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Saturday, August 8, 2020
Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna wins election setting the stage for an eruption of working-class struggles
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/07/slel-a07.html
By K. Ratnayake
7 August 2020
President Gotabhaya Rajapakse’s Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) won the national election on Wednesday and is set to form the next government with a substantial majority. The party secured 128 seats in the 225-member parliament, an increase of 53 MPs.
The opposition Samagi Jana Balavegaya (SJB), which was established early this year as a breakaway from the right-wing conservative United National Party (UNP), won 47 seats. The thoroughly discredited UNP, which was led by former Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, lost 58 seats and will not have a single MP in the next parliament.
The Sinhala chauvinist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), which contested the elections as the Jathika Jana Balavegaya—a new formation established with backing from a host of academics and professionals—won two seats, four less than in the previous parliament. The Tamil National Alliance (TNA), based in the war-ravaged North and East, secured only nine seats, down from 16 MPs in the previous parliament.
According to initial Election Commission estimates, only 71 percent of electors cast a ballot. This is a 12 percent drop in the numbers participating in the presidential election 10 months ago and 6 percent lower than the 2015 August national election.
On Wednesday, President Rajapakse issued a statement insisting that he had won 70 percent of the vote and falsely claiming it was an “expression of confidence” in the government’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
The sharp fall in the number of voters, however, indicates opposition to Rajapakse’s increasingly authoritarian methods and his backing for a big business offensive against jobs, wages and unsafe working conditions. Rajapakse’s claims of lower COVID-19 infection rates in Sri Lanka are because his government has refused to carry out mass testing.
The SLPP campaigned during the election for a two-thirds parliamentary majority, so it could rewrite the constitution and scrap all current limits on the president’s executive powers. The party’s lavish election campaign is estimated to have cost around 1,202 million rupees ($US6.5 million), far more than the other capitalist parties spent on their propaganda.
President Rajapakse addressed dozens of rallies, mobilising people in violation of the official pandemic health regulations. Each of Rajapakse’s appearances, according to an election monitoring group, cost the state 27 million rupees.
After casting his vote on Wednesday, Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapakse, the president’s brother, told the media that if the SLPP failed to win a two-thirds parliamentary majority in the election it would “make arrangements” to secure the necessary numbers. In other words, by purchasing MP votes.
The Sri Lankan president and his brother, along with the military hierarchy, want a dictatorship. Like every government around the world, President Rajapakse is determined to impose the burden of the economic crisis, accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic, on the masses. This will set the stage for the eruption of intense class struggles and revolutionary upheavals.
In the run up to the election, the SLPP stepped up its anti-Muslim and anti-Tamil chauvinism in order to divert social tensions and polarise Sinhala voters. The party used the findings of an official investigation into last year’s Easter Sunday bombings by an ISIS-backed Islamic terrorist group to unleash a wave of anti-Muslim propaganda.
At the same time, it insisted that the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) was remerging. The police provided fuel for these unsubstantiated assertions by suddenly claiming that they had found weapons in several places in the North.
Over the past six months, the opposition parties, including the SJB, UNP, JVP, TNA, the Muslim parties, and the plantation-based unions have publicly supported President Rajapakse and the SLPP minority administration. These formations attended two all-party meetings called by Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapakse’s then SLPP minority administration and backed the president’s measures to “combat the pandemic.”
On April 27, the same organisations pledged “unconditional support” to the president if he reconvened the dissolved parliament. The SJB and UNP separately met with him twice to offer their backing, while the TNA held a private meeting with the prime minister at which they guaranteed their support.
On May 4, UNP leader Ranil Wickremesinghe told the Daily Mirror that his party was “willing to help the government” because it is not “a time to play adversarial politics.”
None of these parties challenged the rapid and ongoing militarisation of Sri Lanka’s government administration. All of them back the government’s unsafe “reopening of the economy” and the massive attacks on jobs, wages and social rights. Like Rajapakse, these parties all fear the eruption of protests and strikes by workers, young people and the rural masses.
The pseudo-left played a key role in preventing the working class from challenging the government. The Nava Sama Samaja Party (NSSP), the Frontline Socialist Party (FSP) and the United Socialist Party (USP) derailed workers’ struggles against the austerity measures of the former Sirisena-Wickremesinghe government. This paved the way for Gotabhaya Rajapakse to pose as the sole opposition during last year’s presidential election.
NSSP leader Wickremabahu Karunaratne even contested this month’s election on a UNP district ticket. The FSP wrote twice to the prime minister supporting the government’s response to the pandemic, despite its “differences.”
