Hurricane Fiona exposes social inequality in Puerto Rico

Rafael Azul

On September 16, two days before Hurricane Fiona hit Puerto Rico, a video El Apagón—Aquí vive gente was posted in YouTube, featuring “Apagón” (Blackout), a song by Puerto Rican singer Bad Bunny about the blackout crisis on the island. 

The video, with its powerful message denouncing the growing inequality on the island, exposes the power crisis, which followed the privatization of the public utility after Hurricane Maria and the bankruptcy restructuring of the island. At the time LUMA Energy promised reliable, better and less expensive service. All three assurances had long been exposed as lies when the video documentary was released. 

People clean debris from a road after a mudslide caused by Hurricane Fiona in Cayey, Puerto Rico, Sunday, September 18, 2022. [AP Photo/Stephanie Rojas]

“Apagón” depicts the popular anger that exists in Puerto Rico, long before the hurricane that hit two days after its release. Five days after its release “Apagón” had been shared 6.4 million times.

“God has been good to us and kept us safe this time when things could have been much worse,” said Vice-Governor Anya Williams, downplaying the disastrous flooding and mudslides and the wholly inadequate response by federal and local authorities and LUMA management. 

No disaster is purely a natural event; it also has political and social content. The frequency and severity of hurricanes is bound up with climate change and the refusal of capitalist governments to take any serious measures to address it. Moreover, the catastrophic impact that Hurricanes Katrina (New Orleans, 2005), Maria, Fiona and so many others is conditioned by the vast socioeconomic inequality that defines Puerto Rico, the United States and the rest of the world. 

Both Governor Pedro Pierluisi and the electricity monopoly LUMA Energy had to walk back their promise that electricity would be restored within days. Predictably, the wealthy neighborhoods in San Juan and the beach condos were first in line.

This week, President Biden pledged “100 percent assistance” for Puerto Rico. What has in fact been offered is a pittance in “emergency aid.” Deanne Criswell, who heads Biden’s Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA), told Governor Pedro Pierluisi that it was making available an insulting $700 in aid per household. Criswell went out of her way to emphasize that this was way over the $500 offered in 2017 after the landing of Hurricane Maria.

This is Biden’s version of the infamous tossing of rolls of paper towels to people by President Trump five years ago. Despite all assurances in 2017, five years later less than one-third of the promised reconstruction has taken place and the island’s electricity grid is in the hands of a profit-driven private firm. 

President Biden also appoints the voting members of the Financial Control Board, which has placed the Puerto Rican economy on rations since the 2017 bankruptcy.

A week after the hurricane, 62 percent of households are still without power and face fuel shortages to power their generators, if they have them. Forty percent of households still lack running water. One thousand people are stuck in public shelters. Those most affected live in working class urban and rural municipalities. 

As with Hurricanes Irma and Maria, the real human cost of this storm is being concealed. Five years ago, between 3,000 and 5,000 people died from Hurricane Maria, which did not flood the island like Fiona has done. Over 30 inches (76 centimeters) of water fell in parts of the island. The report of only four casualties has been met with skepticism.

As flood waters recede, the devastating impact of this storm is becoming clearer. A preliminary estimate from the Puerto Rican Agriculture Department is that wind and flood damage exceeds $100 million, including the loss of this year’s banana and coffee crops and green vegetables. In addition, the storm virtually wiped out the bee industry. The Agriculture Department warned that when the full data is in, actual damages will surely exceed Friday’s account.

The collapse of roads and bridges from the flooding left scores of households isolated in six municipalities. Short on resources, local authorities report having to rely on volunteers, religious groups, NGOs (non-governmental organizations) and individuals to deliver food and first aid while waiting for government and FEMA assistance to clear roads and repair bridges.

Mexico City’s El Proceso news magazine interviewed Manuel Veguilla in a mountain region near Caguas, south of San Juan. “We are all incommunicado,” declared Veguilla, adding that he was worried about the elderly residents of the municipality, including his brother, who lack the strength to walk to the nearest community. Veguilla doubted that city workers would be able to reach the area, describing large boulders that have been left by the receding flood waters. Meanwhile neighbors are sharing water and food left by a volunteer group. The community still lacks electricity and must rely on spring water.

On September 1, two weeks before the hurricane hit, a mass protest of workers and students took place in San Juan denouncing the LUMA Energy debacle and social inequality. In addition to demanding that LUMA’s 15-year contract be rescinded, protesters carried signs calling for the restoration of social services, including the reopening of hundreds of schools that had been closed in the last decade. 

