Two right-wing figures to contest South Korean presidential election

Ben McGrath

On March 9, South Korea will hold an election to replace outgoing President Moon Jae-in. Neither the candidate from the ruling Democratic Party of Korea (DP) nor from the opposition People Power Party (PPP) has anything progressive to offer workers and youth. Both are determined to further open the economy despite the surge of COVID-19 cases and have backed the US war drive in the region against China.

The DP has put forward former Gyeonggi Province Governor Lee Jae-myung as its candidate while the PPP’s candidate is former Prosecutor General Yoon Seok-youl. Ahn Cheol-soo from the minor conservative People’s Party and Sim Sang-jeong of the pseudo-left Justice Party are also running. Moon Jae-in from the DP is ineligible as South Korean presidents serve for a single, five-year term.

The pandemic is a central concern for workers and youth. The government began the so-called “with COVID” era last November, an open admission that it would no longer take serious measures to stop the spread of the virus. Its aim was to get students back into classrooms and workers back on the job to ensure profits for big business. Since then, the number of daily new cases has surged to record highs of more than 17,000, with schools being major centers of transmission.

A screen shows a live broadcast of Lee Jae-myung of the ruling Democratic Party, left, and Yoon Suk Yeol of the main opposition People Power Party during a presidential debate for the upcoming March 9 presidential election, at the Seoul Railway Station in Seoul, South Korea, Thursday, February 3, 2022. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)

Neither Lee nor Yoon will deviate from this agenda. Instead, both have pledged to provide additional payments to businesses affected by the pandemic. While portrayed as assisting small businesses, in reality this amounts to further bailouts for big business and a pittance for everyone else.

Big business, in fact, has enjoyed a surge in profits, as they have exploited the pandemic to engage in stock market speculation while forcing workers into unsafe workplaces. The economy grew by 4 percent in 2021, the fastest in eleven years. In response, both Lee and Yoon have pledged to further deregulate the economy, that is remove any restrictions on profit-making at the expense of the working class. Lee stated on January 6, “If regulations limit competition and efficiency, abolishing or easing them is desirable for the whole economy.”

However, workers are suffering from rising unemployment. Officially, unemployment stands at approximately 3.7 percent, down from 4 percent in 2020. However, Statistics Korea reported on January 24 that 628,000 people had given up looking for work in 2021, a record high. An additional 2.4 million people have taken time off from working, unrelated to education, illness, or childcare. Neither figure is counted in the official unemployment figures. The number of long-term unemployed last year stood at 128,000, approximately half of whom are in their 20s and 30s. This was an 8.1 percent increase over 2020.

The election also takes place under the shadow of the US-led drive to war against China. Under Moon Jae-in, Seoul has backed Washington’s agenda against Beijing, including over Taiwan, risking the outbreak of a dangerous conflagration that would engulf South Korea.

Whoever becomes president following the election will continue and deepen this militarist agenda. Lee stated, in early January, when asked if South Korea would join the US-led Quad, a quasi-military alliance aimed at Beijing, “We don’t have to respond in advance, and even if they do ask, we can give a third-party response from our point of view. We could choose the United States and China simultaneously or not choose either and, depending on the issue, choose one side a little more than the other.”

In other words, since Seoul has supposedly not been asked to join the alliance made up of Japan, Australia, India, and the United States, Lee avoids making his position clear. While undoubtedly conscious of the broad anti-war sentiment in South Korea, Lee and the Democrats speak for sections of the ruling class that fear the conflict stoked by Washington with Beijing is undermining their business interests in China, South Korea’s largest trading partner.

Lee’s posturing is entirely for show. When push comes to shove, Lee will fall in line with Washington’s demands. His public statements commit him to nothing. At the same time, he has not made a single warning about the danger of war between the US and China. He is as responsible for keeping the war preparations hidden from public view as the current Moon administration.

Yoon, on the other hand, has been more vocal in his support for the US campaign against China. Echoing Washington’s propaganda, he stated on January 24, “I would focus on bolstering a comprehensive and strategic alliance with the United States based on the shared values and principles of freedom, democracy, the market economy, constitutionalism and human rights.”

Yoon also stated that he would expand Seoul’s cooperation with the Quad alliance. In November, Yoon called for clearly aligning with Washington against Beijing, saying, “You have to lead the nation’s business with strategic clarity.”

Both the DP and PPP are capitalist parties but orient to different factions of the bourgeoisie.

The PPP’s origins lie in the military dictatorship that came to power after Park Chung-hee’s 1961 coup d’état and ruthlessly suppressed any opposition over the next three decades. Faced with growing unrest in the late 1980s, the South Korean ruling class moved to allow democratic elections, believing that the Democrats would serve as a crucial brake on the growing militancy of the working class.

The Democrat bloc served as a rallying point for various forces opposed to the military dictatorship while blocking any struggle against the capitalist system itself. Since the early 1990s and the advent of elections, the so-called liberal bloc has undergone various name changes as well as splits between the more openly right-wing politicians and those clinging to a thin, and insincere, veil of vague progressivism.

Emerging from this milieu, current President Moon Jae-in was elected in 2017 following the removal of Park Geun-hye, daughter of Park Chung-hee, from office for corruption. Moon previously challenged Park in the 2012 election, but was narrowly defeated. His election came amid of a surge of popular discontent resulting in massive protests demanding the removal of Park from office, but also broader social changes.

Backed by the so-called militant Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU), Moon falsely postured as a friend of the working class and even as a president who would stand up to the US war machinations. None of this was true, as Moon quickly fell into line behind the Trump and then Biden administrations and backed big businesses in disputes with striking workers, including in the auto, shipbuilding, and package delivery industries.

