Sri Lankan president struggling to form all-party government

Saman Gunadasa

Despite initial promises from the opposition parliamentary parties, Sri Lankan President Ranil Wickremesinghe has not yet been able to cobble together an all-party regime. Thus far, only minor parties have agreed to join such a government.

In this photo provided by Sri Lankan President's Office, Sri Lanka's newly elected president Ranil Wickremesinghe, signs after taking oath during his swearing in ceremony in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Thursday, July 21, 2022. (Sri Lankan President's Office via AP)

On August 3, when Wickremesinghe called for an all-party government during his inaugural speech to the new parliamentary session, most of the opposition parties expressed their willingness to take part. His aim was to rally the Colombo political establishment to jointly impose the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) savage austerity measures and suppress any opposition by workers and the poor.

Sri Lanka’s parliamentary parties all fundamentally agree with the IMF austerity program as the solution to the unprecedented economic crisis. They fear, however, the mass popular opposition that the widely despised Wickremesinghe will face when implementing the brutal austerity measures. Wickremesinghe is the sole MP of the United National Party and was installed as president by the discredited parliament. His main support base is the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) of former President Gotabhaya Rajapakse who was forced to flee the country.

Over the past two weeks Wickremesinghe has held discussions with the main opposition party, the Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB), as well as the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) and the Muslim and Tamil parties.

While the SJB has officially announced that it supports an all-party government it will not join it. SJB leader Sajith Premadasa declared that his MPs “agreed to work through an empowered system of parliamentary committees” to support the government but would not accept any ministerial positions.  

In line with that position, SJB MP Harsha de Silva has been appointed chairman of parliament’s committee on public finance. SJB MPs Eran Wickremaratne and Kabir Hashim have also been proposed to head the parliamentary committees on public enterprises and on public accounts, respectively.

Internal frictions, however, have emerged within the SJB over the willingness of de Silva, Wickremaratne and Hashim to join the government and accept ministerial positions. Last week, these MPs jointly announced that they will not openly criticise the government.

Prime Minister Dinesh Gunawardena is scheduled to hold further separate talks this week with the SJB, the SLFP and the National People’s Power (NPP), which is led by the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP).

The JVP/NPP has already rejected any participation in Wickremesinghe’s all-party regime and is calling for an “urgent general election” and a new administration with a “mandate” to implement the austerity measures.

SLFP general secretary Dayasiri Jayasekera told the media on August 15 that his party will also support “an all-party government as proposed by President Ranil Wickremesinghe,” but was “not willing to take any positions in the government.”

The SLFP is also a ‘rump’ party with only nine members of parliament. Two SLFP MPs—Nimal Siripala de Silva and Mahinda Amaraweera—however, have been government ministers for some time and remain members of the party.

The bourgeois Tamil National Alliance (TNA) has voiced its support for the all-party proposal. TNA spokesman M. A. Sumanthiran, after a discussion with Wickremesinghe, said that his party was “willing to work with the government from outside, supporting progressive steps that may be taken.”

The TNA has submitted a “ten-point program,” which includes the release of political prisoners still detained under the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA), return of private land currently occupied by military and repeal of the PTA, as the basis for its “outside support” for Wickremesinghe.  

The Sri Lanka Muslim Congress, the plantation-based Ceylon Workers Congress and the Eelam Peoples Democratic Party (EPDP), have voiced their willingness to join an all-party government. The other three plantation-based unions—the National Union of Workers, the Democratic People’s Front and the Up-country People’s Front—have said they are still considering the president’s invitation.

The disparate response of these political parties, along with some back-pedaling from their earlier agreement with Wickremesinghe’s appeal for an all-party government, highlights the enormous political crisis of Sri Lanka’s ruling elite.

The ruling class and its parties have been thrown into crisis during the past four months by the historic anti-government uprising of workers and the poor in response to the country’s disastrous economic and social conditions.

Mass demonstrations and general strikes demanded the resignation of former President Gotabhaya Rajapakse and his regime and an end to shortages and the unbearable cost of essentials. While the ongoing protests forced Rajapakse to flee the country, Wickremesinghe, his equally despised successor, is determined to implement even greater attacks through the IMF’s program.

Unable to secure the agreement from key opposition parties, Wickremesinghe is reportedly now attempting to persuade MPs from some of these parties to join an all-party regime by offering them cabinet positions. This sort of horse trading is a routine procedure in Sri Lanka to secure a parliamentary majority. The media is also reporting that Wickremesinghe is planning to call the regime a “national government.”

Wickremesinghe is desperate to show the IMF, big business and the international powers that he is able to establish political stability. An IMF staff team is scheduled to arrive in Sri Lanka for a week of discussions with the government on August 24.  

He is also anxious for a quick agreement with the IMF in order to get financial assistance from other agencies, such as the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, and other countries. He hopes to secure a $US3 billion loan under the IMF’s Extended Fund Facility.

Any finance from the IMF will require the destruction of hundreds of thousands of public sector jobs, privatisations, further cuts into subsidies and drastic inroads into remaining public education and health services, as well as higher taxes and further cutbacks to price subsidies for essential goods.

Two weeks ago, the government drove up electricity rates by over 75 percent, postal rates by 233 percent and foreshadowed future water rate increases. The government has already announced an early “restructuring” of the state-owned Electricity Board and Petroleum Corporation, as first targets in moves towards their privatisation. 

Last week, the government unleashed violent police attacks on university students protesting in Colombo, arresting more than 20. They will be prosecuted on trumped-up charges of “unlawful assembly” and attacking the police. Police are also seeking permission to detain Inter-University Student Federation convener Wasantha Mudalige under the Prevention of Terrorism Act.

