African National Congress rejects new measures to counter South Africa’s Omicron variant surge

Jean Shaoul

South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa has refused to introduce any new measures to protect lives in the face of a new wave of the pandemic fueled by the Omicron variant. This is despite widespread concerns over the sudden increase in the country’s test positivity rate to nearly 10 percent from 1 percent, according to data released by South Africa’s National Institute for Communicable Diseases.

Like his international counterparts, this billionaire former trade union leader and head of the African National Congress (ANC) that has ruled the country since the end of apartheid in 1994, made it clear that his sole concern is maintaining the profits of the financial elite.

Ramaphosa railed against the imposition of international travel bans on South Africa and other Southern African countries following the identification of the new Omicron variant by scientists in South Africa—which has the most sophisticated genomic sequencing facilities on the continent—after four foreign diplomats tested positive as they left Botswana on November 11 and genomic sequencing confirmed the variant on November 24. The significant and sudden evolutionary leap of the coronavirus, as reflected by the unprecedented number of mutations in the genome, threatens to overwhelm the country’s woefully inadequate health care system and cause untold suffering.

People line up to be vaccinated against COVID-19 in Lawley, south of Johannesburg, South Africa, Wednesday, Dec. 1, 2021. (AP Photo/ Shiraaz Mohamed)

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has declared the new strain of COVID-19, detected in at least 20 countries, a “variant of concern,” indicating it belongs to the highest risk category whose mutations allow it to spread faster, cause more severe illness or hamper the protection from vaccines. The earliest case identified to date was in Nigeria in October.

Ramaphosa called for the immediate reversal of the bans before they caused any further economic damage, particularly to the tourism sector. South Africa’s tourism sector employs 4.5 percent of the population and accounts for 3 percent of GDP. It lost $10 billion in bookings in 2020 and is estimated to be losing about $10 million every week flights from key markets are suspended.

Contradicting the experience of China that has contained its death toll from the virus to less than 6,000 as a result of a raft of measures that have included travel bans, he added, “There is no scientific justification for keeping these restrictions in place. We know that this virus, like all viruses, does mutate and form new variants.”

South Africa would remain on the Coronavirus Alert Level 1, the lowest level. Rather than imposing additional lockdown restrictions, Ramaphosa called on everyone to get vaccinated. He was considering making vaccinations compulsory for specific locations and activities, having earlier floated the idea of vaccine passports, without which people would not be allowed entry to public events. Masks remain mandatory in public, along with a midnight to 4 a.m. curfew.

The country’s third wave was the result of inadequate safety measures implemented by the governments around the world in the interest of reopening the economy. Ramaphosa is now declaring that even those limited mitigation measures are unacceptable. His insistence on vaccines as the sole public measure to protect the public is contradicted by the criminal failure to provide vaccinations for much of the world’s population as the major powers bought up and hoarded vaccines, stopped the World Trade Organisation from relaxing the rules on patents, and failed to fund and supply the United Nation’s COVAX scheme. As a result, just 7 percent of Africa’s population is fully vaccinated.

In South Africa, only 36 percent of the population, just over 16 million people, has been vaccinated, despite its stated goal of fully immunising 70 percent of adults by the end of this year. Although supplies are now more secure, the level of vaccinations is half the weekly target.

While a recent survey shows that 72 percent of people say they are willing to receive a vaccination, or have done so already, the rate of vaccination is largely dependent on class and race, with white citizens more likely to have been jabbed because their greater wealth, medical insurance and car ownership gives them to greater access to vaccination sites. Poorer workers, including the four million registered immigrants and an estimated two to five million undocumented workers who live in constant fear of harassment and deportation, are dependent upon erratic public transport, are likely to lose half-a-day's pay and must wait in line at public clinics.

According to the National Institute for Communicable Diseases, the seven-day moving average of new cases in South Africa has quadrupled in the past week, from 4,717, to 19,292. A further 8,561 cases were recorded on Wednesday.

Fully 75 percent of all currently sequenced coronavirus cases are attributed to the latest variant, soon expected to reach 100 percent. There are fears that it is the most infectious strain of the virus yet and could possibly evade vaccine protection because of its high number of mutations. Also of concern is that some of the cases were among vaccinated people.

While the new variant has been detected in almost every province, infections are exploding in Gauteng, home to Johannesburg and Pretoria, South Africa’s commercial and administrative capitals, and a quarter of its population. Gauteng has seen 580 COVID-related hospitalisations this week, a more than 300 percent increase. Less than 40 percent of the province’s 12 million residents have received at least one shot of the vaccine, the third lowest of 12 provinces.

South Africa has recorded nearly three million infections and around 90,000 deaths, although excess mortality figures suggest that up to three times this number have died directly or indirectly due to the pandemic. The emergence of new strains is of particular concern given the growing evidence indicating that the country's high HIV-prevalence rate is amplifying the risk of coronavirus mutations. Professor Tulio de Oliveira, a geneticist from the University of KwaZulu-Natal and member of the team of scientists that identified Omicron, said that COVID-infected, immuno-compromised patients can struggle to clear the virus from their bodies and over time can become “factories for variants.”

Salim Abdool Karim, the government's chief adviser during the initial response to the pandemic and a professor at South Africa's University of KwaZulu-Natal and Columbia University in the United States, said that infections could triple to more than 10,000 by the end of this week as the new Omicron variant spreads rapidly. He warned that while existing vaccines should be effective at preventing severe disease and the symptoms at this point appear mild—although the cases were among young people whose symptoms tend to be mild—South African hospitals would be under pressure because of the rapidity of transmission likely to result in a flood of admissions within two to three weeks.

While the ANC government has allowed South Africa’s small, well-endowed private sector that serves the elite to cream off most of the country’s doctors, specialists and healthcare workers, it has starved the public system of resources.

Ramaphosa was forced to admit last June that the public health system was collapsing as the country’s faced its third wave of the infection. One large hospital was forced to close earlier this year after a fire, while other large hospitals turned away patients due to a lack of oxygen. Some had to close due to a shortage of trained staff, with doctors making dozens of telephone calls to secure a bed for their critically ill patients and the army’s medical personnel deployed to Gauteng province to help healthcare workers and carry out community testing and contact tracing.

