The July days of the COVID-19 pandemic wreak havoc on the US

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/03/pand-a03.html





By Benjamin Mateus
3 August 2020

The first confirmed case of a person infected with COVID-19 was traced back to November 17, 2019 (260 days ago), in a 55-year-old man from Hubei province in China. Since then, 18.1 million people have been infected globally, and more than 691,000 have perished.

It has been 195 days since the first person with COVID-19 was identified in the US, in Washington state. Since then, the US has become the epicenter of the global pandemic, with over 4.8 million cases and over 158,000 deaths, outpacing every other nation without a seeming end to the daily gruesome figures. Two million cases were recorded just in July. The previous high in April had seen close to 900,000 cases.

At the end of May, when the initiative to reopen the country’s economy was in full throttle, the nation had barely brought the pandemic under any semblance of control. The daily cases coming off the spring surge, when the seven-day moving average had reached a peak of 32,471, had barely seen a 30 percent decline when the Trump administration and states were clamoring to loosen restrictions and allow commerce to resume.
As predicted, the number of cases started to rise again in mid-June, especially in the Sun Belt states that were keen on opening up as soon as possible. The decline in fatality rates served to assure governors and state officials that the rise in cases was a byproduct of more testing as well as younger people becoming infected. Again, public health experts cautioned that fatality rates would begin climbing soon. But these concerns were dismissed by the media, touting the declines in death rates as assurance that young people were somehow impervious to the effects of the virus.

The physics of the pandemic has proven that such optimistic sentiments were misplaced. In the first week of July, the seven-day moving average of daily fatalities reached its lowest point, with 521, and began climbing steadily, having now reached a seven-day moving average of 1,129. The curve for new cases peaked nearly 10 days ago, reaching a seven-day moving average of over 68,000, and has been on a slow decline. There have been at least 27,585 people who have succumbed in July. By all accounts, it is expected that daily deaths will continue to increase over the next two to three weeks before reaching their peak.

Three states have surpassed New York with total cases—California (513,763), Florida (487,132) and Texas (449,736). Georgia, New Jersey, Illinois, Arizona, North Carolina, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Tennessee have all passed 100,000 cases. California has the distinction of third place in the number of deaths, with 9,370, behind New Jersey and New York. For July, this represents a 51.6 percent increase, just for fatalities. Texas, with 7,266 fatalities, saw a 155 percent increase in deaths. Florida, with 7,022 deaths, has seen a 97.6 percent increase.

Despite the downturn in new daily cases, previously staunch supporters of rapid reopening are now raising the alarm and acknowledging that the pandemic in the US is deeply entrenched in communities throughout the Midwest. Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the White House’s coronavirus coordinator, speaking on CNN, said, “What we are seeing today is different from March and April. It is extraordinarily widespread. It’s into the rural as equal to urban areas. To everybody who lives in a rural area, you are not immune or protected from this virus.”

COVID-19 daily cases seven-day average in the US




Dana Bash, CNN’s chief political correspondent, followed with the question, “People are panicked, people are worried, people don’t understand why this is seemingly completely out of control. Is it time to reset?” Dr. Birx, uneasy, barely managed to defend the administration’s response to the pandemic and essentially deflected the question.

On July 29, a coalition of health experts urged the federal government to step back from their push to reopen the economy and move to close nonessential businesses. A letter drafted by Matthew Wellington, public health campaigns director, US PIRG, and signed by more than 1,000 health professionals, reads, “Hit the Reset Button—of all the nations in the world, we’ve had the most deaths from COVID-19. At the same time, we’re in the midst of ‘reopening our economy,’ exposing more and more people to coronavirus and watching the number of cases, and deaths, skyrocket.”

Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security published a report over the weekend titled “Resetting Our Response: Changes Needed in the US Approach to COVID-19.” They, too, are advocating a shutdown of nonessential businesses, explicitly calling for the closure of high-risk activities and settings “in jurisdictions where the epidemic is worsening” and to “reinstitute stay-at-home orders where health care systems are in crisis.” Additionally, they are demanding bolstering supply chains for personal protective equipment (PPE) and testing equipment, as well as establishing a robust ramping up of contact tracing.

COVID-19 daily deaths seven-day average in the US




The US economy’s contraction in the second quarter of 2020 was the worst ever recorded. Gross domestic product fell nearly 10 percent, shrinking by $1.8 trillion. The only comparison to such a collapse in historical reference is to the Great Depression and the demobilization after World War II. Every week in July, the number of unemployment claims exceeded 1 million.

Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, told reports last week, “The path forward for the economy is extraordinarily uncertain and will depend in large part on our success in keeping the virus in check.” Neel Kashkari, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, has expressed concern over the toll the pandemic has taken and suggested a short-term lockdown to get control of the health crisis. The end of July saw US unemployment supplements expire for tens of millions of people. And still, like their response to the pandemic, Washington continues to bicker over the relief package.

The pandemic is shifting to new locations, rapidly moving into Midwest states like Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, Kansas and Nebraska, predominately due to summer travels. Government officials in some of these states are attempting to reimpose restrictions again, warning residents that a surge could overwhelm their limited hospital capacities. Yet a lack of a real coordinated effort and comprehensive strategy by the Trump administration has led to widespread social resentment and frustration.

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European economy collapses as EU bails out the super-rich

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/03/euro-a03.html





By Anthony Torres and Alex Lantier
3 August 2020

Eurostat economic figures for the second quarter of 2020 show that Europe saw its deepest and most sudden economic collapse in history.

Already before the COVID-19 pandemic, Europe was sinking into recession. In the fourth quarter of 2019, Germany was stagnant, while France (-0.1 percent) and Italy (-0.4 percent) were falling. The collapse in business confidence due to the pandemic and the effects of lock-down measures have now triggered an unprecedented economic disintegration.

Workers, the self-employed and small businesses are seeing a historic collapse in living standards. Eurostat indicated on July 31 that the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) fell by 12.1 percent in the euro zone and 11.9 percent in the European Union (EU). In the first quarter, the contraction was 3.6 percent and 3.2 percent, respectively. In Germany, Europe’s leading economic power, GDP fell by 10.1 percent; the contraction from April to July was 10.7 percent in Austria and 12.2 percent in Belgium.

Italy, which was severely hit by the pandemic, saw its economy fall 12.4 percent. Jack Allen-Reynolds of Capital Economics said: “Italian GDP has in fact fallen to its level from the beginning of the 1990s.” Elsewhere, the collapse was even steeper. France, Portugal and Spain saw falls of 13.8, 14.1 and 18.5 percent, respectively. According to currently available projections, the British economy likely contracted approximately 15 percent in the second quarter.

If European economic activity remains at similar levels for the rest of 2020, Europe will see an economic crash more severe than any year in the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Leading European corporations have suffered record losses in virtually every branch of industry and are now dependent on multi-billion-euro, state-funded bailouts. Among Europe’s major automakers, Volkswagen reported having lost €1.4 billion as its revenues collapsed by 23 percent, while the Renault-Nissan alliance suffered a devastating €7.3 billion loss. European aerospace firm Airbus saw a net loss of €1.9 billion.

Major European oil firms were devastated by the collapse of oil prices driven by the halt in travel and industrial activity during the lock-downs. Total and Royal Dutch Shell reported net losses of €7 billion and $18.1 billion, respectively. The net profits of French luxury conglomerate Hermès collapsed by 55 percent in the first half of the year.

Major airlines also face disaster. Air France-KLM published its profit report on Thursday, reporting an 83 percent collapse in its overall revenues. Lufthansa, for its part, had already reported a €2.1 billion loss in the first trimester. IAG Group, which owns British Airways, as well as Aer Lingus and Iberia, reported a net loss of €4.2 billion in the first half of the year.

Millions of workers have no longer been employed during the pandemic, and companies relied massively on state funding to pay their part-time wages. As of last month, 9.3 million workers depended on such programs in Britain, 4.5 million in France (down from 8.8 million in April), 6.9 million in Germany, and 3.7 million in Spain. Italy, for its part, spent approximately €5 billion monthly on such part-time work arrangements.

An explosive class confrontation is brewing between the working class and the financial aristocracy in Europe and internationally. Having advocated a politically criminal policy of “herd immunity” on COVID-19, calling to end lock-downs and let workers catch the deadly virus to try to acquire immunity, the ruling elite is now proceeding with as much contempt for workers’ jobs as for their health and lives. While grabbing trillions of euros in public funds for the banks and corporations, they are moving to slash wages and jobs.

While the European Central Bank (ECB) has agreed to a €1.25 trillion bailout of European banks, the EU has agreed to a €750 billion bailout package for European states and corporations. These vast sums of public money are being plunged into stocks and the financial markets to bail out the super-rich. However, state authorities and the trade union bureaucracies are not demanding that billionaire investors and major corporations that receive these massive sums in state aid give any guarantees that they will not sack workers or cut their pay.

Instead, dozens of bailed-out corporations are announcing mass layoffs, while governments across Europe and worldwide move to slash social spending and living standards. Already in Britain, plans have gone into effect to cut furlough programs by October, and payments in Spain are to be cut from 70 to 35 percent of workers’ wages by the fall. Yesterday, the IG Metall union announced that it expected 300,000 metalworking jobs to be destroyed in Germany.

