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https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/24/nyur-a24.html
By Karsten Schneider
24 August 2020
Since late June, the Office of Residential Life and Housing Services at New York University (NYU) has been working closely with a small, student-led task force to make racially segregated housing a reality in undergraduate student dorms.
On July 20, Washington Square News, the weekly undergraduate student newspaper of NYU, published an article titled “Student-Led Task Force Calls for Black Housing on Campus,” in which they reported on the university’s willingness to help implement residential communities open solely to “Black-identifying students with Black Resident Assistants.” Since then, the university has officially given the project a green light, aiming to have NYU’s first segregated residential floor established by Fall 2021.
A little over two months ago, a recently-organized advocacy group called Black Violets created an online petition demanding that the university “implement Black student housing on campus in the vein of themed engagement floors across first-year and upperclassmen residence halls.” In their petition, the group argues that “Too often in the classroom and in residential life, black students bear the brunt of educating their uninformed peers about racism.” African American students, they state, desperately require a “safe space” where they can escape from students, staff, and faculty of other races.
At NYU, “themed engagement floors,” also known as “Themed Engagement Communities,” are a network of theme-based floors, located in various undergraduate residence halls, that allow students living on a specific floor to explore a specific subject through various programs and activities planned by a Resident Assistant. There are over twenty Themed Engagement Communities at NYU, with themes ranging from film, literature, and theater to technology, science, and foreign languages. All floors are open to all students, who request residency on a specific floor prior to the start of the academic year.
The approval of a Themed Engagement Community open to students based on their race is new at NYU. However, it is not the first time that the Office of Residential Life and Housing Services has considered such a proposal. In 2002, an NYU senior submitted a plan to develop race-based housing for African American students, claiming that “such a housing program would unite African American students on campus,” and better combat racial discrimination. This proposal was eventually rejected by the university after a brief review and discussion.
Now, despite signs of minimal support from the undergraduate student body—the online petition has garnered a mere 1,105 signatures out of the 26,733 total undergraduates currently studying at NYU—the proposal for race-based housing has been warmly welcomed by the university administration.
There is nothing progressive about the establishment of racially segregated housing at NYU. It is irrelevant whether the segregation being implemented is voluntary or mandatory. Racial segregation, in all forms, is entirely reactionary.
The vile argument advanced in the proposal is that all non-African American students, staff, and faculty are, to varying degrees, hostile and dangerous towards African American students. Their animosity stems from an inherent antipathy towards individuals of different races. Therefore, to end discrimination and ensure true equality within the university, African Americans must completely separate themselves from the rest of the community and “train” non-African Americans to overcome their intrinsic racism.
This irrational and anti-scientific ideology lies at the heart of similar proposals made at several major academic institutions across the country in recent years. This includes the moves towards racially segregated housing at Syracuse University and the recent calls for the implementation of racial quotas at several elite American universities. These demands do not stem from an egalitarian and progressive desire to make education easily available for everyone and eliminate the real dangers that face the majority of students and youth (massive debt, unemployment, homelessness, hunger, poverty, etc.), but from the desire to advance the interests of a very small, privileged layer of the population.
It is no coincidence that a renewed push for race-based housing at NYU comes at a time of unprecedented social, economic, and political crisis in the United States and throughout the world. This move is an outcome of the ever-intensifying racialist campaign being conducted by the sections of the ruling class and affluent middle class politically represented by the Democratic Party and their media mouthpiece, the New York Times. For over 50 years, these oligarchs and their obedient servants in the upper-middle class have relentlessly sought to defend their interests by dividing the working masses through the promotion of racial and identity politics.
Racism cannot be countered with racialism. They are two sides of the same coin. The fundamental division in capitalist society is class, not race. An individual’s relationship to the means of production ultimately determines their position in society.
A review of studies on wealth stratification between the richest and poorest members of the African American community alone exposes the class interests behind identity politics. According to statistics from 2017, the top 10 percent of the African American population owns over 75 percent of all wealth owned by African Americans. The bottom 50 percent of the African American population has zero or negative wealth. Under Barack Obama’s administration, the top 1 percent of African Americans saw their share of wealth double from 19.4 percent to 40.5 percent. Working-class African Americans are worse off than they were four decades ago, while things have never been better for the rich.
The growth of social inequality and poverty has occurred across all racial groups. White workers, black workers, Latino workers, Asian workers, and Native American workers have all seen their standard of living sharply decrease as that of the top 10 percent has dramatically increased.
Regardless of their race, workers face the same daily struggle to survive, laboring for long hours in horrendous conditions for dismal wages. Now, as a result of the ruling class’s ruthless back-to-work campaign, they also face infection with and death from COVID-19 as they are herded back into unsanitary factories and workplaces to pump out the surplus value necessary for the ruling class to pay off its debts.
In the aftermath of the international, multi-racial, mass protests against police brutality, sparked by the brutal murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, and the outbreak of wildcat protests and strikes across several major industries, the ruling class has pushed racial identity politics in an effort to misdirect growing opposition. Using the New York Times’ 1619 Project as a basis, they seek to completely erase class consciousness and the progressive content of the two American revolutions in order to stifle movement towards the third.
