Homelessness soaring in Australia as corporate wealth surges

Mike Head

This Christmas‒New Year period in Australia is marked by growing numbers of working-class people experiencing financial stress, poverty and homelessness.

Homeless woman in Chatswood Mall, Sydney, June 2019 [Photo by Sardaka / CC BY-SA 4.0]

At the same time, the ruling class is celebrating a near-record bonanza on the share market and the top corporate CEOs are taking home huge increases in their annual remuneration packages.

This social divide is becoming increasingly explosive after more than 18 months of the Albanese Labor government, which scraped into office in May 2022, falsely promising “a better future.”

As in the United States and other “advanced” capitalist economies, ordinary people are suffering the greatest cut to their living standards since World War II as a result of soaring prices, rents and home mortgage repayments.

This month’s latest statistics from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare indicate a sharp rise in homelessness. The proportion of rough sleepers seeking homeless services rose by 17 percent in 2023. The proportion of individuals who were already homeless when they sought help grew by 5.5 percent.

“These figures are a stark and alarming indicator of how the deepening housing crisis is pushing more Australians to sleep in their car, pitch a tent or couch surf,” Homelessness Australia CEO Kate Colvin said.

“The data also reveals that homelessness service capacity hardly increased in 2022‒23 despite surging demand, with the number of clients supported across the year increasing only 1.3 percent from 272,694 to 273,648.”

That was a fall of 16,814 from those assisted when funding to homelessness services was temporarily increased during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, only to be slashed again by the federal, state and territory Labor governments now in office across Australia’s mainland.

Homelessness NSW (New South Wales) CEO Dom Rowe said: “Homelessness services are so stretched they are having to turn away one in two people who knock on their doors. And there are many more people who don’t ask for help at all.” Only 21 percent who needed long-term accommodation received it.

Charities are reporting massive rises in requests for help, many from households that have never sought it before.

• Anglicare Victoria reported a 50 percent increase in demand for its emergency relief services over the past year, with about 40 percent of clients asking for help paying the bills after exhausting all other options.

• St Vincent de Paul Victoria spent $2.6 million on its homelessness support in 2022‒23 compared with $1.6 million the year before, a 62.5 percent increase. The charity’s food insecurity support rose by 37.7 percent to $9.5 million, while cost-of-living support, which includes medical expenses, fuel, school supplies and utility bills, jumped by 51.2 percent to $6.5 million.

• Salvation Army Australia said nearly half of the people who reached out to it this year were new. The charity’s survey of 2,000 people, released this month, found 31 percent had used a credit card for Christmas shopping, up from 18 percent last year, while 15 percent had relied on buy now, pay later—double last year.

Australian Council of Social Service (ACOSS) Acting CEO Edwina MacDonald warned: “The skyrocketing cost of rent and energy has created a tsunami of financial distress that is pushing people on the lowest incomes to the absolute brink. Community services are at a breaking point, unable to keep up with the demand from people in desperate need of support.”

An ACOSS survey in September of people relying on sub-poverty-level unemployment benefits or other government income support reported that 73 percent were eating less or skipping meals, while 64 percent were cutting back on meat, fresh fruit, vegetables and other fresh items. In addition, 60 percent experienced difficulty affording the medicine or medical care they needed, 98 percent said the low rate of income support harmed their mental health and 93 percent said it harmed their physical health.

This is just the tip of the iceberg of a wider social crisis. This month’s National Accounts showed that real household disposable income—a measure of living standards—fell 5.6 percent over the year to September 30 and 8.3 percent over two years. That is the biggest drop in decades. Even so, it underestimates the impact on working-class people, who are being hit hardest by the cost of living.

For the wealthy elite, by contrast, the Australian share market set a new 100-day high on the first day of trade after the Christmas and Boxing Day break. Yesterday, it came close to a record high, following the lead of New York’s Wall Street.

Share prices are surging on expectations of interest rate cuts in 2024, making ultra-cheap money available again, combined with high iron ore and other commodity prices. Perversely, these price rises are being driven by the global economic dislocations and record military spending associated with the US war drives in Ukraine and the Middle East and against China.

The stock market bonanza is also based on booming profits extracted from the labour power of workers, whose real wages continue to fall, as they have for a decade.

Despite the Albanese government and the trade union bureaucrats claiming that “wages are moving again,” average weekly wage growth for the year to June 30 was only 3.9 percent. That was far below the inflation rate, which peaked at about twice that level, while total shareholder return for the Australian S&P/ASX 300 index increased by 14.4 percent.

Most of the benefit went to the most affluent layers of society, reflected in soaring rewards for the top company chief executives.

According to the Australian Financial Review, Macquarie Group CEO Shemara Wikramanayake remained Australia’s highest-paid chief executive for the third year in a row. Her reported pay in 2022‒23 was boosted by almost 30 percent, topping $30 million for the first time. She was eclipsed, however, by the Macquarie Group’s head of commodities and global markets Nick O’Kane, who received $57.6 million, after the investment bank reported a $5.18 billion yearly profit.

Victor Herrero, the chief of jewelry chain Lovisa, came second on the CEO list. He received $29.6 million in reported pay last financial year, despite an investor protest vote. Kogan.com founder Ruslan Kogan finished third, receiving $17.2 million in reported pay. Fourth was Greg Goodman of the property developer Goodman Group. He obtained $14.2 million in reported pay, plus an estimated $27.9 million in realised, or take-home pay, after taking into account the market values of shares he received.

