ANTI-RUSSIA WAR FEVER SPREADS ON CAPITOL HILL

By Patrick Martin, WSWS.

July 2, 2020




https://popularresistance.org/anti-russia-war-fever-spreads-on-capitol-hill/




Groups of congressional Republicans and Democrats have visited the White House over the past two days for briefings on allegations that the Russian military intelligence agency GRU offered bounties to Taliban fighters who killed American soldiers in Afghanistan.

They have emerged bristling with demands for retaliation, with one Republican senator declaring, “I want to hear their plan for Taliban and GRU agents in body bags”—in other words, for military action by the United States against Russia, possessor of the world’s second largest stockpile of nuclear weapons.

The “Russian bounties” campaign is a fabrication by the US military-intelligence apparatus and its preferred mouthpiece, the New York Times, which signaled the kickoff of the current campaign with a front-page article Saturday that provided no evidence either of bounties paid or American soldiers killed, only reiterating endlessly that “intelligence officials” believed that Russia had carried out such an operation.

Four days into the affair, there has still been no evidence produced. Not a single witness to the offering, payment or receipt of a “bounty” has been cited. Not a single one of the 31 US military deaths in Afghanistan in 2019 and 2020 has been credibly linked to alleged Russian payments.

The Associated Press carried a report Monday that “Officials are focused in particular” on the death of three Marines, killed when a car bomb exploded outside of Bagram Air Base in April 2019, but did not explain what reason there was for investigating that particular incident.

The same article asserted that captured Taliban fighters had told interrogators about the alleged bounties, claiming, “Officials with knowledge of the matter told the AP that Taliban operatives from opposite ends of the country and from separate tribes offered similar accounts.” But the article continued: “The officials would not name the specific groups or give specific locations in Afghanistan or time frames for when they were detained.”

Aside from the absence of proof, there is a complete absence of motive. Why would the Russian government want to kill a handful of American soldiers in Afghanistan? What purpose would that serve, in terms of Russian foreign policy? Why would they pay fighters of the Taliban, long branded as terrorists by Moscow? Why would fighters in the Taliban, a group whose origins lie in the Islamic fundamentalist guerrilla groups that fought Soviet troops in the 1980s, serve as Moscow’s mercenaries? And why, given that they have fought American imperialism to a stalemate in nearly 20 years of war, suffering massive casualties in the process, would Taliban fighters need a monetary incentive to kill American soldiers?

None of these questions is even raised in the American corporate media, which reproduces the allegations of the US intelligence agencies as though they were unchallengeable truths, no matter how stupid, uncorroborated and self-contradictory.

For official Washington, the “Russian bounties” campaign is merely the latest chapter in the political warfare that has raged for the past four years, since the FBI and CIA began investigating alleged ties between the presidential campaign of Donald Trump and the Russian government.

The Democratic Party has consistently lined up with the sections of the military-intelligence apparatus that have viewed Trump as too soft on Russia and too inclined to abandon longstanding US interventions in the Middle East and Central Asia, from Afghanistan to Syria.

Frightened by the vast popular hostility directed against Trump’s attacks on democratic rights, his racist diatribes against immigrants and minorities, and his subordination of all government policy to the needs of Wall Street and big business, the Democrats have sought to divert all opposition to Trump behind a right-wing campaign to brand him as a stooge of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and create a political constituency for US military confrontation with Russia that could lead to nuclear war.

This was the content of the Mueller investigation into alleged Russian intervention in the 2016 elections, conducted for some two and a half years. This was followed by the campaign over Trump’s withholding of military aid to Ukraine while demanding an investigation into the business activities of Hunter Biden, the son of the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, which led to Trump’s impeachment and Senate trial.

The congressional Democrats and the Biden campaign have seized on the supposed expose by the New York Times as another opportunity to revive the anti-Russia hysteria and wage an election campaign centered on portraying Trump as an agent of Putin—a virtual rerun of the 2016 campaign by Hillary Clinton that ended with Trump winning a surprise victory in the Electoral College.

This would have two major purposes: enabling Biden to avoid addressing the massive social crisis demonstrated in the mounting COVID-19 death toll and the accompanying economic slump; and conditioning the American people to regard Russia with suspicion and hostility, in order to prepare the political climate for war.

