EU countries impose sanctions on Russia over Ukraine crisis

Johannes Stern & Alex Lantier

European governments are responding to Moscow’s recognition of the independence of parts of eastern Ukraine with sanctions, threats and an escalation of the war drive against Russia.

On Monday, European Council President Charles Michel and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen condemned “Russian aggression against Ukraine” in an official statement.

“The decision of the Russian Federation to recognize as independent entities and send Russian troops to certain areas of Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts is illegal and unacceptable”, the statement declares. “It violates international law, Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sovereignty, Russia’s own international commitments and it further escalates the crisis.”

High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borrell, left, French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, second left, facing with German Foreign minister Annalena Baerbock, second right, and Italian Foreign minister Luigi Di Maio, attend a meeting before phone call with their other G7 counterparts at Quai d'Orsay foreign ministry, in Paris, France, Monday, Feb. 21, 2022. (AP Photo/Michel Euler)

Both presidents welcomed “the steadfast unity of Member States and their determination to react with robustness and speed to the illegal actions of Russia in close coordination with international partners.”

At an extraordinary meeting in Paris, European Union (EU) foreign ministers adopted a package of sanctions against Russia. The measures include placing on the EU sanctions list the 351 members of the Russian parliament who voted for the recognition of the Luhansk and Donetsk People’s Republics. A further 27 individuals and entities that contribute to undermining “the territorial integrity, sovereignty and independence” of Ukraine are further targeted for sanctions.

In addition, the Russian state’s access to EU financial markets will be curtailed and EU trade with the breakaway regions restricted. Individuals and entities placed on the EU sanctions list will have all assets held in the EU frozen. In addition, listed individuals will no longer be allowed to enter the EU and no business may be conducted with those affected. According to the current French presidency of the EU Council, the new EU sanctions against Russia are to come into force as early as this Wednesday.

“This package of sanctions has been approved by unanimity,” said the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borrell after the meeting of foreign ministers. “It will hurt Russia and it will hurt a lot and we are doing that in strong co-ordination with our partners, the US, the UK and Canada with whom I have been in close contact.”

Von der Leyen welcomed the German government’s decision to put the Nord Stream 2 permitting process on hold. “Nord Stream 2 must be looked at completely anew from the point of view of supply security for all of Europe,” she said. After all, she said, the crisis shows that Europe is still far too dependent on Russian gas.

As other European leaders have, von der Leyen threatened further steps. “If the Kremlin continues to escalate this crisis, then we will not hesitate to take further measures,” she said. “The European Union stands united and is prepared to act swiftly.”

Apparently, the EU is discussing possible sanctions against the Russian president himself. “Mr. Putin is not on the list of those sanctioned,” Borrell said Tuesday evening after the special meeting of EU foreign ministers in Paris. The decision was made, he said, because there was a need to have further measures in reserve.

At the same time, the EU is increasing its support for the anti-Russian regime in Ukraine and increasing its NATO deployments in eastern Europe. On Tuesday, several EU states announced plans to mobilize their joint cybersecurity unit. “In response to Ukraine’s request, [we] are activating [a] Lithuanian-led cyber rapid-response team, which will help Ukrainian institutions to cope with growing cyber-threats,” the Lithuanian Ministry of Defence tweeted.

The EU’s cybersecurity rapid response team was established in 2019 and consists of Estonia, Croatia, Lithuania, Poland and Romania.

German Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht on Tuesday visited German NATO troops in Lithuania, which have been reinforced in recent days by 350 soldiers and about 100 vehicles and weapons systems. “Russia is acting as an aggressor here. And it is uncertain at this hour how far the Russian side will push its aggression. We stand here vigilant and ready to defend ourselves,” she threatened. “Unfortunately, the diplomacy of the last weeks and months has not been able to prevent this blatant breach of our European peace order.”

The arguments advanced by EU leaders for pursuing an escalating military confrontation with Russia are steeped in lies and hypocrisy. Above all, it is not Russia but the NATO powers that are pursuing an aggressive global military and economic policy, seeking to isolate Russia and reduce it to a semi-colonial status, totally subordinated to the political and military concerns of the NATO imperialist powers.

The current crisis represents the culmination of the war drive with which the NATO imperialist powers reacted to the Stalinist bureaucracy’s dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Freed of the military-political obstacle posed by the Soviet Union, the NATO powers attacked Iraq, Yugoslavia, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq again, and then Libya and Syria. The wars left these countries shattered, costing trillions of dollars and millions of lives.

After Russian warships based in the port of Sevastopol in Crimea deployed off the Syrian coast to prevent US, French and other NATO warships from bombing Syria in September 2013, the NATO powers turned violently against Russia. They backed the Maidan protests and supported a putsch led by Ukrainian neo-fascists in Kiev in 2013 to install a NATO puppet regime in Ukraine. The separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk rebelled against far-right, anti-Russian militias sent by the Kiev regime to attack and terrorize Russian-speaking inhabitants.

As the Ukrainian armed forces, led by fascistic units like the Azov Battalion, now bomb Donetsk and Luhansk, this conflict has re-erupted, but the NATO powers are now pursuing it on a far larger scale, working to break diplomatic relations with Russia and create the grounds for war.

In its editorial, the French daily Le Monde denounces those who do not support a major escalation of sanctions against Russia, writing: “They want to believe that, as Russia was de facto present in the Donbas since 2014, it is not strictly speaking an invasion. This reaction is not up to task of facing the aggression now underway. It legitimizes the 2014 intervention. It does not take into account the profound ambitions of the Russian president: to re-establish a division of the European continent into spheres of influence based on his own criteria.”

The power that intervened in Ukraine in 2014 was not primarily Russia, however, but Washington and Berlin. When Le Monde denounces the “2014 intervention,” it attacks Russian aid to forces in Donetsk and Luhansk, but falsely treats the Kiev regime as an entirely legal entity by simply passing over in silence the fact that it was installed through an illegitimate, far-right coup.

