South Korea to hold general election

Ben McGrath

South Korea will hold its general election for the National Assembly this Wednesday amid the global COVID-19 pandemic. The various parties of the South Korean ruling class will vie for all 300 seats in the unicameral body, with legislators elected to four-year terms. None have a progressive way forward as the economy declines and workers, farmers, and youth face increased attacks on working and living conditions.

The contest is largely between the ruling Democratic Party of Korea (DP) and the main opposition United Future Party (UFP), which was formed in February following a merger of the right-wing Liberty Korea Party and smaller conservative parties and organizations. The so-called liberal DP is banking on the apparent success of the Moon Jae-in administration’s response to COVID-19, while the UFP has called on voters to “judge” the government, particularly over the economy.

The DP is likely to win the election, with an April 8 Gallup Korea poll showing the ruling party with a 21-point lead over the UFP. However, reflecting broad dissatisfaction with the political system, 18 percent of people did not support any party. Regardless of who wins, the government will remain in the hands of President Moon, a Democrat, whose term does not run out until 2022.

Park Sung-min, the head of political polling company Min Consulting, told the New York Times, “The epidemic sidelined all the policy complaints about President Moon. Instead, people believe that his government has done quite well as they see the epidemic spiraling out of control in other countries.”

However, the ruling class acts to benefit itself. South Korea was one of the hardest-hit countries outside of the Middle East during the 2015 Middle East Respiratory Syndrome outbreak. Seoul’s incompetent response then led to widespread anger, which contributed to the massive anti-government protests a little more than a year later.

Today, Moon’s government responded to the COVID-19 pandemic with police state measures that could easily be turned against the working class, especially as the economy worsens amid growth predictions of less than 1 percent or even negative.

After two days of early voting on Friday and Saturday, voter turnout stands at 26.69 percent, the highest since advance voting was introduced in 2014. The high turnout was attributed to people hoping to avoid large crowds on election day to minimize potential exposure to COVID-19.

South Korea’s election is being held when at least 47 countries around the world have cancelled or postponed elections due to COVID-19. However, ballots will not be gathered from eligible Korean voters living in at least 55 countries, including the United States, affecting an estimated 87,252 people, or little more than half of overseas voters.

In order to provide safety for voters, South Korea’s National Election Commission issued guidelines for voters and polling stations that include maintaining social distancing, regularly sanitizing voting booths, and setting aside separate voting stations for anyone showing symptoms of COVID-19.

It is not out of the question that a state with a long history of falsifying or otherwise interfering in elections could exploit the confusion at polling places to alter results. Most recently, South Korea’s National Intelligence Service interfered in the 2012 presidential election to secure a victory for Park Geun-hye by waging an online smear campaign against then-candidate Moon Jae-in.

The election is also the first under a new law passed last December that changes the manner in which the 47 proportionally allocated seats in the National Assembly are distributed. The new law was supposedly meant to make it easier for minor parties to win seats in the legislature by changing how 30 seats are selected while maintaining the old system for the other 17.

The law faced opposition from conservatives who feared the changes would favour the liberal parties. To take advantage of the new system, both major parties have set up satellite parties, the Together Citizens’ Party affiliated with the DP and the Future Korea Party with the UFP to win additional seats in the National Assembly with the intention of merging them with the main parties after the election.

The new laws also lower the minimum voting age from 19 to 18. Clearly concerned about widespread political disaffection among younger people, UFP’s Kim Dae-ho declared on April 6, “People in their 50s to 70s have logic when they bring up an issue. But people in their 30s to 40s do not have logic but only vague sentiment, huge ignorance, and delusions.”

In a bid to contain the political damage, the UFP expelled Kim the following day and issued an apology.

One blogger in his 30s responded to Kim’s comments online, saying, “All age groups, not only those in their 30s and 40s but also those in their teens and 20s, have their own hardships. If we are that illogical and ignorant, why are they begging us for votes?”

As a result of policies carried out by both Democratic and conservative administrations, wages over the last two decades have stagnated and workers increasingly have difficulty finding stable, regular employment.

A study released at the end of last year by the Korea Economic Research Institute found that from 2008 to 2018, youth unemployment grew by 28.3 percent. While the official unemployment rate for those 15 to 29 hovers around 10 percent, the real rate is more than double this when taking into account those in underpaid part-time positions.

The COVID-19 pandemic will only accelerate the attacks on working conditions. On April 8, President Moon unveiled another massive bailout of big business totaling 53.7 trillion won ($US44 billion). At least 36 trillion won will go to prop up export companies. The government will expect the working class to foot the bill.

Wholesale move to online education across the US: A nightmare for students and educators

Alexander Fangmann

Nearly four weeks have passed since many US states began cancelling in-person classes at all grade levels in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Immediately many districts announced a transition to online classes via Zoom or other platforms. These measures are far from a panacea. The vast majority of young people are falling drastically behind and are increasingly anxious, while teachers tasked with designing new curricula virtually overnight are overburdened and stressed.

The rapid transition to online education has revealed the inadequacy of preparation for such an eventuality by schools at all levels. In short, it has become a disaster for large numbers of students. At the same time, it is clear that changes being implemented now are only a prelude, as the ruling class uses the crisis to mount even further assaults on public education at the expense of teachers and students.

Not only has it become evident that most school districts and colleges had no real plans for what to do in the event of a disaster of this magnitude, but decades of austerity have left them few viable or coherent options. Worldwide, according to a UNESCO, students in 188 countries are out of school, or over 90 percent of students worldwide. In many places, students have had no schooling at all since schools closed. As of this writing, 21 states have closed schools for the duration of the school year. New York City has, as of this weekend, done likewise.

A student e-learning, wearing a mask. (Stock Image licensed via Envato)

A poll of 849 teenagers conducted by Common Sense Media between March 24 and April 1 indicates that 41 percent reported they had not attended even a single online or virtual class. While some districts are set to start distance learning on Monday, including in Chicago and parts of Oregon, others are set to wait longer.