Yesterday, Wickremesinghe extended a proclamation mobilising the armed forces across every district in Sri Lanka. These class-war measures are in order to impose the brutal demands of international finance that workers and the poor must pay for the crisis of Sri Lankan capitalism.

Electricity Board and Petroleum Corporation workers have already indicated they will resist the privatisation, with petroleum corporation workers holding a protest march today.

The new bivalent COVID vaccine boosters: The withering of the vaccine-only strategy

Benjamin Mateus

Last week the British Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) announced the approval of the first bivalent COVID-19 booster vaccines for adults, with endorsement by the government’s independent expert scientific advisory body, the Commission on Human Medicines.

Manufactured by Moderna under the name Spikevax (mRNA-1273.214) for those 18 years and older, the bivalent vaccine will be promoted as part of the coming autumn booster program. Only those individuals who have completed the initial vaccination series will be eligible for the bivalent vaccines, but it remains unclear when the booster will be available to the British public.

People queue at a vaccination centre on Euston Road in London, Britain on December 3, 2021 (WSWS Media)

A bivalent vaccine combines two separate elements derived from two different variants of a disease. Each dose of the new Moderna booster dose contains 25 micrograms of vaccine that targets the spike protein from the original Wuhan strain and 25 micrograms targeted against the BA.1 subvariant of the Omicron strain.

Evidence for using the bivalent vaccine was based on a phase 2/3 clinical trial with 437 study participants. The vaccine maker announced results in late June that found neutralizing antibodies against the BA.4/BA.5 subvariants were boosted “5.4-fold above baseline in all participants regardless of prior infection, and by 6.3-fold in the subset of seronegative participants.” (Seronegative participants are those with no serum antibodies, indicating no previous vaccination or exposure to a disease).

Furthermore, “One month after an mRNA-1273.214 booster, neutralizing geometric mean titers (GMT) against BA.4/BA.5 were 941 in all participants, and 727 in seronegative participants. For context, prior studies of a third dose of the prototype booster induced neutralizing GMT against BA.1 of 629 and against Delta of 828. A third dose of the prototype booster was shown to be effective against Delta and BA.1 infection and hospitalization in observational studies.”

Though safety data were similar to Moderna’s initial mRNA COVID vaccines, the neutralizing antibody levels against BA.4/BA.5 were only 1.7 times higher than those receiving the booster against the original strain of the virus. As some have noted, these differences are slight and offer uncertain benefits in clinical terms.

Health officials also emphasize that the current vaccines offer considerable protection against severe disease and death. Still, the obligatory statements of support congratulating the progress in the next generation of vaccines by leading officials were quickly printed in all the mainstream press.

Dr. June Raine, MHRA chief executive, said, “The first generation of COVID-19 vaccines being used in the UK continues to provide important protection against the disease and save lives. What this bivalent vaccine gives us is a sharpened tool in our armory to help protect us against this disease as the virus continues to evolve.”

Professor Sir Munir Pirmohamed, Chair of the Commission on Human Medicines, added, “The virus, SARS-CoV-2, is continually evolving in order to evade the immunity provided by vaccines. This novel bivalent vaccine represents the next step in the development of vaccines to combat the virus, with its ability to lead to a broader immune response than the original vaccine.”

Stephane Bancel, CEO of Moderna, declared, “We are delighted with the MHRA’s authorization of Spikevax Bivalent Original/Omicron, our next-generation COVID-19 vaccine. This represents the first authorization of an Omicron-containing bivalent vaccine, further highlighting the dedication and leadership of the UK public health authorities in helping to end the COVID-19 pandemic.” The vaccine maker is also advancing a second bivalent booster based on the BA.4/BA.5 strain (mRNA 1273.222) and has completed regulatory submissions with Australia, Canada, and the European Union.

The US is following suit with promises that the bivalent booster shots will be publicly available by September. However, unlike the UK, the Biden administration is betting on the boosters that target the BA.4/BA.5 Omicron strains.

At the end of July, the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released a press statement stating that in collaboration with the US Department of Defense (DOD), they had agreed to purchase 66 million doses of Moderna’s bivalent COVID-19 vaccine booster candidate with the caveat that the vaccine manufacturer updates their vaccine to target BA.4/BA.5 which were becoming dominant across the country. Data on these versions aren’t expected until around mid-September. The purchase agreement is on top of the 105 million doses of bivalent COVID-19 vaccine booster purchased from Pfizer.

Pfizer’s bivalent vaccines had previously targeted BA.1 or BA.2 subvariants, providing 30 and 60 microgram doses of one of two bivalent vaccine candidates. Though a monovalent vaccine limited to just the Omicron variant produced a more robust immune response, regulators hope the bivalent vaccines offer broader protection. One month after administering the Omicron-adapted bivalent candidates, they conferred a nine- to 11-fold increase in neutralizing GMTs against Omicron BA.1. However, the titers were three-fold lower against BA.4/BA.5. Pfizer’s boosters will be available for those 12 years and older. Whether the 30 or 60 microgram doses will be used remains to be determined.

Though the Biden administration has the options for a total of 600 million doses—300 million from each vaccine maker—the current allotment of vaccines was purchased through the reallocation of critical COVID-19 response funds. The promised 171 million vaccine boosters are insufficient to cover the US population, and it isn’t very likely that Congress will provide funding for additional doses. US regulators considered these calculations in not authorizing a second booster for adults under 50 this summer. 