Based on this political distortion, Le Monde interprets the Russian intervention in east Ukraine in the most incendiary way possible, as an all-out invasion. From this it concludes that Russian concerns can play no role in the division of military influence between the capitalist powers in Europe, that is, in practice, that the NATO powers will brook no Russian objections to NATO’s placing weapons and troops on its very borders.

In this crisis, the geopolitical appetites of the NATO powers intersect with their attempts to impose reactionary health and social policies amid mounting working class opposition at home.

At the heart of the EU powers’ war drive against Russia is a political campaign to bury reporting of the COVID-19 pandemic. As 6 million people fall ill and more than 20,000 die every week in Europe, governments across the continent are moving to eliminate all remaining public health measures to stop the spread of the virus, a policy already adopted in Britain. Yet the pandemic increasingly is falling out of the news, as officials and pundits insist it must take a back seat to the war crisis NATO is inciting against Russia over Ukraine.

This was crassly laid out this weekend by Munich Security Conference chairman Wolfgang Ischinger, who called to abandon public health measures on COVID-19 and focus on war: “We cannot just postpone world politics. Security challenges don’t do social distancing.”

Germany: The far-right murders of Hanau, two years on

Marianne Arens

Last Saturday, the mass murders of February 19, 2020 were commemorated in the German city of Hanau. The case has never been completely clarified and raises questions that extend far beyond the crime itself.

The ceremony at the Hanau cemetery was broadcast live on Hesse television with a public commemoration in the neighbouring cities of Offenbach and Dietzenbach. In the afternoon and evening, the bereaved families, friends and supporters demonstrated through Hanau, gathering at the crime scenes at the times the murders took place.

In the late evening of February 19, 2020, nine people were shot dead in quick succession. The perpetrator, Tobias Rathjen (43), a racist known to the authorities, had posted a misanthropic confession on the internet shortly before the crime. Nevertheless, he succeeded in visiting one crime scene after the other, at each murdering complete strangers.

The victims of the Hanauer Massacre, mural under the the Friedensbrücke (Peace Bridge) in Frankfurt am Main

On Hanau’s Haymarket, Rathjen first shot a young father named Kaloyan Velkov (33), who was hosting at the La Votre bar, before killing worker Fatih Saraçoğlu (34) in broad daylight and proceeding to murder the owner of the Midnight bar across the street, Sedat Gürbüz (29). From the Haymarket, Rathjen drove 3 kilometers to the neighborhood of Hanau-Kesselstadt, where he first shot young Vili Viorel Păun (22), a courier service driver who had followed Rathjen’s car and had tried several times to reach the police. Rathjen got out, approached Vili’s car and shot him through the windshield.

In Kesselstadt, Rathjen proceeded to shoot dead five more people: at a kiosk he shot the bricklayer Gökhan Gültekin (37) and Mercedes Kierpacz (35), a single mother who was there to get pizza for her two children. Ferhat Unvar (22), a young heating and gas technician, was shot behind the kiosk counter and bled to death from his wounds. In the adjacent Arena bar, the killer finally struck down Hamza Kurtović (22), a warehouse clerk, and shot Said Nesar Hashemi (21), a machine operator at Dunlop. Three others were seriously injured. Finally, the perpetrator drove home unmolested, where he shot his mother and then himself.

Even today, two years later, many questions remain unanswered: Why was the killer, a right-wing extremist known to the police, in possession of multiple firearms? How was it possible that he could continue his killing spree unopposed over such a long time period? Why was the emergency hotline unavailable? And why were the most important details ultimately determined by the bereaved families and not by the state authorities?

Tobias Rathjen had drawn attention to himself in the months before the crime by writing several letters to the attorney general and to the Hanau prosecutor’s office. The letters contained paranoid fantasies, but also references to his website. There, on February 13, 2020, six days before the night of the killing spree, he posted a long document with fascist extermination fantasies and videos that should have raised immediate alarm. But nothing happened and the string of murders took its course.

In the months leading up to the crime, Rathjen had participated in multiple combat trainings in Slovakia as well as other firearms courses. Indeed, he was only one of many: According to the report from the Verfassungsschutz (Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the German intelligence agency), as of the end of 2020 there are at least 1,200 right-wing extremists known to the authorities to be legally in possession of firearms in Germany. In this regard, Serpil Unvar, the mother of the murdered Ferhat, said, “It is hard to imagine that no German intelligence noticed who was training for combat with firearms. The perpetrator trained a great deal to kill our children professionally.”

Other tips should have alerted the authorities at an early stage. Since 2017, there had been two incidents in the immediate vicinity of the perpetrator’s home: A man in full combat gear had insulted Hanau youths as “kanaks” (a racist slur for people of Middle Eastern origin), threatened them with an assault rifle and announced that there would be “dead bodies.” The police, who were alerted, did not take any action, refrained from establishing the identity of the gunman, and instead threatened the bring charges against the young people.

The events of February 19 and thereafter were traumatic for the victims’ families. After the murders, parents and relatives were not informed, they were not allowed to approach the crime scenes and they were not allowed to see their slain children. Instead, the police gathered them in a police hall in Hanau-Lamboy, where they had to wait until the next morning before they learned the identities of the slain.

Those desperate families suffered dismissive, indifferent treatment from the authorities. Piter Minnemann, a survivor of the Arena Bar massacre, approached a group of police standing near the scene of the shooting, “Come quickly, we’ve been shot at, people are dying in there!” As he reported, “They didn’t listen to me at all.”

When Mercedes Kierpacz did not come home, her family, wracked with anxiety, waited for hours outside the cordoned zone in their car. Around two o’clock in the morning, they were rudely apprehended by several armed police officers. The patrol did not react to the father’s insistence: “Listen, I am Mercedes’ father.” The policemen drew his weapon and at gunpoint ordered everyone to get out and put their hands on the car. Only when another officer intervened and said, “These are the relatives,” did they let the family be, without apologizing, merely stating, “False alarm.”

