Tokyo considers long-range missiles for use in first strikes

Ben McGrath

The Japanese government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is continuing its remilitarization drive, recently stating it was considering acquiring long-range missiles capable of striking targets in China and North Korea. Doing so would be a clear violation of the country’s constitution, which explicitly bars Tokyo from waging war overseas or maintaining war material.

The purpose of acquiring such weaponry is to have the ability to launch a first strike on an enemy on the pretext that it was preparing to attack Japan. In other words, Tokyo wants the ability to be able to launch an illegal pre-emptive war.

In an interview with the New York Times on August 16, Defense Minister Taro Kono evaded the question of long-range missiles, no doubt fearing that being too open about the government’s plans could trigger anti-war protests. “Logically speaking, I won’t say it’s a zero percent (chance). The government hasn’t really decided anything yet,” he declared.

On July 31, a ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) committee comprised of senior party officials approved a proposal to acquire long-range, offensive missiles. It is now under discussion by the government’s National Security Council (NSC), which will finalize new military plans by the end of September. The proposal stated, “Our country needs to consider ways to strengthen deterrence, including having the capability to halt ballistic missile attacks within the territory of our adversaries.”

The committee that approved the proposal included Abe’s former Defense Minister Itsunori Onodera. He paid lip service to the constitution, saying Japan would “stay within the bounds of the Constitution and comply with international law.” Onodera, however, was defense minister in July 2014 when Tokyo announced a “reinterpretation” of the constitution to justify going to war with allies in the name of “collective self-defense.” He also served as defense minister from August 2017 to October 2018, assuming office shortly after Abe pledged to re-write the constitution by 2020.

The LDP raised the possibility of acquiring long-range missiles after the government announced in June it would cancel the construction of two sites to station Aegis Ashore anti-ballistic missile batteries from the United States, citing cost and the potential danger of detached rocket boosters falling on inhabited areas. As is clear from the current discussions, this decision did not represent a retreat from Tokyo’s war preparations, but a reconsideration of how to pursue its agenda.

Acquisition of long-range missiles is only one part of Tokyo’s broader agenda to remilitarize to enable Japanese imperialism to aggressively assert its interests overseas. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the LDP has temporarily slowed its push to revise Article 9 of the constitution that bars Japan from waging war. Abe’s goal is to insert a paragraph in Article 9 that explicitly recognizes the Japanese military. The prime minister still hopes to push the changes through by September 2021 when his term as LDP president, and therefore as prime minister, is set to end.

In May, Abe exploited the pandemic to call for a debate in the National Diet to revise the constitution so as to expand the powers of the Cabinet in the event it declares a national emergency, allowing the government to restrict democratic rights. This revision was one of four proposed in March 2018 that also included changes to Article 9.

New security guidelines approved by Abe’s cabinet in 2018 called for a vast expansion of Japan’s offensive military capability. This includes converting its Izumo-class helicopter carriers into aircraft carriers capable of carrying and launching F-35 fighter jets as well as the procurement of cruise missiles with ranges up to 1,000 kilometers to facilitate striking targets on “enemy” territory. Under the Abe government, annual military spending has reached record levels each year, including another all-time high this year of 5.31 trillion yen ($US48.5 billion).

The acquisition of long-range missiles is not the only move currently under examination. The National Security Council is also considering different land-based locations for the Aegis Ashore batteries or placing them on naval vessels. It is also contemplating purchasing the SPY-6 radar system from US defense company Raytheon, which would provide three times the range of the radars currently in use. Japan would need to further update its radar and tracking systems to enhance its first-strike capabilities.

Tokyo claims that the military build-up is necessary in the face of threats from China and North Korea. In particular, Japan has accused China of becoming more aggressive as other nations are distracted by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, it is the US, backed by Japan, that has sharply and dangerously ratcheted up tensions with Beijing, accusing the latter of being responsible for the pandemic and staging provocative war games in the region. All of this is an attempt to deflect growing internal tensions outwards, particularly in the face of worsening economic conditions and anger over the handling of the pandemic.

Another aspect of Tokyo’s decision to acquire its own weaponry is in part driven by uncertainty over Washington’s agenda. Under the Trump administration, the US has threatened to withdraw troops from Japan and South Korea if both countries do not pay more for hosting US troops. This has generated fears in Tokyo that Japan will be unable to rely on the US in the event of war. “[Trump] sees alliances as a business relationship, in very transactional terms,” Bruce Klingner, of the right-wing Heritage Foundation said recently in Foreign Policy. “He’s seeking to make a profit off of stationing US troops overseas.”

This aggressive US policy, however, is not driven primarily by the short-sighted irrationality of Trump or his administration, but by the sharpening conflicts between nation states. Washington is increasingly coming into conflict with its traditional allies as the same global divisions that led to World War I and II reemerge. While the primary target of US and Japanese imperialism today is China, Washington and Tokyo could just as easily find themselves opponents in the future. The Japanese ruling class is no doubt keenly aware of this danger.

German schools reopening without safety measures as coronavirus cases increase

Marianne Arens & Gregor Link

With 2,034 new coronavirus infections in Germany, Friday’s daily increase exceeded the 2,000-mark for the first time since the end of April. Under these conditions, the federal and state governments are setting the stage for a further explosion in the number of cases by reopening schools, spreading the deadly virus throughout the population.

Nationwide, there is a large number of individual outbreak incidents—in the last seven days, only 15 of 294 German districts had no COVID-19 cases to report. According to the official figures, 9,272 COVID-19 patients have died, while the documented cases of infection, at 233,575, are approaching the quarter-million mark.

One of the German states with the largest increase in new cases is Hesse (whose largest city is Frankfurt), in central Germany. Here, the health authorities have been reporting new coronavirus infections in the triple digits every day for a week now. In Offenbach alone, over 500 people are in quarantine. In the meantime, no district or city in Hesse has been without new infections in the past seven days.

The development is particularly threatening in the cities of the Rhine-Main area. In Offenbach and Hanau, for example, the critical threshold of 50 infections per 100,000 inhabitants has been significantly exceeded in the past few days.

In these circumstances, the reopening of schools without serious safety precautions means the creation of countless potential super-spreading events. Although the Robert Koch Institute (German government agency and research institute responsible for disease control and prevention) has been issuing explicit warnings against “crowds of people indoors” for weeks, this is precisely the situation in schools and daycare centres on a daily basis.

In Hesse, entire school classes in Wiesbaden, Bad Nauheim, Büdingen and Homberg (Efze) were sent home to quarantine in the first week of school because coronavirus infections had been detected in one student. In Frankfurt, the second school week after the summer vacations, began Monday with the announcement of the compulsory wearing of masks at all secondary schools.