This was the latest in a series of protests, marches and rallies against the devastating social conditions in the US territory. Eighteen days ahead of Hurricane Fiona’s appearance, one demonstrator, José Rodriguez from Río Piedras, said he had come to the rally during the hurricane season because he was afraid that a total blackout would take place. “As an individual, I can survive,” declared Rodriguez, “but I must think about the more than 30,000, which are bed-ridden. I must think about what happened after Hurricane Maria.”

The Costs of Unlimited Growth: A View from Vietnam

Mark A. Ashwill

Canada, the most affluent of countries, operates on a depletion economy which leaves destruction in its wake. Your people are driven by a terrible sense of deficiency. When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can’t eat money. -Alanis Obomsawin, Abenaki American Canadian Filmmaker, Singer, Artist, and Activist

This quote, which first appeared in a 1972 book chapter entitled “Conversations with North American Indians” and has been reproduced countless times since, often without attribution or misattribution, applies to every country that has embraced the neoliberal economic order with open arms. Vietnam is no exception.

In this system, competition is “the defining characteristic of human relations” and citizens are reduced to consumers “whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency,” in the words of George Monbiot, a British writer known for his environmental and political activism. Inequality is one of its regrettable yet unavoidable features, or so they say. Depending upon the level of government oversight and law enforcement, so is environmental pollution.

Everything Alanis Obomsawin described a half century ago and so much more is happening in Vietnam, including sand mining, deforestation, overfishing in the South China Sea, known as the East Sea in Vietnam, and widespread water pollution. Her searing critique of the fatal flaws of an economic model that prizes production and consumption over conservation and sustainability echoes through the ages and is truer now than when she penned those words.

Obomsawin’s view reflects Native Americans’ deep reverence for nature that transcends tribal affiliation. She speaks from a perspective that views “the entire universe as being alive – that is, as having movement and an ability to act. But more than that, indigenous Americans tend to see this living world as a fantastic and beautiful creation engendering extremely powerful feelings of gratitude and indebtedness, obliging us to behave as if we are related to one another.”

This is exactly how I feel looking out the window of my study into a sea of tropical green, trees of all kinds, birds and butterflies in flight, and squirrels jumping from branch to branch. I am connected to all of them, grateful for their existence, and steadfast in my desire to protect and nurture them.

Native spirituality encompassed the recognition of global interconnectedness and interdependence long before these terms entered the modern lexicon.

Vietnam in the Era of the Consumer Economy

There is a lot of talk these days about the dire need to shift from a linear economy, in which raw natural resources are fashioned into products that are consumed and disposed of, to a circular one. A circular economy is a model of production and consumption that involves sharing, leasing, reusing, repairing, refurbishing, and recycling existing products and materials for as long as possible.

There was a time in Vietnam’s recent past when most people were still poor. As such, they reused, repaired, refurbished, and recycled products because they had no other choice. One had the feeling that the idiom, Necessity is the mother of invention, was invented in Vietnam. I was amazed at people’s ingenuity is making the most of our what little they had.

During my early trips to the country, starting in 1996, just as foreign direct investment was beginning to trickle in and the consumer economy starting to heat up, there was relatively little garbage in the environment. Single-use plastic was just beginning to enter the market. People turned off electrical appliances like clockwork if they weren’t using them to save money and, indirectly, limit the environmental impact of electricity production.

The prevailing mentality was one of conservation and preservation, “waste not, want not,” as my parents, who lived through the Great Depression, used to say. Now, Vietnamese of means have no qualms about leaving all of the lights on in the house and using copious amounts of water and gasoline in their expensive oversized vehicles simply because they can afford it.

Depletion, Vietnamese-Style

The Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) defines the depletion of natural economic assets as “the reduction in the value of deposits of subsoil assets as a result of their physical removal, the depletion of water resources, and the depletion of natural forests, fish stocks in the open seas and other non-cultivated biological resources as a result of harvesting, forest clearance, or other use.”

In other words, aside from energy supplied by the sun, we live in a system in which resources are finite. The supply of sand for the booming construction industry, trees for furniture and paper production, seafood for domestic consumption and export, and water for personal and industrial use are not inexhaustible.

One example of natural resource depletion that has been in the news recently is sand mining to feed the ravenous appetite of the construction industry in Vietnam’s rapidly expanding economy. Sand is used in concrete and manufacturing as an abrasive. Riverbanks are giving way and homes collapsing into rivers in the Mekong Delta, the rice basket of Vietnam. Here in the North, I see this illegal practice occurring with impunity in many places along the Red River

Another is overfishing. Five years ago, a top Vietnamese military official said that the government “should tighten its grip on overfishing as the seafood capacity in the Vietnamese sea is nearing exhaustion.” This means that fishing boats must venture out farther and farther, often into other countries’ territorial waters. As I stumble along the path to vegetarianism for ethical and health reasons, I think of this whenever I seafood.