White House COVID-19 response coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha recently admitted the US is ill-prepared to face more waves of COVID infections. He said, “We have taken money from other really important priorities like having a stockpile of tests and having a stockpile of personal protective equipment. We took those dollars and put them into buying vaccines for the fall and winter because time was running out. We need to get in there and ensure that America is not way behind every other country in the world … I would like to get to a point where every adult in America who wants a vaccine can get one. I’m hopeful. We will be there. We’re not quite there yet. In terms of how many vaccine doses we’ve been able to buy, what’s really limited us is a lack of resources.”

Abandoning any effort to stem the spread of COVID-19

The recent declaration by the Biden administration that COVID is now a permanent feature of American life and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) abrogation of almost all pandemic mitigation measures also imply a forthcoming end to the official COVID-19 public health emergency.

Earlier this month, HHS updated its COVID-19 guidance for hospital reporting. It has changed reporting recommendations for psychiatric hospitals and rehabilitation facilities to once per year, from October to October.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Chief Operating Officer Jonathan Blum recently wrote:

Throughout the COVID-19 public health emergency (PHE), CMS has used a combination of emergency authority waivers, regulations, enforcement discretion, and sub-regulatory guidance to ensure access to care and give healthcare providers the flexibilities needed to respond to COVID-19, and help keep people safer. Many of these waivers and broad flexibilities will terminate at the eventual end of the PHE, as they were intended to address the acute and extraordinary circumstances of a rapidly evolving pandemic and not replace existing requirements. To minimize any disruptions, including potential coverage losses, following the end of PHE, HHS Secretary Becerra has committed to giving states and the health care community writ large 60 days' notice before ending the PHE. In the meantime, CMS encourages healthcare providers to prepare for the end of these flexibilities as soon as possible and to begin moving forward to reestablishing previous health and safety standards and billing practices. [emphasis added]

As Blum’s statement makes it clear, the shift to normalcy is underway. Even CNN observed that the Biden administration is attempting to extricate from the crisis phase of the pandemic and is looking to discontinue the purchase of future vaccines.

While, on the one hand, Jha has incessantly promoted the idea that “we have all the tools we need” to face the pandemic, out of the other side of his mouth, he casually explained at an event sponsored by the US Chamber of Commerce Foundation that the administration was working diligently to get “out of the acute emergency phase where the US government is buying the vaccines, buying the treatments, buying the diagnostic test.”

He added, “My hope is that in 2023, you’re going to see the commercialization of almost all of these products. Some of that is actually going to begin this fall, in the days and weeks ahead.”

Those without health insurance and the under-insured will either pay out of pocket for vaccines and therapeutics or face the consequences of repeat infections. And for the current academic year, children in schools and daycare centers will once more function as a major vector for community transmission of the coronavirus.

According to the latest report by the COVID-19 Scenario Modeling Hub, under various scenarios, including the emergence of new variants and the autumn booster campaign, in the nine months between August 2022 and May 2023, 111,000 to 181,000 cumulative deaths could be expected. Their assumptions include high vaccine efficacy and rapid ramp-up. However, given the current lack of funding and anemic vaccination rates of barely 200,000 per day, the vaccine-only strategy is withering, and the dangers posed by allowing indefinite life to COVID loom.

It bears reviewing a report published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in July 2022 looking at life expectancy in California by census tract median household income. The poorest deciles already had a ten-year lower survival compared to the wealthiest deciles in the pre-pandemic years. Two years into the pandemic, they faced an additional five-year loss in life expectancy. In contrast, the richest saw their projected lifespan of over 85 years remain untouched. Given the nature of COVID and long-term complications caused to the immune system and various organ systems, the implication couldn’t be more apparent as to the long-term impact of COVID on the working class.

A news update published in JAMA in early July reviewing the June 28, 2022, virtual FDA advisory committee meeting about updating COVID-19 vaccines cited Dr. Paul Offit, a pediatric infectious disease specialist and the director of the vaccine education center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. He noted that at the time when BA.4/BA.5 were evolving as the dominant strains, “It is not reasonable to assume that data generated for an Omicron BA.1 vaccine can easily be extrapolated to BA.4 and BA.5. These new Omicron subvariants are highly transmissible. Therefore, they will require a very high level of neutralizing antibodies present at the time of exposure to prevent symptomatic infection.” Given that the BA.1 component of the vaccine only offered a modest rise in neutralizing antibodies, he added, “Why would we think using BA.4 and BA.5 would be any different?”

Waning efficacy of vaccines and the threat of new variants

Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine and co-director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, said, “By fall, it’s likely that Omicron will be in the rearview mirror. From my point, there’s no advantage to giving an Omicron booster.” He then added, “We need an overarching coronavirus vaccination strategy for the country. What we’re doing is we’re allowing the pharma companies to push their own agenda.”

In another recent report published in Nature, microbiologist John Moore at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City explained, “The underwhelming results for the bivalent vaccines are probably due to a phenomenon known as immune imprinting. By now, much of the population has either been vaccinated or infected with an earlier variant of SARS-CoV-2. The immune system has been trained to remember this variant—and a dose of vaccine, even one with Omicron-specific components, will tend to boost those earlier immunological memories. The degree of Omicron-specific response will be relatively small.”

Indeed, in a critical scientific report published in the New England Journal of Medicine in April 2022, vaccine effectiveness rapidly declined after a few weeks for the Omicron subvariants due to their immune evasive qualities, making suboptimal and ephemeral the current vaccine-only strategy.

