Record daily coronavirus death tolls in Italy and Spain since September

Will Morrow

The coronavirus is continuing to spiral out of control in Italy, which is now experiencing the largest number of deaths of any country in Europe. On Tuesday, another 731 people died, and on Wednesday, 753 people, the highest tolls since the peak of the first wave from March 21–31.

The total number of COVID-19 deaths in the country, according to the official underestimated figures, is now 47,217, second only to the UK in Europe. More than 1.2 million cases have been detected. The number of daily new cases hit a record of 40,896 last Friday and has continued to average more than 30,000 in the days since.

On Tuesday, Spain also recorded its largest daily death toll since September, with 435 people killed. Spain surpassed one million cases on October 21, and in the space of just 20 days, the case total increased by 50 percent, to more than 1.5 million.

Coffins with the bodies of victims of coronavirus are stored waiting for burial or cremation at the Collserola morgue in Barcelona. (Image Credit: AP/Emilio Morenatti)

According to the official death count, there have now been 41,668 deaths in Spain. But this is a significant underestimate of the real toll. A report published Tuesday by El Diario detailed the increase in the national mortality rate associated with the two waves of the pandemic. Since 1975, there had never been more than 12,000 deaths in the country recorded in a single week. For three consecutive weeks from March 23 to April 12, the weekly death rate exceeded 18,000.

From March to April alone, there were 43,000 more deaths than the historical average. Since September, the total number of excess deaths has exceeded 15,000, giving a total estimated COVID-19 death toll of more than 58,000.

In Italy, the healthcare system is already on the verge of collapse. Across the country, 42 percent of ICU patients are being treated for coronavirus, significantly above the emergency threshold of 30 percent indicated by the government as the point at which hospitals would be overwhelmed.

Ambulances are queueing up due to a lack of available beds. A video widely shared on social media posted by a health worker at the San Giovanni Rotondo hospital in the province of Foggia, in southern Italy, shows more than six ambulances queued waiting to be able to deliver their patients. “This is total chaos,” the health worker says into the video.

While in March and April the pandemic had been largely confined to the northern regions around Lombardy, the virus is now overwhelming hospitals in the poorer south.

On November 11, a video taken inside the bathroom at Cardarelli Hospital in Naples went viral. A man is seen lying under the bathroom sink of the hospital ward, as the phone operator states, “This man is dead.” Pointing at another motionless patient lying on a bed, they add, “This one we don’t know whether he is alive or dead.”

Last Friday, Rodolgo Punzi, the head of the infectious disease department at Cotugno hospital in Naples, told AP, “The current situation at the Cotugno hospital is that we have no more beds available.” Nurses were seen providing oxygen treatment to patients in their cars outside the hospital a week ago. The army has converted the Formula One racetrack in Monzo into a temporary hospital.

On Monday, the Italian government announced that it had requested Gino Strada, who founded Emergency NGO, which works with civilian victims of war, to manage the response to the pandemic in Calabria. Strada, who is also a surgeon, has previously worked setting up hospitals in Sudan and Afghanistan.

The health commissioner in Calabria, Saverio Cotticelli, resigned from the position on November 7, after admitting that it had no emergency coronavirus response plan.

Calabria is the poorest region in Italy, and has the highest rate of unemployment at 21 percent, and more than 30 percent among youth—double the national average.

Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte has rejected repeated appeals by medical associations for a nationwide lockdown to prevent the spread of the virus.

On Monday, Massimo Galli, the head of the infectious disease department at Milan’s Sacco Hospital, told RAI television, “I am afraid there is no doubt that the situation is largely out of control. Other illnesses don’t go on strike because Covid exists and we have to get organized… otherwise the pandemic will end up doing damage that goes beyond the already very sad number of deaths.” He said a total lockdown throughout the country was required.

The same day, Filippo Anelli, the president of the Italian Federation of Medical Guilds, had called for Italy to be put in a “complete lockdown.”

The situation is “dramatic and therefore we must resort immediately to a total closure,” he wrote. “We have reached fairly critical levels, lines of ambulances at emergency rooms are seen everywhere, intensive care is starting to have significant numbers.”

Anelli told Ansa, “Either we stop the virus, or it will stop us, because the signs show that the system is not holding up. Even the current yellow regions will soon find themselves in the same conditions as the worst-hit areas.”

Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte rejected these appeals on Wednesday, November 11, telling La Stampa that “a generalised lockdown shouldn’t be the first choice—the costs would be too high.”

For the Italian and European ruling class, the “costs” of a lockdown—i.e., the potential impact on the profits of businesses—take absolute and unconditional priority over the tens of thousands of lives that could be saved by a lockdown to prevent the further spread of the virus. The current resurgence taking place across the continent was not inevitable. It is the outcome of the policies pursued by governments in Italy and across Europe.

They have rejected new lockdowns and deliberately reopened economies, pushing millions of workers back to work, ensuring that the virus could spread.

In Italy, as across Europe and the US, the Conte government has kept all primary school students in classes, to ensure that their parents can continue to go to work, while non-essential industries remain open, except for restaurants, bars and some smaller stores in certain regions.

In addition to the massive loss of life, the pandemic has wrought enormous social devastation, exacerbating the existing social crisis. While hundreds of billions have been pledged to prop up Italian corporations, the Conte government has refused to provide basic assistance for workers affected by the impact of the lockdown.

Valeria Leonardi, from SOS Ballarò, a neighborhood committee in Palermo, told the Financial Times on Tuesday that the lockdown from March to April “was a catastrophe for many people, who were already in a precarious situation, often forced to work without a regular contract and out of the institutional safety net, who found themselves without income overnight.”

Municipal elections expose rightward turn of Brazilian ruling class

Tomas Castanheira

Brazil held the first round of its municipal elections on Sunday. The electoral process was marked by the highest abstention rate in the last 20 years, surpassing 23 percent. It also saw an accelerated shift by the Brazilian bourgeoisie to the right, with fascistic attacks against the democratic system and an escalation of state surveillance over social media.

