Seven protest leaders in Thailand arrested by police

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/22/thai-a22.html

By Owen Howell
22 August 2020

Thai police have responded to a mass demonstration in Bangkok last Sunday with a series of arrests. The rally was part of the eruption of student-led protests across Thailand over the past month. Seven prominent members of the student movement organising the protests, Free Youth, were arrested this week on charges including sedition and inciting public unrest.

Six of the leaders were specifically targeted for their participation in a Bangkok student rally on July 18, which sparked the recent wave of anti-government protests. Since then, rallies have proceeded on an almost daily basis.

While originally confined to major universities, the movement has since gained wider support among students and workers around the country, as demonstrated in the Sunday protest, Thailand’s largest since the 2014 military coup.

The three main demands of the protest leaders are to dissolve parliament, end the state persecution of political opponents, and rewrite the current constitution, which was drafted by the military junta.

Arrest warrants were issued during the Sunday rally for 15 leaders of Free Youth. According to the Thai Enquirer, a coordinated police operation was conducted throughout Wednesday night. The six people arrested over the July 18 protest were Baramee Chairat, Suwanna Tanlek, Korakot Saengyangpant, Natthawut Somboonsap, Tossaporn Sinsomboon, and Thanee Sasom.

Police also apprehended rappers Thanayuth Na Ayutthaya and Dechathon Bamrungmuang, leader of the highly popular and notorious hip-hop group Rap Against Dictatorship, for their performances at the protest.

The seventh protest leader targeted was Anon Nampa, a human rights lawyer and leading figure in the Thai protests. Anon was arrested, for the second time this month, over a speech on August 3 calling for reform of the monarchy. In Thailand, anyone who “defames, insults or threatens” the royal family can be prosecuted for violating the draconian law of lèse majesté, and faces up to 15 years in jail.

Ever since Anon’s speech, student protests have openly criticised the political role of King Maha Vajiralongkorn, whose power over the constitution, the armed forces, and the palace fortune has grown considerably since he was installed in 2016.

The lèse majesté law has been used to silence political opposition as many as 90 times since the 2014 military coup. However, Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-o-cha, former head of the military junta, has reportedly received instructions from the King not to use the law, for now. Anon was charged instead with sedition, which carries a maximum prison sentence of seven years.

Anon joined the Thai Lawyers for Human Rights organisation after 2006, when the government of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra was overthrown in a military coup. He became known as a lawyer for the Red Shirts (a grouping of Shinawatra supporters who staged protests in 2010) and lèse majesté offenders. He has previously been charged in 13 cases for involvement in anti-junta protests.

State repression of the protests has been ratcheted up since criticism of the monarchy emerged as a focal point of the movement.

Earlier this month, two other student leaders—both known critics of the monarchy—faced arrest for sedition: Panupong Jadnok, a member of student group Eastern Youth for Democracy, based in Rayong Province; and Parit Chirawak, co-founder and former president of the Student Union of Thailand.

At a rally in Phitsanulok Province on August 9, six youth leaders were abducted by men claiming to be Border Patrol policemen, in an attempt to derail the protest. Prachatai reported that so far five planned protests have been blocked by intervention from authorities.

Six further arrest warrants were also issued on Wednesday for students who led the August 10 Thammasat University protest, in which specific demands to reform the monarchy were first outlined.

In spite of these efforts, the protest movement continues to grow. This week saw whole classrooms in at least eight high schools across Bangkok wear white ribbons and raise three-fingered salutes during the national anthem, in a sign of solidarity with the protests. On Wednesday, hundreds of high school students gathered outside the Ministry of Education building, calling for greater freedom in schools as well as reiterating the movement’s three demands.

Yesterday a major student rally took place in the northeastern city of Nakhon Ratchasima, at which Panupong Jadnok spoke about the reform of the monarchy to loud cheers of support from crowds of high school students. The North-Eastern Student Assembly Network will be holding a protest today in Khong Kaen at 5:00 p.m. and Free Youth is advertising a demonstration tomorrow at Bangkok’s Kasetsart University, which will likely draw a large gathering of students from across the city.

Several of the arrested leaders, now released on bail, have indicated on social media that they will continue to be involved in rallies. As police sought to detain them, they stood in the Criminal Court with a number of MPs from the Move Forward Party and opposition Pheu Thai Party as guarantors.

Senators appointed by the junta have expressed suspicions that Free Youth is a front for opposition political groups, as with the Shinawatra-backed Red Shirts. In particular, they are investigating the funding for the large protests, which have included concerts, extensive lighting, and giant LED screens.

On its Facebook page, Free Youth has rejected these claims, saying: “Our funds come from the masses, who support us only because this is a movement of young people, by young people, and for young people.”

Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit, leader of now-defunct Future Forward Party, has said he played no role in funding the protests, which first began in February when the party, which attracted support from young people, was dissolved by the Constitutional Court.

Royal Thai Army Commander-in-Chief Apirat Kongsompong is attempting to incite popular hatred against the protesters, saying last week: “The coronavirus can be cured, but the disease of chung-chart [‘nation-hating’] cannot be cured.” Apirat’s use of this term, used by past military regimes to rally far-right nationalist forces against internal opposition, is significant.

The media, subject to intense pressure from the Prayuth government, has mostly refrained from reporting protesters’ demands regarding the monarchy at all. Education Minister Nataphol Teepsuwan warned after last Sunday’s rally that there was a limit to how far students should go.

This week’s crackdown on the movement’s leadership expresses fears in the ruling class that the protests could broaden and intersect with widespread discontent in the working population amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Social inequality in Thailand, which greatly increased under the junta’s rule, is set to skyrocket due to the pandemic’s impact and the likelihood of a major economic contraction this year. A Credit Suisse report last year named the country the most unequal in the world, with the richest 1 percent of the population owning 66.9 percent of the nation’s wealth.

Facebook censors anti-fascist and anarchist groups, falsely linking them with extreme-right violence

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/22/face-a22.html

By Kevin Reed
22 August 2020

In a significant escalation of political censorship on its platform, Facebook published an update on Wednesday to its “Dangerous Individuals and Organizations” policy that labels left-wing and anarchist organizations as violent and falsely amalgamates them with fascist militia groups and right-wing extremists associated with the QAnon conspiracy theory.

In a Newsroom blog post entitled, “An Update to How We Address Movements and Organizations Tied to Violence,” Facebook says that it is taking action against “Pages, Groups and Instagram accounts tied to offline anarchist groups that support violent acts amidst protests, US-based militia organizations and QAnon.”

While Facebook says it already removes “content calling for or advocating violence” and bans “organizations and individuals that proclaim a violent mission,” the blog post says that “we have seen growing movements that, while not directly organizing violence, have celebrated violent acts, shown that they have weapons and suggest they will use them, or have individual followers with patterns of violent behavior.”

That the expanded Facebook definition of “dangerous” people and groups is aimed at stifling speech on the social media platform—with 2.7 billion monthly active users worldwide—is shown by the fact that its policy now includes “organizations and movements that have demonstrated significant risks to public safety but do not meet the rigorous criteria to be designated as a dangerous organization and banned from having any presence on our platform.”

Facebook then outlines the actions it will take to suppress content from those it deems “dangerous” and “violent” but do not fit the “rigorous” definition of either description. These measures may include removal of accounts from Facebook and Instagram, limiting recommendations, reduced ranking in News Feed, reduced visibility in Search, removal from Related Hashtags on Instagram and prohibition from advertising and fundraising.

As Facebook is listing off the many techniques it utilizes to ban, delete and suppress content—which it refers to in corporate-speak as “remove, reduce and inform”—it becomes clear that these methods are being perfected in the service of political censorship against oppositional, left-wing and socialist views that are increasing in popularity and pose a threat to the capitalist foundations of the social media giant. Facebook currently has a Wall Street value of $762 billion and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg has accumulated a personal wealth of $100 billion.

The Newsroom blog post goes on to say that Facebook has already removed “over 790 groups, 100 Pages and 1,500 ads tied to QAnon” and additionally “imposed restrictions on over 1,950 Groups and 440 Pages on Facebook and over 10,000 accounts on Instagram.” Lumping anarchists and left-wing groups in with the far right, Facebook says, “For militia organizations and those encouraging riots, including some who may identify as Antifa, we’ve initially removed over 980 groups, 520 Pages and 160 ads from Facebook. We’ve also restricted over 1,400 hashtags related to these groups and organizations on Instagram.”

Among the accounts of anti-fascist and left-wing activists that have been shut down in the present Facebook dragnet are the following:
It’s Going Down: an anarchist news publishing platform that reports on social struggles and exposes the activities of white supremacist and neo-Nazi networks.
CrimethInc.: a left-wing and anarchist publishing organization that identifies itself as an “international network of aspiring revolutionaries.”
PNW Youth Liberation Front: a group that says it is “a decentralized network of autonomous youth collectives dedicated to direct action towards total liberation” and has been involved in the recent protests in Portland, Oregon.

There is no question that by including such groups in its list of “dangerous” and “violent” individuals and organizations, Facebook is supporting the drive by the US political establishment and the US Justice Department to equate opposition within the working class and among young people with the violence of alt-right, neo-Nazi and fascistic militia individuals and groups.

