State University of New York scapegoats students for COVID outbreaks, prepares repressive measures

Alex Findijs

As COVID-19 cases continue to multiply across the State University of New York (SUNY) system, the state government is blaming students for the outbreaks. Just three weeks into the semester over 1,100 students have tested positive. Nearly 700 of these come from SUNY Oneonta alone, highlighting how quickly the virus can spread in school environments.

Refusing to take any responsibility for this catastrophe, the SUNY system is on a crusade to punish groups of students for gathering and lay the ground for further police repression on campuses.

SUNY campus

The most severe example of this comes from SUNY Oswego in upstate New York. During move-in, Mayor Billy Barrow deployed city police officers to monitor students as they arrived at their off-campus housing. Since then, Barrow has ordered a surge in police officers during the weekends to patrol neighborhoods with college students and break up any suspected gatherings. He stated that the police have already intervened to break up parties off campus and have been going door to door in college rental neighborhoods.

These measures are being used to impose strict punishments on students, often without any judicial review. In SUNY: five students and one organization were suspended at SUNY Oneonta, 13 students were suspended at SUNY Fredonia, nine students and three organizations were suspended at SUNY Geneseo and 43 students were suspended at SUNY Plattsburgh, just to name a few. This is a common story across the country, with students facing suspension or expulsion, resulting in the loss of a semester of learning and a full semester’s cost.

Thirty-six students have been “summarily suspended” at Purdue University in Indiana. West Virginia University suspended 29 fraternity students after they met for a party while in isolation. Decisions to suspend the students were made with disregard for proper judicial review and rights to due process.

Despite the irresponsibility of some youth and the role that misguided celebrations and parties may have played in spreading the virus, such criticisms and attacks on students are founded on a lie. The unbridled spread of COVID-19 is not the fault of a relatively small number of students but is a direct consequence of the criminal response of the American ruling class.

These crackdowns signal a turn toward coordinated police-state action directed against students as they arrive on campuses amid the socially and politically criminal drive to reopen schools and workplaces amid the pandemic. SUNY Chancellor James Malatras praised the “relationship between the city police department and the university police department,” which he expected would “pay dividends in keeping down the amount of large gatherings and unofficial events that shouldn’t be happening.”

Malatras, a former top adviser to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, has lauded Oswego’s COVID policies as an example of a “good plan well executed.” The possibility is very real that local police will be deployed in other towns and cities to monitor students living off campus.

The utilization of the police force dovetails with the implementation of greater on-campus monitoring and surveillance. According to the Chicago Tribune, several schools across the country have stated they will monitor social media and security camera footage to identify students violating school regulations. Such violations of student privacy serve only the purpose to bolster the repressive tools available to campus authorities and to direct all blame onto students.

SUNY Oneonta President Barbara Jean Morris stated that the school would be “working to identify the students [photographed gathering] and will quickly issue disciplinary actions and possible suspensions. We will also step up our monitoring of these residence halls to prevent this behavior from happening again.”

Efforts to monitor student interactions through the use of facial recognition software are not out of the question. Lock Port City School District in Western New York stoked controversy when it announced plans to implement a facial recognition system in its schools earlier this year. While such methods are nominally being used to break up unsafe gatherings, they inevitably will be used against students seeking to fight back against unsafe school reopenings, police brutality and other conditions being created by the authorities themselves.

This march toward authoritarian police-state measures arises in New York state, a core bastion of the Democratic Party. Democratic Governor Cuomo was hailed by the media during the early days of the pandemic as a messiah who would lead the country out of the crisis. He was even encouraged to enter the race for the Democratic presidential nomination as a last-minute substitution for the flailing Joe Biden.

In reality, Cuomo’s response to the pandemic was lethargic and inadequate, overseeing the deaths of 30,000 New Yorkers as the state became the global epicenter for several months. His policies only appeared superior because of the abysmally pathetic responses from the federal and other state governments. Now that the crisis has slowed in New York, he is free to embark on the path the Democratic Party has been taking in other states; pursuing the same deadly policies as the Trump administration.

As recently as August 28 Cuomo tweeted out the battle cry “Test Test Test.” But where is all the testing on college campuses? Of the 64 schools in the SUNY system, only three required testing prior to or during arrival. So far, fewer than 38,000 tests have been administered on campuses. This is one test for every 37 SUNY students, who number 1.4 million across all schools.

The abysmal state of testing on campuses is shown in the discrepancy between positive tests administered on campus and those administered at other testing centers. Cuomo has referred to college students as the “canary in the coal mine” and has stated that he expects similar outbreaks to occur in K-12 schools. However, keeping schools and workplaces closed to stop the pandemic would cut into the potential profits of the ruling class, a loss that Cuomo and his ilk are not willing to take.

Of the 1,139 positive cases at SUNY schools only 478 were from campus testing centers. SUNY Buffalo has seen 64 COVID-19 cases since reopening. Only two of these were from campus-administered tests. Similarly, SUNY Fredonia has confirmed 84 positive cases, of which five were tested on campus. Again, 64 students tested positive at SUNY Oswego, where 15 were campus-administered tests.

Students are being set up to fail. There has been no mandatory testing before arrival, limited testing available on campus and a lack of coordination and communication with the student bodies. Then, when an inevitable outbreak occurs, the administration blames the students and rinses itself of all responsibility.

Students must organize on their campuses with faculty and staff to form rank-and-file safety committees that will fight for their health and lives. These committees are being formed by educators in schools all over the country. All students and educators interested in taking up the fight to protect the lives and health of students and workers should join the national Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee and work to build committees on their campuses.

Mauritian cruise ship crews strike to demand repatriation

Tom Casey

Crew members aboard the Mediterranean Shipping Company’s (MSC) Poesia and Musica cruise ships have taken strike action in opposition to the company’s months-long failure to repatriate its employees. The two vessels, along with the MSC Seaview, have been stranded near the port of Santos, Brazil since the height of the coronavirus pandemic and the cruise industry’s shutdown in late March.

On Tuesday, a group of 25 employees on the Musica took to the upper deck of the ship, refusing to return to their cabins until the company guaranteed their travel arrangements. Workers staged similar actions on the Poesia, brandishing signs that contained messages such as “Hostage: MSC stop lying,” “We also have families,” and “Send us back home: our life matters.”

Crew on the MSC Musica stage a sit-in, refusing to return to their cabins until the company guarantees their repatration

Between the three MSC vessels off the Brazilian coast, there are 103 crew members from Mauritius who have been trapped on board for nearly six months. Accounting for the fact that for some crew, contracts of employment began well before the pandemic, it is likely that many of these workers have not seen their families for far longer than that.

A worker on the Seaview who spoke with the WSWS confirmed that the actions of the Musica and the Poesia crew came in the wake of several canceled repatriation dates given by the company, which it blamed on the border policies of the Mauritian government. The employees have had several travel plans issued by MSC fall through since July.

