After the US pullout from Afghanistan last year, the Taliban promised to allow girls to study in school past 6th grade, but then reversed that decision. Today, erased from civic life, girls and women in Afghanistan live under tyranny and in fear, their freedoms suppressed by the Taliban who now prevent them from receiving an education or being able to work.
Having taken over the country as soon as US troops evacuated, the Taliban quickly acquired over $7 billion in American-funded military equipment that had been in the inventory of the former Afghan government before it collapsed, according to a new report released this week by the US Defense Department inspector general. With this military might, the Taliban has been able to enforce strict rules according to Sharia Islamic law, which forbidsactivities such as music, art and of course, education for girls.
From 2001 until 2021, according to a UNESCO study, the percentage of female education in Afghanistan rose rapidly and remained steady. In fact, Datasets from Afghanistan’s national entrance exam, called Kankor, show that the number of female participants in the Kankor examinations gradually increased over those 20 years. Since the Taliban gained power, the fundamentalist Shiite Islam group has whittled away at women’s rights, freedoms and liberties in the country. The question now is what can women do about it? The answer? Nothing, according to some.
In an interview with Chatham House, Afghan human rights activist, Horia Mosadiq slammed the Taliban for denying women basic freedoms. “The Taliban’s hardline gender discrimination is what distinguishes them from other insurgent groups, in Afghanistan or elsewhere,” she said. “They ban women from working outside their home, ban girls’ education after year six, deny women their right to political participation as well as their social, economic and cultural rights.”
She added that she was upset not only at the Taliban, but at the international community for remaining silent on the matter. “We were shocked by the lack of reaction to this decree from the international community, there was nothing,” she said. “As Afghan women and Afghan people, we feel betrayed by the international community because we fight daily against these rules. Women are out protesting, asking for their basic and fundamental rights. But there is no real support to help us push for these human rights and women’s rights agendas.”
Mosadiq said she has “very little hope” that anything will change now. Promises by the international community have come up empty. The Taliban’s promise to the international community were all just a trick according to Mosadiq, and the international community allowed itself to be fooled “because they needed an excuse to give the Taliban money and an international platform.”
Without assistance from the outside then, women and girls in Afghanistan appear doomed to live by the whims of the Taliban rulers. According to a report published earlier this year by Human Rights Watch and the Human Rights Institute at San Jose State University, the Taliban has had a “devastating impact on Afghan women and girls.”
The report notes that, “Since taking control of the city of Ghazni on August 12, 2021, days before entering Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul, the Taliban have imposed rights-violating policies that have created huge barriers to women’s and girls’ health and education, curtailed freedom of movement, expression, and association, and deprived many of earned income.”
Similarly, Amnesty International recently published its own report decrying the Taliban’s moves against girls and women. Titled, Death in Slow Motion: Women and Girls Under Taliban Rule, the report also reveals how women who peacefully protested against these oppressive rules “have been threatened, arrested, detained, tortured, and forcibly disappeared.”
Many people, like Mosadiq, have given up and no longer believe there is anything that can be done to prevent the Taliban from mistreating women and discriminating against them. But there are others who believe that more can be done.
For instance, Amnesty International said it is “calling for [the] international community to impose consequences on the Taliban for their conduct, such as targeted sanctions or travel bans applied through a UN Security Council Resolution, or employ other forms of leverage that can hold the Taliban accountable for their treatment of women and girls without harming the Afghan people.”
“The Taliban are deliberately depriving millions of women and girls of their human rights, and subjecting them to systematic discrimination,” said Agnès Callamard. “If the international community fails to act, it will be abandoning women and girls in Afghanistan, and undermining human rights everywhere.”
Just a few weeks after US President Joe Biden’s visit to Saudi Arabia, aimed at shoring up relations with the murderous regime, his administration has approved two massive arms sales worth more than $5 billion to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). It follows $650 million in air-to-air missiles sent to Riyadh in November 2021 for its criminal war against the civilian population in Yemen.
Included in the sales are Patriot missiles costing $3 billion for Saudi Arabia and a high-altitude missile system costing $2.2 billion for the UAE aimed at protecting the venal petro-monarchs from rocket attacks by Yemen’s Houthi-led rebel movement.
In this photo released by the Saudi Royal Palace, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, right, welcomes President Joe Biden upon his arrival at Al-Salam palace in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, Friday, July 15, 2022. [AP Photo/Bandar Aljaloud/Saudi Royal Palace via AP]
The US State Department, seeking Congress’s approval for the deal, said the proposed sale would “support the foreign policy and national security of the United States by helping to improve the security of an important regional partner. The UAE is a vital US partner for political stability and economic progress in the Middle East.”
Biden had pledged during his election campaign to treat Saudi Arabia as a “pariah state” due to its appalling human rights record and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s signing off on Saudi insider turned dissident Jamal Khashoggi’s gruesome assassination in 2018. He also promised to cut off or cut back on the sale of “offensive” weapons to both Saudi Arabia and the UAE, citing their attacks on civilians in Yemen. But this has counted for nothing next to the more pressing needs of Washington’s geostrategic interests.
Last month, Reuters reported that the Biden administration was discussing lifting the ban on US sales of offensive weapons to Saudi Arabia.
