Internal FBI reports document mass surveillance of left-wing, anti-police violence social media accounts following 2020 police murder of George Floyd

Jacob Crosse

Internal FBI documents published last week by the government transparency group Property of the People have revealed that the Federal Bureau of Investigation, for years, routinely violated the democratic rights of millions of people in the United States by monitoring their private social media accounts even if they were not suspected of any criminal activity.

Protesters march to the 3rd Precinct Monday, April 19, 2021, in Minneapolis as the murder trial against the former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin in the killing of George Floyd advances to jury deliberations. (AP Photo/Morry Gash)

The documents, known as “Situational Reports” or “sitreps” were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by Property of the People and shared with reporters for Rolling Stone magazine. While the reports are revealing, they do have large sections blacked out.

The reports show that FBI employees were/are monitoring private social media accounts and specific hashtags on the largest social media platforms, such as Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat.

The information included in the reports covers a three-year span, from 2019 through 2021. Sitreps from the summer and fall 2020, following the police murder of George Floyd, show that the FBI tracked protest organizers’ accounts in Seattle, Washington and Minneapolis, Minnesota. While Property of the People and Rolling Stone have only reported on FBI documents covering those two cities, there is no doubt similar reports were drawn up for every major US city.

More extensive and detailed analyses are no doubt compiled by the FBI on a regular basis. But even the limited release under the FOIA reveals blatant disregard for the democratic rights of the population and underscores the central role of the “special armed body” in capitalist society as an enforcer of bourgeois class rule, not an impartial protector of the democratic rights of all.

The documents revealed that the FBI has teams dubbed “social-media exploitation,” or SOMEX teams, that comb through social media accounts for information on peaceful protests, including meeting times, locations and participants. Potential targets of surveillance include anyone suspected of being “involved in or present at locations of lawful protests [who] are part of an organized effort associated with anti-government-anti-authority extremism, militia extremism, racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism, or violent gangs.”

The agency distributes information gleaned from accounts they monitor to local police departments which is then assimilated into police databases, in the process painting a target on anyone named in the reports as a potential “extremist,” “Black Lives Matter,” “anarchist,” or “antifa” agitator.

That the FBI violates the constitutional and democratic rights of workers and left-wing elements as a daily practice will not come as a surprise to our readers. However, the revelation that the FBI has been engaged in mass surveillance of social media accounts, including specific hashtags, Facebook groups and private media accounts for years, directly contradicts testimony offered by FBI director Christopher Wray and FBI assistant director of counterterrorism Jill Sanborn before Congress last year, following Trump’s failed coup.

Attempting to explain why the FBI was not prepared to intervene to stop the attack on the Capitol by right-wing militias, or issue widespread warnings beforehand, in two separate hearings, both top FBI officials claimed that the FBI had “specific policies” that prevented the organization from monitoring social media accounts prior to the attack on the Capitol.

As reported last year by the World Socialist Web Site, during a March 2021 hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar took as good coin Wray’s claims that the FBI could not foresee the attack on the Capitol because they had insufficient “intelligence” and no informants within any of the far-right organizations.

Speaking of the Proud Boys, Klobuchar pontificated: “There must be moments, if only we could have known, if we could have infiltrated this group and found out what they are doing. Do you have those moments?”

Beside the fact that it was known at the time Klobuchar made these comments that chairman of the Proud Boys, Henry ‘Enrique’ Tarrio, was a “prolific” FBI informant, subsequent reports have established that the FBI, Capitol Police and the Washington D.C. Metropolitan Police were monitoring right-wing paramilitaries’ communications in real time on January 6, 2021 and were well aware of their plan to storm and occupy the Capitol in furtherance of Trump’s coup prior to the attack.

Following Trump’s failed coup, it has also been revealed that social media companies, such as Parler, sent the FBI reports they had made compiled of specific threats they saw regarding the January 6 certification. In one warning forwarded to the FBI prior to the attack, a Parler user called on fascists to come to D.C. on January 6 to take on “Antifa” and “start eliminating people.”

The documents blow apart Wray’s claims that the FBI failed to prevent the attack on the Capitol because of a lack of “intelligence” and the Bureau respecting the constitutional and the democratic rights of fascist militia groups too much to follow their activities online. They also show the FBI’s role in promoting the lie advanced by Trump and his Republican sycophants that the amorphous “antifa” is a violent and dangerous terrorist group while modern-day Brownshirts, such as the Proud Boys, are a “patriotic fraternity.”

In a June 5, 2020 Seattle sitrep, the FBI specifically named an Instagram user’s private account for simply organizing a “peaceful protest” in support of Black Lives Matter. In the same report, the FBI observed that “Proud boys” and “3%ers will be present during the 6/7 BLM protests, in civilian clothes.”

In contrast to the “peaceful protest” organizer, the FBI did not name any suspected Proud Boys handles. Instead, the report reiterates Proud Boys talking points, stating that the “‘Proud Boys’ consider themselves a patriotic fraternity. All races are represented within the ‘Proud Boys.’”

