Palestinian child shot by Israel dies in detention

Maureen Clare Murphy Rights and Accountability 

21 August 2020

https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/maureen-clare-murphy/palestinian-child-shot-israel-dies-detention




A Palestinian boy who was shot and detained by Israeli occupation forces in the central West Bank on Wednesday died of his injuries.

The family of Muhammad Matar was informed on Thursday that the 16-year-old had been killed. Israel has not transferred the teen’s body to his family, Defense for Children International Palestine stated on Friday.


An Israeli military spokesperson claimed that troops “spotted a terrorist cell” preparing Molotov cocktails and laying tires on the road with the intention of setting them on fire.

Two other boys – aged 14 and 15 – were wounded by live ammunition during the same incident, according to Defense for Children International Palestine.

“They were not detained and both boys are in stable condition in Ramallah-area hospitals,” the group stated.
Children killed

Matar is the second Palestinian child killed over a Molotov cocktail this year.

Muhammad Suleiman al-Haddad, also 16, was shot multiple times in the chest during a protest in the city of Hebron in February. Israel claimed the teen had thrown a Molotov cocktail at soldiers.

Defense for Children International Palestine stated that al-Haddad “appeared to be holding a Molotov cocktail at the time he was shot, according to a video” seen by the group.

“However, he was far enough away from Israeli forces, including the soldier that fired at him, that he likely did not pose any imminent threat when he was shot.”

Israeli forces have killed four Palestinian children so far this year and a fifth child died of injuries sustained during protests along Gaza’s boundary with Israel in 2019.

Three other Palestinian teenagers are presumed dead after Israeli soldiers shot and detained them as they allegedly attempted to breach the Gaza boundary fence and threw an explosive device towards soldiers in January.

Nearly 30 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces so far this year. One Israeli soldier was killed when a rock was dropped on his head during a raid on a West Bank community in the same period.

Palestinian disability and human rights groups told the United Nations last month that “Israeli occupation forces have escalated their use of lethal and excessive force” since 2015.

More than 750 Palestinians have been killed by Israel since October 2015, the groups stated.
Gaza bombarded

Meanwhile, Israel continued to pound what it called Hamas targets in Gaza overnight Thursday.

Israel has been bombing Gaza nightly over the past week and has imposed collective punishment measures on the territory’s population of 2.1 million Palestinians, most of whom are refugees.

Israel has claimed the measures are a response to incendiary balloons released from Gaza which have damaged agricultural fields in southern Israel.

Palestinians fired rockets from Gaza, which has been under a tightened Israeli blockade since 2007, overnight Thursday. Fragments from a rocket damaged a home in the southern Israeli city of Sderot.

On Friday, Israeli defense minister Benny Gantz threatened to deal “a very severe blow” to the impoverished and besieged Gaza Strip.

Last week, human rights groups in Israel called on Gantz to “immediately reverse measures constituting illegal collective punishment that deliberately infringe upon the human rights of Gaza residents.”

Instead, Israel cut fuel supplies to Gaza, causing its power plant to shut down.

UAE bets on Israel for US favor

Omar Karmi The Electronic Intifada 

21 August 2020

https://electronicintifada.net/content/uae-bets-israel-us-favor/31036




It is perhaps fitting that the recently signed UAE-Israel agreement should be known as the Abraham Accord (not, mind, the Ibrahim Accord).

Old Testament Abraham, after all, lived a life of some pronounced treachery. He abandoned his father in pursuit of divine promise. He betrayed his wife, Sarah, on several occasions. He exiled his first born and that child’s mother, one of his servants. And he was prepared to kill his only other son for divine favor.

Accusations of treachery is the Palestinian response to the deal. It arises from a somewhat complacent confidence in the resonance of the Palestinian cause on the “Arab street” and the level of fear Arab leaders hold of their own publics’ opinions.

Yet, perversely perhaps, it is the “Arab street” that likely prompted, rather than deterred, the UAE’s move. Not Emirati public opinion, which has little purchase or influence.

Rather, it is the vulnerability of a country built primarily on foreign – much of it Arab – labor and oil. The UAE has to shore up its foundations before it is too late, before more regional uprisings erupt and blow through or the demand for oil declines as it must and will, sooner or later.

The UAE, in other words, needs to diversify, economically and politically, in order to safeguard the continued familial rule that underpins this not-yet-50 year-old union of seven principalities. And ensuring an unshakeable layer of protection in Washington, through Israel’s good offices there, is one way of doing so.

The “threat” of Iran has only little to do with it, despite the many column inches given over to this supposed point of agreement between the UAE and Israel.

Of all Gulf states, the UAE probably has the most mature relations with Tehran, especially in trade. Like Israel, Abu Dhabi overstates Iran’s power when it suits. Iran’s military is aged. Its supposed political reach across a region in disarray after a disastrous US-led Iraq invasion is limited by sectarianism. And its economy is floundering after decades of sanctions.
Resisting the winds of change

Iran did play a part in the calculation, of course. But any security considerations are trumped by the lessons the UAE has chosen to learn from the Iran nuclear deal struck under Barack Obama.

The UAE was lukewarm at best on the deal. It viewed the agreement, perhaps correctly, as part of a wider attempt by the US under Obama to pivot away from the Middle East after the disastrous Bush-era interventions.

