Still 'Miles to Go' to Ensure a Safe and Fair Election, Rights Groups Say After DeJoy Announces Suspension of Changes to Mail Operations

"Nice try," said Rep. David Cicilline. "You also need to reverse the damage you've already done."
by
Julia Conley, staff writer




https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/08/18/still-miles-go-ensure-safe-and-fair-election-rights-groups-say-after-dejoy-announces

Civil rights advocates vowed to continue fighting to thwart any attempt by the Trump administration to sabotage the U.S. Postal Service and the 2020 general election on Tuesday, after Postmaster General Louis DeJoy announced he would "suspend" changes to post office operations until after the November election.

Following reports that mail sorting machines have been decommissioned at post offices and mail collection boxes have been removed from street corners around the country, DeJoy said the changes would be halted for the time being to "avoid even the appearance of any impact on election mail."

The changes have already led to reports of widespread mail delays and fears that millions of people will be disenfranchised in the November general election as many voters—particularly Democrats—plan to vote by mail due to the coronavirus pandemic.

According to DeJoy's statement, post office hours will remain the same and no mail processing facilities will be closed over the next three months, while a Postal Service task force on election mail will be expanded to include postal workers' unions.

Voting rights advocates applauded the work of activists and Democratic lawmakers over the last several days as Democrats in Congress have pressured DeJoy to testify and a group of voters and candidates from across the country filed a lawsuit Monday over the Trump administration's "assault" on the U.S. Postal Service.

"Organizing works," tweeted Ilyse Hogue, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, adding that there are still "miles to go" to ensure a fair election in November.


Other advocates focused mainly on what was missing from DeJoy's statement—any assurance that the postmaster general will reverse the changes already made to the postal service.

"DeJoy ordered USPS to remove 671 mail sorting machines by end of September, including 24 in Ohio, 11 in Detroit, 11 in Florida, nine in Wisconsin, eight in Philadelphia and five in Arizona," tweeted "Give Us the Ballot" author Ari Berman. "Will removed mail equipment be restored? DeJoy doesn't say in [the] letter and we need answers."

Berman's call was echoed by Democratic lawmakers and other critics.




Without a commitment to reinstating the mailboxes and sorting machines that have been taken out of commission already, tweeted one skeptic, DeJoy's statement is akin to a promise "not to rob any banks other than the ones I've already robbed."


"For now," wrote Kristen Clarke, executive director of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, DeJoy's statement is "just words on paper."


The statement from DeJoy came shortly after reports that at least 20 states plan to sue the postmaster general to force himt o reverse the changes made to mail services.

"We will be taking action to reinstate Postal Service standards that all Americans depend on, whether it's for delivering their prescription drugs or for carrying their very right to vote," said Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro in a statement. "Recent post office changes have been implemented recklessly, before checking the law, and we will use our authority to stop them and help ensure that every eligible ballot is counted."

DeJoy is scheduled to testify before a Senate committee this Friday and a House committee on Monday. The progressive coalition Democracy Initiative said Tuesday that the hearings would provide an opportunity for lawmakers to determine how meaningful the postmaster general's decision to "suspend" changes to Postal Service operations really is.

"We need to hear immediately from President Trump and Postmaster General DeJoy. Be specific: What service cuts are you suspending? What equipment will be restored to service, and in which locations? What is the plan to ensure that the U.S. Postal Service fully embraces the historic demand to vote by mail and ensure that every vote is counted?" said Wendy Fields, executive director of the coalition.

"We expect to hear and see that plan, and nothing less, when the postmaster general testifies before Congress," she added.

In act of high seas piracy, US hijacks Iranian oil bound for Venezuela

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/19/vene-a19.html

By Bill Van Auken
19 August 2020

The US interdiction of oil shipments bound from Iran to Venezuela represents a dangerous escalation of the “maximum pressure” sanctions that Washington has imposed against both countries, raising the threat of armed conflict.

The Department of Justice issued a statement Friday bragging that it had carried out the “largest-ever seizure of fuel shipments from Iran.” It said that “approximately 1.116 million barrels of petroleum” had been stolen “with the assistance of foreign partners.”

There has been no indication of what “foreign partners” were involved in this act of piracy, but US officials claim that the seizure did not involve military force. Rather, it appears that some combination of threats and bribes were used to convince the Greek owners of the four tankers carrying the fuel— identified as the Bella, Bering, Pandi and Luna, all of them flying Liberian flags–to give it up.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the threats included sanctions against the ships’ owners and crews that would prevent them from accessing US ports, US banks and US dollars.
The pseudolegal basis for Washington’s act of high seas piracy was a seizure order issued by a US District Court judge in Washington, DC based upon the Justice Department’s claim that the oil constituted “foreign assets or sources of influence” for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a major component of the Iranian military, which Washington has branded as a “Foreign Terrorist Organization.” This designation, imposed without any justification in April of last year, represented the first time that Washington has deemed a branch of another country’s government as “terrorist.”

Since unilaterally abrogating the JCPOA nuclear deal between the major powers and Tehran in 2018, the Trump administration has imposed a crippling economic sanctions regime against Iran tantamount to a state of war, while building up US forces in the region in preparation for military confrontation.

Gloating over the operation, President Donald Trump falsely claimed at a White House press briefing last Friday, “We seized the tankers, and we’re moving them ... to Houston.”

In reality, the oil was offloaded from the Greek-owned vessels onto tankers contracted by the US military. Two of these transfers took place off the coast of Oman, and two off the coast of Mozambique. The Greek-owned ships themselves were not seized.

