Stanford academic senate condemns Scott Atlas

Jonathan Burleigh

The Stanford faculty senate voted by over 85 percent to condemn the COVID-19-related actions of right-wing Trump administration adviser and Stanford-affiliated Hoover Institution senior fellow Scott Atlas. This principled stand against Atlas, a prominent ideological architect of the US government’s murderous herd immunity policy, demonstrates the overwhelming support within the scientific establishment for a rational, science-based approach to addressing the COVID-19 pandemic.

Dr. Scott Atlas speaks at a White House press briefing, August 12, 2020. (Screengrab via Fox Business/YouTube)

The resolution highlights six actions taken by Atlas that “promote a view of COVID-19 that contradicts medical science.” According to the Stanford Daily, these actions include, “discouraging the use of masks and other protective measures, misrepresenting knowledge and opinion regarding the management of pandemics, endangering citizens and public officials, showing disdain for established medical knowledge and damaging Stanford’s reputation and academic standing.”

Atlas, a neuroradiologist with no background or expertise in public health or epidemiology, has risen to international prominence as an opponent of basic public health measures to contain the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. The same stances, which have rightfully earned the criticism of Stanford faculty, are precisely the reason he was elevated to the position of Trump’s top COVID-19 adviser in August 2020. Director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Disease Dr. Anthony Fauci reported to the Washington Post that Atlas is “the only medical person who sees the president on a regular basis.”

Notably, an amendment to the resolution introduced by psychiatry professor David Spiegel calling for the University to consider sanctions against Atlas, including dismissal, passed by 59 percent. As Spiegel noted, “there is clear evidence that Atlas has violated Stanford’s code of conduct, as well as that of the AMA [American Medical Association].” However, a subsequent amendment removed language about disciplinary action, with its proponents citing concerns about curtailing academic freedom.

This reversal among faculty voters was no doubt due in part from pressure applied by the university administration, which continues to back the Hoover Institution. Although university officials have taken pains to distance themselves and the university from Atlas’s views while shielding him, Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne commented that he was “deeply troubled by the views by Dr. Atlas, including his call to ‘rise up’ in Michigan,” which “was widely interpreted as an undermining of local health authorities, and even a call to violence.” Noting the detrimental role of Atlas’s views on public health, Tessier-Lavigne continued, “We’re therefore compelled to distance the university from Dr. Atlas’s views in the strongest possible terms.”

Even Bush administration national security adviser, unindicted war criminal Condoleezza Rice, the director of the Hoover Institution, was compelled to criticize Atlas’s “rise up” tweet as “offensive and well beyond the boundaries of what is appropriate for someone in a position of authority, such as the one he holds.”

The resolution passed Thursday is the culmination of a campaign that began with a September 9 open letter from 98 Stanford medical faculty that first raised criticisms of Atlas. Atlas’s lawyer responded by threatening to sue the signatories for defamation if they did not immediately retract their claims. The faculty bravely refused to give in to this bullying and continued their campaign. Stanford Provost Persis Drell, representing university administration, threatened these faculty with disciplinary action for “inappropriately” sending their open letter to a faculty email list.

The Hoover Institution, founded in 1919 as an archive of World War I documents, formally became part of Stanford University in 1959. Unlike academic university departments, whose job is to advance humanity’s knowledge of truth, former President Herbert Hoover explained its role as follows: “The purpose of this institution must be, by its research and publications to demonstrate the evils of the doctrines of Karl Marx—whether communism, socialism, economic materialism or atheism—thus to protect the American way of life from such ideologies, their conspiracies, and to reaffirm the validity of the American system.” Hoover’s commitment to this mission was reaffirmed in 2019 by its director at the time, Thomas Gilligan.

Unlike Stanford professors, Hoover fellows do not go through the tenure process required of professors. Instead, they are given appointments by an institution answerable only to the president of the university. These fellows are then able to legitimize their views through their Stanford affiliation. Past and present Hoover fellows include Iraq War architects Donald Rumsfeld, Rice and Reagan-era Secretary of State George Shultz.

Hoover has played a central role in fabricating pseudoscientific arguments supportive of herd immunity policies. As early as March 16, Hoover senior fellow Richard Epstein claimed that only about 500 Americans would die from COVID-19. In April, Hoover research fellow Jay Bhattacharya coauthored a now thoroughly debunked study of COVID-19 antibody prevalence whose statistical analysis bordered on fraud to suggest that the virus was much less deadly than previously understood. Bhattacharya was also a signatory of the Great Barrington Declaration, an open call for governments to pursue mass infections of COVID-19 in hopes of achieving “herd immunity.”

That Hoover fellows were openly denying the dangers of the pandemic as early as March is all the more sinister given that high-level Hoover officials were notified directly by the Trump administration in February of the dangers of the pandemic. This memo was then distributed to financial institutions, who were able to sell assets in advance of the impending stock market dive.

Stanford faculty have occasionally challenged the anticommunist institution’s presence on campus, with campaigns from the 1960s to the 1980s calling on the university to reevaluate Hoover’s affiliation with Stanford. However, the university administration clearly values the ties Hoover brings to powerful sections of the ruling class.

Stanford Provost Persis Drell rebutted such calls this October questioning Hoover’s role as part of Stanford, stating that “they are, in fact, us.”

The vote by 85 percent of Stanford faculty to condemn Atlas’s positions and by 59 percent for disciplinary action of this high-level figure in the fascistic Trump administration was a significant act. This illustrates that there is a powerful constituency among scientists and researchers for public health policy based on science. That the primary opposition to these humane sentiments comes from an institution founded on anticommunism only illustrates in the negative that a world in which policy is based on science is a socialist world.

Mass opposition among healthcare workers as estimated deaths exceed 20,000

Katy Kinner

The International Council of Nurses (ICN), a federation of 130 national nurse associations across the globe, has confirmed the deaths of 1,500 nurses across 44 countries, equal to the number of nurse deaths in World War I. The council also estimates that up to 20,000 health care workers may have died from the virus.

