https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cq9X0_ZdTt8&feature
Friday, August 14, 2020
The Fed Can Still Save State and Local Governments Plus, more postal turmoil
Unsanitized: The COVID-19 Report for Aug. 13, 2020
The Fed Can Still Save State and Local Governments
Plus, more postal turmoil
Forget about road construction, like this water main cleanup in Los Angeles in 2018, without state and local government aid. (Reed Saxon/AP Photo)
First Response
Until my cunning plan to sue every corporation in America comes to fruition, the prospect of a bipartisan deal on coronavirus relief looks remote. There was a grim phone call yesterday that just reiterated the stalemate. President Trump said in his press conference yesterday that a deal “is not going to happen.”
This is particularly distressing for state and local governments, where the two sides are furthest apart. Initially Democrats sought $900 billion in new money while Republicans offered nothing; later the Republican offer came up to a token $150 billion. The only impact on state and local budgets in the Trump executive actions are additional costs to administer the new unemployment benefit.
State and local spending already fell 5.6 percent in the second quarter, and more than 1 million jobs have been cut through July. With no deal, we can expect cuts that could cancel as many as 4 million jobs and slash 3 percent out of GDP. It’s the kind of mindless austerity that held the recovery back after the Great Recession, layered on top of a continuing public health emergency. “Due to Congress’ inaction, the ability of state and local governments to deliver critical services to the American people is now in serious jeopardy,” read a statement from seven organizations representing states, cities, counties, and other local governments.
In the absence of Congress and the White House, the Federal Reserve has become the only game in town for state and local government. They have a Municipal Liquidity Facility, authorized in the CARES Act, which would give some relief with ongoing costs, while adding more borrowing. But to date, it’s been used exactly one time, by the state of Illinois, for $1.2 billion.
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One problem with the program is that it costs too much and leaves too many states and cities out; by one estimate, 255 municipal entities are eligible for the program, but 97 percent would be “functionally excluded” because the penalty interest rates make it cheaper for them to borrow on the municipal bond markets.
The Fed assisted with that earlier this week, lowering interest rates on short-term notes. But they did not do what several progressive House members requested: lower the rates equivalent to the federal funds rate (i.e. zero), extend the maturity to at least five years, and make smaller cities and counties eligible.
Keep in mind that the Fed has bought over 800 companies’ corporate bonds, because they had to keep their promises according to chair Jerome Powell, but the municipal lending is stuck on 1. Some regional Fed presidents have intimated that Treasury is holding up bigger changes on funds to which it contributed its CARES Act share. Others have said that states don’t need liquidity, they need grants, and the central bank’s hands are tied.
Darien Shanske, a UC-Davis professor of law and political science, figured out a way to untie those hands months ago. In a paper co-written with Indiana University’s David Gamage, Shanske lays out how there’s a way to avoid Treasury’s effective veto on the program by lending under the Fed’s Section 14 authority rather than the Section 13 authority being used now. Under those powers, the Fed can purchase six-month notes without needing an equity backstop from elsewhere. The way to extend the terms is to commit to re-purchase the notes every six months for twenty years, with a sliding schedule of repayment of principal. Most localities have a short-term borrowing exception that could make this work.
This sort of creates an operating deficit option in state and local governments for a period. And of course, if you can roll over the notes for 20 years you can commit to doing it for 100, or however long it takes to make these loans effectively grants. I offered a version of this option back in June, and now it’s become if anything more critical. Congress is not stepping in and millions of jobs are at stake. It’s time to unveil this option. Every day the Fed doesn’t is a choice.
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Mail Pattern Boldness
The situation with the Postal Service has begun to hit a critical mass. Clearly the Capitol Forum’s reporting was correct, and there is a gouging in progress with the aforementioned state and local governments over postage for ballot delivery. Top postal officials are claiming that they’re just advising governments about the standard timelines for delivery on marketing mail relative to first class, but in the past, political mailings have been treated like first class mail, according to everyone involved with the process.
This is just a pretense to make ballot mailing less affordable and induce some states or localities to change their practices. California Secretary of State Alex Padilla explicitly calls them “proposed changes to postal service and pricing.” Anyone who doubted that this was happening should doubt no longer.
