Who is responsible for China’s COVID catastrophe?

Evan Blake

A tragedy of monumental proportions is unfolding across China as a result of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) lifting its Zero-COVID policy and embracing the “forever COVID” policy demanded by the US and European imperialist powers.

It is still very early, but reports coming in from all over the country indicate that China is in the throes of an unprecedented crisis. Hospitals are being overrun with patients and bodies are piling up at morgues with extraordinary speed. At the insistence of world finance capital, the CCP has effectively dropped the pandemic bomb on their own country.

In the span of just one month, beginning on November 11, the CCP scrapped every aspect of Zero-COVID, including mass testing, contact tracing, lockdowns and the quarantining of people exposed to others infected with COVID-19. On Monday, the local government in Chongqing, home to 32 million people, announced that public sector employees who test positive for COVID-19 can continue working “as normal.”

The rapidity with which Zero-COVID has been abandoned and the Chinese population subjected to mass infection is staggering. Official infection and death figures are now entirely inaccurate, but the reality of the deepening crisis is impossible to conceal as scenes reminiscent of Wuhan in February 2020 and New York City in March 2020 become ubiquitous throughout China.

Chinese social media platforms are now dominated by discussion of this medical and social catastrophe, with millions sharing stories of their loved ones, colleagues and neighbors being infected, experiencing high fevers and other symptoms, becoming hospitalized or dying at home. Photos showing overcrowded hospitals, including with patients dying on the floor, are being widely circulated.

In numerous posts, individuals estimate that at least 50 percent of their coworkers are currently infected. Pharmacies in multiple cities have sold out of fever medicine and rapid COVID tests. Funeral homes are already being inundated with deceased patients, with some reporting more than quadruple their normal number of bodies and wait times upwards of 10 days.

The elderly population in China is the least vaccinated and most at risk of severe disease and death from COVID-19, but there have also been numerous reports of pediatric hospitals exceeding capacity and children of all ages dying in the past week alone.

In cities throughout the country, streets are empty due to masses of people either being infected or staying home out of fear of infection. Numerous people have caught COVID in their apartments despite taking precautions, effectively unable to escape the virus. This is due to the highly infectious character of the Omicron BF.7 subvariant now spreading in China, combined with the antiquated character of most housing in the country, which facilitates airborne transmission between apartments.

On Saturday, Wu Zunyou, the chief epidemiologist at the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, stated that the current surge will likely continue from now until mid-January, followed by two more waves between late January and mid-March as a result of mass travel for the Lunar New Year. Multiple studies and models published in recent weeks estimate that well over 1 million people could die from COVID-19 in China in the coming months.

The CCP government abandoned Zero-COVID knowing full well that this would result in hundreds of millions of infections and upwards of 1 million deaths. They are guilty of a monumental social crime and are thoroughly discrediting themselves.

However, it must be understood that the instigators and principal agents responsible for this calamity are the governments, corporations and media of the imperialist powers, above all the United States. Having let COVID run rampant in their own countries, they encircled China in a web of unending mass infection which has produced increasingly immune-resistant and infectious variants. Maintaining Zero-COVID on a nationalist basis was always impossible, but the reckless and criminal policies pursued outside China hastened the demise of this policy everywhere.

For over two years, the imperialist powers have demanded that China accept mass infection in order to advance their corporate, financial and geopolitical interests. A major precipitating factor in the lifting of Zero-COVID was threats from Apple, Nike, and other corporations to move production elsewhere. Wall Street and the financial oligarchs refused to tolerate any further disruptions to capitalist production within China, the nucleus of global supply chains.

As the World Socialist Web Site has commented on numerous times, the Western powers and their media have continuously advocated for the rapid and total lifting of Zero-COVID in China. Most recently, a deluge of propaganda in the entire Western press celebrated the reactionary anti-Zero-COVID protests that took place across China in late November, which prompted the final lifting of all mitigation measures.

Typical are the New York Times and the Financial Times, two of the central mouthpieces of Wall Street and the City of London, respectively.

On December 3, the New York Times Editorial Board praised “the remarkable protests across China against the government’s strict ‘dynamic zero Covid’ policy” and supported their call “to lift onerous Covid restrictions.” They gleefully quoted a protester from Shanghai stating, “We were all very happy last night. We started to picture how life would be after the whole country’s restrictions are loosened.”

For its part, the Financial Times published an article on November 27, “China rocked by protests as zero-Covid anger spreads.” The article hailed the protesters, who “complained about a lack of freedom and what they said was the unscientific nature of China’s Covid policies, which aim to eliminate the virus through mass testing, quarantine and lockdowns.”

On Monday, both outlets responded to the escalating health crisis in China by publishing prominent articles which amount to alibis intended to provide cover for their prior promotion of mass infection. Well aware of their responsibility for the looming wave of mass death in China, they seek to absolve themselves and shift all blame onto Xi Jinping and the CCP.

In an Editorial Board statement titled, “China’s botched Covid reopening,” the Financial Times questioned “the capacity of China’s administration to make wise and timely decisions,” stating, “the current rushed and poorly co-ordinated transition from ‘zero-Covid’ towards living with the virus is undermining China’s own claims to ‘put people first.’”

In their lead article Monday, the New York Times wrote, “China suddenly abandoned the ‘zero Covid’ strategy on which Mr. Xi had staked his reputation. Now the country faces a surge of infections, and Mr. Xi has left officials scrambling to manage the disarray and uncertainty.”

