Child infections fuel COVID-19 surge across the US

Evan Blake

On Monday, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) released its latest weekly report on child COVID-19 infections, hospitalizations and deaths in the United States. The data is hampered by the deliberate efforts of state and federal authorities to cover up the spread of the pandemic, but nevertheless it presents damning evidence of the impact of the full reopening of schools this fall.

The AAP report found that for the week ending November 18, another 141,905 children were officially infected with COVID-19, the 15th straight week of over 100,000 official new cases. After reaching a trough of 100,630 new cases for the week ending October 28, this figure surged by 41 percent in just three weeks. The region with the greatest increase in child infections was the Midwest, where nearly 60,000 children were infected last week, a roughly 40 percent increase from the week prior.

This screenshot from the American Association of Pediatrics shows that COVID-19 cases among children have surged 40 percent over the past month.

Children accounted for 25.1 percent of all COVID-19 infections last week, making clear that the reopening of schools continues to fuel the broader surge of the pandemic across the country. The spread of the Delta variant since the end of summer has coincided with the reopening of schools, with roughly 13.5 million Americans officially infected with COVID-19 and 164,291 killed by the virus since schools began to fully reopen four months ago.

Alongside the surge of infections, child hospitalizations are once again on the rise, with just under 1,250 children now hospitalized with COVID-19 in the US. An average of 152 children under 18 are now hospitalized with COVID-19 each day.

The AAP report notes that 636 children have now officially died from COVID-19, with 12 children dying last week in Arizona (4), Ohio (2), California (1), Indiana (1), Kansas (1), Minnesota (1), North Dakota (1), and Texas (1). No information on any of these deaths has been made public, with only one article each from local press in Kansas and North Dakota even acknowledging them.

The deepening wave of infections, hospitalizations and deaths among children are all the more tragic given that a vaccine has finally been approved for all children above the age of four. On Monday, Pfizer and BioNTech released preliminary data finding that their vaccine remains 100 percent effective against symptomatic infection for children ages 12-15 years old four months after the second dose. Roughly two-thirds of all children ages 5-17 remain unvaccinated in the US, and millions were exposed to the virus just weeks before the approval of the vaccines.

The data in the AAP report provides only a glimpse into the devastation wrought by the pandemic policies of the American ruling class. Texas, Alabama, Nebraska and New York (excluding New York City) no longer report child infections. Only 24 states report data on child hospitalizations. Michigan, Montana, New York (excluding New York City), Rhode Island, Utah and West Virginia do not report figures on child deaths from COVID-19.

Furthermore, the level of testing conducted in the US is totally inadequate for all age groups, including children. While the official cumulative total of child infections documented by the AAP is roughly 6.8 million, seroprevalence studies conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimate that in reality roughly 25.8 million children under 18 have likely been infected with COVID-19 from the start of the pandemic through September 2021, over a third of all children in the US.

The long-term social impacts of the pandemic are not quantifiable. Studies on Long COVID among children indicate that millions continue to suffer debilitating symptoms for many weeks after their initial infection, and it remains unknown how long these symptoms will last.

A study published in the journal Pediatrics in early October found that by June 30, 2021, over 140,000 children in the US experienced the death of a parent or grandparent caregiver due to COVID-19. This figure has likely surpassed 200,000 amid the ongoing surge of the Delta variant.

The catastrophic impacts of the pandemic have radicalized millions of workers and young people, who increasingly recognize that their lives and those of their families and communities have been sacrificed in the interests of the financial elite. There is a growing understanding that the only reason schools were reopened was to send parents back to work to produce corporate profits.

Last week, roughly 200 students led their teachers in a 20-minute walkout at Martin Luther King, Jr. High School in Detroit, Michigan, in response to widespread infections at the school and district. Official data from the state showed that 44 students were infected last week at Renaissance High School, while 38 students and staff were infected at Cass Technical High School in Detroit. In total, there were 140 new outbreaks in Michigan schools last week, a 61 percent increase from the previous week, while the number of positive cases linked to those new outbreaks rose 71 percent to 891.

Fearing that last week’s walkout would spread throughout the district and galvanize broader opposition, Detroit Public Schools (DPS) quickly announced an extension of the Thanksgiving break to this entire week. Nearly three dozen other districts throughout Michigan have similarly closed schools this week, both in response to COVID-19 outbreaks and worsening staff shortages.

The entire American political establishment, backed by the corporate media, the teachers unions and the CDC, have continuously lied to the public about the effects of COVID-19 on children and the impact of school reopenings on viral transmission.

The campaign to reopen schools before the elimination of COVID-19 began on July 8, 2020, when then-President Donald Trump tweeted, “SCHOOLS MUST OPEN IN THE FALL!!!” Despite multiple scientific studies having already proven that children catch and transmit COVID-19 as readily as adults, then-CDC Director Robert Redfield modified school reopening guidelines with the lying claim, “We really don’t have evidence that children are driving the transmission cycle of this.”

Upon his election, President Joe Biden pledged to fully reopen schools in Democrat-led districts that were still providing remote learning. In fulfilling this pledge, he relied on the new CDC Director Rochelle Walensky to modify school reopening guidelines repeatedly in February and March. The updated guidelines downplayed the significance of ventilation and reduced spacing recommendations between students from six feet to three in order to pack each classroom.

Biden himself lied directly to a second grader on national television, telling her, “You’re not likely to be able to be exposed to something and spread it to mommy or daddy.” He added, “Kids don’t get … COVID very often. It’s unusual for that to happen.”

The most critical role has been played by American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten, who told the New York Times in February 2021 that she spent upwards of 15 hours each day on the phone with the White House, the CDC, local politicians and union officials to orchestrate the school reopening drive in Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and other major cities.

