The hidden COVID-19 wave and the destruction of public health

Evan Blake & Benjamin Mateus

In recent weeks it has become clear that the United States, as well as Italy, Japan, Britain, Spain and other countries throughout the world are undergoing a significant new surge of the COVID-19 pandemic. This is taking place with virtually no public awareness, reporting in the corporate media or communication from government officials.

As schools reopen globally in the coming weeks after summer or winter break, hundreds of millions of children will be packed into overcrowded, poorly ventilated classrooms, deepening the current wave while society remains totally unprepared.

The following data points for the US demonstrate the reality of the ongoing surge:

• Over the past six weeks, the amount of SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater has risen by 114 percent, according to Biobot Analytics. Infectious disease modeler JP Weiland estimates that this translates to roughly 419,000 Americans now being infected with COVID-19 each day and roughly 4.2 million Americans in total currently infected with the virus.
• CDC data shows that over the past month COVID-19 hospitalizations have climbed from 6,450 to 9,056 admissions per week, an increase of 40 percent.
• The Walgreens COVID-19 index now shows a nationwide positivity rate of 44.7 percent, the highest rate since the start of the pandemic. While testing is down dramatically, this elevated figure is a clear sign that a surge is underway. Southern and Southwestern states like Florida, Alabama, Texas, New Mexico, Nevada and California are most impacted, likely due to the heat wave driving people indoors, with test positivity rates above 50 percent in each state.

US COVID-19 projections as of August 1, 2023. [Photo: JP Weiland]

Scientists are forced to estimate the spread of COVID-19 by sampling wastewater and tracking hospitalizations because the federal government has stopped counting the number of COVID-19 cases.

This is the first wave of the pandemic since the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Biden administration ended their COVID-19 public health emergency (PHE) declarations in early May, which prompted the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other health agencies globally to stop reporting COVID-19 infections altogether.

The total lack of data has been accompanied by a media blackout. With no data or reporting, the public largely gets its information about the spread of COVID-19 on the basis of how many people they know who are ill.

Some of the most basic facets of public health—testing, contact tracing and reporting of disease outbreaks—have been systematically dismantled.

Testing, treatments and vaccines are being completely privatized and sold at marked-up prices that are unaffordable for the vast majority of the population. Under the private market, updated vaccines will not be available in the US until October at the earliest—well after the current surge—and later or never throughout the rest of the world.

Whatever limited media coverage or official statements are made on the present wave of the pandemic, they all seek to downplay its significance. In particular, there is a concerted effort to ignore the scientifically proven aftereffects of COVID-19 infections, including prolonged symptoms known as Long COVID and increased risk of medical emergencies, such as heart attacks and strokes, which are rarely recorded as official COVID-19 deaths.

Among the most alarming recent findings include:

• A preprint study published in June found that SARS-CoV-2 can attack the vagus nerve, potentially the source of many Long COVID neurological symptoms, as well as shortness of breath.
• COVID-19 infection has been linked to increased risk of heart attack for all ages. A study published last September found a staggering 30 percent increase in heart attacks among those between 25 and 44 years old during the first two years of the pandemic. Dr. Susan Cheng, a co-author of the study, remarked, “Young people are obviously not really supposed to die of heart attack. They’re not really supposed to have heart attacks at all.”

• A review published last month in Nature estimated that roughly “400 million individuals globally are in need of support for Long COVID.” The authors concluded, “The oncoming burden of Long COVID faced by patients, health-care providers, governments and economies is so large as to be unfathomable.”

Multiple studies have shown that all the risks associated with COVID-19 infections are compounded with each reinfection. In fact, one of the most concerning features of the current surge is that it is taking place under conditions in which virtually the entire population has either previously been infected with COVID-19 or is fully vaccinated. In other words, over 400,000 Americans and millions more globally are presently suffering breakthrough infections or reinfections each day.

Meanwhile, viral evolution continues unabated, with SARS-CoV-2 changing constantly by finding more innovative ways to replicate throughout the global population. The present wave of the pandemic is being driven in part by the Omicron EG.5 variant, nicknamed “Eris” by scientists. It accounts for over 35 percent of all sequenced cases globally and is now the most prevalent variant in the US and other countries. It is a descendent of the Omicron XBB recombinant variants, which have been dominant globally since last winter.

One of the key mutations of Eris is attributable to the use of monoclonal antibodies, as predicted by scientists months ago. Scientists are now monitoring another mutation, with the combination of both mutations showing increased immune-evasion and producing more severe infections. This combination, referred to as “FLip,” is most prevalent in Spain and Brazil, with the former seeing a rapid spike in cases in recent weeks.

Noted immunologist Yunlong Richard Cao recently explained that the recent evolutionary change “is a very smart move by the virus.” He predicted that this winter there will be further mutations that allow the virus to more easily infect those who have been vaccinated.

