Capitalists Gamble Children’s Lives for Profits
https://socialistaction.org/2020/09/20/capitalists-gamble-childrens-lives-for-profits/
September 20, 2020
By JAMES FORTIN
The openings of grade and middle schools, high schools, and colleges all
have one thing in common – they are the betting chips in a massive
gamble by the ruling class. Like in poker, sometimes you win, sometimes
you lose. In this case, however, the 1% will be betting with our lives,
not theirs.
As of this writing, kids and younger adults are flocking back to their
schools. With a lack of national reopening standards to guide school
districts, however, each community is on its own to decide what is safe
and what it not. Some districts are headed back for in-person
instruction, others are planning to keep students at home for a virtual
classroom environment, some still are combining the two in a hybrid
model. Facing all districts is a disturbing national finding announced
by the American Academy of Pediatrics: more than 97,000 children tested
positive for the virus during the last 2 weeks of July. A more recent
study placed that number in excess of 400,000.
Parents and their children’s teachers, in their overwhelming majority,
refuse to send their kids into infection-prone environments. And even
when they have sent their children along to modified, in-person
learning, examples galore come screaming forward of mass infections in
the very first week of school.
The rush to send the kids back has been a priority especially for those
states run by pro-Trump devotees, and where the virus is relatively
widespread. It those cases it is more a political statement, in line
with prematurely opening the economy, than an educational necessity. The
results have not been good.
In Georgia and Mississippi, in-person attendance resulted in thousands
of quarantines around those states. In Indiana, a high school dropped
in-person schooling and reverted to on-line instruction after only two
days of instruction. Hundreds of other schools across the nation have,
or are considering, reversals from of their first-announced plans to
reopen brick-and-mortar instruction, including the entire state of New
Jersey where the disease runs rampant, with 200,000 having tested
positive for the virus and 16,000 dead.
The pushback from teachers, their unions, and parents to school
openings, and the track of the virus itself, has made school starts
futile for hundreds of school districts around the country, including
the majority of big cities. About half of elementary and secondary
school students in the U.S. already are committed to virtual learning
for the fall, with plans for the other half not yet cast in stone.
Colleges and universities experienced similar results when attempting to
re-open, with the University of Notre Dame, University of North
Carolina-Chapel Hill, and Michigan State University each reversing
course to engage only in remote learning or to delay reopening indefinitely.
A Washington Post poll indicated that two-thirds of parents, including
many Republican parents, disapproved of Trump’s handling of the
school-opening portion of his Covid response.
Teachers, too, and have been outspoken on the issue. Sensing the rush to
be unsafe in many locations, the American Federation of Teachers
authorized local unions to strike, if needed, to prevent the infection
from spreading to both children and staff. Polling in Chicago reflected
that 80 percent of Chicago’s teachers feel uncomfortable and uncertain
about going back into the buildings for instruction.
Trump’s failure to address the contagion in the first place, and then
his denial of it, set the stage for massive infections and the meltdown
of medical facilities & personnel coast-to-coast. Following upon that
fiasco, his bellicose insistence that schools re-open was his attempt to
save his political hide. The consequences of these acts are grim.
Despite extreme misgivings by many, the position of the ruling class
expressed through their surrogates continues to be that schools must
reopen. If moms and dads are busy with home schooling or childcare, they
may be working fewer hours if at all. And if the working class is not
working, capitalism as a system is missing out on their wage
exploitation and the value of their work being usurped by the ruling
class to line their pockets.
To capitalist businesses of all stripes that is the cardinal rule.
Workers on the job mean profits; lack of workers means sluggish
survival, and to some smaller businesses especially, possibly
extinction. The unspoken implication of this imperative of the ruling
economic order is that if some kids should die, or pass along the
disease to those at home, that is just the collateral damage to saving
the economy, a higher-ranking consideration. Back in March and April,
capitalist economists were actually discussing this conundrum before
their deliberations were silenced by the major media.
Hardest hit among children have been those of the oppressed minorities
whose populations continue to die from the coronavirus at significantly
higher rates than whites. Children of color have been hospitalized with
COVID-19 at rates five to eight times higher than white children.
Centuries of systemic racism have relegated the Black communities of
America to substandard and crowded housing, lack of economic
opportunity, and higher unemployment rates than whites. More often than
not, the inner cities also lack adequate medical access and even grocery
stores where fresh foods can be obtained, contributing to Black adults
suffering higher rates of obesity, diabetes, and asthma – underlying
factors that contribute to infection susceptibility.
