Popular music and the social crisis in 2020

Elliott Murtagh & J. L’Heureau

The year 2020 was dominated globally by the COVID-19 pandemic. Every area of social life was significantly and irrevocably altered by the pandemic, including artistic and cultural life.

The impact on the latter sphere—one of the most cherished, sensitive and vulnerable human achievements—has been enormous, although uneven. Live music and movie- and museum-going, for example, have been devastated for obvious reasons.

Recorded popular music has continued to thrive during the pandemic, in many cases breaking previous records in terms of its reach. This is due in part to the unprecedented extent and demand of a global audience facing unique forms of social isolation and quarantine.

Given this situation, it is worthwhile probing how contemporary popular music is responding to and reflecting—or not reflecting—the circumstances at the forefront of present-day reality. What has the music had to offer in terms of social insight and challenging artistry? This article considers a selection of the most popular songs of 2020.

In February, before the pandemic had officially been declared, Canadian singer Justin Bieber released “Intentions,” featuring rapper Quavo. The song and music video have since collected close to half a billion views on YouTube alone. A fund drive was launched with the song for Alexandria House—a transitional housing residence in Los Angeles for poor and homeless women and children—to which Bieber donated $200,000.

The lyrics of “Intentions” aim at empowering a partner (“Heart full of equity, you’re an asset”), while the music video features Alexandria House and focuses on three struggling women seen as pillars in their community who Bieber meets, praises and showers with expensive gifts.

Asked about the song on MTV , Bieber commented, “We just wanted to shine a light on social issues that are happening in our world and in our country… People are marginalized and overlooked, and I just wanted to make people aware of the hurting and broken people that are suffering in humanity.” The “intentions” may be perfectly decent, but the results are distinctly limited, artistically and socially.

Drake, "Toosie Slide"

At the beginning of April, as mandatory stay-at-home orders were being enforced throughout the world due to the spread of COVID-19, Canadian rapper-entrepreneur Drake released “Toosie Slide,” which debuted at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and currently has over 250 million views on its accompanying music video. Referencing and instructing how to perform a dance move by choreographer Toosie, the song has sparked millions of dance videos on the short-video social media platform, TikTok.

The music video opens with nighttime shots of a city in lockdown. It then cuts to the garish interior of Drake’s $100 million Toronto mansion (complete with an NBA regulation-size basketball court). Alone, wearing black gloves and a ski mask, the rapper proceeds to give a tour of his dreadful palace while performing the titular dance. The video ends with Drake dancing in front of a fireworks show in his backyard.

Though the music video directly references the pandemic, the song’s lyrics make no mention of it and lack any shred of substance (“Got so many opps [opponents], I be mistakin’ opps for other opps”). The synth melody repeating every four bars is melancholic yet wispy, barely present and stretched thin throughout, indirectly reflecting the poignant emptiness of social life under lockdown, or perhaps Drake’s life, at any rate.

Pitchfork described the song as “an afterthought, a blank slate that actively tries to not distract from the dance” and, better still, “strictly a business decision.”

Justin Bieber, "Intentions"

In May, “Stuck with U” by Ariana Grande and Justin Bieber and “Gooba” by 6ix9ine were released, followed by “Rain on Me” by Lady Gaga and Ariana Grande.

“Stuck with U” is a direct response to society sheltering in place, painting an ode to love during the hardest of times. It was released as a charity single for the First Responders Children’s Foundation and debuted at number one on Billboard ’s Hot 100. The music video for the song features homemade videos created by Bieber and Grande, as well as other celebrities and fans, depicting quarantine life with their partners.

“Stuck with U” puts forward love in the abstract as a panacea and reveals the artists’ general complacency in the midst of a horrific social crisis. “Got all this time on our hands/Might as well cancel our plans/I could stay here for a lifetime.” And later, emphasizing the point—“Kinda hope we’re here forever.” One truly has to have one’s head in the sand to come up with such a line.

Pitchfork summed up the song’s sentiment. “Instead of Pollyannaish optimism, they sound a note of resignation: ‘Lock the door and throw out the key/Can’t fight this no more/It’s just you and me.’”

“Gooba” by rapper 6ix9ine debuted at number three on Billboard ’s Hot 100 and broke the record for most viewed hip-hop video within 24 hours, racking in 38.9 million views. It currently has 647 million views on YouTube. The main feat of the song is how much wealth, sex and violence-obsessed filth it can cram into its two-minute track length, delivered with aggressive yelling.

Ariana Grande, Lady Gaga, "Rain On Me"

“Rain on Me” by Lady Gaga and Ariana Grande was released May 22—three days before the police murder of George Floyd—and is a 1990s-influenced dance-pop song, which debuted at number one on Billboard ’s Hot 100. Its music video has been streamed 258 million times on YouTube. The song centers around overcoming personal challenges, which both artists have publicly spoken about—Gaga with alcoholism and PTSD stemming from sexual assault and Grande with trauma from the bombing of her 2017 Manchester concert that killed 22 people and the overdose of her ex-boyfriend, rapper Mac Miller. Gaga described the song as a “celebration of all the tears.”

A pre-chorus states, “It’s coming down on me/Water like misery,” while the chorus exclaims, “I’d rather be dry, but at least I’m alive/Rain on me, rain, rain/Rain on me, rain, rain.” Consequence of Sound noted that the chorus line is one “that should make us count our blessings to be alive, hopefully healthy, and, if we’re really blessed, maybe even employed.”

Billboard recently named it the number one best song of 2020, describing it as a “testimonial to the power of crying and persevering through your own trauma” and proclaiming it “2020’s unofficial theme song.” However, the song’s undercooked message stops at embracing personal misery as part of life, never probing its sources. The concluding line of the song, “Won’t you rain on me?,” seems to offer wallowing in one’s emotional difficulties as some sort of solution, rather than struggling with them and facing life head-on.

