Bank of England maps out social counter-revolution

Chris Marsden

The Bank of England (BoE) has increased interest rates by 0.5 percentage points to 1.75, the largest rise in 27 years. It did so to deepen the long recession now begun in the UK, intending to push up unemployment and social hardship for millions.

The Bank of England’s Monetary Price Committee (MPC) announced its decision on Friday. The rate rise is part of aggressive moves by the world’s leading central banks led by the US Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank to “crush” demands for higher wages amid the greatest cost-of-living crisis since the 1930s.

Governor of the Bank of England, Andrew Bailey sits during the Bank of England's financial stability report press conference, at the Bank of England, London, Thursday, August 4, 2022. The Bank of England says the United Kingdom’s economy is projected to enter a recession in the final three months of the year. The bank said Thursday that inflation will accelerate to over 13% in the fourth quarter and remain “very elevated,” for much of 2023. [AP Photo/Yui Mok/Pool Photo]

In its statement released Friday, the BoE said inflation had “intensified significantly” since its May Monetary Policy Report and the MPC’s previous meeting, saying “this largely reflects a near doubling in wholesale gas prices since May, owing to Russia’s restriction of gas supplies to Europe and the risk of further curbs.”

It predicted Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation would rise to over 13 percent by October, and “remain at very elevated levels throughout much of 2023”, driven largely by the lifting of energy price caps. Domestic fuel bills are expected to rise by a further 50 percent in October and again in January.

The BoE made clear its central concern is to contain demands for higher wages. The governors complained that job vacancies were at “historically high levels” with unemployment at just 3.8 percent. This, combined with labour shortages in key sectors, was encouraging high “underlying nominal wage growth” and a broad “increase in recent wage settlements”.

Despite wages lagging far behind inflation, the BoE sounded the alarm over a 5 percent growth in private sector wages compared with 3.5 percent before the pandemic. It warned that public sector pay was set to grow by 4 percent, compared to 1.8 percent in the three months to May.

Significantly, the BoE’s survey of employers “suggested that businesses expected to increase pay deals by around 6 percent over the next twelve months”, less than half the current rate of (Retail Prices Index) RPI measure of inflation, yet sufficient to raise the BoE’s hackles.

The bank explained that “the pressure on wage growth” can only be combatted via recessionary policies, especially via a surge in unemployment by at least 600,000 next year.

The bank’s governors described the risks to the economy from external and domestic “shocks” as “exceptionally large”.

In raising interest rates, the BoE is enforcing the dictates of financial markets, corporate boardrooms and banks in response to a growing wave of strikes and wildcat actions that is threatening to snowball. Its supposedly impartial economic pronouncements are an agenda for class war.

The working class is to be forced to pay for a global inflationary crisis triggered by: 1) trillions of pounds in corporate and financial bailouts by central banks during the pandemic, 2) NATO’s proxy war against Russia that has led to fuel and commodity price hikes, and 3) unprecedented profiteering by the financial oligarchy that has inflated global asset prices worldwide.

The ruling elite intends to force through the largest ever increase in defence spending to wage war against Russia and China via a frontal assault on the working class.

Its tightening of monetary policy is above all a response to the eruption of strikes involving hundreds of thousands of workers after decades in which the class struggle has been suppressed.

Strikes by rail, post and British Telecoms and bus workers have already taken place, and this week saw wildcat strikes over pay at three Amazon warehouses and a food manufacturing company. The ruling class fears this movement will spread, with nurses, doctors, teachers, firefighters, lecturers, civil servants, lawyers and council workers determined to strike after being offered pay rises of as little as 2 percent that will push millions over the edge.

The Bank’s aim is to counter this rising wave of militancy by forcing desperate workers to accept further savage pay cuts or face mass unemployment and financial ruin.

While workers wage demands are being blamed for inflation, the real cause is a staggering increase in corporate profits. Amid the pandemic and NATO’s proxy war against Russia, profit gouging is responsible for around 60 percent of the increases in inflation.

Record profits of nearly £50 billion have been announced by the world’s five biggest oil companies, including £6.9 billion for BP between April and June, and $11.5 billion for Shell. A June 2022 report by the Unite union notes that the top 350 companies listed on the London Stock Exchange saw profits jump by 73 percent in 2021 compared with the year before the pandemic. UK-wide company profits jumped 11.74 percent in the six months from October 2021 to March 2022.

In stark contrast, average wages remain no higher today than they were before the 2008 financial crisis, a loss of £9,200 per year. As a result, galloping inflation means more than two million households are going without “heating or eating”, according to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, and seven million families are living through a “frightening year of financial fear”.

Low-income households have borrowed £12.5 billion of new debt in 2022, including £3.5 billion from doorstep lenders and loan sharks. Now they will be squeezed for even high loan repayments. The rise in interest rates will also be passed on to mortgage holders. With average house prices already nine times more than average annual income, millions will go to the wall.

Half of families have savings of less than a month’s income and over 1.3 million households have no savings at all. With UK energy bills set to double to nearly £4,000 this winter, alongside soaring food prices, the number of families without savings will reach 5.3 million. For 1.2 million families, food and energy bills alone will exceed their disposable incomes.

In this explosive situation, the ruling class has relied on the trade unions to impose de facto pay cuts by isolating and suppressing strikes and agreeing sell-out pay deals. This led to a decline in real wages of 3.7 percent in the three months to the end of May.

But this cannot continue. Massive social anger threatens to erupt outside of the control of the trade unions.  

The raising of interest rates is only one aspect of the ruling class offensive. The Conservative government is using its leadership contest to fashion the most right-wing policy agenda since the 1930s and is introducing a battery of repressive measures against the right to strike and protest.

