Bangladesh: A Safe haven for killers of journalists

Saifur Rahman Saif

Journalists in Jashore, a bordering district in Bangladesh, have observed the death anniversary of slain journalist RM Saiful Alam Mukul, editor of local daily Runner on August 30. It was his 22nd anniversary of death. On July 16, they observed the death anniversary of another journalist Shamsur Rahman, former special correspondent of Bangla daily Janakantho and also stringer of BBC Bangla Service.

Observing death anniversaries of slain journalists marking the day of assassinations has become a regular phenomenon for journalists in Jashore.

Rebel journalist RM Saiful Alam Mukul was killed by some unidentified assailants near his residence at Bezpara in Jashore town at around 10pm on August 30, 1998 local time.

His father Golam Mazed, founding editor of the daily was also killed in torture by the then government during the era of late president HM Ershad.

A case was filed with Jashore Kotwali police station by the victim’s widow Hafiza Akhter Shirin on the next day after the killing without naming the killers. Dulal Uddin Akand, assistant superintendent of police, Criminal Investigation Department,  produced a charge sheet before a Jashore court accusing 22  persons including Tariqul Islam, former minister and  late standing committee member of the country’s main opposition party -Bangladesh Nationalist Party on April 23,199. The BNP leader’s name was dropped from the case by the High Court later. The case was abandoned at one stage. The case came back to life in 2005. Maula Box, assistant superintendent of police, CID pressed a supplementary charge sheet inducting two more names. A court in Jashore framed charges accusing 22 people on 15th June, 2006 dropping the name of Tariqul Islam and another.  The court registered the statements of 25 witnesses in the case in 2010. It is believed that the name of the late BNP leader was inducted in the case for the sake of politics as he was an opposition party leader.

On July 16, 2000 Shamsur Rahman was shot dead by unidentified assailants at his office at Daratana, the heart of Jashore district town in Bangladesh. The incident took place at around 8:10pm on the day. Shamsur Rahman was also a writer of several books.

Both the incidents spurred movement particularly of the journalists in Jashore and also across the country, for which the government made assurance of justice.

As like as Mukul’s wife, Selina Akhter Lucky, wife of Shamsur Rahman, filed a case with the Kotwali police after the death of Shamsur Rahman. The Criminal Investigation Department, where the case was later shifted, submitted its charge sheet, accusing 16 people, five of whom were journalists, including Farazi Ajmal Hossain, special correspondent, Daily Ittefaq. In 2005 the case was shifted to the Speedy Tribunal, Khulna.

Journalists think that the name of journalists who were inducted in the list of murderers is innocent.  They are also victims of politics.

Bangladesh’s popular Bangla daily Prothomalo reported that a total of 27 journalists were killed in the country since 1992 although the name of daily Runner journalist Faruk Hossain and some others were not included.

On the other hand, the UNESCO in its report named 21 journalists in the list of killings.

I personally knew some of the victims, for which I took part in agitations demanding justice for them. Shamsur Rahman, RM Saiful Alam Mukul, Faruk Hossain, Manik Saha and Sheikh Belaluddin are among them. They all were closed to me.

After the killing of Mukul, journalists and political and social activists took to the street demanding justice. At that time they used to say- we want justice—–‘But now, they say – we don’t want justice as we don’t get it—-‘So, Bangladesh has become a safe haven for killers of journalists.

How Obama Administration Covered Up Swine Flu Pandemic?

Nauman Sadiq

It baffles the mind whether it’s willful blindness or anterograde amnesia but while drawing parallels with coronavirus outbreak, mainstream media appears to vividly recall Spanish flu of 1918 from a century ago and doesn’t seem to have an inkling about a much more pertinent example of H1N1 swine flu pandemic in 2009-10, even though it shared a lot of common characteristics with COVID-19 pandemic.

Although official statistics are much lower, according to subsequent peer-reviewed studies, H1N1 swine flu outbreak of 2009 infected 700 million to 1.4 billion people world-wide and caused 1,50,000 to 575,000 fatalities only in the first year of the outbreak in 2009.

Cumulative number of fatalities in subsequent years could be well above a million of which hundreds of thousands of deaths could have occurred in the worst affected countries, the US, Mexico and Brazil, though unreported because extensive testing wasn’t done at the time of the outbreak.

Even though vaccine was invented in 2010, the H1N1 virus was eventually defeated, particularly in the developing world, by natural immunity and not be medical remedies. WHO reclassified it as “variant of seasonal flu” and the dreaded designation “pandemic” was removed in August 2010.

The reason why corporate media and international health organizations shirked their responsibility to create public awareness on the H1N1 swine flu pandemic in the US, Mexico and Brazil was due to the fact that the US economy was going through economic recession that began in 2008 and lasted into 2009, whereas the swine flu epidemic began in March 2009 and lasted into 2010.

Extensive media coverage of the outbreak could have further exacerbated the recession, which it did in part, but thankfully no sweeping lockdowns or quarantine measures were enforced then. Mainstream news outlets were hushed up from reporting on the H1N1 epidemic by then newly elected Obama administration, and self-censorship from a decade ago appears to have restrained corporate media from mentioning the name of swine flu pandemic even now.

Whether it’s swine flu of 2009 or coronavirus outbreak of today, pandemics are like a deluge that can be managed to minimize the damage but cannot be contained. All it takes is a small crack in the embankment for the force of nature to unleash its fury and eliminate all obstacles coming in its way.

When the epidemic is surging exponentially, the contagion infects millions of people within the short span of several months, of which only a minuscule fraction exhibits symptoms and is diagnosed with the infection, while the rest are asymptomatic and go unnoticed. But they develop resistance against re-infection, thus contributing to achieving herd immunity.

Had political correctness been the remedy, designating coronavirus outbreak as seasonal flu would solve the dilemma, as WHO reclassified swine flu pandemic as common cold in August 2010 and gave the international economy breathing space in the aftermath of 2008-9 global recession.

Technically, a patient tested positive for HIV virus isn’t said to be suffering from AIDS. AIDS is the severe form of the infection when dormant HIV virus becomes active, begins replicating and starts causing harm to the body tissues and organs. Similarly, a patient tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 isn’t actually suffering from COVID-19, unless the patient develops symptoms of severe acute respiratory syndrome.

Treatment and hospitalization is only needed for severe cases of COVID-19, and asymptomatic and mild cases of SARS-CoV-2 infection simply have to be quarantined for a couple of weeks either at homes or at quarantine centers until their natural immunity overcomes the virus so they don’t pose a risk of spreading infection among communities.

Periodically, epidemics come and go. They are defeated by body’s natural immune system and don’t need treatment. Certain contagions, like Ebola with case fatality ratio of 90%, require preventive measures, such as quarantines and lockdowns, but the rest, like H1N1 swine flu, H5N1 bird flu and SARS-CoV-2 causing COVID-19 with infection fatality ratio of less than 0.2%, are treated like common cold that causes tens of thousands deaths every year in the US alone. Common cold influenza spreads across the world in yearly outbreaks, resulting in about three to five million cases of severe illness and about 290,000 to 650,000 deaths.