The terrible state of South Africa’s public services testifies to the ANC’s three-decades long suppression of the revolutionary strivings of the black working class. Its main achievement has been to establish a black capitalist class alongside the white capitalists through programmes of “Black Economic Empowerment”. This was sanctified politically through the South African Communist Party’s Stalinist two-stage theory, which proclaimed the formal end of apartheid as a necessary democratic stage before any struggle for socialism.

Chancellor-designate Olaf Scholz and Germany’s federal states reject necessary pandemic restrictions

Johannes Stern

Olaf Scholz (John MacDougall/Pool via AP)

Despite the fact that infections are running out of control in Germany and the highly contagious Omicron variant is spreading, governments at the federal and state level refuse to take the necessary measures to contain COVID-19. They are aggressively pursuing the “profits before lives” policies that have already resulted in more than 100,000 deaths in Germany alone and are creating an ever-expanding catastrophe. Currently, about 60,000 people in Germany become infected every day with close to 500 dying on Monday.

Apparently, this is not yet going far enough for the ruling class. After the federal and state governments deliberated on the pandemic on Tuesday, not a single concrete measure against the mass deaths was announced. There was not even a press conference. Chancellor-designate Olaf Scholz (Social Democratic Party, SPD) and the federal states led by the Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) merely proposed a general vaccination requirement, which the next Chancellor wants to implement by the end of February.

Speaking to Bild-TV, Scholz spoke out firmly against lockdowns and school closures, stressing, “It’s currently mainly about this measure with vaccination and boosters.”

The focus of the outgoing and incoming governments on vaccination as virtually the only response is criminal for several reasons. The vaccines are a powerful weapon against COVID-19, but only in conjunction with all other protective measures. As a result of Germany’s low vaccination rate of 68 percent, about 25 million people, including all children under 12, are virtually without any protection. Only just under 11 percent of the population have received the necessary booster inoculation.

Internationally, the situation is even more dramatic. With a vaccination rate of 42.7 percent, the vast majority of the world’s population—around 4.5 billion people—are not fully vaccinated. What is more, a strategy that relies solely on vaccination is producing new, even more contagious viral mutations, potentially undermining any progress made through vaccination.

On Tuesday, head of US biotechnology company Moderna, Stéphane Bancel, warned of a “significant decline” in the protective efficacy of currently available vaccines against Omicron. “I don’t think the efficacy is in any case at the same level as against the Delta variant,” he told the Financial Times. The large number of mutations on the spike protein that the virus uses to infect human cells, and the rapid spread of Omicron in South Africa, indicated that current vaccines would need to be modified. This could “take several months.

There is no doubt that the Omicron variant is already rampant in Europe, spreading rapidly like the Delta variant before it. Dutch researchers on Tuesday discovered the variant in samples older than any previously known cases. After Belgium, the United Kingdom, Germany, Denmark and the Czech Republic, France also confirmed the first cases yesterday. In Germany, additional cases were reported in Baden-Württemberg (4), Bavaria (15) and Saxony (1).

Despite this dramatic development and demands by scientists and the vast majority of the population to finally act, the ruling class refuses to take the necessary measures. Even the decisions that may be taken at a conference of state premiers scheduled for Thursday are not remotely adequate. According to media reports, they merely involve some additional contact restrictions for the unvaccinated, expansion of the “2G” rule (vaccinated or recovered) in retail outlets, and restrictions on major events and food service.

Comprehensive lock-downs—especially for schools and non-essential businesses—that would be necessary to significantly contain and ultimately even eliminate the virus are vehemently opposed by all parties in the Bundestag (federal parliament) and the trade unions. “The fact that mass events are taking place while schools are being closed, that’s not on. Everything must be done to ensure that educational institutions remain open,” wrote the Education and Science Union (GEW) on Twitter on Tuesday.

At the same time, representatives of the incoming “traffic light” coalition (SPD, Greens and FDP) reacted angrily to the Supreme Court’s ruling that curfews and school closures are perfectly compatible with the constitution. “We would have liked a different result,” said Marco Buschmann, director of the FDP parliamentary group, who is slated to be the future justice minister. FDP vice chairman Wolfgang Kubicki called the ruling “disappointing.”

Only a few days ago, the traffic light parties ended the “epidemic situation of national scope” and thus eliminated the legal basis for uniform nationwide protective measures. To justify this, they had repeatedly invoked the narrative of the extreme right, denouncing protective measures as an attack on democratic rights allegedly incompatible with the constitution.

In reality, it has long been clear which reactionary interests are driving the homicidal pandemic policies. In their coalition agreement, the traffic light coalition partners pledge, among other things, to “increase Germany’s competitiveness as a business location [and] to reactivate the debt brake.” In other words, the SPD, Greens and FDP want to squeeze the hundreds of billions that have flowed to the big corporations and banks as part of the coronavirus bailout packages back out of the population as part of a general attack on workers.

A second factor is the geostrategic and economic interests of German imperialism. In this respect, too, the coalition agreement does not mince its words. It includes an entire chapter entitled “Germany’s Responsibility for Europe and the World,” which advocates a greater role as a world power and the massive rearmament of the Bundeswehr (armed forces).

Germany was aware of “the global responsibility it bears as the world’s fourth-largest economy” and would “form a government that defines German interests in the light of European interests,” it states. The aim is to “establish its own ability to act in the global context and to be less dependent and vulnerable in important strategic areas, such as energy supply, health, raw material imports and digital technology.”

This is primarily a military issue for the ruling class. The coalition agreement envisions, among other things, the procurement of combat drones, massive increases in defence spending, and new war missions. At one point it says, “The Bundeswehr must be reliably equipped in the best possible way in terms of personnel, materiel and finance in accordance with its mission and tasks. The structures of the Bundeswehr must be made more effective and efficient with the aim of increasing operational readiness.”