The notion that variant-specific boosters will be given annually to those who will accept them, like the flu vaccines, means that vaccine immunity will be non-existent in the population for a significant portion of the year. Additionally, concerns over coronavirus resistance to Paxlovid imply that the promised tools to live with COVID are also fading in efficacy. And by reliable accounts, rosy estimates of producing a viable universal or mucosal vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 are one to two years away, and depend on considerable funding and mobilization of resources for success.

Despite this, no scholarship on elimination and eradication has ever been taken up to address the effectiveness of this strategy. This alternative, whose effectiveness has been demonstrated again and again in China, has been repeatedly dismissed as too late, too far gone, too onerous, and politically impossible. However, in the final analysis, the failure to pursue this strategy has been deliberate and based on the policy that prioritizes “the economy”—that is, corporate profit.

Clinical real-world experience, however, has proven such a strategy feasible and expeditious. China’s Zero-COVID policy effectively halted the Omicron wave that passed over the country, particularly Shanghai, in March 2022. Since the end of May, there have been zero deaths across that huge country due to COVID. In the same timeframe, the policy of forever COVID has seen another 30,000 Americans die from this preventable disease.

Investigative report into US state teacher retirement system data exposes mass coverup of teacher COVID-19 deaths

Chase Lawrence & Renae Cassimeda

School districts across the United States have opened or are opening in the coming weeks even as the pandemic continues to kill hundreds and sicken tens of thousands each day.

Ms. Kaiser, a teacher from the Earth School in New York City, holds a sign in solidarity with other teachers who are speaking out on issues related to lack of COVID-1 testing for students on December 21, 2021. [Credit: AP Photo/Brittainy Newman]

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, thousands of teachers and school personnel have died in the US from the virus. An initial investigative analysis by the World Socialist Web Site into state retirement data among teachers and school employees in just eight US states indicates a massive coverup of COVID-19 deaths and excess deaths among the teaching and school employee workforce in the country.

Among the findings, retirement data from just three states—California, Illinois and Ohio—include a total of 1,632 officially reported COVID-19 deaths among active and retired teachers and support staff in 2020-2021. Given the overall lack of data accessible to the public across the US among various retirement systems, the WSWS had to extrapolate from these three states. California, Illinois and Ohio account for one-fifth of the population, meaning an estimated 8,000 COVID-19 deaths among active and retired educators and school employees have occurred across the country during the first two years of the pandemic.

These figures are undoubtedly far higher as we are well into the latter portion of 2022, and schools are beginning to open for the new academic year.

Additional findings from Texas teacher retirement data show a significant uptick in excess deaths among its members, reporting 2,080 excess deaths in 2020-2021. Other states included in the findings, North Carolina, Georgia, and New Mexico, show explicit efforts by state retirement plans to conceal COVID-related deaths among its members.

This horrific toll illustrates the result of the homicidal bipartisan school and workplace reopening policy and the blatant conspiracy by the state and federal governments, the corporate media and trade unions to cover up the dangers of COVID-19. This has been done to keep schools open and parents at work for the sake of profits. Mass infections, long-term illness and deaths will only continue under the current conditions as schools open with even less mitigations than years prior.

Despite the fact that the data exists, there has been no official, systematic national tally made available to the public of COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations or mortality data among teachers and school personnel in the US to date.

Among teachers and school staff, the most complete unofficial national count is compiled by the Twitter user @LostToCovid, who has recorded 2,403 teacher deaths to date. These figures have been corroborated by official and news media reports but are an incomplete tally of the total human cost. The education news outlet, EdWeek, which recorded deaths up until July 2022, notes that at least 1,306 active and retired K-12 educators and personnel have died of COVID-19. Of those, 449 were active teachers.

To note the ongoing character of the devastating human toll of the virus well into 2022, here are just two of the many deaths that have taken place among teachers and staff this year: Jimbo Jackson, 55, principal at Fort Braden School in Leon County, Florida, died in May 2022. Jackson had opposed Governor Ron DeSantis’ July 2020 push to reopen schools after two employees died in the district that year. Casey Nichols, 68, a longtime yearbook and journalism teacher at Rocklin High School in California, died in January. Nichols, formerly retired, had returned to teach photography part-time in the district. Despite mass opposition among staff in the Rocklin district, nothing was done to increase mitigations in the schools.

As for the national teacher unions, neither the National Education Association (NEA) nor the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) has made any effort to keep an updated full account of COVID-related deaths among its membership let alone wage any fight for the safety of its members against COVID-19. On the contrary, they have collaborated with Trump and then Biden in the criminal reopening of the schools and the concealment of the deadly results.

In 2020, the NEA took over the efforts of a Kansas teacher, Alisha Morris, who had been courageously aggregating the spread of COVID-19 cases in schools across the US. The NEA COVID-19 Dashboard based on Morris’ initial data has since been taken down. As for the AFT, its latest report on teacher deaths among its membership was back in January 2021, which cited 530 teacher deaths.

The corporate media has maintained radio silence with few exceptions on the continuing deaths. In this, the media is following the lead of the Biden administration, which has continued to push the lie that the pandemic is over even as Biden himself contracted COVID-19 several times, and deaths soared past 1 million under the Democratic president. The Biden administration deliberately sabotaged the tracking of COVID-19 cases, ending the requirement for hospitals to submit daily death reports in early February, further obscuring the impact of the virus.

Parallel to the large number of deaths is a large coverup by the state governments, Democrat and Republican alike. Many state retirement agencies, despite having obvious knowledge of the scale of deaths, do not make these numbers public. Nor is there any attempt by the corporate media or political establishment, either Democrat or Republican, to make the public aware of these numbers. To date, the WSWS is the only publication to cover the deaths recorded by state retirement systems.

