Partial closures in New York City as infections spread throughout US schools

Renae Cassimeda

Throughout the United States, school reopenings have been a complete disaster. More than 30 K-12 educators have died since schools began reopening in late July, and at least 39,000 students and school employees have been infected across the country.

On October 1, one day after her 58th birthday, first grade bilingual teacher Olga Quiroga died after battling COVID-19. Quiroda taught at Funston Elementary and had worked in the Chicago Public School District (CPS) for over 30 years. Although CPS began the school year fully online for most students, Quiroga became infected after being forced to make a number of trips to her school for required pre-service workdays, including a back-to-school event where she met her students’ parents and handed out supplies for the upcoming academic year.

While sick at home, Quiroga continued to teach her students virtually as the school year began. After a week of worsening symptoms while teaching virtually, she was taken by her daughter to the emergency room and never left the hospital. There have now been nine reported deaths of CPS workers since the onset of the pandemic.

Teachers protest outside Franklin D. Roosevelt High School in New York City, October 2, 2020. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

Despite the surge in infections and deaths among educators across the country, major school districts that have started online are now pushing for the full resumption of in-person learning, which will vastly accelerate the spread of the pandemic.

In New York City, mass school reopenings combined with the easing of social distancing restrictions in recent weeks have led to a rapid rise in infections across the city. At least 145 teachers and 38 students have tested positive for COVID-19, and the average infection rate throughout the city has nearly doubled in the past week, from one to 1.75 percent in the past week.

On Sunday, Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that all non-essential businesses, as well as public and private schools, will close this Wednesday, October 7, in neighborhoods with a three percent infection rate for seven consecutive days. The closures will impact roughly half a million people across nine zip codes and encompass parts of at least 20 neighborhoods within the city, with roughly 100 public and 200 non-public schools closing in the largest school district in the country.

With well-grounded fears that the school openings are leading to a resurgence of the virus in the city, which has already lost 25,000 people to the deadly contagion, de Blasio is collaborating with the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) to try to get ahead of the growing demands for the complete shutdown of the district. The closure of the 1.1-million-student school district would be a major blow to back-to-school and back-to-work campaign spearheaded by the Trump administration with the support on the state and local level by Democrats like de Blasio and Governor Andrew Cuomo.

The number of public schools being closed is less than six percent of the city’s 1,722 public schools. The closures, moreover, are set to take effect Wednesday, not today, supposedly to allow students to ensure they have devices and receive instruction from teachers for remote learning on Monday and Tuesday. Without any scientific evidence, de Blasio insisted, “We do not see a nexus to the public schools.”

In nearby Long Island, New York—with 124 public school districts and 420,000 students—there is growing denunciations of the New York State Education Department (NYSED) for withholding information about the spread of infections. One teacher told the WSWS, “My doctor advised me not to return for in-person classes because I am at high risk. Shortly after the school year began, my district told me I could either physically return, even though the students I was assigned are all remote or take medical leave for the academic year. I know dozens of other teachers in the same situation.

“They try to justify forcing us back for in-person classes by saying that it’s about what’s best for the students. That’s a lie. There have already been positive cases among students and the response has been for teachers and students to just return the next day as if nothing happened.

“I support building rank-and-file safety committees. The unions are not only not doing anything to protect us, most teachers don’t even trust them because they’ve sold us out for so many years. We feel vulnerable because they keep us isolated. I think teachers need new organizations to defend our common interests.”

In Florida, Miami-Dade County Public School began in-person instruction today for pre-K through first grade, as well as students with disabilities. The school board made a last-minute decision last Tuesday to reopen schools after Florida’s right-wing Commissioner of Education Richard Corcoran demanded that the district reopen on October 5 or face up to $300 million in funding cuts. Similar to New York City and other districts, the rest of the student population will be phased in over the coming weeks. Similarly, Broward County Schools in Tallahassee and other districts will also reopen this week under a similar model.

According to the Florida Department of Health, a total of 4,689 COVID-19 cases have been tied to the reopening of Florida’s K-12 and post-secondary schools since September 6. Just this past week, over 1,300 students and staff have been quarantined in Central Florida public schools and Pinellas County Public Schools. Nevertheless, Governor Ron DeSantis stated Friday that closing schools in the spring might have been one of the nation’s biggest “public health mistakes.”

In Wisconsin, a major epicenter of the virus in the US, the death of two Wisconsin teachers in recent weeks has provoked enormous opposition among educators and parents to school reopenings. In response, teachers unions in Racine, Madison, Milwaukee, Kenosha and Green Bay have appealed to the Department of Health Services to prohibit in-person schooling. At the same time, the unions have made it clear they will take no action if their appeal is predictably rejected. Ohio teachers in Gahanna-Jefferson Public School District voted Thursday to strike on October 13 in opposition to lack of safety measures and instructional models to be implemented as schools reopen for in-person instruction. The district plans to bring back at least half of its student population this month and communicated to parents and the community that students who remain home will watch a live stream of the in-person class. Teachers argue that the proposed model for distance learning will compromise students’ learning and impose additional workload on teachers who will be responsible for teaching students both in-person and online.

In Washington, DC, thirteen schools within District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) will open face-to-face in the coming weeks, despite opposition from teachers who have expressed deep concerns over in-person learning. The district and city administration have responded by saying in-person instruction is voluntary, while DC mayor Muriel Bowser has called for a full reopening of schools by November. DCPS teachers protested outside Bowser’s home on Saturday, calling for a halt to the reopening plans.

In nearby Fairfax, Virginia, over 650 teachers in the district have been compelled to return for in-person instruction. Last week, teachers were given 48 hours to decide if they will return to their classrooms for face-to-face instruction starting today. Teachers and support staff were provided four choices: return in-person; submit an American with Disabilities Act request, if they are high-risk; request an unpaid leave of absence; or resign or retire.

The pandemic is being used to purge older, higher-paid teachers from the profession, sharply increase workloads for teachers forced to provide in-person and remote instruction simultaneously, and prepare an historic program of austerity, whether Trump or Biden is in the White House.

