British Prime Minister Liz Truss resigns—a revolutionary crisis for British imperialism

Thomas Scripps & Chris Marsden

UK Prime Minister Liz Truss’s resignation after just 45 days in office has brought the crisis of rule of the British ruling class to a new pitch of intensity. British politics has all the features of a revolutionary situation.

Truss is the shortest-serving prime minister in British history and has fallen as part of the wider breakdown of the Conservative government. By the end of next week, the UK will have had three prime ministers in just two months.

Prime Minister Liz Truss gives her resignation speech outside No10 Downing Street, October 20, 2022 [Photo by Simon Dawson/No 10 Downing Street / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]

Her resignation followed chaotic scenes in the House of Commons Wednesday evening, with Tory MPs unsure whether a vote on fracking was being made a vote of confidence in the government. Deputy whip Craig Whittaker was seen shouting, “I am fucking furious, and I don’t give a fuck any more.” Chief Whip Wendy Morton reportedly resigned on the spot and was chased out of the room by Truss pleading with her to reconsider. Labour MPs claim some of their counterparts were being “manhandled” into voting with the government.

Just hours before, frothing right-wing Home Secretary Suella Braverman delivered a stinging letter of resignation framed as a leadership challenge, stating her “serious concerns about this government’s commitment to honouring manifesto commitments.”

Such open disarray in Britain’s main capitalist party, after 12 years in power and still with a majority of 71 seats, is the result of the enormous international and internal pressures on British imperialism, amid a war with Russia threatening to go nuclear and an unprecedented collapse in living standards.

In different circumstances, a general election would have been called long ago to tamp down tensions in the ruling party or replace it and bring some sense of legitimacy to the reactionary parade in Parliament. But the ruling class is terrified that even so restricted and stage-managed an affair as a parliamentary election would potentially unleash mass protest and opposition. Households are threatened with thousands of pounds a year in extra energy, housing and food costs, provoking strikes by hundreds of thousands of rail, post, telecoms, education and council workers.

The Tory party is desperate to avoid an election and is planning to replace Truss by another palace coup, more naked than even that which removed Boris Johnson. Candidates will need the support of 100 of their colleagues to get on the ballot, in the hope that a single winner can be put to Tory Party members to vote on electronically before next Friday.

This is not assured. Negotiations are ongoing to ensure that former Chancellor Rishi Sunak secures majority support, but this means Penny Mordaunt agreeing to stand aside, as new Chancellor Jeremy Hunt and Defence Secretary Ben Wallace have already indicated they will do. This would leave Sunak standing against a divided right represented by Truss’s fellow ultra-low-tax free-marketeers Braverman and Kemi Badenoch. But in an extraordinary turn of events, Johnson is emerging as a favourite should he manage to go through to the membership vote.

The absence of Wallace and Hunt from the contest is the strongest indication of the political issues at stake, not just for British but also for US and world imperialism.

As Truss was facing the axe Wednesday, Wallace flew to the US for an emergency meeting at the Pentagon to give assurances of the UK’s continuing role in NATO’s war against Russia. Foreign Secretary James Cleverly described the discussions as the sort “which frankly you don’t want to have over the telephone.”

On the economic front Hunt is preparing a fiscal statement of savage spending cuts for October 31 to present to the global financial oligarchy which tanked the British economy in response to Truss’s unfunded tax cuts in the September 23 mini-budget.

President Biden, when asked about any possible negative economic impact from Truss’s resignation, said any spillover would be “inconsequential”. He stressed that she had been “a good partner on Russia and Ukraine and the British are going to solve their problems.” A White House statement thanked Truss for her “partnership” in “holding Russia to account for its war on Ukraine” and pledged continued “close cooperation with the UK government.”

None of this Machiavellian scheming would be possible without the ongoing suppression of the class struggle by the trade union bureaucracy and the Labour Party.

On Wednesday, the Independent newspaper reported that two million workers are set to strike or ballot in the next months—a movement that could bring down any government, let alone that which is presently rotting alive in Westminster.

Instead, only a fraction of the workers demanding strike action have been mobilised, spread out across different individual days of action for different disputes.

The Trades Union Congress (TUC) is working in intimate collaboration with Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, who functions as the point-man for British and US imperialism during this raging crisis.

His call for a general election, now echoed by every other parliamentary party, is an offer for Labour to engineer a smooth transition to another government when this becomes unavoidable, epitomised by his “acceptance” that an election is only possible if Tory MPs decide to honour their “patriotic duty” and put “the nation” before their party.

Sir Keir Starmer, the leader of Britain's Labour Party makes his speech at the party's annual conference in Liverpool, England, September 27, 2022. [AP Photo/Jon Super]

Starmer’s model is for a corporatist alliance between the government, the corporations and the unions of the kind under which US Democratic President Biden is imposing a brutal contract on railroad workers in the US and German SPD Chancellor Olaf Scholz is imposing brutal pay cuts on hundreds of thousands of chemical workers. The Labour leader told the TUC congress on the day of Truss’s resignation that it must work with Labour and the employers in a “true collective agreement for the nation”, including to protect Britain “from tyrants like Putin.”

