UK: Prime Minister Johnson announces requirement to self-isolate with COVID will end in days

Robert Stevens

Prime Minister Boris Johnson has opened a second front, after anti-Russian warmongering, in the campaign to save his premiership by announcing that all COVID rules, including the requirement to self-isolate after testing positive, will be withdrawn in England from the end of February.

Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson during a media briefing on COVID-19, in Downing Street, London, Wednesday Dec. 15, 2021. (Tolga Akmen/Pool via AP)

Originally scheduled to take place on March 23, the move will be given the go ahead on February 23 when Parliament returns in 11 days’ time following its half-term recess. This comes as tens of thousands continue to be infected daily and hundreds die. Another 68,000 infections were announced Wednesday, bringing numbers in the last week to 485,074 cases and 1,526 deaths.

The criminality of Johnson’s actions was underscored by the comments made Wednesday to BBC Radio’s Today by Dr Bruce Aylward, a senior advisor to the World Health Organisation director-general. He warned, “If we look at the situation today—there’s still two million reported cases alone, over 5,000 deaths every single day right now.

“The numbers are absolutely staggering, and what we’re learning to live with is not just this virus, but what should be an unacceptable burden of disease, an unacceptable number of deaths every single day, especially when there are the tools to stop or at least slow this thing, manage it, control it.”

Johnson made his announcement during Prime Minister’s Questions. The previous week’s PMQs were dominated by his attack on Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer, while Director of Public Prosecutions, for allowing the serial rapist and paedophile, Jimmy Savile, to escape prosecution prior to his death in 2011.

The prime minister’s calculated Trumpian dog-whistle led to a right-wing, anti-vax mob surrounding and barracking Starmer Monday evening. A media furore and flurry of denunciations by Labour demanded Johnson’s apology, which never came.

Yesterday Labour determined that the attack on Starmer did not feature in PMQs. Of far greater significance, as Johnson announced that the government was effectively ending all recognition of the pandemic in a matter of days, Starmer said nothing about the more than 180,000 people killed by COVID as a result of putting profits ahead of lives. Labour’s pose as the party of the “moral high ground” means above all doing nothing that would impact the “national interest.”

Johnson spent the last few days organising a cabinet reshuffle, engineering a further shift to the right. According to the Sunday Express, he finalised his new cabinet after agreeing a deal with Tory backbenchers which a government source said is based on policies “to warm the cockles of Tory hearts”. Johnson would now be “listening ‘to the right people’ who will be brought in as replacements.”

Among them are Jacob Rees-Mogg, who becomes the new minister for “Brexit opportunities” and “government efficiency”. Rees-Mogg is the Eton-educated son of former Times editor Baron William Rees-Mogg and is known as the “Honourable Member for the 18th century” for his reactionary views. Johnson has spent weeks assuring the party’s extreme right layers that he will govern henceforth as a “true Thatcherite” with no more “retreats” on lockdowns, jobs furloughs and the like, with the Times commenting that Rees-Mogg’s being “given free rein over post-Brexit turf is… surely a piece of red meat for the right wing of the Conservative Party.”

Steve Barclay, former Brexit Secretary under Johnson’s predecessor Theresa May was appointed the prime minister’s chief of staff. Barclay’s voting record, as the pro-Tory Express pointed out, includes “consistently” voting “against raising welfare benefits ‘at least in line with prices’,” and voting “for a reduction in spending on benefits as well as for reducing housing benefit.” He has also voted “against increasing the tax rate applied to income over £150,000.”

Chris Heaton-Harris, a long-standing Brexiteer becomes chief whip.

The reshuffle came following the resignation of several of Johnson’s key advisers, in response to the “partygate crisis” and his attack on Starmer over Savile. These included his longstanding policy chief Munira Mirza who denounced Johnson for his “scurrilous” attack on Starmer. This elicited an outpouring of support from Britain’s nominally liberal media, who attempted to transform this right-wing libertarian and former member of the misnamed Revolutionary Communist Party into a paragon of principle and virtue.

Other resignation included chief of staff Dan Rosenfield, Johnson’s principal private secretary Martin Reynolds and his director of communications Jack Doyle.

At this stage, it is not possible to calculate how effective Johnson’s counter-offensive in defence of his premiership will be. He has said it will take a “panzer division” to remove him from Downing Street.

Johnson opponents are still some distance from being able to remove him, requiring letters of no confidence from 54 MPs, triggering a no confidence vote in his position as party leader. If over half of Tory MPs (180) then voted to remove Johnson, he would resign as prime minister. So far just 13 letters have been submitted according to the tally of the pro-Tory Spectator. Around another 30 MPs have openly criticised him over partygate but have not gone as far as submitting letters. It is unlikely Tory MPs will send letters during Parliament’s recess, or that the no confidence vote would be held before MPs return on February 21.

Everything that has happened since the partygate scandal erupted in November confirms that this a fight between the most right-wing political representatives of the bourgeoisie. There are no differences over the policies of herd immunity and endemic COVID-19, attacks on the working class to claw back £400 billion spent during the pandemic—most which ended as bailouts for the corporations—or ramping up military conflict with Russia.

In alliance with the US, Britain is doing everything it can to inflame tensions with Russia, with Johnson laying out immediate plans to send 350 marines to Poland, with Typhoon fighter jets and warships ready for mobilisation to south eastern Europe.

The government’s reckless policy is the product of its desperate kowtowing to Washington, which has also insisted that Britain ready massive sanctions against Moscow. So rapidly have events escalated that the government was not, despite its sabre rattling, able to get the necessary legislation through parliament.

Foreign Secretary Liz Truss had promised that by February 10, the “toughest sanctions regime against Russia” in UK history would be on the statute book. According to Politico, Truss will tell her counterpart Sergei Lavrov today, without any sanctions legislation in place, that Russia “risks creating a drawn-out quagmire should it invade Ukraine, incurring a high human and economic cost.”

