Calls for a general strike against military junta in Myanmar

Peter Symonds

Amid mounting protests in Myanmar against the February 1 military coup, calls have been issued for a general strike against the junta. Demonstrations throughout the country over the weekend, estimated in the tens of thousands, continued on Monday despite the use of physical force by the police and threats of violence by the military.

On Monday, the Myanmar Now newspaper quoted opposition activist Ei Thinzar Maung urging government employees to stop work in an effort to “tear down the military dictatorship.”

A crowd of protesters fill a street and a bridge as they demonstrate in Mandalay, Myanmar, on Monday, Feb. 8, 2021. (AP Photo)

Aye Misan, a nurse at a government hospital, told Reuters, “We health workers are leading this campaign to urge all government staff” to stop work. “Our message to the public is that we aim to completely abolish this military regime and we have to fight for our destiny.”

Those who stopped work yesterday appear to have done so on an individual basis and to have been mainly government employees and professionals. One doctor told the BBC: “Today, we, professionals—especially civil servant professionals such as doctors, engineers and teachers—came out to show that we are all together in this. Our objective is the same—to make the dictatorship fall.”

However, industrial workers joined the protest. “This is a work day, but we aren’t going to work even if our salary will be cut,” one protester, 28-year-old garment factory worker, Hnin Thazin, told the AFP.

Significantly a protest of about 1,000 people took place yesterday in the country’s capital of Naypyitaw, an artificial city created by the military as a bastion against social unrest and dominated by government offices. Police turned water cannon on demonstrators to try to disperse the gathering on a highway into the capital.

The Australian Associated Press reported: “Three lines of police in riot gear could be seen across a road as protesters chanted anti-coup slogans and told police they should serve the people not the military, according to media and a live feed of events. Police placed a sign in the road saying that live ammunition could be used if demonstrators breached the third line of officers.”

Naypyidaw is thought to be where top civilian leaders who were seized by the military during the coup, including Aung San Suu Kyi and President Win Myint, are being held.

In Myanmar’s largest city and former capital, Yangon, an internal note for UN staff estimated that some 60,000 people took to the streets to demand the release of political prisoners and an end to the military dictatorship. Nurses, teachers, civil servants and monks joined the rallies with placards such as “Say no to dictatorship” and “We want democracy.” Another sign read: “Release Our Leaders, Respect Our Votes, Reject Military Coup.”

The pretext for the military coup was allegations of electoral irregularities in national elections held last November. Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) won an overwhelming majority with 83 percent of the vote and took 396 out of 476 seats in the combined upper and lower houses of parliament. The military-backed Union Solidarity and Development party won just 33 seats.

In the week leading up to the coup, the military challenged the results in the country’s electoral commission, which dismissed the claims of election rigging. The parliament was due to convene for the first time on February 1 when the military seized power, installed commander-in-chief Senior General Min Aung Hlaing as the country’s leader, declared a state of emergency and detained top NLD figures.

According to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, 165 people, mostly politicians, had been detained since February 1, with just 13 released. An Australian economist, Sean Turnell, who was advising the NLD-led government, has been arrested.

Protests have taken place in the country’s second largest city of Mandalay and many towns and villages. Thousands reportedly marched in the southern city of Dawei and in Myitkyina, the state capital of Kachin in the north. In the town of Myawaddy, on Myanmar’s eastern border with Thailand, police shot into the air to try to disperse a protest.

In Yangon, Kyaw, 58, a small shop owner cited by the Guardian, called for an end to the coup. “There are so many young educated people here, this is a revolution of the new generation,” he said. He had participated in the 1988 uprising against the military dictatorship that involved not only mass protests but a huge strike movement of the working class.

The military is preparing for a new crackdown. A statement on state-run MRTV on Monday declared there had been violations of the law and threats of force by groups “using the excuse of democracy and human rights.” It warned of unspecified action “against offences which disturb, prevent and destroy the state’s stability, public safety and the rule of law.” In areas of Yangon and Mandalay, the junta has imposed a curfew and banned gatherings of more than five people.

Now, as in 1988, the intervention of the working class is essential to the fight for democratic rights in Myanmar. It is, however, critical that such a movement should draw the necessary political lessons from the events in 1988, which ended with a bloody crackdown by troops that killed thousands.

The 1988 strike movement had brought the military to its knees. It relied on the bourgeois opposition led by Suu Kyi, who were just as terrified of the working class as the military, to call off the protests on the phony promises of an election in 1990. Her intervention provided the army with the opening to turn its guns on workers. Having stabilised the situation, the junta simply ignored its promise to hold the election and put Suu Kyi under house arrest.

Two decades later, the military again turned to Suu Kyi as it sought to mend relations with the US and its allies. It released her from house arrest in 2010 and allowed restricted elections under a new constitution, paving the way for an easing of sanctions and for US President Barack Obama to visit Myanmar in 2016. Suu Kyi and the NLD were even allowed to form a government after winning the 2016 election.

However, the key levers of power have remained in the hands of the armed forces. Over the past five years, Suu Kyi has collaborated closely with the military, touring the world to encourage foreign investment, and acting as the chief apologist for its atrocities against the Muslim Rohingya minority. Like the military, her NLD is deeply imbued with anti-Rohingya chauvinism, branding them “illegal immigrants” to justify their complete lack of civil rights.

The NLD represents layers of the capitalist class who are hostile to the military’s political and economic domination, but who are equally fearful of social unrest, particularly of the working class. As she has before, Suu Kyi will seek to exploit the protest movement against the junta to strike a new deal with the military at the expense of working people.

Workers can defend their democratic and social rights only by politically breaking from Suu Kyi and the NLD, and fighting for their own independent class interests on the basis of an internationalist and socialist perspective.