The now departed CEO of Qantas, Alan Joyce, was only the fifth highest-paid CEO in 2022‒23 with reported annual pay of $11.9 million, although his actual payout, including shares and options, was $21.4 million.

As elsewhere around the world, this expanding social gulf is the result of deliberate policies imposed by the ruling capitalist class through its political servants, such as the Albanese government. Backed by the Labor government, the Reserve Bank of Australia followed other central banks in repeatedly hiking interest rates, driving up unemployment levels to stifle workers’ demands for wage rises.

Above all, the Labor government has relied on the services of the union apparatuses to block or shut down stoppages by workers and inflict sub-inflation and employer-friendly industrial agreements.

Calls by ACOSS and the charities for urgently-needed increased funding for homelessness and other welfare services have fallen on deaf ears. ACOSS has repeatedly urged the Albanese government to boost income support, lower the cost of energy bills, and scrap the planned “Stage 3” income tax cuts that will give wealthy households the lion’s share of more than $350 billion over the next decade.

In this month’s Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook (MYEFO), Treasurer Jim Chalmers again rejected calls for cost-of-living relief and reaffirmed the government’s intent to drive up the official unemployment rate to 4.5 percent by mid-2024. That would throw another 150,000 people out of work, in order to keep downward pressure on wages.

The only major increased spending was for military operations. That was another sign of wider US-led war preparations, particularly against China. Workers and youth are being made to pay for the military spending via austerity measures, including deepening real cuts to health, disability, education and welfare programs, placing them on a collision course with the Labor government and the union bureaucrats.

India’s ruling far-right BJP secures narrow overall state election win, as Congress Party suffers further debacle

Arun Kumar

India’s opposition Congress Party suffered a major debacle while the far-right Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has formed India’s national government under Prime Minister Narendra Modi for the past decade, secured a narrow overall victory in the five-state assembly elections whose results were announced earlier this month.

Held in states with a combined population of 230 million, the state elections were widely considered an important testing ground for the national election to be held in the spring of 2024.

The BJP, with the support of much of the corporate media, is pointing to its electoral triumph in the three northern Hindi-belt states that went to the polls in November and December to claim that the state elections showed strong popular support for Modi and his government.

President Joe Biden led Washington in feting India’s far-right Prime Minister Narendra Modi when he visited the US for a state visit last June. [AP Photo/Evan Vucci]

In reality, the BJP’s electoral support is not indicative of any widespread popular enthusiasm for its right-wing, pro-big business policies and incessant promotion of far-right Hindu supremacism. Among workers and the rural poor, there is growing anger over the government’s brutal attacks on their basic social and democratic rights, as it implements pro-investor economic “reforms” and slashes social spending to finance a rapid expansion of India’s military.

However, working people do not see the Congress Party and the other opposition parties—various regional parties and the Stalinist Communist Party of India (Marxist) and its Left Front allies—as a genuine alternative to the BJP. Congress, till recently the Indian bourgeoisie’s preferred party of national government, and its allies have all implemented “pro-investor” policies akin to those of the BJP when in national or state government.

Congress and the regional bourgeois parties also all support India’s ever-expanding anti-China “Global Strategic Partnership” with Washington. While Congress on occasion denounces Modi, his BJP and the RSS-led cabal of Hindu supremacist organizations with which they are closely allied for their most blatant communal outrages, it has increasingly adapted to and connived with the Hindu right.

Buoyed by their state election victories, Modi and his government moved aggressively in the just concluded 18-day-long “winter session” of parliament to ram though a series of repressive laws, violating at will traditional parliamentary norms. This includes a new Telecommunications Act, adopted just days after it was tabled in parliament and while more than 100 opposition parliamentarians had been temporarily expelled for “misbehaviour”. The new law, which has been termed “totalitarian” by some of its critics, gives the government sweeping powers to spy on electronic communications, including encrypted messages, censor online content and in the name of “national security” even take temporary control over the internet.  

In Madhya Pradesh, which with a population of 85 million was the largest of the states to go to the polls this fall, the BJP government that came to power three years ago after it succeeded in organizing defections from a minority Congress-led administration, was returned to power with an increased majority. With 48 percent of the vote to Congress’s 40 percent, the BJP won 163 of the 230 state assembly seats.

In two other Hindi-speaking states—Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh—the BJP wrested power from Congress Party-led governments. In Rajasthan, which with a population of 80 million is India’s seventh largest state, the BJP won just 2 percent more of the vote than Congress. However, due to the first-past-the-post electoral system, which generally disproportionately favors the most popular party, the BJP captured 115 seats to the Congress’s 69.

Only in the south Indian state of Telangana was the Congress able to win government. In a state in which the BJP is an also-ran, it defeated the regional Bharat Rashta Samiti (BRS), which had held power in Telangana since it became a separate state in 2014.

In the fifth state to go the polls, Mizoram, the Mizo National Front, till recently an ally of the BJP, fell from power. The Congress, meanwhile, saw its popular vote fall by 9 percentage points and won just 1 of the 40 assembly seats. Mizoram, which lies in India’s northeast and has a population of little more than one million, will now be governed by a recently-formed alliance of six tribal-based parties known as the Zoram People’s Movement.

A significant indication of growing opposition towards all bourgeois parties was the number of votes for NOTA (None of the Above), which is the bottom-most button on the electronic voting machine ballot. It was reported that NOTA polled more votes than the winning margin in 47 seats across four states, most of them in Madhya Pradesh.