On Sunday, Weingarten and the AFT purchased an advertisement in the Times in order to promote the unions to the paper’s upper-middle-class readers. In the ad, Weingarten writes, “Our affiliates across the country negotiated health and safety protocols to reopen schools and keep them open for in-person learning during the pandemic.” Of course, the ad omits the fact that since July 22 more than 2.6 million children have officially been infected with COVID-19.

All of these figures bear primary responsibility for the homicidal school reopening policies that have been implemented in the US. They have consciously allowed masses of children and their families to be infected, suffer long-term debilitation and die.

Presidential election lays bare sharp class divisions in Chile

Mauricio Saavedra

In what has been described as “historic” by the corporate media, the two main victors in Sunday’s presidential election in Chile are the fascistic José Antonio Kast of the Christian Social Front, with roughly 27 percent of the vote, and Gabriel Boric of the pseudo left-Stalinist electoral front Apruebo Dignidad, with 25 percent. The two will face off in a December 19 second-round ballot. International finance capital is following closely the events as they represent a microcosm of the global development of the class struggle. Chile’s stock market soared by 9.25 percent on opening Monday based on the news of Kast’s front-runner status.

“The two men offer antithetical agendas,” The Guardian commented. “Kast has centered his campaign on conservative social values, security and migration, while Boric espouses an egalitarian, feminist and ecological future for Chile. While Kast proudly declares himself politically incorrect and opposes marriage equality, Boric pushes inclusivity and progressive social values.”

José Antonio Kast of the Christian Social Front

The overriding concern of the financial markets is not who wins the presidential election. While they clearly would prefer a victory for Kast and the far right, the leading candidates in the election all have a proven record of defending private property relations and upholding the capitalist market:

• Kast, the son of a Wehrmacht officer who fought on the Eastern Front, unashamedly declares his unwavering support for Chile’s former fascist military dictator Augusto Pinochet. He was a congressman for the extreme right Independent Democratic Union (UDI) until 2017, when he ran as an independent in the presidential elections of that year. Kast is closely aligned to Spain’s fascistic Vox party, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and is part of the international anti-communist alliance, the “Madrid Forum.”
• Boric, a radical university student leader in the 2011 education protests, has since 2014 sat in the lower house and infamously entered into national unity talks with current right-wing government of Sebastian Piñera in 2019 to head off massive anti-capitalist demonstrations. Boric models his Social Convergence party (which is part of the Broad Front or Frente Amplio coalition) on Spain’s Podemos, which formed a bourgeois government with the Spanish Socialist Workers Party PSOE last year. Like its Spanish counterpart, this pseudo-left party speaks for so-called “progressive” upper middle class professional layers, who espouse identity politics. Its main political purpose is to thwart any independent political mobilization of the working class.
• Sebastian Sichel, from the right-wing ruling Chile Podemos Más, was one of Piñera’s cabinet ministers until early this year. A relative unknown, he attempted to posture during the year’s election cycle as moderate but has supported the violent military repression of youth and indigenous-peasant protests. He will now call for a vote for the fascistic Kast in the second round.
• Yasna Provoste, Christian Democrat, was a minister under Michele Bachelet’s presidency who was disqualified from holding office in 2008 after a civil servant embezzled millions of dollars on her watch. From 2013 until mid-year, she was a congresswoman for the northern mining region of Atacama, whose mining sites were kept operational despite the high number of COVID-19 cases.

The candidates, from the extreme right to the pseudo-left, have moreover pledged to the business world economic stability, no matter what. Boric’s electoral partners in the Stalinist Communist Party (PC) have been at pains to assuage any fears about their role: “We believe that today voting for Boric is the only way to maintain a high level of stability in the country,” said PC president Guillermo Teillier to CNN. Teillier is desperate to win a seat in the Senate.

Gabriel Boric of the pseudo-left-Stalinist electoral front Apruebo Dignidad

Last week, the head of the Chilean Confederation of Production and Commerce, Juan Sutil, said his meeting with the candidates was “of a very high standard” and made special note of “a lot of moderation in all the proposals that we heard.”

The main question that is causing so much consternation in capitalist circles is whether any of the contending political forces will be capable of delivering stability in a country undergoing extreme social polarization and political instability.

The first round result speaks for itself. Only 7 million of the 15 million eligible electorate voted in this Sunday’s presidential elections, or 46.7 percent. Of these, 1.96 million cast their ballot for Kast (13 percent of the entire eligible electorate) and 1.8 million for Boric (12.1 percent of the eligible electorate), obliging the candidates to run a second round.

Even more extraordinary is the continued electoral annihilation suffered by the old and deeply hated political caste that emerged in the transition from military to civilian rule three decades ago. Less than six percent of the eligible electorate cast their vote for Piñera’s candidate, Sebastian Sichel, and just 5.4 percent for Yasna Provoste from the center-left coalition, Constituent Unity.

Polls have shown that support for the Armed Forces and police, the courts, the executive and legislature and the right and so-called left parties has been in the low double or even single digits for three consecutive years. The state has lost all credibility and confronts a historic crisis of rule.

Chile’s changed class relations have been starkly laid bare by the criminally negligent policies in response to the coronavirus pandemic. The state’s violent repression of massive anti-capitalist protests in 2019 and its casual indifference to mass death and infection caused by the virus over the last 18 months have sparked restlessness and a growing militancy in the working class.

In an address to Congress in September, the Central Bank governor reported that labor participation remains today lower than the last five-year average, while companies have encountered among employees a significant decrease in the willingness to work longer hours. In another study, a large share of companies have reported being unable to fill vacancies, and in some cases no candidates applied. Moreover, in the last year miners, health workers, teachers, port workers, retail staff and civil servants have staged strikes and protests over unsafe conditions and poverty wages, some in defiance of the corporatist unions and in defiance of police brutality.