The recent history of ideologically motivated violence in the US exposes Facebook’s false identification of these groups with the extreme right. According to a report by Natasha Lennard in the Intercept, “It bears repeating, ad nauseam, that the far right has carried out 329 murders in the last three decades; none have been attributed to antifa. Between 2009 and 2018, white supremacist and far-right extremists were responsible for 73 percent of extremist murders in the U.S. And that’s not even to mention the state-sanctioned, racist killings carried out by the police.”

The effort to label the left as violent has also intensified over the past three months during the nationwide and global mass protests against police violence and repression that was sparked by the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police on Memorial Day. Both the Democrats and Republicans along with the corporate media have slandered these demonstrations as “violent” and “riots” and, as Trump has stated numerous times, part of the “radical left” and “anarchist” takeover of American cities that must be put down with “law and order.”

In June, at the height of the George Floyd protests, Attorney General William Barr created a task force dedicated to counter “anti-government extremists” who engage in “indefensible acts of violence designed to undermine public order.” In his directive to all Justice Department law enforcement representatives, Barr wrote, “Among other lawless conduct, these extremists have violently attacked police officers and other government officials, destroyed public and private property, and threatened innocent people.”

Furthermore, Barr’s memo said that the “acts of violence” came from extremists “of all persuasions” including the extremer right-wing Boogaloo militia advocates who have engaged in murder and other criminal acts along with “those who identify as Antifa” on the left.

Meanwhile, Senator Ted Cruz (Republican, Texas) chaired a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on August 4 where he claimed, “Across the country, we’re seeing horrific violence, we’re seeing our country torn apart. Violent anarchists and Marxists are exploiting protests to transform them into riots and direct assaults on the lives and safety of their fellow Americans.”

This position is not unique to Barr, Trump and the Republican Party. On the fifth night of the George Floyd protests in cities across the US that have been devastated by decades of attacks on living standards and social programs, the future Democratic Party nominee for President in the 2020 elections, Joseph Biden, denounced protesters for “burning down communities” and carrying out “needless destruction.”

While police and federal agents were beating protesters and National Guard troops were being called up and mobilized against peaceful demonstrations, Biden blamed the public for the decay in the cities, saying, “Violence that guts and shutters businesses that serve the community” is not “the American response.” In late July, Biden reiterated his stance, calling for the prosecution of “arsonists and anarchists.”

These same sentiments have been expressed by Representative James Clyburn (Democrat, South Carolina) and Democratic Mayor of Chicago Lori Lightfoot who, according to the New York Times, after police assaulted protestors calling for an end to police violence, said, “To those who engaged in this criminal behavior, let’s be clear: We are coming for you.”

The purpose and results of the recent closed-door meetings between the Silicon Valley tech monopolies and the White House in the preparations for the US presidential election in November are becoming obvious. As reported by the WSWS, representatives of nine major tech firms—including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Reddit—met with US government law enforcement and national intelligence agencies on August 12 to discuss “election security” with little or no information reported to the public following the online gathering.

The endless references by Facebook and the others to those who identify as antifa as “violent” and “dangerous” are proof of the completely reactionary character of the entire amalgamation of left-wing and anarchist groups with far-right extremists who have actually committed acts of violence and killed people while proclaiming support for the Trump administration.

A Google search of antifa will only yield a Wikipedia entry for the name. There is no official website for an organization with this name in the US, Europe or anywhere else in the world. While there are clearly individuals who identify with the message of “anti-fascism,” the claim that an organization called “Antifa” is coordinating acts of extreme violence against the US government is entirely fabricated.

Instead, what the ruling establishment—of which the social media monopolies are a critical element—fears more than anything is that masses of workers and young people will break free from the two-party political system and begin to organize independently of the entire capitalist political setup on the basis of the fight for socialism. The ever expanding scope of political censorship on social media and on the internet more broadly is certain grow in the weeks leading up to the November 3 election and in its aftermath as the US ruling class seeks to suppress all signs of opposition.



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European countries force children back to school amid resurgence of COVID-19

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/22/euro-a22.html

By Alejandro López
22 August 2020

The drive to reopen schools after the summer break continues unabated throughout Europe as the resurgence of the COVID-19 pandemic accelerates across the continent.

Nineteen European countries have crossed a key threshold of cumulative 14-day infection totals higher than 20 per 100,000 inhabitants, considered an early alarm level by many health experts, according to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. Luxembourg and Spain have reported more than 100 new cases per 100,000 people, followed by Malta recording more than 80, Belgium more than 60, and France and the Netherlands more than 40. The UK has 20.7.

Spain continues to be the epicentre of the resurgence of the virus in Europe. There are more than 1,000 outbreaks of the virus currently active. Over 3,650 more infections the previous day were reported on Friday, while weekly deaths have also risen to 125 people. The death toll in Spain remains one of the highest in Europe, with at least 44,868 victims.

