War crimes in Afghanistan covered up by UK Ministry of Defence

Jean Shaoul

The government has been caught out lying about evidence on the killing of civilians in Afghanistan by the elite Special Air Service (SAS).

Three years into a civil case in the High Court brought by Saiffulah Yar into the deaths of four family members at the hand of the SAS, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) has finally handed over a tranche of e-mails and documents revealing official concerns about the killing of Afghan civilians. The MoD previously indicated it had no such documents.

The documents, written by SAS officers and military personnel, provide evidence of war crimes. They show that while the government claimed that there was no credible evidence about these events, the evidence had been sitting in Whitehall.

It is a damning confirmation of the criminality of the 2001 US-led invasion and occupation of Afghanistan that has led to more than 175,000 deaths, hundreds of thousands of wounded, and millions forced from their homes.

The intervention in Afghanistan, planned well in advance of the bombing of the twin towers in New York in 2001, was not launched to prosecute a “war on terrorism” but rather to project US military power into Central and South Asia. The US was intent on seizing control of a country bordering on the oil-rich former Soviet republics of the Caspian Basin, as well as China. The UK joined as a willing partner on behalf of its own oil corporations in this criminal venture.

The High Court has now ordered Ben Wallace, the Secretary of State for Defence, to explain why the ministry withheld evidence suggesting SAS soldiers executed 33 civilians in Afghanistan in early 2011. He has until November to reply. The MoD claimed it was not new evidence, as it had been reviewed by the official inquiry—Operation Northmoor—into allegations of civilian killings.

Saifullah brought the case against the MoD to discover what happened to his family and whether the case had been thoroughly investigated by the British authorities. His father, two brothers, and a cousin were killed during a raid on his family’s home in Qala-e-Bost, east of Lashkar Gah in Helmand province in southern Afghanistan, under British occupation in 2011.

After the raid, Saifullah, who was 16 at the time, found his father, Haji Abdul Kaliq, 55, two brothers, Sadam, 23, and Atullah, 25, and a cousin shot dead. One of his brothers and his father had been handcuffed and hooded before being shot as they lay face down on the ground. Royal Military Police (RMP) officers had arrived at his family’s compound by helicopter and handcuffed and fingerprinted him, along with the other male members of his family, before he was taken to a barn with the women and children, where they were guarded by soldiers during the raid. He denies that his family had any weapons or were connected to the Taliban, the ostensible cause of the raid.

According to the 1977 Geneva Conventions, shooting civilians is only lawful if they are participating directly in hostilities. With no precise definition of “direct participation,” civilians are expected to be given the benefit of the doubt. Under UK domestic law, which is applicable to the armed forces, a soldier can use force to defend him/herself and others, including lethal force, only provided it is reasonable in the circumstances.

The MoD had previously maintained that it was unaware of any complaint about the raid until the family launched a legal case in 2013. But six years later, it transpired that the Royal Military Police (RMP) had interviewed 54 soldiers involved in the operation leading up to the raid on Saifullah’s family home, with the government’s lawyers claiming that none of those involved could remember very much about the operation.

The documents, first revealed by BBC TV’s Panorama and the Sunday Times, tell a different story. They confirm claims that the government covered up dozens of allegations—including by UK soldiers—of the killing of innocent civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Philip Alston, the former UN Special Rapporteur on executions, told Panorama, “ I have no doubt that overall many of the allegations [of innocent people being killed] are justified, and that we can conclude that a large number of civilians were killed in night raids, totally unjustifiably.”

One of the e-mails, sent by an SAS officer the morning after the raid, described it as “the latest massacre!” and added, “I’ve heard a couple of rumours.” Another document revealed that there had been a secret review of suspicious killings and a string of related incidents in which the SAS had killed fighting-age men, often during a search of premises, allegedly because they had picked up a weapon.

According to the review that covered the first quarter of 2011, 23 people were killed and 10 guns were recovered in three operations. It was clear a senior officer examining the official reports filed about the SAS’s night raids was sceptical of their veracity, remarking on their similarity in that the detained men suddenly grabbed a weapon. He found at least five separate incidents where more people were killed than weapons were recovered. Taken together, this led him to conclude, “In my view there is enough here to convince me that we are getting some things wrong, right now.”

One SAS commander even wrote to London warning there was “possibly a deliberate policy” and that the SAS troops had potentially strayed into “indefensible behaviour” that could amount to being “criminal.”

His concern was that the killings were jeopardising the support of Afghan forces, which were refusing to accompany the British on night raids, and “put[ting] at risk the [redacted] transition plan and more importantly the prospects of enduring UK influence” in Afghanistan.

While the RMP had launched an investigation called Operation Northmoor into 657 allegations of abuse, mistreatment, and killings, including into the deaths of Saifullah’s family members, at the hands of British forces, the government closed it down in 2017. Once again, a three-year-long official probe, costing at least £10 million, failed to result in a single prosecution.

The corporate media had gone into overdrive, branding the investigations as a witch-hunt. The MoD filed complaints against the lawyers bringing civil suits against it, including against Saifullah’s lawyer Leigh Day. Leigh Day was cleared of wrongdoing after a six-week tribunal in September 2017.

In March, the government introduced legislation proposing a five-year limit on prosecutions for soldiers serving outside the UK. With its “presumption against prosecution” that gives the green light to future war crimes, including the mass murder of civilians, the military will now be above the law.

It was WikiLeaks publisher and journalist Julian Assange who, by publishing the Afghan war logs in 2010, a vast trove of leaked US military documents, first brought to the world’s attention evidence of the criminality of a war that has now lasted 19 years. The Afghan war logs exposed the myth that the occupation of Afghanistan was a “good war,” supposedly waged to defeat terrorism, extend democracy, and protect women’s rights. They revealed the mass killings of civilians by both US and UK forces, detailing at least 21 occasions when British troops opened fire on civilians.

It is not just those soldiers who perpetrated these crimes on behalf of British imperialism that have escaped punishment. The guilty include those at the top of the political and military ladder that planned and executed this criminal war, even as they plot new crimes, including catastrophic conflicts with nuclear-armed powers such as China and Russia.

Instead, the only two people who have faced criminal repercussions are those who reported the crimes: Chelsea Manning, who has endured a decade of persecution, and Julian Assange, who is imprisoned in Britain’s maximum-security Belmarsh Prison awaiting court hearings for his extradition to the US where he faces 175 years of imprisonment under the Espionage Act. The exposures of the horrors of both the Afghan and Iraq wars earned Assange the undying hatred of Britain’s political establishment, which is why they have hounded, intimidated, tortured and imprisoned him.