Like many marooned cruise ship workers, the stranded Mauritian MSC crew members have been cut off from the company payroll since March. A video published by TopFM.mu, a Mauritian news source, shows a worker on the Poesia describing her inability to pay for her expenses for her children back home. Similarly harrowing stories have been commonplace among stranded cruise ship workers of all nationalities.

Mauritius is a small island country in the western Indian Ocean, approximately 700 miles from the coast of Madagascar. As national borders around the world closed in the initial stages of the pandemic, the Mauritian administration of Prime Minister Pravind Jugnauth collaborated with the country’s largest privately held tourism corporation, Air Mauritius, Ltd, to impose exorbitant fees on the return of its approximately 4,000 citizens requiring repatriation and quarantine.

It has taken almost half a year for the global cruise industry and worldwide governments to send home nearly 200,000 international workers who were stranded in the wake of the pandemic. In mid-August, there were approximately 12,000 workers still trapped in US waters, with likely thousands more abroad.

A Wednesday article in the New York Times, entitled “Trapped by Exhaustion and Despair,” cites the International Transportation Workers’ Federation (ITF), a major seafarers’ trade union, as estimating that on merchant cargo vessels last month, “300,000 of the 1.2 million crew members at sea were essentially stranded on their ships, working past the expiration of their original contracts and fighting isolation, uncertainty and fatigue.” The WSWS has extensively reported on the deadly conditions facing these stranded seafaring workers, among which there have been dozens of deaths due to COVID-19 outbreaks, as well as several other deaths, which are widely suspected to have been suicides or deaths of despair.

MSC is the world’s fourth largest cruise company. It is also the world’s largest cruise enterprise that is entirely privately held, earning €405 million in profits in 2019, up from €348 million in 2018 [1]. Doubtlessly fueling the ire of its stranded employees is the fact that while its workers have been held hostage on its vessels for months, the company has been among the most ruthless ship operators to push for a resumption of sailings. Last month, amidst several failed European cruise industry restart attempts, as well as the extension of the Cruise Line Industry Association’s (CLIA) voluntary suspension of US sailings, the company managed to be among the first to complete a “successful” cruise since the shutdown of its 2,500-passenger voyage on the Grandiosa.

An August 19 article by the industry publication The Maritime Executive declared that “all eyes are now [on] MSC Grandiosa to see if it can successfully navigate these tricky waters and give this ailing industry some hope.” On Thursday, the Giornale di Sicilia (Journal of Sicily) reported that an Israeli employee on the Grandiosa who had tested positive but was asymptomatic for COVID-19 was evacuated Wednesday into a quarantine facility near Messina.

Although the company boasted that the infected employee’s quick diagnosis and subsequent evacuation reflect its preparedness for coronavirus outbreaks, stating that their enhanced protocol “makes our boats places of total safety,” all claims by MSC that the welfare of their crew is paramount are belied by the horrendous treatment of its workers on board the Poesia, Musica and Seaview.

It was only late on Thursday, doubtlessly in response to the courageous action by its crew members, that MSC issued travel confirmation to its employees. According to a report on defimedia.info, crew members are scheduled to travel home on September 16th.

But the struggle facing seafaring workers is far from concluded. If anything, the stand taken by the Mauritian workers on the MSC Poesia and Musica demonstrates that it is only the direct intervention of the workforce that will deter the major corporations in their relentless drive to enrich their top executives at the expense of the health, safety and basic rights of their employees.

It is significant to note that neither the ITF nor its official Cruise Ship Task Force has made any official statement on—let alone an endorsement of—the actions taken by the Musica and Poesia crew. There remains in this thoroughly corporatized organization little connection to the day-to-day struggles facing the global seafaring work force that it claims to represent.

Constitutional amendment aims to provide Sri Lankan president with authoritarian powers

Sanjaya Jayasekera & Deepl Jayasekera

Early this month, the Sri Lankan cabinet approved a draft 20th amendment to the constitution, which would give sweeping dictatorial powers to the executive president if approved by the parliament. President Gotabhaya Rajapakse’s Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) government is planning to ram the bill through parliament in October.

Sri Lanka’s attorney general has given legal approval to the amendment and ruled that it can be imposed without a referendum, as constitutionally required, if enacted by a two-thirds majority of MPs.

The SLPP won about 145 seats in the 225-member parliament at the August 5 election, and is expected to secure, via backroom wheeling and dealing, the support of enough parliamentarians for a two-thirds majority.

Rajapakse and his SLPP campaigned during the presidential and general elections for repealing the 19th amendment of the constitution, which restricted certain presidential powers. This was necessary, they claimed, in order to establish “strong and stable” government to “develop” the country.

This is a lie. President Rajapakse, who came to power by hypocritically exploiting popular opposition to the previous regime of President Maithripala Sirisena and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, wants dictatorial powers in order to take on the working class. The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the country’s economic, social and political crisis. Anger is rising amongst workers and the poor against escalating government and employer attacks on jobs, wages and living conditions.

The 19th amendment, which limited some of the president’s executive powers, was passed by the Sirisena-Wickremesinghe administration in April 2015. These restrictions include: the president can only appoint top state officials and judges on the recommendation of a Constitutional Council; the president has to seek prime ministerial advice in the selection of ministers and the allocation of their functions; the president can only hold two terms and cannot dissolve parliament until it has completed four and half years of its five-year term.

Sirisena won power by promising to abolish the hated executive presidency, which was established in the 1978 constitution. In fact, two presidents before Sirisena—Chandrika Kumaratunga and Mahinda Rajapakse—made the same promise before they came to power, only to abandon it and then use the executive powers to the maximum.

Like his predecessor, Sirisena ditched his pledge and introduced the 19th amendment. The Tamil National Alliance (TNA), Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) and various pseudo-left groups falsely proclaimed Sirisena’s amendment as a “victory for democracy.”

Apart from retaining the president’s two-term limit, the SLPP’s draft 20th amendment plans to remove all current constitutional restrictions and hand to the president the following powers:

• The president can appoint and remove the prime minister and is not required to consult with the prime minister in the appointment of ministers. Currently, Rajapakse unconstitutionally heads the defence ministry and overseers 23 key state institutions.

• The president can sack the parliament after it has completed just one year of its five-year term.

• The president will be immune from any litigation, including criminal prosecution, and no fundamental rights cases can be filed against him.

• The president can also appoint chairmen of commissions on elections, police, public service, human rights, bribery, corruption and finance, as well as top judges, the attorney general and other high officials. These appointments can be discussed with a proposed Parliamentary Council, whose members will include the prime minister, parliamentary speaker and the opposition leader. It will not be mandatory for the president to be involved in the Parliamentary Council.

