Vietnam struggles to contain rapid resurgence of COVID-19

Owen Howell

The unexpected emergence of a coronavirus cluster in the Vietnamese city of Da Nang has led to a rapid transmission across the country. Though previously lauded as a “success story” in the international press, having recorded no new local infections for 99 days, Vietnam has now detected cases in the capital, Hanoi, as well as Ho Chi Minh City, and throughout the Central Highlands region.

The first new case appeared in Da Nang Hospital on July 25, before the virus spread through the building, resulting in 15 confirmed cases over the next three days. The source of the cluster apparently remains unknown, though some government officials have claimed it originated outside the country. Vietnam has remained shut to most foreign travellers since late March.

The Health Ministry has registered 173 local cases since the new outbreak began, 120 of which were found in Da Nang. Besides the country’s two major cities, the virus has reached the provinces of Quang Nam, Thai Binh, Quang Ngai, Dak Lak, Dong Nai, and Ha Nam.

With 29 local cases discovered yesterday, the tally has grown to 620 infections, as well as five deaths, all of which were recorded since Friday. The victims were all elderly with pre-existing medical conditions.

Local newspaper Thanh Nien revealed the most recent death was an 86-year-old woman who suffered heart and kidney failure. She was admitted to Da Nang Hospital on July 16 and then transferred to a hospital in Quang Nam two days later. This suggests that she contracted COVID-19 in Da Nang at least one week before the first case was confirmed, and therefore that the virus had been circulating in the hospital undetected for a considerable time.

Nearly all of the cases last week were people above the age of 60. However, the 29 cases yesterday included a number of asymptomatic young people, including a 23-year-old health worker and four children below the age of 14. Due to the abrupt and widespread nature of the transmission, medical experts believe the real infection numbers may be far higher than the official figures.

Da Nang, a seaside resort, is a popular holiday destination for Vietnamese tourists on summer vacation. Since early July, over 800,000 people have visited Da Nang. The Vietnamese government fears that tens of thousands of tourists leaving the city after the cluster emerged could cause a disastrous transmission across the country.

On Wednesday, four days after the first case, a lockdown was established and checkpoints set up to prevent people from leaving or entering the city. Thousands of national police and military personnel were deployed in Da Nang, state-run paper Nhan Dan reported. By this time, however, thousands had already left the new pandemic epicentre.

Ho Chi Minh City had recorded 18,000 people returning from Da Nang on Tuesday. Hanoi has received around 54,000 returnees since July 25. Over 21,000 of these are suspected COVID-19 carriers waiting to be tested, as the city’s testing capacity is as yet unable to meet the large requirements.

Vietnam has 118 testing laboratories, of which only 66 are capable of testing samples for coronavirus. The nation’s capacity is 31,000 tests per day—a marginal increase on April’s average of 27,000 a day. But unless it dramatically expands, the testing could soon prove inadequate as the virus surges through a densely populated country of 97.3 million people.

In Da Nang, hospitals and health centres are fast reaching full capacity. Recently, a makeshift coronavirus hospital was installed inside a soccer stadium. The government has sent a contingent of more than 1,000 health workers to Da Nang.

Partial lockdown measures are being implemented in areas where coronavirus cases are appearing. Local authorities in Ho Chi Minh City have placed an apartment building under lockdown since Friday, as two residents had returned from Da Nang and were suspected to have the virus. The building houses 328 residents, but only 26 have been tested.

Tran Van Tan, Vice Chairman of Quang Nam province, imposed blockades on several rural villages and urban neighbourhoods, most of them overcrowded working-class districts. These include the Luu Minh residential area, in Thang Binh district, with 96 households and 384 people. Ostensibly under lockdown because of three confirmed cases there, no testing has yet been organised. With social distancing all but impossible in such locations, they will inevitably become incubators for the virus to grow.

It is now over a week since the Da Nang cluster surfaced, yet the Vietnamese government is reluctant to close businesses and halt production, despite the rapid spread of the virus.

Hanoi has closed its bars and roadside stalls and banned large gatherings. Restaurants and shopping malls, on the other hand, are permitted to remain open. Factories and other large-scale production facilities will continue to operate.

Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc’s warned on Wednesday that every province and every city was at risk. “We have to act more swiftly and more fiercely in order to control the outbreak,” Phuc told an online conference of government officials.

Ho Chi Minh City Party Secretary Bguyen Thien Nan also expressed concern that the situation is becoming far worse than the country’s first wave of infections, pointing to similar resurgences in Italy, Hong Kong, and Australia.

After suspending international travel on March 22, and introducing restrictions, Vietnam appeared to have contained the coronavirus. Like its counterparts in other countries, the government pushed ahead with a reopening policy to reverse the economic damage, particularly focusing on the revival of domestic tourism.

On June 1, the Vietnamese Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism launched a new program aimed at galvanizing domestic tourist demand. The result was that people flocked to Da Nang from June onward, drawn by discounted flights, hotel bookings, and travel deals.

As with other Southeast Asian nations, Vietnam is heavily dependent on its tourist sector. The renewed spread of the virus is being viewed by the government primarily as a setback to their plans to reopen international travel and address the slowing economy.

In a report released on Thursday, the World Bank assessed that Vietnam’s economy would grow at around 2.8 percent in 2020, its slowest rate in 35 years and significantly lower than pre-pandemic levels. This finding, moreover, was based upon the situation before the resurgence in Da Nang.

Desperate to reverse the slowing economy, Prime Minister Phuc on Saturday approved the development of the country’s “night-time economy.” It will allow non-essential activities to occur overnight in major tourism zones and cities, many of which have witnessed new COVID-19 cases. Night markets, discos, karaoke parlours, retail stores, public transport, and other services are expected to generate profits unimpeded, despite the immense risk of accelerating the spread.

US credit outlook rated “negative” as concerns mount over dollar’s global role

Nick Beams

In another sign of concern over the stability of the US dollar, under conditions where the Fed is pumping trillions into the financial system, the Fitch credit rating agency has placed a question mark over the credit worthiness of the United States.

The agency downgraded its outlook for US credit to “negative” from “stable” on Friday, while retaining its AAA rating—the top grade—for the credit of the US. The agency raised issues about whether the US would be able to contain rising deficits as the government continues its corporate bailouts.

