https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIGB054Kc1M
Wednesday, August 26, 2020
Lukashenko threatens military crackdown in Belarus as US initiates discussions with opposition leader
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/25/bela-a25.html
By Clara Weiss
25 August 2020
Amid ongoing strikes and protests, the regime of Alexander Lukashenko, who claims to have won the August 9 presidential elections with 80 percent of the votes, has threatened an all-out military crackdown on protesters.
On Sunday, mass protests again took place in several cities. In Minsk, protests were said to be about as large as the Sunday before, when an estimated 100,000 protesters were out in the streets. In Grodno, a city in the west of the country, about 20,000 people demonstrated against Lukashenko, demanding that he resign. The Grodno region, along with Minsk, has been the main center of the strike movement that has swept the country for two weeks now.
Protesters called for new elections, and many chanted slogans in support of striking miners in Soligorsk and tractor factory workers in Minsk. There was a heavy police and military presence during the protest in Minsk, with soldiers surrounding World War II monuments in the city center. The Ministry of Defense had earlier published a statement “strictly warning” that “In case of disruption of the order and peace in these places—you will have to deal not with the police but with the Army.” The Ministry of Defense also denounced protesters as “fascists.”
After the protest ended, extraordinary scenes showed Lukashenko flying over the empty streets of Minsk, saying “they’ve dispersed like rats.” He descended from the helicopter at the presidential residence with an automatic rifle in hand, and was cheered by heavily armed security personnel.
The mass rallies and strikes were triggered by the initial brutal response by the regime to protests against the election results on August 9 and 10. Over 7,000 people were arrested in the first week of the demonstrations, and 80 people are still unaccounted for. There have been reports of torture and the rape of prisoners with objects, leaving women unable to bear children. As mass protests and strikes continued to grow, the regime initially toned down its use of violence against the protesters. However, now it has decided to go into a full-blown confrontation against demonstrators, and especially striking workers.
On Monday, the leader of a strike committee in Soligorsk, where thousands of potash miners have been on strike since August 11, was arrested. Two members of the opposition’s Coordination Council, including Olga Kovalkova, the representative of opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, were also arrested on Monday morning by police while they were trying to talk to striking workers at the Minsk Tractor Factory.
Above all, the regime has escalated its crackdown on striking workers, who have been threatened with layoffs, and have been paid no wages. On Monday, Lukashenko declared that all state-owned enterprises where strikes are taking place should shut down, and then decide whom they want to hire again.
Lukashenko had earlier also threatened to bring in miners from the Ukrainian Donbass to replace striking miners in Soligorsk. There were reports of Russian workers being driven into Belarus to replace striking workers. While no concrete new numbers of strikes and striking workers have been reported in the press, the website belzabastovka.org indicates that there are still 150 strikes going on in the country.
The German financial newspaper Handelsblatt noted yesterday that the Belarusian economy is on the brink of collapse because of the strike movement. The state-owned companies where workers are on strike, according to the Handelsblatt, accounted for $10 billion out of a GDP of less than $60 billion. Lukashenko’s economic adviser stated that “billions of dollars” had already been lost to the strikes. The Belarusian ruble, the Handelsblatt noted, has been “in free fall” since the beginning of the protests.
There is no question that enormous social and economic discontent, along with opposition to the authoritarian regime in Belarus, are major driving factors behind the ongoing protests and strikes. Workers in Belarus enjoy close to no labor rights. Companies can fire their entire workforces with just seven-days notice, and the vast majority of labor contracts are temporary. The average monthly wage in 2019 was just $500.
This brutal repression and exploitation of the working class has been enabled not only by the state-sanctioned unions, which have implemented a brutal regime of surveillance and terror in workplaces. The so called “independent” unions, which now posture as defenders of the rights of workers, in fact supported the restoration of capitalism, which has created the conditions for the Lukashenko regime to emerge. They now support the pro-EU opposition and have ties to various international union organizations, including the AFL-CIO, which functions as an arm of US imperialism both at home and abroad.
The crackdown by the Lukashenko regime on the strike movement is being facilitated by the right-wing politics of the opposition and the unions. Leading opposition figures are associated with the restoration of capitalism in Belarus and the destruction of the USSR. No less than the Lukashenko regime, they are opponents of the social and democratic rights of the working class, and are, above all, concerned with bringing the strike movement to an end.
While declaring no desire to break ties with Russia, the opposition under Svetlana Tikhanovskaya is oriented toward closer cooperation with the EU and NATO. Several opposition leaders are notorious Belarusian nationalists who seek to end the status of Russian as an official language in the country.
