Biden peddles national self-delusion on pandemic anniversary
The nationally-televised address by President Biden Thursday night combined self-delusion with a complete refusal to address the causes or the real consequences of the coronavirus pandemic.
Biden seemed to have set his speechwriters the task of cramming as many maudlin banalities as possible into the first ten minutes of his speech, as he sought to display the “empathy” that was so lacking in his predecessor, who clearly cared not at all as the COVID death toll in America mounted into the hundreds of thousands.
The language of collective loss, suffering and sacrifice, however, ignored the brutal fact that one section of American society, the super-rich, has lost nothing at all from 12 months of the worst pandemic in a century.
While 527,000 Americans died, the billionaires increased their wealth by $1.4 trillion. While the economy collapsed, millions lost their jobs and hundreds of thousands of small businesses closed their doors forever, the stock market reached new record highs, a process that continues to this day.
Biden, however, in pursuit of his goal of “national unity,” said nothing at all about the class divisions that the pandemic has brought to the fore so clearly. He said little about the tidal wave of economic suffering unleashed by the pandemic, and made only one reference to the congressional passage of his American Recovery Act. This legislation aims to buy time for American capitalism by putting off a full-scale collapse of consumer spending until the end of the summer.
The most striking feature of the Biden speech was its narrow nationalism. He spoke as though coronavirus was a meteor that had crashed out of the sky and struck only the United States, not a global pandemic that has affected every country in the world.
He did not acknowledge the 800,000 dead in Europe, or the nearly equal number of dead in Latin America, or the mounting death toll in India and through Asia—although not in China, where the pandemic began.
This served two purposes. It allowed Biden to avoid the question of how COVID-19 became such a disaster in the United States, which has performed worst of all the major capitalist countries, with 30 million infections and more than half a million deaths.
Wednesday the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that COVID-19 increased the death rate by 15 percent, making 2020 the deadliest year in American history, the first year in which three million Americans have died. This follows a previous report showing that US life expectancy dropped by a full year in 2020.
Biden began by declaring, “A year ago, we were hit with a virus that was met with silence and spread unchecked. Denials for days, weeks, then months that led to more deaths, more infections, more stress and more loneliness.”
But Biden passed over in silence the question of what decisions, driven by what corporate and financial interests, caused this colossal failure, one which directly contradicted the main line of his speech, that there was nothing that Americans could not accomplish if they were united.
Even more importantly, the global character of the pandemic makes nonsense of Biden’s claim that there is a national solution to the crisis. In the fairy-tale world of his presentation, all Americans dutifully get vaccinated, the pandemic is subdued, grandparents get to hug their grandchildren and the population joins in happy Fourth of July gatherings—small scale of course.
But even if such a situation were to come about, the pandemic would still retain colossal global force, constantly throwing up new variants, which would inevitably come to America just as the initial infection did. It is impossible to destroy the pandemic in a single country, because every country is part of a global economy, and whatever variants come to predominate globally will inevitably make their way everywhere—and particularly to a country so interconnected with the world as the United States.
And of course the fairy-tale picture of a united American response to the pandemic is just that: a fiction. Biden was speaking the day after the state of Texas officially ended all restrictions on business operations as well as its mask mandate. Seventeen states, one third of the total, now have no mask mandates and are effectively wide open to the virus.
While Biden touted progress in manufacturing and distributing the vaccine, a quarter of the population, encouraged by Republican demagogues and anti-vaxxers, say they will not get the shots. The president made a veiled reference to this, suggesting that if the population failed to stick together “and conditions change, we might have to reinstate restrictions.”
Biden’s demands for “national unity” are mainly directed against a far more important target, entirely different from the ultra-right, pro-Trump faction. He referred uneasily to the “loss of faith in whether our government and our democracy can deliver.”
The Biden administration faces mounting resistance from the working class and youth, including hundreds of thousands of teachers and students opposed to the administration’s campaign to reopen the public schools and universities, which would have the effect of creating new centers of infection in every major city.