One of the factors contributing to the low voter turnout, in a country where voting is mandatory, was the uncontrolled COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil. After a decrease in contamination rates in September and October, Brazil is registering a rapid rise in coronavirus cases, with averages of new cases and deaths nearly doubling in the last 10 days, according to Worldometerdata. Brazil already has a total of more than 5.9 million cases and 166,000 deaths.

Voters on Line in Rocinha, Brazil’s largest favela, in Rio de Janeiro’s southern zone.

But the abstentions also expressed the discrediting of the entire Brazilian political system in the eyes of broad sections of the working class, which is increasingly dissatisfied with the conditions of mass poverty and social inequality.

There were a significant number of protest votes, which added to the abstentions, surpassing the votes for the first-place mayoral candidates in 483 Brazilian cities, including 18 capitals. In the country’s largest city, São Paulo, protest votes and abstentions reached 3.6 million, while the votes for the top two candidates added up to just 2.8 million.

The election was a fiasco for the Workers Party (PT), which governed the country for 14 years, as well as for the candidates supported by Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro. The PT, which in 2012 was elected in the first round in 630 cities, won only 179 municipal elections this year. Bolsonaro, whose fascist party Alliance for Brazil, which he founded in 2019, has not yet been officially recognized, supported 59 candidates, with only 10 them elected.

There was also a significant drop in the number of candidates elected by the traditional bourgeois parties, the Brazilian Social Democratic Party (PSDB) and Brazilian Democratic Movement (MDB). The parties that registered the largest gains were the Progressive Party (PP) and the Democrats (DEM), the latter having won six capital cities in the first round.

These results were enthusiastically celebrated by the Brazilian media, which characterized them as a victory for “traditional” politics and for “democracy.” In an editorial, Folha de S. Paulo celebrated the “choice of moderate conservatives” and stated: “Two years ago, the national and state elections were characterized by a right-wing wave, often with populist and authoritarian tones, and a rejection of traditional politicians and parties. This scenario has changed.”

The conservative O Estado de S. Paulo, following the same line, declared: “The debacle of Bolsonaroism and Lula-PTism at the polls, two years after they starred in the polarization that plunged the country into an unprecedented moral crisis, is great news for Brazilian democracy. ... Traditional politics is being valued again.”

The political perspective highlighted in this farcical celebration of the Brazilian municipal elections closely resembled the hailing by these same media outlets of Joe Biden’s victory in the US elections. Folha and Estadao praised Biden as a “traditional” and “moderate” politician and considered his election a milestone in the collapse of a “right-wing populist” wave around the world.

But, while a section of the Brazilian bourgeoisie seeks to mirror itself in the reactionary model of the US Democratic Party, the political allies of Bolsonaro have literally mimicked Donald Trump’s false accusations of electoral fraud.

A delay in the release of poll results, which in Brazil are held in electronic ballot boxes (not connected to the Internet), and vague reports of hacker attacks on the Supreme Electoral Court (STE) were used by fascistic figures connected to the President to declare the entire process illegitimate, setting a dangerous precedent for future elections.

Federal Congresswoman Carla Zambelli, co-founder of Bolsonaro’s Alliance for Brazil, declared on Twitter: “Now more than ever we have to talk about #PrintedVote again as a way to check the electronic voting. Nobody will convince me that the system crashes that way without fraud involved.” The son of the President, Congressman Eduardo Bolsonaro, tweeted: “This brings a climate of insecurity, which makes people suspicious that the delay in the disclosure could be a new hacker attack or manipulation, since there is no transparency [in the process].”

As in the United States, the claims that the election of “traditional” right-wing politicians is an effective way to contain the fascistic forces in Brazilian society are absolutely false. The dictatorial threats emerge not from the sick mind of a Trump or a Bolsonaro, but from the response of the ruling elites to the deep crisis of capitalism and the resulting eruption of class struggle.

That the DEM and PP—both heirs of ARENA, the party of the bloody Brazilian military dictatorship of 1964–1985—have consolidated themselves as the major “center” parties of bourgeois politics in Brazil is a clear sign that the capitalist political system as a whole has moved sharply to the right.

This right-wing shift of the Brazilian ruling class was manifested in the unprecedented number of military candidates running in this year’s elections. It was not only the traditional right wing. The PT and its pseudo-left satellite, the Socialism and Freedom Party (PSOL), ran no fewer than 152 candidates coming from the Military Police or the armed forces. Of the 8,422 military candidates running in Brazil, about 10 percent were elected: 50 mayors and 809 council members.

The 2020 elections also witnessed an ominous escalation in the policing of social media in the name of fighting “fake news.” Hundreds of police intelligence officers were deployed in each state to carry out this task. Supreme Electoral Court Minister Luis Roberto Barroso declared: “We are preparing for a war against fake news,” hailing an unprecedented level of collaboration between the Brazilian state and “all technology companies.”

The demand that the Brazilian state censor “fake news” has been championed by the pseudo-left PSOL, which went so far as to demand during the 2018 elections that the Supreme Court block WhatsApp nationwide for this purpose.

The more prominent role played by the PSOL in these elections, going into the second round in two state capitals, is being welcomed by the Brazilian bourgeoisie. Estadao, in an article titled “DEM and PSOL cease to be supporting parties,” stated that the latter represents “the new left—more identitarian and cultural, in the young outskirts of Brazil; people who see the PT as ‘old’.” That is, it clearly recognizes PSOL as a party of the petty bourgeoisie, completely hostile to the working class movement.

The main race being run by the PSOL is for the city of São Paulo, where its candidate for mayor, the anti-Marxist professor and leader of the Movement of Homeless Workers (MTST) Guilherme Boulos, is competing with current Mayor Bruno Covas of the PSDB.

Covas is attacking Boulos in the same spirit as the editorials in Folha and Estadao, and has declared that “experience beat radicalism in the first round and experience will beat radicalism in the second round.” But the pseudo-left candidate is doing everything to prove that this is not the case.