The Obama administration worked to leave in its stead a triangular balance of power between Israel, Arab Gulf monarchies and their dependants, and Iran.

It was a triangle, Gulf countries feared, that would leave them very much the weaker party.

Compounding the UAE’s growing unease with American policy under Obama was the US reaction to the Arab uprisings. Washington allowing its erstwhile ally Hosni Mubarak to fall under the weight of Egyptian street protests, bringing a Muslim Brotherhood government to power in that country’s first democratic election, was particularly troubling.

This all followed years of a massive public relations effort after 9/11 when Arab governments, afraid of the fallout, pulled out all the stops to ensure they stayed in America’s good books.

US-Arab relations came under intense scrutiny in the years that followed. The UAE’s Dubai Ports World company lost a lucrative contract to manage six US ports in 2006 – when even Israeli help could not save the deal – in part because of a campaign spearheaded by Hillary Clinton, then senator for New York where some of the ports were located, due to security concerns.

Oil prices have fluctuated wildly in the decades since 2001, which also saw a global financial crisis that forced Abu Dhabi to use its oil money to bail out Dubai’s more diversified but also more vulnerable service economy in 2009.

With a region in political chaos, the UAE long ago identified as a priority to shore up US support, come what may.
Learning from the Arab uprisings

But simply being part of the region’s “moderate” club did not seem enough during Obama’s presidency, as was evidenced by Mubarak’s demise. Nor was the opposite the case, as shown by Obama’s reluctance to get directly involved in Syria.

Where the US dithered, the UAE took action. It supported Abdulfattah al-Sisi’s coup in Egypt in 2013 and has acted to shore up the Egyptian leader since.

It has intervened in Libya, provided material support to various groups in Syria and, with Saudi Arabia, launched a war on Yemen, all in an assertion of muscle that belies the country’s size, if not its wallet.

Donald Trump’s election victory in 2016 proved a godsend to the UAE, ending the Obama administration’s drifting Middle East policies.

There has even been speculation that the UAE actively interfered – in more ways than one – to aid Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. The UAE has denied such accusations.

Relations between the UAE and the White House have improved immensely over the past four years. In 2018, Trump pulled out of the Iran deal, to the satisfaction of the UAE, Israel and others.

Not long after, the UAE joined countries attending a United Against Nuclear Iran summit on the sidelines of the United Nations calling for Iran’s “economic and diplomatic isolation.”

So much have relations improved, in fact, that another US port deal, this one with a Sharjah-based company, passed without comment or controversy in 2018.
November looms

In return, the UAE has largely supported Trump’s Middle East initiatives, not least on Palestine.

It described Trump’s much-ridiculed Peace to Prosperity plan as a “serious initiative.” Abu Dhabi, the leading emirate, was also clearly not put off by the administration’s decision to move the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.

But good relations with one administration are no guarantee of good relations with another. One country that has successfully pulled off that stunt is of course Israel, which remains a truly “bipartisan” issue in Washington.

With Trump stumbling in the polls, and the possibility of an Obama 2.0 administration under Joe Biden, the UAE has thus played its hand to ensure its future protection. What better advocate in the US than Israel, after all? It has worked for Jordan, the third largest beneficiary of US aid in the world, after Afghanistan and Israel.

And it took a full-scale popular revolution for the US to denounce an obviously corrupt and despotic Hosni Mubarak regime. In the UAE, where even a polite letter can land you in jail, decisive steps to snuff out even the hint of opposition have been taken to ensure that nothing like that would ever happen there.

In other words, the Palestinian issue played a very minor role in the calculations of the UAE leadership when entering into the Israel normalization agreement.

If concerns for Palestinians played any role at all, if was only for the optics and then only as an afterthought, so brazenly ad hoc was the suggestion that the agreement was partly forged to prevent a formal Israeli annexation of more occupied land.

Palestinians might take note. While brotherly loyalty is always welcome, a cause that relies mostly on an appeal to justice, rights, freedom and equality before law might need more reliable allies than rentier states organized along hereditary monarchical, or even hereditary republican, lines.

The UAE did what it did simply because it wants the US to unquestioningly and uncritically support it in the same way the US supports Israel, regardless of who occupies the White House.

After all, Israel bombs and kills at will, whether in occupied territory or in other countries. It is a longstanding transgressor of international law, occupies the lands of its neighbors, has forcibly expelled and continues to subjugate an entire people simply because they are of another ethnicity.

Through it all, the US holds its hand over Israel. That’s the kind of powerful paternal protection we all crave, whatever the price.

Just ask Abraham.

CUPE union shuts down 12-day strike at Port of Montreal

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/22/port-a22.html

By Laurent Lafrance
22 August 2020

Yesterday, after 12 days of a general strike by 1,150 dockworkers at the Port of Montreal against management’s efforts to eliminate jobs and impose more oppressive working conditions, the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) agreed to a seven-month truce during which the strike will be “suspended” and all protest actions canceled.

This “truce” marks the final stage in the union’s efforts since the beginning of the strike to end it as quickly as possible and betray the demands of the rank and file.

The Montreal dockworkers had been without a contract since December 2018. Their strike was part of growing resistance by workers in North America and internationally to the incessant attacks of big business on jobs, worker rights, and public services.