Last week, Detroit Federation of Teachers President Terrence Martin repeatedly said, “We are in a pandemic” to bully teachers into accepting a contract which will keep teachers’ wages roughly the same as they were in 1985 and to replace step increases for new hires, based on seniority, with merit pay schemes tied to testing and teacher evaluations. From Detroit, to New York City, to California and across the county, the unions are playing an absolutely criminal role in aiding this deadly policy, promoting the fraud that schools can be reopened safely while the pandemic spirals out of control.

Spanish court bars Catalan regional premier from holding public office

Alejandro López

Last week, Spain’s Supreme Court upheld an 18-month ban from public office and a €30,000 fine imposed on right-wing Catalan regional premier Quim Torra after the Catalan High Court convicted him of disobedience charges last December.

The decision was widely anticipated. According to the 133-page ruling, Torra disobeyed the Central Electoral Body (CEB) in an “intractable and stubborn” manner, by putting up a banner on a Catalan government building that read “Free political prisoners.” He then refused to take it down after being requested to do so by the CEB.

For the second time in three years, an elected Catalan premier has been ousted on bogus grounds by concerted efforts of the Spanish political establishment, the courts and the police. In October 2017, the right-wing Popular Party (PP) government of Mariano Rajoy had removed Carles Puigdemont and the entire Catalan government from office, with the support of the Socialist Party (PSOE) and Podemos. It used article 155 of the Constitution, claiming Puigdemont had violated the law by holding a Catalan independence referendum.

Regardless of who holds power in Madrid—whether the PP or, as now, the PSOE and the “left populist” Podemos party—the ruling class pursues the same agenda. It uses the Catalan national question to shift politics to the right, build a police state, and promote far-right forces. In this, it must be said, the bankruptcy and reactionary role of Catalan nationalism only helps Madrid in this campaign.

The Supreme Court dismissed an appeal by Torra’s lawyer, based on the argument that a person can only be deprived of public office and political participation after committing a serious crime. It also ruled that it is itself an “impartial court,” even when many of the Supreme Court judges sitting in the case had sat on the Catalan referendum leaders’ trial.

In this trial, it sentenced nine Catalan political leaders to between nine and 13 years in prison for charges of sedition and misuse of public funds. Torra’s banner, “free the political prisoners,” tried to appeal to widespread anger in Catalonia over the dictatorial policies of the Spanish central government, backed by the European Union (EU).

The main architects of this repression have been the PSOE and Podemos. The PSOE, its ministers and Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez have supported the Supreme Court’s decision, demanding Torra call for new elections in the region. They described his removal from office as “opening a new period for Catalonia.”

Podemos has virtually remained silent, except for the Podemos spokesperson in parliament, Jaume Asens. He absolved Podemos, claiming this was part of a right-wing operation, calling the decision “absurd” and that the resulting “unjust” sentence is but one of many “more unjust sentences” of a judiciary “kidnapped by the right.”

Podemos’ position was exposed in the Basque regional parliament, however, when the Basque nationalist parties PNV and Bildu attempted to get the “left populists” to back a joint statement defending Torra. The document called on the Spanish state to “stop criminalizing legitimate political demands and respect the exercise of fundamental rights and basic freedoms.” However, Podemos refused to sign.

In fact, Podemos participated in the anti-Catalan campaign from the beginning. It supported the show trial of Catalan secessionist leaders and then called on the Spanish people to accept their sentencing to lengthy prison terms for organising peaceful protests. They supported the brutal police crackdown on mass protests against the show trial last year, which left hundreds injured.

Last year, Podemos leader and current Deputy Prime Minister Pablo Iglesias pledged “full loyalty” to the PSOE on all state questions, including state repression in Catalonia. Once the Catalan leaders were handed their draconian sentences, and as the streets of major cities in Catalonia filled with tens of thousands of demonstrators, Iglesias said: “Everyone must abide by the law and accept the verdict.”

Torra pointedly noted the role of the PSOE-Podemos government after his removal from office, asking: “Where are the airs of democracy and justice that were supposed to come from the most progressive left-wing government in history?”

The International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) is unequivocally hostile to Catalan nationalism and the Catalan regional government. This institution was inserted into the Spanish political system during the Transition to parliamentary democracy following the death of fascist dictator general Francisco Franco in 1975. It was part of the sordid deal done between the Francoites and the Stalinists, social democrats and Catalan nationalists to block a socialist revolution by the working class.

The pro-capitalist, bourgeois-separatist agenda of the Catalan nationalists aims to divide workers across Spain on national lines. Their support for NATO, the European Union and the implementation of austerity underlines their hostility to the working class. Indeed, Torra, while he worked as a right-wing journalist before becoming premier, wrote pieces in defence of Catalan nationalist death squads which killed militant workers in the 1930s.

The removal of elected figures like Torra must nonetheless be opposed. This brazen violation of democratic principles is part of a broader anti-Catalan campaign that strengthens a police apparatus aimed above all at the working class. This is the manifestation in Spain of a drive by capitalist governments internationally towards police-state rule against an upsurge of the class struggle, and that has only intensified after the outbreak of the pandemic.

The Catalan nationalists cannot and will not oppose this repression, as they fear the working class more than they do a police state in Madrid.

Torra’s own Together for Catalonia (JxCat) and the Catalan Republican Left (ERC), the party of the new caretaker regional premier, Pere Aragonès, have de facto accepted the ruling agaist Torra. They will call elections for February 2021. Torra will also try to appeal to the EU, which has already backed Madrid’s anti-Catalan campaign.

Protests broke out last week, gathering around 1,000 people in Barcelona, far from the hundreds of thousands in the past years. A few bins were burnt and pigs’ heads thrown at the police.

The Catalan nationalists decided not to call mass protests. The pseudo-left Candidatures of Popular Unity (CUP) have been key to this demobilisation. A CUP lawmaker in parliament appealed for a new “strategic agreement” with the main Catalan bourgeois parties, offering them a “national and political agreement” to build a new unity of secessionist forces to “force the state to accept a democratic resolution.”