Growing concern about New Zealand government allowing Omicron to spread

Tom Peters

In a speech to parliament yesterday, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern reiterated the Labour Party-Greens government’s message that nothing will be done to stop mass infections from the Omicron variant of COVID-19.

After stating that New Zealand’s “hospitalisations and deaths have been the lowest in the OECD for the past two years”—the result of an elimination policy, which the government abandoned last October—Ardern declared that the population must now “prepare to encounter COVID-19 in a way that we have not yet to date, and at a scale we are not used to seeing in this country.”

Ardern criticised the opposition National Party for calling for the lifting of border quarantine rules in December and behaving as though the pandemic is “over.” In the next breath, however, she outlined the government’s plan to dismantle the hotel quarantine system, which has kept thousands of COVID cases out of the community.

The purpose of the so-called “COVID-19 Protection Framework” is to keep schools and businesses open, to ensure the uninterrupted extraction of profit from the working class while COVID spreads everywhere. The framework includes vaccine mandates for some workers, and masking requirements in many areas, but excludes nationwide lockdowns.

PM Jacinda Ardern addressing parliament on February 8, 2022. (Source: ondemand.parliament.nz)

Ardern trumpeted the fact that 94 percent of people in New Zealand aged over 12 are double-vaccinated. But only 42 percent of 5- to 11-year-olds have received their first dose. Only about one third of people have received a third dose, necessary for protection against Omicron, leaving a majority of the population highly vulnerable.

New Zealand is now regularly reporting more than 200 cases of Omicron per day. There are 2,048 active infections in the community—a figure that has more than quadrupled in the last two weeks. Case numbers are expected to soar following the end of the summer holidays and reopening of schools last week.

Recent government-commissioned modelling from the research institute Te Pūnaha Matatini says the Omicron outbreak could peak in mid-March, with tens of thousands of cases per day. In what it calls an optimistic scenario, a total of 1.5 million people could be infected, 11,500 hospitalised and 460 could die over a period of three to four months. In a more pessimistic scenario, deaths could reach 1,450.

There are growing signs of opposition to the “let it rip” agenda. A survey of 520 workers by ELMO Software published on Monday found that 64 percent were concerned about being in the workplace as Omicron spreads.

Another poll, by Newshub-Reid Research, found that 44.3 percent did not think the government was prepared for Omicron. Asked whether they would support a lockdown to deal with the virus, 47.9 percent said yes, while 57.8 percent supported keeping the international border closed longer.

Jenny (not her real name), a disability care worker in Auckland, told the WSWS, “I am concerned about the government now changing their strategy and how it might impact on our people.” She was not sure if another lockdown could be enforced, but said “in a way it would be better, because part of responsible government is to protect people.”

Jenny, who is in her 60s, said, “I feel less able to fight viruses than I used to be when I was younger.” She has pre-diabetes, placing her at greater risk from COVID. Jenny also worried what would happen to the people she cares for if workers get the virus. “Disabled people are so vulnerable, in every way. They can’t advocate for themselves,” she said. Her organisation is already understaffed, and workers are often asked to work long hours to fill gaps.

Even though disabled people are at greater risk of severe illness if they get COVID, workers in the sector have not been given the most effective N95 masks, which are in short supply in New Zealand. Jenny also said the people she cares for have not all received a third vaccine dose, although they would in a few days’ time.

Parents are also increasingly concerned. Despite a barrage of false claims by the government, the media and the unions that schools and childcare centres pose a “low risk” for transmission, several have already been hit by outbreaks since they reopened at the start of February. Positive cases have been found in children in Auckland, Hamilton and Havelock North, prompting dozens of schoolchildren and staff to go into isolation.

Hundreds of comments have appeared on the Ministry of Education’s Facebook page in recent days expressing concerns about the lack of physical distancing, poor ventilation, low child vaccination rates and inconsistent masking rules in schools. Only children in Year 4 and over (ages 7 and 8) need to wear masks.

A mother in South Auckland, who has asthma and mitral valve regurgitation (a heart condition), told the WSWS: “There’s a lot of talk from the government about how ‘we need to protect the vulnerable,’ but then there’s no regulation about vulnerable parents having to send their children to school and possibly bring home Omicron. They say it’s for their [children’s] mental health etc. But it won’t be good for their mental health if their vulnerable parent dies.”

She concluded, “It’s not worth risking our lives and our children’s lives for school when we can prevent COVID by reducing contact with others during this time and engaging in remote learning.”

As in other countries, the teacher unions have played a central role in enforcing the pro-business agenda of reopening of schools. Liam Rutherford, president of the primary union, the NZEI, told NewstalkZB on January 31: “Schools are bracing themselves for how you keep your school open when you’ve got a large chunk of your staff or a large chunk of your students all close contacts or with COVID.”

Post-Primary Teachers’ Association president Melanie Webber told Newshub yesterday the pressure on teachers was “not ideal,” but they were “pulling together to do their absolute best to make it work.”

Meanwhile, the corporate media is giving blanket coverage to far-right protests demanding the removal of vaccine mandates. About 1,000 people joined a vehicle “convoy” to Wellington over the past few days, inspired by the so-called “Freedom Convoy” in Canada. Several hundred are camped outside parliament, with signs and slogans denouncing the government’s measures.

Yesterday, former Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters, who leads the right-wing nationalist NZ First Party, tweeted his support for the convoy, saying it represented “legitimately frustrated kiwis.” In fact, such protests are extremely unpopular, but are being promoted by sections of the ruling class internationally to give the impression of significant opposition to public health restrictions, and to push official politics even further to the right.