Even when schools have restarted online, many students are not logging in. According to figures released by Los Angeles schools, around one-third of high school students have not logged into classes daily, while 15,000 have attended none at all. Nationally, 21 percent of students are now “truant,” according to Education Week.

Hundreds of thousands of young people, already traumatized by the lockdowns and deaths or illnesses of family members, are being made more anxious by attempts to learn with unfamiliar or unreliable tools.

“These students were distracted from their world by coming to this building that was outside of the community where they faced all these barriers,” said Malcolm Jones, a teacher in Norfolk, VA, speaking with Education Week. “Now, they’re stuck at home in that chaos. Who can really expect some of these students to do that [academic work packet] when they’re at home starving or they’re at home taking care of their siblings?”

Students that qualify for special education in many states and districts have so far been left out completely. Access Living, an Illinois disability advocacy organization, notes “it is unclear if all missed services will be made up.” In other words, some students may receive no education services at all if it cannot be provided through videoconferencing or over the phone.

With nearly 30 million primary and secondary students in the United States relying on free breakfast and lunch programs at schools, the move to online also threatens increased hunger for students, even for those whose parents are still employed in the midst of record layoffs. After initially setting up food distribution at schools to provide for these students, many districts have cut back on these plans, including Chicago and Detroit, or have eliminated them entirely, as in Houston, Memphis and parts of West Virginia.

An enormous obstacle for many students is a lack of access to technology and internet service. Some schools have been able to provide devices such as laptops or tablets to some students, though it is fairly clear the efforts are leaving many, especially working class students, out of luck. As an example, Chicago Public Schools (CPS) is working to distribute 100,000 devices, a mix of iPads and Chromebooks, to students for online learning. Even with this effort, CPS concedes that around 15,000 students will have neither a computer nor internet access.

Bogdana Chkoumbova, the CPS Chief Schools Officer said, “The unfortunate reality is that our resources remain limited and there remains an unacceptable digital divide in our city and nation,” while Chief Information Officer Phillip DiBartolo said in a letter to principals, “Not all students in our district will get new devices, but our top priority is getting a device to every student who needs one.”

Despite its necessity for online education and other purposes, the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) own figures estimate that 19 million Americans lack broadband internet. In all likelihood, the number of households with functionally inadequate internet service is much higher. While some schools are offering wifi hotspots to students without internet access, others are simply directing students to sign up to inferior, low-cost options from internet service providers.

In other words, the educational response to the pandemic—parallel to the medical crisis—takes place on a shoestring budget after years of de-funding. School closures, among the most important public policy measures to implement social distancing, were not implemented as national policy, with some districts still continuing classes. Likewise, district by district, the transition to online education is occurring in a chaotic and haphazard manner.

Many students will not even have an online education experience as schools offer inferior options for students lacking technology or who are unable to use it effectively. These students will be left with the equivalent of correspondence courses, filling out worksheets picked up at school and returning them to school to be graded.

Although college and university students often have better technology and internet access than primary and secondary students, online learning is still only undertaken by a minority of students in higher education. Before the pandemic, only a third had taken online classes and only 13 percent were taking classes exclusively online. As with students in primary and secondary education, the students already struggling the most academically fare worst in an online environment.

Expectations for what students will learn through the end of this academic year are being drastically lowered, with teachers in some districts told not to fail students. Other schools, colleges and universities are moving from assigning distinct course grades to a simple pass/fail system. This is a recognition that neither students nor teachers have been adequately prepared to conduct effective online education.

Real online education requires more work from instructors to do effectively, and it requires students to possess certain skills and abilities they may not have. According to a survey by the education technology company ClassTag, 57 percent of teachers who responded said they were not prepared to teach online.

At the same time as schools and students are struggling, the vultures from the for-profit online education and educational technology companies have been circling overhead. Practically all of them are offering some kind of limited-time access to resources that are usually quite expensive. Many are wagering that schools will be locked into the tools and be willing to pay large sums in the future when the limited free period expires.

K12 Inc., an “education management” company that runs many “virtual” schools and “academies” across the US for local school districts, has seen its stock surge since the beginning of the year. The company, founded by convicted junk bond trader Michael Milken, anticipates increased enrollment at its schools and more districts signing up for its services. According to a report from the National Education Policy Center, virtual schools such as those run by K12 and Pearson’s Connections Academy are marked by poor outcomes for students, with graduation rates of just 50.1 percent, compared to the national average of 84 percent.

Some colleges and universities are also being lured into arrangements with online program management (OPM) companies. In these arrangements, which have expanded greatly since 2014, institutions sign away upwards of 60 percent of their future tuition revenue to these for-profit companies to run their online education programs. Staffed by lower-paid adjuncts, instructional designers and “coaches” instead of full-time faculty, the OPM companies offer a model that the ruling class would like to see expanded throughout higher education.

These companies will be increasingly brought in as the expanding economic crisis begins to hit education funding. Many states and localities are implementing delays or freezes in collecting property and sales taxes, which are often a major source of revenue for schools, threatening a budget disaster over the coming months and the potential for layoffs in the fall, along with higher class sizes. During the last recession, hundreds of thousands of teachers and other education workers were laid off.

Workers should be on guard that the US ruling class will attempt to remake the education system from top to bottom in the wake of the pandemic. US Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, an advocate of child labor, has already called for “rethinking education” in line with the previous Trump budgets for increased privatization.

The massive ongoing bailout of Wall Street and big business have put paid to the claims for decades that there is “no money” for education. It is high time that funding for schools at all levels must be drastically increased. Teachers and students must demand internet and technology access as part of a basic right to education and culture. Training in online platforms should be universally provided and services adapted to meet all learners, to augment in-person education in normal times and allow education to proceed in emergency situations.

Last-minute deal on oil production cuts

Nick Beams

Using a mixture of arm-twisting, threats and a sleight of hand, US President Donald Trump has secured an agreement from Saudi Arabia and Russia to at least temporarily end their oil price war that erupted last month and cut production.