26-year-old Cardiology Nurse Pauline Reynier puts on a mask as she leaves her shift at the La Timone hospital in Marseille. Only her second day working in the covid-19 ICU, Reynier has been called up to reinforce a fatigued and dwindling nursing staff. Thursday, Nov. 12, 2020. (AP Photo/Daniel Cole)

The ICN arrives at this figure by estimating that health care workers make up approximately 10 percent of the global COVID-19 cases. While case fatality is roughly 2.6 percent internationally, the ICN has cautiously used a low estimate of 0.5 percent case fatality among health care workers to arrive at more than 20,000 health care worker deaths internationally.

In comparison, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimate of US health care worker infections and deaths seems shockingly low, at 228,553 infections and 822 deaths. The US government has no comprehensive record of the frontline health care workers who have died of COVID-19 and the CDC itself has acknowledged that its counts are a vast underestimate. In their examination, health care worker status was only confirmed for 21 percent of the more than 8 million surveyed, and death status was only available for 73 percent of those surveyed.

Data from journalists at the Guardian, in conjunction with Kaiser Health News, are searching through obituary websites, nurse union websites, and sites like GoFundMe.com in order to calculate a more accurate US death count and to tell the stories of the deceased workers. Their ever-growing list of health care worker deaths has reached 1,396.

Messages blare across the mainstream media that individuals who refuse to wear masks or quarantine appropriately are to blame for these deaths. Across social media, nurses and other health care workers write statements or make videos pleading with individuals to forgo holiday gatherings and to take the virus seriously. One cartoon depicts health care workers performing CPR on a COVID-19 patient while the other side of the frame shows people laughing and drinking at a bar without masks.

The real responsibility, however, for the explosion of cases is the world’s ruling class and its apologists who base all social and economic decisions on the needs and interests of the capitalist profit system. Schools, workplaces, bars and restaurants are opened against expert scientific advice as students and workers fall ill, die or suffer long term health issues after their initial infection.

These illnesses and deaths exacerbate the dangerous conditions in the hospitals as staffing is stretched increasingly thin and health care workers’ physical and mental endurance wanes in the tenth month of the battle against the coronavirus. Cases and hospitalizations are reaching record highs as hospital staffing is set to reach record lows.

The Cleveland Clinic, a renowned medical center with affiliate hospitals across Ohio, confirmed last week that nearly 1,000 caregivers are currently off work with COVID-19 infections, triple the number out sick two weeks ago. “Caregiver” is a term the hospital system uses for all employees from nurses to janitorial staff to HR workers, but the infection rates are likely much higher among employees on the front lines. A letter sent out to employees from CEO Tom Mihaljevic cynically stated that these infections are a result of community spread and are not contracted at the workplace.

A Cleveland Clinic nurse recently spoke with the World Socialist Web Site about conditions in the hospital: “I don’t work on a COVID-19 unit, but I have heard that they are filling up. Surgeons who work on my unit have been told to cancel all surgeries that require recovery in the [intensive care unit]. While staffing seems to be acceptable right now, I know that won’t last.

“I’m extremely concerned that the hospital could end up in a situation where it requires hiring a pool of travel nurses. The issue is every hospital is going to be drawing from that same pool. In April we had hotspots in major cities and travel nurses could be deployed to New York City or Los Angeles. Cleveland Clinic even sent a group of nurses to NYC. But now it’s Bismarck, Pittsburgh, El Paso, Southern Ohio; it’s everywhere.”

When asked about the recent announcement from the state health officer in North Dakota that asymptomatic health care workers infected with COVID-19 will continue to work in the COVID-19 units of their hospitals, the Cleveland Clinic nurse added, “It is a horrendous policy. However, in my opinion, this is likely happening in a more subtle way at hospitals across the country.”

She continued, “At Cleveland Clinic, which often sets a national example for other hospital systems, it is difficult to get a COVID-19 test even if you have symptoms. You have to have the correct set of symptoms. My coworkers and I have had experiences of being exposed to the virus, developing symptoms, but not being able to get a test. In a sense, this is asking us to work with coronavirus.”

Mass opposition is growing among health care workers against the criminal policies of governments and hospital systems that have continued to put their lives at risk. Just in the past month, hospital laundry workers in Manhattan and nurses in Flint, Michigan, East Liverpool, Ohio, and Langhorne, Pennsylvania, have gone on strike or threatened to strike against unsafe working conditions.

Additionally, hundreds of workers at 11 Illinois locations of Infinity Health Care Management nursing homes will begin a strike today against low staffing levels, poor pay and the lack of proper personal protective equipment. These workers are members of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).

Over 800 nurses at St. Mary Medical Center in Langhorne, Pennsylvania, 30 miles northeast of Philadelphia in Bucks County, went on strike November 17 after management refused their demands to improve dangerously low staffing levels.

St. Mary’s nurses voted to join the Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals (PASNAP) last year. The union, however, has not yet been able to negotiate the first contract, pushing 85 percent of the nurses to authorize the strike.

St. Mary’s is owned by Michigan-based Trinity Health, a massive “non-profit” Catholic health system, which operates 93 hospitals and 120 continuing care locations in 22 states. Trinity received $600 million in federal grants in April and May as part of the $175 billion CARES Act bailout of health care providers by the US Congress and another $1.6 billion of Medicare advance payments.

Hospital management has worked to suffocate the strike, replacing workers with non-union staff and travel nurses. While the union only authorized a two-day strike, striking nurses were not allowed to return to work until Sunday in order to allow the temporary nurses to finish out their five-day contract.

St. Mary’s nurses returned to work Sunday with no contract. Even if a contract deal is reached in the coming days, nurses should hold no illusions in PASNAP. In early November, PASNAP reached a deal with Trinity Health System at Mercy Fitzgerald Hospital averting a planned walkout by 260 nurses. The new contract was vague and does little to ensure safer working conditions. The three percent wage increase for three years will barely keep pace with inflation, and the precise number of offered additional staff is unclear.

