Government crisis in Austria

Peter Schwarz

The hasty withdrawal from Austrian politics of Sebastian Kurz and his closest cronies has, like the bursting of a boil, brought to the surface the musty stench and rot of democracy in the Alpine republic and throughout Europe.

There is no longer any doubt that for four years, the country was ruled by a criminal gang that spared no means to pave its way to power. Prosecutorial investigations, the publication of internal chats and other revelations have shown the unscrupulous methods they used.

Sebastian Kurz and Karl Nehammer (left), the new Austrian Chancellor (Photo: BKA/Andy Wenzel)

Discredited is not only the conservative Austrian Peoples Party (ÖVP), which elected Kurz as its leader and made him Chancellor and granted him unlimited powers, but also all the other parties that paved his way to power and—in the case of the Greens—secured his power even when the extent of the criminality had long been known.

Kurz had resigned—or, as he called it, “stepped aside”—as Federal Chancellor on 9 October after the Public Prosecutor’s Office for Economic Affairs and Corruption had opened investigations into him on suspicion of corruption and searched his offices. However, he retained all the levers of power. He remained ÖVP chairman and also had himself elected Klubobmann, i.e., parliamentary group chairman in the National Council (federal legislature). His close confidant Alexander Schallenberg, the former Foreign Minister, became Chancellor.

On Thursday, Kurz announced that he was resigning from all his political offices and withdrawing completely from politics. He cited the birth of his first son a few days ago, to whom he now wants to devote more time, as a flimsy reason.

The resignations followed one after the other. Only two hours after Kurz, Schallenberg also announced his resignation, thus confirming that he had never been more than a shadow chancellor by Kurz’s grace. He was followed by Finance Minister Gernot Blümel, who resigned all his posts with immediate effect, including that of Vienna ÖVP leader. The 40-year-old Blümel, who is also being investigated by the public prosecutor’s office on suspicion of corruption and bribery, was among Kurz’s closest circle of friends from the beginning.

Sebastian Kurz, now 35, was long celebrated by the Austrian and international media as a political wunderkind. The law school dropout was the country’s youngest secretary of state at 25, youngest foreign minister at 27 and youngest chancellor at 31.

In the meantime, we know the methods Kurz and his conspiratorial circle of friends used to make their way to the top: With intrigues in the party and government, whereby alleged party friends were bullied and dubbed “asses”; with falsified surveys and paid-for media reports financed by taxpayers’ money; and with the mutual passing on of lucrative posts in state-owned enterprises. The prosecution is investigating them for false testimony, post rigging, breach of trust and bribery.

Kurz and his circle embody a clique of power and money-obsessed social climbers who grew up after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, never experienced major class struggles and therefore know no social scruples and believe they can get away with anything. Kurz’s immediate circle also includes the 44-year-old real estate speculator and multi-millionaire René Benko, as well as the Wirecard managers Markus Braun (52) and Jan Marsalek (41), who pulled off a billion-dollar fraudulent bankruptcy.

Intrigue and fraud alone, however, would not have been enough to pave Kurz’s way into the highest Austrian government office. Rather, he proved to be a useful instrument to carry out a political shift to the right, which is endorsed by all sections of the ruling class. That is why he was celebrated internationally and named a “Next Generation Leader” by Time in 2017. The “statesman of a new kind” has found a new way to deal with the refugee crisis that is being adopted by other European politicians, the US magazine praised.

Kurz, who outwardly always appeared calm, polite and spic and span, knew how to mobilise the dregs of society for the most reactionary goals. In 2015, when numerous war refugees from the Middle East sought asylum in Europe, he became the forerunner of the brutal isolationist policy that is now common practice throughout Europe and has cost tens of thousands of lives.

After taking over the presidency of the ÖVP in 2017, Kurz formed an alliance with the extreme right-wing Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) and had them elect him as chancellor. From then on, their fascist course determined the government’s immigration policy. “Kurz lets the coalition partner FPÖ say the bad things, but remains silent about it himself,” German news weekly Der Spiegel described the division of labour between the chancellor and the right-wing extremists at the time.

Kurz gave the interior ministry to FPÖ politician Herbert Kickl, a notorious racist, who ensured that the police were oriented accordingly. The alliance of ÖVP and FPÖ also took harsh action against the working class. For example, it decided to make working hours more flexible, allowing daily shifts of up to twelve hours.

It was only in May 2019, when the so-called Ibiza video exposed the venality of the FPÖ, that the alliance with the FPÖ was shattered. Kurz had to dismiss its leader, Heinz-Christian Strache and Interior Minister Kickl and subsequently lost a vote of no confidence in parliament. Temporarily, a transitional government under the non-partisan lawyer Brigitte Bierlein took over.

But finally, the Greens came to Kurz’s aid. The party that had always claimed to be the antithesis of the FPÖ formed a government coalition with Kurz at the beginning of 2020, continuing the FPÖ’s right-wing policies on all essential issues.

Kurz’s career, however, could not be saved, even by the Greens. Ever new allegations of corruption, growing social tensions and above all the devastating consequences of its murderous coronavirus policy caused the ÖVP’s poll ratings to plummet.

The government’s refusal to take effective measures against the pandemic made Austria one of the countries with the highest infection rates worldwide. At the end of November, the nationwide seven-day incidence rate rose above 1,000 per 100,000 inhabitants, in some regions peaking at 1,800.

Fierce resistance developed against this. On 10 November, health workers in hospitals nationwide protested against “government inaction” under the slogan “It’s 5 past 12.” The 400,000 employees were physically and psychologically at the limit.

In opinion polls, an overwhelming majority favoured tougher measures to counter the virus. In the third week of November, Unique Research found that only 6 percent of respondents thought the existing measures were sufficient. The mood among the population had “long since tilted towards clear and swift measures to combat the pandemic,” commented the newspaper Heute, which had commissioned the survey.

