The Killing Of George Floyd And The Long History Of Police Brutality In The US

Umang Kumar

Innocent brothers and sisters it’s time to wake up, wake up, wake up

Brothers and sisters it’s time to say something, do something, make ’em

Mmm I wonder, how many Blacks lives, how many Black lives

How many heartbeats turned into flatlines

– “How Many” by Miguel

Just when the news about the way African-Americans were being disproportionately affected by the coronavirus could get no worse, just when you thought that the United States was consumed with battling the virus, came sickening, familiar news, one after another, of a kind that had not hit public notice for a while now.

First, we heard of the senseless shooting of Ahmaud Arbery, a black man out for a run in Georgia. Then came the incident where a white woman in Central Park, New York, called the police on a black man who had asked her to leash her dog. Most recently, we had to bear witness to the horrific murder of George Floyd when a police officer pinned his neck down with his knee.

All three incidents involved the common figure of the black person perceived as a threat.

The scenarios above are familiar ones too – white folk suspicious of black folk in their vicinity and either taking action themselves (Arbery) or immediately calling the police for intervention (Cooper); a law-enforcement officer using excessive force to restrain and punish a black man suspected of some wrongdoing (Floyd).

The second scenario is commonly labeled as “police brutality.” It describes situations in which police officers, often white, bring to bear excessive force on black suspects. This could be in the form of either employing a physical restraining force as with George Floyd in Minneapolis most recently and with Eric Garner in New York in 2014, or shooting at them if sensing even the slightest threat, as in the cases of Michael Brown in Ferguson in 2014 – and hundreds of others over the years!

The August 2014 Michael Brown incident, close on the heels of the July 2014 killing of Eric Garner, set off massive protests in Ferguson (Missouri), which later spread throughout the United States. The state of Missouri had to employ heavily militarized additional forces, to bring the violence under control.

Though a lot of soul-searching and analysis resulted from the manifestation of public anger in Ferguson, from trying to understand the socio-economic divides to thinking of the issues with police biases and training,  that did not do much to put the brakes in racist police behavior throughout the US, even in the same year.

In November 2014, police in Cleveland Ohio, shot and killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice, who was playing in a public park. He was reported by someone in a call to the police as carrying a weapon, “probably fake.” Indeed, it turned out that Rice had a toy gun in his hands. Rice was, however, shot within seconds of the police arriving on the scene.

The list of unarmed black victims of police violence for 2014, just as an example, as maintained by the website Mapping Police Violence is depressingly long, as it is for years before or after. That not much has changed in the years following Ferguson is evident as also detailed in this recent piece from The Guardian titled, ‘Police violence in America: six years after Ferguson, George Floyd’s killing shows little has changed’.

As former President Obama, quoted in the article, put it recently, “We have to remember that for millions of Americans…being treated differently on account of race is tragically, painfully, maddeningly ‘normal’ – whether it’s while dealing with the healthcare system, or interacting with the criminal justice system, or jogging down the street, or just watching birds in the park.” Obama should know – Ferguson erupted during his presidency.

Earlier, in 2013, Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old African-American boy was shot by a local security officer on suspicion of being an interloper in the neighborhood he was in. When the security officer was later acquitted by the courts, the Black Lives Matters movement was conceived of as a platform to rally around. The movement gained strength following the 2014 incidents of police killings.

Protests by the African-American community over police action, such as in Ferguson or in Minneapolis currently, have a long history in the US. These have included the Watts rebellion in Los Angeles in 1965, the Newark riots of 1967 and the protests following Rodney King’s murder in Los Angeles in 1992. Other more recent protests were triggered by Tim Thomas’ murder in Cincinnati Ohio in 2001, Oscar Grant’s shooting in Oakland in 2009 and the death of Freddie Gray in police custody in 2015 in Baltimore.

The much celebrated and emulated Black Panther Movement in the late 60s and early 70s also took off after constant run-ins with the local police in Oakland, California. It was the Hunter’s Point riots that followed the killing of an unarmed black man, Matthew Johnson, that saw the emergence of the Black Panthers who took it upon themselves to monitor the police while openly carrying arms themselves.

There have been constant struggles and investigations in different areas to address the issues of the socio-economic disadvantages of African-Americans, from biases in allocation of state resources for basic social goods to the mass incarceration of black people to instill fear in the community and remove its working adults to prison.

But alongside all this, the confrontation with law-enforcement has been a constant. Terms like “Driving While Black (DWB),” which point to the high incidences of black folk being pulled over while driving without adequate reason, have long been in mainstream parlance.

In many cases, a simple instance of being pulled over can turn fatal, as in the case of Sandra Bland in Texas in 2015. She protested for being stopped for what seemed like a minor infraction and the exchange with the police officer quickly escalated such that he had her arrested and sent to prison. Three days later she was found hanging in the jail.

While the black community has had a fraught and fatal relationship with the police over the years, the white community has generally trusted the police implicitly. According to a Pew Center report, “A survey conducted in mid-2017 asked Americans to rate police officers and other groups of people on a “feeling thermometer” from 0 to 100, where 0 represents the coldest, most negative rating and 100 represents the warmest and most positive. Black adults gave police officers a mean rating of 47; whites gave officers a mean rating of 72.”

Whites and blacks have very different experiences when dealing with the police. Blacks, in fact, often end up being victimized when they seek the police’s intervention. But the experience the white folks have is markedly different.

As an article explains, “Whites calling the police…do not endure long response times, treatment that negates their victimization, or the slide from victim to suspect in the eyes of the police…even when whites have involuntary contact with police, they overwhelmingly experience the police as helpful, benevolent, fair, and efficient problem solvers.”

As the article goes on to say: “This mismatch in experience equates to powerful incentives for people of one racial group to call the police on others who could be seen as breaching ‘white space.’”

Many people have tried to understand the history behind the recent cases of police targeting of black folk. In the US South, a lot of the early policing was linked to maintaining the system of slavery, as an article explains. In the US North, even if the police started out as a municipal force, they were expected to control “a “dangerous underclass” that included African Americans, immigrants and the poor.”

