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https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/01/unem-a01.html
As stock indexes continue their climb
US unemployment supplement expires, setting the stage for mass hunger and homelessness
By Barry Grey
1 August 2020
The $600 weekly unemployment insurance supplement enacted in March as part of the bipartisan multi-trillion-dollar bailout of Wall Street expired Friday, leaving some 25 million US workers laid off due to the coronavirus pandemic facing destitution.
The loss of the federal supplement to state jobless insurance will cut benefits by up to 80 percent in some states, dropping the average national payment from $920 a week to $520, according to some estimates.
In addition, a moratorium on evictions of tenants in buildings with mortgages backed by the federal government, affecting 18 million of the 44 million renter households in the US, expired last week. This means that 11 million households could be served with eviction papers over the next four months, according to the global advisory firm Stout Risius Ross LLC.
With home mortgage payment moratoriums also expiring, a vast growth of homelessness is looming.
Mile-long lineups of cars at food distribution centers have already become commonplace. A cutoff or reduction in the unemployment pay supplement will greatly increase the spread of hunger and even starvation in the US. Already, almost 40 million people do not expect to be able to make their next rent or mortgage payment, and nearly 30 million say they did not have enough to eat during the week ending July 21.
The official unemployment rate, at 11.1 percent, remains the highest since World War II, and the government reported Thursday that new jobless claims for the week ending July 18 rose for the second week in a row, climbing to 1.43 million.
The Labor Department reports that 33.8 million workers are either receiving jobless benefits or have applied and are waiting to see if they will receive them. These workers account for fully 20 percent of the US labor force.
Moreover, the expiration of the unemployment supplement follows Thursday’s report from the Commerce Department that the nation’s gross domestic product fell at a record annualized rate of 32.9 percent in the second quarter, a decline of 9.5 percent from the first quarter of 2020. And this past week, Levi’s, United Air Lines, American Air Lines and Wells Fargo added to the wave of layoff announcements with the warning that tens of thousands of their employees face being furloughed or terminated in the near future.
Under these conditions, the stalemate in Congress over an extension of the unemployment pay supplement, which is certain to result in either the total elimination or a major cut in the benefit, amounts to a declaration of war by the capitalist ruling elite against the entire working population.
This was underscored by the response on Wall Street, where the financial oligarchy reacted to the expiration of benefits on Friday by driving up stock prices on all of the major indices. The Dow climbed by 114 points and Nasdaq shot up by 157 points.
The ruling class is demanding the elimination of the $600 benefit or its reduction in order to carry through its drive to force workers back to work under conditions where its incompetence, indifference and sheer greed have led to the uncontrolled spread of the coronavirus pandemic and the deepest social crisis since the 1930s Depression. Workers are being given the “choice” of going back to factories and workplaces that are breeding grounds for the virus, without any serious protection for themselves or their families, or seeing their families go homeless or hungry.
The Republicans openly denounce the $600 benefit as a “disincentive to work,” because a majority of workers laid off due to the pandemic are receiving more income in jobless pay than they did when they were working. This fact is a stark commentary on the near-poverty wages of most American workers.
But the Democrats echo the Republican line, agreeing, as in the New York Times editorial of July 30, that replacing only “a portion of the income of the average unemployed worker” is “reasonable in normal times,” because it “encourages people to find jobs,” but not in the midst of a pandemic.
In any event, there are no jobs for millions of laid-off workers to return to. As the Economic Policy Institute noted: “There are 14 million more unemployed workers than job openings, meaning millions will remain jobless no matter what they do. Slashing the $600 cannot incentivize people to get jobs that are not there.”
The Republican leadership of the Senate on Monday put forward a series of bills that would immediately slash the federal jobless benefit from $600 to $200 a week through September, and thereafter calibrate the federal addition to state benefits to provide 70 percent of the worker’s previous pay, with a combined maximum of $500.
The Democrats, who passed their so-called HEROES Act in the Democratic-controlled House in May, which would extend the $600 benefit until January, rejected the Republican proposal, setting off negotiations between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer on one side and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows on the other.
President Trump weighed in this week, calling for a stopgap measure that would temporarily extend the federal jobless benefit, at an unspecified amount, as well as the federal moratorium on evictions. In talks on Thursday and Friday, the Democratic leadership rejected a piecemeal deal, nominally insisting on other components of their HEROES Act, including federal aid to state and local governments and additional funding for coronavirus testing.
With no settlement in sight, Senate Republicans adjourned for the weekend, while it was reported that talks would continue between the representatives of the White House and the Democratic leadership.
CBS News reported Friday, citing an unnamed source “with knowledge of the negotiations,” that Meadows first proposed a simple one-week extension of the $600 supplement and then put forward a scaled back bill that would include four months of benefits at $400, along with funding for the reopening of schools and additional funding for the corporate slush fund known as the “small business” Paycheck Protection Program. He agreed, as part of the latter proposal, to strip out the Republican demand for a five-year legal immunity for businesses from lawsuits related to the pandemic.