The Democrats and their media allies have sought to focus attention, not on any evidence of Russian payment of bounties—the less said about that “big lie” the better, as far as the CIA is concerned—but on claims that Trump failed to respond aggressively enough, or was too indolent even to notice when the intelligence agencies first raised the issue (in February 2020 by one account, a year earlier in other reports).

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the top Democrat in Washington, reiterated her “all roads lead to Russia” critique of Trump in an interview with CNN on Monday morning. “It seems clear that the intelligence is real,” she said. “The question is whether the President was briefed. If he was not briefed, why would he not be briefed? Were they afraid to approach him on the subject of Russia?” She speculated that the CIA did not tell Trump about the bounties for fear he would tell Putin.

Among the group of ten Democrats who visited the White House Tuesday morning were two freshmen representatives, newly elected in 2018, who would normally not have been considered for such a high-level mission. But these two, Elissa Slotkin of Michigan and Abigail Spanberger of Virginia, are both former CIA officers, and thus personify the ever-closer alignment between the Democratic Party and the intelligence agencies.

Another member of the “CIA Democrats,” the group of nearly a dozen who entered Congress in 2018 from military-intelligence backgrounds, Representative Max Rose of New York, a former combat commander in Afghanistan, said, “It’s sickening that American soldiers have been killed as a result of Russian bounties on their heads, and the Commander in Chief didn’t do a thing to stop it.”

Former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, used similar language at a press conference that followed his speech on coronavirus in Wilmington, Delaware. In response to media questions, he described Trump’s response to the alleged Russian bounties as “dereliction of duty,” using the same phrase three separate times, in an effort to play up Trump’s deficiencies as “commander-in-chief.”

Some Republicans joined in the anti-Russia chorus, albeit without criticizing Trump’s response. This included Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska, who made the comment about “Taliban and GRU body bags,” calling that a necessary “proportional response” to the alleged Russian action.

Senator Todd Young of Indiana, a former Marine intelligence officer, said the alleged Russian operation “deserves a strong and immediate response from our government.” He called for Senate hearings and for Trump to rescind any invitation for Russia to rejoin the Group of Seven, the grouping of the major industrialized nations, and for personal financial sanctions on Putin.

The only reluctance to enlist in the anti-Russia campaign came from the Pentagon, whose spokesman said late Monday there was “no corroborating evidence to validate the recent allegations found in open-source reports.” The National Security Agency, which monitors all telecommunications in the Afghanistan region, reportedly told CBS News that the claim of Russian bounty-hunting “does not match well-established and verifiable Taliban and Haqqani practices” and lacks “sufficient reporting to corroborate any links.”

But for the bulk of the intelligence establishment, the conventional wisdom was expressed in a commentary in the Washington Post by David Ignatius, a columnist who is a frequent conduit for the national-security establishment. While admitting “there’s a lot we still don’t know about the Russian bounties in Afghanistan”—the understatement of the week—he concluded: “Trump is an obstacle to good policy. Either people don’t tell him the truth, or he doesn’t want to hear it. Whichever way, he’s defaulting on his most basic responsibility as commander in chief.”

In other words, Trump should be removed, as the Democrats have been arguing for years, not because of his right-wing policies and aspirations to establish an authoritarian regime, but because he is too unreliable in his role as the principal defender of the interests of American imperialism all over the world.

AN HISTORIC RANT

By Eleanor Goldfield, Art Killing Apathy.

July 2, 2020




https://popularresistance.org/an-historic-rant/




We don’t need another post about “these times.” We can all pretty much agree that shit is weird – that we’re confused, bewildered and feel like we’re on a boat captained by Bond villains heading towards a waterfall, stuck in a cyclone, trying to build rafts out of shoelaces and hope.

Indeed, the discussion of where we are has hit a bit of a monotonous groove, a broken record type feel that just grates at us whenever we hear it. Someone just needs to kick the turntable and get us another round of beers.

A more interesting Pilsner pondering – one that’s at once more mysterious and more clarifying – is the future we dream of, and the past we can learn from. More than just simple cause and effect, the past is our map, and the future is our navigation plan. Without that map, how the hell can you know where you are, where you started, where the path has taken you, how the hell you got into this storm headed straight for a waterfall, and how to navigate out of it? Basically you can’t.