However, practically all German states are affected by new cases of coronavirus in schools. In addition to the numerous reports from schools in Berlin and Hamburg, at least 16 schools in Schleswig-Holstein in northern Germany were also affected by cases of infection last week, shortly after reopening.

In North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), too, there are particularly large numbers of new infections at schools. In Bochum, the entire Willy Brandt comprehensive school had to remain closed Monday because a teacher who had been at school on Friday tested positive for the virus. In the district of Minden-Lübbecke, the entire Lahde-Frille elementary school network had to be closed at the same time, as COVID-19 cases had occurred in several classes.

As a large city in the Ruhr area, Duisburg is also severely affected, in addition to Dortmund. Last week, there were cases at eight schools. These are elementary schools, comprehensive schools and a vocational college. The Duisburg example highlights the fact that the danger of infection with the coronavirus cannot be separated from social inequality: the affected schools are all located close to each other in Duisburg’s working-class districts.

According to reports, however, the schools and affected classes reacted in a less than systematic manner because of a lack of equipment. Since, as teachers reported, the elementary schools had too few masks, they were closed for days, while the vocational college sent only individual affected classes into quarantine. On the internet, numerous students are reporting on crowded corridors, classrooms and public transportation and documenting this with pictures.

At the same time, testing capacities are diminishing because the government has not linked the reopening of schools with the creation of new laboratories and testing facilities. For this reason, coronavirus tests threaten to become scarce in the autumn as the cold spell begins. Charité hospital chief virologist Christian Drosten therefore recently issued an urgent warning to this effect and called on previously endangered returnees to self-quarantine.

On Instagram, Schülerstreik-NRW (Pupil strike NRW), a student at a vocational school, reports about a confirmed coronavirus case at her school. “Only this pupil and the person sitting directly next to her are no longer at school. The teachers and the rest of the class are still in school after having been together in a classroom for the last few days.”

Similar reports of a lack of testing, lack of quarantine and even cover-ups of coronavirus cases at schools have already reached the World Socialist Web Site from other cities. In this way, governments and authorities are systematically preparing new explosions of infections and deliberately implementing a murderous policy of contamination.

Politicians of all parties have made it clear that they will not close schools again under any circumstances or implement comprehensive security measures. They are not concerned about the students or parents, but exclusively about the interests of big business, which wants to ramp up production again and therefore wants to ensure that children can be accommodated without additional costs.

In Saxony, Health Minister Petra Köpping (Social Democratic Party, SPD) rules out new school closures outright. Köpping told the Sächsische Zeitung that she does not expect a second lockdown, despite rising infection numbers. It would “not come to that, that we have to resort to such measures as we had,” the SPD politician said on Saturday.

Schools should under no circumstances be closed again, announced former Federal Minister for Family Affairs Kristina Schröder (Christian Democratic Union, CDU). She has left office to take up a position as ambassador for the neoliberal think tank INSM (Initiative Neue Soziale Marktwirtschaft). In her speech, she takes a clear stand against new school closures in order to keep the economy running: “If this time we have to discuss closures as a whole again, then this time it should not be schools and day-care centres first, but schools and day-care centres last.”

At the same time, resistance is growing among students, parents and teachers to the unsafe school reopenings.

“Opening schools for regular operations is a difficult task for me,” says Andrea from NRW. “My 13-year-old daughter is the only child in her class wearing a mask. That won’t work for long.” For politicians, “boosting the economy has priority,” she continues. Apparently, “nobody wants to mess with the business lobby.”

Schülerstreik-NRW, who is calling for a student strike in NRW, asks, “What has to happen first for something to change? Sometimes I really think: Does someone have to die of coronavirus to close the school? I feel that I am not taken seriously by the politicians, etc., because I can say on behalf of many: Things can’t continue like this anymore!”

The call by the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality Party, SGP) to form action committees and prepare a general strike against the murderous reopening of schools is meeting with a large response on social media.

“Teachers and students should go on strike nationwide,” Ily M. writes on Twitter. “The politically prescribed school reopenings with their completely inadequate ‘safety measures’ are clearly failing. I have the feeling that I can no longer keep still and allow our children to be the victims of the ministers of education. I think we must organize and discuss a nationwide strike—otherwise, they will send our children and teachers to the slaughter.”

“This also applies to educators, nurses and doctors,” says Sara, a nurse from Berlin Mitte. “There is hardly a profession that is exposed to a higher risk of infection than nursing. What do we do for ourselves if politically responsible persons do not even provide sufficient protective clothing and do not even allow testing for us—do we continue like this?”

Anja, a special education teacher who herself had fallen ill with COVID-19 and is now struggling with the consequences, agrees with this call. “Yes, please strike! Become active! … The more protection at the workplace, the less luck you need to avoid infection.”

New COVID-19 cases skyrocket at University of Alabama and University of North Carolina

Matthew MacEgan

The disastrous situation that began unfolding on college and university classes across the US earlier this month has continued unabated, with several universities reporting spikes in new COVID-19 cases where face-to-face learning is taking place.

On Monday, the University of Alabama (UA) system reported 566 new cases of COVID-19 since classes reopened last Wednesday, 531 of which occurred at its Tuscaloosa campus. This number is in addition to approximately 310 positive cases reported during the “re-entry” phase of returning students to campus, bringing the total of new cases this month close to 900, about three percent of university’s nearly 30,000 student population.

The UA system previously announced that re-entry testing for students yielded less than a one percent positivity rate, but its dashboard pegs the positive test rate at 1.04 percent for its Tuscaloosa campus, which has the largest number of students. These percentages do not yet include the 566 new cases reported over the past week.

The University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill has also seen a massive increase in new cases despite the fact that the university shut down the campus for face-to-face learning last week. The school reported Monday that 31.3 percent of students tested for COVID-19 last week returned positive results. There have been 835 cases since February, and 646 of those were reported after the first day of in-person classes on August 10.

UNC reported a total of 10 clusters at its Chapel Hill campus, each of which represents five or more cases in close proximity. Across the UNC system, more than 1,500 students have tested positive for COVID-19 since the spring.

While many universities are experiencing a similar explosion in new cases as they reopen their campuses for face-to-face learning, the case of UA is especially significant, since Alabama has used its students as test subjects for a wider national reopening of universities and schools. Just last week, the president of UA in Birmingham, Dr. Ray L. Watts, was bragging about the state’s new federally-funded GuideSafe program, which he said “gives us confidence [that] if there’s a flare-up… we can find it early and we can quarantine, treat and reduce the exposure to others.”