In a statement announcing the downgrade, the agency said the US sovereign rating was supported by “structural strengths” and benefited from the role of the dollar as the world’s preeminent currency. However, the outlook had been revised to negative “to reflect the ongoing deterioration in the US public finances and the absence of a credible fiscal consolidation plan.”

Fiscal deficits had already been on a rising path before the economic shock delivered by the COVID-19 pandemic and they had started to “erode the traditional credit strength of the US,” Fitch declared. Now, there was a “growing risk that US policymakers will not consolidate public finances sufficiently to stabilise public debt after the pandemic shock has passed.”

Articulating the class interests of the financial oligarchy in the US and internationally, it made clear where such “consolidation” should take place—not in reductions to the corporate bailouts or a reversal of the massive corporate and personal tax cuts for higher income earners enacted by Trump at the end of 2017.

With one eye clearly fixed on the development of the class struggle, Fitch said: “Having laid bare inequalities in the provision of health care and exacerbated widening wealth inequality… the crisis could also lead to pressure for higher public spending, greater state involvement in the economy, redistribution of incomes and moves to strengthen workers’ bargaining power.”

It left no doubt about how such issues should be dealt with. “The economic crisis has likely brought forward the point at which social security and healthcare trust funds are exhausted, demanding bipartisan legislative action to sustainably fund or reform these programs,” it said. In other words, there should be an assault on spending for basic social services.

Pointing to what it called the “exceptional financing flexibility” of the US—the borrowing by the US government of $3 trillion from February to June and the interventions of the Fed to “backstop financial markets”—Fitch raised the longer-term consequences of these actions.

In what appeared to be a concession to so-called Modern Monetary Theory, which maintains that as the US is the issuer of its own currency it can never run out of funds—a theory widely promoted in pseudo-left circles—it said: “It is a truism that the US government can never run out of money to service its debts. However, there is a potential (albeit remote) risk of fiscal dominance if [debt-to-GDP] spirals, posing risks to US economic dynamism and reserve currency status.”

Concerns about the global role of the dollar as a result of the rise of government debt and the expansion of the Fed’s financial asset holdings, which have increased from under $1 trillion on the eve of the 2008 financial crisis to around $7 trillion today, go well beyond Fitch and other agencies.

In an editorial published at the weekend, the Financial Times warned that the world economy “is in a dangerous place.” Pointing to the resurgence of COVID-19 infections in Europe, Australia and Japan, where the virus had appeared to be contained, it said: “This was the week when hopes for a short lockdown followed by a swift resumption of economic activity were dashed once and for all.”

This meant, the editorial continued, that it was likely governments would have to continue to borrow and spend. The implications were examined in a separate article titled “Dollar blues: why the pandemic is testing confidence in the US currency.”

The article noted that since the initial scramble for dollars in the crisis that hit financial markets in mid-March as the pandemic struck, the dollar has been falling in currency markets, recording its biggest monthly decline for a decade in July.

The Financial Times wrote that the 5 percent fall in the US currency over the month “might sound modest but in the relatively stable foreign exchange market that counts as dramatic.” It added that such a sharp move “inevitably raises questions that go to the heart of the global financial system and the unique role that the US currency plays.”

Those questions are increasingly coming into prominence because of the rise in the price of gold, now trading at a record high of between $1,900 and $2,000 per ounce. Investors, the article noted, are seeking an alternative to the US currency, and as American politics becomes increasingly dysfunctional, “some are openly asking… whether US institutions are now too weak for the world to rely on the dollar.”

Opponents of the view that the dollar could lose its privileged status maintain there is no possibility of it being replaced as the world’s reserve currency, either by the euro or the Chinese yuan. This is because the financial systems of both the euro zone and China are nowhere near large or sophisticated enough for their currencies to play the global role of the dollar.

That analysis is correct as far as it goes. But it does not go far enough. A dollar crisis will not bring about its replacement by the currency of another country or region. Rather, it will set off a crisis of confidence in all fiat currencies and a breakdown of international trading and financial relations.

The FT article cited remarks by David Riley, a chief investment strategist at BlueBay Asset Management in London. He noted that the US government bond market, where yields on 10 year bonds have gone negative when inflation is taken into account, “is reflecting the fact that the US outlook is weakening.”

“There’s going to have to be more stimulus,” he said. “This is where the gold bug view comes in, where sooner or later this is a debasement of the global reserve currency. So you go into gold.”

There are decisive implications flowing from the weakening position of the US. The role of the dollar as the world currency and the decisive importance of US financial markets for every major corporation provide US imperialism with enormous power as it pursues its geostrategic interests.

For example, it is the reason it has been able to impose sanctions against Iran despite opposition from Europe, by threatening to exclude companies that break them from the global flow of finance, or to hit companies backing the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project to transport gas from Russia to Germany.

In response to the deepening crisis of its financial system, triggered and accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic but not caused by it—the underlying tendencies were already well advanced before the virus struck—US imperialism is going to intensify attacks on the working class at home while pursuing ever more aggressive measures internationally, including war, as it seeks to maintain its global dominance.

White House engineering a takeover of TikTok by Microsoft

Kevin Reed

In a state-sponsored hostile takeover, Microsoft Corporation announced late Sunday that it was moving forward with plans to acquire the mobile app TikTok from the China-based corporation ByteDance following a discussion with President Donald Trump.

In a blog post, Microsoft said its CEO Satya Nadella spoke with the president and “is committed to acquiring TikTok subject to a complete security review and providing proper economic benefits to the United States, including the United States Treasury.” The post said the acquisition would be completed “no later than September 15, 2020.”

The takeover would involve the absorption by Microsoft of the operations of the social media video sharing platform in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. According to Microsoft, the TikTok acquisition will be conducted with an unprecedent level of White House involvement. The statement says, “During this process, Microsoft looks forward to continuing dialogue with the United States Government, including with the President.”

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Fox News "Sunday Morning Futures" discussing White House plan to ban the Chinese video sharing app TikTok

Additionally, Microsoft is indicating that the new owners of the extremely popular app will operate TikTok under the direct supervision of the state security institutions within the countries where it will operate. “The operating model for the service would be built to ensure transparency to users as well as appropriate security oversight by governments in these countries.”

The Microsoft announcement comes as no surprise, following the appearance of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on the Fox News “Sunday Morning Futures” earlier in the day. Pompeo said that President Donald Trump “will take action in the coming days” on mobile apps, including TikTok, as part of a growing White House offensive against China.

