COOKING FINANCIAL BOOKS - CONSUMER DEBT EXPLODES - RESTAURANT SURVIVAL - BOOMING RETAIL SALES?- GOLD
Pentagon dispatching emergency medical teams to Minnesota as another winter surge of COVID-19 infections takes hold in the US
On Wednesday, Democratic Governor Tim Walz released a statement announcing that he had secured emergency federal medical teams to support Minnesota hospitals. The Pentagon is sending emergency medical teams to hard-hit hospitals in the state to relieve health care workers there that are facing a continuous onslaught of COVID-19 patients.
“Hospitals around the state need urgent support, and my administration is using every tool at our disposal to help them,” Walz’s statement declared. “The emergency staffing teams coming to HCMC [Hennepin County Medical Center] and St. Cloud Hospital over the next few days will provide an important measure of relief to the healthcare personnel who remain on the frontline of this crisis. Every day, our doctors and nurses are treating Minnesotans sick with COVID-19 or suffering other emergencies. But they are underwater, and they need all the help we can give them.”
The rise in cases in Minnesota has been steady and unyielding. On November 16, the state recorded its high mark of close to 11,000 new COVID-19 cases. The seven-day average has reached 4,224 daily infections. The Minnesota Department of Health said that 1,381 people were being treated at hospitals across the state on Thursday, of which 333 were receiving treatment in intensive care units (ICU). Zero available ICU beds remain in east-central Minnesota, two in the far northwest, and only seven across the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro system. On average 24 people in the state are dying from COVID-19 every day.
Developments in the upper Midwest—Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois and Michigan—represent the leading edge of the wave of illness and death that will hit the country in the latest phase of the pandemic. There are now 35 states reporting a rise in cases over the last two-week period underscoring the beginning of a dangerous winter with the coronavirus supplemented with predictions of a severe flu season.
The seven-day average in the US is now over 88,000 daily COVID cases. Yesterday, there were more than 114,000 reported new infections. Hospitalizations for COVID-19 are now approaching 50,000. Though the seven-day average of deaths has slowly declined to just below 1,100, the number of COVID-19 deaths reported yesterday jumped to over 1,600. Overall, the COVID-19 death toll in the US has surpassed 788,000, with projections of 40,000 more deaths in the next six weeks.
The latest resurgence in the United States comes as the number of new cases globally has been steadily climbing for four consecutive weeks. More than 254 million cumulative cases have been reported since the pandemic began in early 2020. Weekly reported COVID deaths have been hovering just below 50,000 for the last six weeks bringing the total to over 5.14 million reported deaths.
Though Europe is in the midst of the worst wave of infections since the beginning of the pandemic, the rise in COVID-19 cases in the US has many concerned about what awaits the country, especially with Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays around the corner. With all travel restrictions having been lifted, population mobility is at an all-time high, and mask usage is rapidly declining.
The situation is all the more alarming because most countries in Europe have vaccinated a far larger share of their populations than the US. Though the US is calling for all adults to get the third shot, also known as a booster, only 31.5 million, or less than 10 percent, have received them. Additionally, a significant number of fully vaccinated people received their last shot more than six months ago, meaning their waning immunity places them at increased risk of breakthrough infection.
Dr. Sara Spilseth, Chief of Staff at Regions Hospital in St. Paul, Minnesota, speaking with local media, said, “I did not realize that it could get worse, but here we are.” The number of COVID-19 patients hospitalized there has doubled over the last two weeks. “People are dying from COVID even though they don’t have COVID. They are dying from COVID because our hospitals are so full of COVID patients that we can’t take care of anything else.”
Commenting on the rising number of colleagues quitting and those remaining being offered bonuses to take extra shifts, ICU nurse Emily Allen told the NBC affiliated Kare 11, “Personally, it’s still just not mentally worth it for me. It’s scarier for me this time. I have a young family. I’m six months pregnant, which is new from the last time we talked, and I’m just not mentally in a place to pick up any extra shifts no matter what the money is. I think a lot of people feel that same way.”
Despite the current calamity, no matter how many health care workers are “underwater” and “need all the help we can give them,” Governor Walz has reiterated that he has no intentions of implementing a state of emergency across the state and implementing measures to halt the spread of COVID-19. “It’s just not that effective a tool right now to use that [emergency declaration],” he said, then cited his concerns that it would worsen tensions with the Republican-led state senate. His solution for the population was to “just get vaccinated. That’s the big thing.”