EU powers endorse NATO war threats against Russia as Macron visits Ukraine

Alex Lantier

Yesterday, as French President Emmanuel Macron and German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock visited Ukraine, key European Union (EU) powers endorsed the demands Washington is placing on Russia in the Ukraine crisis.

The statements of Macron and Baerbock, and more broadly the entire US-led war drive against Russia over Ukraine, are based on a political lie. Even after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba declared that Russia is not preparing to invade Ukraine, Washington and its European allies claim they are intervening in an urgent and desperate attempt to defend Ukraine from Russian invasion. This absurd pretense was maintained in all Macron’s and Baerbock’s statements in Ukraine.

Members of Ukraine’s Territorial Defense Forces, volunteer military units of the Armed Forces, train in a city park in Kyiv, Ukraine, Jan. 22, 2022. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky, File)

Macron, whose government holds the rotating presidency of the EU, gave a joint press conference with Zelensky in Kiev. After Zelensky briefly greeted Macron and thanked the EU for €1.2 billion in economic aid, Macron launched into a long tirade, applauding the fascist-led putsch that brought the current Ukrainian regime to power amid the Maidan protests in 2014, and endorsing NATO’s hard-line demands against Russia.

He said, “Since the Maidan revolution in 2013-2014, Ukraine has chosen the path of reform and democracy. This choice was made by the Ukrainian people, which mobilized for this goal. … This path is one on which there is no turning back. I want to pay homage to the Maidan protesters and the thousands of soldiers who have died on the front since 2014 to defend their homeland. They were fighting for Ukraine, I want to avoid all forms of simplification sometimes used by foreign forces in the interests of destabilization.”

Macron built his argument for the lies of the US-led war drive against Russia on a falsification of the politics of the Maidan putsch. The fighters that have died for the Kiev regime in eastern Ukraine were not Ukrainian army soldiers fighting foreign enemies, but members of far-right Ukrainian nationalist militias attacking Russian-speaking Ukrainian civilians. These units, such as the Azov Battalion, emerged from far-right street-fighting groups like the Right Sector that led the 2014 putsch in Kiev.

Macron’s statements amounted to a remarkable, public endorsement by the French head of state and the EU presidency of far-right racist groups. The Azov Battalion’s fascistic politics and ties to neo-Nazi organizations internationally are so widely documented that in 2019 they were acknowledged even by the American FBI. It issued a report detailing the links of the US neo-Nazi Rise Above Movement, involved in the bloody 2018 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, and the Azov Battalion and one of its leaders, Olena Semenyaka.

A day before meeting Zelensky, Macron had met Russian President Vladimir Putin, who bluntly warned Macron against letting the Ukrainian regime into NATO. Putin noted that if Ukraine joined NATO, an attack by far-right Ukrainian militias on Russian-speaking regions that broke away from Kiev’s authority, such as the Crimean peninsula, could then drag the entire alliance, including America and Europe, into a war with Russia.

Macron thrust this aside, endorsing the Kiev regime’s fascistic militias as embodying the will of Ukraine. Calling for “broad, aggressive, innovative dialog” with Russia, he demanded the “return of separatist territory of Donetsk and Lugansk” to Kiev and the “protection of Ukraine’s territorial integrity.”

German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock toured the Kiev regime’s front lines in eastern Ukraine, wearing a bulletproof vest and a steel helmet. There, this leading member of the Green Party proclaimed her solidarity with the far-right groups on the front lines, declaring, “I want to send a clear signal here: we, all together as Europeans, are not looking the other way. We do not forget the people whose fate is being decided in this conflict. And we stand on the side of Ukraine.”

Though she was accompanied by Kuleba, who has stated that there is currently no threat of Russian aggression in Ukraine, Baerbock spoke throughout as if Germany was allying with Ukraine against an urgent danger of Russian invasion. “We cannot solve this aggression by the Russian side militarily,” Baerbock claimed, adding, “Each further aggression will have massive consequences for the Russian side.”

Baerbock’s comments were echoed at a final meeting late yesterday of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Macron, and Polish President Andrei Duda in Berlin. While Duda claimed that the military situation was the worst since 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall, denouncing an “unprecedented concentration of Russian troops along the Ukrainian border,” Scholz claimed Russian invasion plans are “extremely concerning.” He added, “Our common goal is to prevent a war in Europe.”

This is a pack of lies. The EU powers are not trying to prevent war, but echoing the war propaganda promoted by Washington. The question posed by the fraudulent pretenses of Macron, Baerbock, Duda, and Scholz is: why are the European governments lying?

The whipping up of a war hysteria against Russia is closely bound up with internal class tensions. NATO has suffered 2 million COVID-19 deaths and suffers millions of new infections each week, yet NATO governments are all ending public health restrictions and instead letting the virus spread. Amid mounting social anger against this policy and growing strikes against high costs of living, the NATO powers are working to divert class conflict into war fever.

The NATO alliance is also pursuing a vast, global geopolitical agenda in which military tensions in Russian-Ukrainian border areas are only a pretext and play a relatively minor role. By demanding that Ukraine, Georgia and other ex-Soviet republics be incorporated into NATO, the NATO powers are working to ring Russia with troops and missile bases on its borders and constantly threaten it with attack. The NATO powers cover this up behind accusations that turn reality on its head, claiming that it is Russia that is plotting aggression against neighboring states.