The government would also be empowered to pass “urgent bills” in the parliament within 24 hours, thus avoiding any legal challenge from the country’s highest court. Modifications to any bill in parliament cannot deviate from its “merits and principles,” meaning parliament cannot make major changes. This clause was not in the 1978 constitution.

President Rajapakse, however, wants to go beyond these anti-democratic measures. He claims, in fact, that the current constitution has been amended 19 times because of its “unsuitability,” and has called for a new constitution based on “one country, one law for all the people.” Such a move would undermine existing laws related to the Tamil and Muslim minorities and further entrench communalist discrimination. Rajapakse’s cabinet has appointed a nine-member “experts committee,” mainly consisting of Rajapakse lackeys, to draft a new constitution.

Sri Lanka’s current constitution was established in 1978 by the then United National Party (UNP) government, which appointed J. R. Jayewardene as the country’s first executive president, transformed the parliament into a rubber stamp and the judiciary into a pliant institution. The 1978 constitution was established to drastically change the Sri Lankan economy and integrate it into globalised production by gutting the social rights of workers and the poor, creating cheap labour conditions and crushing all social opposition.

After systematic anti-Tamil communal provocations—a vicious weapon used by successive regimes to divide the working class and to weaken it in the wake of the 1948 formal independence—the Jayewardene regime began what became a three-decade long civil war against the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). The executive powers were also used to sack around 100,000 public sector employees, who, in July 1980, began a general strike against the government’s attacks on living and social conditions.

The current Rajapakse-led government, however, is not simply returning to the 1978 constitution. The Sri Lankan capitalist class is mired in a deep crisis due to the collapse of exports, tourism and remittances—a result of the growing impact of the global COVID-19 pandemic. Economic growth is estimated to be negative three percent this year, under conditions where the cash-strapped government has to pay $US4 billion annually, until 2024, on foreign loan repayments.

More than 400,000 jobs have been destroyed in the manufacturing sector, with workers’ wages in the private sector being cut by at least 30 percent, according to a labour ministry survey. Social tensions are rising throughout the country as part of the growing resistance of workers internationally.

Rajapakse’s preparations for autocratic rule are in line with the moves of his international counterparts towards fascistic and dictatorial forms of rule. In the US, President Donald Trump is seeking to mobilise fascist elements, while unleashing repression against workers and those protesting against police violence. In India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janatha Party government is intensifying its anti-Muslim attacks and whipping up extreme-right elements to use against workers and the poor.

Rajapakse has already inserted serving and retired military officers into his administration and is creating the framework for a presidential dictatorship, based on the military.

Sri Lanka’s so-called opposition parties have no fundamental differences with the government’s moves towards dictatorship, and are equally fearful of the growing opposition of workers and the poor to capitalism and to Sri Lanka’s ruling elite.

The UNP, Samagi Jana Balavegaya (SJB), TNA, JVP and the Muslim parties have strengthened Rajapakse and his government, attending two all-party meetings on March 24 and April 2, praising the president’s response to COVID-19 and offering their assistance. On August 20, all the opposition parties endorsed the president’s parliamentary policy statement without a vote.

This week the SJB held a protest in the Colombo suburbs and “pledged” to defeat the 20th amendment by “mobilising the people.” This rhetoric is aimed at hoodwinking the population and diverting it into dead-end parliamentary appeals.

Similarly, the JVP is seeking to politically disorient the working class by covering up the real dangers posed by the Rajapakse government’s dictatorial plans. Addressing a September 4 press conference, JVP leader Anura Kumar Dissanayake declared that the new constitutional amendment was “not in the interests of the country” but to “politically benefit one section”—i.e., the Rajapakse family.

Likewise, pseudo-left formations, such as the Frontline Socialist Party (FSP), have lined up with these right-wing parties, and the trade unions, to block any independent mobilisation of the working class.

Addressing a September 4 press conference, FSP educational secretary Pubudu Jayagoda declared that the “autocratic rule of an individual will bring horrific disaster to the country” and issued a pathetic appeal to government MPs to oppose the 20th amendment. Following the August 5 general elections, Jayagoda declared that the FSP was “ready to work with left, petty-bourgeois and progressive sections of the right-wing parties… on common issues.”

The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) is the only organisation that has consistently warned the working class about the growing danger of authoritarian rule in Sri Lanka. No amount of appeals to the government or the opposition parties will change the right-wing anti-democratic agenda being advanced by the Sri Lankan ruling elite.

The working class can only take forward the defence of its democratic and social rights by breaking from every faction of the capitalist class and mobilising around its own independent interests—i.e., on the basis of a revolutionary socialist program. This means fighting for a unified struggle of workers across ethnic lines and to rally the rural poor in the fight for workers’ and peasants’ government based on an international socialist program.

Australian raids on Chinese journalists mark escalation of US-led witch hunt

Mike Head

Reports surfaced this week that further reveal the provocative anti-China agenda driving the secret Australian intelligence raids on four Chinese journalists on June 26. A US-instigated witch hunt against China is being stepped up, fueling a rapidly sharpening conflict between China and Australia.

Operating on a warrant personally issued by Attorney-General Christian Porter, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), the domestic political spy agency, mounted dawn raids on the journalists, as well as a state Labor Party parliamentarian and a part-time member of his staff.

Thanks to ASIO and its media conduits, the 6.30 a.m. raid on New South Wales MP Shaoquett Moselmane, the son of Lebanese immigrants, was splashed all over the media, with headlines falsely accusing him of being a “Chinese agent.”

It was reported to be the first activation of the US-backed “foreign interference” legislation introduced by the Liberal-National government, with Labor’s full support, in 2018.

What was kept secret at the time was that journalists from Chinese publications were also raided. After questioning the journalists for “several hours” and seizing mobile phones, computers and hand-written notebooks, the ASIO officers ordered the journalists not to inform anyone of the raids, the Chinese media reported this week.

These police-state powers were first introduced under the cover of the “war on terror.” They give ASIO the power to secretly conduct interrogations and “special intelligence operations.” Anyone, including the targeted victims, who alerts the public to such operations can be jailed for up to 10 years.

Following the ASIO raids, the journalists left Australia. According to media reports, they included Tao Shelan, the Australia bureau chief of the China News Service, and Li Dayong, China Radio International’s Sydney bureau chief.

Around the same time, the Australian government, citing ASIO advice, revoked the visas of two Chinese academics. One is Professor Chen Hong, who has been director of the Australian studies centre at East China Normal University in Shanghai since 2001 and a frequent visitor to Australia for decades. The other is Beijing Foreign Studies University Professor Li Jianjun, who is currently on a PhD scholarship at Western Sydney University.

ASIO has refused to make any statement about the basis for the raids and visa cancellations. According to media reports, the journalists and academics shared chats with Moselmane on WeChat. Such is the apparently flimsy evidence of “foreign interference.”

