Germany’s federal election and the intensification of class struggle

Ulrich Rippert

The run up to Germany’s federal election this coming Sunday has been characterised by an unprecedented wave of strikes, protests and demonstrations.

Striking hospital workers in Berlin (WSWS media)

German rail workers have been on strike on three occasions since August, paralysing freight and passenger traffic for days. Then, last week, the train drivers’ union (GDL) abruptly ended the nationwide strike, although the strikers’ militancy had increased and the rail management had made only minimal concessions.

The union accepted a drastic reduction in real wages. The agreed increase of 1.8 percent on average over a period of 32 months fails to even compensate for half of the current rate of inflation, which is rapidly approaching 4 percent. The GDL also agreed to the introduction of a two-tier system in the company pension scheme. The previous paid supplementary pension will only apply to so-called existing employees from next year.

This week, the German public service union Verdi is seeking to end the indefinite strike by staff at the two major hospital concerns in Berlin, Charité and Vivantes. At Vivantes, where the issue at stake is the alignment of the extremely low wages paid to subsidiary workers with the general contract for the public service (TvöD), Verdi ended its strike action last Saturday and resumed negotiations.

After top-level talks over the weekend, Verdi said on Tuesday it welcomed “the fact that the Vivantes management had made a move” and presented a new offer. This will now be examined, announced Verdi negotiator Meike Jäger, who is also deputy chair of the Vivantes supervisory board. She added: “We continue to hope to quickly arrive at solutions that will allow the strike to be scaled down.”

Verdi is strangling the strike in Berlin because the union is alarmed at the growing mobilisation of nursing staff, which is spreading like wildfire. The industrial action at the two state-owned hospital corporations is seen by many other workers as a signal to finally take action against the intolerable working conditions prevailing in the health sector. These conditions are the consequence of years of cutbacks, privatisation measures and the orientation to profit making, and have significantly worsened in the course of the COVID-19 pandemic.

At the same time that Verdi is desperately seeking to end the strike in the health sector, it has been forced to call a nationwide short term “warning” strike at IKEA. The Swedish furniture company employs over 18,000 workers in Germany. Average company wage levels are very low and staff have struggled in recent months with additional workloads due to digitalisation and growing online trade.

The situation is even more acute in the engineering and electrical industry. Last week, IG Metall agreed to cut 2,600 jobs at Siemens Energy. There were protest rallies and demonstrations at all of the affected sites, where Siemens workers made clear their readiness to fight. But IG Metall and its associated works councils have never had the intention of waging a serious struggle to defend the jobs.

This is the situation everywhere. Half a million jobs are down to be axed in the German auto industry alone. The ruling class is using the pandemic to reverse all of the working class’s social gains. Under conditions where workers are losing their incomes, livelihood or even their lives, the ruling elite is using the pandemic for a new round of enrichment.

Last week in Saarlouis, more than 3,000 Ford workers demonstrated together with their families against job cuts. The factory, which celebrated its 50th anniversary last year with great pomp, is on the brink of collapse. Of the factory’s more than 7,000 employees, over 2,000 have already been laid off by management in close cooperation with the local works council and IG Metall.

Many people in the region, where the mining and steel industries were shut down many years ago, are angry and deeply concerned. Ford is the largest employer in the region, and thousands of jobs in the auto supply industry and other sectors of the economy are also in danger. Some 14,000 signatures in defence of the plant have been collected in recent months. But Ford management continues to keep its closure plans secret, while IG Metall refuses to lead a joint struggle of all auto workers at all plants to defend jobs.

The same situation prevails at the companies Daimler, Audi, Bosch, BMW and Volkswagen. Daimler announced last autumn that it would double its worldwide job cuts from 15,000 to 30,000. In the summer, workers at auto parts manufacturer Continental fought against the threat of job cuts with a series of protests after management increased its plans for job cuts to 30,000, with 13,000 to go in Germany.

Resistance is developing worldwide. Of particular significance was the industrial action at the American Volvo Trucks in Dublin, Virginia, the fourth largest truck manufacturer in the world. Three thousand workers went on strike for five weeks this summer to oppose a contract deal that significantly worsened their working conditions and wages. On three separate occasions they voted down by a large majority a contract agreed by IG Metall’s American sister organisation, the UAW.

In Belgium, Volvo Cars workers also opposed an agreement between the company and the union to extend the working week. In June, workers at the British pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline went on strike for 11 days to oppose the dismissal of temporary workers and cuts to social benefits.

In Turkey, thousands of electricity workers took spontaneous strike action to protest worsened working conditions agreed by the Tes-Is union. In Canada, miners at Vale in Sudbury, Ontario, went on strike for two months after rejecting a union-backed contract which down-scaled workers.

This development of the class struggle has implications for the election campaign in Germany. All of the country’s parliamentary parties are responding to growing resistance from workers by closing ranks and forming a common front. They all supported the so-called Corona bailouts last year, which handed out hundreds of billions to corporations and the super-rich. Now they are all in favour of squeezing those billions back out of the working class through social cuts, austerity measures, debt brakes, etc. At the same time, the military budget is being further increased.

A key role in this all-party front against the working class is played by the trade unions. They are trying to prove to the corporations and the government that they are best placed and have the best plans for defending big business interests in the global struggle for market share and profits. They want to convince executives that profits and share prices will rise faster if they work closely with the unions.

In doing so, they are using their extensive apparatus of functionaries, including works councils and shop stewards, to suppress any serious struggle to defend jobs, wages and social standards. This strategy includes phoney protests that only serve to spread frustration, and local based campaigns that divide and pit workers against one other. The unions, however, are less and less able to control and suppress the growing resistance in factories.