NTEU enforces deep pay and job cuts at Australian universities

Mike Head

The National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) is pressing ahead in its collaboration with university managements to inflict cuts to wages, jobs and basic conditions. This is despite a rebellion by union members that led to the collapse of NTEU’s “national framework” that offered managements wage cuts of up to 15 percent at all 39 public universities and still accepted the loss of 18,000 jobs.

In the latest outrage, the NTEU national executive is urging staff members at Adelaide University to take pay cuts of up to 15 percent and still accept the elimination of 200 jobs. The union struck a deal with the management following talks that the university’s grateful acting vice-chancellor described as “constructive.”

The Adelaide agreement again demonstrates that the union will stop at nothing to assist the employers and governments as they exploit the global COVID-19 pandemic to impose unprecedented attacks on university workers, who already have experienced years of under-funding, soaring workloads and casualisation.

Like workers everywhere, university educators and professional staff members are being forced by the trade unions to pay the price for the failure of global capitalism to protect lives and livelihoods from the pandemic, which is resurging around the world as a direct result of the ruling elite’s “economic reopening” program.

The NTEU’s collaboration is paving the way for an acceleration of this offensive as the pandemic worsens. Adding to the tidal wave of retrenchments already underway, thousands more university jobs will be destroyed because of the COVID-19 catastrophe in the state of Victoria. The resulting economic hit nationally, and the extension of travel bans and other restrictions, will further devastate universities.

Universities Australia previously predicted up to 30,000 positions would be destroyed in the next three years because of an expected $16 billion of lost revenue, primarily due to the loss of high fee-paying international students. Those estimates are now clearly an understatement.

Melbourne University Vice-Chancellor Duncan Maskell yesterday announced the scrapping of 450 full-time jobs—5 percent of the workforce—plus an unknown number of casual and fixed-term positions. But he said he would consult the NTEU on how to implement the cuts and university would do “everything we can to minimise involuntary redundancies”—which is a means of working with the union to try to stifle resistance.

This is part of an avalanche of job cuts, including 493 at the University of New South Wales, 277 at Monash University, 210 at the University of New England, more than 200 at Charles Sturt University, up to 20 percent of the workforce at Sydney’s Macquarie University and still-to-be finalised numbers at Newcastle University.

The NTEU is trying to sidetrack the outrage of university workers and students into a parliamentary petition campaign, imploring Centre Alliance and other right-wing senators to block the Liberal-National government’s latest student fee hikes and funding cuts. This serves only to stifle independent action by university staff.

At the same time, the union is joining hands with big business leaders, such as Business Council chief executive Jennifer Westacott, to plead with the government to recognise that universities deliver the kinds of “dynamic” graduates that employers want. According to NTEU national president Alison Barnes, writing in the August edition of the union’s Sentry magazine, this business support shows that “everyone looks to the government for a plan to stop Australian universities from sinking beneath the waves.”

Alongside this partnership with business leaders, the NTEU is urging university workers and students to sign a sycophantic open letter to university vice-chancellors, asking them to “stand with us” and oppose the government’s measures. These are the same vice-chancellors with whom the NTEU is holding hands as they shut down courses, close campuses, slash wages and axe jobs.

Adelaide University Acting Vice-Chancellor Professor Mike Brooks sent an email to staff welcoming the “in-principle” deal with the union, endorsed by the NTEU national executive. Clause 19.2 of the agreement states that the total wage reduction can be “an amount equivalent to a maximum total of 15 percent of a staff member’s salary in any given pay period.”

These reductions can include three weeks of compulsory leave purchase, a 3.5 percent wage cut over nine months, the deferral of a pay rise and the axing of annual holiday leave loading. From September, for example, an administrative worker on just above the median full-time female wage of $65,000 a year would lose 8 percent—$263 per fortnight.

Supposedly, this would “save” 200 of the 400 full-time jobs currently facing elimination, but there is no real guarantee of this, especially as the health and economic crisis continues.

At some universities, the NTEU has opposed management proposals, but only because they have been drafted without consultation with the union, which is preoccupied solely with retaining its role as the vehicle for policing the requirements of the employers.

At Victoria’s Deakin University, the NTEU last month appealed to the Fair Work Commission, the federal government’s industrial court, over the management’s plans to axe 427 jobs. Recognising the value of the union’s services, the commission ordered the management to conduct “meaningful consultation” with the union and staff. The order instructed the university to provide “some limited information” on its plans to “the relevant NTEU officials.”

Far from being a protection of jobs, the order permitted the university to continue pursuing “voluntary” redundancies, with the commissioner encouraging the management to “seek some accommodation with the NTEU.”

As a result of this supposed “victory,” the union is imploring the management to “come back to the negotiating table in good faith.” Similar appeals to the Fair Work Commission have become another means for the NTEU to head off the discontent of university workers.

Likewise, at Brisbane’s Griffith University, the NTEU is advocating a “no” vote to a management plan that the union calls “sub-standard,” while insisting that “NTEU members agree” that “everyone has to chip in to help in these difficult times.” On that basis, it is urging its members to tell the management “to negotiate a better deal.”

University workers need to reject the ultimatums being put forward by the NTEU, governments and management: accept wage cuts and other concessions or face redundancies. This is the framework created by governments and the financial elite.

The global pandemic is not the only cause of the deep crisis in the universities. It has accelerated what has been happening for years. Billions of dollars have been cut from universities, since massive cuts introduced by the last Greens-backed Labor Party government of 2010-2013.

Yesterday’s revelation that universities have illegally underpaid casual workers by millions of dollars over the past decade underscores how far this process had gone, long before COVID-19, all facilitated by enterprise agreements negotiated by the NTEU.

The record demonstrates that university academics, staff and students can defend jobs and fight for free, high-quality education, only through a rebellion against the NTEU and other unions and the entire political establishment.

The NTEU’s intensifying collaboration with the employers shows the necessity of the joint call issued on June 15 by the Committee for Public Education (CFPE) and the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) for university workers and students to unite to form independent rank-and-file committees, to prosecute a genuine industrial and political struggle against all the union-enforced attacks.

That requires challenging the capitalist profit system and its grip over society. This means turning to a socialist perspective, based on the total reorganisation of society in the interests of all, instead of the financial oligarchy.