The reasons are two-fold: 1) humanity’s insatiable appetite for fish and other seafood products; and 2) harvesting tools that now exceed nature’s capability to reproduce. This includes ships that can harvest fish at lower depths and process them on the way back to port. According to calculations, the total fishing tools in the world are sufficient to harvest all the fish in the oceans on four planets with ecosystems comparable to that of Earth.

Another widely reported problem is deforestation. Vietnam’s forests (and people) have had to contend with wartime defoliation by Agent Orange. More recently, they have been under siege by illegal loggers who are rarely apprehended. In 2010, Vietnam had 14.5 million hectares (35.8 million acres) of natural forest covering 50% of its land area. By 2021, it had lost 137,000 hectares (338,534 acres), which is the equivalent of 67.3 metric tons of CO₂ emissions.

One endangered species is the fokienia tree, which grows at an elevation of 1,500 meters (4921 feet) in Dak Lak province. It is a “cash crop” among harvested trees because of its high price it fetches. The wood from these trees is used for furniture and art works. Given the rough terrain and lack of patrols, it is virtually impossible to catch illegal loggers in the act and prevent the continued destruction of these precious trees.

Finally, Vietnam has an existential problem with a precious natural resource that is the basis for life itself: water. One recent headline that caught my attention was HCMC’s water supply, lifeblood of 13 million, faces serious problems, an in-depth report. The reasons are pollution, an outdated water distribution network, and salt intrusion.

A report by the Ministry of Natural Resources and the Environment estimated that the total amount of wastewater released throughout the Dong Nai River could have reached 4.7 million cubic meters a day in 2020. The daily amount of wastewater released into this river alone accounts for one-third of the of wastewater released by the entire country. Water quality in the Saigon River, one of the most polluted rivers in southern Vietnam, is a serious issue.

Over the past decade, both of these rivers have played a pivotal role in the economic growth of the Southern Key Economic Zone, which grows. In 2019 alone, these waterways supplied over 5.1 billion cubic meters of water to factories, comprising for 68.3% of all the water used for industrial purposes in Vietnam.

Farther to the North in the Central Highlands, an alarming report came out in 2017 warning that Dalat may run out of clean water in 10 years. The main reason is the usual suspect of pollution related to agricultural activities upstream and the release of untreated wastewater directly into the environment.

For example, the water in the Dankia and Suoi Vang Lakes contains E. coli bacteria that is 12 times higher than the acceptable limit, in addition to heavy metals and other dangerous microorganisms. One end result is that the local water treatment company needs to use 10 times more chemicals than it did 10 years ago to ensure the water is potable.

What Is In Our Control

Some things are in our control and others not. -Epictetus, Greek Stoic Philosopher (50 BC-135)

While it’s true that you can’t eat money, the wealthy can move capital across borders with lightning speed in the technologically sophisticated global financial system of 2022. Many have long since hedged their “quality of life” bets by purchasing real estate in multiple locations as investments and a way out should the situation head south in their home country.

It’s the people with little to no means, the vast majority, who will suffer as their high-net-worth fellow citizens make their escape. They will be left with air that is not fit to breathe, water that is no longer potable, fish and other seafood that are but a distant culinary memory, and a desolate landscape where lush forests used to thrive that resembles the moon where lush forests used to thrive.

It is the obligation of the Vietnamese government and its international partners to act swiftly. What is in its control is the strict enforcement of environmental laws that apply to individuals and corporations. What is not must be negotiated bilaterally or multilaterally with international actors, including nation-states, all of which have a responsibility to solve these problems.

Our fate depends on it.

Greek riot police attack students and education workers protesting universities clampdown

John Vassilopoulos

Greek riot police have brutally attacked students and education workers protesting the introduction of a new campus police force—the University Institutions Protection Teams (OPPI). The OPPI were set up by the conservative New Democracy (ND) government to patrol university campuses.

Thousands protested in Athens and other cities over several days from September 17. The Athens September 17 protest saw a massive mobilisation of riot police, who violently attacked students gathered outside the central building of Athens University where a march was scheduled to start. A video tweeted by journalist Savvas Karmaniolas captured the attack. The footage shows police brutally attacking students who are thrown to the ground and hit with batons and tear gas.

A second video posted by Karmaniolas shows water cannons were deployed down main streets to disperse the students.

In other footage, filmed by Ruptly, terrified youth are seen running into a tube station while being sprayed with water cannon.

In Greece’s second city, Thessaloniki, a larger demonstration of thousands of students marched through its centre on the same day. The previous day, September 16, riot police assaulted students who were protesting their presence on the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki campus.

The protests follow others earlier this month.

