Biden nears narrow Electoral College victory while Republicans lead in Senate

Patrick Martin

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden moved to within a single state of claiming victory in the US presidential election Wednesday, as television networks called Wisconsin and Michigan for the former vice president, and Fox News and the Associated Press called Arizona for him as well. A narrow Biden victory, now the most likely outcome if vote-counting is allowed to proceed, would be well below the double-digit win forecast by many polls.

Biden now has 264 electoral votes, only six fewer than the 270 required to win the White House, while Trump has 217 electoral votes. Vote counting is continuing in four states that have not been called—Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia and Nevada. Trump leads in the first three, but the votes still to be counted are primarily Democratic, either mail-in votes or votes cast in urban centers.

Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden speaks Wednesday, Nov. 4, 2020, in Wilmington, Del. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

In Pennsylvania, the counting of mail ballots throughout Wednesday, most of them in the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh areas, cut Trump’s statewide lead from 700,000 to 212,000, with more than 900,000 votes still uncounted. The process is expected to take until Friday if it is not interrupted by one of several lawsuits filed by the Trump campaign seeking to halt the count.

In Georgia, Trump’s lead has shrunk from more than 100,000 to 38,000 as counting has continued of the huge number of votes cast in the Atlanta area, which went heavily for Biden. In North Carolina, Trump’s lead stood at 77,000, but about 250,000 ballots remained to be counted, mainly in urban centers like Charlotte, Winston-Salem, Greensboro, Asheville and the Raleigh-Durham area. In addition, mail ballots that will be counted if postmarked by Nov. 3 continue to be received in North Carolina.

Given the electoral arithmetic, Trump must win the three states where he is ahead and overcome the Biden edge in one of the states where the former vice president has a narrow lead. This seems unlikely since the Wisconsin vote count has been completed, Biden’s Michigan lead is growing rather than shrinking as uncounted votes in Detroit, Grand Rapids and Flint are tabulated, and the outstanding votes in Arizona and Nevada are mail-in ballots, which have tended to favor the Democrats.

After the Wisconsin secretary of state announced that vote-counting had been effectively completed, with Biden holding a lead of 20,533 votes, about 0.6 percent of the total vote, the Trump campaign announced that it would seek a recount. The recount would not take place until after Dec. 1, when the state government officially certifies the final results based on submissions from township clerks.

The Trump campaign has also filed a lawsuit seeking to halt vote-counting in Michigan, claiming that Republican observers have been denied sufficient access to facilities in Detroit where mail ballots are being checked and tabulated. A bevy of lawsuits were filed in Pennsylvania, including one submitted directly to the US Supreme Court, where Trump appointee Amy Coney Barrett has just taken her seat. That lawsuit asks the court to reverse its previous decision to allow Pennsylvania to accept mail ballots until Friday, as long as they were put into the mail by Election Day.

Also on Wednesday, the Trump campaign filed a lawsuit in Chatham County, Georgia, in a bid to delay or block the counting of absentee ballots. Campaign officials said they were considering filing similar suits in a dozen other counties in the state.

Trump’s refusal to accept his apparent defeat at the polls, including a loss in the popular vote that already exceeds his three million vote deficit in 2016, could lead to a protracted period of political uncertainty, court intervention and provocations aimed at mobilizing fascist supporters against his political opponents.

In the congressional elections, the Democratic Party performed even more poorly than Biden in the presidential contest. In the Senate, the Democrats needed a three-seat gain to take control, but so far have made a net gain of only one, winning Republican seats in Colorado and Arizona but losing the seat of Senator Doug Jones in Alabama.

The other seriously endangered Democratic incumbent, Senator Gary Peters of Michigan, edged ahead of his Republican challenger John James Wednesday afternoon. Republican incumbents defeated well-financed Democratic challengers in Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, North Carolina, South Carolina and Texas, while Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell won reelection easily in Kentucky.

The result is likely to be a 50–48 Senate, with the edge to the Republicans, while two seats are still to be determined in Georgia. In the contest for a full six-year term in Georgia, Senator David Perdue was leading his Democratic challenger Jon Ossoff, but a Libertarian candidate was taking 2.3 percent of the vote. If Perdue fails to win 50 percent of the vote (he is at 50.4 percent at this writing), the two candidates would advance to a runoff in January.

A runoff has already been set in the second contest, which is for the remaining two years of the term of Senator Johnny Isakson, who resigned because of ill health. Democrat Raphael Warnock and appointed Republican Senator Kelly Loeffler advanced to the runoff, with 32 percent and 26 percent of the vote, respectively.

If Biden wins the presidency, giving a Vice President Kamala Harris the tie-breaking vote in the Senate, control of the upper house would be determined by the outcome of the two Georgia runoff contests on Jan. 5, 2021, just as the new Congress is assembling and only 15 days before the inauguration of the new president.

The Democrats retained control of the House of Representatives, but they actually suffered a net loss of seats, perhaps as many as half a dozen, rather than the gain of 10–20 seats predicted by pre-election polling.

At least seven Democratic incumbents have been defeated, including Colin Peterson in Minnesota, Abby Finkenauer in Iowa, Joe Cunningham in South Carolina, Kendra Horn in Oklahoma and Xochitl Torres Small in New Mexico. Two first-term incumbent Democrats lost their seats in south Florida, Debbie Mucarsel-Powell and Donna Shalala, defeated by Cuban-American Republicans who ran strident anti-communist campaigns.

Other Democrats who were trailing Wednesday as vote-counting continued included Max Rose and Anthony Brindisi in New York, Susan Wild and Conor Lamb in Pennsylvania (where huge numbers of mail-in votes remain to be counted), and Harley Rouda in California.

Democrats appear likely to win only five seats now held by Republicans, including two seats in North Carolina that were remapped as heavily Democratic districts, forcing the Republican incumbents to retire, a seat in the Atlanta, Georgia, suburbs won by Democrat Carolyn Bourdeaux, and seats in Arizona and California where Democratic challengers held narrow leads with many votes still to be counted.

More significantly, Democratic challenges to nearly two dozen Republican-held seats seemed to be failing, including incumbents in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, Nebraska, Arkansas and Washington, and Republican-held open seats in Virginia, Indiana, Texas, Colorado, Montana and California.

Despite the retirement of a seven Republican incumbent House members in Texas, dubbed the “Texodus” in the media, not a single seat in the huge state changed hands. Every incumbent, Democratic and Republican, was reelected, and Republicans won every one of the seven vacant seats.

Most of the 11 CIA Democrats first elected in 2018 have won reelection, including Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, Jared Golden in Maine, Andy Kim, Tom Malinowski and Mikie Sherill in New Jersey, Chrissy Houlahan in Pennsylvania, Elaine Luria in Virginia, and Jason Crow in Colorado. Abigail Spanberger in Virginia was narrowly ahead of her Republican opponent by 5,000 votes out of 450,000 cast. Max Rose in New York was trailing badly, while Conor Lamb in Pennsylvania was awaiting the count of mail ballots that might offset a deficit in the same-day voting.

