US steps up war against Huawei

Nick Beams

The Trump administration has announced new bans on Huawei aimed at crippling the Chinese telecommunications giant and eliminating it from the rollout of 5G mobile phone technology around the world.

US Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross announced on Monday that companies will have to obtain a license to sell Huawei any microchip that has been made using American equipment or software.

The latest move further tightens restrictions already introduced on Huawei. US companies had previously been allowed to sell microchips made by US companies so long as they had not been designed by Huawei.

The Wall Street Journal reported that under the new regulations, Huawei will now not be able to buy “even widely available, off-the-shelf chips made by overseas firms, placing severe new limits on Huawei’s ability to source parts.”

The significance of the latest move was underscored by Dan Wang, an analyst at Gavekal Research, who told the Financial Times: “The US government has passed a death sentence on Huawei.”

He said the company was “probably finished as a maker of 5G network equipment and smartphones once its inventories run out early next year.”

Huawei has built up stocks in anticipation of the US moves but it will not be able to replenish them once they run out.

The Commerce Department said the new rules were intended to counter Huawei’s efforts to obtain workarounds to previous restrictions, including finding foreign companies to supply it with chips.

Ross said that the administration had worked to restrict Huawei’s access to US technology. But the company had worked through third parties “in a manner that undermines US national security and foreign policy interests. This multipronged action demonstrates our continuing commitment to impede Huawei’s ability to do so.”

The latest measures were again accompanied by unsubstantiated assertions that Huawei is engaged in spying operations on behalf of the Chinese government and its intelligence services.

In an interview on “Fox & Friends” on Monday, Trump said: “We don’t want their equipment in the United States because they spy on us. They know everything—they knew everything we were doing. Huawei is a way of—is really—I call it the spyway.”

US authorities have furnished no evidence that Huawei is spying on behalf of Beijing, in contrast to the details provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden and others that the NSA and US agencies conduct surveillance on an industrial scale.

Huawei officials have previously said that one of the reasons for the bans imposed on it is because US spy agencies find it easier to conduct their espionage through backdoors provided by American firms.

The latest measures go far beyond excluding Huawei from operating in the US—that had largely been achieved—but are aimed at eliminating it from the global market for 5G technology where it has become the market leader. Huawei is also the world’s largest maker of telecom equipment and has overtaken Samsung as the largest seller of smartphones.

The US semiconductor industry stands to lose billions of dollars from the latest move. As the Wall Street Journal noted, major companies, including Qualcomm, had been lobbying the Trump administration to ease earlier restrictions, not strengthen them.

The head of the Semiconductor Industry Association, John Neuffer, said the new regulations would bring “significant disruption to the US semiconductor industry.”

“We are surprised and concerned by the administration’s sudden shift from its prior support of a more narrow approach intended to achieve stated national security goals while limiting harm to US companies,” he said.

Neuffer said sales to China provided US companies with the profits to innovate. However, one of the reasons the US has fallen behind in developing new technology is that past profits have not been put into research. Rather they have been used to finance share buybacks and other forms of “financial engineering” to boost stock prices.

The “shift” to which Neuffer referred has come about because the real concern is not the claim that Huawei is engaged in spying. It is the threat posed to US economic—and in the longer term military—dominance by the technological advances being made by China as the US economy and financial system is mired in ever-increasing parasitism.

These geo-economic and geo-strategic concerns are now the driving force of US policy, whatever the immediate consequences for the bottom line of US corporations.

Reflecting the orientation of his administration, and behind it the US military and intelligence establishment, Trump responded to the claim that bans imposed on the Chinese messaging app WeChat would hurt US sales in China with a dismissive “whatever.”

The message delivered by Attorney-General William Barr in a major speech in July was that US corporations must get on board with the administration’s anti-China objectives or risk being branded as agents of foreign interference.

The latest US moves against China, extend beyond Huawei and other tech giants. They are now reaching into finance, sparking concerns in sections of the media.

Sydney Morning Herald economics commentator, Stephen Bartholomeusz, noted that the recent financial sanctions imposed on 11 senior Hong Kong officials, taking advantage of the dollar’s key role in the global financial system, had far reaching implications and could be extended to include Chinese banks and other financial institutions.