They added, “Mr. Xi’s own formula for beating back Covid may have inadvertently set China up for this jolting and potentially devastating turn… For two years, his Covid war enjoyed widespread public acceptance, but eventually the effort exhausted staff, strained local finances, and appeared to drown out attempts to discuss, let alone devise, a measured transition.”

The level of cynicism and hypocrisy of these statements is breathtaking. Just days after vociferously demanding an end to Zero-COVID, these propagandists attempt to wash their hands of any responsibility for the consequences.

What is unfolding in China is the final extension of the policy of “forever COVID” enforced by capitalist governments throughout the world since the emergence of the Omicron variant in late 2021. It is a social crime of monumental dimensions, which will have the most far-reaching consequences within China and internationally.

The opening up of one-sixth of the world’s population to infection is giving the coronavirus a new lease on life, allowing it to mutate and evolve into even more dangerous variants that will ricochet throughout the globe. The imperialist powers and their media have sought to destabilize China by fomenting this crisis, but in doing so they will further destabilize the entire world economically, medically and socially. A whole new chapter and stage of the pandemic is now opening.

Political lessons must be drawn from this experience. Behind all their threadbare lies about “democracy” and “human rights,” this is the real face of capitalism. When it comes to defending profits and the accumulation of wealth, there is no crime which the imperialist powers will not commit.

The UK’s Strep A child deaths and the causes of the “tripledemic”

Liz Smith & Thomas Scripps

Nineteen children in the UK have been killed by Strep A in recent weeks, approaching the 27 child deaths recorded in the whole 2017-2018 season, the last major outbreak. The majority of cases normally come between early February and April.

There have been 7,750 cases of scarlet fever—caused by Strep A infection—so far this season, more than treble the number at the same point in 2017-2018, with doctors worried that numbers still have not peaked.

S. pyogenes (also known as GAS) is the causative agent in Group A streptococcal infections, (GAS) including strep throat, acute rheumatic fever, scarlet fever, acute glomerulonephritis and necrotizing fasciitis. [Photo: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Public Health Image Library]

In rare cases, the bacteria can get into the bloodstream and cause invasive group A strep (iGAS). According to the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) data published December 2, there have been 2.3 cases of invasive disease per 100,000 children aged one to four, compared with an average of 0.5 in the pre-pandemic seasons (2017 to 2019), and 1.1 cases per 100,000 children aged five to nine, compared to 0.3 pre-pandemic.

The deaths of these children, caused by a very treatable disease, have been the focus of much national attention. But it is important to separate the genuine popular sympathy and concern from the ulterior motives of the corporate media, which has used these tragedies to bury the broader public health disaster this winter under an exclusive focus on Strep A.

Earlier in the year, the phrase “tripledemic”—referring to respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), influenza and COVID-19—was commonplace. Its use in the papers and broadcast networks has declined as the predicted surge has begun to take hold.

Positivity rates for RSV were 7.7 percent between December 5-11, and 20 percent for children under five. For these younger children, the hospitalisation rate is 18.5 per 100,000.

Diseases with their heaviest impact on older people are also on the rise. In the last week, the number of patients in hospital with the flu increased from 966 to 1,377. At the current rate, admissions next week could pass the peak of the 2017-18 flu outbreak which caused close to 30,000 deaths.

COVID is also surging, with the number of patients in hospital being treated primarily for the disease increasing 17 percent December 6-13, to 5,982. An estimated one in 50 were infected in the week to December 3, up from one in 60 the week before. More than 37,000 peoplehave already been killed by the virus this year, with its deadliest phase usually beginning in late December.

The causes of surging infections

The precise balance of causes of these unprecedented increases in non-COVID diseases is being debated in the scientific community. Two things are certain. The government is responsible, as with COVID, for allowing the crisis to develop. And the anti-public health right-wing is using people’s suffering to sow confusion and agitate against measures to prevent the spread of disease.

These reactionaries, given a platform in papers like the Daily Telegraph, have promoted the idea of an “immunity debt” caused by lockdowns—a slackening in each person’s immune system due to a lack of exposure to illness, which must be repaid through infection. This is just a new rendering of the pseudo-scientific “herd immunity” policy, used to justify the claim that it would have been better had no public health measures been implemented in the last two years.

In fact, as Chair of the British Society for Immunology’s Covid Taskforce Professor Deborah Dunn-Walters told the Financial Times, “Immunity debt as an individual concept is not recognised in immunology. The immune system is not viewed as a muscle that has to be used all the time to be kept in shape and, if anything, the opposite is the case.”

Imperial College London Professor Peter Openshaw told the same paper bluntly, “This would not be a good message for public health: we would still have open sewers and be drinking from water contaminated with cholera if this idea were followed to its logical conclusion.”

Prof Dunn-Walters explained the important difference between individual and population immunity. What is possible is that a smaller group of people than normal were exposed to infectious diseases over the past two years, thanks to physical distancing and masking, leaving a larger than average pool of susceptible people to be infected now that restrictions have been lifted and leading to higher than usual rates of infection.

A paper in the medical journal the Lancet published in July referred to this as an “immunity gap—a group of susceptible individuals who avoided infection and therefore lack pathogen-specific immunity to protect against future infection.”

Imperial College London Professor of infectious diseases Shiranee Sriskandan commented this month, “We know that scarlet fever rates plummeted during 2020-2021… and so we now have a much larger cohort of non-immune children where Strep A can circulate and cause infection.”

These impacts could also be being worsened by the interaction of multiple resurgent pathogens.