Starmer was telling the trade unions to prepare for a change of leadership by getting strikes off the table—using promises that things will get better under a Labour government—and to continue policing the working class as Labour implements an agenda of austerity and war.

A national government of both Labour and Tory ministers, justified by invoking the “national interest”, remains a real possibility to avoid a general election if no solution can be found within the Tory party.

Responding to Truss’s resignation, Chairman of the World Socialist Web Site International Editorial Board David North tweeted, “The resignation of Liz Truss after only six weeks in office is a further confirmation of the development of a fundamental crisis of class rule in Britain. A revolutionary situation, as Marxists have explained, emerges when the ruling class can’t rule in the old way.

“At this point, the ruling class is unable to rule at all. Its survival now depends on the ability of the Labour Party, led by the ultra Blairite Keir Starmer, and the apparatus of the trade unions to strangle the movement of the increasingly militant working class.

“The other essential element of a revolutionary crisis—that the working class can’t live in the old way—certainly exists. The critical issue now is its intervention in the crisis. The demand for a general election must be directed toward calls for independent mass action.”

German Chancellor Scholz announces more weapons for war against Russia

Johannes Stern

Although the NATO war against Russia in Ukraine threatens to escalate into a nuclear conflict, Germany’s Social Democrat/Green/Free Democrat government—the so-called traffic light coalition—is intensifying the war. On Thursday, Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) issued new threats against Moscow in his government statement on the European Union (EU) summit. Without pausing for breath, he boasted of the massive military support from Germany for Ukraine and promised further weapons to make the “difference” on the battlefield.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) during his government statement on the EU summit in the Bundestag on October 20, 2022 [AP Photo/Markus Schreiber]

“When Putin started the war in February, some people suspected that Ukraine would be defeated in a few days,” Scholz said at the beginning of his speech. However, it “turned out differently, also because Ukraine’s partners, including us, supported the country: politically, financially, with humanitarian aid and with weapons.” Artillery and air defense are now “exactly what Ukraine needs most, and that is exactly what we deliver, modern self-propelled howitzers and multiple rocket launchers, for example.”

The circular exchange of tanks, which involves Berlin sending German-made tanks to the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Greece and Slovenia in exchange for these countries sending their Soviet-era tanks to Ukraine, will also give Ukraine “around a hundred tanks its soldiers can use immediately,” the chancellor continued. And Germany promised Ukraine “as one of the first countries in early June modern air defense systems.” One of these systems was “handed over to our Ukrainian friends last week,” and three more will “follow as quickly as possible.” In addition, “anti-aircraft missiles and Cheetah tanks” were delivered.

If Scholz had listed all German arms deliveries since the beginning of the war, he would have massively exceeded his speaking time. Berlin is literally flooding Ukraine with weapons and is the third-largest arms supplier after the US and Great Britain. According to the Federal Government’s official list of “military support services for Ukraine,” Berlin delivered the following items last week alone:

• 1 Iris-T SLM air defense system

• 10 armoured rescue vehicles (previously 5)

• 7 heavy and medium bridge systems

• 167,000 rounds of handgun ammunition

• 200 tents (previously 100)

• 195 generators (previously 12)

• 116,000 cold protection jackets

• 80,000 cold protection trousers

• 240,000 winter hats

The actual war support goes far beyond arms deliveries. According to information from public broadcaster ARD, the German foreign intelligence service BND provides “militarily useful data” to Kiev and is thus directly involved in warfare. Germany also plays a leading role in the training of the Ukrainian army.

Scholz informed the German parliament (Bundestag) that the EU foreign ministers “agreed on a new training mission for around 15,000 Ukrainian soldiers here in the EU” on Monday. And “one of the two headquarters will be located in Germany. By spring, we will be training a full brigade of up to 5,000 soldiers.” In this way, Berlin underlined its “willingness to participate permanently in the development of a strong Ukrainian armed forces.”

Contrary to the official assurances of the government, Germany is thus also a war party under international law. Just a few weeks after the beginning of the war, an expert report from the German Parliamentary Research Service established that the training of Ukrainian soldiers on German soil was tantamount to war participation. “If, in addition to the supply of weapons, the instruction of the conflicting party or training in such weapons were also in question, one would leave the secure terrain of non-warfare,” it stated.

At the time, Scholz himself warned against the danger of a nuclear third world war. In an interview with Der Spiegel at the end of April, he stated that “every effort must be made to avoid a direct military confrontation between NATO and a highly armed superpower such as Russia, a nuclear-armed power.” The issue is “preventing an escalation that leads to a third world war.”

