Dana worker slips and slams head on concrete working in unsafe conditions at Fort Wayne, Indiana plant

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/09/04/head-s04.html




George Kirby
18 hours ago







On Thursday, a production worker handling parts inside a robot cage at Dana’s Fort Wayne, Indiana plant stepped on a loose controller cord, fell, and slammed her head twice on the concrete floor. Workers who witnessed the injury contacted the World Socialist Web Site to report that an ambulance came to the plant after she was taken to the factory infirmary. The worker returned to work Friday out of fear for being docked for poor attendance.

Dangerous conditions at Dana

The injury comes as workers in the plant are angry over unsafe conditions that subordinate workers’ lives and safety to corporate profit. At the same plant, workers report that the company sprayed down workers with dangerous disinfectant and then forced them to keep working when they got sick.

Workers on the same production line are furious that the injury took place. It is just another example of the type of sweatshop conditions against which Dana workers nationwide are rebelling.

One worker told the WSWS that machines in the plant routinely “leak fluids all over the place.” Workers say the line is never shut down when oil leakage becomes a hazard because the company and the union, the United Steelworkers, are only concerned with meeting quotas. Management reportedly purchased a floor scrubber but workers say the scrubber is hardly used. Another worker reported to the World Socialist Web Site that the floors are often covered in oil or rainwater and that injuries are common in the plant.
Two inches of oil on the shop floor at Dana Fort Wayne

The injured worker was forced to return to work today, despite the fact that she may have a concussion. She apparently feared losing her job, despite the risk to her long-term health. It appears that the worker was so symptomatic at work Friday that Dana instructed her to seek additional medical help.

One coworker said, “If she called off from work, it would’ve gone against attendance, and she would’ve been unpaid. With the holiday mandate, they [Dana] take away your holiday pay.” The worker continued, “Workers have raised hell when the gassing occurred and about oil spills in the plant. But Dana, the company just likes and does nothing because, once again, the whole money thing.”
More oil on the floor in Fort Wayne

Like most Dana plants, Fort Wayne workers voted down the sweatshop contract, 362 votes to 39. Many workers believe due to the voting down of the contract workers were mandated to work through the Labor Day holiday. Like all Dana plants, Fort Wayne workers are expected to keep up with Big Three automotive demands regardless of their health and safety.

A group of workers who saw the aftermath of the fall said, “Numerous employees have lost fingers or parts of fingers in accidents in the last 10 years. After the shutdown [March-May 2020] employees were called back to work without a choice, in danger of their lives. We were then completely shut out of profit-sharing for 2020! I understand that management did receive bonuses though for 2020!”
Oil and coolant on the floor in the 541 department

Injuries and death are reportedly common at Dana. Workers say that three production workers and one skilled tradesman died from cancer after working in an area where materials are buffed and machine repairs take place. One worker who had inhaled smoke from a smoldering fire at work later became ill with cancer and passed away.

Workers at this plant were sprayed with a powerful chemical disinfectant, Aspen One Step, that is dangerous if ingested or inhaled or if it comes in contact with eyes or skin. One worker revealed that initially management blamed cleaning workers for spraying the incorrect chemical while stating to others that it was just hand sanitizer that was sprayed. He continued, “I saw this Aspen One Step on my shift. You see these people spray this with a container and an air hose. It’s similar to spraying insecticide. They don’t even have PPE for the people that spray it, they don’t have masks.”

The worker explained that with the way the cleaning crew sprays, “Most of the time they will spray down equipment or the air. I have trouble breathing after they do that. It’s an everyday process, you see them spraying. Sometimes they will clear the line for an hour or two, then have people back on the line. The infected person could’ve been all around the plant, cleaning one area wouldn’t do anything. For the amount of time they spray the plant it should be shut down for months.”

An injury to one is an injury to all! To contact the DWRFC about organizing a new leadership for the struggle at Dana and to make the workplace safe for all workers, email danawrfc@gmail.com or text at (248) 602–0936.

UAW and USW leave Dana workers in the dark after massive repudiation of pro-management contract

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/09/04/dana-s04.html




Shannon Jones
14 hours ago







Now that Dana workers have decisively rejected a pro-management contract negotiated by the United Auto Workers and United Steelworkers, a determined mood is taking hold among workers to demand a contract that addresses their needs. However, since the vote, representatives of the UAW and USW have kept a low profile, giving no indication that they plan to set a strike deadline or seek improvements in the contract.

Dana Incorporated World Headquarters in Maumee, Ohio [WSWS photo]

A worker at the Dana Driveline plant in Toledo, Ohio said of the unanimous 435–0 contract rejection vote at their plant, “People think we have a chance now with everyone coming together and doing the right thing.”

Another worker wrote, “It's not just a contract we’re negotiating, It's a movement and ain't no telling where we headed in the coming days, weeks and months ahead.”

The vote to reject was decisive. As of this writing 12 plants had rejected the contract and the results at four others were unconfirmed. In addition to Toledo, Auburn Hills, Michigan voted 96 percent “no”; St. Clair, Michigan 97 percent; Warren, Michigan 56 percent; Fort Wayne, Indiana, 90 percent; Pottstown, Pennsylvania 78 percent and Paris, Tennessee 83 percent. Lima, Ohio, Danville, Louisville and Dry Ridge, Kentucky and Columbia, Missouri also voted “no” by wide margins. Henderson, Kentucky, Lugoff, South Carolina, and Crossville and Humboldt, Tennessee did not report results.