Chancellor Schallenberg, who went to a meeting of state leaders in Tyrol with the firm intention of not allowing a lock-down for vaccinated people, could not get his way. In order to calm the explosive situation, they agreed on a partial lock-down, which also applies to vaccinated people. Businesses and schools, however, remained largely open.

Now, even the ÖVP’s provincial leaders moved away from Kurz and his closest confidants. After their resignation, the ÖVP party executive on Friday appointed former Interior Minister Karl Nehammer as the new party leader and head of government. Alexander Schallenberg will again become Foreign Minister.

Nehammer, a former professional soldier, is considered a domestic policy hardliner who has seamlessly continued the line of his predecessor in office, Kickl. He is known for his tough stance on immigrants and Muslims and, by his own admission, “admired” Kurz. His appointment as head of government is in preparation for a massive confrontation with the working class.

Nehammer, unlike Kurz, also has good connections to the Social Democrats. However, the Greens have already given assurances that they will continue the coalition with the ÖVP. Green Party leader Werner Kogler praised the always good cooperation with Nehammer, even if they sometimes argued about asylum issues.

The rapid formation of a new government will not solve the deep crisis in Austrian politics. Beneath the constant tremors on the surface are deep tectonic shifts in the social base of society. While social antagonisms continue to intensify under the devastating effects of the pandemic, all the establishment parties are deeply discredited. This applies not only to the conservatives and the Greens, but also to the Social Democrats, who in Austria, as in all other European countries, have transformed themselves into a right-wing, bourgeois party. Between 2015 and 2020, they governed in Burgenland with the FPÖ, i.e., the same right-wing and fascist forces that Kurz brought into government at the federal level.

Romanian Social Democrats join Grand Coalition government amid raging pandemic

Andrei Tudora & Tina Zamfir

A new Grand Coalition cabinet was sworn in on November 25 in Romania.

Under the weight of a catastrophic COVID wave and a looming economic crisis, the previous government led by the National Liberal Party (PNL) disintegrated as their junior coalition partners, Save Romania Union (USR), left the coalition and a no confidence vote was passed against it. The Social Democratic Party (PSD), direct heir to the Stalinist Communist Party, joined the PNL in a Grand Coalition government.

The fourth COVID wave, according to local health experts like Octavian Jurma, had claimed by the beginning of November at least 18,000 lives and continues to take close to 2,000 lives each week. The overall death toll surpassed 57,000.

People hold a large banner that reads "No to Vaccination - Our Children are not your guinea pigs" during a protest against vaccinations, the introduction of the green pass and COVID-19 related restrictions in Bucharest, Romania, Sunday, Nov. 7, 2021. (AP Photo/Vadim Ghirda, File)

As the economic growth, paid for with a criminal policy of mass infection and death, benefited a handful of oligarchs, the liberalization of energy prices threatens to leave millions without basic utilities as winter months approach.

The two parties have signed an agreement that is set to last until the 2024 election, with a rotating premiership. The first prime minister, retired general Nicolae Ciucă from the Liberal Party, was sworn in on the 25th. The PSD will hold key posts such as Healthcare, Economy and Defense. Joining the Coalition will be the Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania, (UDMR) a right-wing party with close political ties to the Hungarian Orban government.

This new political set-up leaves the AUR, an avowed fascist party, as the main parliamentary opposition force in the country.

The Grand Coalition government formed in Bucharest marks a new and dangerous stage in the developing crisis of rule in Romania and Eastern Europe. Thirty-two years after the restoration of capitalism in the region, and as the ruling elites double down on murderous mass infection policies, the norms of bourgeois democracy are being increasingly discarded.

The Grand Coalition will have sweeping powers. It will work to forcibly suppress working class opposition to its murderous pandemic policies. It will also join other right-wing regimes on the region, from the Baltic States, Poland, Ukraine and Moldova, to act as a bulwark against refugees and intensify military provocations against Russia on the Eastern Front.

Like many similar social democratic parties and their pseudo-left appendages internationally, the Romanian Social Democrats have embraced the most right-wing positions on the coronavirus pandemic.

For the past two years, they have used every parliamentary and legal means to attack and thwart any measures taken by the former Liberal government to mitigate the worst effects of the pandemic. This position has seen the Social Democrats openly embrace the most backward social forces and far-right conspiracy theories. Recently, they have attacked the transfer of hospital beds to COVID patients even at the peak of the fourth wave and have blocked legislation introducing the Digital COVID Pass.

Alexandru Rafila, who now holds the position of Health Minister for the PSD, said last year that teachers who were opposed to the dangerous reopening of schools were suffering of “cabin fever.” Rafila, who is a professor of microbiology at the Carol Davila University of Medicine and Pharmacy, is also opposed to the introduction of the Digital COVID Pass. His stated priority will be to further “normalize” COVID, by moving the burden from the hospital system to outpatient care centers.

The education minister Câmpeanu, despised by millions of parents for his Malthusian ramblings, will keep his job, as children will be forced to attend unventilated and unsafe schools. Over 18 children have lost their lives since schools were reopened in September, as many as in the whole previous pandemic period.

The Coalition has created a new portfolio, a Family Ministry, modeled on existing institutions in Hungary and Poland. The post will be occupied by former PSD mayor of Bucharest Gabriela Firea. As mayor of the capital, Firea rose to prominence as one of the most strident opponents of COVID measures. She is one of the main leaders of the party and a devoted follower of the Orthodox church.

During Parliamentary hearings, the Head of the Parliamentary Committee on Equal Opportunities for Women and Men, the fascist AUR deputy Tanasă, after praising the creation of the new Office, asked Firea about banning abortion. Along with issuing a perfunctory denial, the PSD minister had this to say: “I will fight so that all women have access to quality medical services, counseling, guidance so that, together with their families, with their close ones and with their priest they will take the best decision for their life.”

Romania currently allows abortion up to 14 gestation weeks without any qualification. In case of increased risk of fetal malformation, abortion is allowed up to 24 weeks, or at any time after that if the mother’s life is in danger. The new institution is a clear signal that the Grand Coalition will follow the direction set by the Orban and the Law and Justice governments (Hungary and Poland) in curtailing the most fundamental democratic rights.

