US coronavirus hospitalizations surge back to April highs

Bryan Dyne

Hospitalizations in the US caused by the coronavirus pandemic have for the past three days remained above 59,000, matching the previous highs seen during the surge in April, according to data from the Covid Tracking Project. The spike in hospitalizations is the result of infections surging nationally, including more than 69,000 new cases today, along with 1,150 deaths, bringing the total known case count and death toll to 4.17 million and 147,000, respectively.

In April, the virus was largely concentrated in New York City, which was an epicenter of the disease outbreak in the US and internationally. Now, the epicenter of the pandemic in the US could be described as the entire South, with particularly large spikes in Florida and Texas, as well as in California. Those three states make up about 42 percent of the total new cases, and 45 percent of new deaths. Florida in particular set a new record for a number of new deaths in the state, at 173, largely focused in Pinellas, Palm Beach, Hillsborough, Orange, Miami-Dade and Escambia counties.

Paramedics arrive at Florida’s Broward Health Hospital on July 17, 2020 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. (Credit: mpi04/MediaPunch /IPX)

Florida, California and Texas also have the most current hospitalizations of any state. There are 9,422 in Florida, 8,820 in California (including 2284 in an intensive care unit), and 10,893 in Texas (with 3,329 in an ICU). Florida does not report how many of its coronavirus patients are in intensive care units. There are also 3,157 people in Georgia currently hospitalized, and 2,966 in Arizona. Ten other states have at least one thousand patients in hospitals, with hundreds in each state under intensive care.

The situation is equally grim internationally. There are 15.6 million reported cases of COVID-19 worldwide, along with nearly 635,600 deaths. For the past two days, there has been more than a quarter of a million new cases and on average more than 5,000 new deaths. Both trends have been rising since late May as the national lockdowns that had to some extent suppressed the virus’ transmission were ended as workers were forced back on the job.

India is for the second day in a row posting a record number of new cases, 48,446, as well as 755 new deaths. Brazil reported 58,080 new cases, second only to the day before, and 1,317 new deaths. And Spain is facing the threat of a second wave of the pandemic. After keeping its daily new case numbers below 500 for most of June and the first week of July, it has now reported at least 1,000 new cases for the past seven days and a related rise in deaths is expected to follow.

As the virus has exploded out of control in the United States, President Donald Trump has resumed his daily coronavirus press briefings, the last of which he personally attended in April. The president focused a great deal during the past week on his “strategy to safely reopen schools,” which revolve around claims that because children are less prone to dying from the virus, they should be sent into packed and often poorly ventilated buildings for hours at a time while a pandemic still rages.

Dismissing the dangers posed, he asserted that there, “is nothing in this country more important than keeping our people safe,” while at the same time posing as the most fervent fighter against the “China virus” and the “radical left mob you see in Portland.”

The real aim of getting students back to school was uttered moments later, when Trump again decried another “shutdown” as something that would lead to “irreversible harm.” Not harm to human life, but to the “economy” which “we have to get going.” Trump cited higher housing prices as an indicator of the strength of the economy, making no mention of the 1.4 million new unemployed and the more than 30 million continuing unemployed in the country. Trump’s “big numbers” solely refer to the soaring Dow Jones, which ended yesterday above 26,600.

The president then emphasized, “Reopening our schools is also critical to ensuring parents can go to work and provide for their families. The Council of Economic Advisors estimates that 5.6 million parents will be unable to return to work if schools do not reopen this year.” More clearly, children need to go back to school so corporations can again extract profit from their parents’ labor.

The risks are further underscored by the state of testing in the United States. While Trump has repeatedly bragged the US has done more tests than any other country in the world (untrue; China has performed 90 million tests to 51 million done in the US), multiple reports and comments from top US health officials indicate that testing sites in the country are being overwhelmed by the rising case count in the country.

While the US is currently reporting the results of more than 770,000 tests each day, there is a lag time of 3-10 days or more between when a person is tested and when they get the results. When asked about the state of testing by MSNBC, Assistant Secretary for Health Brett Giroir was forced to admit that, even after six months of the pandemic in the US, “there still needs to be a reduced turnaround time.” Giroir also claimed that, by September, the US will be able to do 65 million tests per month, 2 to 3 times the current rate.

He did however note that the average turnaround time for commercial labs is 4.27 days. As a result, it is much harder to have efficient “contact tracing and tracking” to actually contain the spread of the virus. These comments were echoed in an interview on Tuesday by leading infectious diseases expert Anthony Fauci, who told CNN on Tuesday that, “if you don’t know if that person gets their results back early … that kind of really mitigates getting a good tracing and good isolation.”

The turnaround time is not merely, however, the rise in the number of cases. As Fauci noted, anyone who meets the president must get tested, using one of the many faster “point-of-care” tests. These are not however widely available in the United States because of their cost. Instead, workers are forced to rely on labs run by companies such as Quest Diagnostics and Laboratory Corporation of America, who have seen their stock prices rise by billions even as they take days or sometimes weeks to return a test, making them all but useless.

Defending the US Against Looming Presidential Dictatorship

Dave Lindorff

At least Vladimir Putin is gaining his  dictatorial powers democratically. He got elected by a solid majority of Russians, and then he went to the Russian Duma and asked for a constitutional change to allow him to continue to be elected through 2030.

Here in the US, we have created a presidential dictatorship through sleight of hand, Congressional cowardice and public lethargy.

It happened back in September 2001, after the 9-11 attack — you know, the one that we’re supposed to believe was conducted by a bunch of barely competent fliers from Saudi Arabia and that somehow the entire US intelligence apparatus couldn’t uncover plotting their destructive attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon,  and that the US military couldn’t stop.

(Note:  If you think the official story we’ve  heard about this attack that killed nearly 3000 people, from both corporate media and government, is what actually happened, check out this article I wrote in Counterpunch in December, 2005.  I don’t pretend to know what really happened, but I know what we’re told happened didn’t.)

