Showing posts with label oligarchy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label oligarchy. Show all posts
Saturday, March 7, 2020
Friday, March 6, 2020
Message from Represent Us
Victory in Virginia
The Virginia House of Delegates just passed the anti-gerrymandering amendment! Voters will now have the opportunity to make gerrymandering illegal in Virginia at the ballot this November.
This is a huge victory for our partners at OneVirginia2021 and all Virginians. It shows how much impact we can make when we all work together. Thousands of RepresentUs members like you got involved in this campaign and created real pressure that the politicians couldn’t ignore.
Will you share this graphic on Facebook to celebrate the big win in Virginia and spread the word about our movement’s momentum?
I’m amazed by how much work this team put in to get Virginia politicians to pass the amendment, which ends a corrupt practice that rigs elections by letting politicians choose their voters. Over the last month, RepresentUs members joined phonebanks and textbanks to reach out to over 70,000 Virginia voters directly, we traveled to the State Capitol to meet with politicians, and we delivered petition signatures to legislators from over 3,400 RepresentUs members representing all 50 states.
We will need to replicate this energy in the months ahead as we continue the fight to make gerrymandering illegal in states across the country. That includes making sure this amendment wins in November.
But for the moment, let’s celebrate this triumph for voters in Virginia and supporters of fair districts across the nation. Please share the victory graphic on Facebook to tell everyone that you are part of a winning movement that’s ending gerrymandering nationwide.
Oil Bonanza Plunges Guyana Into Political Crisis
Anatoly Kurmanaev. New York Times. March 5, 2020
GEORGETOWN, Guyana — The discovery of an enormous oil deposit off the coast of Guyana was meant to catapult this tiny country into the top echelons of petroleum producers and put its citizens on the path to better lives.
Instead, it has deepened the historical tensions shackling the nation, leaving some Guyanese afraid that the newfound wealth will subvert the country’s fragile democracy and wipe out other industries, as happened in neighboring Venezuela.
The tensions surrounding the elections for president and members of the National Assembly this week may be a sign of trouble to come.
The contest will determine the politicians who will be in charge when the oil money begins to flow this year. It was a hotly disputed race between leaders representing each of the country’s two main ethnic groups, the Afro-Guyanese and those of Indian descent. Voters were split almost perfectly along ethnic lines.
Since the election on March 2, public debate has descended into a cycle of historical grievances. Both parties fear that if they concede, the opposing party would use the oil wealth to shut them out of government for years to come — and deprive their constituents of their fair share of revenue.
So, without official results, both sides are claiming victory, threatening to hamstring the economy of Guyana, already one of the poorest countries on the continent, and plunge it into a prolonged political crisis.
“We’re an ethnically riven society,” said Winston DaCosta Jordan, the country’s finance minister.
“It’s a rare incidence,” he added, to expect to see “money bringing people together.”
The Guyanese recognize that overcoming long standing divisions is a challenge. But the discovery of 8 billion barrels of oil off the coast of Guyana by a consortium led by ExxonMobil could have been a powerful enough incentive for the country’s 750,000 citizens to overcome mutual suspicion and unite around the promise of an economic bonanza that could benefit all.
The start of oil production in December is expected to nearly double the country’s gross domestic product in 2020, according to the International Monetary Fund, and multiply in years to come.
Instead, the winner-takes-all attitude that has marred the elections is weighing heavily on Guyana’s economic prospects as it enters the oil age, said Ralph Ramkarran, a prominent local statesman who led a largely Quixotic campaign for a small multiethnic party.
“The thinking here is, ‘why share when you’re winning?’” he said. “Until that’s fixed, it will remain a place of suspicion and economic underdevelopment.”
The stakes could not be higher.
Exxon started production in December, and although the payoff in 2020 will be a trickle relative to what will come, it is expected to elevate oil income this year to a third of all government revenue, surpassing all of the country’s traditional exports combined, according to the I.M.F.
By the end of the decade, the country’s output will reach 1.2 million barrels a day, according to estimates by the oil consultancy Rystad. That would mean Guyana’s production would overtake the current output of its neighbor, the declining oil giant Venezuela.
The economic decisions taken by the next government will largely determine whether the former British sugar-growing colony is able to harness its oil wealth for national development. But neither major party has offered a plan for the nation.
