New Zealand’s COVID-19 outbreak grows as schools reopen

Tom Peters

On Wednesday, schools reopened in Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city, for all remaining primary and secondary students. The top three high school year levels returned to in-person classes late last month. Early childcare centres can now increase the number of children in each group from 10 to a maximum of 20.

A COVID-19 testing centre in Wellington (Source: Twitter)

The Labour Party-led government is racing to dismantle the city’s lockdown as COVID-19 continues to spread rapidly. Last week, retail businesses reopened in the city. Now hundreds of thousands of school staff and students have returned to classrooms, including under-12s who are ineligible for vaccination.

Over the past week, nearly 200 infections were detected per day. There are a total of 4,300 active cases in the community, most of them in Auckland, and 76 people in hospital.

This is up from just 272 cases on September 22, when the government began easing the lockdown, sending hundreds of thousands of Aucklanders back to work. In early October, at the behest of big business and against the advice of scientists, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced that the country would “transition” away from its previous policy of eliminating COVID-19 from the community.

The deadly virus has since spread to many parts of the country. There are 214 active cases in the Waikato region and 34 in Northland. Today, a suspected infection was reported in the capital, Wellington. Cases have been detected in recent days in Tauranga, Mount Maunganui, Taupo, Thames, Rotorua, Stratford, Levin, Masterton, Palmerston North and Christchurch. None of these places have been locked down.

A six-week lockdown in Waikato ended on Wednesday, with Ardern declaring that the outbreak there was “contained.” Waikato reported 17 more infections on Thursday and 30 today.

Education Minister Chris Hipkins said last week “the risk of reopening schools is outweighed by the benefits of kids re-engaging with their learning face-to-face in this context.” In fact, the decision has nothing to do with children’s wellbeing, but is aimed at forcing parents to go back to work in the interests of corporate profit.

Schools have proven to be major centres for the spread of infection, both in NZ and internationally. This month alone, at least 17 Auckland schools and 3 early childcare centres have reported cases of COVID-19. Most responded with temporary closures.

Claims that children are not seriously at risk from the coronavirus are false. In the United States, more than 700 children have died of COVID-19 and tens of thousands have been hospitalized. In Britain, 110 children have died and more than 69,000 have developed Long COVID, a debilitating illness which can be associated with serious damage to the lungs, heart, kidneys and the brain.

As in other countries, the New Zealand unions are working hand-in-hand with the government to sow complacency and to suppress opposition to the reopening. NZEI Te Riu Roa, the primary teachers union, posted on Facebook on November 11: “The news that schools can start to ease their way back to in-person from next Wednesday is a great sign that we’re getting this virus under control again”—a statement that flies in the face of reality.

The Post-Primary Teachers’ Association stated on November 10 that the government should “provide clearer, sharper, national guidelines for all schools, particularly around responses to COVID-19 cases occurring in the school community.” In October, the union described the reopening of schools as “reckless,” but it has not organised any industrial action against the decision.

Most Auckland primary students will return to school for reduced hours, with social distancing and other mitigation measures being left up to schools to organise. Masks are mandatory in Auckland and Waikato for schoolchildren from Year 4 (ages 7-8) up.

Stan, a parent in Levin, told the World Socialist Web Site following the announcement of a positive case in his town: “I am most concerned about under-12s that can’t be vaccinated. Delta is more contagious, lands more people in hospital and affects younger people.”

Stan noted that local school students are not wearing masks, and said “the government’s shift from elimination means that people are taking precautions less seriously and anti-vaxxers have become more vocal.”

Susan Bates, an early childhood education (ECE) teacher, researcher and co-founder of the Teachers Advocacy Group, told the WSWS that she is currently surveying ECE teachers on Facebook about their concerns. Out of more than 100 responses so far, a majority do not feel safe in their workplace.

She criticised the Ministry of Education and NZEI for providing no guidelines or information about ventilation, air filters and other mitigation measures for ECEs. She also questioned whether all cases detected in ECEs were being reported publicly, noting that she had received unconfirmed reports of infections which have not appeared in the media.

Bates welcomed the government’s decision to mandate vaccination for teachers, but said “the fact is that children still aren’t vaccinated, and they’re also likely to be asymptomatic carriers.” The Delta variant can easily be passed on by children to adults, even if children do not show symptoms.

Bates said governments internationally were “trying to normalize mass death” and this must not be allowed to happen in New Zealand. Some of the recently reported deaths in Auckland appeared to be middle aged and elderly people with underlying health problems “left to fend for themselves.”

She added that authorities were “not focusing on our vulnerable communities.” Māori and Pacific islanders are both less likely to be vaccinated, and more likely to suffer from underlying health problems, often related to poverty, putting them at much greater risk of severe illness from COVID-19.

Currently, just 67 percent of all New Zealanders are fully vaccinated; about 82 percent of the eligible population, and just 63 percent of eligible Māori. The government says once 90 percent of people aged over 12 are vaccinated it will cease to use lockdowns to suppress COVID-19. Preparations are underway for Auckland to completely reopen and travel restrictions in and out of the city to be eased next month.

Even if the target is met, it would leave one in four people unvaccinated. Speaking to Radio NZ on Wednesday, epidemiologist Michael Baker warned against the “feeling of exceptionalism in New Zealand about this virus.” He noted that Singapore, with a similar population size and 86 percent of the total population vaccinated, considerably higher than New Zealand’s rate, is seeing thousands of cases and more than 10 deaths per day.

New modelling by the research institute Te Pūnaha Matatini, commissioned by the government, shows that in a worst case scenario after restrictions are lifted, New Zealand could reach 16,000 cases per week by January, with around 800 needing hospital care.