According to the same piece, “controlling disorder, lack of adequate police training, lack of nonwhite officers and slave patrol origins – are among the forerunners of modern-day police brutality against African Americans.”

A discriminatory regime of laws promulgated after the conclusion of the American Civil War (1865), called the Jim Crow laws, put into practice leagalized racial segregation in the US. It was the police who were often called in to enforce the specifics of the laws, further entrenching the biases against the black population.

The police are not separate from the larger beliefs and attitudes in a society. A historical stance of African-Americans as second class citizens, as dictated by the politics of  disposability, dominates the common attitudes and public policy: “It is a politics in which the unproductive (the poor, weak and racially marginalized) are considered useless and therefore expendable…in which entire populations are considered disposable, unnecessary burdens on state coffers, and consigned to fend for themselves.”

Consider the Washington DC mayor’s recent comment on how the federal government looks at the risk of reopening the economy after the Covid-19 lockdown, while considering the possible fatalities, especially among blacks: “There is this kind of a callous calculation happening that surprises me…It’s kind of like, ‘Well, this COVID is killing old people and, Oh, well. It’s killing black people, and poor people and essential workers. Oh, well.’”

To such deeper and older accounts of systematic neglect and marginalization of African-Americans, and their targeting by law enforcement, is joined the more recent story of America’s notorious “war on drugs.”

As Michelle Alexander, legal scholar and author of the book, The New Jim Crow, explained in an interview, “So, you know, after the drug war was declared…crack hit the streets and really began to ravage inner-city communities, and…a wave of punitiveness really washed over the United States…The drug war was a literal war. It has been, it continues to be, a literal war waged in poor communities of color complete with SWAT teams and military-style equipment and tactics…”

This greater police presence in black communities increased the chances of violent encounters and in many cases, resulted in black folk being swept up into the mass incarceration system, as Alexander explains above.

Other historians push the increased policing and surveillance even further back to the mid-60s into the early 70s. This was the time of the black unrest in places like Newark and Watts and the rise of the Black Panthers.

President Lyndon Johnson, who formulated a “War on Poverty” program to address the disaffection in the black community also sanctioned a “War on Crime,” as historian Elizabeth Hinton has shown. “By 1965, Johnson had formulated a new initiative, what he called a ‘War on Crime.’ He sent to Congress a sweeping new bill that would bulk up police forces with federal money and intensify patrols in urban areas…His initiatives provided money for police to arm themselves with military equipment — ‘military-grade rifles, tanks, riot gear, walkie-talkies, helicopters, and bulletproof vests.’”

What is abundantly clear is that the police have always been the frontline of an apathetic and skittish administration, which has deliberately under-invested in the upliftment of African-Americans. The police, especially the white officers, do their superior’s bidding besides imbibing all the common prejudices against the African-Americans.

Such is the threat that an oppressed, marginalized, brutalized community poses to them that their immediate reaction, despite whatever their training manual says, despite a child or an adult in front of them who is unarmed, is to pull their gun and deal with the supposed threat first.

But the story of the economic disadvantages that the African-Americans suffer from  cannot be ignored. Though, as several incidents including the one with Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates have demonstrated, more well-placed blacks are not necessarily exempt from being stereotyped and viewed with suspicion, the likelihood of poorer blacks being the target of police violence is greater.

The sharp economic divides between blacks and whites are evident in most places in the US. Minneapolis, in the white-majority state of Minnesota, has parts that are poor and economically depressed. As an African-American city official from Minneapolis wrote recently, “Minneapolis hosts some of the worst disparities between black and white success in America.” Similar glaring gaps were found in the areas surrounding the town of Ferguson where protests had broken out in 2014.

While police brutality is certainly a real, existential issue for black Americans, the calamity of the coronavirus has laid bare their vulnerabilities in a stark and undeniable manner. Police brutality and the threat posed by the black body seems embedded deep in America’s history and psyche. So is the socio-economic marginalization of African-Americans.

The protests and reform movements, of course, rightfully seek changes to police operating procedures,  greater conversation on issues of race and solutions like community-control over police. Many organizations seek a minimum of accountability to prosecute the guilty police officers and reopening of old cases to bring a sense of justice.

The tactics and beliefs of the Black Panther Party in struggling against the structures of racism and inequality can be instructive. While advocating for neighborhood self-defence groups to address issues of police brutality, they also campaigned for socio-economic rights, managing their own free breakfast and liberation school programs.

While the current anger and outrage is understandable and protesting the institutionalized racism that pervades the police force is the need of the hour, longer term goals of pressing for socio-economic changes cannot be left by the wayside. Otherwise, it is possible, little substantial difference will accrue to the lives of African-Americans.

Food and Agroecology: Coping with Future Shocks

Colin Todhunter

The food crisis that could follow in the wake of the various lockdowns that were implemented on the back of the coronavirus may have long-lasting consequences. We are already seeing food shortages in the making. In India, for instance, supply chains have been disrupted, farm input systems for the supply of seeds and fertilisers have almost collapsed in some places and crops are not being harvested. Moreover, cultivation has been adversely affected prior to the monsoon and farm incomes are drying up. Farmers closer to major urban centres are faring a bit better due to shorter supply chains.

Veteran rural reporter P Sainath has urged India’s farmers to move away from planting cash crops and to start cultivating food crops, saying that you cannot eat cotton. It’s a good point. For instance, according to a report that appeared on the ruralindiaonline website, in a region of southern Odisha, farmers have been pushed towards a reliance on (illegal) expensive genetically modified herbicide tolerant cotton seeds and have replaced their traditional food crops. Farmers used to sow mixed plots of heirloom seeds, which had been saved from family harvests the previous year and would yield a basket of food crops. They are now dependent on seed vendors, chemical inputs and a volatile international market to make a living and are no longer food secure.

