https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvYrJxNwW5I&ab_channel=TheBeths
Saturday, October 17, 2020
Weekly jobless claims increase as 898,000 Americans file for unemployment
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXnTlj4pL3M&ab_channel=WPRI
New York University defies state COVID-19 guidelines and continues in-person classes
John Conrad
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/10/16/nyuc-o16.html?pk_campaign=newsletter&pk_kwd=wsws
On Oct. 9, New York University (NYU) completed its second 14-day period of COVID-19 tracking, reporting 108 new cases of coronavirus at its main campus in lower Manhattan.
In late August, the state of New York established thresholds for temporary suspension of in-person classes at academic institutions. All colleges and universities are required to track COVID-19 cases at each of their campus locations in 14-day periods. Schools that report over 100 cases or the infection of 5 percent of the total on-campus population within the span of two weeks are required to transition to online instruction until the New York State Department of Health determines that it is “safe” to fully reopen.
NYU passed this threshold on Oct. 7, reporting 101 new cases at its main campus. Despite this indication of a steadily growing outbreak of COVID-19 in the university community, NYU is continuing to hold in-person classes.
On Oct. 6, NYU spokesperson John Beckman announced in an email to the NYU community that the state will allow the university to “continue to carry on as we have been.” Beckman cited NYU’s “low positivity rate” and “robust program of testing” as reasons for why the state government is not requiring the university to shut its doors. He stressed, “Schools, units, and individual faculty members should not independently make changes in instruction or other operations.” In other words, all members of the university community are forbidden from canceling classes for their own protection.
Academic institutions across New York that have thus far passed the state threshold have been forced to shut their doors. Over the last month, three State University of New York (SUNY) campuses ended in-person instruction after hundreds of students, faculty and staff tested positive for the virus on each campus in the span of two weeks. On Oct. 5, the SUNY campus at Cortland paused in-person classes after reporting 101 new cases in roughly one week.
The decision to not immediately halt in-person classes and work at NYU in light of this grim milestone underscores the recklessness of the university administration. Nothing must be allowed to interfere with the hundreds of millions of dollars that the university has continued to rake in as a result of holding in-person classes.
Against the advice of medical experts around the world, over 20,000 students, faculty, and staff were forced back into classrooms, offices and other workplaces at NYU on Sept. 2, endangering hundreds of thousands of lives in New York City. As was expected, the university’s “robust program of testing” has proven to be completely inadequate. Over 260 members of the NYU community have already contracted the virus and that number is steadily rising each day.
The driving force behind every decision made by the university has not been the desire to ensure that academic life continues to be as “rich” and “vibrant” as ever before, but to protect the interests of NYU’s millionaire administrators and the collection of multi-millionaires and billionaires that make up its board of trustees.
For decades, NYU has embodied the broader subordination of academia to private profit. The university has cultivated extensive ties with American imperialism, subordinated student hunger and mental health to private profit and repeatedly demonstrated contempt for the most basic democratic rights.
In New York City more broadly, the response of Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo and Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio to the pandemic has likewise been dictated by the interests of Wall Street. Both politicians are responsible for the devastating delay in shutting down schools and businesses in mid-March, the brutal suppression of mass protests against police brutality, and the disastrous reopening of schools and businesses that is causing a second wave of the virus in the city.
As the number of COVID-19 cases in New York City grows, the risk of an explosion of coronavirus cases at NYU is increasing by the day.
This policy of reopening, despite a steady rise in cases in over 30 states, is taking place throughout the country and internationally. Workers are being forced back to work and their children are being herded back into schools to ensure that nothing impedes the production of profits. This policy has resulted in a death toll surpassing 1 million and almost 40 million infections worldwide.
Workers around the world are beginning to fight back, carrying out wildcat strikes and organizing independent rank-and-file safety committees in workplaces and communities.
The International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) at NYU urges undergraduate students, faculty and staff to unite with struggling graduate student workers to form independent rank-and-file committees and develop a broad struggle on the basis of the following demands:
An end to all in-person classes! There can be no “safe reopening” under conditions of a raging pandemic. In a tragic proof of this fact, just a few days ago, Chad Dorrill, a 19-year-old student at Appalachian State University in North Carolina, died from neurological complications resulting from COVID-19, after taking classes under a hybrid model similar to the one being used at NYU.
The university must meet all needs for technology by students and workers alike to enable remote learning. No student or worker can be allowed to suffer in their educational work from lack of technological equipment.
Free tuition for all! Graduate student workers must receive a living wage and stipend. Education is a social right, not a privilege.
Child care and health care for all university students and workers, including graduate workers, must be fully covered by the university. This includes additional needs and expenses from remote teaching and learning and COVID-19 infections.
Protect international students and immigrants! No to deportations and visa cancellations! Every worker and youth has the right to live, study and work wherever they choose, with full rights of citizenship.
Students, faculty and staff at all academic institutions who seek to undertake a serious fight against mass death and suffering must turn to the broader struggle of the working class for its social and democratic rights. This fight cannot be won by appealing to the university administration or the political representatives of the ruling class. Only the independent mobilization of workers and youth behind a clear socialist program and perspective against the entire capitalist system can save the lives of millions of human beings. We urge all those who wish to take up this struggle to join the IYSSE today.
History of Socialism in America
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80mtCNd-JEw&ab_channel=OriginOfEverything
Barrett’s Evasions Show Why Expanding the Court Is Necessary
The Republican deal with the devil to tolerate Trumpian corruption in exchange for a supermajority deserves both scorn and redress.
