Over a million jobs lost in Spain amid coronavirus pandemic

Alice Summers

Around 1.35 million jobs have been destroyed in Spain since the start of the coronavirus crisis six months ago. Millions of lives are being shattered as the ruling class escalates its assault on jobs, wages and conditions.

According to the Spanish National Statistics Institute (INE), 1,074,000 of these jobs were lost in the second quarter of 2020 alone, between April and June. This is the largest quarterly fall in employment in Spain since records began in 1976, far exceeding the 770,899 jobs lost in the first three months of 2009, after the global financial crash. In April to June this year, 11,800 jobs were lost on average every single day in Spain.

This employment massacre comes after around 285,000 workers lost their jobs in the first quarter of 2020, as the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak began to make itself felt in Europe and lock-down measures were initially put in place. Spain went into lock-down on March 16 and ended all its coronavirus restrictions on June 22 with its declaration of the “new normal”, before re-imposing some local confinement measures in July as COVID-19 cases spiked.

A further 1 million workers are still furloughed under the Podemos-Socialist Party (PSOE) government’s ERTE scheme, with these workers officially considered “employed”. With this scheme set to come to an end in September, and many of these jobs now existing only on paper, the unemployment rate will likely rocket up again in the autumn.

The services sector has been by far the worst hit, losing 816,900 jobs in the second quarter. Industry lost 127,000, with construction (-108,700) and agriculture (-21,400) also severely impacted.

Catalonia—the region worst affected by the coronavirus pandemic in terms of total cases, and second worst in terms of total number of COVID-19 deaths, after Madrid—lost the greatest number of jobs, at 223,700. At least a further 25,000 jobs are known to be at stake in Catalonia, with car-maker Nissan planning on closing its Barcelona auto-factory. Andalusia, one of Spain’s poorest regions, saw a decrease of 198,100 jobs, with the Madrid region also losing 184,000.

Spain now has the highest official unemployment rate in the European Union (EU) according to statistics agency Eurostat, at 15.6 percent, followed by Greece (15.5 percent), Latvia (10.1), Cyprus (9.8) and Sweden (9.3). Across all of the EU’s 27 member states, Eurostat estimates that over 15 million people are now jobless, with a total unemployment rate of 7.1 percent.

Youth unemployment (for workers under 25) in Spain is also the highest in the European Union, standing at a staggering 40.8 percent in June, far more than double the EU’s average (16.8 percent). This is again followed by Greece on 33.6 percent, Sweden (28.7), Italy (27.6) and Luxembourg (26.7).

Globally, 16 percent of young people were out of work between February and May due to the effects of the coronavirus pandemic, according to the International Labour Organization (ILO). Young people who were “lucky” enough to keep their jobs saw their working hours fall 23 percent. Young people in employment were also more likely work in jobs that leave them vulnerable, such as low-paid occupations, informal sector work or as migrant workers, said the ILO.

The pandemic has dealt a devastating blow to workers in Spain, whose pay and working conditions had already been degraded by decades of relentless attacks. Short-term contracts, low pay and underemployment proliferated in Spain even before the outbreak of coronavirus. According to the ILO, from 2009 to 2017, real wages fell by around €3,200 per person per year.

In 2019, 5.2 million workers in Spain were underemployed and wanted to be working more hours than they were currently contracted to do—22.2 percent of the working population. Many other workers had only short term contracts, with only six percent of the contracts signed in 2019 being indefinite. More than one in three short-term contracts was for a duration of less than a week. Nearly one in three people (28.27 percent) were working three or more contracts at a time.

The impact of the coronavirus pandemic has further accelerated these trends towards poverty-pay, precariousness and unemployment. Intermón Oxfam estimates that 700,000 people will fall into poverty this year in Spain. There are now 1.15 million families in Spain in which all of the members are unemployed, an increase of 7 per cent on the first quarter of this year and the largest increase in familial unemployment since 2012.

Official unemployment figures are themselves highly misleading. While millions of jobs have been destroyed and hundreds of thousands are falling into poverty, the Spanish government reported a rise in unemployment of ‘only’ 55,000 in the last quarter, bringing the official number of unemployed in Spain to 3.4 million.

Not only are workers furloughed under the ERTE scheme counted as “employed”, but workers who lose their jobs are required to be actively looking for work to be classified as “unemployed.” But due to confinement measures during the pandemic and widespread closures of businesses, over 1.6 million Spaniards were unable to look for work for months. They were therefore classified as “inactive,” not unemployed.

In fact, according to the INE, only a third (35 percent) of the working-age population were actually working in the second quarter, or 13.9 million people, pointing to the scale of the social catastrophe hitting the working class. In this period, the Spanish government registered 18.6 million people as being “employed”. This means around 4.7 million fell under the radar and were unable to work for other reasons—being on ERTE, being absent due to sickness or being self-employed workers who had to close their businesses. This brings the true number of jobless workers to over 8 million.