Germany: Right-wing terror in Erfurt

Marianne Arens

In the night of August 1, three men from Guinea were brutally attacked by neo-Nazis in Erfurt and had to be taken to hospital. One of them, a 21-year-old youth, suffered such severe head injuries that his condition was still considered “critical” days later; he is still in hospital.

It was in the early hours of the morning when the three happened to pass a neo-Nazi meeting place. They did not know that the “Neue Stärke Erfurt e.V.,” a martial arts club in a former shopping centre in the south of the city, had been occupied for five years by fascists from “Der III. Weg” (“The 3rd Way”) and used as a clubhouse. Several men standing around outside on that night attacked the three passers-by without any cause, beating and kicking them most brutally.

The police arrested 12 of them, but after a few hours, the violent perpetrators, all neo-Nazis known to the city authorities and the police, were free again. Senior Public Prosecutor Hannes Grünseisen, spokesman for Thuringia’s Public Prosecutor General’s Office, reported they were under investigation for committing “grievous bodily harm and breach of the peace.” However, since there was “no danger of a cover-up or of them fleeing,” there was “no reason for their detention.”

Witnesses are still being sought to clarify the exact course of events. The injured victims, whose death the Nazi thugs had accepted, are apparently out of the question as witnesses.

The attack is only the tip of an iceberg. In Erfurt, right-wing gangs of thugs can act completely freely and uninhibitedly under the eyes of the state authorities. This is what happened just a few days earlier, on July 18, when masked right-wing extremists attacked a group of young people celebrating in front of the state chancellery, where surveillance cameras record everything, day and night. At least five of the 12 or so attacked, including young women, were left lying on the floor, some of them seriously injured. As in the case of the Guineans, the Thuringian State Criminal Office (LKA) quickly took over the investigation—and apparently, let it fizzle out.

Last Saturday, about 400 protested in an Erfurt demonstration against racism, right-wing violence and its cover-up by the state. A spokeswoman for the Thuringian Ezra victim advisory service, Christin Fiedler, described the attack in front of the state chancellery:

“This was not a ‘mass brawl’ or ‘confrontation,’ but a targeted, coordinated and insidious attack on people celebrating peacefully by right-wing violent criminals, presumably experienced in martial arts. The perpetrators were partially masked and knew exactly what they were doing. They acted without restraint and with enormous brutality and knowingly accepted causing possible fatal injuries, for example by continuing to kick people who were lying unconscious on the ground.”

For Fiedler, the fact that the attack took place in public, with video monitoring directly in front of the building of the Thuringia state government shows “how secure the perpetrators felt, who did not even stop when the police were already on the scene.”

The fascist attacks in Erfurt are part of a wave of right-wing extremist and anti-Semitic violence. These have increased considerably in Germany. Even the federal Interior Minister, Horst Seehofer, had to admit this when he spoke of a “long trail of blood” in May, when presenting the police crime statistics, which leads from the actions of the neo-fascist NSU, responsible for a series of xenophobic murders, to the attacks in Munich, Halle and Hanau, to the murder of Kassel’s district president Walter Lübcke. Seehofer said, “The greatest threat in our country comes from the right.”

But the neo-Nazis and anti-Semites have no mass support among the population, unlike the 1930s. The majority hates and despises right-wing extremism and expresses this again and again—sometimes in mass demonstrations. The fascists only feel so strong because they know that the “state within the state”—the dark channels and neo-Nazi networks in the police, the Bundeswehr (Armed Forces) and the secret service—are at their side. That is why Erfurt’s well-known neo-Nazis, who are prepared to use violence, are again at large in the city, even though they have just beaten three Guineans half to death.

The decision to let them roam free evinces such open support for the right-wingers that Thuringia state interior minister Georg Maier (Social Democratic Party, SPD) felt compelled to publicly criticise it. “The Nazi thugs of Erfurt are all walking free again,” Maier tweeted. “I know it’s not my place to criticise the justice system, but it’s a disaster for the victims and the people of Herrenberg.” Herrenberg is the housing estate where the attack took place.

Like Seehofer, Maier is trying to cover his tracks. The federal interior minister showed his solidarity with radical right-wing protests in Chemnitz in September 2018, among other things. Maier is part of a state government in Thuringia, which is led by a state premier from the Left Party, Bodo Ramelow, and which courts the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) and seeks to cooperate with it. This was demonstrated only a few hours after Ramelow’s re-election in the spring.

On March 6, Ramelow used his casting vote to help the AfD take over the vice presidency of the Thuringia state legislature. Ramelow then explicitly stated on Twitter that he had “very fundamentally decided to use my vote to clear the way for parliamentary participation, which must be granted to every parliamentary group.”

The Left Party, for which many voters had only cast their ballot because they wanted to set an example against the right wing, thus very consciously ensured the AfD’s “parliamentary participation”—a party that plays down Nazism, fans racism and, especially in Thuringia, has open neo-Nazis in its ranks. It is precisely this policy of the Left Party and the SPD that strengthens and encourages the extreme right-wing gangs of thugs. The SPD interior minister is only concerned because the effects of the right-wing policies of the Ramelow government are visible. He is not taking any action in the matter, despite the public prosecutor’s office being part of his department.

Nazi parties such as “Die Rechte” (“The Right”) and “Der III. Weg” have been explicitly allowed to use the building in Erfurt-South, where the Guineans were attacked, as a clubhouse for five years. Undisturbed by the authorities, they organize right-wing rock concerts, martial arts training, and party meetings there. Enrico Biczysko, is a right-wing figurehead in Erfurt’s city council for the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party of Germany, and the neo-Nazis have friends and supporters in the judiciary and police.

The first police press release after the attack was already characteristic for this right-wing swamp. In officialese, it blandly states, “On 01.08.2020 at about 03:05, a verbal dispute between a group of three foreign fellow citizens and about 10 Germans occurred, which culminated in a physical confrontation. In the course of this quarrel, two persons with a migration background were injured, some of them seriously.” The cynicism of this police communication can hardly be surpassed. Through their presence in Germany, the Guineans had put themselves in danger and ultimately brought about their own injuries.

Far-right protest against COVID-19 restrictions in Berlin: A put-up job

Peter Schwarz

According to police reports, an estimated 20,000 participants gathered in Berlin last Saturday to protest against Germany’s Corona protection measures. The protest was a predictable, put-up job, which closely resembled the scenario of the Pegida demonstrations held five years ago.

