A glimpse into what Chinese workers think about COVID restrictions

Lily Zhao

Last weekend, protests erupted across major cities in China. These relatively small protests, largely drawn from middle class layers, were dominated by demands for an end to the official Zero-COVID policy and the abolition of mass testing, quarantining and lockdowns. Their slogan of “We want freedom” reflected their hostility to necessary public health measures that infringes on their lifestyle and in some cases, their business interests. The ending of Zero-COVID, which the Chinese government is now implementing, will only result in a social disaster—mass infections, deaths in the millions and many more cases of Long COVID.

Residents line up for the first round of mass COVID testing in the Jingan district of western Shanghai, China, Friday, April 1, 2022. [AP Photo/Chen Si, File]

The voice of the working class rarely has a major presence on Chinese social media and especially in the online discussions about the Zero-COVID policy. Two posts from workers in different parts of China paint a very different picture from the blanket coverage in the US and international media falsely painting last weekend’s protests as the voice of the people. Despite the hardships entailed, workers are very conscious of the dangers of infection and are supportive of necessary measures to prevent it.

Food delivery workers in Beijing

A food delivery worker under Meituan, one of the two largest food delivery platform in China, made a post on social media about two weeks ago.

The residential compound in which they had been living was put under lockdown on the morning of November 20 and no one was allowed to enter or exit. A number of food delivery workers decided to stop living there and left the compound before the lockdown was put in place. They were worried about losing their only source of income if they stayed in there, which is what happened last time when the compound was put under lockdown for a week.

Along with 15 other delivery workers, they had been homeless ever since. As the worker described in his post, “Some of us has been living at food delivery stations and some at cheap hotels, but most of us have been sleeping on hallways of office buildings or entrance way to restaurants.” Temperatures in Beijing in late November reached below freezing point in the evenings. Most of these “lodging” places had no heating.

However, even these options were becoming unavailable. The worker continued, “As restaurants in Beijing moved to stop dine-in services, they would not let people [sleep] there anymore. As most people started working remotely, office buildings were harder to get into as well.” Most working class neighborhoods where cheap short subleases could be found had been under lockdown as well and hotels were just too unaffordable.

The worker made this post only to plead for a place to sleep at night at an affordable price. And their plight was shared by many food delivery workers who did not want lose their income because of lockdowns and chose to be homeless.

In an interview with another group of food delivery workers entitled “Food delivery workers attempting to get some sleep on cold nights under COVID”, workers camped in office buildings and slept on the floor near a bathroom because it had the most residual heat. If the weather got colder, they switched from beer to liquor to warm up. Sometimes a couple workers huddled under a single blanket. Despite having a “roof” over their head, they constantly ran the risk of losing their belongings. The interview summarized, “during that cold night of -10, what accompanied them were stomach medicine, alcohol and snores from fellow delivery workers.”

Despite the extremely difficult conditions imposed on them by lockdown measures, the sentiments among workers were very different from the middle class layers demanding “freedom.” In the social media post, the delivery worker asking for help, he stated, “We have been homeless for days, but we still get a PCR test every day and follow all COVID-related measures. We left the residential compound before it was put under lockdown only because we don’t want to lose our only source of income.”

Coal miners in Yangquan, Shanxi

On November 28, a coal miner from Yangquan, a city in the coal-rich Shanxi Province in northern China, made a post on Weibo that started with “HELP!!!!” The miner worked at Yangquan No.5 Coal Mine under Shanxi LuAn Group, one of the seven major coal mining companies in the province. The city of Yangquan also produces the highest quantity of anthracite in the country.

Since November 18, as the number of infections in Yangquan had been on the rise, a few thousand workers were required to stay at dormitories at the mine so that they would not run the risk of being quarantined at home and to keep production going.

No proper quarantine measures were in place at the mine to separate workers who tested positive. Sometimes a worker who tested positive would be handed a hazmat suit but would not be transferred out of the dorm. More than a dozen workers were crammed into a single dorm room with hardly any furniture or appliances outside of beds and a water fountain. Living space was so limited that some workers had to sleep on the floor of the shower. This only led to a further transmission of the virus among miners with many having a fever.

Living conditions were terrible. There was a shortage of food. The miner who made the post reported that “the food they were able to have for a whole day was even less than what they usually had for a single meal.” He also posted a boxed meal they were provided, where there was only rice, shredded potato, shredded carrots and “two or three shreds of meat.” This meal was brought to them around 6 p.m. and it was their lunch. Workers who were ill were not taken care of, as medicine was in short supply. Some workers with a high fever only had insta-ramen to eat. Despite all the harsh conditions, workers were kept on the job.

The worker commented in his post, “in order to meet the coal demand around the country, workers conduct high-risk work in the mine on a daily basis. But when workers are in need of warmth and security the most, where would they get warmth and support from?

“Yangquan is a small city most people probably have never heard of, but it has the largest anthracite production in the country, sending warmth to many places across the country. Please do not just remember us when you feel cold. When we confront a harsh winter, we need others to put a warm coat around us as well.”

After this post spread on social media, the company finally transferred workers who tested positive into local or the nearby Fangcang hospitals and started to provide more supplies to workers remaining at the mine.

What happened at this coal mine was similar to conditions facing workers at the Foxconn factory in Zhengzhou, the largest iPhone factory in the world. Foxconn workers were put under a similar “closed-loop” management without an effective separation of those who contracted COVID. This led to a mass exodus in October and a protest by thousands of mainly newly-hired workers in mid-November over non-payment of bonuses, poor food and being forced to work and sleep alongside workers who had tested positive. The sole concern of management, as at the coal mine, was production and profits.

Many workers have faced great difficulties as a result of the Zero-COVID policy. For temporary workers, who are mainly rural migrants, a day in quarantine means a day without pay. And for those working on assembly lines, they are forced to stay on the job often without basic life and medical supplies.

However, food delivery workers, coal miners, workers on the assembly lines of Foxconn and many more understand that these COVID restrictions are necessary to prevent mass infections and deaths. The social media posts by workers are not calling for “freedom” from Zero-COVID, but for housing, proper food and measures to stop the spread of infections.

The hardships are not the result of the Zero-COVID policy itself. Rather what is highlighted is the need for workers to be provided proper living and financial assistance from the government and employers. Workers should not have to choose between putting meals on the table and running the risk of being infected.

