Wednesday, August 5, 2020
For a nationwide general strike to halt the drive to reopen schools!
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/05/pers-a05.html
5 August 2020
A growing movement is now under way of teachers, students and parents against the effort to reopen schools amidst the expanding coronavirus pandemic.
Over the past month, more than 300,000 educators and parents have joined Facebook groups opposed to the back-to-school campaign. There have been protests and demonstrations in Mississippi, Arizona, Florida, Iowa, Alabama and many other states. On Monday, protests were held in dozens of cities throughout the country.
For this movement to succeed, it must be developed into a nationwide struggle, uniting educators with all sections of the working class in a general strike movement against the homicidal policy of the ruling elites.
The drive to reopen schools, supported by both the Republicans and Democrats, is a linchpin in the broader back-to-work campaign. The demand that workers return to work, put into effect in May, is already responsible for 50,000 deaths in June and July. But the ruling class cannot get workers back to work if their children are not in school.
This is the same logic that is driving the effort to curtail or eliminate federal unemployment benefits, forcing workers to return to work or face impoverishment, homelessness and destitution.
The science is clear: Children are equally susceptible to catching COVID-19, have viral loads equal to or greater than adults, are more likely to be asymptomatic carriers, and transmit the virus at the highest rates of any age group. At least four schools that reopened last week have already had students test positive for COVID-19. Any school that reopens will quickly become a major vector for the spread of the virus throughout that community.
The effort to reopen schools, in other words, means that students will get sick and die, teachers will get sick and die, and parents will get sick and die.
In raising the call for a nationwide general strike, the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) urges educators and all workers to raise and discuss the following demands in their schools, workplaces and neighborhoods:
* Keep all schools closed until the virus is eradicated! With the virus spiraling out of control across the US, in-person instruction cannot be done safely.
* Full funding for public education and online instruction! High speed Internet access, food distribution, mental health care, special education supports, and all other resources needed to provide the best quality remote learning must be guaranteed to every student and educator.
* Halt all nonessential production! Until the pandemic is contained, only key industries such as food production, medical care and logistics should remain open. Workers in those industries must be provided with the most advanced safety measures to prevent infection. All nonessential workers and laid off workers must be provided with full unemployment benefits and access to free health care.
* For a massive expansion of testing and contact tracing! In order to contain the virus, universal testing must be provided for all, and hundreds of thousands of contact tracers hired to track any cases that emerge, and test and isolate those potentially infected.
The past seven months have demonstrated that the fight against the pandemic depends upon the independent intervention of the working class. The death toll keeps rising and the pandemic is spiraling out of control because the ruling class will not tolerate any measures that cut across its interests.
If that means that the pandemic must rage on, so be it. The indifference of the ruling class to this massive loss of life was expressed most nakedly by Trump in an interview with Axios over the weekend. Asked to respond to the fact that 1,000 people are dying every day, Trump replied, “They are dying, that's true. And it is what it is.”
One could not have a clearer statement of class policy. On Monday evening, Trump declared his determination to press forward with his campaign to prematurely reopen schools, demanding on Twitter, “OPEN THE SCHOOLS!!!”
Trump does not just speak for himself. In an editorial Monday, “School-Opening Extortion,” the Wall Street Journal, gives vent to the social interests driving this policy.
The Journal denounces protesting teachers for exercising “political extortion” by resisting the effort to reopen schools. “Children, who would have to endure more lost instruction, are their hostages.” Teachers, the Journal states, are attempting “to coerce parents and taxpayers to dance to their agenda if they want their children to learn.”
What contemptible hypocrisy! The ruling class, for whom the Journal speaks, has systematically degraded public education for decades through the gutting of state funding and the promotion of charter schools, standardized testing and “school choice” schemes to divert funding to private and parochial schools.
The Journal has the gall to accuse teachers of using the pandemic to extract concessions. In reality, it is the financial oligarchy that used the pandemic to demand trillions of dollars in bailout money, sanctioned by the CARES Act passed in late March, with near unanimous bipartisan support. Having looted the state treasury, the ruling class now demands that workers get back to the job of producing profits to pay for it.
