JOE BIDEN'S LYING LAWYER MAYORKAS CLAIMS HE'S 'HORRIFIED' BY BORDER PATROL ON HORSEBACK - AS HORRIFIED AT THE MASSIVE INVASION THE BIDEN REGIME HAS ORCHESTRATED FROM DAY ONE?

LAWYER JOE BIDEN AND HIS LAWYER INFESTED ADMINISTRATION RANKS AS ONE OF THE MOST CORRUPT AND INCOMPETENT IN HISTORY. 

Biden Taps ‘Sanctuary City’ Supporter To Oversee ICE Prosecutions

Move comes as Biden administration faces an influx of illegal immigrants in Del Rio, Tex.

LA JOYA, TEXAS - APRIL 10: A U.S. Border Patrol agent takes the names of Central American immigrants near the U.S.-Mexico border on April 10, 2021 in La Joya, Texas. A surge of immigrants crossing into the United States, including record numbers of children, continues along the southern border. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)

Joseph Simonson • September 22, 2021 1:25 pm

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The Biden administration is tapping a left-wing attorney who has publicly endorsed sanctuary laws for illegal aliens to serve as Immigration and Customs Enforcement's top prosecutor, according to an internal memo obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

ICE announced the hiring of Kerry Doyle, a longtime partner at the Boston-based law firm Graves & Doyle, as the agency's new principal legal adviser, a role that oversees 25 field locations and 1,250 attorneys. The office serves as ICE’s representative in all removal proceedings and litigates cases against illegal aliens and terrorists. 

"Throughout her legal practice in Boston, Ms. Doyle worked closely with the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition and Massachusetts Law Reform Institute providing technical assistance and public testimony and various immigration-related policy issues before the state legislature and Boston City Council," the ICE memo reads. 

A spokesman for ICE did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Doyle's appointment comes as the Biden administration faces an influx of Haitian refugees, who are overrunning the border city of Del Rio, Texas. After reversing a bevy of Trump-era immigration rules, an uptick in illegal migration across the Southern border has strained resources and presented a political problem for the president, who repudiated Trump's hardline approach to policing the border but risks political blowback from an influx of illegal residents. 

Doyle's LinkedIn profile spotlights her work as co-counsel in a case that pushed for — and won — a temporary restraining order against then-president Donald Trump’s 2017 travel ban. The attorney also spoke in favor of a Massachusetts bill called the "Safe Communities Act" in early 2020 arguing that ICE was "out of control." . The measure would have applied sanctuary city laws nationwide and sharply limited the state’s cooperation with the federal government on the deportation of illegal immigrants.

"The Safe Communities Act limits state cooperation … [with ICE]: don’t ask about immigration status; don’t pay for sheriffs to act as ICE agents; tell people their rights," a description of the bill by the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts reads. In June, Doyle told a local news outlet that the state must pass the bill, saying state Democrats should not trust "the Biden administration’s more supportive tone as an excuse not to do what our state needs to do."

Doyle, who did not respond to a request for comment, has also helped represent illegal aliens convicted of crimes in the past. In March, she filed a petition with ACLU Massachusetts to release two criminal aliens with medical conditions, citing the COVID-19 pandemic. Doyle’s name has since been scrubbed from her previous law firm’s website.

One of President Joe Biden’s first executive orders in office was to suspend arrests, deportations, and investigations of most criminal aliens for 100 days. Deportations under Biden have hit a record low. U.S. immigration judges ordered just 25,000 deportations by the end of August, compared to 152,000 in August 2020. The total number of cases completed by immigration courts are at a 28-year low, even as Border Patrol apprehensions hit a 21-year high. 

Doyle will succeed John Trasviña, who assumed the role in January. 

Biden Admin Releasing Haitian Migrants into USA Despite Promise to Remove Them

AP Video Screenshot

BOB PRICE

22 Sep 20210

2:40

Media outlets report that despite promises from DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Haitian migrants are being released into the U.S. interior. One official told the Associated Press the number of migrants released in recent days is in the thousands.

“If you come to the United States illegally, you will be returned, your journey will not succeed, and you will be endangering your life and your family’s life,” Department of Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas said during a press conference in Del Rio on Monday. “Your journey will not succeed, and you will be endangering your life and your family’s lives.”

