US health insurance companies reap billions as COVID-19 pandemic inflicts death and destitution

Alex Johnson

America’s top health insurance companies are experiencing a surge in profits amid the raging COVID-19 pandemic even as the novel coronavirus has sickened or killed a broad section of the population.

The largest health insurance chains, including Anthem, Humana, and UnitedHealth Group, are reporting second-quarter earnings at double the rate from the same period last year. This is mostly due to billions of dollars shed from the abrupt stoppage of medical claims for expensive, elective surgeries and billions of dollars received through the CARES Act, passed in an almost unanimous bipartisan vote by Congress in March.

Most costly operations, such as heart transplants, spinal fusions, and knee replacements, have either been postponed or canceled outright because hospitals have had to concentrate on the influx of COVID-19 patients. Moreover, people have foregone important procedures out of fear of contracting the virus in doctors’ offices and emergency rooms. In the month of April, when the pandemic was raging out of control, outpatient surgeries for HCA Healthcare facilities fell by 70 percent compared to April of 2019 nationwide. In-patient admissions have also fallen by nearly a third. HCA is America’s largest for-profit hospital network.

Excluding COVID-19 patients, health plans and employers have likewise seen an overall decline in health care use by about 30 to 40 percent, according to Tim Nimmer, the global chief at Aon. Annual costs of patient care are expected to be reduced by about 1.5 percent to 2 percent each month.

One of the highest surges came from Humana, which reported last Wednesday that its net income rose to $1.8 billion for the second quarter of 2020, compared to $940 million for the same quarter of 2019. The pharmaceutical giant Cigna also raked in a higher revenue stream, with its adjusted revenue at $39.8 billion dollars for the second quarter, with $1.8 billion in net income gobbled up by shareholders alone.

Last Wednesday, the retail pharmacy chain CVS Health, along with its subsidiary Aetna, a major insurer, posted far higher earnings than it did a year ago. Its net income for the second quarter reached $3 billion, an estimated $1 billion more than it reported for the same period of 2019, on revenues of $65 billion.

Other health insurance corporations are also celebrating monumental windfalls. This includes Anthem, one of the largest for-profit health insurance companies, whose net income soared to $2.3 billion for the second quarter from $1.1 billion in 2019. UnitedHealth reported net earnings of $6.7 billion, compared to $3.4 billion for the same three months last year.

Due to the extraordinary decrease in costly procedures, these firms have been able to circumvent federal health care laws that require a percentage of the revenue they generate from customers’ premiums be spent on medical expenses. Most companies must spend approximately 80 to 85 cents per dollar in premiums on health care coverage. The remaining15 to 20 percent is all they are allowed to spend on administrative costs like marketing and consume as profit.

Insurers are currently spending a far less portion of their premium revenue on their customers’ health care costs. CVS, for example, said in its quarterly report that their medical-benefits ratio was 70 percent for the quarter, compared to 84 percent in the same period of 2019. This has translated into millions of dollars in surplus profit for wealthy executives and major shareholders.

Typically, health insurance companies have also been required under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) to pay out billions in revenue to small businesses and individuals. The Obamacare law, however, grants a three-year window for companies to calculate how much they are required to return.

Nonprofit insurance companies, especially the ones under Blue Cross health care plans, are also witnessing much higher profit margins. While the ACA stipulates that they too are required to pay out a significant amount of revenue through rebates, they can swallow any additional surplus into their capital reserves.

For the companies that own some of the larger pharmacy benefit managers, such as UnitedHealth, there is no limit on how much their networks of doctors and healthcare businesses as well as benefits managers can make. Michael Turpin, a former executive and vice president of USI Insurance Services told the New York Times that the massive profits being reported, “don’t give an accurate picture of how much money they are making for the insurers.”

Doctors and hospital managers are becoming increasingly concerned over the accelerated profits for insurers and the limited accountability that they are facing in their haphazard strategies for addressing the coronavirus pandemic. Colleen M. Byle, a financial officer for Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, which has treated more than 10,000 COVID-19 patients, told the Times that insurers have been given exceptional leeway to profit while doing nothing about health concerns. “The government has been funding the providers significantly ... insurers should be sharing that burden, and they haven’t been.”

While the ruling-class has welcomed the pandemic as a profit-making opportunity, suffering for the working-class is reaching unprecedented levels. An estimated 5.4 million American workers have lost their health insurance between February and May from layoffs, according to several research studies on the loss of worker-employed health care plans. The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that about 27 million in total are at risk of losing coverage by the end of the year. This would leave millions vulnerable to serious illness and death from COVID-19 or pressing health concerns that would make paying medical bills impossible.

In contrast to large insurance companies, small medical facilities and rural hospitals have struggled to remain open and operational since the pandemic erupted in mid-March. Many small hospitals across the country are on the verge of financial ruin because of the cancellation of elective procedures, one of their few sources of dependable revenue, and have been largely left out of the CARES Act bailout.

In early April, Decatur County General Hospital, the only hospital in rural Decatur County, Tennessee, home to about 12,000 people, was forced to shut down due to the expanding threat of the coronavirus. Most non-essential businesses in the county were already closed because of COVID-19. The hospital’s closure created a huge economic toll in the region, as the hospital was one of the county’s largest employers and wiped out more than 100 staff virtually overnight. The hospital’s human resources director, Melinda Hays-Kirkwood, told NPR, “for some people, this has been their only job out of college. It’s hard on these employees that have been here a long time.”

In Williamson, West Virginia, Williamson Memorial Hospital shut its doors in late April. The hospital—one of many chronically underfunded and understaffed medical facilities in rural areas—had filed for bankruptcy last year before the pandemic made it incapable of remaining open. The facility was the only hospital in the coal mining community of Mingo County and had provided treatments for miners afflicted with black lung or injured while laboring deep underground. In recent years, with the collapse of mining in the region and the accompanied social and economic decline, the hospital had been a lifeline for patients who have overdosed on opioids and other drugs.

A research study published by the University of North Carolina found that 172 rural hospitals across the US have been shut down since 2005.

Big tech firms meet with US national security agencies in advance of November elections

Kevin Reed

Nine major Silicon Valley technology corporations issued a joint statement coming out of their meeting on Wednesday with US government law enforcement and national security agencies in advance of the presidential elections in November.

The statement said: “For the past several years, we have worked closely to counter information operations across our platforms. In preparation for the upcoming election, we regularly meet to discuss trends with US government agencies tasked with protecting the integrity of the election. We held the latest in a series of meetings with government partners today where we each provided updates on what we’re seeing on our respective platforms and what we expect to see in the coming months. Specifically, we discussed preparations for the upcoming conventions and scenario planning related to election results. We will continue to stay vigilant on these issues and meet regularly ahead of the November elections.”