The Congress Party dominated Indian politics during the first half-century after independence, and between 1991 and 2014 it did much of the heavy-lifting in dismantling the state-led capitalist development and “non-aligned” policies with which it had previously been associated and falsely touted as “Congress socialism.” This included spearheading the drive to fully integrate India into the imperialist-led world economy and making an Indo-US partnership the cornerstone of India’s foreign policy.

In 2004, after eight years in opposition, the Congress returned to power at the head of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) on the basis of the fraudulent claim that it could intensify the implementation of pro-investor policies while providing increased social support to working people—what it called pursuing “reform with a “human face.” It was under the Congress-led UPA that New Delhi forged its “global strategic partnership” with US imperialism.

By the time the Congress was swept from power in 2014, its rule was synonymous with high prices and mass joblessness and corrupt ties to big business. Since then, India’s so-called Grand Old Party has suffered one electoral defeat after another. It has been eliminated as a major political force in large swaths of India, including Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal, respectively the country’s largest, third largest and fifth most populous states.

In the 2019 national election, the Congress won its lowest ever share of the popular vote, 19.5 percent, and won just 52 seats in the Lok Sabha, less than the 10 percent required to be formally recognized as the official opposition.

With the outcome of the recent state elections, the Congress holds power outright in just three of India’s 28 states, Karnataka, Telangana and Himachal Pradesh, and is a junior partner in coalition governments in three others.

The Stalinist Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPM, and its Left Front allies—including the older but smaller Communist Party of India (CPI)—have similarly suffered a massive hemorrhaging in their electoral support and for like reasons. Since 1991, the Stalinists have supported a succession of right-wing governments at the Centre, most of them Congress-led, in the name of blocking the BJP from power. Indeed, the CPM was instrumental in stitching together the Congress Party-led UPA alliance. Moreover, in those states where they have held office, West Bengal, Kerala and Tripura, the Stalinists have implemented what they themselves have termed “pro-investor” policies.         

As a result, the supposedly “secular” and “progressive” Congress Party and the Indian “Left” have been discredited among the working class, rural toilers and lower middle class. It is the rotten record of these parties that has created the political opening for the BJP to exploit mass social anger and frustration with a combination of phony promises of development and reactionary communalist appeals.

India’s corporate media and big business have provided solid support to Modi and his BJP, which they view as their best bet to ruthlessly pursue their class war agenda at home and great-power aspirations internationally. And they have continued to do so throughout Modi’s second term, during which the BJP has been even more brazen in whipping up animosity against Muslims and other minorities and suppressing dissent, even from within the bourgeois establishment.

The Indian ruling class’s further turn to the right and towards autocratic and fascist forms of rule, as indicated by its lining up behind Modi and his BJP, is not an isolated phenomenon. Rather, it is part of a global trend, personified by Donald Trump in the US, Giorgia Meloni in Italy, Javier Milei in Argentina and Rishi Sunak in the UK.

The BJP’s campaign for the state elections combined Hindu communalism, jingoistic Indian chauvinism and casteism, as well as bare bones populist schemes, often targeting the most desperate of the poor. The party made use of caste divisions for electoral gains, above all, in the selection of its election candidates.

In the wake of Congress’s debacle in the state elections, many of its partners in the newly formed anti-BJP electoral bloc, the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance or I.N.D.I.A., roundly criticised the Congress leadership for its refusal to agree to seat sharing with other alliance members. The INDIA alliance is a political coalition of 28 opposition parties, formed last July, with the aim of ousting the BJP in the 2024 Indian general elections. The Stalinist CPM is part of the INDIA alliance and promotes it, just as it previously did Congress and the UPA, as a “secular” bulwark against the Hindu supremacist BJP. The Stalinists thus provide political life support for the highly discredited big business Congress.

The Congress and INDIA’s alliance “secular” credentials are a fraud. Among its key constituents are the Janata Dal (United), which for most of the past quarter-century has been a major BJP ally, and the fascistic, pro-Hindutva Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray).

As for the Congress, in many of the five states it ran an expressly Hindu chauvinist campaign. In Madhya Pradesh, former Chief Minister Kamal Nath, who led the Congress election campaign in the state, sought to outdo the BJP and the virulently communalist RSS by patronizing chauvinist Hindu priests. Recently he engineered the merger of the Bajrang Sena (a Hindu extremist outfit) with the Congress. In Chhattisgarh, Congress Chief Minister Bhupesh Baghel implemented Hindu chauvinist programs, like building the Ram Van Gaman Path.

Congress has been so closely associated with Hindu chauvinism that even the Stalinists have had to admit it. In its statement on the state election results, the CPM lamented that the Congress Party was “pandering to Hindutva sentiments” during the election campaign, blaming Kamal Nath as “the chief practitioner of this soft Hindutva”.

These criticisms from the CPM are all the more cynical given that they are made of a party that it has been hailing for decades as a “progressive” alternative to the Hindu supremacist BJP. The Stalinist CPM continues to play an extremely reactionary role by subordinating the working class and the rural poor to the pro-big business, pro-imperialist and “soft” Hindutva Congress party and numerous regional right-wing parties under the guise of fighting the fascistic and communal BJP.

Military tensions rise in South America after Venezuela claims oil-rich region controlled by Guyana

Guilherme Ferreira

After the government of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro claimed the oil-rich Essequibo region controlled by Guyana through a referendum held on December 3, military tensions in South America have escalated. Military operations have been carried out by the US and planned by the UK with the Guyana Defense Forces, and Brazil, the region's largest country, sent troops and arms to the border region with Venezuela and Guyana.