South Asian leaders join other heads of state to back bogus climate targets at COP26

Vijith Samarasinghe

The 26th Conference of Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention for Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Glasgow, dragged to an end on November 13, with speeches at the “World Leaders Summit” demonstrating the event to be a cover for the ongoing capitalist pillage of the planet.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi speaking in Houston in 2019. (AP Photo/Michael Wyke)

The more than 100 heads of states attending the two-week conference made pledges that they had no intention of keeping, for goals that will make no dent in the catastrophic climate-change trends predicted by scientists. Even the bourgeois media and commentators admitted it was an historic failure.

Tens of thousands marched in Glasgow condemning the “green wash,” while globally scientists, youth, students and others accurately denounced the event as a charade. Addressing protesters in Glasgow, climate-activist Greta Thunberg declared: “It’s not a secret now that COP26 is a failure, it has just become a PR event.”

In line with their international counterparts, South Asian leaders added their voices to the chorus of false promises. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Sri Lankan President Gotabhaya Rajapakse, Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheik Hasina and Nepal Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba addressed the event live. Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan, however, opted out at the last minute citing “domestic issues.”

In a speech hailed by the mainstream media as a “game changer,” Modi declared that India was “the only big economy which has delivered in letter and spirit on the Paris Commitment [the previous CoP meeting resolution].” He went on to claim that “despite being 17 percent of the world’s population, India’s responsibility for emissions is only 5 percent.”

India’s “achievements,” Modi said, were that the country was fourth in the world in terms of installed renewable energy, its railways were targeted to reach “net zero” carbon emissions by 2030, and the government’s LED bulb campaign is projected to reduce 40 million tons of carbon emissions per annum. Modi said India would reach net zero by 2070.

The rest of his speech was dedicated to ludicrously portraying ancient religious texts as a policy guide, and promoting the so-called Lifestyle for Environment collective action movement, which places responsibility for the climate crisis on the masses. “A mass movement of an environmentally conscious life-style,” he declared, “is what is needed for mindful and deliberate utilisation, instead of mindless and destructive consumption.”

Modi’s speech was filled with deceit. India’s low per capita carbon emissions are not due to any sustainable or environmentally responsible practices adopted by profit-hungry Indian capitalism. Instead they are a reflection of the abject poverty of the masses, who are deprived of the most basic energy needs and requirements.

India is currently the fourth largest emitter of carbon to the atmosphere, after China, the US and the European Union. Even by conservative estimates, its annual emissions are close to 3 billion tons of carbon dioxide. Much of these emissions are from its predominantly coal-based power infrastructure and the diesel-guzzling buses and trucks that constitute India’s highly inefficient road-based transport system.

The country’s meagre reductions in emissions in the industrial sector, and its increase in the non-fossil fuel fraction of the national energy mix by a few percentage points, are nowhere near the emission cuts required to reverse climate change. Modi’s pledge of attaining net zero by 2070 is contemptible, even by the much-criticised target of the Paris commitments, which required net zero to be achieved globally by 2050.

In fact, the very concept of “net zero,” according to three leading environment scientists—James Dyke, Robert Watson and Wolfgang Knorr—is a “trap,” based on the untested theoretical possibility of offsetting carbon emissions in one place, with carbon removal elsewhere and using measures such as tree planting or carbon capture technologies (see: The Conversation). The concept, they write, diminishes the urgency of curbing gross carbon emission. “Offsetting” paves the way for various bargains and “market mechanisms,” such as carbon trading.

Modi’s fig-leaf pledges are bogus and have no possibility of being realised. A week before the summit, Indian authorities were refusing to give a commitment on net zero. The 2070 net zero target was a last-minute addition to Modi’s script, to try and appease those imperialist countries that were using CoP26 as a platform to wage diplomatic war against China and Russia, for their alleged lack of commitment to the climate issue. President Biden publicly criticised the Chinese leadership “for not showing up” to a summit on such a “gigantic issue.”

As Modi was speaking at CoP26, his government halved taxes on petroleum fuels, citing the need to “further spur the overall economic cycle,” in other words, to boost corporate profits. In October, his government was scrambling to increase coal production by any means, to avert a looming power generation shortage. Plans are also underway to significantly expand the country’s coal extraction capacity. Indian capitalism is looking at an exponential future growth of fossil fuel use, not a reduction!

India’s capital Delhi descended into yet another horrific episode of air pollution this month, demonstrating what the future holds for the South Asian masses if the current destruction of the atmosphere continues. The Air Quality Index (a combined measure of key pollutants) reached 499 on a scale of 500. Five major coal power plants around the city had to be shut down to prevent a further deterioration, and the Commission of Air Quality Management ordered schools to be closed indefinitely.

Although winter air pollution in Delhi was conveniently attributed, in the past, to post-harvest crop residue burning by poor farmers in the hinterlands, it is now evident that the real culprits are the power sector, major industries and traffic. Apart from the tiny minority of ultra-rich, who can afford to have air purifiers at their offices and homes, more than 20 million residents of Delhi are being forced to breathe toxic fumes for weeks to come.

Speeches by other South Asian leaders to COP26 were similarly bogus. Sri Lankan President Gotabhaya Rajapakse falsely promised that the island-nation would reach net zero by 2050 and said that Colombo would increase its renewable energy component of the national energy mix to 70 percent by 2030.

Rajapakse even claimed that his government’s disastrous agro-chemical ban would help curb carbon emissions. In fact, Colombo’s import ban on agro-chemicals, which is a desperate attempt to control the country’s massive balance of payments deficit, has devastated small farmers and posed an unprecedented threat to food security. Instead of decreasing, this will increase Sri Lanka’s contribution to carbon emissions exponentially, due to greater food imports and the rural to urban migration of affected farmers.

Both Rajapakse and Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheik Hasina used COP26 to appeal for financial support and investment for climate mitigation and adaptation projects.

Confronting the worst economic crises since the end of British colonial rule, the ruling classes in South Asia see investment in renewable energy projects, and climate adaptation measures, not as essential steps to save the planet’s ecosystem but as financial lifelines for their failing business interests.

In the insane logic of capitalism, any misery of the masses can be turned into a profitable undertaking for the bourgeoisie.