Joint industry statement on the collaboration of big tech with the US government during the 2020 elections published by Facebook.

The nine firms signing the joint statement are Facebook, Google, Twitter, Reddit, Microsoft, Verizon Media, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Wikimedia Foundation. Each of them issued the joint statement on their Twitter accounts along with a short comment.

In the case of Facebook, for example, the joint statement was issued through the company’s Newsroom Twitter feed and said, “Joint industry statement on ongoing election security collaboration between tech companies and USG agencies tasked with protecting the integrity of the election.”

The New York Times reported the meeting and joint statement with enthusiasm, writing, “The group, which is seeking to prevent the kind of online meddling and foreign interference that sullied the 2016 presidential election,” adding that the group “met on Wednesday with representatives from agencies like the F.B.I., the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security to share insights about disinformation campaigns and emerging deceptive behavior across their services.”

The Times report also said that the meeting included representatives from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the Department of Justice’s National Security Division. The CISA was created in 2018 by the Trump administration following the near-unanimous bipartisan passage of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Act by Congress.

Although the meeting and joint industry statement were widely reported, attempts by news media to obtain statements from the participating companies and government agencies have produced nothing but silence. The names of the individuals who attended the meeting have not been released. No details about the meeting—the agenda, the topics of discussion, the planning initiatives, the action items—have been published.

The lack of any information about a meeting between the most powerful internet and social media corporations in the world and US domestic and foreign police agencies, that was held ostensibly to “secure the US elections,” was not lost on some in the corporate media.

Shoshana Wodinsky, of Gizmodo, wrote on Thursday morning: “If the American public is expected to make an informed decision—or hell, any decision—about where to put their votes come November, then we need more information and transparency right now, not less and not later. We need some sort of window behind the scenes to know who’s doing what (and how), so we can have any hope of navigating the information hellscape.”

Although Wodinsky accepts uncritically the unsubstantiated assertions of the US political establishment and intelligence state about “Russian election interference”—which have been repeated incessantly by the New York Times since 2016 as established facts—she is raising an important question: Why should the public think that the secret collaboration of big tech with the US government before the 2020 presidential elections will yield anything other than a “meddling” and “misinformation” campaign of their own in the form of online censorship?

Direct collaboration between the top tech companies and the US government began in the lead-up to the 2018 midterm elections. A meeting was held on May 23, 2018 at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, California to “ensure that the midterms were not a repeat of the Russian interference in 2016.” The meeting was attended by representatives from Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Oath, Snap and Twitter along with Christopher Krebs—who was at the time the undersecretary of DHS—and officials of the FBI’s “foreign influence” task force.

A second meeting at Facebook headquarters took place on September 4, 2019, that included representatives from Google, Twitter and Microsoft and the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security. This daylong meeting was specifically called to prepare for the 2020 elections.

As the crisis of the pandemic was beginning to spread across the US, the joint industry group held an emergency meeting at the White House on March 11 to “stop misinformation” about the coronavirus. This meeting included representatives of Google, Amazon, Apple, Cisco, Facebook, IBM, Microsoft, TechNet and Twitter with US Chief Technology Officer Michael Kratsios.

Following each of these meetings, both government agency and tech company officials refused to respond to any questions or provide details of the discussions. After the session in 2019, Joan Donovan, a research director at Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center, said the public should also be concerned about the collaboration of government agencies with tech giants for privacy reasons. “We don’t know where the lines are drawn internally,” she said. “We don’t know whether the tech companies would consider your inbox or direct messages subject to sharing with the state.”

The collaboration of big tech with the agencies of the US security state takes many forms. Among the most important of these is the provision of advanced systems for the Pentagon in the development of artificial intelligence and machine learning for the killing machines of modern imperialist warfare.

As the corporate leadership of big tech moves to integrate itself further and deeper with the US state apparatus, the workers within these companies have increasingly opposed this collaboration. Google employees organized a campaign in 2018 that forced the company to discontinue its work on the Pentagon’s Project Maven for artificial intelligence implementation in drone warfare.

In January of this year, Amazon workers defied corporate communications directives and spoke out openly against the company’s collaboration with President Donald Trump and the DHS and ICE assault on immigrants within the US.

Lest anyone in the US government might think that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos held any sympathies for the sentiments of his employees, the world’s richest individual embraced the US Department of Defense in an appearance at a national defense forum in California last December.

Discussing the political movement and organizing among Amazon employees, Bezos said, “One of the things that's happening inside technology companies is there are groups of employees who, for example, think that technology companies should not work with the Department of Defense… I think it’s a really important issue, and people are entitled to their opinions, but it is the job of a senior leadership team to say no.”

Bezos went on, “My view is if big tech is going to turn their backs on the Department of Defense, this country is in trouble. That just can't happen.”

Behind the collaboration of big tech with government agencies in the 2020 elections are concerns that the working class, in the midst of the economic and social crisis triggered by the pandemic, will engage in mass struggles that will erupt independently of the two-party system. There is unanimity within both parties and the campaigns of both the Democrats and President Trump in cooperation with the tech monopolies that everything must be done to block the ideas of socialist internationalism and the program advanced only by the Socialist Equality Party in the elections from intersecting with the growing class struggle.

Hundreds of thousands of A-Level results downgraded by UK government

Thomas Scripps

Almost 40 percent of A-Level assessments in England have been bureaucratically downgraded by the government, leaving thousands of students’ futures in jeopardy.

Of results, 35.6 percent were docked by a grade, 3.3 percent by two grades, and 0.2 percent by three grades; 2.2 percent were increased by one grade and a tiny fraction by two or three. In Northern Ireland, 37 percent of grades have been lowered and 5.3 percent raised.

A-Level examinations were cancelled this year due to the pandemic. Students were awarded grades based on the estimates of their teachers, which were then adjusted by the exam boards, overseen by the government’s exam regulator Ofqual. There is no transparency in the methodology used to carry out this adjustment, but it is understood to be based largely on the results of schools’ previous cohorts.

The consequences of this system were previewed in Scotland last week when the Scottish Qualifications Authority docked almost a quarter of grades. The news was greeted with an outpouring of protest by students and teachers, including protests of young people in Glasgow and Edinburgh.

Confronted with this opposition, the Scottish National Party government in Holyrood was forced into an apology and a U-turn. First Minister Nicola Sturgeon stated lamely, “Despite our best intentions, I do acknowledge we did not get this right and I’m sorry for that.”

Scottish Education Secretary John Swinney told the Scottish National Assembly on Tuesday, “We did not get it right for young people. … I want to apologise for that.” He announced that the adjusted grades would be scrapped and results reverted back to the original estimates given by teachers.