In short, the map not only gives you clarity in understanding how you got here, it allows you the foundation on which to build a legit navigation plan to avoid the waterfall, the cyclones and indeed the Bond villains.

Leaving the boat analogy for a second, just think of it in terms of your own life. You know who you are now because you know who you were – and you know who you want to be because you know who you are now. From here we can extrapolate beyond one body to the entire body politic. Folks in this country are forcibly kept from our own body politic’s past – and we therefore have a sort of Borne Identity crisis (albeit with less secret agent training – but just as much government surveillance).

We don’t know who this body politic is because we have no sense of who that body politic was. It follows then that without that knowledge, we’re walking blind into the future – veering closer and sharper towards that waterfall, to mix my metaphors. Our sense of self vis a vis our body politic is just a collection of messy, incongruous here-say “memories” that have sleepily accumulated into a tangled jingoist web.

How to untangle it? How to know who we are by learning who we were…

Because it’s not just a matter of learning history – that’s too vague. Which history are we talking about? Whose perspective are we pulling from? For instance, the current fight over the statues is much more than a fight about statues. It’s a fight over who gets to tell history – who gets to monopolize the storytelling that then becomes the history we teach each other, our children, our nation? The statues coming down therefore represent those who have had a monopoly on that history. And those tearing them down represent the ones who have been silenced, left out or worse – used to glorify and justify their own oppression.

On Juneteenth this year, I watched black folks climb onto the toppled statue of Confederate General Albert Pike. It gave me chills. Not just because seeing a black body standing on the toppled icon of an avowed racist is a beautiful thing, but because it felt to me that I could feel history quake when that statue hit the ground. I could hear history scream – those silenced voices rising as if released from inside the pedestal that this man held sealed for more than 100 years.

The choir is growing. We’re getting glimpses of the understory – the vast world beneath the crowns. Truly, the past is indeed mysterious – not at all because it us unknowable, like the future – but mysterious because it is thick like a dark forest of trees. And right now, our history books tell us only to to look at the crowns. But the biodiversity, the true life, the roots and the strength – all exist underneath.

The histories are legion. The lived experiences, the stories, the threads of life that make up our present day are uncountable. And while it’s true that we can never know all of history, we can sure as shit do better in knowing more of it. We can dive into that mystery, wander the forest floor, forage, skip, frolic, take pause, rest in the shade of giants, contemplate, listen and learn.

The forest is huge – and doubtlessly, it can feel daunting just wondering where to start looking. We’ve been programmed to just trust what we see in those textbooks – fashioned from crowns. You know, some dudes with buckles on their hats got corn from some folks with feathers in their hair and they lived happily ever after…or something. You may chuckle reading that but you’d be amazed at how many people really follow that line of thinking – or maybe you wouldn’t be.

Either way, with this horrifically twisted story and many others, the question to ask is “whose story is this?” The answer to almost all of these is “some rich dead white guy.” That’ll vary here and there but overwhelmingly, that’s the answer. So, then the question is – who else lived that experience? Who else has a story from that place and time that hasn’t been shared? That we haven’t learned, or taught, or amplified? And importantly, are these people still here? Are there descendants that carry their ancestor’s stories – have written about them, saved them, shared them, and we just never heard about it because we were too busy with those tree-top textbooks? Those busy and sponge-like minds sopping up a monopolized history, for the glory of the crowned.

Indeed as we dig, finding out why these stories were buried in the first place is a lesson in and of itself. There is always someone who benefits from erasing, silencing and burying history. Likewise there is always someone who suffers. For example, in order to bolster the genocidal lie of manifest destiny, indigenous history has been so harshly whitewashed that its faded and subtle contours are today only visible to the patient and keen forest walker.

In West Virginia, for instance, the history of radical resistance that saw white and black coal miners marching together, tying on red bandanas as proud rednecks resolutely standing up to the coal industry has been buried – deep. Kids aren’t taught about how these coal miners worked together to gain basic worker’s rights. Rather, they’re taught to take pride in what’s been stolen from them – livelihoods, lives, clean air, water and land. They’re taught that unions are bad – a fact that flies in the face of that very same history that’s been buried so deep. Of course, it has to be! How else can you convince a people that their human rights are subservient to corporate profit a mere two generations after people fought against that very same paradigm? How else could you so cunningly twist the word “redneck” from something radical built on justice and equality to something derogatory akin to right-wing nut job?

