Solomon Islands’ government defeats parliamentary no confidence motion

Patrick O’Connor

Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare yesterday defeated an attempt to oust him via a no confidence motion, with US-backed opposition forces only able to muster the votes of 15 out of the 49 parliamentarians.

Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare (Photo: solomons.gov.sb)

The parliamentary effort to remove the government came directly after an unsuccessful violent coup attempt instigated by opposition forces. Over three days between November 24–26, approximately 1,000 people burned and looted dozens of buildings in the capital, Honiara, killing three people.

The crowd attempted to storm the parliament and after being beaten back by riot police, razed to the ground a building next to parliament, a building at the prime minister’s residence, as well as a police station, high school, and 60 other buildings, with ethnic Chinese-owned businesses especially targeted.

The country’s central bank last week estimated that the rioting would see the national economy contract in 2021 by 0.6 percent, down from the already COVID-affected projected growth rate of plus 0.4 percent.

The destruction was the culmination of a US-supported, two-year campaign against the Solomon Islands’ diplomatic recognition of China. The October 2019 switch from Taiwan to Beijing aligned the Pacific country with the vast majority of UN member states in recognising the Chinese government.

Washington, however, regarded this sovereign decision of the Solomons’ government as an obstacle to its drive to counter China’s challenge to its dominance of East Asia and the Pacific, including by boosting Taiwan.

Republican congressman and Trump ally Marco Rubio publicly threatened to destroy the impoverished country’s economy. A less prominent, but no less provocative, message was delivered to Solomon Islands by a team of US government officials that in late 2019 travelled to Malaita province and held secret talks with Premier Daniel Suidani. The provincial leader subsequently denounced diplomatic ties with China, promoting anti-communist and Christian fundamentalist demagogy. The US government funnelled investment money and $US25 million in direct cash aid as an effective reward for Suidani’s efforts to sabotage the national government’s foreign policy.

Suidani is closely allied with a group promoting Malaitan independence from Solomon Islands, Malaita for Democracy (M4D). This outfit led the violent rioting late last month. Hundreds of people were ferried from Malaita to the capital for the coup attempt, with others prevented by police from landing on an additional ferry on November 24. The government has since proscribed M4D, characterising its members as “domestic terrorists.”

In the immediate aftermath of the coup attempt, Suidani has doubled down on his efforts to oust the government and instigate the reversal of the recognition of China. He addressed the Taiwan Foreign Correspondents Club on December 3, flaunting his US backing by wearing a polo-shirt with a prominent USAID logo. Suidani declared his support for ongoing anti-government protests and insisted that diplomatic recognition of China would end if the government was removed. These remarks were prominently reported in a Washington Post article.

Prime Minister Sogavare yesterday delivered a nearly two-hour long speech on the parliamentary floor opposing the no confidence motion advanced by the opposition leader Mathew Wale.

The address outlined important additional details on the planning and calculations behind the rioting. As the World Socialist Web Site analysed, the violence emerged not from any spontaneous uprising but rather was part of a reactionary coup attempt.

Sogavare characterised the riots as an “an attempted coup to overthrow the elected government.” He said that people travelling from Malaita to the capital on November 24 were given discounted or free ferry tickets, adding that the plan had been to “storm parliament and lock us [parliamentarians] in until I resigned.”

The prime minister accused opposition parliamentarians of conspiring with the Malaitan provincial administration and M4D. These forces gathered in Malaita on November 18, where Suidani had organised a public rally. Opposition parliamentarians were among those who delivered incendiary anti-government speeches. Sogavare quoted parts of these speeches, in the pidgin language in which they were delivered, and said they were an incitement for “people to take the law into their own hands.”

The prime minister added that Suidani had travelled throughout Malaita ahead of the riots, allegedly spreading “disinformation” and building support for an effort to overthrow the government, and had also met with Malaitan people in the settlements on the outskirts of eastern Honiara. Many of the rioters reportedly came from this area, an impoverished slum.

Sogavare told the parliament: “This [no confidence] motion was made against the backdrop of an illegal attempted coup. Violence, intimidation and fear—these actions are illegal and unlawful and were an attack on the principles of democracy.”

The WSWS opposes the US-backed provocative efforts to destabilise and remove the Solomon Islands government, while at the same time extending no political support whatsoever to the Sogavare government.

The prime minister is now manoeuvring to curry favour with the US and Australian governments. His address to parliament notably failed to make any reference to Washington’s support for Suidani and the campaign to reverse the country’s recognition of Beijing. He carefully restricted his condemnation of foreign powers to Taiwan, accusing the opposition of being its agents.

Yesterday’s defeat of the no confidence motion will not resolve the political turmoil in the Solomons. It remains to be seen whether the Australian government will throw its weight behind the campaign to oust the government.

More than 100 Australian soldiers and riot police are now stationed in Honiara, after Sogavare invited the intervention force to halt the rioting. The Australian government has repeatedly insisted that this force will remain in Solomon Islands only for weeks, and Prime Minister Scott Morrison has insisted that Canberra would not take sides in any internal political disputes.

This stance is coming under mounting criticism from within the Australian foreign policy establishment. Former foreign minister Alexander Downer last week wrote a comment piece for the Australian Financial Review, insisting that ending the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI) intervention force in 2017 had proved a mistake. He stated that Australia should have a permanent military-police presence in the country, effectively calling for its conversion into an Australian semi-colony.

