The All-Empire Worker’s League and its Member Organizations call on all Communists, all local Marxist cells, and all those who love the people and yearn for liberation, to engage in immediate efforts to unify and solidify their local allegiances. We urge any and all Marxist-Leninist cells within the US empire or its junior partners Canada and Mexico to contact the League directly to begin the process of integration into a country-wide network capable of opposing the imperialist war machine.

Fight, fail, fight again!

On the morning of the 28th of February 2026, the Great Satan and its vassal in occupied Palestine launched a cluster of missiles at the Islamic Republic of Iran. Just in the opening salvo, the settler-terrorist regime has bombed a school and killed over a hundred school-aged children, decisively bringing the devastation of the children’s holocaust in Gaza to the heartlands of another nation. As thus proven, the imperialists will stop at nothing to reassert their hegemony, to rescue the “Pax Americana,” because they cannot stop. The abyss of financial collapse and imperial decline looms wide in the imaginations of the yankee elites, as well it should. To preserve the empire and their place in it, no crime is too criminal, however grotesque, and no atrocity is too atrocious, however vast. No destruction is too devastating, however permanent and disfiguring for the shared future for humanity. Anything and everything is on the table, no matter the consequences.

Today the Third World War is being fought on every continent. The genocides waged by the imperialists in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo continue unabated. The Alliance of Sahel States continues its open rebellion against the neo-colonial system. The battle with Revolutionary Yemen over control of the Red Sea reignites. Missiles launched by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps rain down across the empire’s “middle east.” Sirens blare once again in the heart of the forward base colony in occupied Palestine. Resistance forces in occupied Iraq launch a new offensive against the imperialists. The decade-long struggle by the Russian Federation to wrest Ukraine from the clutches of the neo-nazi NATO coup regime continues to grind at the unity of the US-NATO-EU imperialist cartel. The people’s struggle for control of the state in Bolivia carries on despite setbacks, and besieged Venezuela and Cuba persist and develop national autonomy with the assistance of the multipolar powers. Soldiers of the Korean People’s Army march triumphant in Pyongyang on their return from the Kursk front, bringing home valuable modern combat experience against imperial troops for use in the defense of their homeland. The Taiwan question looms at the forefront of east Asian politics.

The Palestinian people of Gaza, silenced and forgotten by the West, still struggle for their lives against floods, cold, disease, and starvation, as the colony’s encirclement and genocidal siege continues unabated in its third year. With every passing hour the disfigurement and trauma of colonial genocide is laid ever heavier on the lives and minds of hundreds of thousands of innocents.

At every turn for the past five centuries, the settler-colonial invasion and occupation of our beautiful continent by imperialist Europe and its “United States” has revealed itself to operate according to raw violence and self-interest alone — and today more people than ever before in all of world history stand witness to the unremittent and unabashed savagery of the euro-amerikan imperial system and are asking themselves, “what is to be done?”

Inside the borders of the US empire, the ICE secret police continue to kidnap innocents and doom untold thousands to die in concentration camps. Migrant workers, refugees, and Indigenous people are targeted for ethnic cleansing, and resistance is stamped out by increasingly militarized police forces. The empire’s oppressed wage a daily struggle for survival against a still-rampaging but censored SARS-2 pandemic, eugenicist labor policies, and ever more openly-genocidal ableism and transphobic violence. And yet the “progressives” of the imperial heart of darkness itself are talking about their 2028 electoral candidates, as if this war is merely a matter of legislative policy. Many “socialists” insist that revolution is impossible, and the Four Opportunist Parties continue their strategies of co-opting spontaneous organizing and demobilizing radical movements. For those of us in the imperial core, the question of how to respond, how to organize, and how to start winning, weighs more heavily and more urgently than ever.

Take stock of the international situation, of how ever more of the world is drawn into conflict with the empire. Then take stock of your local situation, of how ever more people around you are drawn into antagonism with the system. Settlers splinter into fragmentary interest groups as the solution to the crisis of imperialism becomes a more contentious and pressing issue, or they simply “check out” of political engagement altogether, preferring to numb themselves with the bread and circuses of our age. At the same time, the oppressed are drawn to co-operate and resist together, or die alone. As the international situation shifts, it is reflected in the local conditions we experience. Just as the settlers here are more and more at each others’ throats, the member states of the NATO imperialist cartel descend into infighting as their position worsens and continues to destabilize. The experience of the first two world wars of the capitalist-imperialist era taught us that global war is the standard modus operandi of how the global capitalist system resolves its internal crises. Furthermore, the experience of the first two world wars taught us that only revolutionary war can put an end to these conflicts. The first world war was ended by revolutionary uprisings in Russia and Germany, and the second by the united efforts of the revolutionary peoples of the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China. No such revolutionary force directly threatens the heartlands of the imperialist forces today as the Soviet Union and its allies once did, and so this third world war will only end as the first did: when the revolutionary masses within the empire unite and put an end to it. These masses are the millions in occupied New Afrika and the occupied First Nations, and the millions of settlers oppressed by their state on the basis of their ability, gender, sexuality, and age.

In fighting all of these wars the empire is running out of ammunition; its production simply can’t keep up. Where it can’t control us with naked force, it seeks to intimidate us with pervasive surveillance. But always remember that the empire doesn’t have the manpower to surveil all of us. This is why it pours its finances into AI to do the work for it (as well as to create venues for speculation and parasitism). The empire aims to have the repression infrastructure it needs built before the AI bubble bursts, but rampant corruption and insufficient electrical infrastructure call even that goal into question. It has taken the combined efforts of billions of people in struggle over the last century to bring the empire to its knees, and our task is paltry by comparison: organize a few million more to at last tear out the empire’s heart on behalf of all humanity. We have to turn the third world war into the second US civil war, and carry this war to vanquish the settler empire once and for all. Only a policy of revolutionary defeatism, the pursuit of the empire’s defeat and complete capitulation to its enemies from within, can provide us the concrete foundation for building revolutionary unity among our organizations. All revolutionary and anti-imperialist organizations must struggle between one another for unity on this line, and where such organizations do not yet exist, they must be built.

The modern executive branch of the US government is designed to work in the general interests, not only of the entire class of US capitalists, but also for the general welfare of the US economy and, as a result, manages the interests of the entire petty bourgeois and labor-aristocratic classes. But what does this mean? There are three classes that directly benefit from the US empire’s stability and economic success: 1) the big imperialist bourgeoisie, the finance capitalists invested in US firms like Bill Gates, the Kochs, etc.; 2) the petty bourgeoisie, those who own their own capital but also have to work; and 3) the labor aristocrats, roughly defined here as those proletarians who receive more than the global average pay for their labor-time.² It is the political expectation that the executive branch will look out for the interests of these three classes. Affordable college and healthcare and access to purchasing land (usually in the form of housing) is part of that understanding. Most division between the Republicans and the Democrats actually comes down to which section of these classes to favor the most.

The Fed has generally played a neutral role in these feuds, leaning toward the Democratic camp of stability to benefit the petty bourgeoisie and labor aristocrats. The reserve system regulates the country’s money supply, which has a direct impact on the velocity of exchange (how quickly money or credit changes hands; in other words, how many transactions occur in any given time), on the total price of all commodities produced in the US market, and on the total number of those commodities produced. These figures are interdependent and related to one another on a push-pull basis, and they trend toward an equilibrium. That equilibrium can be expressed through the following equation:

(p * q) / v = m

Where p = the price of all commodities produced in the economic unit (the US market), q = the total number of commodities in that unit, v = the velocity of money, and m = the total money supply.³ Changes in any of these variables will cause subsequent changes in the others as they move toward the above equilibrium.

Inflation is reflected in the variable (p). For instance, all things remaining equal, if (m), the money supply, increases, either (p) or (q) must increase, or (v) must decrease. The regulation of this process is central to the purpose of the reserve system to prevent, on the one hand, runaway hyperinflation, and on the other, the velocity of money trending toward zero, either of which would cause a catastrophic collapse in the US economy, freezing transactions and halting production. For more details on the role of the Fed, see “The Inevitable Capitalist Crisis Looms” in the Red Clarion.