A rally held during the first day of the strike gave St. Mary’s nurses a chance to express their anger and frustration over their working conditions. Nurses spoke in front of a banner that read “243,” the number of nurses who have left the hospital in the last two years. Many nurses expressed anger that hourly pay at St. Mary’s is several dollars less than nearby hospitals, leading many nurses to seek employment elsewhere, further worsening staffing ratios and patient safety.

Coy Clark, an ICU nurse, who is also a COVID-19 survivor, said, “Trinity Health is telling patients that everything is separated. There are different elevators for COVID and non-COVID patients, there are different entrances, the entire lobby is even separated. What Trinity doesn’t tell you is that this separation stops when you get to the unit. Then your nurse has multiple COVID patients and you.”

Clark contracted COVID-19 from work and was out sick for three weeks. “When I came back in April, life was a living hell. We had to wear the same mask for 15 days. We had to wipe down our blue gowns and reuse them. Then we got new gowns... where the label said, ‘not for medical use.’ All the while, the administration is as snug as a bug in their offices. They aren’t short staffed. They haven’t gotten rid of their secretaries, they don’t care about us.”

A medical-surgical nurse, Kathy, said, “Hospitals need to be brought back to health care instead of turning into corporate entities where watching the stock market is more important than the health of our community.”

While recent health care strikes have broken out in response to expired contracts, the concerns of nurses are tied to the broader crisis of health care in the United States, a product of a decades-long social counterrevolution in which the health care infrastructure has been pushed to the brink in the interests of enriching a tiny oligarchy. Prior to the COVID-19 outbreak, rural hospitals hemorrhaged funding; nursing shortages and unsafe staffing ratios pushed nurses across the country to protest; and deep cuts to Medicaid created provider shortages and spiraling health care costs.

The degradation of the health care system has been abetted by the various health care-related unions in conjunction with the political establishment. Unions have repeatedly accepted sellout contracts and endorsed Democratic Party candidates who push through policies that worsen the conditions of nurses, including recent school and business reopenings that have undoubtedly contributed to the recent surge of the pandemic.

Dozens killed in Uganda as police and military carry out brutal crackdown on protests

Eddie Haywood

Thirty-seven people were killed by security forces, scores of others injured and hundreds more detained after two days of protests shook Uganda’s capital city Kampala and several other towns last week. The largest unrest in the East African country in a decade was sparked by the arrest of presidential candidate Bobi Wine during a campaign rally Wednesday.

After a campaign stop in Luuka, a town in eastern Uganda, police arrested Wine, claiming he violated the Electoral Commission’s guidelines against holding political rallies with more than 200 persons, breaking a decree made by the election body in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Wine was released on bail on Friday.

Wine’s arrest was the second in less than a month. On Nov. 3 Wine was arrested shortly after filling out forms to register his candidacy, with television cameras recording police pulling him from his car.

Ugandan supporters of opposition presidential candidate Bobi Wine protest his arrest and call for his release and an end to police brutality, outside the Ugandan High Commission in Nairobi, Kenya Thursday, Nov. 19, 2020 (AP Photo)

Wine and several other opposition politicians have faced arrest, beatings and torture from police forces in a blatant attempt at intimidation by the ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM) party, led by President Yoweri Museveni.

After the news of Wine’s arrest, thousands of protesters immediately took to the streets in the capital city and other major towns across the country, setting tires afire and occupying major thoroughfares, shouting the slogan, “Free Bobi Wine!”

In a brutal response to the protests, large numbers of Ugandan police, augmented by a contingent of troops from the Ugandan People’s Defence Force (UPDF), the armed forces of Uganda, deployed to repress the demonstrations.

Security forces fired live rounds and deployed armored vehicles in attempt to brutally quell the social unrest in Kampala. Other towns and cities also saw a heavy-handed police crackdown on demonstrators.

Security Minister Elly Tumwine told the media that “the police have a right to shoot protesters dead if they reach a certain level of violence.” Ensuring reporters had heard him correctly, he emphasized, “Can I repeat? Police have a right to shoot you and you die for nothing… do it at your own risk.”

Lieutenant Colonel Deo Akiki, spokesman for the UPDF, announced that the army would take charge of security specifically in Kampala, Mukono, Wakiso and Entebbe, for the duration of the election season. Additionally, he stated UPDF soldiers would occupy various other areas around the country.

Kampala police spokesman Patrick Onyango denounced as criminals the youth and workers who largely comprised the mass demonstrations. “We want to warn the youths who have been lured into participating in illegal activities to desist from participating in such acts. The joint security teams are on top of the situation and will handle anyone who attempts to destabilise the capital city.”

In a demagogic response to the protests on Thursday, President Museveni told a campaign rally in the northern Ugandan town of Karamoja that protesters “were being used by outsiders… homosexuals and others who don’t like the stability and independence of Uganda. But they will discover what they are looking for. We shall not tolerate confused people. They are playing with fire.”

Wine, a popular reggae music artist, whose real name is Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu, was first elected to the National Assembly in 2017, representing Kyaddondo East, in Wakiso district, an extremely impoverished and densely populated area located a few miles east of Kampala.

After growing up in Kamwokya, one of the most impoverished sections in Kampala, Wine attended Makerere University, studying music, dance and drama, obtaining a diploma in 2003. He began his music career shortly thereafter, recording several hit songs, performing in the distinctive musical style known as Afrobeats, which catapulted him to popularity in the East African music scene.

Standing as the candidate for the newly formed National Unity Platform party (NUP), Wine is challenging Museveni in the election set to take place on Jan. 14, 2021, presenting himself as an anti-corruption, reformist candidate.

Since his election to the National Assembly, Wine has emerged as the most significant challenger to the longtime president, who has been in power since 1986 after taking power in a paramilitary coup.

The popular support Wine’s campaign has drawn, particularly from youth and poorer sections across the country, has rattled the incumbent Museveni regime.

Utilizing the slogan “Our People, Our Power,” Wine has made the central plank of his campaign the stated aim of uniting Ugandans against the human rights abuses and corruption of the Museveni government.