The Chinese government’s Zero-COVID policy over the past two years has demonstrated elimination of the virus is possible, but only if implemented internationally. Now confronted with enormous pressures internationally and from sections of business and the middle class at home, the regime is rapidly dispensing with the very measures that have proven effective in suppressing the virus.

As infections and deaths soar, it will inevitably be the working class that is hit the hardest. Employers at Foxconn and coal mines as well as countless other workplaces will take the easing of COVID restrictions as the go-ahead to end even the limited measures now in place to prevent infections.

Large-scale raid against right-wing terrorist network reveals the extent of the fascist danger in Germany

Peter Schwarz

One of the largest police raids in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany took place on Wednesday. Around 3,000 officers from the special police forces stormed 137 locations in 11 federal states on Wednesday morning and arrested 25 people. Another 27 people are being investigated. The state prosecutor has accused them of being members or supporters of a terrorist organisation, and the searches are ongoing.

“The arrested accused belong to a terrorist organisation founded at the end of November 2021 at the latest that aimed to overturn the existing state order in Germany and replace it with its own form of government,” said a statement by the Federal state prosecutor. “The members of the organisation are aware that this project can only be realized through the use of military means and violence against state representatives. This includes the commission of homicide.”

It was not Nazis with bald heads and boots who were arrested but members of high society. Prince Reuss Heinrich XIII was charged by the federal state prosecutor as the ringleader. Prince Reuss is a Frankfurt real estate agent and descendant of a Thuringian noble family who ruled the Vogtland region for 700 years, while another leading suspect is the former paratrooper commander Rüdiger v. P., who led the organisation’s “military arm.”

Among the detainees are also a lawyer with a doctorate, a doctor, a pilot, a classical tenor, the Berlin judge and former Member of Parliament for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) Birgit Malsack-Winkemann, as well as other former elite soldiers, including the former elite special forces (KSK) Colonel Maximilian E. The locations searched included the barracks of the KSK in Calw, Baden-Württemberg, which was already a centre of the right-wing terrorist Hannibal network.

The state prosecutor accused the terrorist network, which it identified as part of the Reichsbürger (citizens of the Reich) milieu and an advocate of QAnon ideology, of concrete coup plans and advanced military preparations. These charges were based on investigations by the Federal bureau of criminal investigations (BKA), which has been monitoring and intercepting the communications of the accused since the beginning of September, with the involvement of several hundred officers. Accounts were also screened and chat groups monitored.

According to the Federal state prosecutor, a “council” chaired by Reuss “has regularly met in secret since November 2021 to plan the intended takeover of power in Germany and the establishment of its own state structures.” Reuss was to be the future head of state, and other members were to be responsible for various ministries, including 'justice,“ “external affairs,” and “health.”

A suspect, second right, is escorted from a police helicopter by police officers after the arrival in Karlsruhe, Germany, Wednesday, Dec. 7, 2022. Thousands of police officers carried out raids across much of Germany on Wednesday against suspected far-right extremists who allegedly sought to overthrow the government in an armed coup. [AP Photo/Michael Probst]

The “council” was affiliated with the “military arm,” some of whose members had “actively served in the military (Bundeswehr) in the past.”

“This part of the association is responsible for enforcing the planned seizure of power by force of arms,” noted the prosecutor. This should be done “via a system already under construction, known as ‘Homeland Security Companies’.”

The leading staff of the “military wing,” headed by Rüdiger v. P., “dealt with, among other things, the recruitment of new members, the procurement of weapons and other equipment, the establishment of an interception-proof communication and IT structure, the conducting of shooting exercises and plans for the future accommodation and catering of the ‘Homeland Security Companies’.” The “focus of the recruitment efforts” was “especially on members of the Bundeswehr and police.” Several meetings were held in the summer of 2022 to implement this objective.

According to the previous investigations, “there is also a suspicion that individual members of the association have made concrete preparations to forcefully penetrate the German Bundestag (federal parliament) with a small armed group.” The coup attempt by Donald Trump on January 6, 2021 clearly served as a model.

Politicians and the media celebrated the raid against the terrorist network as the triumph of a “democracy on guard” (Minister of Justice Marco Buschmann, Free Democrats) and a successful “commitment to the protection of our democracy”(Minister of the Interior Nancy Faeser, Social Democrats).

The right-wing daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung regarded the blow against the group as “a sign that accusations that the security forces are blind to right-wing threats are absurd.” Apart from this, the newspaper sought to evade the issues. “Taking these people seriously would be too much of an honor,” writes FAZ Editor Jasper von Altenbockum. “Despite the monstrous intentions of the group around ‘Heinrich XIII P.R.’, we should retain a sense of proportion. The conspirators lacked any basis for success.”

In reality, the group’s activities underscore how much the far right and its ideology have penetrated the state apparatus and ruling circles, which work to conceal the fascist threat.

The claim that the group was formed only a year ago is simply not credible. Their connections to the AfD, the Reichsbürger milieu and terrorist groups such as the Hannibal Network, which the security forces left largely intact despite detailed journalistic exposures, are too obvious.

Hans-Georg Maassen, who advised and protected the AfD and shared its xenophobic ideology, headed Germany’s secret service for eight years. The National Socialist Underground trio was able to kill its victims undisturbed for years while its members were surrounded by intelligence agents. The murderer of the Kassel regional President Walter Lübcke came from the NSU milieu and was known to the authorities as a criminal right-wing extremist.

Even the presumed ringleader of the uncovered group is no stranger. The intelligence agencies have considered the prince from the Vogtland to be part of the Reichsbürger milieu for years. “His speeches were saturated with anti-Semitic, anti-democratic and conspiratorial statements,” writes Die Zeit.

In 2019, Reuss gave a highly acclaimed lecture at the Zurich Worldwebforum, which made him the star of the far-right milieu. He accused the Jewish Rothschild family of having financed wars and revolutions to eliminate monarchies. The aim of the First World War was, among other things, to “promote the spread of the Jewish population,” according to Reuss.