A lot has gone into burying these histories. And it’s heavy work digging them up. It’s heavy work toppling a monolithic history – but it’s beautiful work. It’s powerful to see these stories echo in the present – it’s powerful to feel the reverberations across the land – from Ohio to California to Louisiana to Pennsylvania.

Patchwork and path-work, these stories are that map – showing us how deep the waters of solidarity are – that there is more than just this storm and these assholes steering our ship. There is a future beyond this hurricane. And by knowing how we got here, why we got here and where the fuck ‘here’ even is, those dreams for the future begin to crystallize – the manifold pathways that could bring us there begin to emerge. Wisps of hope turn into guiding winds – bungling attempts at sailing gradually become the muscle memory of those who have weathered this storm before us. Time stretches and contracts and the mystery of the past radiates resolve midst the oppression – a luminescent strength from stories that were buried, and became seeds. And the mystery of the future feels buoyant, not a sinking anchor we’re already tied to, drowning.

I know we all feel a little sea-sick right now, but (flowery language aside) in short, grab a hold of something, look to the past – not to try and get back, but to get forwards. All hands on deck.

TESTING IS NOT CAUSING CASE COUNTS TO RISE

By Charles Ornstein and Ash Ngu, ProPublica.

July 2, 2020




https://popularresistance.org/testing-is-not-causing-case-counts-to-rise/



The Virus Is Just Spreading Faster.

The Trump administration has doubled down on its claims that coronavirus case counts are up because the U.S. has increased testing. However, a closer look at graphs of testing numbers and positive cases shows that this isn’t the case for many states.

President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence have repeatedly attributed the increase in the coronavirus case count in the United States to an increase in testing.

“We’re doing so much testing, so much more than any other country,” Trump said in an interview with CBN News on Monday. “And to be honest with you, when you do more testing, you find more cases. And then they report our cases are through the roof.”

“I would just encourage you all, as we talk about these things, to make sure and continue to explain to your citizens the magnitude of increase in testing,” Pence said on a call with the nation’s governors last week, according to audio obtained by The New York Times. “And that in most of the cases where we are seeing some marginal rise in number, that’s more a result of the extraordinary work you’re doing.”

These assertions are not backed up by the data, a ProPublica analysis shows.

While it is true that there has been a dramatic increase in testing since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, the increase in positive cases in recent weeks cannot be attributed to the rise in testing alone.

After weeks in which coronavirus cases and deaths were slowly declining, the tide has turned. On Wednesday, the United States surpassed its previous record high number of cases, reached in April when the virus was battering the Northeast, according to data gathered from states by The COVID Tracking Project. Hospitalizations are also increasing, though they are far from their peak nationally in April.

“The tip of the iceberg can’t be growing with the iceberg shrinking,” said Dr. Sten Vermund, dean of the Yale School of Public Health. “It violates laws of physics and oceanography.”

A White House spokesman did not return an email seeking comment.

Deaths have not increased, but they are considered a lagging indicator. It takes several days after exposure for someone with COVID-19 to show symptoms and an additional five to seven days, on average, for the illness to be severe enough to require hospitalization. After that, it can take a couple days to a week to progress to intensive care, and a patient can linger there for some time before recovering or dying.

“Just speaking as an epidemiologist, if I saw rising testing, rising case numbers and declining hospitalizations and deaths, I would say that Donald Trump and Vice President Pence are correct,” Vermund said. Conversely, if those measures are rising, “I would say that they are blowing smoke.”

ProPublica looked at changes in the seven-day average of COVID-19 tests performed and the change in the overall number of positive tests in each state from Memorial Day, May 25, to Tuesday. By Memorial Day, most states had reopened and news reports noted that groups were congregating again.



In other states, including Arizona, Texas and Florida, which did not see a wave of early cases and deaths, the increase in positive results has far surpassed testing growth. In Florida, testing has even decreased a bit comparing the seven days through Tuesday to the same period before Memorial Day. (Florida recorded an abnormally high number of new tests on May 20, which may have inflated the rolling average on May 25.)