This also applies to the deployment of the Bundeswehr within Germany. Major General Carsten Breuer, the commander of the Bundeswehr’s Territorial Tasks Command, reportedly also attended the meeting of the federal and state governments. The two-star general, who has been involved with numerous foreign deployments and was the lead author of the current white paper, will head the future federal government’s Coronavirus Crisis Staff directly from the Chancellor’s Office. WSWS warned after Breuer’s appointment:

The decision to put an active Bundeswehr general in charge of the COVID-19 crisis team permits only one conclusion: the traffic light coalition does not regard the pandemic as a medical problem, but rather as a security issue.

The purpose of the crisis team is not to protect the population from the virus, but to protect the government from the population. The incoming German government is preparing to declare a state of emergency in order to suppress resistance to its policy based on sacrificing countless lives to ensure increased profits and share prices. It is a policy that plays Russian roulette with the health of an entire generation of children and adolescents.

Washington hails victory of Honduran opposition candidate

Bill Van Auken

Honduran president-elect Xiomara Castro (Credit: hablaguate)

The landslide victory of Xiomara Castro in the presidential election held Sunday in Honduras has brought to an end a dozen years of rule by the right-wing National Party, which consolidated its grip over the Central American country through a US-backed coup in 2009. That coup overthrew Castro’s husband, then-president Manuel Zelaya, who was bundled onto a military aircraft in his pajamas and flown out of the country.

While the National Electoral Council (CNE) of Honduras has yet to officially declare Castro the winner, the vote count as of Tuesday showed Castro leading her National Party rival Nasry Asfura by nearly 20 percent, with 53.3 percent of the vote, or 987,670 ballots, compared to 34.2 percent, or 633,885 ballots.

Again, while final results have yet to be confirmed, according a vote analysis by the Honduran daily El Heraldo, Castro’s Freedom and Refoundation (Libre) Party will have the largest caucus in the new National Congress, with 51 seats, and, together with the Salvador Party of television personality and right-wing populist Salvador Nasralla, Castro’s vice president-elect, will hold a majority.

Libre and its allies also won control of city halls in the capital Tegucigalpa, San Pedro Sula and other major cities.

Sunday saw a record turnout at the polls, with over 68 percent of eligible voters casting ballots. As the results confirmed, this turnout was driven by popular hostility to the National Party government, headed for the last eight years by Juan Orlando Hernández (known as JOH).

Characterized by rampant corruption, police state repression and death squad killings, and the descent of ever growing layers of the population into abject poverty, the National Party held onto power thanks only to unrelenting violence and unstinting US support.

Washington’s backing of this criminal regime represented only the latest episode in over a century of US imperialist oppression. Washington invaded Honduras seven times between 1903 and 1925 to uphold the interests of the United Fruit Company and the US banks and to suppress strikes and popular revolts.

The country served as a staging ground for both the CIA-orchestrated 1954 coup that overthrew the democratically elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán and the CIA “Contra” war against Nicaragua in the 1980s, a terror campaign that claimed some 30,000 lives.

During the same period, the CIA helped organize death squads, such as the Honduran Army’s Battalion 3-16, which assassinated trade unionists, leftists and students.

These crimes were carried out under governments of both Hernández’s National Party and the Liberal Party, from which Xiomara Castro’s Libre is a split-off.

While routinely described in the corporate media as a “leftist,” Castro’s victory at the polls has been welcomed by Washington. Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Tuesday, Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Brian Nichols praised the election and declared, “I am hopeful in Honduras we’re going to see the kind of change we have been asking.”

A week before the vote, Nicholas was dispatched to Tegucigalpa to read the riot act to Hernández, making it clear that Washington would not accept a repeat of 2017, in which he seized a second term by means of wholesale electoral fraud, with US backing.

Chiming in with an editorial Tuesday, the Washington Post declared its hope that “A democratic transition in Honduras, followed by moderate rule, would have stabilizing effects that could extend all the way to the Rio Grande. Those must be the United States’ objectives.”

The shift toward support for Castro signals no sudden democratic awakening in Washington. As vice president in the Obama administration, Joe Biden served as the point man in the US attempt to lend legitimacy to the right-wing regime created by the US-backed coup that overthrew Zelaya.

Zelaya, a wealthy landowner and businessman elected as the candidate of the Liberal Party, was targeted by Washington not for any sweeping attacks on profit interests, but rather because of his opportunistic alignment with the “Pink Tide” and the Venezuelan government of President Hugo Chávez, which provided impoverished Honduras with cheap oil.

After his overthrow, Zelaya worked to subordinate resistance to the coup to continued US dominance of Honduras and to big business interests. He entered into US-sponsored talks on forming a “unity” regime with those who overthrew him and, after these negotiations went nowhere, meekly accepted the consolidation of a coup regime through a fraudulent election that installed right-wing National Party leader Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo as president.

Castro and the Libre Party have followed the same political line, immediately entering talks with the Honduran National Business Council (COHEP), the main association representing Honduran sweatshop owners and among the most enthusiastic supporters of the 2009 coup. The council congratulated Castro on her victory before it has been officially announced, making it clear they view her as no threat to profit interests. The talks reportedly centered on means of lowering taxes, paying foreign debt and creating the best conditions for an economy founded on the exploitation of cheap labor.

US establishment observers have noted with approval that Castro has given no indication that she intends to restrict, much less close down, the operations of the Pentagon at its Soto Cano Air Base south of Comayagua. It is the largest US military facility in Latin America, where between 500 and 1,500 US troops remain continuously deployed in a projection of US armed might directed at the entire hemisphere.

Washington’s shift toward Castro is bound up in large measure with the complete discrediting of the Hernández government, which even the US Justice Department described as a “narco-state” in the trial of the president’s brother Tony Hernández, who a New York federal judge sentenced to life in prison earlier this year on drug-trafficking charges. The president himself has been named as a co-conspirator in a vast operation involving the collaboration of every level of the Honduran government and its security forces with the drug cartels.

This collaboration with the cartels is by no means limited to the National Party. The former leader of the Honduran drug cartel Los Cachiros, Davis Leonel Rivera Maradiaga, testified in a New York trial earlier this year that he had paid half a million dollars in bribes to Zelaya, while Zelaya’s former chief aide and third-place candidate for the Liberal Party in Sunday’s election, Yani Rosenthal, served a three-year prison sentence in the US after pleading guilty to drug money laundering charges.

