BIDEN IS ANTI-HAITI

By Pascal Robert, Black Agenda Report.

June 4, 2021




https://popularresistance.org/biden-is-anti-haiti/



And His Haitian-American Press Person Doesn’t Give A Damn.

The current Haitian president is perhaps the most ineffectual US stooge to date, but Joe Biden and his Haitian American press person couldn’t care less.

On Wednesday May 26, 2021 Haitian American Karine Jean Pierre, principal deputy press secretary for the Biden White House, took the podium to address questions from the press. Because the corporate Democratic Party establishment realizes that showcasing racial diversity is necessary in the face of its almost 30 year history of supporting bone crushing policies like NAFTA, GATT, financial deregulation, and the 1994 Crime Bill, Democrats use demonstrations of neoliberal diversity as their only talisman to keep the fealty of their more ethnically diverse constituency.

The irony of Karine Jean Pierre being celebrated as the latest manifestation of Black Girl Magic for Empire is that Jean-Pierre’s Haitian family background will obscure the fact that Joe Biden is currently supporting a political regime in Haiti almost universally loathed by the Haitian people. Jovenel Moise, the current strong man president of Haiti, rules by brutality and executive decree amid charges of massive financial corruption, as terror, kidnappings, political assassinations and insecurity proliferate throughout the land. Many Haitians argue his official term in office is over and that Moise now governs unconstitutionally. Because Moise has been a willing dupe to America’s hard line agenda against the Maduro regime in Venezuela, he has been viewed by the United States as a valuable check against a potential left leaning tide in Latin and South America.

Compounded with Biden’s support for Moise, Biden’s administration has carried out an even more extensive Haitian deportation agenda than Donald Trump. In the early months of Biden’s presidency more Haitians have been deported than in the whole last year of Trump’s presidency. Now, because of obvious pressure from the Haitian-American activist community, Biden has agreed to extend Temporary Protective Status (TPS) to Haitians while not only supporting the regime causing the current immigration surge, but also after having ramped up Haitian deportation to numbers unseen even under Trump. This should surprise no one as Joe Biden at one point in his political career remarked, “The whole Island of Haiti could drop into the ocean and it would mean nothing to the United States.” Yet now we are all supposed to applaud Biden and American Empire because a tool like Karine Jean Pierre has been chosen to blur the Democratic Party’s long treacherous relationship with Haiti going back to the Obama and Clinton regimes.

The vile utility of Karine Jean Pierre as Biden’s Haitian-American mouthpiece will be unclear to many Haitians who will fall into the same tragic trap of “Black faces in High Places” that has so treacherously plagued Black American politics. Ridiculous Blackface compradors for the ruling class like Obama and Kamala Harris have been a normative part of the political game for some time now. However, those seeking clarity will hopefully come to realize that this con game is running its course and enemies of the people can come in a whole rainbow of colors and variations of gender and sexual orientation. The Democratic party’s identity politics charade is the last card they have to maintain their position as guardians of the left flank of capital. The masses of people need to become more aware of how this liberal charade of identity inclusion is merely a smoke screen to keep people in check as the current American reality becomes more and more precarious. Let us all become aware of these contradictions and fight the Empire regardless of the multi-colored players used to control the levers of destruction.

US COVID-19 vaccination campaign drastically slowing

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/06/05/covi-j05.html




Benjamin Mateus
15 hours ago







President Joe Biden has set July 4 as his goal to see 70 percent of all adults in the United States with at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccines. However, he is confronting a lagging vaccination rate that has been declining week to week since the peak in vaccinations in mid-April. In a plea to all unvaccinated people last month, he declared, “This is your choice. It’s life and death.”

Syringes filled with Pfizer vaccines sit at the ready at a COVID-19 vaccination clinic at PeaceHealth St. Joseph Medical Center Thursday, June 3, 2021, in Bellingham, Wash. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson)




On June 3, the seven-day average of reported vaccine doses administered fell below the threshold of one million doses per day. On June 2, only a half-million doses were given. There has been a 33 percent decline from the previous week.

With 2.05 billion doses of the vaccines thus far administered across the globe, almost 298 million doses (14.5 percent) have been given just in the US, a rate of 90 doses per 100 people. More than 368 million doses have been distributed throughout the country, indicating 70 million doses waiting for recipients.

In a sleight of hand, the more than 60 percent vaccinated figure being heavily promoted by the White House does not reflect the population as a whole but only those over 18 with at least one dose. In reality, 50.9 percent of the population has received at least one dose and only 41.2 percent have been fully vaccinated. Of those 18 years or older, 63 percent have received at least one dose and it is this figure that is being advertised. According to the White House’s calculations, another 20 million more adults need to be inoculated for Biden to reach his goal in the next month.

However, this is a meaningless figure in that the theoretical herd immunity threshold of 70 percent would require 70 percent of the population to be vaccinated and this does not account for the new strains of the more transmissible coronavirus that are quickly becoming dominant, which would raise this threshold. In reality, the herd immunity threshold remains unknown and scientists speculate it may be unattainable.

Breakthrough infections with the new variants such as the B.1.617.2 Delta variant may be considerable among individuals with only a single dose, according to recent studies on neutralization antibodies against variants. Though full vaccination is critical to prevent serious disease, breakthrough infections may be much higher with these newer variants. Recent reporting indicated new variants of interest have also been detected in Vietnam.

Also, those 18 years old and younger can very well become infected, become very ill and die, as well as transmit the contagion. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported Friday through their Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) that there has been an increase in the rates of hospitalizations among teenagers in March and April. Dr. Rochelle Walensky remarked, “I am deeply concerned by numbers of hospitalized adolescents and saddened to see the number of adolescents who required treatment in intensive care units or mechanical ventilation.”