Far from Biden’s rosy picture of happy Fourth of July gatherings, the likely prospect of his campaign to reopen the schools is a new wave of mass infections and mass death that turns the summer into a more terrible version of the winter months when the death toll rose above 3,000 a day.
One year of the COVID-19 pandemic: A disaster caused by capitalism
Today marks one year since the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the outbreak of COVID-19 a global pandemic.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus issued the declaration on March 11, 2020, when there were 118,000 reported cases in 14 countries worldwide and 4,291 deaths. “WHO has been assessing this outbreak around the clock,” he said, “and we are deeply concerned both by the alarming levels of spread and severity, and by the alarming levels of inaction.” He repeated calls for “countries to take urgent and aggressive action. We have rung the alarm bell loud and clear.”
With few exceptions—of which China is the most notable—the governments of the major capitalist counties rejected the warnings of scientists. They did not take aggressive action and the alarm bells went unheeded. Over the past 12 months, the number of global cases rose from 118,000 to more than 118 million. The death toll increased from 4,000 to 2.6 million, including 540,000 in the US, 270,000 in Brazil, 191,000 in Mexico, 158,000 in India, 125,000 in the UK and 100,000 in Italy.
The economic toll on the working class has been devastating. The International Labour Organization estimates that the world lost the equivalent of 255 million jobs in 2020, nearly four times the impact of the 2008-2009 global financial crisis. Countless small businesses have been wiped out. Cultural life has been devastated throughout the world.
US President Joe Biden will deliver a prime time address tonight on the occasion of the one-year anniversary of the pandemic. He will no doubt pronounce the obligatory and insincere words about the tragic loss of life over the past twelve months, without any serious examination of why this catastrophe happened and why it is continuing. According to White House officials, he will speak of the coming return of a “sense of normalcy.”
There will, however, be no return to “normalcy.” The global response to the COVID-19 pandemic is a devastating indictment not only of the actions of particular governments, but of the entire social and economic order based on capitalism. It will have the most far-reaching and revolutionary consequences.
The impact of the pandemic is the product of decisions to subordinate human life to the interests of the corporate-financial oligarchy. The urgent public health measures necessary to save lives encountered at every point the ferocious opposition of the capitalist ruling elites.
The critical period of January-March 2020 was devoted to the systematic suppression of information on the danger that the pandemic posed. Only after growing numbers of workers in the United States and Europe refused to enter unsafe auto plants and other job sites were limited lockdowns implemented.
These actions were never part of any serious internationally coordinated strategy. Rather, the haphazard national and local responses were aimed at buying time for the ruling class to implement, for the second time since 2008, a massive bailout of the rich. In the United States, the Federal Reserve funneled $4 trillion into the markets, sanctioned by the CARES Act, passed on an overwhelmingly bipartisan basis in late March of last year. Similar measures were adopted by central banks throughout the world.
Once the interests of the ruling class were secured, governments orchestrated a coordinated campaign to reopen closed factories and schools. The “herd immunity” strategy, pioneered in Sweden, became, de facto, the policy of the entire ruling class. Under the slogan of “the cure can’t be worse than the disease,” the most basic measures to stop the spread of the virus were systematically eliminated.
While millions of people contracted the virus, the financial markets celebrated the most rapid rise in share values in history. One figure sums up the social dynamic: Since the beginning of the pandemic one year ago, US billionaires have increased their wealth by $1.4 trillion. A new layer of “pandemic profiteers” prospered amidst death and suffering.
One year after the official declaration of a pandemic, COVID-19 continues to rage throughout the world. Even with the initial production of a vaccine, its chaotic distribution, hampered by the interests of competing nation-states, becomes itself a factor in the crisis. Only four percent of the world’s population has received even one dose of the vaccine, and even in many of the most developed countries the percentage of the population that has been fully vaccinated remains in the single digits.
In Germany, the supposed model of capitalist efficiency, only 3.1 percent of the population is fully vaccinated, in Spain and France, 3.0 percent, in Italy, 2.9 percent, and in Canada, 1.6 percent.