Labour’s role is critical in enforcing this agenda. Its leader Sir Keir Starmer denounces “magic money tree economics” almost as often as he condemns strikes. Speaking to BBC Radio Merseyside he said Labour was “being very clear we unshakably support NATO, being very clear we are unashamedly pro-business, we work with business.”

CDC, Reuters suppress warnings about airborne transmission of monkeypox

Bryan Dyne

On Friday, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the news outlet Reuters escalated the attacks against those warning that the deadly monkeypox virus can be transmitted through the air. In a “fact check” article published by Reuters, the news outlet claims that social media posts exposing unexplained changes made in late May to the CDC’s guidelines on monkeypox, are “missing the context” of the changes.

The Reuters piece was published after Dana Parish, an author and advocate for those suffering from Long COVID, wrote a series of tweets on July 30 showing that CDC guidelines have been “scrubbed” of clear references to the danger of airborne transmission of monkeypox.

Parish compared the CDC Yellow Book, which is published to provide health and disease information for those traveling internationally, to the agency’s current Monkeypox FAQ, which present conflicting guidelines. The Yellow Book, published every two years and most recently in 2020, states, “monkeypox spread from person to person is principally respiratory; contact with infectious skin lesions or scabs is another, albeit less common, means of person-to-person spread.”

In contrast, the most recent CDC guidance claims that “direct contact” is the primary mode of transmission. “Respiratory secretions,” a term which is not defined or explained, is listed as a secondary mode of transmission at best. To reinforce its assertions, the CDC also writes that, “In the current monkeypox outbreak, the virus is spreading primarily through close personal contact,” including sex.

The conception that monkeypox is primarily transmitted sexually has been massively promoted since the monkeypox pandemic began in early May. The World Health Organization (WHO) and virtually every public health agency of the major capitalist governments have promoted the fact that 98 percent of confirmed so far have been among men sexually active with other men. In reality, testing has been largely confined to this demographic with nearly every non-endemic country refusing to conduct widespread testing to trace the extent of the disease among the entire population. Significantly, in Africa, where monkeypox is endemic in a number of countries and at least 350 cases have been detected this year, 60 percent of all cases are among men and 40 percent have occurred among women.

Historically, airborne transmission has long been recognized as one of the key ways that monkeypox can jump from person to person, and the science of the virus has not changed overnight during the current unprecedented outbreak. A recent preprint article studying this year’s monkeypox outbreak in the United Kingdom showed that “three of four air samples collected” during the study tested positive for monkeypox, indicating that the disease is airborne. In Nigeria, a country where monkeypox outbreaks are more commonplace, their Monkeypox Public Health Response Guidelines have always had “airborne precautions” in place. In July, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHC) published an extensive report on monkeypox, which notes that monkeypox can spread through aerosols and recommends that healthcare workers wear N95 masks for protection.

In an extensive thread defending Parish against the attack by Reuters, anti-COVID advocate Lazarus Long documents numerous sources which have noted the airborne transmission of monkeypox, including multiple screenshots from the CDC’s prior guidance.

Parish commented on the Reuters piece to the World Socialist Web Site, noting that “Fact checkers are supposed to use facts, not government hearsay without any data to back it up. The government refused to test women, children, and straight men saying the virus was only spreading among men having sex with men. This doesn’t show a mode of transmission, it shows that one community was tested while others weren’t. If a virus was known to be primarily airborne before the current outbreak, what evidence is there to show that those cases weren’t spread by airborne transmission? Having sex would put these men at close range for a long enough period to have an infectious dose.

“Remember when the government said you’d only catch COVID if you were around someone for 15 minutes? That was untrue and unsupported, and this all feels too eerily familiar.”

Parish also spoke to the lack of genuine research in the “fact check” article, asking, “Why did Reuters report that the CDC used to explain that respiratory was a primary mode of transmission without showing any evidence that it's no longer happening? Also, why did Reuters talk about the Department of Homeland Security document without explaining that they’re telling health care workers to use N95s at minimum around Monkeypox patients and that there is mention of airborne spread in that document?'

She added, “Reuters confirmed that up until the current outbreak, the CDC and other experts knew airborne was the primary mode of transmission but have provided no evidence to show it’s not or an explanation as to how a virus can suddenly no longer have airborne transmission, especially as cases are spreading so fast.”

Parish also noted that Reuters only contacted the CDC for their article and did not ask her for comment. In other words, attempts are being made to discredit and silence those that argue for the precautionary principle, which demands that the whole arsenal of public health measures be deployed against a deadly viral outbreak which has still many unknown characteristics.

The timing of the Reuters piece suggests there are a variety of high level discussions within the US state regarding its response to the monkeypox pandemic. The same day the “fact check” was published, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authorized the use of the Jynneos smallpox vaccine for children under 18 years old who were potentially exposed to monkeypox at a daycare center in Illinois, despite the absence of clinical trials to test the safety and efficacy of the vaccine for this demographic. The move by the FDA suggests that the government is aware that in previous outbreaks, as recorded in the report from Nigeria, “the majority of deaths [occurred] in younger age groups.” The immediate authorization of the Jynneos vaccine stands in stark contrast to the extended delay in granting emergency use authorization to anti-COVID vaccines for children over the past two years.

At the same time, cases among young people are growing. Over the weekend, Florida reported three new cases of monkeypox in children under the age of fourteen, bringing the total number of infections in children in the US to at least eight. There are now over 7,500 cases in the US and nearly 29,000 cases worldwide. The death toll, according to Our World In Data, currently stands at nine.

As with the coronavirus pandemic, the working class as a whole must ask, “What does the government know about the dangers of monkeypox and when did it know it?” It is increasingly clear that the same backhanded dealings that occurred at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, done in order to ensure the stock market could be propped up at the expense of human lives, are being repeated by withholding the immense dangers of monkeypox from the American and world population.