Guyana’s tiny civil service and outdated laws have not kept up with Exxon’s breakneck development. The company began exporting crude from Guyana’s first deepwater well, located 120 miles off the country’s coast, in January, five years after making the initial oil discovery. The revenue from the government’s first load is expected to fall into the country’s coffers within the next few days.
The country’s mining and environmental laws, which also regulate the oil industry, are outdated and don’t even mention petroleum.
A tentative deal between the government and Exxon to use the natural gas associated with oil production to provide Guyana with cheap electricity, a major voter demand, has gone nowhere because there are no laws or state agencies that can guide such a project, said Guyanese officials.
“We were not expecting this level of activity,” said Newell Dennison, the head of Guyana’s Geology and Mines Commission, who is responsible for overseeing oil exploration from his office in the former colonial railway headquarters.
Mr. Dennison’s computer screen was obscured by stacks of paper, which covered his desk. Because the government’s natural resource databases are not digitized, he seldom needs to turn on the computer, he said.
Some in Guyana worry that the government’s preoccupation with oil is already displacing resources from the country’s traditional industries — sugar, rice, bauxite and gold — which are the country’s largest sources of employment. In the last few years, the government has shut down four unprofitable sugar plants, leading to the loss of 7,000 jobs. The main bauxite mine, run by Russia’s Rusal, is also cutting jobs and exports.
“They have stopped paying attention to the other sectors,” said Bharrat Jagdeo, leader of the opposition.
A new economy catering to oil is rapidly taking shape. Around the capital, Georgetown, abandoned sugar fields are being bulldozed and turned into luxury gated compounds for foreigners and supply bases for the oil companies. A new shopping mall hosting a Hard Rock Cafe and 12 cinemas is catering for those able to tap into the industry’s boom.
But while the offshore oil fields will shower Guyana with billions of dollars in the coming years, they provide few direct jobs. And like everything else in the country, the fate of the displaced agricultural and mining workers has become a partisan battle.
The opposition People’s Progressive Party, backed primarily by the descendants of indentured Indian laborers brought by the British, has promised to use the oil revenues to reopen and modernize the bankrupt sugar refining plants, reflecting their traditional strength in the rural areas.
The ruling Partnership for National Unity party, supported mainly by Afro-Guyanese, wants the agricultural workers to retrain by pouring the oil money into health and education, a nod to their strongholds in the public sector.
But neither party has provided any concrete investment figures or outlined any initial projects.
“The profits from our petroleum industry will provide you, and you and you with a good life,” President David Granger, a 74-year-old retired Army Brigadier who is running for re-election, told tens of thousands of supporters on Saturday.
He didn’t provide details, instead treating his jubilant supporters to colorful live performances of reggae and chutney, Guyana’s national music style, mixing Caribbean calypso with Bollywood themes.
At the opposition closing rally earlier that day, the opposition leader, Mr. Jagdeo, lambasted the government’s handling of the Exxon contract, which grants the company highly favorable terms, without presenting a detailed path forward.
For many voters, party preference is driven by tradition and allegiance to their own group rather than policies.
“My family has voted for them since I was little,” said Ashad Ali, a welder who attended the PPP’s closing rally in the outskirts of Georgetown. He and six of his friends shrugged when asked to explain why their party would be a better manager of the oil wealth.
According to the latest census, ethnic Indians comprise 40 percent of Guyana’s population, compared with 30 percent for the Afro-Guyanese. The country’s traditional swing vote are the Indigenous communities comprising about 10 percent of the population.
The strong performance of a multiethnic party, Alliance for Change, in the last elections briefly raised hopes that the country finally began to surmount its colonial past.
But support for the party had collapsed after it joined Mr. Granger’s coalition.
“We can’t bridge a racial divide,” said Mr. Ramkarran, the veteran champion of a multiethnic government.
Sanders & Biden Spar Over Social Security
WASH POST: Sanders & Biden Spar Over Social Security
David Sirota Mar 6
Bern Notice is a production of the Bernie 2020 campaign. Please forward this on to your friends and tell them to subscribe. The views expressed here are solely of the bylined author.
The Washington Post has a new story about how Social Security is now taking center stage in the Democratic primary, now that the contest is a between Bernie and Joe Biden. And there is new evidence from Google data suggesting that voters are keenly interested in this particular contrast.
Click here to read the Washington Post report.