“China is fully aware,” he wrote, “that if the US were to fully weaponise the dollar’s dominance it could cause chaos within its financial system.”

In a column published earlier this week, Financial Times foreign affairs commentator Gideon Rachman pointed to what he called the “decoupling” of the world’s two largest economies. It had much further to go and the hope of business that “things will soon get back to normal” was misplaced.

The “decoupling” was already spreading “beyond technology and into finance.” For the past four decades, he wrote, business logic had prevailed over strategic rivalry. “But we are in a new world in which political rivalry overrides economic incentives.

“This is not just Trumpian folly. There is now bipartisan consensus in Washington to get tough on China, even if it hurts corporate profits.”

He noted that finance had become a field of conflict and the sanctions deployed against Iran and Venezuela were beginning to be used by the US in its conflict with China.

The risks associated with the US sanctions against Chinese officials, effectively shutting them out of the US financial system, were manageable. “But what happens if and when financial sanctions are applied to major Chinese companies?”

“The past 40 years of world history,” he concluded, “have been built around globalisation and the rapprochement between the US and China. But that world is fast disappearing.”

Rachman did not spell out what is replacing it. But the evidence is clear—an economic, technology and financial war by the US against what it considers its main rival, the logic of which is military conflict.

UN Tribunal finds only one guilty of Hariri assassination and no evidence of Syrian or Hezbollah involvement

Jean Shaoul

Confounding the expectations of the imperialist and regional powers, the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) declared that there is no evidence the Hezbollah leadership or the Syrian government were involved in the 2005 assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in Beirut.

After 14 years of deliberations, yesterday the court in The Hague issued a guilty verdict against Salim Jamil Ayyash, one of the four low-ranking Hezbollah members charged with conspiracy to carry out the massive suicide car-bomb attack that killed Hariri and 21 others on February 14, 2005. It cleared the other three accused on all counts and announced the withdrawal of the warrants for their arrests.

The tribunal was set up in 2007 under pressure from Washington as the result of a UN Security Council resolution, originally to investigate claims that the assassination had been carried out by Syria, and only later switching to Hezbollah.

The investigation and trial in absentia of four Hezbollah members in a hybrid court with Lebanese criminal law and international and Lebanese judges has cost nearly $1 billion, half of it borne by Lebanon’s bankrupt government and much of the rest by the US and France.

The verdict was due on August 7, but postponed due to the August 4 Beirut port blast so as not to detract from a verdict widely expected to blame Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Shi’ite party that forms Lebanon’s largest parliamentary bloc and has sat in government for the last 14 years.

Hariri was the billionaire owner of the Saudi-based construction company Solidere that was rebuilding Beirut’s downtown area destroyed during the 1975-1989 civil war. He had close ties to the US, France, and the Gulf monarchs.

Judge David Re said, “The trial chamber is of the view that Syria and Hezbollah may have had motives to eliminate Hariri and some of his political allies. However, there was no evidence that this Hezbollah leadership had any involvement in Hariri’s murder, and there is no direct evidence of Syrian involvement in it.”

Charges against a fifth Hezbollah suspect were dropped after he was killed in Syria in 2016. As Hezbollah denied any involvement and refused to reveal the four remaining men’s whereabouts, they were tried in absentia, with the case resting on circumstantial evidence. According to records of their mobile telephone data, the men were close to the bombing and their phones went silent immediately afterward.

The STL’s long-awaited ruling implicating just one suspect is a setback for the US and its local stooges, who planned on using a more damning verdict to further their bid to eliminate Hezbollah as a political force in Lebanon and to step up the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” sanctions regime against Iran—aimed at overturning the government and installing a client regime. The STL has been touted as a model for an investigation into the cause of the Beirut port blast that is also being attributed to Hezbollah.

Hariri was one of a long line of prominent politicians, businessmen, journalists, and officials who have died violent deaths in Lebanon over the last 30 years. Variously attributed to Israel, Syria, Lebanese political factions, mafia-style gangs, and Islamist terrorists, they testify to the country’s political instability under the impact of the US-led wars in the region as Lebanon became the focal point in the contest between the US, Israel, Saudi Arabia, France and its allies, and Syria, Iran and its allies—Hezbollah and Amal within Lebanon—and Hamas in Palestine.

