Outbreaks at factories and workplaces fuel COVID-19 surge in the US

Jerry White

While barely reported by the US news media, COVID-19 outbreaks in manufacturing, construction sites and other workplaces are a major driving force for the surge of infections and deaths in the United States.

Workers at the FCA Warren Truck Plant in Warren, Michigan (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio)

Fueled by the Delta variant, the pandemic is once again spreading out of control in the US. Total cases have surpassed 41 million, with more than 670,000 officially recorded COVID deaths. The seven-day average of hospitalizations jumped to 99,879 on September 12, with an average daily death toll of 1,648, up 27 percent over the last two weeks alone.

While there is no national record-keeping for workplace outbreaks and many states do not report details on outbreak locations, the reports that are available show that manufacturing and construction sites, along with K-12 schools and long-term care facilities, regularly exchange positions as the top three settings for spreading the virus.

On Monday, the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services reported that there were 43 ongoing outbreaks at manufacturing and construction sites in the state. This was second only to long-term care facilities (70) and just ahead of schools (42). Twenty of the outbreaks were in the metropolitan Detroit counties, the center of the auto industry.

New outbreaks last week were centered in Michigan schools (77), as students were sent back to classes so parents could be sent back to work, particularly at auto factories, where executives have complained of high absentee rates due to COVID-19 and childcare concerns.

In Illinois, there have been 206 outbreaks at factories and manufacturers since July 1, accounting for 14.2 percent of the total and the highest of any location. In Cook County, which includes Chicago and its industrial suburbs, there have been 56 outbreaks over the last 2 1/2 months, accounting for 32.6 percent of the total.

In California, workplace outbreaks more than doubled between June and July, from 217 to 459. The most outbreaks since the beginning of the year (69) were in the agricultural sector, where migrant workers who harvest crops are packed into busses and dormitories.

These figures confirm reports the World Socialist Web Site has received from workers across the country. In Stuttgart, Arkansas, 55 miles east of Little Rock, workers at a Lennox Industries air conditioner factory report that at least five of their coworkers have died and that the company is bringing in inmates from infected jails to fill in for missing workers. “My brother is afraid to open his mouth and he’s about to die,” the sister of a Lennox worker told the WSWS. “People are afraid to speak up because they are worried about being fired. Lennox is paying judges to keep it open. These people should be exposed.”

The WSWS reported Monday on the outbreak of infections at Dana auto parts plants in Kentucky, Michigan, Tennessee and other states. In Dry Ridge, Kentucky, multiple workers report that a large proportion of the plant’s workforce of around 800 is currently out due to COVID-19. Ex-Dana worker Steven Fletcher says he was fired from Dana Dry Ridge after missing time due to COVID earlier this year.

There are currently nine active cases at the Dana plant in Warren, Michigan, according to an update from the company dated September 9. The company claims that there were 53 confirmed positive cases at the plant in 2020, but already 114 this year. At least one worker has died from COVID-19 in 2021.

Case data from local government organizations reveals that in every county where a Dana plant is located, COVID-19 cases are on the rise substantially.

Far from providing this information to workers and encouraging quarantining, there is a deliberate conspiracy to conceal this life-saving knowledge from workers.

Last Friday, the California State Senate, where the Democrats hold 31 of the 40 seats, unanimously approved a bill that explicitly keeps millions of workers from knowing if there are outbreaks at their workplaces. After lobbying from the Chamber of Commerce, state senators removed a clause that allowed the California Public Health Department to reveal the names of individual workplaces with outbreaks, limiting information only to the industry.

Biden has asked the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to draft an emergency rule directing companies of more than 100 employees to adopt COVID-19 vaccination mandates or test their workers regularly. But the agency, which has been gutted for decades, has few means to enforce such a measure even if it were pursued.

Under Biden, OSHA has done no more to protect workers than it did under Trump. Instead, it has ignored thousands of complaints by workers over the lack of safety protocols, employers concealing outbreaks, and threats of being fired if an infected worker does not show up for work.

As of mid-December, OSHA had received 13,000 COVID complaints, not to mention tens of thousands more submitted to state agencies. To date it has concluded 80 percent of the cases, most with cursory investigations that rarely resulted in an inspection. The OSHA web site currently lists only 576 investigations into COVID-19 workplace deaths across the country, with the last one updated October 2020, and has issued only 103 citations related to these COVID deaths.

The unions have played and continue to play the critical role in keeping plants running in the midst of the pandemic. In the spring of last year, the United Auto Workers (UAW) joined with the Big Three companies to reopen the plants after workers took spontaneous action to stop production.

Now, the UAW and other unions are forcing workers to stay on the job even as infections and death spread. UAW officials, who are not planning to return to their Detroit headquarters until 2022 due to COVID concerns, have ignored the demands of Dana workers, who overwhelmingly voted down a pro-company contract, for strike action. Instead, the UAW and the United Steelworkers are forcing Dana workers to labor 12-hour-days, seven days a week—increasing their exposure to COVID—under an extended contract to stockpile parts to aid the company in the event of a strike.