This social onslaught is proceeding with the complicity of the European trade unions, which are actively helping to design these policies with state officials and corporate management. The German and French unions, in fact, signed a joint statement hailing the EU bailout designed by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron.

The ruling elite is pursuing the most parasitic, selfish and reckless policy since the French feudal aristocracy refused to pay any taxes to resolve the fiscal crisis before the 1789 revolution.

What is being prepared is a new, international eruption of the class struggle outside the corrupt framework of the unions. The most explosive situation is emerging in America, where support payments for workers are being suspended this month, threatening tens of millions with hunger and eviction. In Europe, the EU Commission has estimated that unemployment will reach 9.5 percent in the euro zone, with southern European countries the hardest hit. They foresee unemployment rising to over 20 percent in Greece and Spain, 11.8 percent in Italy, and 10.1 percent in France.

These horrific figures mean the loss of millions of jobs and the bankruptcy of thousands of small businesses, in order to bail out a corrupt financial elite that is plundering massive amounts of public money. It must be added, however, that these estimates are likely over-optimistic. They depend on employers agreeing to rehire tens of millions of workers currently paid by the state, due to a quick recovery in economic output.

Thus, ING economist Bert Colijn told Le Monde: “This recession is like no other. We have never seen such figures, such a dizzying collapse linked to the pandemic and the lock-down, which will be followed inevitably by a rapid upswing which we will see in the statistics for the third quarter.”

Such a scenario seems increasingly unlikely in the longer term, however. The ending of lock-downs has led to a collapse of social distancing measures and now a rapid resurgence of the virus across Europe. The number of daily new cases has risen to 1,000 in France and soon in Germany, over 600 in Belgium, and 3,000 in Spain. Thus, since late June, when the daily number of new cases was at its lowest, just after the lock-down, this number has gone up by a factor of two in France and Germany, seven in Belgium, and 10 in Spain.

While EU states insist they will not impose further lock-downs or only impose regional lock-downs, a policy that in fact accelerates the spread of the disease, their dithering may ultimately leave them no choice but to take drastic measures if the virus explodes out of control. Given the failure of EU governments to implement proper testing and tracing facilities and boost health care spending, such a scenario—entailing a new, drastic contraction in economic activity—is a growing possibility.

Already, the Spanish government re-imposed a “voluntary” lock-down in Barcelona, affecting over 4 million people in an economically vital region of Spain.

Workers cannot stop the plundering of society by the financial aristocracy through nationally-oriented protests organized by the trade unions, which are at the same time negotiating austerity with EU banks and governments. As the pandemic exposes the bankruptcy of the capitalist system, it is essential for workers across Europe to take up a political struggle for state power against the EU. Their best allies are workers around the world fighting against austerity and reactionary back-to-work orders.

The trillions of euros spent to bail out the wealthy must go to fighting COVID-19, safeguarding the salaries of workers and the self-employed, while major corporations relying on public bailout funds are nationalized across Europe and beyond, to be run under workers control as public utilities. This is essential to ensure the health and safety of workers despite the horrific impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting blow to the economy.

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International Olympic Committee promotes Olympics with Nazi propaganda

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/03/rief-a03.html





By Stefan Steinberg
3 August 2020

On July 23, the public relations department of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) posted a video on its Twitter Olympics channel featuring clips from the propaganda film Olympia, made by Leni Riefenstahl for the 1936 Olympic games held in Germany three years after the takeover of power by Hitler and the Nazis.

The Nazi dictatorship had already commenced with its vicious persecution of leftists and Jews and the Games in Berlin provided an ideal opportunity for the regime to win support from an international audience. The significance of the 1936 Games and the role played by film director Leni Riefenstahl in promoting National Socialist ideology are dealt with in the article “Leni Riefenstahl—propagandist for the Third Reich.”

The IOC video, with the hashtag #Strongertogether, showed the cheering crowd at the 1936 Games, the entry of teams into the arena and the traditional torch relay which commences the games. The text accompanying the video read: “Berlin experienced the first torch relay before the Olympic flame was lit. We can’t wait for the next one.”

The IOC initially defended its publication of the video but following a storm of critical tweets was forced to take it down a day later. A tweet from the Auschwitz Museum read: “For two weeks the Nazi dictatorship hid its racist, militaristic character. It exploited the games to impress viewers with the portrait of a peaceful, tolerant Germany. Later, Germany accelerated its expansionism and its persecution of Jews and other ‘enemies of the state’.”

