Saturday, September 4, 2021
Unknown waters ahead puzzle marine modellers
September 3rd, 2021,
by Tim Radford
https://climatenewsnetwork.net/unknown-waters-ahead-puzzle-marine-modellers/
Climate change will alter the blue planet on an almost global scale. Marine life will change in the unknown waters ahead.
LONDON, 3 September, 2021 − By the close of this century, the world’s mariners may be sailing over unknown waters. Up to 95% of the ocean surface climates that Charles Darwin voyaged in the Beagle in the 19th century, and that became part of the global battleground during the wars of the 20th century, will have vanished.
And some − perhaps most − of these climates will be of a kind that have no precedent in human history, or prehistory.
Quite how sharply those familiar waters will disappear depends on what happens to global greenhouse emissions. But at the rates at which humans have been burning fossil fuels so far, somewhere between 35% and almost all the sea surface conditions will have changed, and so will the marine ecosystems that depend upon those conditions.
What happens to the algae and plankton, the pelagic fish and the predators that hunt them, is increasingly difficult to guess: another study has just concluded that even after more than a century of oceanography and marine biological research, humans still don’t know enough about how ocean ecosystems work to be able to be sure of the future.
US researchers write in the journal Scientific Reports that they looked at measurements that define marine surface climate: water temperature, the concentration of dissolved carbon dioxide that defines its pH value on the acid-alkaline chemical spectrum, and the water’s saturation with aragonite, a form of dissolved calcium carbonate, washed over the aeons by the rivers into the sea.
Telling comparisons
Put simply, as greenhouse gas emissions rise, so the oceans become both warmer and more acidic, and the saturation level of aragonite falls. And as this level falls, corals and other marine creatures find it harder to turn sea water into the shell structures that protect them.
The researchers report that they modelled the ocean climates for the years 1795 to 1834 − the years of Coleridge’s poem Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and of the British Royal Navy’s command of the high seas − and for the years 1963 to 2004, the years of the aircraft carrier and supertanker.
Then they compared their findings with what ocean surfaces will look like if carbon emissions peak in 2050, or − this is sometimes called the “business-as-usual” scenario − in 2100.
Under the first scenario, 35.6% of sea surface climates familiar for the last two centuries may have disappeared. Under the second, 95% will have gone, to be replaced by what the authors call ”novel climates.” And, they say in the constrained syntax of academic language, “the degree of global climate novelty at a location may … indicate how stressful novel conditions will be for all species.
“In contrast, the degree of global climate disappearance for a location may represent how hard it might be for species who are well-adapted to climate at that location to find a similar climate in the future.”
“Attempting to summarise the vast complexity of the global marine ecosystem in a handful of equations is enormously difficult”
That the marine world is changing is no surprise: scientists have reported again and again that once-valuable species are migrating, or growing smaller, or dwindling in number.
As temperatures rise, oxygen levels drop, leaving some species gasping. As breeding grounds warm, spawning becomes problematic. So researchers can see what is already happening. It’s much harder to guess what the oceans will be like decades from now.
And in a timely study in the journal Progress in Oceanography, a team from Australia, the US, Canada and Europe issues a similar warning: humans are about to voyage into unknown waters.
Global heating is already driving what they call “significant changes in the structure of marine ecosystems” worldwide. That is, the tiny creatures on which bigger fish ultimately depend will change. And that could be bad news for the millions of people who live by the sea, and seafood.
But, they warn, it is becoming difficult to calculate how the denizens of the deep, and the citizens of the shallows, will respond to ocean climate shifts. There is a lot more research to be done, and some complex mathematical challenges ahead.
Food supplies lessen
“We know the impact of climate change on both water temperature and primary production will alter marine ecosystems in fundamental ways. Fish and other marine animals will burn more energy in warmer waters, leaving less scope for growth and reproduction.
“At the same time, in regions where primary production from phytoplankton decreases there will be less food, which will drive marine biomass down further,” said Ryan Heneghan of Queensland University of Technology in Australia, who led the study.
“Between now and 2100, the change in global marine animal biomass across our models varied between a 30% decline and a small increase of 5%. Across all the models, there were biomass declines across most of the world’s oceans, but the models disagreed on where, why and by how much marine biomass would decline under climate change,” he said.
“Attempting to summarise the vast complexity of the global marine ecosystem in a handful of equations is enormously difficult, and global marine ecosystem modelling is a relatively new field of research; our oldest models are just over 10 years old, whereas the climate modelling community were developing their first models over 40 years ago. There is a lot of work to do.”
How the Australian Labor Party spearheaded the ramming of anti-democratic electoral laws through parliament
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/09/03/elec-s03.html
Mike Head
11 hours ago
Labor Party parliamentarians played the leading role, working hand-in-hand with the Liberal-National Coalition government ministers, in rushing anti-democratic electoral bills through Australia’s parliament last week in just over 24 hours.
Anthony Albanese addresses ALP conference (Source: YouTube)
Labor and the Coalition—the two main parties of capitalist rule—hold the overwhelming majority of seats in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, so they collaborated to push the bills through in record time.
The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) has launched a campaign throughout the working class against the laws. The corporate and political establishment is seeking to suppress the rising opposition to its “reopening” drive as the COVID-19 pandemic resurges, threatening thousands of working-class lives, including those of children.
Nothing comparable to last week’s scenes in parliament has been seen since November 2005, when Labor, as well as the Greens, helped the Howard Coalition government recall the Senate to pass sweeping police-state “terrorism” legislation in just 36 hours. That unanimous stand was based on Howard’s dubious claim, never substantiated, that his government had received “specific intelligence” about a terrorist threat.
Labor’s role in spearheading the passage of the latest bills is revealing. It reflects the nervousness in ruling circles that the resistance of workers, students and parents to the premature return to classrooms and workplaces could erupt out of the control of the increasingly discredited and detested Coalition government.
Hence the need to shore up Labor’s vote, as well as the Coalition’s, by barring access to elections for alternative parties. That includes the SEP, the only one advancing the necessity for workers to mobilise on the basis of a socialist perspective to protect lives and eradicate COVID-19.
As the SEP explained in its statement yesterday, “Defeat bipartisan Australian drive to de-register political parties!” the laws set out to strip party registration from every party not currently represented in parliament. With a federal election looming, the legislation compels parties to provide details of 1,500 members—trebling the previous requirement—within just three months, all in the middle of widespread lockdowns.
Without registered party status, election candidates cannot identify their political affiliations on ballot papers. They must be listed without any party name, or as “independents.”
That not only denies the essential right of political parties to campaign and communicate their views in elections. It robs voters of the ability to cast conscious political votes.
One of the bills specifically seeks to block support for the socialist program advocated by the SEP. It bans parties from using the names “socialist” or “communist” (as well as “labor,” “liberal and “green”) if another registered party has already claimed that label, no matter how falsely.
Another provision restricts voting rights by cutting pre-poll voting to a maximum of 12 days before elections. This undercuts the ability of many working-class voters to cast ballots—more than 40 percent of the electorate voted pre-poll or by post at the last election in 2019.
The introduction and passage of these bills have been buried throughout the corporate media. There is clear concern in the ruling class that support is collapsing for the long-time parties of capitalist rule, and the public must be kept in the dark about the efforts to prop them up.
Last week’s token two-hour “debates” in each house of parliament demonstrated that Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s Coalition government is relying on Labor to prosecute the attack on democratic rights.
Labor MPs were the most aggressive exponents of the bills. Milton Dick, who holds the seat of Oxley in western Brisbane, denounced “people whingeing and whining about this change—so-called believers in freedom and democracy.”
Dick also provided a glimpse of the behind-the-scenes operation between the government and Labor to produce the bills. He said Labor’s shadow minister for electoral matters Senator Don Farrell had worked “incredibly hard” with Morrison’s right-hand man, Assistant Minister Ben Morton, “to ensure that we do work in a bipartisan way.”
Both Dick and Morton declared, without explanation, that some “minor parties” already met the new 1,500-member threshold. They referred to the Animal Justice Party, Shooters, Fishers and Farmers, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, Sustainable Australia and the Liberal Democratic Party. These are all pro-capitalist parties, regarded as useful safety valves to divert the disaffection back into the parliamentary arena.