The results of the voting for both president and Congress has exploded the credibility of polling organizations that predicted a near-landslide for Biden as well as a Democratic takeover of the Senate and significant gains in the House of Representatives. Four years after the 2016 debacle, pollsters working for the corporate media clearly have no way of measuring, let alone understanding, the deep-seated anger among working people generated by the deepening crisis of capitalism.

Official academics downplay the risks of school reopenings as pandemic rages across the US

Benjamin Mateus

Last month, the Atlantic published an article by Professor Emily Oster, an economist at Brown University, titled “Schools Aren’t Super-Spreaders,” which has since been promoted by multiple media outlets to pressure communities to resume in-person learning in K-12 schools and universities across the United States. The New York Times has been early and steadfast in its endorsement of the policy.

In her article, Oster argued that “fear and bad press” led to the slowing down and cancellation of school reopenings in late summer, even in places “with relatively low positivity rates” like “Chicago, L.A., and Houston—all remote, at least so far.” As her article title suggests, Oster seeks to allay these fears by asserting that schools are not super-spreader locations, where one person transmits COVID-19 to multiple others.

Young boy protesting the opening of schools following an outbreak of COVID in Brooklyn, New York. (Credit: Reuters Carlo Allegri)

In reality, COVID-19 is often transmitted in “super-spreader” fashion because its aerosolized form allows it to linger and concentrate in a closed space, with poorly-ventilated and overcrowded classrooms being highly conducive to this type of spread.

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) reported Monday that there were 61,447 new child COVID-19 cases last week, bringing the total in the US to 853,635. This represents 11.1 percent of all US cases, up from 2 percent in April. In October there were nearly 200,000 new cases in children, predominately in Western states such as Alaska, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico and Utah. Other states reporting a greater rise among children include the Dakotas, Kentucky, Michigan and Wisconsin, where recent surges have been significant. These rapid rises coincide with the expansion of school reopenings in recent weeks.

The basis of Oster’s data was limited to the last two weeks of September, where she notes that infections in schools were very contained. She writes: “Our data on almost 200,000 kids in 47 states from the last two weeks of September revealed an infection rate of 0.13 percent among students and 0.24 percent among staff. That’s about 1.3 infections over two weeks in a school of 1,000 kids or 2.2 infections over two weeks in a group of 1,000 staff. Even in high-risk areas of the country, the student rates were well under half a percent.”

According to CISION PRWeb, only 38 percent of K-12 school students were attending schools in person on Labor Day. However, by Election Day that figure exceeded 60 percent, with 35.7 percent of schools offering in-person learning every day, 26.5 percent in a hybrid schedule of 2-3 in-person days per week and 37.8 percent of schools only offering virtual learning.

There are more than 53 million K-12 students enrolled in schools in the US, meaning that over 30 million students are attending schools that now offer some form of in-person learning. The Brown University data set represents 200,000 school children during a period of time when schools were largely being conducted remotely and community transmissions were low.

With close to 10 million cases of COVID-19 in the US, the seven-day moving average has climbed from 35,000 at the end of summer to over 85,000 cases per day. Hospitalizations across the US have exceeded 50,000, and the number of daily fatalities is climbing again. Just yesterday the number of new cases exceeded 108,000.

The conclusions reached by Dr. Oster should be treated with the utmost skepticism. The siloed approach of the study is not appropriate for the complex, dynamic disease transmission of COVID-19, which is spreading amid a complete lack of any coordinated governmental effort to locate the contagion at a granular level. The study is analogous to a blurry, static photograph taken from a film reel. However, these are real-life situations with deadly consequences that require the utmost precision and careful analysis.

In her efforts to downplay the impacts of reopening schools, Dr. Oster is joined by her new colleague at Brown University, Dr. Ashish K. Jha. After working with the Harvard Global Health Institute and serving as a frequent guest on cable news programs throughout the pandemic, Dr. Jha was recently appointed the Dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health.

In an interview Monday with Education Week, Dr. Jha stated callously: “Obviously, if going back to in-person education was going to lead to a lot of infections and deaths, you’d say OK, that’s a cost we can’t bear. But districts that are being too cautious are doing enormous harm to children and families in their communities.”

Seemingly oblivious to the deepening surge of COVID-19 cases across the US, Dr. Jha added: “I’m not saying schools should never close. They probably should at some point if things get really horrible.”

Such casual asides by Oster, Jha and their ilk demonstrate deep resentment of and contempt for the working class, including the more than 50 teachers, staff, maintenance workers and students who have perished from COVID-19 since schools began reopening in late July.

The arguments put forward by these upper-middle-class “liberal” academics follow a similar logic to that proposed by the Great Barrington Declaration of “focused protection,” as advocated by Stanford University neuroradiologist and Trump acolyte Dr. Scott Atlas. This variant of herd immunity is intended to ensure that the workforce is fully engaged in producing profits and not parenting.

More principled academics have approached the question of school reopenings with greater concern. Zoe Hyde, a senior research officer at the University of Western Australia, stated recently: “If community transmission rises, then you will see outbreaks in schools. This has become very apparent in Europe as they battle their second wave.” She added, “It’s quite likely we are not spotting a lot of the infections which are occurring in children.”

Kim Powers, an epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina, commented, “While we know we are only seeing part of ‘the iceberg’ of all infections, we don’t exactly know how much of that iceberg we are seeing.”

As part of its homicidal efforts to achieve “herd immunity” through the mass infection of the population, the Trump administration has aggressively pursued school reopenings. Democrats and Republicans at every level continue to support this reckless policy, while the teachers unions have worked with Democrats to promote the fraud that schools can “safely” reopen with a slight increase in funding.

Numerous studies from case reports, modeling analysis and clinical epidemiological research have found that not only are children able to be infected but are a critical component of community transmission. It is precisely for this reason that it becomes necessary for health departments to make all efforts to follow-up and test children in the chains of transmission.

Additionally, it has been recognized that some children can develop severe Kawasaki-like symptoms that can have significant morbidities and even be fatal. More recently, it has been determined that post-viral syndrome, also known as “long-COVID,” impacts a substantial percentage of the population, including children and young adults. Patients can have an assortment of dysautonomia disorders, which can cause their heart rates to race at dangerously high levels. Others suffer from chronic fatigue and poor concentration for several months.

What is required is a comprehensive strategy of public health measures, including scaled testing, a massive investment in contact-tracing resources, and offering isolation and quarantine facilities that can monitor and treat individuals while safeguarding their families and communities’ livelihood.

