SIRATYST (Stuff I Read and Thought You Should Too) --
“To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.”
(Calgacus, as quoted by Tacitus, Agricola 30-31)"
Workers across the United States are responding with growing anxiety and
apprehension to the outbreak of war in Ukraine, while voicing
skepticism about the hysterical war propaganda being stoked by the Biden
administration and the corporate media.
In its statement released Thursday, “Oppose the Putin government’s invasion of Ukraine and US-NATO warmongering! For the unity of Russian and Ukrainian workers!,” the International Committee of the Fourth International, which publishes the World Socialist Web Site,
wrote, “The public mood is not the same as it was in the 1990s. Masses
of people have gone through the experience of the past three decades of
unending war. The overwhelming sentiment in the working class throughout
the world is opposed to war.”
This was reflected in discussions that the WSWS held on Thursday with workers, a selection of which we publish below.
BNSF railway worker
“I think we’re headed towards a long
drawn-out conflict in Europe. I feel for the people that live there. I
think we should have listened more when Putin talked about demanding
that Ukraine never join NATO. Other than how I feel about Putin
personally, that’s what we should have done diplomatically. I understand
that he has legitimate gripes about that.
“Here in the United
States, I just think with the attack on the working class and the income
divide we have, I don’t want to say it’s past a solution, but with the
current governing principles of this country, and the bipartisan attack
on the working class, in favor of corporations, I just feel like…in our
country, we are some of the least valuable workers in the world because
of the wealth and the income gap. As a person that grew up under the
‘Star-Spangled Banner’ and believing that you get out of your country
what you put into it, it’s hard to believe that anymore. The idea that
hard work makes you rich, that’s BS.”
Clare, an Alabama educator
“I
have absolutely no respect or any kind words for Putin, but I can say
the same about Biden as well, because he egged this on. He turned his
attention against his constituents and his own country to get involved
in this.
“Now we have the whole world looking at us, pointing the
finger at Putin. Biden says ‘we won’t be sending troops in’ but he has
already mobilized troops across Europe, strategically around Russia’s
borders. That’s an automatic indication that you are preparing for war.
Russia might look at that and say, ‘See? They do want war.’
“The US has no businesses doing this. If Biden cannot take care of
his own country, why is he getting involved in this? You can’t just turn
your attention away from the 900,000-plus citizens who have died of
COVID. How can he tell other countries what to do? The US suddenly has
money to mobilize troops, but it doesn’t have money to take care of
people during this pandemic?
“Governor Kay Ivey [in Alabama]
said, ‘We need to pray for people of Ukraine.’ Well, she needs to pray
for people right here, after she turned a blind eye on teachers,
students and parents here who got sick and died from the pandemic.
“Workers
should continue to stand up for themselves, continue the fight to do
whatever it takes to end this pandemic and mobilize against a war. In
Russia, the workers are still facing the pandemic, they do not want war.
In the US, the government will tell the working class it needs to
prepare for war, but we are already treated terribly during non-wartime.
If we continue to protest, we’ll be looked at as ‘unpatriotic.’ But
there is a war right now at home that needs to be fought against the
pandemic. And they are ignoring our voices.”
A trucker in southeast Michigan
“A
lot of people are very skeptical of the lies about Russia, which is
good, because you should always be skeptical of what the ruling class is
telling you. You should also always be trying to see what is really
going on.
“It’s just such a hollow, rickety narrative that
they’re trying to construct here. You cannot possibly look at it in good
faith and think that they are telling you the truth. When they are
pressed just the slightest bit and the reporter asks what evidence do
you have, they say, ‘We have the evidence, and that’s all we’re going to
say, and stop asking questions.’ Any sane person can look at that and
say, ‘Something is not right here.’
“It’s common knowledge now
that the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq were a lie. Nobody believes
this narrative they’re trying to tell us. They have to make this thing
up from scratch. There is not a lot left from the Cold War propaganda
for them to grab onto, but it doesn’t stop them from trying. In my
generation, we were born around the time that the Soviet Union
collapsed. So the communist bogeyman has not been around my whole life.
