Former French health minister charged for “endangering the lives of others” over COVID-19 policies

Anthony Torres

On September 10, the French Court of Justice questioned former Health Minister Agnès Buzyn and charged her for “endangering the lives of others.” Buzyn was health minister in the Macron government from 2017 to 2020, including during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Her indictment underscores the widely felt understanding in the populations of France and internationally that the ruling class pursued a policy of social murder in response to the pandemic.

While France’s political establishment either supports Macron’s policies or has backed the reactionary anti-vaccine campaign launched by the far right and supported by the trade unions, another response to the bankruptcy of the capitalist class is developing from elsewhere. The public prosecutor has so far received 14,500 complaints about the lack of protective equipment for health care workers and the public, a reflection of the enormous social opposition in the working class. To date, nine complaints have been deemed admissible by the court.

The charging of Buzyn follows the opening of a judicial investigation by the General Prosecutor’s Office of the appeals court on July 3, 2020. The plaintiffs, including representatives of a group of doctors, were interviewed at the beginning of September and documented their claims of “endangering the life of others,” “involuntary manslaughter” and “non-assistance to a person in danger.”

The investigation led to several searches in October 2020 at the homes and offices of Buzyn, but also of the Minister of Health, Olivier Véran; of the former Prime Minister Edouard Philippe; of Sibeth Ndiaye, former spokesperson for the government; of the Director General of Health, Jérôme Salomon; and of the General Director of Public Health France, Geneviève Chêne. Buzyn is the first public figure to be charged in this case.

Buzyn has also been placed under the status of witness for “refusal to take appropriate measures to combat a disaster.” This offence, punishable by two years in prison and a fine of 30,000 euros, concerns “anyone who voluntarily refrains from taking or initiating measures that would allow, without risk to himself or to third parties, combating a disaster likely to endanger people’s safety.”

The current Minister of Health, Olivier Véran, the former Prime Minister Edouard Philippe and current Prime Minister Jean Castex will also be questioned.

Not surprisingly, these ministers have the support of the major media outlets and hope to turn the trials to their advantage and legitimize their ongoing policy of permitting the virus to spread.

On the morning of her hearing, Agnès Buzyn declared: “Today is an excellent opportunity for me to explain myself and to restore the truth of the case. I will not let the government’s action, my action as a minister, be tarnished when we have done so much to prepare our country for a global health crisis which, I remind you, is still ongoing.”

The decision to indict Buzyn and the hearing of high officials by the court is the product, above all, of the fear of popular opinion in official circles. Large sections of the working class are convinced that the Macron government has perpetrated a social crime by allowing the coronavirus to kill around 115,000 people in France.

Buzyn’s statement before her hearing contradicts her admission at the beginning of 2020 to the newspaper Le Monde that for months, all the top leaders of the Macron government had knowingly minimized the danger posed by the virus. She explained then that “on December 20, an English-language blog detailed a strange infectious lung disease. I alerted the General Director of Health. On January 11, I sent a message to the president about the situation. On January 30, I warned [Prime Minister] Edouard Philippe that the elections should probably not be held. I was wrestling against my restraints.”

According to Buzyn, she warned at that time that there “would be thousands of deaths.”

For months, presenting the coronavirus as a simple flu, the French authorities did nothing to prepare for an epidemic. They did not even buy masks when government stocks were empty. Not only were the municipal elections held as Europe became the world center of the pandemic, but Buzyn lied publicly, stating on January 24 that “the risk of propagation of the coronavirus in the population is very low.”

The reaction of the political class, including the opposition parties, to the indictment of the former health minister, show the complicity of the entire political establishment with the strategy of the Macron government and the EU of “herd immunity.” No political or trade union organization warned of the deadly danger workers would be exposed to, because they were all agreed to keep workers on the job.

The prime minister’s office defended Buzyn, stating, “No one can doubt the seriousness and commitment that [Agnès Buzyn] showed at the first signs of the epidemic. France took the necessary measures very quickly.”

Damien Abad, president of the Republicans group in the National Assembly, and deputy for the region of Ain, told BFMTV that he “does not share the desire to charge everyone; that’s not how we do politics.” Laurent Berger, secretary general of the CFDT trade union, said he was “uncomfortable” with the fact that politicians who had done their job as best they could were being “thrown into the public eye.”

The decisive question in this case is to politically mobilize the working class, who cannot expect the capitalist courts to rule on the responsibility of the Macron government and the international financial aristocracy. Nor can any faith be placed in the trade union apparatuses to lead a struggle.

It is the workers themselves who through wildcat strikes forced European governments, including Macron’s, into the initial lockdowns in March 2020. The ruling class, however, refused to organize systematic contact tracing and limitation of the virus after the ending of the first lockdown, while refusing to re-implement a lockdown of non-essential industries and schools. The entire ruling class is responsible for a social murder that has killed 115,000 people in France and 1.2 million in Europe.

This is in contrast to China, which pursued a serious scientific policy against the pandemic from the beginning, and thus limited the number of deaths to 5,000. However, in order to carry out this policy on an international scale and put an end to the pandemic, the international working class must be mobilized, independently of the trade union apparatuses, which are allies of governments and the capitalist elite’s policy of “herd immunity.”