Following that attack, Bush, Cheney and a shell-shocked and completely irresponsible Congress passed two catastrophic measures, creating a huge new raft of laws and court rulings that are still with us. One, passed on September 18, 2001, while the wreckage of the WTC was still smoking, was the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), a resolution that launched the so-called “war” on terror — a war that was defined as occurring everywhere in the world including inside the US and that, although just against Al Qaeda, later was interpreted by President Bush and Cheney, then president Obama, and now President Trump, to mean against all those, foreign and domestic who can be called terrorists. (Since then crime gets called terrorism, including the Occupy Wall Street movement and peaceful protests against police violence.)

The second law, the so-called United and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act or USA PATRIOT ACT (really, they did name it that to get Patriot in the title!), passed on October 26 It created a vast police state network of spying on US citizens — all citizens — and also created a Homeland Security Department, a vast new police state agency awash in new paramilitary police forces — ICE, the Border patrol, the Federal Protective Service (formerly security guards at federal buildings), as well as 99 obscure and totally untransparent interagency operations in virtually every major city called Fusion Centers where the intelligence personnel from every agency from the Defense Department and CIA to the FBI, DEA, ICE and Secret Service to State police and local police as well as corporate security units all work and share information.

The lynch-pin to this whole web of autocracy or tyranny was a legal decision drawn up by John Yoo, a Deputy US Attorney General in the Bush Administration who came up with the specious argument, later supported by a right-wing Supreme Court, that in time of war, presidents have virtually unlimited powers. It was the so-called “unitary executive” theory under which, during wartime a president needs to have the powers of not just the executive branch, but also the legislative and judicial branches in his or her hands at the same time.

Now whether or not that theory makes sense in something like the Civil War, when the survival of the nation was at stake, or World War II, when the US was totally mobilized in an epic war on two fronts in Europe and the Pacific, the idea that it was justified by a congressional AUMF to combat a raggedy bunch of Middle Eastern terrorists hiding out in Afghanistan, who were in any case largely ignored by 2002, when the Bush-Cheney gang pulled US troops surrounding the remains of their numbers in the mountains of Bora-Bora and later launched a totally unjustified and disastrous war on Iraq in 2003 (after first obtaining a second AUMF from Congress for that outrageous and illegal invasion, the point should have long ago been clear to every honest member of Congress (I know, there are probably only ten of them if I’m being generous), that there was no reason for the 2001 AUMF to remain in force for even a year, if that.

It has never been rescinded. Neither has the 2002 AUMF for that matter.

So Trump, the wannabe Mussolini of the 21st Century, has the authority, according to various court rulings over the intervening years, to pretty much do whatever he wants — snatch little kids from their immigrant parents and lock them up in dog cages in the desert, send camo-clad heavily armed and unidentified paramilitary thugs from the Customs and Border Patrol force and other federal police-type agencies into cities around the country over the objections of their city and state elected officials to arrest and confine citizens without charges of notification of anyone, to spy on us all without a warrant, to put anyone on the Terrorist Watch List (there are now over a million names on it, including this author’s) — a list that is accessible to every police department in the country, which should make every pretty uncomfortable about being stopped by a cop for failing to signal before a turn.  (I should note that you have no right to know if your name’s on the Terrorist Watch List maintained by the FBI, and if you do discover you’re on it by getting four capital SSSS letters marked on your boarding pass when you fly, and the special closed-door person and bags inspection that goes with it at the gate before boarding, there is no way to find out who “nominated” you for the list and no way to get off it).

This is America today. Trump is going full tyrant, announcing plans to sent his personal paramilitary goon squad to a city near you soon, if he thinks the local government and police can’t “control” legitimate protests, often against police brutality these days.

It’s like the end of America. The end of the Bill of Rights.  Remember Freedom of Speech and Assembly and Seeking  Redress of Grievances? Remember the Right to Face one’s Accuser?  Remember no Arrest with Charge, No Unreasonable Arrest? All gone.

Pffft!

Yet it doesn’t have to be this way.

Congress passed that 2001 and that 2002 AUMF that supposedly hav3 this nation officially in a state of war. Are we actually at war by any stretch of the imagination?  No of course not.  The “War” in Afghanistan, billed as the longest in US history at 19 years and running, involves several thousand troops mostly sitting around in and around Kabul and Kandahar while US planes periodically bomb a few Taliban and various civilian men women and children every now and then. The Iraq War meanwhile  is ancient history. Almost no American troops are in that country, and mostly those who are protect the huge American Embassy compound in the Capital of Baghdad — a fortified Green Zone that attracts rocket attacks like clover attracts bees.

Congress should acknowledge this absurd situation and pass a resolution right now terminating both AUMC resolutions. End the non-war state of war and with it, all of Trump’s “unitary executive” authority to pass laws, ignore congressional mandates, ignore court orders, shift Contressionally-allocated spending to his pet projects and send federal troops into civilian protests to create mayhem.

If Congress-members won’t do that and do it now, every one who fails to do so should be tossed out on their over-padded asses on November 3 or at the next available opportunity.

We need to start camping out at our Senators’ and House members’ local offices with signs demanding an end to Trump’s “unitary executive” powers and to the two AUMF resolutions that enable them. And we need to demand that Biden, the housebound presumptive Democratic Candidate for President should also take a strong position on ending both wars officially by terminating the two resolutions. (He needs to be reminded that one of the unitary executive powers Trump may try to claim could be vacating the Nov. 3 election result.)

You heard it here:  End the AUMF’s!  And shut down the USA PATRIOT Act!

Pass the word to everyone you know.

Cops and Constitutions

Richard Moser

The cops are violating the Constitution by attacking people exercising their basic rights — — that much is obvious.

The rounding up of random protestors because they “fit the description” is related to the discriminatory policing that has historically denied poor, Black, and Brown people their basic rights because they “fit the description.” It’s a form of collective punishment outside the rule of law.

