Young people hit hard by UK jobs massacre

Margot Miller

While the UK’s second four-week lockdown will have minimal impact on the spread of the pandemic in the UK, thousands more face poverty due to rising unemployment.

As job losses continue across all sectors of the economy, young people are especially hard hit. A study by the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and Exeter University found, “More than one in 10 people aged 16-25 have lost their job, and just under six in 10 have seen their earnings fall since the coronavirus pandemic began.”

“Generation COVID and Social Mobility: Evidence and Policy”, published October 26 by LSE’s Centre for Economic Performance, paints a bleak picture. Young people are facing “a dark age of low social mobility.”

The report surveyed approximately 10,000 people over September and October. On top of the 5.4 percent who reported losing their jobs, 7.3 percent were working zero hours though nominally employed. The workless rate in the age group 16-25 was 18.3 percent, compared to 11.9 percent for those aged 26-65.

Shoppers walk along Oxford Street in London, Tuesday, Oct. 13, 2020. (AP Photo/Frank Augstein)

Report co-author Professor Stephen Machin said, “There is a real concern that people who have lost their jobs are moving onto trajectories heading to long-term unemployment, the costs of which are substantial.”

The consequence for young workers beginning their working lives during a recession can impact “on earnings and jobs for 10 to 15 years, … affecting other outcomes including general health and the likelihood of entering a life of crime.”

A new term, “generation Covid”, has entered the vernacular, replacing the derogatory “snowflake generation.” While older workers face increasing hardship—14.3 million people were living in poverty in 2019—the youth in their families are twice as likely to become unemployed since the pandemic began. Young people make up a significant part of the retail, leisure and hospitality workforces—either working full-time or supplementing their income as students—all heavily hit by public health restrictions.

Recent announcements of job losses at supermarket chain Sainsbury’s, retailer John Lewis, Clarks shoes, Lloyds Banking group and a catering firm at British Airways amount to 7,200 redundancies.

In a bid to compete with discount rivals Aldi and Lidl, Sainsbury is shedding 3,000 jobs on its deli, fresh meat and fish counters, and at its Argos stores.

John Lewis will axe 1,500 jobs at head office, on top of 1,300 announced in July. The company employs 78,000 at its department stores and Waitrose supermarkets.

Clarks plans 700 job cuts, translating to two redundancies from each of its 320 shoe shops out of a total workforce of 3,969. The company already announced 900 job losses in May, with a strong possibility of shop closures.

Aviation and tourism firms have shed lost thousands of jobs due to the freeze in holiday bookings during the summer season. After making 1,068 workers redundant, only 500 staff remain employed by airline caterer Do and Co at Heathrow airport.

Despite registering healthy profits Lloyds, taking advantage of lockdown to further restructure, will lose 1,070 posts on top of the 865 announced in September.

The popular fast-food restaurant chain Pizza Express is to shed a further 1,300 jobs. It already announced 1,100 redundancies in August and the closure of 73 restaurants.

The latest casualties to close on the high street are the Edinburgh Woollen Mill chain and the homewares retailer Ponden Home, both part of the Phillip Day retail empire, announcing 860 redundancies. A further 2,000 job are also at risk as the company calls in administrators.

Even before the latest lockdown measures, which closed bars, restaurants, leisure and beauty outlets, as well as retailers classed as non-essential, a sharp rise in unemployment was forecast come winter. Now, in the run up to Christmas, up to £50 billion worth of trade could be lost.

On Tuesday, the Office for National Statistics reported that a further 314,000 redundancies were announced by businesses from July to September—a rise of 195,000 from the previous year and 181,000 from the previous quarter. October saw a drop of another 33,000 of the number of people on payrolls, meaning that there are now 782,000 less people in employment than when the UK imposed its first lockdown in March.

This continues a trend that began well before the pandemic as companies cut costs in an increasingly competitive global market. High street stores were particularly hard hit by competition from online giants like Amazon, which is expanding as demand for online shopping soars.

In this economic climate, graduate jobs are increasingly difficult to find. The LSE report predicted growing inequality in job prospects as students from lower income backgrounds lost 52 percent of teaching time compared to a 40 percent loss from the highest income groups: “62% said their long-term plans have been affected, and 68% said they believed their future educational achievement will be affected by coronavirus.”

Confirming the World Socialist Web Site’s description of the pandemic as a “poor man’s virus”, the study found, “employment and earnings losses are more pronounced for women, the self-employed and those who grew up in a poor family”.

School students in the state sector are also losing out compared to children in the private sector, which has bountiful resources to provide safe onsite learning. The government will not close schools and release the resources necessary for safe online learning at home, despite schools and campuses being among the main vectors for the virus. The education of hundreds of thousands of children is therefore being seriously disrupted as COVID-19 rips through the classrooms. Pathetic amounts of “catch-up” funding have been allocated for schooling missed during the lockdown. This can have life-long consequences.

LSE report co-author Professor Lee Elliot Major, Professor of Social Mobility at the University of Exeter, said, “We are seeing large and sustained losses in education for school pupils and university students in the wake of the pandemic, with those from lower-income backgrounds particularly suffering. The big danger for pupils is that they suffer permanent educational scarring—missing out on key grades that can shape future life prospects.”

Another study by Kings’ Business School (King’s College London), which questioned 350 entrepreneurs during the height of the initial lockdown, reported that Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s job retention scheme offered no help to many self-employed workers or young people in the gig economy. Half a million workers, many of them young, are forced to eke out a living on miserly welfare benefits.

While the mega-rich increased their fortunes with the government’s bailout schemes and ongoing quantitative easing measures, six million small businesses supporting 16.6 million jobs are floundering.

In a separate survey by the Federation of Small Businesses, two thirds of 1,500 businesses polled thought the prospects for trading was bleak, due to both the pandemic and the looming Brexit deadline.

The Resolution Foundation explained it was the young, black, Asian and minority ethnic workers who were falling into unemployment as the government’s initial furlough scheme ended. Only 43 percent of people who lost jobs in March, when lockdown began, had found new employment by September, reported the think tank. For young people it was tougher—only one in three young people found a new job.

