Why did so many poor New Yorkers die of COVID-19?

Josh Varlin

New York City was the global epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic for several weeks in March and April, during which time tens of thousands of people were infected and thousands perished. Recent studies and reports have revealed more fully the role economic inequality has played in determining the virus’s toll, particularly in “disparities in hospital care,” as a July article in the New York Times describes.

Over and above the many other factors contributing to the high infection rate and death toll in New York City (the largest of which being the weeks-long delay in shutting down nonessential businesses), the simple fact that people received different standards of care at different health care facilities—determined largely by their class—often determined whether someone would live or die once they got sick.

This is contrary to Governor Andrew Cuomo’s April 7 claim: “I don’t believe we’ve lost a single person because we couldn’t provide care. People we lost we couldn’t save despite our best efforts.”

In fact, as the New York Times report as well as other interviews with health care workers demonstrate, people did indeed die for lack of care. Had the health care system in New York City been better resourced, many fewer people would have died in emergency room waiting areas before they were seen, alone in understaffed hospital wings or asphyxiating on hospital bathroom floors.

Overall, nearly 24,000 people have been killed by COVID-19 in New York City, according to city data on confirmed and probable deaths. About two-thirds of those who have lost their lives due to COVID-19 “lived in ZIP codes with median household incomes below the city median,” according to a Times analysis of city data.

Death rates per capita in the working class “outer boroughs” were larger than in Manhattan in every age group of adults, with the Bronx suffering the highest rates (2,239 of every 100,000 people over 75 died in the Bronx, a staggering figure) followed by Queens and Brooklyn, which were essentially tied. Staten Island also had higher death rates than Manhattan.

Within Manhattan, deaths were disproportionately in the poorer neighborhoods in the northern part of the borough, rather than in wealthier neighborhoods like the Upper West Side, which saw many of its residents decamp to summer homes in March and April.

With a second wave in New York City all but inevitable if schools reopen later this month—an open question given the immense opposition among educators—an understanding of how the pandemic unfolded in its first wave is necessary.

Before proceeding further into how disparities in care affected patient mortality, it is necessary to review the conditions leading to the high number of infections in the first place.

How the virus spread

New York City is the largest city in the US, with 8.3 million residents and some 20 million in its metropolitan area. In addition to being the home of Wall Street and global finance, it is an international center of culture and travel.

New York is also one of the most unequal cities on the planet, with the most millionaires of any city in the country along with millions living in or near poverty only a short subway ride away from each other.

All of these factors, along with the largest public school system in the country, educating over a million children, and a public transit system used by millions every day, created perfect conditions for the virus to spread rampantly, especially given the fact that basic public health measures were delayed for weeks—which alone killed tens of thousands, including in areas the virus spread to from New York City.

A preprint study from Columbia University researchers concluded that 55 percent of deaths from March 15 to May 3 could have been prevented had lockdown measures been implemented one or two weeks earlier than they actually began, starting in mid-March. New York City was the global epicenter for much of this period.

There is already some popular understanding of how the coronavirus infected workers and the poor disproportionately. The pandemic tore through working class neighborhoods in the Bronx and Queens in particular. Neighborhoods with large immigrant populations, like Queens’ Elmhurst and Corona, were severely affected.

Many factors played a hand in this: high poverty rates, dense and often multigenerational housing, many people working in low-wage jobs that can only be done in person and are considered “essential,” and reluctance to seek medical help due to a lack of insurance. Add to this the high percentage of immigrants in these neighborhoods—many of whom are afraid to seek services due to fear of deportation—and it is clear that this situation presented a “perfect storm” of susceptibility of infection.

It should be stressed that, while the conditions in New York City’s working-class neighborhoods were Petri dishes for the coronavirus, its rampant spread was only made possible by systematic public health failures at the municipal, state and federal levels. Mayor Bill de Blasio and Governor Cuomo, both Democrats, were united with President Donald Trump, a Republican, in initially downplaying the pandemic and delaying public health measures.

Indeed, the Financial Times has reported that Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and a top adviser, discouraged testing in the early stages of the pandemic to avoid spooking the markets. This resulted in a situation where the early spread of the pandemic was totally missed in New York City, and even in March confirmed cases were underestimations by a factor of at least 100 of the true spread of the disease.

How the virus killed

There are many factors contributing to the large number of people who have died from COVID-19, beginning with the disease’s basic features. It attacks the respiratory system and prompts a severe immune system reaction called a “cytokine storm,” which wreaks havoc on the patient’s lungs. However, the disease also impacts other organs and inflames blood vessels in ways that are only beginning to be understood.

COVID-19 is particularly deadly to elderly patients, as well as those with preexisting conditions such as obesity, hypertension and diabetes. However, young patients in their 20s and 30s have suffered strokes and died due to the disease as well, and even very young children have perished.

Just as the illness increases the danger of and reveals preexisting individual health conditions, so does the pandemic itself highlight preexisting social conditions, particularly inequality and all that comes with it.

In the first place, those with lower incomes are more likely to have preexisting conditions making them more likely to die from the disease, including hypertension, obesity and diabetes, all of which are often caused by lifestyle and dietary issues exacerbated by poverty.

An investigation in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that COVID-19 patients hospitalized in March and early April at Northwell Health facilities in the New York City area very often had comorbidities: 56.6 percent had hypertension, 41.7 percent were obese and 33.8 percent had diabetes. Hypertension and diabetes were thus much more prevalent among those who needed hospitalization due to COVID-19 than among the population at large, while obesity has been found to adversely affect patient outcomes.

However, even these social factors, as important as they are, do not paint the full picture. The quality of care received—and, consequently, whether a patient lived or died—often came down to which hospital received the patient, or, in other words, where the patient lived.

Inequality of care and COVID-19 mortality

As thousands were languishing in overcrowded and understaffed hospitals in March and April, patients in well-resourced private hospitals received much better care and suffered a lower death rate, even when considering factors like comorbidities.

The New York Times found that, in April, “patients at some community hospitals were three times more likely to die as patients at medical centers in the wealthiest parts of the city.”

Inequality of care, particularly in patient-to-staff ratios, is at the root of this disparity. A nurse at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center explained to the World Socialist Web Site:

The link between nurse staffing ratios and patient safety is well-researched, measured by increased rates of morbidity, fall incidents, medication errors, overall patient satisfaction and other adverse events. It’s logical that assigning increasing numbers of patients will eventually compromise a nurse’s ability to provide safe care and stay vigilant. I’ve worked in a smaller hospital in Queens that consistently pushed us to 1:8 ratio on a medical-surgical unit, whereas NYP/Cornell doesn’t typically go above 1:5; 1:6 is the absolute max. There’s always been a difference in quality of nursing care between these two hospitals; the pandemic has simply exacerbated it. Breakdowns in the quality of care are often due to staff fatigue. For example, nurses may cut corners with PPE protocol under stress. I’ve also seen housekeepers improperly cleaning COVID rooms because they are understaffed and exhausted.

