Analysis shows 54,000 “excess deaths” in US, pointing to coronavirus death toll of 200,700

Kate Randall

More than 165,000 Americans have now died from the coronavirus, according to Johns Hopkins University data. The US passed the grim statistic of 5 million cases of COVID-19 earlier this month. As horrifying as these figures are, a new analysis shows that the number of deaths from the coronavirus likely has been significantly undercounted.

Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) analyzed by the New York Times have revealed that 200,700 people died from March 15, when the pandemic took hold, to July 25. This is 54,000 higher than the confirmed death toll, averaged, for the same time period in the previous three years. Excess deaths in the analysis are rounded to the nearest hundred.

These 54,000 “excess deaths” are defined by the CDC as “the difference between the observed numbers of deaths in specific time periods and expected numbers of deaths in the same time periods.” The analysis strongly indicates that these excess deaths have been caused by the virus itself or by conditions triggered by the upheaval resulting from the pandemic.

The Times looked at CDC figures for deaths from all causes, adjusting current death records to account for typical reporting lags. This allows for comparisons that don’t rely on the availability of COVID-19 tests in a given place or on the accuracy of cause-of-death reporting. Epidemiologists generally agree that assessing excess deaths is the best way to assess the impact of the pandemic.

A casket is placed into a hearse on April 18, 2020, in Dawson, Georgia (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson)

Higher than normal death rates are widespread for the vast majority of US states. Only Alaska, Hawaii, Maine and West Virginia have death counts that look similar to recent years. Through July 25, the Times analysis shows that there were about 37 percent more excess deaths in the US than the official coronavirus fatality count.

New York City, the early epicenter of the outbreak, has suffered the most dramatic increase in deaths. During the peak of the outbreak in the city, deaths surged to seven times the usual number. Overall, New York City had 27,200 excess deaths during the period analyzed.

In addition to New York City, four states recorded deaths at least 10 percent higher than the normal level. New Jersey saw 18,000 deaths from May to July. New York State, excluding New York City, recorded 14,200 excess deaths. Texas had 13,500 excess deaths; California had 13,400.

While the states with the highest rates of excess deaths were in the Northeast and the West, other states in the West as well as states in the South began to show higher numbers in July, adding to their overall count. These include Florida, with 9,700 excess deaths during the study period; Arizona, with 6,100; and South Carolina, with 3,200.

The Times analysis shows that the pandemic’s toll cannot be attributed simply to the virus killing vulnerable people who would have died anyway. Most of the excess deaths revealed by the analysis could be attributed to the virus itself, but it is also likely that deaths from other causes have also risen due to hospitals being overwhelmed by COVID patients. People suffering from conditions that should be survivable have not sought care out of fear of contracting the virus. Such conditions include heart attack and stroke.

In addition, people who have died at home have had their cause of death listed as pneumonia or other conditions that were likely caused by COVID-19.

The lack of a coordinated nationwide testing system, which would identify coronavirus cases, has contributed to an undercounting of deaths from the virus. While the death toll rises, coronavirus testing is dropping significantly. According to the COVID Tracking Project, the average number of daily tests conducted in the US fell from 809,200 in the week ending July 26 to 712,112 last week.

As the WSWS has reported, there is no systematic testing for workers. There is also a lag in testing results that renders testing virtually useless for contact tracing.

The ruling elite has little interest in identifying COVID cases. Rather, it is laser focused on forcing workers back on the job and sending children back to school. The decline in testing is part of the ruling class’ policy of “malign neglect.”

The Times analysis of CDC data shows that the devastation caused by the coronavirus pandemic is even more devastating than the official figures indicate.

Biden picks former law-and-order prosecutor Kamala Harris to be his Democratic running mate

Patrick Martin

Former Vice President Joe Biden announced Tuesday afternoon that he had selected Senator Kamala Harris as his running mate in the 2020 presidential election. The decision, entirely predictable and widely expected, confirms the right-wing political orientation of the Democratic presidential ticket.

Biden has a 48-year political career in which he has been identified primarily with intensified police repression at home and the ferocious defense of the interests of American imperialism abroad. The 77-year-old candidate will now have a 55-year-old running mate with her own right-wing credentials: as a law-and-order prosecutor and attorney general in California, and, since coming to Washington in 2016, an advocate and defender of the military-intelligence apparatus.

Biden’s statement came on social media less than a week before the opening of the Democratic National Convention, which will nominate the Biden-Harris ticket to face Trump and the Republicans in the November election. He tweeted that Harris was “a fearless fighter for the little guy.”

The truth is that during her 26 years as a prosecutor—first in Alameda County (Oakland), then San Francisco, then for California as a whole—Harris was putting “the little guy” in jail, while she cultivated relationships with the wealthy San Francisco elite (including the Getty oil billionaires), who became her principal political backers.

Kamala Harris, then California Attorney General, poses for a photo with U.S. border patrol agents at the U.S.-Mexico border fence in 2011 (Photo: Office of the Attorney General of California)

Neither Harris nor Biden is associated with any popular social movement or linked to the advocacy of any significant social or political reform. They have carried out their entire political careers under conditions where the Democratic Party has been moving steadily, and ever more rapidly, to the right.

For 36 years Biden was a senator from Delaware, the state where American corporations go to escape regulations, taxes and government oversight. The tiny state has fewer than one million people, but more than one million corporations are headquartered there, thanks to a political environment that guarantees low taxes and look-the-other-way enforcement.

