https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofW1yjiOU0E
Tuesday, May 10, 2022
Monday, May 9, 2022
Democrats duck any real fight on abortion rights
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/05/09/apyu-m09.html
Patrick Martin
10 hours ago
Democratic Party politicians largely dominated the protests that were held in many US cities this weekend against the impending Supreme Court decision repealing Roe v. Wade and abolishing abortion rights in half of the United States. But despite rhetorical pledges to “fight,” the Democratic Party will do nothing to actually oppose the attack on women’s democratic rights.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is bringing legislation up for a vote this week to codify the Roe v. Wade decision into law, but this is an empty gesture, given that such a bill would require a 60-vote super-majority to overcome a Republican filibuster.
At least two Democrats, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Robert Casey of Pennsylvania, oppose abortion rights, and there may be others. There are only two avowedly pro-choice Republicans, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine, meaning that the bill would likely attain at most 50 votes, well short of the 60 required.
This requirement could be removed by revising the rules that allow a minority to filibuster legislation, but several Democratic senators oppose such a change, as well as all of the Republicans in the 50-50 Senate.
President Joe Biden declined last week to answer a question about whether he would support ending the filibuster in order to pass legislation maintaining abortion rights. He has previously opposed such a change in Senate rules.
Schumer did not disguise the performative character of the Senate vote, whose only purpose is to allow the Democrats to posture in the fall election campaign even as they do nothing to actually assist the tens of thousands of women who will immediately be denied access to a necessary health care service once the Supreme Court issues its ruling.
“All of America will be watching,” he said in announcing the Senate vote. “Republicans will not be able to hide from the American people, and cannot hide from their role in bringing Roe to an end.”
Since the draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade was leaked from the Supreme Court last Monday, there has been mounting anger, particularly among young people, over this unprecedented effort to roll back a fundamental democratic right. The Women’s March and the major abortion rights groups have called four regional marches for next Saturday, May 14. They are to be held in New York City, Washington D.C., Chicago and Los Angeles.
This weekend’s protests were relatively small, with an estimated 4,000 in Houston, Texas, being the largest. About a thousand attended a protest in downtown Chicago, which was addressed by the billionaire Democratic governor of Illinois, J. B. Pritzker, while smaller crowds turned out in downtown Detroit, Manhattan and a number of sites in California.
The Houston turnout was significant, given that Texas enacted the most restrictive anti-abortion law in the United States last summer, banning the medical procedure after six weeks of pregnancy—before most women are even aware they are pregnant.
The enforcement mechanism is particularly provocative, authorizing any Texas citizen to file a lawsuit against abortion providers who violate the law and sue for damages, including a $10,000 award to the plaintiff. This vigilante-style provision was aimed at skirting lawsuits challenging the law as a violation of Roe v. Wade, since individuals and not the state government would be enforcing the law.
This loophole was embraced by the Supreme Court majority—the same five justices who apparently are preparing to overturn Roe v. Wade altogether—in a ruling last September allowing the Texas law to take effect, the first time such open flouting of the 1973 precedent has been permitted. It was a warning of the coming attack.
While those attending the Houston rally in Discovery Green, in the city’s downtown, were rightfully outraged both over the Texas law and the impending Supreme Court decision, the speakers sought to channel this anger into the Democratic Party’s election campaign for the fall.
The main speaker was Beto O’Rourke, the Democratic challenger to Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s re-election. Others included Democratic representatives Sheila Jackson Lee and Lizzy Pannill Fletcher, and Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner.
While O’Rourke made demagogic denunciations of both the Supreme Court majority and Governor Abbott, and called for defenders of women’s rights to march to the polls in November for the Democratic Party, another prominent Democrat was visiting the state with a very different message.
House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn campaigned Wednesday in San Antonio on behalf of Representative Henry Cuellar, a right-wing Democrat who opposes abortion and backs maximum repressive measures on the US-Mexico border. Cuellar faces a primary runoff May 24 with Jessica Cisneros, who is backed by the Sanders wing of the Democratic Party.