Since then, however, Scholz and the traffic light coalition have been doing exactly the opposite and fueling the conflict—now also on a nuclear level. Currently, German army (Bundeswehr) Tornadoes are taking part in the NATO nuclear exercise “Steadfast Noon.” A report by the Bundeswehr Association states: “Among other things, the scenario of nuclear participation is being practiced. In the past, the Tornadoes of the Tactical Air Force Squadron 33 from Büchel were regularly involved. Training is given on how to mount the US nuclear weapons stored in underground bunkers under the fighter jets.”

The WSWS has already warned that the US-led nuclear weapons exercise in the extremely tense atmosphere of war carries the risk of a serious miscalculation. What if, after the recent nuclear threats from NATO, the Russian military assumes that the “exercise” is really about the concrete preparation of nuclear strikes? During the Cold War, the NATO exercise Able Archer nearly triggered a nuclear war in 1983 because the Soviet leadership came to the conclusion that Washington was actually planning an attack with nuclear weapons.

Behind the war madness, which threatens the survival of all of humanity, there are several factors. On the one hand, the ruling class is confronted with the deepest crisis of the capitalist system since the 1930s. As at that time, it sees the war as a means of controlling and diverting the tensions outward—above all the explosive social opposition of workers and young people.

On the other hand, geopolitical ambitions are at stake. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union by the Stalinist bureaucracy, the NATO powers have systematically encircled Russia with the aim of subjugating and exploiting the resource-rich country. Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine was reactionary, but ultimately a desperate response of the capitalist Putin regime to the imperialists’ wars.

In order to justify its own war offensive, the ruling class makes use of well-known propaganda techniques. The Bundestag session began with a cynical reference to the crimes of German imperialism in Ukraine. “The memory of the Shoah’s crimes against humanity is and remains indispensable. This is part of Germany’s historical responsibility,” declared Bundestag President Bärbel Bas (SPD) as she welcomed the Ukrainian Holocaust survivor Roman Schwarzman as a guest in the Bundestag gallery. “About one and a half million Jews were murdered in Ukraine. More than 2,000 mass murder sites are located in the territory of today’s Ukraine.”

All this cannot conceal the fact that in the Ukraine war, Germany’s ruling class is returning once again to its criminal great-power policy. Already in the First and Second World Wars, German imperialism tried to annex Ukraine and subjugate Russia militarily, committing terrible crimes. In total, about 30 million people were murdered in the war of annihilation of the Wehrmacht against the Soviet Union.

In today’s war against Russia, Berlin is cooperating in Ukraine with the political descendants of the same fascist forces that fought against the Soviet Union with the German Nazis in the Second World War and supported the mass murder of the Ukrainian Jews. These include far-right militias such as the Right Sector and the notorious Azov Battalion, and also “diplomats” such as the former Ukrainian ambassador to Germany Andrei Melnyk, who is an open supporter of the Ukrainian fascist, anti-Semite and Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera.

The essentially fascist character of the German war offensive is also evident in Berlin’s plan to return to Europe’s leading military power after two lost world wars. In his speech, Scholz praised “the special fund for the Bundeswehr” worth €100 billion, “the refocusing of our armed forces on national and alliance defence,” “the assumption of greater responsibility on the eastern flank of the alliance” and his Prague proposals on “security cooperation in Europe.”

The latter aim to organize the continent also militarily under German leadership. Scholz said he was delighted that “the idea of closer European cooperation in air defence was so quickly taken up by 14 European countries who want to cooperate with us.” The planned German-European missile defence system is “exactly the kind of synergy, the kind of clever division of labour that we now need for the security of Europe.”

The government statement underlined that Germany’s return as an aggressive military power is also exacerbating tensions between the imperialist powers. The chancellor arrogantly rejected the demands for a European gas price cap, despite the fact that most European countries—including France, Spain and Italy—demand it. “A politically set price cap” harbours “the risk that the producers will sell their gas elsewhere and that we Europeans will not get more gas in the end, but less,” said Scholz.

By “European” Scholz means Germany. In order to secure the scarce gas resources on the world market due to the war policy against Russia, the German government has put up an “economic defence shield of up to 200 billion euros” (Scholz). This not only exacerbates the social contradictions in Germany—since the bulk of the sum goes into the pockets of the big corporations and the rich—but also the national tensions within the EU. Many member states are furious over the package because, in their view, it is tantamount to a trade war measure by Berlin against other EU states.

Russia evacuates tens of thousands from Kherson ahead of Ukrainian offensive

Andre Damon

Russian officials in Kherson, the port city at the mouth of the Dnieper River, announced plans Tuesday to evacuate civilians ahead of an expected Ukrainian offensive to recapture the city. Officials from Kherson, which Russia seized during its offensive earlier in the year, said the evacuations were “to avoid casualties among the civilian population.”