Nicolas Smit, an expert on airborne transmission and masks, told the WSWS, “The CDC has a record of hiding evidence of airborne transmission from the public and purposefully misleading them to believe it isn't happening until they are forced to admit it. The CDC admitted to airborne transmission for COVID in January 2020, then told the public for over a year there was no evidence of airborne transmission. The CDC only admitted to airborne transmission a week after the WHO did in May 2021.”

Smit added, “The CDC and President Biden said that once airborne transmission was confirmed, they would recommend airborne PPE like N95s be put into widespread use. But once it happened, they continued to recommend cloth masks and kept a veil of secrecy over superior options like elastomeric respirators.”

Concerns over the airborne transmission of monkeypox are particularly important as schools reopen. Schools, as well as factories, offices and other workplaces, have been shown to be a key vector of transmission for airborne viruses such as the coronavirus and monkeypox. The fact that warnings that monkeypox is airborne are being suppressed suggest that the government is aware of the dangers and attempting to ultimately suppress social opposition to the unchecked spread of a second deadly pandemic virus among children.

“The bottom line is that we need transparency and clear, science-based guidance in order to protect children, their families, teachers, and the broader community,” Parish wrote. “Rather than spend so much energy trying to craft their image by discrediting me and others who have called them out and are rightfully concerned, the CDC and all public health officials should be laser focused on understanding and mitigating the outbreak, and direct communication to the public about how to protect themselves.”

US Senate targets Social Security and Medicare

Andre Damon

Last week, Republican Senator Ron Johnson called for ending Social Security and Medicare as entitlement programs, instead transferring them into the discretionary budget where they would be gutted.

Johnson’s proposal follows a similar call by Florida Senator Rick Scott, who earlier this year called for putting Social Security and Medicare up for renewal every five years.

Social Security and Medicare spending is allocated as mandatory spending, funded by workers’ payroll taxes, to prevent them from being pillaged.  Transferring these programs to the discretionary budget would mean their abolition, slashing US life expectancy as millions of retirees die in poverty and from preventable disease.

Seymour Fogel, "The Wealth of the Nation," commissioned for the Social Security Board Building, Washingon DC in 1938.

“If you qualify for the entitlement, you just get it no matter what the cost,” Johnson said. “And our problem in this country is that [mandatory spending takes up] more than 70% of our federal budget, of our federal spending.”

Yes, retired workers are “entitled” to these benefits, because they have been paying for them their entire lives. Out of every dollar workers have earned, they paid eight cents to finance their Social Security and Medicare benefits, matched by equal payments from their employer.

But Johnson and Scott, lackeys for the billionaires that rule over America, are demanding that these funds that workers have been paying into over a lifetime of toil and struggle be stolen from them to make the oligarchy richer and to fund America’s new “forever wars.”

Social Security was created in 1935 as part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, in response to a wave of social struggles during the Great Depression. Medicare was created in 1965 during President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society reforms, against the backdrop of the Civil Rights movement and a strike wave gripping large portions of the country.

With both of these programs, the leaders of American capitalism sought to convince workers that the capitalist system was capable of providing for the needs of society and preventing the mass poverty and early death of millions of elderly people.

Johnson, Scott and their co-conspirators are making the opposite clear: Capitalism means social misery for the workers and the unending enrichment for the capitalist class.

These senators have articulated as a positive proposal what has been a goal of generations of Democratic and Republican politicians, military strategists and leading think tanks. In 2010, Democratic President Barack Obama formed the bipartisan “National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility,” chaired by former Republican Senator Alan Simpson and Democrat Erskine Bowles, a former chief of staff in the Clinton administration.

The commission called for slashing funding for Social Security and Medicare. On the basis of its proposals, the federal government oversaw a squeeze on social spending at the federal, state and local levels, together with significant cuts to Medicare and Social Security.  

Now, amid the social crisis triggered by the pandemic, the eruption of war with Russia and the conflict with China, America’s financial oligarchy is renewing its calls for the dismantling of these bedrock social safety net programs.

In March Glenn Hubbard, the former Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal calling for slashing Social Security and Medicare to fund a massive surge in military spending, declaring, “NATO Needs More Guns and Less Butter.” Hubbard, a Republican, praised the conclusions of Obama’s 2010 deficit reduction committee and called for the full implementation of its demands.

Hubbard echoed the themes of a 2013 paper by Anthony Cordesman of the Washington think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), which stated: “The US does not face any foreign threat as serious as its failure to come to grips with … the rise in the cost of federal entitlement spending.”

But while there is allegedly no money to pay retirees their retirement benefits, there is no limit to what can be handed out to defense contractors to fund the US conflicts with Russia and China.

In the six months since the outbreak of the US-NATO proxy war against Russia, the United States has pledged over $54 billion to the war effort, equivalent to $2 billion per week. The Senate is currently debating a bill that would send an additional $4.5 billion in weapons to Taiwan as part of the US military standoff with China. 

In June, the Senate Armed Services Committee voted to approve a record $858 billion in military spending for Fiscal Year 2023, an increase of $45 billion over the Biden administration’s budget request and nearly $80 billion over the amount appropriated by Congress for the current fiscal year.

This massive surge in military spending is accompanied by a systematic effort to reduce workers’ wages with the aim of further enriching the financial oligarchy.

In June, announcing a surprise 75 basis point increase in the federal funds rate, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said, “You have a lot of surplus demand … in the labor market … you have two job vacancies for every person seeking a job, and that has led to a real imbalance in wage negotiations.”

Powell made clear that the Federal Reserve is deliberately seeking to increase the unemployment rate, with the aim of further impoverishing workers, even to the point of triggering a recession.