According to the predictions of climate scientists, South Asia is one of the most climate vulnerable regions in the world. Millions will soon lose their land and livelihoods as sea levels rise, while hundreds of thousands more will face death and destitution due to extreme weather events.

Reversal of the imminent global calamity posed by climate change requires revolutionary changes in industry, transport, agriculture and human consumption patterns. Such changes are not possible without a revolutionary social and economic reorganisation, which eliminates the capitalist profit system, with all strategic production and natural resources placed under the democratic and scientific control of the working class.

3.6 million UK families worse off after budget cuts

Simon Whelan

The £20 per week cut to the Universal Credit (UC) social security benefit, together with changes made to the way UC payments are “tapered” by Boris Johnson’s Conservative government, will leave 3.6 million families across the UK worse off.

This is the analysis of last month’s budget by the Resolution Foundation (RF). Changes to UC mean 40,000 fewer people in poverty within working families, but 160,000 more people in poverty in unemployed families, according to the think tank’s analysis.

A UK Jobcentre (Creative Comments)

UC was introduced from 2013 as a combination/replacement for several different previous welfare benefits. The taper rate is the amount of UC withdrawn for every pound a claimant earns through work. The work allowance, the amount some claimants earn before the taper is triggered, has been raised by £500 a year. The taper rate was cut by 8 pence from 63p to 55p. The £2 billion a year change means working benefit claimants keep 45p of every extra pound they earn, instead of 37p.

Of the measures, RF senior economist Karl Handscomb said, “These changes are not enough to offset the damage from the recent £20 a week cut to Universal Credit. While 1.3 million families on Universal Credit will be better off, almost three-quarters of UC families will see their incomes fall this autumn as the cost-of-living crunch bites. Universal Credit has performed extremely well during the crisis. But the recent cut in support means that our basic safety net remains far too weak to support families facing economic bad news.”

According to separate research conducted by the foundation, fiscal measures introduced in just the two years since Johnson came to power, including the recent budget, will increase the tax burden by £3,000 a year per household. The foundation found that the changes to the amount families can keep from their earnings if they are on UC only partially offsets the effect of withdrawing the £20-a-week boost put in place at the beginning of the pandemic. On average, recipients would lose £800 a year, the RF calculated. The £3,000 figure produced by the RF includes business taxes, which are regularly passed on to consumers.

The RF focuses on measuring and improving the living standards for those on low to middle incomes. It conducts research across a range of economic and social policy areas, including incomes, inequality and poverty; jobs, skills and pay; housing; wealth and assets; tax and welfare; public spending and the state, and economic growth.

The government removed the UC uplift payment, along with the jobs furlough scheme, which supported millions of workers, on the basis of lies that the pandemic is as good as over.

The UC £20 cut was the largest one-off reduction made to welfare spending in British history, removing a collective £6 billion from the poorest. Johnson’s savage cuts are worse than the Tories’ 1988 slashing of housing benefits and even the 1931 cut to unemployment benefit carried out during the Great Depression by the National Government under former Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald.

The entire edifice of UC is based on workers receiving poverty level wages. The tapering system is effectively a tax on the lowest paid. Approximately six million people receive UC payments in households containing 3.4 million children. UC is a punitive system, offering minimal financial support, often delayed, and reduced by cruel financial sanctions, payment reductions and financial caps. The benefit is pitched at such a low level that cutting the £20 uplift increase pushes millions of people, including children, into desperate financial circumstances.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation estimates that the £20 cut will on its own force half a million more people into poverty. Approximately 40 percent of those claiming UC are employed at poverty level wages and receive the benefit because their earned income does not cover basic living costs like utility bills, food and rent.

Cutting the UC uplift and reducing the “taper rate” will still mean a further 120,000 people driven into poverty. The Citizens Advice Bureau warned that the taper rate change does not “cushion the blow” of the £20 cut for those still looking for work, or the 1.7 million unable to work because of disability, health issues or caring responsibilities.

Approximately 73 percent of UK families on UC in 2022-23 will be worse off, with more than a quarter (27 percent), marginally better off. The RF says over half of families will be worse off by more than £1,000 a year when everything is factored in, and 75 percent will see a drop in income.

Millions of workers are constantly being churned between states of poorly paid part time or full-time employment, and unemployment.

The super exploitation and wretched low pay experienced by the working class negates last month’s increase in the National Living Wage (NLW). For those on zero hours contracts, what matters as much as the hourly rate, is the number of hours worked. Weeks with no work/no hours or too few hours, and therefore reduced/no wages, can plunge families into debt, especially when the benefit system is deliberately rendered laboriously slow to respond to changes in workers’ status.

The NLW rose but 55p in each extra pound is lost to workers as a result of changes to UC. With the end of the £20 weekly uplift, the RF found that despite the minimum wage rise the lowest paid fifth of households will still lose £280 a year.

The attack on workers’ income is taking place amid conditions of rapidly rising prices and wages failing to keep pace with rising inflation. On Wednesday, it was announced that the Consumer Prices Index measure of annual inflation rose to 4.2 percent in October. This was sharply up from 3.1 percent in September and is its highest level since 2011. The Retail Price Index measure of inflation, which includes housing costs, is already just short of 5 percent.

UK household incomes will be down approximately £1,000 next year, according to earlier RF analysis, as rising prices combine with welfare benefit cuts and rising taxes. The Institute for Public Policy Research says a typical family will lose £500 a year because of the planned increase in national insurance taxes and an expected 5 percent rise in council tax.

US drug overdose deaths surged to 100,000 in first year of pandemic

Kate Randall

More than 100,000 people died of drug overdoses in the United States during the 12-month period ending April 2021, according to new provisional data published Wednesday by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

This staggering number, a dismal record for human misery, coincides roughly with the first year of the coronavirus pandemic. COVID-19 killed about 509,000 people during that same timeframe, from May 2020 to April 2021.

