A conspiracy theory about Covid-19 escaping from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology is the Trump administration’s Iraqi WMD. And the Washington Post’s Josh Rogin is playing the role of Judith Miller. By Max Blumenthal and Ajit Singh
With US deaths from Covid-related complications peaking above 30,000, allies of President Donald Trump are taking their anti-China public relations blitz to new heights of absurdity, hoping to legitimize a conspiracy theory blaming a Chinese biological research lab for engineering the novel coronavirus.
The theory points to the Wuhan Institute of Virology as the culprit behind the pandemic, either through an accidental leak caused by unsafe research on bat coronaviruses or deliberately, by manufacturing a biological weapon. First deployed in January by the right-wing Washington Times, the conspiracy was dismissed and discredited at the time by journalists and scientists.
With an apparent cue this April from a Trump administration desperate to shift the blame for its feckless coronavirus response, Fox News and the Washington Post have fished the story out of the right-wing’s political wet market and polished it off for public consumption.
Though neither outlet published a single piece of concrete evidence to support their claims, the story has gained traction among even fervently anti-Trump elements of the political establishment.
Regarding the real source of Covid-19, the conclusion by a team of American, British, and Australian researchers could not be more clear: “we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible…. Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus,” the virologists stated in a March 17 article published in the scientific journal Nature.
A group of 27 public health scientists from eight countries signed an open letter this March in the Lancet medical journal issuing support to scientists and health professionals in China and “strongly condemn[ing] conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.” The letter states that the scientific findings to date “overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife, as have so many other emerging pathogens.”
Having spent the past four years railing against the “fake news media” and “deep state” elements in the national security bureaucracy for their campaign to paint him and his allies as Russian collaborators, Trump is now employing the same tactics he condemned to ratchet up conflict with China. By planting fake news about Chinese evildoing through anonymous US officials and dodgy document dumps, the White House appears to hope that an escalated conflict abroad will paper over its failures at home.
Trump’s deployment of conspiracy theories about a Chinese lab not only mirrors the tactics his opponents used to ramp up the Russiagate narrative, it recalls the successful disinformation campaign neoconservatives in the George W. Bush administration enacted when they planted a seemingly explosive revelation about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction with New York Times correspondent Judith Miller.
The august reputation of the Times conferred legitimacy on the bunk WMD story, enabling the Bush administration to sell the invasion of Iraq to the Beltway political class across partisan lines. Miller was ultimately exposed as a fraudster and went to jail to protect her neocon sources, but not before thousands of American service members were killed in Iraq and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died in the chaos they spawned.
Today, as the Trump administration ratchets up its propaganda war against China to a disturbing new level, a neoconservative columnist at the Washington Post is filling Miller’s shoes.From dormant conspiracy theory to Iraqi WMD-style disinformation weapon
The theory that Covid-19 virus escaped from a biological research lab in Wuhan, China was revived on April 14 in a dubiously sourced Washington Post column by Josh Rogin. A neoconservative pundit whose bio lists past work at the Japanese embassy, Rogin has spent years agitating for regime change against the countries comprising the Bush administration’s “axis of evil.”
Toward the end of his article, Rogin admitted, “We don’t know whether the novel coronavirus originated in the Wuhan lab.” Up until that point, however, he offered every possible insinuation that the virus had indeed emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. His article appeared to be an intelligence plant that depended heavily on documents dumped by US government officials eager to turn up the heat on China.
The Post columnist’s hypothesis rested largely on a January 2018 cable from the US embassy in Beijing he claimed to have innocently “obtained.” The cable warned that “the [Wuhan] lab’s work on bat coronaviruses and their potential human transmission represented a risk of a new SARS-like pandemic.” But as we explain later, Rogin distorted the nature of the research in question and subsequently refused to publish the rest of the US cable when pressed to do so by scientists.
While shielding his credibility behind caveats, Rogin turned to Xiao Qiang, a US-backed regime-change activist deceptively identified as a “research scientist,” to argue the Wuhan lab theory was “a legitimate question that needs to be investigated and answered.” No virologists or epidemiologists were quoted by Rogin.
Rogin’s article came in for strident criticism by Dr. Angela Rasmussen, a Columbia University virologist, who called his claims about the Chinese lab “extremely vague,” and stated he failed to “demonstrate a clear and specific risk.” But by this point, a disinformation operation apparently guided by the White House was in full swing.
On April 15, the day after Rogin’s op-ed appeared, right-wing Fox News correspondent Bret Baier published a remarkably similar article which stated, “there is increasing confidence that the Covid-19 outbreak likely originated in a Wuhan laboratory…”
Like Rogin, Baier offered no concrete evidence to support his incendiary claim, relying instead on unspecified “classified and open-source documents” from “US sources,” which he admitted he had not personally viewed.
That evening, the arch-neoconservative Republican Senator Tom Cotton launched a carefully choreographed tirade on Fox News. “Bret Baier’s reporting shows that the Chinese Communist Party is responsible for every single death, every job lost, every retirement nest egg lost, from this coronavirus,” Cotton thundered. “And Xi Jinping and his Chinese communist apparatchiks must be made to pay the price.”
The Chinese Communist Party is responsible for every single death, every job lost, every retirement nest egg lost, from this coronavirus. And Xi Jinping must be made to pay the price.
The well-timed spectacle of Cotton’s appearance suggested close coordination between his office, the Trump administration, and their media allies to sell the conspiracy theory to the public.
Meanwhile, leading lights of the liberal anti-Trump commentariat burnished Rogin’s article with the sheen of bipartisan respectability.
After it was shared by New York Magazine columnist Yashar Ali, New York Times columnist Charles Blow expressed his own amazement at the supposedly revelatory column: “I didn’t see this coming.”
Buzzfeed’s Tom Gara went a step further, proclaiming the “escaped from a lab theory” to be “totally plausible” in a tweet sharing the op-ed.
Even the Columbia Journalism Review wrote that Rogin’s piece “contained bombshell new reporting,” ignoring the Washington Post columnist’s well-established history as a publicist for the neoconservative movement.
MSNBC host Chris Hayes also appeared to be taken in by Rogin’s conspiracy:
On April 17, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo elevated the baseless theory to the global stage when he stated, “We are still asking the Chinese Communist Party to allow experts to get into that virology lab so that we can determine precisely where this virus began.”
That same day, Trump declared that “it seems to make sense” that the virus had been manufactured in a lab in Wuhan. Like Cotton and Pompeo, he offered no evidence to support his hunch.
