Indian court exhorts Modi to “protect Hindu rights” with further communalist “cow protection” legislation

Kranti Kumara

A High Court judge in Allahabad in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh issued a reactionary ruling dripping with Hindu-supremacism earlier this month when denying bail to Javed, a 59-year-old Muslim man. In March, more than six months ago, Javed was arrested by the Uttar Pradesh police for the “crime” of cow-slaughter under the state’s draconian anti-cow-slaughter law, and he has been languishing in jail ever since.

Justice Shekhar Kumar Yadav included numerous strident Hindu-communalist observations in his 12-page bail judgment. He called on India’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) national government, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, himself an arch-Hindu communalist, to make “cow protection” a “fundamental right of Hindus” and push legislation through the Indian parliament proclaiming the cow a “national animal.”

Indian Prime Minster Narendra Modi addresses a gathering ahead of Bihar state Assembly elections in Patna, India, Wednesday, Oct. 28, 2020. (AP Photo/Aftab Alam Siddiqui)

Justice Kumar’s comments were breathtaking for their openly Hindu-communalist outlook, medieval backwardness and contempt for basic judicial principles. Invoking ancient Indian religious texts, the judge wrote, “The cow has been shown as an important part in India's ancient texts like the Vedas and the Mahabharata that define Indian culture and for which India is known.”

Needless to say, he failed to mention the Taj Mahal, arguably an even more world-renowned product of Indian culture, which was built for the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan and fuses traditional Indian, Persian, and Ottoman Turkish elements. Nor, in his skewed diatribe on Indian culture, did the High Court judge acknowledge how it has been enriched and transformed over well over a millennium by the culture of Arab, Persian, Turkish, and Central Asian Muslims, including by helping giving rise to Hindustani music, Mughal cuisine and the Urdu language itself.

According to Judge Yadav, “Cow protection and promotion is not just about one religion but it is the culture of the country. It is responsibility of every citizen to save the culture irrespective of the religion.”

Piling on more stupid comments, he declared, “[Whenever] we forgot our culture, foreigners attacked us and enslaved us and if we are not warned, we should not forget the unbridled attack on and capture of Afghanistan by Taliban.”

Absurdly pitting “beef eaters” against those who raise cows for a living, the judge argued that “The right to life is above the right to kill and the right to eat beef can never be considered a fundamental right.” Spewing the pseudo-scientific nonsense that is the stock-and-trade of the Hindu right, he also asserted, “Scientists believe that the cow is the only animal that inhales and exhales oxygen.”

This judgment from the Allahabad High Court, one of India’s oldest and most respected high courts, is emblematic of the extent to which the vile Hindu communalism promoted by the BJP, which has led India’s national government since 2014 and for 13 of the past 23 years, has become firmly entrenched in India’s supposedly secular judiciary, and at all levels. In 2019, India’s Supreme Court, ceding to a decades-long Hindu right agitation, ordered the Indian government to build a Hindu temple on the site of the razed 16th Century Babri Masjid mosque, which was illegally demolished by Hindu fanatics mobilized and incited by top BJP leaders in December 1992 in express violation of an order from India’s highest court.

Justice Kumar’s remarks are of a piece with the poisonous Hindu-supremacist agenda (Hindutva) being pushed relentlessly by the Modi government with the aim of channeling mounting social anger over mass joblessness, poverty and social inequality along reactionary lines and splitting the working class. Since coming to power in 2014, the Modi government has staged one vile communal provocation after another, including stripping Jammu and Kashmir, hitherto India’s lone Muslim-majority state, of both statehood and its special semi-autonomous constitutional status. In the name of “cow protection,” it has encouraged and protected Hindu-vigilante groups that have terrorized and killed poor Muslims. Critics of Hindutva and the Modi government’s communalist policies, including a noted journalist and several prominent intellectuals, have been killed by Hindu extremist terrorists with impunity.

Nowhere is the BJP’s Hindutva extremist agenda being implemented more forcefully than in Uttar Pradesh, which is both India’s most populous state, with an estimated 227 million people in 2018, and home to its largest Muslim population, totaling 34 million.

Uttar Pradesh’s BJP-led state government is headed by Yogi Adityanath, a Hindu mahant (high priest) and notorious Hindu supremacist. Modi and his chief henchman, Amit Shah, personally recruited Adityanath to the BJP and made him its candidate for state Chief Minister in the 2017 Uttar Pradesh assembly elections.

Before he took the helm of the state government, Adityanath had founded his own Hindu-extremist organization, the Hindu Yuva Vahini. Over the previous decade-and-a-half, the organization mounted numerous murderous attacks, lynching impoverished Muslims for the crime of “eating beef” and sometimes burning down their dwellings. The Hindu Yuva Vahini have also attacked Christian churches and pastors.

Adityanath, who rules state with an iron fist, is now using the state administration, especially the notoriously violent state police, to hound and harass innocent Muslims and Dalits (the former untouchables) charging them with concocted legal transgressions, especially cow-slaughter or “illegal” religious conversion.

The Chief Minister has issued two ordinances explicitly directed against Muslims. Although cow-slaughter was banned in Uttar Pradesh in 1955 by a Congress Party state government, Adityanath’s Cow Slaughter Prevention (Amendment) Ordinance, 2020 now makes it punishable by up to 10 years imprisonment and a draconian fine. Beef happens to be a cheaper meat in India and is often availed by the poor, especially Muslims and Dalits, to supplement their nutrition-starved diet.