Among the tools used by the FBI to monitor social media, at the cost of $5 million a year, Rolling Stone reported, is software called Babel X, which is sold by a company called Babel Street. Per a recent article by Fedscoop, Babel Street is led by “Jeffrey Chapman, a former Treasury Department official. ... Chapman was a White House aide and intelligence officer at the Department of Defense, according to LinkedIn.”

In a statement announcing a new contract with Babel Street, the FBI wrote earlier this month, “[t]he tool shall be able to gather information from the following mandatory online and social media data sources: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Deep/Dark Web, VK, and Telegram,” as well as SnapChat, TikTok, Reddit, 8Kun, Gab, Parler, ask.fm, Weibo, Discord, and “additional fringe platforms, and other encrypted message platforms.”

“In procurement documents, the FBI said ... the system should be able to continuously monitor sources,” wrote Fedscoop.

Commenting on the FBI reports, Ryan Shapiro, executive director of Property of the People, told Rolling Stone, “The documents bring into relief three consistent truths about the FBI.”

“One: At its core, the FBI is a political police force that primarily targets the left while ignoring or outright enabling the far-right. Two: FBI spokespersons lie like they breathe. Three: The Bureau shamelessly exploits national crises to expand the already dystopian reach of its surveillance.”

The domestic intelligence agency is aided in their efforts to oppress the working class by the Republican and Democratic Party alike. Ignoring the demands of millions of workers and youth who risked police violence and arrest to march for George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Hannah Fizer, Andres Guardado and all victims of police violence, Biden and the Democrats have purged all talk of “defunding” the police following the 2020 election.

Instead, appealing to their “Republican colleagues” and billionaire backers, Biden’s 2023 budget proposal, the WSWS wrote recently, features “...a substantial increase for domestic police repression.”

Global finance capital presses China to abandon Zero-COVID

Benjamin Mateus

The United States and European Union are growing more hostile to China’s Zero-COVID policy, demanding all obstacles to global production be lifted immediately, including all measures that impact social mobility. Lockdowns and any other mitigation strategies cannot be tolerated anymore.

Residents line up for the first round of mass COVID testing in the Jingan district of western Shanghai, China, Friday, April 1, 2022. (AP Photo/Chen Si, File)

These sentiments are based on the logic of the ruling class that places profits above all else. When the news that the US mask mandates were repealed on public transit systems, passengers on board a jetliner broke out with glee and laughter, a thoroughly backward reaction. This ignorant response reflects the vicious hostility of the capitalist ruling class towards any infringement on its economic pursuits.

As Forbes wrote yesterday, the ministers representing China at the G20 would “have some serious explaining about ‘Zero-COVID’ policy threatening the global economy.” Adding later, “Most of the downshift reflects fallout from the war in Ukraine. But some of it will bear Beijing’s fingerprints, too.”

On Monday, the president of the World Bank Group, David Malpass announced that it had cut its annual global growth forecast for 2022 by nearly an entire percentage point from 4.1 percent to 3.2 percent. He cited the US-led NATO proxy war in Ukraine against Russia as the primary factor impacting global financial prospects. The impact of the conflict has exacerbated ongoing inflationary pressures that have seen consumer prices increase by 8.5 percent from last March.

These economic pressures are having a catastrophic impact on the poorest countries across the globe leading to social crises and unrest. The pandemic has already pushed more than a quarter billion people into extreme poverty. Almost half the world’s population barely survives on $5.50 per day while the capitalist class is gorging itself on soaring energy and food prices. Malpass noted, “This increasing divergence of fortunes is especially troubling given the possibility of social discontent in developing countries.”

He then notes in no uncertain terms, “The emergence of the Omicron variant is a stark reminder that the COVID-19 pandemic is not over. New variants of the virus can put even highly vaccinated countries under pressure and threaten to wreak havoc in those with low vaccination rates, which are the poorest and most vulnerable.”

Indeed, despite attempts by government officials to present the pandemic in the past tense or claim it has become seasonal and endemic, the threat posed by the ongoing pandemic has not been missed by the World Bank. However, these concerns are couched in the urgent need to make progress in vaccinating populations to restore global mobility and resolve supply chain disruptions. Yet, the rabid vaccine nationalism along with pandemic and war profiteering have contributed to the rapidly growing economic impasse.

Economists and political pundits have repeatedly attempted to characterize China’s pandemic prevention strategy against Omicron as imprudent and irresponsible. As Forbes put it, “Fresh lockdowns in Shenzhen, Shanghai, and elsewhere are reaching a critical mass. They mean that roughly 400 million people across 45 mainland cities are under full or partial lockdown, noted economist Lu Ting at Nomura Holdings. Lu says we’re talking about roughly 40 percent of Chinese gross domestic product, or about $7.2 trillion.”

In a recent opinion piece in China’s Global Times, these perceptions were challenged. On April 16, they wrote, “It is supposed to be a matter of the whole world, but some Western media attributed the hindered economic recovery and the bottlenecks in the global supply chains to the insistence on ‘dynamic zero’ policy by several industrial centers in China, brushing the political manipulation that has carried out since the outbreaks of the pandemic with new paint.”

For the better part of the more than two years between Wuhan’s reopening and the current Omicron wave that has beleaguered China’s population, not only have COVID-19 deaths been among the lowest in all countries, but the return to social normalcy has also been repeatedly acknowledged by Chinese and Western media alike.