The fascist AUR party will be the main political beneficiary of the Grand Coalition. The main parties have already integrated ultra-right policies in the governing program.

AUR is the product of attempts by sections of the Romanian ruling class to create a mass fascist party. Such attempts are now taking place throughout the world, as the pandemic is bringing social tension to a boil. However, such a movement does not currently exist.

The AUR’s anti-lockdown rallies draw dozens, at best hundreds, of individuals, drawn from the religious right and other deranged elements. Even their main rallies, which involve considerable organizational effort, such as the anti-lockdown event on October 2, can draw no more than a couple thousand individuals.

Serious efforts are made however to promote and normalize the fascists by the ruling establishment. The most ardent allies in this effort are the corporatist trade unions, the Stalinist PSR (Socialist Party) as well as various pseudo-left groups and commentators.

In Eastern European countries, the legacy of nationalism and backwardness promoted by the Stalinists is responsible for the mistrust of science and directly linked to low vaccination rates and preventable deaths. Stalinist parties like the Romanian Socialist Party (PSR), linked to Die Linke in Germany, are now openly promoting the fascists. Gheorghita Zbăganu, notable leader of the PSR, led a delegation at the October 2 AUR rally. Their placards were taken up by the media as proof of the heterogenous and “populist” nature of the event.

Pseudo-left outlets have likewise embraced the libertarian nostrums of the far right. Groups like the Association for the Emancipation of Workers (AEM), associated with the French Lambertistes (POI), and the Union of Militant Students (Sindicatul elevilor și studenților Militanți, SESM) work to provide a left cover to the maneuvers of the Social Democrats and Stalinists.

Collective bargaining agreement in Germany’s public sector: a slap in the face for all workers

Dietmar Gaisenkersting

After more than twenty months of the coronavirus pandemic, trade union and government representatives have made clear to workers employed by Germany’s federal states that they must not only risk their health and even their lives to pay for the ruling elite’s “profits before life” pandemic policy but sacrifice their wages and salaries.

The Verdi (United Service Union), GEW (Union for Education and Science), IG BAU (Industrial Union for Construction, Agriculture, Environment) trade unions as well as the police and civil servants’ unions on Monday sold out the collective bargaining struggle involving employees of Germany’s 16 federal states.

Berlin strikers on November 25th (Photo: WSWS)

The unions initially demanded a five percent wage increase over a period of twelve months, or at least €150, and at least €300 per month in the health sector. Given the current inflation rate of 5.2 percent, even that would have been an effective wage cut.

But now the 1.1 million federal state employees will initially receive nothing for 14 months. Not for one year, on December 1, 2022, will the wages of all employees be increased by 2.8 percent. The remuneration of trainees, interns and students will be increased by €50 (€100 was demanded) or by €70 in the health care system in one year’s time.

In March of next year, there will be a one-off payment of €1,300 euros for employees. Apprentices, interns and students will receive half this amount. The collective agreement has a term of 24 months until the end of September 2023.

The employers immediately agreed to extend the same pathetic wage result to the 1.4 million civil servants and about one million pension recipients.

The demand for a collective agreement for student assistants has vanished into thin air, as has the demand for improvements in working conditions in road maintenance and road construction. The GEW’s perennial call for equal pay for all teachers, whether they work on temporary contracts or hold permanent appointments as civil servants, was once again dropped.

This time the GEW gave the following bankrupt excuse for dropping the demand for equal pay: “In this collective bargaining round, the GEW finally wanted to achieve the full parallel pay scale for contract teachers.” But the federal states asked for cutbacks to the pay grades. “The unions now had to repel this attack on a cornerstone of the right to pay grades,” it wrote. In return, the federal states refused to negotiate the “structural” demands of the unions. “This also included the parallel pay scale,” the union continued. “The GEW will continue to push this issue.”

In an attempt to cover up the union’s betrayal, Verdi head Frank Werneke said, “This is a largely respectable result,” adding, “It secures noticeable income improvements for a whole range of health care workers and is another intermediate step on our way to improving working conditions in the health care sector.” The union will continue this in future collective bargaining rounds.

If the matter at hand were not so serious, one could laugh. Whom are Verdi and the GEW trying to kid? Only those on the unions’ payroll will be impressed by these absurd statements.

Hundreds of workers immediately spoke out indignantly on the internet and on social media. Sil Jan wrote on Facebook of Verdi, “This is really very depressing. During this time, respect and appreciation would be appropriate, especially for the colleagues in health care and in the social services. This is not even remotely respectable. We are obviously dispensable after all.”

Mike wrote, “The collective bargaining was just a sham negotiation to trick members into thinking they were bargaining.” The fact that Verdi head Werneke is trying to sell it as a good deal is “much worse than the truly bad ‘agreement’!”

Thomas wrote, “I did not strike for this result.” He does not intend to vote for the agreement. Many others confirm that they “definitely did not go on strike for this result.” Many have announced that they will be leaving the union. “Fortunately, there is still the option going forward of saving the monthly dues payment in order to have a little more money,” commented Sven. “Thanks Verdi, for nothing,” added Anja.

On the GEW’s page, Fridolin reported, “I already shook my head at the last one… But this agreement is even worse… How can they tolerate being treated like that?… This is so weak !!! ... in the high phase of the economic upswing and also in the pandemic !!!” He appealed for an expansion of strikes instead of capitulation.

Stephan Brylka wrote in frustration, “And the educators and other educational staff have once again received a slap in the face. And I’m supposed to convince my colleagues to join the GEW.”

Guido stated bluntly, “I feel ripped off. The pensions go up by over four percent and for us there is 1.4 percent. It would have been better to keep on striking.”

