Mass student protests in Thailand continue to grow

Owen Howell

At least 10,000 demonstrators attended a rally on Sunday in the Thai capital, Bangkok, in what was the largest protest since the military seized power in 2014. It is the latest in a month of student-led protests that have swept across the nation.

Protesters gathered at the Democracy Monument, flooding the city’s major thoroughfare, Ratchadamnoen Avenue, and holding public speeches for nearly eight hours. The rally’s organisers, the student movement Free Youth, estimated an attendance of between 20,000 and 30,000 people. Hundreds of police were deployed.

The protesters are calling on Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-o-cha and his cabinet to resign. Their three chief demands are: the dissolution of Parliament and a new election, an end to the intimidation and persecution of political opponents, and the drafting of a new constitution.

In addition, protesters are demanding the reform of the monarchy, particularly the revoking of the lèse majesté law, under which it is illegal to “defame, insult, or threaten” the royal family. Penalties under this draconian law, which is used to intimidate and silence critics, involve jail for up to 15 years.

Protesters in Bangkok (Screenshot from a livestream posted by a participant)

Prayuth Chan-o-cha, a former military general, led the 2014 coup d’état that overthrew a democratically elected government and brought the military junta, the National Council for Peace and Order, to power. The current constitution was drafted by 21 appointees of the junta and was designed to prolong military power and block any challenge from opponents.

While the junta ended nominally in 2019, Prayuth became Prime Minister in a blatantly rigged election, with the result that today the military still maintains control over Thailand’s political institutions.

One notable feature of the election was the unexpected rise of the Future Forward Party (FFP), which ran its election campaign on a call for democratic rights and opposition to the military dictatorship. Founded only the year before, the FFP’s leadership consisted largely of young business executives and academic lawyers, representing a dissident layer of the Thai bourgeoisie and affluent middle class.

The FFP won significant support among young people, while also appealing to workers with its calls for a fairer distribution of wealth and a social welfare system that promotes human dignity.” The party finished with 6.3 million votes and garnered the third-largest number of parliamentary seats after Prayuth’s party and the opposition Pheu Thai party linked to former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra.

After the election, the FFP came under relentless attack in the government’s Constitutional Court. Its leader, multimillionaire auto company director, Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit, was accused of violating election law and was disqualified as a member of parliament.

A protracted legal battle ensued over a supposedly illegal donation of $US6 million from Thanathorn to the FFP, which resulted in a blatantly political decision by the constitutional court on February 21 to disband the party. As various commentators noted, the finances of other parties were not similarly scrutinised. Following its disbanding, the elected MPs from the defunct FFP joined its de facto successor, the Move Forward Party.

The court decision provoked shock and outrage among students resulting in a wave of protests in universities and high schools nationwide during which the three main demands were formulated. Concentrated in Bangkok, rallies were held daily until the shutdown of universities in late February due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Protests erupted again on July 18, when a demonstration of 2,500 students at the Democracy Monument was organised by a student movement named Free Youth, a collective of disparate university groups and clubs across the country on the basis of the demands. Protests subsequently spread to at least 44 of the country’s 76 provinces and have been held almost every day.

The protests arose after the government again extended the state of emergency imposed during the pandemic that banned public gatherings. As there had been no confirmed local infections in Thailand for two months, students accused the government of exploiting the pandemic as a pretext for preventing protests.

Opposition had also grown to the “enforced disappearances” of government critics, including the abduction in June of pro-democracy activist Wanchalerm Satsaksit, who was bundled into an unmarked vehicle by armed men in Cambodia and is still missing.

Through late July, protests were organised by various political tendencies within Free Youth, including an LGBT student group campaigning for the legalisation of same-sex marriage. Another grouping aligned itself with the anti-China movements in Hong Kong and Taiwan, collectively dubbed the Milk Tea Alliance.

Protester leaders drew attention to the pandemic’s devastating economic impact on workers. On July 23, a student group called the New Life Network staged a hunger strike outside Government House, making reference to the worsening social conditions and lack of financial aid for the millions of newly-unemployed, many of them students.

A key turning point came on August 3, when human rights lawyer Anon Nampa, 35, delivered a speech raising the demand to reform the monarchy. Anon has a record of defending junta opponents and lèse majesté offenders.

A large rally at Thammasat University’s Rangsit campus on August 10 centred on a manifesto that proclaimed 10 new demands, including the revoking of lèse majesté and reducing the portion of the state budget allocated to the royal palace.

Tatthep Ruangprapaikit, president of Free Youth, told the Manager Daily that it is not their aim to overthrow the monarchy. However, the mounting hostility towards the King was reflected in the popularity of Twitter hashtag #WhyDoWeNeedAKing?, which has been a trending topic over the past two weeks and received millions of tweets.

After his ascent to the throne in 2016, King Vajiralongkorn consolidated his rule by expanding his constitutional powers, taking control of two army units, and direct ownership of the Royal Family’s assets valued at over $US30 billion. During his reign, which has been intimately tied to the military, the lèse majesté law has been frequently used to imprison critics of the monarchy.

Prayuth last week declared that the student demands regarding the monarchy were “unacceptable,” “risky,” and “went too far.” He also confirmed the king, currently taking refuge in Germany, had requested that nobody be prosecuted for lèse majesté for now—a sign of the deep fear in ruling class of sparking far broader unrest.

Shortly after his August 3 speech, Anon and another student leader, Panupong Jadnok, were arrested by police on multiple unrelated charges. Parit Chirawak, 22, a student leader from Thammasat University and outspoken critic of the monarchy, was also arrested for apparently breaking coronavirus regulations. Human Rights Watch reported on Saturday that police are targeting at least 31 other student leaders.

The protest movement shows no signs of subsiding.