The Murdoch media has published a series of articles in recent days hostile to Sogavare and his government, including pieces recycling the Solomons’ opposition accusations of corruption. In 2006-2007, when a previous Sogavare government was the target of a protracted “regime change” operation orchestrated by Canberra, the Murdoch press functioned as a conduit for Australian government propaganda.

An article in the rightwing Spectator magazine on Saturday criticised the Morrison government for allegedly having “tipped the balance of favour toward Xi Jinping’s interests” by deploying an intervention force that it alleged has stabilised the situation in the Sogavare government’s favour. It continued: “Maybe it’s time Australia started ‘picking winners’ in the Pacific? If we don’t play the game, China will walk in a victory. The longer the communist nation is left to its own devices, the worse the inevitable conflict will be. Australia can’t outspend China’s magical wallet, but it can support grassroots rebellions when they occur.”

The fraught situation in Solomon Islands underscores the enormous stakes throughout the Pacific as US imperialism and its allies attempt to counter China’s growing economic and diplomatic influence. Washington and Canberra will not hesitate in promoting coups, riots, and state breakdown, if such methods are seen as the most effective means of advancing their geopolitical interests.

14,000 Airbus workers take part in “warning” strikes in Germany

Gustav Kemper

Last week, over 14,000 employees of Airbus and its subsidiary Premium Aerotec took part in “warning” strikes across Germany. According to the trade union IG Metall entire production shifts were cancelled at the company’s north German plants in Bremen, Hamburg, Nordenham, Stade and Varel, as well as in Augsburg (Bavaria). The work stoppages began on December 2 and were expected to continue until the weekend.

Airbus plant Finkenwerder, Hamburg (Photo: David McKelvey / CC BY-SA 2.0)

The protest is directed against plans announced in April to cut thousands of jobs in civil aircraft production across Europe. Due to the corona pandemic, there were no pickets or protest events, only an online event. With growing anger against the planned cuts, IG Metall called the limited actions to let off steam. The union is completely prepared to accept the job cuts and other cost-cutting measures, as long as union officials are involved in the planning and execution of the cuts.

In July 2020, when a drop in aircraft orders and the postponement of deliveries led to rumours of massive cuts, IG Metall officials stressed their understanding for the cost-cutting measures and praised the union’s long-standing collaboration with management, officially embodied in the German system of “social partnership.” The union recognised it must take into account the interests “of the company to make profits” as well as the interests of shareholders by “guaranteeing them a good return on investment,” assured Michael Leppek, head of IG Metall in Augsburg, in a podcast interview with a local newspaper.

Over a month ago, at the end of October, Airbus CEO Guillaume Faury announced company profits of €4.5 billion (before interest and taxes) for the first nine months of the year. These profits are the result of the “Odyssey” rationalisation programme unveiled in summer 2020, which envisages cuts of 15,000 jobs worldwide, including 5,000 in Germany.

Most of the planned job cuts at German sites have already been implemented, with workers at Airbus and Premium-Aerotec forced out with severance payments or early retirement schemes, which IG Metall claimed avoided compulsory redundancies. Daniel Friedrich, the district leader of IG Metall Küste, declared, “The threatened redundancies are off the table. Instead, there are intelligent solutions.” This is all IG Metall and the works councils have to offer workers after months-long “negotiations” with management.

The company’s German works council complained after Airbus management informed the European Works Council on 21 April about its plans to restructure the company. The new programme is supposed to affect the aircraft components division, especially fuselage sections, floor structures, wing components, cargo doors and/or pressure bulkheads, from as early as next month. These components are currently manufactured in the Airbus wholly owned subsidiary “Premium Aerotec” with factories in France, Germany and Romania. The division of the former subsidiary is being reintegrated into the main company.

The production of individual parts and small components that also takes place at Aerotec is to be diversified into an independent company that could also manufacture products for other aviation companies. There are 3,500 workers currently employed in the production of such parts in Varel, Augsburg and in Brasov, Romania. This company, under the name ASA, is being offered to investors for purchase.

The latest restructuring affects about 13,000 workers. IG Metall refers to it as a “senseless split” yet when it comes to workers, it is the unions which are splitting and dividing them in the company’s European plants.

Airbus SE is a global aerospace company with over 170 locations worldwide. Without a common European struggle of Airbus workers not a single job can be defended. The various national trade unions act according to the principle of divide and rule. IGM executive member Jürgen Kerner, for example, complained that German factories were being treated less favourably than French locations. “Airbus is mutating more and more into a French listed company with a German branch,” Werner complained.

When 22,000 engineering workers in Cadiz, Spain went on strike for a week last month to keep defend their Airbus plant, IG Metall in Germany did not say a word. Airbus plans to close the entire plant in Puerto Real, a district of Cádiz, by 2024. Together with workers in the supplier industry, the closure of the plant would wipe out over 2,200 jobs. This would be a disaster for the city, which already has an unemployment rate of 34 percent.

The massive strike action by the workforce was suppressed by the Spanish unions, which are no different from IG Metall. Airbus management, the social democratic trade union federation UGT and the Stalinist trade union CCOO, the Spanish coalition government of social democrats and the pseudo-left Podemos together with the Federation of Metal Companies of Cadiz (FEMCA), all agreed to close the Puerto Real plant and make the factory premises available for an unspecified “Industrial Centre for Aviation 4.0.”

Jobs are supposedly secured by the proposal, but this is nothing more than a hollow promise aimed at ending the strike.

The same problems face workers in Germany and all over the world. The unions are imposing job cuts to protect the profits of the corporations. While they organise protests to vent anger, they are feverishly working behind the scenes to finalise the agreements for layoffs and factory closures in exchange for “compensation” or promises of investment plans that are never fulfilled.