In August, Cardi B released “WAP,” which features fellow rapper Megan Thee Stallion. The song is an unpleasant exercise in turning pornography into music, throwing in wealth obsession as a bonus. “WAP” debuted at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and broke the US record for opening-week streams, drawing 93 million.

The song has been lauded “for its sexually charged lyrics and its open expression of women’s sexuality” and, ludicrously, deemed “a liberating anthem for young women this year,” according to Revolt.tv. It was named the number one song of 2020 by Rolling Stone, Pitchfork and NPR, which suggested that “at its core, ‘WAP’ is Cardi and Meg’s assertion that their expression, both artistic and sexual, belongs to them and them alone .” This is rubbish, and an apology for social backwardness.

Much could be said in response to this brief survey of some of 2020’s most popular music.

First and foremost, a staggering contradiction exists between the global-technological possibilities and the ability to reach and influence hundreds of millions of human beings almost instantly, on the one hand, and the poverty of the musical ideas and the reality of unprepared music personalities, essentially overwhelmed in the face of the enormity of the devastation and death toll of the pandemic, on the other. What will future generations think of this artistic response?

Half of the songs above reflect little to nothing of what the broader masses are going through, while an obsession with wealth, sex, drugs and aggressive boasting dominates throughout. The other portion make an attempt to respond to the broader situation, yet they fail to put forth any opposition to or even questioning of the status quo. Empowering a partner, turning to love in hard times and overcoming personal difficulties are all well and good, but an exclusive focus on individual transformation leaves the very system that gives rise to the mounting social crises the artists are supposedly addressing entirely off the hook.

The wealth of the pop stars certainly has something to do with their limited perspectives (the average net worth of the seven artists discussed above is $138 million). However, the critical factor is not so much money as it is the intellectual and artistic atmosphere that has prevailed for several decades: the worship of wealth and greed, the glamorization of military and patriotic violence, the obsession with race and gender.

These limitations and contradictions are reflected in the musical content, which deserves a comment.

While pop music has traditionally contained chord progressions that differ for the verse, chorus and bridge of the song, more and more, contemporary pop is ridding itself of harmonic changes. Harmony—the sound of two or more notes heard simultaneously—is one of the central musical means of exploring emotions and moods. Although many examples of memorable popular music can be found without harmonic motion, little or no such exploration and, generally, an absence of musical complexity is becoming the norm, with four of the six songs previously analyzed utilizing only one or two chords throughout.

Another musical trend in 2020 of significance is the prevalence of “throwbacks,” which consciously look to the past for inspiration. While “Rain On Me” is the only throwback referred to above, many top 40 hits this year mimicked production styles of the 1970s, 80s and 90s, including The Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights” (80s) and Dojo Cat’s “Say So” (70s).

It is worth asking why artists are returning to these styles and what they find meaningful in them, as opposed to developing new forms derived from delving more deeply into contemporary life.

Neither music nor any other art need obey external criteria or “rules,” but these developments are noteworthy and, in our view, given their present trajectory and influence, help to impede the emergence of greater artistic and emotional expression.

The massive success of these songs reflects the wider cultural difficulties, including the state of popular consciousness, which asks far too little at present. The chief blame lies with a social system that has reached the end of the road and has almost nothing of value to transmit through official culture. Innovative work will only arise in opposition to the status quo.

Some popular artists have shown healthy signs of development this year and are beginning to put forward a social critique, such as Lil Baby’s “The Bigger Picture,” which responded to the mass protests over police violence and racism. But even as worsening social issues come to the fore in popular music, big contradictions remain.

To address the underlying objective social problems and point the progressive way forward via their music, a serious and critical examination of the present social and economic reality is needed by artists, while pushing the language of music in every direction.

UK teaching unions call for no work in “unsafe schools” as opposition among educators mounts

Robert Stevens

Deaths from COVID-19 and new cases of the disease surged in the UK over the holiday period. The 454 deaths announced yesterday took the tally in the last eight days to 4,588. Over the same period, just under 400,000 new cases were detected. Almost 55,000 cases were announced yesterday, with over 50,000 cases announced daily over the previous five days.

Hospitals in major cities are now so full of Covid cases that patients are having to be treated in ambulances on arrival or being sent elsewhere. According to a leaked National Health Service (NHS) email obtained by Sky News, intensive care units in three London hospitals—North Middlesex University Hospital, Barnet Hospital and Whittington Hospital—were "full" on New Year's Eve. This left patients waiting to be transferred to other hospitals for critical care.

Boris Johnson’s Conservative government has pursued a policy of herd immunity throughout the pandemic, allowing 2,654,779, people to be infected with the loss of over 75,000 lives according to official figures, and around 90,000 when Covid is mentioned on the death certificate. Today it is urging primary schools throughout England to reopen after the Christmas holiday.

Ambulances outside Manchester's Royal Infirmary on Saturday (credit: WSWS)

Schools have been a major vector for the spread of COVID-19, worsened by a new and more contagious variant of the disease. Despite this, Johnson stressed on Sunday’s BBC Andrew Marr Show that parents should send their children to school in all areas of England where they are open. His government views schools as holding pens that enable parents to go to work and keep the profits rolling in.

Mass resistance to this murderous policy is growing and pressure from educators and parents, mainly organised on social media, has forced a crisis ridden and widely hated government to make several U-turns, including delaying the reopening of secondary schools until January 18.

London and the surrounding county of Essex are at the epicentre of the disease in Britain. On Saturday, the government announced that all primary schools (children from four and 11) in London must remain closed at the start of the term. Previously it had insisted only those primaries in 22 of London's 32 boroughs would be affected by closures. Primaries in 27 other local authorities in the UK have also been told to close for an indefinite period, meaning a million children will not return.

Education Secretary Gavin Williamson (credit: Wikimedia Commons-Kuhlmann/ MSC)

On Sunday, Education Secretary Gavin Williamson, who on New Year’s Eve declared, “We are absolutely confident that all schools are returning,” said that secondary schools in England may remain closed for weeks beyond the scheduled mid-January return date.