Ukraine on the verge of the fourth wave of the pandemic

Jason Melanovski

Last week, Ukraine’s daily coronavirus-related deaths topped 100 for the first time since June, according to the country’s health ministry. New infections likewise increased to over 6,000 for the first time since May 15 as the virus resurges in the impoverished Eastern European country of approximately 41 million. By comparison, in September 2020, the country reported just over 3,000 new cases, testifying to the fact that the global pandemic is far from concluded.

Patients with COVID-19 in a hospital in Lviv, western Ukraine, Tuesday, March 23, 2021. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)

COVID-19 hospitalization rates similarly jumped 51 percent in just one week. The highly infectious Delta variant now accounts for over 70 percent of all new cases, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

Over 58,000 have already died in Ukraine as a result of the pandemic, according to data from Johns Hopkins University, but the real number is undoubtedly higher. In the western L'viv region, reports have surfaced that people have been forced to bury COVID-19 victims in makeshift graves outside of their homes due to a lack of cemetery spaces.

While the government of President Volodymyr Zelensky has spent the entire summer attempting to receive the backing of Western imperialism for its provocative anti-Russia offensive to “ retake Crimea ,” its pandemic policies are preparing the grounds for an even more catastrophic spread of the virus and further mass death.

This Monday, the government announced that it would extend a state of emergency until the end of the year and issued a “yellow” warning for the entire country, which does little more than limit mass events and mandates mask-wearing.

The resurgence of the virus was entirely predictable as the Ukrainian government had earlier lifted the most lockdown restrictions in June with just 1.6 million vaccinated individuals. To date, just over ten percent of the country are vaccinated. The unvaccinated have accounted for over 98 percent of hospitalizations in the past three months, according to Deputy Minister of Health Igor Kuzin.

Throughout the summer the country enforced what it called an “adaptive lockdown” which allowed regional authorities to tighten or ease restrictions depending on the situation locally. In reality, such measures were totally inadequate and weakly enforced and permitted the Delta variant to enter the country unchecked.

Faced with a deteriorating situation, Prime Minister Denis Shmygal announced in early September that the government would be meeting to consider a return to stricter lockdown restrictions.

“The epidemiological situation in Ukraine is predicted to deteriorate ... we see a tendency towards an increase in hospitalizations of patients with COVID-19, but the situation is not critical,” said Health Minister Viktor Lyashko. This statement flies in the face of reality: the country is heading into fall when respiratory infections typically rise and 4.2 million students are being herded back into school.

Shmygal also made clear that the government will attempt to use the already globally-failed strategy of vaccinating itself out of the pandemic.

Last week, the government announced it would be introducing vaccine “passports” that “will allow businesses such as cinemas, gyms, theatres and swimming pools to operate without social distancing requirements if all visitors and at least 80 per cent of staff at the venues are at least partially vaccinated.”

As the WSWS has reported, vaccinations alone will not stop the spread of COVID-19 and could potentially lead to even more dangerous and infectious variants of the virus.

To make matters worse, in a reflection of the widespread distrust and disillusionment with the government and the country’s medical infrastructure, a recent poll suggested that 56 percent of adult Ukrainians have no intention of receiving any COVID-19 vaccine.

Moreover, in comparison to wealthier Western countries, Ukraine has struggled to obtain vaccines and as of August had the largest share of the unvaccinated in all of Europe. The imperialist backers of the Kiev government have refused to provide it with any meaningful assistance in the effort to vaccinate the population.

Nevertheless, in a sign of its fealty to United States imperialism, the country has refused to use the more readily available Russian-made Sputnik V vaccine. The vaccine’s effectiveness was confirmed by data published in Nature magazine in July.

The country’s ruling class has made clear it is aware of the deadly consequences of its policies. Speaking with the Agence France Presse, former deputy health minister and founder of the Centre for Public Health Analysis Pavlo Kovtonyuk, ominously declared that, “This wave will mostly likely be the deadliest.”

Kovtonyuk also admitted that the country’s underfunded and dilapidated hospitals were incapable of dealing with a fourth wave. “No matter how we prepare our hospitals, they will be overcrowded,” Kovtonyuk admitted.

Medical workers throughout the pandemic in Ukraine have worked in desperate conditions with outdated and missing supplies. Exacerbating the situation, throughout the pandemic Ukrainian medical workers have often gone months without pay.

During the summer, a number of medical workers went on strike, demanding unpaid wages and COVID-19 hazard pay. While the country continues to see thousands of new cases a day, the National Health Service has illogically continued to cut hospital staff and wages.

In August, doctors and nurses in the eastern of city of Kupyansk went on strike despite intimidation and threats of layoffs from hospital administration. Earlier in the month, 150 medical workers in the city of Valkov went on strike and blocked a major highway over unpaid wages.

Similar strikes took place throughout the summer in Kiev, L’viv, Suma and Slovyansk and will likely spread as the fourth wave overcrowds hospitals and places medical workers in even more dangerous working conditions.

French universities reopen for in-person learning amid COVID-19 pandemic

Samuel Tissot

As of the beginning of this week, French universities have fully reopened for in-person learning without basic protections against COVID-19 for students and staff. The only restriction in place is the mandatory wearing face masks, which are ineffective against the dominant Delta variant.

Main buildings of the universities Panthéon-Sorbonne and Panthéon-Assas, former Faculty of Law and Economics of the University of Paris (Sorbonne). Place du Panthéon, Paris.

The staggered reopening of universities has unfolded over the past few weeks. Many students entering university education for the first time took part in orientation activities with no restrictions. Sports clubs, drinking events, and other activities involving large group gatherings have resumed as if the pandemic did not exist. In a direct parallel of last year’s deadly reopening, students are daily confronted with overcrowded lecture halls and packed cafeterias.