The second ordinance, termed the “love-Jihad” ordinance, is based on the vile communalist canard that Muslims are seducing Hindu women in order to convert them to Islam, and that this constitutes another front of the Muslim holy war (jihad). In reality, the ordinance is used to criminalize intimate relationships between Muslims and Hindus. Roving bands of Hindu-vigilantes have violently assaulted such couples and the state has brought criminal charges against numerous innocent young Muslim men.

The roots of these reactionary contemporary developments lie in the 1947 communal Partition of the subcontinent into an expressly Muslim Pakistan and an ostensibly secular India. The Congress Party of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru bear the primary political responsibility for Partition as it was unable and organically incapable of unifying the Muslim and Hindu toilers in opposition to the intrigues of India’s departing British colonial overlords, the “two-nation” demand of the Muslim League, and the communal provocations of the Hindu Mahasabha and the BJP’s mentor to this day, the RSS. Fearing the growing movement of the working class and the increasingly radical temper of the anti-imperialist struggle, the Congress betrayed its own program for a united secular India, reached a deal with London under which it inherited the colonial state machine, and implemented partition.

The post-independent “secular” Indian constitution drafted from 1947 onwards and adopted in 1950 includes an explicit “directive” clause, Article 48, that directs the Indian state to formulate legislation to “[prohibit] the slaughter, of cows and calves and other milch and draught cattle.” This was a blatant concession by the Congress Party-dominated Constituent Assembly that drafted the post-colonial Indian constitution to the Hindu-extremist “cow-lobby,” one of a slew of concessions and accommodations the post-independence Congress government made to the Hindu right, although it was politically marginalized and discredited due to the Hindu Mahasabha’s and RSS’s opposition to the anti-colonial struggle and outright collaboration with the British colonial regime.

The Congress Party, which included in its leadership a sizeable faction of Hindu communalists, fertilized the Hindu right during the subsequent three decades, when it continued to dominate Indian politics and continuously held power at the center. It did this first and foremost by making this once fringe movement a legitimate part of the Indian bourgeois establishment. As part of its ever more elaborate attempts to defuse rising social opposition from India’s workers and rural toilers by fanning caste and communal divisions, the Congress subsequently catered to and made concessions to the BJP’s reactionary Hindu supremacist agenda. This eventually led to the brazen and illegal demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, and helped create the conditions for the BJP to emerge, first as a party of national government, and now the premier party of the Indian bourgeoisie.

Cutoff of federal jobless aid in the US leaves millions of workers scrambling to make ends meet

Jessica Goldstein

An estimated 7.5 million workers in the US lost their $300-a-week federal unemployment benefits last week. That is after the federal government reduced federal unemployment benefits from $600 per week in summer 2020.

Some working-class parents, like 33-year-old Amanda Rinehart of Allentown, Pennsylvania, are unable to return to work because of the need to provide care for their children who are at risk for contracting serious cases of COVID-19 if they return to packed classrooms and day care centers. She told the New York Times, “They should not cut these benefits off until there is a vaccine for all the little humans of all ages, because there are parents like me that have children that are high risk for Covid.”

Centerplate Retail and Food recruiter Daniella Medina, left, writes down information from Omene Casimir during a job fair at Hard Rock Stadium, Friday, Sept. 3, 2021, in Miami Gardens, Fla. (AP Photo/Marta Lavandier)

Her 8-year-old son has asthma and is unable to receive a COVID-19 vaccine, like all children under the age of 12 in the US. Since she has no one to take care of him while he remains at home, she left her job as a hotel assistant manager and was able to get by on about $560 per week in unemployment benefits from the federal and state governments. “I have no idea what I’m going to do once these benefits stop,” she said.

The Biden administration ended four US federal pandemic unemployment programs on September 4. The same week that unemployment assistance was cut, the US Supreme Court ruled to end the federal moratorium on evictions that millions of renters relied on for stable housing during the pandemic. States began to see waves of eviction filings in the first week of the end of the moratorium, with some states seeing eviction filings well above average.

The ending of these programs, which had the widespread backing of both Republican and Democratic officials, has left 11 million workers in the US desperate as they scramble to figure out how they will provide for themselves and their families.

One of these unemployed workers, Ana Cepera, told NBC 6 South Florida that she was facing eviction along with her three children because of the abrupt end of federal benefits. “Right now, I’m without a job… Every day I’m like, OK, is today the day that they’re going to tell me I’m going to lose my home?”

The benefits, which amounted to little more than $1,000 to $1,500 per month, served as a lifeline for millions of workers who would otherwise have been on the brink of starvation and homelessness. Yet many of these same workers found it a struggle to navigate underfunded state benefit systems to receive the benefits they were due after they lost their jobs through no fault of their own. Robin Woods of Pennsylvania, who lost her job of two decades in a layoff during the pandemic, described the struggle to stay afloat to 11 News: “It’s been a struggle from day one. I’d get a lump sum, and then I wouldn’t get it. I have had nothing but problems.”

The Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation (FPUC) provided an additional $300 a week to workers who received at least $1 of regular state or federal unemployment benefits. The other unemployment programs ended by the Biden administration programs include Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA), which provided unemployment benefits to those not traditionally eligible to receive unemployment benefits, such as gig workers and freelancers; Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC),which provided additional weeks of unemployment benefits to workers who exhausted all eligible weeks of benefits in the state’s unemployment system; and Mixed Earners Unemployment Compensation (MEUC), which gave an additional $100 a week to eligible workers who earned self-employment income along with wages earned with an employer.

Situations like those of Ana Cepera and Amanda Rinehart are mirrored by the experiences of unprecedented millions of workers in the wealthiest nation in the world. The Democrats and Republicans, who speak for the interests of the rich, have turned a blind eye to the suffering that their policies have created.

