Monday, August 3, 2020
GUARDIAN: GOP Is Forcing Americans To Return To Unsafe Workplaces
America has rigged its economy and its laws to deliberately punish workers who try to refuse to return to virus-plagued workplaces.
David Sirota
Aug 3
Editor’s note: This is my most recent monthly column in The Guardian. It synthesizes much of the reporting we’ve been able to do here at TMI. Through our partnership with The Guardian, our work is now being circulated to millions of readers at one of the world’s largest newspapers. That wouldn’t be possible without your ongoing support. Thank you so much for supporting our journalism work that makes this possible! — Sirota
During a 2019 speech about economic rights, Bernie Sanders said: “Freedom is an often-used word, but it’s time we took a hard look at what that word actually means. Ask yourself: what does it actually mean to be free?”
That question is particularly pressing today, as the push to reopen the economy is cast as a liberation movement. In their telling, conservative activists say employers must be given the freedom to ignore scientific warnings and resume business as usual.
And yet, lifting stay-at-home orders is actually an assault on a core freedom – the freedom to protect oneself and one’s family from a lethal disease, without being bankrupted.
A system that aimed to protect that freedom would provide the same “incessant Fed support” to workers as it is already providing to Wall Street banks. But America has constructed policies that actively try to deprive workers of that freedom and instead force them out into a deadly pandemic, under threat of being economically destroyed.
In locales across the country, millions of Americans are losing employer-based healthcare coverage, and can only get it back if they go back to their jobs as infection rates increase.
In various states, officials are ending eviction moratoriums because “people generally should be back at work,” as Colorado’s Democratic governor, Jared Polis, put it in a declaration saying the quiet part aloud.
In Washington, Donald Trump is trying to brush aside dire warnings and force open schools. Republican governors like Missouri’s Mike Parson are supporting him by declaring that if kids “do get Covid-19, which they will, and they will when they go to school, they’re not going to the hospitals. They’re going to go home and they’re going to get over it” – a formula for spreading the virus from children to entire families.
In Congress, Republican lawmakers are threatening to slash existing unemployment benefits. They are also aiming to shield employers from the threat of lawsuits if and when their profit-maximizing business practices end up making workers sick – a move that “would make it nearly impossible to sue corporations for Covid-19-related legal claims by workers [and] give employers a free pass to flout worker safety laws”, as two Congressional Progressive Caucus staffers recently wrote.
Meanwhile, there have been reports of businesses firing workers who raise concerns over Covid – and a court rebuffed a lawsuit aiming to force the Trump labor department to issue new rules requiring employers to protect workers from the disease.
This isn’t happenstance or random. It is all part of a plan.
Click here to read the rest of the column in The Guardian…
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Congress of millionaires robs the unemployed
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/03/pers-a03.html
3 August 2020
The refusal of the US Congress to take action as supplemental federal unemployment benefits expired July 31 for as many as 30 million American workers demonstrates the social interests that drive the corporate-controlled political system in the United States. A Congress whose average member is a millionaire has not the slightest concern for the mass suffering the cutoff of benefits will inflict on the working class.
Tens of millions of workers and their families have already begun to experience the impact of this act of class savagery. Their weekly incomes will be cut by 60 to 90 percent, depending on the level of state unemployment benefits they may continue to receive. Nearly 20 million households will be unable to afford their monthly rent, under conditions where a limited moratorium on evictions was allowed to expire on the same day, Friday, July 31. Millions more will be unable to buy sufficient food, let alone afford health insurance and medical care under conditions of a nationwide COVID-19 pandemic.
The cutoff of supplemental benefits is not the byproduct of “gridlock” in Washington or the unintended consequence of election-year conflicts between Democrats and the Trump administration, as the corporate media presents it. This is a deliberate policy.
For all their mutual mudslinging and displays of partisan ferocity, the Democratic and Republican parties and the Trump administration serve the same class interests and are pursuing the same goal. They aim to use the threat of poverty, hunger and homelessness to force millions of workers to return to work producing profits for the capitalist class, regardless of the spreading danger from the coronavirus pandemic.
Appearing on Sunday television interview programs, after a three-hour negotiating session on Saturday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (net worth $120 million), speaking for the Democrats, and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin (net worth $300 million), speaking for the Trump administration, agreed that the $600-a-week supplemental benefit would not be renewed in its previous form.
On the ABC program “This Week,” Mnuchin flatly attacked the supplemental benefit, repeatedly describing jobless workers who received the $600-a-week payment as “overpaid” and complaining that the payments had led to widespread refusal by workers to go back to their jobs when recalled after the end of state lockdowns imposed because of COVID-19.
When his interviewer expressed skepticism that an “extra $600” was a disincentive to finding a job, Mnuchin replied, “There’s no question in certain cases where we’re paying people more to work—stay home than to work. That’s created issues in the entire economy.”
