Tuesday, September 7, 2021
NABISCO STRIKES DEMONSTRATE GROWING STRENGTH OF THE LABOR MOVEMENT
By Tyler Walicek,
Truthout.
September 5, 2021
https://popularresistance.org/nabisco-strikes-demonstrate-growing-strength-of-the-labor-movement/
Confronted with management’s burdensome demands for contract concessions, Nabisco workers in Portland, Oregon, instigated a strike last month that has rapidly taken on national proportions. On August 10, around 200 members of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers’ International Union (BCTGM) Local 364 walked off the job at the industrial bakery. Since then, the workforces of every Nabisco production and distribution facility in the country have followed suit, a coordinated action years in the making. The strikers have drawn on the radical energies of a recently resurgent labor movement in the United States — a momentous upswell in a key vector of working-class power.
Sweet Deals For Executives, Scraps For Workers
Nabisco, the maker of popular processed foods like Chips Ahoy! cookies, Oreo cookies and Ritz crackers, is a subsidiary of Chicago’s Mondelēz International. When Kraft Foods split into different entities to skirt antitrust violations in 2012, its snack food business was spun off and reconstituted as Mondelēz, now a Fortune 500 company with $26 billion in yearly revenue. Mondelēz CEO Dirk Van de Put was compensated over $16 million in 2020; in 2017, he was lavished with a pay package of $42.4 million — 989 times the median pay of a Mondelēz employee. Meanwhile, management has declined to redistribute any of its pandemic profit gains; though people staying home in 2020 resulted in a major uptick in snack sales, the company has continued angling to cut overtime and healthcare benefits. Mondelēz’s single-minded focus on squeezing every possible cent from its workforce, combined with such exorbitant executive pay, has underscored disparities between workers and management, accelerating a discontentment that has been gathering strength for almost a decade.
Since Mondelēz assumed ownership of Nabisco in 2012, longtime workers claim, working conditions have deteriorated, sacrificed to management’s ever-more relentless drive for profits. In the background are ambient threats of outsourcing and job loss: The company halved its union workforce earlier this year, with plant closures in Fairlawn, New Jersey, and Atlanta, Georgia, and the union has had to negotiate with an acute awareness that the company can make good on its threats of offshoring. Six years ago, Mondelēz transferred Oreo production from Chicago to Mexico — a move that earned it condemnation from Trump, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders alike.
Against this background, tension between capital and labor within Mondelēz-Nabisco has heightened since contract negotiations in 2016, when management attempted to eliminate pensions in favor of 401(k)s. In April 2020, BCTGM ceded that ground — only for the company to return to the table with even more extensive demands. BCTGM Local 364 vice president and 14-year Nabisco veteran Mike Burlingham says Mondelēz has displayed no interest in compromise: “They don’t want to share their wealth with the workers.… They want to come to the table, insult us with their proposal — which is more like a list of demands — and try to tell us to our faces that this is for our own good,” he told Truthout.
The Mondelēz proposal, which a spokesperson euphemistically described as an “alternative work schedule,” would require more work for less pay, at an already taxing and physically demanding job. Burlingham says that even without the proposed changes, “a lot of us are already putting in 13 to 16 hours a day due to forced overtime, day in and day out, for weeks on end.”
The previous contract afforded workers time-and-a-half pay for shifts over 8 hours and Saturdays, with double time for Sundays. Now, the company wants to limit overtime pay to those who work more than 40 hours — without taking into account which days are worked, or the lengths of individual shifts. Burlingham estimated that for some workers, the reductions in overtime pay could result in losses of $10,000 per year.
The plan would also establish a two-tiered benefits system, under which new hires would also be charged more for health insurance — a well-worn tactic for stoking internal division within unions. This management overreach led to a breakdown in negotiations. It was Mondelēz-Nabisco’s continued intransigence that led BCTGM to trigger the Portland action, the first strike at the company in 52 years.
Coordinated by BCTGM International, the strike expanded to an interstate scale. Mondelēz has three factories (Chicago; Portland, Oregon; and Richmond, Virginia) and three distribution facilities (Aurora, Colorado; Addison, Illinois; and Norcross, Georgia) — all six of which are now on strike. These workforces were already stretched to breaking point. The frustrations expressed by strikers at the Portland bakery are far from isolated concerns, and were echoed by those at other Mondelēz facilities. Interviewed by Jacobin, utility operator April Flowers-Lewis, who has worked at the Chicago plant for 27 years, described deteriorating conditions: brutal schedules, rescinded benefits and an attitude of disrespect from management. In July, Mondelēz was also cited by the city of Chicago for failing to pay out sick leave.
A Mondelēz spokesperson, quoted by CBS, stated that the “alternative work schedule” proposals are intended to “promote the right behaviors” among workers. Elsewhere, the company described the goal of its proposal as “setting up our U.S. bakeries for future investment and long-term success.” At present, the company is busing in nonunion workers (colloquially, “scabs”) to continue production.