Despite warnings of a new surge, driven by more contagious variants, governments around the world are abandoning any remaining measures to contain the pandemic. Yesterday, the US state of Texas removed all restraints on economic activity, while the Biden administration is spearheading the campaign to reopen schools as quickly as possible.
The most decisive refutation of the claims that nothing could have been done is the record of the World Socialist Web Site. Based on publicly available information, the WSWS, the organ of the International Committee of the Fourth International, issued a series of statements one year ago warning of what was to come and elaborating the necessary programmatic response.
On March 13, two days after the official declaration of a pandemic, the WSWS indicted the response of the ruling class. “Precious time was wasted as the global pandemic gathered fatal momentum,” the WSWS stated.
Insisting that “the needs of the working people of the world must take absolute and unconditional priority over all considerations of corporate profit and private wealth accumulation,” the WSWS demanded emergency measures, including an internationally coordinated mobilization of social resources and the shutdown of non-essential production, with full income for all workers.
If these policies had been implemented, countless lives could have been saved.
The fight against the pandemic was never solely a medical issue. The containment of the pandemic cannot be achieved apart from a struggle against the capitalist system.
As with every crisis of this character, the pandemic has profoundly altered the entire political situation. It has enormously accelerated the far-reaching decay of democratic forms of rule. The growth of fascism internationally is directly connected to the homicidal politics of the ruling elites. The January 6 insurrection in Washington was the noxious product not simply of Trump and his co-conspirators, but the reality of class rule.
The ruling class, moreover, confronting a massive social crisis at home and growing anger in the working class, is turning ever more openly to military conflict as a way out. In its first two months in office, the Biden administration has made as a central priority the intensification of its aggressive provocations in the Middle East and against Russia and China.
All the official institutions of capitalist society stand exposed. Governments, whether headed by the extreme right or the supposed “left,” have adopted the same basic policy. In the United States, there has not been a single congressional hearing or even serious media investigation into the sources of the catastrophe or who was responsible. The corporatist trade unions, in reality instruments of management, have done everything they can to suppress opposition and enforce the policy of the ruling class.
As with World War I, the pandemic is generating a profound social and political radicalization of an entire generation of workers and youth. Even as Biden proclaims a return to “normalcy,” there is mounting opposition among educators to the efforts to reopen schools, and in the entire working class to the homicidal policy that the ruling class insists must continue.
And as disastrous as the pandemic is, it portends further and even deeper crises—climate change, even worse and deadlier pandemics, the threat of nuclear war—stemming from the same fundamental causes as the failure to contain the pandemic.
The pandemic proves the necessity of the abolition of the capitalist nation-state system. It shows that the defense of the most vital interests of society is inseparable from the expropriation of the financial oligarchy and an end to private ownership of the means of production. It makes clear the urgent necessity for a scientifically-managed, rationally-organized and democratically-controlled world economy.
The fight for socialism is a global struggle for a society that prioritizes life over profit, human need over the wealth of the oligarchs and international collaboration over national conflict.
Inland Empire schools reopen as infection rates remain high in Southern California
The West Coast Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committees are organizing the enormous opposition among educators, parents and students to the homicidal reopening of schools throughout the region. Register today and invite your coworkers and friends to attend our next meeting at 2 p.m. PST this Saturday!
Elementary schools in the Inland Empire—a region inland of Los Angeles which is home to some four million people—began opening to in-person instruction last week. This reckless move takes place even though the region remains in the state’s most dangerous “purple tier” classification, which designates infection rates higher than seven per 100,000.
Riverside and San Bernardino counties, the two largest counties in the Inland Empire, are overseeing some of the most aggressive school reopening plans in the state. Elementary schools in San Bernardino County were approved to resume in-person classes on February 24. In Riverside County, the Corona-Norco Unified School District resumed in-person instruction for elementary school students on March 1. Riverside Unified School District followed on March 8, and three more districts—Murrieta Valley, Palo Verde and Desert Sands—plan to reopen next week.
The drive to reopen schools in the Inland Empire is part of an aggressive and reckless push to open schools across California and the entire West Coast, which is the final region in the US where the majority of large school districts have not yet reopened. Since taking office, the Biden administration has spearheaded this campaign with the full collusion of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the National Education Association (NEA), and their state and local affiliates.