Parts of the city are just 50 miles from Crimea, the strategic peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014 and whose reconquest is a stated goal of the Ukrainian war effort. Russian officials said they intend to evacuate up to 60,000 people from the portion of the city on the north bank of the Dnieper amid warnings that Russian forces will have to retreat over the river.

Ukrainian soldiers fire, on the front line in the Kharkiv region, Ukraine, Wednesday, Oct. 5, 2022. [AP Photo/Andrii Marienko]

During the past month, Ukraine has recaptured significant portions of the Kherson region using American supplied HIMARS systems and Excalibur projectiles to carry out attacks behind Russian lines. The collapse in southern Ukraine followed the debacle for Russian forces in the Kharkiv region, in which Ukrainian forces advanced dozens of miles in a matter of days.

Despite Russian President Vladimir Putin’s announcement of a partial mobilization earlier this month, both Russian and US commentators have stated that the Russian front is likely to continue retreating amid the ongoing NATO-backed Ukrainian offensive.

While Russian forces suffered a series of setbacks on the battlefield, the Russian military has also launched missile and drone attacks on electricity substations and water distribution centers in Ukraine.

Russian officials said the attacks were in retaliation for the bombing of the Kerch Bridge on October 8, for which the Ukrainian special forces took credit in statements to the press.

In an analysis of the Russian attacks on civilian infrastructure, the Institute for the Study of War commented that “the Kremlin remains trapped in a cycle of appeasing its pro-war constituencies but retaining Russian President Vladimir Putin’s vision of a limited war in Ukraine that is incompatible with their demands and expectations.”

The attacks have had a devastating impact on the Ukrainian population, with electricity and water shut off altogether in some areas.

Despite the disaster for the Ukrainian population, which is viewed as cannon fodder for American imperialism, the US is seeking to escalate the conflict. The New York Times reported, citing US officials, that “the Ukrainian military has a window of opportunity to make gains against Russia’s army over the next six weeks,” before the late-fall mud makes offensive operations more difficult and the cutoff of Russian gas is expected to trigger an energy crisis.

The continuing Ukrainian advances have raised the danger of a nuclear escalation. On Tuesday, Kremlin spokesperson Dimitri Peskov suggested that the four regions of Ukraine occupied by Russia are under the protection of Russia’s “nuclear umbrella.”

“All these territories are inalienable parts of the Russian Federation, and they are all protected,” Peskov said. “Their security is provided for at the same level as the rest of Russia’s territory.”

Amid mutual military exercises on the part of NATO and Russia, there are growing warnings about the potential for a miscalculation leading to a direct clash between nuclear armed powers. On Thursday, British Defense Minister Ben Wallace said a Russian jet had released a missile near a British surveillance aircraft in the Black Sea last month, in what Wallace characterized as a mistake. Wallace made this statement a day after returning from discussions with Washington.

Ahead of the trip, a ministry of defense spokesperson told Sky News, “My boss, Ben Wallace, is in Washington this morning having the sort of conversations that… beyond belief really the fact we are a time when these sort of conversations are necessary.”

On Tuesday, during a livestreamed interview with Deutsche Welle’s “Conflict Zone” program, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg raised the prospect that the use of tactical nuclear weapons by Russia would directly draw NATO into the conflict.

In a revealing exchange, Stoltenberg was asked, “Putin’s Ally, Dmitry Medvedev, says that he thinks the NATO Military Alliance would not risk a nuclear war and directly enter the Ukraine war, even if Moscow struck Ukraine with nuclear weapons; is he right?”

Stoltenberg replied, “He was not right, because what we have stated clearly is that there will be severe consequences.”

In his remarks, Stoltenberg made a revealing admission, asserting that the war did not begin in 2022, with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but in 2014. “So, since 2014, we have adapted the Alliance, and the war didn’t start in February, it actually started eight years ago when they went into Donbas and Crimea.”

Stoltenberg added, “NATO Allies, like especially the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, have trained and equipped the Ukrainian forces, not since February, but since 2014. And that has ensured that the Ukrainian armed forces are much bigger, much better trained, much better led, much better equipped now, than in 2014, and this is making a huge difference on the battlefield, as we speak.”

Stoltenberg made clear the extent of the NATO buildup in Eastern Europe over the past eight years. “For the first time in our history, we have battlegroups in the eastern part of Alliance… What we have seen since 2014 is the biggest reinforcement of NATO’s collective defense since the end of the Cold War.”

Stoltenberg called on NATO to “ramp up production” of wartime armaments, saying that NATO had provided arms to Ukraine “by depleting our existing stocks.”

Critically, Stoltenberg made clear that NATO’s rearmament is targeting not only Russia, but China. Stoltenberg was asked, “Is the next conflict for NATO with China?” to which he replied, “What we have stated clearly, and that’s for the first time in our Strategic Concept, is that the rise of China matters for our security, and it is a challenge for our values, for our interests and for our security.”