Frances O’Grady, general secretary of the TUC, has appealed to the Conservative government to invest in job creation. “Losing your job is terrible at any time, but it is especially hard now when few employers are recruiting new workers. Stopping the devastation of mass unemployment must be the government’s top priority,” she said.

Her statement is the height of cynicism. The trade unions have not lifted a finger to defend a single job, and along with the Labour party enabled the Johnson government to create this health and economic catastrophe through its policy of herd immunity.

More than 660 parents of separated immigrant children cannot be located by the US government

Harvey Simpkins

The horrors of the Trump administration’s family separation policy are continuing to come to light. After an ACLU lawsuit last month revealed that the parents of 545 immigrant children could not be located, a lawyer tasked with reuniting families disclosed this week that the total has now risen to 666. Almost 20 percent of the children were under the age of 5 when separated.

The Trump administration began separating children from their parents in July 2017 under a “pilot program” in the El Paso, Texas area, which lasted until November of that year. In April 2018, the policy was fully implemented at the US-Mexico border and lasted until June 2018, when a US District Judge issued an injunction limiting family separations and ordering the government to reunite all migrant families.

Under this so-called “zero tolerance” policy, all migrants crossing the border, including asylum seekers, were referred to the Department of Justice for prosecution. Undocumented immigrants were imprisoned, with their children sent to various Office of Refugee Resettlement shelters around the country. The separated children included infants and toddlers.

In October 2018, Amnesty International reported that during the period April-August 2018, 6,022 “family units” were separated. Since the government’s “zero tolerance” policy officially ended in June 2018, the government has acknowledged separating another 1,100 children from their families, with the number undoubtedly far higher.

Detention facility in McAllen, Texas, Sunday, June 17, 2018 (Photo US Customs and Border Protection)

The courts have proved ineffective in putting an end to family separation. On January 13, 2020, Judge Dana Sabraw, the same judge who issued the initial injunction, refused to issue further restrictions on the government’s ability to separate families, allowing immigration officials discretion to continue to separate children where the “parent is unfit or presents a danger to the child.” In fact, immigration officials have used this “discretion” to separate families based on “crimes” such as traffic violations or mere suspicion that an adult is not the actual parent of a child.

Now, more than two years after Judge Sabraw ordered the government to reunite all children, the process of finding parents is still ongoing. About two-thirds of the parents of the initially identified 545 separated children were deported, making reunification extremely difficult, if not impossible. According to Steven Herzog, the attorney leading the effort to reunite the separated children, the new group of 121 children includes those “for whom the government did not provide any phone number.” These additional children were mostly separated during the 2017 pilot program.

The deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, Lee Gelernt, told NBC News that the new number “includes individuals in addition to [the] 545 for whom we got no information from [the] government that would allow meaningful searches but [we] are hopeful the government will now provide [us] with that information.”

The Trump administration’s grotesque family separation tactics built upon the foundation laid by the Obama administration. In an inhumane effort to deter families from coming to the United States, Obama’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) instituted the practice of splitting families apart, sending mothers and their children to one detention location and fathers to a facility in another part of the country.

As another tactic to intimidate immigrants, Obama’s DHS routinely violated a 1997 court settlement agreement, known as the Flores agreement, by frequently keeping children in detention beyond 20 days. The Obama administration also deported about 3 million immigrants, more than any president in US history.

In a related development, an important witness into purported widespread medical neglect at a Georgia Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center has been threatened with deportation to the Philippines, despite strong evidence that she is a US citizen.

Alma Bowman has been held at Georgia’s Irwin County Detention Center for more than two years. This is the same ICE facility where a nurse recently filed a whistleblower complaint alleging that a number of women were subjected to sterilization through hysterectomies without consent.

On November 1, ICE denied a stay of removal for Bowman, which sets her up for deportation; however, after further intervention by her immigration attorneys that afternoon, the deportation was halted for the time being. According to Priyanka Bhatt, an attorney with Project South, the organization which filed the whistleblower action, Bowman was “a big source of information” for the September 14 complaint into forced sterilizations.

Since her transfer to the Georgia facility in January 2018, Bowman has been trying to raise awareness about medical abuses, along with the general deplorable living conditions at the facility. In an October 2020 letter to Representatives Hank Johnson and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bowman wrote that “These conditions are not safe for anyone to live in whether they are citizens of the United States or not.”

Bowman was born in the Philippines to a US citizen father and Filipina mother, moving to the US as an adolescent. Under US immigration law at that time, a person born out of wedlock to a US citizen father had to have their father “legitimate” the paternity prior to turning 21. According to The Intercept when she was 11, Bowman’s father filled out an immigration form called a “petition to classify status of alien relative” and submitted it to the US embassy in the Philippines. Bowman’s immigration lawyer argues that the document legitimates her paternity. According to The Intercept , her parents’ 1968 marriage also legitimated her under Georgia law, making her a US citizen.

Despite informing ICE and immigration judges about her citizenship, she remains subject to deportation. Bowman’s situation is far from unique. According to Jacqueline Stevens, founder of the Deportation Research Clinic at Northwestern University, about 1 percent of all ICE detainees and about one-half of 1 percent of deportees are US citizens, resulting in the deportation of thousands of American citizens every year.

MAS inaugurates right-wing government in Bolivia

Tomas Castanheira

Luis Arce, of Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS), assumed the presidency of Bolivia last Sunday. The inauguration ceremony was attended by world leaders, including Spanish King Philip VI and the Podemos vice-president Pablo Iglesias, representatives of the US and Iranian governments, and various Latin American leaders.

The ceremony also brought thousands to Plaza Murillo in the capital La Paz, including delegations of trade unions, social movements and indigenous peoples from different parts of Bolivia.

In his inaugural speech, Arce mentioned those who had died in the Senkata and Sacaba massacres a year ago, who were abandoned by the MAS as they fought against the coup that overthrew President Evo Morales. He also saluted his voters, in his words, the “heroes of the people who have recovered democracy.”

The president-elect, who was the minister of economy in the Morales government from 2006 to 2017, attacked the coup regime of Jeanine Áñez for plunging the Bolivian economy into a “deep recession.” He said she had led Bolivia from the “leadership of economic growth in South America” to “the strongest fall in the economy in the last 40 years.”