The former Hollywood financier, whose personal wealth would cover the cost of supplemental benefits for 10,000 workers for an entire year, was giving voice to the claims of Senate Republicans and numerous corporate employers. They have argued that the $600-a-week federal benefit made it difficult to induce workers to return to work at low-paying fast food, retail and sweatshop positions.
Speaking on the same program, Pelosi tried to make a display of sympathy for the unemployed, criticizing the Republicans for subjecting jobless workers to a greater degree of scrutiny than businessmen who collected tens of millions of dollars in federal payments under the misnamed Paycheck Protection Program.
But she embraced the suggestion of the second-ranking Democrat in the House, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, who said last week that the supplemental benefit was negotiable, and that the Republican demand to reduce the weekly amount was “not a deal-breaker.”
Pelosi suggested a sliding scale of payments, as proposed by Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (Democrat from New York), in which “the amount of money that’s given as an enhancement for unemployment insurance should relate to the rate of unemployment. So, as that goes down, then you can consider something less than the $600…”
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (net worth $22.5 million) has set August 7 as the effective deadline for the ongoing negotiations, the day the Senate will begin its August recess. The House and Senate could well begin their monthlong break—a period of lavishly-paid vacations far beyond the reach of most American workers—having either drastically cut benefits for the unemployed or failed to restore them at all.
On the same day that federal supplemental benefits expired, the House of Representatives passed, on a near-party-line vote, a $1.3 trillion bill to fund the Department of Defense, as well as the departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, Justice, Transportation, Energy and several other agencies.
The military component of that bill, close to $750 billion, would by itself have paid for more than 40 weeks of supplemental unemployment benefits. It includes such items as $70 billion—four weeks of supplemental benefits—for Overseas Contingency Operations, the slush fund the Pentagon uses to cover expenses for wars in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, as well as drone missile strikes across a much wider area.
The most recent bill for a single weapons system, the F-35 fighter jet, at $34 billion, would pay for two weeks of supplemental benefits. A single Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carrier (there are five on order, and 10 planned in total) comes to $18 billion for research, development and construction—one week’s worth of supplemental unemployment benefits to keep 30 million American families alive.
There are other comparisons that can be made. General Motors CEO Mary Barra made $21 million last year, or $420,000 per week, enough to fund the unemployment benefits of 700 jobless workers.
The increase since March in the personal fortune of a single individual, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, comes to $74 billion, enough to cover supplemental benefits for four weeks. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has gained more than $50 billion during the same period. He could pay the benefit bill for an additional three weeks. American billionaires as whole have gained $565 billion over the past four months, enough to finance supplemental benefits until March 2021.
And that leaves out the rest of the Wall Street investor class, those of less than billionaire rank, for whom the four months since the passage of the CARES Act in late March have been the most lucrative period in the history of world capitalism.
Senator McConnell claimed that 15 to 20 members of his Republican caucus opposed any extension of supplemental benefits at all, and several of these diehards have been quoted bemoaning the colossal federal borrowing that has been carried out since the coronavirus pandemic forced the temporary lockdown of the US economy.
The figures cited above, however, demonstrate the lying character of the claims that “there is no money” to provide necessary support to allow workers and their families to survive without being forced back into workplaces that would quickly become focal points of a deadly infectious disease.
Resources aplenty exist, created by the labor of workers. There could be no more fitting disposition of these resources than to confiscate them from the capitalists and put them to use to ensure the survival of the principal productive class in modern society, the proletariat.
To fight for such a perspective, workers must break with the two parties of big business, the Democrats and Republicans, and establish their political independence. The working class must build its own political party, based on a revolutionary socialist program aimed at putting an end to the profit system. This means joining and building the Socialist Equality Party.
Patrick Martin
Drive to reopen US schools continues despite mounting evidence of deadly consequences
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/03/scho-a03.html
By Evan Blake
3 August 2020
The drive to reopen the schools continues across the US despite mounting evidence of the disastrous public health implications of doing so even as the coronavirus pandemic rages out of control.
New cases of COVID-19 and deaths from the disease continue to rise and no plan is in place to contain the spread of the virus. Under these conditions, it is impossible to reopen schools safely even with the most advanced measures to protect teachers and students, let alone the half-measures underfunded school districts are implementing.
Opposition to the reopening of the schools is growing in every part of the country, with social media exploding over the past month since President Trump tweeted that “SCHOOLS MUST OPEN IN THE FALL!!!” There are now over 55 Facebook groups in at least 30 states, with a combined membership of over 300,000 educators, parents and students. These social media groups have served as centers for the organization of car caravans and other forms of protest.
At least four schools in Indiana and Mississippi that resumed in-person instruction over the past week have already had a student test positive for COVID-19. Within hours of the start of the first school day at Greenfield Central Junior High School in Indiana, officials were notified that a student had tested positive, prompting them to isolate the student and order all those with whom the student had come into contact to self-quarantine.