The thing now under dispute is the Fed’s overnight bank funding rate,⁴ the rate of interest which other banks must pay to one another or to the Fed if their own money supply is below the reserve amount required by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for large broker-dealers to ensure the bank can cover its loans at the end of any given day. This rate determines the interest rate for all lending in the US economy. All other lending rates are set somewhere higher than this Federal rate. The lower the lending rates, the more speculative investments will become as money can be loaned with less risk to the lender and thus the borrower. The reason this number is the source of conflict among the ruling class is because it embodies a contradiction in the interests of the major classes invested in the performance of the US economy.

For the big bourgeoisie, it is objectively better for their capacity to invest and make profits if the interest rates are zero. Although the Fed had historically always maintained some interest rate, in the wake of the 2008 crash the Fed set the interest rates to 0%. The US economy had been on this “life support” rate from 2008 until the 2020 economic crisis triggered by COVID-19. An interest rate of zero, however, will not remove excess money from the economy. At the beginning of 2020, the money supply was at 4,000 thousand billion USD. Today, the money supply is at 19,000 billion USD, reflecting a nearly five-fold increase.⁵ It also tends to make banks more unstable (as they will lend far more than they can safely cover), and increase the velocity of money by encouraging increased lending and investment. As a consequence, either the total number of commodities in US markets must fall (and why would they? There has been no change in production) or the price of commodities must rise. This rise is inflation.

The rise in the price of articles of consumption – consumer commodities – has a negligible effect on the big bourgeoisie. They can afford any increase, however large, because personal consumption is a marginal amount of their overall money. Even the rise in the price of means of production – raw materials, machines, factories, land, etc. – would lag significantly behind the gains made as a result of zero-percent lending at the federal level. Indeed, even if the banks should fail and the economy collapse, history has proven that the big bourgeoisie are shielded from the worst effects of that crash and would be able to buy up the resources of those smaller bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie that are driven into bankruptcy, default, or foreclosure for pennies on the dollar, further concentrating their stranglehold on the country’s economic resources.

Conversely, the labor aristocrats cannot weather such a storm and consumer inflation, particularly of necessary staples like food and healthcare. It can drive labor aristocrats into the ranks of the working proletariat and cost them their comfortable class-basis – their homes, their long-term investments, etc. It is in their interests to keep interest rates high, reduce or slow the rate of inflation, and ensure that the banks remain stable.

The petty bourgeoisie, possessing economic relations that are both bourgeois and proletarian, tend to be more like the labor aristocracy when it comes to this question than the big bourgeoisie. Inflation in the costs of the means of production will inevitably drive a significant portion of the petty bourgeoisie out of their class and down into the proletariat as the continued running of their businesses becomes financially untenable. The upper ranks of the petty bourgeoisie – those able to draw on reserves of credit or who are becoming regionally powerful and are on the cusp of entering the lower ranks of the big bourgeoisie – tend to prefer the lowering of the interest rates so they can attempt to grow their money-capital and progress out of their class and enter the big bourgeoisie.

What, then, does this grand jury indictment mean? The Fed has consistently kept the interest rates higher than they had been since 2008 for the past several years. President Trump, acting as the hammer of the big bourgeoisie, has made repeated demands that the Fed lower those interest rates.

On Sunday, January 11, the chair of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, released a video statement in which he said that the subpoenas are an attempt to force him to capitulate to the White House’s political demands. That, in essence, Trump will force him out unless he does not agree to lower the federal interest rate. This matters for three reasons. First, it is an unprecedented breaking of ranks and airing of internal political differences between the Fed and the White House. Second, it suggests a continued feud within the ruling class over how to distribute the spoils of empire. Third, if the Fed does lower the interest rate and if, as a result, inflation explodes more than it already has done, this will result in the proletarianization of large numbers of labor aristocrats and petty bourgeoisie, the closure of many routes available to students and young people intent on entering those classes, and an overall increase in the size of the revolutionary mass base.

For us, the first issue means we have an opportunity to expose the machinery of the state and how it functions. We must also be aware of the concurrent risk here; the left-liberals, the Democrats mostly, will use the extraordinary nature of this rupture to bang their anti-Trump drum and try to recuperate their ramshackle coalition. This risk is real and requires our active intervention to minimize the number of petty bourgeoisie and labor aristocrats who are ideologically drawn back into their orbit.

As to the second reason, we must be extremely wary of declaring that the imperialist bargain between the big bourgeoisie and the upper ranks of the working class is breaking down.⁶ However, we do have the benefit of the bourgeoisie’s own mouthpieces such as the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times to help understand their perspective. Although both sources have been moderate in their reporting of the Powell investigation, both have taken soft pro-Powell and anti-Trump stances.⁷ We can also look to the stock market, which has registered constrained disapproval as investments were moved from stocks into gold.⁸

If there is a fracture between elements of the big bourgeoisie, that group supporting Trump’s nationalist position (as opposed to the old neoliberal internationalism of capital) is growing and the neoliberal position is dwindling.⁹

Therefore, we must begin to prepare for our third conclusion. Trump has rarely allowed himself to be stymied by decorum or procedural niceties. He now holds the US Supreme Court by a wide margin should any of his actions be enjoined by a federal judge. We should first prepare immediate agitation, not demanding that Trump step back and allow Powell to continue as chair, but exposing the manner in which the Federal Reserve serves to stabilize an inherently unjust and exploitative world order. We must do our utmost to ensure the masses correctly understand that any complaints from the Democrats about Trump’s behavior aren’t on their “behalf,” but rather are intended to secure the supply of anesthesia with which they have been dulling the class struggle for a century; that the Democrats are attempting to lull US workers and petty bourgeoisie back to sleep so the empire can continue to burn, loot, and rape the world in their name.

In the intermediate term, we should prepare for a potential economic crash that may result in the unleashing of the contradictions contained by the Fed and its policies since 2020: a collapse in the real estate market and a subsequent depression triggered by numerous bank failures.

Careful attention must be paid in the coming weeks to the way in which this mini-crisis is handled by the state and by the political actors. We must continue to weigh evidence of one kind or another, and determine where the chips will fall so we can formulate a concrete plan of action. As of today, it seems that Trump is routing the supporters of neoliberal stabilization and preparing to enter a new phase of class warfare. This aligns with the White House strategy on increasing friction with ICE and the kidnapping of President Maduro: a global assault on behalf of the big bourgeoisie and the upper ranks of the petty bourgeoisie to repudiate the imperialist power-sharing that had been achieved during the last century.¹⁰ Washington has exploded the “rules-based order” it went through pains to establish over the last hundred years by acting unilaterally, in defiance of international law, and stating the geopolitical-economic interests which it is pursuing, rather than hiding its maneuvers behind high rhetoric of “democracy.”

1. The US central banking system. 
   ︎
2. Here we are using the term labor aristocracy, as elsewhere in pieces published by Clarion staff, to mean anyone who is paid more for each hour of labor than the global average. For more, see Lauesen, Torkil. Unequal Exchange: Past, Present, and Future (Iskra Books, 2025). ︎
3. See Marx, Karl. Capital, Chapter 3. This is consonant with Adam Smith’s understanding of the velocity of money.
   ︎
4. Also called the “Federal Funds Rate.”
   ︎
5. The M1 money supply over ten years, as reported by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Accessed at https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1SL.
   ︎
6. See, for instance, H.W. Edwards’ groundbreaking work Labor Aristocracy, Mass Base of Social Democracy. ︎
7. The Economist, which represents British capital, has much more firmly presented an anti-Trump position on Powell as well as on the ICE killing of Renee Good. The re-emergence of national (as opposed to international) capitalist planning in the US empire has rattled many cages in Europe. See, for instance: Financial Times, “Justice department’s probe into Jay Powell galvanizes Fed leaders to repel Donald Trump’s attacks,” Jan 12; Wall Street Journal’s, “The Fed Fights Back,” Jan. 13.
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8. On the following Monday, the day after Powell’s video, trading was muted and the DOW opened down 500 points. The transfer of money out of the stock market and into commodities represents a fear that the value of the stock market may fall.
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9. Hatred of the Federal Reserve’s regulatory power has been poured into the Libertarian movement and thus embodies a certain kind of right-liberal settlerism. This has been the preserve of an alliance of right-leaning big capitalists and upper ranks of the petty bourgeoisie since at least the early 2000s. It seems this logic is now winning over more and more of the big capitalists themselves.
   ︎
10. The neo-liberal position on immigration has always been the Democratic party line: “We need immigrants to do the jobs no one wants to do, that are too difficult, grueling, intense, or low-paying for real Americans!” The ICE sweeps represent a new ideology that flatly denies this rather grotesque logic and embodies instead the naked nationalist nativism in Washington.
    ︎

There are several diseases currently spreading unregulated throughout the world, many of which are centralized in the so-called United States. The U.S. government, corporations, and much of the population has decided that unmitigated and uncontrolled transmission of deadly disease is now the norm. 