The assassination was initially seized upon by the Bush administration to blame and denounce Syria. Damascus had been granted tutelage over Lebanon as a reward for its support for the US-led coalition against Saddam Hussein in 1990, via the US-Saudi brokered Taif Accords that ended the Lebanese civil war.

Not only was the charge unsubstantiated, the Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad had nothing to gain and everything to lose by engineering Hariri’s assassination under conditions where the United Nations Security Council, under pressure from Washington, had passed Resolution 1559 the previous September, demanding that Syria withdraw its troops from Lebanon.

The Bush administration was seeking the overthrow of the Syrian regime, which the Pentagon had long accused of sheltering a “command-and-control” centre of Iraqi Baathists, allegedly planning the attacks on US forces in Iraq, as well as Palestinian groups opposed to Israel, including Hamas. In the event, using the assassination as justification, Washington achieved most of its desired outcome with the withdrawal of Syrian forces from Lebanon just weeks later, bringing Lebanon firmly within the US orbit.

The powers that most clearly stood to gain from Hariri’s assassination and blaming the crime on Syria were the US and Israel, both of whom have an unparalleled record of assassinating their political opponents, with car bombings in Beirut a regular feature of Mossad’s operations.

Nevertheless, the Bush administration won support for a United Nations Special Tribunal for Lebanon to determine the identity of Hariri’s killers, even though he held no state position at the time. Four pro-Syrian Lebanese generals were arrested and detained without charges for four years.

In July 2006, the US gave the green light to Israel to wage war to eradicate Hezbollah. A six-week operation killed more than 1,200 people, injured many more, damaged or destroyed tens of thousands of homes, and devastated much of the country’s infrastructure, but failed to achieve its political objective. Instead, Hezbollah, not the Sunni and Christian forces in the government, won popular support for its leading role in opposing Israel. State Department cables subsequently released by WikiLeaks revealed that the ruling pro-US Forward Movement of Sa’ad Hariri, Rafiq’s son, had discussed with the US the preparations for a military attack by Israel against Hezbollah.

Later, when Washington sought to bring Damascus in from the cold to isolate Iran, the STL and Sa’ad Hariri reversed themselves, saying they no longer believed that Syria was involved in the assassination. The four generals were released, with Hariri later admitting they had been framed up on false evidence.

Hariri and the STL then switched their attention to Hezbollah, blaming rogue elements in the group, an accusation Hezbollah denied. This created acute political tensions that led to a standoff between the two rival blocs at Beirut airport and established Hezbollah as the most powerful force in the land. In the years that followed, Hezbollah has been represented in all Lebanon’s governments, earning it the undying hatred of Washington, Riyadh, Paris, and Tel Aviv.

Sa’ad Hariri, who was present as the court in The Hague gave its ruling, said, “We accept the verdict of the tribunal and want justice to be implemented,” adding that he wanted “just punishment” for the criminals. Making clear that he (and presumably the US) intend to proceed as planned in targeting Hezbollah, he told reporters, “I think everybody’s expectation was much higher than what came out, but I believe that the tribunal came out with a result that is satisfying.”

The fraudulent STL represented an attempt by the US to channel and divide workers along sectarian lines, in pursuit of its own geo-strategic interests. Its purpose has been to mobilise forces against Hezbollah, Syria, and Iran and to suppress any unified struggle of impoverished workers in the Gulf, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere.

Only an independent intervention by the working class can prevent a wider war in the Middle East. Workers, irrespective of their religion, language, or ethnicity, must unite in opposing the growing danger of imperialist intervention, the deepening assault on their living standards, and the attempts to incite sectarian divisions. What is required is a unified struggle by workers against the cause of their oppression—the capitalist system—and for the United Socialist States of the Middle East.