In fact, they fear anything tapping into social anger that could erupt outside of their control—like Podemos itself, which recently cancelled demonstrations it had called amid mounting protests against the right-wing Madrid regional government’s herd immunity policy.

The CUP itself advances a completely demoralized line. One former CUP lawmaker, Benet Salellas, told El Confidencial it is hard to “assess the situation in this context” of COVID-19, “but I think we are facing a change in the cycle due to the perception that the mobilisations are having very little impact on the state.”

Tens of thousands of UK COVID-19 cases and contacts went unreported

Thomas Scripps

The UK recorded 12,872 new coronavirus cases on Saturday and 22,961 new cases Sunday. These figures included 15,841 cases registered between September 25 and October 2 which were not previously reported because an Excel spreadsheet containing the data became too large and failed to update.

There are two clear conclusions which flow from this fiasco: the pandemic is continuing to accelerate rapidly across the UK, and the government’s test and trace system, six months into operation, is completely dysfunctional.

In the last week, the media was filled with reports that the increase in COVID-19 infections in the UK had “levelled off” or was “slowing”. Not one organisation sought to investigate how this seeming miracle had occurred. It was left to the government to admit that the figures used to support these claims were wildly inaccurate—out by some 4,000 a day.

The truth is that the seven-day rolling average for daily new cases has increased from 4,964 on September 25 (when cases began to go unreported) to around 9,500 as of Monday morning—rapidly approaching the peak averages of 11,000 and 12,000 recently recorded by Spain and France. Another 12,594 cases were reported in the UK on Monday evening.

Medical staff receive training on how to put on and remove personal protective equipment to avoid being infected or transmitting coronavirus, at the Nightingale Hospital North West, in Manchester, northern England. Hospital. (AP Photo/Jon Super, File)

According to the COVID-19 Symptom Study app, whose data is increasing being relied upon by the government as more accurate than its own, there are in reality more than 20,000 new cases in the UK each day. The reproduction rate ( R number) of the virus nationally has increased for the fourth consecutive week, up to between 1.3 and 1.6, but these figures are trailing by two to three weeks current infection rates. The 7-day average for COVID-19 patients admitted to UK hospitals has increased from a low of less than 100 a day at the end of August to 380 as of September 26.

The north of England is suffering significantly worse rates of infection than the national average. Manchester’s infections increased to 495.6 cases per 100,000 in the week to October 1, from 223.2 the week before, according to official figures. Liverpool climbed from 287.1 to 456.4, Knowsley from 300.3 to 452.1, Newcastle from 256.6 to 399.6, Nottingham from 52 to 283.9, Leeds from 138.8 to 274.5 and Sheffield from 91.8 to 233.

Spiraling case numbers in these towns and cities highlight the fact that so-called “local lockdowns”—comprising restrictions on household mixing and 10pm curfews for pubs and bars—are nothing of the kind. In the majority of cases there has been no public health benefit whatsoever to measures which leave schools, shops, workplaces, and public transport untouched and which leave people required to self-isolate in dire financial straits.

No data has been produced by the government to support its exclusive focus on household mixing and social contact. On the other hand, there is ample evidence of mass outbreaks linked to pubs, workplaces, and universities, and of rising numbers of infections in schools.

The Guardian reported last Thursday that 11 out of 16 towns and cities placed under long-term restrictions nine weeks ago saw their infection rates at least double. Wigan, Bolton and Bury, placed under restrictions on July 31, have seen cases quadruple since.

The other geographic feature which unites areas seeing the largest rise in recent infections is the presence of large universities. Northumbria University in Newcastle currently has an outbreak of 770 cases, Manchester University over 380 and Sheffield University 474 students and five staff. In the south of the country, Exeter saw its number of virus cases triple over the course of last week—taking its infection rate higher than the national average for the first time—following outbreaks at its local university.

Besides giving a completely false picture of the spread of the disease, the failure to report 15,841 cases has left tens of thousands of their potentially infected contacts untraced for up to a week. Their details were only passed on to contact tracers by 1 o'clock on Saturday morning. The likely number of close contacts missed is around 50,000. Even when cases are recorded, less than 40 percent of in-person tests are returned within 24 hours and 2.9 percent of home tests. Three in ten close contacts of infected people are never reached by tracers.

The universal response of the government and the corporate media to the announcement of this epidemiological explosion has been to minimise the threat to life, in line with the ruling class’ homicidal policy of herd immunity. Reports in the press have largely written the event off as a “technical glitch” which sowed “confusion”—rather than confirmation of the catastrophic trajectory the UK is set on—and continue to focus on the “good news” that “the infection is still most prevalent in younger people,” in the words of ITV’s Robert Peston.

On Sunday, Prime Minister Boris Johnson told the population to “live fearlessly but with common sense” and, in a revival of his summertime slogan, that he had “hope… things can be significantly different by Christmas.” He insisted that it was “right to reopen the economy.”

This policy, dictated by the profit concerns of big business and the banks, has set the limits to the government’s fraudulent new “three-tier system” for coronavirus restrictions. The highest alert level will only be considered when the virus is already far out of control and stops well short of the national lockdown begun in March, leaving open schools, universities, and non-essential businesses outside of leisure and hospitality. This comes as a leaked Public Health England document seen by the Observer reveals that even the March-April lockdown left the virus “endemic” in deprived areas of Britain.

The feeble three-tier proposal is meeting the resistance of an increasingly vocal section of the Tory party, however, who want an immediate end to all restrictions on companies’ ability to pursue profit at the cost workers’ lives and health. Backbenchers around Tory MP Sir Graham Brady are preparing to challenge the government over the introduction of any additional public health measures.

Chancellor Rishi Sunak is also being looked to as a counterweight to what these frothing right-wingers consider to be Johnson’s abundance of caution. In a recent interview with the Sun, he repeatedly described the 10pm curfew on pubs and bars as “frustrating” and said he had “no regrets” about the Eat Out to Help Out scheme linked to rises in infections.

