Trump’s Supreme Court Pick Could Spell a Fresh Hell for Workers’ Rights

BY MOSHE Z. MARVIT















TUESDAY, JUL 10, 2018, 3:18 PM







http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/21289/trump_supreme_court_labor_union_brett_kavanaugh_kennedy
















On Monday, President Donald Trump announced his nomination of conservative Brett Kavanaugh to replace retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy on the U.S. Supreme Court. If Kavanaugh is confirmed, Chief Justice John Roberts, a fellow conservative, will become the ideological and political center of the Supreme Court, and protections for women, minorities, voting rights, civil liberties and more could come under threat. Workers and labor unions should be particularly concerned about Judge Kavanaugh’s history of siding with businesses against workers and for pushing a deregulatoryagenda.




In his 13 years on the Court, Chief Justice Roberts has helped to unleash unlimitedcorporate money into politics, open the door to mass voter disenfranchisement and lay the groundwork to strengthen the power of corporations over consumers and employees. He has also, in the words of Justice Elena Kagan, led the conservative project of “weaponizing the First Amendment, in a way that unleashes judges, now and in the future, to intervene in economic and regulatory policy.” This is who will now be the swing vote on the Supreme Court if Kavanaugh is confirmed.




Kavanaugh, who is 53 years old, once clerked for Judge Alex Kozinski, who abruptlyretired last year after a long history of sexual harassment was revealed. Previously, Kavanaugh worked with Kenneth Starr to investigate President Clinton and draft the report that lead to Clinton’s impeachment. Over his last 12 years on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, Kavanaugh has shown himself to be an extraordinarily conservative judge. An analysis by Axios determined that Kavanaugh is just slightly less conservative than the most conservative member of the Court, Clarence Thomas.




A review of Judge Kavanaugh’s decisions regarding workers’ rights shows a disturbing trend of siding with employers on a range of issues.




In Southern New England Telephone Co. v. NLRB (2015), Kavanaugh overruled the NLRB’s decision that the employer committed an unfair labor practice when it barred workers from wearing T-shirts that said, “Inmate” on the front and “Prisoner of AT$T” on the back. Under the law, employees are permitted to wear union apparel to work, and the NLRB found that these shirts were protected under the National Labor Relations Act. The Board rejected the argument that “special circumstances” warranted limiting workers’ rights, because no reasonable person would conclude that the worker was a prison convict.




Kavanaugh rejected the Board’s legal analysis, writing, “Common sense sometimes matters in resolving legal disputes. … No company, at least one that is interested in keeping its customers, presumably wants its employees walking into people's homes wearing shirts that say ‘Inmate’ and ‘Prisoner.’” Kavanaugh was undoubtedly correct in his understanding of the company’s desire not to have workers wear such shirts, which is precisely why the workers did so. What the unions did in wearing the shirts was apply pressure in a labor dispute in a manner that the law has long allowed. However, Kavanaugh criticized the Board’s analysis, writing that “the appropriate test for ‘special circumstances’ is not whether AT&T's customers would confuse the ‘Inmate/Prisoner’ shirt with actual prison garb, but whether AT&T could reasonably believe that the message may harm its relationship with its customers or its public image.” By shifting the focus to the employer’s public image, Kavanaugh undercut the right of workers to publicly protest and dissent.




In Verizon New England Inc. v. NLRB (2016), Kavanaugh overturned the NLRB’s ruling that workers could display pro-union signs in their cars parked in the company parking lot after the union waived its members’ right to picket. In his decision, Kavanaugh held that “No hard-and-fast definition of the term ‘picketing’ excludes the visible display of pro-union signs in employees' cars rather than in employees' hands, especially when the cars are lined up in the employer's parking lot and thus visible to passers-by in the same way as a picket line.” Therefore, according to Kavanaugh, the union’s waiver of the right to picket also applied to signs left in cars.




Judge Kavanaugh again overruled a pro-worker NLRB decision in Venetian Casino Resort, L.L.C. v. NLRB (2015). The NLRB had determined that the casino committed an unfair labor practice when, in response to a peaceful demonstration by employees (for which they had a permit), the casino called the police on the workers. Citing the First Amendment, Kavanaugh held that “When a person petitions the government in good faith, the First Amendment prohibits any sanction on that action.” Calling the police to enforce state trespassing laws, Kavanaugh concluded, deserved such protection.




In UFCW AFL CIO 540 v. NLRB (2014), Judge Kavanaugh issued an anti-worker decision involving Wal-Mart’s “meat wars.” After 10 meat cutters in Jacksonville, Texas, voted to form the first union at a Wal-Mart, the company closed its meat operations in 180 stores and switched to pre-packaged meats. (The notoriously anti-union Wal-Mart denied that its decision had anything to do with the union vote.) After the switch, Wal-Mart refused to bargain with the meat cutters, arguing that they no longer constituted an appropriate bargaining unit. Judge Kavanaugh agreed with Wal-Mart’s argument, but did write that Wal-Mart must bargain with the union over the effects of the conversion of the employees.




Judge Kavanaugh has consistently sided with employers in labor law cases, to the detriment of workers’ labor rights. He also has argued that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, established in 2011, is unconstitutional, and Aaron Klein, director of the Center on Regulation and Markets at the Brookings Institution, has said that his nomination “could reverse over a century of American financial regulation.”




