Washington, DC mayor calls for reopening of public schools amid pandemic

Nick Barrickman

On Wednesday, Washington, DC’s Democratic mayor Muriel E. Bowser responded to a reporter’s question about when it would be possible for the District of Columbia to reopen public schools in person. “I think [Washington, DC Public Schools] can do it, and I think DCPS should do it,” she stated.

The mayor added she “would expect” the public school system to begin admitting small groups of students for in-person learning this month. “I don’t think we have any health data to suggest that we can’t do small groups,” she said. The fall school year began on August 31 in DCPS.

The announcement follows news that two of Washington, DC’s largest public charter school networks, KIPP DC and Friendship, were admitting groups of students back for in-person courses several days per week. The two charter networks collectively enroll over 11,000 of Washington, DC’s 100,000 public school students.

Bowser also announced that she had assigned her deputy mayor for education Paul Kihn “to assess the successes and struggles of charter and private schools that have resumed some in-person instruction to glean lessons for the public school system,” according to the Washington Post.

The District originally shuttered schools in March as the pandemic spread across the Mid-Atlantic region. Over 7,000 people have succumbed to complications stemming from COVID-19 in the greater Washington, DC metropolitan area.

Bowser’s declaration represents a right-wing provocation against teachers in the school system. The mayor is taking direct cues from the business community, in this case, the District’s largely unregulated charter school networks, to push for a reckless school reopening which will result in the spread of the deadly COVID-19 illness.

According to the Post: “charter schools offering in-person learning say they are serving small groups of students and have not faced a situation in which a teacher who does not want to teach in person is needed in a classroom. But teachers have told the DC Public Charter School Board that they don’t have protections and are fearful of what would happen if they were asked to return to buildings before they are comfortable.”

In early July, DCPS provoked outrage among public school teachers when it issued a letter to staff asking them to indicate intent to return for in-person instruction in the new school year. Rather than allowing teachers to virtually teach students, the letter suggested teachers unwilling to appear in person should file for sick leave. If sick leave was denied, teachers would then be forced to do in-person course work or face termination.

At the time, the Washington Teachers Union (WTU), an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers, had advised educators not to sign the letter until the school system’s position was clarified. The District of Columbia announced in late July, after considerable parent and teacher pushback, that it would switch to an entirely online format until at least November after COVID-19 cases spiked throughout the region.

“We saw some trends in our data that were not ideal for making decisions about the upcoming school year,” stated Bowser at the time. Bowser’s announcement Wednesday abruptly shifted the school system’s policy once again after less than two weeks of classes were completed.

Bowser’s announcement follows a general trend in the United States in which Democratic Party administrations at the local and state level have often set the pace for an abrupt reopening of businesses and schools amid the pandemic. In the Washington, DC metropolitan region, encompassing the District, Maryland and Virginia, this was set by Virginia’s Democratic Governor Ralph Northam in late May, when his government announced “phase one” reopening of businesses even as COVID-19 case numbers rapidly rose.

Not to be outdone, Maryland’s Republican governor Larry Hogan also began the state’s reopening process at the same time. Last month, Hogan contravened his own health department and demanded that the suburban Washington, DC jurisdiction of Montgomery County allow private schools to open in person even as the local health officer warned “data does not suggest that in-person instruction is safe for students or teachers.”

On Friday, a report from Montgomery County noted over 13 cases at local schools since classes restarted, including an instance at a Catholic school where a second-grade teacher had accidentally infected one of her students with COVID-19.

For its part, the WTU has acceded to the Bowser administration’s about-face, with WTU spokesperson Joe Weedon telling the Post that it sought “more conversations

with the Bowser administration” because it “hasn’t seen satisfactory guidelines for student and teacher safety protocols for in-person learning.”

WTU president Elizabeth Davis told the Post that “there are teachers who are comfortable returning to classrooms and she is working on identifying them.”

Mounting opposition to school reopenings as 55 New York City teachers test positive for COVID-19

Alberto Escalera

With schools slated to reopen across New York City next week, 55 teachers and school staff in the district have already tested positive for COVID-19. Since most of those that tested positive had to wait several days before receiving their test results, many had already reported to school buildings for preservice preparations with colleagues last week.

Teachers across the largest school district in the United States returned to their buildings to prepare for the upcoming school year on September 8, after a deal was struck behind their backs between the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) and Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio.

The deal, which highlights the collusion between the teachers unions in the US and both political parties in the reckless reopening of K-12 schools, sought to derail a widely anticipated teachers strike by delaying the resumption of in-person instruction until September 21. However, all the fundamental issues at stake in the reopening of New York City’s schools remain unresolved, and there is mounting opposition to this homicidal policy.

New York City Teachers protesting unsafe school reopeings on Monday

Late last Wednesday, news began to surface that two teachers at two separate schools, PS 001 and MS 88, both located in District 15 in Brooklyn, had tested positive for COVID-19. According to initial reports, the teachers received their test results Tuesday evening, after they had reported to their respective schools earlier the same day.

By Wednesday it was revealed that 16 teachers from 16 different buildings had tested positive, with most of the tests administered on September 2, a full eight days before being notified of their results and two days after they had been in contact with colleagues in school buildings.

The explosion of COVID-19 positive cases among teachers across the city was entirely predictable given the widespread outbreaks that have taken place in K-12 districts and college campuses across the United States during the past month. Since August, at least six K-12 teachers have died from the coronavirus nationally, with countless others falling ill to the virus.

As in other places, New York City teachers are increasingly engaging in efforts to organize against the resumption of in-person instruction.

On Friday, teachers at IS 230, located in the Jackson Heights neighborhood in Queens, one of the areas worst hit by the coronavirus in the spring, organized a walkout after learning that administrators had failed to notify them that one of their colleagues had received a positive test on Thursday. The teacher had immediately informed both the DOE and the UFT of the results.

One teacher told the media, “We saw the procedures supposedly put in place to keep us safe not actually keeping us safe. We were promised it would be different this time around, … and it hit close to home for us because we already lost a staff member” to the virus in March.

On Monday IS 230 teachers continued their walkout and were joined by teachers at PS 139 in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn, citing concerns ranging from delays in contact tracing and poor ventilation to inadequate measures for disinfecting the building. At least one teacher from the school tested positive for the virus last week.

