Australian government resorts to “pandemic capitalism” as depression looms

Mike Head

Yesterday, the Australian government announced a massive “wage subsidy” bailout for big business that has no precedent. Today’s Australian editorial dubbed it “pandemic capitalism with Australian characteristics.”

In a desperate bid to avert an economic depression which could exceed that of the 1930s, the Liberal-National Coalition government pledged to spend $130 billion in just six months to give employers $1,500 per fortnight for every worker they keep on their payrolls during the worsening COVID-19 disaster.

To quell rising social discontent, the government and the media presented the scheme as one hoping to save the jobs of six million workers and sole traders.

Yet, it is likely to be inadequate to prevent a depression, given the depth of the global crash. More than a million workers have been laid off already, and many businesses will not reopen because the $1,500 a fortnight will not offset their running costs amid the collapse of sales.

As a sign of what is to come, Virgin Australia is asking for more—a $1.4 billion government loan to stay afloat—just after laying off 8,000 workers.

Nor is $750 a week enough for many workers to live on and pay their bills. Moreover, the package excludes hundreds of thousands of workers on temporary visas and casuals who have worked for their employers for less than a year, which may be about half of all casuals.

In reality, most of the funds are destined for the coffers of the largest corporations, such as the construction, mining, logistics and manufacturing giants that are keeping their workforces on the job for as long as possible, often in unsafe workplaces that are exempted from “social distancing” rules. In effect, they will be subsidised to extract profits from the labour power of their workforces.

So pleased were the corporate layers who demanded the package that share prices soared on the Australian stock exchange yesterday. The main index rose nearly 7 percent—the greatest one-day rise in four decades—even as the coronavirus toll worsened in Australia and internationally.

The $130 billion bonanza for employers is more than the annual federal government budget for health and education combined. It is also the third business “stimulus” or “survival” package in 18 days. Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s vow to do “whatever it takes” to protect the current economic order keeps expanding day by day.

These packages, together with the more than $100 billion pumped into the banks by the Reserve Bank of Australia to lend to business, add up to a staggering $320 billion. That is two-thirds of the entire federal budget. State and territory governments have disgorged billions more dollars via business tax concessions and incentives.

The resulting budget deficits will be huge. Already, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg and media commentators are speaking of “generations of debt.” In other words, the cost of this bailout will have to be extracted from the working class by way of the gutting of social spending and further attacks on wages and conditions.

The harsh “austerity” measures imposed on the population to pay for the multi-billion handouts to the banks and business by the last Labor government during the 2008-09 global capitalist breakdown will be dwarfed by those that the ruling class will seek to inflict if and when a “recovery” takes place.

The Australian editorial, while welcoming the “evolving strain” of “pandemic capitalism,” warned: “It will take fortitude to wind back this mammoth expansion of the state; not so much the taking away as the paying back.” In other words, the same financial oligarchy that will “take” the money will demand that it be “paid back” by working people.

For decades, governments around the world have hailed the capitalist market system as the most effective, and even the only possible, means of organising society. Now they are insisting that the state must intervene to rescue the beneficiaries of the market—the wealthy elite whose riches have soared, largely on the back of financial machinations, for year after year.

Some corporate media commentators nervously pointed to the political and ideological discrediting of the capitalist order. The Australian’s editor-at-large Paul Kelly wrote: “The cost over the period constitutes an increase in total government spending of 50 percent. There has never been anything like this. Past ideological prescriptions are annihilated.”

Kelly quoted Deloitte Access Economics partner Chris Richardson, who spoke of the “temporary nationalisation of businesses that we need on the other side of the crisis.”

While all the resources of the state are being mobilised to shore up economic activity, the crucial problem is that this “nationalisation” and the state apparatus itself remain under the control of the same capitalist forces that created this health and economic crisis in the first place.

Warnings of global pandemics were ignored. Hospitals and medical research teams were starved of resources. Essential measures such as mass testing were not taken as soon as COVID-19 became known. Quarantines and shutdowns were delayed for weeks, so as not to cut across corporate profit interests.

Even now, governments and the media are prematurely claiming a “flattening of the curve” of coronavirus infections, yet the numbers keep rising relentlessly, nearing 5,000. In particular, as Australian Broadcasting Corporation medical expert Dr Norman Swan is warning, the number of “community transmissions” not traceable to overseas arrivals is climbing exponentially.

Also unprecedented since World War II is the unified front that has been formed within the entire political establishment. Morrison’s government, widely detested because of its contemptuous response to the summer bushfire calamity, is only able to lurch from announcement to announcement, each one contradicting the other, because of the support being given to it by the Labor Party and the Greens.

A virtual grand coalition government has been formed to try to stabilise the political order and quell social discontent. Morrison is governing with the backing of a frequently-convened “national cabinet.” It is comprised of state and territory leaders, the majority of whom are from the Labor Party.

In addition, Morrison and his key cabinet ministers are holding weekly teleconferences with Labor’s shadow ministers to coordinate the official response. The Labor leaders immediately supported yesterday’s package and undertook to work “constructively” with the government in finalising it and pushing it through a rump sitting of parliament, with just enough MPs summoned to provide quorums in both houses.

This unified front extends to the Greens, who helped pass the last two business handout packages, consisting of hundreds of pages of legislation, through parliament in just one day. Greens leader Adam Bandt was among the first to take to Twitter yesterday to welcome the latest package, while saying it was “too little, too late.”

The trade unions are part of the same front. They rushed to hail the package, even claiming credit for it. The Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) worked closely with the government to devise the scheme.

Across all industries, the unions are collaborating with employers to scrap working and wage penalty rates, in order to boost profits. Last night, Business Council of Australia CEO Jennifer Westacott, speaking on behalf of the 100 or so largest companies operating in Australia, said: “I really commend the ACTU for the cooperative way that they’ve looked at some of these big awards and given some of the flexibility that employers have wanted.”

This line-up in the face of a mounting catastrophe shows in the most direct and concrete manner the necessity for the working class to take control of the situation. While workers must demand urgently-needed measures, such as full income support for all the working people who have lost their jobs, and safe conditions for all essential workers, these requirements are incompatible with the continued control of economic life by the capitalist ruling class.

The necessity for socialism is being spelt out in the cataclysmic conditions overtaking the capitalist centres of Europe and the US, and which are threatened in every country, including Australia. That means replacing the capitalist states with workers’ states that will place the banks and basic industries under public ownership and democratic working class control.