Labor advocates should be extremely concerned about this ideological bent if Kavanaugh becomes a justice on an already very business friendly—and conservative—Supreme Court.

Seattle Just Showed How to Rein In Amazon—And the Company Is Going to War

BY DANIEL MOATTAR










http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/21145/seattle_amazon_head_tax_kshama_sawant_city_council



















While cities across the country line up to shower Amazon with billions of dollars in tax breaks and free office space, the Seattle City Council just hit the tech and retail giant—and the city’s biggest firm—with a new tax meant to fight homelessness and fund affordable housing.




At a packed and at times combative meeting on Monday, after multiple rounds of last-minute negotiations, the Council unanimously passed an amended version of the Employee Hours Tax (EHT), which will effectively serve as a payroll tax on Seattle’s megacorporations. The passage is a major victory for progressives in the city, including councilmember Kshama Sawant, who strongly backed the corporate tax.




The EHT, widely known as the “head tax,” is aimed at businesses with more than $20 million in yearly receipts—i.e., the richest three percent of corporations in Seattle, including Amazon. Those companies will now be taxed $275 per worker, annually, down from an originally proposed cap of $500 per worker. The tax is expected to raise about $48 million per year, funds to be spent on subsidies for affordable housing and resources for the city’s growing homeless population.




But Amazon is striking back. On May 2, the company announced that, until the vote was decided, it would call off all work on a 400,000-square-foot office block being built north of downtown Seattle—a threat the company dropped just after the new tax passed. Amazon still claims to be “evaluating options” to sublease another 700,000-plus square feet it has leased in a skyscraper currently under construction downtown. In a statement released after the vote, Amazon said, “we remain very apprehensive about the future created by the council’s hostile approach and rhetoric toward larger businesses, which forces us to question our growth here.” The company controls nearly a fifth of Seattle’s office space, an unparalleled figure among major American cities.




“It is very difficult to take seriously a threat that essentially boils down to, ‘If you don’t continue to provide a richly subsidized operating environment for the richest corporations and their highly paid employees, we will leave you,’ says Alison Eisinger, executive director of the Seattle/King County Coalition on Homelessness. “That is not corporate citizenship as I understand it.”




Beyond Amazon




The original EHT legislation was more ambitious, and would have brought in about $75 million per year. But prior to Monday, Seattle mayor Jenny Durkan indicated that she would veto the tax, forcing the majority back to the bargaining table. Durkan’s 2017 mayoral campaign featured heavy support from Seattle’s Chamber of Commerce—particularly from Amazon, which donated $350,000 to a group backing her campaign. The final version, passed by the Council 9-0, had a veto-proff majority, assuring it will become law.




“As soon as we saw that Amazon was looking for locations in other cities,” says Sawant, “our politicians sent a craven letter to Amazon saying, ‘We’re so sorry you felt unwelcome—let’s hit the refresh button.’”




“When was the last time struggling renters got a letter from their city,” she asked, “saying, ‘We’re so sorry you felt unwelcome! We’ll work to get you affordable housing?’”




Washington, despite its liberal reputation, is already a low-tax state. It has no personal income tax, no corporate income tax, and leans heavily on its relatively low sales tax. According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a non-partisan think tank, Washingtonians live under the country’s most regressive tax regime.




“Our state is woefully behind in being able to secure revenue in a way that can meet our basic needs,” Eisinger says. She emphasized that—although Amazon is in the spotlight—there is much more to the debate than the company’s retaliation.




“This is not about Amazon,” Eisinger says. “Amazon has succeeded, in a rather ill-conceived way in making it largely about them. But the idea is that the biggest businesses should be able to put a very modest portion of their profits toward addressing a critical and desperately underfunded community need, so that this community is better for their employees and their customers.”




Untaxed state income is a revenue loss for Washington, but a win for Seattle’s legions of tech workers, who are some of the best paid nationwide. Thanks to firms like Amazon, where software engineers’ starting salaries are typically in the six figures, Seattle is seeing some of the nation’s fastest wage growth—but almost all in high-dollar jobs.




Unlike most U.S. tech giants, Amazon is headquartered in a major metropolis, counting on its infrastructure, and the amenities of city life, to attract top talent. Amazon made a “very conscious decision” to use the city as a draw, its vice president for real estate told the Seattle Times.




Other startups-turned-giants are following suit. Google, Facebook, Groupon, Uber, Airbnb and other firms have set up shop in Seattle—bringing in high-value jobs, but using a growing share of the city’s infrastructure. The city has had to add buses to one transit route partly to accommodate Amazon’s hundreds of summer interns, and some smaller companies complain that it’s increasingly hard to rent office space when owners can hold out for Amazon or other huge firms to lease whole floors or buildings.




The housing problem




Above all, the problem is housing. Seattle’s rents are up 65 percent since 2010, and rose 30 percent from 2014 to 2017 alone, due in part to demand from tech hires. “Amazon is behind the biggest rent increase last year,” read a February MarketWatch headline on rent hikes in nearby Tacoma.




Meanwhile, demand for single-family homes has pushed average house prices close to $1 million. Forty percent of Seattle homes now sell at or above that price. And—further raising rents—high home prices are driving more families into the rental market, with Seattle now on the verge of becoming a majority-renter city.