Even though the infection fatality rate of H1N1 swine flu was lower, at 0.02%, compared to COVID-19’s 0.2%, if the total number of cases in the calculation is reduced from 1.4 billion to a few hundred million and the actual number of fatalities caused by swine flu in 2009-10 is accurately calculated, then H1N1’s infection fatality rate would probably be comparable to COVID-19’s fatality rate. Infection fatality rate of COVID-19 could even be less than 0.1% once the outbreak subsides and accurate number of infections and fatalities are correctly known.

Even the most accurate COVID-19 test RT-PCR only has an accuracy level of 50-60%, especially in asymptomatic individuals or if the virus has penetrated deep into respiratory tract. Reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction, RT-PCR (viral testing), is considered the gold standard of diagnosis for COVID-19 and other viruses. Although it has high sensitivity and specificity in a laboratory setting, chances of finding virus in specimens are: 90% in Bronchoalveolar lavage fluid, 70% in sputum and 50-60% in nasal swabs, though used most frequently.

If extensive sero-epidemiological studies are done, it would be found out that actual prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 is much higher than 25 million reported infections, perhaps comparable to H1N1 swine flu’s 700 million to 1.4 billion world-wide infections.

At the peak of the outbreak in March and April, Italian doctors reported the actual number of cases could be as high as 6,50,000, particularly in the worst-hit Lombardy and Milan regions, though total cases in Italy until August are still reported to be only 2,67,000.

Similarly, Iranian epidemiologist Ehsan Mostafavi recently said: “About 15 million Iranians may have experienced being infected with this virus since the outbreak began.” That amounts to 1 in 5 Iranians or 20% of Iran’s population.

Coronavirus may have infected ten times more Americans than reported, according to a report by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Thus, the actual number of infections in the US as well as Europe could be ten to twenty times higher than the official statistics, which is enough for the viral infection to reach endemic steady state and for the population to develop herd immunity against the contagion.

An extensive study in Spain shows 5% population has developed antibodies, which means number of infections is ten times higher than reported 4,40,000 cases. People in urban areas have up to 10% prevalence of antibodies.

Though widely believed to have originated in Wuhan in January, the exact date and place of origin of SARS-CoV-2 are also doubtful. A Spanish research team found traces of the virus in a March 2019 sewage sample whereas the outbreak began in the Chinese city of Wuhan in January 2020. In fact, several Chinese diplomats recently cast doubts over the widely accepted theory that the flu virus mutated by consuming bats in wet markets of China.

Coronavirus outbreak is fundamentally the failing of highly commercialized medical science. Billions of dollars are invested in Big Pharma. But for what purpose, to make skin care products and aphrodisiacs, for performing needless cosmetic surgeries; and hundreds of billions are spent on manufacturing state-of-the-art weapon system as deterrence against adversaries. Yet no preparations were made for dealing with a contingency as catastrophic as a pandemic. That’s criminal negligence, and we have nobody to blame but the capitalist social order and commercialization of essential public services.

Even though corporate media promptly declared Trump’s “drug of choice” antimalarial chloroquine for treating a viral infection to be a hoax, its own prescriptions fared no better than placebos. For instance, dexamethasone would be as effective against coronavirus infections as it is in treating arthritis. Competent orthopedics seldom prescribe it because it’s a steroidal drug having more adverse effects than therapeutic ones. Apparently, the manufacturers of remdesivir and dexamethasone in Big Pharma paid millions of dollars bribes to the mainstream media to market the drugs, which in turn is inclined to sensationalize any news story pertaining to COVID-19.

The only remedy that has proved effective in treating COVID-19 thus far has been convalescent plasma therapy. Plasma therapy works on the principle that antibodies contained in the blood of previously infected person would provide resistance against infection through transfusion of convalescent plasma into a COVID-19 patient’s circulatory system.

Thus, it basically works on the same principle that vaccination does, though plasma therapy would be classified as therapeutic vaccine instead of more common prophylactic ones for treating widespread epidemics. A word of caution, though, it should only be used in severe cases of COVID-19 as prescribed by physicians. Because the treatment is still in experimental stages and antibodies could prove potentially harmful in patients with mild symptoms of the disease.

Globally, the leading causes of 56 million deaths every year are: 15 million deaths from heart diseases and strokes; 5 million from lung diseases; 2 million from dementias; 1.5 million from diabetes; over a million each from diarrhea, tuberculosis and AIDS; and 1.5 million deaths in road traffic accidents. In comparison, coronavirus pandemic has claimed less than a million lives thus far but is getting undue media coverage due to politicization of the pandemic debate.

Mounting evidence of COVID-19 reinfection

Henry Hakamaki

The author is an American working as a graduate immunobiology researcher in Germany.

Recently released research indicated that surviving COVID-19 may not confer long-lasting immunity, although there is conflicting data. Perhaps most notable are the studies that have showed a drop-off of neutralizing antibodies in circulation after just a couple of months post-COVID infection (which is in line with most seasonal coronaviruses, where immunity doesn’t last long at all).

Some newer studies, however, have shown that despite an early drop-off, the decrease then levels out after the initial drop and we still maintain relatively high levels of neutralizing antibodies which would indicate that perhaps immunity would be longer lasting than we were first fearing it may be (perhaps on the order of a couple of years, as long-term antibody studies in SARS-1 have indicated).

It is important to determine whether or not reinfections are occurring and over how short a period of time. Up to the present, we’ve seen a few cases (primarily in health care workers) of where people have tested positive for COVID using the RT-PCR test, then clear the infection, and after a little while test positive again.

These isolated cases, however, have not been confirmed reinfections, because the RT-PCR test is looking for viral RNA and not live virus in the system. While live virus would lead to viral RNA being present (which is why this test works really well for active infections), sometimes it picks up some viral “junk” after the infection has passed.

Let’s think of it this way: our immune system, over the course of its response, totally destroyed all the viral particles in our body, leaving viral debris in its wake. Some of this debris is the RNA from the virus itself, and it’s possible for this RNA to be maintained in our system for some time after the virus itself is destroyed. Since the people who tested positive the second time were asymptomatic, it was just assumed that it was in fact simply junk that was being picked up by the test the second time.

Now, however, the story changes. We have several cases that have turned up in the last week where people who have tested positive a second time have had the viral RNA from their first and second positive tests sequenced, and there was enough genetic variation between the two RNA samples to convince the researchers that it was in fact a new infection the second time around.

When viruses travel through a population, they pick up tiny mutations along the way. By sequencing the viral genetic information, we can track these mutations, and therefore find when a specific sample was from, based on how many of the mutations it had.

You can think of it this way (though this is incredibly oversimplified for illustration purposes): for each 10 people a virus infects, it picks up on average one mutation. Then, after 10,000 people have been infected, we will have approximately 1,000 mutations. Therefore, if we take a sample of the viral RNA in someone’s system, and find that it had 600 mutations from the original virus, that means that the person had been infected around the time that the 6,000th person had been infected. Of course, it’s way more complex than this, but the point is simply that we can look for these mutations to determine whether it’s the same virus, or if it came from a different stage in the virus’s development.