He concluded his speech by reiterating his commitment not only to an amnesty for the bourgeois sectors that headed the coup, but to governing together with them:

“Despite our differences, we have an obligation to live up to the people’s demands for unity, peace and certainty ... I believe in and support the strengthening of the state institutions and the creation of a safe and stable environment where the only ones who have to fear are the offenders, the criminals, the violent and those who commit acts of corruption.”

Evo Morales (Credit: www.kremlin.ru)

Vice-president David Choquehuanca evoked the country’s indigenous traditions and employed pseudo-radical phraseology to defend the blunt right-wing orientation of the new government. Affirming that “our revolution is the revolution of ideas, it is the revolution of balances,” he stated: “We are going to promote the coincidence of opposites to look for solutions between the right and the left.”

Synthesizing the corrupt political line of the MAS, Choquehuanca declared: “Our truth is very simple, the condor takes flight only when its right wing is in perfect balance with its left wing.”

Since Arce’s election victory, the return to Bolivia of ousted president Evo Morales, criminalized by the coup regime, was a controversial question. Significantly, the deposed president was not invited to participate in his successor’s inauguration ceremony, and he was not mentioned in the speech given by Arce.

Morales returned to Bolivia on Monday, a day after Arce’s inauguration. He left Argentina, where he had been in exile since last December, in the company of Argentine President Alberto Fernandez, who accompanied him to the Bolivian border. There, Morales was received by hundreds of Argentines and Bolivians, and joined a caravan around the country together with former vice president Alvaro Garcia.

The same day Morales entered Bolivia, the new government introduced its ministerial cabinet. The 16 ministers chosen by Arce were praised by the Bolivian press as a group of technocrats who shared little in common with Morales.

Arce’s choices revealed his commitment to advancing the interests of Bolivia’s capitalist ruling class. In a brief speech, he pointed out: “This will be an extremely austere government.”

The cabinet choices have generated criticism and protests within MAS itself. David Apaza, a MAS representative from El Alto—a city with a record of major working class struggles, and an important center for the party—said the party’s base was taken completely by surprise by the choice of Arce’s ministers.

Apaza stated, according to Página Siete: “Unfortunately, the list wasn’t closed in consensus nor with consultation.” The MAS leader also warned: “El Alto won’t serve as a staircase [for the government to step over] again. If anything happens, they will be the ones to blame for not attending to the people of El Alto.”

The relatives of the murdered miners’ union leader Orlando Gutierrez also protested the appointment as minister of mining of Ramiro Guzmán, a former general manager of the Vinto Metallurgical Company, demanding that the ministry be handed over to Gutierrez’s brother. According to Mario Cruz, a rank-and-file delegate of the Colquiri miners, the population supports the family’s request and may march to the government headquarters if the demand is not met.

The Bolivian Workers Union (COB), which committed itself to the election of Arce, also criticized the cabinet. Its president, Carlos Huarachi, stated: “The people had an expectation of seeing a man in a poncho, a chulo, a guartatojo or a woman in a pollera skirt. That is the request of the people, of people who have fought, ordinary people who have been in the streets, on the highways, fighting to recover democracy.”

Weeks before his inauguration, Arce had already signaled that he would go against the interests of sectors of his own party and allied organizations in handing out control over slices of the state machinery. He had stated: “I have met with several social organizations and have calculated that I would have needed 149 ministries, [because] they all ask for ministries.”

Beside their petty interests, these organizations’ protests against the new ministers expresses the strong pressure they are feeling from the masses. Over the last few months, they have engaged in a betrayal of the mass struggles against the Áñez coup regime. The MAS, the unions, and the social movements of the Unity Pact have worked to divert the revolt of Bolivian workers and peasants into an electoral channel, which resulted in the bourgeois “national unity” government headed by Arce.

The right-wing character of the new government is already emerging within the first few days of the Arce administration. The leaders of the MAS and its affiliated organizations have every reason to believe that they will soon be confronted with a new upsurge in the revolutionary movement of the Bolivian working class.

US Supreme Court justices signal support for upholding Affordable Care Act

Kate Randall

On Tuesday, key justices on the US Supreme Court appeared ready to uphold the Affordable Care Act (ACA) against the latest challenge from Republican Party opponents of the legislation.

In the course of oral arguments, most of the justices gave a skeptical hearing to Texas Republicans and President Trump’s lawyers, who argued that the ACA, also known as Obamacare, should be struck down in its entirety because Congress had eliminated the tax penalty for those who did not have insurance.

The ACA, which was signed into law by President Obama in 2010 and took effect in 2014, required those who do not have insurance through their employer or a government program such as Medicare or Medicaid to obtain coverage from a private insurer under threat of a financial penalty—the so-called “individual mandate.”

Obamacare survived two earlier challenges in the Supreme Court. In a 5-4 ruling in June 2012, Chief Justice John Roberts joined with the nominally liberal wing of the high court at the time to uphold the individual mandate to purchase insurance. The court also ruled that the federal government could not withdraw existing Medicaid funding from states that decided not to participate in an expansion of eligibility for the program under the ACA.

Clouds roll over the Supreme Court at dusk on Capitol Hill in Washington, Sunday, May 3, 2020. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)

In June 2015, the high court ruled 6-3 that the federal government could provide nationwide tax subsidies to help lower-income people buy health insurance, rejecting the argument that the subsidies should be available only in states that had set up insurance exchanges, or market places, for people who lacked insurance to buy coverage.

In 2017, the Republican-led Congress cut the tax penalty to zero for those who lacked insurance as part of a year-end tax overhaul.

In the oral arguments on Tuesday, several justices said that while this “zeroing out” of the penalty effectively ended the mandate, removal of this provision did not invalidate the rest of the ACA, including its insurance premium subsidies for 20 million people and its coverage for tens of millions more with preexisting medical conditions.