The Spanish ruling class did not use the time garnered by the lockdowns imposed in late March and April to prepare for the expected resurgence of the virus. Twelve-thousand tracers are lacking, hospitals are on the verge of collapse in parts of the country due to lack of medical staff, and nursing homes are registering a significant number of increases, after around 20,000 deaths among the elderly were attributed to COVID-19 between March and May. Even data collection has become an issue.

Day after day, the figures being supplied by the ministry are lower than those offered by the press offices of the country’s regions.

In Germany, the virus is now soaring. The country widely promoted as a model for containing the virus in Europe after implementing an early and aggressive test-and=trace policy reported 1,707 new coronavirus cases in the last 24 hours, the highest single-day increase since April. The national number of infected has risen to 228,261 cases of the virus, with 9,253 related deaths, according to data compiled from the Robert Koch Institute for infectious diseases.

France reported 4,771 new infections, with the daily tally going above 3,000 for the fourth time in the last five days. The health ministry said in a statement: “All the indicators keep going up and the transmission of the virus is getting stronger among all ages groups affected, young adults in particular.”

In Italy, the virus is once again rising rapidly. Last week, Rome registered 629 new cases in 24 hours, up from 500 on the previous two days. Such numbers had not been seen since May, when Italy was the epicentre of the virus in Europe. Yesterday, another 845 people tested positive.

Even though this spring clearly showed the deadly toll of the virus, European governments all agree that there should be no more lockdowns to halt its spread. Instead, they insist that schools must reopen everywhere—even though school reopenings have accelerated the spread of the virus in areas across North and South America—so workers can fully return to work and the extraction of profits can continue. If lives are lost, then so be it: COVID-19 is, as one American doctor put it, a “poor person’s virus.”

In an interview with Paris Match magazine, President Emmanuel Macron declared that French people will have to endure the virus: “We can’t shut the country down because the collateral damage of lock-down is considerable. Zero risk never exists in any society. We must respond to this anxiety without falling into the doctrine of zero risk.”

In Spain, Fernando Simón, director of the Centre for the Coordination of Health Alerts and Emergencies, stated: “We cannot have our children without studying. We cannot jeopardise the competitiveness of our children,” he declared. Feigning sympathy with working class children, Simon pointed out that an “effort” must be made to open schools because “it is very easy to propose online education for those who have the right resources,” because “a child who has his own room, computer and good Wi-Fi is not the same as a child who shares a room with several siblings, parents, who does not have a computer or Wi-Fi.”

Leading political authorities throughout Europe have made similar cynical statements. They hide the fact that for over a decade they have starved schools of resources, while providing endless cash for bank and corporate bailouts, and while showering billions more into military contractors and imperialist wars. The pandemic has been seized to provide billions more for bank bailouts, all of which are being recouped from the population at the cost of lives and health of the working class.

Throughout the continent, resistance is growing against this policy. However, the trade unions, the main agents of the back-to-work campaign in the workplaces, are intervening to suppress growing opposition.

In the UK, where the National Education Union supports the reopening of schools in September, teachers held street protests yesterday across the country with demands such as free personal protective equipment (PPE), weekly COVID tests for teachers, and the ability to close classrooms if local infection rates hit a chosen level. While unions’ statements all talk about reopening safely, they are doing all in their power not to fight to make schools any safer or fight against the Tory government’s blatantly unsafe reopening plans.

In Germany, anger is rising among educators after at least 41 schools in Berlin reported that students or teachers have become infected, less than a fortnight after schools reopened in Germany. The Education and Science (GEW) trade union is supporting school reopenings, however. The GEW has even spoken out against the compulsory wearing of masks in the classroom, urgently demanded by virologists.

In France, despite the biggest weekly spike in confirmed coronavirus cases since the height of its national outbreak in March, Macron insisted: “The return to school will happen in the coming days.” Despite the latest health protocol, adopted by Macron at the end of July relaxing social distancing, compulsory masks for teachers and mixing of students, the teachers union SNUipp-FSU’s main demand is to delay the start of the new school year by a few days.

SNUipp-FSU Secretary General Guislaine David said: “We are asking to postpone the start of the school year. … Ideally, we would need the week of the 31st to be able to prepare for a peaceful return the following week.”

In Spain, teachers have been called on strike in the Madrid region at the start of the new term over the lack of any protocol for the reopening of schools in the region. While the sentiment is widespread throughout Spain, unions are calling for a strike only against the right-wing Popular-Party (PP) regional government. This allows the ruling parties, the Socialist Party (PSOE) and the “left populist” Podemos party, to get off free in regions they control.