Stated bluntly, there is no national contact-tracing infrastructure in the United States. Presently, there are only 53,116 contact tracers in the country, a four-fold increase since April but a far cry short of the more than 100,000 that are recommended. As of October 8, only six states have reached their per capita benchmark: New York, Massachusetts, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska and Utah, as well as Washington D.C. However, as the surge proceeds, even these limited systems are becoming overwhelmed. It has been estimated that fewer than 5 percent of those infected are traced in time to stop them from transmitting to others.

The continued reopening of schools amid a raging pandemic is unconscionable and will only exacerbate the spread of COVID-19 throughout the US and internationally.

Rank-and-file educators must recognize that they can help bring an end to the pandemic through unifying their efforts against state and federal mandates to resume in-person learning. The official bourgeois academics and health experts, as evidenced by the likes of Oster, Jha and Atlas, place the profit interests of the ruling class above the safety and lives of the working class.

Schools and the children who attend them are society’s most precious resources. Educators play a pivotal role in society as community leaders and stand in a position to sway considerable influence within the broader working class. Only through coordinating their efforts with the working class, in preparations for a general strike movement, will teachers and education workers be able to close schools and ensure that adequate resources are provided for high-quality remote learning and the social needs of working-class families.

COVID-19 cases spike across US as health care workers struggle with understaffing in hospitals

Alex Johnson

With infections and deaths from COVID-19 reaching extraordinary levels in the United States, opposition among nurses and health care workers is brewing against the unmitigated spread of the disease and unpreparedness of hospitals for the deluge of sick patients.

The US is experiencing a sharp increase in coronavirus cases, which is coinciding with dangerous upticks in hospitalizations. Daily confirmed cases have hovered near or above 100,000 over the past several days, reaching record-shattering numbers, surpassing the number of infections in April, when the virus was at its peak. The total death toll now stands at nearly 240,000 as of this writing.

Nurses picket University of Illinois Hospital in Chicago in September

Nowhere are these conditions being expressed more catastrophically than in hospitals, which are witnessing a flood of COVID-19 patients that risk bringing the nation’s health care system to the breaking point. An estimated one-quarter of US counties have reported a peak of new cases in the past month, including most cases in states where officials were most eager to prematurely reopen their economies.

These include Ohio, Indiana, North and South Dakota, Wyoming and Wisconsin. Capacity levels are also becoming more acute, as 80 percent of hospital beds in cities such as Atlanta, Minneapolis and Baltimore near full occupancy.

Shortages of health care workers are reaching disastrous levels. In Montana, which is seeing a dramatic rise in infections, staffing shortages caused by the pandemic have shut down a clinic in the state’s capital. Employees at one Northwestern regional hospital who have been exposed to COVID-19 have been told to continue working despite the danger.

In St. Vincent Hospital in Billings, one of the largest cities in Montana, three COVID-19 units were expanded last week, after the state reported its second-highest daily cases on record. Michael Skehan, St. Vincent’s chief operating officer, called the situation facing the hospital a “crisis.” One healthcare worker from the hospital told NBC News, “I never thought we would be anywhere close to where we are now. I’m a good nurse—and the nurses I work with are good nurses—but we are broken.”

In North Dakota, a state where cases are growing at a rate faster than any other, hospitals are being compelled to forgo elective surgeries again because of the surge. Many hospitals are debating plans to potentially request government assistance to hire more nurses, in the face of the abysmal staffing levels.

Despite the imminent crisis facing hospitals, nurses and health care workers are being forced to contend with the virus with little to no changes in hospital conditions or adequate protection. The anger of health care workers has been expressed in several recent demonstrations demanding safe conditions.

In San Luis Obispo, California, workers at 11 Tenet-owned Hospital conglomerates voted overwhelmingly for strike action in opposition to unsafe conditions and hospital neglect. The 4,300-workforce across the region voted by 96 percent in favor of the strike.

Tenet is a multinational and investor-owned health care corporation with 65 hospitals and more than 500 health care facilities. The company has boasted more than $1 billion in profits in 2020 so far and received more than $250 million in CARES Act-related bailout money from the California state government. The company denounced the strike vote in an official statement and is threatening to hire strikebreakers. “Our hospitals will remain fully operational and patient care will continue uninterrupted,” the company said.

In Connecticut, more than 400 nurses held a two-day strike in mid-October over low wages and severe shortages of personal protective equipment. Dozens of nurses picketed outside William W. Backus Hospital in Norwich to charge the hospital with “unfair labor practice,” with many nurses chanting “PPE over profits.” The Backus Federation of Nurses, an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) union, called the limited strike to allow workers to blow off steam, while behind the scenes it negotiated a sell-out contract that failed to address nurses’ demands.

In Redding, California, health care workers at Shasta Regional Medical Center (SRMC) staged a picket protest outside the hospital for two hours on October 28, demanding a change in the hospital’s patient staffing levels, which have remained intolerably low for months.

According to the California Nurses Association (CNA), health care workers sent Casey Fatch, CEO of the SRMC, a petition a month ago outlining more than 200 staff concerns relating to patient safety protocols and staffing policies. Hospital management, however, has responded to nurses’ demands with a callous dismissal, with Fatch telling a local newspaper, “staffing levels are appropriate and adequate for our census and patient level of care needs.”

The unions have rejected any struggle to unite nurses and other health care workers across the state in a common struggle against the health care monopolies and unsafe staffing levels that threaten both frontline workers and patients. Instead, the AFT, the United Nurses Association of California/Union of Health Care Professionals (UNAC/UHCP) and other unions announced on October 29 that they had sued Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) for failing to protect health care workers during the pandemic.

There is no doubt that the Trump administration and OSHA are criminally responsible for conditions that have led to the infection of more than 192,000 health care workers and at least 771 deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But equally guilty are the Democrats, including California Governor Gavin Newsom and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. It was Cuomo who inserted liability protections for nursing home chains into the state budget. A Biden administration will be just as committed to the profit interests of the health care giants as Trump and the Republicans.

The Washington Post reported that the lawsuit was the outcome of frustration on the part of “labor advocates and Democrats” over OSHA’s criminal refusal to enforce safety guidelines in hospitals and other workplaces. During the summer, a judge dismissed a similar lawsuit filed by the AFL-CIO while the pandemic was raging across industries after lockdown measures were lifted.

The OSHA filing is a publicity stunt on the part of the unions, which have done nothing to protect health care workers. That is why nurses, physicians, and other health care workers must form rank-and-file safety committees, independent of the unions, to unite their struggles and enforce health and safety. This must be combined with the development of a powerful political movement of the working class against both corporate-controlled parties, to fight for socialism, including the replacement of for-profit medicine with a socialized system guaranteeing free, high quality care for all.