In July, Spain’s labour minister, Podemos member Yolanda Díaz, stated that the government intended to extend the ERTE furlough scheme beyond its current September cut-off date for the sectors worst hit by the pandemic: tourism, aviation, maritime, leisure and culture. “It would not make sense to undertake this gigantic, unprecedented effort in the Spanish economy [to preserve jobs],” she said, “and then just let things fall away.”

Diaz has reportedly also asked Brussels for a €20 billion funding package from the EU’s SURE (Support to mitigate Unemployment Risks in an Emergency) programme to help finance the ERTE scheme.

Diaz’s pormises are worse than meaningless. Already the Spanish government has laid out plans to steadily cut back on furlough payments from 70 percent of workers’ wages to 35 percent by September, or to 25 percent for workers in companies with more than 50 employees. Any proposed extension to this scheme would still leave vast swathes of the working class with almost nothing.

In an indication of the cynicism of the PSOE-Podemos government’s supposedly “unprecedented” effort to save jobs, in March Diaz claimed that Madrid would enact legislation to keep companies from “taking advantage of the health crisis to lay off [their employees].” Four months later, over a million jobs have been lost—something Diaz declared “impossible” under her plans.

The ruling class in Spain and internationally is sitting atop a social powder keg, as protests and strikes grow against these historic attacks on workers’ living conditions and jobs. Having advocated a criminal, anti-scientific policy of “herd immunity”, forcing workers back into factories and offices to die in the service of their profit-making, the financial aristocracy is slashing jobs with just as little concern for workers’ lives.

The most explosive situation is emerging in America, where support payments for workers are being suspended this month, threatening tens of millions with hunger and eviction. Already this year protests against police violence that began in the United States spread like wildfire across Europe and worldwide, indicating the explosive social conditions internationally.

Germany deports Roma family to Moldova despite life-threatening conditions

Carola Kleinert

On 2 August, the International Day of Remembrance, the European political establishment commemorates the murder of between 500,000 and 600,000 Sinti and Roma by the Nazis. However, discrimination against Sinti and Roma in Germany continues to this day.

On July 15, in the run-up to this year’s International Day of Remembrance, the Berlin state government, a coalition of the Social Democrats, the Left Party and the Greens, deported over 200 members of the Roma minority to Moldova, where COVID-19 is running rampant.

The Berlin Refugee Council complained that those targeted were seized by police officers in the dead of night, at 3 a.m., before being placed on a chartered flight to Moldova. A further night-time deportation occurred on 30 July.

The deportees include several families with young children as well as people with chronic illnesses (including a woman with cancer) and disabled people. As the Refugee Council noted in its press statement, “The deportations were planned and carried out under the sole authority of the SPD/Left Party/Green state government.”

The state government, led by Mayor Michael Müller (SPD), Interior Senator Andreas Geisel (SPD) and Social Affairs Senator Elke Breitenbach (Left Party), provided a powerful demonstration of its ruthlessness towards people without a German passport or residency permit, even under conditions of the coronavirus pandemic.

Müller hypocritically claimed to be outraged by federal Interior Minister Horst Seehofer’s ban on Berlin accepting 300 refugees from Greek refugee camps, claiming that the decision “outraged everyone in the Senate.” Yet officers under the control of his party ally Geisel were at the same time forcing entry into the living quarters of “hundreds of especially vulnerable members of the Roma minority” and deporting them.

“The outrage over the opposition (by the federal government) to the state refugee acceptance programme appears to have been so much hypocrisy at the expense of refugees,” commented Georg Classen, spokesman for the Refugee Council.

Refugees who had signed a voluntary departure order at the State Office for Refugee Affairs and who planned to return soon to their home countries were also forcibly deported. Nora Brezger from the Refugee Council Berlin attacked the government, declaring her doubts about “whether the voluntary return programme can be taken seriously if forcible deportations are carried out in violation of promises made.”

As the World Socialist Web Site has warned since the coming to power in Berlin of the SPD/Left Party/Green coalition, the Left Party and Greens implement the federal government’s ruthless refugee policy wherever they are in government. Forcible deportations carried out at night are part of their standard operating procedure.

Moldova is one of the poorest countries bordering the European Union. One in five of its 3.5 million inhabitants is estimated to live below the poverty line.

The Roma minority there is exposed to state-organised exclusion and discrimination. Bitter poverty due to a disproportionately high unemployment rate, housing problems and homelessness, and extreme difficulty in accessing education, are all part of daily life for the Roma minority. Over half of them have no access to state medical insurance, meaning they can be refused health care treatment.

