Britain’s jobs massacre continues

Margot Miller

Workers are facing an economic calamity as businesses continue to shed jobs. The losses are across all industries—a trend apparent before the pandemic—with the UK’s largest car producer Jaguar Land Rover announcing redundancies, as well as car dealerships, bus maker Alexander Dennis, the distillery industry, retailer Selfridges, holiday giant Tui, and The National Trust.

The government imposed a national lockdown on March 23, though many non-essential online businesses like Amazon and Asos remained open, while outbreaks of the virus continued in workplaces. Winding down the lockdown has driven millions back to work in unsafe conditions, resulting in alarming spikes across regions like the north west and west Yorkshire. The government is intent on reopening schools in September, despite opposition from parents and teachers.

But many have no jobs to go back to. Young people have been especially hard hit, as many work in hospitality and retail. According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), joblessness among 16-24-year-olds increased by 47,000 over last year.

Since the pandemic struck, 13,000 jobs have gone in the UK car industry as demand has plummeted. Car production halved this year, costing 11,000 jobs. With the UK expected to produce just over 880,000 new cars, this marks the lowest output since 1957. Jaguar Land Rover is planning 2,200 redundancies across the industry.

Bus maker Alexander Dennis, which employed 2,700 worldwide before the pandemic, has had no new orders since March and is cutting 650 jobs. Sites in Guildford, Scarborough and Falkirk will be affected. Owned by Canadian NFI Group, the company made 1,250 buses for the UK in 2019. Alexander Dennis chief executive Colin Robertson said the bus industry faced an “unprecedented crisis” and called on the government to make good its pledge to order 4,000 environmentally friendly buses.

Pendragon, which owns car dealers Evans Halshaw and Stratstone, plans to cut 1,800 jobs from its workforce of 8,000. Evans Halshaw caters for mass market selling brands including Peugeot, Renault, Vauxhall, and Ford. Its Stratstone chain sells marques such as BMW, Ferrari, and Jaguar Land Rover. Many of these losses were planned before the pandemic, with the virus acting as an accelerant. Pendragon, which will retain 150 dealerships, expects to save around £35 million a year.

Car dealerships, like high street chains, have suffered closures due to increased competition from online retailers and behemoths like Amazon.

Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders boss, Mike Hawes, said the latest car manufacturing report made “grim reading” and that the future of the UK car-making “depends on securing a good deal” as part of Brexit negotiations. This does not seem a realistic prospect, with a hard Brexit looking increasingly likely, and America an unreliable and inadequate trading partner.

Despite Boris Johnson’s Conservative government allowing itself to be pressured into backing the US in its trade war with China, 6,500 distillery jobs could go due to President Donald Trump’s threat to levy 25 percent export tariffs on UK gin, vodka and blended whisky. Britain exports spirits worth £1.5 billion to the US each year.

Last October, the US imposed a 25 percent tariff on UK single malt Scotch whiskey—fall-out from the EU-US trade dispute between plane makers Airbus and Boeing, according to the industry. The UK Spirits Alliance has turned to International Trade Secretary Liz Truss to challenge the tariffs before the US Trade Representative review on August 12.

KPMG International Services is the first of the big four accountancy organisations to announce redundancies in Britain, planning to slash 200 posts due to falling demand for its consultancy services—an indication that the economy will not return to its pre-pandemic levels. It is planning to cut employer contributions to pensions, currently at 4.5 percent of salaries. In July, Accenture announced it was contemplating reducing its UK workforce by eight percent.

The National Trust has announced 1,200 redundancies since it closed its houses, parks, gardens, and cafes at the start of lockdown. With 5.6 million members, the charity manages some of the UK’s key cultural heritage sites and places of natural beauty. Laying off 13 percent of staff out of a total of 9,500 would save £60 million. The trust has already imposed a recruitment freeze, as well deferring or ending projects worth £124 million.

Another visitor attraction, the Eden project in Cornwall, is set to shed between 200 and 220 jobs after losing £7 million in visitor revenue this year. The project boasts two biomes containing plants from diverse environments and promotes sustainability.

As well as culture and leisure, the holiday industry continues to be severely impacted, despite the government easing restrictions on trips abroad—in its typically shambolic fashion. Tui plans the closure of 166 travel agencies on the high street in the UK and Ireland, after losing £747 million in the first half of 2020. After a brief lifting of restrictions, the government removed Spain from its list of safe destinations for tourists and reintroduced a 14-day quarantine for travelers from Spain. Tui responded by cancelling all flights to the country.

While 900 jobs are on the line, Tui has said that for now 70 percent of employees affected would transfer to home working. The company has closed 70 stores in France with 600 job losses, citing the increasing number of online bookings as a major factor in addition to the pandemic.

The response of Transport Salaried Staffs’ Association General Secretary Manuel Cortes was to “call on Tui and other employers to engage with our union so we can jointly lobby government.”

British Airways, part of the International Airways group, originally planned 12,000 redundancies. It has reached an agreement with BALPA, the pilots union, to accept 270 job losses and major pay cuts.

After revealing that BA had a timetable to fire and rehire thousands on August 7, Unite leader, Len McCluskey, wrote a grovelling appeal to BA chief Alex Cruz, urging that the “only way to have a lasting peace and avoid months/years of industrial unrest is to work with us to achieve an acceptable way forward.”

Upmarket Selfridges is the latest major high street chain to announce job losses across its four stores and impacting 450 jobs, or 14 percent of its staff. Even before the pandemic, the high street was struggling to compete with online retailers due to high rents. John Lewis has also revealed plans to shut eight of its department stores, while Debenhams is up for sale to avoid liquidation.

Manufacturer of household appliances Dysons is set to lose 900 jobs, 600 from its UK workforce. Last year, owner Sir James Dyson came out top in the UKs rich list, increasing his wealth from £3.6 billion to £16.2 billion. Meanwhile, the working class is facing impoverishment as jobs go and wages are slashed.

DW Sports, a gym and sports retailer, is to enter administration, putting 1,700 jobs at risk. It operated 73 gyms and 75 stores across the UK, with all stores now set to close and saving gyms dependent upon deals worked out with the administrators.

The ONS reported that the number of workers on UK company payrolls decreased by 649,000 between March and June, a fall of 2.2 percent. This figure did not include the self-employed who were unable to work.