The very existence of the new uniformed secret police violates our rights. But, there have been so many assaults and exceptions to the Constitution, it cannot seriously be called the “highest law of the land.” Instead, the use of secret police should reveal to us a deeply entrenched and systemic tyranny that is the political blowback from empire. In fact, we are now ruled by an system of principles and practices that are nothing short of a new imperial constitution.

Yes, the empire delivered the death blow against the Constitution and the republic it defined. But we cannot know how the murder was committed without inspecting the body. My years as a teacher made it clear that most people had never actually read the founding documents. How do we expect to transform something we do not know?

Great artists innovate new forms of art when the existing forms no longer express the times they live in or the visions they have for the future. But at the same time, the act of creation comes from knowing and mastering the older decaying forms. This is also true of the political innovations we call revolutions.

The Old Constitution

For us, the old decaying form is the US Constitution. The Constitution failed to grant “the people” any power beyond electing elites to represent them— a limited form of power now totally undermined by the two-party system never mentioned in the Constitution. The Constitution gave all power to the government and no real power to the people — compounded of course by the fact that Blacks, Women, Natives Mexicans who comprised a majority of the people were outside of the definition of ”we the people.”

In its original form, the proposed Constitution was still unacceptable to the minority white male electorate because nothing listed the rights of the people to protect them from the power of the state. The Bill of Rights was added by popular demand and without it the Constitution would not have been ratified.

Those rights were listed in the Bill of Rights — but not granted or created by it — since they were “natural rights” beyond the legitimate power of any government to either confer or revoke. It’s not that the Bill of Rights ever worked well, it didn’t. But it did work as contested terrain to struggle over.

The first Constitution created a republic in form but one that allowed very limited democratic power even for the newly enfranchised white artisans, small farmers, and workers. The “Three/fifths Compromise” of the original Constitution institutionalized slavery, conquest, and the white supremacy that had been taking shape since the first Europeans arrived.

The Imperial Constitution

For the last seventy years, even the remaining form of the republic has been irreversibly damaged by war and empire. And as with racism, institutional structures tell the real tale.

After 1950 or so Congress surrendered its constitutional power to declare war and the imperial presidency quickly took over. The people surrendered too — bullied or conned into obedience by the fear merchants of cold war anti-communism.

In short order, we had standing armies, secret police, and the military-industrial complex. All real power was quickly centralized into the executive branch. There were important milestones when that power was further consolidated: 9/11, the War on Terror, the Patriot Act, various NDAA’s, the militarization of the border, ICE attacks on immigrants, the attacks on Occupy and Standing Rock, to name a few. Mass incarceration and the militarization of police were the final jewels in the imperial crown.

The systematic tyranny of the imperial constitution was ready-made and waiting for a president like Trump. But, in fact, every President since 1950 has been a war criminal and a tyrant by definition: their power is in violation of the rule of law.

And, this monster executive branch includes the rapidly growing police forces — uniformed and secret — and the new form of secret but uniformed police that have appeared in DC, Portland, and Columbus. There are eighteen secret police forces in all. In the past cops often hid their badges before committing crimes — now we have entire police forces that both violate, and are immune from, the rule of law by their very nature. If not intent on committing crime why would police need immunity from the law they claim to enforce?

But the rubber bullets, sticks, and chemical weapons reveal weakness. Would they resort to violence if other forms of social control were working to maintain order? Or is this a domestic replay of the military’s strategy of “full-spectrum dominance?” Do they simply see all forms of dissent as a challenge to their power? All of the above?

We now face an interlocking crisis of existential proportions: climate change, extreme wealth and political inequality, perpetual war and empire, the merger of the corporation and the state, the collapse of democracy, and the ramping up of racism and patriarchy necessary to weaken the people. These crises cannot be faced let alone solved by the existing order because they are the existing order.

A New Constitution?

We now have no choice but to create a new democratic system or else the interlocking crisis will come crashing down on all of our heads. Democracy will take many forms but massive protest movements that reveal and challenge the illegitimate power of the state is a huge step in the right direction. And, the secret police and the militarized police forces are the front lines of unlawful and illegitimate state power. That is why we see the good cop/ bad cop efforts to co-opt the movement with one hand and to crush it with the other. That is why Trump and the executive branch he now personifies have no choice but to double down.

This crisis of empire is the cause of so much sound and fury but this time signifying everything: the old constitution is dead, the imperial constitution rules and the new constitution awaits. Let’s see now — how do new constitutions come to be?

Neoliberalism and the Indian Educational Apparatus

Yanis Iqbal

India is currently reeling under the deleterious effects of decades of neoliberalism. It is increasingly becoming clear that the financial imperatives of neoliberalism have severely subverted social infrastructures which could have alleviated the impact the Covid-19 pandemic. Now, with India ranking 3rd in the daily increase in Covid-19 cases and having experienced the migrant worker crisis, the deep-seated economic fault-lines of a nation in crisis are being crudely outlined.

While the significance of socialism, in contradistinction to neoliberal capitalism, is being highlighted by the pandemic, questions pertaining to the ideological stability of neoliberalism have been left unanswered. It is important to comprehend how neoliberalism, as a comprehensive cultural-subjective structure and an economic-accumulation regime, came to permeate the popular imaginary. How did the Indian working class, a victim of the global labor arbitrage, fail to become militantly politicized and establish intra-subaltern solidarity? In order to answer these questions, we need to take a look at the Indian educational apparatus which has been carefully calibrating, coordinating and creating neoliberal subjectivities through delicately crafted ideological subtexts.

This article will analyze the second chapter “People as Resource” of the “Economics Textbook for Class IX” written by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) to decode the “cloaked neoliberalism” of Indian educational apparatus. The aforementioned chapter is a paradigmatic example of a discursive device concerned with the patterned propagation of the ideology of neoliberalism. A primary feature of neoliberal ideology is its subjectivational colonization of extra-economic spheres through the discourse of “human capital”. Human capital, considered as a cognitive power strategy, greatly facilitates the unimpeded functioning of neoliberalism by producing subjects who have internalized the imperatives of growth and productivity. Through a unifocal emphasis on the economic abilities of an individual, human capital allows for the manufacturing of “economized beings” who ceaselessly strive to completely utilize themselves as a mere resource.