Daniela Ferreira, professor of mucosal infection and vaccinology at the University of Oxford and the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, told the Guardian, “The rising numbers of strep A cases is unusual for this time of the year because they typically occur in late spring or early summer.”

She explained that there has been a “shift in seasonality of certain diseases following the pandemic” and that “Getting infected with bugs such as strep A, RSV, influenza and Covid-19 can weaken the immune system to the point that pneumonia can develop, either caused by these or other bugs.”

The World Health Organisation warned similarly this month, “It is likely that the increase in cases of iGAS disease in children is also associated with the recent increased circulation of respiratory viruses, including seasonal influenza and respiratory syncytial virus, as coinfection of viruses with GAS [Strep A] may increase the risk of iGAS disease.”

Others have suggested damage done to the immune system by prior COVID infection has left the population more vulnerable.

Summarising recent research, Prof Dunn-Walters told the Guardian, “Covid-19 appears to be skewing the immune system in not a very good way, meaning people may not be able to react to other infections as well.”

Danny Altmann, professor of immunology at Imperial College London, told the Times, “We know plenty of other viruses that have all kinds of devious tricks for subverting the immune response… We underestimated the Sars-Cov-2 virus from the word go.”

If this hypothesis is confirmed then if there is some permanent damage to individual immune systems it is not public health measures that were the cause, but the disease which governments allowed to spread like wildfire.

An additional complicating factor is the influence of natural variations in strains of Strep A (and other pathogens). Altmann told the Times, “Until we do the studies we just don’t know whether immunity levels have waned and whether that accounts for this apparent peak.”

He pointed out that viruses and bacteria were subject to “unpredictable cyclical peaks and troughs” and to the “enormous variation” in the genome of Strep A, suggesting the possibility that this year’s strain had simply happened to mutate to become more aggressive.

The government’s abandonment of public health

Whatever the scientific explanation, all these possible causes were known and mitigatable risks, made worse by the actions of the government.

To the degree that prior COVID infections have weakened immune systems, then the additional surge of Strep, RSV and flu is the direct result of the “forever COVID” policy.

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson chairs a COVID-19 press conference with Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance (right) and Chief Medical Officer, Professor Chris Whitty (left) on July 12, 2021. At the press conference Johnson gave the go-ahead, with the backing of Whitty and Vallance, to end all COVID restrictions on July 19, 2021 [Photo by Andrew Parsons/No 10 Downing Street/Flickr / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]

To the degree that restrictions on physical mixing have had an after-effect, this could have been prepared for in advance. Firstly, as COVID campaigner Dr. Deepti Gurdasani has argued on Twitter, it is not necessary to return to the level of disease that prevailed prior to the pandemic. “What we have learned is that we can massively reduce the burden in children,” using even very unobtrusive measures like air filtration and ventilation.

Secondly, any resurgence could have been managed through the rollout of an extensive surveillance and early treatment system for Strep A, RSV and the flu.

Writing in the Guardian, chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh Devi Sridhar notes regarding Strep A, “Early use of antibiotics such as penicillin works against the vast majority of infections within 24 hours, and early treatment is vital to better outcomes… rapid strep A tests into primary care would help an overburdened system by allowing nurses and support staff to test children who are unwell, and move quickly to the most appropriate clinical management.”

Instead, the health system is in a state of acute crisis, tests are not widely available, and the supply of medication is patchy.

Pharmacies are reporting shortages of antibiotics, with Chief Medical Adviser at the UKHSA Professor Susan Hopkins telling the Royal Society of Medicine this week, “I’ve been told in the last few days that we’re using five times more penicillin than we were using three weeks ago,” and admitting, “there may be some behind-the-back-of-doors profiteering.” Pharmacists are being told by the government they can supply alternative antibiotics to the ones prescribed.

Strep A test at home kits began to run out last week and were selling online for £100.

Children’s departments and GPs report being put under heavy pressure by confirmed or suspected cases.

The crisis is not merely the result of mismanagement, but the continuation of a conscious policy by the ruling class to abandon advances in public health now considered an unaffordable drain on profit and public spending.

Germany’s Reichsbürger terrorist network and the fight against fascism

Peter Schwarz

The resurgence of a fascist movement in Germany is a matter of grave concern. There is no other country in which fascism has shown its barbaric face with such sadistic brutality. During the 12 years of the Nazi dictatorship, from 1933 to 1945, Hitler smashed the workers' movement, established a regime of terror, and unleashed a war of conquest and extermination that claimed 27 million victims in the Soviet Union alone and murdered six million Jews. By the time of Hitler’s demise, Germany and half of Europe lay in ruins.

Neo-Nazi march with Reichsbürger symbol in Munich (2005) [Photo by Rufus46 / wikimedia / CC BY-SA 3.0]

The more than 50 people from the Reichsbürger (Citizens of the Reich) movement against whom 3,000 police officers carried out the largest raid in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany are not harmless “crackpots,” as some now claim. Following the police sweep on December 7, the Federal Public Prosecutor accused them of establishing a terrorist group to seize power by military force and kill political opponents.

They are said to have planned to invade the federal parliament (Bundestag), following the example of the attempted coup in Washington D.C. led by former American President Donald Trump on January 6, 2021. Their aim was allegedly to imprison members of parliament and the government, provoke unrest throughout Germany and overthrow the government.