Members of CUPE Local 375, the longshoremen, foremen, and maintenance personnel at the Port of Montreal are fighting for a new contract that guarantees job security and an end to current scheduling practices, which force workers to labor 19 days out of every 21.

The two major container-shipping operators—Termont Montreal and Montreal Gateway Terminal (MGT)—are demanding a threefold increase in the pace of work during weekend shifts. The Maritime Employers Association (MEA), which oversees contract negotiations at the Port, is calling for job cuts on top of the continuing speedup.

The 12-day strike against the Port of Montreal began on August 10 after a 21-month contract dispute in which the unions—CUPE Local 375 and Local 1657 of the International Longshoremen’s Association—did everything to avoid a confrontation with the MEA.

In three limited strikes in July, the unions ordered a section of their membership to stay on the job to comply with the federal government’s “essential worker” regulations that require them to process grain shipments and shipments bound for Newfoundland. Even after the beginning of the general strike, the union continued to observe the essential worker regulations.

It wasn’t until early August that CUPE was forced to submit a general strike notice in response to a provocation by the employer—a 50 percent reduction in wages for night and weekend shifts, and a “technical lockout” involving the routing of several cargo ships to other ports (including those of New York and Halifax, Nova Scotia).

CUPE launched an all-out strike only to defuse the anger of rank-and-file workers while it negotiated a concession-filled contract with management behind the scenes. In defiance of the overwhelming vote of workers in favor of strike action (more than 99 per cent), the union had already proposed a 60-day truce that would have kept the port open during negotiations. But this first offer was rejected by the MEA, which chose to maintain a hard line.

On Wednesday, its CEO Martin Tessier threatened to use managers and scabs to move 477 containers on the pretext that they contained goods “important to the health and safety of Quebec’s economy,” citing without further details pharmaceutical and medical products, sugar and perishable goods.

CUPE responded, after its usual demagogic denunciations, with utter prostration. On Wednesday evening, it canceled the mass picketing that it had threatened to organize the next day in front of the port with the help of other unions. On Thursday afternoon, it agreed to “move containers of controlled products and COVID-19-related cargo and unload a sugar ship.” And on Friday, it signed a full-blown sell-out agreement with the MEA.

The general strike at the Port of Montreal, the first in 25 years, was having a major impact on the entire economy. The activities of the port, the only container port in Quebec, account for 19,000 direct and indirect jobs in 6,300 companies and generate annual economic output estimated at $2.6 billion. According to the Montreal Port Authority, the labor dispute was preventing the shipment of the equivalent of 90,000 containers, which are currently on the docks or have been diverted to other ports.

The Port of Montreal handles close to $100 billion worth of cargo each year, including more than 2 million metric tonnes of iron ore. The shutdown of its operations had already led to a reduction in steel mill production, according to the Mining Association of Canada. The second-largest port in Canada after Vancouver, B.C., it is the country’s main marine gateway for trade with Europe.

That is why the Quebec and Canadian ruling class as a whole reacted with anxiety and anger to the port workers’ strike.

On the very day the strike began, five Quebec employers’ associations signed a joint declaration calling on Ottawa to appoint a mediator and force a return to work. In addition to issues related to US tariffs, supply from China and the health crisis, the signatories wrote, there was “the strike at Canadian National, the railway blockades (Wet’suwet’en), and now the strike at the Port of Montreal.”

At a press conference that day, the president of the Conseil du patronat (Quebec Employers’ Federation), Karl Blackburn, said the general strike is “very bad news that has immeasurable impacts,” blaming the strikers for “taking businesses as hostages.”

For their part, the Quebec and Ontario Economy and Labor ministers sent a joint letter to the federal government asking it to “exercise its leadership” in the face of the strike—an implicit call for back-to-work legislation and criminalizing the strike. Acting as a mouthpiece for big business, Quebec Labor Minister Jean Boulet tweeted Wednesday that “the federal government must act immediately to settle the dispute at the Port of Montreal.”

Federal Labor Minister Filomena Tassi responded to employer pressure with a press release. “We will monitor the situation closely and continue to assess how to support ongoing mediation efforts,” she wrote.

The Trudeau government is relying on the union bureaucracy to impose on its members the dictates of management without government intervention, as was the case in the 2015 railway workers’ strike at Canadian National (CN). But if CUPE proves unable to impose its sellout “truce” deal on the rank and file, the Liberals are ready to use the entire repressive apparatus of the state to impose the demands of big business, including through back-to-work legislation as they did to shut down the 2018 strike at Canada Post.

Management at the Termont terminal has already used the courts to muzzle workers. It filed a complaint following an altercation with striking workers on July 29 in a Montreal parking lot. A group of workers had confronted Termont executives who crossed the picket lines during the four-day strike at the end of July to do work usually done by workers. According to union leader Michel Murray, tension rose a notch when a scab drove his car into a striker. Nine workers were subsequently arrested and charged with physical and verbal intimidation against management and their security guards.

To prevail in their struggle, Port of Montreal workers must make it the spearhead of a mass working-class counteroffensive against capitalist austerity. This strategy is opposed by CUPE and the entire union bureaucracy. Before announcing their sell-out agreement with management on Friday, they had done everything to isolate the strike and channel rank-and-file anger into futile appeals to government mediators and the very employers who are leading the charge on the Montreal dockworkers.