Identity politics solely serves the interests of the wealthy and privileged layer of society that has profited from the suffering of the working class. Specifically, it is the primary mechanism through which the “next 9 percent,” directly below the top 1 percent, seeks to achieve a more equal distribution of wealth within the top 10 percent of society. This layer, the upper-middle class, has no more qualms over exploiting the working masses for personal gain than the corporate, financial oligarchs at the very top of society.
University campuses, dominated by the upper-middle class, have been breeding grounds of anti-Marxism and imperialist recruitment for many decades. NYU stands at the pinnacle of that section of academia’s reactionary position within society. The university’s subservience to the profit interests of Wall Street and its extensive ties to US imperialism drive its every decision. Over the last few years, NYU has carried out significant attacks on workers, subordinated student mental health and food insecurity to profit interests, and demonstrated complete contempt for democratic rights. NYU, like all institutions of “higher” education, is first and foremost a business and will do everything in its power to defend the profit system.
This includes full compliance with the ruling class’s vicious back-to-work campaign. NYU, against the advice of medical professionals around the world, is one of the many academic institutions that has decided to hold in-person classes. Students from across the country are currently flying into New York City to undergo a mandatory two-week quarantine before the university opens.
The decision to hold in-person classes at NYU will prove to be disastrous. Over the last few weeks, several major US schools, including the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Notre Dame, Princeton, and the University of Southern California, were forced to revert to online instruction after explosions of COVID-19 cases amongst their students, staff, and faculty. Despite this, NYU has decided to go ahead with a full reopening; knowingly sacrificing the lives of students, staff, and faculty for profits.
It is imperative that all students realize the danger that they are facing in returning to school. What is needed is not the division of students along identity-based lines, but their unification against the present, barbaric social order. The fight against all forms of exploitation and oppression is inherently linked to the fight against capitalism. Students at NYU and universities around the world who seek to fight for genuine social equality must turn to the international working class, the great, powerful, progressive force in society. It is only by uniting workers of all races, ethnicities, genders, sexual orientations, and nationalities behind a clear, socialist program and perspective that capitalist barbarism will be overcome.
The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) and the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) are at the forefront of this struggle, striving to provide the working class with the independent, socialist leadership that is necessary to end a social order that prioritizes private profit over social need.
The author also recommends:
The cancellation of professor Adolph Reed, Jr.’s speech and the DSA’s promotion of race politics
[18 August 2020]
Demands mount for racial quotas at elite US universities
[13 July 2020]
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/24/nypd-a24.html
By Josh Varlin
24 August 2020
Leading New York City Police Department (NYPD) officials, including Police Commissioner Dermot Shea, have extensive misconduct allegations against them, according to years of records made public by the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU). Shea has overseen the NYPD since being appointed by Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio in November 2019.
NYCLU, the state affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), was able to publish data from the Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB) after a federal judge ruled, per a recent change in state law, such data could be made public.
The CCRB data published by NYCLU includes 323,911 complaints against 81,550 NYPD officers stretching back to 1985. It does not include complaints which are currently being investigated. According to the CCRB, most years only 30-40 percent of complaints are fully investigated, with most stymied due to witness noncooperation or inability to identify the officer.
If investigated, the allegations are either substantiated (the incident happened and constituted misconduct) or unsubstantiated (the CCRB could not prove that the incident happened, or that it constituted misconduct), or the officer is exonerated (the CCRB found that the incident happened but did not constitute misconduct).
While representing only the tip of the iceberg in terms of police misconduct, several current and former NYPD top officials appear in the NYCLU database.
According to the nonprofit New York City news site T he City, “Police Commissioner Dermot Shea got cited for what appears to be a wrongful vehicle search in 2003, during the era of ‘stop and frisk,’ when he was a captain in The Bronx.”
The incident is a microcosm of the indignities and abuse working-class New Yorkers suffer at the hands of the police. The CCRB substantiated that the 2003 incident involved misconduct. Shea was found to have wrongfully pulled over the vehicle before illegally searching it and unlawfully frisking at least one passenger. The disciplinary result of Shea’s illegal actions was that he was given “instructions.”
Three other complaints against Shea resulted in him being exonerated, meaning that the CCRB—an independent body whose board members are appointed by the New York City Council, the mayor and the police commissioner—found that the incident occurred but that the officer conduct did not violate procedure or the law.
Shea’s predecessor, James O’Neill, who was police commissioner from September 2016 until November 2019, also appears in NYCLU’s database. The CCRB substantiated charges that then-Lieutenant O’Neill unlawfully searched and detained someone, along with “unspecified abuse charges,” during a 1997 incident. The CCRB could not substantiate allegations of O’Neill threatening to use and actually using force improperly, as well as using “nasty words.”
T he City reports, “There’s no record indicating O’Neill received any form of discipline stemming from the substantiated charges.” O’Neill was exonerated of three other allegations in 1997, 1999 and 2002, including regarding illegal search of premises and damage of complainant property.
Other top NYPD officials appear in the NYCLU database. The highest-ranking uniformed cop, Chief of Department Terence Monahan, “was named in six ‘abuse of authority’ complaints, at least five of them during the 2004 Republican National Convention [RNC], which saw clashes between protesters and police,” according to the New York Post. While none of the allegations against Monahan were substantiated, protesters at the RNC were awarded a $200,000 settlement for the abuse they received at the hands of the NYPD.