Biden has worked with Republicans to push proposals to freeze Social Security funding, cut Social Security benefits and raise the Social Security retirement age. Biden has even been on the floor of the Senate giving speeches bragging that he tried to cut Social Security on four separate occasions. By contrast, from the moment he was sworn in as a congressman, Bernie has worked to block Social Security cuts and expand Social Security benefits.
Bernie 2020 is right now airing a new ad reviewing the difference between Bernie and Biden on Social Security.
Bern after reading,
Sirota
Israel lobby scores own goal as football charity stands by Ken Loach
Asa Winstanley
Lobby Watch
6 March 2020
https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/asa-winstanley/israel-lobby-scores-own-goal-football-charity-stands-ken-loach?
A leading UK anti-racist charity has rejected Israel lobby demands to distance itself from socialist filmmaker Ken Loach and children’s author and poet Michael Rosen.
Show Racism the Red Card on Thursday stated that it stands by the “decision to work with Ken and Michael, who are both long-standing supporters.”
Last month the group, which works to combat racism in football, announced Loach and Rosen as judges of its annual competition for school children.
The announcement was immediately condemned by leading pro-Israel lobby group the Board of Deputies of British Jews, which called Loach a “poor choice” to judge the competition.
The Board wrote to the charity soon after, with a misleading series of decontextualized quotations it attributed to Loach. The quotations condemned Israel and its official ideology Zionism.
But this week the charity rejected the Board’s demand that it dump Loach, stating that it had “taken time to reflect and listen, and we stand by our decision.”
The charity’s decision was enabled by a massive show of support for the pair from more than 200 prominent figures in sport, the arts, academia and the law.
“We believe that demands for Ken Loach’s removal as a competition judge reflect political differences, including over Israel-Palestine,” stated a letter of support to the charity. “Misplaced accusations of anti-Semitism against Ken Loach risk degrading the real threat of anti-Semitism and other forms of racism.”
“Baseless campaign”
The letter was signed by football legend Eric Cantona, former Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson, the UK Labour Party’s outgoing shadow finance minister John McDonnell, civil rights lawyers Geoffrey Bindman and Michael Mansfield, former government minister Clare Short, British-Palestinian campaigners Ghada Karmi and Ben Jamal, Israeli academics Ilan Pappe and Avi Shlaim and many others.
A second letter of support was signed by Miriam Margoyles, an actor who starred in the Harry Potter movies, musicians Roger Waters, David Gray, Brian Eno and Peter Gabriel, actor and comedian Steve Coogan, and directors Mike Leigh and Peter Kosminsky.
Margolyes, an outspoken Jewish critic of Israel said she was “delighted” by the charity’s decision to stand by the pair as “the best way of responding to a baseless campaign of accusations. Ken Loach is a man who has dedicated his life to opposing racism and he has my full support.”
Former African National Congress MP Andrew Feinstein wrote that criticism of Loach and Rosen “by the Jewish Board of Deputies, an organization that does not represent me or, in fact, the majority of British Jews, is yet another attempt to conflate criticism of Israel and its occupation of the Palestinian territories with anti-Semitism.”
Feinstein said that the “conflation is false and extremely dangerous as it undermines the real and essential struggle against anti-Semitism and all forms of racism.”
More than half a million young people have taken part in the school competition since it was launched in 1998, the charity said.
The Board of Deputies reacted with anger on Thursday, lashing out at Show Racism the Red Card as “a so-called anti-racist charity.”
Amanda Bowman, a vice-president of the Board, called the decision on the judges “shameful” and claimed that “the Jewish community” would “no longer have any confidence” in the charity.
Although the Board habitually claims to speak in the name of all Britain’s “mainstream” Jews, defending their concerns, it spends most of its time lobbying for Israel and attacking the left.
Another key enemy of Loach has been the Jewish Labour Movement, an organization affiliated to the UK Labour Party which has strong ties to the Israeli embassy.
Loach has been one of many people to come under attack over the last few years for his rejection of the manufactured anti-Semitism “crisis” within the Labour Party, and support for its leader Jeremy Corbyn.
He made several election broadcasts for Labour under Corbyn.
Downplaying virus could lose Trump the election
The US president is fumbling in the face of a health crisis of unknown proportions
MARCH 6, 2020
https://asiatimes.com/2020/03/downplaying-virus-could-lose-trump-the-election/
Panic returned to the US stock market on Thursday as the federal government fumbled in the face of a health crisis of unknown proportions, and President Donald Trump appeared to downplay the scale of the problem in a Fox News interview. Someone should tell the president that reality shows don’t go as scripted when the studio is on fire.