These developments raise significant concerns about the future trajectory of the pandemic. In effect, global society is being forced to accept the premise that a dangerous, highly transmissible and rapidly evolving coronavirus will kill millions each year and must simply be endured. Never before in modern history has there been such a level of sheer indifference to what continues to be a huge public health disaster.

As bad as the response was in 2020, at that time governments were forced to implement limited public health measures. Now, in the worst case scenario in which a far more dangerous variant evolves with total immune-escape, a higher fatality ratio and greater infectivity, one must assume that the response of world governments would be to do nothing. The capitalists are determined to never go back to the prior era of public health.

While trillions are squandered on war and bank bailouts, virtually no funding whatsoever is allocated to public health or social infrastructure necessary to prevent disease transmission, treat affected patients or develop more advanced vaccines and therapeutics. The trade union bureaucracies, firmly integrated into the capitalist state, play the essential role in suppressing the class struggle, allowing the corporations to get away with social murder.

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• Film screenings will contribute to awareness and discussion about human rights in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Middle East or Eastern Europe.
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COVID variants drive UK summer infection wave

Steve James

Indications of new waves of COVID-19 infections are emerging in the UK this summer, fueled by new variants of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus that causes the disease.

According to the ZOE Health Study which encourages smart phone users to submit health reports, 52,375 symptomatic COVID cases were reported on August 3, leading to a prediction of as many as 805,411 current symptomatic cases in the UK. In all some 4,817,218 users contribute to ZOE's data.

The ZOE app [Photo: screenshot: covid.joinzoe.com]

Most cases are currently being reported from Suffolk and Leicestershire, while a few days ago the South West and Wales were reporting the highest figures. The ZOE figures record a 30 percent increase in cases since early July, although overall figures remain, thus far, much lower than during the Omicron surge last year, which peaked at over 3.8 million cases.

Testifying to the demolition of systemic community wide testing, the Conservative government's own dashboard for England alone reported a far lower figure of 4,076 new cases in the week to July 29, an increase of 27.8 percent. The dashboard reported 1,438 hospital admissions, an increase of 40 percent. The latest weekly figures for deaths record 63, a reduction of 22 percent, but this dated from the week to July 7. In Scotland, in the week to July 30, there were 118 admissions, and five deaths up to July 8. In Wales, there were 44 hospitalisations and another 69 cases acquired in hospital. Three patients are in critical care.

According to Worldometers, there have been 228,429 deaths from COVID in Britain.

Christina Pagel, a professor of operational research at University College London, commenting on the implications of testing failures, told the Guardian that Britain was nearly “flying blind.” Pagel warned that a new wave of infection appeared to be underway, and that this might accelerate into the autumn.

Pagel called for the re-introduction of high-quality masks in healthcare settings along with re-establishing a nationwide infection survey. Failing that, wastewater testing, also suspended, should be restored. Pagel expressed alarm over “a repeat of the last winter NHS [National Health Service] crisis this winter again, with COVID, flu and RSV [respiratory syncytial virus] all hitting around the same time.”

Wastewater testing, rolled out by the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), sampled untreated sewage three times a week from over 300 treatment works in England. Similar programmes were established in Scotland and Wales, searching for fragments of coronavirus DNA released in faeces, thus giving a broad indicator of COVID-19 levels in the population. In an act designed solely to suppress public knowledge of infection levels, particularly advance warning of emerging infection waves, the UK government ended sampling in 2022. Some level of sampling is continuing in Wales and Scotland.

Epidemiologist professor, Rowland Kao of Edinburgh University, commented in the same article on the significance of the deliberate collapse in surveillance. “With seasonal flu, we have of course a certain amount of predictability with the many years of data. However, with Covid, now that we don’t have those multiple data streams to rely on, it’s harder to say what is happening.”

Kao explained that COVID-19 was not following simple seasonal patterns and that the timing and impact of COVID variants was unknown.

Currently there are two emerging Omicron variants in the UK, accounting for nearly half of all UK cases—Eris and Arcturus. Eris, or EG.5.1, was first monitored in Asia, early July this year. In the UK it was classified as a variant July 10, by which time it was accounting for 11.8 percent of cases. That figure has increased to 14.6 percent. Arcturus emerged in April and now causes 39.4 percent of infections.

Thus far, Eris has not raised concerns to the level generated by Omicron. Eris is currently classed by the World Health Organisation as a “variant under monitoring”, as opposed to a “variant of concern.” Speaking to the Guardian, Imperial College London's Danny Altmann warned of the growing period since most people were vaccinated “The immune-evasion mutations continue to emerge and cross-protection is looking ever more precarious. Meanwhile, immunity beyond one-year wanes appreciably.”