Chinese prime minister: 600 million people earn less than $145 a month

Lily Zhao

On May 28, during a press conference after the National People’s Congress, Chinese Prime Minister, Li Keqiang, stated that “there are still some 600 million people whose monthly income is barely 1,000 RMB ($US145). It’s not even enough to rent a room in mid-sized Chinese cities.”

This comment about the impoverished existence of more than a third of the country’s population provides a glimpse into the staggering level of social inequality and the harsh living conditions faced by workers.

While almost half of its population earns less than $145 a month, China recorded 373 billionaires in 2020, the second highest figure in the world. There is also a significant upper middle class. China is the largest market for all Western luxury brands, accounting for 33 percent of the global market in 2018.

Li’s comments were in response to a question raised by a journalist from People’s Daily, an official newspaper of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China.

People near tibet province. (Image Credit: Flickr user 43423301N07)

The journalist pointed out that 2020 was originally planned as the deadline to win “the battle against poverty”—a campaign to lift 70 million people out of poverty launched by the government in October 2015. The reporter then asked if that will still be fulfilled this year, given the huge declines in household incomes of many due to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Li acknowledged that “before Covid-19 struck, there were some five million people living below the poverty line”, and “because of the disease, some may have fallen back to poverty”. But he then declared that the government “[has] confidence that we are going to ensure the essential needs of our people and achieve our target.”

However, as his own figures made clear, the bright picture painted by Li of completely eradicating poverty by the end of this year has nothing to do with the social reality facing people in China. The very austere measure of absolute poverty excludes hundreds of millions who are struggling to survive on very low monthly incomes.

According to the National Bureau of Statistics in China, as of 2018, the rural population was about 564 million, and their average annual disposable income was just 14,617 RMB ($US2,090), or about 1,218 RMB ($174) a month. In poverty-stricken areas in the countryside, the average drops to about $138 every month. So the rural population constitutes a large portion in the 600 million people referred to by Li whose monthly income is below $145.

On top of low wages, job opportunities in the countryside are in short supply. Even though the official unemployment rate in rural China is not published, ethnographic studies have shown that there are few factories or companies around most villages. Those that exist are only able to employ a few handfuls of people.

The low wages and scarce work opportunities in the countryside are one of the major factors contributing to the huge population of migrant workers in China who seek higher-paid jobs in the cities to support their families in the countryside. In 2019, there were 174.25 million rural migrant workers in China, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.

However, while the average monthly income for migrant workers was about three times higher than in the countryside, living in the cities is still a struggle. Even the official average monthly income does not reflect the actual income of migrant workers. A study by the International Labour Office explained that economic inequality among migrant workers is a lot higher than among the general urban population, so a large portion of migrant workers earn significantly less than the reported average.

Migrant workers experience great job insecurity, changing jobs every one or two years on average. Many work without a written contract, which makes it extremely hard for them to get compensation when facing wage arrears and work injuries. The majority work overtime on a daily basis and on weekends as well, with, at most, two or three days off every month. Without overtime, they do not earn enough to cover their living expenses in the cities, let alone to send money back home. Factory managements use the threat of taking away overtime to discipline militant workers who express discontent over wages and working conditions.

Urban living costs are high, especially in big cities like Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen where a large portion of migrant workers live. A 2010 ethnographic study calculated that the entire annual average income of a migrant worker would not be enough to buy even 1 square-metre of an apartment on the periphery of Beijing. During the past decade, the average housing price in Beijing has doubled.

To reduce rental costs, most migrant workers live in shantytowns, or “villages within cities”, that are crowded and whose infrastructure is usually substandard. The average living space is only a few square metres per person. Most own little or no furniture, and have to share public bathrooms with residents of an entire floor or building. Some choose to live in factory dorms, where they usually share a room with many others, have virtually no private space, and have limited access to essentials like hot shower water.

Migrant workers have very limited or no access to most social services in the cities like education and pensions. In 2017, according to the Ministry of Education, there are 15.5 million “left-behind children” in China, whose parents work in the cities throughout the year and leave them in the countryside because schools in the cities either have very limited admissions for non-local students, or require a large extra-tuition payment. For the workers themselves, a study by Wuhan University shows that less than 22 percent are covered by the basic old-age pension schemes in the cities where they live.

