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https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/05/04/rent-m04.html
By Kayla Costa
4 May 2020
On May 1, millions of Americans were not able to pay their rent due to the dire social crisis sparked by the COVID-19 pandemic, opening up a housing crisis in which many working class families face a future of debt, eviction and homelessness.
The exact number of people who failed to meet rent or mortgage payments on May 1 has not been published. However, based on statistics gathered by the National Multifamily Housing Council, 31 percent of renters (25.8 million people) across the country will either fail to pay their April rent or will do so belatedly.
Experts predict that the rate will be far higher for the month of May, as the economic and social impact of the COVID-19 crisis deepens. An estimated 44 percent of New York City residents say they cannot pay their May rent, according to a localized survey by PropertyNext.
In addition, 6.4 percent of all active home mortgages are currently in forbearance, temporarily extending the due date on a family’s payment, according to financial website Bankrate. This accounts for roughly 8 million households involving mortgages carrying an unpaid principal of $754 billion.
Already, at least 3.8 million homeowners have sought mortgage relief and had stopped making their payments by the end of April, a 2,400 percent increase from early March, according to Black Knight, a mortgage technology and data provider.
According to official figures, more than 30 million people have applied for unemployment benefits over the past six weeks. This is likely an underestimation of the number of people who have been laid off or furloughed due to the inability of many individuals to successfully file a claim, as underfunded and technologically backward state unemployment offices are inundated with requests. The true unemployment rate is estimated at between one-third and one-fourth of the eligible population.
While trillions of dollars are handed over to the financial oligarchy by the political establishment, tens of millions of Americans face unemployment, loss of health care coverage, poverty and hunger. Without jobs and still waiting on stimulus checks and unemployment benefits, thousands are lining up their cars at food banks across the country. Small business owners are among those affected, as are undocumented immigrants, who do not qualify for any benefits.
Emberlea, a veteran with metastatic stage four cancer who is living with her adult son in the Sacramento area of California, spoke with the World Socialist Web Site about the enormous financial hardship produced by the pandemic and the area’s high rents.
Emberlea
“Our rent is close to $2,000 a month,” she explained. “That is close to 60 percent of our regular income. We paid only $500 this month for rent because my son hasn’t gotten compensation yet. The apartment complex took the $500 and applied the rest over the next eight months, an extra $170 per month.”
States such as Arizona, California, Colorado, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, Oregon and Washington have enacted moratoriums on evictions, preventing landlords from initiating the eviction process for an average of two months. However, families are still responsible for repaying their missed payments on top of their ongoing monthly expenses. This creates a situation of insurmountable debt, which most people will never be able to pay off, given the fact that the majority of the US population did not have enough saved to afford a $1,000 emergency expense before the pandemic.
“If you lose your job for two or three months, you might be $3,000 in the hole with no way to really make that up,” Matt Desmond, a sociologist and lead investigator at a Princeton University project called Eviction Lab, told National Public Radio. “We’re faced with millions of families who are behind in rent.”
The financial impact will hit renters in major US cities particularly hard, given the enormous cost of living that is difficult to manage even while working a full-time job. To give a sense of the burden, the average monthly cost of a two-bedroom apartment ranges between $974 in St. Louis to $3,629 in San Francisco.
The National Low Income Housing Coalition calculated that 11.5 million or more people will now be spending at least 50 percent of their income on rent, up by 1.5 million people since the mass layoffs and state shutdowns began in March.
Calls for a freeze on rent and mortgage payments have found growing support from renters and homeowners in major cities throughout the United States and parts of Canada. In some cities, tenants are organizing rent strikes to collectively negotiate with their landlords or issue demands to state governments.
Emberlea has been trying to organize her Sacramento neighborhood to collectively withhold their rent and mortgage payments. “We have so many people out of work,” she said. “We have to make it very clear that the capitalist class, the owners, the CEOs, the bankers, the politicians are sucking the lifeblood out of us. They are working us so hard for almost nothing.”