Clyburn portrayed Cisneros as unelectable in South Texas, and asked reporters, “Which is more important—to have a pro-life Democrat or to have an anti-abortion Republican? Because come November, that could very well be the choice in this district.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has taken a similar position in backing anti-abortion members of the House Democratic caucus against more liberal challengers, claiming there is no “litmus test” on the issue for congressional Democrats.
She was notably dismissive of the rhetorical criticism of the Democratic Party offered by California Governor Gavin Newsom at an abortion rights rally last week. In a piece of demagogy that went further than he perhaps understood, Newsom asked, “Where the hell’s my party? Where’s the Democratic Party? Why aren’t we standing up more firmly, more resolutely? Why aren’t we calling this out?”
Republicans are winning, he continued: “This is a coordinated, concerted effort. And yes, they’re winning. They are. They have been. Let’s acknowledge that. We need to stand up. Where’s the counteroffensive?”
Coming from Newsom, such a question is totally insincere. Newsom is himself the product of the Democratic machine in California, and has built his career on the support of a tightly-knit group of ultra-wealthy families in San Francisco who back identity politics but draw the line against any economic and social concessions to the working class.
Any genuine defense of the right to abortion must start from the reality that this is a class issue. Wealthy and upper-middle class women will always be able to obtain an abortion, regardless of its legal status in many states, or even in the country as a whole. Abortion will be illegal in at least 26 states once the Supreme Court issues its ruling, but the impact will fall nearly exclusively on working class women who do not have the resources to travel to another state.
Pelosi comes from the same social milieu as Newsom—her husband is a wealthy San Francisco real estate investor worth an estimated $100 million or more. Asked Sunday on the CBS program “Face the Nation” about Newsom’s comments, she practically curled her lip. “I have no idea why anybody would make that statement, unless they were unaware of the fight that has been going on,” she said.
She went on to claim that the Democratic Party had been fighting for abortion rights for decades, although admitting that in 2009, the last time the Democrats controlled the White House and both houses of Congress, they did not pass legislation to codify Roe v. Wade because of opposition to abortion within the party itself. Pelosi concluded by throwing up her hands and exclaiming, “let’s just be prayerful about this.”
The apparently semi-senile Pelosi leads the congressional representatives of a fully senile American liberalism, which cannot muster the energy to defend the gains of the last gasp of liberal reform policies in the 1960s and 1970s. The defense of abortion rights, and all democratic rights, can go forward only through the political mobilization of the working class, independently of the Democrats and capitalist politics as a whole, on the basis of a socialist program.
One hundred million coronavirus cases in the US predicted for fall and winter surge
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/05/09/pers-m09.html
Bryan Dyne
9 hours ago
The Biden administration announced Friday that it expects the US to record 100 million new cases of COVID-19 during the coming fall and winter months. According to the Washington Post article that broke the story, the administration also warned of a “significant wave of deaths.”
The projections came from a currently unnamed White House official at a private press briefing, the details of which have yet to be made public. The most the Post states is that the administration made its estimate based on “outside models of the pandemic,” all of which assume that Omicron and its subvariants continue to remain dominant.
The projections become even more dire if new and more virulent variants emerge, as has happened repeatedly since the Alpha variant was first detected in the United Kingdom in late 2020.
The implications of such a level of mass infection are staggering. One hundred million new cases would more than double the official case count of the pandemic, which stands at more than 83 million. One hundred million new cases suggests, based on a study published in April by the Oxford University Press, 43 million new cases of Long COVID. One hundred million new cases implies, using the accepted infection fatality rate of the virus of 0.5 percent, 500,000 new deaths.
A report by ABC News on the projections, which included an interview with White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Ashish Jha, painted a dire picture. Jha confirmed to ABC’s David Muir that “between now and the fall and winter, [it is] very possible we’re going to see new variants” that will be more contagious. At the same time, he noted that when the new wave hits, “we’re not going to have vaccines … we’re going to run out of treatments … we’re not going to have diagnostic testing.”