Hunger increased by quarantines leads to protests across Latin America

Andrea Lobo

Roadblocks, raids of supermarkets and mass quarantine violations by desperate workers forced to work and find food are spreading across the poorest neighborhoods of Latin America, where the official response to the coronavirus outbreak has focused on police state measures and pushed the region to the brink of open dictatorship.

As the coronavirus pandemic spreads to every corner of the world, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization warned of potential world food shortages from supply chain disruptions caused by decline of seasonal migrants, trade barriers, sanctions and currency fluctuations.

After weeks of roadblocks protesting water shortages hampering their protection against the coronavirus pandemic, entire communities across Honduras are now taking to the streets to protest the lack of food and income due to the measures taken by the Juan Orlando Hernández administration to contain the outbreak. A “national and absolute curfew” imposed on March 16 has left hundreds of thousands without an income and led to shortages in staple goods.

The protests against food shortages began on March 24, when public transportation workers in northern Tegucigalpa led crowds to block the main highways of the country’s capital. Bus driver Luis Guzmán told AFP, “We live day by day and have no fixed income. If we don’t work, we don’t eat.” He added that his 4-year-old daughter “is asking for food and I have no money to even buy beans.”

The government promised on March 20 to deliver food to 3.2 million Hondurans in monthly quotas for the rest of the year, under “Operation Benevolent Honduras.” At a meeting with food industry executives one week later, however, María Antonia Rivera, one of the country’s vice presidents, announced that the government is only now preparing 800,000 “Benevolent bags” and that the amount of food will ultimately depend on “negotiations” with suppliers.

Finance Minister Rocío Tábora then declared, “There is an international criterion that each person needs an intake of fundamentally 2,200 daily calories, so we have to make sure that we provide that.” Careful not to infringe on their profit interests, she pleaded with the suppliers to give favorable prices, since “we have partial resources.”

Luis Colindres, head of the National Entrepreneurship and Small Business state agency, added that the armed forces will be in charge of delivering the bags, which will have a supply for 15 days, prioritizing those who have lost their daily income due to the pandemic.

Throughout the weekend, protesters across the country continued to block highways to demand food. On Saturday, a protester in the southern town of Colonias Unidas told HCH, “After 14 days of being locked in our homes without being able to work, there is nothing to eat… Honduras will not die of the coronavirus; it will die of starvation. If we have to die fighting in the streets, we will.”

Workers blocking the road to Olancho in eastern Tegucigalpa told Criterio that they lack food, water and soap, and that they are compelled to find drinking water in “a nearby river that is contaminated with fecal material and solid waste.” The blockade was disbanded when riot police arrived.

In Panama, which has 17 coronavirus casualties, the highest in Central America, price gouging is spreading and a “total quarantine” was established, allowing people to go out only to buy food and medicine. Hundreds in the poorest neighborhoods of Panama City have looted supermarkets for food.

At Curundú, residents began hitting pans on Saturday night to protest that they have not received a meager “Benevolent Bonus” announced by authorities, but anger grew and people flooded the streets, turning trash bins on fire and raiding stores. When militarized police showed up a shootout broke out; no casualties were reported.

President Laurentino Cortizo declared a national state of emergency as early as March 13 and formed a working group for “preserving social order.” While Panama officially has no army, the government has mobilized the police, border patrol and Institutional Protection Service units, whose patrols are using camouflage uniforms, high-powered rifles and armored vehicles with machine guns mounted on them.

A particularly urgent situation is developing in the northwestern Argentine province of Salta, where a wave of deaths of children from starvation is worsening due to the coronavirus quarantines and the willful negligence of the authorities. With promised “food bags” and medical care not arriving and, at least in one case, the outright rejection of a request for transportation to a hospital, three children of five years of age or under died between Tuesday and Thursday.

With five million inhabitants suffering from “severe food insecurity,” according to the FAO, the Argentine government of Alberto Fernández has focused its policy to placing the poorest neighborhoods under siege with police and arresting 33,000 people during curfews in a ten-day period.

In Mexico, raids to loot supermarkets occurred in the states of Mexico, Oaxaca and Puebla, and are apparently being organized on social media. In response, the Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) administration has deployed the Federal Police, National Guard, Army and Navy against the population, while the Cyber Police is cracking down on social media networks.

AMLO has not yet issued a “state of emergency” declaration; however, his Morena party has already enshrined the military’s unfettered deployment in the constitution, effectively subordinating other constitutional rights to a timeless state of war or national emergency.

As in Mexico, Honduran hospital workers also carried out protests earlier in March after seeing none of the $400 million supposedly approved by the government to deal with the pandemic. At the National Cardiopulmonary Institute in Tegucigalpa, which was especially selected for treating severe COVID-19 cases, workers carried out a wildcat strike to protest a lack of water, masks and protective suits.

There are 103 ventilators in Honduras but only 13 are available for saving people with severe cases of COVID-19. After specialists found that 140 new ventilators bought by the government are unfit to deal with coronavirus symptoms, the official in charge of the purchase, Roxana Araujo, simply responded: “That is what was found and what was bought.”

These shortages are the result of decades in which health care has been ransacked to incentivize its privatization and to meet debt payments to Wall Street and the local financial elite. The deals between Honduras and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) exclude health care, water and sanitation from the spending floors aimed at avoiding societal collapse.

The police-state and dictatorial response of the Latin American ruling class to the pandemic is centrally aimed at protecting some of the highest levels of social inequality in the world. The priority of the local oligarchies is remaining competitive for foreign investments, while at the same time continuing debt payments to the financial vultures and spending on a further buildup of the armed forces.

As the National Committee of the Socialist Equality Party wrote in its statement on “How to fight the COVID-19 pandemic”: “Two irreconcilable interests of two classes stand opposed to each other. For the capitalists it is a question of securing their profit interests and ensuring that their property and wealth remain untouched. No measures are to be taken that impinge on their interests. The working class is concerned with the interests of the broad mass of humanity, proceeding not from private profit but from social need.”

Unemployment surges in UK, with millions forced onto punitive welfare system

Barry Mason

Hundreds of thousands of UK workers have been laid off with the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic.

On March 20, Prime Minister Boris Johnson ordered all cafes, pubs, restaurants, nightclubs, theatres, cinemas, gyms and leisure centres to close. Many other firms were already closing due to a collapse in demand as the virus struck.

In a nine-day period to March 24, 470,000 workers applied for financial support through the Universal Credit (UC) system, more than eight times the average. In a normal week, around 50,000 new UC claims are made.

On a single day, March 27, 13,588 daily claims were made—an increase of almost 700 percent.