Workers must study the statement of the Socialist Equality Party (UK), “The working class must mobilise to bring down the Johnson government!” It explains, “What is unfolding in parliament over ‘partygate’ is the modern-day equivalent of a palace coup—a change at the top to preserve the existing order. Left at this level, whether Johnson survives or not, the Tory government—as it did under David Cameron and Theresa May, each one more right-wing than the last—will continue as the most ruthless representative of the major corporations and the super-rich.”

The statement warns, “The crisis is being seized on by powerful sections of the Tory Party to engineer the most right-wing policy lurch ever carried out by a British government, with the Labour opposition marching in lockstep.”

Death of boy trapped in well highlights Morocco’s social catastrophe

Jean Shaoul

A massive four-day long rescue operation failed to save the life of Rayan Oram, the five-year-old Moroccan child who fell down a 32-metre deep well shaft.

5 year old Rayan Awram (Twitter)

Rayan had fallen down the narrow well owned by his father, who had reportedly been working on fixing the well, while he was playing outside in the village of Ighrane, 60 miles from the northern city of Chefchaouen. The poverty-stricken region of the Rif mountains is dotted with deep wells.

After initial attempts to rescue him using a rope failed, the family called in the emergency services which believed it was too risky to widen the shaft and decided to use large diggers in the hope of reaching the child from the side. So dangerous was the unstable sandy and rocky terrain that mechanical digging was halted from time to time amid fears that the ground would collapse, threatening the safety of both the crew and Rayan, and the rescue team had to resort to manual digging.

Food, water, a telephone and oxygen were lowered into the shaft, but it is unknown whether the injured boy was able to eat and drink.

As news about the rescue went viral on social media, with the Arabic hashtag #SaveRayan dominating Twitter, the international print media took up the story, turning it into a media circus. The Moroccan government sought to use the world’s attention on the rescue operation to rally support and unify the population, under conditions where poverty and social unrest are increasing in the wake of the pandemic that has hit the country hard. But by the time the rescuers reached the child, it was too late.

The government, whose cynicism knows no bounds, deployed bulldozers to pave the road and facilitate access to the funeral site, as well as to prepare a parking area, while Royal gendarmes, auxiliary forces and local officials were sent to manage the funeral attended by hundreds of people.

Amid the media frenzy, not a single journalist, including in the world’s so-called liberal journalists who may have spent a holiday in Morocco and visited Chefchaouen’s fabled blue-painted buildings in the medina, even alluded to the economic and social conditions that gave rise to the tragedy. Yet on Tuesday, a seven-year-old boy died after falling into a 50-metre deep well in the village of Al-Sabt, Khemisset governorate, east of the capital Rabat, just hours after Rayan’s funeral.

Some 40 percent of Moroccans labour with primitive tools and animal-drawn ploughs on farms that account for only 15-17 percent of GDP, barely scratching a living. Tourism which accounts for around 20 percent of the economy has been decimated by the pandemic. Around 13 percent are registered as unemployed, undoubtedly a vast underestimate, while most households have reported a fall in their incomes as wages have stagnated for years. According to the World Bank, nearly a quarter of Moroccans are poor or at risk of poverty, particularly in rural areas.

Water shortages are one of the country’s most critical issues. While the government has focused on mega infrastructure projects, including the Casablanca-Tangier bullet train, new tourist resorts and facilities, and mining projects that consume vast quantities of water, linked to the country’s ruling elite and royal family, little is spent on basic infrastructure for workers, peasants and their families.

In 2022, more than 65 years after independence from France, around 45 percent of Morocco’s 36 million population do not have access to clean, piped water. A water desalination plant, reportedly the world’s largest, opened a few days ago near the coastal city of Agadir, a major tourist destination, to provide drinking water and irrigation for high-value fruit and vegetables for export. As much as 35 percent of Morocco’s water is lost through leaking pipes, while industrial and urban waste pollute the water supply.

Even more telling, this tragedy took place not in the desert but in the Rif that receives more rainfall than anywhere else in Morocco, with some areas receiving upwards of 2,000 mm of precipitation a year. The western area, where this tragedy took place was once well forested but decades of overgrazing, forest fires and forest clearing for agriculture, particularly for the cultivation of cannabis—Morocco, particularly the Rif, is one of the world’s major producers—have eroded the soil.

Many of the hundreds of villages like Ighrane in the provinces of Tangier and Chefchaouen are not connected to a drinking water supply. In some cases, villagers get their water from tankers at hugely inflated prices, while others fetch their water from unsecured sources and must carry it over long distances in canisters and buckets. Hundreds of local reports have highlighted the dangers of people resorting to drilling their own wells or holes, often without the proper legal authority, to access water, running the risk of large fines and even imprisonment.

The Rif is one of the poorest regions of the country, long neglected by the government, with little in the way of infrastructure, schools or hospitals. The only means of survival is cannabis production, which while illegal is tolerated as a means of containing the seething tensions that have led to repeated protests in recent years. Last summer, the government introduced legislation that would legalise the cultivation, use and export of cannabis for medical and industrial purposes, but not for recreational purposes, sanctioning production in certain areas including the Rif. It follows the United Nation’s removal of cannabis from its list of the most dangerous drugs.

While the government claims that this will improve the Rif’s economy, freeing cannabis growers from the international drug-smuggling networks, Riffian farmers fear this is simply a cover for the takeover of cannabis production by corporations and well-connected businesses. These are more able to conform to the legal standards required for medicinal cannabis, which in any event is only a small market, or the lower-value industrial market. Moreover, there are no plans to provide an amnesty for the nearly 50,000 farmers with cannabis-related arrest warrants hanging over their heads.

Five years ago, protests erupted in Al Hoceima after the fish salesman Mouhcine Fikri was crushed to death in an altercation with the city’s police. The protests spread far beyond the Rif region over social conditions in Morocco and political opposition to the Makhzen, the barely disguised monarchical regime that controls the country and serves as a loyal ally of the imperialist powers. Hundreds were arrested, and the leaders of the Hirak movement that led the months-long protests were sentenced to 20 years in prison. Since then, the government has done nothing to ameliorate the desperate economic plight of the long-neglected region.

