Ukraine, which has supported the criminal NATO war, was unable to evacuate dozens of its citizens in time before the withdrawal was completed.
The rapid shift in focus of US imperialism away from Afghanistan and the Biden administration’s unceremonious dropping of support for its Afghan stooges has sent shock waves through the Ukrainian oligarchy. Torn by conflicts and widely hated in the desperately impoverished working population, it is heavily dependent on funding and political support from Washington.
In the lead-up to the February 2014 coup, which toppled the pro-Russian government of Viktor Yanukovich, the US pumped some $5 billion into supporting the “opposition,” including various fascist formations like the Azov Battalion. Since then, billions more were given to the government in Kiev, including $2.5 billion for the Ukrainian military, which has been fighting against pro-Russian separatists in East Ukraine. The civil war has claimed over 15,000 lives and displaced millions, with no end to the conflict in sight.
An advisor to Zelensky, Andrew Mac, told the New York Times in advance of the Zelensky-Biden meeting, “The situation in Afghanistan seems to indicate a realignment of U.S. global commitments, and President Zelensky wants to hear from President Biden where Ukraine fits in.” In an indication of just how worried Kiev is, Tymofiy Mylovanov, an adviser to Mr. Zelensky’s chief of staff, told the newspaper, “We are very different from Afghanistan, and we would like to emphasize this. We are an independent country, not a failed state, and our military has managed to resist the Russians, not the Taliban.”
Nikolai Patrushev, the secretary of the Russian Security Council, mockingly commented, “Did the fact that Afghanistan has the status of a main U.S. ally outside of NATO save the ousted pro-American regime in Kabul? A similar situation awaits those who are banking on America in Ukraine.” He predicted that Ukraine “is going to disintegrate and the White House at a certain moment won’t even remember its supporters in Kyiv.”
Fears in Kiev of Washington dropping or reducing its support were fueled earlier this year by the summit between US President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin. The summit was part of the Biden administration’s effort to somewhat ease tensions with Russia, while orienting US foreign policy more directly toward preparations for war against China.
A few weeks later, Berlin and Washington announced a deal over the Russian-German Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline. The deal was struck without consultation with the Ukrainian government, and the invitation to Zelensky to Washington was issued once the deal was announced. The Biden administration has also refused to make any commitment to accelerating Ukraine’s accession to NATO, a central and stated goal of the 2014 coup.
The shifts in US foreign policy have fueled bitter conflicts within the Ukrainian ruling class and stirred up far-right forces against president Zelensky. Ever since coming into office, Zelensky has faced multiple violent demonstrations from the far right, which has opposed any efforts to negotiate a settlement with Russia over East Ukraine, as well as Zelensky’s attempts to work more closely with Berlin. In one of the most recent attacks, in mid-August, right-wing thugs held a demonstration before his office, demanding that he work more closely with the US and that he not “capitulate” to Russia in negotiations over the conflict in East Ukraine. In a highly unusual move this summer, Zelensky, who is the commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s armed forces, was temporarily banned from visiting the front of the civil war.
Almost 800 child migrants are being expelled from Spain by the coalition government of the social-democratic Socialist Party (PSOE) and the “left populist” Podemos party. These mass deportations are the latest atrocity in the so-called “progressive” government’s crusade against migrants and refugees.
The children were among the thousands of migrants who arrived in Spain’s North African enclave of Ceuta, which borders Morocco, in May. Most swam around the six-metre fence that juts out into the sea, walked across at low tide, or used rubber dinghies to cross into Spain. Roughly 10,000 migrants are estimated to have crossed the border with Morocco in barely more than a day, of whom around 2,000 were minors.
In response, the PSOE-Podemos government sent in hundreds of soldiers in armoured vehicles, and mobilised over 200 riot police to reinforce the 1,000-strong police force stationed in Ceuta. Soldiers and police used batons to clear migrants from the beach and threw smoke bombs to stop others from crossing. At least one migrant drowned at sea.
The deportation of hundreds of children is a continuation of the violent assault on these migrants begun in May. Those who made it into the Spanish enclave, despite attacks by soldiers and militarised police are now being summarily expelled without the chance to have their case heard, in flagrant violation of international law.
Podemos has half-heartedly postured as an opponent of the deportation order. The party’s Minister of Social Rights and Agenda 2030, Ione Belarra, pathetically declared, “any process of family regroupment must use a protocol that includes individualised interviews with the children as well as a detailed knowledge on the part of the Prosecutor's Office.”