US announces boycott of Beijing Winter Olympics

Peter Symonds

Less than a month after US President Joe Biden held his first formal summit with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping, the US has announced a provocative diplomatic boycott of the Winter Olympics, due to open in Beijing in February.

The famous "Cinderella's shoe" big air venue built especially for the 2022 Winter Olympics (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

White House press secretary Jen Psaki told a press briefing that the US would send no official delegation to the Beijing Olympics. That would register its opposition to China’s “ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang and other human rights abuses.” American athletes will compete nevertheless.

The decision follows an increasingly hysterical campaign in the US media and political establishment, clamouring for a boycott on the basis of lies about China’s “genocide” of the ethnic Uyghur population in China’s western province of Xinjiang.

The Biden administration has offered no substantive evidence of widespread human rights abuses in Xinjiang, let alone that Beijing is engaged in “atrocities” and “genocide.” The use of the term “genocide,” without a shred of proof, degrades its meaning and the very real crimes of the past, such as the Nazi holocaust.

Allegations of widespread surveillance, detentions and infringement of religious freedom rest on the tendentious claims of a handful of far-right, anti-communist academics, along with the uncorroborated stories of Uyghur exiles connected to organisations such as the US-funded World Uyghur Congress and the American Uyghur Association.

In the dying days of the Trump administration, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo first accused China of genocide in Xinjiang. That lie was rapidly taken up by the Biden administration as part of its vilification of China. The propaganda campaign is one element of the aggressive US strategy of confronting and undermining China on all fronts over the past decade, including a military build-up throughout the Indo-Pacific in preparation for war.

The US is again cynically raising the banner of “human rights” as the pretext for its actions, with Psaki declaring that “we have a fundamental commitment to promoting human rights.”

The rank hypocrisy of this statement is clear from the US-led boycott of the Summer Olympics in Moscow in 1980 to protest against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The Carter administration, which staged the boycott, was instrumental in the huge CIA operation to fund and arm Muslim jihadists against the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul, including the foreign fighters funneled in via the organisation known as Al Qaeda.

Two decades later the “blowback” from the CIA’s dirty war in Afghanistan resulted in the terrorist attacks by Al Qaeda in the US on September 11 2001. Washington seized on the attacks to carry out the illegal invasion and neo-colonial occupation of Afghanistan that reduced the country to ruins and destroyed countless lives. It proved to be a quagmire for US imperialism in the same way that it had been a disaster for the Soviet Union.

As in Afghanistan, the US has repeatedly exploited the issue of “human rights” as the justification for its crimes and atrocities in its “war on terror.” Its wars include the invasion of Iraq and military interventions in Syria and Libya, which involved the destruction of entire societies. Such acts of sociocide constitute real crimes against humanity.

At the same time, the total disregard of US imperialism for human life is also being visited upon the working class at home. Some 800,000 Americans have died from COVID-19 as a result of the criminal policies of the Trump and Biden administrations that have dropped virtually all health restrictions so as to boost corporate profits and the wealth of the super-rich at the expense of the health and lives of ordinary working people.

In a salutary comparison, more people continue to die from the virus every week in the United States than the total death toll in China since the start of the pandemic. Yet no action is taken against those responsible in the White House.

The pandemic, which is now threatening a massive worldwide resurgence of the Omicron strain, has enormously heightened the social, political and economic crisis facing the Biden administration and the political establishment in Washington as a whole. The demonisation of China is a crude attempt to turn the social tensions at home outward against a foreign enemy.

The Biden administration is staging another contemptuous “human rights” exercise this week, billed as the US Summit for Democracy, to which allies are invited and rivals excluded with scant regard for their record on democratic rights. Biden has pointedly invited Taiwan, despite the fact that the US regards the island as part of China under the One China policy. The event will undoubtedly be used as another forum to condemn China, while encouraging allies to strengthen ties with Taiwan.

Washington will seek to also marshal support for an international boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics. Governments in Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom have indicated that a boycott is under consideration.

China reacted angrily to the announced boycott. Its Washington embassy dismissed the announcement as “a pretentious act” and a “political manipulation.”

Foreign ministry spokesperson, Zhao Lijian, declared yesterday: “I want to stress that the Winter Olympic Games is not a stage for political posturing and manipulation. It is a grave travesty of the spirit of the Olympic charter, a blatant political provocation and a serious affront to the 1.4 billion Chinese people.”

Zhao warned of “resolute countermeasures” but Beijing has so far not indicated what it might do.

The boycott is one more sign that the US is deliberately intensifying and accelerating its confrontation with China. The vilification of Beijing over “human rights,” along with the Wuhan Lab lie that China is responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic, is going hand in hand with the maintenance of trade war sanctions and other punitive penalties and the US military encirclement of China.

While the boycott recalls the Cold War against the Soviet Union, the US is not preparing for a protracted standoff with China. Unlike its standoff with the Soviet Union, the US regards China’s extraordinary economic growth as the prime threat to its global dominance and will stop at nothing, including war if necessary, to prevent its eclipse by China.

The Omicron COVID-19 variant and the reckless endangerment of children

Evan Blake

The highly transmissible Omicron variant of COVID-19 has now spread to 49 countries throughout the world, with many already experiencing community spread of the new variant. In the United Kingdom, which combines high rates of DNA sequencing with the “herd immunity” strategy of letting the virus rip throughout society, there are now 246 detected cases of the Omicron variant, a 54 percent increase in one day.