The deal, which Trump pushed for in the wake of the plunge in oil prices, was on the point of collapse over the weekend because of Mexico’s refusal to make cuts to the extent demanded by Saudi Arabia. It was finally stitched together on Sunday.

The fear was that if an agreement had not been reached the oil price would have crashed when trading opened today, after dropping from levels of around $50 per barrel to as low as $20.

Under the deal, Russia and Saudi Arabia will together reduce production by about 9.7 billion barrels a day, more than double the cuts agreed to during the global financial crisis of 2008. Cuts by other oil-producing countries will bring the overall reduction in supply close to 20 million barrels a day, around 20 percent of the total supply.

Oil wells (Stock Image licensed via Envato)

However, there are doubts that even these major reductions will halt the price slide. Global demand for oil has fallen by 30 percent because of the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic, slashing its price by 40 percent since the beginning of March.

According to the Wall Street Journal: “Investors remain concerned that the cuts may not be enough to support higher prices in the coming weeks as world-wide lockdowns pummel demand for gasoline, diesel and jet fuel.”

It said some analysts had warned they were “too little, too late” with oil consumption expected to fall by as much as 30 million barrels a day throughout this month.

Last week, the talks assumed an on-again off-again character. Agreement appeared to have been reached on Thursday when members of the G20 group, currently under the chairmanship of Saudi Arabia, issued a statement saying they would “commit to doing whatever it takes, both individually and collectively” to ensure that the oil market made a recovery.

Speaking after the G20 meeting, Fatih Birol, an official of the International Energy Agency, said the “shock waves” of the pandemic created the oil price slump and threatened “global economic stability.”

He said the emergency measures would not provide a “quick fix” but, like the effect of confinement in containing the COIVD-19 spread, they could help to “lower the peak and flatten the curve.”

However, in a further sign of the incapacity of global organisations to deal with the deepening economic crisis, the G20 call had little effect.

Mexico continued to insist it would not cut its production to the extent demanded by the Saudis. It only committed to reduce its output by 100,000 barrels a day, well below the Saudi demand for a 350,000 barrel production cut.

Fearing a crash in the markets if the deal failed to go through, Trump stepped into the breach and said the US would compensate for the Mexican shortfall by a reduction of 300,000 barrels per day in American output.

It is unclear how that will take place. The US is not committed to direct cuts claiming that the fall in its output will take place as a result of the drop in market prices.

When the proposal was first raised in the back-and-forth negotiations last week, Trump said he expected the Mexican government would “reimburse” the US in return for American production cuts. He did not specify what he meant and the White House declined to comment when asked for an explanation.

The main factor in pushing the Saudis to the deal was a threat by Trump, issued earlier this month, to impose tariffs on crude imports.

Republican senators from US shale oil-producing states also weighed in, holding a meeting for nearly two hours with the Saudi energy minister on Saturday during which they threatened the long-standing ties between the US and the Saudi regime.

One of the reasons for the decision by the Saudis to launch the price war, after an earlier agreement with Russia had broken down, was to force higher-cost US shale oil producers out of the market.

“The Saudis spent over a month waging war on American oil producers, all while our troops protected theirs. That’s not how friends treat friends,” said North Dakota Republican senator Kevin Cramer after the meeting with the Saudi minister.

In the event, political considerations played a major role in securing the agreement, fragile as it is.

The Putin regime is dependent on oil revenues for about one-third of its budget. With analysts warning that the price collapse threatened to create “a serious risk to the Russia’s economy,” Putin is anxious to avoid such turmoil as he seeks to change the constitution and extend his term of office.

“A month ago, no one could have predicted such a crisis and falling demand,” the Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Friday.

While the Saudis started the war, the resultant precipitous decline in oil prices has put in jeopardy plans by the country’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, to transform the country’s economy. His plans for launching infrastructure projects are dependent on oil sales. For his part, Trump is concerned that further price falls will hit oil-producing states that are crucial for his re-election campaign.

He is also fearful that a wave of bankruptcies and defaults could have flow-on effects for financial markets because of the dependence of many shale-oil producers on risky junk bonds for their financing.

As is par for the course, Trump greeted the news of the deal with wildly exaggerated claims. The big oil deal is done, he tweeted on Sunday. “This will save hundreds of thousands of energy jobs in the US.”

However, it is doubtful whether the deal will even hold together and, even it if it does, whether it will prevent a further fall in prices as a result of the greatest contraction in the global economy since the Great Depression.

European Union to spend half a trillion euros on imperialist interests in coronavirus bailout

Peter Schwarz

After a 14-hour video conference and two days of telephone diplomacy, which also involved leaders in Germany, France, Italy and the Netherlands, the European Union finance ministers agreed on Thursday evening to a bailout package worth €500 billion. Its alleged aim is to help states hit especially hard by the coronavirus that were already in economic difficulty prior to its outbreak.

“Today is a great day of European solidarity and strength,” commented German Finance Minister Olaf Scholz (Social Democrats, SPD). “This is about the health of citizens, this is about securing jobs, and it’s about making sure that many companies make it through the crisis.”

None of this is true. The coronavirus has glaringly exposed the character of the capitalist system and its institutions. That also goes for the European Union, which does not embody the unity of Europe and its population, but the interests of the major banks and corporations.

European Union flag (Image Credit Flickr/libereurope)

The bailout is neither aimed at strengthening the health care system, nor at protecting jobs. It does not protect any company from collapse, at least not any that is of social value. Like the national bailout programmes, which outstrip the EU bailout in terms of their size, and the European Central Bank’s purchasing programme, which will see it buy €1.1 trillion of government and corporate debt this year, the EU bailout is aimed at guaranteeing the wealth of the stock markets, banks, and speculators.

The slightly more than €500 billion package agreed to by the finance ministers is composed of three parts.

