“I have nothing but a bunch of ashes”

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/24/fire-d08.html

Hundreds of thousands displaced, six dead as 600 fires rip across California

By Norissa Santa Cruz
24 August 2020

A hellish nightmare has engulfed the West Coast of the United States. Record breaking heat waves, fire and lightning storms have led to the outbreak of over 600 fires throughout the state. The nation's most populous state, and a global breadbasket, has been turned into a deadly inferno fueled by extreme heat waves and weather conditions that sparked fires which have decimated land areas larger than the state of Rhode Island. Currently some 13,700 firefighters are battling the blazes, air pollution is at hazardous levels and at least six lives have been lost.

The dead include a helicopter pilot who crashed while dropping water on blazes in Fresno County, a still unidentified family of three in Napa County, a male Solano County resident and a Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) utility employee working in the Vacaville area.

Two firefighters in Marin County nearly lost their lives on Friday after they were surrounded by flames from the Woodward fire. By chance, a helicopter was nearby and rescued them with minutes to spare. “Had it not been for that helicopter there, those firefighters would certainly have perished,” said Sonoma County Sheriff Mark Essick.

Rare August thunderstorms last week above the Northern California Bay Area produced more than 20,000 lightning strikes that hit trees and vegetation, at a time when vegetation is at its driest, resulting in fires and “complexes” of numerous fires that have merged into major conflagrations in parts of the state. As of Saturday night, more than 140,000 people in the Bay Area have been evacuated while many are choosing to stay behind and attempt to protect their home from approaching walls of fire.

The group of fires known as the L.N.U. Lightning Complex in Napa Valley, burning across the counties of Sonoma, Lake, Napa, Yolo and Solano is the second largest fire in California history. Fire has burned through more than 341,000 acres and consumed 845 buildings and damaged another 230 and is only 17 percent contained as of midday Sunday.

At least 20 fires continue to rage East of Silicon Valley, also known as the S.C.U. Lightning Complex group fires, affecting locations in Santa Clara, Alameda, Contra Costa, San Joaquin and Stanislaus counties. The S.C.U complex fires have grown to 339,968 acres and are now the third largest fire in state history, primarily overtaking less-populated areas. They are only ten percent contained.

The CZU Lightning Complex started August 16 from lightning strikes in San Mateo and Santa Cruz Counties. The complex has charred 71,000 acres, 24,000 structures are threatened, and it is eight percent contained as of Sunday. The River Fire in Monterey County has scorched 42,583 acres, up from 10,000 acres Wednesday, and is 12 percent contained.

The Lake Fire near Lake Hughes in Los Angeles County has continued to burn since August 12 when it began near the Angeles National Forest. So far, it has destroyed 12 structures and 21 outbuildings, damaged six structures and threatens 1,329 others, and has consumed a total of 30,763 acres. By Sunday evening it was only 52 percent contained. Full containment is not expected until early next month.

81-year-old Vacaville resident Hank Hanson lost everything in the fires. He told the Independent, “Tuesday night when I went to bed, I had a beautiful home on a beautiful ranch... By Wednesday night, I have nothing but a bunch of ashes.”

Added to this is the painful devastation of Big Basin Redwood State Park—the oldest in California where 1500 to 1800-year-old living redwood giants and remains of their over 2,000-year-old ancestors became towering kindling over the weekend.

While the extent of the devastation has already hit near records, CAL FIRE expects conditions to worsen this week with dry heat, low humidity, and potential dry lightning expected to begin Sunday and continue over the next several days with another round of thunderstorms that will produce little rain. The National Weather Service issued a red-flag warning of extreme fire danger from 5 a.m. Sunday to 5 p.m. Monday, stretching from Sonoma County all the way through Monterey County.

Hundreds of thousands have been ordered to flee their homes as dozens of wide scale evacuation orders have been called in many areas throughout dozens of counties. Schools and fairgrounds have been hastily turned into shelters. In the time of COVID-19, residents have been forced to flee one deadly situation to another, leaving behind homes and all possessions to enter into crowded fairgrounds and school sites—many of which are at capacity.