Texas and Florida each logged more than 5,000 new cases Wednesday. Hospitalizations are also on the rise in these states.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis told reporters on Saturday that testing alone does not account for the increase in COVID-19 cases in his state. “Even with the testing increasing or being flat, the number of people testing positive is accelerating faster than that,” DeSantis said at a briefing at the state Capitol. “You know that’s evidence that there’s transmission within those communities.”

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott acknowledged Wednesday that the state is experiencing a “massive outbreak” and that additional restrictions may be needed to ensure hospitals don’t become overloaded. On Thursday, he paused the state’s reopening and ordered a halt to elective surgeries in four large counties.

As of Thursday morning, the state reported that 4,739 patients were hospitalized with confirmed COVID-19 infections. That compares to 1,511 on Memorial Day. The Texas Medical Center, which encompasses several major teaching hospitals in Houston, reported that 97% of its 1,330 ICU beds were full on Wednesday. It expects to exceed its ICU capacity by Thursday and then run through its “sustainable surge capacity” in about 12 days. The situation is so dire that Texas Children’s Hospital is now admitting adult patients because of the spike in cases in the Houston region.

A handful of states, including California and North Carolina, saw increases in both testing and in positive results that roughly tracked each other, though the increase in positive cases outpaced the increase in testing. In the case of California, the share of positive results has recently pulled away from any increase in testing. California reported more than 7,000 new infections on Wednesday.



Caitlin Rivers, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said she considers three factors when assessing the pandemic’s direction in a state: the number of new cases, the percentage of tests that are positive and hospitalizations.

If cases are going up and everything else is declining or remaining flat, Rivers said, there may not be reason to be concerned.

“For the states that we know are in trouble and it looks like exponential growth has resumed, it looks like those other indicators are headed in the wrong direction,” she said.

It’s difficult to compare what’s happening in states experiencing current waves with what occurred in New York, New Jersey and Michigan in late March and early April. Because of severe shortages in testing and problems with the accuracy of tests, many people who were sick or exposed to someone who was sick weren’t able to get tested.

Even still, this image tweeted Thursday by New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy shows the shape of the curve of positive tests. At one point, one in every two tests came back positive for the coronavirus.



By comparison, more than 20% of tests are coming back positive in Arizona; the figure has topped 10% in Texas. (View data from your state here.)

If anything, experts say, the increase in testing over the past two months should bring with it a lower rate of positive results. Now that tests are readily available, people can get tested, whether they have symptoms of COVID-19 or not. This includes the “worried well,” meaning people with no known exposure and no symptoms who are nervous that they may have the virus.

If the virus is under control, “the likelihood of an increasing positivity rate with substantial increase in testing is low,” Vermund said.

The malign Russians and Chinese are coming

A feeble Russiagate 2.0 attempt coincides with hypocritical attacks on the new Hong Kong national security law

By PEPE ESCOBAR

JULY 2, 2020




https://asiatimes.com/2020/07/the-malign-russians-and-chinese-are-coming/




No less than 78.03% of Russians have just voted in support of constitutional amendments.

Among these, we find the paramount Atlanticist obsession: the possibility that Vladimir Putin will be able to run for two more presidential terms.

Predictably, anguished cries of “Dictator! Dictator!” have been lobbied like deadly shells all across the Beltway.

They might even silence the echoes of the latest CIA press release to the New York Times, based on “raw” intel, and supported by no evidence or proof whatsoever, that Russia had been paying bounties to the Afghan Taliban to kill US troops.

A crafty amalgamated headline in the Washington Post – the CIA/Jeff Bezos vehicle – gave away the game: “The only people dismissing the Russian bounties intel: The Taliban, Russia and Trump.”

Simpletons will easily fall for it. The message is clear. No one cares about the endless war in and on Afghanistan. The only thing that matters is whether President Trump knew months ago about the intel, and why the National Security Council did not unload another Himalaya of sanctions on Russia.

When in doubt, ask House speaker Nancy Pelosi, a notorious D.C. swamp dweller, who gave away the game with her famous, “With him, all roads lead to Putin. I don’t know what the Russians have on the president, politically, personally, or financially.”