Last week, an extraordinary EU summit called upon the Lukashenko regime to initiate negotiations with the opposition’s Coordination Council. The EU is not recognizing the August 9 elections. This weekend, US Under Secretary of State Stephen Biegun initiated Washington’s first direct discussions with Tikhanovskaya in Lithuania.
Tikhanovskaya later declared that she was “grateful to the US for their support for the Belarusian people.” According to the Russian Gazeta.Ru, this meeting was the first official contact between the State Department and the opposition leader since the mass protests in Belarus began. Biegun is now traveling on to Moscow and Kiev to discuss the crisis in Belarus with the Russian and Ukrainian governments.
Last Thursday, another opposition leader, Valery Tsepkalo, had stated that he was trying to get the West to recognize Svetlana Tikhanovskaya as the “president” of Belarus. He pointed to Venezuela, where the Trump administration has unsuccessfully been trying to topple the government of Nicolás Maduro through right-wing forces around Juan Guaidó, and said, “such a precedent has been created and it’s, in principle, possible to do the same thing [in Belarus].”
Amid ongoing negotiations with the EU and the US, the opposition has been thrown into a profound crisis by the escalating strikes and protests. Even as she is calling for new elections and insisting on negotiations with the Lukashenko regime, and after weeks in which the opposition declared her the winner of the last election, Tikhanovskaya herself declared this weekend that neither she nor her husband, a jailed opposition blogger, would run in a new presidential election. The opposition has yet to nominate a presidential candidate.
In response to the ever more open backing by the EU and NATO for the opposition, the Kremlin has moved closer to supporting Lukashenko, and especially his repression of the strike movement. The Kremlin has refused so far to enter into negotiations with the opposition’s Coordination Council and has denounced the interference of “foreign powers” in the Belarus crisis.
The strike movement in Belarus has demonstrated the enormous social and political power of the working class. However, workers are faced with an extraordinarily dangerous situation. A way forward can only be found through a complete break with all factions of the capitalist class and the trade unions, and a turn to socialist and internationalist politics on the basis of the lessons of the struggle by the Trotskyist movement against Stalinism.
US health care workers infected with COVID-19 pressured to return to work
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/25/nurs-a25.html
By Alex Johnson
25 August 2020
Nurses, doctors and other medical workers in the US who have contracted COVID-19 are increasingly being pressured to return to their hospitals prematurely in violation of public health standards. The failure of health care facilities and employers to provide adequate paid leave—or, in many cases, any paid leave at all—has left health care staff with the cruel “choice” of risking hunger and homelessness for themselves and their families by forfeiting their paychecks or becoming transmitters of the coronavirus in their workplaces.
This homicidal policy is being pursued despite the already existing widespread loss of life and disastrously high infection rates for hospital staff. Health care personnel in many states now account for as many as 20 percent of known coronavirus cases. A joint research project of Kaiser Health News and the Guardian discovered that 167 health care employees have died of COVID-19 while treating infected patients.
Kaiser Health News and Guardian researchers have admitted that the actual number of health care worker deaths due to COVID-19 is likely far higher than 167. A total of 922 health care worker deaths in the course of the pandemic are now being investigated, having been identified as the likely result of coronavirus infection. Internationally, more than 2,000 health care workers across 74 countries have died from the virus, according to a recent “In Memoriam” list released by Medscape.
For the most part, the grievances of health care staff over unsafe conditions have either been ignored or dismissed outright by hospital executives more concerned with cutting costs and increasing profits than protecting the lives of staff members. Dozens of complaints from hospital workers were submitted to the Occupational and Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) this past spring, many of them reporting infected employees being ordered to return to work.
Included is a respiratory clinic in North Carolina where COVID-positive employees were told they would be fired if they stayed home, and a veterans hospital in Massachusetts where ill employees were returning to work because they were not receiving compensation.
Although the bipartisan CARES Act bailout of Wall Street enacted in March included minimal paid time off for workers affected by the pandemic, health care workers have been given virtually no legal protection against unsafe conditions in their workplaces. Emergency responders and health care providers are exempted from the provisions of the Families First Coronavirus Response Act. Anyone who works in a medical facility, from a doctor’s office or nursing home to a pharmacy or medical school, may be excluded by employers from receiving paid sick leave and/or expanded family and medical leave.
Department of Labor officials and other policy makers claim the exemption is necessary to avoid depleting the work force on the frontlines of the pandemic under conditions where large numbers of staff working in overcrowded hospitals have been exposed to COVID-19 patients. This has provoked outrage among health care workers, who point out that on top of being given inadequate personal protective equipment, being forced to work while sick places them and their patients at even higher risk of contracting the virus.