More than 77,000 people were forced to evacuate due to the CZU August Lightning Complex Fire in Santa Cruz County, but the main evacuation center is at max capacity due to COVID-19 social distancing with seventy-nine evacuees and their families living in tents inside the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium. The vast majority are forced to live in their cars or rely on family. State provided hotel vouchers were quickly depleted. Evacuee Liz Jackson told KGO-TV ABC News 7, "We are frustrated and desperate... feeling like we're not in control, it's been horrible.”

Hazardous smoke from the hundreds of fires is flooding the Bay Area and Southern California, endangering the respiratory health of millions of residents in the metropolitan areas. In San Jose, Concord and Vallejo, the air quality index has surpassed 150, threatening everyone in the region.

Many residents have chosen to stay behind to battle the flames and risk their lives, with the full knowledge that if they lose their homes, they will struggle for years with displacement, insurance battles—assuming they are covered—and the rebuilding of a life from scratch under economic conditions akin to the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Cheryl Martin, a 61-year-old high school teacher in Santa Cruz County, told the Washington Post that she and her husband packed up to flee their home on Tuesday when the smoke became so unbearable that she needed a mask in the house. Her husband waited until she was on the freeway to tell her he was going to stay behind to try to save their home. Only on Thursday did he end up fleeing at the last minute, when he could see glowing flames approaching.

Daron Wyatt, public information officer for the California Interagency Emergency Response Team, told reporters, “That’s one of the biggest problems is people decide that they want to stay that they’re not in great danger and then if it does, the situation does change, the firefighters have to shift their focus from fighting the fire to try to protect life.”

The fact that many are choosing to risk their lives or face destitution in a terrible economic crisis is a complete indictment of the capitalist system. In fact, thousands were never made whole and are still homeless and displaced from the record-setting wildfires in 2018 which claimed 84 lives, wiped out the entire town of Paradise, California and produced apocalyptic scenes of people forced to exit their vehicles and run for their lives on gridlocked highways as flames engulfed rows of cars.

It was only in June of this year that PG&E, the Northern California energy utility, pleaded guilty to 84 felony counts of involuntary manslaughter and one felony count of unlawfully causing the devastating Paradise fire. The agency routinely failed to inspect and repair its power lines for years and attempted to declare bankruptcy to escape its debt obligations and other legal liabilities.

While the annual fires are portrayed as being purely environmental and unpredictable, nothing could be further from the case. Like clockwork, every year the fire season arrives between April and October, and every year lasts longer, but also like clockwork the state is always unprepared, with firehouses grossly underfunded and understaffed, while annually the summers get hotter, vegetation drier, and more days with extreme weather are added every season, the result of manmade climate change, which is causing more frequent and severe heat waves in the region and ever larger wildfires across the West.

The current heat wave throughout the state is extremely deadly and breaking records. The temperature at Death Valley National Park hit a scorching 130 degrees Fahrenheit (54.4 Celsius) last week, marking what is likely the hottest temperature ever recorded on Earth. In coastal Santa Cruz, temperatures reached 107 degrees Fahrenheit (41.7 Celsius) and along the agricultural Central Valley they exceeded 110 degrees F (38.3 C).

Exposing the poor state of infrastructure, many utility companies have enforced rolling blackouts in the middle of the deadly heat wave, cutting power to 130,000 people in southern California and 220,000 people in the Central Coast and Central Valley areas.

The journal Environmental Epidemiology estimated that across the US, some 5,600 deaths are attributable to heat annually. Extreme heat disproportionately affects farm and agricultural workers, children and the elderly, with the vast majority of deaths in poor and working class neighborhoods that lack access to cool spaces. Heat stroke is the leading cause of work-related death among farm laborers.

The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee predicts that wildfire blackouts could be California’s “new normal for the next 10 to 30 years, or even longer.” A 2019 University of Southern California environmental study found that the number of extreme heat days—those with temperatures above 95 degrees Fahrenheit—will more than double by 2070 in urban South Los Angeles.