We now have cases in Hong Kong (set to be published in Clinical Infectious Diseases, as of now only excerpts are available of the study: Belgium and the Netherlands, and La Crosse, Wisconsin, of individuals who had sequencing done on both their first and second positive tests and sufficient differences were found where it is more than likely that these were cases of reinfections occurring. The cases have been mild, but these reinfections have occurred three to six months after their initial infection.

While these are isolated cases, and a lot more sequencing will have to be done on other individuals who are testing positive more than once, this is certainly not a good sign. While it is certainly possible that the majority of people will maintain antibodies to a level sufficient for protection from subsequent infections after a first infection (or potential vaccination), it now appears that at least some number of people will be susceptible again to infection shortly after their initial infection. This throws into question even more the possibility of generating “herd immunity,” producing high levels of the population being immune to SARS-CoV-2, even with a vaccination.

Meanwhile, another new preprint was just released today that, frankly, is even more worrying than the earlier cases discussed. This new paper, released as a preprint from The Lancet , looks at a case study of a likely reinfection in Nevada. The individual, a 25-year-old, had originally been infected in April, tested positive for COVID, and presented with a sore throat, cough, headache, nausea, and diarrhea. After nine days, the symptoms had resolved, and two tests, conducted 12 and 29 days after symptom resolution, both came back negative, indicating the infection had been cleared.

However, 31 days after the symptoms had abated initially, the individual began to experience symptoms again, and was hospitalized two days later. Within a week, the symptoms had escalated to hypoxia (low oxygen levels) and atypical pneumonia, requiring emergency supplemental oxygen. When retested, the individual tested positive for COVID.

Importantly, a sample from the initial test in April, and a sample from this later test in June were both sequenced genetically. Once sequencing was completed, mutations between the two samples were mapped, and it was determined that the two samples had enough mutations between them that it was almost certainly two separate infections that took place.

The two main things to note here is that the second infection was significantly MORE severe than the initial infection, which is something that we had not seen in the previous cases of likely reinfection, and that the time between initial infection and reinfection was only 48 days.

We haven’t seen direct evidence of antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE) of SARS-CoV-2 yet (which is where a low level of antibodies actually aids viral entry into cells and makes the infection much worse), but we do have some evidence of ADE occurring in SARS-CoV-1, the closest related virus to the causative agent of COVID-19, leading to more severe illness and acute lung injury when low levels of antibodies are present due to vaccination of animal models.

This evidence not only complicates the picture in regards to “herd immunity,” but potentially even complicates the vaccine development process. This demonstrates once again that proper public health measures would have been far more rational if they sought to understand the science of the virus rather than looking for biomolecular “silver bullets.”

Australian report reveals accelerating social inequality in education

Erika Zimmer

A Save our Schools (SOS) report “Public Schools Face a Funding Crisis; Private Schools Are in Clover” has documented the widening funding gap between public and private schools in Australia.

The data exposes the fraud of the Gonski funding model, commissioned by then Labor Prime Minister Julia Gillard and launched in 2011 ostensibly to overcome the glaring socioeconomic divide in the public, Catholic and private school sectors.

David Gonski, a central figure in big business, was serving as chairman of the Australian Stock Exchange when Gillard appointed him. Sold as “needs-based,” the Gonski funding mechanism became the centre of teacher union campaigns. Millions of dollars of members’ union fees have been allocated to publicising it as a model for “fairer” school funding.

Significantly, the funding data analysed by the SOS report mainly covers the years following the Gonski Review of Funding for Schooling.

The decade between 2009 and 2018 saw an increase of total income for private and Catholic schools nine to ten times higher than for public schools. Income for private schools increased by 16.9 percent per student, 19.7 percent in Catholic schools, but only 2.1 percent in public schools.

Credit: Save our Schools “Public Schools Face a Funding Crisis; Private Schools Are in Clover”

While part of the resource advantage of private and Catholic schools was due to their increased fees, government (both federal and state) funding accounted for 77 percent of the increase in Catholic schools and 62 percent of the increase in private schools.

There was a significant cut—$330 per student on average—in state government funding for public schools. The Western Australian state government, whose public schools enrol a high proportion of Aboriginal students, pupils living in poverty and students in remote areas, cut a massive 13.7 percent from its schools budget.

Credit: Save our Schools “Public Schools Face a Funding Crisis; Private Schools Are in Clover”

The report also charted indices of disadvantage borne by public schools, including the overwhelming concentration of students with higher needs. In 2018, public schools enrolled 82 percent of all low socio-economic students, 84 percent of indigenous students, 77 percent of high disability students and 82 percent of remote area students. Disadvantaged children accounted for 46 percent of all public school enrollments, compared to 20 percent in private schools.

The report further referred to data from a 2018 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) report showing that public schools in Australia have far fewer highly qualified teachers, more teacher shortages, more inadequately qualified teachers, more teacher absenteeism and more shortages of assisting staff than private schools. Thirty-five percent of students in public schools have their learning hindered by a lack of physical infrastructure, compared with 9 percent of students in private schools.

Public schools are supposedly fully funded by government, but increasingly pressure parents to pay “voluntary” levies of up to $1,300 per child annually. By comparison, about half of the income of private schools comes from school fees. The most elite private schools charge parents up to $40,000 per child per annum.

Australia has one of the most unequal education systems of any advanced economy due to privatisation measures promoted by successive Labor and Liberal-National governments since the 1970s.

Wealthy private schools, such as Melbourne Grammar, are showered with public money. Yet that school, for example, boasts of a $30 million science and technology hub with a rooftop terrace and weather monitoring station.

Meanwhile, the public Sheldow Park Primary school in Adelaide has walls that have not been painted in 15 years. The school’s principal told the media: “We have a plan to carpet two or three classrooms per year, based on need. So the ones with the biggest holes in them or the biggest rips get replaced first.”

The gulf between private and public schools has resulted in the country having one of the highest rates of non-public school attendance among the advanced capitalist countries. Forty percent of high school students now attend private schools.

Another SOS group report, The Bureaucratisation of Public Education in Australia, notes that over the past 20 years public schools also have experienced an enormous increase in requirements to comply with regulations, collect and record information and monitor performance. From 2015 to 2019 the number of management staff throughout the system increased by 70 percent—more than ten times the increase in the number of students and teachers.

The report notes that few state education departments focus primarily on supporting teaching and learning. Most scrutinise accountability measures such as financial management, student well-being, behaviour management and safety, teacher appraisal, compliance training, school review processes, curriculum standards, student progress based on standardised test results, workplace health and safety, and auditing.

As a result, teachers are spending the third highest number of hours on management and administration in the OECD.

The teacher unions, such as the Australia Education Union (AEU) and the New South Wales Teachers Federation (NSWTF), have played a leading role in helping governments impose these conditions. At the same time, they seek to tie teachers to illusions in Labor Party governments, despite the record of the Gillard government and one state Labor government after another.

Before last year’s federal election, the unions rebadged their campaign “I Give a Gonski” to “Fair Funding Now” to more closely link their campaign to Labor’s electoral claim to have policies that would lead to “fairness.” The AEU and the NSWTF launched a fleet of Fair Funding Now vans to visit marginal electorates. NSWTF President Maurie Mulheron called for a Labor vote, saying the Liberal Party had “no sense of a fair go.”