At the weekend, the Nomura investment bank predicted further surges in the unemployment rate to 8 percent in the April-June quarter, rising to 8.5 percent in the next three months. In January, the official unemployment rate was 3.9 percent. The Sunday Times noted that an 8 percent rate would be the equivalent of an additional 1.4 million people unemployed and a total jobless level of 2.75 million.

Since UC was rolled out in 2013, there has been a 21 percent cut in Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) staff who administer the system, due to austerity cuts. The loss of 19,000 DWP jobs led to growing workloads for remaining staff. So many people have now overwhelmed the system that 10,000 civil servants in other DWP departments are being deployed into the UC department.

UC is a punitive, means-tested system that merges six benefits into one payment. The rate for those over 25 is normally just £323.22 per month for a single person and £507.37 for a couple. Under mounting pressure, as millions faced the prospect of unemployment for months on end, the government was forced to increase the rate by a miserable £1,000 per year. This would take the rate for a single person to a pittance of £95.85 a week, in line with Statutory Sick Pay rates.

UC can only be claimed online and the numbers trying to access the UC service quickly crashed the website. The Guardian reported a queue of 145,000 people waiting to log onto the UC website, most of whom were new claimants trying to verify their identity. BBC Newsnight reported that one person found themselves 112,000th in the queue for the digidentity.eu website—used as part of the government's ID verification service.

The Guardian reported first-time claimants phoning the DWP 80 to 100 times without getting to speak to anyone. Normally, UC applications would begin with a face-to-face appointment with a job centre worker. Because of the Covid-19 pandemic, a free-phone 0800 number was introduced. The vast majority failed to get through because of the sheer numbers trying to call.

Under UC rules, claimants must make an appointment to process the claim. The Guardian quoted Anna Stevenson from the Turn2Us welfare advice charity as stating, “Universal credit claimants have to make this appointment within 30 days of them completing their applications, and for the claim to be approved, the interview must happen. People have been contacting us to ask what is going on as they are finding it impossible to get through.”

Many people who lost their jobs overnight are in a desperate position. A further obstacle for the penniless is the five-week wait period once a UC claim has been approved before any payment is made. According to the Guardian, 70,000 of the 230,000 new claimants processed earlier this month asked for an advance as they had no money in hand. On top of losing their jobs, thousands have been thrust into immediate debt. The “Budgeting Advance” loan available is totally inadequate. A single person can claim £348, a couple £464, and £812 if a claimant has children—for five weeks. Anyone with £16,000 savings is ineligible for UC.

On March 26, Chancellor Rishi Sunak announced details of the government’s plan for the self-employed during the crisis. The previous week, Sunak announced a massive bailout for corporations, which will be able to access a £370 billion pot of state credit. The government agreed to pay workers unable to work 80 percent of wages in a job retention scheme—to a maximum of £2,500 a month for an initial period of three months. But no provisions were made initially for the self-employed and gig economy workers, whose numbers have shot up from just over 3 million in 2000 to 5.75 million today—15 percent of the labour market. Many took the self-employed option after being made redundant and unable to find decent paying jobs.

With the population in lockdown and workers not allowed to work if classed as non-essential, many self-employed workers, such as decorators, plumbers and people offering services at home such as hair dressing, find work drying up.

Under Sunak’s self-employed scheme, those earning up to £50,000 a year will be entitled to claim up to 80 percent of their earnings—also up to a maximum of £2,500 a month for a period of three months. To be able to get the help they must be able to show their earnings over the last three years, which many workers will not be able to do. The scheme does not include sick pay or extend to the many workers recently joining the expanding gig economy. It covers no one earning less than 50 percent of their income through gig employment.

Any wage subsidy payments would be back-dated to March, but payments will not be made until June. This is under conditions in which around one in three self-employed people earn less than £10,000 a year. In the meantime, those left in financial straits would have to apply for UC and wait at least five weeks.

According to the Guardian, thousands of those classed as a sole-person limited company will not be eligible for Sunak’s scheme, hitting freelance workers in the creative arts sector. A sound engineer who works on TV documentaries explained, “We are just as self-employed as those being helped, but inexplicably find ourselves left out of the scheme. It’s devastating.”

After only one week of the Covid-19 lockdown, millions are struggling to access basic food staples and other essentials. The Food Foundation charity commissioned a YouGov poll to assess the impact of the disease on access to food. It noted:

More than 1.5 million adults in Britain say they cannot obtain enough food, 53 percent of NHS workers are worried about getting food, and half of parents with children eligible for Free School Meals have not received any substitute meals to keep their children fed, despite government assurances that they would provide food vouchers or parcels. This means that 830,000 children could be going without daily sustenance on which they usually rely.

Six percent of respondents, equivalent to 3 million people, have had to take a loan or borrow money to cope with the financial impact of the crisis.

The government intends that the cost of the bailout for corporations and banks will be paid for by workers when the pandemic is finally over. Faced with an unprecedented economic crisis, what will be imposed is an austerity agenda on steroids. The Nomura bank predicts a collapse in GDP of 13.5 percent in the second quarter—more than six times the biggest quarterly fall during the 2008-09 financial crisis.

Germany: The coronavirus pandemic and the destruction of the public health system

Tino Jacobson & Markus Salzmann

Across Europe, the COVID-19 epidemic is shedding light on the disastrous state of the health system. Everywhere there is a shortage of beds, staff, medical equipment and protective gear. Staying in clinics and nursing homes is now life-threatening for patients, doctors and nurses.

Contrary to the numerous comments by politicians and journalists, who suggest that an otherwise stable and efficient health care system would understandably reach its limits in view of coronavirus infections, the truth looks different. The current crisis in the German health care system was deliberately brought about by all the establishment political parties. Over the last 30 years, the German health care system has been radically damaged as a result of austerity, privatised and its institutions trimmed for profit.

In Germany, more than 58,000 confirmed cases had been reported by Sunday evening; 455 people have already died from the virus. According to the president of the Robert Koch Institute, Lothar Wieler, Germany’s health system could reach its limits due to the crisis. Wieler told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung that one must expect that capacity is insufficient. One could not rule out the possibility that there were also more patients than ventilators in this country, he said, referring to the situation in Italy.

It is already clear to everyone that the existing 28,000 intensive care beds in Germany are far from enough, not to mention a lack of personnel. Even before the crisis, there was a shortage of more than 17,000 nursing staff at hospitals in the country. Due to a lack of protective clothing and materials, doctors and nurses are absent every day and even fall ill with the virus. In nursing homes, there is a huge number of deaths. Most recently, 12 people died in a nursing home in Wolfsburg.