Making various pledges as a presidential candidate, Wine has advocated nothing more than a series of minor reforms which, if implemented, would do nothing to address the underlying social crisis ravaging the Uganda population. His promises to “increase business investment” in the country make clear he has no plans to disturb the flow of profits to the major corporations and banks which exploit the working class and peasantry.

The elections take place amid a period of acute social crisis gripping Uganda. The COVID-19 pandemic has ravaged the country, and as of Sunday, there are a total of 17,968 confirmed infections, with a rising infection rate showing no sign of slowing down.

The economic crisis has been exacerbated by the lockdown instituted by the Museveni government to control the pandemic, which has been accompanied by little governmental financial support for the masses who lost their means to make a living, driving millions of Ugandans to destitution.

The exploding social tensions and the economic crisis wracking Uganda must be understood as part of the broader breakdown of bourgeois capitalist rule across the African continent. The historic crisis of the capitalist system and its complete failure to address the social catastrophe afflicting the Ugandan masses makes it clear that only the working class, based on a socialist and internationalist perspective, can lead the fight for social equality and democratic rights.

Backed by the union, Mercedes plans to close its oldest factory in Berlin

Ludwig Weller

The Daimler group plans to discontinue production of the V6 diesel engine at its oldest plant in Berlin locality of Marienfelde. Eighty percent of the factory’s 2,500 jobs will be cut, the beginning of the end for the factory.

In closing the plant, Mercedes management is relying on intensive cooperation with the factory’s works council and the IG Metall union. For many decades, every corporate decision affecting the workforce made at Marienfelde, and all other Mercedes factories, has been discussed beforehand with the works councils, which then develop strategies for their implementation.

The rally in front of the Mercedes plant in Berlin-Marienfelde

One part of this rigged game are the pseudo-protests held at the factory gate with IG Metall flags and whistles, such as on November 12. IG Metall bureaucrats turned up and distributed flags, whistles and IGM caps to their stewards. The media was informed and the head steward of IG Metall Berlin, Jan Otto, made his appeal for the company management to act responsibly. Workers changing shift provided the background scenery for the IGM media show.

The aim of the rally was to provide a smokescreen and distract from the union’s own role in the closure of the plant. Under conditions of increasing discontent and anger on the part of workers over the closure, and growing signs of militancy at other Daimler factories and elsewhere against historically unprecedented cost-cutting measures, IG Metall is refusing to organise any sort of meaningful protest. On the contrary, the union is using the threat of closure to blackmail workers and impose drastic cuts to wages and working conditions.

The extent of the complicity of the unions became apparent last week at Lufthansa. In an act of complete submission, the three trade unions with members in Germany’s biggest airline offered the Lufthansa board of directors a €1.2 billion cut in incomes and the elimination of one-fifth of the workforce. The proposal involves wage reductions of up to 50 percent.

One day before their rally in Berlin, IG Metall announced via the press that the manager of the engine plant, René Reif, was to leave the company and switch to competitor firm Tesla. At the rally, the IG Metall functionaries and the chairman of the works council then loudly denounced this “betrayal” by the manager.

Jan Otto, who took over the highly remunerated post of head steward of IG Metall in Berlin two months ago, scolded the “soulless manager” who had changed sides and offered his services to a non-German company. Otto’s reactionary, nationalist ranting is well known from his time in Gorlitz, when he called for more government support against foreign competition and allowed the far right Alternative for Germany (AfD) to participate in an IGM demonstration.

Otto said nothing about the announced mass layoffs in other Mercedes plants and the billions in cost-cutting measures that the Daimler group has already imposed on the workforce in close cooperation with IG Metall.

He said nothing about the fact that the company, like the entire auto industry, is using the coronavirus pandemic to rapidly implement a long-planned program of massive cost-cutting. He also had no problem with the fact that, despite rapidly rising numbers of Corona infections, tens of thousands of Daimler workers are still being forced into the factories, risking their lives in the process. Nor does he care about the many other Daimler sites in Germany, Europe, and around the world that are to be closed or drastically cut back.

All his indignation was concentrated on his indictment of the “shameless” plant manager, who had let down the works council and IG Metall. In addition, he requested that company boss Ola Källenius organise a faster transition from combustion engine to electric motor production, a process in which IG Metall was ready to play its part.

Jan Otto appealed to the head of Daimler as an old friend: “Ola Källenius, you are making a mistake, what you are doing is nonsense, but you are lucky. We are here, we are saving you from the biggest mistake of your—hopefully not very short—career.”

Works council chairman Michael Rahmel sang the same tune—no less vociferously, but even more theatrically—openly admitting his own intimate and confidential collaboration with plant manager René Reif. Now these bureaucrats have been exposed as utterly empty-handed before the workforce. Workers’ anger over the role of the works council as the henchman of management is becoming more and more obvious, and opposition is growing day by day.

IGM Plenipotentiary Jan Otto

The closure of the Berlin plant is a turning point. It is the oldest Mercedes plant in the world still in production and was founded 118 years ago. In 1902, Daimler-Motoren-Gesellschaft took over an ailing engine factory and expanded it. In the same year, Daimler registered “Mercedes” as its brand name.

Initially, Daimler produced vehicles and ship engines in Marienfelde. In 1916/17, production was switched to armaments and the first German tank, the “A7V,” was developed and built there. In 1926, the company merged with Benz & Cie. to form Daimler-Benz AG. A huge engine plant was then built on an area of around 38,000 square meters.

For years, IG Metall argued that this tradition meant the company could not afford to shut down its Berlin factory. Time and time again, the works councils have lied to the workforce, declaring that a succession of job cuts was the price necessary to secure the site. These lies have now been completely exposed.

It is well known that works council leader Michael Rahmel is an integral member of company management. He sits in the select circle of the Supervisory Board of Mercedes-Benz AG, receives all relevant information, and pockets handsome remuneration and allowances. Together with the other heads of the Daimler/Mercedes works council, he regularly sits with management in the control centre of the global corporation, which has over 300,000 employees.