US and Brazilian officers review troops at close of Southern Vanguard military exercise in November

In an international context dominated by the US and NATO war against Russia in Ukraine, and Israel’s genocide backed by the imperialist powers in Gaza that threatens to engulf Iran, Venezuela and Guyana are aligning themselves with rival sides of a future third world war.

Since the government of former president Hugo Chávez (1999-2013), Venezuela has maintained strong economic and military relations with China, Russia and to a lesser extent Iran, countries that the head of the US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), Laura Richardson, denounced in October as “strategic competitors [of the US] who have malign intentions” in South America.

In a telephone conversation between Maduro and Russian President Vladimir Putin on December 21, both defended “a fair multipolar world order” and “the rejection of illegal sanctions,” which have been used by US imperialism to undermine both countries economically and to attempt regime change. Putin also advocated Venezuela joining BRICS, a bloc formed by Brazil, Russia, India and South Africa, which recently included Iran and seven other countries to counter US hegemony.

On the other hand, Guyana, a former British colony and member of the Commonwealth that in recent years has seen soaring economic growth due to huge offshore oil reserves discovered and exploited mainly by the American company Exxon Mobil, has sought the support of the US and the UK against the threat of annexation by the Maduro government. Having guaranteed “unwavering support” for Guyana, the Pentagon carried out an air operation in Essequibo on December 7, and Guyanese President Irfaan Ali has repeated that he may allow the US to install a military base in the country.

On Sunday, December 24, the United Kingdom announced the deployment of the warship HMS Trent to Guyana for military exercises with its Defense Force. This follows the SOUTHCOM-sponsored military exercise Tradewinds 23, held in July, which for the second time in the last three years was hosted by Guyana and saw the participation of 21 countries, including the United Kingdom and Brazil.

Venezuela’s defense minister, Vladimir Padrino López, responded that same day by writing on X/Twitter that the British initiative is a “provocation that puts the peace and stability of the Caribbean and our America at risk.” He added: “A warship in waters to be delimited? ... What about the commitment to good neighborliness and peaceful coexistence? What about the agreement not to threaten or use force against each other under any circumstances?”

López was referring to the agreement reached between Presidents Maduro and Ali on December 14 in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, whose president, Ralph Gonsalves, heads the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC). According to the agreement, the two countries undertook “not to make threats or use force,” but rather to seek solutions to the crisis in accordance with “international law” and the “peaceful coexistence and unity of Latin America and the Caribbean.” Another meeting is scheduled to take place in Brazil within the next three months.

Despite the claims in the final declaration, the crisis is far from over. Ali has insisted that the “International Court of Justice (ICJ) will decide the dispute over the borders between Guyana and Venezuela,” whose origins date back to the 19th century. The Maduro government, however, has insisted that it does not recognize the ICJ’s jurisdiction, and that Guyana did not have the right to grant oil exploration concessions to Exxon Mobil in a disputed territory.

The government of Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Workers Party – PT) has been working closely with the US government of President Joe Biden to mediate the crisis between Venezuela and Guyana. Due to the possibility of an invasion by Venezuela crossing through Brazilian territory, the Lula government’s defense minister, José Múcio, has warned, “if a more energetic ‘you won't pass here’ is necessary, we are prepared for it.”

This has led the Lula government to escalate its military presence as a deterrent to any Venezuelan initiative in the sensitive Amazon region bordering both countries. He has moved up by two years the transformation of the 12th Mechanized Cavalry Squadron in Boa Vista, capital of the northern state of Roraima, into the 18th Mechanized Cavalry Regiment, which will increase the number of troops from 230 to 700.

Sixteen armored tanks and dozens of surface-to-surface missiles similar to the American Javelin, widely used by Ukraine against Russia, are also being sent to Boa Vista’s military base.

Since the fraudulent impeachment of PT president Dilma Rousseff in 2016, the Amazon region has been the stage for military exercises with the participation of the US armed forces. In 2017, Brazil and the US, alongside Peru and Colombia (which host most of the US bases in Latin America), carried out the first war games in the region. The military exercise marked a new stage of the US imperialism’s “pivot to Latin America” offensive to counter China’s growing presence in the region.

In 2020, under the government of fascistic President Jair Bolsonaro, a close ally of then-US President Donald Trump, the Brazilian armed forces held the largest military exercise in the Amazon region, simulating a war with an “enemy country,” with clear reference to Venezuela. It took place amid increasing US threats against the Maduro government and the largest recent US military deployment in Latin America.

Since Lula’s inauguration earlier this year, his government has deepened its military partnership with the US while providing criminal political cover for the Biden administration as it tries to assert US imperialism’s strategic interests in the region it historically considers its “backyard.” As part of this process, 1,200 Brazilian military personnel and 300 American military personnel carried out a military exercise between November 1 and 16 on the border between Brazil and French Guiana—the same Amazon rainforest environment as the triple border region between Brazil, Venezuela and Guyana.

According to Brazilian Gen. Luciano Guilherme Cabral Pinheiro, head of the Northern Military Command, the aim of the Combined Operation and Rotation Exercise (CORE) was to “expand interoperability” between the armies of Brazil, the US and “forces made up of NATO member countries,” in addition to “ensuring that the Brazilian Army is trained to take part in international operations.” Since 2019, Brazil has been a “Major Non-NATO Ally,” a position surpassed only by Colombia, which since 2018 has been the only Latin American country to be a “global partner” of NATO.