M. Willemsen was just as angry about the deal, asking, “Why don’t the unions call for strikes? At five percent inflation, that is a real wage loss of five percent!… Is this how we attract employees to work in hospitals? Hospitals, schools, kindergartens are supposedly essential services - what remains of that in the pay packet - nothing!” What was the point of the strikes over recent weeks, they wondered.

The GEW national executive replied, “As bitter as it is, without these job actions there would not even have been this agreement.” The employers resisted to the end, “knowing full well that a job action could not have been carried out on this scale in times of steadily increasing infections.”

In other words, the state governments knew perfectly well that the unions would give in. “Of course, we also wanted an earlier pay increase that will impact pay scales,” complained the union leadership. “But the employers didn’t want that.”

This is an official declaration of utter bankruptcy. If the unions can only deliver what the employers want, what is the point of having unions? The many comments stating the strike should have gone further and more extensively show workers’ readiness to fight.

But the unions deliberately isolated the strikes in hospitals, schools, and government services. The protests they organized were token events aimed only at letting off steam. The union leaderships are in cahoots with the employers, are often members of the same political parties, and regularly exchange well-paid positions in the union bureaucracy for senior government posts, and vice versa.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed as never before the subordination of the unions to the capitalist drive for profits at the expense of any consideration for public welfare. Health care workers have achieved incredible feats to keep hospitals running. Since the beginning of the pandemic, almost 140,000 people have been treated with COVID-19 in an intensive care unit, and the official COVID-19 death toll is 101,000. Of the approximately 4,500 COVID intensive care patients nationwide, more than half are on a ventilator. Thousands of intensive care beds can no longer be operated due to mental and physical burnout among nurses.

Despite this, Verdi and the GEW still insist that the schools remain open and that a lockdown must be avoided. A teacher from Duisburg wrote to the WSWS that “much more ruthless” than the real terms pay cut is the fact that the unions have “No plan to eradicate the virus, but rather the expectation that we teachers will continue to put our bodies on the line and help organize death.”

The latest sell-out underscores once again that the unions are on the side of government and big business. In view of the catastrophic COVID-19 situation, public sector workers must urgently organise themselves independently of the unions. Contact us to discuss how to build a network of rank-and-file committees in schools, hospitals, government agencies, and factories to organise resistance to the ruling-class policy of death and build a globally coordinated effort to eliminate COVID-19.

As part of the Global Workers’ Inquest into the COVID-19 Pandemic, we are collecting reports on the experiences of workers to document the impact of the pandemic on working people. We call on all those who are no longer prepared to tolerate the unions’ sacrificing of workers’ health and lives on behalf of the rich to support and participate in the Global Workers’ Inquest.

Amid pandemic, Washington escalates war threats against Russia

Alex Lantier

The US-led NATO alliance, which includes most of the world’s wealthiest countries, has suffered 115.3 million COVID-19 cases and 1.89 million deaths. It is passing through a winter pandemic surge that the World Health Organization (WHO) projects will claim 700,000 more lives in Europe alone. Moreover, the new Omicron variant, which will likely evade current COVID-19 vaccines, is now spreading in both America and Europe.

On Thursday, Biden pledged there would nonetheless be no “shutdowns or lockdowns” to halt the contagion, only continued use of existing vaccines. This means leaving the flow of profits to Wall Street untouched, at the expense of millions of lives lost to the pandemic.

Soldiers take part in an exercise at the Yavoriv military training ground, close to Lviv, western Ukraine, Friday, Sept 24, 2021. Ukraine, the US and other NATO countries continue joint military drills in Western Ukraine presenting offensive exercises in town-like surroundings with tanks and other military vehicles involved. (AP Photo/Pavlo Palamarchuk)

Against this backdrop, Washington, assisted by its NATO allies, is stoking military tensions that serve to distract from mounting internal opposition to its criminally irresponsible policies on the pandemic, and that risks triggering all-out war with Russia, or also China.

NATO is launching a military build-up on Russia’s borders. It is arming Ukraine with Javelin anti-tank missiles, guided-missile warships to be built by Britain, and anti-air missile batteries. The Ukrainian regime in Kiev has not contested Russian reports that it is massing 125,000 troops on its border with Russia.

Then, on Friday, as 521,291 NATO inhabitants fell ill and 3,876 died of COVID-19, Biden called for NATO to prepare for war with Russia, a major nuclear-armed power.

Preparing for a phone call tomorrow with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Biden recklessly declared that he rejects Russia’s “red lines,” that is, that he will take actions even if Russia warns they cross a red line and will lead to war. Speaking of Ukraine, Biden declared, “We’re aware of Russia’s actions for a long time and my expectation is we’re going to have a long discussion with Putin. I don’t accept anybody’s red lines.”

Biden’s rejection of Russian “red lines” was in response to Putin’s warning last week that NATO arming Ukraine with missile bases was a “red line” that could lead to war with Russia. Cruise missiles fired from these bases would need just six minutes to reach the center of Moscow.

Washington presents its policy, of course, as a defense of Ukraine against Russian aggression. After Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov alleged that 94,300 Russian troops are massing near the Ukraine-Russia border, and that “the likelihood of a large-scale escalation from Russia exists,” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken denounced Russia.

After claiming that China is preparing to invade Taiwan and warning of “terrible consequences,” Blinken said, “We’ve seen this playbook before, in 2014 when Russia last invaded Ukraine. Then, as now, they significantly increased combat forces near the border. Then, as now, they intensified disinformation to paint Ukraine as the aggressor to justify pre-planned military action.”

This is a pack of lies. Blinken himself admitted that “we don’t know whether President Putin has made the decision to invade,” and that “uncertainty about intentions and timing” remains. That is to say, Washington and Kiev are alleging only that Russian troops are located on Russian soil, and that they do not know what these troops will do. Yet on this flimsy basis, they are insisting that NATO countries must effectively ignore the pandemic and instead prepare for war with Russia.