A maximum of €240 billion will be made up of loans made available by the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), the agency established in the wake of the euro debt crisis. States in trouble can apply for loans from the ESM worth up to 2 percent of their GDP. Disagreements over the conditions to be attached to these loans nearly caused the entire deal to collapse. The Dutch government insisted, as has previously been the case, that countries accepting loans must impose tax hikes and pension cuts, but Italy rejected this. Although the conditions have been loosened somewhat, the loans can only be used to pay for costs associated with the coronavirus crisis and must be repaid.

Two hundred euros is comprised of loan guarantees from the European Investment Bank (EIB) for small and mid-sized companies. To this end, the 27 EU member states agreed to guarantees worth €25 billion.

A further €100 billion will come from the EU Commission, which will offer cut-rate loans if the cost for Europe’s short-time work programmes increase. These are also loans that will have to be repaid at a later date, i.e. at the expense of social services, health care, and education.

The bailout package also does not strengthen European solidarity, as Scholz claims. On the contrary, it deepens the economic divisions within Europe and therefore plays directly into the hands of chauvinist forces. The bailout programmes following the 2008 financial crisis also had this effect. Countries which accepted these programmes ended up with higher levels of debt when they were completed than before, their social, health care, and education systems lay in ruins, and only international banks profited handsomely.

The two-day squabble between the finance ministers provided a foretaste of what is still to come. They were unable to agree on the most contentious issue of all, the eurobonds or so-called “coronabonds.” They merely agreed to review “innovative forms of financing,” without committing to the specifics of these forms.

The basic idea of “coronabonds” is that countries with low levels of state debt that emerged strengthened from the financial crisis should issue joint bonds with the more indebted countries, which were subjected to EU-dictated austerity during the last crisis. The latter group of states would benefit from this because they would be able to pay lower interest rates than if they issued bonds themselves.

Germany, the Netherlands and some other northern European countries have persistently opposed these bonds, claiming that the EU treaties do not provide for common liability for state debt. By contrast, Italy, Spain, and other southern European countries are firmly in favour. France has emerged as the leading spokesman for this camp.

Some movement has now occurred in the “coronabonds” debate. However, the goal is not to support the long-suffering populations of the highly indebted countries. Any money raised through the bonds, like everything else, would flow into the accounts of the big banks and boost the share markets. Rather, the much greater concern is that the conflicts between competing capitalist cliques could provoke a fragmentation of the EU, weaken Germany’s economic position, and strengthen China.

The conflict over “coronabonds” is therefore increasingly dominated by the fear that China could have the last laugh if the EU fails to get its act together. The issue here is not solidarity, but imperialist interests: how can the European imperialist powers assert their interests in a world characterised by the decline of US imperialism and the rise of China?

Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte made an urgent appeal for “coronabonds” in the German weekly news magazine Die Zeit on April 2.

Firstly, he noted that a key issue is to “protect companies in these difficult times from hostile takeovers.” “Don’t forget,” Conte warned, “that after the crisis is overcome, we will confront a complex geopolitical landscape, the major problems of which we have already experienced over recent years: the crisis of multilateralism, economic tensions, the pressure of immigration, terrorism. With all of these problems, we will either raise our voices as Europeans or not at all.”

Secondly, he pledged to redouble the attacks on the working class and social systems following the coronavirus crisis. Conte wrote that he wished to remind his readers that “Italy, in contrast to what we now constantly hear, went through a difficult process of fiscal adjustment following the state debt crisis, with consistent primary budget surpluses between 2010 and 2019. This path of transparently administering our finances will continue after we overcome this crisis according to jointly agreed upon regulations.”

The supporters of eurobonds in Germany, including the Greens, Left Party, sections of the SPD, economists and even sections of the Christian Democrats, which previously opposed them, have laid stress on their significance for European imperialism.

In a “wake-up call” which appeared in the April 5 edition of Tagesspiegel, former Foreign Ministers Sigmar Gabriel (SPD) and Joschka Fischer (Greens) warned that the EU was threatening, in the face of the greatest challenge since its founding, “to fail miserably. Instead, we see that powers like Russia and China very publicly organise aid shipments to underscore Europe’s deficits.”

Germany “benefits most economically and financially from Europe. We even earned money from the Greek financial crisis,” they note. Europe creates “in the true sense of the word, surplus value for all. Especially for Germany, and particularly in an economic and financial sense.”

Germany must therefore “now show its readiness to lead in Europe, best of all in alliance with France.” Europe requires “common assistance during the crisis and a common plan for reconstruction following the crisis.” Only then will “the euro become a genuine international reserve currency and an alternative to the dollar,” they argue.

According to the two former foreign ministers, “If we don’t do that, Europe will not realise its economic sovereignty, but will always be dependent when it comes down to business on the policy of the dollar region, as we bitterly experienced in the conflict over the Iran nuclear accord.” Europeans can “only rise together to the great strategic challenges of the new decade, digitalisation, immigration, and security policy.”

The two former ministers conclude, “Crises can be opportunities for Europe, like the Balkan wars of the 1990s, which led to the establishment of a European foreign policy.” Fischer knows what he’s talking about. As German foreign minister, he was responsible in 1999 for the first foreign military intervention by Germany following the downfall of the Nazi regime, when Germany joined the war in Yugoslavia. He initiated the return of German militarism, which only gathered pace after his departure.

For the German bourgeoisie, “coronabonds” offer a means to strengthen its hegemony in Europe, pursue its global imperialist ambitions, and push ahead with militarism. Genuine European solidarity demands one thing above all: the unification of the working class in struggle against the ruling elite, which views the coronavirus pandemic as an “opportunity for Europe” and their predatory interests.

The billions now flowing into the accounts of the banks and super-rich must be deployed to combat the pandemic and guarantee the strongest possible protection of the population by continuing to pay wages in full. The huge sums of wealth, banks and corporations must be expropriated, placed under workers’ control, and used to combat the crisis.

Spanish unions support back-to-work order amid raging pandemic

Alejandro López

Spain’s trade unions are endorsing the politically criminal policy of the Socialist Party (PSOE) and Podemos government to force workers back to work today, even as the pandemic is nowhere near ending, with over 20,000 deaths. The measure threatens to lead to hundreds of thousands of more infections and tens of thousands of deaths, while big business reaps massive profits.