In reality, Podemos is complicit in the xenophobic, anti-migrant policies of the government of which it is a part. In office it has implemented policies indistinguishable from those of the far-right, separating migrant children from their parents, building concentration camps on the Canary Islands and facilitating fascistic attacks on migrants stranded there. These policies led to the deaths of more than 2,000 migrants who attempted to cross to Spain in the first half of 2021, according to charity Caminando Fronteras.
Deportations of the minors began on 13 August, with 15 children transported back to Morocco each day on buses. According to the Spanish Interior Ministry, the expulsions were being carried out in accordance with a 2007 agreement signed with Morocco to facilitate the rapid repatriation of unaccompanied children. Three days later, however, after 45 migrants had already been expelled, the Government of Ceuta was forced to suspend the repatriations for 72 hours.
This was in response to numerous legal challenges, including by the non-governmental organisations (NGO) the Spanish Network for Immigration and Refugee Assistance, Coordinadora de Barrios and Fundación Raíces. The children were being deported without having had access to a lawyer or the opportunity to have their cases heard individually, Patricia Fernandez Vicens, lawyer for Coordinadora de Barrios, stated.
Mass expulsions violate both domestic and international laws: children have the right to be heard during all legal and administrative processes that affect them, and the public prosecutor in Spain must issue an individual report before a minor can be deported.
Numerous NGOs denounced the PSOE-Podemos government’s decision as a breach of fundamental rights. UK-based charity Save the Children declared that “any collective repatriation of children and adolescents is illegal.” The Spanish government must carry out an “individual evaluation of every child,” the NGO said, “prepare a process of hearings and pleas for each young person and collect information about the family of origin in Morocco.”
“Many of these children will be deported into a situation of risk to their safety,” declared Andrés Conde, managing director of Save the Children in Spain. The charity has interviewed around 350 of the child migrants who crossed into Ceuta in May, and many reported that they had suffered sexual violence, work exploitation, forced marriage and human trafficking in their country of origin.
Amnesty International, meanwhile, demanded that Spain’s Interior Ministry “halt these expulsions until every document has been inspected by the Juvenile Prosecution Office and guarantee that they have acted in the child’s best interest.”
It is the “obligation of the Autonomous City of Ceuta to protect the rights of minors that they find in their territory,” Amnesty International continued. “The Spanish authorities must in practice, and not just rhetorically, guarantee that the rights of the hundreds of unaccompanied minors in Ceuta are coming first. We have no evidence that this is the case.”
On 24 August, the judicial suspension of deportations was upheld as a “precautionary measure” by a further ruling. “Lifting this measure would be permitting repatriation...,” the judge presiding over the case stated. “It would be absolutely ineffective to have delivered a verdict violating a fundamental right without having attained the intended protection for a minor in Morocco.”
A day later, PSOE Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez summoned Juan Jesús Vivas, president of the autonomous city of Ceuta, to Madrid to discuss plans to continue with expulsions despite these rulings.
Far from halting deportation orders, Sánchez and Vivas, a member of the right-wing Popular Party, doubled down on their plans. They reportedly agreed to prevent the transfer of any of the migrants currently held in Ceuta to mainland Spain and to continue processing deportations via the Aliens Law, rather than through the 2007 repatriation agreement with Morocco. The Aliens Law states that deportation cases must be individualised and carried out with the participation of the minor.
While the Aliens Law may slow the tempo of deportations, Sánchez has insisted that there will be no let-up in the government’s anti-migrant plans and that the children will be deported “in the shortest time possible.” In a government statement, Sánchez pledged to provide “triple support for a safe and ordered return of the minors… with three axes: capacity, administration and diplomacy.”
Sánchez “promised to activate all resources in the hands of the state to return the minors to Morocco,” Vivas stated in a press conference. “The only solution is the return to Morocco …”
Falsely and cynically attempting to present the deportation orders as being for the well-being of the migrant children, the statement declared that Sánchez and Vivas “agreed on the necessity of prioritising a safe and orderly return of the minors to their country of origin, especially with the start of the school term, because their remaining in Ceuta could enormous harm their educational development and increase their uprooting from their families.”
The appalling and illegal treatment of the almost 800 migrant children in Ceuta reveals the deceitful nature of current attempts by the PSOE-Podemos government to posture as humanitarians in their response to the US debacle in Afghanistan.
At the end of August, Irene Montero, Podemos Minister for Equality and partner of former Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias, declared that the priority of the Spanish government “must be women and LGBTI people in Afghanistan now and in the next months.” The PSOE-Podemos government is “doing everything possible to assure that all those who need to can leave the country,” Montero added.