In June, after 25 Republican-led states and one Democratic-led state exited the federal unemployment program early, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki commented that the governors of those states had “every right” to end them early and that the Biden administration “never proposed making the benefits permanent or doing so over the long term.”

Since then, government officials and the press have parroted the hopes of big businesses that the millions of unemployed will be forced by threat of destitution to accept low-wage work in precarious jobs that expose workers to the deadly SARS-CoV-2 virus.

The reality is different. A recent New York Times article reveals that government assistance programs during the pandemic actually kept millions of US workers out of poverty compared to before the pandemic. Roughly 9.1 percent of US workers were considered living in poverty in 2020, a significant drop from 11.8 percent in 2019 and the lowest number since records on poverty levels began to be recorded in 1967, according to the Times .

Data also shows that ending unemployment benefits has done little to compel workers to take on jobs that are dangerous or don’t suit their financial needs or work experience. From April through July, states that cut unemployment early saw only 1.33 percent job growth, states that kept them saw 1.37 percent rise in job growth. There are currently 10.9 million open jobs in US, but most are low wage and in retail, food service and other service industries.

Yet workers are resisting the attempts of the ruling class to push them into dangerous, low-wage work for profits. “We’re still in a pandemic. The idea of being close to hundreds of strangers a day, even while being vaccinated, is not something that appeals to me,” Michael, an out-of-work graphic designer, told CNN Business, explaining why he did not pick up a job as a server at a restaurant while he waited for an opening in his field.

A survey conducted in May by the National Retail Federation and Prosper Insights & Analytics showed that 10 percent of respondents were uncomfortable returning to any kind of in-person work. They mainly cited health concerns over the pandemic and worried that no amount of precautions that employers attempted to use would be effective enough to protect them.

The survey showed 34 percent of respondents said that they wanted social distancing at their workplaces and 33 percent wanted mask mandates, both of which virtually no employer in the US is willing to guarantee for the sake of gaining as much productivity and profit as possible from each worker.

The bipartisan ending of the federal unemployment programs and eviction moratorium comes as the US Bureau of Labor Statistics released data on the Consumer Price Index for August, which shows the inflation rate averaged for all consumer goods in the US at 5.3 percent last month. This is only slightly lower than the 5.4 percent inflation rate reported in July.

The US government has cut meager unemployment benefits for millions of workers at the same time that it has overseen a massive shift of $1.8 trillion to US billionaires, according to a recent report from Americans for Tax Fairness and the Institute for Policy Studies Program on Inequality. Just weeks before the Biden administration ended the federal unemployment programs, President Biden admitted in an address that the US government spent $300 million per day on the two-decade-long war in Afghanistan which ended in a debacle last month.

The rising prices of basic goods coupled with low wages, high levels of unemployment and the uncontrolled spread of the coronavirus pandemic while the richest see their wealth soar to new heights is fueling social tensions of a historic magnitude. Already, the deadly return-to-work drive of the ruling class has caused outbreaks of COVID-19 at workplaces and schools across the US. In most cases, companies, school districts and the unions are not accurately reporting on positive COVID-19 cases in workplaces and schools, sometimes completely blacking out information from the working class and students, further exacerbating the spread of the disease when hospitals all over the US are running out of beds to treat patients.

Concerns over financial stability behind Beijing’s moves against Alibaba

Nick Beams

Over the past year, the Xi Jinping regime has taken significant action against the Chinese high-tech giant Alibaba and its subsidiary, the Ant Group, as part of broader moves directed against high-tech companies.

Alibaba’s founder Jack Ma has been under pressure from government authorities and disappeared from public view for two months at the end of last year, following the decision by financial regulators to suspend the Ant Group’s $137 billion initial public offering (IPO) on Wall Street just as it was about to be launched in November. Had it been allowed to go ahead, the IPO would have been the largest ever.

In this Friday, Oct. 23, 2020, photo, an employee walks past a logo of the Ant Group at their office in Hong Kong. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung)

This week, as initially reported in the Financial Times on Monday, the government moved to break up Alipay, the financial services firm run by Ant. It ordered Ant to separate the app Huabei, which operates like a consumer credit card, from the main group, along with Jiebei, which makes unsecured loans to small businesses.

These actions are part of increased state intervention into high-tech areas of the Chinese economy and its financial system.

Last month, China’s State Council and the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee issued a joint statement saying there was an “urgent need” for new laws to regulate the digital economy and internet finance to ensure that this new business model operated in a “healthy manner.”

There have been various interpretations of the government’s move to tighten control over the country’s high-tech and financial giants. These include: The claim that it emanates from Xi’s authoritarian proclivities; that, in the words of a Financial Times (FT) editorial, it is part of the CCP’s authoritarian drive to bring about a wholesale transformation; and even the claim in an FT column that it is a step towards a second version of the Soviet Union’s central economic planning agency, Gosplan.

There are undoubtedly political considerations in the moves against the high-tech and financial moguls, not the least being Xi’s desire to clip the wings of some of the richest individuals in China, all of them multi-billionaires, in order that their wealth and international financial connections not become the basis for a political challenge to the ruling CCP.

But the more fundamental issue appears to be the implications of what is known as fin-tech for the increasingly fragile Chinese financial system.

An article in the Diplomat earlier this month pointed to these growing concerns. It noted that some observers had pointed to the strident criticism by Ma of Chinese financial authorities last October, just before the attempted Ant IPO, while others have said it is part of a general crackdown to ensure CCP control.

“However, very few have elaborated how exactly Alibaba and its mobile payment system, Alipay, might generate financial risks, and what specific problems they create for regulators… The tension between Alibaba and the monetary authority of China lies in the nature of a privately operated mobile payment system.”

