Chile’s pseudo-left president-elect Gabriel Boric promises to work with far right

Mauricio Saavedra

Celebrations erupted across Chile beginning on Sunday night as it became clear that Gabriel Boric, the pseudo-left former student protest leader and candidate of the Frente Amplio coalition electoral coalition, had defeated the far-right candidate José Antonio Kast of the Christian Social Front by a wide margin.

With 99.9 percent of the ballots counted, 4.62 million (or 55.8 percent) went to Boric, the highest number of votes cast for any candidate since the return to civilian rule in 1990. He placed first in 11 of the country’s 16 districts. In the working class communes of Santiago, like La Pintana, Puento Alto, San Ramon, La Granja, the vote for Boric surpassed 70 percent of the electorate. The fascistic José Antonio Kast of the Christian Social Front received 3.65 million votes, or 44.15 percent.

Gabriel Boric of the pseudo-left-Stalinist electoral front Apruebo Dignidad (Credit: Twitter/@fotoencampana)

Participation of eligible voters increased by 1.2 million compared to the first round ballot in November, when Kast placed first and Boric second. Sunday’s second-round election established another record, with the largest number of ballots cast in the republic’s history—8.63 million, or 55.65 percent of all eligible voters.

The masses of people who streamed into La Alameda, the main avenue of Santiago and the hundreds of thousands who took to the streets across the country were celebrating what they perceive as a victory against fascism and an advance for the struggle against social inequality, poverty and repression that gave rise to demonstrations of millions in 2019.

Crowds chanted “El Pueblo Unido Jamás Será Vencido!” (“The people united shall never be defeated!”) the anthem of Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government, brought to power in 1970 as part of an international revolutionary wave of the working class, and toppled by the US-backed coup of September 11, 1973.

The tragic experience of Chile exposed the lie of that slogan. The people—meaning Chileans of all social classes—could not then, and cannot now, be united because of the objective existence of irreconcilable class interests under capitalism. That dangerous myth was a cornerstone of the national reformist Allende government, which used the term “people” as a means of burying the interests of the working class.

The Stalinist Communist Party was most vociferous in advancing the idea. The armed forces and the Carabineros were the “people in uniform,” privileged layers of the middle class and even the so-called progressive bourgeoisie were part of the “people.” This reactionary theory was connected to that of a two-stage revolution and the bankrupt concept of a “peaceful parliamentary road to socialism” through Popular Fronts.

The fact that this idea was exploded with the fascist-military coup that overthrew Allende’s Popular Unity government, and led to the murder, disappearance and torture of tens of thousands, has not stopped the same forces from promoting these discredited and reactionary conceptions today.

Far from unity, social and class tensions will be raised to a fever pitch under a Boric government.

The coming to power of the pseudo-left Frente Amplio and the Stalinist Communist Party has raised immense expectations among increasingly radicalized workers, students and youth. Only two years ago, beginning in October 2019, anti-capitalist marches and demonstrations erupted across Chile, involving at one point half the country’s population and lasting for months.

This transformative experience expressed the conscious attempt by the masses to articulate grievances accumulated over decades against entrenched social inequality, poverty wages and starvation pensions, a crippled public health and education system, burgeoning student and household debt, rampant police and military violence, criminalization of social protests, suppression of indigenous demands, and nepotism, corruption and graft at all levels of the state.

Popular expectations will be quickly dispelled by the incoming government. Boric had already shifted the axis of his platform to the right during the campaign, picking up talking points on “security” and other issues from the playbook of his fascistic opponent.

Moreover, corporate and financial capital will “make the economy scream” if any measures come into conflict with their stronghold over Chile. Already, the upper echelons of society are transferring their personal wealth overseas.

“More than $50bn has been moved out of Chile since October 2019 as the wealthy shift assets abroad, according to a central bank official,” reported the Financial Times last Thursday. “Bond issuance on local markets has all but dried up after the pension withdrawals and Boric’s pledge to dismantle the private pension system, making Chile one of the biggest Latin American debt issuers on international markets this year.”

The Santiago stock market closed 6.8 percent down on Sunday, while the dollar rose to record levels. The US-based investment bank JPMorgan responded to the election by declaring that “the market will need rapid signals of real moderation” in order to “minimize risk.” Similarly, the Wall Street ratings agency Moody’s declared that “government policies that improve the confidence of businesses and investors will be fundamental to supporting solid growth backed by solid private investment,” while predicting that “Boric will have to lower the tone of his spending proposals to preserve fiscal stability.”

To appease the financial markets and the transnational corporations, Boric will have to quickly drop any pretense of implementing social measures that require a substantial commitment of resources and to proceed with a pro-business program. He will inevitably be compelled to unleash repression when his government’s program clashes with the unfulfilled expectations of the masses, a move that can only embolden the extreme right.

He made his right-wing course explicitly clear in his first address as president-elect before a mass rally in Santiago Sunday night.

“The future of Chile needs all of us on the side of the people and I hope that we have the maturity to count on [the right-wing opposition’s] ideas and proposals to start my government,” he told his audience. “I know that beyond the differences we have in particular with José Antonio Kast, we know how to build bridges so that our compatriots can live better.”

Boric’s mention of the name of his opponent, the far right defender of the crimes of Pinochet’s 17-year fascist military dictatorship and the son of an ex-Nazi Wehrmacht officer, provoked loud booing from the crowd, to which he responded, “Yes, [we need] José Antonio Kast too!” to build democracy. He had held a private meeting with the extreme rightist that same evening in a Santiago hotel room.

He emphasized his commitment to work with the right “which means both an invitation and an obligation to dialogue. I honestly see it as an opportunity to meet again, to unite in great deeds for the good of our country to achieve broad and lasting agreements…” Any changes, he said would have to be “step-by-step, gradual.”

Boric has a proven record of defending private property relations and upholding the capitalist market. A radical university student leader in the 2011 education protests, he has since 2014 sat in the lower house of the Chilean Congress, lending at critical moments support to the government of the day.

In 2019 he infamously entered into national unity talks with the right-wing government of billionaire President Sebastian Piñera to head off the massive anti-capitalist demonstrations. He then proceeded to support “in general” draconian and anti-democratic laws that have permitted the criminalization of all forms of protest.