Biden entered the Senate in 1972 and was always associated with right-wing, pro-corporate politics, rising to become chairman of the Judiciary Committee, then chairman or ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee. He was chosen by Barack Obama to be his running mate in 2008 for precisely that reason: to reassure Wall Street and the Democratic establishment, in the midst of a global financial crisis, that there would be nothing radical about an Obama presidency.

Harris, a generation younger, made her career in the Bay Area, dominated by the Democratic Party politically, during the time when vast fortunes were being made in Silicon Valley. She proved her political worth to big business in her 2003 campaign for San Francisco district attorney. Harris ran as a law-and-order candidate, backed by the police unions and big business, and defeated the “left” incumbent, Terence Hallinan, who had close ties to the Stalinist-led trade unions and the sizeable radical milieu.

Establishing close ties to the older, established wealth of San Francisco, anchored in banking, oil and real estate, Harris followed in the footsteps of two other prominent and wealthy San Francisco Democrats—Dianne Feinstein, first mayor, then US senator, and Nancy Pelosi, congresswoman and now speaker of the House. After six years as San Francisco DA, Harris was the consensus choice of the Democratic Party establishment to succeed Jerry Brown as state attorney general in 2010, and then to take the open US Senate seat in 2016.

Democratic Party officials and their media acolytes have hailed the “historic” character of the selection of Harris, the first African-American woman on a major party ticket. This chorus of praise includes Bernie Sanders, who declared that Harris “will make history.” But despite the hosannas from the advocates of identity politics, her ethnicity and gender provide no assurance about the “progressive” character of her politics.

If anything, the opposite has been the case. Harris has frequently traded on her status as the first black woman to be district attorney, the first black woman to be state attorney general, the second black woman to hold a US Senate seat, etc., as a political screen to cover the right-wing policies she advocates and the social class that she defends: the corporate elite of multi-millionaires and billionaires.

She has now joined this class herself, thanks in part to her marriage to millionaire entertainment industry lawyer Douglas Emhoff. The couple had an adjusted gross income of $1.88 million in 2018, putting them in the top 0.1 percent of American society.

Objectively speaking, there is little to distinguish Harris, with only four years in the US Senate, from other potential alternatives for the vice presidency. She is not notably more qualified than dozens of other senators, governors or representatives. But in the eyes of the advocates of identity politics, in and out of the corporate media, Harris’s mediocrity and right-wing politics count for nothing compared to her skin color and gender.

In her unbounded opportunism and ruthless pursuit of her own career and economic interests, Harris personifies both the social psychology and class basis of identity politics. It is the politics of privileged layers of the upper-middle class, including but not limited to minorities, that use race, gender and sexual orientation to conceal the fundamental class divisions in capitalist society, channel social opposition behind the Democratic Party, and carve out a greater share of the wealth of the top one percent for themselves. It is organically hostile to the interests of the working class and socialism.

Identity politics was the key to Biden’s own campaign for the presidential nomination, which he based on the mobilization of support from the Congressional Black Caucus and African-American businessmen and Democratic Party operatives, trading on his role as Obama’s vice president. Prior to the Obama administration, he had no significant connection to civil rights struggles and won no significant black support in either of his own presidential campaigns, in 1988 and 2008.

With the emergence of Bernie Sanders as the leading candidate for the nomination, with victories in New Hampshire and Nevada and a tie in Iowa, the Democratic Party establishment launched an all-out drive to block the self-proclaimed “democratic socialist” and deliver the nomination to its choice, the former vice president.

The critical turning point in February 2020 came with the fulsome support of Representative James Clyburn, the political boss of the Democratic Party in South Carolina and the third-ranking Democrat in the House of Representatives, as majority whip. Biden had been badly beaten in the first three primaries, but won by a landslide in South Carolina, thanks to a large African-American turnout.

Besides Clyburn’s support, Biden was assisted by the withdrawal of Kamala Harris, who folded up her own presidential campaign in December 2019, and Cory Booker, who dropped out a month later, insuring that there would be no African-American candidate to draw away votes from Biden in South Carolina.

Within days, two more Democratic rivals, Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg, threw their support to Biden, allowing him to sweep the Super Tuesday primaries and become the virtually unchallenged frontrunner. Soon afterwards, Harris endorsed Biden and began campaigning aggressively for him in states like Michigan.

Those celebrating the elevation of a black woman to the presidential ticket seem to forget that only 12 years ago an African-American man, Barack Obama, was elected to the presidency. Despite the claims that the first black president would be a transformational figure, Obama proved to be a thoroughly reactionary defender of Wall Street and the CIA. He bailed out the banks and the stock exchange, forced auto workers to take wage cuts, continued the wars of George W. Bush and added new ones, including Libya, Syria and Yemen.

The disappointment and disillusionment in Obama’s empty promises of “hope” and “change” found expression in the shift of significant sections of the working class, white and black, away from the Democratic Party, leading first to the Republican takeover of Congress—the House in 2010, the Senate in 2014—and then the election of Trump in 2016.

One element in Biden’s decision to choose Harris as his running mate is the need to provide some stimulus, even as poor as this, to black voter turnout in cities like Milwaukee, Detroit, Cleveland and Philadelphia, where the 2020 election could well be won or lost.