These events sent the Conservative government in Westminster into a crisis over fear of an even larger backlash in the rest of the UK. An 11th-hour fudge was devised to offer students a so-called “triple lock,” allowing them to exchange their awarded grades for the results previously obtained in mock exams or to take exams organised for some time this autumn.

The new options add nothing other than confusion. The idea of holding hundreds of exams later this year sidesteps the fact that Britain is by then likely to be suffering a renewed surge of the COVID-19 disease.

For mock grades to be considered, students will have to appeal their assigned grades through their schools. The exam boards have all indicated that they will continue to charge fees for these appeals, rising to punitive levels when they are judged unsuccessful.

There is also no set standard for how mock exams are conducted—Ofqual says it will release guidance on “valid mock grades” in the coming days. Schools often mark mock exams more harshly, in any case, to challenge students to improve for the real thing. And many students make most of their academic progress in the period leading up to the final exam, after mocks have taken place. Many schools have not even run mock exams for all subjects.

Faced with a far more extensive downgrade than in Scotland, Education Secretary Gavin Williamson declared, “We’re not going to be changing this system again.” In an article in the Daily Telegraph yesterday morning, he stated with astounding cynicism that granting students their teacher-assigned grades “would harm Generation Covid for life.”

Thousands of students have had their futures thrown into chaos by the administrative fiat of a crisis-ridden government. They have been deprived of any individual agency in their own achievement and had months of hard work spat on. But the government’s callous disregard is not simply a question of bureaucracy and incompetence. The A-Levels scandal has exposed the dirty secret of the British education system: that it is social class, not merit, that is really being graded.

Detailed figures have not yet emerged for England, Wales, and Northern Ireland, but the Scottish example is indicative. In the most deprived areas, the proportion of students getting A-C grades was reduced by 15.2 percent. In the richest areas, the figure was 6.9 percent. That a similar process has taken place with the latest results is suggested by the fact that the proportion of private school children achieving A*-A grades this year climbed 4.7 percent—more than double the 2 percent increase in non-grammar state schools.

Schools catering to high numbers of working-class students have experienced devastating downgrades. At Wales High School south east of Rotherham, in one of Yorkshire’s poorer boroughs, 84 percent of the sixth form’s more than 130 A-Level students have had results lowered. Further education colleges, attended by more disadvantaged pupils on average, are reporting their lowest grade profiles ever, especially in the A-C grades, with some institutions seeing more than 50 percent of their results adjusted downward.

The education system launders class privilege into academic achievement, granting the sons and daughters of the rich—with access to the best schools and educational resources, private tutors, and more secure home environments—high grades, used to access the rarefied elite of Britain’s top universities. In 2018, the Sutton Trust found that 60 percent of private school pupils in higher education attend Russell Group universities, compared to less than a quarter of pupils in state comprehensives and sixth forms. Even this figure obscures the true scale of inequality, as the most successful state schools are found in areas monopolised by affluent households.

When this system was disrupted by the coronavirus crisis, the Scottish and UK governments swung into action to ensure the working class was kept in its proper place—at the bottom of the pile. The class logic behind their actions was nakedly espoused by Sturgeon before the SNP was forced to retreat. Speaking to Channel 4 News, she said it was “necessary to make sure we have a credible—and that’s important for young people—system of results.

“Without that system of moderation, I would be saying that 85 percent of young people in our most deprived areas had passed Highers [the Scottish qualification] this year, compared to around 65 percent last year and in previous years.”

Comments like these underline the ruling class’s execrable hypocrisy in pushing for the unsafe reopening of schools with the claim that they are concerned for disadvantaged pupils’ and students’ wellbeing. The same people touting the importance of reopening schools for improving children’s life chances are happy to write off those chances with the stroke of a pen.

Students and teachers are determined to resist this injustice. At protests in Scotland, young people carried homemade signs with the slogans, “Classism at its finest,” “Judge my work, not my postcode,” “My postcode should not define me,” and “Stop the postcode lottery.”

The hashtag “#WilliamsonResign” was trending on social media for much of yesterday. A petition started by schoolteacher Neil Brownhill, calling on the government to “Allow teachers to give honest predicted grades for their students,” and “Allow any students who feel they could have done better than their prediction to re-sit the exam in November” on a purely voluntary basis, has gained around 150,000 signatures.

Strikes spread in Belarus as EU, Washington step up pressure

Andrea Peters

Anti-government protests against Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko continue to grow, as a police crackdown fails to suppress popular anger over the results of last Sunday’s presidential election. On Monday, the country’s Central Election Commission declared Lukashenko had secured 80 percent of the ballots cast, decisively defeating his main contender, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya. There is a widespread belief that the government, which has been under Lukashenko’s control for 26 years, falsified the tally.

Yesterday, thousands of demonstrators poured into the capital Minsk. Protesters are also taking to the streets in smaller cities around the country. Workers at Belarus’ major auto plant, BelAZa, have gone out on strike, and they have been joined by fellow autoworkers at other enterprises, including metallurgy, electronics and technology, pharmaceutical, fertilizer, ceramics and other factories. Healthcare workers and members of the Minsk Philharmonia have also walked off the job.

Autoworkers at BelAZa factory on strike

The strikes and demonstrations are occurring in defiance of mass arrests and in opposition to the use of police violence to suppress social opposition. As of Thursday, the Belarusian Ministry of Internal Affairs had arrested more than 6,000 people and killed two demonstrators. The OMON, Belarus’ militarized police force, has attempted to drive back crowds with water cannons, tear gas, rubber bullets and stun grenades.

One autoworker at BelAZa told the press that the OMON snatched a fellow worker off the street as he returned home from the factory, and he has not been heard from since. BelAZa strikers have raised an outcry over the fact that the OMON are bussed into neighborhoods in the same vehicles that the workers produce.

The central demand raised so far by protesters and strikers has been for Lukashenko’s resignation. “Get out!” is a common slogan at protests and on picket lines. Demonstrators are also calling for an end to state violence, the freeing of political prisoners, and the holding of new elections. There are also indications of nationalist sentiment, with “Long Live Belarus” shouted by protesters.

Thus far, social and economic demands do not appear to have come to the forefront of the strikes, but the political oppression faced by the Belarusian working class is entirely bound up with its intense exploitation at the hands of the capitalist class—domestic and foreign alike. Decades of poverty wages, cuts in social spending, and most recently, the government’s homicidal indifference to the COVID-19 pandemic, are all fueling social discontent.

The factory walkouts occurred in response to an appeal issued by NEXTA on the social media platform Telegram for a general strike. NEXTA is an online channel run by the former sportswriter and musician turned blogger and oppositionist Stepan Putilo, who currently resides in Poland. He left Belarus because of persecution by the Lukashenko government for his oppositional activities.