The outgoing Piñera was not about to return the favor. Sunday’s election was marred by heavy-handed attempts by the Piñera government to disenfranchise large swathes of working class communities. Early in the day, independent media reported that the government was operating the public transport system at only 50 percent capacity. Citizens from across the Metropolitan Region, with its close to 9 million inhabitants, turned to social media to denounce the government for disrupting the election, as dozens of working class communes across the country had to mobilize their own means to get to the polls, and an untold number weren’t able to exercise their right to vote.

Minister of Transport and Telecommunications, Gloria Hutt, denied government intervention, but bus drivers revealed to the media that the private commercial bus companies were operating on a Sunday timetable with 50 percent or less the number of vehicles for a usual workday.

The pseudo-left Frente Amplio and the Stalinist Communist Party, the political tendencies directly impacted by this thoroughly anti-democratic intervention into the election process, limited themselves to criticizing the government. Izkia Siches, who left the presidency of the Medical Association to head Boric’s campaign tweeted, “before the operation of @GobiernodeChile to limit public transport in favor of its candidate, we call to organize cabs, buses and shared cars to transport voters.”

They then buried what was a significant attack on the democratic right to vote as it became clear within half an hour of the polls closing that Boric had won by a sweeping majority.

Boric’s government will be modeled in large measure on Spain’s Podemos-Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) coalition, composed of thoroughly corrupt, pro-capitalist stooges who are willing to downplay the threat of a military coup just to keep the working class politically demobilized. Just this last week they unleashed riot police against striking metalworkers in Cádiz.

Like the Chilean coalition, Podemos, with which Boric maintains intimate political ties, is promoted as “left,” but there is absolutely nothing left-wing about it. Rather it is a pseudo-left outfit that speaks for self-obsessed upper-middle-class layers who wish only for a greater distribution of the wealth within the top 10 percent, along with positions of authority and political power for themselves.

The honeymoon with Boric will be short-lived. The Chilean working class will increasingly come into conflict with his right-wing policies from the moment he enters the La Moneda Palace.

Brazil flying blind in Omicron surge as Bolsonaro attacks child vaccinations

Eduardo Parati

In face of the global spread of the Omicron variant, the government of Brazil’s fascistic President Jair Bolsonaro is fighting any measures that would impinge on corporate profits and openly promoting “herd immunity” through mass infections.

Health agencies worldwide are warning of the real impact of the new variant, with the head of the World Health Organization Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declaring that “we’re concerned that people are dismissing Omicron as mild.” He explained, “Even if Omicron does cause less severe disease, the sheer number of cases could once again overwhelm unprepared health systems.”

Such warnings are already being confirmed by the record number of cases in the UK, where almost 70 percent of the population is vaccinated with two shots.

After the devastating Gamma variant wave in Brazil between April and July, thousands of lives continued to be lost to the pandemic every week, and the number of deaths per week has never fallen below a thousand.

Bolsonaro and his health minister, Marcelo Queiroga, in May 2021 (Wikimedia Commons)

Now, facing the threat of deadly surges with the rapid spread of the Omicron variant, with active cases reported throughout Latin America and community transmission confirmed in São Paulo, Bolsonaro’s Health Ministry has only announced meager travel restrictions for international flights, in which airports would require a vaccine certificate, which are being called “vaccine passports,” or a five-day quarantine for those unable to present one.

Such measures are incapable of preventing the entrance of infected individuals, as breakthrough infections with the Delta variant are well documented and a recent South African study found that vaccination with two Pfizer doses offered only 33 percent efficacy against symptomatic infections from Omicron and only 70 percent protection against hospitalization. Furthermore, many individuals only test positive after 14 days of infection, making a five-day quarantine useless. Finally, the quarantines won’t be regulated by any authority but are to be self-imposed, with no way to account for those entering the country who have no economic conditions or refuse to isolate.

But even such inadequate measures were immediately attacked by Bolsonaro, who has responded to Omicron with a renewed offensive against vaccines and any measures to control the pandemic.

In reaction to demands that the government adopt vaccine certificate requirements, Bolsonaro said, “Is there a better vaccine, scientifically proven, than infection? People who were infected are tens of times more immune than those who only took the vaccine.” That is a lie in itself, as vaccines have been proven to be many times more effective than natural immunity, if a person survives the disease without sequelae. On Thursday, Bolsonaro posted a video on Twitter in which a man claims that the vaccines gave no protection, resulting in vaccinated people being the ones who are infected and transmitting the disease while unvaccinated people were being falsely diagnosed.

Using the fact that Omicron infects and transmits more easily, including among vaccinated people, Bolsonaro called for only RT-PCR tests be to implemented at airports, arguing that “It’s more effective than the vaccine, because the vaccine doesn’t stop the virus from infecting and transmitting.” That is another blatant lie, as the meager testing capacity offered by the government allows the free spread of the disease by individuals who only test once, and before positivity, even if they are already infected.

Last week, during an event in the presidential palace, he also attacked the use of masks, telling the audience that “no one is allowed to wear masks here.”

The fascistic president’s objective is to disrupt any measures that would restrict the spread of the virus, and redouble the efforts for an infection-driven “herd immunity,” regardless of the consequences for the millions of victims. His attack on travel restrictions and vaccines are a critical component of his campaign to defend living with the virus in a “post-pandemic period,” as he described the present to an audience of police officers.

Another aspect of Bolsonaro’s campaign is to carry out yet another blackout on COVID-19 data, allowing him to fraudulently downplay the severity of the pandemic.

In August, the Health Ministry had started demanding specific production batch identification be sent to the government’s database for every COVID-19 antigen test, effectively sabotaging the notification of mild cases for months. The government argues in a fraudulent fashion that positive tests are being falsely reported, and more information would be needed. Actually, it has already been exposed by health experts that pharmacy workers, who carry out most antigen test, end up overloaded with the new requirements and the result is a gross undercount of positive tests.

Health agency Fiocruz infectious disease specialist Júlio Croda had stated that “This sudden change from the Health Ministry requiring batch and producer provoked many health services to stop reporting antigen exams with negative results, but especially positive ones.” He added that the undercounting will make it impossible to predict future surges. “It’s probable that the country will be taken by surprise with a sudden surge in hospitalizations, when it can be too late to propose planning measures such as the opening of hospital beds,” Croda stated.

