Thursday, December 3, 2020
Bipartisan $908 billion “emergency relief framework” receives support from Democratic congressional leadership
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/12/03/stim-d03.html?pk_campaign=newsletter&pk_kwd=wsws
Jacob Crosse
9 hours ago
Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer in a joint press conference on Wednesday released a statement signaling their support for a bipartisan $908 billion “emergency relief framework” proposal that was first revealed by Republican and Democratic members of the Problem Solvers Caucus on Monday. The caucus includes Democratic senators Joe Manchin (West Virginia), Mark Warner (Virginia), and Jeanne Shaheen (New Hampshire), and Republican senators Susan Collins (Maine), Bill Cassidy (Louisiana), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Angus King (Maine), and Mitt Romney (Utah).
The proposed four-month “emergency relief package” is another gift to big business and Wall Street and is less than half of the $2.2 trillion package the Democrats had passed before the November election and roughly $800 million less than the $1.7 trillion deal previously offered by the White House. Most important for the ruling class is the bill’s “temporary” liability shield for businesses and other organizations against COVID-19–related lawsuits brought against them by workers or customers who fell ill due to inadequate safety measures.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell however has already poured cold water on the proposal, instead sticking to the $550 billion package he has been pushing for and that has already been agreed upon by President Donald Trump.
“In the spirit of compromise we believe the bipartisan framework introduced by Senators yesterday should be used as the basis for immediate bipartisan, bicameral negotiations,” Schumer and Pelosi said in their joint statement Wednesday, signaling their support for the bill.
The announcement of the proposal came Tuesday during testimony by Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin before the Senate Banking Committee. Both Powell and Mnuchin expressed support for the proposal, with Powell stating that it “sounds like you’re hitting a lot of the areas that could definitely benefit from the help.” Mnuchin stated he looked “...forward to reviewing with you the overall package. I do think that more fiscal response is needed.”
Five months after both political parties allowed enhanced unemployment benefits and housing protections within the misnamed $2.2 trillion CARES Act to expire, leading to food lines, evictions, and death, and less than four weeks until some 12 million lose federal pandemic benefits, the latest murmurs of a possible agreement that leaves out much-needed aid for millions of workers, while protecting businesses from COVID-19–related lawsuits, epitomizes the bipartisan disdain the ruling class has for the lives and safety of workers and their families.
As with the CARES Act in March, the preliminary details reveal a windfall for the financial oligarchy while a pittance is made available for the majority of the population. The framework does not include another round of $1,200 stimulus checks and reduces the enhanced $600 unemployment benefit, which expired at the end of July, to a miserly $300 week.
Left unmentioned in the proposal is the fate of two key emergency economic relief programs—the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program, which provides benefits to so-called “gig” workers and the self-employed, and the Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC) program, which provides benefits to those who have already exhausted their state benefits. Combined, the two programs account for nearly 13 million of the over 20 million people currently receiving some unemployment compensation, and both expire on December 26, the day after Christmas.
The legislation also does not include any renter or mortgage protections, leaving some 30 million people in the US facing eviction in the next two months. The eviction of millions of people and their families with the virus spreading out of control will lead to hundreds of thousands of infections and tens of thousands of additional deaths, with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Robert Redfield already predicting that the US COVID-19 death toll could reach 450,000 by February. Redfield warned that this winter could be “the most difficult time in the public health history of this nation”
Hailing the $908 billion figure as a “good middle ground” that “hits the major elements,” Democratic Illinois Senator Dick Durbin lent his support to the bill while offering mild criticism of the immunity from liability protections included in the bill, before adding that he didn’t want the liability issue to hold up the bill: “I want to make sure that we pass this COVID-19 bill, as the group has brought together, or something like it, for $908 billion, we shouldn’t be delayed or diverted from this effort over a debate for immunity for liability. It’s an important issue but 38 states have already enacted laws related to COVID-19 liability, the others can certainly do it if they wish.”
Of the proposed $908 billion, the bulk of the money in the proposal, $288 billion, is earmarked to the Small Business Administration, primarily to refill the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP).
The PPP was created as part of the CARES Act and was sold as a method for paying businesses through forgivable loans in order to keep workers employed through the pandemic. Instead, it has served primarily as a slush fund for big business and a money-printing service for the large banks that service the loans, with previous disclosures revealing millions handed out to major sports teams, multimillionaires and religious institutions, while millions of workers were still laid off. For small businesses that attempted to obtain a loan, the shifting guidelines and paperwork proved a hurdle too high for many, unlike major corporations with dedicated teams of lawyers and accountants who were able to navigate the government bureaucracy.
On Tuesday, the Washington Post revealed through a Freedom of Information Act request and lawsuit against the Treasury Department, that of the more than 5 million loans that have been processed so far under the PPP, more than half of the $522 billion allocated went to just 5 percent of the recipients. The top 1 percent of loans accounted for more than a quarter of all the loan value, approximately 28 percent.
The data showed that roughly 600 large companies received the maximum loan amount allowed under the program, $10 million. Some of the companies that received $10 million loans were the parent companies of major restaurant chains such as Uno Pizzeria & Grill, Boston Market and Legal Sea Foods.
Following the nearly $300 billion earmarked for the PPP, the next largest item in the framework is the estimated $180 billion for additional unemployment insurance. Under the current proposal, which is unsettled, the unemployment eligibility window would be increased by 13 weeks, allowing workers to claim through March 31, although it is unclear if they would be able to backdate claims.