The crisis between Venezuela and Guyana has been used by the Bolsonaro-led opposition to the Lula government to advance a proposed constitutional amendment that increases the defense budget from 1.1 percent to 2 percent of Brazil's GDP. The measure, however, is also being promoted by leading officials in the Lula government, including its Defense Minister. If approved, the measure would add to an investment of 53 billion reais (11 billion US dollars) already announced by Lula in July to boost the national defense industry. These actions are at the core of the PT’s bourgeois nationalist answer to the tensions with the Brazilian armed forces that emerged in the attempted fascist coup on January 8.

Maduro's claim to Essequibo is based on the capitalist character of his “Bolivarian” government. The Venezuelan bourgeoisie doesn’t want to be left out of the exploitation of oil, and Maduro’s administration sees the enterprise as a way of boosting a severely deteriorated economy and profiting politically ahead of the general elections scheduled for next year. His government also reportedly intends to reactivate PetroCaribe, a partnership between Venezuela and 16 Caribbean countries for the sale of oil and fuel at favorable prices. Launched in 2005 by the Chávez government, it was virtually halted due to US sanctions in 2019.

Despite the Maduro government's anti-imperialist rhetoric, which has mainly targeted Exxon Mobil’s actions in Essequibo, it has relentlessly sought a diplomatic rapprochement with the US. Seeing oil exploitation in Venezuela, the country with the largest known reserves in the world, as a way of minimizing the Ukraine war’s impact on global fuel prices and of undermining oil exportation to China, the US government has slightly relaxed its crippling economic sanctions on Venezuela over the last year. 

At the same time, Washington sees the relaxation of sanctions against Caracas as a way of getting its candidate, María Corina Machado, into next year’s general elections. This process has also been overseen by Brazil, which has mediated negotiations between the Maduro government and the US-backed Venezuelan opposition.

In the latest move toward rapprochement between Venezuela and the US, an exchange of prisoners was announced on December 20. Venezuela released 30 prisoners, including two former members of the US armed forces who took part in an operation in 2020 to overthrow Maduro, and Roberto Abdul, a member of the commission that coordinated the opposition primaries. In exchange, the US released Alex Saab, a former Venezuelan diplomat convicted on trumped-up money laundering charges.

Maduro’s claim on Essequibo has nothing to do with the interests of the Venezuelan working class, let alone the workers of Guyana. Amid a growing domestic crisis, Maduro is trying to deflect a series of internal tensions outwards and, responding to growing geopolitical tensions, to stay in power and guarantee the interests of a sector of the Venezuelan bourgeoisie that has benefited from Chavismo since 1999.

2023: The year of the total COVID cover-up

Evan Blake

Registered nurse Erin Beauchemin monitors an Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation (ECMO) machine connected to a patient in the COVID-19 Intensive Care Unit at Harborview Medical Center Friday in Seattle. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson)

As the year 2023 draws to a close, the contrast between the objective reality of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the delusional fantasy promoted by capitalist politicians and the corporate media has never been greater.

Surveying the official political and media landscape in the US and throughout much of the world over the holidays, there is virtually no mention of the pandemic anywhere. The last time President Joe Biden even publicly referred to COVID-19 was in September, when he jokingly flaunted White House and CDC masking requirements after being exposed to his infected wife Jill.

After two years of continuous efforts to minimize the Omicron variant and all of its progeny as “mild,” the unstated policy towards the pandemic is now simply to ignore it.

Significantly, one of the only recent articles to break this wall of silence was a Washington Post Editorial Board statement titled, “Face it: A ban on ski masks can help fight crime without violating rights.”

While feigning concern over a rise in crime involving the use of ski masks, the article makes clear that the underlying aim is to illegalize all masking in public, including the use of face masks that are one of the most important public health measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19. The editorial endorses a proposal floated by Washington, D.C.’s Democratic Mayor Muriel E. Bowser to impose a “prohibition on ski masks and face coverings.”

The editorial noted that DC removed restrictions on face coverings “in 2020 to encourage the use of face masks during the coronavirus pandemic.” But, the statement concludes, “masks can be read as antisocial in the most basic sense.”

As has happened so many times over the past four years, this Post article signals what will likely soon become the official policy of the Biden administration. The banning of masks is the logical next step in the American ruling class’ drive to enforce their “forever COVID” policy, in which all of society is subject to unending waves of mass infection, debilitation and death. As stated bluntly by Anthony Fauci in August, the elderly and vulnerable will simply “fall by the wayside.”

Contrary to the official narrative that “the pandemic is over” and society must “learn to live with the virus,” the truth is that COVID-19 remains a substantial public health threat which must be addressed. This objective reality can now only be cognized through the work of independent scientists who continue to monitor viral transmission through wastewater sampling, viral evolution, estimates of excess deaths, and the impacts of Long COVID.

In the US, wastewater data from Biobot Analytics show that at present viral transmission nationally is rapidly approaching the second-highest level to date, behind only the initial wave of the Omicron BA.1 subvariant exactly two years ago.

According to the model of Dr. Mike Hoerger of Tulane University, current wastewater levels translate to roughly 1.66 million Americans being infected with SARS-CoV-2 daily, with 11.4 million people (1 in 29) now actively infectious. By January 10, there will be roughly 2 million daily new cases in the US, with nearly 14 million infectious people.

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An even higher percentage of the population is currently infected in England and Scotland, where an estimated 4.2 percent of the population were infected with COVID-19 in the two weeks leading up to December 13, equivalent to roughly 2.55 million individuals or one in 24 people.