The spread in factories and workplaces takes place as the final major public school district, in New York City, was reopened Monday. The resumption of in-person classes throughout the country is behind a catastrophic spike in childhood cases. Nearly one million children have been infected since August 5, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.

The Biden administration, functioning on behalf of the corporate and financial aristocracy, is determined to keep workers on the job and children in schools no matter what the cost in human lives. Under conditions of the buildup of unsustainable levels of debt, fueled by the massive government bailout of Wall Street, they fear that any shutdown of industries would lead to another collapse of the stock markets.

Reopening amid Delta variant surge deepens contradictions in global economy

Nick Beams

There is a deepening contradiction at the centre of the economic agenda being pursued in the major centres of the world economy, in particular the US and Europe.

On the one hand, the policy of re-opening, no matter what the health dangers posed by the Delta variant, and intransigent opposition to any policy of eradication, is pursued on the basis that nothing must be done that could impact the speculative rise of Wall Street and other stock markets over the past 18 months.

Worker carries drinks to a table at Puckett's Grocery and Restaurant, Friday, Sept. 10, 2021, in Nashville, Tenn. (AP Photo/Mark Humphrey)

On the other, the continued wave of infections around the world, that this policy has produced, is hitting all areas of the economy, leading to disruption of global supply chains, the development of bottlenecks and rising inflationary pressures because of shortages. Problems in the supply of computer chips have attracted most attention, but the shortages range across the board from the simplest components to the most complex.

The supply chain squeeze is being reflected in inflation data. In the year to August, the US producer price index, which measures the wholesale prices of goods, as they leave factories and enter the market, rose by 8.3 percent, the biggest annual increase since 2010.

Comments from US business executives and economic analysts, reported in a Financial Times article headlined “US business model darkens as Delta variant upends forecasts” pointed to the slowdown in economic growth.

The largest US airlines have reported a reduction in demand and scaled back their forecasts for revenue growth in the latter part of the year.

Home Depot chief Craig Menear told an investor conference last week, that the company had not provided guidance on its performance this year, because there was “just so much uncertainty” and it was not known how the Delta variant would play out.

The number of S&P 500 companies lowering their forecasts for earnings growth has risen from 37 percent to 47 percent, between the second and third quarters.

The situation confronting small businesses is also worsening. A blog report by the Innovation Group, issued over the weekend, said the share of small businesses reporting weekly decreases in revenue, held steady for the past three weeks “at elevated levels not seen since March.”

Coupled with the decreased share of businesses reporting increases in revenue, only 8 percent, it was “evidence that the small business recovery may be stalling in the face of Delta’s resurgence.”

In Europe there has been something of an economic upswing in the past few months. But how long it may last is another question.

At a press conference last week, following a meeting of its governing council last Thursday, European Central Bank president Christine Lagarde provided a generally upbeat assessment, but warned that Delta could “slow the recovery in world trade and the full reopening of the economy.”

Erik Nielsen, chief economist as UniCredit, told the FT there would be a good growth number for the third quarter, but “the winter brings the risk of a slowdown. Our leading indicator is nose-diving into the end of the year, so there are warning signs this recovery may not be as smooth as people think.”

The problems in the auto industry, due to the shortage of computer chips, have not abated. Major companies in Europe have shut production lines, and overall output is 30 percent below the level it had reached before the pandemic struck.

One of the most significant aspects of Lagarde’s report on the ECB’s meeting, at which it decided to marginally reduce its asset purchases, from €80 billion a month to between €60 billion and €70 billion, under its Pandemic Emergency Purchasing Program, was the issue of inflation.

The inflation rate for August rose to 3 percent, well above the ECB’s target range of 2 percent. Like her counterpart in the US, Fed chair Jerome Powell, Lagarde maintained this was due to “temporary” factors resulting from shortages.

But, in an indication of a key concern of both the ECB and the Fed, she raised the issue of a push for higher wages by workers hit with rising prices.

“One component that we are addressing, monitoring, and checking very attentively is the second-round effect, is the impact that price increases will have on wage negotiations, and that is what could actually fuel a more persistent and durable price increase and inflation going forward,” Lagarde said, in response to a question on inflation at her press conference.

As in the US, the ECB is relying on the trade unions to continue their now long-established role of suppressing wage demands. She remarked, “we don’t expect these wage increases and these wage negotiations to be very strong.” But her comments underscore the fear in the financial establishment that workers will break free of the union straitjacket and begin to take independent action.

Forcing workers to take whatever job might be available, no matter how low the wage or the dangers to their health, was raised in a recent interview with the St Louis Fed president, James Bullard with the FT.

Bullard, one of the “hawks” in the Fed leadership, who favours a more rapid wind-down of the Fed’s monetary stimulus program, said there was plenty of demand for workers and more openings than unemployed.

The problem, he said, was that workers might not want to take them right now. “They can afford to be careful about which jobs they take, or they may feel like they can get an even better job by waiting or searching more diligently.”