Another tweet read: “This shows a total lack of respect for all those German Jews oppressed at that time!” The Games took place just one year after the regime had passed its anti-Semitic and racist Nuremberg laws.

Another tweet criticised the use of the film sequences. “It is always controversial to use footage from a Nazi propaganda film (Riefenstahl’s ‘Olympia’) to express #Strongertogether. How many Jewish athletes were allowed to start for Germany at the time?”

The inclusion of clips from Riefenstahl’s two-part Olympia film makes clear that attempts to revise German history and sanitise the crimes of the Nazis is not limited to the spheres of politics and academia. It is also taking place within the world of sport. This development, however, does not come out of the blue.

A closer look at the history of the IOC reveals that for long periods of time leading positions within the organisation were occupied by former Nazis or sympathisers of the Nazi regime.

Following World War II, a number of top Nazi sports functionaries were able to return to leading positions in West Germany’s sports administration. Three of the most prominent ones were Carl Diem, Guido von Mengden and Karl Ritter von Halt. All three men occupied positions of power within the Nazi sports administration.

Carl Diem was the secretary general of the organising committee for the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games and collaborated with Riefenstahl in presenting the Games as a propaganda coup for the Nazis. After the war, Diem was appointed a member of Germany’s National Olympic Committee and made a consultant to the German interior minister.

Under the Hitler regime, Guido von Mengden was a member of the German Olympic Committee and editor of the National Socialist sports magazine, which was sent to every soldier at the front. After WWII, von Mengden took over as secretary general of the German sports federation and played a leading role in promoting the 1972 Olympics in Munich.

Karl Ritter von Halt joined the NSDAP (Nazi Party) in 1932 and rapidly advanced his career in sport to become the president of the German Track and Field Association. After the war he was held in custody by the Soviets and declared to be a war criminal. Nevertheless, he was able to return to the IOC and became president of the German Olympic Committee and honorary president of the German Field and Track Association.

Leading politicians also played a role in this process. The IOC was only able to show clips from Riefenstahl’s film because it had acquired rights to the film from the social democratic chancellor of Germany, Gerhard Schröder. Schröder secretly sold off the partly state-owned film to the IOC in 2002 as part of his government’s bid to host the Olympic Games in Leipzig.

The transition of prominent supporters of National Socialism to leading posts in sporting organisations after WWII was not limited to Germany. One of the most passionate defenders of Germany’s right to hold the games in 1936 was the American sports official Avery Brundage.

Brundage fiercely opposed efforts to boycott the Berlin Games and was elected to the IOC that year. In October 1936 he gave a speech to the German-American Bund at Madison Square Garden and declared: “Five years ago they [Germans] were discouraged and demoralised—today they are united—sixty million people believing in themselves and in their country.”

The millionaire construction mogul was a leading member of the right-wing America First organisation and was elected president of the IOC in 1952, serving in that role until 1972, when the summer Olympics was once again held in Germany.

Since the departure of Brundage, the IOC, located in the city of Lausanne in the allegedly politically “neutral” country of Switzerland, has remained a hotbed of right-wing extremism. From 1980 to 2001 the organisation was headed by Juan Antonio Samaranch, former sports minister in the fascist regime of General Francisco Franco in Spain.

For the first time since the war, the IOC is currently headed by a German, Thomas Bach, a member of the neo-liberal Free Democratic Party. Bach, who against all IOC rules holds a German diplomatic passport, has been at the centre of a series of corruption scandals since taking over as president in 2013. As IOC president, Bach is ultimately responsible for using the Riefenstahl video.

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White House engineering a takeover of TikTok by Microsoft

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/03/tikt-a03.html





By Kevin Reed
3 August 2020

In a state-sponsored hostile takeover, Microsoft Corporation announced late Sunday that it was moving forward with plans to acquire the mobile app TikTok from the China-based corporation ByteDance following a discussion with President Donald Trump.

In a blog post, Microsoft said its CEO Satya Nadella spoke with the president and “is committed to acquiring TikTok subject to a complete security review and providing proper economic benefits to the United States, including the United States Treasury.” The post said the acquisition would be completed “no later than September 15, 2020.”

The takeover would involve the absorption by Microsoft of the operations of the social media video sharing platform in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. According to Microsoft, the TikTok acquisition will be conducted with an unprecedent level of White House involvement. The statement says, “During this process, Microsoft looks forward to continuing dialogue with the United States Government, including with the President.”

Additionally, Microsoft is indicating that the new owners of the extremely popular app will operate TikTok under the direct supervision of the state security institutions within the countries where it will operate. “The operating model for the service would be built to ensure transparency to users as well as appropriate security oversight by governments in these countries.”