He complained about the power of workers who are drowning in rising prices, even as corporations rake in the highest levels of corporate profits in years.

Nowhere in any section of the US political establishment is there a single mention of stopping the rampant price-gouging by corporations.

The overwhelming factor driving the increase in prices, according to an April 2022 study by the Economic Policy Institute, has been corporate price-gouging that feeds directly into profit margins. The study found that rising corporate profits contributed six times more to rising prices than rising labor costs, in a significant reversal of the previous period.

In 2021, profits surged 35 percent compared to the previous year, in the highest increase in corporate profitability since 1950.

By contrast, over the past 12 months, average hourly earnings for US workers have increased by just 5.2 percent, meaning that a typical worker makes 4 percent less per hour than he or she did a year ago.

The clear intention of the financial oligarchy that Johnson speaks for is to ensure that the impoverishment of workers taking place throughout the United States is transferred to retirees.

The American financial oligarchy has declared war on the working class. After ending of all restrictions on the spread of COVID-19 and forcing workers back into workplaces that are hotbeds for the transmission of the pandemic, the ruling class is engaged in an all-out effort not only to reduce workers’ wages but to slash whatever remains of America’s badly tattered social safety net.

This policy is creating a wave of social opposition in the United States and throughout the world, taking the form of strikes and protests. The growing mood of militancy and determined struggle has found expression in the campaign of Will Lehman, a socialist worker from Mack Trucks in Macungie, Pennsylvania, for president of the United Auto Workers.

In a letter to UAW members, Lehman demanded “Massive pay increases to make up for decades of givebacks,” “mandatory Cost-of-Living Adjustments (COLA) to keep pace with soaring inflation” and “the re-establishment of the 8-hour day, not on the basis of poverty-level wages, but with wages that allow us to provide for ourselves and our families.”

Russian-Turkish talks raise concerns in Western capitals amid NATO war on Russia

Ulaş Ateşçi

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Russian President Vladimir Putin held talks in the Black Sea resort town of Sochi Friday. The summit, only 17 days after a trilateral meeting with Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi in Tehran in July, was closely followed by the NATO powers, which are waging war on Russia in Ukraine and imposing sanctions in Moscow.

The meeting lasted more than four hours and focused on the Ukraine war, related difficulties with grain exports from Ukraine and Russia, the deepening economic, energy and tourism ties between Russia and Turkey, and ongoing wars in Syria and Libya.

Before the bilateral meeting, which was not followed by a press conference, Putin emphasized the growing trade between Turkey and Russia, despite US-European economic and financial sanctions targeting Russia. He said, “last year our trade grew 57 percent, and it doubled in the first few months of this year, from January to May.”

Putin also pointed to ongoing Russia gas deliveries to Europe via Turkey: “TurkStream, the construction of which we completed some time ago, is today one of the most important routes for supplying Europe with Russian gas. TurkStream, unlike all other directions of our hydrocarbon supplies to Europe, is operating well, smoothly, and without failure.”

He thanked Erdoğan for the “grain corridor” agreement reached in Istanbul late July. “The problem of Ukrainian grain exports through Black Sea ports has been settled thanks to your personal involvement and the UN Secretariat’s mediation,” he said.

The first grain vessel under the agreement left Odessa last week and, after being checked in Istanbul, sailed to Lebanon. Three vessels loaded with about 60,000 tons of grain bound for Ireland and Britain are reportedly preparing to depart from Ukrainian ports.

Erdoğan said: “We will open a new page in our bilateral relations. This concerns energy, and especially the ‘grain corridor’ via the Black Sea where we have taken steps… From Turkey’s point of view, I want to note that Russia plays a special role on the world stage.”

Aware of NATO allies’ concern on Russia-Turkey ties and the possibility of sanctions being circumvented, Erdoğan said, “Today the world fixed all eyes on Sochi: What will they do in Sochi, what will they address in Sochi, what will they discuss? Perhaps the world is watching our meeting in Sochi closely. And, perhaps the best answers to these questions will be given after our meeting.”

Supplying Kiev with Bayraktar drones, Ankara has condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. However, it did not participate in Western sanctions and has tried to mediate a ceasefire since the war in Ukraine began, as it has also close economic and military ties with Moscow. This is unacceptable for the United States and other NATO imperialist powers, which seek to prolong the war, imposed regime change in Kremlin and subordinate Russia to their dictates.

Erdoğan said, “I reminded Putin that we could have his meeting with Zelensky” in Istanbul. Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu also wrote on Twitter that Ankara hopes the grain agreements will serve as a basis “to ensure a cease-fire and stable peace” in Ukraine.

However, the joint press statement issued after the meeting made no mention of these issues; nor did it mention Ankara’s potential assault on US-backed Kurdish nationalist forces in Syria.

It announced that they agreed “to boost collaboration about issues that have been pending on the agenda of both countries for a long time, concerning sectors such as transportation, commerce, agriculture, industry, finance, tourism and construction.” The joint statement also called for “the full implementation of the Istanbul agreement, including the unimpeded export of Russia’s grain, fertilizer and raw materials stocks needed for its production.”

Though Turkey illegally keeps troops on Syrian soil, Russian and Turkish leaders committed to “the preservation of Syria’s political unity and territorial integrity,” and “to act in coordination and solidarity in the fight against all terrorist organizations.”

Since May, Erdoğan has been threatening a new military operation against the Kurdish nationalist People’s Protection Units (YPG) in Syria, to create a 30-kilometer-deep zone in which Ankara could resettle around 1 million Syrian refugees. However, the joint statement indicates that Russia, one of the main backers of the Damascus regime together with Iran, still opposes this plan. Moreover, Moscow, unlike Ankara, does not consider the YPG a terrorist organization and maintains significant relations with it.