She added: “How out of touch do you have to be when we’ve got food banks where there are lines miles and miles long of people needing food? They are destroying crops of food. They’re pouring milk out at dairies. They’re crushing eggs because if they can’t sell it, they don’t need it. This is happening all over California, everywhere.”
Facebook groups for tenant coordination are growing and new ones are being established in cities such as Portland, San Francisco, Oakland, New York City, Los Angeles, Kansas City, St. Louis, Jersey City, San Francisco, Seattle, Austin, Milwaukee, Chicago and Philadelphia, as well as cities in Canada.
In New York City, tenants from 2,000 living units across 57 buildings have organized rent strikes to demand that Governor Andrew Cuomo order a halt to rent payments. The Los Angeles Tenant Union reported a rise in membership from 3,000 before the outbreak to 8,000 by mid-April. As of this writing, nearly 1.8 million people signed a “Rent Strike 2020” petition, stating their agreement with the demand for a mortgage and rent freeze along with their intention to withhold rent payments, either voluntarily or because they have no money.
A coalition of pseudo-left and activist groups that stands behind the official “Rent Strike 2020” campaign are seeking to subordinate popular opposition to the Democratic Party, under the false claim that Democratic politicians can be pressured to carry out serious measures to address the social crisis.
This role is exemplified by Socialist Alternative member and Seattle City Councilwoman Kshama Sawant, who is working to channel popular anger behind appeals to Democratic Governor Jay Inslee to enact a temporary cancellation of rent payments. Sawant told her audience at an April 16 town hall that to pressure the Democratic Party, “We will need a fighting movement, and a May 1 rent strike will help to build momentum.”
To mount an effective fight against evictions and impossibly high rents, the struggle must be consciously directed not to the Democratic Party, but rather to the growing wave of strikes and protests by the working class against the policy of both parties to impose the full cost of the pandemic crisis on the working population, summed up in the drive to force workers back to work without any protection against the virus.
Behind the landlords stand banks and big investors who reap immense profits from the private housing market. Thus, the struggle must be guided by the principle that the health and basic needs of the population must take unconditional priority over private profit. The Socialist Equality Party calls for the formation of workers’ neighborhood committees to link up with rank-and-file factory and workplace committees, independent of the pro-corporate trade unions and the Democratic Party.
The criminally negligent response to the pandemic on the part of the Trump administration and governments around the world, driven by a class policy of subordinating human life to corporate profits and the stock market, has demonstrated that the fight against COVID-19 is a fight against the capitalist system. It must be guided by a program to unite the working class internationally to put an end to the profit system and establish socialism.
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"It's been three months, but somehow the Trump administration continues to drag its feet in ramping up the production of critical testing and protective equipment that our health care providers are begging for."
by
Julia Conley, staff writer
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/05/04/counter-trump-inaction-sanders-khanna-bill-would-unleash-75-billion-emergency
Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Ro Khanna on Monday introduced legislation to ensure healthcare providers have enough medical equipment and Covid-19 tests, demanding that the federal government dramatically step up its response to the coronavirus pandemic rather than focusing on getting people back to work as soon as possible.
The Emergency Medical Supplies Procurement Act would dedicate $75 billion to the effort, allowing the government to purchase or manufacture supplies including N-95 respirators, surgical gowns, ventilators, testing kits, and other badly-needed medical equipment as well as vaccines and treatments for Covid-19.
The progressive lawmakers introduced the legislation three days after President Donald Trump moved to fire Health and Human Services deputy inspector general Christi Grimm over her report last month about supply shortages at hundreds of medical centers across the country.
"The United States is the richest country in the world. There is no excuse for our medical professionals and essential workers not to have the masks, gloves, gowns and tests they need to keep safe, treat their patients and stop the spread of this deadly pandemic," said Sanders.
According to Sanders and Khanna, the U.S. currently is testing between 100,000 and 200,000 people per day for the coronavirus—while public health experts recommend testing 500,000 to one million people per day before the country considers ending social distancing orders which have forced millions to stay mainly at home for more than a month.