The second chapter of the NCERT economics textbook is entirely devoted to the discursive diffusion of the ideology of human capital. Explicitly apparent from the title (People as Resource), the chapter aims at the exhaustive framing of the population as a commodified, human capitalized and economized entity. It defines “People as Resource” as “a way of referring to a country’s working people in terms of their existing productive skills and abilities. Looking at the population from this productive aspect emphasises its ability to contribute to the creation of the Gross National Product.” This text has two relevant aspects.

(1) It considers and distinctively singularizes the population as an economically beneficial commodity. When living human subjects are economized and sealed in the “thingness” of human capital, they lose their counter-hegemonic capability to act as revolutionary actors. As humans get progressively parcelized as fragments of productivity and shards of skills, collective critical agency is subsumed under the profit-oriented objective of enriching oneself through the enhancement of employable abilities. The overemphasis on the productivity of the people is further sharpened by the distinction which the chapter makes between an “asset” and “liability”. As per the chapter, “If people cannot be used as a resource they naturally appear as a liability to the economy.” The ideological interlinking of the negatively connoted word “liability” with the people who are not involved in the operations of capitalism unjustifiably paints capitalism with positivity. For example, it is sheer falsification to claim that the capitalists who are engaged in the operations the economy are an absolute asset for the country. On the contrary, they predatorily extract surplus value from laborer and make unwarranted profits. Another normative effect of the “asset/liability” binary is to implicitly persuade people to step out of their status as liabilities and operate within neoliberalism, thus attaining the hallowed label of an “asset”.

(2) The unequivocal reference to the goal of enlarging the GNP innocently inculcates in students the artificially created need of stabilizing a system which, in most of the cases, oppresses them. By interpellating individuals as potential contributors to the GNP, the text intertwines them with the connected mechanisms of hyper-consumption, over-production and surplus extraction. Through the normalization of GNP as something positive whose expansion has to be expedited by everyone, students are re-configured as potential producers and consumers of goods. These producers and consumers are internally regulated with the aim of constantly renewing investments in oneself, enhancing one’s skills, entrepreneurially diversifying risk-management and thus, structurally supporting and supplementing GNP.

People as a Portfolio of Investments

An integral element of human capitalization is the dehumanizing designing of the population as a “portfolio of investments”. The second chapter of the economics textbook clearly enunciates this investment-centred conceptualization of human beings at many places: “Investment in human resource (via education and medical care) can give high rates of return in future. This investment on people is the same as investment in land and capital.” and “Investment in human capital (through education, training, medical care) yields a return just like investment in physical capital.” Though the aforementioned textual information appears simply innocuous, it is able to subterraneously sculpt an entire discursive-axiological field of re-purposed actions. This happens through two ways –

(1) The text theoretically renders the attainment of basic necessities as an economized process of value addition. This is a deeply normative act in the sense that it symbolically moulds and attunes existential essentialities to the ideological machinations of neoliberalism. Seeing basic healthcare, for example, as economically entwined with neoliberalism leads to it serving the exigencies of the accumulation regime. This is most evident in the mental health sector which has been, since the 1970s, experiencing systemic changes. As neoliberalism has progressed, it has mangled the tenuous threads of sociality and fabrics of fraternity with the hyper-individualizing discourse of entrepreneurialism and competition. This has led to a growth in suicides, depression and loneliness.

In response to the social crisis of neoliberalism, the psychopharmacological sector (and the mental field more broadly) has emerged as a restorative mechanism, trying to alleviate social pain through psychotropic drugs. The medicalized strategy of mental health practices exacerbates the tensions of neoliberal sensibilities insofar that it treats mental health pathologies as divorced from larger social structures of accumulation. Consequently, psychotherapy and psychiatry attempt to “re-normalize” these “deviant” individuals so that they can get integrated with the marketized forces of entrepreneurial competitiveness. This initiates a 3-step of cycle of “contradiction containment” wherein the mental health field constantly intervenes on behalf of neoliberalism to stabilize it: firstly, individuals get psychically damaged by the fragmentational sub-systems of neoliberalism; secondly, their mental health problem is pathologized and medicalized by the asocially professionalized practices of mental health practices; thirdly, the re-normalized individuals get integrated with the mechanisms of market and are subjected to the individualizing forces of neoliberalism. The stability of this neoliberal-psychological cycle depends upon the ability of schools to familiarize students with the capitalist functions of healthcare and regard it as an investment in oneself, geared towards the economic enhancement of one’s market position.

Along with the health sector, the educational sector is also undergoing large-scale changes due to the re-composition of individuals as a portfolio of investments. In the economics chapter, it is written that a “A child…with investments made on her education… can yield a high return in future in the form of higher earnings and greater contribution to the society.” In this textual snippet, one can discern two features of neoliberalism –

Firstly, the formulation of education as an instantaneous investment in oneself advances a conservative agenda of depoliticizing and commodifying education. Rather than being an investment, education is an ever-unfinished process of humanization. It is the ethicized symbolization and social sensitization of humankind, culturally coupled with feelings of reciprocal respect, mutual sympathy and egalitarianism. In a nutshell, education is the realization of an individual as a true and compassionate human, cohesively connected to the foundational feelings of reciprocal recognition. But the consideration of education as a mere investment does not allow for the entry of ethical, revolutionary and political sensibilities. Being an investment, neoliberal education is closely interwoven with the predetermined aim of getting a job and securing a position within the stifling confines of the market. Moreover, since education is merely “consumed” to attain a specific thing, political activism and social sensitivity are seen as anomalous, deviating from the frosted and fixed path of job attainment.