In the first debate of the second round of the elections in São Paulo, broadcast on Monday by CNN, Boulos exposed his thoroughly bourgeois program. In addition to minimizing the possibilities of a second wave of COVID-19 in São Paulo, ignoring the already accelerating growth in the number of cases and hospital admissions in the city, he reaffirmed his party’s reactionary approach to the military.

Boulos stated in the debate that the “problem of public security” in São Paulo cannot be solved with “street lighting,” as Covas has tried to do, but requires the hiring of more police! Boulos complained that the city’s local police, the Metropolitan Civil Guard (GCM), has far fewer officers than Rio de Janeiro, and declared: “The role of the GCM is to be in the neighborhoods and to identify, through community policing, where are the focal points of crime, conflicts...following the examples of the security models that best work around the world.”

As protests against police brutality are exploding all over the world, one wonders what model for state violence against the working class and youth is most appealing to this pseudo-leftist charlatan.

The Morenoites of the MRT, who in a slander against the World Socialist Web Site claimed to be “the only leftist organization on Brazilian soil that is fighting a principled struggle against the police and the militarization of politics,” are criminally covering up the reactionary outlook of the PSOL and promoting its election in São Paulo. With their characteristic opportunist politics, they support Boulos through a series of articles that call for a “struggle to confront, reject, and defeat Covas.”

In order to fight the turn by the ruling class towards dictatorship in Brazil and internationally, the working class needs to establish an independent political movement against capitalism, decisively rejecting the political influence of every bourgeois and petty-bourgeois tendency.

Twelve million to lose unemployment benefits in December

Jacob Crosse

Without congressional action in the next month, over 12 million people will lose federal unemployment benefits provided in the CARES Act at the end of the year according to a new report. The sudden elimination of much-needed funds for millions of jobless workers portends a further collapse in the health, safety and well-being of millions of people and their families.

On Dec. 26, the day after Christmas, unemployment researchers Andrew Stettner and Elizabeth Pancotti with the Century Foundation estimate that 7.3 million workers will lose their benefits through the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program, while 4.6 million workers will lose access to monies through the Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC) program.

People wait in line to receive food assistance at the Doles Center in Mt. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

This is over half of the estimated 21.1 million people in the US currently on some form of unemployment, according to the researchers, who also found that another 4.4 million people, roughly every person in the state of Kentucky, have already used up all of their benefits.

For the millions who already have used up their yearly benefits, and the thousands more that will join them in the coming weeks, having to wait until next year is no guarantee they will begin receiving payments again. Byzantine state unemployment systems across the country continue to confound and frustrate hundreds of thousands of workers who have yet to receive their due payments.

Both the PEUC and the PUA program were created with firm deadlines and restrictions in mind. The PEUC program was designed to provide up to an additional 13 weeks of payments to people who had already exhausted their state unemployment benefits, which in some states provide 26 weeks worth of payments, although several are less, with Georgia and Nevada providing only 12 weeks.

The PUA program was designed for so-called “gig” or “contract” workers, such as Uber and Lyft drivers, or the self-employed, such as artists, musicians or other independent contract workers who are normally not eligible for unemployment benefits. This program is supposed to provide up to 39 weeks of payments, however for thousands of applicants, like Howard Booker in Las Vegas, months of trying to get what’s rightfully theirs has been frustrating and futile.

“I just want what’s mine, and I want them to give me my money,” Booker told a local reporter. After months of calling and reaching out to Nevada’s Department of Employee Training and Retention (DETR), Booker said he received a notice this month stating he was “disqualified from PUA” and that he actually owed money due to “overpayments.” Booker says he has yet to receive a “dime” from DETR.

Finally, there is the Lost Wages Assistance (LWA) program, which was created through an executive order by President Donald Trump that authorized the Federal Emergency Management Agency to spend up to $44 billion from the Disaster Relief Fund in the form of $300 payments. Every US state, except for South Dakota, applied for the program with nearly every state having already dispersed the available funds. As with the PEUC and PUA, the LWA program is slated to expire the final week of the year on Dec. 27.

These programs, along with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention federal eviction moratorium, are all that is standing against homelessness and destitution for millions of workers. Despite the grave situation, which has led to miles-long food lines in cities across the country, Congress has yet to come to terms on a new relief package that would extend unemployment benefits and eviction moratoriums indefinitely.

After a letter issued by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Tuesday predictably did nothing to further negotiations on another bill, Pelosi, who was re-elected by her peers on Wednesday to lead the Democratic caucus in Congress again, gave no indication on Wednesday that she and McConnell were any closer to finalizing a bill to stave off disaster.

In fact the opposite was confirmed: congressional aides with Pelosi and McConnell stated to the Washington Post that “no discussions” were taking place on another relief bill. Instead the two politicians were working separately on another “omnibus” bill to approve spending legislation which would avoid a potential government shutdown before the Dec. 11 deadline.

“We will pass an omnibus… We are on a good path to do that,” Pelosi said to reporters.

Why is it that after months of so-called “negotiations” the Democrats and Republicans are no closer to providing relief, something both Pelosi and McConnell have stated they agree on, but can pass funding for the US Postal Service or fast-track Trump’s judicial nominations?

It is not because, as Democratic Party politicians claim, they and their Republican colleagues are so far apart on principles and figures that no deal can be had. Both parties came together with unprecedented speed and unanimity in March of this year, as the Dow Jones Industrial Average was tanking 10,000 points following the first wave of the virus’ spread in the US, to pass the $2.2 trillion CARES Act. With a 96–0 vote in the Senate and a near-unanimous voice vote in the House, the two parties of capital provided billions to giant corporations, the Catholic Church and Wall Street, while rescuing the stock market and the wealth portfolios of the ruling class.

No, the unwillingness on the part of the two parties to reach a deal is not a mistake, it is a definite class policy that is being implemented. It is part of the on-going effort of the ruling class to offload the cost of the pandemic onto the back of the working class by blackmailing teachers and students into dangerous schools, so parents can go back to work and generate profits for the financial oligarchy. All the while the Democrats and Republicans continue to feign disagreement and separation on a relief package, while exchanging fist-bumps and pleasantries as over 255,000 people in the US succumb to COVID-19.