In short, the child’s terrible death is a product of the economic and social conditions prevailing in Morocco today, the source of widespread and legitimate outrage among workers throughout the country and within the Rif. It underscores the bankrupt and criminal character of Morocco’s monarchy and the fraud of independence. The situation is not fundamentally different in any of the country’s neighbours: Algeria, Tunisia and Mauretania.

COVID cases explode in Russia and Ukraine amid war crisis

Clara Weiss

As the imperialist powers are stepping up their war campaign against Russia over Ukraine, threatening the lives of millions, Omicron is ravaging the population in both countries, where almost each day brings a new record in case numbers.

Medics wearing special suits to protect against coronavirus treat a patient with coronavirus, left, as others prepare a patent to move at an ICU at the Moscow City Clinical Hospital 52, in Moscow, Russia, Tuesday, Oct. 19, 2021. (AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko)

On Wednesday, Russia for the first time reported over 183,000 cases, more than ten times the figure of a month ago. Saint Petersburg is now leading the country with over 19,000 reported new cases, followed by Moscow. Over 20,000 people are being hospitalized every day. The daily death toll is also climbing rapidly, reaching 669 on Wednesday.

In Ukraine, cases hit over 38,000, a bit less than Friday’s record of over 43,000 cases, but still significantly more than during any previous wave. 250 people died, more than double the figure of 115 deaths on Monday.

The Guardian recently noted that the high number of cases could affect the fighting capacity of the Ukrainian military should a war break out. Two thousand four hundred of Ukraine’s 150,000 land forces are officially infected, but the real number is likely much higher as testing occurs only sporadically before major social gatherings or if someone has symptoms. In the Russian and Ukrainian armies, vaccination rates are 95 and 99 percent respectively, much higher than among the general population where it stands only at about 50 percent in Russia and just over a third in Ukraine.

Under conditions where Omicron widely infects even those who are fully vaccinated or even boosted, the policies of both oligarchic governments have ensured that the population is left with almost no protection against infection.

As elsewhere, two years into the pandemic, neither Moscow nor Kiev have informed the population about the airborne transmission of the virus and only very few people wear N95 masks, if they’re wearing any masks at all. Mirroring the response of the imperialist powers to the pandemic, the oligarchies in both countries refuse to impose further lockdowns.

While the Kremlin transferred most of the government's work online weeks ago and has scheduled only three parliamentary sessions for this month, most workers are obliged to show up for work unless their employers grant them permission to work remotely, or until the virus forces their workplace to shut down.

Again mirroring the trends in Western Europe and the US, the Kremlin has been scrapping whatever few preventive measures have remained. As Omicron surged in the second half of January, the government reduced quarantine time from 14 to 7 days. Since Monday, people who have been sick with COVID for a week now have to return to work without even taking a PCR test showing whether they are positive or negative.

The situation facing children (and their parents) is particularly horrific. According to Russia’s health minister, Mikhail Murashko, 20 percent of all new cases occur among children. This is almost twice as much as the official rate of about 11 percent during the peak of the Delta wave last fall. At the time, Russian officials acknowledged that 13.5 percent of all children who had been infected would go on to experience long COVID symptoms, which can be extremely debilitating and include headaches, various neurological symptoms and the loss of several IQ points.

Almost 12,000 children were hospitalized in Russia as of Tuesday—a 28 percent increase in a week. The Kremlin has never revealed any figures about how many children have died from COVID-19 so far, but their number must be in the hundreds, if not thousands.

The reasons for this mass infection are clear: Although it has been well established for months that Omicron is affecting children much more than previous variants, schools remain open until the virus forces classrooms to shutter. The vaccination rate among children is minuscule, with just over 41,000 children over the age of 12 having received two shots, as of this week.

Two pediatricians from Saint Petersburg, Ruben Movsesyan and Igor Alexeyev, spoke to the press this week to express their serious concern about the significant growth in severe cases among children. Both doctors have observed a spike in cases of pediatric multisystem inflammatory syndrome, which affects the heart and can also involve intestinal lesions and kidney damage. Often the syndrome only occurs weeks after the initial infection.

Movsesyan, the head of Russia’s Association of Heart Surgeons, told the Peterburgskii Dnevnik, “We're faced with a challenge for the pediatric system, for the whole health care system. When you add up the puzzles related to COVID-19 and complications related to blood clotting, to inflammatory reactions, it’s scary. It’s a new challenge that will be a big problem for us if we don't respond with new programs that can protect children from severe complications, which are often fatal to children's health.

“We need to take these maybe still isolated cases very seriously and bring treatment and rehabilitation programs for children after undergoing COVID-19 into the big complex of functional diagnostics and cardiological monitoring. We anticipate that there may be more such children [with multisystem inflammatory syndrome], and we need to be prepared to address these issues before surgical intervention becomes necessary. If we didn’t talk about childhood in the pandemic before, we're definitely talking about it now.”

The wave of infections and hospitalizations is hitting a heavily understaffed, exhausted, overwhelmed and underpaid medical workforce. The dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 by the Stalinist bureaucracy and capitalist restoration have had a particularly severe impact on the health care sector, and far-reaching cuts and austerity measures have continued under the Putin regime and into the pandemic.

The deplorable state of the health care system has no doubt been a major contributing factor to the staggering death toll of the pandemic, which officially stands at over 336,000 in Russia—by far the largest in Europe—but excess deaths stand at over 929,000. In a particularly shocking indicator, life expectancy has declined by a staggering three years because of the pandemic.

In an initial expression of the social anger that has been accumulating among health care workers, the paramedics of a hospital in the Bashkiri region initiated an “Italian strike” several days ago. The workers, who are making just about 29,000 rubles a month ($383), are demanding better pay and significantly better working conditions. In their statement, they said, “We are working under the most difficult conditions. …We perform our duties conscientiously, but our professional pride does not allow us to watch our fellow citizens being deprived of emergency medical care. There is only one medic on the crew instead of two [that are required by law]! We are actually forced to violate the standards of medical care.”