German teachers, students and parents oppose keeping schools open as pandemic spreads

Gregor Link

The Robert Koch Institute (RKI), Germany’s main disease control agency, reported 17,214 new coronavirus infections on Wednesday. According to statistics from Johns Hopkins University, daily infections in Germany rose well above 19,000 in recent days.

In neighbouring Austria, daily infections have risen above 5,000, with hospitals on Monday reporting a 78 percent increase in patients requiring intensive care treatment within a week.

Parents wait with their children for the start of their first day of school in Gelsenkirchen, Germany. (Image credit: AP Photo/Martin Meissner, File)

In late September, students in Greece occupied over 700 schools to protest the unsafe restart of in-person teaching and demand safe education for all. A few days later, similar nationwide protests erupted in Poland after two teachers and a student died of COVID-19. Students in France have been striking and protesting since Monday against the unsafe return to schools following the end of the autumn holidays. A parent organization in the UK has called a strike for Thursday to oppose the Johnson’s government’s refusal to close schools.

Under conditions of an explosion in new infections, which is the direct product of the German government’s deliberate policy of mass infection, strong opposition to keeping schools open is also developing among students, teachers, and parents in Germany. After a rank-and-file safety committee was founded by students in Dortmund in August, students in Karlsruhe and other cities are now calling for such committees to be established and the closure of schools to be organised.

There is growing support for the call by the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei and International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) for the building of a network of rank-and-file safety committees and the preparation of a Europe-wide school strike against the policy of mass infection.

Tensions are running especially high in Bavaria, where the state government will hold a school conference today with students, parents, and teacher representatives. As in other German states, hardly any local authorities in Bavaria are dividing up classes to keep groups small, even though most regions have a seven-day incidence of 100 infections per 100,000 inhabitants. Even though the RKI published guidelines two weeks ago advising that regular in-person teaching should be halted when infection levels reach such heights due to medical risks, the ministers of education in Germany’s states simply ignored them.

In an open letter to the Education Ministry, the Bavarian State Student Council referred to a “grading spree” of up to four tests per week. This puts students “under incredible pressure to perform, which shows no regard for the current situation.”

An open letter from the State Association of High School Parents and the Bavarian Parents Association complained that the “pace of performance assessment” has been “massively increased since the beginning of the school year,” with the result that “children and their families are groaning.” Hygiene conditions are also catastrophic: “Despite extra buses, students from different classes and different schools are still standing side-by-side. This contradicts all of the regulations we have been asking our children to follow since the beginning of the pandemic.”

The letter continued, “Across Bavaria, the second wave of the pandemic is overwhelming many families. Children are at risk of being left behind. One quarter of Bavarian parental households are affected by short-term work or unemployment. The worry about incomes and jobs is oppressive…Financial resources are inadequate. The four walls of many homes are shaking.”

Instead of easing the pressure placed on students to perform amid this unprecedented social crisis, it is being intensified. “How is it possible to learn the material that was missed out last year and still internalise new content—effectively learning twice as much material?” continued the letter. Rules that previously applied to “regulate schoolwork are being tossed aside without any consultation in the school forums.”

The order for teachers to continue academic testing as if there is no state of emergency is leading to further social turmoil for children and poor families. “The teachers are supposed to dance around the golden calf of awarding grades and are not able to concentrate on that which is the essence of education. As a result, many children are losers of the pandemic…Social relief for the disadvantaged is essential but is neither being considered or granted.”

With the words “that’s enough, this far and no further,” the letter from the parents’ associations concluded with the appeal for “statewide assessments of learning progress without the awarding of grades,” “the repetition of the pandemic year without consequences,” and centrally coordinated digital learning material and significantly reduced learning plans.

In October, 20 parents’ associations from across Germany protested against the brutal policy of reopening schools and the efforts by health authorities to cover up cases. In a joint letter to German Chancellor Angela Merkel and several other federal politicians, they expressed their alarm “that the entire class or year group does not need to go into quarantine, but only often the person who was sitting next to the infected person.”

The signatories also pointed out, “But the ministries don’t allow the infection chains to be examined by scientific analysis. Due to the fact that there are many cases in which entire cohorts are not tested, asymptomatic infections can neither be pursued nor proven.”

This has resulted, according to the RKI, in the origin of 75 percent of all infections being “unknown.” This “diffuse spread” serves as a pretext for governments to adopt totally ineffectual measures, while schools, kindergartens, and factories and other business sites remain open.

Another report from Bavaria shows the disastrous consequences of the conscious policy of mass infection. A recent study by scientists at the Helmholtz Centre in Munich suggests that six times as many children and young people have been infected than were officially recorded in government statistics. The research led by Markus Hippich and Dr. Anette-Gabrielle Ziegle examined 12,000 children and young people between the ages of 1 and 18 for antibodies against the virus.

The scientists discovered that between April and July, an average of 0.87 percent of children and young people had antibodies, six times higher than the positive tests recorded in official statistics. Given the fact that around half of all infections among children are asymptomatic, and that health authorities have a policy of only ordering tests for the students who are directly affected, the virus was able to spread undetected.

Last month, the Princeton Environmental Institute (PEI), Johns Hopkins University, and the University of California at Berkeley published the largest contact tracing study to date in the journal Science. Working with the health authorities in the Indian states of Tamil Nadu and Andra Pradesh, the authors analysed the infection chains and death rate of close to 600,000 residents, who came into contact with close to 85,000 infected people.

The study once again shed light on the importance of “super-spreader” events, and concluded that environments like “offices, households, schools” and party-like indoor events are particularly dangerous. According to the researchers, children and young people play a “key role” in spreading the virus and are “very efficient transmitters.”

The research results confirm the warnings made by the World Socialist Web Site since the beginning of the pandemic: unsafe in-person teaching is part of the campaign of capitalist governments for the deliberate mass infection of the population. International studies have repeatedly proven that the closure of schools, kindergartens and industrial facilities is the most effective way to combat the pandemic. But this can only be achieved through the mobilization of the working class in opposition to the “herd immunity” policy of the ruling class.

Israel’s Contribution to the Destruction of Armenian Nagorno-Karabakh

David Davidian

Every state makes decisions and enacts policies based on its interests and security perceptions. Some state decisions are more insidious than others in that the secondary effects can be devastating, especially by those states that can project sovereignty outside their own borders.

Undoubtedly, Israel’s decision to create a relationship with Azerbaijan was a well-thought-out process. Not that Israel has any long-term stratagem with Azerbaijan, but Azerbaijan having a border with Iran speaks for itself. Azerbaijan’s horrid human rights record, its oligarchic ruling structure, and money-laundering propensity culminated with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev being awarded the moniker “Corrupt Person of the Year.”