On September 8, thousands of students, teachers and other university workers held a march and rally in Athens’ Constitution Square to protest the OPPI. A large banner by the Athens student union at the front of the march read, “University police out of schools! Fight for education—work—life.”

The legislation allowing police onto campuses was originally passed in February 2021, but plans to establish the OPPI were stalled for a year after delays in the recruitment drive and training. The government, which continues to impose crushing austerity measures against the population, has ensured €50 million are available for the 1,000 strong university police and for cameras and turnstiles inside campuses. At this stage the OPPI will be deployed to three university campuses across Athens and at the campus of Thessaloniki University. 260 of the OPPI officers in Athens have been drawn from the special guard units of Attica’s regular police force.

A 1982 law, now overturned, passed by the social democratic PASOK government barred police from entering university grounds unless they were granted permission by university administrators. It was passed in response to the bloody crackdown on the 1973 student uprising at the Athens Polytechnic (known as the Athens Technical University) by the military junta which ruled Greece between 1967 and 1974. Forty people were killed in the attack (24 identified, 16 unidentified). To this day the mangled front gates crushed by the junta’s tanks can be seen, alongside a monument in remembrance of those who perished.

The Athens Polytechnic gate destroyed by a tank during the junta's assault on the campus in 1973 [Photo by GreatBernard / CC BY 4.0]

The large crowds in the Thessaloniki march, despite the heavy rainfall, were also driven by mass revulsion against the riot police’s unprovoked attack the evening before against 5,000 concertgoers attending a free gig headlined by singer-songwriter Thanassis Papakonstantinou on the lawn outside Aristotle University’s humanities department. The concert was part of the annual Eleftheriako Festival organised by anarchist collectives in the city.

Footage posted by social activist group Menoume Energoi on its YouTube channel shows the moment tear gas cannisters were fired, with the cloud of chemicals slowly descending on the crowd while a band was still playing on the stage. Riot police continued attacking the crowd as they were trying to escape the fumes, as captured by a video from reporter Chris Avramidis.

Testimonies given underscore that it was sheer luck the police’s attack did not result in fatalities. In a statement to the press, anti-police violence campaigner Vassilis Maggos said, “I was at the concert. Everything was fine, people were enjoying the music until the police threw the chemicals. It was criminal not only because they threw them without any cause, but also because the area was closed with only three narrow escape routes. One of those was closed by them after they threw the chemicals.

“The tunnel through the Faculty of Theology remained free from where myself and a lot of other people passed and jumped over the fence into the street. At the third escape route I was subsequently told that they also started throwing chemicals there as well. It’s luck that no-one was trampled as people were running. There were many who were trying to calm the situation by asking people who were panicking not to run. I saw people lying down not able to breathe, others at their wit’s end from the terrible distress of the situation, others on all fours throwing up. We were all crying. None of us had anything to protect our eyes.”

Vassilis’s son Yiannis died a month after injuries sustained in a beating by police in June 2020, in the city of Volos, central Greece.

Tensions have been running high at the University of Thessaloniki since the end of last year, after police cleared out the “Steki Tou Viologikou” (Biology Department Hangout)an area within the university run by an anarchist collective for the last 34 years. The pretext used by the university authorities was an intention to establish a science library there. There has been a near constant police presence in the area with frequent clashes between students and police.

Faced with mounting opposition against the authoritarian legislation, the government has opted to tone down the police presence at Athens University by confining OPPI patrols to just outside the borders of the campuses across the city. However, according to conservative daily Kathimerini, it still intends ultimately to have the squads patrolling within the university grounds. The paper added that the prerequisite for this is “the implementation of security plans to establish turnstiles at the building entrances.”

At his speech at the Thessaloniki International Exhibition on the day of the protests, Alexis Tsipras, leader of the pseudo-left SYRIZA, said that he would abolish the university police if he came to power in the general elections scheduled to take place by the summer of 2023 at the latest.

Such promises commit his party to nothing given that SYRIZA is unlikely to win an overall majority. Moreover, Tsipras’s record of radical promises which he then ditches when in power is known by millions. At the start of 2015, SYRIZA was swept to power vowing to end the austerity imposed by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. Within days the party extended the hated memorandum with the EU/IMF and a few months later Tsipras junked his mandate and signed a new bailout package, imposing even more brutal austerity measures than his social democratic and conservative predecessors.

In a press conference at the exhibition, two days after his speech, Tsipras even left the possibility open of governing with New Democracy if there was a “state of emergency”. According to reports, he is on the best of terms with Nikos Papaioannou, the ND supporting dean of Thessaloniki University who has been overseeing the crackdown on students. Despite the war of words between members of his party and Papaioannou, Tsipras has made a point of stopping by the university stall for a photo-op with the dean for the last two years when visiting the Thessaloniki Exhibition.

