https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSO8wL8uEHg
Wednesday, August 12, 2020
Sri Lankan election exposes historic crisis of capitalist rule
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/11/sril-a11.html
By K. Ratnayake
11 August 2020
The Sri Lankan media has responded to last Wednesday’s election win of President Gotabhaya Rajapakse’s Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) by falsely hailing it as a “people’s victory.” The SLPP won 145 seats while the opposition parties won just 74 seats.
As a result, with the votes of six MPs from political allies, the SLPP will have a two-thirds majority in the 225-seat parliament, enabling it to change the constitution. President Rajapakse has been openly campaigning for the removal of constitutional restraints to the executive presidency which would give him sweeping autocratic powers.
The election result is not a “people’s victory” but an electoral win by a party preparing for authoritarian rule under President Rajapakse who has already appointed a host of generals to his administration. The new cabinet will be officially appointed tomorrow and the new parliament convened on August 20.
SLPP leader Mahinda Rajapakse was sworn in as prime minister by his brother President Rajapakse on Sunday. The ceremony was held at Kelaniya Viharaya in northeastern Colombo, a site mythically claimed to have been visited by Buddha. Significantly, President Rajapakse took his oath in Anuradhapura, the ancient Sinhala capital, in the north-central province. Both leaders are thus signalling the Sinhala-Buddhist supremacist character of their regime.
Sinhala-Buddhist supremacism was the main plank of the SLPP’s presidential and general election campaigns. Its purpose was to whip up hostility against the island’s Tamil and Muslims minorities, divert social tensions and divide the working class across ethnic lines.
The Sri Lankan ruling elite faces a profound economic and political crisis that has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. It has backed the SLPP because it promised “strong and stable rule”—i.e., its willingness to suppress rising working-class resistance to Colombo’s austerity policies and attacks on jobs and wages. Like its counterparts internationally, Sri Lankan big business wants the economy restructured and their profits increased by slashing jobs, imposing lower wages and increasing productivity.
The ruling class has turned to the SLPP and its authoritarian plans under conditions of a historic collapse of the United National Party (UNP) and Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), the two traditional parties of the Sri Lankan bourgeoisie.
The UNP, the country’s oldest political party, was only able to win one seat, not in a direct contest but as a result of its national vote, which plummeted to just 250,000. The bitterly-divided party split in February when the majority of its MPs, under the leadership of Sajith Premadasa, left to form the Samagi Jana Balavegaya (SJB).
The factional conflict centred on the electoral unpopularity of longstanding UNP leader and former Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe. The issue, however, was not a question of personality but the deep-seated hostility of workers and the rural poor to this pro-imperialist party and its attacks on democratic and social rights. The SJB won just 54 seats and 24 percent of votes in last week’s election.
The SLFP, led by former President Sirisena, is all but defunct. The majority of its MPs left the party and joined the SLPP when it was formed in 2016. Sirisena and the remaining SLFP parliamentarians contested last Wednesday’s ballot in an electoral alliance with the SLPP.
Consecutive UNP and SLFP administrations have governed the country since formal independence in 1948. The UNP was established in 1946 while the SLFP was formed in 1951 by S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike and other MPs who split in response to rising working class struggles against the UNP. Whether in or out of government, both parties used anti-Tamil communalism to divide the working class and defend capitalist rule. This reactionary agenda culminated in the communalist war in 1983 against the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) creating untold devastation for the masses throughout the island.
Wednesday’s elections also exposed the ongoing crisis of the bourgeois Tamil National Alliance (TNA). It won just 10 seats, down from 16 in the last parliament, with its overall vote falling from 515,963 in the August 2015 election to just 327,168.
The Illankai Tamil Arasu Kachchi (ITAK), the principal party in the alliance, was formed in 1949 in response to the anti-Tamil communalism. ITAK has a long and sordid history of attempting to secure power-sharing arrangements with the Colombo elite. These political manoeuvres have produced one disaster after another for the Tamil masses.