Chief Justice Roberts said Congress did nothing more in 2017 than eliminate the tax penalty for those who did not have insurance. “Here, Congress left the rest of the law intact,” he said. “That seems to be compelling evidence on the question” that the rest of the law should stand.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, one of three justices appointed by President Trump, said that while he felt the mandate was unconstitutional, that should not affect the rest of the law. “It seems very clear the proper remedy is to sever the mandate provision and leave the rest,” he said.

Justices Roberts and Kavanaugh, joined by the three liberal justices on the court, could form a majority to uphold the law when a decision is handed down in the spring of 2021.

A Wall Street Journal column on the ACA’s return to the Supreme Court gives an indication of the ruling elite’s attitude toward the ACA. The Journal writes: “The Court has a chance to make clear that Congress can’t use its taxing power as a constitutional end-run to impose other mandates on individuals.”

It continues: “At the same time, there’s no valid legal argument for overturning the entire ACA. The GOP Congress surgically zeroed out the penalty, thereby severing from the law. Premiums and enrollment in the exchanges have since been stable, so the mandate is clearly not essential to insurance markets. The economic reliance interests on the ACA have also grown since 2012, as amicus briefs from hospitals, physician groups and insurers attest.”

In other words, hospital chains and insurers continue to profit from the insurance premiums paid on the Obamacare exchanges.

The Democratic presidential campaign of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris placed emphasis on their pledge to defend and expand the ACA against any threats by the Republicans to undermine it. At the Senate confirmation hearing last month for Amy Coney Barrett, Trump’s most recent appointee to the Supreme Court, Senator Harris repeatedly questioned her about the impact her appointment would have on the ACA.

Other Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee followed a similar line of questioning of Barrett, making no mention of Trump’s effort to stack the court with right-wing justices who would uphold any attempts on his part to challenge the legitimacy of the election, which is precisely what he is now doing.

In remarks Tuesday following the oral arguments before the Supreme Court on the ACA, President-elect Biden called the Trump administration’s call for the law to be struck down “simply cruel and needlessly divisive,” saying it would lead to 20 million Americans seeing their health coverage “ripped away in the middle of the nation’s worst pandemic.”

The reality is that Biden-Harris’ transition plan to confront the COVID-19 crisis offers only vague and wholly inadequate proposals. In particular, there is no explanation of where the funding will come from for increased testing and adequate personal protective equipment for health care workers. Nor is there any proposal for a new stimulus plan to provide the resources needed by the millions of families, schools and small businesses that are facing a catastrophic situation, which will only worsen as the pandemic grows in the coming winter months.

All Biden is offering are hollow calls for unity with the Republicans. Answering reporters’ questions about the Trump administration’s refusal to concede the election and the General Services Administration’s failure to recognize him as president-elect, stopping the release of millions in funding for his transition to the White House, Biden downplayed the very real threat of a Trump election coup.

US coronavirus hospitalizations hit new peak

Bryan Dyne

The number of hospitalizations from the coronavirus pandemic in the United States reached 61,964 as of Tuesday evening, according to the COVID Tracking Project. Also on Monday, the seven-day average of daily deaths in the US surpassed 1,000 for the first time since August 22. Both statistics demonstrate that the coronavirus is rampaging uncontrolled across the country, while the US ruling elite continues to send workers back to infected factories, offices and schools.

The current hospitalization rate is now higher than the previous all-time high recorded in April, while the number of known new cases is more than three times what it was seven months ago. The number of coronavirus tests returning a positive result has also risen to 7.7 percent, up from 4.0 percent at the start of October, indicating that current testing measures are not fully capturing the true extent of the pandemic.

Still higher numbers loom. In contrast to April, there are not even token measures in place to contain the pandemic, such as the national lockdown that covered most of that month. The policy is instead one of herd immunity, that is, the unchecked spread of the pandemic through the entire population.

This was spelled out explicitly by White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows in an interview on CNN last month, when he admitted, “We’re not going to control the pandemic.”

Hospital staff members enter an elevator with the body of a COVID-19 victim on a gurney at St. Jude Medical Center in Fullerton, Calif. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong, File)

Overall, there have been more than 10.5 million confirmed coronavirus cases in the United States, including 3.6 million that are currently active. Of those who became infected, more than 245,000 have died.

One of the most severe outbreaks in the country continues in El Paso, Texas. According to the city’s coronavirus dashboard, 1,292 new cases were reported Tuesday, and nine new deaths. There are currently 27,895 active cases in the county, more than eight times the number of active cases a month ago.

The number of people currently hospitalized with COVID-19 in the county is 1,076, with 319 patients under intensive care. Dozens have been airlifted to other places in Texas and New Mexico, as the hospitals in El Paso itself are at capacity and emergency field hospitals that have been set up are already strained.

Across the US-Mexico border in Ciudad Juarez, a new mobile hospital that can house 20 COVID-19 patients has been opened to handle the surge in the city. Ciudad Juarez has faced a similar situation to that in El Paso, where a sharp increase in cases in the multinational metropolitan area has forced Mexico’s federal government to send additional aid to the city and the state of Chihuahua as a whole. Ciudad Juarez has suffered 16,641 coronavirus cases since the pandemic began, and 1,525 deaths.

To handle the surge in the past month, El Paso County Judge Ricardo Samaniego ordered restaurants, bars and salons to close, in a two-week lockdown of the county. It is slated to end Wednesday night, although it may be extended. One factor is the sharp rise in deaths in the past month. Six refrigerated temporary morgues are already full and 10 more are en route. Samaniego has requested that a further four be provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), to be sent to local funeral homes as needed.

These procedures, however, are not sustainable indefinitely, as hospitalizations continue to rise elsewhere across the country. The number of field hospitals, available beds, intensive care units and ventilators available to treat coronavirus patients, or patients with any other ailment, are rapidly shrinking. Transferring patients is all the more difficult in the United States, where Medicaid and insurance vary from state to state, meaning that even if beds are available, a given patient still might not be able to move and receive treatment because of the retrograde state of health care in the country.

In one particularly harrowing account, Dr. Emily Porter, a physician in Texas, shared a Twitter appeal for COVID beds from a Texas doctor. The appeal, to the Emergency Physician Forum group on Facebook, reads: “Does anyone who works in Texas have open corvid beds at your hospitals accepting transfers? Getting desperate here in my little town in panhandle. No beds at our hospital and anywhere within 200 miles isn’t accepting. I’ve been calling dozens of hospitals for my 5 patients in my 8 bed ER who need to be transferred out.”