After Erdogan’s invasion threats, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), of which the YPG is the backbone, appealed for support not only to the “international community,” i.e., Washington and the other imperialist powers, but also to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

According to recent reports, the Syrian military is building up forces in YPG-held territory against Turkey. Kommersant reported, “the Syrian army conducted large-scale exercises with the participation of the Russian military. In addition, there are rumors in social networks that for the first time SDF fighters joined the Syrian army. Officially, this report is not confirmed by either the Russian or the Syrian side, but it was picked up by highly respected Arab media, including the Al-Jazeera TV channel and the Al-Sharq Al-Awsat newspaper.”

One of the most significant consequences of the summit was announced by Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak after talks between the two leaders. He said, “Deliveries of gas to the Republic of Turkey were discussed, which is supplied in a fairly huge volume—26 bln cubic meters per year. The Presidents agreed during talks that we will start partial gas deliveries and payment in rubles.”

“Supplies will be partly paid in Russian rubles then at the first stage. This is indeed the new stage, new opportunities, including for development of our monetary and financial relations,” Novak added.

After the meeting, Erdogan said there are efforts to let Russian tourists use Russia’s MIR card for shopping and accommodation in Turkey, a move to avoid Western financial sanctions.

Despite Turkey’s lifting of its veto on Sweden and Finland’s NATO membership after various negotiations, the recent Erdoğan-Putin meeting and potential agreements blunting Western sanctions raised serious concerns in the US and European political and media establishment.

On Friday, the Washington Post wrote, “Concerns are increasing in both the West and Ukraine that Moscow is seeking Erdogan’s assistance to bypass restrictions on its banking, energy and industrial sectors, which are biting deeper into its economy.”

The Post claimed, “A Russian proposal intercepted ahead of the meeting and shared with The Washington Post by Ukrainian intelligence” called for Erdoğan to “permit Russia to buy stakes in Turkish oil refineries, terminals and reservoirs—a move that economists say could help disguise the origin of its exports after the European Union’s oil embargo kicks in fully next year.”

According to the report, “Russia also requested that several state-owned Turkish banks allow correspondent accounts for Russia’s biggest banks—which economists and sanctions experts say would be a flagrant breach of Western sanctions—and that Russian industrial producers be allowed to operate out of free economic zones in Turkey.”

The Post acknowledged, “There was no indication after the talks that Turkey had agreed to such arrangements,” but threatened that this leaves Turkey’s “own banks and companies at risk of secondary sanctions [cutting] off their access to Western markets.”

“Alarm mounts in western capitals over Turkey’s deepening ties with Russia,” the Financial Times (FT) wrote, citing six Western officials “concerned about the pledge made on Friday by the Turkish and Russian leaders to expand their co-operation on trade and energy after a four-hour meeting in Sochi.”

It cited an EU official’s concern that Turkey is “increasingly” a platform for trade with Russia. Another senior Western official “suggested that countries could call on their companies and banks to pull out of Turkey.” The official added that he would “not rule out any negative actions [if] Turkey gets too close to Russia.”

Major NATO powers’ anger at Ankara’s deepening ties with Moscow previously led them to back a failed military coup attempt in 2016 to overthrow Erdoğan.

On Thursday, Turkey’s main financial daily, Dünya, reported: “Cargoes from different countries around the world are unloaded at various ports in Turkey after embargo screening, and the goods are transferred to ships destined for Russia through a reexport process.” It cited Russian Economic Development Minister Maxim Reshetnikov’s claim that the total volume of products brought into the Russia from Turkey “approached USD 4 billion.”

German government’s new “infection protection measures” let coronavirus run wild

Tamino Dreisam

The summer wave of the coronavirus in Germany is already pushing hospitals to the breaking point, and the death toll of 700 per week is 12 times higher than at the same time a year ago. Despite this, the government is preparing for an even greater wave of deaths. The package of measures announced Wednesday by Health Minister Karl Lauterbach (Social Democratic Party, SPD) and Justice Minister Marco Buschmann (Liberal Democratic Party, FDP) is not an infection control law, but an epidemic-spreading law.

Health Minister Karl Lauterbach (SPD) talks with Vice Chancellor and Economy Minister Robert Habeck (Greens) before a cabinet meeting July 27 (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)

The provisions, which are to replace the current Infection Protection Act that expires on September 23, represent a further relaxation of the measures that have been in place until now. The only two measures that will still be mandatory nationwide in the future are a requirement to wear a mask on long-distance public transport, in hospitals and care facilities, and “3G” regulations (vaccinated, recovered or tested) in hospitals and care facilities.

On paper, the individual German states are allowed to take certain other measures—mandatory mask wearing on local public transport, mandatory testing, and mandatory use of masks in schools, restaurants and cultural institutions (from which vaccinated and recovered persons are excluded, however). But the experience of the pandemic to date has shown that state-specific coronavirus measures are generally not applied.

States may only enact measures beyond the limited ones mentioned in the law if there is a threat of overburdening the health care system or critical infrastructure. In plain language, infection can run through the population up until the health care system is on the verge of collapse or the maintenance of capitalist profit maximization is in jeopardy.

But even then, no action would be taken that might interfere with profit accumulation. “All these things that are understood by the term lockdown—curfews, plant closures, school closures—all these things, we don’t think are appropriate anymore,” Bushman declared, summing up the viewpoint of the entire ruling class.

The new Infection Protection Act is to apply until next Easter. This means that even if there is an unprecedented wave of deaths in the winter, no new measures will be taken.

In fact, a fatal wave is already occurring this summer. Although the official 7-day incidence rate has recently dropped somewhat to 451 per 100,00 inhabitants due to the summer vacation, it threatens to rise again even more with the end of the travel season and the return to schools. Nevertheless, 137 districts have an incidence level above 500, and one is even above 1,000.

