Special Privilege in Admission to Elite U.S. Colleges

Lawrence Wittner

Although a major scandal erupted in 2019 over bribery and other fraudulent practices used by wealthy Americans to secure their children’s admission to elite colleges, the affluent continue to benefit from other kinds of special admission policies that are perfectly legal.

Consider the fact that, according to a recent study, only about 57 percent of Harvard’s white students were admitted on the basis of academic merit. The other 43 percent received special treatment because their parents had made large donations to Harvard, or they had parents who had graduated from the school (“legacy admissions”) or taught there, or were recruited as athletes. Without this preferential status, some three-quarters of them would have been rejected in the intense competition for admission.

Actually, a preferential status for the privileged has long been a tradition in the top ranks of American higher education. During their first decades, elite colleges considered only wealthy white students as worthy of admission. Even by the end of the nineteenth century, their campuses were populated primarily by graduates of private high schools. In the early twentieth century, worried administrators, anxious to limit the number of Jews and other new immigrants, leaned increasingly upon legacy status, family donations, and athletic recruiting.

I had a vague sense of these priorities when, from 1958 to 1962, I was a student at Columbia College. Founded in 1754, this male undergraduate school provided the core of Columbia University, which grew up around it. Composed of about 2,000 students, the college was a part of the prestigious Ivy League, and the ideal, promoted by the administration, was “the well-rounded man.” This term had a rather patrician, inbred ring to it, and certainly didn’t describe me or most of my college friends, who had attended urban public schools, came from modest economic circumstances, were devoid of athletic skills, and lacked family connections to the institution.

Nevertheless, while a Columbia undergraduate, I noticed features that suggested a disturbing hierarchy in admissions. A lot of my classmates had attended fancy prep schools, and still others were experienced athletes who ended up as relatively dim stars in the school’s lustrous intellectual firmament. Furthermore, the vast majority of Columbia’s students were white. My entering yearbook (The 1962 Directory), which displays pictures of virtually the entire freshman class, shows only five students who are clearly Black. At the time, college admissions applications required a picture of the applicants, a handy tool for screening out those considered undesirable.

Things began to change a bit—though not much—in 1970, when I was teaching history at Vassar College. As one of the Seven Sister Colleges, Vassar had an elite status comparable to Columbia’s, and came within a hairsbreadth of merging with Yale in the late 1960s. Even so, the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and the discovery of poverty shook it up, leading to pressure to move beyond Vassar’s traditionally white, economically comfortable (and sometimes quite wealthy) student constituency and create a more diverse one. As a result, a committee was charged with establishing new admissions criteria, and I was appointed to the committee.

After many committee meetings, we finally agreed upon a simple affirmative action procedure. In the ranking of admission candidates from 1 (the best) to 5 (the worst), we would give members of previously excluded groups a plus, thus providing them with an edge over others in their rank. At this point, though, with about 15 minutes left in the last meeting, the admissions director announced, rather casually, that the guidelines would, of course, continue to give a plus to children of Vassar graduates! I immediately objected, pointing out that this would reproduce the old admissions pattern. A Black student who served on the committee agreed with me. But we were outvoted, and traditional privileges prevailed.

It should come as no surprise, then, that, even as affirmative action has increased the number of students of color at America’s elite colleges, older patterns of favoritism have continued.

This is particularly true when it comes to the children of the rich. Researchers have found that the offspring of the top 1 percent are 77 times more likely to attend an elite private U.S. college than those from the bottom 20 percent. And this is no accident. At Harvard, top administrators repeatedly bent the school’s admissions standards to accommodate wealthy donors. Jared Kushner’s admission to Harvard, after a desultory academic performance at his prep school, followed upon his father’s offer of $2.5 million to the university. Of course, given inflation and the intense competition for admission, the price has risen over the years. “You used to be able to sway an admissions office for $1 million,” remarked Mark Sklarow, the chief executive officer of the Independent Educational Consultants Association. “Now it’s probably $10 million and up.”

Although some elite colleges no longer give special treatment to children of their alumni, most of them continue this practice. As a result, “legacy” students—who tend to be affluent and white—constitute a substantial constituency, including 14 percent of the freshman class at Yale, 13 percent at Dartmouth, and 10 percent at Brown. At Harvard, “legacy” applicants are six times more likely to be admitted than students without this hereditary privilege.

Finally, most elite colleges continue the practice of prioritizing the admission of athletes. This priority, like other traditional ones, lowers academic standards and—largely thanks to the fact that many Ivy League teams are situated in upper-class sports like sailing, golf, water polo, lacrosse, and fencing—contributes to the admission of large numbers of white, affluent students. As a Harvard faculty member noted, the athletic preference is “blatantly privileging already privileged groups.”

Overall, it’s clear that merit-based admission at the nation’s best colleges will not be secured while these kinds of priorities remain in place.

Democratic Progress in Honduras, Set Backs in El Salvador

Manuel Perez-Rocha

With the election of Xiomara Castro as their next president, the Honduran people can hope that the state of terror they’ve lived in since the coup d’état in 2009 is a matter of the past. However, their neighbors in El Salvador are facing a different fate as president Nayib Bukele unleashes his dictatorial ambitions, plunging the country into a nightmare.

The two countries have taken a 180-degree turn and are now immersed in very different political trends.

During the past decade, El Salvador and Honduras went in opposite directions.

With the progressive Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) taking power in El Salvador 2009 — the first time since the 1992 peace accords that ended the country’s civil war allowed it to become a political partyt — wo successive FMLN governments led El Salvador on the path of democratization. As Salvadoran civil society got stronger, the country achieved great things, such as the unanimous adoption by the country’s legislature of a law banning metallic mining — the first of its kind in the world.