The third highest figure—an estimated $160 billion—is reserved for state, local and tribal governments, which have seen their tax revenues evaporate due to pandemic-induced lockdowns and restrictions. The funding is more than $270 billion less than the $436 billion Pelosi had previously demanded in the $2.2 trillion package.
Another notable figure in the bill is the $45 billion set aside for transportation. The pandemic has decimated public transit, leaving several major cities to consider, or already implement, drastic cuts, including the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which is threatening to lay off 9,300 workers.
The Chicago Transit Authority is also facing a $375 million budget shortfall in 2021, while Denver’s Regional Transportation District passed a budget in mid-November that included $140 million in spending cuts and the elimination of 400 jobs through layoffs and attrition, along with wage reductions and furloughs.
However, according to Senator Warner’s office, of the $45 billion earmarked for transportation, only $15 billion is for mass transit, with $1 billion for Amtrak and $8 billion for the bus industry, leaving $21 billion for the airlines, which already received $25 billion through the CARES Act and still went ahead with furloughing more than 40,000 aviation industry workers.
100 years since US socialist journalist John Reed’s death
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/12/03/reed-d03.html?pk_campaign=newsletter&pk_kwd=wsws
Author of Ten Days That Shook the World
Sandy English, James Macdonald
10 hours ago
Mid-October marked the 100th anniversary of the untimely death of American revolutionary socialist journalist John Reed. The author of Ten Days That Shook the World, a magnificent firsthand account of the Russian Revolution, Reed died in Moscow of typhus on October 17, 1920, five days shy of his 33rd birthday.
About Ten Days That Shook the World, V.I. Lenin, the co-leader of the 1917 October Revolution, commented in an introduction written in 1919, “Unreservedly do I recommend it [Reed’s book] to the workers of the world. Here is a book which I should like to see published in millions of copies and translated into all languages.” The book has had a special place in the hearts and minds of class-conscious workers ever since its appearance. It can still be recommended “unreservedly.”
Many people may be familiar with the name of John “Jack” Reed from the 1981 movie Reds, in which Warren Beatty portrayed the intrepid and principled journalist and for which Beatty won the Academy Award for best director.
What the film cannot convey, among other things, however, is the vital, muscular and poetic quality that made Reed’s writing so influential in his time and to later generations. Reds only hints at the full complexity of the man who, more than any American writer of his generation, followed the demands of his political conscience to their revolutionary conclusions.
John Reed was born in Portland, Oregon on October 22, 1887 into an upper-middle-class family. His mother’s father, Henry Dodge Green, was a wealthy Portland industrialist and his house a center of Portland’s genteel social gatherings.
Reed came of age during the era of the full-blown development of American capitalism. In the 30 years following the Civil War, the US emerged as a modern industrial power. The decades saw the enrichment of the infamous Robber Barons, and the US launched its first imperialist war in 1898, seizing the Philippines and Cuba from Spain.
The urban population swelled in this period, also a time of large-scale immigration, and the working class emerged as a powerful force, expressing—in a series of bitter strike struggles—its determination to fight the omnivorous ruling class.
Reed’s father, C.J. Reed, was a crusader against political corruption in Oregon, helping to take on the logging interests in his capacity as a U.S. Marshal. Not having gone to college himself, C.J. was determined that Jack should attend Harvard, interceding for his son when he failed his entrance exam. Jack passed the second time. Working on and contributing to several Harvard publications, Reed honed his journalistic and editing skills. He also wrote and published a good deal of poetry and became a member of the newly formed Harvard Socialist Club.
Establishing himself in Greenwich Village in 1911, Reed was at the center of the neighborhood’s bohemian culture. The Village was home to such figures as poet Hart Crane, “scandalous” novelist Henry Miller (who, not long before his death, describes Reed’s milieu in Reds) and dramatist Eugene O’Neill.
It was here, as a working writer and an editor at The American Magazine (founded in 1906), that Reed grappled with the challenge of earning a living under conditions where serious art does not pay the rent. For Reed, “serious art” still meant his poetry, which does not make much of an impression after more than a century, and also supplementing his income from The American by selling short stories, which, in some cases genially give a flavor of life at that time.
As Reed came to know Manhattan, however, its palaces and its squalor, he came to realize that something was fundamentally wrong with American society. In a later essay written in the months before his journey to Russia that would result in his witnessing the October Revolution, titled “Almost Thirty,” he would recall the political awakening of his early twenties:
On the whole, ideas alone didn’t mean much to me. I had to see. In my rambles about the city I couldn’t help but observe the ugliness of poverty and all its train of evil, the cruel inequality between rich people who had too many motor cars and poor people who didn’t have enough to eat. It didn’t come to me from books that the workers produced all the wealth of the world, which went to those who did not earn it.
Hearing of a new arts and features magazine with a decidedly socialist orientation, called The Masses (founded in 1911), Reed quickly introduced himself to its editor Max Eastman, who would later translate many of Leon Trotsky’s works into English, and climbed on board as both an editor and contributor.
Though the new magazine could not pay him, Reed would find his work for this important publication his most fulfilling. The Masses was to publish the first stories of Sherwood Anderson in 1916, later to be collected in the groundbreaking Winesburg, Ohio. It published works by figures such as Jack London, the novelist Floyd Dell, and the poets Carl Sandburg and Amy Lowell. Painters John Sloan, George Bellows and Pablo Picasso contributed illustrations.