Meanwhile, as the action enters its third week in Portland, strikers have earned the resounding support of many in the community. Mohammed Mohammed, a production worker on the picket line, spoke to Truthout as a cacophony of celebratory honks from passing cars threatened to drown out his words: “I’m grateful for the city that’s shown us a lot of support. We got a lot of union support; a lot of local businesses bring us food.… People know we’re essential. We’re strong because of each other.”
Such expressions of solidarity have been plentiful, from supporters both on the ground and online (including Danny DeVito). A strike support GoFundMe has raised over $50,000, and BCTGM has urged a boycott of all of Nabisco’s enduringly popular snack foods. On the picket line, demonstrators have been joined by members of over a dozen other unions, including the AFL-CIO and UFCW. At one point, confirmed Mike Burlingham, union railroad conductors in Portland reversed their train and refused to cross the picket line to deliver their freight of confectionary ingredients to the bakery.
Strikers in Portland, as well as those in Atlanta, Richmond and Chicago, have received the aid of their local Democratic Socialists of America chapters. Portland DSA has helped coordinate solidarity rallies, marches and strike support, as has Portland Jobs with Justice, a labor and community activism coalition. Organizers entered a Fred Meyer grocery by the dozen to make shoppers aware of the boycott. Jobs with Justice co-chair Russell Lum told Truthout, “It’s a cry out to Nabisco, sure, but it’s also a cry out against a broken economic system…. The bleeding of these jobs [by outsourcing] is Mondelēz’s business model, and the signal to the workers is, ‘You’re next.’ That’s how Mondelēz wants to bargain, with the workers feeling like they’re on a knife’s edge.”
Demanding More Than Crumbs
The past few years in the United States have seen a historic groundswell of labor actions, coinciding with the highest public favorability toward unions in decades. 2018-2019 were particularly militant years; notable developments include the late 2019 major strike at GM and the Red for Ed wave of nationwide teachers’ strikes. Strike activity reached a 30-year-high in 2019. Some Bureau of Labor Statistics data gave the impression that work stoppages dropped off precipitously at the outset of the COVID-19 crisis — though, it’s worth noting that these numbers do not reflect actions involving under 1,000 employees. During that period, amid complicating factors like layoffs and social distancing, there was an enormous number of small-scale pandemic-safety walkouts by essential workers. Alternate data better captured these stochastic, nontraditional actions. In other words, solidarity, organizing and radical energies persisted throughout the pandemic. And though the virus is still exacting a devastating toll, the return to major strike activity in 2021 indicates a potential for sustained worker militancy.
BCTGM’s modest size makes its members’ boldness all the more impressive. Amid a national climate hostile to unions, BCTGM, further beleaguered by offshoring and plant closures, fell from over 114,000 members in 2002 to about 63,900 in 2019 — making it one of the smallest production worker unions. Historically, the union has not been particularly militant. Like many manufacturing strikes, BCTGM’s actions have tended towards the defensive: protecting existing wins, rather than breaching new territory.
That said, “there are a lot of signs that even manufacturing union workers are increasingly fed up with employer demands for concessions,” says C.M. Lewis, an editor at the labor publication Strikewave. The Mondelēz-Nabisco strikes are preventative measures: “We’re not on strike to secure huge gains. We’re on strike to keep what we’ve already got,” Cameron Taylor, BCTGM Local 364’s business agent, told HuffPost. However, taken with a string of recent BCTGM actions, they’re a component of a positive trend. Says Lewis, “That Nabisco workers [are] striking in multiple states is rare and encouraging, and could be a sign of increased militancy down the road.”
BCTGM members are finding their footing: They organized a workforce of several hundred at a Tennessee brewery in December 2020. And in July, BCTGM members took on the titanic PepsiCo, striking at a plant owned by its subsidiary Frito-Lay in Topeka, Kansas, over concerns analogous to those at Nabisco. The 19-day strike ended with a renegotiated contract — which didn’t meet every BCTGM term, but still held ground and won some gains. Though short of unmitigated victory, that strike still helped bolster the confidence of Nabisco workers in Portland, as Mike Burlingham related to Truthout: “There was a show of solidarity” with Frito-Lay employees, he said, and “it was really good to see those workers were able to come to an agreement … and were successful.” Burlingham added, “There’s been an influx of strikes around the country … people are paying attention to what’s going on. It’s getting to a point where people are saying, ‘It’s enough of the corporate greed. Enough is enough.’”
BCTGM is up against a company that has proven willing to go to great lengths to further exploit workers and ensure the flow of profit. Mondelēz’s threats of offshoring have weight behind them, thanks to free trade agreements and loosened restraints on capital mobility. Mondelēz also maintains massive production capability at a “superplant” in Mexico — ostensibly, the “world’s largest cookie plant” — giving the company enormous leverage in its threats to shift production to workforces in Mexico that are even more callously exploited. (Relatedly, the company, along with Nestle, Cargill, Hershey, and others, has also been named in a class action lawsuit alleging that it “knowingly” utilized forced child labor. That’s far from its only scandal.)
With corporate power further entrenched by the depredations of neoliberal policy and the dismantling of labor laws, workers often find themselves struggling to preserve a status quo. Yet, as C.M. Lewis says, “Successful strikes build confidence and power, and Nabisco workers are experiencing firsthand what potential power they hold in their workplaces. Although this is a defensive strike for the moment, holding the line now is a good start toward going on the offensive and raising standards instead of managing declining working conditions.”