Vili Viorel Paun’s parents also waited, filled with anxiety. It was not until the following noon that they went to the police, only to learn there that their son had been dead for hours. Not a word was said about Paun’s futile attempts on the night of the crime to alert the police and stop the perpetrator. Only much later did the parents find this out themselves. Vili Viorel Paun had tried three times to reach the emergency number but could not get through and his emergency calls were not registered.

Immediately after the first murders at Haymarket, other witnesses informed the police about the murderer’s license plate number. Nevertheless, it took five hours, until three in the morning, for the police to forcibly enter the perpetrator’s house in Hanau-Kesselstadt.

The victims’ bodies were taken to Frankfurt and autopsied there without the relatives being informed, let alone giving their consent. The reports stated untruthfully that the families had “not been reached.” The bereaved families had no chance to see their slain loved ones before the postmortem. “We were deprived of the right to say goodbye with dignity,” said one relative.

The many details combine to form a clear picture: Survivors and relatives had to deal with a police force whose conduct was biased, sloppy and at times racist. In the case of Vili Viorel Paun, the death certificate was in the name of his father, Nicolescu Paun. As Hamza’s father, Armin Kurtović, reported, his son was described in the death certificate as “Oriental-Southern,” although he was dirty-blond, blue-eyed and fair-skinned. “For eight days we didn’t know where he was,” Kurtović said.

After the murders, several survivors even received a “danger address,” i.e., an official statement from the police that the authorities considered the addressees to be a possible source of danger.

Voices from the demonstration against the right-wing terror in Hanau, February 21, 2020

Many rightly criticize the structural racism evident in Hanau. But it is more than that. The attack on the Hanau Nine was an attack on the working class. Hanau and especially Hanau-Kesselstadt are mainly inhabited by working class families originally from Kurdistan, Turkey, Bosnia, Bulgaria and Romania, whose children were born and raised in Germany. They work in construction or at Dunlop, at Opel, at the Rhine-Main Airport, or in the banking metropolis as care workers, in sanitation or in the supplier industry. Most of them know each other and meet after work, while shopping, at schools or sports. Rathjen’s fatal shots were directed against this international, proletarian community.

And here lies the key to understanding the unanswered questions. To this day the entirety of official politics is directed against this social class. The interests of the ruling classes, their profit-before-lives policy in the pandemic, and especially their policies of crisis and war are not compatible with the needs of working people. As the WSWS has previously stated, “The very existence of an alert and potentially rebellious working class poses a constant threat to the ruling politicians.”

The established parties have systematically created a political climate that boosts the extreme-right-wing party Alternative for Germany (AfD) and encourages violent right-wing extremists. This is particularly evident in the German state of Hesse. Right-wing extremist networks reaching far into the state apparatus are protected at the highest levels and hidden from public view. When the National Socialist Underground (NSU) shot Halit Yozgat in April 2006 in the city of Kassel, an agent of the state Verfassungschutz (State Office for the Protection of the Constitution), Andreas Temme, was personally present. An internal report on the NSU findings by the Hesse intelligence service has been sealed to the public for the next 30 years.

The 2019 murder of District President Walter Lübcke (Christian Democrats, CDU) in the city of Kassel is likewise far from resolved. Just like the Hanau murders, it is portrayed as the work of a “lone wolf” perpetrator, the fascist Stephan Ernst.

Hate mail from the organization NSU 2.0, threatening representatives of left-wing politics and culture currently being adjudicated at the regional court in Frankfurt, are being dealt with in a similar manner. The only person accused is 54-year-old Alexander M. from Berlin, also called a “lone wolf” perpetrator. Minister of the Interior Peter Beuth (CDU) claims: “Hessian police officers were at no time senders or participants in the NSU 2.0 threat mail series.” This is a proven lie. Less than an hour before the lawyer Seda Başay-Yildiz received the first threatening letter, there had been no less than 17 queries from three databases from a service computer in the 1st Police Station in Frankfurt.

In the case of the Hanau murders, Interior Minister Beuth also explicitly praised the “professional work” of the police on the night of the crime. However, in June 2021, the same interior minister had to disband the elite unit of the Frankfurt police (Specaleinsatzkommando, SEK) because at least 20 of its officers had frequented chats with right-wing extremist content, where they had shared Nazi symbols and agitated against civilians. Thirteen officers of this SEK unit were on duty and on the scene in Hanau on the night of the crime.

Russia sends troops into East Ukraine, Biden announces sanctions

Clara Weiss

Events in the war crisis over Ukraine between Russia and NATO overtook each other on Monday. The day began with news that two reconnaissance-sabotage units of the Ukrainian army had crossed into Russia’s Rostov region and ended with Russian President Vladimir Putin ordering Russian troops to enter the East Ukrainian separatist republics of Donetsk and Lugansk which he had just recognized as “independent.”

Members of the 82nd Airborne Division of the U.S. Army clean weaponry ahead of deployment to Poland from Fort Bragg, N.C. on Monday, Feb. 14, 2022. (AP Photo/Nathan Posner)

Amid a barrage of war propaganda in the Western media and belligerent speeches by US President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, fighting between the American-funded Ukrainian army and pro-Russian separatists in the East Ukrainian Donbass has escalated since Thursday. There have been thousands of violations of the ceasefire that was brokered in 2015.

The civil war erupted in the wake of the February 2014 coup in Kiev, which had been heavily funded and backed by the US and was effectively carried out by far-right forces like the Right Sector and the Azov Battalion. The conflict has already claimed over 14,000 lives and left at least 3.5 million people in need of humanitarian assistance—almost a tenth of Ukraine’s population.

Since Thursday, civilian infrastructure across Donetsk, including kindergartens and schools, has been subject to shelling. According to the separatists in Donetsk, one civilian was killed in Monday’s shelling by the Ukrainian military.

On Friday, separatists in Donetsk and Lugansk initiated the mass evacuation of the civilian population to Russia, excluding men aged 18 to 55. So far, at least 49,000 people have reportedly arrived in Russia, most of them in the Rostov region. Kilometer-long lines of cars waiting to cross the border have been reported since Friday.