A video statement supporting the fight of Dana workers by Marcia Walters, the widow of Dry Ridge, Kentucky Dana worker Danny Walters, has been viewed hundreds of times. Danny Walters died after suffering a seizure at Dana on the evening of June 1-2 of this year. Nobody from the UAW or management informed Marcia Walters, who was out of town at the time, of her husband’s condition. This led to him dying unattended at home.

In a statement to the WSWS, Marcia said, “This has to stop, there can be no more Danny Walters. I want to use my voice for the people that work there.

“Demand reasonable hours so that you can have some kind of life outside of work. I will forever use my voice for you.”

The vote to reject the agreement, which did nothing to address 7-day, 12-hour workweeks and abysmal pay levels, is only the first step. While Dana workers are in a powerful position, given the disruptions to the global supply chain, there is no time to lose.

The Dana Workers Rank and File Committee issued a statement Thursday night demanding the setting of a strike date and which issued a set of demands corresponding to the needs of Dana workers, not the profit requirements of management.

Workers are determined to end a low-wage regime at Dana that has been cemented by a series of concessionary contracts imposed by the UAW/USW since Dana emerged from bankruptcy in 2008. In the distant past, Dana workers, like other auto parts workers, enjoyed near wage parity with Ford, Chrysler and GM.

Through its betrayal of a series of strikes, including the AP Parts strike in Toledo in 1984–85, the UAW was able to impose a series of substandard contracts, slashing pay for auto parts workers to promote greater “competitiveness” for the major auto companies. This was followed by the spin-off of the parts operations of the Detroit automakers, which one after another declared bankruptcy, robbing workers of pensions and hard-won benefits.

In 2007, Dana offloaded its retiree health care obligations onto the UAW for pennies on the dollar, resulting in a massive cost saving for the company. The deal, which involved handing the union-controlled retiree healthcare trust fund and $780 million in stock and cash, lead to cuts for retirees, but gave the UAW control of a huge investment vehicle. The Dana agreement paved the way for similar deals with the major Detroit automakers. The contract also froze pensions and imposed a two-tier structure. None of these concessions were ever restored even as the company returned to profitability.

The Dana Worker Rank-and-File Committee advised, “The ‘no’ vote means the fight is just beginning. We are in a two-front war: against Dana and its bought-and-paid-for unions. We cannot let down our guard. To prepare for the next stage of this fight, we must lay out a battle plan, study the forces arrayed against us and marshal all our forces and allies.”

The UAW and Dana have been extending the contract day-by-day, shamelessly abandoning the old principle of “no contact no work.” In Dry Ridge, Kentucky workers report that the UAW has even been appointing supervisors as strike captains.

From the start of the contract struggle the UAW and USW have done everything possible to try to divide and confuse workers. The unions never revealed to workers what its demands were or even seriously sought workers’ input. When the contract expired in mid-August, the UAW and USW did not set a strike deadline. Talks continued in secret while the company hired more and more temporary workers in order to increase production in case of a strike.

When the UAW and USW finally announced a tentative agreement, it withheld details until just hours before ratification votes, giving workers almost no time to study the deal. However, their dirty tricks could not hide the fact that the contract maintained the right of the company to impose virtually unlimited forced overtime and did nothing to provide meaningful raises or eliminate the hated tier system.

At informational meetings called to supposedly explain the contract, union officials refused to answer questions and browbeat and intimidated workers who pushed for answers.

In the wake of the stunning rejection, the unions have maintained their silence and have provided no word if negotiations will resume if a strike takes place. Workers report that in St. Clair, Michigan, where only four workers voted in favor of the deal, management, and at least some officials within the UAW, are calling for a re-running of the contract vote.

A worker at St. Clair complained about the voting procedures on the contract, which was held in the plant, not a neutral location. “You just checked your ‘no’ and walked away.” There was no privacy in the voting since it was held out in the open without any screens.

Reflecting the inhuman conditions that Dana workers confront and the utter contempt of management for their health and safety, workers in Fort Wayne, Indiana report that they have been sprayed with the toxic cleaner, Aspen One Step, supposedly to prevent the spread of COVID. While spraying the work area, management insisted on keeping production going, leading to workers becoming ill. Workers report that Aspen carries a warning label citing the dangers of ingestion, inhalation or eye or skin exposure.

WHO reports fifth “variant of interest” as COVID pandemic worsens

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/09/04/usco-s04.html




Benjamin Mateus
16 hours ago

A scientist researching Covid-19 [Credit: Creative Commons)

This week the World Health Organization (WHO) announced the presence of a fifth variant of interest called “Mu,” designated by the alpha-numeric code B.1.621, with several characteristic mutations that make it more resistant to vaccines.

It was first identified in Colombia in January 2021. Though the global prevalence of the Mu variant globally remains low, it accounts for 39 percent of all strains sequenced from Colombia and 13 percent from Ecuador, and its frequency has consistently been rising.

The designation “variant of interest” means that the new version of the virus has genetic markers suggesting a potentially increased capability to infect or increased resistance to vaccines, but it has not yet risen to the level of “variant of concern,” which actually demonstrates increased transmissibility, lethality or resistance in the field.

Additionally, scientists in South Africa announced that they have detected a new variant designated as C.1.2, first discovered during the country’s third wave in May. Though the strain has not been designated a variant of interest by the WHO, it has spread across Africa, Asia, Europe and the Pacific into nine countries, including China and New Zealand.