However, the officially reported incidences have long since ceased to reflect the actual numbers infected. Testing is now only mandatory in very few areas, testing capacities have been cut across the board, and even free public tests have been abolished. The extremely high test-positive rate of 54 percent also underscores the enormous number of unreported cases.

The actual extent of infections can be guessed at, among other things, by the growing number of outbreaks in medical treatment facilities as well as in nursing homes and those for the elderly. In these, there were 150 outbreaks last week (144 in the previous week) and 26 deaths. In nursing homes and homes for the elderly, there were 370 outbreaks (305 the previous week) and 58 deaths.

The burden on hospitals also shows the seriousness of the situation: the adjusted hospitalization incidence rate has been stagnant at 12.5 for several days, equivalent to 10,000 hospitalizations per week. The number of patients receiving intensive care continues to rise and now stands at 1,395, with 457 ICUs currently reporting limited operations, 331 partially limited operations and only 385 regular operations.

The rising numbers are pushing more and more hospitals to the edge of their capacity. On Monday, the Bavarian Hospital Association said that emergency rooms in Bavarian hospitals were currently overloaded due to the coronavirus wave and staff shortages. The number of hospitalizations in Bavaria is currently greater than at the height of the Delta wave last winter.

Some hospitals have had to postpone scheduled operations and ambulances must travel longer to find a hospital ready to receive patients. The Allgäuer Zeitung reported Tuesday that hospitals in the Lindau district in Bavaria’s western Allgäu were so overloaded that ambulances had to transport patients as far away as Reutte, across the border in Austrian Tyrol. A third of the emergency patients in recent days had to be accommodated in hospitals outside the district.

In addition to the direct consequences of a coronavirus infection, the subsequent long-term effects are also becoming increasingly apparent. Children, who usually have comparatively milder illnesses due to the disease, are particularly affected by the long-term consequences. Last Wednesday, the medical journal The Lancet Child and Adolescent Health published a study by Danish scientists involving 11,000 infected individuals, which is considered the largest study of Long COVID to date.

The study came to a dramatic conclusion. About 40 percent of 0 to 3-year-olds, 38 percent of 4 to 11-year-olds and 46 percent of 12 to 14-year-olds were still dealing with long-term effects more than two months after infection. Symptoms ranged from rashes and abdominal pain to memory problems and difficulty concentrating.

Numerous doctors and other experts report the drastic long-term effects they observe. Stephan Gerling, a senior physician and paediatric cardiologist at the KUNO Klinik St. Hedwig in Regensburg, and head of the Long COVID paediatric outpatient clinic there, told Der Spiegel, “Many children don’t notice anything at all as long as they are sitting. But they can’t even manage to go for a six-minute walk anymore—let alone play and romp like other children.”

In an interview with Merkur.de about the consequences of Long COVID for younger individuals, Dr. Jördis Frommhold, chief physician for lung diseases at the Median Clinic in Heiligendamm and expert on Long COVID, also reported, “With young people it is often like this after Omicron: They drag themselves to work, somehow that is still possible. They still manage their duties, but then they sleep at home for the rest of the day.”

She goes on to warn, “Long-term effects in coronavirus are still not talked about enough. But in the future, we’re going to have a lot of absences from work because of Long COVID. You must plan for that. Hundreds of thousands of people are affected. And it’s becoming more and more.” Studies show that once people are reinfected with coronavirus, the likelihood of Long COVID doubles. Already, more than a million people are suffering with Long COVID symptoms in Germany alone.

The ruling class is not only aware of the catastrophic consequences of its herd immunity policy of allowing deliberate infection, it is purposefully pushing it to extremes as part of its cutthroat profits-before-lives orientation. “There will be a great many absences among hospital staff, and at the same time, the number of COVID patients in normal and intensive care units will increase significantly,” Lauterbach stated. At the same time, he hailed the new Infection Protection Act, which is preparing the ground for precisely this development, as “very good.

US-China relations at breaking point

Peter Symonds

The reckless and provocative trip by US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has strained relations between the United States and China to breaking point.

US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, center, walks with Taiwan’s Foreign Minister Joseph Wu, left, as she arrives in Taipei, Taiwan, Tuesday, Aug. 2, 2022. [AP Photo/Taiwan Ministry of Foreign Affairs via AP]

The Chinese government has reacted with Pelosi’s visit by ending dialogue with Washington in key areas, including military-to-military talks, climate change, cross-border crime and drug trafficking, and the repatriation of illegal migrants. Beijing has also imposed unspecified sanctions on Pelosi herself.

“Despite China’s serious concerns and firm opposition, Pelosi insisted on visiting Taiwan, seriously interfering in China’s internal affairs, undermining China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, trampling on the One China policy, and threatening the peace and stability of the Taiwan Strait,” a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson declared.

The eight countermeasures announced yesterday specifically cancel China-US Theatre Commanders meetings, China-US Defense Policy Coordination talks and China-US Military Maritime Consultative Agreement meetings. The Politico website reported that multiple calls by US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Joint Chiefs Chair General Mark Milley have not been returned by their Chinese counterparts.

The breakdown of direct military-to-military contact further heightens the danger of an incident or accident leading to a broader conflict amid the tense standoff between Chinese, US and Taiwanese forces triggered by Pelosi’s visit.

The US is maintaining a major naval presence in waters near Taiwan, featuring the aircraft carrier, the USS Ronald Reagan, with its full complement of warplanes, along with the warships of its accompanying strike group. White House spokesperson John Kirby announced further anti-China provocations, with US naval and air transits of the Taiwan Strait in the “next few weeks.”