The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) estimates that ten percent of the 9.4 million employees who were once on the government financed furlough scheme will become unemployed when it ends completely in October. In May, the ONS revealed half a million people who are technically employed are not in work and not receiving pay.

The OBR warned that unemployment could soar to four million without the development of an early vaccine. This warning was underscored by a survey conducted by the British Chambers of Commerce, which found 29 percent of businesses would cut jobs in the next three months.

Stricter lockdown reimposed in Philippines as cases top 100,000

Joseph Santolan

The Philippines recorded a record 5,000 new COVID-19 cases over the weekend bringing the country’s tally to more 100,000 cases according to the Department of Health. The Philippines now has the second highest number of cases in Southeast Asia, behind Indonesia. The Duterte administration responded on Sunday night by announcing a return to the strict lockdown conditions of modified enhanced community quarantine (MECQ).

Two of Manila’s largest government hospitals were forced to close last week because of the number of infected healthcare workers. Most hospitals report that they are beyond capacity and can no longer take any new patients, as they lack adequate facilities and beds. The Philippine Medical Association warned, in a letter issued over the weekend, that if urgent measures were not taken to curb the spread of the virus the entire medical system was on the verge of collapse.

The Duterte administration has responded to the pandemic with authoritarianism and anti-scientific nonsense, attempting to maintain control of the population and to resume the profit-making operations of banks and major businesses.

The Philippine government imposed one of the longest and harshest lockdowns in the world, which it enforced through draconian police measures. Over 76,000 people were arrested between March 17 and July 25 for violating curfew or lockdown. More than 900 complaints of torture and inhumane treatment have been filed with the Philippines’ Commission on Human Rights.

The police converted Operation Tokhang, the warrantless door-to-door searches conducted as part of the war on drugs, into an alleged hunt for people with symptoms. The government called on the population to report their neighbors if they suspect they might have symptoms. According to the Washington Post, the police have killed a number of “suspects” in their homes as a result of these warrantless searches.

While conducting door-to-door searches, imposing curfews, and carrying out mass arrests, the Duterte government has done next to nothing to detect, trace or isolate the disease. Confronted with a shortage of masks and hygiene supplies, Duterte told the public last week that they should clean their masks with gasoline. Medical professionals responded that if the public followed Duterte’s instructions they would likely contract a respiratory disease.

The Philippine economy confronts its worst contraction in over three decades. Unemployment has reached record levels. The most recently available government data is for April and it reveals that 7.3 million adults were unemployed, a 17.7 percent unemployment rate, which is an all-time high.

An additional 13 million reported that they had jobs but were unable to report to work. The figures have only worsened since April. Extrapolating from the available data, it seems that over half the population has no immediate source of income.

Remittances from migrant workers are a mainstay of the Philippine economy and they have declined substantially as a result of the global crisis.

Confronting an immense loss of profits, banks and major corporations have clamored for workers to be sent back to their workplaces. On June 1, the government responded by placing the capital region under less stringent general community quarantine (GCQ) measures. The police repression continued and young people faced arrest for violating curfew, but the working population was expected to return to work. COVID-19 cases soared.

Of the new cases reported this weekend, 2,737 were in Manila. More than half of all recorded cases, over 55,000, have been in the intensely crowded Metro Manila area. Thus far, the government has officially reported over 2,000 fatalities, but these numbers doubtless grossly under-represent the actual figures.

The catastrophic figures are a result of the government’s refusal to carry out mass testing combined with its back-to-work campaign of the past two months.

Confronting a soaring infection rate and the imminent collapse of the medical system, Duterte on Sunday night announced that he was reimposing the strict conditions of modified enhanced quarantine (MECQ) on the capital region of Metro Manila and its surrounding areas, scheduled to last from August 4 to 18. The general population will be confined to their homes and public transportation will again be shut down.

A majority of the population is struggling to secure their basic necessities. Mass outrage is mounting.

At midnight on Sunday night in a nationwide televised address, Duterte launched a tirade against health care workers who have publicly criticized the government response to the global pandemic. “Do not try to demean the government,” he said.

The president repeatedly returned in his speech to the idea that workers were threatening revolution. He responded with veiled threats of dictatorship, declaring, “I will implement order, changing this government, without informing you. Would you be happy with that? So if you are really on a rampage, you want revolution, fine, let’s start it, go ahead.”

ArcelorMittal lays off hundreds of steelworkers in Indiana, Ohio

George Gallanis

ArcelorMittal, the world’s second largest steel producer, laid off 877 workers last Saturday at its Indiana Harbor Mill in East Chicago in northwest Indiana. Seven hundred seventy-four workers will be laid off indefinitely, and 103 salaried employees will be laid off permanently.

ArcelorMittal Steel Mill, East Chicago, Indiana (Credit: Flickr.com/David Wilson)

Also on Saturday, 353 operations and 72 maintenance employees were laid off at ArcelorMittal’s Eggers Avenue plant in Cleveland, Ohio. In a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) notice sent last Saturday to the state of Indiana, ArcelorMittal Indiana Harbor Vice President and General Manager Wendell Carter said, “Many of the company’s customers closed their operations due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite their reopenings, business conditions continue to be depressed during the pandemic, with no significant improvement in demand for the products we manufacture foreseen in the near term. This has had a direct impact on our business.”

The layoffs in Indiana and Ohio are part of an ongoing global assault on steelworkers’ jobs and working conditions. In early June, workers at ArcelorMittal’s plant in Ilva, Italy, in the country’s impoverished south, struck in opposition to plans to slash 5,000 jobs.

At the same time, the company has forced workers to labor under unsafe conditions in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, jeopardizing the health and lives of workers and their families. At ArcelorMittal’s plant in the Mexican port city of Lázaro Cárdenas, at least 21 workers have died from COVID-19.

While the company has spent years enriching its investors via stock buybacks and dividends, it has sought to justify its attacks on workers by pointing to its recent disastrous financial performance. The company announced last week a net loss of $559 million for the April-June quarter, worsening substantially from last year’s second quarter net loss of $447 million. Sales plummeted to $11 billion, compared to last year’s second quarter earnings of $19.3 billion. For the first half of 2020, sales decreased by 32.9 percent to $25.8 billion when compared with $38.5 billion for the first half of 2019, primarily due to lower steel shipments, which declined 23 percent from last year’s first half.