The Committee for Public Education (CFPE), established by the Socialist Equality Party, is providing leadership to teachers, parents and students in the fight for the social right to a fully-resourced, enlightened education for all students. This is in opposition to the agenda of the entire political establishment, including Labor, the Greens and the trade unions.

Such a struggle can only be based on a socialist perspective for the transformation of society as a whole in the interests of the working class, not the privileged few. The funds to provide a free, high quality education for all exist but securing them requires an assault on the vast wealth built up by the financial elite.

Major Australian corporations report windfalls from JobKeeper scheme

Martin Scott

As the Australian government prepares to introduce “JobKeeper 2.0” next month, reports have revealed the vast transfer of wealth to big business that resulted from the initial version of the wage subsidy scheme.

As the WSWS reported, the extension of JobKeeper—developed by Liberal-National Workplace Relations Minister Christian Porter and his “best friend forever,” Australian Council of Trade Unions secretary Sally McManus, and fully endorsed by the Labor Party—will further reduce workers’ pay and step up attacks on their conditions.

Under the revamped scheme, companies that are making up to 90 percent of pre-COVID-19 revenue will still be granted powers to reduce workers’ hours by as much as 40 percent. This signals the intention of the ruling elite to extend the suspension of workers’ rights indefinitely.

Fortnightly payments to workers still covered by the scheme will be reduced from the already inadequate $1,500, first to $1,200 in October, and then to $1,000 in January. In addition, a second tier—$750 for the first three months, and then $650—will be introduced for part-time and casual workers.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison claimed that the first incarnation of the wage subsidy was “called JobKeeper for a reason, to keep people in jobs.” That was always a fraud. More than 2.5 million workers currently face unemployment or underemployment.

The official jobless rate is expected to reach 11 percent by the end of the year, and if stood-down workers and those who have dropped out of the labour market are taken into account, the real figure will be closer to 14 percent, a level not seen since the 1930s.

The reality is that the JobKeeper scheme, like all the COVID-19 “stimulus” packages in Australia and around the world, represents another historic transfer of wealth to big business. The working class, already shouldering the economic burden of the pandemic through job losses and attacks on wages and conditions, will be forced to pay for the multi-billion dollar scheme in the form of austerity measures, while corporations and their shareholders reap the benefits.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s government has remained tight-lipped about the companies receiving JobKeeper, but according to a breakdown published in May, before applications closed, more than 41,000 businesses with a turnover in excess of $250 million are enrolled in the scheme.

Already, companies listed on the Australian Stock Exchange have received at least $625 million in JobKeeper payments. The total is likely far higher, as employer’s participation in the scheme is not a matter of public record, and many large companies have not yet released financial results for the year that ended on June 30.

JobKeeper eligibility will not be re-tested until the end of September, so even companies that are now reporting profit increases stand to receive an additional $10,500 per eligible employee.

Australian Bureau of Statistics research shows that most individual recipients of government COVID-19 “stimulus” payments put the money towards rent, mortgage repayments, household bills, food and other basic needs. But large companies took advantage of the wage subsidies to return increased dividends to shareholders, even as they eliminated thousands of jobs.

Qantas received $267 million in the first three months of the JobKeeper scheme in addition to a similar amount from industry-specific bailout measures. Despite the cash injection, 20,000 workers were stood down in March, and more than 6,000 have now been sacked.

Furniture retailer Nick Scali paid shareholders a 12.5 percent higher dividend than last year and its share price hit a record high of $9.15 after the company received $3.9 million from JobKeeper and the equivalent New Zealand wage subsidy.

Adairs, which sells manchester and bedding, announced a $5.7 million year-over-year profit increase and paid dividends totalling $18.6 million after receiving $11.3 million in wage subsidies in three months.

Construction and property giant Lendlease obtained $9.7 million from the wage subsidy, and used the extraordinary powers granted by the scheme to stand workers down or reduce their hours. Others were made redundant. While the pandemic had an impact on the company, its core business reported a profit of $96 million for the year. Lendlease’s $310 million overall loss was primarily the result of an earlier decision to shed the company’s floundering engineering division.

Property developer Mirvac, valued at more than $8 billion, was able to collect at least $9 million in JobKeeper payments between April and June, although its annual revenue fell by less than 4 percent to $2.1 billion. The company skirted the 50 percent decline in turnover eligibility test for large corporations by asserting that “Special Purpose Vehicles” within the conglomerate had seen a sufficient downturn to claim the wage subsidy.

Mirvac also used the COVID-19 crisis as cover to sack all of its contract workers on April 21. A former employee told Michael West Media: “I received a termination letter … and then, later that week, received a JobKeeper nomination form from Mirvac HR. I cannot imagine why they would need me to fill out a JobKeeper nomination form if I am not keeping my job.”

Premier Investments, which owns major retail chains Just Jeans, Portmans, Peter Alexander, and Smiggle, expects to announce second half earnings of around $59 million, a 10 percent year-over-year increase. Although overall sales fell by 18 percent, the company was able to exploit the pandemic, standing down 9,000 staff, receiving tens of millions of dollars in wage subsidies and refusing to pay rent while its retail outlets were closed.

The company’s chairman, multi-billionaire Solomon Lew, was instrumental in the design of the JobKeeper scheme, reportedly making an appeal to Treasurer Josh Frydenberg the week prior to the announcement of the wage subsidy.

Other listed share market companies such as casino operator Star Entertainment, airline Virgin, car dealer AP Eagers, medical instruments producer Cochlear and shoe retailer Accent Group all received JobKeeper subsidies.

By contrast, small businesses, especially those in the hard-hit hospitality, tourism, arts, and entertainment sectors, have struggled to qualify for the scheme, which also excludes more than 2.5 million temporary visa holders and casual workers. Appeals to broaden the eligibility criteria for JobKeeper have been ignored, and these workers will continue to be prevented from accessing the dwindling wage subsidy in JobKeeper 2.0.

Far from a package designed to support the millions of workers hit by the economic fallout from the pandemic, the JobKeeper wage subsidy is a corporate bailout aimed at boosting the bottom line of big business, attacking the wages and conditions of workers, and disguising the devastating unemployment crisis confronting the working class.

MGM Resorts to lay off 18,000 workers

Adam Mclean

On Friday, the casino and entertainment giant MGM Resorts International sent a letter to some 18,000 furloughed employees notifying them that their jobs are to be formally terminated on Monday.

At the beginning of the year, the Las Vegas-based casino and resort chain had employed some 70,000 workers. This means that that MGM has now laid off about 25 percent of its workforce. This number is also equivalent to about 2 percent of the entire participating labor force in the greater Las Vegas metropolitan area, although the company has operations nationwide.

With the arrival of the pandemic in America in March, MGM furloughed about 62,000 employees and shut down its casinos. Yet facing losses of billions of dollars in revenue, MGM and the other major casinos moved to gradually reopen over the intervening months, despite the risk to public health. In Clark County, Nevada, where Las Vegas is located, there have been just under 60,000 cases of COVID-19 and over 1,100 deaths.

The laid-off workers will also lose their health benefits at the end of September, meaning they will face the prospect of being caught without access to medical care if they contract COVID-19. This will likely prove to be a death sentence for some of them.