Their radio silence on the threat of back-to-work legislation underscored that CUPE never had any intention of waging a genuine struggle to defend the workers’ interests, which would require the mass mobilization of the working class in defense of jobs, wages, and decent working conditions. Time and again, CUPE and the union bureaucracy as a whole have docilely submitted to anti-democratic strikebreaking legislation, including during the Quebec construction workers’ strike of 2017, the Ontario college lecturers strike of 2017, and the Canada Post strike in 2018.

Against the attempts by the pro-capitalist unions to betray their struggle and impose a new sellout contract, Montreal dockworkers must form an independent rank-and-file strike committee to fight for their demands, including rejection of the truce deal, an end to the use of scabs, no more grueling work schedules and guaranteed jobs for all workers.

This committee must make a broad appeal to workers across North America for a common counteroffensive against the big business assault on wages and working conditions, and to guarantee decent and secure jobs for all. An industrial mobilization of the working class must be combined with a political struggle, based on the socialist perspective of a complete reorganization of the economy to meet the social needs of all, not the profits of a tiny minority.

Australian national cabinet exploits pandemic for economic restructuring

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/22/aust-a22.html

By Mike Head
22 August 2020

Despite continuing COVID-19 deaths, especially in Australia’s chronically-underfunded aged care facilities, yesterday’s meeting of the bipartisan ruling “national cabinet” focused on further reopening the economy for the benefit of corporate profit.

The federal, state and territory government leaders paid lip service to the aged care catastrophe, which had claimed 302 lives by today, and to the hundreds of infections daily in the state of Victoria.

However, the cabinet’s priority was clearly to exploit worsening unemployment and financial distress facing working people to ram through the further restructuring economic and workplace relations.

The meeting’s media statement, issued by Prime Minister Scott Morrison, decreed the need for a “coordinated focus from all levels of government on three key areas”—all of them designed to boost corporate profits.

These consisted of extending the JobKeeper wage subsidy scheme for employers, pouring billions of dollars more into business-related infrastructure projects and “greater ease of doing business through lower and efficient taxes and less regulation.”

Another prong announced in the business “recovery” program was the resumption of the Seasonal Worker Programme and Pacific Labour Scheme, which enable agricultural employers to exploit workers from nine impoverished Pacific Island countries and East Timor as cheap crop-picking labour. These highly vulnerable workers will be offered temporary 12-month visas, exempt from a general ban on international arrivals.

Yesterday’s meeting further demonstrated the unified front being maintained by Morrison and his Labor Party counterparts in their de facto coalition government in the face of rising discontent over the toll of death, disease and job destruction being inflicted on working people.

Citing unnamed sources, the Australian Financial Review reported a “fiery” discussion inside the meeting on the demands of big business for the removal of state border controls, as part of the “reopening” drive. But at the post-meeting media conference, Morrison emphasised the level of agreement between the leaders. He again went out of his way to praise Victorian Labor Premier Daniel Andrews, whose government has presided over the worst resurgence of the pandemic so far.

All the leaders duly agreed to take steps toward lifting or relaxing border controls to meet the needs of big business, starting with agricultural exemptions and a narrowing of restrictions on people residing in COVID-19 “hotspots.”

The meeting committed to expanding the stimulus packages that have already handed billions of dollars to the corporate elite. According to the media statement, the federal packages now total more than $314 billion, with another $48 billion provided by the states and territories.

During the meeting, the states and territories were called upon to contribute another $40 billion over two years in “purposeful” expenditure designed to “achieve the maximum economic dividend.” Over coming months and years, these colossal sums will be clawed back through deep cuts to essential social spending, including on health, aged care and pubic education.

The real “purpose” of these packages was underscored by the revelation, in today’s Australian Financial Review, that some of the country’s largest companies received hundreds of millions of dollars from the JobKeeper wage subsidies, while axing thousands of jobs and fattening their profits.

At the top of the list was Qantas, the former government-owned airline. It obtained $267 million from JobKeeper by June 30, despite standing down 20,000 workers and yesterday announcing the dismissal of another 4,000 of them.

So far, companies listed on the stock exchange have reported receiving at least $625 million in JobKeeper payments. In some instances, companies reported profit booms based almost entirely on these subsidies.

The newspaper reported: “Profit growth across Domino’s Pizza, Southern Cross Austereo, K&S Corporation, Adairs, ARB, Ingenia, and Korvest has averaged 70 percent and yet they have reported a combined $57.5 million in JobKeeper payments.”

Morrison defended these bonanzas as the intended outcome of the JobKeeper scheme, “for the benefit of those workers.” In reality, as the figures confirm, the lion’s share of the benefit goes to employers, not the workers trying to survive on wage subsidies of just $750 a week, only to find that many of their jobs will disappear.

Another expression of the national cabinet’s indifference toward working class lives was Morrison’s defence of Aged Care Minister Richard Colbeck at the post-meeting media conference.

Colbeck had been unable to even tell a Senate committee that morning how many people had died in the federally-funded aged care homes and how many infected residents remained. Yet Morrison declared that Colbeck was doing a good job, supposedly in preventing “far worse” from occurring.