Ever since Saudi and the UAE-led coalition invaded Yemen in April 2015, international human rights groups—including the New York-based Human Rights Watch and the London-based Campaign Against the Arms Trade—have documented the coalition’s use of US and UK weapons in unlawful airstrikes, including undoubted war crimes, breaching Washington and London’s own policies on arms sales. These two imperialist warmongers, which lose no opportunity to justify their bellicosity in the name of human rights, have also provided the Saudis and Emiratis with political and diplomatic cover at the UN, even as their blockade of the impoverished country has put millions at risk of famine.
The Guardian reported that the Biden administration is also exploring the setting up of a new international committee to document and report on human rights violations in Yemen that would include representatives from the Saudi and UAE puppet government in the country. An intensive lobbying campaign by Riyadh put a stop to an earlier United Nations Human Rights Council investigation into possible war crimes. One can only imagine the uproar that would follow if President Vladimir Putin were to be included in a panel to investigate Russian war crimes in Ukraine.
The political reasons Washington supports two of the most repressive regimes on the planet are clear. They are a key market for US arms and play a vital role on behalf of US imperialism in suppressing the working class in Saudi Arabia, the Gulf and throughout the region and supporting Washington’s domination in the resource-rich Middle East. They have allied with Israel in a US-led anti-Iranian axis that threatens to push the region into another catastrophic war.
The economic reasons are less well-known. As the US became increasingly self-sufficient in oil, the petro-monarchs turned elsewhere for customers. By 2020, the Gulf countries were supplying 40 percent of China’s oil imports, with 16 percent of that coming from Saudi Arabia. The Kingdom’s trade with China has soared from $3 billion in 2000 to $67 billion in 2021, while its trade with the US rose from $20.5 billion to $24.8 billion in the same period. While much has been made of China’s 25-year $400 billion trade and investment agreement with Iran, even if it were actualized at some $16 billion a year this is still much less than Beijing’s trade with Riyadh.
Merchandise trade between the Middle East and China has increased significantly, totaling $272 billion in 2020. Furthermore, despite heavy pressure from Washington, no Middle Eastern country has banned the Chinese telecom giant Huawei’s 5G networks. Beijing is now the largest single regional investor and trading partner of 11 countries in the Middle East. Its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), aimed at placing China at the centre of global trade, is the basis of agreements with 21 countries in the region.
Algeria, Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the UAE all have “comprehensive strategic partnerships” with China, while Iraq, Jordan, Morocco, Oman and Qatar are “strategic partners.” Turkey has a “strategic cooperative relationship and Israel a “comprehensive innovation partnership” with China. Tel Aviv’s extensive links with China’s defence technology has on occasions put it at odds with Washington.
A critical element in China’s BRI has been its development and expansion of ports and industrial parks in Egypt, Oman, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Djibouti, China’s only overseas military base, to secure its shipment of goods to Africa, Europe and beyond.
Of even greater significance are the talks, reported in the Wall Street Journal last March, between Beijing and Riyadh over pricing some oil sales to China in yuan. Such a move that would undermine the dollar’s role in the global petroleum market. Under a 1970s agreement between the US and Saudi Arabia, all oil sales anywhere in the world are conducted in dollars, recycled back to the US and to a lesser extent Britain as sovereign reserve holdings in return for military support and security.
The petrodollar system has underpinned the US financial system, allowing it to finance its soaring debts—the US is the world’s largest creditor nation—and the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency. While the US accounts for around 20 percent of global GDP, nearly 90 percent of international currency transactions and 60 percent of foreign exchange reserves are in dollars.
But foreign investment no longer finances US debt to the same extent as it once did. Since the 2008 financial crisis and more recently the pandemic crisis, the Federal reserve has sought to protect financial markets with quantitative easing and bought up US debt itself. As a result, foreign central banks’ and foreign investors’ holdings of US treasury bonds as a proportion of total US public debt have fallen by about 50 percent.
The prospect of Riyadh accepting payment in yuan is totally unacceptable to Washington. It would further and significantly undermine the dollar-based system, following on from Russia and Iran’s attempts to strike payments in different currencies under the pressure of US sanctions. Iraq’s efforts to avoid sanctions by selling its oil for euros was one of the factors that led the Bush administration to declare war on Iraq in 2003, despite opposition from the European powers.
Biden declared quite openly that his trip to Saudi Arabia last month was to bolster America’s position in the region, which had waned under his watch, against its rivals: “I want to make clear that we can continue to lead in the region and not create a vacuum, a vacuum that is filled by China and/or Russia.”
Relations with the Gulf States began to cool after President Barack Obama’s refusal to back Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak during the mass protests that were to bring down his government in 2011 and threaten Saudi clients in Bahrain and Yemen. They became more strained after Washington signed the 2015 nuclear accords with Iran—whom Riyadh and Abu Dhabi accuse of supporting the Houthi rebels who ousted Riyadh’s puppet government in Yemen in 2015—and did little to counter the Houthis’ missile attacks.
Russia’s successful thwarting of the attempted overthrow of Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad, orchestrated by Washington and heavily backed by Riyadh in particular, and of the US-organised coup against Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan have also caused disquiet.
