https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63RvrmViJyo
Wednesday, August 26, 2020
US health care workers infected with COVID-19 pressured to return to work
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/25/nurs-a25.html
By Alex Johnson
25 August 2020
Nurses, doctors and other medical workers in the US who have contracted COVID-19 are increasingly being pressured to return to their hospitals prematurely in violation of public health standards. The failure of health care facilities and employers to provide adequate paid leave—or, in many cases, any paid leave at all—has left health care staff with the cruel “choice” of risking hunger and homelessness for themselves and their families by forfeiting their paychecks or becoming transmitters of the coronavirus in their workplaces.
This homicidal policy is being pursued despite the already existing widespread loss of life and disastrously high infection rates for hospital staff. Health care personnel in many states now account for as many as 20 percent of known coronavirus cases. A joint research project of Kaiser Health News and the Guardian discovered that 167 health care employees have died of COVID-19 while treating infected patients.
Kaiser Health News and Guardian researchers have admitted that the actual number of health care worker deaths due to COVID-19 is likely far higher than 167. A total of 922 health care worker deaths in the course of the pandemic are now being investigated, having been identified as the likely result of coronavirus infection. Internationally, more than 2,000 health care workers across 74 countries have died from the virus, according to a recent “In Memoriam” list released by Medscape.
For the most part, the grievances of health care staff over unsafe conditions have either been ignored or dismissed outright by hospital executives more concerned with cutting costs and increasing profits than protecting the lives of staff members. Dozens of complaints from hospital workers were submitted to the Occupational and Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) this past spring, many of them reporting infected employees being ordered to return to work.
Included is a respiratory clinic in North Carolina where COVID-positive employees were told they would be fired if they stayed home, and a veterans hospital in Massachusetts where ill employees were returning to work because they were not receiving compensation.
Although the bipartisan CARES Act bailout of Wall Street enacted in March included minimal paid time off for workers affected by the pandemic, health care workers have been given virtually no legal protection against unsafe conditions in their workplaces. Emergency responders and health care providers are exempted from the provisions of the Families First Coronavirus Response Act. Anyone who works in a medical facility, from a doctor’s office or nursing home to a pharmacy or medical school, may be excluded by employers from receiving paid sick leave and/or expanded family and medical leave.
Department of Labor officials and other policy makers claim the exemption is necessary to avoid depleting the work force on the frontlines of the pandemic under conditions where large numbers of staff working in overcrowded hospitals have been exposed to COVID-19 patients. This has provoked outrage among health care workers, who point out that on top of being given inadequate personal protective equipment, being forced to work while sick places them and their patients at even higher risk of contracting the virus.
A Kaiser Family Foundation study in early June concluded that approximately 69.4 million workers, four in 10 of the working population, are potentially ineligible for emergency paid sick leave benefits. An estimated one in four of those workers is in the health care industry.
The law also automatically excludes 9.5 million health care workers employed by a private employer with 500 or more employees, while an additional 8.1 million health care workers are subject to the exemption at the whim of their employer. This amounts to about 17.7 million health care workers who are not guaranteed access to federal emergency paid sick leave benefits, even if forced to quarantine because of testing positive for COVID-19.
Moreover, some 15 percent of workers at health care and other social assistance firms are denied any paid sick leave by their employers. Lack of available paid leave has been the main factor discouraging workers with symptoms of COVID-19 from staying home and preventing mass exposure among colleagues and patients.
This exemption has been felt the most among the lowest paid and most exploited sections of the health care work force. About a quarter (24 percent) of the health care workforce who are excluded or subject to exemption are part-time workers. Many of them are highly unlikely to receive any paid leave benefits from their employer beyond sick leave. Additionally, 18 percent of them are low-wage, and therefore have very little saved for emergencies, making it nearly impossible to claw out of a financial hole caused by being deprived of work.
There are pervasive staff shortages at health care facilities. In nursing homes, which remain key hotspots for the spread of COVID-19, low staffing is cited as a culprit in the prevalence of COVID-19 outbreaks. A study released by two University of Chicago researchers who examined various characteristics of facilities with confirmed COVID-19 cases showed that staffing shortages were increasingly linked to nursing home outbreaks.