Six months away from a presidential election, and in the midst of a gruesome public health crisis that threatened to plunge the US economy into a depression, a fringe conspiracy theory had become the centerpiece of Trump’s culture war against China.
In fact, the story first appeared as a trial balloon launched by a right-wing newspaper in January, back when few in the US were paying close attention to the Covid outbreak. The oddball origins of the Wuhan lab theory
On January 24, a shocking headline blared from the pages of the Washington Times, a right-wing paper owned by the South Korean cult known as the Unification Church. “Coronavirus may have originated in a lab linked to China’s biowarfare program,” the paper announced.
Its source for the remarkable claim was a former lieutenant colonel in an Israeli military intelligence unit named Danny Shoham. “Coronaviruses [particularly SARS] have been studied in the institute and are probably held therein,” Shoham remarked to the Washington Times, referring to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Though Shoham suggested “outward virus infiltration might take place either as leakage or as an indoor unnoticed infection of a person that normally went out of the concerned facility,” he ultimately conceded (as virtually every other expert has so far): “so far there isn’t evidence or indication for such incident.”
Shoham is currently a fellow at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, a Likud Party-linked research center based at Israel’s Bar-Ilan University. A look at his work for the institute reveals a clear dedication to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s agenda, with a particular focus on containing Iran and pressing the case for regime change in Syria.
Besides Shoham, the Washington Times cited a broadcast report by Radio Free Asia (RFA) insinuating that the Wuhan Institute of Virology could have been the source of Covid-19.
Left unmentioned was RFA’s role as a US government news agency created during the Cold War as part of a “Worldwide Propaganda Network Built by the CIA,” in the words of the New York Times.
RFA is operated by the US Agency for Global Media (formerly the Broadcasting Board of Governors), a federal agency of the US government operating under the watch of the State Department. Describing its work as “vital to US national interests,” the US Agency’s primary broadcasting goal is to be “consistent with the broad foreign policy objectives of the United States.”
Larry Klayman, a right-wing Republican lawyer with a penchant for filing nuisance suits against political foes, quickly seized on the Washington Times story as the basis for a $20 billion class action lawsuit against China in US federal court. (Senator Cotton and the neoconservative Henry Jackson Society have since called for aggressive US lawfare actions against China over coronavirus.)
Days after the Washington Times article, the paper’s mainstream rival the Washington Post published a lengthy article quoting virologists who refuted the theory that Covid-19 had been engineered, testifying to the quality of research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and pouring cold water on the theory that the virus could have been a bioweapon.
On March 25, two months after its report first appeared, the Washington Times added an editorial note to the article essentially disowning its thesis: “Since this story ran,” the note read, “scientists outside of China have had a chance to study the SARS-CoV-2 virus. They concluded it does not show signs of having been manufactured or purposefully manipulated in a lab, though the exact origin remains murky and experts debate whether it may have leaked from a Chinese lab that was studying it.”
That same day, Danny Shoham told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, “As of now there are still no unequivocal findings that clearly tell us what the source of the virus is.”
The conspiracy theory seemed to have floundered. In its desperation to revive the seemingly dead story over two months later, the Trump administration apparently turned to the same outlet that had initially debunked it: the Washington Post. Spinning US State Department cables into sinister Chinese schemes
The April 14 column by the Washington Post’s Josh Rogin that brought the Wuhan lab conspiracy back from the dead read like a classic State Department document dump. Relying on a pair of two-year old cables from the US embassy in Beijing, Rogin stoked suspicions about alleged safety issues at a lab studying coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
The Chinese facility is a biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) lab, the highest international standard of biosafety precaution. Dozens of BSL-4 facilities are in operation around the world — including 13 facilities in the US alone as of 2013. “The ultimate goal of BSL-4 research,” according to Scientific American, “[is] to advance toward prevention and treatment of deadly diseases.”
Rogin based his fear-mongering about alleged safety concerns with the Chinese lab on a single, vague comment by US embassy officials with no apparent scientific expertise. “During interactions with scientists at the WIV laboratory,” the cable reads, “they noted the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory.”
However, the main takeaway of the State Department cables dumped on Rogin undermines the columnist’s most sensational claims. In the documents, US officials put more emphasis on the value of the research conducted in the Wuhan lab to predict and prevent potential coronavirus outbreaks than they did on safety concerns.
“Most importantly,” the cable states, “the researchers also showed that various SARS-like coronaviruses can interact with ACE2, the human receptor identified for SARS-coronavirus. This finding strongly suggests that SARS-like coronaviruses from bats can be transmitted to humans to cause SARS-like diseases. From a public health perspective, this makes the continued surveillance of SARS-like coronaviruses in bats and study of the animal-human interface critical to future emerging coronavirus outbreak prediction and prevention.”
Dr. Angela Rasmussen, a virologist and associate research scientist at the Center of Infection and Immunity at the Columbia University School of Public Health, pointed out that the cable “argues that it’s important to continue working on bat CoVs because of their potential as human pathogens, but doesn’t suggest that there were safety issues specifically relating to WIV’s work on bat CoVs capable of using human ACE2 as a receptor.”
Ultimately, Josh Rogin was forced to admit that there was no evidence to support his insinuations, conceding in the penultimate paragraph of the article, “We don’t know whether the novel coronavirus originated in the Wuhan lab.”
While Rogin claimed that it was an “unusual step” for US embassy officials to visit the lab in Wuhan, international exchanges are extremely common, as is collaboration between American and Chinese researchers. Since opening in 2015, WIV has received visits from scientists, health experts, and government officials from over a dozen countries.
The facility in question, the National High-level Biosafety Laboratory, is the product of joint-collaboration between China and France, and certified by authorities in both countries along with International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standards in 2016. Since 2015, eight delegations of French government officials, scientists, and health professionals have visited the lab.
It is important to note that France, the country with the most experience with and knowledge of the Wuhan lab other than China, has strongly rejected reports that the novel coronavirus originated in the facility.
“We would like to make it clear that there is to this day no factual evidence corroborating recent reports in the US press linking the origins of Covid-19 and the work of the P4 [or BSL-4] laboratory of Wuhan, China,” an official at President Emmanuel Macron’s office said on April 18.
According to the WHO, “much investment was made in staff training”, with researchers being trained in the US, France, Canada, and Australia and then in house before the lab became operational. Chinese researchers have been forthright and transparent in their safety protocol, publishing, in May 2019, an overview of their training program for laboratory users in a US CDC publication on emerging infectious diseases. Rogin’s faux “scientist” is a US government-backed regime change activist
Instead of discussing issues surrounding WIV with scientific experts, Rogin attempted to bolster his claims by relying on the speculation of anonymous Trump administration officials and Xiao Qiang, an anti-Chinese government activist with a long history of US government funding.