The Culinary Workers Union (CWU), the largest union in Nevada with some 60,000 workers, has not opposed these layoffs. Rather than call a strike, the CWU has put forward the tepid demand that workers be given the “Right to Return," or the right to be rehired to their old positions, at such time “when the economy recovers.”

This is a demand that MGM, on paper, is already willing to meet. CEO Bill Hornbuckle said that laid-off employees will remain on the company's recall list and will retain benefits and seniority if they are rehired by the end of next year.

The CWU recently proclaimed a “victory” in Nevada with the passage of the Adolfo Fernandez Bill, named after a utility porter who died after contracting COVID-19, which purports to enforce strict health regulations on casinos to help limit the spread of the disease. In reality, the bill immunizes businesses from liability unless they violate "controlling health standards" with "gross negligence." Given the fact that official health regulations are being continuously eroded by both the Trump administration and within Nevada—in April, Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman offered up the city's 650,000 residents as "guinea pigs" for re-opening—this amounts to a blank check to businesses to violate elementary safety precautions. Significantly, the bill was also supported by MGM.

It was signed into law in early August on a livestreamed video which included Nevada’s Governor Sisolak, Hornbuckle, CWU spokeswoman Geoconda Argüello-Kline and Fernandez’s daughter. Just three weeks prior to the layoff of 18,000 MGM employees, Hornbuckle had this to say:

“Nevada has proven that it is possible to protect employees, business, and our economy, while also holding bad actors and irresponsible businesses accountable… Bills like this are not just needed in Nevada, but throughout the country. As Nevada’s largest private employer, MGM is proud to partner with the governor and legislative leadership and the Culinary Workers Union to protect workers and to continue our economy’s recovery. MGM has had a long and productive relationship with the union, and our partnership is more important than ever in the wake of COVID-19.”

The CWU operates the Culinary Health Fund, which covers healthcare for 130,000 Nevadans, the CWU’s members, and their dependents. It is one of the state’s largest healthcare providers. Argüello-Kline sits on its board, and it is jointly administered by and receives funding from a number of Las Vegas casinos. As with many other unions, such jointly-managed funds act as cash cows, and are a vehicle through which the financial interests of the union are brought in line with those of the corporations.

EU refuses to accept hundreds of refugees rescued in the Mediterranean

Martin Kreickenbaum

More than 400 refugees are waiting in the central Mediterranean off Sicily for assignment to a safe haven. The weakened and partly injured refugees were saved from drowning last week by the private sea rescue ships Louise Michel and Seawatch 4. The Louise Michel, which had taken in more than 200 of the shipwrecked refugees, was so overcrowded that it was unable to maneuver on the waves for more than a day.

Calls for help to the Maltese and Italian authorities remained unanswered. In addition, 27 migrants, including children and a pregnant woman, have been waiting on the Danish tanker Maersk Etienne for almost four weeks without being able to go ashore.

Due to the discontinuation of all state sea rescue missions in the central Mediterranean, accidents involving refugee boats, often with fatal results, have increased sharply in recent weeks. Due to the illegal detention of private sea rescue vessels such as the Ocean Viking, the Alan Kurdi and the Sea Watch 3, no civilian sea rescue vessels patrolled the central Mediterranean for weeks.

The Louise Michel after a rescue operation on August 29 (AP Photo/Santi Palacios)

But just how dramatically the humanitarian catastrophe in the sea area between Libya and Italy has developed is shown by the rescue missions of Seawatch 4 and Louise Michel, financed by the British street artist Banksy.

The Seawatch 4 departed from Burriana in Spain on August 15 and rescued more than 200 refugees from the sea within 48 hours after arriving in the destination area on August 22 and 23. “Most of the people rescued this morning were weak and disoriented, smelled strongly of fuel and showed symptoms of fuel inhalation. More than 90 people needed emergency showers because they were exposed to the gasoline that powers the engine, generates harmful fumes and is highly corrosive in combination with salt water,” wrote the medical project coordinator of the relief organization MSF on board the Seawatch 4, Barabara Deck.

A few days later the Louise Michel also set sail from Burriana. The former patrol boat of French customs, only 31 meters long, is too small to accommodate and care for hundreds of refugees for several days. With a maximum speed of 27 knots, however, it is much faster than other civilian rescue ships and can therefore initiate rescue operations on the spot. The crew has thus supported the recovery of more than a hundred refugees by the Seawatch 4.

Last Thursday the Louise Michel had to take in 89 refugees. The next day, the ship responded to an emergency call from the reconnaissance aircraft Moonbird, which is operated by refugee aid workers. The Moonbird had discovered a rubber dinghy that was no longer moving and was full of water. “We were shocked when we saw the rubber boat—it was incredibly overcrowded and people onboard were trying to shuffle water out of the boat with their bare hands. We knew this was a grave emergency situation and decided to send out a mayday relay to all authorities and actors in the vicinity. Responsible European authorities failed to react to our distress call and only the Louise Michel responded to this serious distress case,” explained Neeske Beckmann from the Moonbird.

While the European authorities did not fulfill their duty of sea rescue and ignored all distress calls, the Louise Michel rescued 130 refugees from acute distress at sea on Friday morning. One refugee could only be recovered dead from the dinghy, three others had drowned before. Many of the rescued have severe burns from the mixture of gasoline and salt water in the boat, explained Lea Reisner, who was responsible for the operation of the Louise Michel.

Since the Louise Michel could not accommodate 219 refugees on board, the crew attached a life raft to the hull, but this rendered the ship unmaneuverable and it needed help itself. For hours the emergency call of the Louise Michel was ignored by the rescue control centers in Italy, Malta and Bremen. It was not until Saturday that an Italian coast guard ship came to the aid of the helplessly drifting Louise Michel near the Italian island of Lampedusa and took over 49 refugees who were in urgent need of medical assistance. Later, the Seawatch 4 took another 150 refugees and is now waiting with 350 refugees on board to reach a safe haven.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) called on the European Union to immediately provide a safe haven for the more than 400 refugees on the high seas. In a joint statement, the two organizations emphasized that “it is a humanitarian duty to save human lives.” The lack of EU-wide cooperation to take in refugees is “no excuse for denying vulnerable people a safe haven and the assistance they need, as required by international law,” the declaration goes on to say.

But the authorities in Malta and Italy refuse to comply and block the landing of the refugees. In Italy, the government of Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte continues its racist and anti-refugee policy even without the extreme right-wing Lega and its former Minister of the Interior Matteo Salvini. In July, the new independent Minister of the Interior, Luciana Lamorgese, declared that Italy was facing serious health problems due to uncontrolled immigration during the COVID-19 pandemic and ordered military units to Sicily.

In doing so, she fuels racism in the style of Salvini and tries to blame refugees for the renewed increase in the number of cases, for which in reality the Italian government is responsible. Although in Italy tens of thousands of people died of COVID-19 in the spring, the Conte government is also pushing ahead with the reopening policy pushed by all European governments, thereby endangering the health and lives of millions. The refugees are declared scapegoats in order to enforce the opening of schools and the maintenance of production in the factories.