The 302 deaths of aged care residents represent more than 60 percent of the national death toll. Most of the deaths have occurred in recent weeks in Victoria—a direct product of the rush to lift safety lockdowns, compounded by years of government under-funding, privatisation and casualisation of the poorly-paid staff.

Horror stories of elderly people being left to die, some even denied meals and basic care, have resulted from the refusal of the federal and state governments to arrange alternative workforces to replace the thousands of aged care workers who have become infected or had to quarantine, or who quit for fear of infection.

During his Senate testimony, Colbeck confirmed he had received a report in April on one of the first deadly outbreaks, at Dorothy Henderson Lodge in Sydney, which noted that almost all care staff had been furloughed. On April 12, he had issued a press release falsely claiming that the government had “plans in place” for such “worst-case scenarios.”

In a damage control operation, yesterday’s cabinet meeting announced a token “Aged Care Emergency Response Plan.” This consists of just $171 million in spending over coming years, making a total of $1 billion announced since April—a pittance compared to the business handouts.

Most of the new funds are allocated to “increase nation-wide workforce surge support for aged care providers.” This includes already promised “workforce retention payments” to try to convince workers to return to the infected facilities, which have nearly 1,700 active cases linked to them.

Morrison’s praise of Colbeck was a graphic example of the “return to work” offensive being mounted by the national cabinet as a whole. It was in line with Morrison’s claim that Australia was better off “than anywhere else in the world” because “we have this optimistic way of looking to let’s keep this place open.”

The insatiable corporate greed behind this “optimistic” push to fully “open” the economy was voiced by Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce. He called for the lifting of travel restrictions to restore the airline’s profits, even as he unveiled more job cuts and restructuring.

Equally revealing was Tourism Accommodation Australia chairman Martin Ferguson, a former Australian Council of Trade Unions president and Labor Party cabinet minister. He told parliament’s COVID-19 committee it was crucial to get people moving around the country right now to revive the tourism industry.

Special prosecutor appointed in the case of Hannah Fizer, unarmed Missouri woman slain by police

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/22/fize-a22.html

By Jacob Crosse
22 August 2020

Ten weeks have passed since 25-year-old Hannah Fizer of Sedalia, Missouri, located 90 miles east of Kansas City, was murdered by a still publicly unnamed Pettis County deputy while on her way to work. Her killer, believed to be Pettis County Deputy Jordan Daniel Shutte, has yet to be charged with a crime and as of this writing is still on paid leave with the department.

Fizer, who was white, was on her way to work at the Eagle Stop gas station where she had recently been promoted to assistant manager when she was pulled over shortly after 10 p.m. on June 13 for allegedly speeding and “imprudent driving.” Fizer was dead within 10 minutes. The deputy claimed Fizer was “non-compliant” and allegedly professed to having a gun, prompting the deputy to shoot the young woman five times.

Contrary to the police account of an aggressive criminal looking for a fight, family and friends describe Fizer as an easy-going, loving person, who in the words of her father, John, “wouldn’t hurt a frog.” Throughout the preliminary stages of the investigation, the family denied that Fizer owned or carried a firearm, and after three days, investigators were forced to admit that no weapon had been recovered in Fizer’s vehicle, and the only spent shell casings recovered were from the deputy’s weapon.

Following Fizer’s slaying, the Missouri State Highway Patrol (MSHP) immediately took over the investigation from the county in an attempt to defuse simmering anger in the community. Demonstrations and weekly marches led by Fizer’s family and friends have been held in the rural town with a population of roughly 20,000. The weekly marches, numbering as many as 100 people, have been populated with signs demanding, “Justice For Hannah,” “We’re not going away,” and “#SayHerName, No Justice No Peace.”

Since the beginning of the investigation, Pettis County Sheriff Kevin Bond has refused repeated requests from the family to name the deputy responsible for killing Fizer while at the same time threatening the population of Pettis County that he will “do everything in my power” to “quell assaults, riots ... and insurrections.” The family reports that they have not been given any updates about the investigation from police since her death on June 13.

Speaking to the New York Times, Amy Fizer, Hannah’s mother, remarked on the class justice her family has been subjected to and lack of information the family has received so far, noting, “It’s like pulling teeth.” Commenting on the freedom police have to harass, intimidate, and kill workers like her daughter, Amy Fizer bluntly stated, “They pull you over. They do what they want, when they want.”

On June 23, the MSHP released information stating that they had obtained video from a nearby restaurant that recorded the entire incident, but they have yet to release it to the public. The Kansas City Star, which has not seen the video, reported that Fizer can be seen “moving in her car” before the deputy fired his weapon into the vehicle. Multiple bullet holes were located in the driver-side door and window of the vehicle, while Fizer “appeared to” have suffered “multiple gunshot wounds.”

MSHP investigators also revealed that Fizer was recording the traffic stop with her cell phone which was found on the floor of the car. The cell phone has been in state custody since the night of the shooting.

Bond has confirmed that neither his deputy, nor the patrol car, were equipped with cameras, which the department had received three years ago. In a recorded interview with the Kansas City Star, Bond blamed “data failure” and “technical details,” which allegedly prevented the equipment from working.

