“They spout in the news ‘thank you to health care heroes’ but what thanks do we get?”

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/11/nurs-a11.html

US nurses’ poll shows appalling working conditions in the pandemic

By Julian James
11 August 2020

Results from a survey on workplace safety recently conducted by the National Nurses United (NNU) have shed light on the myriad dangers US nurses face on the frontlines of the COVID-19 pandemic. These appalling conditions are a result of chronic unpreparedness and the reckless actions of hospital administrators. The results were posted on the NNU website and include the following:
Only 24 percent of nurses think their employer is providing a safe workplace.
87 percent of nurses who work at hospitals reported reusing at least one piece of single-use PPE. Reusing single-use PPE is a dangerous practice that can increase exposures to nurses, other staff and to patients.
4 percent of nurses who work at hospitals say their employer has implemented a decontamination program to “clean” single-use PPE, such as N95 respirators, between uses. Decontamination of single-use PPE has not been proven to be safe nor effective.
Just 23 percent of nurses reported they have been tested for COVID-19. A lack of testing jeopardizes nurses’ health and safety and their ability to protect their patients and families.
36 percent of nurses who work at hospitals are afraid of catching COVID-19 and 43 percent are afraid of infecting a family member.
27 percent of nurses who work at hospitals reported that staffing has gotten much worse recently. Short staffing is unsafe for patients and nurses. The likelihood of patient death increases by 7 percent for every additional patient in the average nurse’s workload in the hospital.

These results, together with the testimony of thousands of workers, paint a picture of a health care system that is incapable of taking basic measures to protect its workers. In private Facebook groups, interviews and through polling, nurses across the country are testifying to the dire workplace conditions and scarcity of essential tools needed for fighting the pandemic, especially virus tests and personal protective equipment (PPE).

This shocking level of unpreparedness was evident in the early stages of the pandemic—when trucks full of bodies idled on the streets of New York and protesting nurses were forced to wear garbage bags instead of medical gowns—has continued into mid-August, five months after the Trump administration declared a national emergency.

Asked to comment on the recent poll results, two nurses who both work at small hospitals in Western Massachusetts related their own experiences, on the condition their names be changed to protect their identity. Their statements overwhelmingly confirm the NNU findings.

Speaking on PPE and testing, Maya, a nurse in her 30s with 15 years of experience, said:

“At the beginning of the pandemic, some staff had to wear trash bags as gowns and staple used masks together because they were falling apart. Now the hospital is “re-sterilizing” masks, not an approved thing at all.

“Before, you took off your mask as soon as you left the patient’s bedside, and if you needed to go back in you would put on another mask. Now suddenly it’s fine to reuse the same one for a whole week. People got sick from the ‘re-sterilized’ masks, didn’t feel well, had syncopal [fainting] episodes and were passing out. Massachusetts Nursing Association (MNA), our s*** union who claims to be all powerful, fought it so now it’s not ‘forced,’ but we’re still bullied into using them by management.

“As for testing, we attest to no symptoms every day, but there is no actual testing being done. And if we travel outside Massachusetts, we don’t fall under the same quarantine rules as others. They just want a hot body. They say as long as we’re symptom-free we are fine to work.”

Asked to expand on her opinion of the MNA, Maya said,

“They’ve been ineffective since I got there. The local people try but don’t get the backing of higher-ups in the union. So yeah, they’ve been horrible, and we pay over a grand a year in dues.

David, another nurse in his 30s working at a semi-rural hospital in Western Massachusetts, spoke about how conditions deteriorated at outset of the pandemic:

“We didn’t have access to rapid testing because it initially wasn’t available anywhere. The hospital wouldn’t transfer patients from the Emergency Department (ED) to other units until results came back, except for ICU cases and those needing to be moved to another facility. So, patients were backing up in the ED, which used to back up sometimes before the pandemic if there were no beds available, but this was happening on a totally new scale.

“We still don’t have rapid testing, although the turnaround time has recently improved a lot (6-8 hours now). So there has been an uptick in falls and other predictable bad outcomes because of the buildup of patients. And the hospital’s answer is always more paperwork, which we don’t have time to fill out because we are already scrambling to care for patients. This proliferation of paperwork was already endemic but continues to increase.”