Free Spanish rapper Pablo Hasél, jailed on terror charges!

Alejandro López

Spanish rapper Pablo Hasél is set to go to prison for allegedly “glorifying terrorism,” “inciting violence” and “insulting the Spanish crown and state institutions” in tweets and songs. He would become the first musician imprisoned since the end of the fascist dictatorship of Francisco Franco in 1978 and could face up to two decades in prison.

Hasél, 33, whose real name is Pablo Rivadulla, is a left-wing rapper popular for his political songs and poems against successive Popular Party (PP), Socialist Party (PSOE) and Podemos-backed governments. He criticizes anti-immigrant and pro-austerity policies, warning about the rise of fascism, authoritarianism and police state repression.

The unrelenting pursuit of Hasél and other artists and musicians is part of an escalating campaign by the European ruling class on free speech and democratic rights, intensified with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Terrified at growing social opposition to murderous “herd immunity” policies and bank and corporate bailouts, the ruling class aims to censor artists with draconian prison sentences.

Hasél has been persecuted over a number of years. In 2011, he was arrested for his song “Democracy F* You,” where he called for the liberation of the jailed leader of the Maoist armed group, First of October Anti-Fascist Resistance Groups (GRAPO). In 2014 he was sentenced to two years in prison for publicly insulting the King of Spain and glorifying terrorism. The sentence was not served, however, as Hasél did not have a criminal record.

In March 2017, the prosecutor’s office requested five years against him, to be added to the two he already has, for more songs and 64 Tweets. These tweets include:

• “The police kill 15 migrants and they are saints. The people defends itself from this brutality and we are ‘violent terrorists’, scum.” Hasél was referring to the infamous Tarajal Massacre, when police fired tear gas and rubber bullets on migrants attempting to swim across to the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, causing 15 men to drown.
  
  
• “The Bourbon mobster partying with the Saudi monarchy, among those who finance ISIS everything remains.” Hasél was referring to well-known relations between the Saudi and Spanish Bourbon monarchies, and between the House of Saud and Islamist terror group ISIS.

During the trial, Hasél did not condemn his songs and tweets, noting that “half the country thinks the same” about the monarchy. He said he sings about objective facts, widely reported in the media. He said that “in the end I will be the one made to pay” for the monarchy’s action—an observation that former King Juan Carlos seemed to confirm last year, when he fled Spain like a thief to avoid prosecution on corruption charges.

Hasél claimed he saw groups like GRAPO and the Basque separatist armed group ETA as “resistance” organizations. These groups are now defunct, in the case of GRAPO, since the 1980s. Hasél’s songs cannot be seriously presented as support for violent armed actions.

He concluded his defense, saying, “the limits of freedom of expression are always for us. It is the anti-fascists who are tried, persecuted and condemned. For those who want to sentence me to prison, the main problem is that I’m not a fascist, and I don’t want to throw bombs at Catalans, and seek the death of homosexuals and immigrants.”

In November 2020, the higher courts rejected his appeal and approved his conviction. On January 28, he received a judicial order to surrender within 10 days to face imprisonment. Hasél refused to surrender voluntarily, and his incarceration is imminent this week.

Currently he has been sentenced to a minimum of nine months in jail. But the courts are adding many new accusations that he could end up spending as much as 20 years behind bars.

The incarceration of Hasél is a blatant attack on basic democratic rights, including freedom of expression and artistic liberty. To state this does not imply any political sympathy for the petty-bourgeois Basque nationalists Hasél has defended or their terrorist activities, or his support for Stalinist regimes in the USSR, Eastern Europe and China. However, the Spanish state is clearly setting a precedent for a draconian crackdown on any oppositional political or artistic statement.

Indeed, Hasél himself noted, “you don’t have to agree with everything I say to see that this is a serious attack on freedom of expression.”

Last week hundreds and, in some cases, thousands have attended protests defending Hasél in Girona, Barcelona, Lleida, Manresa, Granada, Valencia, Zaragoza and Madrid. He also received solidarity messages from other singers or rappers, including Cesar Strawberry, ToteKing and Los Chikos del Maiz, and actors like Javier Bardem, Luis Tosar and Willy Toledo.

Spanish singer-songwriter Lluís Llach criticized the decision, comparing it to his songs against the Franco dictatorship in the 1970s. “ They are putting more musicians in prison now than during the Transition. Those of us that stood up against Franco’s regime were not imprisoned back then. Now things have changed.”

Hasél’s prosecution is part of a broad campaign of intimidation after the brutal police crackdown on the 2017 Catalan independence referendum. This was followed by relentless propaganda supporting fascist protests, the fascistic Vox party and show trials of Catalan nationalist politicians.

In November 2017, 12 rappers of the now-defunct band La Insurgencia were sentenced to six months in prison for glorifying terrorism. In 2018, rapper Josep Beltrán (Valtònyc) fled to Belgium in May to avoid a three-and-a-half-year prison sentence after being convicted of glorifying terrorism and insulting the monarchy. In recent years, more artists and citizens have been sentenced for blasphemy and glorifying terrorism.

Photo: Valtonyc/Twitter

A stench of fascism emerges from the state apparatus jailing Hasél. The same courts attacking artists for “glorifying terrorism” sentenced Catalan nationalists to a decade in prison for peaceful protests, claimed Francisco Franco’s 1936 fascist coup was legitimate and declared that his regime did not commit crimes against humanity. Over the past months, sections of the army working with Vox have repeatedly called for a coup. In private WhatsApp chats, former generals proclaim the need to “kill 26 million” left-wing voters.

Predictably, the PSOE-Podemos government, which is responsible for Hasél’s jailing, is downplaying the significance of this attack on fundamental liberties.