The editorial concludes by stating, “No political force should have veto power over the education of America’s children.” In class terms, the Journal is demanding that educators, parents, students and the working class should have no say in whether schools reopen or remain closed.
While the Trump administration is spearheading the campaign to reopen schools, it has bipartisan support. In New York City yesterday, teachers, parents and students staged a protest against plans by Democratic Party Mayor Bill de Blasio to reopen schools in the city.
Both Republican and Democratic governors, moreover, have removed restrictions on nonessential production as the pandemic spread, sending workers back on the job to risk their health and lives to produce profits for the corporations.
Teachers are not fighting alone. There is growing anger and opposition in the entire working class. Their allies are students and parents in K-12 schools, as well as students in colleges and universities that are also moving to reopen.
Meatpackers, health care workers, farm laborers, logistics workers at Amazon, UPS, and USPS, transit workers, service workers and the entire working class confront the same enemy. Autoworkers in Michigan and Ohio have already begun forming independent rank-and-file safety committees to organize opposition.
The end of federal unemployment benefits this week threatens millions of jobless with poverty and eviction. Behind closed doors, the Democrats and Republicans are negotiating over how much these benefits will be cut and how quickly, in order to create the best conditions to blackmail workers to get them back to work.
The opposition of teachers in the United States, moreover, is part of an international movement. Facebook groups opposed to reopening schools have formed in the UK, South Africa, and other countries where the ruling class is enforcing the same policy.
To fight back, teachers must form independent rank-and-file organizations. The protests organized by the teachers unions are entirely inadequate. The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and National Education Association (NEA), subservient to the Democrats and the ruling class, are highly conscious of the radicalization taking place among educators and seek to preempt and control this movement. In 2018 and 2019, the unions orchestrated the shutdown and betrayal of a series of teachers’ strikes, beginning in West Virginia.
The Socialist Equality Party urges workers in every industry and sector to develop an interconnected network of rank-and-file committees to prepare for a general strike against the opening of schools and the entire policy of the ruling class.
The measures demanded by teachers correspond with what scientists and epidemiologists insist is necessary to stop the spread of the pandemic. Two absolutely opposed social interests are involved. Teachers are fighting for life. The ruling class is fighting for profits and death.
The trillions that have been handed over to Wall Street and the financial oligarchy must be redirected to provide full unemployment benefits to all workers, and universal access to health care and public education.
The development of a nationwide general strike would create a powerful impulse and would galvanize support internationally among workers who face the same life-and-death decisions. The logic of such a struggle would place the American working class in a direct confrontation with the Trump administration, which seeks to maintain its rule through increasingly authoritarian measures, and the entire ruling class.
All the rights of the working class, even the right to life, depend upon the expropriation of the ruling class and the reorganization of economic life on the basis of social need, not private profit.
The only way to halt the reopening of schools, stop the spread of the pandemic, and prevent millions more infections and deaths is through the mass mobilization of the working class in a revolutionary struggle against the source of all suffering wrought by the pandemic, the capitalist system.
The Socialist Equality Party and its youth movement, the International Youth and Students for Social Equality, are spearheading this fight. We urge teachers to contact us for assistance in organizing your struggle. We call on students and youth to support this struggle and join the IYSSE. Sign up for the World Socialist Web Site Educators Newsletter for updates on this fight.
Statement of the Socialist Equality Party
Fiat Chrysler bribed UAW with tens of millions, new GM court filing alleges
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/05/auto-a05.html
By Tom Hall
5 August 2020
Fiat Chrysler gave United Auto Workers officials tens of millions of dollars in previously unreported bribes, funneled through offshore bank accounts, to secure the union’s involvement in a bid to force a merger with General Motors, according to court filings submitted by lawyers for GM on Monday. The new accusations are part of GM’s bid to reopen its lawsuit against FCA alleging that its Italian-based rival used bribes to convert the union into an “FCA-controlled enterprise.” The lawsuit was dismissed by a federal judge last month, who noted “the direct victims of defendants’ alleged bribery scheme are FCA’s workers,” not GM.