Biden’s billion-dollar arms sales are intended as a down payment on a renewed partnership. They were announced as China’s President Xi Jinping prepares to visit Saudi Arabia as early as this week—his first overseas visit since the COVID pandemic—where he is expected to be given an extravagant welcome, in contrast to its low-key reception of Biden in July. They follow shortly after Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil company Aramco signed a memorandum of understanding with China’s state-owned Sinopec for cooperation in areas, including “carbon capture and hydrogen processes.”
A new study released last week in Pediatrics, a peer-reviewed medical journal published by the American Academy of Pediatrics, revealed that about 8 percent of children hospitalized with COVID-19 at major pediatric hospitals in the United States experienced a neurologic complication of some kind, even if they were otherwise healthy.
Child with COVID-19 in hospital bed (Medical University of South Carolina)
The shocking information revealed in the study emerges just days before school districts across the US reopen their doors to tens of millions of students, teachers and other school staff for fully in-person learning. The reopening is a critical aspect of the Biden administration’s “forever COVID” policy and has the full backing of both the Democratic and Republican parties.
The study, “COVID-19 and Acute Neurologic Complications in Children,” was based on data from 15,000 children hospitalized with COVID-19 in 52 children’s hospitals over a two-year period. Tragically, it is one of only a small handful of studies that has been conducted on the long-term impact of COVID-19 on children.
Neurologic complications are defined in this case as having a diagnosis of encephalopathy, encephalitis, aseptic meningitis, febrile seizure, non-febrile seizure, brain abscess and bacterial meningitis and cerebral infarction.
Encephalopathy is a broad term for any brain disease that alters brain function or structure. Declining ability to reason and concentrate, memory loss, personality change, seizures and twitching are common symptoms. Encephalitis is inflammation of the active tissues of the brain. The inflammation causes the brain to swell, which can lead to headaches, stiff neck, sensitivity to light, mental confusion and seizures.
The study found that 3.84 percent of the children in the study experienced febrile seizures, 2.33 percent experienced non-febrile seizures, 2.19 percent experienced encephalopathy, 0.17 percent experienced aseptic meningitis, 0.13 percent experienced encephalitis, and 0.13 percent experienced brain abscess and bacterial meningitis.
If one takes into account the officially reported figures of 148,555 child hospitalizations, according to the CDC, there have likely been roughly 3,120 cases of encephalopathy, 5,650 febrile seizures, 2,510 cases of brain abscess and bacterial meningitis and 2,510 cases of encephalitis.
In total, over 10,000 children may have experienced neurological complications, just in the United States alone. Extrapolated globally, this number rises to hundreds of thousands of children with potentially life-altering neurological complications. That is, the reckless “let it rip” policies enacted by governments around the world have not only led to the deaths of millions of elderly and working-age adults, as well as thousands of children, but has also caused pain and suffering for hundreds of thousands of children and their families for years to come.
The analysts found that 75 percent of children who had a neurologic complication did not have an underlying neurologic comorbidity, and 60 percent of the same group were otherwise healthy.
These figures are damning in their own right. They are even more alarming when one takes into account the widely held belief that the official figures are significantly lower than the reality. One can only imagine what scientists would find if they had access to all the available data, not only from child hospitalizations but from all reported cases.
In a press release on August 11, co-author James W. Antoon, MD, PhD, MPH, an assistant professor of pediatrics and hospital medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, described the potential impact on children affected, noting, “the complications are almost uniformly associated with worse outcomes and can be life-altering conditions.
“As we found in our study, COVID-related complications can have a significant impact on the lives of children,” Antoon told Healio in an interview last week. “With the emergence of new, highly contagious variants, the potential patients that are at risk is growing.”
All serious scientific evidence points to the same basic conclusion: Forcing schools to reopen for in-person learning is needlessly placing the lives and well-being of millions of children and workers at serious risk.
In fact, at the beginning of August the CDC itself released a study on the effects of COVID-19 on children which found that those previously infected with coronavirus were at substantially greater risk for developing multiple life-threatening conditions, including acute pulmonary embolism, myocarditis and cardiomyopathy, venous thromboembolic events, acute renal failure and Type 1 diabetes, in addition to debilitating symptoms, such as smell and taste disturbances, circulatory problems, fatigue and pain.
Despite the overwhelming scientific evidence, the CDC issued new guidelines for COVID-19 last week which remove or reduce recommendations for quarantine, isolation and testing of exposed and infected individuals. They are the latest in a long series of anti-scientific policies from the agency and conveniently come just as the school year is set to begin.
The CDC’s latest changes to its guidelines mark a deepening of the Biden administration’s “forever COVID” policy that has been forced on the American population. This criminal policy, which amounts to the embrace of former President Donald Trump’s “herd immunity” strategy, has been supported by the entire political establishment.
Notably, this includes the so-called “left” representative Senator Bernie Sanders. On the same day the new CDC guidelines were released, Sanders interviewed White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha, who demanded that schools remain open, stating, “We should look forward to a school year in which every child is in school, is in person, full-time, for the whole year. I think we have all the ability to do that, and that should be the only acceptable standard.” When Sanders made the preposterous claim that “children … are not dying” of COVID-19, Jha did not correct him. According to the CDC, 1,747 children have officially died of COVID-19 in the US, while the real figure is undoubtedly above 2,000.