While Bond has purposely withheld information regarding the deputy who killed Fizer, he appeared in a local news segment in the first week of August to detail charges his department had filed against a young African American man for allegedly following an off-duty Pettis County deputy and asking him, “You like killing people?”

The alleged incident took place during the third week of June. However, Bond purposely waited until after a special prosecutor had been announced in the Fizer case weeks later to publicly name the accused and scold members of the community for attempting to discern the name of the killer cop in their midst, telling KCTV it creates a “very dangerous situation.” The young man was able to post a $10,000 surety bond after being charged with felony harassment.

Within a week of the story airing, the Kansas City Council voted on August 13, 7-5 to criminalize “doxxing” or the sharing of personal information online of police and public officials. The measure, as originally introduced by Democratic Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas, would have only protected state officials. However, after objections from the American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri that it prioritized state officials over the public, it was amended to include the public as well.

MSHP’s investigation into Fizer’s killing was completed on July 30, with the results turned over to the Pettis County Prosecutor’s Office and prosecutor Phillip Sawyer. Besides the aforementioned details, no other findings from the MSHP investigation have been made public or shared with the family as of this writing.

Upon receiving the Highway Patrol’s report, Sawyer waited approximately a week before issuing a public statement on August 4, announcing that he would be turning the case over to General Counsel for Missouri Office of Prosecution Services Stephen Sokoloff.

Attempting to provide the veneer of accountability to the cover-up in progress, Sawyer wrote that his decision to turn over the investigation to Sokoloff was made so that the “families of those involved” have the “confidence...that this matter was handled independently and competently by an individual with no ties to the jurisdiction that I serve.”

Similar to the appointment of a special prosecutor in the case of slain Louisville nurse Breonna Taylor, which occurred over 100 days ago, this tactic is commonly used by the state to delay inconvenient findings and protect killer cops.

Prior to being promoted to general counsel in February 2017, Sokoloff was the Deputy Director of the Missouri Department of Public Safety, where his duties included serving as the acting State Homeland Security Coordinator and on the Department of Homeland Security Identification and Credentials Management Committee. A Democrat, Sokoloff was prosecuting attorney of Dunklin County, Missouri from 1990 through 2014.

In a possible preview of the justice the Fizer family can expect to receive from Sokoloff’s offices, on February 24 of this year, Sokoloff found that a Fulton Police Department officer was justified in the shooting and killing of unarmed 25-year-old Cody McCaulou, which took place on December 30, 2019.

McCaulou, a young father, who was white, was shot multiple times after the officer approached his vehicle with his gun drawn after receiving an anonymous report that the vehicle and occupants inside were attempting to purchase drugs. McCaulou, with his girlfriend and mother in the vehicle, attempted to drive away, triggering the officer to unload on the car with his weapon, shooting McCaulou multiple times through the windshield and causing the vehicle to crash into a nearby building.

The entire incident took less than four seconds and no one except McCaulou was injured. While Sokoloff admitted it was “hard to get a good assessment of the speed” of the vehicle at the time the officer fired his weapon, Sokoloff wrote in his report that the vehicle was “accelerating rapidly towards him [the cop],” and that he felt the “officer had a reasonable belief that he was in danger of serious...injury or death.”

Michael Netherton, Sr., McCaulou’s father, disagreed with Sokoloff's opinion, telling KIMZ, “(The officer) had different options. He really did.” Netherton added that “the car wasn’t speeding or nothing.”

Wayne State University administration announces pay freezes and layoffs

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/22/wsub-a22.html

By Valery Tsekov
22 August 2020

Wayne State University (WSU) President Roy Wilson published a statement on the school’s website in early August announcing pay freezes and layoffs to its staff in the coming year. The statement spelled out several possible “solutions” to WSU’s budgetary crisis being considered by the university’s board of directors.

All of the scenarios place the burden of the budget cuts squarely on workers and students. The measures include pay freezes, layoffs, and furloughs to lecturers and other staff members, as well as budget reductions to the university’s various academic departments, and a reduction in the retirement contributions which are provided by the university to its tenured staff. These measures constitute an austerity attack on education professionals and on the quality of education provided to the attendees at the university. This comes on top years of tuition hikes for students over the past decade.

WSU is an inner-city college campus whose residents and attendees are mostly young people of a working-class background, many of them commuting to their classes from home.

Several of the austerity measures announced in Wilson’s statement on August 4 had been under consideration since before the COVID-19 pandemic arrived in the United States. In other words, the WSU administration is using the crisis to push through long sought after “cost-cutting” attacks on workers and students.

This is most starkly expressed in the situation facing lecturers. In February, 38 percent of lecturers at WSU’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences received “notices of non-renewal.” At the time, the notices stipulated that while not all of these lecturers would be definitively laid off, all of them would not be teaching this coming semester. The notices also indicated that their salaries, if they got called back to work before the end of the fiscal year, would see a proportionate or partial reduction from whatever it was in their contract at the time. In the meantime, the board of directors would give “more consideration” to the question of who should be laid off and who should stay.

As the WSWS stated at the time, “Wayne State University has been subject to ongoing funding crises, which the board of directors has sought to fill through tuition hikes, greater utilization of adjunct faculty, and other regressive measures.”