Meanwhile, in Michigan, the seven-day average doubled in just two weeks jumping from around 4,000 daily cases to over 8,400, the highest rates during the pandemic. On November 15 the state update recorded over 23,000 new cases. The positivity rate of COVID-19 tests has climbed to 19 percent.
There are currently 60 children hospitalized across the state for confirmed or suspected COVID-19 infections, shy of the peak of 71 reported on April 20. This is also a more than 50 percent rise in pediatric hospitalizations since November 3. Dr. Rudolph Valentini, a pediatric nephrologist speaking with the Detroit Free Press, explained, “We are a little bit on edge at this point. We currently are managing. It’s absolutely manageable, but it appears as though there’s trouble around the corner.”
There are more than a dozen hospitalized children at Children’s Hospital of Michigan, where the ER has seen a 70 percent rise in visits. Many are sicker than ever during any previous phase in the pandemic. Up to half are being treated in ICUs. Valentini, describing these developments, explained, “A fair number of them are requiring ventilation, and we have some requiring ECMO [extracorporeal membrane oxygenation], which is a heart-lung bypass.”
The spread of the virus, dominated by the Delta variant, is highest among those aged 10 to 19, corresponding with exposure in school settings. Last week, the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services reported 566 new and ongoing outbreaks in K-12 schools. However, state officials continue to shift the blame to children for not adhering to social distancing and masking recommendations instead of the reopening policies that have perpetuated one community outbreak after another.
On Wednesday, staff and students at Martin Luther King High School in Detroit protested the administration’s foul response to the pandemic by walking out en masse. The noon protest lasted 20 minutes and underscored the prevailing mood of the students and teachers who are fed up with the betrayals of the unions and school boards that have placed their lives and livelihoods at risk.
Meanwhile hospitals across Wisconsin are operating at full capacity. And despite the alarming statistics, officials are limiting their actions to asking unvaccinated residents to “take the shot.” School closures, mask mandates, restrictions in movements and numbers that can gather are a thing of the past. Infections in Illinois have increased 70 percent over the last three weeks.
Dr. Michael Osterholm, the director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, was recently asked by MPR News about his opinion on the recent lifting of the ban on international travel while Europe was facing a deluge of infections. He replied, “One of the problems in dealing with COVID is it moves so quickly that you may embark upon a new public policy that is responding to what was happening yesterday or last week only to see it change this week.”
As pressure is being placed on the current variants as they are passed between the vaccinated and unvaccinated, there are growing fears that a fully vaccine-resistant variant may evolve by spring.
Dr. Mark Dybul, CEO of Enochian BioSciences and a professor at Georgetown University Medical Center’s Department of Medicine in immunology, raised his concerns for where the pandemic is headed this week at the Fortune CEO Initiative conference in Washington D.C.
Predicting possible scenarios for how the pandemic might end, saving the direst for last, he said, “The third possibility is that it’s a mess for the foreseeable future everywhere because the virus will mutate so much that it will even get around therapies. That’s really unlikely. I think we’re heading towards the middle scenario, but it’s gonna take two to three years to get there. In between could be pretty rough.”
The middle scenario, as Dybul described, is one in which the rich-income nations who have a monopoly on vaccines and therapeutics will ride the waves while poorer countries face the brunt of the virus, resulting in tens of thousands of preventable deaths.
The call by the WSWS and the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees for a global strategy to eliminate COVID-19 remains the only viable solution to the pandemic and the preservation of life. The working class, armed with the most advanced scientific understanding of the pandemic, must take action to shut down non-essential production and schools—with full compensation for those affected—in coordination with a massive vaccination, testing, contact tracing and quarantine program which will finally stop the spread COVID-19 and ultimately eliminate the deadly virus.
Washington Post calls for a COVID-19 cover-up
On Tuesday, the Washington Post published an editorial endorsing the creation of a “9/11-commission-style national panel that would examine the pandemic and help prepare the future.” In fact, the proposed panel, comprised of leading representatives of the US state apparatus, would serve to cover up the real causes of and responsibility for a pandemic that has killed more than one million people in the United States and 15 million globally.
A bill to create the panel was introduced on November 4 by four senators: Democrats Dianne Feinstein and Kirsten Gillibrand and Republicans Roger Marshall and Joni Ernst. The commission would consist of 10 members, five Democrats and five Republicans.