“We in DHS are securing additional transportation to accelerate the pace and increase the capacity of removal flights to Haiti and other destinations in the Western Hemisphere,” he stated.

Despite these bold promises of removal, it appears the number of Haitians being removed is in the hundreds while those being released are in the thousands.

The AP reports:

The releases come amid a quick effort to empty the camp under a bridge that, according to some estimates, held more than 14,000 people over the weekend in a town of 35,000 people. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, during a visit Tuesday to Del Rio, said the county’s top official told him the most recent tally at the camp was about 8,600 migrants.

The criteria for deciding who is flown to Haiti and who is released in the U.S. was unclear, but two U.S. officials said single adults were the priority for expulsion flights.

Fox News also reports the release of Haitian migrants into the U.S. interior. The migrants are reportedly being flown by Aero Airways, a major government contractor, to U.S. destinations including Chicago, Denver, Minneapolis, New York City, Yakima (Washington), and Harrisburg (Pennsylvania).

The AP claims as many as 6,000 migrants have been released from the camp in Del Rio, Texas.

Breitbart News reached out to CBP and DHS for confirmation of these flights and the numbers of migrants being removed and released. An immediate response was not available by the time of this publication.

Bob Price serves as associate editor and senior news contributor for the Breitbart Texas-Border team. He is an original member of the Breitbart Texas team. Price is a regular panelist on Fox 26 Houston’s What’s Your Point? Sunday-morning talk show. Follow him on Twitter @BobPriceBBTX and Facebook.

Mayorkas: ‘Horrified’ by Border Control on Horseback — It’s Under Investigation

14

PAM KEY

21 Sep 20210

1:32

Homeland Security chief Alejandro Mayorkas said Tuesday on MSNBC’s “The ReidOut” that he was “horrified” by recent images of U.S. Border Patrol agents on horseback confronting Haitian migrants along the Rio Grande River.

Mayorkas said, “I too was horrified by the images captured by photographers with respect to the activities of Border Patrol agents of horseback. We do not condone. We do not tolerate any mistreatment of any migrant. What we did is we directed an immediate investigation of the events captured in the photographs and on video. I have ensured that the top leadership of the office of professional responsibility lead that investigation and that it be conducted thoroughly and swiftly. We need this resolved swiftly. In fact, I anticipate that the results of the investigation will be available by the end of next week. I’ve committed to making the results public.”

He continued, “I directed that the office of professional responsibility be on-site in Del Rio 24/7 to make sure that the conduct of our employees is consistent with the policies, the training, and values of this department. Lastly, the individuals who are the subject of the investigation are on administrative duties, not executing duties, and not to be interacting with other migrants at this time. The actions we are taking are swift and strong, and we will take further action as the facts in the investigation compel.”

Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN

White House: Illegal Aliens Do Not Need Proof of Vaccination Because ‘Not Intending to Stay’

20,752

The White House

Volume 90%

CHARLIE SPIERING

20 Sep 20210

1:51

The White House conceded Monday they were not requiring border crossers to show proof of vaccination, even though the government requires proof of a vaccine or a negative coronavirus test for other travelers into the United States.

When reporters asked about the apparent double standard on vaccination requirements, White House press secretary Jen Psaki argued that illegal immigrants and migrants crossing the border were not intending to stay in the United States.

“They’re not intending to stay here for a lengthy period of time,” she said, referring to migrants. “I don’t think it’s the same thing. It’s not the same thing.”

WASHINGTON, DC – SEPTEMBER 20: White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki takes questions during the daily press briefing in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House September 20, 2021 in Washington, DC. Psaki held the briefing to answer questions from members of the White House press corps. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Nearly 15,000 immigrants, mostly from Haiti, have created a makeshift camp under the Del Rio International Bridge on the border of Texas and Mexico as they seek entry to the United States.

On September 10, Psaki admitted there was a double standard for migrants crossing into the United States and American citizens working for private businesses with over 100 employees under the Biden administration’s vaccine mandates.

“That is correct,” she said when a reporter pointed out the double standard.

In this Dec. 15, 2020, file photo, a droplet falls from a syringe after a person was injected with the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine at a hospital in Providence, R.I. (AP Photo/David Goldman, File)

Psaki repeated her prepared talking points about the coronavirus process for migrants crossing the border and “the intention” to quarantine individuals demonstrating symptoms of the virus.