David went on to speculate that requirements for ever greater documentation are likely an attempt by the hospital to reduce its liabilities for the increased dangers patients face in a short-staffed ED. In this case, workers who were unable to document their every step could be more easily scapegoated when something goes wrong, even if the failure were due to critical short-staffing.

The dangers of low nurse-to-patient ratios are well documented as mentioned on the survey results sheet released by the NNU, which stated: “The likelihood of patient death increases by 7 percent for every additional patient in the average nurse’s workload in the hospital.” Along with layoffs and wage freezes, maintaining woefully inadequate nurse-to-patient ratios is one of the main ways that hospitals, for-profit and “non-profit” alike, seek to boost their bottom line.

Perhaps most essential to hospital balance sheets are the so-called “elective procedures,” a category defined as any procedure that can be scheduled beforehand. In reality, these procedures are often critical, and cover a broad range of treatments, from hip-replacements to surgical removal of cancer cells. In normal times, these operations account for a huge share of the tens-of-billions of dollars in combined profits of hospitals in the US.

Revenues resulting from the treatment of COVID-19 patients pale in comparison. As a Reuters article from March pointed out, “Hospitals administrators say high-margin services, such as orthopedic and heart procedures, can account for up to 80 percent of revenue, while infectious disease and intensive respiratory treatments are less profitable.”

The connection between the COVID-19 pandemic, falling profits and deteriorating working conditions/job losses is something that health care workers on the front lines are acutely aware of. As Maya stated:

“Hospitals across the country are drowning in debt right now. They only make money from certain departments, and those were all shut down at the beginning of the pandemic. So now we get the cuts and the layoffs. My wages and retirement benefits are frozen for the foreseeable future, and despite all the wage and benefit freezing they did a $6 million rebranding. So, all they care about now is elective procedures and I guarantee there will be forced overtime once they get the okay to continue.”

Maya also provided a damning account of the reckless decision-making of hospital administrators, their hostility toward workers and how these factors are helping fuel the skyrocketing rates of depression, anxiety and nervous breakdowns being experienced by hospital staff throughout the US.

“When changes are made,” she said, “admin doesn’t tell staff and then acts confused as to why none of us are following the rules. At one point, we were pulled from our jobs and redeployed to critical care units after just one four-hour class and one day to shadow. No warning. Never asked if we were okay with it. It was just, ‘If you want your job, you’ll do what we say when we say it.’

“And they laughed in our faces when we asked about hazard pay. We are being treated like pawns and our lives very clearly matter to no one. They spout in the news ‘thank you to health care heroes’ but what thanks do we get? We are all at the max of our emotional and psychological wellbeing and most of us are also on psych meds and/or on leave because of this.”

This is the state of affairs under capitalism, a system in which the lives of health care workers, like other members of the working class, are only valued to the degree they can be made to produce profits for stockholders and executives.



The author also recommends:

An Illinois nurse speaks out against corporate control of health care systems
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Nurse fired by Detroit Sinai-Grace Hospital for refusing to work in unsafe conditions
[12 May 2020]

The coronavirus pandemic and the growing mental health crisis
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Huge fire breaks out at Birmingham plastics factory

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmHTQ5xKc80

Deadly explosion in northwest Baltimore neighborhood injures dozens

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/11/balt-a11.html

By Nick Barrickman
11 August 2020

A massive blast in northwest Baltimore leveled row homes Monday morning in a residential area in what is a suspected gas explosion. The impact of the blast, which struck just before 10 a.m. local time, leveled three adjacent homes and severely damaged a fourth. An unnamed woman was pronounced dead and at least six others have been severely injured and are undergoing treatment in area hospitals.

The regional gas and electrical authority has ordered energy sources shut off to contain any further damage. Firefighters and first responders have been forced to sift through debris for survivors and belongings without the aid of heavy machinery.

“It was catastrophic. It was like a bomb, like you watch things in other countries where they have bombings and things like that. It was like watching that in real life,” stated local resident Dean Jones to reporters. “Telephone poles split, I mean, houses down the block, broken glass. When I initially got there, I could hear a voice just saying ‘Help,’ it’s crazy. It’s something I don’t ever wanna see ever again; I don’t want to relive it ever again.”