While Sanders, Biden and all the rest downplay the significance of COVID-19 and lie about its impact on children, the scientific evidence against their claims continues to mount.
Moreover, there is every reason to believe that the reopening of schools this year could be even more catastrophic than previous years. The US is currently in the midst of a months-long wave of four different Omicron subvariants, with the most dangerous BA.5 subvariant now dominant.
Over the past three months, an average of over 100,000 people have officially been infected each day, with the real figure between half a million and 1 million, while the seven-day average of daily new deaths has once again surpassed 500.
Unlike last year, when the drastic spike in child cases and hospitalizations emerged largely as a result of school reopenings, this year schools are reopening in the midst of a major wave of the virus and an increase in child cases and hospitalizations. This summer alone, over 200 children have officially died from the virus, and child hospitalizations have recently reached the same levels as during the height of the Delta wave last September.
Moreover, virtually no measures are being taken to contain the unprecedented global outbreak of monkeypox, which has already infected over 11,000 Americans, including at least eight children.
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, known as AMLO, announced last week that he will attempt to change the Constitution to bring the country’s National Guard under the control of the military. He also plans to extend the domestic deployment of the Army and Navy beyond the 2024 limit he decreed in 2020.
These maneuvers are preparations to establish a military dictatorship and crush the imminent eruption of working class struggles against inequality and capitalist exploitation.
Ceremony inaugurating the new Special Reaction and Intervention Force of the National Guard, August 16 (Credit: National Guard of Mexico)
Having lost his absolute majority in Congress last year—itself a sign of growing opposition— AMLO says he will impose the change by presidential decree and arrogantly discounted any potential challenge before the Supreme Court, where several recent challenges to policing by the military have simply languished.
“I think the best thing is for the National Guard to be a branch of the Defense Ministry to give it stability over time and prevent it from being corrupted,” he said in a press conference on August 9. “Human rights are respected now,” he added, “there are no torture or massacres anymore.”
A few hours later, attacks broke out in Guadalajara reportedly by drug cartel members, who blocked streets, shot their guns randomly, and burned vehicles, OXXO supermarkets and other buildings. Similar events erupted in Ciudad Juárez two days later, killing 11 people, and again the following day in Tijuana and Mexicali.
Anabel Hernández, a journalist exiled in Germany who specializes on the ties between drug cartels and the state, reported to Deutsche Welle that a source close to the Presidency said the events were staged: “It is about creating an illness to then offer the medicine.”
AMLO’s earlier promise to send the military to the barracks, which was then inseparable from his purported opposition to corruption, was a major, if not the main, reason he was elected. But after coming to power, his administration created the National Guard as a body almost entirely comprised of former Army and Navy soldiers and enshrined it in the constitution as a “civilian institution” under the Public Security Ministry.
Whether it has been through military deployment, unprecedented tax cuts for corporations along the US-Mexico border, the lifting of all restrictions to the spread of COVID-19, and numerous other policies, AMLO has unreservedly worked to fulfill the main political and economic needs of Wall Street, US imperialism and its partners in the national bourgeoisie. Mexico’s position in global capitalism as a source of cheap labor for key industrial products is at the core of all his policies, but this question has been entirely missing in the corporate media.
The COVID-19 pandemic has left 673,000 excess deaths and plunged millions into poverty in Mexico, increasing the official poverty rate to 44 percent. Now, workers are seeing the biggest drops in real wages since at least the 2001 crisis. As of February, the annual increase in the cost of the basic food basket increased 13.9 percent, while wages have only increased on average 5 percent. Meanwhile, Mexico’s dollar billionaires increased their net worth by 31 percent in 2021.
The combination of growing inequality, the massive drop in living standards, and the ongoing mass death and sickness from new COVID-19 variants threatens to provoke a social eruption like that in Sri Lanka. However, to continue these attacks against workers, AMLO is consolidating a garrison state and establishing an authoritarian precedent of ruling by decree and through the barrel of a gun as part of the preparations of the ruling elite for a dictatorship to suppress the class struggle.
At the same time, AMLO’s armed forces have continued acting as frontline troops for the U.S. Border Patrol, with Mexico reaching an all-time record of migrant apprehensions in 2021.
For its part, the Biden administration hosted the first U.S.-Mexico High-Level Security Dialogue in five years last October. This resulted in a “Bicentennial Framework for Security, Public Health and Safe Communities” and the Congressional approval of $158.9 million in military assistance to Mexico as part of the Merida Initiative, the highest since 2013.
US imperialism and the local elite have historically groomed the Mexican military and police to crush social opposition. The prominence of the military eventually fell after the Mexican Revolution until the global resurgence of the class struggle in 1968, when the military was placed front and center to crush mass demonstrations and guerrilla movements. This included the Tlatelolco massacre in October 1968 of several hundred demonstrators in Mexico City.
In tandem with the growth of the industrial workforce in Mexico, the military grew from 60,000 to 453,000 troops between 1973 and 2022, including the 114,000-strong National Guard. The police grew to 385,000 officers.
Meanwhile, killings associated with organized crime continued to increase and reached a record high under AMLO of nearly 25,000 homicides per year. In total, an estimated 350,000 people have been killed and 95,000 more have gone missing in the so-called “war on drugs” since 2006.