Germany’s schools remain open despite a massive second wave of COVID-19

Marianne Arens

According to the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), 267 more COVID-19 patients died in Germany on Monday, in the space of just 24 hours. By Tuesday morning, 14,419 new infections were registered.

Over the past seven days, there have been 145 cases per 100,000 inhabitants nationwide, with numerous hot spots reporting much higher rates. In Berlin alone, there are currently over 1,000 COVID-19 patients in hospital, 274 of whom are being treated or ventilated in intensive care units. The seven-day incidence rate in central Berlin is 360.

The virus has spread rapidly throughout Europe and has claimed 330,000 lives so far. In neighbouring Austria, high case numbers forced the government to tighten its lockdown and close schools on Saturday. Intensive care units in Italy, France, Spain, and Switzerland are on the verge of collapse.

In this situation, the federal and state governments are insisting that schools, day care centres and businesses continue to operate. On Monday evening, the chancellor’s pandemic talks with the state premiers ended without any result.

Angela Merkel and the heads of the state governments agreed on nonbinding “appeals” and refused even to impose a simple binding obligation to wear masks in schools. With schools and day care centres remaining open, all further decisions have been postponed until November 25.

Meanwhile, the pandemic is continuing to spread throughout such facilities. According to a report in this week’s Der Spiegel magazine, coronavirus infections in children have increased tenfold in the last few weeks. According to the RKI, more than 10,400 coronavirus infections in children under 14 years of age were registered in the first week of November. (At the beginning of September, there were less than 1,000 per week.)

A further study from Bavaria last week showed that six times more minors than previously known have been infected with the virus. The number of children who suffer from severe symptoms and must go to hospital has also risen.

The situation in the care sector is also critical. Intensive care units are reaching their limits, with almost 3,500 intensive care patients nationwide. In hospitals, medical practices and other health care facilities, 1,700 doctors and nurses are currently suffering from COVID-19. Since the beginning of the pandemic, there have been at least 24,500 cases among medics, although the number of unreported cases is high. According to the RKI, 25 medics have died.

Mosaic by an Italian artist from portraits of nurses who have died of coronavirus

While the German government is doing nothing to stem the spread of the pandemic and protect the lives of workers, politicians and the business media are increasing the pressure. Under the headline, “Teachers must realize that an extra contribution is necessary in the crisis,” Barbara Gillmann in the financial daily Handelsblatt strings together a series of accusations and lies.

Echoing the notorious “lazy jerks” insult directed at teachers by former Social Democratic Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, Gillmann writes, “So far, schools are still not considered by virologists to be drivers of the pandemic.” She adds that for some teachers, “all the effort with masks and ventilation in the classrooms is simply too much.”

Health Minister Jens Spahn declared on November 13 at the German Care Congress that, if necessary, employees at hospitals and nursing homes testing positive had to continue to work. His latest proposal goes even further. He declared that if as a result of isolation and quarantine measures there is a lack of nursing staff, the question must be asked, “What is the second-best solution after the best possible one?” His “fallback position” consisted of “letting those who have tested positive work with very special protective measures.”

This led to social media boiling over with angry comments. “SisterUncomfortable,” who works in an intensive care unit, tweeted that Spahn’s demand was “a state’s declaration of bankruptcy in 5 words!” She continued: “We are worth nothing! Not even the dirt under the fingernails of the nation! WE. ARE. NOT. YOUR. COMMON PROPERTY!”

She added: “We deserve to be protected. And all I can do is sit back and watch helplessly as they burn us out.”

Duncan Blues wrote, “Nursing staff have been consistently burned [out] for years, and now with coronavirus they are dumping kerosene on the smouldering funeral pyre of the nursing emergency.”

Others confirmed that this has indeed been “like this for quite some time.” One wrote, “As long as there are no symptoms, work must continue.” Another said nurses are “used to being exploited and put under pressure (stepping in, even if you have time off or vacation).”

Ms. Flausch wrote, “This is bad. Have already been told by a friend who is a doctor. He should continue to work with an infection as an ENT at a large university hospital.”

Neinhorn wrote: “It disgusts me deeply how nursing staff are used as service-providing sacks of meat and are treated like service robots with helper syndrome. It made me sick even before COVID and it’s becoming more and more perverted.”

L+ wrote of a “total failure in personnel recruitment in care and education,” and explained that it was “the fault of politics.”

Enije wrote, “Just because a minister says so, we don’t have to take the bullshit. I can’t remember having sworn an oath of service for better or worse.”

For a few days now, the question of how those affected can defend themselves has been repeatedly appearing on the internet. For example, Ingmar V. wrote: “It is absolutely necessary to think about solutions, how nursing staff can conduct a kind of strike without endangering the people they look after. … Proposals?”

The Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality Party, SGP) and its sister organizations in Europe and worldwide have formulated such proposals. We advocate establishing independent rank-and-file committees in schools and factories so that workers can network and take protection against the coronavirus into their own hands, independently of the trade unions. This should be directed toward the preparation of a European-wide general strike.

On March 7, the World Socialist Web Site wrote: “The indifference of the Trump administration to the health of the population is no better, and perhaps worse, than the attitude of the pharaohs of ancient Egypt to the slaves.”

The article went on to say that in responding to the disease, “one principle must guide us: that human need is primary.” It continued: “Combating an epidemic that threatens millions of lives cannot be subordinated to considerations of private profit. … It is necessary to build a mass movement of the working class to demand an immediate emergency response to the crisis, to be paid for by the corporations, the government and the financial oligarchy.”

This past summer, when the government imposed a full reopening of the schools, the WSWS warned that it was only a matter of time before rising infection rates would spread to the elderly and result in thousands of deaths.

This is exactly what has happened. Currently, the number of people infected in nursing homes is rising at an alarming rate.

Over the weekend, a home for the elderly and a nursing home in the Berlin district of Lichtenberg had to be partially evacuated because 30 residents and 17 employees had contracted the virus. Within a short period, 14 of the sick residents had died.