Residents listen to Gauteng Province Premier David Makhura in Lawley, South Africa, Friday Dec. 3, 2021 for the launch of the Vooma vaccination program against COVID-19. (AP Photo/Jerome Delay)

The situation is increasingly dire in South Africa, where daily new infections and hospitalizations have surged far faster than any previous wave. The seven-day moving average of daily new cases is now 10,628, while the test positivity rate stands at 26.4 percent, indicating that the real number of daily new cases is likely far higher than the official figure.

Hospitalizations and deaths are a lagging indicator, but the number of new admissions to hospitals and intensive care units increased by just under 10 percent over the weekend, and another nine South Africans succumbed to the virus over the weekend.

One of the most concerning initial trends of the Omicron surge in South Africa is the disproportionate impact of the virus on infants and toddlers under the age of five. At a press conference Friday, Dr. Waasila Jassat of the National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD) stated, “We’ve seen quite a sharp increase [in hospital admissions] across all age groups but particularly in the under 5s.” She added, “The incidence in those under 5 is now second highest, second only to those over 60.”

In the city of Tshwane, over 100 children less than five years old were admitted to hospitals with COVID-19 between November 14-27, far more than any previous wave of the pandemic. The NICD noted Friday that children under the age of two accounted for roughly 10 percent of the total hospital admissions in Tshwane.

In an interview with SABC News, Professor Rudo Mathivha at the Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital in Johannesburg commented, “If we were to get children, toddlers, coming in great numbers, with significant severity of disease, this is going to be a major problem for us. Our hospitals were not built to house a lot of children, because naturally children do not get that sick in multitude. We will not be able to accommodate them.”

Experts have commented that infants and toddlers are most susceptible because they are not yet eligible for the vaccine, and there is also concern that the heavily mutated virus could affect children differently than previous variants. Already, the Delta variant has caused greater harm to children in the US and internationally, with thousands killed globally.

The growing spread of the Omicron variant takes place under conditions in which the Delta variant is fueling the sixth global surge of the pandemic, with Europe and North America the present epicenters. In response to this catastrophic surge, in which an average of roughly 600,000 people are officially infected and 7,000 people are dying from COVID-19 each day, capitalist governments adamantly refuse to close schools in order to protect children, their parents and communities.

In the United Kingdom, an average of over 45,000 people are now officially infected with COVID-19 each day. While the Omicron variant spreads rapidly and schools are forced to remain open, the Johnson administration is targeting British parent and anti-COVID activist Lisa Diaz with legal actions to try to quell the growing opposition among parents to the sacrifice of their children.

In Germany, an average of more than 55,000 people are officially infected each day. The incidence rate among children aged 5-14 has been above 1,000 per 100,000 people for over a week, the highest of any age group. Over the past month, there have officially been more than 1,540 school outbreaks throughout the country. In response to this crisis, no officials have supported the growing calls for school closures among parents, students and educators.

In France, daily new cases have more than quadrupled in the past month, reaching a current average of more than 40,000. The highest increase is taking place among children aged 6-10, driven primarily by outbreaks in schools. In response, officials are further lifting restrictions and limiting the ability of schools to close in the event of an outbreak.

In the United States, 18 states have detected the Omicron variant while an average of nearly 110,000 people are infected with COVID-19 each day. The entire fall semester has seen a sustained mass infection of children. According to this week’s report from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), which is highly limited due to efforts by state governments to cover up COVID-19 data on children, another 133,022 children were officially infected with COVID-19 across the US last week, the 17th straight week of over 100,000 infections.

The report notes that eight more children died from COVID-19 last week, bringing their total count to 651. However, data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) states that 974 children under 18 years old have succumbed to the virus, including an extraordinary 306 children under the age of five.

Despite the deepening catastrophe of infections, hospitalizations and deaths among children, which Omicron threatens to intensify even further, the entire political establishment, corporate media and the teachers unions insist that schools must stay open.

At a press conference Thursday on the Omicron variant, US President Joe Biden outlined a new “Test to Stay” program, whereby whenever a student tests positive for COVID-19, his or her peers will no longer be sent home to safely quarantine. Instead, they will continue learning in-person if they test negative.

This program, designed to keep kids at school so their parents can stay at work producing profits, was immediately endorsed by American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten. On a day when nearly 20,000 children in the US were officially infected with COVID-19, she cynically wrote, “Testing and tracing has always been our best way of getting an accurate picture of our public health landscape during this pandemic.”

The position of Weingarten, along with the Biden administration, ever more closely resembles that of the “herd immunity” advocates on the far right. In September, Weingarten chaired an AFT town hall at which Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) author Jay Bhattacharya was the featured “scientist.”

The central tenet of the GBD is the pseudoscientific notion that children should actively be infected with COVID-19 to serve as a “human shield” protecting their elders. In reality, this criminal policy has led to the deaths of nearly 1,000 US children and the potential long-term debilitation of millions, with the still incompletely understood effects of “Long COVID.” Before the ongoing Delta surge, more than 140,000 children had already lost a parent or grandparent caregiver to COVID-19, a figure that has likely now surpassed 200,000.

The role of the corporate media is equally criminal. In almost all the print and broadcast news, there is a concerted effort to disarm the population and prematurely declare the Omicron variant “milder” than previous variants of the virus. While the precise virulence and lethality of this latest Frankenstein monster will be determined in time, the rapid surge of hospitalizations and warnings from scientists on the ground in South Africa indicate that Omicron will likely be just as severe as previous variants, if not more so due to its higher transmissibility.