These diseases include SARS-CoV-2, Influenza A, H5N1 Bird flu, Measles, Tuberculosis and Norovirus. This article will mostly focus on the mitigation of the spread of these five diseases and to combat specific misinformation that is clouding current understanding of the risks of these diseases on the individual and the community. 

These five diseases are exceptional in their current level of spread, lethality or resurgence. We will go through several sections discussing vocabulary, the diseases themselves, best practices of prevention, control of symptoms, and post-illness care.

Vocabulary and Concepts

• Epidemic: uncontrolled spread of a disease in a given area that causes exceptional threat to human life and society
• Pandemic: epidemics of worldwide reach
• Multidemic: colloquial slang for multiple pandemics occurring at the same time.  
• Pathogen: any organism or agent that can infect a living being and cause disease
• Virus: a kind of pathogen that hijacks the DNA of the cells of hosts and uses them to reproduce copies of itself, which then go on to infect other cells. Viruses are not technically living. Some viruses can be treated by antiviral medications, although not all. 
• Bacteria: single-cellular life forms, some of which are infectious and cause bacterial infections. These infections are treatable with antibiotics that target different kinds of bacteria and kill them outright. 

Spread

Airborne 

• COVID, Flu A, H5N1, and Measles are airborne viruses that are aerosolized through breathing. This means that they are made into microscopic particles that remain in still air. In indoor rooms without ventilation, they can stay in the air from 2-8 hours. Imagine someone smoking and the odor remaining in the air, and lasts for some time after smoking. Infectious particles can stay in the air for hours after being breathed out. 

Bodily fluids 

• Tuberculosis is a bacterial infection of the lungs that spreads through coughing up mucus, blood or saliva. It is not able to hang in the air like the above viruses, but does remain on surfaces, and anything that your bodily fluids get onto after coughing.  
• Norovirus is transmitted through stool, after bowel movements. It can transfer onto hands, which can then spread by touching surfaces, items or people. Touching a contaminated surface with your hands, and then touching your mouth transmits the disease to you. 

Surfaces

• Flu A, H5N1, Measles, norovirus and Tuberculosis are spread through surfaces, touch, skin, and eating after others. 

Contagiousness

• Flu A, H5N1, COVID, and measles are contagious several days before symptoms show up. 
• COVID is asymptomatic (does not show any symptoms) in up to 40% of all cases, and it is spread during this time. 
• Measles is spread through air and is extremely contagious for unvaccinated or immunocompromised individuals, which may be more people than currently known due to the continuing COVID Pandemic. 

Diagnosis and Seeking Treatment

If you believe you are sick with any of these conditions, seek medical attention at a clinic. COVID, Flu and Norovirus can be diagnosed with a lab test. 

Prevention

Spread of all of the above pathogens can be reduced through one of several means. 

Masking

• Effective against all airborne pathogens. 
• Wearing masks can reduce the amount of pathogens that are breathed out if one is sick, and breathed in if you are in contact with contaminated air. 
• Masks should fit tightly, around the nose and cheekbones, under the chin, and not have any gaps on the side. 
• Once in place, masks should not be removed because this will expose you to contaminated air. Avoid touching your mask (and face in general) to prevent infection through the eyes or mouth. 
•  The most easily accessible are surgical masks but these are by far not the most effective. 
• Properly fitted respirators are far and away the most effective masks. Respirators are ionically charged, meaning they have an effect similar to static, that traps and removes particulates from the air before you breathe it in.
• Properly fitted respirators should have two straps that go around the back of the head, fitting above and below the ears. They should have a good seal around the edges of the mask and your skin that air does not pass through. Depending on the size of your face you may need smaller or larger masks. 
• The most effective masks are N100 or P100 respirators, which block about 99.97% of all microscopic particulates. These can be purchased at hardware stores such as Home Depot or Lowe’s, online at distributors sites, such as 3M or other industrial supply companies. 
• Many people are likely familiar with N95, KN95 or equivalent respirators. Of these, the statistically best respirators are the “duck-bill” respirators. They work best for folks with rounder faces, flatter nose bridges. Other popular choices include 3M Aura respirators or the rounder 3M respirators, and others. Respirator masks with ear loops, such as KN95 masks and KF94 masks, are not as effective because the ear loops do not provide an adequate seal around the mask, and air leaks through. 
• Do not remove masks in bathrooms, when eating, or when in rooms with closed doors, as this will expose you to infection. 

Hand-washing

• Hand washing should be done frequently, before and after eating, after peeing or pooping. 
• Wash your hands in the following manner:
  • Rinse them with hot water for 20 seconds, and spread to your whole hand and wrist. 
  • Use soap and thoroughly scrub your whole hand, palm and back, between all fingers, and under fingernails, for 20 seconds. 
  • Rinse them with hot water for 20 seconds, being sure to wash all the soap off. 
  • Dry with a disposable towel thoroughly until dry. Dispose of the towel.
• Norovirus is not killed or removed from the hands by alcohol hand sanitizer, only soap and water. 

Air Filters

•  Homemade air filters can be constructed from a box fan, duct tape, and four air filters. These can filter out pathogens (and allergens like dust, pollen and pet hair/dander) from the air. 
• You can also purchase HEPA-rated air filters from hardware stores or distributors online. 

Vaccination

• Vaccines are available for Influenza A, Measles, Tuberculosis (unless in the US) and COVID-19. 
• The flu vaccine is generally not taken enough to give herd immunity (needing around 95% vaccination rate), but is effective in significantly reducing infection rate. 
• The COVID 19 vaccine is an MRNA vaccine that is generally safe. It reduces (but does not stop!) risk of spread, and severity of the acute phase of illness. 

Nasal Sprays 

• Airborne viruses are able to be reduced in risk of infection with daily use of  several nasal sprays, including diluted Povidone Iodine (can be diluted from iodine solution), Iota-Carrageenan spray (Betadine Cold defense or other generic sprays), or HOCl (short shelf life of 2 weeks, can be made at home). 

Food Prep

• H5N1 can pass to mammals (humans included) through undercooked poultry and mammal meat, and through unpasteurized milk. Do not drink unpasteurized milk or meat that is not cooked to at least 165 degrees Fahrenheit or 74 degrees Celsius. 

Treatment 

Antiviral therapies 

• COVID patients can be treated with Paxlovid, which is a course of 3 pills twice a day for five days. 
• Paxlovid is a very safe medication. It must be started within 5 days of onset of symptoms, and is indicated for mild to moderate symptoms to prevent worsening disease. 
• There is no reason to not start it for most patients, unless you have kidney or liver damage. 
• It is currently being price gouged, and price can be up to $1700, but insurance covers it for around $25, and there are federal programs in place to apply for reduced cost. 
• Influenza can be treated with Tamiflu, a five day antiviral, or Xofluza, a single dose anti-viral. 
• There are no antivirals for H5N1, Measles, or Norovirus. 

Antibacterial therapies

• Tuberculosis is treated with either an injection or oral form of Penicillin antibiotics. Contact medical providers for instructions on seeking treatment. 

Measles

• Measles causes a fine rash and is contagious for about 4 days before the rash appears. The rash is red, splotchy, and appears across the face, body and limbs. 
• Contact a physician immediately if you are concerned that you have measles or if you were exposed, and follow instructions. 

General Treatment for Viral Illness

• Rest, rest, rest. 
• Fever is often treated with Tylenol/Acetaminophen, or Advil/Motrin/Ibuprofen. Follow instructions on packaging and advice of medical providers. 
• Drink lots of fluids (especially if you have diarrhea), especially broths, or electrolyte drinks (Pedialyte or store brand. Avoid gatorade/powerade, as these are mostly sugar). 
• Cough medicine, either started by doctors or over-the-counter medications as instructed. 

The Diseases

SARS-CoV-2  / COVID-19 / COVID

This virus was discovered in late 2019, sourced to a meat market in Wuhan, China, where it spread rapidly across the world. It is a disease that affects and can damage every system in the body, including the neurological system (brain, spine and nerves), the cardiovascular system (the heart and blood vessels), pulmonary system (lungs), gastrointestinal and digestive system, skin and hair, and every organ. 