“I’m a native Seattleite, and Amazon has had a huge impact,” says Katelyn Morgaine. Morgaine is a case manager at Downtown Emergency Service Center, an organization serving Seattle’s homeless. “None of my coworkers can afford market-rate rent,” she says. “We’re living on top of each other in apartments or wherever we can.” Morgaine claims that some of her coworkers “live in publicly subsidized buildings right next to their clients.”




More than ninety percent of homes now being built in Seattle will be rentals, but with the influx of six-figure jobs, developers may have little incentive to build tens of thousands of units of affordable housing. And Seattle lacks the extensive tenant protections of cities like New York, where renters have long been the majority. Seattle’s City Council has yet to overturn Washington’s state ban on rent control.




The crisis has been especially tough on working-class and poor Seattleites. An analysis by salary comparison site PayScale found that a typical Seattle retail worker would end the year $11,000 in debt after paying for their basic needs. A typical tech worker, on the other hand, would end up with nearly $60,000 in discretionary income.




“We are not opposed in any way to the tech workers, who actually do the work that generates all of Amazon’s profits,” Sawant says. “We don’t begrudge any part of the working class making a decent standard of living. But one of the ways in which Amazon changes the landscape of the economy is by the fact that, except for the tech workers, the other workers who keep Amazon’s campuses running make very, very low wages.”




In 2015, Seattle legislated a minimum wage hike, which will reach $15 per hour for all workers in 2021. But median rent increases have matched or outpaced minimum wage hikes, meaning that the lion’s share of many minimum-wage workers’ raises has gone to their landlords.




Homelessness has spiked to match. King County, where Seattle is located, sits behind only New York and Los Angeles for total number of homeless residents, although the county ranks 13th nationwide for population. Almost a quarter of homeless Seattleites have cited housing affordability as the main reason they were homeless.




“What is visible is a really close correlation in the increases in rent and the increase in the number of people who are homeless,” Eisinger said, citing a recent McKinsey & Company report on homelessness in King County.




Other cities with tech booms have seen similar problems. In California, San Francisco and San Jose have also seen chart-topping gains in median wages—like in Seattle, the gains are concentrated among high earners—along with massive housing shortagesand out-of-control rent spikes.




As in Washington, California’s state limits on rent control mean cities’ hands are tied, for now, on the price front. But a progressive corporate payroll tax in tech-dense cities opens the door to providing new affordable housing, shelters, and services for homeless and at-risk residents.




"This housing crisis did not happen in one day,” Sawant says. “It happened not only because of negligence on the part of the city, but because of a very clear orientation toward what benefits corporations.”




Tax free




Amazon paid no federal taxes in 2017, and expects a tax break of nearly $800 millionfrom the new GOP tax law. In Washington, the company’s state and local tax burden of $250 million represents about eight percent of net profits—or about one-tenth of one percent of last year’s revenue. The Employee Hours Tax would bump Amazon’s state and local tax bill to about $260 million.




In other words, the cash value of the tax is a drop in the bucket—compared not just to Amazon’s existing tax burden but to its savings under the new tax code. But the tax fight might be an important one for Seattle’s favorite megacorporation.




“Almost everything that we value and need in our state is paid for by property and sales tax,” says Eisinger. “We have very few options at the local level for bringing in revenue any other way.” That arrangement, she points out—along with natural beauty, quality healthcare, arts and culture, and a large research university—is a draw for large companies.




The popular blowback to new property and sales taxes is well documented. If the law passes, Seattle’s politicians might find that taxing eight-figure corporations is less politically risky, in the long run, than taxing shoppers or homeowners.




For companies taking advantage of existing city infrastructure—or, in the case of Amazon’s HQ2, seeking massive, custom-made public subsidies—a local tax revolt against large corporations would be bad news.




“The reason there’s national attention on this,” Sawant says, “is that I think this will be a bellwether for other cities, like $15 dollars an hour.” The Fight for 15’s victories in the Seattle area helped drive the movement into national headlines, reshaping the national debate on wages.




“Just in November of last year,” she says, “the majority of the City Council voted no on a similar tax. It shows you in a very direct and live manner what you can achieve by building a movement.”

Amazon Is One Step Closer To Taking a Cut on Literally Every Economic Transaction

In a $5.5 billion sweetheart deal, Amazon has inserted itself between local businesses and local governments.




BY DAVID DAYEN



















http://inthesetimes.com/article/21287/amazon-local-procurement-contract-sweetheart-deal




























The paper the forms are printed on at City Hall. The desk your child sits at in math class. The books in your local library. Amazon has begun to profit from all of these products, extending its business from consumer retail into government procurement, according to a new report released today.




As detailed by Stacy Mitchell and Olivia LaVecchia of the nonprofit Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR), Amazon won a nationwide contract last year to supply up to $5.5 billion in commercial items for states, cities, and school districts through its Amazon Business platform. Already over 1,500 jurisdictions have adopted the contract, despite the fact that it doesn’t guarantee fixed-rate prices or volume discounts, as is typical with government purchasing agreements. This means cities and states could end up overpaying for basic supplies, with Amazon profiting on the back end.