Merkel, Macron call Putin as mass strikes escalate in Belarus

Alex Lantier

Strikes continue to spread across Belarus, after the disputed August 9 presidential elections and amid mounting anger at President Aleksandr Lukashenko’s disastrous handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. This weekend, Belarus saw the largest demonstrations since the Stalinist bureaucracy restored capitalism and dissolved the Soviet Union in 1991. Around 200,000 people marched this weekend in the capital, Minsk, demanding Lukashenko’s resignation and denouncing police violence and mass arrests targeting protesters.

The growing mobilization of the working class has alarmed the European bourgeoisie. German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron both called Russian President Vladimir Putin yesterday, before an extraordinary closed-door meeting of the European Council on Belarus today.

Several state-owned factories joined the strike action yesterday, including the Belaruskali potash factory in Soligorsk. The world’s fifth-largest producer of the chemical, used to produce fertilizer, it earns a substantial portion of Belarus’ export earnings. State broadcasters also joined the strike, as well as the Kupalausky Theater in Minsk. Actors at the theater resigned en masse after the director, Pavel Latushko, was fired for siding with protesters.

They were joining strikes, by Minsk transit workers and at auto and tractor factories as well as hospitals, that began on Monday amid calls for a nationwide general strike. Workers are holding public strike meetings in workplaces including Belaruskali and the MSKT tractor plant in Minsk.

Belarusians gather for a protest rally in front of the government building at Independent Square in Minsk, Belarus, Tuesday, Aug. 18, 2020. (AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky)

Union bureaucrats in Belarus are warning the state that they may lose control of the movement, and demanding Lukashenko’s removal to halt the protests. “The authorities should understand that they are losing control. Only Lukashenko’s resignation and punishment of those in charge of rigging and beatings [of protesters] can calm us down,” miners union official Yuri Zakharov told AP yesterday.

Merkel and Macron both called Putin to discuss the political situation in Belarus, a country of just under 10 million people bordering Russia. They transmitted terse reports to the media, indicating deep concern over the situation and calling for power in Belarus to be shared, or transferred to NATO-backed opposition candidate Svetlana Tikhonovskaya.

“The chancellor has emphasized that the Belarusian government must refrain from using violence against peaceful demonstrators, release political prisoners immediately and initiate a national dialogue with the opposition and society in order to overcome the crisis,” said Merkel’s spokesman, Steffen Seibert.

The Élysée presidential palace said Macron told Putin to “favor calm and dialogue” to resolve the crisis. Macron added that the European Union (EU) intends to play a “constructive role … so that violence against the population ceases immediately, and so a political solution can rapidly emerge, respecting aspirations that have been pacifically and massively expressed in recent days.”

The Kremlin, for its part, reported that the call with Merkel was “an in-depth discussion to focus on the developments in Belarus.” It said, “The Russian side stressed that any attempts to interfere in the country’s domestic affairs from the outside, leading to a further escalation of the crisis, would be unacceptable.”

Yesterday, Maria Kolesnikova, a leading figure in the opposition since Tikhonovskaya herself fled to Lithuania after the elections, said a “coordination council” would be formed to negotiate the transfer of power from Lukashenko. She also stressed the opposition’s “desire and readiness to build mutually beneficial relations with all our partner countries, including of course Russia.”

The Financial Times of London wrote that calls from Berlin and Paris to Moscow constituted an “acknowledgment of Moscow’s over-sized influence on both Mr Lukashenko and the Belarusian economy.” It added that the EU powers want Putin to end the movement by brokering a deal between Lukashenko’s and Tikhonovskaya’s supporters: “The hope in European capitals is that Mr Putin will use that influence to engineer a peaceful resolution to the crisis.”

After the New York Times and the Washington Post in America published editorials this week demanding Lukashenko’s ouster, the FT warned against overt attempts at regime change, citing Eugene Rumer of the Carnegie Endowment think-tank: “Any future leader of Belarus will have to maintain good relations with the Kremlin and pay a certain amount of deference to its sensitivities and sensibilities. To attempt a different course would be unrealistic, dangerous, and run counter to the attitudes of the Belarusian public. Friends of Belarus need to recognise that.”

Such claims to respect Russia and abhor police violence against protesters are shot through with imperialist hypocrisy. While Merkel’s government played the leading role together with Washington in orchestrating a fascist-led coup in 2014 to oust a Russian-backed government in Kiev, plunging Ukraine into civil war, Macron is infamous for his violent police repression of social protests at home. However, it is apparent that Merkel and Macron are reacting to what they perceive as a new and dangerous political development.

Le Monde warned, “The Belarusian movement does not resemble any of the color revolutions that have shaken the post-Soviet space. It does not defend a Western model or oppose Russia.” The daily added that “no one can foresee what the coming days will bring. But one truth is self-evident: this small country … is undergoing accelerating change that is without precedent since the fall of the USSR in 1991. We—the experts, diplomats, and journalists—did not see it coming.”

The EU powers are moving somewhat more cautiously because, surprised by the strike movement, they want the opposition and the Putin regime to jointly strangle it. For now at least, they propose to deal with the threat from below before resuming the aggressive military build-up across Eastern Europe targeting Russia, begun with the Kiev coup.

Workers in Belarus need to organize a politically independent struggle against both Lukashenko and the opposition forces around Tikhonovskaya. Lukashenko, who has ruled Belarus since 1994, is a reactionary strongman presiding over the capitalist kleptocracy that emerged from the Stalinist bureaucracy’s restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union in 1991 and its resulting looting of state assets. But the opposition represents only another faction of the same kleptocracy, maneuvering between the NATO imperialist powers and the Putin regime.

Opposition leaders like Viktor Babariko, a former banker at the Belgazprombank owned by Russian state gas firm Gazprom, or Valery Tsepkalo, a businessman who worked closely with Lukashenko before fleeing to Russia this April, have no principled differences with the regime. The EU is willing to install them in power, because they would continue austerity and Lukashenko’s murderous “herd immunity” policy on COVID-19, which the EU also implements at home.