Summing up this crisis, the journal of British imperialism, The Economist, wrote last Friday: “For most of this century Chile was a stable and predictable country, with steady economic growth and moderate politics. Outsiders saw it as a success story and a model for Latin America. But that stable Chile disappeared two years ago, in an explosion of massive and sometimes violent protests.”

The London-based markets news site Argus commented: “The polarized elections, which are taking place in parallel to a controversial process to rewrite the Pinochet-era constitution, are already alienating domestic and international investors. Growing nervousness over the future of a country long considered a stable economic and political bastion…”

Bloomberg newswire said: “Financial markets have swung wildly in recent months as Chile debates the future of an economic model drawn up in the 1970s and 1980s by the so-called Chicago Boys, disciples of University of Chicago professor Milton Friedman who advocated for open market policies including deregulation and privatization.”

When billionaire Sebastian Piñera became president in 2017 with the support of a mere 25 percent of the eligible electorate, social polarization caused by decades of military and civilian-imposed “free market” policies was already deeply entrenched.

That year, the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) reported that Chile’s ruling 1 percent controlled more than a quarter of the country’s wealth, while the top 10 percent held two-thirds. In contrast, the bottom half of a population of roughly 18 million accounted for just 2.1 percent of the net national wealth.

Taking advantage of the insecurities of the petty bourgeoisie and the decades-long muzzling of the working class by the national reformist parliamentary pseudo-left and the corporatist trade unions, Piñera’s right-wing government sought to capitalize on the political situation.

Assisted by media consortiums which polluted the public discourse with salacious reports of migrant gangs and drug trafficking, Piñera adopted Kast’s xenophobic and authoritarian program, calling for police-state law and order to combat so-called “rising delinquency,” being tough on “illegal immigration” and dealing with indigenous “terrorism” in the south.

This backfired, however, when in October 2019, violent police repression of student civil disobedience protests provoked mass anger in the working class, youth and middle class.

This transformative experience expressed the conscious attempt by the masses to articulate grievances accumulated over decades—entrenched social inequality, poverty wages and starvation pensions, a crippled public health and education system, burgeoning student and household debt, rampant police and military violence, criminalization of social protests, suppression of indigenous demands, and nepotism, corruption and graft at all levels of the state.

Piñera’s immediate response was to resuscitate Pinochet’s phrase declaring that he was “at war with a powerful enemy.” A state of emergency and curfew were decreed for first time since the return to civilian rule, placing the murderous Chilean military on the streets. Human rights abuses began to pile up, with thousands suffering horrible injuries and mutilations and mass arrests resulting in cases of rape, torture and murder.

This only infuriated an insurgent population. All of a sudden, anti-capitalist marches and demonstrations erupted across Chile, involving at one point half the country and lasting for months.

It was then that the beleaguered government called for the aid of the so-called opposition—the Christian Democrats, the Party for Democracy, the Socialist Party, the Progressive Party and the pseudo-left conglomeration Frente Amplio—to stage in November 2019 national unity talks.

Piñera responded to an existential threat from below, as the Chilean bourgeoisie has during other critical moments, by relying upon the corporatist trade unions and the Chilean “left” to disorient, divert and render harmless the struggles of the working class, as he beefed up the repressive state apparatus for use against the masses.

From that moment on, the parliamentary “lefts,” Frente Amplio and in particular the Stalinists, set themselves the task of redirecting the explosive mass struggles into harmless appeals to change the authoritarian constitution.

In sowing the dangerous illusion that by rewriting the republic’s charter the nature of the capitalist state can be reformed, they concealed the fact that it is an instrument that upholds the political dictatorship of the capitalist class, who, when threatened by revolution, sweep aside parliament and constitutional norms and rule by force.

The progenitor of the theory of national exceptionalism—that Chile rests on a supposedly democratic and parliamentary tradition and that its institutions and repressive apparatus adhere to constitutional norms—is the PC. They bear political responsibility for paving the way to the 1973 military overthrow of the Popular Unity coalition government of Salvador Allende and the violent repression of the Chilean working class.

British government declares Hamas political wing a terrorist organisation

Jean Shaoul

Priti Patel, Britain’s Home Secretary, used her visit to Washington last week to announce plans to proscribe the political wing of Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated group that rules Gaza, as a terrorist organisation.

She aims to push the ban through parliament next week, her third such order in the last year. Hamas’ military wing, the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, was outlawed in 2001.

Priti Patel (right) meets US Secretary of State for Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas in Washington (Priti Patel/Twitter)

Under the UK's Terrorism Act 2000, such a ban means Hamas’ assets can be seized and its members jailed. Any expression of support for the organisation, be it fund-raising, flying its flag or logo, wearing clothes with its image, or holding a meeting for the organisation, would be in breach of the law, with supporters facing prison sentences of up to 10 years and/or a fine. Hamas would be joining 78 groups already outlawed under the Anti-Terrorism Act.

On November 12, Feras Al Jayoosi, 34, appeared in a British court to plead guilty to the charge of wearing T-shirts supporting Hamas’s military wing and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which the UK banned in 2001 and 2005. He wore the clothing in the Golders Green area of north London, home to a large Jewish population, on three occasions in June.

Patel tweeted Friday, 'Hamas has significant terrorist capability, including access to extensive and sophisticated weaponry, as well as terrorist training facilities. That is why today I have acted to proscribe Hamas in its entirety.” She claimed it was impossible to distinguish between Hamas' political and military wings.

Founded in 1988 shortly after the outbreak of the first Intifada in the occupied Palestinian territories, Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement, aims to establish an Islamic state in Palestine. Winning support from Palestinians disillusioned with Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas’s subservience to Israel, rampant corruption, nepotism and economic mismanagement, Hamas received the most votes in the 2006 elections, the last the PA has held. In June 2007, Israel, with the support of the PA and later Egypt, imposed a land, sea and air blockade on Gaza that has continued to this day, after Hamas forces defeated an attempted coup in Gaza by Abbas’ Fatah movement.