The drug overdose death toll jumped 29.5 percent from the same period a year earlier and has nearly doubled over the past five years. Synthetic opioids, mainly fentanyl, caused 64 percent of these overdose deaths, up nearly 50 percent from the year before, according to the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics.

Sue Howland, right, a member of the Quick Response Team which visits everyone who overdoses to offer help, checks in on Betty Thompson, 65, who struggles with alcohol addiction, at her apartment in Huntington, W.Va., Wednesday, March 17, 2021. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

Fentanyl was introduced in the 1960s as an intravenous anesthetic. Cheaper, legally or illegally produced fentanyl is often mixed with other drugs like heroin, cocaine or marijuana by drug dealers and sold to users who may not be aware of its presence.

Increases in overdose death counts were almost universal across states, while varying in magnitude. Year-over-year increases of 50 percent were seen in California, Tennessee, Louisiana, Mississippi, West Virginia and Kentucky. Increases in deaths in the range of 40 percent were seen in Washington state, Oregon, Nevada, Colorado, Minnesota, Alaska, Nebraska, Virginia and the Carolinas.

Although the numbers were small, cases in Vermont increased by 85 percent during the year studied. Only New Hampshire, New Jersey and South Dakota saw overdose deaths drop.

Overdose deaths from methamphetamine and other psychostimulants also increased dramatically, up 48 percent in the year ending April 2021 compared to the year before, accounting for more than a quarter of all overdose deaths in the 12-month period studied. While previously fentanyl had been more widely used on the East Coast and methamphetamines on the West Coast, both drugs are now proliferating nationwide. Deaths from cocaine and prescription pain medication have also increased, although not as drastically.

The latest data from the CDC suggests that drug overdose deaths now kill slightly less than Alzheimer’s disease, which claimed about 121,000 lives in 2019, and slightly more than diabetes, about 88,000 lives. Heart disease was the leading cause of death in 2019, killing nearly 660,000 people, while cancer killed nearly 600,000.

Referring to the coming together of the COVID-19 pandemic and drug overdose deaths, Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, told CNN, “In a crisis of this magnitude, those already taking drugs may take higher amounts and those in recovery may relapse. It’s a phenomenon we’ve seen and perhaps could have predicted.” The rise of the synthetic opioid fentanyl, which is as much as 100 times more powerful than morphine, has exacerbated this deadly explosion of opioid deaths.

The death toll of 100,000 Americans from overdoses was more than deaths from car crashes and guns combined. This number was up almost 30 percent from the 78,000 deaths the previous year and more than double since 2015. Most of these deaths occurred among people aged 25 to 55, the so-called prime of life.

By contrast, of the more than 787,500 who have died from COVID-19 to date in the US according to Worldometer, three-quarters have been over the age of 65. It is likely that among American adults under 50 years of age, more died from opioids last year than from the worst pandemic the world has seen in a century.

The COVID-19 pandemic has created a perfect storm for the proliferation of drug overdose deaths. In the early stages of the pandemic, when lockdowns, school and business closures, and mask mandates were put in place in many states, resources to treat substance abuse were scaled back. Many suffering from addiction, particularly young adults, were isolated from their support systems and unable to access treatment. Many were left to overdose alone with no one with them to administer Narcan (naloxone) or call for help.

However, the loosening of restrictions—which has allowed the coronavirus to spread and kill—has not resulted in an improvement in access to care for substance abuse. “Even if COVID went away tomorrow, we’d still have a problem. What will have an impact is dramatic improvement to access to treatment,” Dr. Andrew Kolodny, medical director of opioid policy research at the Brandeis University Heller School for Social Policy and Management, told CNN. “These are deaths in people with a preventable, treatable condition,” he said “The United States continues to fail on both fronts, both on preventing opioid addiction and treating addiction.”

Due to the chaotic, unplanned character of the for-profit health care system and lack of resources, there is also no coordinated program to distribute naloxone (Narcan) widely and at no cost to health departments nationwide. This is also the case with fentanyl test strips, which can tell a user if the deadly opioid is present.

Substance abuse continues to be stigmatized in the US. Those suffering from addiction are chastised by the right and those in authority for their moral failings while programs and treatments are starved for cash. Presidential candidate Biden pledged to “Hold accountable big pharmaceutical companies, executives and others responsible for their role in triggering the opioid crisis,” but this was just hot air.

Lawsuits against such legal drug dealers have yielded a slap on the wrist or less. Earlier this month, a California judge said he would rule against several large counties in the state that accused four drug makers—Johnson & Johnson, Teva, Endo International and AbbVie—of fueling the US opioid epidemic, saying they failed to prove their $59 billion case.

In August, a bankruptcy judge approved a settlement by OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family that the company values at more than $10 billion—a drop in the bucket for the mega-wealthy drug company owners and cold comfort for the millions of Americans who have suffered due to their marketing of deadly opioids.

Over the past three years, the Department of Health and Human Services, through the Health Resources and Services Administration, has invested a paltry $384 million in community-based grants and technical assistance on prevention, treatment and recovery services in rural communities to fight opioid use and other substance abuse disorders.

Speaking on the release of the new overdose death figures, President Biden claimed, “We are strengthening prevention, promoting harm reduction, expanding treatment, and supporting people in recovery, as well as reducing the supply of harmful substances in our communities. And we won’t let up.” He added, “Together we will turn the tide on this epidemic.”

Biden’s false and cynical statements cannot hide the reality. The United States will no more “turn the tide” in opioid deaths than on COVID-19 deaths, although in both cases, there are practical solutions at hand, if the necessary resources were provided.

Instead, the White House turns a blind eye to the enormity of the crisis. Anne Milgram, head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, said, “This year alone, DEA has seen enough fentanyl to provide every member of the United States population with a lethal dose and we are still seizing more fentanyl each and every day.”

In a call with reporters Wednesday, in support of his anti-China campaign Biden attempted to shift the blame for the opioid crisis from the US to Mexican drug cartels sourcing drug-making chemicals from China.