Secondly, the text unites the two main objectives of neoliberalism: competitively increasing one’s personal income and enlarging the national income. These two aims are not contradictory and in fact, smoothly blend with each other to exercise proper hegemony. On an individualizing level, the discourse of entrepreneurial competitiveness exercise its dominance by consensually coiling persons as ever-expanding agents of economic success, seeking new opportunities and increasing productivity. The individual productive aspirations of specific persons are fused, consolidated and conjoined with capitalism through the totalizing dominance of “national economy discourse”.

Through this discourse, the dispersed, heterogeneous wills of separated individuals are quantified and amalgamated as the constitutive elements of capitalism. This occurs crucially through the propagandist prioritization of the national economy which is represented as a bulwark against all economic ills and whose role is indispensable in ensuring the viability of productive activities. Under capitalism, the national economy is the “bourgeoisie’s economy” and denotes the sum total of labor’s toil, peasant’s hardships and the bourgeoisie’s brigandry.  As Rosa Luxemburg once said, “Under capitalism the nation does not exist! Instead we have classes with antagonistic interests and rights. The ruling class and the enlightened proletariat can never form an undifferentiated national whole.” In order to hide this crucial fact, ideological apparatuses substitute nation with bourgeoisie and in this way, totalize the synthetically organized profit-maximizing rationality of individuals.

(2) The second feature of the construal of people as a portfolio of investments concerns the increasing mechanization of emotionally experienced and socially rooted processes. In the entire NCERT economics chapter, there have been instances where humans have been directly equated with tangible things. For example, in the chapter it is written that “When the existing ‘human resource’ is further developed by becoming more educated and healthy, we call it ‘human capital formation’ that adds to the productive power of the country just like ‘physical capital formation‘ [emphasis mine]”. This and the text mentioned initially in the section “People as a Portfolio of Investments” emphasize the imperceptible modalities through which humans are commodified.

The view of human beings as sheathed in “thinghood” is invariant throughout the chapter and though it is mentioned that “human capital is in one way superior to other resources like land and physical capital”, it does not de-commodify human beings. It only considers humans as a thing superior to other things due to its ability to operate and set in motion other objects. Therefore, humans are entirely mechanistic, devoted to the recursive buttressing of the economy through increase in productivity. Furthermore, in this neoliberal world, humans lose their ability to interact with and act upon situations. They, like passive creatures, get assimilated into the objectifying force of their historical environment and become internalized in the regulatory arrangements of material circumstances. The passivization of humans is done primarily to naturalize capitalism and sediment the acceptance of this system.  By refusing the recognize humans as active and dialogical beings, capitalism brutalizes them and as said by Frantz Fanon, “He who is reluctant to recognize me opposes me”.

Creating self-responsible individuals

In the chapter, there are the stories of two children: Sakal and Vilas. Sakal is a child whose family members are relatively educated and whose father worked on an agricultural field. His parents were highly interested in educating Sakal and sent him to a school. After completing higher secondary examination, Sakal studied a vocational course in computers with the help of the loan which his father took. Later, he got a job in a private firm where he made a new software, increased the company’s sales and got bonuses and promotion.

The abovementioned story neatly harmonizes different elements of neoliberalism. Sakal was able to get education not due to the differential coagulation of contingent circumstances but due to the free-floating interests of his parents. Radically abstracted from any materiality, Sakal’s success appears to be the outcome of the de-contextualized feelings of his parents who, severed from the rootedness of reality, felt motivated to educate their son ex nihilo. Through the ideological invisibilization of the dialectical force which material circumstances exert on individuals, an innocent story of a child is able to carefully conceal the incapacitating impacts of capitalism. Karl Marx once said that “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” In the story of Sakal, there is no mention of these “already existing circumstances” which condition the actions of persons.

The story of Vilas, on the other hand, is diametrically opposed to Sakal’s story. Vilas is an eleven-year old boy whose father used to sell fish. His father passed away when he was two-years old. Due to this, Vilas’s mother was compelled to sill fishes to feed the family. Due to poor circumstances, Vilas became a patient of arthritis and could not go to hospital due to the non-availability of money. According to the book, he did not attend school because “He was not interested in studies.” Subsequently, his mother too fell ill and was not able to sell fishes. In order to earn some money and sustain his family, Vilas too began selling fishes.

Vilas’s story shows how neoliberal capitalism is brutally indifferent to the plight of the poor. Instead of seeing Vilas as conditioned by the oppressive materiality of capitalism, the NCERT chapter invites us to view an impoverished, fatherless and physically disabled child as a “failure”. This stance is most conspicuous when the textbook says that Vilas was not interested in studies and suggests that he was self-responsible for what he did. In this type of reasoning, the context of poverty and the related imperatives which it engenders are blithely ignored. What is being posited in this neoliberal line of reasoning is the unsubstantiated statement that “people can do whatever they want”. Consequently, if someone is poor, it is their mistake that they are impoverished and have not attempted to get out of their predicament.

At first glance, the self-responsibilization preached by the economics chapter may seem to be at loggerheads with the commodification of humans advocated by the same text. While self-responsibilization leads to hyper-agency, commodification leads to sheer passivity. Going beyond the outward differences, self-responsibilization and commodification are united through their symmetrical situatedness in the matrix of capitalism and mutually reinforce each other.

On the micro-level, self-responsibilization breaks social cohesion and in this way, pressurizes people to individualistically strive for success and be totally responsible for whatever they do. It is apparent that self-responsibilization operates within the precincts of capitalism because it shadows the effects which the system has on each individual and pits people against each other in a meritocratic vacuum of ahistoricity.

On the macro-level, commodification systematizes and supports the hyper-agency of self-responsible individuals by dubbing these individuals as an unresisting physical input for the workings of capitalism. Being a mere commodity for capitalism, individuals don’t possess the capability to question the naturalized logic of capitalism and try to navigate within the boundaries of the system. Hyper-agency, therefore, gets refined as a lubricating productive motor for capitalism as individuals competitively strive to “become what they want within capitalism.”

