As Brazil’s Bolsonaro remains silent, the Workers Party and pseudo-left hail Biden victory

Tomas Castanheira

With Donald Trump refusing to acknowledge his electoral defeat, which was declared on Saturday by all the major US media outlets, his political ally in Brazil, the fascistic President Jair Bolsonaro, is one of the few world leaders who has yet to take a stand on the outcome of the US elections.

On Saturday night, Bolsonaro made an unscheduled broadcast live on social media, appealing to his supporters to cast their votes in Brazil’s local elections, which will begin next Sunday. Without speaking directly about the United States, he warned: “You are seeing the issues in the world, how politics are in the world.” Making a clear reference to the election of Luis Arce of the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) in Bolivia, he continued: “several countries [in South America] are being painted red again.”

Former PT President Dilma Rousseff toasts Biden in visit to US in 2015. (Credit: Rodrigo Stuckert Filho/PR)

Brazil’s vice president, Army Reserve Gen. Hamilton Mourao, spoke Monday about Bolsonaro’s silence on the US elections. Boosting Trump’s false accusations of electoral fraud, he said: “I think the President [Bolsonaro] is waiting to the end of that imbroglio there, of the discussion, if false voting happened or not, to give his position.” Mourao added: “And I think it’s obvious that the President, at the right time, will convey the greetings to whoever is elected.”

Unlike Bolsonaro, other national leaders, such as the president of the House of Representatives, Rodrigo Maia, a member of the right-wing Democrats, promptly welcomed Biden’s victory. On behalf of the House of Representatives, Maia declared: “Joe Biden’s victory restores the values of truly liberal democracy.”

Biden’s victory was also celebrated by the country’s main bourgeois newspapers. The conservative O Estado de S. Paulo published an editorial with the headline “Relief,” stating that it doesn’t matter if Biden will fulfill his promises. What matters, for Estadão, is that most Americans have decided “to hand over to a traditional and experienced politician the task of leading the country in this hour of deep crisis” and that “this powerful message will be heard all over the world, but especially in countries ravaged by the savage populism inspired by Donald Trump, like Brazil.”

A similar position was taken by former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso (FHC) of the Brazilian Social Democratic Party (PSDB), a reliable spokesman for the interests of the Brazilian ruling class. FHC declared: “In two and a half centuries, no American president had sought to delegitimize the electoral process, one of the fundamental foundations of democracy. The present one did it systematically and deliberately. His reelection would therefore represent a grave risk to democracy, and not only in the United States.”

The newspaper Folha de S. Paulo, the most widely read in Brazil, echoed the reactionary racialist politics of the Democratic Party in the United States, declaring the election of Kamala Harris as vice president “historic, in many aspects.” She is the first “black, Indian-American and Asian-American woman...graduated from an elite African-American university...to reach the White House,” it stated in an article entitled “Kamala as vice president proves that 2020 is the year of black American women.”

However, Folha made it clear what is really at stake by stating in an editorial that the choice of Biden and Harris, representatives of “moderation, dialogue and the diligent exercise of politics,” signaled a refusal by the Democratic Party “to fight the ruffian on the right with radicalization on the left” (making a reference to Bernie Sanders).

The Brazilian ruling class is clearly expressing its nervousness about the destabilization of the political system in the United States, the bastion of world imperialism, and its inevitable consequences for the political crisis in Brazil. There is a growing fear of a “radicalization on the left”—i.e., in the working class—in response to the devastating effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, along with the deepening of already intolerable levels of social inequality, state repression and attacks on democratic rights.

Absolutely aligned with such positions is the supposed “left” opposition to the Bolsonaro government—the Workers Party (PT) and its pseudo-left petty bourgeois supporters of the Socialism and Freedom Party (PSOL)—which also enthusiastically celebrated Biden’s election.

Former PT president Luís Inácio “Lula” da Silva declared on Twitter: “The world sighs with relief at Biden’s victory. ... I express the hope that he will not only be guided internally, but also in his relations with the world and with Latin America, by the humanist values that characterized his campaign.”

His successor, Dilma Rousseff, also tweeted: “Biden’s victory...represents a breath of fresh air for those in the world who fight against the extreme right, intolerance and hatred. The election of the first black woman, Kamala Harris, for the vice-presidency of the United States is a relevant fact.”

Biden’s campaign never defended “humanist values”; on the contrary, it supported, domestically, the repression against the growing protests and, internationally, an aggressive imperialist policy. Lula seeks to cover up Biden’s political career marked by the prosecution of the reactionary interests of American imperialism in the world, including in Latin America. As vice president under Barack Obama, Biden participated in the orchestration of the coup in Honduras that overthrew elected President Manuel Zelaya and oversaw the introduction of draconian sanctions against Venezuela.

In light of the US election, the pseudo-left PSOL launched a campaign with the motto “Hope will overcome authoritarianism.” It states that Biden’s victory heralds the defeat of Bolsonaro in Brazil through...the election of the party’s city councilors and mayors! This opportunistic position assumes an even more reactionary character taking into account that the PSOL, following the lead of the PT, is seeking to “oppose” Bolsonaro in the local elections by running dozens of candidates drawn from the ranks of the Military Police and the armed forces.

In an article entitled “The King is dead. Death to the king!,” the “Resistance” tendency within the PSOL, which recently broke with the Morenoite Unified Socialist Workers Party (PSTU), has openly defended an alliance with a section of the US imperialist bourgeoisie: “With the electoral dispute over, fortunately with the defeat of imperialism sans phrase, the new stage of the struggle begins.”

It continues, with unadulterated petty-bourgeois cretinism: “If until today the enemies have been by our side (!)—and their seductive perfume (!!!) and discreet charm could be perceived without much difficulty—from tomorrow a very clear line—or rather, black, feminine and, above all, classist line—must be drawn between us.”

That both the PT and the PSOL are celebrating the advent of a right-wing US administration led by Joe Biden, which will implement a policy of savage attacks on workers in the US and throughout the world, unmasks the true class interests of these parties that seek to present themselves as “left-wing” and even “socialist” alternatives.