Biden is also seeking to demonstrate to his real constituency, the American ruling elite, that he will represent a steadier hand than the erratic and impulsive Trump. If the selection of Kamala Harris is the conventional, safe and predictable choice, that only underscores his pledge to be a conventional, safe and predictable defender of the interests of corporate America, in contrast to Trump, who is increasingly regarded in the ruling class as a destabilizing factor who provokes mass opposition through his incendiary, authoritarian and racist tirades.

It is significant that on the eve of the selection of Harris, and the week before the Democratic National Convention, the New York Times ran a major report on the growing support for Biden on the stock exchange, while Politico followed with an account of how Biden has won the lion’s share of campaign contributions from Wall Street bankers.

The ruling-class conspiracy to reopen schools: Profit versus science

Genevieve Leigh

A deadly catastrophe is brewing in schools throughout the United States. Hundreds of thousands of children and teachers are being sent back to schools for in-person learning each week, despite a growing body of scientific evidence that children both spread the virus and are susceptible to falling ill themselves.

A spreadsheet published in Education Weekly lists data on reopening plans for 382 school districts, representing approximately 3 percent of all the districts in the US, shows that 200,000 students are already back in classrooms and over 2.7 million will be back in school full time by the end of August. If the data is extrapolated to include all of the nearly 14,000 districts in the US, tens of millions of students, teachers and staff will be back in school over the next several weeks.

New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo has already given the green light to open the state’s schools, including in New York City, the nation’s largest school district, with over one million students and 135,000 teachers and support staff.

Reports are emerging daily of teachers writing out their wills and obituaries before the semester starts. Students and parents are being forced to sign waivers to exempt schools from liability in the event that students get infected with the coronavirus when they return to schools and college campuses.

The drive to reopen schools has been justified by Trump and various right-wing governors with the claim that children are largely unaffected by the virus. The introductory paragraph of the revised CDC guidelines—produced under political pressure from the White House—falsely states that “children are unlikely to be major drivers of the spread of the virus.”

At a White House press conference Monday, President Trump dismissed reports of spreading infections among children, declaring, “I think, for the most part, they don’t get very sick… It’s also a case where there’s a tiny fraction of death, tiny fraction, and they get better very quickly.”

For their part, the Democratic Party-aligned teacher unions, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA) are doing everything they can to suppress popular opposition to the reckless reopening of the schools and have joined the chorus of corporate and political voices who falsely claim that schools can be reopened safely.

The claim that young people are “unaffected” by the virus is a blatant lie. Recent data shows a drastic surge of infections among small children and adolescents:

* A new report from the American Academy of Pediatrics released Sunday found that nearly 100,000 children tested positive for the coronavirus in the last two weeks of July, a 40 percent increase from the previous two weeks. Out of almost five million reported COVID-19 cases in the US, more than 338,000 were children.

* A new CDC report released Friday found that between March and late July hospitalization rates for children increased steadily. About 1 in 3 hospitalized children needed to be admitted to an intensive care unit—a rate similar to the ICU admittance rate for hospitalized adults with the coronavirus.

* Another JAMA study released recently found that babies and young children infected with COVID-19 can carry high viral loads in their throats and airways—up to 100 times the amount of adults.

The science is clear: the reopening of schools while the pandemic continues to rage will lead to countless deaths among students, parents, teachers and other school workers. In countries where schools have been opened, the consequences have been dire. Israel is now suffering one of the world’s highest per-capita rates of new infections, with many experts blaming the reckless reopening of schools as a major factor.

The experience in Georgia high schools earlier this week shows the futility of the limited social distancing measures that districts cite to justify reopening. Students at North Paulding High School, defying the school administration’s ban on photos and social media postings, leaked photos of packed hallways of unmasked kids at their school in the first few days of classes.

Leaked videos reveal a conspiracy of the district Board of Education to get around a department of health regulation that schools classify anyone who has been within six feet of a COVID-19 sufferer for 15 minutes or more as a close contact. In the leaked video clip, a member of the board suggests that students change seats every 14 minutes to get around this regulation.

Dozens of new cases have been confirmed at Paulding High School and surrounding schools since the leaked photos went viral, proving that the situation in Georgia is not the exception, but the rule.

Democrats and Republicans alike claim that they are solely motivated by concerns about the academic and emotional needs of children. On Monday, Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis used this spurious claim when he rejected the plan by the state’s third-largest school district to hold online-only classes for the first month of the semester and instead demanded that 223,000 Tampa-area students attend in-person lessons on August 24.

The supposed concern for the well-being of children never stopped any of the politicians from both corporate-backed parties from slashing funding from public education, closing schools and gutting vital services. Furthermore, none of them dares speak about the permanent psychological damage that will be inflicted on children who lose a teacher, parent, or grandparent to the virus, or how they will be affected socially and emotionally when they are told day after day that socializing, hugging, and playing on playgrounds (i.e., being a child) is against the rules.

The sole reason the Democrats and Republicans want to herd children back into the schools is so that their parents can return to work and restart the flow of corporate profits needed to finance the massive bailout of Wall Street and major corporations. For this homicidal return-to-work campaign to be accomplished, the virus must be normalized, along with the death that will come with it. Or as President Trump so crudely said about the rising death toll, “it is what it is.”