Pathetically Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias tweeted his concern for the state’s reputation. He said, “I think that in a democracy nobody should go to jail for crimes of opinion. There are other legal mechanisms to protect honour, integrity or prestige. I think Hasél’s incarceration will create the feeling that the law is not always the same for everyone.”

Similarly, Podemos spokesperson Isabel Serra stated in a press conference that Hasél’s conviction demonstrates “that freedom of expression in this country has been asphyxiated since the gag law was approved, a law that must be repealed urgently.”

In truth, Hasél has been prosecuted using the penal code, specifically by Articles 578 (exaltation of terrorism), 504 (insults to the security forces) and 491 (insults to the Crown), not under the reactionary Citizens Security Law (“gag law”) of the Popular Party (PP). Serra was attempting to deflect criticism of her party’s complicity in the repression of artists towards the right-wing PP.

Hasél has correctly accused Podemos “of being guilty, direct accomplices” in his persecution.

“In the eye of the hurricane”: The COVID-19 pandemic and the new variants

Benjamin Mateus

There have been 106.9 million cases of COVID-19 confirmed worldwide since the beginning of the pandemic. There have also been over 2.3 million deaths, a conservative estimate by all accounts. After the massive winter surge, cases have been steadily declining primarily due to containment measures put into effect by many countries after seeing their health systems approach near collapse or falter altogether.

Teachers including Amanda Thornton, left, conduct their classes online from laptops during freezing temperatures outside the Joseph Greenberg School in Philadelphia, Monday, Feb. 8, 2021. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

Still, the seven-day moving average of cases remains exceptionally high, with more than 457,000 cases each day. Although it is encouraging that the death toll is following the fall in cases, it still stands at an abominable 12,712 average deaths per day. The dominance of more infective and lethal variants of the coronavirus that are also immune-evading will assuredly, in the context of the global policy of “herd immunity,” lead to future waves of infections. There remains an abundance of energy in the virus to burn for some time.

So far, more than 130 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccines have been administered worldwide. The United States, according to Bloomberg’s vaccination tracker, has vaccinated over 40 million people who have received at least one dose, accounting for about 12 percent of the population. For the first time, the number of vaccinations has outpaced the number of infections. However, this should be taken as a cautionary statistical anomaly rather than a determined global response to the virus.

According to the director-general of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, more than 75 percent of all vaccinations administered thus far have occurred in just 10 countries, which account for 60 percent of global GDP. Many of those vaccinated in these countries are at lower risk of severe disease or death.

Meanwhile, almost 130 nations representing more than 30 percent of the world’s population have yet to receive a single injection, underscoring the deep inequity that characterizes global capitalist relations. Dr. Tedros noted during Friday’s press briefing, “All governments have an obligation to protect their own people, but once countries with vaccines have vaccinated their own health workers and older people, the best way to protect the rest of their own population is to share vaccines so other countries can do the same.”

Vaccine nationalism not only threatens to prolong the pandemic and global economic downward spiral. Without a coordinated international effort to suppress the virus, new and even more virulent lineages of the SARS-CoV-2 may evolve. The overwhelming surge of cases a little more than a month ago in Johannesburg, London and Manaus, Brazil, have confirmed the virus’s deadly nature and how political efforts to return to economic normalcy have contributed to this extremely disturbing development.

Speaking to CNN, Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, cautioned against self-congratulation over the dip in numbers. Given the rising cases of new variants, he compared the present situation in the United States to being in the “eye of the hurricane.”

“I’ve been on Zoom calls for the last two weeks about how we’re going to manage this. The big wall is about to hit us again, and these are the new variants. This could be really very dire for our country as we head into the spring. Now, we’re in a race. We’re in a race to see how quickly we can vaccinate the American people.”

A report from Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, California, published this week on a preprint server for health sciences, found that the B.1.1.7 variant first identified in the UK has a doubling time of a little over a week. It has an infectious rate 35 to 45 percent higher than the wild type of the virus.

The report found the variant was first detected in the US in early November and had spread to more than 30 US states by January. Scientists predict that UK variant will account for 50 percent of cases by March 23. Florida, with the most B.1.1.7 variant cases detected in any state, is expected to reach the 50 percent milestone by March 8. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has reported that six cases of the South African variant have been detected across three states, while three cases of the Brazilian variant, also known as P.1, have been found across two states.

Over the weekend, South Africa announced it was suspending plans to vaccinate frontline health care workers with the AstraZeneca vaccine. South Africa’s Minister of Health, Dr. Zweli Mkhize, explained that a small study conducted among 2,000 volunteers vaccinated with this vaccine found that it offered minimal protection against mild to moderate disease caused by the variant that accounts for 90 percent of COVID-19 infections in the country.

“The AstraZeneca vaccine appeared effective against the original strain, but not against the variant. We have decided to put a temporary hold on the rollout of the vaccine … more work needs to be done,” the minister said.

Evidence is also emerging that the South African variant is both more contagious and virulent. The hope is that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, still awaiting emergency authorization in the US and which has shown adequate results against this variant, will be rolled out soon.

Oxford University, an AstraZeneca partner, issued a statement to the effect that the “yet to be peer-reviewed study” was too small and involved a low-risk population with an average age of 31, making the preliminary conclusions of the study premature and inconclusive. “Protection against moderate-severe disease, hospitalizations or death could not be assessed in this study,” they added.

The race to vaccinate the population against SRAS-CoV-2, while variants of the virus are allowed to continue to spread, does not take into account the danger posed by these mutations and is a potential recipe for disaster. As these more contagious and virulent lineages of COVID-19 become more dominant, mitigation measures must be implemented immediately and an international strategy initiated to vaccinate the most vulnerable. Scientists’ predictions imply that the hurricane alluded to by Dr. Hotez will make landfall and more suffering and avoidable deaths will ensue.