Although he stopped short of saying precisely what the president was going to do, Pompeo claimed without any evidence that “Chinese software companies doing business with the United States, whether it’s TikTok or WeChat” are feeding data directly to the “national security apparatus” in China.

In a statement clearly designed to whip up anti-Chinese sentiments, Pompeo added that Americans using TikTok were having their facial profiles and “information about their residence, their phone numbers, their friends, who they’re connected to” scraped by the Chinese government. He went on to say that these are “true privacy issues for the American people” and that “President Trump has said, ‘Enough,’ and we are going to fix it.”

Pompeo concluded, “I promise you, the President when he makes this decision will make sure that everything we have done drives this as close to zero risk for the American people.”

The short-form video sharing platform has approximately 80 million users in the US, 800 million worldwide and has been downloaded 2.2 billion times. ByteDance has said that its servers are located in the US and Singapore, and tech experts have pointed out that TikTok gathers user data in a manner similar to other popular social media apps.

That Pompeo is making hysterical and unsubstantiated statements is a demonstration of the desperate nature of the aggressive moves by the Trump White House against China. The administration is attempting to deflect the mass opposition to Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic and the authoritarian police measures against protesters across the country in the intensifying anti-China campaign in order to prop up his collapsing reelection prospects.

Meanwhile, it is well-known internationally—primarily due to the exposures by the former national security contractor Edward Snowden in 2013—that the US National Security Agency (NSA) is the number one electronic surveillance operation in the world, gathering data on every single person on earth and storing it in massive server farms such as the Utah Data Center.

On Friday, Trump told reporters that he was going to act soon to ban TikTok. Speaking with reporters on board Air Force One on a flight back to Washington from Florida, he said, “As far as TikTok is concerned, we’re banning them from the United States.” He then called the ban a “severance” and said he had the authority to make the decision. “I can do it with an executive order.”

However, news of Microsoft’s involvement in a forced divestiture of TikTok by ByteDance emerged before the weekend as it was revealed that the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US (CFIUS) was involved. According to a report in the Wall Street Journal , CFIUS began its investigation into TikTok last year following concerns raised in Congress. “The Treasury-led foreign-investment committee is made up of federal agencies and reviews deals involving foreign money to ensure they don’t put the country’s national security at risk.”

No doubt a major consideration in the negotiations over TikTok is the fact that the company has recently valued at $150 billion with major investments from US equity firms Coatue Management and Sequoia Capital. Along with the huge US user base, the entanglement of the American financial elite with TikTok make an outright ban a double-edged sword for President Trump and, in the end, it appears that it will be much better to just steal the company from ByteDance under the auspices of national security concerns.

An article in Forbes by Peter Cohen indicates the thinking among American business pirates. “If that deal goes through for the roughly $5 billion, I estimate TikTok’s US operations are worth, you should buy Microsoft shares. ... the triple digit acceleration of TikTok’s user base could add oomph to Microsoft’s top line,” Cohen wrote on Saturday.

The role of the Democrats in the US seizure of Tic Tok exposes the fact that they have no fundamental differences with the Trump White House. Stephen Mnuchin, who heads CFIUS and has been leading the negotiations with Microsoft and the TikTok investors over the takeover, said on “ABC News” on Sunday that the view that “there has to be a change” is shared by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Democrat of California) and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (Democrat of New York).

Schumer began ringing alarm bells about TikTok last November in a letter to Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy over the US military’s use of TikTok to recruit young people. Schumer wrote, “I urge you to assess the potential national security risks posed by China-owned technology companies before choosing to utilize certain platforms.”

Schumer’s campaign was echoed by Senator Marco Rubio (Republican of Florida), who took the issue to CFIUS, and Senator Josh Hawley (Republican of Missouri), who held a hearing on TikTok’s relationship with the Chinese government.

In this particular instance, it is apparent that Pompeo and Trump have now borrowed a few lines from Schumer, who wrote another letter to Transportation Safety Administration Director David Pekoske in February that said, “National security experts have raised concerns about TikTok’s collection and handling of user data, including user content and communications, IP addresses, location-related data, metadata, and other sensitive personal information.” Schumer added, “particularly when viewed in light of laws that compel Chinese companies to support and cooperate with intelligence work controlled by the Chinese Communist Party.”

European economy collapses as EU bails out the super-rich

Anthony Torres & Alex Lantier

Eurostat economic figures for the second quarter of 2020 show that Europe saw its deepest and most sudden economic collapse in history.

Already before the COVID-19 pandemic, Europe was sinking into recession. In the fourth quarter of 2019, Germany was stagnant, while France (-0.1 percent) and Italy (-0.4 percent) were falling. The collapse in business confidence due to the pandemic and the effects of lock-down measures have now triggered an unprecedented economic disintegration.

Workers, the self-employed and small businesses are seeing a historic collapse in living standards. Eurostat indicated on July 31 that the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) fell by 12.1 percent in the euro zone and 11.9 percent in the European Union (EU). In the first quarter, the contraction was 3.6 percent and 3.2 percent, respectively. In Germany, Europe’s leading economic power, GDP fell by 10.1 percent; the contraction from April to July was 10.7 percent in Austria and 12.2 percent in Belgium.

Italy, which was severely hit by the pandemic, saw its economy fall 12.4 percent. Jack Allen-Reynolds of Capital Economics said: “Italian GDP has in fact fallen to its level from the beginning of the 1990s.” Elsewhere, the collapse was even steeper. France, Portugal and Spain saw falls of 13.8, 14.1 and 18.5 percent, respectively. According to currently available projections, the British economy likely contracted approximately 15 percent in the second quarter.

If European economic activity remains at similar levels for the rest of 2020, Europe will see an economic crash more severe than any year in the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Leading European corporations have suffered record losses in virtually every branch of industry and are now dependent on multi-billion-euro, state-funded bailouts. Among Europe’s major automakers, Volkswagen reported having lost €1.4 billion as its revenues collapsed by 23 percent, while the Renault-Nissan alliance suffered a devastating €7.3 billion loss. European aerospace firm Airbus saw a net loss of €1.9 billion.

Major European oil firms were devastated by the collapse of oil prices driven by the halt in travel and industrial activity during the lock-downs. Total and Royal Dutch Shell reported net losses of €7 billion and $18.1 billion, respectively. The net profits of French luxury conglomerate Hermès collapsed by 55 percent in the first half of the year.