Meanwhile, no one in the United States knows how fast Covid-19 has spread, where it is spread, or how it is spreading. The nationwide shortage of test kits has become an election-year issue, with Democratic officials denouncing the Trump Administration, and President Trump blaming regulatory decisions by the Obama Administration. That is a fight that the incumbent president only can lose: the incumbent president always will take the fall for a perceived fumble in a national emergency. The Obama-era policy, which required hospitals and private laboratories to submit test procedures to lengthy Food and Drug Administration (FDA) review, was an obstacle to rapid testing. But it wasn’t rescinded until February 29, six weeks after Washington State authorities believe that the first case appeared in that state.
Federal officials, meanwhile, are backtracking on promises of a rapid response.
Earlier this week FDA chief Stephen Hahn told Congress that a million test kits would be in use by Friday, but Republican senators warned Thursday that it would take much longer for testing to get underway. “There won’t be a million people to get a test by the end of the week,” Republican Senator Rick Scott of Florida told Bloomberg News. “It’s way smaller than that. And still, at this point, it’s still through public health departments.”
Republican Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma told Bloomberg, “By the end of the week they’re getting them out to the mail. It’s going to take time to be able to get them, receive them, re-verify them and then be able to put them into use.”
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) today announced that it is no longer reporting the number of individuals tested for Covid-19 infection, because state and local governments have taken over most of the testing. As of March 5 the CDC reported just 49 cases under investigation, explaining on its website, “CDC is no longer reporting the number of persons under investigation (PUIs) that have been tested, as well as PUIs that have tested negative. Now that states are testing and reporting their own results, CDC’s numbers are not representative of all testing being done nationwide.”
The US agency added, “In the event of a discrepancy between CDC cases and cases reported by state and local public health officials, data reported by states should be considered the most up to date.”
The CDC added that it has no up-to-date national statistics on coronavirus infections. “State and local public health departments are now testing and publicly reporting their cases. In the event of a discrepancy between CDC cases and cases reported by state and local public health officials, data reported by states should be considered the most up to date,” the agency said.
According to the website ProPublica, the CDC made matters worse by insisting on developing its own test kit, rather than use kits from Europe – and then producing a test kit that didn’t work. “As the highly infectious coronavirus jumped from China to country after country in January and February, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lost valuable weeks that could have been used to track its possible spread in the United States because it insisted upon devising its own test,” the website reported February 28.
WHO guidelines
Even worse, “The federal agency shunned the World Health Organization test guidelines used by other countries and set out to create a more complicated test of its own that could identify a range of similar viruses. But when it was sent to labs across the country in the first week of February, it didn’t work as expected. The CDC test correctly identified Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus. But in all but a handful of state labs, it falsely flagged the presence of the other viruses in harmless samples.”
Marc Lipsitch, professor of epidemiology at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, told ProPublica, “The basic tenet of public health is to know the situation so you can deal with it appropriately. If you don’t look, you won’t find cases.” Lipsitch noted that in China’s Guangdong Province, health authorities tested 300,000 people in fever clinics in order to identify only 420 positive cases.
President Trump meanwhile appeared to dismiss public concerns about the epidemic in a March 4 interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity.
“Well, I think the 3.4% [mortality rate is really a false number,” the president said. “Now, and this is just my hunch, and – but based on a lot of conversations with a lot of people that do this. Because a lot people will have this and it’s very mild. They’ll get better very rapidly. They don’t even see a doctor. They don’t even call a doctor. You never hear about those people. So you can’t put them down in the category of the overall population in terms of this corona flu and – or virus. So you just can’t do that. So if, you know, we have thousands or hundreds of 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.”
He continued, “When you do have a death – like you had in the state of Washington, like you had one in California, believe you had one in New York – you know, all of a sudden, it seems like 3 or 4%, which is a very high number, as opposed to a fraction of 1%,” Trump added. “But again, they don’t know about the easy cases because the easy cases don’t go to the hospital. They don’t report to doctors or the hospital, in many cases. So I think that that [death rate] number is very high. I think the number, personally, I would say the number is way under 1%.”