The new court filings contain by far the largest-scale accusations against the UAW, either in GM’s civil suit or in the parallel criminal probe by the FBI, which has already brought down 14 FCA management and UAW officials. The “hush money,” according to GM, ran into the tens of millions, “exponentially higher” than what had been revealed so far in criminal charges against union officials and FCA executives.
While in its original complaint GM was at pains to insist that it was targeting only FCA and not the UAW, the new filing takes a far more aggressive stance against the auto union. Former UAW President Dennis Williams is now officially named as a defendant in the case. GM lawyers claim that Williams maneuvered former UAW Vice President Joe Ashton, who has already pleaded guilty to separate money laundering and wire fraud charges, onto GM’s Board of Directors in order to function as a “mole” for FCA.
The filing also contains the first public allegations against Ron Gettelfinger, UAW president from 2002 to 2010, who led the UAW during the restructuring of the auto industry under President Obama. It was under the terms of this deal, which slashed wages for new hires in half and destroyed tens of thousands of jobs, that the UAW gained billions of dollars in GM stock and a seat on the company’s board. According to the filing, Gettelfinger maintained overseas accounts in Switzerland and Panama, given to him by FCA, under a family member’s name.
The allegations mean that four of the five most recent presidents of the United Auto Workers have now been implicated in the massive corruption scandal. Gary Jones, who was president from 2018 until forced to step down late last year, has already pleaded guilty to charges that he had conspired with other top officials to embezzle over $1 million in workers’ dues money. Jones’ predecessor Williams is an unnamed co-conspirator in the Jones indictment, and his successor Rory Gamble, who replaced him on an interim basis, is reportedly himself the target of federal investigators.
The elaborate and wide-ranging scheme, dubbed “Kickback City,” involved offshore bank accounts in Italy, Switzerland, Panama, Singapore, Lichtenstein and the Cayman Islands. It was authorized by the late FCA chief executive Sergio Marchionne and other top executives, according to the filing. In addition to Williams and Ashton it also involved UAW Vice President for Fiat Chrysler General Holiefield, who only escaped prosecution because of his death in 2015. The aim of the scheme, GM’s lawyers allege, was to provide FCA with “confidential details about GM’s labor strategy,” aimed at imposing labor costs onto General Motors less favorable than those at Fiat Chrysler and to pressure the GM into a merger.
According to GM, former FCA executive Alphons Iacobelli, who pleaded guilty in 2018 to his role in bribing top UAW officials to obtain concessions in the 2009 and 2015 contracts, “curtailed his criminal plea to ensure that the true scope of the conspiracy was not revealed.” Iacobelli continued to cover up for other FCA executives and UAW officials even after his guilty plea, GM alleges.
While there is no reason to doubt the factual basis of the filing, it has the character of a desperate move by GM, one which suggests an increasingly fractious and embittered climate within corporate boardrooms as companies battle for survival in an economic situation fraught with dire perils.
While automakers had already been preparing for a long downturn even before the coronavirus pandemic, all three Detroit automakers posted huge losses in the second quarter due to a collapse in sales and a two-month cessation of production that was forced by a series of wildcat strikes. GM burned through nearly $8 billion in cash and posted a $806 million loss as sales dropped by roughly one-third. At Ford, where shareholders have long been demanding deeper cuts, CEO Jim Hackett announced his retirement only days after the company posted a $1.9 billion loss.
Prior to Monday’s filing, there were growing signs that the government was preparing to wind down the exposures of UAW corruption out of fear that continuing to air the union’s dirty laundry would serve to further encourage rebellion by autoworkers. But GM’s new filing, which was based on extensive work by private investigators conducted after the original suit was dismissed last month, threatens to utterly discredit the UAW and put paid to any claims the union can be reformed.