A further indication of an emerging UK wave, and broad public concern, is the rapid growth in the sales of lateral flow test kits from pharmacies. Boots reported sales increased 33 percent in the week to July 22, compared with the previous three weeks. Boots charge £9.85 for tests that were formerly provided free of charge, Lloyds sell individual tests for £1.89. PCR swab tests, also formerly free, cost £62.00 from Boots, £67.00 from Lloyds—devastating costs for working class households amid a surge in the cost of living.

Further variants continue to emerge. Last month, the Daily Mail reported a mutation of the virus, taken from a patient swab in Indonesia, with 113 unique mutations. 37 of these were reported to affect the spike protein, which is central to SARS-COV-2's high rate of transmission. The spike protein is also the target of most of the vaccines developed, giving rise to further concerns of reduced vaccine efficacy. It is not known whether this mutation poses a threat, but the emergence of countless variants is unavoidable given the vast level of infection worldwide, driven by the calculated indifference of the capitalist class.

Commenting on the current wave in the UK, Leeds University professor of virology Stephen Griffin said that while numbers seem to be rising less quickly than previous waves the low level of testing means that this is difficult to confirm. He warned, “More infections will also mean more Long Covid, which remains a massive concern and yet is often overlooked when factoring the impact of infection waves.”

A Long Covid study published July 21 in The Lancet by King's College London which explored the impact of Covid on brain function found that “deficits following SARS-CoV-2 infection were detectable nearly two years post infection, and [were] largest for individuals with longer symptom durations, ongoing symptoms, and/or more severe infection.” Tests employed measured memory, attention, reasoning, processing speed, and motor control.

The study, carried out in 2021, found people with Covid-19 infections recorded lower cognitive scores, particularly if symptoms had persisted for over 12 weeks. The impact was described as “comparable in scale to the effect of presentation to hospital during illness, an increase in age of approximately 10 years, or exhibiting mild or moderate symptoms of psychological distress”. The tests were performed on 3,335 people who had been infected by SARS-CoV-2.

As many as 1.9 million people, 2.9 percent of the population, were reporting some level of Long COVID symptoms, as of March 2023 according the UK's Office of National Statistics. Described as “symptoms continuing for more than four weeks after the first confirmed or suspected coronavirus (COVID-19) infection that were not explained by something else”, fatigue, muscle ache and shortness of breath were most reported.

The spread of the disease in Britain, in the fourth year of the pandemic, is mirrored in other countries, including the United States—with data showing that the level of SARS-CoV-2 viral particles in wastewater across the US has risen by 125 percent over the past six weeks—and Australia, which has seen a marked spike in deaths in recent months.

These development refute government lies that COVID-19 is nothing to worry about, is now “endemic” and equivalent to the cold or flu. All evidence points to the deadly virus continuing to mutate rapidly, more than twice as fast as the common flu. New variants that can bypass prior immunity threaten to unleash repeated waves of infections, hospitalisations and deaths.

West African states to hold Thursday summit on Niger intervention

Thomas Scripps

Niger and the wider West African region are teetering on the brink of war.

Nigerien President Mohamed Bazoum was deposed in a military coup led by the chief of his presidential guard Abdourahamane Tchiani on July 26. After a deadline for Bazoum’s reinstatement set down by the Economic Community of West African States expired Sunday, ECOWAS announced a summit to be held in the Nigerian capital Abuja this Thursday.

The defense chiefs from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) countries excluding Mali, Burkina Faso, Chad, Guinea and Niger, pose for a group photo during their extraordinary meeting in Abuja, Nigeria, August 4, 2023, to discuss the situation in Niger. [AP Photo/Chinedu Asadu]

Nigeria, on Niger’s southern border, dominates the union, with 230 million of its total 400 million population, 250,000 soldiers and 35 combat aircraft. Together with Senegal and the Ivory Coast, its government has indicated it would send troops if agreed.

While Nigeria’s Senate voted not to approve a military intervention, a similar vote did not stop then-President Muhammadu Buhari from deploying troops to The Gambia in 2017 to remove President Yahya Jammeh—after he refused to hand over power to Adama Barrow. Nigeria has also led major interventions in Liberia in 1992 and Sierra Leone in 1997.

ECOWAS commissioner for political affairs, peace and security Abdel-Fatau Musah warned Friday, “All the elements that will go into any eventual intervention have been worked out.” He continued, “We are determined to stop it, but ECOWAS is not going to tell the coup plotters when and where we are going to strike.”

The military leaders in Niger have closed the country’s airspace, “In the face of the threat of intervention that is becoming more apparent.” They warned that any violation would meet “an energetic and instant response.”

A spokesperson declared that two African countries had already begun deploying forces, adding, “Niger’s armed forces and all our defence and security forces, backed by the unfailing support of our people, are ready to defend the integrity of our territory.” The country has 25,000 soldiers in its armed forces, and two combat aircraft.