Reuss is suspected of having financed the right-wing terrorist group. In 1998, he auctioned off antiques, furniture, jewelry and paintings worth 3.5 million marks, which had been restored to the noble family following the end of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Reuss also filed numerous lawsuits for the restitution of real estate, palaces, forestry and agricultural property to the feudal ruling family but lost all of them.

The case of Birgit Malsack-Winkemann shows particularly clearly how the judiciary and security forces protect right-wing extremists. The judge at the Berlin Regional Court joined the AfD in 2013 and was elected to the Bundestag in 2017. When she lost her mandate in 2021 and returned to the judiciary, the Berlin judicial administration first tried to remove her from service. But the Judicial Service Court ruled in favour of the reappointment of the right-wing extremist.

On October 13, 2022, long after the BKA had begun investigating Malsack-Winkemann’s involvement in the formation of a terrorist organisation, the judges ruled according to the press statement of the court: “The transfer of a judge to retirement requires a serious impairment of the administration of justice, which cannot be ascertained here. ... Public confidence in the person of the judge must have been damaged to such an extent that the case-law of the judge no longer appears credible; remaining in office must also have affected public confidence in an independent and unbiased judiciary. There were no sufficient facts for this conclusion.”

The judges were also not impressed by the fact that Malsack-Winkemann maintained contact with the far-right “Wing” faction of the AfD, made racist statements about refugees and participated in the Berlin “lateral thinkers” demonstration against COVID-19 public health measures in August 2020, during which far-right forces occupied the entrance to the Bundestag.

The court described the racist hate speech against migrants as a slip of the tongue, explains the legal scholar Andreas Fischer-Lescano on the “Constitutional blog.” “Just because of the ‘xenophobic attitude‘ that emerges in these statements (the court avoids the word racism), ‘it cannot be concluded in any case that the respondent’s attitude is anti-constitutional’,” writes Fischer-Lescano, quoting from the judicial ruling.

The Judicial Service Court is part of the Berlin Administrative Court, which rejected the Socialist Equality Party's lawsuit against the Federal Ministry of the Interior in November 2021. The SEP had demanded that the secret service remove it from its annual report and stop defaming it as a “left-wing extremist” organisation and monitoring it with the secret service.

The court justified its decision against the SEP on the grounds that its demand for “an egalitarian, democratic and socialist society” was contrary to Germany’s Basic Law. This ruling could not have more clearly shown the court’s right-wing and authoritarian attitude. The AfD’s far-right politics and racism are compatible with the constitution, but the demand for a democratic and socialist society is not!

Ultimately, the ruling class’ shift towards far-right authoritarian forms of rule, which is also evident in Italy, the US and many other countries, is a reaction to the deep crisis of the capitalist system. Just as they did 90 years ago, the rulers are responding to the intensification of social tensions and the growth of the class struggle with militarism and dictatorship. As they work with fascist forces in Ukraine to wage their proxy war against Russia, they systematically build up far-right networks in the state apparatus to suppress any resistance to their right-wing policies from below.

Ukraine threatened with total blackout

Andrea Peters

All of Ukraine could be plunged into a total blackout in the coming weeks, experts say, as Russian air assaults targeting energy infrastructure continue. Already, 50 percent of the country’s power system has been damaged or destroyed. This number does not take into account the impact of missile strikes this past Monday which Moscow ordered in response to Ukrainian drone attacks inside Russian territory.

Should the speed of the bombing intensify, the entire country “would be without electricity, water, and heating” for a period of about three to 10 days, said Olexander Kharchenko, director of the Energy Industry Research Centre, in a recent interview with Human Rights Watch. A representative from Ukraine’s Mercy Corps echoed his warning, telling Newsweek that Ukraine’s “entire national grid could collapse within weeks” if there is no let-up to the violence.

Currently, large parts of Kiev, which has already been experiencing rolling blackouts for well over a month, as well as Zaporizhzhia, Odessa, Sumy, Zhytomyr and Kryvyi Rih, are reporting total outages due to Monday’s missile strikes. In many cases, residents have also lost water, because plumbing and waste treatment systems cannot operate without electricity. The neighboring country of Moldova, whose energy infrastructure is connected to Ukraine’s, is likewise experiencing power losses.

As of just mid-November, 10.7 million people, about half of the population that has remained in the country, have gone without one or more essential utility for at least some period of time, if not permanently. The danger of widespread and life-threatening hypothermia is growing, as temperatures plunge during the winter months. A total blackout that lasts even just a few days could result in the deaths of hundreds, if not thousands. As if the weather was a thing totally unpredictable to the most powerful governments and agencies on earth, the US, its allies and the UN are reportedly now “scrambling” in order “to get blankets, insulation, generators, medical supplies,” reports ABC News.

Ukraine’s health care system, which has been gutted by right-wing reforms implemented at the behest of the EU and foreign lenders, is buckling under the weight of the energy crisis. Surgeons are working with the aid of flashlights, headlamps and cellphone illumination. Workers are struggling to keep x-ray, breathing, ultrasound and dialysis machines functioning. Vaccines are spoiling in refrigerators that are no longer cool.

This week the health ministry recently declared a halt to all surgeries deemed “non-essential,” in order to alleviate the burden on medical facilities with limited, temporary power-generating capacity. One of the country’s largest hospitals was recently on the verge of having to evacuate patients recently because its water supply failed.

Even though medical workers are laboring under desperate conditions, some report not being paid for months. Despite the war, the Ukrainian government has refused to fully suspend changes to health care spending that were implemented in 2018 as part of a series of EU, IMF and World Bank deals. According to the new policies, hospitals are paid in proportion to the number of patients they treat, regardless of the expenses associated with keeping their doors open. The impact of this prior to the war was the widespread closure of medical facilities, particularly those outside of major population centers, where there are, in essence, fewer “customers.”

In July, Kiev officials declared that state financing for any hospital not in the “conflict zone” would still be based on per-patient remuneration, thereby providing these facilities no relief. Currently, financially strapped institutions are treating patients but unable to pay their nurses and doctors.

At the Ivano-Frankivsk Regional Infectious Diseases Clinical Hospital in western Ukraine, 80 staff staged a protest in early November because, apart from a one-time $5 payment, they had not received their salaries since August. They told the press that the conditions they face now are no better than they were during the height of the COVID-19 crisis. Another 36 employees from the clinic have no wages and will never be receiving any, as they were laid off over the course of year due to “budget optimization.”