In contrast, the progressive Honduran government of Manuel Zelaya was toppled by the 2009 U.S.-backed coup d’état which, over the next decade, consolidated a “narco-state” under the presidencies of Porfirio Lobo and Juan Orlando Hernández and served the Honduran elite and foreign corporate interests.

“Behind the coup d’état and its consolidation through successive electoral frauds are the interests of extractive capitalism which, in order to impose itself, has made Honduras one of the most dangerous countries in the world for human rights defenders, particularly for those who defend territories from plunder and environmental devastation,” declared the Women’s Mesoamerican Initiative of Human Rights Defenders. Michael Frost, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights Defenders, revealed that around 97 percent of crimes committed against human rights defenders in Honduras remain unresolved.

Carla García, international coordinator of the Honduran Black Fraternal Organization (OFRANEH), tells me with enthusiasm that “the triumph of Xiomara Castro represents hope for the Garífuna people of Honduras of a dialogue and of changes to the territorial policies that aimed at clearing the land to create Zones of Employment and Economic Development (ZEDE) which essentially aim to strip us of our territories”.

For Juan López, a teacher with the Municipal Committee in Defense of the Commons and Natural Assets of the Municipality of Tocoa, the victory of Xiomara Castro “shall allow us to address with greater objectivity and technical truthfulness the case of the eight activists imprisoned for protecting the rivers from mining exploitation, and bring back freedom to our territory.”

In contrast to Honduras’ shift to the left, El Salvador fell in the hands of ultra-right-wing forces since Bukele’s election in 2019, slipping possibly into a more permanent authoritarianism that strives to break away from the tradition of the left and right alternating in power.

Bukele has called himself the “coolest dictator in the worldy world” (sic), mocking his critics dismayed by the massive layoff of state workers and the imprisonment of political adversaries without the right to due process. Bukele’s totalitarian actions also include the adoption of Bitcoin as legal currency and motions to remove the country’s attorney general and Supreme Court justices and replace them with subordinate substitutes. Bukele is also pushing for constitutional changes that would allow him to seek reelection.

Human rights organizations have expressed “concern regarding the deterioration of the human rights situation, [the] consolidation of authoritarian rule and hate speech against human rights defenders, organizations, and media in El Salvador.” They also declared that the “deteriorating human rights situation is a result of President Nayib Bukele and his party’s abuse of power, as well as the ongoing dismantling of public entities and national controls that would be in positions to prevent internal abuses of power.”

Bukele’s Foreign Agents Bill is his most recent authoritarian onslaught. If passed, organizations that receive funding from external sources will have to officially register as “foreign agents” and be excluded from any political activity that is perceived as “disturbing public order” and “threatening national security” or “the country’s social and political stability.” The bill has been strongly condemned by local and international organizations and represents another step towards silencing criticism, restricting freedom of expression and association, and criminalizing independent voices.

“Foreign entities” that fail to register within eight days of the law’s passage and comply with its provisions — to be “determined at the discretion of the authorities” — could lose their legal status, face criminal charges, and receive fines of up to $150,000. This law would also impose a 40 percent tax on the funding received by these organizations, a rule that is unprecedented anywhere in the world. The UN and countries such as Germany voiced their concerns about the initiative, but even as Bukele deploys raids throughout the country against human rights organizations.

In Honduras, El Salvador, and the world, as ousted Brazilian president Dilma Rouseff said in an interview with La Jornada during the last meeting of the Puebla Group, “the greatest mistake is to take democracy for granted.” The ultra-right forces are on the loose.

Foxconn forced to close key Indian facility after worker protest over mass food poisoning

Kranti Kumara

The Taiwanese conglomerate Foxconn, a major Apple Phone supplier, has been forced to close a flagship factory in India for the past week, after workers blocked a key interstate highway to protest the food poisoning of hundreds of their coworkers in a company-provided canteen.

The protesting Foxconn workers blocked the Chennai to Bengaluru highway for some ten hours beginning around 10 PM Friday, Dec. 17. (Facebook)

At least 159 young female workers employed at Foxconn’s plant in Sriperumbudur, on the outskirts of Chennai in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, were hospitalised for food poisoning Friday, Dec. 17. This was a result of their eating a contaminated meal from canteens attached to the company-provided hostels where workers live in conditions akin to those of 19th century indentured labourers.

The company and government authorities are trying to scapegoat the canteen workers who cook and serve the food at the hostels for the incident. Two have been arrested.

According to the Kanchipuram District administration, a further 256 workers were treated as out-patients for vomiting, diarrhoea and dizziness.

Over 1,000 female workers mounted a boisterous protest to voice their anger over the mass food poisoning. They complained that they have repeatedly raised objections to the horrid food they are being served. But whenever they do, Foxconn denies any responsibility and tells them to register their complaints with Tamil Nadu’s DMK-led state government, whose Labour Department is notorious for its intimate ties to management.

According to news reports, the earliest the plant, which employs more than 5,000 workers, will resume production is this Sunday.

The plant shutdown was aimed not only at appeasing the outraged Foxconn workers. Both management and the DMK government feared the protests could spread across the Sriperumbudur industrial belt, a major centre of auto production, as workers employed by other transnational companies and their suppliers face similar conditions.

The Sriperumbudur Foxconn facility manufactures iPhone 12 models for Apple and has started to make Apple’s new, highly-promoted iPhone 13 models as well. In addition, the plant manufactures Amazon Fire TV sticks, Xiomi brand cell phones and other high tech items.