Putilo is one of a number of “anti-corruption” social media personalities who have emerged in recent years, a type that hides support for free-market capitalism under the cover of appeals for “democracy.” A central demand advanced by NEXTA is for Tikhanovskaya to simply be awarded the Belarusian presidency.

Tikhanovskaya, who entered the race after her husband, another pro-democracy opposition blogger, was arrested, ran a largely empty campaign that appealed to little more than “free and fair elections.” Portrayed as simply a brave mother and housewife standing against the regime, she was backed by different wings of Belarus’ right-wing opposition and lauded by the Western media. None of these forces have the slightest concern for the democratic rights of the Belarusian masses, who they look upon as objects of exploitation and political pawns to be used in the broader struggle over the geostrategically important territory occupied by Belarus.

The explosion of popular opposition to Lukashenko—a deeply corrupt, former Stalinist turned wealthy autocrat—is being utilized by the United States and the European Union (EU) to advance their aims against Russia. Minsk has long been a key ally of Moscow and is the last remaining territorial bulwark against NATO on Russia’s western frontier.

Washington has been working to draw Belarus into its orbit, and since 2019 has been in the process of restoring full diplomatic relations with the country after a two-and-a-half-decade hiatus. If it is unable to achieve this with Lukashenko, it will work to achieve it without him. Earlier this week, in a staggering display of hypocrisy, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo released a statement denouncing “ongoing violence against protesters and the detention of opposition supporters” in Belarus. These are the very same actions currently being carried out by the Trump administration in major cities across the United States.

Washington’s right-wing, anti-Russian allies in the Baltics, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, are being pushed forward to pressure Lukashenko. Lithuania has given political refuge to Tikhanovskaya, and the three states have outlined a three-point plan that Belarus must adopt if it wishes to avoid punitive measures. In addition to ending the violence and freeing prisoners, the Baltic states are demanding that Belarus create a “national council of representatives of the state and civil society, whose goal would be to find ways out of the crisis.” This is a set-up, as everyone knows, that Lukashenko cannot accede to without effectively losing political power.

The EU announced Tuesday that it will meet today to discuss sanctions against Belarus, and EU ambassadors made a show Thursday of laying wreaths at the sight where an anti-government demonstrator was killed. A statement from Brussels declared that the EU is preparing to take “measures against those responsible for the observed violence, unjustified arrests, and falsification of election results.”

The EU’s efforts to portray it and its member countries as champions of Belarusian democracy and defenders of Belarus’ peaceful protesters are grotesque. In France, the government beats up, arrests and disperses with brute force “yellow vest” protesters. In Poland—on the very days that demonstrators were being arrested in Belarus—police were kicking, crushing the necks of, and detaining protesters supporting LGBTQ rights. In Germany, the far-right AfD wields broad sway over the entire political system.

Among the chorus of those condemning Lukashenko is the government of Ukraine, where neo-Nazis hold top military appointments and bands of paramilitary gangs maraud through the country killing opponents.

It remains unclear as to how the protests and strikes will develop in the coming days and weeks. The embattled Lukashenko regime issued an appeal Thursday for citizens to send in video-recordings of the “provocateurs” it insists are behind the demonstrations. There are some signs that support for Lukashenko within the state apparatus itself is beginning to give way. An audio recording of the head of the Central Election Commission in Vitebsk, Sergei Pitalenko, was released in which the bureaucrat states that the election results were falsified and that officials were instructed by higher-ups to change the vote tallies.

The central question facing the Belarusian working class is one of mobilizing independently of and in opposition to not just Lukashenko, but all the so-called advocates of “democracy” in Belarus. The battle going on between the regime in Minsk and its domestic and foreign opponents is not one between autocrats and alleged supporters of “human rights” and “freedom.”

The imperialist powers, led by the United States, see Belarus as a pawn within their larger struggle to assert control over the Eurasian landmass. This involves, most centrally, military conflict with Russia and China. They are prepared to unleash slaughter in the region, and the Belarusian population—of which 70 percent speaks Russian as its first language at home—will suffer the consequences. Lukashenko, as well as Vladimir Putin in Russia, having failed to come to a deal with imperialism that will allow them to continue exploiting the working class in the vast region under their control, resort to violence and oppression in an effort to hold onto power.

A unified struggle of the working class of Belarus and Russia, linked with fellow workers in Europe, Asia, and the Americas, is the only basis upon which both imperialism and the post-Soviet ruling class can be defeated. The program that is required is not one of “free and fair elections” but of socialist internationalism.

France holds joint military exercises with Greece, threatening Turkey

Ulaş Ateşçi & Alex Lantier

French President Emmanuel Macron ordered joint military exercises by French and Greek forces yesterday in the eastern Mediterranean, in response to renewed Turkish oil exploration in waters disputed by Greece and Turkey. As the COVID-19 pandemic intensifies pre-existing political and strategic conflicts, the danger of war between the NATO powers is mounting.

On Wednesday, Macron had demanded Turkey stop “unilateral decisions on oil exploration.” He added he would “temporarily reinforce the French military presence in the eastern Mediterranean in the coming days, in cooperation with European partners, including Greece.”

Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis hailed this move, claiming: “Emmanuel Macron is a true friend of Greece and a fervent defender of European values and international law.”

Yesterday, France’s Army Ministry stated that it would send two Rafale fighter jets and the frigate Lafayette to the eastern Mediterranean. This deployment, it added, aims “to stress France’s attachment to freedom of movement, the security of maritime navigation in the Mediterranean and the respect of international law.” These forces have arrived in the southern Greek island of Crete, while two French Rafales also landed in Cyprus, according to Reuters and Anadolu agency reports.

France’s belligerent intervention came after Ankara announced that its seismic research vessel Oruç Reis would resume operations in disputed waters for two weeks. These announcements have escalated tensions between Ankara and Athens. Turkish officials announced that their fighters and warships will escort the Oruç Reis and auxiliary vessels in the region, which Greek warships are also shadowing.

Greece issued a statement demanding that Turkey “immediately end its illegal actions that undermine peace and security in the region.” Its armed forces have been placed on high alert. Mitsotakis warned Wednesday of “the risk of an accident” when “so many naval forces gather in a limited area” and blamed Ankara for this situation.

A danger of “accident” that could rapidly escalate an all-out war emerged when Greek coast guards opened fire on a private boat off the island of Rhodes in the Aegean Sea on Tuesday. They wounded two Turkish and one Syrian civilian aboard.

The Mitsotakis government has also requested an emergency meeting of European Union (EU) foreign ministers over the dispute. The EU foreign ministers are to meet today. At another meeting in Vienna, Greek foreign minister and visiting US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are to discuss the growing tensions in the region.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has combined calls for dialogue with threatening language. On Thursday, he said negotiation with Athens as “the only way to a resolution in the Eastern Mediterranean,” but accused Greece and Cyprus of “malicious intent,” and added: “No country or company can conduct surveys in our areas without our permission.”