French universities reopen despite spread of coronavirus, new variants

Samuel Tissot

Last week French universities began to partially reopen to students. Following a tweet from French President Emmanuel Macron on January 21 announcing the partial reopening, new rules this term will allow each student to attend classes one day per week. Macron’s tweet was made a day after a series of small student protests led by the New Anti-capitalist Party (NPA) and student unions called for the immediate reopening of universities on January 20.

Universite de Paris - Faculte de Droit, Place de Pantheon (Image Credit: Peter Haas/Wikipedia)

The measure will throw hundreds of thousands of students back into classroom settings every day. For example, at just the University of Orléans, 4,000 students will return for in-person education each day. The risk of infection is not limited to the classroom. Students, professors and staff will increase the number of people on public transport and lead to unmasked, crowded lunches in cafeterias.

Even if strict protocols are followed, the virus will inevitably spread in an educational setting. This has been shown by multiple scientific studies. However, in all likelihood there will be a repeat of the September reopening of universities and schools, where supposedly strict rules will not be followed by most universities. Lectures will again take place in poorly ventilated rooms and halls without enough space for social distancing.

In current conditions the policy means a further acceleration in the spread of the virus, leading to more infections and deaths both among students and the wider population. Since the September reopening, nearly 50,000 people have died from COVID-19 in the country.

The relaxation of these measures comes as dangerous variants of the virus become further entrenched in France. On Thursday, Prime Minister Jean Castex reported that 14 percent of COVID-19 cases in the country already involved the more infectious B.1.1.7 variant, first identified in the UK. In France, an average of 419 people have died every day over the past week.

On Sunday, preliminary results from a study were published showing that the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine was significantly less effective against the South African variant. In some cases, the British variant has also developed the E484K mutation that is believed to cause the reduction in vaccine efficacy. The rollout of the AstraZeneca vaccine in France began on Saturday and is a key part of the government’s vaccination campaign, which has still reached less than 3 percent of the population. The government is using the campaign for vaccines as a justification for its refusal to impose a lockdown until the population can be vaccinated and the virus stopped.

Contrary to the notion promoted by capitalist governments and the media, teenagers and young adults do get seriously ill from the disease. At the time of writing, 294 people aged under 30 are hospitalized with the virus, and 51 people in this age category have died from COVID-19 since the beginning of the pandemic. Health care workers treating patients with the British and South African variants have also emphasized that they are generally much younger than during the first wave.

Although undertaken in the name of defending students’ mental health, the partial reopening of universities is a tactical step in the government’s broader “herd immunity” policy. Macron has been pushing for a premature reopening of universities since the new year. On January 4, the Ministry of Higher Education decreed that certain groups of students could return in small groups and to sit for exams.

However, this met sharp resistance from students. For example, L2 students at Créteil University launched a petition against in-person exams. The petition stated: “The health crisis is far from over and is starting up again with the festive season and the arrival of a new strain of COVID is only making things worse. Doing exams in the classroom, given the current situation, is a dangerous action for everyone’s health.”

Although just over a month later, this remains true, with the exam season finished and a new semester beginning. The university administrations, government and student unions have redoubled their efforts to push for a reopening.

The unions and pseudo-left parties bear central responsibility for creating the conditions for Macron to push through the reopening. It was only following a series of small protests organized by the NPA and a coalition of student unions on January 20 that Macron announced the measure.

The protest encompassed the youth organizations of the Greens, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s Unsubmissive France and Macron’s own party, and was backed by the student unions. Only 1,500 protesters gathered in Paris and only a few hundred in other cities across France, yet these protests supposedly “pressured” Macron to implement his own right-wing policy. In contrast, when hundreds of thousands of “yellow vest” protesters demonstrated for months each week against social inequality and tax cuts for the rich, the president’s response was police repression.

In fact, the current reopening has already been criticized among these layers as being too limited. On January 25, Maryam Pougetoux, the head of the National Union of French Students, pushed for even more anti-lockdown measures, stating, “We must go further, with levels of 50 percent [in-person].”

The claim that accelerating mass death and illness in society will improve the mental health of students is absurd. In fact, according to a recent survey by Odoxa-Backbone Consulting, 46 percent of students fear for their own health, and 80 percent fear for the health of their families.

Nonetheless, Macron, in a February 2 interview, claimed his policies aim to “protect our youth as much as possible.”

A number of recent student suicides have underlined the mental health crisis engulfing youth both in France and internationally. While social isolation is a considerable huge strain on students, as well as the rest of society, it is not the underlying cause of the mental health crisis. The vast majority of youth face the specter of unemployment, and do not have access to adequate housing or food. A recent viral video of hundreds of students queuing for food parcels highlights the precarity facing French youth in the 21st century.

While the pandemic has compounded these issues, during the last 12 months the billionaire class’ wealth has rocketed. The youth face the brutal consequences of the European ruling class’ conscious decision to let hundreds of thousands die, including among their family members and friends. Those of student age have grown up only seeing only austerity at home and imperialist war abroad.

Despite the anti-lockdown campaign of Macron and the pseudo-left parties, there is not popular support for reopening universities among the population or the student body. The handful of students gathered by the student union-NPA protest stands in stark contrast to tens of thousands who have demonstrated against Macron’s recent police-state measures: the anti-Muslim Law Affirming Republican Principles and the Global Security Law. A recent poll showed that 70 percent of the French population stated they supported a new lockdown to stop the spread of the virus.