About 30 percent of migrants held in detention facilities have refused vaccines, according to reports.

She said the United States continued using Title 42 authorities to expel some of the migrants from Haiti crossing the border into Texas.

“We want to prevent a scenario where large numbers of people are gathering, posing a threat to the community and also the migrants themselves,” she said.

‘A sea of misery of biblical proportions’

By Patricia McCarthy

“A sea of misery of biblical proportions” is how Steve Bannon described the humanitarian crisis on the southern border.  

Within hours of his inauguration, President Biden stopped the building of the border wall and made it clear to all comers around the world that our border was open.  He invited all those migrants who have arrived from all over the world to enter what the left swears is an irreparably racist nation.  Hmmm.  

The nearly twenty thousand Haitians now baking in the Texas sun were invited, too.  More are said to be on their way.  Babies are being born in what is a nightmare of “Bidenvilles,” our very own refugee camps with all the filth and hunger that implies.  

Most of those stranded there paid the cartels thousands of dollars to get here; the women and girls are routinely sexually abused on the journey and in the camps.  Over a million people, 200k per month, have entered the US since Biden took office; who knows how many escaped notice, the “gotaways”?  

As Press Secretary Jennifer Psaki confirmed, these migrants are not tested for covid nor are they required to be vaxxed.  The American citizens of Del Rio, the Texan town under siege, are quarantined if they test positive but the illegal aliens are free to spread out into the interior of the country at taxpayer expense.  The same goes for the soon-to-be hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees who are being brought here unvetted, unvaxxed, un-covid tested.  They are bringing diseases long ago eradicated here in the US.

There are hardly words to adequately describe the damage done to America since Biden took office, both here and among our soon-to-be former allies.  It sure seems like he is doing China’s bidding.  He gave up Bagram Air Base, one of the largest and most important for American security, left $90b worth of high-tech weaponry to the Taliban thus creating the biggest and best-armed terrorist state on the planet.  

He may have committed treason with those ill-conceived moves as well as by opening the border.  What does Blinken care about?  If the Taliban government will be “inclusive and diverse.”  

It seems like every member of this administration is both malevolent and incompetent, a lethal combination of character traits.  Biden, Harris, Blinken, Sullivan, Mayorkas, et. al. are each mediocrities who have no business running anything, let alone the US.   Between the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Mogadishu on the border, they all have much blood on their hands.  And having promoted the Camp-of-the-Saints invasion on the southern border and the complete takeover of it by the drug cartels, they are responsible, too, for the flood of Chinese-made fentanyl that is killing millions of Americans and the horrific abuse suffered by those girls and women who embark on the journey.  Again, these people are truly malevolent and incompetent.  They do not care about the lives they are destroying, those who have come hoping for permanent residence in the US and those whose towns and cities are being overrun by migrants determined to stay no matter what crimes they may feel entitled to commit. 

“When one with honeyed words but evil mind
Persuades the mob, great woes befall the state.” 
― Euripides, Orestes

The damage done to this country from the moment Biden took office is too terrible to contemplate.  He has purposefully ended the energy independence Trump had achieved.  He ended the sanctions on Russia re: Nord Stream.  He has encouraged migrants from all over the world to come; no covid conditions are required or noted, no vetting.  The border is a free-for-all nightmare for those being overrun and for the migrants themselves.  Women are giving birth in the most unsanitary conditions imaginable.  Biden wants amnesty for them all upon entry.  

Biden is by design importing what the left believes will be a permanent Democrat voting bloc.  

What else explains the administration’s obsession with vaxxing all Americans, even those with natural antibodies?  Perhaps the covid fear-porn is all about culling the population as Dr.Michael Yeadon has been warning for over a year.  What could be better for the Democrats than to replace an independent,  freedom-loving population with millions of illiterate humans from the third world?  These arrivals will provide cheap labor for our largest corporations, will take the taxpayer funded benefits they expect and have been promised, and leave the American middle class as bereft as the former middle class of Venezuela is bereft.  