October 15, 2020 Jeet Heer THE NATION
https://portside.org/2020-10-15/barretts-evasions-show-why-expanding-court-necessary
Donald Trump has been admirably candid about the fact that he’s rushing the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to be a Supreme Court justice because he might need her help to decide the election. “I think this [the election] will end up in the Supreme Court,” Trump told reporters on September 23. “And I think it’s very important that we have nine justices.”
During Tuesday’s Senate hearings, Barrett was asked if she would recuse herself if the scenario Trump outlined came to pass and she had to pass judgment on the election. Barrett refused to commit to recusal, protesting that her personal integrity would guard against any wrongdoing. “I certainly hope that all members of the committee have more confidence in my integrity than to think I would allow myself to be used as a pawn to decide this election for the American people,” she said. Alarmingly, Barrett refused to answer questions about whether Trump has the unilateral right to postpone the election and whether he should commit to a peaceful transfer of power.
Barrett is framing the issue of integrity in narrowly personal terms, as if her own honesty were all that counted. But integrity is a matter of legitimate systems as well as honorable people. It doesn’t matter how much personal decency Barrett has. Her pending elevation to the Supreme Court is the culmination of a corrupt process, one that calls into question the legitimacy of the institution itself.
As Tufts University political scientist Daniel Drezner notes, “So on the one hand everything I’ve read about Barrett suggests she is a person of integrity but on the other hand she willingly accepted the nomination of an impeached president in a rush job of a confirmation process weeks before Election Day.”
By affirming her own personal integrity, Barrett is asserting that she should be evaluated as an individual jurist. But in her public capacity as a judge, she’s not an individual but a soldier in a political army, one that has violated many democratic norms in order to secure a 6-3 supermajority for the Republican nominees on the Supreme Court. It’s the operation of that machine that makes her nomination disquieting.
The path that created that 6-3 majority is well-known: the death of Antonin Scalia, followed by the Republicans under Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell blocking Barack Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland from even receiving hearings, Donald Trump winning the White House with the promise to nominate conservative judges, assurances by Republicans that under the same circumstances as Scalia’s death they wouldn’t nominate a Republican judge, the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and the Republican violation of their own stated standards.
But the corruption goes deeper. McConnell has two great and odious achievements: He has protected Donald Trump from investigation for corruption, and he’s packed the federal judiciary with Republican nominees. McConnell’s two legacies are intertwined. In the Trump era, the institutional GOP has made a deal with the devil: Trump is shielded from the consequences of his crimes, in exchange for which he’s outsourced the selection of judges to the reliably right-wing Federalist Society, with McConnell’s mastery of Senate rules ensuring almost all those nominees will be seated.
McConnell’s work as Trump’s enabler has been constant—and was most visible during the impeachment trial, when the majority leader ran roughshod over rules to ensure there would be no subpoena of witnesses and documents. As Senator Jeanne Shaheen noted in January, “This is not a fair trial … this is a cover-up, pure and simple.”
McConnell has paid a high price in reputation for covering up crimes. It will taint his legacy. But the real-world payoff for the cover-up has also been immense. Since McConnell had already diligently worked to block Obama nominees, this meant that under Trump the Republicans could stack the courts with hundreds of Republicans.
As Jonathan Capehart noted in The Washington Post, “it should be clear that the real ‘court-packing’ has been happening under Trump. Because Republicans choked off confirmations under Obama, Trump ‘inherited’ 103 vacancies, notes a 2020 Brookings study. As of Oct. 6, according to the American Constitution Society, 218 judges have been confirmed, more than Trump’s Republican predecessors and second to Democratic President Jimmy Carter. The average age of Trump’s appointees to courts of appeals, considered the farm team for the Supreme Court, is 48.2 years.”
The Supreme Court supermajority is the top of this pyramid of court packing. To use a famous phrase of Justice Felix Frankfurter, Republican court packing is the fruit of the poison tree. It’s a direct result of McConnell’s norm-breaking, including his tolerance for Trump’s corruption.
If Trump is defeated in November, there has to be a push for legal redress of his corruption. But this legal redress is only part of the solution. To let the packed judiciary stand as it is would be to reward the political corruption that was the heart of the Trump presidency. It would set a precedent that tolerance of corruption is worthwhile because you can extract a huge benefit from it.
Court expansion is necessary not just to rebalance the court, but also to offer a remedy for the corruption that created the problem in the first place.
As McGill University political scientist Jacob T. Levy shrewdly noted, court expansion offends the Republican legal establishment precisely because it would mean that their deal with the devil didn’t work. As Levy observes:
I can psychologically understand the furious reaction “we sold our souls for this 6-3 Supreme Court majority and that means we have a right to have it securely delivered” but it doesn’t inspire much sympathy. Those who cheerfully endorsed or cynically tolerated the last 4 years of assault on the rule of law, the separation of powers, due process, and procedural norms all for the sake of judicial appointments might feel that the price they paid increases their claim on that 6th seat but it makes them singularly unpersuasive defenders of the norm against court expansion and its associated protection of judicial independence. This is the accused murderer of his parents throwing himself on the mercy of the court (so to speak) because he’s an orphan.
Expanding the Supreme Court would have many benefits, not least that it would affirm the principle that a deal with the devil always ends badly.
Assange: The press followed the narrative of the US intelligence agencies
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWbp7ZRRWnE&ab_channel=ProgressiveInternational
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