Despite much public handwringing over the terrible conditions facing ordinary Ukrainians, Western governments’ response can be described, at best, as pathetic. The United States announced last week that it is sending Ukraine just $53 million in additional energy-related aid, bringing its total spending on the support of life-sustaining power infrastructure and supplies to about $106 million. In contrast, Washington has allocated nearly $24.2 billion in one or another form of military aid to Ukraine, including $19.5 billion in weaponry and equipment, according to the Kiel Institute’s Ukraine Support Tracker (UST).

With humanitarian aid from Washington standing at about $10.4 billion, the US has spent about 2.3 times more on facilitating the killing of Ukrainians than it has on saving them. The EU is only slightly better, with a death-to-life spending ratio of about 2:1.

In terms of its support for Ukrainian refugees, as a percentage of its GDP, the US has spent so little that you cannot even see it on the visual graphic of per country refugee support published by the UST.

While the US and the EU have committed respectively about $15.9 and $31.8 billion in financial aid, most of that has yet to be disbursed. Large amounts are coming in the form of loans not grants, and many have various strings attached that require Ukraine to implement one or another pro-market “reform,” i.e., privatization, spending cuts or other measures that will make the rich of the world even richer.

In addition, a portion of the money foreign states and institutions are providing the country is simply being used to pay off debt it owes to these very lenders. A December 5 comment published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace noted that the IMF has refused to defer Ukraine’s debt repayments, such that Kiev was “on track to pay back more than it was receiving from the IMF in 2022.”

With a small change made in October as part of the IMF’s emergency financing program known as the Food Shock Window, the situation shifted slightly. By the end of 2022, Ukraine will have received $2.7 billion in aid from the IMF and paid it $2.4 billion, accumulating in the process another $300 million in debt. In comparison to the IMF, other creditors did Ukraine a kindness and granted the country in August—five months after the war began and its treasury was bled white—a two-year freeze on its Eurobond payments.

Europe’s welcome mat for Ukraine’s 7.9 million refugees is now also being rolled up. The UK’s Homes for Ukraine program is in total crisis, and 14,000 Ukrainians are facing homelessness by Christmas because the government has refused to provide either public housing or adequate aid to British host families. Already, nearly 3,000 refugees, overwhelmingly women and children, are without shelter.

Local officials across Germany are telling the federal government that they no longer have either the facilities or the financial resource to sustain, much less take more, refugees. In Berlin, a tent city near the airport was erected for 3,600 refugees, with little prospect of any sort of permanent housing being provided.

Belgian officials are turning away Ukrainian refugees seeking help with housing. Poland is now charging those staying in government-sponsored facilities for more than four months a daily housing rate. Estonia, uniquely distinguished for its anti-Russian, war-crazed government, declared Tuesday it will not accept any more Ukrainian refugees.

Latvia is imposing a language requirement on those arriving in the country, which as one immigrant advocate pointed out, will simply be used as a means to discriminate against Ukrainians who, despite their desire, cannot learn Latvian because language courses are nowhere to be found.

Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians are expected to seek entry into Europe during the winter. In addition to telling those currently outside the country not to return, authorities in Ukraine are encouraging those still in the country to leave due to the energy crisis. “If they can find an alternative place to stay for another three or four months, it will be very helpful to the system,” said the chief executive of Ukraine’s largest power supplier, Maxim Timchenko in November.

UK government mounts state offensive against striking workers

Robert Stevens

Britain’s Conservative government is preparing to use the armed forces against a growing strike movement. In the next weeks, strikes will be held by hundreds of thousands of nurses, ambulance staff, highway workers, airline workers and civil servants, alongside ongoing national strikes by postal and rail workers.

The struggle by workers in Britain is an advanced expression of a developing movement of the working class internationally. In every country, workers are fighting back against the demands by governments and corporations that they sacrifice their living standards, working conditions, pensions and jobs. This demand is to enable the shoring up of record profits and the funneling of tens of billions of pounds, dollars and euros to cover the cost of the bailouts of big business during the pandemic, and the upscaling of military budgets amid an escalating war by US and NATO against Russia in Ukraine.

Last week a general strike was held in Italy, the second this year, involving workers in all industries, including Trenitalia and Trenord rail workers. In November, there were general strikes in Belgium and Greece and a mass strike in France. Greece’s general strike was also the second this year.

Last week, Belgian rail workers held a three-day strike, following strikes by refinery workers in France and the Netherlands.

Nadhim Zahawi, Tory party chairman, told Sky News’ Sophy Ridge on Sunday that the government “ha[s] contingency plans in place. … We’re looking at the military, we’re looking at a specialist response force ... surge capacity.” Troops could be “driving ambulances” and working on UK borders during strikes. Echoing the denunciation of striking railworkers this summer as “Putin’s stooges,” Zahawi urged nurses not to strike to “send a very clear message to Mr. Putin” that “This is not a time” for the UK “to be divided.”

The Cabinet Office acknowledged that around 2,000 military personnel and civil servants are being trained to support a range of services in the event of strike action. Downing Street’s threats were made in anticipation of Tuesday’s announcement that more than 10,000 ambulance workers are to strike on December 21 and 28. Like all National Health Service workers, they are being offered a miniscule pay deal while inflation surges above 14 percent.

The ambulance strike will follow that of around 100,000 nurses planned for December 15 and 20. Tens of thousands of firefighters are being balloted to strike, with the result to be announced in January.

This week cabinet ministers are gathering in Downing Street for a series of Cobra meetings, dealing with national emergencies or major disruption. The Times reported Wednesday, “Ministers are holding talks today about calling in armed forces personnel to drive ambulances after unions called the first nationwide strike action by paramedics in three decades.

“The Department for Health and Ministry of Defence are holding discussions ahead of a potential formal request for help under the military aid to civil authorities protocol, or Maca.”

BBC Political Correspondent Nick Eardley tweeted Wednesday that when Downing Street was “asked about [the] option of banning strikes for ambulance workers,” this was “not explicitly ruled out.”

