https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=incGQIrHGkE&ab_channel=ChristoAivalis
Thursday, November 12, 2020
Thousands protest in Peru against impeachment, pandemic and economic implosion
Rafael Azul
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/11/12/peru-n12.html?pk_campaign=newsletter&pk_kwd=wsws
Wednesday was the third day of mass protests across Peru. Thousands mobilized in protests against the political, economic and health crises racking this South American country. The demonstrators were met with water cannon and police repression.
On Monday, November 9, Peru’s Congress removed President MartÃn Vizcarra from office. The next day Vizcarra was replaced by Manuel Merino, president of the Congress. Demonstrations took place in various cities in opposition to Vizcarra’s ouster. As president until elections are held on April 11, 2021, Merino is also continuing to preside over congress.
Merino is the third president in the span of one presidential term; Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, Vizcarra’s predecessor, was elected in 2016.
Merino defended the congressional action, defining it as a “process of democratic transition” to defend the Peruvian nation and declaring that the assembly’s votes “were not purchased” and followed due process.
Vizcarra had been impeached for “permanent moral incapacity.” It was alleged that he had received bribes connected to construction projects in 2011-2014, when Vizcarra was governor of the southern province of Moquegua. The accusations are based upon plea bargains by other defendants, without any trial or even investigation having taken place.
Vizcarra’s removal resulted from the legislature’s second impeachment attempt. An impeachment attempt two months ago, allegedly for “influence peddling,” did not obtain the required two-thirds vote of the legislature.
The US State Department indicated that US officials were “following events closely.”
“We look to Peruvian institutions to uphold the constitution and the rule of law,” a spokesman declared. “We note that national elections are scheduled for April. As a region of democracy and prosperity, we call on Peruvians to continue to pursue their political ends via a peaceful, lawful, democratic process.”
Ironically and hypocritically, the statement came on the same day that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told a State Department news conference that there would be a “smooth transition to a second Trump administration,” backing the attempt by the White House to overturn the results of the US presidential elections.
The State Department’s declaration had more to do with its desire to quell the popular reaction to Vizcarra’s removal than with any genuine defense of the democratic process.
In Lima, Peru’s capital, the decision to replace Vizcarra with Merino brought many people into the streets. On Monday night and Tuesday, crowds marched and rallied to protest the Merino’s appointment. A Tuesday protest march along the streets of downtown Lima was blocked from reaching the Congress building. In the course of ten hours of protests, dozens were arrested and several were injured by the police.
Protests are also taking place in the cities of Ayacucho, Cusco, Trujillo, Piura and Iquitos, centers of mining and industry.
While Vizcarra has denied all the accusations against him, political corruption has been endemic in Peru’s ruling elites. Vizcarra himself became president upon the resignation of President Kuczynski because of corruption charges in March 2018 involving the Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht. Nearly every living Peruvian ex-president has been implicated in corruption probes.
Vizcarra’s removal was carried out by all the political parties represented in the legislature. Sixty-eight out of those who voted (out of 130 legislators) have themselves been accused of corrupt practices and are barred from running again for office.
Vizcarra’s removal and the appointment of Merino have taken place in the context of a deepening social and economic crisis. In addition to its government being racked by accusations of corruption, Peru is an epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic, with the highest per capita COVID-19 mortality rate in the Americas.
While the Peruvian politicians continue to enrich themselves through service to the country’s financial oligarchy and foreign capital, Peru implodes. By August of this year, Peru’s gross domestic product had declined 30 percent; unemployment is 40 percent higher than in 2019. Many companies have declared bankruptcy and Peru’s economy has yet to bottom out.
Tourism has contracted by 90 percent, construction by 67 percent and mining by 37 percent.
Like his predecessor, Vizcarra ruled as an enemy of the working class and agent of the mining cartels. In June, following three months of lockdown, without having stopped the coronavirus and under pressure from the ruling class, Vizcarra opened the economy, with devastating effects. Hospitals have run out of resources; the rate of new cases and deaths continues to accelerate. A regime headed by Merino will only deepen the attacks on the Peruvian working class.
Metro Detroit hospitalizations rise sharply as second wave of COVID-19 cases surges across Michigan
Kevin Reed
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/11/12/mich-n12.html?pk_campaign=newsletter&pk_kwd=wsws
Hospitalizations of people infected with COVID-19 in the Detroit metropolitan area increased dramatically last weekend as a second wave of the pandemic surged across Michigan and dwarfed the case numbers of last spring.