Another research study published by the JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) Network found that of three primary issues factored into a facility’s five-star CMS (Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services) rating—including health inspection, quality measures and staffing—only staffing coverage served as a reliable predictor of the scale of COVID-19 outbreaks.
In eight states, nursing homes with high ratings for nurse staffing had fewer COVID-19 cases than nursing homes with low ratings for staffing. The eight states that were investigated—California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Pennsylvania—have all been devastated by the pandemic.
Staffing cuts at major hospital chains have produced significant eruptions of working class resistance and militancy. At California’s HCA Healthcare conglomerate, nearly 1,000 nurses and support staff struck in late June to protest years of cuts and concessions imposed by management and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). Similar struggles have taken place in other states against billion-dollar hospital chains, including 720 registered nurses in Illinois who went on strike in early July to oppose AMITA Health’s abysmal staffing levels.
All of these struggles have been sold out by the unions, which have done everything in their power to isolate strikes and protests where they could not prevent them from taking place. They have stood by and allowed the health care corporations to pay strikebreakers. At the same time, they have limited strikes to pre-determined lengths so as to let health care staff blow off steam while they worked out concessionary contracts with management behind the backs of the workers.
Health care workers can secure adequate staffing and paid leave only through the formation of rank-and-file safety committees independent of the corrupt trade unions. Staff at clinics, hospitals and other medical facilities must unite their struggles in preparation for a nationwide general strike to fight for the containment and eradication of the pandemic and ensure that the economic needs of workers are met.
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Signs of emerging crisis in economy and financial system
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/25/sign-a25.html
By Nick Beams
25 August 2020
As Wall Street continues to surge to record highs—Apple has doubled its market capitalization from $1 trillion to $2 trillion in just two years and the S&P 500 index has surged 50 percent since the mid-March crash—there are clear indications of a crisis building up both in the real economy and the financial system.
Last week, the Financial Times reported that while the market was at a record high, “corporate distress” in the US had never been worse with “large corporate bankruptcy filings” running at a record pace and set to exceed levels reached in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008.
As of August 17, a record 45 companies, each with assets of more than $1 billion, had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, compared with 38 in the same period in 2009 and more than double the figure of 19 in the comparable period last year.
It reported that in total 157 companies with assets of more than $50 million have filed for bankruptcy with a lot more expected to follow.
Ben Schlafman, the chief operating officer at New Generation Research, which tracks bankruptcy filings, told the newspaper: “We are in the first innings of this bankruptcy cycle. It will spread far across industries as we get deeper into the crisis.
“It pains me to say it, but bankruptcy is a growth industry in America.”
The Labor Secretary in the Clinton administration, Robert Reich, said cutting off the $600 per week federal unemployment benefit will push tens of millions into poverty or close to it.
“They won’t have the money to buy billions of dollars worth of goods and services. As a result the entire economy will suffer. Small businesses will continue to suffer the most because they are already precarious.”
Goldman Sachs has said it expects that of the 22 million workers cut from payrolls in the first wave of the pandemic almost a quarter will be permanently axed. In a research note published on Friday and reported on Bloomberg, Goldman Sachs economist Joseph Briggs said that while there was a return to work from temporary layoffs, “other patterns suggest that rehiring prospects for temporarily laid-off workers started to deteriorate in July” and some 2 million workers could remain unemployed well into next year.
Reporting on the situation in Britain, the Financial Times said that accounting, law and investment banking firms were “preparing for a fresh wave of distress in the autumn” when government loan schemes to run out.
Leading insolvency barrister Mark Phillips said: “There are a series of crises looming. The full wave of insolvencies hasn’t even started yet.”
Financial and accounting firms have been involved in efforts to aid companies in restructuring their debt and raise capital to avoid a collapse.
“But the winding down of state support schemes is expected to trigger a large number of insolvency proceedings, as many of these companies run out of cash,” the FT said.