And as the World Bank’s global economic forecast was being mulled over, China’s economy grew faster in the first quarter than expected, with a 4.8 percent annual gross domestic product growth. According to the Financial Times, though consumer spending has declined, industrial production added 5 percent year on year in March.

Additionally, total trade expanded more than 10 percent in the first quarter, and “foreign trade posted positive year-on-year growth for seven consecutive quarters,” according to the Global Times.

The Global Times editorial board then added, “China has contributed a lot to the stable recovery of the global economy but is being accused of hitting global trade simply because several cities’ economies are temporarily affected by the epidemic. This is unjustifiable.” The report explains that the efforts to ensure the economy remains viable must be measured by the more important ability to protect the population.

While almost every government has allowed the Omicron variant to explode, needlessly killing thousands of people across the globe every day, even despite high vaccination rates, the pandemic prevention measures in Shanghai have, in just three weeks, proved that even the more contagious BA.2 subvariant of the Omicron can be contained.

Since April 16, the seven-day average of new cases has turned downward. Since the high of over 27,000 new cases in Shanghai on April 14, new cases barely topped 20,000 yesterday, a more than 30 percent decline from the highs in less than a week.

Daily new cases in China, reported March 1-April 19 (WSWS media)

China brought all resources to bear on these efforts despite the logistical setbacks that plague such massive efforts. This has included several rounds of mass testing of 26 million people and building isolation centers and hospitals to care for tens of thousands of asymptomatic and symptomatic patients. Yet, the bourgeois media has repeatedly chosen not to commend these efforts and ask why these could not be achieved in every other country. Instead, they resort to efforts to disparage these efforts and insist the low infection and mortality numbers in China have been fabricated.

How the Chinese health authorities have counted cases and deaths has not changed since the beginning of the pandemic. The consistency has been confirmed. The current course of the Omicron wave in Shanghai is relatively recent, and symptomatic cases have been climbing for the last few weeks. Authorities have confirmed 10 fatalities this week, indicating that the development of more severe characteristics is a lagging factor.

Professor Jin Dong-yan, a virologist at Hong Kong University, explained to the Guardian that the Chinese health authorities do not usually count deaths from infections if there are underlying conditions. “I don’t think they deliberately covered this up or want to play down this. It’s not true. They are just doing what they did in past years.”

However, not once have the Western press and political pundits raised their hackles about the massive cover-up instigated by the White House and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in changing how COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths are counted or what constitutes a high-risk zone. In fact, they have encouraged the complete abandonment of all tracking measures by implying hospital and ICU capacity was more important. Evidence is growing that not only is the BA.2 sweeping across the US, but hospital numbers are also climbing, all the while flying blind through another storm of infections.

Despite their successes, Chinese authorities have indicated that they are in the process of beginning to ease restrictions in Shanghai. Factories are resuming operations, albeit within the closed-loop system they have utilized during the Olympics. However, China’s economy is intimately tied to the global financial systems. As Jean-Charles Sambor at BNP Paribas Asset Management noted, “We definitely think that Chinese policymakers are willing to make sure they reach their growth targets.” Even China’s leading scientist, Zhong Nanshan, wrote in a recent editorial, “China needs to reopen so as to normalize socioeconomic development and adapt to global reopening. Prolonged dynamic zeroing cannot be pursued in the long run.”

IMF cuts growth forecast and targets wages

Nick Beams

The International Monetary Fund has significantly cut its global growth forecast and made clear it supports a lift in central bank interest rates to clamp down on wage demands sparked by rampant inflation. It will push for austerity “restructuring” measures to deal with rising sovereign debt levels in poorer countries.

International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva speaks at the end of the Financing of African Economies Summit, in Paris. (Ludovic Marin, Pool via AP)

In its World Economic Outlook report issued yesterday, the IMF said global growth for this year would be 3.6 percent, down 0.8 percentage points from its estimate in January and 1.3 percentage points lower than the forecast six months ago. For 2021, it said growth would come in at 6.1 percent.

These figures, however, only partially depict a picture of a rapidly worsening economic outlook amid continuing supply chain constrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic and surging inflation, exacerbated by the war in Ukraine and tighter monetary policy, as central banks lift interest rates.

The WEO report said “unusually high uncertainty” surrounded its forecasts and “downside risks to the global outlook dominate.”

The growth forecast assumed the conflict remained confined to Ukraine, that further sanctions on Russia continued to exempt the energy sector and “the pandemic’s health and economic impacts abate over the course of 2022.” Each of these assumptions is, to say the least, highly problematic.

In a simulation exercise, it calculated that an immediate oil and gas embargo against Russia would further lift inflation and hit the European economy. In Germany, economic institutions have estimated it would destroy 400,000 jobs and reduce output by 2.2 percentage points. For Europe as a whole, the IMF calculated the total output loss would be 3 percent.

Even if its optimistic assumptions are realised, the IMF said that “with a few exceptions, employment and output growth will remain typically below pre-pandemic trends through 2026.”

In his foreword to the WEO, incoming IMF chief economist Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas said overall risks to economic prospects had risen sharply with policy trade-offs becoming ever more challenging.