Today, the catastrophic consequences of the policy of the last 30 years, which was characterized by cutbacks, privatisation and competition in the health care system, are becoming apparent. Under successive governments, clinics were no longer geared towards the welfare of the population, but the generation of profits.

Currently, in terms of medical facilities, 29 percent are public hospitals, 34 percent non-profit (e.g., run by the church) and 37 percent private institutions. For years, there has been a creeping demise of hospitals. In 1998, there were 2,263 hospitals in Germany, in 2007 there were 2,087 and in 2017 only 1,942 hospitals. Accordingly, the number of hospital beds was reduced by around 10,000 within 10 years, from 506,954 (2007) to 497,200 (2017).

The closure of hospitals has drastically reduced the supply of care close to home. Intensive and emergency medical care, in particular, has suffered from privatisation and closures. More and more emergency cases are being turned away from hospitals close to where people live, or there are no longer any clinics there, and people are being taken to hospitals far away.

According to a survey by the DIVI (German Interdisciplinary Association for Intensive and Emergency Medicine), a quarter of the paediatric intensive care units covered by the survey said between 50 and 100 children per year were referred to other hospitals. The reason for this is that many local hospitals have now closed their paediatric and paediatric intensive care units.

A good overview of the development of hospital beds is given by the number per 100,000 inhabitants. In public hospitals, there were 367.7 hospital beds per 100,000 inhabitants in 2005 and 10 years later there were only 332. In non-profit hospitals, the number fell from 257.3 to 236.6 in the same period. Only in private hospitals did the number of beds rise, from 221.8 to 244.6.

Diagnosis Related Groups

After German reunification in 1990, the Christian Democratic Kohl government and the then Health Minister, Horst Seehofer, decided to introduce competition into the hospital sector in addition to privatization. To this end, hospital financing was fundamentally changed by the introduction of so-called Diagnosis Related Groups (DRG), a patient classification system that standardizes prospective payment to hospitals. They were intended to force competition between clinics. Hospitals could only survive if they used their beds to full capacity.

Under the Social Democratic-Green Party government of Gerhard Schröder, the DRG system was then made compulsory in 2004. As a result, the average length of hospital stay fell from 10 days (1998) to 7.3 days (2017). The reason for this is that hospitals are no longer paid according to the length of stay of their patients, but according to fixed per-case flat rates. In contrast, the number of hospital stays rose from 18.6 million patients (2012) to 19.4 million (2017).

The per-case flat rates have had a serious impact on patient care and the day-to-day work of doctors. Only if a patient is discharged from hospital as early as possible does the clinic make a profit. However, if the patient has to stay in hospital longer than is covered by the flat rate per case payment, because the treatment is more expensive, this is usually not reimbursed by the health insurance companies and the clinic must pick up the costs.

Because of per-case flat rates, so-called “bloody discharges” occur. In order to meet the specified waiting times, patients who are not actually ready to be discharged are sent home. This leads to a high complication rate with enormous follow-up costs for the health system. Follow-up treatments must then be carried out by general practitioners, who are, however, severely restricted financially by current budgets.

Chronically ill patients and seriously injured patients, in particular, are treated worse in the case-based lump-sum system, as they are generally not profitable for hospitals. Dr. Arne Manzeschke, Professor of Anthropology and Ethics for Health Professions, explains the problem as follows: “Lucrative patients are courted, less lucrative ones—not DRG-relevant—are passed on if possible.” His conclusion on diagnosis-related flat rates: “On the whole, the economically induced stress in the DRG system reduces the quality of medical services.”

It is significant that even in the current crisis, the system of competition and profit is being maintained. While doctors and nurses are working under disastrous conditions to the point of exhaustion and putting themselves at risk, all proposals to suspend the billing system in practice have so far been rejected.

“Largely business as usual,” reports Tagesspiegel. “This means that every single hospital service, whether provided for corona patients or for normal patients, will be billed to the health insurance funds according to the remuneration system of diagnosis-related flat rates per case (DRG).” Only a small number of “special charges” should exist.

Multi-resistant germs

Even under “normal” conditions, i.e., before the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, massive hygiene problems in clinics became known, which were due to cutbacks, overworked staff and lack of training. MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) has been a huge problem in German hospitals, nursing and old people’s homes for years.

The MRSA bacteria are dangerous for many patients whose immune defence is weakened, and the bacteria are resistant to almost all broad-spectrum antibiotics. If a MRSA infection develops, the bacteria can multiply and cause serious illness. One of the most important transmission routes is direct hand contact between immunocompromised patients and nursing staff. Otherwise, MRSA can be transmitted through contaminated objects (e.g., medical equipment, catheters or breathing tubes), or liquids.

According to estimates by hospital hygienists, approximately 40,000 patients die in Germany every year from hospital-acquired germs, 25,000 of them from multi-resistant germs. One-third of these deaths could be prevented by better hospital hygiene. Causes for the increasing multi-resistant pathogens are especially the frequent use of antibiotics, also in factory farming. Complications that can result from MRSA bacteria include blood poisoning, pneumonia or meningitis. In some cases, limbs must also be amputated.

A business worth billions

In order to further increase the profits of a narrow stratum at the top of society, this policy is being further pursued. Last summer, the Bertelsmann Foundation called for the closure of one in two hospitals in Germany and suggested that not even 600 of the current 1,400 hospitals should survive.

In the meantime, the health care market has become a billion-euro business, from which not only the pharmaceutical companies, but also private clinics and nursing homes and their shareholders on the stock exchanges benefit. Behind the Bertelsmann Foundation is the Bertelsmann Group, whose central figure, Liz Mohn, is one of the richest women in the world. She is a close friend of Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU), and her family is also well connected with the private clinic groups.

Daughter Brigitte Mohn sits on the supervisory board of Rhön-Klinikum AG, a listed operating company that runs 54 hospitals and 35 medical care centres and had already generated sales of €2.32 billion in 2009. Together with Helios, Asklepios and the Sana-Kliniken, Rhön is one of the largest groups in the hospital sector.

The current measures taken by Health Minister Spahn should also be seen against this background. Spahn stands for the further ruthless economization of health care. At the beginning of the year, he presented a draft bill that will further dramatically cut back emergency care in Germany; at its centre is the reduction of emergency facilities by 50 percent.

Clinics that are not among the selected locations are to receive 50 percent less remuneration when they provide outpatient emergency services. In the clinics still selected as emergency facilities, extreme waiting times and increased workloads would occur. Travel distances would be considerably longer.

After Spahn played down the coronavirus crisis for a long time, he is now more or less idly watching as clinics reach their limits. According to Federal Finance Minister Olaf Scholz (SPD), the €55 billion in funds made available by the federal government are not nearly enough to take even the most necessary measures.