In the major industrial centres of Europe there are fears that after what was described as bounce back from the sharp economic contraction in the spring, the recovery is now starting to slow.
There was a 22.5 percent rise in industrial production across the euro zone in May and June, but this was not enough to compensate for the 28 percent fall in the first two months of the pandemic. Germany’s central bank has reported that euro zone manufacturers are still only operating at 72 percent capacity in July compared to their long-term average of 80 percent.
The car-making industry, which forms a vital component of the German economy, has been hard hit, with predictions that global car sales will fall to 69 million this year compared to 88 million in 2019. The head of Audi has said he does not expect the levels of car production to return to their pre-crisis levels at least until 2022 or 2023.
But even these predictions could be knocked awry in the face of what is clearly a resurgence of the pandemic. In the US, it continues to rage out of control while in Europe there are sharp rises in the number of infections due to the return to work drive of governments amid the push to reopen schools.
Last Friday alone, Spain reported 8000 new COVID-19 infections, with the infection rate rising across the region. In Germany the Robert Koch Institute, the country’s main public health organisation said infections had risen sharply in all of the country’s 16 regions in seven days, describing the situation as “alarming.”
Infections have surged again in South Korea, one of the world’s major industrial and manufacturing centres with an additional 397 cases reported on Sunday, the highest number since the beginning of March.
“Cases are rising in 17 cities and provinces across the nation, and we are now at the verge of a massive nationwide outbreak,” the head of the country’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Jung Eun-kyeong, told a news briefing on Sunday.
Amid this wave of disease and economic devastation, markets have continued to rise. But there are growing fears that the conditions are building up for a major financial crisis. The market rise has driven the surge in technology stocks, which form a large component of the S&P 500 index and, above all, the supply of cheap money from the Fed.
One indication of the effect of the intervention by the Fed, which has pumped around $3 trillion into the financial system, is the lowering of the yield on US Treasury bonds as a result of the central bank’s purchases of government debt.
The yield on the 10-year Treasury bond, a benchmark for both US and global financial markets, is now around 0.6 percent, a full percentage point below its level in February. With the yield on government debt now bringing a negative return when inflation is taken into account, this has fuelled a turn to the stock market, gold and corporate debt. This search for a positive return has sparked what has been termed an “everything rally.”
But the rise of the market rests on very shaky foundations as evidenced last week when the minutes of the Fed’s July meeting were published, sending a tremor through Wall Street.
Contrary to many expectations in the market, they showed that the Fed had still not determined into “forward guidance” policy, that is, firm guarantees that there will be no tightening of monetary policy into the indefinite future, including a commitment to purchase bonds to set a cap on bond yields.
With the US government to issue more bonds to finance its debt, this measure is regarded in some quarters as necessary to insure that the increased supply of bonds does not lead to a fall in their price and a consequent rise in interest rates.
Commenting on the massive disconnect between the underlying economy and the stock market, an article in Bloomberg noted that “any number of looming threats could bring the historic rally in US equities to a screeching halt.” They could include conflict over the re-opening of schools, the November election, the conflicts with China or the effects of US monetary policy.
Then there is the issue of the massive increase in corporate debt—more than $1.6 trillion over the past few months. Such is the extent of the debt mountain that Bloomberg reported that an analysis conducted by its intelligence unit revealed that the average below investment-grade firm (or junk-rated company) had debt levels relative to earnings so high in the middle of the year that they would have triggered warnings from bank regulators had they occurred a few years ago.
However, it noted, regulators had dropped those warnings which a few years ago had applied only to a few but which today “could apply to many more.”
Gold has also been part of the “everything rally”—a rise sparked by the search for profit as its price reaches record heights and underlying uncertainty about the stability of the global monetary system as trillions of dollars are created at the press of a computer button by central banks.
While it has been on the rise, the gold price is highly volatile and so sudden downward movement is another factor that could trigger a collapse of the global financial house of cards.