While denouncing the US action, Iranian officials have pointed out that the oil had already been sold to Venezuela and did not belong to Iran. Furthermore, the ships themselves were neither owned nor flagged by Iran.

When the seizure order was issued in July, Iran denounced it at the United Nations as an act of “piracy.”

“Any attempt on the high seas to prevent Iran from involving itself in legal trade with any country that it chooses would be an act of piracy, pure and simple,” Alireza Miryousefi, the spokesman for the Iranian mission to the UN, said in a statement. “This is a direct threat to international peace and security and contravenes international law, including the United Nations Charter,” he added.

Iran had warned that any attempt to interdict its own ships would be met with swift retaliation. “The Islamic Republic will reciprocate any hostile action to contain its legal rights and has not allowed any country to take any such action so far,” an official of the Iranian Supreme National Security Council warned.

The Iranian military’s boarding of the tanker Wilda in the Gulf of Oman last week was an apparent response to the US oil seizure. The vessel appeared to be owned by the same Greek shipping company that agreed to surrender the oil from the four tankers targeted by Washington.

The US act of piracy follows Iran’s successful shipment of $46 million worth of gasoline and petroleum products, including diluents needed by Venezuelan refineries to turn the country’s crude oil into gasoline, to the South American country in May. Iranian tankers carried the cargo. Washington reacted with rage toward this breaching of the “maximum pressure” sanctions regime that it has imposed against both Iran and Venezuela.

At the time, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani warned, “If our oil tankers face problems in the Caribbean Sea or anywhere in the world by the Americans, they will face problems reciprocally.” Iranian officials warned that if Iran was prevented from shipping oil, then no country would be able to do so, suggesting a possible blockade of the strategic Strait of Hormuz, through which some 30 percent of sea-borne oil products pass.

The seizure of the Venezuelan-bound oil by means of threats and bribery is just one step from the use of US military force against Iranian shipping that would spark a major new war in the Middle East, which in turn could provoke a global conflagration.

The worldwide crisis that has been triggered by the coronavirus pandemic, most intensely within the United States itself, has done nothing to blunt the aggressive pursuits of US imperialism and militarism.

Iran, with over 345,000 coronavirus cases and more than 20,000 recorded deaths, has been the worst hit country in the Middle East. While Venezuela had initially appeared spared the horrific toll being recorded in Brazil, Peru, Chile and Colombia, it is now recording over 1,000 new cases daily, while reporting less than 300 deaths. The spread of the deadly virus has been accelerated by the return of Venezuelans who migrated to other Latin American countries in search of work as the Venezuelan economy cratered under the impact of falling oil prices and the punishing US sanctions regime.



Washington sees the crisis and the immense human suffering that it entails as another weapon of war, to be exploited in its quest for hegemony over the Persian Gulf and Latin America. Even as millions are infected and hundreds of thousands die, the threat of a global war that could claim the lives of billions only continues to grow.

US military threats against Venezuela have escalated since April, when Trump took the stage at a supposed COVID-19 briefing to announce the dispatch of a naval task force to the Caribbean for the so-called purpose of stopping drug trafficking, in particular, from Venezuela.

Under the phony pretext of narcotics interdiction—90 percent of the world’s cocaine comes out of Colombia, whose right-wing government is Washington’s closest regional ally—the Pentagon has deployed the largest military force in the region since the 1989 US invasion of Panama.

The US military deployment against Venezuela was followed by an abortive invasion at the beginning of May by mercenary units led by ex-US special forces troops. A Venezuelan court last week sentenced two former Green Berets, Luke Denman and Airan Berry, to 20 years in prison for their part in the operation, which was aimed at seizing and killing Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has vowed that Washington will use all means to secure the release of the mercenaries.

US aggression against both Venezuela and Iran, which respectively hold the world’s first and fourth largest oil reserves, is bound up with the strategic confrontation between the US and China, which has cemented ties with both countries.

Iran has become even more of a focus for US military aggression following the revelation last month that Beijing and Tehran had signed a 25-year “Comprehensive Strategic Partnership” agreement involving $400 billion in Chinese investment in Iranian infrastructure in return for guaranteed energy exports. The deal also includes a significant security component, allowing China to deploy some 5,000 security forces to guard its projects, make free use of Iranian bases and build a port on the strategic Strait of Hormuz.

US imperialism is not about to surrender enforcement of its unilateral sanctions regimes against Venezuela or Iran. Significantly, the Trump administration has announced that Elliott Abrams, convicted in connection with the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s, will now serve not only as its special representative to Venezuela, where he has led the administration’s unsuccessful attempts at regime change, but as its special envoy to Iran as well.

The appointment signals a shift towards stepped up aggression. Driven by US imperialism’s attempts to offset its crisis and decline by military means, the threat of war against both Iran and Venezuela is sharpened by the domestic crisis of the US itself and may be accelerated by the electoral calendar, with a new war a distinctly possible “October surprise.”

Mass student protests in Thailand continue to grow

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/19/thai-a19.html



By Owen Howell
19 August 2020

At least 10,000 demonstrators attended a rally on Sunday in the Thai capital, Bangkok, in what was the largest protest since the military seized power in 2014. It is the latest in a month of student-led protests that have swept across the nation.

Protesters gathered at the Democracy Monument, flooding the city’s major thoroughfare, Ratchadamnoen Avenue, and holding public speeches for nearly eight hours. The rally’s organisers, the student movement Free Youth, estimated an attendance of between 20,000 and 30,000 people. Hundreds of police were deployed.

The protesters are calling on Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-o-cha and his cabinet to resign. Their three chief demands are: the dissolution of Parliament and a new election, an end to the intimidation and persecution of political opponents, and the drafting of a new constitution.