Instead of warning about these possible dangers and advancing the precautionary principle at the heart of public health, the New York Times is opposing lockdowns and ramping up its denunciations of China. In an article Monday, the Times decries China’s “unrelenting march toward herd immunity, the point at which enough people are immune to the virus that it cannot spread through the population.” They denounce China for being “the world’s last zero-Covid holdout” and absurdly present as “authoritarian” the country’s efforts to inoculate children aged 3-11, even as New York City announced the same day a vaccine mandate for private companies.

The truth is that tens of millions of parents were coerced to send their children back into unsafe schools across the US and every advanced capitalist country, with no remote option provided for the vast majority of working and middle class families. A criminal policy aimed at deliberately infecting masses of youth and their families has killed millions worldwide, with young people now increasingly threatened by the Omicron variant, all of which the Times has continuously supported.

UN’s highest ever humanitarian appeal falls on imperialism’s deaf ears

Jean Shaoul

On Thursday, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) launched an appeal to the major powers for a record $41 billion to help the 183 million people most in need of life-saving assistance.

This was a large increase on the $35 billion requested for 2021 and double the amount sought just four years ago. It is needed for some 63 countries, nearly one third of the 193 United Nations member states, most of which came into existence after the national liberation movements took over from the colonial powers that had previously ruled them.

Speaking at a news conference at Thursday’s launch of the appeal, OCHA head and Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths stressed that the number of people in need “has never been as high as this.” He said, “The climate crisis is hitting the world’s most vulnerable people first and worst. Protracted conflicts grind on, and instability has worsened in several parts of the world, notably Ethiopia, Myanmar and Afghanistan.”

Worse is to come.

OCHA’s Global Humanitarian Overview 2022 report, published the same day, draws on the work of 37 agencies, including various UN agencies and international aid organisations. It said 274 million people worldwide will need some form of emergency assistance next year, up 17 percent from the 235 million in 2021, a record high. One in 29 of the world’s 7.9 billion people will need help in 2022, up 250 percent on 2015 when one in 95 needed assistance.

In this Sunday, June 14, 2020 photo, seven-month-old Issa Ibrahim Nasser is brought to a clinic in Deir Al-Hassi, At seven months old, Issa weighs only three kilos. Like him, hundreds of children suffer from acute severe malnutrition because of poverty and grinding conflict. Yemen. (AP Photo/Issa Al-Rajhi)

The report noted that the COVID-19 pandemic, fueled by vaccine inequality, has devastated economies, livelihoods, health systems and education. Testing, diagnosis and treatment for HIV, TB and malaria has fallen. Ante-natal visits dropped by 43 percent and 23 million children missed basic childhood vaccines in 2021. With 2.2 billion children without access to the internet at home, many faced disruption to their education.

The pandemic has increased suffering and extreme poverty, rising again after two decades of decline with women and young workers disproportionately affected by job losses. Some 247 million women live on less than $1.90 a day. Hunger is on the rise and food insecurity has reached unprecedented levels, with 811 million people (11 percent of the world’s population) undernourished and famine “a real and terrifying possibility in 43 countries.”

Political conflicts have hit civilians hard. More than 1 percent of the world’s population is now displaced, of whom 42 percent are children. Millions of internally displaced people (IDPs) live in camps or in impoverished conditions in cities for long periods, unable to return home.

The humanitarian needs are by far the greatest in the Middle East and Africa, thanks to wars provoked, fueled and paid for by the imperialist powers in pursuit of access to raw materials and markets in the interests of the corporations they represent. The priority of the local oligarchies is to remain competitive for foreign investments, while continuing debt payments to the financial vultures, expanding their armed forces and suppressing the revolutionary strivings of the working class and poor peasants.

According to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), 45 million people are at risk of famine in dozens of countries, with Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Ethiopia and Sudan topping the list. In Afghanistan, more than 24 million people are in dire need of assistance as the result of four decades of war and now the worst drought in 27 years.

Syria, which has endured more than 10 years of a US-led war to topple the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, faces a lack of basic commodities amid a horrifically damaged infrastructure. Average household expenditure exceeds income by 50 percent compared with 20 percent in August 2020.

In Yemen, at war since Saudi Arabia, aided and abetted by the US, Britain and the regional powers, invaded its impoverished southern neighbour in April 2015, 16.2 million of the 30 million population face acute food shortages. Even with humanitarian assistance, 40 percent of the population do not have enough food.

In Ethiopia, 25.9 million of its 118 million population need help as a result of the war in Tigray and other parts of the country, Drought and disease are mounting, with many of the country’s 4.2 million IDPs seeking shelter in the towns and cities adding to the social and economic pressures. In South Sudan, 8.4 million of its 11 million people are in need, as a result of the ongoing civil war since independence from Sudan in 2011, and three years of flooding and disease.

As well as the Middle East and Africa, there has been increased demand for humanitarian assistance from Asia and the Pacific, Latin America and the Caribbean. The situation in Myanmar has deteriorated significantly in the wake of last February’s military coup and the pandemic, with 14.4 million of the country’s 55 million people in urgent need of humanitarian assistance. In Haiti, a massive 43 percent of the population need aid, in the wake of last August’s earthquake that affected 800,000 people, on top of the even more devastating one in 2010; the pandemic and the deteriorating economic situation.