Regardless, Azerbaijan is the only state bordering Iran that Israel found compliant enough with whom to create an alliance of convenience. Azerbaijan doesn’t even have an embassy in Israel, yet both engage in trade in the billions of dollars. An embassy in Israel would not be welcomed by either Iran or a wide swath of Azerbaijani society. While no public documents exist detailing what synergistic relations exist between Azerbaijan and Israel, Aliyev described the relationship, “like an iceberg, nine-tenths … below the surface”. Over the past decade, Azerbaijan received well over an estimated six billion dollars (five billion as of the end of 2017) of Israeli high-technology weaponry. Israel receives about half of its crude oil supply from Azerbaijan. The same reference notes many military air flights occurring between Israel and Azerbaijan since the start of the war Azerbaijan inflicted on the Armenians.

So, suppose Israel wants a facility on Iran’s border to gather intelligence on Iran, or further, airbases with the ability to launch a strike on Iran without having to refuel its fighter jets. In that case, it has to give something to Azerbaijan in return. When asked about Israel’s activity in Azerbaijan during an interview on Russian TV, Yaakov Kedmi, the former Head of the Israel Defense Forces Program “Nativ” and, now a military and political expert, said, “I will answer carefully. There were reports in the Western media that very often drones flying from Azerbaijan fly over Iran. These are not Turkish drones. And for a reason, not out of love for aeronautics, Azerbaijan allows drones from Luxembourg to use Azerbaijan to fly over Iran,” Kedmi smiled as Luxembourg is the metaphor for Israel. Azerbaijan allows “Luxembourg’s” UAVs to fly over Iran, and in return, Azerbaijan is sold military hardware that it has clearly stated would be used to kill Armenians. In the current Azerbaijani offensive to capture Nagorno-Karabakh, Israeli-manufactured cluster bombs were used by Azerbaijan. It is still unclear where Azerbaijan purchased outlawed white phosphorus bombs that it has begun raining over Armenian Karabakh. Yet we know who manufactures them.

As reported in the Israeli media, Israel has access to at least one former Soviet airbase in Azerbaijan. The English-language version of this Israeli-media report is slightly different from the original Hebrew and refers to several Azerbaijani bases made available to Israel. In Figure 1, the pink balloon “A” is a former Soviet airbase in Sitalchay, Azerbaijan. Figure 2 is a satellite image with a caption claiming Sitalchay could be an Israeli base. Of course, publicly available documents that confirm any of this don’t exist.

Quoting Haaretz, in 2012,

“U.S. officials told  Foreign Policy that they believe Israel has been granted access to these air bases through a “series of quiet political and military understandings. I doubt that there’s actually anything in writing,” said a former U.S. diplomat who spent his career in the region. “But I don’t think there’s any doubt – if Israeli jets want to land in Azerbaijan after an attack, they’d probably be allowed to do so. Israel is deeply embedded in Azerbaijan, and has been for the last two decades.”

As expected, Azerbaijan denies any of this.

 Figure 1 המרחק בין בסיס סיטאלקיי לאיראן (צילום: Google)

Figure 2 בסיס סיטאלקיי באזרבייג’ן. עשוי לשמש את ישראל (צילום: Google Earth, GeoEye)

Just as it was in Israel’s interest to covertly (Iran-Contra) sell arms to Iran during Iran’s battle with Saddam Husayn’s Iraq, Azerbaijan and Israel cooperate as their varied interests complement each other. Israel requires surveillance of and staging grounds for any potential offensive against Iran. Azerbaijan needs state-of-the-art offensive military weaponry from Israel. During September 2015, in one of many visits to Baku, Azerbaijan by Israeli Knesset members, the chairman of the parliamentary security commission Oren Khazan and the head of the Safadi International Diplomatic Center, Israeli politician Mendi Safadi brought a package of proposals to fight the Armenian lobby. Safadi stated, “I have always been on the side of Azerbaijan, and we are ready to provide protection and assistance to the Azerbaijani side in neutralizing the influence of the Armenian lobby in the U.S. Congress, EU structures and international organizations.” From this point on, an organized anti-Armenian media and political campaign strengthened.

Israeli policymakers had to weigh the potential benefits of a covert agreement with Azerbaijan that factored in billions of dollars-worth of arms sales, a crude oil supplier, and a base of operations against Iran versus any potential off-setting benefits that would take into account Armenia’s current status. Armenia lost. Could Israel have stipulated that its weapons sold to Azerbaijan could not be used against Armenia? It could have, but Azerbaijan would reject such conditions. Israeli calculations put Armenians and ethical matters at the bottom of the priority pile.

Israel has seen the usefulness of Turkey’s expansionist neo-Ottoman policy. Turkey itself and its use of Islamic jihadists against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad serves an Israeli goal of sending Syria decades back in development. Turkey’s Erdogan makes many anti-Israeli claims, including that Jerusalem is Turkey’s, but Israeli-Turkish trade has not suffered; instead, it has expanded.

Israel’s policymakers could see the writing on the wall after Azerbaijan demonstrated its military incompetence during last July’s border flare-up with Armenia. Immediately, Turkey took the initiative and engaged in substantial war games with Azerbaijan, keeping an unknown amount of material and advisors on the ground. On September 27, Azerbaijan began its most massive offensive against Nagorno-Karabakh and its indigenous Armenian population. Some Israelis pronounced support for Armenia; most others did not.

Some Israelis and agents of Israel still claim that Armenia supports Iran or visa-versa. Yet trade between Iran and Azerbaijan has expanded to well over twice that of Armenia’s and Iran’s. In any event, just as Erdogan claims Jerusalem, talk is cheap. Israeli arms and Turkish-Azerbaijani-Israeli-sponsored PR are destroying Nagorno-Karabakh and its people. The silly arguments that “guns don’t kill people, people do,” also breaks down as quickly as guns intercepted in tunnels under Gaza.

Erdogan’s lip service to the Palestinian Cause while discriminating against them is one thing, while his claim made on July 14, 2020, that “we will continue to fulfill this mission, which our grandfathers have carried out for centuries, in the Caucasus again,” is something else. Erdogan’s outburst is a reference to the Turkish genocide of the Armenians. Turkish arms and soldiers are killing Armenian civilians and not just military personnel. Turkey’s import of Islamic Jihadists from Syria and Libya into Azerbaijan are decimating Armenians with Israeli weapons and communications gear.

Without Turkey and its imported Jihadist thugs, Azerbaijan would never have attacked Nagorno-Karabakh, thus defining the limits of its sovereignty. Does Israel hope Turkey militarily penetrates the Caucasus, both cutting off Russia and perhaps fomenting an Azerbaijani-speaking Iran insurrection in Iran’s northwest? Perhaps.

Aliyev thought his blitzkrieg on the Armenians would be over in less than a week, yet the attempted Azeribaijani incursion has dragged into its fifth week. The Turks planned for at most two months of attacks. Perhaps with the Armenians fighting for their very existence, the result will be a government collapse in Azerbaijan. Sun Tzu, the renowned author of The Art of War, wrote, “There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare.”