That is their plan and they are sticking to it.  Sadly, the Republicans in Congress are, but for a few heroes, a waste of the space they were elected to fill.  Clearly Biden deserves to be impeached for his numerous high crimes and misdemeanors perpetrated upon the American people, but the Republicans sit on their hands hoping their boat won’t be rocked, that their privilege will not be disrupted or their access to wealth interrupted.

In these past months the Biden administration has created many “seas of misery,” the cataclysm at the border being only one of them.   The situation in Afghanistan is easily as horrific as what is happening here; the deaths of those thirteen young soldiers are on him as are the deaths of the people killed in the botched drone strike.  Hundreds of thousands of businesses have been shuttered.  

As Biden mandates  vaccines for all and urges discrimination against the unvaxxed, hundreds of thousands of vaccine-related deaths and injuries are occurring but news of them is suppressed.  Biden-caused inflation has made gasoline, meat and other food necessities unaffordable for millions of Americans.  Several of our allies have been ill-treated to the point of estrangement.  Foreign terrorism has been reinvigorated and armed.  One wonders if the people who engineered Biden’s illegitimate win in 2020 are proud of themselves. Do they actually think their Cloward-Piven tactics will leave them unscathed?  They probably shouldn’t rest on their laurels just yet. 

“You only have power over people as long as you don't take everything away from them.  But when you've robbed a man of everything, he's no longer in your power—he's free again.” Alexander Solzhenitsyn. 

Biden, Pelosi, Schumer, and their ilk have made obvious their contempt for the American people and their willingness to strip them of their constitutionally guaranteed rights and freedoms.  They seem unconcerned by our contempt for them but they be surprised by our resilience.  It is true that far too many of us have succumbed to their carefully contrived fear of Covid, but people are waking up to their duplicity.  The fact that these hundreds of thousands of migrants and refugees are arriving without any covid restrictions says it all.  None of this is about anyone’s health.  It’s all about power and control.  May the left soon find itself in a sea of misery.

Phptp credit: YouTube screengrab 

Hospitals throughout US South remain inundated with COVID-19 patients as Delta variant surge continues

Alex Johnson

a day ago

The Southern region of the United States is continuing to see an explosive growth of hospitalizations and deaths which is being fueled by the highly infectious Delta variant of COVID-19. The latest wave of virus is taking a dangerous toll on hospitals in multiple states, as the enormous influx of sick patients is causing strains on hospital staffing and placing untold pressure on health care workers.

While states such as Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Georgia have seen slight declines in their hospitalizations since the initial onset of the Delta wave in August and early September, deaths in all four states have shot upward in recent weeks, demonstrating that fatalities are catching up with the monstrous rise in infections which has been driven by the bipartisan push to reopen schools and lift all pandemic restrictions combined with low vaccination rates.

In Georgia, daily deaths from COVID-19 have risen nearly ten-fold since August 1, according to data from the Georgia Department of Health. An average of 93.7 Georgians a day are currently dying of the virus, which represents a 977 percent increase since the beginning of August.

A nurse enters a monoclonal antibody site, Wednesday, Aug. 18, 2021, at C.B. Smith Park in Pembroke Pines, Florida (AP Photo/Marta Lavandier)

The disaster facing the South has been one of the main contributors to the catastrophic resurgence of the pandemic in the US since early July. The country is now averaging over 2,000 COVID-19 deaths and about 150,000 new infections every day, the highest levels since the deadly winter surge.

Despite the Biden administration’s recent announcement of a vaccine or testing requirement for business with more than 100 employees, about 770,000 shots per day of the vaccine are being dispensed nationwide, well below the peak of 3.4 million a day in mid-April. The slow rate of vaccinations has also rendered a large chunk of the population vulnerable to the Delta variant, with 46 percent still unvaccinated—including all children under the age of 12.

In Tennessee, intensive care units remain dangerously full and have begun to create disruptions in hospital systems across the state. Hospitalizations have plateaued at well over 3,000 since the beginning of September. West Tennessee Healthcare, a critical access hospital in Bolivar, east of Memphis, currently has at least a dozen patients admitted into its facility, five times the two or three patients that the facility usually sees. Half of them are sick with COVID-19, according to Hospital CEO Ruby Kirby.