By placing immense military pressure on Russia, NATO is also seeking to shift its politics to the right and to isolate countries across Eurasia that have relied on Russian support against NATO. These include Syria and Iran, whom Russia has joined in fighting a decade-long war against US-backed “rebel” militias in Syria, and China, the one large country still pursuing a Zero-COVID policy.

In this regard, it is significant that the New York Times recently commented favorably on Macron’s call for a “new European security architecture.” It quoted French Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire as saying that a key question is, “Do we want a Russia that is totally aligned with China or one that is somewhere between China and Europe?” Macron’s “eventual aim,” the Times wrote, is “integrating Russia in a new European security system that offsets its lurch toward China.”

A NATO policy of placing intense military pressure on Russia to break its relations with China, Iran, or Syria is reactionary and reckless. The danger is mounting that more aggressive factions of the Russian post-Soviet capitalist regime, fearing total encirclement, could decide to use their military to pre-emptively crush the emerging NATO military build-up in Eastern Europe, launching an all-out war between nuclear-armed states.

White House seeks to fabricate lower COVID-19 hospitalization numbers

Andre Damon

The Biden administration is moving to slash the official number of COVID-19 hospitalizations by 50 percent or more by changing the standard for who is counted as a COVID-19 patient, implementing a central demand of Donald Trump and other advocates of “herd immunity.”

The move, first reported by Politico, would separate the number of COVID-19 hospitalizations into two groups: those admitted primarily for typical COVID-19 symptoms like respiratory distress; and those who are infected with COVID-19 alongside other medical emergencies, many of which can be exacerbated by COVID-19 infection.

Since no nationwide statistics separating the two groups were kept to date, this will mean that new, narrower hospitalization data will be compared against older data that included a broader range of patients.

“The CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] and HHS is cherry-picking data again,” tweeted Dr. Jorge A. Caballero, who last month broke the story that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) was ending daily reporting of in-hospital COVID-19 deaths.

Precisely because the new proposed way of counting COVID-19 hospitalizations would reduce the official number of COVID patients in the hospital, implementing this method was a central demand of advocates of mass infection such as former president Donald Trump and Trump administration adviser Scott Atlas.

At his rallies throughout the country in 2020, Trump declared that America’s “reporting systems are really not doing it right,” and asserted that doctors incorrectly claim that “everybody dies of COVID.”

According to Atlas’ memoir, he fought to narrow the number of cases that should be counted as COVID-19 hospitalizations policy his “first weekend in Washington” saying it should be the “top” priority of White House coronavirus coordinator Deborah Birx.

Atlas wrote:

The key thing that [Birx] should be doing is interacting with states to instruct them on how to refine their data (e.g., separating hospitalized patients due to COVID symptoms from hospitalized patients who happen to have a positive test).

Central to the demand to reduce what counts as a COVID-19 hospitalization is the claim by the fascist right and proponents of herd immunity that cases have been massively inflated in the United States.

Atlas called for this policy because he alleged there was a serious “overcounting of COVID as the cause of many hospitalizations and deaths in the United States.”

Trump ranted at a rally at Waukesha, Wisconsin on October 24, 2020:

Some countries, they report differently. If somebody’s sick with a heart problem, and they die of COVID, they say, ‘They died of a heart problem.’ If somebody’s terminally ill with cancer [in the US], and they have COVID, we report them [as a COVID death]. And you know, doctors get more money and hospitals get more money. Think of this incentive. … Then you wonder, ‘Gee, I wonder why their cases are so low.’ [The US] and their reporting systems are really not doing it right.

Trump added at a rally at Waterford, Michigan less than a week later:

Our doctors get more money if somebody dies from COVID… You know that, right? I mean, our doctors are very smart people. So, what they do is they say, “I’m sorry, but, you know, everybody dies of COVID.”

Trump said in a September 1, 2020 interview on Fox News, “I saw a statistic come out the other day, talking about only 6 percent of the people actually died from COVID, which is a very interesting — that they died from other reasons.”

Trump got this claim from a fascist QAnon “influencer” named Mel Q, who claimed that the CDC “quietly updated the Covid number to admit that only 6% of all the 153,504 deaths recorded actually died of Covid”…”the other 94% had 2-3 other serious illnesses & the overwhelming majority were of advanced age.”

The post by a Qanon supporter, retweeted by Trump, to claim most deaths attributed to COVID-19 are caused by other ailments.

Trump’s false claims were overwhelmingly rejected by health experts and torn to shreds by fact checkers. In November, Politifact called Trump’s statements in Waterford false, saying, “There is no evidence that official death counts over report the reach of the disease.”

Politifact added, “There is no evidence that [official death counts are] exaggerated. If anything, public health analysts say it likely undercounts the reach of the disease.”

A Politifact "fact check" of Trump's claims that hospitals were overstating COVID-19 cases.

In a fact-check of Trump’s speech in October 24, PolitiFact concluded:

Trump is right that a terminal cancer patient’s death could be counted as a COVID-19 death.

But experts say he’s wrong that there’s anything illogical about that. The decision how to report cause of death is made independently at the local level by a physician, medical examiner or coroner, then listed on each person’s death certificate.

The federal agency that oversees mortality data said what is listed as the “underlying” (i.e., primary) cause of death comes down to timing.

If a terminal patient still had, say 6 months to live, but was infected by the virus and died, the certifier might determine that COVID-19 was the underlying cause of death because of the timing,” Bob Anderson, chief of mortality statistics at the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, said in an email. “In the same way, if that same terminal cancer patient was in a car accident and died from that trauma, the car accident would be the underlying cause. If, on the other hand, death from terminal cancer was imminent or COVID-19 symptoms were mild, COVID-19 might be viewed only as a contributing factor — not the underlying cause — or, if the patient was asymptomatic, it might not be viewed as a factor at all — and therefore, not reported on the death certificate.

