NEW YORK CITY: CLOSED DOOR NEGOTIATIONS COULD PRIVATIZE WORKERS’ MEDICARE

By Paul Becker, Portside.

June 4, 2021




https://popularresistance.org/new-york-city-closed-door-negotiations-could-privatize-workers-medicare/



New York City Workers Are Worried Their Healthcare May Be Privatized.

A hush-hush operation between New York City and the Municipal Labor Council (MLC) to essentially privatize the health care coverage for thousands of retirees has exploded into public view in the past several weeks. The internet has been buzzing with protests against the closed-door negotiations that would take retirees out of traditional Medicare and place them in a Medicare Advantage program run by private insurers, with all its traps and pitfalls.

The MLC is composed of the leadership of about 100 unions with members employed by the city. The city continues to pay for part of their health care coverage, under union negotiated contracts, after they retire.

“What they’re doing is using public money to subsidize a private operation,” said Norm Scott, who was an elementary school teacher in Brooklyn for 35 years. He is now active in Retiree Advocate, a caucus in the United Federation of Teachers, the New York affiliate of The American Federation of Teachers. “Ninety percent of the doctors in the United States take Medicare,” he pointed out, “but with these private insurers, you have to choose from their panel of doctors.” He noted that his wife, a hospital health care provider during her career, had spent countless hours on the phone hassling with companies who had turned down payments for patient treatments that doctors at her hospital deemed essential. “They’re just in it to save money so they can earn higher profits. This is not the rule with Medicare.”

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, Medicare uses only 1.3 percent of the funds it collects on administrative costs (costs not related to medical reimbursements). Medicare Advantage insurance companies average nearly 15 percent on administrative costs, the result of hefty profits and seven and eight figure executive compensation packages.
Opposition To Privatization Of Medicare Growing Among Retirees

The behind-the-scenes negotiations, which have been going on for some time, came to light only a few weeks ago and have aroused a storm of protest from rank-and -file union members who have heard about them. “More and more retirees are looking at it and talking about it on Facebook and other internet outlets,” declared Gloria Brandman, one of the leaders of Retiree Advocate, who taught in Brooklyn for more than 30 years.” We’re in a new world now and this issue has generated lots of concern among rank-and-file retirees.”

While the opposition took shape with teacher retirees in the UFT, retirees in other unions, like the Professional Staff Congress (PSC), representing the faculties of colleges in New York City, and District Council 37, representing other groups of city workers, are also raising deep concerns. The Delegates Assembly of PSC on April 15 unanimously (150 to 0) passed a resolution calling for a moratorium on any agreement between New York City and the Municipal Labor Committee (MLC) to move retiree healthcare coverage from traditional Medicare to Medicare Advantage and asking that the PSC bring the moratorium call to the MLC. The NYC Managerial Employees Association Executive Board adopted a similar motion on May 18.

And two weeks ago, retirees from several unions held a press briefing covered by some media outlets like New York’s Channel 11 and radio station WBAI and attended by about 150 retirees calling public attention to the issue.
Evading A Crucial Question

The growing opposition to the unfolding events compelled UFT President Michael Mulgrew to stage an online audio event, earlier this month, spending 45 minutes trying to assure his members that the union would not settle for any agreement that would reduce the benefits they now enjoy. He took a number of questions from listeners. But he evaded a question from one member who asked if he could keep his doctor under the new arrangement or would he have to switch to another doctor if his doctor was not on the insurance company’s panel.

A Feb. 21 article in The New York Times by Mark Miller vividly described why this question is vital to understanding a key aspect of the issue. Ed Stein, a retiree in Colorado who had been a newspaper editorial cartoonist, chose a Medicare Advantage plan over traditional Medicare when he turned 65. “The price was the same,” he recalled. “I liked the access to gyms, and the drug plan was very good. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I’d be facing a crisis like the one I’m having now.”

At 72, Stein was diagnosed with aggressive bladder cancer. He needed a complex surgical procedure and chemotherapy but the doctor in his area that he decided was best for the treatment was not on the panel of his Medicare Advantage plan. He tried to switch to traditional Medicare which would allow him to have a doctor of his choice but came up against a fact that is little known by the general public: the decision to choose Medicare Advantage is effectively irrevocable. “We were just shocked to learn this,” Stein recalled. In response to this issue, UFT President Mulgrew said that UFT retirees will be able to switch back to Medicare during the period of time a few weeks each year when retirees are allowed to switch their health plan coverage. But if they do so, they will have to pay for supplemental coverage.
Pushing Privatization While More People Lean Toward Medicare For All

Up until now, the UFT and most city unions were advising members approaching 65 to choose traditional Medicare, noting the traps and pitfalls of the Medicare Advantage plans run by private insurance companies. The motive of the city in these new proposals is clearly to try to save money at the expense of retirees. The motive of the unions who are basically changing their position is unclear.