Despite the drop in revenue and income, the company has managed to pay down debt, with net debt down to $7.8 billion at the end of June.

The forced and reckless reopening of the economy in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic has spurred steel production more recently, driven in part by the resumption of production by auto plants. Integrated steel mills rely on auto production for about half their demand, and ArcelorMittal’s plants in northwest Indiana feed the nearby Ford Chicago Assembly Plant, which reopened in mid-May.

Along with the restart of production, backed by both the Trump administration and Democratic Party state governors, the cheap-money policies of the Federal Reserve and the transfer of trillions to banks and corporations via the CARES Act have massively reinflated the stock market. ArcelorMittal’s share price has rebounded 43 percent since late March.

With demand for steel ticking back up, the companies have moved recently to reopen partially idled plants. US Steel announced last month it would restart another blast furnace at its Gary Works in Indiana to meet increased demand in part due to the reopening of the Ford’s Chicago Assembly Plant, and yesterday, ArcelorMittal announced it would restart its #4 blast furnace at Indiana Harbor.

Nevertheless, the steelmakers are determined to use the economic crisis to implement even more painful attacks on jobs and working conditions, adding to a yearslong assault on workers.

Last week, ArcelorMittal’s Chief Executive Officer Lakshmi Mittal indicated further “structural changes,” i.e., cost cuts, were being considered, saying in the second quarter earnings statement, “There are now signs of activity picking up, especially in regions where lockdowns have ended, but clearly it is prudent to remain cautious about the outlook. Against this context, we are examining what structural changes might be required to ensure the company is well configured to prosper in the coming years as demand recovers.”

The layoffs in Indiana and Ohio will have a devastating effect on local communities. Before the pandemic and economic crisis, 36 percent of Gary, Indiana’s residents, which sits to the east of East Chicago, lived below the official poverty threshold of $24,600 for a family of four as of 2017. The Food Bank of Northwest Indiana recently reported that it distributed about 1.1 million pounds of food in June alone. In 2019, the food bank distributed 5.1 million pounds of food for the entire year.

ArcelorMittal is the second-largest steel producer in the world, surpassed this year by China’s Baowu, and the largest in the United States. According to ArcelorMittal USA, it employs approximately 18,000 workers at 27 operations in the United States.

Of these 18,000, some 15,000 hourly production, maintenance, office and technical are members of the United Steelworkers union (USW), which has worked hand in hand with companies for decades to shutter steel mills, decimate jobs and force through concessions agreements.

Since the 1980s, the USW has rammed through contracts which have gutted the living standards of steelworkers and undermined their safety. In 2018, the union sought to suppress the widespread opposition to further givebacks in contract negotiations that year, ignoring unanimous strike votes at ArcelorMittal and US Steel, while seeking to channel anger behind reactionary nationalism and anti-Chinese chauvinism.

The recent and tragic death of 71-year-old steelworker George Salinas at the Indiana Harbor Mill is the latest outcome of decades of collusion between the union and the company.

The fight for the defense of jobs and safe working conditions requires steelworkers to take matters out of the hands of the pro-corporate USW and form new organizations of struggle, rank-and-file safety committees, linking up with their brothers and sisters throughout the US and around the world.

At plants in Michigan and Ohio, autoworkers have formed rank-and-file safety committees independent of the United Auto Workers union in order to demand protection from the coronavirus and an end to retaliation. As one Toledo Autoworker put it, “Workers must stand up and say, ‘Enough is enough,’ and form rank-and-file committees and link up with auto workers and other sections of workers.”

Migrant farmworkers in Spain protest amid COVID-19 surge

Alice Summers

Migrant agricultural workers across Spain are protesting their appalling and unsanitary living and working conditions, which are leading to hundreds of coronavirus infections.

Around 100 migrant farmworkers took part in a protest in the northern Castilla La Mancha region near the city of Albacete, after 400–500 workers were forced into confinement in deplorable conditions in an abandoned factory due to a COVID-19 outbreak affecting at least 23 farmworkers. The workers, many from West Africa, had been housed collectively, without privacy or facilities to sleep and wash. The farm which employed them had refused to provide accommodation, and hotels in the area refused to provide the workers rooms.

In the peak of summer, temperatures in the factory reached 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) and electricity and running water supplies were limited or non-existent.

The workers left their forced confinement and blocked traffic on one of Albacete’s main roads, demanding information about confinement measures and humane treatment. Police sent to enforce the confinement called reinforcements and attacked the demonstrators.

After the demonstration, authorities in Albacete announced plans to re-house the workers, transferring them by bus to Albacete’s IFAB exhibition centre on July 22. The new facilities are wholly insufficient to safely accommodate the workers, however. Hundreds of people are housed in a single hall divided into two by an awning, facilitating a rapid spread of the virus.

The charity Médicos del Mundo (Doctors of the World) wrote that the exhibition centre “does not have the necessary means to guarantee the health of hundreds of people: there is no way to isolate, there are insufficient bathroom facilities and no health care system in place to monitor positive cases and their contacts.”

It continued, “The response of local and regional authorities is far from guaranteeing health and safety as announced by the Ministry of Health.… The solution to an outbreak is not to shut people up in a space without minimum living conditions and without adequate health control and monitoring.”

A number of workers housed in the IFAB centre have gone on hunger strike in protest, according to Salyf Sy, president of the Albacete Association of African Immigrants.

In another protest, around 30 migrant workers set up camp outside the town hall of Lepe, in the southern region of Andalusia, after the shanty town accommodation in which hundreds of migrant workers lived was destroyed by fire. Three separate fires were registered in these shanty towns in a single week. At least one person was injured, and hundreds lost their possessions and were made homeless.

Authorities offered temporary hostel accommodation for around 70 people, though 200 had been made homeless. “It’s always the same,” Antonio Abad of the Collective of African Workers told Público. “A solution is offered for a couple of days until things cool down and people start to disperse … They don’t provide real solutions.”

Protesters camped outside the town hall demanded suitable accommodation, carrying placards with slogans such as “They [the agricultural companies] called for workers. They got people.”

Olivier de Schutter, UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, denounced conditions facing migrant workers across Spain and called on authorities to “immediately improve the deplorable working conditions of seasonal migrant workers, before people die.”