“The
fact that they are willing to commit to this big lie now shows me that
they are totally set on what they are going to do and how little they
take into consideration the attitude and role of the American people.
“The
pandemic made it clear that they don’t care what the people want or
what they are saying or what’s in our best interest. If they want to go
to war, then they are going to war. Nothing is going to stop them short
of working class revolution.
“As crazy as it sounds, I didn’t
think anything could surpass the pandemic. But this is threatening to be
an even more urgent issue with a nuclear holocaust possibly on the
horizon. Nothing could be more important than opposing this war drive.
We have seen their recklessness already, especially the United States.
Who is the only country to ever use nuclear weapons? It’s the United
States. At that time Japan was already in the process of surrendering.
It was pretty much like a show of force.
“We
can’t let nuclear war break out. It would be nice to believe that the
ruling class is not crazy enough to actually take it that far. We cannot
afford that comfort. Frankly, I don’t have any faith in that point of
view. I think it is a false sense of security to think that they would
not provoke a nuclear war. Even if they think they will try to contain
it, and it won’t have to be a nuclear war, that’s just an
impossibility.”
An auto parts worker from Flint, Michigan
“It’s
just like with COVID, all they care about is the money. They say we
need war. We have to provide guns and ammunition, everything, ships to
get them over there, fuel, food for our soldiers. It all costs money.
And somebody is making a bundle. Our schools get cut. We get cut. Our
taxes go up. All because of war. They provoke these wars so that they
can ask Congress to open up the funding.
“When it comes to
providing supplies to fight the pandemic, they say they don’t have the
funding. But when it comes to war, all of a sudden, they have all the
money they need. They don’t have money to fight hunger, or homelessness.
“These army families get tied up in what the government is
saying. That’s how they get us every time. Back in the Gulf War, with
daddy Bush and little Bush, all the way back to Reagan, they lied to us
many times.
“A lot of people are waking up to what’s going on. I
was speaking to a friend of mine, and I explained that everybody has his
breaking point and you haven’t got to yours yet. Mine was losing my
brother to COVID-19. I can accept some things, and some things I just
can’t accept.
“The way they are treating teachers and
autoworkers, doctors and nurses, anybody that has to go to work, they
are not getting a fair shake. Just like my brother, even though he had
diabetes and they knew the plant was full of coronavirus. But people
have to work because they won’t be able to provide for their family if
they don’t. I can understand where a lot of other people are frustrated,
scared, nervous, especially now that there is war time in the middle of
the pandemic. It’s very stressful.
“When I think about the
political parties, I don’t believe any of them anymore. They poisoned my
daughter in the Flint water crisis. We still don’t know the full impact
of that.”
On Saturday, February 26, the World Socialist Web Site is hosting an international online webinar, “Fight COVID and Save Lives! Stop the Drive to World War 3!,”
which will be addressed by leading members of the International
Committee of the Fourth International. We call on all our readers
throughout the world to register and make plans to attend this critical
event.
"Yes, a world war is inevitable, if a revolution does not forestall it. The inevitability of the war flows, first, from the incurable crisis of the capitalist system; secondly, from the fact that the present partition of our planet, that is to say above all, of the colonies, no longer corresponds to the economic specific weight of the imperialist states. Looking for an escape out of the mortal crisis the parvenu states aspire, and cannot fail to aspire, to new partitioning of the world. Only children at the breast and professional 'pacifists' to whom even the experience of the unfortunate League of Nations has taught nothing, can suppose that a more 'equitable' repartition of the territorial surface can be realized around the green tables of democracy. ... Capitalism is condemned. Nothing will save it from collapse. The more resolute and audacious will be the policy of the proletariat the less the socialist revolution will provoke sacrifice, the sooner mankind will enter upon a new road."
Leon Trotsky, interviewed by London Daily Herald in March 1939, via @astrolib
Eighty-two years ago, Leon Trotsky, the great revolutionary Marxist
and leader of the Fourth International, noted (in an essay, “Trade
unions in the epoch of imperialist decay”) that “there is one common
feature in the development, or more correctly the degeneration, of
modern trade union organizations in the entire world: it is their
drawing closely to and growing together with the state power.”