In a recent open letter issued by the staff of MS 88, located in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, teachers denounced the delays in testing results as well as the haphazard and incomplete manner in which the city’s contact tracing program is being carried out. Firsthand accounts are emerging of several teachers being contacted by the city’s Test & Trace Corps three days after reported exposures.

Teachers and administrators across the city are also increasingly exposing the fraudulent manner in which the Department of Education has responded to a series of recent inspections of ventilation systems within school buildings. In a recent example, teachers and administrators from the Murry Bergtraum Campus, located in Lower Manhattan, sent a letter to UFT President Michael Mulgrew and schools Chancellor Richard Carranza, citing details from the most recent ventilation report issued by the DOE for their building.

Among the many unsafe conditions within the building, educators highlight that none of the windows are functional and only 50 percent of the 225 office and classroom spaces within the facility are rated “operational.” The building, which has a student population of approximately 1,000, has no unit ventilators and only two usable bathrooms that must be shared by students and staff. Despite these conditions, the DOE has deemed the building ready to receive students for in-person classes on September 21.

IS 230 teachers working outside after walking out last Friday (Credit: Twitter)

On Monday morning, educators and parents picketed outside the Murry Bergtraum campus.

Increasingly, parents of public school students have rallied behind educators in an effort to block the unsafe reopening of schools. Last Thursday, a parent advisory group in District 16, located in Brooklyn, voted unanimously to take legal action against the DOE to prevent the reopening of schools with in-person classes.

As in other parts of the US, the efforts by rank-and-file New York City educators to organize opposition to the reckless policy of in-person school reopening has shed light on the treacherous role being played by the American Federation of Teachers and its local affiliate, the UFT. While facilitating the reopening of schools, these unions seek to channel the immense opposition of teachers into the electoral campaigns of the Democratic Party.

The efforts of rank-and-file educators to organize popular opposition to the reckless school reopening policy is increasingly leading many to the conclusion that new organizations of struggle must be built. The recent formation of the New York City Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee, along with similar committees of educators across the US, marks a significant step forward in this process.

By imposing a school reopening with in-person classes in New York City, with a student population of 1.1 million, de Blasio is attempting to normalize death among teachers and children. He spelled this out at a press conference Monday morning, stating, “Some people will test positive. … We have to remember that for the very small percentage of people who test positive for the coronavirus, it is a very temporary reality.”

Teachers picketing Intermediate School 230 in Jackson Heights, NY on Monday.

In pressing for the resumption of in-person learning in New York City, the ruling class aims to set a precedent to allow for similar reopenings in cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, and every other district throughout the country that is starting their semesters with online instruction.

The opposition to the unsafe reopening of schools is of vital interest to the working class as a whole. We call on all parents, students, teachers and education workers throughout New York City to read the founding declaration of the New York City Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee and join us.

We urge teachers and education workers, school workers, parents and students throughout the US to build similar Rank-and-File Safety Committees in their respective areas and join our efforts to coordinate a broad, international campaign to end the homicidal policy of in-person school reopening being carried out in the name of capitalist profits.

The University of Iowa and Iowa State University students and staff unite together to oppose in-person learning

Andy Thompson

Iowa students and faculty at the University of Iowa and Iowa State University have united together to oppose the reckless reopening plans of the universities. The students and faculty are planning a sickout today after over 900 students at the University of Iowa participated in a similar action September 2.

The demands of those involved in the protest are to end all in-person classes and have all learning be done online until the pandemic is under control. The protest is being organized by two groups, UIowa Sickout at the University of Iowa and Iowa Student Action at Iowa State.

Representatives from Iowa Student Action told Iowa State Daily, “The Board of Regents and [University President] Wendy Wintersteen made the decision to open, prioritizing their own profit and not the health and safety of the community." The students continued: "They knew it would be unsafe to reopen but did so anyway. They care more about our tuition money and residence hall money than our lives."

Beardshear Hall, Iowa State University campus (Photo: SD Dirk / Wikipedia Commons)

Both schools are seeing massive outbreaks of COVID-19. In Story County, where Iowa State is located, 3,119 individuals have tested positive for COVID-19. Iowa has the country’s worst outbreak of the pandemic per capita. As of this writing, there have been 74,767 confirmed cases in the state. Its positivity rate for those who have been tested is close to 10 percent, and six counties have a positivity rate of over 15 percent. So far 1,218 Iowans have died from COVID-19.

The University of Iowa has reported a staggering 1,804 total cases. The University has done everything in its power to downplay the severity of the outbreak.

University of Iowa President Bruce Harreld has made relatively few remarks on the situation. Instead, he has been participating in an effort with other presidents from Big Ten football schools to create a plan to resume the football season as early as October 17. In August, when the Big Ten presidents voted to postpone the season, Harreld was one of the three votes in the minority to insist on playing during the pandemic.

Meanwhile, the University of Iowa students are reporting difficulties getting tested for the virus and have been provided few resources to handle the outbreak. One student, Will Luebke, told The Daily Iowan that even after he had come into contact with another student who had tested positive for COVID-19 he could not get tested since he was not yet showing any symptoms.

Luebke remarked, “[The Student Health nurseline] number was super busy and it took five different calls to talk to somebody. They told me that they wouldn’t test me, and I had to stay in my room for 10 days and if I had symptoms to call them back,”

On the contrary, the University has spared no expense when it comes to testing their football players and staff. From September 7-13, the University of Iowa athletics department reported that they performed 667 COVID-19 tests with 24 positive cases. Virtually everyone involved with bringing the football program back online has received testing while students are left with nowhere to turn.

At Iowa State University, the fall football season has begun playing before a mostly empty stadium, though several hundred, mostly family members of players, were allowed to be in attendance. Iowa State had originally planned to have 25,000 fans in attendance but announced they would close attendance after mounting pressure from the community.

Yesterday, Iowa’s three major public universities, the University of Iowa, University of Northern Iowa, and Iowa State University all announced that they would modify their spring semesters and cancel spring breaks due to the outbreaks.

The action of the universities throughout the state elucidates the pressing political issues involved in this struggle and underscores the need for the strike to expand and most importantly to adopt a clear political perspective.