The C.1.2 appears to harbor a significant number of mutations with an unusually high mutation rate, which makes it important to track. Newsweek wrote, “It was found to contain many mutations that were found in all variants of concern (VOCs) and three variants of interest (VOIs), as well as additional changes within the NTD (C136F) RBD (Y449H), and adjacent to the furin cleavage site (N679K).

The pre-print study noted, “Like several other VOCs, C.1.2 has accumulated a number of substitutions beyond what would be expected from the background SARS-CoV-2 evolutionary rate. This suggests the likelihood that these mutations arose during a period of accelerated evolution in a single individual with prolonged viral infection through virus-host co-evolution.”

Currently, there have been more than 220 million COVID-19 infections reported and 4.56 million deaths attributed to complications from the infections. The moving average in cases has peaked at close to 660,000 cases per day, while the average in deaths is skirting 10,000 each day. Regionally, the Americas and Europe have seen cases reach previous highs. These developments are being compounded by both the return to school and the reopening of all nonessential businesses and travel.

The United States continues to remain the epicenter of the pandemic during the Delta phase of the pandemic. It has now surpassed 40 million reported cases and 663,000 deaths. The moving average has reached 164,000 new cases per day, having climbed 14 percent from two weeks ago. The average daily death toll has jumped to more than 1,500 per day, a 67 percent rise in the same period.

US hospitalizations continue to climb, with close to 102,000 having been admitted for treatment. Approximately a quarter of these are in intensive care units.

The push to get children back to schools will only produce more devastating results as the majority of them remain unvaccinated. The American Academy of Pediatrics noted that for the week ending August 26, 2021, children accounted for 22.4 percent of reported weekly COVID-19 cases, meaning nearly one in four cases are among this layer of the population.

Since July 22, 2021, when the number of pediatric cases was at 38,000 for the week, that figure has risen to 204,000, just shy of the winter peaks. And all schools have yet to open.

However, rather than acknowledging the failed and bankrupt proposition that children must return to in-class instructions, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky put her usual spin on the matter, saying at a press briefing, “Cases, emergency room visits and hospitalizations are much lower among children and communities with higher vaccination rates. Vaccination work!”

The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluations (IHME) modeling projection, which estimates total reported deaths by December 1, 2021, has been revised upwards. The IHME now expects that more than three-quarter million Americans will have died by then, a social crime for which the capitalist ruling class and its two parties are primarily responsible.

A Johns Hopkins webinar yesterday highlighted South Carolina, Tennessee and Florida as reporting more COVID cases per capita than any other state or any single country across the globe. This demonstrates the lethal role—in a literal sense—of the ultra-right campaign against vaccination, masking, social distancing and all other public health efforts, spearheaded by Republican politicians like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

The policies of Democratic governors and the Biden administration are merely a slower route to the same destination, since reopening schools, social venues and workplaces, with or without masking, means facilitating the spread of coronavirus with all its horrific consequences.

At the Johns Hopkins webinar, one of the experts on the panel, Dr. Bill Moss, the executive director at the International Vaccine Access Center at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, pointed out that allowing hospitals throughout much of the country where the pandemic has accelerated to be inundated by patients was a serious mistake.

Dr. Moss went on to say, “I think one of the most egregious failures of our society, one of our gravest sins as we look back at this particularly during this wave, will be allowing hospitals to be overwhelmed. We have overwhelmed the hospital staff; we are seeing shortages in nurses and respiratory therapists and other hospital personnel. We’ve seen limited bed capacity in hospitals, particularly in intensive care units in a number of counties and states. We are seeing shortages of oxygen. And we should just not be in this place where our health system is overwhelmed now that we ... have three safe and effective vaccines. That was more understandable in the winter surge when vaccines were just being rolled out. … But this is impacting on people who don’t have COVID and need health care services.”

He also went on to indirectly fault the Biden administration’s early messaging on the vaccines giving “false hope that vaccines were going to prevent infections,” calling for public health measures to prevent infection. Vaccines have always been intended for the prevention of severe disease and not infections.

At the present rate of infections, the world will reach 300 million reported cases of COVID-19 by January 2022, the beginning of the third year of the COVID pandemic. With 5.4 billion doses of vaccines administered thus far, the world will have reached 8 billion, or about one dose for every person on the planet, before the year’s end. But the inequity in the distribution continues to disadvantage the poorest nations.

This inequity could be further exacerbated if it becomes necessary to administer booster vaccines on a mass basis in the countries where most of the population has already been inoculated, particularly in Europe and America, because of declining effectiveness of the vaccines and increased ability of the Delta variant to evade immunity.

It is also conceivable that if newer strains create conditions that the vaccines are deemed insufficiently ineffective, the leading pharmaceuticals will have to return to the drawing board and manufacture the next generation of vaccines against the latest variants, with the chilling possibility that the global vaccination would have to start all over again.

UK’s BBC disparages scientific concerns over the unsafe reopening of schools

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/09/03/lint-s03.html




Thomas Scripps
19 hours ago







The World Socialist Web Site spoke with Lisa Diaz, a parent and leading member of the SafeEdForAll (Safe Education For All) campaign group, after an interview she gave to the BBC was used to belittle her scientific concerns over the unsafe reopening of schools.