Erdoğan also criticised French President Macron’s blatant neo-colonial interference in Lebanon after the deadly blast in Beirut, stating: “Macron and others like him only want to bring the colonial period back through their actions in the region.”

Çağatay Erciyes from Turkish Foreign Ministry tweeted Monday: “Greece claims 40,000 square kilometres of maritime jurisdiction area due to this tiny island [of] Kastellorizo, which lies 2 kilometres from the Turkish mainland and 580 kilometres from the Greek mainland.”

In July, tensions over oil exploration in the region nearly escalated into a military clash between the two NATO powers. After German Chancellor Angela Merkel intervened to calm tensions, Ankara stated that it has stopped research activities during the Berlin-backed negotiations with Athens. However, the attempted dialogue collapsed within only a few weeks amid growing rivalries between the imperialist and regional powers for energy resources and strategic advantage.

These conflicts flow from the imperialist-led scramble to re-divide the profits and resources of the regions launched by the 2011 imperialist war in Libya and the proxy war in Syria. The discovery of undersea oil and gas reserves in the Mediterranean has only intensified these conflicts. While imperialist powers wage war to advance the interests of transnational corporations like France’s Total and Italy’s ENI oil firms, regional powers like Turkey, Greece and Egypt fight for crumbs from imperialist looting operations.

NATO’s destruction of Muammar Gaddafi’s regime in Libya in 2011, in which France played a leading role, has had far-reaching and explosive consequences. On August 6, Egypt and Greece signed an agreement on the “delimitation of maritime jurisdictions” between the two countries. This cut across rival maritime claims agreed by Turkey and Fayez al-Sarraj’s Government of National Accord (GNA) in the Libyan capital Tripoli, which vastly expanded Turkey’s territorial waters to justify its claims on oil in the eastern Mediterranean.

Last month, the Egyptian parliament approved the deployment of its army to Libya to support French and Russian-backed Khalifa Haftar’s forces against Italian- and Turkish-backed GNA, whose forces are advancing on the coastal city of Sirte and the airbase at Jufra.

After Macron declared the NATO alliance “brain dead” last year, Paris declared its support for Cairo in a potential confrontation with Turkey in Libya. The French navy then conducted joint maritime training exercises with Egyptian warships last month in the Mediterranean, “in preparation for combat missions against hostile forces.”

Israel’s announcement of “full support” for Greece only further highlights the growing war danger in the region. In a statement, the Israel Foreign Ministry declared: “Israel expresses its full support and solidarity with Greece in its maritime zones and its right to delimit its EEZ [exclusive economic zone].” Israel, Greece and Cyprus are all part of the EastMed pipeline project to transport Eastern Mediterranean gas to Europe via Greece and Italy.

What is ever clearer is that the resources of the eastern Mediterranean and Balkan region cannot be rationally and peacefully developed in the framework of the capitalist nation-state system. As in the 1910s, when the Balkan Wars escalated into World War I between the imperialist powers, growing economic and strategic rivalries in the region threaten to escalate into overt conflict between major military powers, tearing the NATO alliance apart.

The only way to oppose such a development is to mobilise the working class internationally in a socialist and anti-war movement against imperialism.

Under these conditions, bourgeois opposition parties on the both sides of the Aegean support the aggressive, militaristic policies of the Greek and Turkish governments.

Alexis Tsipras, the former Greek prime minister and current leader of the pro-austerity Syriza (“Coalition of the Radical Left”) party, issued a warmongering call to mobilise the Greek military against Turkey. On Tuesday, he said: “The way in which these illegal seismic activities must and can be prevented is known to our Armed Forces since October 2018, when they attempted it effectively. We have full confidence in their abilities.”

Faik Öztrak, the spokesperson of the Kemalist Republican People’s Party (CHP), indicated his party’s full support for the eastern Mediterranean policy of the Erdoğan government: “It is right that the Oruç Reis research vessel is deployed in the area.”

The only way out from these growing conflicts is an independent political intervention by the Greek, Turkish, French and international working class on an internationalist and socialist perspective aiming to overthrow the outmoded capitalist nation-state system, the root cause of war.

Beached Japanese cargo ship causes ecological disaster for Mauritius

Tom Casey

On July 25, the MV Wakashio, a freight vessel owned by the Japanese firm Okiyo Maritime Corp., a subsidiary of Nagashiki Shipping Co. Ltd., collided with a coral reef barrier near the southern coast of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. Nearly two weeks later, on August 6, the vessel began to leak approximately a thousand metric tons of its fuel into the surrounding waters. This week, as the spill grew from covering 3.3 km2 to 27 km2, the Mauritian government claims to have successfully pumped 3,000 of the remaining 4,000 tons of fuel from the ship’s hold.

MV Wakashio hull damage. Source: submitted to the WSWS by a Mauritian worker

The spill will have a devastating impact on the surrounding area’s incredibly biodiverse ecology. The vessel ran aground approximately a mile off the coast of the Île aux Aigrettes (Egrets Island) and the Pointé D’Esny Wetland. The former is home to a large number of rare and endangered wildlife and includes the world’s only remaining patch of Mauritian dry coastal forest. This particular terrain is hypothesized by scientists to have been the preferred habitat of the now extinct species that was native only to this exact region of the world—the dodo bird.

Pointé D’Esny Wetland was established in 2001 as an area covered under the Ramsar Convention, which is also known as the convention on “Wetlands of International Importance especially as Waterfowl Habitat.” In 2017, when the Ramsar Convention’s leadership partnered with United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) World Heritage Center (WHC), the area became an officially protected site by the two conventions.

The fuel leak also threatens the Mahébourg fishing reserve, which lies barely a few miles the north of the grounded freighter. Happy Khambule, the senior climate and energy campaign manager for Greenpeace Africa, stated that “[t]housands of species around the pristine lagoons of Blue Bay, Pointe d’Esny and Mahebourg are at risk of drowning in a sea of pollution, with dire consequences for Mauritius’ economy, food security, and health.”

Copernicus Sentinel data 2020. Source: Wikimedia Commons

On August 7, the Mauritian government under Prime Minister Pravind Jugnauth (Militant Socialist Movement/MSM) declared a state of emergency and requested international assistance. The administration then mobilized the country’s National Coast Guard (NCG) as well as the assistance of Polyeco, a privately held waste management firm based in Greece. French President Emmanuel Macron issued a tweet of support for the Jugnauth government and announced that that France would be deploying “teams and equipment,” which would consist of both from military and civilian personnel from the nearby French overseas department and region of Réunion.

