Wisconsin Governor deploys National Guard to Kenosha after protests break out in wake of brutal police shooting

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/25/keno-a25.html

By Jacob Crosse
25 August 2020

Protests erupted in Kenosha, Wisconsin Sunday night after a still unidentified Kenosha police officer shot an unarmed African-American father of three, 29-year-old Jacob Blake, in the back seven times at point-blank range as he attempted to enter his vehicle where his children, aged three, five and eight, were seated in the back.

The video, which has been viewed millions of times across multiple social media platforms in less than 24 hours, uncorked a geyser of social anger in Kenosha and across the country as protesters took to the streets in opposition to unending police brutality.

Blake’s father confirmed Monday that his son remains in serious condition at the Froedtert Hospital in Milwaukee.

It has been three months since the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police sparked mass multiracial and multiethnic protests, yet despite declarations of “Black Lives Matter” by capitalist politicians, coupled with promises of reform and performative acts of solidarity between kneeling police and protesters, the police, an instrument of class rule, are well on track to exceed 1,000 killings for the sixth year in a row, with the Washington Post recording 651 fatal shootings so far this year.

The Wisconsin Department of Justice Division of Criminal Investigation released a statement within hours of Blake’s shooting declaring that the agency will be leading the investigation into the shooting with the aim of providing “a report of the incident to the prosecutor within 30 days,” after which the prosecutor will make a determination “about what charges, if any, are appropriate.”

Two unidentified Kenosha police officers have been placed on administrative leave, pending the results of the investigation, which will rely on witness statements and social media video footage.

According to the Kenosha News, the city’s police department is one of 440 law enforcement agencies that do not use body cameras. The department is not slated to get cameras until 2022 at the earliest and there is no guarantee the department will actually use them properly.

On Sunday night, Democratic Governor Tony Evers released a statement, echoed by Lt. Governor Mandela Barnes during a Monday press conference, which sought to obfuscate the class nature of police violence in favor of a racialist interpretation that blamed “racism in our state and our country.”

Democratic presidential candidate and leading architect of modern US criminal justice system Joe Biden, who earlier this year recommended as a solution to unending police murder that cops “shoot them in the leg instead of the heart,” likewise called for a “full and transparent investigation” and for efforts to “dismantle systemic racism.”

On Monday, Evers issued an executive order requesting a special session of the legislature to convene on August 31 to take up a series of bills Evers had proposed earlier in the summer that will do less than nothing to stop the epidemic of police terror. The measures call for a “statewide use-of-force policy,” a ban on chokeholds and for more “de-escalation” training.

At the same time, Evers announced that he had activated 125 soldiers from the Wisconsin National Guard to be deployed to Kenosha for “guarding infrastructure and making sure our firefighters and others involved are protected.” By “others,” he was referring to the police, with whom the military will be working closely to suppress and arrest protesters in violation of tonight’s curfew.

Tensions in the impoverished deindustrialized city in southeastern Wisconsin, with an unemployment rate of 9.9 percent, remained at knife’s edge throughout the day Monday after an afternoon press conference with Mayor John Antaramian at the city’s public safety building devolved into another scene of police brutality. Riot police pepper sprayed the assembled crowd of journalists and community members who were demanding entry to the building before the conference was declared over.

Later Monday evening, police in riot gear fired tear gas, rubber bullets and pepper balls at protestors who had gathered outside the city’s courthouse after an 8 p.m. curfew went into effect. National Guard Humvees were deployed to back up the police.

The events that led up to Sunday’s shooting are still clouded as the authorities seek to dissipate public anger while an official justification is concocted. What is known is that the shooting took place at approximately 5:11 p.m. on the city’s north side at 40th St. and 28th Ave. According to state authorities, police were dispatched in response to a “domestic incident.” However, it is unclear at this time who exactly called police or why they were interacting with Blake at all.

Witnesses and Blake’s attorney, Benjamin Crump, attest that Blake, who works as a security guard, was breaking up a fight between two adult women. Stella London, who lives in the neighborhood with her daughters, thought the incident began over a scratched car and once the police showed up, they just “assumed” Blake was the problem, she recalled to the Washington Post.

La-Ron Franklin, speaking to ABC7, says she witnessed “some girls fighting.” Franklin then saw “a gentleman breaking up the fight. When he was turning to get his kids, the officer shot this man seven times."

Blake’s fiancée, Laquisha Booke, told ABC7 that Blake was unarmed. “That don't make no sense to treat somebody like that, who is not armed, with the kids in the back screaming,” she said.