Unions across the country are demonstrating a greater willingness to strike when companies go beyond the pale. The Nabisco picketers all shared that sense of last-straw frustration. Said Oreo production line worker Nicole Bertholomey, “They’re being greedy. We work so hard for this company, and we have families at home. They’re making so much money, and they still want to take everything away from us.”
The 2021 Nabisco strike sits at the intersection of two intertwined forces: growing union confidence, support and strike activity, in correlation with widespread austerity and egregious demands from the ownership class. The interests of capital, at Mondelēz and elsewhere, are not only unwilling but are structurally unable to pursue any end but endless profit. As Nabisco employee Mohammed Mohammed told Truthout, echoing his coworker Mike Burlingham, “It came to a point where enough is enough.”
That phrase could be heard from many others up and down the Nabisco picket line, and the sentiment has lately found purchase throughout the country, from coal mines to the offices of The New Yorker. “Labor” is not a monolithic entity, and there are of course complex challenges impacting unions’ ability to take on corporate power. Still, it’s evident that workers are increasingly unwilling to capitulate — and less hesitant to deploy the strike.
Hope lies in the fact that an embattled populace has, in recent years, been reminded again and again that organizing is the real vehicle of working-class power. BCTGM’s bold actions of the summer of 2021 are an indicator that unions in the United States, resurgent to a degree unseen in decades, will sustain their struggle into the future.
AUSTRALIAN UNION CALLS FOR BOYCOTT OF GENERAL MILLS PRODUCTS
By
People's Dispatch.
September 5, 2021
https://popularresistance.org/australian-union-calls-for-boycott-of-general-mills-products/
Workers’ Strike Completes Third Week
The boycott call by the United Workers Union comes as the indefinite strike by 90 workers of the General Mills factory in Rooty Hill, near Sydney, is completing three weeks.
Around 90 Australian workers at the General Mills factory in New South Wales have been on strike for nearly three weeks. On Wednesday, June 23, the national leadership of the United Workers Union (UWU) called for a national boycott of General Mills products, especially their highly popular Old El Paso and Latina Fresh brands. The boycott is an attempt to expand what the UWU calls the “David vs Goliath battle against one of the world’s biggest food manufacturers.”
The UWU is one of the largest trade union confederations in Australia, consisting of more than 150,000 workers from 45 industrial sectors. It is often called the largest blue-collar trade union in the country. A boycott call from UWU can have serious consequences for the company. The UWU stated, “Let’s show General Mills they messed with the wrong union.”
Workers at the General Mills factory in Rooty Hill, a Sydney suburb, have been on a strike since June 4 after the company refused to accept demands for wage hike rates and proposed to make changes to work conditions in the factory. This is the first strike by workers at any General Mills facility in Australia in the past two decades.
The UWU branch organizing the workers in Rooty Hill has been bargaining with the company for nearly six months for a three-year contract. Among the several demands put forward by workers, a crucial one is an annual pay rise of 3% for the next three years as the workers had to put in extra time and effort during the COVID-19 pandemic. The company rejected these demands and previously offered only a 2% hike in the first year and 1.25% rise per year for the next two years of the contract.
In the latest negotiations, when the UWU was ready to accept a 3% annual pay rise with no change in work conditions, the company rejected it and did not give a counter offer.
“The company, rather than recognizing the workers as essential workers and valuing their labor, has instead punished them. It has attempted to undermine good union jobs that have been won and defended for over a quarter of a century,” said Tom Sayers, a UWU official, speaking to The Guardian, weekly publication of the Communist Party of Australia (CPA),
According to the union, as essential workers, most of its members undertake 12-hour shifts and even multiple weekend shifts to keep up with increasing demand and labor shortages during the pandemic. While they were paid overtime, workers still feel short-changed for their contribution to the company’s tremendous rise in fortunes.
UWU’s letter to the General Mills management states, “Throughout 2020 and 2021, as essential workers, we worked extra-long hours to keep up with massive increases in demand during the pandemic. We thought this would mean that General Mills would listen to our demands: But we were wrong!”
Workers also argue that the company has raked in billions in profits, both globally and in Australia, over the past few years. UWU pointed out the company’s profits have increased by 40% in the last five years and it has raked in USD 26 billion in net revenue for the year 2019-2020.
Union officials have noted that at the height of the pandemic, the company saw a 14% increase in profits for a 21-week period ending August 2, 2020. It also saw a net sales increase of USD 4.5 billion in the third quarter of 2020-2021, which translates to an 8% rise year-over-year. The company thus has the capacity to meet the workers’ demands.
Workers have also complained of “rampant casualization and low wage growth” and the emergence of a two-tiered wage system which keeps new hires stuck in low wages. Many workers have been employed for five years or more under insecure contracts and the company has refused to make them permanent. A sizeable portion of these workers belong to migrant groups like Filipino-Australians.
Sayers told The Guardian that the casualization and tiered system of wages “has become increasingly common in food manufacturing, and it’s an attempt to split the workforce.”
