United States Struggles to Pick a Side in Upcoming Honduran Elections

John Perry

Of the countries in Central America’s “northern triangle,” Honduras is the one that sends the most migrants to the United States. Already this year over 32,000 Honduran migrants have been deported from the United States, including more than 2,600 children. The country’s president, Juan Orlando Hernández (JOH), was supported by President Trump because he is a strongman willing to forcibly stop Honduran migrants from leaving the country. He even signed a misnamed “safe country” agreement implying that Honduras was a haven for asylum seekers. In return, Trump was willing to acquiesce in JOH’s disastrous domestic policies even though they are one of the main drivers for migrants to leave.

Now, with Honduran elections on November 28, the Biden administration must weigh contradicting factors in deciding how to handle Trump’s erstwhile ally. On the one hand, Honduras is strategically reliable and important to U.S. business interests; on the other, problems of state-condoned violence, corruption, and impunity are fostering both continued migration and the drug trade.

Honduras’s neoliberal economy and lax regulation allow the exploitation of the country’s natural resources at any cost to local communities. Honduras has low taxes, public services decimated by underfunding and corruption, and one of the continent’s biggest gaps between rich and poor. Although largely unmentioned in official discourse, such policies align with U.S. business interests and are not seen as a problem for U.S. foreign policy. Instead, it is the mixed economy and social programs of neighboring Nicaragua that are regarded as “an extraordinary and unusual threat” to U.S. security.

Once seen as a “banana republic,” Honduras has long failed to meet the needs of most of its population. Recent blame for its failed governments extends back to Biden’s vice-presidency when, in 2009, Washington turned a blind eye to the military coup that deposed the left-of-center President Manuel Zelaya who had started to make economic and social reforms. After a short interregnum in which Zelaya attempted to return to power, Washington gave its approval for new elections. The National Party’s Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo was the winner, prompting a series of increasingly corrupt governments. Both Lobo and the former first lady, Rosa Elena Bonilla Avila, grossly abused their positions and were later sanctioned by the U.S. State Department. Lobo has so far escaped any charges, but his wife faces prison for defrauding a children’s charity of $505,000. A flawed election in 2013 brought JOH, now Lobo’s rival, to the presidency, and corruption intensified. In defiance of the Honduran constitution, JOH ran for and won a second term of office in 2017 in an election that was even more blatantly fraudulent than 2013. Twenty-four people were killed by police in the protests that followed.

Since the 2009 coup, state-sponsored violence has intensified. Opposition movements, community activists, and government critics have been suppressed by police forces militarized by U.S. funding and training. The United States argues that these forces are necessary to tackle the country’s endemic gang violence. In reality, they appear to have fostered it, leaving many migrants literally running for their lives. Human rights abuses received international attention with the murder of Berta Cáceres in 2016. But this was only one in a series of assassinations and disappearances of activists trying to defend communities from mining, energy, and tourism projects, many promoted by companies from the United States and Canada. Assassinations continue: on July 25, an opposition politician and lawyer, Carolina Echeverría, opened the door of her home to what she thought was a group of medical personnel dressed in protective gear who were coming to check on her husband, ill with Covid-19. They turned out to be assassins who shot her in the side of the head in front of her sick partner. So far in 2021, the Honduran homicide rate is 13 per cent higher than in 2020.

But no issue illustrates Biden’s dilemma more clearly than two recent U.S. prosecutions for drug-running that have implicated officials of JOH’s government and earned it the label “narcostate.” The first was the conviction in New York of JOH’s brother Tony, who faces at least 30 years in prison for bringing 200,000 kilos of cocaine into the United States. The prosecution concluded that drug traffickers “infiltrated” and “controlled” the Honduran government. The country’s ports and frontier posts are said to be a paradise for organized crime because weak systems for inspecting goods allow drugs to be exported and equipment for processing them to be imported.

The defendant in the second case, Geovanny Fuentes, claimed that his drug labs were protected by the military on the orders of the president himself, quoting JOH as saying that he would “shove the drugs right up the noses of the gringos” by flooding the United States with cocaine. While JOH was quick to deny the allegations and to remind Biden of their past friendship, the new U.S. administration has been obliged to distance itself, saying “we are committed to partnering …with those in the Honduran government that are committed to working with us to root out the corruption that has become really endemic to that country.” However, when a list of corrupt officials subject to U.S. sanctions was published in July, it included 21 Honduran politicians—most of them from the ruling National party—but excluded JOH and those closest to him.

Recent natural disasters have further highlighted the ways in which the narcostate fails the majority of Hondurans. In November 2020, two hurricanes hit a country totally unprepared for them, destroying 6,000 homes and seriously damaging 85,000 more. Six months later, the international organization Médecins Sans Frontières said the government’s response had been “inadequate,” leaving more than 55,000 people still living in temporary shelters. Poverty in Honduras increased to 70 percent in 2020, up 10.7 percentage points from 59.3 percent in 2019, driven by tropical storm damage and by the pandemic. It is hardly surprising that yet another migrant “caravan,” largely of Hondurans, was crossing Mexico at the end of August.

The massive disruption caused by the hurricanes also provoked a fresh peak of Covid-19 infections. It continues unabated: August was reportedly the worst month this year for Covid-related deaths. Although the country has received over 4.5 million vaccine doses, mainly as donations, just 13 percent of Hondurans have been fully vaccinated. At the start of 2021, mayors of cities close to El Salvador requested and received vaccines from their Salvadoran counterparts, and Hondurans living near the Nicaraguan border were crossing it to get vaccinated. Weakened by corruption and underfunding, the health service has been overwhelmed. In April, a senior doctor reported “the collapse of the hospital network.” Seven mobile hospitals were ordered to help fill the gaps last year, but five of these are still not operational. The head of the agency that made the $47 million deal was accused of corruption and subsequently sacked. Protesters at one mobile hospital carried a banner proclaiming: “If it were a narco lab, it would be working.”