A report in Bridge Magazine on Monday said that hospitals “in metro Detroit’s six counties are treating over 1,300 patients, up 200 from Friday alone.” Among the hospital systems facing the COVID-19 surge are Beaumont Health, which has experienced an increase in cases from 172 on Oct. 25 to 377 on Sunday, the report said.
Dr. Nick Gilpin, Beaumont Health’s director of infection prevention epidemiology, said, “We’ve had a notable rise in COVID-19 cases in metro Detroit. Community positivity rates have jumped to 8–11 percent in the area.”
The number of daily coronavirus cases in Michigan reached 6,473 on Wednesday, which is more than three times greater than the peak of 1,953 last April during the early days of the pandemic. There have been a total of 217,000 confirmed cases and 7,600 deaths from the pandemic in Michigan.
According to data maintained by the state of Michigan, the major hospitals in metro Detroit, including Ascension Health, Beaumont Health, Detroit Medical Center, Henry Ford Health System, McLaren Health, Michigan Medicine and Trinity Health, all had bed occupancy of between 75 percent and 85 percent as of Wednesday. These seven hospital networks have a total of 1,670 COVID-19 cases, with 340 patients in intensive care.
The surge in cases and hospitalizations has forced many hospitals to restrict visitor access. Henry Ford Health System issued a statement on Tuesday saying that, while the hospital “recognizes the importance of the support by loved ones during a patient’s hospitalization,” the decision to restrict visitation and limit family presence is based on “the health and safety of our patients, our team members and others in our facilities.”
Dave Coulter, executive of Oakland County, a suburban county north of Detroit, said during a live Facebook event on Tuesday, “Over the weekend our seven-day average for confirmed cases spiked to over 400 per day for the first time. That’s a pace of over 2,800 COVID-19 cases per week.”
Hospitalizations across the state of Michigan have quadrupled since Oct. 1. Ruthanne Sudderth, spokeswoman for the Michigan Health and Hospital Association, told Bridge Magazine, “We are getting close to a point where people won’t be able to get care for COVID” or other health issues.
The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS) renewed contracts on Oct. 1 with Suburban Collection shopping mall in Novi and TCF Convention Center in downtown Detroit to be used as backup emergency hospital bed facilities. Lynn Sutfin, spokesperson for MDHHS, said, “We hope that additional hospitalization space isn’t needed, but we are incredibly concerned about the increasing cases and hospitalizations.”
Sutfin added, “Although our hospitalizations are not what they were during the spring surge, over half of COVID-19 inpatients are outside of Southeast Michigan. We are concerned about what may happen if hospitals become overwhelmed.”
According to a report in the Detroit Free Press, the Michigan health care system is not prepared for the surge in cases. Hospital medical executives warn that the systems do not have adequate Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) or staffing—especially nurses and respiratory specialists—to handle a surge that lasts for a prolonged period.
Dr. Lydia Watson, senior vice president and chief medical officer of MidMichigan Health, which has medical centers in Alpena, Clare, Gladwin, Gratiot, Midland, Mount Pleasant and West Branch, said, “We currently have adequate supplies—anywhere from seven to 30 days of everything that we need.” Watson warned that if there is a significant increase in patient loads, this might not be enough.
Michigan Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer told news media on Tuesday that her administration was investigating “next steps” to combat the surge that has been building since mid-June and took off exponentially at the beginning of October. The governor said she was “having ongoing regular conversations” with MDHHS about how to handle the increase.
In early October, the Michigan Supreme Court struck down as unconstitutional a law that the governor had used to issue previous stay-at-home orders and other executive declarations pertaining to the pandemic. Whitmer has since used the authorities of MDHSS to implement measures such as a new mask mandate, but the Republican-controlled legislature is continuing to obstruct such rules.
While the Democrats are presenting the present surge as the singular product of the reduction of gubernatorial executive authority, the fact is that both the Democrats and Republicans in Michigan have worked together to ensure that the economy was reopened despite the ongoing and grave threat posed to public health. Both parties have supported the drive by employers to force workers back into the factories and workplaces and to get schoolchildren back into the schools.
As reported on the World Socialist Web Site yesterday, a wide-ranging cover-up of new infections has been underway in the auto industry as demonstrated at the FCA Sterling Heights Stamping Plant (SSP). In the first ten days of November, there have been nearly the same number of infections of auto workers at SSP as all of October. While at least 22 FCA workers have died from COVID-19 since production was resumed in May, the company has not reported anything to workers since the end of June.