The Democrats reportedly rejected these offers. However, they made clear they were prepared to accept a substantial reduction in the federal jobless pay supplement.
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland said Tuesday on CNN, “Look, it’s not $600 or bust.” He went on to signal his agreement with the Republicans that the current benefit was a “disincentive to work,” saying, “I think that’s an argument that… has some validity to it, and we ought to deal with that.”
Schumer is jointly sponsoring a bill along with Senator Ron Wyden (Democrat of Oregon) that would progressively cut the federal unemployment supplement by $100 for every drop of 1 percentage point in a state’s unemployment level.
And on Friday, Pelosi reiterated on CNN her position that, prior to the August 7 adjournment of Congress for the party conventions, “We’ll find our common ground” on a relief bill.
Any cut in the benefit, already inadequate given the added costs of dealing with the pandemic and rising staple goods prices, will have devastating consequences for workers already struggling to pay rent and put food on the table.
Bonnie Armstrong, a laid-off server from Naples, Florida, told the local CBS television affiliate WINK, “I won’t be able to pay my rent. The fact is, if you’re offered your position back and you say no, you don’t get any more unemployment.”
Saying she would be glad to return to work, she added, “For every job, there are hundreds of people applying. It’s going to be difficult.”
There are tens of thousands of laid-off workers who have not received any unemployment benefits because their state unemployment offices failed to process their claims. In Wisconsin, where 13 percent of claims were still not processed as of July 7, workers have set up a Twitter group called “Empower Wisconsin.”
One member recently posted: “I haven’t received any money either and I filed on March 24th. Friday I called the phone line and actually got through. I was very nice and respectful and I asked, ‘This Sunday will be week #13, when will I receive benefits?’ Guess what!? She hung up on me… no lie.”
The author also recommends:
Millions face economic and social disaster as Wall Street celebrates
[31 July 2020]
Congress prepares to scrap $600 weekly unemployment payment
[29 July 2020]
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/01/dhsi-a01.html
By Jacob Crosse
1 August 2020
In a chilling attack on journalism and the First Amendment, the Washington Post reported on Thursday that two US journalists, New York Times correspondent Mike Baker and editor in chief of the blog Lawfare, Benjamin Wittes, were the subject of three Open Source Intelligence Reports created by the Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A) within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
The reports summarized the recent social media activity of the establishment journalists including the fact that both had published leaked, unclassified documents regarding the ongoing federal occupation of Portland, Oregon by DHS paramilitary forces. The reports included descriptions and photos of the journalists Twitter profiles. The “intelligence products” also incorporated screengrabs of Baker’s and Wittes’ Twitter posts that featured DHS internal documents, including how many times the posts were liked, commented on, or shared by users.
Included in the reports were public tweets from Wittes in which he revealed internal DHS memos. The memos exposed that DHS intelligence operatives, known as “collectors” had collated intelligence reports on arrested protesters which included “FINTEL,” or financial intelligence. Collectors had also created “baseball cards” of arrested protesters with their faces and personal information included.
“Baseball card” dossiers have been used by the US military and intelligence agencies for decades as a way to familiarize soldiers, drone operators and spies with US imperialism’s most wanted targets. During the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the US Defense Intelligence Agency developed a set of 52 playing cards made up of high-ranking members of the Iraqi government, including Saddam Hussein and his family members. By 2018, all but 6 of Iraq’s “most wanted” had been either killed or captured.
The same types of dossiers, “baseball card” or “yearbook” style, were popularized by President Barack Obama during his “terror Tuesday” sessions which he conducted throughout his presidency. After pouring over the “kill lists” prepared by the intelligence agencies, Obama would personally sign off on the drone assassinations, which included American citizens and 90 percent of the time killed someone else besides the intended target.
The DHS I&A is a domestic intelligence agency aimed squarely at the US population. According to the agency’s own operating principles, the I&A’s mission is to integrate intelligence operations across all agencies within the DHS, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, US Marshals as well as the private sector to “identify, mitigate and respond to threats.”
It is not known exactly to how many private, local, state and federal agencies the reports were disseminated, or if the I&A has compiled reports on other US journalists, civilians or, as the agency describes them, “threats.” It is also unknown if or how many I&A collectors are currently operating in other US cities besides Portland, and with what agencies, public or private, they are currently working.
Illustrating the global nature of the attack on journalism, the unclassified/for official use only reports carried a warning that the information contained therein was only “releasable to the governments of Australia, Canada, United Kingdom and New Zealand,” that is the government's composed of the “Five Eyes” US-led surveillance network. This means that intel reports created by I&A have likely been disseminated to fascist sympathizers within the police agencies in each of these countries.
