Australia: Rising number of COVID-19 infections in Sydney schools

Oscar Grenfell

An increasing number of schools in New South Wales (NSW), Australia’s most populous state, have been forced to temporarily close over the past several weeks, following the confirmation of coronavirus infections among students, educators and staff.

The school clusters are one expression of broader community transmission of the virus within NSW where daily cases have remained in the low double-digits for the past month, but could rapidly rise as they did last month in the neighbouring state of Victoria.

The infections point to the dangerous character of the pro-business lifting of COVID-19 restrictions that began in late April. This included the full reopening of schools—even though they are proven potential centres of the coronavirus—as part of a drive to force workers back to their places of employment to generate corporate profits.

According to media reports on the weekend, at least 17 NSW schools were temporarily shuttered over the previous three weeks, with the majority in Sydney, the state’s capital.

The figure is continuing to rise. This morning, Parramatta Public School, in working class western Sydney, was closed after an infection was confirmed among its primary-aged students. The school’s 1,000 pupils, along with all staff, have been instructed to self-isolate.

Parramatta Public School (Credit: Google Maps)

Further schools affected over the past week include Bonnyrigg Heights Public School, in another western suburb, and Our Lady of Mercy College, also in Parramatta. The latter will be closed for the next two weeks with all students returning to online learning because the source of the infection is unknown.

Other school closures are also linked to cases whose origin has yet to be determined. Tangara School for Girls in the northern Sydney suburb of Cherrybrook is the largest school cluster with at least 17 confirmed infections, including among students, teachers and staff.

Media commentary has focused on the possibility of extra-curricular activities at the Catholic college playing a role in the spread. Health authorities are investigating that possibility, but have not confirmed that a Bible and study retreat was a factor in the outbreak. School representatives have said that no camps have been held since March.

Despite this lack of evidence, NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian has blamed out-of-school activities involving students and teachers. She said yesterday that events such as excursions pose a high risk of students “mingling.”

This is a diversion. Social distancing and other basic safety measures have been discouraged inside schools and are actually impossible. Thousands of students are confined throughout the day in close quarters, along with teachers, some of whom are particularly vulnerable to COVID-19. Health authorities have been compelled to admit that older students are as likely to contract and transmit the virus as any other age group.

When the full resumption of face-to-face teaching was announced in May it provoked widespread opposition among parents and educators. Thousands signed a petition initiated by a western Sydney worker against students being used as “guinea pigs” for the broader reopening of the economy.

The reopening has been able to proceed only because of the enforcement role of the education unions, including the NSW Teachers Federation. They welcomed the return to classrooms, even offering to provide the state Liberal-National government with a “timeline” for a staged resumption of face-to-face teaching.

Pointing to the dangerous inadequacy of safety measures, the Independent Education Union, covering non-government schools, belatedly issued a call today for mandatory face mask wearing in all educational buildings.

The school clusters which have occurred in the north, west and southwest of Sydney as well as on the NSW south coast, point to the likelihood of wider transmission of the virus than is being registered in the official figures.

Kristine Macartney, director of the National Centre for Immunisation Research and Surveillance, told the media: “Schools are probably acting as the tip of the iceberg.” The outbreaks indicated “there is some community transmission now in NSW which is going undetected.”

Other experts have called for the re-imposition of restrictions. Alexandra Martiniuk, an adjunct professor of epidemiology at the University of Sydney, told the Guardian the state government should consider the closure of all bars and restaurants until local transmission was contained.

Currently bars, restaurants and gyms are open throughout the state, with minimal safety measures. Large venues are allowed to have as many as 300 patrons on their premises at any time, while up to 10,000 spectators are permitted to attend football matches. This makes contact tracing extremely difficult.

Berejiklian has ruled out the reimposition of any lockdown measures regardless of the spread of the virus. Revealing the subordination of public health to the dictates of the corporate elite, she said last month that new restrictions would have a negative impact on “business confidence.”

There are clear dangers that the pandemic will spiral out of control in NSW as it has in Victoria. In that state authorities resisted calls for lockdown measures for weeks as daily cases in the double-digits were reported throughout the latter half of June. As infections skyrocketed limited restrictions were put in place in Melbourne in early July, but schools and most workplaces remained open.