Huge numbers of students and the wider population remain unprotected in France. Contrary to the myth promoted by the bourgeois media and Macron government, students and young people also die from COVID-19. Since the beginning of the pandemic, 91 people between the ages of 20 and 29 have died from COVID-19, including 10 since the beginning of August.

Many students also remain unvaccinated. One in four people in France between the ages of 18 and 39 are not fully vaccinated, according to figures published by l’Assurance Malady on September 12. Proof of vaccination is not currently required to enter universities. Furthermore, increasingly vaccine-resistant variants will proliferate as long as the virus is not eradicated.

As was the case last year, the entire reopening of universities has been subordinated to the Macron government’s de facto herd immunity policy. Although cases have been dropped since their August peak, on September 21 there were 7,851 cases and 201 deaths. Despite efforts in the media to promote the notion that life is “back to normal,” in just the last seven days, at least 497 people have died from COVID in France. Under these conditions, the World Health Organization predicts 236,000 further deaths across Europe before December 1.

On Wednesday, Professor Arnaud Fontanet, a member of the Scientific Council, told Le Parisien, “We observed the same lull at the end of September 2020, before a cold snap that triggered the second wave in France and neighboring countries,” adding that he “expects the epidemic to start up again in the autumn.” In 2020, following a summer of comparatively low cases, in the six months following the September reopening of universities and schools French deaths rose from 30,000 to 95,000.

Despite these projections, just like last year, no plans have been made for online classes. On top of mass death, a winter surge of the virus could leave students facing another year of financial uncertainty and educational disruption.

With no quality online alternative to in-person lectures, sick students are incentivized to avoid testing in order to participate in classes.

Students in France, 21 percent of whom live below the poverty line according to the Institute of National Statistics and Economic studies, will also have to pay €49 for a PCR test without a doctor’s prescription or €25 for inadequate antigen tests, further disincentivizing those with COVID-19 symptoms from testing. This has created a situation throughout universities where students with multiple COVID-19 symptoms are in crowded classrooms, exposing their peers.

In June 2020, fascistic ex-US president Donald Trump was ridiculed for stating “if we stop testing right now, we’d have very few cases.” Now this very conception drives the Macron government’s health policy, which seeks to undermine support for further lockdowns and social distancing policies by suppressing the true extent of the pandemic.

Despite the increasing number of breakthrough infections, vaccinated students will not be required to isolate after exposure to the virus. Should they choose to isolate, they risk missing lectures and losing grades due to the lack of access to in-person courses online. As vaccine efficacy wanes against new variants, and large numbers of people remain unvaccinated, the Macron government is once again pursuing a deadly and anti-scientific policy of immunity by infection.

In response to this deadly policy, students must turn towards building a movement in the working class fighting for a scientific policy of eradication. Contrary to the myth promoted by governments across Europe and the media, the prevention of mass death and high-quality education are not alternatives. In fact, it is only through a policy of eradication that both goals can be achieved.

Following the shift of courses online in late October last year, French students spent almost an entire university year online. Along with their counterparts across Europe, they endured more than a year of mass death, lost family members, and faced poorly-organized online education.

This contrasts to the situation in New Zealand and China, where an eradication policy resulted in just three months of online classes in universities before summer 2020. Until August 2021, when an importation of the Delta variant from abroad led to a new lockdown, New Zealand continued in-person instruction for over a year. New Zealand has recorded 27 deaths, while China, despite having a population of over 1.45 billion and being the first country hit by the virus, has recorded 4,636 deaths. This compares to the official toll of at least 116,000 deaths in France.

One of the major reasons that Macron has been able to reopen universities without more resistance from students and workers has been the role-played by pseudo-left forces such as the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste and student unions in disorienting students. Forming a campaign around the tragic suicides of two students in January of this year, they demanded Macron reopened universities immediately, giving the president a welcome justification to promote a policy of allowing the virus to spread unchecked.

Ultimately supporting Macron’s demand that France “live with the virus” in order to protect corporate profits, these groups cynically argued that universities must be opened to safeguard students’ mental health. The failure to control COVID-19, however, condemns students and youth to the further loss of loved ones and friends, more isolation, continually-disrupted education, and, in many cases, to death. A scientific policy to eradicate the virus with strong social and financial support for all students is the only remedy to the current mental health crisis.

High quality education is a social right. In the context of a deadly pandemic, however, this first and foremost means that the virus must be properly suppressed. Under the current conditions of mass community transmission universities cannot be made safe. They must be closed until the virus is under control, at which point they can be reopened with the correct precautions. If the correct health measures are taken, then this period of isolation would not exceed two or three months.

During this necessary period of lockdown students, as well as all members of society, must be provided with high-quality housing, financial support, computers and a high-speed internet connection. Similarly, exams and other forms of evaluation that are crucial to students’ futures must be suspended until this necessary lockdown has finished.

Two months into school reopenings in the US: a balance sheet

Emma Arceneaux

Two months into the fall semester, the reopening of schools across the United States has been a horrifying disaster. Both children and educators are dying of COVID-19 at a rate of at least three per day nationwide. In the last five weeks, 100 children have died, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). According to an unofficial tracker on Twitter, at least 311 educators have died since July 1, with the majority occurring since late July once schools began reopening.

The latest AAP report states that last week 225,978 children tested positive for COVID-19, and childhood cases have been steeply rising in every region of the country since July. Nationwide, the 7-day average of pediatric hospitalizations stands at 301.

Data from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) showing COVID-19 cases among children in each part of the US through September 16, 2021 (Source: AAP)

In every region—from the South, where multiple governors are nakedly pursuing the “herd immunity” strategy and outlawing basic health measures, to the Northeast and West Coast where there are relatively high vaccination rates and the media and unions tout limited mitigation measures in schools—pediatric cases have rapidly spiked since schools reopened.