By 1913, Reed would prove a more than receptive audience member when—in a Greenwich Village apartment—he met William “Big Bill” Haywood, leader of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the left-wing syndicalist movement. Reed listened as Haywood described the developing situation in nearby Paterson, New Jersey, where silk workers were on strike and being beaten and jailed by police. Reed, perhaps for the first time, reacted to a major story not only as a journalist but as a partisan, determined to publicize the strike and help the workers.
Soon after arriving in Paterson, a naturally defiant Reed goaded a belligerent police officer into arresting him. In the county jail, overcrowded with immigrant strikers, he befriended the workers—“gentle, alert, brave men, ennobled by something greater than themselves”—and drew out their stories. That “something greater,” the class struggle, can be seen at work in the article Reed wrote for The Masses (“War in Paterson”), which opens:
There’s war in Paterson, New Jersey. But it’s a curious kind of war. All the violence is the work of one side—the mill owners. Their servants, the police, club unresisting men and women and ride down law-abiding crowds on horseback. Their paid mercenaries, armed detectives shoot and kill innocent people. Their newspapers ... publish incendiary and crime-inciting appeals to mob violence against the strike leaders ... They control absolutely the police, the press, the courts.
So moved was Reed by the condition of the silk workers that he organized a dramatic pageant, held at Madison Square Garden, in which the actual workers demonstrated their onerous work and their treatment as strikers at the hands of the police.
Reed’s best known work is Ten Days That Shook the World (1919), but he did produce other outstanding works of reportage, one of which is his account of his experiences riding with Pancho Villa’s army in the Mexican Revolution, titled Insurgent Mexico (1914). The compelling work immerses the reader in the harsh, violent life of La Tropa, Villa’s army, and its camp followers.
As was the case in Paterson, Reed not only sympathized politically with the peasant revolutionaries but came quickly to admire them and want their respect, which he was proud to earn. At one point in Insurgent Mexico, he writes of an initiation into La Tropa over a bottle of sotol:
“Drink it,” yelled the chorus as the Tropa crowded up to see. I drank it. A howl of laughter and applause went up. Fernando leaned over and gripped my hand. “Good for you, companero!” he bellowed, rolling with mirth ... Captain Fernando leaned over and patted my arm. “Now you are with the men (los hombres.) When we win the Revolucion it will be a government by the men,—not by the rich. We are riding over the lands of the men. They used to belong to the rich, but now they belong to me and to the compaƱeros.”
The material Reed sent back to the US, published in The Metropolitan magazine, established him as America’s foremost war correspondent. The writing was at once impressionistic and clear-eyed, imagistic and frank.
Certainly, no more stark instance of brutal oppression could have presented itself to Reed or the world than the Ludlow Massacre of April, 1914, the culminating atrocity of the protracted southern Colorado coal miners’ strike of the winter of 1913-14. Reading of the massacre, Reed immediately left for Las Animas County.
There he made a detailed search of the scene of the massacre, in which National Guard militiamen rented by John D. Rockefeller’s Colorado Fuel and Iron Company killed an estimated 26 miners, their wives and children, some shot with machine guns and some deliberately burned to death in tents the miners had been living in during the strike.
Reed wrote a lengthy, scathing article for The Metropolitan, “The Colorado War,” in July 1914, which detailed the murderous violence of the Rockefeller interests. “I got into Trinidad [Colorado, 15 miles from Ludlow] about ten days after the massacre at Ludlow,” Reed wrote. Later in the article, he explained:
I went to Ludlow next day to see the Federal troops come in and the militia leave. The tent colony, or where the tent colony had been, was a great square of ghastly ruins. Stoves, pots and pans still half full of food that had been cooking that terrible morning, baby-carriages, piles of half-burned clothes, children’s toys all riddled with bullets, the scorched mouths of the tent cellars, and the children’s toys that we found at the bottom of the “death hole”—this was all that remained of the entire worldly possessions of 1,200 poor people. At the railroad station about fifty militiamen waited for the train—boys with the stupid, vicious faces of saloon-corner loafers. Only a few were in uniform, for many of them were mine-guards hastily mustered in. As the regulars left their train one militiaman said loudly, in the hearing of the militia officers: “I hope these red-necks kill a regular so they will go in and wipe out the whole bunch. We certainly done a good job on that tent colony.”
In August of that year, the world was struck by the greatest upheaval to that point in modern times. The First World War broke out in Europe. Reed sailed to Italy as a correspondent for The Metropolitan. He went to France, where he attempted twice to reach the front but was arrested and turned back both times. He then went to London, where he wrote a long article on England in wartime, showing that patriotism was limited to the upper classes. The Metropolitan rejected the article.
In “The Traders War,” written from London and published in The Masses in September, Reed outlined the history of the imperialist commercial rivalries between Britain, France and Germany and stated that the war was nothing more than a continuation of these conflicts. (In a noteworthy scene in Reds, Reed [Beatty], asked at a meeting of the Liberal Club in Portland, Oregon what he thinks “this war is about,” gets to his feet and replies with one word, “Profits.”)
Reed returned to France and in December made his way to Germany via Switzerland. In Berlin, he was able to conduct an interview with the revolutionary socialist Karl Liebknecht, who alone in the German Reichstag had refused to vote to fund the war. When Reed asked him about “the chances of World Revolution,” “‘To my mind’ [Liebknecht] responded serenely, ‘nothing else can come out of this war.’”