The WSWS has previously noted in relation to a planned strike at the University of Illinois Hospital that “[t]he odds of a patient dying increased by 7 percent for every additional patient a nurse had to take on.”

Indeed, a study by Karen Lasater of the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing found that “each additional patient per nurse was associated with significant increases in the odds of nurses reporting poor outcomes,” including burnout, poor patient safety, work interruptions and nurses not recommending their own hospitals.

The most glaring examples of inequality were between the wealthy private hospital systems on the one side—which treat mostly insured patients and have substantial endowments—and small independent hospitals and the public hospital system, New York City Health + Hospitals—which treat many uninsured patients, or those on public insurance—on the other.

Health care workers told the New York Times that the patient-to-staff ratio in emergency rooms “hit 23 to 1 at Queens Hospital Center and 15 to 1 at Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx, both public hospitals, and 20 to 1 at Kingsbrook Jewish Medical Center, an independent facility in Brooklyn.” The recommended maximum is four patients per nurse.

Indeed, staff distribution in the health care system was so irrational that by the end of April, with many hospitals inundated and in need of assistance, some hospitals had the problem of over staffing.

Victoria Gregg, a traveling nurse from North Dakota who worked at the smaller non-profit St. Barnabas Hospital in the Bronx from April 23 to June 11, told the Bismarck Tribune that a nurse from a wealthy part of the city asked if Gregg’s hospital was experiencing overstaffing, which had been a problem at that nurse’s hospital.

Other glaring inequalities abounded during the height of the pandemic: access to experimental drugs, access to ventilators with proper settings, sufficient dialysis machines and access to advanced treatments. All of these factors, combined with the aforementioned public health factors, combined into significantly higher death rates for working class patients.

For example, the mortality rate for COVID-19 patients at Bellevue Hospital Center, a public hospital in Manhattan, was double the rate at New York University Langone Health’s flagship a mere 1,000 feet away.

One of the most disturbing phenomena at understaffed hospitals was what Dr. Dawn Maldonado, a resident doctor at Elmhurst Hospital, termed “bathroom codes.” Dr. Maldonado relayed to the Times that multiple patients would remove their oxygen masks to go to the bathroom and then collapse.

In April, a nurse at Elmhurst told the WSWS that the patient-to-nurse ratio in her unit had doubled from six patients per nurse to 11 or 12. “A single nurse is doing the work of two nurses,” she said. This was under conditions where she had not received full training as a critical care nurse and where nurses in March “had very limited supplies” and had just begun receiving masks at the time of the interview.

Inequality also killed patients within the same hospital systems, including NewYork-Presbyterian and NYU Langone. Workers in both systems wrote letters warning about disparities in care leading to people dying unnecessarily because they ended up at a poorer-resourced hospital within that particular private network.

While networks have denied that inequality resulted in different access to care, some of them reallocated resources and staff after internal staff protests, but only weeks into the pandemic and after much damage had been done.

For example, at the private Mount Sinai network, 17 percent of patients at its Manhattan flagship died, whereas 33 and 34 percent died at its Queens and Brooklyn facilities, respectively. A staggering 41 percent of admitted COVID-19 patients died at Coney Island Hospital, a public hospital in the same network as Bellevue with its 22 percent mortality rate.

It should be noted that even wealthier hospitals still had to make what have euphemistically been called “crisis” decisions, such as rationing personal protective equipment (PPE) such as N95 masks.

The NewYork-Presbyterian nurse told the WSWS: “PPE was scarce and aggressively rationed. … [M]y coworkers and I have saved all of our N95s and keep 20+ used ones in each of our lockers in case NYP can’t provide to us in the future.”

Even under conditions where Weill Cornell did not run out of masks (having rationed them aggressively), its PPE policies produced irrational side effects, like having “to treat each PPE item differently rather than just disposing everything, which would arguably be easier (i.e., saving N95s and sanitizing face shields, but discarding outer surgical masks, hair covers and shoe covers, while sanitizing your hands between every step) in a particular order.”

At the same time, the nurse-to-patient ratio in the intensive care unit (ICU) doubled from 1:2 to 1:4 during the pandemic, with nurses training each other for other positions rapidly in order to increase capacity by 50 percent. “So there were a lot of unprepared nurses in roles they weren't familiar with,” the nurse told the WSWS.

This was the situation at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell, which, she said, “is considered one of the most well-financed and well-resourced hospitals in New York, and I believe our staff and patients directly benefited from this privilege.”

In contrast, at NewYork-Presbyterian Queens, the nurse-to-patient ratio in the ICU quadrupled, meaning each nurse was dealing with up to eight patients requiring constant attention and monitoring.

A central remedy to overcome the disparity in staff and other resources, transferring patients, was only implemented belatedly. In late March, even as Elmhurst Hospital was inundated with patients, stretching workers there past their breaking point, nearby hospitals had excess capacity.

In the early period of the first wave, state officials left the public and private networks, which compete with each other, to their own devices, only intervening to facilitate patient transfers after reports and videos emerged from Elmhurst Hospital revealing the dire conditions there. Much like the belated lockdowns, this action saved lives, but patients died before it was done due to the unconscionable delay and reliance on the profit motives of private hospital chains.

How the virus can be defeated

This overview of how the pandemic proceeded in New York City makes clear that combating and defeating the pandemic is not primarily, let alone only, a medical question, but instead a political question. Nor can it be approached on a local or even national level—the same basic processes are playing out everywhere, and the spread of the virus anywhere is a threat to public health everywhere.

While the pandemic has subsided substantially from the mid-April peak of the first wave in New York City, the resumption of both public schools and indoor dining later this month, combined with the broader back-to-work and back-to-school drives, make a serious second wave coinciding with the fall and flu season inevitable—unless measures are taken to finally mount a serious response.

Workers already know what is needed and, indeed, have been demanding a serious response to the pandemic for months. The fundamentals of an effective public health approach to the pandemic must include the shutdown of nonessential businesses and schools; full compensation to workers and small business owners during the pandemic; a massive investment in the health care system, creating equality of care; and a program of mass testing, effective contact tracing and quarantining of infected and exposed individuals.