Confirming their subservience to imperialism, Jacobin Magazine has promoted AMLO for his “migrant protection strategy” and “pro-poor politics.” As recently as April, this publication tied to the Democratic Socialists of America denounced all claims of an authoritarian turn by AMLO and insisted that “Obrador’s program” is that “the state must aspire to become a lever for social progress, taking charge of economic inequalities and developing institutions for this purpose.”
However, AMLO has shown his true colors time and again. Most starkly, he joined Brazil’s fascistic President Jair Bolsonaro in waiting six weeks before recognizing Joe Biden’s clear electoral victory in 2020, backing in this way Donald Trump’s attempt to establish himself as a fascist dictator. As the WSWS wrote at the time, AMLO “sees in a Trump coup a potential impetus to move more swiftly toward authoritarian forms of rule in Mexico, as the country’s social crisis is exacerbated by the pandemic and stark levels of inequality.”
The Inter-disciplinary Group of Independent Experts on the disappearance of the 43 Ayotzinapa teaching students in 2014 concluded that the military and police collaborated with gangs to kidnap and massacre the students as they were traveling to a demonstration. Moreover, the Navy tampered with evidence; “all information was obtained through torture” by the Ministry of Defense; and their arrest warrants were “falsified.” Twenty key witnesses, including several suspects, have been murdered. Despite all of this, the AMLO administration has not charged a single military official.
His government released the son of Chapo Guzmán, the former leader of the Sinaloa Cartel, in 2019 after capturing him. In March 2020, AMLO greeted and held the hand of Chapo’s mother Consuelo Loera. Anabel Hernández also reported that sources close to AMLO say he is aware and approves of the alliance between Morena officials like the Sinaloa governor Rubén Rocha Moya, the Tamaulipas governor-elect Américo Villareal and several mayors with the Sinaloa Cartel.
In November 2020, AMLO pressured the US to release former Defense Minister Salvador Cienfuegos, despite clear evidence that he was being paid to protect and directly facilitate drug shipments. Once the Trump administration dropped the charges and returned Cienfuegos to Mexico, AMLO exonerated him.
As schools in the United States open for the 2022-2023 academic year, a teacher shortage more than a decade in the making has hit crisis levels, dramatically worsened by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
Teachers protesting the dangerous reopening of schools in New York in 2020 (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews)
A sampling from various states and school districts across the country gives a glimpse of the disaster unfolding in public education. Florida, with most school systems opening last week, has an astounding 8,000 open teaching positions, up from 5,000 at the start of the 2021-2022 school year. Arizona has more than 2,000 general teacher vacancies and over 800 special education teacher openings. As of early August, Nevada had 3,000 unfilled teaching positions.
In January, the Illinois Association of Regional School Superintendents found that 88 percent of school districts in the state had “problems with teacher shortages.” At that time, 2,040 teacher openings were either empty or filled with a “less than qualified” hire. In the Houston area, the five largest school districts reported a combined 2,236 vacancies as of August 1. In Baltimore City, the school system’s chief of staff estimated that, as of the beginning of August, there were 600 to 700 teacher vacancies.
While working-class communities are undoubtedly the hardest hit, the shortage extends to wealthier school districts serving more middle-class and upper middle-class communities as well. As of last week, Montgomery County, Maryland, one of the 20 wealthiest counties in the country, has 157 teacher positions open, 367 support staff openings (for paraprofessional educators and front office employees), and 16 bus driver openings.
Fairfax County, Virginia, one of the ten wealthiest counties, held a hiring event on August 4. After the event, David Walrod, president of the Fairfax County Federation of Teachers, told the local ABC affiliate, “There are still hundreds of positions open.” With schools set to open on August 22, the school system’s official “Instructional Vacancy List,” still shows hundreds of vacancies.
“We’ve had teacher shortages before in the past, but this is a year like no other,” Susan Lugo, president of the Arizona School Personnel Administrators Association, told the local CBS affiliate. “I’ve been in human resources for 12 years and they are truly at crisis level, especially for our special education teachers.”
“I have never seen it this bad,” Dan Domenech, executive director of the School Superintendents Association, told the Washington Post. “Right now it’s number one on the list of issues that are concerning school districts.”
While the pandemic has hastened the exodus of teachers, the shortage is not new. In 2016, the Learning Policy Institute issued a report titled, “A Coming Crisis in Teaching? Teacher Supply, Demand, and Shortages in the U.S.” The researchers noted that since the 2012-2013 school year, the demand for teachers exceeded supply, with the deficit growing each year. The supply deficit went from 20,000 in 2012-2013 to 64,000 in 2015-2016, with a projected gap of 110,000 in 2017-2018.
This trend has only been exacerbated by the pandemic. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are at least 280,000 fewer public school teachers than there were before the pandemic.
Underscoring the shortage, according to Education Week, between the 2008-2009 and 2018-2019 academic years, the number of students completing a teacher-education program declined by about 33 percent. Not only are college students less interested in pursuing teaching careers, but many who start out in teaching quickly leave the profession. According to the Maryland State Department of Education, during the 2021-2022 school year, 55.4 percent of Maryland teachers with less than five years’ experience resigned.
