2020 US census: Americans calling themselves multiracial surged by 276 percent

Gabriel Black

Last week, the US Census Bureau released new findings from the 2020 census conducted last year. The report is one in a series of ongoing releases from the bureau as it analyzes its data. Last week’s report concerns the geographic distribution of the population, the self-identified racial and ethnic background of respondents, age distribution and housing stock.

Most corporate media outlets in their presentation of the report presented its findings in racialist terms, drawing particular attention to the first-ever decline of self-identified “whites” and the increase of “non-whites.” The data, however, considered objectively, undercuts the claim that the basic category of US society is race rather than socio-economic class, and that America is a “white supremacist” society as a result of endemic white racism.

Rather, the data, tracking the changes over the ten-year period since the last census, reveals an accelerating movement of the population from rural areas to major cities, associated with a growth of the working class, and an increasing internationalization and intermixing of different racial, ethnic and national groups.

In other words, racial and ethnic divisions are breaking down, rather than being reinforced by intrinsic differences based on skin color or some other identity trait.

The data shows that as the urban working class has grown, numerically and as a percentage of the population, so too has its multi-racial character. People who do not consider themselves to be of any single race are driving population growth, as urban workers increasingly intermingle, intermarry and raise children with people from entirely different national, ethnic and racial backgrounds.

The racial-ethnic category that registered the biggest increase, by far, was that for people who identified themselves as multi-racial, which rose by 276 percent.

A growing urban working class

The first trend to which the census points is the massive growth of the urban population between 2010 and 2020, as rural people increasingly migrated to major metropoles, especially in the Southwest and Western United States.

Marc Perry, a demographer with the US Census, stated, “Population growth this decade was almost entirely in metro areas.” Metropolitan areas, on average, grew by 9 percent over the last 10 years, while smaller counties grew only by 1 percent. More than half of the nation’s counties did not see any growth, and 52 percent of all counties lost population.

The trend points to the continuation of a process that has spanned the last two-and-a-half centuries: the decline of rural life—especially the ranks of small farmers—as the society became increasingly dominated numerically by an urban and suburban working class. Eighty-six percent of the American population now lives in urban areas.

The breaking down of racial categories

The second major finding to which the census points is the increasingly multi-racial character of the population, as many of these urban workers meet, fall in love and have children with people from different ethnic and national backgrounds.

In 2010, about 9 million people identified themselves as being of multiple races. In 2020, 33.8 million people identified themselves in that way. This 276 percent increase in Americans who consider themselves multi-racial far outpaces the growth of any other racial-ethnic category during this period.

Those identifying themselves as Hispanic or Latino, for example, increased from 17.3 percent of the population in 2010 to 19.5 percent in 2020. Asian Americans increased from about 5 to 6 percent. But those who identify themselves as multi-racial—including Hispanics who do so—increased from 2.9 percent of the population in 2010 to 10.2 percent in 2020.

In its data, the census distinguishes between individuals who identify with just one race and those who identify with a race “in combination” with another. Importantly, the Census Bureau notes that “The ‘in combination’ multi-racial populations of all race groups accounted for most of the overall changes in each racial category.” In other words, to the extent that any racial group grew, it was mainly because of its share in the growth of a multi-racial population.

This can be seen clearly in what is presented as the decline of the “white” population. In the 2020 census, those who marked themselves as just “white” decreased from 63 percent of the population to 57 percent, as compared to the 2010 census. However, while 57 percent of the population identified itself as “just white,” 71 percent of the population identified itself as either “just white” or “white and another race.” In other words, broad sections of white people were partnering with people from other racial and ethnic categories, creating a much larger section of the “white” population that identifies itself as multiracial.

If anything, these significant shifts point to the questionable, at best, scientific validity of the concept of “race” and its inability to provide a scientific basis for analyzing historical and social processes, let alone provide a progressive basis for the political struggles of working people.

In total, the US population grew by 23 million people since the 2010 census. The ranks of people who called themselves multi-racial grew by 24.8 million, suggesting that multi-racial couplings were a major factor on the overall population growth.

The census data is in line with a 2017 study by the Pew Research Center on intermarriage, which showed that of newlywed Hispanic people in the US, 39 percent, on average, do not marry someone who is Hispanic. For Asians born in the US, the figure is even higher, at 46 percent. The same study also gives a sense of how intermarriage is increasing: in 2015, 10 percent of the entire married population had an interracial relationship, but among newlyweds, it was almost double, at 17 percent.

What will America look like 30 years from now if this trend continues? Taking the 2010 to 2020 rate of growth of those identifying themselves as multi-racial and projecting it onto the future, about 156 million people would come from a mixed-race background by 2050. That would be about half of today’s population.

What if the general trend continued for 100 years, or 500? What meaning would race have when the broad mass of the population had ancestry from multiple countries and ethnicities from all over the world?

The racialist myth exploded

For several decades, but with increasing ferocity over the past decade or so, sections of the upper-middle class—especially in academia, the media, Democratic Party politics, and the arts—have sought to present the United States, and, for that matter, the world, as dominated by unbridgeable racial divides.

The pages of the New York Times and other outlets have increasingly devoted themselves to—as the Times ’ discredited 1619 Project puts it—convincing their readers that racism is in the “very DNA of this country” and its population. This wealthy stratum of the population has in many ways gone back to the original racialist conceptions of the 19th and 20th centuries, arguing as Stacey Abrams does in Foreign Affairs that there is an “intrinsic difference” between blacks, whites and other races.