Explaining the themes of the commission, the Post wrote, “One vital area of inquiry is public health systems, which were overwhelmed during the pandemic. The commission would examine the ‘structure, coordination [and] management’ of all levels of government, scrutinizing performance in a host of areas.”
Another part of the investigation would “focus on the virus origins,” including, according to the language of the bill, the possibility of “a laboratory-associated incident involving experimentation, animal handling, or sampling by the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
In other words, the inquiry will have two purposes: Covering up the criminal actions of US politicians and blaming China for the COVID-19 pandemic.
For the Post, the second part is particularly important. With blood on its hands, and facing growing social unrest at home, the American ruling class is desperate to scapegoat China, on the basis of lying and disproven claims that the virus originated in the Wuhan lab. The Post has taken up the task of promoting these lies as aggressively as possible.
It laments that a “recent US intelligence community report on the virus origins was inconclusive.” The intelligence report was “inconclusive” only to the extent that it did not arrive at the conclusions favored by the Post because evidence for this conclusion could not be manufactured. Four out of five US intelligence agencies concluded that COVID-19 was “not developed as a biological weapon” and “not genetically engineered.”
However, the Post goes on, “A commission with time and resources could get closer to the truth.” In other words, it will have more time to concoct a narrative that conforms to the interests of the American ruling class.
The entire framework of the commission is aimed at avoiding any examination of the social and political forces actually responsible for mass death, as this would point to the capitalist ruling elites in the United States and their political servants in both the Democratic and Republican parties.
To this end, absent from the bill or the Post editorial is any reference to the policy of “herd immunity,” under which Trump administration officials deliberately promoted the mass infection of the population with the aim of minimizing the impact of the pandemic on the stock market.
Likewise excluded is any discussion of the financial interests that led the White House, Congress and the media to attempt to “play down” the COVID-19 pandemic in January and February of 2020 in the hopes of avoiding a stock market sell-off. The bill and the Post editorial exclude any mention of the sale of stock by members of Congress who were briefed about the dangers of the pandemic. (Feinstein was herself one of the members of Congress who sold stock ahead of the March 2020 market crash.)
Regardless of the origins of the pandemic, it was the American ruling class and its political representatives that decided to reopen factories and workplaces, fueling the spread of the pandemic. It was they who declared that “the cure can’t be worse than the disease.” And it was they who orchestrated a massive, multitrillion-dollar bailout of Wall Street that continues to this day.
Democratic members of Congress, no less than their Republican counterparts, failed to warn the public about the looming disaster, and Democratic governors throughout the country abandoned social distancing measures even more rapidly than suggested by guidelines adopted by the Trump White House. The Biden administration has completed the return of US schools to in-person instruction and has sought to ensure that workers stay on the job even as the COVID-19 pandemic spreads unchecked.
An “investigation” that excludes these massive crimes is nothing more than a cover-up. And this “investigation” would be delivered in some two years, by which time the death toll will by far eclipse one million.
The Democrats and their fascistic “colleagues” in the Republican Party are preparing this cover-up as they dismantle all remaining restraints on the spread of the pandemic, while tens of thousands of Americans are dying every month.
The model for the commission is itself revealing. The Post called for the commission to base itself on the work of the “Covid Commission Planning Group,” headed by Philip David Zelikow, the former executive director of the 9/11 Commission. The New York Times has likewise published two articles, on June 2 and June 16, endorsing the formation of a commission of inquiry based around Zelikow’s group.
Zelikow, a former aide to Bush’s National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, held secret back-channel discussions with Bush administration officials during the 9/11 inquiry and based much of the conclusion’s findings on evidence extracted through torture. Its conclusions have been overwhelmingly contradicted by subsequently released material.
The “commission” proposed by the Post would be a commission comprised and directed by those who are actually responsible for the disaster they are supposedly investigating.
A serious inquiry into the policies that led to mass deaths in the COVID-19 pandemic, which is absolutely necessary, will be possible only to the extent that it is led by the international working class and conducted independently of and in opposition to the Democratic and Republican parties.
COVID cases surge through northern US states before the holiday season begins
On the CBS program “Face the Nation” yesterday, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen made a revealing statement about the impact of coronavirus in the US, staying away from offering assurances that inflation and the current crisis in the job market would normalize anytime soon.
