Terrifying Winter Ahead As HALF Of Hotels, Restaurants Face Closure

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MB2CHFO2zP8&ab_channel=SecularTalk

Workers’ lives are not expendable! Take action to stop the COVID-19 pandemic!

Marcus Day




https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/11/12/pers-n12.html?pk_campaign=newsletter&pk_kwd=wsws




Ten months into the COVID-19 pandemic in the US, daily new cases are shattering previous records as the virus surges uncontrolled throughout factories, workplaces, schools and communities.

The scale of illness and death is staggering. On Wednesday, new cases again set a record, with over 144,000 reported, according to the COVID Tracking Project.

Over 1,400 died from COVID-19 yesterday, reaching a level last seen in early August, with deaths set to explode as hospitals begin to be overrun. In El Paso, Texas, the bodies have piled up to such a point that six mobile morgues have been established, and four more are being prepared.

By the end of the year, experts warn, close to half a million people could be dead as the death rate surges in line with caseloads.

The homicidal policies of the capitalist oligarchy, demanding the subordination of the preservation of human life to the generation of profits, have led to a catastrophe. The disaster looming before millions of workers cannot be averted without emergency measures. Workers must demand the immediate shutdown of non-essential production, with full compensation for lost wages!

At every turn, the profit interests of the major corporations and banks are blocking the urgent measures necessary to bring the pandemic under control and save lives.

It is increasingly clear that industrial and other worksites are major vectors of virus transmission, despite the lying claims by corporate executives and trade union officials that effective safety protocols are in place. Roughly one-third of Illinois’ outbreaks since July 1 have been traced by the state to factories and workplaces. In additional data collected by the state but kept secret until leaked to the press, outbreaks were revealed to have taken place across a broad swath of corporate employers, including automakers Ford and Fiat Chrysler; logistics and delivery giants Amazon, UPS and DHL; and meat and food producers JBS, Frito Lay, Smithfield, and Tyson.

Across the state border from El Paso, meatpacking company Stampede Meat is suing the state of New Mexico in an effort to reopen, seeking to overturn the health department’s order to close for two weeks despite a new outbreak of cases among workers in late October, with 100 workers already having tested positive at the plant throughout the year. In its lawsuit, the company is citing President Trump’s April executive order stipulating that meat producers stay open under the Defense Production Act.

New research is demonstrating that offices and schools also pose significant risks of transmission. Employed adults who tested positive for COVID-19 were twice as likely to report regularly going to work at these locations than those who tested negative, according to a study released by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last week.

An accurate, detailed and comprehensive picture of the pandemic’s spread at workplaces is being covered up by the corporations, the trade unions, the corporate media, and local, state and federal officials. The capitalists and their defenders all fear that if the full scope of the extent of the virus and its imminent threat were made available to workers, they would overwhelmingly revolt and refuse to work, as happened in the wave of wildcat strikes which led to the shutdown of the auto industry and other non-essential businesses in March.

What information has come to light about the spread of the virus at auto factories explodes the lies by the companies and their accomplices in the United Auto Workers union that the plants are safe. Dozens to hundreds of cases have been reported by workers in recent days at plants, such as Fiat Chrysler’s (FCA) Sterling Heights Assembly and Stamping Plants and the Jefferson North Plant in the Detroit area, the FCA Tipton Transmission Plant and Faurecia Gladstone auto parts plant in Indiana, in addition to large outbreaks earlier reported at General Motors’ Wentzville, Missouri, plant, Ford’s Kentucky Truck Plant, and many others.

If it were not for the independent efforts by workers, who have begun to organize rank-and-file safety committees in collaboration with the World Socialist Web Site and the Socialist Equality Party, little to no information would have emerged at all about the number of cases and the blatant disregard of safety by the companies and the unions.

In contrast to the spring, when outbreaks were centered in New York City and other major urban areas, the pandemic is now surging through virtually the entirety of the US, urban and rural alike. Forty-two states are in the “red zone” for new cases, according to the latest report by the White House’s coronavirus task force, meaning they had a rate of over 100 people testing positive per 100,000 residents in the past week. “There is continued, accelerating community spread across the top half of the country,” the task force wrote, with “the most diffuse spread experienced to date.”

Even as there is no end in sight to the exponential rise in cases, hospitals and health systems are on the brink of being overwhelmed, facing widespread staffing and resource shortages.

Hospitalizations across the country reached a new peak yesterday of 65,368, with 3,404 more hospitalized patients than the day before. Some hospitals in the worst-hit states in the Midwest, including the Dakotas, Wisconsin, and Iowa, are already at capacity, and Illinois is set to run out of ICU beds by Thanksgiving. At the same time, a new explosion of cases is in the offing on the East Coast, with a 19 percent test positivity rate reported last week in Newark, New Jersey’s largest city.