Reed and other American correspondents were able, after long delays, to secure permission to visit the German front in Northern France. Along the way they were feted by German officers and saw the horrors of trench warfare. He wrote articles on these experiences for The Metropolitan and returned to the US in January 1915.
Reed only stayed home a few months. By March, since he was unable to get permission to visit France again, The Metropolitan asked him to report on the war in Eastern Europe. With the artist Boardman Robinson, he visited Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria and Russia.
Almost half the articles he wrote, although Reed could not know this at the time, were about the final days of the tsarist empire with its drunkenness, abuse, and corruption organized into armies. In one article, “An Optimistic Pilgrimage” that still moves the reader 105 years later, Reed passes through a Jewish village near Rovno in what is now Ukraine, and observes the filth and poverty of the Jews and their oppression by the Russians. One of his guides, a Russian army officer, complains that all Jews are traitors to Russia.
The scenes from Serbia are shocking. The first country to be invaded by the Austro-Hungarian Empire in response to the assassination of its Archduke Ferdinand in 1914, Serbia was in the middle of a typhus epidemic. Reed visited one hospital for those stricken with disease:
We entered a barrack, along whose walls cots lay touching each other, and with the feeble light of two lanterns we could see the patients writhing in their dirty blankets, five and six crowded into two beds. Some sat up, apathetically eating; others lay like the dead; still others gave short, grunting moans, or shouted suddenly in the grip of delirium.
When Reed returned from Europe in late 1915, the official political atmosphere in the US had shifted to the right: a pro-war “preparedness” campaign was underway and middle-class public opinion had become anti-German. He moved back to Greenwich Village with the woman he would marry, also from Oregon, journalist Louise Bryant. It was at this time he befriended Eugene O’Neill. Reed, O’Neill, Bryant and some of their circle wrote and performed plays in Provincetown, Massachusetts in the summer of 1916.
The Metropolitan refused to return him to Europe because of his antiwar views. But in the spring of 1917, two more world-shaking events occurred. In March, the Russian tsar, Nicholas II, was overthrown, and in April the United States entered the world war.
Throughout the spring and summer of 1917, Reed wrote antiwar articles for The Masses. By August, he had decided he had to see the revolution in Russia for himself. Reed arrived in Petrograd on September 13, just after the attempted coup against the bourgeois Provisional Government by tsarist General Lavr Kornilov. The coup melted away largely because of the Bolsheviks’ mobilization of workers and soldiers.
Through connections in New York, including Bolsheviks such as V. Volodarsky, Reed became acquainted with that party’s leaders, who were now preparing the overthrow of the Provisional Government and its replacement by a government of Soviets.
He hastened from place to place in Petrograd, saving leaflets and proclamations and documenting the positions of each party. He interviewed leaders of the frightened capitalist parties, and he saw Lenin and Trotsky give speeches to thousands of workers. Reed himself spoke to countless other Bolshevik leaders, workers, soldiers and sailors, as they applied themselves to the historical task of establishing a government of the working class. He was a witness to the Bolshevik seizure of power and was present at the famous storming of the Winter Palace, as well as the struggle afterwards by the new Soviet government against counterrevolution.
For the remainder of the year Reed remained in the new Soviet Russia. He worked for the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs and was briefly appointed consul to the US. In early 1918, he had his first long discussions with Lenin and Trotsky. He left for home soon after, but was detained in Finland until April by the nationalist government.
On his return to New York, he was met on the dock by government agents who seized his papers and summoned him to court the next day. Reed was indicted under the Espionage Act for a 1917 article, published in The Masses, “Knit a strait-jacket for your soldier boy,” which describes what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder.
Reed took up the task of defending the revolution to an American audience in such articles as “Soviets in Action” and “The Structure of the Soviet State” published in T he Liberator (the successor to The Masses ), in the autumn of 1918.
It was at this time that be took up a fight for the ideas of Bolshevism in the left wing of the American Socialist Party, along with Louis Fraina and other supporters of the Russian Revolution in the journal The Revolutionary Age. His papers from Russia were returned to him, and he worked feverishly on his description of the events he had lived through in October-November 1917. Eastman later reported that Reed wrote the book in a remarkably short period of time, sequestered in a room in Greenwich Village, seeing no one and coming out only for meals.
In March 1919, the product of this effort, Ten Days That Shook the World, was published. It was the peak of Reed’s development as a journalist. He combined his own observations and conversations with the scrupulous publication of the documents of the revolution itself he had collected.
Here is how Reed describes the Bolshevik headquarters, the Smolny Institute, a former upper-class girls school in tsarist times (only eight months previously!) on the day of the insurrection, November 7:
The massive facade of Smolny blazed with lights as we drove up, and from every street converged upon it streams of hurrying shapes dim in the gloom. Automobiles and motorcycles came and went; an enormous elephant-colored armored automobile, with two red flags flying from the turret, lumbered out with screaming siren. It was cold, and at the outer gate the Red Guards had built themselves a bonfire. At the inner gate, too, there was a blaze, by the light of which the sentries slowly spelled out our passes and looked us up and down. … A crowd came pouring down the staircase, workers in black blouses and round black fur hats, many of them with guns slung over their shoulders, soldiers in rough dirt-colored coats and grey fur shapkas [hats] pinched flat.