Wilson’s announcement on August 4 claims that these measures will be implemented temporarily for the fiscal year 2021. However, no suggestion was made that staff members who will be laid off would ever be reinstated at some point in the future whenever the COVID-19 pandemic would presumably be under control.

A specific figure on how many people will be laid off has yet to be given. Wilson’s announcement simply states that “both our preferred budget solution and our contingency budget solution include layoffs, though at very different levels. Ultimately, the degree to which we will need to implement layoffs will be determined by our ability to lower compensation of all employees through pay freezes and furloughs.”

The operational definition of “furloughs” in Wilson’s announcement is “a percentage reduction in work hours and a corresponding reduction in salary.” The details of this plan will be settled in the near future through the “bargaining process,” a reference to negotiations that have yet to be finalized between WSU’s board of directors and various unions representing the university’s staff and lecturers.

The targeted budget reductions for the college campus was considered, analyzed, and developed by the university’s Budget Planning Council and the Finance Subcommittee. Both of these bodies consist of designees appointed by Wilson himself, other executives of WSU, union bureaucrats, and so-called “university stakeholders” according to the university’s website, who no doubt include wealthy donors. The class interests which pertain to the members of these bodies who make important decisions affecting workers and students are irreconcilably hostile to the needs of the working class community in metropolitan Detroit.

The preferred budget solution which these bourgeois overlords of the university have in mind includes a salary freeze for all employees including tenured professors, a reduction in the administrative division of the budget by 7 percent, and a reduction in college campus expenditures by 5 percent.

The school’s deans and members of the cabinet have also agreed to take a 5 percent reduction in their salaries, a mostly meaningless gesture made in an attempt to feign solidarity with workers who will be affected by the implementation of this budget solution. Wilson specifically will accept a reduction in his salary of 10 percent, which amounts to $50,000, leaving him with a still overblown salary of $450,000, allowing him to continue a luxurious upper-middle-class lifestyle that he already enjoys.

Members of the board of directors of universities generally receive six-figure incomes from their position within the campus hierarchy and have other sources of income which they collect casually, such as the dividends on their stock portfolios. Investors in the US stock market, in particular, have been receiving enormous windfalls during the coronavirus pandemic, which were ensured earlier this spring through the federal government’s injection of trillions of dollars into the stock market with the passage of the grossly misnamed CARES Act.

The real attitude of the ruling elite towards college educators was on display at WSU in late February of this year, when dozens of protesters held a demonstration on campus in support of the lecturers who had received the notices that their contracts would be allowed to expire this year. The demonstrators at that rally gathered outside of the Faculty/Administration Building to present a petition to Wilson, signed by 800 staff members from WSU and other universities, demanding the reinstatement of the targeted lecturers. Wilson refused to accept the petition in person and ordered campus police to prevent the demonstrators from entering his office.

Universities across the country are carrying out similar austerity measures, laying off faculty members and cutting the pay of their employees as they prepare to reopen under the deadly conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic. The American Council on Education has predicted that colleges and universities nationwide will experience a $23 billion decline in revenue during the upcoming fiscal year, which will have a devastating impact on their budgets.

The University of Wisconsin stands to see a potential collapse in its revenue of $100 million dollars, which will surely lead to a steep drop in its $650 million budget. Missouri Western University announced earlier this summer that it is laying off 25 percent. The University of Hawaii is preparing for a decline in its operational budget for the upcoming year of up to $181 million. Their current budget is $1 billion. Kalbert Young, the official in charge of developing the school’s budget solutions, told the university’s board of regents in a meeting, “There will be prolonged, possibly perpetual changes to how this university is run.”

The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the vast social crisis facing the working class, which is rooted in class antagonisms that are inherent to the global capitalist mode of production. Part of this social crisis involves the placing of high-quality and higher education increasingly out of reach for the working class, burdening students with loans that might take their entire life to pay off, and attacking the living standards of educators and education workers.

All of this demonstrates the urgent need for the independent mobilization of the working class to defend its right to a high-quality education, ensure the social well-being of educators and education workers, and demand the full funding of institutions of higher learning. These objective social needs need to be secured alongside the safety of students and college staff from the deadly illness caused by the novel coronavirus.

The Socialist Equality Party is organizing a fight back against the reckless reopening of schools. All educators, school workers, parents, and students who support this initiative should join our Facebook page and contact us today to find out how to join our fight.

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.

Cornell residential advisors hold one-day strike over coronavirus safety as school reopens

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/22/corn-a22.html

By James Mullan
22 August 2020

On Wednesday, student residential advisors (RAs) for Cornell University’s dormitory system held a one-day strike over unsafe working conditions as the university prepares for thousands of students to return for in-person learning. Cornell is located in Ithaca, in upstate New York.

The strike action was spontaneously organized in response to the university’s reckless reopening plans, which left RAs with even larger workloads than in pre-pandemic semesters. RAs do not have a union or representation in Student Campus Life. They published a list of demands for personal protective equipment (PPE), hazard pay for having to physically work with dozens of students during this semester, standardized responsibilities, and a representative who can participate in Housing and Student Life meetings, among others.

About 50 RAs participated in the single-day strike on Wednesday beginning with the student workers sitting out an online instructional webinar about the RA jobs.