In a graphic display of the vicious class orientation of the entire ruling establishment, he said a problem holding back the supply of cheap labour was that because of the $1400 stimulus payments “households are flush with income.”

The Wall Street billionaires have seen their wealth escalate to record heights as a direct result of the Fed’s pumping of trillions of dollars to the financial system.

But the cry is for still more, and so the meagre payments to workers, faced with rising prices and myriad other problems, are regarded as impediments to the process of extracting ever-greater amounts of surplus value and profit from their labour.

Meanwhile Wall Street speculation, based on ultra-cheap money, by the Fed, reaches ever more dizzying heights. A comment by Wall Street Journal columnist Andy Kessler, published over the weekend, noted some of the more egregious examples of this financial insanity.

Joby Aviation, which plans to begin electric air taxi services in 2024, is worth more than Lufthansa. Earlier this year, Tesla was worth more than the nine next car companies combined, since falling back to “only” the next six.

And the list went on: Airbnb worth more than the hotel chains Marriott and Hilton combined; the Crypto-exchange Coinbase worth more than the NASDAQ exchange; Beyond Meat, made with pea protein, worth more than the entire global market for peas, and used car-sales platform, Caravana, worth more than Volvo, Honda, Ford or Hyundai. And there were many other examples on his list.

This financial madness, Kessler said, is being driven, not least, by the “fear of missing out” but, as he noted, when the selling starts this turns into “fear of losing everything as speculators jump like rats off a sinking ship.”

However, the collapse of this speculative bubble, the like of which has never been seen before, will not just be a market correction and a return to something resembling “normal.”

Such has become the dependence of the US economy on the market mania, it will have far-reaching economic and social consequences, going well beyond the effects of the 2008 crash. It will immediately pose revolutionary tasks before the working class—the necessity to undertake a struggle for political power as the prerequisite for a complete reorganisation of the economy on socialist foundations.

FBI declassified document confirms links between Saudi Arabia and the 9/11 terrorists

Kevin Reed

Under an executive order from President Joe Biden, the FBI declassified an FBI report on Saturday—the twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks—showing that there were links between former representatives of the Saudi Arabian government and the hijackers.

Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia Mohammad bin Salman Al Saud (Credit: en.kremlin.ru)

Although the 16-page report, dated April 4, 2016, is redacted, it contains important details about an investigation by the FBI into the support given by a Saudi consular official and a suspected Saudi intelligence agent in Los Angeles to at least two of the men who hijacked commercial airliners on September 11, 2001.

Entitled, “ENCORE Investigation Update, Review and Analysis: Interview [Redacted] (NOV 2015),” the FBI report reviews connections and witness testimony regarding the activity of the suspected intelligence agent Omar al-Bayoumi and says that he was deeply involved in providing “travel assistance, lodging and financing” to help the two hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar.

The report says that what had been previously portrayed in the official 9/11 Commission Report of 2004 as a “chance meeting” between al-Bayoumi and the two future hijackers was in fact a preplanned and well-orchestrated rendezvous at a restaurant. Purportedly attending San Diego State University as part of a work-study program paid for by a contractor with the Saudi General Authority of Civil Aviation, al-Bayoumi was characterized by the 9/11 Commission report “to be an unlikely candidate for clandestine involvement with Islamic extremists.”

The document from Operation Encore, the codename of the FBI investigation, also says that Saudi diplomat and Islamic Affairs official Fahad al-Thumairy had “tasked” an associate to help al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar when they arrived in Los Angeles and told the associate that the men were “two very significant people.”

Al-Hazmi and Al-Mihdhar were two of the five terrorists who hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 from Washington Dulles International Airport to Los Angeles International Airport and flew the Boeing 757 into the Pentagon, killing all 64 aboard and another 125 people in the building.

The FBI release is the first of what is expected to be several documents in response to the September 3 executive order signed by President Biden on “Declassification of Certain Documents Concerning the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001.” Biden’s order stated, “Information collected and generated in the United States Government’s investigation of the 9/11 terrorist attacks should now be disclosed, except when the strongest possible reasons counsel otherwise.”

This is the first official US acknowledgement that a relationship existed between individuals connected to the government of Saudi Arabia and the attacks that occurred twenty years ago, attacks that became the basis for international war crimes against Afghanistan and Iraq, rendition to black sites, torture and indefinite detention at Guantanamo Bay as well as an assault on numerous fundamental rights contained in the US Constitution. It is significant that an FBI document based on an interview conducted nearly six years ago is now confirming what has been widely known since 2001.

Family members of those killed on 9/11 responded to the FBI document with blunt statements. Brett Eagleson, whose father died at the World Trade Center, said, “Today marks the moment when the Saudis cannot rely on the U.S. government from hiding the truth about 9/11.” Terry Strada of the group 9/11 Families United said, “Now the Saudis’ secrets are exposed, and it is well past time for the Kingdom to own up to its officials’ roles in murdering thousands on American soil.”