There is an expanding body of scientific research showing the centrality of keeping schools closed as part of any plan to contain the pandemic. Last week, a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association ( JAMA) concluded that the widespread closure of schools in mid-March saved at least 40,600 lives over a 16-day period and resulted in an estimated 1.37 million fewer infections over a 26-day period in the spring. Those states that closed earliest saw the largest relative reductions in infections and deaths.
Another JAMA study released last week found that babies and young children infected with COVID-19 can carry high viral loads in their throats and airways—up to 100 times the amount of adults. The study noted, “Behavioral habits of young children and close quarters in school and day care settings raise concern for SARS-CoV-2 amplification in this population as public health restrictions are eased.”
These findings were corroborated in a separate study from Trento, Italy, which found that children 14 years old and younger transmit the virus at over twice the rate of adults aged 30–49.
Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin recently released estimates on the number of children or staff likely to enter US schools already infected, based on current infection rates. Their research found that more than 80 percent of Americans live in a county where at least one person in a school of 500 students and staff would likely arrive infected.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has released a report on a major outbreak at a YMCA overnight summer camp in Georgia in late June, where 260 campers and staff members tested positive for COVID-19, or over 75 percent of those tested. Notably, the camp required all attendees to provide documentation that they had tested negative for the virus before arriving.
The demand that schools reopen is central to the ruling class campaign to force workers back to work in order to pump out profits for the corporate-financial elite. While the Trump administration has spearheaded this campaign, flouting medical science, the Democrats bear equal responsibility for prematurely reopening businesses and demanding the reopening of schools in states they control, such as Rhode Island, Hawaii and Colorado.
Plans to reopen schools are left at the local level, with each of the country’s over 13,000 school districts choosing independently and without statewide or regional coordination whether to fully resume in-person instruction, remain fully online, or adopt a hybrid model where students attend in person part of the week.
Of the 15 largest school districts in the US, 10 have announced that they will at least begin their school years fully online, largely as a result of pressure from parents and educators resisting plans to resume in-person instruction.
In Orange County, Florida, the ninth-largest school district in the US, with over 212,000 students, parents must choose either fully in-person or fully online instruction. For working class parents, many of whom have just seen their federal unemployment benefits eliminated, this “choice” amounts to economic blackmail. They are being compelled to return to work and send their children to school, regardless of their justified concern over the potential for both themselves and their children becoming infected.
According to a University of Texas at Austin study, a school of 1,000 students in Orange County can expect to have 14 students or staff arrive at school infected.
The largest and third-largest districts in the country—New York City and Chicago, both of which are run by the Democratic Party—have announced that they plan to partially reopen schools under the hybrid model. This will affect a combined 1.5 million students and nearly 100,000 teachers.
Given the overcrowded and dilapidated classrooms that exist in these districts, such plans spell disaster for the working class in both cities. Similar plans are proposed by the Hawaii Department of Education, the 13th largest school district, where classes are scheduled to resume on August 17 for over 185,000 students.
The Socialist Equality Party and the WSWS Educators Newsletter have issued the call for educators, parents and students to form independent rank-and-file safety committees to unite across district and state lines and prepare for a nationwide strike to halt the drive to reopen the schools.
We propose that these committees fight for a vast expansion in public education funding, as states face combined budget shortfalls of at least $300 billion. They must establish deep connections with all sections of the working class, including autoworkers, who are forming their own rank-and-file safety committees across the Midwest.
This network of rank-and-file committees must be completely independent of the unions and both the Republican and Democratic parties. The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA) are subservient to the Democratic Party and have ruled out mobilizing their millions of members in a nationwide strike to oppose the reopening of the schools. Instead, they will work to isolate any struggles that break out, as they have with every teachers’ strike since 2018.
The ruling elites internationally, from Brazil to Germany, to Scotland and Australia, are demanding that the schools reopen under unsafe conditions because they are all seeking to force workers back onto the job in order to drive up corporate profits and make workers pay for the trillions being squandered to bail out the banks.
The response of educators, parents and students must therefore be international, fighting to link their struggles across borders in a global counteroffensive against the capitalist system.
The establishment of a network of independent rank-and-file committees in schools and neighborhoods will become a powerful means through which the working class can prosecute its struggle in defense of public health, public education, democratic rights and the social needs of the people in opposition to the limitless greed of the financial oligarchy. We urge all those who wish to form such committees and advance this struggle to contact us today.
The author also recommends:
Hundreds of thousands mobilize on social media to oppose US school reopenings
[31 July 2020]
As opposition mounts to reopening of schools, US teacher union opposes national strike
[30 July 2020]
Teachers face battle as Trump pushes school reopenings
[28 July 2020]
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