Examining the 2014 events shows that the aggressor is not Russia, but NATO. In February 2014, when Biden was Barack Obama’s vice-president, Washington and Berlin backed a putsch led by the neo-Nazi Right Sector that toppled pro-Russian Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich. It brought to power a far-right regime that included the Svoboda Party, which the European Union had formally condemned in 2012 for racist and anti-Semitic views. It also pledged to ban the speaking of the Russian language and murder ethnic Russians in Ukraine.

As far-right militias launched raids into Russian-speaking areas of eastern Ukraine like the Donbass and the Crimea, these regions voted to secede. The fascistic regime in Kiev had no firm claim on the Crimea. It was annexed by Russia in 1783, the year the United States won independence from Britain, and was only ceded to Ukraine by Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev in 1954, when its internal status within the Soviet Union was of little importance.

Yet ever since 2014, NATO has fraudulently claimed that Crimea’s vote to rejoin Russia constituted a Russian “invasion” of Ukraine justifying NATO preparations for war.

NATO is not defending Ukraine, but arming it and goading Moscow to attack. In this regard, it is worth pondering Democratic Senator Chris Murphy’s statement Sunday that “Ukraine can become the next Afghanistan for Russia if it chooses to move further.”

Murphy was referring to the Democratic Carter administration’s decision in 1979 to try to provoke a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The policy, proposed by Democratic strategist Zbigniew Brzezinski, involved arming Islamist mujahedin against the Soviet-backed Afghan regime. Moscow ultimately intervened to support the Afghan government, trapping the Soviet army in a bloody, decade-long war with CIA-backed Islamists allied to future Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. Two years after suffering a shattering defeat, in 1989, the Stalinist bureaucracy dissolved the Soviet Union.

In 2014, amid the mounting crisis of US wars in the Middle East, as Russia and Iran backed President Bashar al-Assad against NATO in the Syrian war, Brzezinski called to repeat this policy.

A few months after the Ukraine putsch, Brzezinski gave a speech at the Wilson Center, during which he proposed to trap Russia in a war in Ukraine. After a Russian invasion of Ukraine, he cold-bloodedly explained, NATO could sacrifice Ukrainian cities like Kharkov and Kiev to wear down the Russian army, the way urban warfare at Stalingrad wore down the Nazi armies in World War II. He said:

“There is a history to be learned here from urban resistance in World War II … If the major cities, say Kharkiv, say Kiev, were to resist and street fighting became a necessity, it would be prolonged and costly. And the fact of the matter is—and this is where the timing of this whole crisis is important—Russia is not yet ready to undertake that kind of an effort. It will be too costly in blood, paralyzingly costly in finances. And would take a long time and create more and more international pressure. …

“[W]e should make it clear to the Ukrainians that if they are determined to resist, as they say they are and seemingly they are trying to do so (albeit not very effectively), we will provide them with anti-tank weapons, hand-held anti-tank weapons, hand-held rockets …”

This is the reckless policy the Biden administration is now working to implement. The most serious warnings are in order for workers in NATO countries, former Soviet republics, and internationally. This would not be the first time in history that a desperate ruling class has concluded that a war will provide a way out of an explosive internal crisis for which it has no progressive solutions.

The pandemic is a trigger event, massively intensifying class and international tensions. Deeply destabilized, the Biden administration and the imperialist governments across Europe are flailing about desperately, looking for a target at which to lash out.

The decisive question today, to save millions of lives, is to mobilize the working class and unite it in a powerful international movement against war and for a scientific policy to halt the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and eliminate transmission of the virus.

Global vaccine inequality: “A policy decision by the rich countries”

Jean Shaoul

Of the 8.07 billion doses of the multiple COVID vaccines administered, most have gone to wealthy countries.

While around 60-70 percent of adults have been fully vaccinated in North America and Western Europe and many are now receiving their third jab, only 6 percent of people in low-income countries have received even one dose. More than 3.5 billion people, nearly half the world’s population, are waiting for their first dose.

Wealthy countries have received over 16 times more COVID-19 vaccines per person than the poorer nations that rely on the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) COVAX programme. According to analysis carried out by the Financial Times, just 9.3 vaccines have been delivered to low-income countries for every 100 people, of which 7.1 have been delivered through COVAX. This compares to 155 for every 100 people in high-income countries, of which 115 were received through known bilateral and multilateral agreements. In many low-income countries, even healthcare workers have not yet been vaccinated.

People who have just received their jab against COVID-19 Friday Dec. 3, 2021 wait for their vaccine card to be processed at the Orange Farm, South Africa, multipurpose center. (AP Photo/Jerome Delay)

Some of the world’s richest countries will have 1.9 billion doses more than they need, prompting the WHO to issue yet another pathetic call for donations and dose-swapping .

None of this was accidental. In his interview with the Financial Times, Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel, replying to those who had criticized Moderna for not doing enough to distribute the vaccine globally, let the cat out of the bag. “This was mostly a policy decision by the rich countries,” he said. “In the US, we were told we had no choice but to give 60 percent of our output to the US government.”

These same countries, on behalf of Big Pharma and other corporations and financial institutions, rejected waivers of intellectual property rights on vaccine manufacture, while stalling on granting additional manufacturing capacity in low and middle-income countries and greater access to vaccines through increased supply through COVAX—the United Nations-backed public-private initiative designed to share vaccines globally at lower cost.

The consequences are devastating for both poor and rich countries alike. Without the full range of global virus-elimination measures, including widespread vaccination, social distancing, closure of non-essential workplaces, schools and universities, infections will rise, enabling the emergence of Omicron and other more virulent strains.

Without measures to contain the virus and protect lives, the United Nations has estimated that low and middle-income countries will suffer economic losses of $12 trillion through to 2025.

This situation flows inexorably from the operation of the capitalist mode of production and distribution, based on profit maximisation by the major corporations and their financiers.