This is the policy of the ruling classes around the globe. Although there are currently more than 1,000 new coronavirus infections per day in Germany, all of the country’s state governments are ruthlessly enforcing school openings after the summer break. Schools in at least 20 countries are planning to open for in-person learning in the coming month, including in Brazil, where record cases and deaths are being reported almost daily.

Educators, students, parents and workers everywhere will not, and cannot, accept this implicit death sentence. In the face of this corporate and political conspiracy only the independent intervention of the working class can and will save lives. There is growing opposition mounting among students, parents, teachers, and broader sections of the working class. Over the past month, an explosion of opposition to the unsafe reopening of schools in the US and around the world with protests across the US and strikes by teachers in Colombia, Argentina, Haiti and other countries. Dozens of Facebook groups have emerged globally, from Rhode Island to Texas, to South Africa, Great Britain, and many other countries, with a combined membership of well over 300,000.

This resistance must be organized and directed. The Socialist Equality Party urges educators and every section of workers to build rank-and-file safety committees, independent of the trade unions and both big-business parties, to prepare for a general strike to halt the reopening of schools, stop the spread of the pandemic and prevent millions more infections and deaths.

We demand that all schools remain closed until the virus is eradicated. Funding must be made available for public education and online instruction. High-speed internet access, food distribution, mental health care, special education support and all other resources needed to provide the best quality remote learning must be guaranteed to every student and educator. At the same time, full income must be provided to parents who have to remain home with their children.

Why Capitalism is in Constant Conflict With Democracy

Richard Wolff

The capitalist economic system has always had a big problem with politics in societies with universal suffrage. Anticipating that, most capitalists opposed and long resisted extending suffrage beyond the rich who possessed capital. Only mass pressures from below forced repeated extensions of voting rights until universal suffrage was achieved—at least legally. To this day, capitalists develop and apply all sorts of legal and illegal mechanisms to limit and constrain suffrage. Among those committed to conserving capitalism, fear of universal suffrage runs deep. Trump and his Republicans exemplify and act on that fear as the 2020 election looms.

The problem arises from capitalism’s basic nature. The capitalists who own and operate business enterprises—employers as a group—comprise a small social minority. In contrast, employees and their families are the social majority. The employer minority clearly dominates the micro-economy inside each enterprise. In capitalist corporations, the major shareholders and the board of directors they select make all the key decisions including distribution of the enterprise’s net revenues.

Their decisions allocate large portions of those net revenues to themselves as shareholders’ dividends and top managers’ executive pay packages. Their incomes and wealth thus accumulate faster than the social averages. In privately held capitalist enterprises their owners and top managers behave similarly and enjoy a similar set of privileges. Unequally distributed income and wealth in modern societies flow chiefly from the internal organization of capitalist enterprises. The owners and their top managers then use their disproportionate wealth to shape and control the macro-economy and the politics interwoven with it.

However, universal suffrage makes it possible for employees to undo capitalism’s underlying economic inequalities by political means when, for example, majorities win elections. Employees can elect politicians whose legislative, executive, and judicial decisions effectively reverse capitalism’s economic results. Tax, minimum wage, and government spending laws can redistribute income and wealth in many different ways. If redistribution is not how majorities choose to end unacceptable levels of inequality, they can take other steps. Majorities might, for example, vote to transition enterprises’ internal organizations from capitalist hierarchies to democratic cooperatives. Enterprises’ net revenues would then be distributed not by the minorities atop capitalist hierarchies but instead by democratic decisions of all employees, each with one vote. The multiple levels of inequality typical of capitalism would disappear.

Capitalism’s ongoing political problem has been how best to prevent employees from forming just such political majorities. During its recurring times of special difficulty (periodic crashes, wars, conflicts between monopolized and competitive industries, pandemics), capitalism’s political problem intensifies and broadens. It becomes how best to prevent employees’ political majorities from ending capitalism altogether and moving society to an alternative economic system.

To solve capitalism’s political problem, capitalists as a small social minority must craft alliances with other social groups. Those alliances must be strong enough to defuse, deter, or destroy any and all emerging employee majorities that might threaten capitalists’ interests or their systems’ survival. The smaller or weaker the capitalist minorities are, the more the key alliance they form and rely upon is with the military. In many parts of the world, capitalism is secured by a military dictatorship that targets and destroys emerging movements for anti-capitalist change among employees or among non-capitalist sectors. Even where capitalists are a relatively large, well-established minority, if their social dominance is threatened, say by a large anti-capitalist movement from below, alliance with a military dictatorship may be a last resort survival mechanism. When such alliances culminate in mergers of capitalists and the state apparatus, fascism has arrived.

During capitalism’s non-extreme moments, when not threatened by imminent social explosions, its basic political problem remains. Capitalists must block employee majorities from undoing the workings and results of the capitalist economic system and especially its characteristic distributions of income, wealth, power, and culture. To that end capitalists seek portions of the employee class to ally with, to disconnect from other, fellow employees. They usually work with and use political parties to form and sustain such alliances.

In the words of the great Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci, the capitalists use their allied political party to form a “political bloc” with portions of the employee class and possible others outside the capitalist economy. That bloc must be strong enough to thwart the anti-capitalist goals of movements among the employee class. Ideally, for capitalists, their bloc should rule the society—be the hegemonic power—by controlling mass media, winning elections, producing parliamentary majorities, and disseminating an ideology in schools and beyond that justifies capitalism. Capitalist hegemony would then keep anti-capitalist impulses disorganized or unable to build a social movement into a counter-hegemonic bloc strong enough to challenge capitalism’s hegemony.