Labor speakers claimed that the bills would prevent billionaires such as mining magnate Clive Palmer registering parties without real members. But like the other parties with seats in parliament, Palmer’s United Australia Party is exempt from the membership requirement, having just recruited far-right Coalition defector Craig Kelly.
The truth is that all the parliamentary parties would have difficulty nominating 1,500 members, unless they could count MPs, staffers, trade union officials and other office holders. They are bureaucratic shells, dominated by branch-stacking conducted by narrowly-based factional powerbrokers.
Labor and the Coalition were intent on seeking to deregister as many parties as possible. They summarily rejected amendments by Kelly and another right-wing figure, Senator Jacqui Lambie, to lower the membership requirement rule to 1,000, and make it apply to only new parties applying for registration, not those already registered.
Another Labor spokesman, shadow minister Andrew Giles, gave voice to the concerns within the capitalist establishment that alternative parties can gain wider support by standing in federal elections. He said a registered party could “build a profile and name recognition” by having its name on ballot papers.
Giles provided an insight into the profoundly anti-democratic outlook that permeates the ruling class. He declared that such ballot recognition was a “privilege” and “significant benefit,” not a basic democratic right. It was an “advantage” that came with “responsibilities” to uphold the parliamentary order.
Likewise, Giles agreed with his Coalition colleagues that registered parties had to hand over membership lists in order to demonstrate a “genuine base of community support.” That denies the function of elections themselves, which are meant to determine levels of political support.
In an attempt to distance her party from the anti-democratic move, Greens Senator Larissa Waters spoke and voted against the bills in Senate. In the House of Representatives, however, Greens leader Adam Bandt notably remained silent.
Waters said the de-registration measures were an “attack on our democracy.” But the Greens supported the previous 500-member rule, which was an anti-democratic provision introduced under the Hawke Labor government in 1984, requiring party registration for the first time.
Combined with state funding for the parliamentary parties, the 1984 laws were themselves a bid to shore up the parliamentary establishment, for which popular support was already crumbling because of growing social inequality and declining working and living conditions.
The party registration scheme was a pre-emptive strike against working-class unrest. The Hawke government’s corporatist Prices and Incomes Accords with the trade unions paved the way for a decades-long assault on workers’ jobs and conditions provoking widespread disaffection and opposition among workers.
The 1984 legislation proved unsuccessful in bolstering the parliamentary order, however. The share of votes going to Labor and the Coalition has continued to fall, down to 75 percent in 2019. This reflects the deepening hostility to their bipartisan pro-business program.
The SEP has always opposed the party registration laws, which also compel parties to hand over the details of their members. That opens them up to surveillance and harassment, and violates the principle of secret ballots, which are meant to provide voters with privacy regarding their political affiliations.
The SEP calls for a concerted campaign to demand the repeal of the latest laws and all restrictions on the democratic right of parties and individuals to stand in elections. At the same time, we appeal to every one of our supporters and readers: apply to become an electoral member of the SEP to help us retain our registration and defeat this attack.
To discuss and take forward this fight, we urge readers to contact the SEP:
Website: http://www.sep.org.au/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SocialistEqualityPartyAustralia/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/sep_australia
Labor and the Coalition—the two main parties of capitalist rule—hold the overwhelming majority of seats in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, so they collaborated to push the bills through in record time.
The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) has launched a campaign throughout the working class against the laws. The corporate and political establishment is seeking to suppress the rising opposition to its “reopening” drive as the COVID-19 pandemic resurges, threatening thousands of working-class lives, including those of children.
Nothing comparable to last week’s scenes in parliament has been seen since November 2005, when Labor, as well as the Greens, helped the Howard Coalition government recall the Senate to pass sweeping police-state “terrorism” legislation in just 36 hours. That unanimous stand was based on Howard’s dubious claim, never substantiated, that his government had received “specific intelligence” about a terrorist threat.
Labor’s role in spearheading the passage of the latest bills is revealing. It reflects the nervousness in ruling circles that the resistance of workers, students and parents to the premature return to classrooms and workplaces could erupt out of the control of the increasingly discredited and detested Coalition government.
Hence the need to shore up Labor’s vote, as well as the Coalition’s, by barring access to elections for alternative parties. That includes the SEP, the only one advancing the necessity for workers to mobilise on the basis of a socialist perspective to protect lives and eradicate COVID-19.
As the SEP explained in its statement yesterday, “Defeat bipartisan Australian drive to de-register political parties!” the laws set out to strip party registration from every party not currently represented in parliament. With a federal election looming, the legislation compels parties to provide details of 1,500 members—trebling the previous requirement—within just three months, all in the middle of widespread lockdowns.
Without registered party status, election candidates cannot identify their political affiliations on ballot papers. They must be listed without any party name, or as “independents.”
That not only denies the essential right of political parties to campaign and communicate their views in elections. It robs voters of the ability to cast conscious political votes.
One of the bills specifically seeks to block support for the socialist program advocated by the SEP. It bans parties from using the names “socialist” or “communist” (as well as “labor,” “liberal and “green”) if another registered party has already claimed that label, no matter how falsely.
Another provision restricts voting rights by cutting pre-poll voting to a maximum of 12 days before elections. This undercuts the ability of many working-class voters to cast ballots—more than 40 percent of the electorate voted pre-poll or by post at the last election in 2019.
The introduction and passage of these bills have been buried throughout the corporate media. There is clear concern in the ruling class that support is collapsing for the long-time parties of capitalist rule, and the public must be kept in the dark about the efforts to prop them up.
Last week’s token two-hour “debates” in each house of parliament demonstrated that Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s Coalition government is relying on Labor to prosecute the attack on democratic rights.
Labor MPs were the most aggressive exponents of the bills. Milton Dick, who holds the seat of Oxley in western Brisbane, denounced “people whingeing and whining about this change—so-called believers in freedom and democracy.”
Dick also provided a glimpse of the behind-the-scenes operation between the government and Labor to produce the bills. He said Labor’s shadow minister for electoral matters Senator Don Farrell had worked “incredibly hard” with Morrison’s right-hand man, Assistant Minister Ben Morton, “to ensure that we do work in a bipartisan way.”
Both Dick and Morton declared, without explanation, that some “minor parties” already met the new 1,500-member threshold. They referred to the Animal Justice Party, Shooters, Fishers and Farmers, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, Sustainable Australia and the Liberal Democratic Party. These are all pro-capitalist parties, regarded as useful safety valves to divert the disaffection back into the parliamentary arena.
Labor speakers claimed that the bills would prevent billionaires such as mining magnate Clive Palmer registering parties without real members. But like the other parties with seats in parliament, Palmer’s United Australia Party is exempt from the membership requirement, having just recruited far-right Coalition defector Craig Kelly.
The truth is that all the parliamentary parties would have difficulty nominating 1,500 members, unless they could count MPs, staffers, trade union officials and other office holders. They are bureaucratic shells, dominated by branch-stacking conducted by narrowly-based factional powerbrokers.
Labor and the Coalition were intent on seeking to deregister as many parties as possible. They summarily rejected amendments by Kelly and another right-wing figure, Senator Jacqui Lambie, to lower the membership requirement rule to 1,000, and make it apply to only new parties applying for registration, not those already registered.
Another Labor spokesman, shadow minister Andrew Giles, gave voice to the concerns within the capitalist establishment that alternative parties can gain wider support by standing in federal elections. He said a registered party could “build a profile and name recognition” by having its name on ballot papers.
Giles provided an insight into the profoundly anti-democratic outlook that permeates the ruling class. He declared that such ballot recognition was a “privilege” and “significant benefit,” not a basic democratic right. It was an “advantage” that came with “responsibilities” to uphold the parliamentary order.
Likewise, Giles agreed with his Coalition colleagues that registered parties had to hand over membership lists in order to demonstrate a “genuine base of community support.” That denies the function of elections themselves, which are meant to determine levels of political support.
In an attempt to distance her party from the anti-democratic move, Greens Senator Larissa Waters spoke and voted against the bills in Senate. In the House of Representatives, however, Greens leader Adam Bandt notably remained silent.
Waters said the de-registration measures were an “attack on our democracy.” But the Greens supported the previous 500-member rule, which was an anti-democratic provision introduced under the Hawke Labor government in 1984, requiring party registration for the first time.