The resources to implement these measures will not be handed over by the super-rich, who monopolize them, merely through moral appeals. Indeed, even as the pandemic was raging, Cuomo pushed for a budget that will cut $2.5 billion from Medicaid in the state once the pandemic ends—with this delay only a ploy to ensure that the state gets a one-time infusion from the federal CARES Act.

The ruling-class austerity drive is not confined to Medicaid. Psychiatric wards are on the chopping block in multiple hospitals, including NewYork-Presbyterian’s Allen Hospital and Brooklyn Methodist Hospital and Northwell Health’s Syosset Hospital, which is on Long Island. The wards, which had been closed to convert into COVID-19 units and have been targeted for closure due to unprofitability, have not been reopened, whereas other parts of the hospitals have been.

At the federal level, the Democrats and Republicans allowed the $600 per week unemployment supplement to expire in July and have not been in any hurry to renew it. If they eventually do, it will be halved or worse.

To implement the necessary life-and-death measures to combat the pandemic, new organizations and a socialist perspective are needed. The unions have accepted and implemented the homicidal back-to-work policy, spearheaded by Democratic and Republican politicians alike.

Educators in New York City have already taken the lead by forming the New York City Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee to oppose the reckless reopening of schools, and educators, students and auto workers in the US and internationally have begun forming similar organs of struggle.

Health care workers and others in New York City and elsewhere must follow this lead and build new organizations capable of opposing the pandemic and defending their lives and standards of living, both of which are under relentless attack.

Infected students denounce administration guidelines, amidst rising COVID-19 cases at Southern California universities

Melody Isley & Emiri Ochiai

The reckless and deadly drive to resume in-person classes at universities has already resulted in over 51,000 positive cases of COVID-19, spanning at least a thousand universities. In California, despite reporting 4,800 new cases each day, many universities are still offering in-person classes and allowing student residence in dormitories and on-campus housing, endangering thousands of students, their families and the broader community.

In Southern California, San Diego State University (SDSU) has recently made national headlines for its outstandingly negligent reopening policies that are resulting in an unmitigated outbreak. At least 513 known positive cases have been confirmed on the campus so far.

A nightmare is unfolding at SDSU, with disturbing reports on social media of infected students given ten minutes to gather belongings before being thrown into isolation dormitories. The infected students are reportedly being housed with strangers and without bedsheets, food or sanitizing equipment.

Students post “HELP US” signs in windows in isolation dorms [Credit: Twitter @sharkey_markey17]

Students are not being told whether and when they will receive medical care. Desperate students are crying out for help on social media and have even posted “Help Us” signs on room windows. Many Twitter posts reveal that isolation dormitories are already reaching capacity, particularly of first and second year students who may not have any available friends or family to help them with supplies while they are quarantined.

After just two weeks of reopening, 64 positive cases of COVID-19 were reported at SDSU, and by the following week, the virus had spread exponentially with 513 known cases and one student hospitalization.

Initially, administrators denied the extent of the spread. Officials not only failed to notify students of cases and offer proper resources like mandatory testing, social distancing and mask wearing, but its public data of coronavirus cases had been manipulated to convey a lower case count.

In a now viral Twitter thread, with over 105,000 likes and 27,000 retweets, an SDSU student and Resident Assistant (RA) in an on-campus dormitory exposed the administration’s health policies as negligent and dangerous. The thread reveals that asymptomatic testing is not mandatory, masks are not being provided, and infected students isolating on campus have largely been left to their own devices.

The university also effectively disincentivizes testing by creating a living environment that is so devoid of resources and proper safety measures that it makes students prefer anxious ignorance than to be forced into university-mandated quarantine dormitories.

Students are advised along the CDC guidelines, and they are told to quarantine at home upon exposure and isolate by self-diagnosis. Officially, SDSU is advising students to remain in on-campus housing if they are exposed or contract the virus, but the university states that if their family home is within “driving distance” then they can return home and almost certainly spread the disease even further.

The growing spread in the region is being felt throughout San Diego County. About 15 miles north of SDSU in La Jolla, California, at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), the administration has released plans to reintroduce 7,500 undergraduate students into dormitories at the end of September. The school has been explicit in its expectation that dozens of students who return to campus may have the virus.

Currently, UCSD plans to test incoming students upon arrival with a second re-test after two weeks with daily self-screening of symptoms. UCSD began a voluntary testing regime in May for graduate students living on campus, which was meant to be the core of the school’s reopening initiative. However, only a fraction of students were able to be tested. Even before the year officially starts, the school is already soliciting the public for donations in order to continue its testing plans.

UCSD will offer 12 percent of its regular courses with in-person instruction, and an estimated 14,500 students will be living on campus for the fall quarter. Two weeks ago, with official reopening still a month away, UCSD revealed that over 40 students have already tested positive for COVID-19 since April, along with 21 campus employees and 184 staff and faculty in the health sciences program.

Over 600 UCSD students and faculty have signed an open letter written by students demanding that the administration cease all in-person instruction and the reopening of undergraduate dormitories.

The insistence on reopening despite the disastrous consequences is driven both by the profitability of student housing and the starving of state and federal funding for education. The least expensive housing options at SDSU are over $11,000 for all grade levels except first year students whose cheapest housing option is over $17,000 for nine months.

As a result of the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic, the Democratic Party-dominated California legislature voted to approve a state budget for the 2020–21 fiscal year with over $54 billion in state spending cuts. This includes cuts to the University of California and California State University systems of $260 million and $300 million, respectively.

Opposition is growing throughout the country to the unsafe opening of schools and universities. In August, students and faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Georgia staged “die-in” protests against unsafe reopening plans, and at least 700 students at the University of Iowa participated in a “sick-out” protest in early September.

Students and faculty at Texas A&M, Pennsylvania State University, Kutztown University, Northwestern University, Boston University and numerous other colleges have written their own open letters and garnered support from hundreds of students.

Beginning on Tuesday, over 1,000 graduate student instructors went on strike at the University of Michigan. The demands include completely online instruction, robust testing and contact tracing, a universal right to work remotely without documentation, rent freezes, emergency funds for students and the demilitarization of the campus.

US jobless claims top 884,000 for second week in a row

Jacob Crosse

For the second week in row, the US Department of Labor on Thursday reported initial jobless claims of 884,000, a huge number that is nearly 200,000 higher than the pre-pandemic record of 695,000 set during the 1982 recession.

Generally seen as a rough measure of how many people are losing their jobs, this mammoth total gives the lie to claims of an economic recovery. Over 60 million workers have applied for benefits since mid-March.