So far in 2020 there have been over 6,000 wildfires of varying sizes throughout California, including the hundreds that are currently burning, compared to over 8,000 in 2019. Despite the predictability of the annual fires, there is nowhere near the number of fire crews, airplanes and helicopters needed to put out the fires. While the state relies on over 2,200 cheap prison laborers to risk their lives battling fires for $2-5 dollars a day, many are currently unavailable due to an early release initiative aimed at limiting the spread of coronavirus in the state’s prisons.

California Governor Gavin Newsom reported Saturday that his office has sent for firefighters from the East Coast and Australia, cynically stating that “These are unprecedented times and conditions, but California is strong—we will get through this.” In line with the push to reopen schools and the economy, Newsom’s callous statement amounts to an acceptance of mounting devastation and death from wildfires.

Newsom recently proposed cutting $681 million from the state budget for environmental protection.

The state has systematically cut funding for social infrastructure, fire department budgets continue to be slashed, and nothing has been done to mitigate the wildfire danger.

In the wealthiest state, home to 154 billionaires—the largest number in the US—as well as Silicon Valley and the Hollywood film studios, the resources more than exist to adequately prepare for the annual fire season by injecting billions into the fire departments, upgrading the states aging energy infrastructure and carrying out controlled burns to clear dry vegetation, but these are not the priorities of the ruling elite.

Democrats leave 20 million unemployed in the lurch

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/24/unem-a24.html

By Patrick Martin
24 August 2020

Three weeks after the US Congress went on vacation and allowed federal supplemental unemployment benefits to expire for 20 million workers, cutting their benefits by $600 a week, the House of Representatives stabbed the unemployed in the back a second time.

The Democratic Party-controlled House reconvened in the midst of its August recess, passed emergency legislation on the US Postal Service, and then adjourned without taking any action on the plight of those thrown out of work by the coronavirus crisis.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi declined to act on the appeal by nearly 100 members of her own caucus, who sent a letter asking that the reconvened House take up legislation to restore federal extended benefits for tens of millions of workers.

The refusal of Pelosi and other leading Democrats to take action on the unemployment crisis shows that the Democratic Party’s claim to uphold the interests of working people is a political fraud. The Democrats jump to attention when Wall Street demands a bailout, but they have no time for workers facing poverty, hunger, eviction and homelessness.

Saturday’s House session followed the Democratic National Convention, where there was virtually no reference to the cutoff of federal extended benefits during four days of rhetorical bilge about the “decency” and “empathy” of Joe Biden. The alleged tender feelings of the Democratic presidential nominee evidently do not extend to those who lost their federal extended benefits on July 31. He made no mention of them in his acceptance speech, nor did he urge the House to take action on their behalf.

The silence of the Democratic National Convention will be matched this week when the Republican National Convention meets to renominate the president. Trump will stage his own coronation with nonstop declarations about the “great economy” and his prowess in “making America great again.” But the only thing “great” about the present state of affairs is the great scale of the social need and mass suffering to which both corporate-controlled parties are entirely indifferent.

Two weeks ago, Trump signed an executive order purporting to revive the extended federal benefits at a much lower level—$300 a week, a cut of 50 percent—to be financed through the disaster relief fund of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

The White House capped the resources to be made available at a total of $44 billion, compared to the $70 billion a month that the supplemental benefits were paying out. In a best-case scenario, this would limit the duration of the $300-a-week benefits to about five weeks. But even this derisory assistance will be further reduced if natural disasters, such as the twin hurricanes expected to strike the Louisiana Gulf Coast this week, or the California wildfires, place sizeable demands on FEMA.

Only one state, Arizona, has begun paying out benefits using the FEMA funding. Fourteen other states have been approved to do so but have not yet been able to carry through the necessary preparatory and administrative work to put the payments into operation.

Most of these states have declined to contribute $100 a week from their own funds to bring the supplemental benefits up to $400 a week, taking advantage of the loophole provided by Trump. The president is allowing states to count existing unemployment compensation payments towards the $100 a week, rather than providing new money.