The Labour Party remains utterly beholden to these reactionary forces. Shadow Health Secretary Jonathan Ashworth described the weekend as “shambolic” before stumbling over his own party’s record in an interview with BBC journalist Andrew Marr.

Marr asked, “[Labour leader] Keir Starmer said on Thursday, 'it was an inevitable risk that when we got our children back into school and our students back at university the infection rate might go up. That was a known risk.' So why, at the time, did he say, 'I expect them back in school, no ifs no buts, no equivocation?’ You were trying to have your cake and eat it.”

Ashworth stammered a denial before saying “you’ve always got to manage different risk.”

In reality, the only “risk” the ruling class are concerned with is to their bottom lines. The bipartisan reopening of the economy, made possible by the return to school, is producing a devastating resurgence of the pandemic which will cost hundreds of lives a day even before the winter season sets in. Workers in all sectors must take their safety and that of their communities into their own hands through the formation of rank-and-file safety committees in every workplace and the preparation of a general strike against the Johnson government’s deliberate endangerment of lives in the interests of the financial oligarchy.

UK plans to detain refugees on prison ships

Robert Stevens

Britain’s Tory government is drawing up proposals to remove migrants and asylum seekers to remote offshore locations—either within other countries or in UK waters—the moment they reach the UK.

Documents seen by the Financial Times, Times and Guardian reveal that the government’s “hostile environment” against immigrants and asylum seekers is to be stepped up with a raft of sadistic proposals. Under one of these, asylum seekers would be sent to the Ascension Islands, a volcanic rock in the Atlantic 4,000 miles away from Britain.

According to the leaks, asylum seeker policy will be closely modelled on the Australian system of “remote detention”, with refugees forcibly sent to offshore islands. The policy—described chillingly as the “Pacific Solution”— has been enforced by successive Labor and Liberal governments since 2001.

Tony Abbott delivering an address last month to the UK's Policy Exchange think tank (photo: screenshot from Policy Exchange video of the event)

Australia’s refugee prison camps have long been condemned by refugee and human rights organisations. In the years from 2010 to January 2019 there were 37 deaths in its detention centres, both the “offshore” facilities on Manus Island and Nauru and “onshore” camps on the mainland and Christmas Island, an Indian Ocean outpost.

Commenting on the UK documents, Rossella Pagliuchi-Lor, the UK representative of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, said “This is the Australian model and I think we have already seen that the Australian model has brought about incredible suffering on people who are guilty of no more than seeking asylum.”

Home Secretary Priti Patel has already announced a post-Brexit Australian points based system aimed at massively restricting immigration post-Brexit.

The new proposals are of a piece with Boris Johnson’s recent decision to appoint former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott as a leading Brexit trade adviser to his government. The Financial Times notes that Abbott, who oversaw Australia’s offshoring policy as prime minister (September 2013-September 2015), recently held discussions with Patel.

The newspaper reported on September 29 that Patel “asked officials to explore the construction of an asylum processing centre on Ascension Island, a British overseas territory more than 4,000 miles from the UK in the south Atlantic, for migrants coming to Britain.”

“The home secretary’s officials also looked at the possibility of building an asylum centre on St Helena, part of the same island group.” St Helena is 800 miles from Britain.

The newspaper said that the idea of using Ascension Island for this purpose had been ruled out, but cited Whitehall “allies” of Patel, one of whom stated, “We have been looking at how other countries have been dealing with this issue… We have been scoping everything. No decisions have been made by ministers.”

The following day, a government spokesman said of the leaked documents, “We are developing plans to reform our illegal migration and asylum policies so we can keep providing protection to those who need it, while preventing abuse of the system and criminality… As part of this work we’ve been looking at what a whole host of other countries do to inform a plan for the United Kingdom. And that work is ongoing.”

For months, the government has been ramping up its anti-immigration agenda, seizing on the arrival of a few thousand desperate people in small boats and dinghies via the Channel between France and the UK. The vast majority of those making the perilous journey are from countries devastated by imperialist wars and proxy wars supported by the UK, including in Afghanistan Iraq, Syria, Libya and Sudan. The government’s rhetoric is backed up by a daily stream of filth vomited up by a venal tabloid press denouncing “illegal” migrants.

The Times published details of other plans under consideration in which “Migrants seeking asylum in Britain would be processed on disused ferries moored off the [UK] coast…” It reported that “One option being considered is to buy retired ferries and convert them into asylum-processing centres.” These could be located in a remote location such as off the Scottish coast. Also being discussed is the “possibility of building a processing centre on a Scottish island.”

Requisitioning ferries that would effectively serve as offshore prison ships is a favoured policy among those drafting proposals. The Times noted, “A disused 40-year-old ferry can be bought from Italy for £6 million. It could house 1,400 people in 141 cabins. A disused cruise ship, at present moored in Barbados, would cost £116 million and could accommodate 2,417 people in 1,000 cabins.”

Literally nothing is off the table in the plans of the British ruling class against defenceless migrants and asylum seekers, with the Times reporting that the “Home Office held discussions about moving migrants to decommissioned oil platforms in the North Sea for processing.”

The Guardian said the leaked documents were marked “official” and “sensitive” and were produced last month. They included advice to Downing Street by the Foreign Office which had been asked to “offer advice on possible options for negotiating an offshore asylum processing facility similar to the Australian model in Papua New Guinea and Nauru”. The documents, the Guardian states, “suggest the government has for weeks been working on ‘detailed plans’ that include cost estimates of building asylum detention camps on the south Atlantic islands, as well as other proposals to build such facilities in Moldova, Morocco and Papua New Guinea.”

The Johnson government is already pushing through legislation under which government ministers and the repressive agencies of the state will operate outside the rule of law. The asylum documents make clear how far they are prepared to go in this direction. Were such camps to be set up in other countries they would go further even than the Australian system in denying migrants and asylum seekers rights they are guaranteed under international law.