As Dr. Porter noted, “emergency physicians are literally crowdsourcing COVID beds on social media while hospital administrators are home sleeping.”

Similar new lockdown measures are being prepared in California. The number of hospitalizations has increased in the state by 32 percent over the past two weeks, according to Dr. Mark Ghaly, the state’s secretary of health and human services. As a result, San Diego, Sacramento and Stanislaus counties—home to 5.5 million people—are going to re-enter the most restrictive phase of their lockdowns starting this week.

Ghaly warned that “if things stay the way they are…over half of California counties will have moved into a more restrictive tier.” This will involve closing down in-person restaurant dining in much of the state, along with gyms and a variety of other nonessential indoor venues. California currently has more than 990,000 cases and 18,000 deaths, with an average of nearly 6,000 daily cases and more than 40 deaths.

Other states are taking similar large-scale measures. Utah Governor Gary Herbert has announced a universal mask mandate while in public for the entire state. There are at least 137,000 cases and 672 logged deaths in the state, with a rate of new cases four times what it was at its peak in late July.

The state has 453 patients hospitalized with confirmed or suspected cases of COVID-19, including 185 patients in ICU beds. At present, Utah has only just enough staffed ICU beds to cope with current cases, and hospitalizations are trending upwards. North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming are similarly overwhelmed.

Workers should not, however, lower their guard because of various actions taken by states. The measures that have been taken are inadequate.

As shown in the case of El Paso, lockdowns take more than two weeks to slow the rate of new cases and hospitalizations. Moreover, none of the new lockdown measures so far are aimed at closing schools or workplaces, which have become the two main vectors of transmission.

What is needed is not a piecemeal closing and reopening carried out county by county and state by state, but a nationally and internationally coordinated effort, including the closure of all workplaces, except those required to produce the personal protection equipment, food and other social necessities, and other resources essential for containing and ending the pandemic, with no loss in income for the workers affected. The focus must be on saving lives rather than protecting the profits of corporations and hedge funds.

French government escalates cover-up of COVID-19 infections in schools

Samuel Tissot

On November 6, the French Ministry of National Education released a press statement alleging that only 3,528 students and 1,165 staff at French schools had tested positive for COVID-19 that week. However, statistics from the Ministry of Public Health show that in just the first three days of the week 25,151 people between 0 and 19 years old tested positive for the virus.

With the vast majority of 0–19-year-olds being school-age pupils and only 50,000 children being home-schooled in France, the discrepancy between these two numbers points to a systematic government cover-up of COVID-19 transmission in French schools.

This is not even the full story for last week’s pupil cases. Given that nearly half of the week’s national cases were reported on Thursday and Friday (58,046 and 60,486, respectively), the number of recorded student cases will likely exceed 40,000 when the data becomes available. Furthermore, with an average test positivity rate of over 20 percent over the past week, the actual rate of infection is likely even higher.

The virus is now out of control throughout France. Between November 2 and 6, more than 190,000 positive tests were recorded in the French population. On Saturday, a record 86,852 cases were reported. Underscoring the danger posed to schoolchildren by the virus, 182 individuals in the 0–19 age group are currently hospitalised with COVID-19 in France. Across all age groups, in the week from November 2 to 8, 3,420 people died from COVID-19.

Students leave their school in Cambo les Bains, southwest France, Thursday November 5, 2020 (AP Photo / Bob Edme)

The government’s latest set of lies comes in the face of increasingly militant opposition from French teachers. Beginning last Monday and continuing throughout the week, thousands of teachers organised strike action independently of the unions in opposition to the reopening of schools on November 2, after the All Saints holiday. Across the country, pupils joined their teachers’ strike action. In Paris, this led to violent police attacks against striking teenagers.

The Education Ministry’s criminal methods are a response to this strike action. Its aim is to present schools as safe in order to gain public support for its effort to pressure teachers back into deadly classroom environments. From the point of view of the ruling class across Europe, schools must be kept open so that profit can continue to be extracted from hundreds of millions of working parents.

This attempted cover-up of the extent of the virus’s spread in schools follows similar tactics used by the government in French schools and universities last month. That two official organs of the government are producing contradictory COVID-19 figures speaks to the profound nature of the crisis engulfing the French state in the face of increasing deaths and teacher strikes.

Following the press release, Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer doubled down on his ministry’s narrative. He claimed that the number of cases was “under control” and that transmission within the education system was “below the proportions found in the rest of the population.” He added that he wanted schools to stay open “at all costs”—these costs being the lives of students and teachers.

The manipulation of these figures has been complemented by a protocol designed to restrict students’ and teachers’ knowledge of cases within schools. When a pupil is confirmed as COVID-19 positive, only the head teacher is told. Despite the fact that masks only reduce the chance of infection, if those exposed wear a mask they are not considered contact cases or informed of their exposure. On Monday, Joe, a middle school pupil, tweeted, “At school today six students tested positive in year six. The class continued as if nothing had happened.”

Eric Menonville, a science teacher, noted on Twitter that the same lies had been used in the effort to enforce a return to workplaces, “It’s all a joke. The ministry of labor told us less than 1 percent of transmission happens at work and the minister of national education told us there is less than 1 percent in the institutions. So where are the infections happening?”

The censorship of case numbers at a local and national level is a murderous crime against the working class. How many parents have sent their children to school believing there are no cases? How many teachers have gone to work believing they are safe? How many pupils have gone on to infect their parents, grandparents and friends because they were not informed that they were exposed to the virus? How many people will die as a result of these transmission paths?

In response to the exposure of Blanquer’s lies, pseudo-left figures, including Alex Corbière, a La France Insoumise deputy, have only demanded that the minister show the real figures.

This half-hearted response makes no appeal to the thousands who have taken strike action in the last week, nor does it call for the necessary shutdown of in-person education. Similarly, the unions have refused to call a nation-wide strike and have actively isolated the groups of teachers who have taken independent action.