In the space of several weeks after the beginning of Term three last month, over 90 Victorian schools were forced to close as a result of coronavirus infections. Only when it imposed “Stage Four” restrictions on August 2 did the state Labor government shutter Melbourne classrooms and return students and teachers to online learning.

By that stage daily infections had soared to a record 725. Under the “Stage Four” measures Victorian cases are continuing to be between 300 and 400 most days. Hospitalisations have skyrocketed from fewer than 50 a month ago to more than 650.

The death rate is growing dramatically. Twenty-one fatalities were announced today, the highest daily figure yet, following 38 deaths over the previous two days. Almost 60 people have lost their lives in just three days. By contrast, Victoria recorded fewer than 20 deaths during the first four months of the pandemic. The state’s cumulative death toll now stands at 267.

The tragic losses are expected to mount with roughly 1,800 cases in aged-care facilities throughout the state. This morning, a shocking report in the Australian alleged that the Victorian Department of Health and Human Services has been refusing to admit many COVID-19 infected aged-care residents to hospital, leaving them at extreme risk of succumbing to the virus.

Instead, the sick residents, mostly elderly, have been left in under-staffed facilities as the coronavirus sweeps through them. Some have been heavily sedated in what is effectively palliative care.

The fact that victims of the pandemic are being left to die is the most graphic expression of the criminal response of the state and federal governments to the public health emergency. It demonstrates, once again, that the most basic social needs of the population, including to life itself, are incompatible with a society dominated by the profit interests of a corporate oligarchy.

French government ends social distancing requirements in schools as classes set to resume

Will Morrow

The Macron administration has released new guidelines for school reopenings at the beginning of September that slash social-distancing requirements for teachers and students.

The document was quietly produced on July 9 and reportedly circulated to educational institutions on July 20, without any public announcements. Media reports cited the document for the first time over the weekend.

The new guidelines state that “in closed areas (classrooms, workshops, libraries, canteens, boarding rooms, etc.), physical distancing is no longer obligatory where it is not physically possible or would not permit the return of all students.” As many teachers have commented on social media, since classrooms typically contain up to 35 students, the rule that distancing will be eliminated if “is not physically possible” for the return of all students means it will apply nowhere.

Students above 11 years old are required to wear masks if they cannot maintain a distance of one meter from one another. Teachers are only required to wear a mask if they are “less than one meter” from students. This directly contradicts scientific evidence that the virus spreads via aerosolized particles which spread far further than one meter in the air. The new guidelines add an exception for teachers in crèches for young children, who are no longer required to wear a mask under any conditions.

There are also no longer any restrictions on inter-mixing of students in different classrooms or year levels, which otherwise limit the spread of the virus among students inside the same school. The guidelines simply state that schools “organize the daily schedule and activities to limit, as much as possible, large mixing and crossings.” There is no requirement that additional public transportation be organized to limit physical contact between students.

This analysis of the back-to-school plans makes clear the fraudulent and essentially homicidal character of the Macron administration’s policy. The government is pursuing this policy well aware that it will accelerate the ongoing resurgence of the virus once schools reopen in September. Students will become infected; their parents, family members and teachers will catch the virus from them; and many more people will die due to these policies.

The guidelines have provoked widespread outrage among teachers on social media. Hundreds of comments have been posted by teachers on the “Red Pens” Facebook group in the past two days. “It’s shameful,” wrote Jean-Paul. “They talk of respecting the health measures even outdoors, but here, in the classroom, not a single protective measure… Scandalous… Murderers.”

“Distancing is no longer obligatory when it is not possible. Let’s make this clearer: No distancing and let’s let the children infect each other,” commented Isa. “And let them infect the adults,” replied Mary.

“It’s obvious that with the return of schools, there will be numerous clusters affecting students and teachers first of all,” said Mina. “There already was one in my school in June although everyone was wearing a mask and was keeping their distance from one another. One has to expect many local school closures and no more general shutdowns.”

The Macron administration has not made any attempt to explain the obvious contradiction between the relaxation of social-distancing measures in schools at the same time as it admits that the virus is resurgent in France and across Europe.