However, in the view of the Federal Office for Immigration and Refugees (BAMF), the “discrimination and marginalization” in their homeland does not amount “generally speaking to anything that is relevant for refugee law,” remarked Martina Mauer from the Refugee Council Berlin to the Berliner Morgenpost in December of 2019.

Only 80 of the 10,500 Moldovans who applied for asylum to the BAMF between 2015 and 2019 obtained a (temporary) residency permit. Applicants were overwhelmingly members of the Roma community.

The further impoverishment and deaths of Roma are seen by the SPD, the Left Party and the Greens as a price worth paying. Their deportation to Moldova, which, according to the Robert Koch Institute and Germany’s Foreign Ministry, is a coronavirus risk area, amounts to a death sentence.

Even prior to the pandemic, it would have been totally unclear how the woman with cancer, who has an artificial anus and was in the middle of a course of chemotherapy, could have continued her treatment or even had her stoma bag changed. “The police ought to have abandoned the repatriation at the point of the deportation at the latest,” wrote the Refugee Council. With the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, the woman is now part of a high-risk group.

The health care system in Moldova has been on the verge of collapse since May. The government extended a state of emergency for the health care system until the end of August. According to the Refugee Council, around 2,000 new infections are registered each week. The World Health Organisation reported last week a rate of new infections of 400 per day, but added that a much higher number of unreported cases was likely. According to official figures, around 27,000 Moldovans have been infected by the virus.

“While solidarity is always pledged in Berlin during the coronavirus pandemic,” the SPD/Left Party/Green government “could not wait to get going with deportations again,” complained Nora Brezger of the Refugee Council. Two mass deportations had already been carried out in June, one to Georgia and the other to Serbia.

According to the 6 August edition of the Berliner Zeitung, 300 people were deported during the first six months of the year in spite of the pandemic. The Berlin Interior Affairs Department reported that the Federal Office for Immigration and Refugees began issuing asylum rejections again in mid-May, and repatriations have been “carried out on an unrestricted basis and regardless of the pandemic since mid-June.” A total of 188 people have been deported from Schönefeld airport, including to Georgia, Moldova and Serbia.

Irrespective of the hypocritical lip service they pay to the need to protect refugees and oppose discrimination, neither the Left Party nor the Greens have condemned the deportations, let alone done anything to prevent them.

Roma and Sinti are among the minorities facing the worst forms of discrimination in Europe. This is also the case in Germany, according to the latest report from the Central Council of Roma and Sinti “On the equal treatment of Sinti and Roma and the fight against anti-gypsy sentiment.”

While job centres, the Office for Work, Department for Foreigners, social services and youth support providers practice systematic discrimination, according to the report, there has also been a persistent manifestation of “anti-gypsy sentiments in the speeches of far-right, conservative and social democratic politicians, in articles and reports... and in hate speech online.”

Four years ago, when the SPD governed in Berlin in coalition with the Christian Democrats (CDU), Interior Senator Frank Henkel (CDU) ordered a brutal crackdown by a unit of police officers against Roma families protesting at the Memorial to the Murdered Sinti and Roma of Europe against their threatened deportation.

The Left Party and the Greens, who were in opposition at the time, appealed to the protesters to end their demonstration at the memorial. Less than a year later, the newly installed SPD/Left Party/Green coalition has enforced the inhumane asylum and deportation policy of the federal government, including against the severely persecuted Roma minority.

Seventy-five years after the downfall of Hitlerite fascism, the ruling elite’s nationalism is once again rearing its ugly head. State-sponsored racism and xenophobia are the inevitable products of this development. Under conditions of deepening crisis, all of the established parties, the Left Party and Greens included, defend the repressive state apparatus and the property interests of the ruling class.

The deportation of defenceless sick, disabled and aged Roma, and the systemic discrimination against minorities, is just as much a part of this class policy as the brutal reopening of worksites and schools amid a raging pandemic.

Protests, crackdown follow Belarus elections

Jason Melanovski & Andrea Peters

Protests have broken out in Belarus after state officials declared incumbent President Alexander Lukashenko the winner in Sunday’s election with 80 percent of the vote. In cities around the country, thousands of mostly young demonstrators have gathered to denounce the results as fraudulent and demand Lukashenko’s removal. The government has cracked down with tear gas and arrests, with 3,000 jailed and one demonstrator killed.

Lukashenko is a Stalinist turned post-Soviet autocrat who has ruled over Belarus for 26 years and amassed, according to one 2009 estimate, a personal fortune of $9 billion. He has described coronavirus as a “psychosis” and counseled the population to drink vodka as a preventive measure. Lukashenko was challenged by Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, the 37-year-old wife of an opposition blogger who was arrested and prevented from running in the elections. State officials report that she received 10.9 percent of the vote.