The unions agree with the back-to-school policy. The CCOO general secretary for education, Isabel Galvín, explicitly stated: “We mobilise because we want to go back to school and remain. We don’t want to be confined the week we start. We are working hard so that all sectors return to their activity and we have to commit ourselves so that there are face-to-face classes. Children need to go back to school for their education and emotional stability.”

It is critical for workers and youth across Europe to set up their own action committees, independent of the trade unions, to prepare strike action against the reopenings of schools and the predictable rise in deaths they will provoke.



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Coronavirus testing remains at reduced levels in the US

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/22/test-a22.html

By Bryan Dyne
22 August 2020

Coronavirus testing in the United States has remained at reduced levels even as schools reopen and cases continue to climb. The average number of tests on a given day is currently 14 percent lower than its high on July 29, despite the total number of known cases rising 26 percent—1.2 million infections—over that same period.

It is estimated that, to fully map the spread of the pandemic, one of the critical pieces of information to actually contain the disease, the US would need to perform 6–10 million tests per day. It currently does about 700,000.

Just over seven months have now passed since the first case of COVID-19 was identified in the US. At the time, there were 580 known cases worldwide, most of them confined to Wuhan, China, and 41 confirmed deaths. In the interim, more than 23 million people have been infected and 801,000 human lives have been lost. The lion’s share, nearly 5.8 million cases and more than 179,000 dead, have occurred in the US.

The start of the decline in testing came in the weeks after US President Donald Trump declared, “With smaller testing we would show fewer cases!” While top US health officials sought to downplay Trump’s comments, there has been no explanation for the decline in testing since the end of July. Brett Giroir, assistant secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services and head of the Trump administration’s testing strategy, instead claimed last week that the amount of testing is “appropriate” for the spread of the virus in the country.

Giroir and those who support the Trump administration’s position are largely basing themselves on the overall decline in the positivity rate—the number of tests returned that confirm a case of the coronavirus compared to the total number of tests performed. This was at about 9 percent in July and has fallen to just above 6 percent now.

What Giroir papers over, however, is that 6 percent is still too high to claim that the virus is contained. The World Health Organization has issued guidance stating that the positivity rate should remain below 5 percent for 14 days as one of the major criteria for stopping the spread of the disease. Moreover, the state-by-state breakdown of the positivity rate reveals that the national average is being weighed down by multiple states in the northeast that were able to suppress the virus early on.

New York, once the world epicenter of the virus, now has a positivity rate of 0.8 percent, indicating that the majority of cases are being detected, allowing for adequate contact tracing and quarantine measures to hunt down the virus and stop its spread. Similar scenarios exist in other states including Vermont, Connecticut, Massachusetts and New Hampshire.

In contrast, Mississippi has a positivity rate of nearly 20 percent, indicating that the pandemic is currently spreading in that state well beyond the ability of local health authorities to track. Every day, there are several hundred recorded cases in the state, and there have been an average of more than 20 deaths per day since July 26.

The situation is similar in Nevada, which has a coronavirus positive test rate of 17.2 percent, and has suffered more than 700 new cases a day since July 3 and more than 10 deaths a day since July 22. This is particularly concerning since the state is home to the popular Las Vegas casinos and resorts which have been reopened for business and are being visited by tourists from all across the country.

All told, 12 states, mostly in the south and west, currently have a positivity rate higher than 10 percent, and a further 21 states stand at 5 percent or higher, indicating that the pandemic is spreading largely out of control in the majority of the country.

Even if the positivity rate was decreasing uniformly across the nation, it would still not yet be a time to celebrate. Nearly 50,000 new cases and more than 1,000 new deaths are recorded each day. Three states—California, Texas and Florida—all currently count more than 500,000 total infections since March. Twenty-eight states report more than 500 cases each day, and 24 report at least 10 daily deaths.

While the Trump administration has raised the cost of mass testing as an impediment, it was reported yesterday by the Wall Street Journal that there are billions of dollars that have already been allocated that could be used for this purpose. In April, $25 billion was allocated for COVID-19 testing, according to the Department of Health and Human Services, of which at most 15 percent has been used. This suggests that testing across the country, especially where it is needed most, could vastly increase without incurring further expenses.

One of the other issues in testing is that the chemical reagents needed to perform the more common type of tests in the country are in short supply. There has never been a coordinated national plan to combat the virus, and as such local, state and federal agencies and governments are in constant competition to acquire the necessary tools to determine whether a given sample from a patient is positive or negative.

Compounding the problem, the current free tests can often take a week or more to be processed. While there are more expensive and quicker tests, they can cost in the range of $100 and are not generally covered by health insurance companies. As a result, workers are faced with two choices: pay a large out-of-pocket expense to get results quickly or wait and possibly be spreading a deadly disease unknowingly for days.