As has been the case throughout the pandemic, the working class and poorest sections of the population have borne the brunt of the social and economic impact of COVID-19. For example, the overall health of workers in Detroit—including an epidemic of underlying conditions such as diabetes, heart disease and other respiratory ailments that compromise the immune system—combined with a lack of access to adequate health care services, effectively turns an infection with coronavirus into a death sentence.
A report in Bloomberg Businessweek on Oct. 21 revealed the fact that the working class population in an area in southwest Detroit, near the zip code 48217, has been poisoned by industrial pollution for decades. The article states, “People in 48217 live on average seven fewer years than in the country as a whole, and asthma hospitalization rates in the area are more than twice as high as those of Michigan and about five times higher than those of the US.”
The residential area, where 40 percent of the population lives in poverty, is in very close proximity to two dozen major industrial sites including “mills run by U.S. Steel and the mining company Cleveland-Cliffs, as well as DTE Energy’s River Rouge coal-fired power station, a Great Lakes Water Authority treatment facility, an oil refinery, a drywall manufacturer, a salt pile, a lime quarry, three scrap-metal processors, a chemical plant, four concrete suppliers, an asphalt maker, Ford’s River Rouge production facility.”
Although Bloomberg attempts to present the impact of these conditions on the health of the working class as a race issue—one of the neighborhoods is 80 percent African American—the reality is that this area of the city is one of most ethnically integrated in all of Detroit.
Medical experts are coming to the conclusion that long-term exposure to air pollution makes it very difficult for the immune system to fight off the coronavirus infection of the respiratory system. Bloomberg quotes Francesca Dominici, a professor of biostatistics at Harvard, who published an article showing that death rates from COVID-19 are connected with even modest increases in long-term pollution exposure.
Dominici said, “If you live in a community where you’ve been exposed to all kinds of toxicants and air pollutants, we know that your lungs have been inflamed for a very long time before, and if you contract the virus, your ability to respond to the virus is compromised.”
Krystal Ball Interview: Democrats' Gaslighting Should Be Met With More Primary Challenges
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZ6GAvL7WLM&ab_channel=StatusCoup
North Dakota reaches 100 percent hospital capacity, tells health care workers to continue working if infected with COVID-19
Alex Findijs
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/11/12/ndcv-n12.html?pk_campaign=newsletter&pk_kwd=wsws
The Governor of North Dakota, Republican Doug Burgum, announced during a news conference on Monday that hospitals have reached 100 percent capacity across the state due to the rapid spike in cases of COVID-19.
North Dakota has become the epicenter of the outbreaks occurring in the Midwest, with daily cases breaching 1,000 last week and active cases reaching 11,719 on November 10. Over 1.5 percent of the entire state population is currently infected with the virus.
Total cases have surpassed 56,000 and total deaths are closing in 700, twice the number of one month ago. Of the 30 COVID-related deaths on Monday, a third were from the Bismarck area. And in Ward County, which has seen 83 deaths in total, two-thirds have come in just the last two weeks.
The rapid rise in cases across the state has put the health care system on the brink of collapse. As of November 10, there are 383 patients hospitalized for COVID-19, with 48 of them in the intensive care unit. With 20 percent of all hospital beds filled by coronavirus patients, North Dakota hospitals are filled to capacity and face a shortage of staff.
In a desperate bid to avoid staff shortages amidst the crisis, the North Dakota government has issued an order that allows nurses who have tested positive for the virus to continue working if they exhibit an asymptomatic condition.
This decision came at the request of hospital administrators, who are terrified by the prospect of losing staff during a dire health emergency which is growing worse by the day.
The extreme decision is recommended by the Strategies to Mitigate Healthcare Personnel Staffing Shortages update on July 17, issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Allowing sick nurses to work is considered a “crisis capacity strategy” for workers who are “well enough and willing,” and is considered a last-ditch effort to maintain adequate staffing, highlighting the severity of the situation in North Dakota
In order to prevent transmission by infected health care personnel, the CDC recommends that they be given the opportunity to conduct telework first. If conditions require them to work on site then they should only interact with infected patients and should be prohibited from contact with immunocompromised patients. CDC guidelines recommend that infected health care workers should only interact with infected patients if necessary, and working with non-infected patients is a “last resort.”
The CDC also notes that infected health care workers can still transmit the virus to coworkers, and provisions should be made to distance infected workers from other staff. This is will be a difficult task for hospitals and it is likely that infected workers will transmit the virus to their coworkers even with precautionary measures taken.
North Dakota has progressed to the stage of allowing infected workers to care for infected patients in hospitals and nursing homes already.