The terrorist network extends deeply into the state apparatus and elite social circles. The detainees include a member of the high nobility, a lawyer, a doctor, a pilot and a judge and former Bundestag delegate for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD). There are also several police officers and a significant number of former and active members of the military, including several officers of the Special Forces Command (KSK), an elite army unit that is trained to kill and take hostages.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. According to members of the Bundestag’s Legal Affairs Committee who were informed of the investigations, hundreds of people signed the group’s “confidentiality declaration.” Preparations were made for the establishment of 280 “homeland security companies” tasked with “arresting and executing” people in the event of a coup.

The network is intertwined with the AfD, which sits in the Bundestag and the state parliaments. It is based on COVID deniers, QAnon supporters, “lateral thinkers”—a title adopted by opponents of COVID public health measures—and Reichsbürger. The latter group alone is estimated to consist of 23,000 people, one in 10 of whom is prepared to commit violence. Reichsbürger deny the existence of the Federal Republic of Germany and strive for the restoration of the German Empire within Germany’s 1937 borders, i.e., including large parts of Poland and the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad.

The right-wing terrorist networks have not fallen from the sky. The Socialist Equality Party (Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei—SGP) has been warning about their development for many years. In 2018, Mehring Verlag published the book Why are they back? by Christoph Vandreier, the current chairman of the SGP. The book demonstrates in detail “how in the last five years the return of German militarism and the construction of a police state have been promoted and the ideological foundation for a fascist movement has been laid.”

It is impossible to understand the growth of the extreme right “without examining the role of the government, the state apparatus, the parties, the media and the ideologues in the universities that pave the way for it,” the preface states.

Right-wing extremist groups and parties have been systematically promoted, even as the danger they pose has been downplayed. The AfD, the first fascist party in the German Bundestag since the end of the Nazi regime, owes its rise largely to the Verfassungsschutz, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, which protected and advised it, and to the established parties, which paved the way for it to assume positions in parliament and adopted its anti-refugee and militaristic program.

The revival of German militarism was accompanied by the trivialization of the crimes of the Nazis. Historical lies justifying Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union were vehemently rejected in the Historians’ Dispute of the 1980s, but today they dominate academic and public discourse. In Ukraine and the Baltic States, the federal government and the German army cooperate with regimes that erect monuments to Nazi collaborators.

Neo-Nazis, such as the three-member National Socialist Underground terrorist group and Stefan Ernst, the murderer of conservative politician Walter Lübcke, were able to kill without interference, even though they were under the surveillance of the intelligence agencies. Right-wing terrorist organisations such as the wide-ranging Hannibal network remained largely untouched, even though they drew up death lists and hoarded large quantities of weapons and ammunition. While there were occasional arrests and trials, the number of accused was always kept low and the “single perpetrator” myth was maintained.

The same applies to fascist networks within the police. In both Hesse and North Rhine-Westphalia, dozens of police officers participated in neo-Nazi chat groups. Hardly anyone was prosecuted. Only this week it emerged that 70 police officers are being investigated in Baden-Württemberg for exchanging swastikas and Hitler pictures in chat groups.

It is against this background that the Reichsbürger terrorist network developed. There can be little doubt that what is thus far publicly known about its members barely scratches the surface, and the Federal Public Prosecutor will do everything possible to keep it that way.

The growth of fascist forces with the support of the ruling elites is not limited to Germany. In the United States, the Republicans, one of the two major bourgeois parties, are increasingly dominated by fascist figures. A coup attempt by Donald Trump only narrowly failed in January 2021. Italy is governed by a prime minister who stands in the political tradition of the fascist dictator Mussolini. In Sweden, the former model country of social democracy, the government relies on a neo-Nazi party to remain in power.

The shift to the right by the ruling elites is an expression of the decay of bourgeois democracy. This has deep objective causes. When the class struggle in Europe intensified in 1929 and authoritarian parties seized power, Leon Trotsky wrote:

The excessively high tension of the international struggle and the class struggle results in the short circuit of the dictatorship, blowing out the fuses of democracy one after the other… What is called the crisis of parliamentarism is the political expression of the crisis in the entire system of bourgeois society.

This is once again true today. Decades of social spending cuts, in which an ever greater portion of national economic output was appropriated for the enrichment of a small minority and for brutal wars, have eroded parliamentarism and exacerbated the class struggle. The needs of the broad masses for decent incomes, secure jobs, good health care, affordable rents and peace no longer find even a distorted expression within the parliamentary framework.

Germany’s Social Democrats and the Left Party have become experts at attacking social services and imposing low wages, and the Greens have become the leading war party. For a long time they relied on the trade unions to suppress the class struggle. But the greater the social opposition from below, the more openly the pro-capitalist parties move to the right and rely on state violence and right-wing terror to suppress it.

The fact that from time to time they are forced to arrest overzealous fascists does not change this. Nobody should give in to the illusion that the German judiciary, which beginning in 1933 was virtually united in the service of the Nazis, will stop the right-wing conspiracy. On the contrary, the measures and laws which it adopts in the name of restricting the far right are inevitably directed against the opponents of capitalism and war.

Australia’s housing crisis pushing thousands into poverty and homelessness

Max Boddy

The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) lifted interest rates by 25 basis points on December 6, the eighth consecutive monthly hike. RBA governor Philip Lowe has signaled that this program, aimed at slowing the economy and beating back a wages push by workers, will continue into the new year. 

Public housing in Sydney inner-city suburb. [Photo: WSWS]

The cumulative impact of the rate rises has been to plunge broad sections of the working class into mortgage stress as their monthly repayments continue to rise. This is having a flow on impact, with unprecedented rental costs, growing homelessness and associated distress, including increasing suicide rates.