Formed in 2002, the TNA responded to the LTTE’s defeat in May 2009, by shifting further to the right, and appealing to the major imperialist powers, including the US, to secure their backing for a deal with Colombo.
The TNA supported Washington’s 2015 regime-change operation to oust then President Mahinda Rajapakse and to install Sirisena. It backed Sirisena’s pro-imperialist administration and its suppression of any investigation into Colombo’s war crimes, including the massacre of tens of thousands of Tamil civilians in the final weeks of war, and also supported the government’s austerity measures (see: “Tamil National Alliance offers to support Sri Lankan president’s autocratic rule”).
The Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) contested the election in a new front called the National People’s Power (NPP) offering populist demands and calling for a “clean” uncorrupted parliament. It won three seats, down from six in the previous parliament. In 2004, the JVP had 39 MPs.
Established in the late 1960s, the JVP was a radical petty-bourgeois party based on a mixture of Castroism, Maoism and Sinhala patriotism. It is now a party of the bourgeois establishment and since 1994 has aligned itself with every regime in Colombo. This includes joining a coalition with President Chandrika Kumaratunga in 2004. Having fully backed Colombo’s communalist war it is widely discredited among the youth and workers initially attracted to it.
Commenting on last Wednesday’s election, JVP leader Anura Kumara Dissanayake said, “This result is not one we can be satisfied with” but added “there is a role for the Opposition outside the parliament as well,” and said the organisation would organise farmers and unemployed. As its previous history demonstrates, the JVP will work with the ruling elites to derail rural poor and youth from turning towards socialism and the working class.
The deep-going alienation of the masses from the political establishment was also revealed by the millions of Sri Lankan citizens who refused to participate in the election. While there are more than 16 million registered voters in Sri Lanka just over 11 million voted—i.e., about 4.7 million did not cast a vote. This is about one million more than the previous national election in 2015, and of those that participated in Wednesday’s election, 700,000 cancelled their votes.
The media rejoicing about the SLPP victory is an expression of their support for the future government’s social assault on all working people. As an August 6 editorial in the Island entitled “Real war ahead” declared: “A democratically elected stable government is a prerequisite for restoring investor confidence, reviving the economy, and improving the country’s credit ratings.”
It is not enough for parties to just call for “stringent measures,” the editorial continued, “The interval in hell, as it were, we have been enjoying all these months will be over soon.” In other words, massive government attacks must be unleashed on workers, the rural poor and youth as soon as possible.
In last Wednesday’s election, the Socialist Equality Party increased its total vote to 780 in the three districts that it contested—Jaffna 146, Colombo 303 and Nuwara Eliya 331. The party’s vote doubled in Colombo, the country’s major working-class centre and in Nuwara Eliya, where the majority of Sri Lanka’s plantation workers live. This increase was amid the COVID-19 pandemic, where party campaigns were limited to online meetings and Facebook sharing of SEP statements and World Socialist Web Site articles.
These conscious votes indicate a growing support for socialism in Sri Lanka. The SEP will intensify its exposure of the Sinhala chauvinist provocations against Tamil and Muslim minorities that seek to divide workers. It was the only party that opposed Colombo’s communalist war against the LTTE and demanded the withdrawal of the military from the north and east of the country.
Our party advances a socialist policy against imperialist war, the coronavirus pandemic and social inequality. We alone call for the working class to break from every faction of the ruling class and independently mobilise—rallying the rural poor and the oppressed—to fight for a workers’ and peasants’ government to implement socialist policies as part of the struggle for international socialism.
Chicago mayor locks down business district after police shooting sparks looting
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/11/chic-a11.html
By Kristina Betinis
11 August 2020
Access bridges over the Chicago River were raised again Monday night, cutting off the business district, known as the Loop, from the rest of the city, as social tensions continue to rise after the police shooting of a young black man Sunday afternoon.
The police shooting and tense confrontation with residents in the Englewood neighborhood on the city’s south side led to looting overnight at several downtown stores, including in the upscale Magnificent Mile retail area. According to media reports, two people were shot, more than 100 were arrested and 13 police officers injured. Additional police have been deployed and an indefinite lockdown of the Loop resumed Monday evening.