Risks of COVID are as follows:

Especially concerning, COVID damages the immune system in the same manner that HIV (the virus that causes AIDS) does. It may cause anyone infected to lose their body’s natural ability to fight off all other diseases. 

COVID damages the brain, causing brain fog, memory issues, can cause neuron cells in the brain to fuse into clumps, can damage other sensory nerves throughout the body causing neuralgia (a burning-type nerve pain), loss of smell and taste. Since the start of the continuing COVID pandemic, dementia rates have drastically increased, and are occurring in younger and younger populations, including young adults. 

COVID damages the heart and blood vessels, and causes blood to clot much more often. Strokes, heart attacks, high blood pressure, have all increased in all age groups and significantly younger since the start of the COVID pandemic. It can also damage the kidneys due to the blood vessel damage it does. 

COVID makes developing cancers significantly more likely,  with all age populations experiencing increased risk of developing cancers such as colon cancer. 

Mortality from all causes has increased in all age groups and populations since the onset of the COVID pandemic, with the number of car accidents increasing, heart attacks and strokes becoming much more frequent. 18-34 year olds are dying twice as much as compared to before the COVID pandemic. 

COVID is deadly, resulting in deaths in 1-2% of all cases. Only about a third of the hospitals reporting deaths from COVID, averaging 1000 deaths a week, but multiplied out to all the hospitals not reporting, it may be killing several thousand people. 

Despite rumors to the contrary, there is no evidence that the source of COVID-19 was from labs of various world governments, nor is this functionally possible with the current level of genome editing technology. 

Influenza

Influenza is a collective name for many related viruses. Influenza A and B are labels given to the most likely strains of influenza to become extremely contagious, and spread during the year. These likely candidates are then taken, and vaccines are made to prevent them by triggering the body’s immune response. 

Flu kills tens of thousands of people each year, and since the start of the COVID pandemic, has killed more and more people every year. 

H5N1 and other avian flus are related to most other common flu strains, but tend to be much more severe, and dangerous to the human body, with much higher likelihood of death (up to 50% of all humans infected with H5N1 die without treatment, and 20% of people die even when aggressively treated). H5N1 is spreading entirely unchecked and uncontrolled in wild, domestic, and agricultural birds, among agricultural mammals like cows and pigs, with many and growing instances of human infection.

All flus damage the lungs and can cause pneumonia (fluid filling the lungs, also risking a secondary bacterial infection). 

Measles

Measles is an extremely infectious, dangerous virus. This is normally vaccinated against in infancy, but efforts by anti-vaccination interests have significantly reduced vaccination rates, either delaying vaccination or not vaccinating outright. Some places in the US are below vaccination required for herd immunity, meaning there are enough unvaccinated people to allow spread. 

Measles can damage the body’s immune system, and wipe out your immunity to diseases you have been vaccinated for previously. 

Measles can permanently damage the brain from inflammation, and the lungs through inflammation and pneumonia. 

Tuberculosis / TB

Tuberculosis was eradicated in the US until very recently. There are vaccines available for this bacteria outside of the US, but it has not occurred enough to warrant vaccine use in the US. It is treatable with Penicillin antibiotic, but until it is treated and resolved is highly infectious and contagious, spreading through droplets of mucus, blood or saliva. 

Norovirus

Norovirus is a virus that causes diarrhea, vomiting, and dehydration in individuals. It is highly contagious and particles can remain suspended in bathrooms for several hours. Ventilation is key, and washing hands and wearing high quality respirators is imperative. Dehydration is a major threat of the illness and is the primary danger especially to the elderly, infants, and children. Norovirus sticks to surfaces extremely well, and cannot be neutralized with hand sanitizer alone. Avoid going to eat at restaurants. 

Well, not over over… they just aren’t going to be helping the workers of Connecticut deal with it anymore. That’s on us now!

Yesterday, Lamont announced that the services and programs put into place to support the residents of Connecticut during the state of emergency are being canceled as of May 11, 2023. 

He makes it very clear that this does not mean that the danger has passed, “I continue to urge Connecticut residents to take actions to protect themselves from the spread of COVID-19 and all respiratory viruses – stay home when you’re sick, get vaccinated and boosted to limit your risk of contracting viruses, and listen to the advice of medical experts on ways to stay healthy.”

Hey, Ned? How are working people expected to “stay home when sick” when they can barely afford to put food on the table as it is? Especially when emergency SNAP benefits are being canceled along with every other program! We have no sick leave, no medical coverage, and no way to provide for ourselves when we get infected. We are being set up for economic disaster for the sin of protecting our fellow workers.

Public Health Commissioner Manisha Juthani adds, “Residents still should get vaccinated, get the updated vaccine, use at-home tests, stay home when they’re sick, and based on your own medical conditions, consider wearing a high-quality mask when respiratory viruses are circulating at high levels in their community.”

Unfortunately, in addition to eliminating the emergency food relief, the state is also transitioning all vaccination, testing and therapeutics to the broken for-profit insurance system. Even the most “up-to-date” vaccines are obsolete, and much less effective against the viral strains currently circulating; if more effective updates ever get released, how will we afford them? The available tests are expensive, and fail to detect new variants with increasing frequency; what worker can afford to take them over and over as a precautionary measure?

Also, if you are amongst the nearly ONE MILLION Connecticut residents covered by Medicaid, you will need to pay extra close attention to your insurance because continuous enrollment is being canceled as well. 

KFF, an independent health policy research organization, has outlined the devastating effects that the abandonment of the continuous enrollment program could have. Especially vulnerable are “…immigrants and people with limited English proficiency (LEP), and people with disabilities.” 

This entire process of rolling back programs and services highlights a few important facts:

1. The government is run by and for the wealthy capitalist class.
2. They do not care about the working class, especially the most vulnerable and least empowered sections of the working class.
3. Any reforms that the government is forced to put in place to respond to the inevitable crises caused by capitalism can and will be taken away as soon as these monsters have the slightest excuse.

The ultra-wealthy elite that run this country did not face this pandemic the way that the working public was forced to. They have always been able to protect themselves, with round-the-clock testing, the ability to stay home whenever they wish, unmitigated access to effective treatments, and comprehensive protection measures at their events. While workers continued to put their lives on the line, the corporate vampires that run this country funneled more profit than ever into their greedy maws, all on the backs of a working class who is still struggling to survive.

Today, as Lamont rips away the meager concessions that were put in place for workers’ safety in the face of a continuing global pandemic, we are reminded who we can rely on: each other. The ruling class is not going to protect us. It is up to us to come together to protect each other from the deadly virus that still rages around us. It is up to us to come together to protect ourselves from the tyranny of these capitalist exploiters. It is up to us to come together to create a world where people come before profits. 

“When one individual inflicts injury upon another such that death results, we call that manslaughter. When society places hundreds in a position that they inevitably meet early & unnatural death … its deed is murder just as the individual.”

Friedrich Engels, The Conditions of the Working Class in England

We have been betrayed. For three years, we have been abandoned, misled, shepherded to our dooms. Millions have died. Hundreds of millions have been disabled. All the while, respectable faces with plastered-on grins breathlessly offer hopeful platitudes, assuring us we’ll all be ok. Just trust the system.

You could be forgiven for not realizing we’re still in the middle of a pandemic, considering the total absence of media coverage. If it was important, you’d surely be hearing about it, right? The last variant you heard about was likely omicron. The last you heard about vaccines was likely “we strongly encourage everyone to get boosted.” The last you heard about masks was that they work, but they’re not required. And why would you bother wearing masks anyway if, as the United States president himself proclaimed, “The pandemic is over”?

Here’s the truth: the pandemic is not over. It’s much worse than you have been led to believe. And unless you’ve spent the past several years reading scientific studies on the subject, it can be hard to convey just how wrong the public perception of COVID really is. Everything from how it’s spread, to how it’s prevented, to what it does once it’s in your body, is being tragically misunderstood.

None of this is an accident. It’s not your “fault” if you aren’t a virologist, immunologist, epidemiologist, or evolutionary biologist. It’s the job of experts and trusted voices to convey the truth and give you guidance. Not only have they failed at this, they have engaged in an active disinformation campaign dedicated to making the pandemic “disappear”. This has not been the result of a classic caricature of conspiracy — some tiny council of elites, gathered in the shadows to craft policy out of whole cloth. What we’re actually witnessing is the quiet collusion of class interest. This form of conspiracy is a feature of cultural hegemony, and it has aligned itself in direct opposition to public health and scientific reality. A “conspiracy” of this sort takes place in full view of the public. Every actor within it has openly telegraphed motivations that we are all taught to see as acceptable: keeping the current economic system intact at all costs.