While this year Tsipras confined himself to a brief handshake, in the light of the brutal police attack the night before, last year Thessaloniki’s main daily Makedonia reported the “warm meeting” between the two men at the university’s stall, noting, “essentially both main parties desire greater tranquility and order within universities” while adding that this consensus facilitates “the process of completing the establishment of the university police.”

While Tsipras is busy courting his future partners in government, his party postures as a friend of the students to lead opposition to the police measures into safe channels. The University Staff Rally at Thessaloniki University, which is SYRIZA’s faction within the lecturers’ union, has called for the resignation of Papaioannou. Earlier this year SYRIZA Youth and the University Staff Rally, endorsed a legal challenge at the Council of State—Greece’s highest administrative court—mounted by student and university trade union groups against the OPPI. As with virtually all challenges brought before the Council of State, it came to nought after the court ruled in May this year that establishing the university police is constitutional.

China experiences surge in COVID-19 cases after relaxing travel and quarantine policies

Aaron Edwards

In the past six weeks, China has experienced significant outbreaks of COVID-19 in several cities and tourist areas throughout the country. On Wednesday, China’s National Health Commission (NHC) reported 114 new domestic symptomatic infections and 512 asymptomatic infections throughout the country, with both figures down significantly from just a few weeks ago.

Since the beginning of July, when Shanghai began to relax restrictions that prevent the spread of COVID-19, there have been a number of outbreaks of the highly infectious BA.5.2 Omicron subvariant in the city and in other metropolitan areas.

In mid-July, the NHC announced that the Zero-COVID strategy had entered a new stage, gradually becoming less stringent. The most significant policy change was a reduction in quarantine time for people arriving from high risk areas and international arrivals from 14 days to 7 days. There were also adjustments in the definition of medium and high risk areas to allow for quicker reopening and shorter lockdowns.

NHC officials have stated that the more relaxed plan is meant to keep infections down as close to zero as possible, while minimizing disruption to the general population and the economy. The shorter isolation times were also adjusted to meet the characteristics of the Omicron variant, which has a shorter incubation period than prior variants.

Residents wearing face masks line up to get their routine COVID-19 throat swabs at a coronavirus testing site in Beijing, Thursday, Sept. 22, 2022. (AP Photo/Andy Wong)

On August 31, the General Administration of Customs removed the requirement for visitors to report their nucleic acid test results, their infection status and vaccination records. Predictably, after these new less stringent protocols began to be enforced, every province in China has had some degree of outbreak.

On July 6, in Xi’an, Shaanxi, a small number of BA.5.2 cases were discovered which led to a seven-day “silent period” rather than a fully implemented citywide lockdown. Crowded indoor recreational venues were temporarily closed, in-person dining was shut down, summer vacation for schools began early, and large organized gatherings were postponed. This same strategy was repeated on July 11 in the northwestern city of Lanzhou, Gansu, after new cases were reported.

Tourist areas such as the island province of Hainan have seen outbreaks that have led to the shutdown of large areas. On August 8, the province reported 1,400 locally transmitted cases since the beginning of the month. By contrast, in 2021 there were only two cases reported for the whole year. Tibet also had a flare-up of COVID-19 cases in the month of August, leading to a rollout of mass testing and the closure of the famous Potala Palace and other religious and entertainment destinations. Yiwu, Urumqi, Dunhuang and several cities in Tibet and inner Mongolia experienced surges of infections in August.

In most cases visitors were required to submit two negative test results, 24 hours apart, in order to leave the area. In some cases there were limited lockdowns, termed “static management,” that lasted from 24 hours to 5 days.

On September 1, the metropolitan city of Chengdu, with a population of 21 million, went into a state of full lockdown after the discovery of an outbreak. The city discovered a total of 1,175 symptomatic cases and 508 asymptomatic cases in the period between August 11 and September 6.

The lockdown of Chengdu, which ended on Monday, was the largest since the two-month Shanghai lockdown that began in April this year. Certain restrictions on daily life still remain. Throughout Chengdu residents need to provide negative nucleic acid test results from within the past 72 hours to use public transit or enter public venues. To deal with the need for testing, five separate air-inflated testing facilities have been built in the city with a capacity to deliver 250,000 tests each day.

Each of the recent outbreaks have largely been suppressed through the continuation of the Zero-COVID elimination strategy, which includes lockdowns, rigorous contact tracing, the safe isolation of infected individuals, mass testing and universal mask-wearing.

China’s adherence to a Zero-COVID elimination strategy continues to have positive results for protecting the population. However, without a globally coordinated elimination strategy, infections and outbreaks will continue to be imported into the country to spread and threaten public health, and pressures will continue to mount for China to completely end Zero COVID.