In the last 14 years, Israel, the strongest military power in the Middle East, has killed thousands of Palestinians in its savage wars of 2008-09, 2012, 2014 and 2021 on Gaza’s essentially defenceless 2 million population in retaliation for the launching of amateurish rockets, balloons and incendiary devices that rarely cause any significant damage, let alone injure or kill anyone.

Benny Gantz, Israel’s Defence Minister and former military chief of staff, faces the possibility of prosecution by the International Criminal Court for war crimes committed by Israel during its 2014 military assault that killed more than 2,100 people, mainly civilians. On the Israeli side, 67 soldiers and five civilians were killed.

Patel ignored Israel’s reign of terror over the Palestinians and failed to provide any evidence of Hamas’ terrorist activities in Britain or elsewhere to support the ban, claiming, “It’s based upon a wide range of intelligence, information and also links to terrorism. The severity of that speaks for itself.”

She added that Hamas is “fundamentally and rabidly anti-Semitic”, arguing that the ban was necessary to protect Britain’s Jewish community. The implications of the ban were made clear when the Daily Mail gloated, “Jeremy Corbyn [the former Labour Party leader] faces TEN YEARS in jail if he meets his ‘friends’ from Hamas again under new measures to treat supporters of the Palestinian group as terrorists.”

In 2009, Corbyn, who has been stripped of his membership of the Parliamentary Labour Party and now sits as an independent MP, described Hamas as “friends” in 2009 during an appeal for dialogue, stating after being attacked that he regretted using the term.

Patel is a former vice-chairperson of Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI). In 2017, she was forced to resign her position as Department for International Development (DFID) Secretary after reports she had held 12 meetings with top Israeli officials, including the then Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other political leaders, arranged by the former head of the CFI, while on a 12-day “family holiday” to Israel. On her return, Patel lobbied to use part of DFID’s aid budget for Israeli army field hospitals treating Al Nusra Front and other Al Qaeda-linked forces fighting the Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad. Her attempt to launder money to groups with proven links to terrorist activity exposed the duplicity of Britain’s “war on terror” and Israel’s role in providing the imperialist powers with deniability for their dirty work in the Middle East.

Patel’s announcement was hailed by Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett predictably declaring Hamas is “a radical Islamic group that targets innocent Israelis and seeks Israel’s destruction.” Notorious for his hardline response to the Palestinians, he has boasted of killing “lots of Arabs” and criticised previous governments for failing to respond to Gaza’s incendiary balloons.

Israel’s Foreign Minister Yair Lapid said the move was a result of “joint efforts” between the British and Israeli governments. It follows reports in the Israel press that Bennett had asked Prime Minister Boris Johnson to proscribe the group when he met with him at the UN COP26 climate conference in Glasgow to discuss relations between the two countries and the Iran nuclear negotiations in Vienna.

Patel’s announcement followed a meeting with US Secretary of State for Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas that, according to the Daily Mail, included an agreement to embed more British spies in US agencies, and vice versa.

On Sunday, Israel’s President Isaac Herzog began a three-day visit to Britain, where he is to meet Johnson, Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, Prince Charles, Jewish community leaders and members of parliament. Top of his agenda is Israel’s opposition to any renewal of the nuclear accord with Iran.

Patel’s move against Hamas must also be seen within the context of Britain’s domestic politics. Patel and other right-wing politicians are using the mantra of “combating anti-Semitism” to push through policies targeting the right to protest and freedom of expression on university campuses, and ultimately the subject matter of research itself. This is bound up with efforts to militarise the campuses and turn them into centres for government propaganda and adjuncts of Britain’s war machine, directed against widespread anti-war sentiment among students and youth.

In September, the University of Bristol set a filthy precedent by sacking David Miller, a professor of political sociology, for his support for the Palestinians, based on allegations that his criticisms of US militarism and Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people were “offensive”. This followed a two-year campaign for his dismissal by pro-Zionist lobby groups and MPs. Miller was sacked despite the university admitting that his alleged remarks were not unlawful,

Last week, a protest organized by student Palestine solidarity activists at a talk given at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) by Tzipi Hotovely, Israel’s far-right ambassador to the UK, provoked a furious backlash from Israel’s supporters. Hotovely’s record as a rabid nationalist and racist politician includes: advocating bringing the occupied West Bank under permanent Israeli control without giving citizenship to Palestinians who live there; inviting a racist and violent anti-miscegenation group into the Knesset, stating that it was 'important to examine procedures for preventing mixed marriages'; and calling the expulsion and flight of 750,000 Palestinians from their homes before and during the 1948-49 Arab-Israeli war “an Arab lie” during an event organized by the Board of Deputies of British Jews.

The Jewish Chronicle denounced the protest as a “Jew hunting mob on the streets of London,” drawing parallels with Kristallnacht, on whose anniversary the protest took place. Conservative and Labour politicians branded the protest as anti-Semitic, calling for harsh measures including a police investigation into those taking part.

This comes weeks after the House of Commons approved a second reading of the Police, Crime and Sentencing Bill, which introduces severe restrictions on the right to protest. The UK government also intends to introduce a Boycott Bill in early 2022 banning public institutions, such as local authorities or universities, from implementing boycotts of products from other countries for political reasons. It targets the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions (BDS) campaign aimed at pressuring Israel to withdraw from the Occupied Territories, remove the Separation Wall in the West Bank, provide full equality to Israel’s Palestinian citizens and respect the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties.

UK school ceiling collapses after a decade of austerity cuts and lifting of safety regulations

Margot Miller

Last week, 12 children and one adult were taken to hospital after a school ceiling collapsed at a primary school in London. The London Ambulance service treated a further three people at the scene.

