Report charges US-Saudi arms sale ignored civilian casualties

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/13/arms-a13.html

By Bill Van Auken
13 August 2020

In its invoking of a phony state of emergency to ram through an $8.1 billion weapons deal that included precision-guided missiles (PGMs) for Saudi Arabia in May of last year, the US State Department “did not fully assess risks and implement mitigation measures to reduce civilian casualties and legal concerns associated with the transfer of PGMs,” a report released Tuesday by the department’s Office of Inspector General charged.

The emergency was declared by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on May 24, 2019 as a means of circumventing congressional opposition to arms sales to the Saudi monarchy and the United Arab Emirates. Pompeo claimed at the time that the weapons were needed urgently to “deter Iranian aggression.”

The report, requested by the Democratic-controlled House Foreign Affairs Committee, came amid fresh reports from Yemen of atrocities caused by US-supplied Saudi warplanes and munitions.

At least nine children were among 20 killed in an August 6 Saudi airstrike against a four-vehicle civilian convoy in northern Yemen. A local health official said that the majority of the dead were women and children, as were seven others who were critically wounded.

The UN humanitarian coordinator for Yemen, Lise Grande, said the attack came “as the victims were traveling by road.” She added, “Like all senseless acts of violence against civilians, this is shocking and completely, totally unacceptable.”

The British charity Save the Children also confirmed the civilian casualties. “In less than a month at least 17 children have lost their lives as a result of indiscriminate attacks in Yemen,” said Xavier Joubert, the charity’s director in Yemen.

On July 14, the UN reported another airstrike in Yemen’s Hajjah province that killed seven children, some as young as two years old.

According to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), the US-backed, Saudi-led war against Yemen has killed over 100,000 people since it began in 2015. The Saudi bombing campaign would be impossible without US weapons and logistical support, which has included targeting intelligence as well as aerial refueling for Saudi warplanes.

The devastating impact of the estimated 257,000 Saudi airstrikes has been compounded by a naval blockade mounted by the UAE with US naval support for the express purpose of starving the Yemeni population into submission. Many thousands more Yemenis, including at least 75,000 children under the age of five, have died of starvation, while the worst cholera epidemic on record has infected 1.2 million. Fully half of Yemen’s 28 million people are living on the brink of starvation.

The US State Department held a press briefing the day before the OIG’s report was released, claiming that the “big takeaway” was that the report confirmed that the State Department and Pompeo acted in “complete accordance of the law and found no wrongdoing in the administration’s exercise of the emergency authorities.”

This claim was echoed by Pompeo at a press conference in Prague Wednesday. “We did everything by the book,” he said. “I am proud of the work that my team did. We got a really good outcome. We prevented the loss of lives.” He failed to specify which “lives” he had in mind. Clearly they were not those of the thousands killed by US munitions in Yemen.

The OIG report does not exonerate Pompeo. It states at the outset that it did not “make any assessment of the policy decisions underlying the arms transfers and the associated emergency.” It notes that the Arms Export Control Act (AECA) of 1976 merely requires that the executive branch declare that “an emergency exists,” which requires that the sale be made immediately “in the national security interests of the United States” in order to override Congress.

The publicly released report was heavily redacted, with the acting Inspector General Diana Shaw invoking in a cover letter “executive branch confidentiality interests, including executive privilege.”

In addition to its indictment of the State Department for failing to concern itself with the civilian casualties caused by the weapons being fast-tracked to the House of Saud, an unredacted copy of the OIG’s report leaked to the media also provides a timeline that makes clear the claim of an “emergency” was entirely fraudulent. It establishes that discussion on the use of the AECA emergency clause began nearly two months before it was actually invoked, and that when the report’s findings were issued to the State Department, just $20 million of the billions of dollars in arms sales involved had been implemented.

Far from Washington having to rush weapons to a beleaguered ally, the emergency declaration was made for the dual purposes of fueling the US war buildup against Iran and safeguarding the billions of dollars in profits from Saudi arms sales accruing to Raytheon and other major US weapons manufacturers.

Congressional opposition to arms sales to the Saudi monarchical regime increased in the wake of the October 2018 assassination of Jamal Khashoggi, a dissident journalist and former regime insider, who was killed and dismembered at the Saudi embassy in Istanbul, Turkey.