But what is happening in India is a microcosm of global trends. Reliance on commodity monocropping for international markets, long global supply chains and dependency on external inputs for cultivation make the food system vulnerable to shocks, whether resulting from public health scares, oil price spikes (the industrial global food system is heavily fossil-fuel dependent) or conflict. An increasing number of countries are recognising the need to respond by becoming more food self-sufficient, preferably by securing control over their own food and reducing supply chains.

Various coronavirus lockdowns have disrupted many transport and production activities, exposing the weaknesses of our current food system. While one part of the world (the richer countries) experiences surplus food but crop destruction due to farm labour shortages, millions of people elsewhere could face hunger due to rising food prices – or a lack of food availability altogether: the story of India’s migrant workers returning to their villages from the cities has been one of hardship, hunger and even death.

If the current situation tells us anything, it is that structural solutions are needed to reorganise food production. In his final report (2014) to the UN Human Rights Council as Special Rapporteur, Olivier De Schutter called for the world’s food systems to be radically redesigned. His report concluded that by applying agroecological principles to the design of democratically controlled agricultural systems we can help to put an end to food crises and poverty challenges. De Schutter argued that agroecological approaches could tackle food needs in critical regions and could double food production in 10 years. However, he stated that insufficient backing seriously hinders progress.

In addition to De Schutter’s 2014 report, the 2009 IAASTD peer-reviewed report, produced by 400 scientists and supported by 60 countries, recommends agroecology to maintain and increase the productivity of global agriculture. Moreover, the recent UN FAO High Level Panel of Experts concluded that agroecology provides greatly improved food security and nutritional, gender, environmental and yield benefits compared to industrial agriculture.

As a model of agriculture, agroecology is based on traditional knowledge and modern agricultural research, utilising elements of contemporary ecology, soil biology and the biological control of pests. This system combines sound ecological management by using on-farm renewable resources and privileging endogenous solutions to manage pests and disease without the use of agrochemicals and corporate seeds.

Agroecology can also offer concrete, practical solutions to many of the world’s problems. It offers an alternative to a prevailing system of doctrinaire neoliberal economics that drives a failing model of industrial agriculture which is having devastating impacts on the environment, rural communities, public health, local and regional food security and food sovereignty.

Agroecology outperforms the prevailing industrial food system in terms of diversity of food output, nutrition per acre, soil health and efficient water use. In addition, by creating securely paid labour-intensive agricultural work in richer countries, it can also address the interrelated links between labour offshoring by those countries and the displacement of peasant farmers elsewhere who end up in sweat shops to carry out the outsourced jobs.

The Declaration of the International Forum for Agroecology by Nyeleni in 2015 argued for building grass-root local food systems that create new rural-urban links, based on genuine agroecological food production. It added that agroecology requires local producers and communities to challenge and transform structures of power in society, not least by putting the control of seeds, biodiversity, land and territories, waters, knowledge, culture and the commons in the hands of those who feed the world.

It would mean that what ends up in our food and how it is grown is determined by the public good and not powerful private interests driven by commercial gain and the compulsion to subjugate farmers, consumers and entire regions to their global supply chains and questionable products( whether unhealthy food or proprietary pesticides and seeds). For consumers, the public good includes more diverse diets leading to better nutrition and enhanced immunity when faced with any future pandemic.

As Florence Tartanac, senior officer at Nutrition and Food Systems Division of the UN FAO, sated in April 2018:

“… agroecological markets bring an increase in the availability of more diverse food, especially of local varieties, that are linked to traditional diets. Therefore, consumers’ awareness should be increased on the importance of diet diversification and its effects on physical and mental health as well as on the positive impacts of sustainable, local and traditional consumption on the social, economic and environmental compartments.”

She made these comments during the second FAO international symposium ‘Scaling up Agroecology to Achieve the Sustainable Development Goals’. And it’s a valid point seeing that the modern diet has become less diverse and is driving a major public health crisis in many countries.

Across the world, decentralised, region and local community-owned food systems based on short(er) food supply chains that can cope with future shocks are now needed more than ever.

A New Economy after Corona Virus

Walter Fernandes

Most people in India seem to believe that COVID-19 has wrecked the country’s socio-economic system and that the poor are feeling its worst effects. That does not seem to tally with the reality. The pandemic has not wrecked the system but has exposed the weaknesses existing in it already. As Paul Carr says COVID-19 “feeds off social and environmental injustice, exacerbating the wounds, scars and illnesses that existed prior to this pandemic.” It has shown that our health, educational and economic systems and employment generation schemes are made for the urban middle and rural upper classes. The poor do not count in them. The first step in searching for a post-COVID solution that can be beneficial to every citizen is to face this reality.

The health infrastructure exemplifies it. There are indications that the number of COVID positive cases is artificially low in India because testing was at first limited to the urban areas and to passengers coming from abroad. The numbers grew as people in the urban slums began to be tested. Testing was later extended to some villages though not to all of them. It is one of many signs that the health system is made for the better off sections. To give one sign of it, India has only 0.7 hospital beds per 1,000 people. It is among the lowest in the world and is the average in the least developed countries. It is over 5 per 1,000 in Europe, 4.6 in the USA and 1.2 even in Sub-Saharan Africa. Moreover, around 64 percent of the beds are in private hospitals. Many such hospitals have world class facilities but their high charges limit their services to the better off sections and to high priced health tourism. The poor have to be content with government hospitals and public health centres (PHC) most of which are poorly equipped. These entities are effective in States like Kerala that manage them well. But in much of Northern, Eastern and North Eastern India most PHCs exist only on paper. The medical personnel visit them occasionally. It would be unrealistic to expect them to test people for COVID-19 or deal even with ordinary illnesses.

Dealing with these issues and building a sustainable health infrastructure that is accessible to the whole population is thus the first post-corona virus challenge. It cannot be achieved by privatising government hospitals and PHCs as some suggest because the profit-orientation of the private sector will make them accessible to the rural upper classes and will continue to exclude the poor. To be sustainable, the rural health infrastructure has to be efficiently run and at the same time accessible to the poor. Private-public partnership (PPP) is a possible solution. In many rural areas, particularly in the Northeast, a large number of civil society and church organisations (CSO) run dispensaries and are doing what the PHCs should be doing. It is possible to build a rural health infrastructure around them with the CSOs and the state working together. Their partnership would involve the government providing the funds and the CSO and PHC personnel joining hands in running them by using each other’s expertise. Such a PPP can build an efficient rural health infrastructure that is accessible to all and is sustainable in the long run.