Beyond the corruption, which has contributed to the staggering growth of criminal violence, the Honduran people have confronted a social catastrophe during the last dozen years of National Party rule. In July of this year, Honduras’ National Institute of Statistics issued a report showing that 73.6 percent of Honduran households are subsisting under conditions of poverty, without resources to pay for basic needs in terms of food, housing and other essential goods and services. It stated that 53.7 percent of Hondurans are living under conditions of “extreme poverty,” confronting hunger and lack of adequate housing.

Conditions of life for the Honduran masses have been battered by the COVID-19 pandemic, the impact of hurricanes Eta and Iota a year ago and years of drought along the Pacific coast. The last year has seen the official unemployment rate double.

The Biden administration’s most immediate concern in relation to Honduras is stemming the flow of migrants and refugees to the US border. This was crudely expressed in the Washington Post editorial, which began by stating that the US has “many reasons … to be interested in the outcome [of the Honduran elections]—309,000 reasons, to be precise.” That is the number of Honduran migrants detained at the US-Mexico border over the course of the past year, the vast majority of them illegally denied the right to apply for asylum and summarily expelled.

Hernández had outlived his usefulness in the context of Washington’s attempts to turn back the migrant flow, while making a pretense of addressing the “root causes” of migration, including corruption. This pretense has been joined with a major increase in funding for security forces of Honduras and the other “Northern Triangle” governments to turn back the tide of refugees with clubs, guns and bullets.

In embracing the electoral victory of Castro, US imperialism hopes to provide a “democratic” facade for is counterrevolutionary and anti-immigrant policies in Central America.

However, the massive social discontent expressed in the landslide repudiation at the polls of the last dozen years of National Party rule will find no resolution in the formation of a new capitalist government under Castro and the Libre Party.

US-backed forces in Solomon Islands continue campaign to remove government after anti-Chinese riots

Patrick O’Connor

US-supported opposition forces in Solomon Islands are preparing a parliamentary no-confidence motion for December 6, aimed at removing the government and reversing its diplomatic recognition of China.

The attempt to oust the government through a parliamentary vote follows the failed coup that saw violent rioting in the country’s capital, Honiara on November 24–26. A mob of about 1,000 people attempted to storm the parliament and were blocked by riot police firing tear gas and rubber bullets. A hut adjacent to the parliament was razed, as was a police station and Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare’s residence.

In three days of violence, a total of 56 buildings were burned to the ground, some of them housing multiple small businesses. Chinese-owned shops and outlets were targeted. Three people were murdered, one adult and two children. Police found their charred bodies in the attic of one of the torched buildings.

Australian Army soldiers talk with local citizens during a community engagement patrol through Honiara, Solomon Islands, Saturday, Nov. 27, 2021. (Cpl. Brandon Grey/Department of Defence via AP)

The government estimates that 1,000 people have lost their jobs as a direct result of the destruction. More than 100 people have been arrested over the violence and looting.

The rioters were led by a separatist group called Malaita 4 Democracy that is closely connected with Daniel Suidani, the provincial premier of Malaita. Over the last two years, Suidani has promoted anti-communist and Christian fundamentalist demagogy against the national government and its 2019 decision to switch diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to Beijing.

Suidani has received crucial political support and funding from Washington. In August 2019, just weeks before Sogavare announced the country’s diplomatic recognition of China, a team of US officials travelled to Malaita and met with Suidani. The World Socialist Web Site noted at the time: “The contingent included members of the Department of State, Department of Defence, Department of Trade, as well as embassy and aid personnel. US intelligence agencies were no doubt also represented in the group. Unusually, the visit to Malaita was not accompanied by a single press release or social media post.”

The US subsequently pledged investment money for the construction of a new port in the province, and $US25 million in direct funding to Suidani’s administration. USAID officials are active in Malaita, as are others with the Republican Party-connected International Republican Institute, who have conducted “training” sessions for Suidani’s political allies.

Flouting the national government, Suidani has maintained independent ties with Taiwan and insists that no Chinese investment is permitted in Malaita. Suidani’s supporters last year issued a pogromist threat, demanding that all people of Chinese background leave the province within 24 hours.

Washington’s support for these forces is being suppressed in the Australian and Western media in the aftermath of the violent riots.

Several reports have suggested that the violence was spontaneously triggered by young people affected by poverty and unemployment. There is no question that the Pacific state is wracked by an enormous economic and social crisis. Its lucrative natural resources, including gold and timber, have been looted for decades by transnational corporations. A tiny elite layer have been enriched in the process, while much of the working class and rural poor lacks access to basic infrastructure such as electricity, running water, and public education.

The rioting, however, was not a spontaneous protest but part of a planned coup attempt. More information is emerging on how this was organised.

The day before the violence erupted, government ministers from Malaita issued a public statement warning of what was being prepared and calling on Suidani to “refrain from inciting Malaitans to engage in unlawful activities.” The statement also demanded that opposition leader Mathew Wale “refrain from fanning the flames of violence and incitement.” The government ministers urged Suidani and the opposition to act to prevent “our brothers and sons from carrying out such potentially dangerous and violent actions.”

One can imagine the howls of outrage that would emerge from the US and Australian media and political establishment if China were to act in a manner comparable to Washington in the Pacific. What would be the response if, within a country that recognises Taiwan, Beijing established diplomatic relations with a rebel province and then funded forces that staged a violent coup attempt? The Chinese government would be roundly denounced for violations of international law, and the issue would be made headline news.

It remains to be seen how the “regime change” drive in Solomon Islands will proceed. Prime Minister Sogavare insists that his government retains a parliamentary majority and will defeat the no confidence motion.

More than 100 Australian police and soldiers are now in Honiara, together with additional forces from Papua New Guinea and Fiji. The Australian-led intervention force was invited in by Sogavare, and their deployment ended the three days of rioting.

Suidani has bitterly complained about this, effectively criticising Canberra for interrupting efforts to overthrow the government. “Australia can help but not like this, through an intervention force, it’s not helpful,” the Malaitan premier told ABC News. “This intervention isn’t good because it’s keeping a corrupt prime minister in power… Australia should not be keeping this guy in power.”