In addition to relying on mass testing, localized lockdowns, static management and silent periods, there have been new developments on the treatment and vaccination front. On July 25, the National Medical Products Administration (NMPA) approved the use of Azvudine for the treatment of COVID-19 symptoms.

Azvudine was developed in 2021 to treat HIV-1 infection and was approved for use on COVID-19 patients in a fast-tracked process that in total only took two weeks. It is less effective than the antiviral Paxlovid, which is also authorized to treat patients, but is much more affordable. Also, in an effort to make Paxlovid more widely available, Chinese drug company Zhejiang Huahai Pharmaceutical entered into a partnership with Pfizer to manufacture the antiviral in China. The non-exclusive partnership will produce the pills over the next five years.

There is also a promising new mucosal vaccine that has just been developed in China and approved for the public. It is an inhaled treatment that is proving to be effective against Omicron variants. Its release was announced by maker CanSino Biologics on Sunday, September 4.

During the recent lockdowns, there has been a relative increase of public criticism toward the Zero-COVID policy on Chinese social media platforms such as Weibo and WeChat. Discredited rumors that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime will make Zero COVID a permanent and ubiquitous government policy, requiring regular mass testing even when there are no outbreaks, have been refuted by NHC officials.

On October 16, the CCP will begin its 20th National Congress, which take place every five years. It remains to be seen what decisions will be made at the congress regarding the continuation of Zero COVID, but the urgency with which Azvudine was approved as a treatment and the relaxation of certain policies indicates a nervousness about continuing lockdowns and a move toward reliance on the new treatments and vaccines. The effect of lockdowns on the economy and tourism, as well as pressures from every other capitalist government to “live with COVID” are becoming evident in the final month before the congress.

The numbers of cases, severe cases, hospitalizations and deaths in China, home to 1.4 billion people, is minuscule when compared to anywhere else in the world. There has not been a single reported death from COVID-19 in China since May 27, while the total number of recorded deaths in the country stands at just 5,226.

By comparison, according to News Nodes the United States has had over 1,056,962 official COVID-19 deaths, while estimates of excess deaths place the real toll above 1.2 million. The current seven-day average of daily new deaths stands at 407, and there are growing warnings that another major surge will take place this fall and winter. Across Europe, nearly 2 million people have officially died from COVID-19. Estimates of global excess deaths outside China stand at roughly 22 million, according to The Economist.

These figures show how effective the Zero-COVID strategy has been, and make clear that it must be implemented everywhere in the world. If China were to drop its mitigation measures and pursue a vaccine- and treatment-only approach, as advocated relentlessly by the Western media, it would likely lead to the deaths of millions of people.

Even though vaccination rates in China are relatively high compared to that of the United States (89.7 percent of the population have had two or more shots in China, compared to 66.8 percent in the US) the constant flare-ups of cases in China prove that a vaccine-only strategy is not enough. On the other hand, if the same rigorous measures implemented in China were practiced the world over, the human race could eliminate SARS COV-2 globally in a matter of months.

German government spends 29 billion euros on gas importer Uniper

Peter Schwarz

The German government is spending €29 billion to buy gas importer Uniper and keep it alive. This is the highest sum spent to keep a single company afloat since the 2008 financial crisis, when the government propped up the banking sector to the tune of €480 billion. And it is likely to be just the beginning; in the first half of 2022, Uniper posted a net loss of €12.3 billion.

Uniper’s gas storage facility in Etzel near Wilhelmshaven [Photo by Uniper]

On Wednesday, the German government, Uniper and previous majority owner Fortum signed an agreement under which 98.5 percent of Uniper will become German state property. The federal government will pay Fortum €480 million for its shares and €8 billion for loans it provided to the Düsseldorf-based company. A further €8 billion will flow to Uniper as a capital injection. Together with the €13 billion that the government has already made available to the company as a credit line, the total cost comes to around €29 billion, as the Financial Times has calculated.

The Ministry of Economics justifies this huge expenditure by saying that it will “secure the energy supply for companies, municipal utilities and consumers.” Uniper, which supplies natural gas to more than 100 municipal utilities and large companies and accounts for 40 percent of Germany’s gas supply, makes a daily loss of more than €100 million because it no longer receives cheap gas from Russia and has to buy the missing volume expensively on the gas market to fulfil its supply contracts.

In the last six months, Uniper also had to write off €2 billion for its stake in the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which did not come into operation because of the Russia sanctions.

The €29 billion the government is pouring into Uniper will only marginally help—if at all—reduce the immense gas prices that are bankrupting countless private households and businesses. Even the gas surcharge, which comes into effect in October and will cost a four-person household an additional €700 a year, is something that Economics Minister Robert Habeck (Green Party) wants to stick with, even though it was mainly intended to prop up Uniper and is legally controversial following nationalization.