Rogin referred to Xiao merely as a “research scientist,” dishonestly attempting to furnish academic credibility for the professional political dissident. In fact, Xiao has no expertise in any science and teaches classes on “digital activism,” “internet freedom,” and “blogging China.” Revealingly, Rogin completely omitted the real record of Xiao Qiang as an anti-Chinese government activist.
For over 20 years, Xiao has worked with and been funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the main arm of US government regime-change efforts in countries targeted by Washington. The NED has funded and trained right-wing opposition movements from Venezuela to Nicaragua to Hong Kong, where violent separatist elements spent much of 2019 agitating for an end to Chinese rule.
Xiao served as the executive director of the New York-based NGO Human Rights in China from 1991 to 2002. As a long-time grantee of the NED, he served as vice-chairman of the steering committee of the World Movement for Democracy, an international “network of networks” founded by the NED and “for which the NED serves as the secretariat.” Xiao is also the editor-in-chief of China Digital Times, a publication that he founded in 2003 and that is also funded by the NED. Using “unverified theories” to smear a Chinese scientist
To slyly suggest the Wuhan Institute of Virology as the source of the Covid-19 outbreak, Rogin honed in on the record of Shi Zhengli, the head of the WIV’s research team studying bat coronaviruses, distorting her record to paint her as a reckless mad scientist. Rogin claimed that “other scientists questioned whether Shi’s team was taking unnecessary risks” and that “the US government had imposed a moratorium on funding” the type of research that Shi’s team was undertaking.
To back up his assertion, Rogin cited a 2015 article in Nature on a debate over risks associated with an experiment that created a hybrid version of a bat coronavirus. Yet the article did not even name Shi, referring instead to a study that took place in the US – not Wuhan – that was led by a team of American infectious-disease researchers at the University of North Carolina. Shi contributed to the study as one of 13 co-authors, 10 of whom worked at American universities.
According to Nature, the American-led study was “under way before the US moratorium began, and the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) allowed it to proceed while it was under review by the agency.”
Out of concern that its article was being carelessly repurposed by conspiracy theorists to suggest that coronavirus was engineered in a lab, editors at Nature placed a disclaimer at the top of the article this March which stated: “We are aware that this story is being used as the basis for unverified theories that the novel coronavirus causing COVID-19 was engineered. There is no evidence that this is true; scientists believe that an animal is the most likely source of the coronavirus.”
In his zeal to spread Cold War conspiracism, Rogin conveniently neglected to mention the disclaimer. Scientists question Rogin’s shoddy reporting, pundit melts down
Scientists have slammed Josh Rogin for failing to interview any experts and relying on vague insinuations in order to push a politically-driven agenda.
Dr. Angela Rasmussen, the Columbia University virologist, criticized Rogin’s sensational claims about the Chinese lab’s safety protocols as “extremely vague,” stating that he failed to “demonstrate a clear and specific risk.” Dr. Rasmussen went on to knock Rogin for inaccurately representing the US State Department cables and “cherry-pick[ing] quotes” in order to advance his narrative.
Dr. Stephen Goldstein, another virologist and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Utah School of Medicine, accused Rogin of “multiple substantive, scientific gaps” and relying on “unsupported innuendo.” Revealingly, Rogin rejected their requests to publish the US State Department cables in their entirety.
After being challenged by Dr. Rasmussen, Dr. Goldstein, and others over his irresponsible reporting and failure to consult scientific experts, Rogin claimed to have spoken with “top virologists,” but refused to elaborate or explain why he did not include the opinions of these alleged experts in his article.
It's irresponsible for political reporters like Rogin uncritically regurgitate a secret "cable" without asking a single virologist or ecologist or making any attempt to understand the scientific context. Thank you, @JeremyKonyndyk, for calling this out.
It's irresponsible for Dr. Rasmussen to lodge ad hominem attacks when she doesn't know who I did or didn't talk to. There are lots of scientists with competing theories and competing analyses. Many have told me they disagree with you, including top virologists. 4 1:01 PM - Apr 15, 2020 Twitter Ads info and privacy 18 people are talking about this
Yeah because your criticism was wrong and baseless. I did talk to several scientists including virologists. You just made that up that I didn’t. It’s despicable.
An April 17 Forbes article by Dr. Jason Kindrachuk, an assistant professor of viral pathogenesis at the University of Manitoba, also undermined Rogin’s claims, asserting that no scientific evidence exists to support the theory that the novel coronavirus leaked from a Chinese lab. A career of carrying water for militarists
While countless journalists have been driven out of mainstream media for challenging pro-war narratives, the Washington Post’s Josh Rogin has made a career out of publishing sensationalist and often factually challenged neoconservative propaganda dressed up as reporting.
After a stint at a Japanese daily newspaper and the embassy of Japan, Rogin earned his name carrying water for the US national security state. At the Daily Beast, he teamed up with fellow neocon Eli Lake on a bogus 2013 story claiming al-Qaeda’s “Legion of Doom” gathered together for a “conference call.”
An obvious product of leaks by national security hardliners seeking to paint Obama as weak on terror, Rogin and Lake were ultimately forced to qualify the non-existent “call” as a “non-telephone communication” after it came in for mockery and criticism from national security experts.
Two years later, Rogin promoted another fake story featuring photos of a column of Russian tanks resupplying pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine. The photos turned out to be years old, and depicted Russian tanks in South Ossetia.
Rogin’s upward failing trajectory led him next to Bloomberg, where he and fellow neocon cadre Eli Lake were rewarded with $275,000-a-year salaries to continue publishing stenography for foreign policy hardliners in Congress and the State Department.
Since Rogin joined the Amazon-owned Washington Post in 2017, he has pressured former White House national security advisor John Bolton to follow through on his “Troika of Tyranny” label with regime-change operations against socialist states in Latin America; seized on the US killing of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi to call for Washington to murder Syrian President Bashar al-Assad; clamored for the US to support extremist militias in the al-Qaeda-controlled Idlib province of Syria; and suggested a former Obama official should be prosecuted in federal court for lobbying for the private Chinese communications firm, Huawei.
At the start of what became a years-long crusade to denigrate Rep. Tulsi Gabbard for her opposition to the US proxy war on Syria, Rogin was compelled to publish a 70-word-long correction after accusing Gabbard of acting as “Assad’s mouthpiece in Washington.”