On the evening of Friday, December 17, Foxconn workers learned that hundreds of their colleagues were being treated for food poisoning after eating their evening meal at their hostel cafeteria. According to news reports, workers exchanged WhatsApp messages expressing concern over the fate of eight workers who had disappeared, fearing they could have died. When they approached management, it shrugged off their concerns, effectively trivializing the incident.

Following this, hundreds of Foxconn workers who had come to start their shift decided to block a major nearby highway. Beginning around 10 p.m. and continuing until it was broken up by police some 10 hours later, workers paralysed traffic on the highway that connects Chennai with Bengaluru, the capital of the neighbouring state of Karnataka. Making clear their anger over the brutal working conditions they endure and their hatred for the company, the protesting workers chanted “Down with Foxconn.”

Numerous protesting workers were beaten by the police and thrown into police vans. The police reportedly detained 70 workers at a wedding hall. Twenty-two trade unionists were also arrested and charged with whipping up the protests.

The Kanchipuram District administration claimed that as of Monday, December 20, 158 of the 159 hospitalised workers had been discharged.

A former Foxconn worker named Durga Devi, who was interviewed in Tamil on YouTube, described the nightmarish conditions these workers face in their hostels—conditions that have only worsened during the pandemic—and the unhygienic food they are provided every day. Durga emphasized that the cooks and workers at the canteen are not to be blamed for the poor quality of the food they serve. Instead, she indicted the company management for skimping on food expenditure and cleaning.

Durga explained that student hostels that previously provided accommodation to college engineering students, but had been shut down for students due to the COVID-19 pandemic, were leased by Foxconn to house its workers. These hostels are so far away from the plant that it takes workers about an hour and a half to travel to the plant by company bus every day. This means that workers spend three hours daily just traveling back and forth from work.

She described the crowded accommodation they endure: “The hostel rooms mostly don’t have windows and in these rooms 8 to 15 workers have to stay. For instance, when I was staying in the hostel, there were a total of 14 workers in my room.” When workers complained to the management that they don’t even have enough space to store their luggage in their allotted room, they were told to “adjust themselves” to what they have been provided.

Durga also complained that “we don’t even get proper sleep and the hostel is not maintained hygienically. We have to dine and sleep in the same place. It is unbearable.” She added, “It is impossible to maintain any kind of social distance in these crowded rooms to prevent the spread of pandemic.”

Reuters news organisation reported in May of this year that hundreds of workers got infected with COVID-19 at Foxconn’s Sriperumbudur factory, forcing the company to temporarily curtail production. As a result, production of the Apple iPhone 12 manufactured at the plant for the Indian market has slumped by over 50 percent. This has prompted Foxconn management to exert massive pressure upon workers to increase production, by increasing the intensity of work and compelling them to work longer hours.

Due to Washington’s ever-escalating offensive against China, Foxconn and Apple are both anxious to shift production from China to India. India’s Narendra Modi-led government, which is closely aligned with the US in its anti-China offensive, is, for its part, anxious to transform India into an alternate production chain-hub to China. It lavished huge sums as well as tax and other concessions on Foxconn to convince it to site Apple cell phone manufacture at the Sriperumbudu plant.

The Tamil Nadu general secretary of the Stalinist Communist Party of India, Marxist (CPM), K. Balakrishnan, condemned the police action against the Foxconn workers on the night of Dec. 17-18. This is completely hypocritical, as the CPM contested the 2021 state elections in a DMK-led electoral bloc, continues to work closely with this ethnic-chauvinist regional party and frequently extols it as a friend of the working class. On taking office in May of this year, the DMK government, with the support of the CPM and its sister Stalinist party, the Communist Party of India (CPI), pressed forward with the “reopening” of the economy amid India’s devastating second wave of the pandemic.

So close are relations between the DMK and the two Stalinist parties, the latter funded their campaigns for India’s 2019 national elections almost entirely from a massive donation of Rs. 250 million ($3.6 million) that the DMK made to them.

As Omicron surges in Europe, governments prepare holiday catastrophe

Samuel Tissot

Following Omicron’s emergence as the dominant strain in the United Kingdom, Scandinavia and Portugal, the vaccine-resistant variant is quickly engulfing Western and Central Europe. In many countries, officially-recorded infections have doubled in a few days, as Omicron is set to become the dominant strain in Europe before the new year.

Shoppers do their last Christmas shopping in Covent Garden in London, Wednesday, Dec. 22, 2021. (AP Photo/Frank Augstein)

Despite an explosion of cases of the vaccine-resistant variant, European governments are refusing to take any significant action to reduce transmission.

Many politicians in fact actively encouraged the European population to gather with family and friends. Yesterday, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson told the population that “people can go ahead with their Christmas plans.” French President Emmanuel Macron told those “who will have the joy of being with their families for Christmas” only to take a reassurance rapid test and then follow “barrier gestures” for social distancing with family and friends. Yesterday, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sànchez stated, “this is not March 2020 or last year’s Christmas.”

In contrast, World Health Organisation (WHO)-Europe chief Hans Kluge warned Tuesday of “another storm coming,” adding: “the sheer volume of new COVID-19 infections could lead to more hospitalizations and widespread disruption to health systems and other critical services.”

Under current conditions, Christmas celebrations this year will be a mass super-spreader event. Under a barrage of misinformation from capitalist governments and media, millions of European families are being lulled into hosting events that will lead to the deaths of tens of thousands of loved ones. In reality, infection rates are at record highs, and sky-high caseloads mean hospitals will soon be overwhelmed all across the continent.

In Western Europe, Omicron is quickly becoming dominant. The UK is witnessing an unprecedented explosion of the virus, with 119,789 cases reported Thursday, following 105,330 cases on Wednesday.

