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This week, the World Health Organization warned that Europe is facing exponential increases in COVID-19 cases. In just the past ten days, the continent has recorded over one million new cases, bringing the total since the start of the pandemic to over seven million.

As Europe emerges as an epicenter of a global resurgence of COVID-19, the EU is pursuing a policy leading to deaths on an unprecedented scale, far surpassing the 200,000 deaths this spring.

After lockdowns reversed the initial surge of COVID-19 in Europe, governments across the continent boasted that they had controlled the virus. As Europes central banks handed out bailouts of 1.25 trillion for the Eurozone and 645 billion in Britain, and the EU negotiated a 750 billion corporate bailout, they demanded workers return to work and youth to school. The priority, they insisted, was avoiding a new lockdown.

All these arguments stand completely exposed. The number of daily new cases in Europe has surged past 150,000, as the virus explodes out of control. France is declaring over 30,000, Britain nearly 20,000, the Czech Republic nearly 10,000, Italy 9,000, Belgium, Poland and the Netherlands 8,000 and Germany 7,000. Authorities report 13,000 new cases daily in Spain, until recently Europes worst-hit country, but newspapers are reporting that regional governments are cutting thousands of cases out of their totals.

Even if the contagion were to remain at its current levels, at 4.5 million cases per month, it would overwhelm Europes health care system. However, EU governments continue to reject a general shelter-at-home or lockdown orderdemanding instead that non-essential workers go back to work, to produce profits on the massive amounts of financial capital being handed over to major corporations. The EU sacrificed workers health and lives to the profits of the financial aristocracy.

Officials in Spain, Britain and France are announcing late-night curfews or restrictions on mobility in selected cities, in an attempt to reassure an increasingly angry and fearful public. From Madrid to Marseille, Paris and Liverpool, however, these curfews have one thing in common: they force workers and youth to keep going as before to work and school, where the vast majority of infections take place. With this policy, the number of new cases will keep rising exponentially.

As the northern hemisphere heads into winterthe season when people stay inside more in poorly ventilated areas and diseases like COVID-19 spread and kill the most rapidlya disaster is looming in Europe and around the world.

The worst can be averted only via the political mobilization of the European and international working class. Indeed, it was only the independent intervention of the working class that compelled the adoption of lockdown policies this spring in Europe, which epidemiologists estimate saved the lives of millions. Wildcat strikes starting at Fiats Pomigliano auto plant and spreading to steel, engineering and food processing plants in Italy and much of Europe shut down international supply chains and forced EU governments to adopt shelter-at-home orders.

After over 1 million COVID-19 deaths worldwide, including over 230,000 in Europe, explosive social opposition is building. Mass youth protests have erupted against back-to-school policies in Greece and Poland, as well as strikes by nurses in Spain and France demanding more resources and better pay to deal with the pandemic. Health workers and professionals are denouncing the herd immunity policies adopted by governments around the world, which Britains internationally recognized medical journal, theLancet, subjected to devastating and unambiguous criticism.

The Lancet wrote, The arrival of a second wave and the realisation of the challenges ahead has led to renewed interest in a so-called herd immunity approach, which suggests allowing a large uncontrolled outbreak in the low-risk population while protecting the vulnerable. Proponents suggest this would lead to the development of infection-acquired population immunity in the low-risk population, which will eventually protect the vulnerable. This is a dangerous fallacy unsupported by scientific evidence.

Uncontrolled transmission in younger people risks significant morbidity and mortality across the whole population, theLancet warned. It added that this threatens to overwhelm the ability of health care systems to provide acute and routine care, would ensure recurrent epidemics, and risks further exacerbating the socioeconomic inequities ... already laid bare by the pandemic.

The Lancet wrote that the stay-at-home measures carried out earlier in the year were essential to reduce mortality, prevent health-care services from being overwhelmed, and buy time to set up pandemic response systems to suppress transmission following lock-down.

Seven months after lock-downs began across Europe this spring, there is no longer any question that the closure of non-essential businesses, combined with massive investments public health, testing, quarantine and contact tracing are the only scientific policy to combat the virus. What remains to be clarified is the political program on which the growing opposition in the working class can be turned in a conscious struggle to avert a truly horrific loss of life. A scientific policy can only be implemented through the international unification and mobilization of the working class in a struggle for socialism.