Combined with state funding for the parliamentary parties, the 1984 laws were themselves a bid to shore up the parliamentary establishment, for which popular support was already crumbling because of growing social inequality and declining working and living conditions.
The party registration scheme was a pre-emptive strike against working-class unrest. The Hawke government’s corporatist Prices and Incomes Accords with the trade unions paved the way for a decades-long assault on workers’ jobs and conditions provoking widespread disaffection and opposition among workers.
The 1984 legislation proved unsuccessful in bolstering the parliamentary order, however. The share of votes going to Labor and the Coalition has continued to fall, down to 75 percent in 2019. This reflects the deepening hostility to their bipartisan pro-business program.
The SEP has always opposed the party registration laws, which also compel parties to hand over the details of their members. That opens them up to surveillance and harassment, and violates the principle of secret ballots, which are meant to provide voters with privacy regarding their political affiliations.
The SEP calls for a concerted campaign to demand the repeal of the latest laws and all restrictions on the democratic right of parties and individuals to stand in elections. At the same time, we appeal to every one of our supporters and readers: apply to become an electoral member of the SEP to help us retain our registration and defeat this attack.
To discuss and take forward this fight, we urge readers to contact the SEP:
Website: http://www.sep.org.au/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SocialistEqualityPartyAustralia/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/sep_australia
Texas passes bill restricting voting rights after collapse of Democratic walkout
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/09/02/vote-s02.html
Alex Findijs
18 hours ago
The efforts of Texas Democrats to block passage of a Republican bill restricting voting rights came to an end Tuesday when the State Senate passed Senate Bill 1 (SB1). Republican Governor Greg Abbott is expected to sign the bill into law within days.
Texas State Capitol (source: Wikimedia Commons)
The passage of SB1 was barely noted by President Joe Biden, who only weeks before had called the attack on voting rights by Republican lawmakers the greatest threat to American democracy since the Civil War.
Leading Democrats are largely ignoring the passage of the Texas law. The Democrats have effectively abandoned their “For the People Act,” which would expand ballot access and ban partisan gerrymandering, and face little chance of passing their more narrow “John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act” in the evenly divided US Senate.
The Texas law will place extensive restrictions and potential criminal penalties on voters. Absentee voting will be highly restricted, drop boxes for mail-in ballots and drive-through voting will be banned, and early voting hours will be limited. Election officials will face criminal prosecution if they mail unsolicited absentee ballots to voters or interfere in any way with partisan poll watchers, who are granted extra rights and protections under the law.
The entire bill is designed to place as many barriers and threaten as many criminal penalties as possible in an effort to intimidate and restrict voters, especially working class and minority voters more likely to vote for Democrats. An amendment designed to exclude voters who were unaware that they were ineligible to vote from criminal prosecution was stripped from the final version of the bill, which emerged from the process of reconciling the state House and Senate versions. The so-called Mason Amendment was named after Crystal Mason, a Texas woman facing a five-year prison sentence for illegally voting, despite not knowing that she was ineligible to vote.
Similar provisions exist in bills across the country. The Brennan Center, a voting rights advocacy group, reports that nearly 400 restrictive bills have been introduced in 48 state legislatures, with dozens making their way toward being signed into law.
The Republican assault on voting rights is a coordinated national offensive against basic democratic rights. It is bound up with the turn of the Republican Party toward fascism and the promotion of Trump’s “big lie” that he lost the 2020 election due to massive voter fraud. This was the basis on which Trump mobilized fascistic forces to storm the US Capitol on January 6 in an attempt to block the certification of the Electoral College vote. Virtually the entire Republican Party continues to promote this lie as part of ongoing conspiracies to establish dictatorial rule in the US.
The entire episode of the Texas Democrats’ “resistance” has contained a large element of political theater. In reality, no section of the ruling class or either of its political parties has a commitment to the defense of democratic rights, including the right to vote and have one’s vote counted.
From the start, the flight of the Texas House Democrats from the state, which temporarily prevented a quorum and delayed passage of the anti-voting rights bill in the Texas House, was a political stunt designed to provide a “left” fig leaf to cover up the Democratic Party’s cowardice and capitulation to the Republican offensive.
At no point have the Democrats made any serious attempt to stop the Republican assault on voting rights. In July, more than 50 Texas House Democrats flew to Washington D.C. to lobby the Biden White House and the Democratic-controlled Congress to pass federal legislation that would override the Texas bill. They were verbally hailed by the White House and Democratic leaders as modern-day civil rights heroes, while, in practice, given the cold shoulder.
Biden refused even to meet with them during their weeks-long sojourn in the nation’s capital. He rejected their appeals to support a weakening of the filibuster rule in the Senate so as to enable passage of the Democrats’ voting bills without Republican support.
Instead, he, along with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer, made it clear their top priority was securing Republican support to pass a watered-down, pro-corporate infrastructure bill that will provide windfall profits to private contractors. This was consistent with Biden’s posture of seeking bipartisan unity with the increasingly fascistic Republican Party.
The inevitable and ignominious end of the Texas Democrats’ stunt occurred when three of the Democrats who had fled the state over a month ago returned last week to the state House floor, providing the Republicans the quorum needed to pass the bill.
The spinelessness of the Democrats was further exposed in their response to the passage of the bill. Texas State Representative Garnet Coleman, whose return to the chamber helped ensure passage of SB1, attempted to downplay the consequences. “[A]ll I can hope is that if those problems occur … that we come back here in two years and fix it.”
Republican Governor Abbott, a Trump acolyte who has banned masking mandates in reopened Texas schools despite cascading COVID-19 infections and hospitalizations, declared this week that SB1 would “make it easier to vote and harder to cheat,” despite the absence of evidence of significant voter fraud.
When the Democrats first walked out of the state legislature in May to prevent voting on the Republican voting bill, Abbott called a special legislative session to pass it. He repeated this maneuver a few weeks later when the Democrats fled to Washington D.C., accompanied by the issuance of arrest warrants for the Democratic lawmakers for dereliction of their duties.
This debacle is another object lesson in the futility and danger of placing any confidence in the Democratic Party to defend the right to vote or any other democratic right. The political conclusion that must be drawn by workers is the need to break with these parties of Wall Street and the military and mobilize independently on the basis of a socialist program to defend basic democratic rights.
The passage of SB1 was barely noted by President Joe Biden, who only weeks before had called the attack on voting rights by Republican lawmakers the greatest threat to American democracy since the Civil War.
Leading Democrats are largely ignoring the passage of the Texas law. The Democrats have effectively abandoned their “For the People Act,” which would expand ballot access and ban partisan gerrymandering, and face little chance of passing their more narrow “John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act” in the evenly divided US Senate.
The Texas law will place extensive restrictions and potential criminal penalties on voters. Absentee voting will be highly restricted, drop boxes for mail-in ballots and drive-through voting will be banned, and early voting hours will be limited. Election officials will face criminal prosecution if they mail unsolicited absentee ballots to voters or interfere in any way with partisan poll watchers, who are granted extra rights and protections under the law.
The entire bill is designed to place as many barriers and threaten as many criminal penalties as possible in an effort to intimidate and restrict voters, especially working class and minority voters more likely to vote for Democrats. An amendment designed to exclude voters who were unaware that they were ineligible to vote from criminal prosecution was stripped from the final version of the bill, which emerged from the process of reconciling the state House and Senate versions. The so-called Mason Amendment was named after Crystal Mason, a Texas woman facing a five-year prison sentence for illegally voting, despite not knowing that she was ineligible to vote.
Similar provisions exist in bills across the country. The Brennan Center, a voting rights advocacy group, reports that nearly 400 restrictive bills have been introduced in 48 state legislatures, with dozens making their way toward being signed into law.
The Republican assault on voting rights is a coordinated national offensive against basic democratic rights. It is bound up with the turn of the Republican Party toward fascism and the promotion of Trump’s “big lie” that he lost the 2020 election due to massive voter fraud. This was the basis on which Trump mobilized fascistic forces to storm the US Capitol on January 6 in an attempt to block the certification of the Electoral College vote. Virtually the entire Republican Party continues to promote this lie as part of ongoing conspiracies to establish dictatorial rule in the US.