This only underscores the fact that teachers and students must form rank-and-file committees that are independent of the unions and pseudo-left forces. On the basis of a fight against the herd immunity policy of all European governments, their aim must be to expand and coordinate the strikes across the continent.

As well as the immediate closure of schools, strikers must demand the implementation of a national lockdown including all educational institutions, government offices, and businesses, with exceptions for essential food, health, and logistics workers. This must be complemented by a rapid expansion of testing and tracing capacity and the provision of adequate resources to families and teachers to ensure the highest possible quality remote learning.

COVID-19 pandemic creating a social disaster in India

Wasantha Rupasinghe

Despite the attempts by the Indian government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to paint a rosy picture about the coronavirus crisis, the pandemic is continuing to spread throughout cities and villages, having already created a social catastrophe.

For all Modi’s talk of “decreasing” COVID-19 cases, every day sees 40,000 to 50,000 officially recorded new infections and 500 deaths, even though these figures are currently about half the most recent peaks in September.

Interviewed by the Economic Times on October 29, Modi did not even refer to the more than 127,000 COVID-19 deaths in the country. Instead, he said: “We should assess our coronavirus fight against the metric of how many lives we are able to save.” He claimed: “India followed a preemptive, proactive, graded, whole-of-government and whole-of-society approach to tackle the pandemic.”

Commuters wearing face mask as a precaution against the coronavirus jostle for a ride on a bus in Kolkata, India, Tuesday, July 21, 2020. (AP Photo/Bikas Das)

In reality, as a result of the failure of Modi’s Baratiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government and state governments throughout the country to stop the spread of the virus, India has become the world second-worst impacted country. According to the highly understated official figures, reported COVID-19 cases now exceed 8.5 million. More than half a million cases are still active.

India’s COVID-19 testing rate is among the lowest in the world and falling. Daily tests per thousand people have dropped from 0.86 per thousand on October 26 to 0.75 on November 2. A number of epidemiologists and medical experts have warned of a second surge during the winter and as a result of large social gatherings in the festive season following the easing of government restrictions.

Internal migrant workers

In his Times interview, Modi claimed that his “timely” lockdown “helped” to avoid “the rapid spread of the virus with many more deaths.” The truth is that the two-month lockdown was a failure and a disaster for hundreds of millions of people, mostly migrant workers. It was not accompanied by mass testing, contact tracing, the supply of basic necessities for people forced to remain indoors and, most importantly, the huge allocation of resources needed to upgrade the under-funded public health system.

More than 100 million migrant workers lost their livelihoods overnight when Modi declared a nationwide lockdown on March 24 with just four hours’ notice. Nearly 1,000 migrant workers died from starvation, exhaustion or accidents as they tried to walk home, often hundreds of kilometers from where they worked. Those unable to walk home were detained in hellish “quarantine” centres without enough food, medical care and COVID testing. When they were finally allowed to leave for their villages amid mounting unrest, many carried the virus to remote areas with virtually non-existent public health facilities.

Modi also boasted of providing “free food grain and pulses to 800 million people for eight months.” But according to a NewsClick report, which cited a survey by civil society organisations, “nearly 66 percent of rural households fell short of cash for food, nearly 40 percent of the households had reduced their food intake, 41 percent of the returned migrants were not working and only 7 percent of migrants had found work under the MGMNREGA [Mahatma Gandhi Rural Employment Guarantee Act]”.

The survey noted that “a number of households had pawned assets to buy food items, and three out of every four had experienced fear and anxiety.” It stated that “only half the returned migrants got free rations three times or more as the Modi government had promised.” Quoting a report published by the Stranded Workers Action Network, the article said 84 percent of migrant workers had received no wages from their employers during the lockdown, while 12 percent got partial payment.

Women and children

Millions of children in poor families have been deprived of education as they cannot afford internet facilities to follow online classes during the closure of schools. The Indian Express on October 12 revealed increasing child trafficking and other crimes targeting children. It reported: “As the economic distress began to sink in, a more sinister movement of children gathered pace—of those being taken away from their homes for illegal labour, trafficking and forced marriages.”

Between March and August, Childline, a national hotline established by the Ministry for Women and Child Development, received 2.7 million distress calls. Another Express article said most of the parents of trafficked children are marginal farm labourers and farmers whose income was severely impacted when they could not sell their perishable vegetables during the lockdown.

Rising other deaths

Due to the disruption of already crippled health facilities, millions of patients suffering from serious diseases like cancer, leukemia and chronic diabetes are in immense danger. An article in the Wire on October 20 painted a grim picture of the situation at the Dr Bhubaneswar Borooah Cancer Institute (BBCI) in Guwahati, the sole full-fledged cancer care centre in India’s northeast.

It showed patient visits at the BBCI fell by 50 percent during the lockdown, while the chemotherapies dropped by 42 percent, radiotherapy 56 percent and surgeries 74 percent.

According to a National Cancer Registry Program (NCRP) report, northeast India had the highest national incidence of cancers between 2012 and 2016. Even at normal times, cancer patients in the region had a hard time accessing cancer care and treatment due to the lack of medical care facilities.

It is likewise with patients suffering tuberculosis (TB), the world’s deadliest infectious disease. India accounts for a fourth of global TB cases. Due to the lockdown and reassignment of lab technicians, between January and June, TB notifications in India dipped by 25 percent from the corresponding period in 2019, according to the World Health Organisation’s annual TB report. This will translate into “millions of excess deaths from tuberculosis,” Zarir F. Udwadia, a consultant physician at Mumbai’s Hinduja Hospital, told the Wire Science.

The pandemic has adversely affected the mental health of millions of people suffering from anxiety, fear, isolation, distancing, uncertainty and emotional distress. India accounts for 15 percent of the world’s mental, neurological and substance-use disorders. According to the Wire, the health ministry has “admitted a treatment gap of 50-70 percent, and this gap has only been rising. To cater to the needs of patients, there are only 0.3 psychiatrists, 0.12 psychologists and 0.07 social workers for every 100,000 Indians.”