Jim Kreindler, who represents families suing Saudi Arabia, said the report validates their case. “This document, together with the public evidence gathered to date, provides a blueprint for how al-Qaida operated inside the US with the active, knowing support of the Saudi government.”

A statement from the Saudi embassy said: “No evidence has ever emerged to indicate that the Saudi government or its officials had previous knowledge of the terrorist attack or were in any way involved in its planning or execution. Any allegation that Saudi Arabia is complicit in the September 11 attacks is categorically false.”

The administrations of George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump all blocked public access to any FBI documents regarding Saudi Arabian involvement with al-Qaeda on the grounds that it risked “significant harm to the national security” of the US. However, the existence of Operation Encore, which dates back to 2007, was revealed in an investigative report based largely on anonymous sources published by ProPublica in January 2020. ProPublica said at the time that the Encore investigation “exposed a bitter rift within the bureau over the Saudi connection.”

The revelations contained in the declassified document raise many more questions regarding Saudi Arabia’s role and that of US intelligence agencies in the events of 9/11. As explained by the World Socialist Web Site on Saturday, not only did the Saudis al-Thumairy and al-Bayoumi facilitate the two 9/11 hijackers in California, but both al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar lived in “the home of the main FBI informant in the Muslim community of San Diego.

“The Saudi connection is so sensitive not only because it involves US imperialism’s principal ally in the Arab world, but because the intimate ties between Saudi and US intelligence agencies raise troubling questions about how it was possible that no one in the CIA, FBI or other agencies was aware of the hijackers’ plans, even though several of them had been under CIA surveillance and were on FBI watch lists as they freely entered and moved about the United States.”

AfDB Japan Africa Dream Scholarship (JADS) 2021/2022

Application Deadline: 22nd September 2021

Eligible Countries: African countries

To Be Taken At (Country): Japan

About the Award: The Japan Africa Dream Scholarship (JADS) Program – capacity building in energy sector through skills development for sustainable development– is a joint initiative by the AfDB and Japan that aims at providing two-year scholarship awards to highly achieving African graduate students to enable them to undergo post-graduate studies (i.e. a two-year Master’s degree program) in priority development areas on the continent and abroad (including in Japan). This Japan Africa Dream Scholarship programme is funded by the Government of Japan.

The overarching goal that the AfDB and the Government of Japan seeks to attain is to enhance skills and human resources development in Africa in a number of priority areas pertaining to science and technology with a special focus on the energy sector. JADS’s objectives are aligned with the Bank’s High 5 agenda (i.e. Light up and power Africa, Feed Africa, Industrialize Africa, Integrate Africa and Improve the quality of life for the people of Africa) and key Japanese development assistance initiatives to Africa and the 6th Tokyo International Conference for African Development (TICAD VI) outcomes.

Upon completion of their studies, the beneficiary scholars are expected to return to their home countries to apply and disseminate their newly acquired knowledge and skills, and contribute to the promotion of sustainable development of their countries.

Type: Masters

Eligibility: The Japan Africa Dream Scholarship is open to those who have gained admission to an approved Masters degree course at a Japanese partner university. Candidates should be 35 years old or younger; in good health; with a Bachelor’s degree or its equivalent in the energy area or related area; and have a superior academic record. Upon completion of their study programs, scholars are expected to return to their home country to contribute to its economic and social development.

Details on Eligibility Criteria are provided in that call’s Application Guidelines, and these detailed eligibility criteria are strictly adhered to. No exceptions are made.

Broadly speaking, nationals of African countries must:

• Be a national of a AfDB member country;
• Be in good health;
• Hold a Bachelor (or equivalent) degree in the energy area (or related field) earned at least 1 years prior to the application deadline date;
• Have 1 years or more of recent development-related experience after earning a Bachelor (or equivalent) degree;
• Be accepted unconditionally to enroll in the upcoming academic year in at least one of the JADS partner universities for a Master’s degree;
• Applicants living or working in a country other than his or her home country are not eligible for scholarships.
• JADS does not support applicants who are already enrolled in graduate degree programs.
• Not be an Executive Director, his/her alternate, and/or staff of all types of appointments of the African Development Bank Group or a close relative of the aforementioned by blood or adoption with the term “close relative” defined as: Mother, Father, Sister, Half-sister, Brother, Half-brother, Son, Daughter, Aunt, Uncle, Niece, or Nephew.

Selection Criteria: The Japan Africa Dream Scholarship programme uses the following four main factors and the degree of cohesion, to review eligible scholarship applications, with the aim of identifying the candidates with the highest potential, after completion of their graduate studies, to impact the development of their countries.

1. Quality of Education Background
2. Quality of Professional Recommendations
3. Quality of Professional Experience
4. Quality of Commitment to your Home Country
5. Quality of Statement of Purpose

Japan Africa Dream Scholarship (JADS) awards scholarships to applicants who have had at least 1 year of paid employment in the applicant’s home country or in other African countries acquired after receiving the first Bachelors (or equivalent university) degree within the past 3 years.