The following is not a complete list due to the inaccessibility of data pulled from state retirement systems, as well as other limitations since some data was only presented in physical or non-recorded board meetings. Data from other sources is deliberately omitted to prevent double counts.

California

California’s State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS), which counts its COVID-19 deaths among current and former staff, recorded 787 total deaths among current and former staff through December 2, 2021, according to the January 2022 CalSTRS CEO report. As the map in the report shows, most of the COVID-19 deaths among retirees happened in California (81 percent). However, there were many deaths among retirees who left the state. The report also notes 90 percent of CalSTRS member deaths, or 706, were among retirees, while there have been 81 recorded COVID-19 deaths among active members.

Map from January 2022 CalSTRS report

CalSTRS records a total of 448,419 active members, 214,056 inactive members and 276,070 in retirement. Taking the most conservative estimates, for retired teachers, the fatality rate would be 128 per 100,000 retirees. The death rate for active teachers by the same method stands at 13 per 100,000.

Texas

Numerous state retirement systems have not recorded actual COVID-19 deaths in their reports but have recorded excess deaths. A December 2021 board meeting book of the Teacher Retirement System of Texas included a presentation slide titled “Mortality Experience from COVID-19” with a table of deaths among retirees. This indicated that between 2020 and 2021 there were “approximately 2,080 more deaths than projected.”

Comparing Texas excess death rates to that of current teacher retirees would translate to a fatality rate of 272 per 100,000 for retirees.

Illinois

In Illinois, according to a Spring 2021 Illinois TRS newsletter, “402 TRS members have succumbed [to COVID-19]” as of Spring 2021. It is not clear how many of these were active or retired members. The winter newsletter of the same year stated, “Since March, 177 TRS members have died from COVID-19 or complications related to the virus.” That is, 579 school staff are officially recognized as having died from COVID-19. After that, no further reference to the number of TRS deaths could be found in Illinois TRS reports.

In Illinois, there were 159,027 active members in the retirement system, and 114,252 retirees as of June 30, 2021, according to the Teachers’ Retirement System of the State of Illinois’s FY2021 Annual Comprehensive Financial Report. The aggregated death rate stands at 106 deaths per 100,000.

Ohio

The Ohio School Employee Retirement System (SERS) Board reported that as of July 2021, 2,995 COVID-19 cases have been reported in SERS’ Medicare plan, with 266 [COVID-19] deaths.

No further mention of COVID-19 numbers or deaths have been made since. In its December 2021 school board report, OHSERS Executive Board Director Richard Stensrud projected a lowering of future COVID-19 deaths among its members and thus chose to stop reporting the figures on COVID-related deaths. No doubt the OHSERS board knows which members die, as it is its job to know when a member dies and what they died from in order to disburse death benefits and stop retirement payments, among other things.

Ohio had 133,532 educators in service retirement, and 4,789 on disability retirement as of FY 2021, according to its Annual Comprehensive Financial Report. The corresponding COVID-19 death rate would stand at 144 per 100,000.

Georgia

According to the minutes of the Teacher Retirement System of Georgia (TRSGA) Board of Trustees in March 2022, Director Cory Buice “presented an overview of member mortality rates and COVID’s impact on our nation, state and TRS.” This indicates that the TRSGA is aware of and discussed retiree deaths, yet no recording of the meeting could be found either on the TRSGA’s website nor online despite the obvious its life-and-death importance to members.

According to a WSB-TV2 news report from January 2022, 64 Georgia teacher deaths were reported to have occurred before July 2021.

North Carolina

At a January 27, 2022 board meeting of the Teachers’ and State Employees’ Retirement System, a board member noted, while detailing the lag in processing death notifications and the onboarding of a new employee for that purpose, that “we are currently working overtime. … A lot of deaths, a lot of death increase.” No count of the deaths attributable to COVID-19 or above the “normal” number of deaths could be found.

New Mexico

The minutes of a New Mexico Educational Retirement Board (NMERB) meeting referenced the large number of deaths in 2020. “Ms. [Karla] Leyba [Member Services Bureau Chief] stated that Dr. Duszynski [Board member] had asked at the December meeting how many deaths among frontline workers, i.e., teacher and staff, were COVID-related. While the NMERB does not include the cause of death in its reporting, she did a manual audit from March through December 2020 and found that a large number of people died because of COVID-19 with a significant number of them being Native American.” No recording of the meeting, record of the large number of deaths found by Leyba, nor any further mentions of deaths could be found on NMERB’s website.

Conclusion

Despite the fragmentary and incomplete nature of this count, it clearly indicates the extent to which deaths have been actively covered up by the government, unions and political establishment. The ongoing obscuring of the number of deaths serves to keep workers on the job no matter how many die so that the financial oligarchy can continue reaping profits. It is also an indication of the degree to which the political establishment, trade unions and government are irreversibly subordinated to the interests of the very same financial oligarchy and irreconcilably hostile to workers’ interests as a result.

The Luftwaffe goes on a world war mission in the Indo-Pacific

Johannes Stern

Following the deployment of the frigate Bayern last year, Germany’s Luftwaffe (Air Force) is now also expanding its operations to the Indo-Pacific.

In recent days, six Eurofighters from Tactical Air Wing 74 in Neuburg an der Donau, four A400Ms from Air Transport Wing 62 in Wunstorf and three A330 Multi Role Tanker Transport from the Eindhoven-based Multi Role Tanker Transport Unit have been deployed “for the first time from Germany to the Indo-Pacific,” according to the Bundeswehr (Armed Forces).