The likelihood of coming down with the coronavirus is not only enhanced
by the disadvantaged state of Black America, but also by what types of
work many African Americans perform. They are overrepresented among
workers found in such essential areas as public transportation, nurses’
aides, and grocery clerks. Workers in such jobs cannot telecommute from
home, as whites are more likely able to do, but must be face-to-face
with the public, making them additionally vulnerable.
The bottom line is that Blacks are more than twice as likely as whites
to come down with the coronavirus, and African Americans account for
one-quarter of all Covid-19 deaths.
Adding to the social stress placed on these communities is the racial
trauma originating from police discrimination, brutality, and killings.
There is likely not a single Black family in the nation which has not
had “the talk” with their children about what to do to stay safe when
encountering the police – a family event in itself which adds to the trauma.
It is called “systemic” racism because it is entrenched in the very
fabric of society. At nearly every level of interaction with others,
such as at the workplace, schools, financial institutions, and
government, disparate treatment is noted. The most blatant example has
been what law enforcement does in its interactions with Blacks.
So similar has the behavior been — coast-to-coast, police department to
police department, killing of one unarmed Black person to the next –
that you would think that cops as a group are a cabal, or organized
crime, or a murderous fraternity. You are not far off the mark.
The role of the police is to defend private property relations.
Individual cops live under the psychology and legal framework of
capitalism, compounded by centuries of the ingrained mantra that Black
people (and other oppressed minorities) are inferior to Whites. If
someone “breaks the law” – capitalist law, often unjust – they are to be
“brought to justice.” In the minds of cops, if a Black person is alleged
to have committed a crime, they are guilty. Or if a Black is even in the
vicinity when the law is broken, they are police suspects, de facto,
because they are Black. Contrary to police denials, this the reality.
George Floyd of Minneapolis is detained and killed by cops over an
alleged passing of a bogus $20 bill. Breonna Taylor of Louisville is
shot in her own home by a group of police breaking down her door,
mistakenly. Rayshard Brooks of Atlanta, whose “crime” is sleeping in a
fast food parking lot, is gunned down by cops while running away. Jacob
Blake of Kenosha, Wisconsin is shot 7 times by the cops in front of his
own children, entering his car, and is paralyzed from the waist down.
The sordid list is lengthy and constitutes the proof.
In each and every instance of police murder brought to public attention
through someone’s cell phone video, it is a case of death by being
Black. These deadly racist attacks against Black people are part and
parcel of life for African Americans in capitalist America. The pandemic
of disease has been joined the lethal pandemic of police brutality and
murder.
We have yet to see what will result from the system’s gamble of sending
children back to school in Covidland, despite reservations and strenuous
objections of parents and teachers who are on guard. Similarly, the
demands of millions that the police be brought under control to stop
their killing rampages has achieved mostly token outcomes to date, if
that, but the sentiment for Black justice has widely deepened and
continues. What we also have observed, however, is a newly awakened
belief by masses of working people engaged in independent action that
such methods are necessary to achieve their just demands.
We realize that sometimes mass movements win and sometimes they lose.
But the stakes are high, and the outcome is uncertain until all the
cards are played.
Socialist Action News
Sign up for our weekly newsletter:
Your email address
Related Articles
COVID-19 Spreads though ICE Detention Centers
September 14, 2020
By LISA LUINENBERG & LAZARO MONTEVERDE
As the COVID-19 pandemic rages across the U.S., immigrants continue to
be hard hit. COVID-19 is spreading almost unchecked through detention
centers that house immigrants.
COVID-19 se extiende a través de centros de detención ICE
September 14, 2020
By LISA LUINENBERG & LAZARO MONTEVERDE
A medida que la pandemia de COVID-19 se desata en los Estados Unidos,
los inmigrantes continúan siendo los más afectados.
Teachers Resist “Back to School” Orders
September 6, 2020
By STEVE R. JOHNSON
Under increasing pressure from state and federal authorities,
schoolteachers across the United States are embroiled in a life and
death struggle over the terms and conditions of re-opening the nation’s
schools for the 2020-2021 year.
--
___
Robert G. Ingersoll
“Progress is born of doubt and inquiry. The Church never doubts, never
inquires. To doubt is heresy, to inquire is to admit that you do not know—the
Church does neither.”
― Robert G. Ingersoll,