Tikhanovskaya, portrayed as a devoted wife speaking out in defense of her husband and “the people,” ran a campaign with no political demands other than “free and fair elections” and “democracy.” She was backed by two other oppositionists—Viktar Babaryka and Valery Tsepkalo—wealthy champions of private property and the free market. Up until recently, they had long held positions in wings of the Belarusian state.

After lodging a complaint on Monday with the Central Election Commission to contest the outcome, Tikhanovskaya disappeared from public view for several hours, possibly detained by government authorities, although what happened remains unclear.

Police use truncheons on protesters during a mass protest following presidential election in Minsk, Belarus, August 10, 2020. (AP Photo/Sergei Grits)

Tikhanovskaya then recorded video appeals expressing personal disillusionment in the campaign and calling on people not to protest and to accept the election results. She then fled to Lithuania, the neighboring country to which she had previously sent her children for their safety. Tikhanovskaya’s video statements were released shortly after.

The Lukashenko government’s police crackdown has been coupled with other authoritarian measures intended to prevent people from using social media to organize further protests. Twitter has been censored and the internet throttled, as the president works to contain widespread disillusionment with his rule, which in recent months has been exacerbated by his criminal refusal to take any measures against the spread of COVID-19.

Tikhanovskaya, promoted by Belarus’ pro-Western and right-wing opposition, has predictably been supported by the EU and the United States. Both are hostile to Lukashenko, a longtime ally of Moscow, and have been seeking to pull Minsk into their orbit in order to intensify Russia’s political isolation.

Following the crackdown on the election protests, the Trump administration—which has been busy jailing, beating and kidnapping protesters on US streets for the past three months—condemned the actions of the Lukashenko government.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that the United States was “deeply concerned” over the “severe restrictions on ballot access for candidates, prohibition of local independent observers at polling stations, intimidation tactics employed against opposition candidates, and the detentions of peaceful protesters and journalists.” Pompeo speaks on behalf of a president who has made clear that he is unlikely to recognize the results of the upcoming elections in the US should the vote not go in his favor and is prepared to resort to violence to crush popular opposition.

German government spokesperson Steffen Seibert likewise criticized the elections and government violence, stating that Germany “condemns the many arrests and violence against peaceful protesters.”

The Western imperialist countries have long labeled Lukashenko “Europe’s last dictator,” not because of his authoritarian policies, but because of his close ties to Russia and failure to “liberalize” Belarus’ economy—in other words, open it up for extreme exploitation by foreign capital. By some estimates, 70 percent of the Belarusian economy is state-owned. According to the EU, 49.2 percent of the country’s foreign trade is with Russia.

Russian President Vladimir Putin was the first head of state to congratulate Lukashenko on his win and stated that he hoped for “mutually beneficial Russian-Belarusian relations in all areas.” Putin also called for Belarus to continue efforts to create a political-economic union with Russia, which, despite a 1997 agreement between the two countries, has failed to come to fruition.

The relationship between Moscow and Minsk has been under extreme strain in the recent period, with conflicts erupting over energy supplies coming from Russia and, most recently, alleged Kremlin interference in Belarusian politics. Just prior to Sunday’s election, the Lukashenko government arrested 33 Russian military contractors and accused them of plotting terrorist activities within the country.

At the center of the growing tensions with Moscow is Washington’s increasing political presence in Minsk. After making the first official visit to Belarus by an American diplomat in more than 25 years, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared in February that the United States would be happy to supply Belarus with “all the oil it needs.”

While Lukashenko has signaled that he is open to a closer relationship with Washington, he also fears a Western-backed “Maidan revolution,” similar to what took place in Ukraine in 2014.

At that time, Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, deemed by Washington and Brussels as insufficiently anti-Russian, was removed through the mobilization of far-right groups that initially sought to cover themselves under the banner of popular opposition. A NATO-friendly, nationalist government was installed in Kiev, which promptly initiated a civil war against pro-Russian breakaway regions in Ukraine’s east, resulting in a mass refugee crisis and the deaths of thousands. Ukraine’s economy, under the control of the International Monetary Fund, Western financiers, and local oligarchs, is in tatters. The population is impoverished.

Following the outbreak of protests on Sunday, Lukashenko stated, “I warned that there will be no Maidan, no matter how much someone wants it.” He warned the population, “for the third time, I am telling parents to check where their child is, so it won’t hurt later.”

Western imperialism hopes to use the protests in Belarus and the candidacy of Tikhanovskaya for reactionary purposes—above all, undermining the economic and geopolitical position of Russia in preparation for an open conflict with Moscow. There will be no “democracy,” no “free and fair elections,” and no prosperity for the Belarusian working class coming from the country’s so-called “opposition,” aided by these forces.

For its part, the Lukashenko government is willing to reach a deal with Washington and Brussels if it would allow it to continue its rule and its enrichment off of the exploitation of the Belarusian working class. Relying on violence to stay in power, it will resort to more if necessary, as it tacks this way and that in an effort to survive within the context of the conflict between Russia and the United States.