The JADS Secretariat uses the following criteria to select the finalists:

• Maintaining a reasonably wide geographical distribution of awards, that takes into account the geographic distribution of eligible applications;
• Maintaining a reasonable distribution of awards across gender that takes into account the distribution of eligible applications across gender;
• Giving scholarships to those applicants who, other things being equal, appear to have limited financial resources
• Unusual circumstances / hardships, when assessing the employment experience and other aspects of an application.

Number of Awards: Not specified

Value of Award: The scholarship program provides tuition, a monthly living stipend, round-trip airfare, health insurance, and travel allowance.

How to Apply:

1. Applicant requests for information and application forms and procedures from the chosen JADS partner university. For any inquiries, please contact JADS@AFDB.ORG(link sends e-mail)
2. Applicant completes required documents and sends them to the university.
3. University evaluates and selects applicants.
4. University sends selected candidates to the AfDB.
5. AfDB reviews submissions from universities, prepares and approves the final list.
6. AfDB contacts selected awardees, and informs the universities.

Visit the Program Webpage for Details

United States Struggles to Pick a Side in Upcoming Honduran Elections

John Perry

Of the countries in Central America’s “northern triangle,” Honduras is the one that sends the most migrants to the United States. Already this year over 32,000 Honduran migrants have been deported from the United States, including more than 2,600 children. The country’s president, Juan Orlando Hernández (JOH), was supported by President Trump because he is a strongman willing to forcibly stop Honduran migrants from leaving the country. He even signed a misnamed “safe country” agreement implying that Honduras was a haven for asylum seekers. In return, Trump was willing to acquiesce in JOH’s disastrous domestic policies even though they are one of the main drivers for migrants to leave.

Now, with Honduran elections on November 28, the Biden administration must weigh contradicting factors in deciding how to handle Trump’s erstwhile ally. On the one hand, Honduras is strategically reliable and important to U.S. business interests; on the other, problems of state-condoned violence, corruption, and impunity are fostering both continued migration and the drug trade.

Honduras’s neoliberal economy and lax regulation allow the exploitation of the country’s natural resources at any cost to local communities. Honduras has low taxes, public services decimated by underfunding and corruption, and one of the continent’s biggest gaps between rich and poor. Although largely unmentioned in official discourse, such policies align with U.S. business interests and are not seen as a problem for U.S. foreign policy. Instead, it is the mixed economy and social programs of neighboring Nicaragua that are regarded as “an extraordinary and unusual threat” to U.S. security.

Once seen as a “banana republic,” Honduras has long failed to meet the needs of most of its population. Recent blame for its failed governments extends back to Biden’s vice-presidency when, in 2009, Washington turned a blind eye to the military coup that deposed the left-of-center President Manuel Zelaya who had started to make economic and social reforms. After a short interregnum in which Zelaya attempted to return to power, Washington gave its approval for new elections. The National Party’s Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo was the winner, prompting a series of increasingly corrupt governments. Both Lobo and the former first lady, Rosa Elena Bonilla Avila, grossly abused their positions and were later sanctioned by the U.S. State Department. Lobo has so far escaped any charges, but his wife faces prison for defrauding a children’s charity of $505,000. A flawed election in 2013 brought JOH, now Lobo’s rival, to the presidency, and corruption intensified. In defiance of the Honduran constitution, JOH ran for and won a second term of office in 2017 in an election that was even more blatantly fraudulent than 2013. Twenty-four people were killed by police in the protests that followed.

Since the 2009 coup, state-sponsored violence has intensified. Opposition movements, community activists, and government critics have been suppressed by police forces militarized by U.S. funding and training. The United States argues that these forces are necessary to tackle the country’s endemic gang violence. In reality, they appear to have fostered it, leaving many migrants literally running for their lives. Human rights abuses received international attention with the murder of Berta Cáceres in 2016. But this was only one in a series of assassinations and disappearances of activists trying to defend communities from mining, energy, and tourism projects, many promoted by companies from the United States and Canada. Assassinations continue: on July 25, an opposition politician and lawyer, Carolina Echeverría, opened the door of her home to what she thought was a group of medical personnel dressed in protective gear who were coming to check on her husband, ill with Covid-19. They turned out to be assassins who shot her in the side of the head in front of her sick partner. So far in 2021, the Honduran homicide rate is 13 per cent higher than in 2020.

But no issue illustrates Biden’s dilemma more clearly than two recent U.S. prosecutions for drug-running that have implicated officials of JOH’s government and earned it the label “narcostate.” The first was the conviction in New York of JOH’s brother Tony, who faces at least 30 years in prison for bringing 200,000 kilos of cocaine into the United States. The prosecution concluded that drug traffickers “infiltrated” and “controlled” the Honduran government. The country’s ports and frontier posts are said to be a paradise for organized crime because weak systems for inspecting goods allow drugs to be exported and equipment for processing them to be imported.