Lisa's Diaz' video exposing the BBC's manipulation of her interview with the broadcaster (creditit: Liza Diaz @Sandyboots2020)

The BBC article, titled “Mixed emotions as pupils return to school across England” described Lisa as “fearful about the possible health effects [of Covid] on children,” adding, “although studies show they are much less likely to get seriously ill.” It referred to her genetic blood disorder “which makes her particularly concerned” and quoted her saying she was “‘devastated’ by the choice” to keep her kids out of school.

Lisa tweeted in response, with a video —which has received more than 177,000 views and been retweeted over 2,300 times—“Annoyed to be depicted as just an anxious mum in today’s @BBCNews article. Like it’s somehow MY problem for NOT wanting my children to catch a deadly virus which causes multi-organ damage & unknown long-term effects. Typical gaslighting. You should be calling out the Govt [government] not me.”

She was supported by leading US epidemiologist Dr Eric Feigl-Ding, who wrote, “Shameful that @BBCNews is accusing a mother worried about #COVID19 & #LongCovid in kids of being anxious—it’s another way of dismissing someone as ‘alarmist’ & ‘hysterical’.”

Speaking with the WSWS, Lisa explained that she had “mentioned in passing that of course I’m gutted for my son, of course I’m upset, he should be going to school, but I’m not going to send him into a Covid petri dish. That was the context. And they’ve taken it all out of proportion and only quoted those two little bits about my underlying health condition. I do have a condition, and it makes it even more callous the way I’ve been treated, but at the end of the day it’s irrelevant. Even if I was completely healthy it’s still an issue—healthy people die from Covid and get Long Covid.”

For most of her BBC interview, Lisa “focussed on the utter lack of mitigation within schools, how the meagre and measly mitigations that were in place in the last academic year have been rolled back; that there’s going to be no masks, no adequate ventilation, no HEPA air filters, CO2 monitors won’t be ready—though, in any case, that’s like putting a plaster on a gaping wound.”

She also explained how “the government are actively taking measures to encourage, as it were, the virus to spread in schools. They’re no longer isolating close contacts… I said about how they’re encouraging assemblies, about senior leadership in schools being told to only reach out for help when 10 percent of the school population has been infected.”

“I said [UK Prime Minister] Boris Johnson is a liar. He’s using our children in a murderous experiment. And I said these are not my words: this is Professor Michael Baker, an epidemiologist who advises the New Zealand government. I said it’s barbaric. I mentioned again about Boris Johnson lying because he admitted at one point that children are vectors of transmission, that school holidays would offer a firebreak.”

Lisa pointed to the catastrophic situation in the United States and rates of Long Covid and hospitalisation among children. “I said it’s not a benign illness in children and this is a myth that needs obliterating. That it causes potentially lifelong complications, damage to the respiratory tract, the heart, the brain, cognitive impairment. We have no idea the full extent of what we’re dealing with and we won’t know for years to come. I said there’s an increase in hospitalisations, that 1,153 children in England alone had been hospitalised [in July].

“There is nothing controversial about saying you don’t want your child to catch Covid, you don’t want your child to be exposed to risk in school. All I want is for schools to be made safe, if they can be made safe.

“I said what we really need to go for is a Zero Covid policy, because it’s completely unacceptable having nearly a thousand people die in a week. That is not living with Covid, that is dying with Covid. There is so much the government can do to drive cases down. Instead, they’ve no regard for human life, they’re selling it as ‘Freedom Day’ and the media are helping to cover it up.”

After her treatment in this interview, Lisa made the principled decision to tell the BBC not to use a to-camera piece she had provided to the broadcaster’s Breakfast news programme, tweeting, “Told @BBCNews that I don’t want them to use interview with me in their @BBCBreakfast piece on Monday. I’m not ‘fearful’, I’m informed. The Government are conducting a dangerous experiment on our kids. And you are complicit.”

She told the WSWS she had taken the decision “having seen this article and how it had been misconstrued and how everything that I’d said had been left out and I was just presented as almost neurotic, as somebody who’s just ‘fearful’. I’m not saying anything different from people with PhDs in epidemiology. Just because I’m a mum from Wigan, don’t patronise me.”

Lisa described the media’s role during the pandemic as “Absolutely pathetic. There has been a media blackout, radio silence. The media are completely complicit… But the reason why they’re doing that is because they’re in cahoots with the government—they want bums on seats so parents can get to work. They couldn’t care less if my child ends up with debilitating long Covid… In terms of what’s gone out in the mainstream media on Sky and the BBC, it’s actually criminal. I think it’s something like 777 people have died in the last week of Covid. Why is that not all over the news?”

Referring to the work of the WSWS, Lisa said, “you are doing a sterling job. Really, you should be in charge of the BBC!”

Many parents and educators have expressed outrage in the last few days at another BBC article headlined, “Long Covid in children 'nowhere near scale feared'”, also posted with the title, “Long Covid in children—time to be reassured”. The article cites a University College London study which has found that up to 14 percent of 11-17 years olds had symptoms linked with the Covid-19 virus 15 weeks after infection.

Deepti Gurdasani, a Senior Lecturer in Epidemiology at Queen Mary University, tweeted: “Not sure how this can be described as 'reassuring' at all. 1 in 7 children having persistent symptoms at 15 weeks with ~34,000 children estimated to be affected (very similar to ONS estimates). Quite shocked by some of the media spin I've seen on this.”