Despite his long record of gaffes and feverish rhetoric, Josh Rogin has managed to mainstream a conspiracy theory dismissed by scientists as pure bunk. Embedded at a paper that has built its brand on opposition to Trump, he provided the Trump administration with the perfect vehicle to deliver New Cold War propaganda to the public. As the Post’s motto warns, “Democracy dies in darkness.”
A small group of frontline healthcare workers dressed in scrubs stood in the middle of a busy street in Denver on Sunday to block hundreds of right-wing protestors traveling to a demonstration against Gov. Jared Polis’ stay-at-home order, which is aimed at slowing the spread of the deadly coronavirus.
Photojournalist Alyson McClaran captured the tense confrontation in a series of photos posted to social media on Sunday. Video clips also emerged on Twitter showing right-wing demonstrators screaming and honking at the nurses as they calmly stood their ground in the street.
“They were blocking the roads until the police force stepped in,” McClaran told the New York Times. “People were putting their cars right up against them.”
The healthcare workers — who have months of firsthand experience with the effects of Covid-19 — told Chase Woodruff of Denver Westword that the protesters defying the stay-at-home guidance were “very aggressive.”
“I’ve been standing here for a few minutes and already seen two people get in their faces,” Woodruff tweeted.
Two nurses, who have witnessed first hand the toll Covid is taking in Colorado, stood up and peacefully counter protested. Here is how they were treated. I had join them.
Observers applauded the nurses as “heroes” for taking a stand against the dangerous demonstration while also voicing dismay that they were forced to do so by reckless protesters, who have been egged on by the president of the United States and Republican lawmakers.
“Just about all of us at some point or another will need a nurse to help us,” tweeted Virginia House of Delegates Member Danica Roem. “I have more times than I can remember. When they’re telling us not to contribute to what they’re seeing in the hospital every day, listen. They just might have a better idea of what we’re up against.”
Health care workers stand in the street in counter-protest to hundreds of people who gathered at the State Capitol to demand the stay-at-home order be lifted in Denver, Colo., on Sunday, April 19, 2020. Photos by Alyson McClaran
Remarkable scene at 12th and Grant, where two healthcare workers from a Denver-area hospital — they declined to say which or give their names — are standing in the crosswalk during red lights as a “reminder,” they say, of why shutdown measures are in place.
According to Denverite, hundreds of people gathered outside the Colorado state capitol building on Sunday in defiance of social distancing guidelines implemented to prevent the spread of Covid-19, which has taken more than 400 lives in Colorado. The governor’s stay-at-home order is set to remain in effect until at least April 26.
“Protesters huddled together on the sidewalk and up the lawn toward the Capitol, waving flags and bearing signs with slogans like ‘Everything we do is essential’ and ‘Unemployment takes lives, too,'” the outlet reported. “In addition to those demonstrating out in the open, cars drove by honking, some trailing American flags, adding to the number of protesters, although at a distance. Other signs included ‘Your health does not supercede my right’ and ‘I would rather risk coronavirus than socialism.'”
During a press briefing Sunday evening, President Donald Trump praised the right-wing demonstrators who have taken to the streets in Colorado, Michigan, and other states over the past week. The protests in Michigan last week were organized by a group with ties to Betsy DeVos, Trump’s billionaire education secretary.
"Oh, more than [40,000] ... good ... you just don't have the sense to understand what's going on" -- a sarcastic Trump isn't happy with @JDiamond1 after he corrects his incorrect statements about the number of Americans who have died from coronavirus
"I've seen the interviews of people. These are great people" -- asked if he's concerned that he's inciting violence with his tweets in support of anti-stay-at-home protesters, Trump defends the protesters and says he's not worried about it
The coronavirus outbreak is serving as a mind-expansion exercise, making hitherto unthinkable solutions thinkable. Debts that can’t be paid won’t be. A debt jubilee may be the best way out.
The United States is currently experiencing a dystopian orgy of death and destruction.
In the midst of the novel coronavirus pandemic, hundreds of thousands of Americans are falling ill, tens of thousands are dying, and everyone else is living in fear they’ll contract the dreaded disease. Meanwhile, tens of millions of workers have either been laid off from their jobs, losing both their paychecks and healthcare benefits, or are being forced to have the freedom to work under precarious and unsafe conditions.
Not surprisingly, they want some relief—both short-term assistance, to pay their bills, and long-term reassurance that a plan is being assembled that will enhance and enrich their lives and those of their family members, communities, and country. Not just getting back to the old normal but a plan to move them to a new and improved normal.
While they wait in vain for that relief, American workers watch as the corporate behemoths they work for are being bailed out, to the tune of $2 trillion (and much more than that, when we take into account the additional trillions the Federal Reserve is pushing into the banking system). Their $1200 stimulus checks and expanded unemployment benefits simply pale in comparison.
So, why not give them some real relief?
My suggestion is a student debt jubilee. The United States should forgive—simply wipe off the books—the $1.3 trillion in loans students and their families owe to the government.
Yes, I understand, I didn’t invent the idea. Bernie Sanders proposed cancelling student debt during the campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, and most of the other candidates adopted some version of the plan. I thought it was a good idea then, and it turns out to be an even better idea now.
Cancelling the federal portion of the student loans would wipe off the books 80 percent of the total student debt in the United States. That would be a tremendous relief, in principal and interest payments, to current and former students and their families.
Moreover, it would make up for the inadequate online courses many of them are finishing up with right now (notwithstanding the heroic efforts of their professors), and make it easier to imagine continuing or enrolling in college—whatever form that takes—this coming fall. And it would help all those former students who are either working for paltry paychecks or trying to get by on less-than-generous unemployment benefits. They wouldn’t have to worry about repaying their student loans.
And for those who are concerned about means-testing such a jubilee, consider the fact that, as I showed last fall, for Americans in the bottom 50 percent of the distribution of income, the largest portion—almost two-thirds—of their total installment debt goes to finance their own or their children’s education.*
Now, can it happen? Sure. First, the total debt students have with the U.S. government could be forgiven with a single piece of legislation. (Forgiving the rest of the debt, the 20 percent owed to private lenders, would be a bit more complicated. It would probably require the government’s purchasing that debt, to the tune of $322 billion, and even that shouldn’t be too difficult given the scale of the current bailouts.)