Corruption is rampant. The National Party’s presidential candidate in the coming election, Nasry Asfura (“Tito”), has been accused of massive misappropriation of funds in his current role as mayor of Tegucigalpa. Honduras’s Supreme Court is protecting him from prosecution so he can continue his campaign. For different reasons, the rival candidates leave Washington with no good options. The Liberal Party represents the traditional opposition, but a number of its members were included in the State Department’s recent list of corrupt politicians, and only four years ago its candidate Yani Rosenthal was imprisoned in the United States for money laundering. If Biden cannot easily back Rosenthal, he is also unlikely for political reasons to back the opposition candidate performing best in the opinion polls, Xiomara Castro. She is the wife of the deposed Manuel Zelaya and the nominee from the left-of-center LIBRE party. Furthermore, having tried and failed to form alliances with some of the remaining eleven minor parties, Castro looks unlikely to win even in Honduras’s desperate circumstances.

JOH’s plan seems to involve holding another badly run election where the National Party prevails through renewed electoral fraud or by buying votes, as happened in 2017. The National Election Council is being deprived of the funds it needs to operate effectively and some 1.7 million voters may not receive the identity cards they need to take part. If Asfura wins, he is widely believed to be ready to protect JOH from prosecution and from the much worse prospect of being extradited to the United States. While strongly criticizing Nicaragua’s electoral process, which also culminates in November, Washington has failed to call out Honduras’s failures. When JOH put forward a purely cosmetic revision of the electoral law, Washington urged the Honduran Congress to back it. The Organization of American States even called it a “significant step forward.” If the Biden administration accepts another highly questionable election result in November, this will signal a willingness to tolerate rampant corruption, deepening poverty, and growing violence, even if this means more Hondurans arriving at its southwest border.

Killing German Cars

Thomas Kilkauer & Meg Young

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Photograph Source: Paulius Malinovskis – CC BY 2.0

Almost since its invention, the automobile has been a weapon, as well as a symbolic prosthesis for male self-worthiness. Regularly, one can observe young men in their cars checking the power of their engines at traffic lights. Reflexes snap setting in motion a mechanism that could hardly be stopped. These men are operating a nervous interaction between the car’s clutch and the accelerator pedal. Their glances go frantically back and forth between the traffic light and the rival.

The scenery was reminiscent of duels between gunslingers in a cheap Spaghetti Western. Both waited for the starting signal. The traffic light jumped to yellow and within fractions of a second they accelerated. Their sound-amplified engines howled, tires squeaked, cars shoot forward. A few hundred meters down the road, they interrupt their race just as rabidly – and, before the next red light, it starts again.

The fact is that such inner-city races are held at traffic lights and they have become rather common. Two years ago, two young men ran several red lights during a late-night race. One of the two crashed into a car at 100 miles an hour. The driver died at the scene. A court found that the two young men had acted with intent accepting the potential death of other road users.

Both were sentenced to life imprisonment for murder. In 2019 however, another court overturned the judgment. But then in June 2020, a higher court confirmed the original conviction. Fast cars seem to be a kind of a Viagra-substitute to enhance male pride and Uber-masculinity. Yet, in the same year a Porsche came off the road and crashed into a traffic light – a twelve year old boy barely survived.

Increasingly, German courts are moving towards harsh punishment for reckless driving. Until now, speeding drivers were usually only convicted of negligence serving up to five years. Regularly, it is treated as an administrative offense, punishable by a fine and the temporary cancellation of a driver’s license.

Sadly, when male honor is at stake, everything else does not matter! The car has become a male self-esteem prosthesis boosting a weakening male sense of self. The power of the engine decides one’s status – the stronger and louder, the more masculinity.

Instead of attenuating the engine noise, engines are deliberately amplified by sound generators. On many evenings, inner-city streets are turned into race tracks. Juvenile men proudly present their thundered racing cars, painted in black and with tinted windows. In some cases, their mothers even get cleaning jobs to pay the leasing rates for their son’s super-charged on-road racing cars.

For many German men, the car, just like soccer, performs an important socio-psychological function. The throttle is the only lever left to operate. The flashy car becomes the pressure valve through which to let escape the jammed anger that has grown inside them. It is an instrument of aggression for those who have to live a life shaped by the permanent defense of oneself. Asphyxiated by inhuman life and even more callous working conditions, they remain trapped in immaturity, impotency, and powerlessness.

As a consequence, the road is becoming more and more a place of aggression, road rage, and a form of urban warfare. According to a report by the World Health Organization, we kill about 1.3 million people per year worldwide in road accidents. It is like killing the entire population of Dallas – every year.

Yet, there are more and more cars – 70 million new cars in 2020 alone. Increasingly, these are off-road vehicles, pick-ups and SUVs – also known as: UAVs or urban assault vehicles. Germany testifies to the unbroken trend towards SUVs and urban warfare on roads. Inside a Sports Utility Vehicle (SUV), many drivers fancy themselves as the little commanders-in-chief inside their rolling fortress.

Even for the majority of the population, the car has long become a socially-accepted instrument for the realization of homicidal and even suicidal tendencies. Murder and suicide often come together particularly in the moment when destructive and self-destructive energies are turned on, leaving a trail of destruction behind.