FSP union leader Duminda Nagamuva, after meeting with Sri Lankan Labour Minister Dinesh Gunawardena, said that the minister had promised to solve workers’ problems. The USP and its unions also met with Gunawardena and big business leaders, supporting their wage and job cutting plans and blocking the eruption of workers’ struggles.
Having come to power by exploiting these betrayals, President Rajapakse’s new government is now preparing for class war.
On Wednesday, Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapakse ominously declared: “We are ready to face the economic challenges. We have already faced challenges more severe than these.”
This is a reference to the sharp decline in Sri Lankan economic growth, which is expected to be negative 1.3 percent this year. The COVID-19 pandemic has severely impacted on Sri Lankan exports, foreign remittances have drastically fallen and tourism has collapsed. Colombo also has to pay $US4 billion for foreign loans over the next three years.
Rajapakse’s statement that previous governments have “faced more severe challenge than this” is a reference to Colombo’s communalist war against the LTTE, which ended in May 2009.
At that time, Mahinda Rajapakse was the president and his brother Gotabhaya Rajapakse the defence secretary. Forty thousand Tamil civilians were killed and hundreds of surrendered fighters “disappeared” in the final weeks of the war, according to United Nations estimates. During and after the war, the Rajapakse administration ruthlessly suppressed the struggles of workers and the poor.
Addressing an election rally last week, President Rajapakse denounced a protest strike by 10,000 Colombo Port workers against the sale of a port terminal to an Indian company.
“The ports have been closed down for no other reason than to leave our economy in ruins. I’m not intimidated by this,” he declared. “[E]very time a leader who cares about the country comes to power extremist groups work towards sabotaging [him].”
While Rajapakse hopes that an absolute parliamentary majority and new dictatorial measures will allow him to take on the working class, the eruption of militant struggles will assume revolutionary proportions. The rising anger of workers and youth against this corrupt political social order and its attacks on jobs, living conditions and democratic rights, including during the 30-year war, is reaching a breaking point.
The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) was the only organisation in the elections that explained the deepening crisis and the need for workers and youth to break from every faction of the bourgeoisie and make the necessary political preparations for the revolutionary challenges ahead.
It called on workers to form action committees in every workplace and in working-class neighbourhoods to confront the pandemic disaster and government attacks on wages, job and democratic rights, along with the danger of imperialist war. The SEP explained that the fight for a workers’ and peasants’ government to implement socialist measures is the only way forward for the working class.
The SEP won a total of 780 votes in the three districts that it contested—Jaffna 146, Colombo 303 and Nuwara Eliya 331. While these numbers are still small, they are class-conscious votes for socialism and an indication of growing support for the SEP.
In the coming period, the SEP will intensify its political struggle to win broad layers of workers and youth to socialist internationalism and build it as a mass party to lead the working class to power.
Health Commissioner forced out as New York City prepares to reopen schools amid national pandemic surge
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/07/barb-a07.html
By Josh Varlin
7 August 2020
New York City Health Commissioner Dr. Oxiris Barbot resigned abruptly on August 4 after months of conflict between her department and Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio related to the city’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. While conflicts between de Blasio and the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH) have been glaring since May, it appears that the impending reopening of the city’s public schools as soon as September 10 was the final straw that prompted Barbot’s departure, reportedly because she expected to be fired shortly.
In early March, Barbot and other top DOHMH officials were among those urging de Blasio to adopt measures to combat the pandemic earlier and more consistently against the urging of, among others, Dr. Mitchell Katz, CEO of NYC Health + Hospitals (H+H), responsible for the city’s public hospitals. De Blasio apparently retaliated by moving COVID-19 contact tracing from DOHMH—which contact traces for HIV and other communicable diseases—to H+H.
Barbot’s replacement, Dr. David Chokshi, has worked for six years in senior roles at H+H. He has endorsed the reopening of schools, saying that New York City is one of the only places with an infection rate low enough to do so. His new role was announced rapidly, illustrating that Barbot was indeed forced out and did not resign of her own volition.
In point of fact, while new cases in the city are in the low hundreds daily, a far cry from the April 6 peak of 6,377, the proportion of tests coming back positive remains above one percent, and tests still take days to return results. With the pandemic surging nationally and with much of the New York economy reopened, a second wave in the state and city is inevitable, especially if the schools reopen as planned.