Lisa commented, “I’m not sure how much worse it can be than playing Russian roulette [with a child’s health]—seven to one. We’re talking about, 15 weeks afterwards, your child being in pain, and there was a big list of symptoms including debilitating exhaustion, headaches—imagine living with that. It’s not okay. How is that ‘not as bad’. How much worse do they want it to be? How can they paint this as a good result?

“And this is an ongoing study. This is the tip of the iceberg. We don’t know, in five, ten years, what the debilitating symptoms could look like. We don’t know [the long-term effects], but we know things are bad at the moment, so let’s use the precautionary principle and do everything we can to protect our children.

“Any normal person would say it’s not okay for one in seven children to be ill for weeks, and we don’t know if they’ll ever get better … The government are keen to say we’ve got to live with it like flu. Covid is nothing like flu.”

Referring to another BBC article posted a day later, “Schools aren't infection hubs, says public health boss,” Lisa added, “They just lie … It’s like saying black is white.”

The same article was also criticised by Dr Feigl-Ding, who tweeted, “Seriously, @BBCNews is now a full on @BorisJohnson propaganda mouthpiece machine now. This story is totally bullshit. Experts like @trishgreenhalgh agree.” Greenhalgh, Professor of Primary Health Care at Oxford University, said in response to the claim that schools were not transmission hubs, “They are, actually. Why wouldn't they be? Schools bring unvaccinated, mostly unmasked people together for prolonged periods in indoor spaces that are inadequately ventilated.”

Speaking about the political situation, Lisa said, “When the government fails to look after us, when the media fails to present the truth—that Covid isn’t a benign illness for children, that schools aren’t safe—then grassroots pressure groups like mine (SafeEdForAll) and concerned parents have to hold the government to account.” She added, “the Labour Party are absolutely pathetic, they’re totally complicit as well,” and “I’m shocked at the unions as well to be honest. They’ve got a duty of care to their members. How many more teachers need to die?”

Lisa pointed to reports by the Office for National Statistics that show workers in teaching and education have the highest rates of Long Covid outside of workers in health and social care. She noted, “I think another four children have died in August of Covid and one died on August 31 who was between 0 and 4 years old. Why’s that not on the news? And how many plane crashes a week is it that we’re looking at now [in terms of overall deaths]? It’s not okay and I will never be okay with that many people dying.”

After disastrous jobs report, Biden doubles down on reopening schools, ending pandemic relief

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/09/04/jobs-s04.html




Barry Grey
14 hours ago







On Friday, President Joe Biden responded to the Labor Department’s disastrous jobs report for August by brushing aside the sharp slowdown in hiring due to the spread of the Delta coronavirus and reaffirming his policy of economic reopening combined with the termination of pandemic-related social relief measures.

Joe Biden [Credit: Flickr.com, Gage Skidmore]

The employment report was issued three days before Labor Day, September 6, when federal unemployment benefits first enacted in March 2020 officially expire. Upwards of 7.5 million unemployed workers will be cut off of all jobless benefits. They will be stripped of a critical lifeline, as inadequate as it is at $300 a week, on which they have relied to avoid destitution and homelessness. An additional 3 million people still receiving benefits from their state system will suffer a $300 cut in total jobless pay.

The report shattered the administration’s claims of a surging economy and booming labor market, the pretext for ending vital benefits for the working class while continuing to pump $120 billion every month into the financial markets and provide virtually free and unlimited credit to the corporations and banks.

US nonfarm payrolls increased by only 235,000 in August, less than half the monthly average since January of 586,000, and far below economists’ predictions of 725,000. Job creation plunged from June’s figure of 962,000 and July’s total of 1,053,000.

This dismal result was likely an underestimation of the slowdown. The Labor Department data was collected in the second week of August, before the full effect of the fourth wave of the pandemic or the impact of Hurricanes Henri and Ida in the second half of the month.

The report’s breakdown of the job market clearly showed the decisive impact of the ongoing surge of COVID-19 infections, hospitalizations and deaths, fueled by the virulent Delta variant and facilitated by the ruthless reopening of businesses and, above all, schools, despite the explosive spread of the virus among children and educators.

The ruling class and its political servants in both parties are united in forcing workers back into unsafe workplaces and schools to feed the ravenous demand for corporate profits. But they are caught in a contradiction. The more they “reopen” in the midst of a rampaging pandemic, the more their efforts come up against the impact of the COVID surge on production and economic activity.

The economic recovery has been driven by increased employment in the low-wage service sector, particularly retail trade and “leisure and hospitality.” The latter has increased by 350,000 on average for each of the last six months, boosted by the dropping of all social distancing measures and the Biden administration’s proclamation of the imminent end of the pandemic and return to normal.

In August, however, as restaurant, dining and vacationing stalled due to the resurgence of the pandemic, this sector failed to register any increase in hiring. Retail payrolls declined.

The Wall Street Journal wrote:


The details of the report had the Delta variant written all over them. Hotels and other accommodation businesses, which in the half year through July added a seasonally adjusted average of 56,700 workers each month, added just 6,600. Restaurants, bars and other food services and drinking places shed 41,500 jobs in August; over the previous six months, they recorded average job gains of 227,400.

The cutoff of federal jobless benefits follows last week’s Supreme Court ruling terminating the moratorium on evictions ordered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as a public health measure. Various think tanks and advocacy groups estimate that as many as 11 million households are behind on their rent and will face eviction in the coming months.