From today, around 4 million workers return to work in construction and industry, including auto, in crowded public transport and without any proper protection gear. Workers will not only risk their lives, but those of their dependents and partners at home. Spain, ruled by a coalition of the social-democratic PSOE and the populist Podemos party, is one of Europe’s first countries to force workers back on the job amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

The pandemic is nowhere near controlled. Yesterday, authorities announced that 619 people had died in Spain from COVID-19, an increase of almost 100 people over the previous day. The was a blow after Spain reported its lowest daily death count in three weeks on Saturday: 510 people.

Coffins with the bodies of victims of coronavirus are stored waiting for burial or cremation at the Collserola morgue in Barcelona, Spain (Image Credit: AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)

Such facts run counter the government’s claims that the pandemic is under control and that confinement is not being relaxed. Minister of Interior Fernando Grande-Marlaska said last Friday that there will be “no relaxation of measures after the return to non-essential work. We are still in the confinement phase and we all have to have this clear. We have not started the de-escalation.”

Standing next to him, Health Minister Salvador Illa stressed that the decision was based on “the recommendations of the experts.” In fact, the measure has been taken against the scientific advice by the government’s own expert committee on COVID-19, the World Health Organisation and leading epidemiologists. It was soon revealed last Friday that the government did not even bother to consult the committee of experts, aware of its members’ opposition to this policy.

The government has not even enforced a health and safety protocol for employees to work in a safe environment. Instead, on Friday, the government made a number of cynical recommendations aimed at saving their face while allowing millions to risk their lives for profits. Workers who have symptoms, “however slight,” should not return to their jobs, and all workers will have to maintain a minimum distance of one meter “two, if possible,” “wash their hands regularly” and, in some cases in which crowding is inevitable, cover their mouth with masks.

The unions not only do not oppose the criminal policy but have become its chief enforcers. As Renault autoworkers complain they are being sent back to a “slaughterhouse,” it is the unions who are bussing them to the catastrophe. Their main concern has been to work with management to extract as much profit as possible. They have only supported lockdown measures when it became impossible to control wildcat strikes and eruptions of anger in factories and workplaces.

In Spain, the PSOE-Podemos government has tasked the unions with developing health and safety protocols with businesses at sectorial and regional level, aware that in most cases business cannot comply. The right-wing daily La Razón said that “when asked to keep a minimum separation of two meters between workers, many companies are neither prepared to make this distance effective nor do they have protective equipment (masks, especially) to minimize the risk of contagion if they cannot guarantee those two meters.”

Podemos and the unions have even admitted this publicly. Last Friday, in a press conference after a meeting with Podemos Minister of Labour Yolanda Díaz Pérez, Unai Sordo for the Stalinist CCOO (Workers Commissions), Spain’s largest trade union, had to admit: “There are currently thousands of companies that are not in a position to guarantee these health and safety conditions.”

The role of the anarcho-syndicalist General Confederation of Labor (CGT) union, promoted as “radical” by forces around Podemos, is no different. While issuing a few toothless complaints about the back-to-work policy, it is giving the government recommendations for its implementation.

In a statement last Friday, CGT said “that all infections related to COVID-19 suffered by workers, whatever industry they are in, must be considered for all purposes as a labour accident, during the service and while commuting.”

Workers will be happy to hear that the CGT is also demanding that, if workers die of COVID-19 making profits for their bosses, this should also be consider a labour-related death.

The pandemic has not only exposed the sharp class divide between the ultra-wealthy oligarchy, and the working-class majority, but also the interests served by petty-bourgeois populist parties like Podemos and unions like CCOO, UGT and CGT. The unions support big business and the government sending workers to work despite the COVID-19 risk. They also say workers must pay back working hours lost by business during confinement by working longer hours and giving up vacation days in coming months.

On the other side, the working class opposes any lifting of any measure which will allow the virus to continue spreading and killing, defending that only essential services remain open.

Internationally, it has been the workers who have forced total confinement measures by shutting down entire industries through wildcat strikes, like those in auto plants in the US, in defiance of the United Auto Workers (UAW) union, and similar walkouts in Italy, Spain and Canada against union-management efforts to continue production despite unsafe conditions.

For decades, the unions have negotiated austerity, wage cuts, redundancies and speed-up in the workplaces. In this period, the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), publisher of the WSWS , stood alone in fighting populist parties like Podemos and exposing the unions as anti-working-class organisations, calling for workers instead to form action committees independent of the unions. Now the unions serve as open policemen for the bosses, extracting profits at the risk of the lives of workers they falsely claim to represent.

Faced with the malign neglect of the ruling elite, and as unions trying to march workers to their deaths, the working class is itself moving into action. After mass wildcat strikes erupted across Italy, workers in several factories in Spain also struck to demand to be allowed to shelter at home. The PSOE and Podemos responded by unleashing regional riot police to violently assault striking steelworkers.

Such struggles, however, requires workers to form independent Action Committees to coordinate strike struggles, opposition to predictable repression by governments across Europe, and a struggle for state power to go to the working class.

These committees can demand the immediate shutdown of non-essential work, with full income for workers affected. No worker should be told to needlessly risk his or her life. Workers laid off must receive full pay, financed by companies and the state. Rent, mortgage and utility payments must be suspended. Where work must continue, as in health care, transportation, food production and other critical sectors, measures must be implemented to guarantee workers’ safety and their rights. Every work location must be staffed with trained health professionals and given the necessary equipment like protective clothing, masks and gloves.

The essential principle guiding the response to this crisis must be that the needs of workers take absolute and unconditional priority over all considerations of corporate profit and private wealth.