Official data for the city indicates 18,938 confirmed COVID-19 deaths and an additional 4,625 probable deaths. The staggering 23,563 total is certainly an undercounting of deaths directly and indirectly caused by the pandemic.
There is every indication that Barbot’s forced departure is an attempt to neuter an agency that has advocated for generally more stringent public health measures than de Blasio, a tool of Wall Street despite his “progressive” posturing, has been willing to adopt. This conflict dates back to before the pandemic, with the mayor and DOHMH squabbling over the 2015 Legionnaires’ disease outbreak in the Bronx.
However, this pales in comparison to the row that began at the beginning of this year. Barbot, who became health commissioner in 2018, and her staff were arguing for the closure of schools and businesses much earlier than the mayor was willing to consider and earlier than their counterparts in H+H were.
As early as March 10, DOHMH officials were urging de Blasio to close the city’s public schools, with some even threatening to resign in the face of the mayor’s intransigence, according to the New York Times.
On the very same day, H+H’s Katz was emailing top mayoral aides recklessly promoting a murderous “herd immunity” approach. He claimed that there was “no proof that closures will help stop the spread,” despite the experience of Hubei Province in China, and worried about the economic impact of any serious public health measures, according to the Times.
He then declared, “We have to accept that unless a vaccine is rapidly developed, large numbers of people will get infected. The good thing is greater than 99 percent will recover without harm. Once people recover, they will have immunity. The immunity will protect the herd.”
This perspective guided the city’s response for the following week, needlessly condemning tens of thousands to an early grave in New York City and in areas across the US where the virus spread from New York.
De Blasio only ended up closing the schools days later above all due to threats of a mass sickout by rank-and-file teachers. At this point, further shutdowns at the city and state levels were inevitable, especially under conditions in which workers nationally were engaged in job actions against the spread of the virus and when the Wall Street bailout had not yet been passed in Congress.
His reluctant coming around to public health measures did not mend the relationship with DOHMH or Barbot. In early May, de Blasio handed control of the city’s COVID-19 contact tracing program to H+H, despite DOHMH overseeing contact tracing measures for other diseases like HIV. Public health experts at the time roundly condemned the decision, and de Blasio officials privately told the media the decision was “outrageous.”
The contact tracing program began, in the understated words of the New York Times, with “a rocky start.” Despite supposedly being chosen because it can rapidly hire people, H+H has outsourced call center management to a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group, and fewer than half of those contacted have provided the necessary information to contact tracers.
Dr. Neil Vora, director of the contact tracing efforts, admitted in an internal meeting, “Right now, cases are popping up all over the place, and we are not linking them to known contacts except in a small proportion of cases.”
The dirty tricks against Barbot did not end there, however. In particular, this was demonstrated in a confrontation that allegedly occurred in March between Barbot and New York City Police Department Chief of Department Terence Monahan which surfaced later in May.
NYPD officers had been attempting to strong-arm half a million surgical masks from the DOHMH stockpile but were promised a lower amount due to shortage of supplies. Barbot allegedly said, according to the New York Post tabloid, “I don’t give two rats’ asses about your cops.” (NYPD officers have been ostentatiously violating state mandates and departmental policy by eschewing masks, including during the violent crackdown on protests against police violence.)
While no doubt garnering her sympathy among health care workers and workers more broadly in New York City, who loathe and fear the NYPD, the leaking of the conversation sparked a firestorm in the media and among the police, particularly among the fascistic police union officialdom.
At that point, Barbot seemed firmly on the outs, appearing at fewer news conferences, and the Times notes that de Blasio again turned to Katz for advice.
Recent weeks have seen lower-profile friction between de Blasio and DOHMH about how to reopen the schools, including what containment measures are appropriate when a student tests positive.
Barbot’s being forced out occurs during a relative lull in the city’s coronavirus cases, but also at a critical moment which will determine how the next phase of the pandemic will affect the city. With caseloads overwhelming hospital systems across the country, it is only a matter of time before there is a resurgence in New York City, especially within the schools.
As of this writing, the city’s public school district, the largest in the country, is the only district among the six largest in the US preparing to resume in-person instruction at the beginning of the school year. All of the other largest, including Chicago and Miami-Dade, have had to bow to the reality of the expanding pandemic and the immense opposition among educators and parents to the resumption of classes, for at least a few weeks.
However, forcing students back to school is the linchpin of the back-to-work campaign in the US. Millions of workers are unable to return to full-time work if their children are being taught remotely. That such a policy will result in the infection and deaths of an untold number of children, educators, staff and parents, along with an acceleration of the pandemic, is small potatoes to President Donald Trump as well as Democratic officials like de Blasio.