The entire episode of the Texas Democrats’ “resistance” has contained a large element of political theater. In reality, no section of the ruling class or either of its political parties has a commitment to the defense of democratic rights, including the right to vote and have one’s vote counted.
From the start, the flight of the Texas House Democrats from the state, which temporarily prevented a quorum and delayed passage of the anti-voting rights bill in the Texas House, was a political stunt designed to provide a “left” fig leaf to cover up the Democratic Party’s cowardice and capitulation to the Republican offensive.
At no point have the Democrats made any serious attempt to stop the Republican assault on voting rights. In July, more than 50 Texas House Democrats flew to Washington D.C. to lobby the Biden White House and the Democratic-controlled Congress to pass federal legislation that would override the Texas bill. They were verbally hailed by the White House and Democratic leaders as modern-day civil rights heroes, while, in practice, given the cold shoulder.
Biden refused even to meet with them during their weeks-long sojourn in the nation’s capital. He rejected their appeals to support a weakening of the filibuster rule in the Senate so as to enable passage of the Democrats’ voting bills without Republican support.
Instead, he, along with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer, made it clear their top priority was securing Republican support to pass a watered-down, pro-corporate infrastructure bill that will provide windfall profits to private contractors. This was consistent with Biden’s posture of seeking bipartisan unity with the increasingly fascistic Republican Party.
The inevitable and ignominious end of the Texas Democrats’ stunt occurred when three of the Democrats who had fled the state over a month ago returned last week to the state House floor, providing the Republicans the quorum needed to pass the bill.
The spinelessness of the Democrats was further exposed in their response to the passage of the bill. Texas State Representative Garnet Coleman, whose return to the chamber helped ensure passage of SB1, attempted to downplay the consequences. “[A]ll I can hope is that if those problems occur … that we come back here in two years and fix it.”
Republican Governor Abbott, a Trump acolyte who has banned masking mandates in reopened Texas schools despite cascading COVID-19 infections and hospitalizations, declared this week that SB1 would “make it easier to vote and harder to cheat,” despite the absence of evidence of significant voter fraud.
When the Democrats first walked out of the state legislature in May to prevent voting on the Republican voting bill, Abbott called a special legislative session to pass it. He repeated this maneuver a few weeks later when the Democrats fled to Washington D.C., accompanied by the issuance of arrest warrants for the Democratic lawmakers for dereliction of their duties.
This debacle is another object lesson in the futility and danger of placing any confidence in the Democratic Party to defend the right to vote or any other democratic right. The political conclusion that must be drawn by workers is the need to break with these parties of Wall Street and the military and mobilize independently on the basis of a socialist program to defend basic democratic rights.
Pandemic-related unemployment programs expire for over 7.5 million jobless workers in the US
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/09/03/unem-s03.html
Jacob Crosse
12 hours ago
The Labor Day holiday this weekend marks the end of pandemic-related unemployment benefits for millions of jobless workers after the Democratic Party-controlled Congress and President Joe Biden refused to lift a finger to extend the programs which have served as a critical lifeline.
Pedestrians wear face coverings while passing by a sign on an empty restaurant/retail space Thursday, Jan. 21, 2021, in downtown Denver. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)
Despite the fact that COVID-19 continues to spread uncontrolled throughout the country, resulting in at least 660,000 deaths as of this writing, the ruthless logic of the capitalist system demands that workers return to work producing profits for the ruling class, even if it kills them and their families. An average of 164,000 people are testing positive for the virus every day.
Research conducted by the Century Foundation found that the ending of the CARES Act’s pandemic unemployment aid programs, such as Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA), Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation (FPUC) and Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC), will leave some 7.5 million workers with no unemployment benefits on Labor Day, September 6, 2021.
“This is a five-alarm fire that we’re treating as if nothing were wrong,” Andrew Stettner, a senior fellow with the Century Foundation, told Politico. “It is an act of policy negligence to allow a record number of workers to be completely cut off from unemployment benefits as the Delta variant surges, jeopardizing the economic progress we have made.”
The elimination of the unemployment programs, meager as they were, will spell catastrophe for millions of jobless workers and their families, many of whom have been forced to subsist on the paltry payments to pay for basic necessities, such as food, shelter and medicine.
While the US government is consigning millions of people to hunger, homelessness and poverty, no such worries plague Wall Street bankers and money managers, who will continue to grow fat off of the Federal Reserve’s monthly $120 billion injections, which Chairman Jerome Powell indicated last Friday would continue.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average continues to set record highs, lining the pockets of the ultra-wealthy and politically connected. Meanwhile, the latest report from the Department of Labor gives some indication of the large number of people reliant on unemployment benefits who will now be without any income. For the week ending August 14, over 12 million claims were made across all unemployment programs. This includes 5.4 million for the PUA and 3.8 million continued claims under the PEUC.
The PUA program was designed for so-called “gig” and contract workers, who would typically not qualify for traditional state unemployment benefits, while the PEUC is designed for workers who have already exhausted state benefits, which in many states typically last between 20 and 26 weeks, but in some states, such as Florida, can be as little as 12 weeks.
The FPUC initially provided an additional $600-a-week federal bonus on top of state-level unemployment benefits. However, this ended last July and was only reinstated briefly by then-President Donald Trump at $300 a week, half of the previous amount, and revived by the Democrats this year at the same level.
A March analysis from Forbes found that there is not a single state where the average weekly state benefit is more than $475, with a vast majority doling out between $236 and $320 a week, that is, between $12,272 and $16,640 a year. For comparison’s sake, a full-time minimum wage worker working 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, can expect to earn just over $15,000.
An unemployed worker from Detroit told the World Socialist Web Site that the cutoff of pandemic relief “has made it very difficult to pay bills and forces me to panic.
“Three hundred dollars a week is not enough to pay bills or even buy groceries for two weeks. The Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) and the Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC) at least gave me a few hundred extra dollars to pay bills. Not to mention student loans will go back to normal deductions soon.”
The elimination of benefits began earlier this summer, in June, when 26 states, all but one governed by a Republican, began ending the federal benefits prematurely. The cutoff was done with the blessing of the Biden administration, with White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki telling reporters on June 4 that Republican governors “have every right” to “not accept” federal unemployment payments, adding, “That’s OK.”
The cutting of benefits was hailed in the capitalist press, including NBC News, as a “bold, mass, social and economic experiment” to see if starving workers would be prodded back to work during a public health catastrophe.
The results of this criminal “experiment” were revealed in a recent paper, authored by economists and researchers at Columbia University, Harvard University, the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the University of Toronto. The paper found that ending benefits early did not translate into mass hiring. Instead, in the “cutoff states” studied between June and August, the researchers found that the majority who lost benefits, seven out of eight, did not find new jobs.
“Most people lost benefits and weren’t able to find jobs,” wrote University of Massachusetts Amherst Economics Professor and co-author of the paper, Arindrajit Dube. While the cutoff did not fuel job growth, it did result in a nearly $2 billion reduction in consumer spending from June through the first week of August in the “cutoff states.”
“They turned down federal transfers, and that money didn’t come back into the state [from new jobs income],” University of Toronto Assistant Professor of Economics Michael Stepner told CNBC.
The elimination of the benefits follows the recent Supreme Court ruling that overturned the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) eviction moratorium. While vindictive landlords and right-wing judges continued to file and process evictions throughout the pandemic, including nearly half a million in the 31 cities tracked by the Princeton Eviction Lab since March 2020, the complete elimination of the moratorium has left some 3.5 million people at risk of eviction in the next two months, according to a mid-August U.S. Census Bureau Household Pulse Survey.
One estimate from Goldman Sachs suggested that 750,000 renter households would likely lose their homes by the end of the year. The same analysis found that between 1 and 2 million households would not receive any federal support, putting them at risk of eviction.
The cutting off of benefits, coupled with the ending of the eviction moratorium, is forcing millions of workers and their families to move in with friends and relatives to avoid homelessness. The cramming of people into small apartments and rental homes exacerbates the spread of the deadly Delta variant of the coronavirus.
This has been given a further boost thanks to the duplicitous trade unions, which have worked hand in glove with the ruling class to reopen schools for in-person learning. This anti-scientific policy has led to the mass infection of children and hundreds of preventable deaths among educators and school personnel, while at the same time fueling community spread of the virus.
