Trump the phony

The "billionaire" who hides his taxes. 

The "genius" who hides his college grades. 

The "business man" who bankrupted a casino. 

The "playboy" who pays for sex. 

The "Christian" who doesn't go to church. 

The "philanthropist" who defrauds charity. 

The "patriot" who dodged the draft. 

The "innocent man" who refuses to testify and fires people who are investigating him.

NYT's Bombshell: Trump's $0 Tax Returns

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxzzcxC-yL8&ab_channel=FaultLinesRadio

Why We Fight, complete documentary film (2005) in English with Spanish subtitles

 

https://vimeo.com/320268608

Drugged by the police: the rise of ketamine in the law enforcement arsenal

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naRc7SF0K6w&ab_channel=TheRealNewsNetwork

Michigan State University pushes forward with football amid a mass spike in COVID-19 cases

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/09/28/mich-s28.html?pk_campaign=newsletter&pk_kwd=wsws

By Luke Galvin
28 September 2020

Since August 24, there have been 1,250 cases of COVID-19 linked to the reopening of Michigan State University (MSU). The university has officially recorded 499 positive cases, which both the university and the Ingham County Health Department have acknowledged is an underestimation of the true number of cases.

The sheer speed at which the virus is spreading is expressed by the fact that only 41 cases were known before the first of September.

Just over a week ago, the Ingham County Health Department recommended the entire MSU campus self-quarantine after nearly 350 new cases emerged on campus. The health department followed this suggestion by instating a mandatory quarantine for 23 fraternity and sorority houses, and seven rental houses. Even with these measures, cases have exploded, reinforcing the basic fact that college and university campuses, where thousands of students live in dorms and other forms of student housing, cannot reopen safely.

Michigan State University - Spartan Stadium (Flickr: Tony Faiola)



The outbreak at MSU is only the latest indictment of the ruling class’s homicidal back-to-work and back-to-school campaigns, spearheaded by the Trump administration and supported by the Democrats.

Despite this massive outbreak, testing numbers are declining on the campus. In a statement given to the press last Tuesday, Linda Vail, a health officer of Ingham County, noted that MSU’s case count only includes self-reported positive cases.

Vail also acknowledged the university’s refusal to use the official health department case data even though MSU relies on the county health department to carry out part of its contact tracing. In spite of this, Vail has called MSU “amazing partners” in fighting COVID-19. In the latest demonstration of her kowtowing to the MSU administration, Vail made clear she would not directly order MSU to cancel its first football game and would only “advise” them to do so.

This dangerous complicity from local health officials is being promoted at the highest levels. Just in the past few weeks alone, the CDC modified its health guidelines to facilitate the reopening workplaces, schools, and college university campuses, under immense pressure from Washington.



MSU has decided to push ahead with its scheduled October 24 football game. MSU spokesperson Emily Guerrant defended this position by stating that Vail doesn’t have the authority to order MSU to cancel its game: “In a pandemic, a local health official has a lot of power, but I honestly don’t know when it comes to a football gathering.” This statement is in direct contradiction with the Michigan health code which gives authority to health officers to make such decisions during epidemics or pandemics.

The drive to continue college sports is no doubt motivated primarily by the fact that they are a primary source of revenue for universities. According to Forbes, MSU made an average of $44 million in profit from its football program each year between 2015-17, making it the 22nd most profitable program in the state. MSU’s team also happens to be the sixth most valued team in the Big Ten.

The university also announced last week that they would be furloughing the entirety of its student Residential and Hospitality Services (RHS) staff with a less than two-week notice. These 700+ student employees worked overtime to set up the campus and assisted with student move-ins in the early weeks of the semester.

This cutthroat decision also places the student workers in a particularly precarious situation. These students have no way to pull out of their housing contracts. With many now losing their income they will have to decide within one week whether or not to drop their classes in order to meet the deadline to get a full tuition refund. This means MSU has left many international students and students reliant on their wages and work-study compensations to attend school in limbo with no date as to when they can expect to return to work.

Despite overwhelming scientific evidence that indicated that the reopening of schools would lead to hotspots for the virus, hundreds of universities still pushed forward with reopening plans. The cost of these decisions is now playing out in real-time. Not only has it led to more cases, more hospitalizations, and more death, but also the destabilization of the lives and livelihoods of students and workers.

However, students, teachers, and workers have not taken these decisions laying down. Opposition continues to build at universities and K-12 schools throughout the country.

At the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC), thousands of UIC workers, along with 800 nurses from the University of Illinois Hospital, have been on strike for higher wages, better staffing, improvements on workload and time off, and personal protective equipment (PPE) like N95 masks for all health care workers and hospital staff.

At the same time, pressure continues to mount at the University of Iowa and the Iowa State University, where students and faculty are protesting the dangerous reopening policies of both schools.

The recent strike by graduate students at the University of Michigan against the university’s dangerous reopening policies continued for over a week before being smothered by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), which isolated the strike and worked hand-in-hand with the university administration to end it.

This development, in particular, demonstrates the necessity of turning to the only social force capable of fighting for the health, safety, and right to life of students and workers. That social force is the working class.

The Socialist Equality Party and its youth and student wing, the International Youth and Students for Social Equality, urge students, teachers, and staff to link up their struggles to put an end to the sacrifice of human life for corporate profit. All those who support this initiative should join our Facebook page and contact us today to find out how to get involved.