A woman looks at signs at a store in Niles, Illinois [Credit: AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh]

The Labor Department reports that the four-week average jobless claim number is just under a million a week, at 992,500. So-called “gig” workers and independent contractors continue to apply for benefits under the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program and this week’s report shows 838,916 PUA claims, an increase of more than 90,000 compared to the previous week.

A comparison of this week’s and last week’s initial and PUA claims reveals that over 100,000 more workers, or 1.7 million total, filed for government assistance.

The Labor Department reported that the seasonally adjusted insured unemployment rate was 9.2 percent for the week ending August 29. In all, the government estimates the total number of people claiming unemployment benefits to be 29,605,064, an increase of over 380,000 from the week prior.

The increasingly desperate situation confronting laid-off workers is underscored by the news that the Lost Wages Assistance (LWA) Program, enacted through an executive order issued by President Trump last month, stopped accepting state applications as of September 10. An estimated $30 billion out of the $44 billion in the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) grant program has been distributed to 48 states as well as Guam and the District of Columbia.

With funding for the program quickly drying up, many states have already announced that that they will stop sending payments to beneficiaries over the next month, despite the fact that millions have yet to receive anything due either to backlogs or ineligibility. For instance, workers who are receiving less than $100 in state unemployment benefits are ineligible to receive LWA grants, while several states, such as Mississippi, have yet to distribute any funds as of this writing.

After six months it is clear that of the 22 million jobs that disappeared when lockdowns began in earnest toward the end of March, a majority are not coming back.

A September 4 report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics exemplifies the gaps in employment based on education, with 12.6 percent of workers without a high school diploma unemployed compared to just 5.3 percent of workers with a Bachelor’s degree or greater. For those with just a high school diploma, the unemployment rate is at 9.8 percent, while for those with an Associate’s degree or some college the figure is eight percent.

Despite widespread joblessness and all the misery that entails under capitalism, the US Congress, widely populated by millionaires, failed this week to come to terms on a “skinny” $300 billion Republican coronavirus relief bill that included an extension of the $300 per week federal jobless supplement until the end of the year. That is half the size of the federal jobless aid enacted as part of the CARES Act. That benefit expired on July 31.

The Republican Senate bill, which included hundreds of billions of dollars in previously allocated but unspent aid, also provided more than $250 billion in additional small business loans, $105 billion to reopen the schools, $16 billion for coronavirus testing and tracing, $31 billion for vaccine development and distribution, $20 billion for farm assistance, $10 billion for child care support and $10 billion for the US Postal Service.

Right-wing provisions in the bill included legal immunity for businesses from potential suits from workers impacted by unsafe conditions during the pandemic and a two-year “school choice” tax credit to promote private schools at the expense of the public education system.

It did not include any additional funding for cash-strapped states and local governments, or a new cash stipend. The CARES Act provided a $1,200 stipend for most American adults.

The bill failed to muster the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster and proceed to a floor vote, with 52 (all Republicans) voting in favor and 47 against. Every Democratic senator except vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris, who was not present, voted against the bill, along with Republican Rand Paul of Kentucky.

The defeat of the Republican measure, a foregone conclusion after the Democratic congressional leadership declared it “dead on arrival,” appears to mark the end of a protracted exercise in political theater in which both parties postured as advocates for workers devastated by the pandemic, but neither made any serious effort to actually provide relief.

The Democratic-controlled House of Representatives passed a $3.2 trillion relief bill last May, knowing it would never be taken up by the Senate. That bill included restoration of the full $600-per-week unemployment benefit through the end of 2020, plus $1 trillion in federal aid to deficit-ridden state governments and money for food stamps, hospitals and pandemic-related needs.

Negotiations between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer on one side and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows on the other continued in desultory fashion throughout August, finally collapsing at the end of the month.

While Republicans and Democrats rushed to pass the multi-trillion-dollar bailout of Wall Street by a near-unanimous vote in last March’s CARES Act, neither party was serious about enacting legislation to address the worst social crisis since the Great Depression.

This is underscored by the Democrats’ agreement with Mnuchin to pass a “clean” continuing resolution before the end of the fiscal year on September 30 to keep funding the federal government and prevent a shutdown. House Speaker Pelosi, in making this agreement, signaled that the Democrats would not attempt to use the threat of a shutdown in the midst of the pandemic and mounting social unrest, and just weeks ahead of Election Day, as leverage to force the White House and the Republican Senate to provide some degree of serious relief for laid off workers.

As the World Socialist Web Site wrote on September 9, the two parties of American capitalism “have a common interest in using the threat of destitution and homelessness to pressure workers into returning to COVID-19-infected factories and teachers to unsafe schools in order to ‘reopen the economy,’ i.e., resume the pumping out of profits to back up the massive debt incurred in the bailout of the corporate-financial oligarchy. This homicidal policy is being spearheaded by the Trump administration, but it has the full support of the Democrats, who are implementing it at the state and local level.”

Democratic governors and mayors, facing combined budget shortfalls in the hundreds of billions of dollars, are planning massive layoffs of teachers, health care workers and other public employees, along with brutal cuts in basic social services and pensions. Not a single Democratic governor or mayor has suggested raising taxes on the wealthy to avoid cuts that will only increase the coming wave of evictions and the growth of hunger and poverty.

Latin America, epicenter of COVID-19 pandemic, on the brink of social explosion

Tomas Castanheira

The COVID-19 pandemic has created devastating conditions for the whole of Latin America. On Tuesday, the region reached the grim milestone of 300,000 COVID-19 deaths and, on Thursday, surpassed 8 million infections.

The most affected country, in absolute numbers, is Brazil, the most populous in the region. It ranks third in the world in terms of total recorded cases, trailing only India and the United States, and has the second highest number of deaths, exceeded only by the US. It has already confirmed more than 4.2 million cases and 130,000 deaths. Following Brazil comes Mexico, which has registered about 650,000 cases and almost 70,000 deaths, the fourth highest COVID-19 death toll in the world.

Cemetery workers place crosses over a common grave after burying five people at the Nossa Senhora Aparecida cemetery in Manaus, Brazil [Credit: AP Photo/Felipe Dana]

The coronavirus mortality rate in the region is terrifying. Although it represents 10 percent of the world’s population, Latin America accounts for one-third of all COVID-19 deaths. Peru has achieved the lamentable status as the country with the highest number of COVID-19 deaths per capita, with more than 30,000 deaths among a population of about 32 million. The global list of the ten countries with the highest rates of COVID-19 deaths per inhabitant also includes Chile, Bolivia and Ecuador.

This horrific toll is the result of absolutely criminal policies by capitalist governments in confronting the virus, combined with abysmal preexisting structural conditions.