Meanwhile, mail sorting equipment is vanishing from post offices, and tens of thousands of letters are piling up even in relatively small communities. As far as the election is concerned, Trump openly admitted today that he’s holding up any funding to facilitate mail-in voting. “If we don’t make the deal, that means they can’t have the money, that means they can’t have universal mail-in voting,” he told Fox Business.
I don’t think strongly worded letters are going to cut it, at least not from one party. This is an attack on commerce in America, and a theft in progress of the vote.
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Today I Learned
Weekly jobless claims went under 1 million for the first time in five months. There are still 29 million taking unemployment benefits though, now without a $600 enhancement. (Calculated Risk)
Yesterday was the deadliest for official listed fatalities since May. The data seem to presage a peak within days, but gaps in the stats make that uncertain. (Axios)
Other exposures to different coronaviruses, like the common cold, could give people immunity. (Miami Herald)
Frozen chicken in China imported from Brazil tests positive for COVID-19. (Reuters)
Life in a coronavirus vaccine trial. (CNBC)
That high school in Georgia (the one with the hallway photo) is still closed after more positive cases. (WSB-TV)
Payouts for vaccines that don’t yet exist when the U.S. already paid for the R&D have shockingly not raised much anger. (Wall Street Journal)
AMC Theaters going YOLO and opening up starting next week. (The Verge)
UK in record recession as social catastrophe looms
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/13/rece-a13.html
By Thomas Scripps
13 August 2020
The UK is officially in the worst recession on record. Having recorded two consecutive quarters of declining GDP, Britain’s economy is the same size as it was in 2003, smaller than the lowest point reached during the 2008-9 financial crisis. The response of the Johnson government and the employers will be a brutal assault on the living standards of the working class.
After a fall of 2.2 percent in the first three months of the year, the UK economy plunged by more than a fifth (20.4 percent) in the next three months to the end of June. This is the biggest quarterly decline since records of similar statistics began to be kept in 1955. It is the worst experienced by any of the G7 nations—roughly double the decline suffered by Germany and the United States.
Britain has been especially hard-hit, in part due to the structure of its economy, heavily weighted towards the services sector, which accounts for 80 percent of output. Largely consumer-facing, this sector has been especially affected by social distancing and lockdown measures, and by the caution shown by the population in response to the COVID-19 virus.
Consumer spending was down 27.7 percent in May and was still 14.5 percent lower than a year earlier in June. Visits to retail destinations were down 39.4 percent last month nationally and down 69 percent in central London, which is more heavily dependent on tourists and office workers.
Services fell 19.9 percent last quarter—accounting for three quarters of the fall in total GDP—and recorded a relatively low uptick of 7.7 percent month-on-month in June. Manufacturing fell by 16.9 percent, followed by an 11 percent climb. Construction collapsed by 35 percent but has since jumped 23.5 percent.
Overall, including growth registered across the economy in May (2.4 percent) and June (8.7 percent) as public health measures were recklessly lifted, GDP is now 17.2 percent below its February level. The Bank of England (BoE) forecasts an annual fall for 2020 of 9.5 percent, the deepest drop since 1921 in the aftermath of the First World War, amid the collapse of British imperialism’s commanding world position.
The BoE predicts the recovery of GDP to slow significantly after the initial rebound, with output only reaching pre-pandemic levels at the end of 2021.
Things could be worse still. In May, the BoE forecast a 14 percent collapse in GDP, the worst recession in 300 years. The improved outlook was prompted by the earlier than expected easing of the lockdown and a more rapid pickup in some areas of consumer spending. However, the BoE is warning of “downside risks,” including a resurgence of COVID-19 that is guaranteed by the reckless ending of the lockdown.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has highlighted the risks posed by a lasting lag in business investment, down 31.4 percent since the first quarter, as nonessential spending is cut or postponed, especially in consumer-facing industries. Tom Stevenson, investment director at Fidelity International, told the Guardian, “No one knows exactly what the recovery from coronavirus will look like—particularly with the potential for a second wave of infections and further local lockdowns—but it is likely that it will be a slow crawl towards pre-COVID levels.”