But while the US and NATO are seeking to escalate the conflict with Russia and China, the social, economic and political crisis triggered by the war is intensifying. In the UK, inflation hit a 40-year high on Thursday, with bread prices surging as much as 30 percent throughout Europe in recent months. On Tuesday, the Guardian reported that the British Broadcasting Corporation has prepared secret scripts to read on air to announce rolling blackouts that are expected over the winter.

Dangerous new COVID-19 variants threaten massive fall-winter surge

Evan Blake

One month into the fall season in the Northern Hemisphere, it is clear that the next global wave of the COVID-19 pandemic has begun.

Due to the dismantling of testing and data reporting throughout much of the world, official infection figures are now largely worthless. The most accurate estimate of the real number of daily COVID-19 infections from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) shows that 21 million people were infected globally on Wednesday, up 23 percent from the most recent trough of 17 million infections on September 27.

Amid this deepening crisis, the ruling elites throughout the world have discovered the perfect cure for the pandemic: Simply ignore it and cover it up. At most, the broadcast news has brief segments on the pandemic once per month, while the print media just echoes the lies of the capitalist politicians.

This propaganda has had a terrible impact on mass consciousness, and global society is wholly unprepared for the current surge. Having been told, in the words of US President Joe Biden, that “the pandemic is over,” many are failing to take even the most elementary precautions. As one observes the careless actions of the misled public, the image comes to mind of Pieter Bruegel’s famous painting “The Blind Leading the Blind.”

But the political leaders are not blind. With malice aforethought, they have ignored the repeated warnings of epidemiologists and prioritized the profit interests of the corporate-financial elite over life. From the beginning of the pandemic, far-right figures have sowed deep confusion within the population, while over the course of the past year ostensibly liberal governments throughout the world have embraced the homicidal “herd immunity” strategy pioneered by the far right. The consequences of these policies are being realized as the world enters an even more dangerous situation.

The growing wave is unlike anything seen since the start of the pandemic and has many scientists deeply concerned. As a result of the unhindered spread of COVID-19 over the past year, the Omicron variant has spawned hundreds of subvariants with different mutation profiles, creating what experts have termed a “variant soup.”

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The most worrying are a collection of highly-mutated “escape variants” that are more immune-evasive and infectious than all other Omicron subvariants. Particularly worrisome are BQ.1.1 and XBB, which are considered likely to become dominant throughout the world in the coming weeks. In Singapore, XBB became dominant two weeks ago and is fueling a massive surge of infections and reinfections.

Studies indicate that both of these subvariants and others will render ineffective the last remaining monoclonal antibody drugs Evusheld and Bebtelovimab, threatening tens of millions of immunocompromised people throughout the world with greater risk of severe disease and death.

One of the greatest concerns of experts is the mounting toll of Long COVID, a broad spectrum of prolonged symptoms that can affect nearly every organ in the body. A preprint study led by Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly of the Washington University School of Medicine found that compared to those with one COVID-19 infection, those with reinfection had double the risk of all-cause mortality, triple the risk of hospitalization, and nearly double the risk of at least one Long COVID symptom. The study notes, “The risks were evident in subgroups including those who were unvaccinated, had 1 shot, or 2 or more shots prior to the second infection.”

Significantly, the XBB variant has propelled reinfections in Singapore from only 5 percent in mid-August to 17.5 percent by October 14, an unprecedented increase that underscores the dangers of the new “escape variants.”

In an alarming press briefing Wednesday, World Health Organization (WHO) COVID-19 Technical Lead Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove stressed that the XBB subvariant “is showing significant immune-evasion.” She continued: “This is of concern for us, because we need to ensure that the vaccines that are in use worldwide remain effective at preventing severe disease and death. The more this virus circulates, the more opportunities it has to change.”

She concluded, “We need to be able to track this virus. There are millions of cases being reported each week, but our surveillance has declined, testing has declined, sequencing has declined, and that, in turn, has limited our ability as an organization, with our expert networks around the world, to assess these [subvariants].”

Dr. Kerkhove’s comments are a devastating indictment of the pandemic policies implemented throughout the world. Even if the current “variant soup” does not render existing vaccines unable to prevent severe disease and death, the constant spread of the virus provides it with billions of hosts in which it will continue to mutate and potentially evolve into a more lethal strain, while the WHO’s ability to monitor these mutations has been substantially degraded.

To say that American and world society are flying blind into a coming storm is a vast understatement. A more accurate description would be that the plane’s pilot has deliberately jettisoned the engine’s fuel, sabotaged the landing gear and told the air traffic controllers to go home.

Following the dictates of the Biden administration, on Thursday the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) switched from daily to weekly reporting of COVID-19 cases and deaths. On Friday, the agency quietly ended its limited program for distributing free masks. Last week, epidemiologist Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding revealed that the CDC has withheld data showing that the BQ.1 and BQ.1.1 subvariants are rapidly becoming dominant across the US and now account for a combined 11.4 percent of all variants. In New York, where these new subvariants have reached their highest proportions, COVID-19 hospitalizations surged by 9 percent in the past week alone.