In fact, it is clear that the refugees who make the crossing from Tunisia or Libya to Italy are no risk for the spread of the virus. But instead of being systematically tested and placed in safe and humane conditions, they are held for weeks on quarantine ships or in completely overcrowded refugee camps. Only a week ago, the president of the Italian region of Sicily ordered that all the reception centers on the island be closed and all refugees deported. Regional President Nello Musumeci also justified this barbaric plan with fear of rising COVID-19 infections.

In his order, Musumeci, who had been hoisted into office by right-wing and right-wing extremist forces, further decreed that no refugee was allowed to enter, pass through, or stop on the island. Also affected by the order are the civilian sea rescue ships of the aid organizations, including now the Seawatch 4 and the Louise Michel.

Since the beginning of the year, almost 19,000 refugees from North Africa have landed in Italy, with a particularly sharp increase in the proportion of Tunisians fleeing their country. According to official figures, 359 refugees have drowned in the Mediterranean. The actual number of victims is probably far higher. Since the European Union has withdrawn from sea rescue and at the same time civil sea rescue has been largely blocked—rescue ships are repeatedly being moored for flimsy reasons—many boat accidents in the central Mediterranean go unnoticed.

This is also suggested by reports from the Alarm Phone organization, which registers calls for help and forwards them to the sea rescue services. Between August 16 and 23, Alarm Phone received four calls for help from refugees in a single week. The organization assumes that at least 100 refugees drowned in these four accidents. Another 160 refugees are missing.

This is an incomplete list of recent tragedies.

• On August 18, an inflatable boat with at least 95 passengers bursts in international waters off the Libyan coast. However, the emergency response service in Rome does not want to intervene, since the Libyan coast guard is supposedly responsible. The coast guard in turn points to technical problems and cannot provide a boat. Hours later an EU reconnaissance plane circles over the scene of the accident, but does nothing. Only the next day does a Libyan fishing boat pick up 65 survivors and take them back to Libya.

• On August 16, an inflatable boat with 82 refugees on board is fired upon off the Libyan coast and catches fire. Forty-five people die, the survivors are brought to Libya and interned in camps although they need urgent medical attention.

• The same day another boat capsizes off the Libyan coast. Only one of the 40 refugees on board survives.

• On August 18, a refugee boat gets into distress off the Tunisian coast. Three of the 18 occupants die.

The indifference of the European Union to the thousandfold death of refugees in the Mediterranean—since 2014 alone, more than 14,000 refugees have officially drowned in the Mediterranean—is a blatant violation of international law and constitutes a humanitarian crime. Under the German Council Presidency, the murderous policy of “Fortress Europe” will be further intensified. There are plans to intern refugees at the EU’s external borders and to carry out fast-track asylum procedures and massive deportations.

However, the essentially racist and fascist actions of the European elites are meeting with ever-increasing resistance. The donation of the Louise Michel by the British street artist Banksy, reportedly after a conversation with the captain and sea rescue worker Pia Klemp, is only one expression of this development.

The Louise Michel adorns a variation of Banksy’s famous graffiti “Girl with a Balloon” in the form of a refugee child pointing to a heart-shaped life ring. In a video published on Instagram, Banksy justifies the foundation of the ship, named after a French author and anarchist who defended the Paris Commune in the 19th century, with the words: “Like most people who have made it in the art world, I bought a yacht to cruise around the Mediterranean. It is a French Navy ship that we converted into a lifeboat because the EU authorities deliberately ignore distress calls from ‘non-Europeans.’”

A petition on Change.org entitled “Impunity for Sea Rescue,” which was initiated last year after an Italian court prosecuted Klemp, has now received over 460,000 signatures.

Mounting social and health disaster in Louisiana after Hurricane Laura

J. L'Heureau

Three days after landfall in southwest Louisiana of Hurricane Laura, the most powerful hurricane to hit the state since 1856 and the fifth strongest ever to hit the continental US, the scale of destruction and accompanying social crisis is coming into sharp relief.

Almost 600,000 residents along the stretch of the Gulf coast covering southeast Texas to southeast Louisiana were ordered to evacuate their homes in advance of the hurricane. Following landfall last Thursday, the number of fatalities continues to rise and will no doubt continue to do so as rescue and recovery efforts proceed.

As of this writing, there are a total of 17 reported deaths from both Louisiana and Texas. Five fatalities are reported in east Texas, with four of the five succumbing to carbon monoxide poisoning from improper indoor usage of a portable generator. In Louisiana, there are 12 reported deaths, including seven people killed by carbon monoxide poisoning from a generator.

Such a high number of deaths due to improper generator usage is alarming, considering that more than 900,000 people lost power during the storm. According to poweroutage.us, as of Sunday morning 350,000 people were without power in Louisiana, the majority in the southwestern, central and northern parts of the state. In Texas, 77,000 were without power, and 9,000 lacked power in Arkansas.

Christina Stephens, a spokeswoman for Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards, said last Friday that “about 23 percent of the state was out of power.” A resident of Lake Charles told the New Orleans Advocate, “So many people stayed... I’m just trying to figure out if they’re dead or alive right now, but they don’t have any power or service, so I couldn’t get in touch with anybody.”

The Red Cross stated that the hurricane destroyed up to 8,000 homes in both Louisiana and Texas, and that tens of thousands of people have sought shelter, including 3,000 in hotels across Louisiana.

Moody’s Analytics estimated that the total economic cost of Hurricane Laura could be around $20 billion. Other estimates projected $25 billion in damages. According to the US Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters report for this year, the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), which is a part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), estimates that as of July, “there have been 10 weather/climate disaster events with losses exceeding $1 billion each to affect the United States.”

The same report states that the US “has sustained 273 weather and climate disasters since 1980 where overall damages/costs reached or exceeded $1 billion,” and that “the total cost of these 273 events exceeds $1.790 trillion.”

A report by the Environmental Defense Fund cited in a recent opinion piece published by the Hill found that “storms and hurricanes accounted for $954.4 billion” of these disasters since 1980. The NCEI report indicates that this year will mark the seventh consecutive year “in which 10 or more billion-dollar weather and climate disaster events have impacted the United States.”

Thousands of homes in Lake Charles, which has a population of 75,000, had their roofs torn off, rendering them vulnerable to rainy weather over the weekend. This has forced many evacuees who cannot afford to remain evacuated for a prolonged period to return immediately.

But given the historic downturn in economic activity and resulting financial hardship the vast majority of the population is facing amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, the time it takes for businesses and homeowners to recover could be much longer than in the past. Many will not be able to cover the exorbitant cost of insurance deductibles. Tom Larsen of CoreLogic said that since Hurricane Harvey in 2017, he’s seen that “only about 30 percent to 40 percent of homes that have flood damage have flood insurance.”

In addition to the wind damage, storm surge and flooding, Hurricane Laura dropped more than a foot of rain in some areas. The small town of Cameron, Louisiana was left inundated with water. The day after Laura’s impact, due to power outages, 98 water systems in Louisiana were inoperable, affecting more than 200,000 people, especially in Lake Charles, DeRidder and Alexandria. Many people might not have access to clean water for weeks.