London is the centre of the current surge and has seen a spike in hospitalizations since mid-December. On December 20, 301 people were hospitalized with COVID-19, an 80 percent increase on the previous week. As of this writing, hospitalization data for more recent days has still not been uploaded to the government’s coronavirus website “due to a processing delay.”

In France, 91,608 cases were recorded on Thursday, after 84,272 cases on Wednesday, the two highest daily totals in the entire pandemic. Due to staff shortages from infection, the National Railways have begun cutting regional train services. On Thursday, the Scientific Council warned of hundreds of thousands of daily cases in January and “a possible disorganization of society from the beginning of January” as huge numbers of people are infected or in quarantine.

In Spain, cases doubled to 60,041 on December 22 from 26,568 on December 20. The Omicron variant is apparently responsible for most of the surge, going from 3 to 47 percent of cases in the space of just one week. The PSOE-Podemos government’s only measure has been to mandate mandatory mask wearing outdoors.

Spanish epidemiologist Quique Bassat stated that “we need stricter and more restrictive measures which are capable of containing this uncontrolled transmission.”

Portugal, where Omicron is already dominant, recorded 8,937 cases on December 22, the highest since January, and almost double the average for the last seven days. Deaths in Italy are at their highest point since May, with an average of 128 in the last seven days. The seven-day average of 27,199 for new cases is the highest since November 2020.

In Germany, cases and deaths fell slightly in the last week following a prolonged wave driven by the Delta variant. In the last three months, a staggering 16,000 Germans have died. However, the fall in Delta cases and deaths is quickly being replaced by a rapid rise of Omicron, which now is estimated to account for 30 percent of cases. On December 23, the Robert Koch Institute confirmed the first death from the Omicron variant in the country.

Omicron is already dominant in the Scandinavian countries. In Denmark, the seven-day average for cases is now over 10,000, with a record 13,057 cases recorded on December 21. In a country which has adult double vaccination rates of 96.2 percent and an adult triple vaccination rate of 46.2 percent, this shows just how devastating Omicron will be throughout Europe in the coming weeks. The seven-day average for deaths is now at its highest point since February.

In the Netherlands, what have been coined as “strict” lockdown measures by the capitalist press, have been announced until at least January 14. However, four guests will be allowed to attend another household for Christmas and New Years’ celebrations, non-essential production is continuing, and the government intends to reopen schools on January 10. Such measures will neither protect the population from the Omicron surge nor eradicate the virus.

While the impact of Omicron is already being felt in Western and Central Europe, the virus is rapidly moving East. As death and infection rates fall in those countries after a devastating Delta wave, they will be likely hit even harder by Omicron.

Since October 1, 90,000 Russians, 37,000 Ukrainians, 21,000 Romanians, 17,000 Poles, 10,000 Bulgarians, 8,000 Hungarians, 5,500 Czechs, have died of COVID-19. Nine of the top 10 countries for COVID-19 deaths per million inhabitants are Eastern European or Balkan states. The virus has thrived there on low vaccination rates, official “herd immunity” policies, and health care systems ravaged by the restoration of capitalism in the former USSR and Yugoslavia.

The Delta wave is in fact still claiming over 10,000 deaths a week in these countries. However, the Omicron variant has already been identified in Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Romania, Czechia, Hungary and all the Baltic States. It is only a matter of time before it begins to dominate there.

Although Western and Central European nations have higher vaccination rates and have begun campaigns for booster jabs, millions remain unprotected. In Eastern Europe, over 100 million people remain unvaccinated. Significantly, most children in Europe have either received only one jab or are totally unvaccinated.

With schools fully opened throughout the autumn term, the number of child hospitalizations has surged in Europe. In France there are currently 153 children hospitalized with COVID-19, including 35 in critical care. On Wednesday it was reported that another child in the UK died from COVID-19, bringing the total to 121 deaths of under-19s since the pandemic began. Between December 1 and 16, 148 children were hospitalized in Germany, over half of whom were below 3 years old.

In contrast to the criminal inaction of European governments, health authorities in China are once again showing that stringent health measures can eradicate the virus and protect lives. In the city of Xi’an, 13 million people have been locked down after the detection of 127 infections in a round of mass testing. Such measures have repeatedly halted outbreaks in China.

As Omicron cases explode exponentially in Europe, the alarm must be sounded. The continent is on course for a health and societal crisis leaving hundreds of thousands dead from COVID-19, and many more dead due to devastated health care systems’ inability to provide care.

The capitalist class bases its health policy not on infections, deaths, or even hospital saturation, but on its ability to keep non-essential production running so that its stream of profits is uninterrupted. Thus, even in the face of a highly infectious and vaccine resistant variant, it refuses to put in place the measures necessary to defend human life.

In March 2020, wildcat strikes begun by Italian workers spread through Europe and led to the only proper lockdowns to date. Now, only a conscious mass movement of the European working class directed against the bourgeoisie and its policies of mass infection can lead to a scientific fight against the virus.

First Omicron cases detected in Indonesia

Owen Howell

Last week Indonesia officially recorded its first cases of the new Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2, which has quickly spread into Southeast Asia. The variant was finally discovered after two weeks in which the Indonesian government refused to impose urgent public health measures to prevent the arrival and spread of Omicron.

Workers in protective gear lower a coffin of a COVID-19 victim for burial at the special section of the Pedurenan cemetery designated to accommodate the surge in deaths during the coronavirus outbreak in Bekasi, West Java, Indonesia, Monday, July 26, 2021. (AP Photo/Achmad Ibrahim)

The Health Ministry has so far reported three infections of Omicron, all linked to overseas travelers. Spokesperson Siti Nadia Tarmizi told local magazine Tempo this week that the ministry had traced 250 close contacts of the three confirmed cases, of which 10 people tested positive for COVID-19. Genome sequencing is underway to determine whether it is the Omicron variant.

