Pakistan’s Supreme Court orders no-confidence vote, paving way for change in government

Sampath Perera

Pakistan’s Supreme Court has ordered parliament to meet Saturday and remain in session until a vote on an opposition motion of “no-confidence” in Prime Minister Imran Khan and his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI)-led government is concluded.

Pakistan's Prime Minister Imran Khan, center, arrives to attend a military parade to mark Pakistan National Day, in Islamabad, Pakistan, Wednesday, March 23, 2022. (AP Photo/Anjum Naveed)

According to all reports, the motion is all but certain to pass. Such an outcome would legally compel Khan and his cabinet to resign, paving the way for the opposition parties to form an alternate government, which would aim to hold office until the next regularly scheduled general election in 2023.

With the military, the power behind the throne in Pakistani capitalist politics, signaling that it no longer supports Khan, the government has suffered significant defections in recent days. Both PTI coalition partners and PTI legislators have crossed over to the opposition.

The National Assembly had been due to act on the opposition no-confidence motion last Sunday, April 3. However, capping weeks of desperate manoeuvres to prevent a vote or exclude those who had defected from the government from participating, Khan prevailed on Deputy Speaker Qasim Khan Suri, a staunch Khan loyalist, to void the motion and shut down parliament. Khan then instructed the largely ceremonial president, Arif Alvi, to dissolve parliament and call a snap election. But the PTI leader retained his full powers as Prime Minister pending the setting of an election date and the formation of an interim election-campaign government.

Suri justified his suppression of the opposition motion—on the face of it a flagrant violation of basic constitutional norms—by claiming Khan and his government were the victim of a “foreign conspiracy.” This only echoed the assertions of Khan, including in a televised address to the nation, that a foreign power—understood to be the United States—is determined to remove him from office.

Over the course of four days last week, a five-judge bench of the Supreme Court heard the petitions from the opposition parties challenging the legality of Deputy Speaker Suri’s actions.

In a short ruling issued Friday evening, the court unanimously declared Suri’s voiding of the no confidence motion “contrary to the Constitution and the law and of no legal effect.” It further declared parliament “to have been in existence at all times, and continues to remain and be so,” thereby annulling the presidential dissolution order. Making clear that no further delay in acting on the opposition’s no-confidence motion should be brooked, the court stipulated parliament must meet no later than 10.30am on Saturday and remain in session until the vote on the motion is taken.

The Supreme Court ruling has received enthusiastic backing from the establishment press, further indicating Khan’s loss of support within the capitalist elite. In an editorial highly critical of Khan, Dawn, the country’s most-widely read English daily, welcomed the court ruling, which it said had “defeated a most egregious assault on the country’s democratic order.”

The political-constitutional donnybrook in Islamabad is unfolding amid a massive economic crisis that compelled the Khan government to again seek International Monetary Fund (IMF) support at the beginning of the year and has fueled seething popular anger over soaring inflation, mass joblessness and endemic poverty.

As of April 1, the country’s foreign reserves had declined to $11.3 billion, which is not even sufficient to pay the country’s import bill for the next two months. Yet the IMF has announced that it will halt its bailout program until a new government is formed and presumably recommits to the massive austerity program the PTI coalition government agreed to implement.

The COVID-19 pandemic and now the NATO-Russia war over Ukraine have dealt body-blows to an already crippled economy.

Pakistan’s central bank has said inflation in March was higher than expected, acknowledging a major spike in the cost of food, diesel and other essentials. Persistent double-digit inflation has already substantially increased food insecurity across the country, including among salaried workers. As part of the IMF bailout package, subsidies have been slashed and sales taxes, whose burden fall far heaviest on working people and the poor, hiked.

The economic crisis, coupled with the government’s privatization and austerity policies and its ruinous mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic, have drastically eroded the popular support for Khan and his PTI.

Prior to coming to power, Khan had demagogically denounced his opponents’ repeated implementation of IMF austerity and “structural readjustment” programs. But once in office, he quickly reneged on his claim he would never turn to the IMF and has worked with it to impose the full burden of the country’s economic crisis on the backs of the masses.

Khan’s indifference to the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic worsened the already unbearable living conditions for the vast majority of the population. His government has only officially acknowledged 30,361 pandemic deaths. A study published in the medical journal The Lancet in March estimated the true death toll to be more than 664,000.

The opposition parties are exploiting the mounting popular anger against Khan. Moreover, the Islamabad elite is aware of the increasing danger that the simmering popular anger erupting against the government could rapidly develop into an open rebellion against the utterly corrupt political establishment as a whole. Sections of the ruling elite are no doubt following the emergence of mass protests in Sri Lanka with increasing alarm.

Ultimately, however, it is the military, the real powerbroker in Islamabad, which has directly ruled the country for over half of its existence and controls its foreign and security policy, that is playing the decisive role in the almost certain ouster of Khan. Two main issues are at stake in the power struggle unfolding in Islamabad.

The opposition campaign, which is led by the PML-N and PPP, the two parties that dominated parliamentary politics from the late 1980s to Khan’s election in 2018, is animated by more than just lust for pelf and power. Large sections of the ruling class have concluded that Khan is incapable of implementing highly unpopular policies dictated by the IMF. After Khan attempted to slash prices of fuel and electricity to placate growing mass anger, the IMF criticized the government’s “one step forward, two steps back” approach in March. Khan had just received a $1 billion loan tranche in February. Khan’s critics fear that the country’s economy will be in freefall if it fails to secure IMF support.

Secondly, serious differences over foreign policy are being bitterly fought out in Islamabad. Khan’s professed policy of “neutrality” in the US-NATO war with Russia over Ukraine has been sharply condemned by the US and other Western powers and opposed by the Pakistani military.

Addressing a security conference in Islamabad on April 2, the day before parliament was originally to debate the no-confidence motion, the Army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa contradicted Khan. “Sadly, the Russian invasion against Ukraine is very unfortunate,” Bajwa said. “Despite legitimate security concerns of Russia, its aggression against a smaller country cannot be condoned.”