Despite warnings from public health officials, more than half of U.S. states partially reopened their economies in recent days—even as the country saw its highest single-day death toll from Covid-19.
In order to produce the number of tests needed to track the outbreak and the equipment needed to protect healthcare providers and save patients' lives, Khanna and Sanders said, the federal government must be compelled to invoke the Defense Production Act specifically for that purpose.
"Congress must explicitly authorize that the Defense Production Act (DPA) is fully utilized to demand that the private sector manufacture the equipment and products that our medical personnel, patients, and frontline workers desperately need," said Sanders.
The U.S. Congress authorized $1 billion for the production of protective equipment and other hospital necessities—a figure which "pales in comparison to the amount of supplies needed to protect frontline healthcare workers and increase testing capacity," said Khanna and Sanders in a statement.
"It's been three months, but somehow the Trump administration continues to drag its feet in ramping up the production of critical testing and protective equipment that our health care providers are begging for," said Khanna. "Testing is the key to safely restarting our economy and this bill provides the federal government with the resources and directives that will get us where we need to be."
Trump has invoked the DPA only to direct specific companies to manufacture PPE and ventilators, and last week he used the law to compel meat processing plants to stay open during the pandemic, putting thousands of workers at risk in workplaces where social distancing is difficult if not impossible.
Under the Emergency Medical Supplies Procurement Act, the administration would be required to respond promptly requests from states in need of healthcare supplies. With states relying on the Strategic National Stockpile for equipment—and then going directly to manufacturers as that supply dwindled—state governments have been forced into a bidding war over desperately-needed products.
"States and cities should not be forced to bid against each other for scarce and overpriced medical equipment," said Sanders.
The legislation would also include strict oversight and accountability provisions to avoid the misuse of the funding, after other federal programs responding to the pandemic, including the Paycheck Protection Program, were beset with the misappropriation of funds.
"We're also including safeguards to ensure no member of the Trump family or administration gets a dime of recovery funding," tweeted Khanna, two weeks after the president's business, the Trump Organization, sought rent relief due to the pandemic.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/05/04/mili-m04.html
By Gregor Link
4 May 2020
The world economic crisis triggered by the coronavirus pandemic has become a catalyst for the plans of German imperialism to force Europe under its hegemony and to grasp for world power again.
This is most openly expressed in a recent paper by the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP), an influential German think tank. Under the title “Deterrence and Defence in Times of COVID-19”, it says: “As the unprecedented economic fall-out of this crisis is starting to become apparent, it may seem tempting to curtail defence spending. However, “current volatility in the world,” according to the authors of the study, would make this “irresponsible.”
Christian Mölling, the main author, is well networked in foreign policy circles. Before becoming DGAP research director and program director for security and defence, he worked for the German Marshall Fund of the United States and the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, SWP), which jointly published the programmatic paper“New Power, New Responsibility” in 2013.
“Europe”—meaning, above all, Germany—“can still shape its own destiny,” write Mölling et al. “Germany’s upcoming EU presidency” offers “a genuine opportunity” to emerge from the crisis “intact” and “possibly even stronger.” In order to achieve this goal, the advisers to the German government call for a “comprehensive conflict strategy” in the confrontation with rival powers, both within the borders of Europe and at the global level.
With a view to Germany’s EU Council presidency in July, the authors write: “This may have looked like a routine job—until now. The fact that the largest EU economy, the largest defence spender and the second largest military force in the EU takes over in midst of the crisis gives Berlin leverage to shape outcomes in the defence realm.” Germany should use its leadership role to “shield key European defence and industrial capabilities” and “propose a pragmatic redesign of instruments like the European Defence Fund and PESCO [Permanent Structured Cooperation].”
PESCO is the preliminary stage of a continental European military alliance being promoted by Germany in particular. Except for Denmark and Malta, all EU states belong to it. Founded in November 2017, the cooperative “is to be seen as a direct reaction to the British [EU] exit referendum,” Ronja Kempin of the SWP told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in 2019.