The list of bought and paid for union bureaucrats is extensive. At the very top is Michael Brecht, chairman of the central works council of Daimler AG. He is the deputy chairman of the company’s Supervisory Board, Mediation Committee, Presidential Committee and Audit Committee. In return, he receives compensation of almost €500,000 per year, plus countless bonuses. His actual salary is not even included in this figure; for his post as chairman of the central works council of Daimler AG, his salary is probably the same as that of a senior Daimler manager.

The union bureaucrats are not only embedded in management structures and well informed via the German system of “co-determination,” they also provide big corporations with sophisticated concepts and strategies. This support, usually invisible to the workforce, is essential for companies which would otherwise encounter direct resistance from workers when jobs and conditions are cut. These concepts are developed by the Hans-Böckler trade union foundation, which functions as a special type of management consultancy firm.

But there is more. This summer, IG Metall founded its own investment company called “Best Owner Group” (BOG). The BOG aims to buy up supplier companies threatened with insolvency, either whole or in part. In this way the supply chains of the auto companies are to be secured by preventing “over capacity” via cuts, or companies are shut down completely.

At the time, the WSWS wrote the following: “To date, IG Metall and its works councillors served as co-managers, helping to draft plans for restructuring and layoffs, and imposing them on the workers. Now they are going a step further and dismantling companies independently. Manager Magazin therefore humorously titled its report on the fund ‘The good vultures of IG Metall.’”

When it became known in the summer that company boss Ola Källenius wants to cut 30,000 jobs and close six plants, the German business periodical Manager Magazin headlined: “Daimler boss starts harshest program of cuts in history.” The Smart plant in Hambach, France, passenger car plant in Iracemápolis, Brazil, the new engine plant in Jawor, Poland, and a factory in Aguascalientes, Mexico are all to be closed down. In addition to the factory in Berlin-Marienfelde, the components plant in Hamburg and the Mercedes factory in Ludwigsfelde with its Sprinter production are also under threat.

The coronavirus crisis and technical changes in the auto industry are being used by investors and shareholders to clear the decks in the auto industry by laying off tens of thousands of workers, rip up social achievements fought for in the past and introduce slave-like conditions in the factories.

The unions, which defend the capitalist profit system and are closely linked to the nation-state, always act against the interests of workers. It is high time Daimler workers took action against this conspiracy between management and the works councils.

The right to work and decent wages stands higher than the obscene enrichment of major shareholders and their henchmen. The works councils must be forced to disclose all details of their secret negotiations with management.

Guatemalan government cracks down on anti-austerity protests

Andrea Lobo

Amid a deepening and historic social crisis in Guatemala, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and Hurricanes Eta and Iota this month, thousands joined demonstrations across the country to oppose austerity.

The demonstrations on Saturday and Sunday were triggered by the Congress’s approval of a 2021 budget that included cuts to programs against hunger, public education, care for coronavirus patients and protection of human rights.

The restoration of funds for food programs at the last minute failed to appease demonstrators, who demanded major increases in social spending.

Flames shoot out from a corridor of the Congress building after protesters set a part of the building on fire, in Guatemala City, Saturday, Nov. 21, 2020. (AP Photo/Oliver De Ros)

Hundreds on Saturday entered the Congress building in Guatemala City and set a hall on fire, initially without the intervention of police who were present.

The main demonstration of about 7,000 people, involving families with children, marched to the Plaza de la Constitución, about four blocks from the Congress.

“The resignation of the legislators and President, the blocking of the 2021 budget and anger for the lack of aid to communities affected by the storms were the main slogans,” according to El Periodico, which also reported demonstrations in the cities of Alta Verapaz, Petén, Chiquimula, San Marcos and Quetzaltenango.

A protester told the AFP, “Guatemala cries with blood; the people have had it. We have been living while getting stomped for over 200 years.” Others denounced the lack of economic aid during the pandemic.

Immediately after the fire at the Congress, the Police Special Forces moved in against the protesters and passersby at the Plaza and neighboring streets with anti-riot gear, tear gas canisters and a water cannon. Fourteen demonstrators were treated at the nearby hospital due to beatings and effects of the tear gas—one lost an eye, and another remains in serious condition—and 40 were arrested.

Right-wing President Alejandro Giammattei also exploited the incident at the Congress to threaten demonstrators. “We will not allow vandalism against public or private property. Whoever gets caught participating in these criminal events will feel the full weight of the law,” he tweeted.

The main business umbrella group CACIF also called for the punishment of those responsible for “vandalism” and “violent actions.”

A day before the protest, however, Vice President Guillermo Castillo called on Giammattei for both of them to resign, expressing the fears of a social explosion. “I have expressed very clearly to the President that things are not going well,” he said in a video posted on social media. He then stated that such a maneuver was necessary to ultimately ram through a budget based upon “austerity to avoid further debts.”

In 2015, a series of mass protests compelled the Congress to strip immunity from then President Otto Pérez Molina, who was implicated in a vast corruption scheme, and forced his resignation. At the time, the unrest was ultimately suppressed by NGOs and parties with ties to Washington, which sought to channel it behind support for the US-sponsored International Commission Against Impunity (CICIG) that had investigated Pérez Molina.

This resulted in his replacement by the austerity-driven administrations of Jimmy Morales and Giammattei who ran “anti-corruption” campaigns aimed at covering up the class interests they represent and their subordination to US imperialism.

As the pandemic spreads freely amid a full economic reopening and ending of pandemic aid to those left without income, coronavirus deaths are spiking to levels not seen since July. More than 100 deaths were reported just on Wednesday and Thursday, with the total number of registered deaths now surpassing 4,000.

Extreme weather events, intensified by global warming, have also affected the livelihoods of millions. After five years of devastating droughts, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras have been ravaged this year by the tropical storms Amanda and Cristobal in June, and Eta and Iota in November, which caused widespread devastation of plantations.

The Guatemalan government estimates that 120,000 hectares of plantations were destroyed involving 30 different crops. The authorities have reported 59 dead and 100 missing from both storms. Eta caused a landslide that buried the entire indigenous village of Queja, where families fear the number of missing could be much higher.