Only a revolutionary movement of the working class within Belarus, united with its class brothers and sisters to the east and west, can challenge both imperialism and the post-Soviet oligarchy.

Hospital fire in southern India kills 10 COVID-19 patients

Arun Kumar

A massive fire at a hotel-turned hospital in Vijayawada, a major city in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, last Sunday morning has killed 10 COVID-19 patients and injured 30.

The tragedy follows the August 6 fire that killed eight people in the intensive care unit of a private COVID-19 designated hospital in Ahmedabad, the largest city of the western state of Gujarat. With the pandemic spreading rapidly in the country, the circumstances of the fire point to criminal negligence on the part of governments and hotel and hospital authorities.

Last Sunday around 5 am, a fire broke out on the ground floor of the Swarna Palace hotel COVID-19 facility and quickly spread to the upper floors of the five-storeyed building. When the fire erupted, around 30 patients and 10 medical staff were on the premises.

As reported by Indian Express, the victims of the fire are: Dokku Siva Brahmaiah (58) of Machilipatnam, Potluri Poornachandra Rao (78) of Ghantasala mandal, Krishna district,

Majji Gopi (54) of Machilipatnam, Sunkara Babu Rao (68) of Vijayawada, Kosaraju Suvarnalatha (42) of Ponnur, Guntur district, Maddali Ramesh (57) of Vijayawada, Sabbithi Ratna Abraham (48) of Jaggaiahpet and his wife S Rajakumari (40), Duddu Venkata Narasimha Pavan Kumar (30) and his mother Duddu Venkata Jayalaxmi (48) from Kandukur of Prakasam district.

Post-mortems confirmed that eight out of the ten victims had recovered from COVID-19 and tested negative. They would have been discharged in a couple of days and been with their families again.

Fire department officials told the Week they received a call at 5.09 am informing them about the fire raging inside the hotel. The officials estimated that the fire must have started at around 4.30 am on the ground floor. By the time fire engines arrived at the hotel, the flames had spread to the first and second floors.

Six fire engines were pressed into service to douse the flames. The firemen found that most of the people on the first two floors were still in their beds and had passed away due to suffocation.

The fire was brought under control within 45 minutes. Those occupying rooms on the fourth and fifth floor and those who escaped to the upper floors managed to save their lives. At least seven patients jumped from the terrace as the flames spread to the upper floors. Two others were asphyxiated as thick fumes enveloped the hotel, the Indian Express reported.

Fire officials told the media that the cause of the blaze was an electrical short circuit. The wooden flooring, waste dump and electronic items on the ground and other floors fuelled the spread.

According to Fire Safety Director Jairam Naik, the makeshift hospital had “violated” safety rules. The fire department confirmed that hospital management did not obtain an NOC (No Objection Certificate) before converting the hotel into a COVID facility.

The police complaint filed by revenue officials claimed that hotel management knew about electrical defects in the premises but failed to rectify them as it would have involved large expenses. The same officials charged that Ramesh Hospitals, which leased the hotel, used the facility despite knowing this safety risk.

Within 24 hours of the fire, the local police arrested three Ramesh Hospitals officials, including the Chief Operating Officer, for allegedly neglecting the need for electrical repairs that could have averted the disaster.

The evidence, however, indicates that the officials who were meant to check the fire safety requirements at such buildings looked the other way while hospital management breached basic safety norms.

In an obvious attempt to contain popular anger over the resulting loss of lives, the state and central government authorities responded as they usually do. Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Y.S. Jaganmohan Reddy announced an ex-gratia payment of 5 million rupees to the next of kin of victims. Prime Minister Narendra Modi tweeted his “anguish” about the incident and offered “all support.”

The Indian Express reported that the National Disaster Response Force, the State Disaster Response Force, fire service and police personnel who participated in the rescue operation urged their higher officials to send them to special quarantine as they had been exposed to COVID-19.

“When we requested our higher-ups in this regard, they told us to undergo home isolation,” one officer said. “This won’t help in preventing the virus from spreading to our families if we are affected.”

The callous attitude of higher officials toward personnel who were exposed to the coronavirus flows from the class response of the Indian ruling elite as a whole to the pandemic.

Having ignored the danger of COVID-19 for more than a month, Modi’s government was finally forced to implement a nationwide lockdown on March 24. However, that lockdown proved an utter failure. This was due to its ill-prepared nature, particularly the government’s refusal to provide for the basic necessities of the people who were forced to stay in, and to take other vital measures such as mass testing, contact tracing and proper quarantine.