The approach to identifying an underlying cause is laid out by the World Health Organization, which says a “death due to COVID-19 is defined for surveillance purposes as a death resulting from a clinically compatible illness, in a probable or confirmed COVID-19 case, unless there is a clear alternative cause of death that cannot be related to COVID disease (e.g. trauma).” The Center for Health Statistics says this guidance is “used in virtually all countries to code and classify causes of death.”

PolitiFact concluded, “In short, this distinction between dying from COVID or with COVID isn’t nearly enough to alter the scale of the national pandemic.”

Regardless of the total falsehood of Trump’s claim, it has been embraced by the Biden administration, with CDC Director Rochelle Walensky downplaying the surge in hospitalizations of children in December by claiming, absurdly, “Many of them are actually coming in for another reason. But they happen to be tested when they come in and they’re found incidentally to have COVID.” The White House’s claim that the Omicron variant has somehow made Trump’s lies true is simply absurd.

Under the previous administration, Atlas sought to artificially reduce the number of people who were hospitalized with COVID-19 because he sought to make the dangers of the disease seem lower, in order to facilitate his efforts to infect large portions of the country with COVID-19

As Birx testified before the House Coronavirus subcommittee, Atlas believed large portions of the population “should be allowed and actually encouraged to get the virus and spread the virus because that was your pathway, although it’s never said that way, to herd immunity.”

At the time, Birx warned other White House officials that Atlas was “dangerous,” and his theories were “reckless.” She warned that the implementation of Atlas’ theories would lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.

“With our current mitigation scenario, we end up near 300k by Christmas and 500k by the time we have vaccine,” she wrote. “Without masks and social distancing in public and homes we end up with twice as many deaths.”

With total indifference to Biden’s previous pledges to “follow the science,” his administration has adopted the talking points of the Trump administration, with officials routinely calling for the end of mask mandates and promoting “natural” immunity. Last month, Biden’s chief medical adviser, Anthony Fauci, even went so far as to raise the prospect that the Omicron variant of COVID-19 is a “live virus vaccine,” in a major concession to the pseudoscience of “herd immunity.”

In other words, the conclusion of the House Coronavirus subcommittee that the Trump administration made “deliberate efforts to undermine the nation’s coronavirus response” fully applies to the Biden administration.

Ford temporarily lays off thousands at North American plants, citing chip shortage

James Martin & Marcus Day

Ford Motor Company announced last week it would stop or reduce production at several plants across North America, citing a shortage of semiconductors. On Monday, Ford temporarily laid off thousands of hourly workers, many who will struggle to pay their bills without supplemental unemployment benefits.

Most production ground to a halt at Ford’s factories in Chicago, Illinois; Wayne, Michigan; and Cuautitlan, Mexico. At Ford’s Kansas City Assembly Plant, the company idled production of its lucrative F-150 pickup trucks, while another shift for Ford’s Transit vans will continue to run.

Trucks on the assembly line at Ford Dearborn Assembly (Ford Media)

Output at Ford’s Kentucky Truck and Louisville Assembly plants, as well its Dearborn, Michigan, truck plant, will be operated either on single shifts or a reduced schedule. Ford also said it would eliminate overtime at its Oakville factory in the Canadian province of Ontario.

Kelli Felker, Ford’s manufacturing and labor communications manager, told the press, “The global semiconductor shortage continues to affect global automakers and other industries in all parts of the world. While we continue to manufacture new vehicles, we’re prioritizing completing our customers’ vehicles that were assembled without certain parts due to the industry-wide semiconductor shortage.”

Stellantis, also citing the chip shortage, reduced production of its Chrysler Pacifica minivans at its Windsor, Ontario, plant last week. Last year, Stellantis had announced that it would be laying off 400 workers in January at its Belvidere Assembly Plant, near Rockford, Illinois.

Labor shortages due to workers getting infected by the coronavirus have deepened the global supply chain crisis, as corporations and countries across the world fail to implement any serious measures to stop the pandemic, ever-more openly pursuing a criminal “herd immunity” or “live with the virus” strategy. At just one semiconductor plant in Malaysia, owned by French-Italian conglomerate STMicro, at least 20 workers died of COVID in 2021, as the factory was pushed to run nearly nonstop to meet overseas demand, according to a report in December by Bloomberg.

At the same time, Ford and General Motors made billions in profits last year, while countless workers were sickened on the job during the Delta and Omicron surges. According to recent earnings reports, Ford reported $17.9 billion for 2021 in net income globally. About $8.2 billion of its 2021 net income came through Ford’s financial speculation and non-productive investment gains from its stake in the electric auto startup Rivian. However, with the ongoing labor and supply chain crisis, Ford projected a reduction in output for the first quarter, causing a selloff of Ford shares by 10 percent on Friday.

While companies such as GM have sought to put forth an air of confidence that the worst of the supply chain crisis is behind them, financial analysts, as well as chip makers such as Intel, Nvidia, and AMD themselves, have repeatedly pushed back the target for a “return to normal” to the second half of 2022, or into 2023 or later.

Meanwhile, the auto companies and the unions continue to maintain a near-total information blackout on the number of COVID cases, making it difficult to determine to what extent the latest production disruptions have been driven by outbreaks at plants in the US. To fight for information on the spread of infections and the implementation of necessary safety measures—including the shutdown of non-essential production and full income protection for those affected—more and more workers have been organizing rank-and-file committees at auto plants, schools and other workplaces.