Through educational-normative technologies, the system of accumulation is able to stabilize neoliberalism. By presenting a radically abstracted picture of existence where individuals were ostensibly unshackled from material circumstances, neoliberalism was able to unleash a new process of subjectivation. The Indian masses too got entrapped in the de-materialized emptiness of neoliberalism and did not recognize the commodification which was closely combined with this radical abstraction.

Furthermore, neoliberalism achieved a political homeostasis by using the over-arching frame of human capital to produce polyclassist pacts. In order to defuse the militancy of a class-divided society, the conception of human capital was introduced which amorphously lumped all classes together as a single productive asset. Finally, intra-subaltern solidarity was undermined through the creation of self-responsible individuals who are only accountable to themselves and live as closed monads. As self-responsibilization intensified, impoverished people increasingly lost mutual sympathy as each came to see the other as individually culpable of poverty and failed to look at the macro-structural arrangements which suppress them.

As the Covid-19 pandemic intensifies, widespread inequalities will widen and the public discontent with these systemic shortcomings will also expand. To subjectively translate this growing objective discontent, it is necessary that a new programmatic politics of inclusive solidarity be constructed. Taking cognizance of the fact that the Indian educational apparatus subcutaneously injects neoliberalism in the Indian populace will go a long way in building such a politics of inclusion. As the Indian people discern that the current education subjugates them, they will start carving a beautiful and ethical education which truly serves the oppressed people.

Anglo Mainstream Censors List Of 60 Holocaust & Genocide Atrocities

Gideon Polya

Deaths in holocausts, genocides and famines and deriving from actual violence or from imposed deprivation are given in brackets as follows for the following alphabetically listed atrocities:

1978-1997 Afghan Genocide and Afghan Holocaust (6 million),

2001 onwards Afghan Genocide and Afghan Holocaust (7 million),

15th – 19th century African Holocaust (slave trade; 6 million),

16th century onwards Amerindian Genocide (90 million),

19th century Argentinian Indian Genocide (1 million),

1915-1923 Armenian Genocide (1.5 million),

post-1950 Asian Holocaust due to Australia-complicit US Asian Wars (40 million),

1914-1924 Assyrian Genocide (Syriac Genocide; 0.2-0.3 million),

1788 onwards Australian Aboriginal Genocide and Aboriginal Ethnocide (2 million),

1769-1770, Bengal Famine (10 million),

1942-1945 WW2 Bengali Holocaust, WW2 Bengal Famine and WW2 Indian Holocaust (6-7 million),

1971-1972 Bengali Holocaust and gendercide (3.0 million),

1967-1970, Biafran Genocide (2 million),

1990s Bosnian Genocide (circa 0.1 million),

20th century Brazilian Indigenous Genocide (1 million),

1969-1998 Cambodian Genocide (6.0 million),

19th century Chinese Holocaust (Opium wars and Tai Ping rebellion; 20-100 million),

1937-1945 WW2 Chinese Holocaust (35 million),

1958-1961 Chinese Holocaust of the Great Leap Forward (20-30 million),

19th -20th century Congo Genocide (Belgian Congo) (10 million),

1960 onwards Congolese Genocide and Congolese Holocaust (20 million),

1984-1985 Ethiopian famine (1 million),

1939-1945 WW2 European Holocaust (30 million Slavs, Jews and Roma killed),

1941-1950 German Genocide and German Holocaust (9 million),

Global Avoidable Mortality Holocaust (1,500 million since 1950),

1960-1996, Guatemala Mayan Indian Genocide (1.9 million),

1757-1947 Indian Holocaust from famine and deprivation (1,800 million),

1947 Indian Holocaust due to Partition (1.0 million),

1918-1920 Influenza epidemic (50-100 million),

1917-1919 Iranian Famine (2 million),

1978 onwards Iranian Holocaust and Iranian Genocide (3 million),

2003-2011 21st century Iraqi Genocide and Iraqi Holocaust (2.7 million),

1990-2011 Iraqi Genocide and Iraqi Holocaust (4.6 million),

1914-2011 Iraqi Genocide and Iraqi Holocaust (9 million),

1939-1945 WW2 Jewish Holocaust, Shoa (5-6 million),

1950-1953 Korean Genocide and Korean Holocaust (5.2 million),

1840s Irish Famine (2 million),

1955-1975 Laotian Genocide (1.2 million),

2011 Libyan Genocide (0.2 million),

19th century Maori Genocide in New Zealand (0.2 million),

2000 onwards 21st century Muslim Genocide and Muslim Holocaust (32 million),

1900s Namibian Genocide (0.1 million),

17th – 19th century North American Indian Genocide (up to 18 million),

1916 onwards Palestinian Genocide and Palestinian Holocaust (2.2 million),

1865-1870 Paraguay Genocide (1 million)

1939-1945 WW2 Polish Genocide and Polish Holocaust (6 million),

21st century Rohingya Genocide (circa 0.1 million),

1921-1922 Russian famine, Povolzhye famine (5 million),

1930-1953 Russian Holocaust under Stalin (20 million),

1994 Rwandan Genocide (0.9 million),

1992 onwards Somali Genocide and Somali Holocaust (2.2 million),

19th century South Pacific Genocide via disease (0.1 million),

1930-1953 Soviet Holocaust under Stalin (20 million),

1955-2018 Sudan Genocide and Sudan Holocaust (13 million),

2011 onwards Syrian Genocide (1.0 million),

1990-2018 Tamil Genocide in Sri Lanka (0.2 million),

1975-1999 East Timorese Genocide (0.3 million),

1930s Ukrainian Famine, Holodomor (7 million),

1945-1975 Vietnamese Genocide and Vietnamese Holocaust (15.3 million),

2015 onwards Yemeni Genocide (circa 0.1 million) (my sincere apologies for any absences or underestimates).

Final comments.