Such a struggle will be fiercely opposed by the financial aristocracy and its military and political leaders. In April, thousands of retired and current French officers signed tribunes proposing to conduct military operations to repress social opposition in France and kill thousands of people. Far-right politicians speak openly of their terror at the danger of revolution and of their plans to establish a military dictatorship.

“Today, to the security crisis is added the pandemic, all against the backdrop of an economic, social and political crisis, while there is no confidence in government leaders,” said retired General Philippe de Villiers. “I fear that this pent-up anger will explode, all at the same time. … The rule of law is obviously important, but at some point, it is also necessary to think strategically.”

Scientists find new evidence of the natural origins of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19

Andre Damon

Earlier this month, scientists revealed the closest discovery yet to a “smoking gun” in the search for the origins of the deadly COVID-19 pandemic.

In a new pre-print paper by the French Institute Pasteur and the University of Laos, an international team of scientists say they have found a group of viruses that are the closest relatives of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

A researcher swabs a bat's mouth to take samples at Sai Yok National Park in Kanchanaburi province, west of Bangkok, Thailand, Friday, July 31, 2020. Researchers in Thailand have been trekking though the countryside to catch bats in their caves in an effort to trace the murky origins of the coronavirus. (AP Photo/Sakchai Lalit)

In the part of the virus critical to infecting humans, called the receptor-binding domain (RBD), the newly discovered viruses are more similar to the original variant of SARS-CoV-2 than are the variants of that virus that have emerged in the past year, including the currently dominant Delta variant.

“Sequences very close to those of the early strains of SARS-CoV-2 responsible for the pandemic exist in nature, and are found in several Rhinolophus bat species,” concludes the paper.

Professor Stuart Neil, head of the department of infectious diseases at King’s College London told the Telegraph: “Two or three of these viruses have RBDs which is only two or three changes from that seen in SARS-CoV-2—essentially, closer to the original than some of the variants of concern we see out there in some respects.”

The authors continue, “These viruses may have contributed to SARS-CoV-2’s origin and may intrinsically pose a future risk of direct transmission to humans.”

The newly discovered viruses are more effective at infecting human beings than RaTG13, the bat coronavirus discovered in 2012 that had up to now been the closest relative to SARS-CoV-2.

The scientists note, “The RBDs of the viruses found in our study are closer to that of SARSCoV-2 than to the RaTG13 RBD, the virus identified in R. affinis from the Mojiang mineshaft where pneumonia cases with clinical characteristics strikingly similar to COVID-19 were recorded in 2012.”

In the narrative presented in the US media, the investigation of the origins of COVID-19 is a constant tug-of-war between two competing hypotheses, both backed by evidence. There is supposedly an ongoing “debate” between proponents of the natural origins of COVID-19 and the theory that the disease was released from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.

But in the scientific community, there is no debate. New revelations and discoveries are constantly emerging, but they only deepen humanity’s understanding of the natural origins of COVID-19 and the dangers posed by other animal-borne diseases to modern society.

The findings by the French and Laotian scientists refute the “lab leak” conspiracy theory, according to which scientists performed “gain of function” experiments on naturally occurring viruses in order to make them more infectious to humans, then released them, inadvertently or deliberately, into the city of Wuhan, China.

Nicholas Wade, the advocate of racist pseudoscience whose claims about a “lab leak” were cited uncritically by every major US newspaper, claimed that the RBD of SARS-CoV-2 “seemed optimized for the human receptor,” leading to the conclusion that “the virus might have been generated in a laboratory.”

But now a very similar RBD, with apparently the same capacity to infect humans, has been found in nature.

As scientists scour the bat caves of Indochina for potential predecessors of SARS-CoV-2, they are homing in, less than two years into the pandemic, on what for SARS took a decade and a half to discover—the specific natural origin of the virus.

In 2017, Nature reported, “In a remote cave in Yunnan province, virologists have identified a single population of horseshoe bats that harbours virus strains with all the genetic building blocks of the one that jumped to humans in 2002, killing almost 800 people around the world.”

The journal continued, “Although no single bat had the exact strain of SARS coronavirus that is found in humans, the analysis showed that the strains mix often.”

The author of the 2017 study, Shi Zhengli, has been falsely and absurdly demonized by the US media as having created the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead, she warned in 2017 that “The risk of spillover into people and emergence of a disease similar to SARS is possible,” and urged measures to control the spread of animal diseases in humans.

The authors of this month’s study note that, like the 2017 breakthrough that led to the identification of the origins of SARS, proof of the origins of SARS-CoV-2 may come in the form of finding individual pieces of the virus that may have arisen through recombination or “mosaicism.”

They write, “Although the identification of SARS-CoV-2 in bats is a major goal, it may be unattainable. A more realistic objective is to identify the sequences that contribute to its mosaicism.”

Of all the major English-language publications, only the UK-based Telegraph has reported the breakthrough discovery. This report, along with other findings pointing to the widespread prevalence of bat coronaviruses and their ability to infect human beings, have gone unreported by the same newspapers that gave breathless credence to the fabrications of Nicholas Wade.

The latest scientific findings, combined with the admission last month by most of the US intelligence agencies that SARS-CoV-2 was “not genetically engineered,” should put the final nail in the coffin of the Wuhan Lab conspiracy theory. Those newspapers and writers that promoted this conspiracy theory owe the world a public explanation and apology.