Major airlines also face disaster. Air France-KLM published its profit report on Thursday, reporting an 83 percent collapse in its overall revenues. Lufthansa, for its part, had already reported a €2.1 billion loss in the first trimester. IAG Group, which owns British Airways, as well as Aer Lingus and Iberia, reported a net loss of €4.2 billion in the first half of the year.

Millions of workers have no longer been employed during the pandemic, and companies relied massively on state funding to pay their part-time wages. As of last month, 9.3 million workers depended on such programs in Britain, 4.5 million in France (down from 8.8 million in April), 6.9 million in Germany, and 3.7 million in Spain. Italy, for its part, spent approximately €5 billion monthly on such part-time work arrangements.

An explosive class confrontation is brewing between the working class and the financial aristocracy in Europe and internationally. Having advocated a politically criminal policy of “herd immunity” on COVID-19, calling to end lock-downs and let workers catch the deadly virus to try to acquire immunity, the ruling elite is now proceeding with as much contempt for workers’ jobs as for their health and lives. While grabbing trillions of euros in public funds for the banks and corporations, they are moving to slash wages and jobs.

While the European Central Bank (ECB) has agreed to a €1.25 trillion bailout of European banks, the EU has agreed to a €750 billion bailout package for European states and corporations. These vast sums of public money are being plunged into stocks and the financial markets to bail out the super-rich. However, state authorities and the trade union bureaucracies are not demanding that billionaire investors and major corporations that receive these massive sums in state aid give any guarantees that they will not sack workers or cut their pay.

Instead, dozens of bailed-out corporations are announcing mass layoffs, while governments across Europe and worldwide move to slash social spending and living standards. Already in Britain, plans have gone into effect to cut furlough programs by October, and payments in Spain are to be cut from 70 to 35 percent of workers’ wages by the fall. Yesterday, the IG Metall union announced that it expected 300,000 jobs to be destroyed in Germany.

This social onslaught is proceeding with the complicity of the European trade unions, which are actively helping to design these policies with state officials and corporate management. The German and French unions, in fact, signed a joint statement hailing the EU bailout designed by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron.

The ruling elite is pursuing the most parasitic, selfish and reckless policy since the French feudal aristocracy refused to pay any taxes to resolve the fiscal crisis before the 1789 revolution.

What is being prepared is a new, international eruption of the class struggle outside the corrupt framework of the unions. The most explosive situation is emerging in America, where support payments for workers are being suspended this month, threatening tens of millions with hunger and eviction. In Europe, the EU Commission has estimated that unemployment will reach 9.5 percent in the euro zone, with southern European countries the hardest hit. They foresee unemployment rising to over 20 percent in Greece and Spain, 11.8 percent in Italy, and 10.1 percent in France.

These horrific figures mean the loss of millions of jobs and the bankruptcy of thousands of small businesses, in order to bail out a corrupt financial elite that is plundering massive amounts of public money. It must be added, however, that these estimates are likely over-optimistic. They depend on employers agreeing to rehire tens of millions of workers currently paid by the state, due to a quick recovery in economic output.

Thus, ING economist Bert Colijn told Le Monde: “This recession is like no other. We have never seen such figures, such a dizzying collapse linked to the pandemic and the lock-down, which will be followed inevitably by a rapid upswing which we will see in the statistics for the third quarter.”

Such a scenario seems increasingly unlikely in the longer term, however. The ending of lock-downs has led to a collapse of social distancing measures and now a rapid resurgence of the virus across Europe. The number of daily new cases has risen to 1,000 in France and soon in Germany, over 600 in Belgium, and 3,000 in Spain. Thus, since late June, when the daily number of new cases was at its lowest, just after the lock-down, this number has gone up by a factor of two in France and Germany, seven in Belgium, and 10 in Spain.

While EU states insist they will not impose further lock-downs or only impose regional lock-downs, a policy that in fact accelerates the spread of the disease, their dithering may ultimately leave them no choice but to take drastic measures if the virus explodes out of control. Given the failure of EU governments to implement proper testing and tracing facilities and boost health care spending, such a scenario—entailing a new, drastic contraction in economic activity—is a growing possibility.

Already, the Spanish government re-imposed a “voluntary” lock-down in Barcelona, affecting over 4 million people in an economically vital region of Spain.

Workers cannot stop the plundering of society by the financial aristocracy through nationally-oriented protests organized by the trade unions, which are at the same time negotiating austerity with EU banks and governments. As the pandemic exposes the bankruptcy of the capitalist system, it is essential for workers across Europe to take up a political struggle for state power against the EU. Their best allies are workers around the world fighting against austerity and reactionary back-to-work orders.

The trillions of euros spent to bail out the wealthy must go to fighting COVID-19, safeguarding the salaries of workers and the self-employed, while major corporations relying on public bailout funds are nationalized across Europe and beyond, to be run under workers control as public utilities. This is essential to ensure the health and safety of workers despite the horrific impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting blow to the economy.

Scottish government prepares to reopen schools as new COVID-19 spikes emerge

Steve James

The Scottish government led by Scottish National Party (SNP) leader and First Minister Nicola Sturgeon announced its intention to reopen all schools in Scotland on August 11.

The decision, announced by Sturgeon July 30, once again underscores the point that, presentational differences notwithstanding, SNP policy on the coronavirus pandemic is indistinguishable from that of Boris Johnson’s hated Conservative government in Westminster.

From August 11, primary and secondary schools will begin to reopen. All schools are expected to be fully operational by August 18. Only the most minimal measures will be taken to prevent coronavirus infection rapidly taking hold in schools, endangering the health and lives of large numbers of children, and placing their families, particularly elderly and vulnerable relatives, in danger.

Scotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo, Pool)

Government advice does not require physical distancing between children and young people of any age, although adults are expected to maintain two-metre distancing. Personal protective equipment (PPE) will not be required unless specified by a risk assessment. Pupils will not be required to wear face masks, nor will they be required to physically distance on school buses. “Enhanced hygiene” measures are required, meaning only more time for hand washing and sanitiser use. Windows and doors are to be left open.

Sturgeon sanctimoniously claimed she was acting on the “moral and educational imperative that we get children back to school as soon as is safely possible.” Her deputy, Education Secretary John Swinney, claimed he was responding to concerns from teachers.

“That’s why we’ve taken such care to gather the evidence, we established a specific expert group to look at all of these questions and to provide us with clinical advice” said Swinney.