In addition, protesters are demanding the reform of the monarchy, particularly the revoking of the lèse majesté law, under which it is illegal to “defame, insult, or threaten” the royal family. Penalties under this draconian law, which is used to intimidate and silence critics, involve jail for up to 15 years.
Prayuth Chan-o-cha, a former military general, led the 2014 coup d’état that overthrew a democratically elected government and brought the military junta, the National Council for Peace and Order, to power. The current constitution was drafted by 21 appointees of the junta and was designed to prolong military power and block any challenge from opponents.

While the junta ended nominally in 2019, Prayuth became Prime Minister in a blatantly rigged election, with the result that today the military still maintains control over Thailand’s political institutions.

One notable feature of the election was the unexpected rise of the Future Forward Party (FFP), which ran its election campaign on a call for democratic rights and opposition to the military dictatorship. Founded only the year before, the FFP’s leadership consisted largely of young business executives and academic lawyers, representing a dissident layer of the Thai bourgeoisie and affluent middle class.

The FFP won significant support among young people, while also appealing to workers with its calls for a fairer distribution of wealth and a social welfare system that promotes human dignity.” The party finished with 6.3 million votes and garnered the third-largest number of parliamentary seats after Prayuth’s party and the opposition Pheu Thai party linked to former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra.

After the election, the FFP came under relentless attack in the government’s Constitutional Court. Its leader, multimillionaire auto company director, Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit, was accused of violating election law and was disqualified as a member of parliament.

A protracted legal battle ensued over a supposedly illegal donation of $US6 million from Thanathorn to the FFP, which resulted in a blatantly political decision by the constitutional court on February 21 to disband the party. As various commentators noted, the finances of other parties were not similarly scrutinised. Following its disbanding, the elected MPs from the defunct FFP joined its de facto successor, the Move Forward Party.

The court decision provoked shock and outrage among students resulting in a wave of protests in universities and high schools nationwide during which the three main demands were formulated. Concentrated in Bangkok, rallies were held daily until the shutdown of universities in late February due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Protests erupted again on July 18, when a demonstration of 2,500 students at the Democracy Monument was organised by a student movement named Free Youth, a collective of disparate university groups and clubs across the country on the basis of the demands. Protests subsequently spread to at least 44 of the country’s 76 provinces and have been held almost every day.

The protests arose after the government again extended the state of emergency imposed during the pandemic that banned public gatherings. As there had been no confirmed local infections in Thailand for two months, students accused the government of exploiting the pandemic as a pretext for preventing protests.

Opposition had also grown to the “enforced disappearances” of government critics, including the abduction in June of pro-democracy activist Wanchalerm Satsaksit, who was bundled into an unmarked vehicle by armed men in Cambodia and is still missing.

Through late July, protests were organised by various political tendencies within Free Youth, including an LGBT student group campaigning for the legalisation of same-sex marriage. Another grouping aligned itself with the anti-China movements in Hong Kong and Taiwan, collectively dubbed the Milk Tea Alliance.

Protester leaders drew attention to the pandemic’s devastating economic impact on workers. On July 23, a student group called the New Life Network staged a hunger strike outside Government House, making reference to the worsening social conditions and lack of financial aid for the millions of newly-unemployed, many of them students.

A key turning point came on August 3, when human rights lawyer Anon Nampa, 35, delivered a speech raising the demand to reform the monarchy. Anon has a record of defending junta opponents and lèse majesté offenders.

A large rally at Thammasat University’s Rangsit campus on August 10 centred on a manifesto that proclaimed 10 new demands, including the revoking of lèse majesté and reducing the portion of the state budget allocated to the royal palace.

Tatthep Ruangprapaikit, president of Free Youth, told the Manager Daily that it is not their aim to overthrow the monarchy. However, the mounting hostility towards the King was reflected in the popularity of Twitter hashtag #WhyDoWeNeedAKing?, which has been a trending topic over the past two weeks and received millions of tweets.

After his ascent to the throne in 2016, King Vajiralongkorn consolidated his rule by expanding his constitutional powers, taking control of two army units, and direct ownership of the Royal Family’s assets valued at over $US30 billion. During his reign, which has been intimately tied to the military, the lèse majesté law has been frequently used to imprison critics of the monarchy.

Prayuth last week declared that the student demands regarding the monarchy were “unacceptable,” “risky,” and “went too far.” He also confirmed the king, currently taking refuge in Germany, had requested that nobody be prosecuted for lèse majesté for now—a sign of the deep fear in ruling class of sparking far broader unrest.

Shortly after his August 3 speech, Anon and another student leader, Panupong Jadnok, were arrested by police on multiple unrelated charges. Parit Chirawak, 22, a student leader from Thammasat University and outspoken critic of the monarchy, was also arrested for apparently breaking coronavirus regulations. Human Rights Watch reported on Saturday that police are targeting at least 31 other student leaders.

The protest movement shows no signs of subsiding.

Merkel, Macron call Putin as mass strikes escalate in Belarus

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/19/bela-a19.html



By Alex Lantier
19 August 2020

Strikes continue to spread across Belarus, after the disputed August 9 presidential elections and amid mounting anger at President Aleksandr Lukashenko’s disastrous handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. This weekend, Belarus saw the largest demonstrations since the Stalinist bureaucracy restored capitalism and dissolved the Soviet Union in 1991. Around 200,000 people marched this weekend in the capital, Minsk, demanding Lukashenko’s resignation and denouncing police violence and mass arrests targeting protesters.

The growing mobilization of the working class has alarmed the European bourgeoisie. German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron both called Russian President Vladimir Putin yesterday, before an extraordinary closed-door meeting of the European Council on Belarus today.