“The economic effects of the war are spreading far and wide—like seismic waves that emanate from the epicentre of an earthquake—mainly through commodity markets and financial linkages.”

Even before the war, he noted, inflation had surged in many economies because of soaring commodity prices and pandemic-induced supply-demand imbalances.

He also pointed to the longer-term implications of the war, warning it had increased the risk of a “more permanent fragmentation of the world economy into geopolitical blocks with distinct technology standards, cross-border payments systems, and reserve currencies.”

While he did not make the point, such a fracturing was characteristic of the decade of the 1930s in the lead-up to World War 2.

However, he did note that such a fragmentation represented “a major challenge to the rules-based framework that has governed international and economic relations for the last 70 years.”

For the IMF, as is the case with the major central banks, the key issue regarding inflation is its effect on wage demands and the eruption of broad social struggles, such as those now taking place in Sri Lanka against devastating price hikes.

Gourinchas noted that in advanced economies, including the US and Europe, inflation had become a central concern, running at its highest level in 40 years “in the context of tight labour markets.” There was a rising risk that “inflation expectations become de-anchored.”

The language of the IMF and other financial institutions is always aimed at covering over the class meaning of economic information. “De-anchoring” of inflation expectations refers to a situation in which workers initiate struggles for wage rises to compensate for past losses and the further hits to their living standards in the immediate future.

In emerging and developing economies, he warned, “increases in food and fuel prices could significantly increase the risk of social unrest.”

The response was laid out clearly by the Gourinchas.

“Central banks will need to adjust their monetary stances even more aggressively should medium- or long-term inflation expectations start drifting from central bank targets or core inflation remains progressively elevated,” he wrote.

The effect of such aggression will be to induce recessionary trends in the major economies while adding to the interest rate and debt burdens of poorer countries that are already cutting health and social services to pay interest to banks, investment houses and the IMF.

The issue of wages was also highlighted in the body of the report. It said that inflation was rising rapidly in advanced and less developed countries alike. “In both cases, tighter monetary policy will be appropriate to check the cycle of higher prices driving up wages and inflation expectations, and wages and inflation expectations driving up prices.”

The IMF made it clear highly indebted countries will need to “restructure” their sovereign debt and undertake “consolidation” to meet international payments. The meaning of these words has already been made clear in bitter experiences going back decades. They signify even further cuts in public health, education and other vital social services.

The surge in global interest rates is already well underway, as reflected in sharp movements in US bond markets over recent weeks. Bond prices fell again yesterday sending interest rates, or yields, higher. [The two have an inverse relationship.]

The yield on those 10-year Treasury bonds indexed to inflation moved into positive territory yesterday for the first time since March 2020 before the effects of the pandemic led to a plunge in financial markets.

The Financial Times reported that real yields had “rocketed higher this year”, driving higher yields more broadly and “increasing pressure on riskier parts of the financial markets.”

The yield on the two-year Treasury bond has gone as high as 2.61 percent, its highest level since January 2019.

Members of the US Federal Reserve’s policy making body have stepped up the push for higher rates in advance of a speech by Fed chair Jerome Powell on Thursday in which he is expected to further elaborate on the central bank’s monetary policy.

The president of the Chicago branch of the Fed, Charles Evans, has said the base rate could go to 2.5 percent by the end of the year—from its present level of 0.5 percent—and may need to go even higher. One of the most persistent advocates for a higher rate, James Bullard, the president of the St Louis Fed, said a 0.75 percentage rate hike may be warranted at some point this year.

The effect of such increases—all aimed at pushing down on wage demands—will increase recessionary trends in the US and sharply increase mortgages costs for homebuyers, even as workers confront rising prices across a wide range of commodities.

And it will put increased pressure on other central banks in Europe and around the world to follow suit.

‘Towards a Multipolar World Order’: Is This the End of US Hegemony?

Ramzy Baroud

The meeting between Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, in the Chinese eastern city of Huangshan on March 30, is likely to go down in history as a decisive meeting in the relations between the two Asian giants.

The meeting was not only important due to its timing or the fact that it reaffirmed the growing ties between Moscow and Beijing, but because of the resolute political discourse articulated by the two top diplomats.

In Huangshan, there was no place for ambiguity. Lavrov spoke of a new ‘world order’, arguing that the world is now “living through a very serious stage in the history of international relations” in reference to the escalating Russia-Ukraine/NATO conflict.

“We, together with you (China) and with our sympathizers,” Lavrov added with assuredness, “will move towards a multipolar, just, democratic world order.”

For his part, Wang Yi restated his country’s position regarding its relations with Russia and the West with precise words, some of which were used before in the February 4 meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping. “China-Russia cooperation has no limits … Our striving for peace has no limits, our upholding of security has no limits, our opposition towards hegemony has no limits,” Wang said.

Those following the evolution of the Russia-China political discourse, even before the start of the Russia-Ukraine war on February 24, will notice that the language employed supersedes that of a regional conflict, into the desire to bring about the reordering of world affairs altogether.