The defendant in the second case, Geovanny Fuentes, claimed that his drug labs were protected by the military on the orders of the president himself, quoting JOH as saying that he would “shove the drugs right up the noses of the gringos” by flooding the United States with cocaine. While JOH was quick to deny the allegations and to remind Biden of their past friendship, the new U.S. administration has been obliged to distance itself, saying “we are committed to partnering …with those in the Honduran government that are committed to working with us to root out the corruption that has become really endemic to that country.” However, when a list of corrupt officials subject to U.S. sanctions was published in July, it included 21 Honduran politicians—most of them from the ruling National party—but excluded JOH and those closest to him.

Recent natural disasters have further highlighted the ways in which the narcostate fails the majority of Hondurans. In November 2020, two hurricanes hit a country totally unprepared for them, destroying 6,000 homes and seriously damaging 85,000 more. Six months later, the international organization Médecins Sans Frontières said the government’s response had been “inadequate,” leaving more than 55,000 people still living in temporary shelters. Poverty in Honduras increased to 70 percent in 2020, up 10.7 percentage points from 59.3 percent in 2019, driven by tropical storm damage and by the pandemic. It is hardly surprising that yet another migrant “caravan,” largely of Hondurans, was crossing Mexico at the end of August.

The massive disruption caused by the hurricanes also provoked a fresh peak of Covid-19 infections. It continues unabated: August was reportedly the worst month this year for Covid-related deaths. Although the country has received over 4.5 million vaccine doses, mainly as donations, just 13 percent of Hondurans have been fully vaccinated. At the start of 2021, mayors of cities close to El Salvador requested and received vaccines from their Salvadoran counterparts, and Hondurans living near the Nicaraguan border were crossing it to get vaccinated. Weakened by corruption and underfunding, the health service has been overwhelmed. In April, a senior doctor reported “the collapse of the hospital network.” Seven mobile hospitals were ordered to help fill the gaps last year, but five of these are still not operational. The head of the agency that made the $47 million deal was accused of corruption and subsequently sacked. Protesters at one mobile hospital carried a banner proclaiming: “If it were a narco lab, it would be working.”

Corruption is rampant. The National Party’s presidential candidate in the coming election, Nasry Asfura (“Tito”), has been accused of massive misappropriation of funds in his current role as mayor of Tegucigalpa. Honduras’s Supreme Court is protecting him from prosecution so he can continue his campaign. For different reasons, the rival candidates leave Washington with no good options. The Liberal Party represents the traditional opposition, but a number of its members were included in the State Department’s recent list of corrupt politicians, and only four years ago its candidate Yani Rosenthal was imprisoned in the United States for money laundering. If Biden cannot easily back Rosenthal, he is also unlikely for political reasons to back the opposition candidate performing best in the opinion polls, Xiomara Castro. She is the wife of the deposed Manuel Zelaya and the nominee from the left-of-center LIBRE party. Furthermore, having tried and failed to form alliances with some of the remaining eleven minor parties, Castro looks unlikely to win even in Honduras’s desperate circumstances.

JOH’s plan seems to involve holding another badly run election where the National Party prevails through renewed electoral fraud or by buying votes, as happened in 2017. The National Election Council is being deprived of the funds it needs to operate effectively and some 1.7 million voters may not receive the identity cards they need to take part. If Asfura wins, he is widely believed to be ready to protect JOH from prosecution and from the much worse prospect of being extradited to the United States. While strongly criticizing Nicaragua’s electoral process, which also culminates in November, Washington has failed to call out Honduras’s failures. When JOH put forward a purely cosmetic revision of the electoral law, Washington urged the Honduran Congress to back it. The Organization of American States even called it a “significant step forward.” If the Biden administration accepts another highly questionable election result in November, this will signal a willingness to tolerate rampant corruption, deepening poverty, and growing violence, even if this means more Hondurans arriving at its southwest border.

Killing German Cars

Thomas Kilkauer & Meg Young

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Photograph Source: Paulius Malinovskis – CC BY 2.0

Almost since its invention, the automobile has been a weapon, as well as a symbolic prosthesis for male self-worthiness. Regularly, one can observe young men in their cars checking the power of their engines at traffic lights. Reflexes snap setting in motion a mechanism that could hardly be stopped. These men are operating a nervous interaction between the car’s clutch and the accelerator pedal. Their glances go frantically back and forth between the traffic light and the rival.

The scenery was reminiscent of duels between gunslingers in a cheap Spaghetti Western. Both waited for the starting signal. The traffic light jumped to yellow and within fractions of a second they accelerated. Their sound-amplified engines howled, tires squeaked, cars shoot forward. A few hundred meters down the road, they interrupt their race just as rabidly – and, before the next red light, it starts again.

The fact is that such inner-city races are held at traffic lights and they have become rather common. Two years ago, two young men ran several red lights during a late-night race. One of the two crashed into a car at 100 miles an hour. The driver died at the scene. A court found that the two young men had acted with intent accepting the potential death of other road users.