Three fire engines and 20 firefighters attended the incident at Rosemead Preparatory School & Nursery in Dulwich, after the ceiling of a second floor Year 3 classroom caved in on November 15. Luckily, no one sustained serious injury, though one child was detained in hospital under observation, after what must have been a terrifying experience.

The Urban Search and Rescue team were sent to the school and, while staff and pupils were evacuated temporarily, determined that the building “was at no further risk of collapse.”

An ambulance and fire engine outside Rosemead Preparatory School in London (Credit: London Fire Brigade/Twitter)

The other classes in the school resumed as normal for the rest of the day, despite the psychological trauma suffered by all concerned. A mother waiting to pick up her eight-year-old son told the Daily Mail, “Fortunately my son was not involved but it must be traumatising to have seen their friends covered in blood.”

Rosemead is a private school for children aged two to 11 years. With 325 children on rolls, annual fees range up to almost £15,000. The school acquired the 156-year-old building in 1974 after a group of parents bought it from the Old Vic theatre.

The Health and Safety Executive have begun “initial inquiries” into what could have been a tragic outcome.

Since the 2008 financial crash, every government department has suffered crippling cuts, including the Health and Safety Executive (HSE). Since 2010, the HSE has lost 500 frontline inspectors as part of budget cuts of 50 percent.

Each local authority in the UK, responsible for enforcing building regulations, have been subjected to draconian cuts since 2008. Rosemead Preparatory School is in a district run by Southwark Council. The Labour-run council has implemented tens of millions in cuts after having its funding cut by more than £146 million by central government since 2011.

When Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron took office in 2010, he implemented a “bonfire of regulations,” relaxing restrictions to create a bonanza for profiteers. Cameron openly pledged to “kill off safety culture”, declaring, “We need to realise, collectively, that we cannot eliminate risks and that some accidents are inevitable.”

The Department for Education advice on standards for school premises in England, last updated March 2015 applies to all schools, including private and local authority-run schools and Academies. It states: “This advice is non-statutory, and has been produced to help recipients understand their obligations and duties in relation to the School Premises Regulations 2012…

“There are fewer regulations than previously and they are less prescriptive, allowing schools more flexibility in how they use their premises. Many regulations state that provision must be ‘suitable’. This is not precisely defined, but schools must take into account the age, number and sex of pupils, and any special requirements they have, when determining whether provision is suitable.”

Successive governments, including Labour, have subordinated every aspects of society, including the safety of school buildings, to the grotesque bloating of wealth of the billionaires.

· In September, Ford Primary School run by the Horizon Multi Academy Trust in Plymouth suffered a partial collapse of the school hall roof.

· A secondary school in Berkshire suffered a partial roof collapse over a walkway on November 15, 2020. Sandhurst school, with 1,000 pupils on its rolls, was forced to use 10 temporary classrooms. The headteacher said she felt, “Relief of course that nobody was hurt - that just does not bear thinking about.”

· In October 2019, part of the roof and brickwork at St Anne’s Catholic Primary School in Sutton, St Helens collapsed, exposing a classroom to the elements. Fortunately, this occurred during half term so there were no injuries. The Liverpool Echo reported “one worried parent said: 'It's scary to think what could have happened if they were in school as builders said nobody would have survived that.”

· On May 10, 2018, a teacher and three pupils, aged between six and seven, suffered minor injuries when part of the ceiling fell in a Year 2 classroom at Nechells Primary School, Birmingham. Nearly 330 sq. m (3,552sq ft) worth of ceilings at the Grade II listed building were replaced.

· Edinburgh Council commissioned an investigation into school building safety after a disastrous collapse of a wall at Oxgangs Primary School in February 2017, leading to the subsequent closure of 17 schools for checks. The schools were procured under the Public Private Finance Initiative (PFI).

A report published in 2018 following an investigation into the Oxgangs Primary School collapse led by construction and procurement expert Professor John Cole was damning. It stated: “The fact that no injuries or fatalities to children resulted from the collapse of the gable wall at Oxgangs School was a matter of timing and luck. Approximately 9 tons of masonry fell on an area where children could easily have been standing or passing through. One does not require much imagination to think of what the consequences might have been if it had happened an hour or so later…

“The Inquiry has become aware that this was one of five avoidable incidents of external masonry panels failing in strong winds at Scottish schools in the last few years… in all cases it would appear that proper quality control at the time of building could have identified and have rectified the basic defects in construction that led to the failures.

An example of the tearing up of regulations was summed up by Cox who stated, “Despite the significant increasing reliance being placed on the quality assurance by contractors of their own work, there is no formal requirement for the personnel within contracting organisations charged to have undergone any recognised test of competency to do so.”

· Weeks before the beginning of the 2018 autumn term, the ceiling of soon-to-be opened North-West Community Campus school in Dumfries caved in due to a leak caused by a badly fitted sprinkler. The school was built with a private finance initiative (PFI) costing £28 million.

Under the PFI system, in operation until 2018, private contractors built public buildings and maintain sites in exchange for mortgage-style payments, usually over 25 years paid for by public funds. The 17 Edinburgh schools cost £130 million to build but will eventually cost taxpayers £531 million. The scheme was initially introduced under the Conservatives in 1992 and then vastly expanded by the 1997 Blair Labour government.

A recent survey of 1,500 British state school leaders commissioned by the National Association of Head Teachers found that 83 percent of schools lack funds to repair dilapidated school buildings. The survey confirm those of a Department of Education study, which found that schools in England alone face a repair bill of £11.4 billion. It concluded that £2.5 billion was needed for electrical and IT repairs, £2 billion for boilers and air-conditioning repairs, and £1.5 billion for mending roofs, windows and walls.