There may, however, be some relief regarding the dismal US testing situation. Last week, the Food and Drug Administration issued an emergency authorization for a new, inexpensive and quick saliva test developed by researchers at the Yale School of Public Health. The tools and chemicals needed to perform the test are much more readily available, cost about $5 per test, and return results in about three hours. The method is largely considered very scalable. It remains to be seen if such a technique will actually be deployed in practice.

“They are killing people to save money”

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/22/auto-a22.html

Fiat Chrysler, UAW conspire to keep workers on the job after exposure to coronavirus

By Shannon Jones
22 August 2020

Workers at Detroit area auto plants report that the Fiat Chrysler management and the United Auto Workers union are forcing workers to stay on the job after exposure to coronavirus.

According to multiple accounts by autoworkers, both on social media and reported separately to the World Socialist Web Site Autoworker Newsletter, the union and management are refusing to inform workers that coworkers are infected with the virus or to send workers into quarantine after exposure, as prescribed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Workers have even been told not to report illness to coworkers.
The abandonment of COVID-19 protections in auto plants takes place as the Trump administration and Democratic governors across the United States are working together to force a deadly reopening of schools. On Tuesday the Department of Homeland Security issued guidelines declaring teachers “critical infrastructure,” enabling states to force teachers that have been exposed to the deadly virus to continue work, potentially infecting others.

Democratic governors in New York, Michigan and other states have encouraged public schools to reopen despite mounting resistance on the part of teachers and parents.

At Jefferson North Assembly Plant (JNAP), according to Facebook posts and confirmed by workers in the plant, management refused to ask a plant worker to self-quarantine even though she was exposed to another worker on her team who tested positive for COVID-19.

A worker at FCA’s Toledo Jeep plant reported that no less than three workers on their team had tested positive for coronavirus, but management failed to inform the rest of the team, much less ask them to self-quarantine. “There should be a lawsuit. This is beyond inexcusable,” the worker said.

A worker at the FCA Sterling Heights Assembly Plant north of Detroit told the WSWS Autoworker Newsletter: “Last week they sent a whole line home that was supposed to be exposed, but before they left they trained their replacements. They are not following guidelines.

“They are bringing us back without even testing us. We may or may not have the virus. If you say you have no symptoms they send you back.

“I think the UAW is on the side of management. All they care about is lining their pockets. What’s happening is that if someone has come into contact with someone else (with COVID), they are asking you not to tell anyone; the union rep is telling us not to tell anyone. What happens to those people they came into contact with?”

Fiat Chrysler is winding down even the limited and inadequate safety protocols implemented after the restart of production in May. This week, JNAP’s labor relations department announced that the extra five minutes added to breaks for cleaning and social distancing in the lunchroom and break areas will be eliminated as of September 1. Similar memos have reportedly been sent to workers at other FCA factories.

A younger worker at JNAP told the WSWS Autoworker Newsletter that workers were in an uproar about the elimination of the extra five minutes for breaks. “That extra five minutes added to a 12 minute break is life changing. Going to the bathroom was at least five minutes, that only left you 7 minutes. You didn’t even have time to go to a vending machine.

“Almost all the protocols are now gone. It seems odd, because COVID is not gone. The first week we came back we had 20 minutes to clean our work areas before the shift. They gave us special gloves. They are now doing away with anything that hurts productivity. We even had to fight to get the cleaning supplies back. I wish they would just be honest and come out and say that their money is more important than our lives.”

In response to the latest revelations, the Jefferson North Assembly Plant Rank-and-File Safety Committee, established by autoworkers in June after wildcat strikes against safety conditions briefly shut production at the plant for the second time this year, issued the following statement:

“The Jefferson North Assembly Plant Rank-and-File Safety Committee wants to bring to light the misrepresentation from the UAW and FCA about the handling of COVID cases and exposure of employees. Most of the processes they earlier implemented in the case of exposure to COVID have been eliminated.

“Even as it stands the safety measures in place are totally inadequate. Since the return to work management and the UAW have been covering up the real extent of the spread of COVID in the plants even though timely notification of all COVID infections is critical for maintaining workers health and safety.

“Now workers have been told by plant safety that while they were potentially exposed to the virus by other team members, the company will not send them out to self quarantine for 14 days as previously required or clean their work area. This is unacceptable!

“Slowly but surely FCA is returning to the procedures that were in effect before workers stopped production in March. As of September 1 management is eliminating the extra five minutes added to each break to give employees time to get to restrooms and social distance as well as find lunch tables.