Private elderly care operator Kursana, which belongs to the Dussmann Group and has the closest relations with the Social Democratic Party-Left Party-Green Party Berlin Senate, employs almost 7,000 staff at its 116 facilities, including numerous caregivers on temporary contracts. Comments on the internet speak of “too few and overworked staff who exceed their limits daily.” They note that at Kursana, one nurse has to care for nine residents.

In Mannheim there were outbreaks at two facilities. More than 120 people (93 residents and 28 nursing staff) were infected, and eight residents died within a short time. There were further outbreaks in old people’s and nursing homes in Bad Soden-Salmünster in Hesse, Fürth in Bavaria (with 63 people infected), and Karlsfeld near Munich, with 48 people infected and 13 dead in a single old people’s home.

“The heads of government have blanked out the distress in old people’s homes,” Eugen Brysch, head of the Patient Protection Foundation, commented in response to the chancellor’s meeting on Monday. Brysch pointed out that so far half of the deceased COVID-19 patients have been residents of old people’s and nursing homes.

Teachers, school principals, parents and students are increasingly aware of this, and more and more of them are calling for action to stop the pandemic from spreading throughout the schools—but meeting with resistance from politicians.

In early November, the city of Solingen decided to divide up classes and hold weekly alternating face-to-face and distance-learning classes. But the North Rhine-Westphalia state executive, a coalition of the Christian Democrats and Free Democrats, banned this. Education Minister Yvonne Gebauer cited “educational equity” as the reason.

When a comprehensive school in Lollar, near Giessen, decided to take part in a voluntary testing series, almost 90 percent of the students took part. Last week, the test results at the Clemens Brentano European School in Lollar became known, and of some 750 pupils in grades five to 10 who took the test, 60 were COVID-19 positive. As a result, the entire school was closed.

However, it will have to reopen next Monday, after just under two weeks, and resume normal operations.

A video of Markus Söder is currently circulating, in which the Bavarian state premier openly expresses the deeper political motives for the opening of schools and day care centres. On September 22, Söder explained that the real purpose was to keep the economy running.

He said: “Our children need to be cared for if we want to prevent an economic lockdown. That is the context: schools and day care centres also have the purpose of keeping the economy running.”

There is no significant difference here from what Donald Trump promised Wall Street earlier this month: “This administration will not be going to a lockdown.”

Thai protests for democratic reforms continue despite violent police attack

Peter Symonds

Thousands of young people, who have been demanding democratic reforms, continued to protest yesterday in Thailand after the police used water cannon and tear gas against demonstrators the previous day. At least 55 people were treated in hospital on Tuesday, including six with gunshot wounds.

The protests, which have lasted for months, took place as the Thai national assembly considered seven motions to amend the country’s anti-democratic 2017 constitution drawn up by the military junta that seized power in a coup in 2014. The coup leader and now prime minister—former army chief Prayuth Chan-ocha—instigated the “national consultation” in a bid to enlist the support of opposition parties and defuse the ongoing demonstrations.

Protesters occupy a main road as they gather at a junction in Bangkok, Thailand, October 15, 2020 [Credit: AP Photo/Sakchai Lalit]

The politically heterogeneous protest movement has centred on demands for a new constitution, Prayuth’s resignation, and measures to curb the monarchy. This includes the repeal of a draconian lèse majesté law under which anyone deemed to be insulting the monarchy can be jailed for up to 15 years.

The national assembly met as a joint session of the 500-seat House and 250-seat Senate—the former was elected in 2019 and the latter consists of military appointees. Any motion required not only a majority of the joint sitting but the support of one third of the Senate, ensuring that it would not pass without the support of Prayuth and the top military brass.

Only two of the seven motions were passed yesterday—to establish a constitutional drafting committee with a limited scope. In particular, it will have no mandate to change clauses of the constitution related to the military. A motion by iLaw, the Internet Law Reform Dialogue, that would have allowed all aspects of the constitution to be changed, was defeated. The two motions that were passed still have to be ratified by a second and third vote, then by King Maha Vajiralongkorn.

Thousands of protesters gathered on Tuesday at a rally held outside the national assembly building in a bid to influence legislators. Police turned water cannon on the demonstrators after they attempted to break through barricades and enter the grounds of the legislature. Clashes also broke out with pro-monarchy supporters who hurled stones and other objects at the protesters.

Panumas “James” Singprom, a leader of the Free Youth group, said that three protesters were shot and two had suffered broken legs. Police claimed that they did not fire live ammunition, but did confirm that one protester had been shot in the thigh, and a passerby had also been shot in the hip. Erawan emergency services said that six people had received gunshot wounds and three remained in hospital.

While some reports indicate that the gunshots occurred after the police withdrew, the police and military have a record of using provocateurs. The clashes that ensued with pro-monarchy supporters may well have been used to turn firearms on the protesters in a bid to intimidate them and could presage a far more aggressive crackdown by the military-backed government.

The violent attacks on the pro-democracy protesters provoked a large turn-out yesterday. By Wednesday evening, more than 10,000 demonstrators surrounded a police headquarters building in Bangkok which was splashed with blue and yellow paint—the colours of the chemically-laced water fired at protesters the previous day.

Sucharn Thoumrungroje, a 20-year-old engineering student, said he decided to attend Wednesday’s rally after learning of what happened at the national assembly on Tuesday. “I feel that it is unacceptable that the state used force against its people,” he told Associated Press. “I understand that there are risks in taking part in rallies but I will come as much as I can to show that we are not afraid and stand firm on our demands.”

Before the demonstration broke up, a large protest was announced for November 25 at the offices of the Crown Property Bureau, which manages the vast holdings of Thailand’s royal palace. Its resources, controlled by King Maha Vajiralongkorn, are estimated to be worth more than $40 billion.

The protracted protests reflect deep-seated hostility among young people in particular to the anti-democratic methods used by the traditional Bangkok elites—the monarchy, military and state bureaucracy—to maintain their political domination. The military, with the support of the monarchy, ousted democratically-elected governments in 2006 and 2014—the first led by the billionaire businessman Thaksin Shinawatra, the second by his sister Yingluck Shinawatra.