The car allows the combination of both forms of homicides and suicides – the term rampage is increasingly used. And it can be used by racists to kill – not only in Charlottesville. On New Year’s Eve 2018/19, a 50-year-old unemployed German man deliberately drove his car in groups of foreigners. Ten people were injured.

In April 2018, another man drove his van into a café killing four and injuring a further 36 people. The car has become the weapon for German men who do not have firearms and do not know how to obtain them. In February, a car crashed into a crowd of people in front of a bakery at the entrance to the pedestrian zone in the city of Heidelberg. The car caught three bystanders before hitting a lamp-post and coming to a stop. Two bystanders were injured and a 73-year-old man succumbed to his injuries hours after the crime in a local clinic. The driver fled on foot but was shot by police.

In August 2013, a 46 – year-old man drove his car through the city of Regensburg. He broke through a construction site barrier, drove at top speed through a pedestrian zone, injuring pedestrians. Finally, he crashed into the glass front door of a laundry shop killing a five-year old girl and her three-year-old sister.

During the 2006 FIFA World Cup, a man in his car broke through the barrier around the fan mile at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, driving into the crowd and injured twenty people. A court declared him mentally ill as he was sent to a mental hospital.

Germany is not alone. In neighboring Austria, a 26 year old man drove his SUV into a crowd at a pedestrian zone of Graz’s city center. After that, the man attacked people with a knife. Three people died and more than thirty were injured. Nice in France (2016), a man drove a truck into the crowd of revelers and killed 86 people.

The rampage with a car as a weapon has established itself as a new mode. It happened again on the evening of 19^th December 2016 in Berlin. An Islamist assassin drove a trailer into a crowd at the Christmas market. Twelve people died and 55 were injured. On February 24^th, 2020, a 29 year old man drove a Mercedes into people in the town of Volkmarsen injuring dozens of people including a large number of children.

The perpetrator was arrested facing 91 cases of attempted murder – the trial is still pending. In a similar rampage, a man in Trier drove his SUV through Trier’s pedestrian zone killing five people and injured twenty-four others. German police managed to stop and arrest the 51 year old man. The man was drunk and had apparently spent the last few nights in his car.

His act was reminiscent of the Münster rampage (April 2018), where a 48-year-old German drove a minibus into a roadside cafe killing two people and injuring twenty others. The man shot himself at the crime scene. His motives remained in the dark.

Many of these men – always men! – embody a form of hyper-normality, which, apparently, sometimes goes pregnant with its opposite – male destructiveness as well as Demonic Males: the Origins of Human Violence. The apparent normality of our petit-bourgeois social order gives birth to male monsters – every day.

In many cases, all too often male perpetrators are questioned by police but advised by their lawyers to come up with a plausible sounding statement. The initial, “I do not know why I did this” is no longer the most honest truth by the time questioning takes place. Once again, idyll and horror lie close together. Madness and Civilization are not as neatly separated as we have been made to believe.

In the midst of our normal Christmas shopping frenzy, violence suddenly breaks out. It shows that our petit-bourgeois shopping society is made up of money and senseless commerce. At the surface, it is pretended to be peaceful society – a simulation, as French philosopher Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) pointed out.

There is a permanent threat of urban warfare at its hidden core. It is no coincidence that the murderous weapon of a very normal man is his car, the SUV.

Originally developed for the military, today they turn streets into war zones. Men climb on board, sink into the leather seats and drop the door into its heavy lock. All sounds fade away, nothing can harm the self-imagined warrior any longer. SUV drivers have the feeling of sitting in a castle. The higher you sit, the more you underestimate your speed, the small others appear, and the more risky when you drive. A little pressure on the accelerator and you are already moving at 100 miles per hour on Germany’s infamous Autobahn and elsewhere.

From the point of view of the SUV driver, small- and medium-sized cars turn into little vermin. SUV drivers – given the sheer mass of their cars – assume everyone and everything gives way – especially pedestrians, children, dogs, and cyclists.

One is tempted to think that with the SUV, the inhuman doctrine of Social Darwinism has produced its very own vehicle that suits its twisted ideology. In an SUV, one is an Uber-master of any situation in the traffic – men ride a majestic cannonball into madness. Men is the king of the road and Lord of life and death.

Yet, mass death by cars not only hits people. The number of animals killed by cars is stratospheric. By now, many understand that a hare, a hedgehog, a robin and a fox have the same right to exist as a human being. Animal ethics tells us that we inhabit the same earth. With this level of ethical awareness, many are gripped by horror in the face of the daily massacre.

Yet, the destruction of nature continues unabated. The people live in oblivion to our global deforestation and adjacent environmental vandalism. The racing SUV driver remains unmoved. They follow a motto of madness in the face of forest deaths saying, my car also drives without forest!

On the historical dialectic of the car which is, after all, not much more than a reactionary extension of a horse drawn car-riage, our beloved cars did not always have a bad press. In its beginnings as an everyday vehicle, it was also an instrument of liberation for many – mostly very wealthy members of upper society. Much later, the capitalist miracle which many grew into was carried forward by the Fordist industries.

By the 1950s, the German automobile had become one of the central products of mass production and mass consumption. Cars became affordable even for workers who made them. Whether bought from the first self-earned money for a few hundred Deutsch Marks, or borrowed from the father or older siblings, the car expanded the radius in which young Germans moved.

Still today, Germans get their driver’s license on their eighteenth birthday – the hallmark of formal adulthood. Even the revolt of the late 1960s made use of the car in various ways. As Germany’s government responded with so-called emergency laws – the semi-dictatorial Notstandsgesetze – to anti-war rallies against the war in Vietnam, universities boiled over.

