Brazil’s return to classrooms fills pediatric ICUs

Eduardo Parati

While the media and the Brazilian government have highlighted the decrease in occupancy rates for adult ICU beds, pediatric intensive care units are receiving an explosive number of new admissions. Children are being terribly impacted by the spread of the Omicron variant of COVID-19.

In Santa Catarina, the occupancy rate of pediatric ICU beds for COVID-19 treatment increased 433 percent in the first 15 days of February; and between December and January, hospitalizations for children under the age of 15 rose nearly 12-fold. The state of Rio de Janeiro registered an 850 percent increase in the occupancy of pediatric ICU beds between December and January, with the number of children between 6 and 12 years old hospitalized jumping from 6 to 57.

Return to in-person classes in September 2021 in Olinda, Pernambuco (Wikimedia Commons)

A CNN Brazil report revealed that on February 8, only 8 pediatric ICU beds were available for the entire state of Rio de Janeiro, all concentrated in only two hospitals in the capital. Similar situations are reported throughout the country.

Reports from health care workers show that the new variant, promoted as “mild” by governments around the world, is driving child hospitalizations to unprecedented levels.

At a pediatric hospital in Goiânia, the capital of the state of Goiás, the intensivist physician Fernanda Peixoto reported earlier this month that there has never been such a large number of children hospitalized. Children with COVID-19 can remain hospitalized for more than a month.

In the state of Ceará, pediatric intensivist physician Manuela Monte, who works at a children’s hospital in the capital, Fortaleza, told the BBC, “We are a hospital of reference, and our pediatric COVID ICUs were full in January, while adult care was relatively under control.” She added, “Children of all age groups have been admitted with COVID. And we have had severe cases in children who had no health problems at all. Because of the immune system being compromised by COVID, they ended up getting a bacterial infection, pneumonia, or meningitis before they got to the hospital.”

According to the epidemiological bulletin of the Health Secretariat of the capital of Rio de Janeiro, the number of hospitalizations of children in January was about five times higher than during the second wave caused by the Gamma and Delta variants last year.

The surge in hospitalizations is occurring while millions of children remain unvaccinated, with states registering disparities in vaccination rates, delays and missed doses. In February 16, while Paraná, São Paulo and the Federal District have respectively, 28.1 percent, 28.6 percent and 34.6 percent of children between 5 and 11 years old vaccinated with the first dose, most of the states that provided data have less than 20 percent coverage. This is the case of Amapa, Mato Grosso do Sul and Pernambuco, which vaccinated 5.4 percent, 12.9 percent and 12.5 percent, respectively. On Thursday, the health secretary of the state of Rio de Janeiro announced the interruption of vaccinations for a week due to lack of pediatric doses.

Although hospitals are already overloaded, the beginning of classes in state school networks across the country since February 7 has yet to have its full potential impact on health care systems. With the reopening of schools, millions of unvaccinated students and education workers are being placed in crowded schools and on public transportation, which will directly drive new outbreaks of the pandemic.

In Manaus, capital of Amazonas, a world epicenter of the coronavirus in 2020 and 2021, and where school reopenings were a decisive factor in the generation of the Gamma variant, Fiocruz epidemiologist Jesem Orellana warned on local radio 18 Horas: “The return to face-to-face classes on February 14, 2022 for 5- to 11-year-olds can be considered premature and puts at risk the well-being and even the life of the students, and also of an extensive chain of possible contacts, inside (education workers, in general) and outside of school (collective transport, cafeterias, LAN houses, for example), as there are still tens of thousands of unvaccinated or incompletely vaccinated people in Amazonas.”

On Thursday, three days after school reopenings in the state network and in the capital, the Amazonas government announced the demobilization of the Nilton Lins hospital, focused on COVID-19 treatment, which was activated in January 2021 during the Gamma variant outbreak.

School reopenings are happening at the same time as it is declared in the media, on the one hand, that Omicron has reached a plateau, and, on the other, that the abrupt surge in the number of cases would imply a subsequent equally abrupt drop.

Contrary to what the government and the media are stating, the situation remains ominous, and the risk of new outbreaks is not over. On February 15, the Fiocruz Observatory released a note pointing out that in 4 states and 7 state capitals, ICU occupancy rates remained above 80 percent, with the Federal District registering 99 percent occupancy. Another 14 states and 12 state capitals remained above 60 percent occupancy.

In February, the first cases of the Omicron subvariant BA.2 were reported in Brazil. A study conducted by four Japanese universities, not yet peer-reviewed, indicated that this version is more aggressive than the original, highly resistant to vaccines and able to reinfect people already affected by the BA.1.

In an interview with Globo, Salmo Raskin, a geneticist and director of the Genetika Laboratory in Curitiba, Parana state, declared: “This study serves as a warning. Much has been said about the risk of BA.2 overtaking BA.1 as the dominant strain, as has already occurred in Denmark, India, the Philippines, and Singapore. A possible spread of this subvariant in Brazil could interrupt our beginning of decline in cases, generating new peaks and deaths.”

The outbreaks of cases, the admission of large numbers of patients to hospitals and the abandonment of any policy to control the spread of the disease by the state and federal governments mark the open adoption by all sections of the Brazilian political establishment of the fraudulent “herd immunity” policy through mass infection of the population. With the recurring record of over 1,000 deaths daily since the beginning of the month, the response of the ruling class is to promote the “new normal” of large-scale infections and deaths.