Professor Chen told Beijing’s Global Times it was “preposterous” that the chat group, where they shared jokes and photos of personal excursions, was regarded as a covert means of political influence.

Chinese authorities only revealed the ASIO raids on the journalists this week in response to the latest chapter in the escalating anti-China campaign by the Australian media and political establishment—sensational headlines about two Australian journalists being questioned by Chinese police.

The timeline of this affair is significant.

On March 2, as part of a deepening US military, economic and diplomatic offensive against the Chinese regime, the Trump administration cut the number of visas for Chinese citizens working at Chinese media organisations in the US to 100, effectively expelling 60 journalists.

The US government also declared Chinese media outlets, including the official news agency Xinhua, to be “foreign diplomatic missions.” As a result, they were publicly placed under heightened surveillance, with limits on their property and locations. In return, the Chinese government expelled most journalists from the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal.

In Australia, the corporate media outlets soon turned their attention to Moselmane, armed with material supplied by the intelligence agencies. On March 31 it was reported that he had posted an article on his website praising Chinese President Xi Jinping’s leadership in alerting the world to COVID-19 and containing the pandemic in China.

Moselmane was immediately publicly reprimanded by his state parliamentary leader, Jodi McKay, for making “inappropriate comments.” That underscored Labor’s bipartisan support for the alignment behind the US confrontation with China.

A few days later, media outlets reported that Moselmane had written a commentary on February 5, saying that government and media efforts to blame China for the spread of the supposed “Wuhan virus” were xenophobic and designed to incite anti-Chinese hatred.

For voicing this political opinion, the Labor Party immediately stripped Moselmane of a parliamentary post. Several weeks later, on June 26, ASIO raided his home and parliamentary office, and those of his part-time electorate officer, John Zhang. Labor then forced Moselmane to take indefinite leave from parliament.

Despite the politically and personally damaging “foreign interference” accusations against them, which they both deny, no charges have been laid against Moselmane and Zhang. Zhang has launched a High Court challenge, exposing the nebulous nature of the accusations hurled against him and charging the government and ASIO with violating the implied freedom of political communication in the Australian constitution.

Next, on August 14, Cheng Lei, a dual Chinese-Australian citizen working as a journalist for a Chinese government television network, was reported to have been arrested in Beijing. She was “suspected of carrying out criminal activities endangering China’s national security,” the Chinese Foreign Ministry said.

Little is known of these allegations, but the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs then ramped up the conflict. It advised the only two journalists employed by Australian outlets in China to leave the country. They were the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s China correspondent Bill Birtles and the Australian Financial Review ’s Shanghai correspondent Michael Smith.

Acting on this official advice, Birtles and Smith booked flights out of China for September 3. The night before, Chinese officials visited both and told them they could not leave until police had interviewed them about a legal case, apparently relating to Cheng Lei.

The Australian embassy then told the two journalists to flee into Australian diplomatic residences. There they remained for five days before agreeing to answer questions from the police if they were granted exit permits. After one-hour police interviews, which Smith described as “unremarkable,” they flew out of China.

One can only imagine the political and media furore if the Chinese embassy in Australia had taken similar action to block or delay the ASIO raids and questioning of the Chinese journalists.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian accused Australia of hypocrisy and double standards. “The Australian side describes its ‘questioning’ of Chinese journalists as normal procedure, but accuses the Chinese side of engaging in ‘hostage diplomacy,’” he said.

These developments are part of an accelerating campaign, designed to poison public opinion against China and create a wartime-like atmosphere.

Last month, Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s government announced—also with Labor’s bipartisan support—an unprecedented Foreign Relations Bill, essentially designed to tear up or prohibit all agreements with Chinese entities by universities, as well as state, territory and municipal governments.

A few days later, the government launched McCarthyite-style parliamentary hearings into “foreign interference in the university sector.”

These actions are all part of sharp intensification of the anti-China propaganda drive that has been underway for years, spearheaded by the US-integrated intelligence apparatus and the corporate media.

The Australian ruling elite has placed the population on the frontlines of an aggressive US confrontation with China that could lead to a catastrophic nuclear war as the US seeks to reassert the hegemony it obtained via World War II.

As in the US also, the nationalist agitation against China is an attempt to divert the rising unrest being generated by the disastrous, corporate profit-driven response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the soaring levels of unemployment and social inequality.

The use of the draconian ASIO powers under the “terrorism” and “foreign interference” laws is a warning that the drive to military conflict is being accompanied by attacks on democratic rights that will increasingly target domestic social and political opposition, not just academics and journalists.

India-China border conflict remains on knife’s edge

Jordan Shilton & Keith Jones

The four-month-long standoff between Indian and Chinese troops over disputed areas along their 3,475 kilometre-long border in the Himalayas has escalated dramatically over the past two weeks. The threat that a localized clash could spark a regional war that would drag in the world’s major powers is being increased by US imperialism’s provocative support for India’s right-wing Modi government, and a renewed push by the major European powers to bolster their military-strategic presence in the Indo-Pacific region so as to thwart China’s rise.

Alleging a Chinese plot to seize Indian border territory, the Indian military launched what it termed a “pre-emptive” operation on the night of August 29 and 30. Deploying what it has now emerged were several thousand troops, India captured a series of strategic heights in inhospitable mountainous terrain near Pangong Lake along the Line of Actual Control (LAC), the countries’ contested de facto border. The 134 kilometer-long lake lies at the junction of Indian-held Ladakh and the Chinese-controlled Aksai Chin region.

In reality, the India manoeuvre was a provocative escalation of tensions that has brought heavily-armed Indian troops to within two hundred metres, or “eyeball to eyeball,” with their Chinese counterparts.

Last Monday, live ammunition was fired at the border for the first time in more than forty years, violating a bilateral agreement that prohibits soldiers patrolling near the disputed LAC from discharging their firearms. India has claimed that Chinese forces fired into the air during a confrontation, while Beijing has countered that it was in fact Indian troops that opened fire at a Chinese patrol. Nobody was injured in the incident, but it resulted in an escalation of threats on both sides.

Indian sources claim as many as 50,000 Chinese troops have been deployed to the Aksai Chin border region, along with fighter jets and artillery. India, which has similarly made major “forward” deployments to air bases and army camps, has fortified its newly-conquered heights in eastern Ladakh/Aksai Chin with tanks and additional troops.

Indian Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar and his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi issued a statement pledging their respective militaries would “quickly disengage, maintain proper distance, and ease tensions,” following a two-and-a-half-hour meeting Thursday in Moscow, on the sidelines of a Shanghai Cooperation Organization conclave.

This does not change the fact that the conflict remains on a knife’s edge.