While Biden and the Democrats touted the passage of the American Rescue Plan in March as the “most progressive” and “transformative” piece of social legislation since the New Deal of the 1940s, the fact is that many of the “benefits” contained within the bill are mired in red tape or are fleeting, such as enhanced unemployment benefits.
Another example is the estimated $46.6 billion in federal rental assistance included in the bill, which was supposed to help offset the over $70 billion in back rent owed, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition. However, the Treasury Department revealed this past week that only $5.1 billion, or 11 percent, of the funds had been distributed through July, leaving millions of renters without access to the much needed support. Like state unemployment systems, the process for applying for and getting approved for the aid is purposely convoluted and difficult to navigate.
The incompetence, criminality and indifference to human suffering displayed by the ruling classes in all capitalist countries in response to the pandemic demonstrate the need for the working class to intervene independently with its own socialist program, which prioritizes the preservation of human life and social need above private profit.
Despite the fact that COVID-19 continues to spread uncontrolled throughout the country, resulting in at least 660,000 deaths as of this writing, the ruthless logic of the capitalist system demands that workers return to work producing profits for the ruling class, even if it kills them and their families. An average of 164,000 people are testing positive for the virus every day.
Research conducted by the Century Foundation found that the ending of the CARES Act’s pandemic unemployment aid programs, such as Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA), Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation (FPUC) and Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC), will leave some 7.5 million workers with no unemployment benefits on Labor Day, September 6, 2021.
“This is a five-alarm fire that we’re treating as if nothing were wrong,” Andrew Stettner, a senior fellow with the Century Foundation, told Politico. “It is an act of policy negligence to allow a record number of workers to be completely cut off from unemployment benefits as the Delta variant surges, jeopardizing the economic progress we have made.”
The elimination of the unemployment programs, meager as they were, will spell catastrophe for millions of jobless workers and their families, many of whom have been forced to subsist on the paltry payments to pay for basic necessities, such as food, shelter and medicine.
While the US government is consigning millions of people to hunger, homelessness and poverty, no such worries plague Wall Street bankers and money managers, who will continue to grow fat off of the Federal Reserve’s monthly $120 billion injections, which Chairman Jerome Powell indicated last Friday would continue.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average continues to set record highs, lining the pockets of the ultra-wealthy and politically connected. Meanwhile, the latest report from the Department of Labor gives some indication of the large number of people reliant on unemployment benefits who will now be without any income. For the week ending August 14, over 12 million claims were made across all unemployment programs. This includes 5.4 million for the PUA and 3.8 million continued claims under the PEUC.
The PUA program was designed for so-called “gig” and contract workers, who would typically not qualify for traditional state unemployment benefits, while the PEUC is designed for workers who have already exhausted state benefits, which in many states typically last between 20 and 26 weeks, but in some states, such as Florida, can be as little as 12 weeks.
The FPUC initially provided an additional $600-a-week federal bonus on top of state-level unemployment benefits. However, this ended last July and was only reinstated briefly by then-President Donald Trump at $300 a week, half of the previous amount, and revived by the Democrats this year at the same level.
A March analysis from Forbes found that there is not a single state where the average weekly state benefit is more than $475, with a vast majority doling out between $236 and $320 a week, that is, between $12,272 and $16,640 a year. For comparison’s sake, a full-time minimum wage worker working 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, can expect to earn just over $15,000.
An unemployed worker from Detroit told the World Socialist Web Site that the cutoff of pandemic relief “has made it very difficult to pay bills and forces me to panic.
“Three hundred dollars a week is not enough to pay bills or even buy groceries for two weeks. The Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) and the Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC) at least gave me a few hundred extra dollars to pay bills. Not to mention student loans will go back to normal deductions soon.”
The elimination of benefits began earlier this summer, in June, when 26 states, all but one governed by a Republican, began ending the federal benefits prematurely. The cutoff was done with the blessing of the Biden administration, with White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki telling reporters on June 4 that Republican governors “have every right” to “not accept” federal unemployment payments, adding, “That’s OK.”
The cutting of benefits was hailed in the capitalist press, including NBC News, as a “bold, mass, social and economic experiment” to see if starving workers would be prodded back to work during a public health catastrophe.
The results of this criminal “experiment” were revealed in a recent paper, authored by economists and researchers at Columbia University, Harvard University, the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the University of Toronto. The paper found that ending benefits early did not translate into mass hiring. Instead, in the “cutoff states” studied between June and August, the researchers found that the majority who lost benefits, seven out of eight, did not find new jobs.
“Most people lost benefits and weren’t able to find jobs,” wrote University of Massachusetts Amherst Economics Professor and co-author of the paper, Arindrajit Dube. While the cutoff did not fuel job growth, it did result in a nearly $2 billion reduction in consumer spending from June through the first week of August in the “cutoff states.”
“They turned down federal transfers, and that money didn’t come back into the state [from new jobs income],” University of Toronto Assistant Professor of Economics Michael Stepner told CNBC.
The elimination of the benefits follows the recent Supreme Court ruling that overturned the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) eviction moratorium. While vindictive landlords and right-wing judges continued to file and process evictions throughout the pandemic, including nearly half a million in the 31 cities tracked by the Princeton Eviction Lab since March 2020, the complete elimination of the moratorium has left some 3.5 million people at risk of eviction in the next two months, according to a mid-August U.S. Census Bureau Household Pulse Survey.
One estimate from Goldman Sachs suggested that 750,000 renter households would likely lose their homes by the end of the year. The same analysis found that between 1 and 2 million households would not receive any federal support, putting them at risk of eviction.
The cutting off of benefits, coupled with the ending of the eviction moratorium, is forcing millions of workers and their families to move in with friends and relatives to avoid homelessness. The cramming of people into small apartments and rental homes exacerbates the spread of the deadly Delta variant of the coronavirus.
This has been given a further boost thanks to the duplicitous trade unions, which have worked hand in glove with the ruling class to reopen schools for in-person learning. This anti-scientific policy has led to the mass infection of children and hundreds of preventable deaths among educators and school personnel, while at the same time fueling community spread of the virus.
While Biden and the Democrats touted the passage of the American Rescue Plan in March as the “most progressive” and “transformative” piece of social legislation since the New Deal of the 1940s, the fact is that many of the “benefits” contained within the bill are mired in red tape or are fleeting, such as enhanced unemployment benefits.
Another example is the estimated $46.6 billion in federal rental assistance included in the bill, which was supposed to help offset the over $70 billion in back rent owed, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition. However, the Treasury Department revealed this past week that only $5.1 billion, or 11 percent, of the funds had been distributed through July, leaving millions of renters without access to the much needed support. Like state unemployment systems, the process for applying for and getting approved for the aid is purposely convoluted and difficult to navigate.
The incompetence, criminality and indifference to human suffering displayed by the ruling classes in all capitalist countries in response to the pandemic demonstrate the need for the working class to intervene independently with its own socialist program, which prioritizes the preservation of human life and social need above private profit.
At least 43 dead as massive storm ravages US northeast
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/09/03/idaf-s03.html
Sandy English
12 hours ago
Massive flooding inundated broad swaths of the US northeast on Wednesday night, including New York City and downstate New York, as well as New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Areas of Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts were also flooded, and tornadoes were reported on Cape Cod.
At least 43 people are dead and more than 250,000 households and businesses are without power. Subway and commuter rail services were halted in many areas, roads were closed and the homes of hundreds of thousands of people were damaged or destroyed.
In New York City alone, at least 12 people died, one in a car stuck in the floodwater and 11 drowned in their basement apartments. Basement apartments, often flouting building codes, are cheaper housing for immigrant workers who live in the most expensive city in the United States. They are often crowded and may house undocumented workers who live in fear of deportation and work some of the lowest paying jobs.
Ang Lama, his wife Mingma Sherpa and their two-year-old son, Lobsang, an immigrant family from Nepal, died in their basement apartment in Woodside, Queens. The apartment has only one door. A neighbor told the media that she believed water was cascading down the staircase outside, which created pressure on the door so that the family could not open it.
As with many New York apartments, the windows were barred and could not be used for escape. A certificate of occupancy obtained by the New York Times shows that the death trap the family called home was not approved for residential use.
Five people died in one apartment complex in Elizabeth, New Jersey, including a couple in their 70s and their 38-year-old son, and one in a car in Passaic when the Passaic River overflowed. At least three people died in Pennsylvania, two apparently by drowning.