Testing rates in the region are among the lowest in the world, precluding both contact tracing and realistic estimates of the spread of the virus. Mexico has conducted only 11,462 tests per million inhabitants and Argentina 32,816, according to Worldometer. The United States, which has far from an adequate testing level, has conducted 271,552 tests per million inhabitants.

Precarious health care systems, with doctors and nurses working without proper personal protective equipment, resulted in severe rates of infection among health care workers. Mexico is the country with the highest number of health professionals killed by COVID-19 in the world, over 1,400. Brazil is fourth, with more than 600. Bolivia’s Ministry of Health speaks of 200 health professionals killed, but there are estimates of four times that number.

The lack of infrastructure in hospitals, especially of adequate ventilators for COVID-19 treatment, has been aggravated by the criminal diversion of funds appropriated to fight the pandemic. Cases of government corruption, linked to gross overbilling for the purchase of health care equipment, have come to light in Brazil, Mexico, Bolivia and Ecuador.

In the face of school closures, which affected 165 million students throughout Latin America, governments were unable to provide adequate structures for distance learning. Only eight of the region’s 33 countries have provided some technological devices to students. Among the poorest families in the region, only 10 to 20 percent have access to a computer, according to the United Nations Economic Committee for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).

The immense suffering caused by the disease has accelerated a brutal downgrading of the living conditions of large sections of Latin America’s working masses. An ECLAC report points to an explosion of poverty in the region in 2020. More than a third of the population will face unemployment and food insecurity.

The official level of unemployment in Latin America will reach 13.5 percent by the end of the year, an increase of 5.4 percent compared to 2019. The total number of unemployed will increase from 26.1 million to 44 million. This is a massively higher impact than that recorded after the 2008 global financial crash, when unemployment increased by 0.6 percent, from 6.7 percent in 2008 to 7.3 percent in 2009.

The total number of Latin Americans living in poverty is expected to rise from 186 million to 231 million. “We calculated that eight out of 10 people in the region—and we’re talking about 491 million people—will live on an income that is up to three times the poverty line. And that means that 491 million people will live on under $500 a month,” ECLAC executive secretary Alicia Bárcena told Foreign Policy.

The shock to the Latin American economy will produce a 9.1 percent contraction of its GDP by the end of 2020. The tourism sector alone has already suffered US$230 billion in losses as borders closed. This is the equivalent of two-and-a-half times the GDP of a country like Bolivia.

While for Latin America’s working population the present period has spelled terrible privations, for the capitalist oligarchy it is a time of celebration. From March, when the pandemic hit the region, until July, the fortunes of 73 Latin American billionaires have grown by US$48.2 billion, the international aid group Oxfam reported.

In Brazil, as nearly 10 million workers lost their jobs and millions more suffered deep wage cuts, the combined income of Brazil’s 42 billionaires grew from US$123.1 billion to US$157.1 billion. What this parasitic oligarchy accumulated over a five-month period of pandemic, US$34 billion, is US$11 billion more than the Brazilian government invested in health care in the whole of 2019.

Itapevi, São Paulo, Brazil [Credit: Felipe Barros/ExLibris/PMI]

The International Committee of the Fourth International defined the COVID-19 pandemic as a trigger event, which brought out the deep economic, social and political contradictions of the world capitalist system. Social inequality, a dominant feature of this system, is being exacerbated internationally and, in particular, in Latin America, the most unequal region on the planet.

At the same time, the international working class is manifesting its discontent with the situation in a growing wave of political radicalization. The mass protests against social inequality that took place in Chile and Ecuador between October and November of 2019 announced a political trend that will increasingly dominate the region and the world.

Latin American workers responded to the conditions imposed by the ruling elites and their governments in the face of the pandemic with a series of wildcat strikes in different sectors of the working class, from app delivery workers to nurses, which spread throughout the region, from Mexico to Brazil.

Workers and peasants took to the streets in Bolivia and clashed with Jeanine Áñez’s coup regime, demanding its fall and an end to the hunger conditions imposed by its violent and disastrous quarantine. Revolts against hunger policies also broke out in Chile’s impoverished working-class neighborhoods.

This week, the murder of a worker by the Colombian police provoked the eruption of militant protests across the country. The brutal repression unleashed by the extreme-right government of President Iván Duque, leaving ten dead and hundreds wounded, has only increased popular anger.

The escalation of state violence is the desperate response of Latin American ruling elites to the growth of social conflicts that present themselves, more and more, as an open confrontation between two social classes with irreconcilable interests. On the one hand, there is a billionaire elite and its corrupt and violent states, and on the other, the working masses increasingly impoverished and dissatisfied with the prevailing social order.

In this battle, apparent bourgeois political antagonists such as Brazil’s fascistic President Jair Bolsonaro and Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, representative of the “Pink Tide” governments and an idol of the pseudo-left, join hands against the working class, spreading lies and disorganizing the fight against the pandemic, while forcing workers into contaminated workplaces to generate profits and guarantee the privileges of the capitalist oligarchy.

But the strength of the working class united as an independent political force is far greater. The fundamental question posed for the Latin American workers is the construction of a revolutionary leadership that unifies them among themselves and with their brothers and sisters internationally and leads them in struggle to overthrow the capitalist system and reorganize society based on socialist policies.

Revelation of US government conspiracy on COVID-19 exposes EU herd immunity policy

Alex Lantier

Revelations that Trump and other top US officials lied publicly about the danger posed by COVID-19 exposes the politically-criminal policy of the European Union (EU). While they had access to official briefings like those available to their US counterparts, they reproduced the same litany of lies and expressing the same flagrant contempt for their citizens’ lives, advocating a policy of “herd immunity,” that is, of controlled spread of the virus in the population.

This is a warning about European Union (EU) officials who are now demanding that workers and children return to work and to school despite an accelerating spread of the virus. Their statements on COVID-19 are worthless. Like Trump, they have a record making false public statements trivializing the pandemic, in flagrant contradiction with medical information they were receiving in private, to boost the stock markets and the wealth of the super-rich at the expense of workers’ lives.

These revelations about Donald Trump, published by the well-known US journalist Bob Woodward, center on the American president’s private knowledge of COVID-19, provided by intelligence briefings and discussions with Chinese officials. It is simply not credible to assert that EU officials did not have access to the same type of information as Trump.

On January 28, intelligence officials told Trump the pandemic would be “the biggest national security threat you face in your presidency.” Then on February 7, Trump told Woodward that Chinese President Xi Jinping had warned him about the disease: “This is deadly stuff. It’s also more deadly than… even your strenuous flus… this is five percent [case fatality rate] versus one percent and less than one percent.” He added, “It goes through air, Bob. That’s always tougher than the touch.”