Over the past decade, Alipay has grown into the largest mobile payment platform in the world. People put money into their Alipay account and then use their smart phone to scan a QR code when making a transaction, without the need for cash or cards. Alipay QR codes can be seen everywhere in shopping complexes.

When people use Alipay, the Diplomat report said, they believe they are making transactions in renminbi (RMB), the Chinese currency controlled by the central bank. They are, in fact, using a currency issued by Alibaba with exchanges with RMB at the ratio of 1:1.

In the most extreme case, if Alibaba were to go bankrupt, then any Alipay account would be worthless.

There are other, more immediate, questions.

One problem is that Alibaba is not a commercial bank and is not covered by banking regulations, such as the regular reporting of its reserves. As a tech company, it is free from such supervision.

Another problem identified in the Diplomat article is that Alipay, a privately-run system, is massively used. The issue is how can the monetary authority maintain financial and economic stability “if the majority of grassroots transactions in China take place through a non-RMB currency?”

It pointed out that as the Alipay system continues to grow, “one day the central bank might need Alibaba’s support or even the approval in order to achieve its monetary policy objectives,” a possibility that it cannot tolerate.

The People’s Bank of China (PBOC) cannot roll back the mobile payment system because it is so widespread that “reversing it would likely inflict substantial pain on the economy and cause unnecessary panic.”

So the alternatives appear to be the introduction by the PBOC of its own mobile payment system or the imposition of greater state control over Alibaba and Alipay.

In many respects, the Chinese government is caught in problems of its own making. The development of high-tech firms such as Alibaba and its Alipay system was promoted by the regime in an earlier period as it stepped up the introduction of market mechanisms to facilitate increased dynamism in the Chinese economy and financial system.

The problems it is now encountering recall the remarks of Marx on the development of the credit system in the 19th century. In the first stages, he explained, it “furtively creeps in as the humble servant of accumulation,” but then assumes a powerful and dominant position. Or, as he put it in the Communist Manifesto, the bourgeoisie is like the sorcerer’s apprentice, who conjures up forces from the nether world which then escape his control.

The issues that have arisen in China, among them the private ownership of massive data sets of consumer transactions and the implications of high-tech developments for the stability of the financial system, are not confined to that country.

In an editorial on the moves to break up Alipay, the FT said worries over “how regulators should handle big financial data are not unique to China.”

It pointed out that last year, before he became the head of the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Gary Gensler “published a paper warning that using artificial intelligence to make lending decisions could lead to financial instability.”

US parents and educators denounce school openings as COVID infections spiral out of control

Renae Cassimeda

Ninety-eight percent of K-12 schools in the United States are now open for in-person instruction, leading to a spread of COVID-19 infections in schools and surrounding communities. Over 94 percent of the country is experiencing “high” levels of transmission, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and cases among children have exploded.

More than 1.2 million infections among children ages 0 to 17 have been reported in the US since July 22 when schools began reopening for the fall semester. This is roughly 20 percent of the 5,292,837 child cases since the pandemic began, according to data from the American Academy of Pediatrics. Tragically, 111 children have died since July 22, about a quarter of the 460 total childhood COVID-19 fatalities. According to the CDC, nearly 30,000 children were hospitalized in August alone.

Chicago educators and parents protest school openings (Source: CPS Sick-Out Info Facebook page)

Despite the surge in cases, hospitalizations and deaths, due to the more infectious Delta variant, the Biden administration and state and local officials from both corporate-controlled parties have doubled down on their efforts to keep schools open. The political establishment has pursued this criminal policy with the full backing of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the National Education Association (NEA) and their state and local affiliates.

New York City Public Schools, the largest district in the US with 1.1 million students, began in-person instruction Monday, following a deal between Mayor Bill de Blasio and the United Federation of Teachers. According to the New York City Department of Education Daily Covid Case Map, there have already been 114 classroom closures and over 150 partial classroom closures in the first two days of instruction. There have been 218 positive cases reported this week.

Despite the already concerning numbers, infections are and will be vastly underreported due to inadequate testing, contact tracing, and quarantine protocols in the district. Testing is not mandatory in the district. Only volunteer, unvaccinated students will be randomly tested biweekly. This will result in tests for only 10 percent of unvaccinated children. This is a four-fold decrease from the number of tests administered last semester. Under the current model, hundreds, if not thousands, of infections will go undetected and unreported in the district.

“It is horrible they are making everybody go back while cases are rocketing,” a New York City special education teacher who recently took leave for non-COVID medical issues told the World Socialist Web Site. “They are not quarantining people who are sick or exposed like before. They said we must have safe distancing and testing in the schools but then they do not do it.”

The protocols set up by the mayor and school officials are designed to keep the schools open no matter how severe outbreaks are. Individual schools will be closed only if there is evidence of a COVID-19 outbreak in the building, but this will be difficult to prove given a low level of testing and transparency. The district’s quarantine policy is far more lax than last year’s, and fully vaccinated staff and students in middle and high schools are exempt from needing to be quarantined if exposed to a positive case.

The same conditions exist across the US. Educators and parents are particularly concerned that school officials are providing inadequate details about outbreaks or deliberately concealing life-and-death information from them.

Steve, an educator in the Bay Area of California, said, “One teacher was recently out for about a week. I eventually found out she was out ‘for COVID.’ When she returned, she said none of the students nor the staff members she worked with had been notified that they had been in contact with someone on campus who had been infected with COVID.”

Steve continued, “One of the school substitutes shared with me that he had replaced four teachers over the last three weeks who had been out for COVID. No one had shared with him that he might be in contact with people on campus (students) who had been in contact with persons who had contracted COVID.”