Two weeks after powerful windstorm, Iowa faces humanitarian crisis
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/25/iowa-a25.html
By Jessica Goldstein
25 August 2020
More than two weeks after the powerful derecho windstorm devastated a large swath of the US Midwest on August 10, the working class and poor in the hard-hit state of Iowa are still suffering from the catastrophic damage caused by the storm in the face of a lack of resources or urgency from local, state and federal government agencies.
A total of 1.9 million residents across the region lost power due to the storm, with 1.4 million maximum simultaneous outages, broken down by state to 759,000 in Illinois, 585,000 in Iowa, 283,000 in Indiana, and 345,000 in other states such as Nebraska and Wisconsin.
Four total deaths due to the direct impact of the storm were reported, three in Iowa and one in Indiana. To add to the criminality of the response of the ruling class and government, there exist no warning systems for derechos although they have occurred in the past, a repetition of the failure to warn residents of tornados in many parts of the Midwest and South or to raise alarms in California over the wildfires that swept through the northern part of the state in 2018.
In Linn County, Iowa, where winds reached their highest velocity at 140 mph, residents face a serious humanitarian crisis. In the city of Cedar Rapids, the second-largest city in the state with a population of 126,326, every one of the city’s 60,000 homes and businesses were damaged to some degree, according to Mayor Brad Hart. Across Iowa, the storm severely damaged an estimated 82,000 homes. In the immediate aftermath of the storm, roads were impassible, cell phone service was very spotty, and trash removal was stopped across much of the state.
At a Monday press conference on the state of emergency in the city, Cedar Rapids Department of Public Works officials explained that crews are continuing to work to remove an estimated 48,000 tons of debris from curbsides. To underscore both the city and state’s utter lack of preparation for such a disaster, officials noted that massive piles of debris in Cedar Rapids are continuing to pile up, with residents responsible for moving and hauling felled trees and other debris to their curbs for pickup. The total timeframe for cleanup and removal of tree debris in the Cedar Rapids area is expected to take months.
The city is using an outside contractor for pickup, meaning that it does not have the resources itself to coordinate cleanup from a natural disaster despite the recent experiences of major floods in the city in 2008 and 2016.
Meanwhile, traffic signals are still not fully operational, and most street and safety road signs have not been repaired. A curfew in Cedar Rapids that had been set following the storm to keep residents off hazardous roads, blocked by felled trees and power lines, has now been lifted indefinitely, yet roads are still blocked or unsafe for travel in several areas.
Beth Malicki of local Iowa news station KCRG spoke to PBS about the anger of the residents toward the callous response of officials at all levels of government toward their immediate needs “What residents say they need most is the basics. Shelter, food, water, ice to keep insulin cold. They're not asking...to rebuild everything, because right now, this is a humanitarian crisis," she said.
Describing the popular response to the pace of aid and lack of any organization, she continued, "They're outraged; that's an understatement. There's been this lack of urgency in covering it. It's so desperate that people from nearby communities that weren't as hard-hit are going door-to-door to check on people”
The anger, she noted, is directed at "decision-makers who they feel did not move quickly and effectively enough at all levels," local, state and federal. "We've found people stuck in their homes...that's not our job as media...we're not supposed to be emergency responders, or advocates of anything but the truth."
Malicki went on to admit that FEMA had called her newsroom because they were not able to get through to Cedar Rapids city officials to find out where aid was needed. "These people are living in imagery that is unimaginable to be happening in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in the United States of America."
With the lack of any coordinated government response, residents must rely on charitable organizations for food assistance. At the press conference, the Salvation Army reported that 1,250 people were served lunch and dinner by the organization in the past week, but because the gym cafeteria was damaged by the storm, it has only the resources to provide grab-and-go meals twice daily on Wednesdays and Thursdays, hardly enough for the number of residents who are in need.
Cedar Rapids officials could not provide an update on exactly how many residents have been displaced, but estimate that 1,700 housing units were impacted by the storm—far lower than reported across other media outlets—and that the need for housing assistance for families will likely extend to two to three months in an area where temporary housing in hotels and motels “is continuously in flux.”