The incident began when police shot a 20-year-old youth in Englewood, who, they claimed, had fled after being stopped and fired on officers before they shot him. The young man, whose name has not been released because he has not yet been charged with a crime, is reported to be in stable condition at University of Chicago Hospital.
In comments to the Sun Times, Earl Allen, the victim’s brother, contradicted the police version of events. Allen said he and his brother were in Moran Park when his brother got in an altercation before both left the park with a group of people. Allen said someone in the group made a comment to officers in a police vehicle, which prompted the police pursuit.
Allen said he was walking to his home after the group dispersed when he heard 8 or 9 shots ring out but did not see shooters. Shortly after he said he saw his brother wounded and running into their home. Allen also denied the weapon that police claim was found at the scene belonged to his brother.
About 100 youth gathered at Cook County Jail Monday night to demand police body camera footage from the Sunday shooting.
Shortly after the shooting on Sunday, residents gathered to confront a growing number of police, some in helmets and armed with rifles. Tensions mounted as hundreds of cops formed a line and residents implored young people to get inside, fearing that they would be severely beaten or killed by police.
By midnight on Sunday evening, 400 police officers were deployed in response to hundreds of people reportedly entering the Magnificent Mile and near West Side shopping districts where smashing and looting went on into the early morning. The Illinois state police blocked off ramps from expressways and the bridges across the Chicago River were raised, except for the one on LaSalle Street for police and emergency vehicles.
Democratic Mayor Lori Lightfoot responded by deploying more police, threatening more aggressive prosecutions and cutting off nighttime access to the Loop. From 8 PM to 6 AM, street and train transit is cut off except at certain points until further notice.
Lightfoot also announced the deployment of “infrastructure assets,” i.e., more security forces, directed by Chicago Police Department, to protect commercial properties.
Lightfoot and Chicago Police Supt. David Brown held a press conference Monday morning to denounce the looting and announce a massive police crackdown. “This is not legitimate First Amendment-protected speech,” Lightfoot said. “These were not poor people engaging in petty theft to feed themselves and their families. This was straight-up felony, criminal conduct.” She said police would use camera footage to track down suspects, adding, “We are coming for you.”
Brown said the looting had been “fueled by misinformation” about the age of the police shooting victim and the conduct of the police.
Both the mayor and the police chief blamed Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx for not being aggressive enough in prosecuting scattered instances of looting that occurred during the massive anti-police violence protests over George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis. “Criminals took to the streets with the confidence that there would be no consequences for their actions,” Brown said.
In fact, thousands of youth were arrested, beaten and teargassed from May into July. Many face trial and severe punishment this month.
The Democratic political establishment is using the looting incidents to escalate police repression against an increasingly restive population. Last month, Lightfoot announced that she had reached an agreement with the Trump administration to send a “surge” of 200 federal agents to Chicago, allegedly to fight crime.
Chicago, America’s third largest city, is a social tinderbox, the result of a four-decade-long class war overseen by the Democratic Party. Once thriving working-class neighborhoods have been reduced to poverty and destitution by the shutdown of factories and decades of budget cuts, which led to the closure of public schools, recreation centers, public housing buildings and health clinics.
As thousands of low-rent homes were demolished, Democratic mayors handed over billions in tax cuts and incentives to Boeing and other corporations to set up their headquarters downtown. As powerful financial and real estate interests made a killing, rising rents drove out working class and lower middle class residents and homelessness exploded.
Well aware that social tensions were reaching a breaking point, Lightfoot’s predecessor, Rahm Emanuel, the Obama White House’s first chief of staff who was also known as “Mayor One Percent,” beefed up the police forces. Lightfoot, who repeatedly claims there is no money for schools and teachers, has followed suit, adding $100 million to the budget line of the Chicago Police Department (CPD) last year, a seven percent increase over the previous year.