At a gas price of 20 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh), a four-person household with an annual consumption of 20,000 kWh will have to pay about €5,000 for the gas bill this year. New contracts were already concluded in August at a much higher price of 28 cents per kWh; in 2021 it had been 5 cents. The situation is even more catastrophic for energy-intensive small and medium-sized companies, most of which have signed shorter-term contracts and are now facing price increases of several hundred percent.

Much of the €29 billion for Uniper is flowing into the coffers of the big energy companies, which are making record profits because of the energy shortage and astronomical prices on the spot markets.

Uniper was spun off from German energy giant Eon in 2016, which posted a profit of €4.1 billion in the first half of 2022. Uniper served as a kind of “bad bank” for Eon, to which the group outsourced its fossil energy operations while turning to its more lucrative grid, energy services and green energy businesses.

Since then, Uniper has changed hands several times until it was finally acquired outright in 2020 by Fortum, which is majority-owned by the Finnish state. It was a bad deal: Fortum paid €7 billion for its stake and collected a total of €900 million in dividends; now it has received €480 million for the sale.

Uniper is not only Germany’s biggest gas importer, but also operates power plants and gas storage facilities. The group employs about 11,500 people in 40 countries, about 5,000 of them in Germany. Its main markets are Germany, the UK, Sweden and—until the Ukraine war—Russia. The Russian subsidiary Unipro operated five power plants, employed 4,000 people and recently accounted for one-fifth of the operating profits. Last year, the company generated sales of around €164 billion.

The €29 billion now being spent to bail it out is part of the huge sum European powers are paying for the war and sanctions against Russia—and which will eventually be passed on to the working class in the form of social cuts, layoffs and unaffordable energy prices.

According to calculations by the Bruegel think tank, the 27 EU members have allocated €314 billion and the UK €178 billion to dampen the energy crisis, without making much difference.

As might be expected, the service sector union Verdi fully supports the federal government’s €29 billion action. “The takeover by the government is necessary to ensure security of supply and it is in the interests of the employees,” said Verdi national executive member Christoph Schmitz. An insolvency would be an incalculable risk for the gas market in Germany and the entire energy and heating supply, he said.

Harald Seegatz, chairman of Uniper’s works council, also welcomed the move. He said Uniper, with its roughly 5,000 employees in Germany, was of systemic importance to the energy supply and needed permanent support. “The government must see its stake in Uniper as a long-term commitment,” he demanded.

US political establishment seizes on declining test scores to bar remote learning and accelerate attack on public education

Emma Arceneaux & Renae Cassimeda

Recent results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a national standardized test conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), showed a decline in scores among age nine students during the pandemic. Preliminary results from NAEP’s long-term trend (LTT) reading and mathematics assessments note that in 2022, average scores dropped five points in reading and seven points in mathematics compared to 2020.

The tests have been seized upon by the Biden administration, the political establishment and the corporate media to cynically blame remote learning during 2020–2021 for “learning loss.”

 Students are lined up outside of the Adams' campus of Oyster Adams Bilingual School, as they wait to check-in for the first day of school, Monday, Aug. 29, 2022, in Washington D.C. [AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais]

US Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said the onus for academic decline should be placed squarely on the Trump administration’s “mismanagement of the pandemic.” By this he did not mean Trump’s prioritizing of corporate profit over human life and his embrace of the pseudo-scientific theory of “herd immunity,” i.e., the deliberate infection of masses of people. After all, the Biden administration has adopted essentially the same policy, declaring that the population must “learn to live” with COVID-19.

No, Cardona was simply criticizing the temporary shift to remote learning, which was forced on state and local authorities not by Trump, who viciously opposed it, but by the demands and opposition from teachers, students and parents to being herded into dangerous classrooms.

“That’s why President Biden, from Day One of his Administration, pushed so hard to get schools reopened and students back into classrooms,” Cardona declared.

Major school districts have also blamed the preliminary results on remote learning. Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent Alberto Carvalho stated, “as anticipated, the preliminary state assessment results illustrate that there is no substitute for in-person instruction.”

To the extent that standardized testing accurately measures academic achievement, which many educators and experts reject, there are a number of more profound factors contributing to lower scores than remote learning, none of which the Biden administration or media care to discuss.

First, is the widespread illness of children over the past two years. A nationwide study published in Nature in May estimated that close to 51 million children had been infected, or a staggering 70 percent of US children. Nearly 160,000 have been hospitalized and at least 1,790 have died, according to the CDC. The vast majority of pediatric illness and death occurred under Biden’s watch during the Delta and Omicron waves, when schools were prematurely forced open amid soaring transmission.