As significant layers of the Brazilian ruling class are increasingly dissatisfied with the Bolsonaro administration—not because of his brutal policies against the working class, which they find absolutely necessary, but because they fear that his provocations will unleash uncontrollable mass opposition—the PT and the PSOL seek to present themselves as a viable political alternative to defend capitalist rule in Brazil.

Long-COVID post-viral syndrome: Lessons from the Russian Flu of 1889 for the COVID pandemic

Benjamin Mateus

"While the so-called Spanish influenza of 1918–19 is frequently invoked as an analogue for COVID-19, the Russian influenza might be a better cultural parallel." Mark Honigsbaum

The English medical historian and journalist Mark Honigsbaum offers an interesting anecdote on the impact of the 1889–90 Russian flu in a recent article on the COVID-19 pandemic published in the Lancet. The Russian flu pandemic of 1889–1890 had killed around one million worldwide. Several waves of the epidemic recurred over the intervening years from 1891 to 1895.

The English feminist and campaigner for women's suffrage, Josephine Butler, wrote in January of 1892 to her son, "I don't think I ever remember being so weak, not even after the malaria fever at Genoa. I am so weak that if I read or write for half an hour, I become so tired and faint that I have to lie down.” (Honigsbaum & Krishnan, 2020)

During the Christmas season of 1891, she was stricken with the Russian influenza and left weak with conjunctivitis and pneumonia for several days. Though her fevers had subsided, she recounted that there had been little improvement in her overall condition three months later.

Hospitals in the early 1890s caring for patients stricken with the Russian Flu

A post-epidemic analysis conducted in 1957 using blood obtained from people still alive from the period noted that they had antibodies to H2N2, which may have originated from the Russian flu. Four decades later, a seroarcheological study then asserted the strain was most likely an H3N8 subtype instead. However, more recent studies led by Belgian biologist Leen Vijgen indicated that the contagion could have been a coronavirus, specifically the HCoV-OC43.

The “Asiatic” or “Russian” flu originated in central Asia, where it smoldered regionally throughout Siberia and northern India for a period of six months from May to October of 1889. Once it landed in St. Petersburg in November 1889, the pandemic accelerated westward, spreading, in a matter of weeks, into Europe, followed by the United States, and, then, the rest of the Americas, Australia, and coastal Africa, completing its circumnavigation of the globe by the fall of 1890.

The Russian Influenza has been characterized as the prototype of the modern era of a pandemic for the rapidity of its spread within an increasingly interconnected world.

In a scientific report published in PNAS in 2010 on the 1889 influenza pandemic, the authors wrote, “At that time, the 19 largest European countries, including Russia, had 202,887 kilometers of railroads, which is more than now. Transatlantic travel by boat took less than six days at that time, instead of less than one day now (which is not a substantial difference, given the time scale of the global spread of the pandemic.)”

Railroad and train in Lviv region (1880s)

In their support of the Russian flu pandemic's coronavirus theory, Vijgen and his team explained that in the second half of the 19th century, cattle herds were being affected by a deadly contagious respiratory disease. They hypothesized that the bovine coronavirus might have been the inciting agent in the sickened animals that underwent a zoonotic transfer into humans from 1870 to 1890 when industrialized nations were engaged in massive culling operations to stem the infections in the livestock industry when handlers could have quickly become infected.

The authors determined through a molecular clock technique, which uses the mutation rate of biomolecules to deduce the time in prehistory when two or more life forms diverged, that a common ancestor of the current Bovine coronavirus and HCoV-OC43 dated back to 1890, circa the Russian flu pandemic.

Additionally, they noted that the pronounced neurological symptoms that distinguished the Russian influenza from other influenza outbreaks speaks to coronavirus as a likely candidate.

Other findings indicated that men and the elderly appeared to be more susceptible to the virus. The reproduction number (R0) was 2.1, with a case fatality rate between 0.1 to 0.28 percent.

Infection symptoms included high fevers, crippling fatigue, and central nervous system disorders.

A Dublin physician named John Moore provided an account from a patient who fell ill on December 20, 1889. The female patient wrote, “Then my face and head got very hot and uncomfortable, and pains began in my arms, shoulders, and legs. All night the pains were very bad, sometimes so sharp across the back of my chest that I could have cried out.”

A report authored by Mark Honigsbaum, titled “The ‘Russian’ influenza in the UK: lessons learned, opportunities missed,” explains that after the first case was identified in December 1889, the virus began to kill thousands of people over several weeks. “The disease had already sickened the British Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, and sparked mass absenteeism in the General Post Office’s Telegraphic Department, the center of communications of the British Empire.”

Perhaps the most famous case was the death of Queen Victoria’s grandson, Prince Albert Victor, which changed the line of succession. Russia’s czar, the king of Belgium, and Germany’s emperor had taken ill but survived their infection.

Honigsbaum notes that the excess deaths from respiratory failure and the pattern of deaths impacting the middle age ranges “should have aided the public health response, but British health authorities preferred to advocate cautious preventive measures that did little to alleviate the pandemic’s impact.” The medical community was consumed by a now obsolete miasmatic theory that held the disease was caused by a noxious form of bad air.

The pandemic returned a year later, killing twice as many people. From 1890 until 1892, it has been estimated that 110,000 died from the infection in England.

In a study mapping the deaths from influenza in Paris in 1889 and 1890, the authors highlighted excerpts from a French newspaper La Lanterne that reported a single-day high of 450 burials on December 31, 1890 as comparable to the present situation in France in its second COVID-19 surge. The high daily deaths in Paris persisted throughout January 1891. (Kimmerly, Mehfoud, & Marin, 2014)

Russian Flu in Paris

In the context of the present pandemic, specifically considering thepost-COVID-19 viral syndrome known better as Long-COVID, Ms. Butler’s words quoted at the beginning strike a dreadful chord.