Contrary to the claims by the Biden administration that unvaccinated individuals are responsible for the current fourth wave of the pandemic, the AAP data, combined with local reports, prove that school reopenings are driving the terrible surge of COVID-19 in every corner of the US. The chorus of Democratic Party officials who promised that schools would be safe with proper mitigations are actively relaxing such measures and undermining the means for tracking the spread of COVID-19 in schools.

An essential element of the strategy to eradicate COVID-19 globally, which is the only viable and scientific response to the pandemic, must include the closure of in-person education until the virus is eliminated. Combined with the closure of nonessential workplaces, mass vaccinations, universal masking and testing, contact tracing, the safe isolation of infected patients, and other public health measures, COVID-19 could be eradicated worldwide within two to three months.

South

In Georgia, a total of 47 educators have died this school year alone and an average of one educator has died each day since August 11. At least 15 children have died from COVID-19 in the state since the start of the pandemic, including four in August alone. Earlier this month, state epidemiologist Dr. Cherie Dreznik said that 60 percent of all outbreaks in the state were occurring in K-12 schools.

Two educators in Georgia died on September 21, Sharon McClellan and Joe Harris. McClellan, 50, taught STEM at Welch Elementary. Her death follows that of Welch’s School Resource Officer Frankie Guitterez, who also died of COVID-19 two weeks earlier. Harris, 35, was a teacher at Lyman Hall Elementary School in Hinesville and the mayor of Riceboro.

Florida, which has five of the 10 largest school districts in the US, is once again deliberately falsifying its pandemic data. A backlog of 1,213 deaths from COVID-19 was reported yesterday, including 189 that occurred prior to August 26, according to the Miami Herald.

On Wednesday, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, Ron DeSantis’ newly appointed surgeon general and a signatory of the Great Barrington Declaration, announced changes to school quarantine protocols. Under the false pretense of allowing parents to decide what is best for their children, students who have been exposed to COVID-19 can go to school “without restriction” and students who choose to quarantine may only do so for seven days if asymptomatic.

In August, at least 15 school personnel died in the Miami-Dade school district in a 10-day period. From July 30 to September 9, the state’s pediatric deaths more than doubled, with 10 children below 16 years of age dying in that period. The state obscures pediatric cases by including 16- and 17-year-olds in an adult category.

Since the start of the semester, over 22,000 children have tested positive for COVID-19 in Mississippi. The state recently surpassed New Jersey for the highest cumulative per capita COVID-19 death rate in the US, with roughly one in 312 people dead. There have been seven pediatric deaths in the state since the start of the pandemic, and four of those have occurred in the last two months.

Last week, the Board of Trustees for the Mississippi Institutions for Higher Learning became the first higher-ed governing body in the country to ban public universities and colleges from mandating COVID-19 vaccination for faculty, staff and students.

There were 6,382 K-12 cases recorded last week in Alabama. The state does not publish a cumulative tally of cases over the school year, preventing the weekly figures from being examined over time.

The quarantine and contact tracing protocols in place last school year have been reduced or eliminated. Last year, school officials had to notify families when their children came into contact with anyone who tested positive. This year, schools are only required to report known cases to the state.

Dr. Karen Landers of the Alabama Department of Public Health bluntly told local news, “Based on widespread community transmission and the number of daily positive COVID-19 cases and close contacts... the Department of Public Health is unable to investigate, contact trace or issue quarantine orders for all positive cases and close contacts.”

According to state health officer Dr. Scott Harris, a recent drop in hospitalizations is due in large part to an increase in deaths, which exceeded 100 per day this week. The state also made national news after an unofficial announcement that there were more deaths than births in 2020, a first in the state’s record that dates back to 1900. A study by the University of New Hampshire Carsey School of Public Policy, published in May, found that deaths exceeded births in twenty-five states in 2020, up from only five in 2019.

Nearly half of Louisiana’s 16 pediatric deaths have occurred in the past two months. The seventh child to die since mid-July was announced on Wednesday, only five days after the sixth.

Days before Hurricane Ida, there were 453 cases reported in New Orleans Public Schools, leading to 4,657 students and staff in quarantine, or nine percent of the combined student and staff population. After returning to school following a three week closure, there are 34 active cases in the district.

There have been at least 126,687 students and over 25,000 educators infected since August 8 in Texas. Major outbreaks are ongoing throughout the state, including more than 4,400 infections total in the Fort Bend district in Houston.

Midwest

In Michigan, where about 60 percent of students attend districts that require masks, there were 98 new outbreaks reported in K-12 schools on Monday, accounting for 56 percent of total outbreaks in the state. Another 14 percent of outbreaks occurred in a category that includes childcare, after school programs and youth sports. Schools have only been open one month.

Across Illinois, there have been 206 outbreaks in K-12 schools over the past month. Pediatric cases have steadily increased since July, with infections in ages 5-11 jumping from 391 the week ending July 17 to 3,300 the week ending September 11, an increase of 843 percent.

In Minnesota, there have been over 1,600 cases in K-12 settings in the first two weeks of school and health officials announced Thursday that two school staff members have died in the same period.

Northeast

New York City, the largest school district in the country with 1.1 million students, is touted as having some of the strongest mitigation measures in the country. Yet Democratic mayor Bill De Blasio announced Monday that unvaccinated children will not be required to quarantine after close contact with a student who tested positive if they were both masked and three feet apart.

The Situation Room, the inter-agency body that is responsible for tracking cases and deciding on quarantines and closures in the district, has slashed its operating hours since last year, leading to a dangerous lag between infections and quarantines.

