Saturday, July 11, 2020
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Supreme Court rules against Trump on releasing tax returns, but allows delay
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/07/10/supr-j10.html
By John Burton
10 July 2020
The Supreme Court’s October 2019 term ended yesterday with pair of 7–2 decisions rejecting Donald Trump’s assertion of absolute presidential immunity from subpoenas. The two closely watched cases were the subject of telephonic oral arguments last May that lasted more than three hours.
Any remaining chance that Trump’s tax returns might become public before the November election, however, seems dashed by the court’s failure to order that the financial documents, which are in the possession of Trump’s accountants and lenders, be turned over forthwith. Instead both cases were remanded to the lower courts burdened with various instructions to consider additional factors before compelling any production of documents. Trump’s legal team will have no problem running out the clock.
Trump not only asserted absolute presidential immunity from subpoena, he sought to extend that immunity to cover third parties like banks and accounting firms with which he did business before becoming president. The court majority rejected his arguments, but the practical result of the decision is to push back any release of compromising financial information until after the election, the main short-term goal of the White House.
The tax returns and other financial documents no doubt reveal extensive financial chicanery and tax avoidance by Trump himself, family members and the complex network of entities they control.
Both controlling opinions were authored by Chief Justice John Roberts and supported by what seems to be a carefully assembled political coalition: the four more liberal associate justices, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, all joined without issuing separate opinions, and both associate justices appointed by Trump, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, voted with the majority as well. Only associate justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented and would have quashed all the subpoenas, effectively placing the president above the law.
It seems clear that Roberts, who is dedicated to preserving what remains of the wilting credibility of the Supreme Court, wanted to pose as a defender of the traditional separation of powers, which strictly limits the president’s authority, while at the same time delaying the release of the records until after the election, calculating that otherwise, Trump might defy the court openly and challenge it to enforce its ruling.
Trump v. Vance overruled Trump’s claim of absolute immunity from the Manhattan grand jury subpoenas directed to his longtime accounting firm, Mazars USA, that sought financial documents relating to what Roberts delicately characterized as “business transactions involving multiple individuals whose conduct may have violated state law.” In fact the District Attorney opened a criminal investigation following the federal conviction of Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen for orchestrating payoffs made illegally with campaign funds to silence women with whom Trump supposedly had sexual affairs.
Roberts began his analysis with the 1807 federal prosecution of Aaron Burr for treason. Following the infamous duel with Alexander Hamilton, the former vice-president allegedly schemed to raise a private army and seize territory from Spain, and then foment a rebellion to form an independent nation out of the Louisiana territory recently purchased from France.
Burr subpoenaed correspondence from President Thomas Jefferson, who objected on the basis of executive immunity and state secrets. In a biting rejection of Trump’s claim to absolute immunity from subpoenas, Roberts quoted at length from Chief Justice John Marshall’s opinion overruling Jefferson’s objection.
Marshall, according to Roberts, wrote that the president does not “stand exempt from the general provisions of the Constitution.” Citing the “common law” of England on which United States jurisprudence is based, Marshall identified as the “single reservation” to the duty to testify in response to a subpoena was “the case of the king,” whose “dignity” was seen as “incompatible” with appearing “under the process of the court.”
Roberts continued, “But, as Marshall explained, a king is born to power and can ‘do no wrong.’ The President, by contrast, is ‘of the people’ and subject to the law.”
“In the two centuries since the Burr trial, successive Presidents have accepted Marshall’s ruling that the Chief Executive is subject to subpoena,” Roberts concluded.
Roberts addressed Trump’s back-up argument that at minimum grand jury subpoenas directed to papers of sitting presidents “must satisfy a heightened need standard,” in other words that the evidence is “critical,” “not available from any other source,” and needed “now, rather than at the end of the President’s term.” Roberts called Trump’s argument a “double standard that has no basis in law.”
Rather than ordering the accounting firm to turn over the papers immediately to the grand jury, where they would still be subject to secrecy, Roberts sent the case back to the lower court with an invitation for Trump to raise more procedural and legal hurdles.
Trump “can challenge the subpoena as an attempt to influence the performance of his official duties, in violation of the Supremacy Clause,” or “argue that compliance with a particular subpoena would impede his constitutional duties,” Roberts wrote.
In Trump v. Mazars USA, the president sued to block subpoenas served by the House of Representatives Oversight and Reform, Intelligence and Finance Services Committees on the accounting firm and two of Trump’s biggest lenders, Deutsche Bank and Capital One. These subpoenas sought, according to Roberts’ description, “a decade’s worth of transactions by the President and his family,” ostensibly to “guide legislative reform in areas ranging from money laundering and terrorism to foreign involvement in US elections.”