The coup leaders in Niger are supported by the regimes on its Western border in Mali and Burkina Faso—products of military coups in May 2021 and September 2022—which have said they will treat an ECOWAS invasion of Niger as a declaration of war against them. The two countries sent a delegation to the Nigerien capital Niamey on Monday, to demonstrate their “solidarity… with the brotherly people of Niger,” according to the Malian army.

Guinea, run by Colonel Mamady Doumbouya as interim president following a coup in September 2021, has also backed Niger.

Algeria and Chad, both large countries with significant military forces, bordering Niger to the North and East, have declared against military action and said they would not intervene. Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune described any war as a “direct threat to Algeria.”

West Africa [Photo by PirateShip6 / CC BY-SA 4.0]

ECOWAS has already imposed sanctions on Niger, suspending all commercial transactions, freezing its state assets, suspending financial assistance through regional development banks and cutting electricity supply, leading to blackouts.

The imperialist powers, including France, Germany, the UK, and the European Union have suspended aid payments. These measures are a humanitarian time bomb in a country where 40 percent of the government budget is provided by international aid.

France, the former colonial power in Niger, has been the most aggressive. Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna met Nigerian Prime Minister Ouhoumoudou Mahamadou in Paris on Saturday before declaring, “France supports with firmness and determination the efforts of ECOWAS to defeat this coup attempt.” She left unsaid whether this would include French military support.

Italy and Germany have been more cautious. Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani told La Stampa Monday, “The only way is the diplomatic one.” Annalena Baerbock, German Minister of Foreign Affairs, “welcome[d] the mediation efforts.”

There are major interests at stake—most importantly the supply of and profits from crucial energy commodities, and the policing of African migration to Europe.

Niger is the world’s seventh-largest producer of uranium, Europe’s second largest supplier (at 25 percent) after Kazakhstan. Its other major exports include gold and, locally, petroleum.

This wealth is controlled by foreign companies. The SOMAIR, COMINAK and Imouraren uranium mines are majority owned by French interests, the SOMINA uranium mine, Agadem Basin oil wells and SORAZ refinery by Chinese, and the Samira Hill Gold Mine by Canadian.

None of the profits generated make their way back to the Nigerien population. The country’s tax-to-GDP ratio was just 9.8 percent in 2022—the OECD average is 34 percent. Massive tax exemptions for the extractive industries mean that Niger’s uranium production contributes a mere 4-6 percent to its government revenue.

Much of this is in any case spent on “security” on behalf of the European powers. Niger is considered central to what the European Union’s former special representative for the Sahel Ángel Losada called “Europe’s new forward border.” Its northern town and region of Agadez is considered the gateway to the Sahara, and a major staging point for journeys to the North African coast and on to Europe.

Hundreds of millions of euros have been spent by the EU employing the Nigerien military and police as pre-emptive border guards. It sponsored Law 2015—36 cracking down on migration through the country which has caused immense disruption to patterns of social and economic life in the region and fueled a dramatic growth in illegal smuggling.

Italy and Germany, two of the European powers most involved in policing migration across the Mediterranean, are worried a major conflict would blow up these arrangements and drive huge numbers to seek asylum in Europe. It would also undermine Italy’s “Mattei Plan” for sourcing more of its energy from Africa, already involving major deals with Algeria and Libya and discussions with Congo-Brazzaville, Angola, and Mozambique.

For Niger, exploitation and “securitization” have contributed to a social catastrophe. Over 40 percent of the population live on less than $1.90 a day, with nearly 20 percent requiring humanitarian assistance. Over 3 million people suffer acute food shortages. More than 40 percent of children aged 5-14 are labouring.

These conditions, combined with an influx of NATO’s Islamist proxies used in the Libyan civil war to the Sahel, have fueled the growth of jihadist militias across the region, responsible for thousands of killings every year and hundreds of thousands of displacements.

Hostility to the government of Bazoum and his Nigerien Party for Democracy and Socialism which presided over this disaster, combined with opposition to the presence of now ousted French soldiers, will have contributed to the rally of 30,000 in support of the coup on Sunday.

But Tchiani is no more a solution to Niger’s problems than ECOWAS and the imperialist powers. None of the military takeovers in the region have done anything to improve the conditions of the population, whatever the anti-colonialist rhetoric deployed.

The task confronting the Nigerien working class and rural masses is to mobilize for the defeat of Tchiani and Bazoum and to reach out to their class brothers and sisters across West Africa, whose interests they share, to take up the same fight against their own ruling elites, rather than a fratricidal war.

In an already fragile society, any conflict between ECOWAS and Niger-Mali-Burkina Faso would have appalling consequences. Commenting on the prospect, Senior Associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies Cameron Hudson told Foreign Policy, “If it’s not a bluff and they were to attempt to go through with this, there is no clean way that happens without massive civilian casualties and without the fear of a spreading regional conflict.”