Paul Borman, the federal judge in the GM-FCA lawsuit, issued an extraordinary and nervous order in June demanding the two companies meet to settle their dispute out of court. “If this case goes forward, there will be years of contentious litigation,” Borman said, while the coronavirus pandemic “requires our attention here and now!” When lawyers for GM balked, Judge Borman dismissed the lawsuit on July 8.
At the same time, federal prosecutors began a series of meetings with UAW President Gamble to hammer out an agreement that would close the federal probe and keep the union out of federal receivership.
It is not clear whether the court will accept GM’s arguments and if the suit will be reopened. However, if there is any truth to the company’s allegations, it should serve as the final nail in the coffin for any lingering doubts as to whether the UAW remains, in spite of rampant and universal corruption, a “workers’ organization.” The filing’s description of a murky underworld of offshore bank accounts and corporate espionage depict an organization which is completely integrated within the orbit of the financial elite, and correctly seen by the auto companies themselves not as an adversary but as a tool of corporate policymaking. It is the outcome of decades of betrayals by the UAW, which have destroyed hundreds of thousands of jobs while the incomes of top union officials have soared along with the rising stock market.
For autoworkers, had the alleged FCA-UAW scheme to force a merger with GM succeeded, it would have produced even greater disasters than that which have already been inflicted through union-brokered concessions. The ultimate purpose of such a merger would have been to close down countless facilities and lay off tens of thousands of workers as “redundant,” a goal that the late Marchionne frequently declared in public. But for the UAW, the tens of millions in bribes would have been only a down payment for the billions in stock and other financial incentives that it could have expected to reap as a reward for brokering such a deal.
Such filthy dealings demonstrate the urgency of the call by the World Socialist Web Site and the Socialist Equality Party for the building of new organizations by workers, entirely independent of the UAW gangsters. Absolutely nothing associated with this organization can be trusted.
The latest revelations show, once again, that autoworkers must break with the UAW and take the initiative into their own hands. The World Socialist Web Site Autoworker Newsletter is helping workers accomplish this by forming rank-and-file safety committees at workplaces throughout the country. For help forming a committee at your plant, contact us at autoworkers@wsws.org.
House Speaker Pelosi signals readiness to cut unemployment benefits
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/05/unem-a05.html
By Jacob Crosse
5 August 2020
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi in an interview on PBS’ “NewsHour” program Tuesday signaled the Democratic Party’s willingness to reduce benefits for the nearly 30 million US jobless workers who had been receiving $600 a week in enhanced federal unemployment pay. The jobless benefit, part of the CARES Act, which allocated trillions for the corporations and banks, expired this past week.
The federal benefit, along with a moratorium on rental evictions from properties with federally backed mortgages, was allowed to lapse at the end of July, leaving millions in the lurch.
Shortly before the expiration of the federal unemployment benefit, the House of Representatives, in a near party-line vote, passed a $694.6 billion defense appropriations bill for 2021. The bill, overwhelmingly supported by the Democratic Party, included funding for 91 F-35 fighter jets ($9.3 billion) and nine new Navy ships ($22.3 billion). Added together, the cost of these 100 pieces of military hardware could provide supplemental jobless benefits for 30 million people for nearly two weeks.
While both parties worked around-the-clock for the financial oligarchy and their cratering stock portfolios by passing the CARES Act in late March, now that Wall Street has been rescued, the two big business parties are taking their time in working out the terms for imposing the full brunt on the economic crisis triggered by the pandemic on the backs of the working class.
Throughout the PBS interview, Pelosi, with an estimated net worth of $120 million, portrayed herself and the Democratic Party as champions of working people. However, when gently pressed by the news anchor, Judy Woodruff, the House speaker signaled the corporate-financial elite that the Democrats were prepared to cut the already inadequate $600-a-week benefit, saying, “Let’s find out what we can afford.” She added, “We will find our common ground.”
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows have been meeting daily behind closed doors with Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer and Pelosi. While the Democratic negotiators have claimed “progress” in the talks, the White House representatives, who had proposed cutting the unemployment supplement to $200, have said the two sides remain far apart.