One document outlines that Australia’s system is “based on migrants being intercepted outside Australian waters”, allowing Australia to claim no immigration obligations to individuals under international law. But Britain’s proposals would mean relocating asylum seekers who “have arrived in the UK and are firmly within the jurisdiction of the UK for the purposes of the ECHR and Human Rights Act 1998”. Johnson himself is involved in framing the proposals, with the newspaper reporting, “One document says the request for advice on third country options for detention facilities came from ‘the PM’.”

A major problem, according to the documents, is that setting up camps in far flung locations such as Ascension Island or St Helena would be “extremely expensive and logistically complicated”. The Guardian reported that it would cost £220 million to build a camp with 1,000 beds, with running costs of £200 million. One document notes the “significant” legal, diplomatic and practical obstacles involved in building a camp on Ascension, including the existence there of “sensitive military installations”.

Regarding St Helena, the Foreign Office proposals amount to jackboot diplomacy and criminality being plotted at the highest levels of the state. The authors of one document write, “In relation to St Helena we will need to consider if we are willing to impose the plan if the local government object” [emphasis added].

Locating detention centres in other countries, not British overseas territories, is not “favoured” by the government, one document notes, but it may “wish to explore [the option] in case it presents easier pathways to an offshore facility”.

Proposals to repeal legislation in order to “discourage” and “deter” migrants from entering the UK—and to kick them out as soon as they enter—are also revealed in the documents. Home Office legal advice to Downing Street would require “disapplying sections 77 and 78 of the Nationality Immigration and Asylum Act 2002 so that asylum seekers can be removed from the UK while their claim or appeal is pending.”

In what is described as a “likely legislative change” by the Guardian, another document reveals Home Office advice that a new law would require “defining what we mean by a clandestine arrival (and potentially a late claim) and create powers allowing us to send them offshore for the purposes of determining their asylum claims”.

The discussions underway on the necessity to drive back migrants was conveniently “leaked” to the media just before the Tories annual conference was to begin, with Patel’s speech Sunday—titled “Fixing our broken asylum system”—made a centrepiece of the event. Patel referred to “illegal” migrants no less than eight times in her speech to the Tory faithful, with the FT noting that the Tories’ right-wing base supported sending asylum seekers 4,000 miles away by a nearly two-thirds majority.

Repressive anti-immigration policies, in Britain and Australia alike, have been built up over decades by all the political representatives of the ruling class.

The Tories are building on a reactionary framework already established by the European Union. According to the FT, “Patel’s team looked at the idea, considered by the EU, of creating a centre for processing asylum claims in north Africa so that migrants could be screened before making the hazardous trip to Britain.”

Also being considered, according another document leaked to the Financial Times, is the construction of “floating walls in the English Channel to block asylum seekers in small boats.” The Home Office has consulted “Maritime UK, a trade group, to discuss erecting temporary ‘marine fencing’ in one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world.” Similar fencing is being considered by Greece’s government, which already has in place a series of concentration camps on its mainland and islands--in agreement with Turkey and the UK—in which tens of thousands of refugees and asylum seekers are detained in horrific conditions.

The FT drew attention to the fact that the first British government to consider sending asylum seekers to foreign countries for “processing” was Blair’s 1997 Labour government. “Tony Blair’s government considered a similar idea—including a potential processing centre in Tanzania—in the early 2000s, but quickly concluded it was unfeasible.”

Pandemic exposes Australian employers’ exploitation of young backpackers

Michael Smith

A sharp drop in the number of young international backpackers in Australia due to the COVID-19 pandemic has created a “labour crisis” for agricultural, tourism and other employers that have relied heavily on them as super-exploited cheap labour.

Wages and conditions are so poor throughout entire industries that for decades major employers and labour hire contractors have depended increasingly on “working holiday maker” visa holders and overseas workers on other temporary visas to extract profits.

Successive governments, both Liberal-National Coalition and Labor Party, have created and extended these visa programs to allow employers to impose shocking conditions of low wages, backbreaking conditions and other abuses on visiting young people.

Backpackers at Queensland farm (Credit: Olivia Chauveau/Facebook)

Recent media investigations and reports have highlighted systemic under-payment, wage theft and accommodation rip-offs, as well as sexual harassment. These practices have flourished despite a series of government and parliamentary inquiries.

An Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) report titled, “There are no human rights here,” revealed some of the abuses occurring under the federal government’s Working Holiday Maker (WHM) visa scheme.

One backpacker, Elin, said her piece rate payments sometimes equated to as low as $2.50 an hour. A subcontractor had made sexual advances, and she had been asked to post job ads on Facebook groups targeting Asian workers, with a $100 commission if they took the offer.

Another ABC report featured Kiah Flower, a backpacker from the US who lost her restaurant job at Queensland’s Airlie Beach, due to the pandemic. She then got a strawberry-planting job near the regional city of Bundaberg through a labour hire company which offered accommodation. She said she was receiving less than the minimum wage and could not afford her rent.

Under the WHM visa scheme for young people aged 18 to 31, they must work in designated regional areas and industries for 88 days if they want to apply for a second year visa.

Merle Quaak, from the Netherlands, arrived earlier this year. She accepted the first job she could find in order to complete her 88 days of farm work. This was on a piece-rate contract picking tomatoes and she ended up receiving $111 for seven days’ work. She then found another job in a packing shed with an hourly wage rate, but her pay slips were inaccurate.

Another backpacker, Ellie, from Europe said her labour hire provider submitted different names for tax purposes, changed her name, and submitted false claims of superannuation contributions on many of her payslips during her tomato picking job in Bundaberg from April to June 2020.

These instances highlight employers’ use of illegal false record keeping and pay slips in order to manipulate records. This makes it easy for labour hire companies to shut down and restart operations under different names, a process termed “phoenixing.”

Backpackers are highly vulnerable to exploitation under this scheme. They can become locked in a cycle of debt with their sub-contractor, hostel owner and or farmer, and in some cases have their passport or wages held at ransom.