Objective events have exposed the role that Watts and other school administrators are playing: reopening universities and sacrificing the lives of students, faculty and staff. Programs like GuideSafe are put in place not to protect students, but to allow administrators and lawmakers to wash their hands of the consequences of reopening.

While many university administrators have begun blaming students for increases in new cases at universities, UA President Stuart Bell has insisted on the opposite. He said, “Our challenge is not the students. Our challenge is the virus, and there’s a difference, folks… It’s how do we have protocols so that we make it to where our students can be successful, and we can minimize the impact of the virus.”

The protocols that Bell discussed included setting up isolation spaces and disciplining violations of COVID-19 mandates. What is not included is the closing of UA campuses and moving to remote forms of learning. The UA system dashboard, which does not reflect the giant increase in cases over the past week, shows that about 20 percent of the “isolation space” was already occupied at the Tuscaloosa campus prior to this new upsurge in cases.

Dr. Ricky Friend, dean of the UA College of Community Health Sciences, told reporters that while isolation and quarantine spaces were not yet at capacity, “we are concerned that each day that goes by, there might be new cases.” Friend reported that UA was working on getting additional space on top of the 450 beds that are already in place to isolate and quarantine students, a number which is only about half of the 900 cases reported overall this month by UA.

Despite Bell’s supposed defense of students at UA, his general response to the increase in new cases has consisted in targeting students rather than installing more protections and safer infrastructure.

The 566 new COVID-19 cases were reported just a few hours after the City of Tuscaloosa announced that it will be closing bars for the next two weeks and that bar service at restaurants must cease. Bell wrote in a letter to students that university police and the Tuscaloosa Police Department would monitor bars, restaurants and off-campus residences to enforce university guidelines. On Friday, UA announced a 14-day moratorium on all in-person student events outside of classroom instruction.

Other universities across the US are following suit. Ohio State University announced recently that it had issued 228 interim suspensions for individuals and student organizations that had attended or hosted large parties and gatherings in the university district. Boston College also recently announced that it will utilize the Boston police to watch and break up parties in and around its campus.

Alabama has recorded more than 117,000 cases of COVID-19 and has a death toll of 2,024, placing it fourteenth among US states. Alabama Governor Kay Ivey praised both the mayor of Tuscaloosa and university officials for “acting swiftly.” Tuscaloosa Mayor Walt Maddox, a Democrat, stated at a press conference, “My hope is that this will be just a brief pause on their plans to reopen and that we can get this in our rearview mirror sooner, rather than later.”

Other universities around the US that have experienced increases in COVID-19 cases include the University of South Carolina (USC), which recently placed two buildings in its Greek Village under quarantine. The university currently reports that there are 44 active student cases and two active faculty cases. Since August 10, when testing at USC began, a total of 90 students and 10 faculty have tested positive for the virus.

The University of Southern California is also reporting an “alarming increase” in the number of COVID-19 cases among students. It identified 43 cases and has placed more than 100 students in a 14-day quarantine due to exposures. The university resumed instruction almost entirely online beginning August 17 and is limiting access to campus, but many students remain in private apartments and houses off campus, where they are still susceptible to the virus.

Towson University in Baltimore County, Maryland decided to temporarily move to online classes after 55 people tested positive for COVID-19 on campus over two days last week. Princeton University, the University of South California and the University of Notre Dame all either postponed or cancelled face-to-face instruction last week.

While university administrators and lawmakers have continued to keep campuses open in many cases, students, faculty and other staff have continued to protest the reopening measures.

Students and faculty at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania protested the first day of fall semester classes on Monday. One student told reporters, “This last weekend was really honestly terrifying, and we don’t know what the rest of the school year is going to look like, but if it’s any predictor, it’s going to be bad.”

A group of graduate students at Ohio State University protested the return to campus Tuesday, bringing a car caravan to circle the campus in Columbus followed by a socially distanced rally around Bricker Hall. The graduate students issued demands, including the right to opt out of all in-person activities during the pandemic, the reinstatement of cost-of-living adjustments and a meeting with administrators to discuss their demands.

More than 300 University of Georgia (UGA) faculty members signed a column published by the student newspaper last week criticizing the university’s plans for reopening. A model created by John Drake, director of the UGA Center for the Ecology of Infectious Diseases, predicts that hundreds of students were already infected with COVID-19 prior to their arrival on campus and that these will spread the virus to tens of thousands of other students, faculty and staff within the next two months.

Drake wrote: “The resumption of in-person instruction at the University of Georgia is unwise. It is not grounded in evidence nor in the recent experience of other peer universities. Regardless of the precautions taken by the University on campus, both projections and experience suggest that a widespread outbreak of COVID-19 is inevitable unless there is an immediate change in plans for the fall semester.”

University of Michigan (UM) professors are similarly opposing the August 31 reopening of their campus in Ann Arbor. A few dozen professors and community members gathered outside of the Fleming Administration Building last Wednesday to protest.

Kento Toyama, a professor at UM’s School of Information, who organized the protest, told reporters: “We just don’t understand the underlying, true motivation for the decision to reopen. I don’t think anybody other than the university administration—and even then, probably not most people—fully understand the reasons.”

The underlying motivation, which the World Socialist Web Site has outlined numerous times this year, is that the reopening of schools is the official policy of the American government and both big business parties, Democrats and Republicans. The policy of the ruling class, which university administrators and state lawmakers are carrying out, is to fully open the economy, which requires the opening of schools. The inevitable surge of COVID-19 infections and deaths is already underway.

Australian Labor Party and unions agree to slash income support and working conditions

Mike Head

The Australian Labor Party confirmed yesterday that it will back legislation, drawn up in backroom talks by the federal government and the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU), to reduce JobKeeper and JobSeeker payments and allow employers to keep cutting workers’ hours and wages.

Labor’s parliamentary caucus agreed to vote for the Liberal-National government’s bill, ensuring it will pass through parliament during the current fortnight sitting, after its provisions were finalised during negotiations between ACTU secretary Sally McManus and Workplace Relations Minister Christian Porter.

In its assault on workers, the ACTU-designed deal goes far beyond the initial JobKeeper package drafted by McManus and Porter in April-May. After that agreement was reached Porter called McManus his BFF (“best friend forever”) and Prime Minister Scott Morrison phoned McManus to thank her for the ACTU’s “constructive” role.