Forced to note the national mood--with one opinion poll showing that he would lose a general election and even his own seat--Johnson told Marr, “It may be that we need to do things in the next few weeks that may be tougher.” Even so Johnson continued to lie, declaring that "I understand people's anxieties, but there is no doubt in my mind schools are safe."

The government’s own Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies said the opposite on December 22 and December 31. Appearing on the same show, SAGE adviser Professor Mark Walport said the new variant of COVID-19 has “transmitted more readily in younger age groups as well. It is going to be very difficult to keep it under control without much tighter social restrictions. We know that a person between 12 and 16 is seven times more likely than others in a household to bring the infection into a household."

Laura Duffel, a matron at a London hospital, told the BBC’s Radio Five Live Saturday, “We’ve have children coming in and it was minimally affecting children in the first wave… we now have a whole ward of children here. I know that some of my colleagues are in a similar position where they have whole wards of children with Covid.”

The number of educators dying from Covid is also increasing. Among recent deaths are Paul Hilditch, a 55-year-old who taught engineering and technology at Conyers School in Yarm, North Yorkshire; Michael Haigh, a 60-year-old school site worker; Lynne Morgan, a learning support assistant at Christ the King College on the Isle of Wight, and Michele Cockrill, a 62-year-old teaching assistant and mother of two from Sittingborne, Kent.

In a particularly tragic case, the Daily Mirror reported Saturday that an entire five-member family was struck down with coronavirus after one their children, aged 12, contracted the disease after returning to school in September. The disease took the life of his grandmother, Maria Rico.

The terrible toll taken by the pandemic is the political responsibility of the trade unions and Labour Party, which have collaborated with the Tories throughout in reopening the economy and forcing educators and students back into schools, colleges and universities.

Mounting popular opposition has forced a change of tack.

On Saturday, the National Education Union (NEU), which had previously only called for a delay in reopening secondary schools to allow for the testing of pupils, issued fresh advice to its half a million members. Avoiding any mention of industrial action, the NEU wrote that it is “in our view, unsafe for you to attend the workplace at present… The NEU’s advice is that you should decide to advise your head teacher or principal that you will not be attending the workplace but will be available to work remotely from home.”

The NEU called on members to fill in a model letter telling their employers that under relevant health and safety regulation, “I am exercising my contractual right not to attend an unsafe place of work.”

While declaring that it is “completely committed to ensuring that children can return to school as quickly as possible,” the 300,000 strong National Association of Schoolmasters/Union of Women Teachers stated Saturday that it now supported the “immediate move to remote education for all schools,” as it was “abundantly clear that the pandemic is seriously impacting on the ability of all schools to continue to operate normally.”

The National Association of Head Teachers, previously among the staunchest in insisting that schools stay open, declared, “We are calling upon government to remove people in schools from the physical harm caused by the current progress of the disease.” It planned to advise members that they should not discipline any teachers who refuse to come into work.

The main public sector union, Unison, which has more than 350,000 members in the education sector, including many classroom assistants, and the GMB general union, took the same position.

The unions are seeking to head off a rebellion by their members. The scale of opposition was indicated by the 100,000-strong attendance at an online NEU meeting, called to discuss the crisis, Sunday morning.

The same political calculations led Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, who infamously said that schools must be re-opened, “no ifs, no buts” in September, to insist yesterday that "the virus is clearly out of control”, and that it was necessary to “bring in… restrictions now, national restrictions, within the next 24 hours."

All educators must be aware from their past record that as soon as is practical, the unions will work with Labour and the Tories to herd children and staff back into school. According to ITV News Political Correspondent Dan Hewit, Starmer does not want a full lockdown as in March, but a limited “circuit breaker” as was carried out in November, with a senior Labour Party source telling him that schools should be “the last to close”.

COVID-19: Global vaccination stymied by nationalism and profit gouging

Jean Shaoul

The world’s poorest countries are in grave danger from the long-term spread of COVID-19 after some of the richest nations, representing just 14 percent of the global population, have bought 53 percent of the most promising vaccines so far.

As a result, it could take until late 2022 or early 2023 before even half the population in low-income countries are vaccinated.

Many underdeveloped nations have reported relatively few COVID-19 cases and deaths, with the entire African continent of 54 countries reporting fewer deaths than France, but this is a gross underestimate of the real number. The shocking lack of resources to test for infection, the stigma attached to acknowledging the disease, and even the lack of universal death registration systems render the official statistics all but meaningless.

COVID vaccine (Stock image credit: Envato)

Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO), welcomed the vaccines, saying they provided “a glimpse of the light at the end of the tunnel.” He nevertheless insisted, “we will only truly end the pandemic if we end it everywhere at the same time, which means it’s essential to vaccinate some people in all countries, rather than all people in some countries.”

Ghebreyesus added, “vaccines will complement, but not replace, the many other tools we have in our toolbox to stop transmission and save lives. We must continue to use all of them.”

In reality, the plight of the working class in the advanced capitalist and oppressed nations bear a remarkable similarity. While the imperialist centres have a monopoly on the vaccine, the anarchy of the market and the indifference of the financial oligarchy toward the lives of millions, makes for a vaccine rollout plagued by obstacles and half-measures.

It is doubtful that any country can end its epidemic via vaccination alone. About 70 percent of the world’s population would need to be immunized to achieve “herd immunity”, a target unlikely to be met in the short-term, in part because most of the vaccines have not been approved for the under 16 age group.

The race to procure vaccines against a fast-spreading virus that travels unimpeded by border controls has set in motion a ferocious national competition that threatens to prolong and intensify the pandemic.

The irrationality of the capitalist system of production for private profit, not the public good, means the pandemic will kill many more people worldwide for years to come and resurge even in nations that manage to control it through vaccination. In addition to causing immense and unnecessary loss of life, the continuation of the pandemic will plunge billions of people into poverty.