Though the readiness to push against US-led western hegemony is inherent in both countries’ political objectives, rarely did Moscow and Beijing move forward in challenging western dominance, as is the case today. The fact that China has refused to support western economic sanctions, condemn or isolate Russia is indicative of a clear Chinese forward thinking policy.

Moreover, Beijing and Moscow are clearly not basing their future relation on the outcome of the Ukraine war alone. What they are working to achieve is a long term political strategy that they hope would ultimately lead to a multipolar world.

Russia’s motives behind the coveted paradigm shift are obvious: resisting NATO’s eastern expansion, reasserting itself as a global power and freeing itself from the humiliating legacy of the post-Soviet Union. China, too, has a regional and global agenda. Though China’s ambitions are partly linked to different geopolitical spheres – South and East China Seas and the Indo-Pacific region – much of Beijing’s grievances, and priorities, overlap with those of Moscow.

Aside from the direct economic interests between Russia and China, who share massive and growing markets, they are faced with similar challenges: both are hoping to gain greater access to waterways and to push back against US-western military advancements in some of the world’s most important trade routes.

It was no surprise that one of Russia’s top strategic priorities from its war with Ukraine is to widen its access to the Black Sea, a major trade hub with a sizable percentage of world trade, especially in wheat and other essential food supplies.

Like Russia, China too has been laboring to escape US military hegemony, particularly in the Indo-Pacific. The exponential rise in the Chinese military budget – estimated to grow by 7.1% in 2022, speaks of the way that China sees its role in world affairs, now and in the future.

The US trade war against China, which was accelerated by former US President Donald Trump, was a clear reminder to Beijing that global economic power can only be guaranteed through an equal military might. This realization explains China’s decision to open its first overseas military base in Djibouti, in the very strategic Horn of Africa, in 2017, in addition to Beijing’s military moves in the three artificial islands in the South China Sea, and its latest military deal with Solomon Islands in the South Pacific.

While the Russian and Chinese motives, as enunciated by top officials on both sides are clear – to “move towards a multipolar world order” – the US and its allies are not motivated by a specific, forward thinking political doctrine, as was often the case in the past. Washington simply aims to contain the two rising powers as stated in the yet-to-be officially released 2022 National Defense Strategy (NDS). According to the NDS, “the growing multi-domain threat posed by the (People’s Republic of China) PRC” is the primary challenge to US interests, followed by the “acute threats” posed by Russia.

Considering the complex interests of both Russia and China, and the fact that the two countries are facing the same mutual enemy, chances are the war in Ukraine is merely a prelude to a protracted conflict that will manifest itself through economic, political and diplomatic pressures and even outright wars.

Though it is premature to speak about the future of this global conflict with certainty, there is little doubt that we are now living in a new era of global affairs, one which is fundamentally different from the decades that followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Equally true, we also know that both China and Russia will be important players in shaping that future, which could indeed push us away from US-western hegemony and “towards a multipolar world order”.

Now is the Time for Nonalignment and Peace

Roger McKenzie & Vijay Prashad

Wall art, Portland, Oregon. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

War is an ugly part of the human experience. Everything about it is hideous. War is most obviously the act of invasion and the brutality that goes along with its operations. No war is precise; every war hurts civilians. Each act of bombardment sends a neurological shudder through a society.

World War II demonstrated this ugliness in the Holocaust and in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. From Hiroshima and the Holocaust rose two mighty movements, one for peace and against the perils of further nuclear attacks, and the other for an end to the divisions of humanity and for a nonalignment from these divisions. The Stockholm Appeal of 1950, signed by 300 million people, called for an absolute ban on nuclear weapons. Five years later, 29 countries from Africa and Asia, representing 54 percent of the world’s population, gathered in Bandung, Indonesia, to sign a 10-point pledge against war and for the “promotion of mutual interests and cooperation.” The Bandung Spirit was for peace and for nonalignment, for the peoples of the world to put their efforts into building a process to eradicate history’s burdens (illiteracy, ill health, hunger) by using their social wealth. Why spend money on nuclear weapons when money should be spent on classrooms and hospitals?

Despite the major gains of many of the new nations that had emerged out of colonialism, the overwhelming force of the older colonial powers prevented the Bandung Spirit from defining human history. Instead, the civilization of war prevailed. This civilization of war is revealed in the massive waste of human wealth in the production of armed forces—sufficient to destroy hundreds of planets—and the use of these armed forces as the first instinct to settle disputes. Since the 1950s, the battlefield of these ambitions has not been in Europe or in North America, but rather it has been in Africa, Asia, and Latin America—areas of the world where old colonial sensibilities believe that human life is less important. This international division of humanity—which says that a war in Yemen is normal, whereas a war in Ukraine is horrific—defines our time. There are 40 wars taking place across the globe; there needs to be political will to fight to end each of these, not just those that are taking place within Europe. The Ukrainian flag is ubiquitous in the West; what are the colors of the Yemeni flag, of the Sahrawi flag, and of the Somali flag?