Several state-owned factories joined the strike action yesterday, including the Belaruskali potash factory in Soligorsk. The world’s fifth-largest producer of the chemical, used to produce fertilizer, it earns a substantial portion of Belarus’ export earnings. State broadcasters also joined the strike, as well as the Kupalausky Theater in Minsk. Actors at the theater resigned en masse after the director, Pavel Latushko, was fired for siding with protesters.

They were joining strikes, by Minsk transit workers and at auto and tractor factories as well as hospitals, that began on Monday amid calls for a nationwide general strike. Workers are holding public strike meetings in workplaces including Belaruskali and the MSKT tractor plant in Minsk.
Union bureaucrats in Belarus are warning the state that they may lose control of the movement, and demanding Lukashenko’s removal to halt the protests. “The authorities should understand that they are losing control. Only Lukashenko’s resignation and punishment of those in charge of rigging and beatings [of protesters] can calm us down,” miners union official Yuri Zakharov told AP yesterday.

Merkel and Macron both called Putin to discuss the political situation in Belarus, a country of just under 10 million people bordering Russia. They transmitted terse reports to the media, indicating deep concern over the situation and calling for power in Belarus to be shared, or transferred to NATO-backed opposition candidate Svetlana Tikhonovskaya.

“The chancellor has emphasized that the Belarusian government must refrain from using violence against peaceful demonstrators, release political prisoners immediately and initiate a national dialogue with the opposition and society in order to overcome the crisis,” said Merkel’s spokesman, Steffen Seibert.

The Élysée presidential palace said Macron told Putin to “favor calm and dialogue” to resolve the crisis. Macron added that the European Union (EU) intends to play a “constructive role … so that violence against the population ceases immediately, and so a political solution can rapidly emerge, respecting aspirations that have been pacifically and massively expressed in recent days.”

The Kremlin, for its part, reported that the call with Merkel was “an in-depth discussion to focus on the developments in Belarus.” It said, “The Russian side stressed that any attempts to interfere in the country’s domestic affairs from the outside, leading to a further escalation of the crisis, would be unacceptable.”

Yesterday, Maria Kolesnikova, a leading figure in the opposition since Tikhonovskaya herself fled to Lithuania after the elections, said a “coordination council” would be formed to negotiate the transfer of power from Lukashenko. She also stressed the opposition’s “desire and readiness to build mutually beneficial relations with all our partner countries, including of course Russia.”

The Financial Times of London wrote that calls from Berlin and Paris to Moscow constituted an “acknowledgment of Moscow’s over-sized influence on both Mr Lukashenko and the Belarusian economy.” It added that the EU powers want Putin to end the movement by brokering a deal between Lukashenko’s and Tikhonovskaya’s supporters: “The hope in European capitals is that Mr Putin will use that influence to engineer a peaceful resolution to the crisis.”

After the New York Times and the Washington Post in America published editorials this week demanding Lukashenko’s ouster, the FT warned against overt attempts at regime change, citing Eugene Rumer of the Carnegie Endowment think-tank: “Any future leader of Belarus will have to maintain good relations with the Kremlin and pay a certain amount of deference to its sensitivities and sensibilities. To attempt a different course would be unrealistic, dangerous, and run counter to the attitudes of the Belarusian public. Friends of Belarus need to recognise that.”

Such claims to respect Russia and abhor police violence against protesters are shot through with imperialist hypocrisy. While Merkel’s government played the leading role together with Washington in orchestrating a fascist-led coup in 2014 to oust a Russian-backed government in Kiev, plunging Ukraine into civil war, Macron is infamous for his violent police repression of social protests at home. However, it is apparent that Merkel and Macron are reacting to what they perceive as a new and dangerous political development.

Le Monde warned, “The Belarusian movement does not resemble any of the color revolutions that have shaken the post-Soviet space. It does not defend a Western model or oppose Russia.” The daily added that “no one can foresee what the coming days will bring. But one truth is self-evident: this small country … is undergoing accelerating change that is without precedent since the fall of the USSR in 1991. We—the experts, diplomats, and journalists—did not see it coming.”

The EU powers are moving somewhat more cautiously because, surprised by the strike movement, they want the opposition and the Putin regime to jointly strangle it. For now at least, they propose to deal with the threat from below before resuming the aggressive military build-up across Eastern Europe targeting Russia, begun with the Kiev coup.

Workers in Belarus need to organize a politically independent struggle against both Lukashenko and the opposition forces around Tikhonovskaya. Lukashenko, who has ruled Belarus since 1994, is a reactionary strongman presiding over the capitalist kleptocracy that emerged from the Stalinist bureaucracy’s restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union in 1991 and its resulting looting of state assets. But the opposition represents only another faction of the same kleptocracy, maneuvering between the NATO imperialist powers and the Putin regime.

Opposition leaders like Viktor Babariko, a former banker at the Belgazprombank owned by Russian state gas firm Gazprom, or Valery Tsepkalo, a businessman who worked closely with Lukashenko before fleeing to Russia this April, have no principled differences with the regime. The EU is willing to install them in power, because they would continue austerity and Lukashenko’s murderous “herd immunity” policy on COVID-19, which the EU also implements at home.

Nils Schmid of the German Social-Democratic Party (SPD) told Deutschlandfunk that his preferred model for regime change in Belarus is not the 2014 Kiev putsch, but the restoration of capitalism and the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

He said, “the broad popular movement in Belarus recalls more the change in Eastern Europe in 1989–1990. So I also think the model for organizing a political transition is more sitting around a round table than a movement that in one blow from the streets topples the regime. Lukashenko is still holding onto power, until now very few officials—mayors or security forces—have broken with him.”