The military top brass hope to patch up Pakistan’s seriously frayed relations with the US, which have deteriorated sharply over recent years as Washington has made India—Pakistan’s regional rival—a frontline state in its diplomatic, military, and economic offensive against China. Pakistan’s military believes it can take advantage of India’s significant economic and military dependence on Russia to present Islamabad as a more dependable ally to the US than Delhi.

Broad sections of Pakistan’s elite, which have found themselves ever more economically reliant on China under conditions in which Washington has made India its principal South Asian ally, are hoping to restore some type of precarious balance in its relations with its two principal traditional partners.

After the vote on the no-confidence motion was scheduled, Khan publicly accused the US of demanding his ouster. He stated that a diplomatic communication in Washington he received through his ambassador warned of “dire consequences across the world” for Pakistan if he is not voted down in the parliament. There is no doubt Washington would welcome his ouster. However, Khan’s rage did not extend to the military establishment that was clearly opposing his foreign policy and tacitly allowing the challenge of the opposition to gain steam.

The military has a long history of close ties to Washington and the Pentagon that were always separate from the relations of the civilian government with the US. The military is widely acknowledged to have orchestrated Khan’s 2018 election victory from behind the scenes, but later distanced itself from the government, especially over the past year.

Sixth wave of pandemic underway in Canada as governments dismantle COVID reporting and last protective measures

Dylan Lubao

All signs point to Canada being in the midst of a developing sixth wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, triggered by the emergence of the BA.2 subvariant of Omicron and fueled by government let-it-rip policies at the federal and provincial level.

In this Thursday, April 29, 2021, photo, Sherry Cross Child, a Canadian resident of Stand Off, Alberta, receives a COVID-19 vaccine at the Piegan-Carway border crossing near Babb, Mont. (AP Photo/Iris Samuels)

Across the country, case numbers, hospitalizations and deaths are surging after hitting an ebb less than three weeks ago. The fifth wave of the pandemic, triggered by the BA.1 subvariant of Omicron, produced the highest number of infections and hospitalizations on record, and the third-highest death toll of any wave of the pandemic. Over 6,500 Canadians succumbed to the disease during the first Omicron wave, which the corporate-controlled media has incessantly declared to be “mild.”

Some parts of the country, such as the Maritimes and the northern territories, are experiencing their worst phase of the pandemic. Prince Edward Island, with a population of just 157,000, recorded over 2,200 cases per million people on April 2. This rate of infection is higher than any other province or state in Canada and the United States. The Northwest Territories, with a population of just 45,000, was a close second at almost 2,000 cases per million.

On April 6, over 13,500 new infections were officially recorded across the country. This figure is certainly a vast undercount due to the decision of provincial governments to withhold public PCR testing from all but the most clinically vulnerable. In the province of Quebec alone, epidemiologists estimate that between March 24 and March 29, 18,000 to 32,000 people were infected on a daily basis by BA.2.

Dr. Tara Moriarty, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Toronto, estimates that on March 31, over 136,000 people across the country contracted the disease. Comparing official government figures to Dr. Moriarty’s estimates, the former is an undercount of infections by at least a factor of 10. She previously co-authored a Royal Society of Canada report released in mid-2021 documenting the vast government undercount of COVID-19 deaths.

Dr. Moriarty estimates that in the country’s most populace province, Ontario, with a population of 14.5 million, around 40,000 people were infected with BA.2 on March 31. In Alberta, Dr. Moriarty estimates 37,000 people were infected on March 31, in a population of 4.3 million. The province’s hard-right United Conservative Party government led by Premier Jason Kenney has spearheaded the dismantling of public health measures and the downplaying of the threat posed by COVID-19.

Even the Ontario Science Table, a government COVID-19 advisory group that regularly downplays the severity of the pandemic, raised the alarm of a “tidal wave” of infections on the order of 100,000 to 120,000 new infections per day, based on wastewater surveillance. Given this figure, half of the province’s population could be infected in just over two months. Wastewater surveillance figures across the country corroborate Dr. Moriarty’s projections as well as those of other principled epidemiologists.

The aggregator website covid19tracker.ca has daily hospitalizations nationwide at 4,957 as of April 8, a more than 16 percent increase over the previous week. This figure is almost as high as the peak of the second wave of the pandemic in the winter of 2020, and is on track to surpass the peak of 10,000 hospitalizations during the previous BA.1 wave. On April 4, Quebec reported a 40 percent increase in COVID-19 hospitalizations over the previous two weeks.

Daily deaths are inching up again after three weeks of holding relatively steady at 40 per day. Since deaths are a lagging indicator of the severity of the pandemic, daily fatalities are set to skyrocket in the coming weeks. Dr. Moriarty’s estimates underscore that the official death toll continues to be a gross undercount, with an estimated 165 COVID-19 deaths on March 31 versus an official count of 39.

This immense discrepancy between reported and estimated COVID-19 deaths is due to the limited testing of the deceased. Only Quebec systematically performs COVID-19 testing on those suspected of succumbing to the disease, while the other provinces sweep the growing number of excess deaths under the rug.

The potential long-term impact of Long Covid, which affects an estimated 10 to 30 percent of all those who contract the disease, is mind-boggling. Preliminary studies of Long Covid show debilitating effects on major body organs, such as the brain, as well as the cardiovascular, gastrointestinal, and even reproductive systems. With an estimated one-third of the total Canadian population infected with COVID-19 since the pandemic began, anywhere from 1.25 million to 3.76 million people will live and die with the chronic effects of the disease for years and decades to come.

With the approval of the federal Trudeau government, all provincial governments responded to the emergence of the far-right Freedom Convoy in early February by embracing its fascistic demands for the elimination of all public health measures. As a result, widespread public testing and contact tracing, indoor capacity limits, isolation protocols after infection, and mask mandates have been scrapped in the majority of provinces.

Schools across the country have always been incubators for the pandemic. Nevertheless, the vast majority of provinces and school boards have discontinued mask mandates. Only Quebec, Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland and Labrador, and the northern territories of Yukon, Nunavut, and the Northwest Territories still require children to wear masks. In addition, parents have been discouraged from informing their child’s school of a positive case in their household. Self-isolation requirements have been scaled back to the point that some children can return to class almost immediately following infection.