The first case was detected on December 15. The victim had no recent history of overseas travel and was a cleaning worker at the Wisma Atlet emergency hospital in Jakarta’s Kemayoran district, a facility created in March 2020 to treat COVID-19 patients and quarantine Indonesians returning from abroad.

The worker reportedly contracted Omicron from a citizen returning from Nigeria on November 27, who was being quarantined at Wisma Atlet.

The following day, the government announced an additional five suspected cases, including three Chinese nationals at a hospital in Manado, North Sulawesi, and two Indonesians who had returned from South America and Britain. The latter two were confirmed as Omicron cases on Friday, after authorities completed genome sequencing. Both were also being quarantined at the Wisma Atlet hospital.

The Health Ministry was able to identify the five individuals and the first case using a specific type of polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test that can detect the S-gene target failure (SGTF), which is one of the identifiers of the Omicron mutations.

The Omicron variant, after emerging in South Africa last month, has recently been reported in a number of Indonesia’s neighbours, including Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and the Philippines. The World Health Organisation (WHO) categorised the highly transmissible and vaccine-resistant strain as a “variant of concern” and a “very high risk” nearly a month ago, warning world governments that Omicron cases could double every one and a half to three days.

Despite the evident danger, no serious health measures were implemented. Instead, the Indonesian government made a conscious decision to continue its reopening plans, through a “vaccine-only” strategy, and force the population to “live with the virus.”

President Joko Widodo said in a livestreamed address last week that the arrival of Omicron was “inevitable,” and warned the public against becoming complacent as restrictions are relaxed.

Widodo reiterated false claims that Omicron is “mild” and that vaccines offer effective protection. “It’s important to be on alert but we should not panic because so far, Omicron has not shown any characteristics that could endanger patients, especially those who have been vaccinated,” he said.

He went on to address the population: “Even though the domestic situation is close to normal, don’t slack off implementing health protocols.” In fact, not only is the situation far from normal, but if anyone is guilty of disregarding public safety, it is Widodo’s government.

Limited mobility restrictions on public activities, introduced on November 29, remain the only measures to slow transmission. Planned stricter measures were scrapped two weeks ago. The government response is largely confined to impotent public appeals. Widodo has asked people and state officials to temporarily refrain from travelling abroad, while Health Minister Budi Gunadi Sadikin called for mask wearing and physical distancing.

Despite recent travel bans on some African countries, as many as 3,000 people have continued to enter Indonesia every day over the past month, according to Kompas.

Investment Minister Luhut Pandjaitan, who leads the official COVID-19 response in Java and Bali, revealed on Monday that the government had prepared “contingency measures” to be implemented only if certain unstated conditions regarding Omicron’s spread are present. But until then, the current inadequate restrictions will stand, only to be further relaxed at the soonest opportunity.

After the announcement of the first case, Luhut pointed to the corporate-financial preoccupations underlying the government’s pandemic policy: “The development of the Omicron variant will be the key to economic recovery in 2022. If Omicron were to result in significant hospitalisation and the current vaccines were to lose their potency, the recovery would be slower than expected.”

Hostile to any tightening of restrictions, Indonesia’s financial elite is raising concerns that any retreat from the reopening agenda will severely impact economic activity, especially consumer spending over the end-of-year holiday period.

Josua Pardede, chief economist at Bank Permata, predicted Omicron would have a limited effect on fourth-quarter GDP growth, confident that the government will continue eliminating social restrictions over the holidays. “Omicron can be a threat [economically] if not mitigated by the government,” he said.

Rully Arya Wisnubroto, a senior analyst at state-owned Bank Mandiri, told the Jakarta Post, “We see that uncertainty is still high, [but] the probability of continued economic growth is still quite [high].” Bank Mandiri projects GDP to grow 5 to 5.5 percent next year, in line with targets outlined in the state budget.

The hope that Indonesia’s economy, which suffered a major contraction last year, will return to pre-pandemic conditions in 2022 is based on the expectation that the government’s reckless and homicidal reopening plans will proceed unhindered.

Responding to recent talk of reimposing lockdown measures, Gilbert Simanjuntak, from Jakarta’s Regional Legislative Council and a member of Widodo’s PDI-P party, hailed the “herd immunity” policies of the UK and Brazilian governments. He also asserted, like Widodo, that the spread of Omicron was inevitable.

By contrast, medical experts have criticised the lack of public health barriers against Omicron, which has ravaged countries with relatively higher vaccine coverage, including the US, the UK, and elsewhere in Europe. Only 38 percent of the Indonesian population is double vaccinated, with Health Minister Budi calling it unlikely Indonesia will meet its target of 50 percent before the year ends.

Dicky Budiman, an Indonesian epidemiologist at Griffith University in Australia, described Omicron as a “clear threat” to Indonesia’s healthcare system. He noted that, as viral transmission still occurs across the country, Indonesia “is not truly safe and has not escaped the crisis yet.”

He added, “Furthermore, Indonesia is not a country that has isolated itself over the past month before [the first Omicron case] was found, and the genomic surveillance remains limited.” He has called for a drastic expansion of the national contact tracing program to track the variant’s spread, with at least 2 to 5 percent of all positive cases each month to be examined for Omicron.