For months afterwards, however, Trump and other US officials publicly mouthed a pack of lies, also told by EU officials—comparing COVID-19 to the flu, insisting that fear of the virus is worse than the virus, and so on. Speaking of the virus, Trump told Woodward that he “always wanted to play it down” in order to avoid “panic,” that is, a collapse of the financial markets.

The initial response of major European papers to revelations of this conspiracy at the summit of the American state has been as extraordinary as the report itself. Virtually all published superficial articles focused almost exclusively on the question of whether the report would harm Trump and benefit the Democratic Party in the November 2020 US presidential elections.

Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung titled its article “Woodward’s book on Trump is a gift for Biden.” It wrote, “Trump has lied to the American people. At least that is how Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden sees it.” After discussing Woodward’s report, the SZ contradicted its own headline, concluding it was unclear whether it would benefit Biden: “What Woodward’s revelations mean for Trump’s re-election, we will find that out first in November.”

France’s Le Monde claimed that the world is “by now familiar” with the phenomenon of Trump struggling with embarrassing revelations. It concluded: “These extracts show that the president lied to his fellow citizens about the seriousness of the threat, and he is already frequently accused of having delayed taking measures he knew would strongly impact the economy.”

None of these articles posed the obvious question: if these reports expose Trump as a liar, what does this say about EU officials who knew the same things and made similar statements as Trump?

Firstly, EU states were doubtless well aware of the tone of the intelligence briefings Trump received on COVID-19. Indeed, as EU states have pledged in recent years to spend hundreds of billions of euros on strengthening the NATO military alliance, they were intensifying the already close coordination of their intelligence agencies’ reporting of common threats facing NATO.

Two months before the outbreak of COVID-19 last December, the NATO alliance published an article on its web site, titled “A new era for NATO intelligence.” It announced a “broad series of reforms to improve the quality and utility of intelligence provided to NATO’s most senior political and military leaders.” It reported that the allied NATO powers “agreed that a common approach would improve intelligence sharing, coordinate production, enhance indications and warning, and improve management and governance.”

As for Chinese officials, they were in close discussion with the EU on the pandemic. On February 13, almost a week after Trump told Woodward about discussing COVID-19 with Xi, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi traveled to Berlin to meet German Chancellor Angela Merkel to discuss the virus. According to the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Merkel “highly commended China's decisive and forceful response and tremendous efforts” and pledged to “support, help and work with China” on COVID-19.

It is not credible under these conditions to claim that top EU officials were unaware that US intelligence saw the pandemic as the major world threat in January and that Chinese officials had explained that COVID-19 was a deadly threat.

Yet not only did EU officials abstain from unmasking Trump’s conspiracy, of which they were well aware, but they themselves repeatedly downplayed the virus. Like Trump, they sought to avoid taking measures that would affect the flow of profits to the banks and the financial aristocracy.

They constantly equated COVID-19 with milder illnesses that are not fatal for healthy adults or children. On January 23, German Health Minister Jens Spahn infamously compared COVID-19 to the flu: “That is also a risk we have every day.” On February 24, eleven days after Merkel met Wang, Spahn again argued against establishing social distancing, this time comparing COVID-19 to the measles. Tagesschau cited him as saying: “Measles are clearly more contagious than COVID-19, but cities are not blockaded because of measles outbreaks.”

On March 5, French government spokeswoman Sibeth Ndiaye declared, “We must remember that 80 percent of those infected [with COVID-19] only get a big cold, or at worst a big flu. … We are not going to stop the country.”

That same day, as his government advocated a herd immunity strategy, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said Britain could “take it on the chin, take it all in one go and allow the disease, as it were, to move through the population, without taking as many draconian measures.”

Though EU governments apart from Britain and Sweden did not admit it so openly, the entire EU sought to implement the herd immunity policy. On March 11, Merkel called a press conference and baldly asserted: “A high percentage of the population, experts say 60 to 70 percent, will be infected.” Given the EU’s population of over 510 million, this meant accepting well over 300 million cases of COVID-19 in Europe.

The exposure of Trump’s lies about COVID-19 shows that these EU officials were also misleading the public, while accepting in private a level of infections that would lead to millions of deaths.

They vindicate the warnings and the political work of the ICFI. Already, on February 28, the ICFI had issued a statement calling for “a globally coordinated emergency response to the coronavirus pandemic.” It warned of the pandemic’s vast potential scope and called for the allocation of hundreds of billions of dollars to fight the pandemic and help workers, immigrants and other people protect themselves from the virus.

Responding to the advocacy of herd immunity strategies by Johnson, Merkel, and others, the WSWS wrote: “What such statements reveal is not incompetence, but political criminality. Seventy-five years after the downfall of the Nazi Third Reich, a fascistic attitude towards the working class prevails in the financial aristocracy, mirroring that of Ancient Rome to its galley slaves: work until you die.” In its reply to Merkel, it called for massive public spending, quarantines and the independent organization of the working class in workplaces in order to fight the virus.

Only the independent intervention of the working class, in a wave of spontaneous strikes centered in Italy that spread across Europe in March, compelled EU governments to adopt lockdowns. The EU relentlessly pressed for a return to work, however, voting trillions of euros in EU and European Central Bank bailouts to the banks and major corporations, which were explicitly approved by the major German and French trade unions. At the same time, they denied small businesses and workers appropriate funding to weather the economic impact of the lockdowns.

Studies by Imperial College London published in Nature have estimated that the lockdowns saved around 3 million lives in Europe. The fact that several million lives are at risk is underscored by a 17-page internal memo prepared on March 18 by the German Interior Ministry and later published on its web site. Titled “How we get COVID-19 under control,” it asserts: “Most virologists, epidemiologists, doctors and political scientists, when asked what would happen if nothing is done, reply with a worst case scenario in which over 1 million die in 2020, in Germany alone.”

As EU officials now force children back to school and their parents back to work, the European ruling class is again conspiring against the population. Governments across the EU have declared that there will be no more lockdowns, and Spanish officials have already blurted out that their back-to-school policy leads to “practically all children” being infected.

That is to say that, behind the backs of the people, the EU is conspiring to place the lives of millions at risk in order to fund bailouts and enrich the financial aristocracy. Workers across Europe must be warned: the ruling class and its political establishment is again preparing a massive social crime. It can only be fought on the basis of the independent, international mobilization of the working class, based on a revolutionary and socialist perspective.