A Kaiser Family Foundation study in early June concluded that approximately 69.4 million workers, four in 10 of the working population, are potentially ineligible for emergency paid sick leave benefits. An estimated one in four of those workers is in the health care industry.
The law also automatically excludes 9.5 million health care workers employed by a private employer with 500 or more employees, while an additional 8.1 million health care workers are subject to the exemption at the whim of their employer. This amounts to about 17.7 million health care workers who are not guaranteed access to federal emergency paid sick leave benefits, even if forced to quarantine because of testing positive for COVID-19.
Moreover, some 15 percent of workers at health care and other social assistance firms are denied any paid sick leave by their employers. Lack of available paid leave has been the main factor discouraging workers with symptoms of COVID-19 from staying home and preventing mass exposure among colleagues and patients.
This exemption has been felt the most among the lowest paid and most exploited sections of the health care work force. About a quarter (24 percent) of the health care workforce who are excluded or subject to exemption are part-time workers. Many of them are highly unlikely to receive any paid leave benefits from their employer beyond sick leave. Additionally, 18 percent of them are low-wage, and therefore have very little saved for emergencies, making it nearly impossible to claw out of a financial hole caused by being deprived of work.
There are pervasive staff shortages at health care facilities. In nursing homes, which remain key hotspots for the spread of COVID-19, low staffing is cited as a culprit in the prevalence of COVID-19 outbreaks. A study released by two University of Chicago researchers who examined various characteristics of facilities with confirmed COVID-19 cases showed that staffing shortages were increasingly linked to nursing home outbreaks.
Another research study published by the JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) Network found that of three primary issues factored into a facility’s five-star CMS (Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services) rating—including health inspection, quality measures and staffing—only staffing coverage served as a reliable predictor of the scale of COVID-19 outbreaks.
In eight states, nursing homes with high ratings for nurse staffing had fewer COVID-19 cases than nursing homes with low ratings for staffing. The eight states that were investigated—California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Pennsylvania—have all been devastated by the pandemic.
Staffing cuts at major hospital chains have produced significant eruptions of working class resistance and militancy. At California’s HCA Healthcare conglomerate, nearly 1,000 nurses and support staff struck in late June to protest years of cuts and concessions imposed by management and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). Similar struggles have taken place in other states against billion-dollar hospital chains, including 720 registered nurses in Illinois who went on strike in early July to oppose AMITA Health’s abysmal staffing levels.
All of these struggles have been sold out by the unions, which have done everything in their power to isolate strikes and protests where they could not prevent them from taking place. They have stood by and allowed the health care corporations to pay strikebreakers. At the same time, they have limited strikes to pre-determined lengths so as to let health care staff blow off steam while they worked out concessionary contracts with management behind the backs of the workers.
Health care workers can secure adequate staffing and paid leave only through the formation of rank-and-file safety committees independent of the corrupt trade unions. Staff at clinics, hospitals and other medical facilities must unite their struggles in preparation for a nationwide general strike to fight for the containment and eradication of the pandemic and ensure that the economic needs of workers are met.
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Signs of emerging crisis in economy and financial system
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/25/sign-a25.html
By Nick Beams
25 August 2020
As Wall Street continues to surge to record highs—Apple has doubled its market capitalization from $1 trillion to $2 trillion in just two years and the S&P 500 index has surged 50 percent since the mid-March crash—there are clear indications of a crisis building up both in the real economy and the financial system.
Last week, the Financial Times reported that while the market was at a record high, “corporate distress” in the US had never been worse with “large corporate bankruptcy filings” running at a record pace and set to exceed levels reached in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008.
As of August 17, a record 45 companies, each with assets of more than $1 billion, had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, compared with 38 in the same period in 2009 and more than double the figure of 19 in the comparable period last year.
It reported that in total 157 companies with assets of more than $50 million have filed for bankruptcy with a lot more expected to follow.
Ben Schlafman, the chief operating officer at New Generation Research, which tracks bankruptcy filings, told the newspaper: “We are in the first innings of this bankruptcy cycle. It will spread far across industries as we get deeper into the crisis.
“It pains me to say it, but bankruptcy is a growth industry in America.”
The Labor Secretary in the Clinton administration, Robert Reich, said cutting off the $600 per week federal unemployment benefit will push tens of millions into poverty or close to it.
“They won’t have the money to buy billions of dollars worth of goods and services. As a result the entire economy will suffer. Small businesses will continue to suffer the most because they are already precarious.”
Goldman Sachs has said it expects that of the 22 million workers cut from payrolls in the first wave of the pandemic almost a quarter will be permanently axed. In a research note published on Friday and reported on Bloomberg, Goldman Sachs economist Joseph Briggs said that while there was a return to work from temporary layoffs, “other patterns suggest that rehiring prospects for temporarily laid-off workers started to deteriorate in July” and some 2 million workers could remain unemployed well into next year.