Contrary to suggestions that the surging overdose deaths have come because health care resources have been diverted from substance abuse treatment to the pandemic, the US ruling elite and the profit-based health care system are responsible for both catastrophes. Those dying from drug overdoses and those cut down by COVID-19 are both victims of the homicidal policies of corporate America and its political representatives.

“Catastrophic” flooding cuts transportation links, forces thousands to evacuate homes in British Columbia

Roger Jordan

Floodwaters described as “once in a century” and “catastrophic” have engulfed wide swathes of southwestern British Columbia since Sunday night as the result of a record rainfall, attributable to an “atmospheric river.” Many Fraser Valley communities saw a month’s worth of precipitation fall in just two days.

Thousands of people have been forced to flee their homes, and damage to highway and rail networks has left Greater Vancouver, with a population of over 2.5 million, effectively cut off from the rest of Canada by land.

BC Premier John Horgan declared a 14-day state of emergency at a press conference Wednesday afternoon, noting that he expects the death toll to rise over the coming days. Horgan also requested federal assistance from the Canadian Armed Forces to provide services to thousands of evacuees and restore drinking water to communities whose supplies have been contaminated by the floods.

Abbotsford, BC inundated by flood waters on Tuesday (Credit: City of Abbotsford)

The floods are the product of climate change, which is at the root of a series of extreme weather events and other disasters that have devastated western Canada, and especially BC, in recent months.

An unprecedented heat dome in late June led to the deaths of over 600 BC residents. High temperatures and drought subsequently contributed to one of the province’s worst wildfire seasons ever. All of these natural disasters have been exacerbated by the utter failure of the provincial New Democratic Party and federal Liberal governments to take preventive measures and invest in crumbling infrastructure.

The current official death toll of one, a woman crushed in her car by a mudslide, is likely to increase considerably. Two other people are officially reported missing. Several areas of the province are only accessible by helicopter, making it likely that further casualties are yet to be discovered. Merritt (population 7,000) is largely underwater after authorities ordered all residents to leave because the town’s water plant has been inundated with flood waters. A gas line providing heat to residents in Princeton was cut, with utility FortisBC declaring that it will not be up and running again before the weekend.

Although the exact number of evacuees across the province is unknown, at least 20 evacuation centres have been set up. The city of Hope is hosting 1,100 evacuees alone.

The four highways linking the Lower Mainland to the BC Interior have been blocked by landslides, which trapped over 270 people in their cars Monday night. The provincial New Democratic Party government announced late Tuesday that a lane for emergency services traffic was open on Highway 7, which runs parallel to the Trans-Canada Highway. Two rail lines used to transport goods to the Port of Vancouver have also been severed, with one blocked by a derailed CN Rail train. While CN Rail and CP Rail say they hope to re-establish services within days, some of the highway damage could take months to repair. Pictures are already circulating of empty shelves in supermarkets across the province, driven primarily by panic buying.

A woman cleans out her flood-damaged home Wednesday, Nov. 17, 2021, in Sumas, Wash. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson)

City authorities in Abbotsford, which lies in the Fraser Valley about 70 kilometers east of Vancouver, issued an urgent evacuation order late Tuesday for residents in Sumas Prairie, a major agricultural area close to the US border. The low-lying region is threatened with inundation due to the imminent failure of the Barrowtown pump station, which is struggling to keep floodwaters from the Fraser River out of the Sumas Lake Canal. The pump station would most likely have already failed were it not for the efforts of 300 local volunteers and emergency services personnel, who built a 25-meter-long dam to protect the site.

Over 180 people were rescued overnight by air and water from Sumas Prairie. The region, where at least 300 people remained stranded as of Wednesday morning, accounts for about half of BC’s dairy and poultry products.

Gareth, a farmer from BC, told the World Socialist Web Site, “In September, we get on average two inches of rain, but this year we got six. The west coast of Canada will have drier summers and wetter winters due to the ice melting, jet streams slowing, and weather systems not moving through because of our ever-increasing emissions of green house gases and the resulting hotter temperatures.

“That was certainly the case as we experienced an unprecedented heat dome with record highs. This fall, in my 50 years, I have never seen rain this hard or for this long. As a farmer, these extremes are going to make growing food much more difficult.”

The floods and landslides were triggered by unprecedented rainfall that began on Saturday. Some areas, including Hope, recorded as much rain within three days as they typically see throughout the entire month of November. In Vancouver, a sea barge ran aground at English Bay due to high winds.

The unprecedented rainfall was caused by an “atmospheric river,” a dense column of water vapour that carries moisture from the tropics towards the poles. As it travels, the moisture falls as rain. Although atmospheric rivers are not unprecedented, climate change is increasing their sizes and making them more likely to dump large quantities of water over brief periods of time.

Criticism of the NDP government is building, which failed to send out an emergency warning to residents in the affected areas despite forecasts having projected the impending storm. BC is the only Canadian province never to have used the Alert Ready system, a nationwide emergency service that allows governments to send messages directly to cell phones. The Northwest Territories, which has less than 1 percent of BC’s population, has used the Alert Ready system four times this year alone, including for flash floods. All that BC Public Safety Minister Mike Farnworth could offer as an excuse Monday was, “It is in place for tsunamis. We have publicly said it’s in place for next season’s fire season.”

Beyond the lack of a coordinated response in the face of an “atmospheric river” that was forecasted, scientists have attacked the political establishment for its failure to listen to their repeated warnings about the likelihood of such extreme events becoming ever more common.

Peter Wood, a scientist who produced a recent report on the link between clearcut logging and community damage due to floods and wildfires, told the Guardian, “This is exactly what the best available science has predicted for years. We know the outcome when you log steep slopes…You reach sort of a tipping point where the forest is no longer able to provide that moderating service of controlling flow of water.” Wood added, “Over the last couple days, I’ve been looking at the areas that have been particularly hard hit, and it happens to coincide with some of the communities that have been logged the heaviest.”