Chief of Detectives Rodney Harrison has 21 complaints against him, of which an abuse of authority complaint was substantiated. Chief of Crime Control Strategies Michael LiPetri has 25 complaints against him, of which three have been substantiated.
That abusive cops rise to the top in the NYPD comes as no surprise to most New Yorkers. However, summary data put forward by the CCRB, as well as analyses of the NYCLU database, hint at the much broader culture of brutalization within the NYPD.
The CCRB received 7,663 complaints (each complaint can contain multiple allegations) in 2006, with a general decline over the following decade, in part due to the official discontinuation of stop-and-frisk, which a judge found to constitute unconstitutional searches and be racially discriminatory in application. However, from 2016 through 2019 complaints increased annually, reaching 4,962 in 2019.
A plurality of complaints originated in incidents which did not result in arrests or even a summons, and a plurality occur when a police officer suspects a crime—that is, is not called to the scene of a reported crime—expressing the arbitrary character of police violence and other heavy-handedness meted out to the city’s working class residents.
ProPublica, which separately published a subset of the CCRB data, found that of the 36,000 current NYPD officers, 3,900, or 11 percent, have “had at least one substantiated allegation.”
A small fraction of complaints, less than 3 percent, led to the officer receiving punishment, with only 12 officers dismissed, according to the NYCLU. For those cases investigated and substantiated, the NYPD decides internally how to act on the CCRB’s findings, with Police Commissioner Shea—himself, as revealed by the data, an abusive cop—making the final decision.
Several categories of allegations within the NYCLU database are revealing:
Beating: 4,215 allegations, of which 314 were substantiated. Except for two entries of “No Disciplinary Action,” no NYPD findings or punishments are listed in the database.
Chokehold: 1,746 allegations, of which 84 were substantiated. The NYPD found the officer not guilty in about half of the substantiated cases.
Gun firing: 423 allegations, of which 16 were substantiated. About half of the NYPD findings and punishments are not listed.
Refusal to obtain medical treatment: 1,885 allegations, of which 132 were substantiated, mostly resulting in training and command discipline. Officer Damian Marcaida was fired in 1999 for this infraction.
Vehicle search: 5,575 allegations, of which 753 were substantiated, mostly resulting in command discipline, training or instructions.
Offensive racial language, e.g., slurs: 2,781 allegations, of which 75 were substantiated by the CCRB. About half of these, despite being substantiated by the CCRB, had their charges dismissed by the NYPD, or were found not guilty. Many of those found guilty received instructions or written warnings, with very few substantiated claims resulting in penalties such as the loss of vacation days.
Offensive language against black people (separate from the above category): 2,970 allegations, of which 200 were substantiated, with no NYPD findings or punishments listed beyond a single finding of “not guilty.”
There were also three allegations of a sexually motivated strip search, one of a sexually motivated frisk and 32 of a “sexual/romantic proposition.” Offenses include multiple categories for police officers using items like flashlights and radios as clubs, as well as for offensive language targeting complainants’ race, ethnicity, gender, disability or religion. There are also eight threats related to immigration status. Such bigoted and backward elements find a ready home in police departments across the United States.
That so few police officers are held accountable for their actions is by design. The CCRB functions as a fig leaf for the NYPD. Its board is appointed by the political representatives of the same ruling class which the NYPD defends, along with appointees from the NYPD commissioner himself. It has limited powers and can only make recommendations to the NYPD, which often lets officers off the hook entirely in its own process or gives them merely a slap on the wrist for serious violations of democratic rights.
Even the limited oversight the board provides is anathema to the police and their fascistic unions, which sued to keep the NYCLU database under wraps after the organization obtained it through a Freedom of Information request.
Hundreds of cases being investigated by the CCRB have been delayed since March because officers refused to attend remote hearings necessitated by the pandemic, reportedly over concerns that such testimony would be leaked. It was only in early August that the department ordered officers to attend hearings.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/24/gree-a24.html
By Jacob Crosse
24 August 2020
In a series of blatantly undemocratic actions, Democratic Party state election commission members have kicked Green Party candidates off of the ballots in several states within the last week. The moves express the fear within the ruling class over the growth of social opposition and display the political gangsterism of the Democratic Party.
The moves come as Democratic state governors in Michigan and California and bourgeois courts have blocked the Socialist Equality Party’s candidates from the ballot, forcing them to gather signatures despite the coronavirus pandemic. While the SEP opposes the politics of the pro-capitalist Green Party, we defend the democratic right of its presidential nominee, Howie Hawkins, to appear on the ballot in all 50 states.
With regards to the Greens, the Democratic Party’s immediate concern is that any left-wing choice in the November election will subtract votes from the right-wing Biden/Harris ticket. Several last minute decisions have effectively barred Green Party candidates up and down the ballot from appearing in Texas, Montana and Wisconsin.
On Wednesday, three separate rulings in Texas courts blocked Green Party candidates from appearing on the November ballot, including US Senate candidate David Collins, 21st congressional district candidate Tom Wakely and candidate for railroad commissioner Katija Gruene.