While Suidani is publicly complaining about the Australian-led intervention, behind the scenes Australian officials are likely to be undermining the Sogavare government and encouraging defections to the opposition.

In 2006–2007, when Sogavare was previously in power, his government was the target of a sustained destabilisation drive orchestrated by the Australian government. The prime minister was regarded as a threat to the neo-colonial RAMSI operation (Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands) that had been launched in 2003.

Canberra’s ultimately successful campaign to remove Sogavare from office involved a series of provocations, including the illegal arrest and rendition to Australia of the Solomon Islands’ Attorney General Julian Moti, on trumped up charges. After this case was thrown out by Australia’s High Court, the Australian government was forced to issue a formal apology and pay compensation.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has declared that Australian forces are only in the Solomon Islands to maintain security, will remain only for “weeks,” and will play no role in the country’s internal political disputes.

No credence whatsoever can be lent to these assurances. The Australian ruling class has longstanding and significant economic and geostrategic interests in the country, and in the wider South Pacific region. More broadly, Canberra is an intimate partner in Washington’s aggressive drive to maintain its hegemony in the Asia-Pacific and to counter China’s growing economic and diplomatic influence.

US seeks to block Spanish investigation into CIA operation against Assange as British ruling on extradition appeal is “imminent”

Oscar Grenfell

Over the past 24 hours, WikiLeaks has reported that a British High Court ruling on a US appeal aimed at securing Julian Assange’s extradition is “imminent.” Several other legal sources have also stated that the decision is to be brought down in early December.

The US appeal was directed against a January District Court judgement, which blocked Assange’s dispatch to his American persecutors. That narrow verdict endorsed the authoritarian argument that states have a right to prosecute publishers of “national security” material, but rejected extradition on the grounds that it would be “oppressive,” given Assange’s acute medical issues and the draconian conditions in which he would be detained in the US.

Judge Vanessa Baraitser accepted that there would be a “high risk” of Assange committing suicide, if he were extradited.

The US appeal, heard in late October, centred on callous attempts to undermine expert medical testimony about Assange’s health issues, and bogus assertions that the conditions of his imprisonment would not be as bad as claimed by the defence. The US “assurances” themselves stated that Assange could be placed under “Special Administrative Measures” at any point during his detention, a regime of total isolation likened to “living death” by human rights organisations.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is taken from court, May 1, 2019. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham, File)

At the appeal hearings, the defence spotlighted a recently-published Yahoo News report, which documented plans by the Trump administration and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to kidnap Assange or assassinate him when he was a political refuge in Ecuador’s London embassy in 2017.

Based on the anonymous statements of more than thirty former US officials, the article made clear the murderous plans were hatched in retaliation for Assange’s exposure of mass CIA spying and hacking operations. Officials explained that the US Justice Department cobbled together its indictment of Assange, over separate WikiLeaks publications, so that there would be a pseudo-legal cover if the CIA proceeded with its kidnap plan.

As Mark Summers, QC told the appeals hearing, “This is the first time, of which we are aware, that the US has sought the assistance of a UK court in obtaining jurisdiction over someone where the evidence suggests it has contemplated, if not plotted, the assassination, kidnap, rendering, poisoning of that person.”

The gross illegality of the US pursuit of Assange has not previously stopped the British judiciary from facilitating his persecution at every step. And whatever the upcoming ruling decides will be the subject of further appeals, underscoring the crucial importance of developing a movement of the working class for Assange’s immediate freedom.

While the US authorities have aggressively used willing British courts to further their vendetta against Assange, they have adopted a very different attitude to other legal proceedings relating to the WikiLeaks founder.

In a follow-up article late last month, Michael Isikoff, the chief investigative correspondent at Yahoo News reported that “The Justice Department has failed to respond to multiple requests from Spanish authorities for help in an investigation into a local security firm suspected of being used by the CIA to conduct aggressive—and potentially illegal—surveillance of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.”

The firm involved is UC Global, which held the Ecuadorian government contract for managing security at its London embassy. Whistleblowers from the company have alleged that in 2016, its CEO David Morales entered into a secret agreement with emissaries of the CIA to transform the embassy into a hub of spying and dirty tricks against Assange. Morales was arrested and later released on bail in late 2019, and is the subject of Spanish judicial proceedings involving three sets of alleged victims of his activities: Assange, WikiLeaks staff and German reporters who collaborated with them, and former Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa.

Extensive evidence in the public domain has demonstrated that UC Global recorded every aspect of Assange’s life, including privileged meetings with his lawyers, before turning over the material to the CIA. The firm was allegedly involved in break-ins and other attacks on Assange’s lawyers, including in Spain. And the whistleblowers have asserted that there were discussions about facilitating a kidnapping or poisoning of the WikiLeaks founder, in cahoots with American intelligence.

Isikoff reported: “Since June of last year, Spanish judges have sent three requests for information to the Justice Department primarily seeking information about the ownership of IP addresses believed to be in the United States that had access to files documenting Assange’s activities while he was holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, according to copies of the requests reviewed by Yahoo News.”

All of those requests had been ignored by the Justice Department, despite an agreement between Spain and the US for mutual assistance in criminal investigations. Justice Department officials, however, have sought to prise information from the Spanish judiciary about the case. Previous reports have indicated this included a sinister and extraordinary demand for the identities of the UC Global whistleblowers.

“I am not so pleased about it,” Santiago Pedraz, the investigating judge told Yahoo about the US stonewalling, adding: “They have absolutely not answered anything.”

There is no innocent explanation for the US response, which combines intense interest in the proceedings and the material held by the judiciary, with an attempt to prevent the investigation from establishing the truth. The Justice Department’s actions can only be interpreted as a tacit admission that Morales and UC Global were functioning as a CIA cut-out.

That the Justice Department is covering for the CIA is significant. Prosecution lawyers for the US extradition have previously suggested that even if there had been a spying operation against Assange, it had nothing to do with the Justice Department and the proceedings for extradition. They have touted supposed Chinese walls between different branches of the US government. But in the Spanish case, the Justice Department is protecting CIA surveillance of Assange, at the same time as it seeks his extradition from Britain.