After the Post published its initial story online Thursday night, DHS spokesman Alexei Woltornist released a memo dated July 31 which tried to distance the agency's leadership from the actions of those directly under his charge. The memo reads in part: “Upon learning about the practice, Acting Secretary [Chad] Wolf directed the DHS Intelligence & Analysis Directorate to immediately discontinue collection information involving members of the press. In no way does the Acting Secretary condone this practice and he has immediately ordered an inquiry into the matter.”
The memo ended, implausibly, with Wolf professing his commitment to, “ensuring that all DHS personnel...respect...civil rights and civil liberties, particular as it relates to the exercise of First Amendment rights.” Journalists have been specifically targeted by police and paramilitaries for assault and arrest since the beginning of the nationwide protests following the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25.
The US Press Freedom Tracker, which catalogs various assaults on the press including arrests, physical attacks, equipment damage and teargassing noted that in the US, as of Thursday, there had been over 612 reported cases of “press freedom incidents” this year. Portland accounts for over one sixth of the nation's total incidents with 106 violations. Minneapolis/St. Paul follows with 99 incidents while New York and Washington, D.C. are nearly tied in third, with 41 and 40 incidents, respectively.
The revelation that the US government is developing intelligence reports on US journalists prompted a letter of “concern” from Democratic senators on the Senate Intelligence Committee. In a letter signed by senators Martin Heinrich (New Mexico), Mark Warner (Virginia), Dianne Feinstein (California), Ron Wyden (Oregon), Kamala Harris (California), Michael Bennet (Colorado) and independent Angus King (Maine), the senators demanded that the I&A maintain its “statute” obligations by keeping the, “congressional intelligence committees fully and currently informed of its operations.”
As is the case with the hundreds of federal agents now being deployed to Democratic controlled cities such as Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, Seattle and Portland, the Democratic party does not actually oppose the deployment of federal goon squads or construction of intelligence dossiers of US citizens as long as they are included in the decision making process.
There is no constituency within the US ruling class, or any other capitalist government, for the defense of democratic rights, including a free press. While Julian Assange is being silenced and jailed for exposing the crimes of US imperialism abroad, US journalists, the vast majority of whom have kept silent or encouraged Assange’s ongoing persecution, now find themselves targets for exposing US police terror at home.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/01/covi-a01.html
By Benjamin Mateus
1 August 2020
Just six months ago on Thursday, January 30, the World Health Organization declared the outbreak of the novel coronavirus and the disease it caused, COVID-19, a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC).
As the Director-General of the WHO, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, noted then, “we don’t know what sorts of damage [it] could do if it were to spread in a country with a weaker health system. We must act now to help countries prepare for that possibility. For all these reasons, I am declaring a PHEIC over the global outbreak of the novel coronavirus. The main reason for this declaration is not because of what is happening in China but because of what is happening in other countries. Our greatest concern is the potential for the virus to spread to countries with weaker health systems that are ill-prepared to deal with it.”
At the time of the PHEIC declaration, there were 7,818 total confirmed cases worldwide, with only 82 cases of COVID-19 without any fatalities outside of mainland China across 18 countries. Dr. Tedros, during the press briefing, also warned, “this is the time for science, not rumors. This is the time for solidarity, not stigma.”
Despite the warning, the wealthy nations of the globe squandered the time that was bought by the lockdowns imposed by China to prepare for the epidemic by imposing flight restrictions and border closures while healthcare and public health infrastructure remained in shambles.
It was only on March 11 that the WHO characterized the COVID-19 epidemic as a pandemic. The number of cases outside of China had risen 13-fold, and the number of cases had reached 118,000 across 114 countries, with 4,291 people who had lost their lives.
At the WHO’s press briefing on Thursday, remarking on the declaration of PHEIC, Dr. Mike Ryan acknowledged that public health systems across the world responded slowly to implementing a comprehensive strategy to bring the pandemic under control. “The capacity to do surveillance, an integrated response is not there,” he said. “We need to look really hard to our assumptions of the existence of systems that did not prove correct.”
Since then, the pandemic has wrought a trail of devastation that continues to rage in defiance of national borders. The daily cases of COVID-19 have reached a seven-day moving average high of 260,028. There are more than 17.7 million cases with close to six million active cases. Total deaths are approaching 700,000 globally, with a seven-day moving average of 5,655 fatalities per day. Three days running, more than 6,000 people have died. Much of the recent fuel to the coronavirus’ acceleration has been the demand by the markets and the financial oligarchs to reopen commerce even while community transmission remained hot, and health experts warned incessantly that such measures would be ruinous.
Initially, Italy bore the brunt of the pandemic followed quickly by New York City. France, the United Kingdom, and Spain followed. The continent accounts for 2.87 million cases and over 203,000 deaths. Despite the massive efforts to bring the pandemic to a grinding halt, reopening efforts have led to resurgences in Spain, Germany, and France again while the Ukraine and Russia are attempting to fend off their initial foray with the virus. Many of the stateless and most impoverished in the country are facing uncertainties, including ethnic minorities, the homeless, and those recently released from prisons. They account for more than 35,000 people.