Only a massive, revolutionary assault on capitalist property can overcome the entrenched economic interests that have dictated a murderous policy on COVID-19. The inescapable conclusion of theLancets article is that EU governments back-to-work, back-to-school policy was a false, anti-scientific policy, foisted on workers and youth by the financial aristocracy based on lies.

EU officials knew their policies would lead to mass deaths. In March, as strikes forced them to agree to lock-downs, the German Interior Ministry prepared a classified report that over 1 million Germans could die in 2020 of COVID-19 without emergency measures. Officials at a French national security council meeting reportedly heard top-secret warnings of hundreds of thousands of deaths. However, these warnings were hidden from the population and buried by the media, so that EU banks and governments could push workers back to work and restart the flow of profits.

Europes union bureaucracies and allied middle class parties, like Germanys Left Party, Podemos in Spain, or Frances New Anti-capitalist Party, are implicated in this criminal policy. After doing nothing to mobilize workers this spring, they helped implement the back-to-work policy. After the German and French unions signed a statement this summer endorsing EU bailouts, they expect that billions in bailout funds will pass through banks and works councils into their stock portfolios and union coffers, and are leaving thousands or millions of workers to die.

The sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) have called for workers and youth to organize safety committees in workplaces and schools, independently of the unions, to oppose the herd immunity policies of the ruling class. As the virus tears through the population, it is clear that defending health and safety in individual workplaces or schools is impossible without a collective, revolutionary strategy to oppose the financial aristocracys strategy of mass infection and death.

This requires building the ICFI as the revolutionary leadership in the international working class, to lay the political basis for mass, coordinated strike actions, systematic opposition and the taking of power to impound the necessary resources for a scientific and humane fight against COVID-19. This includes a shelter-at-home policy for youth and all non-essential workers, backed by financing for workers and small businesses no longer able to operate. It demands a revolutionary struggle by the working class to bring down the EU and replace it with the United Socialist States of Europe.

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Mobilize the working class against the European Union's herd immunity policies! - WSWS

INTRODUCTION

SOLIDAR is a network of Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) that are working to improve economic and social rights inside and outside of Europe. On an international level, SOLIDAR is immersed in the process to create the SOLIDAR Network through the Organising International SOLIDARity (OIS) programme, the purpose of which is to strengthen the collaboration between our members and their capacities for greater, more fruitful impact. The OIS programme is strongly focussed on Central America. Specifically, on a national level, our priority countries are Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua.

One goal of the OIS programme is to monitor the progress of economic and social rights in Central America. The current situation with respect to the spread of COVID-19 in Central America has led to greater uncertainty and alarm regarding the impact of the pandemic on the region, which is one of the most polarised in the world. Through the SOLIDAR Network, we have carried out an initial analysis of the measures that are currently being implemented to combat COVID-19 and how these are contributing to the dilapidation of an already fragile social structure, while also putting at risk the achievement of these countries development objectives and of the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

In this context, the SOLIDAR Network in Central America calls on their governments, the international community and the EU to redouble their efforts in ensuring the attainment of the SDGs, paying special regards to:

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Impact of COVID-19 on Central America: Analysis and recommendations for the European Union - Costa Rica - ReliefWeb

The decision, which is final and cannot be appealed, is part of a string of long-running disputes between Boeing and Airbus.

GENEVA, Switzerland World Trade Organization arbitrators said Tuesday that the European Union can sanction up to $4 billion in U.S. goods over Washington's illegal support for plane maker Boeing.

The ruling, which could inflame Trump administration criticism of the Geneva-based trade body, amounts to one of the largest penalties handed down by the WTO. It comes a year after another ruling authorized billions in penalties against the European Union over support for Boeing rival Airbus.

The decision, which is final and cannot be appealed, dates back to 2006 and is part of a string of long-running disputes between the two plane-making giants at the Geneva trade body.