The Greenpeace International senior portfolio manager and former environmental advisor to the Mauritian Prime Minister Mokshanand Sunil Dowarkasing (MSM) announced that the cleanup involved removing the remaining fuel from the vessel while avoiding breaking vessel in half, which could result in the further release of the toxic liquid.

Like many shipping vessels, the MV Wakashio was registered in a country unrelated to its owners, in this case Panama. Shipping lines shop around for countries with looser regulations in a system referred to as “flags of convenience.” This enables them to pay lower wages, provide worse accommodations for their crew, and cut corners on maintenance. In 2019, ships registered to Panama accounted for 30 percent of all ships detained for failing port inspections across the Indian Ocean.

Mauritius, Madagascar, and eastern coast of Mozambique. Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors

The disaster has sparked widespread concern by the Mauritian population. As a measure of this outpouring, a public Facebook group of more than 40,000 members was created specifically for the purpose of civilian volunteers to coordinate cleanup activities. There have been many reports of Mauritians of all ages donating locks of their hair to be used for the absorption of the leaked fuel.

In the wake of the recent July 11 protests against the Jugnauth administration, the popular concern for the environmental impact of the fuel spill has also taken on a broad anti-government character. As the WSWS reported, last month’s demonstrations were held in response to the savage austerity policies that were carried out in the name of protecting the Mauritian population against COVID-19. Jugnauth has also received bitter criticism over his handling of the situation facing its thousands of stranded maritime workers who have spent months waiting to be returned from marooned vessels around the world. The government was widely denounced by workers for implementing exorbitant repatriation fees as a boon for its major tourism companies.

A Mauritian worker, in a statement given anonymously to the WSWS for fear of retaliation by the state, denounced the role of the Jugnauth administration in the handling of the MV Wakashio disaster. “I think our government is at fault, completely. The NCG was aware that there was a potential problem, and while they were in a position to do something about it, they didn’t take any action.”

MV Wakashio Oil Spill on southern coast of Mauritius Island. Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors

Referring to the exclusion of local Mauritian news outlets to Jugnauth’s press conferences which were recently held in Blue Bay, a coastal area close to the spill, the worker continued, “our Prime Minister is acting like a dictator now. All of the civil servants are his own men—the police commissioner, the law, and the speaker in parliament. Many Mauritians really want Jugnauth to resign.”

The worker also denounced the administration’s recent crackdown on free speech, which has included the April 15 arrest of Rachna Seenauth, a former assistant to the Mauritian president, for creating a social media post that satirized the Jugnauth government. “They have agents all over the internet just to patrol social media. If you post something that the Prime Minister doesn’t like, he’ll send the police to arrest you without any warrant. Just imagine. …”

Sunday’s Forbes article, in which its author practically salivates over what he doubtlessly views as potentially profitable solutions to global environmental shipping crises, makes clear that American business views such events not as crimes against the quality and safety of human life, but rather as opportunities to wrench profits from untapped markets. “Whilst the technological revolution in favor of sustainability is being led by many innovative technology companies, policy making lags far behind. The disaster in Mauritius shows there is a need for…(t)he creation of a global ‘Ocean Mission Control’ to support local authorities around the world, particularly in poorer countries who would otherwise lack critical scale to access such resources. The governance of such a resource will need to be more akin to an agile, purpose-driven Silicon Valley startup than traditional international structures.”

While Mauritian workers correctly oppose the blatant corruption of the Jugnauth government and the business interests it represents, they should be wary of attempts to channel their opposition behind both national and imperialist capitalist drives to profit from the Wakashio ecological disaster. There exists no genuine contingency for democratic rights or environmental protection among the political representatives of the Mauritian bourgeoisie, nor among the international capitalist class.

Mounting opposition against school openings in Germany

Carola Kleinert & Gregor Link

According to official figures, the coronavirus pandemic is now claiming around 6,000 lives worldwide every day. In the US alone, the virus is killing nearly 1,500 people every day. Although the number of new daily infections in Germany is at its highest level in three months, with 1,226 cases on Tuesday, Berlin’s Senator for Education Andrea Scheeres (SPD) allowed schools to reopen on Monday based on compulsory attendance and full operation.

At the same time, the Berlin state government, consisting of a coalition of the SPD, Left Party and the Greens, has waved aside the scientifically required minimum distance of 1.50 meters to protect against infection. More than 370,000 students at Berlin’s schools, together with 87,000 apprentices, plus all of their teachers, returned to full classes without mask protection at the beginning of this week.

Students of the Robert-Koch vocational college sit with face masks in the classroom during computer science lessons in Dortmund, Germany, Thursday, Aug. 13, 2020. (AP Photo/Martin Meissner)

The states of Brandenburg, Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein also resumed regular schooling on Monday. Schools reopened in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania last week and in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany’s most populated state, on Wednesday this week.

The red-red-green Berlin state government led by Mayor Michael Müller and Education Senator Sandra Scheeres (both SPD) has—contrary to the reservations expressed by serious virologists—unashamedly capitulated to the demands of big business: in order for companies to benefit from the labour of parents, their children must return to school at all costs.

This is clearly outlined in a joint statement of the Chamber of Industry and Commerce (IHK), the Hotel and Restaurant Federation (Dehoga), the Trade Association and Employer’s Federations (UVB) last Saturday: “It is in the interest of entrepreneurs and their coworkers that their children are again reliably educated and cared for.” According to the business bosses, it is “high time that the regular operation of Berlin schools starts up again.”

There has been an angry response in social media to such statements and the state government’s policy of opening up schools. Kathy, a Berlin teacher, explained on Twitter: “The welfare of children is constantly being cited as the main reason for opening schools.” The demands of the business federations, she continued, are “incredibly inhuman.” One of Kathy’s colleagues notes: “The UVB is apparently the association to which Scheeres and the Senate report directly.”

Jasmin, a primary school teacher in Berlin, spoke to the World Socialist Web Site about the conditions at her school and what should be done. She described the plan of the Berlin state government as “completely ridiculous.” In its “model hygiene plan,” she said, the Berlin Senate decreed “that rooms should be properly aired for several minutes at least once per lesson and during breaks. However, prior to the summer holiday, many windows could not be opened properly for security reasons. But narrow and poorly ventilated rooms offer ideal conditions for COVID-19 to spread.”

Twitter user Dieter R. has a similar view. He writes about the hypocritical reminder by Family Minister Franziska Giffey to regularly air schools: “In many schools the windows cannot be opened at all because otherwise they would fall out! In whole corridors one cannot even put windows on tilt! And what good is it anyway to tilt windows in a class of 30 kids? There is hardly any fresh air in the classroom and no ventilation. This is all just a bad excuse—like the alleged measures agreed by the KMK [Conference of Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs].”