Late last year, Brazil’s fascistic President Jair Bolsonaro began a campaign of attacks on childhood vaccination, declaring it to be an individual choice by parents, adding that he would force them to obtain a prescription to vaccinate their children. Meanwhile, his Health Minister Marcelo Queiroga delayed the start of vaccinations for children between the ages of 5 and 11, holding a “public hearing” that gave voice to fascistic antivax figures promoted by the government. This campaign continues, with Bolsonaro’s ministers in recent weeks attacking the vaccination of children as a human rights violation.

Meanwhile, the response to the pandemic by state governments, including in states ruled by the Workers Party (PT) and its allies, is becoming indistinguishable from that promoted by the fascistic president.

Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo had announced in October the end of mandatory masking, and only backed off in the face of the new outbreak of infections. The states are aggressively promoting school reopenings, discarding any vaccination goal and declaring that the schools are “prepared” to receive the students.

The governor of Bahia, Rui Costa of the PT, promised in January not to implement any more COVID-19 restrictions that would affect the economy. “At this moment, we will not interfere with any other economic structure.” He added: “Schools will return on the 7th, face to face; it will not be hybrid or virtual.” Meanwhile, the governor of Ceará, Camilo Santana, also from the PT, limited himself to the “recommendation” of postponing classes for 15 days, limiting the public in stadiums to 30 percent of capacity, and the mandatory use of N95 masks in pharmacies, schools and supermarkets.

The president of the Brazilian Society of Immunizations (SBIm), Renato Kfouri, took on the sordid role of promoting in-person learning in several newspapers and on television. In an interview with CNN, after stating that the risk of children developing severe illness and even death from COVID-19 is “much higher than pneumonia, influenza, measles, infantile paralysis,” Kfouri advocated the return to classes, stating: “I think we shouldn’t fear the return to classes without vaccine. In fact, if one should wait for the vaccines to begin to work ... we are talking about a return to school in May for children over five years old, because below we won’t have the opportunity yet. There is no justification today for us to keep children out of in-person schools waiting for the vaccines.”

The response of the federal and state governments to the pandemic reveals that there is no concern for the “mental health” and “education” of children, as was propagated in the corporate media throughout the pandemic to justify the deadly reopenings.

During the periods of remote and hybrid education, everything was planned not to ensure the learning and health of the students but to enrich the large corporations, with several states making deals with mass education platforms setting up contracts of hundreds of millions of reais with mobile phone operators, while most children did not even have access to digital equipment and adequate learning environments. Since the beginning of the pandemic, hundreds of thousands of young people have been forced to abandon their education to guarantee income for their families, a reflection of the massive growth of poverty in Brazil and the criminal neglect of its ruling class.

The main concern of the ruling elite has always been to ensure that parents return to the workplace to guarantee the profits for the large corporations.

The ruling class in Brazil is attacking the public health measures necessary to eliminate the virus, the only viable strategy to preserve millions of lives in the coming months and years and promoting instead the mass infection of the population ever more openly. This deadly policy, aimed at ensuring the profits of big business and the obscene enrichment of billionaires, must be answered by the Brazilian and international working class with a strategy to eliminate the virus and save lives.

The vaccine is a decisive component of a set of measures to combat the pandemic and must be combined with temporary lockdowns, testing and contact tracing, the mandatory wearing of masks, the control of travel and the guarantee of full income for all affected workers.

Prince Andrew and a monarchy in crisis

Paul Bond

The British royal family has been cultivated for centuries as a constitutional monarchy, providing a critical pillar and head of the bourgeois state. As such, a major royal crisis always indicates a sharpening crisis of bourgeois rule.

It is not accidental that the current royal debacle centred on Prince Andrew unfolds under conditions of factional warfare within the Conservative Party, the pre-eminent parliamentary vehicle of the bourgeoisie, and another over the leadership of the Metropolitan Police, Britain’s largest force.

Prince Andrew [Credit: commons.wikimedia.org]

Prince Andrew’s settlement of up to £12 million to Virginia Giuffre was intended to draw a line under his connection with the sex trafficking of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. But it has only bought a brief period of silence from Giuffre, who has agreed not to tell her story until after the queen’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations this summer.

The 95-year-old Queen Elizabeth II, who has just been reported as infected with COVID-19, was looking to restore some stability to the institution, making efforts to minimise the possible reign of the heir to the throne, Prince Charles. Her illness points not only to the lie that the pandemic is over, but also emphasises the precarious position of the monarchy as an institution. Her successor Charles is widely seen as a pampered buffoon, whose ecological posturing cannot hide a sense of entitlement built on a declared belief in the feudal Divine Right of Kings that led his namesake, Charles I, to lose his head.

The settlement not only failed to lift the taint of scandal from Andrew, but also triggered questions about who will be footing the bill. Reports are that the queen and Charles have made bridging loans, under conditions where nearly a fifth of British workers are already living in poverty.

The royal family have sought to distance themselves from Andrew, the queen’s second son, but the rot is widespread. A charity set up by Charles is enmeshed in a police inquiry into “cash for honours” also involving Charles’s younger son, Prince Harry. Harry’s own ongoing dispute with the monarchy has now reached a court appeal over allowing him to provide his own private security during visits to Britain.

Britain's Queen Elizabeth II is joined by Prince Charles, the Prince of Wales, and at rear, from left, Kate, Duchess of Cambridge, Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, Prince William, Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex during a reception at Buckingham Palace, London to mark the 50th anniversary of the investiture of the Prince of Wales. March 5, 2019 file photo (Dominic Lipinski/Pool via AP, File)

Giuffre accused Andrew of sexually abusing her when she was 17 years old. The prince’s statement admitted no liability but announced “a substantial donation” to her charity for the victims of sex trafficking. This led to the filing of a stipulated dismissal of the suit against him, keeping Andrew off the stand over details of his interactions with Giuffre at Epstein’s properties in 2000-2001, again covering up Epstein’s activities.