The vaguely-worded statement outlines no concrete proposals on how the border standoff and rival claims over where the LAC lies are to be resolved. It needs recalling that the bloodiest clash to date, which occurred in the Galwan Valley on the night of June 15, erupted during an official period of “de-escalation” following two non-lethal clashes between Indian and Chinese troops in May, at points 1,000 kilometers apart. The June clash, which saw soldiers engage in hand-to-hand combat with rods, blades, and stones, resulted in the deaths of 20 Indian soldiers and an unknown number of Chinese forces.

Although some troop withdrawals took place after the June clash, tensions have escalated in recent weeks, with both sides insisting that the onus is on the other to defuse the crisis. Meanwhile, the number of disputed points along the border has increased. Late last month, Jaishankar declared the possibility of a military confrontation between the rival nuclear-armed powers is the highest since India and China fought a month-long border war in 1962.

Any number of localized clashes, intended or otherwise, could easily blow up into an all-out war. In an ominous development, a senior Indian military official told the Times of India earlier this week that local commanders have been granted wide latitude to determine how to respond to Chinese military activities. “Our soldiers on the heights are well-armed and fully-prepared,” the unnamed official added.

India’s provocative actions at its border with China are motivated by two interrelated factors. First, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his crisis-ridden Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government are using the tensions with Beijing to shift official politics sharply to the right and whip up a bellicose Indian nationalism. By so doing, they hope to overcome popular opposition to aligning India ever more closely with Washington, justify a further massive buildup of India’s military might, and divert attention away from the disastrous health and social crisis triggered by the government’s ruinous handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Secondly, Modi and the entire Indian ruling elite—including the opposition Congress Party, which during the current crisis has repeatedly taunted the BJP government for not being sufficiently aggressive against Beijing—know that they enjoy the full backing of US imperialism in the conflict with China. Almost immediately after the border dispute erupted in May, Washington demonstratively inserted itself into the conflict, denounced China as the aggressor, and directly tied it to the US-incited South China Sea dispute.

This is part of a bipartisan policy, pursued by Republican and Democratic administrations alike for two decades, to cultivate close military-strategic ties with India so as to transform it into a bulwark against an increasingly economic and geopolitically powerful China.

The irreconcilable conflict between US imperialism and China, now the world’s second largest and by some measures biggest economy, was summed up by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in a late July speech in which he repudiated the five-decade-old US policy of “engagement” with China. Pompeo unveiled a comprehensive strategy of diplomatic, economic, and military pressure against China, making clear that the US is now determined to bring about regime change in Beijing.

The India-China border dispute is made all the more explosive because it is becoming ever more enmeshed with Washington’s aggressive diplomatic-military offensive against Beijing. Despite the remote and almost uninhabitable character of the disputed territories, including some peaks that rise to 5,100 meters (17,000 feet) above sea level, they are of growing strategic significance.

The $60 billion China Pakistan Economic Corridor, which is a key plank of Beijing’s broader Belt and Road Initiative to develop economic ties with the Middle East, Africa, and Europe, runs near the disputed border, and through Chinese and Pakistani-held territory claimed by India. Moreover, Aksai Chin provides the only road link between China’s Tibetan and Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Regions, where US imperialism and its allies have sought to exploit ethnic grievances to weaken the Beijing regime.

US imperialism’s incendiary role all but ensures that if a war erupts over the India-China border, it will take on global dimensions. Central to US strategy, beginning with Obama’s “Pivot to Asia” and further underlined by the Pentagon’s 2018 declaration of a new era of great-power “strategic competition,” has been to transform India into a US frontline state against China.

As part of its ever more aggressive stance towards China, leading US officials have begun to publicly call for the creation of a NATO-style alliance in the Indo-Pacific region to challenge China. They are pressing for the Quad—a four-country, US-led strategic dialogue revived in 2017 that includes India, and Washington’s two principal Asia-Pacific allies, Japan and Australia—to serve as the basis for such an alliance. India is set to host a Quad ministerial meeting in October, where the prospects for deepening military-security cooperation among its members and adding additional member states, like South Korea or New Zealand, will reportedly be discussed.

While US imperialism, as always, plays the most provocative and destabilizing role, its European and Japanese competitors are not far behind. Outgoing Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe unveiled more than $2 billion in subsidies earlier this week to encourage Japanese companies to relocate their production facilities from China to India. At a meeting on Thursday, Abe and Modi also announced a bilateral logistics and military base-sharing agreement, patterned after that reached in 2016 between the US and India, which allows US warships and warplanes to make routine use of Indian ports and bases for maintenance and resupply.

Two days earlier, India, France, and Australia held their inaugural trilateral dialogue, an annual meeting that will focus on strategic and economic cooperation in the Indo-Pacific region. India is particularly interested in securing access to French military bases in Reunion and Madagascar, which it hopes will enable it to combat the expansion of China’s naval presence in the Indian Ocean through a recently established base in Djibouti and what the Pentagon claims is an undeclared based in Gwadar, Pakistan. Following the dialogue, French Defence Minister Florence Parly travelled to India for Thursday’s induction of five Rafale fighter jets into the Indian Air Force, which is the first stage of a $7.8 billion agreement between the two countries for 36 fighter jets. Parly also held talks with her Indian counterpart, Rajnath Singh, on expanding industrial and logistical cooperation within the framework of Modi’s “Make in India” campaign.

Not to be left out, Germany’s cabinet adopted late last month a new strategic doctrine for the Indo-Pacific that commits Europe’s largest economy to engage strategically and militarily across the region. In keeping with the German ruling elite’s systematic drive to revive militarism and an imperialist “world-power” foreign policy, the 80-page document declares that Berlin’s role “could comprise participating in security policy forums, participating in military exercises in the region, planning joint evacuations, sending liaison officers, as well as various forms of naval presence.”

In a statement announcing the publication of the document, Foreign Minister Heiko Maas underscored the predatory interests behind the plan, asserting, “The Himalayas and Straits of Malacca may seem far away. But our prosperity and geopolitical influence in the decades to come depend precisely on how we cooperate with the states of the Indo-Pacific.”

The hotly-contested Indian Ocean, which accounts for more than 40 percent of global maritime trade and is relied upon by China for oil imports as well as much of its export trade, is rapidly emerging as one of the world’s most volatile flashpoints.

The great power rivalries, which have been enormously exacerbated by the global economic crisis triggered by the pandemic, pose an immense danger to the working class of the region and the entire world.

Working people in India, China, throughout the region and internationally cannot stop the mounting danger of a war, fought between nuclear powers, in the Indo-Pacific by appealing to any of the powers involved. While it is the target of aggression by the imperialist powers and their Indian bourgeois satraps, the Stalinist regime in Beijing, which is the guardian of the vast wealth of China’s rapidly growing oligarchy of billionaires, has no progressive answer. China has responded to India’s provocations at their shared border with reactionary nationalist appeals of its own, and pledges to obliterate the Indian military with China’s superior armed forces should a military conflict with New Delhi erupt.