Michigan’s Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer was one of those who announced they would go forward with the $300 a week benefit without adding any new state money. Whitmer addressed the Democratic National Convention from a United Auto Workers union hall, and professed her sympathy for autoworkers but said nothing about her decision to limit the size of extended jobless benefits.

Two of the three largest states, Texas and Florida, have declined so far to join the $300-a-week program, declaring that they need further clarification on the terms. The largest state, California, is one of the 14 that have enrolled, but Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom said the state could not afford to add $100 a week to the payout. New York state, the fourth largest, will follow a similar path.

The blatant refusal of the Democratic-controlled House to take action Saturday allowed White House spokesmen to raise the issue themselves on the Sunday television talk shows, pretending sympathy for the unemployed. White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows regularly objected to every penny of social spending while he was a House member himself and a leader of the ultra-right House Freedom Caucus. But appearing on ABC News, he criticized Pelosi, asking, “Why did they come back on a Saturday and only deal with postal? Why did they not deal with enhanced unemployment? Why did they not extend the PPP program that actually helps small businesses?”

Kate Bedingfield, Biden’s deputy campaign manager, appearing on the same program, managed to avoid speaking either of the unemployed or the $600-a-week supplemental benefit, saying only that Biden “also believes that we need to get money to people who are hurting now,” without saying anything more concrete.

Pelosi herself appeared on the CNN program “State of the Union,” and dismissed the White House suggestion that the House pass a stripped-down bill extending supplemental unemployment benefits, without additional money for state and local governments, coronavirus testing and tracing, food stamp benefits, or the Postal Service. Trump was only offering “crumbs,” she said. “All the president wants is this one thing. He wants his name on a letter to go out with a check in it.”

This is of course true, just as it is true that the Democrats calculate that the cutoff of unemployment benefits will hurt Trump more than themselves in the November elections.

But behind the mutual vituperation and jockeying for electoral advantage, both capitalist parties are committed to meeting the demands of corporate America, which regards compelling workers to go back to their jobs, regardless of the danger to their health and lives, as the number one priority. Every other action of the Democrats and Republicans, from cutting off supplemental benefits to reopening the schools no matter how many coronavirus outbreaks erupt, flows from this central class imperative.

The truth is that corporate America, like its counterparts around the world, has seized on the COVID-19 pandemic to carry out a long-planned restructuring of class relations, driving down wages, destroying jobs, and undermining long-established social benefits, from Social Security and Medicare to public education.

The cutoff of supplemental benefits, now entering its fourth week, comes amid mounting signs of a further sharp slowdown in the US economy and a skyrocketing of social need.

The New York Times wrote of the first circumstance on Saturday, under the headline, “Economic Data Points to Pause in Recovery as Aid Programs Expire.” The newspaper noted: “Real-time measures of consumer spending, business sentiment, small-business reopening plans and even available jobs began flatlining last month, suggesting that the wave of virus infections that swept across parts of the United States in June and July came with economic consequences.”

The Washington Post detailed the social consequences in a harrowing report posted on its website Sunday night, under the headline, “Debt, eviction and hunger: Millions fall back into crisis as stimulus and safety nets vanish.” The article began, “Without federal aid to stave off the impact of the pandemic and economic recession, households that were already on the margins are now being pushed to the brink of financial ruin,” and it cited the estimate by a Columbia University researcher that the $600-a-week supplemental benefit and other federal payments had kept 17 million people from falling below the poverty line as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.

As these articles demonstrate, the US political establishment, both the capitalist parties and their media apologists are all well aware of the scale of the social and economic disaster facing tens of millions of working people. Their main concern is to suppress the mass struggles of the working class that will erupt and to block the development of a political movement of the working class against the profit system as a whole.