The arbitrators were tasked with setting a dollar value in sanctions such as tariffs that the EU could impose a year after the WTOs appellate body found that Boeing had received at least $5 billion in subsidies that were prohibited under international trade rules.

The United States had argued that the illegal support merited no more than $412 million in penalties, while the EU had countered that they deserved some $8 billion. The award in essence was 10 times more than what the U.S. had claimed, and half that the EU wanted.

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Trade body says EU can sanction $4B worth of US goods, including Boeing jets - KING5.com

A European Union flag and a U.K. flag during a special meeting of the European Council on November 25, 2018 in Brussels, Belgium. AFP via Getty Images

The U.K. and the European Union have now entered either their ultimate bluffing session before striking a last-minute compromise on their future relationship, or the inexorable slide toward the no-deal Brexit both sides promised to avoid ever since the 2016 U.K. referendum on the countrys membership.

A summit of EU leaders on Thursday sternly noted that progress on the key issues of interest to the Union [was] still not sufficient for an agreement to be reached, and called on the U.K. to make the necessary moves to make an agreement possible.

U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson then retorted on Friday that the EU had refused to negotiate seriously, and said that the U.K. would get ready for arrangements with its biggest trade partner that would be more like Australia from January 1 next year, when the so-called transition period of the countrys exit from the union expires.

Translation from the two-day drama: Things go on as usual, albeit with heightened rhetoric and now tighter deadlines.

Read: U.K. will quit talks if no trade deal agreed upon by Oct. 15, Boris Johnson said in September

What mattered in Johnsons BBC interview is what he didnt say: After warning two weeks ago that he would walk away from the long-running trade talks if no progress had been made before the EU summit, Johnson is, in fact, ready to keep talking despite the absence of progress. His intended threat of a no-deal Brexit came with the caveat, repeated three times in the six-minute interview, that it would only happen unless some fundamental change of approach is perceptible on the EU side.

The EU, for its part, had urged the U.K. to keep talking, and instructed its key negotiator Michel Barnier to keep doing what he has been doing for months. And Barnier said indeed that he would be in London next week to do just that, in a meeting with his counterpart, the U.K. Brexit negotiator David Frost.

Read: Ursula von der Leyen self-isolates after mixing with all 27 EU presidents and prime ministers from the bloc

Talking about what? That will be the real question. The no-deal scenario is constantly described by Johnson and other U.K. governments ministers as the Australian option, meaning that the U.K. would simply trade with the EU according to the very basic, and costlier, rules of the World Trade Organization. But that is seemingly ignoring that Australia has a range of other agreements and bilateral deals with the EU which it deems so unsatisfying that it engaged in proper free-trade negotiations with the union two years ago.

Barnier, in any case, is unlikely to come back to London just to talk about the wine trade or the mutual exchange of passenger records topics covered by two of the current EU-Australia agreements.

So the U.K.-EU comprehensive trade treaty that both sides swear they want to conclude will once again depend on whether or not European fishermen will be able to keep trawling in British waters, what kind of guarantees the U.K. will give the EU that it wont engage in a race to the bottom in environmental or social regulations, and what assurances the two sides will provide each other that the disputes will be dealt with in good faith and following strict legality.

Read: U.K. asks consumers to go easy on fish & chips its all about Brexit, but theres a catch

What has been surprising in the last two days is that the official tone set by EU leaders and Johnson was more dramatic than the upbeat noises emanating from the two sides negotiating teams in the preceding days. That suggests that the rhetoric ramp-up is more political than technical, and that a deal might be in sight after all, once everyone has taken the ultimate posture.

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It was billed as the final showdown between the EU and U.K. this is what will happen next - MarketWatch

Though time is quickly running out for a trade pact between the United Kingdom and the European Union in the critical final hours of Brexit divorce talks, both sides will continue to be linked together regardless of what happens, according to a panel of European business executives hosted by Northeastern University.

The U.K. left the EU in January but continued to apply the blocs rules through the end of 2020 as it attempted to hammer out new border agreements. But talkswhich have a deadline of Oct. 15have hit a snag around several key trading issues and it remains to be seen what happens next.

