Democratic Party leads nationwide purge of Green Party candidates from November ballots

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.

Vindictive court rulings prove British state wants Assange dead

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

Postmaster General testifies before a Senate Committee on mail crisis

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.

Private schools in Massachusetts to get rapid COVID-19 testing

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.

Florida court set to rule on lawsuit challenging in-person schooling

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.

“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.