Despite the desperate need, funding for 2022 will not be forthcoming. This year’s OCHA appeal garnered just $17 billion, less than half the amount requested, with the 10 most underfunded emergencies receiving less than half what was needed, leading to cutbacks in food rations and life-saving healthcare services. Griffiths acknowledged this, saying, “We’re aware that we’re not going to get the $41 billion, much as we will try hard.” He did not spell out why this was so or the consequences for the world’s most destitute people.

It is not as if there are no resources available. The world’s richest billionaires have seen their wealth increase astronomically this past year and could easily foot the entire bill. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, the net worth of Elon Musk, founder and CEO of Tesla and the richest person in the world as of December 2021 is $311 billion, while that of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is $201 billion. Yet the world’s governments refuse to tax them or their ilk.

This leaves the OCHA reliant on appeals to donor countries that have become increasingly unsuccessful.

Its parent body and the UN’s humanitarian agency, the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), was set up in 1950 along with the 1951 Convention on Human Rights and the Convention on the Status of Refugees to address the tens of million refugee, forcibly displaced and stateless people crisis following World War II, in the political context of the Cold War. Then popular revulsion at the Holocaust happened to align with Washington’s strategic interests in asserting its global hegemony, containing the influence of the Stalinist regime in Moscow and above all suppressing the threat of social revolution on a global scale.

Nevertheless, the UNHCR, and the agencies it spawned in the 1990s such as OCHA after the collapse of the Soviet Union, were always funded on an ad hoc basis.

Its approach was based primarily on aiding those in camps and defending the right to seek asylum anywhere but in the imperialist centres. This laid the framework of a global refugee regime, providing the template for the response to multiple crises in the 1960s in Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and Europe within the context of the Cold War.

Today, the majority of IDPs do not reside in camps, while the right to asylum is being obliterated.

OCHA’s appeal and report fell on deaf ears. Indeed, the agency pointed out the complete bankruptcy of its call. Admitting it had no solutions for the crisis, the OCHA declared, “Humanitarian aid cannot provide a path out of protracted crises when such a scarcity of funds persists.”

There was no mention of the appeal in the world’s press, testifying to the degree to which starvation and misery are not only being normalized but becoming the policy of choice—a weapon in the hands of the major imperialist powers that speak for their corporate and financial oligarchs, and their puppet regimes in the world’s poorest countries.

Washington now routinely uses sanctions and secondary sanctions to exert “maximum pressure” on Cuba, Venezuela, Iran and its allies in Syria and Lebanon, to cite but a few, in a bid to force them to toe its line. Israel has blockaded Gaza for more than 14 years; Saudi Arabia has besieged Yemen for six years and the Ethiopian government is blockading the rebel Tigray province to starve them into submission.

UK child poverty soars as workers’ living standards suffer sharp decline and household poverty grows

Simon Whelan

Child poverty in Britain is growing rapidly as working-class families suffer a severe reduction in living standards and are tipped into poverty.

Over recent months rapidly rising bills and prices, wages failing to keep pace with inflation, and cuts of £20 a week to the Universal Credit welfare payment on which million rely, including millions of low paid workers, have decimated incomes.

Cumulatively, UK household incomes could drop on average by approximately £1,000 next year, according to analysis by the Resolution Foundation (RF) thinktank. The Institute for Public Policy Research says a typical family will lose a further £500 a year because of the planned increase in national insurance taxes next April and an expected 5 percent rise in council tax.

Recent figures from the Department for Works and Pensions record astonishingly high levels of child poverty even before housing costs. It found that 11.7 million children (18 percent) are in relative poverty and 9.2 million (14 percent) are in absolute poverty. Once housing costs are taken into account, 14.5 million children (22 percent) are in relative poverty and 11.7 million children (18 percent) suffer absolute levels of deprivation.

RF expects child poverty to rise further by 2.7 percent, approximately 400,000 extra children, in the coming year. Over the course of this Parliament (2019-2024), the RF expects child poverty to rise from 30.9 percent to 33.7 percent, or one in three children. Even if the Universal Credit uplift payment of £20 a week (introduced at the start of the pandemic) had remained—it was removed by the Conservative government in October—the RF would still have expected child poverty to grow to 31.4 percent by 2024-25.

According to a report released November 29 by child poverty charity The Childhood Trust (CT), 250,000 children in the UK will go hungry this Christmas. The report, “Cold, Hungry and Stressed”, estimates that nearly a fifth of families are worried about not being able to afford Christmas dinner.

The Childhood Trust report "Cold, Hungry and Stressed"

While childhood poverty was prevalent before the coronavirus pandemic, the CT stress how the scale and complexity of child poverty has intensified over the past 18 months because of economic and political developments that have jointly reduced UK incomes.

Laurence Guinness, CEO of The Children’s Trust, said, “The social and economic situation across fuel, food and support services will force families into making impossible decisions between feeding their child or keeping them warm, decisions no families should be forced to make”.

The CT found families are being forced into desperate measures in order to make sure their children are fed and 28 percent of women admitted they have gone without food so their child can eat. Of the 55,318 children represented by 30 charities in the CT report, it is estimated that approximately 14,152 (26 percent) will not receive any Christmas presents this year. Contacted by the CT, London charities reported that 67 percent of the children they support were affected by food poverty in October 2021 and over half of the charities surveyed reported an increase in the number of people accessing their services due to food poverty. Of these charities, the average increase in the number of beneficiaries was up by an incredible 50 percent.

These results echo findings from CT’s UK-wide survey, which reported 22 percent of London and 20 percent of UK respondents were financially concerned about not being able to buy Christmas presents this winter.