The plight facing migrant workers is shared by working class youth and many urban workers: low wages, unemployment, high living costs, mortgage, and poor access to high quality education and health care. A survey conducted by the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) in 2019 shows that 56.5 percent of urban households are burdened by debt, and 75.9 percent of the debts are from house mortgages. According to an International Monetary Fund (IMF) study, “between 2010 and 2016, the share of debt held by highly indebted households—with a debt-to-income (DTI) ratio above 4—increased from around a quarter to almost half.” Among low-income households, the DTI ratio has increased to almost 6. The study concluded that these conditions will make low-income groups most vulnerable to “adverse income shocks”.

The COVID-19 pandemic is exactly such a “shock.” It has intensified not only the debt crisis of many families but rendered the living conditions of the working class ever more precarious. The job market is contracting. This year’s college graduates, and rural migrant workers who have finally made their way back to the cities, are confronting unemployment. There are many reports of severe wage cuts and refusals to pay compensation to replace salaries lost during the months of lockdown.

While the vast majority of people struggle to get a decent wage, housing, social services, and education, there is a distinctively different reality for the super-rich in China. China is now one of the most socially unequal countries, with a Gini co-efficient of 0.465 in 2019. Data from the National Bureau of Statistics show that the annual average disposable income for the top 20 percent of the population is 70,639.5 RMB ($10,091), almost 11 times higher than that of the bottom 20 percent, and twice than that of the next 20 immediately below them. The PBOC survey referred to previously shows that among urban populations, the assets of the top 20 percent household constitutes 47.5 percent of total assets, while the bottom 20 percent only constitutes 2.6 percent.

Prime Minister Li’s concern for the hundreds of millions on low incomes is as meaningless as the government’s “battle against poverty” campaign. The source of the enormous social inequality is the opening up of the country in the 1980s as a cheap labor platform for foreign investment by the Chinese Communist Party as it overturned the gains of the 1949 Revolution and restored capitalism. It is the unhindered exploitation of workers that has enriched the resultant layer of parasitic billionaires and super-rich in China, as well as capitalists around the world.

SAG-AFTRA’s Health Plan restructuring faces massive opposition

Marc Wells

The Screen Actors Guild‐American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) union sent out a memo to its 160,000 members announcing that its health plan will undergo a massive restructuring. The move has provoked enormous opposition from current and retired performers and other media professionals who need health care coverage more than ever due to the continued spread of COVID-19.

The three basic modifications, which will come into full effect on January 1, 2021, are:

1. Changes to the earnings requirements that will reduce the number of participants who qualify for the plan.

2. Increased premiums that result in more revenue to the plan.

3. Benefit changes that reduce plan cost but increase participants’ out-of-pocket costs.

The type of coverage received under SAG-AFTRA’s health care plan has been based on income. To get Tier I coverage a union member has to have an income of at least $35,020 a year. The inferior Tier II coverage has an income threshold of at least $18,040 a year. Income is typically based on wages paid for individual film, TV, stage or recording sessions and residuals from past performances.

The restructuring eliminates the two tiers and brings the threshold to $25,950 a year for participants under 65. For many retired members over 65, the new plan means loss of SAG-AFTRA health care, since they will no longer be allowed to use their residuals income to qualify for the new threshold, with a few exceptions, until 2022.

This will translate into a loss of supplemental coverage for a vulnerable layer of older members, as well as primary coverage for many others who, in light of today’s state of the entertainment industry, find it hard, if not impossible, to get sufficient sessional union work (and residuals if applicable) to reach the $25,950 annual threshold.

The union argues that those who no longer qualify for coverage can either pay for COBRA coverage—out of workers’ own pockets—or may be eligible for coverage through the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). After the first year, during which the plan offers a discounted COBRA rate, this will mean substantially higher premiums and other costs for low-income individuals and families.

Premiums are being increased considerably. The union fund is also demanding that members with more dependents pay a steeper increase. Therefore, an individual participant will be hit by a 25 percent increase. Add one dependent and the premium will jump 52.5 percent. With two or more dependents the increase is a whopping 99.2 percent, or nearly double the old premium.