At the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the advanced capitalist countries that are home to the handful of giant drug companies that own vaccine patents, whose development was largely publicly funded, acted to bolster their already obscene profit profiteering. They rejected calls from India and South Africa, backed by more than 100 countries, 100 Nobel laureates and prominent human rights groups, including Doctors Without Borders, Human Rights Watch and Oxfam, to waive intellectual property (IP) rights and allow them to manufacture or import cheaper generic versions. While US President Joe Biden publicly backed the call to waive patent rights, this was for public consumption. Washington did nothing to address the technicalities involved or confront the pharmaceutical companies.

As WTO director-general Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, a former Nigerian finance minister and World Bank number two, pointed out, “The WTO’s work is not just defined by the IP waiver. If you get the waiver but you don’t have manufacturing capacity, you can’t use it. If you have manufacturing capacity but no technology transfer, you can’t use it.”

Big Pharma has no interest in boosting vaccine manufacturing capacity that would push down prices, nor in eradicating a virus which has proved to be a gold mine for them. Just seven countries in Africa have vaccine manufacturing facilities that have largely been denied the right to produce Western vaccines under license. Morocco and Egypt have announced plans to start producing China’s Sinopharm and Sinovac vaccines. Rwanda has signed a deal with the European Union to bolster its vaccine manufacturing capabilities, with South Africa recently signing a $700 million deal with the US and Europe to produce 500 million doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine by the end of 2022.

Pfizer’s former CEO played a key role in developing the WTO’s global patent agreement, known as TRIPS, that underpins Big Pharma’s profits, with Pfizer also leading the drive to bypass the WHO’s COVID-19 Technology Access Pool CTAP, calling it “nonsense.” The CTAP scheme was set up in May 2020 to boost the supply of COVID-19 therapeutics, diagnostics, vaccines and other health products and enable timely, equitable and affordable access via public health-driven voluntary, non-exclusive and transparent licenses.

The imperialist powers have backed the pharmaceutical corporations to the hilt in their refusal to share their technology and know-how and to prevent their vaccines from being donated to certain countries. Even when doses are filled and finished—the final stage of vaccine production—in poorer countries such as South Africa, as in the case of the single shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine, they are exported to wealthy countries. The US and European Union have further limited production by restricting not just vaccine exports but also the raw materials needed for vaccine production.

The COVAX scheme has missed all its targets, despite begging rich countries to share their vaccines, as a result of vaccine nationalism and profit gouging. With rich countries rushing to sign deals with the manufacturers, COVAX was left out in the cold, with no power to force manufacturers to honour their contracts via lawsuits, forcing it to rely on donations.

The scheme had been banking on supplies from India, the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer, but has received no doses since March. This was because India banned the export of the Serum Institute’s output of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine in order to supply the home market amid a massive surge in cases and struck a deal for an additional 600 million doses.

This forced poorer countries to strike their own deals with the manufacturers, further weakening the scheme’s negotiating power as COVAX was left to negotiate on behalf of fewer nations. With the vast majority of the 10.9 billion vaccines expected to be manufactured this year already sold, most of the remaining 950 million supply includes Chinese vaccines and an Indian vaccine, Covaxin.

As a result, COVAX has so far only delivered about 582 million doses of an already much reduced annual target of 1.4 billion and now faces the impossible task of delivering the rest by year end. African Union officials estimate the scheme will deliver just 470 million doses to African countries by the end of December, less than a quarter of the 2 billion needed to deliver two shots to its entire adult population. WHO Africa regional director Matshidiso Moeti said, “At this rate, the continent may only reach the 40 percent target by the end of March 2022.”

While the cost of vaccines and the limitations of supply have been major problems, low-income countries face the additional, far higher and often insurmountable costs of cold storage, distribution and administration without either the infrastructure or healthcare personnel to do so. The Democratic Republic of Congo had to give away 1.3 million out of its COVAX-supplied 1.7 million AstraZeneca doses because it couldn’t administer them before they expired. With only 28 percent of health-care facilities in sub-Saharan Africa having reliable electricity, GAVI, the public-private partnership that works with COVAX, is seeking to procure thousands of cold boxes, vaccine carriers, refrigerators and freezers for 71 low-income nations.

The major powers are using vaccines as an instrument of “soft power” in pursuit of their geostrategic interests. US President Joe Biden announced at a COVID conference held on the sidelines of the opening session of the UN General assembly in September that the US would donate an additional 500 million of the Pfizer vaccines to low and middle-income countries, bringing America’s total global donation to more than 1.1 billion doses. This was widely seen as an effort to shore up Washington’s position after China’s announcement the previous week that it had delivered 1.1 billion vaccine doses to more than a hundred countries. Europe has announced that it will give 70 million of its vaccines to COVAX.

As all evidence shows, any appeals to the ruling elites to combat vaccine inequality, let alone eliminate the virus, are doomed to fail.

A science-based coronavirus policy that puts lives before profits requires the seizure of the assets of the pharmaceutical and other major corporations and their financiers to pay for the necessary measures to eliminate the virus that include: the abolition of the intellectual property rights held by the giant pharmaceutical companies, global collaboration in vaccine production and distribution by all those countries that have the facilities to do so, and the provision of mass funding for every country to implement a comprehensive vaccination programme via public health officials and health systems to ensure their safe and effective distribution and administration.

Chile’s election: Boric and pseudo-left offer no defense against threat of fascism

Mauricio Saavedra

Immense pressure is being exerted on Chilean workers and youth to vote for Gabriel Boric of the Apruebo Dignidad electoral front in a second-round presidential ballot. Boric, who won 25.8 percent of the vote in the first round will face off with the fascistic candidate of the Christian Social Front, José Antonio Kast, who won 27.9 percent, on December 19.

The working class has every reason to be alarmed by the electoral growth of the fascistic right in Chile. Kast’s program of slashing public spending and gutting the public sector, lowering taxes for the super-rich and erecting a police state is aimed at making the working class pay for the crisis of Chilean capitalism, which has been deepened by the government’s criminally negligent response to the COVID-19 pandemic over the last 18 months.