Repeated warnings have also gone unheeded regarding the government’s failure to take precautionary measures against wildfires and the risk of flooding. Controlled burns of shrubs and vegetation can help limit forest fires and conserve older, larger trees, which can in turn act as a barrier against water flowing off slopes. But many of these programs were slashed during the austerity budgets imposed by the BC Liberal governments of Gordon Campbell and Christy Clark.

The NDP, which returned to power in 2017, has retained and even boasted about its commitment to a no less rigorous regime of fiscal discipline. The NDP’s callous indifference towards the plight faced by the population due to increasingly erratic weather patterns was underscored during last summer’s heat dome, when Premier Horgan notoriously declared that the hundreds of deaths were “a part of life” and that everyone ought to take “personal responsibility” when extreme weather events occur.

The fate of the area around Lytton, a small town in the Interior that made headlines around the world during the summer when it was almost burned to the ground by a wildfire, illustrates the close connection between out-of-control forest fires and an increased danger of flooding. A section of the Trans-Canada Highway was washed away by the Thompson River east of Lytton Monday.

The refusal to invest in basic infrastructure and preventative measures is being graphically exposed by the disaster unfolding near Abbotsford. The danger posed by flooding to the province’s prime agricultural region was identified in a March 2021 report from the Fraser Basin Council, which warned that the dyke system protecting the Sumas Prairie from the Fraser River was at risk of failure. The Council estimated the cost of an inundation of the region to be anywhere from $20 billion to $30 billion.

The devastation wrought across Canada’s third most populous province over recent days, and the crisis it is producing for the supply of foodstuffs and other basic necessities, provides a dire warning as to the urgency of a comprehensive international program to tackle climate change, and invest in infrastructure to protect people in Canada and around the world from ever more extreme natural disasters.

The last year alone has witnessed horrendous flooding in Europe, which claimed over 200 lives in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands; massive wildfires in Siberia which sent smoke to the North Pole for the first time on record; devastating flooding in New York City and New Jersey that drowned workers in their apartments; and the Texas winter storm which knocked out the state’s power grid and killed hundreds more.

But the ruling elite in every country has shown itself entirely unwilling and incapable of taking any measures that challenge the prerogative of the super-rich and big business to acquire vast profits. The globally coordinated strategy necessary to tackle climate change is inconceivable under conditions in which the ruling class in every country stokes geopolitical rivalries and military tensions, as was shown at the recently-concluded COP26 summit in Glasgow.

Major staffing shortages at schools throughout the US due to COVID-19 pandemic

Chase Lawrence

As winter approaches, the COVID-19 pandemic is accelerating in the US and schools coast to coast are experiencing major staffing shortages. As a result of widespread infections and a mass exodus of teachers from the profession, roughly 40 percent of all district leaders and principals describe their current staff shortages as “severe” or “very severe,” according to a survey by EdWeek Research Center conducted last month.

The entire fall semester has been utterly chaotic for educators, coinciding with the Delta surge of the pandemic that has killed over 150,000 Americans. The latest data from the American Association of Pediatrics released Monday showed another 122,000 official infections among children, an increase of 22 percent from two weeks ago. The AAP report indicates 11 additional deaths last week, bringing the cumulative number of child deaths to 625.

A student wears a face mask while doing work at his desk at the Post Road Elementary School, in White Plains, N.Y., Oct. 1, 2020. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)

The situation is most dire across the Midwest and Northwest, as well as some states in the West. One of the worst affected states is Michigan, where schools were once again the number one source of COVID-19 outbreaks last week. Overall cases in the state are quickly approaching record highs, with the number of active cases now exceeding all previous points in the pandemic at over 319,000. This number is over 25,000 more than the nearly 294,000 active cases at the last peak on April 25.

According to the Michigan state government’s website, schools account for half of all active outbreaks in the state, or 480 out of a total 821. Outbreaks forcing an end to in-person classes or the outright canceling of classes have been widespread .

Waterford Mott High School in Oakland County, Michigan, went virtual recently due to illness and a staffing shortage. A local ABC affiliate cited a letter from the school’s principal, Craig Blomquist, to families of students explaining that the building was closed until next Monday due to staffing shortages. The district stated, “like many industries, so too is the education field in need of more personnel in almost every capacity. Here at Waterford School District, we are actively hiring in many positions, for both full and part time, for permanent building substitute teachers, as well as transportation and food service workers.”

Galesburg-Augusta Community Schools in Galesburg also canceled classes for next Monday and Tuesday, citing a high number of absences due to illness and a shortage of certified teachers.

Grand Rapids Public Schools (GRPS) has canceled two days of school in December for “COVID-19 wellness days,” which will not be made up later in the school year. GRPS spokesperson John Helmholdt stated in a district email, “This school year has been particularly trying as we are facing a historic teacher and support staff shortage crisis coupled with the continued global pandemic.”

Helmholdt explained that the “COVID-19 wellness days” are being taken for fear of schools being shut down from a further hemorrhaging of teaching and other staff: “Our teachers are doubling up classes, principals are teaching every single day, we’re having to send our curriculum team into buildings to teach on almost a daily basis. At this point, we’re trying to fill the gaps and so we knew there was a need for these wellness days, and we wanted to find the best time that would work for all.”

In Detroit, COVID-19 cases are increasing at an alarming rate, with Detroit Public Schools considering going partially remote in order to slow the spread of COVID-19 among its staff. The district recently sent an email asking school board members for input on whether or not Fridays should be remote only. Terrence Martin, president of the Detroit Federation of Teachers (DFT), says the number of staff sick with COVID-19 increased 260 percent, from 20 to 52, in just one week.

The union refused to call for a strike to stop the mass infection of its members, instead opting for the district’s suggestion to have Fridays off. This hardly comes as a surprise, as the unions have been the spearhead for the reopening effort in the ruling class campaign to reopen schools in order to fully reopen the economy.