States and counties across US conceal COVID-19 outbreaks at schools

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/24/scho-a24.html

By Evan Blake
24 August 2020

Using the fraudulent pretext of “protecting medical privacy,” a growing number of states and school districts across the United States are deliberately concealing information from the public on COVID-19 outbreaks in schools that have reopened. These include the states of Maine, Virginia and Oklahoma, as well as Camden County, Georgia, and Orange County, Florida. In Tennessee, Louisiana, and many other states, the decision is left to each individual county, and an unknown number of county officials are concealing outbreaks in schools from the public.

Following an outbreak in Camden County in early August, Deputy Superintendent Jon Miller sent a districtwide email to administrators, writing, “Staff who test positive are not to notify any other staff members, parents of their students or any other person/entity that they may have exposed them.” The district has not publicly confirmed a single case, while the virus is raging throughout the state, and there have been rumors of infections at multiple schools.

This criminal policy of concealment has become the modus operandi across industries—including in logistics, auto, meatpacking, health care, and more—and serves as a primary mechanism for implementing the homicidal return-to-work campaign of the ruling class. If cases are concealed and no one knows whether their coworkers have been infected, the powers-that-be can justify reopening while the pandemic spreads even more rapidly.
The American ruling class, like its counterparts in Sweden and many other countries, is actively seeking to develop “herd immunity” based on infecting huge sections of the population, which will produce further mass deaths. Already, over 180,000 Americans have been killed as a result of this murderous policy. In Sweden, authorities deliberately kept schools open in pursuit of “herd immunity,” producing a per capita death rate nearly 10 times that of its neighbor, Finland, which in contrast closed schools and most businesses.

The drive to reopen schools is now the linchpin of the broader campaign to resume production in the US and globally. In order to force parents back into unsafe factories and workplaces, the ruling elites in the US, Brazil, Britain, Germany, Australia and a growing number of countries are determined to force educators and children back into unsafe classrooms. Setting a precedent of not reporting COVID-19 outbreaks in schools in the US will have immense ramifications for the working class internationally.

Since late July, there have been well over 2,800 reported infections of students and staff from at least 800 schools in 46 states. Dozens of schools in Florida have reported infections, with at least 1,200 confirmed cases. In Mississippi, 71 of the state’s 82 counties have reported outbreaks of COVID-19 in schools, and at least 200 students and 250 teachers have tested positive statewide.

In Georgia, at least 84 schools have already had outbreaks, with a combined 337 confirmed cases. In the Cherokee County School District alone, nearly 2,500 students and 62 staff members have gone into quarantine.

No doubt authorities also fear that the release of information about new outbreaks will provoke teacher strikes and student walkouts. The drive to reopen schools has already encountered enormous opposition. Since the beginning of July, there have been hundreds of protests in nearly every state. Last week, nearly half of all teachers and support staff in J.O. Combs Unified School District, a suburb of Phoenix, Arizona, carried out a wildcat sickout strike.

The news that districts are keeping COVID-19 cases secret was widely shared in the dozens of Facebook groups that have formed to oppose school openings. In one group in Rhode Island, which has over 15,000 members, a member commented, “By staying hush, they are aware that basically, it could kill people. I can’t believe what’s happening.” Another wrote, “This makes tracing impossible. Absolutely irresponsible and dangerous. Denial is just going to make a bad situation worse!”

Last week, the Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee was founded to organize the immense opposition to the drive to reopen schools and the assault on public education. Safety committees, which are independent of the unions, are being built on district and state levels. These committees demand the immediate release of all known and suspected COVID-19 cases at every school and workplace, and comprehensive testing and contact tracing programs, which are the prerequisite of any rational plan to contain and eradicate the virus.

Even the most basic right to information can only be secured through the independent initiative of educators, parents and students. The teacher unions at every level, and both the Democratic and Republican parties, have made clear that they will facilitate the covering up of this vital information, and do everything they can to keep educators isolated by district and state.

The situation is now critical. The lives of hundreds of thousands are on the line. Last week, the Department of Homeland Security quietly branded teachers and all education workers “critical infrastructure workers” on the instructions of the Trump White House. The DHS is the same agency that oversees the paramilitary BORTAC forces which Trump deployed in Portland and other cities last month, as part of his preparations to erect a presidential dictatorship.