Collins, Wakely and Gruene were all ruled ineligible for failing to pay filing fees, newly passed by the state legislature last year, which required candidates to pay as much as $5,000 to appear on the ballot. The ruling was made two days after a deadline for write-in candidates to file.
Green Party lawyers are challenging the filing fees in court as an unconstitutional burden, however, a ruling will likely not be handed down before the ballot certification deadline.
In a statement issued by the Green Party, the party accused the Democrats of “weaponizing” the legal system “to suppress votes.” However, within the same paragraph, presidential candidate Howie Hawkins pleaded for, “the Democrats… to join the Greens in fighting Republican efforts to prevent average Americans from voting.”
The statement once again made the argument that having the Greens on the ballot would be a benefit to the Democrats, noting: “The presence of Green candidates brings out voters who would otherwise stay home. Many voters who go to polls to support Green candidates end up voting for Democratic candidates in down-ballot elections.”
Prior to Wednesday’s ruling, Charles Waterbury, a Green Party candidate running for the Texas Supreme Court, was also forced to withdraw after his Democratic opponent, Amy Clark Meachum, sought a court order declaring his candidacy invalid because Waterbury allegedly voted in the March 3 Democratic party. State law bars candidates for state or county office from representing one political party in the general election if they voted in another party’s primary election within the same election cycle.
In a clear sign of their anti-democratic intentions, Democrats are not challenging the eligibility of Libertarian Party candidates, even though they have yet to pay the filing fees as well.
In Montana, the Democratic Party engaged in a massive pressure campaign against people who had already given valid signatures on a petition for Green Party ballot access, according to Green Party representatives. The Montana Supreme Court threw out the Green Party’s petition for lack of signatures after the Democrats succeeded in getting roughly 500 signatories to recant their signatures. The Democrats repeatedly called signatories, and in some cases showed up to people’s homes with a third-party notary, demanding they recant because the Green Party petition was financed to the tune of $100,000 by the Montana Republican Party.
Montana State Senate Green Party candidate Gary Marbut, speaking to Fox News, said that the party will seek an emergency injunction with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals while the Montana Secretary of State, a Republican, is separately appealing to the US Supreme Court in favor of the Greens’ ballot access.
Debbie Rowe, a volunteer on Marbut’s campaign, recalled to Fox News the pressure Democratic party operatives put on voters to recant their signatures: “The Democratic party had called most of them about 15 to 25 times to badger them to do a withdrawal.”
Rowe continued, “One elderly couple told me that they just didn’t feel comfortable saying ‘no’ after the 20th call they received. The Democratic Party even had a third-party notary come to their house to take their withdrawal; I think that scared some people, too—they think, ‘now they know where we live.’”
This past Thursday, the Wisconsin Elections Commission effectively banned the Green Party presidential and vice presidential candidates from appearing on the ballot this November. The Democrats argued against ballot access due to the fact that Green Party vice presidential candidate Angela Walker, a Milwaukee native, moved during the petition drive. Green Party members attest that they attempted to update Walker’s address with the commission prior to the deadline, however, the Democratic members of the commission ruled that of the 3,623 valid signatures submitted, 1,834 had Walker’s former address which the Democrats argued made them “invalid.” The signature requirement was 2,000. The Hawkins/Walker campaign argued that they have an additional 2,000 signatures to submit with Walker’s current address, but the commission will only count 4,000 signatures, and since the deadline has now passed, the remaining signatures cannot be considered per the commission. The party is expected to challenge the commission’s ruling, which as of now bars the party from appearing on the ballot.
The Greens are also spending thousands of dollars to pay attorneys as part of lawsuits in Pennsylvania, Oklahoma and Nevada for ballot access. In Pennsylvania, Democrats allege the paperwork contained “numerous defective signatures, illegible signatures, signatures of unregistered voters, signatures in the handwriting of theirs and signatures of fictitious persons.”
The 2020 elections will not be the culmination of an open, democratic process, but a conspiracy among the oligarchy to stifle any dissent or movement among disaffected workers and youth.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/04/08/pers-a08.html#pk_campaign=sidebar&pk_kwd=textlink
8 April 2020
In a London court hearing yesterday [7 April], District Judge Vanessa Baraitser declared that the extradition show trial of Julian Assange will proceed in May, despite the fact that Britain is under a national lockdown and the coronavirus pandemic is rapidly spreading through the country’s prison system.
Baraitser’s ruling was the second in a fortnight that places Assange’s life and safety in jeopardy and underscores the travesty of justice being perpetrated against him.
On March 25, she rejected an application for bail made by Assange’s legal team, which detailed the “very real” and potentially “fatal” threat posed to his health by the coronavirus pandemic.
Assange is currently held on remand in London’s maximum-security Belmarsh Prison. He faces extradition to the US, where he would be convicted of bogus espionage charges and imprisoned for life for exposing war crimes and human rights abuses by successive US governments.
It was exactly a decade ago that WikiLeaks published the Collateral Murder video. Its images of the indiscriminate murder of unarmed Iraqi civilians and two journalists by US occupation forces were viewed with horror by millions around the world.