The same processes are underway across Europe, where COVID-19 infections, reinfections, hospitalizations and deaths are steadily rising. In Germany, Oktoberfest and other large events encouraged by politicians are now fueling a second wave of BA.5 infections, which has pushed hospitals to the brink. Since Monday, there have been 680 deaths from COVID-19 across the country, over 60 percent higher than two weeks ago, and experts warn that the new variants will only compound an already dire situation. In France, where BQ.1 and BQ.1.1 now account for the majority of all infections, COVID-19 deaths are steadily rising.

The misinformed public is not to be blamed for the profound lack of scientific understanding. Misanthropy and debilitating pessimism will do nothing to effect a change in the pandemic. Rather, every effort must be made to counter the government’s propaganda and educate workers and youth on the science of the Zero-COVID elimination strategy, which remains viable and necessary today.

In the past year, the recklessness of the pandemic policies has been extended to the arena of the US-NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, which Biden himself acknowledged threatens to erupt into nuclear “Armageddon.” Hospitals, schools and industries across the US and internationally are in a state of collapse after unending COVID-19 waves have caused massive staffing shortages. The coming winter will be catastrophic unless immediate action is taken by the working class.

US Government TechGirls Programme 2023

Application Deadline: 16th December 2023 09:00PM EST

Eligible African Countries: Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestinian Territories, and Tunisia;

To be taken at (country): USA

About the Award: Since 2012, TechGirls trained and mentored 186 teenage girls (ages 15-17) from Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Palestinian Territories, Tunisia, and Yemen. The core of the program is a three-week experience in the United States. 

TechGirls participate in an interactive technology and computer camp (with US Girls), join a tech company for a day of job shadowing, and participate in community service initiatives. There is a TechGirls multiplier effect – inspiring others in their local community to pursue Stem.

Type: Training

Eligibility: Students eligible to apply are those who:

• Are from one of the following eligible countries:
  • United States
  • Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestinian Territories, and Tunisia;
  •  Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan
• Are between the ages of 15 and 17 at the start of the exchange;
• Have demonstrated advanced skills and a serious interest in technology, engineering, and/or math in their academic studies;
• Intend to pursue higher education and/or careers in technology;
• Have strong English language skills;
• Exhibit maturity, flexibility, and open-mindedness;
• Will attend at least one additional semester of secondary school upon their return to their home country; and
• Are committed to completing a community-based project upon their return home.
• Preference will be given to those who have limited or no prior experience in the United States. You are not eligible if you have travelled to the United States in the last three years as part of any other ECA exchange program.

Please note that family members of U.S. Embassy or Consulate staff or U.S. Department of State employees are not eligible to apply.

TechGirls encourages people with diverse backgrounds and skills to apply, including individuals with disabilities.

Number of Awards: Not specified

Value of Award: The TechGirls program covers the following costs:

• Roundtrip international airfare from participant home country to the United States
• Housing during program

• Double occupancy hotel or dormitory accommodations
• Meals during program

• Breakfast, lunch, and dinner

How to Apply: Online Application

Visit Programme Webpage for Details

Growing COVID hospitalisations and cases in New Zealand

Tom Peters

Case numbers and hospitalisations for COVID-19 are continuing to climb in New Zealand following the government’s removal of all public health measures to combat the pandemic.

Medical staff test shoppers who volunteered at a pop-up community COVID-19 testing station at a supermarket car park in Christchurch, New Zealand. [AP Photo/Mark Baker]

As of yesterday, according to Newsroom, there were 214 people in hospital with the virus, a 24 percent increase in the past week, and more than double the figure of 105 recorded on October 5. Meanwhile, the seven-day average for officially-recorded infections is 2,211, up 27 percent on a week ago. This is almost twice the seven-day average of 1,344 recorded one month ago (on September 20).

COVID-linked deaths, which are only being reported on a weekly basis, remain relatively low, with 10 reported last week. Throughout the pandemic, however, deaths have lagged behind hospitalisations and case numbers, meaning the toll is likely to increase soon.

Internationally, there is a renewed wave of the pandemic, driven by more infectious subvariants of Omicron including BQ.1 and BQ.1.1. In Germany, hospitalisations due to COVID doubled nationwide in the space of just one week, and there are reports of hundreds of outbreaks in hospitals and nursing homes. France and Italy have reported 461 and 544 COVID deaths in the last seven days, an increase on the previous week of 32 and 38 per cent.

Despite the alarming trend both in New Zealand and internationally, the Labour Party-led government is doing everything it can to disarm the population and normalise mass COVID infection. Yesterday, acting COVID-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins announced the removal of emergency powers from the COVID-19 Public Health Response Act 2020, including the ability to impose lockdowns, border restrictions, vaccine mandates, contact tracing systems and vaccine certificates.