The impact of the rate rises is exacerbated by runaway inflation, which the hikes will do nothing to address. While official inflation is at 7.3 percent, for household goods and essential basic items the rate is much higher. According to the latest Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) figures, for instance, fruit and vegetables had a 16.2 percent annual price increase in the 12 months to the September quarter.

Research agency Roy Morgan has stated that, taken together, the rate increases thus far will push one in four home loan borrowers into “mortgage stress.” There are different measures for this phenomenon, but the market research firm defines it as households allocating more than 25 percent of their take-home pay to repayments.

This, however, is only the tip of the iceberg. Next year, between July and December, at least $275 billion worth of home loans from the major four banks are set to come off fixed rates.

Andrew Barker, economist at the Committee for Economic Development of Australia (CEDA), said “almost half of loans taken out in the middle of 2021 were taken out on a fixed-rate basis.” This was “unusually high for Australia.”

The growth in fixed-rate loans was bound up with the RBA’s decision to reduce interest rates to record lows in 2021 to encourage families to purchase houses at massively high prices, with false promises that there would be no rate rises until 2024. The purpose was to funnel billions into the financial markets.

Those who purchased houses at that time are at the highest vulnerability. 

The dangers are compounded by falling house prices. According to CoreLogic, home values in the five largest capital cities, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth, have dropped by 6.4 percent based on the year-on-year average. 

The drop is different in each of the cities, with some values rising, however Sydney, Australia’s most populous city, has seen a 11.5 percent year-on-year decline.

Some are at risk of becoming “mortgage prisoners.” This occurs when a mortgage holder is unable to refinance their loan and the value of their underlying asset, their property, is less than their outstanding debt on it.

The increasing hardships facing mortgage-holders are having a flow-on effect, with record rental increases. Mortgage-holders who rent out a property are seeking to offset their costs by hiking rents. This is compounded by long standing issues of supply.

Figures put out by SQM research, also in November, indicated that rents in Sydney had skyrocketed by an unprecedented 28 percent over the previous 12 months to an average of $709 per week. The indices were similar in a number of other capital cities, with a 24 percent rise to $574 per week in Brisbane, for instance. Rents are also rising more rapidly in regional areas than ever before.

The annual Rental Affordability Index, released last month, found that more than 40 percent of low-income tenants are now in rental stress, defined as spending more than 30 percent of their income on housing costs.

Increasingly, there are simply no affordable dwellings for the poor. A March 2022 study, for example, found just 1.4 percent of properties advertised nationally were affordable to a couple on the aged care pension.

Growing numbers are being pushed into homelessness, underscored by research published by Launch Housing in conjunction with the University of NSW at the beginning of the month.

Their Australian Homelessness Monitor 2022 report notes there are no up-to-date statistics measuring homelessness. Instead, they used a proxy measure, the increased caseload of specialist homelessness services. “Across Australia,” the report states, “the average monthly number of specialist homelessness service (SHS) users grew from 84,800 people in 2017–18 to 91,300 people in 2021–22.” 

This may be a conservative estimate as SHS caseloads vary from region to region and monitor only those who seek, and are provided with, assistance. Even so, it amounts to an increase of 8 percent over the four-year period, twice the rate at which the total number of households has grown.

Over the four years there has been a disproportionate increase in older adults reporting homelessness. The report notes “SHS service users aged 50–64 and 65+ increased in number at more than twice the rate of younger age groups.” 

Social misery is inevitably increasing. Suicide Prevention Australia is warning that housing access and affordability is the fastest growing cause of distress in the country.

Its December Community Tracker noted a 71 percent increase in Australians experiencing elevated stress levels in November compared to the same time in 2021. While cost of living and personal debt remained the number one driver, housing access and affordability have escalated rapidly over the past three months, overtaking unemployment and job security.

Some 38 percent of Australians knew someone in their life or personal networks who has died from or attempted suicide in the past twelve months, a 7 percent increase from the previous month.

The housing crisis is the direct result of the policies of successive governments, Labor and Liberal-National alike. They promoted the speculative housing bubble which drove up costs through tax incentives, the low interest regime and other measures.

At the same time, governments have gutted public housing, depriving the poor and vulnerable of any affordable options. 

Social housing, involving government subsidies to non-government organisations, is also in a crisis. The Australian Homelessness Monitor stated that “over the period 1991–2021, social housing lettings plunged by 42 percent—or proportionate to population, 61 percent.”

None of these issues will be addressed by the federal Labor government. After assuming office in May, it dropped its campaign slogan of a “better future,” instead declaring that working people would need to accept “sacrifice” and “pain,” in the form of continuing real wage cuts, a soaring cost of living and austerity cuts to social spending.

As part of this offensive, the government budget allocated virtually nothing to housing. It included just $350 million to build a measly 10,000 new dwellings, with the state and territories contributing in kind to building another 10,000. In total, with previous commitments, Labor claims the plan will construct 40,000 new homes. Some will be social housing, while others will be vaguely defined “affordable housing.”

However, construction will not begin until 2024 and they will be built over a five-year period. Even if they are built, of which there is no guarantee, it is barely a drop in the ocean for the social housing need. According to several research reports, Australia’s shortfall in social housing dwellings is 524,000 and is set to reach 671,000 over the next decade.

The housing crisis is a stark example of the fact that the most basic needs of working people are incompatible with a society dominated by the profit interests of the banks, the billionaires and governments that do their bidding.