Multiple news sources reported young children and the elderly buried beneath rubble and debris. “I didn’t think, someone’s in there,” Jones said. “So we went and we just started digging. We started calling out, ‘Is anybody in here? If you’re in here, can you say something so we know that you’re here. Once they said it was a kid in there, I lost it. I got to get in here now. I just felt like, hey, what if it was me? I’m not a hero, I’m a human.”

Kevin Matthews, a neighborhood resident and building inspector for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), reported being knocked across his bedroom by the blast. Upon arriving at the scene, Matthews told the Baltimore Sun that he heard “shouting from children trapped: ‘Come get us! We’re stuck!’”

Area residents have provided an outpouring of support to the victims of the explosion. Caravans of goods, including bottled water to help with overheating in the early August sun, have been donated and stockpiled at the nearby shopping center. Counselors are at the scene to provide assistance for emotional trauma and area officials are looking into securing overnight housing for those who have lost their homes.

Officials for Baltimore Gas and Electric (BGE) have remained mute about the potential cause of the blast. A public statement released on Monday said that the source of the explosion was “currently unknown” and that gas and electricity for the neighborhood had been turned off. Once search and rescue efforts have been concluded, the corporation would work with the local fire department in order to determine the source of the explosion. “Customer-owned appliances and piping will also be investigated,” it said.

With air conditioning cut off alongside electricity, many residents have been reported wandering outside in the neighborhood.

BGE, the oldest utility company in the United States, supplies natural gas to the 680,000-person metropolitan Baltimore area as well as its outlying counties comprising nearly 1 million homes. It is a subsidiary of the Exelon Corporation, a top-grossing energy conglomerate that makes nearly $3 billion a year in profits. While the ultimate cause of the blast is still unclear, the gas piping system in Baltimore, as with other major industrial cities, is exceedingly outmoded and crisis-prone.

According to testimony taken earlier this year before the Maryland Public Service Commission and reported by the trade publication Engineering News-Record, “a BGE executive estimated that one-third of the utility’s gas distribution mains, one-quarter of its gas services and half of its transmission mains are more than 50 years old, with 15 percent of its gas distribution system made of ‘outmoded’ materials.”

Gas leaks have crept up in recent times, with the Sun reporting in 2019 that the number of gas leaks BGE reported grew from 5,500 in 2009 to a peak of 9,600 reported leaks in 2016. In 2017 and 2018 reported gas leaks were at more than 8,000. In 2013, the company introduced a pipeline improvement program which is geared to remove and replace old piping.

Commenting on this program, the Sun wrote, “In the Baltimore area, BGE needs to replace thousands of miles of obsolete pipes that already could be leaking. Though hundreds of workers are assigned to the task, at the rate BGE is going, the work will take at least two decades.”

Utilities currently charge individual customers cents on the dollar monthly to raise funds for new pipelines. BGE was able to spend $139 million on upgrades in 2018 through this method, a small fraction of its profits.

How the Pandemic Defeated America: Ed Yong on How COVID-19 Humiliated Planet’s Most Powerful Nation

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XW5yXwpLdZ8

The brutality of capitalist justice

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/11/loui-a11.html

Louisiana Supreme Court denies review of Fair Wayne Bryant’s life sentence for allegedly stealing a pair of hedge clippers

By Helen Halyard
11 August 2020

Fair Wayne Bryant, now 60 years old, has spent the last 23 years at Angola State Penitentiary in Louisiana on one count of attempted simple burglary. This penitentiary is one of the largest, and most notoriously brutal, state institutions in the US.

In 2018, Bryant’s attorney Peggy Sullivan appealed his sentence before the Second Circuit Court of Louisiana, stating that her client “contends that his life sentence is unconstitutionally harsh and excessive.”

The state appellate court, after a hearing held in November 2019, maintained that the sentence was in accordance with the habitual offender law and no longer subject to review. That decision was then appealed to the seven-member Louisiana Supreme Court.

On August 5, with one dissenting vote, the other 6 Supreme Court justices declined to review the appeal upholding the decision of the State Appellate court that Bryant remain in jail for the rest of his life.

Bryant’s crime was attempting to steal a pair of hedge clippers.