To fight COVID-19, poverty wages and police-state violence, the principal allies of workers in Belarus are workers across Europe, Russia and internationally. As the EU hands out trillions of euros in bank and corporate bailouts for the super-rich, it is clear that the ruling class will neither provide the resources needed to treat the pandemic, nor halt the explosion of military-police violence across Europe. The workers must take control of the urgently-needed resources, which are created by their own labor, as part of an international struggle to take power and build socialism.

Within Belarus and Russia, this means opposing the bankrupt political settlement that emerged from capitalist restoration in the Soviet Union, breaking with parties and unions affiliated to the regime or the imperialist-backed opposition, and a turn to the Trotskyist movement’s struggle for Marxist internationalism against Stalinism’s nationalist and counter-revolutionary role in the Soviet Union.

Trump’s suggestion of a pardon for Edward Snowden meets US intelligence community backlash

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/19/snow-a19.html



By Kevin Reed
19 August 2020

Several recent comments by President Donald Trump that he is interested in taking a “good look at” pardoning the former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden have prompted vociferous denunciations from the US intelligence community, leading Democrats and Republicans and the corporate media.

Democrats and Republicans with close ties to the intelligence agencies have launched a campaign of opposition after the president said he would look into the case of the former NSA contractor who exposed illegal mass surveillance.

During a news conference on Saturday from his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, the President told reporters, “There are many, many people—it seems to be a split decision—many people think that he [Snowden] should be somehow be treated differently and other people think he did very bad things. I’m going to take a very good look at it.”

These statements on the weekend were a follow up to comments Trump made to the New York Post in an interview published on Thursday. In that interview, Trump said, “There are a lot of people that think that [Snowden] is not being treated fairly. I mean, I hear that.” The President went on to tell the Post, “I guess the DOJ is looking to extradite him right now? … It’s certainly something I could look at. Many people are on his side, I will say that. I don’t know him, never met him. But many people are on his side.”

In 2013, Snowden—at great personal risk—exposed to the entire world that the CIA and NSA were conducting a massive electronic spying operation on the US and world population. With extensive documentary proof, Snowden showed that these agencies were systematically violating basic constitutional rights by sifting through data streams transmitted over telecom trunklines and secretly eavesdropping on the personal computer activity of individuals in real time, among many other criminal activities.
Within a week of the publication of his revelations, Snowden was charged with violations of the Espionage Act of 1917. After publicly identifying himself as the whistleblower who smuggled 1.7 million documents out of an NSA facility on a flash drive, Snowden fled for his safety, eventually obtaining asylum in Russia where he has been living in forced exile in Moscow ever since.

Among those denouncing the suggestion of a pardon for Edward Snowden were Congresswoman Liz Cheney (Republican, Wyoming), daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, who tweeted, “Edward Snowden is a traitor. He is responsible for the largest and most damaging release of classified info in US history. He handed over US secrets to Russian and Chinese intelligence putting our troops and our nation at risk. Pardoning him would be unconscionable.”

Cheney’s unsubstantiated claim that Snowden put the lives of American troops and agents at risk with his revelations—which were shared with journalists from the Guardian and the Washington Post who reviewed and published them—has been repeated by those who are closest to the US intelligence agencies. Other than undermining the illegal spying operations of US imperialism, no proof has ever been provided that anyone has lost their life from Snowden’s revelations.

Replying to Cheney’s tweet, Snowden posted on his own Twitter account, “twitter: the museum of the confidently incorrect.” Hundreds of people responded positively to Snowden’s comment, referring to him as a “hero,” thanking him for his revelations and denouncing Cheney.

The top two Congressmen on the House Armed Services Committee said a pardon of Snowden would “mock our national security workforce.” A statement from Chairman Adam Smith (Democrat, Washington) and Representative Mac Thornberry (Republican, Texas) said, “It would be a serious mistake to pardon anyone who is charged under the Espionage Act, who admits to leaking sensitive information, and who has spent years since then as a guest of the Putin regime.”

In another bipartisan statement, former congressman Mike Rogers (Republican, Michigan) and Representative Dutch Ruppersberger (Democrat, Maryland), who served on the House Select Permanent Committee on Intelligence, wrote in a Washington Post Op Ed, “the only way Snowden should return to the United States is to face prosecution for his actions.”

Rogers and Ruppersberger go on to make the absurd claim that Snowden should have “come to us” if he had been “truly alarmed by anything he witnessed as a CIA employee or as an NSA contractor.” As everyone knows, if Snowden had brought to Congress his concerns about the massive violation of the US Constitution by the NSA, carried out with the endorsement of political figures such as Rogers and Ruppersberger, no one would ever have heard of him or the illegal spying operation.

The former House intelligence leaders also regurgitate the smears that have been leveled against Snowden’s character since he first went public with his revelations, writing, “Snowden’s actions were not born out of principles, morals or a commitment to civil liberties. They were illegal, opportunistic and self-serving.”

Making it clear that the whistleblower could not get a fair trial if he were to return to the US to face the charges against him, they write, “Snowden is entitled, as all Americans are, to a free and fair trial. But such a trial would expose actions that profoundly betrayed his country and led to the criminal espionage case against him.”

Fox News Live published an article on Monday highlighting the fact that a lawsuit filed by the US government against Snowden has revealed the whistleblower earned $1.2 million in speaking fees since 2015. The judge in the case—which is aimed at seizing money earned by Snowden from his memoir Permanent Record—made the information publicly available on Saturday. Clearly written in opposition to a pardon of Snowden, the Fox News Live article also quotes the tweet from Liz Cheney.