But if racism runs in the DNA of the country and its population, why are such large and increasing sections of the population partnering, raising children and sharing finances with people who are supposedly insurmountably alien and hostile to them?

This dramatic growth—over just 10 years—is a simple and powerful refutation of the lie that America is composed of separate races of human beings who cannot genuinely understand each other, culturally relate or speak to one another, or politically unify—stuck, as it were, in entirely separate social trajectories.

But it is this very trend documented by the census that is either ignored or twisted by the leading purveyors of racialist thought.

A prime example is a column published this week by Charles Blow, the right-wing, racialist New York Times pundit. Blow presents the census data as a nightmare for “white power acolytes.” But nowhere in his column does Blow mention that the biggest growth revealed by the census was among mixed-race people, often people with one white parent.

Blow presents the data from the standpoint of a war between races—that is, the same premise as the white supremacists—but from the “black” side of the barricades. He writes that it heralds a race war, a “passage of power… not without strife” between “whites” and “non-whites.”

Such are the filthy lengths to which the racialist defenders of capitalism and enemies of the unity of the working class are prepared to go. Indeed, Blow is no less frightened by the increasing internationalization and homogenization of the population than the white supremacists and fascists.

Almost 175 years ago, Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels wrote: “The working men have no country… National differences and antagonisms between peoples are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto.” ( The Communist Manifesto, Chapter two)

This is the process revealed in the census report. As the population becomes increasingly composed of urban workers, those workers are meeting, falling in love and having children with people from different national, ethnic, religious and linguistic backgrounds… increasingly dissolving the historical baggage of reactionary racial categories used for centuries to divide and rule over the oppressed.

Two other points are worth making about the census data.

First, while data released by the Census Bureau last January showed a significant slowdown in national population growth—37 out of 50 states grew more slowly than in the previous decade—the data just released shows that young people, in particular, are declining as a share of the population. During the last 10 years there was an absolute decline of 1 million people under the age of 18.

This shrinking youth population testifies to the economic hardship that millions of younger, would-be parents face post-2008. While the Great Recession is over 12 years in the past, the US economy remains, especially with COVID-19, in dire straits. The wealth of the ultra-rich has soared, but the vast majority of the population—regardless of ethnicity or skin color—has seen a further decline in living standards.

The report also notes that housing units grew by only 6.7 percent between 2010 and 2020, about half the growth of the previous decade. Again, this points to the slowdown in economic growth and the impoverishment of broad sections of the population, including the phenomenon of young people being forced to live with their parents through their twenties. The report also notes that almost 10 percent of the entire housing stock in the country lies vacant—some 13.6 million homes with no one living in them! This not only points to the financial inability of many people to find housing, but also the absurdity of the capitalist system, which squanders resources for the enrichment of an oligarchy and for war, while millions are homeless or without decent and affordable housing.

Billions in US federal rent assistance money withheld from millions facing eviction

Chase Lawrence

Out of the $46.5 billion in funding provided for rental assistance under two bailouts enacted in December 2020 and March 2021, the vast majority has not been distributed, with only an estimated $3 billion of the funds being distributed as of August 3 according to CNBC, while millions are at risk of eviction or foreclosure.

According to the Eviction Lab, in the six states and 31 cities tracked by it, 480, 456 evictions have taken place during the pandemic. In just those areas alone, 6,108 evictions were filed in the last week. This is in spite of the announcement on August 3 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) of the extension of the eviction moratorium to October 3 for counties “experiencing substantial and high levels of community transmission levels.”

The moratorium extension itself was only issued after Democrats allowed it to expire on July 31 and then after they washed their hands of it. The latest temporary version is a significant revision of the previous moratorium which, at least in letter, covered all renters. While CNN, citing a “source familiar with the effort” estimates it covers 90 percent of renters, which by no means should be taken at face value, that would still mean hundreds of thousands are now not covered who previously were, and can be thrown out of their homes amid a surge in the pandemic.

The extension itself has an uncertain legal future as attested to by the federal judge who allowed the Biden administration’s revised moratorium to remain in place, no doubt a veiled reference to a challenge by the extreme-right Supreme Court.

Approximately 1.6 million households reported being “very likely” to face eviction in the next two months according to the US Census Bureau’s July 21-August 2 Household Pulse Survey, while another 1.9 million where “somewhat likely.” Some 5.8 million were not at all confident in their ability to pay next month’s rent. Additionally, 238,000 homeowners were “very likely” to have to leave their house due to foreclosure, while another 826,000 were “somewhat likely” to have to leave.

For those seeking assistance, only 287,000 cited applying and receiving household rental assistance through state or local government, while 1.49 million were waiting for a response and 890,773 were denied assistance.

Only 15 states and the District of Columbia had spent 10 percent or more of the funds initially approved by Congress as of the end of June, according to the US Treasury, despite $25 billion of the funds for the Emergency Rental Assistance Program (ERAP) having been approved on December 27 of last year and $21.55 billion in March 11 of this year, under the Consolidated Appropriations Act and the “ American Rescue Plan Act ” bailouts, respectively.

According to a HuffPost analysis of Treasury Department data, “in roughly 40 states, counties and cities, not a single cent from ERAP made it out the door during that time.” This included some smaller counties, but also whole states such as New York, which received $801 million in funds, and Puerto Rico at $325 million, where nothing from ERAP was distributed.