As a basis for German options for action, the DGAP authors draft various scenarios of political developments on the European continent.
The common starting point of these scenarios is the following situation: “From 2020 onwards, European countries are likely going to find themselves under a double strain: While public finances will come under stress, the need for continued or even increased defence investment will remain as the security environment deteriorates.”
The DGAP paper argues that the military and weapons are indispensable for managing the political upheavals arising from the crisis and at the same time to assert German and European geostrategic interests against international rivals: “Europe cannot take a tough stance on Russia in the east and neglect the south. It is not possible for Europe to focus on just one pillar. It must address deterrence, defence and crisis management simultaneously.”
The paper describes the effects of such a policy as follows: “As some governments are forced to declare bankruptcy, the remaining forces are needed for internal security tasks.” This would result in a lack of investment in the national armed forces. The security situation would be “tense as Russian analysts assume that the nuclear threshold has been lowered due to the loss of conventional capabilities.”
Elsewhere it says: “Given the lack of US leadership in the global response to COVID-19, Beijing is currently positioning itself as the alternative provider of soft power. Beijing is presenting an image of control and benevolence, delivering medical equipment and test kits to Europe and elsewhere, while the United States is barely able to handle the crisis at home.”
In fact, the United States was the greatest “source of uncertainty” from the German point of view. The DGAP paper states that it is possible that the “deep rift in US society” and the “enormous strain that the fight against the pandemic puts on the US economy” could lead to a political withdrawal of the United States from Europe.
The result of such an “Ami goes home” [Yanks go home] scenario would be “an intra-European debate on nuclear deterrence. Given that Europe includes nuclear powers as well as countries that have signed and ratified the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, internal cohesion is strained. Both budget and nuclear debates meet with political resistance in individual states. This paradoxical situation of having to spend more while budgets are becoming tighter exacerbates political rifts between Europeans. Just as during the last crisis, Europeans have different spending priorities. Diverging spending patterns impact defence industries differently across Europe.”
From the German point of view, the goal in this situation must be to politically “integrate” countries that have fallen behind in the meantime. To this end, a political instrument should be developed that corresponds to NATO’s national framework concept.
The idea that the global crisis—despite considerable challenges—presents itself above all as an opportunity for German imperialism runs like a red thread through the DGAP study.
With a view to major European armaments projects such as MGCS (Franco-German battle tank) and FCAS (joint European air combat system), the paper recommends, for example, that the German government take the initiative immediately. This crisis “offers a chance to overcome national sentiment in organizational and defence industrial cooperation.” It should be seized even though political resistance is to be expected. Germany should “envisage the next generation of defence industrial cooperation and consolidation.”
But the stubborn nationalism of other EU countries is not the only brake on German ambitions that could now finally be “overcome.” Another “obstacle” that needs to be removed is the “firewall that traditionally separates civilian and military R&D in Europe.” Instead, the aim must be to use all available means more “creatively” to achieve military and strategic goals. If even this does not produce the desired results, “alternative means” must be used.
The paper literally states: “Conflict has already spilled out of the conventional military domain. If military means prove more expensive or less effective than alternative ones, it is prudent to consider a more comprehensive way to engage in conflicts and deter adversaries. Such a comprehensive conflict strategy could build on the lessons learned from hybrid warfare and foreign influence operations against Europe” (emphasis added).
These lines leave no doubt that the German bourgeoisie, despite its defeat in two world wars, is preparing new historical crimes behind the backs of the people. In 2005, the American military strategist Frank G. Hoffman defined “hybrid warfare” as a “combination of conventional and irregular ways of fighting in connection with terrorist actions and criminal behaviour.”
When German military advisers speak of “alternative means” in this context, this must be taken as a serious warning. The “elements” of such hybrid warfare are, according to the definition, among other things the use of “nuclear, biological, chemical and improvised explosive devices,” the implementation of “disinformation and propaganda campaigns” together with cyber-attacks, as well as the “deployment of covertly fighting troops, or soldiers and military equipment without national emblems, operating on foreign territory.”