On this occasion Reed encounters the Bolshevik leader Lev Kamenev. Kamenev reads out to him, translating from Russian into French, effectively the first proclamation, just passed in session, of the new Soviet government: “The new Workers’ and Peasants’ Government will propose immediately a just and democratic peace to all the belligerent countries … The Soviet is convinced that the proletariat of the countries of Western Europe will aid us in conducting the cause of Socialism to a real and lasting victory.”
And Reed’s description of Lenin stands out:
Dressed in shabby clothes, his trousers much too long for him. Unimpressive, to be the idol of a mob, loved and revered as perhaps few leaders in history have been. A strange popular leader—a leader purely by virtue of intellect: colorless, humorless, uncompromising and detached, without picturesque idiosyncrasies—with the power of explaining profound ideas in simple terms, of analyzing a concrete situation. And combined with shrewdness, the greatest intellectual audacity.
(An insightful description, aside from the characterization of Lenin as “colorless” and “humorless,” which was anything but the case!)
Ten Days That Shook the World is one of the artistic achievements not only of the Russian Revolution, but of American and world literature. The fact that it inspired another great work, Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein’s, October (1928), gives it a unique place in human culture.
Reed discovered the drama of the revolution in its own action, in the rapid and intense response of classes to one other in the pursuit of their social goals, expressed not only by force of arms, but by the most profound political thought. He was able to translate this into narrative and description.
Ten Days That Shook the World was the first time the revolution spoke in its full eloquence to the world. Lenin in his famous preface to the book, noted above, commented: “With the greatest interest and with never slackening attention I read John Reed’s book, Ten Days That Shook the World. … It gives a truthful and most vivid exposition of the events so significant to the comprehension of what really is the Proletarian Revolution and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. These problems are widely discussed, but before one can accept or reject these ideas, he must understand the full significance of his decision. John Reed’s book will undoubtedly help to clear this question, which is the fundamental problem of the international labor movement.”
In the summer of 1919, Reed helped to launch the Communist Labor Party (one of the forerunners of the Communist Party, founded in May 1921), as it split from the opportunist Socialist Party. In October he left again for Soviet Russia and participated as an American delegate to the Second Congress of the Communist International, held from July 19 to August 7, 1920. Following that, Reed attended the Congress of the Peoples of the East in Baku in Soviet Azerbaijan, an assembly of 1,900 delegates from across Asia and Europe organized by the Communist International, which opened September 1.
French leftist Alfred Rosmer, in Moscow Under Lenin, has a well-known description of Reed speaking at the Congress in Baku, a city famous for its petroleum industry. Rosmer noted that Reed, who had learned a few words of Russian, “was a great success. He shouted a question to his audience: ‘Don’t you know how Baku is pronounced in American? It’s pronounced oil!’ The solemn faces were suddenly shaken with laughter.”
Reed returned to Moscow on September 15, fell sick with typhus and died on October 17. It is said that he might have survived if the American government had not had an embargo on medications to Soviet Russia.
Rosmer explained in his book that when he and others returned from Moscow, “a sad piece of news greeted us. John Reed, who had returned in advance of us, was in hospital, ill with typhus. No effort was spared to save him, but it was all in vain and a few days later he died. His body was displayed in the great hall of the House of Trade Unions. On the day of the funeral, winter had already arrived and snow was falling. We were overwhelmed.”
Rosmer continued, “A burial place was found for him in the Kremlin wall, in the section reserved for heroes who had fallen in the revolutionary battle. The words of farewell were spoken by [Nikolai] Bukharin, for the central committee of the Communist Party, by [Alexandra] Kollontai, and by his comrades from the Executive Committee. Louise Bryant, who had arrived only to see him die, was there, completely shattered by grief. The whole scene was indescribably sad.”
Reed’s reputation after his death has been closely tied to the fate of the Russian Revolution. The Stalinist regime that usurped the Soviet state in the next decade could not abide the truth about the revolution, and Trotsky’s role in October 1917, as Reed had depicted it. Stalin is mentioned only in passing because he played virtually no role in the seizure of power. The work was banned, at Stalin’s insistence, in the Soviet Union for decades.
Equally, anticommunist commentators in Europe and America have sought to make Ten Days That Shook the World into a mere literary accomplishment. Some have alleged, falsely, that after disagreements over Communist tactics in 1920, Reed became disillusioned with Marxism.
Despite the Stalinist and anticommunist treatment of Reed and his work, for millions of workers and young people Ten Days That Shook the World remains an indispensable introduction to the most momentous event in world history. In a time when the question of socialist revolution has been placed before millions and millions, a new generation must discover his work.
Ten Days That Shook the World is currently on sale at Mehring Books for $14.40.
Professor Wolff On The Economics And Vulgarity Of Corporate Welfare
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cE5bcBzm4YA&ab_channel=act.tv
UAW keeping workers at Ohio Ventra parts plant on the job without contract during pandemic
Zac Thorton
10 hours ago
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/12/03/flex-d03.html?pk_campaign=newsletter&pk_kwd=wsws
[To learn more about forming a rank-and-file safety committee at your plant, contact autoworkers@wsws.org.]
The United Auto Workers (UAW) has kept auto parts workers at a plant in northern Ohio on the job for five months without a contract during the pandemic. Autoworkers at the Sandusky, Ohio plant operated by Flex-N-Gate subsidiary Ventra overwhelmingly voted down a sellout deal two months ago, brought forward by the union, which contained cuts to starting wages and extended the period for new hires to reach full pay. Since the rejection, the union has kept workers completely in the dark about the status of negotiations.