Under state rules in California, elementary schools can reopen when new infections fall below 25 per 100,000 residents, an extremely high benchmark which ensures that all but the hardest hit counties can begin their reopening plans immediately. Preschool and elementary school students are resuming in-person instruction under a hybrid model in which students are divided into morning and afternoon groups, in order to decrease class size.
While high schools and middle schools remain online for now, they can reopen in a given county once it moves from the purple tier to the red tier. Riverside County is planning to reopen middle and high schools as early as April 1.
Last week, state officials announced that seven counties in Northern and Central California—El Dorado, Lassen, Modoc, Napa, San Francisco, San Luis Obispo and Santa Clara—would be moved to the red tier, clearing the way for a reopening in those districts. Upon reclassification, San Francisco Unified School District immediately approved a tentative agreement to resume in-person instruction starting April 12.
Schools across the state are being pressured to reopen following an agreement between the state legislature and Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom on March 1 allocating $6.6 billion for schools that reopen by March 31. In what amounts to bribing financially strapped school districts to reopen, the deal stipulates districts that have moved to the red tier would have to resume in-person instruction for elementary school students and at least one grade in middle school and high school in order to receive the additional funding.
The most critical role in facilitating the reopening of schools is being played by the teachers unions. On Tuesday, the leadership of United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) reached a tentative agreement with the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), the second largest in the country, to resume in-person instruction in April. This abject betrayal follows the model set by the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) last month, and if approved will set a precedent for reopening schools throughout California.
Across the country, the reopening of schools has been an unmitigated disaster, leading to at least 675,000 COVID-19 infections among students and staff, according to the COVID Monitor curated by whistleblower Rebekah Jones. The dangers are now compounded by the spread of new, more virulent strains of the virus, including the B.1.427 variant that emerged in California last summer and has become the dominant strain in the state.
This variant is expected to account for as much as 90 percent of the state’s infections by the end of March. It appears to reduce the effect of antibodies in neutralizing the virus and has likely contributed to the rapid spread of the disease throughout the state.
Alfonzo, a UPS worker in the Inland Empire, told the World Socialist Web Site, “Before working for UPS, I was a substitute teacher. If there’s one thing I learned, it’s that the classroom is the most fertile ground for any infection. That is exactly where you catch anything, and all teachers know it.
“Schools here in the Inland Empire are being reopened basically not for educational purposes, since that could be accomplished remotely, but as day care centers where working people drop off their kids while they need to go back to work. And that is not a choice they are making voluntarily. Capitalism is pushing them into very hard decisions. For example, most families cannot live on one salary and the pressure to get out there is enormous.
“There are also school staff that are not being mentioned in the media. These are people, like janitors and cleaning crew, who are being sent back to work, and I don’t think they are being offered hardly any type of protection. Yet, they are the staff that make schools run. Now with the danger of variants, what will happen to them?”
The efforts to send hundreds of thousands of students and educators into poorly ventilated classrooms throughout California and the West Coast region will be disastrous and has already provoked an outpouring of anger on social media among educators, parents and students.
This opposition must find conscious expression through the building of rank-and-file safety committees, independent of the unions and both big business parties. Such committees now exist in Los Angeles, San Diego, Northern California, as well as in Michigan, Texas, Tennessee, New York City, Chicago and other cities and states across the US and internationally, with plans to form committees in Oregon, Washington and throughout the West Coast region.
We urge educators, parents and students in Riverside, San Bernardino and throughout the region to sign up today to help build rank-and-file committees at every school and workplace to fight to implement the lockdown measures necessary to contain the pandemic and save lives, while providing full compensation to all workers affected. Sign up today to get involved and make plans to attend Saturday’s meeting of the West Coast Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committees!
Message from big business on coronavirus pandemic: Save profits, not lives
As the coronavirus pandemic continues to spread throughout the world, and as reported cases in the United States increase at a faster rate than in any other country, a definite line is emerging from the American ruling class: “The cure is worse than the disease.” In other words, the lives of millions of workers must be sacrificed in the interests of corporate profit.