The current government is nothing more than a thinly veiled front for the military and its allies. Moreover, while he stepped down as army commander in chief to become prime minister, Prayuth has never been elected. He was appointed as an “outside prime minister” by a joint session of the national assembly, as allowed in the 2017 constitution.

The Shinawatras and their Pheu Thai party represent a layer of the Thai ruling class whose interests have been frustrated by the traditional elites and their business cronies. At the 2019 election, young voters supported the Future Forward Party (FFP) founded by Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit, a top executive of the Thai Summit Group, which was established by his father and is the largest auto parts manufacturer in the country. Thanathorn was disqualified from parliament earlier this year on trumped-up charges and the FFP dissolved. Its MPs have now formed the Move Forward Party (MFP).

Both opposition parties are seeking to exploit the protests to extract concessions from the military-backed regime. However, these oppositional layers of the ruling class are far more fearful of the student protests sparking a mass movement of the working class, than they are of the military. Moreover, neither party has any fundamental commitment to democratic rights and improved living conditions for working people. In office, Thaksin Shinawatra was notorious for imposing pro-market restructuring and instigating a murderous “war on drugs.”

The danger confronting the student movement is the lack of a clear political perspective. As is the case around the world, the struggle for democratic rights is completely bound up with the fight to abolish capitalism which, in its worsening crisis, is driving the ruling classes to autocratic methods of rule. A genuine struggle for democracy requires a turn to the working class and the fight for a socialist future.

Macron prepares “global security” law banning the filming of French police

Anthony Torres & Alex Lantier

On Tuesday, President Emmanuel Macron’s government presented its “global security” bill to the National Assembly. Coming after the announcement of plans for a law against “separatism” ostensibly targeting Islamist groups, this bill is part of a campaign to establish a permanent state of emergency, handing draconian powers to the police.

Its provisions are unprecedented. Anyone publishing of images of a public event including police agents in a way that could “harm the agent’s physical or psychological well-being” faces one year in jail and a €45,000 fine. This purely subjective criterion, which allows police to arrest anyone filming them simply by stating that they feel uncomfortable being filmed, undermines freedom of the press and any attempt to hold security forces accountable for police brutality.

Emmanuel Macron (en.kremlin.ru)

The law also grants police vast new powers to carry out video-surveillance of the population. Access to security cameras in stores or public institutions as well as apartment complexes will be granted not only to national but also municipal police. Moreover, the bill authorises police to deploy drones with facial recognition technology to overfly and monitor public protest marches.

It comes, moreover, after it emerged that the government quietly slipped a provision into its law authorising university research funding to effectively ban protests in universities. It reads: “Penetrating or remaining in an institution of higher education without authorisation by legislative or regulatory acts or by the appropriate authorities, in order to disturb the tranquility or good order of the establishment, can face penalties.” These include three years in prison and a €45,000 fine.

It is evident that, after years of mounting social protests in France and internationally, a turning point has been reached. After bloody repression of strikes and “yellow vest” protests, the Macron government was terrified by international mass protests that erupted, including in France, after the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis this spring. Facing mounting public anger at the massive death toll from COVID-19, the ruling elite is trying to establish a police dictatorship.

Unsustainable levels of social inequality and the state criminality like that revealed by the pandemic are everywhere undermining whatever remains of democratic forms of rule. In America, Trump is refusing to admit defeat in the presidential elections and launching a coup, appealing to far-right militias to try to keep him in office. In France, the government is trampling upon constitutionally protected rights, such as press freedom and the right to protest, ramming through an illegitimate law in a desperate attempt to silence opposition by creating a climate of police terror.

There is no question that this law is illegitimate and incompatible with a democratic form of government. The United Nations Human Rights Council and the French government’s own human rights ombudsman have both denounced the law as violating fundamental democratic principles.

The UN noted that publishing images of police is “not only essential to respect the right to free information, but also legitimate in order to exercise democratic control of public institutions. Their absence could in particular prevent the documentation of potential abuses and excessive use of force by security forces during demonstrations.” The UN warned that by enacting the law, France would violate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as well as the European Convention of Human Rights.

Claire Héron, France’s human rights ombudsman, warned that the law is “not necessary to protect police and paramilitary police, unduly threatens freedom of expression, and creates obstacles to control their action.” She also found that filming demonstrators as under the terms of the law could “directly threaten the privacy” of demonstrators and “potentially threaten the freedom to demonstration, which the state is tasked with protecting.”

While the bill was being presented to the National Assembly, journalists’ unions and human rights groups held protests against this antidemocratic law. In Toulouse, around 1,300 people, including “yellow vest” protesters marking the two-year anniversary of their protests, met in the city centre and were dispersed by riot police firing tear gas an hour later. Around 700 attended in Bordeaux and Lyon, where protests took place before the police prefecture, as well as several hundred in Marseille and Rennes, on Republic Square.

In Paris, several hundred protesters gathered in front of the National Assembly on Tuesday, while deputies inside began debating the bill. Riot police surrounded them, firing volleys of tear gas and arresting 33 people.

A journalist at the France3 public television station filming the demonstration on assignment with a cell phone was arrested and detained. “Identified by his press card, he was nonetheless arrested and freed today in the early afternoon. No reason for the detention was given and no charges were filed,” France3-Paris stated, adding that it “condemns with the greatest firmness this abusive and arbitrary arrest of a journalist while at work.”

France’s public television authority issued a statement, declaring: “Management of France-Télévisions condemns this restriction on press freedom and the exercise of the right to inform” and “reserves the right to undertake necessary legal action.”

Nonetheless, members of Macron’s Republic on the March (LREM) party insisted they would ram the law through at all costs. Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin, who while presenting his “anti-separatism” law has appealed to anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim sentiment by denouncing kosher and halal food aisles in supermarkets, made clear that this law is intended to muzzle the press.