More recently, on December 10, a day before the introduction of vaccine passports and quarantines, the government’s online COVID-19 platform was hacked, preventing many states from reporting new cases, deaths and vaccinations while also shutting down the vaccine certificate system.

After the attack, several states stopped reporting COVID-19 data, resulting in a drop. The number of cases dropped almost by half, with 24,164 reported throughout last week in comparison to two weeks ago, when 49,932 cases were reported.

According to Metropoles, the 7-day moving average of deaths fell by 34.9 percent in the week since the hacking. Such an artificial decrease, which has continued for eleven days now, would provide a fraudulent basis to claim that the pandemic is under control.

The attack also affected data from other systems, with Fiocruz stating it is unable to access flu cases from previous months and that they are essential to “keep the population informed on the current epidemiological situation.” The global spread of the Omicron variant is coinciding with a seasonal flu epidemic in the country, threatening to quickly overload the healthcare system.

The hackers were identified as a small non-professional group, who were only capable of hacking the government’s website because there were weaknesses in the platform’s security. Only two days before the invasion, the federal administration had opened a public bid to reinforce security on its servers, pointing out they were incapable of monitoring threats in real time.

Whatever the real motives for the hacking, which happened at a convenient moment for Bolsonaro, the resulting distortion and undercounting of cases and deaths are welcomed by all sections of the ruling class.

Since the first Omicron case was recognized in South Africa, the idea of a “mild” Omicron variant has been promoted in the corporate media. As Brazil flies blind during a deadly global surge, this claim is aimed at keeping factories, workplaces and schools open to guarantee profits for big corporations as the virus rips through the population.

Amid the cancellation of New Year’s events throughout the country, it is also aimed at justifying maintaining preparations for next year’s Carnaval festivities and the unchecked spread of the disease through an anticipated mass influx of tourists.

The corporate media’s complacency towards Bolsonaro’s criminal actions has been shown by its focus on the decision by Supreme Court Justice Luís Roberto Barroso making vaccine passports mandatory for those entering the country, as if it had “defeated” Bolsonaro’s policies. It is not even guaranteed that this grossly insufficient requirement will be enforced. Only five days after Barroso’s decision, Justice Nunes Marques, whom Bolsonaro frequently calls “my 10 percent on the Supreme Court,” was able to stop a final decision on the vaccine passports, postponing it until after the recess in February. This will allow Bolsonaro to continue his campaign against the vaccine passports amid the blackout in COVID-19 data and well into the Omicron phase of the pandemic.

Meanwhile, state governors in Brazil, promoting the insufficient “vaccine-only” strategy, made in-person learning mandatory throughout the country in November, provoking the infection of thousands of children and risking new COVID-19 surges.

Many scientists have explained throughout the pandemic that vaccines are a powerful component in the fight against COVID-19, but they can only truly protect the population if implemented together with other critical public health measures, including mass testing and contact tracing, temporary lockdowns, travel restrictions and high quality masks.

Now, as the Omicron variant exposes the idea that vaccines alone are able to control the coronavirus spread, the “vaccine-only” strategy has allowed fascistic figures such as Bolsonaro not only to attack this critical component in the fight against the virus, but all mitigation measures.

Making clear that the government’s response to Omicron will be to allow a full-blown catastrophe, Bolsonaro reacted angrily to the announcement last week that Pfizer vaccines were approved for children 5 to 11 years old and threatened to effectively put a target on technicians from Anvisa, the national agency responsible for the approval.

Appealing to fascistic elements in his social base, Bolsonaro stated that “We want to publish the names of these people... You have the right to know the names of those who approved vaccines for your children of 5 years old or older.” Such declarations occur amid reports of scientists being persecuted for publishing pandemic data and exposing the government’s policy.

On Sunday, the president made public his plan to distribute jabs for children only under the authorization of their parents and with a medical prescription.

As the new variant is already showing its aggressiveness towards children, Bolsonaro’s policy means letting thousands of children get hospitalized, having to deal with the still unknown long term effects of COVID-19, or even die. Currently, only 66 percent of the population is vaccinated with two doses, and children remain unvaccinated.

The demand for specific medical prescriptions for vaccinating children will leave tens of millions vulnerable, as working-class parents barely have access to doctors in the country’s dilapidated healthcare system.

This is exactly what Bolsonaro intends. Throughout the pandemic, Bolsonaro has presented his campaign against measures to rein in the virus as a fight for “freedom.” Now, his new offensive amid the spread of Omicron promotes the same theme, attacking the vaccine passport as a “leash that they want to put on the people,” while his health minister echoed his words that “It’s better to lose your life than your freedom.”

Retired US generals warn of 2024 election coup

Patrick Martin

In an op-ed commentary posted Friday on the website of the Washington Post, three retired US generals warn that the 2024 presidential election could lead to a political crisis dwarfing that of 2020, and a split by the military into rival camps.

The three retired generals—Steven Anderson, Paul D. Eaton and Antonio M. Taguba—all veterans of the Iraq war and other US military conflicts around the world, declare that the approaching first anniversary of the January 6 attack on the Capitol should be the occasion for considering what could happen if the outcome of the 2024 presidential election is disputed.

Retired US Generals Paul D. Eaton, Antonio M. Taguba, Steven Anderson

They urge the Pentagon to begin preparing now to counteract “the potential for lethal chaos inside our military … we are chilled to our bones at the thought of a coup succeeding next time.” The measures would include stepped-up surveillance of military units to identify potential “mutineers.”

The three generals, long retired after many decades in the Army, publicly opposed the Trump administration and aligned with the pro-Democratic Party wing of the military-intelligence apparatus.

Eaton, a retired Army major general who had been in charge of training the Iraqi army in the early years of the US occupation, publicly denounced then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in 2007 and called for his resignation.

Taguba, also a retired Army major general, was forced out of the military after leading the internal investigation into the Abu Ghraib prison atrocities in 2004, and issuing a harshly critical report. Anderson is a retired brigadier general who was deputy commander for logistics in Iraq, under General David Petraeus.

The op-ed outlines “[t]he potential for a total breakdown of the chain of command along partisan lines—from the top of the chain to squad level … The idea of rogue units organizing among themselves to support the ‘rightful’ commander in chief cannot be dismissed.