On Wednesday, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak told Parliament he was preparing “new tough laws” to combat strikes. The Sun newspaper, owned by Rupert Murdoch, reported last week that the government planned to “rush through an anti-strikes Bill” that “would open a new front in the Government’s war with health, rail and postal unions among others.” The “package may include using agency workers to fill strikers’ crucial roles and making it easier for bosses to replace strikers permanently.” This “would add to legislation currently going through Parliament to ensure a minimum level of service on strike days in key industries, such as rail.”

Minimum Service Levels (MSLs) legislation would require rail unions to guarantee that at least 20 percent of trains run during strikes or face a £1 million fine.

This assault on workers’ rights is also a universal response by the ruling class internationally. Last week US President Joe Biden’s Democratic Party administration signed into law a dictatorial bill passed by Congress to impose a national rail contract rejected by tens of thousands of railroaders, outlawing strike action.

Minimum services legislation is already widely used across Europe and has spearheaded a turn to direct state repression to enforce brutal austerity, ever since the 2008 global financial meltdown.

In 2010 this saw Spain’s Socialist Party government force 2,200 air traffic controllers back to work at gunpoint to smash a wildcat strike. Armed soldiers stood over them with the threat of immediate arrest should they stop work.

This summer Spanish airline and metal workers were subjected to minimum service orders by Spain’s Socialist Party (PSOE)-Podemos government, and Ryanair imposed a minimum service requirement preventing many workers from legally stopping work. The previous month, Hungary’s far-right government imposed minimum service levels, preventing most teachers from joining strikes.

In October, the Macron government in France requisitioned striking refinery workers to force them back to work and break a powerful action hitting the arteries of the economy.

As it prepares the ground for a state offensive against Britain’s working class, the Tory government is depending on the trade union bureaucracy to deepen its ongoing efforts to police and suppress demands for broader strike action.

For months the trade union leaders have done everything in their power to isolate and contain strikes by rail, postal, telecoms and university staff and prevent them from coalescing into a general strike. Last week the Communication Workers Union bureaucracy agreed with British Telecom to a well-below inflation pay settlement for 40,000 workers, aimed at ending one of the four ongoing national strikes. Talks are held continuously between the government and the rail, education and health unions in the hope of imposing a similar rotten agreement.

The threat of anti-strike legislation is not directed against the bureaucracy but aimed at providing it with ammunition to use against rank-and-file trade union members. Over the last four decades, the Trades Union Congress and its affiliated unions have refused to challenge the many anti-strike measures imposed by successive Tory governments, including the outlawing of secondary action that makes a general strike illegal. The trade unions would respond to the use of the armed forces and the imposition of MSL orders by insisting that the law must be upheld and strike action called off.

China’s COVID Uprising

Mel Gurtov

Significant dissent in China reared its head for the first time since the Tiananmen uprising in 1989. In many of China’s major cities, protesters joined hands to denounce the COVID restrictions and, though not in all cases, also denounce the Chinese Communist Party and its leader, Xi Jinping.

Western media tended to emphasize the latter agenda, pushing the possibility of regime change to the top of the news when in fact that theme was not the dominant one among the demonstrators.

It seems that young people, especially students, were mainly the ones calling for Xi to step down, whereas most everyone else focused on easing quarantines and returning to something resembling normal life. Neither in size, breadth of support, geography, or political impact were these protests anything like Tiananmen.

Predictably, China’s security apparatus is responding by cracking down on anyone who seemed to be leading the protests. But there really are no leaders, just fed-up people.

The real question is how lasting the protests might be, and whether or not they will evolve into mass resistance. That seems increasingly unlikely: Beijing is now easing COVID restrictions, as I’ll discuss in a moment, putting pressure on protesters either to keep going or claim a small victory and disperse.

“It’s like some national subconsciousness that resurfaces,” said Geremie Barmé, a New Zealand scholar. “Now it’s resurfaced again, this projection of self and of rights and ideas.”

She was referring to comments on China’s internet about civil liberties, democratic values, and freedom of movement. For some time, amidst a repression that has become the hallmark of the Xi era, these ideas have rarely surfaced, confined to small discussion groups of intellectuals and students.

But it’s questionable how much the general public shares such sentiments; their concern is more likely about the arbitrary rules governing zero-COVID that have forced them into isolation and considerable disruption to their daily lives. They have actually been fighting those restrictions for a long time in their neighborhoods.

The Xi Jinping leadership may appear finally to be listening to the complaints, though that would be very much out of character. “Frustrated students,” Xi says of the protesters, perhaps recognition that he needs to respond to their anger.

Most likely to dictate Xi’s response is the severe impact on China’s economy of the zero-Covid policy and the protests. Suddenly, public health officials are saying the threat from the Omicron variant is fading and China’s zero-Covid policy is working, allowing for an easing of the rules.

New regulations have been issued that promise quarantining at home rather than in some horrendous camp. Lockdowns of businesses are ending in some cities. Mass testing will be reduced. The Foxconn plant that produces Apple products seems to be resuming production after protests over wages and work conditions.

I can only speculate about the long-term consequences of the protests, which may wither or resurface depending in part on whether the party really is ready to abandon zero-COVID. At the least, the protests have considerably dented Xi Jinping’s reputation and the durability of his leadership at the very moment of triumph in extending his rule at the 20th Party Congress.

It is now clear that many Chinese do not approve of his rule, and a safe prediction is that such disapproval is shared by some among the political elite. Given his stubborn character and unrelenting search for enemies since he took command in 2012, he might authorize another wave of repression such as he has previously carried out against corrupt Party officials, dissident human rights lawyers, ethnic groups, and pro-democracy advocates.

Moreover, Xi’s ability to deliver on a serious dialogue with the US on climate change and other global issues may be undermined. As always, we shall have to wait and see.

From Mao to now, what China’s leaders have most feared is organized resistance that would challenge the party-state’s monopolization of power. That is not what we are witnessing today, though the protesters’ display of a blank sheet of paper recalls Mao’s dictum that “on a blank sheet of paper, many beautiful characters can be written.”

He meant, a revolution. As Nicholas Kristof writes in the New York Times (November 30),

“Historically in China, mass protests have arisen not when conditions were most intolerable (like the famine from 1959 to 1962) but when people thought they could get away with them, such as the Hundred Flowers Campaign of 1956, the April 5 incident of 1976, the Democracy Wall easing of 1978-79, the student protests of 1986 and Tiananmen in 1989.”