But none will be forthcoming, because the advocates of the “Wuhan lab” theory are serving definite class interests. Their shameless lies, using bogus pseudoscience, aim to further a right-wing, xenophobic, and racist campaign to demonize China, laying the ideological groundwork for imperialist war.

America’s deadliest pandemic: COVID-19 eclipses the Spanish flu

Benjamin Mateus

This month, COVID-19 officially became the deadliest outbreak of infectious disease in American history, eclipsing the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic that killed 675,000 Americans over two years.

This grim milestone comes as the daily death toll surges throughout the United States. A staggering 2,228 Americans lost their lives on Wednesday to COVID-19, after 2,152 died on Tuesday. By the time this article is published, the US death toll will have reached 700,000, according to Worldometers.info.

Visitors sit among white flags that are part of artist Suzanne Brennan Firstenberg's "In America: Remember," a temporary art installation to commemorate Americans who have died of COVID-19, on the National Mall in Washington, Tuesday, Sept. 21, 2021. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)

The official death toll in the US is higher than in any other country. The United States makes up just 4.2 percent of the world’s population, but it accounts for 14 percent of the nearly 4.7 million deaths worldwide, according to official figures.

The hidden toll of the pandemic remains far higher than what is reported. A study from January of this year concluded that approximately 35 percent of COVID-19 deaths remain uncounted, meaning that the real US death toll is greater than one million, a figure consistent with a recent study by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME).

More than 9.1 million years of life have been lost to COVID-19 in the United States, according to a study published this week in the Annals of Internal Medicine. “Our results demonstrate that COVID-19 has not been a pandemic just for the old and the vulnerable, but also for the younger and healthier groups,” noted the study’s authors.

The catastrophic impact of the Spanish flu, like the COVID-19 pandemic, was the product of the conscious decision of the ruling class to subordinate the preservation of human life to profit.

The Spanish flu pandemic originated in the state of Kansas, but it spread throughout the globe, infecting a third of the world’s population. It spread in the trenches of World War I, notorious for their lack of hygiene and adequate medical care.

The very name of the disease, the “Spanish flu,” reflected the efforts of the US and European political establishment to suppress popular knowledge of the disease’s existence. Wartime censorship prohibited serious and honest reporting on the disease, but the press in Spain reported its spread, leading to the misnomer.

US President Woodrow Wilson, who was keenly aware of the deadly nature of the flu, never uttered a single public statement on the epidemic. Historian John M. Barry, author of The Great Influenza, noted, “In terms of managing a federal response to the pandemic, there was no leadership or guidance of any kind from the White House. Wilson wanted the focus to remain on the war effort. Anything negative was viewed as hurting morale and hurting the war effort.”

The 1918 Great Influenza pandemic was intimately tied to the war that brought legions of troops across oceans together to fight a war for imperialist conquest. And despite the catastrophic toll that bullets, shells and land mines took on the troops, the influenza virus killed still more.

More than 100 years after the Spanish flu pandemic, human society is objectively far better prepared to stop and eradicate COVID-19. Highly effective vaccines against COVID-19 were developed in just 10 months. Revolutions in communications and information have made it possible to have detailed knowledge about the whereabouts and contacts of infected people. The ability to treat patients with effective and safe therapeutics is readily available.

However, the social relations of capitalism have prevented the rational use of these tools to save lives and end the pandemic. Even amid the massive surge of deaths from COVID-19, the American ruling class has doubled down on its efforts to reopen schools and workplaces, leading to what experts warn could be a massive resurgence of the disease.

Instead of using these tools to eradicate the pandemic, capitalism has “normalized” mass death.

Biden, Macron pledge to meet amid mounting US-EU conflicts over China

Alex Lantier

Less than a week after Paris recalled its ambassador to the United States over Australia’s canceling of a €56 billion contract with France to build submarines, amid the sudden signing of the Australia-UK-US (AUKUS) alliance against China, Paris and Washington announced moves to repair ties.

US President Joe Biden and French President Emmanuel Macron will meet next month in Europe to discuss the crisis. The two spoke in a 30-minute phone call yesterday, according to White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki. The Élysée presidential palace posted a brief communiqué on the Biden-Macron telephone call in English and in French on its website, which announced that Washington and Paris will “open a process of in-depth consultations” to try to reestablish trust.

President Joe Biden meets with Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison at the Intercontinental Barclay Hotel during the United Nations General Assembly, Tuesday, Sept. 21, 2021, in New York. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

Biden apparently accepted responsibility for not consulting Paris about AUKUS, according to the communiqué, which states: “The two leaders agreed that the situation would have benefitted from open consultations among allies on matters of strategic interest to France and our European partners. President Biden conveyed his ongoing commitment in that regard.”

Biden and Macron are to meet next month in Europe for discussions, and a French ambassador will return to Washington, it added. It reaffirms “the strategic importance of French and European engagement in the Indo-Pacific region, including in the framework of the European Union’s recently published strategy for the Indo-Pacific.” The statement commits Washington to supporting “a stronger and more capable European defense,” which it called “complementary to NATO.” It also endorses France’s ongoing neo-colonial war in Mali and the Sahel.

This brief statement does little more than paper over deep contradictions emerging between Washington and its European Union (EU) “allies,” however. The press has widely described these events as the deepest crisis in US-French relations since 2002-2003, when Paris joined Berlin and Moscow in opposing the US-led invasion of Iraq. The question of how to manage relations with China’s rising economy is provoking deep and bitter conflicts inside the NATO alliance.