When three of the strikers were fired, the rest of the emergency workforce at the hospital recorded a video, demanding that their colleagues be reinstated. Otherwise, they warned, they would all leave their jobs.

War threat escalates as Israel strikes Syrian army targets

Jean Shaoul

In a dramatic escalation of US and NATO provocations against Russia, Israel launched multiple strikes on Syrian army targets near Damascus early Wednesday morning, killing one soldier and wounding five more.

An Israeli Air Force F16I fighter from the 253rd Squadron, also known as the Negev Squadron. (AP Photo/Ariel Schalit)

The attack brought a rare and sharp denunciation from Russia. It confirms the warning issued by the World Socialist Web Site in its statement “US-NATO escalate war threats against Russia: Are you ready for World War Three?” that irrespective of Washington’s plans or expectations, “The unleashing of a war with Russia would within weeks—if not days—drag in Iran, Israel, China and Taiwan.”

Syria’s news agency SANA reported that some of the strikes came from fighter jets flying over southeast Lebanon and others from surface-to-surface missiles fired from the Golan Heights, which Israel has illegally occupied and annexed since capturing the territory during the 1967 war with its Arab neighbours. Syrian air defences had brought down some of the missiles, but the Israeli attack had caused serious damage to civilian buildings in Qudsaya city, northwest of Damascus.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) claimed it had attacked targets in Syria, including a radar facility and anti-tank batteries, in response to an earlier anti-aircraft missile fired Tuesday into northern Israel that exploded in the air without causing any injuries or damage. While the rocket had not been intercepted by Israeli air defences, it activated warning sirens in Umm al-Fahm, a Palestinian city in northern Israel.

The Syrian-launched rocket followed a series of strikes launched over the last 10 days by the IDF against targets in the Damascus area that Israel claims are Iranian weapons dumps or military outposts belonging to Hezbollah.

Israel has launched hundreds of airstrikes on Syria, attacking government positions as well as fighters and facilities belonging to Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Iranian forces. According to the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, Israel had struck at least 29 targets in Syria in 2021, down from 39 strikes in 2020 which it said was highest since 2011. Israeli attacks had killed 130 people, including five civilians. Nearly half of those killed were affiliated with Iranian-backed militias.

Last December, IDF jets overflying the Mediterranean Sea launched one of Israel’s biggest attacks, hitting shipping containers at Syria’s main commercial port Latakia, igniting a massive blaze. While Israel claimed its targets were arms shipments to Hezbollah and Iranian militias, Syrian fire officials in Latakia said the containers held spare auto parts and oil. It followed another attack on the port earlier in December. According to the Russian Center for the Reconciliation of Warring Parties in Syria, Syrian air defences did not engage with Israeli planes because a Russian air force plane was landing at the nearby Khmeimim airbase, implying some degree of collusion between Moscow and Tel Aviv.

Collaboration between the two countries has been close since Syria called for Russian support against the Islamist militias in 2015, with Israel’s former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu paying frequent visits to Moscow. Last October, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and President Vladimir Putin reportedly discussed security coordination in Syria at Russia’s Black Sea resort Sochi, with an Israeli minister who attended the meeting hinting that Putin had agreed to let Israel operate freely against Iranian and Hezbollah targets in Syria. As a result, Israel has been able to bomb Syria without fear of any response from Russian planes.

Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, seated, smiles as he waits to pose for a group photo with the ministers of the new government at the President’s residence in Jerusalem, Monday, June 14, 2021. (AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo)

This thaw has ended with the ramping up of US and NATO’s war threats against Russia. US Lieutenant General Erik Kurilla, nominated to take over Central Command that oversees Middle East operations, told the Senate Armed services Committee, the Russia-Ukraine conflict could spill into Syria. Damascus, which signed an agreement with Moscow in 2015 granting it free use of its airbase at Khmeimim, recently extended Russia’s lease on its naval base at Tartus, Moscow’s only naval base in the Mediterranean Sea. Last Friday, Russian naval ships arrived at Tartus to take part in large-scale drills.

In mid-January, Syrian and Russian fighter planes and early warning and control aircraft began joint patrols of the airspace along Syria’s borders, including the Golan Heights that have witnessed frequent Israeli air strikes. Moscow said these patrols would now be a regular occurrence.

In a further instance of deteriorating relations, Russia refused an Israeli demand earlier this month to resolve an electromagnetic interference from its Khmeimim air base in Syria on the GPS of planes landing in Tel Aviv’s international airport. Moscow said that it’s air defence systems at Khmeimim were installed for the express purpose of protecting its soldiers in the region.

Moscow has also asked for Belarus to send 200 soldiers to Syria. They would not be involved in any fighting and would remain outside the conflict zones to help Russian troops provide humanitarian aid. Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko has denied reports that he intends to send troops to Syria.

In a sharp break with its previous practice, Moscow responded angrily to Israel’s latest airstrikes. Alexander Yefimov, Russia’s ambassador to Syria, told Novosti that Russia views the Israeli retaliatory strike as “illegal.”

“Russia strongly condemns the Israeli raids on Syria, and calls for an end to them,” he said. “We inform West Jerusalem of this position constantly and at various levels.” Israeli strikes on Syria are “absolutely illegal in terms of international law,” and “leave human casualties, cause tangible material damage, violate Syria’s sovereignty, pose a threat to international civil aviation, and in general increase tension in the already escalating military-political situation.”

Israel’s air strikes also signal an end to the tentative deal the US cut with Russia easing the political pressure on Syria. Under the arrangement, if approved by the Security Council, the United Nations was to hold fewer meetings on Syria’s chemical weapons and speed up sessions on humanitarian relief.

Israel, which is home to many immigrants from both Russia and Ukraine, had sought to balance between Moscow and Kiev as the conflict escalated. It has largely remained silent in the war of words between the US and its European allies and Russia, as a war would have a disastrous impact on Israel’s economy, reliant as it is on Ukraine as a source of cheap labour for its high-tech industries.