This clash was literally unprecedented, according to Roberts. He outlined instances of Congress seeking documents from the president at least as far back as 1792, but “Historically, disputes … have not ended up in court. Instead, they have been hashed out in the hurly-burly, the give-and-take of the political process between the legislative and the executive.”
“This dispute therefore represents a significant departure from historical practice,” Roberts wrote. “We recognize that it is the first of its kind to reach this Court.”
Roberts then announced that lower courts “must perform a careful analysis that takes adequate account of the separation of powers principles at stake, including both the significant legislative interests of Congress and the unique position of the President,” listing four factors: the legislative need, the breadth of the request, the validity of the legislative purpose and the burden imposed.
“Other considerations may be pertinent as well; one case every two centuries does not afford enough experience for an exhaustive list,” Roberts concluded.
Under a more democratic view of the balance of powers, the House of Representatives should itself determine whether subpoenaed documents relate to legitimate legislative concerns. Roberts’ ruling inserts the entire federal judiciary, stacked with Trump-appointed reactionaries, between the House and the executive branch to arbitrate the legitimacy of Congressional actions and is itself an anti-democratic interference with the balance of powers.
Trump immediately tweeted his reaction to the rulings with his typical cocktail of ignorance, mendacity and grievance, complaining that “Courts in the past have given ‘broad deference.’ BUT NOT ME!” adding, “This is all a political prosecution. I won the Mueller Witch Hunt, and others, and now I have to keep fighting in a politically corrupt New York. Not fair to this Presidency or Administration!”
Trump’s personal lawyer, Jay Sekulow, contradicted his client. “We are pleased that in the decisions issued today, the Supreme Court has temporarily blocked both Congress and New York prosecutors from obtaining the president’s tax records,” according to a statement. Confirming the stonewalling will continue, Sekulow added, “We will now proceed to raise additional constitutional and legal issues in the lower courts.”
Fiat Chrysler ends third shift at Windsor, Ontario plant eliminating 1,375 jobs
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/07/10/fcac-j10.html
By Carl Bronski
10 July 2020
Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) announced last week that the end of the third shift at its Windsor, Ontario auto assembly plant is irrevocably slated for next Monday, July 13. The announcement finalizes earlier plans to eliminate the shift and the 1,375 jobs assigned to it.
About 700 senior workers have accepted a buyout retirement package. Lower seniority workers will simply be laid off and placed on a list for possible rehire as Temporary Part Time workers (TPTs) when such openings occur and at significantly reduced pay and benefits.
When the initial announcement was made in 2019, Unifor officials claimed to have been blindsided by the planned layoffs. The union then did nothing to organize opposition to FCA’s aggressive corporate downsizing, which is driven by its determination to boost profitability. Instead, it parroted the company’s justification for the move so as to reinforce the sense of inevitability about the process. This no doubt played a role in encouraging many workers to accept buyouts.
Talking like a corporate executive, Unifor Local 444 President Dave Cassidy said the cuts were “strictly a business decision based on the Pacifica.” He rejected any comparison to the then impending shutdown of the Oshawa GM plant.
Right-wing Ontario Progressive Conservative Premier Doug Ford then issued a demagogic statement claiming his government “stood behind” Fiat Chrysler workers. He went on to boast that his government was dedicated to boosting corporate profits. “Our government is lowering taxes, lowering electricity rates and slashing red tape. There has never been a better time for auto manufacturers to invest in the province of Ontario,” declared Ford.
The New Democratic Party issued similar hollow statements of solidarity with Windsor autoworkers, while Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau’s Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development, Navdeep Bains, simply expressed his “disappointment” with FCA’s decision.
The Windsor plant, which builds the Chrysler Pacifica minivan, Pacifica Hybrid, Grand Caravan, and Chrysler Voyager, has operated on a three-shift schedule since 1993. The plant is the largest employer in Windsor, which has been devastated by a steady reduction of auto production in the city, once called the automotive capital of Canada. There are about 5,900 workers currently employed at the facility, which underwent retooling in 2015 to build the Pacifica. The plant can build up to 1,500 vehicles per day.
The job cuts will have an immediate knock-on effect in the city’s auto parts sector. It is expected that local FCA suppliers Flex-N-Gate and Syncreon will shed at least 200 jobs due to the Chrysler retrenchment.