Tackling COVID-19 in Hebron, the epicentre of the outbreak in Palestine (credit: MSF.org)

A handful of giant drug companies that own patents on the vaccines, resulting from costly research carried out largely in publicly funded laboratories, will rake in obscene profits for years to come.

The manufacturers of just three vaccines, Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, and AstraZeneca, expect to produce around 5.3 billion doses in 2021 to vaccinate about 2.6 billion people (two doses are needed to protect against the coronavirus). With rich countries having already pre-ordered large quantities—more than half of all the promising vaccines—the People’s Vaccine Alliance, including Amnesty International, Oxfam and Global Justice Now, warns there is not enough vaccine to go round.

According to the Alliance, wealthier countries have bought enough doses to vaccinate their entire populations three times over, with Canada ordering enough vaccine to protect each citizen five times. The US has pre-ordered 1.1 billion doses of several potential vaccines, nearly double the number needed. Just three countries, Australia, Canada, and Japan, have secured more doses of potential vaccines than all of Latin America and the Caribbean—which have with more than 17 percent of global coronavirus cases.

During the swine flu (H1N1) outbreak, the US and other rich countries bought up nearly all the available vaccines. Swine flu killed more than a quarter of a million people worldwide in 2009-10. Wealthier nations agreed to share some vaccines with low-income countries only after satisfying their own needs.

In the HIV/AIDS epidemic, poor nations were priced out of the market for life-saving medication as companies imposed a uniform international price. As a result, the cost of anti-retroviral drugs on a per capita GDP-adjusted basis was higher in South Africa than in Sweden or the US, putting it beyond the reach of the millions of South Africans with HIV/AIDS.

Pharmaceutical companies, with the backing of the US Clinton administration and some European governments, sued the South African government that had bought cheaper generic drugs abroad, naming Nelson Mandela, the president of South Africa, as the lead defendant and only abandoning their lawsuit in the face of mass international protests.

Earlier this year, instead of coordinating the production and distribution of personal protective equipment, ventilators, and medicines that they had failed to prepare for a future pandemic, the European Union (EU) along with another 70 countries, imposed bans or limits on their export.

Belgium’s Budget State Secretary, Eva De Bleeker, revealed the massive scale of profit gouging by Big Pharma. She posted on Twitter—then quickly deleted—the prices the EU negotiated to pay as a bloc, for the leading Covid vaccines. The information exposed wide variations in prices between manufacturers, with Moderna, whose research was funded by the US government, charging 10 times the price of Oxford/AstraZeneca, whose research was funded by the UK government:

•  Oxford/AstraZeneca: €1.78/$2.16
  
  
•  Johnson & Johnson: $8.50/$10.33
  
  
•  Sanofi/GSK: €7.56/$9.19
  
  
•  Pfizer/BioNTech: €12/$14.59
  
  
•  CureVac: €10/$12.16
  
  
•  Moderna: €14.80/$18

The US paid $1.2 billion to secure 300 million Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine doses for Americans, even before they were proved safe or effective, a sum equal to $4 per dose, twice as much as the EU paid. The US paid $19.50 per dose for the Pfizer vaccine compared to $14.59 by the EU, fueling outrage in the US Congress. In contrast, Moderna’s vaccine will cost $18.00 a dose in the EU compared with $14.80 in the US.

If or when the richest countries share their excess doses, they will likely donate or sell them at low cost bilaterally to their allies and client states, as an instrument of political power, instead of distributing the vaccines through multilateral public health initiatives.

Children in Hebron, Palestine practising preventive health, September 2020 (credit: MSF.org)

Anna Marriott, Oxfam’s health policy manager, said, “No-one should be blocked from getting a life-saving vaccine because of the country they live in or the amount of money in their pocket. But unless something changes dramatically, billions of people around the world will not receive a safe and effective vaccine for Covid-19 for years to come.”

Last October, India and South Africa asked the World Trade Organization to waive intellectual property protection for the vaccines and allow developing countries to manufacture or import generic versions. The US, the EU and the UK all rejected the proposal.

Unable to pay the exorbitant prices demanded by Big Pharma, some 94 poor and middle-income countries have signed agreements with Covax, a Public-Private Partnership comprising international health organizations including the World Health Organisation, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) and GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance. But this initiative will at best provide vaccines for 20 percent of the participating countries’ population.

The Covax vaccine sharing scheme is one of three arms of the Access to Covid-19 Tools (ACT) accelerator, set up by the WHO, the European Commission, and the French government. It is part of a broader restructuring of the global public health industry following the debacle of the HIV/AIDS lawsuit, away from WHO and towards the private sector. The new initiatives empower donor nations, philanthropies including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and new consortia such as GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance (that includes vaccine producing corporations), and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria.

Recipient countries must sign opaque deals with strings attached, paying up-front without knowing which vaccine they will receive or when the doses will arrive. Covax provides an estimate of price per dose, but the purchaser must bear the risk if actual costs run higher, if the vaccine fails or if anything goes wrong. Seth Berkley, GAVI’s chief executive, said it could secure an initial two billion doses with more later, but refused to disclose information on its deals with the drug companies, describing them as commercially confidential. He did not explain when supplies would arrive, or where the $6.8 billion to purchase them will come from, or how distribution networks, already compromised by the economic impact of the pandemic, would cope.

Many poor countries will be almost entirely dependent on international aid organisations to get some vaccines for free or at low cost.

While publicly funded laboratories have made possible the rapid development of vaccines, the disastrous response of all the major capitalist powers to the global COVID-19 pandemic makes clear the need to put an end to capitalism and the subjugation of human health to private profit. The international working class must intervene to expropriate the pharmaceutical giants and every major industry sector, transforming these monopolies into publicly-owned and democratically-controlled utilities to serve the needs of humanity.