The Delta variant has been estimated to be 50 to 70 percent more transmissible than the B.1.1.7 Alpha variant. Individuals infected with the Delta variant also have a 2.7 times higher risk of needing hospitalization than those with the Alpha variant. While the Delta variant is now the dominant strain in India and the UK, genetic sequencing is demonstrating a sharp rise in this variant in the United States.

States across the US are now moving to incentivize unvaccinated residents to get vaccinated with prizes and giveaways. Governor Jim Justice, Republican from West Virginia, announced during a news conference on Tuesday that the state would run a lottery program from June 20 to August 4 that would include prizes of money, firearms and vehicles. On Father’s Day the state planned to give away five custom hunting rifles and five custom hunting shotguns, according to The Hill. Other prizes included custom outfitted trucks, lifetime hunting and fishing licenses and a $1 million lottery cash prize on June 20.

Anheuser-Busch, the giant brewing company, released a statement announcing the company “will unlock its biggest beer giveaway in history: when we reach the 70 percent milestone, America. Your next round will be on us!” CEO Michel Doukeris added, “At Anheuser-Busch, we are committed to supporting the safe and strong recovery of our nation and being able to be together again at the places with the people we have missed so much. This commitment includes encouraging Americans to get vaccinated, and we are excited to buy Americans 21+ a round of beer when we reach the White House goal.”

Other states engaging in these gimmicks include California, New Mexico and Ohio, who have started similar lottery drawings in the hopes of spurring the vaccination effort.

However, little effort has been taken to explain why these sharp declines have occurred, preferring to blame people based on political ideology. Rhetoric aside, this question was studied and reported on by the CDC in their May 28 MMWR release.

They sought to look at the patterns in COVID-19 vaccination coverage by social vulnerability and urbanicity. They found that disparities in county-level vaccination coverage by social vulnerabilities had increased despite expanding vaccine eligibility, especially in large fringe metropolitan and non-metropolitan counties. They wrote, “By May 1, 2021, vaccination coverage among adults was lower among those living in counties with lower socioeconomic status and with higher percentages of households with children, single parents, and persons with disabilities.”

States in the Deep South, with high rates of poverty, have barely given at least one dose to a third of their populations while those fully vaccinated are just reaching 30 percent. A significant section of the population in the poorest areas remains vulnerable as the vaccination initiative is reaching a ceiling.

Mississippi has fully vaccinated just 27.5 percent and vaccination rates have declined five percent from a week ago. Alabama, with 29.3 percent fully vaccinated, has seen a 73 percent drop in vaccinations from the week prior.

While North America and Europe, where the majority of the vaccines have been distributed, are seeing COVID-19 infection rates continue their steady declines, across Southeast Asia, the Eastern Mediterranean, Western Pacific and Africa, cases remain high or have remained precariously steady.

Cases are on the rise again across South Africa where four of nine provinces are facing a brutal third wave. The winter season in conjunction with an increase seen in travel and the loosening of restrictions is leading to concerns from the World Health Organization (WHO).

A WHO Africa statement released on June 3 noted, “African countries must urgently boost critical care capacity to prevent health facilities from being overwhelmed. This comes as vaccine shipments to the continent grind to a near halt… In the last two weeks, Africa recorded a 20 percent increase in cases compared with the previous fortnight. The pandemic is trending upwards in 14 countries and in the past week alone, eight countries witnessed an abrupt rise of over 30 percent in cases. South Africa is reporting a sustained increase in cases, while Uganda saw a 131 percent week-on-week rise last week, with infection clusters in schools, rising cases among health workers and isolation centers and intensive care units filling up. Angola and Namibia are also experiencing a resurgence in cases.”

The regional director for WHO Africa, Dr. Matshidiso Moeti, sounded the alarm. “The threat of a third wave in Africa is real and rising. Our priority is clear—it’s crucial that we swiftly get vaccines into arms of Africans at high risk of falling seriously ill and dying of COVID-19. While many countries outside Africa have now vaccinated their high-priority groups and are able to even consider vaccinating their children, African countries are unable to even follow up with second doses for high-risk groups.”

Less than two percent of Africa’s population has received a COVID-19 vaccine. Additionally, some of the vaccines that are arriving have waited so long to be shipped in storage that they have expired, necessitating they be destroyed.

After months of promising to send COVID-19 vaccine doses to the waiting world, just 80 million doses may eventually leave the US. In a hypocritical statement so commonplace with US leaders, President Joe Biden said, “The United States will be the world’s arsenal of vaccine in our shared fight against this virus. In the days to come, as we draw on the experiences of distributing the vaccine doses announced today, we will have more details to provide about how future doses will be shared.”

Los Angeles Times promotes right-wing parents’ group that advocates lifting of mask mandates for students

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/06/05/scho-j05.html




Angelo Perera
14 hours ago







On Wednesday, the Los Angeles Times featured an article titled, “Parents frustrated by pandemic education launch activist group to raise their voices.” The article sympathetically portrays the fringe right-wing parents’ group “OpenSchoolsCA,” which has established a non-profit to lobby for an even more aggressive opening of schools this fall, including the abandonment of all safety measures such as masks, quarantines of classrooms where COVID-19 outbreaks occur, and more. While not stated explicitly, the Times article makes clear that the group will also promote charter schools, school choice and other efforts to privatize public education.