Far-right figures and organisations that pull the strings behind the scenes and maintain close links to the Verfassungsschutz (Germany’s domestic secret service), the police and the right-wing extremist Alternative for Germany (AfD) called the protest, and mobilised a broad coalition of confused, frustrated and eccentric individuals. Political circles and the German media then inflated the whole issue, took the moral high ground and criticised the crude slogans of the demonstrators while declaring at the same time that those taking part were “concerned citizens” whose concerns had to be “taken seriously.” In so doing they were able to divert attention from their own reactionary policies and push the political climate further to the right.

The Pegida demonstrations were used in a similar way to sabotage the “welcoming culture,” whereby broad sections of the German population welcomed refugees from war-wracked countries in the Middle East and North Africa, and to intimidate all those supporting the refugees.

Journalists worked their fingers to the bone with articles which concluded that—in the words of the right-wing extremist historian Jörg Baberowski—”it naturally ends in aggression…wherever many people come from foreign contexts” and when the population is not involved. According to this logic, the refugees—i.e., the victims of the far right—were responsible for the growth of right-wing extremism.

The Corona demonstration in Berlin followed the same pattern. Many of those agitating behind the scenes were among the same people behind the Pegida demonstrations, i.e., neo-Nazis, far-right Reichbürger, supporters of the AfD, the neo-Nazi NPD and the conspiracy theorist QAnon movement, who travelled from all over Germany to Berlin. These forces were joined by opponents of vaccination, Corona deniers and so-called “angry citizens,” together with members of Berlin’s party crowd.

The police watched patiently as the participants disregarded Corona distancing and mask regulations, waved illegal Reich flags and displayed unconstitutional symbols. In contrast to the G20 protests in Hamburg or the recent demonstrations against the murder of George Floyd, where police resorted to the use of pepper spray and water cannons at the slightest opportunity, not a single police officer could be seen along broad stretches of the march. Only after half an hour of the final rally had passed did police officially declare that the protest was ended due to non-compliance with hygiene rules. At the same time, police made no move to break up the demonstration.

Afterwards, leading politicians and the media frothed at the mouth regarding the non-compliance with official hygiene regulations. Demonstrations should be possible, also in a period of Corona…”but not like this,” twittered the German Health Minister Jens Spahn (CDU). Justice Minister Christine Lambrecht (SPD) declared she had no sympathy for demonstrators who high-handedly ignored Corona precautions. Economics Minister Peter Altmaier (CDU) called for tougher penalties: “Those who deliberately endanger others must expect serious consequences.” SPD leader Saskia Esken angrily referred to “covididiots.”

These expressions of outrage were aimed at diverting attention from the policies of these very same politicians. The anti-social behaviour of the demonstrators last Saturday pales in comparison with their own criminal response. Germany’s federal and state governments, run by various coalitions involving the CDU, CSU, SPD, Greens, FDP and Left Party, are all pursuing a policy of opening up society and the economy that threatens the lives of hundreds of thousands.

As the worldwide number of infected persons approaches 20 million, with the number of fatalities now exceeding 700,000, the number of cases in Germany is again rising significantly. Currently tens of thousands of holiday makers are returning home, having been encouraged to travel abroad by the lifting of travel warnings. At airports in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, where almost half of the returnees voluntarily applied for a Corona test, 2.5 percent proved positive, an extremely high figure.

Despite this, schools are opening up across the country, starting with Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania next week, although it has been proven that schools, with their cramped classrooms and dilapidated infrastructure, are an ideal environment for mass infections.

The Viennese research group Complexity Science Hub, which has statistically evaluated Corona data from 76 regions, concluded that the closure of schools, kindergartens and universities was an “extremely effective means” to limit infection. According to an analysis published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, school closures saved more than 40,000 lives and prevented 1.3 million infections in the US alone.

Conversely, a study by the Technical University of Berlin shows that aerosol concentration in the air of a classroom—critical for transmission—is reached just two minutes after a single infected person in the room coughs. Despite this fact, schools are once again commencing operations at full capacity.

The hygiene measures that have been put in place, which vary from state to state, are risible. For example, the obligation to wear masks, which Federal Education Minister Anja Karliczek (CDU) is now advocating after initially rejecting the proposal, only applies from the school gate to the classroom, but not in the classroom itself, where the risk of infection is highest.

The Robert Koch Institute (RKI) also estimates the risk of infection to be high in a full classroom where minimum distance rules are not observed. This information is contained in a letter to the Rheinische Post. The prerequisites for maintaining this distance in classrooms are almost non-existent.

The RKI also warns against studies that attribute a significantly higher resistance on the part of children to coronavirus infection. It may well be that the alleged resistance of children is merely due to the fact that they had less social contact during the closure of kindergartens and schools, the RKI notes on its website.

Meanwhile, the media are trying to portray the Berlin demonstration staged by far-right manipulators as an expression of a broad mood within the population. In its lead commentary on Monday, the Süddeutsche Zeitung claimed that when a five-figure number of people take to the streets in Berlin, “one must fear that what was being expressed were issues concerning hundreds of thousands, at least.”

Opinion polls prove the opposite. A recent survey conducted by the opinion research institute Civey for the Tagesspiegel newspaper concluded that 77 percent of those questioned would accept a tightening of contact restrictions if the number of infections rose again significantly. Only around 20 percent were opposed. According to the current Politbarometer, 77 percent also expect a second wave of coronavirus infections to occur soon.

The pressure to lift contact restrictions and open schools does not come from the population, but rather from business and finance interests together with their cronies in the media and political circles. Having transferred hundreds of billions of euros to the corporations and banks to guarantee the profits and fortunes of the rich, the government is seeking once again to squeeze these sums out of the working class. The opening up of schools is a basic condition for parents to be fully available to the labour market and able to work. The drive for profits is being placed above the lives of millions of children and their families.

The neo-Nazis and right-wing extremists who set the tone at the Berlin demonstration have been deliberately targeted to create the necessary political climate for this policy. They are closely linked to the state apparatus, as was revealed most recently by the NSU murders, the murder of the politician Walter Lübcke and the uncovering of various far-right terror networks in the German army (Bundeswehr) and police.

Protecting the health and livelihoods of the population against the effects of the Corona pandemic is first and foremost a political task. It is only possible on the basis of a socialist programme that puts human and social need above the profit interests of big business.