The “JobKeeper 2.0” measures will throw about five million workers onto poverty-line payments from next month amid the worst unemployment since the 1930s Great Depression. At the same time, it will allow companies to continue slashing wages and conditions even if they no longer qualify for JobKeeper wage subsidies.

The clear purpose of these measures is to give workers no choice but to accept the gutting of their conditions and push them into unsafe workplaces, regardless of the danger of infection, amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The ACTU-Labor-government deal is a centrepiece of the drive to “reopen” the economy and exploit the pandemic to further restructure workplace relations at the expense of the working class.

The bill extends employers’ powers to reduce workers’ hours and adjust their duties and location of work. This is both for businesses still claiming wage subsidies and for “legacy employers” who no longer qualify for the subsidies but claim to be suffering just a 10 percent decline in revenue due to COVID-19.

The main “limit” is that workers’ hours and wages cannot be cut by more than 40 percent. Also, they cannot be called in to work fewer than two hours on a single day. In other words, the bill is another green light for the casualisation and impoverishment of millions of workers.

When the ACTU and the government struck their initial deal on the JobKeeper legislation, which Labor helped pass in May, the unions claimed that this was only a temporary measure, confined to employers that qualified for wage subsidies. This pretence has now been abandoned.

The 3.5 million or so workers currently receiving a bare minimum wage of $750 a week, via JobKeeper subsidies handed to their employers, will have their incomes reduced to just $500 a week by the end of the year, and to only $325 a week for part-time or casual workers. These amounts are not enough to live on.

The approximately 1.6 million jobless workers now receiving JobSeeker unemployment allowances of $550 a week will have these pittances cut by $150 a week to just over $400. That is just above the starvation level of $280 a week for the pre-COVID Newstart jobless payment. And the government has foreshadowed cutting this level further after December 31.

After yesterday’s caucus meeting, Labor’s leaders said they would back the bill even if the government rejects any Labor amendments to adjust the pace of slashing these payments. Labor is trying to posture as having some concerns about workers bearing the burden of the pandemic-triggered economic crisis, while pledging its support for the bill to satisfy the demands of the corporate elite.

Another pretence by the government, Labor and the unions—that JobKeeper is for the benefit of workers—was shattered last week. Annual profit reports by companies confirmed that the JobKeeper wage subsidies are propping up and inflating the profits of large companies, even as they axe thousands of jobs.

At the top of the list was Qantas, the former government-owned airline. It obtained $267 million from JobKeeper by June 30, plus as much again in direct government subsidies, while standing down 20,000 workers. Yesterday it announced the dismissal of 2,500 ground crew members, on top of 4,000 retrenchments last week.

By last week, companies listed on the stock exchange had reported receiving at least $625 million in JobKeeper payments, often while reporting increased profits based almost entirely on these subsidies. The true level of the corporate handouts remains hidden because the government refuses to provide a list of all the companies and the amounts they are receiving.

While the ACTU and its affiliates feigned opposition to Qantas’s job destruction, they are working night and day to block any struggles by workers against it or any other attack on jobs and conditions. At the same time, they are collaborating behind closed doors with the government and the major employers in five working groups on how to impose more “industrial relations reforms.” These “round table” groups are due to report next month.

McManus told a recent Griffith University online event that making industrial awards “simpler and less complex” was an area for potential agreement. She denied media reports that the process had produced impasses, saying agreement could be reached with some employer groups.

Her comments were a reminder of her interview on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s flagship “Insiders” television show in April, when she told employers: “You can get everything you want through co-operation.”

McManus boasted that she and the unions had worked to make “changes” to industrial awards and agreements affecting 2.5 million restaurant, hospitality and clerical workers in “about a week.”

In one typical “change”—made without any consultation with these millions of workers—the Australian Services Union allowed employers to force 1.3 million clerical workers to work any hours from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. from Mondays to Fridays, and 7 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. on Saturdays without overtime rates. It also permitted casuals to be allocated shifts as short as two hours.

This week’s proceedings in parliament again demonstrate how much the ruling class depends on the Labor Party and the unions to quash unrest in the working class over the mass unemployment, cuts to wages and conditions, and exposure to unsafe conditions in workplaces, including schools, hospitals and aged care facilities, amid the pandemic.

After months of recess, parliament has been recalled for a fortnight just to rush through this bill and other legislation to hike university students’ fees. Parliament will not meet again until October 6, when another brief session will be organised to rubber stamp an austerity budget.

The country remains governed by a de facto coalition with the Labor Party via a self-proclaimed “national cabinet,” which sanctions emergency decrees issued by the federal, state and territory government leaders.

This collaboration takes to a new level the partnership forged for decades between the unions, employers and government to suppress the opposition of workers to the endless attacks of the financial elite. These have produced a soaring gulf between the super-rich and the working class, especially since the union-employer-government Accords reached by the ACTU and the Hawke-Keating Labor governments in the 1980s and 1990s.

Today’s government-corporate-union offensive underscores the necessity for workers to break from Labor and the unions, and to turn to an alternative socialist perspective: The fight for a workers’ government that would place the banks and corporations under public ownership and democratic workers’ control to reorganise production for human need and health, not private profit.

Rising COVID-19 death toll underscores decades-long crisis in Australian aged care

Clare Bruderlin

The catastrophic spread of COVID-19 throughout more than 130 aged care facilities in the Australian state of Victoria has so far resulted in the deaths of at least 304 residents and over 1,700 infections.

Data from the Victorian Department of Health and Human Services shows that residential aged care accounted for the majority of coronavirus outbreaks between June 1 and August 11. In total, 335 of the 525 people who have died from coronavirus in Australia since the pandemic began were aged care residents.

The pandemic has exacerbated a decades-long crisis. Extensive privatisation and the gutting of public healthcare carried out by successive governments, Labor and Liberal-National alike, has meant that the needs of the elderly and infirm are subordinated to the profit requirements of the corporate and financial elite.

Since 1997, there have been 18 separate government inquiries into residential aged care. An interim report, handed down last year by an ongoing Aged Care Royal Commission, conceded that many of the failings identified in previous inquiries remain widespread.

The decades-long assault on the elderly has created the conditions for the rampant spread of the virus in aged care facilities. Recent reports have revealed catastrophic conditions, including widespread malnutrition, dehydration and untreated sores and infections. Victorian state Labor and federal health authorities blocked some aged-care residents infected with COVID-19 from being transferred to hospital—a policy that amounts to social murder.

One nurse at St Vincent’s hospital in East Melbourne told the Guardian that she treated an elderly resident from the private Kalyna Care facility who was transferred to the emergency department only after she was found with infected wounds and 18 sores on her body. The nurse said the woman had been “left in a room to rot,” and her death last week was “the culmination of six to eight weeks of neglect.”