An untold number of people who have recovered from their infection continue their struggles facing chronic ailments with no end in sight and no help from an incredulous health community that has often attributed their complaints to “being in their heads.” (yerramilli, 2020) The post-viral syndrome associated with COVID-19 has only recently been gaining coverage in the media.

In a study that is still to be peer-reviewed, out of 4,182 cases of COVID, 558 (13.3 percent) patients noted symptoms beyond four weeks, 189 (4.5 percent) beyond eight weeks, and 95 (2.3 percent) beyond 12 weeks. These symptoms include extreme fatigue, persistent headaches, shortness of breath, and the loss of smell, affecting disproportionately females, older people, and those of higher weight.

In an online survey of self-reported symptoms from patients from Renown Health System in Reno, Nevada, out of 233 COVID-19 positive cases, 43.4 percent had symptoms lasting more than 30 days, and 24.1 percent had at least one symptom 90 days out from their positive results. These symptoms include chest pain, heart palpitations and tachycardia, poor concentration, shortness of breath, memory loss, confusion, headaches, and dizziness. Those with shortness of breath are at higher risk of developing chronic symptoms.

A European study from the Netherlands found that one-third of 1,837 non-hospitalized patients were dependent on caregivers.

Though these patients do not require intensive medical care, those who have joined social media support groups recount how debilitated their condition has made them, complaining of “rolling waves of symptoms” and “brain fog.” As one New Jersey-based administrator for the COVID-19 Slack group poignantly stated, “We’re not dead, but we’re not living.”

One of the most insidious aspects of the chronic effect of COVID-19 infection is the incapacitating exhaustion and ill-feeling. Thousands of those affected report struggling with just getting out of bed, let alone working for more than a few minutes at one time. A small study from Italy of 143 people discharged from a Rome hospital indicated that 53 percent had fatigue, and 43 percent had shortness of breath two months later. (Carfi, Bernabei, & Landi, 2020)

As with the Russian influenza, post-viral syndromes have been frequently reported with viral illnesses. Even with the Spanish flu of 1918, which was caused by the H1N1 influenza virus and killed an estimated 24.7 million to 50 million people, journals kept by treating physicians noted that many of those who survived never fully recovered.

After the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) pandemic of 2003 that infected over 8,000 individuals and killed close to 800, many of those who survived were followed to assess their health outcomes. In a study of survivors one year out from their infection, 18 percent continued to have decreased walking tolerance while 17 percent had still not returned to work. More than 60 percent had persistent fatigue. Forty-three percent were being evaluated for mental health disorders. Sleep disturbances were common. Caregivers of many of those severely impacted noted a considerable decline in their patients' cognitive capacities. (Tansey & Herridge, 2007)

In a pooled analysis of 28 studies in patients with documented SARS and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) infections, six months after discharge, 27 percent had impaired lung functions and reduced exercise tolerance. More than one-third of these patients suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and depression compounded by anxiety.

During the early phase of the pandemic, in a letter penned in June to the editors of the journal Medical Hypotheses, the lead author Dr. Raymond Perrin, a neuroscientist and specialist in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome from the School of Medicine and Manchester Academic Health Sciences, warned about the potential for a post-viral syndrome that could manifest in patients recovering from a COVID-19 infection, similar to that in SARS patients.

“After the acute SARS episode some patients, many of whom were healthcare workers, went on to develop a Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (CFS/ME)-like illness which nearly 20 months on prevented them returning to work. We propose that once an acute COVID-19 infection has been overcome, a subgroup of remitted patients are likely to experience a long-term adverse effect resembling CFS/ME symptomology such as persistent fatigue, diffuse myalgia, depressive symptoms, and non-restorative sleep.”

CFS/ME is a complex, fatiguing, long-term medical condition distinguished by lengthy exacerbations after mental or physical activity, significantly diminished capacity to accomplish tasks that had been routine previous to their illness, and unrefreshing sleep or insomnia. The proposed mechanism is a byproduct of the immune response to the infection that traverses the blood-brain barrier via the olfactory pathway into the hypothalamus.

The “pro-inflammatory cytokines” that pass through the blood-brain barriers cause inflammation in the central nervous system leading to “autonomic dysfunction,” which manifest “acutely in high fevers and in the long term to dysregulation of the sleep/wake cycle, cognitive dysfunction and profound unremitting anergia (lack of energy).”

There have been over 50 million cases of COVID-19, and by all accounts, the present surge is a massive tsunami of cases that have placed every health system in the Northern Hemisphere on notice. Millions are expected to die. However, millions more, especially within the working class who have lost their jobs, will face an uncertain future of disabling conditions and chronic unemployment unless immediate efforts are made to bring the pandemic under control. Early intervention and supportive care will be necessary to mitigate the long-term consequences for millions. Medical bills and the cost of treatments must be waived.

According to a Wall Street Journal report, Tricia Sales, a 41-year-old who fell ill with COVID-19 in March and is experiencing unremitting symptoms of nausea, dizziness, and numbness in her hands and feet, owes more than $100,000 in medical expenses. Many people are forgoing treatment due to concerns over high deductibles, attempting to live on their savings as they are still too ill to return to work.

The City University of New York Public School of Health estimated that if 20 percent of the US population contracts COVID-19, one-year post-hospitalization costs would be more than $50 billion, without considering the long-term care post-acute recovery. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, many insurance companies are raising 2021 premiums to account for expected COVID-19 costs.

Though a paramount concern, death is not the only indicator of importance concerning the health crisis caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Experience with post-viral syndromes has a long history in medical journals. The literature on SARS and MERS should have informed public health policies and provided guidance early during the pandemic in the post-treatment management and care of these patients.

It will be critical to developing rehabilitation programs in this context to address the multidimensional aspect of this disease. It has been predicted that 45 percent of discharged patients will require health and social care, while another 4 percent may need continued inpatient treatment. The health impact on all national health systems will be considerable.