Students and intellectuals were pivotal to all those protests. Even when unsuccessful at transforming China’s political system, they signaled that democratic thought was alive under very harsh authoritarian rule.

Xi’s zero-COVID policy has been a strategic mistake from which he may never recover—especially if the high number of cases we’re seeing continue to rise as he resists foreign-made vaccines and fails to attend to the poorly protected elderly population.

Soaring maternal mortality figures expose deplorable state of women’s health care in America

Kate Randall

New international data show that the maternal mortality rate (MMR) in the US continues to far exceed the rate in other high-income countries. This national scandal in maternal health exposes, perhaps more than any other measure of the health of the US population, the appalling state of the health care system in America, which is subordinated to private profit.

A doctor uses a hand-held Doppler probe on a pregnant woman to measure the heartbeat of the fetus on Dec. 17, 2021 [AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis, File]

Data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)—analyzed by the Commonwealth Fund—show both a worsening of maternal death rates around the world in recent years and a widening gap between the US and other leading industrialized nations.

Maternal mortality is defined by the World Health Organization (WHO) as the death of a woman while pregnant or within 42 days of childbirth. In 2020, the latest year data are available from the CDC, the US maternal mortality rate was 23.8 deaths per 100,000 live births. By contrast, in the Netherlands that figure was only 1.2.

For black women in the US, maternal mortality in 2020 stood at an even more appalling rate: 55.3 deaths per 100,000 live births, exposing severe racial disparities in maternal health care in the US. For white women the rate was 19.1, while for Hispanic women it stood at 18.2, figures still more than double that in Canada, the US neighbor to the north.

American Indian and Alaska Native women are more than two times as likely as white women to experience maternal deaths.

Data: Data for all countries except US from OECD Health Statistics 2022. Data for US from Donna L. Hoyert, Maternal Mortality Rates in the United States, 2020 (National Center for Health Statistics, Feb. 2022). Source: Munira Z. Gunja, Evan D. Gumas, and Reginald D. Williams II, “The U.S. Maternal Mortality Crisis Continues to Worsen: An International Comparison,” To the Point (blog), Commonwealth Fund, Dec. 1, 2022. https://doi.org/10.26099/8vem-fc65 [Photo: Commonwealth Fund]

US maternal mortality has been on the rise since 2000 and has spiked in recent years. The maternal death rate increased in six of the nine countries studied with figures available from 2020: Canada, Germany, Korea, Norway, Sweden and the US. Maternal mortality fell in 2020 in Australia, Japan and the Netherlands. (Figures were from 2015 in France, 2017 in the UK, 2018 in New Zealand and 2019 for Switzerland.)

In global ranking, the US stands at only 55th in maternal mortality rates, just behind Russia and ahead of Ukraine, according to the WHO.

In December 2020, the US Department of Health and Human Services declared maternal deaths a public health crisis. In October 2022, the CDC released new data gathered between 2017 and 2019 that showed a 27 percent increase from the agency’s previous report covering years 2008 to 2017.

Of the deaths in 2020, 22 percent occurred during pregnancy, 13 percent during childbirth and 65 percent during the year following childbirth. (This one-year period differs from the 42 days after childbirth used by the WHO.)

CDC data show a steady increase in maternal deaths from 2018 through 2021: 658 deaths in 2018, 754 deaths in 2019, 861 deaths in 2020 and 1,178 deaths in 2021. This last year’s data is provisional.

The CDC concluded that 84 percent of pregnancy-related deaths are preventable. 

In the agency’s latest report, mental health conditions are cited as the most frequent cause of pregnancy-related deaths, and approximately 23 percent of deaths are attributed to suicide, substance use disorder or other mental health conditions. Almost all deaths involving drug overdoses during pregnancy and the postpartum period involved opioids. 

A woman in the US seeking care for substance abuse during pregnancy faces the possibility of criminal or civil penalties, including imprisonment and the prospect of having her child taken away by Child Protective Services. Currently, 24 states consider substance use during pregnancy to be child abuse, while health care providers in 25 states are required to report suspected prenatal drug use to the authorities.

Rachel Diamond, clinical training director and assistant professor at Adler University, writes in The Conversation: “Research has long shown that 1 in 5 women suffer from mental health conditions during pregnancy and the postpartum period, and that this is also a time of increased risk for suicide. Yet, mental illness—namely, depression—is the most underdiagnosed obstetric complication in America.” Diamond says that maternal suicide has tripled in the last decade. 

Following mental health, the next two leading causes of maternal death are hemorrhage and cardiac conditions, which account for about 14 and 13 percent, respectively.

The 2020 figures analyzed by the Commonwealth Fund are from the first year of the pandemic. A US Government Accountability Office (GAO) analysis of CDC data shows that COVID-19 was a contributing factor in one-quarter of all maternal deaths in 2020 and 2021. 

CDC provisional data from 2021 show that of 1,178 maternal deaths reported, 401, or more than a third, were COVID-related. It can be anticipated that the overall rising trend in maternal mortality will continue as COVID-19 continues to surge across the globe.

A JAMA Network Open research letter published in June found an 18.4 percent increase in maternal mortality between 2019 and 2020. The CDC reports 658 deaths in 2018, 754 in 2019 and 861 in 2020. This is under conditions where the number of live births fell from 3,791,712 in 2018 to 3,613,647 in 2020.

In the Netherlands, which has the lowest MMR of the 14 countries studied, there was an increase in home births and vaginal deliveries and a decrease in cesarean sections (both planned and emergency), seeming to indicate these types of births were safer for women during the pandemic. 

The US is the only country included in the Commonwealth Fund analysis that does not provide universal health care, leaving nearly 8 million women of reproductive age without medical coverage. Although the Affordable Care Act expanded Medicaid, the government health care plan for the poor, hundreds of thousands of women live in 11 states that have not expanded Medicaid under the ACA.

While Medicaid covers around four in 10 births, benefits under the program cover care only up to 60 days postpartum. Only about 40 percent of new mothers attend their postpartum visits. A March of Dimes report earlier this year found that one in four Native American women and one in five black women did not receive adequate prenatal care in 2020. The rate for white women was one in 10.