The Microsoft announcement comes as no surprise, following the appearance of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on the Fox News “Sunday Morning Futures” earlier in the day. Pompeo said that President Donald Trump “will take action in the coming days” on mobile apps, including TikTok, as part of a growing White House offensive against China.

Although he stopped short of saying precisely what the president was going to do, Pompeo claimed without any evidence that “Chinese software companies doing business with the United States, whether it’s TikTok or WeChat” are feeding data directly to the “national security apparatus” in China.

In a statement clearly designed to whip up anti-Chinese sentiments, Pompeo added that Americans using TikTok were having their facial profiles and “information about their residence, their phone numbers, their friends, who they’re connected to” scraped by the Chinese government. He went on to say that these are “true privacy issues for the American people” and that “President Trump has said, ‘Enough,’ and we are going to fix it.”

Pompeo concluded, “I promise you, the President when he makes this decision will make sure that everything we have done drives this as close to zero risk for the American people.”

The short-form video sharing platform has approximately 80 million users in the US, 800 million worldwide and has been downloaded 2.2 billion times. ByteDance has said that its servers are located in the US and Singapore, and tech experts have pointed out that TikTok gathers user data in a manner similar to other popular social media apps.

That Pompeo is making hysterical and unsubstantiated statements is a demonstration of the desperate nature of the aggressive moves by the Trump White House against China. The administration is attempting to deflect the mass opposition to Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic and the authoritarian police measures against protesters across the country in the intensifying anti-China campaign in order to prop up his collapsing reelection prospects.

Meanwhile, it is well-known internationally—primarily due to the exposures by the former national security contractor Edward Snowden in 2013—that the US National Security Agency (NSA) is the number one electronic surveillance operation in the world, gathering data on every single person on earth and storing it in massive server farms such as the Utah Data Center.

On Friday, Trump told reporters that he was going to act soon to ban TikTok. Speaking with reporters on board Air Force One on a flight back to Washington from Florida, he said, “As far as TikTok is concerned, we’re banning them from the United States.” He then called the ban a “severance” and said he had the authority to make the decision. “I can do it with an executive order.”

However, news of Microsoft’s involvement in a forced divestiture of TikTok by ByteDance emerged before the weekend as it was revealed that the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US (CFIUS) was involved. According to a report in the Wall Street Journal , CFIUS began its investigation into TikTok last year following concerns raised in Congress. “The Treasury-led foreign-investment committee is made up of federal agencies and reviews deals involving foreign money to ensure they don’t put the country’s national security at risk.”

No doubt a major consideration in the negotiations over TikTok is the fact that the company has recently valued at $150 billion with major investments from US equity firms Coatue Management and Sequoia Capital. Along with the huge US user base, the entanglement of the American financial elite with TikTok make an outright ban a double-edged sword for President Trump and, in the end, it appears that it will be much better to just steal the company from ByteDance under the auspices of national security concerns.

An article in Forbes by Peter Cohen indicates the thinking among American business pirates. “If that deal goes through for the roughly $5 billion, I estimate TikTok’s US operations are worth, you should buy Microsoft shares. ... the triple digit acceleration of TikTok’s user base could add oomph to Microsoft’s top line,” Cohen wrote on Saturday.

The role of the Democrats in the US seizure of TikTok exposes the fact that they have no fundamental differences with the Trump White House. Stephen Mnuchin, who heads CFIUS and has been leading the negotiations with Microsoft and the TikTok investors over the takeover, said on “ABC News” on Sunday that the view that “there has to be a change” is shared by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Democrat of California) and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (Democrat of New York).

Schumer began ringing alarm bells about TikTok last November in a letter to Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy over the US military’s use of TikTok to recruit young people. Schumer wrote, “I urge you to assess the potential national security risks posed by China-owned technology companies before choosing to utilize certain platforms.”

Schumer’s campaign was echoed by Senator Marco Rubio (Republican of Florida), who took the issue to CFIUS, and Senator Josh Hawley (Republican of Missouri), who held a hearing on TikTok’s relationship with the Chinese government.

In this particular instance, it is apparent that Pompeo and Trump have now borrowed a few lines from Schumer, who wrote another letter to Transportation Safety Administration Director David Pekoske in February that said, “National security experts have raised concerns about TikTok’s collection and handling of user data, including user content and communications, IP addresses, location-related data, metadata, and other sensitive personal information.” Schumer added, “particularly when viewed in light of laws that compel Chinese companies to support and cooperate with intelligence work controlled by the Chinese Communist Party.”