Los Angeles Unified School District students stand in a hallway socially distance during a lunch break at Boys & Girls Club of Hollywood in Los Angeles – Aug. 26, 2020. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong, File)

The Times writes that the group “coalesced around parent anger over how long it was taking to reopen California campuses that were closed for a year or more amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Their discontent simmered for months when reopenings offered students much less than a full five-day-a-week school experience.”

A similar right-wing group, Reopen California Schools, recently launched a campaign to sue the California Department of Public Health for mandating these safety measures, which they describe as “barbaric.”

The Times article is only the latest example of the bourgeois media uncritically presenting such right wing fringe groups as the voice of the majority of parents, when in reality the vast majority continue to keep their children learning safely at home. According to data from Chicago Public Schools, only 22 percent of students attended in-person classes the week of April 19. In New York City, 61 percent of students are still attending remotely. In Los Angeles—as the LA Times article itself is obligated to note—the parents of roughly 70 percent of children are keeping their kids at home.

While the founding member of OpenSchoolsCA, Oakland parent Megan Bacigalupi, insists that her organization does not back charter schools, at least two of its advisers are prominent right-wing advocates for charter schools: David Castillo, a charter school consultant and advocate, and former Oakland Unified School District board member Jumoke Hinton Hodge, a virulent promoter of charter schools.

During the pandemic, the American ruling class has doubled down on its efforts to expand charter schools by diverting funds from public schools. An analysis by Good Jobs First, which tracks stimulus spending at Covid Stimulus Watch, shows that private and charter schools received roughly six times more funding per school than public schools from the CARES Act: $855,000 per facility on average, compared to $134,500 for public schools. The Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) under the CARES Act, which was not open for public entities, allocated $5.7 billion in PPP loans to charter and private schools.

Following the worst year in living memory for educators and the entire working class, when masses have been forced to return to deadly working conditions, the efforts to defund public education will provoke further opposition within the working class. To counteract the growing class consciousness among workers, the ruling class utilizes its bought-and-paid-for media to uncritically air the views of a frustrated group of middle-class parents. A close examination of the backgrounds of these individuals makes clear the class forces for whom they speak.

Megan Bacigalupi’s public LinkedIn page highlights a career with police agencies in New York, before she relocated to California. Serving first as a lawyer in the Office of the Criminal Justice Coordinator under former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, she went on to become the Deputy Commissioner for Intergovernmental Affairs at the New York City Business Integrity Commission. Megan and her husband John Mellott Bacigalupi, who is currently a senior vice president at Cantor Capital, are a “power couple” intent on jockeying for privileges within the upper-middle class.

Jumoke Hinton Hodge has a long record of being a shill for charter school corporations. In 2012, she was endorsed by Go Public Schools, an organization backed by advocates for charter schools like the Walton Family Foundation. Go Public Schools provided Hodge with almost $63,000 in the 2012 Oakland School Board race, and then almost $105,000 in 2016.

In 2012, Hodge voted to close five elementary schools in Oakland, resulting in the displacement of an estimated 900 elementary students. The vote led to a three-week occupation of Lakeview Elementary, forcing the superintendent to resign. In 2019, ignoring the pleas of students, teachers, and community members, Hodge voted along with the majority of the school board to close Roots International Academy, forcing students to relocate to a school over a mile away. Shortly thereafter, during the 2019 Oakland teachers strike, Hodge viciously attacked and choked a kindergarten teacher, Danisha Right, a brutal assault for which she received no punishment.

OpenSchoolsCA also has the support of a few medical professionals that have distorted science for political purposes during the pandemic. Replying to their own tweet on the formation of the non-profit, the organization expressed their solidarity with three scientists that the organization considered to be “public health guiding lights.” All three scientists—Vinay Prasad, Monica Gandhi and Tracy Beth Høeg—have been promoted by the ruling class in their reckless drive to reopen schools.

Gandhi is a Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. On May 27, she spoke on Democracy Now, adding weight to the scientifically discredited claim by the US intelligence agencies that SARS-CoV-2 may have been leaked from the Wuhan Virology Institute in China. She then supported the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidance to lift restrictions on vaccinated populations. Throughout the spring, Gandhi has also been brought on the broadcast media to push for school reopenings, recently going so far as to advocate the complete lifting of mask usage among all children in schools, long before most are vaccinated.

Tracy Beth Høeg is a physician at Northern California Orthopaedic Associates who promotes the scientifically disproven claim that the infection in schools is merely a reflection of infection in the community. Similar to statements made by Gandhi and advocated by OpenSchoolsCA, Høeg recently opined in the Washington Post that “children should return to their normal lives this summer and in the upcoming school year, without masks and regardless of their vaccination status.”

A recent tweet by Høeg states: “The message that schools are overall safer than the community for kids both in terms of COVID and overall health and safety needs to get out and can’t be emphasized enough.” On Twitter, she argues against providing adequate ventilation in classrooms, and claims that it is “very safe” for teachers to work in poorly ventilated rooms with unmasked students.

Vinay Prasad is a hematologist-oncologist and Associate Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco. Prasad frequently argues that schools must stay open and that it is up to the individual to take appropriate action to not be exposed to the virus. He completely ignores the fact that schools have been major centers of outbreaks across the US, and that students have acted as transmitters of the virus, leading to an unknown number developing “Long COVID,” while thousands are being treated for multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C). Prasad recently stated, “Unless the local healthcare system is approaching overload or collapse, schools should remain open.”

American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) features an interview between Prasad and Martin Kulldorff, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. Kulldorf was one of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) that argued for a policy of natural herd immunity, which became the de facto policy of the Trump administration and continued under Biden, as the vaccines have been gradually distributed.