The latest Yahoo revelations coincide with another explosive report, indicating that sections of the corporate press were aware of, and complicit in, the spying operation as it was underway.

An article in MintPress, by John McEvoy and Pablo Navarrete, published correspondence between Guardian journalist Stephanie Kirchgaessner and a “source” within UC Global, between July and November, 2018.

In September 2018, Kirchgaessner published a story alleging that in late 2017, there had been a failed plot for Assange to escape the embassy and travel to Russia, a narrative that has been thoroughly debunked by Assange’s lawyers and WikiLeaks staff.

Instead, in 2017 there were discussions between Assange, his lawyers and Ecuadorian officials, about conferring diplomatic status upon him to heighten his legal protections. There were also conversations about using that diplomatic status to seek refugee in a third-country. Aitor Matinez, one of Assange’s lawyers, told MintPress the countries Assange and his representatives proposed were China, Serbia, Greece, Bolivia, Venezuela and Cuba. When an Ecuadorian official suggested Russia, it was dismissed out of hand by Assange.

The plans would come to nothing after they were discovered by the US. As Isikoff’s initial article on the CIA campaign against Assange documented, the American authorities and their British counterparts had planned a shoot-out and other terroristic methods in London if Assange did leave the building.

The discussions about Assange’s potential exit were surveilled by UC Global, and passed on to the CIA. A December 21, 2017 meeting between Assange and Rommy Vallejo, then the head of Ecuadorian intelligence, prompted particular panic. Within 24 hours of the discussion, which reportedly centred on the means of Assange exiting the embassy, the US issued an international warrant for his arrest, demonstrating that it had been apprised of the conversation and its content by UC Global.

One of Kirchgaessner’s messages to her UC Global source is particularly significant. On November 12, 2018, she asked them for a “transcript” of the meeting between Vallejo and Assange. This would clearly indicate awareness that Assange’s meetings were being spied on by an entity that was hostile to him. The conversation with Vallejo was attended by Assange’s lawyers, meaning the Guardian reporter was requesting illegal material, obtained through covert surveillance, of privileged discussions involving a political refugee and his attorneys.

At the time, the Guardian was pumping out false stories seeking to depict Assange as a “Russian agent.” This included a notorious 2018 piece, alleging that Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort had visited the WikiLeaks founder in the embassy. MintPress cited internal UC Global reports indicating that the firm had tried to find evidence of such a visit, prior to it taking the security contract, but had come up empty handed. The Guardian published its lies about a fictitious meeting nonetheless and has never retracted them.

The latest revelations demonstrate that the web of those implicated in the illegal campaign against Assange is wide. The Guardian collaborated with entities, including UC Global, whom it must have known were themselves collaborating with the US authorities against Assange.

Beyond underscoring the role of the official press as a willing accomplice of the intelligence agencies, however, this suggests that the spying operation was an open secret in the political and media establishment. If the Guardian was aware of the illegal surveillance, so too must have been sections of the British Labour Party, the British government, and their counterparts in Australia.

Supreme Court launches frontal assault on right to abortion

Patrick Martin

Wednesday’s oral arguments on abortion before the Supreme Court showed how close the court is to rescinding this fundamental democratic right, with colossal political consequences.

Two generations of Americans have no experience of the world before Roe v. Wade, during which obtaining an abortion was a surreptitious, often criminalized process, sometimes ending in physical mutilation and even death, and the right of women to make such decisions was subordinated to the reactionary ministrations of police, priests and politicians. They will react with justified fury to this attempt to turn back the clock.

The hearing underscored the role of a clerical-reactionary faction in the US ruling elite, closely allied to the fascistic forces headed by ex-President Donald Trump. The prominence of right-wing Catholics on the high court—Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, and Chief Justice John Roberts—has particular significance on the issue of abortion, where they are imposing a religious dogma in flagrant violation of the separation of church and state.

The Supreme Court building in Washington, Sunday, May 3, 2020. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)

These five justices, plus Trump appointee Neil Gorsuch, have clearly decided to uphold the Mississippi law banning abortion after a pregnancy reaches 15 weeks. The six justices asked few questions and seemed largely indifferent to the arguments being made. Their main concern was whether the case should be used for an immediate repeal of the landmark 1973 ruling, or whether to uphold the Mississippi law on narrower grounds, while not yet officially repealing Roe.

This would accomplish the same goal a bit more slowly, since it would abolish the standard set by Roe and the 1992 follow-up decision in Planned Parenthood vs. Casey, which upheld the right to abortion until the fetus is viable outside the womb, at approximately 23 weeks.

If fetal viability is no longer the standard, there is no judicial reason why the 15-week limit set by Mississippi could not be further lowered, to 12 weeks, eight weeks, or even six weeks, before most women even know they are pregnant. A six-week “limit” would be essentially the same as an outright ban.

Much of the hearing was given over to the three remaining moderate liberal members venting their concern that the court was discrediting itself in the eyes of the American people, who overwhelmingly support abortion rights. (Opinion polls on the eve of the hearing found huge majorities opposed to repealing Roe v. Wade, ranging up to 75 percent in an ABC/Washington Post survey.)

Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor all warned that the court was taking unprecedented action in threatening a democratic right on which millions have relied for the past 50 years and doing so only because the composition of the court has changed, not because of any change in the nature of the issue or in public sentiment.

The sharpest criticism came from Sotomayor, who cited the statements of Mississippi state legislators, openly declaring that they had passed the 15-week law “because we have new justices.” She asked, “Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts? I don’t see how it’s possible.”

The composition of the court is itself a manifestation of the decay of American democracy, brought to the brink of collapse last January 6 when Trump attempted to overturn the 2020 election and maintain himself in power.

Trump himself appointed three of the six members of the ultra-right majority. The newest justice, Amy Coney Barrett, was installed only days before the election, while Trump was openly declaring he would not abide by the results and was counting on Barrett to adjudicate a challenge to the election of Biden in the Supreme Court.