From the moment humanity learned of the novel coronavirus, uncertainty swirled. SARS-CoV-2, named for its terrifying viral cousin, seemed to be even worse than SARS: more deadly, more transmissible, better at evading detection. A singular question arose in the minds of two very different classes of people: “How do we survive this?” For one of those classes, the question was literal: how do we avoid being killed by a disease that seems to be spreading and killing invisibly and indiscriminately? For the other class, the question being asked in boardrooms and capitols was really: “Could this dislodge our grip on power?”

For infectious disease experts, the emergence of an unknown human pathogen — quickly identified as a novel virus — necessitated a pretty clear course of action: contain it, characterize it, and share information as freely as possible. Days after the first cluster of cases were found in Wuhan, Chinese health authorities issued a warning to the WHO. The full genome of the virus that would come to be called SARS-CoV-2 was released to the world before it was even documented outside of China. Coronavirus labs around the world began mobilizing rapidly to study the virus, including creating synthetic versions to study in cultured mammalian cells to learn as much as possible about its life cycle and pathogenicity. 

Why did experts mobilize so quickly, even before human-to-human transmission was conclusively proven? The primary reason is the precautionary principle: when dealing with an unknown, if you don’t know conclusively that it isn’t dangerous, presume the worst case scenario and take the proper precautions. If that wasn’t enough of a reason, researchers figured out pretty quickly that this was a relative of SARS, which has caused enough mayhem on its own to warrant every measure possible to avoid a repeat tragedy. This principle was particularly upheld in China, which had borne the brunt of the SARS crisis, but true precaution never truly materialized in the capitalist world.

After a brief experiment in precautionary measures (stay-at-home orders, mask mandates, quarantine guidelines) many countries in the West quickly saw the writing on the wall — these precautions were not sufficient to stamp out the emerging pandemic. There were measures that could have stopped the virus in its tracks: contact tracing (testing every single person who was in the vicinity of a potential case), enforced quarantines combined with guaranteed paid time off for even the hint of exposure, mandating fitted respirators (and distributing multiple N95s to every resident). But these measures would have required central governments to nationalize key industries, companies to pay employees not to work, and individuals to get comfortable with some discomfort in the name of social welfare (although many already were). These measures would have been a tremendous imposition on the free market, and even then, there was no guarantee they would completely eradicate SARS-CoV-2.

Even half measures, like local mask mandates, were better than nothing, and they did keep many people safe in the beginning. But despite them being utterly insufficient in the face of the crisis we were thrust into, they were still too much for the capitalists to tolerate. They were “harming the economy” by impeding production and discouraging consumption. Tiny protests, led by business owners demanding an end to “restrictions,” garnered massive media attention. Less than 2 months after their implementation, stay-at-home orders were already on their way out, even as cases continued to rapidly climb. Injected into every news story about the pandemic was a consideration for the malaise of the capitalists, whose economic ruin would surely spell the end of our society. The drive to “end the pandemic” began almost as soon as the pandemic arrived in the U.S.

The Lies and the Truth

Near the beginning of the pandemic, you may have heard a common refrain from public health sources: if we address the situation properly, it’ll look like we overreacted. And yet, by the time community transmission started ramping up in the U.S. in March 2020, we had already failed to “overreact.” The consensus had already come in from the highest levels: at all costs, do NOT start a panic. World leaders at the time, including the U.S.’s Donald Trump, the U.K.’s Boris Johnson, Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, Spain’s Pedro Sánchez, and Italy’s Giuseppe Conte, all spent the first few months of 2020 exhorting the public not to “give in to fear.” Following precipitous stock market crashes in February and March of 2020, every market analysis firm reported on the tremendous financial damage being done by “coronavirus concerns.” The overwhelming narrative in the early days was that fear of the virus would be worse than the disease it causes. This philosophy manifested in several ways, including outright lies that still haunt us to this day, driving misinformed “personal risk assessments” among the population, including:

• Masks don’t work.
• Masks do work, but cloth masks are fine.
• Stop the spread by washing hands, standing 6 feet apart, and sanitizing surfaces.
• COVID is not airborne
• COVID is airborne, but that’s not the main way it spreads.
• The only people harmed by COVID are old and immunocompromised people.
• Children don’t get COVID.
• Children can get COVID, but they can’t spread it.
• Reinfections are rare.
• Breakthrough infections after vaccination are rare.
• Reinfections and breakthrough infections happen, but they’re mild.
• Once enough people have been exposed, herd immunity will end the pandemic.
• Viruses naturally evolve to become less deadly.
• Once you recover from acute infection, you’re out of the woods.
• Long COVID is psychological, not physical.
• Long COVID is physical, but not a big concern.
• Heightened lethality of non-COVID diseases is due to “immunity debt.”

The list of officially-sanctioned lies could potentially go on for pages. The most critical feature of the misinformation is that it is always centered around that same core philosophy of minimization. That trend continued to evolve throughout the pandemic: whether it’s Anthony Fauci admitting that he discouraged masks because he didn’t want to trigger panic-buying, the CDC shifting its metrics from transmission levels to “community levels” in soothing pastel colors, school districts touting their supposed low transmission rates, or any of the other examples of public health malpractice, everything has been geared toward pushing people to underestimate danger rather than overestimate. This pattern has continued to this day, with officials attempting to head off panic in the face of the extremely infectious and immune-evasive XBB.1.5 variant (colloquially referred to as the “Kraken” variant).

Before going further, let’s clarify what that danger actually is. Because of how complex biological systems are, it is difficult to convey all the nuance of a viral pandemic without getting too technical. Nevertheless, we can make some pretty clear assertions, based on condensing hundreds of scientific studies into a few paragraphs. With that in mind, here’s everything you need to know about COVID-19 and the virus that causes it:

COVID is airborne. Airborne transmission is different from droplets, which are large particles containing the virus, expelled when you speak, cough, sneeze, etc. Droplets are heavy enough that they will eventually drop to the ground or nearby surfaces, meaning it’s relatively easy to contain: any physical barrier — like a cloth mask or plexiglass — will block these droplets before they can reach another person. “Social distancing” is a concept that applies to droplet transmission, under the presumption that the virus-containing droplets will fall to the ground before reaching someone 6 feet away. Sanitizing surfaces kills any viral droplets that have landed on them before someone can touch them and then touch their orifices.

However, COVID is not confined to droplets. We have known for years that it can spread through aerosol as papers published in the New England Journal of Medicine, Emerging Infectious Diseases, and Risk Analysis demonstrate going back to 2020. Aerosol is composed of much smaller particles that bounce around between air particles, and can stay suspended and infectious in the air. Picture someone smoking: the behavior of the smoke is much more akin to the behavior of viral aerosols. Can you still smell the smoke behind a plexiglass shield? How about if you’re six feet apart? In a crowded, enclosed space, how many people would breathe in the smoke of one smoker? Measures designed to protect against droplets aren’t exactly pointless against COVID, since it also spreads via droplets. But just because you’re not spewing COVID-laden spittle in someone’s face does not mean you’re keeping your germs to yourself.

You can get COVID over and over. The idea that you become immune to COVID after getting infected or vaccinated is based on the concept of immune memory. Every time a pathogen enters your body (either through infection or vaccination), your immune system mounts a defense to stop it: first a broad “kill anything that moves” phase we call innate immunity, then a phase of adaptive immunity, which is targeted to kill the specific thing that triggered the immune response. Pieces of the invader are used to create, recruit, and activate a variety of immune components — including antibodies, T cells, and B cells — that are trained to recognize that specific pathogen. Some cells of the immune system, called memory cells, are kept around from that second stage as a sort of permanent record. If the exact same pathogen shows up again, the immune system already knows what to look for. This is the key behind vaccination: expose your immune system to a harmless piece of the virus, and it’ll remember it when it encounters the real thing.