Ray McGovern – who knows one or two things about the CIA – completely debunkedthe CIA plant. He included a key assessment by Scott Ritter – who knows a thing or two about US “intel” from his experience as a former UN weapons inspector in Iraq:

“Perhaps the biggest clue concerning the fragility of the New York Times’ report is contained in the one sentence it provides about sourcing — “The intelligence assessment is said to be based at least in part on interrogations of captured Afghan militants and criminals.” That sentence contains almost everything one needs to know about the intelligence in question, including the fact that the source of the information is most likely the Afghan government as reported through CIA channels.”

No wonder the Kremlin dismissed it for what it is: “an unsophisticated plant.” And fine, sophisticated Russian diplomacy did smell the proverbial rat: the framing of Trump, once again, as a Russian agent.

A delicious touch of mischief was added by a Taliban spokesman: “We” have conducted “target killings” for years “on our own resources.”

Anyone familiar with the Afghanistan quagmire knows that if Moscow wanted to raise hell on Americans, it could easily supply the Taliban with deadly surface and surface to air missiles – and end that endless war in a flash.

That, of course, would send NATO into a frenzy. As NATO is the weaponized arm of the EU, Russian-European relations would be sunk into eternal permafrost.

Russia simply does not need to expel the US from Afghanistan. As much as US bases such as Bagram keep an eye on everything happening in the strategic intersection between Central Asia and South Asia, Russia, China and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) keep an eye on the Americans.

What the SCO wants is to devise a realistic Afghan peace plan – already a work in progress – brokered by Asians, including India, Pakistan and SCO observers Iran and Afghanistan.

Russian diplomacy also clearly identifies the collateral damage of the CIA plant – in fact a meek Russiagate 2.0 attempt, but with perfect timing.

Everything that Putin and Trump had been negotiating – the oil market, arms control, the G-7, and of course Afghanistan – is now on hold. The only “winner” would be NATO’s wet dream of – hostile – power play, capable of thwarting the Eurasia integration project led in tandem by China and Russia’s “pivot to Asia”.



Meanwhile, in Hong Kong…

Hybrid War by the Deep State on Russia, a relentless affair, now proceeds in tandem with Hybrid War on China.

So cries of deep despair once again had to be lobbied all across the NATO spectrum when, 23 years after the Hong Kong handover, the special administrative region (SAR) finally started to be de facto decolonized.

The full text of the Hong Kong National Security Law is here. It got the seal of approval of President Xi Jinping only a few hours before midnight on June 30 – exactly 23 years after the handover.

Article 9 is particularly interesting: it stresses the necessity to “strengthen public communication, guidance, supervision and regulation over matters concerning national security, including those relating to schools, social organizations, the media and the internet.”

This means that if media and social media are let loose in Hong Kong, 5th columnists will run riot, as they do in any color revolution, and as they did during the “protests” last year, black blocs included. Now it’s a matter of being responsible, or otherwise landing in major legal trouble.

The new National Security Law is as much about preventing sedition – and Hybrid War tactics – as smashing money laundering by dodgy mainland characters. There is nothing extraordinary with Hong Kong now having legislation with a broad extrajudicial reach.

The US arbiters itself the privilege of being extrajudicial as it sees fit. Take the Julian Assange case, facing extradition to the US for the “crime” of acting as a publisher, committed outside US territory.

The Assange case – complete with psychological torture inflicted by British minions in a high-security prison fit for terrorists – reduces to ashes the whole US hysteria over Hong Kong.

And then there are European so-called leaders, in unison, condemning China over the “deplorable” security law.

The late, great Gore Vidal told me in London in 1987 that in the future Europe would be a mere, inconsequential boutique. Now Europe is in fact terrified that sooner rather than later it will be reduced into Far Western Asia. Talk about the revenge of history on those who named Asia “the Far East”.

As Covid-19 Takes Toll, DeVos Denounced for New 'Craven' Public School Privatization Scheme

"With our country dealing with a pandemic, an economic recession, and structural racism, she's spied an opening to exploit this crisis to resuscitate her failed agenda."


by
Jake Johnson, staff writer




https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/07/02/covid-19-takes-toll-devos-denounced-new-craven-public-school-privatization-scheme







With the Trump administration planning to demand that Congress devote a large chunk of the state and local education funding in the next Covid-19 relief package to a new grant program for private and religious schools, the 1.7 million-member American Federation of Teachers on Thursday accused Education Secretary Betsy DeVos of attempting to exploit the pandemic to advance her privatization agenda.