We might never know if Israel is directly providing intelligence to Azerbaijan in its war against the Armenians. The truth will eventually be revealed, as such secrets are the most fleeting.

In 1992, when I was an avid user of an early version of social media (the term hadn’t been invented yet) called UseNet, I was approached by an ex-coworker who was the chairperson of a local Zionist Council, just west of Boston, MA. I was asked why I still posted eyewitness accounts of Azerbaijani pogroms against Armenians in Soviet Azerbaijan that occurred two years earlier. I found this question odd and the tone arrogant, considering that we both spent much of our free time at work discussing common aspects of the Holocaust and the Turkish genocide of the Armenians. I told this person I was informing the world about what was happening to my people, just the way I thought she wished the world knew about what was happening to her people in Poland during WWII. In response, I was told that my postings had a harmful impact on Azerbaijan, which was developing a relationship with Israel. What was a friendship between us, in one phone call, degenerated into “we both will go our separate ways.” A rather foreshadowing incident.

Turkish government rejects lockdown as pandemic spirals out of control

Barış Demir

As the COVID-19 pandemic explodes across Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government is insisting on a back-to-work and back-to-school policy, rejecting calls for lockdown measures. As the official death toll surpassed 10,000 last week, the Health Ministry recorded more than 2,300 cases of COVID-19 and around 75 deaths each day.

The Erdoğan government is effectively imposing a “herd immunity” policy in the interests of the Turkish ruling class, making an arbitrary, unscientific distinction between “cases” and “patients,” with patients including only those who are hospitalized. It is hiding the real data so as to force workers back to work to produce profits, and students back to school—a homicidal policy supported by the bourgeois opposition parties and the trade unions.

The back-to-school campaign intensified this week, with fifth and ninth grade students forced back into in-person learning. More than 10 million students have begun in-person learning since September, predictably spreading the virus massively among children.

The banner reads “As They Tell A Success Story, We Are Dying.” Doctors of the Istanbul Medical Chamber stand in homage to Dr. Salih Kanlı who died of COVID-19, October 20, 2020, Istanbul. [Credit: Istanbul Medical Chamber]

Prof. Dr. Elif Dağlı has explained the increasingly dangerous situation among children: “In the week of September 14-20, the number of patients in the 5-14 age group was 2.9 per 100,000, but it increased to 4.3 per 100,000 in the same age group by the week of October 19-25. On October 29, the last time a daily report was available, this rate was 6.7 per 100,000.” This constitutes an indictment against the trade unions, such as the pro-opposition Eğitim-Sen, which have supported reopening schools.

The disastrous situation with the pandemic in Turkey can only be understood by interpreting official data and statements. An unnamed Turkish senior official recently told Reuters: “It appears the number of cases is around five times the number of patients.”

In addition, statistics show that the actual number of deaths from COVID-19 could be almost twice the commonly-cited figure. According to official data from the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality, from 11 March to 13 October, 7,024 excess deaths occurred in Istanbul compared to the 2015-2019 average. However, according to Health Ministry data, as of September 27, 2020, the total number of deaths due to COVID-19 in Istanbul was only 3,135.

Moreover, Turkey is in fourth place in Europe in terms of the number of severely ill patients with 2,341. However, Emrah Altındiş from Boston College’s department of biology has raised a question about the official number of severely ill patients: “The minister [of Health, Fahrettin Koca] says ‘66 percent of nearly 9,000 intensive care beds in Istanbul are full.’ This makes 6,000 intensive care patients in Istanbul alone.”

However, the government is not even considering the inadequate, token restrictions various countries in Europe are now applying in the face of growing popular anger, even as the pandemic is exploding out of control in Turkey—particularly in Istanbul with a population of more than 16 million. The Istanbul Medical Chamber has recently underscored that Istanbul will face a chaotic situation if effective and appropriate measures are not taken.

Koca announced on October 28 that the rate of increase in cases in Istanbul in the last week was 62 percent, adding, “the number of cases in Istanbul has reached 40 percent of all cases in Turkey. Four out of 10 people who tested positive for COVID-19 are in Istanbul.”

Dr. Osman Elbek from the Turkish Medical Association (TTB) criticized the lack of public measures to contain the pandemic: “The pandemic cannot be left to individual initiatives … I have not heard anything other than ‘No one should leave their house, pay attention to the mask and hygiene.’ It is seen from the increase in the pandemic that these are not enough. People should be careful, of course. But no public measures are taken.”

Dr. Cavit Işık Yavuz, another TTB official, said: “39 percent [of new patients] were determined in the last week [19-25 October]. Looking at the chart, the trend is clear. Why are we still waiting to take new measures?”

The government’s only “measure” has been to ban resignations and vacations by health care workers. In fact, it has put the burden of the pandemic entirely on these workers’ shoulders, hiding the true extent of the situation and not taking adequate measures. This fuels anger against government policies among health workers.

Health workers are employed for excessive periods of time, and many who test positive but do not show symptoms reportedly are forced to continue working. More than 40,000 health workers have been infected, and nearly 120 have died.

Although the health minister has admitted that “If we do not control the situation in Istanbul, the pandemic will cease to be manageable,” he insisted the government would not take any new measures, continuing what is effectively a “herd immunity” policy.

When Koca admitted that “public transportation” used by the working class to get to work is “one of the major sources of risk,” his statement revealed the capitalist profit drive behind state policy. He added, “I appeal to employers: do your best to switch to a flexible working system, work in shifts if your conditions are suitable.”

Istanbul Governor Ali Yerlikaya has openly acknowledged that the national government and local municipalities pursued a “herd immunity” policy, prioritizing profits over lives. Stating that there are 400,000 public employees and 5 million private sector workers in Istanbul, he said: “Istanbul residents go to work even though they are infected. They are afraid of COVID-19, but more afraid of being fired. There is a problem at this point.”

Underlining his collaboration with Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu from the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), Yerlikaya’s proposed solution for this ongoing outbreak among workers in Istanbul is flexible working. He said all the trade union confederations reacted positively to this proposal, exposing the reactionary collaboration between the political establishment and the unions at the expense of workers’ lives.

The Erdoğan government has transferred hundreds of billions of Turkish liras to the bourgeoisie during the pandemic. In October, the parliament doubled the Treasury’s borrowing limit for 2020. According to Treasury data, borrowing on financial markets for the first eight months this year was over 250 billion liras. As around the world, with billions being pumped into the coffers of the ruling class with low-interest loans and stimulus packages, this debt has to be paid by the working class with increased exploitation and elimination of its social rights.

The government recently proposed a law to expand flexible and temporary work, especially among workers age 25 to 50, effectively eliminating their right to severance pay. This is a massive attack on the social rights of the working class, long demanded by the ruling class.