The second challenge is the migrant issue. The manner in which the migrants were treated during the lockdown shows the callousness of our society in general and of the governments in particular towards the poor. Singapore, a small city state announced the lockdown three days in advance and gave its people enough time to return to their base. India, on the contrary, gave a four hour notice for a lockdown and social distancing. A realistic time table would have been to give people four to seven days to return to their homes and mobilising all the trains and buses to ferry stranded people back to their base. A four hour warning and stopping all transport immediately left millions of migrant daily wage earners stranded with no work and with no money. The migrants who were abandoned tried to walk back home and use every means available because remaining back would have meant starvation. However, in an affidavit the Central Government seems to have told the Supreme Court that none was walking on the highways. A senior minister is reported to have said that there is no starvation and none has died. Simultaneously everyone was asked to remain indoors wherever they were. Such an order ignored the fact that 50 percent of urban dwellers live in one room tenements in the slums or on pavements. Similar numbers in the rural areas do not have a house where they can have privacy. What do lockdown and social distancing mean to them?

These and similar actions are signs of the total lack of sensitivity of our society towards the poor, particularly towards people who live on daily wages hundreds or thousands of kilometres away from their homes because their native place does not provide them productive employment. The migrants thus challenge both the State and our society as a whole to find an economic response that can provide them a livelihood and not one based on the minimum starvation wage of Rs 120 for a 12-hour day that the Centre and many States have announced. This wage is less than half the poverty line and it will legalise bonded labour and push the migrants who have come back home from one exploitative situation into a new bondage. A solution can be found by reviving the local economy in a new form. The massive destruction of the natural resources is a major cause of people’s impoverishment and loss of livelihood that has forced millions of people to migrate away from their homes. Such destruction has repercussions such as more and more ferocious floods every year. Most governments have been responding to the floods by building bunds, providing relief, cleaning the Ganga and dredging the Brahmaputra. These actions will keep the contractors in business for years to come but do not solve the problem of the floods which are caused by deforestation in the catchment areas of the rivers. Because of it silt flows into the rivers, raises their level and causes more floods every year. More land takeover in the name of development and defence deprives many more people of their livelihood and forces them to migrate away from their states in search of employment.

Today they return home because those avenues have closed and one has to find a response to this situation by dealing with the causes of their exodus. Its main reason is the destruction of the natural resource base and the disasters like floods and droughts resulting from it. A response to it requires a united effort of the rural population to rebuild their resource base. It poses a challenge to the CSOs because the state will not take the initiative. To the state these resources are only sources of revenue that is got by destroying them. The civil society has to search for an alternative together with the migrant returnees and the local people. The best solution is probably to form them into self-help and other organised groups to replant the forests, replenish water sources and revive land that has been rendered infertile by floods and droughts. They then need to organise the people into rural agro-based industrial units that plan a three crop regime based on local technology. They cannot stop at producing crops because their market is controlled by the forces that encourage contract farming which recent central schemes support. The local people have to go beyond production. They have to process and market these crops. It will involve a great deal of training in processing and marketing. This effort to revive a bottom to top local economy also requires plenty of self-confidence in the local people and the CSOs have to help them to acquire it. This effort can generate employment and can absorb the youth returning to their native place. MGNAREGA can be used for this purpose but organising the local people and migrant returnees into viable self-help groups has to be its foundation.

Australian schools affected by new coronavirus clusters

Patrick Kelly

The reopening of schools in Australia’s two most populous states, New South Wales (NSW) and Victoria, has immediately triggered multiple coronavirus cases. The infections have exposed state and federal government claims, both Labor and Liberal, that teachers, staff and children are safe to return to school amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

In NSW, with only a week’s notice, the Liberal government of Premier Gladys Berejiklian ordered the full reopening of the schools on May 25. Just one day later, two schools in Sydney had to be closed, Moriah College and Waverley College, after students, one in Year 5 and another in Year 7, tested positive. The schools were closed for several days while they were cleaned. Children who had been in close proximity to the infected were advised to self isolate, and many families took their children to get tested. There was no identified spread of the virus from the two confirmed cases.

The two private schools are located very close together in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, near Bondi beach, which emerged as one of the coronavirus hotspots at the peak of the initial wave of infections in late March. How the students were infected, and whether there was a connection between the two cases, remains unknown.

In what has emerged as a repeated pattern, the media initially reported the Sydney school infections but then quickly dropped coverage, with no follow up investigative reporting.

NSW Education Minister Sarah Mitchell insisted that despite the new infections, the government had “made the right call” in reopening schools. She added that there “will be occasions [when] we do have a positive case that affects a school community,” declaring this was “something we’re going to have to live with.”

The same disregard for public health and safety has been demonstrated by the state Labor government in Victoria. On May 25, schools reopened for students in Years Prep-2 and 11-12, ahead of a full reopening next Tuesday. As in NSW, the rushed return to the classroom has triggered coronavirus infections.

In the working class Melbourne suburb of Keilor Downs, a cluster of at least 13 cases has resulted in the temporary closure of three schools.

Keilor Downs College closed last week after a student tested positive, reportedly through a known source. A teacher had earlier tested positive, though had reportedly been working from home and had not had physical contact with the school. St Albans Secondary College and Taylor Lakes Secondary College were also affected, with 80 students from the three public high schools told to self-isolate.

A younger relative of the infected student later also tested positive, resulting in the closure of Holy Eucharist Primary School in St Albans and the quarantining of a Year 2 class and the teacher. The young student had reportedly been asymptomatic before being tested, underscoring the likelihood of ongoing community transmission that is not being detected by the targeted testing system in place.