Chicago hadn’t distributed any of its $80 million in ERAP funds either at the end of June, with the spokesperson for the Chicago Department of Housing saying that the department had been waiting on the City Council, which is ruled by Democrats, failing to allocate the funds since May when the applications opened.

Politicians for both parties have criticized local governments for the glacial pace that rental assistance was distributed.

Senate Minority Leader and coup plotter Mitch McConnell stated last week, “The problem has been with state governments who have been pathetically slow to get the money out.”

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer criticized his own state of New York, stating he would send a letter to the state government to “immediately start disbursing those funds.”

Representative Bobby Rush, Democrat of Illinois, referring to the city of Chicago’s delay of $80 million in ERAP funds, stated that “Bureaucratic bungling is unacceptable,” and, “I am astounded and heartbroken that my constituents, who are suffering from horrendous economic woes in the midst of an ongoing pandemic, have not received the full financial relief that I voted for.”

New York City’s Mayor Bill de Blasio’s spokesperson Bill Neidhardt stated, referring to the unemployment benefits, “The main reason is that the application was fucking impossible.”

Neidhardt, saying perhaps more than he intended, stated, “I think it’s strategic incompetence. That’s why they delayed it, and that’s why they rolled out a mind-bogglingly unusable interface. Both those things show they didn’t want people to get the money.”

Sarah Saadian, vice president of public policy at the National Low Income Housing Coalition stated that while some places were distributing funds, many states and local governments were “putting in place their own documentation requirements or very lengthy application processes, which are getting in their own way of distributing aid.”

State governments undoubtedly played a role in holding up these funds through sheer incompetence and indifference. The central reason, though, has the same roots as the holding up of unemployment money, and that is the drive to shove workers back into low-paying jobs through economic blackmail so they can get back to producing profits for the financial oligarchy. As the WSWS wrote on April 29 of last year:

The unemployment benefits program included in the CARES Act has been, to a large extent, an elaborate exercise in deliberate mass deception. When Congress and the White House presented the additional 13 weeks of state-based unemployment insurance beyond the typical 26 weeks, plus an additional $600 weekly federal supplement through July 31, 2020, as a social safety net during the COVID-19 crisis, they knew very well that millions of unemployed workers would be unable to take advantage of it.

The Democrats and Republicans knew that many workers would not be able to get through to the antiquated systems in the state capitals across the country, which would be completely overwhelmed and unprepared for the number of people seeking to apply for benefits. They were counting on these systems being so backed up with delays and confusion that workers would give up and end up receiving little or nothing of the government money.

Just as before, both Republicans and Democrats are well aware that the distribution of such money would encounter significant caveats, yet they did nothing to address these.

“In most cases they couldn’t scale up an already-existing program, or if they could scale up an existing program, that program was tiny compared to the funding available now,” Ann Oliva, a housing policy expert at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities told HuffPost. “That explains some of the lag.”

The glacial rate of the distribution of ERAP funds is in direct contrast to the lightning fast speed at which the continuous bailout by the Fed to Wall Street and large corporations is carried out. The justifications, evasions and blame game going on in D.C. and across the states are thoroughly unconvincing given that the Fed gives out over $120 billion per month, almost triple the total amount allocated to ERAP , to buy up corporate bonds and other financial assets, which are quickly used by Wall Street to fuel an orgy of speculation whose result can be seen in soaring stocks and soaring wealth of the billionaires. This contrast becomes even more evident when it’s considered that only a fraction of ERAP funds have been distributed, while the $120 billion is quickly put to use in speculative activities by Wall Street.

One could also point to the bailout of the airline industry, which, while being nominally allocated less money, in reality received far more than the $3 billion currently distributed. American Airlines received $5.81 billion through the CARES Act, while Delta received $5.4 billion, with both of their CEOs receiving millions while laying off tens of thousands of workers.

The failure to provide for housing, and the ongoing eviction and foreclosure crisis, is a testament to the bankruptcy of the capitalist system and to the necessity for its overthrow and replacement by socialism, reorganizing society to meet human need rather than private profit.

US military steps up Taliban-approved evacuation from Kabul

Patrick Martin

US military evacuations from Kabul were stepped up Wednesday with the agreement of top Taliban leaders, who have arrived in the Afghan capital and begun establishing a new government to replace the US puppet regime that collapsed on Sunday.

Some 2,000 US citizens and Afghan associates were flown out of Kabul on Wednesday, and the US military said it would be able to increase the airlift to 9,000 a day once all runways at the main airport are cleared. There were at least 4,000 US troops at the airport and a total of 6,000 were expected once the full deployment was carried out.

Taliban fighters pose for photograph in Wazir Akbar Khan in the city of Kabul, Afghanistan, Wednesday, Aug. 18, 2021. (AP Photo/Rahmat Gul)

General Frank McKenzie, head of the US Central Command, negotiated the evacuation protocol with senior Taliban leaders at Doha, Qatar, on Sunday, and he flew secretly into Kabul on Tuesday to oversee it, according to press reports. McKenzie did not give any interviews or have any publicized meetings with the Taliban during his visit.

The spectacle of the top US commander stealing into the airport with the permission of the victorious guerrilla movement against which he was fighting is a stark demonstration of the debacle suffered by American imperialism in Afghanistan.

No amount of vilification of the deposed Afghan government by the White House can conceal the fact that it is the US government, and the Biden administration, which have suffered a devastating defeat, not merely its puppet in Kabul.