The United States continues to lead as the global epicenter of the pandemic with 4.7 million cases and nearly 157,000 deaths. Though cases have plateaued at a high of almost 70,000 cases per day, the fatality rate has been climbing, reaching nearly 1,500 three days running. According to covidexitstrategy.org, The pandemic that has seen a record number of deaths in the sunbelt states is pushing north through the Midwest states. Yet, federal and state officials have begun an effort to hide the real statistics, making the tracking of hospitalizations and cases impossible.
In a recent development in Georgia, 260 children, teens, and staffers, out of 344 tested, were found to be positive for COVID-19 while attending an overnight camp. More than half those testing positive were children ages 6 to 10. Masks were not required for the children. The massive cluster highlights the fact that children are very susceptible to the virus and should be considered contagious if infected. This will add to the growing return-to-school catastrophe that has the nation on edge. Yet, Director of the Centers for Disease Control Dr. Robert Redfield continued to endorse the reopening of schools while unable to provide clear guidance as to how to achieve sufficient measures to ensure the safety of teachers, staff and students.
During the US House of Representatives’ special select committee investigation into the Trump Administration’s response to the pandemic, Admiral Brett P. Giroir acknowledged to lawmakers that getting COVID-19 testing back to a turnaround time of 48 to 72 hours “is not a possible benchmark we can achieve today, given the demand and the supply.” Yet his attempt to paint an optimistic scenario only fell on bewildered ears. Testing shortages continue to hamper efforts on the ground.
Dr. Fauci, in his opening statement, assured the hearing that he was “cautiously optimistic” that the Moderna mRNA vaccine would be successful. The vaccine trial was ushered in with pomp and circumstance as this week beginning the phase three trial intending to enroll 30,000 subjects to prove the efficacy of the vaccine.
However, the United States has positioned itself to bring all viable vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 under its control. Sanofi and GlaxoSmithKline reported that the US government would provide them up to $2.1 billion to fund their development and manufacturing of their experimental COVID-19 vaccine. As part of this quid pro quo, they will provide the US with 100 million doses with an option to procure up to 500 million doses. They are expected to begin trials in September.
On top of the Moderna vaccine, Operation Warp Speed has also invested $1.2 billion in UK-based AstraZeneca’s vaccine with the assurance of 300 million doses. They have also announced the purchase of 100 million doses of German-based BioNTech’s vaccine, created in collaboration with Pfizer, for $1.95 billion.
Should these regimens require two doses, and if the immunity remains short-lived, the vaccine will become a bonanza for shareholders and critical life-saving treatment against a virus that has barely infected the world’s population despite the arduous six months the world has suffered to this moment.
Brazil India, Chile, South Africa, Columbia, Mexico, Peru, and Argentina are only a shortlist of countries hard-hit by the pandemic whose economies remain in disarray and are unable to provide adequate care to the poorest in their countries. Countries and areas like Japan, Israel, Lebanon, and Hong Kong are facing a record number of new cases after they had suppressed infections to single digits. In Australia, the rising tide of cases forced officials to impose restrictions on Melbourne, a city of more than 5 million.
Experience with the 2009 Swine flu demonstrated that vaccine distribution would not be based on the allocation of resources to the most in need or essential, but to those that can pay. The majority of nations will be forced to negotiate for vaccines for millions of inhabitants who will face the most likely winter surge. The six months of the public health emergency of international concern has demonstrated capitalism’s total inability to deal with the threat of infectious disease and other critical threats to mankind.
A barrage of new changes have come down, including delayed mail sortation. Workers say they threaten USPS’s core mission.
Rachel M. Cohen
https://theintercept.com/2020/07/29/usps-postal-service-privatization/
JULY HAS BEEN a flurry of confusion and stress for postal workers, as a barrage of new measures are threatening to fundamentally overhaul and undermine the culture and operations of the U.S. Postal Service.
Earlier this month, the Washington Post reported on a memo from the new USPS Postmaster General Louis DeJoy urging postal staff to leave behind mail at distribution centers if they thought it would cause a delay for letter carriers. Another memo stated that the USPS would be looking to cut transportation and overtime costs, bringing about “immediate, lasting, and impactful changes” to the federal agency.
The following week, postal workers learned of yet another new pilot program called Expedited to Street/Afternoon Sortation, or ESAS, that would be rolling out in 384 delivery units nationwide beginning on July 25. The crux of this program, as outlined in an unsigned memo dated July 16, is to send letter carriers out to deliver mail more quickly in the morning by prohibiting them from sorting any mail in their offices before they go.
These changes could delay mail from getting to its final destination by at least one day, if not longer. While the USPS memo billed ESAS as an effort to “improve consistency in delivery time” to customers, reduce overtime, and increase efficiency, postal workers were alarmed and shocked by these new dictates, which appeared to directly undermine a core value of their work.