To this must be added the impact of Long COVID, a far-reaching condition which, in children, is known to increase the risk of acute pulmonary embolism, myocarditis, venous thromboembolic events, acute renal failure and Type 1 diabetes, as well as debilitating symptoms, such as smell and taste disturbances, circulatory problems, fatigue and pain.

Second, there is the trauma and grief resulting from the life-altering loss of parents, caregivers and teachers due to the “let it rip” response of both the Trump and Biden administrations. In February 2022, it was estimated that over 200,000 children in the US had lost a parent or primary caregiver, a figure which has only grown. An estimated 8,000 educators in the US have died of COVID-19. Unlike missed school, for a child there is no such “recovering” from a dead mother or father.

Finally, the official response to the pandemic, guided by the principles of private profit and not public health, has led to an economic and social catastrophe for the working class. World governments, led by the United States, seized upon the pandemic to transfer unprecedented sums of money to the major corporations through the CARES Act bailout. The wealth of US billionaires increased by 2.1 trillion dollars, or 70 percent, between 2020 and 2021, while conditions of life for the working class have only grown more dire. Millions have lost their jobs, while wages have fallen far behind the 40-year inflation high.

During Biden’s tenure, the Democratic Party has overseen the expiration of pandemic-related unemployment benefits, the federal moratorium on evictions and the Child Tax Credit, which was estimated to reduce child poverty by as much as 40 percent. Most recently, they have allowed the universal free lunch program to expire, which has impacted an estimated 10 million children.

Setting these factors aside and accepting the premise that school closures on their own were a major contributor to academic decline, remote learning was carried out in a haphazard fashion with inadequate funding and resources from the start. Many educators even described the process as “sabotaged” by school districts. The federal and state governments never provided the resources to guarantee free, high quality internet to every student, adequate training in online technology for educators and students, or the necessary financial support for parents to stay home with their children.

Moreover, these chaotic school disruptions, during which students have been yo-yoed between in-person and remote learning, could have been entirely avoided had the necessary measures been taken to suppress transmission and eliminate COVID. This would have involved the temporary closure of schools and non-essential industries, the provision of basic income and necessities and other public health measures, as was done in China.

In any case, the correlation between testing declines and remote learning is ambiguous at best. The NAEP results showed that declines occurred in every region of the country, including areas that returned to in-person schools in 2020. The declines occurred across urban, suburban and rural settings.

Stephanie Tait, author and disability advocate, compared officially published state testing results from the two states that stayed remote longest—California and Oregon—to the two that were remote for the shortest period—Texas and Florida—which showed no correlation between time schools remained remote and score decline.

In an opinion piece published Thursday in the New York Times, David Wallace-Wells, who asserts that schools should be the “last to close, first to open” and downplays the risk that COVID-19 poses to children, admitted that the correlation between remote learning and score declines was unclear. He even cited state and local level data compiled by notorious COVID-minimizer economist Emily Oster, which showed that scores declined whether schools were remote or not.

Throughout the pandemic, conditions inside classrooms have been crisis-ridden. Last year, amid an historic teacher shortage and widespread absences due to illness, it became commonplace for students to be crammed into cafeterias and auditoriums, or for armed police and national guard to act as “substitutes.” In neither of these scenarios did any learning take place, except perhaps for the broader social lessons drawn by many students, including that their lives and education were of little value to the powers-that-be.

The political manipulation of the NAEP results has multiple purposes. On the one hand, they are being used as a preemptive strike against any future school closures amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, which Biden has declared to be “over.” As the recent Town Hall co-hosted by the White House and teachers unions made clear, the political establishment is unified on the demand that schools remain in-person so that parents can be forced into equally unsafe factories and workplaces.

More than this, the tests will be used to justify a broader attack against public education, teachers and students. For decades, standardized tests have been used by the ruling class to cut funding, lay off educators and convert public schools into private charters, all in the name of “education reform.”

Just as the political establishment has no concern for the actual lives and health of American children, they have proven for decades that they could care less about their “progress and academic well-being,” as Cardona claimed. This is evident in the decades of budget cuts, school closures and the crumbling state of American schools, in which millions of students learn inside buildings with antiquated or broken HVAC systems, mold, even roach and mice infestations, as documented by teachers in Columbus, Ohio, who recently struck.

In addition to these damning conditions, academic achievement, as measured by NAEP tests, was already declining before the pandemic, particularly among the lowest-performing students who typically come from low-income families. Both the NAEP’s main tests and its LTT assessments showed either stagnation or declines in reading and math scores since 2012. Speaking on the 2019 results, NCES Associate Commissioner Peggy Carr stated, “Over the past decade, there has been no progress in either mathematics or reading performance, and the lowest-performing students are doing worse.”