Except this isn’t even close to the whole story. For one thing, the snapshot stored in your immune memory is just a physical piece of the pathogen, and viruses evolve very quickly. As the virus changes, the real thing starts to resemble the record being kept by your immune system less and less, and it becomes easier and easier for new variants to evade adaptive immunity. The more people that get infected, the more times the virus randomly mutates — and the more likely it is that a particular combination of those mutations makes a virus that is unrecognizable to your immune system. For a while, the WHO used to categorize these mutants as “variants of concern,” giving them each a new name. When the virus mutated enough to evade the immunity to the wild-type virus, they named it alpha. The lineage that was able to evade alpha was called beta. Delta was particularly immune evasive and its mutations brought high levels of lethality. Omicron was so different from all existing strains that it was practically able to infect everyone, no matter when they got infected and/or vaccinated. And then… they stopped giving the variants names. “Omicron” is still used to describe every descendant of that original variant, despite the dozens of highly-infectious, highly dangerous variants circulating today, none of which look enough like omicron itself for your immune system to efficiently recognize them.

COVID screws with your immune system. Upon infection, SARS-CoV-2 immediately gets to work suppressing attempts to stop it. It hijacks your cells’ machinery to shut down production of crucial immune system alarms. This includes the component used to present pieces of the virus on the surface of the cell to tell the immune system “Hey! This cell is infected, and here’s the culprit!” This component is necessary for specific immune cells to identify the target and proceed with the adaptive immune response, leading to both delayed innate and adaptive immune response.

When immune cells arrive on the scene, the SARS-CoV-2 virus is able to infect them as well. Monocytes, which are involved in ushering in the adaptive immune response, get infected by SARS-CoV-2, and are reprogrammed to prevent them from presenting antigens and teaching the adaptive immune system what to look for. T cells rush to become cell killers, causing the signature massive tissue damage that can be fatal in severe cases. Every infection depletes your body’s reserve of naïve T cells — that pool of “blank” immune cells your body keeps on hand for later deployment and specialization — damaging your ability to mount an effective immune response to future infections — including other pathogens. This is why, no matter how many people get infected or vaccinated, we have not — and will not — reach “herd immunity.” Naïve T cells are also necessary for stopping the cell-killing activity of activated T cells, which is a factor in the severity of acute COVID. Worse still, the population is steadily becoming more vulnerable to infections of all types. We are in the middle of an alarming surge of diseases beyond just COVID: RSV, influenza, strep A, and many others are hospitalizing people in record numbers — opportunistic infections, handed the gift of a softened-up population of victims.

For a while, vaccines were highly effective against severe acute infections — not because they prevented infection or created lasting immunity, but because they prompted your body to create antibodies to the virus, which can persist in your blood for months. If you got infected while these antibodies were present, it helped your immune system compensate for the virus’s suppression of adaptive immunity. Your immune response was less likely to go haywire, cause massive tissue damage, and lead to severe clinical outcomes. However, by the time boosters became available, the vaccines were already obsolete: they were engineered to target the original version of the virus, which you were already unlikely to ever see again.

COVID evolves rapidly. An idea has been floating around for years that SARS-CoV-2 will naturally reach an “evolutionary ceiling,” where it can no longer adapt around our immune systems, and will become no more pathogenic than a cold. This is predicated on a misunderstanding of evolutionary and viral dynamics. The main factors guiding the evolution of the virus are: how well it can spread from person-to-person, how well it can infect cells, and how well it can evade the immune system. This latter factor is the most crucial since, as previously noted, the virus’s effect on the immune system is a significant driver of its danger. The idea of an evolutionary ceiling stems from the notion that, in order to adapt around our immune system, the virus needs to change, and those changes necessarily impact its other features — namely its ability to spread and infect. But this is not the case.

As the virus spreads, it racks up mutations. Every new host gives the virus trillions of opportunities to mutate before sending it on to the next victim. By the time SARS-CoV-2 first took over the world, it had already diverged so thoroughly into separate lineages, giving rise to variants like alpha, beta, delta, and omicron. The Omicron lineage eventually emerged with another profoundly unique and highly-infectious set of mutations, and followed the same pattern. In its wake, it left behind many more child lineages, each distinct enough from each other to create a “variant cloud.” For months, the various omicron sublineages have been unable to outcompete each other, because none has had a set of adaptations so exceptionally advantageous as to outstrip the spread of the others. However, as the mutations continue to accumulate across all lineages, it’s only a matter of time before a new mega-variant emerges. It will sweep across the population, again diverging as it goes, spawning new lineages of its own — and leaving millions dead and disabled in its wake.

COVID is persistent. We’ve known for years that other coronaviruses, like SARS, can persist in your body long after initial infection. This is likely a byproduct of their evolutionary history; they evolved to spread through bat populations and survive bats’ unique immune systems. Bats are very long-lived for their size, potentially living for decades, even with multiple different infections quietly simmering inside them. However, in humans, these viruses’ tactics for suppressing a well-regulated bat immune system present a form of overwhelming force, which wreaks havoc on our bodies.

After the chaotic and potentially-lethal initial stage of acute infection, the virus is able to settle in for the long haul — evidence has been found in the gut, in human waste, and among “cured” patients. This can happen whether the acute phase was disastrous and hospital-worthy, or quiet enough for you to experience no symptoms at all. By this point, the virus will have suppressed your body’s immune memory, infiltrated throughout various organ systems — including your cardiovascular, nervous, and renal systems — and begun pumping out a steady supply of new virus. Of course, this persistent infection causes damage to the various organs where the virus has made its home, especially since it can trigger further inflammation. Your immune system is constantly trying to smoke it out, damaging more organ tissue as it does so. Your risk of heart attacks, strokes, neurological symptoms, and death in general are much higher during this persistent phase — and it only gets worse with every reinfection. It still remains unclear how long this persistent phase can last — certainly as many months as have been studied so far.

Evidence has been mounting for years that COVID is actually a type of autoimmune disorder, with several components of your immune system turning against your own cells. Not only are pro-inflammatory molecules heightened in both the acute infection and in so-called long COVID, high levels of antibodies against normal cellular pieces have been found in over half of patients hospitalized with COVID. The implications of COVID triggering autoimmunity are broad and can get fairly technical, but needless to say, the population being infected over and over with such a debilitating virus is catastrophic.

The Motive

Why would governments, public health officials, news media, business leaders, and every other trusted voice tell us outright lies (such as “COVID is not airborne!”) and avoid highlighting crucial truths (such as COVID’s propensity to damage immune systems)? Why would such a simple thing as distributing and mandating the proper usage of high-quality respirators — a layup of public health policy — be portrayed as being so toxic that to suggest it would get you laughed out of the room? Why would institutions like the CDC casually mention the existence of long COVID with one breath, and with the next, pat themselves on the back for “diminished hospitalizations”? Why has the entirety of public health policy contracted down to “Get vaccinated and you’re free”?

Part of it is simple ignorance: in the beginning of the pandemic, there was a lot we didn’t know. There were clues, of course; hypotheses based on what we knew about other coronaviruses. We could have guessed at airborne transmission, immune suppression, viral persistence, and rapid evolution, but we didn’t know these things conclusively. We didn’t know the exact numbers for case fatality, transmission, long-term symptoms, etc. But we didn’t need to know. The precautionary principle could have guided us to keep up avoidance and containment practices until we knew exactly what we were dealing with. And yet, the clearer the picture has become, the more we have reduced those measures, instead of ramping them up. COVID is more dangerous than initially expected, and yet we have continued to make ourselves more vulnerable.

The cold truth of the matter is that the motive behind COVID minimization is greed and social control. The capitalist system depends on constant growth: constant production, constant consumption, constant expansion of profits. Even brief pauses — such as a month-long stay-at-home order — have disastrous effects on capital. Implementing the mass prevention strategies necessary to slow down transmission (daily rapid testing, contact tracing, guaranteed paid leave for exposed workers, high-quality respirators, etc.) is expensive, and eats into profits. An information campaign explaining why everyone needs to stay home, instead of contributing to “the economy,” eats into profits further. Winding down all non-essential business and keeping it shuttered until the true end of the pandemic would contract the economy down to only what is necessary for society to function. The opportunities for financial capital to invest in new, profitable enterprises would vanish faster than they reemerge.

For capitalism to function, it requires two things: a steady supply of workers producing value and an unending flow of consumption to realize that value as profit for the capitalist. The onset of a pandemic presented a challenge on both of those fronts. Workers getting sick en masse and being forced to stay home for a couple of weeks — or even dying or becoming disabled and exiting the workforce altogether — was only one potential headache for the capitalist class. Far worse was the prospect of workers staying home out of precaution, thereby grinding production to a halt. Consumers staying home and buying only the essentials would prevent the realization of profits across huge swathes of the economy, cutting off the flow of capital necessary to keep the whole system running.