Speaking with American news outlet Axios last week, Foreign Secretary Yair Lapid said that Israeli officials, who have been involved in behind-the-scenes de-escalation efforts, “don’t see a violent confrontation soon.” He added, “We have a duty to act with caution about the Russia-Ukraine crisis that no other country has.” His comments infuriated his Ukrainian counterpart, despite Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky denying that Russia was on the point of invading his country.

Israel’s airstrikes against Damascus therefore can only be understood as the result of orders from Washington to up the ante against Russia.

Israel’s strikes against Damascus come as Bennett’s government faces multiple domestic crises. A right-wing National Unity government in all but name, buttressed by the corporatist trade unions, it was put in place last June under guidance by the incoming Biden administration to replace Netanyahu’s Likud-led coalition, a fervent supporter of former president Donald Trump, following the fourth inconclusive election in two years.

It confronts an increasingly angry Israeli working class, who have lost loved ones in the pandemic as the government lifts all restrictions aimed at limiting the spread of the virus to keep the profits rolling in even as workers lose their livelihoods and see wages eroded by rising prices. This domestic crisis feeds into the war fever generated over Ukraine, encouraging Jerusalem to seek a way of buttressing its position, as it has so often before, through a fresh and more dangerous turn to militarism.

Over 1 million years of life lost to drug overdose among youth in the US

Genevieve Leigh

Children and young adults in the US lost approximately 1.2 million years of life due to unintentional drug overdoses over a five year period, according to a recent research letter published in JAMA.

OxyContin pills are arranged for a photo at a pharmacy in Montpelier, Vt. on Tuesday, Feb. 19, 2013. (AP Photo/Toby Talbot)

The Ohio State researchers found that approximately 3,300 adolescents (ages 10–19 years old) died of an unintentional drug overdose between 2015 and 2019, representing about 187,078 years of life lost. Nearly 22,000 young people, those aged 19–24 years old, died from an unintentional overdose over the same time period. All told, young people saw 1,227,223.58 years of life lost. Males collectively lost more years of life than females, the researchers said.

These figures are a staggering illustration of the devastation the drug epidemic has wrought on society, and in particular, on a whole generation of young people. What potential scientific, artistic, or cultural achievements were also lost with the one million years of life taken from this generation?

These figures are all the more alarming considering that there has been a sharp rise in overdose deaths since the end of the study in 2019, which coincides with the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Drug overdose deaths in the US rose nearly 30 percent in 2020, resulting in a total of 93,000 deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The figures translate to an average of more than 250 overdose deaths each day, or roughly 11 lives lost every hour.

The rise in deaths from 2019 to 2020 marked the largest single-year increase of overdose deaths on record, eclipsing previous years by thousands. The increase equates to 21,000 more deaths in 2020 than in 2019. Prior to 2020, the largest year-to-year increase was 11,000 in 2016—a figure which stunned experts at the time and is just barely over half of the increase in 2020.

Provisional data from CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics indicate that 2021 will set a new record. According to the preliminary data, there were an estimated 100,306 drug overdose deaths in the United States during the 12-month period ending in April 2021. The figure represents an increase of 28.5 percent from the 78,056 deaths during the same period the year before.

To put these figures in historical context, according to the CDC, there were about 9,000 overdose deaths in 1988, around the height of the crack epidemic.

All 50 states and the District of Columbia reported a spike or increase in overdose numbers during the COVID-19 pandemic. West Virginia continues to be the epicenter of the crisis with the highest rate of overdose deaths in the country. However, urban areas have overtaken rural areas for age-adjusted death rates. The number of 45–64-year-old non-Hispanic Black people in urban areas dying from synthetic opioid overdose has been rising swiftly, according to the latest data.

The sheer scale of death from drug overdoses in the heart of world capitalism is among the starkest indications of a profound sickness in American society. Drug abuse and overdoses and other “deaths of despair” are symptoms of a society in deep crisis.

Consider the following: overdose deaths combined with COVID-19 deaths have driven down life expectancy to such an extent that the year 2020 officially registered the largest drop since 1943, during World War II. Mortality rates for young adults aged 25 to 34 have skyrocketed in the last decade, reaching levels not seen since 1953.

Behind each one of the tragic deaths there is a family, friends, teachers and others whose lives are forever changed after losing a loved one.

The political establishment, Democrat and Republican alike, have no solution to this crisis. In fact, the crisis itself is a direct product of their policies which have for decades starved social services, driven down wages for workers, crushed any movement of working class opposition to austerity measures and further lined the pockets of the richest layers of society.

For the ruling class, “economic health” is consistently raised above human life. Nowhere is this phenomenon more clearly illustrated than in the COVID-19 pandemic.

At the present daily death rate of 2,700, it will take just over 30 more days for the United States to register a million dead. In response to this incredible figure, the New York Times published only a tiny blurb at the bottom of its front page, entitled “900,000 Dead, but Many Americans Move On.”

For the Biden administration, the financial-corporate elite and their media apologists, the pandemic is over. At the behest of the White House, federal and state governments are ending restrictions on the spread of the disease and winding up systematic reporting on cases, hospitalizations and deaths.

Throughout the pandemic, governments around the world responded to the unprecedented public health emergency by pumping trillions of dollars into stock markets, big banks and corporations to prop up world capitalism. In order to pay back this money, workers were forced into plants, factories and other workplaces where COVID easily spreads to continue production and guarantee corporate profits.

As a result of these policies, inequality has reached new heights throughout the world. A new billionaire has been created every 26 hours since the pandemic began. The world’s 10 richest individuals have doubled their fortunes, while over 160 million people are projected to have been pushed into poverty. Meanwhile, an estimated 17 million people have died from COVID-19 worldwide.

Workers and youth will remember the years 2020 and 2021 as years of great suffering, during which they lost a loved one, struggled to provide for their families, or wondered about what sort of future they might look forward to under such dire circumstances.