Although Louisiana’s State Supreme Court refused to hear the case, Bryant will have one more chance at possible parole. An earlier ruling by the lower appeals court in 2018 stated that Bryant had been illegally denied parole eligibility. Bryant filed an appeal on July 21 and the Louisiana Committee on Parole will decide whether or not to hold a hearing. Even then, the final decision would be made by the board.

Upon reading about this case, one is reminded of Victor Hugo’s classic novel Les Misérables, which tells the story of Jean Valjean, a French peasant sentenced to 19 years in jail for having stolen a loaf of bread. But as Bryant was sentenced not to 19 years but to life in prison, here America compares unfavorably even to Hugo’s depiction of France under the Bourbon Restoration, when the French monarchy was re-established after the defeat of Napoleon.

This grueling and horrific experience for one count of alleged petty theft demonstrates the true face of justice in capitalist America. One finds one set of rules for the poor and oppressed and another set of rules for those who control the wealth and run the political and state institutions, including the police and courts and their representatives in the Democratic and Republican parties.

Less than two weeks before Bryant lost his appeal, the grotesquely misnamed “SAFE TO WORK” Act was introduced into Congress, which provide companies with legal immunity if their workers become seriously ill or die from the coronavirus after becoming infected at work.

Louisiana has the highest incarceration rate in the United States. According to a recent report from the ACLU, 1 out of every 86 residents in the state is in prison. A disproportionate number of inmates are black or another minority. The state’s prisoners suffer brutal treatment. The Angola Three, Herman Wallace, Albert Woodfox and Robert Hillary King, each spent 40 years in solitary confinement at Angola, the longest ever such period in prison history.

In her dissenting statement, Chief Justice Bernette Johnson wrote: “The sentence imposed is excessive and disproportionate to the offense the defendant committed. Mr. Bryant was sentenced, as a habitual offender, to life in prison for unsuccessfully attempting to make off with somebody else’s hedge clippers.” Johnson noted. In her dissent, she went on to review the conditions that this prisoner and thousands of others face in a state suffering from one of the highest poverty rates in the country.

“Mr. Bryant’s sentence is sanctioned under the habitual offender law because of his four prior convictions. His first conviction was attempted armed robbery in 1979, for which he was sentenced to 10 years at hard labor. He has had no more violent convictions. He was subsequently convicted of possession of stolen things in 1987; attempted forgery of a check worth $150 in 1989; and simple burglary of an inhabited dwelling on 19 March 1992. Each of these crimes was an effort to steal something. Such petty theft is frequently driven by the ravages of poverty or addiction, and often both.”

The Bryant case is the product of decades of bipartisan “law-and-order” campaigns. It was Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden who authored and promoted the “tough on crime” legislation passed 25 years ago, which was signed into law by then President Bill Clinton. This law was the one of the key factors in the explosion of mass incarceration beginning in the period of the 1990s. The bill led to longer prison sentences, a growth of the number of prison cells and a more aggressive policy of policing. Approximately 1,000 people are killed each year by US police.

Laws enacted in the state of Louisiana followed those of the federal government, including the habitual offender statute, which condemned thousands of young people to life imprisonment for minor offenses at one of the harshest prison facilities in the US.

In addition, large numbers of the country’s prison population are innocent. To date over 375 people have been exonerated through the Innocence Project based on DNA evidence and legal appeals.

On April 29, 2016, political prisoner Gary Tyler was freed at the age of 57 years old after spending his entire adult life at Angola for a crime he never committed. He was framed up at the age of 16 for the shooting death of Timothy Weber, a 13-year-old white student. The killing occurred in a racially charged atmosphere whipped up by elements such as David Duke, then emerging as a leading figure in the Louisiana and national Ku Klux Klan.

The Workers League (forerunner of the Socialist Equality Party) played a major role in campaigning for Gary Tyler’s freedom and carried out a determined national and international struggle to mobilize the working class in his defense.