Even regular hand washing and disinfecting remain “as chaotic as it was prior to the summer holidays,” Jasmin points out. “Our school has only one cleaner for the entire school building, just like before the pandemic! For less than 11 euros per hour he cleans from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.—after he has finished with the last toilet, he can start all over again. The very dirty toilets and rooms are horrific and exceed one’s best efforts. The school washrooms are cleaned around midday—although that should really be done in the morning. Sometimes there is only one functioning sink and soap dispenser. In the rooms themselves, the floor is only swept once a day by the cleaner.”

The teachers and education assistants, according to Jasmin, have to take on cleaning duties in addition to their existing duties. For example, “before and after each break in the yard” they have to ensure “that primary school children wash their hands thoroughly in the washrooms individually.” They are also responsible for disinfecting the premises and surfaces: “During our breaks, we have to disinfect all surfaces after each change of class. In the computer rooms, all keyboards, mice and monitors must be disinfected after every use. Teachers have to use their breaks between classes for cleaning and watching over toilets.”

In a statement to the WSWS, Ingo R., the head of the classroom care team in his child’s class, criticised the lack of cooperation between parents and school staff: “I think it’s a pity that many head teachers don’t engage in proper dialogue with parents,” he said. “I have met many parents who would have liked to have transferred the technical tools of the working world to the world of school.”

But while many teachers, parents and students are opposed to opening schools under unsafe conditions, the Berlin school authorities are arrogantly ignoring these concerns. Instead, Scheeres announced the establishment of a “Hygiene Advisory Board,” consisting of doctors, child psychologists, parents, students and politicians, i.e., with the exclusion of teachers, which is to meet in a “working group.”

“So instead of measures backed by medical experts, there will first be a working group,” Sven D., a Berlin teacher, noted on Facebook. “Then they have won time again to do nothing. And then to make sure they don’t get any work afterwards, they gather together groups of people who represent the ‘right’ positions. This virus was first detected in Germany over six months ago, more than 9,200 people have since died, including pupils and teachers—and now a working group is being set up. This administration is unwilling to work and is prepared to go over dead bodies with its laziness and incompetence.”

His colleague Andreas S. writes: “Why hasn’t money been pumped into the school system for months? Not even now, when oversized classes, small classrooms, a lack of ventilation systems and lack of equipment become life-threatening?”

Based on the findings of international leading virologists and epidemiologists the WSWS has repeatedly warned that the specific conditions prevail in businesses and schools provide optimal conditions for so-called “superspreading” events. The virologist at Berlin’s Charité hospital, Christian Drosten, along with many other scientists, has repeatedly stated that appropriate distance rules and the use of personal protective masks in closed rooms are indispensable to prevent mass outbreaks and chains of infections affecting hundreds of people.

The Berlin Senate’s hygiene concept is not only inadequate, it also fails in practice due to the conditions prevailing in schools. “The formation of smaller groups and the prevention of the mixing of different class groups, which the school authorities stress, will be jettisoned at the latest in the afternoon based on the after-school care system,” Jasmin noted. “There are neither fixed groups nor compulsory masks provided in after-school care. Even if teachers use empty classrooms for after-school care, it is not possible to maintain the group structures existing from previous lessons, because there is not enough care personnel.”

If an infection becomes known in a class group, she continues, “it is the public health department which decides on appropriate quarantine measures. Until this decision is made, only the affected student is quarantined. All others must continue to be educated normally, including any siblings scattered over several classes.”

The crowded public transportation system in the city of Berlin, which most students use to get to school, is another major problem.

There is widespread anger and despair at the decisions and actions of the school authorities. According to a survey conducted by the ARD Press Club, 56 percent of all respondents consider school “normal operation without distance rules” to be irresponsible.

Another contribution by a Berlin teacher on Twitter is significant: “This school in normal operation is a time bomb, now lessons are due to recommence for a while,” she writes, “When you walk through the narrow corridors, you can almost hear the ticking.”

Her colleague Verena apparently speaks for many when she writes: “What is being demanded by politicians now is completely inhumane. Even with a mild progression of the disease, no one really knows what the long-term damage will be. In the end, everyone is at risk of being infected and no one can predict how the virus will actually affect each individual. When the only priorities are ‘education’ and capitalism, I believe we have lost all of our important values.”

“Moreover, there is no guarantee that you will receive a proper education by putting oneself and the lives of loved ones at risk,” she adds ironically.

Jasmin also emphasises the social impact on poor families and their children: “Many students—especially those from poorer families—do not have laptops and pads. Solutions and learning concepts have been available for years: More social staff and translators to work as family helpers, smaller learning groups, more rooms, more teaching staff, better cleaning and equipment of schools. Schools and teachers have suffered huge cuts and are now being pushed into the experimental field of herd immunity, with serious consequences.”

Against this background, Jasmin makes an urgent appeal to her colleagues: “Teachers should refuse to work under these circumstances and go on strike until their demands for smaller classes and more support at all levels of school life are met. This includes cleaning staff, family helpers, translators and other support staff. Free recreational activities should also be organized for children and psychological support services should be established. The money is there. Tax the rich!”

First two weeks of US school reopenings lead to massive spread of COVID-19

Zac Corrigan

Over the past two weeks, numerous school districts across the US resumed in-person instruction, leading to multiple serious outbreaks of COVID-19 affecting thousands of students, educators, school workers and parents. With tens of millions more children slated to return to schools in the coming weeks, the dangers posed are enormous.

The exact spread of the disease through the schools is not known, because there is no national coordination of the school reopening process itself. States and school districts have different policies not only on what constitutes a “safe” reopening, but also on how, or whether, to record COVID-19 outbreaks and publish the data. There are nearly 14,000 school districts across the US, and each is being left to its own devices amid a global pandemic that is spiraling out of control.

The following is a partial list of outbreaks at US schools in just the last two weeks:

• In Georgia, where Governor Brian Kemp does not require masks in schools, Cherokee County School District has recorded at least 84 cases since reopening for face-to-face instruction on August 3. Over 1,400 additional students, teachers and staff at 22 schools across the district were in close contact with these positive cases and are now under two-week quarantine.
  
• Also in Georgia, North Paulding High School was forced to close Monday and Tuesday this week after a student’s photos and videos of students without masks packed into narrow hallways went viral. The school planned to reopen on Wednesday, but by then 35 cases had been reported and the shutdown was extended merely until next week.
  
• At least seven schools in the Houston County School District in central Georgia have reported at least one positive case, and an unknown number have been quarantined.
  
• Delaware Community Schools in Muncie, Indiana, sent 228 students at five schools into quarantine this week after they either exhibited symptoms of COVID-19 or came into contact with a player on the Delta High School football team who tested positive.
  