Darmanin defended the arrest of French state television personnel, saying that if they want to cover demonstrations, journalists “must be closer to the authorities” and “furnish them with reports.”

A fascist stench is rising from the Macron administration. Jean-Michel Fauvergue, a co-sponsor of the “global security” bill and the former leader of the French national police’s RAID assault squad, indicated that he felt censorship is necessary to stem rising public outrage at the state and the security forces. He said that the law would “win back terrain” lost in the “war of images” that “authority, the state in particular, is currently losing.”

Fauvergue did not say it, but the target of the war waged by the state is the people, and above all the working class.

In the last five years, countless videos on social media have exposed acts of savage police brutality against “yellow vest” protesters, striking transport workers, and student protesters. During the “yellow vest” protests alone, more than 11,000 people were arrested and detained, over 4,400 wounded by police, two-dozen people lost eyes and five lost hands, while one onlooker, Zineb Redouane, aged 80, was shot and killed with a police tear gas canister. The Macron government decorated the police officer who led the unit that killed Redouane.

Fighting the Macron administration’s fascistic policies, including its policy of forcing workers and youth to remain at work and school and thus spread the coronavirus, requires the independent political mobilisation of the working class on a socialist and internationalist programme. The union bureaucracies and their political allies, including the big-business Socialist Party (PS) and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s Rebellious France (LFI) party are all integrated into the police-state apparatus.

While LFI official Danièle Obono criticised the “global security” bill for potentially encouraging “self-censorship” in France, Hervé Saulignac for the PS commented: “There are red lines that should not be crossed. Even [former conservative President Nicolas] Sarkozy never went that far.” These criticisms are hypocritical, however: it was the PS that set into motion the suspension of democratic rights, imposing a two-year state of emergency in 2015. Mélenchon’s legislative group voted for the state of emergency in the National Assembly at the time.

The “global security” law is in the direct continuity of the policy carried out by the PS, backed by the LFI, preparing the legal terrain for Macron to install a permanent state of emergency.

The twin threats of COVID-19 and the financial aristocracy’s drive to dictatorship pose vast challenges to workers and youth. Halting the virus at schools and workplaces worldwide requires the forming of safety committees—independent from the unions, which support the back-to-work drive—to inform workers and students, and press for a lock-down policy allowing them to safely shelter at home. Fighting the drive to dictatorship requires a socialist political movement, fighting to transfer power to such independent bodies of the working class in France and internationally.

Over 800 nurses strike Philadelphia area hospital for improved staffing

Samuel Davidson

Over 800 nurses at St. Mary Medical Center in Langhorne, Pennsylvania, 30 miles northeast of Philadelphia in Bucks County, went on strike Tuesday morning after management refused their demands to improve staffing levels at the hospital. Working conditions for the staff are at dangerously low levels, endangering nurses and patients amid the surging COVID-19 pandemic.

Like the United States in general, Pennsylvania has seen a spike in infections with the seven-day average for new cases climbing tenfold from 500 in July-August to over 5,000 now. The positivity rate has shot up from 5.9 percent to 23.1 percent during the same period.

Nurses on the picket line. (Image Credit: PASNAP/Facebook)

Last week, 911 emergency responders had to divert all new patients from St. Mary’s for 15 hours because the hospital was full and could not handle any more patients. The strike at St. Mary’s is only the latest expression of growing outrage of healthcare workers throughout the United States who are risking their lives without adequate resources while officials allow the pandemic to spread uncontrolled.

Beth Redwine, a nurse, told the Philadelphia Inquirer that she and her co-workers are striking for the community. “Truly, the reason we are out here is that, God forbid, they have to come to the hospital, we can give them the care and attention they deserve,” she said. Other nurses told the paper that it is impossible to keep staff when they can get paid $6-7 an hour more at nearby hospitals.

Understaffing is particularly dangerous because hospital workers must place a COVID-19 patient on their stomach to help with the task of breathing with a ventilator. This life-saving technique, called “proning,” requires “up to a half-dozen nurses and aides to perform,” Rebecca Givans, a labor studies specialist at Rutgers University, told National Public Radio. “Having a shortage of staff means that every COVID patient cannot have that level of care and people may die because of that.”

Nurses at St. Mary Medical Center voted to join the Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals (PASNAP) last year, but the union has not been able to negotiate its first contract yet. Nurses voted by 85 percent to authorize the strike.

Hospital management has attacked the nurses for walking off the job during the pandemic and has pledged to keep the hospital working with non-union staff. Although the union announced that the strike would only last two days, the hospital said it would not allow nurses to return to work until Sunday.

“We are hearing concerns from our community that PASNAP, which has placed patient safety at the center of their platform, would choose this time—when the country and our local community contend with a COVID-19 surge—to exercise their right to strike,” hospital officials said in a statement.

This is completely cynical for officials who sit in corporate offices far away from the viral spread and more concerned about containing costs and boosting shareholder returns than ensuring safe conditions for patients and hospital workers alike.

St. Mary’s is one of the most profitable hospitals in the Philadelphia area, making an average of $58 million in profits in each of the last three years. It is owned by Livonia, Michigan-based Trinity Health, a massive “non-profit” Catholic health system, which operates 93 hospitals and 120 continuing care locations in 22 states. Trinity CEO Michael Slubowski pocketed $2.5 million in the year ending June 2019, according to company records.

Trinity received $600 million in federal grants in April and May as part of the $175 billion CARES Act bailout of healthcare providers by the US Congress and another $1.6 billion of Medicare advance payments. Nevertheless, Trinity has furloughed workers and slashed costs to compensate for lost income during the pandemic.

This has only increased the dangers of exposure for health care workers who have seen 1,700 of their colleagues die from COVID-19 since the pandemic began.

“Who is going to take care of my two daughters if I get sick and die,” asked a Pittsburgh nurse who is supporting the strike. “There is no one to care for them. Worse yet, what if I bring it home to them and one of them gets sick.”

“Healthcare workers are not slaves. They are in no way obligated to work in unsafe conditions,” one commenter supporting the strike posted on social media.