She noted, “It really depends on the pandemic. The pandemic has been calling the shots for the economy and for the inflation. And if we want to get inflation down, I think continuing to make progress against the pandemic is the most important thing we can do.” She suggested that any improvement might not take place until next fall—i.e., nearly a year.
This is a stunning admission, especially when every political pundit and public health official, from President Biden on down, has been claiming that the United States is rapidly returning to normalcy with the vaccines, or that COVID eventually will become no worse than the common cold, or at least, will no longer arouse public concern.
A piece by David Leonhardt in the New York Times titled “How does this end?” makes precisely this claim that the American people have to accept the risks associated with infection because “the virus is unlikely to go away, ever.”
Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University, speaking with the Washington Post, made a similar assessment in response to the question as to when the pandemic would end. She replied, “It doesn’t end. We just stop caring. Or we care a lot less. I think for most people, it just fades into the background of their lives.”
Leonhardt is a professional propagandist for the US ruling elite, spreading the political line of the day, which is that working people must live with the virus because they will have no other choice. Nuzzo is a scientist who is capitulating to the political and social pressure of a financial aristocracy that has never cared for the lives of working people, and wants any display of official concern shut down.
Currently, there have been almost 48 million cases of COVID-19 reported across the country, with close to 784,000 deaths thus far. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation is projecting another 60,000 will perish by the end of the year. The seven-day average of new cases has surpassed 80,000 per day, an 11 percent increase over the last 14 days. Though the daily death toll is currently declining, it remains above 1,100 a day, and the death rate is a lagging indicator in the course of infection, meaning that with rising cases, deaths will also ultimately increase.
Regions of the Midwest and Northeast are seeing new surges in cases. In the South, the declines have ended, and COVID cases are turning upwards.
Minnesota has become the epicenter of the pandemic in the US, with the daily average number of cases climbing to 3,802 or 67 per 100,000 (+54 percent 14-day change), the highest per capita rate in the country. The state has fully vaccinated 61.8 percent of its population, and 22.2 percent have received a third shot known as a booster.
Despite these measures, the number of breakthrough infections has been climbing. According to the public health department, fully vaccinated individuals made up 197 of the 483 deaths occurring from September 5 to October 9. They also accounted for 1,082 of the 3,492 COVID hospitalizations. In all, breakthrough infections have climbed “29 percent over the previous four months.”
Regarding waning immunity, Minnesota exemplifies a critical point. Almost 85 percent of all fully vaccinated individuals in the US received their vaccines four or more months ago. According to the CDC, there have been 29.2 million booster doses given. This accounts for less than nine percent of the population. In other words, a significant portion of all fully vaccinated people are under threat from Delta due to waning immunity.
Kris Ehresmann, Minnesota’s infectious disease director, told the Star Tribune, “It’s fair to say we are kind of in a perfect storm moment. We have Delta as the dominant strain so that certainly has changed the landscape since we first identified it in Minnesota in June. Then you have the impact of waning immunity.”
As the pandemic continues its surge across the upper Midwest and into the Northeast, Illinois, Vermont and New Hampshire are witnessing a startling increase in daily COVID case rates. The ongoing surge in infections in Michigan is particularly troubling as health systems are once more facing high volumes of patients and reconverting their facilities to accommodate COVID patients.
Just yesterday, the state reported close to 9,000 new infections, approaching last winter’s highs. The seven-day average has climbed to over 4,800 daily cases. Deaths have also been steadily rising. According to the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, the test positivity rate has surpassed 16 percent, suggesting there are large numbers of undetected cases.
As one Beaumont Health System physician told the press, “Metro Detroit is again becoming a hotspot for COVID-19.” Admission for COVID has jumped 20 percent over the week, raising concerns among hospital administrators about how they will manage this fourth wave of infections.
Dr. Nick Gilpin, Beaumont’s Health’s director of infection prevention and epidemiology, speaking at a news conference last Thursday, said, “I am very concerned about the trajectory of this new wave,” then noting that 397 patients were hospitalized for COVID.
Though these figures are lower than the peaks seen last April, he worried they were climbing rapidly. “This is our early warning system,” he continued. “We are seeing community numbers increase. And I think with more cold weather on the way, with people starting to make plans for the holidays to get together, I think it’s an important time just to let everyone know that we’ve got to stay vigilant. We’ve got to make sure we’re wearing those masks. We’ve got to make sure we’re taking those precautions. We’ve got to get ourselves vaccinated. Those are the things fundamentally that are going to really improve the situation.”