The total number of cases has now surpassed 20 million around the world, with more than 700,000 dead. In Europe, the World Health Organization issued a new warning this weekend of a resurgence of cases in countries where lockdown measures have been eased since the spring. Spain has gone from an average daily infection rate of 132 in June to over 1,500 in the first 10 days of this month.

In France, more than 4,500 cases have been detected in three days. The number of people in hospitalization rose from 383 on Friday to 396 on Sunday. Nicolas Peju, the assistant director general of the Regional Health Service in the Île-de-France region around Paris, reported Sunday that the number of daily cases in that region exceeded 500 in recent days, compared to 100 at the end of June. “We are at the beginning of a rebound of the epidemic,” he said.

The school reopening policy is motivated not by scientific considerations but the naked financial greed of the French corporate and financial elite. Any restrictions on a full return of all students into classrooms are to be ended, to free parents to return to work and keep producing corporate profits. The same interests underlie the school re-openings underway internationally, including by the Trump administration in the United States, in Britain, Germany and beyond.

French Prime Minister Jean Castex has explicitly stated that there will be no general confinement in France as occurred in March. Castex declared last month that a confinement “stops the spread of the virus, of course, but from an economic and social standpoint it’s a disaster.”

In other words, the deaths of tens or hundreds of thousands cannot stand in the way of corporate profits.

The government is relying on its close collaboration with the trade unions to enforce this homicidal policy. The major trade union federations have all made clear they will do nothing to prevent the reopening of schools in September. The SUD trade union released a statement on Monday in response to the latest school guidelines, declaring that it would “display great vigilance concerning the evolution of the health situation,” and “calls on staff to do everything to protect their health in their workplace.”

The school guidelines justify the ending of distancing requirements by referring to “reassuring data concerning the impact and transmission of the coronavirus among children.” This is a flat-out lie. While young people are statistically less likely to die from the virus than older adults, there is no scientific consensus that they transmit the virus less actively. Some studies indicate that children are more active propagators than adults. The long-term impact of the virus on young people also remains not understood.

A recent study from South Korea was based on testing and tracing of nearly 60,000 people who had come into contact with infected people. They found that for people who lived with patients 10 to 19 years old, 18.6 percent contracted the virus—the highest rate of transmission of all age groups.

A July 30 research letter in the journal JAMA Pediatrics reviewed tests of 145 patients with mild to moderate COVID-19 symptoms within one week of contracting the virus. They found children aged five to 17 exhibited similar levels of viral nucleic acid in their upper respiratory tract as adults. Young children aged under 5, however, had 10 to 100 times more SARS-CoV-2 in their respiratory tract than the older cohorts. The researchers note that pediatric studies “have reported a correlation between higher nucleic acid levels and the ability to culture infectious virus.”

The development of a struggle against the school reopening policy cannot be left in the hands of the trade union federations, which are collaborating actively with the Macron government. Teachers must instead establish their own independent rank-and-file safety committees in every school and workplace, as the starting point for waging an independent organizational and political offensive uniting the entire working class. The organization of a safe and rational response to the pandemic means a political fight for a workers government and socialist policies based on social need rather than private profit.

After White House, Congress cut aid to unemployed, evictions and food lines spread across the US

Jacob Crosse

Less than two weeks after the White House and congressional Democrats allowed the $600 weekly federal unemployment supplement to expire, slashing the income of some 30 million unemployed workers by 60-80 percent, evictions are already on the rise and food lines are growing by leaps and bounds across the United States.

In signing four executive actions on Saturday, President Donald Trump claimed that he had intervened to temporarily resume the unemployment benefit, although at a sharply reduced rate of $300-$400. He also said his unilateral action, bypassing Congress, would prevent a wave of evictions following the expiration of a partial moratorium at the end of July.

But it will be weeks or even months before jobless workers receive any of the promised money. Moreover, Trump’s executive memorandum on rent failed to extend the expired ban on evictions or provide any rental assistance, setting the stage for a rapid growth in the ranks of the homeless.

A senior White House official confirmed to CBS News on Tuesday that there are currently no plans for congressional Democratic leaders, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, and White House negotiators, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, and White Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, to meet this week to discuss a fifth coronavirus relief bill. In fact, Meadows has already left Washington DC “for an unspecified amount of time,” according to a Washington Post report Tuesday.