Another Wire article, based on data from the Indian government’s Health Management Information System, reported “drastic declines in health services during lockdown, ranging from 20 percent or so for ANC (number of pregnant women registered for antenatal care) registration to 60 percent or so for in-patient headcount and major operations.” It added: “Out-patient attendance during the lockdown was just half of normal levels.”

All these figures show that an even bigger health disaster is on the way, behind the COVID-19 pandemic.

Yet, the government and the Indian ruling class have refused to direct much-needed funds into the healthcare system. In his Times interview, Modi insisted that India was becoming a “major producer of PPE and masks” and “we are not only meeting our domestic demand but are also capable of meeting the demand of other countries.” Yet, 87,000 health care workers have been infected and 573 have died due to COVID-19, even according to the government’s own data.

India’s health budget was less than 2 percent of the country’s gross domestic product between 2009 and 2019, one of the lowest levels in the world. India ranks 184 out 191 countries in public spending on health. An estimated 62.4 percent of the current health expenditure is paid by patients themselves. The government contributes only 16.7 percent, putting India among the countries with highest out-of-pocket expenditures on health.

Police crack down on Thai protesters demanding democratic rights

Peter Symonds

The riot police clashed with thousands of protesters in the Thai capital of Bangkok on Sunday as they sought to deliver letters setting out their grievances and demands to the King Maha Vajiralongkorn. The ongoing protests, comprised mainly of students and young people, are demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha and his military-backed government, a new constitution and reforms to the monarchy.

The protesters gathered at the city’s Democracy Monument before marching toward the Grand Palace, where they planned to deliver their letters. While the police estimated the number involved at 7,000, Reuters journalists put the figure at more than 10,000. After the protesters broke through police lines and pushed aside one of the buses set up as a barrier, the police used water cannon and riot police to disperse the march.

One demonstrator, Thawatchai Tongsuk, told Associated Press: “If the police gave way, I believe that the leaders would have submitted the letters and then been finished. Everyone would go home… The more violence they use, the more people will join the protest.”

The protests have continued for months despite the arrest of protest leaders and the imposition of a state of emergency. Broad layers of young people have been involved in what has been a politically diffuse movement that has included everything from references to the Hunger Games and Harry Potter to the involvement of activists demanding gay rights. The underlying motivation, however, is hostility to the political domination of the military in concert with the monarchy, the state bureaucracy and key sections of business.

Protesters occupy a main road as they gather at a junction in Bangkok, Thailand, October 15, 2020 [Credit: AP Photo/Sakchai Lalit]

Prime Minister Prayuth, as army commander in chief, led the 2014 military coup that ousted the Pheu Thai government of Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra and was installed as head of the military junta. Yingluck Shinawatra and her billionaire brother Thaksin Shinawatra, who was ousted as prime minister by the 2006 military coup, represent business whose interests have been stymied by the domination of traditional Bangkok elites.

While an election was eventually held last year, it was under an anti-democratic constitution drawn up by the military that stacked the 250-seat upper house with military appointees and allowed for the installation of an “outside prime minister”—that is one that had not stood for election. Prayuth, who did not stand for election, was appointed by a joint sitting of the upper house with the 500-seat lower house. Even then, the military’s Palang Precharath party came second in the election. It had to wheel and deal to obtain enough support to install Prayuth, who has nominally retired from the army, as prime minister.

The protesters have publicly criticised the monarchy, which has been the political linchpin of the Bangkok elites. In doing so, they risk jail terms of up to 15 years under the country’s draconian lese majeste law—the repeal of which is one of their demands. The monarchy has become even more unpopular after King Maha Vajiralongkorn was installed in 2006 following the death of his father. The king, who spends most of his time in Germany, has attempted to consolidate his personal control over the huge crown assets and elements of the military.

The protest on Sunday was designed to expose the empty character of the king’s gesture a week before. At a rally of thousands of royalists outside the Grand Palace, a reporter asked the king what he had to say to the protesters. “We love them all the same,” he declared and said Thailand was a land of compromise, hinting that concessions might be possible.

The government, however, has made no such moves. Amid an expanding protest movement, Prayuth revoked the state of emergency earlier this month and attempted to establish a meaningless “national consultation” aimed at enlisting the assistance of opposition parties. But he has flatly refused to resign. Protest leaders have rejected any participation in such a process.

The New York Times cited a right-wing royalist and publishing tycoon, Sondhi Limthongkul. At the end of last month, he called for the military to directly intervene so as to restore stability and protect the monarchy. “I see a coup as not a bad thing,” he said. Sondhi was central to whipping up yellow shirt, royalist opposition to Thaksin Shinawatra, paving the way for his overthrow in 2006.

Prayuth has refused to rule out a coup, saying in late October that he would not determine whether “there will be a coup or there won’t be a coup.” In reality, a military “coup” would do no more than shuffle the personnel in the regime, which is effectively controlled by the military in any case. However, the military would be brought onto the streets to suppress the protests, including by force. In 2010, the military violently suppressed protracted demonstrations by pro-Shinawatra “red shirts,” killing at last 90 and wounding hundreds.

The lack of a clear political program is the greatest danger confronting the protesters, who continue to have illusions in the opposition parties—including the Pheu Thai party of the Shinawatras and the smaller Move Forward Party (MFP) that, as the Future Forward Party, won a significant vote from younger people at the 2019 election. Like Pheu Thai, however, the MFP represents layers of big business that seek to end the domination of the traditional elites.

The founder of the Future Forward Party, Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit, who was disqualified from parliament earlier this year on trumped-up charges, has personal wealth of $US180 million. He was a top executive of the Thai Summit Group, which was founded by his father and is the largest auto parts manufacturer in the country.

Young people need to turn to a different political perspective. Around the world, the ruling classes, confronted with mounting economic and social crises, are resorting more and more to authoritarian forms of rule to contain and suppress growing opposition in the working class. The fight for democratic rights in Thailand is intimately bound up with an orientation to the working class, not politicians such as Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit and their parties, and the struggle based on a socialist program to abolish capitalism.

Australian Senate passes motion acknowledging “alleged” persecution of Julian Assange

Oscar Grenfell

On Monday, the Australian Senate passed a motion “noting” the plight of WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, who is imprisoned in Britain and faces extradition to the United States for his exposure of American imperialism’s war crimes, global diplomatic intrigues and human rights violations.