Among the many residents who had their homes completely destroyed are several hundred families living in an apartment complex in Cedar Rapids that is home mainly to refugees from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Micronesia, who are all the more vulnerable due to their tenuous immigration status and inability to understand English. After the storm, most residents had nowhere to go and many stayed in dangerous apartments with no roofs and with wires hanging down and nails and sharp objects jutting from walls.
Volunteer Kelly McMann described the desperate conditions to PBS, explaining, "It feels like [we’re] in a third-world nation here, this is like our version of a [Hurricane] Katrina, minus the deaths." The comparison to the devastating 2005 hurricane was apt, in both the scope of its damage and the government’s negligent response.
Cedar Rapids city manager Jeff Pomeranz defended the city's highly inadequate response to the crisis in saying, "This is an unprecedented disaster...we've got council members working around the clock trying to make sure residents have a place to go."
Alliant Energy, which supplies power to Linn County, where Cedar Rapids sits, reported that 99 percent of customers finally had power restored 13 days post-storm. Mayor Hart told reporters at Monday’s press conference that all power should be restored in the city in the coming days—over two weeks after the storm ended—and that “only” 650 city residents still remain without power. In his comments, he made clear that the city is relying heavily on volunteer firefighters for recovery efforts, further underscoring the total lack of preparedness for the storm.
Hart went on to detail the austerity aid packages for residents that are being provided through Federal Emergency Management Agency grants requested by Republican Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds. These include disaster loans of up to $200,000 in low-interest loans to homeowners, and additional assistance to homeowners and renters of up to $40,000 for terms of up to 30 years.
Governor Reynolds is scheduled to visit Cedar Rapids Tuesday to announce the distribution of Small Business Administration loans to businesses, many of which have been completely destroyed.
The widespread damage from the storm also threatens a possible food shortage in the US in the coming year, as over 14 million acres of crops were wiped out as wind gusts whipped across the state, exacerbating the hunger crisis brought on by job losses and rising food prices during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The impact to Iowa’s farmland was so great that it was visible on satellite images taken by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Crops were flattened by the winds and had leaves stripped away by hail. Lance Lillibridge of the Iowa Corn Growers Association told Fox News that the storm destroyed 8.7 million acres of corn and 5.3 million acres of soybean, resulting in "a looming natural disaster that could affect the nation's food supply."
According to Lillibridge, without federal aid, many farmers will be in a dangerous situation where they "will probably just go under and be done." Even greater of a concern is the destruction of giant grain storage bins across the state that imploded under the force of the winds, which reached sustained speeds of 80-140 mph lasting for 40-50 mins, equivalent to a category 4 hurricane. The duration of high wind gusts was longer than derechos of the past, which typically endured less than 30 mins.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration expects the August 2020 derecho will be one of the costliest storm events in the past decade, with agricultural economists estimating damage of $4 billion. While the state at all levels has been utterly slow to respond with even the bare minimum of aid, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, whose company announced in February the opening of its first fulfillment center in the state just outside of Iowa City, increased his net worth by $13 billion during a single day in July.
As it was with the wildfires in California and the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina, the criminal nature of the ruling class is revealed in its response to the humanitarian crisis in Iowa. The government and the corporations are allowed to get off scot-free, and the working class is left to pay for its negligence.
The Trump administration has treated the derecho as if it was another thunderstorm that residents will push through, a mirroring of the same attitude taken by the ruling class toward the coronavirus pandemic. Governor Reynolds waited until August 13 to declare a disaster in the state and did not request federal aid until August 16, asking for only $4 billion from the federal government.
The Trump administration approved a paltry $45 million of Governor Reynolds' aid request on August 17, covering 16 counties, for debris removal and repairs to government buildings and utilities. The administration did not immediately approve the individual assistance request for 27 counties that includes $82.7 million for homes destroyed or with major damage and $3.77 billion for agriculture damage to farmland, grain bins and buildings and $100 million for private utility repairs. An amended individual assistance plan, with cuts that Reynolds agreed to, was implemented on August 20.
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