The students and faculty involved in this struggle have taken an important step in linking up their struggles across campuses. It is only in a united fight by teachers, students, and workers more broadly that the policy of in-person learning can be halted and lives saved.

This struggle is part of a growing movement around the country of students, teachers, and workers who are opposed to the reckless reopening of schools and campuses. While the Trump administration has spearheaded this campaign, the Democratic Party is equally complicit.

What is required to carry this struggle forward is the independent mobilization of the working class against the entire policy of the ruling class to send children back to school, students back to campuses, and workers back to plants and factories. The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) and its youth and student movement the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) urge faculty, staff, and students in Iowa to solidarize themselves with the state’s thousands of meatpackers who also staged walkouts to protest pandemic conditions.

Dramatic spike in Philippines’ coronavirus death toll

Owen Howell

The Philippines recorded a sudden surge in deaths caused by COVID-19 on Saturday, along with a continued rise in case numbers. The death toll rose by 186, a new record and an alarming leap from the country’s average of around 50 deaths per day over the past week. It is the highest single-day fatality rate recorded so far in Southeast Asia.

The spike was attributed to incorrect figures provided by local authorities. The Department of Health said 128 cases previously reported as “recovered” were discovered to be 126 deaths and two active cases. The classifications cover data going back to April.

President Rodrigo Duterte’s administration explained the discrepancy in recorded deaths as an inevitable product of the country’s continuing validation process, in which reported cases are often duplicates or erroneous entries.

It is not the first time, however, that Philippine authorities have been found to conceal or alter data recording the spread of the virus. From June 12 to August 21, more than 4,000 cases were removed from the COVID-19 tally, apparently because of encoding errors. There were also corrections that revealed 309 deaths, earlier announced as recovered cases.

The official death toll reached 4,371 on Saturday, but this record suggests that the real total could be much higher.

The national government’s pandemic response has been marked by a lack of any serious efforts to detect, trace or isolate the disease. In public televised addresses, Duterte has by turns downplayed the threat of the virus and advocated unscientific methods, including washing face masks with petrol.

Confronting the worst coronavirus outbreak in both Southeast and East Asia, the Philippines has seen cases double over just five weeks. After an increase of nearly 5,000 new infections on Saturday, the figures have risen to 261,216 cases. It was the fifth consecutive day on which over 3,000 additional cases were tallied.

Of Saturday’s reported cases, 2,619 came from capital city Manila’s overpopulated metropolitan area, which has accounted for around half of total coronavirus figures. At least 82 percent of the newly confirmed cases dated back as far as August 30. The government had previously said it was expecting an “irregularly high number of cases this week,” due to the slow arrival of reports from overworked laboratories.

The underfunded health sector is struggling to provide an accurate picture of the virus’ rapid community spread across the densely crowded archipelago.

The Philippines currently has only 119 licensed laboratories capable of conducting coronavirus tests. Its testing rate is still among the lowest internationally, performing just 28,018 tests per million people.

As with testing labs, hospitals are unprepared to meet the demands placed on them by the global pandemic. Filipino Nurses United vice president Leni Nolasco has urged the government to immediately hire the country’s 200,000 unemployed skilled nurses to address the chronic shortage of nursing personnel in COVID-19 referral hospitals.

The government’s recent token efforts to augment the health system—with 5,000 new beds for isolation facilities and $US61 million for personal protective equipment (PPE)—will prove insufficient to prevent a growing public health crisis.

From the outset, Duterte’s government has imposed draconian police-state measures on the one hand, while pursuing ever more frantic bids to resume economic activity on the other.

Production in key sectors was halted in mid-March by a repressive lockdown centred in Manila. Social restrictions were slowly eased in June, with catastrophic results as the virus spread through reopened workplaces. Nevertheless, the government has desperately pushed the economic reopening, particularly since a recession was officially declared in the second quarter.

On Friday, Duterte signed into law a second economic stimulus package, known as Bayanihan II. It includes financial aid of $US2.8 billion for major corporations affected by the lockdown, as well as a $US525 million standby fund for future bailouts later this year. Similar to its predecessor, Bayanihan II allows presidential powers to realign funds for pandemic-related expenses.

Congressman Bienvenido Abante Jr. said last week that “funds are scarce” due to the low revenue collections brought about by the pandemic, the Manila Times reported. The new package, however, assured private businesses that funds will not be lacking for them, even as depleted healthcare and social welfare programs suffer.

Duterte’s signing of the package came as the government declared a further easing of restrictions across the entire Philippines, which began yesterday. Iligan City, Bacolod City, and Lanao del Sur will remain under modified enhanced community quarantine (MECQ) until the end of the month. For the rest of the country, workers will be herded back into unsafe and crowded workplaces to restart the flow of corporate profits.

Public transportation is gradually reopening. The number of passengers on the Metro Rail Transit was raised yesterday. The Department of Transportation announced that as many as 204 commuters are now permitted on a train (i.e., 68 per wagon). They added that physical distancing would be lowered to 0.75 metres between passengers, to be further reduced every two weeks.

A state-backed contact tracing app, Staysafe.ph, is set to be rolled out in transport terminals in the coming weeks. The app, however, is not a genuine attempt to implement contact tracing, but instead serves to justify the government’s back-to-work drive and the false notion that it is safe to return to places of employment.

The swift reopening of the country’s failing tourism industry is also on the agenda. Hotels can now accept greater numbers of guests under “specialised programs” outlined by the Department of Tourism, as the country restarts domestic travel.

Significant investments are being made in an expensive new project to rehabilitate Manila Bay for tourism purposes. Interior Undersecretary Jonathan Malaya claimed it would not detract funds from the government’s coronavirus response, despite growing criticism of the project as the health crisis worsens.

Fearful of mass opposition, government officials are trying to justify their failure to contain the pandemic since March. Health Secretary Francisco Duque III said on Friday, as quoted by ABS-CBN News: “I will be the first to admit that our initial response was rather slow, if not laggard. Why? Because nobody actually expected this pandemic.”

Such statements from ruling elites around the world aim to shrug off responsibility for the devastation inflicted by the pandemic. Medical experts had continually warned about a potential pandemic throughout the past decade.

Epidemiologists and health experts from the University of the Philippines have estimated that total cases could reach 310,000 to 330,000 by the end of this month.