Trump illustrates the current conditions for capitalist hegemony. First and foremost, his government lavishly funds and celebrates the military. Secondly, he delivered to corporations and the rich a huge 2017 tax cut despite their having enjoyed several prior decades of wealth redistribution upward to them. Thirdly, he keeps deregulating capitalist enterprises and markets. To sustain his government’s largesse to its capitalist patrons, he notoriously cultivates traditional alliances with portions of the employee class. The Republican Party that Trump inherited and took over had let those lapse. They had weakened and led to dangerous political losses. They had to be rebuilt and strengthened or else the Republican Party could no longer be the means for capitalists to craft and organizationally sustain a hegemonic bloc. The GOP would then likely fade away, leaving the Democratic Party for the capitalists to ally with and use for such a hegemonic bloc.

Capitalists have switched hegemonic allies and agents between the two major parties repeatedly in U.S. history. Just as the Republican Party let its alliances with sections of the employee class lapse, opening the space for Trump, so too did the Democratic Party with its traditional allies. That opened space for Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the progressives. To revive and rebuild the Republican Party as a hegemonic ally with U.S. capitalists, Trump had to give a good bit more to Christian fundamentalists, white supremacists, anti-immigration forces, chauvinists (and anti-foreigners), law-and-order enthusiasts, and gun lovers than the old GOP establishment did. That is why and how he defeated that establishment. For historical reasons, Clinton, Obama, and the old Democratic Party establishment survived yet again despite giving little to their employee class allies (workers, unions, African Americans, Latinx, women, students, academics, and the unemployed). They kept control of the party, blocked Sanders and the growing progressive challenge, and won the popular vote in 2016. They lost the election.

Capitalists prefer to use the Republicans as their hegemonic partner because the Republicans more reliably and regularly deliver what capitalists want than the Democrats do. But if and when the Republican bloc of alliances weakens or otherwise functions inadequately as a hegemonic partner, U.S. capitalists will shift to the Democrats. They will accept less favorable policies, at least for a while, if they gain a solid hegemonic partner in return. Were Trump’s alliances with portions of the employee class to weaken or dissolve, U.S. capitalists will go with the Biden-Clinton-Obama Democrats instead. If needed, they would also go with the progressives, as they did in the 1930s with Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Trump repeatedly aims to strengthen his alliances with the more than a third of American employees who seem to approve of his regime, no matter the offense given to others. He counts on that being enough for most capitalists to stay with the Republicans. After all, most capitalists prefer Republicans; his regime strongly supported the military and corporate profiteering. Only Trump’s and the Republicans’ colossal failures to prepare for or contain both the pandemic and the capitalism-caused economic crash could shift voter sentiment to elect Democrats. So Trump and the Republicans concentrate on denying those failures and distracting public attention from them. The Democratic Party establishment aims to persuade capitalists that a Biden regime will better manage the pandemic and crash, deliver a larger mass base to support capitalism, and only marginally reform its inequalities.

For the progressives inside and outside the Democratic Party, a major choice looms. Many have felt it. On the one hand, progressives may access power as the most attractive hegemonic allies for capitalists. By sharpening rather than soft-pedaling social criticisms, progressives may give capitalist employers stronger hegemonic alliances with employees than the traditional Democratic establishment can or dares to offer. That is roughly what Trump did in displacing the traditional establishment of the Republican Party. On the other hand, progressives will be tempted by their own growth to break from the two-party alternation that keeps capitalism hegemonic. Instead, progressives could then open up U.S. politics so that the public would have greater free choice: an anti-capitalist and pro-socialist party competing against the two traditional pro-capitalist parties.

Capitalism’s political problem arose from its intrinsically undemocratic juxtaposition of an employer minority and an employee majority. The contradictions of that structure clashed with universal suffrage. Endless political maneuvers around hegemonic blocs with alternative sections of the employees allowed capitalism to survive. However, eventually those contradictions would exceed the capacity of hegemonic maneuvers to contain and control them. A pandemic combined with a major economic crash may provoke and enable progressives to make the break, change U.S. politics, and realize the long-overdue social changes.

The Rise of Nationalism Has Led to the Increased Repression of Minorities

Patrick Cockburn

We live in an era of resurgent nationalism. From Scotland to Sri Lanka, from China to Brazil, governments rely on nationalism as a source of communal identity and a vehicle for common action.

In countries where religious identity appears to dominate, as with Islam in Turkey and Hinduism in India, religion has bonded with nationalism. In nominally communist countries like China and Vietnam, it is likewise nationalism that adds to governments’ legitimacy and political muscle.

This nationalist upsurge the world over is bad news for ethnic and sectarian minorities. Everywhere they are facing greater oppression and less autonomy from national governments maximising their power. At best they face marginalisation and at worst elimination. This is true for the Uighur in Xinjiang province in China, the Muslim population of India-controlled Kashmir, the Shia majority in Sunni-ruled Bahrain and the long-persecuted Kurdish minority in Turkey, to name but four.