A measure of the Scottish government’s “care to gather evidence” was the rebuke issued to Sturgeon by director of the UK’s Office for Statistical Regulation, Ed Humpherson. Writing to the Scottish government’s chief statistician, Roger Halliday, Humpherson noted Sturgeon’s July 3 claim repeated on several occasions that the “the prevalence of the virus in Scotland, right now, is five times lower than it is in England.”

Humpherson complained that “sources used to underpin this claim have been difficult to identify… it is important to recognise that a comparison of COVID-19 prevalence rates is not straightforward. If it is to be undertaken, the results and the uncertainties should be communicated transparently.”

Humpherson noted the comparison was based on groups of statistics that were not directly comparable and with unclear timeframes. He concluded, “We do not think that the sources above allow for a quantified and uncaveated comparison of the kind that was made.”

In other words, the Scottish government chose its statistics to justify the impression that its response to the pandemic was qualitatively better than in England.

Comparing similar statistics, however, the UK’s Office for National Statistics reported that Scotland suffered the third worse rate of excess deaths in Europe over the first half of 2020. Only Spain and England fared worse. Of the 25 major European cities with the highest rates of excess deaths, Edinburgh and Glasgow were both in the top 10, along with London, Birmingham, Amsterdam, and Madrid.

The ONS conceded that the fact that Scotland retained its lockdown a few weeks beyond May 10 meant that death rates continued to fall in Scotland. On the week beginning May 23, for example, Scotland had an age-standardised mortality rate 5.11 percent above average for the last 5 years. England’s rate was 7.55 percent, against Spain’s 6.65 percent. The downward trend has continued. In the week to July 26, COVID-19 accounted for less than 1 percent of all deaths in Scotland, compared with 36 percent at the pandemic peak.

But whatever gains may have been made by extending the lockdown in Scotland, they are rapidly being squandered in the rush to make up lost time. Many workplaces are already working normally, but fully returning the schools August 11 is the key to restoring the generation of profit. This will inevitably be accompanied by tragedies reminiscent of the pandemic’s early days.

New infection spikes have already emerged in advance of schools re-opening. Among the most concerning was that reported in Inverclyde, which includes the former industrial towns of Greenock and Port Glasgow. Inverclyde, which has some of the poorest areas in Scotland, has consistently recorded by far the highest infection and death rates.

In May, the region reported a COVID-19 death rate of 12.7 deaths per 10,000 people, more than double Scotland’s rate at the time of 5.1 deaths.

A June report from NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde suggested that the coronavirus was circulating extensively in the area long before the lockdown. Talking to Scottish Television of her experiences early during the pandemic, Dr Abby Gunn, a consultant to the Inverclyde Royal Hospital in Greenock, made the same point. She explained, “Every ward and every room that you went to had Covid-19 in the hospital. We saw this coming months in advance, yet we were still doing some of the real-time planning after we had the first positive case.”

Last week, NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde confirmed a cluster of cases had again emerged in Inverclyde. Eleven new cases have been reported including a worker at Amazon’s 300,000-square-foot Faulds Park distribution centre outside Gourock, which employs 400. Although some workers were sent home, the entire facility remains operational.

An Amazon worker told the Greenock Telegraph, “The problem is that the person who tested roamed about putting items onto steel shelving, so workers feel the whole plant should have been closed down for a deep clean. Who knows where this person or others who are now isolating touched? People are concerned that management haven’t gone far enough to make sure the whole site is safe.”

Distribution played a role in other cases associated with the Inverclyde cluster. Deliveries by an infected driver to a Port Glasgow pharmacy appear to have resulted in several cases linked to the pharmacy.

Another spike associated with an outbreak at a privately contracted NHS contact tracing centre, run by Sitel near Motherwell, has now been linked to 27 COVID-19 cases. These include workers at the site and cases associated with reopened pubs and cafes across central Scotland.

Five people tested positive last week at the Fullarton Care Home in Irvine, where 22 elderly people died during the peak of the infection crisis. Run by HC-One, which operates 300 care home across the UK, the Irvine care home was criticised by the Care Inspectorate for poor hygiene and infection control, with staff untrained in the safe use of PPE.

Of a total of 4,201 COVID-19 deaths in Scotland, 46 percent, 1,932, have been in care homes. Many were caused by hasty releases of 1,300 untested elderly hospital patients, some of whom later showed COVID-19 symptoms. Most died in extremely difficult circumstances—isolated, frightened, written off by an over stressed hospital system, and left in care homes suffering extreme staff shortages because of the pandemic.

No confidence should be placed in the Scottish government, or its allies and apologists in the trade union bureaucracy and the pseudo-left groups, to do anything but defend the interests of capitalism. To combat the pandemic, and the attacks on living standards being pushed through, workers in Scotland, as in England and internationally, must mobilise independently through the formation of rank and file organisations in every workplace, school, and neighbourhood. They must take up the struggle for the socialist reorganisation of society.

Drive to reopen US schools continues despite mounting evidence of deadly consequences

Evan Blake

The drive to reopen the schools continues across the US despite mounting evidence of the disastrous public health implications of doing so even as the coronavirus pandemic rages out of control.

New cases of COVID-19 and deaths from the disease continue to rise and no plan is in place to contain the spread of the virus. Under these conditions, it is impossible to reopen schools safely even with the most advanced measures to protect teachers and students, let alone the half-measures underfunded school districts are implementing.

Opposition to the reopening of the schools is growing in every part of the country, with social media exploding over the past month since President Trump tweeted that “SCHOOLS MUST OPEN IN THE FALL!!!” There are now over 55 Facebook groups in at least 30 states, with a combined membership of over 300,000 educators, parents and students. These social media groups have served as centers for the organization of car caravans and other forms of protest.

A school bus in Omaha, Nebraska, July 29, 2020. (AP Photo/Nati Harnik)

At least four schools in Indiana and Mississippi that resumed in-person instruction over the past week have already had a student test positive for COVID-19. Within hours of the start of the first school day at Greenfield Central Junior High School in Indiana, officials were notified that a student had tested positive, prompting them to isolate the student and order all those with whom the student had come into contact to self-quarantine.

There is an expanding body of scientific research showing the centrality of keeping schools closed as part of any plan to contain the pandemic. Last week, a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association ( JAMA) concluded that the widespread closure of schools in mid-March saved at least 40,600 lives over a 16-day period and resulted in an estimated 1.37 million fewer infections over a 26-day period in the spring. Those states that closed earliest saw the largest relative reductions in infections and deaths.