The announcement of a final layoff date had been expected by autoworkers at the plant for some time. FCA has revised the shift’s end date five times since the initial announcement was made last year. In the ensuing months the company delayed issuing a conclusive end date as it calibrated production volumes with the plummeting sales figures of its Grand Caravan and Pacifica models and then, more recently, recalibrated once again to adjust for lost production during the COVID-19 shutdown.
Sales numbers for the facility’s main product, the Chrysler Pacifica, have steadily declined in recent years. Last year, purchases of the model dropped by 17 percent in the vital US market and by 38 percent in Canada. Sales of the Grand Caravan were down by 19 percent in the US and by 15 percent in Canada.
In mid-March, North American automakers temporarily closed their plants for two months after autoworkers in Canada, the United States and Mexico began to refuse unsafe work and carry out other job actions that included walkouts and wildcat strikes to protest the lack of protections against the spread of the coronavirus in their plants. In fact, it was a day and a half work refusal at the FCA operation in Windsor that began the cascade of job actions across the continent.
Windsor-Essex County, which includes the City of Windsor, remains one of Ontario’s COVID-19 hotspots with infection rates skyrocketing amongst migrant farm worker populations.
Work refusals have once again gathered steam in plants located across the river in Detroit, where virus infections are spiking. In recent days, autoworkers at FCA Jefferson North and FCA Sterling Heights have staged work stoppages over recurring infections. In both plants workers formed their own rank-and-file safety factory committees in opposition to the joint United Auto Workers (UAW) and FCA drive to force workers to continue production regardless of the deadly virus threat (see: Fiat Chrysler threatens to fire workers who stop production over COVID-19 concerns).
There was one other contributing factor to the previous delays in finalizing the third shift closure date in Windsor—the upcoming contract negotiations at the Canadian operations of the Detroit Three automakers.
It is no coincidence that the Windsor layoffs will take effect only two months before contracts expire at FCA, Ford, and General Motors facilities in Canada for about 16,000 autoworkers. It is expected that vehicle production in Canada on the part of the Detroit Three automakers will fall another 27 percent over the life of the next contract. The latest layoffs will be used as a threat by FCA to bully and intimidate autoworkers into accepting sweeping concessions, including wage and job cuts.
The future of 160 jobs at FCA’s Etobicoke casting plant is already in doubt. At the company’s Brampton assembly operation, which employs 3,400 workers, production capacity is currently significantly underutilized, as the future of the Dodge Challenger, Dodge Charger and Chrysler 300 sedans remain in limbo.
This strategy is not limited to FCA. Just weeks before the Canada Detroit Three contract negotiations are set to begin, analysts are reporting that Ford may be planning to phase out its Oakville assembly plant by 2023 due to the cancellation of its Edge cross-over program. Ford has axed more than 1,000 jobs in Oakville over the past year. For its part, General Motors laid down the gauntlet last year with the shuttering of its keystone assembly plant in Oshawa, Ontario that saw 2,300 assembly jobs slashed and thousands more auto parts jobs destroyed.
Unifor President Jerry Dias has already signalled that he will once again do everything in his power to suppress worker job action and to prove to the Detroit Three automakers that Unifor can be relied on to ensure that their Canadian plants are among their most profitable anywhere in the world.
In a May interview with Automotive News Canada previewing the contract negotiations, Dias went out of his way to proclaim his opposition to a strike. If “after months and months and months of reduced volume based on the pandemic” things are “starting to get back to a resemblance of where they were pre-crisis, no one is going to want a disruption,” said Dias. “And I mean nobody; both the workers and the automakers.”
With workers having been driven back into the plants in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is an urgent need for workers to build rank-and-file safety committees independent of and in opposition to the union. These committees must ensure that health and safety precautions are enforced and production is immediately shut down when infections occur. In opposition to the automakers’ demands for layoffs to boost investor payouts and corporate profitability, they should also take up the fight to defend all jobs.
These committees must be the springboard to seize the conduct of the fight for a new contract out of the hands of the Unifor bureaucrats, forge unity with autoworkers in the US and Mexico , and organize a counteroffensive against all concessions, two-tier wages, and job cuts.
Neyveli Thermal plant explosion in southern India kills 13 workers
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/07/10/nlcb-j10.html
By Arun Kumar
10 July 2020
The massive July 1 explosion in a thermal power plant which killed 13 workers at the government-owned Neyveli Lignite Corporation India Ltd (NLC) in Tamil Nadu was the second fatal blast at the company in just two months.