“These are changes aimed at changing the entire culture of USPS,” said Mark Dimondstein, the national president of the American Postal Workers Union. “The culture I grew up with, and of generations before me, is that you never leave mail behind. You serve the customer, you get mail to the customer. Prompt, reliable, and efficient.”
Dimondstein said the union is putting in place an ESAS monitoring and reporting plan to evaluate the impacts of these new changes to service. “We are definitely getting our members educated and we will fight this post office by post office, community by community,” he said. The union is also coordinating with members of Congress to discuss strategies, and Dimondstein said he’s hoping for oversight hearings in early fall.
ESAS25 pages
“I think the best way to put it is we’re concerned,” said Arthur Sackler, manager for the Coalition for a 21st Century Postal Service, a postal industry advocacy group. “Maybe this will just delay mail delivery once, but we’re worried if there’s no real time to sort, and no overtime, then there could be a cumulative growing impact.”
Sackler said his group has still gotten no information or clarity about these new rules and their potential consequences from the federal agency. “We haven’t been told anything, we haven’t been consulted, and over the last three decades the Postal Service has had a good track record of talking to unions and industry groups if there are going to be changes.”
In a statement, USPS spokesperson David Partenheimer told The Intercept that the Postal Service “is developing a business plan to ensure that we will be financially stable and able to continue to provide dependable, affordable, safe and secure delivery of mail and packages to all Americans as a vital part of the nation’s critical infrastructure. The plan, which will be presented to the Board of Governors when it is finalized, will include new and creative ways to help us fulfill our mission, and will focus on the Postal Service’s strengths to maximize our prospects for long-term success.” In addition to developing the broader business plan, Partenheimer said, “the Postal Service is taking immediate steps to increase operational efficiency by re-emphasizing existing plans that have been designed to provide prompt and reliable service within current service standards.”
Postal workers have been on high alert since May, when it was announced that the USPS Board of Governors had selected DeJoy to serve as the new postmaster general and CEO. DeJoy has been a top Republican Party fundraiser, including for the Republican National Convention and the president’s reelection effort, which prompted questions about how exactly he secured his new gig.
DeJoy previously worked as chair and CEO of New Breed Logistics, a massive warehousing and distribution company, and is the first postmaster general in over two decades to have never worked at USPS. He replaced outgoing postmaster general, Megan Brennan, who was appointed in 2015 and had been a career-long USPS employee, beginning as a letter carrier in Pennsylvania.
A bevy of worker violations and complaints have racked up at DeJoy’s old stomping ground. When he was CEO, the National Labor Relations Board ruled that New Breed’s hiring practices were “motivated by anti-union animus” when it avoided hiring any Longshore union members after it secured an Army contract in California. Between 2001 and 2015, New Breed and its affiliates paid more than $1.7 million for violations of labor law, wage and hour regulations, employee discrimination, and aviation regulations. In 2014, the New York Times reported on four women who worked in a Memphis warehouse for New Breed who suffered miscarriages after their supervisors refused their requests for light duties while pregnant. That same year New Breed merged with XPO Logistics, and since 2015, XPO and its affiliates have paid more than $30 million for a range of workplace violations. Last year, hundreds of drivers, warehouse workers, and intermodal drivers at XPO facilities worldwide protested against abuse and wage theft. Then when the Covid-19 pandemic hit, XPO offered to “lend” workers up to 100 hours of time off, but said they would have to repay that time.
DeJoy vowed to bring about change to USPS, criticizing the organization for having “an expensive and inflexible business model” that he said he looked forward to tackling head-on. “I did not accept this position in spite of these challenges, I accepted this position because of them,” he told USPS employees in a June 15 video address.
Postal service workers feel particularly unnerved by the new ESAS program and DeJoy’s appointment given the Trump administration’s announcement in 2018 that the president would like to restructure and privatize USPS. The White House suggested that USPS could save money by raising rates, ending door-to-door delivery, and cutting down days of mail service. This past April, Donald Trump called the Postal Service “a joke” and tried to force the agency to quadruple its package rates in exchange for Covid-19 relief.
Delaying mail delivery in the name of cutting costs and efficiency, Dimondstein argued, means that people will lose confidence in one of the most trusted federal agencies in the country, which, unlike its private competitors, delivers everywhere, including to unprofitable and rural areas. “Undermining and degrading the Postal Service helps frustrate the customer, which sets the stage to privatizing it,” he said. “The Trump administration is on record for raising prices, reducing service, and reducing workers’ rights and benefits. This [pilot] may be Trump’s first foray to try and actually accomplish some of those things.”
Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr., D-N.J., pointed to the implications delaying mail could have not just on letters and packages, but also for the upcoming election. “With states now reliant on voting by mail to continue elections during the pandemic, the destabilizing of the post office is a direct attack on American democracy itself,” he said in a statement. Pascrell is a vocal supporter of postal banking and a co-sponsor of the USPS Fairness Act, a bill that would repeal the requirement that the Postal Service annually prepay future retirement health benefits. In May, he called for an inspector general investigation into possible political interference by the Trump administration within USPS.