Young Germans traveled from educational protests of teach-in to teach-in in old, scrap-metal cars. On the back seats of these cars, not only anti-war speeches were composed, but also cuddling, eating, drinking, sleeping, sex, and listening to music took place. Some nights were spent on dark, lonely streets banging hard rock.

Yet, the infamous back seat of a car became part of Germany’s sexual revolution. Meanwhile, the car radio became the medium of subversion. Many of these emancipatory aspects – which a common car once possessed – shouldn’t be concealed or forgotten. Yet, this was a long time.

Today, the development of the figures alone is proof that cars have overwhelmed us: in 1960, almost five million cars were registered in Germany; last year it was almost 48 million. This came with severe consequences: the car remains the cause of one of the most common deaths of children in Germany. Of the 153 fatal accidents involving children under the age of 15 registered in 2019, for example:

+ 54 occurred with a means of transport (mostly cars);

+ 33 children drowned;

+ 21 children fell into death;

+ 17 children died from a choking accident;

+ 6 children died because of poisoning;

+ 2 children died as a result of smoke, fire and flame; and

+ 20 died of unknown causes.

Yet, while the car may well be one of the most common causes of death for children in Germany, it has also become a symbol of hyper-consumerism and status. However, the pathologies associated with driving go even further than that.

Even though cars are the means of clogging streets, road congestion and traffic jams, a car is stationary for a whopping 23 hours per day – a monstrous 95.83% of a car’s existence that it does not move at all. Still, those few trips Germans do cause massive problems. Yet, the stationary car will be even more stationary as people work from home even in a post-Coronavirus world.

Yet, alternatives like the electric car and even the most beautiful, gender-fair, ecological, e-scooter electro-skateboard, and bicycle-based capitalism remains capitalism. It contributes to the acceleration of our common global environmental destruction.

Rapidly, we move towards the 6^th mass extinction and a future of an uninhabitable earth. Yet, we stick to our cars, our hyper-consumerism, and, of course to consumer capitalism. Adorno might have been right when saying, immovably, they insist on the very ideology which enslaves them. 

Covid cases surge in Britain with accompanying flood of hospitalisations

Robert Stevens

The UK continues to record tens of thousands of COVID infections each day and around 1,000 deaths a week. In the last week, a further 256,910 cases were announced, up 6 percent on the previous week. A further nearly 30,000 cases were recorded on Saturday, along with 156 deaths.

Nationwide 983 people died over the last week due to COVID, an increase of 198 (25 percent) on the previous week.

Passengers at Euston Square London Underground station in August, 2021 (WSWS Media)

COVID infections are being allowed to spread like wildfire, with over 7.2 million people having been infected since the start of the pandemic. According to Office for National Statistics data published Friday, one in 70 people across Britain are testing positive in England. Infection and deaths are being fueled by the Delta variant, with more than 669,000 cases of the variant now recorded in the UK, with over half a million (556,542) of these in England. While Delta is the dominant variant, there are at least 16 variants of COVID still in circulation in Britain.

Internationally only the United States, with a population five times that of Britain, recorded more cases over the last week. However, the number of cases per million population in Britain last week (3,761) was significantly higher than in the US (2,830).

With the economy fully opened on July 19, with schools returning across the UK in the weeks between August 11 and last week—the result has been a significant increase in hospitalisations.

Hospital bed occupancy due to COVID is at its highest levels since March 10, with daily admissions passing the 1,000 mark last week for the first time since the Delta variant became dominant in May. On September 6, 1,063 patients were admitted to hospital with COVID on a single day.

The surge in hospitalisations is evident from data from an 11-day period from August 19-29, when the number of COVID patients increased by 590 (9 percent). In the 11 days to September 11, the number of people in hospital with COVID shot up by more than 1,000, going from 7,091 to 8,098, and increase of 14 percent and the highest level for six months.

It is estimated that if hospitalisations reach 1,500 a day, the National Health Service (NHS) faces being overwhelmed. This is only a matter of time. The Independent reported Saturday, “New analysis from the science analytics company Airfinity shows that the hospitalisation threshold that has led to previous lockdowns in the UK could be met in mid-November if admissions continue to rise unabated. It’s estimated that daily infections will need to surpass 50,500 to reach this point—37,622 daily infections were recorded on Friday.”

The Mirror newspaper revealed in its own analysis of NHS data on Saturday that since all coronavirus restrictions were abandoned on July 19, 154 of 217 NHS Trusts recording an increase in the number of beds taken by people with the virus. Among some of the “sharpest rises” being reported were at hospitals in some of the UK’s largest cities including London, Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Nottingham, and Leicester.

A growing number of hospitals nationwide are reporting red and black alerts. On Friday, the Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust announced the suspension of routine and urgent surgeries due to pressures intensified by a “peak” in Covid admissions.

A red alert means that hospitals are facing a 'significant impact' and a black alert (now known as 'Opel 4' means that a hospital is 'unable to deliver comprehensive care' and patient safety could be compromised. On Saturday, two hospitals in Derbyshire—Royal Derby Hospital and the Chesterfield Royal Hospital—announced Opel 4 alerts. BBC News reported Saturday that “The accident and emergency teams at Chesterfield Royal, Royal Derby Hospital and Queen's Hospital, Burton-upon-Trent [in Staffordshire], saw 1,038 patients on Monday alone. The number of patients with COVID across the three sites rose to 77, an increase from 65 last week with 11 being in the most critical condition.”