Exposure of Trump’s lies on COVID-19 implicates Spain’s Podemos party

Alejandro López

Revelations that US President Donald Trump deliberately misled the public about the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic also expose the “left populist” Podemos party in Spain. Podemos is in government with the social-democratic Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) and had access to the same type of information as Trump. Just like him, they issued misleading statements downplaying the risks posed by the pandemic.

This is a warning about “left populist” parties and politicians allied to Podemos internationally, such as Bernie Sanders, Jean-Luc Mélenchon of La France Insoumise, Katja Kipping of Die Linke in Germany, and Syriza in Greece. Drawn from the affluent middle class and based on the identity politics of race and gender, these parties lie and adopt murderous policies on issues that mean life and death to the working class.

Last week, well-known journalist Bob Woodward revealed that on January 28, US intelligence told Trump the pandemic was “the biggest national security threat you face in your presidency.” On February 7, Trump told Woodward that Chinese President Xi Jinping had warned him about COVID-19: “This is deadly stuff. It’s also more deadly than … even your strenuous flus … this is 5 percent [case fatality rate] versus 1 percent and less than 1 percent.” Trump added, “It goes through air, Bob. That’s always tougher than the touch.”

Another politician doubtless receiving such warnings was Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias, who is deputy prime minister of Spain’s PSOE-Podemos government and, since February, sits on Spain’s Intelligence Affairs Commission. That commission directs, supervises and controls the activities of the Centro Nacional de Inteligencia(National Intelligence Centre—CNI). Working closely with the CIA and other NATO intelligence services, the CNI assesses issues identified as major threats to Spanish national security, specifically including pandemics.

Podemos party leader Pablo Iglesias speaks as Spain's caretaker Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez looks on after signing an agreement at the parliament in Madrid, Spain, Tuesday, Nov. 12, 2019. (AP Photo/Paul White)

Nonetheless, Iglesias was silent as Trump, top PSOE-Podemos government officials and the entire European ruling establishment downplayed COVID-19, encouraging the public to act as if nothing unusual was happening as the virus spread.

Experts on the CNI’s activities have already stressed that the CNI and its overseers were well aware of what was occurring. In June, Fernando Rueda, a leading authority on Spanish intelligence, said on radio that the CNI’s role during the pandemic has been “very important.” The CNI’s task, he said, “is to inform the government of everything that may be of interest to them in order to make the appropriate decisions.”

Rueda said the CNI had extensive information about COVID-19 since January, thanks to its US partners. “If the US had information at the beginning of the year and the CIA informed the [US] president that what was happening in China was more serious than what was being said, it is logical to think that the CIA would have also informed other secret services that China was not telling the truth about the expansion of the coronavirus.”

Woodward’s reports have subsequently shown, however, that Trump was in fact being accurately briefed by China. It was Washington and the EU countries who downplayed COVID-19.

Rueda then said, significantly, that “having information does not mean that you act. … Although the secret services must warn about any danger that could affect national security, governments sometimes ignore them. The CIA warned in January of the danger that the coronavirus could cause and Trump ignored their recommendations.”

Other reports suggest the CNI informed the Spanish government directly by the end of January. According to the right-wing news site OkDiario, the CNI transmitted to the Spanish government “concerns” raised by the head of the CNI delegation in China after the virus emerged in December 2019 in Wuhan.

This was based on contacts CNI Delegate in China Beatriz Méndez de Vigo had with intelligence sources at the Ministry of State Security (MSS), the ministry overseeing China’s intelligence services. Her notes from Beijing, written in mid-January 2020, highlighted an “alert” issued by a group of doctors from Wuhan Central Hospital, led by Dr. Ai Fen.

Thus, by January the Spanish government, and by February Iglesias, had access to reports on the severity of the disease, its ability to spread, and the necessity of lockdowns to contain it.

This information was also publicly available in the World Health Organization’s [WHO] January 30 notice, which declared the pandemic “a public health emergency of international concern.” Significantly, the WHO warned in the note that it was still possible to prevent the spread of the virus if countries put in place strong measures to detect the disease, isolate and treat cases, trace contacts and promote social distancing measures.

Yet Madrid and other EU governments refused to take action. At the time, Podemos was focused on its brainchild, the Sexual Liberty bill, to define all non-consensual sex as rape and establish special courts to deal with sexual offences. The virus continued to spread, however, and on February 24 Spain detected its first COVID-19 cases.

The first cases did not, however, change the course of the PSOE-Podemos government. On March 4, just 10 days before Spain implemented a nationwide state of alarm and lockdown, Spain’s National Security Council downplayed the threat posed by the virus.

Despite WHO notices, CNI warnings and the fact that the virus had already spread to Spain (Italian schools were already closed), the Council approved a report placing a pandemic as one of the least likely of 15 risk scenarios contemplated by Spain’s National Security Strategy. The only scenario judged less likely was one involving proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Iglesias attended this meeting.

Official accounts trivialised this act of criminal negligence as a bureaucratic error, with El País claiming that “the bulk of the document had been drafted months earlier” and dismissing the event as “underscoring experts’ limited foresight.”

On March 5, the day after the Council downplayed the virus, Podemos’ Minister of Labour Yolanda Díaz evaluated the risk very differently. Her ministry sent a guide to companies warning that work activity must cease if there is a “serious, imminent and inevitable” danger of COVID-19 infection, stressing that the interpretation of risk must be “restrictive.”

This immediately provoked a firestorm of denunciations. The big business associations CEOE and CEPYME denounced Díaz’s guide as a “grave mistake.” A CEOE official said, “Let’s be realistic. What do we do? The worker evaluates that he has coughed a lot? What if the employer says no, he has only coughed three times? Let’s be serious.”

The government rebuked Díaz for not having coordinated her response with the Ministry of Health; the Secretary of Communication called it a “grave mistake.”

Díaz quickly backed down, drafting a statement with the Prime Minister’s Office agreeing that only the Ministry of Health is authorized to send information on COVID-19. Iglesias intervened to praise Díaz and the “great work she is doing,” without referring to either the guide or COVID-19.