Fires destroyed “the only accommodation available for the seasonal workers when they arrive in Spain,” de Schutter stated. “Local authorities have so far ignored the more than 170 people who have ended up on the streets.” These incidents “lay bare the urgent need to regulate the working conditions of migrant workers, and, therefore, to guarantee decent working and living conditions,” he added.

The Spanish Ministry of Defence has sent a military taskforce to oversee the installation of tents, beds and living equipment in a migrant camp in Lepe.

In early July, numerous migrant farmworkers, mostly women from Morocco, also protested in nearby Cartaya, after they were left stranded in Spain when their home country closed their borders to stem the spread of coronavirus. Over 7,000 migrant workers were left without funds and in limbo after their harvesting contracts ended.

Many workers live without electricity or running water, stated the local Andalusian association Mujeres 24h. “The farms that we have been able to access are not suitable for a long-term stay. Many are prefabricated modules, designed for non-extreme weather conditions, with large concentrations of people in very small spaces, which doesn’t meet the rules of hiring in the origin[al] agreement,” it stated.

While local officials claimed to have provided the women with food, the workers dispute this, saying that they have been entirely reliant on meagre charity from their employer.

Morocco’s Foreign Affairs Ministry reopened its borders to citizens and residents on July 14, but many of the women are still stranded: ferries to Morocco are scheduled only from the ports of Sète, in France, and Genoa, in Italy—both over 1,000 kilometres away. Travelers on ferries and flights back to Morocco must provide evidence of a negative COVID-19 test less than 48 hours old. However, most of the workers do not have the money to travel or for coronavirus testing, Mujeres 24h reports.

The appalling conditions facing migrant farm workers in Europe constitute an indictment of the capitalist system. Low-paid agricultural workers are treated as entirely dispensable, forced to work back-breaking days with few rights, in appalling conditions bordering on modern-day slavery.

Médicos del Mundo report that many employers refuse to give workers contracts, and “mafia middlemen often take off with around 80 percent of their tiny salary… [Workers] labour from dawn to dusk for around 2 to 3 euros an hour.”

With unbounded cynicism, Deputy Prime Minister Pablo Iglesias of the pseudo-left Podemos party, which rules in coalition with the Socialist Party (PSOE), told the Spanish Congress that migrant workers’ conditions “bring shame” to Spain. However, he claimed he is “very proud” of having “contributed to an unprecedented social safety net.”

This crisis is of the PSOE-Podemos government’s making. It enacted austerity and was criminally inactive in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, leading to death and destitution on an unprecedented scale. The pandemic has had a particularly brutal impact on farmworkers and other highly exploited and vulnerable layers of workers.

Last week, Health Minister Salvador Illa announced that of the 201 coronavirus outbreaks recorded that week, most were linked to temporary workers or gathering places like bars and clubs. María José Sierra, head of the Coordination Centre for Health Alerts and Emergencies, also reported that 34 COVID-19 hotspots in Spain are linked to horticultural companies employing temporary workers, with around 700 cases reported amongst these workers.

At the weekend, El País reported that a staggering 44,868 people in Spain have died of coronavirus, far exceeding the 28,434 deaths recorded by the Spanish Ministry of Health. El País tallied data for deaths “from COVID or from suspected COVID” registered by Spain’s 17 autonomous regions to arrive at this figure. This death toll makes Spain the second worst hit country in Europe, exceeded only by the United Kingdom.

Teachers protest Jordan government’s closure of union and harsh crackdown

Jean Shaoul

Several thousand teachers took to the streets of Irbid, Jerash, and other cities on Saturday to protest the government’s decision to shut down the Jordanian Teachers Syndicate union and demand the release of its board members.

The 13 detained union leaders are currently on hunger strike in Jordanian prisons.

The protests follow rallies last Wednesday, where the police were out in force in the capital, Amman, after the government warned people not to demonstrate, amid threats of arrests and detention. They come in the wake of the attorney general’s decision on July 25 to close the teachers’ union for two years, a raid on the union’s headquarters and the arrest of acting chairman Nasser Nawasreh on charges of incitement.

The union’s council was summoned for questioning on “criminal and corruption charges” after government officials accused the syndicate of having an “Islamist” agenda, meaning that it was allied with the Muslim Brotherhood. On July 15, the Court of Cassation officially dissolved the Brotherhood’s Jordanian branch and closed its offices. King Abdullah’s relationship with the Brotherhood, once one of the monarchy’s strongest supporters, turned sour after the organization supported the 2011 Arab Spring protests.

While Hassan Abdallat, Amman’s prosecutor-general, did not specify what the alleged crimes were, he said they included “financial violations” and issued a gagging order on the case, including social media.

The government’s clampdown on the Jordanian Teachers’ Syndicate, which has 140,000 members, came just days after the union organised a rally in Amman attended by hundreds of teachers demanding the government abide by its agreement to increase the teachers’ abysmally low wages by 35–75 percent, according to experience and seniority. The starting salary of a public-school teacher with a university degree is $500 a month, barely over the “absolute poverty line” of $479 for a family of five each month. After the first year, a teacher gets an automatic annual increment of $5 to $13, depending on qualifications and experience, rising to a maximum of $635 a month. As a result, many teachers take a second job to support their families.

The teachers went on a nationwide strike for a month at the start of the school year in 2018, affecting 1.3 million students, in one of the longest public-sector strikes in the country’s history. The agreement to end the strike included a pay increase for this year. But last April, the government cited the COVID-19 pandemic as the pretext for abandoning the agreement and freezing all public sector wage increases.

In mid-March, the government imposed one of the strictest lockdowns in the world, closing its borders, banning flights and ordering people to stay indoors, and even closing grocery stores and pharmacies for three days, before organizing deliveries of basic commodities directly to neighbourhoods and later allowing food shops and pharmacies to open. The security forces vigorously enforced the curfew, fining thousands of people, and impounding cars.

While the two-month-long lockdown was largely successful in limiting the spread of the virus—to date there have been 1,208 confirmed cases and 11 deaths—it has had a devastating effect on people’s livelihoods in a country already in the grip of a severe economic crisis with little or no social safety net.