The social crisis has only been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the economic catastrophe it has triggered. Twenty-five thousand Illinoisans filed for unemployment August 1 and 33,000 filed the week before that. Along with jobless workers across the country, these laid off workers have now had their $600 a week federal supplement taken from them.
Unemployment on the South Side is estimated to be double Chicago’s official unemployment rate of 15.6 percent for June. In working class and poor neighborhoods, the devastation is similar to that seen in wartime. The suicide rate among African Americans in Chicago in 2020 has already surpassed the figure for 2019. This year, there have been 58 suicide deaths and of that total, 80 percent were men and 40 percent were under 30 years old.
At the same time, Illinois is the home to at least 18 billionaires, including the state’s Democratic governor and Hyatt hotel magnate JB Pritzker. The relentless police violence is aimed at defending the wealth and power of the corporate and financial oligarchy against an increasingly radicalized working class.
Access bridges over the Chicago River were raised again Monday night, cutting off the business district, known as the Loop, from the rest of the city, as social tensions continue to rise after the police shooting of a young black man Sunday afternoon.
The police shooting and tense confrontation with residents in the Englewood neighborhood on the city’s south side led to looting overnight at several downtown stores, including in the upscale Magnificent Mile retail area. According to media reports, two people were shot, more than 100 were arrested and 13 police officers injured. Additional police have been deployed and an indefinite lockdown of the Loop resumed Monday evening.
The incident began when police shot a 20-year-old youth in Englewood, who, they claimed, had fled after being stopped and fired on officers before they shot him. The young man, whose name has not been released because he has not yet been charged with a crime, is reported to be in stable condition at University of Chicago Hospital.
In comments to the Sun Times, Earl Allen, the victim’s brother, contradicted the police version of events. Allen said he and his brother were in Moran Park when his brother got in an altercation before both left the park with a group of people. Allen said someone in the group made a comment to officers in a police vehicle, which prompted the police pursuit.
Allen said he was walking to his home after the group dispersed when he heard 8 or 9 shots ring out but did not see shooters. Shortly after he said he saw his brother wounded and running into their home. Allen also denied the weapon that police claim was found at the scene belonged to his brother.
About 100 youth gathered at Cook County Jail Monday night to demand police body camera footage from the Sunday shooting.
Shortly after the shooting on Sunday, residents gathered to confront a growing number of police, some in helmets and armed with rifles. Tensions mounted as hundreds of cops formed a line and residents implored young people to get inside, fearing that they would be severely beaten or killed by police.
By midnight on Sunday evening, 400 police officers were deployed in response to hundreds of people reportedly entering the Magnificent Mile and near West Side shopping districts where smashing and looting went on into the early morning. The Illinois state police blocked off ramps from expressways and the bridges across the Chicago River were raised, except for the one on LaSalle Street for police and emergency vehicles.
Democratic Mayor Lori Lightfoot responded by deploying more police, threatening more aggressive prosecutions and cutting off nighttime access to the Loop. From 8 PM to 6 AM, street and train transit is cut off except at certain points until further notice.
Lightfoot also announced the deployment of “infrastructure assets,” i.e., more security forces, directed by Chicago Police Department, to protect commercial properties.
Lightfoot and Chicago Police Supt. David Brown held a press conference Monday morning to denounce the looting and announce a massive police crackdown. “This is not legitimate First Amendment-protected speech,” Lightfoot said. “These were not poor people engaging in petty theft to feed themselves and their families. This was straight-up felony, criminal conduct.” She said police would use camera footage to track down suspects, adding, “We are coming for you.”
Brown said the looting had been “fueled by misinformation” about the age of the police shooting victim and the conduct of the police.
Both the mayor and the police chief blamed Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx for not being aggressive enough in prosecuting scattered instances of looting that occurred during the massive anti-police violence protests over George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis. “Criminals took to the streets with the confidence that there would be no consequences for their actions,” Brown said.
In fact, thousands of youth were arrested, beaten and teargassed from May into July. Many face trial and severe punishment this month.