Residents in several affected areas have already carried out demonstrations demanding aid, including a protest when Giammattei visited the town of Cobán for a photo op with emergency rescue teams.

By June, the NGO Action against Hunger had already estimated that the food-deprived population would double to 1.2 million in Guatemala due to the pandemic. They cited the loss of half a million jobs and a drop in remittances.

The UN Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLAC) has estimated a similar increase in people living under official poverty, reaching 51.6 percent.

Exploiting the pandemic, the government issued $3.8 billion in debt, but only 15 percent of this was actually spent on the pandemic response, or about $570 million. By comparison, 15 percent of the 2021 public budget, or $1.9 billion, will go to servicing interest payments.

While there is undoubtedly rampant government corruption, the continued attacks against the social conditions of workers, youth and peasants and the imperviousness of the ruling elite to mass suffering are the result of broader historical and international processes.

Whatever the pressures from below, the government and all capitalist political parties are ultimately beholden to the tiny financial and corporate oligarchy in Guatemala and its imperialist patrons. Ever since its independence from Spain in 1821, the traditional landed oligarchy and rising commercial bourgeoisie never pursued the tasks carried out under the bourgeois democratic revolutions in the United States and Europe, chiefly the breakup of landlordism and its independence from the colonial powers.

This process was embodied by the Aycinena clan, which controlled vast swathes of trade and land across Central America before and after the 1821 independence from Spain, and continues its lineage up to Guatemalan ex-president Álvaro Arzú Irigoyen (1996-2000) and his family’s network of partnered business groups.

Researchers have also traced back the Diaz-Durán family fortune in Guatemala, whose ministers and businesspeople strongly backed the privatizations in recent decades, to the landowners that settled after the Spanish conquest of what would become El Salvador.

Guatemala also has one “self-made” dollar billionaire, Mario López Estrada, who came to control the country’s main mobile phone service company Tigo (formerly Comcel), after serving as Communications Minister when the company was handed monopoly control of the sector, while subsequently receiving numerous tax exemptions and cuts to public service bills.

During this entire period, the interests of this ruling elite, from access to credit and foreign investments to production and export markets, remained entirely subordinated to those of Wall Street and the US and European corporations.

Today, in order to pay the mountain of debt accumulated in the bailout of its banks and corporations, US and European imperialism are ruthlessly intensifying their exploitation of workers globally, their neocolonial plundering and the pursuit of hegemony against geopolitical rivals, chiefly China. This is what lies behind Guatemalan capitalism’s inability to meet the most basic social needs and its turn to police-state repression.

To oppose austerity, the Guatemalan working class must organize independently of all “anti-corruption” capitalist forces and the pro-capitalist trade unions and build a new political leadership under a socialist and internationalist revolutionary program.

Thanksgiving in America: Massive food lines and evictions as benefits expire

Kate Randall

As this week’s Thanksgiving holiday approaches, a social catastrophe is unfolding across America on a scale not seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

As of Sunday, there were more than 12.2 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the US and nearly 257,000 deaths. The past week has seen an average of more than 170,000 cases per day, an increase of 59 percent from the average two weeks earlier.

Hospitals are being overrun by the surge of cases. Thousands of nurses at hospitals across the country are coming down with the virus, leaving hospitals short-staffed and placing patient care in extreme danger. In El Paso, Texas, a unit of 36 National Guard troops has been mobilized to work through a backlog of close to 240 bodies, victims of COVID-19, at the county morgue. The bodies will be loaded onto refrigerated trucks.

The Marshall Project, a nonprofit journalism website, reports that as of November 17 at least 197,659 inmates in state and local prisons had contracted the virus and 1,454 had died, a likely undercount due to poor reporting.

As the rise of hospitalizations continues unabated, working-class families across the country are facing a crisis of hunger and poverty alongside the sickness and death from the pandemic. Tens of millions of workers have lost their jobs or been hit by cuts in pay or work hours.

Food lines that already stretch for miles, evictions and foreclosures, and the loss of health benefits are set to increase exponentially when what remains of government assistance runs out immediately after Christmas.

The hunger relief organization Feeding America warns that some 54 million US residents, or one in six, currently faces food insecurity. Many families with children were already facing hunger before the pandemic hit.

In Arlington, Texas, 6,000 families arrived for a distribution of frozen turkeys outside a sports stadium on Friday. On November 14, people in Dallas waited up to 12 hours to receive a turkey, 20 pounds of nonperishables, 15 pounds of fresh produce and bags of bread. Photos of the lineup at the food bank showed thousands of cars backed up across four lanes, spanning several miles.

On Saturday in Los Angeles, some 1,000 people lined up on foot for a food distribution at a church.

The moratorium on evictions imposed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) expires on December 31. Since the order does not cancel or freeze rents, all back rent will come due January 1. An estimated 11 to 13 million renter households are at risk of eviction, according to investment bank and global advisory firm Stout.

As no actual relief dollars have been provided by the government to help families with their rent, landlords have used unscrupulous tactics to illegally evict tenants. They have allowed conditions in rental units to deteriorate, leaving renters a choice between leaving or living with mold or infestations of bed bugs, roaches and maggots. Families forced out of their apartments face living on the streets, doubling up with relatives or friends or sleeping in shelters—all of which increase the danger of contracting COVID-19.

Many families struggling with paying for food and housing face the cutoff of remaining COVID-19 relief funds by the end of the year. Long gone is the $600 federal benefit to boost weekly unemployment benefits. According to the Century Foundation, 12 million Americans will lose their unemployment benefits on December 26 when two major pandemic programs expire. Another 4.4 million will have already exhausted these benefits before they expire.

The two programs set to lapse are the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA), which provides benefits to self-employed individuals not eligible for traditional state programs, and the Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC) program, which extends an extra 13 weeks of benefits to people who exhaust state benefits. Both were established by Congress as part of the CARES Act, which doled out trillions of dollars to corporations and banks.