Over the last two years, the callous and indifferent attitude of the ruling class to workers has been more starkly exposed than at any time in recent history.

The devastating revelations about drug overdoses in the US underscore the complete inability of the capitalist system, in the country where the financial aristocracy has amassed historic levels of wealth, to put those resources to use in dealing with an acute social crisis.

The necessary resources—doctors, nurses, counselors, drug treatment programs, anti-overdose drugs like Narcan—should be made freely available through a massive social mobilization that would cost only a fraction of what the Pentagon spends each year on the military.

However, the mobilization of the necessary resources is impossible under a political system dominated by two right-wing capitalist parties that do the bidding of Wall Street. The measures required to confront the drug crisis in the US cannot be carried out without a frontal attack by the working class on the wealth of the corporate and financial elite and its stranglehold on the entire economic and political system.

Continuing US-led economic blockade provokes North Korean missile tests

Ben McGrath

Since the beginning of 2022, North Korea has conducted seven, mostly short-range ballistic missile tests, with the latest taking place on January 30. The number of tests exceeds by one the total number in all of 2021. The most recent test involved an intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM), the most powerful North Korea’s military has launched since 2017.

This photo distributed by the North Korean government shows what was said to be the test launch of a Hwasong-12 intermediate range missile in Pyongyang, North Korea, Aug. 29, 2017. (Korean Central News Agency/Korea News Service via AP)

The tests are a desperate response by the North Korean regime to the crippling US-led sanctions that continue to block much of the country’s trade and cut off prospects for foreign investment, as well as to rising geo-political tensions. All of this has created a worsening economic and political crisis within the Stalinist bureaucracy in Pyongyang, compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic and natural disasters.

Attempts to reach an agreement with the US have led nowhere, with Washington ignoring Pyongyang’s concerns about giving up North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs without security guarantees and an end to the sanctions.

Washington, while ratcheting up its provocations against Russia, responded to the latest tests by issuing a hypocritical and self-serving statement on February 4, calling on the UN Security Council to take action against Pyongyang. The statement was also signed by the UN representatives of eight other US allies, including Britain and Japan.

While accusing Pyongyang of destabilizing the region, the US declared it was willing to meet North Korea without preconditions but remained committed to “the complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula consistent with relevant Security Council resolutions.”

Despite its claims, Washington has not made any meaningful moves for talks. The US special representative for North Korea policy, Sung Kim, currently serves in a part-time role while also being ambassador to Indonesia. At the same time, Biden has yet to appoint a formal ambassador to South Korea.

Pyongyang has therefore been left to languish. That suits Washington, which continues to maintain a stranglehold over the North Korean economy. In talks with US President Trump, North Korea ended its nuclear and long-range missile tests in return for very little—a moratorium on large-scale joint US military exercises with South Korea. This was never meant to be a long-term solution to the repeated crises on the Korean Peninsula.

China’s UN ambassador Zhang Jun pointed to the little the US has done to negotiate with North Korea. On February 4, Zhang told reporters: “We have seen the suspension of the nuclear test, we have seen the suspension of the launch of intercontinental ballistic missiles. And then what has been done by the US?” He said the Biden administration should ask itself “in what way they can accommodate the concerns of DPRK [North Korea]… to really bring tension down and then to put things under control.”

While Washington claims to be willing to hold talks, previous negotiations between the US and North Korea have gone nowhere or resulted in deals that the US subsequently sabotaged. Under the Trump administration, talks were used as a platform to bully Pyongyang into completely giving up its nuclear and missile programs as a starting point for any easing of sanctions.

North Korea’s weapons programs are, in effect, the only bargaining chips it has in dealing with the US. North Korea has not conducted nuclear or long-range missile tests since 2017, when its leader Kim Jong-un met in Singapore with Trump. Pyongyang clearly expected an easing of the various sanctions imposed by Washington, either unilaterally or through the UN. Pyongyang has also long requested a treaty to formally end the 1950–1953 Korean War, which only ceased with an armistice.

Washington’s refusal to address any of Pyongyang’s concerns led to the failure of the second Trump-Kim summit in Hanoi in 2019 and the stagnation of talks, a situation that the Biden administration has maintained.

Since the onset of the global pandemic in 2020, the economic situation in North Korea has greatly worsened. The spread of COVID-19 forced Pyongyang to seal its borders to the outside world, including China, North Korea’s largest and only significant trading partner. The decision by the US and nearly all other countries to embrace “herd immunity,” only further isolated North Korea, which fears the spread of the virus could have a destabilizing impact.

John Delury, a history professor at Yonsei University in Seoul, told the New York Times: “This is a deeply isolated, autarkic economy. No amount of sanctions could create the pressures that COVID created in the last two years. Yet, do we see North Korea begging and saying, ‘Take our weapons and give us some aid?’ The North Koreans will eat grass.”

In 2020, the first year of the pandemic, the North Korean economy shrank 4.5 percent, the greatest decline since 1997. The economy was equally volatile last year, with a looming danger of food shortages. This is in part due to the shutting of the border, preventing North Korean farmers from accessing agricultural equipment and fertilizers.

Kim Jong-un spoke on the state of the economy at a plenary session of the 8th Central Committee of the Workers Party of Korea (WPK) in December, saying the government would make it “an important task for making radical progress in solving the food, clothing and housing problem for the people.”

North Korea has reopened its border with China on a limited scale. A North Korean freight train crossed into China from Sinŭiju on January 16, the first time the land border has been opened in two years. A South Korean government source told the Joongang Ilbo that “due to the North’s lack of domestic resources, and it appears the North Koreans are desperate for Chinese support and raw materials.”

North Korea is moving closer to Beijing. With the opening of the Winter Olympics on Friday in Beijing, Kim Jong-un sent a message to Chinese President Xi Jinping, calling for improved relations. The message praised the opening of the event despite the pandemic and declared he would work to develop the relations between the ruling parties and the two countries to “a new high stage.”