At the time of Snowden’s revelations in 2013, the real estate swindler and TV personality Donald Trump repeatedly labelled him a “spy” and “traitor” who should be executed. According to the New York Post, before taking office, Trump tweeted at least 45 times that Snowden should be put to death.

In the exclusive interview with the President last Thursday from the Oval Office, the Post wrote, “Trump commented on Snowden for the first time as president after accusing former President Barack Obama of spying on his 2016 campaign. ‘When you look at Comey and McCabe, and Brennan—and, excuse me, the man that sat at this desk, President Obama, got caught spying on my campaign with Biden. Biden and Obama, and they got caught spying on the campaign,’ Trump said.”

An opinion in Bloomberg by Eli Lake, columnist covering national security and foreign policy, argues that the President’s suggestion of pardoning Snowden is “a reckless idea” that will “backfire on Trump.” Lake makes the absurd claim that pardoning Snowden would undermine efforts by Attorney General William Barr to reform the FBI’s use of the secret surveillance courts and correct the abuses of the intelligence community.

Lake goes on to write, “one can see why Trump and some of his advisers would be keen on rewarding Snowden seven years after his great heist of state secrets. Trump sincerely believes that the national security state that Snowden exposed unfairly spied on his campaign in 2016 and stoked a meritless investigation into his campaign’s ties to Russia for the first two and a half years of his presidency. Pardoning Snowden would be a way of settling scores.”

COVID-19 overtakes accidents as third leading cause of death in the US as testing continues to decline

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/19/covi-a19.html



By Benjamin Mateus
19 August 2020

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released a press brief Monday noting that the number of fatalities currently attributed to COVID-19 make it the third leading cause of death in the United States this year, behind heart disease and cancer.

The Worldometer’s COVID-19 tracker places the number of confirmed cases in the United States over 5.6 million, with 175,000 deaths as of this writing and the toll continues to rise by more than 1,000 every day. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington currently forecasts that over 251,000 Americans will have lost their lives to COVID-19 by November 1 if current projections hold.

According to the CDC, the ten leading causes of death for the non-pandemic year 2018 in descending order were heart disease (647,457), cancer (599,108), accidents/unintentional injuries, (169,936), chronic lower respiratory disease (160,201), stroke (146,383) Alzheimer disease (121,404), diabetes (83,564), Influenza and pneumonia (55,672), kidney disease (50,633) and suicide (47,173).

The first official COVID-19 death occurred on February 28 in Seattle, Washington, a man in his 50s who had underlying health conditions. However, postmortem testing on deaths from Santa Clara County suggests the first deaths took place earlier in the month.
The sole fact that COVID-19 deaths have become the third leading (preventable) cause of death in the US speaks to the utter negligence and criminality on the part of the Trump administration and the ruling class. Had lockdown been initiated earnestly two weeks earlier than was the case in March, epidemiologists estimate 54,000 fewer people would have died by early May when the official death toll surpassed 70,000.

Ali Mokdad, a professor of Global Health at the IHME, speaking to Healthline about the US death toll fast approaching a quarter million people, said, “Unfortunately, that is the track we’re on. We have pretty much totally relaxed some of our social distancing mandates because there is a big concern about the economy…These are not just numbers. These are loved ones, family members, essential workers who sustain our economy.”

The latest predictions have not taken into account excess mortality figures, which the New York Times found show that at least 200,000 more people have died than usual since March, 60,000 higher than the number of deaths that have been directly linked to COVID-19.

To place the toll of the current pandemic into its proper historical context, it would be worthy to briefly review a recent study that compared its impact so far to the devastating Spanish flu which stuck the globe a little over 100 years ago.
The 1918 H1N1 influenza pandemic killed 675,000 people in the United States. In a comparative study recently published in JAMA Network, during the peak of the 1918 pandemic in New York City (NYC), 31,589 all-cause deaths occurred among 5,500,000 residents. This yielded a mortality incidence rate of 287 deaths per 100,000 persons-months. This was 2.8 times higher than the preceding four years, which averaged around 100 deaths per 100,000 persons-month.

During the height of the COVID-19 outbreak in NYC in April, 33,465 all-cause deaths occurred among a population of 8,280,000, placing the incidence rate at 202 deaths per 100,000 persons-months. The scale of incident deaths during the COVID-19 pandemic is very much comparable to the health crisis that affected the city a century ago.

However, given the advances in medicine, public health, and safety, the incidence of all-cause mortality in the preceding years was 50 per 100,000 persons-month. In other words, the all-cause mortality compared to the previous years, from 2017 to 2019, is 4.15 times higher. In this light, to equate the present coronavirus pandemic to the seasonal flu is simply malicious.

The opening of the economy in late spring coincided with the ramping up of COVID-19 testing and apparent plateau in infections. What many commentators did not take an adequate measure of was that the number of cases across the country appeared stable because New York state was seeing dramatic declines in their new cases after implementing a massive shutdown of the city. What was happening in the rest of the country was a rapid increase in numbers hidden in the static created by New York’s massive amount of cases.
Once New York State’s numbers had plummeted sufficiently, it became evident that the half-hearted measures in the rest of the country had done little to contain the pandemic.

Testing was now clearly revealing that the epidemic had become deeply entrenched along a broad geographic region leading Trump to make his infamous complaint that, with more testing, you get more cases. As cases rose to record heights, death followed with the gruesome scenes witnessed in New York replayed in Florida, Texas, Arizona and elsewhere throughout the country.