Ever since, the US and its allies—including Britain and Australia—have hounded Assange. They are determined to silence him forever as part of their turn to authoritarian rule and the imposition of new military provocations and mass austerity demanded by a criminal financial oligarchy.
Assange’s health has been systematically destroyed by a decade of arbitrary detention. Last May, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer found that Assange displayed medically verifiable symptoms of psychological torture resulting from his decade-long persecution.
The WikiLeaks founder has a chronic lung condition that renders him especially vulnerable to respiratory illness, along with a host of other medical issues.
Since last November, the Doctors for Assange group, comprised of over 200 medical professionals around the world, has warned that Assange may die behind bars because he has been denied adequate medical care. Their calls for him to be transferred to a university teaching hospital have been dismissed by the British authorities.
In an open letter last month, Doctors for Assange wrote: “Julian Assange’s life and health are at heightened risk due to his arbitrary detention during this global pandemic. That threat will only grow as the coronavirus spreads.”
Speaking for the group, Dr. Stephen Frost told the World Socialist Web Site: “Mr. Assange must be assumed by doctors to be severely immunocompromised and therefore at greatly increased risk of contracting and dying from coronavirus in any prison, but especially in a prison such as Belmarsh. Every extra day Mr. Assange is incarcerated in Belmarsh prison constitutes an increased threat to his life.”
Countless human rights organisations have warned that the UK’s prisons are “breeding grounds” for coronavirus. Were Assange to remain in prison, argued defence lawyer Edward Fitzgerald QC two weeks ago, he would be “seriously endangered in circumstances from which he cannot escape.”
Judge Baraitser, however, ruled that the “global pandemic… does not provide grounds for Mr. Assange’s release.” She had “no reason not to trust” the government’s advice on protecting prisoners from the virus “as both evidence-based and reliable and appropriate.”
When the ruling was given, 19 prisoners across 12 different prisons had already tested positive for the virus and 4,300 prison staff were self-isolating, including one hundred at Belmarsh.
By the time she presided over Assange’s hearing yesterday, 107 prisoners were known to be infected across 38 different prisons, meaning the virus is confirmed as present in at least a third of prisons in England and Wales. Another 1,300 prisoners were self-isolating. Of the top three prisons for reported cases, two were in London—Wandsworth with 11 and Thameside, situated immediately next door to Belmarsh, with 7. Nine prisoners were reported to have died after becoming infected, including one inmate at Belmarsh.
Revealing plans to release several thousand low-risk prisoners late last week, the UK government made the astonishing announcement that because Assange was “not serving a custodial sentence” he would not be considered eligible. Only one conclusion can be drawn: the WikiLeaks founder is being kept in prison with the deliberate intention of exposing him to a deadly disease.
At yesterday’s hearing, Assange’s lawyers requested that the next phase of extradition proceedings, scheduled to begin on May 18, be postponed. They detailed the Orwellian situation facing their client under conditions of a national lockdown.
Fitzgerald explained that Assange’s already minimal contact with his legal team has been restricted even further. His lawyers “are not able to have any reasonable communication with him at present.” They are unable to visit him at all in prison or to meet with him via video and have been able only to hold a few telephone calls with their client. Assange’s defence is therefore now largely being carried out by post, which is insecure and takes weeks to be received.
There is no chance of the extradition hearing being carried out fairly while the epidemic and lockdown restrictions continue, with Assange, witnesses, legal teams, the press and public unable to attend in person.
In any case, Fitzgerald continued, Assange is too ill to participate safely in the proceedings, even virtually. In order to access the video link in Belmarsh, he must move across the prison, queue with others and use shared facilities—all potential opportunities for contracting the coronavirus. Given Assange’s state of health, said Fitzgerald, it would be unjust to make him appear in court in this way.
Baraitser was unmoved, saying she intended to keep to the date of May 18 and hear as much evidence as possible that month, with witnesses participating via video link if necessary.
Not only does the British government refuse to accept the coronavirus pandemic as grounds for bail, they will not let it disrupt the schedule of their show trial. If they don’t succeed in ensuring that Assange dies in prison, no concern for the pretence of fair legal proceedings will prevent them from railroading Assange to a US prison as planned, in what amounts to an extraordinary rendition. In events that outstrip the imagination of Franz Kafka, the whole extradition hearing may be heard in absentia, not only of the accused but of his lawyers and witnesses!
Underscoring the utterly vindictive character of the campaign against Assange, Judge Baraitser also insisted on lifting reporting restrictions barring his partner and children being publicly named. The WikiLeaks founder has sought to maintain their anonymity to ensure their safety.
Baraitser cruelly claimed there was “no evidence” that Assange’s partner would be subject to harassment if her name was revealed or that any US agency wished her or her children harm. She had the gall to claim that her decision was motivated by the “strong public interest” in the “accurate reporting” of the case. As she knows full well, Assange has been slandered and his case wilfully distorted by the corporate media for a decade. Releasing his partner’s name is intended to add fuel to the fire.
These acts of naked criminality are carried out under conditions in which the world’s attention is focussed on the coronavirus pandemic and the criminal responses of the world’s governments. But the effects of the virus cannot be allowed to cover for the escalation of the vicious assault on the most significant journalist of the 21st century.