Neil Gorsuch was named to a seat held open for nine months by Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, who insisted that Barack Obama did not have the right to fill a vacancy during a presidential election year—a precedent he cynically repudiated to push through Trump’s nomination of Amy Coney Barrett four years later.

The Democratic Party conducted no serious opposition to any of Trump’s nominations. They protested impotently over Gorsuch. They side-tracked the hearings for Brett Kavanaugh, Trump’s second nominee, into a #MeToo-style diversion, while avoiding any discussion of his right-wing views and his role in the impeachment conspiracy against Bill Clinton.

This process reached its nadir with Barrett, the law professor affiliated with a reactionary Catholic secret society, who replaced Ruth Bader Ginsburg. There was no basis in identity politics to oppose replacing a woman with another woman, and the Democrats were busy covering up Trump’s ongoing conspiracy to overturn the election, so they simply stood by as the court was moved sharply further to the right.

The Democrats have spent the past two decades accommodating and adapting to the right-wing attack on abortion rights. The New York Times—a quasi-official publication of the Democratic Party—marked the looming onslaught on the right to abortion by publishing and prominently featuring a rant by Ross Douthat, under the headline “The Case Against Abortion.”

The right to abortion is a class question. For all the handwringing of the Democrats, their social base in the upper middle class is not unduly exercised at the prospect of the repeal of Roe v. Wade. Women with money will still have access to abortion if they want it. They can easily travel to California or the Northeast, where it will still be legal, or even to Canada and Europe.

It is a far different question for working-class women in the South, the Midwest and other states where abortion would become severely restricted or outright illegal in the event of the repeal of Roe. Even now, lower-income women in those states have great difficulty in obtaining an abortion—in Mississippi, for example, there is only one clinic providing abortions in the entire state.

In Texas, the new state law authorizing vigilante civil lawsuits over any abortion provided after six weeks of pregnancy has virtually shut down access to abortion services in the second largest US state, forcing women to drive hundreds of miles to Oklahoma, Louisiana or New Mexico, with the risk of losing their jobs because of the time off work and at great expense.

Figures presented to the Supreme Court in amicus briefs and during the oral argument document the hardship for working women. One in four women will seek an abortion in her lifetime, and of these, 75 percent are low income, 59 percent already have children, and 55 percent experience disruptive life events, such as losing a job or a partner, which are factors in their choice to end a pregnancy.

The far-right political forces being mobilized to destroy the right to abortion are the same forces that have played a leading role in demanding the ending of all restrictions on the COVID-19 pandemic and which came close to establishing a fascist dictatorship with the coup attempt of January 6.

The Democrats have capitulated to these political forces over and over: They have totally accepted the demands for the reopening of schools and abandonment of other pandemic restrictions, and they have sought to cover up the role of their Republican “colleagues” in the January 6 coup attempt.

Philippine government ramps up campaign for “living with the virus”

Dante Pastrana

The Philippine health department reported today 167 new deaths from COVID-19. The total death toll now stands at 48,712 and counting. Since the pandemic began, 2,833,038 people have been infected in the country. Active cases are at 15,327 with over 1,025 in intensive care and 457 requiring ventilators.

The Philippine government of President Rodrigo Duterte, egged on by the financial elites, is rapidly dispensing with all of its half-hearted mitigation efforts. Like capitalist governments around the world, it aims to force workers and the general populace to “live with the virus” and remove all barriers to the profit-making of the capitalist class.

In November, the Philippine education department launched a pilot program of in-person schooling, comprising 100 public schools and 20 private schools. An estimated 5,245 students, many from kindergarten to Grade 3, participated, according to the news website, Rappler.com.

Three participating schools in Zambales province, however, according to the same website, postponed the opening following five teachers and two staff members testing positive for the Covid-19 virus.

Police operate a checkpoint Tuesday, Aug. 4, 2020, outside Manila, Philippines. (AP Photo/Aaron Favila)

In September, the Philippine government abandoned its quarantine tier system in Metro Manila, the national capital region, just days after daily infection rates in the country reached 26,208, the highest then recorded. It shifted to a so-called alert level system, aimed at ending mobility restrictions and based not on the daily infection rates but on vaccination rates and health facilities utilization. Since then, the alert level system has been rolled out for nationwide implementation with the capital and other key urban areas at alert level 2, a less restricted level.

The Duterte government never sought to break the chain of transmission, much less eliminate the virus. It did not conduct mass testing and contact tracing was severely hampered by lack of funds. While it imposed militarized lockdowns around poor communities, exceptions for construction, export processing and business outsourcing were carved out which kept workers in unsafe building sites, factories and poorly ventilated offices.

To the extent that the government sought to regulate the infection rate it was to prevent the largely privately-owned healthcare system from buckling under the wave of patients desperately seeking urgent care.

Two key elements of the government’s pandemic response, related to children, however, quickly drew the ire of the capitalist class. These were mobility restrictions imposed upon those 18 years of age and below, and the shutdown of all schools, public and private, which were shifted to remote learning.

Socioeconomic Planning Secretary Karl Chua was quoted in a Manila Bulletin report in January complaining that restrictions imposed on children dampened demand as families with at least three members accounted for 90 percent of total non-essential spending.

Chua added, “Since children are not allowed to go out of their homes, even to study, family activities are restricted, and thus a big part of the economy is not functional.”

Parents, according to another study, were the largest contributors to the PHP 547 billion ($US10.8 billion) informal eat-out market, accounting for 48 percent of the spending, equivalent to PHP 277 billion.

Unsurprisingly, a key component of the alert level system from levels 1 to 3 is the lifting of all mobility restrictions on children. The government placed the national capital region at level 2 in November and is expected to bring the capital to level 1 by December.

The Philippine Star reported on October 26 that the shift in the national capital region in October from level 4 to level 3 was estimated to have resulted in an additional PHP 14.2 billion in sales over a period of two weeks.

Symptomatic of the drive in the capitalist class to reopen the economy is Joey Concepcion, one of the fifty richest Filipinos. Concepcion has an estimated worth of PHP 8.8 billion pesos and is a key business adviser to the Duterte administration.