The opposition from the RAs garnered significant support from the student body and university staff. The RAs’ twitter page, formed on August 19, quickly gained attention from alumni, professors and graduate student workers.

It took less than one day for Cornell administrators to agree to meet with a representative of the RAs to discuss the demands. The administration was no doubt worried about bad press amid the unfolding disaster at many other colleges and universities that have pushed ahead with in-person learning.

Following the meeting on Thursday, the Cornell RAs announced via Twitter that they were ending their strike in order to negotiate the demands with the administration. As of Friday evening, there was no further information regarding an agreement between the two parties.

Cornell RAs have so far taken a brave stand against the reckless reopening policy of their school. The International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE), the youth and student movement of the Socialist Equality Party, supports the students in their fight against unsafe working conditions. However, we urge the Cornell RAs to consider the broader issues, and dangers, involved.

Under the current conditions, it is incredibly dangerous for students, staff and faculty to return for in-person learning at all.

Cornell is expecting between 4,500 and 5,000 undergraduate students to move into on-campus housing next week. This represents a decrease of only about 30 percent from the normal capacity of 7,000. Many hundreds of students who will live off-campus in Greek housing or subleased apartments have already begun moving into the area.

The Cornell reopening plans were outlined in a statement published on June 30. It states that the school reopening plans are based on modeling (produced by a Cornell professor) that concludes that students are safer on campus than at home.

The cornerstone of Cornell’s reopening plan is the research conducted by Cornell professor Peter Frazier, who concluded that “residential instruction, when coupled with a robust virus screening program of the form we intend to implement, is a better option for protecting the public health of our community than a purely online semester.”

This plan has nearly identical testing and containment protocols as have been used at Ivy League and other elite universities, including testing undergraduates twice a week. The theory is that students will be safer if they are on campus, monitored very closely, and tested routinely.

However, despite the university’s supposedly sound modeling, their official statement made a clear warning of the risk involved: “There are, of course, limits to the predictive power of epidemiological modeling… There is simply no way to completely eliminate risk, whether we are in-person or online; even under the best-case projections, some people will become infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and some will develop the severe form of the COVID-19 disease.”

The arguments made by the administration are riddled with holes. Most notably perhaps, these testing and containment plans do not extend beyond the community of those paying tuition and living in campus housing. Cornell, like nearly all universities around the country, has no plan to provide randomized or stratified testing for the population of Ithaca as they welcome thousands of students into the area.

Cornell University is in Tompkins County, New York, with a population of slightly over 100,000 residents. The town will soon be flooded with thousands of students from all over the country who could very well catch and spread the virus during the course of their travel.

There is no doubt that if Cornell is allowed to reopen for in-person learning it will lead to more infections, more hospitalizations and more deaths.

For colleges and universities that have so far moved ahead with in-person learning, the results have proved disastrous. Only days after starting in-person courses this fall, several universities, including Princeton and the University of Southern California, have already been forced to hastily cancel or postpone their plans and reinstate online learning.

On Tuesday, Notre Dame announced that it was moving all undergraduate classes to remote instruction for two weeks, and Michigan State asked undergraduates who planned to live in residence halls to stay home while they transition to remote formats.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which did not conduct widespread testing prior to reopening last week, announced Monday that all undergraduate instruction would be moving online immediately. This move came after four separate outbreaks occurred on campus during opening week, leaving 130 students infected and several hundred more quarantined.

One administrator and professor at Yale University, Laurie Santos, the Head of Silliman College and a psychology professor, sent a chillingly honest email to campus residents this week telling them that they may be killed by COVID-19 while attending school this semester: “We all should be emotionally prepared for widespread infections—and possibly deaths—in our community. You should emotionally prepare for the fact that your residential college life will look more like a hospital unit than a residential college.”

In Cornell’s reopening plan, the residential advisors are made into part-time managers of the activities of dozens of students each, helping to enforce the social distancing measures within the dorms and stop such activities as parties. Students should be warned that it is very likely that when the inevitable outbreaks do occur on campus, the administration will follow the lead of other leading universities in blaming students’ “bad behavior” for the clusters of infections.

Some colleges have even used the virus as an excuse to beef up campus police. Boston College, for example, is hiring a Boston police detail to “keep an eye on and break up parties on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights.”

Despite the irresponsibility of some students, the scapegoating of youth for the rise in COVID-19 cases is founded on a lie. The unbridled spread of COVID-19 is not the fault of a relatively small number of students but is a direct consequence of the criminal response of the American ruling class to the pandemic, which has been entirely based on the demands of the financial and corporate elite.

The ruling class is determined to reopen schools because it is a central pillar of the broader goal of reopening the economy and getting workers back to work to produce profits.

The IYSSE urges students, faculty, staff and others at Cornell to broaden their struggle beyond their current demands. We urge students to join teachers and staff at schools and colleges around the country in opposing the reckless drive to reopen schools.

In order to prepare for such a struggle, the Socialist Equality Party has launched the Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee. The committee is hosting an online meeting today to discuss how teachers, students, parents and other workers can organize a fight back. We urge Cornell students to attend the meeting at 3 p.m. EDT (12 p.m. PDT), today, August 22.



The author also recommends:

Form independent rank-and-file safety committees of educators, parents and students!
[15 August 2020]