Andrew had sought to have the case dismissed, claiming no recollection of meeting Giuffre and suggesting a widely circulated photograph of them together was faked. His attempts at public rebuttal backfired spectacularly.

A BBC interview, intended to clear his name, generated ridicule and criticism. Andrew told journalist Emily Maitlis, “If push came to shove and the legal advice was to do so, then I would be duty bound” to testify or give a statement under oath.

He evidently did not expect to be held to that. As soon as it became clear he could not prevent the case proceeding, Andrew moved to an out-of-court settlement. He has been spared a court appearance, but he will not be returning to royal duty. He was stripped of royal titles and patronages last month.

His settlement statement referred cynically to a commitment to “fight against the evils of sex trafficking,” in response to which lawyer Nick Goldstone told the Telegraph Andrew “is toxic, and this settlement will not have changed the verdict of the court of public opinion.”

Andrew expected his defence to be accepted on the basis of privilege alone, which proved a wild misjudgement. Robert Lewis, attorney for another of Epstein’s victims, attributed the delay in settling the case to Andrew’s “arrogance.” Epstein, Maxwell, Andrew, the Catholic Church, said Lewis, “all think the law on some level applies only to everybody else.”

A monarchy that used to provide bourgeois rule with an appearance of stability in times of crisis is now itself in freefall.

The overthrow and then execution of Charles I in 1649 marked the birth of bourgeois rule out of feudalism. The restoration of his son Charles II as constitutional monarch eleven years later was aimed at safeguarding the world’s first state based on bourgeois rule through a political compromise enshrining the hereditary principle on which both the old feudal aristocracy and the newly emerging capitalist class, in their own way, depended against the re-emergence of popular opposition.

Prince Andrew, the Duke of York (left), in June 2012 (Creative Commons)

The monarchy became the most bourgeois institution imaginable: the head of state during the explosive growth of the British Empire, a symbol of the nation in two world wars, and later a tool of global realpolitik in the complex relations with US imperialism, Britain’s other imperialist rivals and the newly independent states across the Commonwealth. Elizabeth has done the bourgeoisie sterling service in this regard.

But the declining international position of the British bourgeoisie has gone hand in hand with an embrace of the naked speculation of financial parasitism. The monarchy has tried to court this layer, while being forced to streamline its own activities in line with its social decline.

Charles’s former wife, Diana, Princess of Wales, blazed the trail in forming close links with the yuppie layers of the super-rich who emerged with the speculative boom of the 1980s. Following her acrimonious divorce, she aimed to shift the succession to her son William, second in line to the throne, rather than Charles.

William, groomed as a popular traditionalist who combines Elizabeth’s sense of duty with his mother’s facility with the newer layers of the elite and her “popular touch”, has stepped into this role. He is the great white hope of the monarchy, provided any reign of Charles III can be kept as brief as possible.

Faced with an efficiency drive to keep the monarchy functional as a pillar of state, those royals outside the line of succession, like Andrew, deeply resent not being as rich as the people they are courting. The richest royal, the queen, does not even make the top 300 wealthy individuals in the UK.

But the lifestyles of the lesser royals are no less lavish for that and are a major focus of public anger and loathing. Questions over how Andrew will scrabble together his £12 million come at a time when an estimated half a million people are being driven into poverty by the cut of just £20 a week from the Universal Credit social security benefit.

Andrew’s own courting of financial layers was seen in the sale in 2007 of his former home to Timor Kulibayev, son-in-law of the president of Kazakhstan. The country house in Berkshire was sold for £15 million, £3 million above the asking price. Kulibayev’s spokesman insisted this was a “commercial arm’s length transaction” using “entirely legitimate” funds.

But Andrew is now down to his last chalet as he sells off his assets. This is on the market for £17 million but is understood to be heavily mortgaged and unlikely to cover the costs of his settlement. Meanwhile, rising fuel prices this April are expected to see one fifth of British households experiencing fuel poverty.

Charles’s charity, the Prince’s Foundation, is meanwhile being investigated over allegations that it helped secure a CBE award and British citizenship for one of its donors, billionaire Saudi businessman Mahfouz Marei Mubarak bin Mahfouz.

Mahfouz also donated to a charity run by Harry, Charles’s younger son. Harry and his wife Meghan Markle have been a consistent PR thorn in the side for the Windsors. Similarly groomed to make the family appear modern, they calculated that, being some way from the line of succession, they could make considerably more money based in the US as free market operators with royal associations.

There is an air of desperation among royalists. After Andrew’s settlement and the Prince’s Foundation investigation, the Sun reported Elizabeth’s now clearly postponed return to public activity with the headline, “Thank God for the Queen.” But what do they have beyond that?

The pivotal places of Charles I and II at critical moments of bourgeois rule are known—what place is left for Charles III? The crisis of the monarchy points to the festering rottenness of bourgeois rule. It is falling to pieces, with a ruling class in crisis escalating its social plunder and devastation.

Jeffrey Epstein’s associate Jean-Luc Brunel found dead in Paris jail cell

Kevin Reed

French business partner and friend of deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, Jean-Luc Brunel, was found dead in a Paris prison cell on Saturday. The Paris prosecutor’s office said Brunel’s death was being investigated and appeared to be a suicide.