With or without a deal, the EU is the most important export destination, the most important trading partner for the U.K., said Sara Hewin, chief economist at investment banking giant Standard Chartered, speaking on a live teleconference from London.

The U.K. is an important trading partner for the EU, so no matter what happens with the Brexit talks, the two sides are closely linked together, she said.

Joseph E. Aoun, president of Northeastern, kicked off the panel by noting that the COVID-19 pandemic had forced the international community to grapple with a range of issues that were unforeseen at the start of the year.

We are living in a new situation for all of us, whether we are in Asia, in Europe, in Africa, in the Middle East, in Australia, or in the United States, or in the Americas. Obviously, everybody is looking at the impact of COVID-19 on on our everyday lives, but also on how we interact with other people, on our businesses, our communications, and our travels, he said.

Oct. 15, which also coincides with an EU summit in Brussels, was supposed to be the line in the sand for striking a deal. An arrangement by that date would still have left enough time in the rest of 2020 for the legal and bureaucratic details to be worked out and for the treaty to be drawn up, Hewin said.

Negotiations between U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, slated for the evening of Oct. 14, may smooth out some of the remaining hurdles, which include state aid, trade with Northern Ireland, and sovereignty over fishing waters, panelists said.

More precisely, the EU is keen on the U.K. not turning into an aggressive competitor, Hewin explained. There are state aid rules in the European Union that prevent governments from giving an unfair advantage to certain businesses through financial support. Meanwhile, the pressing issue with fisheries is that while they are a small part of the U.K.s economy, they are a significant sector politically.

The U.K. wants to gain sovereignty over fishing waters, but the EU wants to have certainty that fishermen from France, Belgium, and the Netherlands will have access to U.K. waters, and they dont want this to be negotiated on an annual basis, said Hewin.

Solidarity will be key to moving the broader, post-pandemic European economy forward, added Doris Honold, who worked in corporate banking in Europe and Asia before taking a fellowship with Harvard Universitys Advanced Leadership Initiative.

She and other panelists also discussed the effect of the coronavirus on other aspects of the European economy.

I think the economic outlook for Europe, like for most of the rest of the world other than China, is grim, Honold said from Germany. Forecasts call for a K-shaped recovery in which certain sectors of the economy recover more quickly and have an upward trajectory while other sectors lag behind, causing a downward slide, she said.

The clear shift from consuming services to consuming goods means that goods-producing sectors are thriving while service-oriented industries like restaurants and travel industries are hurting. The situation will not change until the global pandemic ends, and Honold said forecasts dont predict a recovery until 2022.

Any success over the pandemic is only temporary unless its beaten everywhere, which requires more global collaboration across Europe and also across the world, Honold said. I think Germany always showed solidarity with its neighbors and will do so in the future.

Over in France, where Philippe dOrnano runs the high-end cosmetics firm Sisley, the coronavirus financially impacted the family business. The initial hits to the business came from China before moving to other Asian countries, Europe, the United States and the Middle East, dOrnano said. Still, the companys digital business helped offset some losses.

The pandemic had a severe impact in March and April before Sisley started to recover in May, dOrnano said.

Being a mid-sized company was an advantage, dOrnano said, in that it allowed the business to keep factories open despite some employees working from home, while bigger companies shut everything down.

Prime Minister Jean Castex has warned that France could face further restrictions, including a lockdown, as the nation faces a strong second wave of new infections.

Several large cities, including Paris and Marseille, were recently placed under maximum virus alert. While local governments have objected, bars and other public establishments will be closed in high-infection areas. The prime minister has called on French residents to limit private gatherings in their homes to limit the viruss spread.

I think the real question will be whether we can go forward or whether were going to be confined again, dOrnano said. The uncertainty surrounding the pandemic has caused people and companies to hold the line on spending, crimping the economy, he added.

The virtual panel discussion was sponsored by Northeasterns Young Global Leaders program and hosted by graduates Emilio Botin and Alia Malik. Prior discussions have focused on climate change, Africa, and Latin America.

For media inquiries, please contact media@northeastern.edu.

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What happens to Europe if a Brexit trade deal isn't reached? - News@Northeastern