At the same time, health insurers are beginning to charge COVID-19 patients for hospital stays and other medical treatment, adding an additional financial burden to devastating and often long-term health consequences of the virus.

In remarks from the White House on Friday, Biden callously dismissed the impact on workers of both the dismal jobs report and the cutoff of government benefits.

“Despite the impact of the Delta variant,” he said, “what we’re seeing is an economic recovery that is durable and strong. The Biden plan is working. We’re getting results. America is on the move again.”

Oozing a combination of cynicism and incipient senility, Biden went on to hail the Labor Day holiday as a celebration “honoring the dignity of work, honoring the American worker.”

He then indicated how he planned to “honor the American worker.”


Even as some of the benefits that were provided are set to expire next week, states have the option to extend those benefits and the federal resources from the Rescue Plan to do so. Not more federal taxes, state taxes, but they have the federal money to be able to do that.

This, of course, is a brazen lie. Twenty-six states weeks ago terminated the federal unemployment benefit programs prematurely, one of which is Democratic-controlled. They did so, moreover, with the explicit blessing of the White House, whose press secretary told reporters in June that Republican governors “have every right” to “not accept” federal unemployment benefit funds.

What Biden was really telling workers was: “Tough luck. You’re on your own.”

When it came to the pandemic profiteers, however, the president could not be more solicitous. After boasting that “there have been so many records the stock market has hit under my presidency,” he said, “[T]he very wealthy will—they’re still going to have three homes or four homes, if they want. It’s not going to change what schools they can send their kids to. It’s not going to change their standard of living. But just pay a fair share.

“Corporate America—it’s going to continue to do very well. … We’ll still have millionaires. We’ll still have billionaires. We’ll still have corporations that do incredibly well and CEOs that make a lot of money. But everybody has to start paying their fair share.”

There is no “fair share” in a society where billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk double their fortunes off of the death and suffering of millions of people in the US and around the world.

The homicidal policy of reopening the economy and letting the pandemic rip—rejecting science-based policies to eradicate the virus because they cut across corporate profit-making—is bound up with the termination of the meager social relief measures imposed at an earlier stage of the pandemic. They are two sides of the same coin.

This connection was spelled out by the financial press on Friday. The Financial Times wrote of the end of US jobless benefits:


Goldman Sachs economists estimate that July’s jobs growth would have been 400,000 higher had the enhanced benefits expired nationwide, and forecast next week’s termination to add 1.5 million in payroll gains by the end of the year.

On the reopening of schools, the Wall Street Journal noted:


Economists expect that school reopenings in August and September will help pull some parents, particularly mothers, back into the labor force as child-care responsibilities ease.

Workers—from autoworkers and bus drivers to school teachers and college professors—must be blackmailed into risking their health and lives, and the lives of their loved ones and friends, under the immediate threat of destitution, hunger and homelessness. Once back on the job, they face intensified exploitation, sweatshop conditions, intolerable work schedules and low pay—all for the purpose of extracting the maximum profit to back up the mountain of debt resulting from the bailout of the financial oligarchy.

This is how Biden and the American ruling class “honor” the American worker on Labor Day.

New York’s Ida disaster: A social crime in the center of world capitalism

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/09/04/pers-s04.html




Daniel de Vries
13 hours ago







The record rainfall that overwhelmed much of the Northeastern United States this week has left at least 48 dead and millions more grappling with the fallout from the historic flooding.

The remnants of Hurricane Ida dropped more than 2 inches (5 cm) of rain on 60 million people throughout the region, with densely populated portions of New York and New Jersey recording up to 9 inches (23 cm) overnight. In New York City’s Central Park, the storm gushed 3.15 inches (8 cm) of water in just one hour, blowing away the previous record set just 11 days earlier.

Flooding at Penn Station subway in New York City, September 1, 2021 [Photo by Twitter user @Debz1lla]

The massive flooding in New York City—the wealthiest city in the world and home to the world’s highest concentration of billionaires—has revealed the deadly consequences of the systemic defunding of social infrastructure and the impoverishment of masses of workers.

While the storm’s intensity was unprecedented, it was by no means unexpected. Scientists have warned for decades about the consequences of global climate change, including the inevitability of more intense tropical storms driven by warming oceans, which have absorbed 93 percent of excess heat associated with global warming. Hurricane Ida strengthened into a Category 4 storm in a matter of hours, fed by waters in the Gulf of Mexico that were 3–5 degrees Fahrenheit (1.7–2.8 degrees C) higher than the norm last century.

Along with the climatic impacts, scientists have also long sounded the alarm over the abysmal lack of preparedness. “Much of the infrastructure in the Northeast, including drainage and sewer systems, flood and storm protection assets, transportation systems, and power supply, is nearing the end of its planned life expectancy,” the US National Climate Assessment stated in its latest report in 2019. “Current water-related infrastructure in the United States is not designed for the projected wider variability of future climate conditions compared to those recorded in the last century.” The authors stressed that “significant new investments in infrastructure” are needed to protect life and property.

The flooding this week exposed the spectacular failure to act on these warnings. Roadways across the region were transformed into raging rivers, submerging cars and motorists alike. More than a dozen people died in vehicles in New Jersey. One driver was found dead after being swept nearly two miles by floodwaters.