In terms of reducing overtime, Dimondstein said the obvious way to do so is to hire more workers. Between 2009 and 2018, according to the Government Accountability Office, USPS cut its workforce by more than 77,000 employees. “There’s always going to be some fluctuation in mail, and overtime goes up during periods of high mail volume, but it also goes up when you’re understaffed, and during this pandemic we’ve had over 38,000 postal workers quarantined for Covid-19 exposure so someone has to cover those shifts.”
Drew, a letter carrier in Rockford, Illinois who requested his last name be withheld in case of employer retaliation, has worked for USPS for the past two years, and his parents also worked as carriers at different times. “This is the worst any of us have ever seen it,” he told The Intercept. “One of the things that’s always been a central tenet of the Post Office is that the mail gets through, no matter how late you have to work, what the weather is, and now it feels like that’s being thrown out the window.”
The level of uncertainty that looms over carriers now is affecting morale, according to Drew. “We don’t know what sorts of overhauls are coming down the line,” he said. “It feels like something new comes down every few weeks.”
https://theintercept.com/2020/07/30/dismantle-homeland-security/
FEDERAL AGENTS AT PROTESTS RENEW CALLS TO DISMANTLE HOMELAND SECURITY
After months of protests demanding the defunding of police, the abduction of protesters turns the focus to Homeland Security.
Alice Speri
July 30 2020, 6:31 a.m.
IN HIS FORMAL PROPOSAL to create the Department of Homeland Security, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush wrote that “the changing nature of the threats facing America requires a new government structure to protect against invisible enemies that can strike with a wide variety of weapons.”
The Bush administration wanted a new agency to oversee everything from border security to emergency preparedness and response — “the most significant transformation of the U.S. government in over a half-century,” the document noted.
Eighteen years later, the Department of Homeland Security has ballooned into the third largest agency in the U.S. government, employing 240,000 people, including more than 60,000 law enforcement agents — nearly half the total number of federal law enforcement agents. DHS oversees two dozen subagencies and offices and has an annual budget of $50 billion. Since its founding, in 2002, the department has run agencies as different in scope as the Transportation Security Administration and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, while also largely replicating, through dozens of regional law enforcement hubs known as fusion centers, the counterterrorism mission that premised its founding but remains the primary responsibility of other agencies.
And yet the invisible enemy Bush feared arrived nonetheless. Every two to three days, the coronavirus is killing the number of Americans who died on September 11. Since the beginning of the pandemic, the virus has killed 50 times as many.
Criticism of DHS has accompanied the department through its existence, most recently when former Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen became the face of the Trump administration’s brutal policy of separating children from their parents at the southern border. Calls to abolish U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — one of DHS’s most visible and abusive agencies — have echoed from street protests to the halls of Congress and the 2020 presidential primary. Then earlier this month, as President Donald Trump deployed DHS troops, primarily from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, against protesters rallying against police violence in Portland, Oregon, he once again trained the spotlight on the troubled department. The unidentified agents abducting people in unmarked rental cars raised questions about what the Border Patrol was doing on the streets of an American city and awareness about the impunity with which it operates elsewhere. And their presence stoked calls to not only abolish ICE or CBP, but also to dismantle their parent agency altogether.
“This current moment is bringing this opportunity for widening the frame and having people understand just how large this force has grown, and who are the people working there, and who do they listen to,” said Marisa Franco, director and co-founder of Mijente, one of the groups that popularized the call to abolish ICE. “Has dumping, dropping, flushing all this money down the toilet into these agencies made us any safer? Has it done any real good? Would we rather spend that money somewhere else? I think that’s a really critical conversation to have.”
Franco noted that after 9/11, some might have been hesitant to target DHS because of how closely it was associated with the attacks on New York and Washington. But the last two decades, and particularly the last several months, have radically transformed how many Americans understand what security means and what their government should do to keep them safe.
“I just think the veneer is off,” said Franco. “I think people are pretty shocked at what’s happening, and they are really thinking about how to stop it.”
From 9/11 to Abolition
Trump has been threatening to “send the feds” into American cities, mostly ones run by Democrats, for as long as he has been in office. By the time DHS deployed its federal agents, the nationwide protests that started with the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis had mostly dwindled after raging for weeks. In Portland, before the agents’ presence set them off once again, they had shrunk in size to a few hundred protesters.
The deployment of federal law enforcement — particularly BORTAC, a tactical unit some have dubbed CBP’s “RoboCops” — came after weeks of growing calls to defund police departments across the country moved from protest chants to budget negotiation hearings. The deployment is widely understood to be political theater aimed at distracting from the administration’s disastrous response to the Covid-19 pandemic. But at a moment when criticism of law enforcement has reached an unprecedented number of people, Trump’s show of force is having the effect of elevating the local call to defund and abolish police to a sprawling federal law enforcement apparatus that remains largely nebulous to most Americans.