Ventra, which produces headlamps for Ford, employs 2,200 workers at its 1.2 million square foot Ohio facility. Contract negotiations with the company are being led by UAW Region 2B Director Wayne Blanchard, along with UAW Local 1216 officials.
Even without a contract, the UAW is keeping workers on the job in the midst of a major COVID-19 outbreak inside the plant. Dozens of autoworkers have been confirmed infected, most within the past few weeks. Meanwhile, workers have voted overwhelmingly to authorize a strike, by a 98 to 2 margin.
Expressing the thinking of the Local 1264 leadership, former bargaining committee member Clifford Loomis told the World Socialist Web Site Autoworker Newsletter, “Our bargaining team is still meeting the company, working towards a new tentative agreement. We have our ability to strike should things go that far, and our strike authorization passed with tremendous force.” When asked by this WSWS reporter how “far” things are supposed to go before a strike is called, given the spread of coronavirus, Loomis responded, “I don’t believe COVID-19 has any part in our negotiations.”
In fact, since the reopening of the auto industry in May, the UAW has worked with management to keep workers on the job and prevent a repeat of the wildcat strike wave which shut down the industry in March. At many key plants, the union has only recently been releasing any figures on the spread of the disease. However, a leak from Fiat Chrysler’s Jefferson North Assembly Plant demonstrated that the union has been given detailed statistics on infections and deaths from the beginning by management.
Determined to take matters into their own hands, autoworkers at plants throughout the country are forming rank-and-file safety committees to break through the UAW information blackout and coordinate a joint struggle in defense of workers’ lives, including a shutdown of all nonessential industry, with pay guaranteed by the billions in profits which the Detroit automakers made in the third quarter. This includes not only assembly workers at major plants like Fiat Chrysler’s Sterling Heights Assembly Plant but parts workers at Faurecia’s Gladstone and Saline plants.
The blackout on negotiations has prompted a number of workers to reach out to local media to denounce the union. Many more have taken to social media to do the same.
In comments to the Sandusky Register, one worker said, “We’re not hearing anything from anyone. A lot of us are asking ‘Where is [Local 1216 President] Brett Whyde?’” Whyde, the report states, has been silent “for months.”
While staying silent on negotiations, on November 20 Whyde issued a finger-waving letter to workers decrying quality issues at the plant. “We currently have 17 [quality rejects] for the month of November ... we had 17 QR’s in total for the entire month of October with a goal of single digits,” Whyde stated in language which may as well have been ghost-written by management. “The other big offender for everyone’s knowledge is that we have ... accumulated over $140,000 in scrap on Monday alone, which more than doubled our target.”
After chewing out workers for their poor performance, Whyde noted casually that the plant had seen 11 infections over the previous week, with 46 workers in quarantine. In a letter the following Wednesday he admitted to seven infections and 56 workers in quarantine.
The November 20 letter, which was posted on the union’s Facebook page, prompted an outpouring of anger from workers. One worker wrote:
“WHAT’S GOING ON WITH THE CONTRACT? THAT’S WHAT WE WANNA KNOW! Are we getting our little $300 ($500 taxed) ‘bonus’? Are you all even meeting with them? Or just hanging out up there? Meanwhile your plant and members who voted for you guys are getting sh---ed on daily by management! This is just unbelievable!”
On November 22 the union’s Facebook published the November 20 letter from UAW President Rory Gamble announcing the suspension of “all local union meetings and events” until April 15, 2021. While workers are being forced to risk their lives in the factories, the UAW is taking measures to safeguard the health of the bureaucracy and shield it from the criticisms of its membership.
The response from workers has been scathing. “Still can’t have membership meetings, still can’t have a new contract, still can’t have a raise, still can’t get management to quit signing off on bad parts,” wrote one worker. “We can, however, have meetings in the plant on the floor where we are encouraged to stand close together so we can better hear management tell us we suck.”
The mounting anger from workers forced Whyde to issue a second letter on November 25. In it, he refused to take any responsibility for keeping workers in the dark or for continuing to allow contract negotiations or lack thereof to carry on indefinitely. Instead, he presented the union as completely subservient to the company, writing, “In regards to Collective Bargaining your bargaining team is and has been ready and able to participate when the Company provides their availability.”
Whyde also shot down any suggestion of a strike, claiming that any strike “has to be authorized by Detroit for legality reasons.” This is the same bogus excuse given to Sterling Heights Assembly Plant (SHAP) workers in Detroit by UAW Local 1700 President Louie Pahl, who said workers “have to be given permission” from “the International and the IEB.” In the course of the same podcast where he made these statements, Pahl threatened workers not to read the World Socialist Web Site .
As every autoworker knows, UAW President Rory Gamble and the coterie of gangsters in Solidarity House will never call a strike. Instead, they are doing everything possible to keep production going at full capacity to fuel massive profits for the automakers.
The workers at Ventra and all autoworkers must draw the necessary conclusions. The struggle to defend their livelihoods and their lives must not rest in the hands of the corrupt UAW. Instead, workers must form rank-and-file safety committees to appeal to autoworkers, teachers and other workers across the country for support and to organize a struggle to shut down the auto plants. To learn more about forming a rank-and-file safety committee at your plant, contact the World Socialist Web Site at autoworkers@wsws.org.