Official unemployment in the first quarter of 2020, before the pandemic took effect, had reached 19.3 percent. Inflation has risen as a result of a 3.7 percent tax on basic commodities, one of a raft of austerity measures including privatisations implemented to secure a loan from the International Monetary Fund. Jordan’s tourism sector, which with its world-famous heritage sites such as Petra accounts for 10 percent of GDP, has evaporated.

According to Jordan Labour Watch, Jordan’s formal market will lose about 140,000 jobs—10.5 percent of the 1.35 million jobs in both the private and public sectors.

The return of tens of thousands of the more than 1 million well-qualified Jordanians—Jordan has a population of 10 million—working in the Gulf is further impacting on unemployment as falling oil prices, lockdowns and the pandemic’s economic fallout have led to massive job losses.

The Gulf countries are using the crisis to curtail the number of migrant workers, who make up a significant proportion of their workforce. This has had a major impact on remittances back to Jordan. Jordan’s central bank reported a reduction of 5.4 percent for the first quarter of 2020 compared to last year.

Jordan has in turn ordered migrant workers—numbering around 800,000 mainly low-paid workers from Egypt and Yemen employed in agriculture, construction and catering—to leave the country. While the government announced that most businesses could reopen, it insisted that at least 75 percent of their employees would have to be Jordanians.

The lockdown has gutted state revenues and led to the sharpest economic contraction in two decades. With the economy expected to shrink by 3.5 percent this year, the government, whose debt already exceeds GDP, has again turned to the IMF to secure a $1.75 billion loan.

The country hosts the second highest number of refugees per capita in the world, including more than 745,000 registered with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) from Syria, Iraq, Yemen and other countries—although the actual numbers are far higher than this—plus an estimated 2 million Palestinians.

Jordan has been badly hit by the US’s termination of its $300 million annual funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, representing about a quarter of the agency’s budget. The cuts have had a devastating impact on schooling and essential services, such as medical clinics and trash collection, for hundreds of thousands of refugees in the country.

Jordan is host to more than 1.4 million Syrian refugees, only half of whom are registered. According to the UNHCR, whose operations in Jordan were only 58 percent funded in 2019, one third of refugees who were working previously are now out of work. While around 160,000 refugees have returned to Syria. Many, unable to prove ownership of their property, have no homes or jobs to return to, while others fear retribution and military conscription.

As poverty and social unrest rise, the government has used the draconian emergency laws introduced in March to curtail democratic rights and crackdown on opposition, arresting activists over comments on social media. In April, the military arrested top executives of Roya TV after it screened a crowd of labourers complaining about their inability to work because of the lockdown.

These attacks on democratic rights—even criticizing the royal family is a crime—and living standards are being implemented in the interest of transnational corporations and Jordan’s tiny financial elite, which rules the country with an iron fist.

King Abdullah has announced parliamentary elections in November, but this is just a sop to public opinion and a rubber stamp for his unelected government. Abdullah, who is closely aligned with US imperialism, uses his prime ministers as a fig leaf, sacking them with monotonous regularity as sacrificial lambs to save his own skin and his family’s wealth.

Trump installs ex-general and anti-Islam bigot in top Pentagon post

Patrick Martin

In an action that combines authoritarian contempt for Congress and a direct appeal to racist and fascist sentiments, President Trump has installed retired Army Gen. Anthony Tata in a top policy-making position in the Pentagon.

Trump took the action after Tata withdrew his name Sunday from consideration for the post of undersecretary of defense for policy, the third-ranking position in the Department of Defense. Tata withdrew following the cancellation—with only an hour’s notice—of a July 30 confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee.

According to the Pentagon announcement, Tata “has been designated as the official Performing the Duties of the Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Policy reporting to the Acting Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Dr. James Anderson.” Anderson had been named as a temporary fill-in for the post after the previous undersecretary, John Rood, was forced out for opposing Trump’s action in withholding military aid to Ukraine—the decision that led to his impeachment last December.

Under the thoroughly anti-democratic procedure employed by the White House with increasing frequency, when the Senate declines to confirm his nominee, Trump simply appoints the person to fill the position of top deputy to the vacant post, and the new “acting” deputy becomes a temporary replacement filling the vacancy more or less indefinitely.

Trump applied the same technique last fall when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell opposed the nomination of former Virginia state Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli for the number-two position in the Department of Homeland Security. Cuccinelli is now the acting deputy, serving under the acting Secretary Chad Wolf, meaning that the huge department, with more than 240,000 employees, is entirely run by Trump nominees who have not been confirmed by the Senate.

Tata, former planning director of the 82nd Airborne Division and later deputy commander of the 10th Mountain Division in Afghanistan, was forced to retire as a brigadier general in 2009 after an investigation into allegations of adultery (considered a crime under the Uniform Code of Military Justice). He went on to hold several high-level positions in the Republican-run state government of North Carolina. His nomination for Pentagon policy chief was called into question after his record of Islamophobic remarks on Twitter came to light.

Among other things, in tweets posted in 2018, Tata called former President Barack Obama a “terrorist leader” and a Muslim who “did more to help Islamic countries than any president in history.” He also described Islam as the “most oppressive violent religion I know of.”

A political supporter of President Trump, Tata was a regular commentator on Fox News before taking a position with the Pentagon as a senior adviser to Secretary of Defense Mark Esper. He at one point accused former CIA Director John Brennan of having issued a coded order for the assassination of Trump and urged Brennan to commit suicide rather than be prosecuted for treason.

After Democrats on the Senate Armed Service Committee called on Tata to withdraw, a Pentagon spokesman issued a disclaimer, saying, “The general himself has stated that he does not believe or support the comments he made. He issued a letter to the committee retracting those statements.”

Tata’s letter dismissed his attacks on Obama and Islam as a “few misstatements,” which, “while grievous, are not indicative of who I am.” He deleted the remarks only after his nomination to the top Pentagon job led the media to dig up his social media history.

Senator Jack Reed (D-Rhode Island), a former paratrooper who is the ranking Democrat on the Armed Service Committee, condemned Trump’s appointment maneuver for undermining the military, saying that his “goal is to hollow out, politicize, and undermine the Pentagon the way he has the State Department and Intelligence Community. …”

“This is an offensive, destabilizing move,” he added, calling the method of Tata’s appointment an “insult to our troops, professionals at the Pentagon, the Senate, and the American people. … Clearly, President Trump wants people who will swear allegiance to him over the Constitution.”