Growing malnutrition is a Big challenge

Vikas Parasram Meshram

India is the second largest food producing country in the world and we are number one in the production of milk, pulses, rice, fish, vegetables and wheat. Despite this, a large population of the country is a victim of malnutrition. According to the United Nations’ report ‘The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2022’, people’s struggle with hunger has increased rapidly after the Corona period of 2019. In the year 2021, 76.8 crore people in the world were found to be undernourished, out of which 22.4 crore i.e. 29 percent were Indians. This is a quarter of the total number of undernourished people in the world.

Malnutrition is one of the most serious problems in India, yet it has received the least attention. Today India has the highest number of stunted and 2.55 crore stunted children in the world. As a result, the burden of disease on the country is very high, National Family Health Survey-4 data shows that the prevalence of malnutrition in the country has decreased, but today more than half of the children in 51 percent of low-income families are stunted and 49 percent are underweight.

According to the Global Hunger Index report released on October 14 – “Hunger levels in India are critical.” India ranks 107 out of 121 countries in the world. India’s score is 29.1, while ‘zero’ means no one is hungry. India also lags behind its neighbors – Nepal (81st), Bangladesh (84th), Sri Lanka and Pakistan (99th).

It is estimated that on average about 20 percent of children under the age of 5 suffer from visible and life-threatening malnutrition. About 35 percent of children are not as tall as they should be. Of course, there is a fundamental difference between hunger, unhealthy food, and malnutrition.

The authors and compilers of this Global Hunger Index report have compiled data on hunger and malnutrition in India. Compared to a population of over 140 crores, the hunger situation in India presents a very alarming situation. India’s Food Security Act, Public Distribution System, Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Food Yojana, Poshan Mission, Anemia Free Mission etc. issued from 2020 onwards, malnutrition and hunger are not reducing.

Malnutrition is still a serious problem in India with more than 33 lakh children being malnourished. Although the Government of India has launched a ‘National Poshan Abhiyan’ campaign to ensure a ‘malnutrition-free India’ by 2022, the goal seems far off.

In 2021, the number of undernourished people in the world was estimated to be 768 million. Of these, 224 million (about 29 percent) were Indians. Today the situation has improved a lot, as food security is a constitutional right of the average Indian. In this context it is also worth noting that India is the second largest food grain producing country in the world. India ranks first in the world in the production of milk, pulses, rice, fish, vegetables and wheat. How can such a country be ‘hungry’? Yet there is widespread malnutrition in the country, which is an alarming situation. India has a considerable population below the poverty line. The Government of India needs to consider these figures from these aspects as well as through projects like Nutrition Mission 2.0 and Mid Day Meal, as India has changed completely since independence. India is becoming self-reliant. The average growth rate of agriculture sector has been consistently positive
According to a report titled ‘The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2022: Repurposing Food and Agriculture Policies to Make Healthy Diets More Affordable’ by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, it concludes that hunger and malnutrition in India are at critical levels?

German parliament agrees purchase of F-35 fighter jets for nuclear war against Russia

Johannes Stern

Three weeks after the German government launched its 2023 war budget, a massive arms build-up is underway. On Thursday, the Bundestag (parliamentary) budget committee released €10 billion for the procurement of 35 US F-35 Lightning II stealth bombers capable of carrying nuclear weapons.

In this Aug. 5, 2019 photo released by the U.S. Air Force, an F-35 fighter jet pilot and crew prepare for a mission at Al-Dhafra Air Base in the United Arab Emirates. [AP Photo/Staff Sgt. Chris Thornbury/U.S. Air Force]

That same day, the Bundeswehr (Armed Forces) Federal Office of Equipment, Information Technology and In-Service Support (BAAINBw) signed the purchase agreement with the US Air Force. According to a statement from the American Embassy in Berlin, the fighters are to be delivered “between 2026 and 2029.” The US Foreign Military Sales Program will “handle the sale, which includes mission planning systems, munitions, logistics and training.”

The acquisition of the nuclear bombers is a declaration of war on the working class and youth in several ways. For one thing, it makes it clear that the ruling class is prepared to wage nuclear war to advance its imperialist interests—even if it means the deaths of tens of billions of people and the potential destruction of the entire planet.

In his government statement on Thursday, Chancellor Olaf Scholz (Social Democratic Party, SPD) blatantly threatened nuclear power Russia with all-out war: “If necessary, we will defend every single square meter of alliance territory,” he declared. To this end, he said, “the special fund of 100 billion euros has been agreed—the largest investment in our Bundeswehr since its existence.” With the procurement of modern F-35 fighter jets, he said, “We are continuing to make our German contribution to nuclear sharing in the alliance.”

Scholz preferred not to elaborate on what that means. In the event of a nuclear war against Russia, Bundeswehr fighter jets—currently of the Tornado type—would be armed with US nuclear bombs stored in Germany and would also deploy them. The possible armament of the F-35 includes “free-falling nuclear weapons,” according to an article on the official Defence Ministry website.

With the ongoing escalation of the NATO proxy war in Ukraine against Russia, the leading NATO powers not only accept the threat of a nuclear third world war, but they are also actively preparing for it. Air Force Inspector General Ingo Gerhartz openly threatened Russia with the use of nuclear weapons back in June. “For credible deterrence, we need both the means and the political will to implement nuclear deterrence, if necessary,” he declared.

The World Socialist Web Site commented at the time, “The fact that a German general is openly threatening to use nuclear weapons against Russia must be taken as a serious warning. Seventy-seven years after the fall of the Third Reich, a fascist mentality is once again spreading in the ruling class. It is ready to commit the worst crimes once again in order to assert its imperialist interests.”