Similar spikes in transmission have been recorded in the Baltic and Nordic countries, Germany, Poland, Singapore, Canada and elsewhere.

This global wave of mass infection is being fueled by the Omicron JN.1 subvariant, a descendant of the highly-mutated BA.2.86 variant (nicknamed “Pirola”) which is now dominant globally and was deemed a “variant of interest” by the World Health Organization (WHO) last week. Throughout much of the developing world, wastewater data are entirely unavailable, but it is safe to assume that JN.1 is causing similar spikes in transmission internationally.

Tracking excess deaths attributable to the pandemic has become increasingly difficult, as numerous countries have shifted their baseline to include 2020, thereby skewing their data. The Economist’s excess deaths tracker, long the most reliable, has not been updated since November 18. At that point, their cumulative total of excess deaths stood at a staggering 27.4 million people, roughly four times the official figure of 7 million.

In the US, the CDC stopped reporting excess deaths in September. One of the only up-to-date trackers using pre-pandemic figures as the baseline is run independently by health expert Greg Travis, whose figures indicate that excess deaths remain significantly above pre-pandemic levels, in particular for younger age groups.

Thousands of scientific studies make clear that COVID-19 is the underlying cause of the vast majority of these excess deaths. The virus has been proven to persist in myriad body tissues, with the ability to damage virtually every organ, manifesting in over 100 different symptoms that are often debilitating. A COVID-19 infection places one at greater risk of heart attack, stroke, kidney disease, various neurological disorders, and more.

The WHO itself estimates that one in 10 infections leads to Long COVID and multiple studies have shown this risk is only compounded by reinfections. With each new wave of mass infection, the immense crisis of Long COVID only broadens in scope, with hundreds of millions now believed to be suffering globally.

Among the most alarming impacts of COVID-19 are those on the cardiovascular system, as highlighted in a study published last week in iScience titled, “Predicted risk of heart failure pandemic due to persistent SARS-CoV-2 infection using a three-dimensional cardiac model.”

The study created the first in vitro model of cardiac tissues impacted by SARS-CoV-2, finding that the virus “persistently infects the heart opportunistically causing cardiac dysfunction triggered by detrimental stimuli such as ischemia.” The authors conclude that “the population at risk of future heart failure due to persistent infection of SARS-CoV-2 is expected to exponentially increase.”

Graphical abstract from study, "Predicted risk of heart failure pandemic due to persistent SARS-CoV-2 infection using a three-dimensional cardiac model" [Photo by Kozue Murata,Akiko Makino,Keizo Tomonaga,Hidetoshi Masumoto / CC BY 4.0]

This echoes a similar warning made over a year ago by cardiologist Dr. Rae Duncan, who stated, “I am very concerned that we are going to have a tsunami of cardiovascular complications including heart attack and strokes and vascular dementia over the next few decades.”

None of this scientific reality is brought to the attention of the world’s population, who are instead systematically lied to by the powers-that-be. Throughout the pandemic, science has been continuously distorted and held hostage by an unholy alliance between governments, corporations, the media and the trade unions, all of which are now colluding to enforce the “forever COVID” policy.

Over the course of the past two years, following the evolution of the highly infectious and immune-resistant Omicron variant in November 2021, there has been a total evisceration of all public health response to the pandemic. By design, data collection and reporting on COVID-19 testing, hospitalizations and even deaths have steadily become totally inaccurate.

The year 2023 witnessed the culmination of this process with the WHO and Biden administration ending their COVID-19 public health emergency (PHE) declarations in May. This was combined with the complete privatization of the government’s responsibilities to test, vaccinate and treat the population.

As a result of the ending of the PHE in the US, at least 13.4 million Americans have been disenrolled from Medicaid, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF). Rapid antigen tests are unaffordable for most Americans, while more accurate PCR tests are nearly impossible to access. A growing number of Americans have had to pay over $100 for their latest booster shots, and in October, Pfizer announced that they intend to charge nearly $1,400 per five-day course of the life-saving treatment Paxlovid once the government’s stockpiles run out, likely in the coming year.

The ruling elites’ policy of simply ignoring the pandemic and forcing everyone to fend for themselves is untenable and will inevitably collide with reality. The basic functioning of society cannot sustain unending body blows of mass infection and debilitation with Long COVID.

The refusal of the ruling elites to address or even acknowledge the pandemic is a glaring sign of the dead-end of the capitalist system. The past four years of the pandemic have inured the ruling class to mass death, conditioning them to carry out the most savage barbarism. This is now on full display in the ongoing genocide of the Palestinians, carried out with utter ruthlessness and brutality, with the whole world watching live on social media.

The year 2024 will see a deepening of the global struggle against war, the pandemic and the capitalist system. There are growing calls for renewed mass protests against the genocide in Gaza, which have involved millions throughout the world over the past two months. In the US, tens of thousands have signed a petition appealing to the Biden administration to guarantee funding for Long COVID research, a sign of the intense ongoing opposition to the pandemic.

Volkswagen: Management and works council agree on a billion-euro cuts programme

Ludwig Weller & Peter Schwarz

Following months of secret talks, Volkswagen management and the works council agreed on December 19 on the concrete form of the drastic savings programme that the supervisory board had already decided upon on June13—also with the support of the so-called “employee representatives”.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, works council member Daniela Cavallo, VW CEO Oliver Blume and Lower Saxony’s Minister President Stephan Weil at a factory meeting in Wolfsburg in February 2023. [Photo by Volkswagen]

As early as next year, VW aims to save 4 billion euros on its core brand and as much as 10 billion euros by 2026. The return on sales is to increase from 3.4 to 6.5 percent as a result. The cost of this doubling of profits will be borne by the workforce.