While Biden endorses the EU’s strategy on the Indo-Pacific and European defense as “complementary” to Europe’s NATO alliance with Washington, the way the Australian-French contract was broken and the AUKUS alliance was announced gives the lie to these claims. Washington, London and Canberra did not discuss AUKUS or the breaking of the French contract with any of the EU powers before announcing these decisions September 15.

In 2015, all the major EU powers rejected US pressure and signed up for the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), the investment arm of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The BRI has led, however, to hundreds of billions of dollars in Chinese investment across the Middle East, Central Asia and beyond, and the signing of strategic alliances between China and countries like Iran, which US imperialism routinely threatens with war.

The Wall Street Journal, for its part, hailed Washington’s breaking of the French-Australian submarine contract as “smart” in a recent editorial, stressing that it was in retaliation for French policy: “French President Emmanuel Macron has made a point of emphasizing ‘strategic autonomy’ from the US, including on China, Russia and Iran. … Europe can’t play China’s game of divide-and-conquer on economic and strategic issues without consequences for its US relationship.”

While Biden formally endorsed the EU’s Indo-Pacific strategy, this strategy paper is incompatible with a US policy of arming Australia with nuclear submarines to threaten China. In it, the EU pledges to “pursue its multifaceted engagement with China, engaging bilaterally to promote solutions to common challenges, cooperating on issues of common interest and encouraging China to play its part in a peaceful and thriving Indo-Pacific region.”

The conflict between US and European imperialist policy on China underlay French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian’s criticism of the AUKUS alliance as a step towards war. Le Drian said, “We see the rise of an Indo-Pacific strategy launched by the United States that is militarily confrontational. That is not our position. … We don’t believe in the logic of systematic military confrontation, even if sometimes we must use military means.”

Indeed, conflicts continued between the AUKUS countries and the EU yesterday, as British Prime Minister Boris Johnson ridiculed French concerns: “It’s time for some of our dearest friends around the world to ‘prenez un grip’ about all this and ‘donnez-moi un break.’” Johnson’s mock-French call to “get a grip” and “give me a break” was his response to angry comments from the EU officials, criticizing the AUKUS alliance as a breach of faith, targeting not just France but the EU as a whole.

Such statements must be taken as a warning to workers around the world that, whatever the official attempts to downplay the crisis, tensions between the United States and Europe that twice in the last century exploded into world war are again reaching explosive levels.

EU Council leader Charles Michel denounced the United States for bad faith, adding, “The elementary principles among allies are transparency and confidence, these go together. But now, what do we see? An obvious lack of transparency and good faith.”

EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell of Spain said a meeting of EU foreign ministers amid the ongoing UN General Assembly meeting in New York had come out in support of France. The ministers “clearly expressed their solidarity with France,” Borrell said, adding that the AUKUS alliance is “not a bilateral issue” between Washington and Paris but “affects” the whole EU.

Foreign ministers of the EU imperialist powers made similar statements. “I can understand the anger of our French friends,” said German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas. “What was decided—and the manner in which it was decided—is irritating and disappointing, and not only for France.”

Belgian Foreign Minister Sophie Wilmès called the signing of the AUKUS alliance at France’s expense “a thunderbolt in contemporary life in France, in Europe certainly and geostrategically at the level of the entire world.” She called on Europe to be “more vocal” and “present on the international scene,” particularly on the issue of relations with China.

In Italy, former Foreign Minister Marta Dassù told La Repubblica that AUKUS “contains a risk: the division of the West between an Anglo-Saxon sphere aiming to contain China on the one hand, and a traditional Euro-Atlantic sphere with NATO concentrated against Russia. The question that is posed is how long these two Western alliances can remain united.”

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte responded to the AUKUS crisis by proposing to delay EU trade talks with the United States. “We support not having the meeting on economic safety at this point with the US,” Rutte told reporters on Tuesday.

Russian officials also said they see both the US-Australia-Japan-India “Asian Quad” alliance and the AUKUS alliance as targeting Russia. Speaking of the Quad, Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev said, “Washington will also try to involve other countries in this organization, especially to pursue anti-Chinese and anti-Russian policies. … Just now, another military bloc was formed in the region, AUKUS, which pursues the same objectives.”

Yet neither the EU imperialist powers nor the post-Soviet capitalist kleptocracy have a progressive policy to oppose the US war drive against China. They either seek to adapt themselves to the framework of US policy, or furiously arm themselves in an attempt to compete with Washington militarily—a policy that entails massive military spending and attacks on the living standards and social rights of the working class.

Spain’s PSOE-Podemos government calls for “normalization” of COVID-19

Alice Summers

As COVID-19 continues to spread through Spain, the coalition government of the social-democratic Socialist Party (PSOE) and the “left populist” Podemos party is campaigning to downplay the risks of the virus, calling for its “normalization.”

In a recent speech to a meeting of the Spanish Society of Epidemiology, Fernando Simón, director of the Centre for the Coordination of Health Alerts and Emergencies (CCAES), and one of the PSOE-Podemos government’s key advisors during the pandemic, made this policy clear. Presenting measures such as lockdowns as an overreaction to a relatively benign disease, Simón likened Spain’s pandemic response to “shooting a fly with a bazooka.”