Just days earlier Ami Jones, an Intensive care consultant at the Aneurin Bevan Health Board in Wales tweeted that the Board had “‘flipped’ the largest part of the unit from Amber (non-Covid) to red (Covid). Covid patients now make up the majority of our patients on the unit.” He added, “Vaccination has certainly weakened the link between infections and hospitalisations. But it hasn’t broken it and the unvaccinated are featuring heavily in hospitalised patients.”

The reopening of schools is fueling the surge of cases. Schools opened in Scotland from August 11, a few weeks before they began to open in England. By the end of the month cases in Scotland had tripled. Almost 40 percent of the new cases are in children, accounting for 2,729 out of the 6,836 cases recorded last Thursday. Last week, around one in 45 people tested positive for COVID in Scotland (around 117,300 people). The previous week infections were recorded in around one in 140 people.

While cases have been rising among young people for months—with the highest rate still among 10 to 19-year-olds—new data shows that infections among older generations are rising again. The Independent noted research from Colin Angus, a senior research fellow and health inequalities modeler at the University of Sheffield, showing that most COVID hospital admissions in July were among those aged 25-34. This has shifted since early August with the “highest admission rates have been recorded in the 75-84 age bracket. Angus said that cases are “clearly rising” among over-65s and “a [there was a] definite shift towards cases being older now compared to six weeks ago.” Angus’ conclusion was that this was not down to waning immunity levels but “It’s probably more to do with greater exposure to the virus.”

Such widespread infection is laying the basis for an even more devastating phase of the pandemic in which variants can emerge that are resistant to existing vaccines. In the face of this, the ruling elite is fixated on its herd immunity agenda and “saving the economy' i.e., the profits of the corporations.

According to media reports this weekend, Prime Minister Boris Johnson is to repeal powers from the Coronavirus Act applying to England which could in any way hinder big business piling up their profits. The Telegraph reported, “These include the ability to close down sectors of the economy, such as pubs and restaurants, and to restrict access to education by closing down schools, colleges and childcare.” Under the measures to be announced, “Infectious people can also no longer be legally detained, and restrictions on events and gatherings cannot be imposed.”

All manner of mass gatherings is allowed, which are proven super-spreader events. From September 16-19, an estimated 50,000 people will attend the Isle of Wight festival under conditions in which COVID infection is raging among its small population of just over 141,000. Last Thursday, local newspaper the County Press reported that 34 acute beds were being occupied by COVID patients, up from 30 the previous week. This represents 20 percent of all acute beds on the Island being occupied by a Covid patient. A second intensive care unit at the island’s only hospital, St Mary’s, has had to open, which the trust’s chief operative officer, Joe Smyth, said is already “very, very full”.

The newspaper reported, “Government figures show between the last week of July and September 1, 2,289 covid cases were recorded on the Island—nearly a fifth of the Island's entire cases since the pandemic began.”

An exponential growth of COVID is threatened as mass public transport systems report record numbers of travelers. Last Monday, London Underground recorded its busiest morning since the start of the pandemic—with school run trips understood to be playing a major role. Just under a million rush-hour trips on the Underground were recorded—nearly a 20 percent increase from the previous week and the highest level since the first lockdown in Britain in March 2020.

A propaganda offensive is being waged by the privately owned rail network to get even more passengers back on trains, with the Rail Delivery Group (RDG) complaining that train commuting remains at just 33 percent of its pre-Covid rate. Central to its appeal is protecting the profitability of the rail firms, along with those of the major corporations who own most High Street businesses. The BBC reported, “Research carried out by WPI Economics for the RDG indicated that these commuters spent a total of £30bn a year on food and drink, shopping, entertainment and culture, boosting local businesses.”

UK schools in state of disrepair as they reopen to a raging pandemic

Simon Whelan

A survey of 1,500 British state school leaders conducted by the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) revealed 83 percent do not have sufficient funds to repair dilapidated school buildings. Speaking to the Observer newspaper, school leaders complained of leaking ceilings, faulty heating systems, broken windows and inadequate ventilation systems.

The run-down state of Britain’s classrooms will exacerbate the already dangerously high risk of COVID-19 transmission in schools.

NAHT head of policy James Bowen commented that the pandemic has “laid bare the scale of the problem”. He added, “Issues like ventilation and having enough space suddenly became really important. We were desperately ill-prepared for that. The government’s latest advice on ventilation for schools said open as many windows as you can. If your windows are screwed shut because they’re not deemed to be safe, or you’ve got external doors that are faulty, that’s a real problem.”

The findings of the NAHT survey confirm those of a Department of Education (DfE) study, which found that schools in England alone face a repair bill of £11.4 billion. It concluded that £2.5 billion was needed for electrical and IT repairs, £2 billion for boilers and air-conditioning repairs, and £1.5 billion for mending roofs, windows and walls.

The DfE’s estimated cost of £11.4 billion for “remedial work to repair or replace all defective elements” is a near £5 billion increase on the £6.7 billion recommended by the National Audit Office (NAO) as necessary to return all school buildings to a satisfactory condition in 2017. The DfE admitted, “While [the NAO report] was calculated on a slightly different basis, this does demonstrate that the overall condition need in the estate has grown over the last six years”.

Spiraling repair bills are a measure of the ruling class’s utter disregard for state schoolchildren’s wellbeing. Earlier this month, the unexpected findings of a school project run by the Don Hanson Charitable Foundation shone a light on the consequences.

The Foundation sends out educational materials on different topics to 20,000 UK schools. Over 600 schools received equipment for testing local water sources, as part of the Great British Water Project. Fourteen schools discovered that their water contains lead concentrations five times higher than the safe limit.