At present, the city-MLC negotiations are at a stalemate with two insurance companies bidding for the goodies. A facilitator has been appointed to mediate between the two companies.

The Advantage plans around the country are growing, sparked by aggressive marketing campaigns that tout “extras” like gym membership and other incentives. Their growth has also been aided by quiet changes in federal law and regulation in recent years. And under the Trump administration, Medicare administrators have been tipping the scales improperly in favor of Advantage.

The aggressive campaign to essentially privatize health care and weaken Medicare comes at a time when more and more people are seeing the advantage of government run health care, as is the case in virtually all other developed countries. Medicare for all became an issue in the 2020 presidential campaign and currently, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren has introduced a bill in Congress that would establish a universal Medicare system. And in New York, a bill in the State Legislature which has majority support will make healthcare a right by establishing a universal single-payer healthcare system. Everyone would have quality healthcare regardless of age, employment, or immigration status. All healthcare would be covered (including dental, mental healthcare, long-term care and prescriptions). If it passes it would be a huge step towards health justice in New York and around the country.

Meanwhile, in New York City, the future of the issue is currently up in the air. It seems that the only barrier to the effort to turn city retirees’ medical coverage over to private insurers is a rising tide of opposition by members of city unions and perhaps the public at large.

WHAT’S UP WITH THE SUDDEN ATTACKS ON SCHOOLS THAT TEACH CRITICAL RACE THEORY?

By Jeff Bryant, LA Progressive.

June 4, 2021



https://popularresistance.org/whats-up-with-the-sudden-attacks-on-schools-that-teach-critical-race-theory/




When North Carolina public school teacher Justin Parmenter penned an opinion piece for the Charlotte Observer about the difficulties of teaching in hybrid mode during the pandemic, with students both in-person in the classroom and remote online, he didn’t expect to get called out by a legislator on the floor of the state House of Representatives.

The main point of his editorial, Parmenter told me in a phone call, was that teaching his seventh-grade class in the hybrid model isn’t sustainable because it forces teachers to make compromises that limit the learning opportunities of their students.

But that point was not what Iredell County Republican Representative Jeff McNeely was compelled to comment on. Instead, he attacked Parmenter, who was named a finalist for Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools Teacher of the Year in 2016, for attempting to “indoctrinate” his students about “environmental pollution.”

As Parmenter explains on his personal blog, McNeely’s remarks referred to a piece of writing Parmenter asked his students to respond to that happened to be about pollution, and McNeely made his comment in the context of a discussion in the House about a new bill, HB 755, that “would require schools to post online a comprehensive list of all teaching, classroom, and assignment materials used by every teacher in every class session,” according to WRAL. McNeely spoke out in support of the bill in the House Education Committee meeting because he felt it would “help the parents going to the next grade be able to look and see what that teacher taught the year before” and, apparently, avoid having their children exposed to teachers who would “teach ’em in a certain way to make ’em believe something other than the facts.”

Aside from pollution being, indeed, a fact, what HB 755 proposes is impractical, to say the least, Parmenter told me. “Teaching is an art form,” he said, with multiple opportunities for “teachable moments” to arise spontaneously during every lesson. Having to document that would not only be tedious busywork, but it could also discourage teachers from tailoring instruction to students.

Parmenter suspects that McNeely’s comment, rather than being an honest discourse on pedagogy, is more likely a ham-handed attempt at making a “cheap political point.”

“It’s not surprising,” Parmenter said, “given the current national context.”

The national context he was referring to is the wave of agitation drummed up by right-wing political organizations and Republican politicians over the perceived “indoctrination” of students that occurs in public schools.
‘None Of This Is Really About Critical Race Theory’

A prominent flashpoint in this upheaval is the supposed infiltration of the teaching of critical race theory (CRT) in public school curricula. The controversy “exploded in the public arena this spring,” reports Education Week, “especially in K-12, where numerous state legislatures are debating bills seeking to ban… [CRT’s] use in the classroom.”

The bills have surfaced in at least 15 states, according to Education Week. That includes North Carolina’s version, which debuted in May, NC Policy Watch reported.

The bills repeat a nearly identical set of prohibitions on “how teachers can discuss racism, sexism, and other social issues,” according to Education Week, using language similar to that of an “executive order former President Donald Trump put in place to ban diversity training for federal workers.” President Biden has rescinded that order, but efforts to ban diversity training are continuing in universities and school districts, according to the Washington Post, where the focus of legislation has extended beyond employee training to include school curricula and teaching practices.