Kansas City: “I pretty much live paycheck to paycheck”

Ford’s Kansas City facility in Claycomo, Missouri employs over 7,520 workers and is down to just one shift this week. The plant has been ravaged by mass infections and deaths in recent months during the Omicron surge.

A worker at the Claycomo facility described the delays workers often face in getting unemployment pay, telling the WSWS, “Since I am C crew, this will be my first time this year filing for unemployment. It will be my ‘waiting’ week. I’ll have to wait for the letter in the mail from unemployment and then take it to the hall in order to get paid and that could be another week. So it’s annoying.

“I pretty much live paycheck to paycheck,” she added, “and my daughter’s birthday is this month.”

A trucker that delivers to Michigan Assembly Plant in Wayne, where workers produce the Bronco and the Ranger, said, “My regular runs have all been canceled since last Thursday, and yesterday almost no one at my company was working. Things have been very slow at the plants.

“I think it’s very telling,” he observed on the relationship between the pandemic and the supply chain crisis, “that these plants will operate for as long as they possibly can until enough people refuse to work in unsafe conditions throughout the supply chain causing these shortages that force plants to shut down.

“I think we as workers need to organize that momentum into a coordinated strike to shut down all non-essential production until the virus can be eliminated.”

Chicago: “It’s crazy. Everyone has been getting it”

At Ford’s 98-year-old Chicago Assembly Plant (CAP) in the Hegewisch neighborhood, thousands of workers are out of work for the duration of the week and face hardship due to the idling of production. Ford’s assembly plant in Chicago has over 5,800 workers and produces the Explorer and Lincoln Aviator sports utility vehicles, as well as the Police Interceptor Utility.

Last week United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 551 announced that the main plant would be on layoff, starting with B crew, from February 3 through February 13. A UAW spokesperson stated on Facebook that there were “multiple supplier issues” prompting the layoffs.

One worker replied, “We’ve been out of bcm [body controller] modules for a while now. They’ve been recycling them and just parking units outside.” Body controller modules are electronic units in cars that control different vehicle parts, including windows, mirrors, air conditioners, locking and more.

Many of the plant’s just-in-time auto parts suppliers and its workforce across the region in Chicago and the industrialized region of northwest Indiana, including Lear Seating, will also be impacted or idled. Ford’s Chicago Stamping Plant in Chicago Heights, which employs 1,290 workers who supply sheet metal stampings for CAP, will also be affected by the slowdown.

While the UAW claims that the workers at the assembly plant will get 75 to 80 percent of their pay during closures, the temporary part-time and full-time workers will not receive any supplemental unemployment benefit (SUB) pay and will face immense hardship, being forced to rely on just meager state jobless aid. In Illinois, the maximum weekly unemployment check for an individual is $542.

The cruel conditions temp workers will face are the direct product of decades of UAW-backed concessions and sellout contracts, including the vast expansion of the use of temps forced through by the union during the 2019 contract struggle .

To add insult to injury, temporary full-time Ford workers affected by the layoffs who have newly been converted to become “in-progression” second-tier workers will not be eligible for supplemental unemployment benefits. A UAW Local 551 post noted, “You need one year of seniority as of the last day of work prior to a lay-off” to receive additional unemployment benefits.

As at many auto plants, workers at CAP have confronted the increasing threat of infection or even reinfection with COVID as the Omicron variant surged throughout the population since November. Last month, 32-year-old CAP autoworker CalebDyedied tragically after a long battle with COVID-19. As has been the norm throughout the auto industry, the UAW did nothing to inform workers about Caleb’s cause of death or to stop production despite the spread of the virus at the plant.

A Ford CAP worker spoke out against the unsafe conditions workers face from COVID and the cover-up by the company and the union as they attempt to keep workers on the job.

“It’s crazy. Everyone has been getting it,” he said, “but some people who’ve already had it don’t say anything because you only get paid [sick leave] for the first time,” adding that workers have had to deal with a large amount of bureaucratic hurdles in order to even get their unpaid COVID absences approved by management.

The worker said he himself had recently contracted COVID a second time. “Pretty sure I got it at work. A lot of coughing and some horrible body aches, and I got really tired very quickly.”

Washington pushes UK Conservatives to impose sanctions on Russian oligarchs

Jean Shaoul

Boris Johnson’s Conservative government has announced it will impose sanctions, including travel bans and asset freezes, on oligarchs and key supporters of President Vladimir Putin if Russia invades Ukraine.

Britain is playing a key role in the US and NATO’s war drive against Russia, supplying arms to Ukraine, as well as 100 elite SAS personnel, and doubling its military presence in Eastern Europe. But Washington has demanded more still—financial sanctions as part of the provocations against Russia.

Speaking in the House of Commons last Monday, Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said that new legislation, to be pushed through by February 10 using emergency procedures, would be “the toughest sanction regime against Russia we have ever had.” It would give the government “the power to sanction a broader range of individuals and businesses,” likely to include banks and energy companies, and allow the UK to “target anyone providing strategic support close to Vladimir Putin.” She added, “Nothing is off the table and there will be nowhere to hide.”

British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, right, is greeted by NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg prior to a meeting at NATO headquarters in Brussels, Monday, Jan. 24, 2022. (AP Photo/Olivier Matthys, Pool)

Refusing to name any individual Russians at risk of being sanctioned, Truss said the aim was to create maximum anxiety among Putin’s supporters. The government would also publish its long-delayed review into how more than 700 wealthy Russians who had secured Tier 1 visas allowing them to live in the UK had acquired their wealth. The investigation was ordered in 2018 following the poisoning of Sergei Skripal, a former Russian military officer and British intelligence agent, and his daughter, Yulia Skripal. The British government accused Russia of attempting to murder the Skripals in Salisbury using a Novichok nerve agent.