Nils Schmid of the German Social-Democratic Party (SPD) told Deutschlandfunk that his preferred model for regime change in Belarus is not the 2014 Kiev putsch, but the restoration of capitalism and the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

He said, “the broad popular movement in Belarus recalls more the change in Eastern Europe in 1989–1990. So I also think the model for organizing a political transition is more sitting around a round table than a movement that in one blow from the streets topples the regime. Lukashenko is still holding onto power, until now very few officials—mayors or security forces—have broken with him.”

To fight COVID-19, poverty wages and police-state violence, the principal allies of workers in Belarus are workers across Europe, Russia and internationally. As the EU hands out trillions of euros in bank and corporate bailouts for the super-rich, it is clear that the ruling class will neither provide the resources needed to treat the pandemic, nor halt the explosion of military-police violence across Europe. The workers must take control of the urgently-needed resources, which are created by their own labor, as part of an international struggle to take power and build socialism.

Within Belarus and Russia, this means opposing the bankrupt political settlement that emerged from capitalist restoration in the Soviet Union, breaking with parties and unions affiliated to the regime or the imperialist-backed opposition, and a turn to the Trotskyist movement’s struggle for Marxist internationalism against Stalinism’s nationalist and counter-revolutionary role in the Soviet Union.

COVID-19 overtakes accidents as third leading cause of death in the US as testing continues to decline

Benjamin Mateus

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released a press brief Monday noting that the number of fatalities currently attributed to COVID-19 make it the third leading cause of death in the United States this year, behind heart disease and cancer.

The Worldometer’s COVID-19 tracker places the number of confirmed cases in the United States over 5.6 million, with 175,000 deaths as of this writing and the toll continues to rise by more than 1,000 every day. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington currently forecasts that over 251,000 Americans will have lost their lives to COVID-19 by November 1 if current projections hold.

According to the CDC, the ten leading causes of death for the non-pandemic year 2018 in descending order were heart disease (647,457), cancer (599,108), accidents/unintentional injuries, (169,936), chronic lower respiratory disease (160,201), stroke (146,383) Alzheimer disease (121,404), diabetes (83,564), Influenza and pneumonia (55,672), kidney disease (50,633) and suicide (47,173).

The first official COVID-19 death occurred on February 28 in Seattle, Washington, a man in his 50s who had underlying health conditions. However, postmortem testing on deaths from Santa Clara County suggests the first deaths took place earlier in the month.

Patient in an Intensive Care Unit

The sole fact that COVID-19 deaths have become the third leading (preventable) cause of death in the US speaks to the utter negligence and criminality on the part of the Trump administration and the ruling class. Had lockdown been initiated earnestly two weeks earlier than was the case in March, epidemiologists estimate 54,000 fewer people would have died by early May when the official death toll surpassed 70,000.

Ali Mokdad, a professor of Global Health at the IHME, speaking to Healthline about the US death toll fast approaching a quarter million people, said, “Unfortunately, that is the track we’re on. We have pretty much totally relaxed some of our social distancing mandates because there is a big concern about the economy…These are not just numbers. These are loved ones, family members, essential workers who sustain our economy.”

The latest predictions have not taken into account excess mortality figures, which the New York Times found show that at least 200,000 more people have died than usual since March, 60,000 higher than the number of deaths that have been directly linked to COVID-19.

To place the toll of the current pandemic into its proper historical context, it would be worthy to briefly review a recent study that compared its impact so far to the devastating Spanish flu which stuck the globe a little over 100 years ago.

Nurse from 1918 with guidance to the public (Credit: Photo by Everett/Shutterstock)

The 1918 H1N1 influenza pandemic killed 675,000 people in the United States. In a comparative study recently published in JAMA Network, during the peak of the 1918 pandemic in New York City (NYC), 31,589 all-cause deaths occurred among 5,500,000 residents. This yielded a mortality incidence rate of 287 deaths per 100,000 persons-months. This was 2.8 times higher than the preceding four years, which averaged around 100 deaths per 100,000 persons-month.

During the height of the COVID-19 outbreak in NYC in April, 33,465 all-cause deaths occurred among a population of 8,280,000, placing the incidence rate at 202 deaths per 100,000 persons-months. The scale of incident deaths during the COVID-19 pandemic is very much comparable to the health crisis that affected the city a century ago.

However, given the advances in medicine, public health, and safety, the incidence of all-cause mortality in the preceding years was 50 per 100,000 persons-month. In other words, the all-cause mortality compared to the previous years, from 2017 to 2019, is 4.15 times higher. In this light, to equate the present coronavirus pandemic to the seasonal flu is simply malicious.

The opening of the economy in late spring coincided with the ramping up of COVID-19 testing and apparent plateau in infections. What many commentators did not take an adequate measure of was that the number of cases across the country appeared stable because New York state was seeing dramatic declines in their new cases after implementing a massive shutdown of the city. What was happening in the rest of the country was a rapid increase in numbers hidden in the static created by New York’s massive amount of cases.

Comparison between Spanish Flu and COVID-19 in NYC

Once New York State’s numbers had plummeted sufficiently, it became evident that the half-hearted measures in the rest of the country had done little to contain the pandemic.

Testing was now clearly revealing that the epidemic had become deeply entrenched along a broad geographic region leading Trump to make his infamous complaint that, with more testing, you get more cases. As cases rose to record heights, death followed with the gruesome scenes witnessed in New York replayed in Florida, Texas, Arizona and elsewhere throughout the country.

As hospitals in these states filled up and morgues pushed to over-capacity, mandates were reinstituted for social distancing and mask wearing. Bars and restaurants were ordered closed by governors who had been utterly resistant to imposing any restrictions as the virus spread into their communities.