Reasons for teacher disaffection are not hard to find. Teachers are woefully underpaid, with the average public school teacher receiving $65,090 during the 2020-2021 school year, and as low as $49,583 in Florida. Large and growing class sizes, long hours, inadequate resources, mandatory rote testing of students, and a general deterioration in working conditions are also causes of the crisis.
The pandemic has only accelerated the departure of teachers. When most schools shut down at the start of the pandemic in the spring of 2020, school systems were largely unprepared, thrusting the burden on teachers to continue to educate students online with little or no support.
Then, in the course of 2020-2021 and 2021-2022, as more and more school systems reopened for in-person learning, and as mitigation efforts were increasingly abandoned, teachers were forced to risk their health and very lives to teach.
While the US government keeps no statistics on the number of school workers who have lost their lives to COVID-19, the Twitter page “School Personnel Lost to Covid” has documented that, at a minimum, 2,403 school workers, including teachers, support staff, and bus drivers have died.
With staffing shortages, the teachers who remain face even greater responsibilities, further exacerbating the already sky-high stress levels for teachers. Many teachers returning to in-person teaching during the pandemic also had new duties to take on, including COVID testing of students, regulating mask wearing (when it was still mandated), creating assignments for students in quarantine, and extra tutoring to help students who had fallen behind during the pandemic.
A June 2021 RAND survey found that more than three-quarters of teachers reported experiencing frequent, job-related stress, compared to 40 percent of employed adults overall and 25 percent of teachers reported symptoms of depression, compared with 10 percent for the adult population as a whole.
In response to the teacher shortages, school systems are filling vacancies in ways that will leave students with a woeful education. In Florida, reactionary Republican Governor Ron DeSantis recently signed a bill allowing military veterans to teach without a bachelor’s degree. In Tucson, Arizona, the school system is considering using virtual math teachers from an online education company to fill in for 24 math teacher vacancies. In Texas, two districts, the Mineral Wells Independent School District and Chico Independent School District, are reducing the school week to four days due to staff shortages.
Numerous districts plan on filling teacher vacancies by using administrators to work as substitutes, combining multiple classes together in large spaces such as auditoriums or gymnasiums, offering paid student teaching positions, using substitutes for longer term assignments and using teachers to teach outside their areas of certification.
In an August 15 press release, Baltimore City schools acknowledged that “it will be challenging” to have enough teachers at every school. “In lieu of a teacher, some students may have a paraprofessional, a long-term substitute, a retired teacher, a reassigned teacher-leader or central office former teacher on the first day of school,” the press release continued.
Other school districts, from Osceola County in Florida to Phoenix, Arizona, are turning to teachers from Mexico, South America and the Caribbean, bringing them in on temporary visas to fill in some of the teacher vacancies. Undoubtedly, the foreign teachers will be underpaid even in comparison to their dramatically underpaid American counterparts.
In a series of teachers’ strikes since 2018, starting with a wildcat strike by West Virginia teachers, educators around the country have waged courageous fights to reverse the abysmal conditions in schools, pushing for higher wages and reduced class sizes, among other demands. During the pandemic, teachers have waged numerous struggles calling for remote learning and other necessary public health measures. However, the National Education Association (NEA) and American Federation of Teachers (AFT) have systematically isolated and worn down each job action, urging teachers to “remember in November” and vote for the Democratic Party.
After Joe Biden was elected president in November 2020, his administration immediately pushed for the reopening of schools where they remained fully remote, largely in Democratic-controlled areas. Backed by the teachers’ unions, which have done nothing to protect teachers during the pandemic, public school systems are now fully open for in-person learning, with even basic mitigation measures, such as mandating masking and improved ventilation, almost completely non-existent, and virtual learning options nearly non-existent.
Now, with schools reopening across the country, the unions either ignore the pandemic or promote the pseudo-science of the Biden administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In a press release in response to the Montgomery County teacher shortage, the union did say not a single word about the pandemic and the unsafe conditions facing teachers as they return to school.
More damning, in an August 11 press release, Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, whose last reported annual salary of $426,327 puts her comfortably in the top 5 percent of income earners, wholeheartedly endorsed the latest unscientific guidelines from the CDC on COVID-19, stating “We welcome these guidelines.”
The guidelines, announced no doubt in anticipation of school reopenings and a new massive surge of cases, remove or reduce recommendations for quarantine, isolation and testing of exposed and infected individuals. No doubt hundreds or even thousands more students and teachers will die as a result of this AFT-endorsed policy.
Weingarten’s press release is ripe with dishonest and hypocritical claims. After calling for a “safe and welcoming learning environment,” she disavows any public health measures, including a mask mandate, that would actually promote a safe learning environment. Echoing the Biden administration and its right-wing public health advisors, the only measures she calls for are “vaccines, testing and masks (and no stigma for those who mask).”
Yesterday Sri Lankan police unleashed a savage attack on students protesting in Colombo against President Ranil Wickremesinghe’s ongoing anti-democratic measures and its social attacks on the working class and the poor.
About 2,000 students, mobilised by the Inter-University Student Federation (IUSF), began a demonstration at Lipton Circus in Central Colombo at around 3 p.m., planning to march to Colombo Fort, about three kilometres away.