Turns Out Most Americans AREN'T Completely Insane, Thankfully

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDGQRuMRoQA

Peru reopens economy as thousands of miners contract COVID-19

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/11/peru-a11.html



By Mauricio Saavedra
11 August 2020

The Peruvian government has reintroduced curfews and extended a military-enforced state of emergency and quarantines to 14 of the country’s 25 regions until the end of August following a record number of coronavirus infections. The restrictions of movement, first decreed in March, have not been applied to the lucrative mining sector, which the pro-business government of President Martín Vizcarra agreed to gradually restart when it classified mining as an “essential industry” earlier in May.

With 478,024 coronavirus cases, Peru has the third most infections in Latin America, and with over 21,000 fatalities, it has the highest per capita death toll in the region. The Pan American Health Organization is investigating whether the country failed to count another 27,000 deaths caused by COVID-19, which would raise the death toll to almost 50,000. The Washington Post reported last week that thousands of death certificates listing COVID-19 as one of several causes of death were not included in the country’s official toll “because the victims did not undergo a coronavirus test before dying.”

Underlying this immense suffering and death are the decades of structural adjustment programs prized by finance capital. Initiated by authoritarian president Alberto Fujimori in 1990, the Peruvian masses have been at the receiving end of policies that have been geared to meet the requirements of financial and corporate interests—mass layoffs through privatizations of state-owned industries, the elimination of job security laws and wage indexation, the privatization of social security and pension systems and the elimination of subsidies for basic foodstuffs and consumables. The systematic gutting of health budgets over years has left a nation of 33 million with a total of 1,606 ICU beds in private and public hospitals, and 90 percent of those are in use.

While the consequences of these policies were partially masked due to rapid growth of foreign direct investment in the mining sector during the 2000s as Peru opened up its economy to super-exploitation, the coronavirus pandemic has laid bare their true social cost.

The vast majority of workers are in the informal sector. Millions live a precarious existence without job security, minimum wage protection or access to social security. Lima, the country’s capital of some 10 million, has concentrated the majority of coronavirus cases in its overcrowded and impoverished working-class districts.

In the more isolated regions, where the indigenous and peasant communities reside among immense mining operations run by transnational corporations, extreme social inequality means that there is a lack of access to proper medical facilities and assistance amid an exponential growth of coronavirus cases. Arequipa, the second-most-populated Peruvian city, with 1 million inhabitants, and the commercial and industrial hub of the southern Andes, had just seven cases in March. By the end of the first week of August, Arequipa, now under quarantine, recorded 18,190 infections and 869 deaths.

The WSWS reported that in the first 10 days of the outbreak in March the Andean regions where the large export mining operations are concentrated—including Huancavelica, Ayacucho, Apurímac, Puno, Moquegua and Tacna in the south and Cajamarca in the far north—had recorded not a single coronavirus case. Today, each of these regions has thousands of cases and many hundreds have died: Huancavelica 2,148 infections (41 deaths), Ayacucho 4,603 (81), Apurímac 1,206 (42), Puno 3,211 (98), Moquegua 4,244 (128), Tacna 3,918 (44), and Cajamarca 7,974 (239).

More than 3,000 of these coronavirus cases are among workers in the mining sector, although this figure is incomplete, as the last official recording of cases in the mining industry was from the beginning of July. The Ministry of Energy and Mines has sought to downplay this by stating that the reported infections represent only 2 percent of all workers who have currently returned to operations, but it has sparked fury among mineworkers and local populations:
More than 300 workers at Pan American Silver’s La Arena mine in the region of La Libertad downed tools to protest the growing number of COVID-19 cases at the mine and a lack of testing. Workers fear they could transmit the disease to their families when they go on break, according to a statement from the FNTMMSP, the national mining and metallurgical workers union.
The population of Tambo Valley initiated protests opposing the reactivation of Southern Copper’s Tia Maria copper project, in the southern region of Arequipa for fear of further infections and concerns over toxic waste contamination.
Social organizations and peasant communities denounced an “excessive presence” of trucks transporting minerals for Las Bambas mining company, in the region of Apurimac that exposed workers and communities to COVID-19.

Earlier in the year, the government responded to the economic crisis triggered by the coronavirus pandemic by implementing “Reactiva Peru,” a program worth some 60 billion soles (US$16.9 billion)—an amount equal to 11 percent of GDP. Its main purpose was to prevent a collapse in private credit through establishing a loan guarantee fund for business. Paltry handouts from these large sums were promised to the poorest, as more than one third of the workforce lost their jobs due to the pandemic.

