This weekend, I read columnist (and former Reagan speech writer) Peggy Noonan’s weekly op ed in Jan. 8 Wall Street Journal, The Endless Loop of Covid 19. She criticized Biden’s recent speech and record on Covid 19 in the face of massive infections and hospitalizations, lack of testing, contradictory and confusing CDC guidance [most recently driven by Delta Airlines]. Fair points; with US cases and deaths the highest in the world, (Liberals: Biden is no better than Trump at protecting the vulnerable.) Noonan went on to credit Biden for insisting on keeping schools open (apparently without teachers, bus drivers, and support staff, quite a magic trick).
USA Today, Jan. 5, 2022.
And then, describing the agreed-on stance of the business class and their Democrat, Republican, and media lackeys, Noonan writes:
“The biggest single thing he [Biden] could say to convince American parents that he was on their side, being serious and trying to end this pandemic well, is to put himself and his party in some jeopardy by finally, late in the game, going forcefully against the most reactionary force in American public life, the teachers unions. The selfish, uncaring attitude they weren’t ashamed to show regarding the closing of schools, their fantasies about how uniquely vulnerable they themselves now are, and their pleasure in flexing political muscle—they covered themselves in shame the past two years.”
Teachers unions, the” most reactionary force in American public life”? The US leads the world in Covid cases and deaths because of. . .teachers unions?
According to this business-class spokeswoman, the selfish and uncaring are:
Teachers trying to protect their own, their families’ and their students’ health and safety.
Teachers locked in a classroom with 30 or more susceptible kids, bad ventilation, and a wildly contagious virus affecting both the vaxxed and unvaxxed.
The Illinois Covid curve:
Teachers trying to teach with massive student absences while covering for sick colleagues (so many teachers are out sick, some kids are just warehoused in school gyms and lunchrooms).
It’s physically impossible to teach in this situation. Teachers know that. They know that a distance learning break will help schools, teachers, and students learn as much as possible, safely, until the latest Covid wave passes. Whatever happened to flatten the curve?
But in-person learning isn’t the endgame regardless of all the breast-beating about children’s education, socialization, and mental health. The president, politicians, Democrat Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot (who just got Covid herself), and the business class all agree: schools have to stay open so parents can go to work generating profits.
And just like clockwork, within days, the Chicago Teachers Union leadership herded the teachers back into petri-dish classrooms, kowtowing yet again to the Democrat Party, Chicago’s Democrat mayor/former corporate attorney, and Illnois’ billionaire Democrat governor JB Pritzker, all happy as hell to see the teachers and students sacrifice for the economy.
Forget education; school has become a training ground for the working class. Keep going, students and teachers, until you’re too sick to produce anything for the important people.
New York City’s new Democrat mayor Eric Adams said it clearly: “It’s time to open up and feed our ecosystem, our financial ecosystem.” Fuck the frontline workers who have to keep this “financial ecosystem” shitshow going. Expendable.
In-person learning with a vertical spike in cases and overwhelmed hospitals is insanity only the Chamber of Commerce and the donor class could dream up from the safety of their home office Zoom meetings.
The Coddled but Unessential: Office Peeps Vaxxed to the Teeth and Still Working from Home
While ground-down teachers and healthcare workers care for scores of exposed kids and sick people, major corporations including Facebook (Meta), major New York City Banks, and others just extended work-from-home arrangements for their frightened, coddled office workers, causing a ripple effect on offices’ nearby businesses still waiting for customers.
The same governors, urban mayors, and elitist columnists excoriating teachers aren’t calling office workers “selfish and uncaring” for cowering at home and killing dependent downtown businesses. They wouldn’t dare.
Democrats long ago jettisoned the working class. Its new voter base, the professional/managerial class, simply must be protected from infection.
Last week in a press conference, NYC’s mayor Adams berated corporations for extending work-from-home arrangements claiming absent office workers are causing financial hardship for small Manhattan businesses and their workers. Other mayors have tried the same guilt trip. To no effect. Corporations don’t take orders from politicians; it’s the other way around
(Adams tripped over himself in his appeal to NYC business leaders and generated howls of outrage. “My low-skill workers, my cooks, my messengers, my shoe-shine people, those who work in Dunkin Donuts, they don’t have the academic skills to sit in a corner office.” Wait, I thought they were essential workers. And “my”? Comedian and commentator Tim Black ripped Adams and his elitist “low-skill” slam of working people: “Sounds like he’s running a plantation.”)
Learning to Live with Covid: A Class War on All Workers
Under a new mantra, “learning to live with Covid,” the business class demands heroics from the people they once called essential workers (note that mainstream media has disappeared this term). Translated: Let the working class get Covid to keep the economy moving. Unmentioned: Also the already- ill and elderly; they’re expendable too.
Hold it sideways and we have officially flattened the curve!
Meanwhile, overwhelmed US hospitals are rationing care in a MASH unit triage fiasco. Old folks with strokes or broken hips or heart attacks, and anyone of any age with any non-Covid emergency, risk substandard care and death or prolonged disability.
The Corporate Controlled CDC Weighs In
Last week on” Good Morning America,” a reporter interviewing CDC chief Rochelle Walensky said that the vaccines are working well to prevent serious illness even in the face of Omicron and then asked Walensky. “Should we be rethinking how we’re living with this virus?” Walensky’s answer (unmentioned that it was related to a recent study on outcomes for the vaxed):
“The overwhelming number of deaths, about 75%, occurred in people who had at least four comorbidities so really these are people who are unwell to begin with.”
Restated: we’re losing people who are unwell to begin with—also elderly people, equally as unproductive and with the added bonus of saving on social security payments.
Not everyone cheered that the majority of Covid deaths occur among the “unwell.” From Matthew Cortland, a disabled lawyer and activist for healthcare and patient rights.
In service to their capitalist overlords, public officials simply become blatantly inhumane. Or maybe they’re selected for that trait.