Like its counterparts internationally, the government is behaving as though the pandemic is over. All that remains of the public health measures are seven-day, self-isolation periods for positive cases, and mask mandates in healthcare and aged care facilities.

The ministry of health this week made the extraordinary admission that it has been dramatically under-reporting the number of COVID-19 hospitalisations. On October 17, total hospitalisations were revised up from 14,043 to 19,476—an increase of more than 5,000 or one third.

In a 169-word statement, the ministry said the undercount was a “coding issue,” relating to “a data source that has been used for the past three and a half months.” It said the under-count related to people who had “relatively short” hospital stays of between one and three days, and illogically added that the issue “did not affect the hospitalisation numbers released in the ministry’s daily, and now weekly, updates, which counted the number of beds occupied with patients with COVID-19.” In fact, it clearly did affect the reported numbers of people in hospital with the virus, creating the impression that the Omicron wave was considerably less severe than it really was.

One has to ask: Are there other “coding issues,” for instance, relating to reported COVID deaths? The ministry reports that as of October 17 a total of 3,047 people had died within 28 days of a COVID infection. However, it claims that only 2,065 deaths are attributable to COVID.

The contention that one in three people who died within weeks of contracting the deadly coronavirus actually died of something totally unrelated is highly dubious, to say the least.

The vast majority of these deaths were completely preventable. They occurred after Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced in October 2021 that New Zealand was abandoning its elimination policy, which had kept the country mostly free from COVID-19 up to that point. Lockdowns were abandoned and all schools and businesses reopened, with the full support of the union bureaucracy, allowing the virus to spread everywhere.

The decision to embrace a policy of mass infection was made against public health experts’ advice and without any democratic input. It was based entirely on the demands of big business for an end to lockdowns and public health measures that were viewed as a barrier to the extraction of profit from the working class.

The latest rise in cases has led to renewed warnings from scientists. Microbiologist Siouxsie Wiles told One News on October 18 that infection can lead to long-term problems: “The number of people who are at risk of heart attacks and strokes increases, so it’s really not something we should be complacent about.” She urged people to wear masks indoors, despite the removal of mandates.

Epidemiologist Michael Baker pointed out to the New Zealand Herald that over the last eight months, including two case peaks and varying levels of mortality, the daily average of deaths has been around 8.5. He said there could be another 700 deaths this year if the trend continues, bringing the official COVID death toll to around 2,700, or 7 percent of the expected total deaths.

Based on estimates that half the population has been infected, Baker said as many as 120,000 people could also develop Long COVID, a debilitating condition that can affect the brain, heart, lungs and other organs.

The ongoing crisis in public hospitals is likely to lead to even more deaths. This was highlighted by an independent investigation into the death of a 50-year-old woman from a brain bleed in June, which released its report this week. The woman went to South Auckland’s Middlemore Hospital but left after being told she would have to wait eight hours for treatment in the emergency department. The report stated that the overcrowded department “is an unsafe environment for both patients and staff and is not sustainable.”

One doctor at the hospital told the Herald there were “massive shortages of senior medical officers all over New Zealand and a number of resignations occurring and still senior management just keep saying everything is fine.”

Thousands of nurses across the country recently protested over the staffing crisis and low wages by refusing to work extra shifts.

Health NZ chairman Rob Campbell defended the hospital system, telling Newsroom that “bad results do happen in all medical services” due to “[f]allible people, fallible diagnoses, fallible medications, processes and technologies.” He declared: “We all bear responsibility, not some object called a system.”

In fact, the pandemic, which has killed more than 22 million people, is an unanswerable indictment of the capitalist system, which prioritises profit ahead of people’s health and lives.

Amid French refinery strike, Macron to impose 2023 budget without parliamentary vote

Anthony Torres & Alex Lantier

With refinery workers striking in France against inflation and the NATO-Russia war in Ukraine escalating, Macron moved yesterday to ram his 2023 budget through the National Assembly without a vote. After the May 2022 elections, Macron’s Renaissance party has only a minority in the Assembly, and its budget was doomed to go down to defeat in a vote.

Ultimately, the Macron government decided yesterday to force approval of the revenues portion of its budget bill, using the French constitution’s anti-democratic Article 49-3. This article allows the government to force the Assembly to adopt the budget without a vote, unless it adopts a motion of censure to bring down the government. The government is set to invoke this article again before the end of the week on the financing of Social Security—and, potentially, up to seven times before the budget is adopted.

Imposing its budget without a vote and trying to crush the refinery strike by requisitioning workers to force them to work, the Macron government operates without any popular support and with open contempt for basic democratic principles. It is a warning to workers of all industries not only in France but across Europe. They face governments that are unalloyed dictatorships of the banks, implacably opposed to working class demands and protests.