Similarly, when Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark Milley were asked at a Pentagon press conference Wednesday whether they planned to extend the military perimeter at the Kabul airport to establish evacuation routes for Americans who might be trapped in the city, they flatly acknowledged that they could not do so.

Not only did the American troops not have the “capability” to expand into the city, Milley said, but to attempt it might weaken their grip on the airport, the sole lifeline not only for those seeking evacuation, but for the American troops themselves.

Pentagon spokesman John Kirby revealed that US commanders were speaking to Taliban commanders “multiple times a day” to avoid military conflicts between US and Taliban soldiers. The airlift is expected to continue to August 31, a date set by President Biden for completion, with as many as 9,000 people a day removed from the country.

However, in an interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos, parts of which were aired Wednesday evening, Biden for the first time indicated that the troop withdrawal deadline might be extended past August 31. “If there’s American citizens left [after August 31],” he said, “we’re going to stay until we get them all out.”

The top political leader of the Taliban, Abdul Gani Baradar, who had been heading the negotiations in Qatar, arrived in Afghanistan Tuesday for the first time in 10 years. He spent most of that period in jail or under house arrest in Pakistan, before he was released in 2018 at the urging of the Trump administration to take the leading role in talks with the United States.

In Washington, both Democratic and Republican congressmen and senators bemoaned the swift collapse in Afghanistan and attacked the Biden administration for its decision to pull out the last 2,500 US troops. The departure of the US forces became a trigger for the collapse of the puppet regime, which took only 11 days once the Taliban launched a military offensive.

In the ABC News interview partially aired on Wednesday, Biden told Stephanopoulos that he knew very well that there would be “no leaving without chaos ensuing” in Afghanistan.

This is a remarkable admission, and underscores that all the assurances given by a succession of US presidents—Bush, Obama, Trump and now Biden himself—about “progress” in Afghanistan were a pack of lies.

All of these presidents, and a succession of Pentagon bosses, ambassadors and military commanders, were aware of the corrupt and unpopular character of the puppet regime in Kabul. All of them concealed this reality from the public, while portraying the US military intervention as a war against “terrorism” and for “democracy” and women’s rights.

The real nature of the puppet regime was summed up by columnist David von Drehle in the Washington Post, who observed, “You could fit all the genuine supporters of deposed Afghan President Ashraf Ghani into his getaway car and still have room for the piles of cash…” (Ghani reportedly escaped the country with $164 million, arriving Wednesday in the United Arab Emirates, where he will enjoy a luxurious exile).

The American media continues its near-unanimous hostility to the speech delivered by Biden on Monday, in which he defended his decision to withdraw. It continues its unrelenting pro-military propaganda, portraying the US occupation in Afghanistan as a defense of the Afghan people, after multiple revelations—including those by WikiLeaks and Julian Assange—of US war crimes against the population.

This campaign is aimed at preserving the essential ideological premise of imperialism and neo-colonialism—that the imperialist military is holding the line between “civilization” and savagery—for future use in other countries targeted by Washington, or even in Afghanistan itself, should conditions permit.

One report, by CNN Business, suggested the real material interests underpinning the 20-year US war. Headlined “The Taliban are sitting on $1 trillion worth of minerals the world desperately needs,” the article noted that while one of the poorest countries in the world, Afghanistan was “sitting on mineral deposits worth nearly $1 trillion,” including not only iron, copper and gold, but also rare earth minerals and “perhaps most importantly, what could be one of the world’s biggest deposits of lithium—an essential but scarce component in rechargeable batteries and other technologies.”

Decades of civil war had prevented the exploitation of this potential wealth, but now, the article warned, China, which shares a border with Afghanistan and has maintained contact with the Taliban, was in a position to gain an advantage in the world market.

Even in defeat, American imperialism maintains its focus both on potential sources of profit and its wider struggle for global dominance. Biden emphasized this aspect of his decision to withdraw from Afghanistan is his speech Monday, referring to “our true strategic competitors, China and Russia” as more important antagonists for his administration.

Mass COVID-19 deaths continue in Indonesia

Robert Campion

Indonesia persists as the epicentre of COVID-19 infections in Asia and, in terms of deaths, of the world.

There were 1,180 official deaths confirmed in Indonesia on Tuesday, taking the overall death toll past 120,000. The past 31 days has witnessed over 47,000 deaths and more than half of the total deaths from the pandemic have occurred in the last two months.

Workers in protective suits carry a coffin containing the body of a COVID-19 victim into an ambulance to be taken for a cremation in Bali, Indonesia, Monday, Aug. 16, 2021. (AP Photo/Firdia Lisnawati)

The number of daily cases has fallen from the July highs of 50,000 to 20,741, attributed to a drop in figures on the heavily populated islands of Java and Bali. The latter was devastated over the past month with hospitals overwhelmed and gravediggers unable to work fast enough to cope with the bodies.

On Tuesday, the island of Bali recorded 888 new infections as well as 48 deaths—the first time in three weeks that new cases fell below a thousand.

In the capital Jakarta, daily active cases per have dropped from 100,000 in mid-July to below 15,000 as of last week. New cases have dropped from 10,000 per day to 2,500. Bed occupancy for referral hospitals has likewise dropped to 33 percent and ICU occupancy to 59 percent.

Out of a population of roughly 10 million, a vaccination campaign in the devastated capital has resulted in 5,437,338 people fully vaccinated and 2,697,619 partially vaccinated as of Wednesday.