"It is telling that, after spending more than three years doing nothing to help the public schools that 90 percent of children attend, Betsy DeVos races to divert resources into private hands 48 hours after the Supreme Court's decision in Espinoza," Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said in a statement, referring to the high court's ruling Tuesday that religious schools cannot be excluded from taxpayer aid programs.

"Secretary DeVos and President Trump are using this pandemic as an excuse to push an ideological privatization agenda that would divert much-needed funds away from our public schools."
—Sen. Patty Murray

"With our country dealing with a pandemic, an economic recession, and structural racism, she's spied an opening to exploit this crisis to resuscitate her failed agenda," said Weingarten. "And it's especially sickening that, in the middle of a national reckoning over race, when poor schools are in desperate need of funds to reopen safely, DeVos hijacks the anniversary of the Civil Rights Act to shift support away from where it's needed most."

"DeVos' craven attempts to divide and privatize would be laughable if the stakes weren't so high," Weingarten added.

McClatchy reported Thursday that the Trump administration intends to ask Congress "for a 'one-time, emergency appropriation' for a new grant proposal" that would "be provided to states to distribute to nonprofit institutions that disburse scholarships to qualified students who want to attend non-public schools."




"The White House is seeking to have 10% of the amount that Congress approves for state and local educational agencies set aside for the grants," according to McClatchy. "Trump will also seek approval of $5 billion in federal tax credits for businesses and individuals who donate to the scholarship programs."

Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), the top Democrat on the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, warned in a statement Thursday that "Secretary DeVos and President Trump are using this pandemic as an excuse to push an ideological privatization agenda that would divert much-needed funds away from our public schools that serve approximately 90% of students across the country."

"Right now, our public education system is facing unprecedented challenges—public schools are scrambling to implement safety protocols with limited funds, millions of education jobs are on the line due to looming budget shortfalls, and families across the country are struggling with a chaotic, uncertain reality," Murray said.

"On the anniversary of Civil Rights Act of 1964, it's also important to note the pandemic has exacerbated severe racial inequities that have long existed in our education system," the Washington Democrat continued. "If Republicans have any sincere interest in addressing these inequities, they should show it by working with Democrats to invest in public education and address systemic racism rather than siphoning resources away when they're needed more than ever."

'A Scandal': Contracts Show Trump Giving Big Pharma Free Rein to Price Gouge Taxpayer-Funded Coronavirus Drugs

"The amount of money the government is throwing at companies is unprecedented. Normally when you write bigger checks, you should have more leverage, not less leverage."


Jake Johnson, staff writer




https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/07/02/scandal-contracts-show-trump-giving-big-pharma-free-rein-price-gouge-taxpayer-funded







Government contracts obtained by consumer advocacy group Knowledge Ecology International show that the Trump administration is giving pharmaceutical companies a green light to charge exorbitant prices for potential coronavirus treatments developed with taxpayer money by refusing to exercise federal authority to constrain costs.


Five of the seven documents reviewed by KEI are classified as "other transaction agreements," which allow federal agencies to loosen regulations designed to protect the public in order to help companies streamline the product development process.Through the Freedom of Information Act, Knowledge Ecology International (KEI) last week got hold of a number of heavily redacted agreements between the Trump administration and major pharmaceutical companies like Johnson & Johnson, Regeneron, and Genentech.

In the case of four contracts for potential Covid-19 treatments or vaccines with Johnson & Johnson, Genentech, Regeneron, and Roche issued by the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) and the Pentagon, the Trump administration omitted a standard condition requiring that products developed with taxpayer money be made available to the public "on reasonable terms."

"This means that the government has limited its ability to intervene if the pharmaceutical companies (which are party to the agreements and are receiving hundreds of millions of dollars to conduct the research) charge unreasonable prices for the resulting Covid-19 vaccines or treatments," KEI noted in a press release.

KEI also found that federal contracts with Genentech and Regeneron for coronavirus treatments contain passages restricting the government's ability to "have generic manufacturers make and distribute through pharmacies and other commercial outlets an effective diagnostic test, drug, or vaccine for Covid-19."