Three main union confederations issued a statement on this bill, calling on the government to use “social dialogue mechanisms.” In fact, the main concern of these pro-capitalist organizations is to keep growing anger in the working class under control and to block any independent struggle against this reactionary law.

Their open collaboration with the ruling class on its “herd immunity” policy and back-to-work campaign has made clear that the only way forward for the working class against the pandemic and in defending social rights is to organize and mobilize internationally, independently of the unions.

Record-setting Hurricane Eta batters Central America

Andrea Lobo

Hurricane Eta intensified at an almost unprecedented pace Tuesday, reaching winds surpassing 150 mph before hitting Puerto Cabezas, the largest town in the North Caribbean Coast Autonomous Region of Nicaragua, with a population of over 60,000.

The Nicaraguan authorities have already reported significant flooding, along with damage to homes and public infrastructure. More than 30,000 people were evacuated from Puerto Cabezas and other coastal communities.

Hundreds have already been evacuated in neighboring Honduras due to severe flooding as the hurricane drops massive quantities of water from the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean on the impoverished Central American isthmus. The Honduran chief of emergency operations, Marvin Aparicio, reported the death of a child due to a landslide, which is still being investigated.

In an already record-setting 2020 Atlantic hurricane season, Hurricane Eta neared Category 5 (157 mph or higher). Some models indicate that it might have reached this category before landfall, which would make it the first Atlantic storm to reach Category 5 in November since 1932.

Flooded homes in the Rosita district of the Northern Caribbean Autonomous Region, November 3 (Credit: CD-SINAPRED)

Eta matched the 2005 record as the 28th named storm in the Atlantic hurricane season, which specialists indicate is far from over. This season has been particularly exacerbated by higher-than-average sea surface temperatures in the Caribbean and Atlantic due to global warming. Conditions from the Pacific caused by the La Niña have also contributed.

After reaching Category 1 late Sunday night, the US National Hurricane Center forecasted that it would hit the coast as a Category 2 storm, but it picked up energy from the warm Caribbean waters at such speed that it reached almost Category 5 in just one day. Its pressure fell to the lowest in this hurricane season, another measure of its strength.

Princeton University climate scientist Kieran Bhatia found that Eta’s last three 24-hour intensity changes were “off the chart” compared to the Atlantic November storms since 1982.

Awestruck Brian McNoldy, senior research associate at the University of Miami, tweeted Monday night, “Absolutely unreal. Rarely do we witness this anywhere in the world. Eta became a monster today.”

The storm follows Hurricane Zeta last week, which left millions without power and killed six in Louisiana, after reaching Category 2. On Sunday, on the Northwestern Pacific Ocean, Typhoon Goni reached the Philippines with 195 mph winds, making it the strongest landfalling tropical cyclone in recorded history. It left widespread flooding and destruction, with at least 20 dead reported so far.

The US National Hurricane Center (NHC) warned of a massive 14- to 21-foot storm surge in Nicaragua and “catastrophic, life-threatening flash flooding” across portions of all of Central America, as well as heavy rain in southern Mexico, Jamaica, the Cayman Islands and southern Haiti through Friday evening.

Costa Rica had reported 32 floods and eight landslides in the southwest due to the indirect impact of Hurricane Eta, with hundreds forced to go into shelters.

The danger of landslides and flooding is especially high in Guatemala and El Salvador. Just last Thursday at midnight, about 100 families were caught unawares by a landslide in the Salvadoran town of Nejapa, killing nine. According to El Faro, the government failed to communicate a warning of flooding upstream. El Salvador raised its emergency status to “red” over Hurricane Eta.

As the NHC warned on Monday night that “preparations to protect life and property should now be complete” in Northeastern Nicaragua, residents in Puerto Cabezas were reporting on social media that they were being rejected from the scarce 17 shelters. Residents were seen scrambling around town in the dark with their belongings in search of shelter.

Several videos showed dozens of families crammed into churches and schools reporting that they had no mattresses, food, face masks or any means of preventing the spread of COVID-19. The town lost power early afternoon Monday due to falling trees and power lines.

Eta is expected to lose force rapidly after landfall, becoming a tropical depression as it cuts a path through Honduras. It will then turn to the northeast toward Cuba and the Gulf of Mexico, potentially returning to hurricane intensity.

Last year, the Germanwatch Global Climate Risk Index ranked Honduras and Nicaragua as the second and sixth countries most affected by extreme weather events, signaling vulnerability “where extreme events will become more frequent or more severe due to climate change.”

The floods, landslides, hurricanes and droughts that have ravaged the isthmus in recent years have greatly intensified social inequality and the resulting struggles of workers, peasants and youth against these social conditions. Especially since 2018, hundreds of thousands have joined mass caravans to migrate to the United States or participated in mass protests, roadblocks and strikes against the authoritarian regimes of Juan Orlando Hernández in Honduras and Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, both of which have responded with police-state repression.

From the displacement to more precarious territories by landed oligarchs, mining, energy and agricultural corporations, to social austerity, the capitalist ruling elites across the region have long increased the vulnerability of the impoverished masses to extreme weather events by subordinating every aspect of social life to the profits of foreign and local investors.

Billions of dollars have been spent in the region by US imperialism to finance brutal regimes and paramilitary forces to crush any popular challenge to the super-exploitation of the Central American working class and the plundering of its natural resources and public coffers. At the same time, bourgeois nationalist fronts and petty bourgeois guerrilla movements oriented to striking a better deal for the local elites with imperialism have thwarted an international struggle of workers against capitalism and for socialism.

As the COVID-19 pandemic runs rampant, all Central American governments are ending whatever economic assistance they provided and lifting economic restrictions. Honduras has reported 2,688 deaths and seen a continuous increase since early September, while the Sandinista administration in Nicaragua has brazenly sought to cover up the extent of the pandemic, reporting only 156 deaths.

There is no reformist solution within the capitalist nation-state system to lifting Central America out of its wrenching poverty, just like there is no magic bullet, like carbon taxes or profit incentives in renewable energies, to end global warming induced by greenhouse gas emissions, not to speak of sheltering the hundreds of millions that will inevitably be impacted in the short-term by its effects.

The blaming of the shortsightedness or venality of “human nature” by pseudo-left tendencies influenced by the Frankfurt School and other forms of anti-Marxism are only formulas used by affluent layers to conceal the fact that responsibility lies with capitalism and its division of a globalized economy and the global ecosystem into nation states competing to accumulate profits for their respective oligarchies.

These urgent issues can only be solved by the international political mobilization of the working class to expropriate the fortunes of the financial elites and major banks and corporations globally. Trillions of dollars from this social wealth must be used in programs to rebuild Central America, develop clean, safe and efficient energy and transportation systems and abolish all forms of social inequality.