Many of the casual workers have also reportedly been threatened with job loss and forced to cross the picket line. The company has begun outsourcing work using a labor hire firm called Chandler Mcleod to compensate for the striking workers.
UWU has presented a sense of workers’ unity and solidarity in this struggle. The striking workers’ families, along with members and leaders from its other units in New South Wales, and others like the NSW Teachers’ Federation, Filipino groups like Migrante NSW, Yapak, Bayan, and Anakbayan, have all joined the striking workers at the picket line in large numbers. Workers have also received support from political parties like the CPA and the Australian Labor Party (ALP).
The Economist: “Excess deaths” during pandemic exceed 15 million
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/09/06/econ-s06.html
Benjamin Mateus
8 hours ago
Fifteen million more people have died during the COVID-19 pandemic compared to historical norms, according to a recent report by the Economist. This figure is more than three times the reported COVID-19 deaths, which stands at 4.6 million people.
“Many people who die while infected with SARS-CoV-2 are never tested for it, and do not enter the official totals,” the editors write. “Conversely, some people whose deaths have been attributed to COVID-19 had other ailments that might have ended their lives on a similar timeframe anyway. And what about people who died of preventable causes during the pandemic because hospitals full of COVID-19 patients could not treat them? If such cases count, they must be offset by deaths that did not occur but would have in normal times, such as those caused by flu or air pollution.”
The capitalist nations were warned repeatedly by scores of national and international public health agencies that such an event was more than certain. Every means was within their capacity to employ all resources to have checked the spread of the infection in its initial phase and brought the pandemic to an abrupt end.
Instead, the financial oligarchy have squandered every opportunity to end the suffering of billions of people by further enriching themselves through massive transfers of wealth only to force workers back to workplaces. This policy has given free rein to the virus to not only spread into every corner of the planet, but to constantly mutate into more virulent forms. It has been the policy of herd immunity that has culled such a massive number of people under the false auspices of “the cure can’t be worse than the disease.” In fact, as the Economist report indicates, the disease has taken a horrific toll on the international working class, orphaning and impoverishing untold millions.
As the Economist report states, the wide range in figures stems from the complex nature of ascertaining data from national and subnational levels. Delays in reporting deaths, specifically confirming COVID-19 and COVID-related deaths and attributing the cause of death, make the statistics imprecise but offer an appropriate ball-park figure. Among the globe’s 156 countries with one million or more people, the Economist only managed to obtain data on total mortality from 84. Among these, some have only reported these figures once to their national registries.
As the table above indicates, the estimate of excess deaths in regions like Asia and Africa are 700 to 800 percent over official COVID-19 deaths. This stems from the implementation of herd immunity policies while lacking the resources to care for the infected. Additionally, lack of reliable reporting of COVID-19 cases and delays or the omission of tracking of those that have died has led to this stark disparity in figures.
The impact of the pandemic on India has been, by far, most calamitous. The surge of the Delta variant in the spring across the country accounts for a significant number of excess global deaths over the last five months. Although there had been only 171,000 COVID-19 deaths reported in mid-April, the excess deaths at the time were ten times higher, at 1.6 million. Since then, even though only 270,000 additional COVID-19 deaths have been reported, the excess deaths have climbed 2.7 million, reaching 4.3 million.
Additionally, countries like Indonesia had very deadly foray with the virus, seeing the reported COVID-19 death toll surge as health care systems became inundated in a matter of days. With supposedly 135,500 COVID-19 deaths, the excess deaths stand at 500 percent higher, with 800,000 estimated deaths.
South Africa has been pummeled by repeated waves of infections. After having faced the Beta variant of the coronavirus, they are now dealing with another strain designated as C.1.2, which is demonstrating an unusually high number of mutations and mutation rate. Though the officially-reported number of COVID-19 deaths is over 80,000, there have been close to a quarter-million excess deaths, a figure three times higher. However, the excess deaths compared to COVID-19 deaths across many nations in Africa indicate a severe undercounting. Excess deaths in Nigeria are 6,400 percent higher. In Ethiopia, it is 3,500 percent. Egypt’s is 1,400 percent, and in the Congo, a little more than 1,000 COVID deaths have been reported. However, the excess deaths are above 130,000, or more than 12,000 percent. Despite reports of Africa being spared during the pandemic, this critical analysis suggests otherwise.
Even in regions like Europe and the US with more robust reporting systems and detailed documentation of death certificates, because of the social crisis and ensuing chaos created with overburdened health systems during repeated waves of infection, excess death estimates are far above official COVID-19 deaths reported.
By the end of July, excess deaths in the United States had plummeted even below their historical norms, and cases of COVID-19 and deaths had approached lows not seen since March 2020, when the pandemic first surged across the country.
But as the US state and federal government implemented a bipartisan policy of reopening schools, COVID-19 cases have rapidly climbed to include COVID-19 deaths having most recently exceeded the seven-day average of over 1,500 per day. Excess deaths, too, have catapulted, reaching 3,000 per day. That means that excess deaths are now twice those of the official COVID-19 death tolls. In all, the cumulative COVID-19 deaths, according to their tracker, currently have reached close to 650,000, and excess deaths are 820,000, or 30 percent higher.