Opening of schools in Germany based on deliberate lies and deception

Gregor Link

Last week, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) again reported almost 1,000 daily deaths and well over 30,000 new infections in Germany. With cold storage facilities and crematoria in several cities already overwhelmed by corpses, hospitals nationwide face making decisions about who can receive life-saving treatment or be refused it. Among the population, the excess mortality rate rose steadily to 14 percent in November. In Saxony, it is now as high as 55 percent.

This mass death, unprecedented in post-war German history, was deliberately brought about by the federal and state governments’ drive to keep workplaces open and thus secure the profits of the banks and corporations at the expense of workers’ health.

Schools and day-care centres around the world have played a key role in the outbreak since the beginning of the pandemic. However, governments have repeatedly resorted to pseudo-scientific data and outright lies to justify the policy of keeping schools, businesses and day-care centres open amid the pandemic. This has ranged from “studies” on the absence of outbreaks in deserted facilities, as in Saxony, to calculating the “human capital costs” of “lost education,” to promoting the right-wing propagandists of “herd immunity.”

Students arrive at the 'Friedensburg Oberschule' school for the first day at school after the summer vacations during the new coronavirus outbreak in Berlin, Germany, Monday, Aug. 10, 2020. (AP Photo/Michael Sohn)

At the same time, the education and health authorities have refused to implement the RKI’s measures at schools and to test the classmates of infected children. The “diffuse outbreak” resulting from this policy has served as a pretext to cover up the fact that workplaces, schools and day-care centres are the central drivers of the pandemic. The mass spread of the virus among the population would not have been possible without this deliberate policy of coverup by the state executives and their education ministers.

The criminality with which this campaign has been conducted was most recently demonstrated by the deliberate suppression of a study from Hamburg that had existed for months, according to which massive outbreaks were also taking place within schools in Germany. The study was not mentioned by the Hamburg education minister or any of his colleagues. Instead, ministers lied in unison that the schools were safe.

Yet, the results of the study are clear. The Heinrich Pette Institute and the University Medical Centre Hamburg-Eppendorf (UKE), who investigated the case of a mass outbreak at the Heinrich Hertz School, had concluded, “Infections/transmissions have taken place at the school.” They deduced from the almost universally “identical genome sequences” that “the vast majority of transmissions were most likely due to a single source of infection.” “The possibility that the outbreak resulted from independent inputs can be ruled out with a probability bordering on certainty.”

The study was prepared as early as September, but its existence only became known shortly before the Christmas holidays, when the Hamburg social authorities felt compelled to respond to a specific and legally justified request for information from a private individual.

Hamburg’s Education Senator (state minister) Ties Rabe (Social Democratic Party, SPD), who, without any factual basis, had claimed since the beginning of the pandemic that schools were “infection-proof,” has withheld this study for months.

As recently as November, based on an internal “analysis of figures” by the authorities, Rabe had claimed that 85 to 90 percent of pupils had been infected outside of school, at home or in their free time.

Rabe is a spokesman for all SPD-led state education ministries and knew about this study for a long time. Shortly before the conference involving state and national government representatives with Chancellor Angela Merkel (Christian Democratic Union, CDU) at the end of November, he still vehemently advocated keeping schools open for face-to-face lessons. “School and lessons are much safer than leisure time and the home,” Rabe wrote, “this applies to pupils just as much as school employees.”

Even official government data show that teachers and educators are at great risk day after day. For example, figures from the state school authorities in North Rhine-Westphalia show that the incidence of coronavirus among teachers more than doubled in October and November—both in absolute numbers and in relation to the population as a whole. At the same time, data on incapacity to work from the health insurance companies Barmer and AOK show that educators, medical assistants and nursing staff are particularly likely to contract COVID-19. Among educators, the incidence is more than 2.2 times higher than the average for those with health insurance.

But although they must have been aware of these figures, as well as the Hamburg study and many other scientific papers proving the high incidence of infections in schools, the state education ministers kept claiming schools were safe.

As late as mid-November, Berlin’s education senator Sandra Scheeres had shamelessly spread the lie that “schools and day-care centres are the safest places to break infection chains.” On November 30, she asserted that the mass infections of pupils and teachers registered by the RKI, among others, “take place outside of school.” At that time, the young teacher Soydan A. from the Berlin district of Kreuzberg was already in hospital with COVID-19 and later died after he had most likely been infected at school.

Schleswig-Holstein’s Education Minister Karin Prien (CDU) falsely declared in mid-November that there were “no indications whatsoever that schools are drivers of infection in this situation.” More recently, she rejected the demand for early consultations on an extension of distance learning and again emphasised that it was her government’s “goal” to “reopen schools as the first social sector.”

The education minister of Rhineland-Palatinate, Stefanie Hubig (SPD), went so far as to attribute false quotes to scientists to justify keeping schools open. After a hearing of various epidemiological and medical experts on December 7, she published a press release in which quite a number of those present found themselves dishonestly misquoted.

Alexander Kekulé from Halle University Hospital, who had stated in the weeks before that there were “the most serious outbreaks at secondary schools,” was quoted in the press release in a way that distorted what he had said. He wrote to the Ministry of Education, “The two sentences are not mine. Please only quote what I actually said.” Epidemiologist Professor Markus Scholz from Leipzig protested against “this kind of appropriation and falsification” and spoke of “pure propaganda”—a term also used by the Rhineland-Palatinate Philologists’ Association in a joint public protest statement by those involved.

In addition to Kekulé and Scholz, the association’s statement quotes medical specialist Dr. Jana Schroeder, “Your press statement suggests I agreed with its content as an expert, which was and is not the case, [therefore] I expect you to either correct this or remove my name under your statement.” She mused whether “you were in a different conference than I was.” On behalf of the scientists and physicians involved, the association concludes, “Since opposition to disagreeable expert opinions seems to be very strong in the Ministry of Education, the Philologists’ Association calls for the unabridged recording to be passed on to the press.”