In the same facility, where more than 20 residents and 15 staff have been infected with COVID-19, photos emerged showing a 95-year-old woman with ants crawling over a wound on her leg.

An audit of Kalyna Care by the aged care regulator some three weeks earlier found that the wounds of residents were not being properly treated, and an Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission assessment team found that the facility failed all five requirements it was tested on. Staff, it stated, did not “have the knowledge and competency to perform their roles effectively.”

However, it was not until Kalyna Care became severely understaffed, as aged care workers were forced into quarantine, that the Victorian government took over the facility and placed residents under the control of a public hospital. The chair of the board of Kalyna Care stated that at one point there was only one nurse and one personal care assistant responsible for 68 residents. Similar tragedies have played out at facilities across Melbourne.

The vast majority of the facilities where outbreaks have occurred, including Kalyna Care, are privately owned and operated, with some of the largest providers amassing millions of dollars in profits each year.

There are around 2,500 aged care facilities in Australia tasked with caring for over 200,000 people. Forty-one percent are owned by private corporations and 50 percent by “not for-profits,” primarily churches and charities. The remaining 9 percent are government owned.

A report released by the Centre for International Corporate Tax Accountability and Research this month revealed that nine of the largest not-for-profit aged care operators, which received $2.4 billion in Government funding in 2019, collectively paid their executives and board members more than $30 million in compensation.

The report also revealed that “while four of the top six operators reported losses in 2019, losses were driven by property investment... Each of the 6 operators generated between $26 million and $62 million in net cash from operations.”

Furthermore, in a recent audit, one of the largest not-for-profit aged care operators, Uniting, which owns more than 70 facilities, was found to have underpaid 9,561 workers in New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory by more than $3.36 million over the past six year. One worker was underpaid nearly $12,000.

The top six private for-profit aged care providers—Bupa, Opal, Regis, Estia, Japara and Allity—received over $2.17 billion in annual taxpayer subsidies in 2015-16 and made substantial additional operating profits, while paying just $154 million in tax.

According to the Australian Taxation Office, the total combined income of all for-profit aged care providers was over $5 billion in 2015-16, with a total profit of $402 million after tax.

The major windfall to private operators is the direct consequence of the pro-business restructuring of the sector spearheaded by the Labor Party.

In the early 1990s, the federal Labor government of Prime Minister Paul Keating introduced competitive processes for the allocation of funds to aged care and opened up government-funded homes to for-profit organisations. It also pioneered a “user pays” regime by imposing higher fees and introducing entry bonds on residents in aged hostels. By 1997, the number of government-owned aged care facilities had fallen from 19 percent in 1972 to around 11 percent.

The Howard Liberal-National government deepened this process, cutting $1 billion from aged care in the 1996-97 budget, claiming that higher nursing home fees and entry bonds would provide incentives for investors to expand and improve the industry.

In 2011, a Productivity Commission reported brought down by the Gillard Labor government made recommendations that the elderly should pay up to 35 percent of their own aged care costs and that these contributions should be funded from the value of their homes, using “reverse mortgages.”

Acting on these recommendations in 2012, the Gillard government released its “Living Longer, Living Better” package, which it said would deliver “a less regulated, more consumer-driven and market-based aged care system.” What this meant, in practice, was that the cost of providing aged care services was substantially shifted onto elderly residents and their families.

Today, aged care residents can expect to pay a basic daily fee of up to $52.25, which is 85 percent of the single person rate of the aged pension, for day-to-day services such as meals, cleaning, facilities management and laundry.

Additionally, there is a “means-tested care fee” for residents which can be up to $259.15 per day. This is used to cover the cost of residents’ personal and clinical care needs which can include help with bathing, dressing, grooming and going to the toilet, specialised nursing services and medication assistance.

Despite the rising cost of care, a 2018 report submitted to the royal commission found that up to half of all residents in aged care facilities suffer from malnutrition as a result of inedible and non-nutritious food coupled with an inadequate number of staff to assist residents who cannot feed themselves.

Another submission found that in 2017, the average food budget in aged care facilities was just $6.08 per resident per day, which was less than the average in Australian prisons ($8.25 per prisoner per day).

Staffing levels in residential aged care in Australia are substantially below those of other comparable countries.

A study carried out for the royal commission released last October, found that per day, aged care residents receive just 36 minutes of care by registered nurses, 8 minutes by allied health professionals and 144 minutes by personal care assistants.

When this was compared with standards in the US, over half (57.6 percent) of Australian residents were found to be in facilities with substandard care. To bring all residential aged care facilities to minimum adequate average staffing levels would require an overall increase of staff by 37.3 percent.

If Australian practices were brought to the standards of Canadian British Columbia, levels of care would have to be increased by 175 percent.

Moreover, the number of higher-trained aged care staff has decreased. In 2003 registered nurses working in aged care accounted for 21.4 percent of the workforce. By 2016 this was reduced to 14.9 percent. The number of less trained personal care attendants, who are often low-paid, casual employees, increased from 56.5 percent in 2003 to 71.5 percent in 2016.

A submission to the royal commission revealed that the present Morrison Liberal-National government was warned in April that aged care facilities would struggle to find staff during a coronavirus outbreak, based on the experience of outbreaks at the Dorothy Henderson Lodge and Newmarch House in Sydney, where an estimated 87 percent of the workforce had to go into quarantine.

Furthermore, aged care workers since March have reported personal protection equipment (PPE) shortages and inadequate infection control.

Despite these warnings, no significant measures have been taken by either state or federal governments to stop the spread of the pandemic in aged care facilities.

On Friday, the Morrison government announced that it would invest $171 million into the aged care sector, claiming this would bring the total investment during the pandemic to $1 billion. However, aged care facilities are not required to report how they are spending this funding.

Jason Ward, of the Tax Justice Network Australia, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that while providers have received additional funding during the pandemic, there is “no evidence that they have spent that money in a way that’s been effective in preventing this disease and unnecessary deaths.”

The tragic deaths and illnesses are an indictment of the capitalist system, which subordinates every aspect of life to the profit interests of a tiny corporate elite. As has been the case in Britain and internationally, Australian governments have pursued a homicidal policy of allowing aged care residents to become sick, knowing that many of them would succumb to the virus.

This underscores the fact that the fight for socialism, a society in which social need, not private profit, determines the allocation of resources, is a life and death question.