The motion was the first to be passed in either house of the federal parliament that is in any way supportive of Assange, since the British police illegally arrested him in April 2019. It is one of only a handful of times the WikiLeaks founder has been mentioned in parliament following last month’s conclusion of the final British show trial hearings for his extradition on unprecedented US espionage charges, on which he could be jailed for life.

The impetus for the motion was undoubtedly concern over popular hostility toward the complicity of the parliamentary establishment in the railroading of an Australian journalist and publisher.

Over 150 legal experts and lawyers’ associations around the world condemned the British court proceedings as a legal travesty. A group of 161 prominent international political figures, including 13 former national presidents, similarly denounced the hearings as a sham and demanded Assange’s immediate freedom.

Assange with former Ecuadorian Foreign Minister Ricardo Patiño in 2013 [Credit: Xavier Granja Cedeño/Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores]

The Australian government and the Labor Party opposition, aided by the corporate media, however, maintained a stony silence throughout the trial. This was in line with the support given by the entire political establishment for escalating US militarism and its corollary—efforts to quash anti-war opposition, epitomised by the campaign to destroy Assange.

With the verdict over Assange’s extradition due on January 4, the Australian ruling elite is well aware that the widespread latent public support for the WikiLeaks founder, which they have sought to suppress, will again come to the surface.

The motion’s function was to put on record the “concerns” of some parliamentary parties, without committing them to anything. The perfunctory character of such gestures is underscored by the fact that not a single corporate media outlet, including the publicly-funded Australian Broadcasting Corporation, reported the motion. Nor does it appear that any of those who passed it have gone to any great lengths to publicise the motion.

The resolution was moved by Greens Senators Peter Whish-Wilson, Sarah Hanson-Young and Janet Rice. The motion passed with the support of Labor Party senators and some crossbenchers. Those who voted against were members of the Liberal-National Coalition government and the right-wing populist Jacqui Lambie.

The text of the motion can be described only as ambivalent, tepid and mealy-mouthed. Its form is to state a series of incontestable facts, without commenting on their significance or putting forward any clear political position.

The motion begins by “noting” that Assange is an Australian citizen, that he has a family and that he won a 2011 Walkley Award for outstanding contributions to journalism, all of which can be discovered by looking at his Wikipedia entry.

The second section “acknowledges that during the recent extradition trial, the court heard evidence about” WikiLeaks’ exposure of war crimes and human rights abuses, along with

(ii) the alleged spying operation conducted against Julian Assange by UC Global on behalf of United States (US) intelligence agencies, (iii) the alleged seizure of legally privileged material from the Ecuadorian Embassy by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, (iv) alleged plans to poison and kidnap Julian Assange, and (v) the devastating health consequences that Julian Assange is currently facing.

The final section “acknowledges” that there have been demands from local councils for the Australian government to intervene in defence of Assange, that a number of “world leaders” have called for his freedom, and that protests have been held in support of the WikiLeaks founder.

The motion abruptly concludes by noting that a British court will rule on Assange’s extradition next January. Anyone looking for an indication of what the senators themselves are planning to do will be disappointed.

Significantly, the motion was amended between the time that it was put on notice on Sunday night, and passed on Monday. The change was to place the word “alleged” before each of the references to violations of Assange’s rights by the US government and intelligence agencies.

The purpose of these amendments was to prevent any direct condemnation of the crimes of the American state against Assange, or any suggestion that the senators were preempting the decision of the British courts.

Labor, like the Coalition government, has insisted that it has “full confidence” in the British and US legal processes, despite the fact that the attempt to extradite Assange and to prosecute him for publishing activities violates international laws and domestic legislation in both the UK and US.

Labor has held fast to this position, even as it has been shown that the British judge overseeing the case has close ties to the intelligence agencies, and that Assange has been denied the right to prepare a defence, would have no prospect of a fair trial in the US, and has been deliberately imperiled by coronavirus infection by being detained in a maximum-security British prison, despite the fact that he has not been convicted of a crime.

By inserting “alleged” before each substantive statement of fact, the motion leaves Assange’s fate in the hands of the British judiciary and ruling class, which have already demonstrated that they will rubber stamp the demands of the major powers for Assange to be thrown in a US prison for the rest of his life.

Similar calculations underlie the motion’s failure to make any demands for the Australian government to intervene. Labor has echoed the government’s false claims that it can provide only worthless “consular assistance” to Assange. This has been aimed at covering-up the fact that there are substantial legal bases and precedent for a government to fight for the freedom of a citizen who is being persecuted abroad.

Behind Labor’s mask of impartiality and vague concern for Assange’s health, the party, which has the closest ties to the US and Australian intelligence agencies, is intensely hostile to the WikiLeaks founder. It was a Greens-backed Labor government that responded to WikiLeaks’ exposures of US war crimes by denouncing it in 2011 as a criminal organisation, and pledging to assist the American intelligence agencies in their campaign against Assange.

The character of the motion demonstrates again that the fight for Assange’s freedom cannot succeed through parliamentary horse-trading and appeals to the official parties.

The Greens, while claiming to oppose the persecution of Assange, have rejected calls, including from within their own ranks, for a public, party campaign demanding that the government intervene to secure his freedom. Instead, they have sought to divert opposition behind illusions in the very parliamentary set-up that is responsible for Assange’s dire plight.

This is in line with the Greens’ character as a party of the affluent upper middle-class, oriented toward forming coalitions with Labor and the Liberals, and increasingly open in its support for imperialist war.

As the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) explained in a recent congress resolution, “the only way to block Assange’s extradition to the US and secure his freedom is through the development of a mass international movement, centred in the working class. Millions of workers have entered into explosive struggles over the past years, including in Britain, the US, and, increasingly, in Australia. These will intensify over the coming period.

“The task of all those fighting for Assange’s freedom, including the SEP, is to turn to this movement, and to explain that the fight for the WikiLeaks founder’s liberty must be inscribed on the banner of every struggle in defence of democratic rights, for social equality and against war.”