Moreover, in line with its policy of placing the profit interests of big business over the lives of workers and the rural poor, Modi’s government reopened the economy by “unlocking” its lockdown from late April, leading to a rapid spread of the pandemic throughout the country. Now, according to even substantially under-reported official figures, the number of confirmed coronavirus cases in India is over 2.3 million, with more than 46,000 deaths.

Andhra Pradesh, the only southern state to record 10,000-plus daily cases on more than one occasion, witnessed a new single-day high of 10,820 infections last Sunday, propelling the state’s overall tally to 227,000. With 97 new deaths, the loss of lives in the state rose to 2,039.

Canada’s military launched operation to “shape” opinion amid pandemic

Roger Jordan

Based explicitly on methods that it had used during the neocolonial occupation of Afghanistan, Canada’s military developed and began to implement an “information operations” plan as part of its initial response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The plan, according to a leaked Canadian Armed Forces’ document, was aimed at “shaping” and “exploiting information,” with the aim of deterring civil unrest. It included plans for military personnel to broadcast government-approved propaganda over loudspeakers and by establishing temporary radio stations; to carry out “village assessments” across the country of the potential for unrest; and meet with community leaders and religious officials.

The “information operations” plan was activated by the military’s Canadian Joint Operations Command, which is a unified command centre for army, air force, and naval operations within Canada, on April 8. This was just two weeks after the Chief of the Defence Staff, General Jonathan Vance, had announced the deployment of some 24,000 Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) personnel and reservists in response to the pandemic.

The information operation was temporarily suspended five days later, amid conflicts among military officials as to the role the armed forces should play in creating and disseminating state propaganda. However, only on May 1 did Vance order the operation scrapped. Despite Vance’s decision, “several” military sources were so troubled by the operation and its anti-democratic implications that they reached out to the Ottawa Citizen to express their concerns.

Military officials acknowledged in interviews with the Ottawa Citizen that the plan was about maintaining control over the population and preparing for civil unrest. Asked by the Citizen if the army expected riots or civil disobedience to occur, Rear Admiral Brian Santarpia, who was the Canadian Joint Operations Command’s chief of staff, at the time, declared, “That was our worst-case scenario…Our worst-case scenario for COVID was that the first wave would be so much worse and that some of the 24,000 people we had would have to be called out in aid to civil power.”

Several military officials said the plan drew on tactics used by the CAF in Afghanistan to convince villagers to back the US-led occupation rather than the Taliban. Canada’s military has officially denied this.

The planning document seen by the Citizen bluntly identified strengthening trust in the government and suppressing social opposition as key objectives. Desired outcomes included, “Canadian public is deterred from participating in Civil Disobedience,” and “Canadian public compliance with suppression measures is reinforced.”

Although Vance put a stop to the operation, Santarpia left no doubt that the military intends to mount similar propaganda and intelligence initiatives to “deter” and, if needed, suppress social unrest in the future. “We will develop and grow this capability over the coming years,” Santarpia told the Citizen, “as it’s really important at both home and abroad,”

These revelations, which have prompted an internal inquiry, fully confirm the analysis made by the World Socialist Web Site about the real reason for the Trudeau Liberal government’s commitment of about a quarter of the CAF’s total troop strength to its anti-COVID-19 deployment. Calling attention to Vance’s appeal to CAF personnel to be on a “war footing,” we warned in an article published May 8, “From the standpoint of the ruling class, the enemies the military will need to ‘fight’ are at home as well as abroad. Leading bourgeois publications, including Britain’s Financial Times, have raised the spectre of the pandemic producing social unrest on a vast scale, driven not least by the huge bailouts already given to big business and the devastating economic downturn that is accelerating internationally”.

Motivated by this fear, a small military unit associated with the troops that were deployed to long-term care facilities in Ontario in May was tasked with gathering intelligence on oppositional sentiment among the population. A Precision Intelligence Team (PIT) trolled through posts on social media about relevant news topics. Posts gathered by the team included expressions of concern over the catastrophic conditions in Ontario’s long-term care facilities. The team passed the information that it gathered to the right-wing provincial government of Doug Ford along with the warning that it represented a “negative reaction” from the public.

The CAF has also had to order an investigation into the PIT unit’s spying. But top CAF officials have defended it. “We don’t constrain that sort of initiative,” Santarpia told the Ottawa Citizen, because “the young folks who are doing it are going to surprise us every time with something that turns out to be more relevant than any of us thought it would be.”

The armed forces’ push to employ at home methods it developed while waging a counter-insurgency war amid a largely hostile Afghan population has been all but ignored by the mainstream media. The only substantial articles to appear are the three penned by the journalist who broke the story—the Ottawa Citizen’s well-connected defence correspondent, David Pugliese.

For its part, the Liberal government has sought to downplay the affair. The Defence Ministry claimed that Minister of Defence Harjit Sajjan was never briefed on the military’s “information operations,” which a spokesperson labeled “mistake.” Vance also claimed not to have known about the operation until he intervened to shut it down.