All these communities are coming under crushing pressure to surrender to the political and cultural control of the national state. The same brutal methods are used everywhere: mass incarceration; disappearances; torture; the elimination of political parties and independent media representing the persecuted community. Any opposition, however peaceful, is conflated with “terrorism” and suppressed with draconian punishments.

The degree of mistreatment of these embattled communities varies with the balance of power between them and the central government. There is little the Bahrain Shia, though a majority of the population, can do to defend themselves, but the 182 million Muslims in India cannot be dealt with so summarily.

Even so, they are in danger of progressively losing their civil rights and residency through the Citizenship Amendment Act and the proposed National Register of Citizens. The Turkish Kurds are well organised but their political leaders are in jail and Turkey leads the world in the number of journalists, many of them Kurds, it has imprisoned.

What makes these countries different is partly the political strength of the persecuted communites, but above all the degrees of international support they can attract. This in turn depends less on the cruelties they endure than on their ability to plug into the self-interested rivalries of the great powers. Related to this is the ability to attract the sustained attention and sympathy of the (usually western) international media.

The Uighur deserve all the sympathy and attention they can get, but it would be naive to imagine that the sudden interest of the west in their fate over the last year has much to do with the undoubted justice of their cause. President Xi Jinping has been chosen as the new demon king in the eyes of the US and its allies, his every action fresh evidence of the fiendish evil of the Chinese state.

There is no reason to suppose that any of the films of Uighur prisoners manacled hand and foot are untrue or that a million Uighurs are not the targets of brainwashing in giant concentration camps. But the manipulation of public opinion has always relied less on mendacity, the manufacturing of false facts, and more on selectivity; on broadcasting the crimes of one’s opponents and keeping very quiet about similar acts of oppression by oneself and one’s allies.

What is striking over the last year is the disparity between the international attention given to the fate of the 11 million Uighurs in the Autonomous Uighur Region in Xingjian and the 13 million people in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir.

The situations in Kashmir and Xinjiang are comparable in some ways. On 5 August last year, Indian prime minister Narendra Modi’s government stripped Kashmir – India’s only Muslim-majority state – of its special rights and split it into two federally administered territories. He claimed that the aim was the economic regeneration of Kashmir, but the prolonged curfews enforced by a heavily reinforced Indian military presence has ruined local economic life.

These lockdowns and the almost complete shutdown of the internet are far more severe than anything resulting from the coronavirus epidemic, and have reduced Kashmiris to colonial servitude. “This has been compounded,” says Amnesty International, “by a censored media, continuing detention of political leaders, arbitrary restrictions due to the pandemic with little to no redress.”

The anniversary of the end to Kashmir’s autonomy was marked this month by even tighter restrictions. Local political leaders were jailed or were forbidden to leave their houses. “One year later the authorities are still too afraid to allow us to meet, much less carry out any normal political activity,” said the former chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir, Omar Abdullah, on Twitter. But worse things than jail and house arrest happen at the hands of the Indian authorities. Since 1990 between 8,000 and 10,000 Kashmiris have disappeared according to the Association of the Parents of the Disappeared, a movement modeled on that of the Argentinian mothers whose children had vanished, mostly tortured to death or executed by the military dictatorship.

Kashmir is only the apogee of the mounting persecution of almost 200 million Indian Muslims under Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government. The willingness of the government to double-down on humiliating the Muslims was exemplified this week when Modi laid the foundation stone for a Hindu temple to replace the sixteenth century mosque that was destroyed by right-wing Hindu mobs in 1992. Some 2,000 people were killed in the rioting that followed the mosque’s destruction.

Powerful governments tend to underestimate the amount of trouble that small minorities can cause them, despite an immense disparity in the balance of power between the central state and the minority in question. Look at the trouble a small ethnicity like the Uighurs have caused Beijing. Foreign powers may be exploiting their grievances for their own purposes, but those grievances are real. Look at the trouble a century ago that the Irish and the Boers caused the British Empire at the height of its power. Then as now, the very puniness of the opposition of small communities tempted seemingly all-powerful regimes to reject conciliation in the belief that they have no need to compromise. They do not understand why their overwhelming political and military power does not make them the easy winner.

Kashmir is a classic example of this syndrome. By ending the state’s autonomy, Modi said he would bring an end to the “Kashmir problem”. In fact, he predictably made it worse and it is not going away.

The west has been prepared to back Modi unconditionally because it hopes India will be a counterbalance to China. They are the only states in the world with populations over a billion. But the states backing the BJP Hindu nationalist government have not taken on board what an extraordinarily dangerous game they and Modi are playing: seeking total victory over Kashmir though it is backed by neighbouring nuclear-armed Pakistan.

Attempting to marginalise Indian Muslims so numerous that, if they formed a separate country, it would be the eighth largest in the world is not possible without extreme violence.

The riots in Delhi in February were a taste of this. Ignoring this potential for disaster is like officials in Beirut who were blind to the danger of storing thousands of tons of explosives in the heart of the city.

COVID-19 Poses a Huge Threat to Stability in Africa

Elizabeth Schmidt


In March 2020, as the COVID-19 virus traversed the planet, UN Secretary-General António Guterres called for a global ceasefire to fight the common enemy.

The virus, compounded by the effects of armed conflict, he noted, hit the most vulnerable the hardest. Women, children, the marginalized, and the displaced were among the most defenseless. Hostilities must cease to permit the delivery of aid, the conditions for diplomacy, and ultimately, a resolution to the conflicts.