Even though 40 to 50 people continue to die each day, the fall in case numbers has led to authorities junking the “red zone” status of many in the city districts and declaring the disaster over.

Currently, the partial lockdown measures which began on July 3 are extended for another week. Shopping centres in 21 cities on Java are allowed a maximum capacity of 50 percent between 10 a.m. and 8 p.m.

Chief investment minister Luhut Binsar Panjaitan, who has overseen the medical disaster, stated, “On one hand, it [the lifting of restrictions] indicates a rapid economic recovery but on the other hand it brings a serious risk of another surge in new cases in the next two or three weeks.”

Meanwhile, the virus continues to spread throughout the archipelago in Sumatra, Sulawesi, the southernmost province of East Nusa Tenggara and even the far-flung Riau islands.

As of August 6, new infections in areas outside Java and Bali accounted for 54 percent of the national total, up from 44 percent at the start of the month and 34 percent on July 25.

All of these provinces are dangerously behind Jakarta in terms of vaccination. The health infrastructure is ill-equipped to deal with major outbreaks, and lacks accurate reporting and contact tracing. Vaccination rates are approximately 15 percent in East Kalimantan, on the island of Borneo. In East Nusa Tenggara, it stands at just 11 percent.

Poverty with multigenerational families living in cramped quarters, poor nutrition and lacking information exacerbates the dangers of contracting the disease, particularly for children. Since July, 100 children have died each week from the disease according to the Indonesian Paediatric Society (IDAI).

“People said that children are not affected and that children cannot die. But right now, we have a lot of children dying,” said Dr Aman Bhakti Pulungan, head of the IDAI in an interview to Reuters on Monday.

“Inequality is one of the problems. Inequality in treatment because not every place has a paediatric or neonatal intensive care unit.”

Dr Mario Nara spoke from Sikka, East Nusa Tenggara, which contains high rates of malnutrition and child mortality.

“Some are asthmatic… some are malnourished… others have heart problems, or other disabilities. They may have hydrocephalus [fluid in cavities of the brain], cerebral palsy and most of them are stunted,” he said.

“A condition like stunting or malnutrition will impact the child’s immune system. If they get an infection, it is likely to hit them harder.”

In an interview with the Financial Times, Fansca Titaheluw the acting director at Provita Hospital in Jayapura, the capital of Papua province in eastern Indonesia, reported three COVID-19 patients and a baby in intensive care had recently died due to oxygen shortages.

“If the outbreak caused by the Delta variant continues, and there is no change in attitude from the community, Jayapura will be in chaos,” he said.

On the island of Batam, Marlyan Marzzaman told the New York Times that when she was diagnosed with the disease in July her doctor told her to isolate at home. This led to the infection of her otherwise-healthy four-year-old Daniel, who developed a fever within days.

The hospital, having reached full capacity could not treat him in time. It lacked oxygen, ICUs for children and staff. The child died. “I am very, very disappointed,” Marlyan said. “When I asked for help there was no response. They really don’t value life.”

On Monday, President Joko Widodo emphasized in his State of the Nation address the need to always balance health and the economy, by means of avoiding a complete lockdown “[We must] find the best combination of interests between public health and economic interests because the virus is always changing and mutating. Thus, the handling must change according to the challenges faced,” he said.

Widodo also stressed the need to continue to implement the government’s pro-business “job creation” law passed last year amid mass protests by workers and labour groups. It constitutes an economic offensive against the social position of the working class with the slashing of real incomes, the removal of limits of the length of contract work as well as the scrapping of mandatory leave for childbirth, marriage or bereavement.

“The pandemic has indeed significantly slowed down our economic growth,” the president said. “But it must not hinder the process of structural reforms of our economy.”

Like governments around the world, Widodo’s administration is putting the corporate profits and the business interests of the wealthy before the health and lives of working people, with tragic consequences.

The Delta variant of coronavirus is a Frankenstein produced by capitalism

Benjamin Mateus & Norisa Diaz

It is well understood that human activities in the conduct of commerce and the prosecution of wars have been the primary causal factors for zoonotic spillovers that have led to large outbreaks of deadly contagions. Pandemics are entwined with world history, and the COVID pandemic is no different in this regard.

The evolution of the virus that has produced the Delta variant in the span of only 18 months since the declaration of the pandemic, in the final analysis, is a byproduct of the ruling elite’s utter incompetence and malign neglect in responding to the threat.

The virus’s evolutionary adaptations have been greatly aided by policies that have placed profits above the well-being of the population by allowing schools and businesses to remain open, giving the virus free rein to circulate across the globe.

(AP Illustration/Peter Hamlin)

Dr. Yaneer Bar-Yam, head of the New England Complex Systems Institute, who has been modeling pandemics in the context of a complex global network for close to two decades, has warned that the ease of global travel, where every region of the world is connected in a matter of hours to every other place, could allow the propagation of deadlier diseases which quickly grow to pandemic proportions.

In a report from 2016, titled “Transition to Extinction,” he writes, “When we introduce long-range transportation into the model, the success of more aggressive strains changes. They can use the long-range transportation to find new hosts and escape local extinctions ... the more transportation routes introduced into the model, the more highly aggressive pathogens are able to survive and spread.”