The deliberate sabotage of online learning in the US (Part 2)

Chase Lawrence

Online education and austerity

States across the US are facing massive budget shortfalls as a result of the pandemic-induced collapse in tax revenue. According to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), K-12 districts in the US face a combined $1 trillion shortfall by the end of 2021. There have already been huge budget cuts in nearly every state, resulting in the elimination of at least 354,000 K-12 and 337,000 higher education jobs since last spring. The Wall Street Journal, noting that overall state budget shortfalls have already hit $434 billion, predicted that the shredding of education and social programs will “fuel social unrest.”

These gargantuan sums are a fraction of the $6 trillion handed over to Wall Street through the CARES Act, which was passed at the end of March in a near-unanimous vote by Republicans and Democrats in Congress, including Bernie Sanders. The CARES Act allocated merely $13.5 billion for schools, and both big business parties have made it clear that no federal rescue for education is being planned.

A student e-learning, wearing a mask. (Stock Image licensed via Envato)

While Joe Biden has falsely claimed that his administration will serve the interests of educators, one need only look to the massive austerity implemented while he was vice president under Obama to see what is in store in the coming period. Following the 2008-2009 financial collapse, the Obama administration bailed out the banks and escalated the attack on public education as part of an overall assault on the working class. By 2012, at least 350,000 teachers had lost their jobs and countless schools throughout the country were closed.

During the pandemic, districts have been forced to use rainy day funds to get by, scrambling to provide students with Chromebooks to accommodate distance learning. Education Dive reports that many districts have purchased low quality technology, writing, “where they’re able to cut corners, they cut corners. Some are opting for free online tools without the best track records or purchasing refurbished devices with substandard specs. … Those are more likely to break down, they’re more likely to experience trouble in an online learning environment so they might, for instance, have not enough memory.”

Other districts are finding it difficult to even get devices at all, including Denver Public Schools, which has 94,000 students. Trade war measures imposed by the Trump administration meant that 12,500 Lenovo devices manufactured by China and destined for Denver schools were seized at the border.

A Denver schools spokesperson noted in late summer, “We anticipate thousands of DPS students, including a large portion of our youngest students, will be forced to start the school year remotely, without access to technology, if we are unable to secure devices. This will put our most vulnerable further behind.” The district has been reduced to scouring warehouses and offices for computers and imploring alumni to mail in extra devices.

Moreover, significant declines in attendance will exacerbate the fiscal crisis in at least 20 states, as school funding in the US is largely predicated on enrollment. For example, Wisconsin has reported that student counts have fallen by 3 percent, the largest drop in decades, resulting in a funding loss of more than $23 million. These cuts also disproportionately affect poorer districts, which receive less revenue from local property taxes.

Inequality in online learning

Special education students, who under federal mandates are legally entitled to receive “free and appropriate education,” have faced particular difficulty with online learning. Approximately 7 million special needs students qualify for an Individualized Education Plan (IEP) that is tailored towards their learning needs. The pandemic has disrupted access to IEPs and there has been no significant effort on the part of the federal or state governments to aid in the transition to online learning or to provide the necessary safety equipment and medical personnel to ensure a safe learning environment for students who are incapable of learning online due to a disability.

Parents of special needs children, many of whom live in poverty, have had to set aside everything in order to assist their children in learning, since education specialists are unable to provide adequate services remotely. The dire conditions facing special needs students and their families has cynically been used as a pretext for sending some of the most medically vulnerable of society back to school in the middle of a pandemic.

The widespread switch to online learning has also exposed the huge disparity in internet access in the US and internationally. In 2019, only 56 percent of adults making less than $30,000 and 72 percent of those making between $30,000 and $50,000 had broadband internet at home. This impacts many students’ ability to access online learning, forcing large numbers to rely on smartphones alone. Seventeen percent of the US population is dependent on their phone for internet service and smartphones can have limited or even no access to districts’ online schooling applications.

Even when students have internet, oftentimes the service is inadequate for schoolwork. A 2020 FCC report noted the wide disparities between urban and rural access to 25 Mbps/3 Mbps broadband, which is considered adequate for electronic learning.

These disparities are far worse on a global level, with UNICEF reporting that 463 million children have been unable to access remote learning during the pandemic. “The sheer number of children whose education was completely disrupted for months on end is a global education emergency,” said UNICEF director Henrietta Fore, adding, “The repercussions could be felt in economies and societies for decades to come.”

In East, West, Central, and South Africa, almost half of all children are unable to access remote learning. In North Africa and the Middle East, 40 percent of students are unable to access remote learning, in South Asia 38 percent of students, and Eastern Europe and Central Asia 34 percent of students.

Speculators exploit the crisis

The financial oligarchy has massively increased their investment in the technology sector during the pandemic, while reaping the unprecedented growth in stock valuation. The wealth of America’s billionaires rose to $3.88 trillion as of October 13, a jump of $931 billion from March, with tech billionaires Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Ellison amassing unfathomable wealth.

The sales of education technology has been a key component of the stock market climb. “There are tremendous opportunities to invest into EdTech, with strong growth in both venture capital and listed equity,” a senior fund manager at Credit Suisse Asset Management recently stated. He added, “The Coronavirus pandemic will accelerate investment, with many EdTech companies bringing forward investments into new functionalities.”

Like vultures picking apart a dying animal, the financial oligarchs are enriching themselves off of the crisis of education they created through years of bipartisan defunding. Both political parties are responsible for the assault on the fundamental right to high-quality education for all. For their part, the teachers unions have provided support to the politicians wielding the axe, while suppressing numerous strikes and protests of educators.

The class divide in education has widened to an abyss during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the fight for the universal right to free, high quality education, the first step forward for educators, parents and students is the formation of independent, rank-and-file committees. These committees must be completely independent of the Democrats, Republicans and unions, and fight to establish the political independence of the working class.

Teachers, education workers and students must advance a genuine socialist program in defense of public education. This entails seizing the massive bailout given to the financial oligarchy, nationalizing the multi-trillion-dollar tech corporations and converting them into public utilities, providing high-quality computer equipment and free broadband to all students, securing full funding for all levels of education, abolishing student debt, assuring mental health supports for students, and providing full financial support to parents and caregivers who must stay at home while schools are closed.