A vast social crime is being carried out by the corporations and the government, with workers being threatened with unemployment, homelessness and hunger if they do not continue laboring at non-essential factories and workplaces and exposing themselves to the deadly virus—all in order to ensure there is not a moment’s let-up in profitmaking for the ruling class.

Both the Democrats and Republicans are in fundamental agreement that non-essential production must continue, and an incoming Biden administration, if it takes office, will be just as determined to keep business operating. The same underlying pro-corporate policy is being pursued in Europe, where governments of all political stripes have ensured industrial enterprises and schools remain open, resulting in a similar explosive growth in cases.

The result of these criminal policies is an utter catastrophe which, as terrible as it is, is set to worsen to a degree which is almost unimaginable. The worst nightmares of infectious disease experts are being realized.

If action by the working class is not taken, hundreds of thousands of lives in the US alone will be threatened and countless more throughout the world.

To save themselves and their loved ones, workers must take matters into their own hands. Rank-and-file safety committees must be expanded and organized to prepare walkouts to shut down the non-essential plants, warehouses and other workplaces. If governors, state and federal officials will not close the plants to protect lives, then workers must.

Rank-and-file committees must shut down non-essential workplaces and schools and demand full compensation and income security while the pandemic is brought under control. At essential workplaces such as food and medical supply producers, genuine safety measures must be implemented, overseen by workers’ safety committees in consultation with public health and infectious disease experts. A massive redistribution of wealth must take place, with resources directed towards implementing universal testing, contact tracing, free treatment provided to all, and social support provided to the unemployed.

The realization of such necessary life-saving measures requires the independent political mobilization of the working class in a struggle against the capitalist system, which subordinates all social needs, including life itself, to profit.

72% In Fox News Poll Want Government Run Healthcare System

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmlL8SRrImQ&ab_channel=SecularTalk

Russia, Turkey negotiate cease-fire in Armenian-Azeri war over Karabakh

Alex Lantier




https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/11/12/cauc-n12.html?pk_campaign=newsletter&pk_kwd=wsws




On November 10, a cease-fire backed by Moscow and Ankara went into effect in the six-week war between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region. Unlike previous truces negotiated by Russian, French and US officials which collapsed immediately, this cease-fire has so far held. This appears to be largely because, unlike previous ceasefires, it has support from the Azeri government and its main international backer, Turkey.

The two former Soviet republics have repeatedly waged fratricidal wars over the Karabakh, which first broke out in 1988 in the run-up to the Stalinist regime’s 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union. Whereas Armenia took over the Nagorno-Karabakh in the 1988-1994 war, however, the current cease-fire agreed by Russian, Armenian and Azeri officials makes substantial concessions to Azeri territorial demands, handing much of the Karabakh to Azerbaijan.

Recent weeks saw major Azeri advances, relying on devastating strikes from Turkish and Israeli high-altitude drones. Evading Armenia’s older air defense systems with tactics worked out against Syrian and Russian forces in the decade-long NATO proxy war in Syria, they destroyed Armenian missile batteries, artillery and armored vehicles. After Azeri forces reported this weekend that they had captured Shusha, Nagorno-Karabakh’s second-largest city, Armenia agreed to a ceasefire.

According to the truce, Armenian and Azeri troops are to initially remain on their current positions. As 1,960 Russian peacekeepers with armored vehicles and equipment deploy along the contact line, however, Armenian troops will withdraw. Armenia will retain those parts of the Karabakh it currently holds, including the capital, Stepanakert. It must also return to Azerbaijan the districts of Agdam and Kalbajar, which it took over during the 1988-1994 war, by November 20.

The deal also calls to secure complex land routes through the mountainous region. Azerbaijan is to guarantee the security of the Lachin Corridor linking Stepanakert to Shusha and then to Armenia. The corridor will be patrolled by Russian peacekeepers. Armenia will guarantee the security of land routes from Azerbaijan via Armenia to the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic, a landlocked Azeri-administered enclave separated from Azerbaijan by Armenian territory.

This shaky cease-fire, even if it holds, will not resolve the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, which the region’s capitalist regimes have proven incapable of resolving for three decades. Not only does it leave the way open to more aggressive nationalist elements on both sides to advance claims on the entire enclave, but it is likely to trigger new population displacements Armenian authorities only 10 days to abandon regions they have held for a quarter century.

This comes after a new, massive loss of life in the latest war. Russian officials have stated, based on estimates privately communicated to them by Azeri and Armenian officials, that at least 5,000 people died in the war from September 27 to October 22. Official Azeri or Armenian casualty totals have still not been published, however. Moreover, Azeri forces’ advances and Armenian bombardments also forced an estimated 90,000 Armenians and 40,000 Azeris to flee their homes.

Nonetheless, officials across the region applauded the deal, which Turkish official sources said was negotiated on Saturday between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Kremlin press secretary Dmitri Peskov applauded the “not insignificant efforts” involved.