Many Michigan school districts have been forced to shut one or more schools for in-person instruction and revert to online classes because of high infection rates, particularly in rural and outstate areas where vaccination rates are lower. Some schools in Calhoun County (Battle Creek), Allegan County (near Holland) and Jackson County were closed in whole or in part. The biggest outbreak is in Bay County, with four high schools reporting 221 cases combined, and four middle schools reporting another 168 cases.
Since September, 26 percent of all Michigan COVID cases occurred in people younger than 20, and K-12 schools were the number one category for outbreaks, accounting for 104 out of 181 new outbreaks and 428 of 744 continuing outbreaks.
With one of the highest rates of fully vaccinated people (72 percent), Vermont is also seeing an explosion of cases with a 14-day increase in new cases at 91 percent, reaching 59 COVID cases per 100,000. The trajectory in cases is astounding. Intensive case beds are quickly filling up with patients. The number of available beds is approaching single digits, having reached over 90 percent occupancy, the highest capacity the state has ever encountered.
Dr. Jan Carney, associate dean for public health and health policy at the University of Vermont’s Larner College of Medicine, told the local news station, “Across the United States and Vermont, we’re seeing the impact of the highly contagious Delta variant. It really is so contagious it seeks out pretty much every unvaccinated person.”
Colorado remains among the worst-hit states. Governor Jared Polis, appearing on “Face the Nation,” said that one out of every 48 residents in Colorado has been infected with coronavirus, and virtually all the hospitals are filled to overflowing. There is a statewide order authorizing hospitals to triage vital services—effectively deciding who should live and who should die where there are inadequate resources or numbers of staff.
These trends are extremely ominous as the Thanksgiving week (November 22–28) will soon inaugurate the holiday season. NPR reported that booked flights for Thanksgiving were up 78 percent over last year and even higher than in 2019. These broad-based population movements will drive the rates of new infections across the country.
Survey reveals one in three Texas children have had COVID-19
In October, the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston and the Texas Department of State Health Services published a report, titled Texas Coronavirus Antibody Response Survey (Texas CARES), which found that over one-third (36.5 percent) of children in the state have been infected with COVID-19. Additionally, the results indicate that roughly one-quarter of educational professionals have been infected with the virus.
The report measured infections within the 275-500 days preceding October 3, the maximum range within which infection-generated antibodies remain detectable via test. Since its publication, the percentage among children has increased somewhat to 36.96, indicating further infections.
The results expose the massive fraud of the state’s portrayal of the pandemic, as well as the lie propagated by governments around the world that COVID-19 rarely affects children. The Texas government, in line with the entire political establishment and corporate media, has covered up the scope of child infections and deaths.
Texas’ COVID-19 dashboard only reports the age distribution for 3 percent of infections, which the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) report on November 4 noted, “resulted in an undercount of child cases” in the state. The current dashboard makes it appear that ages 0-19 years account for only 7.7 percent of infections as of November 5.
Researchers who produced the Texas CARES report measured the levels of COVID-19 antibodies among Texas residents. Participants were given two tests, an “N-test,” which does not detect antibodies developed from vaccinations, and an “S-test,” which detects antibodies developed both from previous infections and from vaccinations. The survey did not measure active COVID-19 infections. Participants were given three antibody tests over a period of six to eight months.
The tests were used to estimate the percentage of people in Texas who have antibodies to COVID-19, known as seroprevalence. The survey suggests that as of October 2021, about 75 percent of people in Texas had antibodies from either an infection or vaccination. Those with vaccine derived antibodies had higher antibody counts than infection-derived antibodies, exposing once again the myth that “herd immunity” can be achieved through infection. The report also found that of the children who had antibodies from an infection, 50.8 percent reported never having any symptoms.
The project is ongoing, with a dashboard that is updated weekly. Children have the highest seroprevalence levels among any group. As of this writing, the dashboard shows an infection-derived seropositivity (using only the “N-test”) of nearly 36 percent in children under 10 years old and nearly 38 percent in those between 10 and 19 years old, meaning those respective percentages of children had a previous COVID-19 infection.