Luftwaffe Eurofighter (Krasimir Grozev, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

The German squadron arrived in Australia yesterday and will participate in large-scale military exercises in the region over the next few days. These bear a decidedly offensive character and are part of the war preparations of the United States and its allies in the region against China.

The Bundeswehr’s official website says: “During the Pitch Black air combat exercise, the Eurofighters will practice air strikes and defence with international partners in larger formations.” The Eurofighters would be “deployed in air-to-air and air-to-surface roles during this exercise.” The Kakadu multinational naval combat exercise, he said, was about protecting “ships from the air.” In total, the manoeuvres involved “about 250 airmen and women,” he said.

According to the Australian armed forces, these are the largest manoeuvres of their kind. Pitch Black alone would involve “up to 2,500 soldiers and up to 100 aircraft from around the world.” One report highlights that “Germany, Japan and the Republic of Korea are participating fully for the first time.” The Kakadu exercise would also be “the largest to date,” with 19 ships, 34 aircraft and more than 3,000 troops from 25 countries, it said.

According to the German Defence Ministry, the exercise will be followed by “short visits” by the Luftwaffe squadron to “East Asian partners with shared values”—Japan, South Korea, and Singapore—all countries that play a key role in the US-led anti-China alliance in the region. And apparently, the next deployments are already planned. “The Bundeswehr’s stiffened presence will continue in the coming years,” the ministry writes.

The showing off by the Bundeswehr in the Indo-Pacific underscores how aggressively German militarism is behaving again after two lost world wars and the horrific crimes it was responsible for in the 20th century. The present operation was “the largest and most challenging deployment ever seen in the Luftwaffe,” boasted its most senior officer, Luftwaffe Inspector Ingo Gerhartz, before take-off.

Luftwaffe Inspector Ingo Gebhartz (Amit Agronov / IDF Spokesperson’s Unit)

The Lufwaffe chief, who recently threatened the use of nuclear weapons against Russia, emphasized the global claims of German militarism. “The Luftwaffe can not only protect NATO’s eastern flank in the Baltic, but also cooperate with friendly nations in the Indo-Pacific. For us, there is no either-or! We are sending a clear signal that the Luftwaffe can be deployed quickly and worldwide, even with multiple missions to be fulfilled in parallel.”

That is unequivocal. Germany is not only taking a leading role in the course of the war against Russia, but now also against China. Taking the Luftwaffe’s provocative posturing in the Indo-Pacific to the extreme, Gerhartz announced that he himself plans to fly a Eurofighter from Australia to Japan. His route passes directly by the South China Sea and Taiwan.

German intervention will further escalate the situation in the region. Since House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan earlier this month, the Indo-Pacific has come to resemble a powder keg, and a direct military confrontation between the United States and China is emerging as an imminent threat.

The Chinese military has indefinitely extended exercises around Taiwan that began immediately following Pelosi’s departure. The US has deployed an aircraft carrier battle group led by the USS Ronald Reagan near the island and plans to send warships through the Taiwan Strait. Another US delegation arrived in Taipei on Sunday. The One China policy, which had been the basis for diplomatic relations between the People’s Republic of China and Washington since 1979, has effectively ended.

Washington’s offensive aims to subjugate the former semi-colony of China and thus secure the supremacy of US imperialism. Although this project would mean a devastating third world war, German imperialism does not want to stand aside when it comes to controlling and dividing up this resource-rich and geostrategically pivotal region. Despite its close economic ties to China, the German ruling class is swinging onto a war course.

Leading government and opposition figures in Germany had already thrown their weight behind Pelosi’s Taiwan trip and called for a more aggressive approach toward China. The tone was set by Green Party Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock. In a foreign policy keynote speech at the New School in New York, she called Beijing a “competitor and systemic rival.” She said it could not be in Germany’s “interest for China to create excessive economic dependencies in its region.”

The media is also beating the war drum. “Germany must prepare for a conflict with China” and “free itself from dependence on the People’s Republic--even if it costs prosperity,” demands Germany’s most-read news weekly Der Spiegel. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung warns, “The open conflict with Russia is currently overshadowing the systemic competition with China. In the long term, however, the confrontation with Beijing is the more difficult task.”

This is not about defending “values” and “democracy” against the Russian and Chinese “aggressors,” as the official propaganda would have us believe, but about tangible imperialist interests. It is the NATO powers—first and foremost the USA and Germany—that have launched murderous wars for raw materials, sales markets, and spheres of influence in the Balkans, the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa over the last 30 years. Now, the imperialist redivision of the world is directly about the subjugation of Moscow and Beijing.

Like the NATO proxy war against Russia, the German military offensive in the Indo-Pacific was systematically planned. At the last NATO summit at the end of June, a new NATO strategy was adopted that explicitly gears up the military alliance toward a military confrontation with nuclear powers Russia and China. Germany’s Foreign Ministry published its so-called “Guidelines on the Indo-Pacific” back in September 2020, in which it declares the Indo-Pacific region “key to shaping the international order in the 21st century.”

The strategy paper then explicitly formulates German imperialism’s claim to leadership in the region: “The Himalayas and the Strait of Malacca may seem far away. But our prosperity and geopolitical influence in the coming decades will be based precisely on how we cooperate with the states of the Indo-Pacific.” As a globally active trading nation, Germany should “not be content with a spectator role” there, including militarily.

The assassination of Daria Dugina and the US-NATO war in Ukraine

Joseph Scalice

On Saturday, Daria Dugina, daughter of Russian nationalist public intellectual Aleksandr Dugin, was assassinated by a car bomb that blew up her Toyota Land Cruiser on a highway west of Moscow, Russia.