Coronavirus infections in Germany hit a new record

Markus Salzmann

The number of reported new coronavirus infections in Germany reached a record level on Saturday with 23,399 cases, according to the Robert Koch Institute (RKI). The previous record of the day before was exceeded again by about 2,000 cases. The number of fatalities rose by 130 and now stands at 11,226.

The situation in hospitals, and especially in intensive care units, is becoming more dramatic day by day. As of Saturday, 2,839 patients were receiving intensive medical care. Exactly one month earlier, the figure had been 470. According to the German Interdisciplinary Association for Intensive Care (DIVI) register, the number of patients requiring ventilation rose from 233 to 1,534 during the same period.

People are ordered to wear mandatory face masks due to the coronavirus pandemic at a shopping street in Cologne, Germany, October 22, 2020 [Credit: AP Photo/Martin Meissner]

Doctors assume that intensive care bed capacity will be exhausted by the beginning of next month, at the latest. A concrete forecast is difficult to make, as many beds are reported as available, but there are no staff available to manage them. On average, five nurses are needed per intensive care bed.

The German Foundation for Patient Protection has expressed doubts that the correct number of available beds is being reported by hospitals. It is feared that hospitals report an appreciable number of beds as available, for which no nursing staff are available, reported Tagesschau.

A total of 642,488 infections have now been registered in Germany. At the end of September, Chancellor Angela Merkel (Christian Democratic Union, CDU) had warned that there could be 19,200 new infections per day by Christmas. This figure was already exceeded in October. Most recently, Merkel had to warn of a collapse of intensive care bed provision in Germany given the latest infection figures.

Laboratories are now increasingly overloaded with test evaluations. The RKI had reported a backlog of around 99,000 samples in 69 laboratories by November 1; two weeks earlier, it was around 21,000 in 52 laboratories. According to the RKI, an increasing number of laboratories reported they had reached the limits of their capacity in recent weeks.

This development was predictable and avoidable. All scientific forecasts and the experiences in other countries pointed to it. However, the federal and state governments made a conscious decision not to take effective measures. They did not impose a necessary lockdown, but only highly inconsistent and insufficient contact restrictions. Schools and daycare centres remain open so that production can continue in the factories.

In practice, this equates to the inhuman policy of “herd immunity,” which gives free rein to the virus in the hope that the population will eventually become immune. In Sweden, where herd immunity was official government policy, it led to a mortality rate nine times higher than in neighbouring Finland. Nevertheless, this policy has been adopted by Germany’s grand coalition of the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats (SPD) and all European governments.

The infection figures show how ineffective the current mild restrictions are. Despite the lockdown in Germany, a clear reversal of the trend is not yet in sight, as the RKI also noted in its report on Thursday. A further increase in community transmissions has been observed; the spread of the disease is diffuse, and the infection chains cannot be traced.

The situation is particularly tense in the capital. For the first time, Berlin is registering more than 15,000 active coronavirus cases. There were 697 new infections on Saturday alone, with two more deaths being added. Health Senator (State Minister) Dilek Kalayci (SPD), who is responsible for the disastrous pandemic policy of the Berlin Senate (State Legislature), is currently in quarantine.

To distract from his policies, Berlin’s governing mayor Michael Müller (SPD) called for a “month of personal responsibility.” He aims to blame the population for the rising number of infections, an effort which received the support of the Greens.

The Left Party even attacks the inadequate measures implemented by the Senate and speaks out against any restrictions being placed on the ability of big business to ensure the flow of profits. Last month, Left Party chairwoman in Berlin Katina Schubert openly opposed placing further restrictions on contacts. “Berlin must look at what is important for Berlin, just as Thuringia, for example, takes it upon itself to do. We don’t have to go along with everything,” Schubert told the media.

Schubert thus made clear that the positions of Thuringia’s State Premier Bodo Ramelow are widespread in the Left Party. Ramelow publicly praised the “Swedish model” and advocates herd immunity, i.e., the murderous infection of the population with the coronavirus.

In practice, Berlin’s SPD-Left Party-Green Senate advocates this policy of contagion as well as the grand coalition at federal level. The Senate Administration for Education published new figures on Friday on the number of infections in Berlin schools. Since last week, the number of cases has almost doubled, as the Berliner Zeitung reported. The number rose from 408 to 744 students and from 157 to 221 school staff members. Above all, the number of closed learning groups has reached an absolute peak of 326, the paper reports. At the end of October, it was 22 groups. In vocational schools, 207 students and 15 teachers tested positive.

The districts of Neukölln and Tempelhof-Schöneberg have each recorded 105 pupils proven to be infected. The COVID-19 infections are similarly high in Mitte, Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg and Reinickendorf. More and more students, parents and teachers are calling for regular operations in schools and learning establishments to be stopped, as there is no longer any protection against infection.

In doing so, they face all the parties in the Senate and the trade unions, which, with their usual ignorance and unscrupulousness, want to enforce regular classes. Only now, after the infection figures have exploded, is the GEW education union quietly demanding that some lessons be held online.

Even this proposal goes too far for the SPD, the Greens and the Left Party. A spokesperson for the education administration declared that the current situation in schools was by no means such that personal attendance at classes should be suspended. Schools were not hotspots, he said.

It is not only the obvious statistics from Berlin that prove this statement wrong, studies clearly show that children and adolescents are “key players” in spreading the virus and are “very efficient transmitters.” Stopping regular lessons at schools and closing daycare centres would be an effective way to stem the spread of the virus.

As throughout Germany, Berlin’s health authorities are completely overwhelmed by the situation. According to Public Health Officer Patrick Larscheid from the Berlin-Reinickendorf health department, many coronavirus infections ultimately remain undetected. “We are already seeing quite a lot of the iceberg: But I estimate that about four-fifths will remain under the water. That means: For every case we see, we don’t see about four cases.”

Due to the situation, the health authorities were no longer able to rapidly devote a lot of effort to every single case, Health Senator Kalayci said on Friday. After the establishment parties in Berlin, above all the SPD and Left Party, have enforced stringent cutbacks over the last decades, the public health bodies have broken down and are now unable to deal with the situation.