Similarly, workplaces across the country allow infected workers to return to work within five days of infection, meaning they are still infectious. Because provincial governments have removed widespread testing, thousands of workers undoubtedly go to work while infected, some without evident symptoms, ensuring that the pandemic will continue in perpetuity.

The next stage of the government plan to implement the corporate-backed “profits before life” program is to methodically dismantle even the collection and publication of data, while lying outright about the continued impact of the virus on individuals and society.

Only Quebec and Ontario continue to provide daily pandemic reports, although the governments at the Parliament Building and in Queen’s Park are undoubtedly working feverishly to overturn this. British Columbia this week ended daily reporting, and the rest of the provinces transitioned to weekly reports soon after the end of the fifth wave.

The corporate press, which throughout the pandemic uncritically reported lies about the virus to justify allowing it to spread throughout the population, is also winding down its coverage. This trend is exemplified by the decision by CBC News to end its popular daily COVID-19 tracker with no legitimate justification.

Political leaders at the provincial and federal level continue to downplay the severity of the current stage of the pandemic. Theresa Tam, the country’s Liberal-appointed Chief Medical Officer, declared that hospitalizations and admissions have been “levelling off,” before proclaiming that “Canada’s health system is … expected to withstand this uptick.”

Similar language has been used by Ontario’s hard-right Premier Doug Ford, who called the resurgence of the pandemic just weeks after the fifth wave a “little spike” that the province would be able to “manage.”

Quebec’s conservative Premier, François Legault, who recently contracted COVID-19, dismissed the disease as “a cold, pretty much,” before insisting that “we will have to learn to live with the virus.” By “we,” the former Air Transat CEO was not referring to the corporations, millionaires, and billionaires he and his government represents, which have been lavished with tax breaks and subsidies throughout the pandemic. Rather, he was referring to the working class, which has suffered unprecedented declines in its life expectancy and socioeconomic position over the past two years.

Shanghai lockdown extended indefinitely as COVID-19 cases continue to climb

Benjamin Mateus

Regarding the global COVID-19 pandemic, all eyes have turned towards China, where the lockdown in Shanghai has been extended indefinitely to battle the highly infectious and immune-resistant Omicron BA.2 subvariant that has caused a record surge of infections in the country.

Health workers in protective suits prepare for coronavirus testing for residents at a compound near residential buildings, Thursday, April 7, 2022, in Beijing. (AP Photo/Andy Wong)

Since mid-March, COVID-19 cases have been continually rising in Shanghai, the financial center of China. On March 28, Shanghai health officials initiated a two-stage lockdown whereby the city east of the Huangpu River would be placed in lockdown for five days, followed by the western half of the city. However, late last Thursday health officials opted to lock down the entire city until cases are brought to zero.

Beijing is mobilizing all its resources to assist Shanghai during an outbreak on the verge of spinning out of control. More than 38,000 medical workers from 15 provincial-level regions have been deployed to assist in infection control, including building makeshift hospitals that can accommodate at least 50,000 patients. On Friday, the city underwent a second round of citywide testing.

Despite concerns about supplies reaching neighborhoods under lockdown and delays in coordinating food deliveries, the situation seems to have improved recently. As Bloomberg confirmed, “Officials have ramped up assistance in recent days, and some residents have begun receiving food packs from the government that include eggs, milk, vegetables, and luncheon meat.”

The efforts being employed in Shanghai have been compared to that in Wuhan city in Hubei province, which emerged out of a 79-day lockdown precisely two years ago on April 8, 2020. As happened then, the initial foray into lockdown has been chaotic and complex. Establishing such a vast, previously nonexistent logistics network means delays, setbacks, and social apprehension. However, the commitment to these efforts has been unwavering.

Yesterday, China’s National Health Commission (NHC) reported 24,224 new COVID-19 cases (including 91 imported cases), of which 22,648 were asymptomatic. However, the bulk of daily COVID-19 cases continues to be counted in Shanghai, and the city reported 21,222 new cases yesterday, of which 824 were symptomatic infections.

Daily COVID cases China March 1 to April 8, 2022. (WSWS Media)

By comparison, there were only 3,001 COVID-19 cases in the rest of mainland China, with 716 symptomatic cases. Most of these cases continue to be identified in the northeast province of Jilin. There were 2,266 COVID-19 cases, with 2,027 in Changchun, a city of nine million known locally as China’s “City of Automobiles” or the “Detroit of China.” Lockdowns in Jilin city have drastically reduced new infections, with only 228 reported Friday.

The apparent rise in COVID-19 cases across Shanghai is a product of mass citywide PCR testing to ascertain the location of every infection. In other words, the testing has uncovered the actual extent of the silent community transmission contributing to the rise in infections.

Many in the population who have supported elimination complained that the somewhat laissez-faire approach in Shanghai until late March contributed to the avoidable onerous outbreak. After criticizing the Chinese government’s policy, even the New York Times had to admit that the support for Zero-COVID remains high in China.

Chen Daoyin, a former assistant professor at the Shanghai University of Political Science and Law, told the Times, “Beijing had clearly doubled down on Zero-COVID and was bringing Shanghai in line with the rest of the country. In a system like China’s, where politics determines everything, it’s impossible for you to walk a different road.”

In contrast, the US is doubling down on “living with the virus.” COVID-19 surveillance systems are being rapidly dismantled, adhering to fascistic former president Trump’s infamous quip, “If we didn’t do any testing, we would have very few cases.” These efforts have had full bipartisan support and approval from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Additionally, the numerous reported infections among high-level Washington politicians, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, mislead Americans to believe that COVID-19 is harmless.

More than one million Americans have needlessly perished from COVID-19, and life expectancy in the US has declined by more than 2.2 years during the pandemic. In stark contrast, fewer than 5,000 have died in China and life expectancy has now surpassed that of the US.