Another JAMA study released last week found that babies and young children infected with COVID-19 can carry high viral loads in their throats and airways—up to 100 times the amount of adults. The study noted, “Behavioral habits of young children and close quarters in school and day care settings raise concern for SARS-CoV-2 amplification in this population as public health restrictions are eased.”

These findings were corroborated in a separate study from Trento, Italy, which found that children 14 years old and younger transmit the virus at over twice the rate of adults aged 30–49.

Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin recently released estimates on the number of children or staff likely to enter US schools already infected, based on current infection rates. Their research found that more than 80 percent of Americans live in a county where at least one person in a school of 500 students and staff would likely arrive infected.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has released a report on a major outbreak at a YMCA overnight summer camp in Georgia in late June, where 260 campers and staff members tested positive for COVID-19, or over 75 percent of those tested. Notably, the camp required all attendees to provide documentation that they had tested negative for the virus before arriving.

The demand that schools reopen is central to the ruling class campaign to force workers back to work in order to pump out profits for the corporate-financial elite. While the Trump administration has spearheaded this campaign, flouting medical science, the Democrats bear equal responsibility for prematurely reopening businesses and demanding the reopening of schools in states they control, such as Rhode Island, Hawaii and Colorado.

Plans to reopen schools are left at the local level, with each of the country’s over 13,000 school districts choosing independently and without statewide or regional coordination whether to fully resume in-person instruction, remain fully online, or adopt a hybrid model where students attend in person part of the week.

Of the 15 largest school districts in the US, 10 have announced that they will at least begin their school years fully online, largely as a result of pressure from parents and educators resisting plans to resume in-person instruction.

In Orange County, Florida, the ninth-largest school district in the US, with over 212,000 students, parents must choose either fully in-person or fully online instruction. For working class parents, many of whom have just seen their federal unemployment benefits eliminated, this “choice” amounts to economic blackmail. They are being compelled to return to work and send their children to school, regardless of their justified concern over the potential for both themselves and their children becoming infected.

According to a University of Texas at Austin study, a school of 1,000 students in Orange County can expect to have 14 students or staff arrive at school infected.

The largest and third-largest districts in the country—New York City and Chicago, both of which are run by the Democratic Party—have announced that they plan to partially reopen schools under the hybrid model. This will affect a combined 1.5 million students and nearly 100,000 teachers.

Given the overcrowded and dilapidated classrooms that exist in these districts, such plans spell disaster for the working class in both cities. Similar plans are proposed by the Hawaii Department of Education, the 13th largest school district, where classes are scheduled to resume on August 17 for over 185,000 students.

The Socialist Equality Party and the WSWS Educators Newsletter have issued the call for educators, parents and students to form independent rank-and-file safety committees to unite across district and state lines and prepare for a nationwide strike to halt the drive to reopen the schools.

We propose that these committees fight for a vast expansion in public education funding, as states face combined budget shortfalls of at least $300 billion. They must establish deep connections with all sections of the working class, including autoworkers, who are forming their own rank-and-file safety committees across the Midwest.

This network of rank-and-file committees must be completely independent of the unions and both the Republican and Democratic parties. The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA) are subservient to the Democratic Party and have ruled out mobilizing their millions of members in a nationwide strike to oppose the reopening of the schools. Instead, they will work to isolate any struggles that break out, as they have with every teachers’ strike since 2018.

The ruling elites internationally, from Brazil to Germany, the UK and Australia, are demanding that the schools reopen under unsafe conditions because they are all seeking to force workers back onto the job in order to drive up corporate profits and make workers pay for the trillions being squandered to bail out the banks.

The response of educators, parents and students must therefore be international, fighting to link their struggles across borders in a global counteroffensive against the capitalist system.

The establishment of a network of independent rank-and-file committees in schools and neighborhoods will become a powerful means through which the working class can prosecute its struggle in defense of public health, public education, democratic rights and the social needs of the people in opposition to the limitless greed of the financial oligarchy. 

NAEd Spencer Dissertation Fellowship Programme 2021

Application Deadline: 8th October 2020

About the Award: The Dissertation Fellowship Program seeks to encourage a new generation of scholars from a wide range of disciplines and professional fields to undertake research relevant to the improvement of education. These $27,500 fellowships support individuals whose dissertations show potential for bringing fresh and constructive perspectives to the history, theory, analysis, or practice of formal or informal education anywhere in the world.

Type: Fellowship

Eligibility: The NAEd/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship Program is open to all eligible applicants regardless of race, national origin, religion, gender, age, disability, or sexual orientation.

• Applicants need not be citizens of the United States; however, they must be candidates for the doctoral degree at a graduate school within the United States.
• Fellowships are not intended to finance data collection or the completion of doctoral coursework, but rather to support the final analysis of the research topic and the writing of the dissertation. For this reason, all applicants must document that they will have completed all pre-dissertation requirements by June 1, 2021 and must provide a clear and specific plan for completing the dissertation within a one or two-year time frame.
• Applicants should have a demonstrated record of research experience in education.
• Proposed project must be an education research project. NAEd/Spencer funds studies that examine the efficacy of curriculum and teaching methods; however, we do not fund the initial development of curriculum or instructional programs.
• Applications will be judged on the applicant’s past research record, career trajectory in education research, and the quality of the project described in the application.
• Fellows may not accept employment other than as described in the application, nor may they accept other awards without prior approval (including awards from NAEd or Spencer) that would provide duplicate benefits.
• Applications must be made by the individual applying for the fellowship; group applications will not be accepted.

Selection Criteria:

• Importance of the research question to education
• Quality of the research approach and feasibility of the work plan
• Applicant’s future potential as a researcher and interest in educational research

Eligible Countries: Any

To be Taken at (Country): USA

Number of Awards: 35

Value of Award:

• 2 Professional Development Retreats Led by Senior Scholars
• $27,500 Fellowship Stipend

Duration of Award: 1 academic year

How to Apply: Click here to access the application portal.

• It is important to go through all application requirements in the Award Webpage (see Link below) before applying.