Local and regional office suppliers (an under-the-radar industry that pioneered many customer conveniences, such as next-day delivery, more commonly associated with Amazon) can still sell to municipal governments under the deal—but only if they join Amazon’s platform, and pay the 15 percent share of revenue that Amazon takes for access. This underscores Amazon’s real goal—to levy a tax on all economic activity, as market analyst Ben Thompson put it last year. Businesses large and small are induced into joining the Amazon marketplace when there’s no other way to reach customers. Whoever makes the sale, Amazon takes a cut.




With annual spending of close to $2 trillion, state and local government procurement is a logical next market for Amazon. Says Mitchell, one of the report’s co-authors, “[Amazon CEO] Jeff Bezos’ vision comes out of Wall Street: How can I make a bit of money on everything?”




The contract is part of a broader strategy by Amazon to grab a chunk of public spending. The company hired Anne Rung, once the Chief Acquisitions Officer for the White House, to head up its government division. An “Amazon amendment” in last year’s defense authorization bill would allow defense procurement officials to use the platform for off-the-shelf commercial items. Amazon’s rivals have warned that the Defense Department is poised to award the company a $10 billion cloud computing contract.


A contract tailor-made for Amazon




In January 2017, Amazon secured the five-year contract, which carries the potential for six more years of renewals, through U.S. Communities, which facilitates joint purchasing agreements for its 55,000 members, in exchange for a small piece of the revenue. Through this setup, government agencies of any size pool their purchasing power and get better terms on long-term contracts.




Or, at least that’s the theory. But it only works if there’s a competitive bidding process to extract the most favorable deal. In this case, the request for proposal (or RFP) for the contract was so specialized that only one company appeared able to meet it. “We thought, ‘This is absolutely spec’d to Amazon,’” said Gordon Thrall of Guernsey, an office supplier that was part of the coalition that won the previous U.S. Communities contract in 2010.




U.S. Communities solicited bidders who could run online marketplaces offering 10 different product categories, something only Amazon was able to meet. The RFP attracted only five eligible bids, three from companies that only sell specific items like musical instruments or commercial printing services. A normal RFP attracting so few responsive bids would often get redone; but Amazon won the contract.


Who needs price controls? Trust the free hand of the Amazon marketplace




One-stop shopping for every item a local public agency might need is certainly attractive. But governments gave up plenty to Amazon in the exchange. At the heart of these deals is usually a fixed price guarantee, which allows for consistent budgeting. “It’s the bedrock of public procurement,” says Mitchell. “Typically a city would say, here are the 1,000 items we buy the most of, you have to guarantee the price. The risk is on you if the price goes up.” Suppliers accept that risk in return for a long-term, high-volume contract.




This contract gave no pricing instructions at all; no guaranteed fixed rates, no volume discounts. Instead, U.S. Communities asserted that, because Amazon Business is a “marketplace” with numerous sellers, competition would ensure the lowest price. Purchasers can freeze the price on any item they order for seven days. But otherwise, as U.S. Communities wrote in a response to the report’s authors, “Pricing on Amazon Business is dynamic through their competitive marketplace.”




An Amazon spokesperson tells In These Times that the contract provides “features and benefits that help simplify the procurement process and increase efficiency for buyers.” The company also noted that public agencies will be able to “ensure competitiveness and best-value pricing … we have seen great progress to date.”




According to the report, however, U.S. Communities didn’t appear to test whether prices were actually lower on Amazon with anything more rigorous than a spot-check. In webinars to public agencies, Amazon and U.S. Communities have stressed the upside of this arrangement. But prices also can increase, and often do; After all, that’s what inflation is.




The report compared 57 goods purchased by a California school district over two weeks in January to prices on Amazon. The school district paid $1,205 with free next-day delivery; Amazon would have charged at least 10 percent more—12 percent with comparable shipping speeds. A separate study from the Naval Postgraduate School of items purchased by the Air Force found that the current e-commerce platform created by the General Services Administration beat Amazon on price for “most items.”




This makes sense, because sellers on the platform have to pay that 15 percent fee to Amazon. It’s impossible for them to do that and also offer the lowest price, especially on a public agency contract, where discounts are usually guaranteed and profit margins are very slim.




Though we think of Amazon as the unparalleled leader in speedy delivery, this contract also offers worse service. Independent office suppliers have provided free next-day shipping for decades, and that was guaranteed in the previous U.S. Communities contract. Amazon offers no guarantee on shipping, and only provides two-day shipping if cities sign up for Amazon Business Prime for $499 a year.





Finally, Amazon altered the contract’s terms and conditions, including giving itself the ability to intervene in and redact public records requests to ensure that information sought by the public about the contract never gets disclosed. The RFP’s original terms stressed that all communications related to the contract “shall be open to the inspection of any citizen, or any interested person, firm or corporation.”




In other words, Amazon landed a contract where they will offer worse service at a higher price than independent supply stores. “Amazon waltzed into this sector and secured a contract not by out-competing, but by using its power and pull,” Mitchell says.


The cities that resist




Pushing into state and local procurement expands the number of transactions upon which Amazon can levy a tax. But some cities have other ideas. Though cities already use Amazon for various off-contract purchases, some to disturbing extremes (Denver’s public schools spent $1.6 million on odds and ends in 2016), Phoenix only spent $700 on the platform in 2016. The City Council instead created a Local Small Business Enterprise Program in 2012 to prioritize its purchasing. Spending with small business jumped from $50,000 to $2.3 million in two years. And those dollars circulated within the local economy, rather than Amazon’s corporate treasury. A spokesperson for the city financing department told In These Times that Phoenix hasn’t signed onto the Amazon contract because of concerns about its small business program.