The AIER, a libertarian think tank which posits as their aim “a society based on property rights and open markets,” is engaged in a highly reactionary, anti-working class and anti-socialist enterprise. The GBD had the backing of right-wing billionaire Charles Koch, who hosted a private soiree of scientists, economists and journalists to provide the homicidal declaration a modicum of respectability and formulate herd immunity as a necessary global policy in response to the pandemic.

The elevation of figures like those involved in OpenSchoolsCA has a definite political aim. The American ruling class, having done essentially nothing to curb the pandemic through public health measures, stands exposed in the eyes of broad masses, while the pandemic itself is far from over.

In order to undermine mounting opposition among workers, the ruling class relies on a fringe minority in the medical and scientific community, the capitalist media and a privileged layer within the upper-middle class that itself is utilizing the crisis to advance its own material position within the top 10 percent of American society. The ruling class fears above all a social explosion from below, as the simmering anger of broad masses threatens to erupt to the surface.

Pandemic provokes wave of bus workers strikes across Brazil

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/06/05/braz-j05.html




Tomas Castanheira
14 hours ago







Responding to brutal cuts in jobs and wages and grossly unsafe conditions at workplaces, a wave of strikes by bus drivers and fare collectors has engulfed bus transportation systems across Brazil over the past year.

A report published last week by the National Association of Urban Transport Companies (NTU) made this clear. Between March 2020 and April 2021, workers carried out 238 strike movements, protests and demonstrations that disrupted the circulation of 88 different bus transportation systems in the country. And given that these struggles have continued at a feverish pace over the past months, this number must already be considerably higher.

Bus workers on strike march in Vitória, Espírito Santo. May, 2020. (credit: CNTTL)

The intense strike movement of bus workers in Brazil is part of an international resurgence of class struggle that has been accelerated by the catastrophic response of capitalist governments to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The pandemic had a tremendous impact on transportation systems. In Brazil, although considered a public service, bus transportation is run by private, profit-driven companies that have incurred substantial losses that they have tried, as much as possible, to shift onto the backs of the hundreds of thousands of workers they employ.

The NTU report states that since the pandemic began, some 77,000 jobs have been cut in the industry. Those workers who have managed to keep their jobs have suffered heavy cuts in their salaries, officially implemented through a wage and hours reduction bill approved last year by Jair Bolsonaro's government, and by delays in payments that have become widespread among the companies.

The attacks on bus workers during the pandemic represented only the most recent escalation of a process that has been going on for the last few years. Bus companies have declared for years that their operations are not profitable enough, and in response they have raised fares, laid off workers and sought to eliminate the jobs of fare collectors, intensifying the workload of the drivers.

The immense anger that has built up among the workers against increasingly intolerable conditions imposed by capitalism were exposed by the explosion of strikes in the last 14 months. Besides paralyzing the transportation systems, bus workers expanded their struggles with protests that took over the streets of capital cities all over Brazil.

In Teresina, capital of Piauí, drivers and fare collectors started a strike in May 2020 against the dismissal of 400 co-workers and cuts in their wages and benefits. They marched almost daily in the streets and in front of the City Palace, raising hand-made signs that read: “I don’t have enough to eat today, imagine tomorrow” and “Bus drivers’ lives matter.”

Although the strike was ended by the union after 50 days, the problems faced by the workers have not been solved. Last Monday, bus drivers from three bus companies in Teresina held their seventh strike since the beginning of 2021, demanding their unpaid wages.

In Vitória, capital of Espírito Santo, a series of militant strikes broke out in different bus companies in the city throughout 2020. The bus workers held several demonstrations and used buses to block traffic on the city’s main avenues. Although their demands were essentially the same, the unification of the workers’ struggle was undermined by the unions negotiating the termination of the strikes with each company.

In one of the longest and most militant strikes in Vitória, at the Tabuazeiro bus company, the workers continued their movement in defiance of decrees by both the courts and the union. “We are now at the company’s door convincing workers to accept the injunction [preventing the strike], but they are not complying with the union’s request,” declared the president of the bus drivers union.

The strikes have increasingly taken on a political character. On election day of the second round of Brazil’s municipal elections, some 2,500 bus drivers went on strike in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s second largest metropolis, demanding their unpaid wages. The workers’ protest was interconnected with the widespread repudiation of the capitalist political system at the ballots across Brazil, which reached record levels in the last elections. In Rio de Janeiro, nearly 50 percent of electors refused to choose between the two hated candidates.

This process of political radicalization of the working class expressed itself with special clarity in an episode that occurred in Maceió, capital of Alagoas. In September of last year, a group of bus workers fired from the Veleiro company blocked one of the city’s main avenues, demanding the payment of their outstanding salaries seven months after they were dismissed.

A worker interviewed during the demonstration by a local TV station stated: “This is going to happen to all the workers, to the workers as a class. This is absurd, we are fathers of families. This is happening to the system as whole, it’s the system that is allowing all this. It’s not Veleiro; if it were only the company, it would already have been solved. The system is unable to solve it.”

The protest was met with brutal repression by the government of Renan Filho of the MDB party. The military police Special Operations Battalion was mobilized to conduct a war scenario on the streets of Maceió, attacking the workers with rubber bullets and gas grenades while chanting battle songs.

An official statement from the Veleiro company, in repudiation of the workers’ protest, demonstrated the terror with which the ruling class perceives the revolutionary implications of these growing struggles. The company stated, “If all problems have to be solved in this way, society will live in anarchy.”