The other Democrats on the committee—Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand, Mazie Hirono, Richard Blumenthal and Gary Peters—all backed Reed in opposing the nomination. Besides the Democrats, at least two committee Republicans, Joni Ernst of Iowa and Kevin Cramer of North Dakota, had indicated they were likely to oppose Tata’s confirmation.

The installation of General Tata is part of a larger process in which Trump is seeking to fill positions in the national security apparatus with fascist-minded individuals completely loyal to him personally, while removing anyone with ties either to previous administrations or to his own former defense secretary, retired Gen. James Mattis.

Four top Pentagon officials announced in late June that they were leaving the administration, including the two top technology officials, Michael Griffin and Lisa Porter, the top foreign policy official, Kathryn Wheelbarger, and the acting comptroller, Elaine McCusker. Previous departures, according to an account in the New York Times, included Esper’s chief of staff, Eric Chewning; Randall Schriver, the assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific affairs; and two Navy secretaries, Thomas Modly and Richard Spencer.

Trump has also installed an ultra-right figure, filmmaker Michael Pack, a longtime associate of former Trump counselor Stephen Bannon, as head of the US Agency for Global Media, which oversees the Voice of America. Pack carried out a full-scale purge of all the agencies that broadcast American government propaganda to the world, installing ultra-right figures loyal to Trump.

Voice of America Director Amanda Bennett and Deputy Director Sandy Sugawara announced their resignations after Pack took over. He then dismissed the heads of Radio Free Asia, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Middle East Broadcasting Networks, the Office of Cuba Broadcasting, and the Open Technology Fund.

Trump appointed another former Bannon associate, Sebastian Gorka, for a four-year term on the National Security Education Board, which oversees a program aimed at training US citizens in foreign languages useful for the pursuit of the foreign policy interests of American imperialism.

Anger grows across the US as closed-door talks continue on expired unemployment relief

Jacob Crosse

Frustration, anxiety and anger are rising among the roughly 30 million workers who stopped receiving their weekly $600 federal unemployment supplement last week after Congress failed to reach an agreement on a new coronavirus stimulus bill and adjourned for the weekend.

Closed-door talks Monday between Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, on the one side, and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, on the other, reportedly left the two sides far apart on a possible extension of the enhanced jobless benefit.

Pedestrians wearing protective masks wait on line for food donations during the COVID-19 pandemic in the Corona neighborhood of the Queens borough of New York. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

Both sides are agreed on slashing the already inadequate $600 weekly benefit on the grounds that its recipients, part of the tens of millions laid off due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the incompetent, Wall Street-dictated response of Trump and both big business parties, are being “overpaid.” They are haggling over the details of how much to cut and how fast to cut it.

The social interests behind the cut-off of jobless aid were demonstrated by the response of Wall Street. The Dow shot up 236 points on Monday. The Nasdaq jumped 157 points, prompting Trump to tweet, “RECORD HIGH NASDAQ.”

The refusal of Congress to extend the benefit sets the stage for a social catastrophe. Termination of the federal supplement cuts the weekly income of the unemployed by 60 to 90 percent. Tens of millions of households, already in arrears, face homelessness following the expiration of moratoriums on evictions and foreclosures.

According to a survey by the US Census Bureau, one in seven tenants in California did not pay rent on time last month and nearly 1 in 6 do not expect to pay on time in August. The same survey found that overall in the US, 23,759,822 renters reported “no confidence” or “slight confidence” that they would be able to make rent in August.

The research firm Stout concluded that nearly 1 million renters across the Ohio valley, which includes Ohio, Kentucky and West Virginia, are unable to pay rent this month and face eviction. At the end of July, Stout estimated that some 475,000, or 43 percent, of Michigan renters were at risk of losing their home.

Hunger, already on the rise as seen in the proliferation of mile-long lineups of cars at food distribution centers, is poised to explode and threaten starvation.

Official unemployment remains in the double-digits at 11.1 percent. For the week ending July 25, another 1.4 million workers filed initial unemployment claims, meaning that over 52 million Americans have filed for unemployment benefits since mid-March.

An AP/NORC poll published last week revealed that 27 percent of households had someone laid off due to the pandemic, 33 percent had someone with reduced hours of work, 24 percent had someone forced to take unpaid time off, and 29 percent had someone working at reduced wages.

Congress’ failure to extend the federal unemployment benefit and a partial ban on evictions is not the result of partisan “gridlock.” It is deliberate policy. The aim is to blackmail workers back into virus-infected factories and workplaces so they can resume pumping out profits for the banks and corporations.

Hundreds of thousands of workers laid off during the pandemic have never received a cent of unemployment pay due to the failure of state employment agencies to process their claims. In Colorado, the Department of Labor and Employment says of the 664,532 unemployment claims filed since mid-March, 223,298 claims are still pending.

In New Jersey, 50,000 are still waiting to be paid, while the Department of Employment, Education and Training in Nevada reports a “delay” that has caused over 20,000 claims to remain “unpaid.” Meanwhile, the agency has sent “overpayment” letters to thousands of workers who have yet to receive anything!

WSWS reporters spoke with workers in Illinois and Pennsylvania regarding the expiration of their benefits.

“I feel like I’m being deprived of my money that I earned for working,” Dana, an unemployed store manager, said. “I worked for over 20 years straight. When you get put on unemployment you don’t see all your money, like you would if working. The $600 helped me tremendously. It was like getting a paycheck and being able to see all your money without them deducting your pay. I was able to play catch up on my bills and pay for medical expenses.”

Laura, an unemployed worker in Illinois, remarked that “the $600 was a huge blessing and added benefit to my house. It allowed me to save and pay my bills.”

“I was laid off,” she continued. “I did not choose this situation. Being on unemployment is not ideal. I want to work, but no jobs are out there right now. I would like to get medical care and other benefits that are provided when you work.

“So I really don’t like it when the secretary of the Treasury makes it look like unemployed people have no incentive to look for work. Workers are used to hearing the lie that there is no money to support the programs we rely on, so, yes, I agree it is time we do something about it.”

“I don’t know what I am going to do,” Helen, an unemployed Pittsburgh worker, told the WSWS. “I worked as a health aide. My daughter is 9. I’ve been out of work since March when the schools closed.