People wait to speak with representatives from the Oklahoma Employment Security Commission about unemployment claims Thursday, July 9, 2020. (AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki)

Under Trump’s legally dubious executive orders, US states already slashing budgets and furloughing workers in an attempt to make up for massive deficits incurred as a result of the pandemic are being asked to contribute an additional $100 a week on top of whatever meager state unemployment benefit is being paid out. The federal government would then add a further $300 a week.

In a letter released Monday in response to Trump’s executive actions, the National Governors Association registered its “concern” over “the significant administrative burdens and costs this latest action would place on the states.” The letter requests that Congress and the administration “get back to the negotiating table and come up with a workable solution.”

Meanwhile, early data from across the country indicate that evictions have already begun en masse. In Florida, Republican Governor Ron DeSantis postured as a protector of renters when he announced he was extending the state moratorium on evictions for a month. However, the text of the order bars only “final actions” in eviction proceedings, and only if the tenant can prove that nonpayment of rent is due to the coronavirus.

In Duval County, Florida, court records for the first week of August show 219 eviction filings, the first full week since the federal moratorium expired.

In California, data collated by CalMatters show that more than 1,600 households have been evicted since March 4, when Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom first declared a state of emergency. The report notes that this figure is likely a drastic undercount due to the fact that sheriffs’ departments in “14 counties did not respond to data requests,” including Los Angeles County, which includes more than 10 million residents.

A recent report by the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy estimated that up to 365,000 Los Angeles County renters could be facing eviction in the next month. This coincides with a separate study conducted by the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), which found that as many as 120,000 households in Los Angeles County, including up to 184,000 children, will become homeless as evictions resume.

Food lines continue to stretch for miles in major cities across the country. On Tuesday, there were reports of 2,000 people lining up at a food bank in Queens, New York.

In Dallas, nearly 8,000 people lined up at dawn to collect donated food. The first people in line arrived three hours before the distribution began. Speaking to local NBC television affiliate WMBF, Pauletta Johnson said she wanted to get there early because “It helps feed the grandkids.” Johnson continued, “I don’t really have the money. I’m on a fixed income and I don’t have the money to buy some of the things that I need to get. So that’s why I’m here this morning.”

According to Feeding America, a national nonprofit food bank network, food banks distributed over 1.9 million meals from the beginning of March through the end of June. In March, food banks gave out 20 percent more food than average.

In addition to mass homelessness and growing hunger, the double-digit unemployment rate means that millions are now without health insurance. A new study by Zippia found that in the state of Michigan nearly 222,000 workers have lost their insurance since the start of the pandemic.

Nearly 100,000 people, or 11 percent of New Hampshire’s adult population, are now uninsured, according to a recent report from the National Center for Coverage Innovation. The same report found that the increase in uninsured Americans nationally surpassed any previously recorded annual increase.

The two big-business parties and the social class they represent are more than willing to sit back and let the working class bear the full brunt of the pandemic, as long as the stock market remains at near-record levels. Even after a dip at closing on Tuesday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average ended up at 27,791.44, only 1,300 points down from its mid-February high. Since the passage in late March of the CARES Act multitrillion-dollar bailout of Wall Street, the Dow has risen by more than 30 percent.

The supposed “partisan gridlock” that has prevented the passage of a new stimulus bill and extension of the federal unemployment supplement is a fraud. The slashing or elimination of the financial lifeline for millions of working-class families, along with the reckless rush to reopen the schools, is part of the strategy of the ruling class to force workers back to work even as the pandemic rages out of control. It is a bipartisan strategy.

When it came to passing legislation to hand over trillions to the financial oligarchy, both parties joined hands and passed the CARES Act in record time, and by a near-unanimous vote. When Trump then launched the back-to-work campaign, Democratic governors and mayors complied and announced plans to reopen businesses and public venues, despite the failure to contain the pandemic and the absence of adequate testing and contact tracing. Now Democratic officials in states and cities across the country are working to reopen the schools despite the rise in infections and deaths that will inevitably follow.

But when it comes to a measly $600 to enable laid-off workers to pay rent and put food on the table, the entire political system comes to a grinding halt. There is no mystery here: both parties are beholden to the oligarchy that rules America and do its bidding.

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.