Reality of American capitalism exposed: Millions line up for food aid as pandemic spreads

Niles Niemuth

“… in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”—John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, April 1939

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The rapid spread of the coronavirus in the United States is revealing the consequences of decades of ruling-class policy, which have left the center of world capitalism completely unprepared for a significant health care emergency. At the same time, the economic crisis brought on by the pandemic is exposing the reality of widespread poverty and insecurity.

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, breadlines became a symbol of social distress. Such scenes are reemerging in the form of massive line-ups for emergency food assistance in every state and community.

On Thursday, 6,000 cars lined up for five miles at a food bank drive-through in San Antonio, Texas. Some families arrived 12 hours early to ensure they received some aid. In Inglewood, California, south of Los Angeles, 5,000 cars lined up to receive food on Friday. Food bank usage in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, has increased by 543 percent in recent days.

Boxes of food are distributed by the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank, at a drive thru distribution in downtown Pittsburgh, 10 April, 2020 [Credit: AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar]

Those who are lining up are not just the poorest workers, who typically rely on food banks in hard times, but also broader sections of the working class and middle class families who have never had to rely on such aid in their lives.

“I’ve never had to go to a food pantry in my life,” Shanell Gray, a recently laid off hotel worker, told the Columbus Dispatch at a food distribution in Ohio’s capital city this weekend. “This just went really fast. I was able to pay my rent for this month. May is the struggle.”

Nearly 17 million workers have filed for unemployment in the last three weeks, the highest number ever recorded. Even this figure, however, underestimates the scale of layoffs. Millions more are either ineligible for benefits or have been unable to apply due to overloaded websites and call centers.

The vast majority of the population has yet to receive any financial assistance. Just 10,000 people had received a direct deposit to their bank account as of Friday, and most states still have not established a means of sending out the $600 weekly increase in unemployment for four months.

While trillions have been handed over to the banks and gigantic corporations—with no requirement that they wait in lines—every obstacle is being put in place to prevent workers from getting anything and to cut off aid as soon as possible.

Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia, son of the late arch-reactionary Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, has done everything in his power to limit payments, including by excluding gig workers who use phone apps to find work and making it easier for companies to avoid paying sick and family leave.

“We want workers to have work, not to become dependent on the unemployment system,” Scalia declared in an article posted last week on Fox Business News. The comments mirrored Trump’s outraged response to the fact that “we’re paying people not to go to work.”

The consequences will be catastrophic. According to one survey, nearly three-quarters of all workers live paycheck to paycheck. Almost three in 10 American adults have no savings. With so many hanging on by their fingernails before the pandemic, the often-individual experience that one missed paycheck spells personal disaster has become a mass phenomenon.

Already, one-third of Americans missed paying rent in the first week of April, a figure that is sure to be higher in May as millions deplete their savings accounts to get by without a paycheck. If they are not immediately being evicted, due to a patchwork of local and state level moratoriums, then millions will eventually be thrown into the streets because they cannot afford to pay back the rent they will owe when workplaces reopen.

If the promised stimulus money does arrive from the federal government, it will count for little. The one-time $1,200 payment will not cover the cost of rent in most cases, let alone food and other essentials. The stopgap measures included in the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act passed by Republicans and Democrats last month are woefully inadequate to meet social need.

While so many are hungry for food, the anarchy of the capitalist market has been exposed by the fact that farmers are destroying crops of staple foods as orders and prices fall. No measures have been taken to redistribute and process food for consumption even as stores struggle to keep up with demand for basic food items such as milk and eggs.

Instead eggs are smashed by the tens of thousands, countless tons of green beans mulched and plowed into fields, onions buried by the tens of thousands of pounds in trenches to rot. Five percent of the country’s milk supply has been dumped, and it could rise to ten percent with the continued closure of schools, restaurants and hotels.

The massive economic devastation that is unfolding will be exploited by the Trump administration to agitate for a return to work, creating conditions in which those who are unable to find work or refuse to endanger their lives are cut off from unemployment and other aid.

The working class, however, will have its say. Over the past several days, worried comments have begun to appear on the likelihood of mass social unrest.

Bloomberg editorial board member Andreas Kluth warned Saturday that the pandemic will lead to “social revolutions,” which the ruling elites must be prepared to confront.

Kluth explains that countless Americans simply do not have the option to stay home to avoid the coronavirus, putting them at risk of getting sick or infecting their families. He notes that the situation is even worse for the millions who live in slums in countries like South Africa and India, where social distancing is not an option, handwashing is impossible without running water and there are no emergency supplies of face masks.

“In this context, it would be naïve to think that, once this medical emergency is over, either individual countries or the world can carry on as before. Anger and bitterness will find new outlets… In time, these passions could become new populist or radical movements, intent on sweeping aside whatever ancien régime they define as the enemy.”

Capitalism is being exposed to a degree without precedent in modern history. Workers must draw the lessons. A system that funnels trillions to a handful of financial parasites while condemning millions to poverty and death must be swept aside.

Thomson Reuters Foundation COVID-19 Crisis Reporting Hub – sub-Saharan Africa 2020 for African journalists

Application Deadline: 16th April 2020

Eligible Countries: African countries

To be Taken at (Country): Global

About the Award: The outbreak of the novel Coronavirus sweeping the globe is threatening millions of lives, pressuring health care systems and disrupting economies. Equally relentless is the proliferation of misinformation and a lack of understanding about the potential consequences and impacts of COVID-19, leading to widespread confusion, fear and complicating efforts by governments and organisations to find solutions to the crisis.

The need for factual, reliable and trusted news and information to confront this dearth and ‘infodemic’ has never been greater. However, journalists from different professional backgrounds are locked in an emergency news cycle, struggling to navigate the complexity of this fast-changing story in order to succeed in their mission to inform the public.

Thomson Reuters Foundation’s COVID-19 Crisis Reporting Hub creates a space for journalists across several countries to gather virtually for training, knowledge sharing, expert sessions and network building, ensuring that they and their newsrooms remain on top of the story of the year.