Mitchell believes that, with local businesses already being so dramatically undercut by Amazon, cities should resist handing them public purchasing as well. “Not only is Amazon setting up a contract to take advantage of public dollars, but they’re inserting themselves as a gatekeeper between local government and local businesses,” she says. “This is a way for local officials to talk about the dangers of monopoly.”

I Couldn’t Help But Wonder…Is Democratic Socialism Catching On?

Sex and the City star and New York gubernatorial candidate Cynthia Nixon is now a democratic socialist.

BY KATE ARONOFF

http://inthesetimes.com/article/21293/democratic_socialism_cynthia_nixon_new_york_governor_dsa

In real-time, candidates and, critically, groups like DSA and the social movements and community organizing outfits they work with, are helping map out what a 21st century American democratic socialism might look like.

New York gubernatorial candidate Cynthia Nixon is a democratic socialist. Nixon, who is challenging incumbent Gov. Andrew Cuomo, wrote in an email to Politico that some “more establishment, corporate Democrats get very scared by this term but if being a democratic socialist means that you believe health care, housing, education and the things we need to thrive should be a basic right not a privilege then count me in.”

This move comes just weeks after Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—a self-described democratic socialist and dues-paying member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)—won an upset primary against Rep. Joe Crowley, until that point considered one of the most powerful Democrats in the House. In the wake of Bernie Sanders’ presidential primary, these developments have sparked a conversation about what the term ‘democratic socialism’ actually means.

The Right spent much of Obama’s presidency, confusingly, for socialists, calling policies like the Affordable Care Act—a market-based exchange dominated by private healthcare insurers—socialism. Now that candidates like Nixon and Ocasio-Cortez are actively choosing to identify with the label publicly, the Right doesn’t have much ammunition to draw on, comparing demands for common-sense things like affordable housing to Stalinist five-year plans.

In real-time, candidates and, critically, groups like DSA and the social movements and community organizing outfits they work with, are helping map out what a 21st century American democratic socialism might look like. Nixon and Ocasio-Cortez have defined it mainly as a natural extension of the measures outlined in their policy platforms, which include support for policies like Medicare for All, free public college, taxing the rich and upending backward voter suppression laws.

As Ocasio-Cortez straightforwardly put it when asked to define democratic socialism: “In a modern, moral and wealthy society, no person in America should be too poor to live. … What that means to me is health care as a human right. It means that every child, no matter where you are born, should have access to a college or trade-school education, if they so choose it. And I think that no person should be homeless, if we can have public structures and public policy to allow for people to have homes and food and lead a dignified life in the United States.”

It wasn’t diatribes about ownership over the means of production that won Ocasio-Cortez her election, and it won’t be singing the Internationale that wins Nixon hers. What has seemed to resonate with New York voters—and with those of fellow democratic socialists Lee Carter, in the Virginia legislature, and Carlos Ramirez Rosa, a Chicago Alderman—is a tangible vision of a more humane society, backed up by a genuine commitment to listening to and fighting for the concerns of their constituencies.

Older and existing models of socialism and social democracy offer lessons, but not exactly roadmaps. Sweden’s universal healthcare system is both successful and popular, while the country is one of the world’s whitest. Norway’s massive social wealth fund has given the country a robust public sphere, but was also built on oil wealth. And even America’s own history of democratic socialism in power—like much of American history writ large—was at times riddled with racism, as when socialist Milwaukee Congressman Victor Berger defended segregation. The writings of Marx and Lenin offer plenty of valuable insights into capitalism and political strategy, although may not be of much help in crafting a plan to effectively abolish ICE (which both Ocasio-Cortez and Nixon call for).

Building any sustainable democratic socialism in 21st century America—the unique challenge that socialists in the United States find themselves saddled with—is grappling with the fact that the country was built on a brutal foundation of genocide and slavery which fundamentally defines our society, and that the threat of climate change demands that we decarbonize our economy by 2050 at the absolute latest or face civilizational annihilation.

After being stripped violently from America’s political consciousness through decades of red-baiting and state-sanctioned murder, socialism is, for the first time many can remember, emerging here as something other than either a countercultural aesthetic preference or the preoccupation of a handful of academics. It’s now firmly enmeshed in our politics, and as such has to grapple with questions that are harder to parse out in real life than online or in theoretical texts: How do socialists govern? How do we run subway systems or fire departments, or the Environmental Protection Agency? What does it actually look like to bring things previously left to the market under public ownership?

The strength of American democratic socialism will fail or fly in the long-run based on what it’s actually able to deliver. In the short-run, it has to win over voters who’ve probably never heard of it. Here’s hoping Nixon and other democratic socialist candidates can make the case successfully this year. 

Australia’s new secrecy laws block exposure of government crimes

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/07/14/inte-j14.html

In the name of combating foreign interference

Australia’s new secrecy laws block exposure of government crimes

By Mike Head

14 July 2018

Under the cover of outlawing so-called improper foreign influence in Australia, the Espionage and Foreign Interference (EFI) Act pushed through parliament last month contains 12 new or expanded secrecy offences.