The coronavirus pandemic has underscored that the public’s access to true and accurate information is a life and death question. In every country, working people are being confronted by governments and corporations that have systematically lied about the implications of a public health emergency that began last December—assisted by a corrupt and pliant media.
Assange founded WikiLeaks to uphold the public’s right to know. He pursued this commitment courageously, earning the enmity of imperialist governments and their political and media lackeys around the world. It is time to repay the debt.
Saturday marks 12 months since Assange was illegally expelled from Ecuador’s London embassy, where he was a political refugee, and brutally arrested by the British police. The events of the past year have unquestionably demonstrated that the purpose of the entire operation against the WikiLeaks founder has been nothing less than his physical and psychological destruction.
The alarm must be sounded: Assange’s life is in imminent danger! His fate depends on the construction of a mass movement of the international working class for his immediate and unconditional release. Join this fight today!
Thomas Scripps
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/24/post-a24.html
By Shuvu Batta
24 August 2020
Reports and images from around the country of torn postboxes, dismantled mail processing machines, live animals delivered dead and the delayed shipments of medicine to elderly and veterans have ignited widespread public outrage. It is now very clear that the drive to wreck an institution older than the United States itself, to justify its privatization and sale to profit-driven corporations, is proceeding at a rapid pace.
The USPS expects to run out of cash by 2021, but it is the delivery crisis, particularly its potential impact on the US elections, which has created a deadlock in Congress, with the Democratic-controlled House passing a bill to provide an additional $25 billion in funding and the Senate Republicans expected to reject it.
President Donald Trump recently denounced this appropriation effort, initiated partly to offset the losses caused by the coronavirus crisis and partly to insure proper functioning during an election in which mail ballots will be critical. Trump claimed, “This is all another HOAX by the Democrats to give $25 billion unneeded dollars for political purposes without talking about the Universal Mail-in Ballot scam … that they are trying to pull off in violation of everything that our Country stands for.”
Postmaster General Louis DeJoy testified before an emergency session called by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs on Friday. Two competing and false narratives were on display, with the Democrats blaming Trump and the Republicans as sole authors of the postal crisis, while the Republicans essentially denounced the USPS as “a sort of perhaps unfixable problem,” in the words of Senator Rand Paul, which required complete dismantling and privatization.
Republican committee chair Ron Johnson of Wisconsin started the meeting off by pointing out that DeJoy was not a Trump appointee, but rather had been chosen by “the bipartisan Postal Board of Governors.” All of these governors, however, whether Democratic or Republican, were appointed by Trump.
Ranking Democrat Gary Peters scolded DeJoy over the impact of the policies he has implemented since taking the reins in the spring. He revealed that his office had received over “7500 reports of delays from Michigan and around the country in less than two weeks. They have written to me about skipping doses of their medication and their small businesses losing customers or having to lay off employees, all because of changes that you directed.”
Among the changes instituted by DeJoy were an effective ban on overtime, leading to the piling-up of mail in facilities and lengthy delays.
As the WSWS had reported earlier on the hiding of COVID-19 deaths and infections at USPS by management, it was further revealed over the course of the meeting that the USPS leadership is hiding important data which reveal the internal operations of the Post Office.
DeJoy contradicted himself throughout the meeting. He claimed at one point, “We serve 161 million people. We still deliver at 99.5 percent of the time. We have significant efforts to continue to improve on that process,” and then later, “I won’t go as far as to not say that we had maybe a four or five percent hit on our service level for delayed, all sorts of mail, marketing mail, everything, because it got stuck on a dock and we’re drastically bringing that down.”
He even stated at one point, “Theoretically everyone should have gotten their mail faster.”
The Republican Senators received DeJoy with great fanfare and admiration, with former Florida governor and now Senator Rick Scott introducing DeJoy with, “can you just talk about why you’re uniquely qualified” to lead the USPS and, “How does it make you feel when you have people make these unsubstantiated claims that you personally have a goal to slow down the mail?”
DeJoy is a major GOP donor, according to FEC Data since 2016 he has given roughly $1.2 million to the Trump Victory Committee and the Republican National Committee each alongside smaller contributions to Republican House and Senate Candidates. Simultaneously, according to a report by USA Today, he and his wife may claim up to a total $75,815,000 in assets from US Postal Service competitors.
Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky inadvertently suggested the reality of the situation by asking DeJoy, “If you came in as a venture capitalist and a venture capitalist group took over the post office and named you CEO what would you do that you are unable to do because it’s a government agency?”
DeJoy thanked Paul for the question and answered, “Number one, the legislative reform that I would ask is what I said in my written testimony and opening remarks on integration of Medicaid and pension reform. I would like to be kind of liberated on pricing, it’s a very, very competitive market out there now. I would like more pricing freedom.”
The Postal Service Reform Act of 2018 was a bipartisan bill which had aimed to achieve part of what is outlined, the bill would have led to a retiree paying an additional $1,600 or more per year in Medicare premiums, according to National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association President Richard G. Thissen.
Senator Paul called for further assaults on postal services to his own rural constituents, declaring, “We also need to look at—the easiest way to continue personalized service to each person individually at their house would be to do it less frequently, and frankly, people who live 20 miles down a shell road, if you told them they were going to get twice a week versus six times a week, I think we’d actually live with this.”