One can only resolve the urgent problem of education and training within such a framework. It is perfectly possible to provide education in compliance with appropriate safety measures, but this requires that the huge funds currently being diverted into the accounts of the wealthy must be redirected to renovate dilapidated schools, rent additional rooms, purchase computers and IT technology, employ more teachers to instruct small groups, etc.

There is no shortage of ideas and initiatives from committed teachers and parents, but they are being rejected on the grounds of cost or blocked by bureaucratic means.

The Socialist Equality Party (SGP) advocates the establishment of action committees in educational institutions and residential areas that function independently of the trade unions and establishment parties. Such committees are necessary to coordinate resistance to the life-threatening policy of opening up the economy.

Resistance to a system that subordinates every sphere of life to the profit interests of big business and finance is developing in factories, hospitals, transport and public services around the world. The SGP and its sister parties in the International Committee of the Fourth International are fighting to build a broad socialist mass movement.

Gold price surges to record high

Nick Beams

The pumping out of trillions of dollars and other currencies by governments and central banks around the world, led by the US Fed, to bail out corporations and the stock market, has sent the price of gold to a record high of more than $2000 per ounce.

The gold-buying frenzy has two driving forces: speculation as investors rush in, believing the price will go even higher, and longer-term concerns that the flooding of financial markets with massive amounts of computer-generated money could lead to a crisis of confidence in the US dollar, extending throughout the financial system.

The extent of the gold buying was revealed earlier this week when the Financial Times reported that the exchange traded fund (ETF) SPDR Gold Shares, which owns physical gold stocks rather than financial derivatives based on the metal, was buying tonnes of gold every day.

Its holdings, which are kept in the London vaults of the global bank, HSBC, now amount to 1258 tonnes after it bought 15 tonnes on Monday and Tuesday of this week.

Comprising a partnership between the Boston bank, State Street, and the World Gold Council, a trade body, SPDR’s gold stocks are now equal to a quarter of the gold held at Fort Knox in the US and are more than the gold reserves of the Bank of Japan, the Bank of England and the Reserve Bank of India.

The immediate aim of SPDR is the return obtained from gold buying. The ETF has reported a 33 percent return this year as the price of gold has soared, lifting its value to more than $80 billion.

The Financial Times cited a note by Wells Fargo analysts which pointed to the reasons for the rising gold price. In early 2020, it said, “gold’s rally attached itself to coronavirus fears and excessive global money printing. More recently, gold has hopped on the US dollar train; rallying above $1900 [it is now at more than $2030] as the US dollar has become one of the weakest currencies on the planet.”

In so-called “normal times—now something of a distant memory—gold is at a disadvantage compared to investment in government bonds because it does not return interest. But the massive bond buying programs of the Fed and other major central banks have raised the price of bonds and pushed interest rates to record lows (the two have an inverse relationship).

This week the interest rate on 10-year US Treasury bonds, one of the foundations of the global financial system, has been around 0.5 percent—near its all-time low. This means that when inflation is taken into account, these bonds, regarded as a safe haven, are bringing negative returns, prompting a turn to gold.

A fund manager at the global asset management company Schroders, Jim Luke, noted that when inflation is taken into account, the US 10-year bond yield has fallen to a record low of minus 1.02 percent this month and could drop even further.

“People who look at gold tend to get characterised as ‘gold bugs’ and some do have that kind of blind-faith mentality,” he told the Financial Times. “But what’s drawing investors to gold is not faith in gold itself, it’s much more lack of faith in other things—central banks, governments and, in particular, a lack of faith in the availability of real returns elsewhere. Gold is the inverse of that.”

The sharp twists and turns in financial markets are being driven by the massive inflow of money, created at the press of a computer button, by governments and central banks as they seek to bailout corporations and sustain the stock markets.

According to the Bank of America, governments have announced $20 trillion worth of stimulus measures as they seek to counter the effects of the coronavirus, an amount equivalent to 20 percent of global gross domestic product. The bank has said that the price of gold could rise still further and reach $3000.

This has led to the creation of what could be described as the development of a split personality syndrome in increasingly crazy financial markets.

On the one hand, stock market speculators reckon that the intervention by the US Fed in mid-March, when it became the backstop for all areas of the US financial system—from the market in US Treasuries to corporate bonds—means that whatever the developments in the real economy the Fed will be on hand to support Wall Street.

That belief has been behind the rise and rise of stock markets from their plunge in mid-March which has added hundreds of billions of dollars to the fortunes of the financial oligarchs as workers face the worse economic conditions since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Yesterday, amid the further worsening of the pandemic, the Dow rose by 373 points, or 1.4 percent, the S&P 500 increased by 0.6 percent, taking it to within 2 percent of its record high recorded in February, and the tech-heavy NASDAQ index recorded its 31st record high for 2020.

On the other hand, there is a growing fear, reflected in the rising price of gold, that the continued pumping out of trillions of dollars of computer-created money by central banks is undermining the entire financial system.

Since August 1971, when US president Nixon withdrew the gold backing from the US dollar, every currency in the world, from the US dollar down, has been a fiat currency, meaning it has no backing in a physical asset.

Confidence in the monetary system over the past 50 years has been maintained by the belief that the power of the state, governments and central banks, is able to maintain stability. But this confidence is now being rapidly eroded by the unprecedented expansion of the money supply.

This is expressed in the fear that, if continued, this must lead at some point to inflation—an inflation caused not by rising prices in the real economy but from the collapse in the value of fiat currencies, starting with the US dollar which has been falling sharply over the past months.

Other factors are also at work, in particular the growing political dysfunction in the US amid concerns that the November presidential elections may not even be held or that if they are they will result in a major crisis if Trump is defeated but refuses to accept the result.

Rising geo-political tensions, above all the conflict with China, are also fueling a crisis of confidence.

And, while it is not often reported on in the financial press, there is also a real fear that devastation produced by the pandemic and the subordination of the health of society to the relentless drive by all governments to maintain corporate profits, no matter what the cost, is going to produce an upsurge of class struggle that will shake the very foundations of the capitalist economic order.

COVID-19 outbreaks at four workplaces in Swindon, UK

Tony Robson

A spate of COVID-19 outbreaks have been reported at four separate workplace locations in Swindon. Workers at a Royal Mail delivery office, a fire station, the Honda car factory, and a distribution centre for the food supermarket chain, Iceland, have been taken ill.

Swindon, in Wiltshire in the southwest of England, has a population of 200,000. The outbreaks at varying workplace locations across the town within the space of two days is unprecedented. Yet the response of the local media was to express “fears of another lockdown,” rather than focusing on the heightened threat the outbreaks posed to workers and their families.