Despite the collapse of the school ceiling in a Victorian-era building, resulting in hospitalisations, Rosemead Preparatory School remained open. The school commented, “Parents and families can be reassured that the school day is continuing as usual today for the rest of the school.”

This decision was taken under condition in which there is a hysterical campaign by the ruling party, backed by Labour and the trade unions, that schools must remain open at all costs during the pandemic.

The government and Labour claim that schools must remain open in the best interests of children, but what is driving this policy is the imperative of big business is that they be kept open in order to allow parents to go to work and prevent any curtailment of the accumulation of profit.

The run-down state of schools can only exacerbate the transmission of COVID-19 in schools—which will only be safe for face-to-face teaching when the virus is eliminated. Children are crammed into overcrowded classrooms, in run-down school buildings which in some cases are structurally unsound. They are catching and spreading COVID, and in thousands of cases developing Long COVID with unknown long term health consequences. There have been 112 child COVID fatalities to date, and more will succumb to this dreadful disease.

Coronavirus pandemic in Austria runs out of control

Markus Salzmann

The unscrupulous policies of Austria’s ruling parties in recent months have led to mass coronavirus infections and high death rates. On Friday, the country of 8.9 million people recorded 15,809 new infections, one of the highest infection rates in all of Europe. Over the weekend, around 15,000 people were also infected daily. On Thursday, the threshold of one million infections was exceeded.

People wait to get COVID-19 vaccines in Vienna, Austria, Monday, Nov. 22, 2021. (AP Photo/Vadim Ghirda)

More than 12,000 people have lost their lives since the pandemic began. The country’s hospitals are collapsing under the high number of intensive care patients. The 7-day incidence rate per 100,000 inhabitants has been above 1,000 for days. In several provinces, it far exceeds that. In Salzburg, it was 1,805 on Friday and in Upper Austria 1,677. The vaccination rate of 66 percent is very low compared to other European countries.

The ferocious wave of infections has been raging for weeks in all sectors of society. In addition to hospitals and nursing homes, schools and kindergartens, in particular, have been exposed to the contagion. In the second week of school after the autumn vacations in the middle of the month, 3,520 PCR tests returned positive results at schools.

According to the Ministry of Education and the City of Vienna, there were 965 positive tests in Vienna alone (862 students, 103 teachers), in Upper Austria there were 673 students, in Lower Austria 406, in Styria 328, in Tyrol 248, in Carinthia 235, in Salzburg 209, in Vorarlberg 96 and in Burgenland 73. Since there is no thorough testing regime, the number of unreported cases is many times higher.

The long-term consequences of this policy are not even foreseeable yet. Since spring 2021, the Agency for Health and Food Safety (AGES), MedUni Graz and the Austrian Society for Paediatrics and Adolescent Medicine (ÖGKJ) have been conducting a study into this. Most recently, the first interim results from 755 children up to 14 years of age were presented.

The Salzburger Nachrichten quoted Daniela Schmid, the AGES study coordinator, saying, “Sixty percent of the children who tested positive developed clinical symptoms of COVID-19 disease. Just under 7 percent presented to a physician; 2.4 percent were hospitalized.” Later than four weeks after infection, Long COVID symptoms were observed in 11 percent of children under 10 years of age. Ten- to 14-year-old children were affected even more frequently, at 15.5 percent. The most common Long COVID symptoms observed were generally increased fatigue (4.2 percent), followed by impaired sense of smell and taste (3 percent) and shortness of breath. Symptoms were still observed in 6.2 percent of respondents more than three months after infection.

Staff in the country’s hospitals have long since reached the limit of their capacity, and regular care of patients is no longer possible. A nurse from a hospital in Upper Austria told the APA news agency about the dire conditions there. From Sunday night to Monday the previous week, she said, there were so many deaths in her hospital that the pathology department was already at its limit. “Bodies had to be deposited in the corridor because of overcrowding.”

In hospitals in the province of Salzburg, virtually all intensive care beds are occupied. Last Wednesday, 30 of the total 136 intensive care beds were occupied by COVID-19 patients. Under these conditions, triage measures—i.e., the selection of which patient can be treated and which patient is doomed to die—are being prepared concretely. A spokesman for Salzburg regional hospitals explained that a team of doctors had been nominated to decide which patients could still be treated with intensive care. It was necessary to warn “the population and politicians from this time on that we are up against the wall,” the hospital spokesman said.

In this small state alone, there is currently a shortage of 272 hospital beds. In addition, there is a shortage of medical and nursing staff. Because of the sharp rise in the number of infections, the state of Salzburg also expects a further massive increase in COVID-19 patients.

The federal government coalition of the Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) and the Green Party, as well as the Austrian Social Democratic Party (SPÖ), which is in government in several states, is responsible for the catastrophic situation in the Alpine republic. Since the beginning of the pandemic, all parties have all been implementing in essence the policies of the far-right Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ), which most openly advocates the criminal and murderous policy of deliberate mass infection.

This cannot be obscured even by the lockdown that went into effect on Monday, which the government only decided upon on Friday. The same regulations now apply that were used in previous lockdowns in Austria. For example, there are restrictions on leaving homes. This is now only allowed for shopping, visits to doctors and relatives, work or outdoor exercise. Only supermarkets and stores supplying daily needs remain open; other stores are closed. The same applies to cultural institutions and indoor sports facilities. In addition, the introduction of a general vaccination requirement is being discussed.

As with previous measures, those now adopted come much too late and are far from sufficient. Initially, the measures are to apply for only 20 days, until December 12. This period is not enough to reduce the number of infections to the extent that would be necessary.

The government is trying to maintain the “profits before lives” policy at all costs. Despite the explosion in infections, businesses and schools remain open. Although parents are free to choose not to send their children to in-person classes, the unrestricted opening of businesses means that parents have little opportunity to make that choice.