The Democratic political establishment is using the looting incidents to escalate police repression against an increasingly restive population. Last month, Lightfoot announced that she had reached an agreement with the Trump administration to send a “surge” of 200 federal agents to Chicago, allegedly to fight crime.
Chicago, America’s third largest city, is a social tinderbox, the result of a four-decade-long class war overseen by the Democratic Party. Once thriving working-class neighborhoods have been reduced to poverty and destitution by the shutdown of factories and decades of budget cuts, which led to the closure of public schools, recreation centers, public housing buildings and health clinics.
As thousands of low-rent homes were demolished, Democratic mayors handed over billions in tax cuts and incentives to Boeing and other corporations to set up their headquarters downtown. As powerful financial and real estate interests made a killing, rising rents drove out working class and lower middle class residents and homelessness exploded.
Well aware that social tensions were reaching a breaking point, Lightfoot’s predecessor, Rahm Emanuel, the Obama White House’s first chief of staff who was also known as “Mayor One Percent,” beefed up the police forces. Lightfoot, who repeatedly claims there is no money for schools and teachers, has followed suit, adding $100 million to the budget line of the Chicago Police Department (CPD) last year, a seven percent increase over the previous year.
The social crisis has only been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the economic catastrophe it has triggered. Twenty-five thousand Illinoisans filed for unemployment August 1 and 33,000 filed the week before that. Along with jobless workers across the country, these laid off workers have now had their $600 a week federal supplement taken from them.
Unemployment on the South Side is estimated to be double Chicago’s official unemployment rate of 15.6 percent for June. In working class and poor neighborhoods, the devastation is similar to that seen in wartime. The suicide rate among African Americans in Chicago in 2020 has already surpassed the figure for 2019. This year, there have been 58 suicide deaths and of that total, 80 percent were men and 40 percent were under 30 years old.
At the same time, Illinois is the home to at least 18 billionaires, including the state’s Democratic governor and Hyatt hotel magnate JB Pritzker. The relentless police violence is aimed at defending the wealth and power of the corporate and financial oligarchy against an increasingly radicalized working class.
US Attorney General Barr gives fascistic tirade against Antifa, Black Lives Matter
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/11/barr-a11.html
By Patrick Martin
11 August 2020
In a television interview Sunday night on Fox News, US Attorney General William Barr declared that some of the Democratic representatives who questioned him at a congressional hearing two weeks ago were revolutionaries seeking to overthrow American capitalism, in league with terrorists.
The fascistic rant—whose logical conclusion is the criminalization of all political opposition to the Trump administration—came in the course of an appearance on “Life, Liberty & Levin,” a Sunday night interview program.
Barr began with fulsome praise for the police, attacking the Black Lives Matter movement and the protests against police violence that swept the United States after the May 25 police murder of George Floyd. “The fact is, generally speaking, we have superb police in this country,” he said. “There will be some instances of excessive force, but by and large it’s an excellent police force. And if they’re going to be demonized like this, they’re not going to work in these cities.”
Host Mark Levin, in what appeared to be a choreographed effort, cited a report by an ultra-right think tank on the loosely organized protest group Antifa (antifascist). The Gatestone Institute, which sponsors brazenly Islamophobic “research,” was chaired until 2018 by John Bolton, who then joined the Trump administration as national security adviser.
The Gatestone report cites material produced by the Verfassungschutz, the German secret service agency that has placed the German Trotskyists of the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (SGP—Socialist Equality Party) on its surveillance list, while giving its stamp of approval to the Alternative for Germany (AfD), the principal vehicle for the revival of neo-Nazi trends in Germany.
The report presents Antifa as a large, well-organized international conspiracy of tens of thousands of militants, although it is invariably described by supporters as little more than a signboard used by anarchists and other protesters in different localities, who communicate through social media but do not constitute an organization in any real sense of the term.