The March of Dimes found that nearly 7 million women of childbearing age and 500,000 babies live in counties that are “maternity care deserts,” i.e., they have no obstetric hospitals or birth centers and no obstetric providers. Over 2.8 million women of childbearing age and nearly 160,000 are impacted by reduced access to maternity care. 

Following the US Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, at least 15 states now have total or near-total abortion bans. A research letter from December 2021 published in Duke University Press projected that a total ban on all wanted abortions in the US would lead to a 7 percent increase in pregnancy-related deaths in the first year and a 21 percent increase in subsequent years. For black women, these subsequent years of a total abortion ban would lead to a 33 percent increase in maternal deaths, according to these projections.

According to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, health care spending in the US grew to $4.3 trillion in 2021. Hospital-related services accounted for more than 31 percent, or $1.3 trillion, of 2021 health care spending.

Private ownership of the giant health care chains, the pharmaceutical industry and insurance companies dominates health care services in the US. The delivery of medical care is not organized to serve the needs of the population but to fill the pockets of hospital CEOs and the shareholders of health-related corporations.

The same politicians of both big business parties who have allowed well over a million people, by the official count, to die so far in the COVID-19 pandemic are equally guilty in allowing the woeful state and worsening of women’s health care. 

Doctors, nurses and other health care workers who have chosen a livelihood dedicated to caring for and treating pregnant women are hamstrung in their efforts by private control of the health care industry—which leads to the closure of hospitals and the slashing of jobs and services.

Pregnancy and childbirth should be a joyous and fulfilling time for women and their families. But by the CDC’s own estimates, 990 of the 1,178 maternal deaths in 2021 were preventable. Millions more pregnant women are denied prenatal and postpartum care due to poverty and lack of services in the counties where they live.

Interest rate hikes start to make their impact

Nick Beams

Nine months after the US Federal Reserve began lifting interest rates, forcing other central banks to do the same, the rise in the price of money is starting to surge through the global economy and financial system.

The rate rises, being carried in the name of “fighting inflation,” have been instituted to try to suppress the growing upsurge of the world working class in response to soaring prices by inducing a major economic slowdown or even a recession.

As the Federal Reserve announces a rate change, traders work on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange in New York, Wednesday, June 15, 2022. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

At present much of the media coverage focuses on the collapse of FTX. The main conclusion being drawn is that the demise of the $32 billion crypto exchange was the product of fraud committed by its founder Sam Bankman-Fried who operated what was essentially a Ponzi scheme.

But there are deeper forces at work. The spectacular rise of FTX, which was promoted as one of the safest outfits in the crypto world, was very much the outcome of the massive inflow of cheap money provided by the Fed after the market freeze of March 2020 at the start of the pandemic.

The fallout from the demise of FTX has called into question the future of the entire crypto system.

The publicly listed company, Coinbase, which operates a crypto exchange, only had a limited exposure to FTX, just $15 million, it said. But as the Financial Times reported last week its stock and bonds have been knocked, sparking “renewed concerns about the outlook” for the company.

At the start of the year, the company’s bonds were discounted at 93 cents on the dollar, now they are at 59 cents. The fall in its share price has been even more pronounced. Last November, when the Fed was still pouring money into the financial system, its shares were $369. They have lost 81 percent of their value so far this year.

In a report issued last week, Moody’s Investor Services said the collapse of FTX was a “credit negative” for Coinbase and warned that its “implosion” would “radically transform the cryptoecosystem” and raise doubts about the ongoing prospects of the entire industry.

The company has said it is a “strong position” and it has no meaningful exposure to the FTX demise. But such assurances will likely be taken with larger grains of salt given that FTX was also regarded as a safe operation.

The impact of rising rates and the end of cheap money goes far beyond the crypto world. It should be recalled that one of its first affects was the crisis in the British financial system in September-October when the supposedly safe strategies pursued by pension funds were called into question. This required an emergency intervention by the Bank of England after a collapse of the British pound and a massive selloff in UK bond markets.

Another area of concern is the commercial real estate market. It has also been boosted by low interest rates in the period since the 2008 financial crisis, but is now being squeezed by declining demand for office space as a result of COVID and higher interest rates.

In New York, the largest office space market in the world, there is now the prospect of “zombie” companies, according to a report in the FT last week. It cited comments by a major real estate company executive Doug Harmon.

During the prolonged bull market boom, “fueled by historically low interest rates and nearly free money,” Harmon and his firm presided over record-breaking sales. Harmon now says he is carrying out “triage.”

He told the newspaper that rising interest rates were like petrol igniting an office firestorm. “Everywhere I go, anywhere around the world now, anyone who owns an office says: ‘I’d like to lighten my load.’”

In a sign of growing problems, the giant private equity firm Blackstone said last week it would limit the redemptions investors could make in a $125 billion commercial real estate fund it operates.

The developments at Blackstone are part of a broader trend. In an article yesterday the Wall Street Journal reported: “Big and small investors are queuing up to pull money out of real-estate funds, the latest sign that the surge in interest rates is threatening to upend the commercial property sector.”

The interest hikes are not only hitting individual firms and key sectors of the economy but whole countries, particularly poorer ones with high levels of debt.

A New York Times article published at the weekend warned: “Developing nations are facing a catastrophic debt crisis in the coming months as rapid inflation, slowing growth, rising interest rates and a strengthening dollar coalesce into a perfect storm that could set off a wave of messy defaults and inflict economic pain on the world’s most vulnerable people.”

Earlier this year, it noted, the World Bank said as many as a dozen countries could face default next year and the IMF estimated that 60 percent of low-income countries were either in debt distress or faced a high risk of it and since then the situation had worsened.

The Council on Foreign Relations has said that 12 countries now had its highest default rating, up from three 18 months ago.

Global financial institutions recognise the mounting crisis, but nothing is being done. As the Times article reported, at the G20 meeting last month there were expressions of concern about the “deteriorating debt situation” but offered “few concrete solutions.”

The G20 statement simply reaffirmed “the importance of all actors, including private creditors, to continue working toward enhancing debt transparency.”

In the major economies the forecast is for a recession. Both the UK and the eurozone are predicted to move into recession next year with the US economy expected to grow by only 0.2 percent next year, according to the Wall Street Journal.

It reported that a survey of economists and investors by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia showed expectations were that GDP would fall in the next three or four quarters, the highest since the survey started in 1968.