Conditions have worsened to the point where the hospital’s health operators are being forced to transfer ventilated patients to intensive care units (ICUs) in larger cities like Memphis or Nashville, which also have a very limited number of open beds. “We’re managing them, but it is putting a strain on the system, trying to hold these patients in these hospitals until we can get them moved,” Kirby told WKU Public Radio. While COVID-19 hospitalizations statewide have declined slightly over the last week, more than a thousand COVID patients remain in ICUs across Tennessee.

Like many states that have become epicenters for the latest Delta wave, staffing has reached dangerously low levels at hospitals which are flooded with COVID-19 patients. Many hospitals in Tennessee are now receiving help from the state’s National Guard, while the state has even offered money to help pay for travel nurses.

In eastern Tennessee, hospital operators say even offering high pay isn’t enough to fill all the openings left by nurses who’ve left the COVID-flooded ICUs due to working arduously long hours and suffering burnout. One chief medical officer, Dr. Harold Naremore of Blount Memorial Hospital in Maryville, told WKU the challenges the hospital is facing are “very frightening” because “there’s no more staff to bring in.”

At North Carolina’s Duke University Hospital in Durham, 99 percent of adult inpatient beds were occupied on average each day in the week ending on September 11—the ninth-straight week that the hospital has been at 98-100 percent capacity. According to the data, an average of 81 of those patients had confirmed or suspected COVID-19, meaning COVID patients filled about one out of every nine beds on average each day. In the intensive care unit, all ICU beds were occupied on average each day last week.

At the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill Hospital, 86 percent of adult beds were occupied on average each day that same week, and 83 of those beds were filled with COVID-19 patients. About one in seven beds were filled with a COVID patient each day. At WakeMed in Raleigh, 88 percent of inpatient beds were occupied on average each day. Of those beds, more than a quarter were filled with COVID-19 patients—a daily average of nearly 150 suspected and confirmed COVID patients.

In Kentucky, at least 70 percent of hospitals are facing critical staffing shortages, with health and political officials issuing dire warnings of an imminent collapse of several facilities. Staffing shortages have been reported in 66 of the state’s 96 hospitals, the highest level yet throughout the pandemic. Governor Andy Beshear along with Kentucky’s public health commissioner Dr. Steven Stack admitted last week that the latest surge in COVID-19 is straining the entire health care system.

“Our hospitals are at the brink of collapse in many communities,” Stack noted. According to health experts, the highly contagious Delta variant has exacerbated the crisis. Dr. Ryan Stanton, an emergency room physician in Lexington, Kentucky said he’s seen the virus spread to whole families, especially if older members are unvaccinated. “Now in Kentucky, one-third of new cases are under age 18,” Stanton said in a recent Newsweek interview.

Contrary to the lying claims made by the Biden White House and entire political establishment that the reopening of K-12 schools can be done safely, one of the main facilitators for transmission are now children, with small children and youth participating in in-person learning and other face-to-face activities spreading the virus to the rest of their families. Stanton pointed to the reopening of schools and classroom learning, a reckless and homicidal policy that’s been pursued by every governor nationwide and the Biden administration, as directly responsible for the catastrophe. “Between daycare and schools and school activities, and friends getting together, there are just so many exposures.”

Perhaps the greatest indicator of distress from the Delta-fueled upsurge are intolerable conditions that health care workers in Kentucky and nationwide have been forced to endure. More than 400 members of the Kentucky National Guard, as well as strike teams from the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s emergency medical services, have now been deployed to help struggling hospitals across the state.

In an interview with ABC News, Kerri Eklund, a nurse working in Elizabethtown at Baptist Health Hardin Hospital, relayed the tragic burdens facing nurses. “I would honestly say it’s at least three times worse than what it was the first time. We’re seeing a lot of people getting really sick. There are patients that will come in and they’ll be doing okay for a few days and then, in the blink of an eye, they go downhill.”

Many health care workers have described the current wave as unexpected after brief relief in the spring and early summer, with infections and deaths slowed to their lowest numbers during the pandemic. Central blame for the resurgence, however, lies with both corporate-controlled parties and institutions such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention which in May dropped all national health mandates, above all social distancing and masking, in order to greenlight in-person learning in schools, as demanded by Biden, and ensure no restrictions remained on profit making.