In contradistinction to the unscientific measures employed in the US and much of the rest of the world, the Chinese authorities have shifted from a mitigation strategy in Shanghai to implementing the strictest standards to eliminate COVID-19 and preserve life and livelihood. The sudden shift and resoluteness have been met with savage attacks in the Western press against the Zero-COVID policy, decrying its impact on the global markets.

On March 29, the Editorial Board of the Financial Times, the mouthpiece of finance capital, wrote, “Ultimately, China will need a strategy to exit Zero-COVID-19 and live with the virus … As the world slowly returns to business as usual, the policy will come at a higher and higher cost to China.”

On April 3, The Economist remarked, “The pain will be felt abroad too just as it was amid the lockdowns in Shenzhen, another city deeply entangled in global supply chains … One team of economists estimates that a one-month lockdown of Shanghai and its spillover effects would knock a staggering four percent off China’s GDP in that period.”

On April 6, the Washington Post Editorial Board wrote, “For two years, China’s leadership has bragged to anyone who would listen that its authoritarian system did a better job fighting the pandemic than the undisciplined and chaotic democracies. Pointing to the towering death toll in the United States, Beijing expressed pride that its policy of clamping down mercilessly whenever an infection was discovered, a policy called ‘Zero COVID,’ was working.”

The Post added, “For the most part, it did, and China’s population was spared the sacrifices and misery seen elsewhere. But now, China’s dictatorship is on the ropes in its battle with the virus.” Evidently, in this battle the Post is rooting for the virus to win.

Bloomberg provocatively opened its April 7 report, “Pets beaten to death. Parents forced to separate from their children. Elderly folks unable to access medical care. Locked up residents chanting ‘we want to eat’ and ‘we want freedom.’” No mention was made of efforts being made to alleviate these concerns, which affect a tiny minority of those under lockdown.

On April 8, the Wall Street Journal complained that the lockdowns are strangling manufacturing operations and placing undue strains on “stretched global supply chains.” They wrote, “Stringent government measures to contain the country’s COVID-19 outbreak, the worst in more than two years, are locking down tens of millions of people, mostly in and around the industrial heartland of Shanghai.”

Regarding these fiery statements and rumors being purported about the plight of Shanghai, the WSWS had the opportunity to speak to Dr. Y in Shanghai on condition of anonymity.

Commenting on the concerns raised in the media about children being separated from their parents, she said, “Yes, that was true and made a lot of people very angry and verbal. COVID-positive children were quarantined at a center away from their negative parents. Positive parents, however, could stay with their children. However, after the outrage, the authorities adjusted their policy and allowed parents to stay with their children.”

Regarding the issue of food and supplies, Dr. Y explained that food distribution was being handled locally by communities. “Locking everyone in their homes and closing all the supermarkets to prevent clustering [of people] obviously creates food shortages. People are forming WeChat groups in their community to bulk order things, and they also try to order groceries and have them delivered through different apps. The success is based mainly on luck.”

A box of vegetables delivered to a family in Shanghai. (WSWS Media)

She added, “Keep in mind that the cry for lack of food is very loud. However, there are reports that the authorities are going to start to take over the whole city’s food distribution instead of relying on local communities.”

Dr. Y and other healthcare workers in China have corroborated that the elimination strategy had allowed them to return to normal life routines until recently. They all expressed concern about the threat that Omicron poses and supported the current efforts.

Authorities’ recent imposition on freedom of movement stems directly from the dangers posed by allowing the virus free rein in the population without enough immune protection. The let-it-rip policy that international financial markets insist on would be socially catastrophic and politically destabilizing for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) authorities.

The purpose of the Western media’s attack on China’s Zero-COVID policy is to incite anger and reaction among the Chinese population. Utterly indifferent to concerns for the life and well-being of their own population or that of any other country, the ruling elites are weaponizing the virus as an existential threat and a political weapon against the Chinese.

Sri Lanka at centre of growing debt and inflation crisis

Nick Beams

Sri Lanka, now engulfed by ongoing demonstrations and protests, is at the centre of a debt storm ripping through a swathe of lower-income countries. This is bringing social devastation for hundreds of millions of people as capitalist governments, banks, financial speculators and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) demand their pound of flesh.

Sri Lankans wait at a fuel station after spending hours to unsuccessfully buy kerosene oil in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Thursday, April 7, 2022. (AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena)

This crisis has been building for years but reached a new peak of intensity because of the COVID-19 pandemic and now the explosion of the prices of basic commodities, including foodstuffs, gasoline, fuel and cooking oils, flowing from the US-NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.

Yesterday, the United Nations announced that its food price index for March had reached a record high, increasing by 34 percent from a year ago. The index was 12.6 percentage points higher than in February. The UN described this as a “giant leap.”

The crisis is about to be further exacerbated by the drive by central banks around the world, led by the US Federal Reserve, to sharply lift interest rates over the next months in response to rising inflation.

Sri Lanka’s foreign currency reserves are plunging, with doubts about whether it will be able to pay any of the estimated $8.6 billion in debt repayments due this year. On Thursday, the Sri Lankan central bank reported that the country’s foreign currency reserves had fallen to $1.93 billion in March, down 16 percent from $2.3 billion in February.

The Sri Lankan situation is the sharpest expression of a global process that has developed over the past decade. At the end of January, a report by the British-based Jubilee Debt Campaign estimated that developing country debt payments increased by 120 percent between 2010 and 2021. Average government external debt was estimated at 14.3 percent of government revenue in 2021, compared to 6.8 percent in 2010.

In January, the World Bank estimated that lower-income nations would have to pay $35 billion to official and private sector lenders in 2022, an increase of $10.9 billion over the previous year and a rise of 45 percent since 2020.

Since those estimates were issued, barely two months ago, the financial position of these countries has dramatically worsened because of the further boost to inflation by the war in Ukraine.

The debt crisis has been intensified by the ending last December of the Debt Service Suspension Initiative (DSSI) introduced by the G20 group of nations in April 2020. The DSSI has proved to be, in the words of the Financial Times, a “damp squib.”