By attaching this label to educators, Trump is enabling state and local officials to invoke “national security” and use their repressive state apparatus to force teachers and school workers back to work, even if they are known to have come into contact with someone infected with COVID-19.

Demonstrating the manipulation of science in the interests of the ruling class, last week the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued updated guidelines that fully sanction the reopening of schools. Where outbreaks of COVID-19 occur, the guidelines advocate the short-term suspension of individual classes and the cancellation of events and afterschool activities, rather than the shutdown of the entire campus.

While acknowledging that “children of all ages are susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 infection,” the CDC falsely claims that the children “might play a role in transmission.” This is despite multiple comprehensive studies proving that children do transmit the virus. The CDC concludes that “in-person learning is in the best interests of students,” ignoring the permanent physical and emotional damage that will be inflicted upon children who spread the disease to teachers, parents and grandparents, dwarfing any disruption caused by online learning.

In the struggle for their health and safety—and for the social interests of the vast majority—educators, parents and students must base themselves on the latest science, which proves demonstratively that reopening schools is a deadly endeavor.

The Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee is working to coordinate a unified opposition to the nationwide campaign to reopen schools. We will do everything in our power to assist in the building of local rank-and-file committees in every school and neighborhood, to unite with broader sections of the working class in preparation for a nationwide general strike to halt the reopening schools, stop the spread of the pandemic, and save lives.

Everything depends on the independent initiative of educators, parents, students and the entire working class. We urge all those who support these principles to get involved with our work, share our statement widely, join our Facebook group, and build rank-and-file safety committees at your schools, workplaces and neighborhoods to prepare for the struggles ahead.

Oppose the Stalinist slanders by CPP founder Jose Maria Sison! Support Joseph Scalice!

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/24/pers-a24.html

24 August 2020

In a vicious and menacing slander posted on Facebook on August 18, Jose Maria Sison, the founder and ideological leader of the Maoist Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), has attacked Joseph Scalice, a leading scholar of Philippine history, as a “pathologically rabid anti-communist and CIA psywar agent posing as an academic Trotskyite.”

Sison’s extraordinary outburst was in response to the announcement that Scalice will deliver an online lecture on August 26 hosted by Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, where he is a postdoctoral researcher. The lecture will “explore the historical parallels” between the CPP’s support for fascistic Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte in 2016 and the “endorsement of the Marcos dictatorship by an earlier Communist Party.”

Scalice, who is fluent in Tagalog and has a Ph.D. in Southeast Asian Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, is widely known and respected as a scholar in the United States and in South East Asia. His Ph.D. thesis on the CPP’s history has attracted a significant interest in the Philippines, where workers and youth, as well as academics, are seeking to understand the underlying roots of the CPP's repeated betrayals. Scalice has contributed essays on Philippine history, politics and social conditions to the World Socialist Web Site.

Utterly incapable of defending the CPP’s political role, Sison reprises his long personal involvement in Stalinist and Maoist denunciations, threats and violence in branding Scalice as an agent of US imperialism. He denounces the “futile attempts” of “Trotskyites” to blame the CPP and its front organisations for “the rise to power and current criminal rule of the traitorous, tyrannical, genocidal, plundering and swindling Duterte regime.”

It is a matter of record, well known in the Philippines, that the CPP and its front organisations supported the fascistic Duterte when he won the presidency in 2016 and staged rallies in his support. On the occasion of Duterte’s first State of the Nation address, BAYAN, the CPP’s umbrella front group, staged a rally of nearly 40,000 people and invited Duterte’s newly appointed chief of police, Ronald dela Rosa, to address it. The CPP’s youth front, Anakbayan, welcomed Duterte’s speech as “a breath of fresh air.”

Several prominent figures nominated by the CPP accepted posts in Duterte’s administration. These included leaders from two organisations tied to the political line of the CPP. Rafael Mariano, the longtime head of the Kilusang Magbubukid sa Pilipinas (KMP) peasant organisation, was put in charge of the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR). Joel Maglungsod, vice president for Mindanao of the trade union umbrella organisation Kilusang Mayo Uno (KMU), was made undersecretary of the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE).