There has been a pervasive propaganda campaign to sell the Frente Amplio and the Communist Party coalition as some “radical left” alternative to the right. It is nothing of the sort. Boric, a radical university student leader in the 2011 education protests, has since 2014 sat in the lower house of congress. There he infamously entered into national unity talks with the current right-wing government of President Sebastian Piñera in 2019 to head off massive anti-capitalist demonstrations. While the history of the Communist Party is far longer and more complex, today it is a thoroughly bourgeois party.

Gabriel Boric (Credit: Mediabanco)

The Frente Amplio models itself on the Spanish pseudo-left group Podemos and the government it formed with the Spanish Socialist Workers Party in 2020. While in Chile it was the right-wing billionaire President Piñera who allowed COVID-19 to rip through the working class neighborhoods, in Spain it was the Podemos-PSOE coalition government. Under their watch 88,000 COVID-19 deaths and over 5.1 million infections were recorded as the fake left regime kept non-essential industries open. It has also deliberately downplayed the growing danger of fascistic military conspiracies to overthrow the government as it cracks down on the strike wave sweeping the country.

Chile’s parliamentary opposition, which is desperate to cling to some political power, has come out for Boric. From the Christian Democrats to the Socialist Party, they are cynically sounding the alarm bells over Kast’s rise.

“I will vote for Gabriel Boric,” said Christian Democrat presidential candidate Yasna Provoste the day after losing in the first round elections. “José Antonio Kast represents the reversal of all advances and the serious risk of plunging the country into a new wave of violence…”

Supporting Boric “is what any democrat would do today, be it a liberal democrat, a right-wing democrat, a center-left democrat, or a left-wing democrat. What is at stake today is democracy, what is at stake today is respect for human rights,” argued Party for Democracy (PPD) senator Guido Girardi. His remarks were echoed by Ricardo Lagos (PPD), Álvaro Elizalde (PS), Jaime Naranjo (PPD) and other dinosaurs of the former ruling center-left coalition.

Yet over the last three years they all tacitly supported Kast’s law-and-order crusade when Piñera gained parliamentary approval for key aspects of his platform to unleash repression against ongoing social protests, immigrants and the indigenous communities.

Nor has Kast fallen from the sky. He was a longtime congressman of the extreme right Independent Democratic Union (UDI), a party closely associated with the fascist-military dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet. Like Pinochet’s University of Chicago and Harvard-trained civilian aides of an earlier period, the post-dictatorship parliamentary center-left was also inserted by imperialism into a convulsive political situation in the 1980s. When working class struggles erupted in that decade in response to a deep recession and bloody military repression, this center-left political opposition channeled the incipient rebellion into calls for a return to parliamentary democracy in which the fascistic military-civilian alliance was left intact.

The greatest fear of the “renewed” left and the Stalinist Communist Party was a return to the revolutionary struggles of 1970-1973 when the question of dual power was sharply posed in Chile. More than a decade had passed since Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government successfully reined in the rank-and-file committees, the Industrial Belts and other organizing bodies of the proletariat in advance of the US imperialist financed and backed coup d’état of September 11, 1973.

Their chief ideological weapon was the Stalinist theory of a two-stage revolution and the bankrupt concept of a “peaceful parliamentary road to socialism” through Popular Fronts—both of which disarmed the working class and prevented its mobilization at the crucial moment. Part and parcel of this ideology was their promotion of national exceptionalism, with the claim that Chile’s state institutions, its police and armed forces, had a legacy of adherence to democratic and constitutional norms.

These misleaders were able to effectively paralyze working class political action because of their domination of the labor movement in the 1970s and because there existed no Bolshevik-type party to provide political leadership.

Under the influence of Pabloite revisionism and its contention that the Cuban Revolution of 1959 proved that the socialist revolution could be carried out through “blunted instruments,” i.e., petty-bourgeois nationalist guerrilla movements, without the participation of the working class or the leadership of a conscious Marxist vanguard party, the Chilean section of the Fourth International had abandoned Marxism and liquidated itself into the guerrillaist Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR) in the 1960s.

The transition from dictatorship to civilian rule in the late 1980s was deliberately realized without even touching the pillars of Pinochetismo —the amnesty law protecting the military from prosecution, the authoritarian constitution, the autonomy of Carabineros and the Armed Forces, the subsidiary state and extreme social inequality. The Stalinists, who remained on the parliamentary periphery but held trade union posts, limited themselves to bourgeois demands to redraft the Pinochet constitution and to “democratize” the state apparatus.

It is under the present conditions of a renewed revolutionary period that the bourgeoisie is relying on the pseudo-left to play the role of the old and deeply hated political caste that emerged in the transition from military to civilian rule three decades ago and the Popular Unity of an earlier period.

Like all these previous permutations, Apruebo Dignidad is beholden to capitalism and is dedicated to upholding the capitalist nation-state.

“We are preparing to be a government that provides certainty of change and brings stability to our country. Aware of the moment we are going through, we present this government plan made with the utmost responsibility,” the alliance’s program states. The paeans to stability and responsibility are directed at Chilean and international investors, guaranteeing that in power they will be “fiscally responsible.”

Whether the historically weak, subservient and virulently anti-Communist Chilean capitalist class buys their program is another question. The president of the Confederation of Production and Commerce again raised concerns about the inclusion of the Communist Party. Seeking to allay any fears, Boric replied by saying: “we have the duty to talk to everyone, and to bring everyone together, and in this sense, large companies ... have to be part of this transformation process.”

The specific function of this electoral front is to obstruct an increasingly rebellious and militant working class that will inevitably come into conflict with the ruling class and their servants amid the worst global capitalist crisis since the interwar period.

Notwithstanding the media’s promotion of Boric as a “radical left,” the Frente Amplio-Communist Party coalition is part of the pseudo-left, whose social constituency is the upper-middle class—lawyers, professionals, academics, the political and trade union bureaucracies, the upper civil service, state functionaries, and artists and media celebrities. It is deeply hostile to the independent mobilization of the working class and is opposed to the fight for social equality.