The six water plants in Lake Charles took a heavy beating from the hurricane. Aly Neel, a spokeswoman for the Louisiana Department of Health, said that even after getting them back online, which might take one week, it cannot be guaranteed that they “will be fully functional, that they will be able to provide 100 percent or that they can fully treat the water.”

Republican Mayor Nic Hunter has not given an estimate for when power and water service will be adequately restored. He wrote on Facebook, “If you come back to Lake Charles to stay, make sure you understand the above reality and are prepared to live in it for many days, probably weeks.”

Discussing the widespread damage to the water and sewerage systems in southwest Louisiana, Amanda Ames, the chief engineer at the Louisiana Department of Health, stated: “This is definitely a bigger issue than we normally see. We always have power loss after a major storm... but significant damage to water systems is not something that occurs after storms like this.”

President Donald Trump, upon Democratic Governor John Bel Edwards’ request, approved a disaster declaration for 23 parishes (or counties) in the state, opening up assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

The COVID-19 pandemic, still raging uncontrolled across the country due to the homicidal back-to-work and back-to-school campaigns of the Democrats and Republicans, is also greatly exacerbating Laura’s impact. Given that testing for the virus was limited to only hospitals and clinics across the state last week in preparation for Tropical Storm Marco and Hurricane Laura, and that, as Bel Edwards noted, southwest Louisiana “was the most active region in the state for new cases before the storm arrived,” the state has essentially been “flying blind” regarding the virus’ current reach, according to Dr. Alex Billioux, the head of the state’s Office of Public Health.

State officials announced 30 more COVID-19-related deaths last Friday, and hospitalizations for the virus have been rising again.

“If we think of Laura on top of COVID or COVID on top of Laura, it’s new and overwhelming,” said Susanne Straif-Bourgeois, an associate professor at the Louisiana State University Health Sciences School of Public Health. Expressing the anti-scientific and indifferent response of the ruling class to the social, economic and psychological impacts of the pandemic and worsening weather disasters, Bel Edwards summed up the situation by stating, “It is just not possible for me to tell you what we are going to do in two weeks.”

Amid cross-Canada protests against back-to-school drive, Trudeau announces $2 billion to fund school reopenings

Roger Jordan

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced last Wednesday that Ottawa is providing $2 billion in additional funding to the provinces to support their reckless drive to reopen schools amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

The funding will enable hard-right premiers like Francois Legault in Quebec, Doug Ford in Ontario, and Jason Kenney in Alberta to force millions of students, teachers and education staff into overcrowded school buildings in the coming weeks and underscores yet again that Trudeau Liberals government is spearheading the corporate elite’s drive to “reopen” the economy, irrespective of the cost in human life.

In announcing the funding, Trudeau stressed that reopening schools is “critical to restarting the economy, since it allows parents to return to work without stressing about the health of their children.” “No parent,” Trudeau continued, “should be losing sleep because they have to go back to work, but aren’t confident schools are properly prepared.”

The fact that reopening schools has nothing to do with the hypocritical concerns offered up by politicians about the welfare of children and their right to education and everything to do with the interests of big business was underscored by the Canadian Chamber of Commerce’s full-throated support for Trudeau’s announcement. “Our members have repeatedly stated that the biggest impediment to more fulsome participation by women in business is access to reliable and affordable childcare and safe, full-time return to school policies across the country,” said Leah Nord, the director of workforce strategies and inclusive growth for the Chamber, which is a right-wing mouthpiece for Canadian big business.

The Trudeau government’s spearheading of the homicidal reopening of the economy is in keeping with its policy throughout the pandemic, which has been based on defending the wealth of the super-rich and big business at the expense of working people. With the support of its trade union allies, the Liberal government crafted a $650 billion bailout for the financial oligarchy and big banks in March, while placing millions of workers who lost their jobs on rations. It is now exploiting the social crisis produced by these policies to bully workers back to their jobs, eliminating the CERB (Canada Emergency Response Benefit) and slashing government aid to the jobless, so that the ruling class can continue to enrich itself through stepped up exploitation.

Provincial governments have prepared for schools to function as little more than holding pens for children so that their parents can be forced to return to unsafe workplaces. Decades of budget cuts have led to dilapidated school buildings, shortages of teaching and education staff, outdated equipment, and a lack of resources to implement even basic hygiene measures. Yet provincial governments from Quebec’s right-wing populist Coalition Avenir Quebec regime to British Columbia’s New Democrats have announced no more than a handful of one-off spending pledges that do not even come close to addressing the basic health and safety needs of students and education staff.

They have also made clear that they have no intention of closing schools or childcare facilities, even when the inevitable increase in COVID-19 infections takes place.

Quebec’s Health Minister Christian Dubé bluntly informed the population on the province’s first day of school last Thursday that they should prepare for a spike in cases, and by implication more deaths. “I need people to understand,” said Dubé, “that we might start with a few teachers who have to be isolated, but later on there will be outbreaks. We have to expect it and take the required steps.”

Referring to the province’s childcare facilities, Families Minister Mathieu Lacombe added, “We do not intend to shut down the entire childcare network as we did in the first wave. A second wave is more than probable, but with our plan, we are ready.”

This is similar to neighbouring Ontario, where the Ford government has all but ruled out local or district school shutdowns. It has handed over to local school boards the decision on whether to keep open individual schools facing COVID-19 outbreaks, with specific instructions that total school closures should be avoided as far as possible. Government guidelines even state that if a school must be shut down due to an outbreak, it can reopen before the outbreak is declared over.

The education unions are complicit in the government-big business drive to reopen the schools and the placing of students, teachers, support staff, and parents at grave risk. Across the country, thee unions have suppressed any opposition to the school re-openings, while promoting illusions that the capitalist state can oversee safe conditions for teachers and students. In Ontario, for example, the province’s four education unions have vowed to challenge the Ford government’s reopening plan at the Labour Relations Board, which has dismissed hundreds of workers’ complaints about unsafe working conditions related to COVID-19. Meanwhile, the unions have refused to organize strikes or any other form of protest.

There is growing opposition across the country to the recklessness and contempt for the lives of students, teachers and parents being shown by the federal and provincial governments, big business, and the trade unions.

In British Columbia, concerned parents have established the group Safe September BC. The group held a rally in Vancouver earlier this month to call for major changes to the NDP’s school reopening plan.

In Ontario, over 200,000 people have signed a petition that demands the Ford government’s reopening guidelines be substantially revised to take account of the safety and wellbeing of students and teachers.

In Quebec, 150 physicians, epidemiologists, and other scientists signed an open letter to the Legault government denouncing the school reopening. “The current back-to-school plan in Quebec needs to better consider all the available scientific evidence to prevent outbreaks in schools, to avoid jeopardizing the safety of our children, teachers and parents, as well as, to prevent a resurgence of SARS-CoV2 (COVID-19) in our community,” the letter states. “It needs to be promptly reviewed and revised to ensure a safer return to school for all.”

The mass popular opposition to the ruling elite’s back-to-school drive and premature reopening of the economy must be mobilized into a working class political movement to put the protection of human life ahead of corporate profit. The Educators Rank-and-File Committee, set up by teachers in the United States to organize the opposition to reopening schools, has stressed that under present conditions, there can be no safe return to in-person learning.