Educators have shattered any illusion that even these inadequate measures can be maintained. An internal survey done by the United Federation of Teachers found that 92 percent of respondents said that students cannot maintain three feet of distance throughout the day; 89 percent said students are not following mask protocols; and 98 percent believe neither the mayor nor the Department of Education have a proper safety plan in place.

While the UFT estimates that 90 percent of teachers in the district are vaccinated, there have been 1,689 confirmed cases among staff and students and 1,294 classroom closures in the first 10 days of school.

There have been school outbreaks across the state of Maryland, leading to thousands of students being quarantined and at least one school shutting down entirely. In Hartford County, 1,100 students are in quarantine or isolating after 158 students and 44 staff tested positive. In Baltimore City Public Schools, 240 students tested positive last week, up from 185 the previous week. In Carroll County, 6 percent of the student body is currently quarantined.

West

Across California, a state run by the Democratic Party, efforts are being made to relax testing and quarantine protocols in schools and hide the spread of COVID-19 in workplaces.

Citing a low test positivity rate, Long Beach Unified School District has paused all student testing for a week. Still, roughly 650 students and 25 staff tested positive in the first three weeks of school.

The Los Angeles County health director recently said that school districts in Los Angeles may now adopt loose quarantine protocols for unvaccinated students, as long as they were wearing a mask when exposed. Already, vaccinated students are not required to quarantine. As of September 17, there were 1,465 active cases and six outbreaks in Los Angeles Unified School District, the second largest in the US with over 600,000 students.

Meanwhile, the California Senate unanimously passed a bill on Friday that would allow for outbreak data to be hidden from workers. The bill would expand the employers exempt from the COVID-19 outbreak reporting requirement to various entities including community clinics, adult day health centers, community care facilities, and child day care facilities. The bill will go into effect immediately if signed by Governor Gavin Newsom.

In the school districts surrounding Seattle, Washington, two weeks into the semester there have already been 195 cases among students and 73 among staff. While Washington has one of the highest vaccination rates in the US (at 62 percent) as in Alabama, a recent decline in hospitalizations is at least in part due to an increase in deaths, according to Washington State Hospital Association CEO Cassie Sauer.

The accounts above represent a summary of the catastrophe unfolding across the country.

From the ultra-right wing DeSantis/Ladapo duo in Florida to the liberals in New York and Los Angeles, politicians from both capitalist parties are reducing quarantine requirements despite pediatric cases near or exceeding all-time highs. In Washington, run by Democrats, and in Alabama, run by Republicans, hospitalizations are declining in large part due to an increase in deaths.

Far from pursuing a more scientific and humane pandemic policy compared to the Republicans, the Democratic Party, backed by the teachers unions, is essentially following the same playbook. The mitigation strategy has been exposed for what it really is—herd immunity with palliative care.

Biden administration sends migrants in chains back to Haiti, prepares Guantanamo camp

Chase Lawrence

The Biden Administration is deporting refugees to Haiti in an airlift where many are being held in chains, some of those arriving in the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince have told reporters. Multiple Haitian refugees described having been deported by plane by Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to Haiti in chains. One refugee stated, “They chained me like a slave.”

A man carries a boy across the Rio Grande river as migrants, many from Haiti, leave Del Rio, Texas to return to Ciudad Acuna, Mexico, early Wednesday, Sept. 22, 2021, some to avoid possible deportation from the U.S. and others to load up on supplies. (AP Photo/Fernando Llano)

Refugees, many of whom have not set foot in Haiti in decades, are left with little more than the shirts on their backs after leaving the airport. No provision for housing has been provided, leaving many with the immediate prospect of homelessness and poverty in the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.

Haiti has been beset by a stream of crises. A devastating earthquake killed more than 2,200, destroying or damaging more than 137,000 homes and 212,000 people having lost access to safe drinking water, with half of those in need still awaiting aid, according to the United Nations. This is in addition to the coronavirus pandemic, a presidential assassination and extreme poverty, as well as a general disintegration of society with widespread crime where much of the country is essentially run by crime lords.

The ongoing repression of Haitian immigrants is so ferocious and the conditions to which they are forced to return so terrible that Biden’s own special envoy to Haiti resigned in protest.

Daniel Foote called the policy of migrant expulsions “inhumane.” He wrote, “I will not be associated with the United States’ inhumane, counterproductive decision to deport thousands of Haitian refugees and illegal immigrants to Haiti, a country where American officials are confined to secure compounds because of the danger posed by armed gangs to daily life,” calling the US approach to Haiti “deeply flawed.”

Given the standards of the State Department, which routinely apologizes for barbaric regimes like those of Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Thailand, it is remarkable that the Biden administration policy is so brazenly cruel and antidemocratic that an American diplomat feels compelled to object.

It was also revealed Thursday that Biden’s DHS is currently seeking a contractor to operate a concentration camp for refugees in Guantanamo Bay. The contract requires at least ten percent of the guards to speak Spanish and Haitian Creole, according to government records.

The concentration camp’s contract solicitation states, “The service provider shall be responsible to maintain on site the necessary equipment to erect temporary housing facilities for populations that exceed 120 and up to 400 migrants in a surge event”

As many as 12,000 Haitians were sent to Guantanamo Bay between 1991 and 1993 by the George H. W. Bush administration. This was following the US-backed military coup of September 30, 1991, which resulted in military rule until 1994, as well as the subsequent murder of 3,000 Haitian political activists between 1991 and 1993.

The White House Press Secretary Jennifer Psaki, as well as the DHS, claimed that Haitian immigrants would not be sent from the southern US border to the camp, and that it was for immigrants detained at sea.