Regardless of whether keeping infected workers on the job can be done safely, it is clear that the necessity to do so is the product of negligent health policies pursued by Governor Burgum.
The first-term Republican governor has refused to issue a mask mandate for the state, opting instead to merely encourage residents to wear them. The developing crisis has since tempered Burgum’s opposition to mask requirements somewhat, with the governor saying he was open to allowing local ordinances on the issue.
The urban centers of Bismarck, Grand Forks, Williston and Fargo have passed local mask mandates in response to the pandemic, but most of the mask mandates around the state carry no punishment for failing to comply.
The most that Burgum has done was raising the risk level in all North Dakota counties to “high risk.” This comes with recommendations that all restaurants, bars and event venues operate at 25 percent capacity. Throughout the entire pandemic Burgum has never once raised a risk level to “critical,” which would require the closure of businesses and a mandatory stay-at-home order.
Burgum is clearly toeing the line of President Donald Trump, who has consistently lied about the danger of the pandemic and promoted the policy of “herd immunity” which places profit over lives. He has contradicted the scientific work of the CDC, claiming that “shutting down the economy doesn’t necessarily slow the spread” of the virus.
This is of course false.
A recent study published by the CDC on the lockdown in Italy concluded that the lockdown was instrumental in bringing the virus under control.
On the question of herd immunity, the World Health Organization (WHO) has stated that “attempts to reach ‘herd immunity’ through exposing people to a virus are scientifically problematic and unethical. Letting COVID-19 spread through populations, of any age or health status will lead to unnecessary infections, suffering and death.”
The positivity rate in North Dakota is currently around 19 percent, indicating uncontrolled spread and a severe lack of testing. If nothing is done to stop the spread of the virus now, North Dakota, a state of just 760,000 people, may see tens of thousands more fall ill, and thousands die.
The policies of the North Dakota government, in the face of full hospital capacity and continuously rising cases, are a clear sign that the state government is placing profits over people, and that the policy of herd immunity has no scientific validity.
COVID Nurse on Whether President Biden Will Reverse the Crisis
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLWVlz783Dk&ab_channel=StatusCoup
Trump, Republicans continue campaign to overturn election
Patrick Martin
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/11/12/elec-n12.html?pk_campaign=newsletter&pk_kwd=wsws
Democratic President-elect Joe Biden increased his overall lead in the popular vote to more than five million Wednesday, with 77.4 million votes, the most ever won by a US presidential candidate, compared to 72.3 million votes for President Donald Trump.
Biden’s percentage of the popular vote reached 50.8 percent, as more votes were counted in the heavily Democratic West Coast states, which allow late-arriving mail ballots as long as they were postmarked by November 3. His share of the popular vote is the highest for any candidate challenging an incumbent president since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1932 landslide victory over Herbert Hoover, exceeding that of Ronald Reagan in 1980 (50.7 percent).
The former vice president maintained his leads in four closely contested states, with his margins actually increasing to 14,112 in Georgia, 36,726 in Nevada and 50,215 in Pennsylvania. Biden’s lead in Arizona fell to 12,813, but nearly every ballot has been counted there and both Fox News and the Associated Press “called” the state for the Democrat on election night.
Victory in those four states would give Biden 306 electoral votes, compared to 232 for Trump, when the Electoral College assembles in various state capitals on December 14. That assumes Trump maintains his 70,000-vote lead in the remaining “uncalled” state, North Carolina, which is awaiting the counting of tens of thousands of provisional, mail-in and military ballots.
The scale of Biden’s popular vote victory and his comfortable margin in the Electoral College—the same 306 electoral votes that Trump called a “landslide” when he hit that mark in 2016—only underscore the extraordinarily anti-democratic and ominous character of Trump’s refusal to accept the outcome of the election. This intransigence has been backed by the vast majority of Republicans in the House and Senate, who have refused to acknowledge that Biden is president-elect.
Vote-counting, recanvassing and litigation continued in all the closely contested states Wednesday, with the Trump campaign failing to make any gains on the legal front. By one tabulation, Trump’s advocates were 0 for 10 in court decisions and had so far been unable to convince a single judge to delay the certification of the results.
In Georgia, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, rejected demands from the state’s two Republican senators that he resign for alleged faulty oversight of the voting, in which both Republican incumbents were forced into a January 5 runoff against Democratic challengers. Raffensperger said there would be a hand recount of the more than five million votes cast in the state, affecting both the presidential race and the two Senate contests.