If these statements are true, they raise a host of questions, all of which are carefully avoided in the accounts of the military’s activities provided so far. Does the military have a free hand to conduct whatever operations it deems fit within Canada without government authorization? If the government had no idea about the military’s plan, who took the decision to deploy soldiers in accordance with the “information operations” plan? Did the “worst-case scenario” that purportedly informed the operation include plans for the military to assume any government functions in the event of the breakdown of “law and order,” and, if so, which ones and under whose authority?

In Canada, as in all the other major imperialist powers, the past two decades have seen a pronounced turn toward militarism, a vast expansion of the power and reach of the national-security apparatus, increasing criminalization of social opposition, and a turn toward authoritarian forms of rule.

Since it participated in the invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, Canada has been engaged in almost perpetual war in alliance with Washington. This includes, the Canadian Armed Forces’ decade-long leading role in the Afghan counter-insurgency war, its participation in the 2004 overthrow of Haiti’s elected president and the 2011 “regime-change” war in Libya, and its operations, ongoing since 2014, in Iraq and Syria. Canada is also deeply integrated into the US military-strategic offensives against Russia and China.

Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper celebrated Canada as a “warrior nation.” Trudeau’s Liberals have dressed up Canada’s foreign policy in a more “humanitarian” guise. But the CAF’s foreign deployments have continued to expand and the defence budget to swell, with a more than 70 percent increase to be implemented between 2017 and 2026.

All this has boosted the political prominence of the military and nourished the idea within sections of the ruling elite and the national-security establishment in particular that military force provides a way to overcome mounting and increasingly intractable problems. In February, just before the pandemic erupted in Canada, the Conservatives, supported by much of big business, were baying for the military to be deployed to quell the railway blockades in support of the Wet'suwet'en hereditary chiefs.

The most noxious expression of the ruling elite’s promotion of militarism and reaction is the growth of far-right and even fascistic forces within the military, as was revealed by the failed attempt of a CAF reservist to assassinate Prime Minster Justin Trudeau last month.

The rise of militarism and authoritarian forms of rule has occurred under conditions of a dramatic increase in social inequality. Based on data from 2016, the Parliamentary Budget Office recently revealed that the richest 1 percent of Canadians hold over one quarter of the country’s wealth—roughly equal to the share owned by the poorest 80 percent. Protecting the staggering levels of wealth held by Canada’s super-rich oligarchy under conditions of such glaring inequality is increasingly incompatible with democratic forms of rule.

The coronavirus pandemic has deepened the social chasm that separates the capitalist elite and the mass of working people, and accelerated the turn towards authoritarian forms of rule. Right-wing governments in Ontario and Alberta have passed emergency powers legislation that allows them to override collective agreements, ban protests, and punish workers who resist the reckless back-to-work campaign. These powers are all aimed at ratcheting up the exploitation of the working class to pay for the multi-billion dollar bailout of the large corporations, banks, and financial oligarchy organized by the Trudeau government in collaboration with the trade unions and NDP.

Johnson government deploys armed forces against refugees making Channel crossings

Tony Robson

Under the political leadership of Home Secretary Priti Patel, British armed forces are being deployed against refugees crossing the Channel from France in rubber dinghies and small boats.

These inhumane, illegal, and xenophobic measures must be opposed. What is being legitimised is a further evisceration of the right to asylum and the use of the state to terrorise those displaced by hardship and persecution, including many who have fled wars in their homelands instigated or backed by the British ruling elite.

The Ministry of Defence has deployed RAF surveillance aircraft to assist the Border Patrol off the south coast. This has been described as an “initial offer of assistance.” A formal request has been made by the Home Secretary for the active intervention of the Royal Navy.

Patel has created a new position, the Clandestine Channel Threat Commander, whose role will be to work closely with the French state in policing the Channel against refugees. She has appointed Dan O’Mahoney, a former Royal Marine who served in Kosovo and Iraq. A government press release states that he “will have the primary responsibility of making the Channel route unviable for small boat crossings.”

The deployment of the Royal Navy to hound and drive back lightweight vessels, overcrowded, and unfit for sea crossing will result in disaster. It is a breach of maritime law, which stipulates that those at risk of drowning at sea must be rescued.

On Monday, Prime Minister Boris Johnson stated that current law was too restrictive over deportations and described the Channel crossings made by desperate refugees as "very bad and stupid and dangerous and criminal." This is a more appropriate description of Johnson and his government.

There is a large element of political distraction involved in the revival of anti-refugee witch hunting. The resort once again to stoking anti-migrant sentiment and xenophobia is dictated by the fact that the government is backed into a corner, faced with rising social anger over its incompetent and criminal handling of COVID-19.