“Imagine competing commanders in chief—a newly reelected Biden giving orders, versus Trump (or another Trumpian figure) issuing orders as the head of a shadow government. Worse, imagine politicians at the state and federal levels illegally installing a losing candidate as president.”

The three generals go on to elaborate a worst-case scenario of the internal and global consequences of such a conflict erupting in a divided military.

“… with loyalties split, some might follow orders from the rightful commander in chief, while others might follow the Trumpian loser. Arms might not be secured depending on who was overseeing them. Under such a scenario, it is not outlandish to say a military breakdown could lead to civil war.

“In this context, with our military hobbled and divided, U.S. security would be crippled. Any one of our enemies could take advantage by launching an all-out assault on our assets or our allies.”

Citing the failure to seriously investigate the January 6 insurrection or punish any of its leaders, they call on Congress and the Biden administration to “take steps to prepare for the worst.”

They conclude, “the Defense Department should war-game the next potential post-election insurrection or coup attempt to identify weak spots. It must then conduct a top-down debrief of its findings and begin putting in place safeguards to prevent breakdowns not just in the military, but also in any agency that works hand in hand with the military.”

Only two days before the generals’ commentary, Reuters published a lengthy profile of the group of military officers, retired and in the reserves, who worked with retired general Michael Flynn to devise plans for Trump to overturn the outcome of the 2020 elections.

These included Colonel Phil Waldron, who worked for Flynn in the Defense Intelligence Agency, specializing in psychological warfare; Lieutenant Colonel Ivan Raiklin, a former Special Forces officer in Afghanistan; and Captain Seth Keshel, a former Army intelligence officer.

Waldron developed the conception that the 2020 election was rigged using methods he was familiar with from his work in the DIA, a psychological warfare operation by foreign adversaries. This contention became the basis of various outlandish claims about election results being routed through servers in Germany, or altered by Italian satellites, and changed by software built in Venezuela or otherwise manipulated by China.

Raiklin, according to Reuters, was “a leading promoter of the ‘Pence card’ theory—in which Vice President Mike Pence purportedly could have blocked the January 6 certification by Congress of Biden’s victory.”

Captain Keshel “claimed to have developed statistical models that prove the 2020 election results were fraudulent … Keshel in August released an analysis which he claimed showed Trump won seven states that went to Biden. Trump embraced the claim …”

According to Reuters, the efforts of the former officers not only triggered renewed calls for audits in all the battleground states, they also provoked threats of violence against election officials, both Republican and Democrat, who defended the election as fairly conducted and the results as accurate.

It has already been widely reported that Waldron helped draft the PowerPoint presentation, titled, “Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 JAN,” which was delivered to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and briefed to selected Republican congressmen on January 5. Among the slides were recommendations that included, “Declare National Security Emergency” and “Declare electronic voting in all states invalid.”

But the Reuters report provides further confirmation of the active role played by former military officers—who clearly had continuing contacts within the Pentagon—in the organization and political incitement of the January 6 coup.

The Washington Post published a further column on the likelihood of the outbreak of civil war in the United States, by one of its regular op-ed writers, Dana Millbank, who usually adopts a posture of mocking humor and unseriousness.

In Sunday’s column, however, Millbank interviewed a political science professor at UC San Diego, and adviser to the CIA on political instability, Barbara F. Walter, who employs the CIA’s own methodology for assessing civil conflict and applies it to the United States. Her conclusion, “We are closer to civil war than any of us would like to believe.”

Millbank gives an excerpt from Walter’s forthcoming book, to be published in January, titled, How Civil Wars Start .

“No one wants to believe that their beloved democracy is in decline, or headed toward war,” she writes. But, “if you were an analyst in a foreign country looking at events in America—the same way you’d look at events in Ukraine or the Ivory Coast or Venezuela—you would go down a checklist, assessing each of the conditions that make civil war likely. And what you would find is that the United States, a democracy founded more than two centuries ago, has entered very dangerous territory.”

The United States is on the verge of “open insurgency” which would lead to “sustained violence as increasingly active extremists launch attacks that involve terrorism and guerrilla warfare, including assassinations and ambushes,” the CIA adviser writes, according to Millbank.

Such scenarios are not just the nightmare of one trio of retired generals, or one CIA adviser. Rather, these commentaries are given space in the leading newspaper in the US capital to articulate what is being widely discussed within leading circles in the US ruling elite: that January 6, 2021, far from being a one-off event, is a warning of an impending eruption of violent conflict, in 2024 if not sooner.

COVID-19 explodes in Spain as PSOE-Podemos government refuses action

Alice Summers

As the more contagious Omicron variant of the coronavirus spreads rapidly across Europe, cases are rising exponentially in Spain. Average daily infections have more than quintupled in a month.

On Friday, Spain reported 33,359 new COVID-19 cases, the highest single-day total since the height of the “fourth wave” in mid-July (excluding Mondays, when cases from the weekend are also announced). On Thursday, Madrid alone saw infection numbers increase by around 6,000. Over 300,000 infections have been recorded across the country since the start of December.

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

Even these already catastrophic figures are likely a significant underestimate, as testing remains woefully inadequate in Spain. Only 3,121 tests are being conducted for every 100,000 members of the population, leading to a test positivity rate of 13.9 percent across the country as a whole—well above the 5 percent threshold that the World Health Organization (WHO) considers to be an indicator that the pandemic is under control.

In much of the country, this situation is even worse. Eight of Spain’s 17 regions have more than 15 percent of their tests coming back positive: Aragón (19.5 percent), the Valencia region (19.1 percent), Castilla y León (18.9 percent), Navarra (18 percent), Murcia (16.2 percent), the Basque Country (15.8 percent), La Rioja (15.5 percent) and Andalusia (15.2 percent). Only two regions have test positivity rates below 10 percent, and none are within the WHO’s 5 percent recommendation.

The rapid rise in infections in Spain is a sharp warning about the very real dangers posed by the virus, which the Socialist Party (PSOE)-Podemos government has allowed to spread unchecked. The PSOE-Podemos coalition has engaged in a criminal and concerted campaign to downplay the risks of COVID-19 in recent months, justifying its refusal to take any measures to contain infections with the claim that vaccination had rendered the disease relatively benign.