Local Director of Public Health Steve Maddern stated blithely, “As lockdown restrictions are eased, we would expect to see small outbreaks to occur—this is usual, and it is being dealt with in the usual way.” He stressed that an outbreak was defined as “just two people at a linked situation.”

This is in line with a pattern of official indifference nationally. Local health officials and the Public Health bodies have sought to minimise any disruption to the operations of the corporations as outbreaks of the virus have flared up in the meat processing industry and retail distribution centres in Wales and the north of England. Employers have been absolved of all responsibility, while the onus has been shifted onto workers and the public to follow loose guidelines on personal hygiene.

The Royal Mail delivery office in Dorcan, Swindon, with around 1,000 staff, was closed for 48 hours from July 21 to organise a deep clean, after two postal workers tested positive for the virus. Public Health England (PHE) was reported as satisfied that procedures had been followed and there were no outstanding concerns. While postal workers were sent home, no mandatory testing was organised and, according to one account, they were informed that they could report back to duty before receiving their results.

Since the start of the pandemic, Royal Mail has been a flashpoint for walkouts and stoppages by postal workers over the lack of social distancing and personal protective equipment (PPE) in delivery and sorting offices around the UK. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) reported that 40 postal workers, mail sorters, messengers and couriers, have died after contracting COVID-19. Concerns had been raised by postal workers at the Swindon delivery office back in March about the failure to provide gloves and hand sanitiser.

On July 22 it was announced that three firefighters tested positive at Swindon fire station. Dorset and Wiltshire Fire and Rescue Service issued a press release stating that the organisation of further testing would be conditional on whether other staff became symptomatic. Assistant Chief Fire Officer James Mahoney said there was no requirement to review existing practices in the workplace to safeguard against COVID-19.

The fire and rescue service are overstretched nationally due to years of job cuts and a failure by the government to introduce priority testing. Services in the UK were operating with 11,500 firefighters fewer than in 2010, according to the Fire Brigades Union (FBU). The government has ignored calls made by the FBU to introduce priority testing. In April, the union estimated that up to 12 percent of firefighters and control staff nationally were in self-isolation.

Honda posted an on-site notice on July 21 that a worker at its factory in south Marston had tested positive for the virus. The risk of transmission to the 3,000 workers employed at the site has been underplayed by the company, which has withheld details of the extent of infections and continued production. It citing the authority of PHE that it is complying with all safety requirements to maintain a “Covid-secure site.”

The developments at Honda should serve as a warning to all car workers in the UK. The company suspended production from March 18 and reopened in early June, along with Nissan in Sunderland. BMW, PSA and Ford resumed production in mid-May. In the US, after the auto giants were forced to temporarily shut production due to walkouts by car workers, the resumption of production has led to a wave of infections.

Attempts at cover-ups have unraveled, most clearly at the Iceland distribution centre in Bridgemead, which employs over 700 workers and is operated by XPO Logistics.

The distribution hub has remained open with the approval of PHE, even as the number of workers testing positive has more than quadrupled after a mobile testing unit was set up on-site July 29. The previous Friday there were 13 reported cases. Based on the most up-to-date figures, 64 cases have been confirmed and two workers have been hospitalised. A total of 150 staff are self-isolating.

Swindon accounted for the highest increase in coronavirus cases per 100,000 of the population in England in the final week of July. The outbreak at the Iceland distribution centre was the most important factor in the increased ratio from 19.8 per 100,000 the previous week to 48.6 per 100,000.

As far as the Director of Public Health is concerned, however, testing and tracing is simply a case of compiling statistics with no consideration given to any measures of containment that would interfere with the flow of business. Maddern declared that the risk of a wider community outbreak “remains low.”

A few days later, five workers bused from Swindon to the Bakkavor cake factory in nearby town Devizes tested positive.

Official irresponsibility is meeting with significant resistance. The empty assurances of public health officials who sing from the same balance sheet as the government and corporations, has failed to convince around half of the workforce at the Iceland distribution centre to return to work.

Opposition is developing independently of the unions. Speaking to BBC Radio Wilshire, Unite official John McGookin, stated, “As I understand it now, a lot of the workforce have voted with their feet and decided it’s not safe to go to work at the minute.”

McGookin acknowledged that XPO Logistics was refusing to speak to the union but issued no call to mobilise against the company. He said he had no idea why the company had not closed the site.

This is self-serving rubbish. The conduct of XPO Logistics and Iceland have a definite class logic, which Unite tries to conceal. The risk of infection and death is viewed as collateral damage in the pursuit of profit. XPO Logistics has followed the same course at the distribution centre it operates on behalf of ASOS in south Yorkshire, where they refused to close the site for a deep clean after nine workers tested positive for the virus in May. Its reckless actions have been backed to the hilt by the local Labour authority.

Further evidence of a growing intransigence among workers has been expressed at the Bakkavor cake factory in Devizes, which employs 540. On Monday evening, workers staged a strike from 6 p.m. to midnight over having to work in unsafe conditions after the infections of the Swindon workers were discovered.

This emerging opposition must find organised political expression. A socially responsible approach to the pandemic is inconceivable as long as policy is dictated by the corporate elite and its stooges.

Resuming college football driven by financial interests

Andy Thompson

Despite a dramatic increase in new COVID-19 cases in July and expectations of another surge in the fall as schools reopen, US colleges and universities are moving forward with plans to operate their college football programs with minimal changes.

It is practically guaranteed that the opening of the 2020 football season and the fall college semester will spark new outbreaks of COVID-19 among players, the general student population and the surrounding communities. The average student is at an even greater risk because, unlike players, they will not have access to the testing or dedicated health resources reserved for athletics.

Although ostensibly an amateur competition (although under-the-table bribes are common practice to secure commitments from top high school recruits), college athletics in America is a multi-billion dollar business, with attendances and TV audiences equal to, and in some cases greater than, professional competitions. Top college football coaches, who at public universities are technically state employees, make salaries similar to those of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies.

Ben Hill Griffin Stadium (Wikimedia Commons)

In the intense struggle for fan interest and revenue, top schools routinely funnel hundreds of millions into their athletics programs even as their academic infrastructure crumbles. Last year’s football champion, Louisiana State University, receives more in donations each year from alumni to its athletics program than to the actual university. The contrast between its decision to invest millions into a futuristic locker room for the football team and the continuously-flooded basement of the school’s library was widely covered in the press last year.