Scheeres, Prien and Hubig are the new vice-presidents of the Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs (KMK). The new president, Britta Ernst (SPD) from Brandenburg, has also lied about safe schools in the past and has already announced that she wants to reopen schools quickly.

Baden-Württemberg’s education minister, Susanne Eisenmann (CDU), has already announced that from January 11, “day-care centres and primary schools will be reopened for in-person teaching … regardless of the incidence figures.” The same applied to those in “grades 5, 6 and 7 as well as the final grades.” Amid the pandemic, life-threatening face-to-face teaching “cannot be replaced by anything,” the minister explained in an interview with the Deutsche Presseagentur.

Using brazen lies and falsified data, the federal and state governments want to push through their policy of keeping schools and businesses open against growing resistance among the population. Students have long since organised themselves into independent action committees and plan to strike when their schools reopen. Among parents and teachers, anger and indignation are growing in face of tens of thousands of deaths and hundreds of thousands of new infections. This will take on even sharper forms with the exposure of the criminal fraud by the education ministers.

Over 2,900 US health care workers have died from COVID-19

Benjamin Mateus

As the year 2020 has officially drawn to a close, the measure of the COVID-19 pandemic’s toll on health care workers has been nothing short of devastating and far higher than reported by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). According to the most recent analysis published on December 23 by the Guardian and Kaiser Health News (KHN), more than 2,900 US-based health care workers have died from their infections since March. Many of these infections are directly attributable to insufficient personal protective equipment (PPE) and hazardous working conditions such as long hours and high patient loads.

A December 10 report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine addressed to the assistant secretary for preparedness and response at the Department of Health Human Servies, Dr. Robert Kadlec, titled “Rapid Expert Consultation on Understanding Causes of Health Care Worker Deaths Due to COVID-19 Pandemic ,” notes that “the COVID-19 pandemic has created both acute and chronic stresses on the health care system and the health care personnel nationwide. At present, the nation lacks a uniform system to collect, collate, and report illnesses and deaths among health care workers due to COVID-19.”

Health workers at the Severo Ochoa Hospital in Leganes, Spain, Friday, April 10, 2020. (AP Photo/Manu Fernandez)

They continue, “Evidence suggests that COVID-19 infection is more prevalent among health care workers who lack appropriate PPE [personal protective equipment] or in work settings without a universal mask mandate. Whether an individual health care worker’s infection originated in the workplace or the community may be uncertain. Only a few studies report on efforts to improve the health and well-being of health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic.”

In September, the National Nurses United (NNU) published a report titled “Sins of Omission,” placing the death toll at 1,718 by September 16, of which 213 were registered nurses. By comparison, the CDC had reported only 574 health care worker deaths by August. According to the NNU, at the time there had been at least 258,768 cases of COVID-19 infection among health care workers, 166 percent higher than the official tally of 156,306 cases according to the CDC. At the time, the US had 6.9 million infections, representing 2.1 percent of the population. Health care workers then accounted for 3.8 percent of all infections.

That governmental agencies such as the CDC are unable to track health sector infections and deaths accurately or in real-time is in itself not only an abdication of their responsibility to a most valued sector of society but demonstrates a complete disconnect between the responsibility of government and the role of protecting the population from the pandemic. The bureaucratic inertia inherent in many of the government institutions attests to this.

In a Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report released on October 30—looking at data for COVID-19-associated hospitalizations among 6,760 health care personnel, across 13 states over the period from March 1 to May 31—6 percent of adults hospitalized with COVID-19 were health workers, of which 36 percent were in nursing-related occupations. Obesity affected 73 percent of these admissions. They also stated that 28 percent had been admitted to intensive care units, 16 percent needed mechanical ventilation and 4 percent had died.

Included as accomplices in this are hospital systems and health care industry executives who have washed their hands of any accountability for their inept mismanagement and unpreparedness in the face of the pandemic in their drive for profits. Despite the billions in COVID-19 relief funds funneled into lucrative health systems, little has been done to improve health workers’ conditions as the winter surge is pushing hospitals to the brink.

The exposure by the NNU with regards to COVID-19 infections and deaths among health workers is certainly welcome. However, they also have to be held accountable for the impact of the pandemic on the rank-and-file.

Repeatedly, when nurses and health care workers have sought to take their fight to the health systems, decrying the intolerable conditions they had faced in their hospitals during the pandemic, the unions channeled this outrage into isolated media-opportunity walkouts to vent steam. They then quickly urged nurses to acquiesce to the demands imposed by the health systems with none of their demands met.

Yet, these findings are not unique to the United States. Every nation that has faced an extensive and exhaustive struggle with the pandemic has seen health care workers bear the pandemic's brunt, precisely because their health systems, local governments and the unions representing the workers have done little to protect them from the coronavirus.

An International Council of Nurses’ (ICN) analysis published at the end of October found that more than 1,500 nurses had died from COVID-19 in 44 countries. They estimated that the health care worker COVID-19 fatalities worldwide were possibly higher than 20,000. Approximately 10 percent of all COVID-19 infections worldwide are among health care workers. The World Health Organization noted that though health care workers make up less than 3 percent of the population, they have accounted for around 14 percent of all COVID-19 cases.

Speaking at the Nightingale 2020 virtual conference on October 27, ICN Chief Executive Officer Howard Catton said, “The fact that as many nurses have died during this pandemic as died during World War I is shocking. Since May 2020, we have been calling for the standardized and systematic collection of data on health care worker infections and deaths, and the fact that is still not happening is a scandal. … I genuinely believe that global has never been more local in terms of the challenges we are facing, the lessons we need to learn and the solutions we seek. For example, getting personal protective equipment across borders requires governments to work together on customs and control issues, and when we have a vaccine, getting it to everybody who needs it, rather than just those who can afford to pay for it, will require multilateralism and cooperation.”

Forbes published an article on November 17 noting that almost 300,000 health care workers had been infected worldwide as of August 15. At the time, the United States led with 114,500 COVID-19 infections among health care workers. By November 15, just three months later, that number had risen to 216,049 health care worker infections, according to the conservative estimates provided by the CDC.