This “vaccine-only” strategy, pursued by governments across the world, has facilitated mass circulation of the virus, encouraging the emergence of more contagious and vaccine-resistant variants and leading to the current unfolding catastrophe of the Omicron strain.

Deaths have continued to rise in Spain, with the average daily number of fatalities more than doubling in a month—up from around 20 a day in mid-November to about 50 people now. In the last week alone, 327 people have died from the virus, including 103 last Monday. Daily fatality figures usually lag behind rising infections by around two weeks, meaning this latest increase in cases will not be reflected in the death statistics until around the end of December.

As of Monday, 7,501 people were in hospital with COVID-19, with 1,442 in Intensive Care Units (ICUs). This has nearly tripled in a month. Although a smaller proportion of all cases end up in hospital, due to widespread vaccination, those hospitalized appear to be getting more seriously ill. Around 20 percent of all hospitalizations currently end up in ICUs, according to Álvaro Castellanos, president of the Spanish Society of Intensive Medicine, up from approximately 10 percent during the rest of the pandemic.

Even though the Omicron variant has only recently begun to spread in Spain, incidence rates are already exploding. The 14-day incidence rate reached 609 per 100,000 people on Monday, having skyrocketed up from the low of 40.52 per 100,000 recorded only two months ago in mid-October. It has taken only eleven days for the incidence to roughly double, up from 305 per 100,000 on 9 December.

According to the government’s own framework, any rate above 500 puts the country in a situation of “high risk,” the maximum risk level. This in itself is a significant downplaying of the dangers posed by the virus: in mid-November, the PSOE-Podemos coalition doubled this threshold from 250 to 500 per 100,000, supposedly in response to the decreased risks posed by COVID-19 now that a large proportion of the Spanish population is vaccinated.

The nationwide figures obscure the real impact that the pandemic is having in some areas of Spain, with more than half the country’s regions recording incidence rates above or significantly above 609. The northern region of Navarra has so far been worst affected, recording a staggeringly high incidence rate of 1,394 per 100,000. It is followed by the Basque Country (1,124), La Rioja (960), Aragón (938), Castilla y León (842), the Valencia region (668), Asturias (658), Murcia (651), the Madrid region (651) and the Balearic Islands (613).

Yet despite the explosion in cases, the PSOE-Podemos government is refusing to take any action to combat the deadly disease and has continued to insist that vaccination alone will be enough to combat the current tsunami of infections. “It is true that this new wave of expansion of the virus has very different characteristics and affects us in very different circumstances,” PSOE Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez told a conference of the party’s Catalan branch in Barcelona on Sunday.

“With notably higher contagion figures,” he continued, “we have lower hospitalization and intensive care occupation than a year ago. The first conclusion is that vaccination works, and that this health crisis can only be stopped with science.”

Sánchez’s response to the pandemic has nothing in common with a scientific strategy to combat the virus, which would involve social distancing measures, the shutdown of non-essential business, isolation of all infected cases and the putting in place of a mass testing and tracing infrastructure, in addition to vaccination.

While making impotent warnings about the “real and certain health risk” posed by the Omicron variant, Sánchez proposed no measures to protect Spain’s population from this danger, other than a vague statement that the government would “evaluate new measures that could be introduced in the coming weeks.” The prime minister has convened a meeting of regional presidents this Wednesday to discuss the pandemic.

The “vaccine-only” strategy of the ruling elite is fully supported by the pseudo-left. In its online publication Izquierda Diario, the Morenoite Workers’ Revolutionary Current (CRT) has agitated against necessary public health measures throughout the pandemic, denouncing social-distancing restrictions as “authoritarian and palliative.”

In one of their rare pieces on the pandemic, the CRT denounces the decision of the Catalan government to reimpose a mandatory 10-day self-isolation period for those who have been in close contact with a confirmed coronavirus case, a basic public health measure.

“Once again, the prevention of the risk of infection is proceeding through restrictive measures,” the article states. “In this case, too, [it is] during the most significant days of the year [as we approach Christmas], instead of encouraging vaccination as the most effective prevention measure within communities which have not yet been vaccinated.”

Price increases for food and other basic necessities to squeeze Canadian workers’ already hard-pressed incomes

Matthew Richter

Workers in Canada face the threat of a sharp spike in prices for groceries and other basic necessities in the coming year, under conditions in which inflation is already running at levels unseen in three decades.

According to the most recent Consumer Price Index (CPI) report, released by Statistics Canada last Wednesday, inflation is running at 4.72 percent, its highest level since the recession of the early 1990s, which was Canada’s deepest economic slump, up until that point, since the Great Depression. Inflation has well exceeded the Bank of Canada’s target range of 1 to 3 percent throughout most of 2021.

(Source: Canada’s Food Price Report 12th Edition 2022)

Overall food prices have risen 4.4 percent this year, but there have been significantly higher increases for many types of meat and vegetables.

The Maritime provinces have seen steeper inflation than other parts of the country. Prince Edward Island is currently experiencing the highest rate of inflation in the country at 7 percent. A CBC report indicates that soup kitchens on the island have seen an increase in demand. In New Brunswick, inflation is at 5.7 per cent. Quebec and Ontario, the country’s two most populous provinces, have experienced price rises of 5.2 percent and 5.0 percent respectively.

The rising cost of foodstuffs is especially devastating for workers and their families, many of whom struggle to put food on the table, never mind the foods necessary for a healthy and balanced diet. Demand at food banks has increased by 20 percent since 2019, according to a recent report from Food Banks Canada, a surge not seen since the depths of the 2008 recession.

Canada’s Food Price Report, an annual report published by Dalhousie University and the University of Guelph, predicts that food prices will rise at the fastest pace in the coming year since the report’s inception in 2010. Food price inflation is expected to come in at between 5 and 7 percent. The average family of four is projected to spend $14,767 on food in 2022, an increase of $966 from this year’s average expenditure of $13,801.

The increase will have a disastrous effect on those on a fixed income and workers in the “gig economy.” It is estimated that 2 million seniors live on an income of $17,000 a year or less. “Gig economy” workers—workers who are hired as “independent contractors” for the likes of Uber and parcel delivery, and other services—represent at least 1 in 10, or 1.7 million, workers in the national workforce, according to data from Statistics Canada. Many gig workers seek to make ends meet by juggling several poorly paid “gig” jobs at once.