“We cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself,” Trump declared on Twitter Sunday evening. “At the end of the 15-day period [that began one week ago], we will make a decision as to which way we want to go.”
At his news conference Monday, Trump said that he wants American businesses to reopen in a matter of “weeks, not months… At a certain point, we have to get open and we have to get moving. We don’t want to lose these companies…”
Downplaying the significance of the pandemic, which is already overwhelming health care systems in the US, Trump added, “We have a very active flu season, more active than most… And you look at automobile accidents, which are far greater than any numbers we’re talking about. That doesn’t mean we’re going to tell everybody no more driving of cars. So we have to do things to get our country open.”
If millions of people die, so be it. It is a cost of doing business. So declares the corporate and financial oligarchy. Lloyd Blankfein, the former CEO of Goldman Sachs, wrote on Twitter that it was necessary “within a very few weeks to let those with a lower risk of the disease return to work.”
These statements came as Wall Street suffered a further fall on Monday, dropping to the lowest levels since Trump was elected in 2016, despite the infusion of unlimited sums of cash to the financial markets by the US Federal Reserve.
The move by the ruling class to quickly end restrictions on business operations to boost Wall Street defies the recommendations of epidemiologists and doctors. The New York Times, in an article posted Monday night, wrote that “Trump, Wall Street executives and many conservative economists began questioning whether the government had gone too far,” even though “relaxing those restrictions could significantly increase the death toll from the virus, public health officials warn.”
The Times failed to note, however, that among those leading the “back to work” campaign is the editorial page of the New York Times itself, the media outlet for the Democratic Party. The most explicit argument for letting people die in the name of “economic growth” came from leading Times columnist Thomas Friedman.
In a column published Monday, Friedman asks, “But as so many of our businesses shut down and millions begin to be laid off, some experts are beginning to ask: ‘Wait a minute! What the hell are we doing to ourselves? To our economy? To our next generation? Is this cure—even for a short while—worse than the disease?’”
Friedman’s column stacks one lie on top of another.
Lie #1: It is impossible to contain the disease
Friedman argues that governments should abandon efforts to contain the pandemic. He writes that “at this stage there is no way of avoiding the fact that many, many Americans are going to get the coronavirus or already have it. That ship has sailed.” He goes on to cite fellow Times contributor David L. Katz, who declares “we missed the opportunity for population-wide containment.”
The World Health Organization (WHO), the globally recognized authority on infectious disease, has been clear that the abandonment of efforts at “containment” of COVID-19 is inappropriate and unacceptable. “The idea that countries should shift from containment to mitigation is wrong and dangerous,” said the organization’s director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
The fatality rate of COVID-19 varies by country. In Korea, where a vast portion of the population has been tested and extensive resources have been brought to bear in treating the pandemic, the fatality rate is 1.2 percent. In Italy, where the health care system is overwhelmed by the disease, the fatality rate is 9.4 percent and growing by the day.
Based on this range of possible outcomes, Friedman’s proposal to allow the majority of the population to be infected with COVID-19 would be purchased with between one million and 18 million lives.
Lie #2: Social distancing does not save lives
Friedman takes an even more reprehensible step, not just arguing against efforts to contain the pandemic through contact tracing, isolation and quarantine, but demanding the end of social distancing measures in the name of preserving the “economy.”
Friedman argues that “governors and mayors, by… basically sending everyone home for an unspecified period, might have actually increased the dangers of infection for those most vulnerable.”
This is yet another false and unsubstantiated statement, totally at odds with the guidance of the WHO, which has endorsed social distancing as necessary to save lives by keeping hospitals from being overburdened.
Lie #3: Saving lives will “destroy the economy”
Friedman continues, “But we also need to be asking ourselves—just as urgently—can we… maximize the chances for as many Americans as possible to safely go back to work as soon as possible. One expert I talk to below believes that could happen in as early as a few weeks.”