These are specifically designed to criminalise the exposure of abuses—especially war crimes and human rights violations—committed by Australian governments and their US partners.

The laws can outlaw reporting on everything from the SAS killings of civilians in Afghanistan to the torture-like treatment of refugees in Australia’s Pacific island detention camps.

Terrified of growing unrest, hostility toward capitalism and opposition to war, the Australian government is seeking to block access, especially via the Internet, to critical information that the public has the right to know.

Above all, the targets are whistleblowers and journalists such as WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange and former US National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden. They helped alert the world’s people to the atrocities, regime-change operations and mass surveillance of Washington and its military-intelligence allies.

Anyone who assists individuals to reveal such crimes, or reports their exposures, including writers and publishers on progressive, left-wing or anti-capitalist media outlets, can now face lengthy imprisonment.

This is on top of a raft of secrecy laws imposed over the past decade to outlaw reportage of secretive operations by the spy services, identification of undercover intelligence agents and disclosures about the treatment of refugees by the militarised Australian Border Force.

The latest secrecy laws are a crucial element in the anti-foreign influence laws being imposed by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s government, with the opposition Labor Party’s bipartisan backing, to suppress dissent amid intensifying US-led preparations for war against China.

In an extraordinary June 8 radio interview, Andrew Hastie, who chairs the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, pointed to the real thrust of the measures.

Hastie, a member of the Liberal-National Coalition government and former SAS officer, said Australia’s role in the US-led Five Eyes intelligence alliance made the country a “soft underbelly” for authoritarian regimes “seeking to get secrets from the United States.”

Australia’s spy and electronic surveillance agencies, which monitor the highly strategic Indo-Pacific region, are a key link in Five Eyes network with the NSA and its counterparts in Britain, Canada and New Zealand.

Hastie told Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio: “What we can’t have is radical transparency.” Questioned on what he meant by that, he said: “Radical transparency is Julian Assange dropping a whole bunch of Commonwealth secrets out for public consumption.”

Hastie, having received closed-door intelligence “briefings” in Washington, along with other members of his committee, was drumming up the agitation by the government and the intelligence agencies for the rapid passage of the legislation.

His remarks underscored the intense pressure being applied to the Turnbull government by the US military-intelligence establishment to pass the legislation and step up its commitment to the US military confrontation with China, Australian capitalism’s largest export market.

Hastie’s comments also highlighted the fact that the laws target any independent investigatory journalism that endangers ruling class interests, especially by laying bare government war plans, lies and propaganda.

The new secrecy offences go significantly beyond the old Crimes Act official secrets laws, which they replace.

First, they have a wider scope. Instead of banning the disclosure of secret documents—either classified, “prescribed” or relating to “prohibited places”—they outlaw divulging “inherently harmful information” or material that “is likely to cause harm to Australia’s interests.”

“Inherently harmful information” covers classified material, information obtained by the Australian and allied intelligence agencies, and information relating to the operations of the Australian or foreign law enforcement agencies. Thus, for example, WikiLeaks’ publication of files exposing the CIA’s computer hacking activities is now a serious crime in Australia.

“Cause harm to Australia’s interests” is even more sweeping. It includes to “harm or prejudice the health or safety of the Australian public or a section of the Australian public” or “harm or prejudice the security or defence of Australia.” This extends to information that supposedly endangers any Australian person or threatens the country’s anti-refugee operations or the profit interests of Australian companies.

The EFI Act defines “national security” to include “protection of the integrity of the country’s territory and borders from serious threats” and “the country’s political, military or economic relations with another country or other countries.”

Second, the new laws apply to everyone, not just internal whistleblowers, as the Crimes Act offences did. The EFI Act outlaws not just leaking, but “dealing with” information. “Deal with” is defined to cover a long list of activities: “collect,” “possess,” “make a record of,” “copy,” “alter,” “conceal,” “communicate,” “publish” and “make available.”

“Make available information” includes “place it somewhere it can be accessed by another person,” “give it to an intermediary” and “describe how to obtain access to it, or describe methods that are likely to facilitate access to it (for example, set out the name of a website, an IP address, a URL, a password, or the name of a newsgroup).”

In other words, whoever is sent information, and therefore automatically possesses it, can be convicted, as can individuals associated with WikiLeaks or any other platform that is set up to anonymously receive material from whistleblowers.

Third, the new laws particularly target non-corporate media websites by providing a limited defence for people “engaged in the business of reporting news, presenting current affairs or expressing editorial or other content in news media.”

According to the explanatory memorandum attached to the act, this defence is confined to the staff of “media organisations.”

The defence is highly conditional. It only applies if the individual “reasonably believed” that dealing with the material was “in the public interest.” These terms are not defined, leaving the way open for politically selective prosecutions. Who decides what is “reasonable” and what the “public interest” is?

Anyone claiming the defence also bears an “evidentiary burden” of proving it, undercutting the centuries-old requirement for the prosecution to prove guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt.”

In addition, the “reasonable belief” defence does not apply to material that identifies an intelligence agent or a person in witness protection program, or that “directly or indirectly” assists a foreign intelligence agency or military organisation.

However, media companies that cooperate with the intelligence apparatus in censoring sensitive material to remove any damning information are likely to be protected as acting “reasonably” in the “public interest.”