The BoE is also worried about unemployment and the impact of job insecurity on spending. UK payrolls dropped 730,000 jobs between March and July, according to the ONS, and vacancies are 45 percent lower than a year earlier. The number of people claiming out-of-work benefits reached 2.7 million in July, double the level before the pandemic.
This situation will worsen dramatically after the government furlough scheme is ended in October. Around five million people were still on the scheme in June, according to the ONS. The Financial Times quotes Gerwyn Davies of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) saying, “A real concern is that this is just the first wave of bad news for the jobs market,” and Capital Economics consultancy’s Ruth Gregory warning, “This is just the lull before the storm.”
Research by the CIPD and recruiter Adecco, reported Monday, found a third of employers intended to make redundancies between July and September. The BBC obtained figures showing the number of firms notifying the government in June of their intention to cut 20 or more jobs was five times higher than in the same month last year.
Brexit and the prospect of higher tariffs in Europe paid by British companies are listed as another risk factor.
Even taken together, these warnings and announcements are only a snapshot of a developing crisis of British capitalism, itself only a specific manifestation of a world breakdown centred on the failure of the capitalist system to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic. The virus is out of control across the Americas and in resurgence across the world. Chancellor Rishi Sunak is reportedly considering delaying his autumn Budget until spring in the case of a new series of local lockdowns and a spike in coronavirus cases.
The content of the government’s economic plans, however, is already clear. Sunak told the BBC after the official figures on the recession were announced: “I’ve said before that hard times were ahead, and today’s figures confirm that hard times are here. Hundreds of thousands of people have already lost their jobs and, sadly, in the coming months many more will. But while there are difficult choices to be made ahead, we will get through this and I can assure people that nobody will be left without hope or opportunity.”
Workers have heard all this before. It will be followed by calls to “tighten belts” and “sacrifice” in the national interest. Mass unemployment, on a scale not seen in decades, will be used to enforce vicious cuts to wages and conditions. As in the crash of 2008-9, government debt will be used to justify the evisceration of essential social services.
The working class must reject all such demands. Only they are called on to make sacrifices. Trillions have already been handed to the super-rich globally, on the pretext of confronting a public health and economic catastrophe of capitalism’s own making after years of worsening social inequality, financial parasitism, and assaults on the social conditions of the working class. Now the pandemic rages on, and a further historic collapse in living standards is in preparation.
The money and assets looted by the super-rich must be reclaimed by the working class, and the corporations taken into public ownership, turned towards socially useful production, and placed under democratic control.
In the Labour Party and the trade unions, workers confront a hostile force that has worked hand-in-glove with the Conservative government throughout the pandemic and will continue to do so as the economic crisis deepens. A fightback against them all demands the formation of rank-and-file committees of workers, and the building of the revolutionary party, the Socialist Equality Party, to lead a struggle for socialism.
The author also recommends:
Nearly 650,000 jobs lost in UK during pandemic, with much worse to come
[18 July 2020]
13 August 2020
The UK is officially in the worst recession on record. Having recorded two consecutive quarters of declining GDP, Britain’s economy is the same size as it was in 2003, smaller than the lowest point reached during the 2008-9 financial crisis. The response of the Johnson government and the employers will be a brutal assault on the living standards of the working class.
After a fall of 2.2 percent in the first three months of the year, the UK economy plunged by more than a fifth (20.4 percent) in the next three months to the end of June. This is the biggest quarterly decline since records of similar statistics began to be kept in 1955. It is the worst experienced by any of the G7 nations—roughly double the decline suffered by Germany and the United States.
Britain has been especially hard-hit, in part due to the structure of its economy, heavily weighted towards the services sector, which accounts for 80 percent of output. Largely consumer-facing, this sector has been especially affected by social distancing and lockdown measures, and by the caution shown by the population in response to the COVID-19 virus.
Consumer spending was down 27.7 percent in May and was still 14.5 percent lower than a year earlier in June. Visits to retail destinations were down 39.4 percent last month nationally and down 69 percent in central London, which is more heavily dependent on tourists and office workers.
Services fell 19.9 percent last quarter—accounting for three quarters of the fall in total GDP—and recorded a relatively low uptick of 7.7 percent month-on-month in June. Manufacturing fell by 16.9 percent, followed by an 11 percent climb. Construction collapsed by 35 percent but has since jumped 23.5 percent.