NATO-backed anti-Putin oppositionist Navalny sentenced to additional 19 years in prison

Clara Weiss

On Friday, a Russian court extended the nine-year prison sentence for Alexei Navalny, the most prominent NATO-backed critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, by another 19 years. While his earlier sentence had been based on charges of bribery and contempt of court, the latest sentence was based on charges of “extremism”.

Daniel Kholodny, who worked as a technician for Navalny’s YouTube channel, also stood trial alongside Navalny and was sentenced to eight years in prison for organizing an extremist group. Navalny will have to serve the 19-year prison sentence in a maximum-security penal colony, reducing his ability to communicate with the outside world to almost zero. So far, Navalny had been able to continue to post political commentaries on his Telegram channel from prison. The trial proceedings were closed to the public as well as to his family members. 

Earlier last week, another court rejected the appeal of the 25-year prison sentence of Vladimir Kara-Murza, who had been sentenced for “treason” and defamation of the Russian armed forces. Like Navalny, Kara-Murza is a central figure in the NATO-backed opposition to the Putin regime and has extensive ties to the ruling elites in Washington.  

The sentencing of Navalny and Kholodny and rejection of the appeal for Kara-Murza come under conditions of a profound crisis of the Putin regime and infighting between warring factions of the state apparatus and ruling class. In late June, Evgeny Prigozhin, a billionaire mercenary-leader and long-time ally of Vladimir Putin, staged a coup attempt with an explicit appeal to the openly pro-NATO faction of the Russian oligarchy. Prigozhin and his Wagner troops have since been given carte blanche and appear to have been reintegrated into the regime. Wagner troops are still active in Africa on behalf of Russia and many of the troops are stationed in Belarus, a close ally of Russia. Prigozhin has been at a recent summit, hosted by the Kremlin with African leaders and diplomats, in St. Petersburg. 

While essentially giving Wagner carte blanche, however, the Kremlin has also begun arresting a series of prominent political figures. Among them was Igor Strel’kov, a former leader of the pro-Russian separatists in East Ukraine who has long called upon the Putin regime to impose a general mobilization. The Kremlin has also arrested Boris Kagarlitsky, a well-known leader of the pseudo-left and Stalinist milieu in Russia with long-standing ties to the oligarchy and state apparatus. Like Navalny, Stre’lkov and Kagarlitsky were also charged with “extremism”. 

The US and the EU were quick to denounce the sentencing of Navalny. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken released a statement, noting “The United States strongly condemns Russia’s conviction of opposition leader Aleksei Navalny on politically motivated charges. The Kremlin cannot silence the truth. Navalny should be released.” The EU also “strongly” condemned the ruling. The WSWS has noted in the past the nauseating hypocrisy of these denunciations of the Putin regime by the imperialist powers. US and European imperialism are not only responsible for the bombing of multiple countries over the past decades, resulting in the death and maiming of millions. Washington and Brussels have also brutally persecuted and unlawfully imprisoned the Australian journalist Julian Assange, whose conditions of detention amount to systematic physical and psychological torture.

There is no question that the ultimate target of the attacks on democratic rights, now leveraged most publicly against opponents of Putin within the state and oligarchy, will be the working class. In particular, the charges of “extremism” and “treason” that were used most recently against Navalny, Kara-Murza, Strel’kov and Kagarlitsky, are defined so broadly that they could easily be applied to genuinely left-wing and socialist opponents of the regime and the war in Ukraine. 

However, in order to develop their political opposition to the Putin regime from their independent class standpoint, workers and young people must have a clear understanding of the political forces involved in this escalating infighting within the Russian oligarchy.

Contrary to his depiction in the Western media, Navalny is neither a democratic nor a popular critic of the Putin regime. With his base of supporters limited to privileged layers of the upper middle class, Navalny’s political history is marked above all by his association with ultranationalist forces and sections of the ruling elites and state apparatus in both Russia and the US. He belonged to a rapacious and reckless layer of social climbers that tried to benefit from the 1991 destruction of the Soviet Union by the bureaucracy and the restoration of capitalism. He became involved in politics after his endeavors in banking and real estate had largely failed. In an early interview, he gave expression to his Social-Darwinistic views, stating, “I wanted a market economy in the most wicked form—the strongest survive, the rest are simply superfluous.”

Since 2010-2011, Navalny has been built up systematically by the Western media. At the time, he was a co-organizer of the far-right “Russian Marches”, and had released videos denouncing people from the North Caucasus as “cockroaches”. Navalny has also repeatedly called for a redrawing of the borders of Russia, without the predominantly Muslim North Caucasus. As the WSWS has documented, Navalny was built up by Washington and Berlin not despite but because of his ties to the far right.

Much as in Ukraine, where the descendants of the Nazi collaborators of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists have played a central role in the 2014 regime-change operation and the current war, the US-backed opposition in Russia has centrally involved far-right forces. They form a central component of the imperialist strategy to foment ethnic and national strife as part of the attempt to not only destabilize but also break up the country.