It is under these conditions that Barbot’s position at DOHMH became untenable. For all of de Blasio’s blathering about “teamwork,” his decision was driven by Wall Street’s profit interests.
Thanks to the “herd immunity” position adopted for a few days in the largest city in the country, New York City was the undisputed epicenter of the pandemic globally for weeks. The return to such policies signaled by Barbot’s ouster, on the eve of the return to in-person instruction, will spell an even worse bloodbath, unless halted by the independent action of the working class, guided by a socialist program.
West Palm Beach, Florida seniors face eviction from low income housing
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/07/flor-a07.html
By Matthew Taylor
7 August 2020
Low income seniors formerly living at the St. Andrews Residence in West Palm Beach, Florida are facing possible eviction from their temporary housing in the coming weeks. The residents of St. Andrews, a low-income senior living facility owned by the Episcopal diocese of Southeast Florida, were forced to leave the building after an electrical fire broke out in June that left the facility temporarily uninhabitable.
Of the residents who were displaced, 125 were placed in hotels in the area after the fire, with the rest going to live with friends or family. They continued to pay rent and were delivered the three daily meals that were included in their rent arrangement.
Last Sunday, according to the Palm Beach Post, the tenants of St. Andrews received a notice from SPM Management, which runs the facility on behalf of the diocese, that if the building did not conclude repairs and pass inspection by August 14, so residents could return home, they would no longer be accommodated in hotels and their meal service would also be cut off.
Through no fault of their own, the elderly residents of St. Andrews now face homelessness and hunger, amid the coronavirus pandemic, which has ravaged the senior population in the US and internationally. Already residents have been informed that one tenant, who is currently residing in a hotel, had tested positive for the virus.
As of Thursday, West Palm Beach and surrounding Palm Beach County have recorded 35,735 COVID-19 infections and 892 deaths. The state of Florida remains a hot spot for infections and deaths, reporting 7,650 new cases and 121 deaths on Thursday.
St. Andrews management has made no effort thus far to test its residents for coronavirus, instead instructing them to seek out tests from their own doctors. For many residents who do not have their own cars this is impossible.
Jim Jensen, 77, who suffers from COPD and was placed in a local hotel told the Palm Beach Post that the news “had me quite upset because I could end up homeless...the thought that at 77 years old and being homeless for no reason is rather disturbing, I didn’t cause this.”
Another resident spoke to the Post anonymously because “I’m afraid I would be evicted. I’m scared to death of management.” They added that many residents “Don’t know where they are going to go. Some of them don’t have any family left. They have outlived their families. They are petrified.”
The initial displacement was highly disruptive on its own because many residents have no cars or are unable to drive. St. Andrews, like many similar facilities in other cities, is located downtown, making it easier for the residents to access stores, doctors’ offices, and other necessities. After being forced to leave after the fire in June they were spread around to various hotels in the area.
Additionally, the placement in hotels puts the seniors, already at a high risk of dying from COVID–19 if they contract the virus, in still greater peril due to the fact that area hotels have many guests from other states and counties, increasing the risk of coronavirus transmission.
According to the accounts of multiple residents who spoke to the Palm Beach Post , the facility has been in disrepair for years, with leaky pipes and electrical problems common, elevators that worked intermittently in the 15-story structure, and pervasive black mold throughout the building.
“I have had to purchase expensive air purifiers and special allergy filters which are costly to survive in my apartment,” 67-year-old resident Judy Collins told the Post. “St. Andrews is always riding on the minimum to get by.”
Nancy Gregory, 75, told the Post that she moved out of the building last year due to extensive black mold. Residents also reported that the mold problem is so severe that it would coat clothing.
Many residents were also impacted when St. Andrews discontinued mail service to the facility last year, forcing them to pick up their mail at the nearest post office a mile away.
This is not the first time the building has experienced an electrical fire. In March of this year an electrical fire forced the residents of the building to temporarily evacuate. Another fire occurred in October 2018, which left the building without air conditioning for a week.
Collins told the Post that many residents believe that the diocese is spending a minimal amount on repairs because they plan on selling the building for a profit. The building, which sits along the Intracoastal waterway, was first purchased in 2009 for $3.3 million dollars, it is now valued at $13.8 million.
The Episcopal Diocese and its leader Reverend Peter Eaton have declined to speak with the press.
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