These protests were an effort to divert anger over the social crisis, poor housing, food insecurity and the mental health crisis behind a campaign for an end to lockdown measures. In doing so, they are functioning as the political cheerleaders for a policy aimed at sacrificing tens of thousands of lives for the profits of the corporate and financial elite. The campaign for a “reopening” is aimed at preventing any impact of a lockdown on corporate profits, and keeping schools open is necessary in order that children’s parents can continue to go to work.

The return to in-person instruction at the universities is a useful tool to increase pressure on schoolteachers to maintain in-person education. It also provides a precedent for the reopening of non-essential enterprise, including restaurants and hospitality venues.

Students and young people must not allow themselves to be used as pawns in the government’s efforts to pursue homicidal policy. Schools, universities and non-essential workplaces must be closed, and a comfortable living wage must be provided to the entire population, young and old. To fight for this program, students should turn to the working class, the only social force capable of imposing a scientific response to the pandemic. The fight against the policy of death is the fight against capitalism and for socialism.

Reopening schools: A medical experiment on children

Andrea Peters

On February 2, a nine-year-old child in Texas died from COVID-19. The little girl, Mackenzie Gongora from the city of San Antonio, was diagnosed with the disease just three days earlier. Her family received a call from the after-school program Mackenzie attended on January 29 telling them that she had a headache, stomachache and fever. They immediately took her to the doctor, where they discovered that she had coronavirus.

Elementary school students in Godley, Texas, Wednesday, Aug. 5, 2020. (AP Photo/LM Otero)

With Mackenzie presenting mild symptoms and there being no indication of respiratory problems, physicians told her parents to take her home and make her comfortable and to return to the hospital if her conditioned worsened. Her illness did not appear to progress. But on the morning of February 2—also her father’s birthday—Mackenzie’s parents awoke to find her lifeless body. They are, no doubt, destroyed.

Mackenzie’s father and eight-year-old sister have also tested positive for COVID-19. Scarborough Elementary School, where she attended, issued a pro forma statement stating the “community is saddened.” It has not announced on its website any plans to close the school for quarantine, or even mourning.

The little girl’s death follows quickly on the heels of the loss of two other children to coronavirus in Texas. In Tarrant County, nine-year-old J.J. Boatman and a child under the age of one died in late January. Like Mackenzie, J.J. was attending in-person school.

Dr. Arthur Caplan, professor of bioethics at New York University, told the World Socialist Web Site: “You can’t underestimate potential health dangers for children. We do know there are some who are severely damaged. We’re not sure yet what the virus might be doing over time to them. So we want to be cautious, not cavalier, about protecting children, and that means carefully following up and monitoring what’s happening to some sub-sample of numbers. We shouldn’t ignore them in our studies. We want to get them to school for social and psychological purposes, but that doesn’t mean that we should just throw away caution because they’re kids.”

After noting the importance of testing vaccines on children, he added that this was still “six to nine months away.”

According to the latest data from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 276 children under the age of 17 have died from the illness and 2,241,893 have tested positive—making up over 12 percent of total infections in the US. Case numbers for the young are rising, a fact that, as COVID-19 whistleblower Rebekah Jones has pointed out on Twitter, coincides with many post-holiday school reopenings. As the more contagious UK variant of the virus becomes dominant in the US, these numbers will grow.

Hospitalizations of those under 17 have been rising since October, increasing alongside the overall rising rate in the adult population. The number of children receiving in-patient care for COVID-19 last spring and summer—when schools were overwhelmingly shuttered—was much lower and seemed to be following a different trend than that of adults at the time.

A central claim behind the back-to-school drive being implemented by the Biden administration with the support of the education unions and backed to the hilt by every section of the political establishment—from the “left” to the far right—is that COVID-19 does not pose a serious risk to children. This claim rests upon the one-sided interpretation of data, the suppression of data and, perhaps most fundamentally, data that do not exist.

The World Socialist Web Site has written an extensive critique of media reports and the CDC’s claim that it is safe to reopen schools. In short, many studies indicating that schools are significant sites of transmission have been ignored, in favor of very limited research conducted in settings where the school environment looks nothing like that found in the majority of K-12 systems in the US or during times when schools were largely closed.

Beyond this, however, an enormous amount of information about COVID-19 is simply missing, particularly as it applies to children. Testing for coronavirus in the young is low, compared to their overall share of the population and total tests done. For instance, working with data from 10 states, the American Association of Pediatrics found that just 6 to 18 percent of all testing was carried out on children.

This is attributable not to the fact that children do not get coronavirus, but that they, similar to a large segment of the adult population, are mostly asymptomatic or only mildly symptomatic. In other words, their infection rate appears low not because children do not get infected but because those infections are not being recorded.

However, undetected COVID-19 is not harmless to the body. Current data show that asymptomatic and mildly symptomatic infections can pose serious long-term risks, including to a patient’s respiratory and cardiovascular systems.

All those stampeding educators and children into the classroom know this. They simply lie about it when arguing that reopenings can be done safely.

A December 28 article published in Forbes noted: “‘Kids don’t get sick from COVID-19.’ Early into the pandemic, this was one of the false claims that far too many parents, and even medical professionals, were quick to embrace and repeat. But we learned more. … We now know that children can absolutely get sick from COVID-19, that they can die from it, and that they can develop long-term health complications, even if their initial presentation seemed mild.”

Because COVID-19 is a new virus, there has only been limited time to study its lasting effects. However, it is well-known that viruses in general scar the body, including adenoviruses, enteroviruses, Coxsackie viruses, tespiratory syncytial virus (RSV), chicken pox, Ebola, West Nile virus and other coronaviruses (a category that includes SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes COVID-19). Some of the illnesses associated with these viruses include diabetes, chronic anemia, hepatitis, hearing loss, muscle weakness, abnormal gait, abnormal reflexes, memory loss, muscle and joint pain, chronic fatigue, headaches, asthma, decreased lung function, myocarditis, pericarditis, persistent heart failure, and on and on.