It has taken less than two weeks since the first round for the Apruebo Dignidad coalition to begin shifting from pledges to initiate “transformative” changes to a law-and-order discourse. In an attempt to woo the center-right, Boric has taken up all of Kast’s talking points of being tough on delinquency, assuring “unwavering commitment to confront drug trafficking, crime and recover public spaces with security…”

Major League Baseball owners lock out players

Alan Gilman

The owners of Major League Baseball (MLB) teams locked out 1,200 professional baseball players after the collective bargaining agreement expired Wednesday at midnight. Less than two hours prior to that deadline the owners voted unanimously to lockout the players, provoking the first work stoppage since the players’ strike of 1994-95.

Baseball’s owners are representatives of the financial aristocracy of America. Twenty-three of its 30 owners are billionaires, with the other seven each worth several hundreds of millions of dollars. Driven by continual increases in television revenues and soaring ticket prices from ultra-modern new stadiums financed largely with public funds, revenues for MLB reached a record $10.7 billion in 2019, the last year before the coronavirus pandemic.

The major issue in this dispute centers on attempts to alter free agency and compensation, and ways to promote more competitiveness across the league. As part of recent negotiations, the players union, the Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA), proposed changes that included free agency after five years of service time (instead of six), salary arbitration earlier in players’ careers, and a raising of the luxury-tax threshold, so big market teams can spend more on player salaries without penalties.

Major League Baseball union head Tony Clark, right, and chief negotiator for the players association Bruce Meyer listen to a question during a media availability in Irving, Texas, Thursday, Dec. 2, 2021. Owners locked out players at 12:01 a.m. Thursday following the expiration of the sport's five-year collective bargaining agreement. (AP Photo/LM Otero)

The model that has been used by baseball for the past several decades provided that during the first three years of a player’s career, a team could unilaterally dictate a player’s salary. For the next three years, a player would gain arbitration rights and an arbitrator would resolve any differences between what a player wants to earn and what an owner is willing to pay. Then, after six years, a player would become a free agent, with the league’s most veteran players being in a position to obtain contracts worth tens of millions or, in some cases, hundreds of millions over several years.

While the free agency system has led to substantial rises in average salaries since its introduction in 1975, extreme levels of inequality exist within rosters. The average major league career now lasts three to four years, meaning most will never even make it to free agency. Of the players on opening day rosters last season, 46 percent made less than $1 million, with 35 percent at less than $600,000, according to an Associated Press salary survey. The minimum salary last season was $570,500.

In the minor league system, thousands more each year earn sub-poverty wages of between $8,000 and $14,000 in the hopes of one day earning a spot on a major league team, but only about 10 percent of minor leaguers end up playing even a single game in the majors. In September, ESPN ran a story of the devastating mental health impact of these impossible financial difficulties on minor league players.

In this era of analytics, teams have learned it is smarter to pay players for what they are projected to do rather for what they have done, and consequently the younger and less expensive player is being prioritized. Players often are now released before they can go through salary arbitration three times, and when non-elite players hit free agency, they might find a minor league contract just as likely as a multiyear contract.

Owners of less competitive teams have also used the strategy of “tanking,” to trade and sell off their best players, who are generally older, restock with younger inexpensive players, and build a more competitive team in the near future with higher draft picks for much less money. Under the franchise system used by US professional sports but uncommon everywhere else in the world, the worst teams not only retain their spots in the league the following season but are granted the first pickets in the following year’s amateur draft.

Under the present system, the teams with the worst records get higher draft picks. As Sporting News put it, “The way the system is set up now, owners reap two giant benefits from fielding awful teams: 1. They’re pocketing money they could/should be spending to keep/bring in better players. 2. They’re collecting high draft picks every year that they’re awful.”

In 2021, the publication reported that six teams lost at least 95 games out of a 162-game regular season, bottomed out by the Orioles and Diamondbacks at 110 losses each. In 2019, four teams lost at least 103 games, and another six lost 90-plus. In 2018, eight teams lost at least 95 games, “led” by the Orioles, at 115 losses. This is close to the worst record in modern MLB history set by the New York Mets, then an expansion club, in 1962, when they lost 120 games.

The players insist that to correct these disparities there should be a lottery type draft that will not reward teams with the worst records. They also want players to be compensated earlier in their careers by allowing them to reach salary arbitration and free agency sooner.

Since CBAs were first negotiated in the late 1960’s, they have been structured to expire during the off-season. Initially the owners locking out players was a frequent occurrence, with lockouts taking place in 1973, 1976 and 1990. Players also carried out four strikes in 1972, 1980, 1981 and 1994-1995.

The 1994-1995 strike, which also revolved around owners’ attempts to limit free agency, was the longest in professional sports history, lasting 232 days. During this strike, 948 games were canceled in the 1994 season and the first 18 games of the 1995 season. Eventually various court and arbitration rulings reimposed the prior CBA until another agreement could be negotiated.

For the past 30 years, Major League Baseball has been played without any lockouts or strikes. Today, however, its owners and its players are being influenced by the same economic tensions and pressures, including the global pandemic, which are impacting workers in this country and globally that has led to a massive strike wave.

In the last ten days before the lockout, contrary to their claims of economic hardship regarding contract talks, many of these same owners were able to scrape together over $1 billion to sign nine players.

The owners, by instituting a lockout now, can do so without risking losing any games since the season does not begin until late March, and at the same time place pressure on unsigned players and free agents who are now prohibited from negotiating or signing any new contracts during the lockout, as well as attempting to create a divide between the higher- and lower-paid players.

One of the top player representatives, however, is Max Scherzer, one of baseball’s premiere pitcher’s, who just a few days ago signed a three-year $130 million contract with the New York Mets.

Scherzer, in response to the lockout, commented that the union has over the last five years been amassing money to weather this labor dispute. “We have a pretty good war chest behind us of money that we can allocate to players. The best-case scenario is not to tap it. Obviously, hopefully, we get a deal at some point in time, but just know as players, we’re steadfast in our belief of how we see the game.”