As the virus spread, Podemos continued to downplay it, calling instead for mass participation in the upcoming feminist march for Women’s International Day on March 8. By then, there were already 17 confirmed dead and nearly 600 recorded infections. Against WHO advice, the government let the demonstration proceed with 120,000 people in attendance, including PSOE and Podemos ministers.

This was followed by an abrupt shift. On March 10, the PSOE-Podemos government adopted limited measures against COVID-19, like banning sports events and flights to Italy—then the European country worst hit by COVID-19. On March 13, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez suddenly announced a nationwide lockdown, as industrial strikes spread from Italy across Europe.

Podemos’ conspiracy against workers and youth continues to this day, even though nearly 50,000 people have died in Spain and over 930,000 worldwide since then. Instead of using the time granted by lockdowns to test the population and prepare contact tracers to contain new outbreaks, however, the Spanish government focused on forcing workers back to work to produce profits after billions of euros in EU bailouts had been doled out to the banks and big corporations. Today, hospitals are once again teetering on the brink due to the lack of staff, and nursing homes are registering mass infections.

The PSOE-Podemos government is sending millions of children and students back to school, aware that this will lead to disaster. Education Minister Isabel Celaá reported that Podemos Minister of Equality, Irene Montero, told her privately that without a general protocol, the return to school will be “chaotic.”

In fact, the return to school is a politically criminal act that will massively accelerate the ongoing resurgence of the virus. The right-wing regional premier of Madrid, Isabel Ayuso, bluntly declared: “It is likely that practically all children, one way or another, will be infected with coronavirus.” Podemos is helping implement this herd immunity policy. It bears full responsibility for the tens of thousands of infections already recorded in the ongoing resurgence of COVID-19 and the wave of deaths set to ensue.

Protests continue against Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borisov

Markus Salzmann

For over two months, thousands of people have been marching in the streets of Bulgaria almost every day in opposition to Prime Minister Boyko Borisov. They are demanding the resignation of his right-wing government as well as new elections and fundamental reforms of the state apparatus. Bulgaria is viewed as the poorest and most corrupt country within the European Union.

Last week, the protests reached their peak to date, as security personnel used significant force against protesters. One hundred twenty people were arrested and around 60 injured. At least 38 people had to be taken to hospital, according to press reports. This includes a number of journalists.

The demonstrations in Bulgaria share many similarities with the protests against President Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus. Yet, unlike the latter case, they rarely get the attention of German and other European media outlets.

The reason for this is simple: Borisov’s GERB Party (Citizens for a European Development of Bulgaria) is a member of the European People’s Party, to which Germany’s Christian Democratic Chancellor Angela Merkel and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen also belong. His politics are strictly pro-European, while President Rumen Radev, who supports the protests against the government, leans more toward Russia.

Protest against the government in front of the new National Assembly building, demanding government resignation in Sofia, Bulgaria, Thursday, Sept. 10, 2020. (AP Photo/Valentina Petrova)

Borisov, who began his political career in the Stalinist Communist Party of Bulgaria, has been in power since 2009. Since then, he has resigned twice in the wake of mass protests, but quickly came back into government on both occasions. Since the spring of 2017, he has been governing in a coalition with the United Patriots, (VP), an alliance of far-right and fascistic organizations.

Borisov is viewed as the embodiment of a system characterized by a tight entanglement of oligarchs, politics and the state. The protests are the “outbursts of long-standing indignation against the corruption and arrogance of the powerful, along with the fear of the coming of a terrible economic crisis,” Hristo Ivanov, who himself used to be a minister in Borisov’s cabinet, told Deutsche Welle .

Ivanov had spectacularly sparked the protests, by breaking into the luxury home of Ahmed Dogan. It is located on public land and has been illegally sealed off by state security personnel. Dogan is known as one of the wealthiest and most politically influential men in the country. After Ivanov put a video about his stunt online, it received over a million views.

The search of the workrooms of two advisers of President Radev also inspired the protests. Radev, a former general, is supported by the opposition Socialist Party, (BSP). Protesters also demand the resignation of Chief Public Prosecutor Ivan Geshev, who is viewed as an assistant of Borisov.

Borisov systematically solidified his grip on power with the help of the police and the military. Most of the press and the judiciary are also under the control of the government and the oligarchs that are aligned with it. Borisov seeks a constitutional change that would limit the authority of the president, while continuing to strengthen the state apparatus.

Supreme Court of Cassation President Lozan Panov, an opponent of Borisov, spoke of a “captured state” in der Spiegel. “In our country, there is an oligarchic merger of the legislature, the executive as well as the judiciary,” he told the German news magazine. He says, therefore, of media mogul Delyan Peevski that the latter is “not formally, but a de facto co-prime minister, as key institutions and offices are under his influence.” Panov accused the European Union of nourishing the cancer of corruption in Bulgaria with its grants.

The protests are socially heterogenous and lack a clear perspective. Calls for a “systemic change” dominate along with those for an end to the corruption. The protesters consist largely of young, educated people from the major cities.

“The spectrum of participants in the protest marches through the inner cities every evening goes from the young climate activists and supporters of the former Communist Party, to the urban conservative middle class and the young Western overseas university students who are currently living in Bulgaria due to the coronavirus pandemic,” Bulgarian broadcast moderator Vessela Vladkova told the MDR television station.

The current protesters are “especially young people who are in a less economically dire situation, but rather they are worried about the future of the country and the morality of the political elite,” according to Vladkova. The government would have difficulties staying in power “if those people who will become impoverished in the fall and winter through the economic crisis, caused by the coronavirus pandemic, join the protests.”

In truth, many workers have already started demonstrating against the government. A group of nurses have been protesting for weeks in front of the Ministry of Health in Sofia.

The opposition parties, representing rival cliques within the country’s ruling class, are trying to dominate the protests. Among them is the PR man Arman Babikjan, one of the organizers of the protests, who has good contacts inside the Bulgarian elite. He is trying to use the protests to unite the discredited and feuding opposition parties into a bloc against Borisov.

Babikjan said that he personally would welcome it “if the citizens’ protest declared a leader.” He is also willing to work together with the far-right. “When it comes to the basis of democracy, there is no left or right,” he explained. Like Judge Panov, Babikjan also appeals to the European Union to support the protest movement.