The engineering of recession is now the central objective of the Fed. As the head of Blackrock’s Investment Institute, Alex Brazier, told the Journal, if the Fed wants to get core inflation down to its 2 percent target “it needs a recession.”

The Economist magazine in an editorial earlier said the term “permacrisis,” designated by the Collins English dictionary as their word for 2022, “accurately encapsulates today’s world as 2023 dawns. It cited the war in Ukraine, the serious risk of nuclear escalation and the highest levels of inflation since the 1980s.

It said much of the world would be in recession in 2023 and “in several places economic weakness could exacerbate geopolitical risks.” With many European economies on the edge of recession, higher interest rates “will further sap consumer spending and increase unemployment.”

Britain would undertake the biggest fiscal tightening of the G7 group of major economies while suffering the deepest recession, with Italy “also a worry.”

While the US economy was in better shape than Europe’s or China’s, America’s relative economic strength could prove a problem for the rest of the world. As it continued to aggressively raise interest rates, lifting the value of the dollar, it would oblige “other central banks to keep up.”

In other words, the effects of interest rate hikes over the past nine months, on both the financial system and real economy, are going to rapidly intensify in the coming period.

Manhattan jury finds Trump family companies guilty on all charges

Jacob Crosse

After a six-week trial, a Manhattan jury needed only one day to find two Trump family businesses guilty on all 17 criminal counts leveled against the organizations. Charges against the Trump Organization and the Trump Payroll Corporation included criminal tax fraud, conspiracy and falsifying business records.

To find the organizations guilty, the New York jury had to find that the Trump Organization’s former chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg, or his subordinate, senior vice president and controller Jeffrey McConney, as high agents of the company, acted on behalf of the company to their benefit.

Former president Donald Trump, left, his chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg, center, and his son Donald Trump Jr., right, attend a news conference at Trump Tower in New York on January 11, 2017. [AP Photo/Evan Vucci]

Jurors found that the executives at Trump’s companies orchestrated a long-running tax dodge scheme that allowed them access to high-rise apartments, luxury cars and bountiful holiday bonuses, all off the books and tax-free. Weisselberg admitted on the stand and in a previous guilty plea to falsifying business records and keeping a separate set of accounting books in order to hide the expenditures, in the process reducing the tax burden on the companies and on himself.

The well-known practice, which is illegal, lasted for decades within the Trump family businesses and is, in fact, pervasive throughout the corporate-financial elite and the capitalist economy as a whole. Major exposures of the financial secrets of the world’s elite have shown that tax evasion and money laundering among the financial oligarchy are not just routine, but ubiquitous.

Despite being found guilty on all counts, the Trump Organization was fined only $1.62 million, a fraction of the hundreds of millions of dollars the business reports in yearly revenues and a rounding error compared to Trump’s estimated $3.2 billion net worth as of September 2022, according to Forbes.

The verdict is politically significant as it implicates the former president. The Trump Organization was founded by Trump’s fascist father, Fred Trump, and is now, along with the Trump Payroll Corporation, legally a felonious enterprise.

The convictions could also be used as evidence in a future criminal trial against Trump. They further jeopardize Trump’s third run for president, which he announced three weeks ago.

While Trump himself was not on trial, he was named several times during the proceedings by prosecutors. Following the guilty verdict, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said the criminal investigation into Trump, which appeared to be winding down earlier this year, remains “active and ongoing.”

The verdict is the culmination of a long-running investigation that began with a criminal inquiry by then-Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. into the Trump Organization in 2018. Vance’s handpicked successor, Bragg, took up the investigation after he was elected in 2021.

Within a month of being sworn in, Bragg informed the two leading prosecutors in the investigation that he did not feel they had enough evidence to bring charges against Trump himself, as they had yet to turn Weisselberg against his lifelong employer. The two prosecutors promptly resigned and a previously impaneled grand jury was allowed to expire.

While he refused to turn against his boss, Weisselberg still served as the prosecution’s chief witness in the trial against the Trump family businesses. As part of a plea deal agreed to earlier this year, Weisselberg admitted that he and McConney engaged in a conspiracy to “defraud federal, New York state, and New York City tax authorities.”

In order to secure a 100-day sentence, despite being found guilty of 15 felonies, Weisselberg had to testify against the companies he oversaw for decades as Trump’s so-called “money man.”

On the stand during the trial, Weisselberg, who is still an employee of the Trump Organization, accepted all of the blame for the criminal practices in which the company engaged, supposedly free from any influence or direction from Trump or his family members. Defense lawyers for the Trump companies likewise argued that Weisselberg went “rogue” when he decided to manipulate the company books for his and his family’s personal benefit.

In rendering the guilty verdicts, the jury indicated that it found the defense arguments unpersuasive.

On the morning prior to the guilty verdict, Trump re-posted an earlier statement on his personal media platform, Truth Social, accusing the District Attorney’s Office of engaging in a “political Witch Hunt” over “Fringe Benefits, something that in the history of our Country, has never been so tried in Court before.”

In a statement to the New York Times following the verdict, Trump said he was “disappointed with the verdict” and planned to appeal. Alan Futerfas, a defense lawyer for the Trump Organization, confirmed that the company would appeal.

Trump, seeking to distance himself from the verdict, said the case was about Weisselberg “committing tax fraud on his personal tax returns.” The Trump Organization similarly released a statement after the verdict stating that the “notion that a company could be held responsible for an employee’s actions, to benefit themselves, on their own personal tax returns is simply preposterous.”

Weisselberg’s lawyer, Nicholas Gravante Jr., issued a statement after the verdict was reached asserting that his client fulfilled his “only obligation relating to the trial... [to] testify truthfully, and clearly he did.”

DA Bragg said following the verdict, “The former president’s companies now stand convicted of crimes. That is consequential. It underscores that in Manhattan we have one standard of justice for all.”

Bragg’s comments are betrayed by reality. Aside from the token fine levied against the companies, which will in no way prevent them from continuing their criminal operations, the fact that Trump himself has yet to charged with a crime related to the numerous illegal activities in which his businesses were engaged underscores the two-tier class justice system that exists in America.

The most damming example of “class justice” in America is the fact that Trump remains free 23 months after attempting to overthrow the government.