This is not an isolated example. Two years ago, 676 state schools were referred to the Health and Safety Executive over concerns that they were not safely managing asbestos in their buildings.

According to the ONS, between 2001 and 2019, at least 305 school workers have died of mesothelioma, a cancer almost exclusively linked with asbestos exposure. A study published in Environmental Health Scotland in 2018 found that there were five times more mesothelioma deaths among teachers than would be expected for populations not exposed to the substance.

Parading its indifference to children and educators alike, the DfE report merely “recommends” that fire-sprinklers be fitted in new schools, four years after the horrific Grenfell Tower fire. It only gives “clear guidance” that fire-sprinklers should be installed in new special schools and boarding accommodation, as well as in school buildings with floors higher than 11 metres above ground level, effectively four storeys or higher.

Fire safety design guidance currently has only an “expectation” that new buildings have fire-sprinklers installed and in recent years only one in three new school builds have had fire-sprinklers fitted.

Tilden Watson, head of Zurich Municipal’s education section, specialists in school insurance, told the Guardian, “By limiting sprinklers to schools above 11 metres, the government is effectively writing off a significant proportion of the school estate. This will create a two-tier system of safety, which is arbitrary and ill-thought-through. As predominantly single-storey buildings, primary schools will be hardest hit, especially as they already suffer nearly twice the rate of blazes as secondary schools.”

The disastrous state of the UK’s school infrastructure is the result of longstanding government neglect, private profiteering and savage austerity cuts.

School funding was slashed after the 2008 financial crash. As an example, in 2011 the repair budget for schools on Merseyside, including the city of Liverpool, was slashed by more than half, from £130 million to just £61 million. Another 12.5 percent cut followed the next year. Even prior to the crash, in 2006, Liverpool’s schools were £50 million short of what was needed to bring their buildings up to standard and were forced to hold classes in 168 mobile classrooms, up from 40 just one year before.

Overall government capital spending on schools declined by 44 percent between 2009-10 and 2019-20. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has calculated that school funding per pupil in England fell by 9 percent in real terms in the same period, the largest cut in over 40 years.

Increasing numbers of schools are therefore running financial deficits, with many struggling long before the pandemic. The size of the total schools deficit stood at £233.3 million in 2018/19 and rose to £266.4 million in 2019/20—the highest level since records began in 2002/03.

The Liverpool Echo reported how on Merseyside alone a total of 74 schools had a combined deficit of £18.5 million in 2019/20, according to DfE figures. That was up from 49 schools in 2018/19, with numbers having already risen sharply upwards from 16 in 2012/13, when comparable figures began. The average deficit per school in 2019/20 was £249,739 and Gateacre secondary school in Belle Vale, Liverpool alone has a deficit exceeding £3 million.

Gateacre School in Liverpool (Credit: Creative Commons)

Schools built under Private Finance Initiative (PFI) contracts, a specialty of the Tony Blair-Gordon Brown Labour governments, are especially laden with backbreaking costs.

Under the terms of a PFI deal, the government or local authority commissions a private firm to build a project using their own capital, with the local authority then paying back enormously inflated costs to the corporations over decades. Liverpool’s Parklands High School in Speke, constructed under a £100 million contract and opened in 2002, still costs Liverpool council £4 million per year despite the school closing in 2014. The city’s taxpayers must fork out £12,000 per day until 2028.

In total, PFI deals have locked Liverpool authority into approximately £13 million each year in repayments. Sixteen Merseyside schools built under PFI contracts continue to face financial difficulties which negatively impact pupils.

These facts show up the government’s pledge to spend a pathetic £25 million sending CO2 monitors to schools for the contemptible fraud it is. The ruling class will not provide the resources necessary for a minimally acceptable learning environment and standard of safety in normal times, let alone in a pandemic. The decades-long neglect of schools and the abandonment of children and educators to the virus are part of one and the same class policy, which prioritises profits over the basic needs of the vast majority of society.

The point of the monitors, which have yet to arrive in most schools and will do nothing except diagnose a problem everyone already knows exists, is to encourage the fiction that classrooms can be made safe. The reality is that only a combination of school and workplace closures, together with extensive public health measures, testing, tracing and vaccination, working towards the elimination of the virus, can bring an end to the dangers posed by COVID-19.

Study revealing vast undercount in Canada’s pandemic death toll buried by corporate media, political establishment

Omar Ali

The political establishment and corporate media have effectively buried a major study that shows Canada’s official tally of pandemic deaths is a vast undercount. Titled “Excess all-cause mortality during the COVID-19 epidemic in Canada,” the study was released by the Royal Society of Canada’s pandemic task force on June 29. In examining the period between February 1 and November 28, 2020, it found that overall pandemic fatalities were likely underestimated by two thirds with approximately 6,000 deaths of people aged 45 and above not being registered as being caused by COVID-19. These deaths were instead attributed to heart attacks, strokes and other ailments.

The authors wrote that their conclusions were “based on an examination of the best available reports of excess deaths across Canada, the pattern of COVID-19 fatalities during the pandemic, cremation data showing a significant spike in at-home versus hospital deaths in 2020 and antibody surveillance testing that collectively unmasked the likely broad scope of undetected COVID-19 infections.”

A member of the Canadian Armed Forces working at a Quebec nursing home. (Canadian Dept. of Defence)

To ensure the most accurate results, the researchers were compelled to factor in the growth in opioid-related deaths. The arrival of the pandemic significantly worsened the opioid epidemic, which has claimed thousands of deaths across Canada in recent years.