What is required is the building of a global, working-class-led, anti-war movement to stop the mad drive of the imperialist and great powers towards a catastrophic military conflagration. This movement must be based on the recognition that war can be fought only by taking up a struggle against its source, the capitalist profit system, on the basis of a socialist programme.

Full classes, full buses—German schools are becoming a coronavirus trap

Marianne Arens

In Germany, the total number of people infected with coronavirus exceeded a quarter of a million this week. At present, almost 17,000 acute cases of COVID-19 are officially registered, which is about four times as many as in the summer months. The largest group of newly infected people is now 20- to 24-year-olds.

The seven-day average has been around 1,200 newly infected people per day for weeks. On Tuesday, almost 1,500 new infections were recorded—the highest figure since the end of April. On Wednesday, it was 1,176 and on Thursday almost 1,900, an alarming new high since spring. In Germany so far, 9,400 people have paid for the pandemic with their lives.

While the number of cases is currently rising rapidly again in France, Spain and other European countries, Germany, with its rigorous policy of reopening schools, is resolutely steering towards a second coronavirus wave. At the same time, politicians from all parties in the Bundestag (parliament) and state governments are ignoring the warnings of serious virologists.

In the Fuldaer Zeitung, Prof. Philipp Markart, director of pneumology at Fulda Hospital, warned, “Currently, the number of infections is rising again. And not only that, but the number of patients is increasing again. At Fulda Hospital, we are again treating people with COVID-19 who are so seriously ill that they need in-patient treatment and oxygen.”

The pulmonary physician reported “dramatic individual developments,” including a number of “relatively young patients without serious pre-existing conditions, who, while completely healthy, suffered severe, sometimes fatal, complications.” Prof. Markart cited the lack of a vaccine against COVID-19, the “high infectivity, the transmissibility even by asymptomatic infected persons and the sometimes very severe course of the disease” as factors that make it so dangerous.

Despite all this, politicians are determined to force teachers, educators and over 10 million pupils back into the same dilapidated and overcrowded schools as before the pandemic. After the start of school in Bavaria on September 8 for 1.6 million pupils, regular classes are also to begin for a further 1.5 million pupils next Monday in the last federal state, Baden-Württemberg.

Despite a highly reluctant information policy on the part of the authorities, which is already bordering on an information blackout, sporadic reports of more and more cases of coronavirus at schools are appearing.

In Berlin, the Senate [state ministry] Department for Education announced on Monday that 25 Berlin schools are currently infected with COVID-19. A total of 70 learning groups are affected. However, how many pupils and teachers tested positive, how many are in quarantine and how many are seriously ill are being concealed.

In Dresden, 110 people have been in quarantine for one week. There is coronavirus in Torgau in Saxony, too; one primary school, one secondary school and one after-school care centre had to close, and in Pirna there was a COVID 19 case at a grammar school. On the Baltic Sea coast (Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania), new cases are known at schools in Güstrow and Rostock. In Güstrow, more than 70 people from the state support centre “Hören” and pupils and teachers from the “Küstenschule” in Toitenwinkel were sent into quarantine for 14 days after two pupils tested positive for coronavirus

In the southern and western federal states, too, more and more new cases are becoming known. In Olching (Upper Bavaria), there was a case at a grammar school on the first day of school on Wednesday, and 103 pupils were sent into quarantine. In Lower Saxony, according to a brief communication from the ministry, there are “just under 50 schools with coronavirus-related restrictions.” Twenty-four pupils and four teachers had tested positive.

In Wiesbaden, more than 100 pupils from two schools in Erbenheim are in quarantine after cases of coronavirus, and at a third Wiesbaden school, the suspicion of infection so far has been neither confirmed nor eliminated.

In North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), several schools in the districts of Holsterhausen and Frintrop in Essen, among others, are newly affected, with two pupils and one caregiver testing positive for COVID-19 on Tuesday. Since the end of the summer holidays, the number of Essen schools affected has thus risen to 15.

In Düsseldorf, there was a particularly severe case: on September 3, 20 pupils from Freiherr-vom-Stein-Realschule tested positive for COVID-19 after taking part in a four-day class trip to Chiemsee. Although one pupil fell acutely ill there, the 54 pupils drove home together in a 10-hour trip by coach. In Bavaria, school trips are not yet permitted.

This probably illustrates best how carelessly and irresponsibly the authorities are dealing with the pandemic and that they are not warning, preparing and protecting teachers and pupils from infection.

All the safety concepts that were painstakingly worked out before the holidays are being discarded. Almost everywhere, there are explicit rulings against wearing a face mask in class. In Wiesbaden, an administrative court has even expressly prohibited the “urgent recommendation” to wear a mask in class.

The education politicians responsible are apparently deliberately trying to risk new so-called superspreading events.

Schools are in no way equipped to deal with coronavirus. The summer holidays were not used to install modern ventilation systems, air filters and CO2 measuring devices or to renovate sanitary facilities. The politicians’ contempt for the life and health of teachers and pupils was summed up by NRW Education Minister Yvonne Gebauer (Free Democratic Party, FDP) when she remarked that €100 per child for the purchase of air filters in classrooms was “a good idea, but too expensive.”

The same government, which is paying €3.2 billion from the coronavirus programme alone for better digitisation in the federal armed forces, among other things, has failed to equip schools with the necessary IT equipment for online learning. As a result, teachers and pupils are forced to spend many hours a day in full classrooms whose windows often cannot even be opened. And on their way to school, they are forced to squeeze into crowded buses and trains.

In several federal states, e.g., Berlin and Baden-Württemberg, handouts have been distributed to parents, according to which children should also be sent to school “if they have a cold, a slight or occasional cough or a scratchy throat.” If a child does indeed test positive, often only this one child is sent home without those they have been in contact with being identified, isolated and tested.

In the meantime, it has been established beyond doubt that children can be highly contagious even if they are infected but asymptomatic or show only minor symptoms. “Trace, isolate and test, test, test” has been the World Health Organisation’s recommendation for six months now.

At the same time, teachers, educators and school employees who belong to the risk groups or have relatives at home at risk are morally pressured or forced by the courts to take part in face-to-face teaching. And the parents of previously ill pupils are left completely alone. Hundreds of posts by indignant parents are now blazing across social media.

“Ma En” from Lower Saxony writes that what is going on in schools is “inhuman”: “Family members from risk groups with whom a pupil lives together are worth absolutely nothing! Russian roulette is being played with us!”

Taty, the mother of a previously ill 13-year-old and two 4-year-old twins, writes: “I am so incredibly angry right now. So terribly angry. ...” As she writes, the special schools in Märkischer Kreis (NRW) have just been stripped of everything: “School psychologists, toys, playground equipment, because it’s too expensive.”

As the twin siblings of the “big one” were also previously ill with pseudo-croup, the latter had been at home since March. “I reported my first home-schooling to the school without any problems. It was immediately decided that I would receive a permit until 31.07.2020. ... I contacted the school management during this time and asked for an extension—but they refused immediately.”