According to business news website, bilyonaryo.com, in a webinar that presented increased vaccinations as a pretext for a rapid reduction of anti-Covid-19 restrictions, Concepcion stated, “Let’s take a more aggressive role in really vaccinating our citizens, especially in the provincial areas. And if we are able to do that, then if cases do go up—but who cares if cases do go up?”

The report quoted Concepcion as stating that catching COVID-19 should not deter Filipinos from going out and spending as he claimed they were unlikely to die or be hospitalized if they have been vaccinated against the virus.

In April last year, as the pandemic ravaged the Philippines, Concepcion also batted successfully for the resumption of construction work.

Arguing even then that workers must learn to live with the virus, he was quoted in Rappler.com as stating that the poor were unaffected by the virus because: “Maybe because they are so used to so much exposure that they have a better immunity than us, who are sheltered in a well-protected environment.”

According to the BusinessWorld, like the capitalist class around the globe, the fifty richest families in the Philippines saw their collective wealth increase by 30 percent, totaling PHP 3.94 trillion pesos over the course of the pandemic.

The consequences for working people have been terrible.

The Philippine Daily Inquirer reported in August that the Philippine Paediatric Society presented data that 48,411 children aged 18 and younger had been infected with COVID-19. Of the cases in children, 40.2 percent were in the 15- to 20-year-old age range, 23.8 percent among 10- to 14-year-olds, 17.4 percent among five to nine-year-olds, and 18.5 percent among those aged four and below.

The COVID infection rate is likely drastically underreported. A large portion of workers in the Philippines are paid on a day-to-day basis. Under a regime of “no work, no pay,” these workers and their families who, if they are lucky, have received meagre financial aid from the government, have suffered horrendously under the government lockdowns over the past two years.

Two or three families often share a single dwelling and a positive COVID-19 test result of one member places all under quarantine and cuts them off from their desperately needed earnings. As a single COVID-19 test costs over half of the monthly minimum wage earned by a Metro Manila worker, there is every incentive for ordinary people to avoid being tested for the virus, even they are symptomatic.

Omicron COVID-19 variant detected in the United States

Benjamin Mateus

The first case of a person infected with the Omicron variant in the United States was identified yesterday. The fully vaccinated individual whose identity is being protected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is a working-age adult who resides in San Francisco.

According to the CDC, the infected person returned from South Africa on November 22. Subsequently, they developed mild COVID symptoms prompting testing, which was confirmed positive on November 29. Genetic sequencing was conducted on the sample at the University of California, San Francisco, showing the infection was caused by the Omicron variant. They have remained in self-quarantine since, and all known contacts have thus far tested negative.

During the daily White House briefing on the pandemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci, White House medical adviser and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said, “We knew it was just a matter of time before the first case of Omicron would be detected in the United States.”

The Biden administration refused to take any serious measures to contain the spread of the disease.

San Francisco health director Dr. Grant Colfax talks about the first confirmed case of the omicron variant as Mayor London Breed, right of podium, listens during a COVID-19 briefing outside City Hall in San Francisco, Wednesday, Dec. 1, 2021. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg)

Speaking at the White House Wednesday, Biden pledged that there would not be any “shutdowns or lockdowns.” Even for international travel, the new measures to be employed, COVID testing for all travelers 24 hours before boarding regardless of vaccine status, will do little to slow down the spread of the coronavirus.

The Wednesday White House press conference was also notable for the near complete omission of the Delta variant's continuous deadly assault on the population. Such developments have become so commonplace they are no longer worth even serious considerations.

For instance, there was no mention that for 16 straight weeks, more than 100,000 children have been infected with COVID. Since September 1, 2021, 1.85 million children have been infected, meaning that 27 percent of all infected children became infected in just the last three months. Seven more children died over the holiday week, bringing the cumulative total to 643 perished from COVID.

Meanwhile, the state of the pandemic in Michigan grows disastrous each day. The seven-day average of daily COVID cases climbed to a record high of 8,409. The Positivity rate is nearly 20 percent. The number of COVID-positive adults hospitalized has reached a record pandemic high of 4,296. Two hundred people died yesterday from COVID. And there is no indication that the situation will ease anytime soon.

On November 29, more than 216,000 COVID cases were reported by The New York Times COVID tracker.. The Worldometer COVID dashboard noted there were 113,000 COVID cases and 1,500 COVID deaths yesterday. In total, there have been almost 50 million COVID cases and over 800,000 reported deaths in the US.

With the confirmation of the US case, at least 24 countries across five continents have identified the new variant. In the UK, where the sequencing of coronavirus is relatively robust, 22 cases have been found. And, as of this writing, Hong Kong and Ireland confirmed Omicron cases, adding to the list of countries by the hour.

In South Africa, where 77 cases have been sequenced, new COVID-19 cases have almost doubled, climbing from 4,373 on Tuesday to 8,561 on Wednesday, per the country’s health officials. Health experts have said the curve of infections is far steeper than Delta and predominately attributed to Omicron. Hospitalizations have been rising in concordance with cases. A worrisome data point is that admissions for children under four years of age have been dramatic.

Dr. Nicksy Gumese-Moeletsi, a virologist at the World Health Organization, told Newsweek, “There is a possibility that really we’re going to be seeing a serious doubling or tripling of the cases as we move along or as the week unfolds. There is a possibility that we are going to see a vast increase in the number of cases being identified in South Africa.” Only 24 percent of the country’s population has been fully vaccinated.

The repeated rise of new, more virulent variants is not just a biological phenomenon. The more people are infected, the more the virus is likely to mutate. Such ripe conditions for the constant evolution of the virus are a direct byproduct of the policies set forth by the government of capitalist countries who deem the market must remain unfettered by the concerns raised by the pandemic.

Dr. Peter Jay Hotez, Dean for the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, offered his take on the current Omicron variant. He tweeted, “[It] isn’t a surprise. We’ve been saying the finding of Omicron in the US was practically inevitable given that it’s in multiple European countries.” Warning that the spread of the omicron variant does not necessarily mean that the decline of delta variant cases, Hotez warned, “I see a possible twin epidemic or syndemic unfolding …”