Reporting on the situation in Britain, the Financial Times said that accounting, law and investment banking firms were “preparing for a fresh wave of distress in the autumn” when government loan schemes to run out.
Leading insolvency barrister Mark Phillips said: “There are a series of crises looming. The full wave of insolvencies hasn’t even started yet.”
Financial and accounting firms have been involved in efforts to aid companies in restructuring their debt and raise capital to avoid a collapse.
“But the winding down of state support schemes is expected to trigger a large number of insolvency proceedings, as many of these companies run out of cash,” the FT said.
In the major industrial centres of Europe there are fears that after what was described as bounce back from the sharp economic contraction in the spring, the recovery is now starting to slow.
There was a 22.5 percent rise in industrial production across the euro zone in May and June, but this was not enough to compensate for the 28 percent fall in the first two months of the pandemic. Germany’s central bank has reported that euro zone manufacturers are still only operating at 72 percent capacity in July compared to their long-term average of 80 percent.
The car-making industry, which forms a vital component of the German economy, has been hard hit, with predictions that global car sales will fall to 69 million this year compared to 88 million in 2019. The head of Audi has said he does not expect the levels of car production to return to their pre-crisis levels at least until 2022 or 2023.
But even these predictions could be knocked awry in the face of what is clearly a resurgence of the pandemic. In the US, it continues to rage out of control while in Europe there are sharp rises in the number of infections due to the return to work drive of governments amid the push to reopen schools.
Last Friday alone, Spain reported 8000 new COVID-19 infections, with the infection rate rising across the region. In Germany the Robert Koch Institute, the country’s main public health organisation said infections had risen sharply in all of the country’s 16 regions in seven days, describing the situation as “alarming.”
Infections have surged again in South Korea, one of the world’s major industrial and manufacturing centres with an additional 397 cases reported on Sunday, the highest number since the beginning of March.
“Cases are rising in 17 cities and provinces across the nation, and we are now at the verge of a massive nationwide outbreak,” the head of the country’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Jung Eun-kyeong, told a news briefing on Sunday.
Amid this wave of disease and economic devastation, markets have continued to rise. But there are growing fears that the conditions are building up for a major financial crisis. The market rise has driven the surge in technology stocks, which form a large component of the S&P 500 index and, above all, the supply of cheap money from the Fed.
One indication of the effect of the intervention by the Fed, which has pumped around $3 trillion into the financial system, is the lowering of the yield on US Treasury bonds as a result of the central bank’s purchases of government debt.
The yield on the 10-year Treasury bond, a benchmark for both US and global financial markets, is now around 0.6 percent, a full percentage point below its level in February. With the yield on government debt now bringing a negative return when inflation is taken into account, this has fuelled a turn to the stock market, gold and corporate debt. This search for a positive return has sparked what has been termed an “everything rally.”
But the rise of the market rests on very shaky foundations as evidenced last week when the minutes of the Fed’s July meeting were published, sending a tremor through Wall Street.
Contrary to many expectations in the market, they showed that the Fed had still not determined into “forward guidance” policy, that is, firm guarantees that there will be no tightening of monetary policy into the indefinite future, including a commitment to purchase bonds to set a cap on bond yields.
With the US government to issue more bonds to finance its debt, this measure is regarded in some quarters as necessary to insure that the increased supply of bonds does not lead to a fall in their price and a consequent rise in interest rates.
Commenting on the massive disconnect between the underlying economy and the stock market, an article in Bloomberg noted that “any number of looming threats could bring the historic rally in US equities to a screeching halt.” They could include conflict over the re-opening of schools, the November election, the conflicts with China or the effects of US monetary policy.
Then there is the issue of the massive increase in corporate debt—more than $1.6 trillion over the past few months. Such is the extent of the debt mountain that Bloomberg reported that an analysis conducted by its intelligence unit revealed that the average below investment-grade firm (or junk-rated company) had debt levels relative to earnings so high in the middle of the year that they would have triggered warnings from bank regulators had they occurred a few years ago.
However, it noted, regulators had dropped those warnings which a few years ago had applied only to a few but which today “could apply to many more.”
Gold has also been part of the “everything rally”—a rise sparked by the search for profit as its price reaches record heights and underlying uncertainty about the stability of the global monetary system as trillions of dollars are created at the press of a computer button by central banks.
While it has been on the rise, the gold price is highly volatile and so sudden downward movement is another factor that could trigger a collapse of the global financial house of cards.
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