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[10 May 2014]
Internal CDC document projects U.S. coronavirus deaths could reach 3,000 per day by June 1—nearly double the current daily death toll.
by
Jake Johnson, staff writer
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/05/04/kind-large-scale-negligent-homicide-trump-urges-reopenings-cdc-report-warns-surge
As President Donald Trump publicly encourages states to reopen their economies against the advice of public health experts, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is privately projecting that U.S. Covid-19 deaths could reach a staggering 3,000 per day by June 1—nearly double the current daily death toll of more than 1,700.
The New York Times on Monday obtained an internal CDC document (pdf) predicting around 200,000 new coronavirus cases each day by the end May, up from around 25,000 new cases per day at present.
"The projections confirm the primary fear of public health experts: that a reopening of the economy will put the nation right back where it was in mid-March, when cases were rising so rapidly in some parts of the country that patients were dying on gurneys in hospital hallways with cases rising so rapidly that the health care system is overloaded," the Times reported.
The CDC projection came to light just hours after Trump claimed during a Fox News town hall that the U.S. has been "successful" in limiting the death toll from the virus. More than 1.1 million people have contracted Covid-19 in the U.S. and nearly 68,000 have died. The virus has killed at least 1,000 people across the nation every day since April 2.
"The administration should be tried for crimes against humanity," Mairav Zonszein wrote in response to the CDC data.
Mother Jones reporter Dan Friedman ripped Trump for publicly urging states to reopen their economies even as his administration predicts a massive surge in coronavirus deaths behind closed doors. Georgia, Texas, Florida, Oklahoma, and other states have begun to lifting social distancing restrictions in recent days despite their lack of adequate testing equipment.
"Keeping dire internal projections private while publicly pushing states to 'reopen' due to electoral considerations is kind of like large scale negligent homicide," Friedman tweeted.
While a number of states have initiated the reopening of their economies, a new analysis published Monday by the Center for American Progress found that none of the nation's fifty states has reached the crucial kind of thresholds public health experts say would be needed to safely do so.
"Based on evidence-based thresholds for incidence and testing, no state is ready to substantially relax its stay-at-home order," wrote Topher Spiro and Emily Gee, the authors of the analysis.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/05/04/covi-m04.html
By Bryan Dyne
4 May 2020
President Donald Trump’s virtual town hall meeting last night marked a new stage in his administration’s drive to force the American population back to work amidst the spreading coronavirus pandemic. That it was held at the Lincoln Memorial, which honors the fight for equality which the 16th president embodied, gave the event an even more politically obscene character.
The primary purpose of the event, titled “America Together: Returning to Work” and moderated by Fox News anchors Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, was to justify forcing workers back to work without any real protection against the deadly virus. It was held after a weekend of meetings at Camp David with Trump’s top advisors, reportedly including Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow and press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, to map out the administration’s pivot from the public health disaster to the resumption of corporate profit-making.
While announcing no measures to combat the pandemic, which continues to spread across the country, Trump opened by claiming, “I think we’ll have a vaccine by the end of the year,” implying that it was now safe for people to be exposed to the virus. Neither Trump nor the moderators made any mention of the warnings by medical experts internationally that a vaccine would likely take at least 18 months to develop.
He then proceeded to demand that schools, colleges and universities reopen by September, and boasted of his executive order to keep meat packing plants open even as the pandemic infects and kills large numbers of workers. When asked about employees worried about getting infected, he said, “The employees have to want to work. If they don't want to work, that's one thing. But they are working and they need the money.”
Trump tied any possibility of federal support to states and municipalities facing economic collapse to a payroll tax cut, calling it “essential” to any piece of legislation he would sign. A payroll tax cut would simultaneously provide a further windfall to corporations and the rich and slash revenues that support Social Security and Medicare. The gutting of these core social programs has long been a goal of the financial oligarchy and the Republican right.