In Arizona, the state attorney general, Republican Mark Brnovich, said Trump was “very, very unlikely” to win enough of the remaining uncounted ballots to overcome Biden’s lead. “It does appear Joe Biden will win Arizona,” he told Fox Business, saying there was no evidence of fraud or widespread irregularities in the voting or the vote-counting.
In Michigan, Republican challenges to vote-counting in suburban Oakland County, which Biden carried by a wide margin, were thrown out Tuesday. Overall, Trump’s defeat in the state, by a sizeable 146,000 votes, came from a swing against him among white working class voters, particularly in the Wayne, Oakland and Macomb County suburbs, compared to 2016.
On Wednesday, the Trump campaign went to federal court seeking to bar the state from certifying Biden’s victory in Michigan. The resort to federal rather than state courts is significant, since it indicates an intention to begin a chain of legal appeals that would take the issue to the US Supreme Court, where Trump has appointed three of the nine justices, including Amy Coney Barrett, confirmed and sworn in just before the election.
In the most critical state, Pennsylvania, whose 20 electoral votes put Biden over the top in the Electoral College, a Republican lawsuit was heard in Montgomery County, in the Philadelphia suburbs, which went heavily for Biden. The hearing included the following remarkable exchange in court, between Judge Richard P. Haaz and Trump campaign lawyer Jonathan S. Goldstein, over 592 mail ballots being challenged by the Republicans.
THE COURT: I am asking you a specific question, and I am looking for a specific answer. Are you claiming that there is any fraud in connection with these 592 disputed ballots?
MR. GOLDSTEIN: To my knowledge at present, no.
THE COURT: Are you claiming that there is any undue or improper influence upon the elector with respect to these 592 ballots?
MR. GOLDSTEIN: To my knowledge at present, no.
On Monday, the most sensational allegation of Trump’s supporters in Pennsylvania, about systematic mail-ballot vote fraud in Erie collapsed when a postal worker who had come forward as a purported whistleblower admitted that his claims of ballot-stuffing were fabricated. The postal worker had received $130,000 in donations from right-wing sources before he made his admission. Senator Lindsey Graham, Attorney General William Barr and Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani had all cited this false account as the basis for charges of vote fraud.
It is increasingly clear that the purpose of the flurry of lawsuits filed by the Trump campaign is not to actually shift the results of the vote-counting, since there is no evidence of fraud and the number of ballots in question is too small to affect the outcome. The aim is to discredit the vote-counting as a pretext for Republican-controlled state legislatures in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona to step in and name slates of pro-Trump electors, rather than the pro-Biden electors chosen by the voters.
There is tight timetable for Trump and his co-conspirators to engineer such an electoral coup in Michigan. Most Michigan counties have completed their mandatory recanvass of the balloting, and the state is on track to meet its November 17 deadline for certification of the vote. That would be followed by Biden electors assembling in the state capital, Lansing, to cast the state’s 16 electoral votes.
Not counting the electoral votes of Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada and Arizona, Biden would have 227 electoral votes and Trump 232, creating an illusion of parity. Actually, Biden is leading in all six states by a combined total of 280,000 votes.
Trump needs to block the certification of Biden’s victory in at least four of these states in order to keep him below 270 in the Electoral College, or engineer the outright hijacking of electoral votes by the state legislatures, which are Republican-controlled in all but Nevada.
At least one state representative in Wisconsin, Republican Joe Sanfelippo, has endorsed the selection of Trump delegates for the Electoral College, setting aside the popular vote. He has been appointed by Assembly Speaker Robin Vos to a committee that is investigating the election results.
A group of Pennsylvania state representatives have backed a similar effort to steal that state’s electoral votes, or at least delay certification of a Biden victory, required by November 23, but the Republican leader of the state Senate has so far disavowed it. That is why Trump recently tweeted about the need to elect a new leadership for the Republican caucus in the Pennsylvania legislature.
In both Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the state legislatures would have to defy state laws that award the state’s electoral votes to the presidential candidate who receives the most support from state voters.
As Trump and the Republican Party are well aware, their greatest asset is the cowardice and duplicity of their political opponents, Biden and the Democratic Party. Biden is doing everything in his power to downplay the dictatorial character of Trump’s moves, dismiss the danger to democratic rights, and politically disarm the population.
As the Socialist Equality Party (US) Political Committee explained in its statement (“Stop Trump’s conspiracy to nullify the 2020 elections!”) posted Wednesday on the World Socialist Web Site:
The only viable response to the conspiracy being hatched in the White House is the demand for the immediate removal of Trump, Pence and their co-conspirators.
This demand can be realized only through the independent intervention of the working class and the struggle to organize a nationwide political strike.
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