The specifics in these bills ban teachers from addressing concepts related to race and gender, for instance, prohibiting teachers from making anyone “feel discomfort or guilt” because of their race or gender. But the list of transgressions seems purposefully vague and general, almost as if to invite a lawsuit, explains Adam Harris in the Atlantic. And proponents of the bills have adopted critical race theory, an academic idea dating back to the 1970s, as a “shorthand” for their concerns.

“But none of this is really about CRT,” James Ford told me in a phone call. Ford is a former North Carolina Teacher of the Year who currently represents the Southwest Education Region on the North Carolina State Board of Education and serves as the executive director of the Center for Racial Equity in Education.

“First, in these calls to stop the teaching of CRT,” he said, “there is no clarification of what CRT really is. There’s no argumentative critique of the actual concept.” Indeed, many of the bills don’t even mention the term.

The real target, Ford explained, is “divisiveness.” For the people who criticize teachers and promote these bills, Ford believes, there can be “no nuance at all” in discussing “matters of religion and customs and the values of rugged individualism and free-market ideology.” There can be no challenges of assumptions and no revising of long-standing mythologies about America and American society.

According to Ford, these people see education as a process about “making kids assimilate,” and “simply talking about a subject like pollution takes on a heightened sense of alarm about society being undermined.”
Outlawing ‘Divisiveness’ In Schools

Many of the bills specifically target the banning of teaching “divisive concepts,” according to Politico, with one bill, in West Virginia, going so far as to call for teachers to be “dismissed or not reemployed for teaching… divisive concepts.”

Proposed laws against “divisiveness” in schools prompt Ford to question, “Divisive for who?” and he notes that the people behind all these bills are overwhelmingly white, wealthier folks who have generally benefited most from the nation’s education system. Ford suggests they may be provoking white resentment against public schools because schools are now more populated with Black and Brown children who may express doubts about a prevailing narrative about the country that may not include people who look like them.

Ford also finds it ironic that people who are intent on outlawing school “indoctrination” have chosen to impose their own agenda by attacking critical thinking and questioning of cultural norms, which, to him, is what truly sounds like indoctrination.

From a practical standpoint, it would be nearly impossible to police what goes on inside hundreds of thousands of classrooms. And it’s hard to imagine how teachers of American history would steer clear of violating these laws while teaching about the Trail of Tears, slavery, the Civil War, and the suffragette and Civil Rights movements, or how English teachers could engage students in writing while avoiding current events and topics that are apt to elicit meaningful responses from students.

Because these concerted attacks on public schools and teachers make little sense academically, they have prompted many observers to consider whether there is more of a political intent behind the effort.

Parmenter suggested that attacks on schools and teachers are an attempt to change political momentum at a time when national leadership under a Democratic presidential administration enjoys high approval ratings.

New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg seems to agree, writing, “Part of the reason the right is putting so much energy into this crusade [against the teaching of CRT] is because it can’t whip up much opposition to the bulk of Joe Biden’s agenda.” She concludes, “Telling parents that liberals want to make their kids hate their country and feel guilty for being white might be absurd and cynical. It also looks like it might be effective.”

But that argument makes sense only if you ignore the other education agenda right-wing politicians have rolled out at the very same time they are whipping up white resentment over diversity in schools.
School Choice’s ‘Best Year Ever’

It’s certainly no coincidence that in many states where there are bills attacking the teaching of divisive topics—including Georgia, Missouri, Arkansas, Iowa, South Dakota, and West Virginia—state lawmakers are also considering or enacting new “school choice” laws to create or expand programs that give parents vouchers so they can remove their children from public schools and send them to private schools at taxpayer expense. Other school choice acts create or expand programs that give parents taxpayer dollars to spend on homeschooling and other educational expenses they incur for their children.

The 2020-2021 school year has been the “best year ever” for school choice advocates, says Alan Greenblatt on Governing: The Future of States and Localities. Greenblatt notes the proliferation of new laws has created education savings accounts that give parents public funds to pay for “a wide range of education-related services.” Other laws create or expand state tax-credit programs that funnel donations from businesses and wealthy people into school vouchers for parents.

Many of these new provisions have been passed in states that had previously resisted school choice programs—such as Arkansas, Kentucky, Missouri, and West Virginia—or that—like Georgia, Maryland, Montana, and South Dakota—had very small programs that are now ballooning into massive redistributions of public funds for education.

“States that were long resistant [to school choice] have now opened up,” Greenblatt observes, and once the programs start up, regardless of how small, “they tend to expand, not contract.”