“I couldn’t go to work because I don’t have anyone to take care of her. They are starting school, but I’m really scared what will happen to her. Things are getting worse in Pittsburgh. They ended the social distancing too soon and opened up the bars and restaurants. Now everyone is getting sick again. Even if the schools stay open, they are not having the after-school programs and I don’t have anyone to watch my daughter.

“The $600 allows me to pay my bills and buy food and things. I don’t know how we will get by. I have to pay for electric, gas and rent. I have car insurance, cable, phone and internet.

“They knew the unemployment was coming to an end. These politicians can meet and vote to give the rich all kinds of money, but when it comes to the poor they can’t find the time. All they care about is the rich. They don’t care about the working people.”

One month of the coronavirus pandemic: 7.2 million infected, 165,000 dead

Bryan Dyne

The month of July was the deadliest yet in the COVID-19 pandemic, as the disease continued to tear through the global population.

More than seven million people were infected with the disease last month, compared with 4.4 million the month before. And 165,000 people died, compared with 139,000 the previous month. In total, 18.4 million people worldwide have been infected, and the death toll will have hit, by the end of today, over 700,000.

Indian health volunteers take swab samples as part of the India-Israel Non-Invasive Raid COVID-19 test study camp, at a government hospital in New Delhi, India, Friday, July 31, 2020. (AP Photo/Manish Swarup)

The center of the global disaster is the United States, the wealthiest capitalist country with the most extreme social inequality and where human life is cheapest.

In the United States, there were two million new cases in July, up from 800,000 in June, and 27,500 people lost their lives, another monthly record. If the disease continues at this pace, 330,000 people will die in the US in the course of a year.

White House Coronavirus Task Force Coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx warned Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union,” “What we are seeing today is different from March and April. It is extraordinarily widespread.” She then added that the pandemic is entrenched in both “rural and urban” areas.

This disaster is the predictable consequence of the White House’s abandonment of all efforts to contain the pandemic as part of its drive to prematurely force workers back into workplaces where the disease is raging. In April, when states throughout the country reopened factories, the country had just passed one million confirmed coronavirus cases and was nearing 58,000 known deaths in this country alone.

Seven weeks ago, Vice President Mike Pence declared that “the alarm bells over a second wave of coronavirus infections” were “overblown.” He claimed that “great progress” was being made, which was “a cause for celebration.” The administration’s “success” had at that point resulted in 2.2 million cases of COVID-19 and more than 121,000 dead.

Today, the real testament to the administration’s response is the ongoing mass suffering and death across the country. There are more than 4.8 million cases in the United States, more than double what they were in mid-June. An additional 38,000 men, women and children are dead, bringing the national tally to just under 159,000.

The situation is similarly dire in Latin America, which has recorded five million cases and well over 203,000 deaths. The situation is most dangerous in Brazil, led by the fascistic Jair Bolsonaro, who has repeatedly dismissed the pandemic as a “little flu” and has actively ignored warnings from his top public health officials, firing two during the course of Brazil’s outbreak. The country has so far suffered more than 2.7 million COVID-19 cases and is expected to cross the threshold of 100,000 deaths sometime this week.

In Mexico, led by Andrés Manuel López Obrador, there have been 439,000 cases and 47,000 deaths, both of which are considered to be vast underestimations of the spread and death toll of the pandemic in the country.

The pandemic has similarly spiraled out of control in India. There are 1.8 million known cases, with more than 50,000 new cases each day. Nearly 39,000 people have died. It took only 25 days to add one million more cases to the current caseload from July 10, when the total COVID-19 cases in India stood at 794,000. This means that more than half of the country’s total cases occurred in the past four weeks.

The disease is also spiking again in European countries, such as Spain, France and, to a lesser extent, Germany. All three of these countries were hit hard when the coronavirus first emerged in Europe in March and April and had done a better job than the US in suppressing their outbreaks. But as a consequence of their governments’ efforts to get workers back on the job, the number of cases is growing. Germany now averages more than 600 new cases a day, France more than 1,000 and Spain more than 2,000.

Throughout the world, the disease is fueling unemployment, poverty, homelessness and hunger. According to the United Nations, hunger tied to the pandemic is leading to the deaths of 10,000 children every single month.

In April, the World Health Organization warned strongly against premature economic reopenings by any country if it could not reliably “find, isolate, test and treat all cases, and trace every contact.” During that same period, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top US infectious disease expert, warned that abandoning restrictions on business operations would cause “needless suffering and death.”

Instead, the US political establishment, from the White House on down to state governors in both parties, abandoned efforts to contain the pandemic, allowing businesses to reopen and fuel the spread of the disease. The American financial oligarchy is totally indifferent to the death and suffering of millions.

The United States has adopted a de facto policy of “herd immunity,” forcing workers back into factories, plants and offices so corporations can continue to extract surplus value to pay for the billions or trillions of dollars handed out to the rich.

While this policy is particularly egregious in the United States, it is mirrored in every country, where the primary concern of governments has been to preserve not the health and well-being of the population but the wealth of the financial oligarchy.

The COVID-19 disaster is the product of the anarchy and irrationality of capitalism, most nakedly expressed in the industrialized world in the United States. The destruction of the health care infrastructure over decades is of a piece with the financialization and deindustrialization of the economy and the destruction of jobs, wages and social services.

Instead of global cooperation, the US is using the prospect of a potential vaccine to its own advantage, engaged in what the Wall Street Journal called a “high-stakes geopolitical scramble to secure supplies for a scientific breakthrough that could confer enormous economic and political power.”

On February 28, now more than five months ago, the International Committee of the Fourth International issued a call for a globally coordinated emergency response to the coronavirus pandemic. At a time when the total number of cases stood at 100,000 and the number of deaths stood at 3,000, the ICFI warned that “the danger cannot be overstated.” Rather than taking measures to stop the pandemic, the ruling class utilized the health care disaster to gorge itself, profiting off of death and social devastation.

Now, more than 18 million have been infected, and more than 700,000 people have died. Seven hundred thousand people! All with families, friends and coworkers devastated by the loss. And there is no end in sight.

There could hardly be a more damning exposure of the social, political and moral bankruptcy of capitalism. The working class will not forget what has happened. The pandemic, acting upon the preexisting crisis of the capitalist system, has created the conditions for enormous revolutionary convulsions, in the United States and throughout the world.