Clearly, in the present chapter of the pandemic, the United States has emerged again as the pandemic’s epicenter primarily due to lack of comprehensive global strategies that could eradicate the virus. After the spring surge through India, which killed a reported 400,000 people, a figure believed to be an underestimate by a factor of ten, the Delta variant quickly spread across the globe becoming the dominant strain by mid-summer. That means in only three months’ time the world was facing a new pandemic of the Delta strain. In the span of that time, the US had essentially returned to business as usual, leading to the present catastrophe.

Last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that the Delta strain accounted for more than 97 percent of all cases in the US. On August 13, there were more than 720,000 new cases of COVID-19 reported worldwide. Of these, more than 155,000 were in the United States, nearly five times the number of cases reported in India, which ranked second.

And with the sudden rapid rise in COVID cases, the US death toll is once again inching upwards, with 769 deaths registered for the same date. The seven-day moving average for reported deaths has doubled since last month, standing at over 650 per day, or more than 4,500 per week.

These deaths are preventable, and the country has every means in its capacity to ensure not one more person dies from COVID. The blood of these victims is on the hands of the White House occupant despite concerted efforts by both Republican and Democratic politicians to sow discord and animus in the population based on issues of vaccine and mask mandates.

The real issue is not mask mandates, a totally inadequate measure given the threat of Delta, but the refusal of the Biden administration, the CDC, and state and local governments of both parties to immediately enforce a wide-scale lockdown.

Under these conditions, the bipartisan call by the ruling elites to open schools for in-class instruction is sheer insanity, which places in danger the health and well-being of 75 million plus children and adolescents of whom the vast majority remain unvaccinated.

In a month, the country has seen a dramatic rise in the number of children becoming infected. Last week, the American Academy of Pediatrics reported that nearly 94,000 children had been infected. On Saturday, August 14, 2021, just over 1,900 children were reported admitted to hospitals with COVID, the highest ever recorded. The current COVID-19 disease ravaging the youngest in the population has been described aptly as the “pandemic of the innocent” considering continued attempts to minimize the impact of the more severe Delta variant.

As Professor Amber Schmidtke, a renowned science communicator who teaches at the University of Saint Mary in Leavenworth, Kansas, noted, “Not only are these kids sick, but every age group has met or exceeded previous maximums for ER visits for COVID-19 illness. It’s not correct to say that kids don’t get sick from COVID-19. That is disinformation. Call it when you see it.” [Emphasis added]

If that were not enough, further concerns are emerging by frontline health care workers who are reporting a surge in children diagnosed with a both COVID-19 and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). Dr. Pia Pannaraj, an infectious diseases specialist at Children's Hospital in Los Angeles, told NPR this concerning phenomenon is putting 'babies up until about a year and a half or two years of life” at risk.

Attempts have been made throughout the pandemic by the ruling class to suggest that schools are islands where the virus does not spread, or that they are separate entities that play no role in community spread. In a recent conversation, Dr. Bar-Yam affirms that the relationship between infections in schools and high transmissions in households has been strongly established. It is impossible to separate the issue of infections at schools from infection in homes and, more broadly, in the community. Schools must be closed to stop Delta’s continued spread.

As of Friday, the World Health Organization reported that there have been 205,338,159 confirmed cases of COVID-19, including 4,333,094 deaths globally. This ghastly figure is an undercount by at least a factor of three as analysis of excess deaths suggest the human catastrophe is far higher than reports would indicate.

Unchecked, the SARS-CoV-2 has been allowed to disseminate into every community, leading to more virulent and deadly variants. Unfortunately, the Delta variant will not be the last.

What is most striking about the Delta strain has been its ability to evade immunity and transmit so much faster than its predecessors. It also replicates with tremendous efficiency, creating copies of itself at a rate thousands of times higher than when the “wild” version first emerged less than two years ago.

Within each infected person, the virus invades living cells and makes billions of copies of itself by transforming cells into virus-making factories. Each of these replicated copies has the potential for mutation within each person—vaccinated or not—that continues the spread and further mutation of the evolving virus.

What policy makers and governmental officials are ignoring, as they pursue reopening schools and forcing parents back into the workplace, is that the limited measures that had proven only partly effective against the spread of the coronavirus previously may be completely futile given the more virulent biological properties of the Delta variant.

Dr. Deepti Gurdasani recently warned that this is not a virus we can learn to live with: “Over time we’ve had many new variants arise in different parts of the world and they have shown a level of escape from previous immunity, which means that if you’re immune against a previous variant of the virus, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re immune against a new strain. What that means is that even if you have a level of immunity against previous variants, you may not be able to reach the herd immunity threshold because this virus is constantly evolving.”

Even breakthrough infections are becoming more commonplace with Delta among those fully immunized. This is partly a product of the biology of the virus, but more the result of the natural waning of the immunity generated by the vaccines, after the passage of time.

Most of those infected after vaccination will be spared a severe course of infection. Yet a growing number of the victims of such post-vaccination infections are finding their way into hospital beds, intensive care units, and even the grave. More worrisome is that people with breakthrough infections can transmit the virus as effectively as those who become infected without having ever received the vaccines.

Many scientists and doctors are even beginning to refer to the Delta strain as an entirely different virus. “The delta variant is almost like a whole new COVID virus, as it behaves very differently from the previous COVID strains,” reported Dr. Mike Hansen, a pulmonologist and critical care physician, on his educational public website, explaining that the variant’s multiple spike protein mutations allow it to enter the body’s cells with greater ease and evade the body’s immune system.