Brunel, who had been charged with rape and jailed in 2020, was a member of Epstein’s inner circle of associates and started a modeling agency called MC2 Models in New York and Miami in 2004 with investment funds from the billionaire financier. They had broken off contact following Epstein’s 2008 guilty plea, conviction and sentencing to 18 months in prison for procuring for prostitution a girl below the age of 18.

Ghislaine Maxwell (left) and Jean-Luc Brunel (right) along with Jeffrey Epstein (middle) on his private jet. (US DOJ)

Ghislaine Maxwell, who was recently convicted of sex trafficking with Epstein, originally introduced her billionaire boyfriend to Brunel, whom she had known since the 1980s when he was co-owner of the international agency Karin Models.

French officials said Brunel, 75, was found hanging in his cell at 1:30 a.m. at the historic La Santé prison, operated by the Ministry of Justice and located in a southern district of Paris. He was being held in pretrial detention on charges that he raped girls between the ages of 15 and 18. He was also under investigation as part of a government probe into the sex trafficking activities of Epstein in France that was begun in 2019.

In a statement, Brunel’s legal team said Brunel was in “distress” about his incarceration and the denial by the authorities of his repeated requests for a provisional release from the prison. Giving credence to the suicide explanation for his death, the statement said, “Jean-Luc Brunel never stopped declaring his innocence. His decision was not guided by guilt, but by a deep sentiment of injustice.”

Brunel is known to have traveled frequently with Epstein, who had an elite 8,000 square foot apartment in Paris in one of the wealthiest sectors of the city and that overlooked the Arc de Triomphe. The apartment, which had a specially built massage room and was put on the market for $14 million after the billionaire’s death, was the location of social gatherings organized by Epstein and Maxwell that included liaisons between his super rich friends and underage girls.

Virginia Giuffre, the most prominent of Epstein’s abuse victims who settled a lawsuit against Prince Andrew of the UK last week for an undisclosed amount, has said in court filings that Brunel would offer modeling jobs to girls as young as 12, take them to the US and “farm them out to his friends, especially Epstein.” The court documents also include accusations made by Giuffre that Epstein sexually trafficked her to Brunel on “numerous occasions and in numerous places.”

There was also evidence of Brunel’s supplying Epstein with underage girls that was uncovered when a trove of court documents from 2004 and 2005 were unsealed shortly after Epstein’s death. Written phone call messages retrieved from Epstein’s Palm Beach mansion included in instance where a friend named “Jean-Luc” called about a “teacher for you to teach you how to speak Russian” who was “2x8 years old” and “not blonde.”

Meanwhile, there were accusations against Brunel as far back as 1991 that he drugged and raped young women. Former Dutch model Thysia Huisman, told the Times on Saturday of Brunel’s death, “It makes me angry, because I’ve been fighting for years. For me, the end of this was to be in court. And now that whole ending—which would help form closure—is taken away from me.”

Anne-Claire Le Jeune, a lawyer representing Huisman and other victims, told the Associated Press that she felt “Great disappointment, great frustration that (the victims) won’t get justice.”

Responding to the news of Brunel’s death, Virginia Giuffre tweeted: “The suicide of Jean-Luc Brunel, who abused me and countless girls and young women, ends another chapter. I’m disappointed that I wasn’t able to face him in a final trial to hold him accountable but gratified that I was able to testify in person last year to keep him in prison.”

Giuffre’s attorney Sigrid McCawley, said in a statement, “For the women who have stood up and called for accountability from law enforcement around the world, it is not how these men died, but how they lived, and the damage they caused to so many. The fight to seek truth and justice goes on.”

The fact that Brunel’s death is being attributed to suicide, just like Epstein’s, adds to further suspicions that there is an ongoing conspiracy within the ruling establishment to cover up the extent of the criminal sex trafficking operations of the capitalist elite that lasted for two decades. While the New York Medical Examiner declared Epstein’s death a “suicide by hanging,” an independent autopsy expert hired by the billionaire’s family showed that the injuries to his neck were consistent with strangulation by another person.

When accusations of Epstein’s sexual abuse of underage girls reemerged in a civil suit by two “Jane Does” in December 2014, Brunel sought compensatory damages in a Dade County, Florida court from the billionaire, saying he had been unfairly embroiled in the scandal and his modeling agency had suffered financially from the impact on his reputation.

Accusations contained in those court documents included evidence submitted by four victims, one of whom was Virginia Giuffre, that Epstein, Prince Andrew, US lawyer Alan Dershowitz and Brunel had forced her to have sex with them. The three men denied the allegations and Epstein’s lawyer said they were old and discredited.

The way this case was worked out shows the manner in which the criminal sex trafficking operation of Epstein and others was repeatedly swept under the rug by the US judicial system. In April 2015, the presiding judge ruled that the allegations against Prince Andrew and Alan Dershowitz were to be stricken from the case because Jane Doe 3 (Giuffre) and Jane Doe 4 were not part of the initial lawsuit and had no bearing on the issues related to Epstein.

In her 2015 affidavit, Giuffre said, “Jeffrey Epstein has told me that he has slept with over 1,000 of Brunel’s girls,’’ adding that the men “loved orgies with kids — that is having sexual interactions with many young teenagers at the same time. Sometimes as many as 10 underage girls would participate in a single orgy with them. I personally observed dozens of these orgies.”