It is staggering to conceive that when in July the country could have heeded the warnings made by epidemiologists about the deadliness of the Delta variant and imposed a comprehensive elimination strategy to prevent any further COVID-19 related illnesses, instead, in one short month it is facing, perhaps, its worst ordeal with the virus.
In summing up their analysis, the Economist report states, “Measured by excess deaths as a share of the population, many of the world’s hardest-hit countries are in Latin America. Although Russia’s official death tally suggests that it has protected its citizens tolerably well, its numbers on total mortality imply that it has in fact been hit quite hard by COVID-19. Similarly, we estimate that India’s death toll is actually in the millions rather than the hundreds of thousands. At the other end of the table, a handful of countries have actually had fewer people die during the pandemic than in previous years.”
Even as the pandemic surges to new heights, capitalist governments have no intention to raise a single finger to bring this pandemic to an end. The present course they have set the world on will also see new and more deadly strains of the coronavirus emerge that will perpetuate the pandemic leading to more untold millions of deaths. Avoiding this catastrophe requires a political intervention by the working class, armed with the demand for the complete and total eradication of COVID-19.
Republicans step up efforts to disrupt January 6 investigation
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/09/06/coup-s06.html
Patrick Martin
8 hours ago
House Republicans have taken a number of steps this week aimed at disrupting the work of the House Select Committee established to investigate the January 6 attack on Congress, including the role of President Trump and other top Republican leaders in preparing and directing the assault.
The latest actions were touched off by letters sent Monday to at least 30 telecommunications and social media companies, including Apple, AT&T, Facebook, Parler and Verizon, asking them to preserve records that might be sought for the investigation into the January 6 coup attempt.
The letter, co-signed by chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Mississippi) and vice chair Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming), cited records from April 1, 2020 through January 31, 2021, indicating that at least some of these records will be subpoenaed by the committee. The list of individuals covered by the request has not been made public, but it reportedly includes at least a dozen Republican members of Congress.
The information sought would not include the content of the communications, but rather who called whom—connections that could be quite revealing, particularly in the days leading up the assault on Congress and on January 6 itself.
A group of ultra-right Republicans, including Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Andy Biggs and Paul Gosar of Arizona, Louie Gohmert of Texas, Mo Brooks of Alabama, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Matt Gaetz of Florida, were in regular touch with fascist groups like the Proud Boys and the Oathkeepers during months between the election and January 6, when the results of the Electoral College vote were to be certified by Congress.
There were reports of representatives giving guided tours of the Capitol a few days beforehand to people later arrested on January 6—essentially helping them carry out reconnaissance for the upcoming attack.
During the attack itself, Boebert was live-tweeting the movements of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, one of the main targets of the attackers, who stormed her offices, chanting “Nancy, Nancy,” while her staff barricaded a conference room in terror.
If any Republican representatives were in direct communication with the rioters during the attack, they could face felony conspiracy charges, as well as expulsion from their seats in the House.
That no doubt accounts for the vehemence with which McCarthy responded to threat of subpoenas. He issued a denunciation Tuesday of what he called “attempts to strong-arm private companies to turn over individuals’ private data.” He told the tech companies not to cooperate with any requests for information from the House Select Committee, warning that otherwise a future Republican House majority, perhaps after the 2022 elections, “would not forget.”
This was a direct attempt to block the functioning of a committee established by a majority vote in the House of Representatives. McCarthy had previously sought to prevent the committee from functioning by naming die-hard Trump supporters like Jim Jordan of Ohio to serve on it. When Pelosi rejected Jordan and Jim Banks of Indiana, McCarthy responded by pulling all Republicans off it, except for the anti-Trump Republican Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, selected by Pelosi.
The Select Committee issued statement in response to McCarthy’s threat, saying, “We’ve asked companies not to destroy records that may help answer questions for the American people. The committee’s efforts won’t be deterred by those who want to whitewash or cover up the events of January 6th, or obstruct our investigation.”
Congressional committees regularly subpoena private data held by telecommunications and social media companies. The only difference in this case is that the request includes data relating to members of Congress. It also includes data of executive branch officials in the Trump administration, including Trump himself, who was in regular contact with the fascist groups, either directly or through intermediaries like his long-time political crony Roger Stone.
In a follow-up action, McCarthy and other top Republican leaders are discussing the expulsion of Cheney and Kinzinger from the Republican caucus. Cheney was actually the chair of that caucus, the number three position in the leadership, until earlier this year, but she was voted out and replaced with Elaine Stefanik of New York as a result of her public condemnation of Trump over the January 6 coup attempt.
On Thursday, McCarthy gave an interview to a local television station in his California district, in which he claimed that investigations by the FBI and the Senate had already cleared Trump of any responsibility for the January 6 attack.
This is a declaration of unmatched cynicism, since McCarthy himself stood on the floor of the House of Representatives January 13, during the debate on Trump’s second impeachment, and said that Trump bore responsibility for the attack but that impeachment was the wrong remedy.