Bankers bare their teeth on wages

Nick Beams

Amid surging inflation around the world, powerful sections of finance capital are voicing the demand that central banks lift interest rates to suppress the growing movement of the working class for wage rises.

In a media conference on Monday, Ethan Harris, head of global research at the Bank of America (BofA), underscored the call by the bank’s economists for the US Federal Reserve to carry out seven interest rate hikes, each of 0.25 percentage points this year, and four more in 2023.

The Wall St. street sign is framed by the American flags flying outside the New York Stock exchange, Friday, Jan. 14, 2022, in the Financial District. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)

The call was in response to data from the Labor Department which showed that average hourly earnings increased by 0.7 percent in January and wages have risen by 5.7 percent over the past year.

With wage increases well below the inflation rate, now at around 7 percent and set to go higher, and prices of basic items such as food and gas rising much faster, the BofA call reflects growing demands for what amounts to a pre-emptive strike.

Harris said if he were the Fed he would be “getting nervous” that it was not just a “few outliers” that were driving the wage increases.

“If I were the Fed chair… I would have raised rates early in the fall. When we get this broad-based increase [in inflation] and it starts making its way to wages you get behind the curve and you need to start moving,” Harris said, as he claimed wages were rising across virtually all income classes.

The same views have been advanced by Goldman Sachs. A note issued by Goldman economists this week pointed to what has been termed the “great resignation” as workers leave the labour force altogether or switch to jobs paying a higher rate.

“These trends have pushed wage growth to a rate that increasingly raises concern about the inflation outlook,” the note said.

Faster growth of labour costs than is compatible with the Fed’s 2 percent inflation target was likely to keep it on a consecutive hiking path and could bring a more aggressive response.

Financial analyst Mohamed El-Erian, the chief economic advisor at the global financial firm Allianz, who began calling for interest rate increases last year, told the business channel CNBC that talk of seven interest rate rises this year showed how out of date Fed policy was.

“So hopefully they can regain the inflation narrative, hopefully they can control the wage narrative,” El-Erian said.

He expressed his concern that the lack of action by the Fed in the past meant that rapid rate hikes may be more than the economy could absorb. That is, a too rapid rise would push the economy into recession.

At the same time, there is concern in some financial circles that interest rate hikes aimed at suppressing wages will hit the inflated stock market which has been dependent on the flow of ultra-cheap money that has pushed Wall Street to record highs.

Writing in the Financial Times last month, Philipp Hildebrand, the vice-chair of Blackrock, the world’s largest asset management fund, took issue with the calls for central banks to aggressively tighten monetary policy, noting that the inflation surge was not being driven by excessive demand but by limits on supply capacity.

Avoiding any mention of Blackrock’s material interest in maintaining the low-interest rate regime that has proved so profitable for Wall Street, he couched his article in terms of the impact tighter monetary policy would have on the broader economy.

“Central banks,” Hildebrand wrote, “have either to accept higher inflation or be prepared literally to destroy demand across the whole economy to ease supply constraints in one part of it.”

He said if central banks were seeking to maintain inflation at the target rate of 2 percent amid the present supply constraints it would mean “driving the unemployment rate up to double-digit levels.”

Robert Reich, former labor secretary in the first Clinton administration, added his voice to those opposed to the lifting of interest rates. In a comment published in the Guardian this week he warned: “Higher interest rates will harm millions of workers who will be involuntarily drafted into the inflation fight by losing jobs or long-overdue pay raises.”

Contrary to Fed chief Jerome Powell’s expressed concern about wages pushing up prices, Reich said there was no wage-price spiral and workers’ real wages had dropped because of inflation.

“Even though overall wages have climbed, they’ve failed to keep up with price increases—making most workers worse off in terms of the purchasing power of their dollars,” Reich stated.

As with all would-be reformists, Reich maintained that the present push for interest hikes was a “mistake” and the product of a “line of reasoning [that] is totally wrong,” ignoring the essential class dynamic which is at work.

Having driven workers back into unsafe working conditions, amid the spread of the pandemic, to maintain the flow of profits for the corporate and financial elites, there is a determination that this flow be further enhanced by clamping down on wages.

The nakedness of this drive was most clearly expressed across the Atlantic in the decision by the Bank of England (BoE) last week to increase its base rate by 0.25 percentage points, with clear indications of more rises to come as UK inflation surges to 7 percent by April.

At his press conference, following the decision by the BoE’s Monetary Policy Committee, the central bank’s governor, Andrew Bailey, made clear it was all about wages.

Responding to a questioner who noted that the fall in real post-tax labour income was the largest since 1990, even bigger than after the 2008 financial crisis, and possibly the “biggest squeeze” since Napoleonic times, Bailey said the decision was taken because of the “further pressure [on inflation] coming from the labour market.” Bailey openly acknowledged that the decision would impact most heavily on those “least able to afford it.”

Asked whether the BoE was “just making a bad situation worse for real people,” he claimed that he knew it was a “hard message” but “if we don’t take this action, it’ll be worse.”

In response to a question as to whether, when households were already down, the central bank was trying to squeeze them further or change expectations, so workers did not make wage demands, Bailey went to the heart of the issue.

He said that “when I go round the country talking to businesses, when we all go around the country talking to businesses, it’s the first, second and third thing that businesses want to talk about, which is pressure in the labour market and the cost of labour.”

Bailey’s comments were underscored by the BoE’s chief economist, Huw Pill, in an online conference yesterday at which he said that wage growth this year of 5 percent would be “stronger than that consistent with the inflation target over the medium term.” That is, real wages must be cut.

The same issue was raised, albeit in a different form, by the governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia, Philip Lowe, on its latest monetary policy decision last week. Lowe announced that the RBA would cease purchasing government bonds but did not lift interest rates.

In his press conference following the decision, Lowe pointed to the crucial importance of the Fair Work Australia Commission and the role played by the trade unions in enforcing its wage decisions saying there was “a lot of inertia because of our institutional arrangements.”

Responding to a question about the risk of inflation, he said that inertia meant it was “quite unlikely” that wage growth would be pushed up to “problematic rates.”