The Crimes Act penalties have been substantially increased, up to 10 years for an “aggravated” offence from seven years’ imprisonment for leaking official secrets that allegedly prejudice Australia’s military defence or security. There is a roughly proportional increase in the jail terms for lesser offences.

People can be convicted even if they did not intend to “deal with” information that was “harmful” but were merely “reckless” as to that possibility. That is, they were aware of a “substantial” and “unjustifiable” risk of such an outcome. And “strict liability” applies to some offences. For example, an “aggravated offence” can be committed even if the person is not aware that the document had a security classification.

As with some other parts of the EFI Act, the attorney-general must consent to prosecutions, but that only magnifies the danger of political victimisation.

The secrecy laws, like the “foreign interference” legislation as a whole, are designed to give governments and the intelligence-police apparatus a broad array of powers to try to silence dissent and jail those who reveal the truth about the drive to war and austerity.

AMLO (new Mexican president) assembles right-wing cabinet

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/07/14/mexi-j14.html

Mexican president-elect assembles right-wing cabinet 

By Alex González

14 July 2018

After a sweeping victory in the Mexican presidential elections, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), the leader of the Movement for National Regeneration (Morena), has proposed a cabinet for his upcoming six-year administration that is dominated by leading figures of previous reactionary Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and Party for National Action (PAN) administrations.

AMLO, whose coalition included Morena, the Evangelical Christian right-wing Social Encounter Party (PES) and the Workers Party (PT), won more votes than any other Mexican presidential candidate in history and more than twice the number of votes as the runner up, Ricardo Anaya of a coalition including the right-wing National Action Party (PAN) and center-left Party for Democratic Revolution (PRD).

The Morena-led coalition will have a super majority in both houses of congress and the mayorship of Mexico City, the second largest city in Latin America. Morena also won governor races in five out of the nine states that held elections. The new federal and state governments will take office on December 1.

The election results are another indication of a leftward shift in the population. Over 30 million people voted for AMLO and Morena, many of them based on the illusion that the new administration would implement measures to address rampant inequality, the country’s advanced state of militarization, and the plight of immigrants on both sides of the border.

Studies have shown that the purchasing power of the population has declined by as much as 80 percent in the past three decades, while the homicide rate is equivalent to, if not worse than, war-torn countries. Highlighting the collaboration of the Mexican government with the US deportation apparatus, a recent report by the BBC revealed that the Mexican government detained—often under deplorable conditions—and deported over 138,000 Central American children under the outgoing Peña Nieto administration.

AMLO’s cabinet is very close to the one he proposed last December. While the media and pseudo-left have hailed the “progressive” gender composition of his cabinet (eight men and eight women), the appointment of well-known figures from former administrations is yet another reassurance to the powers-that-be that he is a “responsible” bourgeois politician who can be trusted to safeguard their interests.

Esteban Moctezuma, the proposed secretary of education, was an interior and social development minister under former PRI president Ernesto Zedillo (1994-2000). On Wednesday, Moctezuma stated that the national teacher evaluations would stay in place, albeit with removed provisions that tie scores to hiring and pay. He also stated that teachers who missed working days while on strike should be subject to punishment by the school administrations and the unions. In June, a strike by more than 80,000 teachers was betrayed by the teachers’ unions, which urged them to vote for AMLO as a supposed solution to their demands. This has been exposed as a reactionary fraud.

For the position of secretary of the interior, AMLO has tapped Olga Sánchez Cordero Dávila, a former member of the Mexican supreme court and a Zedillo appointee. Sánchez Cordero has already backpedaled on AMLO’s campaign promise to dismantle the Mexican intelligence agency Cisen.

The agency came under fire last year after an investigation by the New York Times revealed that the Mexican government had purchased software to hack into the phones of journalists and political opponents.

As overseer of the Cisen, Sánchez Cordero has expressed her enthusiastic support for the repression of social struggles. “It is imperative that we rule using intelligence. ... Imagine that there is a social movement in Guerrero or Oaxaca and that we do not have knowledge of these social movements, that we do not have knowledge of what is happening in Mexican society,” said Sánchez Cordero. “That would be very serious.”

The proposed secretary of finance, Carlos Urzúa, is an economist and World Bank consultant. He has reiterated promises to maintain “fiscal balance,” i.e., to not raise taxes on the rich or undertake significant spending on social programs. Instead, the AMLO administration has proposed “consolidating social welfare programs” and “centralizing government purchases” to finance his minuscule new programs. In other words, even with control of the legislature and the presidency, the new government will not carry out any significant measures to address the country’s social crisis.

Urzúa has elaborated on AMLO’s campaign promise to improve “competitiveness” along the US-Mexico border by slashing the value added tax (VAT) in half. Last week, Urzúa detailed that the “free zone” would extend around 30 kilometers south of the border, encompassing the cities of Tijuana, Mexicali, Ciudad Juárez and Reynosa.

Recent studies have estimated that such a policy would create a budget shortfall of 30.3 billion pesos per year (about US$1.6 billion). Given that AMLO has promised an “austerity budget,” lowering taxes will be paid for by attacks on social programs and the creation of a super-exploited labor force for transnational corporations.