The response to Guterres’s appeal was discouraging.

Africa, a key battleground on both the pandemic and conflict fronts, had much to gain from a universal ceasefire. However, in the months that followed, little common ground emerged at negotiating tables, where weaker actors made contingent demands that the powerful refused to honor, or on the battlefields, where more powerful parties declined to lay down arms, hoping to achieve a military win.

The Security Council, divided internally, failed to endorse the proposal for more than three months. The United States posed a major obstacle when it insisted that its “counterterrorism” operations be exempted from the ban — a demand that was substantially honored in the final resolution.

Absent political will, the UN resolution will not promote the domestic and international cooperation necessary to defeat the virus. Evidence from Africa — notably, Mali, Nigeria, and Somalia — suggests that in countries already weakened by poverty, political repression, and violent extremism, the pandemic is intensifying societal tensions and exacerbating rather than quelling civil unrest.

The impact of the virus has highlighted regional inequalities. The collapse of health and economic systems, already under duress, has spurred ethnic scapegoating and xenophobia. Virus containment measures have offered authoritarian states new opportunities to strengthen their powers and repress their opponents. Internal conflicts, which before the pandemic had spilled over borders and attracted foreign military intervention, risk further intensification.

Increasing Poverty — and Risks of Extremism

African economies, already devastated by the impact of climate change, violent conflicts, and global downturns, have been further battered by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has pushed millions of people into extreme poverty.

In Mali, where 3.5 million residents face food insecurity as a result of violent extremism and civil unrest, virus-related economic shutdowns and reduced remittances may threaten 1.3 million people with hunger and impoverish 800,000 more. In Nigeria, the World Bank predicts that COVID-19 will drive oil revenues down by 70 percent this year — fallout from worldwide industrial shutdowns, work-from-home orders, and the grounding of airplanes. The ripple effects may force 5 million more residents into poverty — in a country that already tops global charts for extreme impoverishment.

Economically vulnerable populations, abandoned by their governments, are targets of opportunity for violent extremists — including many that are affiliated with al-Qaeda or the Islamic State. In Somalia, al-Shabaab has established a COVID-19 treatment center and offered protection and basic services where the state has not.

Although courted by extremists, these populations are also the extremists’ greatest victims. In northeastern Nigeria and elsewhere in the Lake Chad region, Boko Haram has refused to close its mosques and schools, rendering local populations more vulnerable to the disease. With state attention and resources diverted to the pandemic, al-Shabaab and Boko Haram have stepped up their attacks, increasing the number of internally displaced persons and refugees and provoking multinational counter-offensives that have killed countless civilians.

Scapegoating and Repression

Fear and hardship provoked by the disease have fueled a rise in ethno-nationalism, xenophobia, hate speech, and the targeting of refugees, migrants, and other marginalized populations.

Pandemic-induced border closures and movement restrictions render these populations even more vulnerable. In Yemen, where war and the COVID-19 pandemic have decimated the health system, Houthi militias have blamed migrants from Ethiopia and other parts of the Greater Horn for the virus’s spread and forced thousands into the desert without water or food. Other African migrants, pushed into Saudi Arabia, have been beaten and imprisoned.

If fear and hardship have stoked the flames, measures taken to impede the virus’s spread may generate further instability. Some governments have declared states of emergency that have broadened executive powers and opened the door to greater human rights abuses by authoritarian regimes.

Across the continent, police have violently attacked civilians who ignored lockdown rules or protested virus-induced price gouging. Informal sector workers have been disproportionately targeted, and migrants from other countries have been denied services and assistance. Elections postponed due to health concerns have allowed some leaders to extend their terms; others have used the crisis to expand their powers. In Somalia, where elections have been delayed indefinitely, opposition forces have cried foul and warned that consequences will follow.

A Recipe for Instability

The realization that we are all in this together has prompted a call for increased international cooperation to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. The UN’s call for a global ceasefire is one step in the right direction. However, the world’s response has been weak.

In Africa, warring parties and international mediators have made little progress on the diplomatic front. In Mali, Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM), al-Qaeda’s regional affiliate, is willing to negotiate with the government — and may even collaborate against the Islamic State in Greater Sahara (ISGS). However, it will begin talks only if foreign troops depart. The powers that be have little interest in this option, and the UN resolution bolsters their position, having excluded from its ban counterterrorism operations focused on al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, and their affiliates.

The entrenchment of ethno-nationalism, xenophobia, and narrow self-interest in some of the world’s wealthiest nations makes it unlikely that the global north will commit the resources and know-how necessary to combat the virus successfully — which would eliminate one of the factors contributing to civil conflict.

While African actors on the ground are working to develop effective solutions, they are up against formidable odds. If those with power fail to act, poverty, repression, divisions within and between countries, and the long history of detrimental foreign intervention make further instability, rather than international cooperation, the most likely outcome of Africa’s COVID-19 crisis.

War on Truth: How Kashmir Struggles for Freedom of Press

Robert Fantina

On the first anniversary of the Indian crackdown on Kashmir, the repercussions for the Kashmiri people are dire. It is said that in time of war, the first casualty is truth. And while India has not declared war on Kashmir, it’s brutal repression of that country and its people has caused that ‘first casualty’ to occur.

