https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiI9Cvf8Ycs&feature
Saturday, August 8, 2020
US Homeland Security chief defends police-state crackdown, announces federal paramilitaries to remain in Portland
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/07/wolf-a07.html
By Barry Grey
7 August 2020
In testimony Thursday before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, the acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Chad Wolf, aggressively defended the violent crackdown on anti-police brutality protesters in Portland, Oregon by paramilitary units of Customs and Border Protection (CBP), an agency of DHS.
Wolf also announced that the “full augmented DHS law enforcement posture” would remain on alert in Portland indefinitely, despite an agreement with state and local officials to draw back the militarized federal immigration police and allow Oregon state troopers to police protesters rallying daily outside the Hatfield Federal Courthouse in downtown Portland.
Wolf denounced the Democratic mayor of Portland and governor of Oregon as well as the Democratic-controlled Portland City Council, all of whom publicly opposed the deployment of the federal police by President Trump and repeatedly demanded their removal. He presented an Alice in Wonderland version of events, according to which violent and criminal mobs of left-wing terrorists and Antifa-linked anarchists attempted night after night to destroy the courthouse and violently attacked the CBP paramilitaries.
In Wolf's telling—echoed by the Republican majority on the committee—his forces were “abandoned” by local and state authorities, who, by implication, were complicit in rampant mob violence.
He also attacked the Portland City Council for “prohibiting local police cooperation and ‘information sharing’ with “federal law enforcement,” i.e., Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and CBP agents who arbitrarily detain immigrants and jail or deport them.
He denounced the media coverage, which documented to some extent the brutal attacks on peaceful demonstrators carried out by CBP police, including a specially trained fascistic unit called BORTAC, using tear gas, flash-bang grenades, truncheons and “impact munitions.” At least one demonstrator, 26-year-old Donavan LaBella, was critically wounded when a paramilitary officer shot him in the head and cracked his skull.
Wolf specifically defended the chilling practice carried out in Portland of seizing protesters blocks away from the courthouse, trundling them into unmarked vehicles and taking them to secret locations to be interrogated, without probable cause and in many cases without any charges being laid. This trademark of military dictatorships and fascist regimes he called a “common de-escalation tactic.”
He boasted that his agents had arrested 99 Portland protesters on federal charges and added that “the next 30 days will see a lot more activity in terms of charging people.” The Washington Post reported Thursday that the charges include assaulting a federal officer, arson, damaging federal property and operating a drone in a restricted area. There are 24 felony and 45 misdemeanor charges, carrying prison sentences of up to 20 years.
The police-state assault on protesters in Portland is an extension of the Gestapo-style campaign against immigrants being carried out by Trump and his fascistic aide Stephen Miller, in which Wolf's immigration police have served as Trump’s personal militarized force. In February, the White House confirmed that it was deploying BORTAC to conduct immigration roundups in cities, such as Portland, where local governments have ordered local police not to fully comply with federal immigration officials.
So-called “sanctuary cities” where these special tactical units, which have served in Washington's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, have been deployed include Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York, San Francisco and Newark.
Committee Chairman Ron Johnson, Republican from Wisconsin, set the tone for the rest of the Republicans on the panel in his opening remarks. He named two police officers killed in the course of the nationwide, multiracial protests against racism and police violence that erupted in response to the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police on May 25. He then cited DHS to claim that 277 attacks on police and federal officers occurred “during those ‘peaceful protests’ that started in May.”
This grotesquely distorted presentation of the protests—which were savagely attacked by local police and National Guard troops—was conflated with statistics showing an increase in urban crime during the pandemic to claim that the protests have unleashed “anarchy” and an out-of-control crime wave on the country.
This narrative, which echoes that of the White House, is aimed at justifying the imposition of dictatorial rule, based on the military and the police, including fascistic forces being encouraged by Trump both inside and outside the repressive organs of the state. It is the response of a ruling class discredited by its catastrophic handling of the coronavirus pandemic, following decades of self-enrichment, war and attacks on working-class living standards, and terrified of the growth of popular opposition and hatred for capitalism.
The Democrats are no less petrified at the prospect of a mass movement of the working class. Their response to the wave of protests has been to align themselves even more closely with the military, the FBI and the CIA, while seeking to hijack the protests and channel them behind a racialist narrative. The Democratic Party and allied media, led by the New York Times, interpret every issue—from the pandemic, to unemployment, to police killings—almost entirely as manifestations of racism, concealing the basic class divisions in society that underlie racial discrimination, and working to divide the working class.
None of the Democrats at Thursday’s hearing raised the fundamental threat to democratic rights posed by the police-state policies of DHS and the Trump administration, which were defended across the board by Wolf. They were silent on Trump’s attempted coup on June 1, which preceded the crackdown in Portland and deployment of federal police to many other cities. On that day, Trump threatened to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act and deploy active-duty troops across the country to crush the protests against police violence.
He was stopped at that point by the military brass, which considered such a move premature and unprepared, and likely to set off a mass popular uprising that could spiral out of control. But as the World Socialist Web Site warned, the danger of an anti-constitutional coup d’etat remained, and the authoritarian plotting centered in the White House continued.
The ranking Democrat on the committee, Michigan Senator Gary Peters, meekly criticized Wolf for undermining public trust in the DHS through his “heavy-handed” tactics, and said the “singular focus on protecting federal property is distracting the department from addressing the threat posed by domestic terrorism” He demonstratively did not defend the state and local Democratic officials in Oregon who were attacked by Wolf. Nor did he defend the protesters from the DHS head’s slanders.
Kamala Harris of California, reportedly at the top of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s list for vice president, along with former Obama National Security Adviser Susan Rice, also failed to defend the protesters. She focused her questions on suggestions that Wolf was acting in concert with Trump and tailoring his provocative policies to Trump’s reelection campaign.
Just in the week preceding Thursday’s hearing, the Washington Post revealed that DHS’s Office of Intelligence Analysis had drawn up open source intelligence reports on two journalists who covered the protests in Portland and created “baseball card” dossiers on dozens of arrested protesters.
The Nation obtained a copy of a DHS intelligence report showing that Wolf’s department was targeting activists, branding them as “Antifa,” and attempting to tie them to a foreign power, a prelude to indicting them as terrorists. The leaked report named several individuals who had fought with the Kurdish YPG militia against ISIS during the period when Washington was allied with the YPG. This documented the plans to use the post-9/11 “anti-terror” laws to criminalize domestic political opposition on the left.
And on July 30, officers of the US Border Patrol, an agency of CBP and DHS, raided a camp set up by the migrant aid group No More Deaths in Arizona, 11 miles from the US-Mexico border, and arrested one of the activists.
Neither the anti-terror surveillance of protesters nor the raid on immigrant aid activists were raised by any of the Democrats on the committee.
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.
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