University students marching towards Slave Island in central Colombo, 18 August, 2022 (Image: WSWS Media)
Addressing the media at the start of the march, IUSF convener Wasantha Mudalige said that there was no warrant banning the demonstration, which was called, he said, because none of the problems facing the masses had been resolved. He warned President Wickremesinghe not to use any repression against protesters.
A senior police officer declared, however, that the protest was “illegal,” that the police had the power to arrest demonstrators, and that they could take any measures to stop the event.
Sri Lankan police and security forces have been given wide-ranging power under the Colombo government’s draconian emergency laws. Wickremesinghe proclaimed a state of emergency on July 17, three days after being appointed acting president by former President Gotabhaya Rajapakse, who fled the country after months of mass protests.
Student protesters yesterday chanted slogans such as, “Ranil-Rajapakse junta must go. Stop repression,” “Release the arrested Aragalaya [protest] activists,” and “Build peoples’ councils.” Other chants included, “Reopen the universities and schools,” “Relief for the people,” “No more loans,” “Return stolen money,” “For a new constitution to protect people’s power,” and “Abolish the executive presidency.”
Half an hour after the march began, students were confronted by a massive contingent of 500 police, including riot control officers, and accompanied by two water cannons.
The marchers were immediately assaulted with water cannons and tear gas. Police officers and heavily-armed members of the riot control unit chased students for more than two kilometres towards Borella, repeatedly firing the water cannon and tear gas. Police beat demonstrators, dragging some of them away into police jeeps.
Police and water cannons at Slave Island to block student march reaching Colombo Fort, 18 August 2022 (Image: WSWS Media)
When several hundred students rallied at Borella Junction, they were violently attacked again with water cannons and riot police, who chased them towards Narahenpita, another part of Colombo. Police also stopped public transport buses, searching for students, and attempting to detain them.
According to media reports, six activists were arrested, including IUSF convener Mudalige and Inter-University Bhikkhu Federation convener Gallewé Siridhamma.
Students from Kelaniya, South-East and Rajarata universities protested yesterday evening, condemning the police attacks and calling for all arrested student activists to be released.
This police brutality is a clear warning that the Wickremesinghe government will attempt to use all its repressive powers—including unleashing the military and police to crush any and all anti-government actions by workers, youth and the poor who fight for their social and democratic rights.
It is four months since the eruption of a mass uprising involving millions of Sri Lankan workers, young people and the rural poor calling for resignation of President Rajapakse and his government. The mass protests and general strikes—the largest in Sri Lankan history—demanded an end to the rampant inflation, shortages of essentials, such as food, medicine and fuel, and lengthy power cuts. The anti-government uprising forced Rajapakse and his regime to resign, shaking the ruling elite to its core.
Less than 24 hours after his anti-democratic appointment as president by parliament, Wickremesinghe ordered a July 22 violent predawn military-police attack on protesters occupying the presidential secretariat and Galle Face Green. Nine activists were arrested and many injured in the attacks. Scores of other activists have been arrested since the pre-dawn raids.
The Wickremesinghe regime has made clear that it will implement the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) savage austerity measures, including the destruction of hundreds of thousands of public sector jobs, the privatisation of state-owned enterprises, higher taxes and further cuts to price subsidies.
Wickremesinghe has called on all the opposition parties to form an all-party government in an attempt to rally the capitalist establishment as a whole to implement the IMF’s demands. Wickremesinghe and the ruling elite, however, are haunted by the mass upsurge that brought down Rajapakse and fear a new eruption of struggles against austerity.
Millions of workers, backed by the rural poor and the oppressed, walked out in general strikes on April 28, May 6, May 10 and May 11 to demand the resignation of Rajapakse and his regime. The trade unions limited these to one-day protests and called for an interim parliamentary regime, the same demand being made by the opposition Samagi Jana Balavegaya and Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna.
On August 15, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced that another 120 New Zealand soldiers will be sent to the UK to assist with training Ukrainian armed forces for the US-NATO proxy war against Russia. The troops, she said, “will be focused on infantry training, in particular front-line combat, including weapons handling, combat first aid, operational law and soldiers’ skills.”
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Defence Minister Peeni Henare announcing the deployment of 120 more troops to Britain to train Ukrainian forces. August 15, 2022. (Source: Jacinda Ardern Facebook page.)
They will join soldiers from Britain, Canada, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Latvia, Germany and the Netherlands, which are all providing trainers. In the last six weeks, more than 2,300 Ukrainian civilian recruits have passed through the program, and Britain has pledged to train 10,000 by October.
Already, in May, New Zealand sent 30 Defence Force personnel to instruct Ukrainian forces in the use of artillery. New Zealand troops have also been stationed in Germany and Belgium, involved in coordinating supplies for Ukraine, and assisting with unspecified intelligence operations.
The total number of New Zealand forces supporting Ukraine will increase to 224. This makes it NZ’s largest military deployment in decades, exceeding the numbers stationed at any one time in Iraq and Afghanistan during the criminal US-led wars in those countries.
Ardern told a press conference that New Zealand was joining the international “response to Russia’s ongoing aggression,” and that its “blatant attack on a country’s sovereignty, and the subsequent loss of innocent lives, is wrong and intolerable.”
