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Sunday, August 29, 2021
Hurricane Ida leaves Cuba and is expected to reach Louisiana
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Iraq hosts summit aimed at easing tensions in the Middle East
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Millions face loss of their homes in wake of US Supreme Court ruling overturning eviction moratorium
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/08/28/evic-a28.html
Chase Lawrence, Barry Grey
17 hours ago
On Thursday night, the US Supreme Court overturned the national moratorium on evictions of renters put in place as a pandemic relief measure. The six-to-three ruling, with the right-wing bloc solidly aligned against the nominally liberal minority, upheld an emergency petition brought by realtors’ groups in Alabama and Georgia to terminate an extension of the eviction ban enacted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) early this month following the July 31 expiration of a prior ban.
People from a coalition of housing justice groups hold signs protesting evictions during a news conference outside the Statehouse, July 30, 2021, in Boston. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer)
The right-wing majority on the court had already signaled its intention to terminate the eviction ban, which, in any event, was slated to expire on October 3. Under conditions of an out-of-control pandemic, surging housing costs and consumer prices, and the expiration of federal unemployment benefits set for early September, the ruling by the unelected court marks a dramatic escalation of the class war policies being pursued by the corporate-financial oligarchy and all of its official institutions and parties.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that the number of adults living in households that are behind on their rent could exceed 11 million.
According to data from a Census Bureau survey, 6 percent of renters nationwide—more than 3.5 million people—say they are unable to pay their full rent due to the pandemic and are “likely” or “very likely” to face eviction. In several Southern and Midwestern states, including Missouri, North Carolina and Louisiana, almost one in five renters say they are worried about getting evicted.
The Wall Street Journal bluntly summed up the situation in an article headlined, “Renters Prepare for Eviction After Supreme Court Ruling.” It explained that landlords, with the exception of those in a handful of states and cities that have their own restrictions, can immediately go to court to obtain evictions for unpaid rent. In most courts, delayed eviction cases will now go forward. In others, already approved evictions will now be carried out by marshals and sheriffs.
The savagery of the ruling was underlined by its being carried out under an expedited “shadow docket” procedure that omits oral hearings, does not require signed opinions and, in general, curtails standards generally associated with due process.
The majority opinion, unsigned, declared that the CDC was overreaching its legal powers by ordering the eviction ban on public health grounds, citing the increased risk of COVID-19 infections and deaths resulting from a surge in homelessness. The ruling said the moratorium could not be maintained without congressional action.
The dissent, authored by Justice Stephen Breyer, denounced the use of the “shadow docket” procedure to decide such a socially consequential matter and cited the explosive spread of the pandemic with the proliferation of the Delta variant. He essentially argued that it was an inopportune time to terminate the eviction ban, writing: “The public interest strongly favors respecting the CDC’s judgment at this moment, when over 90 percent of counties are experiencing high transmission rates.”
The Biden White House, which had been prepared to accept the expiration of the eviction ban at the end of July and has made clear it will not seek to extend the federal unemployment benefit, signaled that it would not fight the court ruling. It and the Democratic Party are focused on forcing millions of unvaccinated children and hundreds of thousands of teachers into unsafe schools, even as infections and deaths hit new highs, rising most rapidly among school-age children.
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told reporters on Thursday that the administration would not seek to pass legislation to block evictions, and instead would seek to facilitate the distribution of $46.5 billion that had previously been appropriated to aid distressed renters and homeowners. The Treasury Department reported on Wednesday that only some $5.1 billion of this money had actually been disbursed by states and localities as of the end of July. Entire states, including New York, have not distributed a penny in renter relief funds.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi similarly said the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives would seek to expedite the flow of rental-aid funds and said nothing about reinstituting a halt to evictions.
Even were the entire amount allocated to be immediately disbursed, it would be a drop in the bucket compared to the depth of the housing crisis. Responding to the court ruling, President and CEO of the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) Diane Yentel said the result would be “millions of people losing their homes this fall and winter, just as the Delta variant ravages communities and lives.” She added that “evictions further burden overstretched hospital systems and make it much more difficult for the country to contain the virus. Evictions have been shown to increase the spread of, and potentially deaths from, COVID-19.”
According to an NLIHC report released in July, titled “Out of Reach 2021: The High Cost of Housing,” in “no state, metropolitan area, or county can a full-time minimum-wage worker afford a modest two-bedroom rental home, and these workers cannot afford modest one-bedroom apartments in 93 percent of US counties.” The report continues: “Over 7.5 million extremely low-income renters are severely housing cost-burdened, spending more than half of their incomes on housing.”