Lowe stated that inflation was caused mainly by supply side problems that the market would resolve and the “inertia in Australia’s wages system means that the pick-up in inflation, in broad terms, is going to be fairly modest—and if it’s faster than that we can respond.”

In other words, if workers do respond to price hikes, which, in terms of basic necessities are far above the official rate of 3.5 percent, and begin to break free of the union-enforced straitjacket, the central bank will respond with the same measures being employed by its international counterparts.

German politicians and media attack students opposing herd immunity COVID policies

Gregor Link

A petition calling the German government’s current herd immunity COVID plan “irresponsible and lacking solidarity” has received more than 126,000 signatures in less than a week. Under the slogan #WirWerdenLaut (#We’reGettingLoud), hundreds of thousands of students, teachers and parents—supported by scientists, journalists and over 100 student representatives—are demanding an immediate end to the “profits before lives” policy that has already cost millions of lives and led to the emergence of new and more dangerous coronavirus strains.

“As a teacher, I am on the front line every day,” writes Martina N. from Fulda in support of her signature. “The situation in schools has remained unchanged for two years, this is one of the biggest sins against the young generation.” Sandra K. from Freiburg explains, “I understand the fear and worries of pupils. There is enough money for so many things. However, schools, our children and teachers are being let down. It is unbelievable.”

Sandrine H. writes, “It was deliberately decided to infect families, teachers, educators and caregivers. We send our children to kindergartens and schools and count the days until infection.” Stefanie S. adds, “I signed to protect my child (at-risk patient) from arbitrary infection.”

Satirist Jan Böhmermann also supported the petition, stating, “Big business demands that parents put their children in schools and kindergartens.”

Politicians from all parties and media representatives, on the other hand, have launched a foul campaign against the petition and its initiators, because they fear the growing opposition to their policy of deliberate mass infection like the devil fears holy water. Die Welt editor-in-chief Ulf Poschardt, who is notorious for his reactionary fits of rage, compared the critical students to “climate apocalyptics.” Poschardt denigrated the signatories of the petition as “young fear-mongers and state nerds … acting out their passive-aggression against the freedom-loving majority of young people.”

The president of the Standing Conference of the State Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs (KMK), Karin Prien (Christian Democratic Union, CDU), initially feigned willingness to talk in view of the response to the petition on Twitter, but at the same time supported a comment that accused the signatories of making common cause with scientists who advocate a “no-covid” strategy—as if an orientation towards science were something objectionable.

In an interview with private broadcaster RTL, Prien even tried to turn the demands of the petition on their head and misuse the young people to support a call to infect even vulnerable groups: “That children and young people are now becoming louder,” after politicians had taken notice of “the interests of adults, and here especially of vulnerable groups,” she could “understand very well.” Prien and the other education ministers have played a central role in sacrificing the health of children and vulnerable groups alike to corporate profit.

Particularly foul is a commentary by Katharina Riehl that appeared in the Süddeutsche Zeitung last Friday. Riehl attacks all those pupils, parents and teachers who criticise “the supposedly politically intended infection of children.” The author claims that it was “a fable” that children are forced to go to school “despite daily new record incidences, so that mummy and daddy can go to work and the assembly lines and cash registers in Germany don’t stand still.”

Those who declared that children were being “fed to the lions of evil capitalism” and criticised that schools were being misused as “care centres for the offspring of its workforce” are spreading a “fairy tale” from the “left-liberal milieu,” she declared. Describing enforced in-person classes in the midst of the pandemic as the “vicarious actions of a capitalist society” and invoking a “politically imposed herd immunity strategy for the benefit of the economy” was “polemical nonsense.”

Dieter Janecek, who as a member of the Bundestag (federal parliament) and economic policy spokesperson for the Greens has always aggressively advocated the removal of important protective measures in schools, also denied on Twitter that there was a “planned infection” of society. Janecek equated the “thesis that schools were being kept open because of the economy” with the right-wing extremist “conspiracy theories” of QAnon types.

But Federal Health Minister Karl Lauterbach (Social Democratic Party, SPD) has repeatedly made it clear that the infection of society with Omicron is based on a precisely worked out plan. At a press conference at the end of January, Lauterbach explained that “the plan” was that “the older population groups” should not be “disproportionately” affected by Covid-19: “It’s going about as we imagined.” He said a conscious decision had been made not to “reduce contacts too much now.”

A KMK paper headlined “Ensuring attendance at schools despite Omicron” states quite bluntly that “maintaining school operations” was “relevant to the system and, moreover, a basis for ensuring the ability to work.”

Defaming critical students, parents and teachers who oppose this herd immunity policy as scaremongers and even conspiracy theorists is the latest chapter in a media campaign that attempts to silence justified criticism of the “profits before lives” strategy. It must be rejected in the strongest possible terms and the courageous young people defended.

To counter the phalanx of establishment political parties and the media, students must unite with workers internationally and develop a global movement to eliminate the virus.

In its recent statement, the IYSSE calls for the building of Rank-and-File Committees for Safe Education to take the fight into their own hands and enforce the necessary safeguards. The only way to stop the policy of deliberate mass infection is to fight internationally for “Zero Covid.” This requires a socialist programme that places the lives and health of the people before the financial interests of corporations.

It is important that the #WirWerdenLaut petition is used as a starting point to organise further protests and strikes. The youth organisation “Fridays for Future Frankfurt am Main” yesterday called on all students and supporters “to join the school strike on 11.02. at 14:00 at the Alte Oper.”

Tweet reads: Enough is enough! The current situation in schools is no longer tolerable. We call all pupils and supporters to a school strike on February 11!

“For two years of the pandemic, schools have been neglected while Lufthansa is saved with billions of euros and everything is done to keep the economy going,” the organisation wrote on Twitter. “In schools, however, it is apparently not even possible to purchase air filters across the board. People are getting infected every day in our classrooms and in our environment—how long are we going to put up with this? Is education even possible under the constant fear of infection? We say enough is enough!”