Both were sentenced to life imprisonment for murder. In 2019 however, another court overturned the judgment. But then in June 2020, a higher court confirmed the original conviction. Fast cars seem to be a kind of a Viagra-substitute to enhance male pride and Uber-masculinity. Yet, in the same year a Porsche came off the road and crashed into a traffic light – a twelve year old boy barely survived.

Increasingly, German courts are moving towards harsh punishment for reckless driving. Until now, speeding drivers were usually only convicted of negligence serving up to five years. Regularly, it is treated as an administrative offense, punishable by a fine and the temporary cancellation of a driver’s license.

Sadly, when male honor is at stake, everything else does not matter! The car has become a male self-esteem prosthesis boosting a weakening male sense of self. The power of the engine decides one’s status – the stronger and louder, the more masculinity.

Instead of attenuating the engine noise, engines are deliberately amplified by sound generators. On many evenings, inner-city streets are turned into race tracks. Juvenile men proudly present their thundered racing cars, painted in black and with tinted windows. In some cases, their mothers even get cleaning jobs to pay the leasing rates for their son’s super-charged on-road racing cars.

For many German men, the car, just like soccer, performs an important socio-psychological function. The throttle is the only lever left to operate. The flashy car becomes the pressure valve through which to let escape the jammed anger that has grown inside them. It is an instrument of aggression for those who have to live a life shaped by the permanent defense of oneself. Asphyxiated by inhuman life and even more callous working conditions, they remain trapped in immaturity, impotency, and powerlessness.

As a consequence, the road is becoming more and more a place of aggression, road rage, and a form of urban warfare. According to a report by the World Health Organization, we kill about 1.3 million people per year worldwide in road accidents. It is like killing the entire population of Dallas – every year.

Yet, there are more and more cars – 70 million new cars in 2020 alone. Increasingly, these are off-road vehicles, pick-ups and SUVs – also known as: UAVs or urban assault vehicles. Germany testifies to the unbroken trend towards SUVs and urban warfare on roads. Inside a Sports Utility Vehicle (SUV), many drivers fancy themselves as the little commanders-in-chief inside their rolling fortress.

Even for the majority of the population, the car has long become a socially-accepted instrument for the realization of homicidal and even suicidal tendencies. Murder and suicide often come together particularly in the moment when destructive and self-destructive energies are turned on, leaving a trail of destruction behind.

The car allows the combination of both forms of homicides and suicides – the term rampage is increasingly used. And it can be used by racists to kill – not only in Charlottesville. On New Year’s Eve 2018/19, a 50-year-old unemployed German man deliberately drove his car in groups of foreigners. Ten people were injured.

In April 2018, another man drove his van into a café killing four and injuring a further 36 people. The car has become the weapon for German men who do not have firearms and do not know how to obtain them. In February, a car crashed into a crowd of people in front of a bakery at the entrance to the pedestrian zone in the city of Heidelberg. The car caught three bystanders before hitting a lamp-post and coming to a stop. Two bystanders were injured and a 73-year-old man succumbed to his injuries hours after the crime in a local clinic. The driver fled on foot but was shot by police.

In August 2013, a 46 – year-old man drove his car through the city of Regensburg. He broke through a construction site barrier, drove at top speed through a pedestrian zone, injuring pedestrians. Finally, he crashed into the glass front door of a laundry shop killing a five-year old girl and her three-year-old sister.

During the 2006 FIFA World Cup, a man in his car broke through the barrier around the fan mile at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, driving into the crowd and injured twenty people. A court declared him mentally ill as he was sent to a mental hospital.

Germany is not alone. In neighboring Austria, a 26 year old man drove his SUV into a crowd at a pedestrian zone of Graz’s city center. After that, the man attacked people with a knife. Three people died and more than thirty were injured. Nice in France (2016), a man drove a truck into the crowd of revelers and killed 86 people.

The rampage with a car as a weapon has established itself as a new mode. It happened again on the evening of 19^th December 2016 in Berlin. An Islamist assassin drove a trailer into a crowd at the Christmas market. Twelve people died and 55 were injured. On February 24^th, 2020, a 29 year old man drove a Mercedes into people in the town of Volkmarsen injuring dozens of people including a large number of children.

The perpetrator was arrested facing 91 cases of attempted murder – the trial is still pending. In a similar rampage, a man in Trier drove his SUV through Trier’s pedestrian zone killing five people and injured twenty-four others. German police managed to stop and arrest the 51 year old man. The man was drunk and had apparently spent the last few nights in his car.

His act was reminiscent of the Münster rampage (April 2018), where a 48-year-old German drove a minibus into a roadside cafe killing two people and injuring twenty others. The man shot himself at the crime scene. His motives remained in the dark.

Many of these men – always men! – embody a form of hyper-normality, which, apparently, sometimes goes pregnant with its opposite – male destructiveness as well as Demonic Males: the Origins of Human Violence. The apparent normality of our petit-bourgeois social order gives birth to male monsters – every day.