The massive loss in educational staff has not been exclusive to the pandemic, which merely accelerated ongoing processes. Enrollment in Michigan’s teacher preparation program dropped by more than 70 percent over the eight years between the 2008-09 and 2016-17 school year, according to an October 2019 Bridge Michigan article. The number graduating dropping 45 percent between 2011-2017, with Bridge citing “Low salaries and negative perceptions of teaching” as driving this process.

All restrictions to stop the COVID-19 pandemic in the state have been repudiated. In June, Michigan’s Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer ended mask mandates and social distancing, with a ban on mask and vaccine mandates signed into law as part of the state budget in September, drawing praise from Whitmer for its “bipartisan nature.” Michigan stopped its policy of closing schools with a certain threshold of cases and currently has no threshold that would trigger school shutdowns.

In Jefferson County, Missouri, the Northwest School District has turned to hiring students amid continuing labor shortages, with a local Fox News affiliate reporting, “The district is now hiring its own high school students to fill open jobs in the district.” The positions range from cooks to maintenance and after-school child care.

Kim Hawk, the district’s chief operating officer, stated that “Some of the positions have been short-staffed since last year.” She added, “We just have struggled to find any help at all, and if you drive around and look at the help-wanted signs everywhere, you know the competition is stiff. So, we knew we had to come up with some other plan.”

Twenty-five students have reportedly applied for the jobs, which pay minimum wage. Mark Catalana, the district’s chief human resources officer, said that the jobs would not involve working late nights, weekends, or holidays, which could only mean that students would be working on school days when they should be learning. This desperate move by the district once again disproves the feigned concerns about “learning loss” by advocates of school reopenings during the pandemic. The Fox affiliate also stated that, “The district said it would encourage other districts to do this as well.”

Last month, Missouri’s Department of Elementary and Secondary Education approved a 20-hour online course to certify substitute teachers in lieu of the original 60 college credit hours from an academic degree-granting institution in response to a severe shortage of substitute teachers.

In Washington State, Seattle, Bellevue and Kent school districts announced unexpectedly that there would be no classes Friday due to staffing shortages. The Seattle Times noted, “State Superintendent Chris Reykdal said he wasn’t shocked by the closures,” adding, “he even registered surprise that so few school districts had to close.” This year, the state has approved 10 percent more emergency substitute certificates, which allow workers without college degrees to teach a classroom.

In Kentucky, lawmakers passed a provision allowing retired teachers to return to classes full-time without impacting their pensions in response to the statewide teacher shortage. A local Spectrum news affiliate stated that school districts can temporarily go from hiring just one percent of retired teachers to up to 10 percent, with Jefferson County Public schools hiring 44 retired teachers under the provision. The district had 187 classroom vacancies as of early November.

The reason there has been such a mass exodus from the profession is because teachers have seen so many of their colleagues get sick and die, while the pandemic has totally destabilized an already precarious and under-funded public education system. Further, educators have endured the pressure of far-right parents at school board meetings, who are now literally advocating for the banning and burning of “undesirable” books, much as the Nazis did.

While teaching was once a highly-regarded profession in the US, it has been thoroughly undermined by capitalism. This decades-long, bipartisan process preceded the pandemic and has become qualitatively deepened over the past two years. As dire as the situation is now, further budget cuts are looming throughout the country, threatening to make permanent the staff losses that have already taken place once the limited pandemic funding runs dry. The unions have fully conspired with this process, before and during the pandemic.

Peronist government hammered in Argentine midterm elections amid record poverty

Miguel Andrade

The ruling Peronist Frente de Todos coalition of President Alberto Fernández suffered a staggering defeat in the midterm legislative elections held Sunday, losing almost 6 million votes. This represents 35 percent of the votes the Peronists won in the elections for the House in 2019, when Fernández was elected in the first round with 48 percent of the vote.

The Sunday elections renewed half of the House nationwide, and a third of the Senate. In the latter case, a direct comparison with previous results cannot be made, as votes were cast in only the third of the provinces that had not voted in 2019. The elections also renewed a number of provincial and municipal legislatures.

The thrashing suffered by the Fernández coalition resulted in the loss of 10 deputies and two senators, spelling the Peronists’ loss of the Senate majority for the first time since the return to civilian rule in 1983.

Alberto Fernández and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner after Peronist victory in 2019.

Sunday’s electoral defeat is even more significant as it took place under conditions in which all Peronist factions are united in the Frente de Todos ruling coalition, under the political leadership of former president Cristina Kirchner, who serves as Fernández’s vice-president and head of the Senate.

The government’s defeat will mean a political deadlock for the remaining two years of the Fernández presidency, as the main bourgeois opposition of the Juntos por el Cambio coalition led by the predecessor of Fernández, the right-wing billionaire Mauricio Macri, also lost 2 million votes and failed to secure a majority in Congress.

The elections also delivered the largest vote ever for the pseudo-left United Left and Workers Front (FITU), which increased their vote by 82 percent in comparison with 2019, to over 1.3 million votes. This will double their House delegation to four deputies. FITU won 25 percent of the vote for the party’s list in northern Jujuy province, where the unionist Alejandro Vilca will now serve in the province’s six-member delegation to the federal House.

Just behind the pseudo-lefts came the far-right list La Libertad Avanza of the fascistic economist Javier Milei, a supporter of Donald Trump and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro. It won three seats and over a million votes. In his campaign, Milei led rabidly anti-communist rallies with supporters menacingly chanting “the leftists are afraid.”

The results for Avanza Libertad are seen as a political earthquake in a country which barely 38 years ago was ruled by a fascist-military dictatorship that killed 30,000 socialist and left-wing workers and activists. That regime became known for particularly vicious methods such as stealing the children of political prisoners and executing prisoners by throwing them from planes into the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, where proof of the regime’s crimes could never be found.