Authoring a comment piece about their research at Politics.co.uk, Guinness wrote “Since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, household food insecurity has increased, food bank use has reached its highest levels, and the number of children eligible for free school meals has risen. This winter, the rising cost of food is hitting low income families hard.” Guinness said children face devastating life-long consequences from food insecurity and the nutritional deficiencies it causes.

Charities involved with CT predict fuel poverty will get even worse in winter 2021/2022 causing many families to choose between heating their homes or feeding their children. The lives of 24,591 of the 25,726 children (96 percent) affected by fuel poverty across 23 of the charities surveyed are predicted to significantly worsen. Out of the total 106,523 children represented by 31 charities in this report, approximately 38 percent are expected to experience fuel poverty at some point during the Christmas holidays.

Millions of people are rationing the use of their gas central heating system. Kevin Peachey, personal finance correspondent for BBC News, reported December 2 on the case of Sandy Birtles and her child. Sandy must pile coats and blankets on top of him to keep him warm in bed. “When she goes in to check on him at night, Sandy Birtles says she can hardly see her teenage son for all the layers on his bed. The single mother of two says that the family do all they can to keep warm as the bills continue to rise.”

The article noted National Energy Action’s calculation that when domestic energy prices rise in April, it will mean that the typical domestic gas bill will have doubled in just 18 months. The charity, which campaigns for warm, dry homes, used industry data and forecasts to predict that the typical gas bill, for those on standard tariffs, is likely to have gone up from £466 a year in October 2020, to £944 in April 2022.

Widespread poverty has resulting in cases of malnutrition almost doubling in the decade since the Conservatives came to power in 2010. National Health Service research found that people were treated in hospital 4,657 times for the condition in the 2010/2011 financial year. By 2020/2021, this had risen to 10,109.

Poverty affecting millions of people has resulted in a staggering increase in the use of food banks over the last decade. In 2009/2010, The Trussell Trust provided 40,898 emergency three-day food parcels. By 2020/21, approximately 2.5 million parcels were given out across Britain. As an indicator of how poverty has worsened in the course of the pandemic, the amount of food parcels given out in 2020/21 was over 600 thousand more than the previous year. Nearly a million (980,000) food parcels were given out to children. The Trussell Trust operates nearly 1,300 food banks and a further 1,000 are operated by other organisations.

As working-class living standards collapse and poverty rockets, the ruling Conservatives occupy a parallel universe of Thatcherite triumphalism. When the United Nations special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Professor Philip Alston, visited the UK in 2018 reporting on the impact of “extreme poverty” on people’s lives, the government belittled him and rubbished his damning findings. In 2013, a report on UK housing by UN Rapporteur Raquel Rolnik was dismissed as “a Marxist diatribe” by Kris Hopkins, the then Tory housing minister.

On the same day the Childhood Trust released their figures on child poverty, John Penrose MP, chairman of Conservative Policy Forum, wrote in a Daily Telegraph column, “In the past forty years… Britain has pretty much defeated mass unemployment, and improved living standards beyond our parents’ and grandparents’ wildest dreams.” Today, said the Tory minister receiving £81,932 plus expenses a year, the problem is that “We’re stuck down a blind alley, built by the political Left, where poverty is defined as a question of how equal or unequal people’s pay might be.”

Penrose has been this astoundingly corrupt government’s “anti-corruption champion” since it took office. He is married to the multi-millionaire incompetent Baroness Dido Harding, who has been paid £63,000 a year since 2017 for working two days a week as head of NHS Improvement, a role which saw her lead the privatised test-and-trace fiasco.

WHO says that Omicron could become the dominant variant globally

Benjamin Mateus

According to a press release on Friday by the World Health Organization (WHO), the Omicron variant (B.1.1.529), first detected in South Africa in early November, has now been found in 38 countries across all six WHO regions. Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, WHO’s chief scientist, explained that though “it is possible that it [Omicron] could become the dominant variant [globally],” Delta still accounts for 99 percent of all infections worldwide.

Cases globally continue to surge, with more than 266 million cumulative reported cases and over 5.27 million deaths. Delta continues to take its toll on the populations of North America and Europe. The daily average number of cases has continued its steady climb for nearly two months, reaching more than 600,000 cases per day worldwide. Deaths have held constant at a horrific rate of around 7,000 per day.

Medics wearing special suits to protect against coronavirus treat patients with coronavirus at an ICU of a hospital in Volgograd, Russia, Sunday, Nov. 21, 2021. (AP Photo/Alexandr Kulikov)

In the United States, cumulative cases will top 50 million this week. Deaths are approaching 810,000, according to the Worldometer COVID dashboard. Meanwhile, the number of daily COVID cases is fast approaching 150,000 once more. The seven-day average of cases is over 106,000, and the rate of daily deaths has turned upwards, nearing 1,200 on a daily average.

In Europe, more than 88 million COVID cases and 1.56 million deaths have been reported. Weekly cases have been rising for more than nine straight weeks, with close to 400,000 cases on a daily average. Though there are indications that deaths have plateaued, they remain disastrously high at around 30,000 per week or more than 4,200 per day.

In East Asia, countries that had been able to control the coronavirus up to now face their most dire period in the pandemic. South Korea had a single-day high of 5,352 cases and 70 deaths on December 4. Infections are growing exponentially there, and deaths are rapidly rising. Further south, Vietnam and Thailand continue to battle recent surges.

Despite these developments, the world is focused on the current concerns raised by the highly mutated and transmissible Omicron variant. As bad as Delta has been, the incredibly rapid rates of infections caused by Omicron in South Africa have gripped public attention. According to the initial contact with this variant, it has far outpaced any of its previous predecessors.