Wildfires turn US West Coast into an apocalyptic hellhole

Linda Rios

The massive wildfires ravaging the West Coast of the United States continue to burn unabated. More than 100 active fires are raging across the region, including the largest fires in state history for Washington and California, with the fire season is set to last until at least October or November. The state governments of California, Oregon, and Washington have all declared a state of emergency.

On Thursday night, authorities announced seven new deaths attributable to the North Complex fire in Butte County, bringing the total death toll in the state to 19. At least 25 people have now died in the fires across the West Coast, with dozens of missing people across the region and hundreds of thousands displaced from their homes.

As with the criminal mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic, the mass devastation wrought by the wildfires exposes the complete inability of capitalism to address any social problem. While labeled a “natural disaster,” the unprecedented destruction is in fact a product of the subordination of all aspects of society to the profit interests of the financial oligarchy.

The ruling class has done nothing to address climate change, which in recent decades has created ever deeper droughts and wildfire seasons. They have cut state budgets to the bone, leaving fire departments drastically under-staffed and ill-prepared to handle such massive fires. So far this year, wildfires across California, Oregon and Washington have burned more than 3 million acres of forestry and decimated small, mountain communities.

The fires have filled the air with ash and smoke, compromising air quality and covering the densely populated metropolitan regions of Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles and other cities in an apocalyptic orange haze akin to images of Mars. Portland, Seattle and San Francisco now have the worst air quality in the world, while Los Angeles ranks seventh-worst.

Fine particulate matter released by the fires will cause permanent lung damage to millions of residents and threaten the lives of tens of thousands of people with respiratory conditions. Those with heart, lung, or vascular diseases are now at higher risk for stroke and heart attack. The poor air quality weakens the immune systems of even healthy people, placing the region’s population of roughly 50 million people at greater risk of contracting COVID-19, while those that do contract the virus will suffer exacerbated symptoms.

According to official counts, which are generally considered significant underestimates, roughly 186,000 homeless people live in California, Oregon and Washington, many of whom completely lack access to indoor shelter and are now forced to endure unbearable breathing conditions on the streets. The limited supply of hotel vouchers provided by the Democrat-led state governments have quickly dried up, forcing thousands more people to live in their cars.

The majority of the fires began as the result of dry lightning strikes, triggered by record-breaking, triple-digit heat waves. The extreme heat, combined with very low to no humidity, and the drying out of thousands of acres of forestry, have created “tinderbox” conditions. These arid conditions also encourage the infestation of certain types of beetles, which weaken and kill trees, which in turn feed the wildfires.

The speed at which the fires have spread has also broken records, with the Bear Creek fire in California tore through roughly 230,000 acres in approximately 24 hours. Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at University of California, Los Angeles, told the New York Times, “It’s really shocking to see the number of fast-moving, extremely large and destructive fires simultaneously burning. I’ve spoken to maybe two dozen fire and climate experts over the last 48 hours and pretty much everyone is at a loss of words. There’s certainly been nothing in living memory on this scale.”

California

Across the state, at least 20 fatalities have been reported, over 3.1 million acres burned, and over 6,000 structures have been destroyed. To date, there have been 7,700 wildfire “incidents” so far this year.

On Thursday, the August Complex Fire, located 150 miles north of San Francisco, became the largest fire in the state’s history at 746,755 acres, far surpassing the Mendocino Fire of 2018, which burned 459,123 acres. The fire complex, only 24 percent contained, is the result of the merger of multiple fires and is now larger than the state of Rhode Island.

Several other major fires continue to burn in Northern California, including the North Complex fire in the foothills to the Sierra mountains, northwest of Sacramento, and the Creek Fire, north east of Fresno, both of which have led to the evacuation of thousands of people.

In Southern California, the SQF Lightning Complex has burned 35,674 acres and remains wholly uncontained despite burning for nearly a month. The Apple Fire, which began on July 31 and is 95 percent contained, has been one of the longest burning fires. The Dolan fire has burned 73,089 acres and is 40 percent contained. The Lake Fire is 90 percent contained and burned 12 structures. The Valley Fire, east of San Diego, has burned nearly 18,000 acres and is only 39 percent contained.

Oregon

With 39 fires burning through the state, over 500,000 residents have been evacuated from their homes throughout parts of Oregon, representing over 10 percent of the state’s population. At least 14 people have been killed, almost 1 million acres have been burned, and hundreds of homes and commercial buildings have been destroyed.

Portland mayor Ted Wheeler issued an Emergency Order on Thursday as “extreme wildfire conditions threatening lives and property” grew closer to the metropolitan area of 2.4 million people. Saturated with smoke from the 39 fires raging across Oregon, according to the Office of Emergency Management, the cities air quality index registered at 379 on Friday, a level that can be described as “hazardous” to human health. The air quality is currently considered the worst of all major cities in the world.

The city order closes parks, directs homeless people to "relocate as quickly as possible to safer areas," and activates evacuation sites for fire victims. The order did not provide any resources or safe evacuation areas for the city's homeless.

The Beachie Creek and Riverside fires, close to the town of Estacada—24 miles outside of Portland—were threatening to merge on Friday, as they are separated by only one mile. A merger of the wildfires would increase the intensity due to “plume dominated” fire behavior. The towns of Estacada and nearby Molalla have been evacuated.

With nearly 3,000 firefighters deployed against fires tearing through rural areas, several towns in the western part of the state have been completely decimated. The chief of the Oregon Department of Forestry estimates that another 3,000 firefighters are needed, highlighting the urgent need for more firefighters and resources to combat the fires. “This could be the greatest loss of human lives and property due to wildfire in our state’s history,” Oregon Governor Kate Brown warned at a recent press conference. “We have never seen this amount of uncontained fire across our state.”

Washington

There are approximately 15 active fires in Washington state, with over 500,000 acres having been burned in the span of just a few days. The Pearl Hill and the Cold Springs Canyon fires are threatening to merge together. A 1-year-old boy was tragically killed in the Cold Springs Fire, and both of his parents are still in critical condition with severe burns. The fire is only 25 percent contained at present, while the Pearl Hill fire is 50 percent contained. In total, over 200 homes and structures have been lost with close to 800 more being threatened.

The Olympic Peninsula has been especially affected by poor air quality, as a dense and massive plume of smoke has moved north from the Oregon fires. Cooler winds are expected soon, which will bring more smoke particles from the southwest.

California, Oregon and Washington are all dominated by the Democratic Party, which has overseen decades of unending budget cuts. These cuts have deepened as a result of the economic fallout wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic, which will further undermine the already insufficient funding for much needed resources to combat the growing number of fires.