Michael, a parent of two children in a school district in the San Luis Obispo area of California, said, “The local paper reported an estimated 500 cases in the district during the first month of reopening, that’s nearly as many new cases this month as all of last year.

“Our former district did not provide a remote option, so we enrolled our kids in an Independent Study program at a neighboring district. The materials are awful, worse than nothing. We're looking for alternatives, leaning toward homeschooling as soon as the affidavit filing period opens. We are not sending our kids in to be canaries in the mine!

“Some school administrators may have good intentions, but they’re clearly not qualified to decide pandemic risks for children or society. No sane person who cares about reducing a deadly pandemic would require children to gather in schools. It increases spread, as simple as that.”

Adding to the causes for the underreporting of cases is the delay in getting test results, low turnout for testing, positive results for individuals who are identified outside of a district testing program and therefore not reported, and inadequate contact tracing and lax quarantining protocols.

The Tennessee Department of Education (TDOE) relaunched its COVID-19 Dashboard on Tuesday to report cases in each school district. Parents have been in an uproar as major discrepancies have been identified across various districts. They have organized their own tracking of cases through Facebook groups.

A significant discrepancy is in Knox County Schools (KCS), one of the largest districts in the state. The TDOE dashboard shows only 300 new student cases last week in the district, but Tennessee Department of Health data shows 1,012 infections among children ages 5 to 18.

KCS parents recently received a letter from district officials which declared that the dashboard aims to “protect individual privacy.” The data does not include pre-K students or staff, it has omitted a school site due to low enrollment and included total absences without breaking down how many are COVID-related absences.

“The idea of ‘protecting privacy’ is the same canard they have been using since the beginning of COVID,” a former teacher in the district responded to the letter. “FERPA [Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act] has a caveat about providing information if there is a health issue like a pandemic. The school board willfully misinterprets FERPA to avoid providing accurate COVID info. Also, lumping all absences together is pure obfuscation. They know the students who are absent because of COVID or quarantine because they are not marked absent but temporary virtual learners. It would be very easy to have two lists, one of non-COVID absences and one of ‘temporary virtual learners.’”

In addition to parents aggregating their own data on positive cases, Knox County parents have also recently organized sickouts to keep children home to protect their lives and long-term health.

A similar development has occurred in Hawaii Public Schools where a surge in childhood cases has provoked mass opposition from parents and teachers. Parents in Hawaii have also used social media to aggregate COVID-19 infections in schools and have organized an ongoing sickout to keep their children out of schools.

“Our community spread is getting out of hand, and everyone knows schools should not be open now,” a special education teacher in Hawaii told the WSWS. “I had more kids staying home in late August than I had in my classroom, and now we are being told to provide distance learning for kids who are approved for special conditions and can’t come to school. This year may be more challenging in some ways than last year.”

Noting the district’s active role in covering up the spread in schools, she said, “The State has forbidden indoor gatherings of 10 or more, and yet we have full classes of 20-30. This feels schizophrenic. There is no more COVID MOU [Memorandum of Understanding] or any kind of addendum to our collective bargaining agreement pertaining to health and safety. The interim superintendent is claiming spread isn't happening at school, but only out in the community.”

Chicago Public Schools (CPS), the third largest district in the US with over 340,000 students, is also seeing a rise in infections. Last Thursday, CPS officials reported 2,900 students and staff members had been identified as a close contact to someone who tested positive for COVID-19. Yet according to a source close to the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), the district informed the union there were 5,665 students and 98 staff members who had potentially been exposed to the virus.

The media is blaming inadequate contact tracing for the spread. Without a doubt, tracing is inadequate and CPS officials have failed to do the bare minimum. CPS officials have repeatedly missed their deadline to roll out a testing program. The district promised that this would be in place by the start of the school year, and after several delays now says it will be ready at the end of September. So far, only three percent of students and staff have opted into the district testing program. According to CPS, only 638 tests were administered across the district last Monday.

With growing anger among educators and parents, the CTU is calling for the establishment of “guardrails” of improved safety measures and a metric for closing a school, based on a certain number of infections. However, this is just damage control from the CTU, which supported the opening of the schools based on the fiction it could be done “safely.” Last year, CTU President Jesse Sharkey, a member of the now defunct International Socialist Organization, blocked a strike by teachers over Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s criminal reopening of schools.

On Monday night, CPS parents protested outside Lightfoot’s home demanding a remote option due to the lack of safety protocols and thousands of students who have been placed on quarantine for COVID-19 exposure. While the sentiments of parents were no doubt sincere, the “remote option” demand has been promoted in Chicago, New York City and other locations by sections of the trade union bureaucracy affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America as a means of letting off steam and encouraging individual opt-outs by concerned parents, rather than collective action by the working class to close the schools, which is a critical component of the public health strategy needed to save lives.

US, Britain, Australia announce major military pact against China

Peter Symonds

In a major escalation of the US-led war drive against China, President Biden together with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced a new military alliance focused on the Indo-Pacific region. While not mentioned by name, China was obviously the primary target of the new AUKUS pact.

A top US official briefing the media described the agreement as “a fundamental decision, that binds decisively Australia to the United States and Great Britain for generations.” It marks a reforging of the wartime alliance during World War II in the Pacific in which Australia was a major base of operations for both the US and Britain—at that time against Japan.

Boris Johnson, Scott Morrison and Joe Biden at G7 meeting in June 2021 [Source: Australian Government]

For British imperialism, the pact signifies the return of a military presence to Asia that it relinquished over fifty years ago when it withdrew its bases in South East Asia and the Persian Gulf. In April, the British navy despatched an aircraft carrier strike group for exercises in the Indian Ocean and sensitive South China Sea––its largest force since the Falklands War in the southern Atlantic in 1982.