President Donald Trump makes no secret of his contempt for the US and world population facing death and impoverishment. Focused entirely on his plot to nullify the election and establish a presidential dictatorship, he says nothing about the rising toll of sickness and death or the inability of millions of families to pay the rent and put food on the table. On Saturday, he skipped a discussion on the pandemic at the G20 summit in order to play a round of golf at his Virginia resort.

A week ago, Trump made his first public statement in days to reiterate his opposition to a lockdown of the economy to contain the pandemic and save lives. Days later, Democratic President-elect Joe Biden gave a press conference and declared that a Biden administration would never impose a national lockdown. This followed the call by Michael Osterholm, a member of his own coronavirus advisory board, for a six-week nationwide lockdown and full pay for affected workers.

Both parties have conspired to block any congressional action to provide a new round of jobless benefits and other relief measures for workers and small businesses following the July 31 expiration of the minimal benefits provided under the CARES Act.

The public health disaster and the social crisis are two sides of a human catastrophe that is the result of deliberate policies carried out by the Trump administration and, in all essentials, backed by the Democrats. The bipartisan response to the pandemic is driven not by the goal of saving lives, but by the economic interests of the ruling corporate-financial oligarchy. The sole concern is to protect the wealth of the billionaires through government handouts and free money from the Federal Reserve, ensuring a record rise on the stock market.

The antisocial interests of the financial elite are the main obstacle to any effective measures to contain the pandemic and save lives. Nothing is permitted that infringes on the self-enrichment of moguls such as Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who has doubled his personal fortune to $200 billion in the course of the pandemic.

And to pay for the bailout and explosion of corporate and government debt, workers are being forced into factories and workplaces that are rife with the virus so as to continue the flow of corporate profit. This is the dirty secret behind the back-to-work and back-to-school drive, the centerpiece of the deadly policy of “herd immunity” openly pursed by Trump and tacitly supported by Biden and the Democrats.

Workers are deliberately being driven to the edge of destitution and homelessness in order to force them back into the factories, workplaces and schools.

The corporatist trade unions are fully supporting the back-to-work and back-to-school drive, while covering up virus outbreaks in the factories and schools and policing the workplaces to block opposition by workers.

There is growing anger in the factories and among teachers. Many are following the lead of the Socialist Equality Party and the World Socialist Web Site and forming rank-and-file safety committees independent of the unions and the Democratic Party to coordinate action in defense of workers’ health and lives.

Only the independent intervention of the working class in opposition to both capitalist parties and the profit system they defend can produce a progressive and humane solution to both the pandemic and the social crisis.

The struggle to save lives and livelihoods is a struggle against the capitalist system. It requires the expropriation of the corporate oligarchy and utilization of its vast wealth to shut down all nonessential production until the pandemic is contained, provide full wages and income protection for laid-off workers, ensure safe working conditions for essential workers and marshal the resources needed to rebuild the health care system and provide free health care for all.

Workers and educators should establish rank-and-file safety committees at every workplace and school to enforce safe working conditions, organize strike action where necessary, and prepare the ground for a political general strike to halt the destruction of workers’ lives and livelihoods.

Economic life must be reorganized along socialist lines through the nationalization of the health care industry, the banks and the major corporations under the democratic control of the working class, so as to base the economy on social need, not private profit.

Trump continues drive to nullify election

Patrick Martin

President Donald Trump continued to press his efforts to overturn the 2020 election result and suppress millions of votes, despite a series of legal defeats and political setbacks in six closely contested states won by Democrat Joe Biden.

Trump announced he would appeal a devastating federal court ruling in Pennsylvania, where a conservative federal district judge—a former Republican Party official—denounced the Trump campaign for seeking to disenfranchise more than six million voters on the basis of zero evidence.

Judge Matthew Brann granted a request from Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar to dismiss the Trump suit, issuing a 37-page opinion that characterized Trump’s legal arguments as a “Frankenstein’s Monster” stitched together from irreconcilably opposed legal theories without any effort to reconcile them.

President Donald J. Trump talks to members of the press [Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian]

“This Court has been presented with strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations, unpled in the operative complaint and unsupported by evidence,” Brann wrote. “In the United States of America, this cannot justify the disenfranchisement of a single voter, let alone all the voters of its sixth most populated state. Our people, laws, and institutions demand more.”

“This Court has been unable to find any case in which a plaintiff has sought such a drastic remedy in the contest of an election, in terms of the sheer volume of votes asked to be invalidated,” he continued, “One might expect that when seeking such a startling outcome, a plaintiff would come formidably armed with compelling legal arguments and factual proof of rampant corruption… That has not happened.”

While Trump’s lawyers sneered that Brann was an “Obama-appointed judge,” he is actually a former Republican Party chairman and member of the conservative Federalist Society, appointed under the auspices of Senator Pat Toomey, the state’s lone Republican statewide officeholder. Toomey praised Brann as “a longtime conservative Republican whom I know to be a fair and unbiased jurist.”

The Trump campaign filed notice with the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in Philadelphia against Brann’s decision. Chief Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani said the case should ultimately be decided by the US Supreme Court, which has a 6–3 right-wing majority, including three justices appointed by Trump himself.

The appeal will not stop the state of Pennsylvania from certifying Biden’s victory in the state, with its 20 electoral votes, most likely on Monday, when county election officials formally report their results to Secretary of State Boockvar. Biden won Pennsylvania by more than 80,000 votes, twice Trump’s margin when he carried the state in 2016 against Hillary Clinton.

In this Nov. 2, 2020, file photo, a county worker collects mail-in ballots in a drive-thru mail-in ballot drop off area at the Clark County Election Department in Las Vegas. (AP Photo/John Locher, File)

As in several other court actions it has filed, the Trump campaign in Pennsylvania dispenses with the wild claims of massive fraud made by Giuliani and other lawyers at press conferences. Instead, it focuses on the fact that counties used different standards in treating mail-in ballots, particularly in allowing voters to “cure” technical errors such as a failure to sign the outer envelope of the mail ballot.