There is also a six-month cap on backpackers staying with the same employer, yet workers must be with an employer for that period to file an unfair dismissal claim with the “Fair Work” authorities. This lack of protection against dismissal discourages visa holders from raising safety or wage theft concerns.

Yet the only response of the political establishment to the abuse exposures has been to expand such programs and extend them to jobless workers and school leavers to overcome the loss of about half the backpacker workforce because of the pandemic.

An interim report by the latest parliamentary inquiry, currently being conducted by the bipartisan Joint Standing Committee on Migration, said WHM visa holders are being employed in a wide range of industries beyond fruit-picking, including in health services and nursing homes. They “provide a vital labour source in the agriculture, horticulture, food processing, tourism, hospitality, health and aged care sectors.”

The interim report, released this month, emphasised the demands of agricultural employers for new sources of cheap labour. It stated: “Given the number of WHM in the country fell from approximately 140,000 in March 2020 to 70,000 in June 2020, the NFF [National Farmers’ Federation] stated that ‘the industry will be confronted with a labour crisis, the likes of which it has never seen before.’”

The NFF told the parliamentary committee that between 20 and 60 percent of some farm workers are made up of people on the Working Holiday Maker visa.

The committee, which includes Labor and Greens representatives, recommended that Prime Minister Morrison’s Coalition government urgently develop and implement a “Have a Gap Year at Home Campaign” to attract young workers, particularly school leavers and university graduates, to undertake regional work. It said the campaign should “appeal to young Australians’ patriotism and their sense of adventure.”

Another recommendation includes allowing workers on JobSeeker unemployment benefits to retain their poverty-line payments while taking low-paid agricultural and horticultural work.

How low the wages are was indicated by a submission to the inquiry by AUSVEG, the peak employers’ body for the vegetable and potato industries. It complained that JobSeeker payments were acting as a disincentive for jobless workers to pick crops.

AUSVEG said “many growers have reported that they’ve had workers collect their final pay cheques and leave because they’d rather go home and receive the JobSeeker payment than work on the farm. To put it in perspective, after tax there’s only about a $250 per fortnight difference in take-home pay for a level 1 on the horticultural award to that of the JobSeeker payment.”

Last month, the government cut the JobSeeker benefit by $300 a fortnight to around $800, in a deliberate move to force unemployed workers into such work, or back into unsafe conditions amid the worsening global pandemic.

The government has also launched a pilot program of bringing up to 200 workers from Vanuatu, a small impoverished former French colony in the Pacific, into the Northern Territory to pick mangoes.

Farming is one of the most dangerous occupations in Australia, accounting for 21 percent of workplace fatalities. The employers profit from a widespread lack of regulations and one of the most poorly regulated labour hire industries in the world.

An official Fair Work Ombudsman “Harvest Trail” inquiry, which ran from August 2014 to November 2018, found a multitude of breaches of the Fair Work Act, with more than $1 million in stolen wages affecting over 2,500 workers. However, there have been no significant changes. Instead, the parliamentary elite is moving to expand the super-exploitation.

Armenian-Azerbaijan war turns Caucasus, Central Asia, Russia into a powder keg

Clara Weiss

The war between Armenia, whose population is Christian, and Azerbaijan, a predominantly Muslim country, in the South Caucasus has turned the entire region into a military and ethnic-religious powder keg.

The war began on September 27, when Azerbaijan launched a major offensive, involving heavy artillery, tanks and warplanes, against the Armenian-controlled enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. Both Baku and Yerevan have now bombed major cities, and civilian casualties are estimated to be in the hundreds.

Military analyst Leonid Nersisyan told the Russian Nezavisimaya Gazetalast week that the scale of the fighting was unprecedented, and that the military losses incurred in a single day already went beyond what occurred during the war of 1992-1994.

Video purporting to show an attack on an Armenian position. (Screen capture from video provided by the Azerbaijan Defense Ministry)

In an address to the nation on October 4, Azerbaijan’s president, Ilham Aliyev, declared that his country would not stop the offensive until Armenia formally agrees to withdraw its forces from Azerbaijani territory. He also demanded a public apology from Armenia. These conditions are generally deemed unacceptable to Armenia.

On Monday, Iran announced a peace plan, offering itself as a mediator between the two warring sides. However, the Russian press reported that Baku and Turkey, which is heavily backing Azerbaijan, are preparing for a prolonged war that might eventually draw in both Russia and Iran. Russia has an important military base in Armenia, and the war threatens to cut off supply routes to this base.

The war has major implications for Europe, Russia and the Middle East, as it directly intersects with the conflicts in the Middle East and Northern Africa that have been ignited by the intervention of US imperialism in the past decades.

War between Azerbaijan and Armenia over the Nagorno Karabakh enclave first broke out in 1988. It was directly connected to the push by the Stalinist bureaucracy toward capitalist restoration in the Soviet Union, which was accompanied by the whipping up of extreme nationalist and separatist sentiments. The war lasted over six years, killing an estimated 40,000 people and displacing hundreds of thousands.

By virtue of its geographic position as a bridge between Europe, the Black Sea and the Middle East, the energy-rich Caucasus has long been a hotspot for geopolitical rivalries. Since the break-up of the USSR in 1991, the religious and ethnic tensions in the region, which had been exacerbated by decades under the rule of the Stalinist bureaucracy, have systematically been exploited, especially by the US and its allies, to further their interests.

Today, these conflicts are deeply enmeshed with the US-led wars in the Middle East. Initial reports that thousands of Islamist mercenaries from Syria and Libya are being deployed on the side of Azerbaijan have been confirmed by French President Emmanuel Macron. He suggested that the Islamist fighters are entering the Caucasus through Turkey, which has also been heavily involved in the wars in Syria and Libya. The arming and training of Islamist militias has been a key component of the strategy of Washington in the civil war in Syria.

Moreover, over the past decade, Azerbaijan has been closely integrated into US and Israeli war preparations. The Russian press noted that the Azeri missiles that have destroyed civilian targets in Armenia have all been manufactured by Azad Systems, a company co-owned by the Azeri Defense Ministry and the Israeli company Aeronautics Defense Systems. The Trump administration granted Azerbaijan aid worth $100 million in 2018-2019, up from $3 million the year before.