These statements echo Washington’s false and hypocritical narrative of Russia being solely responsible for the war. In fact, Putin’s disastrous and reactionary invasion of Ukraine was deliberately provoked by the US and European powers, which supported a far-right coup in 2014 that ousted the elected government of Viktor Yanukovych. This triggered the separation of Crimea and a civil war with pro-Russia separatists in eastern Ukraine.
The US and NATO have poured billions into arming and training Ukraine’s military, including fascist militias such as the Azov Battalion and the Ukrainian Volunteer Corps. At the same time, NATO has built up its forces throughout Eastern Europe in preparation for direct war with Russia.
US imperialism and its allies aim to inflict a crushing defeat on Russia, to overthrow Putin, and establish a puppet regime. This is part of Washington’s broader strategy to reverse America’s economic decline through war against both Russia and China. The Ukrainians being trained in Britain are cannon fodder for the opening stage of this global war.
New Zealand, a minor imperialist country with a neo-colonial sphere in the south-west Pacific, has been an ally of the US since World War II, and has become completely integrated into its war plans. New Zealand’s ruling elite has no objection to illegal invasions in violation of national sovereignty to safeguard its own interests and those of its allies.
The Labour Party-led government of Helen Clark, supported by the pseudo-left Alliance Party, sent the elite SAS military unit to take part in the 2001 US-led invasion of Afghanistan. For 20 years, successive NZ governments redeployed troops to this imperialist war. The Clark government also deployed dozens of soldiers to Iraq in 2003. These wars, aimed at establishing US control over resources and strategic areas of the globe, have cost the lives of more than a million people and made millions more homeless and destitute.
Now, the Ardern government is dragging New Zealand into a far more explosive conflict involving nuclear-armed powers, which is rapidly developing into a third world war.
The latest deployment was undoubtedly discussed during US Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman’s meeting with Ardern in New Zealand on August 9. Afterwards, Sherman told Radio NZ that relations between the two countries were “incredibly valuable” and that New Zealand could eventually join the AUKUS (Australia-UK-US) security pact, which is aimed at ramping up the militarisation of Australia and the Indo-Pacific region in preparation for war with China.
Sections of the NZ political and media establishment are nervous about US military provocations against China, which is New Zealand’s most important trading partner. Former Prime Minister John Key described US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan earlier this month—escorted by navy warships including an aircraft carrier—as “reckless, provocative and dangerous.”
The Ardern government, however, has labelled both Russia and China as “threats” to the international order, and is intent on using the war in Ukraine to strengthen ties with the US and NATO. Defence Minister Peeni Henare told the media on August 15 that the latest deployment “provides an opportunity for NZDF personnel to gain valuable experience through conducting core soldier skills in a foreign environment, alongside key partners, which promotes retention in our defence workforce.”
Retention of soldiers is a key concern as the government boosts military spending. In July, Henare pointed to $4.5 billion being invested in 12 major defence capability projects, including the purchase of “four new P-8A Poseidon aircraft, five new C-130J Super Hercules aircraft, and 43 Bushmaster vehicles.”
However, on August 10, Stuff reported that a survey last September found 34 percent of army personnel were dissatisfied with low wages and 27 percent were actively looking to leave—1,100 out of 4,500 soldiers. No progress has been made towards the goal, announced three years ago, of increasing the size of the army to 6,000 soldiers.
The government and corporate media—assisted by Labour’s allies, the Green Party and the pseudo-left supporters of imperialism—are seeking to overcome deeply ingrained anti-war sentiments by whipping up anti-Russia hysteria. As in the US and internationally, militarism and nationalism are being stoked to divert growing anger in the working class over the surging cost of living and social inequality, and the public health disaster caused by the Ardern government abandoning any effort to stop the spread of COVID-19.
Last week, prominent TV and radio host Tova O’Brien travelled to Ukraine to interview President Volodymyr Zelensky. The trip was supported by New Zealand’s state broadcasting fund. The fawning half-hour interview, which aired on Today FM, had nothing in common with journalism; it was unadulterated war propaganda.
O’Brien did not ask about the causes of the war, or the role of the Ukrainian government and its imperialist backers in provoking it. The interview was devoted to glorifying Ukraine and its leader, and pressuring New Zealand to expand its support for the war.
O’Brien stated at one point: “New Zealand has given just 3 Euro [$NZ4.86] per capita [for lethal aid]. At the other end of the spectrum, America has given 71 Euro per capita. The global average: 29 Euro. Do we risk being on the wrong side of history here?”
Zelenksy replied that history would remember how much money each country gave to the war effort. He also said the amount of money given by NZ would not even pay for a single day of fighting.
O’Brien used the interview to demand the expulsion of the Russian ambassador from New Zealand, and that Ardern visit Ukraine in person.
While in Ukraine, O’Brien also interviewed a small number of New Zealanders participating directly in the conflict. Writing for Stuff, she described one, favourably, as a “fighter keen for the combat experience New Zealand’s military wasn’t able to give him, the adrenaline rush of being in contact with the enemy.” The article was basically a recruitment advertisement for mercenaries on behalf of the Ukrainian state.