Julie K. Brown of the Miami Herald, who has covered the Epstein sexual abuse story for many years, wrote on Sunday morning that, just like Epstein, Brunel was reported to have attempted suicide previously while in jail. According to an anonymous source, Brunel had “tried to kill himself several times” and this was confirmed to the Herald by his attorney Mathias Chichportich, who said his client made “several suicide attempts” over the 14 months of his detainment.

However, the lawyer told the Herald that Brunel was not under any active suicide watch and was being held in what is known as the “vulnerable people area” of the prison which is for people who are at risk of facing violence, a common problem for detainees facing sexual assault charges. Following an attempted suicide during the Christmas holidays, a judge ruled Brunel’s “detention was no longer justified given the status of the prosecution,” Chichportich said. That decision was overruled a few days later and Brunel was sent back to jail.

10,000 New Zealand healthcare workers vote to strike

Tom Peters

Last week, 10,000 allied health workers in New Zealand’s public health system voted overwhelmingly in favour of holding two 24-hour strikes, on March 4 and 18.

The Public Service Association (PSA) members work in dozens of vital roles throughout the country, excluding as doctors and nurses. They include workers who sterilise hospital equipment, pharmacists, physiotherapists, social workers, dental assistants, hundreds of laboratory workers responsible for COVID-19 tests, and about 100 contact tracing workers.

Wellington Regional Hospital (Google Streetview)

In December, more than 90 percent of these workers voted to reject an offer from the country’s District Health Boards (DHBs), which did not match the rate of inflation and, for many, would have been a real wage cut.

The strike vote is a sign of international working-class anger over soaring living costs, as well as chronic understaffing and decades of underfunding of essential services—conditions which have fueled the COVID-19 pandemic. In recent weeks, nurses in New South Wales, Australia, held a statewide strike, and there have been nationwide strikes in Turkey and Sri Lanka.

In New Zealand, the Omicron surge that began late last month is already placing huge pressure on healthcare services. There are more than 16,000 active cases, and hospitalisations have reached 116, an all-time high for New Zealand.

The Labour Party-led government abandoned its elimination strategy for COVID-19 last October, at the behest of big business. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has declared an end to nationwide lockdowns and has joined other governments internationally in allowing Omicron to spread.

The PSA described the DHBs’ offer as “insulting,” but has not publicly announced any specific claims on pay and conditions. In a media statement, the union vaguely called on the government to make “an offer that ensures fair pay and treatment for our members.” It noted that many allied health workers make less than $22.75 an hour, which the unions call a “living wage,” even though it is clearly not enough for a reasonable standard of living.

The 10,000 workers have had their pay frozen since their last Multi-Employer Collective Agreement (MECA) with the DHBs expired 15 months ago. That agreement included an increase of just over 9 percent for most workers, over a three-year period from 2017-2020. This has been outstripped by the cost of living, which officially increased 11.7 percent from September 2017 to the end of 2021.

The annual rate of inflation is now 5.9 percent, the highest rate in 30 years, meaning real wages are going backwards at a rapid pace.

The 2018 allied health workers’ MECA was similar to a sellout deal imposed on 30,000 nurses and healthcare assistants by the New Zealand Nurses’ Organisation, following a nationwide strike in 2018. Both agreements failed to address the staffing crisis in the health system which was a major factor behind the nurses’ strike.

Nurses held a further strike last year over the continued staffing crisis and low pay, but the unions again ensured that the struggle remained isolated, and the workers were soldout. Now, amid a global health crisis, conditions are worse than ever.

A government-ordered review of hospital staffing, released this month, based on a survey of 3,992 nurses and other health workers, found that 62 percent of frontline staff “reported that half or more of their last 10 shifts were understaffed.” Two out of five nurses reported being asked to take extra shifts every week.

Data released to the opposition National Party shows there are 2,200 vacant nursing positions across the country, a 7.8 percent vacancy rate.

Radio NZ (RNZ) today reported that “patients are spending as long as 36 hours in emergency departments—often waiting hours in corridors.” Emergency physician Dr John Bonning, from the College of Emergency Medicine, said overcrowding was “manifestly worse than this time last year… worse than ever.” Patients have “zero privacy” and there are serious “infection control issues.”

Lab workers are also under growing pressure. The Institute of Medical Laboratory Science told RNZ on Sunday that laboratories can’t keep up with the demand for processing tens of thousands of COVID tests each day. In Auckland, the waiting time for a test result can be as long as five days, which makes effective contact tracing for positive cases virtually impossible.

The crisis is exacerbated by the Labour government’s refusal to expand the border quarantine system to allow more migrants into the country. Hundreds of applications from healthcare workers wanting to relocate to New Zealand have been rejected by immigration authorities over the past two years.

In response to the allied health workers’ strike vote, Health Minister Andrew Little announced on February 17 that “the DHBs are now going to apply to the Employment Relations Authority for facilitation to try and break through the remaining issues.” He urged the DHBs “to do everything they can to come to the party, to come to terms and reach agreement to avoid a strike action happening.”

The government is relying on the PSA to either call off the strikes or, if this proves impossible, to minimise their impact. The ruling class is fearful that health workers could set an example for others looking for a way to oppose low wages and unsafe conditions as Omicron explodes.

About 5,000 senior doctors and dentists last year rejected a zero pay offer, with many reportedly calling for strike action.

Last December, about 2,000 rail workers employed by the state-owned company Kiwirail voted for a nationwide strike, only to have it cancelled by the Rail and Maritime Transport Union (RMTU). The union then pushed through a deal that failed to keep pace with living costs.