The biggest threat to the British people is not the arrival of a few hundred refugees on the shorelines of its southern coast, but the present occupant of Number 10 Downing Street. The Johnson government has been responsible for turning the UK into the epicentre of the pandemic in Europe in terms of excess deaths and is plunging society headlong into a resurgence of the virus through its return to work policy and reopening of schools.

The number of those undertaking the Channel crossings has risen, but from a low baseline. In the year up to August 7, 4,000 refugees made landings on the UK coast on 300 boats. Last Thursday 235 people landed.

The hysteria mounted against the refugees is not solely the preserve of the right- wing media such as the Express, Telegraph and Daily Mail. The Independent writes in terms of a “surge” and the BBC adopts a shrill tone, describing a couple of a hundred people as “record numbers”.

This serves to create the impression that managing the inflow of refugees is an impossible task, while desensitising public opinion over their plight. The claims that the clampdown is motivated by a desire to prevent refugees from drowning and falling foul to criminal gangs are rank hypocrisy. The barriers which governments around the world have erected against the right to asylum have forced refugees into taking desperate action.

The Channel is one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world, with strong currents which makes undertaking the 20-mile crossing particularly hazardous. Those who undertake the Channel crossing are from the most impoverished and war-torn parts of the globe. According to the BBC, recent arrivals have included entire families from Yemen, Eritrea, Chad, Eqypt, Sudan, and Iraq.

Based on the overall figures for immigration last year to the UK, the number of unauthorised Channel arrivals does not even represent a percentage point. The UK also receives far fewer asylum seekers than other European Union (EU) countries such as Germany, France, and Spain. In 2019, there were 49,000 asylum applications in the UK, a third or just over a half of those for the EU countries cited.

Earlier in the year the government launched Operation Sillath to speed up the deportations of refugees back to France. This is conducted under the terms of the Dublin regulations of the EU on asylum, which makes refugees the responsibility of the first country they reach. In May, the Guardian reported evidence compiled by human rights lawyers and campaigners that the government was denying asylum seekers the right to have their applications considered in the UK, deporting them back to France without any proof they had made an original claim here, or spent any time in the country.

Lily Parrott, a lawyer at Duncan Lewis solicitors stated, “We feel that this is being done illegally and on the basis of a conflation between the Dublin convention and a UK-France treaty about border management. This would be an egregious breach of European Law that allowed many asylum-seekers to be wrongly removed from the UK.”

Since 2019, the UK has deported 155 refugees back to France, around 3 percent of those that landed on the south coast.

The Johnson government takes its political cue from the far right of the political spectrum. For months, former Brexit leader Nigel Farage has mounted a media campaign vilifying the government for losing control of the UK’s borders. This has included video footage of his boat patrols around the Channel and tours of southern ports in which he has portrayed himself as the single-handed champion of the national interest against an “invasion”. Video footage has included Farage identifying a distressed light weight vessel in the Channel at risk of sinking. When they were rescued, he denounced the Border Patrol as “an illegal migrant taxi service.”

This virulent campaign is now being politically mainstreamed. The BBC primetime TV newscast Monday reported, “On land, at seas and in the air. Today the government sought to assure its citizens that it can control its borders.” The report cut to an aerial shot of the Home Secretary aboard a police patrol boat stating that Priti Patel’s involvement was “to underline her determination against the breaching of UK sovereignty.”

The harassment and vilification of refugees from the most oppressed and impoverished corners of the globe is in marked contrast to the Johnson government’s official open door policy extended to 2.9 million Hong Kong citizens. The right to asylum applies only to the extent that it provides a fig-leaf for the British ruling class in its alliance with the US against China, and for stepped-up measures of trade war and military confrontation.

In the face of this witchhunt, there has been no principled opposition mounted by the Labour Party. Apart from occasional handwringing about the plight of refugees, the Labour Party has focused on complaints that Brexit will endanger continued cooperation between the British and French governments over efforts to clampdown on asylum seekers. Dianne Abbott, former shadow Home Secretary under Jeremy Corbyn told the BBC, "These things were bound to get more difficult as we prepared to leave the EU. What I'm saying is in the medium term and the long term, there has to be better cooperation across the EU. That is the only solution, otherwise whenever the weather is better and the seas are calmer, you're going to have these desperate people trying to cross the Channel."

These comments were celebrated by the right-wing Express newspaper, which provided Abbott with prominent coverage.

The defence of open borders and the right to asylum is an integral part of the fight for democratic rights and against capitalism. The division of the world into rival nation states dominated by the most powerful imperialist powers who have driven millions from their homes through environmental disasters, famine and war is the main barrier to human progress. It is the irrationality of this system and its subordination of technological progress to the extraction of wealth by an oligarchy that has prevented a socially progressive response to the pandemic and resulted in a humanitarian disaster.

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.