In the almost two-hour meeting, a critical element missing was any discussion on DeJoy’s move to centralize his leadership and create a new department responsible for sorting mail during an election cycle, which will be largely decided through mail-in ballots.
Senator Kamala Harris, who is a part of the Senate committee, decided to spend her time on the campaign trail rather than question an individual who may have conspired against her campaign. This only demonstrates the unseriousness of the Democrats’ posturing as defenders of democracy against Trump.
In stark contrast to the duplicitous role of the Democrats, who are equally as responsible for the manufactured crisis at USPS, postal workers in Wenatchee and Seattle-Tacoma in Washington have restored into service dismantled mail-sorting units. Workers in Dallas, Texas, have ignored the USPS’ directives.
The Senate hearing was largely political theater. Much noise was made about the $25 billion which USPS needs in order to maintain its function of providing essential items such as life saving medicine to all Americans, but no such noise was made in regards to the $738 billion budget to the US military approved last year, with even the so-called socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez voting in favor.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/24/mass-a24.html
By Will McCalliss
24 August 2020
Demonstrating the deep class chasm when it comes to the pandemic, the Broad Institute is providing select private schools with concierge testing to facilitate their back to school efforts.
Broad is a nonprofit biomedical research center in Cambridge, Massachusetts and part of the far-flung Broad Foundation. Nationally, the foundation set up by billionaire Eli Broad is best known for its school privatization policies, including the training of school superintendents through the Broad Academy.
In Massachusetts, Broad has partnered with the Cambridge Innovation Center (CIC) and PWNHealth, a clinician network, to providing some private institutions regularly scheduled, bulk COVID-19 testing, guaranteeing test results within 24 hours. Such regular testing and quick responses are inaccessible to tens of millions of Americans.
The partnership, called Assurance Testing Alliance, sends test kits to schools where students, faculty and staff self-administer (or, in the case of young students, are administered) the nasal tests. They also ship the tests back to the Broad Institute’s lab and provide training, set up for the collection, a software portal to receive results, and various administrative and logistic coordination.
To qualify for this program, schools must commit to testing at a rate of once or twice a week or daily, with at least 1,000 tests to be administered in the fall. At $48-60 per test, the cost is $50,000 and up.
The World Socialist Website has described COVID-19 “a poor man’s virus.” It is also “a poor child’s virus.” Regular testing is one of the crucial factors necessary to contain the spread of COVID-19, but frequent testing of an entire school is only available to the wealthiest private schools in America. The message is clear: send your child to a private school and they can be as safe as money can buy; meanwhile, public schools will be enormous vectors of death and disease.
That the tests are guaranteed to be returned within 24 hours, while most Americans suffering from the symptoms are left waiting for days and even weeks to get their results, further demonstrates the inhumanity of the ruling class’s response to the pandemic. The technology and resources for reliable access to testing with fast results exist, but with no significant investment given to public testing, only rich can qualify.
Frankly, even with testing, opening private schools amidst a raging pandemic is by no means “safe.” Depending on the type of school, students and/or faculty and staff must commute to school and testing, especially self-administered testing, is imperfect. Anything less than daily testing in such a setting leaves plenty of time for asymptomatic carriers to spread the disease.
As the World Socialist Web Site noted this week, overall testing for COVID-19 continue at depressed levels even as public schools and universities reopen and cases continue to climb. The average number of tests on a given day is currently 14 percent lower than its high on July 29, despite the total number of known cases rising 26 percent—1.2 million infections—over that same period.
Broad is apparently also selling its testing services to colleges and universities in Massachusetts, the Commonwealth and the city of Cambridge for select groups such as those in senior housing and long-term care.
Fully titled the Eli and Edythe L. Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, this is far from the Broad family’s first foray into education. The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation has lobbied for, supported and financed for-profit charter schools to the tune of tens of millions of dollars, and even wrote a guide to closing public schools. The Broad Center for the Management of School Systems, which has recently been moved to the Yale School of Management, is a training program that teaches school administrator careerists how to turn education into a profit machine; its graduates have gone on to devastate education in Detroit, Chicago, Oakland and elsewhere.
In effect, Broad, together with a web a similar big business foundations such as Gates, Carnegie, and Walton, have developed a whole organizational infrastructure in education policy, including charter schools, advocacy organization, education consulting and research organizations and countless nonprofits—all aimed at destroying public schools and fully opening the education “market” to Wall Street.
The Cambridge Innovation Center (CIC) is a real estate service, which typically rents office space to tech startups. With more people working from home, the CIC was almost certainly losing out on rent it could typically rely on, giving it a vested interest in engineering ways to convince companies it is safe enough to reopen their offices.
Notably, the CIC was founded by two MIT alumni, Timothy Rowe and Andrew Olmsted. The connection to MIT between the CIC and the Broad Institute, and who is being offered this service, does not come as a surprise. Competitive private schools in Greater Boston often serve as a funnel to elite universities in the Northeast, including MIT and Harvard. Wealthy parents often consider the tuition for these schools, which can run at least as high as $50,000 a year, an investment that gives their children a greater chance at being admitted to incredibly competitive universities.