Visit Award Webpage for Details

Regimes Without Reason and Conscience

Bhabani Shankar Nayak

The world is silently witnessing the erosion of democratic, progressive, secular and liberal cultures of governance. The contemporary governments are becoming more authoritarian and threaten the multicultural mosaic of societies around the world. The governing and non-governing elites falsely argue that democracy breeds inefficiency and creates functional barrier to the animal spirit of profit making and entrepreneurial activities. The majority of people are conspicuously silent. The pandemic has taken away the limited space for resistance to the on-going authoritarian ordeals. From Washington and Westminster to Beijing, Brussels, and New Delhi, the authoritarian cultures define the operational character of the governments. These Machiavellian authoritarian regimes are not only against freedom and democracy but also spread bigotry. The silent coup of reactionary forces is accelerated by rewriting of history, imposition of neoliberal economic policies, removal of all institutional and legal barriers to the lynch mob of market forces.  The governments are not bystanders but active facilitators of authoritarian regimes as a dominant reality in society, politics and economy.

There is a commonality of authoritarian regimes across the globe. These regimes follow a common conservative cult called ‘nation first’.  This ‘nation first’ reactionary political and economic dogma derives its philosophical lineages from social and religious conservative thoughts, that in essence argues to protect, promote and glorify moral traditions of the past. The conservatives and authoritarian ideologues argue that the values of the past can provide solutions to the present predicaments of the society. The knowledge of the past is more valuable for the present. The past glories and successes are the life and blood of contemporary authoritarian states and governments. The conservative ideals are opposed to change and prefer to maintain status quo. Edmund Burke as a philosopher is the patron saint of conservative philosophy for last three centuries. His philosophy continues to provide political justification to authoritarian and conservative regimes of today. Burke was opposed to the idea of any form of revolutionary change in the society as it destroys the traditional fabrics of good society.  Such an ideological framework is a deliberate strategy to avoid accountability and suppress citizenship rights and liberties. There is relentless attack on democratic and multicultural cultural ethos in politics; often led by governments with conformist outlooks devoid of conscience and compassion.

The contemporary conservative politics is a reaction against the aggrandisement of neoliberal capitalism, which consolidated wealth in the hands of few and marginalised the masses. The capitalist classes have formed an alliance with the conservative forces to further consolidate their power and wealth.  The government formed out of such an alliance does not represent the interests of the marginalised masses. As a result, the world is confronting miseries amidst plenty. The forward march of reactionary and authoritarian governments across the globe is based on the politics of maintaining social, cultural and religious order of the past in the name of national, ethnic and religious glory based on conquest and dominance of minorities and working-class population. Such irrational, illogical and authoritarian outlooks define conservative philosophical praxis.

The conservative governments use the state power to implement their authoritarian agenda of governance devoid of conscience and compassion. These forces are not only hostile to critical public opinion but also suppress any form of dissent within a democratic culture. Democracy dies its natural death without the voices of dissent and debates. The idea of mass obedience to authority is central to authoritarian governance model practiced by conservative governments across the world. The authoritarian regimes and their ideology of mass obedience kills the innate conscience and compassion within human beings. The idea of dominance, hierarchy and subjugation becomes the organising principles of authoritarian states and governments under which majority of people suffer. As a result, the banality of authoritarian evil becomes normal and natural in the society, which produces totalitarian leaders without conscience and compassion. Such leaders use every opportunity to lead and dominate the masses by using state power. The governments become hostage to such leaders and their ideological cult. The compassion and conscience tend to restrict individuals in the misuse of power but the authoritarian cult leaders do not have any such restrictions in use and abuse of power. The authoritarian leaders are revengeful, manipulative, unsympathetic and untrustworthy. These social and psychological characters are products of conservative and capitalist societies. From Americas, Africas to Europe and Asia, the world is witnessing such characteristics in leaders ruling these continents.

The pandemic fueled economic crisis is ravaging the world but the governments are mute spectators in USA, UK, India, Brazil, Iran, Mexico and many other countries. The leaders and the governments in these countries show little compassion and conscience in discharging their democratic responsibilities for their citizens. The global health crisis has revealed that these authoritarian regimes promote the propaganda of ‘nation first’ but in reality, these leaders betray the very people elect them to power. These governments and leadership stand with the capitalist class to further consolidate their wealth even during the global health and economic crises. The political and economic profiles of authoritarian governments show that these right-wing regimes are really without any form of human or animal conscience. The right-wing regimes and their leaders are motivated by fear and use it to rule the massed by spreading prejudice.  The aggressiveness in authoritarian leaders is a product of fear; the source of the desire to dominate with medieval mindset. These leaders use fake news and misleading information to manipulate and control the masses.

Why do people vote leaders and regimes without reason and conscience? Why do people support dictatorships? Why do people support their own subjugation? The Stockholm syndrome, political ignorance, illiteracy, poverty and love for strong leaders etc are some of the silly reasons based on superficial analysis. The alternative to such a right wing, reactionary and authoritarian shift in society, politics and economy needs dispassionate analysis on the causes of such a transformation. It is impossible to fight authoritarian regimes without understanding the foundations of their support and reasons behind the causes of its growth. The capitalist delusions and growth of anti-politics culture of entitlement led to the rise of authoritarian regimes with the help of reactionary religious and market forces.  In spite of flagrant erosion of democratic space and deepening of crises, the popularity of authoritarian regimes and their leaders did not decline. It is a serious cause of concern while reimagining alternatives. Foxy electoral strategies are not enough for radical social and political transformations to defeat authoritarian psychopaths. The survival of democratic, liberal, progressive and multicultural values depends on radical alternatives produced in impending people’s struggles. People’s struggles are incubators of ideas and inventories of alternatives. There is no other sustainable alternative to struggles based on compassion and conscience.

Royal commission into Australia’s bushfires promotes greater use of the military

Margaret Rees

The catastrophic “Black Summer” bushfires that ravaged south-eastern Australia from late July 2019 until February this year are currently the subject of a number of official investigations. These include the federal government’s Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements and several state government inquiries.

Described as an unprecedented “ecological disaster,” the bushfires killed 34 people, including nine firefighters on the fire front, and 445 others who suffered premature death from exposure to smoke.

Almost 6,000 homes and buildings were incinerated and close to 13.7 million hectares of land and 3.5 million hectares of natural forest areas burnt. An estimated one billion animals were killed. Almost 120 animal species and 471 plant species are in now serious danger with urgent action required to ensure they survive.