Greenblatt credits the pandemic for creating a lot of the momentum for this expansion of school laws. But he also quotes education historian Jack Schneider who notes that the drive for more school choice was accelerating long before COVID-19, during the expansions of charter schools under former President Barack Obama and through the fiery denunciations of “government schools” by former President Donald Trump’s Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

Indeed, school choice proponents like the conservative Manhattan Institute have long contended that a public school system funded by government, but with private entities providing the education services, should be “the democratic norm” for the nation. They call privatization of the school system “educational pluralism,” as opposed to the apparent divisiveness of publicly operated institutions.

“Public schooling forces zero-sum conflict such as we are seeing over CRT,” writes Neal McCluskey, the director of the libertarian Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom, in RealClearPolicy. Of course, this “conflict” is “zero-sum,” as James Ford points out, only if you insist it is.

But school choice proponents like McCluskey argue that having a public system that allows people from different backgrounds to come together and share varying points of view is not “diverse” at all because it might open a window to a critique of America that potentially “demonizes” the country.

Instead, in this up-is-down and down-is-up view of the world, the only way to solve divisiveness, according to McCluskey, is by “letting millions of families and educators choose for themselves” by funding a system of privately operated schools that cater only to those parents who already share the same ideologies.

McCluskey might be correct that such a system could “end heated disagreement over ideas like CRT” in schools, but it certainly would guarantee these conflicts spill over into other arenas for these students later in life, when they become adults whose views have hardened and become more resistant to change because they never experienced real diversity of thought during their formative years.

“[A] new era of school choice vouchers may be parents’ best defense against public school curricula,” warned former Attorney General William Barr, according to Just the News, in his first public speech since leaving office under the Trump administration in December.

“Barr suggested,” Just the News reports, that “some of the new woke curricula pushed by the left might infringe religious and speech freedoms and impose a secular theology that violates the Constitution’s Establishment Clause prohibiting government from imposing religious beliefs.”

No doubt, as the effects of the pandemic wane in many places due to vaccinations, fearmongering over supposed divisiveness in public schools will only grow. It is likely that there will be a ratcheting up of the rhetoric for greater school choice to enable parents to escape the supposed adverse consequences of being exposed to anything other than long-accepted narratives about subjects, regardless of a changing world.

A new nonprofit launched in March, Parents Defending Education (PDE), has targeted “woke indoctrination” in schools, Fox News reports. PDE “is just the latest” organization to take up the cause, according to the article, which also lists Discovery Institute, Oregonians for Liberty in Education, and Parents Against Critical Race Theory.

According to Education Week, PDE has already targeted school districts around the country with federal civil rights complaints against schools that address systemic racism. The article notes that “[PDE] staffers work or previously worked at organizations such as the Cato Institute,”—where McCluskey works—the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, and Coalition for TJ. The Cato and Fordham institutes are ardent proponents of school choice, and Coalition for TJ has filed a lawsuit to stop changes to admission standards that would allow more enrollment diversity at a Virginia high school.

Ford agrees that these attacks on “woke” indoctrination in schools are “unequivocally related to efforts to privatize education,” and he points out that many of the same people orchestrating these new laws targeting public education are strong proponents of school choice. “Historically, there is a pattern connecting race issues and privatization,” he says.

Numerous studies have found evidence supporting Ford’s argument, but it’s not at all hard to imagine that an effective strategy for pushing white families out of public schools is to raise fears that their children are being indoctrinated with values and beliefs that could divide them ideologically or emotionally and draw a wedge between them and their families and neighbors.

Nor is it a stretch to believe that families of color, seeing white families become enraged about the teaching of structural racism, would consider fleeing a public school to find a privately operated alternative that would be more culturally affirming for their children.
‘I Don’t Think That’s Funny At All’

In the meantime, public school teachers will be increasingly scapegoated by conservative advocates who are stigmatizing the idea of addressing controversial topics in schools. Proponents of these laws seem to not know teachers “have to leave our politics at the door,” Parmenter told me, and these conservative advocates seem to believe teachers “don’t have the integrity and professionalism to understand that [they] know there are lines you simply don’t cross.”

Parmenter senses that the negative impact these laws will have on the teaching corps, already reeling from the stress caused by the pandemic, may discourage future teachers from entering a profession where they’re constantly under the watchful eye of people who may not respect them and understand how they do their job.

“Less mysterious” to him are the negative impacts these attacks on public schools and teaching will have on students.

“For children to learn how to read and write, they need to engage with a variety of different texts,” he says, and while he found Representative McNeely’s accusations of “indoctrination” somewhat comedic—“like because I just happened to mention that the piece of writing my class focused on was about pollution, that made him think, ‘I just caught one of these Commies admitting what they are up to’”—Parmenter fears any new law that is so “invasive of teachers” will ultimately be harmful to their students. “And I don’t think that’s funny at all.”

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.