Their political differences with Borisov are minimal. In the 30 years since the restoration of capitalism, many parties and cliques secured their interests on the backs of workers in Bulgaria. The EU is at fault for the horrible conditions in the country. Its austerity packages over the last decades pushed large portions of the population into abject poverty.

The coronavirus pandemic exacerbates the social crisis. So far, there are almost 18,000 reported infections and 700 deaths in the country of 7 million people. There are no protective measures in schools or businesses anymore. The government has categorically ruled out any measures that could hurt economic interests in any way.

The already rampant poverty in the country continued to rise during the coronavirus crisis. Workers with unstable employment have lost their jobs. Many of those who earn their paycheques overseas can no longer travel there. Even before the coronavirus crisis broke out, over a third of children in Bulgaria were at risk of poverty.

As Bloomberg pledges $100 million, Wall Street boosts Biden campaign

Patrick Martin

Billionaire Michael Bloomberg has pledged to spend at least $100 million to support the campaign of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden in Florida. This announcement Sunday is only the largest pledge of support from the financial oligarchy for the Democratic campaign.

Bloomberg aide Kevin Sheekey said the pledge of virtually unlimited financial backing to Biden in Florida, the most critical “battleground” state in the 2020 election, “will allow campaign resources and other Democratic resources to be used in other states, in particular the state of Pennsylvania.”

Florida has 29 electoral votes, the most of any closely contested state, following California with 55, overwhelmingly Democratic, and Texas with 38, leaning Republican. New York state, also with 29 electoral votes, is heavily Democratic.

Only once in the last 60 years—Bill Clinton in 1992—has a candidate won the presidency while losing Florida. The last Republican to lose Florida and still win the White House was Calvin Coolidge in 1924, when the state was lightly populated swampland.

Early voting begins in Florida September 24, and Bloomberg’s money will pay for massive campaign advertising on behalf of Biden, in both English and Spanish. Campaign officials said the funds would be devoted almost entirely to television and digital ads.

Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg stands for the pledge of allegiance during a ceremony on Sept. 11, 2020, in New York. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)

Even before the Bloomberg commitment, the Biden campaign and supporting Democratic groups had outspent Trump and the Republicans by $42 million to $32 million. The flood of cash from the billionaire media mogul will give the Democrats a three- or four-to-one advantage over the final seven weeks of the campaign.

The efficacy of Bloomberg’s huge financial commitment is open to question. The media billionaire spent $1 billion (a mere one-fiftieth of his gargantuan personal fortune) on his own pursuit of the Democratic presidential nomination. He launched his campaign at a time when he believed Biden’s candidacy was near its demise, hoping that his money might forestall the nomination of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.

The sudden revival of Biden’s campaign with his victory in South Carolina in February and then in the Super Tuesday primaries on March 3 led Bloomberg to abandon his own efforts and endorse the former vice president, since their right-wing views on a range of topics, and particularly on foreign policy, were virtually identical.

Since then, Bloomberg has transferred $20 million from his abortive presidential campaign to the Democratic National Committee, as well as pumping in another $120 million to local, state and congressional campaigns, making him by far the largest single backer of the Democratic Party.

Florida is only the most glaring example of the general trend in the 2020 election, in which the financial oligarchy and Wall Street have indicated a distinct preference for Biden and backed it up with heavy financial commitments.

During August, the Biden campaign broke all records for fundraising in a single month, raking in $365 million, nearly double the previous record of $203 million set by the campaign of Barack Obama in September 2008, and more than Hillary Clinton and Trump combined to raise, in August 2016, $233 million. The Trump campaign also broke the Obama record, but its total of $210 million in August was far behind the pace set by the Democrats.

Approximately $205 million of the $365 million came through online donations, including 1.5 million new donors. This is more an indication of the widespread hostility to Trump among millions of working-class and middle-class people than any groundswell of support for Biden, who personifies the corrupt US political establishment, having spent 36 years in the Senate before his eight years as Obama’s vice president.

That means that $160 million—a near-record amount by itself—was raised through large donations from wealthy supporters of the Democratic Party. While Trump continues to rake in the lion’s share of support from industries such as oil and gas, mining and real estate, Biden has collected the bulk of financial backing from the banks, hedge funds and insurance industry.

Under rules set by the Federal Election Commission, a wealthy donor can now give as much as $830,600 to support a presidential candidate, routing much of the money through federal and state party committees rather than the candidate’s own campaign.

The result of the disparity in fundraising throughout the summer is that the Democratic presidential campaign has now caught up with and even surpassed Trump’s war chest. The Trump reelection campaign, despite raising an unprecedented $1.1 billion, has less cash on hand for the fall than the Biden campaign. According to press accounts, more than one-third of the money raised by the Trump campaign was used to pay the expenses of fundraising itself.

There were several reports last week that the Trump campaign was experiencing a “cash crunch,” and was unable to sustain advertising in all 15 of the so-called battleground states. Both the Washington Post and Bloomberg News reported that Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien has halted television advertising in Michigan and Pennsylvania at least temporarily, and that Biden was outspending Trump in nearly every closely contested state.

Stepien replaced Brad Parscale as campaign manager in July, at least in part because of concerns that Parscale had squandered Trump’s substantial initial fundraising advantage.

According to the media tracking firm Advertising Analytics, the Biden campaign spent $17 million in television and digital advertising in nine battleground states during the week of September 3, compared to $4 million by the Trump campaign.

The Clinton campaign outspent Trump by similar margins in 2016, but Trump campaign aides had boasted they would not face such a deficit in 2020. Trump has hinted he would seek to make up the difference from his personal fortune, but there has been no sign yet of any direct outlay by the billionaire to back his own campaign.

Israel becomes first country to impose second national COVID-19 lockdown

Jean Shaoul

On Sunday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud-Blue and White coalition approved a full national lockdown to start on Friday morning, just before the Jewish New Year. It is the first government in the world to impose a second national lockdown.

The government put in place tight restrictions in early March. But in late April, as the infection rate began to fall, Netanyahu announced the phased reopening of schools, workplaces, restaurants, bars, clubs, swimming pools and hotels in the interest of corporate profits. He did so without putting in place any measures to guard against or deal with a second wave, despite recommendations from a team of experts, headed by Professor Eli Waxman from the Weizman Institute of Science.

His team recommended that the government reconsider its decision to restart the economy if the daily number of infections rose above 200, which the government ignored.