Since then, however, McCarthy has abased himself before Trump and his fascist acolytes and tried to demonstrate his abject loyalty to the would-be dictator.
His statement Thursday only had one fig leaf—he cited the bipartisan report of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, headed by Democrat Amy Klobuchar, which limited its examination of January 6 to the security failures at the Capitol and did not address the role of Trump at all, thanks to Klobuchar’s cave-in to the Republicans on the committee.
As for the FBI, no report has actually been issued, only a leak to Reuters which claims that the FBI exonerated Trump, without addressing any of the factual questions involved. There is no indication that Trump has ever been interviewed by any federal agency about his actions on January 6, when he addressed a rally of thousands of supporters outside the White House, directed them to the Capitol, then watched with satisfaction as they broke into the building and sought to block certification of his election defeat.
Fascist militias threaten officials, force shutdown of schools in Washington State
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/09/06/prou-s06.html
Jacob Crosse
9 hours ago
Three Vancouver, Washington public schools were put into lockdown this past Friday after roughly 50 Proud Boy militia members and anti-mask protesters attempted to enter Skyview High School with a maskless student, in violation of public health guidelines. In addition to Skyview High School, Alki Middle School and Chinook Elementary were placed on high alert and locked down due to the fascist threat. Video recordings showed Proud Boys chanting “USA” while waving American flags and wearing their trademark yellow and black shirts, with the group’s motto “F--k Antifa” displayed on their chests. Despite members of the group being recorded massing on school grounds, in breech of the law, local police apparently made no attempt to disrupt the fascist rally and appeared to look on approvingly. As of this writing, no arrests have been reported and no charges have been filed.
In a report from Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB), private security guards, who denied the Proud Boys entry into the school, said some of the women aligned with the Proud Boys accosted female students, calling them “derogatory names.”
Writing to OPB, Pat Nuzzo, a communications director for Vancouver Public Schools (VPS), said the lockdown was instituted as a “safety precaution.” VPS school board President Kyle Sproul told OPB that the lockdown was needed to ensure student safety. Sproul added that “protesting at our school campuses and disrupting the school day is not in the best interests of students.”
In addition to the Proud Boys, members of the far-right Patriot Prayer militia group also took part in the provocation at Skyview High School. The rally itself was organized online by Patriot Prayer leader Joey Gibson, who falsely claimed in online posts building for the event that students who did not wear masks would be arrested if they attempted to go to school.
This is not the first time far-right Patriot Prayer members have tried to enter restricted spaces in order to violently pursue their agenda.
Last December, Gibson and fellow Patriot Prayer leader Chandler Pappas, in a prelude to the January 6 attack, lead a group of approximately 100 as they stormed the Oregon state Capitol in Salem in an attempt to disrupt a special legislative session.
While the Proud Boys were joined by a few parents from other schools protesting the mask mandate, students at the school organized an impromptu counter-protest in which they distributed masks and held up signs supporting public health measures aimed at containing the spread of the coronavirus. A 16-year old student named Lucas told OPB, “All the learning gets disrupted. We have to sit down quietly, not make noise, and we were hunkered down in our classrooms for around an hour to an hour-and-a-half.”
The very next day, a group of Proud Boys rallied approximately 100 miles north, in Olympia, Washington, in opposition to COVID-19 public health restrictions. The group attacked counter-demonstrators and journalists, assaulting independent journalist Alissa Azar. In a disturbing social media clip, Azar can be heard screaming as Proud Boys spray her with bear mace and shove her to the ground.
Following the assault on Azar, Proud Boy brawler Tusitala “Tiny” Toese was reportedly shot in the leg. Olympia police say they are investigating the shooting of Toese. No arrests have been made as of this writing.
In another assault on journalists carried out by far-right elements, on August 28 in Traverse City, Michigan, Record-Eagle reporter Brendan Quealy was attacked by anti-vaccine and anti-mask protesters while covering their rally at a public park. Quealy told police that two men shoved and pushed him before punching him in the face for recording audio at the rally. The attack is still being “investigated” by the Grand Traverse County Sheriff’s Office.
The hands-off approach taken by local police towards the violent militia groups and their supporters mirrors the lax treatment Proud Boys members encountered when confronted by US Capitol Police during the January 6 attack on the Capitol. The assault, spearheaded by Proud Boys militia members, was aimed at blocking congressional certification of the Electoral College vote and officially recognizing Joe Biden as the president-elect.
Dozens of members of the group are facing some of most serious charges levied by federal prosecutors in connection with the attempted coup, but dozens more Proud Boys who participated in the attack and in subsequent violent rallies have yet be arrested. The far-right foot soldiers are deeply intertwined with the Republican Party and the capitalist state. Members of the group have admitted to being FBI informants and enjoy close relations with Republican Party operatives .
The incident in Washington State was not the only time last week when far-right elements attempted to storm schools in opposition to public health measures meant to stem the spread of the pandemic. The day before the Proud Boys rally in Vancouver, Washington, three Arizona men entered the Mesquite Elementary School in Tuscon carrying zip-ties and attempted to perform a “citizen’s arrest” on Principal Diane Vargo for having the temerity to enforce masking and quarantine mandates.