Transportation systems have been inundated. The worst conditions were seen in the New York City subway system. Photos posted by riders on Twitter showed water gushing down stairways and on top of trains. According to the MTA, people had to be evacuated from approximately 20 subway cars. Dozens of central auto arteries were closed down, including the New York State Thruway. One road in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, simply crumbled under the impact of the rain.
Residents throughout the region were given almost no time to prepare for the massive flooding. New York Governor Kathy Hochul declared a state of emergency only at 1:42 a.m. on Thursday morning, after the region was flooded. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio mentioned the rain only briefly at a press conference on Wednesday.
This is despite the fact that the flooding should have been anticipated. One meteorologist told the online journal The City, “The signs were here all week for a significant rain event. Yesterday the Weather Prediction Center had us at a pretty rare high risk of excessive rainfall for our area, which is pretty rare to see.”
The storm is from the remnants of Hurricane Ida, which made landfall in southern Louisiana as a Category 4 storm on Sunday. Winds of over 150 miles an hour (240 kilometers/hour) destroyed buildings, bridges and knocked out New Orleans’ electric grid. Five days later, approximately one million people in Louisiana and Mississippi remain without power, and at least six people died.
Storms with heavy rainfalls, while not completely unprecedented in the northeastern United States, have become more intense and more common in the last few years. Aiguo Dai, a professor of atmospheric science at the University at Albany at the State University of New York, told the New York Times: “Storm intensity is increasing much faster than the average change in precipitation. And it’s the intensity that really matters because that’s what we design our infrastructure to handle.”
Increased precipitation in a single rainfall is a feature of human-induced climate change. As the planet warms, the atmosphere contains more moisture which can fall in a single storm.
New York City’s Central Park measured the highest rainfall on record, 3.15 inches (8 cm) in an hour, on Wednesday night. This was far above the previous record of 1.94 inches (5 cm) during Tropical Storm Henri on August 21, a week and a half ago. Overall, nine inches (23 cm) of rain fell on many parts of New York, Connecticut, New Jersey and Massachusetts. The Schuylkill River in Philadelphia reached levels not seen since the 1850s.
The destruction in the northeast caused by Ida follows a series of other climate-change related disasters this year, including the devastating wildfires in the western United States, the floods in Europe in July that killed more than 200 people, and the floods in China last month, when 8 inches (20 cm) of rain fell in one hour on Zhengzhou, capital of the Chinese province of Henan.
Scientists have warned for decades that climate change will lead to more frequent and extreme weather events, but governments throughout the world have rejected the emergency measures necessary to slow and reverse the process. Nothing, moreover, has been done to make roadways safe, secure housing from flooding or upgrade sewer systems that routinely overflow. Investments and repairs pledged by Democratic Party politicians in New York City after Superstorm Sandy nearly one decade ago have gone largely unfulfilled.
In a statement about the disaster, President Joe Biden said that “extreme storms and the climate crisis are here” and called it “one of the great challenges of our time.” Such statements, made after every disaster, mean nothing.
The necessary reduction in greenhouse gasses required to halt global warming requires massive changes in energy production on the basis of a globally coordinated and scientific plan. To protect millions of workers throughout the world from the impact that climate change is already having requires an enormous diversion of social resources.
This type of transformation is incompatible with the capitalist system. It requires the transition to a planned, socialist economy on a world scale.
Over the past year, the ruling class has demonstrated that it is utterly incapable of responding to a global pandemic. The elementary measures necessary to eradicate the virus—social distancing, mass vaccination, a lockdown of schools and non-essential workplaces as well as support for workers who must stay home—have been rejected because they went against the interests of the financial oligarchy.
The same ruling class cannot and will not sanction the massive allocation of resources and infringements on profit required to address a threat to the very future of humanity itself. The fight against climate change is, as with every great social issue confronting the working class, a revolutionary question.
Louisiana nurses describe the conditions they face in the aftermath of Hurricane Ida
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/09/03/loui-s03.html
Katy Kinner
11 hours ago
Hurricane Ida made landfall on Sunday as the second most powerful storm in Louisiana’s history. While the recorded death toll in the state is currently 12, deaths are expected to rise as first responders search damaged homes and respond to calls for help. Power has been lost for one million residents in Louisiana and 120,000 residents in nearby Mississippi. Power is not expected to return to the New Orleans area for several weeks.
Already working under the dangerous conditions of the Delta variant, health care workers in the hurricane’s path are now facing additional horrors. There are multiple reports from nurses on social media as well as in the mainstream media that several hospitals have suffered extensive roof damage, water damage and power outages.
Dozens of hospitals have lost power and had to evacuate all their patients to intact hospitals. Elizabeth, a nurse from New Orleans, reported on Facebook, “No hospitals in NOLA have power. They are all running on generators.”
Another nurse on Reddit described the experience on Sunday as the storm surged, “I’m in a Louisiana hospital. We are being evacuated. I was in the direct line of the hurricane in Lafourche Parish. We were hit bad! Water is leaking everywhere—small electrical fires have started—all COVID ICU patients were moved to the ER! We have no water and we have to poop in red biohazard bags. A rat fell on a guy’s head. This had been one hell of a day.”
Lady of the Sea General Hospital in Galliano, the Ochsner St Anne’s hospital in Raceland and Ochsner’s Health Center in Kenner were just some of the hospitals to have reported extensive structural damage. Hospital evacuations took place across the state. Many nursing homes and long-term services care facilities were also evacuated.
Depending on the facility, evacuations have different levels of difficulty. Patients who cannot walk have to be transported by several health care workers via stretchers down multiple flights of stairs as elevators are not functioning.
Transporting critically ill patients, such as COVID patients in the ICU, can be deadly. A nurse on Facebook reported that multiple patients at her facility in Baton Rouge passed away during transport. The same nurse also stressed that she did not know how she would handle an influx of patients as her hospital is already full with COVID-19 cases.
In numerous instances evacuations were disorganized and unsafe. An investigation by the Louisiana Department of Health into the evacuation of 800 nursing home residents from eight separate facilities into a warehouse in Tangipahoa Parish during the storm is ongoing. Four residents have died following the evacuation.
Since Tuesday the state has been rescuing residents from the warehouse and has, so far, sent over fifty residents to a nearby hospital. One Louisiana Department of Health official, Joe Kanter, reported that many patients in the warehouse were soiled with urine and feces and families had no knowledge of their loved ones’ whereabouts during the storm.
Some hospitals and nursing homes were temporarily left without water, sewage or electricity due to failed generators. Others are still without power and water. Several nurses on the Facebook group “Louisiana Nurses” reported no running water or sewage at a hospital in Kenner since Sunday. Another wrote that they were without running water for a day, relying only on a limited supply of bottled water for all patients, staff and family members.
Joseph, a nurse in Mississippi, told the WSWS that he was staying in a nearby hotel, waiting his hospital to call him in to work. “Hospitals are on generators. They are working on paper. Only one or two computers can get Epic [hospital software used to organize and chart patient data]. Our hospital is doing what it can. They are full. No patients are being discharged from the floors. Therefore, it’s a gridlock. They are holding multiple patients in the ED.”
Joseph stated that he is part of “Team B,” meaning he was not on shift at the time of the hurricane, but will be called in in a few days to take over for “Team A” who was on shift during the hurricane and will remain locked down in the hospital until it is safe to change shifts. This is a common way of organizing health care workers during natural disasters and is a method used in most hospitals affected by Hurricane Ida. Depending on the location of hospitals, that means Team A nurses could be on shift for several days, sleeping in break rooms and lobbies.
As Hurricane Ida bore down on Louisiana, hospitals were already overfilled with COVID-19 patients, leaving little room for victims of the storm. The Associated Press reported on Sunday that there were more than 2,400 COVID-19 patients in Louisiana hospitals when the hurricane hit. After the ICU at one hospital lost generator power, COVID-19 patients had to be hand bagged, or manually resuscitated, until they could be moved to a floor with electricity.
Evacuated and closed hospitals can create a deadly situation for communities in the aftermath of Ida as residents face an increased risk of COVID-19 infections due to living in shelters or in close quarters with family. In addition, the improper use of generators in homes presents the risk of carbon monoxide poisoning. According to New Orleans local news station WWL-TV, nearly four dozen people have been hospitalized and one person has died from carbon monoxide poisoning. The number of those hospitalized is bound to increase.