Following the shooting, a crowd quickly gathered around the officers, who were forced to retreat in the face of hundreds of people as they marched towards the local police station, demanding the shooter be arrested.

Upon arriving at the police station, a multiracial group of protesters, including women and children, were ordered to disperse and then met with a fusillade of rubber bullets and tear gas. Police attempted to use garbage trucks to block protesters’ path. However, as night fell, the trucks were set ablaze as angry demonstrators remained on the streets outside the Kenosha County Public safety building, filling the night with cries of “no justice, no peace.”

Hundreds of protesters continued to remain in the streets, defying the hastily imposed 10:15 p.m. Sunday night curfew. In response, SWAT teams as well as riot police and an urban assault vehicle were deployed in an attempt to enforce the curfew, with police firing tear gas and rubber bullets at marchers well past 1 a.m.

Besides Kenosha, demonstrations against police violence were held in several US cities over the weekend, including Madison, Wisconsin; Louisville, Kentucky; Detroit, Michigan; Portland, Oregon and Lafayette, Louisiana, where 31-year-old Trayford Pellerin was gunned down by Louisiana State police Friday night outside of a Shell gas station. Pellerin, who was black, died after multiple police officers fired 11 rounds at him as he attempted to enter the gas station.

Police were allegedly called to the scene after someone reported a man walking around with a knife in his hands. In the cell phone video, Pellerin can be seen walking towards the gas station as police pursue on foot and in vehicles. As Pellerin reaches for the door, shots were fired from multiple weapons.

Rickasha Montgomery, who filmed the shooting, said she saw police electrocute Pellerin with a taser before shooting him. As with the shooting of Blake, neither man was facing officers, much less attempting to get physical or violent, yet both were met with deadly force.

As news of the shooting spread, protests were held throughout the weekend and into Monday in Louisiana’s fourth largest city. Three protesters were arrested Saturday night after refusing orders to disperse by police who, clad head to toe in riot gear, proceeded to fire tear gas and smoke bombs at marchers. On Sunday, nearly 200 protesters descended on Lafayette City Hall into the evening chanting, “Back turned, don’t shoot!”

The Republican convention: Four nights of fascist filth begin

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/25/pers-a25.html

25 August 2020

The Republican National Convention, which opened last night, must be taken as a serious warning by the working class. This event has an out-and-out fascist character. It is putting on display the most reactionary forces in American life: racists, anti-Semites, rabid anticommunists and militarists.

Such is the rotten character of the official political system that the dregs of humanity are accorded hours of prime time television and treated seriously as a legitimate part of public life. These forces have a very real prospect of consolidating their position at the head of the most powerful imperialist state on the planet.

Diatribes against socialism and open appeals to racism and xenophobia are vomited across the airwaves with little or no opposition from within the media establishment. On the contrary, one television network, Fox, is devoted entirely to the propagation of such views, while the others offer little more than half-hearted corrections, as though a four-day fascist propaganda show requires only a bit of fact-checking.

The opening night of the convention confirms the danger against which the WSWS and the Socialist Equality Party have consistently warned: Donald Trump and the Republican Party are seeking to establish an authoritarian, personalist movement, an American form of fascism, which would smash opponents through the use of brute force.

Trump does not have a purely electoral perspective. His convention is itself a demonstration of this, since it is primarily aimed at whipping up antisocialist hysteria in its right-wing base and justifying preemptive action by the police and military, as well as by ultraright paramilitary forces.

As far as the election campaign goes, Trump does not expect to convince a majority of the American people to support him. He did not win the popular vote in 2016, and he is the first American president to have gone through an entire term in office without ever having the support, in even a single opinion poll, of a majority of the American people.

He aims to create an environment in which there is enough uncertainty about the outcome of the vote—through his claims of massive fraud, outright sabotage of the mail-in vote, and efforts to disrupt in-person voting through the mobilization of police, sheriffs and immigration agents at the polls—that he can make a claim to retaining power.

No Democrat has answered Trump’s declaration, made last week, that the outcome of the election may be unknown for weeks or even months after the polls close on November 3. This only demonstrates the fecklessness and unseriousness of the Democratic Party.

It is not that there is any broad support in the American population for Trump’s fascistic views. Quite the contrary, the trend is to the left, particularly among workers and youth. But there is a widespread and thoroughly justified feeling that the Democratic Party is no alternative and offers nothing to working people.

Millions of working people reject the big lie of the Republican convention--the claim that Trump has mobilized an effective response to the coronavirus pandemic that has infected nearly six million people in the US and killed more than 180,000. The United States has four percent of the world’s population, but 25 percent of the COVID-19 cases and 23 percent of the deaths. In its inept, corrupt and callous response to the pandemic, the Trump administration and the American ruling class have demonstrated the complete failure of American capitalism.