The new powers would allow Britain to act in “lockstep with the US and other allies to freeze assets and ban travel” if Russia’s forces invaded Ukraine. The US has threatened to cut off foreign lending, sales of sovereign bonds, technologies for Russia’s critical industries and the assets of Putin’s inner circle and to hit the country’s largest state banks as well as the government’s Russian Direct Investment Fund, which would directly impact on Russian companies’ ability to finance their activities.

The UK’s pledge to implement sanctions follows weeks of complaints by the Biden administration that no economic measures against Russia would be effective so long as London remained an attractive location for Russian money, a reference to London’s reputation as the world’s prime money laundering centre.

The Times reported that, according to its diplomatic sources, US State Department officials had expressed “dismay and frustration” at the British government’s failure to take tough action against the flow of Russian funds, particularly in “Londongrad.” “The fear is that Russian money is so entrenched in London now that the opportunity to use it as leverage against Putin could be lost,” its Washington source said. “Biden is talking about sanctioning Putin himself but that can only be symbolic. Putin doesn’t hold his money abroad; it is all in the kleptocrats’ names and a hell of a lot of it is sitting in houses in Knightsbridge and Belgravia right under your government’s noses.”

The US is writing a cheque that will cost its imperialist ally dearly. Some of the wealthiest parts of London such as Belgravia are awash with the empty mansions of Russian millionaires and billionaires. Well-known oligarchs such as the owner of Chelsea football club Roman Abramovich, aluminium magnate Oleg Deripaska, and Vladimir Yakunin, an old neighbour of the Russian president and former Russian Railways boss, have homes in London. Some, such as Eugene Shvidler, Alexander Knaster, Konstantin Kagalovsky and Abram Reznikov, are expatriates with controlling stakes in major European companies.

London’s main appeal to Russia’s kleptocrats is equally attractive to their Ukrainian counterparts and other global investors—Britain’s infamous “light touch regulation” that greenlights financial swindling, the criminal mis-selling of financial instruments, money laundering, interest rate and foreign exchange-rate manipulation and tax evasion via the use of trusts and blind trusts in offshore tax havens.

In 2018, the government estimated £100 billion of “dirty money” had flooded into Britain from countries including Russia. In 2020, the House of Commons Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) said the City of London provided “ideal mechanisms” for recycling illicit finance and had become a “laundromat” for offshore wealth.

While the government has used sanctions to target Russians abroad—some 180 Russians and 48 corporate entities are subject to UK sanctions, mainly in relation to the destabilization of Ukraine—it has done little to investigate and sanction illicit Russian money on British shores. This is despite the creation of the Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation (OFSI) in 2016, with a declared mission to crack down on corruption and dirty money flowing into the City of London. Since then, it has managed to levy just six fines totalling £20.7 million, despite reported breaches totalling £1 billion in 2019-20 alone. Legislation passed in 2017 giving courts the power to issue “unexplained wealth orders” compelling investors suspected of corruption and criminality overseas to explain the source of their money has been no more effective.

To launch sanctions against selected Russian oligarchs could have a broader and unwelcome impact. If investors from the Middle East and elsewhere see that their assets can be threatened at Washington’s behest, then London immediately becomes a less attractive investment location. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov called Truss’s measures an “extremely alarming” development that “undermines investment attractiveness and the United Kingdom’s attractiveness as such.”

No less a consideration in the government’s reluctance to clean up the City’s Augean Stables are the close links between the Conservative Party and donors with ties to the Kremlin. According to the Times, multiple senior Conservative MPs, eight junior ministers and six members of the cabinet, including Chancellor Rishi Sunak and Alok Sharma, received donations either personally or through their constituency parties from individuals or companies linked to Russia.

Truss’s comment about nothing being off the table was designed to show the Biden administration that the government was considering other measures, including reforms of Companies House, a register of properties held by overseas citizens and a public register of beneficial ownership in the British Overseas Territories that serve as tax havens. It is, however, unlikely that an economic crime bill containing such measures will be introduced, given the longstanding opposition from the City of London and the petro-monarchs in the Persian Gulf.

This is clearly not enough for the Biden administration, which is pushing for the immediate implementation of sanctions. US imperialism is intent on using the war threats against Russia as a stick to beat its European allies, forcing them to fall in line with its broader economic and financial demands. In the case of Britain, the crisis provides Washington with the pretext to further reduce London’s role as an international financial centre to New York’s advantage, amid changes to the European Union’s banking regulations that would undermine British banks’ corporate lending.

It comes after US officials threatened to withdraw approval for Russia’s recently completed pipeline, Nord Stream 2, a measure that Britain supported. The project would deliver Russian natural gas directly to Germany, which is wholly dependent upon imported fuel to power its electricity network, and beyond. Washington has also called on France to implement sanctions against Russia. There have been warnings that Russia might retaliate by cutting oil and natural gas exports to Europe, creating massive shortages and driving up prices.

The one institution where there is an unreserved willingness to abide by Washington’s dictates is the Labour Party. Anxious to demonstrate its credentials to US imperialism, the party that famously declared itself “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich” has adopted a pose of outrage over Russian oligarchs. Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy insisted that “dirty Russian money” swirling around British society and the Conservative Party should be returned to clamp down on Moscow’s influence in the UK and send a message to Russia amid the crisis in Ukraine.