A DHS spokeswoman claimed that the camp at Guantanamo is a separate facility from that housing supposed terrorists, and it is maintained to house people fleeing the Dominican Republic, Haiti and Cuba in small boats that are intercepted by the US Navy. She added that the contract was a “routine renewal” posted last week and had no connection to the border crisis at Del Rio, Texas.

The ongoing Border Patrol operation at Del Rio has provoked widespread protests after agents were photographed on horseback in the Rio Grande, whipping and herding migrants as they sought to cross the river. The Biden administration’s response was to suspend the use of horses, as though brutality and violence dealt out on foot was acceptable.

There are several reports of Haitian refugees rebelling against the illegal and clearly fascistic attempts by the US government to expel them. Along the border, Haitian migrants in custody hijacked multiple buses attempting to displace or deport refugees from the Del Rio camp, forcing out drivers in incidents that threatened to disrupt the deportations.

Both the rebellions and the alleged release of Haitians in Texas—rather than their deportation—have been widely reported in the right-wing, pro-Trump media, such as Fox News and the Washington Examiner, which are seeking to discredit the Biden administration as too soft, and to justify in advance the use of deadly force by the Border Patrol or the Texas state police.

The Washington Examiner quoted a “senior administration official” declaring, “They’ve been basically overpowering the drivers and they’ve actually hijacked a couple of the buses and driven them down the road a little ways and escaped. This happened multiple times.”

The official complained about the lack of chaining of refugees, who are protected under international law: “They’re moving the detainees, but they’re not shackled—they’re not restrained in any way. Yesterday some detainees kicked a window out and 22 escaped,” referring to an incident on Monday.

A bus to San Antonio, Texas was taken over by migrants, who broke out of the bus and escaped. The refugees were later recaptured by law enforcement.

The camp in Del Rio, Texas once comprised 15,000 Haitian refugees from the Americas who gathered under an overpass after crossing the US-Mexico border over the course of a few days. Biden’s DHS has already deported or moved to detention camps a total of 4,000 refugees, it claims, while an estimated 4,000 remain at the overpass.

There has been no explanation of where the remaining 5,000 to 7,000 refugees have gone, whether back to Mexico, released into Texas or “disappeared” into the vast gulag of US immigration detention facilities.

United Nations refugee chief Filippo Grandi and 38 American civil rights groups have called on Biden to stop deportations. Grandi urged the US to lift its Title 42 health-related restrictions, which were used by the Trump and extended by the Biden administration to deport immigrants, stating they “deny most people arriving at the southwest U.S. land border any opportunity to request asylum.”

He continued, “The summary, mass expulsions of individuals currently underway under the Title 42 authority, without screening for protection needs, is inconsistent with international norms and may constitute refoulement.”

According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights: “Under international human rights law, the principle of non-refoulement guarantees that no one should be returned to a country where they would face torture, cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment and other irreparable harm. This principle applies to all migrants at all times, irrespective of migration status.”

DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said Tuesday that the public should “expect to see dramatic results within the next 48 to 96 hours” in the coming days on Haitian immigrants, essentially stating that they are going to break up and deport the refugee camp along the border, and that “Our goal is to do so within the next 10 days or nine days.”

When Mayorkas, a former top official in the DHS under the Obama administration, was appointed to head the agency, the identity politics crowd and pseudo-left sang his praises as the first immigrant to oversee the department and as a savior who was to reverse the policies of the previous administration.

Janet Murguía, the president of UnidosUS, a Latino advocacy organization, praised him at the time saying, “After four long, dark years … [and] a general contempt for Latinos from the highest office in the land, Mayorkas’s nomination signals a new day for the Department of Homeland Security and for all our country.”

Erika Andiola, chief advocacy officer for RAICES, a nonprofit that provides legal services to low-income immigrants, went even further, stating, “We hope that as the first Latino and someone who has advocated for immigrant rights, [Mayorkas] will change the direction of DHS once and for all.”

For all the attempt to push the “systemic racism” narrative down the public’s throat, to blame white people for racism, Biden himself shows the real source of the racism: the capitalist system and the capitalist state, and its ruling parties, both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party.

Barbaric experiments with “COVID-19 drug kit” killed hundreds in Brazil

Eduardo Parati

Last Saturday, a G1 report was published showing that the private health insurance provider, Prevent Senior, was involved in a sinister experiment in March-April 2020, secretly medicating hundreds of COVID-19 elderly patients with hydroxychloroquine and erythromycin without their knowledge, resulting in the deaths of at least nine people.

Bolsonaro with HCQ boxes in one of his live Facebook videos.

The report showed a company director, Fernando Okinawa, in a WhatsApp group explicitly demanding that medical staff hide their prescriptions of a combination of hydroxychloroquine and erythromycin from patients. Meanwhile, cardiologist Rodrigo Ester, Okinawa and others distorted the patients’ data, erasing information on the deaths of seven out of nine patients, to publish a paper promoting the drugs as effective treatment for COVID-19 patients. With these alterations, they could claim that no one died when using their “early treatment.”

The report about the macabre experiment was published after the Brazilian Senate’s inquiry commission (CPI) on Bolsonaro’s handling of the pandemic received a formal complaint in late August signed by 15 doctors stating that a deal was made between the Bolsonaro government and the company to distribute medications of the so-called “COVID-19 kit,” which includes hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin and other unproven or since discredited medications. The doctors’ complaint also described how they were forced not to use masks to “disseminate” the virus among patients who would be used as “human guinea pigs.”

Last Thursday, the complaint was substantiated by a leak of medical records of patients. Another executive director from Prevent Senior, Pedro Benedito Batista Jr., was called by the CPI to testify on the revelations.

A resemblance of this episode to the barbaric eugenic experiments undertaken by the Nazis was promptly recognized. Comments were made in the media making references to Josef Mengele, a Nazi SS officer who coordinated horrific experiments on camp prisoners in the Auschwitz concentration camp during the Second World War.