People walk along a boulevard in Barcelona, Spain. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)

At the start of the pandemic, Simón stated, “We knew very little, we knew that it was very serious, but we didn’t know how serious…. It’s true that we had to take drastic action so that our health system did not collapse, but if we had had the information then that we had later, we could have organised a more direct response.”

Speaking on the current so-called “fifth wave” of the virus, he said: “It’s very likely that Spain will not have any more major epidemiological waves…. There could be a sixth, seventh, eighth or ninth wave, but they won’t be like the others.”

The situation now “has nothing in common with what we were seeing before,” the CCAES director claimed. “There could be another ripple [of the pandemic] in some specific groups, but the situation in Spain, right now, is very favourable, making it possible, bit by bit, to normalize the situation.”

Simón’s speech epitomises the Spanish ruling elite’s utter disregard for the lives of workers and youth, who will continue to get sick and die in these “sixth, seven, eighth and ninth waves.” His calls to “normalize the situation” amount to an acknowledgement that the PSOE-Podemos government aims to let the virus spread unchecked. In this, it is in the company of the bourgeoisie the world over, which is demanding that workers “learn to live with the virus”, that is, to accept mass death from a preventable disease as an inevitable part of life.

Throughout the pandemic, Simón has been one of the most reliable spokespeople for this “herd immunity” policy. Last November, as infections reached their highest numbers since the spring, Simón appeared in a press conference for the Ministry of Health to insist that no lockdown would be implemented, even if it could save thousands of lives.

“What we have right now in Spain is not a [stay-at-home] lock-down, and this will probably not be necessary,” he stated. “If we carry out a real and full confinement and nobody leaves their house for any reason, within around 15 days we would have this under control, or perhaps within a month. But this is impossible. There are people who need to work, to buy things, who need to leave… Total confinement is impossible.”

“If the objective is to completely eliminate transmission,” he added, “forget it, it is impossible.”

Spain’s Constitutional Court is also reportedly planning to declare unconstitutional the second state of alarm in Spain, which lasted from October 2020 until May 9 this year. The state of alarm is the juridical mechanism used to impose health-related restrictions, such as lockdowns.

The Court’s announcement comes in the wake of a previous ruling on the COVID-19 lockdown measures imposed from March to June 2020, which were also declared unconstitutional. The legal challenge to both states of alarm was brought by the far-right Vox party. While the second challenge will not be officially voted on by the 12 Court judges until October, right-wing magistrate Antonio Narváez has drafted a statement declaring that measures imposed to combat the pandemic during this time exceeded the remit of the October-May state of alarm.

The two judgements are the Spanish ruling elite’s pledge to allow no let-up in the “herd immunity” policy they are pursuing together with the entire European bourgeoisie. No matter how many new “waves” of the pandemic might engulf Spain—and regardless of how many thousands more needless deaths may occur—the ruling class insists that there will be no return to the lockdown measures forced upon it by a continent-wide wave of wildcat strikes in March and April last year.

In his efforts to downplay the virus and campaign against necessary health restrictions, Simón has aligned himself, like the PSOE-Podemos government for which he speaks, with Vox’s reactionary and criminal anti-lockdown policies.

Simón’s statements and the two legal rulings come under conditions in which the virus is far from under control in Spain. Many hundreds of people continue to die each week from COVID-19, and tens of thousands are infected. With the reopening of schools at the start of this month, cases will likely shoot up further, as millions of children are herded back into unsafe and overcrowded classrooms, taking the virus home to parents, grandparents and other family members.

Children and adolescents continue to be among the worst affected by the “fifth wave” of the pandemic, with significantly higher rates of infection reported among 12–19-year-olds than among the population as a whole. As of 13 September, the incidence rate per 100,000 people among this age group was 154.45, and 149.56 among under-12s, nearly double the rates reported among 60–69 and 70–79 year olds.

Spanish authorities consider any rate above 150 “high risk,” so that by the Spanish ruling elite’s own metric, all groups under 19 years of age are in a “high risk” position.

The PSOE-Podemos government allowed the virus to let rip over the summer, leading to spiraling infections and over 4,000 coronavirus deaths. Despite the constantly repeated adage that “children don’t get COVID,” 315,000 under-19s have been infected with the virus since June 20. Of these, 1,900 were hospitalized, 91 were admitted to Intensive Care Units (ICUs) and seven died, according to Spain’s National Epidemiological Centre.

Millions of children and youth remain unvaccinated, putting them at heightened risk of contracting the virus and getting seriously ill. Only slightly more than half of 12–19-year-olds in Spain have received both required jabs of the vaccine, with some regions having full vaccination rates of only 29 percent among this age group. Those under the age of 12 are not eligible for immunization, and remain completely unprotected from the virus.

The PSOE-Podemos government has proven utterly hostile to a scientifically-guided policy to eliminate the pandemic and save lives. Like the ruling class across Europe, it has placed corporate profits and the wealth of a super-rich elite above all else, seeing tens or even hundreds of thousands of deaths as simply the acceptable cost of doing business.

EU funds have bailed out banks and large companies to the tune of hundreds of billions of euros, while workers have been forced to continue working in unsafe factories, schools and offices and have died in droves from the coronavirus. The same “herd immunity” policies have prevailed across Europe, more or less openly, no matter the nominal political colouration of the party in power.