Barr hailed the Gatestone report—which quotes his own comments about Antifa—and launched into a diatribe against Antifa. “They are a revolutionary group that is interested in some form of socialism, communism,” he said. “They’re essentially Bolsheviks.”
He went on to claim that Antifa used “fascistic” tactics. According to Barr, they infiltrated the mass protests against police violence. “What they do is, they are essentially shielding themselves or shrouding themselves in First Amendment activity,” he said. “They hijack these demonstrations and they provoke violence. And they have various tiers of people from the sort of top provocateurs down to people who are their minions and run the violent missions.”
He continued, “It’s a new form of urban guerrilla warfare. Mao Tse-Tung used to speak about the guerrilla being like fish swimming in the ocean the way the guerrilla moves through the people. The guerrilla hides out among the people as a fish in the ocean.”
The purpose of this demented presentation, issued without the slightest attempt to present any evidence, was to make an amalgam stretching from the alleged violent protesters through Black Lives Matter and other groups organizing the anti-police protests, to the Democratic Party.
Barr described this entire range of political opinion as though it were a unified and coherent political tendency, which he described as “the left,” which was seeking power through a coordinated campaign to remove Trump from office. All those opposing Trump constituted “a Rousseauian Revolutionary Party that believes in tearing down the system.”
The attorney general included the corporate media in this amalgam, claiming that the media deliberately concealed evidence of widespread Antifa violence in Portland, Oregon and other US cities.
“Anyone with eyes can see what’s happening,” he declared. “They see the violence. They see these groups of agitators and their black outfits, their helmets and their shields, which, incidentally, have the hammer and sickle on them most of the time, are rushing the police, causing violence, throwing rocks… You don’t see it on any of the national news. You don’t see it on the networks. You don’t see it on the cable stations. And yet you hear about these peaceful demonstrators, so it’s a lie. The American people are being told a lie by the media.”
There is a definite fascistic content to the type of political amalgam concocted by Barr. Just as Trump tweeted that Black Lives Matter protests constituted “treason”—a crime punishable by death—Barr suggests that “the left” is at war with the Trump administration and “America,” and should be treated accordingly.
Referring to the House Judiciary Committee hearing, where there was mild criticism of federal police tactics in Portland, Barr said that some members of the committee were “true believers” and “essentially revolutionary,” while the majority were “cowards who are mostly interested in getting reelected.”
After reading those words, dripping with menace, it is necessary to remind oneself that Barr is not a Nazi jurist condemning all opponents of the Führer to be hanged. He is the chief law enforcement official of a government that is nominally democratic, where public opposition to the president is legal, and where the First Amendment to the Constitution guarantees such rights as freedom of speech and freedom of assembly.
Despite his phlegmatic demeanor and lawyerly word-juggling, however, Barr has much in common with Carl Schmitt, the principal legal theorist of the Third Reich.
That such an individual is the nation’s chief law enforcement official and presides over the machinery of the “justice system” of the United States testifies to the rotted out, degenerate and profoundly antidemocratic character of “American democracy.” Genuine democracy is incompatible with the staggering levels of social inequality that prevail in the US. More accurately, the United States is an oligarchic society that has yet to fully shed the trappings of bourgeois democracy, but, in the face of mounting social tensions and a growing threat of working-class revolution, is lurching toward dictatorial forms of rule.
Trump’s attorney general is well aware that groups like Antifa and acts of minor vandalism—overturning fences outside federal buildings and setting small fires—are no threat whatsoever to the capitalist system. In his reference to the Bolsheviks, however, Barr reveals his real fears and those of the entire American ruling elite, whether pro-Trump or anti-Trump.
The Bolshevik Party led the first successful mass revolutionary workers’ uprising in history, the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia, which established the Soviet Union as the first workers’ state. It is the repetition of that example, on a much wider scale, that is the nightmare of American imperialism and its official thugs like Barr.
For their own political reasons, they choose to lump together the threat from below, from the working class, and their opponents within the ruling elite, in the Democratic Party. But it is the working class that is the real target of the repressive measures that Barr & Co. are preparing.
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