Writing
shortly after the outbreak of World War II, Trotsky explained,
“Democratic unions in the old sense of the terms, bodies where in the
framework of one and the same mass organization different tendencies
struggled more or less freely, can no longer exist.”
Trotsky was
writing shortly after the eruption of the semi-insurrectionary
struggles, including the seizure of factories in sit-down strikes, that
led to the formation of the mass industrial unions in the US. However,
his analysis of the tendency toward the “growing together” of the
unions, the state and the corporations was extraordinarily prescient.
This process continued throughout the post-World War II period,
including through the purging of the socialists and militant workers
from the unions prior to and after the merger of the AFL and CIO in
1955.
Commenting on the transformations that have taken place
since Trotsky’s analysis, WSWS International Editorial Board Chairman
David North noted
that “the process of global economic integration and transnational
production deprived the trade unions of a national framework within
which they could apply pressure for limited social reforms. No room was
left for even the most moderate resort to the methods of class struggle
to achieve minimal gains. The unions, rather than extracting concessions
from the corporations, were transformed into adjuncts of the state and
corporations that serve to extract concessions from the workers.”
Speaking to foreign reporters during a major press conference on Friday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky criticized the “slightly imbalanced” coverage of the situation surrounding his country exhibited by some Western politicians and media.
“Today
we are not seeing any greater escalation than it was before. Yes, the
number of servicemen has increased, but I spoke about that at the
beginning of 2021 when they talked about the military exercises of the
Russian Federation,” Zelensky stated.
“From media
coverage, it looks like we are at war already, that troops are already
at the roads, that there's mobilization, people going somewhere. It's
not the case. We don’t need this panic.”
Overhyping the
tensions around Ukraine has already had a heavy impact on its economy,
Zelensky revealed. Billions have been withdrawn from the country amid
the panic, he added, without specifying any currency.
The president also touched upon the phone talks with his US
counterpart Joe Biden, which took place earlier in the day. Zelensky
dismissed media reports that they did not go well, insisting that he did
not have any disagreements with the US president.
“We do not
have any misunderstanding with the president of the United States.
Simply, I deeply understand what is happening in my country, and he
understands what is going on in the US well,” Zelensky explained.
At the same time, the Ukrainian leader admitted that he might have some secrets to keep from Biden.
Three senior epidemiologists in Australia—Guy Marks, Brendan Crabb and Raina MacIntyre—have issued an urgent appeal entitled “Backed by Science: Here’s How We Can Eliminate COVID-19.”
The statement, which was published on Sunday by Health Policy Watch, calls for sustained and globally coordinated action to eliminate the deadly virus. It was posted amid an unprecedented surge of COVID infections across Australia which is overwhelming hospitals, aged-care facilities and ambulance services, and leading to shortages of Rapid Antigen Tests and ongoing delays in the provision of “booster” vaccines and the inoculation of school-age children.
The document challenges the escalating barrage of government and mainstream media claims that Omicron is “mild,” that society must “live with the virus,” and that herd immunity can be achieved by “let it rip” policies. These unscientific assertions serve only to justify policies that place corporate profits above health and lives.
As infections rise throughout Seattle and
Washington state, students and teachers have initiated sickouts at two
high schools in defiance of the local, state and federal governments’
policy of mass infection and death.
Students at Franklin High
School in Seattle, Washington, initiated a walkout on Friday, calling
for increased safety measures and for remote learning as Omicron rips
through the schools and the community. Many schools throughout the
Seattle area and the Pacific Northwest have closed this week as the
rampant spread of COVID-19 caused major staffing shortages.
Franklin High School in Seattle [Source: Wikimedia Commons]
Franklin
High School has the highest infection rate in the entire school
district, with Roosevelt High School trailing behind, according to the
Seattle Public Schools (SPS) COVID-19 Dashboard. It recorded 52 cases in
the first week of school alone, an undercount of the real rate of
infection as testing sites are overwhelmed throughout the city.