Taty describes an odyssey that lasted for weeks until she finally succeeded in releasing her 13-year-old son from attending classes with the help of a medical certificate. “One day before the start of school we got the permit. I am grateful for this. But I don’t want other pupils or parents to have to experience such fears and desperation.”

There are lots of reports like this. Jennifer tells about her aunt, a 61-year-old teacher who has survived cancer and is currently being forced into attending classes. She states: “Problems in the education system have existed for a long time. Now it’s all blowing up in our faces! When you consider how many teachers belong to the risk group.” The pedagogical staff would have to “line up in rows at the company doctors to check whether they are really at risk”.

And when asked why the state and federal authorities do not publicly report coronavirus infections in schools, Eva answers: “Because then it would also be clear as hell to the general public that reopening schools without a concept is a no-go. This must be prevented so that the money rolls in.”

As these contributions show, the politicians’ lies, manoeuvres, and motives are increasingly being exposed. The impetus behind the reopening of schools is the drive to reopen all businesses for profit. Corporations and banks insist that parents are at the disposal of production. For this reason, politicians in unison categorically rule out a new lockdown.

The Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality Party) is the only party that takes the CoV-Sars-2 virus seriously and gives top priority to the fight against it.

Hundreds of new COVID-19 cases raise fears of uncontrolled outbreaks across the Pacific

John Braddock

A surge of COVID-19 cases in several Pacific states has sparked fears of uncontrolled outbreaks across the region. Hundreds of new cases have emerged in the past month, with many governments relaxing previous measures to control the virus, in order to “open up” their disintegrating economies.

The far-flung islands of the Pacific previously escaped high levels of COVID-19. However, the contributing factors—remoteness, small and scattered populations and the difficulties of travel and transport—have proved to be no defence against a rapidly worsening health and social crisis.

On July 15, French Polynesia re-opened to international visitors, in a desperate bid to resurrect its moribund tourism industry. The first COVID-19 outbreak between March and June, which affected 62 people, had been brought under control with a lockdown and border closures.

Now, with some 3,000 people landing in Tahiti each week, the number of cases has ballooned by 891 since early August to 953. They are mostly in urban areas, but also in Bora Bora, Raiatea, Huahine and Hao.

Flights from Los Angeles arrived after US tourists, among others, were cleared to enter without needing to quarantine. President Edouard Fritch acknowledged that the COVID-19 crisis had worsened in the US, and would do so in the French territory as well, but claimed that if French Polynesia failed to open up the consequences would be “catastrophic.”

Five Tahitian trade unions last week dropped empty threats of a general strike after the government remained adamant it would not reintroduce a two-week quarantine for arriving travellers.

A union spokesman said they were told that the authorities hoped there would be eventually “collective immunity,” i.e. the criminal policy of “herd immunity” demanded internationally by business interests. School attendance remains compulsory, despite strike calls by teachers for tougher containment measures, and fruitless appeals by teacher unions.

The largest number of cases is in the US state of Hawai’i, with nearly 7,000 infections and 49 deaths. In late August, Governor David Ige imposed a 2-week lockdown for the island of Oahu to stem a spike in cases, which had risen to more than 200 a day. A similar order, declared in March, had previously pushed daily infection numbers down.

The US Surgeon General, Jerome Adams, who was in Hawai’i, described the move as only a “temporary reset” while contact tracing and isolation measures were enacted. Designated “essential businesses” have remained open, including child-care, construction, healthcare, grocery stores, gas stations, banks and financial institutions, and hardware stores. Public schools, and the University of Hawai’i still have in-person classes, but private schools have been able to conduct studies online.

In the Western Pacific, the US territory of Guam has close to 700 active cases, including 53 in hospital and 12 in intensive care, with 21 deaths. Scores of infections have been traced to US military personnel, as deployments to major bases have continued, with the Trump administration allowing the virus to run rampant in military facilities.

The aircraft carrier, USS Theodore Roosevelt, docked in Guam in March, in the midst of a mass outbreak of COVID-19 on board. Hundreds of sailors were quarantined in local hotels and crowded into the naval base gym. Some 1,156 infections among the crew were not counted in Guam’s figures, but local officials have detailed nearly 200 military-linked cases on the island, including 35 personnel from the Andersen Air Force base, who broke quarantine to visit local restaurants.

Guam’s governor, Lou Leon Guerrero, has extended a public health emergency until the end of September, saying: “We are in very dire straits. We are in very desperate times. Our island right now is sick.” The Guardian quoted Felix Cabrera, of the governor’s physicians advisory group, who warned that with the fragile healthcare system stressed to the limit, the situation is “going to get worse before it gets better.”

In Papua New Guinea (PNG), the Pacific’s largest country, the number of confirmed infections has escalated from 11 in mid-July to 488, including five deaths. The cases, which first appeared among health workers at the Port Moresby General Hospital, have now spread from the capital to half the country’s 22 provinces. With fewer than 16,000 tests conducted among the population of 9 million, the real infection rate is likely many times higher than the official figures.

A recent lockdown of Port Moresby was lifted after just a fortnight and domestic travel re-opened. Prime Minister James Marape declared PNG would not go back into lockdown, despite the escalating case numbers. “COVID-19 not only affects us health-wise but also economically,” Marape said. “That is why we will not have another lockdown. We must adjust to living with the COVID-19… we will not shut down our country again,” he insisted.

This deadly decision portends a social disaster in one of the world’s most impoverished countries. The ramshackle health system is already being overwhelmed.

According to the Pacific Community development agency, only 55 percent of people in the Pacific have access to clean drinking water. World Vision’s PNG director, Heather MacLeod, told the Guardian that without clean water people cannot protect themselves, and the likely result will be “a spread of the disease on a massive scale.”

The PNG government last month blocked the arrival of a flight carrying 180 workers from China, after Chinese mine operator Ramu NiCo., which runs the Ramu Nickel mine, revealed 48 employees were given a coronavirus vaccine in a possible unauthorized trial.

PNG’s pandemic response controller, David Manning, banned the workers “in the best interests of our people.” Demanding explanations from Beijing, Health Minister Jelta Wong said that if the shoe was on the other foot, China would be up in arms. “The relationship has been tested here,” she warned.

The incident underscores the deepening geo-strategic tensions generated across the region as the COVID-19 crisis intensifies. At the forefront is Washington’s stepped-up confrontation with, and preparations for war against China.

US Secretary of Defense Mark Esper made a flying visit to Hawai’i, Palau and Guam last month, condemning China’s purported “malign activities” in the region, and seeking to buttress American influence. Esper had earlier promised Palau’s president, Tommy Remengesau Jr, that the Trump administration would help secure COVID-19 vaccines for the country, when one became available.