Jha, however, had nothing to propose aside from the White House mantra that vaccines are the panacea to end the pandemic. “If you’ve been vaccinated and boosted, you have a very high degree of protection against severe illness,” said Jha, making no mention of even basic mitigation measures such as masks.
Vaccines are one of the necessary tools to fight the pandemic. Vaccination rates in the US, however, have stalled out with only 67 percent of the population having gotten a full initial course and less than 31 percent having received a booster shot. Such low rates are only possible in an antiscientific social and cultural climate promoted by both the Republicans and Democrats. As a result, the Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker estimates that at least 234,000 people have died since June 2021 that would have otherwise lived if they had been fully vaccinated and boosted.
Moreover, the coronavirus variants have proven increasingly capable of evading immunity granted by the vaccines, especially the Omicron variants. In January and February, 42 and 40 percent, respectively, of all deaths from COVID-19 in the US were among fully vaccinated people, including 12 and 15 percent who were boosted with a third shot.
This means that if there are 500,000 deaths from COVID-19 this year, more than 200,000 will be among those who have had at least two shots of the vaccine. And with every passing month, the effectiveness of vaccines already administered diminishes.
There is also every possibility that the prediction by the Biden administration proves to be an underestimation of the coming waves of the pandemic. While the official case counts stand at an average of nearly 70,000 a day, the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington estimates that there are currently more than 492,000 new infections each day, the vast majority of which go undetected amid the lack of testing and ongoing massive coverup of COVID-19 data.
At such a rate, there will be more than 115 million new infections by year’s end, even without another surge. The threat posed by the pandemic continues to be so dire that even one of the leading representatives of capitalism, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, commented to the Financial Times, “We’re still at risk of this pandemic generating a variant that would be even more transmissive and even more fatal.” Gates continued, “It’s way above a 5 per cent risk that this pandemic, we haven’t even seen the worst of it.”
The Biden administration now openly acknowledges that the coronavirus pandemic is not “over” or “endemic,” as has been presented by ranking officials and the corporate media. Rather, it is developing into a tsunami of new cases and deaths that has the potential to exceed even the colossal scale produced by the Omicron wave in December, January and February.
The media, however, is treating this largely as a nonissue. The pandemic has been largely dropped from the television news and print media. The ABC News report was more notable for being the network’s first significant report on the pandemic in months than for any new details presented on the looming public health disaster.
As for the White House, it has announced its projections but proposes no measures to stop it. It has not held a press conference to warn the American people of the looming danger or provide any guidance on what must be done to avert it. On the contrary, the Biden administration has overseen the elimination of virtually every even minimal mitigation measure to lower transmission, including mask mandates.
The policy of mass infection is alive and well under the Democrats, just as it was under the Republicans. One hundred million cases and the resultant hundreds of thousands of deaths and millions of cases of Long COVID are seen as merely the cost of doing business to keep Wall Street coffers overflowing.
The White House briefing again makes clear that any level of death is acceptable to the American ruling elite so long as it does not impinge on its ability to extract surplus value from the working class. Various pandemic trackers continue to surpass an official death count of 1 million and barely a mention has been made of such a colossal loss of life in the press. Now the federal government has admitted that deaths will rise to at least 1.5 million.
The response of the working class must be to fight against the imminent tidal wave of infection and death. This can only be done through a policy of global elimination, which entails the aggressive implementation of every public health measure, including the shutdown of nonessential production and schools, along with vaccination and other mitigation measures, to stop viral transmission.
Such a policy can only be enforced through a mass movement of the working class, which connects the fight against the pandemic with the growing struggles of workers throughout the world against inequality, exploitation, war and the soaring costs of consumer goods. A consciously revolutionary struggle must be developed to purge Earth of the underlying disease responsible for the catastrophic impact of the pandemic, the capitalist system.
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