Besides the economic demands, the struggles of bus drivers and fare collectors were driven by the highly unsafe conditions in transportation that led to explosive rates of infections among its workers.

Bus drivers accounted for the highest number of workers whose labor contracts were terminated by death over last year. In São Paulo, the largest city in the country, the COVID-19 death rate among bus drivers and conductors is three times higher than the rest of the population. Up until April, according to the union, 131 bus drivers had died from the disease just within the city.

The outbreak of the second wave of COVID-19 in Brazil since the beginning of this year has fueled mass anger among workers against deadly conditions in their workplaces. In the first five months of this year, infections and deaths skyrocketed, jumping from 195,000 deaths on January 1 to more than 470,000 today.

On April 16, bus drivers in Salvador, the capital of Bahia, shut down bus garages and blocked avenues with their cars after the news of the death of two co-workers from COVID-19. In the same period, bus drivers in Vitória went on a one-day strike to protest the unsafe resumption of public transportation, which had been shut down for two weeks to contain the spread of the coronavirus. Other similar protests have taken place in different regions of the country.

At the same time that bus workers were striking, other sections of the Brazilian working class were giving combative responses to the danger of infections in their workplaces. Strikes and protests against deadly conditions have also erupted in the rail and subway transportation systems, among teachers against the unsafe reopening of schools and by oil workers over outbreaks of infections in their plants and offshore platforms.

This clearly demonstrates that the wave of strikes among bus workers in the last period represented a powerful movement of the working class in defense of broad social interests. How is it possible then that these struggles have remained deeply isolated from each other until today?

Just as in every country, the radicalization of Brazilian workers is exposing the absolute contradiction between their interests and those of the corporatist trade unions that claim to officially represent them.

The National Confederation of Land Transport Workers, which includes more than 300 unions, made this abundantly clear in an open letter it sent to the government at the end of February. The union demanded that the state fund the bus companies – the same demand made by the association of the companies – with the stated aim of “mitigating the growing general strike movement” among its ranks.

In the months following the publication of that letter, which were marked by a growing rank-and-file revolt against the increasingly catastrophic situation of the pandemic, the unions employed a series of criminal maneuvers with the aim of sabotaging the workers’ movement towards a general strike.

Seeking to deflect the growing call among workers for the implementation of scientific measures to combat the deadly virus, the trade union federations called for a March 24 action dubbed as the “working class lockdown.” The event was a complete fraud. Not even the innocuous one-day strike announced by the unions was organized in the workplaces. The bureaucrats limited themselves to holding token demonstrations demanding the speeding up of vaccinations.

With the same strategy, the public transportation unions in the state of São Paulo called for a general strike on April 20, also dubbed as the “transportation lockdown.” The call coincided with the highest peak of COVID-19 deaths in Brazil, which exceeded the average of 3,000 deaths per day. In the state of São Paulo alone, 1,389 deaths were registered in a single day in April.

A transportation strike under these conditions would have a colossal impact on the circulation of people and the transmission rate of the virus, and would point towards an independent working-class response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The movement was, however, called off on the day before by the unions after they had a theatrical negotiation with the state government, which agreed to include transportation workers as a priority in the vaccination schedule.

This grotesque betrayal has been widely used as model by local unions across the country, which continue to hold a series of theatrical one-day strikes to alleviate the pressure from rank-and-file workers, which invariably end in their inclusion in the local vaccination schedule.

The wide popular anger against the criminal handling of the pandemic and the social crisis by the fascistic Bolsonaro administration has emerged in massive demonstrations across the country last Saturday.

By isolating and betraying these movements, the corporatist trade unions are playing a key role in implementing the homicidal herd immunity policy of Bolsonaro and the ruling class. The corrupt leaderships behind these unions, connected to the Workers Party and their allies in the pseudo-left, are trying to deflect the growing movement against Bolsonaro into a dirty deal within the bourgeois state.

The fight against the catastrophic development of pandemic and the growing social crisis in Brazil can only go forward if the working class is mobilized as an independent social force.

This makes imperative a definitive break with the unions and parties that represent capitalism and the establishment of rank-and-file committees that directly represent the interests of the working and advance socialist politics.

Manufacturer of device used in Flint, Michigan bone lead tests declares it unfit for use on humans

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/06/05/flin-j05.html




Sheila Brehm
14 hours ago







The manufacturer of the handheld radiation-emitting scanner used to test for lead in the bones of Flint, Michigan, residents notified the primary law firm involved in the $641.25 million Flint Water settlement that it is unfit for use on humans.

Thermo Fisher Scientific headquarters (Wikimedia Commons)

The May 12 letter was made public June 3 on Facebook and published in part by the Detroit Free Press. The manufacturer, Thermo Fisher Scientific, sent a letter to Napoli-Shkolnik of New York, the lead law firm in the civil litigation case, warning that the XL3t Niton (X-ray fluorescence) analyzer has never been marketed for use on living organisms, “including without limitation, any such use to measure bone lead levels in living persons, nor have we sought or obtained FDA approval for such use.”

The lead bone scanner is only available at the Flint offices of the Napoli law firm—for a $500 fee if they are not represented by Napoli. The official language in the settlement proposal contends the bone test is “voluntary” or “optional,” but in order for residents to get more than a maximum of $1,000 per household compensation, they must show proof of lead in their bodies. Lead, a dangerous neurotoxin, dissipates in the blood after a few weeks but can remain in the bones for decades.