Return to Peace, Return to Nonalignment

We are overwhelmed these days with certainties that seem less and less real. As Russia’s war in Ukraine continues, there is a baffling view that negotiations are futile. This view circulates even when reasonable people agree that all wars must end in negotiations. If that is the case, then why not call for an immediate ceasefire and build the trust necessary for negotiations? Negotiations are only feasible if there is respect on all sides, and if there is an attempt to understand that all sides in a military conflict have reasonable demands. To wit, to paint this war as the whims of Russian President Vladimir Putin is part of the exercise of permanent war. Security guarantees for Ukraine are necessary; but so are security guarantees for Russia, which would include a return to a serious international arms control regime.

Peace does not come merely because we wish for it. It requires a fight in the trenches of ideas and institutions. The political forces in power profit from war, and so they clothe themselves in machismo to better represent the arms dealers who want more war, not less. These people in the blue suits of bureaucracy are not to be trusted with the world’s future. They fail us when it comes to the climate catastrophe; they fail us when it comes to the pandemic; they fail us when it comes to peacemaking. We need to summon up the old spirits of peace and nonalignment and bring these to life inside mass movements that are the only hope of this planet.

It is not merely sentimental to reach back to the past to breathe life into the Non-Aligned Movement of today. Already the contradictions of the present have raised the specter of nonalignment in parts of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Most of these countries voted against the condemnation of Russia not because they support Russia’s war in Ukraine, but rather because they recognize that polarization is a fatal error. What is needed is an alternative to the two-camp world of the Cold War. That is the reason why many of the leaders of these countries—from China’s Xi Jinping to India’s Narendra Modi to South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa—have called, despite their very different political orientations, for a departure from the “Cold War mentality.” They are already walking toward a new nonaligned platform. It is this actual movement of history that provokes us to reflect on a return to the concepts of nonalignment and peace.

Nobody wants to imagine the full implications of the encirclement of China and Russia by the United States and its allies. Even countries that are closely allied with the United States—such as Germany and Japan—recognize that if a new iron curtain descends around China and Russia, it would be fatal for their own countries. Already, the war and sanctions have created serious political crises in Honduras, Pakistan, Peru, and Sri Lanka, with others to follow as food and fuel prices rise astronomically. War is too expensive for the poorer nations. Spending for war is eating into the human spirit, and warfare itself increases people’s general sense of despair.

The warmakers are idealists. Their wars do not settle the major dilemmas of humanity. The ideas of nonalignment and peace, on the other hand, are realistic; their framework has answers to the children who want to eat and to learn, to play and to dream.

NHS in a state of collapse amid resurgent COVID hospitalisations and deaths

Stephen Alexander

The National Health Service (NHS) is facing an unprecedented and debilitating crisis amid a renewed surge of coronavirus hospitalisations and deaths following the Conservative government’s lifting of all key public health restrictions.

In a remarkable thread posted on Twitter Sunday, the chief executive of NHS Providers Chris Hopson set out the “four big, interrelated challenges” creating “the longest and most sustained period of NHS pressure” 20 experienced chairs and CEOs from across the health service had ever experienced.

Hopson lists as challenge one, “Much higher levels of covid prevalence that we were expecting”.

In the first week of April, patients in hospital with COVID-19 exceeded 20,000 across the UK—levels not seen since the worst days of the pandemic in January and February 2021. There are presently 19,028 patients in hospital with COVID infections, according to official figures, with 15,432 admitted over the past seven days. Hundreds are dying daily of the disease, including nearly 2,000 deaths over the seven days to last Thursday.

In the face of widespread calls by health leaders and scientists for the reintroduction of social distancing and masking requirements in public spaces to ease the pressure on hospitals, the Johnson government has insisted that there will be “no change to our guidance and our living with COVID plan still stands”.

Hopson told The Sunday Times that COVID is surging partly because the government is pretending “Covid doesn’t exist any more and that nobody needs to take any precautions.” This followed Matthew Taylor, the chief executive of the NHS Confederation, telling the BBC earlier that week, “In our view, we do not have a living-with-Covid plan, we have a living-without-restrictions ideology”, and British Medical Association chair Dr Chaand Nagpaul warning of the consequent pressures on the health system, “This Easter looks set to be just as bad as some of the worst winters we have ever seen.”

Challenge two is a “very pressured urgent and emergency care pathway”. Pressures, says Hopson, are “significantly greater, lasting longer and more geographically widespread, than we have seen before.”

The worst hit area of hospital care is in accident and emergency departments, which have seen waiting times for acutely life-threatening type 1 patients increase to record levels in recent weeks. NHS Confederation reports:

“There were 1.42 million type 1 attendances in March, of which 58.6 per cent of attendances were completed within four hours. The worst performance on record prior to the pandemic was 68.6 per cent in December 2019, and performance in February was the previous worst on record (60.8 per cent).”

“Meanwhile there were 22,506 12-hour waits from decision to admit, to admission (or trolley waits, as they are known)… Across the whole of 2019, there were 8,272 12-hour trolley waits recorded, so March’s figure is 272 per cent of an entire year’s worth of 12-hour waits pre-pandemic.”

Deputy director of research at the Nuffield Trust Dr Sarah Scobie said patients were facing “frightening levels of suffering” and warned, “It is hard to imagine an end in sight, with lengthy waits for healthcare firmly here to stay.”