Other goods driving inflation include gasoline, which rose an astonishing 43.6 percent from 2020. Housing and transportation costs are also up significantly. The former is up 4.8 percent year over year, while the latter has increased by 10 percent. The red-hot housing market, particularly in major cities like Toronto and Vancouver, has received extensive attention in the corporate media over the past year. However, much more significant for large numbers of low- and middle-income workers is the substantial rise in rents in major urban centres. The average rent for all properties in Canada was $1,817 per month in November 2021, an increase of 3.6 percent year-over-year, and up 1 percent from October.

Rental apartments, the most “affordable” housing for much of the population, increased by more than $250 between November 2018 and November 2021 rising from $1,403 to $1,662—or almost 18 percent. This average masks the considerably higher cost of rent in major population centres like Toronto or Vancouver, where the average rent approaches $3,000.

The most extreme increases in rent have taken place in the Greater Toronto Area, where rents are up more than 11 percent year-over-year. Some cities within commuting distance of downtown Toronto have seen rental prices spike by as much as 14.95 percent during the past year.

The principal reasons for the mounting inflationary pressures are the vast, state-led enrichment of the financial oligarchy during the pandemic and the ruling elite’s murderous response to COVID-19.

As a result of the pandemic bailouts implemented by Canada and every other major capitalist state in March-April 2020, trillions of dollars have been funneled into the financial markets, massively swelling stock valuations and the balance sheets of the banks and financial elite. The drive to reopen the economy and schools amid the pandemic helped boost corporate profits, while placing workers’ lives at risk.

Under these conditions, inflation is eating into the purchasing power of the working class. Data from November’s Labour Force Survey shows that average wages rose only 2.8 percent year-over-year. When compared against the average 4.7 percent inflation, this translates into a hefty pay cut of 2 percent. The impact on many low-wage workers, who were already earning poverty wages prior to the pandemic, only finds a pale reflection in this general statistic.

Canada’s billionaires, on the other hand, are more prosperous than ever. In a report published December 9, the Parliamentary Budget Office (PBO) released figures showing that the wealthiest one percent of Canadian families control almost 25 per cent of all wealth in the country. The top 20 percent owns as much as the bottom 80 percent of the population. Canada’s 48 billionaires added $78 billion to already obscene fortunes during the first year of a pandemic that has already killed more than 30,000 Canadians.

In this context, inflation is proving to be a major catalyst for class struggle in Canada and internationally, after decades in which workers’ resistance was artificially suppressed by the corporatist trade unions. Major struggles have emerged across Canada, including among miners, food-processing and public sector workers.

In late October and November, over 20,000 New Brunswick public sector workers mounted a two-week-long strike against the Conservative government of Blaine Higgs in order to press their demand for a 20 percent “catch up” wage increase, over four years, after a decade-and-a-half of real-wage cuts. Even this modest demand, which the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) shamelessly betrayed when it sold out the strike, would have meant that workers’ wages would not have kept pace with inflation. In the end, CUPE rammed through a five-year deal that contained overall wage increases of just 2 percent per year, with an additional premium of 25 cents per hour per year that barely pushes the annual “increase” to 3 percent.

The Canadian ruling class is painfully aware that inflation pressures, combined with the catastrophic impact on the working class of its “profits before life” pandemic policy, could set off the social powder keg they are sitting atop.

Summing up the fears of the financial oligarchy in a speech on December 9, Bank of Canada Deputy Governor Toni Gravelle, said, “If supply disruptions and related cost pressures persist for longer than expected and strong goods demand continues, this would increase the likelihood of inflation remaining above our control range… While we expect inflation to ease in the second half of next year, we are closely watching inflation expectations and labour costs to ensure that the forces pushing up prices do not become embedded in ongoing inflation.”

When Gravelle speaks of “related cost pressures” and the “forces pushing up prices,” what he means is the need to squelch the upsurge of the class struggle. Gravelle and the corporate elite as a whole know full well that the unsustainable increase in prices will drive the working class into mass struggles that implicitly challenge capitalist rule. The fact that the corporatist unions have ruthlessly enforced concession-filled contracts that do not even keep pace with inflation and have imposed the homicidal open economy/open schools policy in the face of bitter opposition from workers throughout the pandemic, is driving workers to ever more openly contest their authority.

Omicron surge threatens to overwhelm health systems across the United States

Benjamin Mateus

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Monday that the Omicron variant now accounts for 73 percent of all new coronavirus cases in the US, establishing it as the dominant strain in the country.

States and cities are being overwhelmed by new cases, with the largest number reported in New York state, over 23,000 new infections, a single-day pandemic high. The number of cases is higher than even during the deadly days of spring 2020, when New York City was the epicenter of the world pandemic and bodies were stacked up in freezer trailers for lack of time and space to bury them.

Puseletso Lesofi prepares to sequence COVID-19 omicron samples at the Ndlovu Research Center in Elandsdoorn, South Africa Wednesday Dec. 8, 2021. The centre ls part of the Network for Genomic Surveillance in South Africa, which discovered the omicron variant. (AP Photo/Jerome Delay)

It has been 42 days since the first detected case of Omicron was sequenced in Botswana and 26 days since the World Health Organization alerted the world to the dangers posed by the new highly transmissible variant B.1.1529, which it named Omicron. Early estimates placed the doubling time at around two days.

On December 1, 2021, the University of California, San Francisco, reported that a man returning from South Africa on November 22 tested positive for infection with Omicron on November 29. By the week ending December 11, health officials estimated that circulating Omicron across the country had risen to 12.6 percent. This number has jumped six-fold in only a week.

With the holiday season upon the country, the number of people flying has doubled from a year ago and there is no indication that things will slow down as the restrictions being implemented are rhetorical in nature and will do little to halt the rapid trajectory of the new variant. More than two million people are transiting through airports each day according to the Transportation Security Administration.

Outgoing NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins, speaking with CNN host Anderson Cooper on Friday, explained that he expects daily infections to reach a million new cases. “The big question is,” he posited, “are those million cases going to be sick enough to need health care and especially hospitalizations?”