The purpose of this legal argument is to invoke the “equal protection” doctrine devised by ultra-right Justice Antonin Scalia in the notorious Bush v. Gore decision, which awarded the presidency to the Republican candidate in 2000. Scalia claimed that the court could step in and suppress vote-counting in Florida on the grounds that different counties had used different standards in the handling of ballots with “hanging chads.”

This argument was so specious that the 5–4 right-wing majority insisted that it should not serve as a precedent for any future decision. But Trump’s attorneys have frequently sought to invoke it this year, since it provides a means for the Supreme Court to intervene and overturn the actions of state authorities in certifying their electoral votes.

Another tactic is being employed in Michigan, which Biden won by an even larger majority, more than 150,000 votes. Trump and the Republican Party are putting enormous pressure on Republican members of the Board of State Canvassers, which meets today to receive and approve the certification of the votes by the state’s 83 counties.

The Trump campaign has sought to elevate minor discrepancies in vote tallying in Wayne County, the state’s most populous county, in order to invalidate the nearly 800,000 votes cast there. The discrepancies are truly minor—357 votes out of 250,000 cast in the city of Detroit. Notably, one Republican official offered to certify the votes in the largely white Wayne County suburbs—which have similar small discrepancies—so long as the votes in Detroit, which is 80 percent African American and 95 percent Democratic, were thrown out.

The Trump campaign hopes that the two Republicans on the four-member state panel will force a 2–2 deadlock. Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel and the state Republican Party appealed to the board to postpone action for two weeks, which would take it perilously close to the Dec. 8 deadline for certifying Michigan’s 16 votes in the Electoral College.

During this period, further pressure would be applied to the leaders of the Republican-controlled state legislature to nominate a pro-Trump slate of electors, which would be substituted for the Biden slate elected by the voters. Trump met with Michigan state legislative leaders Friday but so far has not gained their support for this brazenly unconstitutional and anti-democratic maneuver.

In a tweet Saturday night, Trump openly embraced this stratagem. “Hopefully,” he wrote, “the Courts and/or Legislatures will have the COURAGE to do what has to be done to maintain the integrity of our Elections, and the United States of America itself.”

But the conservative Detroit News published an editorial calling on the Board of State Canvassers to certify Biden’s victory and only 75 Trump supporters turned out for a rally at the state Capitol Saturday.

In the four other states where Trump is seeking to overturn Biden’s victory at the polls, both legal and political moves appear to have failed.

In Georgia, a hand recount concluded Friday with the certification of a Biden victory by a narrow but significant margin, 12,670 votes. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, both Republicans and Trump loyalists, signed off on the vote count as reflecting the will of the voters, certifying the state’s 16 electoral votes for Biden. The Trump campaign immediately filed for a second recount, to be conducted at state expense.

In Wisconsin, recounts began in Dane County (Madison) and Milwaukee County, the state’s two most populous and most heavily Democratic counties. The Trump campaign, which paid for the recounts, tried to bog down the proceedings by objecting individually to every mail ballot—the vast majority of those cast. Local election officials decided to record a general challenge to all ballots in order to complete the review in time for the state’s certification deadline of Dec. 1. Biden won Wisconsin by more than 20,000 votes.

In Arizona, the Republican-controlled Board of Supervisors in Maricopa County, where two-thirds of the state’s population lives, voted unanimously Friday to certify the county’s election results after all of the Trump legal challenges were rejected by the courts. Biden won the state by just over 10,000 votes, thanks in part to a 40,000-vote majority in Maricopa County.

“It’s time to dial back the rhetoric, conspiracies and false claims,” said Clint Hickman, the Republican board chairman. “In a free democracy, elections result in some people’s candidate losing.” The county results go to Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, who will certify them on Nov. 30 and award Arizona’s 11 electoral votes to Biden.

In Nevada, all counties completed canvassing their votes last week and forwarded the results to Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske, a Republican. According to state law, the Nevada Supreme Court will canvass the vote on Tuesday, Nov. 24, and Governor Steve Sisolak will then issue a proclamation awarding the state’s six electoral votes to Biden. Trump can then seek a recount, but Biden won Nevada by more than 33,000 votes.

The Pennsylvania court decision had a significant political impact. Senator Pat Toomey declared that Trump had exhausted all plausible legal challenges and should now accept the result of the election. He said, “I congratulate President-elect Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris on their victory. They are both dedicated public servants and I will be praying for them and for our country.”

While such statements are generally made within hours of a US election result, the vast majority of Republican senators, representatives and governors have not publicly admitted that Biden is the winner of the presidential election and should be accorded the status of president-elect, with access to federal resources for his transition.

With the announcement over the weekend that Senator Rick Scott of Florida and Senator Kelly Loeffler of Georgia have contracted COVID-19, more Republican senators have acknowledged testing positive for coronavirus (eight) than have acknowledged Biden as president-elect (seven).

The most forceful criticism of Trump from within official Washington came from Senator Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, who denounced the president for “overt pressure on state and local officials to subvert the will of the people.” He declared, “It is difficult to imagine a worse, more undemocratic action by a sitting American president.”

Romney’s words went well beyond anything said by President-elect Biden or any other leading Democrat. The Democratic Party policy is to downplay the significance of Trump’s refusal to concede and cover up the dangers to democratic rights. They fear that Trump’s coup attempt could provoke a massive upsurge among working people and youth that would threaten not only the Trump cabal, but the capitalist system as a whole.

The White House and the Trump campaign are both clearly in deep crisis, and not only politically. Trump announced that his son, Donald Trump Jr., had tested positive for COVID-19. Trump Jr., with characteristic fascist arrogance, said he would make use of the quarantine period to clean his guns.

Giuliani’s son, Andrew, who works at the White House, also tested positive for COVID-19. As a result, Giuliani did not attend Trump’s Friday meeting with the delegation of Michigan legislators.

Late Sunday came the announcement that attorney Sidney Powell, who made the most inflammatory charges at a Trump campaign press conference Thursday, claiming a Chinese-Venezuelan conspiracy to subvert the US elections, was no longer working for the Trump campaign.