Among adults sufferers of COVID-19 it is already clear that lasting effects include “brain fog,” chronic fatigue, joint aches, blood clots, rashes, hair loss, loss of taste and smell, depression, anxiety, and damage to the heart, lungs and kidneys. In some cases, these conditions are life-threatening. It is unclear when or whether they will resolve.

One of the most concerning problems witnessed in asymptomatic patients—including children—is serious damage to the respiratory system. Studies coming out of China, for instance, albeit working with limited sample sizes, have found what are called “ground glass opacities” in asymptomatic young people, similar to those seen older patients. Doctors do not yet know what the implications of this damage is or how it will develop as individuals age.

According to an article posted on WebMD in August, the director of Palm Beach County’s health department, Dr. Alina Alonso, found these Chinese studies so concerning that she warned county officials in July about the danger of school reopenings.

“They are seeing there is damage to the lungs in these asymptomatic children. … We don’t know how that is going to manifest a year from now or 2 years from now. Is that child going to have chronic pulmonary problems or not?” she told commissioners.

There are myriad other dimensions of “long-haul” coronavirus infections.

A November 2020 Swedish study of five children found “fatigue, dyspnoea, heart palpitations or chest pain, and four had headaches, difficulties concentrating, muscle weakness, dizziness and sore throats” to be lasting problems. One child had to be hospitalized for perimyocarditis. And while, “some had improved after 6–8 months … they all suffered from fatigue and none had fully returned to school.” The study’s authors made a particular point about the problem of extremely limited data regarding COVID-19 in children.

Neurological and psychiatric illnesses are also appearing in young “long-haulers.” In August, ABC News carried a report about a 15-year-old in Britain who tested negative on COVID-19 diagnostic and antibody tests but clearly had the illness. She currently suffers from encephalitis and has undergone a significant mental regression as well as a change in personality. Her acute symptoms included hallucinations and violent seizures.

Her physician, a pediatric neurologist at the Evalina London Children’s Hospital, noted, “I think that COVID has taught us that every time we feel complacent, that we know the spectrum, a new spectrum sort of evolves.”

“We worry that the long-term effect would be in essentially brain growth,” he added, with children having a lot of this ahead of them.

In October, the Union of Pediatricians in Russia reported that scientists have found a 30 percent decline in the cognitive functioning of children infected with the virus. They also detected a fall in the sperm count of boys with severe cases, which could impact their future fertility. They have no idea if either condition will resolve itself.

This list goes on.

A Wall Street Journal piece published in August reported the comments of a New York doctor who reported seeing young patients with auto-immune disorders. She believes they were triggered by COVID-19. In a study of adults, researchers at the University Hospital Frankfurt have found clear evidence of heart damage among some asymptomatic COVID-19 sufferers.

What is being carried out with the forced reopening of schools is effectively a medical experiment on more than 50 million children. COVID-19 will spread within the schools under conditions in which nobody yet has a full picture of how widespread, severe and long-lasting the impact of the virus is on the young. The early data are alarming.

Some children will die, others will become severely ill. How many will grow up with organ damage, cognitive decline, mental and psychological problems, auto-immune disorders and the like? The answer of the politicians and union leaders—all of whom endlessly bellyache about the “well-being of the children”—is: Let’s find out.

The Senate trial of Donald Trump: The questions that must be answered

Barry Grey

The Senate impeachment trial of Donald Trump, which begins today, arises out of an event without precedent in the history of the United States: an attempted coup d’état by the president of the United States, aimed at overturning the result of an election, violently suppressing Congress and establishing a one-man dictatorship. In the course of this attempted coup, the lives of senators, representatives and even the vice president were threatened. Several people were killed.

On the eve of the second impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump, Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., center right, the lead Democratic House impeachment manager, walks through the Rotunda to the Senate to prepare for the case, at the Capitol in Washington, Monday, Feb. 8, 2021. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

There is no question that Donald Trump is guilty of not only “High Crimes and Misdemeanors.” He has committed felonies of the most serious character. His impeachment should be followed by his indictment on criminal charges, trial, conviction and lifelong imprisonment. His many co-conspirators should be identified, subjected to criminal proceedings and thrown into high-security prisons along with him.

But this is unlikely to be the result of the Senate trial. While the 80-page Democratic House managers’ brief released last week lays out a detailed factual case documenting that Trump led a months-long campaign to prepare a coup d’état, the Democrats who control the Senate—not to mention President Biden—have no stomach for this fight. Although Trump’s conspiracy was either directly supported or facilitated by the Senate Republicans, the Democrats continue to bow politely before this right-wing riffraff and address them as “colleagues.”

To the extent that the Democrats’ trial strategy is directed to the Republican senators—i.e., persuading them to convict Trump—the proceedings will evade what should be its central purpose: to expose before the entire country the criminal conspiracy led by Trump and involving sections of the state, including the military-police apparatus and powerful sections of the corporate-financial elite.

There are a number of obvious questions that relate to the operation of the conspiracy that must be answered, including:

• How was it possible that the Capitol Police, the D.C. National Guard, the FBI and other federal security forces were so completely unprepared for what was known in advance to be a violent attack?
  
  
• Why was there a virtual stand-down of Capitol security forces despite well documented plans for violence, involving fascistic militias like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers?
  
  
• With whom were the leaders of the mob in contact during the assault? Who visited the Trump White House in the days leading up to the attempted coup? How did the fascists know the layout of the Capitol building?

But there are more fundamental questions that no one is asking, let alone answering. First and foremost: If the coup succeeded, what was the plan?