Currency market turmoil impoverishes millions of Turkish workers

Barış Demir

Millions of workers’ living standards are plunging after President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced financial measures and the Central Bank released massive dollar reserves in a desperate attempt to stem the collapse of the Turkish lira (TL). The most obvious result of Monday’s operation is the overnight enrichment of the financial aristocracy, both internationally and in Turkey, at the expense of the working class.

People at a currency exchange shop, in Ankara, Turkey, Tuesday, Dec. 21, 2021. Turkey’s currency made significant gains Tuesday after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced extraordinary measures to safeguard lira-denominated deposits against volatility seen in recent weeks and boost confidence among Turks as they have watched their buying power erode. (AP Photo/Burhan Ozbilici)

After a cabinet meeting Monday evening, to encourage Turks to leave their deposits in lira, Erdoğan promised to cover whatever gains they would have received had they bought dollars: “If the returns made by our people on Turkish lira at the bank are higher than the increase in the exchange rate, they will receive these returns; but if the returns given by the exchange rate are higher, the margin will be directly paid to our citizens.”

This state guarantee given to Turkish lira deposit accounts will be covered by the Central Bank printing money, for which the working class will pay the price via more inflation. Recently, it was known that about 65 percent of individual deposits in Turkey are in foreign currency. Workers and middle-class people who tried to protect themselves from the depreciation of lira by investing their limited savings in foreign currency, saw a severe depreciation of their savings overnight.

On Monday, the Turkish lira fell to over 18 TL against the US dollar, from 7 TL at the beginning of February. While Erdoğan announced his measures on Monday evening, the Central Bank reportedly sold US$7 billion on Monday evening and Tuesday, according to Uğur Gürses, a former Central Bank economist and journalist. Gürses states that this supply of dollars did not come directly by the Central Bank as before, but indirectly through public banks. The dollar then fell back to 12.5 TL on Tuesday.

While the depreciation of the foreign currencies against TL continued this week, price hikes made for a long time due to the increase in the exchange rate remained. Turkey’s import-reliant economy is severely affected by global price fluctuations. Over the past year, there has been an increase of around 100 percent in prices for energy and basic necessities.

While official annual inflation was announced as 21 percent in November, the real rate was at least 59 percent, according to a study by the independent Inflation Research Group (ENA group). As this fueled anger and demands for significant wage increases in the working class, Erdoğan responded last week by announcing a nearly 50 percent minimum wage increase for 2022.

This was in reality a “raise” that would again be largely borne by the working class, as it was combined with a substantial tax cut for corporations. Moreover, despite this raise and the rise in the value of the TL this week, the monthly minimum wage has still fallen in dollar terms: it is only US$370 after having been US$384 at the beginning of 2021.

Price increases in Turkey are part of a global surge in inflation, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic began, as central banks pour trillions of dollars into world financial markets. This is accompanied by the disruption caused by the pandemic in global supply chains.

This surge in inflation adds pressure on central banks to tighten monetary policy, raising interest rates to keep providing positive real returns on capital to investors. However, Erdoğan has been pressing the Turkish Central Bank for some time to cut interest rates to support economic growth in the export and construction sectors. With another 1 percent discount last week, the Turkish Central Bank has cut interest rates by 5 percent overall in the last four months—despite the international financial oligarchy’s expectation of an interest rate increase.

This fiscal policy accelerated international finance capital’s flight from the lira and the massive depreciation of the Turkish currency in 2021, while the US Federal Reserve signaled an interest rate hike for 2021. The interest rate of 15 percent was below the official inflation rate of 21 percent, which meant a 6 percent negative interest rate for the TL. Moreover, growing tensions between Ankara and its NATO imperialist allies undermined the financial elite’s confidence in Turkish markets.

On the other hand, despite Erdoğan’s “anti-interest” populist rhetoric, the new currency-protected deposit policy he announced means an indirect interest rate increase. The Erdoğan government’s latest intervention came as a response to growing fear in ruling class circles of a general crisis as well as sharp criticisms of current financial policies.

On Friday, Union of Chambers and Commodity Exchanges of Turkey Chairman Rifat Hisarcık-lıoğlu reacted on Twitter to the latest 1 percent cut in interest rates: “The turbulence in the markets and the level of exchange rates worry and negatively affect many of our companies. We expect urgent measures to stabilize the markets and ensure predictability.”

Istanbul Chamber of Industry President Erdal Bahçıvan also said last week: “We are watching with surprise as the Central Bank, which cut interest rates yesterday, released its precious foreign exchange resources to the market today.”

The Turkish Industry and Business Association (TÜSİAD), representing the dominant sections of the Turkish bourgeoisie, called to “quickly return to the generally accepted rules of economic science,” stating: “It has become clear that the intended results will not be achieved with the economics program being tested. We emphasized the risk of this process resulting in severe depreciation in TL, acceleration in inflation, suppression in investments, economic growth and employment, and most importantly, our impoverishment as a country.”

It added, “As a matter of fact, after the steps taken within the scope of new economic preferences, an environment of insecurity and instability has emerged.”

There is no reason to think that the latest measures will permanently reverse the collapse of the Turkish currency. In fact, the fluctuation in lira provided a suitable environment for the financial oligarchy to make massive profits with speculation. Now they also get an exchange rate difference guarantee from the Treasury. It is clear that the exchange rate difference guaranteed by the government will be covered by printing money, which will fuel inflation that will further impoverish the working class.

While these measures have stopped the lira’s slide for now, the financial elite’s doubts on the Turkish economy are growing. Turkey’s five-year CDS score has increased to 623, marking growing concern in financial circles of possible state bankruptcy. Moreover, the Borsa Istanbul (BIST 100) index has dropped from 2,400 to 1,800 since December 17. The index had its worst performance since the pandemic hit Turkey in March 2020.