EU denounces Russia over alleged poisoning of oppositionist Alexei Navalny

Johannes Stern & Alex Lantier

On Monday, doctors at Berlin’s Charité hospital claimed they had found indications that Alexei Navalny, the head of Russia’s pro-NATO liberal opposition, had been poisoned. The Charité said its findings indicated “an intoxication by a substance from the active substance group of cholinesterase inhibitors,” although the specific substance is not yet known. Navalny is reportedly being treated with the antidote atropine.

Berlin and the European Union (EU) immediately seized upon the case. German Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) and Foreign Minister Heiko Maas (SPD) issued a joint statement declaring: “In view of Mr Navalny’s major role in Russia’s political opposition, the country’s authorities are urgently called upon to fully investigate this act as a matter of urgency – and to do so in a completely transparent way.” Demanding that those responsible be “be identified and brought to justice,” they added: “We hope that Mr Navalny can make a full recovery. We also send our best wishes to his family, for whom this is a most trying experience.”

Alexei Navalny (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

The EU also demanded an investigation. “The Russian authorities must immediately initiate an independent and transparent investigation,” EU foreign affairs representative Josep Borrell demanded in a statement published on Monday evening. Similarly, the French foreign ministry issued a statement yesterday condemning a “criminal act targeting a major figure in Russian political life” and demanding “a rapid and transparent inquiry.”

Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov declared that Moscow has no plans to initiate a criminal investigation of Navalny’s illness. “The medical analyses of our doctors and those in Germany are completely in agreement. But their conclusions are different. We do not understand the haste of our German colleagues,” Peskov said. He asserted that there are “many other medical possibilities” to explain Navalny’s illness; Russian doctors initially diagnosed Navalny as suffering from a metabolic disorder.

What actually happened to Navalny, who fell ill suddenly on a flight from Tomsk to Moscow on August 20, remains unclear.

What is clear, however, is that the drive by Washington, Berlin and other NATO imperialist powers to isolate and secure regime change in Russia, launched with the February 2014 NATO-backed putsch in Kiev, has reached a new and critical stage. An explosive crisis has emerged after the disputed August 9 presidential elections in Belarus. This crisis was complicated, from the point of view of imperialist strategy, by the sudden entry into activity of the working class in Belarus.

In February 2014 in Ukraine, after a Russian-backed government cracked down on pro-EU protests, NATO backed a far-right putsch in Kiev. During this operation, opposition gunmen secretly shot Ukrainian riot police in so-called “sniper massacres,” using the ensuing police crackdown to discredit and then topple the regime. This led not only to civil war in Ukraine, but an explosive military standoff between NATO and Russia along Russia’s borders in Eastern Europe. NATO troops and military advisors are now posted to all the Baltic republics, Poland, and Ukraine.

This month, when opposition forces in Belarus launched protests against incumbent President Aleksandr Lukashenko’s declaration of victory, leading to a brutal police crackdown, strikes erupted in factories and workplaces across Belarus. The upsurge of industrial action by the working class in the former Soviet republic stunned bourgeois forces of all political colors. While the Kremlin is backing Lukashenko, the EU has supported an unelected Coordination Council set up by opposition parties linked to rival candidate Svetlana Tikhonovskaya.

Moreover, anger at social inequality and the disastrous official handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, which helped drive Belarusian workers into action, extend well beyond Belarus. There is mounting dissatisfaction among both the Russian ruling elite and Russian workers with President Vladimir Putin—reflected, in a highly distorted way, in last month’s protests in the far eastern city of Khabarovsk against the Kremlin’s removal of regional governor Sergei Furgal, of the far-right Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR).

The Khabarovsk protests have made clear the growing centrifugal tendencies in the Russian state apparatus, as 18 regions in Russia are set to hold regional elections on September 13.

If Navalny has indeed been poisoned, the timing of this attack strongly suggests it was a political operation. However, it remains unclear who would have carried it out and for what ends. Two basic possibilities, with many related variants, emerge. One is that Navalny was poisoned by elements in the Putin regime, acting with or without the knowledge or support of the president, though it is questionable whether a reckless and obvious act would strengthen the Kremlin regime.

Another possibility is that opposition factions in Russia or their imperialist handlers gave a possibly non-lethal dose of poison to Navalny in another “false flag” attack, aiming to discredit the Russian regime by committing an act they expect would be blamed on the Kremlin.

Such an attack could have the politically-convenient consequence of burnishing Navalny’s at best tattered opposition credentials. Navalny, a viciously anti-immigrant politician, reportedly received US government funds funneled via the National Endowment for Democracy in 2006, before heading to Yale University in America to participate in the “Yale World Fellows” program in 2009. He is currently viewed among broad layers of the Russian population as a tool of NATO.

While the attacker in the alleged poisoning of Navalny has not been identified, leading European politicians and media are nevertheless rushing to loudly accuse the Putin regime.

“Although a strong suspicion already existed, the certainty of the poisoning is shocking and a repulsive policy of the Russian leadership,” said Norbert Röttgen (CDU), chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the Bundestag. “The policy of poisoning consists of insidiously eliminating opposition members and sending a clear message to all Russian citizens: Those who oppose democratically live dangerously. Any naivety and trivialization that is repeatedly recommended towards Russia, especially in Germany, is out of place,” Röttgen declared.

The German Greens’ foreign policy spokesman, Omid Noripour, also blamed Russia. “It is now obvious to everyone that this kind of attempted assassination and murder has a system,” he said. Referring to allegations that Moscow poisoned the Skripal family in Salisbury, Britain and shot a former Chechen militia leader in the Tiergarten in Berlin, he added: “The British called the EU Council after the attack in Salisbury, the German government did not do that after the Tiergarten murder. Now it is high time and a good opportunity for this—after all, Germany holds the presidency of the [EU] Council.”

Similarly, in a column titled “What the Navalny Affair reveals of the Putin system,” Le Monde’s Moscow correspondent Benoît Vitkine baldly cited a Twitter hashtag #WeKnowWhoIsGuilty, now used by Russian opposition supporters, as evidence that Putin is responsible for Navalny’s illness: “An ambassador of France, the one for human rights, has echoed this call. Behind these words is a simple truth: political violence is inherent to the Putin system.”

In fact, the 30 years since the Stalinist bureaucracy’s geopolitically suicidal 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union have shown that reactionary violence is inherent to the capitalist system. The NATO war drive in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia made possible by this elimination of the main military counterweight to the imperialist powers left a trail of devastation with millions of dead and tens of millions of refugees. Since the Ukraine putsch, there have been mounting military exercises and preparations for a direct NATO attack on Russia, a nuclear-armed power.