Location of Nagorno-Karabakh

However, statements from the White House have left Washington’s position on the war unclear. The rapid escalation of the war in the Caucasus coincided with a week that was dominated in Washington by Trump’s public threats of a coup in November, followed shortly thereafter by the news that Trump and an ever-growing number of White House personnel have been infected with the coronavirus.

Meanwhile, in France, calls are growing for Paris to take the side of Armenia.

Iran, like Russia, has refrained from openly taking sides, insisting on negotiations and a ceasefire. Russian media reports suggest that there are growing anti-Armenian sentiments within Iran, whose population is predominantly Muslim and includes 20 million ethnic Azeris, a fifth of the total population. The vast majority of them live in the north of Iran, which directly borders Azerbaijan. There are also an estimated 150,000-300,000 ethnic Armenian Christians living in Iran.

Both Turkey and Azerbaijan have portrayed the war as one in defense of the Muslim world and Muslim values against the onslaught of Christian Armenia. Russia itself is home to a Muslim minority of about 14 million people (10 percent of the total population), many of whom live in the North Caucasus.

In an indication of just how explosive the Kremlin considers the situation, all official statements have been limited to a call for a ceasefire and negotiations between the two sides. According to Nezavismaya Gazeta, President Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov have taken matters into their own hands and don’t want other officials interfering in their negotiations.

A piece published by the think tank journal Russia in Global Affairs, whose authors have close ties to the Kremlin, stressed that the war in the Caucasus broke out on the fifth anniversary of the beginning of Russia’s military involvement in the civil war in Syria. It noted: “One of the tasks of Russia at the time was to contain the threat of Islamist terrorism and prevent it from coming closer to its borders. However, now…fighters from Syria and Libya are fighting in Karabakh.”

The journal advocated a negotiated settlement with Ankara in order to prevent a further escalation of the war and limit the bolstering of Turkey’s influence. It noted that “perhaps the main task of Erdogan consists in creating a mechanism for mutual cooperation with Russia over Karabakh. The series of deals between Putin and Erdogan on the southern flank of the Russian borders in recent years have been very beneficial to both sides.”

It pointed out that even though Turkey was a NATO member, recent years have shown that Ankara “is no longer ready to play the junior partner of the Americans in the broader region from Northern Africa and the Balkans to the Middle East, the Caucasus and Central Asia, which it [Turkey] historically has seen as ‘its own.’” The piece argued that Moscow should try to slow Ankara’s offensive, create the basis for a ceasefire between the warring sides and strengthen the role of the Minsk group of the OSCE—which does not include Turkey—and then find a way “to politely say ‘nyet’ [no] in Turkish.”

The central fear of the Kremlin is that the war on its southern borders and especially the presence of Islamist fighters could reignite long-simmering regionalist, ethnic and religious conflicts within its own borders. Just to the north of Armenia, in the predominantly Muslim North Caucasus, the Kremlin fought two bloody wars against a US-backed Chechen separatist movement from 1994 to 2009 to prevent the secession of the region from the Russian Federation. The wars resulted in the death of about a tenth of the Chechen population and have left the region in shambles.

Fears of ethnic and regional conflicts in Russia have already been heightened in recent months as major protests under regionalist banners have broken out in Khabarovsk, a city in Russia’s economically underdeveloped Far East. The US- and German-backed liberal opposition is systematically encouraging these regionalist and separatist sentiments and tendencies.

Moreover, on Russia’s western border, the regime of Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus has been shaken by mass protests since August, raising the specter of his replacement by a government aligned more directly with NATO and the EU. At the same time, the civil war in East Ukraine on Russia’s border, which was triggered by the US- and German-backed coup in February 2014 in Kiev, continues to rage.

The Russian oligarchy, which emerged out of the Stalinist bureaucracy that betrayed the 1917 October Revolution and destroyed the USSR, has no way out of an unfolding catastrophe that it itself has helped create.

For the working class, the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan poses enormous dangers. The only path to halt this war and avert the threat of much broader ethnic and military conflicts lies in the struggle for socialism. This fight must be consciously based on the lessons of the struggle of Trotskyism against Stalinism.

Protests erupt in Chile after police throw 16-year-old off bridge

Mauricio Saavedra

Protests and demonstrations erupted over the weekend in Chile after video footage surfaced showing a Carabinero Special Forces police officer pushing a 16-year-old youth off the Pio Nono Bridge in Santiago.

On late Friday afternoon, nurse technicians, who have been protesting for a month for professional recognition, improved working conditions and salary increases, were joined by a spontaneous demonstration of hundreds of youth, indigenous and other social groups in the lead-up to a referendum to discard the military dictatorship’s constitution, scheduled for October 25.

Protest over police attack, banners read "State Assassins" and "He didn't fall, the cops pushed him". (Credit: De Frente)

By 7 p.m., the Carabineros and a squadron of Special Forces set upon the protesters with water cannon and tear gas, and made dozens of arrests. At about 7:30 p.m., as Special Forces were chasing a section of the protesters over the bridge, an officer rushed 16-year-old Anthony Araya with such force that he pushed him over bridge’s railing. The youth fell head first into the shallow Mapocho River, 5 meters below. Suffering severe head trauma, he remains in critical but stable condition.

For minutes the officers looked down upon the seemingly lifeless body lying face down in the riverbed but made no attempt to lend aid to the critically injured youth. Even while the health brigade, firemen and emergency services were initiating a rescue, police continued to fire tear gas, hindering their work.

As news of the incident began to circulate online and in the media, the Carabineros issued an initial statement denying all responsibility for what they call a “lamentable accident.” The national press and networks reiterated the official message claiming that the youth “lost his balance on the railing” after a police officer “tried to stop” him.