The new plan will now exclude spouses who may have an employer’s plan. Moreover, deductibles are also doubled (from $250/500 to $500/1,000) and the out-of-pocket maximum for out-of-network services is being eliminated, potentially exposing members to financial disaster.

Rank-and-file opposition has been massive. A petition launched by a few performers received nearly 14,000 signatures in three days and social media sites have blown up with denunciation of the union.

David Christian, for example, wrote, “I worked my tail off for 28 years to get lifetime medical at 65, and to have the SAG/AFTRA Health Plan Trustees pull the insurance that we've all worked so hard for is unconscionable and an absolute betrayal.”

Todd Giebenhain said, “I have Cystic Fibrosis and this is tantamount to war against our own members. Which therefore inherently threatens the entire industry. We need extra assurances that we will be covered by our union at all costs, at all debt levels possible, during this pandemic. This action against the sick and retired, let alone every individual actor, is exactly the opposite. Completely inexcusable and evil. Lifetimes of work, and trust in the eventual benefits of our contributions, amounting to a death sentence for many. What good is keeping the Health Fund in the black for future years if it causes the union to implode upon itself in the meantime?”

Gerald Webb commented, “Our leadership has failed us. Worse, they put a theatrical contract in front of us to vote on knowing the poor state of the pension plan and hid it from us until after the contract vote.”

George Bryson added, “60 years as a SAG member. Now I don’t make the money I used to make. It’s ok. I’ve got health insurance from SAG. I’m old and now can relax. Now you’re stripping my health insurance away. Your decision is going to kill me and many of my retired, older, SAG member friends. Horrible decision!”

The union claims that, out of the 33,000 current health plan participants and their 32,000 dependents, 3,300 members and 2,700 dependents won’t qualify according to the new eligibility requirements. This is a substantial underestimation of the damage that is based only on preliminary data. The reality will doubtlessly be harsher since entertainment production remains shut down and making any sessional income this year is practically impossible.

The fact that only 20 percent of the total SAG-AFTRA membership is even eligible for coverage, moreover, speaks volumes about the state of the entertainment industry and the precarious conditions for hundreds of thousands of artists and performers who have do not even have medical coverage.

Claims by some of the union health fund trustees that the union waged a huge battle to protect medical coverage are nothing but lies. David White, SAG-AFTRA’s national executive director, chief negotiator and health fund trustee recently told a membership conference, “It’s union trustees versus management trustees on many of these decisions.”

The SAG-AFTRA Health Plan is governed by a board of 40 trustees, made up of 20 union trustees and 20 producer trustees. It is based on the corporatist program of labor-management collusion, which has produced disastrous consequences for workers in every industry. In order to protect the profits of the giant entertainment firms, the union signed agreements that allowed them to make contributions to the fund that were far below the rate of medical cost inflation.

Last month, SAG-AFTRA pushed through a new, three-year contract with television and theatrical producers with less than 30 percent of the membership voting. While SAG-AFTRA President Gabrielle Carteris called the deal “a terrific wage package and an outsized increase in SAG-AFTRA Health Plan contributions,” the agreement included only a one percent increase in the producers’ contribution to the fund in the first year, with options to divert 0.5 percent from workers’ meager three percent wage increases in years two and three.

Both the producers and the union trustees are pointing to increasing deficits to justify the cuts. The fund has been suffering since the SAG and AFTRA merger in 2017. What followed was a succession of fund deficits: $48 million in 2018, $50 million in 2019, with a projected $141 million this year and $83 million next year. The board advised that, at the current rate, reserves would have run out by 2024 and the restructuring was “necessary in order to protect the plan.”

With the producers responsible for 80 percent of the plan’s funding, the union—which maintains a formal separation from the union trustees—has claimed that the economic downturn as the chief reason for the restructuring. However, industry executives have made it clear that the cuts were planned long before the pandemic.

Michael Estrada, Chief Executive Officer for the plan, commented in a Zoom conference that rising health care costs were the chief driving force for the benefit reductions. “In order to ensure the long-term sustainability of the health plan, the trustees must balance the relationship between revenues and expenses,” declared Estrada. “Since they have less control over the revenue to the plan, primarily determined by the bargaining parties, the trustees focused their attention on expenses.”