Events yesterday also revealed the mechanisms that keep Macron in power, despite his lack of a popular base: the complicity of the union bureaucracies and allied forces in the political establishment.

Even as Macron revealed his weakness, acknowledging his lack of support in the Assembly, factions of the Stalinist General Confederation of Labor (CGT) union capitulated to him, working to gradually wind down the refinery strike. Indeed, yesterday CGT officials announced the end of the strike at the Donges refinery, while police tried to shut down the strike at the Feyzin refinery near Lyon—requisitioning 20 key workers at the facility in order to to restart production.

“Today the main thing for us was to get out of this strike cleanly, with cohesion and as a unified bloc,” CGT officials at Donges told BFM-TV. They justified their action by citing low turnout at the CGT’s October 18 national day of action, asserting, “The broadening of the movement we had hoped for did not take place.”

In reality, the CGT national confederations are isolating and disarming the strikers. France’s union confederations have multibillion-euro budgets, dwarfing the €10,000 fine workers face if they disobey a requisition order, but none of the unions are helping the workers defy the requisition. Above all, despite its symbolic one-day protest on October 18, the CGT bureaucracy is not mobilizing broader support for refinery workers in any continuing solidarity strikes.

Profiting from the union bureaucracies’ demobilization of the working class, however, Macron is doubling down on his budgetary agenda of inflation, austerity and militarism.

The €480 billion budget, based on tax revenues of €320 billion, foresees a massive budget deficit of €160 billion. It raises defense spending by over €3 billion to €44 billion and cuts energy price subsidies, so that energy prices are expected to rise fully 15 percent. This will further drive up prices and decimate living standards for workers already reeling under the impact of 7 percent inflation in France in 2022. Nearly €6 billion in state revenue comes from EU bailouts, which go to pay off wealthy investors by buying up their state debt and stock holdings.

Neither the recklessness of its military build-up amid the NATO-Russia war in Ukraine nor the inflationary impact of its energy subsidy cuts and its EU bailouts of the super-rich were discussed in the parliamentary debates, however. Rather, deputies attacked the Macron government on various measures, especially smaller tax concessions to the wealthy.

Macron had authorized the government to use Article 49-3 at a cabinet meeting a week earlier, but Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne reportedly replied that “debate should take place.” In the Assembly, however, the debates on the 2023 budget spun out of the government’s control: It lost votes on numerous items in the budget bill, including sometimes even amendments proposed by members of Macron’s own Renaissance party.

Particularly embarrassing for the Macron government was its defeat by an amendment proposed by Jean-Paul Mattei, a member of the small right-wing Democratic Movement party that is part of Macron’s ruling coalition. Mattei demanded a temporary raise in taxes for “super dividends” paid out by highly profitable corporations—a tax hike the Macron government and Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire had opposed. Mattei’s amendment was supported by Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s New Popular Union, the neo-fascist National Rally (RN) and factions of Macron’s Renaissance party.

Borne met with Renaissance party deputies on Tuesday morning to prepare the use of Article 49-3 after discussions with Macron. Yesterday, under jeers from the opposition parties, Borne announced the use of the 49-3: “We could have given up looking for a compromise. We chose dialog. While we do not agree on everything, we can come together when the national interest is at stake. We must give our country a budget. I stake the responsibility of my government upon this.”

For now, this decision appears to have little chance of bringing down the Macron government. Mélenchon’s Unsubmissive France (LFI) and the far-right RN have both submitted motions of censure against the Macron government, in line with Article 49.3. Currently, however, it is expected that these motions have little chance of passing, since LFI and the RN both refuse to vote for the other party’s censure motions. The right-wing Republicans party has already let it be known that it will not vote for either motion of censure.

Above all, however, none of the decisive issues posed to workers by this budget are discussed in official political life. In this, the deputies in the National Assembly are no different than the bureaucrats of the CGT. The enormous danger of the NATO-Russian war in Ukraine erupting into a full-scale nuclear war that would devastate Europe and the role of bank bailouts and energy policy in driving a wave of inflation that is devastating workers internationally are all passed over in silence.

This sinister silence lulls the public to sleep and facilitates the union bureaucracies’ demobilization of the working class, by hiding the enormous dangers of war and economic collapse facing workers.

Particularly heavy responsibility falls on Mélenchon, who won nearly 8 million votes among urban workers and youth in the April 2022 presidential election. Despite nearly having advanced to the second round, Mélenchon did not seek to project opposition to Macron or neo-fascist Marine Le Pen, the two candidates in the run-off. Instead, he promised that he could work under either of them, as their prime minister. He then formed a New Popular Union (NUPES) alliance with the widely despised, anti-worker Socialist Party (PS) of former President François Hollande.

Mélenchon has done nothing to appeal to his masses of voters to mobilize in defense of the refinery workers, against inflation and austerity, or against imperialist militarism and war.