Up to 700,000 women, children and elderly people may be evacuated from Donetsk alone. With most of these people already completely impoverished before they were forced to flee, they are now faced with the loss of virtually all of their belongings and a catastrophic social and public health situation in Russia, where over 150,000 new COVID-cases are being reported every single day.

As the fighting continued to escalate over the weekend, the separatist authorities called upon all men capable of carrying arms to take weapons into their hands.

On Monday afternoon Moscow time, it was reported that the Russian secret service FSB, along with troops from the interior ministry, opened fire and killed five Ukrainian soldiers, while taking one captive. Russian news had also reported on Friday that Ukrainian bombshells had exploded in Rostov near the border with Ukraine.

Also on Monday afternoon, Putin convened an extraordinary session of Russia’s National Security Council, arguing that the situation in the Donbass had become “critical.” The meeting was also attended by the heads of the separatist so called “People’s republics” of Donetsk (DNR) and Lugansk (LNR). Both were formed by pro-Russian separatists in the wake of the 2014 coup in Kiev. At the meeting, one leading Russian official after another argued in favor of Russian recognition of these republics as “independent.”

Late Monday evening Moscow time, Putin gave an hour-long address to the nation. Beginning with an anticommunist tirade in which he denounced the 1917 October Revolution and claimed that Ukraine was a “creation” of “Bolshevik, Communist Russia,” Putin devoted much of the speech to glorifying the Tsarist Russian Empire and various Tsarist generals.

He pointed to the systematic encirclement of Russia by NATO, complaining that US President Bill Clinton responded “extremely coolly” when he asked him in 2000 whether or not the US would support Russia’s accession to NATO. The Russian president then discussed at length the implications of the US-backed coup of 2014 for Russia, which, in his words, had turned Ukraine de facto into a “colony” and “puppet” of the US.

Putin noted that Ukraine’s adoption of a new military strategy in March 2021 meant that the country was openly preparing for war with Russia. With the US and NATO ignoring Russia’s demands for security guarantees and de facto arming Ukraine, Russia, he said, had a “knife at its throat.” Putin also alleged that a “genocide” against Russians was taking place in East Ukraine and argued that the Kiev government has de facto ignored the Minsk Agreements of 2015.

On that basis, Putin claimed that recognizing the separatist territories of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Lugansk “People’s republics” was the only way to safeguard Russia’s security interests.

Right after the speech, Putin signed two decrees recognizing the DNR and LNR as “independent” and calling for the preparation of treaties of friendship between the republics and Russia. The decrees also stated that, until such an agreement would be signed, the Russian Ministry of Defense would provide troops to both republics “to safeguard peace.” Shortly thereafter, Putin gave the order to send Russian troops into Donetsk and Lugansk.

Putin’s speech led to the most severe collapse on the Russian stock market—by over 14 percent—since the 2008 world financial crisis. Since Monday was a holiday in the US, most of the sell-off was driven by European and regional, including Russian, investors. Some of Russia’s biggest companies and banks, including the state-owned oil company Rosneft and Sberbank, lost between 21 and 25 percent of their value. On international markets, the Brent oil price rose above $97 per barrel, the highest price since 2014.

US President Biden immediately denounced Putin’s move as a violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and signed a decree prohibiting any trade with the DNR and LNR. In the decree, he described the recognition of the DNR and LNR as an “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.” Everyone who engages in trade with or donates to the authorities of the DNR and LNR will henceforth be banned from entering the US.

So far, the Houthi rebels in Yemen, who have been engaged in a year-long civil war with US-backed Saudi Arabia, have endorsed Russia’s recognition of the DNR and LNR. Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega indicated that he supported Putin’s decision but has not officially recognized the separatist republics.

US officials announced that more sanctions will be forthcoming on Tuesday. The EU and UK also announced severe sanctions, as did Japan and Australia.

In a brief address to the nation, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, who had already spoken with Biden, claimed, in clear defiance of his government’s saber rattling and official military strategy, that it was only interested in “peace.” He insisted that Putin’s recognition of the DNR and LNR constituted a threat to Ukraine’s territorial integrity and that Ukraine was entitled to “self-defense” under these conditions.

Monday’s escalation comes after weeks in which the US and NATO recklessly ratcheted up tensions with Russia, including by sending 5,000 troops of the 82nd Airborne Division to Poland and 300 Javelin missiles to Ukraine, and unleashing a torrent of war propaganda in the media.

The unfolding war crisis is the culmination of the decades-long effort to encircle Russia and subjugate the entire former Soviet Union as part of the attempts of US imperialism to maintain its global hegemony.

Fundamentally, the drive to war is rooted in the decline of US imperialism and the profound crisis of the world capitalist system, which has been severely accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Sitting on top of a social powder keg, the US ruling class, in particular, has been driven into a war frenzy, desperate to find a path to divert the immense social tensions outward and close ranks within the ruling class.

The dynamics unleashed by these processes are rapidly spinning out of control. In its statement from February 14, the International Committee warned, “War with Russia in Ukraine, however it begins or whatever the course of its initial stages, will not be contained. It will follow an uncontrollably expansive logic. Every state in the region will be drawn into the conflict. The Black Sea, which laps across the shoreline of seven countries, will be transformed into a cauldron of escalating conflict, sweeping across Transcaucasia, the Caspian Sea region, Central Asia and beyond.”

Johnson government adopts “dying with COVID” strategy for the UK

Thomas Scripps

Britain’s government has finalised its “living with COVID” strategy. Speaking to parliament yesterday, Prime Minister Boris Johnson made clear this should properly be called a plan for workers “dying with COVID”. He announced:

• From today, the end of guidance that school staff and students test twice weekly.
• From this Thursday, the end of the legal requirement to self-isolate after a positive test, routine contact tracing and self-isolation support payments.
• From March 24, the end of COVID sick pay provisions.
• From April 1, the end of free testing for the general public.

Every word uttered in defence of this murderous policy is based on a lie. Johnson told the BBC on Sunday, “We are now one step closer towards a return to normality and finally giving people back their freedoms while continuing to protect ourselves and others.”