Hospitals are to receive financial compensation for postponed scheduled operations and treatments in order to be able to treat more patients with a coronavirus infection. For every hospital bed that is not occupied, there will be a flat rate payment of €560 per day. This means that clinics will continue to weigh up economically whether or not to use a bed for coronavirus patients.

The current crisis in the health care system makes it clear that the ruling class is neither willing nor able to protect the population sufficiently and to provide adequate treatment throughout the country. Not alms, but substantial financial resources must flow immediately into the construction and expansion of clinics and medical facilities. All cuts made in recent decades must be reversed. Privately run hospitals and facilities must be converted to public ownership and no longer serve the greed of shareholders but the welfare of society.

German government preparing major domestic military deployment

Johannes Stern

According to a new report, the German government is preparing a major domestic deployment of the military. The report, based on an internal document from the Interior Ministry, was published Friday by Der Spiegel.

“The Bundeswehr (German Army) will mobilise 15,000 soldiers over the coming days to help manage the Coronavirus crisis,” said the news magazine. It will involve men and women “who are not deployed in foreign interventions or in NATO commitments.” By 3 April at the latest, “full operational capability will be reached.”

The plan is being “kept under wraps militarily” and “secret.” Over the course of three pages, the topics “Area security and force projection,” “command structure” and “force categories and possible tasks” are discussed. It is “an operational plan that is unprecedented in the history of the Republic.”

The number of troops to be mobilised for specific tasks is “listed in detail.” The plan includes 5,500 soldiers for “security and protection,” 6,000 soldiers to “support the population,” 600 military police officers for “security and traffic services,” 250 soldiers from the ABC Division for disinfection, and 2,500 logistics soldiers for “storage, transportation and handling.”

According to the authors, the tasks include “mass accommodation (i.e., containers), quarantine”; regional support; preparing areas for care and military airfields; disinfecting materiel, surfaces and spaces; protection of spaces, objects and critical infrastructure; and supporting security and traffic services.

Four regional command centres under the direction of Gen. Martin Schelleis, lieutenant general of the Air Force and general inspector of the armed forces, will lead the deployment. The Naval command in Rostock is responsible for Mecklenburg-Pomerania, Schleswig-Holstein and Hamburg; the Air Force command in Berlin for Berlin and Brandenburg; the 1st Armoured Division in Oldenburg for Bremen, Lower Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and North-Rhine Westphalia; and the 10th Armoured Division in Feitshöchheim, Bavaria for the rest of the country.

The extensive deployment of the Army domestically sheds light on the disastrous state of the civilian health care system. After decades of privatisation and austerity, it is not even close to being prepared for a pandemic like COVID-19. Overwhelmed civilian authorities filed 200 requests for assistance from the military by Friday morning, reported Der Spiegel. They included requests for personnel and materiel assistance, such as the provision of protective materials, disinfectant and beds from military stockpiles.

Regardless of how much medical assistance the military ends up providing, its deployment must be taken as a warning. Der Spiegel reported that there have been “controversial follow-up questions” from various German federal states about soldiers “who will ultimately be assisting while armed.”

The Green/Christian Democratic coalition government in Baden-Württemberg, for example, is considering “officially declaring a state of emergency due to the catastrophic state of police personnel and requesting help from the military.” Interior Minister Thomas Strobl has reportedly already contacted federal Defence Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer about this.

With the domestic deployment of the Army, the ruling elite is setting into motion long-developing plans for rearmament and militarisation. The “2016 White Paper on Security Policy and the Future of the Army,” Germany’s official security policy doctrine, stated in the section “Domestic deployment and support from the Army” the following: “To support the police in the effective combating of a disaster situation, the armed forces can under narrow restrictions carry out official responsibilities and assume powers of intervention and compulsion.”

The assumption of “powers of intervention and compulsion” and the carrying out of “official responsibilities” have nothing to do with medical assistance and disaster aid. The Army would, in fact, become a domestic tool of suppression, which has a long and bloody history in Germany. Under the Kaiser, during the Weimar Republic, and under the Nazis, military and paramilitary units were deployed to crush social and political protests and revolutionary struggles by the working class.

This is what the ruling elite is preparing for today. A document from the European Union’s Institute for Security Studies titled “What ambitions for European Defence 2020?” sees one task of future military interventions as “shielding the global rich from the tensions and problems of the poor.”

“As the proportion of the world population living in misery and frustration will remain massive,” the report states, “the tensions and spillover between their world and that of the rich will continue to grow. Technology is shrinking the world into a global village, but it is a village on the verge of revolution. While we have an increasingly integrated elite community, we also face increasingly explosive tensions from the poorer strata below.”

Since this document was first published in English in 2009 (a German translation with a foreword by EU Foreign Policy High Representative Catherine Ashton appeared in 2011), social inequality in Germany and across Europe has exploded. While austerity policies have thrown millions into social misery—some 13 million people in Germany are now considered poor—and gutted the continent’s health care and social services, a tiny layer at the top of society has enriched itself obscenely. In Germany, the richest 1,000 individuals and families control wealth totaling close to €1.2 trillion, more than three times the annual federal budget.

The Coronavirus pandemic has laid bare the political and moral bankruptcy of the entire capitalist system. Like the financial crisis of 2008-2009, the ruling elite views this far greater catastrophe as a chance to transfer billions to the coffers of the large corporations and investors. It is not only willing to sacrifice the health, but also the lives of millions of workers to achieve this. Although the pandemic continues to spread—there were more than 6,933 new cases and 84 deaths in Germany on Friday—the calls to send millions of people back to work are growing ever louder.

In the March 27 World Socialist Web Site Perspective column on the ruling elite’s demand that workers get back to work without any serious protection from the virus, we wrote that for the ruling elite, “’winning the war” against the pandemic means, above all, establishing the best conditions for the intensified exploitation of the working class. But for the working class, the success of the fight to contain the spread of the coronavirus is measured in “lives saved, not profits made.”

The commentary continued: “This is an irreconcilable conflict. The determination of the ruling elite to deal with the pandemic without undermining the capitalist profit system leads to authoritarianism and war. The efforts of the working class to combat the pandemic lead to socialism.”

The planned domestic deployment of the military must be viewed in this context.

Millions of Europe’s health care workers endangered by government neglect

Thomas Scripps

The death from COVID-19 of a further 2,335 people in Europe on Monday brought the total on the European continent to 26,548. There were 24,334 new cases yesterday, bringing the total to 409,797.