The PSA, New Zealand’s largest union, represents the privileged upper middle class union apparatus. It is wedded to the Labour Party and urged workers to re-elect it at the 2020 election. The union falsely claimed, in a September 19 statement, that the Ardern government had delivered “significant progress toward fair pay and improved conditions for many workers in both the public and private sectors.”

In fact, the government used the pandemic to carry out an unprecedented transfer of wealth to the rich, pushing social inequality to record levels. Like capitalist governments internationally, Labour gave tens of billions of dollars to big business in the form of subsidies and tax breaks.

This money is now being recouped by starving public services, including healthcare, and driving down wages. In May 2021, the government announced a public sector wage freeze for workers earning more than $60,000, which is about three-quarters of the workforce.

The unions have sought to prevent any organised opposition to these austerity measures, just as they have enforced the government’s criminal policy of allowing COVID-19 to spread through the country. The unions supported the reopening of schools and non-essential businesses, with minimal public health restrictions.

Munich Security Conference targets Russia

Johannes Stern

This year's Munich Security Conference was dominated by the escalation of war preparations between the USA and NATO against Russia.

Leading representatives of the imperialist powers—including German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht (both Social Democrats, SPD), Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock (Greens), American Vice President Kamala Harris, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky—met in the Bavarian state capital to threaten Russia and fuel the conflict with the nuclear-armed power.

U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz at the Munich Security Conference (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, Pool)

In his speech on Saturday, Scholz openly stated how acute the situation is. “War is looming again in Europe. And the risk is anything but averted,” he explained.

Like all speakers, with the exception of Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, he blamed Russia alone for the situation. “The deployment of well over 100,000 Russian soldiers around Ukraine” was “not justified on any grounds.” Russia has “raised the question of Ukraine's possible NATO membership as a casus belli,” although “no decision at all” is pending.

Then he threatened Moscow. At his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on February 15, he “made it clear: Any further violation of Ukraine's territorial integrity will have high costs for Russia—politically, economically and geostrategically.” At the same time, he “emphasized that diplomacy will not fail because of us.” He added, “Ultimately nothing less than peace in Europe is at stake.”

Scholz's attempt to present himself as a broker “for peace” is absurd.

One does not have to support Putin's bankrupt Russian nationalism and militarism to acknowledge that NATO is the aggressor. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union by the Stalinist bureaucracy 30 years ago, the military alliance has been systematically encircling Russia, contrary to all assurances at the time. Altogether there have been five eastward expansions of NATO in the past two decades. Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary joined the military alliance in 1999; Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia in 2004; Albania and Croatia in 2009; Montenegro in 2017 and North Macedonia in 2020.

NATO's insistence on Ukraine's “right” to now also become a member of the military alliance is part of a strategy to weaken and ultimately completely subjugate Russia. When Western representatives in Munich repeatedly cited Moscow's “violation of Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity,” they were turning reality on its head.

Indeed, in early 2014, Washington and Berlin, working closely with fascist forces, orchestrated a coup against Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych after he refused to sign an association agreement with the European Union (EU). Since then, they have been systematically strengthening the right-wing, anti-Russia regime in Kiev in order to retake Crimea and Donbass, which opposed the coup by large majorities and were oriented toward Moscow.

The currently escalating confrontation is the result of NATO's systematic offensive, which is ever more openly taking the form of outright preparations for war. As early as 2017, the military alliance stationed four battle groups, each consisting of 1,000 soldiers, in Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia as part of the “Enhanced Forward Presence.” These battle groups are currently being strengthened. At their meeting in Brussels last Wednesday, the NATO defense ministers decided to set up additional battle groups in Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and Slovakia.

In Munich, Harris boasted about further troop redeployments. “We have deployed an additional 6,000 American service members to Romania, Poland, and Germany. We have put another 8,500 service members in the United States on a heightened sense of readiness. As President Biden has said, our forces will not be deployed to fight inside Ukraine, but they will defend every inch of NATO territory.” She added that they will continue to support Ukraine with “security, humanitarian and economic assistance.”

Zelensky's appearance underscored the extent to which NATO already regards the regime in Kiev as a close ally. To thunderous applause from those present, the Ukrainian President called for a “clear timeline” for the country's admission to the European Union and NATO and for the “the supply of the latest weapons, machinery and equipment for our army—an army that protects the whole of Europe.”

He added threateningly, “I want to believe that the North Atlantic Treaty and Article 5 will be more effective than the Budapest Memorandum.” In the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, the former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Belarus and Ukraine renounced nuclear weapons.

Scholz and Harris insisted in their speeches that Germany and the US fully support Article 5 of the NATO treaty. “Let me be clear: America’s commitment to Article 5 is ironclad. This commitment is sacrosanct to me, to President Biden, and to our entire nation,” Harris said. Scholz added, “Germany stands by the guarantee of Article 5—with no ifs and buts.”

These statements have far-reaching consequences. Article 5 states that “an armed attack against one or more ‘parties’ will be considered an attack against all of them” and “that in the event of such an armed attack, each of... the party or parties being attacked Provides assistance… including the use of force of arms.”

To put it bluntly: if the conflict in eastern Ukraine, which is being systematically fueled by right-wing extremist militias, spreads to include an eastern European NATO member, Washington and Berlin undertake to go to war against the world's second-strongest nuclear-armed power with unforeseeable consequences.

Nevertheless, in addition to the US, Berlin of all places, which attacked Russia in the Second World War and carried out a war of annihilation throughout Eastern Europe, is intensifying the war drive.