However, as schools were preparing to reopen for face-to-face classes in a few weeks, the scope of “more” testing became a point of contention for the White House. In mid-July, in conjunction with the transfer of responsibility on hospitalization reporting from the CDC to the Department of Health and Human Services there was a sudden decline in the number of daily testing across the country, predominately in the hardest-hit states. Not surprisingly, the decrease in the number of new cases quickly followed as reports were appearing that the virus was spreading in states like Georgia, Mississippi, Tennessee, Missouri, and Iowa.

Yesterday, the New York Times reported that there had been only 40,022 new cases confirmed on Monday, with only 542 deaths. The weekly average had dropped 16 percent from two weeks before to 50,543 cases per day. Over the same intervening period, the seven-day average for tests per day had fallen 10 percent to 736,000.

Sadiya Khan, assistant professor of cardiology and preventive medicine at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, told U . S . News & World Report, “I want to be enthusiastic about the numbers going down, but it’s really hard to convince me that it’s not because we’re just doing fewer tests. The dramatic drop is very concerning while we see schools reopening, businesses reopening, and we’re trying to move our economy forward, and yet we’re not prepared.” On Tuesday, the US conducted 642,814 tests, according to the Covid Tracking Project, well below the already falling average.

The blame has been cast on a lack of capacity for such a large number of testing caused by a shortage of supplies, trained personnel, and machines that can perform mass throughput analysis, which has led to delays in reporting numbers. The nature of decentralized private labs without a coordinated national supply chain has been cited as the main factor. Several media outlets have noted that the number of people going to testing sites has been declining out of apathy and frustrations with long delays in reporting. A survey conducted by CNBC found almost 40 percent of Americans had to wait more than three days for their results, which makes the results useless as the window for contact tracing is 48 hours or less.

According to TIME, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is supposedly working with states in an attempt to resolve these bottlenecks. National stockpiles are empty, and so FEMA competes with labs for the same supplies. They write, “FEMA sends supplies it receives to the states, which then send them to the labs. But health policy experts and lab directors interviewed by TIME say it’s unclear how many supplies FEMA is procuring and how the states are distributing them.”

Adding to the confusion, major case reporting errors have further exacerbated accurate counting. The Associated Press reported that in Iowa, “potentially thousands of coronavirus infections from recent weeks and months have instead been erroneously recorded as having happened in March, April, May, and June.” Last week the California Department of Health and Human Services Secretary reported that a server outage led to delays in reporting results from a backlog of 250,000 to 300,000 tests.

With declining testing, there is a correlation with rising test positivity. Johns Hopkins coronavirus resource center has noted percent positivity rate for recently hard-hit states—Nevada 17.1, Idaho 16.6, Florida 16.4, Mississippi 15.9, Texas, 13.0, Kansas, 12.5, Georgia 12.0, Iowa 11.2, Missouri 9.8, Indiana 9.6, Nebraska 9.5 and Arizona 9.2—have been climbing. Only 19 states have positivity rates under 5 percent, the lax criteria set by the World Health Organization for reopening schools. The CDC also noted that percent positive tests for ages 0 to 4 and 5 to 17 years old exceed ten percent and are climbing.

The ruling class, for its purposes, has learned it is best to fly blind through the pandemic.

Disastrous US school openings lead to 3,000 infections across 44 states

Evan Blake

Within weeks, the reopening of schools across the United States has already become a complete catastrophe. Outside of the mobilization of educators, parents and the broader working class to halt this homicidal policy, there will be rapid acceleration of the spread of the deadly COVID-19 disease throughout every region of the country.

Because no government agency at the local, state or federal level is systematically tracking work-related COVID-19 cases and deaths, Kansas teacher Alisha Morris took it upon herself to begin compiling this data in a spreadsheet. The list, which is now curated by roughly 35 people, has been shared in the dozens of Facebook groups that have been set up to oppose the unsafe reopening of schools and has been viewed tens of thousands of times by educators, parents and students.

The spreadsheet, which the WSWS utilized to produce a map that has also gone viral, paints a chilling picture of the spread of the pandemic in schools across the US.

According to this data and an official account from Mississippi released Monday, since schools began reopening during the week of July 27, roughly 3,000 teachers, students and staff have tested positive for COVID-19 from hundreds of schools across the country. All but six states—Alaska, Washington, Delaware, Vermont, North Dakota, and New Hampshire—have at least one school that has already experienced an outbreak of COVID-19.

Map of over hundreds of reported COVID outbreaks in US schools

As of Tuesday, there are over 900 entries on the spreadsheet, with each one representing a separate school that has had at least one positive or suspected case since the start of the pandemic. Most entries are based on local news reports since the beginning of August.

The devastation has been most extreme in the South, which for weeks has been a major epicenter of the pandemic in the US. Largely controlled by the Republican Party, these states most closely followed the “herd immunity” strategy of letting the virus rip through the population, as advanced by the Trump administration. These officials were the most aggressive and earliest to reopen their economies and have now been the most strident in demanding full in-person instruction, often with the bare minimum of personal protective equipment (PPE) provided to teachers and staff.

The heaviest-hit Republican-led states include:

• Mississippi, where 71 of the state’s 82 counties have reported outbreaks of COVID-19 in schools. As of Tuesday, 199 students and 245 teachers have tested positive statewide, while 2,035 students and 589 teachers have been forced into two-week quarantines.
  
• Florida, where at least 331 students and staff have tested positive for COVID-19 and at least 11 have died, many from earlier in the summer.
  
• In Georgia, there are now at least 296 known cases and 481 suspected cases at 67 different schools.
  
• In Texas, at least 140 different schools have reported a combined 380 cases.
  