The report also points to the degree to which workers have succumbed to the pandemic. A quarter of the un-official COVID-19 deaths were in the 45-64 age cohort, likely consisting of frontline and essential workers.

The report offers several possible explanations for the large discrepancy in the official death toll and the number of excess deaths. In comparison to wealthy countries of similar size, testing in Canada has remained very low when adjusted for case burden. There is no systematic post-mortem testing except in the provinces of Manitoba and Quebec. When there is no positive test attached to a mortality, many provinces do not report likely causes of death. These factors have contributed to COVID-19 deaths being missed when comorbidities are present in the deceased.

The authors explain, however, that their results are only preliminary even for the period which they examined. The nation’s antiquated reporting system (baseline data from the period of 2015-19 only became available late last year) means that mortality statistics for the study period are still rolling in. The death count is therefore likely to be revised upwards as more data becomes available.

Differences in the per-capita death rate and seroprevalence numbers indicate that the attribution of 95 percent of cases and deaths to Ontario and Quebec may not be accurate. Seroprevalence itself, the authors point out, may underestimate the extent of infections as levels of antibodies decline over time.

Content to downplay the risks inherent in their drive to reopen the economy amid the pandemic, officials allowed testing capacity to remain woefully inadequate as the virus spread. The report observes that by “May 17, 2021, Canada’s peer countries had performed a cumulative average of 98 tests per positive case over the course of the pandemic, while Canada had performed 25 tests per positive case.”

This graph showing the weekly number of cremations in Ontario from January 1, 2020 to April 13, 2021 confirms the Royal Society's findings of large numbers of uncounted COVID-related deaths. It shows excess deaths, including and excluding those officially attributed to COVID-19, as compared with the average number of weekly cremations from 2017 to 2019. (Ontario COVD-19 Science Table)

Screening of the population was rare; even long-term care homes, whose residents were the hardest hit in the pandemic’s first wave in the spring of 2020, only implemented regular testing during the second wave. This meant that, in the words of the report, “During the frequent, lengthy periods of the Canadian COVID-19 epidemic when local public health contact tracing was overwhelmed and non-epidemiologically linked community cases were high, a person who died of symptoms clinically compatible with COVID-19 would not be reported as a COVID-19 death unless post-mortem testing was conducted.”

The authors damning findings are undermined by their effort to impose a racial framework on the excess deaths that is rooted in reactionary identity politics. They write that among the “uncomfortable truths” brought to light by the pandemic is the existence of “systemic racism” in light of the high numbers of immigrants and minorities among the dead. In truth, the deaths among these groups point to their overrepresentation in the most oppressed layers of the working class. Compelled to live in multigenerational homes, ride crowded transit vehicles, and work in-person in jobs with little prospect of social distancing, it is their socio-economic, i.e., class, status that put them at increased risk of contracting the virus.

Despite this weakness, the study itself ultimately acknowledges the class nature of the pandemic. It states that “[blood] donors in the most materially deprived neighbourhoods were nearly four times more likely to be seropositive than donors in the most affluent neighbourhood.”

With little reported information on the occupations of those who died from COVID-19, the authors examined 142 workplace outbreaks and found that among the jobs commonly associated with infection were health care workers, cleaners, transportation workers, postal workers, agricultural and restaurant workers, as well as those in the mining, manufacturing and construction sectors.

Internationally, reports on excess deaths during the period coinciding with the pandemic have also shed light on the degree to which the toll of COVID-19 has been understated. A recent report by the Economist magazine estimates that the virus has claimed that lives of more than 15 million people worldwide, triple the official figure. The response of the ruling classes in every country to these revelations has largely been to ignore these studies or, in the case of the Narendra Modi-led government in India, to virulently denounce them. The hostility stems quite clearly from the recognition that the true death toll is further evidence of the fruits of the murderous “herd immunity” policy pursued by capitalism the world over so that profits can be ensured by forcing workers back on the job, public health be damned.

Canada’s media has for all intents and purposes suppressed the study since its initial release. Many news outlets carried reports on the Royal Society study on the day of its release. But this was not followed up with further analysis building on its findings of excess mortality, let alone scrutiny of the political decisions that left Canada woefully unprepared for the pandemic and have led to successive waves of mass infection and death. Subsequent reporting on Canada’s official death toll has almost never been accompanied with the acknowledgement that the real number of COVID-19-related deaths is in all probability far higher.

All sections of the Canadian ruling class have advocated the prioritizing of profits over saving lives, and backed the ruinous back-to-work/back-to-school drive. Provincial governments whether led by the New Democrats in British Columbia, the Coalition Avenir Québec in Québec, the Progressive Conservatives in Ontario, or the United Conservative Party in Alberta have systematically abandoned even the most basic public health measures aimed at slowing the spread of the disease.

At the federal level, with the election campaign entering its closing stages, the major parties have been squirming to differentiate their virtually identical approaches to the pandemic. All of the parliamentary parties support a “profits before lives” strategy that insists that the wellbeing of the big banks and corporations must take priority over the safeguarding of human life. The only difference between the pandemic policies of the Liberals, Conservatives, New Democrats, Bloquistes and Greens is the degree to which they support vaccination mandates. Even the BBC was forced to conclude that the differences in the parties’ COVID-19 platforms were “pretty thin.” All are committed to keeping the economy open, whatever the cost and are complicit in the enormous death toll this strategy has produced.

The ruling class and its political representatives are determined to prevent lockdowns—although they have been shown to be the most effective means of preventing the virus’ spread. Thus, they promote vaccination as the only acceptable public health measure to fight the pandemic, placing their hopes that the hospital system does not collapse as the pandemic’s fourth wave rages (despite models showing enormous strain on ICU capacity), and the working class does not independently intervene to shutdown schools and workplaces till the pandemic is brought under control.