What is required is the allocation of billions of dollars to purchase equipment to ensure all students have access to high-speed internet and online learning, the hiring of thousands of teachers and support staff to provide the best possible education to students amid the pandemic, and guaranteed full income for parents forced to stay at home to look after their children. Information on COVID-19 infections at schools and other education institutions must be made public to assist with containing the disease and contact-tracing, and there must be an end to all persecution of whistleblowers who expose the appalling health and safety conditions in their schools.

University of Florida graduate residents expose plans to quarantine COVID-19 victims in family housing

Charles Sutter & Matthew MacEgan

Many universities across the United States opened for face-to-face learning in August, putting the health and lives of students, faculty, and staff in danger by facilitating the spread of COVID-19. This includes the University of Florida (UF), located in Gainesville, where administrators have been exposed for secretly designating vacant apartments in Graduate and Family Housing (GFH) villages to quarantine positive cases of COVID-19.

On August 22, an online petition was launched by GFH residents, opposing what they then only suspected was a discrete attempt by the university to prepare quarantine spaces within five family apartment complexes that are owned by UF.

Residents who observed suspicious behavior, such as UF workers moving basic furniture into empty apartments that were supposed to be vacant, had already called and emailed the UF Department of Housing & Residence but received no response prior to the petition being launched.

University of Florida

Within a few hours, hundreds of residents and their families had signed, and this precipitated the housing department finally responding with a letter addressed to the writers of the petition confirming their suspicions. The letter was also an attempt to downplay their understandable anger and anxiety. They claimed that the GFH villages would only be used “in the last extremity.”

“When residents heard the news,” the updated petition currently explains, “many were alarmed, particularly since the coronavirus is known to be far more virulent than seasonal influenza. There was no public announcement or consultation about the plan or indeed concern for the views of residents.”

Many of the families who take up residence in these facilities are international students who are bringing their families from abroad. This means that while such families have already been anxious over the uncertainties linked to the Trump administration’s efforts to crack down on student visas, they also must now be hyper aware of their family living spaces potentially becoming hotbeds for COVID-19 cases.

Like most universities around the country, UF shifted classes online and closed residence halls in March due to mounting pressure from workers and students around the country. However, the university began reopening the campus on June 12, in their own words, “pursuant to the Board of Governor’s Blueprint for Opening the State University System for the Fall Semester 2020 .” This of course refers to the policies of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, an outspoken supporter of US President Donald Trump.

The official policy being pursued by UF officials can only be described as a “herd immunity” strategy. Associate Professor Michael Lauzardo, who is the director of the new “UF Health Screen, Test & Protect” initiative, wrote in a letter published on the UF Health website on August 25, “Having cases on campus, and in every segment of society for that matter is, has been, and will be inevitable until we develop immunity by previous infection or by a vaccine.”

One of the first services that the university reopened in June was on-campus day care, allowing parents to “get back to work” and bringing administrators in line with the policies of the Trump White House.

New students began moving into UF residence halls on August 21, and face-to-face courses are partially reopening today. The current UF reopening plan calls for 35 percent of course sections across all programs to be held in a face-to-face format or a hybrid version. Another 35 percent will be live, online classes. The remainder will be held in an asynchronous format.

The UF COVID-19 dashboard currently shows that 272 students and staff have tested positive for the virus and that among the 1,242 students tested at the Student Health Care Center, 18.6 percent (195) tested positive. The dashboard only states that these cases have been recorded since May 6, so there is no temporal element to show how the data is trending. One can understandably assume that this lack of detail is intentional.

Florida has been a global epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic and ranks among the states with the highest number of infections. At the time of this writing, Florida has reported over 621,000 cases and more than 11,100 deaths due to complications with the virus. Most of these cases have been recorded in the more populous counties containing major cities such as Miami and Tampa, but Alachua County, where Gainesville is located, has reported nearly 5,100 cases. With 270,000 residents, this means that nearly 2 percent of people living in the county have tested positive for COVID-19.

With face-to-face classes resuming today, Alachua County residents can expect that the number of cases will skyrocket as they have done around other universities in the southeastern US. The University of Alabama saw 566 new cases within just one week of reopening, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill reported 646 new cases of COVID-19 within two weeks of restarting face-to-face instruction, despite moving all undergraduate courses to an online format after the first week.

University officials, unabashedly, cannot emphasize enough how “excited” they are to participate in what UF President W. Kent Fuchs has labeled a “historic” period in the history of the university.

In a statement to students published on August 18, Fuchs stated, “Fall is always a tremendously exciting time in our community. We ask you to join us as we together embrace shared responsibility for one another, reducing the spread of COVID-19 and paving the way for a productive and rewarding year.”

It is not difficult to understand why President Fuchs is so excited to relaunch in-person classes this week. He consistently lands on Forbes ’ top-10 lists of the highest paid public university officials, and in 2017 he received a salary of $1,102,862. Fuchs lives in a $2,000,000 mansion located across the street from Corry Village, one of the GFH villages where the university was secretly preparing to quarantine COVID-19 cases.

In a letter to “fellow Gators” on August 18, Fuchs asked students, faculty, and staff to take a pledge to “promote safety both on campus and off campus.” The university has launched a social media hashtag, #Gatorswearmasks, and President Fuchs stated in his August 18 statement that “personal responsibility is key.” The only safety measures being taken are “to promote facial coverings, physical distancing, staying home when sick, frequent handwashing and other proven COVID-19 prevention measures.”

Other university officials have echoed Fuchs, insisting that the response to the pandemic is merely a matter of personal responsibility. Vice President for Student Affairs D’Andra Mull wrote in an email to students on Friday, “I, personally, am excited to embrace the normalcy that the routine of classes brings” (emphasis added). Referencing an address by Fuchs earlier that week, she emphasized that the “ultimate task of our campus community is for us to be kind.” She then proceeded to claim that “kindness” means upholding personal responsibility policies on and off campus.

The words of Fuchs and Mull are utter rubbish. A pandemic, by definition, is an outbreak that is prevalent throughout a whole country or throughout the whole world. The response cannot be addressed simply at a personal or even a local level. It requires national and international coordination driven by scientific knowledge.

The shift of all responsibility to the individual level has a definite social character. Following the example of schools like University of Alabama, Ohio State University, and Boston College, the UF Police Department is coordinating with the Gainesville Police Department on what they call “party patrol.”

UF spokesperson Steve Orlando told reporters last week that they will severely discipline students who attend large gatherings or parties, claiming that it’s a student conduct issue. “It’s not one of those things where we want to come on with a heavy hand, but we want to help educate students and help them understand why it’s important not to do these things.”

Apparently, for UF administrators, “educating students” means arrests and possible beatings or killings by police. This is made considerably more abominable by the fact that 2020 has seen mass international protests against police violence and killings, and US police have already killed 656 people so far this year.

It is not ultimately the students who will bear responsibility for the spread of coronavirus but the administrators who brought thousands back to campus under conditions of a still raging pandemic. As the World Socialist Web Site has elaborated time after time, the reopening of major universities like UF is part of the official policy of the ruling class to fully reopen the economy. This requires the opening of schools, which will inevitably be accompanied by new surges of COVID-19 infections and deaths.