The fault lines of a disastrous new world war are rapidly emerging as the Biden administration forges alliances in the Indo-Pacific against China which the US regards as the greatest threat to its global hegemony. Far from easing tensions with Beijing, Biden has ramped up the US confrontation with China on every front—from its hypocritical denunciations of “human rights” and the Wuhan Lab lie to trade war measures, naval provocations in the South China and East China Seas and unfounded accusations of Chinese threats against Taiwan.

The AUKUS announcement comes ahead of the first-ever, in-person leaders meeting next week of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue or “Quad”—a quasi-military alliance of the US, Japan, India and Australia. It follows a virtual meeting of the leaders—also a first—convened by Biden in March that pledged allegiance to “a free, open rules-based order.” This stock phrase signifies a commitment to the post-World War II imperialist order dominated by the US in which it set the global rules.

The announcement comes in the immediate aftermath of Washington’s debacle in Afghanistan after two decades of a criminal and bloody neo-colonial occupation ended in the ignominious collapse of its puppet regime in Kabul. The withdrawal from Afghanistan was part of a broad strategic shift set out in Pentagon documents away from “the war on terror” to focus on “great-power rivalry”—chiefly against China.

The aggressive and militarist character of the new alliance is underscored by the associated decision to provide Australia with nuclear-powered submarines that will greatly extend the capabilities of its navy’s submarine fleet. Nuclear-powered submarines, as oppose to the diesel-powered submarines that Australia had contracted to buy from France, can operate at far greater distances and remain submerged for extended periods of time, enabling them to be deployed to the strategic South China and East China Seas.

The US has only ever shared its nuclear submarine technology with one other country—Britain—some 70 years ago. Only six countries currently have nuclear-powered submarines. Prime Minister Morrison was at pains to insist that Australia would not acquire nuclear weapons, which would be a breach of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, nor would it establish a civilian nuclear industry.

There is, however, a logic to the decision: without a nuclear industry, Australia, which has among the largest uranium reserves in the world, would be completely dependent on the US or UK for nuclear fuel for its submarines. Once a nuclear industry is developed, fuel can also be used to build nuclear weapons—a move proposed in recent years amid rising US-China tensions by several Australian strategic analysts.

A top Biden administration official told the media that the formation of AUKUS was the “the biggest strategic step Australia has taken in generations.” The alliance and the acquisition of nuclear-powered submarines is the culmination of the closer and closer integration of Australia into the US war plans against China that began with the Obama administration and accelerated under Trump.

President Obama chose to announce his “pivot to Asia,” which set course for an all-embracing conflict with China, in a speech to the Australian parliament in November 2011. The visit to Australia followed the ousting of Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in an inner-party coup by “protected sources” of the US embassy in Canberra. Rudd’s “crime” was not that he opposed the US-Australian alliance but that he advocated US compromise with China as Obama was preparing for confrontation.

Rudd’s replacement Julia Gillard signed an agreement with Obama to open US military bases to US Marines, warships and warplanes. The Australian foreign minister and defence minister are currently in Washington for talks with their American counterparts in the annual AUSMIN talks which are expected to outline an even closer integration of the Australian armed forces and military bases with the US war machine.

The negotiations between the US, Britain and Australia to conclude the AUKUS alliance have been underway behind closed doors for months according to unnamed sources. The complete secrecy is not only aimed at keeping China in the dark, but reflects the fear in ruling circles in Washington, London and Canberra that the widespread, but latent, anti-war sentiment among workers and youth will erupt.

The latest announcement makes clear that the US imperialism’s preparations for war against China are well advanced. If it cannot subordinate Beijing to US interests by other means, the American ruling class will not hesitate to go to war to prevent being eclipsed by China.

The only means for halting this catastrophic drive towards conflict between nuclear-armed powers is to forge an international anti-war movement of the working class on the basis of a socialist perspective to put an end to the capitalist system and its reactionary division of the world into rival nation states.

UK schools reopening puts lives and health of future generations at risk

Margot Miller

With schools now open for the autumn term, UK schoolchildren are being placed in grave danger. Since the government reopened the economy and relaxed all restrictions, COVID -19 cases have soared.

Daily UK cases were 29,173 on September 12, with deaths hitting 971 over the previous seven days—up 22.6 percent. Cases rose highest, by 42 percent, among 10–19-year-olds in the week ending September 4, according to Public Health England (PHE).

On Monday, a Downing Street press conference announced that the UK’s four Chief Medical Officers are recommending 12-15-year-olds take up the vaccine “to prevent further disruption to education.” Vaccination will not be mandatory and does not apply to the under 12s.

SEP campaign stall in Manchester (WSWS Media)

While vaccination usually provides protection against more severe disease, many people who are hospitalised have been vaccinated. Vaccination does not provide 100 percent protection from becoming infected or prevent transmission.

The decision to extend the vaccination programme is not motivated by concern over the welfare of children, or the education of disadvantaged children, but the fear that rising cases will mean parents having to stay at home instead of making profits for the big corporations. Throughout the pandemic, Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government has minimised the dangers to children, and denied that schools are major vectors of transmission.

On September 2, PHE released revised guidance for schools, including the abandonment of previous albeit limited mitigation measures like mask wearing and sending bubbles home, declaring, “Whilst the risk of severe illness from COVID-19 infection in children and young people has remained low throughout the pandemic, the vast majority of children and young people who get COVID-19 only have very mild symptoms and some will have no symptoms at all.”

For the Conservative government the lives of the 80 children who died from the virus during the pandemic do not matter, nor the tens of thousands with Long COVID.

The BMJ (formerly, the British Medical Journal) addressed an open letter to Health Secretary Gavin Williamson dated September 3, castigating the government for “Allowing mass infection of children.”