In recent studies by the Imperial College, London, titled reports 48 and 49, the authors found that vaccine effectiveness for Omicron dropped by 4.5-fold compared to Delta. They also confirmed the new variant’s explosive exponential growth and wrote, “we find no evidence (for both risks of hospitalization attendance and symptom status) of Omicron having different severity from Delta, though data on hospitalization are still very limited.”

Lead author Neil Ferguson warned, “This study provides further evidence of the very substantial extent to which Omicron can evade prior immunity given by both infections or vaccination. This level of immune evasion means that Omicron poses a major, imminent threat to public health.”

Indeed, if upwards of one million cases of Omicron infections are expected each day, is the health care system prepared for such an onslaught?

The answer is was provided in a recent letter dated December 14, 2021, to Rhode Island Governor Dan McKee and the director of the state’s Department of Health, Dr. Nicole Alexander-Scott. Dr. Nadine T. Himelfarb, an emergency medicine physician in Providence, Rhode Island, and president of the Rhode Island Chapter of the American College of Emergency Physicians, began with the following words: “I write to you on behalf of a community in distress.”

She explained, “We are, one could say, the canary in the coalmine of healthcare, and our state healthcare system is currently collapsing.”

Dr. Himmelfarb added, “Right now, in Rhode Island, citizens cannot consistently receive the standard of care of emergency medicine. In fact, in every hospital in the state, they are often receiving care that previously we would equate to what one would receive in an underdeveloped country: rationing resources, unable to provide privacy, and certainly unable to provide any COVID19 isolation precautions. This is the care lucky patients receive [emphasis added] .”

The scenes Dr. Himmelfarb describes are reminiscent of the frontline wartime scenario where medics have to decide who they will save and who will have to die: “These nightmare scenarios have come true, in multiple departments across the state, in the past few weeks. Imagine patients dying while waiting to be seen by a doctor who is 50 feet away and, because of lack of staff and thus capacity, simply unable to treat them.”

Statewide, she notes, 25 to 50 percent of nursing positions are vacant. These sobering statistics even predate the pandemic. Additional missing roles include secretaries, radiologists and laboratory technicians. A nurse or doctor is only as good as the ability for the entire health system to function cohesively. “Deficiencies at every level of this throughput chain have resulted in a complete gridlock of our state healthcare system … Although COVID-19 may not be the immediate cause of the current capacity crisis, any surges from COVID-19 are unmanageable under current conditions.”

COVID-19 infections across Rhode Island have risen exponentially and are the highest across the country on a per capita basis. These seven-day averages now exceed more than 1,000 infections per 100,000 in a state which boasts one of the most fully vaccinated populations, with 75.5 percent having received two doses and 86.6 percent at least one dose. This raises the fundamental question of the effectiveness of a vaccine-only strategy out of this pandemic.

Emergency departments are at the forefront of any mass casualties or outbreaks of infectious diseases. Strains and deficits in any health care system’s ability to respond to these casualties are funneled into emergency departments, where they are amplified.

Two years of the pandemic have only accelerated the collapse of the health care systems in the United States. Delta has taken a massive toll recently across the upper Midwest and Northeast.

In Pennsylvania, where cases have continued their surge since the beginning of autumn, hospitals are at capacity, and the staff is stretched thin and exhausted by the deluge of patients.

As the state now faces the spread of the Omicron variant, a quarter of the state has few or no ICU capacity left, and two-thirds of hospitals lack any more bed capacity. More than 4,600 COVID hospitalizations were reported to the health department by Friday. The daily death rate is now above 100.

On Sunday in Ohio, where the Delta surge is pushing infections to 10,000 a day, soon to outpace last winter’s deadly wave, 4,675 Ohioans were hospitalized and 1,176 were in ICUs, according to the state’s hospital association. The daily death toll is approaching 100, the highest during the pandemic.

Along with these ongoing developments in the pandemic in the US, the COVID-19 Modeling Consortium out of the University of Texas at Austin, on December 16, 2021, projected that if measures are not taken to slow the spread of Omicron, the country would see the most significant health care surge to date by the beginning of February 2022.

“In this extreme scenario, we project a wave that peaks on February 2, 2022, with cases, hospital admissions, and deaths reaching levels that are 2.2, 1.8, and 1.2 times higher than the January 2021 peak.” Cases are expected to reach one-half million per day and over 30,000 daily hospitalizations.

The Biden administration is responding to this catastrophe with complete callousness. White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Jeffrey Zients, at the December 17, 2021, press briefing, declared, “We are intent on not letting Omicron disrupt work and school for the vaccinated. You’ve done the right thing, and we will get through this. For the unvaccinated, you’re looking at a winter of severe illness and death for yourselves, your families, and the hospitals you may soon overwhelm .”

Such a characterization is patently false as the blame for the skyrocketing toll of the pandemic is not on the unvaccinated but on the policies set in place early in the pandemic by the Republicans and observed by the Democrats. The Biden administration, as much as Trump’s, are culpable for the mass death that has befallen the population that has seen one in every 100 elderly persons (one in 400 in the general population) die from the virus.

And rather than employing efforts to end the pandemic through bolstering public health capacities, the Biden administration has insisted on a vaccine-only strategy which keeps schools and businesses open to ensure the flow of profits to the capitalist class. This is the policy of nearly all capitalist governments around the world: normalization of death and putting profits over human lives.

A Zero COVID strategy, shown to viable and effective in China, would have saved millions of lives already. It still is required to shut down the pandemic and eliminate COVID-19, before SARS-CoV-2 evolves into even more terrible forms that Delta and Omicron.

Over 1,000 children have died from COVID-19 in the United States

Renae Cassimeda

At least 1,015 children ages 0–17 have died from COVID-19 in the United States, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The majority of these deaths, 515, have occurred in the past three and a half months since September 1, 2021, as a direct result of the Biden administration’s homicidal school reopening campaign this fall.

Students, some wearing protective masks, arrive for the first day of school at Sessums Elementary School in Riverview, Florida, August 10, 2021 (AP Photo/Chris O'Meara, File)

The breakdown of the data shows that 319 children ages 0–4, 213 ages 5–11, 240 ages 12–15 and 233 ages 16–17 have died from COVID-19. Additionally, the severe multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C) is also still rising, with the CDC now reporting 5,937 total cases and 52 total deaths.