The author also recommends:

The global campaign to reopen schools drives COVID-19 deaths past one million
[22 September 2020]

US college football season set to begin early November
[26 September 2020]

Using human rights to promote war: debunking UN's new Venezuela report

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEI5udZWJdI&ab_channel=TheGrayzone

Trump’s Operation Legend prepares local police forces to suppress opposition

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/09/28/oplg-s28.html?pk_campaign=newsletter&pk_kwd=wsws



By Alex Findijs
28 September 2020

As Trump lays the grounds for a coup d’état in the event he loses the November 3 presidential election, the United States Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Operation Legend approaches its third month of activity in cities across the country. The operation—named after LeGend Taliferro, a four-year-old boy killed in June by a stray bullet in Kansas City, Missouri—has seen the deployment of hundreds of federal agents and millions of dollars in funding to local police departments to aid in the suppression of protests against police violence.

The operation has been presented by the Trump administration as a means of helping beleaguered police departments crack down on a rise in violent crime. However, this is only a cover for the funneling of more federal money and personnel primarily into the local police departments of nine major cities across the country: Detroit, Michigan; Chicago, Illinois; Baltimore, Maryland; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Cleveland, Ohio; Indianapolis, Indiana; Albuquerque, New Mexico; Memphis, Tennessee; and Kansas City, Missouri.
The influx of funds for expanding police departments and their equipment has been considerable:
In Cleveland, the DOJ’s Bureau of Justice Assistance provided $1 million to Operation Legend activities and the Community Oriented Policing Service Office made $10 million available to the Cleveland Police Department to fund the hiring of 30 officers, five Ohio State Highway Patrol troopers, and four Adult Parole Authority officers.
The Detroit Police Department was provided $2.4 million for the hiring of 15 officers and issued $1.4 million for the operation.
The police departments of Milwaukee, Wauwatosa and Cudahy, Wisconsin, were provided $10.2 million to hire 29 new officers and $1.9 million to support Operation Legend.

The money that is being provided far outstrips the expected costs of these hirings alone. The rest of the money that is being provided to cities is intended for a vast expansion of the repressive tools of the state, including upgrading crowd control equipment and the development of surveillance operations.

In Memphis, Tennessee a video has surfaced this week of sheriff’s deputies wielding taser riot shields, reportedly purchased through funding from Operation Legend.

The cities of Memphis and Detroit have also expanded their surveillance capabilities since the launch of Operation Legend. According to a report from the Intercept, Memphis signed a contract with the Israeli company Cellebrite, which is famous for its technology that can hack and extract data from smart phones. This purchase was made on August 2, just two days before federal agents arrived in the city. Two weeks later, Detroit also purchased a plan from Cellebrite for its “premium” software package at a cost of $100,000.

In Chicago, where over 100 federal agents have been deployed through the operation, it was announced on August 14 that the city was implementing a new “around the clock” monitoring program using social media to identify looters.

Additionally, five cities—Memphis, Cleveland, Albuquerque, Milwaukee and Detroit—will receive money from Operation Legend to implement gunshot detection technology. The surveillance system, pioneered by company ShotSpotter, uses microphones placed in neighborhoods to detect the sound and location of gun shots. The possibility that this technology could be expanded to track protesters and monitor workers is not out of the question.

Operation Legend is a significant component of Trump’s scheming, but it is only part of a broader move to militarize and federalize the police launched in December of 2019 under Operation Relentless Pursuit (ORP).

ORP was announced by Attorney General William Barr with the stated goal of combating crime in America’s most violent cities. More accurately, it was intended to lay the groundwork for advanced police repression and greater federal police presence on the ground.

Many of the same cities that have been targeted under Operation Legend were also the focus of ORP. A considerable $71 million was allocated to be distributed in grants to cities for the purpose of purchasing new equipment and technology as well as increasing the size of local police forces and financing “federally deputized task force officers.” In addition to these grants, Trump stated during a meeting with International Association of Chiefs of Police in 2019 that he had made $600 million worth of surplus military equipment available for local law enforcement agencies.

A critical aspect of both of these operations has been their deployment to Democratic-led cities that approved the allocation of federal agents and funds under Trump’s plan. This is a significant exposure of the Democratic Party and its false claims of opposition to Trump.

In fact, the Democrats have welcomed the deployment of federal police agents with open arms. Many of these programs, particularly the distribution of military equipment to local law enforcement, were enabled by the Obama administration which also provided military-style equipment to local police forces and aided local police departments in suppressing protests against police violence.

All opposition to Trump and his authoritarian maneuvers is being channeled behind the presidential campaign of former Vice President Joe Biden, a similarly reactionary character who splits from Trump on tactics alone, particularly when it comes to foreign policy regarding Russia and China. Towards this end the Democrats are working to prevent the mass mobilization of the working class against Trump out of fear that it will challenge the interests of the financial oligarchy.

Operation Legend, and the complicity of the Democrats in enabling it, is a dire warning of the political repression that is being prepared by both parties in the lead up to and aftermath of the election. Only the political mobilization of the working class in the fight for socialism can defeat Trump’s plotting and the descent of the United States in the direction of fascism.