In a separate case reported yesterday, a kindergarten teacher from Macleod Preschool, in Melbourne’s north-east, tested positive. The kindergarten was closed for “deep cleaning.” Health officials reported that at least 12 children and 8 staff were considered close contacts of the infected teacher.

As in NSW, the state Labor government has insisted that school staff need to accept that continued outbreaks of infections are inevitable. Victorian Education Minister James Merlino declared last week: “There is no doubt, there will be outbreaks… we will deal with them on a school-by-school basis.”

The rushed reopening of the schools in the midst of the pandemic is grossly irresponsible. Government assurances of school staff and child safety are outright lies. Scientists are still learning about the coronavirus, including how it affects children. It is well documented that COVID-19 disproportionately affects older people, but doctors internationally are only beginning to explore the painful and potentially fatal symptoms in a minority of cases that trigger what has been called paediatric inflammatory multi-system syndrome, resembling Kawasaki Disease.

Moreover, there are conflicting scientific studies concerning the question of whether the coronavirus is less transmissible through young children. Christian Drosten, virologist at Berlin’s Charite hospital, explained in late April that evidence indicated that “viral loads in the very young do not differ significantly from those of adults … children may be as infectious as adults.” The study that Drosten led concluded: “Based on these results, we have to caution against an unlimited reopening of schools and kindergartens in the present situation.”

The rushed reopening of the schools in Australia has nothing to do with an objective, scientific evaluation of the real risks confronting teachers and school staff, students and families. Rather it forms the spearhead of the ruling elite’s drive to fully reopen the economy for big business and finance capital, eliminating social distancing and lockdown measures that impinged on the generation of profit. Prime Minister Scott Morrison, supported by the Labor Party through the national cabinet, has insisted that there will be no plan to eliminate coronavirus because it would be too costly.

The Australian Education Union and other teacher unions, including the NSW Teachers’ Federation, are complicit. The bureaucracies have endorsed the rushed reopening of the schools, playing a crucial role in suppressing teacher concerns and opposition by agreeing with and amplifying the official rationales for a return to face-to-face teaching.

Teachers are being given contradictory and impossible to implement advice. Morrison has repeatedly declared that social distancing is not necessary or advisable within schools, but at the same time, half of the federal government’s glossy poster for school teachers is devoted to advice on how to maintain social distancing measures.

One of these states: “Maintain smaller classes.” As though class sizes are determined by teachers! No funding or other measures necessary to reduce class sizes have been put in place, such as strict class caps and the hiring of tens of thousands of additional teachers across the country.

Teachers and school staff cannot allow themselves and their students to be used as guinea pigs in a dangerous social experiment.

The Committee for Public Education (CFPE) published a statement on May 28 opposing the reopening of school systems in states and territories where there is community transmission of COVID-19—currently New South Wales (NSW) and Victoria—and calling for the formation of safety action committees to protect the safety and wellbeing of students and staff threatened by the coronavirus pandemic.

Microsoft to replace MSN news production workers with artificial intelligence

Mike Ingram

Microsoft is firing dozens of news contractors after June 30 and replacing them with artificial intelligence (AI).

Around 50 journalists and editors in the US contracted though Aquent IFG and MAQ Consulting and 27 in the UK contracted through PA Media (formerly the Press Association) will lose their jobs. These workers operate MSN news pages, curating content and in some cases rewriting headlines and editing content to fit the format.

MSN was launched as Microsoft’s news portal in 1995. At its launch, MSN published original content as well as links to news, weather and sports updates. In 2014, the site was relaunched as a partner with other news sites, paying them to redistribute their content.

At the launch of Microsoft News in June 2018, Microsoft said it had more than 800 editors working in 50 locations around the world. The company has been gradually moving toward AI for its news work in recent months, using AI to scan for content and process and filter it. Software can also suggest photos for human editors to pair with content.

In the “About us” section of msn.com, Microsoft states:

“Every day, our publishing partners send us more than 100,000 unique pieces of content. Our AI scans the content as it arrives, processes it to understand dimensions like freshness, category, topic type, opinion content and potential popularity and then presents it for our editors. Our algorithms suggest appropriate photos to pair with content to help bring stories to life. Editors then curate the top stories throughout the day, across a variety of topics, so our readers get the latest news from the best sources.”

The layoffs indicate that Microsoft aims to eliminate the manual curation step and fully automate the process, with the potential loss of hundreds of jobs.

In a statement to the Seattle Times, Microsoft said, “Like all companies, we evaluate our business on a regular basis. This can result in increased investment in some places and, from time to time, re-deployment in others.

The Microsoft spokesperson said the layoffs were “not the result of the current pandemic,” but Microsoft, as with other companies, has seen a significant decline in ad revenue.

Full-time news producers will remain employed by Microsoft, but as they perform similar functions to the fired contractors, their jobs could also be at risk.

The Seattle Times cites employees speaking anonymously, saying that MSN will use AI to replace the production work they had been doing. “It’s been semi-automated for a few months but now it’s full speed ahead,” one soon-to-be-terminated worker said.

According to the Guardian, in the UK, “Employees were told Microsoft’s decision to end the contract with PA Media was taken at short notice as part of a global shift away from humans in favor of automated updates for news.”

A worker expressed concern to the Guardian that the move to automation was risky, as staff were careful to stick to “very strict editorial guidelines” to ensure that users were not presented with violent or inappropriate content. As MSN is the default browser homepage on Windows devices, there is particular concern regarding younger users.

The use of artificial intelligence in journalism has grown in recent years. A February 2019 New York Times article titled “The Rise of the Robot Reporter” noted that “Roughly a third of the content published by Bloomberg News uses some form of automated technology.”

The Associated Press first began using AI for the creation of news content in 2013 to produce sport and earnings reports. The Washington Post used “automated journalism” to report on the Rio Olympic Games in 2016.

In 2017, Google funded an automated news project in which computers would write 30,000 stories a month for local media. The Press Association (PA) received £622,000 for its Reporters and Data and Robots (Radar) scheme, which it claimed would benefit “established media outlets,” independent publishers and local bloggers.