After children, young adults age 20-29 had the next highest seroprevalence at 30 percent. This is compared to the average infection-derived seropositivity among all participants, which stood at 24 percent, itself a damning figure.
The implications of the study are astounding. In Russia, 13.5 percent of all children who were infected with COVID have suffered Long COVID symptoms, which can include severe neurological difficulties and a cognitive impact comparable to stroke or lead poisoning.
The Texas CARES study also looked at several specific groups, including school-aged children (ages 5-19), educational professionals, university members, business employees, unemployed people and participants at community health clinics. Again, school-aged children had the highest seropositivity as a group at 36.5 percent positive using the N-test.
Educational professionals, consisting of all school staff, had a 26.7 percent seroprevalence, exposing the vast spread of the virus in schools that have reopened with few to no protective measures in place.
Underscoring the pandemic’s impact on primarily low-income and working class populations, the second highest seroprevalence by group was among community health clinic patients and staff. These are clinics which receive federal funding to provide health care to underserved populations, including Medicaid recipients and uninsured patients.
In regard to the ongoing impact of the pandemic on children, the AAP report also listed eight child deaths in Texas between October 28 and November 4, nearly half of the 17 pediatric COVID-19 deaths nationwide in that period. In total, 109 child deaths from COVID-19 have been recorded in Texas since the start of the pandemic, 17 percent of all recorded child deaths in the US, currently at 614.
The media is equally involved in a concerted campaign to cover up childhood infections and deaths. No news reports have been published by the corporate or local media on any of the child deaths recorded in the latest AAP report. This is true not just of the children in Texas, but also those in California, Colorado, Maryland, South Carolina, Guam, Tennessee, Virginia and Washington.
A culture of secrecy now pervades at schools, with educators and parents reporting to the WSWS and on social media that they are not informed when their children are exposed to infected students.
If the study’s findings are representative of the state’s population, it would indicate that millions more Texans have been infected than officially reported. If the seroprevalence among child participants in the study (ages 5-19), at 36.5 percent, is indicative of the entire population of the same age in Texas, then 2,000,280 children older than 5 have potentially been infected.
This figure is over five times the cumulative student case count reported in Texas schools by the Texas Department of State Health Services (TXDSHS) for all of the pandemic, which stands at 363,996 as of this writing. The seroprevalence averaged for all participants, at 24 percent, would indicate that 7 million people have been infected in Texas, over 2 million more than the official count.
The survey itself hints at some of the causes of the undercount of infections. Only 18.97 percent of participants had previously self-reported a positive COVID-19 diagnosis, versus the 24.1 percent who tested positive for infection-derived antibodies using the N-test. That is, a significant number of participants were unaware that they had been previously infected. The abysmal state of testing in the US accounts for many millions of infections going undetected.
There are some limitations to the survey as well. Participation was voluntary and was focused in heavily urban areas, with the highest participation in the Austin area, followed by a slightly lower participation in Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth and San Antonio. There was significantly lower participation elsewhere in the state, meaning that many rural areas may be underrepresented. Although two-thirds of the participants were female, seroprevalence was nearly identical for males and females, making this largely irrelevant.
Overall, the report is a damning indictment of the social crime being perpetrated by both the Republican state government and the Democratic Party, which controls many of the highly populated urban counties in Texas. The crime includes not only the entirely preventable spread of COVID-19, but also the extensive cover-up of it. It also exposes the rotten nature of the trade unions, particularly the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA), which have forced their members to accept the full reopening of schools, despite millions of children being infected and thousands of educators dying as a result.
These policies serve the interests of the ruling elites, who sit on an increasingly unstable stock market and an astronomical amount of debt. They insist that the economy must be fully reopened, seeking to stave off the collapse of their moribund system, while continuing to accumulate obscene amounts of wealth. The full reopening of schools is an essential part of this scheme. The ruling elites and the capitalist politicians, who tell the population to learn to live with the virus, cannot be pressured to change their course.
To put an end to the mass infection of the population, and children in particular, workers must take matters into their own hands. This requires building independent rank-and-file committees, separate from the capitalist political parties and trade unions, to link together across state lines and all industries. These committees must be organized into a conscious movement of the working class internationally, fighting for a global strategy to eliminate COVID-19, as elaborated clearly in the recent webinar hosted by the WSWS and the International Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC).
No comments:
Post a Comment