If present estimates hold for the United States, by the end of March 2021, another 210,000 deaths will pile on to the catastrophic 360,000 deaths that have taken place since the pandemic swept across the nation just 10 months ago. With the new variant of the coronavirus likely to become the dominant strain of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the increased transmissibility will mean further intensification of the infections, which are already bringing many health systems across the US to the point of collapse and continuing to endanger the health and livelihood of frontline workers.

Australian government negligence threatens large-scale COVID-19 outbreak

Patrick O’Connor

The latest coronavirus wave continues to grow in Australia’s two largest cities, Sydney and Melbourne.

After the first of these cases were detected in eastern Sydney in mid-December, each day has seen announcements of new clusters and infection sites. There are now 36 active cases in Victoria and 190 in New South Wales. While these numbers are low compared to the mass infections ravaging the United States, Europe, and other regions, there are indications that the infection spread is on an exponential trajectory. New cases are emerging more quickly than during the previous waves in 2020.

In Melbourne, there are more than 20 exposure sites, mostly in the city’s eastern suburbs but also including the central business district. Sydney remains the epicentre of the latest outbreak. Genomic testing has indicated there are several different transmission chains, with identified clusters in the Northern Beaches area, the western-Sydney suburbs of Croydon and Berala, and the regional city of Wollongong.

COVID-19 testing station at Summer Hill, Sydney

The Berala cluster, now with 15 confirmed cases, may be the most threatening. According to epidemiologists, the source was a returning overseas traveler, who infected a patient transport driver while en route to hotel quarantine. This infection again points to the inadequate provision of personal protective equipment (PPE) for health and other emergency workers.

A close contact of the driver then unknowingly infected two workers at a BWS bottle shop. These workers, who worked shifts every day between December 22 and December 31, subsequently spread the virus to multiple customers. An estimated 1,000 people were in the shop on New Year’s Eve alone. The thousands of people who entered the store over the 10-day period have been asked to self-isolate for two weeks, regardless of test results.

Whereas the initial Sydney outbreak was concentrated in the city’s affluent Northern Beaches area, Berala is a largely working-class suburb. About 60 percent of people there are immigrants and a significant proportion are manufacturing workers.

Experience in Australia and internationally demonstrates that the coronavirus pandemic is particularly dangerous in working-class areas. As a consequence of decades of “free market” and pro-business measures, enacted by successive Labor and Liberal governments, workers often have multiple jobs, have little or no sick leave, live in larger households to save on rental payments, and can have inadequate access to high quality healthcare.

Sewerage tests have detected traces of coronavirus at treatment plants in Liverpool and Glenfield, also working-class suburbs in Sydney’s south-west, indicating an infection spread uncontained by contact tracing measures.

In the face of this major public health threat, the response of state and federal governments, Labor and Liberal, amounts to criminal negligence.

Credit - Covid19data.com

The state Labor government in Victoria has again been exposed for failing to make the necessary investment in public health infrastructure. An estimated 60,000 people holidaying in New South Wales during the Christmas period were told to return home before the border was closed on January 2, and to be tested within 24 hours. This has triggered a debacle over the past three days, as it immediately became evident that the government had not prepared the necessary facilities to conduct so many tests.

Cars queued for as long as nine hours at testing stations. Many locations turned people away on multiple days, while those who do not own a car were told they could not be tested at all. Only 22,000 tests were conducted on Saturday and 32,000 on Sunday, with some reports indicating lengthy delays in obtaining test results.

Some test centres may have increased the risks of infection spread. Steve Williamson, who returned to Melbourne from Queensland, told the ABC that he had holidayed in an area with no coronavirus cases. When, however, he complied with the demand to get tested on return, he had to wait in an undercover and walled area at Sunshine Hospital with around 60 other people, some of whom had symptoms. Williamson said he was concerned that the testing system “could exacerbate the problem instead of containing it.”

In New South Wales (NSW), the state Liberal government, backed by the federal government of Prime Minister Scott Morrison, has ignored multiple warnings issued by epidemiologists and medical experts.

The government resisted mandating the wearing of masks until yesterday. This backflip followed a sharp condemnation of the government from the Australian Medical Association. The group’s vice president, Dr Chris Moy, said refusing to mandate masks was “a pretty ridiculous decision [that] doesn’t make sense.”

Other basic precautions are still not being enacted. Large gatherings continue to be permitted. An indoor concert by the group Human Nature was held in Rooty Hill, an outer-western Sydney suburb, on Saturday night, with 1,200 people, mostly unmasked, singing along. Outdoor gatherings of as many as 2,000 people remain permitted, with exemptions allowing even larger events. The government insists that a five-day cricket test match, between Australia and India, will proceed as planned beginning Thursday, in front of more than 20,000 people each day.

Raina MacIntyre, head of the biosecurity research program at the University of NSW’s Kirby Institute, characterised the cricket match, together with Christmas and New Year’s Eve, as a “trifecta of super-spreading events.” She told the Australian Financial Review: “If we don’t have it down to zero transmission by Australia Day [January 26], then we are in for prolonged pain.”

The NSW government has openly declared its commitment to protecting the interests of big business, as it refuses to consider more sweeping measures, including locking down Sydney, to eliminate the virus.

Berejiklian explained that the mandatory mask order was aimed at avoiding any measures that “restrict business activity, jobs or economic activity.” She defended the test cricket potential super-spreader event on the basis that people should “consider the thousands of jobs it keeps, consider the sense of normality it gives us.”

The premier’s references to “jobs” are properly translated as “profits.” As for “normality,” the government is attempting to condition the working class to accepting an ongoing risk of contracting COVID-19 in their workplace or while travelling to work.

EU-China investment agreement raises tensions with US

Nick Beams

The European Union and China have struck an agreement on an investment treaty that opens up opportunities for European companies in the Chinese market but threatens to cut across the stated aim of the incoming Biden administration in the US to mobilise its allies in an anti-China front.