More recently, neo-Nazi forces with ties to the neofascist scene in Germany, as well as the Ukrainian regime and the NATO-backed opposition in Russia, were involved in incursions on Russian territory. Shortly after leading the most significant incursions to date, the neo-Nazi leader of the Russian Volunteer Corps, Denis Nikitin, was interviewed on Navalny’s YouTube channel, with the interviewer being completely uncritical of Nikitin’s well-known and extensive ties in Europe’s neo-Nazi scene. 

In addition to his relations with the far right, Navalny has retained ties to sections of the Russian elites and state apparatus. Among his earliest backers were figures such as the economist Sergei Guriev, a former adviser of ex-president Dmitry Medvedev, and the former banker Vladimir Ashurkov, now a leading figure of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Fund, both of whom have long fled the country.

Navalny, like Kara-Murza or the ex-oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, thus speak for sections of the state and oligarchy that see in a complete line-up of Moscow behind geopolitical strategy of the US and in the break-up of the Russian Federation, the best means to advance their own economic interests in the exploitation of the raw material and social resources of the country. 

The ever-more draconian prison sentences handed down to prominent representatives of the NATO-backed opposition in the Russian state and oligarchy are indicative of intense conflicts and crises unfolding behind the walls of the Kremlin, as the war in Ukraine is now well into its second year and all previous calculations of the Putin regime to somehow force the imperialist powers to the negotiating table have disastrously backfired.

Yellow freight declares bankruptcy, in the latest assault on workers’ jobs

Alex Findijs

A sign for Yellow Corp. trucking company stands outside its facility on July 31, 2023, in Nashville, Tenn. [AP Photo/George Walker IV]

Two weeks after shuttering operations, freight company Yellow officially filed for bankruptcy on Monday.

The closure of Yellow and the elimination of 30,000 jobs is a massive assault on the working class by Wall Street, escalating a wave of layoffs this year. This is the latest in the continuing jobs bloodbath by the corporate oligarchy, which has eliminated hundreds of thousands of jobs.

In the tech industry alone, nearly 225,000 jobs have been slashed so far. In January, Amazon announced that it would cut 18,000 jobs from its office staff followed by another 9,000 in March. Microsoft added to the carnage with 10,000 layoffs. Meta (the parent company of Facebook) announced another 10,000, and Google’s parent company Alphabet announced 12,000 job cuts. Dozens of other companies in the tech sector cut large portions of their staff.

The bankruptcy of Yellow is the largest single layoff this year and the largest for industrial workers since 2009, when General Motors laid off 47,000 workers. The bankruptcy filing all but finalizes the firing of 22,000 members of the Teamsters, who had not all been officially laid off by the company when it closed operations. Several workers reported that they had not received any communication from the company, and that without confirmation of their job status they were unable to file for unemployment or find employment elsewhere until the bankruptcy declaration.

Yellow’s collapse will not just affect those workers laid off. Thousands of truckers, warehouse workers, and office staff have just been dumped into the job market. One Yellow worker from Atlanta said dozens of workers showed up to interview for a position at a competitor who was offering 50 percent less than advertised. When workers said it wasn’t enough to live on, they were told if they didn’t take it someone else would.

This is the deliberate purpose of the bankruptcy. Trillions of dollars have been pumped into financial markets to prop up the capitalist economy during the pandemic, and the government regularly spends billions of dollars a week to fund its proxy war in Ukraine. This money is to be extracted from the working class through ever greater levels of exploitation.

The centerpiece of the Biden administration’s domestic policy has been to suppress wage growth through the raising of interest rates, aimed at triggering a surge in unemployment to use as a weapon against the working class. The official policy of the Federal Reserve has been to “get wages down,” in the words of Fed Chairman Jerome Powell, who lamented last year that “employers are having difficulties filling job openings, and wages are rising at the fastest pace in many years.”

The pandemic had the effect of tightening the labor market and has triggered a massive and growing resurgence of the class struggle, with workers demanding wages that not only match inflation but that recoup the losses from decades of concessions.

In response, Wall Street is demanding a stronger hand in the exploitation of the working class. At workplaces around the country Wall Street will demand similar attacks on the working class, targeting wages, working hours, benefits and working conditions.

Roughly 150,000 auto workers have their contracts expire next month at the Big Three auto companies (General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis—formerly Chrysler). Management will be demanding concessions as the industry turns to electric vehicle production that requires up to 40 percent less labor than gas-powered cars.

United States Postal Service rural letter carriers have seen their pay slashed by up to $20,000 a year under its new payment scheme. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy intends to eliminate roughly 50,000 jobs at the USPS through his “Delivering for America” restructuring program.

Meanwhile, workers at UPS are rebelling against the sellout contract negotiated by the Teamsters that fails to meet their demands.