This is why, following an online conference with district health officials, Kalayci is now insisting those infected and their contacts take more “personal responsibility.” At the same time, she said possible infected contacts that did not belong to a risk group were not promptly being followed up. There, it will “take some time,” she said, knowing full well that this, in turn, can lead to numerous more infections and deaths.

Puerto Rico holds elections for new governor

Julio Patron

Although residents of Puerto Rico are denied the right to vote for the US president and have no voting representatives in the US Congress, elections took place in the US territory last Tuesday for governor as well as legislative and and mayoral posts, along with ballot initiatives. The results, which reveal a sharp decline in votes for the two main parties and an increase in third-party votes, reflect the growing distrust and contempt Puerto Ricans rightly have toward the entire political establishment.

Officials count early votes at the Roberto Clemente Coliseum where social distancing is possible amid the COVID-19 pandemic, during general elections in San Juan, Puerto Rico, November 3, 2020 [Credit: AP Photo/Carlos Giusti]

Pedro Pierluisi of the New Progressive Party (PNP) won the election with less than 33 percent of the vote, beating Carlos Delgado of the Popular Democratic Party (PPD), who received nearly 32 percent, by barely 17,000 votes.

Voter turnout was very low for the island, with only 51 percent of the population participating. Significantly, for the first time since the establishment of the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico in 1949, neither of the two main bourgeois parties, the PNP and the PPD, received over 40 percent of the vote, and neither will have a majority in the legislature. Third party candidates received, as a whole, over a third of the vote for governor, almost doubling their share from the 2016 election.

Puerto Rico also voted on the issue of statehood, with 52 percent voting in favor, and nearly 48 percent voting against. The vote has been cast multiple times in the past and is binding neither on the island’s nor the US government. However Puerto Ricans vote, the decision as to whether Puerto Rico is admitted as a state rests with the US Congress, which has shown no inclination to pursue the matter. The vote therefore is essentially meaningless. The issue of whether Puerto Rico should remain a Commonwealth (PDD) or become the 51st state (PNP)—and in previous referendums whether it should seek national independence—has long served as a means of diverting intense class and social conflicts into safe political channels.

The new governor, Pedro Pierluisi, was involved in the corruption scandal that ignited mass protests in 2019, in which one-third of the island’s population took to the streets and overthrew Governor Ricardo Rosselló, also a member of the PNP.

Pierluisi was Puerto Rico’s non-voting member of the US Congress between 2009 and 2017. His brother-in-law was the chairman of the Financial Oversight Management Board (FOMB), popularly known as the junta, which oversees the island’s economy in the interests of Wall Street creditors. During his eight years in Washington, his wife ran a firm providing advice to vulture funds on how best to loot the island’s economy, and the couple increased their personal wealth 27-fold.

Before 2009, Pierluisi had worked 11 years for the law firm O’Neill & Borges LLC, whose top client became the FOMB. Pierluisi then returned to the firm to work as the junta’s top legal advisor.

In July 2019, private messages exchanged between Rossello, Pierluisi, and other officials were made public, exposing discussions of hiding emergency supplies, attempting to cover up the negligence of local politicians, and jokes about shutting down public utilities, dead Hurricane Maria victims and even killing political opponents. Pierluisi, who was briefly installed as governor after Rosselló stepped down, was himself ousted only five days later in the face of continuing mass protests, after which current Governor Wanda Vázquez came to power.

Pierluisi is widely despised by Puerto Rican workers and youth, and the election results do not reflect popular support. Rather, the vast majority of people either did not vote at all or voted against him, including for third-party candidates, who themselves benefited from the radicalization of workers and youth and aimed to keep the population tied to the ruling establishment.

Puerto Rico has been engulfed in a series of political, economic and social crises which have left the island in shambles, most recently intensified by the coronavirus pandemic and natural disasters.

Earlier this year, the island faced a string of earthquakes which damaged an already crumbling infrastructure, including schools and homes. In the face of the negligence and indifference of the Puerto Rican government, hundreds of workers from the northern region of the island, which was less impacted by the earthquakes, took it upon themselves to go to the south of the island with emergency aid for residents, bringing water, food and hygienic supplies. There has been no assistance for workers who have lost their homes, and many schools throughout the island are still closed.

Puerto Rico’s elections took place amid record-breaking daily reported cases of COVID-19. The pandemic has been allowed to spread by the malign neglect of the Puerto Rican government. Wanda Vázquez Garced, the outgoing governor of Puerto Rico, began reopening the economy in September.

Puerto Rico hit an all time high for daily recorded cases in the last two months, reporting over 1,000 new cases several days a week, with a current average of 772 cases a day. There are over 72,000 cases and nearly 900 deaths on the island as of this writing.

Even before the pandemic, the health care system in Puerto Rico had been decimated by underfunding, which has led doctors, nurses and other health care workers to leave the island over the years, creating the conditions for mass deaths due to COVID-19.

The real issues confronting the working class on the island, such as decaying infrastructure, the health care crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic and immense poverty, will not be addressed within the confines of the existing political establishment. The only way out of the crisis is through the independent mobilization of the Puerto Rican working class against the capitalist system, uniting with workers on the mainland and internationally in the struggle for socialism.

US judge blocks shutdown of TikTok scheduled for November 12

Kevin Reed

On October 30, a Pennsylvania district judge blocked the Trump administration from implementing restrictions that would have shut down the Chinese video sharing app TikTok in the US as of November 12 unless it is sold to an American company.

A smartphone with TikTok and WeChat apps [Credit: AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein, File]

Judge Wendy Beetlestone of the US District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania ruled in favor of a lawsuit filed by the TikTok users Douglas Marland, Cosette Rinab and Alec Chambers who said the scheduled ban would cause them to “lose the ability to engage with their millions of followers on TikTok, and the related brand sponsorships.”