All parties are seeking to pass a new bill that would provide reduced benefits, using the prospect of hunger and homelessness to blackmail workers into returning to virus-infected work sites or take other work at lower pay when their previous jobs have been eliminated.
At the end of the interview, Pelosi made clear that the goal of the Democrats was the same as the Republicans: “reopening” the economy (i.e., resuming at full blast the flow of corporate profit) by forcing teachers and students back to school so as to allow “our parents to go to work.”
For his part, President Donald Trump in a Tuesday press conference threatened to issue an executive order to suspend the payroll tax, the primary source of funding for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. He also took the opportunity to lash out against China, claiming that the looming wave of evictions in the US was “China’s fault.”
The World Socialist Web Site spoke to unemployed workers about the consequences of a cutoff or reduction in the federal unemployment supplement.
April, a cook from rural northern Illinois, said: “The $600 dollar added bonus really did help. We could not have survived without it. It made me realize that everyone needs to be making a basic amount to live and thrive.
“I was actually getting slightly more with the added money than I was with my paycheck before being unemployed, only because my pay was so low. Now that the benefit is gone, I am still unemployed and my partner now makes way less than he did previously.
“I went from working one job. Now I can’t find full-time work. I’ll have to work two or three jobs just to get by. And then my partner started a new job and was denied Medicaid because he makes $3 too much. He makes $11 an hour.
“We have a little saved up. I hope to stay in my apartment and be able to take care of the necessities, but if I don’t find work before then, I am not sure what we will do once September arrives. I am constantly oscillating between being angry and scared. Everything is so unequal. You have millionaires and billionaires and then you have the rest of us just trying to get by.”
A cashier from Virginia who was forced to return to work after the state failed to process her unemployment claim told the WSWS: “I was a cashier, now I am a personal shopper. I applied for unemployment benefits back in April. The benefits never were approved.
“I had panic attacks fearing for my safety. Luckily for me, my family and girlfriend, who was able to get the expanded benefits, were able to help me with rent throughout the last few months. If it wasn’t for them, I’d have been working throughout this entire pandemic.
“Two weeks ago, the last bit of money I received from the $1,200 check Trump sent ran out and I was forced to return to work. I’m not sure if I have a compromised immune system, but I had open heart surgery, so I’m worried if I catch this disease. My parents are elderly. I see people in my state socializing and not wearing masks. I’m definitely scared.
“The fact that I didn’t get any benefits throughout the entire pandemic has really hurt me
financially. My girlfriend and I had plans to move into a house together, but that isn’t going to happen now for a long time.
“This order to get back to work is really tough on people. We’re being forced to take high risks with our health in the middle of a health care crisis. If someone in the US government had actually done something to help people before this pandemic happened, we wouldn’t be in this situation now.”
Widespread protests in Bolivia oppose postponement of elections
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/05/boli-a05.html
By Tomas Castanheira
5 August 2020
Since Monday, a movement of strikes and blockades of main roads by workers and peasants has been spreading in Bolivia. Protesters are opposing a decree that further postpones general elections, threatening to maintain the de facto government of Jeanine Áñez indefinitely in power.
This week’s actions are a continuation of massive demonstrations that took place last week, on July 28, shortly after the Supreme Electoral Court (TSE) announced the cancellation of the elections scheduled for September. Amidst a protest in El Alto, a traditionally militant working class section of the capital city of La Paz, the Bolivian Workers’ Central (COB) called a general strike and blockades on August 3 if the court did not back down.
According to the COB, blockades were erected at 75 locations in the country on Monday, including strategic points in the Santa Cruz, La Paz, Cochabamba, Potosí, Oruro and Sucre regions. Marches by miners, peasants, indigenous people and poor urban workers took place.
In Potosí and El Alto, police forces clashed with demonstrators, throwing gas bombs and arresting people. In La Paz, a number of young people who were on hunger strike in front of the TSE were arrested and taken into custody by two police buses.