The Democrats’ profession of concern over the Saudi atrocities carried out with US weaponry in Yemen was belated, to say the least. American arms sales to Riyadh soared under the administration of Barack Obama, which provided the Saudi military with cluster bombs, fighter jets, white phosphorus, targeting lists, midair refueling and around-the-clock maintenance, without which the slaughter of Yemenis would have been impossible.

In any case, for Washington and both US capitalist parties, Yemen and its US-backed war crimes are merely a sideshow in the greater game of struggle for hegemony over the energy-rich Middle East.

The drive to war against Iran has not been blunted by the exponential spread of the coronavirus pandemic in the US and internationally. On the contrary, the crisis which it has unleashed has only intensified American militarism, which provides a means of directing uncontrollable domestic tension outward.

Washington’s determination to effect regime change in Iran has only escalated in the face of Beijing’s cementing last month a far-reaching agreement with Tehran, providing $400 billion of investments in Iran’s oil, gas and transport sectors, in exchange for cheap oil supplies. In addition to Chinese investments in other sectors, it will allow China to deploy up to 5,000 troops to protect its interests in Iran.

The danger of a US war against Iran, made plain with Washington’s drone assassination at Baghdad’s international airport on January 3 of Gen. Qassem Suleimani, one of the most senior officials in the Iranian government, is bound up with US preparations for war against nuclear-armed China and Russia and the threat of a nuclear holocaust.

This threat can be answered only through the political mobilization of the international working class in struggle against war and its source, the capitalist profit system.

Indonesia gets ready for mass production of a COVID-19 vaccine

 

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US Supreme Court rules ballot access petitioning must proceed during coronavirus pandemic

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/13/cour-a13.html

By Kevin Reed
13 August 2020

On Tuesday, the US Supreme Court overturned a lower court decision in Oregon that had reduced the required number and extended the deadline for collecting signatures to place a referendum on the state ballot, in consideration of the restrictions on public intercourse during the coronavirus pandemic

The order states: “The application for stay presented to Justice Kagan and by her referred to the Court is granted.” It says the lower court ruling will be “stayed pending disposition of the appeal…”

The order was approved by seven of the nine justices, including Chief Justice John Roberts, while Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor “would deny” the state’s application for a stay.

The temporary order—which was unsigned and included no legal justification for the decision—blocked an injunction issued by US District Judge Michael McShane in Eugene on July 10 that modified ballot access requirements in Oregon during the pandemic. The result of the blatantly political Supreme Court order is that a referendum to change the manner in which electoral districts are drawn in Oregon will be kept off the November ballot.

In the case, Oregon Democratic Party officials objected to the intervention of Judge McShane easing petitioning requirements for an organization called People Not Politicians. The group wanted to put a measure on the ballot that would eliminate partisan gerrymandering and take redistricting decisions out of the hands of legislators. It would create an independent commission to consider redistricting instead of leaving the matter in the hands of legislators.

According to a report in the Washington Post, a representative of People Not Politicians said the organization was “well on the way to getting the needed signatures when Oregon’s pandemic-related restrictions made petition drives virtually impossible.” Judge McShane agreed, the Post reported, “it was because of the restrictions that the group fell short and ordered the state to reduce the number of signatures needed to place the measure on the ballot.”

In a brief to the US Supreme Court on behalf the Oregon Democratic Party, Attorney General Ellen F. Rosenblum wrote, “Despite the changes to our daily lives related to the pandemic, the signature and deadline requirements have not changed.”

Openly attacking the democratic rights of the public, Rosenblum added, “It might mean that getting an initiative on the ballot in a particular year is extraordinarily challenging, owing to a pandemic or other natural disaster. But that does not violate the First Amendment, because there is no right to legislate by initiative in the first place.”

In its arguments to the Supreme Court, the People Not Politicians group explained that overturning Judge McShane’s ruling would deny Oregon voters “a once-in-a-decade opportunity to decide whether to reform their state’s redistricting process.” Redistricting usually occurs every 10 years after the decennial census is taken.

Oregon’s constitution stipulates that placing initiatives on the ballot requires that signatures of registered voters equal to 8 percent of ballots cast in the most recent governor’s race. The signatures are to be collected and submitted by four months before the upcoming election. This meant that People Not Politicians needed to collect approximately 150,000 signatures by July 2.

Representatives of the campaign, which had the support of Common Cause, the League of Women Voters and the NAACP, say they had collected approximately 64,000 unverified signatures by the deadline. The groups then sued Oregon Secretary of State Beverly Clarno demanding accommodations due to the pandemic.