As questioning of the official line continued to spread online, Lt. Col. Rodrigo Soto of the East Santiago Prefecture issued a far more qualified denial to the press: “What the Carabineros…absolutely deny is that this person was grabbed by the feet or thrown into the river with a water cannon as witnesses on social networks invented. Fortunately there is a video that shows that this unfortunate accident occurred in a context of intense detention of people who were causing disorders. ...”

Anthony Araya (Credit: Facebook page of Faby Malio)

Within minutes, video footage taken by Venezuelan state-run media Telesur, showing in slow motion the moment when the Carabineros pushed the youth off the bridge, went viral on social media, further incensing the population. Caserolazos (the banging of pots and pans) carried on into Friday night. Images of the bodies of victims of the military dictatorship thrown into the Mapocho river in the 1970s were placed side by side with the image of Anthony Araya’s motionless, bloodied body lying in the same river.

In the following days, protests were organized in various of the capital’s working-class communes, as well as in the city center. The boy’s parents were greeted with a demonstration outside the hospital where he was undergoing surgery. The vigil, as with the other protests, was dispersed with water cannon.

At no point on Friday did Chile’s billionaire president, Sebastian Piñera, or his interior minister, Victor Perez—who served in Augusto Pinochet’s civil-military dictatorship—or Carabineros director Mario Rozas, utter a word of support to the youth or his family, or condemn the actions of the paramilitary police. The contrast between their unbridled hostility toward any expression of working class opposition, on the one hand, and their enthusiastic support for actions of the ultra-right, on the other, is as sharp as black and white.

Just over a month ago, truck owners barricaded arterial roads at strategic locations cutting the supply of goods and perishables, in an attempt to force congress to pass draconian police state measures. The truck owners’ associations, with a track record for putschist activity—most infamously the CIA-backed lorry owners strike of 1972 that sought to topple the government of Salvador Allende—were aided in their seditious actions by Carabineros who regulated the flow of traffic for them. Similarly, far from repressing the small marches called in defense of Pinochet’s constitution, police have provided escorts for these bands of middle-class reactionaries and outright fascists.

The center-left parties, however, have gone into overdrive, attempting to make hay out of a looming political crisis for the ultra-right government. They began issuing demands for the resignation of Mario Rozas, director general of the Carabineros, as well as Interior Minister Perez, in a cynical attempt to curry favor with the masses.

Deputy Pablo Vidal (Democratic Revolution) called on the lower house to deny appropriations for the Carabineros’ budget until Rozas and Perez resign. He was followed by a dozen others, all of whom sought to outdo each other in condemning the police actions and threatening to take the matter to the courts.

These cynical maneuvers should be treated with the contempt they deserve.

They are designed to channel growing anger into toothless calls for institutional reform. The removal of Rozas and Perez will demonstrate accountability. The courts must be seen to be functioning on the basis of the rule of law, so some “bad apples” caught committing human rights crimes need to be sacrificed. Token appeals for training police, the army and the other bodies of armed men in human rights doctrines have to be fulfilled. In other words, the primary function of the Chilean “left” is to sow illusions in parliamentary democracy and to safeguard the capitalist state lest it be threatened from below by the working class.

This has been their historical function. They are brought together by a common ideology that claims that Chile is a nation with democratic traditions and an adherence to constitutional norms. This specious theory of national exceptionalism was used throughout the 20th century, and especially by the Stalinist Communist Party (PCCh), to deny the necessity of the working class

taking up a socialist and internationalist revolutionary struggle against capitalism. This issue became a crucial factor in the defeat of the masses in 1973, when Allende peddled this nationalist dogma even as the military bombarded the presidential palace.

Today all the so-called “left”—from the PCCh, the Socialist Party (PS), the Humanists and the Party for Democracy (PPD), to the student movement coalitions that arose in the 2000s such as Frente Amplio, Revolucion Democratica, Convergencia Social, to the latest electoral permutations of all of the above, such as Fuerza Comun and Nueva Mayoria—belong to a bureaucratic caste that has sought to dominate the working class in Chile with middle-class reformist politics.

In one form or another, they have for three decades since the return to civilian rule derived their privileged existence from positions in the executive apparatus or the legislature, the civil service, or the unions and other social organizations. Meanwhile the conditions of the working class and the youth have worsened to levels not seen since the darkest days of the dictatorship.

The Chilean state, nonetheless, is undergoing a genuine crisis of bourgeois rule. The cop that pushed Anthony Araya over the rails is in custody after a court of guarantee heard the case brought by state prosecutors over the weekend. This is unprecedented. In two of the most emblematic human rights violations to emerge from the unrestrained police crackdown last year, it took nine months to arrest the cop responsible for blinding Gustavo Gatica and ten months for the preventive detention of the cop that nearly killed Fabiola Campillai .

Ominously, the Santiago Court of Appeals on September 28 rejected 14 appeals for protection against the use of anti-riot weapons, upholding their use in enforcing public order. The criminal complaints wanted the courts to “declare the illegality and/or arbitrariness of the act attributable to officials of the Carabineros of Chile, consisting of arbitrarily shooting bullets and/or pellets…causing very serious injuries” and that threatened “the right to physical and psychological integrity of persons, freedom of assembly and freedom of expression.”

The appeals represented more than 100 students who suffered injuries and mutilations resulting from the disproportionate and indiscriminate firing of “non-lethal” munitions by Carabineros in October and November last year.

The court dismissed the cases, arguing that the government and the police were confronted with “excessive illegal activity” of “unusual violence,” and therefore the amount of restraint required was unforeseeable.

“The regrettable outcome of violent acts by some citizens cannot be a justification for preventing the use of weapons belonging to police bodies, especially when these police bodies have regulated and adjusted their protocols in accordance with international police standards, respecting the fundamental guarantees of all subjects of law,” the court ruled. This ruling must be taken as a real warning.

The murderous police violence proves that all of the tensions that gave rise to mass social convulsions last October have only been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Chilean youth and workers are increasingly turning to militant class action against social inequality, homelessness, mass unemployment, extreme poverty, police state repression and the threat of dictatorship.