President attacked
News commentators attacked the president for appearing to encourage people with mild symptoms to go to work. Trump retorted in a March 5 tweet, “I NEVER said people that are feeling sick should go to work. This is just more Fake News and disinformation put out by the Democrats, in particular MSDNC. Comcast covers the CoronaVirus situation horribly, only looking to do harm to the incredible & successful effort being made!”
Short of test kits, Washington State health authorities have asked people with mild symptoms not to come to public clinics, because there is nothing that the clinics can do for them immediately. Microsoft, Google and Amazon have told their Seattle-area employees to work from home.
Lack of basic information, hesitant action, conflicting statements and the failure to acknowledge previous blunders contribute to the panic registered on the US equity market. In an election year, it really doesn’t matter whose fault it was. The buck stops at the president’s desk, in Harry Truman’s celebrated saying – but never more so than during a public health crisis.
https://asiatimes.com/2020/03/downplaying-virus-could-lose-trump-the-election/
Panic returned to the US stock market on Thursday as the federal government fumbled in the face of a health crisis of unknown proportions, and President Donald Trump appeared to downplay the scale of the problem in a Fox News interview. Someone should tell the president that reality shows don’t go as scripted when the studio is on fire.
Meanwhile, no one in the United States knows how fast Covid-19 has spread, where it is spread, or how it is spreading. The nationwide shortage of test kits has become an election-year issue, with Democratic officials denouncing the Trump Administration, and President Trump blaming regulatory decisions by the Obama Administration. That is a fight that the incumbent president only can lose: the incumbent president always will take the fall for a perceived fumble in a national emergency. The Obama-era policy, which required hospitals and private laboratories to submit test procedures to lengthy Food and Drug Administration (FDA) review, was an obstacle to rapid testing. But it wasn’t rescinded until February 29, six weeks after Washington State authorities believe that the first case appeared in that state.
Federal officials, meanwhile, are backtracking on promises of a rapid response.
Earlier this week FDA chief Stephen Hahn told Congress that a million test kits would be in use by Friday, but Republican senators warned Thursday that it would take much longer for testing to get underway. “There won’t be a million people to get a test by the end of the week,” Republican Senator Rick Scott of Florida told Bloomberg News. “It’s way smaller than that. And still, at this point, it’s still through public health departments.”
Republican Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma told Bloomberg, “By the end of the week they’re getting them out to the mail. It’s going to take time to be able to get them, receive them, re-verify them and then be able to put them into use.”
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) today announced that it is no longer reporting the number of individuals tested for Covid-19 infection, because state and local governments have taken over most of the testing. As of March 5 the CDC reported just 49 cases under investigation, explaining on its website, “CDC is no longer reporting the number of persons under investigation (PUIs) that have been tested, as well as PUIs that have tested negative. Now that states are testing and reporting their own results, CDC’s numbers are not representative of all testing being done nationwide.”
The US agency added, “In the event of a discrepancy between CDC cases and cases reported by state and local public health officials, data reported by states should be considered the most up to date.”
The CDC added that it has no up-to-date national statistics on coronavirus infections. “State and local public health departments are now testing and publicly reporting their cases. In the event of a discrepancy between CDC cases and cases reported by state and local public health officials, data reported by states should be considered the most up to date,” the agency said.
According to the website ProPublica, the CDC made matters worse by insisting on developing its own test kit, rather than use kits from Europe – and then producing a test kit that didn’t work. “As the highly infectious coronavirus jumped from China to country after country in January and February, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lost valuable weeks that could have been used to track its possible spread in the United States because it insisted upon devising its own test,” the website reported February 28.
WHO guidelines
Even worse, “The federal agency shunned the World Health Organization test guidelines used by other countries and set out to create a more complicated test of its own that could identify a range of similar viruses. But when it was sent to labs across the country in the first week of February, it didn’t work as expected. The CDC test correctly identified Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus. But in all but a handful of state labs, it falsely flagged the presence of the other viruses in harmless samples.”
Marc Lipsitch, professor of epidemiology at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, told ProPublica, “The basic tenet of public health is to know the situation so you can deal with it appropriately. If you don’t look, you won’t find cases.” Lipsitch noted that in China’s Guangdong Province, health authorities tested 300,000 people in fever clinics in order to identify only 420 positive cases.
President Trump meanwhile appeared to dismiss public concerns about the epidemic in a March 4 interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity.