• Indiana now has over 100 confirmed cases from at least 75 different schools.
  
• Tennessee now has at least 99 confirmed cases from 44 different schools.

In total, at least 406,109 children have now tested positive for COVID-19 in the US, representing 9.1 percent of all cases. One of the chief lies used by state officials to justify reopening schools, that children are less susceptible to the virus, stands thoroughly exposed.

While the Trump administration and his state and local backers have been most aggressive, the back-to-school and back-to-work policy also has the fulsome support of the Democratic Party at every level.

With the Democratic National Convention (DNC) taking place this week, the party is fully geared towards covering up their record of facilitating the homicidal policies demanded by the ruling class. On Monday, New York Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo absurdly claimed that his response to the pandemic was spotless, covering up the fact that nearly 33,000 people have died in the state under his watch. Cuomo has sanctioned the reopening of schools across the state, including in New York City, the largest school district in the country. Schools are also opening up in Michigan, led by Governor Gretchen Whitmer who also spoke at the Democratic National Convention Monday.

The Biden-Harris campaign website states, “Everyone wants schools to fully reopen for in-person instruction. Creating the conditions to make it happen should be a top national priority.”

The statement goes on to place the blame for the crisis solely on Trump, while proposing that schools can be reopened “safely” simply with some more funding for testing, contact tracing and PPE for educators. There are no specifics whatsoever on the level of community spread Biden thinks is “safe,” leaving the door open for districts to resume in-person learning whenever they choose, which is the exact same policy pursued by Trump.

If there is any tactical difference between Trump and the Republicans on the one side and the Democrats on school openings it is the latter’s use of the American Federation of Teachers, the National Education Association and other unions to dissipate anger through temporary delays, hybrid online/in-person learning and other maneuvers to buy time for the full reopening of the schools. Above all, the unions are doing everything they can to prevent a nationwide strike increasingly being demanded by educators because this would lead to a direct confrontation not only with Trump but Biden and the Democratic Party.

The campaign to open schools over the next few weeks in New York City and Los Angeles—both overseen by the Democrats—will set a major precedent for districts across the US. On Tuesday, Dr. Irwin Redlener, director of the Pandemic Resource and Response Initiative at Columbia University, warned of the immense dangers posed by opening schools in New York City, telling WNYC, “Schools are going to become hotbeds for the infections to take hold again and spread through the community.” He added, “It’s almost inevitable if we are in fact going to even hold some classes in real time in real classrooms,” exploding the myth that the “hybrid” model is in any way safe.

Significant outbreaks of COVID-19 have already happened in multiple Democrat-led states where at least some districts have fully reopened, including the following:

• Illinois already has at least 67 cases from 20 different schools.
  
• In Michigan, 16 different schools report a combined 27 confirmed cases, mostly student athletes at summer training camps.
  
• In California, there are at least 22 known cases from at least six schools, including 13 cases at the El Centro Elementary School District in the Central Valley.
  
• Pennsylvania reports at least 25 confirmed cases from 19 different schools.
  
• Hawaii now has at least 11 known cases at 12 different schools.
  
• Massachusetts has at least 17 confirmed cases at 12 different schools.

The explosion of cases at schools nationwide has provoked a huge backlash by educators, parents and students, who have already organized well over 100 protests over the past month and have assembled by the tens of thousands in dozens of Facebook groups in nearly every state.

There are growing calls for mass sickouts and nationwide strike action to halt the drive to reopen schools. In Arizona, 109 out of roughly 250 teachers and support staff in the suburban Phoenix JO Combs Unified School District called in sick Monday, canceling all classes that day. The shutdown of schools was extended through Wednesday, and teachers remain defiant and unwilling to sacrifice themselves.

Facing concerted pressure from educators and parents, the Newark Public School District in New Jersey was forced to reverse course Monday and start the school year online, after having pushed for in-person instruction for weeks. Significantly, the Newark Teachers Association had been promoting the equally unsafe “hybrid” model and, sensing huge opposition among rank-and-file educators, made an about-face on Monday.

On Wednesday in Detroit, teachers are expected to overwhelmingly support a “safety strike” in a vote organized by the Detroit Federation of Teachers, which is fearful of a revolt by the city’s 4,000 teachers.

Facing a similar groundswell of opposition, the Little Rock Education Association in Little Rock, Arkansas is now posturing as a defender of teachers’ and students’ safety. However, the union is simply demanding that in-person learning resume once the positivity rate in the county remains below 5 percent for 14 consecutive days. This elevated figure represents a high degree of community spread, and under conditions in which testing is being deliberately curtailed would be specious and wholly unsafe.

The central question facing teachers, education workers, parents and students is the need to build new forms of organization, independent of the unions, to coordinate a unified opposition to the nationwide campaign to reopen schools. It is for this reason that the Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee was founded, in order to unite the immense opposition to the homicidal policies of the ruling class.

This national body is serving as a central organization to coordinate the building of a network of independent, rank-and-file committees in every school and neighborhood. The committees must fight to link up with broader sections of the working class facing the same deadly working conditions, in preparation for a nationwide general strike to halt the reopening of schools and the broader return-to-work campaign.

TechCongress Congressional Innovation Fellowship 2021

Application Deadline: 27th August 2020 at 11:59pm EST.