Holocaust ignoring and genocide ignoring  are far, far worse than repugnant holocaust denying and genocide denying because the latter can at least permit refutation and public discussion. Holocaust ignored yields holocaust repeated. Genocide ignored yields genocide repeated. History ignored yields history repeated. Peace is the only way but silence kills and silence is complicity. Please tell everyone you can. Lest we forget.

Death of 14-year-old on the job highlights growth of child labor in Canada

Frédéric Charlebois

A 14-year-old boy lost his life June 15 in a workplace accident at Atelier PJB in Saint-Martin, a village 125 km south of Quebec City. The young worker was crushed by his forklift truck when it overturned. The minimum legal age to drive such a machine in Quebec is 16. Terrible as it was, this event—which highlighted the growth of child labor in Quebec and across Canada—is not an isolated case.

In fact, the accident was only the latest in a series in which very young workers have been seriously injured or killed. Last year, a 13-year-old was dragged by a conveyor belt at Bardobec, a cedar wood manufacturing company in Saint-Just-de-Bretenières, a city in southeastern Quebec. The young boy escaped with his life, but suffered a punctured lung, broken ribs and third-degree burns. In another 2019 case, a 17-year-old from Alma, Quebec died after being crushed by a 3,000 kg concrete panel just two weeks after starting work at Béton Préfabriqué du Lac.

These tragic events underscore that young people who work are not just doing “odd jobs” like mowing their neighbour’s lawn. Often, they are performing “adult jobs” with all the responsibilities and risks that come with them. This finds expression in the large numbers of injuries suffered by young people in various industries. Just in 2017, 2,656 young people under the age of 19 were involved in a workplace accident in Quebec.

The situation is particularly serious in the agricultural sector. Children are often involved in farm work at a very young age, even as young as 7 or 8 years old, and they are quickly tasked with driving large and powerful machinery, leading to injuries and deaths.

As evidenced by the employment statistics for high school youth, the ruling class is increasingly using teenage labor. According to data from the Centre d’étude des conditions de vie et des besoins de la population (Center for the Study of the Living Conditions and Needs of the Population), one out of every two high school students (aged 12 to 17) in Quebec works during their studies, an increase of 10 percent in just 6 years. Even among those in junior high aged 12 to 13, 46 percent have a paid job during the school year.

While the proportion of employed high school students is around 36 percent in the Montreal metropolitan area, this figure skyrockets outside of Quebec’s major urban centers. In Abitibi-Témiscamingue, two-thirds of young people have to balance work with high school study, while in five other Quebec regions the number of youth who are working while studying is close to or exceeds 70 percent.

There is no minimum age for working under Quebec law, but parental authorization is required until the age of 14. While some restrictions prohibit working at night, during school hours, or activity that is harmful to a young person’s health before the age of 16, these standards remain largely on paper.

Quebec is the province with the highest student employment rates, and one of the most legally flexible. But the rest of Canada is not far behind. In fact, more than half of Canada’s ten provinces do not have a minimum working age. Even in those that do, a waiver can be obtained if parental permission is provided. While some provinces have formal restrictions (on allowable hours in Quebec or types of employment in Nova Scotia), others such as British Columbia and Alberta allow the exploitation of youth in dangerous environments as young as 12 years of age.

As part of a gamut of anti-worker measures, Alberta’s United Conservative Party introduced legislation (Bill 32) earlier this month that will make it legal to employ 13- and 14-year-olds without their parent’s permission.

Across Canada, many businesses rely on a minimum-wage workforce largely made up of young people to remain “competitive” and rack up large profits. For some large companies, such as McDonald’s or Tim Hortons, teenagers and young adults represent more than 50 percent of their workforce.

Child labor, which is far from being a thing of the past, has historically been condemned and opposed by the working class for several reasons.

Child labour can exact long-term physical and psychological consequences on an immature human body. Also, young people are particularly vulnerable to occupational accidents. Generally they are employed to do “regular” work, with little to no supervision and preventive measures. This puts them at greater risk than adults, since they lack experience and training, and tend to be ignorant of potential dangers.

Employers also pressure teenagers to work more hours, which can have long-term consequences on their learning. Employers take advantage of young people’s fear of losing their jobs to put more and more demands on them. Since the government monitoring system operates on the basis of complaints rather than inspections, such abuses are only detected where there is an industrial accident or when they are just too blatant.

Working at a young age also hinders the ability to access higher education, in particular limited-enrollment programs. It is recognized that when youth work more than 15 hours per week, their school performance drops markedly. In addition to causing burnout in children and teenagers, work accentuates the school drop-out rate. Sometimes employers who want their young workers to work full-time encourage then to abandon their studies.

Child labor only underscores the extent of the social crisis across Canada. Children do not work for fun but to meet basic needs, such as helping to cover family expenses. According to Campaign 2000, 1.35 million children live in poverty, or nearly 19 percent of the country’s children. The use of food banks has increased in recent decades. In Beauce, the region where St. Martin is located and the June 15 tragedy occurred, foodbank use increased by 500 percent between 2006 and 2018. This crisis has been further exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic.

Britain’s Russia Report: Propaganda for authoritarianism and war

Thomas Scripps

The UK’s Intelligence Security Committee (ISC) report into “Russian interference” in British politics has been released in significantly redacted form, after a year’s delay.

What was built up by the most fervently anti-Russian sections of the media as a political bombshell is a dud. Besides brief repetitions of previous claims of Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential elections and 2017 French elections—asserted as proven facts—the report adds a few new allegations and nothing in the way of evidence.

A single throwaway reference is made to “credible open source commentary suggesting that Russia undertook influence campaigns in relation to the Scottish independence referendum in 2014.” This is justified with a reference to a study by Ben Nimmo, a member of the imperialist think tank, the Atlantic Council.

The report’s sole case study, on the 2016 Brexit referendum, is less than three pages long and begins, “There have been widespread public allegations that Russia sought to influence the 2016 referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU. The impact of any such attempts would be difficult—if not impossible—to assess, and we have not sought to do so.”