There was no suggestion by the president, the moderators or the video-taped and carefully vetted questioners that social distancing measures should be kept in place and non-essential businesses remain closed until the disease was contained.
The continued rise in confirmed coronavirus cases across the country, however, underscores the fact that there is no scientific or medical basis for Trump’s drive to force people back to work. The number of new cases in states, including Colorado, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, Texas and Wyoming, is trending upwards even as they are reopening, while the number of new cases in Alabama, Florida, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, and West Virginia has stayed relatively constant.
No state has seen a consistent reduction in the number of new COVID-19 cases over the past 14 days, ostensibly the criterion to reopen under Trump’s official guidelines.
Just as the number of cases has continued to rise in the United States, currently standing at just under 1.2 million, the number of deaths has also continued to climb, currently at more than 68,500. This includes more than 3,000 over the weekend. Internationally, there are more than 3.5 million officially confirmed cases and nearly 250,000 recorded deaths.
These figures are why Dr. Mike Ryan of the World Health Organization (WHO) on Friday insisted that to safely loosen social distancing measures and reopen businesses, there had to be in place the capacity for comprehensive testing, contact-tracing and quarantining, something that exists nowhere in the United States. Ryan also said that exiting from “public health and social measures… requires a very careful, well-planned process that’s based on, number one, understanding the exact epidemiology of the disease in your country or at subnational level; so do you understand the problem, do you understand where the virus is?”
This is the basic question that is still largely unknown across the world and especially in the United States. One fact rarely mentioned by the media is that as testing has been expanded, the percentage of positive cases to the number of tests has stayed constant. This indicates both that the pandemic is still spreading and that the current level of testing does not capture the full extent of the pandemic in the country.
This has not stopped every section of the American political and media establishment from supporting the reopening drive. The Wall Street Journal on Friday published an editorial titled, “Testing Isn’t Everything,” with the tag line, “It won’t banish the coronavirus, and it’s not an excuse for not reopening,” directly contradicting the advice the WHO has been giving for months.
The Democratic-aligned Washington Post, owned by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, published an editorial on Sunday under the headline, “Managing the reopening.”
At a recent news conference, Colorado Governor Jared Polis, a Democrat, lashed out at a reporter who asked whether or not the state had enough testing to reopen. He retorted, “You’re still obsessed with testing.” He then demanded that people focus on “the need to wear masks, the social distancing and protecting our most vulnerable,” in order to cover up the fact that the pandemic is still spreading in the state.
The position of the Trump administration itself was spelled out very explicitly by the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner last Wednesday, when he asserted on Fox that, “We’re on the other side of the medical aspect of this and I think we’ve achieved all the different milestones that are needed. So the federal government rose to the challenge, and this is a great success story and I think that that’s really what needs to be told.”
What success story? Yesterday, in a discussion with Fox’s Chris Wallace, White House Coronavirus Task Force Response Coordinator Deborah Birx backtracked from the administration’s previous statement that there would only be 60,000 fatalities from the pandemic, claiming that “our projections have always been between 100,000 and 240,000 American lives lost.” She added that the estimate applies only “with full mitigation.”
Neither Birx nor Wallace batted an eye at the staggering figure, which is more than the number of American deaths in World War I and about half those in World War II. And, as Birx openly admits, this projection holds only if physical distancing is maintained.
The policies being advocated by Birx, Polis, Kushner and Trump amount to developing some form of “herd immunity.” By not testing and contact-tracing to know where the virus is, while simultaneously ordering everyone back into the factories, offices and workplaces, they are setting up the majority of the population to be exposed to the deadly contagion.
Even under the most optimistic scenarios, millions will likely die. The most conservative estimates of the infectiousness of the virus state that half of the population will need to become infected and successfully fight off the virus before it will be unable to spread. At a death rate of just 1 percent, about 1.65 million people would die, double the number of soldiers killed in the Civil War.