Prime Minister Boris Johnson (centre) speaking at Monday's Downing Street press conference with (right) Sir Chris Whitty and (left) Sir Patrick Vallance (screenshot from video/Boris Johnson/Twitter)

The Conservative government’s strategy is based on the removal of all protections and will not lead to “normality”.

Scientific Advisory Group on Emergencies (SAGE) member Professor Robert West told Times Radio that the government had decided to “abdicate its own responsibility for looking after its population,” adding, “It looks as though what the Government has said is that it accepts that the country is going to have to live with somewhere between 20,000 and 80,000 COVID deaths a year and isn’t really going to do anything about it.”

Medium-term scenarios outlined on February 10 by SAGE in a universally ignored briefing raise even graver concerns. Professor Maggie Rae, President of the Faculty of Public Health, called the ending of free testing “incomprehensible”. There is no sound scientific or medical basis for the government’s policy.

Johnson blurted out his real motivation in his BBC interview. “We need people to be much more confident and get back to work… We don’t need to keep spending at a rate of £2 billion a month [on testing].”

The super-rich view any public health response to the pandemic as a state-subsidised interruption of the flow of profits, which must end. Their “new normal” does not mean doing away with the virus, but with the victims of the virus who will be forcibly exposed to COVID-19 in their workplaces.

The “work till you drop” drive has reached such a pitch that Britain’s 95-year-old monarch has been enlisted as the royal face of the campaign. “Queen vows to carry on working with Covid,” cheered the Daily Telegraph; “Queen, 95, hit by Covid… but she vows to work on,” the Sun; the Mirror reported, “Queen gets Covid but she carries on”; the Metro ran the inevitable “Queen keeps calm and carries on”; and the Daily Mail touted “Queen’s Covid example to us all”.

The boardrooms and their media outposts have worked themselves into such a frenzy that no one in the corporate media has asked whether risking the life of the head of the British state at a time of extreme political crisis, including within the monarchy, is a good idea.

The second lie is that COVID-19 can now be managed by, in Johnson’s words, “encouraging personal responsibility.” He added cynically, “It’s very important we should remain careful”.

How, exactly? Interviewed on Sky News yesterday, Business Minister Paul Scully said that for people who contracted COVID, “like any transmissible illness you’d stay at home… but it’ll be down to themselves or down to their employer.” In fact, it will be entirely “down to their employer” with workers doubly pressured by having no access to even limited sickness and self-isolation payments.

Without free testing, moreover, most people will have no way of knowing whether or not they even have a COVID infection. The virus will be allowed to run rampant.

Enter the third lie, that the combination of the Omicron variant and the vaccination programme have ended any serious threat from COVID. The UK is “in a different world,” Johnson said Sunday. “I want to be able to address the problems of the pandemic with a vaccine-led approach.”

It is Johnson and his supporters that are living “in a different world” or trying to sell the myth of one. Omicron is still taking a significant toll on health and lives, with the long-term implications still unknown. Vaccinations, a vital tool in the fight against COVID-19, are being continually undermined by the removal of other public health measures, allowing the virus to circulate and new variants to develop.

As the government’s Chief Scientific Officer Sir Patrick Vallance admitted yesterday, there is “no guarantee” that the next variants will be less severe. “We expect there to be further variants and they could be more severe.”

More than 1,000 cases of the more transmissible BA.2 subvariant of Omicron had already been detected in the UK by the start of this month. Preliminary results from a study at the University of Tokyo suggest it may be more severe and resistant to treatments. Deltacron, a hybrid of the more deadly Delta and Omicron variants, has also been confirmed in the UK.

Even with additional shots, immunity from vaccination is waning. A recent study of triple-jabbed people by the US Centre for Disease Control found that protection against hospitalisation fell from 91 percent during the first two months to 78 percent after four. For protection against visits to urgent care and emergency departments, it fell from 87 percent to 66 percent. After more than five months, effectiveness fell to 31 percent, though the researchers note the estimate was “imprecise because few data were available”.

Plans for a fourth jab in the UK, announced by Health Secretary Sajid Javid yesterday, are being limited to people aged 75 and over, the immunosuppressed and residents in old age care homes.

As SAGE advisor Professor West told Times Radio he would be “very surprised” if the “living with COVID” strategy would be cost effective, given the economic costs of Long COVID and hospital admissions. But this underestimates the brutality of what is planned.

From the beginning, the government’s preferred “herd immunity” policy has been to trade the lives of the old and the clinically vulnerable off against the profits of the rich. Its attacks on social security payments and underfunding of the National Health Service show it has no intention of caring for the aged and infirm. Seeing them die is seen as a positive boon, as Johnson made clear in October 2020 with his infamous declaration, “No more fucking lockdowns. Let the bodies pile high in their thousands!”

Johnson is given a free hand to act by the Labour Party and the trade unions. He made his statement to a parliamentary chamber that looked half asleep.

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer raised some pro-forma concerns, to be forgotten in a week’s time, advancing Labour’s obscenely-named plan to “live well with COVID”, framed as a more responsible version of the government’s policy. He said, in reference to testing, “If you’re 2-1 up with ten minutes to go you don’t sub off one of your best defenders.”

The UK is not “2-1 up”, it is 180,000 lives down.

Trades Union Congress General Secretary Frances O’Grady agreed with Johnson, that “We are all looking forward to getting on with our lives,” before appealing to his criminal government to “put the country and public health first” by maintaining free tests and improving sick pay. This is something neither she nor any union leader has any intention of fighting for.

Johnson’s announcement applies specifically to England, with the devolved governments of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland following their own timescales. But whatever political points they try to score today over the Tories, they will follow suit in short order, as they have done throughout the pandemic.

UK higher education workers continue strikes over pensions, pay and conditions

Robert Stevens

Over 50,000 higher education (HE) workers are continuing strikes this week, with two days of action Monday and Tuesday. The action began on February 14 with a five-day strike.

Staff are fighting attempts by university management to cut their already devalued pensions by another 35 percent. The cuts are on top of £240,000 already lost from the average lecturer’s retirement income over the past decade.