As hospitals in these states filled up and morgues pushed to over-capacity, mandates were reinstituted for social distancing and mask wearing. Bars and restaurants were ordered closed by governors who had been utterly resistant to imposing any restrictions as the virus spread into their communities.

However, as schools were preparing to reopen for face-to-face classes in a few weeks, the scope of “more” testing became a point of contention for the White House. In mid-July, in conjunction with the transfer of responsibility on hospitalization reporting from the CDC to the Department of Health and Human Services there was a sudden decline in the number of daily testing across the country, predominately in the hardest-hit states. Not surprisingly, the decrease in the number of new cases quickly followed as reports were appearing that the virus was spreading in states like Georgia, Mississippi, Tennessee, Missouri, and Iowa.

Yesterday, the New York Times reported that there had been only 40,022 new cases confirmed on Monday, with only 542 deaths. The weekly average had dropped 16 percent from two weeks before to 50,543 cases per day. Over the same intervening period, the seven-day average for tests per day had fallen 10 percent to 736,000.

Sadiya Khan, assistant professor of cardiology and preventive medicine at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, told U . S . News & World Report, “I want to be enthusiastic about the numbers going down, but it’s really hard to convince me that it’s not because we’re just doing fewer tests. The dramatic drop is very concerning while we see schools reopening, businesses reopening, and we’re trying to move our economy forward, and yet we’re not prepared.” On Tuesday, the US conducted 642,814 tests, according to the Covid Tracking Project, well below the already falling average.

The blame has been cast on a lack of capacity for such a large number of testing caused by a shortage of supplies, trained personnel, and machines that can perform mass throughput analysis, which has led to delays in reporting numbers. The nature of decentralized private labs without a coordinated national supply chain has been cited as the main factor. Several media outlets have noted that the number of people going to testing sites has been declining out of apathy and frustrations with long delays in reporting. A survey conducted by CNBC found almost 40 percent of Americans had to wait more than three days for their results, which makes the results useless as the window for contact tracing is 48 hours or less.

According to TIME, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is supposedly working with states in an attempt to resolve these bottlenecks. National stockpiles are empty, and so FEMA competes with labs for the same supplies. They write, “FEMA sends supplies it receives to the states, which then send them to the labs. But health policy experts and lab directors interviewed by TIME say it’s unclear how many supplies FEMA is procuring and how the states are distributing them.”

Adding to the confusion, major case reporting errors have further exacerbated accurate counting. The Associated Press reported that in Iowa, “potentially thousands of coronavirus infections from recent weeks and months have instead been erroneously recorded as having happened in March, April, May, and June.” Last week the California Department of Health and Human Services Secretary reported that a server outage led to delays in reporting results from a backlog of 250,000 to 300,000 tests.

With declining testing, there is a correlation with rising test positivity. Johns Hopkins coronavirus resource center has noted percent positivity rate for recently hard-hit states—Nevada 17.1, Idaho 16.6, Florida 16.4, Mississippi 15.9, Texas, 13.0, Kansas, 12.5, Georgia 12.0, Iowa 11.2, Missouri 9.8, Indiana 9.6, Nebraska 9.5 and Arizona 9.2—have been climbing. Only 19 states have positivity rates under 5 percent, the lax criteria set by the World Health Organization for reopening schools. The CDC also noted that percent positive tests for ages 0 to 4 and 5 to 17 years old exceed ten percent and are climbing.

The ruling class, for its purposes, has learned it is best to fly blind through the pandemic.

Disastrous US school openings lead to 3,000 infections across 44 states

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/19/scho-a19.html



By Evan Blake
19 August 2020

Within weeks, the reopening of schools across the United States has already become a complete catastrophe. Outside of the mobilization of educators, parents and the broader working class to halt this homicidal policy, there will be rapid acceleration of the spread of the deadly COVID-19 disease throughout every region of the country.

Because no government agency at the local, state or federal level is systematically tracking work-related COVID-19 cases and deaths, Kansas teacher Alisha Morris took it upon herself to begin compiling this data in a spreadsheet. The list, which is now curated by roughly 35 people, has been shared in the dozens of Facebook groups that have been set up to oppose the unsafe reopening of schools and has been viewed tens of thousands of times by educators, parents and students.

The spreadsheet, which the WSWS utilized to produce a map that has also gone viral, paints a chilling picture of the spread of the pandemic in schools across the US.

According to this data and an official account from Mississippi released Monday, since schools began reopening during the week of July 27, roughly 3,000 teachers, students and staff have tested positive for COVID-19 from hundreds of schools across the country. All but six states—Alaska, Washington, Delaware, Vermont, North Dakota, and New Hampshire—have at least one school that has already experienced an outbreak of COVID-19.
As of Tuesday, there are over 900 entries on the spreadsheet, with each one representing a separate school that has had at least one positive or suspected case since the start of the pandemic. Most entries are based on local news reports since the beginning of August.

The devastation has been most extreme in the South, which for weeks has been a major epicenter of the pandemic in the US. Largely controlled by the Republican Party, these states most closely followed the “herd immunity” strategy of letting the virus rip through the population, as advanced by the Trump administration. These officials were the most aggressive and earliest to reopen their economies and have now been the most strident in demanding full in-person instruction, often with the bare minimum of personal protective equipment (PPE) provided to teachers and staff.

The heaviest-hit Republican-led states include:
Mississippi, where 71 of the state’s 82 counties have reported outbreaks of COVID-19 in schools. As of Tuesday, 199 students and 245 teachers have tested positive statewide, while 2,035 students and 589 teachers have been forced into two-week quarantines.


Florida, where at least 331 students and staff have tested positive for COVID-19 and at least 11 have died, many from earlier in the summer.