“More than 226,000 people in the US experienced homelessness on sidewalks or other unsheltered locations on a given night in 2020,” the report notes, “and another 354,000 experienced homelessness in emergency shelters, with limited ability to self-isolate. In addition, more than 2.7 million renters live in overcrowded housing conditions.”
Another NLIHC report issued in July states that many who have remained caught up on rent “may have done so by unsustainable means,” such as “using credits cards or loans, selling assets or drawing down savings, or borrowing from friends and family…” Of those who had fallen behind in rent, a majority reported delaying bills and cutting back on food, while more than a quarter had forgone medical care.
Moreover, in much of the country, evictions continued even before the ending of the moratorium, which was poorly enforced and frequently defied by right-wing judges. The Princeton University Eviction Lab reported over 6,500 evictions last week in the six states and 31 cities it tracks. Since March 2020, 480,000 eviction cases have been filed. Some cities are already up to or above pre-pandemic levels of evictions, including Las Vegas, Nevada and Gainesville, Florida.
John Jopling, director of housing law at the nonprofit Mississippi Center for Justice, told the Washington Post, “You hear a lot of people talk about this cliff that we’re headed for as far as evictions, but really, I think, it’s more of a rolling tide—and we’re already in the middle of it.
“These tenants, they’re going to wind up in cars, they’re going to wind up on top of relatives, which is not what they need to be doing especially now in intergenerational households with all the variants of COVID that are spreading out there. They’re going to wind up on top of elderly relatives because of that immediate removal.”
The social and economic interests that dictate government policy were underscored by the concurrence of the Supreme Court attack on hard-pressed working-class families and the speech delivered the following morning by Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell. Giving the keynote address at the annual Jackson Hole, Wyoming meeting of Fed officials and world central bankers, Powell reassured Wall Street that the flood of money into the financial markets by means of zero interest rates would continue indefinitely, and any tapering of quantitative easing purchases of financial assets—currently at the rate of $120 billion every month —would be carried out slowly, despite the highest rates of US inflation in 30 years.
The result was a further surge in stock prices, with the Nasdaq and S&P 500 indexes closing at new record highs.
It’s time to create an economy that works for all of us, not just the 1%.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0b-E-YSgMc
Death toll in Kabul airport terrorist attack rises to 170, as US military continues evacuations
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/08/28/afgh-a28.html
Jordan Shilton
17 hours ago
The official death toll from the terrorist attack outside Kabul international airport on Thursday was increased significantly on Friday to over 160. The number of Afghan victims almost tripled and the US Defense Department confirmed the death of one additional service member, bringing the total of American military fatalities to 13.
Wounded Afghans lie on a bed at a hospital after a deadly explosions outside the airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, on August 26, 2021. (AP Photo/Mohammad Asif Khan)
At a Defense Department press briefing Friday morning, Major General Hank Taylor stated that only one suicide bomber was involved in the assault. Originally, reports indicated that a second blast occurred at a nearby hotel. After the bomb exploded amid a large crowd waiting to be processed for travel at the airport’s Abbey Gate, other Islamic State-Khorazan (ISIS-K) attackers opened fire. American troops also fired into the crowd to clear the area. It remains unclear how many lives were lost as a result of the gunfire.
Taylor also stated that the evacuation of US and allied officials, operatives and citizens, as well as Afghan collaborators with the two-decade-long neocolonial occupation, was continuing. He said that 89 flights had left Kabul in the previous 24 hours carrying a total of some 12,500 people. Among them were 300 Americans, taking the total of Americans who have left since the Taliban came to power to over 5,100. Two flights carrying 18 wounded American soldiers left for the Ramstein Air Base in Germany.
Since evacuations began on August 14, some 111,000 people have been flown out. Taylor confirmed that another 5,400 people are inside the airport waiting to leave.
At a White House briefing later in the day, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki confirmed that the Biden administration’s national security team believed that a further terrorist attack prior to the August 31 deadline for the end of the evacuation and withdrawal of US troops was “likely.” She added that “maximum force protection” measures were being taken at the airport.
It was made clear at both briefings that the numbers being evacuated over the coming days will drop sharply as US troops begin the process of withdrawal. Taylor declared, however, that it will be possible to evacuate people “until the very end.”
That remains to be seen, with a Taliban spokesman claiming late Friday that the organization had taken over control of parts of the airport. Although the Pentagon promptly denied the report, BBC chief international correspondent Lyse Doucet, who is currently in Kabul, was informed by sources that American and British troops would hand over control of the airport to the Taliban in a matter of hours.