It aimed to defer $20 billion in debt, but the relief was only $12.7 billion, and countries have had to resume payments this year and recognise debts suspended under the scheme.

The biggest beneficiaries of the DSSI were the commercial banks, commodity traders and bond holders, which received $14.9 billion while suspending only $24 million, or just 0.2 percent, of the amount due. Tim Jones, the head of policy at Jubilee, said the DSSI had “effectively become a bailout scheme for private lenders.”

An analysis by the Bretton Woods Project published earlier this month observed that “countries in debt distress like Zambia are being forced to make payments to private creditors like BlackRock [the world’s biggest asset management company], at the expense of their own population’s wellbeing.”

As part of the US push against China, there has been a growing campaign to blame its loans for the mounting debt crisis.

But Jubilee reported that of the debt repayments due this year, 47 percent are to private lenders, 27 percent to multilateral institutions, 12 percent to China and 14 percent to other governments. The Chinese loans were either on terms in line with those of the IMF and other multilateral lenders, or better.

There is no solution to the debt crisis under so-called debt restructuring. Any such measures will be employed as they have been in the past—to impose even further austerity measures on the population, with much of the money used not to finance productive investments or social spending but to pay off the holders of past debts.

In Sri Lanka, the Socialist Equality Party has raised the necessity for debt repudiation and the expropriation of the wealth of the banks and the ultra-wealthy as an immediate first step in tackling the crisis and for a turn to the working class in other countries in a common struggle.

The conditions for the development of this orientation—a unified global struggle against the financial octopuses starving and strangling hundreds of millions of people—have been created by the eruption of strikes and protests around the world over the past few weeks.

These developments have sent a shiver of fear through sections of the US political establishment.

Members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee this week sent a letter to President Biden warning that the “grave global food security crisis” flowing from the Ukraine war was threatening “to push millions of people into hunger and destabilize regions of strategic importance to the United States.”

But assistance in alleviating the food crisis will not come from the US. Politico reported that while US officials have been working to alleviate shortages they are running into problems. Wheat reserves, including in the US, are running lower than normal as the result of a drought and “governments with grain surpluses have been reluctant to release too much of their supply, including Canada.”

In other words, on the food crisis, poorer countries will receive the same treatment as they have had when a global rollout of COVID vaccines was blocked by the vaccine nationalism of the major powers.

Sarah Charles, a leading official of USAID, testified to a Congressional subcommittee that the “impacts of the current crisis on poverty, hunger, and malnutrition could be even more significant than those seen in the global food price crisis of 2007–2009 and the subsequent civil unrest, as the last crisis followed a period of strong economic growth, whereas the years since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic have been characterized by an increasingly worse global economic downturn.”

In the Yemeni city of Aden, she noted, the price of a piece of bread increased by 62 percent between February 25 and March 3. In Lebanon, domestic food inflation had reached 483 percent.

In South Africa, protests had doubled to more than 1,000 a year since 2018 amid warnings that the country was “likely to have entered a phase of ongoing violent instability.”

In an interview with the BBC on Thursday, the Eurasia Group think tank director Daniel Kerner was asked whether there could be a wave of social explosions in Latin America, such as took place at the end of 2019.

He replied: “Yes, in 2019, we were seeing much discontent in many places, and it’s true that the pandemic put a pause to the problem. But at the same time it was just a pause and now the situation is much more explosive.”

Summing up the fears in ruling circles, a report by the German Friedrich Ebert Institute said: “As was said in the days of the French Revolution, if the population has no bread, those in power are threatened with disaster.”

The crisis is not confined to poorer countries. Workers in the major economies, including Britain, the US and Australia, are starting to initiate action to secure wage rises in the face of rampant inflation, which the Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey has said will deliver a “historic shock” to incomes.

German government and IG Metall celebrate opening of Tesla factory in Grünheide

Ludwig Weller

Construction site of the Tesla Gigafactory in Grünheide (Image: Michael Wolf / CC BY-SA 3.0 / wikimedia)

What transpired last week at the site of Tesla’s new electric car factory in Brandenburg, east of Berlin, can only be described as spectacle.

Tesla founder Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, personally handed over the first Brandenburg-produced vehicles to customers, who paid €70,000. Much like Helmut Kohl in his day, who promised “flourishing landscapes,” Social Democratic Party Chancellor Olaf Scholz declared at the event, “The East is ahead industrially.”

Economics Minister Robert Habeck, a member of the Green Party, described the US company as a role model for Germany. Tesla had chosen Germany, he said, because the company expected it to become the leading market for electromobility. That was also his goal, he said.

The fact that Tesla Gigafactory, which was built in record time, was largely constructed without a permit and under slave-like working conditions at the construction site, did not bother Habeck in the slightest.

On the contrary, he encouraged Germany’s corporate masters to proceed with the same ruthlessness. “This short period of factory construction can, of course, be something of a benchmark for the pace of work at Tesla in other areas as well,” Habeck said. “I’m working on it 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”

Visibly impressed by Musk’s unscrupulous methods, the economics minister indicated his notion of “green capitalism.” He declared, “If the permits hadn’t come, they would have had to take things down. It’s a different corporate daredevil culture—but it worked out.”

The laudatory remarks from the Federation of German Industries (BDI) sounded almost restrained in comparison. “The pace at Tesla must serve as a model for investment projects in Germany,” said BDI President Siegfried Russwurm.

All of the politicians present used the opening of the electric car plant as a welcome opportunity to promote Germany’s energy independence from Russia. Here, too, Habeck set the tone, saying, “We want to become independent of Russian oil. That is not trivial.” Referring to the Ukraine war, he added, “To show that we can not only replace oil with oil, but we can also do it electrically, is, of course, a nice symbol on this day.”

With so much official approval and enthusiasm, the IG-Metall union could, of course, not be absent. Birgit Dietze, IG Metall district manager for Berlin, Brandenburg and Saxony, sent the following message to Tesla: “On the occasion of the plant opening, I congratulate the Tesla company and its founder Elon Musk.” She added, “In Grünheide, employees are working on the drive technology of the 21st century as pioneers of electric mobility in a globally leading plant.”