The danger confronting working people does not come from the inherent strength of the Trump camp but from the dead weight of the Democratic Party, which seeks to suppress the real opposition to the would-be Mussolini in the White House, which comes from below—the strikes and walkouts by teachers, autoworkers, warehouse and logistics workers triggered by the pandemic, the massive and unprecedented popular protests against police violence and racism.

Rather than saying what is—that Trump is moving to establish an authoritarian regime—and appealing to the American people against it, the Democrats seek to woo sections of the Republican Party itself: the former governors, senators and military-intelligence operatives who were paraded in front of the convention that nominated Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

At the same time, they seek to split the working class along racial lines, continually counterposing race to class and blaming whites as a whole for the racial discrimination and violence that are the product of capitalism and the capitalist state. This emphasis on racial (and gender) identity actually gives Trump and the ultraright an opening to make an appeal to white workers facing the destruction of their jobs and living standards under the impact of the coronavirus pandemic and the economic collapse it has triggered.

Trump won the presidential election in 2016 because the Democratic Party made a point of demonstrating its hostility to the working class, particularly in the industrial Midwest, the focal point of the destruction of jobs and wages during the eight years of the Obama-Biden administration.

The Democratic vote collapsed, not only in rural and small-town working class areas, but in the inner-city neighborhoods of Milwaukee, Detroit and Philadelphia, tipping the states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania to Trump and, with them, the White House.

With the nomination of the right-wing Biden-Harris ticket, the Democratic Party is running the 2020 election with the same strategy as 2016, making no appeal to the working class and seeking to further consolidate its standing as the favored party of Wall Street and the military-intelligence apparatus.

In their first joint interview since the convention, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris appeared on ABC News Friday night. In the course of nearly one hour, they made no mention of poverty, hunger, homelessness or the cutoff of the $600-a-week supplemental federal unemployment benefit upon which some 28 million workers, laid off because of the coronavirus pandemic, depended for their survival.

Ignoring the economic distress that unites millions of working people of every race and gender, the Democrats act as though there were no serious crisis, in a country where nearly 200,000 have died in the pandemic and 28 million are unemployed. Trump has a program—the forcible suppression of social contradictions using fascist methods. The Democrats have no program, except to claim that the horrors of capitalism would be made more tolerable if they were inflicted by a more “diverse” selection of rulers.

The Socialist Equality Party is serious about the fight against Trump and fascism. For that very reason, we entirely oppose and reject the policy of the Democratic Party and of all its political apologists, from the liberal advocates of identity politics, to the corrupt trade unions, to the ex-radicals of the pseudoleft. Trump cannot be fought without a socialist program that mobilizes the working class, potentially the most powerful force in society, on a class basis.

Trump constantly points to the rising Dow Jones Industrial Average, S&P 500 and NASDAQ. In this sense he is being honest: he has run the country in the interests of Wall Street. The Democrats represent the same constituency, but they seek to hide this fact from the working class, even as cash from the big banks and the stock exchange floods the Biden campaign coffers.

The essential role of the Democratic Party is to strangle social opposition to capitalism. They are all for opposition to Trump as long as it does not impinge upon the social interests of Wall Street. But the growing movement by the working class in opposition to capitalism provides the only possible basis for a real struggle against Trump and the financial oligarchy of which he is the most corrupt and reactionary representative.

Patrick Martin

A new real-world economics text book

August 25, 2020

https://rwer.wordpress.com/2020/08/25/a-new-real-world-economics-text-book/




The 2008 financial crisis, the rise of Trumpism and the other populist movements which have followed in their wake have grown out of the frustrations of those hurt by the economic policies advocated by conventional economists for generations. Despite this, textbooks continue to praise conventional policies such as deregulation and hyperglobalization.

This textbook demonstrates how misleading it can be to apply oversimplified models of perfect competition to the real world. The math works well on college blackboards but not so well on the Main Streets of America. This volume explores the realities of oligopolies, the real impact of the minimum wage, the double-edged sword of free trade, and other ways in which powerful institutions cause distortions in the mainstream models. Bringing together the work of key scholars, such as Kahneman, Minsky, and Schumpeter, this book demonstrates how we should take into account the inefficiencies that arise due to asymmetric information, mental biases, unequal distribution of wealth and power, and the manipulation of demand. This textbook offers students a valuable introductory text with insights into the workings of real markets not just imaginary ones formulated by blackboard economists.