The resurgence of the class struggle inside what was previously the territory of the Soviet Union marks a significant new stage in this political crisis. It is virtually self-evident that the NATO powers are keeping Navalny as a tool to intervene in Russian politics in a period of mounting wars and class struggles. Were the political forces around Navalny to obtain more power inside Russia, moreover, they would be bitterly hostile to the working class.

The danger of war, growing social inequality and the disastrous official handling of the COVID-19 pandemic can be resolved on a progressive basis only through the re-emergence of mass working class struggles based on a revolutionary socialist and internationalist program. In Russia, Belarus and across the region, this means building the Trotskyist movement opposed to the capitalist gangster oligarchy that emerged from the Stalinist restoration of capitalism. This would be an integral part of a mass, international movement in the working class against war and the murderous policies adopted by capitalist governments worldwide amid the pandemic.

India emerges as a global epicenter of COVID-19 pandemic

Wasantha Rupasinghe

India is emerging as a global epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic, with the virus spreading rapidly throughout the country, including to rural areas where public health facilities are largely nonexistent.

Home to the world’s largest number of desperately poor people, the South Asian country now leads the world in terms of daily new confirmed COVID-19 cases, with new cases exceeding 60,000 on virtually every day for the past two-and-a-half weeks.

India is on pace to soon surpass Brazil as the country with the world’s second largest total tally of COVID-19 infections.

Since Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party government began “reopening the economy” at the end of April, the country’s COVID-19 caseload has gone up exponentially, with cases increasing more than a hundredfold.

On May 1, India had just over 25,000 cases and 1,150 deaths. As of Tuesday, according to extremely conservative official figures, total infections rose to 3,170,942 with 58,570 fatalities. A record number of daily infections was registered on Saturday, with 70,488 cases. Underscoring that the spread of the virus continues to accelerate, the past seven days have witnessed the fastest weekly increase in new infections and fatalities since the start of the pandemic, with nearly half a million new infections and 6,666 people losing their lives. The latest one million infections have been registered in just 16 days.

Commuters wearing face masks jostle for a ride on a bus in Kolkata, India, Tuesday, July 21, 2020. (AP Photo/Bikas Das)

Responsibility for this health and social disaster lies squarely with the entire Indian ruling class, which has pursued policies from the outset aimed at defending the wealth and business interests of the superrich, while leaving the vast majority of impoverished workers and toilers to fend for themselves.

The Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party government led by Modi has refused to take any serious measures to strengthen the country’s chronically underfunded health care system and has facilitated the rapid spread of the virus to almost every corner of the country with its homicidal back-to-work drive. It has been supported in this by all of the official opposition parties, which have used their positions in various state governments to throw open the economy so big business can begin extracting profits once again from highly-exploited workers, regardless of what this costs in human lives.

Despite the horrendous toll the coronavirus has taken, especially on the working class and rural poor, Modi continues to insist that his government has mounted an exemplary response. In his August 15 Independence Day speech, Modi said India is “doing well” in the battle against the deadly pandemic. He added that he “believe[s] the indomitable will power and determination of 130 crore [10 million] countrymen will make us win over Corona [pandemic], and we shall definitely win.”

Modi’s rhetoric is aimed at covering up the callous attitude of his BJP government towards the lives of millions of working people and rural toilers. After ignoring the threat posed by the pandemic for more than two months, the government belatedly implemented an ill-prepared countrywide lockdown on March 25 with only a few hours’ notice. The lockdown failed to prevent the spread of the disease, above all, because the government did not use the time to increase desperately needed financial support to the health care system, nor put in place a system of mass testing and contact tracing to identify and contain infections.

Neither did the government provide adequate financial and other support to the tens of millions of workers who lost their incomes overnight, resulting in hunger and social distress on a vast scale. The social misery produced by the government’s policies meant that millions of workers were left with no choice but to return to unsafe workplaces when lockdown measures began to be prematurely lifted from late April onwards.

The Congress Party, Stalinist Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPM and the Communist Party of India (CPI), Aam Admi Party (AAP), Shiv Sena and several regional parties are equally to blame for the rapid spread of the pandemic. All of them, whether as part of current or past governments at the central or state levels, have intentionally neglected the public health care system by limiting budget allocations to the meagre level of 1.5 percent of India’s GDP.

Since the onset of the pandemic, none of the state governments involving these parties has challenged the Modi government’s criminal policy of “herd immunity,” which involves allowing the virus to run rampant so that major companies can return to business as usual. It is worth noting in this regard that two of the states hit hardest by the virus, the western state of Maharashtra and the capital of Delhi, are run by a coalition government of the ultra-right Shiv Sena and Congress, and an AAP government respectively.

The “herd immunity” policy, which even its advocates acknowledge will likely lead to a death toll in the millions, is the spearhead of a savage assault being prepared by the Modi government against the working class. The prime minister has vowed to initiate a “quantum jump” in pro-investor reforms, including the further relaxation of India’s already lax labour laws so as to slash labour costs and make India more attractive to global investors.

To downplay the disastrous consequences of its policies, which are becoming ever clearer with the daily increases in new infections and deaths, the Modi government primarily highlights the so-called “recovery rate,” which is "nearly at 75 percent.” It also claims to have presided over a “lower fatality rate” of 1.86 percent, which is “one of the lowest globally,” according to the Union Health & Family Welfare Ministry.

These claims are absurd in many ways. Indian state authorities are notorious for vastly under-reporting death rates, which has no doubt contributed to the comparatively low official fatality rate. Changes made to the procedure for releasing COVID-19 patients from hospitals have also artificially boosted the recovery rate. Whereas a patient initially required two negative coronavirus tests before being discharged, the government adopted new guidelines in April that allowed patients to be discharged if they showed no symptoms for three days. Even patients receiving critical care require just one negative test before being discharged. As a result, there have been repeated reports of patients who have died after leaving hospitals. It remains unclear whether these deaths are being logged as coronavirus casualties.

The attempt to paint a rosy picture of the low death rate also ignores the devastating impact COVID-19 is having on the elderly and other vulnerable sections of the population. According to a study by the US-based National Bureau of Economic Research, Indians over the age of 60 account for 53 percent of all virus deaths, even though they make up just nine percent of the general population.

The refusal of the Modi government and its counterparts at the state level to make available additional funds for India’s desperately underresourced public health system has also created terrible conditions at many hospitals. There is an acute shortage of medical staff and personal protective equipment for frontline workers. Doctors, nurses and other medical staff have been forced to labour in hellish conditions and have often gone for months without pay. This has triggered a growing number of strikes and protests.