The IG Metall bureaucrat’s gushing words knew no bounds. “In future, she declared, “anyone looking for the major automotive locations on a world map will come across the town of Grünheide in Brandenburg. With the opening of the Tesla factory, eastern Germany is strengthening its international pioneering role in electromobility.”

She concluded by saying that innovative strength and high productivity were an “important prerequisite for good working conditions and good wages in Germany.”

It remains to be seen how innovative and environmentally friendly electric cars really are. What is certain is that the auto companies are using the shift from gasoline-fueled vehicles—often called a “transformation”—to cut costs, reduce staff and increase profits.

According to recent studies by the Ifo Institute, some 180,000 jobs will become surplus in Germany alone over the next three to four years. Even if 12,000 people are soon employed at the Gigafactory in Brandenburg, that will hardly outweigh the loss of hundreds of thousands of other jobs.

US corporations like Tesla and Amazon have shown in recent years what “innovation and high productivity” mean for workers. Work pressure and work tempo are drastically increased. Standard work hours, break regulations, social standards, relatively high wages, predominantly fixed contracts—things once fought for by workers and still prevalent in the German auto industry—hardly exist at Tesla and Amazon. The enthusiasm of the government, BDI and IG Metall for Tesla must be viewed in this context.

Musk’s Starlink supports war against Russia

In the context of the Ukraine war, other issues are raised that are directly related to Elon Musk.

Tesla, as well as German car companies, especially VW, are complaining about shortages of supplies and raw materials due to the war in Ukraine. It is not only supply bottlenecks for gas, coal or oil that the industry fears. Above all, nickel, central to battery production, and magnesium, the raw material for aluminium alloys, but also palladium for the construction of catalytic converters are needed in the automotive industry. The largest producers and suppliers of these raw materials are Russia and China.

Long before the war, there were pandemic and speculation-related supply shortages and price increases of up to 400 percent. The war and the massive sanctions against Russia are now leading to huge supply shortfalls. In a cross-industry survey by the Munich-based Ifo Institute, 89 percent of companies in the automotive industry cited problems with purchasing.

In this regard, it is noteworthy that Elon Musk is in the thick of the war against Russia, alongside NATO, the US and Europe. As Stern-Online recently reported, the Starlink satellite Internet network operated by Musk’s company SpaceX plays an important role in the war against Russia.

According to the report, truckloads of Starlink ground stations reached Ukraine at the very beginning of the war. Ukrainian Digital Minister Fedorov reportedly had asked Musk for them via Twitter. In particular, he said, the Aerorozvidka (aerial reconnaissance) unit, which uses drones to monitor and attack Russian tanks and positions, has benefited the Ukraine military. The unit uses Starlink to access strategic databases, contact control centres and provide artillery support.

“Once Aerorozvidka has identified Russian targets, soldiers pilot unmanned aerial vehicles with anti-tank munitions over them and drop the bombs—or relay the coordinates,” Stern-Online wrote.

A Ukrainian soldier reportedly confirmed the effectiveness of the attacks, saying, “At night, it’s impossible to see our drones. We specifically look for the most valuable truck in the convoy and then hit it accurately. We can do that very well and with very little collateral damage—it is possible even in villages.”

Workers must reject NATO’s war effort as strongly as they reject Russia’s war on Ukraine. NATO deliberately provoked the war by systematically encircling Russia. It is waging a proxy war in Ukraine, the goals of which are regime-change in Moscow, the break-up of Russia and unhindered access to the country’s valuable raw materials. To achieve this, it is risking nuclear war.

The German government is using the war as a pretext for the biggest arms build-up since Hitler. It is supplying weapons to the war zone and tripling its arms budget this year from €50 billion to €150 billion.

This can only be understood as a declaration of war on the working class, which must bear the costs. The danger of war can be fought only by the united resistance of the working class of Russia, Ukraine, Germany and worldwide.

The role of IG Metall

The implications for the German working class of the war against Russia and the unprecedented expansion of military spending will be all too clear at the Tesla plant in Grünheide. The workers who will soon be producing up to 500,000 electric cars a year will have to deal with an owner who will stop at nothing to maximize his company’s profits.

Earlier this year, when Tesla announced it would have a works council elected at the plant as early as February 28, 2022, this was immediately welcomed by IG Metall, which has long served as an advocate for the company’s interests in the auto industry.

However, IG Metall was unable to draw up its own candidate list because it simply did not have enough members in the plant. Now there is a works council, the majority of whose members are from the “Gigavoice” list. This list was set up and financed by Tesla itself, and its candidates all came from middle- and even upper-management levels, and called themselves managers, supervisors and superintendents.

According to information from two different sources, the result of the works council election probably looks as follows:

* 881 of 1,879 votes cast went to “Gigavoice,” which can thus provide 10 members of the presumably 19-member Gigafactory works council.

* 404 votes, and thus four seats, went to the “Giga4You” list.

* 340 votes and three seats went to the “Heart of Tesla” list.

* 196 votes and two seats went to the “Energy for the Future” list.

It can already be seen from the names of the three smaller lists that they are equally aligned with the profit interests of Tesla, even though they may have some “normal employees” in their ranks, which allows IG Metall to present them as an alternative.

Although the election result is tantamount to a slap in the face for IG Metall, Berlin District Manager Dietze welcomed the election. She said the automaker had taken the “first step in the co-determination landscape that has grown here.”

“The works council election had some problems, such as the early date, as the workforce is growing strongly and many positions were not yet filled, especially in production,” Dietze continued. “Nevertheless,” she said, “this first works council election at Tesla in Grünheide was a successful premiere.”

Now, she concluded, “the first step toward a culture of co-determination must be followed by others,” adding that IG Metall had “every interest in seeing this plant flourish and enjoy lasting success.”

Pandemic profiteers: GXO Logistics acquires Clipper Logistics in billion pound deal

Allison Smith

UK-based warehousing company Clipper Logistics is set to be acquired by the world’s largest contract logistics provider, GXO Logistics.The cash and stock share acquisition deal is worth £943 million and due to be completed this summer.