Milei had as his running mate the lawyer Victoria Villaruel, who has for decades specialized in defending former military officers accused by Argentine courts of taking part in “dirty war” kidnappings and executions. She holds the view that the 1976 coup and the ensuing state terror regime were a necessary reaction to the actions of Peronist guerrillas. In his victory rally in the Luna Park entertainment venue in Buenos Aires, Milei spoke with a Gadsden flag being held in the background, while Confederate flags were seen in the crowd, which reportedly chanted “no more blacks,” a racist slur directed in Argentina against indigenous populations and immigrants from other nations in South America with indigenous background.

Such a political earthquake comes against the backdrop of an explosive social situation. Poverty now engulfs over 40 percent of Argentines, up from 35 percent in 2019. That is the highest rate since 2004, in the wake of the worst economic crisis in the country’s history in 2002, when the GDP fell by 11 percent. Last year, Argentina suffered the second worst GDP drop in its history, of 10 percent.

The almost 10 percent rebound of this year will do little to offset the losses for workers after three straight years of recession, with GDP drops of 2.6 and 2.2 percent in 2018 and 2019. Over 60 percent of children are now poor, while unemployment stands at 10 percent. A third of those employed are in the so-called informal sector, without access to pensions and other social rights. Inflation is running at 55 percent on an annual basis, while signs are growing that the government will be forced to agree to a major devaluation of the national currency, the peso, which is being traded in the black market for half of the official exchange rate.

The government is also facing popular hostility because of its disastrous handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, which claimed over 115,000 victims in the nation of 45 million, or almost 260 deaths per 100 thousand inhabitants – above the 232 dead per 100,000 in the United States and trailing only Peru and Brazil in Latin America.

Such a social catastrophe came despite the use by the Fernández administration of every bankrupt tool in the nationalist-corporatist arsenal of Peronism, including laws forbidding firings, mandating wage increases in the private sector and price controls over consumer goods deemed “essential,” a ban on meat exports and a cap on the amount of US dollars each person can buy in what is effectively a dual currency economy. None of this prevented the jump in poverty rates of over 5 percent. This year, the rate of inflation projected in the federal budget will be almost half of the real rate, meaning that all of the mandated adjustments to wages and social programs will fall far behind the rise in prices.

In the latest attempt to appeal to big business for “stability,” in October, the government announced that it was mandating a freeze on the prices of 1,400 goods, only to see inflation rise 3.5 percent over September prices. The price freeze mandate was a response to the scorching defeat suffered by the government in Argentina’s September open and mandatory primary elections (PASO), in which every party must clear a threshold of 1.5 percent of the votes to be able to run its candidates. Now, such fictitious – almost ritualistic – corporatist appeals to big business to freeze prices will be used by the government to delay its already ineffective wage rise decrees.

The elections also brought to the fore Argentina’s debt to the IMF, of over US $50 billion, the largest amount ever lent to any country. The deal was made in 2018 by former president Mauricio Macri, who lost his reelection bid to Fernández in 2019. During their presidential campaign, the Peronists toyed with the idea of defaulting on the debt, branding it “illegitimate” and even “illegal” based on the open support of the Trump administration for the deal in opposition to initial reservations on its feasibility on the part of the IMF’s technical body.

Taking office, Fernández initiated a brutal IMF-mandated austerity drive with the promise that cuts to poverty relief programs, reinstatement of taxes on basic goods and the end of inflation-adjusted pension corrections would be compensated by larger economic growth, which never came. As for the “legitimacy and legality” of the debt that was central to the Peronist campaign, the new government shunned the question as irrelevant, saying the only way forward was to attract foreign investment and show “credibility” by paying the debt.

When the pandemic hit the country, the Fernández administration blamed the right-wing opposition led by Macri and their “individual freedom” demagoguery, akin to that of the European, Brazilian and American far-right, for his government’s failure in stopping the catastrophic spread of the virus in the country.

Faced with a stunning defeat in the PASO in September, the government attempted to resurrect anti-IMF demagogy. Cristina Kirchner, who plays a more direct role in the corporatist “grassroots” Peronist organizations, from unions to so-called “social movements,” penned an open letter attempting to blame all of government’s problems on the failure of Fernández to listen to her and declaring she expected him to “honor the decision” taken “individually by her to put forward Alberto Fernández as a candidate for president of all Argentines” and criticizing the fact that the government was withholding authorized spending.

Kirchner made clear she was “not asking for radicalism,” but for the government to follow what she said “is happening widely in the United States and Europe, that is, the state acting to mitigate the tragic consequences of the pandemic.” The government then paid back US $1.9 billion to the IMF under more false promises that austerity would be relieved by negotiations with the fund. The government is now expected to agree to a major devaluation of the peso in order to meet the discrepancy of its real devaluation in the black market, bringing further inflation and impoverishment.

The historic significance of the 2021 elections cannot be underestimated. It has further exposed the historic bankruptcy of Peronism, which under the leadership of Kirchner and during the so-called “Pink Tide” was able to briefly dissociate itself from the brutal austerity measures of former president Carlos Menem, leading to the 2001 crisis.

From its first days, the return of Peronism was lauded by the financial markets as a possible means of imposing austerity while keeping the working class under control through the Peronist corporatist unions. The emergence of openly pro-dictatorship, fascistic forces in the form of Javier Milei’s La Libertad Avanza, is a sharp warning of preparations within the ruling classes to address the growth of class struggle with the most brutal methods.

Those warnings must be extended to the pernicious role played by the pseudo-left FITU. Despite its nominal references to socialism and class independence, the FITU forces are a collection of petty-bourgeois renegades from Trotskyism, led by the Socialist Workers Party (PTS), who specialize in sabotaging working class struggles by fostering illusions that the reactionary, anti-communist Peronist unions can be pushed to the left. That same role was played in the period preceding the 1976 coup, allowing the Peronist-aided Argentine Anticommunist Alliance (AAA) death squads to decapitate the working class organizations ahead of the military takeover. Later, in the 1980s, the predecessor of the FITU, the Morenoite Movement Towards Socialism (MAS), supported the Communist Party and the Alfonsín government in their amnesty for the torturers and murderers of the dictatorship, after the fascistic Carapintada military uprising.