The wages of higher education lecturers have collapsed. This week the University and College Union (UCU) noted that with the retail price index measure of inflation now at 7.8 percent, staff pay has fallen by more than a quarter (25.5 percent) in real terms since 2009.

Lecturers are also fighting insecure employment contracts, unmanageable workloads and pay inequality. The union notes, “Over 70,000 academics are employed on insecure contracts. The gender pay gap in UK universities sits at 16%, whilst the disability pay gap is 9% and the race pay gap is up to 17%.”

The Universities and Colleges Employers Association, are offering a well below inflation pay offer of 1.5 percent on existing salaries for 2021/22.

The picket line at the University of Glasgow (WSWS Media)

There has been solid backing for the strike, under conditions where the UK has suffered three nationwide storms during the first week of action. This determination to fight is in sharp contrast to the UCU bureaucracy who have done everything to curtail action from the outset and want nothing more than to see it ended with a rotten sell-out.

The UCU has divided the strike into separate disputes, with last weeks’ five-day strike over pensions only. This week, while expanding the strike from 44 universities participating to 68, over both the pension and pay cuts, action is reduced to just 48 hours. Next week, staff at 68 universities are striking for three days (February 28 to March 2) only over pay.

The 68 universities involved are attended by over 1 million students. But no joint action with students has been organised, except on the very last day of strikes on March 2, with a 'student strike for education' called by the National Union of Students.

The UCU’s real agenda despite having a mandate to strike throughout the whole of March to May 6, is to end the dispute for good as early as possible. In response to a provocation by six universities—prompted by the Universities and Colleges Employers’ Association—docking strikers pay by 100 percent, and others saying there would be partial reductions for staff engaging in action short of a strike, the UCU ensured that no industrial action was taken.

Strikers rally on Monday at the University of Leeds (WSWS Media)

Several branches voted to strike. Alarmed that the strike could then spread out of their control, the UCU bureaucracy intervened and said that instead of immediate strikes being called, staff at the universities involved should instead declare yet another separate dispute. The UCU imposed this diktat, fully aware that anti-strike laws mean that organising a strike ballot and giving the employers the necessary notice would take months, by which time this term would be over.

In a desperate attempt to avert strike action in a sector of the economy that UCU General Secretary Jo Grady noted received income worth almost £41 billion, she sent a desperate letter to Universities UK CEO Alistair Jarvis aimed at “averting widespread industrial action”. This was based on promising “a serious compromise on the part of UCU and its membership”.

The UCU proposals include increasing maximum employee contributions from 9.6 percent to 11 percent in April, along with an increase in employer contributions, until a new valuation of the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS) scheme, involving riskier and higher return investments, can be issued in June. The £82 billion Universities Superannuation Scheme is the UK’s largest private pension fund by assets.

As last week’s strike ended, Grady took to the pages of the mouthpiece of the City of London, the Financial Times. She complained that despite the UCU’s best efforts, “we do not believe UUK [Universities UK] are serious about reaching a resolution. When UCU submitted its first set of proposals last summer, employers opposed even a small increase in their own contributions and refused to underwrite our suggested payments adequately.”

Grady continued, “now, UUK seem to be guiding employers to reject our latest, pragmatic attempt to resolve the dispute. In new proposals that mark a significant compromise from our members, UCU is calling for a sensible, evidence-based valuation of the scheme’s financial health as of 31 March 2022 and small one-year contribution increases for both members and employers to protect benefits…”

She pleaded, “We would like to avoid more disruptive strike action…”

Strikers on the picket line at the University of Leeds (WSWS Media)

No appeal is being made to students or other education workers. As one striking lecturer told WSWS reporters this week, “I think the marketisation of higher education is the biggest part of the picture of what we are fighting against and that’s why we should find solidarity with the students because they are those paying the cost of this marketisation.”

Instead, the UCU has launched an e-mail campaign urging its members, “If your institution is one of the 44 where strike action is taking place by UCU members over the devastating proposed 35% cuts to their hard-earned pensions, please email your [Vice Chancellor]/principal and urge them to engage with UCU.”

Another plea was made Monday ahead of further talks between the UCU and the UUK being held today at the Joint Negotiating Committee. This was after being told last week by the employers that they would tolerate only a tiny extra 0.3 percentage points in terms of contributions they will pay towards pensions. Employers also insist that inflation-linked annual increases to pensions be capped at a maximum of 2.5 percent, even if CPI inflation-the lowest measure of inflation—is above 2.5 percent. The employers also demand that the application of that cap is deferred until 2025.

The union said, “The JNC has until Monday 28 February to determine what changes to make to the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS) pension. UCU has submitted compromise proposals that were confirmed as implementable by the USS trustee which runs the scheme. UUK must decide whether to push ahead with cuts of 35% to university staff's guaranteed retirement income or whether it is willing to work with UCU and resolve the pension dispute.”

This has only one endgame: another serious defeat for higher education workers which will have major ramifications for workers everywhere as the Johnson government ends all COVID restrictions and escalates its offensive against pensions, pay, terms and conditions.

Damning Auditor General report exposes failure of Canada’s government to protect migrant farm workers from COVID-19

Talia Brown

The death of an unidentified farm worker from Jamaica last month, who perished while in mandatory isolation of COVID-19 in Southwestern Ontario without receiving any treatment, reveals once again that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government has done nothing to improve the dangerous conditions that temporary migrant workers confront. On the contrary, the terrible living and working conditions faced by this particularly oppressed section of the working class have continued to deteriorate since the onset of the pandemic.

Farm Workers [credit: USDA]

A damning report prepared by the Auditor General (AG) of Canada published in early December 2021 details how inspectors working for Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC), a federal agency, have been largely negligent in their inquiries over new pandemic regulations designed to protect workers from COVID-19 on Canadian farms.

The report highlights several alarming aspects, such as the evident lack of supervision of investigators, including both federal employees and contractors, and the lack of professional expertise from the investigators, with many having no serious training provided and barely six months of professional experience. The report also questions the quality, relevance and veracity of information gathered amid budget cuts at the ESDC.