Sabadell bank and Spanish trade unions prepare to sack 1,900 workers

Santiago Guillen

The onslaught on jobs amid the COVID-19 economic crisis continues its course. Sabadell Bank has announced its intention to dismiss 1,936 workers, or 12.5 percent of the workforce. This is on top of the trade union-sanctioned dismissal of 1,800 workers last November.

Sabadell Bank is Spain’s fourth-largest financial institution by volume of assets. Its assets are valued at 223 billion euros, with 2,402 branches, over 20,000 employees and 11.9 million clients. Even as the pandemic triggered the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s, it earned 220 million euros in the first half of the year, up 51.5 percent over the same period last year.

Sabadell bank sign (Wikimedia Commons/MJaundoo1)

Presenting a profit report in the first half of 2021 with lucrative dividends for shareholders, Sabadell’s financial director Leopoldo Alvear boasted: “We are already seeing tangible results in the improvement of efficiency and cost savings that we hope will continue to have a positive evolution in the next quarters.” His “cost savings” were a reference to €100 million in cuts, including the plan to dismiss 1,900 workers and close 500 branches.

By the end of 2021, Spanish banks are set to destroy 18,000 jobs, or one in ten jobs in the banking sector in 2020. Since the 2008 global economic crisis, Spanish banks have laid off 105,065 workers and closed 23,673 bank branches, while earning profits of over €100 billion.

The banks have resorted to trade union-sanctioned redundancy schemes, known by their acronym ERE in Spanish. This year, Santander bank, the world’s 16th largest banking institution, dismissed 3,600 workers. BBVA, the 42nd largest bank in the world, with around €676 billion in assets, dismissed 2,935. CaixaBank, Spain's third-largest lender by market value, dismissed 6,452 workers. At Liberbank, management is preparing to dismiss 1,000 of its 9,660 staff.

The banks have been able to launch this offensive against jobs due above all to the role of the trade unions. These are not “workers’ organisations,” but a labor police force comprised of upper-middle-class executives tasked with isolating and suppressing the class struggle, inseparably integrated into the capitalist parties and state.

The announcements of these mass sackings follow a scheme now familiar to workers. First, management declares that hundreds or thousands of workers will be sacked. The unions then claim to be surprised and outraged by the numbers and start negotiations with management. In the final act of the whole well-staged process, an agreement is reached, with the initial number of job losses slightly reduced. The unions then present it as a great victory for the workers, while management claims the unions were “hard” negotiators but are satisfied with the result.

The unions then reap the rewards for their corporate services. For each ERE they receive a commission for each dismissal, which can reach up to 10 percent, in addition to fees they charge workers for legal advice. In short, the unions benefit in proportion to the number of jobs they destroy!

Ultimately, tens of thousands of jobs are destroyed through what the unions present as voluntary redundancies, financed at taxpayers’ expense. The working class ends up paying the state to subsidise corporations to fire workers through the medium of the trade unions! More and more higher-paid jobs are eliminated, a process that serves to cut wages and benefits for the entire working class.

The same thoroughly scripted process is now unfolding at Sabadell.

Two weeks ago, the main trade union at Sabadell Bank, Workers Commissions (CCOO), reacted to the mass redundancy announcement by stating that it was “disproportionate, unreal and an insult to the entire staff.”

CCOO was careful not to call a strike. Instead, it claimed, “there are alternatives, as the composition of the workforce allows undertaking a restructuring based on early retirement and voluntary redundancies.” In other words, the trade union is accepting the framework of mass redundancies even before negotiations begin! On Thursday, CCOO staged a small protest at Banco Sabadell headquarters in Oviedo, as the bank was presenting its annual “Economic Research” awards.

CCOO will not defend jobs. Barely a year has passed since they last negotiated a mass redundancy affecting 1,800 workers in December 2020. When the bank announced the plan, the union posted a statement welcoming it as a “positive plan.” CCOO stressed that the proposed conditions guarantee that there will be no forced dismissals, and that “a significant number of people can leave the bank with conditions far superior to those that have been offered up to now.”

Mass anger is developing against corporate-union redundancy schemes. Aware of this opposition, the unions are consciously setting out to sabotage workers struggles, ensuring that workers remain isolated from their class brothers and sisters—even within the same industrial sector.

Earlier this year, the General Union of Workers (UGT) and CCOO called a one-day strike at BBVA to let off steam in response to an ERE targeting over 3,000 workers. The strike was the first in 30 years. Facing mass support for the strike, UGT and CCOO quickly closed off further strike action, fearing that it would extend to other banks where layoffs were being executed, and accepted a 10 percent reduction of the workforce.

In June, the unions organised two strikes on two different dates at CaixaBank against the ERE affecting thousands of workers. Just a few weeks later, in early July, they agreed to the mass redundancy. CCOO posted a statement claiming that, “After months of arduous negotiations, workers’ labour representatives have managed to transform the wildest ERE in the history of the Spanish financial sector into the best of the moment. […] The 8,291 dismissals initially proposed by management has ended up being reduced to a maximum of 6,452 voluntary terminations.”

The working class can take forward its fight to preserve jobs and conditions only by breaking with the PSOE-Podemos government, the trade unions and their pseudo-left apologists. These include groups like the Morenoite Workers’ Revolutionary Current (CRT), which reacts to each betrayal by calling on workers to form a “united front” with the trade unions—the same organisations enforcing the attacks at the behest of big business.