As Turkey has become a paradise for the profiteers of financial aristocracy, they will try to meet the price of this massive wealth transfer, which peaked during the pandemic period, with the general impoverishment and brutal exploitation of the working class. Fierce class battles undoubtedly lie ahead.

Latest excess deaths estimate place toll of pandemic above 18 million

Bryan Dyne

For the second year in a row, the Christmas holiday is blighted by the continued onslaught of the coronavirus pandemic. Worldwide, there have been nearly 280 million recorded cases and just over 5.4 million officially confirmed deaths. And the real toll is far higher. Excess death projections from the Economist estimate that 18.4 million men, women and children have died in the past two years from COVID-19.

People line up to receive test kits to detect COVID-19 as they are distributed in the Lower East Side neighborhood in the Manhattan borough of New York Thursday, Dec. 23, 2021. (AP Photo/Craig Ruttle)

Accepting the higher figure, the coronavirus pandemic has been as deadly in two years as World War I was over four years. Moreover, the rate of death has increased: About twice as many people died from the virus in 2021 than in 2020. As World Health Organization Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus noted on Wednesday, there were more coronavirus deaths in 2021 “than from HIV, malaria and tuberculosis combined.”

Now, the emergence of the Omicron variant of the virus, first reported to the World Health Organization exactly one month ago, threatens to eclipse even these heart-stopping figures. The Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington predicts that there will be as many as 3 billion cases over the next three months. As the IHME noted, “that’s as many infections as we’ve seen in the entire pandemic so far.”

More starkly, such a spike in infections would cause a truly staggering number of deaths. If Omicron is even a fifth as lethal as Delta, the IHME figures imply 3 million additional deaths by the end of March. And contrary to the claim that Omicron is “mild” presented in the corporate media, there is ample evidence to suggest that this variant is about as deadly as its predecessors, in which case the tally of the dead would skyrocket even higher.

The collapse of hospital systems under the impact of such a surge in cases would drive the death toll even higher. A September study in the Annals of Internal Medicine found that nearly 1 in 4 deaths during the first 10 months of the pandemic took place because hospitals were overwhelmed. An October paper from the Journal of Hospital Medicine found that mortality from other acute and chronic illnesses surged during times of high COVID-19 hospitalizations.

In the United States, where the IHME predicts 140 million new cases by April, there are already signs of such appalling conditions returning. Reports have emerged on Twitter, for example, that a major hospital system in Phoenix, Arizona, has enacted crisis standards of care. Patients 75 and older will reportedly have to meet certain criteria to be eligible for life-saving care, and those 85 and older will not be eligible at all for some treatments.

No doubt such policies will become more common in the near future. There are currently more than 70,000 patients hospitalized with COVID-19 in the US, the majority of those as a result of a fall surge of the Delta variant. The full impact of the Omicron variant, which was only detected in the US on December 1 and is now the cause of an estimated 73 percent of cases nationwide, has yet to be felt.

“If we wait for signals in increasing hospitalizations, we’re probably too late by a substantial amount,” said Marm Kilpatrick, an infectious disease researcher at University of California, Santa Cruz, to NPR. She continued, “I’m quite concerned” that hospitals across the country will be overwhelmed by the sheer number of cases.

New York City, the current epicenter of the pandemic in the US, is likely a precursor for the rest of the country. Hospitalizations have gone up 50 percent since the beginning of the month, while new cases have more than tripled from 7,000 a day to more than 22,000 a day, higher than even last winter’s peak. Deaths have also begun to trend upward, from 38 a day to 59 a day.

Pediatric hospitalizations have risen particularly sharply in the state, doubling over the past week. The data tracks that of South Africa, which has made clear that children, who remain largely unvaccinated, are particularly susceptible to the new variant of COVID-19.

The situation continues to worsen elsewhere in the US. An outbreak in Florida has caused the state’s 7-day average case count to jump from 2,700 to nearly 11,000 in just a week. In Illinois, daily average cases have risen to more than 11,500, just under the state record set last winter. Similarly in Ohio, daily cases have exceeded 10,000. New England states such as Rhode Island and Connecticut also have daily case counts at or exceeding their previous highs and, on a per capita basis, are facing a number of infections second only to New York.

Nationally, there is an average of more than 173,000 new cases each day and just under 1,300 deaths. The test positivity rate has also begun to climb, reaching 9.1 percent, indicating that many more cases are going undetected as Omicron rips across the country.

Thousands of these cases, moreover, are among those who were previously considered to be fully vaccinated. Data from the Philadelphia Department of Public Health shows that among its more than 11,200 COVID-19 cases since the beginning of December, 3,300 were among vaccinated patients, further evidence of Omicron’s increased ability to evade immunity.

Breakthrough cases are a particular concern for the elderly. National data from the CDC shows that among the 27 states reporting, there have so far been 1.5 million cases among those vaccinated and 16,727 deaths. Of those deaths, 6,258, or 2.26 percent of breakthrough cases were among people between the ages of 65-79, and 8,011, or 8.56 percent, were aged 80 and older.

Extrapolating such numbers based on the IHME predictions suggests there will be millions of breakthrough cases among the elderly from Omicron and tens of thousands of deaths over the next three months.

“We have no way further to retreat,” says Putin, as NATO escalates military build-up on Russia’s borders

Clara Weiss

In an extraordinary speech on Tuesday before Russia’s officer corps, the entire Defense Ministry as well as cadets of military schools, President Vladimir Putin made clear that the Russian government is preparing for a potential war with NATO.