At lower, less lucrative levels of competition, hundreds of programs have already canceled their seasons. All championships for the National College Athletics Association (NCAA)’s Division II and Division III have already been canceled, the sport’s governing body announced yesterday. Many programs in Division I’s lower-level Football Championship Subdivision have also canceled fall sports.

But at larger, more lucrative programs, university administrations are proceeding full speed ahead. Many schools have not even made the decision to play without fans. The University of Texas, whose football stadium is in the middle of downtown Austin, one of the most populous cities in the country, plans on playing its home football games in front of 25 percent capacity crowds, or 25,000 people. Similar schemes are in the works at the University of Georgia, Ohio State University and other schools. Not even Major League Baseball, whose reckless return to play is on the verge of collapse after several outbreaks, has allowed fans into its stadiums.

In June, the NCAA announced that it would permit schools to allow student athletes to return to campus for summer workouts and pre-season training. Most football programs jumped at the opportunity to get their players back to training, in order not to lose an edge on their competition. Almost immediately, large-scale outbreaks occurred on team rosters. Both reigning champion LSU and the previous year’s champion, Clemson, confirmed over 30 cases each on their teams.

The NCAA had stated that athletes would be given access to testing, facilities monitored by health professionals and other amenities to prevent an outbreak among the teams. Despite these measures the results so far have been a disaster.

At Rutgers University, nearly 30 football players and several team staffers have tested positive for COVID-19. The players have been sent to quarantine in on-campus dorms, which are often cramped and close-quartered.

New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy told reporters Tuesday that he will not order the university to cancel their season, explaining that the outbreak among players has not changed his previous decision to allow the season to move forward. Murphy insists that the decision to cancel the season is not with him, but with the NCAA and the Big Ten Conference, of which Rutgers is a member.

Rutgers stands to lose $50 million if the season is canceled. This is actually one of the lower projected losses for a canceled 2020 season. Ohio State would be expected to lose over $104 million in revenue should the season be canceled.

On Wednesday, the Big Ten put to bed any speculation that the season would be shut down when it released the conference’s 2020 football schedule. It is projected to start on September 3 with a contest between Ohio State and the University of Illinois.

The only significant disruptions to football schedules have been the cancellation of out-of-conference games by the Big Ten and the other “Power Five” conferences which monopolize the sport’s revenues. While the ostensible purpose is to provide schools with flexibility to reschedule games, it is more plausible that the pandemic is being seized on as an excuse to further entrench the cartel system which controls the sport’s highest levels.

So far, only one top football program, the University of Connecticut, has announced it will not play in the 2020 season. However, even in this case, financial considerations likely play a role, as the school’s football program has been hemorrhaging money for years and the school faces pressure from boosters to abandon football altogether in order to concentrate resources on the school’s more successful and lucrative basketball program. While it is possible that more schools will individually cancel their season in the coming weeks, at this point it does not appear to be the norm.

There are growing signs that schools are attempting to cover up outbreaks on their football teams. According to a report by CBS Sports, multiple Colorado State football players and staff members claim the school is attempting to hide an outbreak among the players and threatening students with losing their position on the team if they report symptoms.

One student interviewed told CBS, “We had a player who definitely had coronavirus symptoms, coughing at practice and he wasn’t wearing a mask and I was next to him, touching him and there was spit and sweat. I told him he needed to get tested but he really didn’t want to because then he would be out. The next day he is not at practice. [If he tested positive] he already had spread the virus. That’s why a lot of players don’t feel safe at football practice.”

A staff member told CBS: “There are some red flags in the athletic department but the common denominator with this administration is to protect the coaches before the student-athletes and that makes them feel more like cattle.”

Resistance to the drive to reopen is emerging among athletes themselves. A group of players in Pacific-12 Conference (Pac-12) has written an open letter to the NCAA with a list of demands regarding the 2020 season. They write, “Because we are being asked to play college sports in a pandemic in a system without enforced health and safety standards, and without transparency about COVID cases on our teams, the risks to ourselves, our families, and our communities, #WeAreUnited.”

The players’ demands include health and safety protections, the ability for students to opt out of the season without consequences, and a prohibition on compulsory COVID liability waivers. They also state their opposition to the shutdown of less profitable sports programs, several of which have been cut from various schools. The letter also calls for an “end to racial injustice in college sports and society” and for “economic freedom and equity.” Specifically, the letter states this would mean players would form a “civic-engagement task force.” They are also demanding that they receive a percentage of sports revenues and rights to accept sponsorship deals, effectively acknowledging them as professional athletes and ending the age-old sham of their “student-athlete” status.

Almost immediately after the letter was published, players began being threatened by coaches for organizing opposition to the 2020 season. One player at Washington State, Kassidy Woods, told the New York Times that when he called his coach to tell him he wanted to opt out of the season because he had been diagnosed as high risk for sickle cell disease, his position on the team would be at risk.

The coach told Woods that his scholarship could be honored for this year because of health reasons, but that if he was part of any organized action against the season that it would be handled differently and his position on the team could not be guaranteed.

As of Wednesday morning, players from the Big Ten have released a similar list of demands as the Pac-12. These players also call for protections against COVID-19, and added language calling for students who report symptoms or violations by the school to be protected against repercussions.

Altered CDC guidelines provide unscientific basis for reopening schools

Mitch Marcus

Over the past week, a growing number of schools reopened across the US, despite the fact that the coronavirus pandemic is raging out of control. Already, schools in Georgia, Indiana and Mississippi have had students test positive for COVID-19, throwing reopening plans into immediate crisis and deepening community spread of the virus.

To justify their reckless moves to resume in-person instruction, school district officials are invoking the revised guidelines issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on July 23. The CDC, which had published weak, nonbinding guidelines in May, has recently bowed to political pressure from the Trump Administration and is more forcefully advocating for the reopening of schools.

Science teachers Ann Darby, left, and Rosa Herrera check-in students before a summer STEM camp at Wylie High School in Wylie, Texas. (Image credit: AP Photo/LM Otero, File)

The body of scientific evidence demonstrates conclusively that it is thoroughly reckless to reopen schools in the US, a fact which has not gone unnoticed by educators and families. A recent Kaiser Family Foundation Poll shows broad public support for keeping schools closed, with 71 percent of those polled feeling schools do not have adequate resources to reopen safely and 79 percent worried that teachers and staff will get sick when schools reopen.