“The developments of the past few months in particular show us how necessary it is to continue concentrating on the topic of ‘alliance defence’ in the North Atlantic region. We have to muster the skills that are required for this,” Scholz demanded. “And yes, that also applies to Germany. Airplanes that fly, ships that can set sail, soldiers who are optimally equipped for their dangerous tasks—a country of our size, which bears a very special responsibility in Europe, must be able to afford that.”

Scholz left no doubt that Germany was taking part in the war effort against Russia in order to pursue its own geostrategic and economic interests as a major power.

“The European Union is our framework for action, our opportunity,” he emphasized. “Remaining a ‘power among powers’ is what we're talking about when we talk about ‘European sovereignty.’ Three things are needed on the way there: First, the will to act as a ‘power among powers,’ second, common strategic goals, and third, the ability to achieve these goals. We are working on all of these.”

At the beginning of the security conference, Social Democratic Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht called for another massive increase in the defense budget. On Sunday she repeated her appeal. “We will continuously increase defense spending,” she announced at a panel discussion on the future of EU security and foreign policy. The goal of Germany’s traffic light coalition government is to spend 3 percent of gross domestic product on defense, diplomacy and development aid in the future.

Bayer Foundation Women Empowerment Award 2022

Application Deadline:

18th March 2022

Tell Me About Bayer Foundation Women Empowerment Award:

Game-changing female entrepreneurs of Sub-Saharan Africa – is your innovation driving positive change by bringing better health and nutrition to everyone? Harvest a healthier future by applying for the Bayer Foundation Women Empowerment Award 2022. Lace up your gloves, Get in the Ring and grab the spotlight for a chance to win €25,000!

The value of this award comes to 50,000 Euros. Winners of the award will receive a cash prize of 25,000 Euros. They will also be entered at no additional cost, into an intensive 24-week growth accelerator, the value of which is 25,000 Euros. The accelerator provides a rare opportunity for awardees to receive tailored support and training for scaling, including active investor feedback. They will also gain access to relevant mentorship and advice from Bayer experts, as well as membership of the Bayer Foundation global alumni and partner network, which offers the opportunity to raise capital and exchange knowledge about the experience gained.

Dr. Monika Lessl, Executive Director of Bayer Foundation, says “Studies have shown that women play a central role in bringing change and working towards a more equal society. We also see this in our daily work. In the many years of Bayer Foundation’s activities, the positive impact of strong women has been a central theme. They are the change-makers we need. As a basic principle for our activities, we, therefore, have chosen to strengthen and highlight the role of women as leaders in science and as entrepreneurs,”

What Type of Scholarship is this?

Entrepreneurship

Who can apply for Bayer Foundation Women Empowerment Award?

Are you a woman game changer, driving sustainability and social impact through entrepreneurial innovation? To apply for the Open Application, you can sign up from any country within Sub-Saharan Africa. Through the Open Application, you may become one of the 16 finalists that will be selected from this group by the Bayer Foundation and Get In The Ring team.

Which Countries are Eligible?

Sub-Saharan African countries

How Many Scholarships will be Given?

Not specified

What is the Benefit of Bayer Foundation Women Empowerment Award?

• 24-week growth accelerator program
• €25.000 Cash prize
• Workshops and trainings
• Access to network
• Access to the Women Empowerment Award Final Event
• Additional funding opportunities

How to Apply for Bayer Foundation Women Empowerment Award:

ACCEPT THE CHALLENGE AND APPLY NOW!

Visit Award Webpage for Details

Victoria Nuland in Colombia: Is Washington plotting another coup?

Bill Van Auken

U.S. State Department Under Secretary for Public Affairs, Victoria Nuland, speaks during a joint statement with Colombian National Police Director Gen. Jorge Luis Vargas, not in picture, in Bogota, Colombia, Tuesday, Feb. 8, 2022. (AP Photo/Fernando Vergara)

Following high-level security talks held in Colombia last week, Washington’s Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Victoria Nuland, alleged that “foreign actors” are attempting to subvert that country’s upcoming elections. She vowed that the US military and intelligence apparatus would work with its Colombian counterparts to assure “a free and fair election here; a Colombian election for Colombians.”

“We must safeguard it against outside actors interested in manipulating elections, as they have tried to do in other parts of the world,” Nuland told reporters.

Polls have placed Senator Gustavo Petro, a former member of the M-19 guerrilla movement, which traded the “armed struggle” for bourgeois politics, as the clear front-runner in the presidential race. Approval ratings for incumbent President Iván Duque, Washington’s closest ally in the region, and for his far-right party stand in the low teens.

Accompanied by Pentagon and US intelligence officials, Nuland was in Bogota for the US-Colombia High-Level Strategic Security Dialogue, a mechanism created in 2012 to better coordinate the actions of Colombia’s right-wing government with the counterrevolutionary operations of US imperialism in the Western hemisphere.

While Nuland did not directly name the “malign external actors” who are supposedly plotting to interfere with Colombian votes by “propagating lies and stories that are not of Colombian origin,” she and her aides, along with Duque’s far-right regime in Bogota, left no room for doubt that their target was Russia.

Just days before Nuland set off for Colombia, Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Brian Nichols, who was part of the mission to Bogota, told a US Congressional panel that Russian “efforts to destabilize our hemisphere or to inject conflict from Ukraine to the Western Hemisphere [are] unacceptable, and we will work with our partners throughout the hemisphere to prevent that.”