Russian news media stated that people close to Dugin believed that he had been the intended target of the bombing that killed his daughter. The BBC reported that he had planned to travel in the same car as his daughter and changed vehicles only at the last minute.

Within hours of the attack, the US media hastened to deny the obvious conclusion that this assassination was connected to the ongoing war between the United States and Russia in Ukraine.

A screenshot of the August 17, 2022 New York Times article, "Behind Enemy Lines, Ukrainians Tell Russians ‘You Are Never Safe’"

The New York Times assured its readers that “there was no evidence that the attack was connected to the war in Ukraine.” What an absurd lie! The assassination carries the stench of the Ukrainian secret police and their CIA handlers.

Both the evidence of history and the logic of contemporary developments lead to the inescapable conclusion that the assassination of Dugina was a political crime, bearing the fingerprints of Washington, calculated to provoke a wider war.

The involvement of Washington in such a scenario is not only plausible; it is the political default hypothesis, that which must be assumed to be true unless otherwise proven false. The entire history of US imperialism is one of assassinations and wars instigated by the US intelligence agencies.

Four days before the murder, the Times was enthusiastically describing the methods of assassination and car bombing being used by the Ukrainian secret forces. In an article headlined, “Behind Enemy Lines, Ukrainians Tell Russians ‘You Are Never Safe’,” the paper reported how Ukrainians would infiltrate Russian held territory to plant explosives and “assassinate officials.”

The Times described in detail how a right-wing Ukrainian operative planted a car bomb “wrapped in tape with the sticky side facing outward, into a wheel well.” On another occasion, they “placed a bomb under the driver’s seat, rigged to explode when the engine started.” Such assassinations were favored by Washington, and the bombings, the Times reported, were designed to “signal to Western donors that Ukraine is successfully rallying local resources in the war.”

Ukraine would do nothing that might jeopardize American support. The conflict in Ukraine is a war run by the CIA and funded by the Pentagon. The question raised by the Moscow car bombing of Daria Dugina is: Precisely what role did Washington play in this event?

Washington has piled provocation upon provocation, each calculated to expand the war. The car bomb explodes on the world stage in the immediate aftermath of multiple Ukrainian attacks on a Russian military base on the Crimean peninsula. The attacks were conducted with arms supplied by Washington and were welcomed by the Biden administration.

Washington has poured over $10 billion in direct military aid and another $40 billion in additional aid into Ukraine since the outbreak of the war earlier this year. It has armed Ukrainian military and paramilitary forces, has trained Ukrainian units and has provided targeting information for missile and drone strikes. The attacks on Crimea are an outgrowth and escalation of this policy.

Putin responded by downplaying the attacks in Crimea, seeking to control the spread of the conflict and wage a limited war in Ukraine. 

It is evident that the war has not gone well for Ukraine. Washington has funneled immense sums of money and arms into the conflict, yet Russia’s hold on southern and eastern Ukraine seems increasingly unshakeable.

The aims of US imperialism in conflict with Russia are nothing less than the redrawing of the map of the Eurasian landmass. Washington seeks to splinter the vast political bulk of Russia—from the steppes to the taiga—into manageable proxy states from which immense raw material wealth can be extracted.

If these ends cannot be achieved through a proxy war, then direct conflict must be provoked.

Ukraine is suffering huge and unsustainable losses. The achievement of the US’s war aims require greater NATO involvement in the actual fighting, not only weapons but soldiers.

Any significant retaliation by Russia for the latest assassination, as well as a string of attacks on Crimea, will be immediately denounced as “unprovoked” and used as a pretext for even greater and undisguised physical involvement of NATO personnel in the war.

What better means than compelling Putin to retaliate, making him seem culpable for the escalation of the conflict? The US strategy is escalation through provocation.

It is this reckless calculation that drives US imperialism. Existing US commitments and strategic aims can only be secured by the expansion of conflict, and this requires provocation. Provocation has become the bedrock principle of Washington’s international behavior. This rationale underpins Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, pushing conflict with China, as it does the car bombs of Ukrainian secret forces.

The targeting of Dugin and his daughter, both associated with the most hard-line and hawkish layers in the Russian military, will intensify the pressure on the Putin administration to escalate the war in Ukraine into open conflict with the United States and NATO. The New York Times indicated this aim today when it wrote that Putin had attempted to contain the war in an effort “to maintain a sense of normalcy” in Russian society. The assassination, they wrote, threatened to upend this.

The Kremlin kept silent, issuing no statement on Saturday in response to the assassination. Prominent militarist figures and right-wing media pundits publicly blamed Ukraine for the assassination and called for retribution. Tsargrad TV, the nationalist network of which Dugin is editor, declared that “Kyiv would shake” from missile strikes.

The New York Times wrote, “While it remained unclear how or if Mr. Putin would respond to Ms. Dugina’s death, the calls for vengeance underscored how the Ukrainian invasion’s most fervent supporters could still become inconvenient allies for the Kremlin—especially if the Russian leader seeks to avoid an escalation of the war.”

From the beginning of the war over Ukraine up to the present, the US has sought at every point to pour fuel on the fires of world war, seeking to provoke a reaction. The danger is growing daily that such a reaction will in fact come, with incalculable consequences.

New Zealand firefighters hold nationwide strike

Tom Peters

Last Friday, nearly 2,000 professional firefighters and support staff stopped work for one hour across New Zealand, in what was the first ever nationwide strike by these critical workers. 