In California, Governor Gavin Newsom supported the cutting of $681 million from this year’s state budget for environmental protection. Oregon lawmakers recently proposed $400 million in budget cuts, as a budget writing subcommittee “kicked off” their July meeting by proposing the delay of much-needed wildfire equipment purchases.

Scientists have been warning for decades that climate change will produce catastrophic consequences for the world’s population. The devastating wildfires gripping the West Coast mark a qualitative deepening of a years-long process of worsening wildfire seasons and follow similar record-setting wildfires across Australia last year. The underlying cause of these immense crises is the capitalist system, in which all of society’s resources are controlled by a tiny layer of parasitic oligarchs.

The massive social dislocation caused by the wildfires, like the deadly COVID-19 pandemic, are a testament to the inability of capitalism to serve the interests of the majority of the population. Only through the socialist transformation of society will the working class be able to stop the devastating wildfires, halt and reverse climate change, put an end to the pandemic and ensure that the social needs of the working class take precedence over private profit.

As pandemic death toll approaches 200,000, American oligarchs celebrate their wealth

Niles Niemuth

The United States is passing through a historic social, economic and political crisis. The death toll from the coronavirus pandemic is nearing 200,000 and could double by the end of the year. Democratic forms of rule are breaking down, with the Trump administration intensifying its open incitement of fascistic violence. Tens of millions are unemployed and face impoverishment and homelessness. Wildfires are burning out of control on the US West Coast.

It is impossible to understand any of these processes outside of the massive levels of social inequality. The United States is an oligarchy, with a concentration of wealth that is historically unprecedented.

The release of the Forbes 400 billionaire report gives a sense of this reality. The richest 400 individuals (0.00012 percent of the population) now possess more than $3 trillion.

The report declares: “Pandemic be damned: America’s 400 richest are worth a record $3.2 trillion, up $240 billion from a year ago, aided by a stock market that has defied the virus.” The surge in the stock market, underwritten by the multi-trillion-dollar CARES Act passed in March, has filled the already overflowing coffers of the super-rich, who now hold claim to the equivalent of 15 percent of the country’s gross domestic product.

Even the numbers provided by Forbes, based on figures from July 24, are a major underestimation of the current reality. Since that time, the wealth of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest person, has shot up to more than $200 billion, while the wealth of Tesla CEO Elon Musk has grown to over $100 billion. Bezos’s holdings are three million times greater than the annual income of the typical American household.

The staggering level of inequality reflected in the Forbes list is the central feature of American society, which is defined by the transfer of obscene and ever larger amounts of wealth from the working class into the hands of a tiny financial oligarchy through tax cuts, bailouts, the slashing of wages and the clawing back of pensions and other benefits won by workers in the struggles of the 20th century.

The latest rise in the billionaire’s wealth is not based on any exertion of labor but on the inflation of the stock market, with trillions of dollars in debt from the Federal Reserve and Congress which will be paid off the backs of the working class. Everything has been subordinated to ensuring that the Dow Jones and S&P 500 rise to new heights.

It would take the median American, who earns $33,000 per year, 97 million years to earn as much as is controlled by the wealthiest Americans. Consider what $3.2 trillion could pay for in a year:

• In the 2016-17 school year, $739 billion was spent on public elementary and secondary schools, providing education for 50.8 million students and employing 3.2 million teachers and another 3.2 million school employees.

• The Congressional Budget Office projects that the federal government will spend $1.3 trillion on health care programs this year.

• Diabetes cost the US economy $327 billion in 2017, with insulin accounting for $40 billion of this total. The average cost of insulin, critical for the survival of diabetes patients, is up to $6,000 per year and continues to rise.

• According to the US Department of Agriculture, $800 billion was spent by Americans on food and beverages for consumption at home in 2019. The federal government provided $60 billion of this in food stamps for the poorest and most vulnerable to gain access to essential nutrition.

• The 2018 fire season cost $24 billion, driven by record devastation including the destruction of the city of Paradise, California. All told, extreme weather and climate disasters that year cost $91 billion.

Added up, the wealth of just 400 people could pay for an entire year of public education, health care, nutrition and disaster relief for millions of Americans. The UN recently reported that 132 million more people will go hungry worldwide this year due to the pandemic, driving the number of undernourished close to 1 billion.

Despite the burning need to save millions from malnourishment and starvation, the World Food Program faces a shortage $5 billion in its effort to deliver food to those in need. The wealth of the 400 richest people in the US is more than 600 times this amount.

Every element of politics is subordinated to the interests of this social layer. It is for this reason that the danger of the pandemic was initially covered up, the bailout of Wall Street was organized and the back-to-work and back-to-school campaigns were implemented.

The systematic looting of society left the country vulnerable to such an outbreak. The subordination of health care to the predatory interests of for-profit health care companies and insurance giants turned nursing homes for the elderly into death chambers and left nurses and doctors without the necessary personal protective equipment and other medical equipment—such as ventilators—needed to treat patients.

The drive of the Trump administration to fascism and the cultivation of extreme right cannot be understood except in relation to the class interests of the oligarchy, representing that faction of the ruling class which seeks to smash outright any sign of opposition from the working class. On the other side of the coin, the Democrats represent that faction that has sought to use the politics of race and identity to smother the class struggle while fighting for access to positions and greater wealth.

As only the latest example, the racially fixated New York Times published its “Faces of Power” list this week, noting that too many people in “influential positions” are white. What difference would it make if everyone one of them was black, Hispanic, Asian or Native American? In fact, the report found that a majority of police chiefs in the largest cities are black or Hispanic. Cold comfort for the young black men who are disproportionately killed by police.

The obsession by upper-middle class academics and journalists on race and gender is a distraction from the grotesque levels of wealth that define social relations in American society. This form of politics has nothing to do with the interests of the working class. Instead, it seeks to harness anger over racism and social inequality to advance the interests of a small layer of minorities in the next 9 percent who want a larger piece of the pie hoarded by the top 1 percent.

At every point, science, reason and human solidarity collide with the economic interests of the current rulers of society—the oligarchs, the parasitic masters of finance capital. It is impossible to defend democratic rights or save lives without confronting this issue.

Mass problems such as the COVID-19 pandemic, increasingly deadly fires fueled by climate change, and global hunger require mass solutions. The problems of mankind cannot be resolved without breaking the stranglehold of the capitalist oligarchy in every country. The wealthy must be expropriated and directed toward meeting social needs. The large corporations and banks transformed by the working class into democratically controlled institutions oriented to meeting human need and not private profit.

The social inequality that characterizes capitalist society—and all the policies that flow from it—is fueling an immense growth of social anger and working class struggle. These struggles must be organized and united on the basis of a conscious, revolutionary and socialist program.