“It’s been rumored the company has made changes because employees aren’t cleaning, but what isn’t being said is that for weeks the company hasn’t supplied cleaning products and have empty bottles at work areas. We deem this unacceptable and demand both the UAW and FCA follow the protocols they set in place to get workers back into the factory. If this is not met workers will have to take appropriate action because it’s apparent the safety of workers and their families mean nothing to them.”

The JNAP Rank-and-File Safety Committee has since joined with Safety Committees at several other plants throughout the country to form the Autoworkers Rank-and-File Safety Committee Network.

FCA is also seeking to intimidate workers from keeping each other informed of the spread of the virus on social media. On August 10, FCA management sent a letter to salaried and hourly employees warning that workers could be disciplined and even terminated for social media posts that violated a long list of regulations including the exposure of “confidential company information”—in plain language, unsafe management practices.

However, this situation is hardly unique to FCA. From the beginning, management, at all the Detroit-based automakers, have suppressed the real extent of the pandemic in the auto plants. They have done so with the collusion of the UAW, which has been revealed by federal indictments and a lawsuit between General Motors and FCA to have accepted tens of millions in corporate bribes. Even COVID deaths are being covered up. The UAW and management failed to inform workers of the death of a young Ford contract worker at the Van Dyke transmission plant who succumbed to COVID last month.

A veteran Detroit area Ford worker said that cases were being covered up at their factory.

“I think the UAW and the company are telling people not to tell others if they have COVID.

“It doesn’t matter if we are exposed, they don’t care—they are not quarantining everyone who is exposed. At the end of the day it is a gain if some of us legacy workers die. There goes your pension, there goes your insurance, there goes your Social Security, there goes your Medicare. They know that. Our lives don’t matter. There is no other reason they won’t tell us. Look at the billions they are saving by workers dying. They are killing people to save money.”

The attack on elementary safety measures demands an urgent response from autoworkers. Autoworkers must develop safety committees joining workers together at plants across North America, and link up their struggles with teachers, Amazon workers and other sections of the working class to demand that workers lives take precedence over corporate profits.

The Biden campaign and the attempt to “rescue” American hegemony

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/22/pers-a22.html

22 August 2020

Over the past week, the American public was subjected to an eight-hour infomercial, officially termed by the Democratic Party a “convention,” in which the long-time political reactionary Joe Biden was packaged simultaneously as the great American everyman and a miracle cure for America’s problems.

Amid celebrity cameos, empty platitudes, and unconvincing “personal” anecdotes, the vast majority of this week’s telethon was devoid of any actual discussion of program and policies. Behind the hoopla, however, there are significant conflicts within the ruling class, centered primarily on issues of foreign policy.

These conflicts were partially revealed on Tuesday night, when the convention aired a pre-recorded segment featuring a group of seven military, intelligence and diplomatic officials who claimed that the Trump administration was not fighting the US wars in the Middle East and pursuing its conflicts with Russia and China aggressively enough.

Commenting on Trump’s Middle East policy, Brett McGurk, in charge of the US operations in the Middle East under Obama, said, “Our military had a policy to maintain our presence in Syria,” which Trump went on to “abandon.” He concluded, “It’s shameful.”

Rose Gottemoeller, former Deputy Secretary General of NATO, concluded that Trump “hasn’t been standing up” to Russia and China “at all.” Another State Department official added, “Thanks to Donald Trump, our adversaries are stronger, and bolder.”

Following the segment, General Colin Powell added that Biden “will make it his job to know when anyone dares to threaten us, he will stand up to our adversaries with strength and experience. They will know he means business.” The “business” for which Powell is best known is the destruction of Iraq and the death of one million of its inhabitants, based on false claims about “weapons of mass destruction.”

These themes were expanded upon in a letter published Friday by a group of 72 high-level intelligence and military officials—and war criminals—headed by former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden, declaring their support for Biden.

The first of the letter’s ten bullet points states that Trump “has called NATO ‘obsolete,’ branded Europe a ‘foe,’ mocked the leaders of America’s closest friends, and threatened to terminate longstanding US alliances.” As a result, the letter concludes, “ Donald Trump has gravely damaged America’s role as a world leader.”

In other words, the present administration has undermined the fundamental geostrategic aims that have led the United States into three decades of war: The effort to control the Eurasian landmass, including the Middle East.

In the four years since Trump became the Republican nominee, a ferocious conflict has been raging within the ruling class, centered on differences over foreign policy, and in particular the “hot war” being waged between the Ukrainian government and pro-Russian forces in its Eastern regions after the US-backed coup in 2014.

Instead of focusing on the conflict with Russia that has been the preeminent concern of much of the foreign policy establishment, the Trump administration has been preoccupied with stunting the economic growth of China while building up US military capabilities to fight a war in the Pacific.