In a public statement, Yellow management blamed the Teamsters for “literally driving our company out of business.” The exact opposite is the case. The union bureaucracy, working closely with the White House, has played a critical role in suppressing strikes and enforcing substandard contracts.

At Yellow, the Teamsters used the faltering company as a convenient foil for militant posturing. O’Brien made several public comments declaring that the Teamsters would no longer give concessions to Yellow after giving “billions of dollars” to the company in previous contracts.

But after the company refused to make payments to workers’ benefit plans, the Teamsters called off a strike at the last minute, claiming it had reached a deal to allow the company to make up its missed payment. In reality, this bought time for the company to wind up its operations and prepare for bankruptcy. When Yellow finally announced bankruptcy, General President Sean O’Brien issued a complacent statement calling it “unfortunate.”

The inaction of the Teamsters to intervene and defend the jobs of 22,000 members was a conscious decision. Any strike action by Yellow workers would have emboldened UPS workers, who are currently voting on the sellout contract. The Teamsters have instead allowed 22,000 union and 8,000 nonunion jobs to be sacrificed in order to maintain “labor peace.”

The Teamsters barely communicated with their own members at Yellow. One Yellow truck driver described going to the union office to ask about his job. A union official responded, “Job, what job? Yellow is closed, they just haven’t filled out the paperwork yet.”

Yellow’s collapse will be a feeding frenzy for the vultures of Wall Street. Yellow had over $2.25 billion in assets in December. Billions of dollars in equipment and real estate will be picked for scraps by its creditors, chief among them Apollo Global Management.

Apollo is a major private equity firm with nearly $600 billion in managed assets. It gave Yellow a $500 million loan in 2019, organized for the United States government to give Yellow a $700 million bailout in 2023, and is the leading creditor in Yellow’s debtor-in-possession bankruptcy, which will give the firm first choice when Yellow’s assets are sold.

Yellow’s $1.6 billion in debt is considerable, but its two main investors, Apollo and the US government, have trillions of dollars in resources. Apollo manages assets totaling nearly $600 billion, and the United States spends over 500 times Yellow’s debt on the military each year.

Australian government vows to hold indigenous Voice referendum despite falling support

Mike Head

Australian Labor Party Prime Minister Anthony Albanese last weekend declared that his government would proceed, sometime later this year, with its referendum to entrench an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander advisory body, called the Voice, in the country’s 1901 Constitution.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese at Garma Festival in Australia, August 5, 2023. [Photo: Tiwtter @AlboMP]

Albanese made his vow in the face of media opinion polls showing collapsing support for the proposal. The latest Newspoll published in the Australian yesterday, indicates that support has dropped to 43 percent, from 54 percent in April, and is now below 50 percent in every state. To pass, the referendum needs a majority nationally and in four of the six states.

The prime minister was speaking at the annual Garma Festival organised by the Yothu Yindi Foundation, formed by five regional Yolgnu clan groups, held 40 kilometres from the remote Northern Territory township of Nhulunbuy. Albanese rejected calls, including from within the “Yes” camp, to postpone the vote. He stated: “I can promise all of you—and all Australians—there will be no delaying or deferring this referendum.”

Albanese’s stand indicates how much is at stake for his government, as well as for big business, most of which publicly backs the referendum and provides much of the multi-million dollar funding for the official “Yes” campaign.

A wider political crisis is developing. There is growing distrust in the Voice project and the government itself, especially in the working class, amid falling real wages and a worsening cost-of-living and housing crisis, and opposition to the massive spending on AUKUS nuclear submarines and other weaponry for a US-led war on China.

From the day it narrowly won last year’s election, Albanese’s government made the Voice plan a central feature of its entire political agenda. Its primary concern is fashioning and presenting a concocted image of Australian “unity.” At the same time, it is seeking to divide the working class along racial lines, in order to prevent a unified movement against the deepening assault on working-class living standards, including those of the indigenous workers, one of the most vulnerable sections of the working class.

In his Garma speech, Albanese again made this pitch. “We can vote Yes, in a spirit of unity,” he said. “We can bring our country together.” He emphasised that this unity included “employers and business leaders, who understand the value and power of a Yes vote.”

This appeal is being made for domestic purposes, to divert attention away from the intensifying class divide between the wealthy and the working class, including most indigenous people. It is also for geo-strategic purposes, to portray Australian imperialism as “democratic” and “inclusive.” That is particularly important in the South Pacific, where the Labor government is under intense US pressure to do more to bully countries into line against China.

Albanese once more tried to falsely present the Voice as a means to improve the appalling and still-deteriorating conditions of most indigenous people—seeking to exploit the widespread public concern over these conditions. He cited some of the latest damning statistics, showing the shocking low life expectancy, and high disease and suicide rates, among indigenous people.