In the UK’s 2019 General Election, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) used AI to produce nearly 700 articles, covering every constituency that declared election results overnight.

In December 2019, the BBC reported: “Using machine assistance, we generated a story for every single constituency that declared last night with the exception of the one that hasn’t finished counting yet. That would never have been possible [using humans].”

Sweeping attacks on migrant workers in Russia amid COVID-19 pandemic

Andrea Peters

A tidal wave of anti-immigrant measures is under preparation in Russia, as the Kremlin and its nominal political opponents in other parties attempt to divert mass discontent over the government’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic and skyrocketing poverty by promoting xenophobia and Russian chauvinism.

There are currently 11 million foreign workers in Russia, of which nearly half are from the former Soviet republics in Central Asia. Official unemployment in the country has doubled since March and now stands at nearly 1.7 million. It is expected to reach 5 to 6 million by the end of the year. According to a recent poll by the Levada Center, 28 percent of the Russian population said they would join street protests over collapsing incomes and living standards.

Under these conditions, the federal news agency RIA Novosti reported last Friday that the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MIA) is considering the creation of a vast database that contains foreign workers’ biometric information, health histories, details of their legal and “social” status, and criminal records. These laborers would be required to put the app “Migrant” onto their smartphones, which would track their movements and activities and link to the database. The entire system would assign each individual a “migrant social trust rating,” which would automatically decrease if the person refused to download the software.

In order to facilitate the rollout of “Migrant,” the government is considering a mass amnesty for undocumented workers. The aim is to induce undocumented immigrants to register with the state.

The government would simultaneously unveil a labor exchange for migrants, where workers would receive job placements in a narrow range of specific, low-wage industries. “Women could be sent to work in old-age homes or places that serve invalids, and the rest to workplaces in city infrastructure, utilities, or transportation,” a government source told RIA Novosti. Incentives will be given to employers to participate, and laborers might receive “a grocery bag of food, some basic necessities, or a cash payment.”

In short, the aim is to create a government-run caste system in the Russian labor force, with migrants funneled into the worst-paid jobs and subject to constant surveillance. RIA Novosti ’s source told the press outlet that the coronavirus pandemic has created a “force-majeure” situation, the implication being that the government now has the right to dispense with whatever minimal legal limits are in place in order to address “the possible aggravation of the migration situation.”

The Stalinist Communist Party of Russia (KPRF) is playing a central role in the campaign against immigrants. The KPRF was founded in 1993 by a section of the apparatus of the former Stalinist bureaucracy, which had destroyed the conquests of the Russian revolution of 1917 and dissolved the USSR in 1991. It now trades in Russian nationalism, right-wing chauvinism, and phony semi-opposition to Putin. The party is pushing to enact permanent federal limits on migration, targeting primarily workers that come from Central Asia.

The KPRF is also calling for raising wages for migrants, for the purpose of increasing the cost of employing them, such that native-born Russians are more competitive in the labor market. In essence, they wish to make Russian citizens—for whom the legal minimum wage is about 1200 rubles ($196) a month--the preferred low-wage labor force.

Anti-immigrant policies are also taking hold at the local level. Saint Petersburg, the country’s second largest city, just passed a measure that requires native-born Russians to be hired over migrant workers in construction, warehousing, the service sector and other industries. A businessman from the region was just fined 200,000 rubles ($2900) for hiring a foreign laborer.

Currently a petition put out by a representative of the far-right National Democratic Party, “Protecting the labor market and security for Russian citizens,” is circulating online. Blackguarding migrants as criminals, religious radicals and terrorists, it calls for mass deportation of unemployed migrants to Central Asia. The newspaper Nezavism aya Gazeta notes, “political scientists, professors of sociological sciences, regional deputies and political activists of different orientations are seen among the signatories.”

The intensified anti-immigrant policies come as Russia’s migrant workers face an economic and social catastrophe. Millions, laid off due to the COVID-19 pandemic, are stranded in the country and unable to return home because of the closure of borders and suspension of rail and air links. The International Organization for Migration, a branch of the UN, estimates that 60 percent of Russia’s foreign laborers cannot pay their rent and 40 percent cannot buy food. The Migration Development Fund, a Russian charity organization, received 30,000 appeals for help in just one week in May.

Living in squalid, overcrowded apartments, this population has faced the spread of the coronavirus. The sick are forced into strictly monitored, at-home quarantine, where they may infect their roommates. Every time another person in a household gets ill, local authorities restart the quarantine clock for everyone in the home, such that thousands are locked in their apartments for weeks on end. ABC News carried the story of one migrant worker in Moscow, who explained that there were only a few kilos of flour and some oil left to feed the 10 people with whom she lived. They have been stuck inside for more than 20 days.

Although President Vladimir Putin announced a temporary suspension of paperwork and payments required of migrants to maintain their legal work status due to the coronavirus, workers report that employers continue to demand money from them for their so-called “labor patent”—a work license renewed by the employee each month. In Saint Petersburg and Moscow, the patents cost 4,000 ($58) and 5350 rubles ($78), respectively.

Local governments are simply ignoring other aspects of the presidential decree, with courts continuing to detain migrant workers on the basis of the claim that federal statutes on migration are still in force and supersede directives issued from the Kremlin.

The crisis in Russia is spilling into migrants’ home countries, whose economies are highly dependent on the remittances sent by workers back to their families. According to the World Bank, transfers from citizens working abroad constitute 31.3 percent of Tajikistan’s and 32.9 percent of Kyrgyzstan’s gross domestic product. When the borders reopen and millions are able to return home, the Central Asian states to which they return will see a mass influx of young and impoverished returnees.

The political attack on migrants coming from all quarters of the Russian political establishment overwhelmingly targets those from Central Asia. It is sustained by a subservient media, which never fails to carry a news story about a crime allegedly committed by a migrant and almost always features photographs of individuals who appear to be Central Asian.