• In Livingston Parish, Louisiana, 141 students are under quarantine along with 17 teachers and staff, seven of whom tested positive. In Jefferson Parish, all 75 first graders as well as six teachers at Dr. John Ochsner Discovery Health Sciences Academy are now under quarantine after one student tested positive.
  
• At Enterprise City Schools in Alabama, three students tested positive at two school sites. Roughly 120 were quarantined, 27 of them with symptoms and the rest for close contact.
  
• There are 19 cases recorded and an unknown number under quarantine in at least six different schools in Oahu and Kauai, Hawaii.
  
• At Manteca Unified School District in California, two teachers and two staff tested positive during the first week of classes, and more than a dozen teachers are now under quarantine.
  
• Two students tested positive and another seven were quarantined at South Jones High School in Jones County, Mississippi.
  
• This is in fact an international process, and in Berlin, Germany, COVID-19 has been detected in students and staff at eight schools after schools were reopened this week.

The return to in-person classes takes place as the COVID-19 pandemic is still raging through much of the United States. Since August 3, the day many of these schools began in-person teaching, the World Health Organization (WHO) has recorded 11,580 new COVID deaths and more than 575,000 new cases in the US.

This plastic guard, built by a teacher, is not allowed by the school administration.

At least 97,000 children tested positive in the US in the last two weeks of July, and the latest scientific evidence shows that children can not only become severely ill from COVID, but they can also be even more potent spreaders of the disease than adults. A recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), found that babies and young children infected with COVID-19 can carry viral loads in their throats and airways up to 100 times more than adults.

US teachers and students are under immense pressure from the government to accept the deadly policy of a return to school. For the ruling class, the return to in-person schooling is key to the larger policy of a “return to work” for masses of workers.

In response to the pandemic, Democrats and Republicans in Congress passed the CARES Act on a near-unanimous basis, funneling trillions of dollars to the banks and big businesses. Now, their plan is to squeeze this money out of the working class in the form of wage cuts, speedup of production and further attacks on benefits. But in order to do any of this, workers must be at work, and therefore their children must be at school.

A social media post showing the small amount of PPE provided to another teacher.

That is why the reckless rush to open the schools is a bipartisan policy. This involves not only Republicans like Trump, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis—who on Thursday compared teachers to Navy Seals who had to overcome “obstacles” like the commandos that killed Osama bin Laden. It also involves Democrats like New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and others.

The campaign to reopen schools has been met with growing opposition among educators, education workers, parents and students. In addition to numerous car-caravans and other demonstrations, teachers and students have taken to social media to express opposition and to expose the disastrous conditions they confront in the schools, even in the face of threats and recriminations from school administrators.

Spearheading the campaign to reopen schools, the Trump administration has become increasingly strident in its attacks on educators and public education, while stoking divisions between parents and teachers. On Wednesday, Trump held a live-streamed event called “Kids First: Getting America’s Children Safely Back to School,” in which he repeatedly suggested that schools should be defunded if they do not return to full capacity. DeVos slandered teachers by stating that children “can’t be held captive to other people’s fears or agendas.”

Following the lead of Trump, state and local officials are punishing those that speak out or seek to maintain their health and safety. In El Mirage, Arizona, a music teacher faces a fine of $2,000 after he resigned, without sufficient notice, rather than risk contracting COVID-19 by reporting to his school building to teach virtual classes online. A Dysart Unified School District spokesperson said that the district can waive the fee in the case of a medical emergency, but that it was choosing to enforce it during the pandemic, to make sure classrooms are staffed.

The students who revealed the dangerous conditions at Georgia’s North Paulding High School were suspended for unauthorized use of smartphones at school, and the principal was recorded threatening others with “consequences” if they post anything “negative” on social media. The suspensions were only lifted when teachers and students opposed it and the school became the subject of national attention due to the viral leaks.

Nikolai Vitti, superintendent of the Detroit Public Schools Community District, threatened teachers over their use of social media to expose conditions. In an email communique titled “Protection of Employee Freedom of Speech and Limits to It,” he wrote, “guidelines to help employees avoid situation in which [their] expressions may conflict with the district’s interests.” These “guidelines” include the following: “A teacher must not express an opinion for the purpose of persuading students to the teacher’s point of view.”

A teacher writes that this is all the PPE she was provided for the entire school year.

Nonetheless, teachers are taking to social media by the thousands to express their opposition, expose conditions and share information. In particular, Facebook groups containing thousands, or even tens of thousands, of teachers have sprung up in recent weeks, such as Iowa Educators for a Safe Return to School (21,567 members), Illinois for a Safe Return to Campus (32,583), Texas Teachers for Safe Reopening (47,973) and Parents Against The Opening Of Schools (113,505).

Teachers are posting photos of the inadequate cleaning supplies and PPE provided by the schools. One post shows a single mask, a package of alcoholic wipes, and one bottle of disinfectant, noting “this is what the school gave me for PPE for the entire year.” Another teacher quipped, “Seems they forgot the urn for my ashes.”

Many teachers have posted photos of plastic guards they have built with their own supplies, because the schools have not provided any, only to be told by administrators that such elementary protections constructed by teachers are not allowed.

One teacher who made such a makeshift guard wrote movingly, “I got Covid over the summer and it permanently damaged my heart (aortic aneurysm). So, I came up with what I thought was a creative way to further protect myself not that I’m high risk. My largest class is 40, desks are 15 to 18 inches apart, and we don’t have dividers. I was told it is not approved and has to be taken down. Does anyone know why? Who can I take this to?”

In the face of this disaster, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA) continue to collaborate with state and local officials, peddling the lie that schools can be reopened safely. In Chicago, Los Angeles and other cities, the unions have reached deals to start the semester with online learning only but this is maneuver aimed at preventing a revolt by teachers and parents and to give Democratic officials more time to prepare for a full reopening.

The mounting opposition among teachers, education workers, parents and students to the homicidal campaign to reopen schools must become organized and unified across district and state boundaries. The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) calls upon all those opposed to reopening schools to form a network of independent rank-and-file safety committees, independent of the unions, in every school and neighborhood to prepare a nationwide general strike to halt the opening of schools and force the closure of those that have opened. At the same time, these committees must demand full income to parents and caregivers who stay at home with children, a massive funding program to provide high-speed internet access and state-of-the-art online learning, along with universal testing and contact tracing to contain the spread of the virus.

Pitted in a battle against the entire political establishment, educators, school workers, parents and students have powerful allies in the broader working class—autoworkers, logistics, service, health care, and more—who confront the same campaign to force them to work in unsafe conditions. Networks of safety committees must be built in every industry, uniting the working class in a common struggle against the capitalist system and both of the corporate-controlled parties.