In his ruling imposing an injunction, Judge McShane gave state officials two choices: either put the redistricting measure on the ballot or reduce the number of signatures required to 59,000 and extend the deadline.

Asserting the precise opposite of Oregon’s attorney general, Judge McShane wrote in his ruling: “Because the right to petition the government is at the core of First Amendment protections, which includes the right of initiative, the current signature requirements in Oregon law are unconstitutional as applied to these specific plaintiffs seeking to engage in direct democracy under these most unusual of times.”

Initially, the secretary of state had consented to Judge McShane’s ruling, but she ultimately deferred to the attorney general following the intervention of the state’s Democratic Party leadership.

A three-judge panel from the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco refused to overturn Judge McShane’s ruling in a two-to-one vote. Rosenblum stepped in at this point and requested the intervention of the US Supreme Court, dismissing any concerns about the pandemic and writing in her initial brief: “The district court plucked a new number of signatures and date out of little more than thin air and substituted them for the Oregon Constitution’s signature and deadline requirements.”

Tuesday’s Supreme Court order continues and deepens the position of the highest court in the US, which has stayed challenges to state election officials calling for special provisions during the pandemic. The Supreme Court has rendered similar decisions in cases in Alabama, Idaho, Texas and Wisconsin this year, blocking the expansion of voting by mail ballots and absentee ballots and preventing the use of online signatures on petitions.

In all of these cases, concerns about the threat to the health and lives of the voting public have been trumped by the politically motivated and thoroughly false legal argument that First Amendment rights are being protected by not making any electoral accommodations for the pandemic.

The Supreme Court decision in the Oregon case Clarno, Or Sec. Of State v. People Not Politicians, Et Al. corresponds to the lower court rulings against the Socialist Equality Party’s candidates’ lawsuits, which challenged the signature-gathering requirements as impossible to satisfy safely during the ongoing pandemic.

The SEP campaign of Joseph Kishore for US president and Norissa Santa Cruz for US vice president sued the states and demanded court injunctions blocking the onerous and impossible physical signature gathering requirements.

In California, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals effectively rejected the SEP candidates’ appeal on July 27 by refusing to expedite the case, meaning that a decision would not be reached until after the ballots are already printed without the SEP candidates’ names on them. On August 5, without giving any reasons, the panel denied the SEP candidates’ motion to reconsider that ruling.

In Michigan, the SEP is awaiting a ruling by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals on Kishore and Santa Cruz’s appeal of the decision of US Judge Sean Cox in Detroit denying the party’s lawsuit against the Democratic administration of Governor Gretchen Whitmer.

In both of these lawsuits, the defendants and courts have consistently argued that SEP members and supporters should have been collecting physical signatures on petitions throughout and during the height of the pandemic, in defiance of state of emergency stay-at-home orders and in violation of their own political principles.

Behind the bipartisan gang-up of political officials and judges against the democratic rights of the public and the SEP in the 2020 elections is fear of the expanding struggles of the working class against the catastrophic economic and social crisis caused by the pandemic. Above all, the capitalist political establishment fears the growing popular support for socialism and, as the legal cases have shown, it is prepared to dispense with democracy entirely in order to keep the SEP from getting on the ballot.

Top U.S. & World Headlines — August 13, 2020

 

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Diversions, posturing as school board votes to reopen school in small-town Massachusetts

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/13/mass-a13.html

By Joseph Mario
13 August 2020

School districts across Massachusetts are finalizing their plans for a September start to the fall semester. The vast majority have voted for a hybrid model. Though the plans vary in details, essentially students alternate between in-person and remote learning. Teachers will report to school every day and come in to contact with all of their students in a given week. For middle and high school teachers, this amounts to close contact with up to 150 or more adolescents in a five-day period.

These decisions have outraged communities across the state, especially after a recent uptick in positive cases has led Governor Charlie Baker to reintroduce social distancing measures. Meanwhile, his administration has doubled down on its return to school campaign by pushing the vast majority of the state’s 289 school districts to resume full in-person learning.

Scituate, a small coastal town south of Boston, is one example of broader situation. Its school committee voted 4-1 Monday night to approve a hybrid plan for reopening schools in the fall. The meeting, which began with statements from the superintendent, Bill Burkhead, and the five members of the committee, included an extended period for public comment in which parents and teachers voiced their objections to the proposal. In general, the proceedings were marked by attempts of committee members and the superintendent to dodge accountability and an informed and spirited resistance to the plans on the part of members of the public.