Flint’s population, poisoned with lead in water seven years ago, is once again being victimized by “voluntarily” subjecting themselves, including children and pregnant women, to a radiation-emitting bone scan. The Flint water crisis caused dozens of deaths, lifelong health and developmental problems in both children and adults, as well as plummeting home values. Now Flint residents are being mistreated and further victimized.

The Napoli law firm was appointed by US District Judge Judith Levy as the co-liaison counsel in the settlement and because it is the only firm with access to the bone scanner, has the majority of clients. It appears the registration for the settlement has had very little oversight as 85,584 people have registered but 13,315 of those appear to be duplicates. More than 21,600 of the total cannot yet be determined to be unique registrants. It is also not known how many people Napoli has scanned but estimates range in the thousands.

According to information on the Thermo Fisher Scientific website, the analyzer the law firm has been using is designed not for measuring lead inside the bones of live persons , but for use in “mining and exploration” and for “scrap metal recycling,” among other industrial uses.

Chloe Hansen-Toone, Thermo Fisher’s vice president and general manager, acknowledged in the letter to Napoli that the company was aware that the device was used in academic research projects with Institutional Review Board (IRB) oversight, “but your use of the XL3t does not appear to arise in the context of academic research, and we are not aware of any IRB approval for your activities.”

Thermo Fisher’s letter to Napoli is explicit about how the analyzer cannot be used. “As you are aware in your rental agreement with Thermo Fisher, Napoli agreed to be solely responsible for the prudent operation of the XL3t.” The safety instructions state, “to never point the analyzer to yourself or another person when the shutter is open. We further advise you that Thermo Fisher has not validated the safety of the XL3t when used in a manner inconsistent with its safety instructions.”

This is a staggering refutation of the claims made by the Napoli law firm since at least as early as the summer of 2018. Aaron Specht, frequently cited as a “medical expert,” is the Harvard University research associate who was hired by Napoli to modify the XRF scanner, and asserted it was safe.

Moreover, Thermo Fisher’s letter is a validation of objections to the use of the bone scanner by Flint doctors, including Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha and Dr. Lawrence Reynolds.

In February of this year Dr. Reynolds, a Flint pediatrician, filed an objection to the use of the scanner on the grounds that it was not approved for use on humans and was being used as a condition for compensation.

Dr. Reynolds told the WSWS this week, “The voices of Flint residents were ignored again. Residents are not given access [to information], nor credibility, so here we are again. How is it possible that Napoli has operated since August 2019, using the device on thousands of people and no one knows? It’s mind boggling.

“As far as I’m concerned, many parties turned a blind eye or had deaf ears when complaints were brought forward. US District Judge Judith Levy, who is presiding over the settlement, Attorney General Dana Nessel, who is a party to the settlement representing the defendants, and Special Master Deborah Greenspan, have all failed to stop the use of the scanners.”

Reynolds’ objection was filed February 26, 2021, but has not yet been ruled on. The filing was submitted to Judge Levy and copies were sent to the Michigan attorney general’s office and the Michigan Licensing and Regulatory Agency.

Although, Reynolds’ filing was covered in the local press at the time, the more widely known case is that of Amber Stebbins, a 23 year old in her 28th week of pregnancy who had the bone lead test done at the end of April without any protective shield.

Around March of this year, Thermo Fisher was contacted by the law firm of Leopold and Pitt, who wanted to purchase the device for their own bone scan operation, and was turned down. A letter similar to the one sent to Napoli was also sent to Leopold and Pitt on May 21.

Since May 12, 2021, when the letter from Thermo Fisher was received by Napoli, the law firm has submitted numerous sworn declarations—not from scientists or medical doctors authenticating the safety of the device, but from affiliated lawyers and carefully-selected clients.

The declaration submitted May 26 from Ari Kresch, a Michigan attorney with thousands of Flint clients in the settlement who works with Napoli, asserts that the bone scanner is “… a state-of-the-art program to accurately measure the presence of lead ingestion in one’s body while being cost-effective and safe. …What my research has also confirmed, is the reliability in the bone scans as a safe and efficient way of securing the highest possible amount of compensation.”

Declarations from Napoli’s clients followed a script that typically contains the following: “I was told this is not a requirement to participate in the proposed settlement… I do not feel unsafe in receiving the bone lead test. I have faith in the Bone Lead Testing Program as an accurate and safe means of measuring long-term exposure and I am not concerned over the safety of this procedure… I have faith that Napoli Shkolnik would not expose their clients or others in the community to risk of harm. The purpose of the Bone Lead Testing Program is to ensure we are fairly compensated for our injuries and to understand the true damage of the Flint Water Crisis.”

This is from the declaration of Claudia Perkins-Milton who was tested for lead on September 20, 2019, at Napoli’s Flint law office although the settlement was not approved by Judge Levy until January 2021.

In another attempt to combat the damning exposure and possible illegality involved in using the scanner, a Napoli-Shkolnik newsletter announced support for the Flint bone lead testing program from attorney Ben Crump on May 18. Crump is known nationally and internationally for representing the families of African American men and women brutalized and killed by the police.

Crump, along with his legal associates, attended rallies in Flint in December 2019 which he hosted with Napoli dedicated to specifically promoting the free bone lead test.

Also giving the stamp of approval to Napoli and the bone scans is Dana Nessel, the Michigan attorney general. A spokesperson for Nessel told the Detroit Free Press that plaintiffs were permitted to obtain a bone scan to support their claims. They were not required to get one, but “could voluntarily undergo that process based upon the advice of their lawyers.”

The Democratic administration of Governor Gretchen Whitmer is a participant in the rotten and paltry settlement and is complicit as much as former Republican Governor Snyder, who faces charges that are less than a slap on the wrist—misdemeanors for “neglect of duty” which will result in a $1,000 fine and/or a year in jail.