With the pandemic escalating at break-neck speed, frontline health care workers are seeing the consequences of the deadly policies pursued by the ruling class in intolerable working conditions. Medical professionals from nurses and physician assistants to respiratory therapists have reported feeling stretched so thin that many are experiencing exhaustion and burnout.

In Kentucky, which has become an epicenter for the new surge, health practitioners have reported seeing highly experienced and exceptional colleagues walk away from their profession in droves because of the stress and anxiety they are having to deal with. Many front-line workers are fearful of yet another surge as the current fall season stretches into the winter months without any serious effort to suppress the pandemic and eliminate COVID-19. In the same interview with Newsweek, Eklund said, “I’m really worried that it’s just going to keep getting worse...because we all know that winter is the worst time for health issues all together.”

Three children dying of COVID-19 every day in the US

Genevieve Leigh

9 hours ago

According to the latest data from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) another 225,978 children were officially infected with COVID-19 and at least 20 died in the last week alone. Since July 1, a staggering 1.47 million children have been infected, 4,561 have been hospitalized and 145 have died.

Over 100 children have died from COVID-19, or roughly three children a day, in the last five weeks in the US. The time period coincides with the forced reopening of K-12 schools and college campuses throughout the country.

Children lost to the pandemic: Kimora "Kimmie" Lynum, top-left (family photo), Makenzie Gongora, top-right (GOFUNDME), Kali Cook, bottom-left (Karra Harwood/GoFundMe), and Ryland Lee Daic, bottom-right (family photo).

Perhaps even more alarming, the latest AAP data shows that multiple states have quietly changed their parameters for tracking child infections, hospitalizations and deaths in order to obscure the data. Alabama, for example, changed their definition of “child cases” from ages 0-24 down to 0-17. In Missouri and Hawaii the definition for “child cases” was adjusted from ages 0-19 to 0-17. Similar changes were made in other states.

Florida has stopped reporting child hospitalizations altogether. Arkansas has stopped reporting child deaths and hospitalizations. Nebraska has completely removed their COVID-19 dashboard from public view—that is, the state is no longer reporting child cases, hospitalizations, or deaths.

In other words, the available data for how the new Delta variant is affecting children is being manipulated to under-report the severity of the situation.

Even with the efforts to play down the impact on children, the available data is incredibly damning. Over two weeks, from September 2 to September 16 there was a 9 percent increase in the cumulated number of child COVID-19 cases. Local reports reveal devastating stories of the young lives unnecessarily taken by the pandemic.

Alexia Jade Garrison (Image Credit: McClure Funeral Home and Cremation Services)

On Thursday, September 16, 17-year-old Alexia Garrison, high school senior from Illinois passed away from COVID-19. Alexia’s father, Jason Garrison, told WCIA that his daughter had not been vaccinated, and she had no pre-existing conditions.

Her father reported that his daughter had mild symptoms throughout her quarantine period after catching the virus. After she was no longer showing any symptoms, she returned to school. Alexia collapsed in her home late Wednesday night and was pronounced dead early Thursday morning. The family is being told that COVID pneumonia was the cause of death.

Danny Rees (Image Credit: GoFundMe/Tammy Rees)

On September 14, 13-year-old Danny Rees from Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin died after testing positive for COVID-19. Danny’s mother, Tammy, told Channel3000 that her son had been congested for two days prior to his death. His mother thought he only had a cold before he suddenly stopped breathing while resting at home.

The Fort Atkinson School Board approved a mask mandate Thursday night following his death.

Addison Wishart (Image Credit: GoFundMe/Sina Trotman)

On September 12, 17-year-old Justin Leming, a high school student from Soddy-Daisy, Tennessee, died from COVID-19. On September 4, Addison Wishart, only 4 years old, from Evans, Georgia, was recovering from abdominal surgery when she contracted COVID-19 and died.

The deaths of these children are beyond tragic. Their families and friends are dealing with unimaginable grief and pain from the loss of their loved ones at such a young age. It is hard to overstate the impact that such tragedies are having on society. How does a parent of elementary school youth explain the death of a friend, a teacher or a bus driver? How do they promise their children that they are safe after such tragedies?

Parents and workers are being put in impossible situations. The forced reopening of schools has purposefully coincided with the cutting off of federal unemployment benefits and the scrapping of the eviction moratorium, threatening millions of families with destitution and homelessness unless they send their children to unsafe schools and return to unsafe workplaces.