Remains of a home in Balmoral, New South Wales

Announcing the federal government’s royal commission in February, Prime Minister Scott Morrison stated that the “inquiry acknowledges climate change, [and] the broader impact of our summers getting longer, drier and hotter.”

Morrison is a long-time advocate of the coal industry. In mid-January and at the height of the catastrophic fires, he told the media these conditions were the “new normal” and that people should get used to it.

The Commission and Morrison’s ‘acknowledgement’ of climate change will not produce any fundamental change in Australia’s environmental policies and fire and emergency responses. It is an attempt to defuse deep-seated popular concerns over climate change seen in mass protests across Australia, prior to and during the bushfires.

Canberra has called this inquiry not in order to protect the population from the increasingly catastrophic bushfires. Rather it is to remove constitutional constraints on the use of the Australian military on home soil and the suspension of democratic rights in response to anything the government deems to be a national emergency.

The three commissioners chosen to head the six-month inquiry reflect this political agenda. Chairman Mark Binskin was the Australian Defence Force chief from 2014 to 2018; Dr Annabelle Bennett is a former Federal Court of Australia judge; and Professor Andrew Macintosh is a climate change legal expert from the Australian National University.

Nor will the inquiry expose those politically responsible for grossly inadequate response to the bushfires and the decades of government cost-cutting to fire and emergency services.

As Dr Bennett warned participating state government lawyers in an early session, the inquiry “is not a finger pointing Commission.” The inquiry’s “terms of reference” are silent about the gross lack of civilian resources, including the lack of modern fire-fighting equipment, professional firefighters and evacuation infrastructure.

The commission has heard early testimony from several scientific experts, including Dr Karl Braganza of the Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO senior climate-change research scientists, Dr Helen Cleugh and Dr Michael Grose who outlined the link between climate change and the bushfires.

Braganza explained the climate-change drivers producing longer and hotter summers and flammable bushland in Australia. These included the El Niño Southern Oscillation in the Pacific Ocean, the Indian Ocean Dipole and the Southern Annular Mode westerlies that circumnavigate the Antarctic.

Cleugh pointed out that these climate drivers were impacted by the direct effects of global warming. Grose said greenhouse gas emissions and ozone depletion over the stratosphere around Antarctica were also factors.

The hearing has heard harrowing accounts from some of the survivors who detailed the impossible conditions they endured. Caroline Peterson, a former ranger from Kangaroo Island in South Australia, spoke of “the fire that kept on giving,” which returned three separate times through burnt forest. The fire was so intense that her family home and other asbestos houses exploded in the heat.

Brian Windebank, a retired teacher, was holidaying with his wife at Mallacoota, a small beach resort in South East Victoria with only one access road. The couple and thousands of other holidaymakers and residents were cut off and trapped in the town by the approaching inferno. They were eventually evacuated by sea and air.

The input of survivors, however, has been minimised during hearings which have been dominated by testimony from military chiefs and high-ranking officials from various emergency, police and fire agencies from different states and territories.

At one point during the hearings commission, chair Binskin offered his thanks, “on behalf of the other commissioners,” for Australian Defence Force help during the fires. This assistance, he declared to witnesses Vice Chief of the ADF Admiral David Johnston and Chief of Joint Operations Lieutenant General Greg Bilton, was appreciated by “all of Australia.”

Admiral Johnston and Lieutenant General Bilton used military advertising films to promote the military’s “Operation Bushfire Assist.” The $87.9 million military operation involved 8,000 ADF personnel, including the callout of 2,500 reservists and 500 people from Australia’s defence force partners.

Military personnel were involved in clearing fire breaks and road access, repairing fences and transporting animal fodder, fuel, water and other supplies. Three amphibious ships were provided for disaster relief tasks, including the evacuation of residents and holiday makers from Mallacoota, as well as 26 helicopters and 41 fixed wing aircraft.

However, all this could have been carried out by civilian services if governments had expanded existing and created new vital infrastructure or made the advance preparations called for by emergency services experts in scores of previous government inquiries. Moreover, fire and emergency services that are almost entirely dependent on volunteers, have been progressively run down over decades by Liberal-National Coalition and Labor governments.

Like education and health, government funding of emergency services is tailored to the demands of the profit system, where everything, including human life, is determined by the dollar bottom line.

The Australian Defence Force by contrast is not just exempt from cost cutting but is provided vast amounts of money. Last month the Morrison government, backed by the Labor opposition, announced that $575 billion will be given to the military, including $270 billion for new military hardware, over the next decade.

When the Commission began its hearings the mainstream media gave coverage to the complaints of the Emergency Leaders for Climate Action (ELCA), a group of 33 former leaders of bushfire agencies, who came together in April 2019.

Alarmed at scientific warnings of a catastrophic bushfire season, ECLA members unsuccessfully attempted to rouse the Morrison government to invest in equipment and take action on climate change.

One member, Greg Mullins, a former NSW Fire and Rescue commissioner, told ABC TV that ECLA warnings to the government in 2019 of a bushfire catastrophe were ignored and that Canberra “was holding back money for [hiring fire-fighting] aircraft, and then it was too late.”

While this question was not directly addressed when Mullins testified at the commission, he said that Emergency Management Australia (EMA) had been subsumed into a federal government home affairs bureaucracy and that the government responses “during the bushfires was too slow and too late.”

Emergency services, he said, had been diluted “after 9/11 because the focus was on counter-terrorism… We would get about 15 minutes at the end of the meeting to talk about emergency management issues. So it was very much an afterthought in my view.”

Climate change, Mullins explained, was causing the increased frequency and severity of extreme weather events. “We need more help… the enemy being climate change [there are] insufficient resources to deal with this threat,” he said.

In mid-January, respected bushfire science expert Kevin Tollhurst wrote an op-ed comment for the Conversation pointing out that there have been 57 formal police inquiries, reviews and royal commissions related to bushfire and fire management since 1939.

“Do we need yet another?” Tollhurst asked, when many of the recommendations made by the 1939 Stretton Royal Commission, and others since, have “still not been fully implemented.”

The current royal commission is no different. It has little to do with combating catastrophic bushfires but is to justify the federal government mobilising the military and give it wide-ranging powers on home soil.

This is already underway since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic with soldiers being mobilised to try to plug holes in grossly inadequate health services. They will also be used to suppress growing opposition to the criminal negligence and back-to-work policies of state and federal governments.

The commission will provide an interim report on August 31 before presenting its final findings to the federal government on October 28.