Second, there are precedents. The one that occurs immediately, which came up during the Greek debt crisis, was the 1953 London Debt Accord, which resulted in the cancellation of half of Germany’s (then West Germany’s) debt: 15 billion out of a total of 30 billion Deutschmarks. As Gregori Galofré-Vilà et al. explain,
Even if we were to ascribe the most cynical and instrumental motivations to the LDA of 1953 (namely, the need for a strong Germany in the context of the Cold War of the 1950s, in addition to the realization of the errors of the Versailles Peace Conference and their subsequent effects), it is clear that this debt relief was emphatically designed to help Germany grow and always prioritized German economic health over the repayment of the debt. This involved significant sacrifices by creditors (in the form of renouncing a significant part of their debt), but also the implementation of mechanisms to avoid any risk of stagnating the German economy by the burden of debt repayments.
And it was a success. A decade later, Germany had no debt problems.
A student debt jubilee for American students and workers would have similar effects, affording them substantial breathing room to get through the current crisis and look forward, once a plan is in place, to leave their homes, rejoin their family and friends, and resume their activities.
*According to the latest Survey of Current Finances by the Federal Reserve, 31 percent of Americans in the bottom half carry student loans, and their average outstanding education debt is $34 thousand. (For those in the bottom 25 percent, it’s even worse: 40 percent of families have student debt, and their average is $43 thousand.) Just student debt is considerably more than the $23,250 average annual pre-tax income of those in the bottom 50 percent.
On Tuesday, the US Senate passed another bipartisan bailout bill, whose benefits will once again go disproportionately to wealthy employers. The centerpiece of the bill is a new infusion of $310 billion of taxpayer money into the so-called “Paycheck Protection Program” (PPP), a provision of the $2.2 trillion CARES Act enacted at the end of March.
The PPP is supposedly aimed at aiding small businesses and preserving the jobs of their employees. In reality, the program is designed to make it difficult for mom-and-pop businesses to obtain relief, while funneling a substantial portion of the allotted funds to large enterprises with thousands of employees, and enriching Wall Street banks that make millions in processing fees and interest payments.
The new bill was passed by unanimous consent, with no Democratic senators rising to oppose it. It takes only one dissenting senator to block a unanimous consent vote and force a roll call vote. That would have disrupted the rush by the White House and both parties to enact the measure this week, since senators, currently dispersed around the country due to the pandemic, would have had to assemble in the Capitol.
Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had previously announced that she would hold a vote in the lower chamber either Wednesday or Thursday. President Trump tweeted his support for the bill on the eve of the Senate action and urged Republicans to vote for it.
The program extends low-interest loans backed by the federal Small Business Administration (SBA) and allows the loans to be forgiven if the recipients rehire furloughed or laid-off employees and devote 75 percent of the loans to payroll, utility or rental costs for a period of eight weeks. It was presented to the public as being open only to businesses with fewer than 500 workers and less than $2 billion in revenue.
However, after lobbying by restaurant and hotel chains, Congress agreed to the insertion of a provision making larger companies eligible for PPP money, as long as none of their individual locations employed 500 people. As a result, multimillion- and billion-dollar chains such as Ruth’s Chris steakhouses, Shake Shack, Potbelly and J. Alexander were given priority by Wall Street banks, including JPMorgan, Bank of America and Wells Fargo. They approved loans for large companies ranging from $15 to $20 million each, while hundreds of thousands of family-owned restaurants, beauty and barber shops, gas stations and small retail outlets were shut out.
The PPP was allotted $349 billion under the CARES Act, a small fraction of the trillions allocated by the Treasury and the Federal Reserve to bail out major corporations and banks and prop up the stock market. The program is administered by the SBA but conducted through major banks, which actually approve and administer the loans. These financial institutions are seeking to maximize their profits and minimize their risk by extending larger loans to bigger companies.
Such was the demand that the program ran out of funds last Thursday, less than two weeks after it was launched. More than 25 percent of the value of the loans that had been approved went to fewer than 2 percent of the firms that got relief.
There are 30 million small businesses in the US, employing tens of millions of workers. Many are being bankrupted by the shutdown of much of the economy caused by the pandemic and the government’s failure to contain it.
Eleven percent of restaurant owners surveyed by the National Restaurant Association say they expect to close permanently by the end of this month. UBS Bank said 200,000 US restaurants, one in five, could go out of business. Nationally, 8 million restaurant workers have already been laid off. For the vast majority, the government program will do nothing to save their jobs.
The bill passed by the Senate on Tuesday includes, in addition to the $310 billion in new money for the PPP, $60 billion for a separate rescue program nominally for small businesses that also ran out of funds last week. The Economic Injury Disaster Loan program includes $50 billion in loans and $10 billion in grants.
Sixty billion dollars of the new PPP funding is to be handled by smaller “community” banks, with the intention of ensuring that minority-owned businesses get a share of the money.
The Democrats had made a show of pushing for additional money for hospitals and coronavirus testing, as well as for aid to state and city governments that are facing massive deficits due to collapsing tax revenues, and for more funding for the food stamp program. There is nothing in the series of corporate bailout bills enacted since the eruption of the coronavirus crisis to address the staggering growth of hunger in America. The consequences of repeated cuts in the food stamp program and social programs more broadly under Obama as well as Trump are now seen in massive food lines spreading across the country.
In the end, the Democrats settled for a completely inadequate $75 billion for hospitals and a derisory $25 billion for testing in the bill, whose total cost is pegged at $484 billion. They abjectly dropped their demand for relief to state and local governments and additional funding for food stamps.
The failure to secure aid to the states and localities is particularly significant. Depression levels of unemployment and negative economic growth are bankrupting state and local governments across the country.
While there is universal acceptance within both parties that unlimited amounts of public funding must be supplied to the corporate-financial elite to offset the impact of the economic collapse triggered by the pandemic, when it comes to the jobs, pensions, wages, schools and health care of the working class, the opposite principle applies. The only possible response, the ruling class declares in one voice, is the most brutal austerity.
Trump, for his part, is deliberately withholding aid from states and cities in order to pressure them to reopen their economies more quickly. He and Republican congressional leaders have held out the possibility of discussing such aid in a new round of bailout legislation.
According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, state tax revenues may fall by $500 billion over the next three years. Moody’s Analytics warns that states may face combined deficits of $158 billion to $203 billion through the 2021 fiscal year. More than 2,100 cities across the country expect budget deficits this year.
Governors and mayors, Democrats no less than Republicans, are already imposing spending freezes and cuts. New Jersey’s Democratic governor, Phil Murphy, has frozen more than $1 billion in spending and cut property tax rebates for homeowners. Virginia Governor Ralph Northam, a Democrat, is seeking to freeze $2.3 billion in new spending that had been approved by lawmakers, scuttling a program for free tuition at community colleges and canceling an increase in the state minimum wage.