The campaign against people from this region is particularly grotesque and tragic because the workers from these areas were, like those in what today is the Russian Federation, all once citizens of the Soviet Union. Based on the program of internationalism, the Russian revolution sought to unite the disparate peoples of the former Russian empire on the basis of the principle of equality. This effort was brutally betrayed by Stalinism, culminating ultimately in the restoration of capitalism in a dismembered former Soviet Union, where workers of all ethnicities are exploited.

Egypt: el-Sisi approves legal framework for military dictatorship

Jean Shaoul

Prefiguring the actions of Donald Trump in the United States, Egypt’s blood-stained dictator General Abdel Fatah el-Sisi has approved amendments to emergency law granting himself and the armed forces additional powers.

The provisions provide the legal framework for a military dictatorship in the Arab world’s most populous country, with el-Sisi at its head. They will ban—not just limit—all political opposition to the domination of the corporate, financial and military elite over economic and political life.

While presenting these measures as a means of combating the COVID-19 pandemic, having seized power in a military coup in 2013 el-Sisi is preparing to suppress seething social discontent as the global recession, closures and curfews push the country’s fragile economy into meltdown and its impoverished people into destitution.

Indifferent to the desperate conditions facing the country’s 102 million population, the government did nothing to prepare for the pandemic despite Egypt being identified in early February as one of the African countries most at risk. Travel bans and lockdown measures were only imposed after dozens of workers on a Nile cruise ship in the southern city of Luxor tested positive for the disease in mid-March.

The International Food Policy Research Institute estimated that Egypt, due to the decline in Suez Canal revenues as a result of the fall in world trade, particularly oil and natural gas, remittances and tourism, could lose $2.3-$2.6 billion a month, hitting the poor hardest. Prior to the pandemic, one in three Egyptians were living on less than $1.40 a day and, according to the World Bank, “some 60 percent of Egypt’s population is either poor or vulnerable.”

Under conditions where the state is the single main employer, accounting for six million jobs and providing patronage for politicians’ supporters, most people work in the informal sector as daily wage earners and street peddlers, testifying to the total inability of the national bourgeoisie to develop the economy after nominal independence from the colonial powers. These workers have a stark choice: work and risk infection or stop and risk starvation.

While the government announced a $5.6 billion raft of measures—chiefly cheap loans—to support the employers, it provided little or nothing in the way of income support to the working class.

The official number of cases of COVID-19 is approaching 25,000 and the number of deaths nearly 1,000. But these figures are widely believed to be a gross underestimate, because of the lack of testing, the lag in reporting deaths attributable to the virus outside hospitals and the government’s desire to cover up the scale of the crisis and its role in the spread of the pandemic. Egypt expelled Guardian and New York Times’ reporters for questioning the data.

Egypt’s healthcare system has proved incapable of responding effectively to the crisis. The Egyptian Medical Syndicate has said that 19 doctors had died from the disease and more than 350 others were ill. It accused the Ministry of Health of negligence for its handling of COVID-19 and said it was responsible for the doctors’ deaths for failing to provide personal protective equipment and quarantine beds for frontline staff. It warned the system could “collapse.” This warning came two days after a 32-year-old doctor, unable to get a bed at a quarantine hospital, died. His death prompted doctors at Cairo’s al-Munira hospital to publish a mass resignation letter on Facebook.

Despite the rising death toll, two weeks ago the government moved to reopen the economy, restarting public transport, opening shops and businesses and allowing hotels and the hospitality sector catering to the domestic market to start operating, prompting fears of a renewed surge in cases. The flight and travel ban had closed the country’s tourism sector, which accounts for around 12 to 15 percent of GDP and brings in $1 billion of foreign currency a month and is a major employer.

In April, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) warned in its World Economic Outlook that the Middle East and North African economies could shrink by 3.3 percent in 2020. The pandemic would compound the region’s unemployment problem and worsen the already high public and external debt. Acutely aware of the social tensions, it added, “A mishandling of the outbreak could elevate distrust in local governments, sowing seeds for further social unrest and adding to regional uncertainty.”

The IMF has already approved $2.8 billion in new emergency financing for Egypt even as it is considering another loan of up to $5 billion more. It follows a $12 billion IMF package negotiated in 2016 that entailed harsh austerity measures, including cutting subsidies on fuel and electricity that particularly impacted the poor. Last month, the cabinet approved a draft law cutting public sector salaries and pension payments.

Heightened social tensions lie behind el-Sisi’s assumption of ever greater dictatorial powers, despite the fact that Egypt has been under a state of emergency for most of the past four decades except for brief intervals between 2012 and 2017.

During his seven years in power, el-Sisi has thrown 60,000 political activists, critics, including secular and Muslim Brotherhood politicians, journalists, and human rights defenders, into Egypt’s notoriously overcrowded and squalid prisons, where they are often detained for years without trial. According to Human Rights Watch (HRW), hundreds have died in custody due to medical negligence or the atrocious conditions.

Egypt ranks as one of the foremost jailers of journalists and bloggers who dare to voice criticism of the regime. Sisi has arrested the relatives of at least 15 dissidents, journalists and cultural figures, who have used social media platforms to air their criticisms in exile. The security services have blocked more than 500 websites, bought up shares in TV networks and censored the scripts of popular TV series.

Two Washington-based think tanks, the Project on Middle East Democracy (POMED) and the Center for International Policy (CIP), said, “Sisi's regime has engaged in a systematic pattern of gross human rights violations, from gunning down peaceful protesters in the streets to jailing tens of thousands of political opponents, including journalists, academics, and human rights defenders.”

It added, “The Sisi government has severely restricted the ability of independent non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to operate, all but eliminated a free and independent press, and perpetuated tensions between Muslims and Christians.”

All this has proceeded with the tacit support of successive US administrations and the major European powers. Now the new law gives the intelligence and military forces wide ranging law-enforcement powers, including arrests, investigations into crimes, the detention of “suspects” and the seizure of property without judicial oversight.

It gives el-Sisi as president the power to order the military to conduct preliminary investigations and prosecutions into offences deemed a violation of the emergency law.