With the purchase of the F-35s, German war plans are now massively accelerated. When Gerhartz announced the deal on Thursday, along with Bundeswehr Inspector General Eberhard Zorn and Defence Minister Christine Lambrecht (SPD), he boasted that the procurement of the fighter jets was not only “historic” but “that we are buying the appropriate spare parts [and also ammunition] that will ensure us a high level of operational readiness right at the start.”

Lambrecht herself made it clear that the purchase was part of a comprehensive upgrade of the Bundeswehr. It was “a good day for the Bundeswehr, a good day for national and alliance defence,” she cheered. “Today, we succeeded in getting a procurement worth almost 13 billion euros underway in the Budget Committee.” She added that work was being done at “full speed” to “breathe life into the turn of the times,” proclaimed by Chancellor Scholz at the beginning of the Ukraine war. The “procurements” that had been set in motion concerned “the entire range of the Bundeswehr.”

In addition to the F-35s, the Budget Committee released funds for the procurement of the following weapons systems at its last meeting this year: modern radios for the Army worth almost €3 billion, 140 over-snow vehicles worth €552 million and 118,718 new HK416 assault rifles for around €273 million. In addition, the Puma infantry fighting vehicle is to be upgraded at a cost of €1 billion.

The purchases will be financed from the €100 billion special fund for the Bundeswehr already approved in June. This is just the start of Germany’s biggest rearmament and war offensive since Hitler. “For me, this was now the starting point for implementing our projects from the special fund,” Zorn explained. “That means we will still be submitting a large number of so-called 25 million [euro] bills to parliament in the next few years.”

Specifically, the inspector general named the following “necessary orders”: Germany’s assumption of command of the NATO spearhead Very High Readiness Joint Task Force (VJTF) next year; the deployment of a combat-ready Bundeswehr division for NATO by 2025; the deployment of a combat brigade for the European Union, also by 2025; and the readiness “of 20 boats and ships annually” of the German Navy. For all of this, he said, “a reliable rising financial line” was needed.

The “historic” rearmament requires historic attacks on the working class. While billions are gushing into the Bundeswehr, massive cuts are being made in the areas of health, education and social welfare. Adjusted for inflation, the 2023 budget includes the biggest cuts since the end of World War II. The health budget alone will be cut by almost €40 billion (!) from €64.36 billion to €24.48 billion—and this amid a pandemic that has already cost several million lives worldwide.

Hardly any acquisition could sum up the priorities of the ruling class better than the F-35 nuclear bombers: death and destruction are higher priorities for them than life and social progress. The €100 billion special fund is more than four times the health budget and almost five times the education budget (€21.46 billion). The €10 billion now being squandered on fighter jets alone could be used to hire more than 34,000 additional teachers for five years; or nearly 52,000 nurses for the same period in the health care system, which is also completely underfunded.

All parties in the Bundestag are working closely together to push through this militaristic madness, which is destructive in every respect. Lambrecht expressly thanked “the budget holders for making this possible today—with a broad majority even beyond the traffic light coalition” of the SPD, Liberal Democrats (FDP) and Greens. He said it was a “very important sign that the breadth of parliament is behind the Bundeswehr, behind this turn of the times.”

The massive rearmament of the Bundeswehr is also vehemently supported by the Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) and the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD). Within the federal government, the Greens are taking a particularly aggressive stance. “We are pleased to be able to put the most modern jet in the world in the capable hands of the pilots of our air force,” said Philip Krämer, who sits on the defence committee for the former pacifists. His colleague Sebastian Schäfer stressed that the task now must be to “ensure a functioning and rapid operational readiness.”

Although the Left Party criticizes the purchase of the F-35s and the Bundeswehr special fund in words, it is itself closely involved in the war and rearmament offensive. Its leading representatives, such as Thuringia State Prime Minister Bodo Ramelow and Berlin mayoral candidate Klaus Lederer, explicitly support arms deliveries to Ukraine and even call for the reintroduction of conscription.

Others, such as former party chairwoman Gesine Lötzsch, sit on both the budget committee and the secretly convened “Special Fund of the Bundeswehr” committee. Speaking to the left-wing party paper Junge Welt, Lötzsch recently gave an insight into her activities as a de facto lobbyist for German imperialism. “In the summer, I was in the US with a delegation from the budget committee. There, we talked to politicians and arms manufacturers,” she reported. Then she added cynically, “They already had a precise plan of how they will divide the 100 billion euros among themselves.”

Protests mount in Peru with at least 21 killed by US-trained security forces

Andrea Lobo

Peru’s military and police, both trained by the Pentagon, have escalated their repression after the declaration of a national state of emergency on Wednesday and the imposition of a regional curfew on Friday.

Clash between protesters and police in Lima, Peru following the removal of President Pedro Castillo (Photo: VOA) [Photo: VOA]

The onslaught ordered by the newly installed regime of President Dina Bolaurte, backed by Washington and the European Union, has killed at least 21 demonstrators. Videos show military battalions charging forward and shooting live ammunition, and police firing deadly tear gas canisters directly at crowds, including from helicopters, carrying out arbitrary detentions, and brutally beating unarmed protesters.

While the initial demonstrations were triggered by the impeachment and arrest on December 7 of Peru’s elected president, Pedro Castillo, who tried to preemptively dissolve Congress, the growing unrest has been triggered by a mountain of social grievances against the entire ruling elite, including inflation, mass unemployment, hunger, the highest COVID death rate in the world, generalized corruption, environmental destruction, among others.