The CDC guidelines are based on several mitigation strategies such as mask use and social distancing when “feasible, practical, acceptable, and tailored to the needs of each community.” These recommended, not required, measures will mean little in the dilapidated and overcrowded classrooms that are the norm across the US.

But even these threadbare measures were too onerous for Trump, who tweeted July 8 that the guidelines were “very tough & expensive.” Vice President Mike Pence, chair of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, added that week, “We don't want the guidance from CDC to be a reason schools don't open.” The CDC responded by dutifully publishing what is essentially a political document rationalizing the homicidal campaign to reopen schools titled, “The Importance of Reopening America’s Schools this Fall.”

The document downplays the dangers involved in reopening schools, omitting key studies that disprove their claims and instead relying on studies from early in the pandemic that have been disproven. Of the six sections of the document, only one deals with the actual relationship of COVID-19 to children, while the other five sections deal with the importance of schools to children, as if there were any doubt of that. There is no section dedicated to, and barely even a mention of, the transmissibility of COVID-19 from children to adults or from schools to the broader community.

Based on this document, one would think that children teach, feed and bus themselves to school! There is a complete omission of the presence of teachers and other school staff within the buildings and buses. The introductory paragraph states, “The best available evidence indicates if children become infected, they are far less likely to suffer severe symptoms.” This assertion is backed up by three citations, all of which are studies published in April. It is true that children appear to be less likely to suffer severe symptoms than adults, yet severe cases do exist among children.

The CDC reports that between February 1 and June 17 there were 13 deaths of children between the ages of 5 and 14. By July 15, there were 342 cases across the US of pediatric multi-system inflammatory syndrome, including six deaths. On Tuesday, it was reported that two teenagers in Florida succumbed to the virus, bringing the total number of minors killed by COVID-19 in the state to seven.

There have been multiple recent reports of the significant numbers of children who have contracted the virus: 23,000 children in Florida, 7,573 in Tennessee, 4,900 in Mississippi, and 260 campers and staff members (75 percent of attendees) at an overnight summer camp in Georgia.

In one notorious international example, in Israel the number of new cases had risen from fewer than 50 per day two months ago to more than 1,500 per day in early July, primarily attributable to school outbreaks that infected at least 1,335 students and 691 staff.

The new CDC document also asserts that the “death rates among school-aged children are much lower than among adults.” Again, lower does not mean nonexistent, and how many deaths of children is acceptable to the CDC? They state that children “account for under 7 percent of COVID-19 cases and less than 0.1 percent of COVID-19-related deaths.”

Last week, a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) concluded that the widespread closure of schools in mid-March saved the lives of at least 40,600 people over a 16-day period and prevented 1.37 million fewer infections over a 26-day period in the spring. Given that community transmission is now taking place at a far higher rate, the CDC is effectively sanctioning mass death.

Particularly pernicious is the CDC’s false comparison between the effects on children of COVID-19, the flu, and H1N1. It states that while COVID-19 has been responsible for 64 deaths, this is less than each of the last five flu seasons as well as the 358 pediatric deaths from H1N1 over an 18-month period. The implication is that the public should adopt the perspective of “herd immunity” and accept a “reasonable” amount of death akin to that produced by regular seasonal ailments.

The comparison to H1N1 does not hold water since the COVID-19 pandemic, unlike the H1N1 threat of 2009-2010, is only getting worse after only seven months in existence and the vast majority of schools have not yet reopened.

As to the seasonal flu, the reproductive rate is 1.3 while that of COVID-19 is between 2 and 2.5. This seemingly narrow disparity equates to deaths from the flu of between 20,000 to 60,000 people over the course of a year, while COVID-19 has killed over 160,000 Americans in just over seven months.

The CDC also states that “transmission among children in schools may be low” and that there have been “few reports of children being the primary source of COVID-19 transmission among family members.” The CDC cites studies from April and May to back up these assertions, ignoring a July 16 publication of the CDC’s own journal, Emerging Infectious Diseases, of a study from South Korea, the largest of its kind, which showed that children between the ages of 10 and 19 spread the virus as frequently as adults.

Since the revised guidelines were published, a series of scientific studies have exploded this claim, demonstrating that children spread the virus at an equal or greater rate than adults. The CDC has made no public statements on these studies or revised their guidelines to align with the latest science.

The rest of CDC document deals with the benefits to children in attending school, including receiving educational instruction, social and emotional skill development, safety, nutrition, and physical activity. While mentioned in the agency’s May guidelines, these factors were featured much less prominently, underscoring the political nature and hypocrisy of the revisions.

Democratic and Republican politicians alike are shedding crocodile tears at the effects of their own decades-long socially homicidal policies which have resulted in pervasive poverty, hunger and homelessness among children. They have the temerity to suggest that they suddenly care about the well-being of children so much that forcing them back to school during a raging pandemic is an act of charity, and teachers who oppose this are insensitive to the hardships endured by children outside school walls.

Last week, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci, echoed these themes when interviewed at the national convention of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT).

Fauci, in a live-streamed discussion with American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, admitted, “In many respects, unfortunately, though this may sound a little scary and harsh—I don’t mean it to be that way—is that you’re [the nation’s teachers] going to be actually part of the experiment.”

There was an immediate outpouring of opposition to Fauci’s statements within the AFT meeting itself, with one teacher commenting, “My students, families, teachers, school/district staff should never be expendable for an experiment.”

The incident was also widely denounced on social media. An elementary school music specialist commented in the Oregon for a Safe Return to Campus Facebook group, “Damn, I used to like him but I will not be an unwitting participant in an experiment.” Another responded, “EVERY teacher… SHOULD REFUSE, RESIST, and STRIKE, if necessary!”

In fact, the Declaration of Helsinki, the research ethics cornerstone document adopted in 1964 in response to the horrors of Nazi human experimentation in World War II, states, “Participation by individuals capable of giving informed consent as subjects in medical research must be voluntary [Article 25]” and is invalid if the “potential subject is in a dependent relationship with the physician or may consent under duress [Article 27].”

Neither the teachers, dependent upon their districts for their paychecks and health insurance, nor the students who are minors and incapable of giving consent, nor the parents who are threatened with poverty and homelessness if they do not go to work, can “voluntarily” participate in this experiment free from “duress.”

Teachers, parents, and all workers must take control of the situation, demanding a nationwide general strike against the homicidal drive to reopen schools. The working class must be guided by science, not Wall Street’s insatiable need for profit.