This cascade of EREs marks the beginning of deeper attacks on the working class that will intensify in coming months. The banks are set to benefit from the European Union’s COVID-19 pandemic policy of prioritising profits over human life to pay for the 750-billion-euro bailout fund.

Spanish banks and corporations are to receive 144 billion euros. In exchange, the PSOE-Podemos government is enforcing its “herd immunity” policy—reopening the economy, sending workers back to non-essential work and forcing children back to school, which has already cost the lives of over 100,000 people and 4.9 million infections—nearly 10 percent of the population. Thus the banks managed to maintain profits of over €3 billion in 2020 and expect an 18 percent increase in 2021 over those obtained before the pandemic, in 2019.

Rising gas prices threaten a “winter of discontent” in Britain

Robert Stevens

The British media is filled with warnings that the huge rise in global gas prices will provoke a “winter of discontent” due to the desperate situation confronting millions of working people.

According to trade association Oil & Gas UK, the price of wholesale gas has more than quadrupled since this time last year. It has jumped by 250 percent since January and 70 percent since August.

The natural gas price hike is due to a combination of global events. Gas storage is low in most countries, particularly in Europe, and this has been exacerbated by the reopening of economies. Moreover, there is increased demand for gas in Asia, especially China, which has been moving away from coal and becoming more reliant on gas-fired power plants.

A view of empty shelves at a supermarket in London, Monday, Sept. 20, 2021. Retailers, manufacturers and food suppliers have reported disruptions due to a shortage of truck drivers linked to the pandemic and Britain's departure from the European Union, which has made it harder for many Europeans to work in the U.K. (AP Photo/Frank Augstein)

These shortages have attracted the attention of the financier parasites in the imperialist countries, who have made a killing in the natural gas futures markets. Investors have been slow to unwind speculative positions they developed previously amid supply bottlenecks, driving up gas prices. This orgy of speculation is driven by the multi-trillion pandemic bailouts by the Fed, European Central Bank, Bank of England, et al.

A growing narrative in the media pins the blame on the Putin administration in Russia. Typical was a Financial Times article on Monday headlined, “Why some see the hand of Russia in Europe’s gas price crisis”. The Guardian also referred to “Russian gas games” and complained, “As shipments of gas have turned from Europe towards China, flows of pipeline gas to Europe from Russia have failed to make up the shortfall.”

The situation in Britain is particularly acute, with its energy market overexposed to the gas shortage. Less than 1 percent of Europe’s stored gas is held by the UK—which has among the lowest gas storage capabilities in Europe.

Gas shortages have raised the spectre of a shutdown of large sections of the UK economy, including its food and drink sector, due to the crisis at fertiliser producer CF Industries. Its plants produce most of the carbon dioxide (CO2) used in food production and cold storage. Moreover CF's CO2 is used by nuclear power stations for cooling, and in the National Health Service for procedures including invasive surgery and endoscopy.

The US-owned company was forced to halt production at two of its factories in Cheshire and Stockton-on-Tees on Monday night due to soaring gas prices—for the second time in 24 hours. The firm supplies 60 percent of the UK’s food grade carbon dioxide supply. It’s impact on the meat industry was immediate as carbon dioxide is used when slaughtering pigs and chickens to stun them. Poultry producers forecast that if production was halted for any length of time it could result in shortages, including for Christmas, the most profitable time of year.

CF’s shutdown comes amid a worsening shortage of basic consumer goods in supermarkets, with UK supply chains hit due to Brexit, the coronavirus pandemic, and an unprecedented shortage of long-haul lorry drivers. On Monday, Richard Walker, managing director of frozen food retailer Iceland, warned, “This is no longer about whether Christmas will be OK. This is more about keeping the wheels turning and the lights on so we can actually get to Christmas.”

Production didn’t resume at CF until Tuesday afternoon, after its US-based chief executive, Tony Will, flew to Britain for crisis talks with Conservative government Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng. The talks saw the government agree to paying the entire operation costs of one of CF's plants for the next three weeks at a cost to the taxpayer of 'ten of millions' of pounds. Even so, it is estimated that it could still be three more days before the factories start producing CO2 again.

The entire cost of the gas price increase and the economic fallout will be borne by the working class, with millions facing a massive increase in their bills and a threat to their jobs.

Already this year, seven energy firms have collapsed, with over a million domestic households forced to seek a new supplier. It is estimated that the 60 or so UK energy companies could be reduced to 10 by the end of the year, with all smaller supplies going to the wall and the “Big Six” corporations making a killing. The risk of more energy suppliers collapsing increased yesterday as British wholesale gas prices surged by 16 percent, with markets closing at a record high.

It is expected that the larger suppliers who take on the customers from the collapsed firms will charge them the maximum allowed under the energy price cap—£1,277 a year for a typical household. Millions of the poorest households who use pre-paid meters will be hardest hit. The price increase takes place shortly before the planned end of the £20-a-week uplift in Britain’s main social security benefit, Universal Credit, affecting millions.

The Daily Mirror warned, “Ministers have insisted they will not remove the price cap on energy bills after wholesale gas prices soared. But the cap itself is being raised on October 1—followed by the £20-a-week benefit cut biting for the first time between October 13 and November 12, depending on people’s payment date.”

The newspaper cited research from the Resolution Foundation showing that “out of 4.4 million households on Universal Credit, a staggering 40% are on pre-payment meters—compared to just 10% of families not on benefits. Those customers will face a 13% or £153-a-year rise in the price cap—more than the £139 rise in the price cap more broadly.”