“There is more skepticism of law enforcement on every level of government than there has been in this country’s history, and it’s arguably a result of the overreach of law enforcement,” said Alex Nowrasteh, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. “Their unaccountability, the violence of the policies they are carrying out, and the violence with which they are doing it is more known and understood by more people than ever before.”
“The latest deployment of DHS, and especially CBP officers, going into American cities without the request of local political authorities is incredibly disturbing,” he added. “It’s like a novel written by a libertarian about the encroaching powers of federal law enforcement.”
CBP is not the only federal agency Trump has dispatched to fight his political battle: Last week, the Department of Justice launched what it called “Operation Legend” — a coordinated initiative “across all federal law enforcement agencies working in conjunction with state and local law enforcement officials to fight the sudden surge of violent crime,” according to the department’s announcement. As The Intercept has reported, federal-local partnerships of this sort, flooding cities with FBI, U.S. Marshals Service, Drug Enforcement Administration, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and other federal agents, along with local police, are nothing new. On Tuesday, Attorney General William Barr was grilled by legislators about the Justice Department’s response to the protests; testimony from DHS officials is scheduled for later this week.
While it is hardly the only agency facing criticism, DHS embodies much of the unaccountable culture of policing that a growing number of Americans have come to reject. And in the middle of a public health and economic crisis of historic proportions, DHS’s massive, and costly, infrastructure has also become an emblem of government’s misplaced priorities. The Cato Institute, which has called for the abolition of DHS for nearly a decade, argued in a 2011 policy paper that the agency had already failed. “DHS has too many subdivisions in too many disparate fields to operate effectively,” David Rittgers, a former legal policy analyst at the institute, wrote at the time. “Americans are not safer because the head of DHS is simultaneously responsible for airport security and governmental efforts to counter potential flu epidemics.”
Today, the greatest threat to American safety in decades has come not in the form of a terrorist attack, but as a pandemic and the resulting economic disaster that have only been exacerbated by years of investment in the country’s sprawling security apparatus at the cost of everything else. “If this is not a clear failure of DHS, and this is not a clear failure of the billions of dollars that were poured in, then I don’t know what else would be a clearer example,” said Hamid Khan, an organizer with the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, a group that has called for an end to mass surveillance across levels of government. “Billions of dollars, and for what?”
Calls to dismantle, or at least rein in, DHS have surfaced repeatedly over the years, for instance in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, as well as at the height of the Trump administration’s family separation effort. Last year, following the exposure of a Facebook group for CBP agents filled with racist, violent, and misogynistic content, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez advocated the disbandment of DHS altogether, calling the department’s establishment “an egregious mistake.” Now, the scenes in Portland, against the backdrop of the health, economic, and policing crises the nation is facing, have given those calls new momentum.
“If the Trump years have shown anything, it is that the agencies within D.H.S., and especially ICE and C.B.P., are in desperate need of root-and-branch reform or some other fundamental change,” Jamelle Bouie wrote in the New York Times. “If and when we close the book on Trump, perhaps we should use the opportunity to close the book on Homeland Security too.”
“I never thought that the Department of Homeland Security would be used against our own people,” former Sen. Barbara Boxer wrote earlier this month, calling her own vote in favor of the agency’s creation “myopic.” “Congress can act to both condemn this gross tyranny and then restructure the department so that no president, now or ever again, can have a private police force and menace the people he or she swears to protect.”
As the movement to defund police grew over recent months, a number of people have also called on legislators to withhold DHS funding until more robust checks can be imposed on an agency whose current oversight is the jurisdiction of more than 100 committees and subcommittees — a bureaucratic nightmare that’s effectively allowed parts of the department to go rogue.
“Given this state of affairs, there is no excuse for Congress to rush through another multi-billion-dollar appropriation for the department,” analysts with the national security forum Just Security wrote this week ahead of a DHS appropriations vote. “Before any funds are made available, Congress should conduct some of the oversight that’s been missing to date.”
The Just Security analysts also called on legislators to demand that Trump nominate a DHS secretary. Chad F. Wolf, a lobbyist, is currently running the department in an acting capacity, unconfirmed by the Senate, as are Ken Cuccinelli, his deputy, and dozens of other Trump administration officials. And the analysts called on legislators to push for greater transparency on part of DHS, including the publication of operational guidelines and assurances that the department’s law enforcement activities are conducted “with appropriate care for constitutional rights and clear channels of accountability.”
“This trend toward lawlessness is on full display in Portland,” they wrote. “The leverage afforded by the appropriations cycle presents the best and perhaps only opportunity for Congress to confront a department run amok.”