The latest scandal over the bone scans makes clear that there will be no justice for Flint residents outside of the independent political mobilization of the working class against the capitalist system, its courts and the entire political establishment. The Flint water crisis which endures to this day is the product of a bipartisan attack on the working class by corporate interests and its resolution requires the fight for a socialist society based on social need, not private profit.

Los Angeles-area parents denounce union-backed drive to fully reopen schools

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/06/05/laus-j05.html




Hong Jian, Kimie Saito
13 hours ago







By the end of April, all schools within the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), the second-largest district in the US with over 600,000 students, had opened for at least partial in-person learning.

Parents and students line up to pick up school materials outside the Aurora Elementary School in Los Angeles [Credit: AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes]

The reopenings could not have taken place without the collusion of the United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), which told teachers and parents that a slight decline in coronavirus cases in April meant that schools were perfectly safe to resume in-person learning. Sham votes were conducted, telling teachers that they either voted to return under terms reached with the district or under conditions solely of the district’s choosing. No options were provided to continue remote learning.

While the UTLA and LAUSD forced teachers into classrooms knowing it would result in serious illness and death, parents and students have, for their part, largely refused to return to in-person learning. This has led to a major political fiasco for the district and by extension the Democratic Biden and Newsom administrations, which have undertaken a massive push to reopen schools to fully reopen the economy at whatever cost in suffering and death.

According to an analysis conducted by the Los Angeles Times, a full month after schools reopened, only 7 percent of LAUSD high school students and 30 percent of elementary students had returned to classrooms. This has led to a major push by outgoing Superintendent Austin Beutner to pressure students back into classrooms this fall while promising full-time, in-person learning for all students regardless of the state of the pandemic. “The best place for students to learn is a classroom at school,” Beutner said last week.

This effort is aided and abetted by the UTLA and especially by its national parent union, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). The AFT, with more than 1.7 million members, is launching a campaign to push children and teachers back into classrooms, entitled “Return, Recover and Reimagine: Toward A Renaissance in America’s Public Schools.”

In a May press release, AFT President Randi Weingarten falsely claimed to speak on behalf of teachers, stating, “Educators have yearned to be back in school, with their students.” Expressing the nationalist and pro-capitalist character of all the trade union bureaucracies, she added, “The United States will not be fully back until we are fully back in school. And my union is all in.”

The mad drive to reopen classrooms while more lethal variants of the coronavirus circulate worldwide, and while the US itself recently surpassed 600,000 official deaths, has provoked enormous opposition from parents, teachers and students. A recent proposal in Los Angeles to lengthen the school year was dead on arrival due to a barrage of opposition from parents and teachers. Parents themselves have also begun organizing groups online to oppose bringing their children back into unsafe classrooms.

The World Socialist Web Site recently spoke to a member of the Facebook group, “Our Voice: Communities for Quality Education Group.” The group description states, “OurVoice is a new bilingual (English/Spanish) Facebook Group for parents, students, educators, education leaders, and everyone who is interested in shaping the future of public education.” They have stated that the government, school district and unions did not consult with or listen to parents when they decided to reopen schools for in-person learning for the final two months of the school year.

The WSWS spoke with Ms. Franco, who has four children, two of whom are students in South Gate within LAUSD. One child, 12, is attending South Gate Middle School, and her son John, 16, attends South Gate High School. An older son is serving in the Marines.

Recently she attended a Zoom meeting featuring a representative of state Superintendent of Instruction Tony Thurmond’s office, who was trying to convince her that parents should send their children to school. He said, “The schools are safer than your home.”

This directly contradicted comments made by UCLA pediatrician Jennifer Brazier Peralta, an advisor to LAUSD Superintendent Beutner, who recently stated, “Children can still get very, very sick from COVID.”

Ms. Franco said the official’s statement angered her, noting, “I told him, ‘Don’t tell me your schools are more safe than my house, especially when I’ve been volunteering at more than 700 schools. I have a lot of evidence that can prove what conditions are really like inside the campuses.’”

Parents are concerned not only with the COVID-19 pandemic, but also the epidemic of school shootings, including in districts like LAUSD. Ms. Franco said, “There’s absolutely no safety for my children. They have been victims of bullying. There are gangs, fights and drugs. Of course, my kids are worried. That’s why we decided to continue school from home. There is no safety. My daughter just texted that another South Gate student got shot on April 30. His name was Luis Gutierrez, and he was 17 years old.”

Ms. Franco said she had attended a number of meetings with school officials, and had made a point of asking what would happen if children brought the virus home and infected their parents? She said, “Nobody knows how to answer me. Nobody wants to bear the consequences.”

Another parent from OurVoice told the LA Times, “It would be devastating to see my daughter Ashley sick.” She added, “But if she is asymptomatic and she infects me without knowing it, like many children, then if the cancer did not end my life, the coronavirus could kill me… Being a Latina, being low-income, living in a poor neighborhood, having chronic illnesses and having only one income brings me closer to death.”

Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) has been thoroughly inadequate on campuses, much like school supplies during normal times, leaving teachers to once again fend for themselves and their students. Not only were teachers not provided with adequate PPE, but air filtration systems were not upgraded, and in some cases didn’t even work.

As of this writing, there have been 3.78 million COVID-19 cases in California and 63,013 deaths. Of those, there have been 1.24 million cases and 24,201 deaths in Los Angeles County alone.