The three TikTok users each have more than 1 million followers on the short-form video sharing social media platform. They argued that they would lose access to “professional opportunities afforded by TikTok” if the White House ban were to take effect on Thursday and the judge agreed that they would face “significant and unrecoverable economic loss caused by the shutdown of the TikTok platform.”

In August, the White House issued an emergency executive order stating that Beijing-based ByteDance’s ownership of TikTok—as well as the ownership of WeChat by Tencent Holdings—was a threat to national security threat and the company must divest itself of the platform or be shut down.

The White House campaign—which has bipartisan backing in both houses of Congress—to force the TikTok divestiture has been aimed at whipping up anti-Chinese sentiments. It is based on the completely unproven assertions that the firm has been sharing the personal data of 100 million US users of the platform with Chinese state intelligence.

An initial deadline for TikTok to be sold by September 27 was set by the US Commerce Department after which the app would no longer be available for download on Apple and Android devices. This measure was also blocked in court by a Washington D.C. federal judge, who ruled in favor of TikTok itself. Judge Carl Nichols said that President Trump’s executive order was an unconstitutional violation of First (free speech) and Fifth (due process) Amendment rights.

The measures scheduled to be taken against TikTok on November 12 would have completely shut down the platform. They included the halting of the following transactions: (1) any provision of “any internet hosting service” enabling the functioning of the mobile TikTok application; (2) any provision of “any content delivery network service” enabling the functioning of the mobile TikTok application; (3) any provision of “directly contracted or arranged internet transit or peering services” enabling the functioning of the mobile TikTok application; and (4) any utilization of the TikTok mobile application within “the land and maritime borders of the United States.”

Judge Beetlestone noted in her ruling that TikTok user Rinab has 2.3 million followers and creates videos for fashion brands and other companies and earns between $5,000 and $10,000 per video from sponsoring companies. TikTok user Chambers has 1.8 million followers and has earned $12,000 making videos for Extra gum brands. User Marland makes comedy videos and posts about his life, and partners with record labels to promote music and has 2.7 million followers.

“For so many people, me included, their entire job and livelihood is TikTok and to have that taken away based on random speculation really does not make sense,” Marland told the Washington Post .

Hilary McQuaide, a TikTok spokeswoman, said the company was “deeply moved” by the support from creators. “We support our creative community in continuing to share their voices, both through the platform and the legal options available to them, and we are committed to continuing to provide a home for them to do so,” McQuaide said.

TikTok has 700 to 800 million monthly active users worldwide and it is published in 39 languages. It is one of the most popular and fastest growing social media apps in the history of similar technology. A major feature of the software and a key to its popularity is the proprietary recommendation engine that is able to learn quickly what kind of videos each individual user is attracted to and then serve the up such that the amount of time spent on the platform is extended.

In addition to the ramping up of anti-Chinese propaganda, another aim of the Trump administration has been to pry a lucrative social media property—ByteDance has recently been valued at $180 billion—from the hands of its Chinese owners and give it to his supporters from among the American business elite.

There was an initial frenzy of secret corporate meetings following the Trump administration’s emergency executive order, first involving Microsoft and then Oracle and Walmart. Microsoft’s offer was ultimately rejected and then a deal was announced on September 19 involving a “technology partnership” with Oracle and Walmart which left a majority ownership of TikTok in the hands of the current ByteDance executives.

President Trump was also attempting to force any acquisition deal to funnel a $5 billion “contribution” into what the White House called an “education fund” for American young people, the details of which have never been published or talked about since. When ByteDance executives were asked about Trump’s education plan the day after he made the idea public, they told reporters that it was the first time they had heard anything about it.

Going back to the end of 2019 and the beginning of 2020, the Democrats in Congress have pushed for a ban of the use of TikTok among US military and law enforcement personnel. On July 20, the House of Representatives voted 336 to 71 to bar federal employees from downloading TikTok as part of the $741 billion defense spending bill. On August 6, the TikTok ban was adopted unanimously by the US Senate.

It was this bipartisan support for the anti-Chinese xenophobia that was picked up on by the White House at the end of the summer and into the fall as part of the effort to boost the Trump reelection campaign.

On this question, it is clear that Democratic Party President-elect Joe Biden will continue to pursue the same or more aggressive anti-Chinese stance. In a review of tech policy of the presumptive incoming president on Monday, National Public Radio (NPR) said, “the scrutiny of the popular video-sharing app reflects a growing wariness in Washington about China's involvement in the tech industry—a sentiment shared by members of both political parties.”

NPR quoted Darrell West, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, who said, “The era of permissionless innovation is over. There’s going to be more public engagement, more public oversight and public regulation of the technology sector.” West went on to say, “Biden will take a tough stance on China and Biden will actually have a strategy. Trump had neither a process nor a strategy.”

Trump escalates defiance of the 2020 election outcome

Patrick Martin

In a series of actions Monday, President Trump and his closest aides and political accomplices demonstrated that they do not accept the vote of the American people to remove him from office, and that they will do anything in their power to prevent the victorious Democratic Party candidate, former Vice President Joe Biden, from taking office on January 20.

On Monday afternoon, Trump fired Secretary of Defense Mark Esper in a tweet because Esper had opposed using troops to suppress demonstrations in American cities—a “failing” Trump hopes to remedy with his next Pentagon chief.

The Trump-appointed chief of the General Services Administration (GSA), which handles logistics and infrastructure for the federal government, said she would not move forward with the legally required assistance to the Biden transition team until the outcome of the election was known.

Attorney General William Barr sent a circular to all US attorneys authorizing them to initiate investigations into vote fraud if it “could potentially impact the outcome of a federal election,” effectively lining up the Justice Department behind Trump’s bogus claims that the election has been stolen from him.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Ky., talks with reporters after he spoke on the Senate floor Monday, Nov. 9, 2020, at the Capitol in Washington [Credit: AP Photo/Susan Walsh]

Barr held a closed-door meeting with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on the same afternoon that McConnell delivered his first public remarks on the 2020 election. Speaking from the floor of the Senate, he upheld Trump’s “right” to file lawsuits over alleged irregularities in half a dozen states won by Biden.