A Wrong Message for the Pandemic

Cesar Chelala

Public health messages addressed to the general population should be clear and unambiguous. This is particularly important in times of a pandemic like that caused by the coronavirus. Millions of lives are at stake. One of the messages, “social distancing,” widely used by public health authorities during the present pandemic, exemplifies this shortcoming. It should be replaced by “physical distancing.”

“Language that is unclear –or worse, that conveys inadvertent and counterproductive meanings—undermines public health discourse. This is as true in public health as anywhere; successful behavior-change efforts, like those crucial to defeating covid-19, depend in part on accurate, compelling language,” wrote Joanne Silberner and Howard Frumkin in The British Medical Journal.

The imposed isolation has affected people of all ages. One of the most serious effects of the coronavirus pandemic has been on people’s mental health. Children have increased sadness and depression. They also have difficulties with concentration and attention and avoid activities and games that they enjoyed in the past, particularly when they are unable to join their friends.

Many people have experienced symptoms of anxiety, fear, and depression that have even led some to hurt themselves and others. In many countries, there has been an increase in incidents of domestic violence. The seriousness of the situation is aggravated when people are unable to work or to find paying jobs of any kind. For many low-income adults, the threat of eviction and homelessness is a heavy burden.

Elderly people are more prone to get sick with the coronavirus both as a result of having a weaker immune system and underlying health conditions. Because elderly people often depend on younger family members for their daily needs, isolation measures can critically damage a family support system. Those elderly with physical or mental disabilities need increased attention and care.

In these situations, asking people to do “social distancing” is an ambiguous message that can be misinterpreted. What is needed is more intense social connection, albeit done by telephone or through social media. In this regard, the government through its public health authorities should provide specific recommendations for more effective social connectivity. Increasingly, public health experts are calling for people to do “interpersonal physical distancing” or, in brief, “physical distancing” to avoid becoming infected by the virus.

Public health experts are alerting that measures such as testing and contact tracing are losing effectiveness given the speed of transmission of the pandemic. It is now particularly necessary to change the words “social distancing” for “physical distancing” and insist on the importance of increasing social connection among people to alleviate the mental health effects of the pandemic, and prevent the transmission of the infection.

Being human means staying connected. I am reminded of the words of John Berryman in his poem Homage to Mistress Bradstreet,

“We are on each other’s hands who care”

The Plunge in Consumption of Services Leads to a Record 32.9 Percent Drop in GDP

Dean Baker

The saving rate hit a record 25.7 percent level in the first quarter, indicating that few of the pandemic checks were spent.

The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) shrank at a record 32.9 percent annual rate in the second quarter. While almost all the major categories of GDP fell sharply, a 43.5 percent drop in consumption of services was the largest factor, accounting for 22.9 percentage points of the drop in the quarter. Nonresidential fixed investment also fell sharply, dropping at a 27.0 percent annual rate. Residential investment fell at a 38.7 percent annual rate.

The plunge in service consumption was expected since this was the segment of the economy hardest hit by the shutdowns. Within services, health care, food services and hotels, and recreation were the biggest factors reducing growth by 9.5 percentage points, 5.6 percentage points, and 4.7 percentage points, respectively.

Spending on health care services fell at a 62.7 percent annual rate in the quarter. This was due to people putting off a wide range of medical and dental checkups and procedures, which far more than offset the care needed by coronavirus patients. The annual rate of decline for food and hotel services was 81.2 percent and for recreation services 93.5 percent.

Consumption of nondurable goods fell at a 15.9 percent annual rate. Declines in clothing and gasoline purchases were the biggest factors, taking 1.0 percentage point and 0.9 percentage points off the quarter’s growth, respectively. Demand for durable goods fell at just a 1.4 percent rate, but this followed a decline of 12.5 percent in the first quarter. Interestingly, spending on cars actually rose slightly in the quarter, adding 0.15 percentage points to growth.

Consumption expenditures by nonprofits serving households rose at 182.5 percent annual rate, adding 3.0 percentage points to the quarter’s growth. This reflects the effort by private foundations and charities to ameliorate the hardships being experienced by many households.

Both structure and equipment investment fell sharply in the quarter, declining at 34.9 percent and 37.7 percent annual rates, respectively. The drop in equipment investment is especially striking since it fell at a 15.2 percent rate in the first quarter. Investment in intellectual products fell at a more modest 7.2 percent annual rate. Residential investment fell at a 38.7 percent annual rate, although this followed a jump of 19.0 percent in the first quarter.

Exports and imports both fell sharply, with exports dropping at a 64.1 percent rate and imports falling at a 53.4 percent rate. Because US imports are so much larger than exports, trade actually added 0.7 percentage points to growth in the quarter.

Federal government spending rose at a 17.4 percent annual rate, driven by a 39.7 percent increase in non-defense spending, presumably most of which is pandemic related. State and local spending fell at a 5.6 percent rate, likely reflecting school closings in the quarter.

Prices fell sharply in the quarter, with the Personal Consumption Expenditure (PCE) deflator falling at a 1.9 percent annual rate and the core PCE falling at a 1.1 percent annual rate. These declines reflected sharp drops in the price of items such as gasoline, hotels, and clothes. Many of these declines were already being reversed by the end of the quarter. They will almost certainly not continue into the third quarter.

The savings rate soared to a record 25.7 percent. This reflects the jump in disposable income attributable to the pandemic checks, coupled with the sharp drop in spending. Nominal disposable income rose at a 42.1 percent annual rate. This rise was, of course, uneven, with people who were still getting their regular paychecks or retirees seeing large jumps in income from the pandemic checks, but with many of the unemployed seeing sharp drops.

With the economy mostly reopened, despite serious outbreaks of the pandemic in large parts of the country, we are virtually certain to see strong growth in the third quarter. But even if the economy grows at a 15 or 20 percent annual rate, it would be nowhere close to recovering the losses from the last two quarters.

The shape of the rescue package currently being debated will also be hugely important. In addition to the unemployment insurance supplements that will be necessary for laid-off workers to sustain their consumption, state and local governments will need large amounts of money both to avoid layoffs and to implement programs for the safe reopening of schools, workplaces and businesses. In this context, it is very difficult to see any economic rationale for the $1,200 pandemic checks.