It states, “Open source studies have pointed to the preponderance of pro-Brexit or anti-EU stories on RT and Sputnik, and the use of ‘bots’ and ‘trolls,’ as evidence of Russian attempts to influence the process,” but admits, “HMG [Her Majesty’s Government] had not seen or sought evidence of successful interference in UK democratic processes or any activity that has had a material impact on an election, for example influencing results.” Furthermore, “We have not been provided with any post-referendum assessment of Russian attempts at interference.”

None of which stops the report declaring, on the say-so of British officials and special contributors like anti-Russia hawks Anne Applebaum and Christopher Steele, that Russia poses a serious “threat to the UK.” The government and intelligence agencies are scolded for failing to provide the proof for this narrative. “Had the relevant parts of the Intelligence Community conducted a … threat assessment prior to the referendum,” it is “inconceivable” that “Russian intent” to interfere would not have been discovered, it asserts.

Realising how thin their “evidence” is, the report’s authors also decided to discover the presence of Russian oligarchs rubbing shoulders with Britain’s ruling circles. They are accused of developing a “new normal” of “Russian influence,” having “invested in extending patronage and building influence across a wide sphere of the British establishment—PR firms, charities, political interests, academia and cultural institutions.”

The ISC has concocted a way of presenting no evidence of Russian interference in elections as proof of Russian interference in elections. As to referencing Russian oligarchs, no one needs convincing that the super-rich of many nationalities dominate British politics. The idea that this is evidence of a Machiavellian Russian plot is absurd.

As for the allegations of biased coverage on RT and Sputnik, where is the national media that does not represent its own ruling class’ interests abroad? The report approvingly references the UK’s military Fusion Doctrine which explicitly lists the BBC’s World Service as an instrument of UK “soft power.” It lists as a source of its findings the Integrity Initiative, described as “a UK-based think-tank and charity, aimed at countering Russian disinformation campaigns,” but which is a government-backed psy-ops operation. It describes the UK’s “offensive cyber capability” as “essential.”

The only thing the report proves is that British politics is ever more closely mirroring American politics, where conflicts within the ruling class are fought out through the prism of anti-Russian hysteria, with anti-democratic and militarist implications.

The ISC Russia report has been a central mechanism through which pro-EU, Democratic Party-aligned sections of the British bourgeoisie have carried out their opposition to Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his Brexit policy. Johnson sought to impede its publication to prevent any undermining of the 2016 referendum vote on which his government depends.

Such differences on foreign policy orientation notwithstanding, raising the “threat” posed by Russia allows both wings of the ruling class to pursue the goals they have in common—the suppression of political dissent in the working class at home and the preparation for aggressive interventions abroad.

One of the most sinister sections of the report reads, “Whilst we understand the nervousness around any suggestion that the intelligence and security Agencies might be involved in democratic processes … that cannot apply when it comes to the protection of those processes. … In our opinion, the operational role must sit primarily with MI5. … The policy role should sit with the Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism (OSCT)…”

The authors also advise “a requirement for social media companies to co-operate with MI5 where it is suspected that a hostile foreign state may be covertly running a campaign.”

These are arguments for McCarthyism and a police state, where accusations of foreign interference can be used to outlaw facts and opinions the ruling class finds inconvenient. Russia is held responsible for “fomenting political extremism” and a “general discrediting of the West.”

The report quotes the Integrity Initiative’s view that “When people start to say ‘You don’t know what to believe’ or ‘They’re all as bad as each other’, the disinformers are winning.” It quotes British journalist and security specialist Edward Lucas saying, “If you believe that the West is run by hypocritical, incompetent, greedy politicians, then it becomes much harder to take any kind of moral high ground about Russia which really is.”

An indication of the use these recommendations will be put to was given by Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab’s allegation last week that Russia had interfered in the 2019 General Election by “amplifying” a leaked government document on a potential trade deal with the US, which then Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn revealed at a press conference—long after it had been circulating freely on the Internet. The pro-Tory media denounced Corbyn as Russia’s “useful idiot,” passing over the fact that the leak revealed the fact that Johnson’s government was preparing to sell off sections of the National Health Service. News reports on the Russia report crowded out reports of a vote by Tory MPs against a Labour motion barring foreign private companies securing control of UK health care services.

The turn to censorship and authoritarianism is intimately bound up with Britain’s attempt to spearhead an international war drive against Russia. The report argues as one of its key themes, “More broadly, the way forward lies with taking action with our allies; a continuing international consensus is needed against Russian aggressive action. The West is strongest when it acts collectively and that is the way in which we can best attach a cost to Putin’s actions. The UK has shown it can shape the international response, as it did in response to the Salisbury attacks. It must now seek to build on this effort to ensure that momentum is not lost.”

Support for this policy is now near universal in the corporate media and capitalist parties, with the sole difference that some believe the focus should be on China as the main danger. The Telegraph argued in its July 22 editorial, “it is now beyond obvious that Russia is a rogue state that must be confronted robustly.” The Financial Times wrote on July 21, “With so much focus on a potential ‘new cold war’ with China, the report is a salutary warning of the challenge still posed by the main foe in the last one.” The same day, the Guardian, which has led the anti-Russian sabre rattling, labelled Russia a “hostile state,” having previously editorialised, “what will the government do to halt [Putin’s] ongoing assault on Britain?”

Labour’s Shadow Foreign Secretary Lisa Nandy said in an interview with the LBC radio station, “There have been repeated concerns that the Russian government have been interfering in British democracy. … We don’t need this Russia report to know that we’ve got a problem here and we’ve got to be much tougher in our approach.”

Confronted with a crisis of British imperialism after Brexit and, more importantly, increasingly explosive domestic social tensions, the ruling class is relaunching an anti-Russian campaign. The strategy is to maintain Britain’s geostrategic position by placing it in the front rank of an international confrontation with Russia and China, led by the US, urge “national unity” against global enemies and justify domestic censorship and repression.