In Georgia, there are now at least 296 known cases and 481 suspected cases at 67 different schools.


In Texas, at least 140 different schools have reported a combined 380 cases.


Indiana now has over 100 confirmed cases from at least 75 different schools.


Tennessee now has at least 99 confirmed cases from 44 different schools.

In total, at least 406,109 children have now tested positive for COVID-19 in the US, representing 9.1 percent of all cases. One of the chief lies used by state officials to justify reopening schools, that children are less susceptible to the virus, stands thoroughly exposed.

While the Trump administration and his state and local backers have been most aggressive, the back-to-school and back-to-work policy also has the fulsome support of the Democratic Party at every level.

With the Democratic National Convention (DNC) taking place this week, the party is fully geared towards covering up their record of facilitating the homicidal policies demanded by the ruling class. On Monday, New York Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo absurdly claimed that his response to the pandemic was spotless, covering up the fact that nearly 33,000 people have died in the state under his watch. Cuomo has sanctioned the reopening of schools across the state, including in New York City, the largest school district in the country. Schools are also opening up in Michigan, led by Governor Gretchen Whitmer who also spoke at the Democratic National Convention Monday.

The Biden-Harris campaign website states, “Everyone wants schools to fully reopen for in-person instruction. Creating the conditions to make it happen should be a top national priority.”

The statement goes on to place the blame for the crisis solely on Trump, while proposing that schools can be reopened “safely” simply with some more funding for testing, contact tracing and PPE for educators. There are no specifics whatsoever on the level of community spread Biden thinks is “safe,” leaving the door open for districts to resume in-person learning whenever they choose, which is the exact same policy pursued by Trump.

If there is any tactical difference between Trump and the Republicans on the one side and the Democrats on school openings it is the latter’s use of the American Federation of Teachers, the National Education Association and other unions to dissipate anger through temporary delays, hybrid online/in-person learning and other maneuvers to buy time for the full reopening of the schools. Above all, the unions are doing everything they can to prevent a nationwide strike increasingly being demanded by educators because this would lead to a direct confrontation not only with Trump but Biden and the Democratic Party.

The campaign to open schools over the next few weeks in New York City and Los Angeles—both overseen by the Democrats—will set a major precedent for districts across the US. On Tuesday, Dr. Irwin Redlener, director of the Pandemic Resource and Response Initiative at Columbia University, warned of the immense dangers posed by opening schools in New York City, telling WNYC, “Schools are going to become hotbeds for the infections to take hold again and spread through the community.” He added, “It’s almost inevitable if we are in fact going to even hold some classes in real time in real classrooms,” exploding the myth that the “hybrid” model is in any way safe.

Significant outbreaks of COVID-19 have already happened in multiple Democrat-led states where at least some districts have fully reopened, including the following:
Illinois already has at least 67 cases from 20 different schools.


In Michigan, 16 different schools report a combined 27 confirmed cases, mostly student athletes at summer training camps.


In California, there are at least 22 known cases from at least six schools, including 13 cases at the El Centro Elementary School District in the Central Valley.


Pennsylvania reports at least 25 confirmed cases from 19 different schools.


Hawaii now has at least 11 known cases at 12 different schools.


Massachusetts has at least 17 confirmed cases at 12 different schools.

The explosion of cases at schools nationwide has provoked a huge backlash by educators, parents and students, who have already organized well over 100 protests over the past month and have assembled by the tens of thousands in dozens of Facebook groups in nearly every state.

There are growing calls for mass sickouts and nationwide strike action to halt the drive to reopen schools. In Arizona, 109 out of roughly 250 teachers and support staff in the suburban Phoenix JO Combs Unified School District called in sick Monday, canceling all classes that day. The shutdown of schools was extended through Wednesday, and teachers remain defiant and unwilling to sacrifice themselves.

Facing concerted pressure from educators and parents, the Newark Public School District in New Jersey was forced to reverse course Monday and start the school year online, after having pushed for in-person instruction for weeks. Significantly, the Newark Teachers Association had been promoting the equally unsafe “hybrid” model and, sensing huge opposition among rank-and-file educators, made an about-face on Monday.

On Wednesday in Detroit, teachers are expected to overwhelmingly support a “safety strike” in a vote organized by the Detroit Federation of Teachers, which is fearful of a revolt by the city’s 4,000 teachers.

Facing a similar groundswell of opposition, the Little Rock Education Association in Little Rock, Arkansas is now posturing as a defender of teachers’ and students’ safety. However, the union is simply demanding that in-person learning resume once the positivity rate in the county remains below 5 percent for 14 consecutive days. This elevated figure represents a high degree of community spread, and under conditions in which testing is being deliberately curtailed would be specious and wholly unsafe.

The central question facing teachers, education workers, parents and students is the need to build new forms of organization, independent of the unions, to coordinate a unified opposition to the nationwide campaign to reopen schools. It is for this reason that the Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee was founded, in order to unite the immense opposition to the homicidal policies of the ruling class.

This national body is serving as a central organization to coordinate the building of a network of independent, rank-and-file committees in every school and neighborhood. The committees must fight to link up with broader sections of the working class facing the same deadly working conditions, in preparation for a nationwide general strike to halt the reopening of schools and the broader return-to-work campaign.

All educators, school workers, parents and students who support this initiative should join our Facebook page and contact us today to establish local rank-and-file committees in your school and neighborhood. Send us any pertinent information, including significant developments in your district or state, and we will share this widely with a global audience. We will be hosting a national call-in meeting at 3:00 p.m. EDT (12:00 p.m. PDT) on Saturday, August 22, to discuss developments and the way forward. We urge you to make plans today to attend this vital meeting.