Bipartisan assault on US public education intensifies amid COVID-19 pandemic

Alberto Escalera

Several recently published reports have drawn attention to the unrelenting assault on public education being carried out by Republicans and Democrats across the United States. Under conditions of a deepening pandemic, which is exacerbating the broader economic and social crisis for the working class and poor, the bipartisan gutting of school district budgets across the US is projected to reach an unprecedented scale.

According to a recent Economic Policy Institute (EPI) study, K-12 districts across the US are facing a $1 trillion shortfall by the end of 2021. The sharp decline in state and local tax revenue comes in the aftermath of decades of systematic disinvestment in public education. State and local funding constitutes the majority source of K-12 public school budgets in the US.

While corporate profits quickly rebounded in the period following the Great Recession, surpassing 2008 levels by nearly 80 percent within six years according to many conservative estimates, spending on public education was consistently slashed during the same period under the Obama administrations. Average state and local funding for public education only returned to 2008 levels in 2016 and remained flat from that year until the onset of the pandemic. The Center for American Progress estimates that near-term state and local spending on education will drop as much as 50 percent due to the pandemic.

An empty classroom

The further evisceration of state and local budgets for education will have a devastating impact on education workers and public school students alike.

Recent Bureau of Labor Department data reveals that nearly 1 million K-12 education jobs were cut during the first four months after the onset of the pandemic. Another 350,000 education jobs were slashed this past September alone. The mass layoffs in public education, which is aggravating residual staffing shortages stemming from pre-pandemic layoffs, is taking place amid a general rise in K-12 student enrollment across the US.

In addition to job cuts, the decades-long, bipartisan effort to drive down wages among education workers has continued full force. A Southern Regional Education Board study published in September details how average teacher salaries across the US have sunk so low that mid-career educators in 38 states, both Democrat and Republican-led, qualify for federal assistance programs such as food stamps. One out of five teachers in the US is forced to take on a second job to make ends meet.

Massive job cuts, stagnant wages and worsening school conditions, including increased classroom overcrowding, crumbling school infrastructure, as well as antiquated and inadequate instructional materials, form the objective conditions that have compelled teachers across the US to engage in an ongoing series of strikes since the February 2018 statewide wildcat strike by West Virginia teachers.

Despite the initiative and courage of rank-and-file educators, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the National Education Association (NEA) and their state and local affiliates have continuously worked to isolate and wear down striking teachers in an effort to subordinate their struggle to the Democratic Party, which has played an equally active role in gutting education.

Significantly, many of the education jobs that are being eliminated are concentrated among special education teachers, teacher assistants and other support staff, guidance counselors and school nurses. Reduced staffing in these areas has been shown to aggravate the negative impact of cuts to education for those students most in need of support. Additionally, school districts across the country are slashing enrichment programs in areas such as arts and foreign language study.

The response to the deepening crisis in education from both major parties has been to further shift the burden of the catastrophe onto the backs of the working class while seeking to ensure that the obscene accumulation of wealth by the ruling oligarchy continues uninterrupted. While the precipitous decline in tax revenue owing to the pandemic has impacted all 50 states across the US, it is particularly illustrative to examine how areas under Democratic administrations are using budget deficits to further weaken public education.

In New York state, Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo has cynically sought to use the pandemic to build a national profile for himself by feigning opposition to Trump, while repeatedly rejecting even modest proposals to increase taxes on the wealthy to address an estimated $14.5 billion budget deficit. In the midst of the pandemic, Cuomo is withholding 20 percent of state K-12 education funding, resulting in a combination of draconian cuts and ballooning indebtedness in local school districts.

The Schenectady City School District, located in the Mohawk Valley roughly two hours from New York City, relies on state aid for nearly 70 percent of its operating budget. Due to Cuomo’s withholding of funding, the district was recently forced to eliminate 400 positions, including 79 teachers, 14 social workers and 231 paraprofessionals.

Even before the pandemic, school district debt in New York averaged $9,267 per student, compared to $8,500 per capita for the US as a whole. Currently, the total debt of school districts in the US amounts to just under $500 billion.

In New York City, Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio has used a $9 billion municipal budget deficit to cut over $700 million in education spending for the current year. Rather than encroach even minimally upon the obscene levels of wealth accumulated by the financial oligarchy on Wall Street, the self-styled “progressive” Democrat has resorted to austerity measures such as layoffs, wage cuts, the slashing of programs and a new municipal bond issue.

After weeks of threatening to lay off 9,000 education workers, de Blasio, with the connivance of the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), used the budget crisis to carry out a brazen act of wage theft by reneging on $450 million in deferred wages owed to city teachers from 2009–2011. At the same time, de Blasio and other city Democrats have stepped up lobbying efforts to convince state lawmakers to allow the city to issue $5 billion in new municipal debt, for which working class residents of the city will be made to pay to the financial oligarchy.

In California, where years of defunding education has resulted in some of the highest class sizes and fewest numbers of guidance counselors per capita in the country, as well as drastic reductions in course offerings and other student supports, Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom recently signed a budget that essentially guarantees the long-term indebtedness of local school districts.

After reducing the current education budget by $10 billion from the previous year, the state is deferring over $12 billion in K-12 funding to local school districts. In order to cover short-term expenses, local districts are now being forced to issue municipal bonds on the off-chance that a new federal stimulus package will allow the state to make up for withheld funding in the spring.

Even if a new federal stimulus package makes its way through Congress, by no means a forgone conclusion even under a Biden presidency, the scale of education funding is likely to fall significantly short of even the most conservative estimates of what is required to stabilize local school districts.

The multitrillion-dollar CARES Act—which was passed with unprecedented speed on a bipartisan basis last March in order to prop up the stock market—allocated a paltry $16.5 billion in total education funding. Subsequent legislative proposals to provide funding for modest relief measures, including direct assistance to workers and the poor as well as education aid to states, have been met with bipartisan indifference.

There is no section of the ruling elite capable of resolving the education crisis or any of the fundamental social or economic problems facing the broad masses. The bipartisan campaign to use the pandemic in order to further dismantle K-12 public education underscores the hypocrisy behind all of the current claims that the back-to-school drive is intended to address the needs of children.

The herding of school-aged children and teachers back into understaffed and insufficiently resourced school buildings as the deadly coronavirus is allowed to “rip through the population” is perhaps the clearest testimonial of the criminal indifference that characterizes the capitalist class.

Yet, a growing number of education workers, along with working class parents and youth, are taking up the struggle to oppose the decades-long bipartisan attack on public education and the homicidal policy of unsafe school reopenings. Education workers across the US and internationally are forming rank-and-file safety committees to fight for safe working conditions amid the deadly pandemic as well as the right of working-class youth to a quality education and culture.