The moment it became obvious to market analysts that COVID was more than just a local Chinese outbreak, it triggered utter panic in the financial sector. Fears about the slowdown of profits led to several mass stock sell-offs from investors, lowering stock value, triggering even more panic-selling, across multiple different days. This wasn’t just speculation: decreased demand for oil rapidly triggered a massive price war that caused prices to spiral for months until becoming negative, with the holders of oil futures paying to offload their contracts. Without ramping demand back up, production of this and other key commodities would be financially toxic.

Capitalism also relies on a reserve army of labor to keep labor costs artificially deflated. A contracted economy, in which any worker willing to work is a rare commodity, tips the balance of power in favor of workers. Workers could more easily bargain for higher wages and safer working conditions (including liberal COVID leave). Most worryingly of all, in the context of long-term precautionary measures, the population would get used to a dangerous notion — that we have value beyond our labor and our consumption. When faced with the prospect of death or disability, the contradictions become sharpened in our eyes. Hundreds of millions of workers would suddenly ask “Why am I risking my life for this?” The frustration at a choice between abject poverty and potentially contracting a debilitating condition would galvanize workers to stand up for our rights. Waves of labor mobilization, rent strikes, workplace lockouts, boycotts, and more would sweep the country — and the world. It would be the greatest challenge to the political power of the capitalist class in a century.

The Strategy

Actually solving the pandemic was never in the cards for the U.S. and the rest of the capitalist world. It would have necessitated deep international cooperation, massive investment in clean air infrastructure, a persistent information campaign (and censoring of hazardous misinformation), efforts to build public trust in government, guaranteed paid leave, nationalization of key industries, and more. Basically, it would involve massively undercutting the philosophy of free market capitalism.

Instead, the explicit goal of the ruling class has been to make the pandemic simply disappear from public perception. Any reminder of the existence of a highly-transmissible, highly-dangerous, mass-disabling disease could trigger panic, or worse: organized, militant labor action. Averting this crisis required a careful campaign of culture-crafting; the people themselves needed to become convinced that there was no reason to fight. Consent for protracted mass infection needed to be manufactured.

There are three main ways this hegemonic narrative around COVID has been propagated to the public: official rhetoric, public policy, and media framing. These three facets of idea propagation feed into each other, and all three are maneuvered in various ways by the interests of capital. The process by which a hegemonic narrative is crafted in the capitalist sphere is not quite as straightforward as one might expect. It’s not a simple matter of a state propaganda department deciding on a central doctrine, issuing scripts to paid actors, and imprisoning all who dissent. There is no party line for the capitalists, no single convocation of business elites, and relatively few shadowy backroom deals. Explicit planning meetings are held — independently — among the leadership of different ruling class parties and distinct business interests, and their similar class interests lead them to similar priorities. But the way narrative unity of this sort is achieved is not through an all-powerful conspiracy. Instead, the “decision” for how to frame events arises organically from the interplay of the many individual sectors that comprise the ruling class propaganda machine.

The tone struck by what we think of as official sources sets the stage for the broader social response. This rhetoric comes from a variety of places — heads of state, government agencies, individual experts, think tanks, and other entities imbued with a sense of authority. These are voices that we are socialized to pay attention to. When they speak, they easily garner media attention. A news outlet that ignores or disputes these sources loses access to them and invites flak, thereby harming their ability to sell more news. These voices are generally in the room when policies are crafted — or crafting the policies themselves. What “the experts” say matters, and the particular experts being promoted by governments and corporations have steadily coalesced around rhetoric that minimizes the public health threat of the virus.

Official rhetoric does not always come to total agreement on presentation. The two-party system in the U.S. is often characterized by competing “official” stances, even when both stances are de facto acceptable to the established capitalist order. Throughout 2020, many prominent figures, including Donald Trump, attempted to prematurely declare the end of the pandemic. The Great Barrington Declaration attempted to launder the notion that attempts to mitigate the pandemic were harmful, and that we should instead try to reach “herd immunity” by allowing the virus to run rampant through the population. This was a non-starter in terms of propaganda material, since we could all see the devastation in plain sight. However, this was still valuable to the ruling class, because it laid the groundwork for a potent narrative — that of the “level-headed pragmatists” guiding us through the pandemic. Against the backdrop of conspiracy theories, bunk cures, and political disengagement from the reality of the pandemic, there came a promise from the liberal wing of the ruling class: “Unlike our opponents, we actually care, and we will get you through this.” Despite the difference in tone, the trajectory of the policies themselves has largely been preserved across political lines.

Pandemic public policy has been both shaped by and indicative of the official rhetoric of whoever happens to be in charge. It has reflected the recommendations of experts — those experts which had been chosen by the ruling government. In places governed by more liberal tendencies, curfews and cloth mask mandates lasted longer, instilling an implicit message that, unlike those science-denying conservatives, the liberals were “following the science.” This meant that, when these half-measures were rescinded, it seemed obvious that now people could feel safe putting themselves at risk.

Every policy choice has acted to shape the public’s perception of the pandemic. Mandating that businesses put stickers on the floor to demarcate 6 feet of distance hammered home the false notion that being 6 feet apart from others protected you. Requirements that bars and restaurants be closed for indoor dining made people reckon with the fact that these necessarily-unmasked spaces were dangerous. Reversing that restriction while mask recommendations were still in effect created confusion and demonstrated that the recommendations were meaningless. School districts shuttering physical classrooms put every parent on high alert for their children’s safety, while so-called “hybrid learning” taught people that safety was a parent’s choice. As school districts moved away from virtual school altogether, the message became clear: there is no reason to worry about your children getting sick. Steadily, measures put into place to protect people from the virus have been reversed, until the current state of affairs, where every public health “policy” has become instead a recommendation — and those recommendations don’t even come close to establishing true safety.

Economic measures taken during the pandemic have worked in a similar way to public health policy. In the beginning, policies were put in place to help the people who would be economically impacted: paycheck protection programs, tax credits, expanded unemployment benefits, eviction moratoria, stimulus checks, and student debt deferral. This aid was granted to ensure that the economic situation for the working class never got so despondent that workers would have greater incentive to rebel through labor militancy, rent strikes, or even violent uprisings. As these measures dried up, they came with the accompanying message: “You’re on your own now.”

Throughout the pandemic, media attention has been focused on reproducing official rhetoric through op-eds and interviews. The experts promoted above all have always been selected based on their proximity to power, both in terms of their official appointment and their rhetorical line. As governments and agencies solidified their pandemic-minimization rhetoric and policies, individuals who championed that line became even more appealing. The lure of manufactured conflict allowed media companies to profit by highlighting astroturfed, unpopular movements protesting all forms of public health policy. Depending on their particular cultural bent, news corporations could position themselves either as “freedom-fighters,” standing up to the government tyranny of half-baked precautionary measures, or as “champions of reason,” pushing back against misinformation and science denial.

In all cases, the pivot in 2021 was palpable. Now that vaccines had arrived, there was a feasible narrative for transitioning away from “economically-disruptive restrictions.” As soon as you got vaccinated, you were free to get back to normal. “Fresh air smells sweeter without masks!” proclaimed the first lady, triumphantly. Summer of 2021 was full of freshly-inoculated people enjoying significant levels of antibody-based protection, and cases were at their lowest point. The media trumpeted this wonderful news at every opportunity, showcasing ecstatic public health officials, booming businesses, and throngs of maskless people, while ignoring the still-omnipresent circulation of background cases.

Prognosis

With every new major variant, cries of “No one could have seen this coming!” quickly give way to “At last, the pandemic is over.” The same refuted myths of herd immunity, hybrid immunity, and vaccinated immunity keep cropping up, only to be dashed to pieces by the next wave. In the latter half of 2022, we entered a phase of multiple overlapping variants — all deliberately still referred to by their parent, omicron, to avoid panic. The baseline of weekly infections and deaths have remained higher than at any other phase of the pandemic, save for spikes as a new dominant strain emerged. The expert, government, and media line has stagnated at a calibrated silence, interspersed with the occasional recommendation to get vaccinated. Fitted respirators are recommended (lumped in with less-effective cloth and surgical masks), but they are not mandated, and rarely even modeled. Schools are fully in-person, despite their established role as hotspots of community transmission. At every opportunity, governments, corporations, and community organizations congratulate themselves on making it through the pandemic.