The Foreign Ministry of Iran, which like Russia has traditionally supported Armenia, declared that it was “content about the signing of an agreement” and expressed “hope that the agreement would lead to the final arrangements for long-lasting peace in the Caucasus.”

After Azeri President Ilham Aliyev hailed the ceasefire as being “of historical importance” and a “capitulation” by Armenia, Turkish Defense Minister Hulusi Akar visited the Azeri capital, Baku yesterday and declared: “The present situation is very pleasing for us. This operation is an awakening ... The Azeri army has shown its power to the whole world.”

In Armenia, where the government had largely hidden its growing military setbacks, protesters stormed the parliament and beat parliamentary speaker Ararat Mizoyan.

The cease-fire is a humiliating defeat for Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan. Elected in 2018 after mass protests against former Prime Minister Serzh Sargsyan, he advanced a chauvinist platform demanding full international recognition of Armenian authority over the Karabakh.

Pashinyan announced on Facebook the cease-fire handing over much of the Karabakh to Azerbaijan, calling it “unspeakably painful.” He continued, “The decision is made basing [sic] on the deep analyses of the combat situation and in discussion with best experts of the field. … This is not a victory but there is not defeat until you consider yourself defeated. We will never consider ourselves defeated and this shall become a new start of an era of our national unity and rebirth.”

Pashinyan had to hide as protesters stormed his official residence, tearing his nameplate off his office door and chanting, “Nikol betrayed us.”

Middle East Eye reporters at protests in Yerevan saw a woman shout at riot police: “I have lost all my relatives. I have lost my house. What are you going to do about it?” Another man, a former Armenian inhabitant of the Nagorno-Karabakh, who fought in the 1988-1994 war but had to flee to Yerevan in the current war, approved the cease-fire: “If we had carried on, we would only have lost. Many more people would have been killed.”

The Stalinist dissolution of the Soviet Union proved to have disastrous geopolitical consequences, throwing the Middle East and Central Asia open to bloody ethnic conflict and imperialist wars.

Enormous uncertainty still hangs over the cease-fire. As Russia and Turkey wage proxy wars as they back rival sides in the civil wars triggered by NATO intervention in both Libya and Syria, Azeri forces shot down a Russian Mi-24 on November 9. Baku subsequently called it a “tragic mistake.” The Kremlin also appeared to contradict Turkish claims that they would deploy peacekeepers to enforce the ceasefire, saying that only Russian peacekeepers would be deployed.

Perhaps the greatest danger comes from the explosive political crisis in Washington after the 2020 elections, and the risk of new US wars in the region. As Trump launches a coup trying to remain in office even after Democrat Joe Biden won the vote, both Trump and Biden have signaled a highly aggressive policy. While Trump nearly went to war with Iran last year, the Democratic Party has relentlessly demanded aggression against Russia, denouncing Trump as a Russian agent.

Significantly, both Russia and Iran have warned against CIA-backed Syrian Islamist militias who were transported from the Syrian war to Azerbaijan with tacit Turkish support. Iranian state-run IRNA agency warned that “the Islamic Republic’s firm response to the terrorists should they transgress against the Iranian borders is a calculated, firm and strategic position. … If after having expelled the [Al Qaeda-linked militias] from Syria and Iraq, some people help their deployment in Iranian borders, they have certainly made a grave mistake.”

Russia, whose war-torn regions of Chechnya and Dagestan also border Azerbaijan, made similar warnings. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov called to “prevent the transfer of mercenaries, whose number in the conflict zone, according to available data, is already approaching 2,000. In particular, Putin raised the issue during a phone call with Turkish President Erdoğan on October 27 and during regular conversations with leaders of Azerbaijan and Armenia.”

Concerns are mounting in Russia’s post-Soviet capitalist oligarchy that this truce could prove to be not the end but the beginning of a regional war across the former territory of the Soviet Union. This was the subject of the financial daily Vedomosti ’s article yesterday titled “How Russia Lost the Second Karabakh War.”

Warning that Ankara’s successful support for the ethnic-Turkic Azeris would encourage “pan-Turkic plans,” it wrote: “The balance of power in Turkic republics of Central Asia will also change radically … There is no doubt that Turkic nationalist and separatist groups inside Russia itself will also act more strongly.” It added, “Also we must suppose that this operation, judging from its execution, was not planned by the Azeris, or even by the Turks.”

Noting that the NATO-backed regime in Ukraine is now purchasing Turkish drones as it pursues its conflict with Russia in eastern Ukraine, Vedomosti called for a Russian build-up of “loitering weapons and strike drones.” It added, “The Armenian catastrophe of 2020 must serve as a warning to others, so that we do not end up learning a similar lesson.”