From March 2020 to June 2021, more than 79,000 workers arrived to work in Canada’s agricultural sector under the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP), which oversees the hiring of cheap labor from poorer countries by farm owners. The majority of workers on the SAWP are from Mexico and other Caribbean and South American countries. The terms of the SAWP are akin to modern-day indentured servitude, with a worker’s right to remain in Canada dependent upon them retaining their job with a specified employer. SAWP participants have virtually no hope of ever obtaining permanent residency to live in Canada, even after many years of hard labour.

Many long-standing problems for migrant workers were exacerbated by the pandemic. These include a lack of proper housing, delays in wage payments, no substantial legal rights, no medical protection amid a pandemic, and the threat of being deported to their country if they speak up about unsafe working conditions. Communal living arrangements, poor sanitary conditions, and a general disregard for the well-being of the workers combined to create a significantly higher risk of COVID-19 transmission among migrant workers.

In response to a public outcry over the high number of outbreaks on Canadian farms and the death of three migrant workers documented in a series of news reports, the Trudeau government promised a thorough investigation on farm work conditions. In July 2020, it made available over $16 million to ESDC, supposedly to strengthen its inspection regime. The AG’s report makes clear that no improvements in fact took place.

Since March 2020, all inspections have been conducted virtually and relied solely on the employers submitting pictures and videos of their facilities, as well as interviews with workers. The report notes that the problems were so troubling that the AG’s office decided to prolong its oversight into 2021. While the AG found that 73 percent of the quarantine inspections it examined in 2020 were deficient, this figure rose to 88 percent in 2021.

The list of failures by the ESDC is long. The report notes, among other things, that inspections “lacked the diligence and urgency that were needed in light of both the pandemic circumstances and the department’s own policies.”

Some of the report’s most damning findings include:

• Even though “poor-quality evidence or no evidence was collected” in most inspections, “the department assessed almost all employers as compliant with the COVID-19 requirements.” ESDC bureaucrats even gave employers a passing grade in the 16 percent of reports that discovered evidence of a violation of pandemic regulations.
• When COVID-19 outbreaks were identified on farms, the AG found inspections were initiated quickly, “but were inactive for long periods.” The report cites an example where during an interview with the inspector, the employer said they were not offering separate accommodation for workers who tested positive, and that both infected and non-infected workers were sharing a bathroom and a kitchen. After learning this, the ESDC investigator “did not follow up on corrective measures for more than one month.”
• The AG found no evidence that inspectors had acted to address concerns raised by workers, including when some workers complained to the department that they had no access to food while in isolation.

Working under the direct order of the ESDC, the inspectors’ botched work is the direct result of the indifference of the Trudeau government towards the highly exploited migrant workers who are utilized as a disposable workforce to enrich big agricultural companies. The fact that the situation worsened during the reporting period shows how employers can continue to flout health rules with impunity, keep workers in poor living conditions and impose abusive working arrangements on them.

Significantly, the AG report may be incomplete because an important portion of contract employees belonging to the audit service went on strike last year to demand better salary conditions and a pay grid system.

Syed Hussan, executive director of the advocacy group Migrant Workers for Change, sharply criticized the ESDC following the AG’s report. He said the report is “deeply, deeply concerning,” but not all that surprising. “The auditor general is saying what we already know — inspections cannot and will not protect migrant farm workers,” Hussan declared in an interview with CBC News, adding, “ESDC was not created to protect migrant farm workers. It was created to ensure a steady supply of cheap labour.”

The horrendous conditions faced by migrant workers is just one example of the criminal disregard shown by the ruling elite towards workers’ lives since the beginning of the pandemic. Employers, with the full approval of governments and the support of the trade unions, have enforced a continuation of business as usual with totally inadequate public health measures in order to safeguard corporate profits. At the request of the financial oligarchy, governments have reopened schools, universities and workplaces prematurely, leading to wave after wave of infections and death.

The Trudeau government reacted to the AG report with empty promises that it will listen to the office’s recommendations. Employment Minister Carla Qualtrough, who is responsible for ESDC, pledged to “rebuild” the temporary foreign worker inspection program and do more to support the inspectors tasked with carrying out this work in the future. “Rest assured, we’ll do better,” she claimed.

In truth, the past two years have provided ample proof that the Trudeau government represents the interests of the financial and corporate elite and has no intention of improving the safety and living conditions of migrant workers. Over recent weeks, the Trudeau government has endorsed the scrapping of almost all COVID-19 public health measures by provincial governments from coast to coast, helping implement the program of the far-right Freedom Convoy. This is paving the way for a resurgence of infections just as thousands of migrant workers arrive in the coming weeks for the new growing season.

The Trudeau government’s “pro-refugee” and “pro-migrant” pretensions have been thoroughly exposed. In the latest example of its indifference to the plight of refugees fleeing poverty and oppression, Trudeau’s Liberals concluded a deal with the Biden administration to close a loophole in the Safe Third Country Agreement with the United States in order to prevent refugees from crossing the Canada-US border outside of official checkpoints.

Meanwhile, the unions are doing nothing to defend migrant workers. In response to the Auditor General’s report, the United Food and Commercial Workers union (UFCW) issued a pro forma communique filled with platitudes and a clear indication that it would do nothing to improve working conditions, other than pleading uselessly to the Trudeau government to do more.

US Centers for Disease Control withheld critical statistics on COVID-19 for more than a year

Benjamin Mateus

On Sunday, the New York Times reported that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has been withholding the publication of critical data that could have helped local and state public health departments better target their responses to stem infections and protect lives.

Students and parents walk to class at Tussahaw Elementary school on Wednesday, Aug. 4, 2021 [Credit: AP Photo/Brynn Anderson]

Instead, they have been cherry-picking vital information to present an upbeat assessment of the state of the pandemic, which has only further endangered lives in the process.

The author of the report, Apoorva Mandavilli, wrote, “Two full years into the pandemic, the agency leading the country’s response to the public health emergency has published only a tiny fraction of the data it has collected, several people familiar with the data said.”