The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated all pre-existing inequalities in American life. Whether it be quality of education, access to elite universities, or health and life itself, the ruling class hoards what it can for itself and leaves the working class struggling to survive.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/24/fled-a24.html
By Alex Johnson and Matthew MacEgan
24 August 2020
This week, a Florida court will decide on a lawsuit filed by the Florida Education Association (FEA), which aims to block the state’s order that all public schools must be open five days a week by August 31. Leon County Circuit Judge Charles Dobson will rule on the imposition of in-person instruction across all of the state’s 67 counties.
In early July, the union filed a lawsuit against Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, the Department of Education, and Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran after the state passed a legal mandate requiring all brick-and-mortar schools host in-person instruction by the end of August. This edict, in line with the demands of the Trump administration, deliberately ignored warnings by infectious disease experts and scientists of the dangers posed to a premature reopening with the pandemic raging across the Sunshine State.
The FEA and its umbrella of local unions argue that Corcoran’s edict violates the state constitution’s guarantee of “safe and secure “ public education. The lawsuit also opposes the earlier intimidation tactics used by DeSantis to coerce school districts into reopening, including the risk of losing state funding if they did not comply with Corcoran’s order. The attorneys describe this behavior in the lawsuit as “financial bullying. “
In the face of teacher demonstrations across the state, the union has launched its lawsuit as a fig leaf, which the state and national teacher unions oppose any collective struggle to stop the homicidal return to school. But even in the highly unlikely case that the suit is decided in favor of the FEA, it merely vacates the state edict that schools must open and “allows local districts to make the best and safest decisions on reopening physical campuses, without the threat of funds being withheld by the state. “In other words, it does not mean schools will be compelled to switch to remote-only learning, only that district authorities have the right to close face-to-face learning.
For their part, DeSantis, Corcoran and state education officials hypocritically claim they are upholding Florida’s constitutional requirement to provide “high-quality education” to schoolchildren. Judge Dobson heard closing arguments from both sides on Friday and is moving quickly to issue a ruling before the month ends since some school districts have already opened. Students have already returned to classrooms in Duval County (Jacksonville), the sixth-largest district in the state and 29 additional districts are planning to physically reopen over the next two weeks.
Lawyers for the state argued during the hearings that school districts still have the option to keep students enrolled in virtual learning programs and that health officials can make recommendations for schools to close. The same attorneys also claimed that if conditions within schools become unsafe for the health of educators, they can simply take medical leave under the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA).
A biology teacher testified Friday that the medical leave given under the FMLA is unpaid, forcing him to continue working. David Wells, attorney for the state confirmed with Judge Dobson that such medical leave would be unpaid, which means that Florida educators, some of the lowest paid educators in the nation, could go weeks without receiving income should they take leave to protect their health.
Developments in recent weeks point to a disaster that is already unfolding because of the state’s homicidal back-to-school policy. Since the beginning of August, there have been more than 8,300 COVID-19 cases in children under 18 and 100 of those required hospitalization.
On Friday, when the circuit court was hearing closing arguments from both sides, the Department of Health reported an hour before the proceedings that a 6-year-old girl from Hillsborough County had died from complications resulting from COVID-19. She is the eighth child to die from the virus in the state, and the third to die in less than a month.
The FEA lawsuit, like the mass demonstration called in Tallahassee in January, is aimed at boosting illusions in the courts, which are not neutral arbiters but ultimately serve, like every other institution of the capitalist state, the most powerful corporate and financial interests. The reopening of the schools is of primary concern to both political parties because it is crucial to get children out of the homes so their parents can return to largely unsafe workplaces and resume producing profits.
The unions are opposed to any serious struggle because this would lead to a direct confrontation not only with Trump and his acolytes like DeSantis but the union-aligned Democratic Party. But nothing has ever been achieved without mass struggle. This includes the heroic 1968 strike by 27,000 Florida teachers, which forced the State Board of Education to increase funds for public education.
But the FEA has long repudiated any such struggles. In 2020, the FEA and its two parent organizations—the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT)—have worked diligently to prevent the opposition of Florida teachers from coalescing into a statewide and national strike. In the meantime, they have told teachers to place their faith in Judge Dobson along with Joe Biden and the Democrats, even though the Obama-Biden administration oversaw some of the greatest attacks on teachers and public education.
Two weeks ago, parents and teachers gathered at the Governor’s Mansion to demand that schools stay online during the fall. A little over a week ago, a group of teachers demonstrated in Santa Rosa County against a massive layoff of over 80 teachers. It is clear that educators and parents in Florida want to fight for their safety and in general for high-quality education.
For educators to defend their lives and those of their students, they take matters into their own hands. The Socialist Equality Party calls on educators and parents to build rank-and-file safety committees, independent of the unions, in every school and neighborhood to save lives and fight for what teachers, students, and parents truly need, not what politicians claim is affordable. These committees must appeal to and unite with every section of workers—manufacturing, logistics, food processing, health care, public and private sector—to prepare a general strike.
The Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee will serve as a national coordinating body for this work, and all those seeking to carry out a genuine struggle should contact the committee today.