In many cases, all too often male perpetrators are questioned by police but advised by their lawyers to come up with a plausible sounding statement. The initial, “I do not know why I did this” is no longer the most honest truth by the time questioning takes place. Once again, idyll and horror lie close together. Madness and Civilization are not as neatly separated as we have been made to believe.

In the midst of our normal Christmas shopping frenzy, violence suddenly breaks out. It shows that our petit-bourgeois shopping society is made up of money and senseless commerce. At the surface, it is pretended to be peaceful society – a simulation, as French philosopher Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) pointed out.

There is a permanent threat of urban warfare at its hidden core. It is no coincidence that the murderous weapon of a very normal man is his car, the SUV.

Originally developed for the military, today they turn streets into war zones. Men climb on board, sink into the leather seats and drop the door into its heavy lock. All sounds fade away, nothing can harm the self-imagined warrior any longer. SUV drivers have the feeling of sitting in a castle. The higher you sit, the more you underestimate your speed, the small others appear, and the more risky when you drive. A little pressure on the accelerator and you are already moving at 100 miles per hour on Germany’s infamous Autobahn and elsewhere.

From the point of view of the SUV driver, small- and medium-sized cars turn into little vermin. SUV drivers – given the sheer mass of their cars – assume everyone and everything gives way – especially pedestrians, children, dogs, and cyclists.

One is tempted to think that with the SUV, the inhuman doctrine of Social Darwinism has produced its very own vehicle that suits its twisted ideology. In an SUV, one is an Uber-master of any situation in the traffic – men ride a majestic cannonball into madness. Men is the king of the road and Lord of life and death.

Yet, mass death by cars not only hits people. The number of animals killed by cars is stratospheric. By now, many understand that a hare, a hedgehog, a robin and a fox have the same right to exist as a human being. Animal ethics tells us that we inhabit the same earth. With this level of ethical awareness, many are gripped by horror in the face of the daily massacre.

Yet, the destruction of nature continues unabated. The people live in oblivion to our global deforestation and adjacent environmental vandalism. The racing SUV driver remains unmoved. They follow a motto of madness in the face of forest deaths saying, my car also drives without forest!

On the historical dialectic of the car which is, after all, not much more than a reactionary extension of a horse drawn car-riage, our beloved cars did not always have a bad press. In its beginnings as an everyday vehicle, it was also an instrument of liberation for many – mostly very wealthy members of upper society. Much later, the capitalist miracle which many grew into was carried forward by the Fordist industries.

By the 1950s, the German automobile had become one of the central products of mass production and mass consumption. Cars became affordable even for workers who made them. Whether bought from the first self-earned money for a few hundred Deutsch Marks, or borrowed from the father or older siblings, the car expanded the radius in which young Germans moved.

Still today, Germans get their driver’s license on their eighteenth birthday – the hallmark of formal adulthood. Even the revolt of the late 1960s made use of the car in various ways. As Germany’s government responded with so-called emergency laws – the semi-dictatorial Notstandsgesetze – to anti-war rallies against the war in Vietnam, universities boiled over.

Young Germans traveled from educational protests of teach-in to teach-in in old, scrap-metal cars. On the back seats of these cars, not only anti-war speeches were composed, but also cuddling, eating, drinking, sleeping, sex, and listening to music took place. Some nights were spent on dark, lonely streets banging hard rock.

Yet, the infamous back seat of a car became part of Germany’s sexual revolution. Meanwhile, the car radio became the medium of subversion. Many of these emancipatory aspects – which a common car once possessed – shouldn’t be concealed or forgotten. Yet, this was a long time.

Today, the development of the figures alone is proof that cars have overwhelmed us: in 1960, almost five million cars were registered in Germany; last year it was almost 48 million. This came with severe consequences: the car remains the cause of one of the most common deaths of children in Germany. Of the 153 fatal accidents involving children under the age of 15 registered in 2019, for example:

+ 54 occurred with a means of transport (mostly cars);

+ 33 children drowned;

+ 21 children fell into death;

+ 17 children died from a choking accident;

+ 6 children died because of poisoning;

+ 2 children died as a result of smoke, fire and flame; and

+ 20 died of unknown causes.

Yet, while the car may well be one of the most common causes of death for children in Germany, it has also become a symbol of hyper-consumerism and status. However, the pathologies associated with driving go even further than that.

Even though cars are the means of clogging streets, road congestion and traffic jams, a car is stationary for a whopping 23 hours per day – a monstrous 95.83% of a car’s existence that it does not move at all. Still, those few trips Germans do cause massive problems. Yet, the stationary car will be even more stationary as people work from home even in a post-Coronavirus world.

Yet, alternatives like the electric car and even the most beautiful, gender-fair, ecological, e-scooter electro-skateboard, and bicycle-based capitalism remains capitalism. It contributes to the acceleration of our common global environmental destruction.

Rapidly, we move towards the 6^th mass extinction and a future of an uninhabitable earth. Yet, we stick to our cars, our hyper-consumerism, and, of course to consumer capitalism. Adorno might have been right when saying, immovably, they insist on the very ideology which enslaves them.