No injuries were reported and the three men left the school after police were called.
Forty-year-old Rishi Rambaran, the father of one of the children instructed to quarantine, was identified as one of the men who stormed the school. He is the only person arrested in connection with attack.
Another attacker who was identified is Kelly Walker, who live-streamed the incident on Instagram. According to The Daily Beast, Walker owns a coffee shop in Tuscon that describes itself as “Tuscon’s hub of freedom and delicious coffee.” The shop recently hosted a “Freedom Talk” event for Republican Party operative, convicted felon and far-right commentator Dinesh D’Souza. In October, the coffee shop is planning on hosting former Space Force Lieutenant Colonel Matthew Lohm e ier .
Lohmeier was relieved of his command earlier this year after he appeared on a podcast promoting his self-published book, which warns of an impending “white genocide.” Lohmeier claimed that a “neo-Marxist agenda” was being advanced in the military, cloaked in “Critical Race Theory,” with the ultimate aim of overthrowing the US government and replacing it with a “communist dictatorship.”
Fascists feel empowered to harass and intimidate educators, journalists and students because they have been allowed to by sympathetic police departments and have the support of Republican Party politicians. During a rally last Sunday, a Republican candidate for governor of Pennsylvania, Steve Lynch, evoked applause from the audience when he advocated “removing” by force “school board members” who adhere to masking and quarantining guidelines.
“I’m going in there with 20 strong men,” he said. “I’m going to speak in front of the school board and I’m going to give them the option, they can leave or they can be removed. And then after that we are going to replace them with nine parents and we are going to vote down the mask mandates that evening. This is how you get stuff done, forget writing your legislators, forget it. They are not listening. You gotta do something.”
Lynch added, “When I see criminals trying to take my rights and my beautiful children and everything they are going to do, you’re going to have to take my life. There’s no way, I’ll die on this hill.”
At a school board meeting in Buncombe County, North Carolina in early August, Hitler admirer, Trump co-conspirator and Republican Congressman Madison Cawthorn railed against “woke, liberal government officials” for imposing a mask mandate. Cawthorn, who recently threatened a second coup attempt, called mask-wearing “psychological child abuse” and accused board members of “muzzling” children.
While Republicans, working closely with their fascist militia allies, threaten violence against any who adhere to minimum public health guidelines, the Democrats and their trade union toadies do nothing to protect teachers and students, not only from the coronavirus, but from fascistic attacks as well. The Vancouver Education Association, the union that claims to represent Vancouver teachers, has yet to post anything on its website or on social media pages condemning the fascist rally on Friday.
On September 18, militia groups and Republican Party officials plan to hold a rally in Washington D.C. whose central demand will be the release of those imprisoned for participating in the fascist insurrection on January 6.
The “Justice for J6” rally is being organized by former Trump campaign employee Matt Braynard, who organized similar rallies earlier this summer, as well a July event outside the Washington D.C. Central Detention Facility in support of the imprisoned fascist insurrectionists. While no speakers list has been unveiled as of this writing, Texas Republican and coup supporter Louie Gohmert intimated to CNN last month that he might speak at the event in support of militia members who “have been so badly mistreated.”
“So we haven’t given up,” added Gohmert.
Michigan government complicit in use of unsafe X-ray bone scanners on Flint residents
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/09/06/flin-s06.html
Sheila Brehm
12 hours ago
Documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by the Detroit Free Press reveal the Michigan government’s criminal responsibility for failing to investigate and shut down the radiation-emitting bone lead testing on Flint residents. Without any oversight or regulation by the state for 18 months, beginning in August 2019, testing for lead contamination was not conducted in a medical facility, but in the local Flint law offices of New York-based law firm, Napoli-Shkolnik.
In a shocking revelation, a report issued by the Michigan Occupational Safety and Health Administration (MIOSHA) states the devices were administering dosages 48 times over the accepted limit: “The reported dose equivalent to the skin of 48.5 millisievert exceeds the limit of 1 millisievert (100 mrem).”
When health violations are uncovered at a restaurant, the facility is immediately closed. However, the state made no attempt to protect the health and well-being of Flint residents or inspect the Napoli-Shkolnik devices for a year and a half.
Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s administration allowed thousands of Flint residents to unknowingly subject themselves to radiation from an X-ray XRF fluorescent hand-held scanning device manufactured for detecting metals and other elements in inanimate objects, such as scrap metal. The devices are explicitly not approved for use on humans according to Thermo Fisher, the manufacturer.
The bone lead test is a major part of the paltry $641.25 million Flint water settlement for the victims of the lead-in-water poisoning which was triggered by the bipartisan decision to switch to Flint River water in April 2014 without any corrosion control. Thousands of residents were poisoned by lead that leached from the system’s pipes and have suffered innumerable negative health effects in what is one of the worst social crimes in American history. The city’s drinking water was rendered unusable, forcing residents to rely on bottled water while they continued to pay some of the highest water bills in the country.
Lead poisoning in the blood dissipates after 30 days but remains in the bones for decades. Lead bone testing is included in the settlement’s language. Erroneously described as “voluntary” by Attorney General Dana Nessel, the bone lead test is the way for residents to receive higher compensation. Without the tests, the remuneration is capped at only $1,000 per household for most residents.