Washington State Governor Jay Inslee, also a Democrat, this month vetoed budget items projected to cost $445 million over three years, including a plan to hire 370 school guidance counselors. Michigan may have a deficit as high as $7 billion over the next 18 months.
New York’s Democratic mayor, Bill de Blasio, announced last week that he would slash over $2 billion in city services over the next year. He plans to close public pools, reduce sanitation pickups, suspend the summer youth employment program and impose a hiring freeze.
Detroit’s Democratic mayor, Mike Duggan, has threatened to throw the city back into bankruptcy and bring in an emergency financial manager to impose new cuts in social services, pensions and jobs.
Last week the Washington Post reported over 3,000 complaints had been filed with the US federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) by workers against employers for failing to implement or adhere to safety measures to protect workers from infection with COVID-19.
The “largest share of complaints come from health-care workers” according to the article, some of whom “have been given ‘plastic ponchos’ and masks made out of paper towels... a lack of hand sanitizer or soap...But the complaints span a broad variety of workplaces, including Yosemite National Park, factories and funeral homes.”
Information about complaints specifically related to coronavirus safety is not readily available anywhere on the federal OSHA website. The Post was only able to obtain the information through the Freedom of Information Act, an indication that the statistics that concern workers the most are specifically being suppressed and that workers have made far more complaints.
It is unlikely that OSHA has issued citations for the coronavirus-related complaints, since the poorly funded and undermanned agency—with 2,100 inspectors responsible for the health and safety of 130 million workers—only issues citations after an investigation.
Combined with COVID-related complaints filed with individual state OSHA offices, the total number filed is significantly higher than what the Post has reported. WTVR Richmond 6 News reported that Virginia state OSHA staff have handled more than 3,000 complaints by phone and email from employees and employers related to COVID-19. Oregon state OSHA has received 2,747 complaints about workplace conditions since March 2, but has not issued a single citation, according to the Portland Tribune.
In Iowa, Democratic legislators have filed an OSHA complaint urging Tyson Foods to close its plant in Waterloo following the closure of Tyson’s Columbus Junction plant, where two workers died of COVID-19. Workers from Columbus Junction were transferred to Waterloo with no quarantine time in between.
In a separate letter addressed to Tyson, the lawmakers cited an anonymous complaint by a worker who revealed the danger faced by thousands of food processing workers across the US. “I can’t practice social distancing, because of my work. There are a lot of people in front of me and beside me. They gave the workers an unsown fabric mask. They offer a small bonus to keep the workers. They said the workers can call in [to take the day off] without getting a point, they also said that if they call in they will lose the bonus. Tyson did not care about the worker’s health and safety; they only care about their business.”
Iowa is one of a handful of US states with no shelter-in-place order. The Iowa Democrats who filed the complaint are aware that OSHA is incapable of shutting down job sites, which can only be done through a court order. Iowa Republican Governor Kim Reynolds told Des Moines WHO TV 13 that there are no plans to close the Waterloo plant.
On Monday, the New York Times editorial board published an opinion piece urging the agency to clamp down. “OSHA has precedent on its side for tougher rules. During the H1N1 flu outbreak, it made C.D.C. rules enforceable, requiring the use of face masks and other measures to slow transmission. It has failed to act so far this time, however.”
Like all aspects of the health system, OSHA is woefully unprepared to deal with the immediate demands of the working class in the wake of the pandemic. The federal and state agencies are drastically understaffed, thanks to personnel cuts carried out by successive Democratic and Republican administrations, and have long bowed to the profit interests and prerogatives of the corporations.
OSHA has made clear that in spite of the crisis, in most cases it will not be able to respond any more quickly than usual to requests for investigations. On average, it takes OSHA six months to complete an investigation in response to a complaint. It has recommended that employers conduct their own investigations and report back to the agency, which will inevitably result in countless cover-ups.
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) guidelines for workplaces only recommend that employers take measures to protect workers during the pandemic, including cleaning and disinfecting frequently touched surfaces and social distancing of six feet between workers, and that employees who feel sick should not come to work. If workers become ill, they are recommended to self-monitor for 14 days, but there is no recommendation for implementing widespread testing.
There are no general guidelines for personal protective equipment, other than for critical workers, for whom some kind of face mask at all times is recommended, and no recommendations that employers pay for sick leave and health insurance.
Like the CDC, OSHA only recommends that employers do the “right thing,” and has no legal power to enforce guidelines. Even if businesses are found to have committed serious violations, whatever fines OSHA imposes can be challenged, and are regularly reduced, even when workers are killed.
OSHA is an agency of the US Department of Labor, which is headed by Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia, the son of the late ultra-right Supreme Court justice. Scalia is a member of US President Donald Trump’s recently announced “Opening Our Country Task Force.”
Along with the state, US corporations rely on the trusted service of the trade unions to keep workers on the job and coordinate a return to work under unsafe conditions. The United Food and Commercial Workers (UCFW) has tried to block every job action by workers against unsafe conditions, even as the union itself reports that at least 1,500 of its members have been infected and 30 have died from COVID-19. Smithfield Foods, in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, was only shut down after meatpacking workers protested in opposition to the UFCW.
The United Auto Workers (UAW) is involved in plotting a return to work at auto companies in the coming weeks, complete with bogus “safe work playbooks,” created by the companies, which will do nothing to effectively stop the spread of the virus. The auto industry in the US was shut down only after rank-and-file workers took matters into their own hands with walkouts and other job actions in March, which the union actively opposed.
Federal laws do not require an employer to notify workers if an employee tests positive for the novel coronavirus, which can prevent effective contract tracing and contain the spread of the virus. There are no laws that require employers to follow CDC recommendations for social distancing and PPE, and there are no guidelines as to what constitute “essential” industries. Workers in the US are left at the mercy of business demands with no protection from the unions, state or any of its agencies.
On Monday the National Law Review published a detailed overview of OSHA’s guidelines for workplace inspections arising out of hazards caused to workers by the pandemic. It states that, “OSHA clarifies that fatalities and imminent danger exposures related to COVID-19 will be prioritized for inspections, with particular attention given to healthcare organizations and first responders,” and that inspections in the very highest risk workplaces are not guaranteed but “may” warrant an on-site inspection.