In Terrebonne Parish where hospitals were evacuated and closed down, only a small ER remained open. Terrebonne Emergency Preparedness Director Earl Eues warned Monday that “Our hospitals are out of commission. If you have a heart attack or cut your arm while chain-sawing or fall off a roof, we have very limited medical care for you.”
Ida made landfall 16 years to the day after Hurricane Katrina hit the state, destroying much of the city of New Orleans. Elizabeth, a Louisiana nurse who worked at Methodist Hospital in New Orleans during Katrina, posted her thoughts on social media as Ida approached. “The same damned date of Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Isaac. Katrina changed my nursing career forever and Isaac flooded everyone around me in my town, including my elderly parents. Having yet another storm bearing down on you, ON THE EXACT SAME DATE OF SO MUCH TRAUMA, really fires up someone who is already high strung…”
Elizabeth also shared an online journal she wrote during Katrina, describing working throughout the storm, saying “That night was hell. Absolute hell. Patients were screaming for help (no call light system) all night long… You have NO IDEA how hot it was in the building. NO IDEA. We all dripped with sweat constantly… the stench of our patient’s bodies, along with our own was almost unbearable.”
Elizabeth described what happens when the generators stopped working in her hospital, an experience shared by nurses across social media during Ida. Patients who are on ventilators are reliant on electricity and will not survive unless someone is manually pumping their lungs with air. “One night, the generator died in the front building. They had to hand bag (ambu bag) the ventilator patients. Everyone took turns. Patients started dying… later the next day, the manpower basically ran out and the docs in the ICU decided to put t-pieces on the intubated patients (so if they could breathe on their own, they could. We stopped bagging). We lost four, I believe.”
She continued, “We had NO MEANS to contact the families to let them know that their loved ones had died, and their bodies may not be recovered for weeks and weeks… the dead bodies in the morgue on the first floor had floated away.”
The global ruling elite whose priorities lie with the profit interests of the giant corporations and the super-rich have shown that they are unwilling and unable to confront man-made climate change, which has exacerbated weather phenomena in line with repeated warnings made by scientists.
Decades of dismantling infrastructure, government regulation and social welfare have reduced hospitals and neighborhoods to a point where they stand no chance against natural disasters, leaving millions at the mercy of intensifying storms, heat waves and fires fueled by climate change.
Health care workers worldwide have suffered immensely under the decaying capitalist health care system that was ill prepared for both a global pandemic and extreme storms. It is time for health care workers and all workers to fight for a rational, science-based program to suppress the virus and combat climate change, based on putting human lives before profits. Above all this means taking up the fight for socialism.
The Texas abortion ban: A massive assault on democratic rights
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/09/03/pers-s03.html
Patrick Martin
11 hours ago
The US Supreme Court’s decision to allow the Texas abortion ban to go into effect September 1 is a brutal attack on democratic rights that must be opposed by the entire working class. At a stroke, abortion has been made effectively illegal in a state with nearly 10 percent of the American population. As many as two dozen other states are expected to follow the Texas example. The outlawing of abortion in half the country will not wait for a formal decision by the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade: It has already begun.
In this June 30, 2021, file photo the Supreme Court is seen in Washington. The Supreme Court is allowing a Texas law that bans most abortions to remain in force, stripping most women of the right to an abortion in the nation’s second-largest state. The court voted 5-4 to deny an emergency appeal from abortion providers and others that sought to block enforcement of the law that went into effect Wednesday, Sept. 1. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)
The Texas state law, passed last May, imposes the so-called “fetal heartbeat” rule adopted by half a dozen states previously, which effectively prohibits abortion after about six weeks of pregnancy—before most women even know they have become pregnant. The name is itself a medical absurdity, since at six weeks there is no fetus, only an embryo, and no heart to beat, only a collection of cells able to discharge electricity, which is detectable only on monitors developed in the last several decades.
A remarkable feature of the Supreme Court action is its moral and intellectual cowardice. The five justices who comprise the majority offered only a single paragraph to explain it, unsigned by any of them, made public 24 hours after the law had been allowed to take effect, and released to the public just before midnight. This for a decision that has incalculable and immediate effects on the lives of thousands of women, and ominous implications for millions.
The four justices who opposed the 5–4 decision spelled out the contradictions and legal absurdities of the Supreme Court action in dissenting opinions. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the Texas law “is a breathtaking act of defiance—of the Constitution, of this Court’s precedents, and of the rights of women seeking abortions throughout Texas… the court has rewarded the state’s effort to delay federal review of a plainly unconstitutional statute, enacted in disregard of the court’s precedents, through procedural entanglements of the state’s own creation.”
Justice Elena Kagan focused on the anti-democratic procedure adopted by the high court itself, not only in the Texas abortion issue, but in a series of other cases decided in what is now called the “shadow docket,” where the court rules on an emergency basis without hearings and other essential legal procedures. One such action was the recent high court ruling striking down the ban on most evictions imposed as a public health measure by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“Without full briefing or argument, and after less than 72 hours’ thought, this Court greenlights the operation of Texas’s patently unconstitutional law banning most abortions,” she wrote. “It has reviewed only the most cursory party submissions, and then only hastily. And it barely bothers to explain its conclusion—that a challenge to an obviously unconstitutional abortion regulation backed by a wholly unprecedented enforcement scheme is unlikely to prevail.”
This is a critical issue, as one legal analyst explained to the WSWS: “Perhaps the single most important consideration in deciding such injunctions is ‘the likelihood of success on the merits.’ The Texas law cannot be sustained unless Roe is reversed, as the dissents point out. The fact that the Supreme Court majority denied the injunction without discussing the likelihood of success on the merits can only be interpreted by someone who understands how these jurisprudential matters work as a stealth overruling of Roe.”
Reactionary and anti-democratic policies require reactionary and anti-democratic methods. Almost as significant as the effective repeal of abortion rights in the Texas law is the method chosen to carry out this attack: authorizing any individual to file a lawsuit against anyone who “aids or abets” an abortion, with the promise of a $10,000 reward and recovery of all legal costs if the lawsuit is upheld. As Justice Sotomayor wrote, “In effect, the Texas Legislature has deputized the State’s citizens as bounty hunters, offering them cash prizes for civilly prosecuting their neighbors’ medical procedures.”
According to press reports, Texas Right to Life has already begun soliciting anonymous tips on its website and asking for volunteers to “join the team of pro-lifers working to enforce” the law. An online form solicits informants to name a clinic or doctor potentially involved and pledges to “ensure that these lawbreakers are held accountable for their actions.”
The appeal to vigilantism is a feature of other new Texas state laws, like the bill restricting voting procedures that was passed last week, empowering far more aggressive conduct by “poll watchers,” whose task will be to challenge the right of voters to cast ballots. Because of another new state law permitting unrestricted “open carry” of firearms without license or permit, voters going to the polls are likely to confront armed challengers demanding their credentials.
President Biden issued a statement Wednesday denouncing the Supreme Court action as “an unprecedented assault on a woman’s constitutional rights under Roe v. Wade,” and the Texas law as one that “unleashes unconstitutional chaos and empowers self-anointed enforcers to have devastating impacts.”
But he proposed in response to this no more than consultations between the White House and various federal departments “to see what steps the Federal Government can take to ensure that women in Texas have access to safe and legal abortions…” In other words, nothing. He did not call for Congress to pass a law to codify Roe v. Wade, which would require overriding a Senate filibuster. Too many Senate Democrats support the filibuster—or oppose abortion rights—to carry this out.
The Democrats invariably use the five-member ultra-right majority on the Supreme Court as an excuse for doing nothing, but every one of these five justices owes his or her seat to the perfidy and fecklessness of the Democratic Party.
Clarence Thomas was confirmed after the notorious hearing presided over by Senator Joe Biden, then the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, who refused to block the nomination. Samuel Alito was confirmed after 18 Democrats joined with the Republicans to shut down a filibuster.