This at the same time assumes that everyone gets adequate health care. While the medical infrastructure in the most hard-hit places in the US—New York and New Jersey—has not yet totally collapsed, it no doubt would if the number of cases suddenly increased two-, five- or ten-fold. At that point, data from Italy and Wuhan suggests that up to five percent of people die because there are not enough ventilators and other critical supplies to go around. In this scenario, 8.25 million would die.
Moreover, whether or not a recovered patient remains immune to the coronavirus is still an open question. Immunity from the SARS pandemic in 2002–2004 lasted on average two years, which means the only reason that virus did not become seasonal is that it was contained. There is concern among epidemiologists that the current coronavirus pandemic will become seasonal, and because there is no immunity or vaccine, it will kill some percentage of the population every year.
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[29 April 2020]
Judge Lorna Schofield of the Southern District Court of New York has ordered the Federal Communications Commission to turn over server logs and other records pertaining to the fake comments that poured into the agency's system in 2017 as it moved to repeal net neutrality protections.
The New York Times sued the FCC in 2018 demanding that the agency release data logs that could shed light on who was behind the fake comments. The newspaper filed the lawsuit after the FCC refused to comply with a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the records on the grounds that revealing IP addresses from the fake comments would be an "unwarranted invasion of personal privacy."
But Schofield ruled (pdf) last Thursday that the FCC, headed by former Verizon attorney Ajit Pai, failed to make a "persuasive" case for withholding the information from the public and said the records could help determine whether the agency's comment process is "vulnerable to corruption."
"In this case, the public interest in disclosure is great because the importance of the comment process to agency rulemaking is great," Schofield wrote. "If genuine public comment is drowned out by a fraudulent facsimile, then the notice-and-comment process has failed."
As of this writing, Pai has yet to comment publicly on the court's ruling.
In a tweet on Friday, Democratic FCC commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel said "it's time for the agency to come clean." Rosenworcel was the only FCC commissioner to dissent from the agency's refusal in 2018 to comply with the FOIA request for public comment records.
"Something here is rotten," Rosenworcel said at the time.
The FCC's widely unpopular plan to repeal net neutrality protections, which took effect in 2018, garnered more than 22 million public comments. According to the New York attorney general's office, more than 9 million of the comments may have been submitted with stolen identities.
Gizmodo reported last year that "in May 2017, dozens of Americans came forward with claims that their identities had been used, without their consent, in a campaign to inundate the Federal Communications Commission with public comments critical of [net neutrality]."
"What was most curious, however, is that each of these people had supposedly submitted the very same comment; a veritable word salad of telecom industry talking points," Gizmodo reported. "In particular, the comment was a rebuke of the Obama administration's exercise of 'unprecedented regulatory power' in pursuit of net neutrality, a policy which it accused of 'smothering innovation, damaging the American economy, and obstructing job creation.'"
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/05/04/pers-m04.html
4 May 2020
In a modern-day version of the “big lie,” the Trump administration is claiming that the COVID-19 pandemic is the product of the deliberate actions of the Chinese government.
On Sunday, President Donald Trump, in a “town hall” with Fox News, accused China of taking actions specifically intended to infect millions of Europeans and Americans.
After repeating the false claim that the novel coronavirus originated in a research laboratory in Wuhan, which he said China tried to cover up, Trump declared: “They didn’t stop people going into the USA and all over the world... They said, hey look, this is going to have a huge impact on China, and we might as well let the rest of the world” become infected.
“They allowed this to go into our country, they allowed it to go into other countries,” Trump said.
Such claims have been asserted repeatedly in recent days by top administration officials. On Sunday morning, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared that there is “enormous evidence” that the virus originated in a Wuhan laboratory, adding, “Remember, China has a history of infecting the world.”
In a separate interview Sunday, White House advisor Peter Navarro declared that China “seeded the world with what became the pandemic.” He added, “I did write a book in 2006 called The Coming China Wars. On page 150, I predicted that the Chinese Communist Party would create a viral pandemic that would kill millions of people worldwide. It is now beyond my wildest nightmare what China has inflicted on the world.”