According to the Los Angeles County Department of Health (LACDH), on June 4 there were 234 new cases in LA County with 14 people succumbing to the virus, while there were 253 hospitalizations. As of May 28, 73 percent of residents over 65 have received both doses of the vaccine. Among those 16 and over, LA County has just reached 53 percent.

In other words, the population of Los Angeles, like every other region of the US and the world, is nowhere near the estimated 80 percent threshold needed for true immunity even if natural immunity from previously-infected individuals is taken into account.

On May 22, the LACDH issued a press release which declared that the B.1.1.7 UK variant had surpassed the California B.1.427/429 variants as the dominant strain in LA County. They stated that 53 percent of the specimens analyzed were of the UK variant and none were of the California variant. Six new cases of the P.1 Brazilian variant and one of the B.1.351 South African variant were also detected.

The LACDH has stated that LA County will ease capacity and distancing requirements along with the state of California on June 15, as well as adopting the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) revised masking requirements for vaccinated individuals. This in practice universally lifts mask requirements, as there is no method to determine whether a person is vaccinated or not.

Biden drops corporate tax increase and cuts infrastructure plan by over $1 trillion in negotiations with Republicans

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/06/05/infr-j05.html




Kevin Reed
13 hours ago







In private talks with Republicans at the White House on Wednesday, President Joe Biden offered to dramatically reduce his $2.25 trillion infrastructure package by eliminating a proposed corporate tax increase and by cutting the total spending in the plan by more than half.

President Joe Biden talks about the May jobs report from the Rehoboth Beach Convention Center in Rehoboth Beach, Del., Friday, June 4, 2021 [Credit: AP Photo/Susan Walsh]

According to a report published by the Washington Post Thursday afternoon—based on information from an anonymous person familiar with Biden’s closed-door meeting with lead Republican negotiator Senator Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia —the President outlined “a plan for about $1 trillion in new spending” and said “he could take the proposed rate increase off the table in an attempt to broker a compromise” with Republicans.

From the moment Biden announced the infrastructure bill called “The American Jobs Plan” on March 31, Republicans declared it a nonstarter due to the proposed tax provisions. Biden had originally called for raising the corporate rate from 21 percent to 28 percent, effectively undoing the cuts engineered by the Trump White House and Republicans in Congress in 2017.

While Biden’s original proposal is thoroughly inadequate to address the decaying, neglected and crumbling US roads, bridges, rails, pipelines, ports and information infrastructure, the Republicans have attacked it as too much spending and have called for an amount far below $1 trillion.

The White House has repeatedly appealed to the GOP to negotiate while simultaneously offering to scale back and cut the plan in response to every objection from congressional Republicans. On May 27, Biden’s Press Secretary Jen Psaki issued a statement praising the work of Senator Capito “and her colleagues” many of whom do not consider Biden to have won the 2020 presidential election or to have taken office legitimately.

Psaki’s statement said “It is encouraging to see her group come forward with a substantially increased the [sic] funding level—nearing $1 trillion. We appreciate the hard work that went in to making this proposal and continuing these negotiations.” By that point, Biden had already agreed to cut the infrastructure proposal down to $1.7 trillion.

The Washington Post’s unnamed source also reported Biden still “intends to seek the tax increase” and that the White House “could pursue the policy outside of the infrastructure debate—or in the case that bipartisan negotiations ultimately collapse.”

Biden’s alternative tax plan “would amount to a new minimum corporate tax of 15 percent” and “take aim at dozens of profitable US corporations that pay little to nothing to the federal government annually.” The Post report continued, “The White House also proposed stepping up enforcement on corporations and wealthy earners who rely on loopholes to lessen their tax burdens, according to the person familiar with the talks.”

After the report of Biden’s infrastructure climb down became public, the White House reported that additional talks took place on Friday. The press statement said the President met with Senator Capito and House Transportation Committee Chairman Peter DeFazio (Democrat from Oregon) and that they discussed a new offer from Republicans for a “$50 billion increase in spending across a number of infrastructure programs.” The statement continued, “The president expressed his gratitude for her effort and goodwill, but also indicated that the current offer did not meet his objectives to grow the economy, tackle the climate crisis, and create new jobs.”

The meeting with DeFazio was significant in that the congressman has advanced a surface transportation reauthorization bill in the House that would provide $547 billion in funding for infrastructure over five years without Republican support. The White House press statement said, “The President and Chairman DeFazio agreed on the benefits of continued engagement with Democratic and Republican Senators as the House work [sic] on infrastructure advances this coming week.”

Talks between the White House and Republicans are scheduled to continue on Monday although the events on Friday have increased the likelihood that a bipartisan agreement will fall apart. While the Democrats have the ability to avoid the Republican opposition by using the budget reconciliation process, they are refusing to use this option.

The pivotal role of West Virginia Democratic Senator Joe Manchin emerged again on Thursday when he said that he would not support passing the infrastructure package through budget reconciliation, a special vote in the Senate that requires a simple majority instead of the 60 votes needed for most laws to be passed.

Manchin said the notion of proceeding on a major piece of legislation without GOP support “a disaster waiting to happen.” Without Manchin’s support, Democrats do not have a majority of 51 votes—including the tie breaking vote of Vice President Kamala Harris—in the Senate needed to pass the bill with the budget reconciliation procedure.

The ongoing insistence by the White House of the necessity for collaboration with Republican supporters of the coup attempt of January 6, and the speed with which Biden has dispensed with major provisions of his infrastructure bill, makes clear that the Democrats’ claims that the “American Jobs Plan” will “rebuild a new economy” and “create millions of good jobs” is in fact a fraud.