France saw its worst daily toll with 418 deaths, bringing the total to 3,024. After China, Italy and Spain, France has now crossed the 3,000-death threshold. Health agency Director Jerome Salomon reported that 5,107 people were in serious condition requiring life support.

Italy reported an additional 812 deaths, bringing its total to 11,591. Spain reported 812 new deaths, raising its total to 7,340. Britain recorded 180 additional deaths, bringing its total to 1,408. Germany reported 19 new deaths; it has now suffered 560 COVID-19 fatalities.

These totals include many young people and those with no underlying health conditions. Last week, a 16-year-old girl in Paris with no health complications became the virus’ youngest victim in Europe. Of the 260 people who died in the UK last Saturday, 13 had no underlying health conditions.

The crisis is taking a particularly heavy toll on woefully under-resourced health care workers fighting on the front lines of the pandemic. This intolerable situation threatens the health and lives of medical staff and their families and the collapse of already overwhelmed health care systems.

In Italy, 8,358 health care workers were reported infected as of yesterday. Sixty-one have died. Doctors Without Borders has sent a team to Codogno in the north of the country to care for hospital workers and support staff.

In Spain, Fernando Simon, the head of the country’s emergency coordination centre, said Friday that 9,444 health care workers were infected, up from 3,475 less than a week earlier. This represents 12 percent of current cases. The real numbers are thought to be much higher. At least three medical workers have died.

In the UK, one in four National Health Service (NHS) doctors is ill or self-isolating with sick family members, according to the Royal College of Physicians (RCP). Overall, the RCN found that up to a fifth of all front line health staff has been forced to take time off work to self-isolate. Over the weekend, the first two deaths of medical employees were reported. The GMB trade union believes that 4,100 ambulance workers have also self-isolated, roughly 17 percent of paramedics.

A study published by the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet found that in China’s Hubei province, the first epicentre of the pandemic, 70 percent of front line health workers suffered extreme levels of stress, 50 percent had depressive disorders, 44 percent had anxiety and 34 percent had insomnia. There have been several reports of suicide by nurses in northern Italy.

Responsibility for the tragedy unfolding in hospitals across Europe lies squarely with the ruling elites, which have failed to provide protection for medical staff. Reports of inadequate supplies and quality of personal protective equipment (PPE) are widespread.

In France, doctors have been taking spare masks from construction sites and factories. Biologist Francois Blanchecott told France Inter radio, “We’re asking mayors’ offices, industries, any enterprises that might have a store of masks.”

Alain Colombie, a 61-year-old doctor, posted a photo of himself naked, with the words “cannon fodder” written on an armband, to highlight the lack of protection. Below the photo he wrote, “President Macron, you are asking your little soldiers to go to the front without weapons or defences (masks, gel, overshirts) and, of course, without consideration.”

Colombie explained that he wanted to “come to the defence of the entire family of health care workers.” He added, “I denounce a guilty lack of preparation, even though I’ve been communicating about COVID-19 since the end of January.”

Doctors in smaller hospitals in the German capital Berlin have warned of possibly having to close due to a lack of masks, glasses and suits.

Professor Julio Mayol, medical director at the Clinico San Carlos Hospital in Madrid, Spain, said, “It is a bad situation, it is really bad and it is getting worse day by day, because the number of positive COVID-19 patients is increasing.

“We can provide them with more beds, but we need personal protection equipment, and there is a global shortage, and this makes it very difficult for us to send health care workers to battle on the front line without the adequate equipment. … health care professionals are getting infected. I estimate it could be as many as 25 percent in the near future if we don’t do something.”

Dr. Natalia Silva, from the San Juan de Deu Hospital near Barcelona, told Al Jazeera, “We have to wear masks that we should throw away once they have been used once. Instead, we have to wear them for days. We have also protective glasses that do not fit, and we have to pass them around from one doctor to another.”

The Spanish government has been forced to call up 50,000 additional medical workers, including recent graduates and retired doctors and nurses, to plug the rapidly widening gap.

On Saturday, Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of The Lancet, wrote a blistering indictment of the British government’s response to the crisis:

“The NHS (National Health Service) has been wholly unprepared for this pandemic. … February should have been used to expand coronavirus testing capacity, ensure the distribution of [World Health Organisation]-approved PPE, and establish training programmes and guidelines to protect NHS staff. They didn’t take any of those actions. The result has been chaos and panic across the NHS. Patients will die unnecessarily. NHS staff will die unnecessarily. It is, indeed, as one health worker wrote last week, ‘a national scandal.’ The gravity of that scandal has yet to be understood.”

Horton reprinted a selection of harrowing messages he has been sent by health workers in Britain:

“It’s terrifying for staff at the moment. Still no access to personal protective equipment or testing.”

“It feels as if we are actively harming patients.”

“When I was country director in many conflict zones, we had better preparedness.”

“The hospitals in London are overwhelmed.”

“The public and media are not aware that today we no longer live in a city [London] with a properly functioning western health care system.”

“How will we protect our patients and staff? … I am speechless. It is utterly unconscionable. How can we do this? It is criminal … NHS England was not prepared … We feel completely helpless.”

Despite the Johnson Conservative government’s promises to roll out mass testing of health workers, just 900 NHS staff were tested for COVID-19 over the weekend.

The government distributed a survey to textile manufacturers two weeks ago asking what protective equipment they could make but have made no further contact with the factories that responded. The same factories report receiving pleas from local hospitals for “anything you can make.”

A document leaked Monday showed a stock check carried out by Northern Ireland’s regional health service. It found that 32 of 33 COVID-19-related PPE products were listed as “out of stock.” Some suppliers are warning that protective gear will not be ready until the summer.

Many staff have already been forced to buy their own protective gear or use makeshift equipment. The hashtag #GetMePPE has been trending on Twitter, and doctors and nurses have set up a crowdsourcing website, “GetUsPPE.org,” to appeal for donations. Over the weekend, Public Health England released guidance on the use of PPE that sets a significantly lower standard than World Health Organisation (WHO) guidance.

Every few days bring new evidence of warnings ignored and preparations not made. In 2017, the UK government’s Department of Health rejected advice from an independent advisory committee recommending “providing eye protection for all hospital, community, ambulance and social care staff who have close contact with pandemic influenza patients.” The committee were told to reconsider and ultimately drop their advice due to “the very large incremental cost of adding in eye protection,” according to minutes of the meeting.

According to the Guardian, a July 2019 review of the UK’s biological security strategy focusing on preparations for emerging infectious diseases was postponed and then cancelled. Professor Sir Ian Boyd, a former government adviser involved in writing the strategy, explained, “Getting sufficient resource just to write a decent bio-security strategy was tough. Getting resource to properly underpin implementation of what it said was impossible.”