The weekly COVID-19 report from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) notes an additional 11 new child deaths recorded during the week ending December 16. Weekly new cases among children continue to rise, with 169,964 new cases recorded in the latest report, making it 19 consecutive weeks that well over 100,000 new cases were reported. As of December 16, the AAP notes that at least 7.4 million children have been infected with COVID-19 since the onset of the pandemic.

Despite such staggering numbers, the data is still a vast undercount of the real spread of COVID-19 among children in the US due to a lack of robust and systematic testing, contact tracing and reporting across the country, as well as other reported limitations of the CDC and AAP data.

Notably, of the 802,969 reported total COVID-19 deaths in the US, 120,948 do not indicate the age of the individual. The CDC also notes a potential six-week delay in their case and death reporting due to a number of factors, including delays from processing death certificates and reports from states.

Also worth noting are the limitations of the AAP report, which does not include data from four states in their cumulative death toll. Montana, New York (excluding New York City), Rhode Island and West Virginia do not release age distribution of deaths in their state reports. Michigan only recently began publicly reporting age distribution of deaths, adding a total of 29 child deaths in the state to the cumulative national death toll among children in the AAP report.

The rapid spread of the Omicron variant throughout the US and internationally is fueling an already accelerating surge of infections from the Delta variant. The exponential rise in cases and hospitalizations by Omicron in South Africa, Denmark and the UK threatens to unfold in countries across the world due to the variant’s high transmissibility and ability to evade vaccines. The further spread of infection will continue to compromise patient care as hospitals reach or exceed capacity.

The response of the political establishment, the corporations and the mainstream media has focused entirely on downplaying the devastating impacts of the virus, while promoting efforts to keep schools and workplaces open amid an intensifying winter surge.

In schools across the US, cases have exploded in the past week, prompting temporary school closures due to large outbreaks. Burbio.com, a national school closures tracker, indicates that at least 1,338 schools have closed this month due to COVID-19 outbreaks. So far, at least 421 schools will be closed at the start of their spring semester in early January.

According to an unofficial compilation on Twitter, at least 2,101 educators and school staff have died from COVID-19, in addition to the 1,015 children who have succumbed to the virus. In the past two weeks alone, these include Alayna Thach, a 17-year-old high school student in Pennsylvania; Jane Jones, a 44-year-old special education teacher in Illinois; and Pam Brock, a 50-year-old pre-K teacher and high school cheer coach in Alabama. The vast majority of school staff and student deaths have not been reported in the media.

The very real dangers of Omicron and the possible development of further variants of concern showcases the ineffectiveness of a vaccine-only approach, a policy which has been ruthlessly carried out by the Biden administration. In reality, this is a policy of mass infection which has been forced on the population, epitomized by the efforts to keep schools and workplaces open despite the clear and present dangers of Omicron.

As school districts and states engage in bitter conflict over vaccine and mask mandates, the alarming developments with Omicron show once again the entirely inadequate mitigation measures in place in schools across the country and the dire necessity to halt in-person instruction.

Recent studies have shown that boosters are necessary to protect against Omicron infection. However, the CDC data shows that as of December 15, only 5.6 million US children ages 5–11, or 20 percent of this age group, have received at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine. Roughly 12.9 million US children and adolescents ages 12–17, or 52 percent of this age group, have received two doses of the vaccine.

On December 9, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authorized the Pfizer vaccine for use as a booster in children ages 16 and 17. However, adolescents in this age group can only receive a booster six months after they have had their second dose, which means that nearly the entire population of children and adolescents ages 0–17 has reduced protection from Omicron through vaccination.

Doubling down on the argument that schools must remain open at all costs, Biden’s chief medical adviser, Dr. Anthony Fauci, said during a Monday interview on Morning Edition, “The best way to protect them is to surround the children with people who are vaccinated and boosted. That’s the best way to protect them. Keep them in an environment where the people around them are very unlikely to be infected.”

Other protections for students and staff in schools across the US remain entirely inadequate, with poor ventilation and filtration, as well as a lack of robust testing, contact tracing and quarantining of infected or exposed individuals. A recent report from Education Week notes that as of December 10, nine states have banned school districts from setting universal mask mandates, and only 16 states and the District of Columbia require masks to be worn in schools.

All districts across the country lack adequate guidance on the necessary use of high-quality masks, with an N95 rating or higher, in high-risk indoor settings such as schools. As a result, the majority of students and staff in schools with mask policies wear cloth or surgical masks that offer minimal protection from infection. Keeping schools open for the start of the spring semester in January after the winter holiday is a recipe for further unnecessary mass infection, death and long-term illness among children, all school staff and their families.

Despite these alarming developments and data pointing to the dangers of the winter surge and the immense threat of Omicron, schools are being kept open. The Biden administration’s announcement of a “Test to Stay” policy in schools, which has recently been endorsed by the CDC, expresses the growing adoption of an openly “herd immunity” perspective by the White House. According to the policy, unvaccinated students identified as “close contacts” of a COVID-19-positive peer will no longer have to quarantine, but will remain in school unless they test positive during the week after an exposure.

This policy is totally unscientific, as it ignores the airborne nature of the virus as well as the highly transmissible character of the Omicron variant. A “close contact” is identified as a student who has been within six feet of an infected individual for more than 15 minutes. Yet an infected student who sits in a poorly ventilated and packed classroom can potentially expose everyone in the room. Additionally, under the policy, vaccinated students who are asymptomatic do not need to test, even if exposed. With a highly transmissible variant such as Omicron, such a policy risks allowing for major outbreaks among a vulnerable student population.

The “Test to Stay” program is anticipated to be implemented in New York City Public Schools and Los Angeles Unified School District, the two largest US public school districts with a combined student population of over 1.6 million students, by February 2022.

The fact that over 1,000 children have lost their lives to COVID-19 in the US has gone almost entirely unmentioned by the corporate media, while the teachers unions have remained totally silent on this horrific fact. Their silence is a damning indictment of their complicity in the school reopening campaign, which was always meant solely to send parents back to work producing profits.

The indifference of the ruling class shows there is no level of mass infection or number of childhood deaths that they are not prepared to accept, as they repeat the mantra that society must “learn to live with the virus.” The independent mobilization of the working class is necessary to fight against these criminal herd immunity policies and demand a globally coordinated strategy to eliminate COVID-19.