The extent to which Washington is dependent on coordinating and cooperating with the Taliban in the final stages of its withdrawal underscores the scale of the debacle suffered by US imperialism with the collapse of its puppet regime in Kabul. Even Biden administration officials were forced to acknowledge that the outcome of the remainder of the mission is to a considerable degree dependent on the Taliban’s support.
Asked whether coordination with the Taliban was the best of many bad options, or the only option, Psaki frankly responded, “Maybe both.” She added that “by necessity, that is our option,” because the Taliban controls “wide swathes” of Afghanistan and the area surrounding the airport. The coming days would be the “most dangerous period to date” in US military operation, she added in a prepared statement.
For its part, the Taliban appears to be offering an olive branch to Washington with its appeal, reported by the State Department yesterday, for the US to retain a diplomatic presence in Kabul after August 31. A Taliban spokesman also told al-Jazeera that the movement planned to announce an “inclusive caretaker government,” including members from the Uzbek and Tajik minorities.
Under questioning, Defense Department and State Department officials went out of their way to reject accusations of Taliban complicity in, or responsibility for, Thursday’s attack, the background to which remains murky.
ISIS-K claims to be a regional affiliate of Islamic State, and perpetrated a series of attacks that strengthened the US-backed puppet regime. Whatever the current affiliation of this organization, which reportedly has less than 2,000 followers in Afghanistan, it remains a fact that all of the Islamist militias, including Islamic State and the Taliban, are the product of the tragic encounter experienced by Afghanistan and the broader region with over four decades of US imperialist intrigue and brutal neocolonial war.
Underscoring the disastrous outcome of these policies for the imperialist strategists in Washington, even some of Biden’s fiercest critics have tacitly accepted that the US has no alternative but to withdraw. In a press conference convened Friday in response to the previous day’s terrorist attack, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy denounced Biden for “weakness and incompetence,” and for accepting a “Taliban-dictated deadline.” But when it came to explaining his alternative course of action, all he could offer was a call for the reconvening of the House to receive a confidential intelligence briefing and adopt a bill that would prohibit US troops from withdrawing until “every single American” has been evacuated.
Retaining an American military presence in the war-ravaged country would require the deployment of tens, if not hundreds of thousands of troops. Biden and his foreign policy and national security advisers have ruled this out because they view such an expenditure of military and financial resources as a diversion from the main conflicts they confront, against Russia and above all China.
These geostrategic considerations are buried in the media coverage, which portrays the American and allied soldiers as saviors rushing to the rescue of the Afghan people to protect them from barbarism and death. American soldiers are “saving as many people as they can,” Taylor proclaimed at Friday’s Pentagon press briefing, and are engaged in a “noble mission.”
This militarist claptrap has been repeated ad nauseam by the media and political establishment in the United States, Canada and Western Europe. As Germany concluded its evacuation mission yesterday with the arrival of around 300 soldiers in the country, media outlets reported breathlessly about the returning heroes. The soldiers “brought thousands of people out of Afghanistan to safety,” wrote German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier. “Our country is proud of you.”
In reality, the American soldiers and their European allies are leaving behind a war-ravaged country in which hundreds of thousands of Afghans were slaughtered and maimed by air strikes, night raids, torture and abuse carried out by the imperialist powers and their local collaborators.
The Cost of War Project estimates that 700 civilians were killed by allied air strikes during 2019 alone, the highest figure since the war began. Although US air strikes declined in 2020 after the Trump administration signed a ceasefire with the Taliban, those conducted by the Afghan Air Force, which was entirely dependent on the US for ammunition and maintenance, increased. Some 3,000 civilians were estimated to have lost their lives in the conflict during 2020.
The pro-imperialist stooge regime that presided over these horrendous conditions was up to its eyeballs in graft and corruption. While former Afghan President Ashraf Ghani reportedly fled the country with over $150 million in cash, 90 percent of the Afghan population was living on less than $2 a day after two decades of US-led military occupation.
In a briefing released Friday that received far less attention than the fate of the comparative handful of people crowded around Kabul airport, the UN reported that up to half a million people could flee the country by the end of 2021 due to a looming food crisis. The UN reported that prior to the Taliban coming to power, half of the population required some form of humanitarian aid and half of all children under five years of age were acutely malnourished.
Since the beginning of 2021, 560,000 people have been registered as internally displaced, adding to the 2.9 million internally displaced persons at the end of 2020. Over 80 percent of those displaced since the beginning of the year are women and children.
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