Daniela Cavallo, chairwoman of the General Works Council, is continuing to hoodwink the workforce, claiming that most of the savings will now be achieved independently of personnel cuts. She deliberately did not give any figures on the jobs to be eliminated. The head of the VW core brand, Thomas Schäfer, also remained silent. Both claim that only financial targets are in question and that no plans for job cuts are involved. This is a lie.

Company management assumes that “a five-digit number of jobs,” i.e., at least 10,000, will be lost, as reported by the F.A.Z. newspaper. According to the agreement reached, costs in administration alone are to be reduced by 20 percent, which, according to the F.A.Z., means more than 4,000 jobs will be cut.

This job massacre is supposedly going to take place without “compulsory redundancies.” Cavallo claims that the agreed job security terms will remain in place until 2029, but this means merely that employees will be forced out of the company using other methods, e.g., partial retirement for those born from 1967 onwards, cancellation of agreements and unbearable work stress. In addition, the existing hiring freeze is being extended. The aim is to “maximise staff reductions in line with the demographic curve,” as the company puts it.

The reduction in staff goes hand in hand with a corresponding increase in work intensity. Here, too, Cavallo is being deliberately deceptive. “We will continue to ensure that processes, structures and tasks actually improve and become faster,” she explained, “because work intensification must not result.”

But that is exactly what the job cuts will entail. A drastically reduced workforce will inevitably lead to the “compression of workloads,” resembling conditions at Tesla with a faster pace of work, fewer breaks, overtime and extra shifts when required.

This “compression of workloads” affects not only production and administration but also the process of development and suppliers. The works council and executive have agreed on specific savings targets.

Two hundred million euros are to be saved in the coming year alone through shorter production times, i.e., an increase in the pace of work. Savings of 320 million euros are planned in purchasing, which will further accelerate the wave of bankruptcies and redundancies in the supplier industry. Medium-sized companies with hundreds of employees are already filing for bankruptcy every week, while the big players—Bosch, ZF and Continental—are cutting thousands of jobs. The engineering and car workers trade union, IG Metall, is deliberately playing off its members in auto production against their colleagues employed at suppliers.

The optimisation of “after-sales business”—spare parts, repairs and other services—is also expected to bring savings of more than 250 million euros, which will lead to additional redundancies.

In particular, the work intensity in the product development departments will intensify. One billion euros is to be saved here by 2028 by reducing the development time for new models from 50 to 36 months. For developers, this means long, sleepless nights and overtime.

Wage levels, which were already reduced to below the inflation rate via several previous wage deals, will also fall further in the coming years. It is not Tesla that will adapt to Volkswagen, but rather VW will adopt Elon Musk’s methods of exploitation.

Of course, IG Metall and the works council know all this. That is why they are trying to play down the social impact of these cutbacks. The assertion that the massive job losses and other cuts are necessary and unavoidable is a lie. Only those who line up on the side of management and its profit targets, not the side of VW workers, would argue in this way.

IG Metall and its works councils are experts in fleecing the workforce in order to drive up corporate share prices and profits. A recent insider report by Manager Magazin on a VW supervisory board meeting gave an insight into how the billionaire capital owners impose their profit requirements with the help of their henchmen, falsely called “employee representatives,” together with the social democratic (SPD)-Green state government of Lower Saxony.

Manager Magazin reports that at a meeting in mid-November, members of the supervisory board literally scolded VW boss Schäfer. “They didn’t like what he presented to the company controllers on job cuts, investment cuts and other cost-cutting ideas. Too soft, not well-founded enough, is how insiders summarised the criticism.”

Oliver Porsche, 62, and Günther Horvath, 71, in particular, as representatives of the major shareholder families Porsche and Piëch, repeatedly asked critical questions at the meeting and expressed their dissatisfaction. In the end, they humiliated Schäfer by demanding he revise his report and have it presented next time by a team from management consultant Roland Berger.

Not only management but also the works council bowed to pressure from the billionaire family clans whose fortunes go back to the crimes of the Nazis. What is now being presented is in line with their demands.

For years, VW has implemented one cost-cutting programme after another—all of them drawn up together with IG Metall and its works council and imposed on the workforce. It is time to draw the necessary conclusions. Jobs, wages and working conditions can only be defended independently of,and against the IG Metall bureaucracy.

To this end, action committees must be set up in which all VW workers who want to wage a serious fight join forces. These committees must be independent of the works council and IG Metall.

The threatened cutbacks at Volkswagen are part of an international attack on the working class. Big business and governments everywhere are attacking social gains and rights in order to finance the huge costs of militarism and trade war and drive up share prices.

2023: A year of financial turbulence

Nick Beams

The year is set to close with the US stock market at, or very close to, record highs after what has been a turbulent year for the financial system.

The rise on Wall Street, which has been boosted by the “dovish” turn by the US Federal Reserve at its December 13 meeting, is being fueled by market expectations of at least three and possibly as many as six interest rate cuts in 2024.

New York Stock Exchange [AP Photo/Richard Drew]

The surge is extending across the board. The Dow has hit seven record highs for the month and the S&P 500 is fractionally below its record high reached in January 2022 after posting a 34 percent rise from its low last year. And in what has been described as a “bond carnival” the world biggest debt market, that for US Treasuries, is on track to make its biggest two-month gain on record.