Nichols’ warning followed a statement by Russian Vice Chancellor Sergei Ryabkov that Moscow would not rule out deployment of military assets to Cuba and Venezuela if the US and NATO continued their buildup on Russia’s western borders.

Washington’s efforts to line up Latin American governments against Russia over the Ukraine crisis have yielded spotty results. Argentine President Alberto Fernandez traveled to Moscow at the beginning of this month for meetings with President Vladimir Putin, while Brazil’s fascistic President Jair Bolsonaro embraced Putin at the Kremlin on February 16, the very day that US intelligence sources had claimed Russia would invade Ukraine. Bolsonaro used the occasion to declare Brazil “in solidarity” with Russia.

In Colombia, however, Washington’s anti-Russia campaign has been greeted with open arms. It dovetails with the anti-Russian propaganda of the Duque government itself, which claimed implausibly that the mass strikes and protests that swept the country last spring had been fueled by Russian social media propaganda.

More recently, Duque’s Minister of Defense, Diego Molano, charged—without providing a shred of evidence—that the Venezuelan National Armed Forces (FAN) were being mobilized on Colombia’s border “with the support and technical assistance of Russia and Iran.”

In an interview with Colombia’s BluRadio, Nuland echoed the false charges of the Duque government. “We are concerned that the Russians seem to be increasingly active in these border regions and these are the same border regions where we are seeing violent actors, we are seeing drug trafficking, we are seeing criminality, we are seeing money laundering these kinds of things,” she said. “So what exactly is Russia doing there and, more importantly, what can the United States do together with Colombia to harden those borders and ensure that any negative activity remains on the Venezuelan side?”

Aside for the completely unsubstantiated character of the fantastic charge that Russia has any presence whatsoever on the Colombia-Venezuela border, the claim that sealing this frontier would protect Colombia from “negative activity” spilling over from Venezuela is preposterous.

Colombia is responsible for an estimated 70 percent of the world’s cocaine supply, and top government officials are deeply involved in drug trafficking. Just days before Nuland’s arrival in Bogota, a top Colombian Army general was relieved of his command for connections to traffickers, while the former commander of the armed forces, a close ally of Duque popularly known as “the godfather,” was formally accused of using the military to protect the interests of a cocaine cartel.

Duque, besieged by crises and widely hated in his own country, appeared buoyed by his meetings with Nuland. He boasted that his government and Washington would be sharing “intelligence information, national security information, where any foreign influence, or attempted influence, can be identified in our electoral process.”

In the immediate wake of these talks, Duque flew to Europe where he presented the same narrative about election interference before the European Parliament and held meetings at the Brussels headquarters of NATO. He vowed that Colombia, the only Latin American country to be named a “global partner” of the US-led alliance, would defend Ukraine’s right to join NATO, blindly following its patron Washington down the path to World War III.

The United States is an unlikely guarantor of election integrity in Latin America, and Under Secretary Nuland an equally improbable champion of democracy. The CIA has interfered in countless Latin American elections and engineered coups throughout the continent to overthrow elected governments out of favor with US imperialism.

As for Nuland, she is infamous for her role in preparing the 2014 fascist-led coup that overthrew the pro-Russian government of Viktor Yanukovich Ukraine, installing a pro-Western regime.

In 2013, Nuland bragged that Washington had “invested over $5 billion” in the Ukrainian opposition, and in 2014, she was recorded on a telephone call with the US ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, selecting the head of a post-coup government and discussing US collaboration with neo-fascist forces like the Svoboda party.

Nuland’s mission to Bogota and unsubstantiated claims of Russian election meddling—recycling similarly fabricated claims of the Democratic Party about the 2016 election in the US—has all the earmarks of an operation along the lines of the one she organized in Ukraine.

It provides Duque and the Colombian right Washington’s validation of a pretext for abrogating the presidential election set for this May and preventing the victory of Gustavo Petro.

Petro, the former mayor of Bogota, has done everything in his power to prove his reliability to Colombia’s ruling elite, eschewing any association with socialism and leftism and running as the anti-corruption, pro-ecology candidate. Nonetheless, his victory would call into question Colombia’s unconditional diplomatic and military alignment with US imperialism in Latin America.

Under Plan Colombia, inaugurated under the Democratic administration of President Bill Clinton in 1999, the US poured some $10 billion into Colombia between 2000 and 2016 to fund a brutal counterinsurgency campaign waged in the name of a “war on drugs.” These vast sums secured the allegiance of the Colombian military and successive right-wing governments to Washington. They also bought the Pentagon access to bases on Colombian soil and the use of the country as a launching pad for coup attempts against the government of neighboring Venezuela.

US imperialism will hardly be indifferent to these arrangements being upended by the votes of the Colombian people.

While in Colombia, Nuland handed over a check for $8 million to the Colombian National Police, supposedly to finance “human rights” training. Established in the 1950s, the National Police has operated under the direction of the Colombian Defense Ministry as a counterinsurgency force to combat left-wing guerrillas and social opposition. During the mass protests and strikes last year, it was responsible for the killing of scores of workers and youth, and the torture, beating, sexual assault and extra-legal imprisonment of many more.

Nuland hailed this repressive force as “the backbone of our cooperation to strengthen Colombia’s democracy,” protecting its “citizens from all forms of malign influence and activity.”

This tribute echoes the language used in the days when Washington extolled the torture regimes of Pinochet in Chile, Videla in Argentina and Médici in Brazil as bastions of the “Free World” against the “malign influence” of socialism.

The threat that, as US imperialism prepares for world war, Washington will resurrect the methods of fascist-military coups in Latin America is very real.