The
students at Franklin High School are demanding that schools implement
safety measures or they will not return, with many students calling for
remote learning and the closure of schools until it is actually safe to
return. The list of demands on the Change.org petition calls on the district to:
Provide N95 masks for all
Perform weekly required COVID-19 testing at school
Continue contact tracing
Provide COVID-19 vaccines, including booster shots, available at school
Update the district’s COVID-19 dashboard daily
Provide one mental health therapist for every 30 students
There
is broad support for the action of the high school students throughout
the state, with more than 800 people signing the petition as of Friday
afternoon.
One student at Kamiak High School in Mukilteo, north of Seattle, told the World Socialist Web Site,
“At school, we’ve had children test positive in the library. It’s
unfair quite honestly. When we look at the chart for COVID cases in our
county, we’ve had up to 3 times more COVID cases compared to the initial
outbreak when we went into lockdown. The numbers are growing, and our
measly precautions are not preventing sickness. Human life should be
above all.”
The Franklin High School students said they decided to
join the movement initiated by students nationally for the closure of
unsafe schools and other COVID-19 safety protocols, such as those
actions taken by high school students in Chicago, Boston and other
cities across the US.
Alongside the walkout of high school
students, teachers at Chief Sealth International High School in Seattle
also staged a sickout Friday in response to the rise in infections at
the school and the lack of safety protocols. They are calling for the
district to provide KN95 and N95 masks, weekly on-site testing, the
hiring of more staff and increased funding for mental health resources.
If
these conditions are not met, they call for the closure of schools and
for remote learning options. Rebecca Neil, a Chief Sealth International
High School science teacher, said in an online post, “the system is
broken and Seattle Public Schools has failed to provide necessary
protections on so many levels. So much of what we are facing was
preventable with strategic planning and preparation, and [the] Seattle
Public Schools district leadership failed to act.”
In
response to the action by the teachers, the school administration
decided to fully close the high school for the day Friday, with no
remote instruction.
The growing militancy of educators and youth
comes in response to the unprecedented surge of the Omicron variant and
the intransigence of the state’s Democratic politicians, who are
following the Biden administration’s lead in implementing a “herd
immunity” strategy of mass infection and death.
Washington state’s
Democratic Governor Jay Inslee said at a press conference on Thursday
that “hospitalization rates will continue to go up,” acknowledging that
the hospital system in the state is already “in crisis” and that “the
emergency rooms are full.”
Inslee has called out 100 National
Guard troops in order to help the hospitals deal with the unprecedented
crisis, while insisting that SPS schools remain in-person. The school
district is scheduled to return to in-person classes on Tuesday, sending
over 50,000 students and staff into overcrowded, poorly ventilated
buildings where COVID-19 will spread like wildfire.
The walkouts
in Seattle are part of a broader struggle by high school students,
parents and educators against the deadly policy of mass infection and
for the closure of unsafe school. Protests have broken out in New York
City; Chicago, Illinois; Oakland, San Francisco and Los Angeles,
California; Boston, Massachusetts; Portland, Oregon; Baton Rouge,
Louisiana, and a growing number of cities across the US.
The IYSSE
and the WSWS call on students and educators to join the growing
resistance against the unsafe reopening of schools across the country
and internationally.
EXCERPT--Article references Canadian response, but USA is nothing if not worse!:
Four myths we chose to embrace
We find ourselves in this bad place because of the easy currency of bad ideas in a technological society.
These dangerous ideas — and I’m only going
to deal with four — are worth reviewing again because if we don’t
challenge and abandon them, we will be fighting COVID for years.
Myth 1: Vaccines will get us out of this.
From the beginning of the pandemic politicians told citizens to wait for the vaccine because a single technology will save us.
Yet as The Tyee has consistently warned, vaccines are imperfect tools
that have severe limits. Moreover no vaccine has ended any outbreak
without the help of other public health tools including masks,
quarantines and reductions in mobility. The assumption that a vaccine or
drugs can end a novel evolving pathogen in real time without the
strategic use of other interventions to bring transmission to zero has
made society more fragile and not less so.
Omicron’s superspreading events in
vaccinated populations have highlighted the danger of this thinking.
Three doses of the Pfizer vaccine
offers only 70-per-cent protection.
Yes, the vaccines may blessedly keep some
of us out of the hospital and that’s good news. But if vaccines aren’t
smartly paired with other interventions to end transmission, we will be
spinning our wheels for years to come.