The entire public transportation network in New York City ground to a halt Wednesday evening, not as a preparatory measure to protect the public but out of necessity once the system ceased to be navigable. Subway lines functioned as sewers and waterfalls cascaded down onto subway platforms, stranding passengers for hours.

A combination of rainwater and sewage engulfed homes across several states. At one housing complex in Elizabeth, New Jersey, floodwaters killed four residents and left 600 homeless. In New York City, at least 11 drowned after being trapped in flooded basement apartments.

Alongside the devastating scenes in the Northeast, residents along the Gulf Coast, where Hurricane Ida first made landfall, remain in dire conditions. At least 16 have died in Louisiana and Mississippi. The victims include four nursing home residents, who were evacuated to a filthy warehouse lacking facilities for the more than 800 residents herded inside two days before the hurricane struck. Officials determined that three of the four deaths were related to the storm.

Other causes of death include not only injuries sustained during the storm but also electrocution and carbon monoxide poisoning. It was not until Thursday, four days after Ida struck, that New Orleans officials announced they were organizing a voluntary evacuation to allow elderly and disabled residents to seek shelter outside of the state. Hundreds of thousands of households remain without power, with service not expected to be restored until next week at the earliest.

The impact of the storm has put a spotlight on the horrific social reality in the United States, especially in the heart of global capitalism, New York City. While the wealthy were well protected in their insulated penthouses and multistory brownstones, the brutal housing conditions for the working class were tragically exposed by the storm. At least 11 died in illegal basement conversions in Queens. Many more have been made homeless.

Unable to afford the extortionate rents even in the outer boroughs of New York City, tens of thousands of mainly immigrant workers are forced to take up residence in hazardous basement apartments. Some are occupied by families. Others are set up dormitory-style with a dozen or more beds rented out, sometimes in shifts. Barely habitable in the best of times, they become death traps under increasingly common flood conditions.

Just a handful of subway stops away from the center of global finance capital in Midtown Manhattan, the conditions for the “Other Half” in New York City resemble the depictions of the squalid and dangerous tenements on the Lower East Side that Jacob Riis exposed 130 years ago, long assumed to be in the distant past.

Hurricane Ida is not simply a tragic natural disaster. More fundamentally, it is a social crime. For decades, the ruling class has refused to provide funding for the maintenance of critical infrastructure, let alone building out infrastructure to handle forthcoming climate extremes. Nine years after Hurricane Sandy devastated the region, New York has not even completed all the needed repairs to the transit system. Much of the shoreline remains dangerously unprotected. Rather than mobilizing billions of dollars to provide adequate housing for the masses of workers, immense resources in the city have been squandered constructing luxury homes in the clouds for the wealthy.

Ida, which has devastated both the Gulf and Atlantic coasts, unfolds as wildfires are ravaging much of the West Coast. It comes on the heels of a relentless series of climate disasters around the world, including massive flooding in Germany, China and Tennessee, and unprecedented heat waves in the Pacific Northwest. A recent report from the World Meteorological Organization found that the number of climate-driven disasters has increased by a factor of five over the past 50 years, killing more than 2 million and inflicting more than $3.6 trillion in losses.

The worsening impacts of climate change on the working class are already regular features of life under conditions where global temperatures have risen 3.4 degrees F (1.1 degrees C) from pre-industrial levels. Another half a degree of warming is already inevitable due to the inertia of the climate system. Global capitalism is on a trajectory to blow past the meaningless commitments made by national governments to limit the increase to two degrees. The future of human civilization itself is at risk.

The policies of the ruling class are determined by its own social interests. Just over the past year, as millions have died from the pandemic and climate disaster after disaster has unfolded, trillions of dollars have been pumped into the markets to boost the financial oligarchy’s fortunes. In the past 12 months alone, the S&P 500 added more than $10 trillion to its market capitalization.

Meanwhile, what has been done to address climate change? After every disaster, the political establishment declares a wake-up call and mouths empty pledges to change course. Yet the modern-day tenements of Queens and the decaying subway system remain deadly. The climate vulnerabilities are growing, while the trillions needed to shore up infrastructure are instead floating into the coffers on Wall Street.

The refusal of the ruling class in New York City to invest in climate resiliency measures has been matched by the incapacity of the global ruling class to put in place any meaningful response to the crisis. The decades of attempts to construct an international regime to stop global warming, from the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 to the Paris Agreement in 2015, have failed miserably.

To effectively address the climate crisis, which at its core is an international issue, requires a level of planning and coordination impossible under a system divided into rival nation-states that subordinates every facet of social life to profit. It requires the mobilization of society’s resources to implement wholesale changes in the production of materials and generation of energy, rapidly transitioning to renewable power for industry, transportation and homes.

The class issues bound up with climate change are mirrored in compressed form in the pandemic. The horrific death tolls from COVID-19—officially more than 660,000 in the US and 4.5 million globally—have not triggered a rational response from the ruling class to pursue the eradication of the virus. Instead, billionaires in the US have feasted on death, growing $1.2 trillion richer during the pandemic.

In his preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Karl Marx wrote, “At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or—this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms—with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution.”

What has blocked a rational solution to both the pandemic and to climate change is 1) the private ownership of the means of production; and 2) the division of the world into nation-states. These are the “fetters” that are preventing the progressive development of humanity. Their elimination is the precondition for dealing with climate change and for opening up a path to an enormous technological and scientific development of human society in the interests of the vast majority, not the tiny few.