“Children have suffered significant harms from covid-19,” the letter explained. “In just the past two months there have been over 2,300 hospitalisations of under 18s in England. There are an estimated 34, 000 children living with long covid in the UK already… Up to one in seven of those infected are expected to have persisting symptoms at 12-15 weeks. Long covid can be associated with multisystem disease in some children, including persistent cognitive symptoms.”

When schools reopened in Scotland on August 19, COVID cases surged to the highest level at any time during the pandemic. COVID related absences reached a new high of 38,361 on Tuesday, despite the continuation of mask wearing there.

Dingwell Academy in the Scottish Highlands had to close due to staff self-isolating. Second year pupils at Inverness High School were waiting for Covid test results after an outbreak in class.

In Northern Ireland, hundreds of children were sent home. More than 3,500 people aged five to 19 tested positive in the week to September 7.

Eighteen schools in the Fermanagh and Omagh District Council area sought advice from the Education Authority relating to Covid cases. Around 400 pupils from Larne High School stayed home on September 6 after contact with a positive case.

The Northern Ireland Assembly was recalled to debate a motion expressing its “significant concern with increasing reports of pupil absences due to the Covid-19 situation in our schools.” Rather than closing schools to stem transmission, however, Stormont decided on a “more targeted approach to contact tracing” to be done by the Public Health Agency, measures which will facilitate transmission.

In line with the rest of the UK, close contacts are redefined so pupils in the same class as a positive case “will not routinely be asked to isolate and take a test.” Students identified as close contacts will not have to self-isolate for 10 days, but can return to class if they test negative or have no symptoms on day two of their absence. They must take another coronavirus polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test on day eight.

Given that it can take a week for the virus to incubate, this is madness.

The new PHE guidance states “if you are fully vaccinated or aged under 18 years and six months you will not be required to self-isolate if you are a contact of someone who has tested positive for Covid-19.”

Someone tweeted on SafeEdForAll (Safe Education for All), “My eight-year old’s friend and mum have Covid, sister seems fine so keeps going to school to mix with 500 plus and other families, including six classes at a time in poorly ventilated assembly and lunch halls.”

Another tweet read, “Department for Education’s new pandemic policy means a child’s entire household could have Covid, and they can still attend school—unless a child voluntarily takes a test which shows positive or if they overtly show symptoms. This isn’t ‘minimising disruption in schools’; this is hiding it.”

In England, 59 pupils at the Stamford Endowed Schools, Lincolnshire were isolating from September 9 after testing positive. Positive cases were reported at Shirley Manor Primary Academy in Bradford.

According to data published by SafeEdForAll, there were 62 UK school outbreaks for week ending September 13. This will be an underestimation, as there is no official publication of schools with Covid infections either by the government or the trade unions. The outbreaks are only tracked thanks to parent Daniella Modos-Cutter.

Throughout the pandemic, the education unions promoted the fiction that with mitigation measures alone schools can be made safe.

The National Education Union along the with the GMB, Unison and Unite published “Coronavirus: joint union safety checklist for schools” for the autumn term. This leaves it to individual union representatives (reps) to make risk assessments and negotiate limited mitigation measures with management on a school-by-school basis. Reps victimised for fighting for safety measures can expect no help from the unions.

Labour Shadow Education Secretary Kate Green, whose party is fully committed to keeping unsafe schools open, said she couldn’t “understand why the government no longer requires masks to be worn in schools when infection rates are higher than they were when masks were required.” Yet many parents who keep their children off school are bullied by Labour controlled authorities, and either forced to deregister their children or face fines and imprisonment. Their defiance is an expression of the fact that the working class is not prepared to live with the virus.

***

On Saturday, Socialist Equality Party members campaigned in central Manchester with the statements, The Eradication of Covid-19 is the only way to stop the pandemic and Oppose the return to Schools: Children and educators’ lives matter.

The statements make clear that it is possible to end the pandemic, but what is required is a mass mobilisation of the working class, independent of the trade unions. This movement must fight for a global strategy involving an array of public health measures including vaccination, strict lockdown of non-essential industries and the closure of schools. The alternative is mass deaths, illness and the possible emergence of variants immune to the current vaccines.

A passer-by commented, “I really agree with what you are doing. It’s got to be based on the data”.

A teacher explained, “It’s all back to normal. They don’t wear masks. Even the test and trace isn’t working. You have to get the consent of parents before you can test and trace. I don’t feel safe as a teacher.”

Biomedical graduate Aisha said of the Johnson government, “We had such a slow response to the whole pandemic. They didn’t do anything until the last minute. That’s what’s happening now. Everyone’s mixing, no masks, everything’s going back to normal, forget living in a pandemic!

“All the festivals are going ahead, there’s no social distancing, a perfect place [for the virus] to breed. We’ve had so many failed lockdowns. Eradication is the ideal measure.”

Aisha’s sister Laiba, a Year 8 schoolgirl, said she wanted to be vaccinated against Covid: “It would be good. We should be wearing masks, even if we do get vaccinated, especially in schools. We have to wear masks on buses, but not in school where it’s crowded. Good luck!”

UK Johnson government’s autumn/winter COVID-19 plan declares virus is endemic

Robert Stevens

Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Health Minister Sajid Javid yesterday confirmed that they will do nothing to oppose the escalating spread of the COVID-19 pandemic as autumn gives way to winter.

Johnson chaired a Downing Street press conference to confirm a “Plan A” that the government describes as “a comprehensive approach designed to steer the country through autumn and winter 2021-22.” Earlier, Javid said the plan would be imposed “without the need for stringent economic and social restrictions”.