“Only four out of 19 Closing the Gap targets on track,” Albanese said, without referring to the fact that the last Labor government, that of Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, set up the “Closing the Gap” program more than a decade ago, falsely promising that it would rectify the disaster.

Albanese could not explain how the Voice, a proposed unelected body whose members would be selected mainly by representatives of existing land councils and other government-funded indigenous organisations, would make any difference. For the past five decades, similar consultative bodies have failed to do so, while cultivating a privileged layer of indigenous business owners, media personalities and senior academics.

Nor could Albanese make any mention of the roots of the historic and ongoing social crisis, which lie in the past 235 years of history since British colonisation and the establishment of Australian capitalism. That silence is because the Labor government is totally committed to upholding the corporate profit system that has been responsible for the dispossession, massacres, destruction of communities, forced separations and ongoing trauma inflicted on the indigenous population.

The Voice would only continue that catastrophic record by strengthening the state apparatus of “the parliament and executive government” responsible for it. Members of the Voice and its accompanying staff and agencies would be integrated directly into this system of capitalist rule.

One of the architects of the Voice, right-wing Aboriginal lawyer Noel Pearson, outlined its pro-business agenda in an interview published by the Australian Financial Review last Friday. Pearson said the Voice would “empower” indigenous communities to help end “passive welfare,” which he blamed for the surging indigenous incarceration rates and over-representation of indigenous children in out of home care, separated from their families.

Pearson, himself an adviser to prime ministers since the 1990s, told the newspaper: “I think for too long, at least for two decades, we’ve been in a world where everything that has gone wrong means the indigenous community can say, ‘it’s the government’s fault.’”

His comments serve to shift the blame away from the successive business-backed governments, Labor and Liberal-National alike, that have presided over the oppression, with the assistance of such figures. It also demonstrates what Pearson and other Voice backers mean by “self-empowerment” of indigenous people.

Pearson has long been an advocate of cutting people off welfare payments, which he derides as “sit-down money,” in order to coerce them into what are invariably low-paying jobs. At the same time, he encourages the expansion of the indigenous business elite, often on the back of land claims and deals with mining and pastoral companies.

The Garma Festival itself provided a picture of the pro-corporate agenda behind the Voice scheme. Initially launched in 1999, the festival has become an annual elite gathering of government leaders, capitalist politicians, bureaucrats and corporate chiefs.

Those in attendance this year included what the Australian Financial Review termed “a large corporate delegation.” It featured Business Council of Australia president Tim Read and executives from the country’s largest companies, such as Telstra, Qantas, Woodside, Woolworths, Rio Tinto and the big banks. It said business leaders welcomed the chance to explore commercial opportunities.

Far from being a grassroots affair, Garma is a ticketed event of 2,500 people, for which you had to register and be accepted. Tickets cost $2,503—far out of reach for most people—while businesses pay up to $5,000 for a corporate ticket. The basic price of $2,503 includes airport transfers, meals, accommodation (tent, air mattress and sleeping bag). Participants could drive, but the festival is about 700 kilometres from the nearest large town, Katherine.

Interviewed by the Australian, Yothu Yindi Foundation chief executive and Garma Festival director Denise Bowden basically echoed Pearson’s perspective. She said: “Across the nation we think people can learn from our strong law and cultural leadership.” She said cultural authorities like the Dilak Council, headed by leaders of Yolngu clans, who own a range of businesses, including a mine, could help the Voice identify government waste and underperformance.

The festival is even run as a business venture. Speaking to the National Indigenous Times, Bowden said the event brought in millions of dollars in tourism revenue and supported 46 local businesses in the Arnhem Land region, as well as another 39 businesses elsewhere in the Northern Territory, while employing 160 Yolngu people.

Among the festival participants were indigenous leaders from 12 ­regions across Australia who represent an alliance called Empowered Communities. It boasts of speaking directly to governments since 2015 and depicts itself as proof that the Voice can work, including by producing substantial government savings.

Cape York representative Fiona Jose told the Australian that the Empowered Communities initiative showed indigenous people were ready and willing to cut waste. “We make tougher decisions with and for our people than government will ever be able to do … It’s possible because we’re doing it,” she said.

This is the true face of the Voice. It is a pro-capitalist operation to promote indigenous business ventures, at the expense of ordinary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and thus perpetuate the economic system responsible for their impoverishment.

From the start, the Voice plan was orchestrated by Pearson and other hand-picked indigenous elite figures, working in partnership with the then Liberal-National government of Tony Abbott in 2015, to head off anger over that government’s wholesale scrapping of indigenous welfare and health services, as part of its brutal austerity measures against the working class as a whole.

Far from being a movement from below, the Voice plan remains a bid to divert the ongoing anger and disaffection among ordinary indigenous people, and the rest of the working class, as workers and their families suffer the greatest cuts to their real wages and living conditions since World War II.