Eligible Countries: International

To Be Taken At (Country): USA

About the Award: The fellowship is a twelve-month residency on Capitol Hill, running from January to December, with an optional 13th month the following January.  Fellows work directly for a Member of Congress or Congressional Committee for the duration of their residency and may spend their time on technology-related issues like emerging technologies, AI and automation, election security, data privacy, encryption, cybersecurity or defense technology policy.  Typical duties may include:

• Briefing Members and staff about technology issues
• Researching legislation
• Preparing for hearings or markups
• Meeting with stakeholder groups and building coalitions

Type: Fellowship

Eligibility: Citizenship is not a requirement to apply.  TechCongress is unable to assist with visa applications or renewals but anyone legally authorized to work in the United States through the duration of the fellowship and holding a US bank account is eligible to apply.
Applicants should:

• Have experience working in or with technology, and the ability to convey complex technical subjects to less-technically savvy individuals.
• Have some professional experience or be enrolled in or near completion of a graduate level program.
• Have a strong desire help build the Congressional Innovations Fellows program.  As part of the 2020 class, fellows should expect to give ongoing feedback about fellowship activities, rapidly prototype and help build the pipeline for technological expertise into Congress.

Selection Criteria: Fellows are selected by an independent selections board using criteria that includes:

• Potential for leadership in technology policy
• Professional achievements and technical ability.
• Commitment to building a diverse and cross-sector technology policy ecosystem.
• Potential for future growth and career advancement.
• Interpersonal, communication and “tech-translation” skills.
• Individual plans for incorporating the fellowship experience into specific career goals.

Number of Awards: Not specified

Value of Award: The Congressional Innovation Fellowship provides a unique opportunity to change Congress by injecting desperately needed technological expertise into the Legislative Branch.  Fellows receive competitive stipend and benefits during their nine month residency to ensure that they can achieve maximum impact.
Benefits include:

• $85,000/year equivalent stipend
• Health insurance supplement of up to $400/month*
• Relocation allowance of up to $2,500
• Equipment or travel allowance of up to $2,500

Duration of Programme: 12 months running from January 2021 to December 2021.

How to Apply: APPLY

Visit Programme Webpage for Details

Needed: Indicators for Measuring Injustice and Societal Decay

Ralph Nader

Economic indicators – data points, trends, and micro-categories – are the widgets of the big information industry. By contrast, indicators for our society’s democratic health are not similarly compiled, aggregated, and reported. Its up and down trends are presented piecemeal and lack quantitative precision.

We can get the process started and lay the basis for qualitative and quantitative refinement. Years ago, when we started “re-defining progress” and questioning the very superficial GDP and its empirical limitations, professional economists took notice. Unfortunately, with few exceptions, economists cling to the yardsticks that benefit and suit the plutocrats and CEOs of large corporations.

Here are my offerings in the expectation that readers will add their own measures:

1. A society is decaying when liars receive mass media attention while truth-tellers are largely ignored. Those who are chronically wrong with outrageous and baseless predictions are featured on news broadcasts, op-ed pages, and as convention and conference speakers. On the other hand, those who forewarn and are proven to be accurate are not regaled, but instead, they are excluded from the media spotlight and significant gatherings. Consider the treatment of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz post-Iraq invasion, compared to people like Congressman Dennis Kucinich, Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn who factually warned Washington not to attack illegally a country that didn’t threaten us.
2. A society is decaying when rampant corruption is tolerated, and its perpetrators are rewarded with money, votes, and praise. When President Eisenhower’s chief of staff, former New Hampshire Governor Sherman Adams, accepted a vicuña coat from a textile manufacturer, he was forced to resign. The daily corruption of Trump and the Trumpsters towers beyond measure over Adams’ indiscretion. Yet calls for Trump and his cronies to resign are rare and anemic. Tragically, the law and the norms of decency have done little to curb the corrupt, criminogenic, and criminal excesses of Trump & company. Even government prosecutors and inspectors generals have been fired, chilled, and sidelined by Trump and his toady,  Attorney General Barr.
3. A society is decaying when a growing number of people believe in fantasies instead of realities. Social media makes this an ever more serious estrangement from what is actually happening in the country and in the world. Believing in myths and falsehoods leads to political servitude, economic disruption, and social dysfunction. The corrupt concentration of power ensues.
4. An expanding economy focusing increasingly on ‘wants and whims’ while ignoring the meeting of basic ‘needs and necessities’ shatters societal cohesiveness and deepens miseries of many people. Adequate housing, healthcare, food, public services, education, mass transit, health & safety standards, and environmental protections are the prerequisites for a humane democracy. The economy is in shambles for tens of millions of Americans, including hungry children. Minimal economic security is beyond the reach of tens of millions of people in our country.
5. With few exceptions, the richer the wealthy become, the more selfish they behave, from severely diminished contributions to charities to the failure to exert leadership to reverse the breakdown of society. Take all the failures of the election machinery from obstructing voters to simply counting the votes honestly with paper records. The U.S. Senate won’t vote to give the states the $4 billion needed for administering the coming elections despite the Covid-19-driven need for expanded voting by mail. The Silicon Valley, undertaxed, mega-billionaires could make a $4 billion patriotic donation to safeguard the voting process in November and not even feel it.
6. Rampant commercialism knowing no boundaries or restraints even to protect young children is running roughshod over civic values. Every major religion has warned about giving too much power to the merchant class going back over 2000 years. In our country, justice arrived after commercial greed was subordinated to humane priorities such as abolishing child labor and requiring crashworthy cars, cleaner air, water, and safer workplaces. Mercantile values produce predictable results, from excluding civic groups from congressional hearings and the mass media to letting corporations control what the people own such as the vast public lands and public airwaves.
7. Then there is the American Empire astride the globe, enabled by an AWOL Congress and propelled by the avaricious military-industrial complex. In his 1961 farewell address, President Dwight Eisenhower presciently forewarned that “[W]e must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” All Empires devour themselves until they collapse on the countries of their origins. Over 55% of the federal government’s operating spending goes to the Pentagon and its associated budgets. The military-industrial complex increasingly leads to quagmires and creates adversaries abroad, as it starves the social safety net budgets in our country. Our country’s military spending with all its waste is surging and unaudited. The U.S. spent more than $732 billion on direct defense spending in 2019; this is more than the next ten countries with the largest military expenditures.
8. A society that requires its people to incur crushing debt to survive, while relying on casinos and other forms of gambling to produce jobs, is going backward into the future.
9. Public officials who repeatedly obstruct voters from having their votes received and counted accurately and in a timely fashion continue with impunity to try to steal elections. Then Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp (now governor of Georgia) “stole” the election in 2018 from gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams. Abrams said Kemp was an “architect of voter suppression.” And that because Kemp was the Georgia Secretary of State during the race, he was “the referee, the contestant and the scorekeeper” for the 2018 gubernatorial election. He escaped accountability. Democracy decays.
10. Access to justice is diminishing. Tort law – the law of wrongful injuries – has been weakened in many states with arbitrary caps on damages for the most serious injuries. It also is harder than ever for citizens to get through to real people in government agencies.