Ambulances are also experiencing unprecedented delays. In five out of the last seven months, response times for the most serious, life-threatening injuries has been well over nine minutes compared to the standard of seven minutes. Likewise, category 2 patients, including suspected heart attacks or strokes, which guidelines say should receive treatment within 18 minutes, are taking an average of 1 hour and 1 minute to reach because of ambulance delays.

Overall waits for ambulances have reached an average 2 hours 17 minutes, which is the first time since records began that this figure has exceeded 2 hours.

The London Ambulance Service is now planning to use volunteers to answer category 3 emergency calls, including people in the late stages of labour, with abdominal pains, and cases of diabetes where patients can be treated in their own homes.

President of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine Dr. Katherine Henderson commented, “It feels shaming to me that we’re in this situation.”

Nursing staff in an NHS hospital (Credit: WSWS Media)

“Challenge 3,” Hopson writes, is the “care backlog”. The waiting list for elective procedures rose to a record 6.18 million patients in March, up from 6.1 million in February. This is despite the valiant efforts of NHS workers who cleared 1.26 million patients off the waiting list in February and achieved a reduction in still dangerously high waiting times for cancer diagnosis and treatment.

The Financial Times reported Sunday that in the week ending April 12, fewer than 5,000 general or acute hospital beds were unoccupied in England, 5.4 percent of the total and the lowest level across the pandemic. Nigel Edwards, chief executive of the Nuffield Trust, told the paper “No hospital system can run at that level of occupancy outside of very short periods of crisis.”

NHS managers have begun to ease infection control and prevention procedures to free up hospital capacity. These include measures such as ending the systematic testing of patients and the separation of COVID-positive patients from the general population, as well as relaxed protocols for personal protective equipment.

According to NHS sources, The Independentreports, “at least two major hospitals, in Newcastle and York, have dropped testing of all patients without symptoms in order to alleviate pressure on beds—raising fears that Covid could spread on unchecked wards. Other hospitals are also likely to do the same as bed pressures worsen.”

As well as high hospital demand due to COVID, clinicians are unable to discharge patients no longer requiring hospital treatment due to a staffing crisis in community health services and social care.

Workforce shortages are described by Hopson as “the biggest of challenge of all.” Daily staff absences now stand at approximately 71,000 on top of 110,000 staff vacancies in NHS England. The figure is approaching the previous peak in absences recorded on January 10, 2022. In the South West and South East regions of England absences had already exceeded their January peak in March, with 48 percent of absences due to COVID in the South West.

Approximately a quarter of health workers are looking for new jobs, according to a recent NHS staff survey, due to widespread staff burnout and low morale. NHS staff have suffered 8 million mental health sick days in the last five years, 2.2 million of them in 2021. Only 27 percent of the NHS workforce feel that there are enough staff in their organisation to allow them to do their jobs properly and safely. Close to half have been made unwell by work-related stress in the last month, a third say they feel burnt out and a third say they are exhausted at the thought of the next shift.

Dr Thomas Dolphin, a consultant anaesthetist, told the Guardian, “We brutalised our staff for months on end. Then, not surprisingly, quite a lot of them have left or retired, or moved to another country as soon as they could because it was soul-destroying. Now we’re in a position where we’re even more short staffed. The consequence is in those numbers.”

Hopson concludes his thread damningly, “These pressures are a result of four long term fault lines built up over last decade. Longest/deepest NHS funding squeeze ever. NHS therefore unable to build extra capacity to meet growing demand. Rising workforce shortages. Govt failure to address problems in social care.”

The Conservative government, which is committed to privatising the health service, has no intention of resolving the situation. Health Secretary Sajid Javid has insisted that workforce numbers will need to be addressed based on existing budgets. Chancellor Rishi Sunak has instructed NHS Trusts to make a £4.75 billion in “efficiency savings” as part of plans to slash “wasteful” spending across the public sector.

A British Medical Association (BMA) survey of 1,194 doctors found that 52 percent of doctors believe that the government’s recovery plans are “totally unachievable” and 36 percent believe they are “mostly unachievable” with existing health resources.

UK COVID-19 vaccine roll out for 5-11-year-olds mired in delays during unprecedented virus surge

Liz Smith & Tania Kent

Under conditions of an unprecedented rise in COVID cases, young children are being placed at continued risk by the delay of the vaccination programme for 5-11-year-olds.

National Health Service (NHS) staff only began vaccinating children aged 5-11 from April 4. Local vaccination centres or community pharmacies are being used rather than schools.

Huge numbers of children and their families have already been infected or re-infected needlessly. Last month, Office for National Statistics (ONS) data revealed that the highest infection rates for all age groups were among these unvaccinated 2-11-year-olds, expected to attend pre-school settings, nurseries and primary schools with no mitigation measures in place at all—no masks, no appropriate ventilation, no social distancing.

By January 2022, cumulative cases of COVID in the 0-19 age group had reached 3 million. Due to the unrestricted spread of the disease, in several variants, by April 13 this total had reached over 4.4 million in the 0-19 age group in England alone.

ONS figures from April 13, tweeted by Safe Education for All member @tigresseleanor, show that among children aged 0-9 there have been a total of 1,548,770 cases; among those 10-14 there have been 1,576,132 cases.