In a spiraling economic and political crisis, President Vizcarra was forced for the second time in less than a month to reshuffle his cabinet after a vote of no confidence by the opposition-controlled Congress last week. Vizcarra replaced pro-mining Prime Minister Pedro Cateriano with retired Gen. Walter Martos, who made clear that his priority will be a continuation of the agenda of reopening the economy under conditions in which Peru’s central bank forecasts a 12.5 percent drop in the gross domestic product this year.

“The economy has to be revived gradually. We have to be very careful, but I think that returning to a total quarantine, at this time, would be very complicated,” Martos told TV Peru.

The Peruvian government, like its counterparts in other Latin American countries heavily tied to extractive industry exports, has sought to keep the mines operational. In March, while the giant domestic and international businesses that exploit Peru were obliged to reduce their workforces, they did not stop functioning. By July, as Vizcarra sought to reopen the economy despite the spike in cases, the Energy and Mines Ministry reported that mining was 90 percent operational.

Mining is the dominant sector of the Peruvian economy. Hundreds of billions of dollars of direct investment have flowed into mining exploration and exploitation over the past 20 years, and another US$58 billion were to be directly invested for FYI 2020-2021 before the pandemic stalled exploration activities. The government has earmarked another 30 billion soles (US$8.4 billion) to reactivate the mining industry.

Peru is among the world’s major producers of mineral commodities, which account for more than 60 percent of the country’s exports and 10 percent of its GDP. Copper and gold are the most important mineral exports by value, but there are also enormous reserves of silver, zinc, lead and tin. The mining sector, directly and indirectly, employs an estimated 1.5 million workers.

China is the largest foreign investor in Peru’s mining projects, but US, Canadian, Australian and British imperialism assert immense influence through the consortiums that control multibillion-dollar mining operations and projects. The most significant global players, including Anglo-American, Rio Tinto, BHP Billiton, Glencore, Freeport-McMoRan, MMG, Newmont, Pan American Silver, Barrick, Gold Fields, Southern Copper, Doe Run Peru, Consorcio Minero Horizonte, and ZINSA, enjoy some of the world’s most lax corporate laws.

Peruvian laws and regulations do not discriminate between national and foreign companies. There are no restrictions on repatriation of earnings, international transfers of capital, or currency exchange practices. The remittance of dividends, interests and royalties has no restrictions. Under a revised fiscal system, mining companies now pay royalties based on their operating profits rather than on sales.

“The fiscal changes introduced were largely supported by mining companies and according to industry analysts they have not adversely affected investment decisions or the degree of Peru’s mining sector competitiveness compared to other countries,” reports a website dedicated to providing investment intelligence for the mining sector.

Such is the dependency that, in the middle of this health and social catastrophe, Vizcarra has sought to facilitate further exploitation of the nation’s untapped riches by modifying regulations for mining activities, dispensing with even a modicum of ecological protection and allowing the consortiums to ride roughshod over the needs of the populations.

Pro-business Gestión reported that an amendment to the Environmental Protection Regulations for Mining Exploration seeks to provide “predictability” in decision-making, reduce transaction costs for mining licensees and help increase investment in the sector. In other words, any exploration project will go ahead with little state interference.

Driving this insatiable and criminal reopening of the economy is the 20.4 percent plunge in copper production in the first half of 2020 compared to the same period in 2019. Gold production fell 34.7 percent and zinc 23.7 percent. Lost profits need to be recouped, no matter the consequences. This is especially pressing today as the price of gold has reached a historic high and copper surpassed US$6,000 a tonne in June, up about 30 percent since March as both China and Europe begin reopening.

Mining activity always poses environmental risks. However, it is possible to scientifically foresee dangers and determine the safest methods of extraction to prevent deadly impacts upon workers, communities and the environment. This does not enter the calculations of the transnational and domestic mining giants or the governments that serve their interests. Countless catastrophic disasters caused by BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto, Barrick, BP et al., due to the anarchy and irrationality of capitalist production for profit, are only a taste of what is to come in Peru and Latin America and the rest of world if the working class does not politically intervene with a socialist program to resolve the political, social and economic crises facing humanity.