The working class is moving to take a stand against this criminal neglect. Following strikes and protests by workers in the United States and in Europe to demand safe working conditions, 500 warehouse workers for British fashion retailer ASOS walked out of a warehouse on Saturday in Barnsley, South Yorkshire to protest against unsafe conditions.

A mass, international campaign must be developed for the closure of all non-essential plants and warehouses and to demand that workers involved in essential production, health and care services above all, be provided with full protective gear by the government and employers. Such measures must be paid for out of the hoarded wealth of the super-rich.

Growing protests in US immigrant detention centers over coronavirus pandemic

Meenakshi Jagadeesan

More than 150 immigrants held at the York County Prison detention center in Pennsylvania have started a hunger strike demanding immediate release amidst the coronavirus pandemic. The strike, first reported by the Movement of Immigration Leaders in Pennsylvania, is part of a growing movement across detention centers around the country. As reported last week, 350 immigrants held in the Stewart Detention Center in southwest Georgia have been on a hunger strike since last Thursday demanding better protection against the pandemic.

The situation prevailing in these centers has long been breeding grounds for public health disasters. Last year, a mumps outbreak that started at a Texas immigration detention center quickly surged through the system, sickening nearly 1,000 migrants in 57 facilities across the country. During that outbreak, an entire wing at the York County Prison had to be quarantined for two months.

At this point, the Trump administration has only acknowledged two cases of adults held in a New Jersey detention center, five Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) employees in three different states, and three children under the protection of the Office of Refugee Resettlement as testing positive for COVID-19. However, given the nature of the pandemic as well as the highly unsanitary conditions prevailing in the world’s largest network of immigration detention centers, these numbers do not fool anyone, least of all the detainees themselves.

Phoebe Lytle, a law student volunteer who has spoken with detainees at ICE facilities in Louisiana, told the Guardian, “People are terrified for their lives and think that they’re going to die there. ... I don’t think anyone is saying it in a light or flippant way.” Jaclyn Cole, a volunteer for the Southern Poverty Law Center, was quoted in the same report as hearing 10 to 15 shots during a 10-minute phone call with a Cuban detainee being held at the Pine Prairie Processing Center. Cole was informed that guards had been shooting rubber bullets and using chemical agents against protesting detainees.

In the past week alone, according to government documents obtained by Buzzfeed, guards have used force to quell detainee protests over COVID-19 fears at least four times. The incidents mentioned in the documents took place in three ICE detention facilities in Louisiana and Texas—LaSalle ICE Processing Center, Pine Prairie ICE Processing Center, and South Texas ICE Processing Center.

Last Wednesday, ICE medical officials, along with representatives of the Geo Group, the private contractor which runs the center, held a meeting about COVID-19 at the LaSalle Processing Center. The meeting soon descended into chaos with about 75 protesting detainees being pepper-sprayed by the guards. ICE spokesperson Brian Cox confirmed the incident, claiming that the use of force was necessitated by protesting detainees who “refused to comply with directives from facility staff,” and four of whom “attempted to force their way out of the housing area.”

Similar statements have been made about other incidents as well—the use of “pepper balls” against 23 detainees in LaSalle, the use of pepper spray against “physically combative” detainees in Pine Prairie, and the use of force against the 60 detainees in South Texas who told guards they would “continue their protest until they were released from custody.”

Each of these actions has been justified by ICE and its private contractors as necessary measures against “actions that compromised the security protocols of the facility.” However, the point being made by the detainees is precisely that none of the protocols actually in place will secure them against the spread of the coronavirus. As Alexandra Seo, whose mother is being held at LaSalle, told Buzzfeed, “They are freaking out about it. ... She is saying ‘help her,’ she is begging for help.”

Dr. Sirous Asgari, an Iranian scientist, who is being held in the ICE holding facility in Alexandria, Louisiana, spoke at length to the Guardian about the “inhumane conditions” prevailing in filthy and overcrowded centers. His case is a perfect illustration of the sheer disregard for any legal norms that governs this administration’s treatment of immigrants.

In 2017, Dr. Asgari, who has a Ph.D. in materials engineering from Drexel University, and his wife arrived in the US with valid visas. Their two children live in America. Shortly after arriving, he discovered that he was being prosecuted by the US government for alleged violations of sanctions law. Charged with stealing trade secrets related to his academic work with a university in Ohio, Dr. Asgari was fully exonerated in a trial that concluded five months ago.

However, the Trump administration revoked his original visa when he was initially charged, and then, in a Kafkaesque scenario, this was given by US immigration officials an an excuse to detain him even after his acquittal. After arriving at the Alexandria Staging Facility (ASF) on March 10, Dr. Asgari has been seeking to “self-deport” to Iran, but ICE has refused to let him leave the country or be reunited with his family in the US.

ASF is meant to be a final transit stop where detainees are to be held no longer than 72 hours before being deported. However, because of the general travel restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the 400-bed facility is holding people for days on end and bringing in more people who might have been exposed to the virus. The overcrowded facility, Dr. Asgari said, provides no hand sanitizer or face masks. Despite having brought his own face mask, since he has a history of serious respiratory illness, he was prevented from using it.

Detainees have been forced to clean their own living spaces and toilets with the limited cleaning supplies they are given and often must wear the same clothes they have traveled in since there are no laundry facilities. Of course, social distancing is impossible to practice in a space where 100 people are often crammed into bunk beds placed in a single pod.

Dr. Asgari reported that his pod had only six showers for all the inmates, which made it impossible for people to maintain basic hygiene. In addition, ASF also kept the detainees on a very limited diet, providing only one hot meal a day at 5 p.m., and two small meals at breakfast and lunch. There was no option for people to buy more food, even if they could afford it.

As Dr. Asgari put it, “The way ICE looks at these people is not like they are human beings, but are objects to get rid of. ... The way that they have been treating us is absolutely terrifying. I don’t think many people in the US know what is happening inside this black box.”

The protests by detainees in recent days is a desperate attempt to open up the black box. To continue running these detention centers at a time when the coronavirus pandemic is escalating at a dangerous pace is criminal.

US prisons begin release of inmates after COVID-19 pandemic engulfs system

Sam Dalton

On Monday the official total of positive COVID-19 cases in New York City prisons rose to 167 prisoners, 114 staff and 23 prison healthcare workers. The infamous Rikers Island, with a population of 4,740, now has the highest infection rate of any defined population globally, at almost 3 percent. Rikers’ infection rate is almost 10 times more than New York City as a whole, which has an infection rate of 0.357 percent, according to the Legal Aid Society.