Alfonzo Durazo, AMLO’s new chief of public security, was a former member of the PRI before being appointed as private secretary of former PAN president Vicente Fox (2000-2006). Durazo has vowed to create a new border police force to round up and deport immigrants. “We need to create a border police force that will be highly specialized. ... They need to apply the law,” stated Durazo in a recent interview.

As for AMLO’s nebulous campaign promise to “fight corruption,” Durazo disclosed that this meant increasing the salaries of law enforcement officials and creating more police academies to double the number of security personnel that could receive training each year. AMLO has previously backed centralizing the country’s police forces and holding daily briefings with military brass.

The repressive measures that organically flow from AMLO’s right-wing policies are spelled out by the inclusion of Manuel Mondragón, who is infamous for coordinating the assault on demonstrators during the inauguration of Peña Nieto in 2012. The assault on the peaceful protesters led to one death and the injuries of dozens of students. After AMLO confirmed that Mondragón would join his security team, the hashtag #MondragónNoEsCambio (#MondragónIsNotChange) became a trending topic on social media.

As objective conditions draw the masses into struggle, illusions that AMLO or Morena will address the intolerable social and economic conditions confronting millions of Mexicans may dissipate sooner rather than later. AMLO is not rejecting the “mafia in power,” which he has blamed for the country’s social ills, but rather incorporating them into the highest levels of his government.

The task of socialists is not to lend “critical support” to AMLO, but to politically educate and prepare the working class for a revolutionary struggle to put an end to the capitalist system. This requires the unification of the Mexican working class with workers in the United States and across the Americas, who are also being driven into struggle.

Only 57 of 3,000 immigrant children have been reunited with parents

By Trévon Austin

14 July 2018

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/07/14/immi-j14.html

The Trump administration has blatantly ignored a court order requiring it to reunify children under the age of five who were separated from their parents at the US-Mexico border. Out of 103 of the youngest children, only 57 children were reunited with their parents while the remaining 46 were deemed “ineligible” for alleged “safety” reasons or because their parents were already deported or in criminal custody. That means that roughly 2,950 of the 3,000 children separated from their families have not been reunited with their parents.

Last month, US District Judge Dana Sabraw established a series of deadlines for the Trump administration to reunite the nearly 3,000 children separated from their parents, mostly under the administration’s “zero tolerance” policy. The first group of children was required to be reunited with their parents by Tuesday.

The government falsely claims that it is in full compliance with Sabraw’s order. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Homeland Security (DHS), Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and Health and Human Services Secretary (HHS) Alex Azar said in a joint statement that their departments “worked tirelessly” to safely reunite children, and the Department of Justice (DOJ) has been negotiating with Sabraw to carve out exceptions.

The media has effectively abandoned the issue, deeming it resolved. The media has instead focused on bogus allegations of “Russian intervention” in the US elections. But in reality, hundreds of parents will never see their children again as a result of Trump’s policy.

Half of the children under the age of five who were not returned to their parents were not returned because the parents are in criminal custody in the United States or have been sent back to their home countries. Twelve parents have already been deported and have found it impossible to locate their children. The US government claims that it is working with foreign consulates in an effort to return children to the deported adults, officials said.

Although the Trump Administration has claimed that it has stopped large-scale separations of families at the border, some parents claim that they were separated from their children after the supposed halting of the family separation policy. Even if the family separation policy were actually halted, the change would only mean a return to the status quo previously set by the Obama administration under which families were detained together in immigration jail.

In reality, families crossing the border will still face the possibility of being separated and children will continue to be used as a deterrent. In their joint statement, the DOJ, DHS, and HHS confirmed this:

“Our message has been clear all along: Do not risk your own life or the life of your child by attempting to enter the United States illegally,” the statement said. “Apply lawfully and wait your turn.”

The government has also implemented tougher rules for migrants seeking asylum in the United States. Earlier this week, officials at the US border were provided with a new set of guidelines that will likely lead to more asylum seekers being turned away before they have had a chance to prove their “credible fear” of returning to their home country before an immigration judge.

On Wednesday, US Citizenship and Immigration Services issued a memo that indicates asylum seekers fleeing domestic or gang violence should generally be denied entry into the United States, and also notes that officers may use an illegal border crossing against a migrant in his or her asylum case.

Under US law, migrants who demonstrate they have a “credible fear” of persecution in their home country can be granted asylum within the United States. Migrants that cross the US-Mexico border, illegally or through legal ports of entry without valid visas, are placed into detention and typically given a “credible fear” interview after a few days.

However, the new memo all but reverses such rules. Some reports from the border have even shown that migrants trying to enter legally are being turned away.

The new guidelines largely mimic a decision made by US Attorney General Jeff Sessions last month. Sessions reversed long-standing US policy by ruling that most victims of gang or domestic violence alone are not eligible for asylum under federal law.

Ignoring the fact that the US is largely responsible for destabilizing countries in Central America, Session wrote, “the mere fact that a country may have problems effectively policing certain crimes or that certain populations are more likely to be victims of crime, cannot itself establish an asylum claim.”

Sessions’ decision and the new memo have already drawn criticism from immigration lawyers.

Laura Lynch, a senior policy lawyer with the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told the Texas Tribune that migrants wouldn’t have any opportunity “to obtain a lawyer or provide evidence to corroborate their claims” under the new policies. “This memo…is effectively shutting off access to asylum in the US,” she said.