The protests have taken the form of large marches, dozens of roadblocks and several airport occupations primarily by youth from the impoverished, marginal areas of the towns and cities, which are dominated by informality and precarious social services and housing. Major contingents from rural areas in the south, where the support for Castillo is concentrated, have also joined the demonstrations.

The largest march so far took place in Lima on Thursday, with tens of thousands demanding the resignation of Boluarte, who was Castillo’s vice president, the dissolution of the Congress and immediate elections. A police rampage ensued in the evening, with cops brutally beating protesters, journalists, emergency workers, and passersby.

Boluarte has failed to appease the anger by promising to hold elections in 2024 and then 2023 and declaring to congress people “We are all leaving!” She even absurdly sent her condolences to the “mothers in Ayacucho,” where her government has killed several teenagers for demonstrating.

Meanwhile, the state forces have tried to claim that the protests are being led by “terrorist and criminal” agitators. The police antiterrorism chief Óscar Arriola tried to criminalize the protests claiming that they have identified a handful of people linked to the defunct Maoist guerrilla movement Sendero Luminoso, Movadef, a group formed to seek amnesty for Sendero prisoners, and the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA). Given the widespread nature of the social explosion, however, he was forced to effectively undermine his own argument by stating that “there are no leaders; this is a sui generis situation” and that “there is a class hatred in every behavior.”

The far-right legislators who drove Castillo out of power are now demanding tougher repression. In the words of legislator Héctor Valer in a congressional session, “A grouping of people cannot push the state against the wall… These people deserve more authority and a tougher hand.”

Applying victor’s “justice” after the successful parliamentary coup against Castillo, the prosecutors and courts controlled by the far-right have ordered Castillo to remain in custody for 18 months. The ousted president and his former prime minister Aníbal Torres were arrested together on their way to the Mexican embassy, when their escorts were ordered to turn them in. Castillo was denied a lawyer at the summary online hearing Thursday that ended with his prison sentence. Torres, aged 79 and the preeminent legal scholar in the country, has gone into hiding. Both are being vindictively investigated on the trumped-up charge of “rebellion,” which legally refers strictly to an “armed uprising.”

Castillo, who had until now focused his pleas of defense to US imperialism, published another handwritten note on social media in which he declared, “The visit of the [US] ambassador to the [presidential] palace… was to give the order for deploying the troops on the streets to massacre my defenseless people and open the roads for the exploitation by mining companies…”

While the government and US imperialism ramp up the repression, the spontaneous character of the protests is being exploited by the trade union bureaucracy and pseudo-left groups to channel them away from any appeal to the working class in Peru and internationally and toward illusions that a new Constitution and elections within the same nationalist framework of capitalist politics will somehow resolve the urgent social demands of the youth, workers and rural poor.

The General Confederation of Peruvian Workers (CGTP), which includes the main miners unions, as well as those in construction, among metalworkers, and other sectors, has resisted organizing a strike and instead convoked a vague “national day of protests” on Thursday.

While denouncing the Congress as “illegitimate,” the CGTP leadership has actually worked to legitimize the regime that Congress and US imperialism have installed. On Tuesday, after meeting with Dina Boluarte, the chairman of the CGTP Luis Villanueva declared: “We believe that a bad decision was made but it has been corrected through a constitutional succession. However, we are facing a much stronger crisis. We believe that the decision is in the hands of President Dina Boluarte and the Congress.”

The meeting to legitimize Boluarte fully exposes the bureaucracy’s radical-sounding demands as merely an attempt to mimic the mood in the streets verbally only to divert the movement back into the dead-end of capitalist politics.

Similarly, the Agrarian and Rural Front of Peru, which includes a wide array of organizations, has called for a “popular insurgency against the neo-fascist coup” and the liberation and restitution of Castillo. However, their demands for a new “Patriotic, gender-equal, eco-friendly and plurinational Constitution” and new elections also seek to divert the protests behind the same capitalist framework.

This is the script their counterparts in Bolivia and Chile used to suppress the mass upheavals that erupted in both those countries in 2019. In Bolivia, the demand for new elections overseen by the US-backed coup regime only served to legitimize it and its killings of demonstrators, while maintaining the role of the military as the ultimate political arbiter. In Chile, a despised new draft Constitution—rejected at the polls—and the election of pseudo-left president Gabriel Boric have not resolved any of the issues around privatized pensions, education, inequality, and state repression that fueled the protests.

The discrediting of the entire political establishment—reflected in the demand “Throw them all out!”—poses the key question of what is to replace it and which social class will determine this? The election of another capitalist politician and drafting of another capitalist constitution will not resolve the crisis of bourgeois rule in Peru. It will only serve to politically demoralize, confuse and demobilize the masses as the local oligarchies and imperialism prepare to reimpose dictatorships under the supervision of the US-trained armed forces.

In Peru, the second-top producer of copper, the mines are owned by a handful of global corporations led by BHP Billiton, Glencore, Freeport, Teck and Grupo Mexico. Meanwhile, there are 37 Peruvians who own more than $100 million and at least five billionaires. Democracy is impossible and corruption is an inevitable outgrowth under such conditions of inequality and imperialist domination.

As demonstrated by the response of all governments in the region to the pandemic and inflation, there is no limit to the deaths and suffering the bourgeoisie will inflict upon the workers and rural poor to create more profitable conditions for national and global finance capital.