Far from breaking from Duterte as he launched his “war on drugs,” the CPP welcomed the campaign of extrajudicial killings directed at the most oppressed layers of the population, and, in its official newspaper, Ang Bayan, called on the “revolutionary forces” to cooperate with it. The war on drugs became a campaign of mass murder in which over 30,000 people have been killed in the past four years by police and paramilitary forces.

Scalice in his writings has not only documented the repeated betrayals of the CPP and its various breakaway organisations, but explained that they are rooted in the reactionary nationalist ideology of Stalinism and its Maoist variant. Its perspective of the “two-stage theory” declares that in countries with a belated capitalist development, such as the Philippines, socialism is off the agenda and the working class and peasant masses have to support the “progressive wing” of the bourgeoisie.

In the Philippines, the Stalinist Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP) claimed that Ferdinand Marcos represented the progressive layers of the bourgeoisie. It backed him to win the presidency in 1965 and worked to subordinate workers and peasants to Marcos as he prepared to assume dictatorial powers through the declaration of martial law in 1972.

Sison was a member of the PKP youth wing who was expelled from the party in 1967 and founded the CPP in 1968. While Sison opposed the pro-Moscow PKP, neither he nor the CPP ever reexamined the theoretical roots of the PKP’s treachery or broke from Stalinism. He propagated a Maoist version of the two-stage theory that was responsible for painting one or another faction of the bourgeoisie as “progressive,” right up to the point when, having stabilised its rule with the CPP’s assistance, the ruling class turned on its allies and working people.

The “traitorous, tyrannical, genocidal, plundering and swindling Duterte regime” is just the latest in a series of Philippine governments helped into power by the CPP and/or rival Stalinist parties.

The menacing threat contained in Sison’s libelous attack on Scalice must be taken seriously. Sison and the CPP have a long record of physical violence and murder against their political opponents, including dissident members of their own party. His denunciation of “Trotskyites” recalls the slanders of Stalin and his gangster regime, which murdered an entire generation of revolutionaries in the purges of the 1930s, culminating in the assassination of Leon Trotsky in August 1940.

We call on our readers to oppose Sison’s slander against Joseph Scalice. Statements of opposition should be posted and circulated on social media. The WSWS also urges the widest attendance at the lecture that will be delivered on Wednesday (click here to register). We have been informed that more than 1,000 people in the Philippines and throughout Asia have already registered. Dr. Scalice has also received principled support from academics.

The CPP no longer commands the respect and support of broad layers of working people in the Philippines that it did in the 1970s and 1980s. It has fragmented into rival parties that compete with each other to ally with one or another faction of the Philippine bourgeoisie in return for crumbs of privilege and power. But the stultifying legacy of Stalinism and Maoism remains, not only in the Philippines but throughout the region.

Scalice’s lecture will provide an introduction to workers, youth and intellectuals who want to understand the reasons behind the CPP’s betrayals and are looking for a political perspective upon which to base the struggle against authoritarianism in the Philippines.

Peter Symonds

Why Does California Have So Many Wildfires?

There are four key ingredients to the disastrous wildfire seasons in the West, and climate change figures prominently.

August 23, 2020 

Kendra Pierre-Louis and John Schwartz 

NEW YORK TIMES

https://portside.org/2020-08-23/why-does-california-have-so-many-wildfires

Again, California is aflame.

More than 400,000 acres have been burned in Northern and Central California, with many of the fires set off by nearly 11,000 lightning strikes. High temperatures and strong winds have made the situation even worse.

Evacuation orders in Santa Cruz County covered 48,000 people, including the campus of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and those being evacuated must weigh the risks of seeking refuge in evacuation shelters in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. People living far beyond the burn zone are struggling with the smoke, and beloved sites like Big Basin Redwoods State Park have been badly damaged.

What is it about California that makes wildfires so catastrophic? There are four key ingredients.
The (changing) climate

The first is California’s climate.