Child hospital admissions have increased since the April 1 decision to end the provision of free tests, including in schools. By April 13, total child COVID hospital admissions had reached 23,592. Of these 12,808 were aged 0-5, and 10,784 aged 6-17. On that day a further 95 children were admitted to hospital. There are over 150,000 children suffering with Long COVID and some 161 children have died from COVID in the UK, the highest toll in Europe, followed by Ukraine with 85.

A reception class teacher (left) leads the class at the Holy Family Catholic Primary School in Greenwich, London, Monday, May 24, 2021. (AP Photo/Alastair Grant)

The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) has now advised that all children in the 5-11 age group be offered two 10 microgram doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, a third of the strength given those aged 12 and over, with an interval of at least 12 weeks between doses—or 8 weeks for children who have medical conditions that put them at increased risk from the virus or who live with someone with a weakened immune system.

Almost five million children are eligible for two doses of the vaccine following the updated guidance, which recommends children can benefit from a “non-urgent offer of the vaccine.”

The phrasing consciously downplays the dangers. The JCVI and the Royal College of Paediatricians and Child Health (RCPCH) have been at pains to stress that COVID-19 is mild in children and that therefore the benefits of vaccination are minimal, in service to the government’s reopening agenda.

President of the RCPCH Dr Camilla Kingdon responded to the JCVI announcement by saying, “Any decision to vaccinate should be a matter of choice and it should never be mandatory.” Developing a false narrative that COVID vaccinations for children will reduce the uptake of other childhood vaccinations such as Measles, Mumps and Rubella (MMR), Kingdon stated, “The COVID-19 vaccination must not displace others”.

The opposite is more likely. There are financial incentives for GPs to meet MMR vaccination targets. These are being made more stringent, with the BMJ warning, “GPs in deprived areas now face being penalised financially at a time when they may need extra resources to improve uptake.” All of which threatens to sideline COVID vaccination.

Children aged 5-11 years who have serious medical conditions that put them at increased risk from COVID-19 or who live with someone with a weakened immune system have been eligible for the vaccine for some time, but even among these more vulnerable children there have been significant delays in accessing the vaccine.

Since the NHS National Booking System opened on April 2 for families of 5-11-year-olds, only around 40,000 have booked a vaccination appointment. This is a drop in the ocean, and it is not hard to see why. There has been little to no vaccine promotion, with the task being left to schools to inform parents via email where they can be accessed.

The continued downplaying of the risks for children and delay in organising vaccination, giving fuel to the anti-vax movement, has also had an impact on scientific awareness in the population.

ONS research found that “For pupils aged 5 to 11 years, 62% of their parents said they were likely to agree to their child having a COVID-19 vaccine compared with 24% who said they were unlikely to agree to their child having a vaccine (22 November to 15 December 2021). The most common reasons for parents not wanting their child to be vaccinated included worrying about the side effects (54%) and wanting to wait to see how it works for children aged 5 to 11 years (49%).”

Delayed vaccinations for 5-11-year-olds follows a similar story for 12-15-year-olds, finally provided jabs, through schools, midway through the autumn term. The vaccine rollout among children was delayed for months after the JCVI decided against recommending vaccination for almost all under-18s.

Documents leaked in May last year revealed that the JCVI made its decision with the claim, ripped straight from the “herd immunity” playbook, that “Circulation of covid in children could periodically boost immunity in adults.”  The document added that “Children rarely develop severe disease or die of COVID-19; even children with underlying comorbidities have a very low risk”.

By the time the government—under mounting pressure from concerned parents and educators—made the decision that some school-age groups, excluding those under 12, should be vaccinated, the entire summer period had been lost. The vaccine programme among 12–15-year-olds was finally rolled out in late September, but it has been marked by chaos, reaching only a fraction of pupils. Only19.3 percent of this age group had been vaccinated by the end of October, according to a UK Health Security Agency estimate. Over 40 percent of schools had not received the single vaccine for their pupils by half term (October 25, 2021).

Over two months later, masses of children are still unvaccinated with the required at least two doses. The latest ONS update published February 1, reads, “As of 9 January 2022, 52.5% of pupils aged 12 to 15 years and 69.7% of pupils aged 16 to 17 years in state-funded schools in England have received at least one dose of a coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccine, while 5.8% and 46.0% respectively have received two doses.”

Government indifference over vaccination for children runs parallel with new isolation guidance for people aged 18 and under in England which states: “If they have mild symptoms like a runny nose, sore throat or slight cough, they can still go to school or college. If they have a temperature or are unwell the advice is for them to stay at home and avoid contact with others where possible—they can go back to school when they are well enough and don’t have a temperature. Testing isn’t recommended—but if they test positive they should try to stay at home for three days”.

With free testing having ended and a single test costing £3, parents already facing a steep rise in the cost of living estimated to plunge 1.3 million people into absolute poverty in the UK will be left with little choice but to try to manage without a test and risk their loved ones catching the virus.

Many schools have had to close again in the last week due to staff and pupil infections. Faced with an unprecedented crisis, the headteacher unions are demanding the return of free lateral flow tests, with the general secretary of the National Association of Headteachers (NAHT) Paul Whiteman saying the current setup “feels reckless in the extreme”.