These statements are urgent warnings of the necessity of a struggle against ethnic nationalism and its encouragement by Stalinist forces, and the building of an international and socialist, that is to say Trotskyist, anti-war movement against imperialism among workers across the region and the world.

Hilariously Out of Touch Democrats Blame Leftists for THEIR Failures

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IefyVRoy_c4&ab_channel=TheHumanistReport

Fox News show has total contempt for its own viewers

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emdYuxqgiPw&ab_channel=ChristoAivalis

West Virginia Kroger workers reject sellout agreement, vote overwhelmingly to strike

Zac Thorton



https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/11/12/krog-n12.html?pk_campaign=newsletter&pk_kwd=wsws




In West Virginia, workers for the grocery and retail giant, Kroger, have resoundingly rejected a pro-company sellout agreement which sought to impose higher health care costs and eliminate or reduce certain benefits for senior employees. In addition, workers have signaled their determination to defend their interests by voting overwhelmingly for strike action.

The proposed contract, which covers the Charleston-area Kroger stores, was rejected 1,551–130. The current contract, which was ratified in 2017, expired on August 29, but has been extended indefinitely while the company and the union continue to negotiate.

Under the proposed agreement, Kroger would place a cap on the amount of money it contributes to health care benefits, placing more of the burden on its employees. Beginning in 2021, this cap would be 10 percent, and by 2023 it would be lowered to 8 percent.

According to the Herald-Dispatch, Paula Ginnett, president of Kroger’s Mid-Atlantic division which oversees West Virginia, said that the proposal “included a $20 million wage investment that would allow associates to grow their hourly pay. Some associates, she said, could improve their rate by up to $4.65 per hour depending upon their position during the life of the next contract.” The reality is that the company’s increased pay offering will hardly alter the fact that Kroger workers receive poverty wages.

For the average full-time Kroger worker, the current contract lists starting pay as a meager $8.75 per hour, with increases every six months, capping out at $15.26 after 72 months. Under the proposed agreement, pay increases would take place on a yearly basis (referred to in the contract as “levels” numbering 1–4, with 4 being the maximum). For new hires on or after Nov. 1, 2020, starting pay would be $10 per hour. By 2023, a level 4 worker will cap out at $15 per hour. If they are “red circled,” they will cap out at $16.16 per hour. In the end, these small pay increases will be unable to offset the increased health care costs.

The move by Kroger to increase health care costs for its workers, under conditions of a global pandemic which has claimed the lives of over 230,000 people in the US alone, is an outright provocation. To date, West Virginia has over 30,000 total cases and 553 deaths. Now with the reopening of schools and the continuous erosion of basic safety measures, cases in the state have begun to surge.

Kanawha County, where Charleston, the state capital and largest city is located, accounts for the majority of the state’s cases, with over 4,000, and the highest total deaths with 117. Nearby Logan County has the second highest, with 48 deaths.

The union representing West Virginia Kroger workers is the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 400. Fearing an explosion of working class anger in response to the company’s efforts to attack workers’ living standards, the union was forced to hold a strike authorization vote in order to save face in the eyes of its membership, as well as to buy more time to conspire with the company on a new sellout agreement.

Despite workers voting 1,490–199 in favor of strike action, the union will do everything possible to avoid a strike. This was pointed out by Kroger Mid-Atlantic Corporate Affairs Manager Allison McGee, who said, “Associates are continuing to report to work as scheduled. A strike authorization doesn’t mean a strike. At this point, the union has not called for a work stoppage.”

The World Socialist Web Site recently spoke to James, a worker in Virginia for the supermarket chain Giant, who is also a member of UFCW Local 400. James was angered by the effort to attack Kroger workers’ health care, commenting, “They [Kroger] can afford anything. It’s had record profits during the pandemic.”

James stated that, after having his hazard pay eliminated while the pandemic still raged, he and other employees had received a mere $150 “bonus” from the corporation. “Even this was taxed,” he said, noting that when all was said and done, he only received $108. “Now they want to come after [workers’] health care? F––– that! We should all be on strike over this outrageous attack.”

The WSWS also spoke with a Kroger worker in Nashville, Tennessee. He remarked, “It’s awful, however, it isn’t surprising. Kroger isn’t known for its compassion, at least not among its employees. Some companies try to be profitable by making their employees proud to work for them (or so I’ve heard). Kroger is more thuggish about it, for lack of a better word.”

In order to defend their interests, the workers in West Virginia must take matters out of the hands of the pro-company UFCW and into their own. Throughout the pandemic, the union has done nothing to safeguard the lives of grocery workers, who, as genuinely essential workers, have been forced to remain on the job throughout the pandemic. It was not until the workers themselves started to take action that the companies began providing personal protective equipment and sanitation products. The Socialist Equality Party encourages all workers to form independent rank-and-file safety committees to protect their lives and defend their interests.