Up to this point, Superintendent Burkhead had uncritically accepted and praised all guidance and protocols issued by the Massachusetts Department of Early and Secondary Education (DESE). However, in a theatrical about-face, Burkhead began Monday’s proceedings with a tirade against Baker and Education Commissioner Jeffrey Riley for not providing clear directives for local officials. While the Baker administration and Riley in particular deserve criticism for their reckless reopening of schools, the superintendent’s sudden upswell of indignation meant only to curb and deflect public anger as they moved to reopen classes. The committee members, likewise seeking to shield themselves from criticism and accountability for what they clearly recognize as a dangerous act, lauded the superintendent’s grandstanding.

One school committee member speculated that the pandemic would “go on forever” even with a vaccine and suggested that communities must immediately grow accustomed to the risk as with the seasonal flu. The superintendent asserted that extended school closures would result in increased suicides.

A question from a teacher revealed that the committee did not fully understand what it was poised to vote on. Apparently, some of the members believed they were only approving the general plan, which by state mandate had to include measures for fully in-person, hybrid and fully remote models. Others believed they were voting to approve Superintendent Burkhead’s decision to start with the hybrid model on September 16. This was debated at length and the committee changed its mind twice before deciding to vote on hybrid to start the year. The urge to defer to state officials, to a “metric”, to a constantly receding temporal horizon when a firm decision can be made, reveals the discomfort of a body that on some level recognizes the danger of reopening schools, but are compelled by political pressure political pressure to do so.

Janice Lindblom, a social worker employed by a nursing and rehabilitation facility located in the town, was the only dissenting voice. Lindblom pointed out that a safe reopening would be impossible without large-scale proactive testing with rapid turnaround times, a condition which is simply not on the table.

In stark contrast to the evasions and confusion of their local leaders, parents and teachers demonstrated a highly informed skepticism of the district’s plan, both in terms of safety and quality of education. First to comment was a teacher with twenty years of experience in the district. Citing a comprehensive study conducted in South Korea which concluded that older children transmit the disease at rates at least as high as adults, he noted that the aging faculty of the high school would face significant exposure to infection on a daily basis. He further noted that the lack of substitute teachers, a chronic problem for districts across the state, would undermine protocols meant to ensure even the minimal social distancing called for under the plan (3 to 6 feet). All such concerns were “taken under advisement,” meaning neither the superintendent nor the school committee could answer the objections, not for a lack of planning, but because the return to school in the midst of a pandemic poses an array of insoluble problems.

Several parents raised concerns about the options available to families afraid to send their children into crowded and confined spaces. The state has contracted with Edgenuity, a for-profit company that provides a fully automated learning program, which has mostly been used to “serve” students for whom traditional models have failed. In reality, the program boosts graduation rates while providing little remediation to struggling students. Parents rightly noted that this option would isolate students from their peers and teachers, provide a separate and unequal education, and effectively privatize a significant portion of Scituate Public Schools.

Another veteran teacher questioned the accuracy of test positivity rates in gauging the prevalence of community spread, citing evidence that suggests actual infection rates far outpace reporting. Surprisingly, committee members agreed, contradicting their earlier calls for a “metric” to determine policy. Nevertheless, they voted to approve a return to in-person learning. In reality, this was an economic decision made many months ago.

These and countless other comments exposed the plan as a dangerous and short-sighted capitulation of common sense to powerful financial and business interests, served by the Baker administration and executed by district superintendents and local school boards. The wealthy has a lot riding on the return to work, which depends on the return to school. Otherwise, stock valuations propped up by massive infusions of fictitious capital will plummet even faster than they did in mid-March.

Woman With Covid Evicted

 

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Wall Street continues to feed on death and economic devastation

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/13/wall-a13.html

By Nick Beams
13 August 2020

Amid mass death, economic contractions not seen since the Great Depression, rising unemployment, and impoverishment for millions, Wall Street continues its relentless surge, siphoning up wealth to the heights of society.

Yesterday, the S&P 500 index ended up by 1.4 percent. It briefly climbed above its record high set in February during the day, before finishing within a hair’s breadth of that level. The index has risen 3.3 percent so far this month and is up by 4.6 percent compared to the start of the year.

The Dow rose by 269 points, or 1 percent, and the tech-heavy NASDAQ index climbed by more than 2 percent.