AskProfWolff: Capitalism's "Economic Growth" Fetish
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8qW2K344Yk&ab_channel=DemocracyAtWork
Police department in Mississippi pilots program linked to home security cameras
Scott Burris
10 hours ago
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/12/03/amaz-d03.html?pk_campaign=newsletter&pk_kwd=wsws
In an expansion of the relationship between big tech and the US military-police apparatus, new software has been developed by FÅ«sus that allows police to register locations of home security cameras and livestream footage, including Amazon Ring doorbells.
Taking advantage of design features in Amazon Ring, such as local “crime and safety” neighborhood networks, FÅ«sus has gone one step further and integrated home security products with police in “Real-Time Crime Centers” (RTCC) that combine feeds from public and private security cameras.
FÅ«sus advertises itself as the “first company to unify live video, data and sensor feeds from virtually any source ... that enhances the situational awareness and investigative capabilities of law enforcement and public safety agencies.” It is already testing pilot programs in Jackson, Mississippi and West Palm Beach Florida, and has other contracts with police in Minnesota, Georgia, California and Illinois.
Police departments and home security companies are required to obtain agreements from users to allow their camera footage to be accessed in this way. However, the tech companies typically market the feature as a system to provide police with helpful information to reduce local petty crime, like package theft.
Once a homeowner signs the agreement, law enforcement can tap into users’ security cameras at any time through the Real-Time Crime Center, without notification. Thus, law enforcement is able to access, share and store vast amounts of private data collected from homes and businesses without oversight. The fact that this activity is largely unregulated opens the door for unconstitutional invasion of privacy and violations of other democratic rights, including free speech and restrictions against unreasonable searches and seizures.
A look at the FÅ«sus website and how they market to law enforcement is revealing. The company writes, “We create a public safety ecosystem that includes a registry map of all the public and private cameras in your region, a multi-media tips line for the public, and a cloud-based digital evidence vault for investigators.”
The company is also promoting the solution as a means of responding to the decline in police recruits and early retirements which have resulted in a “shortage” of officers. FÅ«sus’s solution to this “problem” is an Orwellian scenario with a vast array of relatively inexpensive cameras blanketing society, allowing police to respond more efficiently with the aid of real-time information.
On top of the expanded access to live footage of every neighborhood, the new program would free up money for police departments to spend on other things like crowd control equipment or hiring more officers. “It would save [us] from having to buy a camera for every place across the city,” said Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba in a statement reported by the local network WLBT. “If someone says, 'I want my Ring door camera to be used,’ we’ll be able to use it.”
Matthew Guariglia of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) stated, “We’re concerned with pretty much all of this.” He explained the intrusive nature of these programs. “The footage from your front door includes you coming and going from your house, your neighbors taking out the trash, and the dog walkers and delivery people who do their jobs in your street. In Jackson, this footage can now be live streamed directly onto a dozen monitors scrutinized by police around the clock. Even if you refuse to allow your footage to be used that way, your neighbor’s camera pointed at your house may still be transmitting directly to the police.”
Amazon Ring already has partnerships with roughly 1,300 police departments across the United States, according to Guariglia, an increase from 400 in July of last year. Amazon Ring video footage and snapshots can already be accessed by those police departments through cloud storage databases, often without any oversight or needing to request a warrant.
In 2019, Democratic Party Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts launched an investigation into the partnership between police and Ring that was widely reported in the corporate media at the time. He said, “the lack of privacy and civil rights protections for innocent residents is nothing short of chilling,” and “Amazon Ring’s policies are an open door for privacy and civil liberty violations.” However, nothing ever came of Markey’s investigation.
In some cases, free devices are now being offered to police departments as an incentive, and some cities have even subsidized the purchase of these devices, a clear sign that they are more beneficial to the police and authorities than they are to homeowners.
This is not the first time Amazon has partnered with law enforcement under the rubric of public safety. In 2016, Amazon Web Solutions (AWS) released the artificial intelligence software Rekognition, providing access to photos by law enforcement. But by 2017 AWS incorporated facial recognition, video tracking algorithms and law enforcement databases to allow the identification and tracking of individuals in real-time.
A particularly chilling video demonstrating Rekognition’s capabilities shows a policeman walking down a crowded street with facial recognition automatically “boxing” faces and “identifying” a missing person, which automatically flags nearby officers to respond. Such technology could easily be used to target and collect information on undocumented immigrants on the streets, protesters in a crowd, or specific workers at a picket line or protest.
After the meaning of these systems came to public attention—along with an open letter from Amazon employees opposing their company’s cooperation with police, US Immigration, Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP)—Amazon attempted to publicly distance itself from the project, although it continues to further enhance and refine its surveillance capabilities.
The integration of the major technology corporations with the state has developed in tandem with the growing inequality and instability of the capitalist system. Whatever marketing tools are used to encourage users to sign misleading agreements, the real aim of “Real-Time Crime Centers” is to develop more advanced systems of tracking that will be used to target the poor and working class, especially those engaged in oppositional and socialist political activity.
Technology, which carries immense potential for the progressive development of society, cannot be left in the hands of the ruling class for its interests in defending profits and suppression opposition. Tech workers, united with the whole working class, must demand these corporations be transformed into public utilities, and that the scientific and technological resources available be democratically directed to meet the urgent needs confronting humanity.