A must-have for students studying the principles of economics as well as micro- and macroeconomics, this textbook redresses the existing imbalance in economic teaching. Instead of clinging to an ideology that only enriched the 1%, Komlos sketches the outline of a capitalism with a human face, an economy in which people live contented lives with dignity instead of focusing on GNP.

Trump’s USPS Chair Grilled After TMI Report

USPS Board of Governors Chair Mike Duncan faces tough questions about his roles simultaneously running the postal service and leading GOP super PACs operating in the 2020 election.


David Sirota
Aug 25




This report was written by David Sirota and Walker Bragman



The Trump-appointed chief of the United States Postal Service was interrogated on Capitol Hill on Monday about his Republican super PAC ties, which were first surfaced by a TMI investigation. At the same time, new documents showed that the GOP takeover of the agency coincided with a significant slow-down in mail delivery just months before the November election.

Under harsh questioning from Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill., USPS Board of Governors Chairman Robert Duncan confirmed that, while leading the postal service, he has also been serving on the board of two Republican super PACs aiming to tilt the 2020 election. One of the super PACs is working to keep the Senate in Republican hands and the other has spent nearly $1.9 million to support President Donald Trump’s reelection. Krishnamoorthi also flagged that Duncan’s postal service bio boasts of his fundraising efforts when he served as chairman of the Republican National Committee.

Last week, the top Republican on the House Oversight and Reform Committee suggested that postal service delays aren’t actually happening and any slowdowns that may occur have nothing to do with the appointment of Trump donor Louis DeJoy as postmaster general.

“Democrats are acting like any mail delays are new and orchestrated by Postmaster General DeJoy,” said Arkansas Rep. James Comer in a speech on the House floor.

In fact, the recent delays are new and do coincide with DeJoy’s appointment, according to internal postal service documents released by congressional lawmakers over the weekend.

Those documents show a clear dropoff in service standards starting in July. DeJoy was appointed to his job only a few months before the sharp decline -- and in a process that critics say did not follow normal hiring procedures.



DeJoy is a Trump ally and prolific GOP fundraiser. He served as a deputy finance chairman of the Republican National Committee in 2017. DeJoy has also held stock in companies like UPS that directly compete with the USPS, and has been accused by Democrats of playing politics with the post in an effort to skew the election.

Trump has suggested he wants to block additional funding for the postal service in order to prevent more Americans from voting by mail in the upcoming election.

“If we don’t make a deal, that means they don’t get the money,” Trump said earlier this month. “That means they can’t have universal mail-in voting.”

DeJoy began making changes that slowed USPS operations upon being installed at the top of the agency.

In June, the Postal Service began removing mail sorting machines. Last week, Motherboard reported that at least 19 machines in five processing facilities nationwide “either have already been removed or are scheduled to be in the near future.” A CNN report found that those removals had been planned for months, but that internal documents referred to them as a “reduction” in equipment.

The USPS also implemented new delivery policies under the guise of cutting costs. The Postal Service banned overtime, heightened scrutiny of deliveries, and imposed a new rule to force mail trucks to depart on time regardless of whether or not they were fully loaded with the day’s mail. The policies were first revealed in leaked internal memos.

The agency at first denied these were official policies, but three days later it launched an Expedited to Street/Afternoon Sortation initiative which imposed the rules -- mail trucks were to leave on time and mail sorting was to stop at the end of the work day regardless of whether or not all of the day’s mail had been sorted or loaded. Earlier this month, CNN reported that USPS had also begun “reducing post office operating hours across several states and removing letter collection boxes.”

As President Trump warned that absentee voting would be unreliable, the Postal Service also sent letters to 46 states and DC warning that “certain deadlines for requesting and casting mail-in ballots may be incongruous with the Postal Service’s delivery standards.” Those letters, which went out at the end of last month, suggested that absentee ballots requested less than 15 days before the election and ballots mailed less than a week beforehand may not be counted.

“The Postal Service cannot adjust its delivery standards to accommodate the requirements of state election law,” they read.

Facing scrutiny and increasing disquiet from Democrats, USPS suspended its removal of collection boxes nationally. On Friday, DeJoy assured lawmakers that "the Postal Service is fully capable of delivering the nation's election mail securely and on time.”

Here's Why You Can't Sit This Election Out

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-DeMAsBsGs

Protestors Condemn Lawmakers at RNC for Abandoning Jobless Workers

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arJ2Qvtc1rw

Will the DNC Get Away with Cozying Up to Big Oil As Even The Military Seeks to Go Green?

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sroF63T-jSM