The details of the contracts come just days after the Trump administration faced backlash from consumer groups for refusing to require Gilead to charge a reasonable price for its Covid-19 treatment remdesivir. On Monday, as Common Dreams reported, Gilead announced it will charge U.S. hospitals around $3,120 per privately insured patient for a treatment course of remdesivir, which was developed with the help of at least $70.5 million in taxpayer funding.

"Allowing Gilead to set the terms during a pandemic represents a colossal failure of leadership by the Trump administration," Peter Maybarduk, director of Public Citizen's Access to Medicines Program, said in a statement Monday. "The U.S. government has authority and a responsibility to steward the technology it helped develop."


As the Washington Post reported Wednesday, "[Johnson & Johnson] has a $456 million contract with BARDA to develop a coronavirus vaccine and a $152 million contract to conduct screening of drug compounds that could be Covid-19 treatments."

"Regeneron has contracts worth up to $130 million to develop two therapies for the disease," the Post noted. "Roche's Genentech subsidiary has contracts worth $47 million to develop a pair of therapies."

James Love, the director of KEI, told the Post that "the amount of money the government is throwing at companies is unprecedented."

"Normally when you write bigger checks," Love said, "you should have more leverage, not less leverage."

Katie Porter Demands Resignation of Trump Small Business Chief for Enabling 'Abuse' of Covid-19 Relief Funds

"She is fighting with the nonpartisan GAO on basic data that lets them do their job of transparency and accountability," Porter said of small business administrator Jovita Carranza.


by
Jake Johnson, staff writer




https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/07/03/katie-porter-demands-resignation-trump-small-business-chief-enabling-abuse-covid-19




California Congresswoman Katie Porter is demanding the resignation of the Trump administration's small business chief for enabling "abuse" and "waste" of coronavirus relief funds and refusing to comply with basic government oversight efforts.

Porter's call came after the Government Accountability Office (GAO) said in a report last week that it "encountered the most difficulty trying to obtain information from the Small Business Administration (SBA)" during the process of examining the Trump administration's handling of the $650 billion Paycheck Protection Program (PPP).


"Because of the number of loans approved, the speed with which they were processed, and the limited safeguards, there is a significant risk that some fraudulent or inflated applications were approved," the GAO said. "In addition, the lack of clear guidance has increased the likelihood that borrowers may misuse loan proceeds or be surprised they do not qualify for full loan forgiveness."The GAO also said SBA's attempts to speed up the loan application process left the sprawling small business relief program "more susceptible to fraudulent applications."

In an interview on MSNBC Thursday, Porter argued the GAO's findings demonstrate that SBA administrator Jovita Carranza is "unfit to continue in that role."

"The PPP program, that $650 billion, this is one of the biggest government programs in our country's history, and she is fighting with the nonpartisan GAO on basic data that lets them do their job of transparency and accountability," said the California Democrat. "That is the wrong mindset for somebody whose title is administrator."

Watch:





In a series of tweets last week, Porter warned that the SBA "has essentially no plans to review 99% of PPP loans."

"According to the [GAO] report, small businesses that didn't need the money returned at least 3,800 loans," Porter wrote. "How are you going to know if the other 4,576,388 loans are legitimate? Any answers, [Treasury Secretary] Steve Mnuchin or Jovita Carranza?"

"Carranza has mismanaged this program from start to end, refused to comply with lawful oversight, and enabled waste, fraud, and abuse of taxpayer dollars," said Porter. "She should take responsibility and resign."

The SBA and the Treasury Department have both come under fire for resisting calls to disclose basic information about recipients of small business loans. On June 11, as Common Dreams reported, Mnuchin told the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship that information about PPP loan recipients is "proprietary" and "confidential."

In response to widespread backlash—including from Porter and other lawmakers—Mnuchin and the SBA agreed to disclose the names of borrowers who received loans of $150,000 or more.

On top of Trump administration intransigence, advocacy groups have warned that oversight of Covid-19 relief funds has been lax because the commission created by Congress to monitor the money remains without a chair nearly 100 days after its inception. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) must agree on the appointment.

"Without a head, the commission has been severely constrained in its critical work of overseeing the economic stabilization efforts that the Treasury and Federal Reserve were charged with in the CARES Act," Lisa Gilbert, executive vice president of Public Citizen, said in a statement Wednesday. "Filling this seat must be a top priority for congressional leadership so that the American public can be reassured that there is robust oversight of our money as it goes out the door."