Neil Gorsuch was confirmed to fill the seat vacated by the death of arch-reactionary Antonin Scalia after Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell blocked the filling of the vacancy by President Obama with only a perfunctory response from either the White House or the Senate Democrats. McConnell then abolished the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations—something the Democrats now refuse to do to consolidate Roe v. Wade into law.
When Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh for the high court in 2018, the Democrats avoided any examination of his right-wing political and judicial record—including on abortion rights—in favor of a #MeToo-style denunciation of actions he allegedly carried out as a teenager, 30 years before his nomination. This approach, as well as the whole #MeToo campaign, was enthusiastically supported by the pseudo-left and publications like Jacobin.
Two years later, following the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg less than two months before the election, McConnell cynically abandoned the supposed principle of holding back on filling a Supreme Court vacancy during the final year of a presidency and rammed through Trump’s nomination of Amy Coney Barrett. Her gender made her immune to the type of attack carried out against Kavanaugh, as well as winning her points in those layers of the upper-middle class obsessed with identity politics.
As the World Socialist Web Site wrote in 2019,
The systematic evisceration of abortion rights across much of the country has attracted only a tiny fraction of the energy, money and media attention devoted to the Democrats’ reactionary #MeToo campaign, which seeks to improve the fortunes of upper-income women—actors, corporate executives, professors—by removing their male superiors and peers through largely trumped-up allegations of sexual misconduct. The Alyssa Milanos of this world do not care about abortion rights for working class women in Alabama and Georgia. Even with a total US ban, they would always be able to jet off to Toronto or London.
This political record demonstrates that even in those areas where the Democratic Party professes the most irreconcilable differences with the Republicans, such as abortion rights, this corporate-controlled party is incapable of offering any serious resistance to the mounting attacks on the democratic rights of the working class.
The fight to defend abortion rights, and all democratic rights, can go forward only through the independent political mobilization of the working class, in a struggle against the Democratic Party and the entire capitalist two-party setup, for a revolutionary socialist perspective.
The Texas state law, passed last May, imposes the so-called “fetal heartbeat” rule adopted by half a dozen states previously, which effectively prohibits abortion after about six weeks of pregnancy—before most women even know they have become pregnant. The name is itself a medical absurdity, since at six weeks there is no fetus, only an embryo, and no heart to beat, only a collection of cells able to discharge electricity, which is detectable only on monitors developed in the last several decades.
A remarkable feature of the Supreme Court action is its moral and intellectual cowardice. The five justices who comprise the majority offered only a single paragraph to explain it, unsigned by any of them, made public 24 hours after the law had been allowed to take effect, and released to the public just before midnight. This for a decision that has incalculable and immediate effects on the lives of thousands of women, and ominous implications for millions.
The four justices who opposed the 5–4 decision spelled out the contradictions and legal absurdities of the Supreme Court action in dissenting opinions. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the Texas law “is a breathtaking act of defiance—of the Constitution, of this Court’s precedents, and of the rights of women seeking abortions throughout Texas… the court has rewarded the state’s effort to delay federal review of a plainly unconstitutional statute, enacted in disregard of the court’s precedents, through procedural entanglements of the state’s own creation.”
Justice Elena Kagan focused on the anti-democratic procedure adopted by the high court itself, not only in the Texas abortion issue, but in a series of other cases decided in what is now called the “shadow docket,” where the court rules on an emergency basis without hearings and other essential legal procedures. One such action was the recent high court ruling striking down the ban on most evictions imposed as a public health measure by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“Without full briefing or argument, and after less than 72 hours’ thought, this Court greenlights the operation of Texas’s patently unconstitutional law banning most abortions,” she wrote. “It has reviewed only the most cursory party submissions, and then only hastily. And it barely bothers to explain its conclusion—that a challenge to an obviously unconstitutional abortion regulation backed by a wholly unprecedented enforcement scheme is unlikely to prevail.”
This is a critical issue, as one legal analyst explained to the WSWS: “Perhaps the single most important consideration in deciding such injunctions is ‘the likelihood of success on the merits.’ The Texas law cannot be sustained unless Roe is reversed, as the dissents point out. The fact that the Supreme Court majority denied the injunction without discussing the likelihood of success on the merits can only be interpreted by someone who understands how these jurisprudential matters work as a stealth overruling of Roe.”
Reactionary and anti-democratic policies require reactionary and anti-democratic methods. Almost as significant as the effective repeal of abortion rights in the Texas law is the method chosen to carry out this attack: authorizing any individual to file a lawsuit against anyone who “aids or abets” an abortion, with the promise of a $10,000 reward and recovery of all legal costs if the lawsuit is upheld. As Justice Sotomayor wrote, “In effect, the Texas Legislature has deputized the State’s citizens as bounty hunters, offering them cash prizes for civilly prosecuting their neighbors’ medical procedures.”
According to press reports, Texas Right to Life has already begun soliciting anonymous tips on its website and asking for volunteers to “join the team of pro-lifers working to enforce” the law. An online form solicits informants to name a clinic or doctor potentially involved and pledges to “ensure that these lawbreakers are held accountable for their actions.”
The appeal to vigilantism is a feature of other new Texas state laws, like the bill restricting voting procedures that was passed last week, empowering far more aggressive conduct by “poll watchers,” whose task will be to challenge the right of voters to cast ballots. Because of another new state law permitting unrestricted “open carry” of firearms without license or permit, voters going to the polls are likely to confront armed challengers demanding their credentials.
President Biden issued a statement Wednesday denouncing the Supreme Court action as “an unprecedented assault on a woman’s constitutional rights under Roe v. Wade,” and the Texas law as one that “unleashes unconstitutional chaos and empowers self-anointed enforcers to have devastating impacts.”
But he proposed in response to this no more than consultations between the White House and various federal departments “to see what steps the Federal Government can take to ensure that women in Texas have access to safe and legal abortions…” In other words, nothing. He did not call for Congress to pass a law to codify Roe v. Wade, which would require overriding a Senate filibuster. Too many Senate Democrats support the filibuster—or oppose abortion rights—to carry this out.
The Democrats invariably use the five-member ultra-right majority on the Supreme Court as an excuse for doing nothing, but every one of these five justices owes his or her seat to the perfidy and fecklessness of the Democratic Party.
Clarence Thomas was confirmed after the notorious hearing presided over by Senator Joe Biden, then the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, who refused to block the nomination. Samuel Alito was confirmed after 18 Democrats joined with the Republicans to shut down a filibuster.
Neil Gorsuch was confirmed to fill the seat vacated by the death of arch-reactionary Antonin Scalia after Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell blocked the filling of the vacancy by President Obama with only a perfunctory response from either the White House or the Senate Democrats. McConnell then abolished the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations—something the Democrats now refuse to do to consolidate Roe v. Wade into law.
When Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh for the high court in 2018, the Democrats avoided any examination of his right-wing political and judicial record—including on abortion rights—in favor of a #MeToo-style denunciation of actions he allegedly carried out as a teenager, 30 years before his nomination. This approach, as well as the whole #MeToo campaign, was enthusiastically supported by the pseudo-left and publications like Jacobin.
Two years later, following the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg less than two months before the election, McConnell cynically abandoned the supposed principle of holding back on filling a Supreme Court vacancy during the final year of a presidency and rammed through Trump’s nomination of Amy Coney Barrett. Her gender made her immune to the type of attack carried out against Kavanaugh, as well as winning her points in those layers of the upper-middle class obsessed with identity politics.
As the World Socialist Web Site wrote in 2019,
The systematic evisceration of abortion rights across much of the country has attracted only a tiny fraction of the energy, money and media attention devoted to the Democrats’ reactionary #MeToo campaign, which seeks to improve the fortunes of upper-income women—actors, corporate executives, professors—by removing their male superiors and peers through largely trumped-up allegations of sexual misconduct. The Alyssa Milanos of this world do not care about abortion rights for working class women in Alabama and Georgia. Even with a total US ban, they would always be able to jet off to Toronto or London.
This political record demonstrates that even in those areas where the Democratic Party professes the most irreconcilable differences with the Republicans, such as abortion rights, this corporate-controlled party is incapable of offering any serious resistance to the mounting attacks on the democratic rights of the working class.
The fight to defend abortion rights, and all democratic rights, can go forward only through the independent political mobilization of the working class, in a struggle against the Democratic Party and the entire capitalist two-party setup, for a revolutionary socialist perspective.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)