A free press and free speech are two hallmarks of any democracy and are the major way for people to peacefully initiate governmental change. Thanks to the Indian government, both are in short supply for Kashmiris. Journalists within Kashmir have a very difficult time reporting. They are often summoned by the police and asked about their work. This tactic of intimidation can’t help but dampen news reported both within and outside of Kashmir. David Walmsley, editor-in-chief of The Globe and Mail, commented in 2019 that “Press freedom is often taken for granted in countries where it exists, and is often not considered a priority in countries where it has never existed.” While it did exist in Kashmir, it clearly no longer does, due to the Indian oppression. Ironically, at the 2019 World News Day, an annual event convened by Canada to celebrate “… the positive impact of professional journalism on their communities”, eight of the forty outlets participating were from India. And World News Day occurred nearly two months after India revoked the ‘special status’ of Kashmir and began its brutal suppression of the people of that country.

India continues to proclaim the falsehood that it serves as a ruler or administrator of Kashmir, when it is, in fact, a brutal occupier. It has become so difficult and dangerous for journalists that often they publish articles under an assumed name.

That is the situation for journalists already in the country. For those seeking to enter, they must obtain permission and, if granted, will be continuously monitored while there. And they are not exempt from the frequent police summonsing that those already based their experience.

This, of course, does not include Indian journalists who can freely enter and leave as long as they agree to publish the party line, overlooking atrocities committed against the Kashmiri people, and presenting life in Kashmir as very positive, thanks to Indian benevolence. Truth continues to be a main casualty of the brutal occupation.

For any journalist covering what is happening on the ground in any location, a main source of information is the people who are living through the situation. Kashmiris are hesitant to speak to journalists unless they know exactly what organization they write for; the possibility of saying the ‘wrong’ thing to a pro-India journalist is very real, and the consequences can be swift and deadly. This represses the ability of journalists to write the kind of news stories that relate the extent of the dire situation in the country. Added to that is the feeling among much of the population, certainly justified, that whatever they do or say will not bring them justice. The Indian government is brutally occupying the nation, and the international community is ignoring the situation.

Censorship has become a way of life, preventing the outside world from knowing the horrors that the Kashmiri people are experiencing. Kashmiris themselves, suffering under this brutal occupation, may not know the extent of the suffering throughout their own country due to censorship. For the Indian government, this censorship is required to oppress the people; prevent, or at least minimize, global condemnation, and proceed with its imperial goals.

Like the rest of the world, Kashmir has been impacted by coronavirus, and a lockdown of the nation may occur at any time. How that will look different from life in Kashmir under Indian occupation can only be imagined. An Indian government-support program did not include Kashmir, leaving the people there to deal with the pandemic by themselves while suffering from brutal oppression.  By providing no aid, the Indian government seems to want to make things so difficult for the Kashmiris that their focus is on survival, diverting attention from the theft of their nation and their rights. The economic situation, and the survival of Kashmiris, are both at risk, because employment that had previously been restricted only to Kashmiris is now open to Indians entering the country. Additionally, the harsh and brutal repression by the Indian soldiers occupying Kashmir produces great fear among the people. All this is causing a feeling of betrayal and despair among the people of Kashmir.

Coronavirus itself is getting a lot of media exposure in Kashmir, along with local issues such as water shortages and the conditions of roads. This prevents exposure and discussion of the main issues facing Kashmir, which are many, all of which are caused by the current brutal occupation and India’s colonial plans for the country. One Indian official proclaimed that India would follow the Israeli model in stealing Palestine from the Palestinians to steal Kashmir from the Kashmiris.

So many issues need to be addressed, but are being ignored, including the following:

+ More and more educated youths are arming themselves as protection from, and aggression toward, the occupation.  This is seen as necessary, since the world community seems content to allow India to destroy Kashmir and its people.

+ The drug problem, rampant in many parts of the world, seems to be taking a strong hold within Kashmir. With conditions as difficult as they are, substance abuse may be seen by some to provide them with a least short-term relief from the emotional pain they are experiencing. Yet the consequences of this drug use will be far-reaching and detrimental.

+ The tensions between India and China that could have far-reaching, devastating impacts on Kashmir, are not being discussed. Should those tension erupt into armed conflict, Kashmir, bordering both nations, will experience even greater suffering.

+ And why the world is ignoring the unspeakable suffering of the Kashmiri people at the hands of their Indian overlords remains a mystery. Many governments pay lip service to criticizing Israel’s brutal occupation of Palestine, but even that is lacking for Kashmir.

It is no secret that India plans to change the demography of Kashmir; that is part of the brutal, racist ‘Israeli model’ that India is emulating. Kashmiris worry that, as more Hindus are allowed in Kashmir, any future referendum about the future of the country will not be left to the Kashmiris alone.

So, while the internal media focus may be on coronavirus and local issues, discussion of key issues facing the nation are minimized. However, while the discussion may be minimized, the suffering isn’t.

On the August 5 anniversary of the Indian crackdown of Kashmir, people around the world must act. International law, which grants Kashmir independence, must be respected. The people of Kashmir have waited far too long, and India must not be allowed to establish ‘facts on the ground’ as Israel has tried to do in Palestine. The Kashmiri people, like everyone else on the planet, are entitled to the basic right of self-determination; the global community must demand that they be granted that right.