Arkansas is a shithole because of cowardly career politicians who pander to idiots

https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/npr/2021/08/11/1022877843/theres-vaccine-drama-in-arkansas-where-rates-are-low-and-everyone-has-an-opinion/



There's Vaccine Drama In Arkansas, Where Rates Are Low And Everyone Has An Opinion

The state has one of the lowest vaccination rates in the U.S. And this weekend, 80,000 doses will expire because of lack of demand. The campaign is on to get people to sign up.

PIEN HUANG | POSTED ONAUGUST 11, 2021, 4:47 PM




Kenny Nations, manager of the movie theater, changes the sign on the marquee; he is fully vaccinated and has tried to encourage co-workers to follow suit. // Liz Sanders for NPR

This weekend, 80,000 doses of COVID-19 vaccines will expire in Arkansas. There simply weren't enough people in the state willing to get their jab — even though cases and deaths from the delta variant are rising there at an alarming rate.

"Prior to the vaccine, I was heartsick because people died and we couldn't help them. Now, they don't get the vaccine and we can't help them," says Tammy Kellebrew, a pharmacist who travels to rural hospitals across the state. "And so after every death, I go back to the pharmacy and I cry, and then I go back to work."

"I'm angry, upset, disappointed," says Dr. Jose Romero, health secretary for Arkansas. "As a nation, we've worked so hard to get this vaccine out. And not to have them accepted by the public is difficult to understand and difficult to accept."


Arkansas has one of the country's the lowest vaccination rates



Arkansas, a largely white, rural state powered by farming, factories and rugged individualism, has one of the country's lowest COVID-19 vaccination rates. Just 36% of the state's 3 million people are fully vaccinated.

In May, Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson set a modest goal of administering at least one shot to 50% of the total population by the end of July. The state has made progress — but is falling short by more than 100,000 people.

The result of the vaccine resistance, along with the rise of the super-spreadable delta variant, is more COVID cases and more preventable deaths. Hospitals in Arkansas are again reaching critical capacity, and staff are exhausted.

Kellebrew wore a mask with Dr. Anthony Fauci's face on it to a town hall meeting held by Hutchinson in her hometown of Dumas, a small, majority-Black city in the southeast delta region on July 27. It was one in a series of community COVID-19 conversations the governor has been holding as he travels the state pleading with Arkansans to get the shot.

"I'm a Trump supporter and I am a Republican, and I got both vaccine [doses]," Hutchinson stated at another meeting on July 28 in Heber Springs, a lakeside retirement and resort community in the Ozark foothills. "It's not about politics. It's about my health."


Rumors include the vaccine making you magnetic



Reasons for vaccine resistance are diverse and many, says Col. Robert Ator, who heads the state's vaccine distribution program. "What started out as being a logistics and distribution kind of an exercise has turned out to be psychology," he says. "Our targeting strategy has been to work down on the micro level, to work with individual communities to understand what is the barrier in that area and let us address those."

For starters, there's a tide of misinformation along with distrust of the government. Debbie Reynolds attended the town hall in Heber Springs. She has not been vaccinated, and the meeting did not sway her. "They treat you like you're just too dumb to make good decisions for your family," she says. "How many people do you see laying around on the sidewalks and in their yards dying of COVID? Nowhere."

The battle to get more people vaccinated often comes down to the efforts of individuals like Dollie Wilson, a 71-year-old missionary who attended the meeting in Dumas. She plans to go door to door to persuade people to get vaccines and recently canvassed at a local Walmart. "I got cursed out by one person, but I got five people to sign up for the vaccine. It was well worth it," she says.

Cheryl Stimson, owner of the Dumas Family Pharmacy, has personally administered more than 5,800 shots in the community at churches, schools and local events. She has been trying to get every worker vaccinated at the city's various factories.

"I've been to all but one, and I'm trying to talk them into letting me come in," she says. "The plant manager has a lot of people who are leery of taking the vaccine for all various reasons. They're afraid it'll make them sick. They're afraid that they're conforming — that somebody's making them do something they don't want to do."

Kellebrew, who administers shots at vaccination clinics across the state, says she's trying hard to calm people's specific fears.

Once, at a grocery store, a woman told her she was nervous about getting the vaccine because of a rumor on the internet that it can make you magnetic. "I said, 'Do you really believe that?' And she said, 'Well, I'm not sure.' " Kellebrew recounts. So she found a magnet in the store and demonstrated on a person to whom she had just given the shot. "The magnet kept falling off her arm, and I said, 'Is that what you needed to see?' And she said, 'Yes. I think I'll get a shot.' " Kellebrew now travels with a magnet.


There are signs of change



Demand for vaccines has actually improved greatly in the past three weeks, according to Ator. He says the governor's town hall meetings are encouraging people — and the delta variant is scaring them. But with the rapid spread of the delta variant, now representing almost 90% of the sequenced virus cases in Arkansas, he worries it may not be enough. "My biggest concern is we're going to be a month too late, and we're going to have a lot of people suffer because of it."

State officials say that if they can find a way to punch through the hesitancy they're facing now, they could end up as a model for other slow-to-vaccinate parts of the nation as the delta variant spreads.

"There are a lot of places that may have higher vaccination rates than what we have in Arkansas, but they're certainly not high enough to suppress the spread of the delta variant," says Dr. Jennifer Dillaha, the state epidemiologist for Arkansas. "It may be just a matter of time before they get hit as well."