The Clipper warehouse in Sheffield (credit_Twitter @SheffCouncil)

GXO has roughly 100,000 employees across 869 sites globally. Clipper has 10,000 at 52 across Europe.

Announcing the deal, Clipper’s executive chairman Steve Parkin salivated, “The offer from GXO gives shareholders the opportunity to receive a high portion of cash at a significant premium to the prevailing share price and a premium to the all-time closing high, whilst also being given the opportunity to benefit in the potential future upside in the combined group.”

Malcolm Wilson, chief executive of GXO, commented, “Together, GXO and Clipper have a one-of-a kind growth opportunity.”

Both companies are reaping the rewards of the pandemic. Profits have soared across the logistics sector due to the COVID-19 crisis that has caused a dramatic growth in online shopping. In 2020, online retail accounted for an average of 28.1percent of all retail sales, up from 19.2 percent in 2019.

Clipper’s revenue for the six months to October 2021 was £406 million, up 33.1 percent on the year before; it’s profit before tax grew 12.6 percent to £16.1 million, coming on top of a 38.2 percent increase in the first year of the pandemic.

Parkin’s base level remuneration was £512,000 in the year ending April 2021. But he cashed shares to the tune of £62 million that January. Shareholder’s dividends increased 14.3 percent in 2020 and another 12.5 percent in 2021, with over £7.2 million paid out in 2021.

GXO’s revenue for 2021 was $7.9 billion, up 28 percent on 2020. Its earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization increased from $457 million to $633 million.

CEO Malcom Wilson is paid a base salary of £468,000, plus pension, insurance and car entitlements. The company’s annual incentive plan allows him to double or triple that. Other incentives include an award of $850,000 for company performance in 2021 and a gift of 120,000 stock options on taking up the position last year.

These vast fortunes, and the extensive personal luxuries they afford their owners, were built by the two companies’ tens of thousands of employees forced to work for a pittance amid a raging pandemic. Median annual pay and benefits at Clipper are £20,835, with GXO paying similar rates. While shareholders and management were patting themselves on the back for record profits, workers across the country were falling ill, forced to work in unsafe conditions and threatened for raising the alarm.

In March 2020, workers at the Clipper warehouse in Ollerton, Nottinghamshire, told the BBC that the company was “putting lives at risk” and that they were being “crammed into corridors”. One explained, “There’s easily 100 to 200 people in the hallway, all having to press the same security buttons, having to clock out with the same finger scanners.” The site processes refunds for Marks & Spencer and River Island.

Workers’ concerns were dismissed. One explained, “When I voiced my opinions and said I felt unsafe one manager said, ‘Just think of how many people die of cancer every year’.” Another manager responded, “At this time all I care is about getting refunds processed”.

The same month, Clipper sent an email to employees at its Northampton e-fulfilment centre, responsible for Zara clothes, claiming that any coughing and sneezing was likely to be hay fever. It threatened that in any case, “If, in a rare instant, the site has a case of COVID-19, the site will not close… Therefore, there is no point in telling people you have the virus when you do not. Anyone who behaves in this way will be investigated through the disciplinary process and please note this is a breach of H&S [health and safety], and would be treated as gross misconduct.”

In July 2020, an outbreak of dozens of cases at Clipper’s Pretty Little Thing (PLT) distribution centre in Sheffield, England, served as a contributory factor in the local lockdown of the city. One worker who became infected told the Sunday Times, “I caught it from the warehouse. There’s no way I should have been working. How is distributing cheap women's fashion essential?”

Others warned that the distribution centre was “a breeding ground for the virus”. Speaking anonymously for fear of victimisation, they described the lack of even the facilities to wash their hands—with only four soap dispensers in a 650,000 square foot warehouse, the size of 15 football pitches—and having to conduct their work in 4-foot-wide aisles, largely unable to socially distance.

Three months earlier, in April 2020, a worker at the warehouse had told the Yorkshire Post, “They won’t furlough us and I need the money, my wife is begging me not to go in and I don’t want to take it home to her but I’m not well paid.” Describing the conditions inside, he said, “You’re still passing people, you’re still queuing for lockers where there are 100 other people. I see on the news about social distancing then there’s 300 of us all in the warehouse.”

In April 2021, an outbreak at Clipper’s warehouse in Selby, which processes ASOS returns, was linked by public health officials to a sharp rise in the town’s infection rate—ultimately climbing to the highest level in England for the seven days to April 22. Clipper admitted the workforce had been “significantly affected” but insisted there was no evidence of transmission within the warehouse.

Workers told a local councillor that social distancing and mask wearing were not being enforced, that conditions were like a “sweatshop”, and that the company was creating a “culture of fear”.

At GXO, previously a part of XPO Logistics, at least 77 workers tested positive in a single outbreak in August 2020 at a warehouse run for supermarket Iceland in Swindon. Over 60 people, more than 10 percent of the workforce, were infected in an XPO warehouse supplying supermarket Morrisons in Bellshill, Scotland. The company’s policy is to dock the first three days of wages from workers off sick, pushing people to work while infected.

In addition to this ruthless exploitation, the multi-billion and million-pound companies both benefited from some of the many government handouts to the corporations on offer during the pandemic.

Between December 2020 and February 2021, the only period for which figures are available, XPO received between £12 and £25 million in furlough money. If this rate of support was consistent throughout the pandemic, the company could have been paid more than £100 million while it was handing out multimillion pound bonuses.

Clipper received a secretive and lucrative Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) contract worth £11 million. The company’s chairman Steve Parkin is a major donor to the ruling Conservative Party, having given eight cash donations totaling £730,000.

The same story could be told of corporations all over the world. Amid the social catastrophe of the pandemic, their billionaire owners have literally made a killing, continuing their grotesque self-enrichment at the expense of the working class.