Tackling the Monster
DHS was founded on the belief that a lack of interagency communication had caused the government to miss cues about the 9/11 attacks. The department brought together agencies that had previously operated under several different departments, creating an unwieldy mess of clashing cultures and duplicative efforts, and setting up a massive bureaucracy whose scope, and cost, ballooned over the years.
DHS’s size and sprawling nature are part of the reason why a broader grassroots movement targeting the agency has not yet emerged. “It’s a department that has so many layers, and so many tentacles to it,” said Khan. “So it’s a matter of how do we pick it apart and look both at the larger infrastructure and at the points of this monstrosity that can be exposed and picked upon one by one?”
Questions about the efficiency of the consolidation of profoundly different agencies under DHS were raised from the beginning, across party lines, but the department’s creation was hastily approved anyway. Despite early promises that spending would be contained, the agency’s cost more than doubled in the first decade of the department’s existence, in part thanks to the funding of dozens of state, local, and regional information and intelligence-sharing centers, known as fusion centers. The centers were established ostensibly to improve collaboration among law enforcement agencies but in practice replicated the work of the FBI and FBI-run Joint Terrorism Task Forces. DHS had little to show for its price tag: A 2012 Senate Homeland Security report found that the department’s fusion centers “often produced irrelevant, useless or inappropriate intelligence reporting to DHS, and many produced no intelligence reporting whatsoever.” In 2015, Sen. Tom Coburn issued a scathing report concluding that “despite spending nearly $61 billion annually and $544 billion since 2003, the Department of Homeland Security is not executing any of its five main missions.”
But DHS was not just a colossal waste of money: Its very existence, and the need to justify it, puts civil liberties at risk. Over the years, fusion centers that had been set up to counter terrorism dedicated much of their time and resources to sharing intelligence about crime, which was already the responsibility of local law enforcement. And increasingly, they started monitoring the constitutionally protected activities of activists and government critics. “There are not enough terrorists to go around; the police and the FBI already identify and prosecute potential terrorists whenever possible,” the Cato report noted in 2011. “So fusion centers seem to be treating mere political dissent as a threat without any indication of violent intent in order to justify their continued existence.”
A product of the war on terror, in more recent years DHS came to be defined by the work and human rights violations of two of its largest agencies, CBP and ICE, whose treatment of migrants, as well as immigration activists, has been a precursor to the abuses now on display in Portland.
CBP in particular operates far beyond the border, as its authority extends 100 miles into the interior to an area that encompasses nine of the country’s 10 largest cities and nearly two-thirds of the U.S. population. In recent months, hundreds of CBP agents were dispatched to respond to protests against police violence in Washington, D.C., and a CBP drone monitored the George Floyd protests in Minneapolis. The move to police protests has been a disturbing development for an agency that for years has been accused of pushing the limits of its legal authority.
“This is an opportunity for the broader public to see and really ask themselves, if this is what DHS agents and this is what Border Patrol agents do to mostly white people in Portland, imagine what they are doing to women crossing alone in the middle of the night with children, to young people coming across the desert in the borderlands,” said Franco. “I think people asking themselves that question should really send a chill down their spine, imagining what might happen, and what is happening, and what has been happening.”
When immigration enforcement and border protection were moved away from the Department of the Treasury and the Department of Justice to the jurisdiction of the newly formed DHS, “there was an explicit reframing of immigration from being a labor issue to a national security issue,” noted Franco. “And what is happening now is that they’re trying to frame people exercising their freedom of speech and their right to protest and their right to organize as an issue of national security. And calling people who do those things terrorists.”
“Customs and Border Protection is, in liberal terms, one of the least professionalized agencies, and to name it more plainly, it’s been captured by white supremacists.”
While critics of DHS and its war on terror ethos have been warning of those dangers since the agency’s early days, their concerns came into sharper focus under the Trump administration. CBP and ICE in particular, whose rank and file were among the first to endorse Trump’s presidential bid, have often contributed to the impression that they are more loyal to the president than to their legal mandate. “The DHS houses Trumpism’s true believers,” sociologist Stuart Schrader wrote in the New Republic earlier this month.
“I think there’s a good reason why it’s Customs and Border Protection that’s in Portland and not another law enforcement agency,” said Brendan McQuade, a professor at the University of Southern Maine who studies the Homeland Security apparatus. “And that is because Customs and Border Protection is, in liberal terms, one of the least professionalized agencies, and to name it more plainly, it’s been captured by white supremacists.”
Migrants and their communities have known that for years, and as Americans connect the dots between what is happening in Portland and what has been happening along the border and in immigration detention centers nationwide, scrutiny of DHS is bound to grow.
What is coming into focus is a more general rejection of the notion of “security” that the U.S. has long peddled, said McQuade.
“The unique circumstances of Covid, the Trump administration’s very poor handling of it, and the insecurity and uncertainty that has created have created textbook circumstances for political rupture and realignment,” he added. “Now is the time to push everything on the table and fight for the biggest demands.”