Within days of the government lifting restrictions on schools’ class sizes, there was a resurgence of the virus. In July, Siegal Sadetzki, Israel’s director of public health services, resigned, saying that insufficient safety precautions in schools, as well as large gatherings like weddings, had fueled a “significant portion” of second-wave infections.

Seven months into the crisis, it is still difficult to gain access to testing or get speedy results. After months of claiming it had a contact-tracing system in place, the health ministry handed over responsibility to the army which is now appealing for help from private companies and saying it will not be ready until November at the earliest.

Sunday’s decision came amid a soaring infection rate. Israel now tops the world rankings in the number of new COVID-19 cases per capita, with 157,000 confirmed cases—between 3,000 to 4,000 new cases are being recorded every day—and 1,136 deaths in a country of 9 million people. The vast majority of cases have occurred since May when Netanyahu famously told people that the lockdown was over, and people should “go out and have a good time.”

In the West Bank, 35,663 cases have been confirmed along with 214 deaths. This includes 8,550 cases in East Jerusalem, while the Hebron governorate has been the hardest hit. The Palestinian Authority has imposed lockdowns on badly-affected areas and a ban on public gatherings including weddings and graduation parties. In Gaza, 1,631 cases have been reported and 11 deaths. The first cases of community transmission were recorded on August 24, and since then the authorities have imposed a strict lockdown.

During the first phase of the lockdown, scheduled to last at least three weeks, people are not allowed to go more than 500 metres from their homes. Schools and non-essential workplaces, businesses and organisations will close. Restaurants will be open for delivery or takeout only and public transport will be reduced. Gatherings are limited to 10 people indoors and 20 people outdoors, severely limiting traditional family gatherings and religious services during the Jewish holy days.

These regulations are based on a new coronavirus law authorising the cabinet to issue restrictions, including limitations on the number of people at demonstrations and the distance between protesters that will curb the weekly anti-Netanyahu protests. The police are preparing to enforce the lockdown policy, even as voices from several groups have announced on social media they will not follow restrictions. Police plans permit the forceful dispersal of gatherings, including entering synagogues if necessary, with large numbers of officers from patrol, riot police and Border Police units.

Such are the political tensions within the ruling coalition over the government’s budget—now postponed until the end of November—that Sunday’s cabinet meeting was the first in a month.

The coronavirus cabinet committee had recommended a national lockdown—reportedly with the support of Netanyahu, Health Minister Yuli Edelstein and coronavirus coordinator Professor Ronni Gamzu—in large part because of warnings that the hospitals, underfunded for decades, would soon be overwhelmed by the rising number of patients. Yesterday, the Western Galilee Hospital in Nahariya became the first hospital to announce that it was unable to accept any more coronavirus patients.

Ten days ago, as the number of confirmed cases rose, the Netanyahu government ordered a week of overnight curfews and school closures to take effect from last Tuesday in 40 “red” areas with the highest infection rates. This was a capitulation to the religious ultra-Orthodox parties upon whom he is dependent, and effectively neutered Gamzu’s plans.

Gamzu had called for a full lockdown, including the closure of non-essential workplaces and schools, in the 40 worst affected towns and cities, predominantly religious and Arab, Bedouin and Druze communities. The mayors of four of the affected towns had warned Netanyahu that they would not cooperate with authorities if the lockdowns were imposed. The Health Ministry also announced that the 3,000 Hasidic pilgrims returning from Uman in the Ukraine after the Jewish New Year will not have to quarantine in isolation hotels but will be allowed to self-isolate at home.

Netanyahu, facing the prospect of years in jail if found guilty of fraud, bribery and breach of trust in three separate cases, will do anything to maintain his support base and keep himself in power while he manoeuvres to avoid conviction. This extends to provoking an all-out conflict with the judiciary, which he has accused of launching a “left-wing coup” to unseat him.

As infections continued to mount, around 120 doctors and scientists wrote an open letter urging the government not to impose a general lockdown, but instead adopt the “Swedish model” of herd immunity. Some were even invited to give evidence to the Knesset’s coronavirus committee. Another group of 150 doctors and scientists vehemently opposed them for encouraging widespread infection, but the open letter served the government’s objectives in challenging the scientific recommendations and questioning the acceptance of lockdowns.

The proposal for a second national lockdown met furious resistance from the ultra-Orthodox religious communities, businesses, and the Histadrut trade union federation. Some 85,500 businesses are expected to close this year, compared with 40,000 in a normal year. At least 21 percent of workers are unemployed, a figure set to increase. With businesses claiming that the lockdown would cost them $2 billion and threatening non-compliance, Netanyahu told his finance minister to come up with a new economic package to assist them, adding to the record high budget deficit that is nearly triple that of a year ago.

Yaakov Litzman, chairman of the United Torah Judaism party, the construction and housing minister and a Netanyahu ally, resigned from government in protest over the expected lockdown Sunday, saying that it would “prevent hundreds of thousands of Jews, of all sectors, from praying in synagogues.”

Even the timing of the lockdown was adjusted to meet Netanyahu’s demands. The postponement until Friday enables him to fly to Washington for Tuesday’s signing of the Israel-United Arab Emirates normalization agreement, now slated to include Bahrain as well, and to posture as a world statesman.

Both the Orthodox community, which has insisted on keeping its places of worship, schools and religious seminaries open, and Arab Israelis, who have held traditional large-scale wedding celebrations, have been blamed for the spread of the disease. But this is hardly surprising. Netanyahu has based his coalition on incitement against Israel’s Arab citizens and the cultivation of every form of backwardness among his own far-right and religious support base, guaranteeing the ultra-Orthodox rabbis autonomy to keep their schools free of a modern science-based curriculum.

The continued growth of religious ideology, like its counterparts in other countries, the cultivation of divisions between Israel’s diverse communities and the economic, social and healthcare crisis now engulfing Israel-Palestine are the price paid by the working class for the betrayals of their old political leaderships. This can only be overcome by the Israeli and Palestinian working class uniting with their class brothers and sisters throughout the Middle East on the basis of a conscious, revolutionary and socialist programme.