The Democrats’ own indictment lays out in extensive detail the months-long conspiracy to overturn the results of the election that culminated on January 6. Trump organized a mob to storm the Capitol and stop the Congressional certification of the results of the election. This is precisely true. But if they succeeded in seizing hostages, what were they going to do?

And what were the forces within the state involved in this operation? In the months before the coup, Trump made critical changes to the military aimed at facilitating it. The military has just initiated a “lockdown” supposedly aimed at addressing the proliferation of “domestic extremism” within its ranks. Who within the military supported the operation, and what were their roles?

Who, moreover, was providing the financial backing? As is well known, in order to uncover the roots of a criminal conspiracy, it is necessary to “follow the money.” Trump’s own cabinet was stocked with billionaires, including individuals like his former education secretary, Betsy DeVos, the sister of Blackwater founder Erik Prince. The DeVos family is known to have provided funding for the right-wing demonstration in Michigan to demand an end to restrictions on the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. What is the connection between the fascistic mob on January 6 and high-level support within the ruling class?

Finally, who were the Republican politicians and officials, at both the federal and state levels, who worked with members and leaders of the various fascist militia and vigilante organizations?

Many of the senators sitting as jurors in the trial either facilitated or directly participated in the events underlying it. This includes Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, who led the drive to reject the Electoral College vote on January 6. It also includes all those, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who helped Trump promote the lie of a rigged election by refusing for weeks to acknowledge Biden’s victory.

The New York Times published a report yesterday, “‘Its Own Domestic Army’: How the G.O.P. Allied Itself With Militants,” reporting on the political alignment of the Republican Party with fascistic militias involved not only in the January 6 insurrection but also the plot to kidnap and assassinate the Governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, prior to the election.

The Times notes:

Following signals from President Donald J. Trump—who had tweeted “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” after an earlier show of force in Lansing—Michigan’s Republican Party last year welcomed the support of newly emboldened paramilitary groups and other vigilantes. Prominent party members formed bonds with militias or gave tacit approval to armed activists using intimidation in a series of rallies and confrontations around the state. That intrusion into the Statehouse now looks like a portent of the assault halfway across the country months later at the United States Capitol.

What was the involvement of Republican Party officials throughout the country, along with local sheriffs and police departments, in facilitating and supporting the January 6 insurrection?

The Democrats oppose the full exposure of the conspiracy. Biden is seeking to distance himself completely from the Senate trial. “Biden’s strategy for Trump’s impeachment: Sit back and STFU,” noted a headline in Politico yesterday. “The Biden team,” Politico wrote, “has shut down question after question about where Biden stands on this week’s trial, even with its massive historical, constitutional and political ramifications. On Monday, press secretary Jen Psaki wouldn’t even say whether the president would receive daily updates on the trial’s progress.” It continued:

“The last thing Americans want to see right now is that conversation from the podium,” Karen Finney, a former Hillary Clinton campaign adviser and Democratic strategist, said of the White House talking about impeachment. “Part of what they’re trying to do here is say ‘it’s a new day it’s a new administration.’ They’re not going to use the White House and the tools of the presidency to engage in politics.”

In other words, it is necessary to “move on.” In particular, the Democrats want to cover up the complicity of its “colleagues” in the Republican Party, which has become an incubator for fascist forces and their integration into the political establishment.

What Trump expresses is the deep-rooted, anti-democratic and fascistic tendencies embedded in the state and the entire ruling class. The Democrats have no desire to expose the extent of the conspiracy, because this would involve an exposure of the underlying political and social conditions of which the Trump administration is an expression.

Global Nuclear Non-Proliferation: Ten Years of Rising Dangers

Manpreet Sethi

Early 2010s: A Mood of Optimism

The decade of the 2010s dawned with much nuclear hope and optimism, basking in the glow of President Obama’s Prague speech of April 2009. The NPT RevCon in May 2010 reflected and added to this sentiment as a final document was consensually achieved and an ambitious Action Plan identified 46 steps for the promotion of non-proliferation and disarmament.      

The mood of the times was also captured by the renowned nuclear strategist, Thomas Schelling, who wrote in an article in Daedalus, “There is no sign that any kind of nuclear arms race is in the offing—not, anyway, among the current nuclear powers…That should contribute to nuclear quiescence... Except for some ‘rogue’ threats, there is little that could disturb the quiet nuclear relations among the recognized nuclear nations.”

Indeed, the nuclear superpowers appeared to have arrived at a stable modus vivendi that minimised the possibility of nuclear use. President Obama’s 2010 Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) recommended limiting the use of nuclear weapons to “extreme circumstances,” thereby at least notionally moving the ‘use’ spectrum to a narrow range of contingencies. On non-proliferation, too, there was a sense of well-being about the NPT, with it having achieved a universality with only four outliers. The two nuclear taboos—against nuclear use and nuclear proliferation—were perceived to be strong. 

In 2010, President Obama also convened the first Nuclear Security Summit (NSS) in Washington, DC. The US was joined by 47 other states to call attention to securing nuclear material as a way of countering the threat of nuclear terrorism. In 2012 and 2014, when the two next Summits were held, the number of participating states grew to 53, and several joint statements, ‘house gifts’, and ‘gift baskets’ were announced. By the time of the last Summit in 2016, however, Russia and the US had fallen out, which not only led to Moscow opting out of the event, but also impacted other aspects of their nuclear relationship.

Mid-Decade: An Altered Nuclear Landscape

The souring of US-Russia relations began with the Ukrainian crisis in 2014 and eventually began reflecting in their nuclear policies as well. For instance, further arms control between US and Russia stalled, and mutual accusations of nuclear build-up in violation of existing treaties, such as the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, began to be made. It was  around this time that emerging Chinese belligerence also began to alter other inter-state equations. As political relations became stressed among the major nuclear powers, hedging strategies became visible in military capability build-up, including  ‘nuclear modernisation’.      