A vaccine-only policy will prolong the
pandemic and exhaust our health-care systems. Only nuanced policies that
focus on eliminating transmission with the strategic use of testing,
improved ventilation and restraints on international travel will get the
job done.
Myth 2: Pandemics are unpredictable and have nothing to do with policy or human behaviour.
Not true. Our global technosphere has
provided a perfect environment for COVID to flourish. Two human
behaviours in a technological society have fed and accelerated this
pandemic. The first is unrestricted global travel, which guarantees the
circulation of variants. The second is poor ventilation in our
artificial living and working spaces.
International travel seeded the pandemic
and has launched every variant since. Poor ventilation, in turn, has
guaranteed the rapid transmission of new variants in schools,
workplaces, restaurants and spin classes. Without enclosed spaces built
by our technologies, this virus would perish. The evolutionary
biologists Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein have correctly called COVID
“a disease of buildings, cars, ships, trains and airplanes.”
Yet public policy has failed to address these two critical issues. The complexity expert Joe Norman correctly has imperfect tools
that “Adaptively severing long-range connections — essentially all
long-range connections — should be the first step in addressing any
emerging disease that poses significant pandemic potential.”
And until Canada’s politicians become
strong advocates for changes in clean air standards in public buildings
and workplaces, the pandemic will linger like secondhand smoke.
Myth 3: We can live with this virus, and it will become milder over time.
Really? How’s that working for you?
Economies flooded by fear don’t work very well when people are dying,
the hospitals are full and routine medical care becomes difficult if not
impossible.
In contrast the research shows
that societies that collectively respond with policies that reduced
transmission to zero or near zero experienced fuller civil rights and
healthier economies.
Elimination matters for several key reasons. For starters there is no guarantee any new virus will evolve toward a milder state. It is a complete scientific myth.
Let me repeat Haseltine’s pointed warning that we have not seen the worse COVID can deliver yet.
At the same time the cost of “living with
the virus” is growing exponentially. The variants keep adding to those
political, economic and psychological costs by increasing transmission,
severity and lethality of COVID-19.
More variants equals more mutations which
equals more risk for all of us. And the variants are now clearly
outracing the vaccines. How long do Canadians want to be prisoners to
this charade because politicians believe “we can live with this virus”?
Myth 4: COVID is just a flu-like virus.
Just because a novel coronavirus may
provoke flu-like symptoms doesn’t make it a flu. Or even a close
relative. Unlike the flu, which is spread by children, COVID-19 is
driven by random superspreader events originating in just 20 per cent of
the population. The two viruses represent radically different diseases
requiring totally different public health responses.
As many physicians have argued, it is best to think of this novel virus as an evolving thrombotic fever.
It attacks the vascular system and can destroy brain cells.
Even people with mild symptoms can suffer
from chronic disabilities (fatigue and brain fog) a year after
infection. To date we have no clear idea how an infection might undo a
person’s health a decade from now.
Any politician who still dismisses or compares COVID to a flu should be forced to clean and bathe the dead.
Like many competent public health workers the developmental biologist Malgorzata Gasperowicz has long argued that “waves don’t come on their own. Bad policies make waves.”
And that’s Omicron in a viral nutshell.
It’s the result of only focusing on vaccines and ignoring other vital
interventions such as widespread testing and border controls to stop
transmission.
It’s the consequence of ignoring the science on aerosol spread because Omicron now thrives in unventilated spaces.
It’s also the direct result of not addressing the problems posed by unrestricted global mobility.
Gasperowicz has another important point.
The virus just doesn’t attack individuals but society as a whole. If we
think of society as a meta-organism and each person as a cell in that
organism, then we can think of public health and political leadership as
our immune system.
“Societies with weak or compromised
immune/defence systems end up with raging infection or sepsis. Societies
with strong/functional immune systems clear up the infection. They
don’t get infected or don’t let the infection to progress,” Gasperowicz
told The Tyee.
From the beginning, COVID has asked
Canadian society the rudest of questions: Is your political immune
system working for you? Or for a triumphal global virus?