Conducted remotely over 12 weeks for journalists sub-Saharan Africa, the hub will feature the latest platforms and interactive online tools to connect participants in engaging real-time video seminars with world-class trainers and experts. Journalists will acquire relevant knowledge, trade tips and insights about their different contexts, master new digital skills, and access influential policymakers and officials for exclusive information and story ideas to help them cover the impact of Covid-19 in their respective countries at a deeper, better-informed level.

The cohort will meet twice a week for a live 90-minute virtual session with trainers and/or expert speakers to ask questions, share ideas, learn new skills and practice them. All live sessions will be recorded and supplemented with extra material. Post-session discussions and feedback on an exclusive hub forum will extend the learning process.

*In addition to the two 90-minute weekly live sessions, participants should allow for a further 2-3 hours per week of independent research, activities and group interaction on the forum.

The programme will include: 

• Online seminars analysing the pandemic through different lens and impacts on sectors;
• Virtual classes on journalism tools and skills including, verification tools for fact-checking,  data visualization, mobile journalism and digital newsgathering;
• Briefings with top policymakers, healthcare officials, civil society groups;
• Curated newsletter with the latest analysis, research findings and developments
• Exclusive membership to group forum for sustained exchange of learnings, feedback and support

Type: Training

Eligibility: 

• Applicants must be African nationals based in sub-Saharan Africa and working as full-time journalists or regular contributors for English-language media organisations
• They must have a minimum of three years professional experience and have a good level of spoken and written English. 
• Applicants must have access to a minimum internet speed of 1 MB/second. (You can check the speed of your device by logging from it on www.speedtest.net).

Number of Awards: Not specified

Value of Award: Thomson Reuters Foundation will fund participation for journalists.

Duration of Award: 27 April – 17 July

How to Apply:
    2 relevant work samples (maximum file size 5 MB) – in English. TV/Radio journalists can send in their scripts and a brief summary.
•    A biography of up to 250 words outlining your career
•    A statement of between 250 and 500 words describing any factors affecting your work as a journalist and how you hope to benefit from this training programme which you are applying for.

If you have any difficulties applying, please email trfmedia@thomsonreuters.com 
APPLY

Visit Award Webpage for Details

COVID-19 is Manufactured Chaos

Wim Laven

In late December of last year, the Chinese announced an epidemic in Wuhan. The autocratic Chinese government should have made that outbreak known at least three weeks earlier.

Over here, the increasingly autocratic Trump dithered, misunderstood, failed to act, dismissed the threat as nothing, and let coronavirus win. This poor excuse for an official finally lets us know on March 31 that we can expect more than 100,000 American deaths, yet he fails to model basic preventives such as physical distancing and wearing face masks while in the company of others, endlessly and idiotically stressing that all this is “optional.”

An abbreviated timeline with Trump’s claims:

Jan. 22: “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China” Davos, Switzerland

Jan. 30: World Health Organization declares Public Health Emergency of International Concern.

Jan. 31: “Proclamation on Suspension of Entry as Immigrants and Nonimmigrants of Persons who Pose a Risk of Transmitting 2019 Novel Coronavirus”

Feb. 2: On Fox News: “We pretty much shut it down coming in from China. It’s going to be fine.”

Feb. 25: While visiting India: “I think that’s a problem that’s going to go away. They have studied it. They know very much. In fact, we’re very close to a vaccine.”

Feb. 27: During Black History month reception at White House: “One day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”

Feb. 28: At a campaign rally: “hoax.”

March 4: Back on Fox again: “If we have thousands of people that get better just by, you know, sitting around and even going to work – some of them go to work, but they get better.”

March 6: While touring the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta: “I think we’re doing a really good job in this country at keeping it down… a tremendous job at keeping it down.”

March 8: Tweet: “We have a perfectly coordinated and fine tuned plan at the White House for our attack on Coronavirus…”

March 10: Press briefing: “It will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away.”

March 13: declared the COVID-19 pandemic a National Emergency

Trump was lying while people were dying. But he created this problem well in advance.

On May 10, 2018,  Stephen Schwartz, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Senior Fellow,  responding to the Trump administration decision to disbanded the National Security Council’s pandemic response team, Tweeted, “When the next pandemic occurs (and make no mistake, it will) and the federal government is unable to respond in a coordinated and effective fashion to protect the lives of US citizens and others, this decision by John Bolton and Donald Trump will be why.”

By contrast we can review a different outbreak. Ebola.

December 2013: 18-month-old boy in a small village in Guinea is infected by bats. Nearly 30,000 would die from the subsequent outbreak.

When President Obama responded to the Ebola pandemic he sent experts to West Africa months before a case reached US soil and also before the WHO labelled Ebola an international threat. The response was proactive and robust; it contained the spread enough to basically keep it from the US.

Of course, during the preventive and responsive Obama administration successful defeat of Ebola’s threat to the US, Trump was busy tweeting his usual ignorant and insulting anti-Obama offal. He called Obama “stupid” and with his signature nastiness, tweeted that the American health worker who had become infected while helping with the CDC team should not be brought home for treatment but should “suffer the consequences.”

By stark and tragic contrast, six years later Trump was in power and we see the predictable catastrophic outcomes. He never sent experts to China; he actually removed Dr. Linda Quick, the CDC health advisor who was in China in July 2019, thus eliminating the expert who worked closely with Chinese public health officials, which slowed the US response by weeks. After dismissing the COVID-19 threat and predicting it would magically disappear, he finally instituted a travel ban. The horse was long gone and he claims great credit for finally shutting the barn door.

Criminally malignant intent or incomprehensibly hateful ignorance? You decide. Those are our logical assessment options. We now have 434,791 cases and 14,802 deaths with no end in sight.

Australian hospitals lack ventilators and staff to deal with pandemic

Clare Bruderlin

Last Thursday, the federal and Victorian state governments announced a $31.8 million agreement with a consortium of local companies to produce 2,000 ventilators to enable hospitals to deal with COVID-19. However, the life-saving equipment will not be ready until July.