Death by eviction
Judd Legum and Tesnim Zekeria
Dec 3
As the pandemic rages, landlords across the country continue to kick tenants out of their homes. In Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, for example, 244 families have been evicted from their homes since September 4. Just last week, landlords filed 2,358 eviction cases in 27 cities tracked by the Princeton University Eviction Lab.
It's killing people.
A new study by public health researchers at Johns Hopkins, UCLA, and other institutions looked at the impact of "the expiration of state-based moratoriums during the summer of 2020." The researchers "tested whether lifting eviction moratoriums was associated with COVID-19 incidence and mortality."
The results are chilling. The study concluded that "lifting [eviction] moratoriums amounted to an estimated 433,700 excess cases and 10,700 excess deaths" between March 13 and September 3. The infections and fatalities occurred across "27 states that lifted eviction moratoriums" during the study period. In Texas alone, the study found there were 4456 excess deaths after the state lifted its eviction moratorium on May 18. The researchers "accounted for stay at home orders, mask orders, school closures, testing rates, time trends, and other state characteristics to better isolate the impact of eviction moratoriums."
Evictions result in crowding, as families consolidate homes to make ends meet, or homelessness, forcing families to live in shelters or other congregate settings. This increases the chances of contracting COVID. Further, the impact of COVID on this population may be more severe because "poor health and costs associated with healthcare may drive eviction risk."
"Looking to 2021, policymakers should consider extending federal, state and local moratoriums alongside rent relief, and other legal and supportive protections to prevent future evictions, COVID-19 transmission, and associated harms," the study's authors conclude.
What about the federal moratorium?
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) instituted a national eviction moratorium starting September 4. The moratorium doesn't expire until the end of 2020. So why are thousands of people still getting evicted?
The moratorium is not universal and not self-executing. To qualify, tenants must fill out a declaration stating that they have tried to obtain rent assistance from the government, earned no more than $99,000 in 2020 ($198,000 for couples), are unable to pay because of loss of income, and would likely become homeless if evicted. If tenants fail to fill out this form, evictions can proceed normally. Many tenants are not represented in court and don't even know the moratorium — or the declaration — exists.
Further, judges in some states, including North Carolina and Missouri, have refused to recognize the federal moratorium. Even if a court does recognize the declaration, it does not prevent eviction cases from being filed. In court, according to the CDC, landlords can challenge "the truthfulness of a tenant’s declaration." The CDC also warns that tenants that complete the declaration "in bad faith" will be subject to criminal prosecution for perjury.
In many cases, the filing of an eviction case itself is enough to get a tenant to vacate. Eric Dunn, director of litigation at the National Housing Law Project, explains:
Because tenants often value their ability to obtain other rental housing over remaining in one specific property, the fact that such cases are being filed likely has a chilling effect on tenants who would otherwise assert the moratorium. Tenants who receive eviction notices will move out to avoid the creation of an eviction record, rather than stay in their homes.
The eviction moratorium also does nothing to stop landlords from evicting tenants for criminal activity, property damage, or building code violations.
So it's easy to see how, despite the moratorium, thousands of people continue to face eviction every week. But, as bad as things are, they are about to get much worse.
The eviction cliff
Despite the holes in the CDC’s moratorium, it has had an impact. According to the Eviction Lab, more than 150,000 evictions have been filed across 27 major cities during the pandemic. But evictions are still well-below average. In Phoenix, for example, eviction filings were more than 50% below average in November.
But at the same time, unpaid rent continues to accrue — once the moratorium expires in January, renters will be expected to pay back their rent in full along with any late fees. In other words, without rental assistance, the moratorium will end with an avalanche of evictions. Come January, many may find themselves homeless in the middle of the still-raging pandemic.
According to a report prepared for the National Council State Housing Agencies, an estimated “8.4 million renter households, which include 20.1 million individual renters, could experience an eviction filing” in January.
This especially impacts Black and Latino renters who face a higher risk of eviction than white renters. These are the same populations who are already disproportionately impacted by COVID.
There is also a large group of people who have been paying for rent using credit cards, either because they did not qualify for the moratorium or were unaware that they could remain in their homes without paying rent. The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia recently found that there has been a “70% percent increase from last year in people paying rent on a credit card,” reports NPR.
“If you're putting your rent payments on to a credit card, that shows you're really at risk of eviction. That means you've run out of savings; you've probably run out of calls to family members to get them to loan you money,” said Shamus Roller, executive director of the Housing Law Project, to NPR.
Congress goes AWOL
The last time Congress passed a COVID relief bill was over seven months ago. With evictions set to resume in January, the deadline for lawmakers to act on this impending crisis is quickly approaching.
This week, a bipartisan group of senators revealed a new $908 billion stimulus package proposal. The new proposal includes $25 billion in rental assistance. But it is unclear if this will be enough. Experts are estimating that “renters will owe close to $70 billion in unpaid rent...in January, or $5,400 for the typical family that has fallen behind.” Diane Yentel, the President and CEO of National Low Income Housing Coalition, told Vox that “it’s going [to] take at least $100 billion in rental assistance.”
“For nine months, this tsunami on the horizon has been completely predictable and entirely preventable; we’ve known the solution to this for months, [the problem] is the lack of political will,” said Yentel.
House Democrats passed a $2.2 trillion relief package in October that provided $50 billion in rental aid for those at risk of eviction as well $5 billion in homeless assistance grants. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, meanwhile, is pushing a $500 billion “targeted relief bill” that does not provide any rental aid or any “continuing eviction protections.”
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