But here, too, the military and intelligence figures aligned with the Biden campaign feel that the White House has been ineffective. As two of the letter’s signatories wrote in an article in Foreign Policy magazine, “Trump has confronted China by starting trade wars with everyone else” rather than involving other imperialist states. “Major democratic powers including Japan, France, and Canada are desperate to work with the United States to blunt China’s predatory technology policies.”

From the standpoint of the ruling class, it is primarily these differences over foreign policy, not domestic policy, that are being fought out in the election. Facing the greatest social and economic crisis since the Great Depression, domestic policy has been conducted on a largely bipartisan basis. The CARES Act, which sanctioned the multi-trillion-dollar bailout of Wall Street while starving testing and contact tracing, passed unanimously in the Senate and by an unrecorded voice vote in the House.

The latest issue of Foreign Affairs, one of the main journals of US geopolitics, lays out some of the concerns of the dominant factions of the state. “After nearly four years of turbulence,” the lead editorial states, “the country’s enemies are stronger, its friends are weaker, and the United States itself is increasingly isolated and prostrate.”

Its concern is that Trump has proven an unreliable steward of the interests of the ruling class abroad. “Dragging his party and the executive branch along, the president has reshaped national policy in his own image: focused on short-term advantage, obsessed with money, and uninterested in everything else.”

The magazine’s lead story declares that Trump’s unstable and erratic foreign policy has resulted in a situation in which “China is wealthier and stronger, North Korea has more nuclear weapons and better missiles… and Nicolás Maduro is more entrenched in Venezuela, as is Bashar al-Assad in Syria.”

From the standpoint of the Biden campaign, the solution to all of these crises is to reassert American dominance and “leadership” over its traditional allies in Europe and Japan in order to pursue a more aggressive US policy against Russia and China. The United States must again be the world hegemon.

The central focus of the new administration will be “reclaiming America’s place in the world” through the reassertion of “American exceptionalism,” stated Joe Biden adviser Jake Sullivan in the Atlantic .

Earlier this year, Biden published an article entitled “Rescuing U.S. Foreign Policy After Trump” in the March/April issue of Foreign Affairs. In that article, he declares, that “to counter Russian aggression, we must keep the alliance’s military capabilities sharp.” At the same time, the United States needs to “get tough with China.” The “most effective way to meet that challenge is to build a united front of U.S. allies and partners to confront China.”

But while the latest issue of Foreign Affairs may be titled “The World Trump Made,” the geopolitical debacle facing the United States did not spring from Trump’s head. Trump did not make the “world.” Rather, the “world”—and, specifically, the crisis of American imperialism—made Trump.

The decline in the hegemonic position of the United States extends over a period of decades and was already evident prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990-91. The dissolution of American imperialism’s Cold War adversary was seized on by the strategists of the American ruling class to declare a “unipolar moment.” The United States could utilize its unrivaled military power to counter its declining economic position through force.

The endless series of wars launched by the United States over the past three decades have destroyed entire societies—in Iraq, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, and Yemen, among others. But they have failed to reverse US imperialism’s fortunes. Moreover, they have profoundly distorted and brutalized American society itself: a process of which the fascistic Trump administration is an expression.

Even prior to Trump’s inauguration, there were growing tensions between the US and its erstwhile allies in Europe. The coronavirus pandemic and the disastrous response of the ruling class to it—a policy that has been bipartisan—has further eroded the global position of American capitalism.

American imperialism confronts intractable problems, and first among them is the growth of social opposition within the United States itself. Among the considerations motivating support for the Biden campaign within the ruling class is the hope that it can somehow establish a broader base for imperialist aggression abroad. The promotion of identity politics is aimed at further integrating privileged sections of the upper middle class behind the project of global domination. This is what Kamala Harris represents.

A Biden/Harris administration will not inaugurate a new dawn of American hegemony. Rather, the attempt to assert this hegemony will be through unprecedented violence. If it is brought to power—with the support of the assemblage of reactionaries responsible for the worst crimes of the 21st century—it will be committed to a vast expansion of war. Trump and Pompeo are barreling headlong toward a conflict with China. Biden’s critique of this disastrous course is that the United States needs to get “tough,” whether against Russia, China, Afghanistan, Syria, or everywhere in between.

The American ruling class, moreover, confronts in the growth of the class struggle the most serious threat to its geopolitical ambitions.

Whichever course is ultimately determined by the election, US imperialism has, as the World Socialist Web Site warned in the run-up to the Iraq war, a “rendezvous with disaster.” All factions of the US state are united on a course of action that will lead to the deaths of countless millions. The struggle against war will not go forward through the selection of either Trump or Biden, but through the independent struggle of the working class.

Andre Damon

The Missing Verse of The Star Spangled Banner That May Change Your View Of Our Anthem

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEl9gUOgvZQ