In the UK alone, the logistics sector employs some 215,000 workers, directly contributing £127 billion Gross Value Added to the British economy each year, which they have the power to a bring to a standstill. The fact that such a decisive section of the working class can be so abused is thanks to the trade unions, which work to suppress and sabotage opposition.

UK doctors surgeries forced to close doors to all but urgent care needs

Ben Trent & Richard Tyler

Local doctors’ surgeries across the UK face an ongoing crisis as coronavirus infection levels reach new heights. A record one in 13 people are infected with the virus, according to the latest Office for National Statistics figures.

The impact of the pandemic on doctors and other workers in local GP practices has seen some “struggling to maintain regular services”, according to a recent article in health professionals’ Pulse magazine. This has meant closing surgery doors to all but the most urgent cases.

Dr Dave Triska, a GP at a Surrey-based practice, told Pulse at the end of March that half his team of eight doctors were off and about one third of the overall staff.

“We’ve never had to restrict services like we’ve had to due to Covid,” he said, “We just physically don’t have the people to do it. There’s a limit to how much you can do.”

Describing the situation as “Russian roulette”, as each day brought new absences, he said his surgery could soon reach “critical numbers”. Those with overall responsibility for general practice, such as NHS England and the Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs), had “no backup plan”.

“We’re basically on our own, and we have to make do,” Dr Triska said.

Similar COVID-related shortages are impacting GP surgeries across England, including in Cambridgeshire, Greater Manchester, Hertfordshire, and Yorkshire and the Humber.

Scotland, where the devolved Scottish Parliament has responsibility for health policy, has also seen several examples of local surgeries being forced to close their regular appointment booking service. The Mistylaw practice in Lochwinnoch messaged patients requesting that on three days this month they only contact the surgery if they have urgent care needs. While the surgery was still able to fulfil pre-booked appointments, it said extra appointments were very limited due to staff shortages.

In Wales, where the Welsh Parliament is responsible for health provisions, the Crickhowell doctors surgery had to cancel all routine appointments on Monday due to high levels of staff sickness.

As the World Socialist Web Site reported last October, beleaguered GPs suffered immensely in the latter quarter of 2021, as the pressure mounted to roll out the vaccine booster program aimed at combating the then-latest variant of COVID-19.

“The impact of COVID, the vaccine rollout and backlogs across the system are resulting in increased demand on a National Health Service [NHS] already barely able to cope. The crisis in primary care services, in which General Practitioners (GPs) play a vital role, is having a crippling effect.”

The article also drew attention to a report highlighting how the GP workforce in England had shrunk by 1,904 since 2015, exposing the government’s hollow pledges to recruit a further 5,000 GPs by 2020 and then—after failing to meet this target—6,000 by 2025.

The current situation is no less dire. A recent survey carried out by the Royal College of GPs (RCGP) found that at least a third were planning to retire in the next five years, leaving 14,000 fewer GPs than are currently working.

Doctors who work in local practice face a grinding schedule where they are officially only allocated 10 minutes to see a patient, one of the lowest appointment times among developed countries. Addressing the Health and Social Care Committee last month, retired GP Dr Andrew Green said, “We need to accept that 10-minute appointments are not safe. The only way that you can run a 10-minute appointment surgery on time is by cutting corners.

Dr Green added, “One of the things that made me finally give up normal clinical work was the feeling at the end of the day that I wasn’t happy with the work that I’d done because I couldn’t fit what the patients needed into the 10-minute appointments.”

The government’s criminal “herd immunity” policy, which has allowed the virus to rip through the population in successive and ever-higher waves of infection, has placed intolerable burdens on NHS hospitals. This has produced a monumental backlog of those waiting for vital elective procedures, which now exceeds 6 million. In turn, this increases pressures on GPs, who must manage patients on excessively long waiting lists, with some forced to live with excruciating pain or physically limiting conditions.

Dr Kate Fallon, a GP in Somerset, told the Health and Social Care Committee, “We have a 63-week wait to see a gastroenterologist at the moment. And what are all those patients doing? Well, we’re holding them, we’re taking the risk, we’re trying to support them through that.”

This caused “an awful lot more patient contacts,” while they waited for a surgery appointment. “It’s not just gastroenterology, but that’s the worst example,” Dr Fallon said.

“Learning to live with the virus,” as the government insists must happen, also impacts on nursing staff who work in local GP practices, where two thirds are expected to leave within the next year. Common reasons cited for wishing to depart included feeling exhausted, overworked, and underpaid, as well as having too little time to do their jobs to the desired standard.

A poll carried out by Nursing in Practice, surveying close to 400 practice nurses, found that 18 percent were considering early retirement, while 8 percent were looking to leave the profession. Altogether, only a third of those surveyed were planning to stay on as a GP nurse.

A nurse practitioner in northwest England explained, “I feel I am not given the time I need to do my job to the standard that I would like to. I feel undervalued”. Another in the East Midlands declared that they “cannot see any improvement on the horizon.”

The realities of being overwhelmed and understaffed are hitting numerous regions. To alleviate the pressures, drastic measures are being taken. Several London practices are training reception staff to double-up as phlebotomists and take blood from patients.

Public satisfaction with the NHS, 1983 to 2021.

With all areas of the NHS suffering from decades of under-funding, further aggravated by the government’s malign neglect in face of the pandemic, it is hardly surprising that a recent survey found patient satisfaction with GP services had fallen by almost a third.

According to the 2021 British Social Attitudes Survey, only 38 percent of respondents were satisfied with NHS general practice. This is a thirty-point fall over the year and the lowest figure recorded since the survey began in 1983. Waiting times for GP and hospital appointments were cited as the main reasons for dissatisfaction with the NHS overall. The survey saw the lowest level of satisfaction with the NHS since 1997. More people (41 percent) were dissatisfied than satisfied (36 percent), a 17-point slump in this measure.

The government’s enforced collapse of free universal healthcare services will be used by it to push for the further privatisation of the sector. In an editorial on Wednesday, the house paper of the Conservative right-wing, the Daily Telegraph, attacked healthcare spending on an “unreformed, and increasingly unpopular, socialised behemoth that too often shows more interest in its staff than its patients.”