Vaccination, while a critical component of the fight against the disease, is not a panacea. A policy guided by a scientific understanding of the disease must recognize the threat posed to the unvaccinated and the threat of new variants emerging that evade existing vaccines.

The Royal Society report points out that the official death toll of nearly 26,000 at the time of writing in early June (currently more than 27,000) is greater than any mass casualty event in Canadian history, save the influenza pandemic of 1918 and the two world wars. To prevent further devastation and to institute a rational, science-based response to the pandemic, the working class must intervene to halt all non-essential work, so that the necessary public health measures, travel bans, school closures, vaccination, testing, and contact tracing can be employed as part of a comprehensive eradication strategy to stop the continued spread of the deadly virus.

Four year old dies from COVID-19 in Texas as cases in children skyrocket across the US

Alex Findijs

A four-year-old child died of COVID-19 last Tuesday in Texas just four hours after exhibiting symptoms, in a tragic example of the expanding impact of the pandemic on children across the United States. Kali Cook of Barclif, Texas, began showing symptoms of COVID-19 around 2 a.m. and by 7 a.m. that same morning she had passed away in her sleep.

Kali’s mother was unvaccinated and had tested positive for COVID-19 the day before. “I was one of the people that was anti, I was against it,” she told Daily News. “Now, I wish I never was.”

The sudden death of Kali Cook is a rare occurrence, but it is by no means an isolated incident. COVID-19 cases among children are exploding across the country just weeks after the reopening of schools, and the number of child deaths continues to rise.

Kali Cook (4) Image credit: Karra Harwood/GoFundMe)

Florida recorded 2,448 deaths last week, including four children under the age of 16. For the past three weeks children have made up one-third of new cases in Florida despite making up just 22 percent of the population. In just the past six weeks the total number of COVID-related child deaths in the state has doubled.

In response to the rise of pediatric cases, Tampa General Hospital released a video of pediatric doctors and nurses encouraging more people to get vaccinated.

“The delta variant really kind of changed the game for us, because we weren’t seeing that many children — now we’re starting to see them in the ICU,” said Janet Elozory, pediatric ICU nurse manager at Tampa General.

The situation is the same across the country. According to data from the American Academy of Pediatrics, children now account for more than a quarter of weekly infections nationwide. During the week ending September 2, nearly 252,000 children tested positive for COVID-19. Between August 5 and September 2 nearly 750,000 children tested positive as the pace of infection continues to climb.

In Colorado, 2,661 children tested positive in the last week of August alone, up from 347 cases a week in mid-July. At the current growth rate of infection, child cases will continue to double every week. If this pace continues, it will take less than two months to infect all of Colorado’s 860,000 school-age children.

This rapid rise in cases is translating to an increase in child hospitalizations. During the week of August 22, 71 children aged 6 to 17 were hospitalized in Colorado, up from 40 during the prior week.

The connection between the rapid rise in cases and hospitalizations to school reopenings is apparent. Dr. Kevin Carney, associate chief medical officer at Children’s Hospital Colorado, told the Fort Morgan Post, “The state has seen a significant increase in the number of pediatric patients infected with COVID-19. It’s not surprising, given that within the last few weeks, kids have gone back to school.”

Similar thoughts were expressed by Dr. Bryan Kornreich, a pediatrician from Frederick County in Virginia. Kornreich explained to WUSA9 that there has been a surge in pediatric COVID infections since schools opened, and that, “I’m worried we’re just going to run out of COVID tests, because now the number of tests we’re going through a day, it can’t be sustained… and the manufacturer can’t keep up with the demand.”

Child cases are even worse in South Carolina, where more than 4,000 students and 398 staff tested positive during the first week of September. Young people aged 11 to 20 make up the largest group of those infected at 23 percent of cases, followed in second by children under the age of 11 constituting 15 percent of cases.

The rise in cases in the state resulted in the deaths of two students in early September. A 9 year old and a 15 year old both died of COVID-19 on September 1 in Aiken County, according to the Associated Press.

The effect on children is not felt through infection alone, though. Tens of thousands of children across the country have lost one or both parents or another primary caregiver from COVID-19 during the pandemic. Just last week, a Michigan couple with seven children both died within one day of each other.

Troy and Charletta Green had been married for 22 years. Prior to a planned trip to Florida in August, Troy fell ill and decided to stay behind while his wife and children traveled to Orlando. Shortly after arriving Charletta fell ill as well. Both suffered from respiratory issues, with Troy placed on a ventilator on August 23 and Charletta on August 26.

The couple began to recover but Charletta developed a serious blood clot and passed on September 9. After learning of the death of his wife, Troy suffered a heart attack and died the next morning. As a result of the continued spread of COVID-19, which has been allowed to persist through the bipartisan policy of “herd immunity,” the children of Troy and Charletta Green, aged 10 to 23, tragically lost both of their parents.

Every day hundreds more children around the world are added to the list of those who have lost a parent to COVID-19. Research by the Lancet estimates that around 1.1 million children have lost at least one primary caregiver globally. Of that number, 114,000 children are from the United States. Given the gaps in reporting on deaths and cases around the world, the true figure is likely even higher.

The continued threat to the health and lives of children and their parents is a social crime of immense proportions. The persistence of the pandemic and the emergence of ever more contagious and dangerous variants is the product of the insatiable greed of the ruling class, which demands that children return to school so that parents may return to work generating profits for the wealthy.