SAG-AFTRA officials have feigned surprise and shock over the cuts. It is simply not credible, however, that only a month or so before the announcement of a major health care coverage restructuring the president of the union had no idea about what was being planned. It is far more likely that this was worked out between the union and management behind the backs of union members.

At a more fundamental level, the union’s collusion in the attack on health care benefits is the result of the capitalist profit system, which the unions fully support. In fact, the American Federation of Teachers, the United Auto Workers, the Teamsters and other unions control trillions of dollars in pension and health care funds, which have become a lucrative source of investment income for the union bureaucracy. These union business executives now have a financial incentive to cut benefits and lower the life expectancy of union members in order to retain more money in these investment funds.

This is why performers and every other section of workers need to build new organizations of struggle, rank-and-file committees, independent of the unions, to fight for what workers need and not what the corporate and financial oligarchy say is affordable.

The mobilization of workers to fight the pandemic and demand full health care coverage for all has to be guided by a socialist program in opposition to both corporate-controlled parties, including Democratic presidential nominee Joseph Biden who, as vice president in the Obama administration, oversaw the greatest transfer of wealth from the working class to the super-rich in US history.

In act of high seas piracy, US hijacks Iranian oil bound for Venezuela

Bill Van Auken

The US interdiction of oil shipments bound from Iran to Venezuela represents a dangerous escalation of the “maximum pressure” sanctions that Washington has imposed against both countries, raising the threat of armed conflict.

The Department of Justice issued a statement Friday bragging that it had carried out the “largest-ever seizure of fuel shipments from Iran.” It said that “approximately 1.116 million barrels of petroleum” had been stolen “with the assistance of foreign partners.”

There has been no indication of what “foreign partners” were involved in this act of piracy, but US officials claim that the seizure did not involve military force. Rather, it appears that some combination of threats and bribes were used to convince the Greek owners of the four tankers carrying the fuel— identified as the Bella, Bering, Pandi and Luna, all of them flying Liberian flags–to give it up.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the threats included sanctions against the ships’ owners and crews that would prevent them from accessing US ports, US banks and US dollars.

The Greek-owned tanker Bella, one of four ships from which the US hijacked oil bound for Venezuela.

The pseudolegal basis for Washington’s act of high seas piracy was a seizure order issued by a US District Court judge in Washington, DC based upon the Justice Department’s claim that the oil constituted “foreign assets or sources of influence” for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a major component of the Iranian military, which Washington has branded as a “Foreign Terrorist Organization.” This designation, imposed without any justification in April of last year, represented the first time that Washington has deemed a branch of another country’s government as “terrorist.”

Since unilaterally abrogating the JCPOA nuclear deal between the major powers and Tehran in 2018, the Trump administration has imposed a crippling economic sanctions regime against Iran tantamount to a state of war, while building up US forces in the region in preparation for military confrontation.

Gloating over the operation, President Donald Trump falsely claimed at a White House press briefing last Friday, “We seized the tankers, and we’re moving them ... to Houston.”

In reality, the oil was offloaded from the Greek-owned vessels onto tankers contracted by the US military. Two of these transfers took place off the coast of Oman, and two off the coast of Mozambique. The Greek-owned ships themselves were not seized.

While denouncing the US action, Iranian officials have pointed out that the oil had already been sold to Venezuela and did not belong to Iran. Furthermore, the ships themselves were neither owned nor flagged by Iran.

When the seizure order was issued in July, Iran denounced it at the United Nations as an act of “piracy.”

“Any attempt on the high seas to prevent Iran from involving itself in legal trade with any country that it chooses would be an act of piracy, pure and simple,” Alireza Miryousefi, the spokesman for the Iranian mission to the UN, said in a statement. “This is a direct threat to international peace and security and contravenes international law, including the United Nations Charter,” he added.

Iran had warned that any attempt to interdict its own ships would be met with swift retaliation. “The Islamic Republic will reciprocate any hostile action to contain its legal rights and has not allowed any country to take any such action so far,” an official of the Iranian Supreme National Security Council warned.