For all other workplaces, even those where workers are at high risk from constant contact with the public and other workers, such as in meatpacking plants, Amazon warehouses and grocery stores, OSHA will only offer phone and antiquated “fax” inspections in most cases.
OSHA has developed a pyramid of Risk of Worker Exposure to SARS-CoV-2 for its official website which ranges from low to very high risk. OSHA states that most US workers fall within the “low risk” category. According to its standards, manufacturing, food processing, retail workers in close contact with other workers and the public only fall under “medium risk,” despite the recorded deaths and outbreaks, due to the fact that they are not medical or morgue workers.
In reality, all workers are at risk for contracting COVID-19 as long as workplaces remain open without mass testing and contact tracing measures in place to contain the spread of the pandemic. The “level of risk” assigned by OSHA is nothing more than a way to justify the corporate ruling class’s demands that workers either stay on the job or are forced back to work in unsafe conditions while the pandemic proliferates.
Workers in the US and worldwide will draw invaluable political lessons from the life-or-death struggle against orders to sacrifice their lives for corporate profit. They cannot allow their fate to be left up to the Democratic Party, state agencies and the unions. Now is the time for workers to take the initiative by forming rank-and-file committees to demand the closing of non-essential workplaces, with full compensation for affected workers, and universal testing, protective gear and a safe working environment for essential workers, which is supervised by rank-and-file committees in conjunction with health care professionals.
As small groups organize protests against social distancing measures implemented to slow the spread of COVID-19, health care workers have responded with protests of their own against the right-wing demonstrations and the lack of personal protective equipment (PPE) in hospitals.
On April 19, hundreds of protesters assembled in front of Colorado’s state capitol calling for the state and country to lift stay-at-home orders. Nurses in the area staged a counter-protest and demanded the demonstrators go home. Images of Colorado health care workers defiantly standing in the street to block protesters’ cars have gone viral and garnered the support of people across the country, who are sympathetic to and admire the selflessness and sacrifice of health care workers.
Colorado-based photographer Alyson McClaran, who captured the moments, described the scene as being pregnant with anger as protesters yelled at the nurses. One protester with a sign that read “Land of the Free” told one of the nurses to “go back to China.” McClaran told Time magazine, “[m]y gut was telling me this is history, and I wanted to document what is happening in my city right now and show what was going on. I had tears in my eyes half the day because I was in shock at how many people were out, and how much anger there was, so I had to protect myself by leaving. I didn’t feel safe health-wise, and that’s when I stumbled upon the nurses.”
“I understand people are stressed,” she said, “and they want to get back to work, but it just showed how much anger there was. Unlike other protests I’d covered, like gun violence, Black Lives Matter, this is a global issue. Everywhere is experiencing this right now at the same time, that’s why it felt different.”
Health care workers in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania also opposed a demonstration organized on April 20 after the governor extended the state’s shelter in place order until May 8. A group of nurses stood about a block away from the main protest, holding signs telling those who opposed the stay-at-home to return home.
A nurse who was among the counter protesters, held a sign that read: “I Don't Want You in My ICU ... Stay Home!"
“We don’t think we have enough equipment in all the hospitals in Pennsylvania to take care of all the patients that are going to be coming in based on us getting a surge," Katrina Rectenwald, a nurse at the protest, told CNN.
The opposition to social distancing measures has been organized and facilitated by ultra-right reactionary forces. Many protesting across the country wore pro-Trump garments and, in some cases, carried assault rifles and displayed Confederate flags or Nazi insignia. The largest of these protests, organized in Lansing, Michigan, was sponsored by the Michigan Conservative Coalition, an ultra-right group of Trump loyalists.
In addition, fascistic organizations such as the Michigan Proud Boys, the Michigan Liberty Militia, and other far-right forces were involved. Donald Trump defended anti-quarantine protesters as “great people.” “These people love our country, they want to get back to work," the president said in a tweet.
The protests coincide with the drive to “reopen” the country, heavily promoted by both major parties and the media. States including Texas, Florida, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Georgia have utilized the protests to either open sections of their economies or announce “frameworks” for reopening.
Georgia Governor Brian Kemp has gotten backlash for his decision to allow businesses such as gyms, bowling alleys, hair and nail salons and massage therapists to open as early as Friday. The state has not even met the inefficient and fraudulent guidelines put in place by the Trump administration, placing countless lives in danger.
The National Nurses United (NNU) organized a protest outside the White House on Tuesday demanding the Trump administration take action to protect health care workers. The nurses read aloud the names of 50 nurses who have died while battling the coronavirus. The NNU demanded the administration utilize the Defense Production Act (DPA) to order the mass production of PPE, ventilators and coronavirus test kits.
“NNU is calling on Congress to mandate the DPA’s use to produce the equipment and supplies health care workers need to care for COVID-19 patients as well as to conduct mass testing that is required to control the spread of the virus,” the union said in a statement Tuesday.
One nurse told NBC News, “We are here because our colleagues are dying. I think that right now people think of us as heroes, but we’re feeling like martyrs.”
Last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reported that at least 9,200 health care workers were infected with the coronavirus but admitted there was no comprehensive way to tally those who lost their lives trying to save others. The organization stressed that the count was drawn from just 16 percent of the nation’s COVID-19 cases, meaning the real number of health care workers infected is significantly higher. Using data from states, the CDC estimated that health care workers account for approximately 11 percent of all infections.
Some states, including Ohio, have reported rates of health care worker infections as high as 20 percent but have not revealed data for individual counties, cities or hospitals. The Henry Ford health center in Detroit reported that more than 700 employees tested positive for COVID-19 but declined to state the number of deaths.
Nurses countrywide are insisting they be provided with proper protective gear. Demonstrations have taken place in Michigan, Washington D.C, New York, Arizona, Los Angeles, Kentucky, New Jersey, and elsewhere. Nurses in Phoenix counter-protested a Patriot’s rally on Monday. Other nurses across the country reported being reprimanded for speaking out against the lack of proper protective gear. Many have said they feel persecuted for simply trying to protect themselves and others.
Unions have organized a number of the protests and have tried to channel the anger felt into the Democratic Party or slogans such as “PPEs over profits.” The unions, in typical fashion, have not challenged the capitalist profit system but merely offer health care workers an avenue to blow off steam. The lack of PPE and the destructive campaign to prematurely reopen the economy stem directly from the prerogatives of the capitalist system.
Health care workers are placing their lives and those of their families in danger to save others under extremely difficult conditions. A huge mental and physical toll is placed on them. However, capitalism demands their well-being be subordinated to the extraction of profit from the working population.