China is staging its own largest-ever military drills in six areas close to Taiwan, due to continue until noon local time on Sunday. These involve the dispatch of military aircraft into the Taiwan Strait, the firing of missiles into waters to the east of Taiwan, including over the island itself, and the deployment of naval ships into the areas, disrupting international flights and shipping.

In a pointed warning to the US and Japan, several Chinese missiles reportedly landed inside the 200-nautical mile Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), surrounding Japan’s southern islands near Taiwan, sparking a protest from Tokyo. The largest US military bases in Japan are sited on Okinawa, which is part of Japan’s lengthy southern island chain.

Taiwan’s defence ministry reported it had scrambled fighters to warn away Chinese aircraft that it said had entered the island’s self-declared Air Defence Identification Zone (ADIZ), some of which also had crossed the median line in the Taiwan Strait separating the island from the Chinese mainland. The ministry said a total of 68 Chinese military aircraft and 13 navy ships had conducted missions in the strait.

The East China Sea Air Defense Identification Zone as shown in pink boundaries (Source: Wikipedia - CC BY-SA 2.0)

The risk of a military clash is increased by the extremely confined space in which such manoeuvres are taking place. The Taiwan Strait is just 130 kilometres wide at its narrowest point. The nearest inhabited Japanese island, Yonaguni, is only 110 kilometres to the east of Taiwan.

Moreover, the Taiwanese ADIZ, which has no standing in international law, not only hugs the Chinese mainland, including heavily-fortified islets just kilometres from major Chinese cities, but covers a significant portion of the Chinese mainland itself. In many cases, Chinese aircraft cannot even take off without “intruding” into the ADIZ.

In a statement steeped in hypocrisy and cynicism, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken condemned the Chinese exercises, saying: “There is no justification for this extreme, disproportionate and escalatory military response… now, they’ve taken dangerous acts to a new level.”

At the same time, Blinken reiterated that the US intended to stage further provocations by sending its military through the narrow waters between Taiwan and the Chinese mainland and encouraging its allies to do the same.

Despite initial expressions of concern about the inflammatory character of Pelosi’s trip, the Biden administration backed it and authorised the mobilisation of US military aircraft and warships as part of the visit. Now the White House, its allies such as Japan and Australia, and the US and international media repeat the lie that the visit in no way changed the status quo surrounding Taiwan.

In reality, the trip is another major nail in the coffin of the One China policy that underpinned the establishment of diplomatic relations between the US and China in 1979. Beijing insists that Taiwan is an integral part of One China of which it is the legitimate government—a position that the US accepted de-facto when it broke diplomatic and military relations with Taiwan and removed its embassy and its armed forces from the island.

Beijing has repeatedly warned that it will reintegrate Taiwan by force if Taipei ever declares formal independence from China. The visit by the highest-ranking US official in 25 years is just the latest in a series of steps by the Trump and Biden administrations calculated to call the One China policy into question. That included a public acknowledgement last year of the presence of US troops on Taiwan—a territory that de facto the US recognises as part of China.

Taiwan would be part of China today if it were not for US imperialism. The protocols reached between the US and its allies at the end of World War II recognised that Taiwan—the Japanese colony of Formosa since 1895—was part of Chinese territory. In the wake of the 1949 Chinese Revolution, the defeated Kuomintang armies fled to Taiwan, where Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek presided over a brutal military dictatorship.

For nearly a quarter century, successive US administrations maintained the fiction that the Chiang Kai-shek dictatorship was the legitimate government-in-exile of all China. That changed in 1972 when President Nixon visited China and forged a quasi-alliance with Beijing against the Soviet Union. Taiwan and the One China policy was central to the protracted negotiations that finally culminated in the establishment of formal US-Chinese relations in 1979.

The Biden administration is now deliberately undermining those foundations. In doing so, it is goading Beijing into taking military action to reunify Taiwan and prevent the island being drawn into Washington’s web of anti-China alliances throughout the Indo-Pacific. Taiwan is not only critical to China strategically but is home to the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, which has a virtual monopoly on the production of the most advanced semiconductors vital for countless commercial and military applications.

US imperialism is consciously exploiting Taiwan and endangering its population, in the same way as it has used Ukraine to provoke a war with Russia. It is seeking to provoke a conflict over the island and drag China into a military quagmire that will weaken and fracture the country that Washington regards as the chief threat to the “international rules-based order” on which its global domination rests.  

Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan marks a dramatic escalation in the US provocations against China, but Washington will not stop there. As it increasingly renders the One China policy a dead letter, the US is arming Taiwan to the teeth, as part of its decade-long military build-up throughout the Indo-Pacific region for a war with China with potentially catastrophic consequences.

Amnesty International report exposes Ukraine’s violations of international law, deliberate use of civilians as human shields

Clara Weiss

The human rights organization Amnesty International released a report Thursday showing that “Ukrainian forces have put civilians in harm’s way by establishing bases and operating weapons systems in populated residential areas, including in schools and hospitals.”  

Amnesty International’s findings corroborate an earlier report by the United Nations which also provided evidence that the Ukrainian army has been using civilians as human shields in the conflict. Both of these recent reports come on top of extensive documentation of war crimes committed by the Ukrainian army and its neo-fascist paramilitary forces, particularly against Russian prisoners of war.

Written in cautious language, Amnesty International’s report is a damning exposure of the criminal character of the imperialist proxy war in Ukraine in which the civilian population is but a pawn for the imperialist powers and their lackeys in the Ukrainian oligarchy and military.

As one resident of the city of Bakhmut told Amnesty International, “We have no say in what the military does, but we pay the price.”

The report was compiled by researchers investigating Russian strikes in the Kharkiv, Donbas and Mykolaiv regions between April and July. In the words of Amnesty International’s Secretary General Agnès Callamard, “We have documented a pattern of Ukrainian forces putting civilians at risk and violating the laws of war when they operate in populated areas.”