The tech-heavy NASDAQ 100 index is set to record its largest rise since 1999, at the height of the dot.com bubble. It is up 55 percent this year, fueled by the prospects of profits from artificial intelligence.

But the market frenzy is being accompanied by expressions of concern that the extreme volatility in the financial system, evident throughout the year, can spark major problems, if not a crisis.

“We have an ‘everything rally’ at the year’s end. The magnitude is breathtaking,” Sonja Laud, the chief investment officer at the UK’s largest asset manager Legal & General Investment, told the Financial Times (FT). “I’m worried about that. There’s no room for error.”

And, notwithstanding the euphoria in markets over the prospect of rate cuts, the effects of the steep rise in rates over the past 18 months—the Fed rate is now more than 5 percent after being near zero for more than a decade—are still flowing through the system and can cause sudden shocks.

No one, for example, predicted that the rises would lead to three of the four largest banking failures in US history in March, marked by the fastest run on deposits seen in history, and would require a major intervention by the Fed and government authorities to prevent a financial meltdown.

It is significant that one of the areas of greatest concern is the US Treasury market, where government debt is bought and sold. Now approaching $27 trillion it is the bedrock of the US and global financial system.

It is showing signs of increased volatility. In the middle portion of the year yields on 10-year bonds were rising as they were sold off—yields and bond prices move in opposite directions—in the expectation that the Fed was going to maintain its monetary policy tightening stance.

But as inflation numbers started to come down and wage demands continued to be suppressed by the trade union apparatuses, there was a rising clamour in the markets for rate cuts. At first the Fed appeared to resist these demands. But at the December meeting Fed chair Jerome Powell threw in the towel and made a pivot, just two weeks after insisting that the previous orientation would be maintained.

The result has been that the yield on the 10-year bond, which touched just over 5 percent in October is now down to around 4 percent and set to go even lower. Such rapid movements in a market where shifts of fractions of a percentage point can be significant, is indicative of instability.

Another cause of concern which has emerged this year is the so-called basis trade where big bets are made exploiting the slight difference between bond prices and what they will fetch in futures markets. Because the differences are so small traders need to borrow large amounts of money to make the operation profitable.

In a recent post on his Chartbook site, economic historian Adam Tooze noted that regulators were “particularly concerned” about the speculative character of the trade in which a hedge fund employs a minimum of its own money and a maximum of borrowed money.

The amounts involved are large, more than half a trillion dollars.

“According to one set of estimates,” Tooze wrote, “in December 2022 the hedge funds owed $553 billion on basis trade borrowing and were leveraged at a ratio of 56 to 1. This creates the potential either for widespread losses in the credit system or major hedge fund failure.”

The numbers involved have almost certainly gone up this year, creating the risk that the failure of even one fund can set off a “dash for cash” and the kind of “doom loop” that developed in the UK in October 2022 when falling bond prices forced pension funds to sell bonds to raise cash, sending prices even lower.

But as Tooze noted, even as regulators seek to intervene, they are to a great extent operating in the dark because “we don’t know all that we might about how the Treasury market and its working.”

Even if they start to come down, interest rates are likely to remain well above the near zero level to which they fell after the financial crash of 2008 and the Fed’s policy of quantitative easing involving the outlay of trillions of dollars as it bought government debt.

US government debt, boosted by increased government spending on war and the military is reaching new record highs—it now stands at more than $33 trillion. But the interest bill on this debt is rising rapidly and is now the third largest item of government spending after Medicare and Social Security.

As military spending continues to rise this has led to heightened calls for cuts in key areas of social spending. In other words, the attacks on the social position of the working class must be deepened so the ever-increasing war expenditure is financed, and the holders of Treasury debt are paid.

The latest rise in the stock market and the prospect that it could climb even further has created an atmosphere of euphoria. But closer analysis reveals it is highly unstable.

Back in the 1960s and 1970s Wall Street was driven by what was known as the “nifty fifty”—the cohort of high value stocks which brought good returns.

Those days have long gone, and the market is now dominated by the so-called “magnificent seven.” These comprise the big tech names, Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet (the owner of Google), Amazon, Telsa, Meta (the owner of Facebook) and Nvidia.

So top heavy has the market become that at the midpoint of the year the price of these stocks had risen by between 40 percent and 180 percent and were responsible for all the increase in the S&P 500 index in the year to that point as all the others remained flat. Since then, others have joined the “everything rally” but the Mag7 continue to dominate and account for 64 percent of the rise in the S&P.

As the FT recently noted: “Their size is now so pronounced that they do not dominate just US stocks, but a large slice of the performance of global equity markets too.”

This high degree of concentration of financial power, which has accelerated this year, is reflected in the banking sector as well. In the first nine months of the year, according to analysis carried out by the FT, based on figures compiled by an industry tracker, JPMorgan Chase took in almost 20 percent of US bank profits. This was up from around 12 percent a year earlier.

Its earnings have exceeded those of its rivals Bank of America and Citigroup combined and in the words of one Wells Fargo analyst “JPMorgan is the Goliath of Goliaths.”

However, as Wall Street and finance capital in general, salivate on the prospect of cheaper money there are signs of weakness in the underlying economy. Commercial real estate is starting to feel the effects of higher interest rates, consumer spending is being hit by inflation as wages continue to lag, corporate bankruptcies are on the increase, rising by 30 percent in the 12 months to September compared to a year earlier, and mass layoffs are taking place, particularly in high-tech.

Beneath the surface of the present celebrations in financial markets all the conditions which led to the turbulence of 2023 have not gone away but are continuing to intensify.