This is not simple negligence on the part of those who govern and shape our society. It amounts to social murder: the establishment of policies that place large numbers of people on the path to an early and unnatural death. You have the right to health, and that right is being deliberately stripped away from you with a policy of mass infection. Just because the choice isn’t being made with the specific goal of eliminating us (such as in the case of genocide), doesn’t absolve the choice itself. And that choice is being continually reaffirmed every day. The calculation has been made with no special regard for human health; only the preservation of the social order. Too much death and disease could challenge the power of the ruling class; 15 million excess deaths is just the cost of doing business.

We are at a crossroads in this ongoing crisis. As we continue to pretend everything is normal, the virus continues to evolve. Multiple lineages are circulating, accumulating mutations that help them evade immunity and run roughshod over defenseless populations. The next uber-variant is likely already here: the XBB.1 lineage is as different from the original SARS-CoV-2 virus as that virus was from SARS, and has an even higher ability to infect cells. With every wave that washes over us, our organs and our immune systems become weaker. Life expectancy is declining at an alarming rate. We are an increasingly disabled population, with no community support — or even awareness. The longer we allow ourselves to be governed by a culture of individualism, capitalist greed, and ignorance, the sicker we will all become.

As Marxists warned last year and the year before that, the crisis in the housing market, so long suppressed by the last-ditch stabilizing measures  of the U.S. government, has finally broken out into the open. The contradiction was unsustainable: the working classes have been deprived of their income by death, disease, and economic manipulation, and are now being forced to pay back rent that the government suspended — rent that they can’t afford. Now that this larcenous manipulation — the issuing of what are essentially interest-free loans to banks and investors, billed in the presses as “relief” — has increased the cost of staple goods and threatens hyper-inflation, the political lackeys of the U.S. real estate capitalists are preparing to give the economy a strong dose of “shock therapy.” The real costs of the so-called “relief” are becoming more and more apparent.

In Connecticut alone, hundreds of working class families have been thrown onto the streets. A smoldering fire of evictions threatens to explode into a full-blown conflagration of houselessness far beyond the capacity of the meager resources allotted by the capitalist state to combat it.

This particular housing crisis was created by the COVID pandemic and the bungled half-measures taken by the government in response. Even as investors line their pockets, the working people sink deeper into misery. This stop-and-start “protection” has merely given the illusion of safety while allowing the capitalists to plunder the public coffers and leave growing numbers unhoused, food-insecure, and unemployed.

“I haven’t seen this in my 20 years working in Connecticut,” said David Rich of the Housing Collective in Fairfield County. Housing advocates are calling it the “perfect storm” for the working classes. The state reports a shortfall of more than 85,000 units of rental housing. As of late August 2022, only about 2% of the state’s rental units were available, which gives Connecticut the lowest vacancy rate in the U.S. Empire.

“The people who are coming into the shelter now were housed and [lost housing] either through evictions or being priced out of their housing,” said Michele Conderino of the Open Doors Community.

ACT CT, a bourgeois NGO operating in Connecticut to “address the root causes of poverty, addiction, and health,” released a report on the state of houselessness in Connecticut from data gathered on Tuesday, January 25, 2022. They identified 2,930 people who were unhoused in Connecticut on that date. Last year the same report identified 2,594 houseless persons. The very first wave of the crisis has seen an increase in houselessness by 13%, which is a reversal of a decade of decreases.

And it’s not only that there is insufficient shelter for rent — the protections for tenants introduced at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic have since been lifted and evictions are now being processed at an increasing pace. Those protections were still in place in January of this year, when the study was conducted, but in March there was a 70% increase in eviction filings — from an average of 1,469 each March to 2,490 in March of this year. The effects of this dramatic increase have not yet been seen.

What’s more, landlords have taken this crisis as an opportunity to drive rents up. Average rents across Connecticut are up 12% over the last 18 months and are projected  to continue rising.

Inflation caused by the capitalist printing of “free money” to the banks throughout 2020, 2021, and early 2022 has pushed many working class families already on the brink of poverty over the edge. Compounded with the lifting of eviction protection and the predatory housing purchases by huge investment firms like BlackRock, Mandy Properties, and Farnam Realty, the capitalists appear to be conspiring to drive working class people out of their homes.

There’s no sign this crisis will let up any time soon. In fact, every law of capitalist development points firmly to its intensification as the investment markets suffer contractions and the U.S. Federal Reserve withdraws its offerings of what was essentially, until now, free credit to the banks and investors. All this adds up to a worsening crisis for working class families in Connecticut and across the U.S. Empire. 

Houses and apartments are “withdrawn” from the market for a “more profitable” resale or investment. There are 700,000 unoccupied units of housing in Connecticut. The owners of these properties refuse to rent them, for the selfish reason that they can make more money by waiting and using their real estate holding sas passive investments to sell as they “appreciate” in value than they can by renting them. In other words, under capitalism, housing is often more profitable when it isn’t actually used for housing. These landlords buy up all the property, wait for desperation and misery to increase, and then sell them at huge profits.

But why is all this happening? The greed of a few is the dispossession of many.

Let’s step back to the beginning of the COVID pandemic: To save the lives of millions, measures were implemented to keep many from going to work. Clumsy half-measures at alleviating pandemic-induced poverty were adopted by the government. But the government’s policies weren’t stringent enough to burn out the disease (unlike the zero-COVID plan in China) and weren’t liberal enough to keep the markets functioning.

While “essential” industries (from food processing to restaurants) were kept open and the workers there were subject to sickness and death, other workers, especially the labor aristocrats and petit-bourgeoisie, were protected under stay-at-home orders. COVID-19 was permitted to rage among the poorest strata of the laboring classes, resulting in government-sanctioned social mass murder.

But, for the capitalist economy to function, for money to circulate, for stocks to stay high, for banks to remain solvent, eventually even those labor aristocrats and petit-bourgeoisie had to go back to work. To support capital during the initial period, the Federal Reserve began issuing what were essentially interest-free loans to banks and investors. Then, under immense pressure from their capitalist masters, the government declared the pandemic was “over” and forced everyone back to work by removing all the protections it had extended: rent and eviction protection, mandatory or free COVID tests, free vaccinations and boosters, school closures, work closures.

The capitalists and their lackeys in government have the tools to alleviate the misery they’re creating. The unhoused merely have to seize this property or have it ordered available by the government; that this is unthinkable speaks to the power of the bourgeoisie to command not only the police force, but the very halls of government.

The pandemic has not ended. The capitalist government did not provide long-term solutions for anything. Neither the disease, which continues to ravage and kill, nor the economic problems, which were shifted from the ruling class onto the working classes, have been addressed. We shouldn’t be surprised by any of this.

The government has worked tirelessly to do what is best for the capitalists. When the capitalists were afraid they might be infected, a limited amount of protections were put in place. After they’d had enough time to develop suitable defenses, like monoclonal antibodies or increased security and temperature screening in their walled gardens, they told everyone “Hey! Get back to work! And by the way, you still owe me a year’s rent.”

This is a stark example of the contradictions at the heart of the capitalist system. The government, composed of the representatives not of the renters, but the landowning classes, can’t order the forgiveness of the overdue rents (doing so is actually constitutionally forbidden, because that would be considered a “taking”), nor can it afford to pay those overdue rents itself.

Where are public funds being spent? Not on the unhoused, those with marginal housing, or those working people being forced out of their longtime homes. Rather, the State of Connecticut just held a lavish state funeral for two Bristol police officers, costing tens of thousands of dollars, diverting millions in state resources, and drawing tens of thousands of fascist fellow-officers and fascist cop supporters from across the country. Indeed, every city in Connecticut is increasing funding for the police across the board.

Thousands of evictions are expected each month going forward. The dreaded “cliff” is still ahead of us: the sharp and sudden explosion of litigation and summary process that will drive thousands of working-poor people onto the streets across the U.S. Empire.

With this crisis now coming to a long-anticipated head, the subterranean contradictions of capitalism, its sometimes-hidden brutality, stands revealed and unveiled for all to see. In response, tenants unions are springing up across the state, but this will not alone stem the tide. Only a united coalition  of unhoused councils, unemployed committees, and housing justice activists, led by a strong Communist movement, can bring the capitalists to heel and force them to concede ground.