The price cap will likely be reviewed again next April, with the Times reporting, “analysts are predicting that the regulator will have to allow another significant increase in bills then, if wholesale prices remain as high as forecast.”

This social catastrophe unfolds as around a million workers are due to be forced off the Job Retention Scheme, under which the state pays a proportion of employees’ wages, at the start of October. Many of these workers will not have jobs to go back to.

Food costs rose by one percent last month and inflation is now approaching 5 percent—the highest level in a decade. Rent costs are up massively, with the average rent at £1,053 per month—an increase of almost 7 percent on the same time last year, and 2.3 percent up on August’s figure.

Since Larry Lamb, the former editor of Rupert Murdoch’s Sun, first borrowed from Shakespeare to warn of social crisis and working-class militancy in the late 1970s, the ruling class has warned of a “winter of discontent” in times of acute crisis. But the present situation is worse than anything that went before, with the UK already seeing a growing number of struggles by workers across all sectors of the economy against the destruction of pay, terms and conditions.

Writing in the Sun on Tuesday, Liam Halligan, the Economics and Business Editor of the right-wing GB News, warned, “As inflation rises this autumn, if wages don’t keep up—and for many they won’t—workers will get angry.”

Wealth-X report: Billionaire wealth surged during pandemic

Trévon Austin

A new report from research firm Wealth-X found that the global COVID-19 pandemic has intensified the growth of social inequality and witnessed an unprecedented accumulation of wealth among the most privileged layers in society. For the first time in human history, the world had more than 3,000 billionaires in 2020.

This amounts to a 13.4 percent increase in billionaires since 2019, currently totaling 3,204 individuals, with a median wealth of $1.9 billion. Billionaires’ collective wealth swelled to $10 trillion, a 5.7 percent increase from 2019.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos (AP Photo/John Locher, File)

“Viewed in aggregate, the global pandemic delivered a windfall to billionaire wealth, boosted by the flood of monetary stimulus and swelling profits in key sectors that coined a new wave of younger, self-made billionaires,” the report said.

Billionaire wealth has increased steadily since 1990, but one-third of these wealth gains have occurred during the pandemic. US billionaire wealth increased nineteen-fold over the last 31 years, from an inflation adjusted $240 billion in 1990 to $4.7 trillion in 2021.

The parasitic growth in wealth was most pronounced in the United States, the center of world capitalism. The ranks of billionaires in all of North America grew by 17.5 percent from last year. In fact, North America’s 980 billionaires account for 30.6% of the world’s billionaires.

The US was the top billionaire country in 2020. According to a report from Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) and the Institute for Policy Studies Program on Inequality (IPS), American billionaires have seen their collective wealth surge by 62 percent, approximately $1.8 billion, since March 18, 2020. Following North America, Asia saw its number of growing by 16.5%, for a grand total of 883. Asia’s billionaires saw their collective net worth grow to $2.6 trillion, a 7.5% increase.

The good fortune of this tiny layer of the world’s population over the past 18 months is all the more appalling when contrasted to the growing immiseration and impoverishment of billions of workers around the globe. As a few thousand billionaires amassed enormous sums of wealth, workers around the world lost $3.7 trillion in earnings during the pandemic, according to a report from the International Labor Organization (ILO).

The report estimated an 8.8 percent year-by-year decline in global working hours from 2019 to 2020, equivalent to 255 million full-time jobs. This is approximately four times greater than the recorded loss during the 2008-09 global financial crisis.

The lost working hours were due to massive cuts in working hours and unprecedented levels of job loss, impacting some 114 million people and their families. Significantly, 71 percent of these job losses came from “inactivity,” meaning at least 81 million people around the world left the labor market because they could not find work.

Women have been more adversely affected by the pandemic than men. Globally, employment losses for women stand at 5 percent, versus 3.9 percent for men. Women were much more likely than men to drop out of the labor market, most commonly due to childcare concerns. Younger workers have also been devastated. Employment fell by 8.7 percent among workers aged 15-24 years old, compared to 3.7 percent for adults. Generation Z, the oldest of whom is 23, has become the most unemployed generation and is on track to experience the same financial struggles as millennials.

In the US alone, the official poverty rate rose by 1.0 percent from 2019 to 2020, according to the US Census Bureau. The poverty rate grew to 11.4 percent, marking the first increase in the official poverty rate after five years of consecutive decline. In 2020, there were 37.2 million people in poverty, approximately 3.3 million more than in 2019.

At the same time, median household income in 2020 dropped by 2.9 percent from the previous year. This is the first statistically significant decline in median household income since 2011.

Over 86 million Americans have lost jobs, almost 38 million have been sickened by the virus, and over 675,000 have died from it. Between 2019 and 2020, the real median earnings of all workers fell by 1.2 percent. The total number of people reporting earnings decreased by about 3 million, while the number of full-time, year-round workers decreased by approximately 13.7 million.

The chief obstacle to solving the world’s burning social questions—whether the devastating impact of COVID-19 or the widespread growth of poverty—is the private profit interests of the capitalist ruling class. Every action these vultures have taken in response to the pandemic has been driven by the effort to protect the wealth and privileges of a few. To save lives and avert even further disaster, workers must fight for a policy based on the interests of the working class, the vast majority of society.