Last year, under then Chancellor Sebastian Kurz (ÖVP), Austria was already the pioneer in its reopening policy. Although the country was one of the starting points of the pandemic in Europe, the People’s Party and the Greens have always refused to impose the scientifically necessary protective measures, citing economic interests. Half-hearted, short “lockdowns” were ordered several times. After they ended, wide-ranging reopenings always resulted in a huge increase in the number of infections.

Last month, Kurz was forced to resign after the Central Public Prosecutor’s Office for the Prosecution of Economic Crimes and Corruption searched the Federal Chancellery, the Ministry of Finance and the ÖVP party headquarters. Kurz and his closest associates have been accused of serious embezzlement, bribery and making false statements.

But policies have not changed in any way as a result. Kurz’s successor, Alexander Schallenberg, declared just a few days ago that there would be no “lockdown in solidarity with the unvaccinated.” Vice Chancellor Werner Kogler and Health Minister Wolfgang Mückstein (both Greens) also resisted the urgent advice and demands of doctors and scientists who had been warning for months of the catastrophe that has now occurred.

The government’s unscrupulous herd immunity policies, largely in line with those of the FPÖ and QAnon types, have strengthened these far-right forces.

While tens of thousands are becoming infected daily and dozens die from COVID-19, large demonstrations against coronavirus protections were again permitted in Vienna and were escorted by police. Predominantly right-wing and openly fascist groups called for participation in these demonstrations and, according to media reports, mobilized about 30,000 people from Austria and abroad. The demonstrators included convicted neo-Nazi Gottfried Küssel and Identitarian leader Martin Sellner.

Although there were indications of possible attacks on hospitals and vaccination centres, the Vienna police said they did not expect the situation to escalate. And even after demonstrators carried out attacks, the protests could be carried out and ended unhindered. The close ties between the state and right-wing extremist elements were also shown by the call of high-ranking military representatives to participate in the protests.

CVS announces 900 US store closures over next three years

Jessica Goldstein

CVS Health announced last Thursday that it plans to close 900, or 9 percent, of its US stores by 2024. The company will begin the closures in 2022 and will close about 300 stores each year, according to a report by CNBC.

CVS/pharmacy on Garrett Road in Durham, NC. [Credit: Ildar Sagdejev / Wikimedia Commons]

The corporation said that its decision was based on needs to adjust to consumers shifting to shopping more online, in spite of in-store retail sales increasing over the last year as shoppers made more visits to its stores which provide COVID-19 tests and vaccinations. CNBC reports that the corporation will shift its focus to “digital growth and turning its stores into health-care destinations.”

The store closures are a part of the decade-long decline of the brick-and-mortar retail industry, supplanted by the growing online retail industry, dubbed the “retail apocalypse.” The onset of the coronavirus pandemic accelerated this trend. According to the Week, “Major retailers closed 12,000 stores in 2020, after an already devastating 2019, when more than 9,300 stores closed. Another 80,000 stores—9 percent of the nation’s total—will close in this ‘retail apocalypse’ over the next five years as e-commerce sales grow, predicts a report from financial services company UBS.”

The announced closures are part of a strategy to continue to shore up the corporation’s profits to meet the demands of its major shareholders in the face of major technological shifts in the industry and supply chain shortages that are expected to impact profits on a global scale for an indefinite period of time.

After Thursday’s announcement, the company’s stock rose 2.81 percent, closing at $95.34. According to CNBC, the company has outperformed its own targets and competitor drugstore chains, such as Walgreens, on Wall Street this year. Its shares are up 40 percent over the last year and the corporation has a market value of over $125 billion. Its three largest institutional shareholders, BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard, are among the largest asset management firms in the US and control a majority of stock market wealth.

CVS did not disclose the locations of the stores slated to close, nor the number of workers that would lose their jobs as a result of the closures. Even without exact numbers, it is reasonable to predict that several thousand workers will lose their jobs every year over the next three years. The company has mentioned that “it will help those who are impacted find a different opportunity or role at another location,” but without the prospect of new locations or jobs for lower-skilled workers in the company’s plans, it is likely that most retail workers affected by the layoffs will be turned out on the street to fend for themselves.

The corporation’s booming assets are not simply the result of increasing sales after the onset of the pandemic and lifting of very limited lockdown measures across the US. CVS retail locations were considered essential businesses during the brief period of nationwide shutdowns from March through May of 2020, and workers at the retail locations could not stay home.

Workers at the stores must accomplish unreasonable workloads with fluctuating hours for very low pay. The job posting site Glassdoor cites the average store associate and cashier’s pay at poverty wages of $13 per hour, or just $27,040 per year for workers who work 40 hours per week. Many workers work only part time, however, and are ineligible to receive most benefits while being required to fulfill the same tasks on their shifts as full-time workers. Pharmacy technicians do not fare much better, with an average annual pay estimated at just $17 per hour, or $35,360 per year.

In contrast to these poverty wages, former CEO Larry Merlo “earned” $36.5 million in total compensation in 2019, over a thousand times the lowest-paid CVS workers, who ensure that the stores run and their products are delivered on a daily basis. Merlo was the highest-paid health insurance CEO that year, according to industry website Fierce Heathcare. CVS acquired health insurance payer Aetna in 2019, establishing the company’s foothold in the private health insurance industry.

Merlo announced plans to retire in late 2020 and was replaced by current CEO Karen Lynch in early 2021. Lynch was a president and insurance executive at Aetna before she was named Merlo’s successor.

Workers who posted job reviews on Glassdoor offer insight into the company’s exploitative practices, which have allowed it to extract massive amounts of value from its low-paid workforce over the years to satisfy the profit aims of its wealthy shareholders and corporate managers.