Health and Care Bill drives another nail in the coffin of the UK National Health Service

Rory Woods

The Health and Care Bill, currently going through Parliament, is a devastating attack on the National Health Service (NHS) and what remains of the “universal, comprehensive, publicly funded and provided free at the point of delivery health service” in England.

As shown over the course of the pandemic, the British ruling class has thrown out any pretence of protecting the health and wellbeing of the working class and embarked on a criminal herd immunity policy which has led to over 180,000 deaths. Extracting the maximum financial gain out of the health and social care system is a part of this murderous profits before lives strategy.

Millions will be compelled to pay for treatment out of their own pockets as some elective and investigation services are going to be rationed or removed from a “duty to arrange” services list, for example, ophthalmic (eye) services.

Mobile MRI Unit of Alliance Medical private health company stations at Southampton University Hospital (WSWS Media )

The government’s statutory duty to provide hospital medical services was scrapped under the 2010-2015 Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition. This obligation was passed to the Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) established under legislation introduced in 2012 by then Health Secretary Andrew Lansley.

In the present bill, the duty to provide for key services, such as nursing and ambulance services, will be passed to newly established “Integrated Care Boards” (ICB), which can also include representatives of private health companies.

A fundamental attack on public health care is the fact that an ICB will not be required to arrange provision of emergency services for everybody present in its area—unlike a CCG.

According to public health experts Professor Allyson Pollock and Peter Roderick at Newcastle University, the way the responsibilities of the ICBs are to be legislated, “evokes the US definition of a health maintenance organisation which provides ‘basic and supplemental health services to its members”’. This will further open the door to for-profit health companies to enter the NHS.

Writing in the Guardian, they point out that “despite the focus on ICBs, much of the real power and decision-making will lie with four groups that already exist but are not mentioned in the bill: provider collaboratives, place-based partnerships, primary care networks, and companies accredited to the Health System Support Framework.”

Such collaboratives include companies such as Cygnet, Priory and Elysium. Many companies are already involved in pandemic profiteering are part of the Health System Support Framework, including Atos, Capita, Centene (Operose), Deloitte, Ernst & Young, McKinsey, PWC, Serco and Optum Health (United Health). US private health companies, including Centene and United Health, are becoming key players in the NHS with the former running dozens of GP surgeries and the latter benefiting from numerous NHS contracts.

“The private sector will be present at every level of the health service,” Pollock and Roderick conclude.

These private companies are allowed to be members of the ICBs, their committees and sub-committees, which will plan and commission services, deciding how the NHS budget is spent. For them, the NHS budget of £146 billion a year is a goldmine waiting to be plundered.

Another major assault contained in the Bill is the attack on social care. This will ensure that poorer pensioners bear a greater financial share of their care costs than the better off.

Additional funding for health and social care is to be raised through an across-the-board increase in National Insurance Contributions (NIC) of 1.25 percent. The NIC system already disproportionately hits the lower paid, whereby the poorest can pay 12 percent on most of their income, while the richest only pay 2 percent on a major part of theirs.

In 2019, Theresa May’s Tory government introduced the 10 year Long Term Plan with then NHS England’s Chief Executive Simon Stevens—former vice precedent of US private provider United Health. A network of 44 Sustainability and Transformation Partnerships (STPs) created by May government was turned into the more centralized “Integrated Care Systems (ICSs). These organisations act as a vehicle for further privatisation. Stevens wrote to the government suggesting the legislative repeal of significant key sections of the Health and Social Care Act 2012 that he deemed barriers to wholesale privatisation.

The government has heeded his call. The new bill will repeal section 75 of the Health and Social Care Act 2012, and revoke the NHS (Procurement, Patient Choice and Competition) Regulations 2013, which required compulsory advertising of contracts of more than £600,000 for health care services. Private companies will be able to extend their contracts without any obstacles and win new lucrative contracts with only minimal oversight.

Private companies already enjoy a large share of the NHS budget. In 2018/19, NHS commissioners spent almost £10 billion on private sector services—7.3 percent of the Department of Health and Social Care budget. According to the Kings Fund healthcare thinktank, if spending on primary care services such as GPs, opticians, dentists, and pharmacies is included, approximately 25 percent of NHS spending already goes to the private sector.

During the pandemic billions of pounds were transferred to private companies, with some granted VIP access thanks to their Tory cronies. One example is the dysfunctional “NHS test and trace system”, run by 22 private companies who collectively have received billions. A further billion was spent on Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) enriching private companies, who supplied substandard equipment to key workers exposed to a deadly disease with terrible consequences.

The Centre for Health and the Public Interest (CHPI) noted that the government spent an estimated £2-5 billion buying treatment services from private hospitals during the pandemic although “in total, private hospitals delivered 0.08 percent of COVID care.”

The largest union in the NHS, Unison, portrays the health and social care bill in a positive light. Unison claims that the legislation will even reverse the sweeping privatisations pioneered by Lansley’ s Act in 2012, saying it represents a plan “to change the law away from Lansley’s market madness.”

The opposite is the case. The legislation will further enshrine the ability of the private sector to cherry pick the most profitable parts, while those that produce no “shareholder value” will be left to a cash-strapped NHS.

The opposition Labour Party and their trade union partners are accomplices in the destruction of the NHS. Their “campaign” to defend the NHS consists of futile parliamentary debates demanding its “renationalisation.” Unison is backing a “day of action” to defend the NHS with other unions including Unite on February 26. There is no national demonstration, instead Unison says it will include “stalls in target constituency high streets and outside hospitals, to highlight the tsunami of attacks the NHS is facing.” This agenda is directed at trying to persuade a few dozen Tory MPs who won seats in previously Labour constituencies to change course.