The latest tragic loss of life was not simply an accident, but an industrial catastrophe waiting to happen and the result of management’s criminal refusal to take action following the death of eight workers in the previous explosion on May 7. As in previous accidents, this month’s blast further underscores how capitalist production places profit interests above the lives of workers, disregarding even the most basic safety requirements.
On July 1, six NLC contract workers—Ramanathan, Nagaraj, Venkatesa Permal, Silambarasan, Arun Kumar and Padmanabhan—died on the spot and 17 employees, including permanent and contract workers, a junior engineer and two supervisors, were badly injured and hospitalised. Seven out of the 17 later succumbed to their injuries having been initially taken to an NLC-run hospital in Neyveli and then shifted to the private Appollo hospital, in Chennai, the Tamil Nadu state capital.
The NLC is a highly-profitable, central government-owned corporation, which mines lignite and generates electricity. It has four open cut mines with an annual capacity of about 30 million tonnes in Neyveli, and an open cut operation at Barsingsar in Rajasthan state. NLC also owns four thermal electric power stations in Neyveli and one at Barsingsar.
The May 7 explosion occurred after NLC resumed operations on April 8 at the plant without carrying out mandatory maintenance and safety procedures after the national government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi ended lockdown measures. This callous disregard for workers safety and the Indian government’s determination to “reopen the economy” has seen a rapid spread of the coronavirus in Tamil Nadu and across the country.
According to hotindiareport.com, the July 1 explosion was in Unit V of TPS II, an outdated boiler that had shut down late on June 30. Workers and engineering staff were “attempting to revive the unit when a fire reportedly broke out in the boiler, resulting in the explosion” at 10 o’clock the next morning.
As the WSWS previously noted in its report on the May 7 explosion, NLC has a notorious record of ignoring basic safety measures.
The downtoearth.org website has stated that over the past five years NLC has had two major accidents and one minor one that have exposed serious maintenance and safety problems in the old units being used in the company’s thermal power stations.
The efficient and safe-operating life of a thermal power plant is around 25 years. Despite calls by the Delhi-based non-profit Centre for Science and Environment, however, NLC has delayed commissioning new units. Its power stations have been running with units that should have been retired between 2011 and 2015. In fact, some of its units have been in operation for as long as fifty-seven years.
A report on this month’s explosion by newsclick.in included comments from NLC management, the trade unions and the Indian government.
In an attempt to diffuse widespread anger over the catastrophe, management has suspended a senior official and India’s coal ministry initiated a high-level inquiry and internal probe. An NLC official told the media that at least 3 million rupees ($US40,000) will be given to each family of the workers killed and 500,000 rupees ($6,770) to those injured. Regular employment will also be provided to an eligible member of the family of the deceased.
Additionally, Tamil Nadu Chief Minister K. Palaniswami has announced 300,000-rupee compensation for the families of workers killed, along with 100,000 rupees ($1,330) and 50,000 rupees ($665) to those who suffered serious and mild injuries respectively. India’s home minister, Amit Shah, offered condolences for those killed and said the victims and survivors will be given “all possible help.”
Shah and Palaniswami’s crocodile tears and the pittance in compensation packages given by NLC and the state government are an attempt to dissipate the growing anger of workers and their families and to cover up company and government responsibility for the repeated industrial accidents.
The NLC’s two recognised unions are affiliated to the Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU) and the Labour Progressive Front (LPF)—federations of the Stalinist Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPM and its ally the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), the main state opposition party, respectively. These organisations are complicit in the tragedy, having refused to seriously demand mandatory safety measures at NLC plants.
While the last explosion forced leaders of these unions and affiliated parties to make some “criticism” of safety conditions at NLC plants, this rhetoric was so much hot air.
C. Amirthalingam, general secretary of the NLC General Workers and Employees Union, which is affiliated to the Stalinist CITU, told the media: “The cleaning of boilers used to happen on each shift till a few years back. Now, with the decreasing workforce, daily maintenance has almost stopped. The privatisation of maintenance work and the consequent improper maintenance work have led to recurring accidents.”
CPM state secretary K. Balakrishnan declared: “The private contractors have failed in proper maintenance of the boilers leading to the accident. The details on the process of allocating contracts for maintenance works need immediate enquiry by a high-level committee and action on the culprits.”
Amirthalingam and Balakrishnan’s comments are bogus and cynical. These union officials and the organisations they head have blocked any mobilisation of workers in strikes or other industrial action to demand the decommissioning of outdated and dangerous plants and the establishment of basic safety standards and modern procedures.
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