Palau, with a population of 20,000, 1,500 kms east of the Philippines, is currently re-negotiating its so-called “compact of free association” with Washington. Remengesau has used assertions of growing Chinese influence to call for greater US involvement. Ahead of a meeting with Trump last year, he urged “a stronger US presence in the Pacific, we want to see that happen.”

While Palau has welcomed Chinese tourists and investment, the former US trust territory remains firmly under the wing of Washington, which provides defence, funding, and access to social services. Palau is one of four remaining Pacific nations that recognise Taiwan, after Solomon Islands and Kiribati switched diplomatic recognition to Beijing last year.

Following Esper’s August visit, Remengesau revealed that, in a hand-delivered letter, he told Esper he was eager to host land bases, port facilities and airfields for the US military, as well as a US Coast Guard presence.

Mexico runs out of death certificates with 122,765 “excess deaths” reported during pandemic

Norissa Santa Cruz & Carlos Reed

On Saturday, the Mexican government reported that there have been at least 122,765 “excess deaths” between mid-March and August 1.

The “excess death” count, representing the increase in the overall number of deaths in a given country over the historical average number of deaths during the same period, serves to expose the gross underreporting of COVID-19 deaths, not only in Mexico, but in countries across the globe. Epidemiologists agree that estimating excess deaths is the best way to assess the impact of the pandemic.

Mexico has reported some 69,095 confirmed COVID-19 deaths and 629,409 cases. The country has the world’s fourth highest death toll, trailing India (75,062 deaths), Brazil (128,694 deaths), and the United States, which ranks first, with 194,367 deaths.

Given that at least 600 people are dying on a daily basis, the excess deaths estimated up to August 1 would place Mexico’s real death toll today ahead of the officially recorded toll in Brazil and near that of the United States.

Between 15 to 20 days ago, many states began running out of death certificates. This has particularly been the case in impoverished and working class communities in the State of Mexico—the most populous state—as well as in Mexico City and Baja California, according to Deputy Health Minister Hugo López-Gatell, who leads the government’s pandemic response.

Mexican health workers protest; sign reads, “I'm COVID-19 positive and they ordered me to work” [Credit: Facebook]

Despite the rapid spread of the deadly virus, the majority of Mexico’s population has not been able to stop working. While many workers fear becoming infected, the catchphrase for the poor has become that their choice is to “die of COVID or die of hunger.” Half of Mexico’s 127 million residents do not earn enough to meet their basic needs, and one in five suffers from hunger. Over half of Mexico’s children live in poverty, and a United Nations study found that 14 percent of children suffer from stunted growth as a result of malnutrition.

A study by the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) found that at least 16 million more people will fall into extreme poverty. According to the UNAM, the Mexican government needs to spend 15 billion pesos (about $670 million) per month to ensure the provision of the basic food basket for the 32 million people in extreme poverty in the coming months.

Compounding the problem, the Mexican population receives little to no state relief in the form of unemployment compensation or social assistance in a country where at least 58 percent of the Mexican working class relies on the informal economy, which comprises 30 percent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP). Another 25 percent of Mexico’s GDP is derived from the vast maquiladora industry run largely by multinational corporations on the US-Mexican border. This industrial sector remained open during the pandemic, due to pressure from international finance capital, particularly within the US.

Sergio Moctezuma, the state labor secretary for Baja California said that in the state, “The vast majority of infected people are factory workers.” In mid-May the health secretary of Northern Baja California announced that, at the time, 83 percent of official deaths (432 of 519) were maquiladora workers, in an industry where the majority of workers are between the ages of 25 and 45.

The vast degree of social inequality in Mexico, involving poor living conditions and public infrastructure for masses of the population, means that the virus has found ideal conditions for its spread. An April 2020 report by the World Bank found that 51.2 million people are considered at or below the poverty line. The report adds that “inequality in Mexico ... is among the highest in OECD countries.”

Additionally, 6.2 percent of the population, or some 1.8 million people, have “no access to limited standard sanitation.” This same condition affects an estimated 35 percent of the world’s population or some 2.5 billion people, according to the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC).

President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) has done nothing to prevent the virus’s devastating toll on the working class and the poor of Mexico.

His government, moreover, has agreed to using the Mexican population as guinea pigs for pharmaceutical companies in the US, Russia and China to test their vaccines on a massive scale. While not necessarily protecting the Mexican population from the virus and potentially causing harmful effects, AMLO hopes to use these trials to suppress popular concerns as the coronavirus spreads out of control.

The Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) announced in a statement this week that it had reached a deal with Landsteiner Scientific and the AMLO administration to distribute 32 million doses of its Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine in November. “Deliveries are expected to start in November 2020 subject to approval by Mexico’s regulators,” according to the RDIF representative. Mexico has also committed to participating in late-stage clinical trials for vaccines developed by US company Johnson & Johnson and two Chinese companies.

Last month, AMLO announced in a disingenuous fashion that Mexico’s poor would receive equal access to health care and free vaccines, stating that “All the citizens will have access to the vaccine, and there should be no concern for poor people as they will be vaccinated with the same urgency. They will not be the last people to receive it.”

While AMLO paints a fantasy world where the poor have equal access to health care, the reality on the ground is that tens of thousands of poor are dying because they cannot afford to stay home from work or social distance, and lack access to basic sanitation. According to data by the IMF, Mexico has only spent 0.2 percent of its GDP in 2020 to address the pandemic, while other nations have dedicated 2.1 percent of their GDP on average.

According to public records of Mexico’s epidemiological oversight database, in at least 75 percent of Mexico’s coronavirus deaths, amounting to 51,924 people, the patients never received any treatment with a ventilator before they died or any form of intensive care treatment, which could have saved their lives.

The catastrophic COVID-19 health crisis has demonstrated the criminal negligence and incompetence of the Mexican bourgeoisie. According to the OECD, Mexico occupies the last place in implementing large-scale testing. On average, 0.4 tests are done per thousand people in Mexico, while the other 36 OECD member nations have carried out on average 22.9 tests per thousand inhabitants.

The large death toll has also had a devastating effect on frontline workers. Amnesty International reported last week that Mexico has the highest number of confirmed COVID-19 deaths among medical personnel in the world. A total of 1,410 health care workers have died and 104,590 have tested positive. El Financiero reported that there have been more than 100 street protests by health care workers from various institutions, demanding safe working conditions to face the pandemic.

AMLO and his Morena party came to power employing populist phraseology to cast themselves as the much needed “change” for Mexico. However, his government is the continuation of the longstanding reactionary rule of the Mexican national bourgeoisie, oriented to protecting its class interests and those of the transnational corporations.

Along with every government worldwide, the Morena administration has made clear its indifference to the deaths of tens of thousands of workers that have resulted from its pro-capitalist policies. It is essential that, as a response, the working class unites on an international basis to fight for socialism.