The disturbing nature of these practices was made even clearer this Wednesday during a CPI session with Batista, when it was revealed that Anderson Nascimento, a former Prevent Senior director, made regular references to the SS themes of “obedience and loyalty” and tried to promote them inside the company. He was discretely removed from the company in 2017 and now works in the even bigger Hapvida, a health insurance provider for 4.8 million people.

Workers Party (PT) Senator Rogério Carvalho said during the session that he had received information that Prevent Senior went through the social network profiles of their employees looking to fire “‘left party’ sympathizers and followers of groups critical of the Bolsonaro government.”

Far from being an exception, the episode is “only the tip of the iceberg,” stated Bruna Morato, the lawyer representing the doctors at Prevent Senior. On Wednesday, Morato revealed that hundreds of patients died as a result of the “experiments” carried out by the company until April 2021. In fact, an April report by G1, Prevent Senior doctors recounted being forced to continue going to work after being diagnosed with COVID-19 and prescribe “COVID-19 kits” for patients without the consent of their families. Hospital coordinators threatened to fire doctors who refused to prescribe kits and enforced informal quotas for kit prescriptions.

Director Batista, who himself became a target of the CPI investigation after his testimony on Wednesday, expressed the apparent regularity with which fascist-minded individuals are taken under the wing of the company and put in administrative positions. In one tweet, he encouraged doctors to “test as much as possible,” meaning to use unproven or discredited medications for COVID-19 treatment to “test” the response of elderly people.

The data distortions themselves were not isolated to the company’s macabre experiment, but adopted as part of its general protocols. Company officials oriented medical staff in WhatsApp groups to alter patient charts for those diagnosed with COVID-19 14 or 21 days after the beginning of their symptoms, removing them from the COVID-19 case list. Such a blatant distortion would allow the company to declare a higher rate of successful treatment for COVID-19 cases by shifting the cause of death for those patients who died after the two or three week period to kidney failure, heart failure, or any other complications which are expected in severe COVID-19 cases.

The demand that doctors prescribe COVID-19 treatments without scientific evidence is not isolated to Prevent Senior. A doctor from Hapvida in the state of Ceará stated anonymously that “It is known by all doctors who work in the clinical staff of [Ceará’s capital] Antônio Prudente Hospital that there is pressure to prescribe the [COVID-19] kit.” According to a report by Repórter Brasil, both companies continued to force medical staff to prescribe hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin and other unproven or discredited medications to their patients at least until April of this year, while archiving multiple complaints by doctors who refused to prescribe the medications to their patients.

Bolsonaro promotes Prevent Senior’s unapproved human trials

Since the beginning of the pandemic, Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro has been at the center of an anti-scientific campaign to justify the full reopening of the economy without any restraints on the virus’s spread. He aggressively promoted the use of hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19 throughout the pandemic.

In April 2020, the fascistic president, his family members and a federal attorney close to the president, Ailton Benedito, started promoting the Prevent Senior pre-print article on Twitter days after it was published. Bolsonaro also received the company director Batista during a live meeting to promote false COVID-19 treatments.

A video obtained by Metrópoles shows Batista stating he shares Prevent Senior medical data “all the time” with the federal government. Meanwhile, one of Bolsonaro’s medical advisors, Paolo Zanotto, helped the company in developing its COVID-19 medical protocols.

At the time, the president’s anti-scientific declarations in favor of discredited drugs to treat COVID-19 patients were already a critical component of his campaign to cultivate a far-right movement. His Twitter post promoting the Prevent Senior study was published one day before a fascist rally outside the Army headquarters in Brazil’s capital, in which he appeared demanding the shutdown of Congress and the Supreme Court for supporting partial shutdowns of economic activities to contain the pandemic decreed by governors and mayors.

That such barbaric experiments were imposed on multiple hospitals can only be described as an appalling crime against humanity.

The use of “COVID-19 kits” was systematically enforced by Prevent Senior without the consent of thousands of families and with direct support from President Bolsonaro. Ominously, this barbaric experiment on the elderly was directly defended by this same president at the United Nations.

Demonstrating his readiness to unabashedly continue a deliberate policy of herd immunity through mass infection, Bolsonaro defended “early treatments” during the opening session of the UN General Assembly and suggested he would not finance any more vaccine purchases after November. This was five days after Globo’s Prevent Senior report exposed the barbaric experiments on the elderly. On Tuesday, the president’s cabinet sent suggestions of questions for Wednesday’s CPI session with Batista, which would promote the advantages of “early treatments.”

When the company’s “study” was made during March-April of 2020 and published as a pre-print version, it was soon retracted by the National Research Ethics Commission (Conep). The clinical trials with human subjects had been completed without ever receiving approval to even start. Since then, Bolsonaro has never recognized their ethical implications, much less apologized. Quite the opposite, he continued and doubled down on his campaign against lockdowns and in favor of “early treatments.”

The fascistic ideology being developed under Bolsonaro’s open herd immunity policy finds its breeding ground in the diseased state of the capitalist system in Brazil and internationally and the criminal response of the world’s ruling classes to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Around the world, millions of children are being sent back to schools with the expected consequence that they will be infected, develop “Long COVID” and other symptoms and die in mass. In the UK, the Boris Johnson administration sent 10 million children back to school even as its deputy Chief Medical Officer stated, “I think it’s quite inevitable that they will be [infected] at some point.”

American capitalism normalizes mass death

Andre Damon

Twenty-two months since the emergence of COVID-19, there is no end in sight to the pandemic, which continues to kill on a massive scale.