Meanwhile, on Twitter, Trump kept up a stream of denunciations of supposed fraud in the election, with baseless claims that elections overseen by Republican state officials, as in Georgia, Arizona and Nevada, and vote tallying conducted mainly by Republican local officials, as in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, were rigged in favor of Biden and the Democrats.

The firing of Esper is the most ominous step, coming only days after an interview given by the Pentagon chief to the Military Times, in which he recalled his well-publicized dispute with Trump last June, when the president threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act and deploy active duty federal troops against the millions demonstrating against police violence after the murder of George Floyd.

In response to pressure from the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other top officers, concerned that such an openly repressive intervention was inadequately prepared and likely to discredit the military in the eyes of the American population, Trump backed down temporarily. But he is clearly aware that he can overturn the results of the November 3 election, clearly won by Biden, only through the use of military force.

Esper did not discuss this subject directly, but he told the Military Times that he had prepared a letter of resignation and then decided against sending it, concerned about what might come next. “Who’s going to come in behind me?” he asked. “It’s going to be a real ‘yes man.’ And then God help us.”

The undeniable implication of Esper’s firing is that Trump wants a Pentagon chief who will say yes to the deployment of troops into American cities to deal with the mass unrest that would undoubtedly follow an attempt by the president to defy the election results.

Trump named Christopher Miller, director of the National Counter-Terrorism Center (NCTC), as Esper’s replacement to head the Pentagon on an “acting” basis. Miller retired in 2014 after a 31-year career as a Special Forces officer. He joined the White House staff in 2018 at the National Security Council (NSC), working on counterterrorism under John Bolton, then the national security advisor.

Soon after Bolton left the White House in September 2019, Miller came to Trump’s attention as the NSC liaison to the Pentagon during the Special Forces operation in which ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was assassinated. Miller subsequently moved to a counterterrorism position at the Pentagon, before being selected by Trump to head the NCTC.

At least one senator, Democrat Ron Wyden of Oregon, voiced objections to Miller’s appointment because he indicated at a confirmation hearing that he would not oppose the NCTC supplying information on American citizens to the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, to assist in the suppression of ongoing protests against police violence in Portland, Oregon.

Trump repeatedly denounced the Portland protesters as terrorists and sent federal paramilitary forces into the city. Miller was confirmed by the Senate on August 6 in a voice vote, indicating that no Democrat felt strongly enough even to demand a roll-call vote.

The decision by GSA Administrator Emily Murphy not to begin formal cooperation with the Biden transition team has both political and practical significance. A spokeswoman for Murphy told Reuters that she was waiting until “a winner is clear,” although the traditional practice at the GSA has been to begin liaison efforts as soon as a winner is called by the major television networks and other news organizations.

Trump and his congressional backers have demagogically attacked Saturday’s announcement of a Biden victory by the Associated Press, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox News, the New York Times and Washington Post as though it was a usurpation of the popular will by “giant corporations,” although Trump made no such objection when the same organizations called him the winner the morning after the polls closed in the 2016 election.

It would be unprecedented for the transition to a new administration to be delayed until after formal certification of the results of the election by the authorities in 50 states and the District of Columbia, a process that will take two or three weeks, given the slow arrival of mail ballots, particularly from overseas and military voters, and the time required for recanvassing and recounting in those states where the contest is close enough to warrant such action.

The Electoral College does not meet until December 14 to cast the electoral votes for the rival presidential tickets. And this process could well be disrupted if, as some state legislators and right-wing pundits have suggested, Republican-controlled state legislatures in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona intervene and attempt to impose pro-Trump electors rather than the pro-Biden slates elected by the voters.

Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos has called for a wide-ranging investigation of the election—Trump lost the state by 20,000 votes—citing “concerns surfacing about mail-in ballot dumps and voter fraud.” In Pennsylvania, there has already been discussion among Republican legislators about how to go about appointing pro-Trump electors.

The letter from Attorney-General Barr to federal prosecutors authorizes them to investigate “if there are clear and apparently credible allegations of irregularities.” In the context of Trump’s open defiance of the election results, the directive amounts to making the resources of the Justice Department freely available to the Trump campaign. It also supersedes a longstanding policy that federal prosecutors not involve themselves in election-related cases until after states certify the results.

In his statement on the election, Senate Majority Leader McConnell made no mention of the Democratic president-elect, a former senator and supposed “friend,” according to the pro-Biden media. McConnell’s brief speech made no reference to allegations of vote fraud or ballot stuffing.

But other Senate Republicans were far less constrained. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, appearing on Fox News, demanded that losing Republican Senate candidate John James in Michigan also refuse to concede. “If Republicans don’t challenge and change the US election system, there will never be another Republican president elected again,” he declared.

A Trump legal adviser revealed the strategy behind the state lawsuits, telling Fox News last week, “We’re waiting for the United States Supreme Court—of which the president has nominated three justices—to step in and do something. And hopefully Amy Coney Barrett will come through.”

Only a handful of top Republicans in Congress or around the country have acknowledged Trump’s defeat and the victory of Democratic candidate Biden. This includes three governors—in the heavily Democratic states of Maryland, Vermont and Massachusetts—four of the 53 Senate Republicans, and only a dozen of the nearly 200 members of the House of Representatives, including four who are leaving office.

In all these reactionary machinations, there are elements of both desperation and delusion. The bulk of the Republican Party has embarked on a political course to deny the results of an election in which 75 million people voted for the Biden-Harris ticket. While the Democratic Party might well capitulate to such a political coup, there is no chance that the American population as a whole will passively accept the usurpation of the presidency. Trump can maintain power only through methods of mass repression and violence.

The atmosphere in the White House itself appears to be that of a besieged fortress. According to an unnamed official who spoke with CNN, “John McEntee, director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office, is spreading the word throughout the administration that if he hears of anyone looking for another job they will be fired.” The administration has also been shaken by a third wave of COVID-19 infections that has hit Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson, and top Trump campaign adviser David Bossie.