The FOIA report includes documents from the MIOSHA office within the Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity. They show that the government’s first inspection of the bone scanning operation at the Napoli law office was not conducted until March 23, 2021—18 months after the bone scanning began!
The state’s silence and inaction became impossible after Dr. Lawrence Reynolds submitted a court filing February 26, 2021 raising grave concerns about the safety and efficacy of the radiation-emitting device. He also noted the two devices being used by Napoli had never been registered with the state. Dr. Reynolds is a Flint pediatrician and former CEO of Mott Children’s Health Center.
The court submission prompted Napoli to register the two devices at the end of February. An email sent March 18, 2021, from the State of Michigan to Napoli acknowledges that their application for registering the bone scanning devices was received and that the devices were registered and certified.
The state of Michigan’s Radiation Safety Section (RSS) however did not inspect Napoli’s offices until March 23, 2021. Two weeks later, on April 9, John Ferris, MIOSHA physicist supervisor, sent the following email to the Napoli law firm:
“Please describe the dose levels to the individual being irradiated and how the dose levels were determined and please provide any supportive documentation such as copies of your research projects that evaluated dose levels for this particular use of the hand-held x-ray fluorescent machines. Are the machines are (sic) being used (including the results of the scans) as part of a medical research project? ” [Emphasis added]
To ask at this point if a medical research project is taking place is not credible and is an insult to the Flint population. It is implausible that the state, which is the major party in the Flint water settlement, was unaware of the bone scanning. It is written into the language of the settlement and is included in the compensation grid. How was it possible that registration was granted for two radiation-emitting devices without inquiring about how they were used?
Furthermore, the Napoli law firm aggressively marketed itself and the bone lead test to sign up thousands of clients beginning in July 2018 when African American actor Hill Harper was featured in Flint television infomercials. Al Sharpton went to the city in the fall of 2018 and reportedly signed up 5,000 clients for Napoli. Benjamin Crump, known for representing the families of African American men and women brutalized and killed by the police, held two rallies in Flint with Napoli in fall 2019 advertising free bone scans if they signed up with the law firm. The settlement provides 32 percent for lawyers’ fees from each award, making it highly lucrative to sign up clients who will get larger awards if the bone scan test demonstrates lead contamination.
On May 4, 2021, a week after all the bone lead testing ended on April 27, as stipulated in the settlement agreement, a letter from the State to Napoli referred to the March 23 inspection of “the x-ray facility” noting the items of non-compliance and requesting a deadline to comply by May 30. The letter also noted that if the non-compliance issues were remedied in a timely fashion, there would be no penalties: “…the Department has found it efficient to work with registrants to ensure the safe use of x-ray machines without the need to issue civil penalties.”
Other non-compliance issues included the lack of finger or wrist radiation monitoring devices for the scanner operators, nor was there an on-site Michigan-licensed physician. None of those scanned, including at least one pregnant woman, were informed that radiation was being emitted—meaning that there was no informed consent.
The MIOSHA report also noted that no shields or protective measures were provided to residents, nor were there any signs advising people of the use of radiation equipment. Other serious non-compliance issues included the absence of automatic shutoff timers that terminate the exposure after a preset interval. Adding insult to injury, Napoli submitted a 40-page Flint -XRF Analyzer- Radiation Safety Manual which appears to have been produced in May 2021, well after thousands had been herded into their law offices and were unknowingly subjected to unacceptable levels of radiation.
In July 2021, Assistant Attorney General Margaret Bettenhausen told US District Judge Judith Levy at the public “Fairness Hearing” that the inspection of Napoli’s office by MIOSHA only required “several minor changes to procedures, including some signage issues.” Her statements at the hearing were made on behalf of Democratic Attorney General Dana Nessel and should be viewed as nothing less than bald-faced lies.
Meanwhile, a deposition of Thermo Fisher was to have taken place last Thursday but was postponed. Judge Levy has not yet ruled on a motion submitted by Dr. Reynolds to hold an evidentiary hearing with a neutral radiation expert, before ruling on the present language of the water settlement.
The Democratic Party administration of Governor Whitmer as well as that of former Governor Rick Snyder’s Republican administration who oversaw the switch to the toxic Flint River, and the Obama administration which joined in the coverup, are all responsible for harming the population and should be criminally prosecuted.
Justice for the people of Flint will not be secured through the capitalist courts or by appealing to the politicians from either capitalist party. They are all beholden and accountable to the financial oligarchs, who have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic by pursuing a “herd immunity” policy that has resulted in 660,000 preventable deaths in the US alone, repeating on a mass scale their homicidal hostility and indifference to the working class population of Flint.
The vast resources of society must be marshaled to meet the needs of Flint residents as part of a united fight of autoworkers, teachers, health care workers and logistics workers in the US and internationally. This requires a political struggle by the working class for socialism against the capitalist system.
We urge those who agree to form an independent Flint Workers Action Committee which will be affiliated with the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees and will fight for what Flint residents need to be made whole.
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