While the two governments hailed the announcement as a triumph for national-based manufacturing, it underscored the lack of urgently-needed pandemic-fighting equipment, and the staff needed to operate it, in Australia’s hospitals.

Another alarming aspect of the announcement was that the federal government invoked “emergency” powers to allow its health minister to exempt ventilators from the usual safety and performance tests of the Therapeutic Goods Administration.

For weeks, federal and state governments have been promising to triple intensive care unit capacity. But modelling suggests there are not enough invasive ventilators—used to aid breathing in seriously-ill COVID-19 patients—to support such a surge.

Despite premature government and corporate media claims that the end of the pandemic is near, the number of COVID-19 cases in Australia continues to rise, passing 6,200, with 55 deaths. The New South Wales (NSW) Health Department previously predicted that in the coming months some 80,000 people in that state alone were likely to require intensive care beds. In neighbouring Queensland, the health department predicted 64,000 beds would be needed.

The ventilators jointly promised on Thursday by federal Industry Minister Karen Andrews, from the Liberal-National Coalition, and Victorian Jobs Minister Martin Pakula, from the Labor Party, would only represent an almost doubling of Australia’s ventilator stocks.

An article published in the Medical Journal of Australia last week indicated the acute shortage of intensive care unit (ICU) beds. It estimated that there are only 2,378 available intensive care beds in the public and private sectors. This equates to 9.4 ICU beds per 100,000 people. In Italy, where the coronavirus rapidly overwhelmed hospitals, there were 12.5 ICU beds per 100,000 people.

At the reported maximum surge capacity, the existing ICUs could support an additional 4,261 ICU beds and 2,631 invasive ventilators. Yet there was another problem. Even with ICU beds at maximum surge capacity, the journal article estimates that this would require up to 4,125 additional senior doctors and 65,758 registered ICU nurses.

Far from meeting this need, the federal government last week pledged $4.1 million to e-learning provider Medcast to offer free online courses to 20,000 registered nurses, to train them to work in intensive care and high dependency units.

The Australian Nurses and Midwives Federation, the trade union that covers some 280,000 workers, welcomed “the government’s strategy” on its web site. “This will maximise the capacity of experienced, registered nurses and prepare them to boost the intensive care nursing workforce as needed in dealing with the unfolding pandemic,” the union claimed.

In reality, in addition to the inadequate number of free places available, registered nurses must seek approval from their managers in order to undertake the courses. Registered nurses who do not qualify for free training will have to pay for it out of their own pockets. A four-day Critical Care Nursing Course with Medcast costs $945.

Moreover, the course comprises just 32.5 hours of education. Medcast notes in its FAQ: “This is not designed to replace practical training delivered in the clinical setting nor is it designed to replace formal postgraduate critical care qualifications. It is an expectation that the nurses who complete this course will go on to be supervised by more experienced HDU [high dependency unit] and Critical Care nurses and work as part of a team providing patient care.”

Reflecting staff shortages across the entire health sector, 40,000 former doctors, nurses, midwives and pharmacists whose registration ended in the past three years are being urged to return to the medical workforce. There is no indication that any training will be provided to these workers. It will be left to their employers to “support them to make a safe return to practice and to ensure patient safety.”

Preparations are being made also to hire students to bolster health staff. Without concern for the psychological or physical wellbeing of students, Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s government announced that restrictions would be lifted on some 20,000 international nursing students working in the health system, so they could work up to 40 hours per fortnight.

Many international students may have no choice but to take on this work, in order to remain in Australia. The government has refused to provide any financial support for the two million or more international workers and students who have lost their jobs and livelihoods as a result of the pandemic. Morrison last week said they could “return to their home countries.”

Acute staff shortages exist in the ambulance and paramedic services too. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) reported recently that NSW Ambulance planned to recruit paramedic students. Charles Sturt University students were “to be hired on a short-term casual basis.”

Australian Paramedics Association spokesperson Alan Murphy told the ABC that students would be “put in a position where they’re unable to drive an ambulance under lights and sirens, but they’re also not in a position to be able [to] treat patients unsupervised either. So you’ve got a qualified paramedic in the front trying to drive and direct treatment unsupervised while the student is in the back with the patient.”

NSW Ambulance employs just 3,800 paramedics, who provided care to 1,224,060 patients in 2019, before the outbreak of the coronavirus. The pressure on paramedics to cover under-staffing, can be seen in the 11 percent increase in overtime payments for paramedics between 2017-18 and 2018-19.

Reflecting the extent of under-staffing and equipment shortages, Sydney Health Ethics last week published a framework “to help clinicians, hospital administrators and policy makers decide how to allocate clinical health resources as they become scarce within a pandemic such as COVID-19.”

The framework referred to three groups who were to be excluded from ICU care:

“The first group is those who are likely to recover—they are expected to survive without access to the ICU, even if they would, in normal circumstances, be admitted and could benefit from it. The second group are those who are dying—according to the best available evidence they are terminally ill (e.g. they have advanced, inoperable cancer). They are to be given supportive care, including palliative care, but are not to be considered for ventilation etc. The third group are those who choose not to be admitted to the ICU.”

According to the framework, patients deemed eligible for ICU should be divided into high and low priority, with high priority given to those who “on the basis of their current medical condition, are highly likely to recover and benefit long-term from admission into the ICU,” whereas low priority is given to those who “may recover after admission to the ICU.”

Such guidelines raise the spectre of doctors, nurses and health officials having to decide who will live and who will die, matching the horrific scenes of Italy, Spain, the UK and the US.

The inability of the health care system to cope with the unfolding pandemic is the product of decades-long cuts to funding to public health services carried out under Liberal-National and Labor governments alike, with the trade unions repeatedly suppressing the opposition of health care workers.

Instead of directing funding toward preventing the spread of the virus and treating patients, the government has pledged billions to the banks, big business and private hospital owners. The Morrison government’s biggest corporate bailout—its $130 billion wage subsidy for employers, backed by the Labor Party—equals the amount allocated to public hospitals over four years in the 2019-20 federal budget.