Plan A was released in a 32-page document. It is based almost exclusively on encouraging additional vaccinations, with barely a nod towards other measures of mitigation.

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson walks in 10 Downing Street ahead of a COVID-19 press conference. 14/09/2021 (Picture by Simon Dawson / No 10 Downing Street/FlickR)

“Building our defences through pharmaceutical interventions: vaccines, antivirals and disease modifying therapeutics” is centred on rolling out a booster jab programme for all over-50s and offering the vaccine to 12- to 15-year-olds, on the advice of the chief medical officer.

Aside from this, there are deliberately vague commitments to “Test, Trace and Isolate” measures, “Supporting” the National Health Service [NHS] and social care by “managing pressures and recovering services”, “Advising people on how to protect themselves and others”, and “helping to vaccinate the world and managing risks at the border.”

The real core of the government’s strategy was outlined in the Telegraph in a Monday article, “No more national lockdowns as Boris Johnson rips up Covid rules.”

The newspaper gloated, “Boris Johnson will make clear this week he is ‘dead set’ against another national lockdown as he rips up the old system of Covid rules and adopts a new approach for winter… A senior government source told The Telegraph of the argument Mr Johnson would make: ‘This is the new normal. We need to learn to live with Covid’”.

The government avoids such a naked declaration only because it is fully aware of the terrible consequences of letting the virus rip. Cases, hospitalisations and deaths all higher than they were this time last year, despite the vaccination programme.

On the day the government’s plan was released modelers on the government’s own SAGE advisory committee warned that without swift intervention, between 2,000 and 7,000 people a day could be hospitalised with Covid in England alone by next month compared with 1,000 a day now. Even then it advised only “more light touch measures,” including “encouraging home working… clear messaging that recommends people acting cautiously, more widespread testing, a return to requiring all contacts of cases to isolate, and more mask-wearing.”

This is merely an appeal for a swifter implementation of the government’s Plan B, which consists of a few minimal measures to be implemented only if the NHS faces being overwhelmed. What is being advanced as a contingency plan is not a plan at all. The entirety of Plan B covers just four short paragraphs, with the first of three “measures” consisting of a commitment to communicate “clearly and urgently to the public that the level of risk has increased, and with it the need to behave more cautiously”, introducing “mandatory vaccine-only COVID-status certification in certain settings,” and “Legally mandating face coverings in certain settings.” Mass participation gatherings indoors and outdoors would still be permitted, providing businesses running them operated mandatory vaccine passports for entry.

Plan B final stipulation is that “The Government would also consider asking people once again to work from home if they can, for a limited period,” while stressing that “this causes more disruption and has greater immediate costs to the economy and some businesses than the other Plan B interventions, so a final decision would be made based on the data at the time.”

Johnson described Plan B as having “a number of different shots in the locker”, while insisting that they would only be used as a very last resort to avoid moving to a lockdown and hitting the profits of the corporations. “You wouldn’t necessarily play them all at once, far from it, you would want to do things in a graduated way,” he said.

Point 76 of the autumn/winter plan states, “Given the high levels of protection in the adult population against COVID-19 by vaccination, relatively small changes in policy and behaviour could have a big impact on reducing (or increasing) transmission, bending the epidemic curve and relieving pressure on the NHS. Thanks to the success of the vaccination programme, it should be possible to handle a further resurgence with less damaging measures than the lockdowns and economic and social restrictions deployed in the past.”

The government’s Plan A and Plan B both proceed on the basis that COVID-19 is now endemic and cannot be eradicated. This is no longer based on the claim that “herd immunity” will be reached through a combination of vaccination and infection, but a naked assertion that “living with the virus” means mass deaths for many years to come.

The Telegraph ’s Monday editorial: “Britain must put an end to all Covid restrictions” declares, “Covid is now an endemic disease, which means people will still catch it—including many who have been vaccinated—and some will end up seriously ill in hospital and even die.”

A Times column Monday by Science Editor Tom Whipple and Science Reporter Kaya Burgess noted that “This time last year there were 4,000 daily cases and 1,000 Covid patients in hospital. Today there are 30,000 daily reported cases and 8,000 patients in hospital. We are going into autumn from a far higher base.”

The widespread belief previously was that “if we just got the nation over the herd immunity line all would be fine.” But “thanks to the Delta variant, that line is less clear and seems ever-receding. Immunity drops off over time, each wave of boosters and infections tops it up. So it is that the country approaches an equilibrium of endemicity, a point that is our true finish line.”

For “equilibrium of endemicity”, read an “acceptable” level of illness and death. Last month the i newspaper revealed that the government has already conducted as closed-door “cost-benefit analysis” declaring that an “acceptable level of Covid-19 deaths” of around 1,000 deaths a week was preferable to a renewed lockdown. And even then this would only prompt a “discussion” of possibly more stringent containment measures.

The Times ended its ruminations with a tortured simile comparing the Covid pandemic to “a bell struck in a dark cave. The first echo comes back loud and clear. So too does the second. But each subsequent echo is diminished and distorted until it is just a faint reminder, barely discernible. The clanging din of Covid is far quieter today. One day it will cease.”

This is anti-scientific nonsense. There is no reason assume that the virus will steadily become more benign, to be treated like flu. Further mutations made possible by the failure to contain and end the pandemic can lead to yet more deadly strains. Preventing this means the mobilisation of the working class, organised in rank-and-file safety committees in every workplace and neighbourhood, against Johnson’s criminal government and its de facto allies, the Labour Party and the trade unions. This must be based on a conscious plan for the final elimination of the virus through measures including the shutdown of non-essential industries, schools and universities, with all necessary cost borne by the major corporations and banks.