The Iranian military’s boarding of the tanker Wilda in the Gulf of Oman last week was an apparent response to the US oil seizure. The vessel appeared to be owned by the same Greek shipping company that agreed to surrender the oil from the four tankers targeted by Washington.

The US act of piracy follows Iran’s successful shipment of $46 million worth of gasoline and petroleum products, including diluents needed by Venezuelan refineries to turn the country’s crude oil into gasoline, to the South American country in May. Iranian tankers carried the cargo. Washington reacted with rage toward this breaching of the “maximum pressure” sanctions regime that it has imposed against both Iran and Venezuela.

At the time, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani warned, “If our oil tankers face problems in the Caribbean Sea or anywhere in the world by the Americans, they will face problems reciprocally.” Iranian officials warned that if Iran was prevented from shipping oil, then no country would be able to do so, suggesting a possible blockade of the strategic Strait of Hormuz, through which some 30 percent of sea-borne oil products pass.

The seizure of the Venezuelan-bound oil by means of threats and bribery is just one step from the use of US military force against Iranian shipping that would spark a major new war in the Middle East, which in turn could provoke a global conflagration.

The worldwide crisis that has been triggered by the coronavirus pandemic, most intensely within the United States itself, has done nothing to blunt the aggressive pursuits of US imperialism and militarism.

Iran, with over 345,000 coronavirus cases and more than 20,000 recorded deaths, has been the worst hit country in the Middle East. While Venezuela had initially appeared spared the horrific toll being recorded in Brazil, Peru, Chile and Colombia, it is now recording over 1,000 new cases daily, while reporting less than 300 deaths. The spread of the deadly virus has been accelerated by the return of Venezuelans who migrated to other Latin American countries in search of work as the Venezuelan economy cratered under the impact of falling oil prices and the punishing US sanctions regime.

Washington sees the crisis and the immense human suffering that it entails as another weapon of war, to be exploited in its quest for hegemony over the Persian Gulf and Latin America. Even as millions are infected and hundreds of thousands die, the threat of a global war that could claim the lives of billions only continues to grow.

US military threats against Venezuela have escalated since April, when Trump took the stage at a supposed COVID-19 briefing to announce the dispatch of a naval task force to the Caribbean for the so-called purpose of stopping drug trafficking, in particular, from Venezuela.

Under the phony pretext of narcotics interdiction—90 percent of the world’s cocaine comes out of Colombia, whose right-wing government is Washington’s closest regional ally—the Pentagon has deployed the largest military force in the region since the 1989 US invasion of Panama.

The US military deployment against Venezuela was followed by an abortive invasion at the beginning of May by mercenary units led by ex-US special forces troops. A Venezuelan court last week sentenced two former Green Berets, Luke Denman and Airan Berry, to 20 years in prison for their part in the operation, which was aimed at seizing and killing Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has vowed that Washington will use all means to secure the release of the mercenaries.

US aggression against both Venezuela and Iran, which respectively hold the world’s first and fourth largest oil reserves, is bound up with the strategic confrontation between the US and China, which has cemented ties with both countries.

Iran has become even more of a focus for US military aggression following the revelation last month that Beijing and Tehran had signed a 25-year “Comprehensive Strategic Partnership” agreement involving $400 billion in Chinese investment in Iranian infrastructure in return for guaranteed energy exports. The deal also includes a significant security component, allowing China to deploy some 5,000 security forces to guard its projects, make free use of Iranian bases and build a port on the strategic Strait of Hormuz.

US imperialism is not about to surrender enforcement of its unilateral sanctions regimes against Venezuela or Iran. Significantly, the Trump administration has announced that Elliott Abrams, convicted in connection with the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s, will now serve not only as its special representative to Venezuela, where he has led the administration’s unsuccessful attempts at regime change, but as its special envoy to Iran as well.

The appointment signals a shift towards stepped up aggression. Driven by US imperialism’s attempts to offset its crisis and decline by military means, the threat of war against both Iran and Venezuela is sharpened by the domestic crisis of the US itself and may be accelerated by the electoral calendar, with a new war a distinctly possible “October surprise.”

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.