Since the crisis of mid-March, when the market plunged and the financial system froze, the S&P 500 has risen by 50 percent on the back of government corporate bailouts and the pumping of trillions of dollars by the Fed and the assurances that it will continue to function as the backstop for Wall Street.

The rise of the US market followed similar developments in Europe, most notably in the UK where the FTSE 100 index rose by 2 percent. This came in the face of data for the second quarter that showed Britain had experienced its worst recession on record. Gross domestic product fell more than 20 percent for the three months, an annualised rate of almost 60 percent.

A breakdown of the rise in the S&P 500 index points to the growth of monopoly and the increasing domination of the high-tech companies, with more than one third of yesterday’s rise coming from the increase in the share prices of just three companies, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft.

Together with Alphabet (the owner of Google) and Facebook, these companies dominate the S&P 500. Amazon’s revenue alone has risen by 40 percent for the quarter as a result of the increase in online orders due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

It is a different story for smaller companies. Companies in the Russell 2000 stock index have reported aggregate losses so far of $1.1 billion compared to profits of close to $18 billion a year ago.

Predictably, as COVID infections and deaths have continued to mount in the US, President Trump has hailed the rise of the stock market as an indication of economic health. Speaking at a press conference on Tuesday evening, he said the US economy was “rebounding with a strength like nobody thought was possible… We’re very poised for a great third quarter and very poised for some great stock numbers.”

Amid a continuing health disaster, by far the worst per capita in the world, he claimed the decline in European GDP was 40 percent worse than in the US and “we’ve built such a strong base that we’re able to do things and sustain better than anybody in the world by far.”

But rather than the stock market rise indicating underlying economic health, it is a fever chart of the diseased character of the US economy and its financial system for which Trump is the representative.

Less than five months ago, all US financial markets—including the $20 trillion market for US Treasury bonds, the foundation of the global financial system—froze threatening to set off a meltdown going far beyond that of 2008.

Nothing has been resolved since then. In essence what has taken place is that a debt crisis has been temporarily resolved by the creation of still more debt through the interventions of the Fed.

As a recent article in the Financial Times noted, after spending years warning of the dangers of excessive corporate debt, central bankers have responded to the coronavirus storm in financial markets by creating more of it—a continuation and intensification of the measures put in place after 2008.

“To stave off a debt crisis, monetary policymakers create conditions that allow companies to borrow even more, increasing the potential severity of the next crisis,” the article noted.

So far this year, more corporate bonds have been issued than in the whole of 2019 with more debt expected next year under conditions where the capacity to repay this debt is being weakened.

According to the Bank of America, the ratio of the debt of top-rated US companies to editda (earnings before interest, tax depreciation and amortization) hit 2.4 at the end of the second quarter, the highest level in records going back 19 years, and will reach 3.2 by the end of this year.

Even companies whose bonds are rated as junk, that is, lower than investment grade, have been able to cash in. Earlier this month, the Financial Times reported that one such company, Ball Corporation, a maker of aluminium cans, was able to raise $1.3 billion by issuing a 10-year bond paying below 3 percent—the lowest borrowing cost ever recorded in this market.

With the Fed intervening in financial markets to buy up all forms of debt—from US Treasuries to corporate bonds—companies have gorged themselves on cheap money. In the 12 years since the 2008 crisis, the level of outstanding US corporate bonds outstanding has doubled to $12 trillion.

These figures have far-reaching economic and social implications. On the one hand, they signify that all the conditions are being created for a meltdown of the financial system, leading to companies either going bankrupt or slashing jobs and investment as they struggle to make repayments, with defaults threatening to rip through the financial system.

On the other, they signify a deepening of the assault on the working class already underway.

The Fed can create massive amounts of money through the press of a computer button, adding to the already existing mountain of financial assets. But it cannot create new value. Financial assets, including stocks, do not of themselves embody value. In the final analysis they are a claim on the surplus extracted from the working class in the process of production which must now be increased to meet the demands of Wall Street.

The divergence between the claims of the stock market is indicated by the rise of the S&P index to its record high in the face of the biggest contraction in the real economy since the Great Depression.

The price to earnings ratio of stocks in the S&P 500 now sits at 22.5 compared to the average of 15.5 over the past decade—an indication of the extent of the onslaught on wages, jobs and working conditions that is already being undertaken and which will intensify in the immediate future.