A former store manager from Orlando, Florida, who worked at the company in 2014 described long hours and short staff situations. “Work hours were excessive. To be successful, hours worked were borderline slavery… Vacations were almost nonexistent due to constant visitors from corporate stopping in to do reviews. Holiday weeks were paid 4 days regular, 1 holiday, and you worked all 5… Company preaches quality of life for their clients while quality of life for their employees is nonexistent. As a ‘manager’ in your average store you will be ‘managing’ a total of one person during your shift, with a total of 10 people at location.”

In 2021, conditions were no better. A current full-time store associate wrote, “They do not believe in you spending time with family. Full timers ARE FORCED to work every major holiday, including Christmas and Thanksgiving. You work more than 48 hours a week. Managers… choose favorites. You are forced to become an acting store manager (with no managerial authority). They bounce you around from store to store without really giving you a say.”

A current pharmacy technician writes, “There is little room for advancement when it comes to moving up in the industry. The pay is not at what it should be, especially if you’re certified (or not) for the amount of work a technician does. Underappreciated and promised for compensation when marks are hit with a store, but given no incentive or reward for doing so… It is all about the numbers, there is less ability to create a good work environment or a good customer relation with the ratio of 1 pharmacist and maybe (if lucky) 1 technician at some stores, and at core stores, it’s being understaffed.”

The experiences of workers at CVS echo other corporations that have continued to demand greater productivity under more stressful conditions and lower real wages when inflation is factored in, which currently stands at about 6 percent for consumer goods in the US. Workers at John Deere in the US were sent back to work this month after a bitter strike when the UAW and Deere pushed through a concessions contract with below-inflation wage increases, in spite of the company making record profits this past year.

Workers who will lose their jobs at CVS are likely to face a bleak employment landscape. According to the New York Times, the US economy is not near “recovered” from the shock of the pandemic. Remarking on the October jobs report, the Times reports, “Total employment is 4.2 million below—and the unemployment rate remains more than a full percentage point above—where it was in February 2020.”

Most jobs available to workers who are looking for work, especially those who lack education or certifications, are low-paying and are in more dangerous work settings under conditions of the pandemic. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook, four of the top five occupations projected to have the most growth through 2030—home health and personal care aides, restaurant cooks, fast food and counter workers and waiters—all have a median pay of under $30,000 per year.

The closures will not just impact workers who will lose their jobs, but also access to medications for many working class Americans. The company’s retail locations are a major provider of vaccines and prescriptions across the US. The decision to close nearly a thousand of these locations while the pandemic continues to kill over 1,000 people in the US each day is another exposure of the travesty of the capitalist system placing profit before the most basic necessities for human life.

Nearly 3/4 of the World’s Dictators Receive US Weapons and Military Assistance

Matthew Hoh

The US supports nearly 75% of the world’s dictators, autocracies, monarchies, military regimes, etc., with weapons, military training and money. Please remember this the next time someone tells you the US should do X or Y because such and such a nation is bad…

Comparing Freedom House’s list of Not Free nations* to FY 2020 US overseas weapons sales, military training and financial assistance**, we find that of the 57 nations considered undemocratic, 42 receive weapons, training and/or money for their military and security services. This means 74% of the non-democratic nations of the world are supported militarily by the US. Interestingly, the remaining 15 nations are nearly all sanctioned. The world’s countries can be divided into two parts: those who buy/receive weapons from the US and those sanctioned. It seems like it’s a pretty simple arrangement.

74% is a slight increase from four years ago when Rich Whitney at Truthout utilized the Freedom House list and compared it to FY 2015 military assistance data. It is likely no surprise to anyone that US support for non-democratic governments increased under President Trump, but, to be fair, it was a minor increase. The hypocrisy and dissonance between stated US support for democracy, liberty and freedom, and how the US government conducts itself exists whether a Democrat or Republican is in the White House.

The list of nations is below. I have listed occupied territories with the nations that are occupying them; so, Gaza and West Bank are under Israel, Western Sahara is under Morocco, Tibet is under China, and Donbas and Crimea are under Russia. Also, please note, this list only includes nations not considered democracies. Nations that are listed as partly free or free by Freedom House, but are clear and gross violators of human rights, and that are recipients of US weapons, military training and military assistance funding, like Columbia, Honduras, India, Pakistan, Philippines, and Ukraine are not included.

Y denotes received weapons, military training or military funding assistance, or a combination.

Afghanistan Y
Algeria Y
Angola Y
Azerbaijan Y
Bahrain Y
Belarus N
Brunei N
Burundi Y
Cambodia Y
Cameroon Y
Central African Republic Y
Chad Y
China (includes Tibet) N
Cuba N
Democratic Republic of the Congo Y
Djibouti Y
Egypt Y
Equatorial Guinea N
Eritrea N
Eswatini N
Ethiopia Y
Israel Y
Jordan Y
Gabon Y
Iran N
Iraq Y
Kazakhstan Y
Kyrgyzstan Y
Laos Y
Libya Y
Mali Y
Morocco (Western Sarhara) Y
Myanmar Y
Nicaragua N
North Korea N
Oman Y
Qatar N
Republic of the Congo Y
Russia (includes Crimea and Donbass) N
Rwanda Y
Saudi Arabia Y
Somalia Y
South Sudan Y
Sudan N
Syria N
Tajikistan Y
Tanzania Y
Thailand Y
Turkey Y
Turkmenistan Y
Uganda Y
United Arab Emirates Y
Uzbekistan Y
Venezuela N
Vietnam Y
Yemen Y
Zimbabwe Y

*This is not an endorsement of Freedom House or its methodology. However, Freedom House is an excellent source for this purpose as no one will accuse Freedom House of being anti-American, pacifist or isolationist in their ideology, leftist or libertarian in their political leanings, non-believers in American Exceptionalism, etc.

**Information on FY 2020 US weapons sales, training and military assistance provided by Center for International Policy’s Security Assistance Monitor Program.