This campaign to reopen schools has been spearheaded by the Biden administration and the Democratic Party with the full backing of the Republicans. The ruling class is carrying out this campaign in direct opposition to science, which clearly shows that the reopening of schools is not safe under the current conditions and children are susceptible to contracting and spreading the virus. Closing schools and non-essential businesses for a relatively brief time is one of the key tools for stopping the spread of COVID-19 and saving lives.

While it is true that children die at far slower rates than adults, children are dying every day from the virus.

For those children who contract the virus but do not die, there is mounting evidence of long term symptoms and complications from the new variant. Innumerable stories are emerging of severe cases among children. Just a brief review of some of the more harrowing cases include the following:

• Eduardo Cortes, 8, from San Diego, California, contracted COVID-19 from his parents, who were unvaccinated. Both parents had contracted the virus several weeks prior. Cortez was hospitalized a month later with Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome (MISC). According to reports from the family, Cortes’ fever reached a staggering 106.1 degrees.

MISC has affected about 4,000 children since April 2020. There have been 80 cases diagnosed in San Diego alone. Doctors do not know why some kids are susceptible to MISC, while others are not.

• Elijah “E.J.” Johnson,18, has been admitted to a pediatric ICU in Missouri just one month after he scored two touchdowns in his first high school football game of the season. His mom told local reporters that he is now fighting to breathe due to COVID pneumonia complicated by blood clots.

Elijah was not vaccinated. His mom has been vocal on Facebook about Elijah’s situation, “because the youth are being exposed and transmitting the virus more and more. ... his school doesn’t have a mask mandate, it’s optional.”

• Christian Davila, 17, from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina was placed on life support due to COVID-19. Davila has been at MUSC’s Shawn Jenkins Children’s Hospital for three weeks. According to local reports he’s only been awake for the last week and a half of his stay. He is now regaining strength. “To walk into a hospital and see your son laying on a ventilator and nothing you can do about it, it floors you,” his dad told ABC-4 News.

“When we first heard about this Covid, you know, I thought it was nothing serious, nothing more than just the flu, you know, media hype whatever, but after watching what my son’s gone through over the last month, it’s totally changed my mind,' his father added.

Pediatric cases are on the rise in South Carolina. As of Thursday, there were 36 children hospitalized with COVID-19 statewide, 16 in the ICU, six on ventilators and two on life support.

• 1-year-old Ava Amira Rivera was placed on life support due to COVID-19 after being airlifted to a Texas hospital 150 miles away from her home because of a shortage of pediatric beds in the Houston area. “My heart sank to the floor,” her mom told reporters.

The Biden administration, union bureaucrats and politicians on both sides of the aisle have repeated the chorus ad nauseam that “we must learn to live with the virus.” But this is a lie. All of these deaths and infections were preventable. Had the proper measures been taken at the start of the pandemic, the virus could have been contained and eradicated. Now, due to the negligence and criminality of the ruling class, both Democrat and Republican, much more dangerous strains of the virus are developing.

The fact of the matter is that all factions of the ruling class—from Republicans, who are demanding an end to every mitigation measure, to Democrats, who claim that reopening can be carried out safely through “mitigation”—are opposed to the measures that are necessary to eradicate the virus, including the shutdown of schools.

In the country's largest school district, New York City, Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio unilaterally announced on Monday that unvaccinated children who are known to have been exposed to COVID-19 in classrooms will no longer be required to quarantine. These moves come just one week after schools reopened in the largest district in the US with roughly 1.1 million students.

The Democrats are working closely with the trade unions, and in particular the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) in every state, to keep the schools open no matter the cost. AFT President Randi Weingarten has declared that “the number one priority is to get kids to be back in school.”

These efforts have been accompanied by a massive campaign in the corporate media to downplay the dangers posed to children and to promote the idea that things are “back to normal.”

There is, however, nothing “normal” about child deaths and infections from COVID-19. Opposition to these deadly policies is brewing among workers, parents and students across the country and in fact, internationally.

What is necessary is a common fight to close all K-12 schools, universities and nonessential workplaces with full compensation for those affected, in combination with a mass vaccination campaign, universal testing, contact tracing, isolation of infected patients and other public health measures, as part of a broader strategy to eradicate COVID-19 on a world scale.