The agreement was announced last Wednesday by the president of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen and China’s President Xi Jinping. It has been in the making since 2014 and until a couple of months ago appeared to be stalled.

But a concerted push by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Xi following the US presidential elections secured an agreement.

Chinese President Xi Jinping, right, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, center, French President Emmanuel Macron, left background, and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, left foreground, at the Elysee presidential palace in Paris, Tuesday, March 26, 2019. (AP Photo/Francois Mori)

In remarks to the Financial Times, the EU’s trade commissioner, Valdis Dombrovskis, said the deal contained the “most ambitious outcomes” that China had ever agreed to in terms of market access. European businesses would have more certainty and predictability for their operations and there were “very welcome changes to the rules of the game, because for a long period, trade and investment relations with China have been unbalanced.”

These comments were echoed by European Council president Charles Michel, who said the investment deal would “help rebalance the trade and investment relations between the EU and China.” European investors had been given an unprecedented level of market access providing businesses with “certainty and predictability for their operations.”

Under the terms of the deal, joint venture requirements are lifted in financial services and are to be phased out in auto production. There are new openings for European companies in health services, cloud computing and electric vehicles. China has also agreed not to discriminate against European companies in awarding contracts in favour of state-owned and state-subsidised Chinese firms.

Dombrovskis said on financial services the EU had secured the same benefits as the Phase 1 trade deal agreed to by the US and China last January.

In an attempt to head off opposition from countries and political parties within the EU, China agreed to uphold the terms of the Paris climate accord and to pursue ratification of international labour standards covering forced labour.

Under the deal, China will gain broader access to some manufacturing sectors within the EU, and to the energy industry.

But the primary gain for Beijing is on the political front. Xi intervened directly in the negotiations, speaking with Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron. He was eager to secure agreement in the face of criticism from some quarters in China that his policies have led to the isolation of Beijing as a result of the trade and economic warfare against it by the Trump administration.

That pressure is not going to relent under the Biden administration and may become more intense as the Democrats seek to involve the European powers and others in the anti-China drive rather than the go-it-alone approach adopted under Trump.

Xi was anxious to secure the agreement before the scheduled coming to power of the Biden administration on January 20. The official Chinese news agency, Xinhua, said that in his call with Macron, Xi had said relations between China and the EU were “gaining more global and strategic significance under the new circumstances.”

Noah Barkin, a specialist on Europe-China relations at the consulting firm Rhodium, said in a note issued late last month that the deal was a setback to plans for trans-Atlantic cooperation against Beijing and called it a “geopolitical coup for China.”

“Preventing such a trans-Atlantic front has been a top priority for the Chinese leadership and likely explains Xi Jinping’s eleventh-hour intervention to seal a deal – and Beijing’s insistence that it be concluded quickly, before Biden takes office.”

The main push for the agreement on the European side came from Merkel, who regards it as providing greater advantages for German auto companies, such as Daimler and Volkswagen, for their manufacturing operations in China.

In a statement shortly before the announcement of an agreement, the president of the German Association of the Auto Industry, Hildegard Müller, said it would “significantly improve the competitive environment for European companies in China” and would provide a “new impetus for a global, rules-based framework for trade and investment.”

The incoming Biden administration has left no doubt about its opposition.

Before announcement, Jake Sullivan, Biden’s choice as national security adviser, wrote on Twitter that the incoming administration “would welcome early consultations with our European partners on our common concerns about China’s economic practices.”

A former official in the Obama administration told the Financial Times that Beijing’s push to close the deal was part of a deliberate effort to derail the prospect of greater US-EU cooperation over China under the next administration. Sullivan had basically said to “slow things down,” but that was not happening.

The Trump administration had earlier weighed in with a statement issued by John Ullyot, a spokesman for the US National Security Council.

“Our allies and partners increasingly agree that the obvious approach when dealing with Beijing is ‘distrust and verify.’ Any commitment from [China] that is not accompanied by strong enforcement and verification mechanisms is merely a propaganda win for the [Chinese Communist Party].”

There is also significant opposition within EU circles to the agreement. Last Tuesday, before the deal was announced, Reinhard Bütikofer, the chair of the European parliament’s delegation for relations with China, called it a “strategic mistake.” He said it was “ridiculous” for the EU side to claim as a “success” the commitments that Beijing has made on labour rights. China has been accused by human rights organisations of using large numbers detained Uighurs in the Xinjiang province as forced labour—a claim it denies.

Underscoring the intensifying rivalries between the major economic powers, he said, “The values we all cherish in our Sunday sermons must be adhered to if we are not to fall victim to a new systemic rival.”

The deal has raised the question of how and even if the EU will cooperate with the US in dealings with China under the incoming Biden administration. At the end of November, a paper prepared by the European Commission called for an alliance with the US to overcome the conflicts incurred in the Trump administration.

It said the EU-US partnership needed “maintenance and renewal” if the democratic world were to assert its interests against “authoritarian powers” and “closed economies [that] exploit the openness our own societies depend on.”

The critics of the deal say it will undermine a partnership directed against China. EU trade commissioner Dombrovskis, however, told the Financial Times that the deal could help other countries in securing commitments from China.

He said the EU wanted to “engage very closely with the US” and he did not see either the Phase I agreement with the Trump administration or the EU agreement on investment as “hindering this cooperation in any way.”

The agreement has to be ratified by the European parliament before it goes into effect and there is certain to be intervention by its opponents in both the US and the EU to have it blocked.

Given the extent of the snub to the US contained in the announcement of the agreement, pushed forward from the EU side by Merkel, the Biden administration may decide to continue down the same road taken by Trump.

Thomas Wright, a senior fellow at the influential Brookings Institute, said the EU decision was “unquestionably damaging and will have many justifiably asking if it’s worth Biden’s time placing a big bet on Europe.”