This pattern includes the use of hospitals as de facto military bases—a clear violation of international law—which Amnesty International has confirmed for five locations. According to the report, “In two towns, dozens of soldiers were resting, milling about, and eating meals in hospitals. In another town, soldiers were firing from near the hospital.”

The report also found that the Ukrainian army “has routinely set up bases in schools in towns and villages in Donbas and in the Mykolaiv area.” While not entirely prohibited by international law, the use of schools and residential buildings by the military is only deemed legitimate when the army has no other options. Moreover, the military is obliged to do everything in its power to minimize civilian casualties, including through evacuations and by giving effective warnings of attacks that might endanger civilians.  

However, the researchers found evidence that Ukrainian forces had launched “strikes from within populated residential areas as well as basing themselves in civilian buildings” that were, in most of the documented cases, kilometers away from the actual front lines. According to Amnesty, there were “viable alternatives … that would not endanger civilians.” Moreover, the organization was “not aware” that the armed forces had asked or assisted civilians to evacuate nearby buildings, which constitutes a failure to take all feasible precautions to protect civilians.  

The report noted, “At 22 out of 29 schools visited, Amnesty International researchers either found soldiers using the premises or found evidence of current or prior military activity—including the presence of military fatigues, discarded munitions, army ration packets and military vehicles.”

The report continues, “In a town east of Odesa, Amnesty International witnessed a broad pattern of Ukrainian soldiers using civilian areas for lodging and as staging areas, including basing armoured vehicles under trees in purely residential neighbourhoods, and using two schools located in densely populated residential areas. Russian strikes near the schools killed and injured several civilians between April and late June—including a child and an older woman killed in a rocket attack on their home on 28 June.”

The response by the Ukrainian government to the report has been nothing short of hysterical. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky denounced the report in an address to the nation, claiming that it turned the “victim” into the “aggressor.” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba fumed on Twitter that the report “distorts reality, draws false moral equivalence between the aggressor and the victim, and boosts Russia’s disinformation efforts.”

In reality, Amnesty International denounced Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in the report but insisted that this “does not exempt the Ukrainian military from respecting international humanitarian law.” The report also stresses that the violations of international law by the Ukrainian army “in no way justify Russia’s indiscriminate attacks.”

It should also be noted that the overwhelming majority of the organization’s reports on the war so far have focused almost exclusively on war crimes by Russia, and Amnesty International itself is by no means an impartial observer. Most notoriously, it restored the “prisoner of conscience” status for the right-wing Russian anti-Putin critic Alexei Navalny, an avowed racist, after coming under intense political pressure last year.

Significantly, the Ukraine office of the organization vehemently opposed the publication of the report. Its head, Oksana Pokalchuk, declared, “We did everything we could to prevent this report from going public.”  

The fact that Amnesty International ended up releasing the report despite serious internal divisions and immense political pressure indicates that the real situation on the ground in Ukraine is, if anything, far more disturbing than even what this report suggests. It should also be noted that the German news magazine Der Spiegel, which has played a prominent role in the anti-Russia war propaganda in Europe, admitted in a report on Friday, rather grudgingly, that its own reporters had made similar findings as Amnesty International and that the conduct of the Ukrainian military “raises legitimate questions.” 

The hysterical response by the Ukrainian government points to extreme nervousness on the part of the Ukrainian oligarchy and its imperialist backers about the political implications of the report. The testimonies cited by Ukrainian civilians indicates that there is significant anger about the country’s military conduct and growing popular opposition to the war in Ukraine itself.

Above all, however, the report exposes the criminal character of the war and deals a major blow to the relentless war propaganda in the media. 

Day in and day out, the working class in Europe and the US is being bombarded with news about alleged Russian war crimes, while neo-fascist paramilitaries like the Azov Battalion are praised by the Associated Press and the New York Times for their “bravery.” The entire edifice of this imperialist war propaganda has been based on the lie that the invasion of Ukraine by Russia was entirely unprovoked and that all the death and destruction in this war are to be blamed entirely on Moscow. 

Yet the Amnesty International report leaves no doubt that, whatever the war crimes by the Russian army—and there is no question that such crimes have been committed—a significant number of the civilian casualties of this war, which now number over 5,000 dead and over 7,000 wounded, were caused by the conduct of the Ukrainian military. 

Moreover, anyone reading the report must ask the question: Why does the Ukrainian military behave in such a way? If there was any truth to the claim that this war was about the defense of “democracy” and the “rights” of the Ukrainian population, such conduct would either not take place at all or be immediately condemned by the Ukrainian government and its General Staff. 

The reality is that the US, which has deliberately provoked this war after laying waste to half a dozen societies in the Middle East and North Africa, and the Ukrainian oligarchy could care less about the millions of lives now being destroyed and the thousands killed in the war against Russia. 

In a rare moment of truth, Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov recently described his country as a “testing ground” for Western arms manufacturers, which have reaped major profits from the tens of billions of dollars in money for weapons that NATO has pumped into the Ukrainian military. 

The real aim of the war, which was deliberately provoked by NATO, is to bleed Russia dry. The strategy is to pump Ukraine full with advanced missiles and weapons in order to engineer a military defeat with horrific losses in the hope that this would precipitate a major domestic crisis, which can facilitate the ongoing regime change operation by the imperialist powers. 

From the standpoint of Washington and the other imperialist powers, the war in Ukraine is but the opening shot in a new scramble to carve up Russia and China in a new re-division of the world. With the relentless anti-Russian war propaganda and the glorification of the supposedly heroic martyrs of the Ukrainian army, world public opinion is to be prepared for a far bigger war that threatens a nuclear catastrophe. The Amnesty International report has dealt a significant blow to this sinister propaganda effort.