“Well, I think the 3.4% [mortality rate is really a false number,” the president said. “Now, and this is just my hunch, and – but based on a lot of conversations with a lot of people that do this. Because a lot people will have this and it’s very mild. They’ll get better very rapidly. They don’t even see a doctor. They don’t even call a doctor. You never hear about those people. So you can’t put them down in the category of the overall population in terms of this corona flu and – or virus. So you just can’t do that. So if, you know, we have thousands or hundreds of 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.”
He continued, “When you do have a death – like you had in the state of Washington, like you had one in California, believe you had one in New York – you know, all of a sudden, it seems like 3 or 4%, which is a very high number, as opposed to a fraction of 1%,” Trump added. “But again, they don’t know about the easy cases because the easy cases don’t go to the hospital. They don’t report to doctors or the hospital, in many cases. So I think that that [death rate] number is very high. I think the number, personally, I would say the number is way under 1%.”
President attacked
News commentators attacked the president for appearing to encourage people with mild symptoms to go to work. Trump retorted in a March 5 tweet, “I NEVER said people that are feeling sick should go to work. This is just more Fake News and disinformation put out by the Democrats, in particular MSDNC. Comcast covers the CoronaVirus situation horribly, only looking to do harm to the incredible & successful effort being made!”
Short of test kits, Washington State health authorities have asked people with mild symptoms not to come to public clinics, because there is nothing that the clinics can do for them immediately. Microsoft, Google and Amazon have told their Seattle-area employees to work from home.
Lack of basic information, hesitant action, conflicting statements and the failure to acknowledge previous blunders contribute to the panic registered on the US equity market. In an election year, it really doesn’t matter whose fault it was. The buck stops at the president’s desk, in Harry Truman’s celebrated saying – but never more so than during a public health crisis.
What must be done to fight the Pandemic
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/03/06/pers-m06.html
6 March 2020
The coronavirus pandemic continues to spread through dozens of countries around the world in what is among the worst outbreaks of infectious disease in a century, threatening the lives of millions of people.
Refuting the White House’s criminally dishonest dismissal of the disease’s severity, the number of cases in the United States continues to rise rapidly. The response at every level of government has been negligent and incompetent, exposing a total lack of planning and preparation in the world’s richest capitalist country.
Even as the White House was downplaying the lethality of the virus and equating it with the common flu, the United Nations’ World Health Organization (WHO) reported on March 4 that 3.4 percent of people infected by the coronavirus had died.
There is no way to accurately determine the extent of the infection in the United States because of the absence of testing equipment.
The indifference of the Trump administration to the health of the population is no better, and perhaps worse, than the attitude of the pharaohs of ancient Egypt to the slaves. The media has spent far more time bemoaning the fall in share values on Wall Street than the loss of human life.
Congress has authorized a mere $8.3 billion to fight the outbreak—less than one tenth the annual cost of the war in Afghanistan and one fifteenth the wealth of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.
Without emergency intervention, there is a danger that this pandemic will spread uncontrollably throughout the population and cause a staggering loss of life. In the worst-case scenario, outlined this week by Dr. Marc Lipsitch of Harvard University, as much as 60 percent of the global population could become infected. At current rates of mortality, this would mean the deaths of over a hundred million men, women and children.
As the World Health Organization pointed out in its February 28 report, “The COVID-19 virus is a new pathogen that is highly contagious, can spread quickly, and must be considered capable of causing enormous health, economic and societal impacts in any setting.”
The report noted that the virus “is transmitted via droplets and fomites [objects] during close unprotected contact between an infector and infectee.” The WHO added that “human-to-human transmission of the COVID-19 virus is largely occurring in families.”
Measures can be taken to dramatically reduce the number of infections and prevent the loss of countless lives. But the response of governments throughout the world has been disastrously inadequate and an untold number of people will die as a result. The vast majority of the victims will be from the working class, the poor and other vulnerable sections of society.
This social catastrophe must be prevented. All sections of the working class, youth and students must demand that governments take emergency action to stop the spread of the virus and provide the necessary care for all those who are infected by the disease. This requires a massive reallocation of social resources.
The principle that must guide the response is that the needs of society overrule the interests of profit. Capitalist calculations of share values and profits must not be allowed to limit, undermine, or prevent the combating of the disease.
From this standpoint we raise the following demands:
No expense can be spared in making testing for the coronavirus available immediately in every country. Trillions of dollars must be invested internationally in testing regimes, the manufacture of protective clothing, the purchase of oxygen machines and other necessary technology, the construction of new hospitals and the expansion of existing hospital facilities.