In a manner of speaking, Delta is a Frankenstein virus that has been allowed to emerge by the inaction of capitalist governments around the world. And it is currently filling hospitals, in the worst conditions witnessed since last winter, and taking an unprecedentedly heavy toll on children. Just this weekend Dallas, Texas, reported that all ICU beds for children were fully occupied.

Despite these dangers, the ruling elite have continuously employed every conceivable measure to prevent any effective comprehensive public health strategy that would place eradication of the virus on their agenda. And subordinated to the diktats of the financial markets, public health efforts have given the coronavirus ample room to develop and spread, in direct contradiction to scientific principles.

In short, the Delta variant is the product of capitalism's complete disregard for human life. With less than one-fifth of the world’s population vaccinated and a significant portion immunologically naive to the virus (with no prior infections), it is safe to assume we are still at the early stages of the pandemic whose final outcome, as a social and political event, not just a medical one, remains to be decided.

Global eradication using all resources and capacity must be the primary objective of the world’s people. All other issues must be subordinated to the full support of the populations, including financial, job, and food security as well as isolation and medical facilities to treat and care for the population until the coronavirus has been eliminated from every region of the planet.

Delta variant fuels rapid surge of COVID-19 cases across southern US

Trévon Austin

The rapid spread of the coronavirus across the southern US has caused growing concern among public health experts. During a press briefing last Thursday, White House COVID-19 response coordinator Jeff Zients noted that Texas and Florida accounted for nearly 40 percent of new COVID-related hospitalizations in the US over the past week.

In Texas, cases and hospitalizations are reaching heights not seen since February. According to the Texas Tribune, hospitalizations in the state have skyrocketed by 400 percent within the last month. The increase in cases has been fueled by the criminal policies spearheaded by Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who recently declared Texas is “past the time of government mandates.”

Elementary school students on the first day of classes in Richardson, Texas, August 17, 2021. (AP Photo/LM Otero)

“Going forward, in Texas, there will not be any government-imposed shutdowns or mask mandates,” Abbott said. “Everyone already knows what to do.”

After lifting statewide mask mandates earlier this year, Abbott claimed personal responsibility and vaccinations would sufficiently contain the pandemic. However, the numbers are so staggering that the state health department was forced to admit in a tweet Wednesday that Texas is “facing a new wave” and the variant “has erased much progress to end the pandemic.”

Abbott himself was reported Tuesday to have contracted coronavirus, in a breakthrough infection, since he has been vaccinated. At his age, 63, and physical condition—he has been paralyzed from the waist down since 1984, due to an accident—the governor would be considered at higher risk from the virus.

Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton have focused on blocking local masking mandates and eviscerating public health and safety measures. On Sunday, the Texas Supreme Court sided with Abbott and reversed a ruling that prevented him from enforcing a ban on local mask mandates in workplaces and schools.

Texas’ vaccination rate has consistently lagged behind other states. Its 44 percent full vaccination rate as of Tuesday ranks 36th nationally. The state’s positivity rate—the percent of virus tests coming back positive—was 17.7 percent on Tuesday, well above the 10 percent threshold that Abbott has previously identified as a danger zone. Furthermore, several of the state’s hospital regions have seen the percentage of COVID patients in their care rise about 15 percent.

Texas now has 11,552 people being treated in hospitals for COVID-19, according to the latest data provided by the state health department. The number of available ICU beds across the entire state has dwindled to 322, with some regions having none at all. According to state officials, 12 of 22 hospital regions in the state have 10 or fewer available ICU beds.

“I think it’s pretty clear in the data that Texas is in the middle—or beginning, depending on how you look at it—of a really major pandemic surge, and not just in case counts but particularly in looking at health care needs across the state,” said Spencer Fox, associate director of the COVID-19 Modeling Consortium at the University of Texas at Austin. “Many regions are now facing numbers that we haven’t seen since the winter,” he told the Texas Tribune.

Public health experts say the pandemic will only be exacerbated by the coming school year, especially after Abbott declared no district can require students to wear masks or get vaccinated. This is particularly problematic because many of those who are unvaccinated are children under age 12, who are not eligible for a vaccine.

Researchers have recorded higher vaccination rates in urban areas, but the cities’ poorer neighborhoods and minority neighborhoods tend to have drastically lower rates. A CNBC analysis of state data found just 37 percent of people in Dallas County neighborhoods that are majority black and Hispanic have been fully vaccinated as of July 26, compared to 58 percent of people in majority-white neighborhoods. Overall, black and Hispanic Texans hold the lowest vaccination rates among racial groups statewide, at 28 percent and 35 percent respectively.

According to a CNBC analysis of data compiled by John Hopkins University, five states broke records for the average number of daily new COVID cases over the weekend. Florida, Louisiana, Hawaii, Oregon and Mississippi all reached new peaks in their seven-day average of new cases per day as of Sunday. Even more, Louisiana, Mississippi and Florida are suffering from the three worst per capita outbreaks in the country.

Florida reported a whopping 151,764 new COVID-19 cases for the week on Friday, marking a record seven-day average of 21,681 new cases per day, more than any other state. According to Florida’s health department, more than half of the ICU beds in the state are occupied by COVID patients.

Florida’s surge comes as Republican Governor Ron DeSantis refuses to enforce mask mandates and other pandemic policies to combat the massive outbreak. In May, DeSantis signed an executive order that permanently lifted all COVID-19 restrictions and banned local officials from enacting new pandemic policies.