The number of COVID-19 cases in Pennsylvania is only expected to rise as the winter months set in. This weekend, hundreds of thousands of college students, many infected with the coronavirus, return home for the extended winter break and will only lead to greater spread.

In the face of the growing pandemic, the Democratic administration of Governor Tom Wolf has taken no action to stop the spread. He is following the lead of Republican President Donald Trump and President-elect Joe Biden, repeatedly stating that the government will not issue another stay-at-home order.

Nurses at three other Philadelphia area hospitals have also voted to strike. While nurses at Mercy Fitzgerald in Delaware County reached a tentative contract, staff at St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children in Philadelphia and nearby Einstein Medical Center have voted overwhelmingly to strike.

PASNAP has not called out these nurses, forcing the St. Mary’s nurses to strike on their own. PASNAP and other unions do not want a broader struggle which would immediately come into conflict with the Wolf administration and the Democratic Party.

St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children in Philadelphia was bought last year by Tower Health and Drexel University, which began cutting staff almost immediately. The hospital has closed down one of two floors that care for children suffering lesser afflictions. This move forced staff to keep children longer in the emergency room and intensive care then they need to be.

One registered nurse at St. Christopher’s told CNN that staffing was the “number one issue.” In a scathing denunciation of the for-profit health care system, the nurse said. “We’re in an era of health care being run by hedge fund groups. They do not care about where or how long they run as long as they make them profitable. They’re not invested in these hospitals.”

While nursing staff is being cut, Clint Matthews, the CEO of Tower Health made nearly $2.8 million last year, and Einstein CEO Barry Freedman’s made nearly $4 million.

Peaceful antiwar protesters sentenced to federal prison terms during pandemic

Kevin Reed

Three Catholic activists from the group known as the Kings Bay Plowshares Seven were sentenced last week to between 10-14 months in federal prison for protesting against nuclear weapons at a US naval base in St. Mary’s, Georgia on April 4, 2018.

The sentences of the Catholic Worker antiwar protesters were handed down in a virtual courtroom by Judge Lisa Godbey Wood of the US District Court for the Southern District of Georgia.

Kings Bay Plowshares Seven on April 4, 2018 before they entered the US naval base to protest against nuclear armed submarines. [Photo credit: kingsbayplowshares7.org]

Carmen Trotta, 58, of New York City and Clare Grady, 62, of Ithaca, New York, were sentenced to 14 and 12 months in prison, respectively, on November 12. Martha Hennessy, 65, was sentenced to 10 months on November 13. All three were also sentenced to three years of supervised probation along with restitution payments of $25 per week. Hennessy is the granddaughter of Dorothy Day, the founder in the 1930s of the Catholic Worker movement.

Although Judge Wood imposed less time than specified by court sentencing guidelines, she rejected appeals from supporters of the protesters that they get no prison terms at all under conditions of the raging coronavirus pandemic.

As Martha Hennessy told the Intercept, “I’m hoping that with the amount of time that I’ve been given, that I will be there only briefly, and then I hopefully will be sent either to a halfway house or home confinement,” adding, “There are millions of people who are trapped and contracting Covid-19 and dying in the prison system. Ninety percent of prisoners are people dealing with violence, trauma, poverty, addiction, neglect, abuse in childhood—and this is how we’re treating them?”

Kings Bay Plowshare Seven attorney Matthew Daloisio said that the defendants have been punished enough and warned that some of them have previous health conditions that make them more susceptible to serious harm from the pandemic. Daloisio added that he questions why prison would be applicable to the protesters at all.

The seven Plowshares activists were charged with three felonies—conspiracy, destruction of government property and depredation—and misdemeanor trespass for breaking into the Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base and carrying out various nonviolent acts of protest against the presence of six nuclear submarines armed with 20 Trident warheads at the base.

They broke into the naval base by using a bolt cutter on a remote gate and then walked two miles through swamps to locations where they prayed, splashed bottles of their own blood onto a wall, spray painted messages against nuclear weapons onto a sidewalk, hammered on parts of a shrine to nuclear missiles and hung protest banners before they were arrested.

The Kings Bay naval facility, which covers 16,000 square acres in Camden County, Georgia—approximately 35 miles north of Jacksonville, Florida—is the US Atlantic Fleet’s home port for the nuclear-armed submarines.

The defendants were convicted on all four counts against them on October 24, 2019 after a two-day 12-member jury trial at which they were barred from citing their religious convictions or mounting what is known as a “necessity defense” and argue that their lawbreaking was necessary to halt the far greater crime of nuclear war.

The sentencing of Trotta, Grady and Hennessy follows by approximately one month the sentencing of Plowshares protesters Patrick O’Neill of Garner, North Carolina, to 14 months and two years of probation, and Jesuit Father Steve Kelly of the Bay Area in California, to 33 months, minus time served since the incident, plus three years of probation. Catholic Worker activist Elizabeth McAllister of New London, Connecticut, was sentenced in June to time served, plus three years of probation, after spending more than 17 months in prison awaiting trial.

The final member of the Kings Bay Plowshares Seven, Mark Colville, 59, of New Haven, Connecticut, has been granted a delay of his sentencing hearing until December 18 because he refused to waive his right to appear before the judge in open court instead of attending a virtual hearing.

The three activists that appeared before Judge Wood last week were permitted to make statements prior to their sentencing. Carmen Trotta told the court, “[I] deeply believe that what our country needs, desperately, is a great deal more resistance to its ongoing foreign policy, which is a threat to the globe, not merely for nuclear weapons, but even through, simply, the ongoing war.”

The aggressive prosecution, conviction and sentencing of the peaceful antinuclear war Plowshares protesters—who chose to take their nonviolent action on the 50th anniversary of the assassination of the Martin Luther King, Jr.—demonstrate that the political and judicial establishment in the US cannot tolerate organized political opposition to imperialist militarism and war.

As has also been the case throughout the protests against police violence that began last spring following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis cops on Memorial Day, the ruling elite is prepared to use the forces of state repression against peaceful protesters demanding equality and basic democratic rights.