Omitted from publication included data on the effectiveness of boosters in adults under 65. Without the data, health experts had to turn to international sources such as Israel to recommend the third shot. However, Israel’s definition of severe disease differs from that used in the US. (In Israel, a person with rapid breathing and oxygen levels below 94 percent is considered to have a severe illness, while the CDC reserves that category for anyone who is sick enough to need hospitalization.)

Also, the social dynamics of the two countries—public health initiatives, state of the health care infrastructure, therapeutics, etc.—are dissimilar, meaning the best decisions can only be made by using real-time data available for the region.

The Washington Post, also reporting on the CDC’s remarkable negligence, said that on July 12, 2021, Pfizer scientists had met with senior US government health officials to explain that their rationale for booster shots was based on data from Israel that showed immunity to the vaccines waned quickly, especially among the elderly and immunocompromised. The CDC indicated their “data showed something quite different.”

The Post wrote, “Other senior health officials in the meeting were stunned. Why hadn’t the CDC looped other government officials on the data? Could the agency share it—at least with the Food and Drug Administration, which was responsible for deciding whether booster shots were necessary? But CDC officials demurred, saying they planned to publish it soon.”

A month later, reports published in the US corroborated the Israeli data.

It is more likely the CDC had siloed and forgotten the information, choosing to ignore its implications and leading to the backpedaling the Post describes. But it further confirms that the CDC has become deeply enmeshed in political decisions to control the flow of scientific information to the public. The deliberate intent is science conforms to policy rather than shaping it.

Other vital data left out that has only recently been published included information on hospitalizations and death by age and vaccinations status, including breakthrough infections rates that could have warned the public about the rapid decline in vaccine effectiveness.

Another glaring omission has been data derived from wastewater surveillance across the country that could identify emerging COVID-19 hot spots and new variants. It was more than a year ago the CDC had established its National Wastewater Surveillance System. Early this month, the agency added wastewater data to its COVID-19 trackers, providing a broad perspective on the surge of infections across hundreds of communities.

CDC spokeswoman Kristen Nordlund told the Times, “The agency has been slow to release the different streams of data because basically, at the end of the day, it’s not yet ready for prime time. [The agency’s] priority when gathering any data is to ensure that it’s accurate and actionable.”

The pandemic has demonstrated that the CDC cannot handle large volumes of data while operating under political oversight. There are grave dangers to the population when the premier public health authority is unable to provide timely and vital information on the status of this or any other epidemic.

Nordlund let it be known that the agency was reluctant to share efficacy information on the vaccines with the public “because they might be misinterpreted as the vaccines being ineffective,” the Times wrote. She also said that the data represented only a small percentage of the population, which is a devious attempt to sidestep the issue.

Epidemiologists and scientists frequently utilize limited but broadly applicable data to address critical and pressing questions. The CDC had no problem generalizing that COVID-19 had little impact on school-aged children using limited data obtained from a single school or district, much that is untenable even for the CDC.

These developments are significant. Hospitals are no longer required to report real-time data on COVID-19, specifically deaths, to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), relying on the CDC to update these statistics.

As children were facing a deluge of infections due to a concerted national effort to force teachers back to the classrooms and schools be opened regardless of the cost or impact on communities, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), which has been substituting as a reliable source on COVID-19 infections among children, was repeatedly asking the CDC on the granular data relating to hospitalized children. They were told it was unavailable.

Since the pandemic began, according to the limited data available on the CDC’s COVID-19 tracker, at least 1,346 children have died. Those under five make up the largest subgroup, with 434 total deaths. According to the AAP, approximately 60 percent of all child deaths occurred in the last six months. Between January 25, 2022, and February 19, 2022, 219 children died, of whom 74 (one-third) were under five. By contrast, the influenza virus has killed fewer than five children in the last two years.

Early in the pandemic, several international studies pointed to the importance of schools and children as vectors of community transmission for the coronavirus. Many principled researchers and epidemiologists defied the official pretense that children were neither impacted nor very contagious when infected. Yet, the CDC has repeatedly taken the baseless position that children are “essentially immune to the disease” and has put children in harm’s way.

Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, chair of the AAP’s Committee on Infectious Disease, speaking with the Times, said she had also repeatedly asked the CDC for an estimate on the contagiousness of a person infected with the coronavirus five days after symptoms begin. She said, “They’ve [CDC] known this for over a year and a half, right, and they haven’t told us. I mean, you can’t find out anything from them.”

Due to the massive surge of infections caused by the Omicron variant, instead of calling for an immediate shutdown and the application of stringent mitigation measures, the CDC simply shortened their isolation period to five days, claiming there was a sound scientific basis for their decision.

In late December, when the guidance was issued, Yonatan Grad, an associate professor of immunology and infectious diseases at Harvard’s School of Public Health, declared, “To me, this feels honestly more about economics than about the science. I suspect what it will do is result in at least some people emerging from isolation more quickly, and so there’ll be more opportunities for transmission, and that, of course, will accelerate the spread of COVID-19.”

Later, a human challenge trial based in the UK, where healthy volunteers were purposely infected with the coronavirus to provide the basis for future studies to test new vaccines and therapeutics, found that symptoms started within two days. Viral load increased rapidly, peaking after five days. Many still had high levels of active virus 10 days, and some 12 days following infection. And yet, the CDC director told health care workers that they didn’t have to isolate if they had the sniffles. This week she claimed it was essential to give people a “break from masks” even as new subvariants of Omicron are accelerating in the US.

Aside from the death of hundreds of children, even the CDC has had to acknowledge the catastrophic loss of life sustained in the US over the last two years. More than 80 million have reportedly been infected. Over 960,000 have died from COVID-19. Excess deaths are 15 to 35 percent higher than the officially recorded COVID-19 deaths. Close to 2,000 people die each day of COVID-19, but even these horrific figures are in question. How many more deaths are we no longer tracking?

These revelations mean that the CDC and the head of the agency, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, are complicit in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.