Meanwhile, fissures between the nuclear weapon (NWS) and non-nuclear weapon states (NNWS) erupted at the 2015 NPT RevCon, which was unable to achieve a consensus final document. NNWS refused to accept more non-proliferation obligations, such as denial of enrichment and reprocessing technologies or acceptance of the Additional Protocol as mandatory for nuclear cooperation. Instead, they urged NWS to move towards disarmament. It may also be recalled that before the RevCon, two Humanitarian Initiative conferences were held in 2013 and 2014, which drew attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of nuclear use and hence the need for their delegitimisation. This initiative gathered momentum with several NNWS pressing for negotiations for a treaty to eliminate nuclear weapons. In response to an UNGA resolution, a UN conference to negotiate a legally binding instrument was convened in 2017. None of the nuclear-armed states, however, participated in these negotiations. Nevertheless, riding on the support of some enthusiastic NNWS, the effort led to the adoption of the Treaty on Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) in June 2017.

While the Ban treaty was being negotiated, much doctrinal churning and capability build-up were underway in the nuclear-armed states. President Trump’s entry in 2017 heralded a casualness in US’ nuclear approach, which became evident in a display of nuclear brinkmanship. His ‘tweeterrances’ (deterrence through tweets) with North Korea are ample illustration of this phenomenon. The 2018 NPR expanded the role of nuclear weapons to include large-scale conventional, cyber, and space attacks. It identified Russia and China as significant nuclear challenges, deterring whom required a range of capabilities, including low-yield nuclear weapons for regional contingencies. Efforts were initiated to build submarine-launched, nuclear-armed cruise missiles to add to the already formidable American deterrent.

Meanwhile, Russia was already fortifying its nuclear deterrence through building ‘invincible’ weapons that no defences could defeat. Underwater nuclear-armed drones and hypersonic missiles were among the new weapon systems introduced to meet the challenges posed by the US pursuit of ballistic missile defence (BMD) and Prompt Global Strike (PGS). Russia also emphasised its tactical nuclear weapons to give credence to a strategy of ‘escalate to de-escalate’ in case of US/NATO conventional attacks.

While a distant third in terms of nuclear numbers, China, too, became more open about its nuclear modernisation efforts in this period. 2018-2020 saw Beijing reflecting far greater confidence in its nuclear missiles in terms of their survivability, penetrability, and accuracy.

A Decade Ends: Risks of Nuclear Use and Proliferation Rise

As a result of these and other related developments, the decade ended with a higher sense of the risk of nuclear use, especially as a result of accidental use due to miscalculation or misperception exacerbated by the fog of war. Strained inter-state relations, unregulated modernisation of nuclear arsenals, emergence of new technologies, and breakdown of the arms control architecture were some of the factors aggravating nuclear risks.

The possibility of nuclear proliferation, too, re-emerged. On the one hand, North Korea’s nuclear and missile advancements continued to haunt South Korea and Japan. Both countries saw the emergence of debates on developing their own nuclear capability to establish credible deterrence. Meanwhile, in West Asia, the threat of nuclear proliferation accelerated after the 2018 US withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran. The 2015 agreement had actually marked a high point for non-proliferation since it was meant to arrest Iran from enriching uranium beyond 3.67 per cent, and keeping the stockpile below 300 kg. Several other restrictions were also put in place while allowing Iran to pursue the full fuel cycle for its peaceful nuclear programme, albeit under IAEA safeguards. The stalling of the JCPOA resulted in Iran also taking ‘remedial measures’ of its own, including enriching uranium up to 20 per cent. By the end of 2020, it had accumulated close to 17 kg of such uranium. While this is far from weapons capability, threat perceptions in Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the UAE are on the rise.

Doomsday (Clock) Reflections

Over the years, the Doomsday Clock maintained by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists since 1947 has become a good indicator of the state of global nuclear (and climate) concerns. In 2010, the minute hand of this clock stood at 6 minutes to midnight. In fact, the time was adjusted from previous year’s 5 to 6 minutes. President Obama’s problem-solving approach to nuclear issues with Russia, Iran, and loose nuclear material were all seen as contributors to a ‘hopeful state of affairs’. However, in 2012, the minute hand was once again back at 5 minutes owing to a lack of action on nuclear arms reductions or disarmament.

The rest of the decade saw the world’s steady progression closer and closer to midnight. In 2015, the time reduced to three minutes; in 2017, it moved up by another thirty seconds; in 2018, by another thirty seconds; and, in 2019, by twenty more seconds. Consequently, the year 2020 ended with the dubious distinction of the world being at 100 seconds to midnight—the closest ever to Armageddon. Ironically, this happened in the same year that the world commemorated the 75th year of the atomic bombings, and NPT’s 50th year. The TPNW attained its 50th ratification, enabling it to enter into force in January 2021, also in 2020. While this last development is noteworthy at least on a normative scale, it does not lead to a world free of nuclear weapons. Nuclear-armed states remain entrenched in deterrence beliefs and capability build-up despite the unprecedented healthcare emergency that mauled their economies through 2020.

As the world steps into 2021, hope has been pinned on the change in American leadership. Given the power of this one country to steer global nuclear developments, and given that President Biden has indicated a wise and stabilising approach to many nuclear issues, optimism for a change of nuclear direction is widespread. While none believe that a world without nuclear weapons will suddenly and miraculously become possible, perhaps it will be possible to inch towards a safer nuclear perch from where such a world at least becomes visible.