That “expert” is Dr. David L. Katz, whose published works include Dr. David Katz’s Flavor-Full Diet: Use Your Tastebuds to Lose Pounds and Inches with this Scientifically Proven Plan. Katz has promoted the quack science of homeopathy and “energy medicine,” declaring that the medical profession must embrace “a more fluid concept of evidence.” Surgical oncologist David Gorski has argued that Katz specializes in seeking “to ‘integrate’ pseudoscience with science, nonsense with sense, and quackery with real medicine.”
In an earlier column in the Times, Katz argued for “most of society to return to life as usual and perhaps prevent vast segments of the economy from collapsing. Healthy children could return to school and healthy adults go back to their jobs. Theaters and restaurants could reopen.”
Friedman, citing Katz, argues “as with the flu, the vast majority will get over it in days, a small number will require hospitalization and a very small percentage of the most vulnerable will, tragically, die.”
In fact, economic activity necessary to the functioning of society can be sustained under safe conditions with a massive investment in infrastructure. All non-essential production can be shut down for a period of time necessary to contain the pandemic. However, this requires that the principle determining all the actions of governments—the profit interests of the rich—be eliminated from all consideration.
The statements of Katz and Friedman have been condemned by leading epidemiologists. In a letter to the Times, a group of four Yale epidemiologists, Sten H. Vermund, Gregg Gonsalves, Becca Levy and Saad Omer, slammed Katz’s “suggestion that the global community is overreacting to Covid-19,” declaring that “he favors letting the pandemic run its course.”
Gonsalves, an assistant professor of epidemiology at Yale, who has spent decades researching infectious diseases, was even more direct on Twitter, declaring that neither New York Times op-ed editor Jim Dao nor editorial page editor James Bennet thought of “talking to an infectious disease epidemiologist about any of this before publishing this irresponsible garbage.”
He wrote that the articles by Katz and Friedman “are going to undermine public health efforts with a bunch of hot air, based on no evidence, no analysis full-stop.”
He continued: “In the @WhiteHouse we have @realDonaldTrump who botched the response to the epidemic, @nytimes we have entitled upper-middle class men who know little more than the President does and like him, love to say what’s on their minds. You should be ashamed of yourselves: @DrDavidKatz @tomfriedman @jimdao & @JBennet.”
The New York Times is deliberately promoting quack science during a pandemic and putting lives at risk. These actions have a definite social content. Like Trump, the primary concern of the Times is to reopen businesses and pump up the value of the stock market, at any cost. If it means that the workers forced to toil in unsafe conditions “will, tragically, die”—so be it.
There is an underlying logic to this process. The massive infusion of credit into the financial system must be supported by the extraction of surplus value from the working class.
The lifting of mandatory quarantines will do little to get people to shop and go to restaurants. But not working will be treated as an individual decision, making workers who refuse to work under unsafe conditions ineligible for unemployment insurance.
From the beginning, the ruling class has viewed the pandemic not as an issue of public health, but as a potential impediment to generating profit. Its sole concern has been how the crisis will impact its bottom line. Now that it has secured a massive government bailout, the ruling class wants to ensure that business returns to normal.
This form of socially sanctioned euthanasia has a distinctly fascistic character, not dissimilar to the argument by the Nazis that the disabled were “undesirable” elements who should be eliminated. In the face of the greatest crisis facing American capitalism, the ruling class is revealing itself to be not just parasitic, but homicidal.
This policy arises out of the unchallenged assumption that no measures can be taken that impinge upon the profit system. Even in the midst of a global pandemic, which threatens the lives of millions, the priority of world governments and their media flunkies is to defend, at all costs, the wealth of the ruling class and the interests of the corporate-financial elite.
All the economic resources of society must be mobilized now to fight the pandemic, not salvage Wall Street! The demand of the ruling class that workers sacrifice their lives and the lives of their families by returning to work, to be realized by force if necessary, will generate enormous opposition.
The development of mass opposition to the demands of Wall Street, the media and the Trump administration must be based on an understanding that the fight against the pandemic, and the implementation of policies to secure the health and safety of workers, is at the same time a fight against capitalism.
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