Overall, including growth registered across the economy in May (2.4 percent) and June (8.7 percent) as public health measures were recklessly lifted, GDP is now 17.2 percent below its February level. The Bank of England (BoE) forecasts an annual fall for 2020 of 9.5 percent, the deepest drop since 1921 in the aftermath of the First World War, amid the collapse of British imperialism’s commanding world position.
The BoE predicts the recovery of GDP to slow significantly after the initial rebound, with output only reaching pre-pandemic levels at the end of 2021.
Things could be worse still. In May, the BoE forecast a 14 percent collapse in GDP, the worst recession in 300 years. The improved outlook was prompted by the earlier than expected easing of the lockdown and a more rapid pickup in some areas of consumer spending. However, the BoE is warning of “downside risks,” including a resurgence of COVID-19 that is guaranteed by the reckless ending of the lockdown.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has highlighted the risks posed by a lasting lag in business investment, down 31.4 percent since the first quarter, as nonessential spending is cut or postponed, especially in consumer-facing industries. Tom Stevenson, investment director at Fidelity International, told the Guardian, “No one knows exactly what the recovery from coronavirus will look like—particularly with the potential for a second wave of infections and further local lockdowns—but it is likely that it will be a slow crawl towards pre-COVID levels.”
The BoE is also worried about unemployment and the impact of job insecurity on spending. UK payrolls dropped 730,000 jobs between March and July, according to the ONS, and vacancies are 45 percent lower than a year earlier. The number of people claiming out-of-work benefits reached 2.7 million in July, double the level before the pandemic.
This situation will worsen dramatically after the government furlough scheme is ended in October. Around five million people were still on the scheme in June, according to the ONS. The Financial Times quotes Gerwyn Davies of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) saying, “A real concern is that this is just the first wave of bad news for the jobs market,” and Capital Economics consultancy’s Ruth Gregory warning, “This is just the lull before the storm.”
Research by the CIPD and recruiter Adecco, reported Monday, found a third of employers intended to make redundancies between July and September. The BBC obtained figures showing the number of firms notifying the government in June of their intention to cut 20 or more jobs was five times higher than in the same month last year.
Brexit and the prospect of higher tariffs in Europe paid by British companies are listed as another risk factor.
Even taken together, these warnings and announcements are only a snapshot of a developing crisis of British capitalism, itself only a specific manifestation of a world breakdown centred on the failure of the capitalist system to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic. The virus is out of control across the Americas and in resurgence across the world. Chancellor Rishi Sunak is reportedly considering delaying his autumn Budget until spring in the case of a new series of local lockdowns and a spike in coronavirus cases.
The content of the government’s economic plans, however, is already clear. Sunak told the BBC after the official figures on the recession were announced: “I’ve said before that hard times were ahead, and today’s figures confirm that hard times are here. Hundreds of thousands of people have already lost their jobs and, sadly, in the coming months many more will. But while there are difficult choices to be made ahead, we will get through this and I can assure people that nobody will be left without hope or opportunity.”
Workers have heard all this before. It will be followed by calls to “tighten belts” and “sacrifice” in the national interest. Mass unemployment, on a scale not seen in decades, will be used to enforce vicious cuts to wages and conditions. As in the crash of 2008-9, government debt will be used to justify the evisceration of essential social services.
The working class must reject all such demands. Only they are called on to make sacrifices. Trillions have already been handed to the super-rich globally, on the pretext of confronting a public health and economic catastrophe of capitalism’s own making after years of worsening social inequality, financial parasitism, and assaults on the social conditions of the working class. Now the pandemic rages on, and a further historic collapse in living standards is in preparation.
The money and assets looted by the super-rich must be reclaimed by the working class, and the corporations taken into public ownership, turned towards socially useful production, and placed under democratic control.
In the Labour Party and the trade unions, workers confront a hostile force that has worked hand-in-glove with the Conservative government throughout the pandemic and will continue to do so as the economic crisis deepens. A fightback against them all demands the formation of rank-and-file committees of workers, and the building of the revolutionary party, the Socialist Equality Party, to lead a struggle for socialism.
The author also recommends:
Nearly 650,000 jobs lost in UK during pandemic, with much worse to come
[18 July 2020]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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