How Software Companies Might Lead Us Out of Our E-Waste Dilemma

Julian Vigo

I first came across the subscription model when, immediately following a software update, my Adobe Acrobat system failed to work and I was forced to reinstall it. But when I got to the step for entering the serial number I was instead deferred to an Adobe website where I was told to sign up for their subscription services. I didn’t have the time to write to Adobe to complain nor did I want to subscribe to something I already purchased. So, instead of subscribing, I sought out a freeware alternative which has more or less done the job over the years.

Since this event occurred, however, I began to notice the subscription model sprouting up everywhere: my email program uses this model, so too do many apps, and my WordPress themes have also switched to this payment mode. It is estimated that about 80% of historical software vendors will now have subscription services also known as software-as-a-service (SaaS) model over the previous sales model. While this might seem trivial to some, it is a huge price difference to many of us who make do with our computers long after they need to be replaced using similarly slow software that won’t outpace the hardware. Moreover, the subscription model is quite expensive comparatively, especially if we use certain software occasionally. How did we get here that a software leasing system is becoming the preferred model for small businesses?

First, I am aware that the obvious answer here this: capitalism. How could we not foresee that asking someone to plop down $300 for one piece of software would be—in this economic climate especially—a lot more difficult to sell. Getting consumers to pay for what appear to be smaller fees within a monthly subscription model has brought forth a boom in the subscription model among a client-base that is cash-poor.

What originated targeting the enterprise sector around 2015 soon caught on in the consumer market as it proved challenging to crack the sale of expensive software to people whose salaries were being downsized while also experiencing a fall in the quality of living. After all, is it feasible to sell a $699 Adobe suite product in one go, or might selling a $9.99 a month subscription be the better deal? Obviously, for startups, the monthly fees save enormously for what might be untenable first-year expenses. But, for individuals, it seems like the software market will never level off, growing in expense year by year such that subscription models for some seemed to take the bite off spending hundreds in one go. For instance, when I lost the use of Adobe, I couldn’t afford to subscribe but I also could not find an inexpensive or free replacement to do markups on PDF aside from some light proofreading tools contained in Apple’s Preview that came with my computer. Finding cutting edge software, as the saying goes: you get what you pay for.

The market which educates us about where to buy and what to buy tends to be heavily focused within media journalism where people who buy software tend to inform themselves about these products to include the comparable freeware and less expensive versions of software they can no longer afford. Many websites specialise in teaching the consumer what to look out for in new software, which freeware contains malware or which software is best to use for website design, for instance. While SaaS might seem to some hardly suitable for a population losing work in the era of COVID-19, unable to afford new software, when the math comes in, it might just be that SaaS is the least expensive and more efficient.

The software industry has faced its biggest hurdle in sales as people have lost jobs in unprecedented numbers since the invention of the home computer or laptop and even since the Great Depression. In fact, along with the race to find the vaccine to COVID-19 is the race to keep software sales up for companies whose clients are now under- or unemployed. The enterprise software that set the subscription model as the default payment model is now no longer a given as businesses are questioning their need to pay into what is a costly exercise in this economically slow era. While US small businesses are suffering particularly during the COVID-19 crisis, companies like Zoom have learned from their popularity during lockdown: consumers cannot afford to upgrade their hardware to run the latest software. Enter stage left, Zoom’s HaaS (hardware-as-a-service) model where now we can rent computer hardware for $75 a month.

While there are many ways to look at SaaS and now HaaS from the more cynical to creative analytical perspectives, it’s hard not to be skeptical about companies cashing in even during a financially strapped period of our collective history. At the same time, for those of us facing computer hardware issues (I am writing this from my computer jimmy-rigged to a cheap screen as I hold out for computer prices to drop this autumn), maybe the subscription model would be the best of all worlds as we can at least ask for quality and hardware that can keep up with the software, and vice versa.

Of all the trends I never expected to change as a result of this global pandemic, the formats for selling computers and software would have been the last on my list—if even at all on my list. Perhaps, the future of leasing our technology, privacy issues aside, might also provide us with a more ecological way of using and reutilising hardware where the companies who source technology to us are ultimately the bodies left responsible for recycling or shipping old tech to recycling centres. Still, this model in the private sector will be a hard sell for those of us who are more possessive of our laptops than we are our toothbrushes.

Still, just as some experts claim that “the future is the subscription model” regarding software, we might begin to consider the HaaS model currently being ramped up in the business sector and all the possibilities it offers us both as consumers and ecologically-minded individuals. While we can keep up with the latest news on digital waste and recycling, the reality is that we are producing 40 million metric tons of e-waste (electronic waste), much of which can be recycled, much of which cannot. The disposal and recycling of components containing lead, cadmium, beryllium, or brominated flame retardants are not always straight-forward and inevitably pose a significant health risk to those workers who handle these materials in addition to their families and the communities that come into contact with these substances. With e-waste having increased 21% over the past five years according to the UN’s Global E-waste Monitor, the thoughtful use of hazardous materials needs to take the front seat to our predilection to buy, buy, buy.