People across the US have expressed deep sympathy and admiration for those on the frontlines of the coronavirus pandemic. However, with each passing day the conflict between the interests of a tiny parasitic layer and most of the world’s population becomes clearer. A global fight for socialism is necessary to ensure the safety of health care workers and the population.
On Monday night, Donald Trump announced via tweet that due to the coronavirus the government would shut all immigration to the United States, a move without precedent in American history.
This shameful police state action is a desperate attempt by the Trump administration to distract from the criminality of the ruling class’s own response to the coronavirus.
Every element of the official response—from ignoring the initial warnings to the multi-trillion-dollar corporate handout and the insane efforts to rush workers back to work—has been to protect Wall Street and guarantee corporate profits no matter the human cost. The result has been economic collapse and death on a mass scale. Yesterday was one of the deadliest days on record and the US is approaching 50,000 total deaths, with no end in sight.
Trump’s proposal for a 60-day “pause” on immigration would include all legal applications for immigrant visas and permanent residency. It would, however, exclude guest farmworker visas at the request of large agribusinesses.
The social landscape of the country would be drastically altered by such a move, which would effectively establish a permanent underclass of people who have no avenue to ever access social programs, unemployment benefits or decent-paying jobs.
As tens of millions of Americans confront an indefinite future of mass unemployment, food lines and poverty, Trump’s announcement is a dangerous and calculated attempt to scapegoat the most oppressed sections of the working class for the devastating social consequences of the ruling class’s bipartisan response.
As usual, Trump announced the new policy in a flippant late-night tweet that contained almost as many lies as total words:
“In light of the attack from the Invisible Enemy, as well as the need to protect the jobs of our GREAT American Citizens, I will be signing an Executive Order to temporarily suspend immigration into the United States.”
At yesterday’s press conference, Trump absurdly claimed that immigrants are responsible for the lack of medical supplies, scapegoating them for the government’s inability to provide adequate medical resources, ventilators and protective equipment for health care workers. Banning immigration was necessary to “help to conserve vital medical resources for American citizens,” Trump said, implying that non-citizens deserve to die without any medical care.
Trump also blamed immigrants for the fact that 22 million people filed for unemployment benefits in recent weeks, saying his immigration ban was to “help put unemployed Americans first in line for jobs as we reopen.”
Trump’s reference to “reopening” workplaces betrays an immediate purpose of his announcement: to use racial and national chauvinism as a tool to distract from and suppress social opposition to the ruling class’s efforts to open business and workplaces by Trump’s proposed goal of May 1.
Several states, including Georgia and South Carolina, have already begun opening non-essential businesses in advance of Trump’s proposed date, despite overwhelming medical evidence that such moves will lead to the deaths of countless thousands more.
But Wall Street is demanding the right to exploit the working class with no restrictions and with no attention to how many will die. While millions of laid-off workers are still awaiting their stimulus and unemployment checks, trillions of dollars were transferred to the banks and corporations overnight under the bipartisan CARES Act.
Corporate America is preparing for millions to go back to work by legally protecting itself against any responsibility for the forthcoming surge in deaths.
During his press conference Monday, Trump said his administration was going to provide blanket protection to corporations from lawsuits filed in behalf of workers who get sick or die on the job: “We are trying to take liability away from these companies,” Trump said. “We just don’t want that because we want the companies to open and to open strong.”
Under conditions where workers are already engaged in strikes and protests against non-essential work in the US and internationally, the “back to work” order threatens to trigger a social explosion.
The Washington Post worried in an April 19 article, “As more than half the people in the world hunker down under some form of enforced confinement, stirrings of political and social unrest are pointing to a new, potentially turbulent phase in the global effort to stem the coronavirus pandemic. Already, protests spurred by the collapse of economic activity have erupted in scattered locations around the world.”
At the same time, Trump’s panicked announcement on immigration underscores the profound divisions within the ruling class as to how best to suppress social opposition and maintain corporate profits in the midst of the coronavirus crisis.
Trump is engaged in an ongoing fight with a series of Democratic state governors, including Washington Governor Jay Inslee, who said that Trump was “fomenting domestic rebellion” by promoting small right-wing protests demanding an end to stay-at-home regulations.
Last month, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said Trump’s threat to implement a forced quarantine on the whole state would amount to a “federal declaration of war” against the states, calling it “a civil war kind of discussion.” California Governor Gavin Newsom has repeatedly called California a “nation state” in recent weeks and formed the “Western States Pact” with Oregon and Washington, the explicit purpose of which is to promote a “shared vision for reopening their economies.”
The opposition to Trump by governors of these states—home to Wall Street, Silicon Valley and Amazon—does not represent a progressive alternative to Trump. The Democratic Party governors are no less determined to force workers back to work against the advice of medical experts. The Democratic Party has been just as aggressive as Trump in scapegoating China and Chinese people for the spread of the disease.
Trump’s ban on immigration is part of an international process. Across the world, each national bourgeoisie is responding to the crisis by erecting trade barriers and limiting immigration, “protecting himself,” as Leon Trotsky wrote, “behind a customs wall and a hedge of bayonets.”
But the nature of the coronavirus crisis demands an international response, not limited by the framework of the nation-state system, which the disease itself does not respect.
Just across the now-closed US-Mexico border, thousands of Mexican workers at sweatshop factories and warehouses in cities like Tijuana, Matamoros and Ciudad Juárez are protesting to demand a halt to non-essential production and full pay for time off from work. These demands are the same as the demands of their counterparts in the US, Europe and elsewhere. They objectively express the yearnings of billions of people, regardless of national identity or citizenship status, who are not prepared to die of coronavirus to help the corporate bottom line.
The growing mass graves filled with people who should not have died are a monument to the capitalist system and the global ruling class that has used the disease to enrich itself even further. Trump’s xenophobia is an attempt to divide the working class and distract it from the growing death toll, from the food bank and unemployment lines, and the deadly prospect of a return to work. Desperate governments take desperate measures.
The fact that the demands of striking workers appear so patently reasonable to billions of workers but are unacceptable to the financial aristocracy means the demands are impossible to achieve under capitalism. Seizing the productive forces out of the hands of the rich and reorganizing society to meet human need is a matter of life and death.
@mooncult
A small group of frontline healthcare workers dressed in scrubs stood in the middle of a busy street in Denver on Sunday to block hundreds of right-wing protestors traveling to a demonstration against Gov. Jared Polis’ stay-at-home order, which is aimed at slowing the spread of the deadly coronavirus.