Accessible and universal testing: There is no way to combat the spread of coronavirus without testing that is accessible to all those who show symptoms. It is essential that testing be made available immediately throughout the United States and the entire world.
Free high-quality treatment: Stopping the spread of the coronavirus is impossible in a society where only those with money can see a doctor. In a country like the United States, where the average household cannot afford to pay cash for a $400 expense, providing free treatment is inseparable from controlling the spread of the disease.
Every country must immediately begin to provide free testing and treatment, and pay all medical costs associated with the coronavirus. Medical care is not a privilege, it is a right!
Paid sick leave for all workers: It is vital to ensure that workers do not feel pressured to work when they are sick. Corporations and governments must immediately begin providing paid sick leave for all employees.
Equality of care: In the United States, a vast and disproportionate share of medical resources is monopolized by the financial oligarchy. Reports abound of the V.I.P. emergency rooms in Manhattan and the Hamptons for the super-rich, and the massive emergency bunkers and private medical treatment centers being constructed by the oligarchs in their own mansions.
There can be no preferential treatment in combating this pandemic! Equality of care is not only a moral question, but an urgent social necessity. The private doctors of the rich and those engaged in vanity procedures must be immediately drafted to treat the general population. Access to care must be determined by necessity, not wealth. The rich have the right to the same treatment as anyone else—but no better.
Protect refugees, prisoners and the homeless: Around the world, millions of people are homeless, millions more are fleeing war and poverty, and countless others are imprisoned under conditions that make them vulnerable to infectious disease. Everything must be done to improve the conditions of prisoners, refugees and the homeless and provide these vulnerable populations with access to hygiene and the best quality medical care.
Stop price gouging: Medical supplies and sanitary products must be made available to households and medical workers, and all those profiting from the crisis should be held criminally liable.
Safe working conditions: Employers and the government must be responsible for providing all employees—from medical workers to factory, warehouse, retail and service workers—with a safe work environment.
The supervision of safety cannot be left to the employers. Workers should form rank-and-file committees to make sure that safety codes are being observed by the employers and measures are being taken to combat the spread of the disease. These committees will ensure that workers are not compelled to work in an unsafe environment and that coworkers who become ill receive the necessary treatment and support.
Support the ill and the quarantined: No one should fear that being designated and quarantined means neglect and ostracism. Workers should form neighborhood committees to ensure that those who are sick and quarantined are safe and have social support and the necessary food and supplies.
For international collaboration: US economic sanctions against Iran are causing severe medical shortages in a country with over 3,000 coronavirus cases, and the US political establishment has been waging a campaign to demonize Chinese scientists and doctors. All sanctions must immediately be lifted and all restrictions on international medical collaboration ended!
In responding to this dangerous disease, one principle must guide us: that human need is primary. Combating an epidemic that threatens millions of lives cannot be subordinated to considerations of private profit.
Any claim that there is no money to save the lives of millions of people is a contemptible lie. In the United States alone, there are more than 13,000 individuals with over $30 million in wealth. Just three people—Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett—own more wealth than the poorest half of American society.
Funding shortfalls must be covered by emergency seizures of the fortunes of ultra-high-net-worth individuals.
It is necessary to build a mass movement of the working class to demand an immediate emergency response to the crisis, to be paid for by the corporations, the government and the financial oligarchy.
As the International Committee of the Fourth International wrote its statement of February 28, 2020:
In demanding that capitalist governments implement these emergency measures, the international working class does not abandon its fundamental aim: the ending of the capitalist system. Rather, the fight for emergency action will raise the consciousness of the working class, develop its understanding of the need for international class solidarity, and increase its political self-confidence.
The opportunities provided by modern medical technology to stop such an outbreak are unprecedented. Never before has so much been known about a pathogen so early: Its genome has been sequenced and effective tests have been designed within a matter of weeks.
But the outbreak of the disease has exposed the gaping chasm between the enormous promise of modern medical technology and the totally irrational character of a society based on the private accumulation of wealth.
Whatever the outcome of this pandemic, the crisis irrefutably establishes the fact that capitalism cannot deal with the existential threats facing humanity—from climate change to natural disasters and infectious diseases. The coronavirus crisis poses the urgent necessity for the socialist reorganization of society.
Statement of the Socialist Equality Party (United States)
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