Other powers include closing schools and universities, shutting down public and private-sector bodies entirely or partially, postponing payment of bills and compelling Egyptian returnees from abroad to undergo quarantine on their arrival home. Crucially, they include restricting different forms of public and private gatherings, banning the export of certain goods and turning schools and youth centres into hospitals.

Human Rights watch wrote that the amendments amounted to a “cover for new repressive powers” that “could curb rights in the name of ‘public order.’” It pointed out, “Only five of the 18 proposed amendments are clearly tied to public health developments. Making them part of the emergency law means that the authorities can enforce the measures whenever a state of emergency is declared, regardless of whether there is a public health emergency.”

Canada’s governments ignored 2006 pandemic preparedness report

Dylan Lubao

A May 15 W orld S ocialist W orld S ite article titled “The 2003 SARS epidemic: How Canada’s elite squandered the chance to prepare for the COVID-19 pandemic” characterized the response of the country’s ruling class to the novel coronavirus as a “social crime.”

This point is further substantiated by perusal of a fourteen-year-old report that was commissioned by the federal and provincial governments in the aftermath of the 2003 SARS outbreak. The report both anticipated the current COVID-19 pandemic and outlined a comprehensive public health response.

The recommendations contained in the report were essentially ignored by every level of government across the country.

Titled “The Canadian Pandemic Influenza Plan for the Health Sector,” the 550-page report was a significant undertaking, developed through the collaboration of governments at the federal, provincial or territorial, and local level.

It recalled the devastating impact of pandemics and reiterated the necessity for preparedness, collaboration across provincial borders and governmental jurisdictions, and a rapid response to the country’s initial cases of pandemic influenza.

Of particular note is that the report was coauthored by Theresa Tam, the country’s current Chief Public Health Officer. As late as January 29 of this year, Tam downplayed the risk to Canadians of the novel coronavirus as “much, much lower than that of many countries.”

Tam made these remarks a month after the federal government and doctors across the country were notified of a novel virus outbreak in a Wuhan marketplace that would become the source of the pandemic. Four days earlier, on January 25, Canada had recorded its first case of COVID-19.

What is even more striking is how accurately the 2006 report predicted the development of the outbreak in Canada.

Under a section titled “Background,” the report made the prediction that a strain of pandemic influenza would likely originate in Asia, and that it would probably arrive in Canada within three months. The report went on to estimate that the peak in infections would occur two to four months after the arrival of the virus, with the peak in mortality occurring one month afterward.

Ominously, the report also forecast that over 70 percent of the population would contract the virus. A “mild to moderate” outbreak would see 15 to 35 percent of the population fall clinically ill (5.6 to 13 million people), with a staggering 10,000 to 60,000 deaths. The COVID-19 death toll in Canada, currently at 7,395, is steadily approaching the lower limit of this projection.

Notwithstanding the report’s focus on the influenza virus, as distinct from the novel 2019 coronavirus (designated SARS-CoV-2), its projections retain their validity because of the similar pathological features of the two viruses, including the way they are transmitted and disease symptoms.

The public health measures advocated by the report in its “Preparedness” section were, therefore, no less compelling.

They stressed the need for rapid “collection, collation and analysis of detailed epidemiological, laboratory, and clinical data” on a new pandemic virus. This required the preparation of a robust research and testing capacity in the country’s medical laboratories. Instead, due to years of cuts to health care funding, Canada’s testing capacity remains extremely low even as the pandemic enters its sixth month.

In addition, a 2004 consultation by the World Health Organization cited in the report insisted that the containment of a novel pandemic virus would require “aggressive public health care measures,” including the use of “antiviral drugs, contact tracing, quarantine and exit screening.”

The report tacitly acknowledged the ramshackle state of public health care in Canada. It described the country’s health care institutions as “running at maximal or near maximal bed capacity,” and warned that a pandemic could “exceed the capacity of the current health care setting to cope.”

The images in 2020 of health care professionals working with inadequate or nonexistent personal protective equipment, and having to solicit donations of surgical masks from the general population, serve as a tragic confirmation that these warnings were ignored by all levels of government and all major political parties in the 14 years after the report was published.

The three pillars of testing, contact tracing, and quarantine formed the bulk of the report’s plan to combat a pandemic prior to the development of a vaccine. A group of data tables specified the recommended public health measures to be implemented at each stage of the pandemic’s evolution.

For example, even in a scenario where a foreign virus had only hatched sporadic infections within Canada, the report recommended an approach only undertaken by a few countries to halt the spread of COVID-19, notably South Korea.

It specified the “collection and dissemination of epidemiological and clinical data for cases occurring in Canada,” followed by a need to “isolate cases,” and “quarantine or activity restriction [sic] of contacts.”

Without lending political support to the capitalist government of South Korea, it is clear that its early and aggressive containment of the COVID-19 outbreak by means of mass testing and contact tracing allowed it to emerge from the first wave of its pandemic with less than 300 deaths.

Just as it was ignored for over a decade by federal, provincial, and municipal governments in Canada, the report has also been essentially overlooked in the corporate media’s coverage of the pandemic. To call attention to this “pandemic playbook” would be to indict Canada’s big-business governments, past and present, for willfully rejecting its rational public health directives.

Governments across the country, from that of Trudeau and his Liberals in Ottawa to the hard-right Ford Conservatives in Ontario and Legault’s Coalition Avenir Quebec regime, are instead frantically scrambling to reopen all workplaces and public institutions. They are doing so in opposition to warnings of medical experts that a premature rollback of restrictions could lead to the infection of millions and thousands more deaths.

At the same time, a concerted effort is underway to place the blame for the upswing in infections on ordinary working-class people. Stories of large crowds ignoring social distancing guidelines have recently been given blanket coverage in the corporate press, ignoring the fact that figures like Ford exaggerated the mid-April dip in new COVID-19 cases to bolster his government’s back-to-work push.

Nevertheless, the 2006 report remains an important document for illustrating how Canada, or any country, could have effectively managed the current pandemic from a health perspective. It would be a valuable resource in any future worker-led tribunal into the Canadian ruling elite’s criminal handling of the current crisis.