Louisiana recorded a record seven-day average of more than 5,800 new COVID cases on Sunday, an increase of more than 26 percent from the previous week. The state also reported a seven-day average of 44 COVID-related deaths, a spike of over 46 percent compared to a week ago. Almost half of the state’s 882 reported ICU beds were occupied by coronavirus patients as of Monday, compared with a nationwide average of 25 percent, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.

Louisiana has the fifth-lowest vaccination rate of any state in the US, with only about 38 percent of its population fully vaccinated against COVID-19, government data shows.

As of Monday, Mississippi reached a seven-day average of nearly 3,300 new coronavirus cases, an increase of 57 percent from a week ago. The state’s death toll also hit a seven-day average of 20, up almost 80 percent from a week ago. Mississippi has the nation’s second-lowest vaccination rate, with 35.8 percent of its population fully immunized as of Sunday. State officials reported Monday that almost 55 percent of Mississippi’s ICU beds were being used for COVID patients.

COVID-19 pandemic worsens in South Korea

Ben McGrath

The COVID-19 pandemic is intensifying in South Korea because the Moon Jae-in government refuses to take the necessary measures to stop the spread of the virus.

The daily number of cases reached a national all-time high of 2,222 on August 11. As of Monday, there have officially been 226,854 cases and 2,173 deaths, including six people who passed away that day.

Healthcare workers in Seoul, South Korea, call for increased staffing at a demonstration on August 5, 2021. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)

The seven-day moving average for daily new cases stood at 1,871 as of Saturday, having almost quadrupled in a month.

The Seoul metropolitan area, the southern city of Busan and Jeju Island are under Level 4 restrictions in the government’s four-tier system. This limits the number of people allowed to gather in groups, but allows businesses and private study academies to remain open, contributing to the spread of the virus. The other regions of the country are under Level 3 restrictions.

A major reason for the sharp eruption of the virus in recent weeks is the slow rollout of vaccines, compounded by the spread of the Delta variant. Only 43.6 percent of people have received one dose of the vaccine, while 19 percent have been fully vaccinated. The situation has been worsened by glitches in the online reservation system, as well as a delay in vaccine delivery from US drug maker Moderna.

Despite this, schools are set to re-open this month following the summer break, with students attending on a rotational basis. This means the virus could spread even more quickly.

Under Level 4 restrictions, all classes should be online. But the Education Ministry absurdly stated on August 9: “Only 16 percent [of students] contracted the virus at school, meaning that schools are the least common place for transmission.”

The government consciously ignores the fact that students may contract the virus from school-aged siblings at home or from parents forced to go to work. Moreover, new studies demonstrate that infection can lead to cognitive impairment worse than that from lead poisoning or from a stroke.

Students, teachers, and parents are speaking out against school reopenings. A student wrote in an online petition to halt the return to in-person classes: “It is difficult for all schools to thoroughly control students’ wearing of masks. And especially during physical activities, the frequency of students’ contact is very high and there is no way to deal with it.”

The drive to force students and teachers back into dangerous classrooms is fueled by the same interests as in other countries: the demand from the capitalist ruling class to keep workers on the job. Since the start of the pandemic, the Moon administration has sought to avoid restrictions on big business as much as possible to meet this end.

When the government introduced its multi-level restriction system in June 2020, daily cases stood at around 50. The system initially had three levels, with the third and highest being implemented if daily cases rose above 100 for 14 straight days. This required the government to close schools and ban gatherings of ten or more people.

By the end of August last year, cases had spiked to well over 200 per day, including 441 new infections on August 27. At the time, schools and private study academies were closed, while other public facilities were either shut or had their hours reduced. The Moon government, however, refused to implement the highest tier restrictions, instead creating a “Level 2.5.” Moon said he wanted to avoid “a huge economic blow,” which in fact meant protecting corporate profits.

In November 2020, the administration formalized this new level and added a “Level 1.5” as well, creating a five-tier system until June this year. The lowest tiers required businesses like restaurants and entertainment facilities to do little more than ask customers to maintain social distancing and to wear masks. Stricter limits were only implemented after daily cases exceeded 400 for Level 2.5 and 800 for Level 3.

The authorities stated last November that their goal was no longer to eliminate COVID-19, but to live with the virus. Then-Prime Minister Jeong Se-gyun stated: “The latest reorganization [in the levels] is aimed at settling a sustainable quarantine system.” That is, the government would do little more than quarantine cases, not try to actively prevent them.

Winter saw a then record-high in total daily cases of 1,240 on December 25. While conditions were met to go to Level 3, the government kept the Seoul metropolitan area at Level 2.5 and the remaining regions at Level 2. Prime Minister Jeong sought to blame ordinary people for not following the rules, saying on December 27: “The key in controlling the spread of the coronavirus is whether we actually carry out the rules in place ourselves.”

While the number of daily cases fell, they remained in the hundreds, even as children returned to schools for the start of the new academic year in March. The same number of cases that had led to school closures the previous August, now was met with little more than a few perfunctory statements from government officials about social distancing.

Throughout the spring months and into summer, daily cases stood at between 500 and 800, with the seven-day average on June 30 sitting at 631. At this point, the government introduced its current four-tier system, which went into effect on July 1, in order to further remove restrictions on big business. As cases surged, the new system was postponed for the Seoul area, while the rest of the country was initially placed under Level 1, the lowest tier.

Since then, the spread of COVID-19 has exploded, producing the worst situation since the pandemic began. Yet the Moon administration is downplaying the danger as much as possible, continuing the drive for profits at the expense of lives.