According to Angelique Coetzee, the South African Medical Association chair, the effective reproduction number (R) for Omicron has been estimated to be above six. Speaking with the BBC, she said, “We know currently that the virus is transmissible. According to the scientists, the R-value is 6.3, I think.” The value for Delta was just over five.

Since scientists there first detected the Omicron on November 9, when the daily average was just 266 cases, infection rates in South Africa have risen 32-fold at 8,861 new cases per day. Cases are doubling every three days. Accompanying this trend has been a concerning rise in hospitalizations of children under the age of five, underscoring the issue that children are not only able to become infected, but they can become very ill.

During a press conference, Dr. Waasila Jassat, Public Health Medicine Specialist who works at South Africa’s National Institute for Communicable Diseases, said, “All these young children being admitted, most of them, the parents have not been vaccinated either. So, I think, certainly the value of vaccination in the adults, protecting the children in the homes, is something to keep in mind.”

Infants under the age of two account for about ten percent of hospital admissions in Tshwane, the epicenter of the Omicron outbreak in South Africa. The incidence of admissions for children under five is second only to those over the age of 60. Dr. Jassat explained that more than 100 children under the age of five were admitted in the first two weeks of the fourth wave. In the first two weeks of the country’s third wave, less than 20 children had been hospitalized.

Rather than taking the appropriate public health measures to stem this massive tide of infections, President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa is pressing for a vaccine mandate. Only a quarter of the country’s population is fully vaccinated. Meanwhile, Health Minister Joe Phaala has attempted to control the messaging on these developments by assuring the public that even though Omicron is more transmissible, it is “less severe.”

GISAID, which is tracking SARS-CoV-2 variants globally, noted that 35 countries have thus far submitted sequences confirming the presence of the Omicron variant. South Africa has submitted 228 sequences, accounting for almost 80 percent of all submissions. The United Kingdom has submitted 84, Ghana 33, the US 27, and Botswana 23. In the US, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said that 15 states had detected the Omicron variant.

CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky, speaking on ABC News on Sunday, said, “We know we have several dozen cases, and we’re following them closely. And we are hearing about more and more probable cases every day, so that number is likely to rise.” And this statement comes on the heels of ever-rising cases of infections caused by the Delta variant.

Walensky’s insistence that SARS-CoV-2 will become endemic in the US must be seen by the working class as an abdication of her responsibility to protect the population. It is a political statement that assures the ruling class that the policy of the CDC is aligned with that of the financial oligarchs. Omicron will be treated no differently than Delta or any future variants.

In Europe, the Netherlands, Germany, Portugal, Switzerland, Belgium, Spain, France, Italy, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Luxembourg, Ireland, and the Czech Republic have reported cases. The European CDC’s December 2, 2021, threat assessment brief noted that more than 70 cases had been confirmed by 13 European Union and European Economic Area countries by the time of their report. These are, by now, a vast undercounting, as several superspreader events have already been confirmed.

According to a Norwegian public health official, at a recent Christmas party in Norway where 120 people had joined in the festivities, more than half have been infected by Omicron. Dr. Preben Aavitsland said, “This party has been a superspreader event. Our working hypothesis is that at least half of the 120 participants were infected with the Omicron variant during the party. This makes this, for now, the largest Omicron outbreak outside South Africa.” [Emphasis added]

The European CDC made the following prediction in their brief: “…preliminary data from South Africa suggests that it may have a substantial growth advantage over the Delta variant of concern (VOC). If this is the case, mathematical modeling indicates that the Omicron VOC is expected to cause over half of all SARS-CoV-2 infections in the EU/EEA within the next few months.”

They added, “The presence of multiple mutations in the spike protein of the Omicron VOC indicates a high likelihood of reduction of neutralizing activity of antibodies induced by infection or vaccination. Preliminary data suggest that the Omicron VOC may be associated with increased risk of reinfection in South Africa.” The statement is based on a recent study out of South Africa that showed a very high rate of reinfection, implying that Omicron can evade immunity from previous infections and vaccinations.

What is less clear is if infection with Omicron will produce less, the same, or more severity than Delta. The Technical Lead at the WHO, Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, noted that it was still too early to make sense of the severity caused by Omicron. Generally, children and young adults will have mild symptoms, and inferences in populations that have been vaccinated or previously infected with other variants will muddy attempts to concretize these questions in the initial period. She said, “There were initial reports that it tended to be more mild, but it’s really too soon.”

Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO’s health emergencies program, echoed his colleague's caution: “It takes time, unfortunately. We saw that as well in previous waves of this pandemic. When the incidence rate goes up, it takes a week or two for that to result in hospital admissions and deaths.”

In North America, besides the US, Mexico and Canada have also reported the new variant. Cases have also been found throughout Southeast Asia, Japan, Brazil, and Australia. By all accounts, many countries that lack comprehensive sequencing capacity are more than likely harboring Omicron. It is more than sure that this new variant has been deeply seeded in communities throughout the globe.

Indeed, despite the concerns raised by Omicron, country after country continues to take a cavalier attitude to these developments, a situation that could evolve into a two-strain pandemic, with Delta and Omicron acting side-by-side, rather than one displacing the other. As noted by numerous principled scientists, the reliance on a vaccine-only strategy is shortsighted and irrational. It amounts to calling for the population to get vaccinated and hoping for the best. The logic remains that the stock markets must remain unfettered by the risks posed by these deadly variants to the planet's population.