The anger of Bolivian workers and peasants against the coup regime has grown substantially in the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. The devastation of the virus is intersecting with the substantial increase in poverty in the country.
Unemployment has exploded in Bolivia, rising from 4.8 percent at the end of 2019 to 8.1 percent in May in urban areas. The Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (Cepal) predicts that by the end of the year some 500,000 Bolivians will be driven into extreme poverty and 36 percent of the population will be poor.
Under these conditions, the government has used the prospect of infection by the coronavirus to implement police state measures and postpone the date of the elections three times, while proving absolutely incapable of containing the spread of disease and hunger among Bolivians.
Over the past month, the number of COVID-19 infections has more than doubled, having already exceeded 80,000 confirmed cases. The number of deaths has risen even more sharply. With a record 89 deaths in a single day recorded on Sunday, the total number of deaths tripled in July to over 3,000.
These figures are a gross underestimate of the real situation, as the country has one of the lowest testing rates in the world. The recent explosion in the number of cases is directly associated with the anarchic resumption of economic activity, promoted by the government since June in the interests of the bourgeoisie.
Its most terrible results have been demonstrated in the collapse of the precarious Bolivian health care system. Most hospitals have already been forced to close their doors temporarily after the widespread contamination of their staff. The latest case occurred at the 9 April clinic in La Paz, which declared a state of emergency on Monday after 70 percent of nurses and 60 percent of doctors were found to be possibly ill with COVID-19.
The collapse of the funeral system, which is simultaneously occurring, was graphically expressed in the recent implementation of “portable” crematoria fixed on the back of vehicles that circulate on the streets of Bolivian cities.
In Bolivian prisons, which hold 18,000 people, most of them on a pre-trial basis, the government has already counted more than 150 cases and 40 deaths. Last week, a rebellion broke out simultaneously in four jails in Cochabamba, demanding medical assistance and measures to prevent the transmission of the virus.
Doctors and health professionals have protested against the general lack of personal protective equipment, which is resulting in the extremely high illness and death tolls of these workers. Groups of these professionals have been seen participating in this week’s demonstrations.
The coup regime is terrified that the growing demonstrations will get out of control and threaten to overthrow its power. Its desperate response is to promote an escalation of violence.
Making clear the government’s preparation for military intervention against the protests, the Government Minister Arturo Murillo’s threatened the protesters this Tuesday: “Lift the blockades, or we will lift them ourselves.”
Murillo has been one of the main officials responsible for the government’s fascistic tirades. In recent months, he has attacked the blockades of residents already taking place in the poor district of Cochabamba, K’ara K’ara, as being orchestrated by the “narco-terrorist” Evo Morales.
The conspiratorial accusations of all the opposition as “terrorists,” which justifies the permanent maintenance of Áñez and her allies in power, are growing in direct proportion to the social opposition.
Last week, Defense Minister Fernando López appeared on a television program accusing the massive protests growing in the outskirts of La Paz of being in fact a biological terrorist attack by peasants, supposedly contaminated with COVID-19, against the cities. “It’s not a protest… it is the people of Chapare who have come to El Alto to hack down, they are coming to infect the people of El Alto and La Paz,” he said.
The threat of a brutal repression of the Bolivian masses on the streets cannot be overestimated. The government is preparing even greater violence than that employed by the military in the aftermath of the coup, when at least 23 demonstrators were killed and more than 230 wounded.
In the same way that he abandoned those who were fighting against the coup in the streets last year, Morales is negotiating a deal between the COB and the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) and the bourgeoisie.
“The meetings between TSE Bolivia and COB should not be just a greeting; dialogue is important to reach consensus on a unilateral decision by the electoral authority with dramatic consequences on the population such as postponing elections again and again,” declared Morales on Twitter at Monday.
The agreement being prepared by Morales with the same forces that promoted the coup will only pave the way for the crushing of the working class and peasant forces.
In order to fight against the fascist threats, against the miserable conditions and the coronavirus that plagues the population, Bolivian workers need to advance an independent political perspective towards socialism, unified with their brothers and sisters in Latin America and globally.
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