Given the scarcity of testing, the true case numbers are undoubtedly much higher. At least two prison workers have died in New York.

COVID-19 has spread throughout the prisons nationally. Cook County Jail in Illinois, as of March 29, had 101 cases among inmates and 12 among staff. March 29 also saw the first confirmed death of a federal prisoner from the disease, a 49-year-old inmate in Louisiana.

The spread of the virus and the first deaths within the prison system have prompted the release of prisoners across the United States. According to Mayor Bill de Blasio, New York City has released over 1,000 prisoners, lowering the number of incarcerated people in the city to fewer than 5,000 for the first time since 1949. Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, whose state has 78 COVID-19 positive inmates at the time of this writing, signed an executive order calling for the immediate release of nonviolent prisoners.

The Los Angeles County sheriff’s office has ordered similar measures and California Governor Gavin Newsom has ordered a stop to new prison admissions. New Jersey has also released over 1,000 inmates. Prisoners who are being released are not being tested for the virus.

These measures are haphazard and, in most cases, too little, too late. An acute outbreak of COVID-19 across US prisons is already taking place. Hundreds, if not thousands, of prisoners and prison staff will die as the result of the incompetence and negligence of the ruling class. Kelsey Kauffman, the director of education at Indiana Women’s Prison, stated that the failure to release inmates earlier “may be considered one of the great public health tragedies of our time.”

Although the New York City prison system is the epicenter of the crisis, the highly infectious nature of the disease and its uncontrolled spread through the national prison system, with its population of over 2 million people, mean this will become a national catastrophe.

Since the beginning of the outbreak in the US in January, countless warnings from prison and medical professionals about the dangers of inaction have been ignored. On March 6, the Prison Policy Initiative called for wide-ranging releases throughout the US. On March 15, the World Health Organization wrote, “Efforts to control COVID-19 in the community are likely to fail if strong infection prevention and control measures, adequate testing, treatment and care are not carried out.” New York only began releasing prisoners in very small numbers on March 20, and most remain behind bars. The continuing failure to expand these measures will result in many more deaths.

Before the outbreak of COVID-19, the vulnerability of the prison population to infectious diseases had shown that a catastrophe was possible without strong corrective measures. Numerous outbreaks of meningitis, syphilis and tuberculosis have occurred in many US prisons since 2000. A 2011 paper, “The Rise of Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus (MRSA) in U.S. Correctional Populations,” stated, “Strategies that focused on increased awareness, early detection and appropriate management, enhanced hygiene, and maintenance of a clean environment have proven successful in containing clusters and outbreaks.”

The crowded and unsanitary conditions of prisons allow infectious diseases, such as COVID-19, to spread rapidly. Jimmy, a recently released inmate from Rikers Prison, told the New York Times: “You’re on top of one another no matter what you do. There’s no ventilation. If anything is floating, everybody gets it.” He went on to say he had seen dormitories and holding pens with feces smeared across the walls. Official guidance instructing prisoners to keep at least 3 feet apart is impossible to follow. Fifty inmates typically share the same toilet, only three telephones and continue to eat together on cramped tables. In most US jailhouses, beds are typically less than 24 inches apart.

Prisoners have more underlying health conditions than the overall population, meaning that infection is more likely to be deadly. State and federal prisoners are 12 times more likely to have suffered from tuberculosis than the general population and three times more like to suffer from HIV/AIDS. Prison populations also suffer from increased rates of diabetes, hypertension and asthma.

The rapid spread of infection among a less healthy population means that the majority of cases requiring hospitalization and ventilators will come in a short period, putting additional strain on already under-resourced hospitals and healthcare workers. Again, this will increase the number of deaths.

Prison staff are also at increased risk of infection. Contrary to reports from New York City authorities, prison workers have not received promised personal protective equipment. A public health practitioner who works at Rikers Island told the World Socialist Web Site: “When I came to administer tests there were no masks and no gloves although I was told they would be provided. All the correctional officers that come in are in one line and not socially distanced. People are desperate to work as they need the money, so they do not want to admit if they do have symptoms nor take sick time. We are just having these tests to say they are testing; they aren’t doing anything to stop the spread.” These unprotected workers are at heightened risk of not only infecting themselves, but also their families when they return home.

Amy, a nurse whose son is currently in a New York state prison for a parole violation, told the WSWS: “My son has asthma and is a smoker. He got 18 months for missing curfew. In the prison he is regularly in a crowded cafeteria and has no access to hand sanitizer. He told me it is spreading like wildfire in there. We are waiting to see if he gets released, but there are so many vulnerable and sick people with him. I am really concerned about them; their lives could end in five minutes.”

Compounding the health crisis in the prisons, all New York City facilities will have various services curtailed due to the pandemic, including creative art therapy, access to caseworkers, age-based screenings for sexually transmitted infections, a program to combat intimate partner violence and new methadone treatments.

The rapid influx and outflow of prisoners through the national system mean prisons act as launching points for the disease’s spread through the wider population. Last year an estimated 10.6 million people cycled through American prisons.

The release of prisoners has incited a barrage of “law-and-order” demagogy from sections of the political establishment. In response to releases, US Attorney General William Barr stated, “Many inmates will be safer in Bureau of Prisons facilities where population is controlled and there is ready access to doctors and medical care.” These words, which ignore the mass privatization of prison healthcare in the past two decades and chronic shortages this has entailed, are facilitating potentially thousands of preventable deaths.

The entire political establishment, Republican and Democrat alike, is culpable in this disaster. Their shocking incompetence and callousness are not accidental or the product of ignorance. The delay in the release of prisoners, despite calls from the medical and prison community weeks ago, is an expression of their subservience to Wall Street, and particularly the corporations who benefit from the plentiful supply of hyper-exploited prison labor across the US. Indeed, it is the case that hundreds of thousands of innocent and nonviolent inmates are still behind bars under conditions where prisons are deadly breeding grounds for the pandemic.

Former Vice President Joe Biden, the frontrunner for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, played a leading role in enacting multiple “crime bills” that have dramatically expanded the number of people imprisoned in the US.

The American prison system was in a deep crisis before the rapid spread of COVID-19. No society in human history has incarcerated as many of its own citizens as the United States. The COVID-19 outbreak—and the threat it poses to millions of lives in the prison system—is not just an act of nature, but the product of decades of the conscious subordination of correctional facilities to the profits of major corporations, leading to mass incarceration under atrocious prison conditions.