For example, on July 18, sanitation workers and nursing staff of the All India Institute of Medical Science (AIIMS) in Patna went on strike to protest the nonpayment of their salaries for the previous two months. Although the facility was designated as a COVID-19 hospital by the state government, striking workers alleged it had become a “hub for VIP patients of COVID-19 like ruling government leaders, ministers, bureaucrats, judges and businessmen.” As they have occupied the majority of the isolation rooms and ICU beds with ventilators, health care workers or their family members have been refused admission and treatment at the hospital where they have worked since the beginning of the pandemic, according to NewsClick.

Across India, around 200 doctors have already succumbed to the virus, 40 percent of whom were general practitioners.

These protests in the health care sector coincide with mounting social opposition among the working class and rural toilers to the pro-corporate agenda of Modi and the ruling elite as a whole. Millions of workers, including social health and child care workers, have participated in various strikes and protests over recent weeks against planned privatisations, cuts to public spending, and attacks on workplace rights.

The growing opposition to the Indian political establishment must find an independent political way forward if it is to put a stop to the ruling class onslaught on working people and save lives amid the raging COVID-19 pandemic. This requires the mobilisation of the working class and rural toilers in a struggle for a workers and peasants government pledged to socialist policies.

American Airlines announces 19,000 to be laid off starting October 1

Jacob Crosse

American Airlines executives announced Tuesday that without additional government funding through the Payroll Support Program (PSR), included in the CARES Act passed earlier this year, it will proceed with furloughing 19,000 workers on October 1. Thousands may still be laid off regardless of whether Congress hands over more public money to the airline.

As part of the bipartisan CARES Act passed at the end of March this year, the major US airlines were bailed out to the tune of $25 billion, with American Airlines receiving a hefty $5.8 billion gratis from the US taxpayer. As part of the terms of the bailout, the airlines were required to use the money to retain workforces through September 30.

With the additional layoffs, American will have 40,000 fewer workers than it did before the pandemic. More than 12,500 workers have already been forced to leave through “voluntary” retirements, buyouts and other schemes.

In addition to American, Delta Air Lines announced on Monday that it will furlough over 1,940 pilots unless the Air Line Pilots Association agrees to a minimum 15 percent pay cut.

American AIrlines Boeing 777 (Image Credit: Steve Lynes)

The mass layoffs in the US airline industry are part of a global restructuring of the airline industry that is destroying the jobs of thousands of airline workers in the UK, Germany, Australia and other countries. It occurs at a time when more than 30 million workers are officially unemployed, and jobless workers have been without their $600-a-week federal unemployment benefit and many face evictions for nonpayment of rent.

All of the major airlines spent billions of dollars in the decade leading up to the pandemic on share buybacks and dividend distributions to stockholders. In a Bloomberg report earlier this year, it was revealed that American, United, Southwest, Delta and Alaska had spent 96% of their free cash flow, (money remaining after capital expenditures) between 2010-2019, buying back their own shares.

American Airlines led all domestic carriers, spending $12.97 billion on buybacks during that time, even though the company had a negative free cash flow of over $8 billion during that same period. Delta and Southwest were close behind, spending $11.4 and $10.65 billion on buybacks respectively.

Despite the bailouts, the airlines have continued to pressure workers into accepting buyouts, taking early retirement, or acceding to leaves of absence for months on end and in many cases unpaid.

Some 17,500 workers—members of the Allied Pilots Association and the Association of Flight Attendants—are being targeted for the new “involuntary staffing reductions,” according to the notice distributed to workers by American Airlines CEO Doug Parker and President Robert Isom.

The letter included a chart titled “Anticipated furloughs by workgroup,” which identified 1,600 pilots, 8,100 flight attendants, and 2,223 fleet service workers for layoffs with the remaining spread across “dispatch,” “passenger service,” “wholly owned carriers” and “maintenance.” An additional 1,500 management and support staff will be terminated by the end of September.

The executives blamed lower flight volume and the continuing spread of the pandemic for the layoffs while urging workers about to be thrown into a tailspin of financial insecurity and panic to “take heart that we will get through this together.”

As CEO for American last year, Parker pocketed over $11 million, and $12 million the year prior, while Isom “earned” over $7.1 million in 2019, according to salary.com.

There is no “in this together.” The coronavirus has exposed the massive class chasms that exist in US capitalist society. While the rich have never had it better, as their stock portfolios continue to gain value through artificial manipulation of the stock market via injections from the Federal Reserve, workers, the majority of whom own nothing in the Wall Street casino, have been laid off by the millions with prospects of a quick rehiring turnaround looking more remote by the day.

A survey reported in the Washington Post and conducted by Gusto, a payroll firm with small business clients in every US state, found that roughly 33 percent of workers furloughed in March were permanently laid off by July, while only 37 percent have been called back to their previous employer.

The US Labor Department estimates that 3.7 million unemployed workers permanently lost their job by the end of July with that number expected to reach between 6.2 million and 8.7 million by the end of this year, according to an analysis from Gabriel Chodorow-Reich of Harvard University and John Coglianese of the Federal Reserve.

Small businesses continue to suffer under medically necessary lockdowns as deadlines to apply for funding provided through the Paycheck Protection Program long expired, along with any funds thousands of small businesses received. While the bulk of the money through the program was siphoned by large businesses, billionaires, politicians, charter schools and the Catholic Church, millions of small businesses were able temporarily stave off job cuts and closures with the federal aid, which has now dried up.

A database maintained by Oxxford Information Technology, which tracks about 32 million businesses, nonprofits, farms and government entities, expects about four million US businesses to close by the end of the year with only 1.3 million new businesses expected to be established.

In the face of the brutal job cutting of American Airlines workers, the Allied Pilots Association and the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA have opposed any strikes or other actions in defense of their jobs.

In a less than seven-minute Facebook video, Sara Nelson, president of the AFA and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, echoed the airline executives’ talking points. She repeated the lie that the pandemic was a crisis that “no one could have prepared for,” adding that “no one thought” the US would continue to be the center of the coronavirus pandemic months after the passage of the CARES Act. In a crude promotion of Biden and the Democrats, Nelson implored workers “not to give up” and continue to “get even more engaged in fighting to extend the Payroll Support Program.” She advised soon-to-be-furloughed workers to “keep up the calls” to the corporate shills in Congress who are currently on vacation to demand they “pass the relief.”

If airline workers, like autoworkers, Amazon and other logistics workers, nurses and health care workers and teachers are to save their jobs, it will be up to them to organize rank-and-file committees, which are independent of the nationalist trade unions and the capitalist Democratic Party.