This strategy will not be implemented by the political establishment or the trade unions, but must be fought for by the working class organized independently from both parties and the corporate controlled trade unions.

Wealth-X report: Billionaire wealth surged during pandemic

Trévon Austin

11 hours ago

A new report from research firm Wealth-X found that the global COVID-19 pandemic has intensified the growth of social inequality and witnessed an unprecedented accumulation of wealth among the most privileged layers in society. For the first time in human history, the world had more than 3,000 billionaires in 2020.

This amounts to a 13.4 percent increase in billionaires since 2019, currently totaling 3,204 individuals, with a median wealth of $1.9 billion. Billionaires’ collective wealth swelled to $10 trillion, a 5.7 percent increase from 2019.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos (AP Photo/John Locher, File)

“Viewed in aggregate, the global pandemic delivered a windfall to billionaire wealth, boosted by the flood of monetary stimulus and swelling profits in key sectors that coined a new wave of younger, self-made billionaires,” the report said.

Billionaire wealth has increased steadily since 1990, but one-third of these wealth gains have occurred during the pandemic. US billionaire wealth increased nineteen-fold over the last 31 years, from an inflation adjusted $240 billion in 1990 to $4.7 trillion in 2021.

The parasitic growth in wealth was most pronounced in the United States, the center of world capitalism. The ranks of billionaires in all of North America grew by 17.5 percent from last year. In fact, North America’s 980 billionaires account for 30.6% of the world’s billionaires.

The US was the top billionaire country in 2020. According to a report from Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) and the Institute for Policy Studies Program on Inequality (IPS), American billionaires have seen their collective wealth surge by 62 percent, approximately $1.8 billion, since March 18, 2020. Following North America, Asia saw its number of growing by 16.5%, for a grand total of 883. Asia’s billionaires saw their collective net worth grow to $2.6 trillion, a 7.5% increase.

The good fortune of this tiny layer of the world’s population over the past 18 months is all the more appalling when contrasted to the growing immiseration and impoverishment of billions of workers around the globe. As a few thousand billionaires amassed enormous sums of wealth, workers around the world lost $3.7 trillion in earnings during the pandemic, according to a report from the International Labor Organization (ILO).

The report estimated an 8.8 percent year-by-year decline in global working hours from 2019 to 2020, equivalent to 255 million full-time jobs. This is approximately four times greater than the recorded loss during the 2008-09 global financial crisis.

The lost working hours were due to massive cuts in working hours and unprecedented levels of job loss, impacting some 114 million people and their families. Significantly, 71 percent of these job losses came from “inactivity,” meaning at least 81 million people around the world left the labor market because they could not find work.

Women have been more adversely affected by the pandemic than men. Globally, employment losses for women stand at 5 percent, versus 3.9 percent for men. Women were much more likely than men to drop out of the labor market, most commonly due to childcare concerns. Younger workers have also been devastated. Employment fell by 8.7 percent among workers aged 15-24 years old, compared to 3.7 percent for adults. Generation Z, the oldest of whom is 23, has become the most unemployed generation and is on track to experience the same financial struggles as millennials.

In the US alone, the official poverty rate rose by 1.0 percent from 2019 to 2020, according to the US Census Bureau. The poverty rate grew to 11.4 percent, marking the first increase in the official poverty rate after five years of consecutive decline. In 2020, there were 37.2 million people in poverty, approximately 3.3 million more than in 2019.

At the same time, median household income in 2020 dropped by 2.9 percent from the previous year. This is the first statistically significant decline in median household income since 2011.

Over 86 million Americans have lost jobs, almost 38 million have been sickened by the virus, and over 675,000 have died from it. Between 2019 and 2020, the real median earnings of all workers fell by 1.2 percent. The total number of people reporting earnings decreased by about 3 million, while the number of full-time, year-round workers decreased by approximately 13.7 million.

The chief obstacle to solving the world’s burning social questions—whether the devastating impact of COVID-19 or the widespread growth of poverty—is the private profit interests of the capitalist ruling class. Every action these vultures have taken in response to the pandemic has been driven by the effort to protect the wealth and privileges of a few. To save lives and avert even further disaster, workers must fight for a policy based on the interests of the working class, the vast majority of society.