Firefighters rally outside the Fire and Emergency New Zealand (FENZ) head office in Wellington. (WSWS Media)

Firefighters held dozens of rallies in the main cities of Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch, and in the cities and towns of Hamilton, Dunedin, New Plymouth, Palmerston North, Rotorua, Invercargill, Tauranga, Gisborne, Napier, Hastings, Timaru, Nelson, Masterton, Whanganui, Taupo and Kawerau.

The strike points to rising anger among workers over the out-of-control cost of living, including prices for food, housing and petrol, and chronic underfunding of what is an essential, life-saving service. It follows a recent strike by 10,000 healthcare workers. On August 10, the New Zealand Herald reported that Wellington ambulance workers are also considering industrial action after rejecting a 1.5 percent pay increase.

The New Zealand Professional Firefighters Union (NZPFU) has scheduled further one-hour strikes for August 26 and September 2 and 9, which it may yet try to call off. Union secretary Wattie Watson told Radio NZ that the union hoped to “resolve the situation” in talks this week with FENZ, mediated by the Employment Relations Authority.

Talks between the union and FENZ over a new pay agreement have been dragging on for about 14 months. After firefighters rejected an initial offer of a 1.5 to 2 percent pay increase in May, FENZ presented a revised offer this month that it said would amount to an increase of between 8 and 19.1 percent over the next two years, plus a lump sum of $2,000. The wage rise is not backdated for the past year, and only trainees, who currently receive close to the legal minimum wage, would get 19.1 percent. 

Spread across 2021-2023, the new offer does not keep up with the annual inflation rate of 7.3 percent, making it effectively a pay cut. This follows years of stagnant wages: the last pay increase, in July 2020, was between 1 and 3 percent (depending on the role). The union has asked for a pay rise of 18 percent over three years, which is still below inflation.

Internal Affairs Minister Jan Tinetti, who is responsible for FENZ, has stated that the offer cannot be increased. FENZ and the Labour Party-led government have refused to address other key concerns raised by firefighters about dangerous levels of understaffing, equipment that continually breaks down, and a lack of mental health support.

The World Socialist Web Site spoke with firefighters at the rally outside the FENZ headquarters in Wellington. 

A firefighter with nearly a decade of experience, Al, said FENZ was lying to the media by “saying that recruits can make $90,000 a year.” To make this amount of money a trainee firefighter would have to work nearly 100 hours a week. 

Fraser, who has been a professional firefighter for three years after volunteering for five, currently receives about $55,000 (roughly $26.45 an hour). He said he could get a higher-paying job as a truck driver, without the risks of cancer and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) associated with being a firefighter. 

Fraser, Wellington firefighter (WSWS Media)

He said firefighters want FENZ “to acknowledge that these problems exist.” The agency was “refusing, point blank, to even put that in writing.”

Fraser explained that it was “not uncommon” for firefighters to work 100 hours a week due to the severe staff shortage. “Because of the nature of this job, we have to have four firefighters on a truck to be safe,” he said. “All of our operating standards are based on a crew of four, and every time we don’t have four on a truck, that puts us at increased risk, it inhibits our response, because we have to alter our tactics. It’s frustrating and it’s putting property and lives in danger.”

Since May this year, he said, there have been 40 separate shifts in which Wellington City Fire Station has been unable to fully staff its vehicles. 

Asked how the crisis had got so bad, Fraser blamed FENZ for mismanagement and prioritising the wrong areas. Across the country, for instance, the fire service only has five operational 32-metre ladders. Like other equipment, these appliances are not properly maintained and are constantly breaking down. One of Wellington’s two high-reaching ladders has been out of order for about two-and-a-half years.

He expected the next strike to go ahead on August 26, saying the firefighters’ strong support for such action “is a reflection of the frustration we have from not being acknowledged or valued by this organisation.”

Bill, who has been a firefighter for 39 years, said he was concerned about trucks repeatedly breaking down. Bill explained that his fire truck, which is 21-years-old, broke down while the crew was at the scene of a fire, creating a “really dangerous” situation. “We’ve got two guys on the end of a hose that rely on having a constant supply of water to protect them, and they couldn’t do that.” The crew had to call in another truck to assist them.

He believed the problem was the way FENZ was prioritising its spending. He said the agency had purchased “heaps of new trucks,” but these had proven unfit for purpose and broken down, forcing fire crews to rely on the older vehicles. 

Bill added that COVID-19 was making staffing problems worse: “Guys are doing 70 to 80 hours a week to try and keep trucks on the run. Trucks are coming off the run regularly.” 

The Labour government abandoned its elimination strategy for COVID-19 late last year, and has progressively removed public health restrictions, allowing the virus to spread across the country. This criminal decision, which was imposed on workers with the collaboration of the trade unions, has led to millions of infections and about 2,000 deaths from the virus, so far.

While firefighters are determined to fight, the NZPFU has offered unspecified concessions to FENZ in an attempt to call off the strike action. On August 17 the union revealed that it had “presented an amended set of claims which significantly reduced the overall cost of the NZPFU claim,” but FENZ did not respond. 

The union bureaucracy shares responsibility for the present crisis, having suppressed opposition from workers for decades. Workers across the country and internationally are facing the same attacks on wages and conditions, but the unions are doing everything possible to keep them isolated from each other and to prevent any movement against the Labour government and big business.

As firefighters were striking, 145 workers in Kawerau remained locked out by toilet paper manufacturer Essity. The company is trying to force them to accept a below-inflation pay rise, and the Pulp and Paper Workers’ Union has remained virtually silent on the dispute for the past two weeks.

More struggles are inevitable as workers across all industries confront soaring living costs and unsafe conditions, made worse by the rampant spread of COVID.