Here’s the hard part for those on the left concerned about our ecological contributions to the planet’s destruction and our responsible use of technology: we need to consider for a moment that SaaS and HaaS, for all the capitalistic contrivances they so clearly embody, might also offer us a short-term solution to e-waste. After all, the writing is already on the wall with the federal government having announced last week that it would stop buying used computers. Short of curtailing our computer spending, we need to stop buying disposable devices entirely which is not a feasible option for most of us who use computers for our survival or we need to insist upon all tech products being upgradeable, unlike Apple’s retina series Macbook which leaves users at the mercy of tech companies building updated systems instead of demanding that tech be held accountable for e-waste and that they offer the possibility to swap out older components to improve efficiency. For some pundits, we already don’t really own our computers which, although debatable, does offer us another perspective into how owning a device implicates us in the need to constantly pay into updating these system’s software and hardware. In this sense any form of tech ownership is already a leasing into the future of invariable crashes, fixes, and updates.

Might the best compromise between ecological waste and capitalistic excess be a hybrid solution where the public and private sectors demand that hardware devices are made adaptable to upgrades while the leasing—and not the sale—of hardware is considered as the future model of technological acquisition?

The Basic Case for a Wealth Tax

Bob Lord & Lee Price

Changes in tax policy since 1980 have been driving U.S. inequality to levels not seen since the original Gilded Age. Reversing that trajectory — and restoring a more egalitarian society — will require a complete overhaul of the changes in tax policy we’ve seen over the past four decades.

Taxes as a share of national income have now been remarkably stable for 40 years. Total federal tax revenue last year stood at 17 percent, about the average for the last half-century. Income taxes, meanwhile, have stayed steady at 8 percent of the economy.

These stable percentages should be a cause for alarm, not satisfaction. In any tax system based on progressive tax principles, federal income tax revenue should increase as a greater share of income goes to people in the higher tax brackets. But that hasn’t happened. The big tax cuts that Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump have signed into law have tilted our tax structure in favor of those at the top.

Thanks to these cuts, our wealthy have spent the last four decades paying taxes at significantly lower rates. The taxes they pay have dropped so much that total federal revenues have remained stable only because average Americans are paying, as a share of the economy, far more in regressive payroll taxes.

Some numbers: Between 1980 and 2018, tax law changes favoring the nation’s rich left our billionaires paying 79 percent less in taxes, as measured as a share of their wealth. The country’s top .01 percent, a group consisting of households with wealth in excess of $100 million, have seen their tax payments as a share of their wealth drop by almost as much, 73 percent.

Most of us reliably consume most of any boost in income we see. Not people with massive wealth. An ultra-wealthy household that realizes $25 million in tax savings doesn’t rush out and spend that extra $25 million on food, home improvements, or new clothes. Most of those added millions just add to that ultra-wealthy household’s wealth, and that in turn increases the household’s future income — and future wealth.

In other words, wealth begets wealth, and the giant cut in the taxes our rich people pay, as a percentage of their wealth, has turbocharged how rapidly our nation’s wealth is concentrating. The share of America’s wealth that our top .01 percent hold has quadrupled, rising from 2.3 percent in 1980 to 9.6 percent in 2018. The incomes of the top .01 percent of our nation’s earners have, over the same years, jumped from 1.5 percent to 4.6 percent.

Restoring the tax structure our wealthy faced back in 1980 would certainly slow our nation’s growing inequality of wealth and income. But simply restoring what we had in 1980 isn’t going to reverse the absurd concentration of America’s wealth we have now. The billions our richest have already accumulated will continue to pile up ever higher if we merely go back to the 1980 status quo. Jeff Bezos is currently sitting on well over a $100 billion appreciation in the value of his Amazon stock. None of the value of that stock will land on his federal income tax return until he sells his Amazon shares.

So what can we do? A tax on wealth would be the most direct and rational way to address America’s obscene level of wealth concentration.

Relying solely on taxes on income or real estate property or consumption is never going to adequately reverse how concentrated our nation’s wealth has become. Yes, the wealthy should pay much higher income tax rates on their earnings from wealth. Yes, they should face property taxes and excise taxes on consumption like the rest of us. But the wealthy should also face an additional tax on their actual wealth.

Such a tax would function as a constraint on the accumulation of additional wealth and also raise significant revenue, even if some rich evaded this new levy. Household wealth in excess of $172 million, according to economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, would represent a tax base of $6.3 trillion. Household wealth in excess of $31 million would represent a tax base of over $13 trillion.

Senator Elizabeth Warren last year proposed a 2 percent tax on wealth above $50 million and a 3 percent tax above $1 billion. If this tax had been in place in 1982, Saez and Zucman calculate, the Fortune 400 share of our nation’s wealth would have increased from 1 percent to 2 percent in 2018. In real life, without that tax in effect, the Fortune 400 share rose to 3.5 percent in 2018.

According to Saez and Zucman, a 10 percent tax rate on wealth in excess of $1 billion would have, if begun in 1982, kept the Forbes 400 share of the nation’s wealth at its 1982 level of 1 percent.

We can’t turn the clock back to 1982. But we can take serious steps to undo the inequality damage we’ve experienced since then. Our suggestion: Let’s add a third tier to Senator Warren’s proposal. On wealth in excess of $5 billion, let’s now impose a 10 percent tax.

Might this levy cause those fortunes well above the $5 billion mark to actually shrink over time? Perhaps, but that wouldn’t be so terrible. After all, any rich household with a mere $5 billion would still have enough wealth to cover $100,000 per day of expenses for over a century.

We would see a far worse result — for our democratic well-being — if we permitted fortunes over $5 billion to grow ever larger. So let’s err on the side of reversing America’s obscene inequality, not protecting multibillionaires.