New cases of COVID-19 reach a one-day high of nearly 308,000 worldwide

Benjamin Mateus & Patrick Martin

The World Health Organization (WHO) reported Monday a record one-day high of 307,930 new cases of COVID-19. According to all COVID-19 tracking dashboards, the globe is soon set to surpass 30 million infections. The United States, Brazil, and India have remained at the epicenter of the global pandemic for several weeks running, accounting for the majority of daily new cases.

The Worldometer COVID-19 dashboard estimates there have been almost 930,000 deaths in little more than eight months since the first victim died on January 11 in Wuhan, a 61-year-old-man who was a regular customer at the now infamous wet market. The seven-day moving average of daily deaths has exceeded 5,000 since mid-July, meaning that in approximately two weeks, the total number of deaths worldwide will exceed one million.

Nurses and physicians on a COVID-19 unit in Texas [Credit: Miguel Gutierrez Jr.]

The crude global case fatality rate (total deaths divided by total cases) stands at an astounding 3.18 percent. However, this also doesn’t account for the excess deaths that have been consistently reported in almost every country, which would put the mortality much higher. There is no legitimate debate either over the deadliness of this contagion or the warnings of epidemiologists and other medical scientists that society’s resources must be fully mobilized to contain and suppress this pandemic.

The predictions for the next several months are dire. If the working classes of every nation do not resist the policy of herd immunity that the ruling classes have thoroughly implemented to ensure the economy is operating at full speed, it will only accelerate the toll in lives and health.

It is more than six months since President Trump admitted to Bob Woodward, the senior Washington Post reporter, after his conversation with Chinese President Xi Jinping, “This is deadly stuff. It’s also more deadly than … even your strenuous flu … this is five percent [case fatality rate] versus one percent and less than one percent.”

Global case fatality rate (Credit: Our World in Data)

As the WSWS noted, this conspiracy to hide the deadly nature of the pandemic involved Trump’s cabinet, the Democrats and Republicans in Congress, and the media establishment. It is obvious as well that China provided similar warnings to European leaders, whose deceptive rhetoric and malign actions are nearly identical with those of the United States.

The US is poised to surpass 200,000 deaths before the week's end, which, in raw numbers, exceeds the number of American deaths in World War I, the Korean War and Vietnam combined. By the end of this year, according to a conservative projection by the University of Washington, that figure could reach 410,000, the equivalent of total US combat deaths in World War II.

Despite these harrowing figures, Trump declares that the country has “turned the corner” on the pandemic, a remark that will find a place in history alongside “light at the end of the tunnel” during the Vietnam War, or George W. Bush’s boast of “Mission Accomplished,” three months into the US invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Cumulative global cases of COVID-19 (Credit: Our World in Data)

As for the Democrats, their presidential candidate hopes to profit politically from Trump’s colossal failure and obvious indifference. But Democratic governors are carrying out the same policies at the state level, promoting the reopening of factories and other workplaces, and the back-to-school campaign that has already touched off a new wave of illness and death.

And in Congress, both capitalist parties demonstrate their callousness toward the tens of millions who have been thrown out of work by the impact of the pandemic. Federal supplemental unemployment benefits expired on July 31 for 20 million workers, and neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have lifted a finger to assist them—after they moved heaven and earth to pass legislation that gave a $3 trillion bailout to the big corporations and banks.

The real concern of all sections of the political establishment is the mounting resistance among workers and youth to the policy of herd immunity, under which the majority of the population will be infected and millions will die or suffer major and potentially lifelong damage to their health. The focal point is now the struggle over the reopening of K-12 education and colleges, where strikes have broken out despite the effort of the unions to subordinate all actions of workers to the presidential campaign of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

Cumulative global deaths due to COVID-19 (Credit: Our World in Data)

While the Democrats rely on the unions to suppress the working class, the Trump administration is turning to the open use of force. Trump himself has hailed the police execution of Michael Reinoehl, a left-wing protester against police violence, and defended the ultra-right gunman who killed two Black Lives Matter protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin. He has repeatedly threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 and call out the military against political opponents.

In a further sign of the fascistic tendencies erupting from the Trump administration, a longtime political operative, Michael Caputo, recently installed as Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services for Public Affairs, the top communications job in that department, claimed Sunday that there was a “resistance unit” of scientists inside the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—the main federal disease-fighting organization—who were engaged in “sedition” against President Trump.

Caputo’s seemingly deranged remarks came in a video he hosted live on his personal Facebook page, reported by the New York Times and then confirmed by Caputo in an interview with the Washington Post. The diatribe was apparently set off by media criticism of Caputo’s role in doctoring reports by the CDC and HHS on the impact of the coronavirus pandemic to make Trump’s role look better.

A former Trump employee in various business ventures, Caputo had no background in health care when he was appointed in April, in the midst of the global pandemic, to oversee HHS communications about the public health crisis.

In the course of his video, Caputo claimed that the shooting of a right-wing counterdemonstrator in Portland, Oregon last month was a “drill” in preparation for widespread left-wing violence against Trump and his supporters. He predicted that Trump would win the election, that his Democratic opponent Joe Biden would not concede, and that “armed insurrection” would be prepared.

“And when Donald Trump refuses to stand down at the inauguration, the shooting will begin,” he said. “If you carry guns, buy ammunition, ladies and gentlemen, because it’s going to be hard to get.” He went on to say that he himself felt physically threatened, and that his “mental health has definitely failed.”

Even before he was appointed to the top public relations job at HHS, Caputo had tweeted, on March 11, “For the Democrat 2020 victory strategy to work, 100,000+ Americans have to die.” It was the reopening of the US economy, promoted by Trump and carried out at the urging of governors of both parties, that drove the death toll well above that number before the end of May.

The homicidal policy of the US ruling elite in the coronavirus pandemic and the emergence of fascistic tendencies within the Trump administration are interconnected phenomena.

American capitalism is plunging into the abyss, facing intractable social, economic and political crises for which no section of the ruling elite has any solution.

As the Socialist Equality Party declared in its recent statement on the COVID-19 crisis:

The fight against the pandemic is not primarily a medical question. As with every great problem confronting the working class—social inequality and poverty, war, environmental degradation and dictatorship—it is a political and revolutionary question, which raises the need for the working class to take power in its own hands, overthrow capitalism, and restructure all of society on the basis of social need.