A procession of vehicles drive past photos of Detroit victims of COVID-19, Monday, Aug. 31, 2020 on Belle Isle in Detroit. (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio)

The center of the pandemic is again in the United States, where the official death toll this week surpassed 700,000. More than 9.1 million years of life have been lost to COVID-19 in the US, according to a study published this week in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

On Monday, 935 people lost their lives; on Tuesday, 2,152; on Wednesday, 2,228; and on Thursday, 1,944. Since the start of the week, in just four days, a staggering 7,000 died. In the past month alone, 51,000 have perished in overcrowded hospitals, homes and nursing centers.

On July 4, US President Joe Biden declared “independence” from the COVID-19 pandemic, saying, “We can live our lives, our kids can go back to school, our economy is roaring back.” Biden discouraged mask wearing and urged vaccinated people not to social distance, claiming that the pandemic was all but over. Since that time, more than 80,000 Americans have died from the pandemic.

Even in the most optimistic scenarios, such as one released by the COVID-19 scenario hub based on anticipating a dramatic decline in cases, the death toll will hit over 800,000 by the spring.

But at the present rate of death, with an average of 1,726 people dying each day, more than 300,000 people will die in the next six months, bringing the official US death toll to well over one million.

Among the dead are 480 children, including 20 in just the past week alone. And more than 100,000 children have lost a caregiver to the pandemic, according to a study published in July.

Throughout the country, from Wisconsin to California, hospital intensive care units are filled to capacity. Hospitals are issuing emergency protocols for nurses and doctors to make the horrific decision to determine who will live and who will die, due to a shortage of respirators and other life-saving equipment.

One in three people who are infected with COVID-19 will get “long COVID,” with symptoms lasting for more than two weeks. For hundreds of thousands, this means permanent debilitation: chronic fatigue, pain and long-term cognitive impairment, including among an entire generation of children.

But with more than 2,000 people dying each day—a rate greater than any war the United States has ever fought—the US political establishment is declaring that the pandemic is all but over. “As we end this pandemic, we must get ready for the next,” tweeted US Vice President Kamala Harris on Thursday.

To talk about the “end” of the COVID-19 pandemic as two thousand people die day after day is insane. But in the twisted logic of the American ruling class, “ending” the pandemic simply means ignoring it. The level of death being witnessed in the United States is to be treated as the “new normal.”

What is taking place is a horrifying normalization of death.

In the wealthiest and most powerful capitalist country in the world, close to one million people are dead from a preventable disease. These deaths were the result of lies and cover-ups by the Trump administration and Congress, which deluded and disarmed the public as the disease spread throughout the country in January and February.

On May 14, 2020, the Subcommittee on Health of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce held a hearing on “Scientific Integrity in the COVID-19 Response,” in which whistleblower Rick Bright excoriated the Trump administration’s response to the pandemic. Bright declared that “public health officials were fully aware of the emerging threat of COVID-19 by early January 2020.” But the US government was “intent on downplaying this catastrophic threat.”

It would be the first, last and only hearing of its kind. While Congress would continue to call public health officials to testify, it would be within the framework of accelerating plans to reopen schools and businesses. There was no effort to investigate Bright’s allegations: that a systematic cover-up, involving both the Democrats and Republicans, disarmed the United States’ response to the pandemic.

The failure to investigate the response to the pandemic continued under the Biden administration, which made its appeal to the American public on the basis of popular hostility to the Trump administration’s disastrous handling of the pandemic.

Notwithstanding the scale of the disaster, it has not been the subject of any serious public investigation, even where there was clear evidence of wrongdoing, such as the sale of stock by members of Congress briefed on the pandemic, the revelations of which forced Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Richard Burr to resign from his post.

The failure to hold anyone to account for the disastrous response to the pandemic is intentional. From the standpoint of the ruling class, the actions that contributed to the massive death toll were not mistakes. This is why there have been no investigations and no one has been held to account, because this is the policy advocated by the entire ruling class and the entire capitalist system.

To the extent that blame can be assigned, it must be on the basis of a myth that does not indict the US policy response. This is the origin of the “lab leak” lie, which seeks to blame China for the COVID-19 pandemic.

The US government’s cover-up was part of the policy of “herd immunity,” which remains the policy to this day. “Infants, kids, teens, young people, young adults, middle aged with no conditions etc. have zero to little risk… so we use them to develop herd… we want them infected,” wrote Trump administration official Paul Elias Alexander.

This was the same policy that led UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson to declare last year, “no more fucking lockdowns—let the bodies pile high in their thousands.”

To the extent that the ruling class has a strategy for responding to the pandemic, it is to allow the mass infection of the population, which, combined with the immunity generated from vaccines, will supposedly prevent major new surges of the disease. This means that COVID-19 will become endemic in the population, killing perhaps several hundred thousand people each year.

This “optimistic” scenario relies on the prayer that a new COVID-19 variant does not emerge that, like the Delta variant, leads to a surge in cases and deaths.

American capitalism’s ability to accept and “normalize” mass death must be treated as a warning. All arguments that a nuclear war is inconceivable because society is not prepared to accept the loss of millions of lives have been refuted by the response to the pandemic. If the American ruling class is prepared to accept the loss of a million lives from a preventable disease, it will accept the deaths of tens of millions in a nuclear war. As Bloomberg News commented last year:

Yes, the US has botched its response to COVID-19. At the same time, its experience shows that America as a nation can in fact tolerate casualties, too many in fact. It had long been standard Chinese doctrine that Americans are “soft” and unwilling to take on much risk. If you were a Chinese war game planner, might you now reconsider that assumption?

While the entire capitalist order stands behind the “herd immunity” policy, the working class cannot accept the continued wave of mass death. It must intervene, in the US and throughout the world, to put an end to the pandemic, to demand and enforce the necessary public health measures to eradicate the virus.