Russian President Vladimir Putin gestures while speaking during his annual news conference in Moscow, Russia, Thursday, Dec. 23, 2021. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko)

For much of the speech, Putin highlighted case after case in the past three decades in which the US has bombed countries, in complete disregard of international law and previous agreements. He pointed to Iraq, Libya and Syria and, in particular, the bombing of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Putin also accused the US of supporting ISIS and other Islamist terrorist organizations, including in separatist Islamist movements in Russia’s North Caucasus. 

In recent weeks, Putin has made several major public statements, invoking the danger of a “Yugoslavian scenario”—that is, the break-up of the country through a combination of ethnic conflicts, civil wars and imperialist bombardments—repeating itself, on a much larger scale, in Russia. 

Putin indicated that the Kremlin fears that the US, working together with the government in Kiev, is preparing a military provocation with chemical weapons. Pointing to the situation in Ukraine, where a US- and EU-backed coup in 2014 toppled a pro-Russian government, triggering an ongoing civil war and massive build-up of NATO on Russia’s borders, Putin said that NATO must understand that “We have no way further to retreat,” this is “right before our doorstep.”

Putin warned, “In case of continuation of the rather aggressive line of our Western colleagues, we will respond with adequate military-technical measures, [we] will react harshly to the unfriendly steps.”

Yet while stating that any written contracts or agreements with the US and NATO were effectively worthless, he doubled down on the need for NATO to sign just such an agreement with “guarantees” to Russia that it would acknowledge certain “red lines.” Underscoring just how desperate a situation the Kremlin oligarchy sees itself in, Putin cried that the NATO powers must give, “Something, at least something.”

A few days before Putin’s speech, the Kremlin issued a list of guarantees that it wants NATO to provide, including to stop further arming of Ukraine in the military stand-off with pro-Russian separatists in East Ukraine, and to cease stepping up its troop deployment to Eastern Europe. The Russian government also demands that NATO issue a written guarantee that it would never accept Ukraine as a member state. 

US and EU officials have already indicated that they regard many of these demands as “unacceptable.” The US and Russia are scheduled to resume negotiations about the conflict over Ukraine early next year. 

The same day that Putin gave his speech, the Biden administration met to discuss new sanctions in the case of a war between Russia and Ukraine, which hat would hit the Russian economy on a hitherto unprecedented scale. The sanctions now being discussed include the banning of any exports of Apple products, as well as technology that is critical to the aircraft and automobile industry of Russia, two of its largest industrial sectors. 

Earlier reports by CNN and BBC indicated that the US and EU are also considering cutting off Russia from the SWIFT agreement, the main basis for international financial transfers, which are critical to the operations of Russian banks and companies in the world economy. Such a move is widely described as the “nuclear” option in economic warfare by the imperialist powers and would threaten a near-total collapse of the already fragile and crisis-ridden Russian economy. 

Just a few days earlier, the US Congress passed a record war budget of $770 billion, focused on preparing for war against China and Russia.

NATO has also continued to step up its provocations and war preparations on Russia’s borders in recent weeks. According to a report by the German Sueddeutsche Zeitung, US general Tod Wolters proposed on December 7 that 6,000 troops from NATO’s “spearhead” unit should be mobilized so that, in case of war, they can be moved within just five days into a “crisis region”. Usually, the time foreseen for such deployments is at least seven days. The spearhead unit is currently stationed in Turkey but will be based in Germany in 2023. Other special and logistical units have also been put on high alert. 

In an indication of bitter conflicts behind the scenes within the oligarchy over how to respond to the growing pressure from imperialism, the Russian business daily Kommersant, the Russian equivalent of the British Financial Times or American Wall Street Journal, had a lead article on Putin’s speech that was drenched with cynical comments, and compared Putin’s warnings of a provocation with chemical weapons by the US with Colin Powell’s notorious lie about weapons of mass destructions in Ukraine. 

The piece warned that “this is already not the Cold War, everything has become a lot hotter” and concluded with the sardonic comment that it would “be nice to have an assurance that there will be a new year.” 

While Putin, not without foundation, is warning of the repetition of the Yugoslavian catastrophe on a much bigger scale in the former Soviet Union, the truth is that the Russian oligarchy has no progressive response whatsoever to the ever-growing danger of war. It is revealing that the 30-year anniversary of the Stalinist dissolution of the Soviet Union on December 26 has been largely passed over in silence by the Russian media and went entirely unmentioned by Putin. 

The Putin regime and the ruling oligarchy as a whole have emerged out of the Soviet bureaucracy that betrayed the October Revolution for decades, and liquidated the USSR in 1991. When the US attacked Iraq in January 1991, ushering in a three-decades-long period of imperialist wars of plunder, they did so with the acquiescence of the Moscow bureaucracy.

Focused on the destruction of the Soviet state and the plunder of its social resources, robbery that was carried out hand-in-glove with the American bourgeoisie, the newly emerging oligarchy in Russia was caught up in the delusional belief in the possibility of peaceful cooperation with imperialism. Yet all the agreements and assurances from NATO, including that it would not move closer to Russia’s borders, were blown to pieces within years. 

Now, that the imperialist powers are openly preparing for war against Russia, the only response from the Putin regime is a combination of endless begging for what Putin himself recognizes are worthless assurances, on the one hand, and the promotion of nationalism and a military build-up, on the other. 

The utter bankruptcy of the oligarchy’s response to the threat of an imperialist assault is determined by its class interests. The biggest enemy that it sees itself confronted with is the Russian and international working class, not imperialism. On all critical matters of class policy, above all the social counterrevolution of recent decades, and the homicidal response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Russian oligarchy has, in fact, been mirroring the policies of the American and European ruling class.