“Fire, in some ways, is a very simple thing,” said Park Williams, a bioclimatologist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. “As long as stuff is dry enough and there’s a spark, then that stuff will burn.”

California, like much of the West, gets most of its moisture in the fall and winter. Its vegetation then spends much of the summer slowly drying out because of a lack of rainfall and warmer temperatures. That vegetation then serves as kindling for fires.

[Follow our live California wildfires map tracker.]

But while California’s climate has always been fire prone, the link between climate change and bigger fires is inextricable. “Behind the scenes of all of this, you’ve got temperatures that are about two to three degrees Fahrenheit warmer now than they would’ve been without global warming,” Dr. Williams said. That dries out vegetation even more, making it more likely to burn.

California’s fire record dates back to 1932; the 10 largest fires since then have occurred since 2000, including the 2018 Mendocino Complex Fire, the largest in state history, and this year’s L.N.U. Lightning Complex, which is burning west of Sacramento.

“In pretty much every single way, a perfect recipe for fire is just kind of written in California,” Dr. Williams said. “Nature creates the perfect conditions for fire, as long as people are there to start the fires. But then climate change, in a few different ways, seems to also load the dice toward more fire in the future.”
People

Even if the conditions are right for a wildfire, you still need something or someone to ignite it. Sometimes the trigger is nature, like a lightning strike, but more often than not humans are responsible.

“Many of these large fires that you’re seeing in Southern California and impacting the areas where people are living are human-caused,” said Nina S. Oakley, a research scientist at the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, in a 2018 interview speaking about the historic fires at that time.

Many deadly fires have been started by downed power lines. The 2018 Carr Fire, the state’s sixth-largest on record, started when a truck blew out its tire and its rim scraped the pavement, sending out sparks.

“California has a lot of people and a really long dry season,” Dr. Williams said. “People are always creating possible sparks, and as the dry season wears on and stuff is drying out more and more, the chance that a spark comes off a person at the wrong time just goes up. And that’s putting aside arson.”

There’s another way people have contributed to wildfires: in their choices of where to live. People are increasingly moving into areas near forests, known as the urban-wildland interface, that are inclined to burn.
Fire suppression

It’s counterintuitive, but the United States’ history of suppressing wildfires has actually made present-day wildfires worse.

“For the last century we fought fire, and we did pretty well at it across all of the Western United States,” Dr. Williams said. “And every time we fought a fire successfully, that means that a bunch of stuff that would have burned didn’t burn. And so over the last hundred years we’ve had an accumulation of plants in a lot of areas.

“And so in a lot of California now when fires start, those fires are burning through places that have a lot more plants to burn than they would have if we had been allowing fires to burn for the last hundred years.”

In recent years, the United States Forest Service has been trying to rectify the previous practice through the use of prescribed or “controlled” burns.
The Santa Ana winds

The second stage of this year’s fire season is yet to come.

Each fall, strong gusts known as the Santa Ana winds bring dry air from the Great Basin area of the West into Southern California, said Fengpeng Sun, an assistant professor in the department of geosciences at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

Dr. Sun is a co-author of a 2015 study that suggests that California has two distinct fire seasons. One, which runs from June through September and is driven by a combination of warmer and drier weather, is the Western fire season that most people think of. Those wildfires tend to be more inland, in higher-elevation forests.

But Dr. Sun and his co-authors also identified a second fire season that runs from October through April and is driven by the Santa Ana winds. Those fires tend to spread three times faster and burn closer to urban areas, and they were responsible for 80 percent of the economic losses over two decades beginning in 1990.

It’s not just that the Santa Ana winds dry out vegetation; they also move embers around, spreading fires.

Which brings us back to climate change.

Ultimately, determining the links between any individual fire and climate change takes time, and analysis from the evolving discipline of attribution science. But the effects of the greenhouse gases humans produce underlie everything that occurs in the atmosphere, and the tendency of climate change to make dry places more dry over time is a warning to the West of a fiery future.

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