These are brazen and unsubstantiated lies. Neither Trump, Pompeo, Navarro or anyone else has provided a shred of evidence to substantiate their claims.
The method recalls that of Nazi Germany, which collapsed 75 years ago this month. Hitler, who committed suicide on April 30, 1945, amid the rubble of the Third Reich, used it to justify the invasions of Poland and Czechoslovakia and other crimes.
The aim of the “big lie” is to intimidate through its sheer brazenness. According to Wikipedia, it “is a propaganda technique and logical fallacy. The expression was coined by Adolf Hitler, when he dictated his 1925 book Mein Kampf, about the use of a lie so ‘colossal’ that no one would believe that someone ‘could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.’”
Trump’s utilization of this method comes at the very point where the American government is abandoning any systematic effort to slow the spread of the pandemic, effectively allowing large sections of the population to become infected.
The Trump administration is seeking to provide itself with an escape hatch. Whatever happens, it is China’s fault. Knowing that its program will lead to a rapid and substantial growth of fatalities, the White House is hoping that when the butcher’s bill of its disastrous policies comes due, it will be able to direct social tensions outward against China.
These allegations have a definite logic. If the Chinese government deliberately allowed and encouraged the coronavirus to infect the United States and Europe, this would be an act of biological warfare that goes far beyond the terrorist attacks of September 11. It would mean that China had carried out an act of war against the United States.
With unbridled recklessness, in order to justify its own criminal indifference to the lives of millions of people, the Trump administration is setting up a situation that can make military confrontation with China unavoidable.
These claims are undermined even by the findings of Trump’s own intelligence agencies. The New York Times noted in an article published April 30, “Most intelligence agencies remain skeptical that conclusive evidence of a link to a lab can be found, and scientists who have studied the genetics of the coronavirus say that the overwhelming probability is that it leapt from animal to human in a nonlaboratory setting, as was the case with H.I.V., Ebola and SARS.”
The administration’s lies, however, are facilitated by the media and the political establishment as a whole, which do not expose them as fabrications but rather present them as legitimate positions. Whatever differences they may have, the anti-China campaign serves definite geo-strategic interests and domestic political imperatives supported by the entire ruling class.
In a Sunday editorial, the Democratic Party-aligned Washington Post condemned “China’s effort to avoid accountability for the novel coronavirus pandemic through a global propaganda campaign.” It declared, “The response to such belligerence cannot be appeasement.” Last month, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden released an ad attacking Trump for “rolling over” to the Chinese government in relation to the coronavirus.
All variants of the anti-China narrative—the theory that China deliberately created the virus as a bio-weapon, the claim that the virus escaped from a laboratory and the allegations that China concealed knowledge of the disease from the world—are contradicted by publicly available information.
The Wuhan Municipal Health Commission publicly reported a cluster of pneumonia cases on December 31, 2019. China identified the virus that causes COVID-19 on January 7, 2020, and Chinese scientists warned that the disease could be capable of human-to-human transmission.
But it was not until nearly eight weeks after the first public statements by Chinese health officials that any systematic testing for COVID-19 began in the United States. The US had conducted only 1,000 COVID-19 tests by March 4, two months after the first warnings by Chinese officials. China, South Korea and other Asian countries had carried out millions of tests by early February.
Even as the virus was ripping through the United States, Trump, the media and Congress systematically downplayed the significance of the disease. As late as February 28, Trump was still claiming that the coronavirus “is going to disappear” like “a miracle.” He condemned those saying that COVID-19 was rapidly spreading throughout the country, declaring, “This is their new hoax.”
The Trump administration, acting as the representative of the financial oligarchy, did nothing to protect the population from the pandemic. After utilizing the crisis to orchestrate a massive handout to Wall Street, the ruling class has launched a back-to-work campaign that will cost tens or hundreds of thousands of lives.
The “big lie” against China is both an excuse for its own criminal negligence and an attempt to cover for the criminal policies it is now implementing.
Andre Damon
