The CumEx fraud in Germany: Organised crime with government support

Gustav Kemper & Peter Schwarz

Banks and big shareholders relieved the German treasury of at least €31.8 billion ($US37.5 billion) between 2001 and 2016 alone. Including similar cases in other European Union (EU) countries, the stolen money amounts to over €60 billion.

This is the conclusion of a report on the so-called CumEx transactions prepared by tax expert Professor Christoph Spengel from the University of Mannheim for a German parliamentary commission of inquiry. The term CumEx is derived from Latin, meaning “with without,” and refers to the disappearing nature of the fraudulent dividend payments.

Only known cases of fraud are included, the number of unreported cases is presumably much higher.

The CumEx transactions are not simply tax evasion, but organised fraud. The banks had taxes refunded to them they never paid.

The crème de la crème of the international financial industry was involved. In Germany, all the well-known major banks were involved—Deutsche Bank, Commerzbank, even state banks or institutions that are partly state-owned, such as DekaBank, as well as investment funds and private investors.

They were supported by an army of financial lawyers and tax consultants. The tax authorities and finance ministers turned a blind eye. Members of parliament from all parties voted for laws that made fraud possible in the first place.

While fare dodgers who do not pay a fine of €60 quickly end up behind bars, not even one of those responsible for what is probably the biggest robbery in German history is in jail. Two British stockbrokers, who were sentenced by the Bonn Regional Court in March this year in a test case for tax evasion to the tune of €447.5 million, got off with mild suspended sentences.

In the meantime, more than 100 banks on four continents and around 1,000 people responsible are being investigated. However, the proceedings are dragging on slowly and the defendants are hoping to be saved by the statute of limitations.

The fraudulent model of CumEx transactions was simple and easy to see through. It always occurred around the date of the dividend payment. Blocks of shares moved from one hand to the other, with (Cum) entitlement to dividend payment or without (Ex) if the share was acquired after that date. Although the capital gains tax of 25 percent plus 5.5 percent solidarity surcharge was only paid once, several temporary owners of the share packages subsequently had the tax refunded.

This obvious fraud was considered a “legal business model” in the financial sector. Everyone knew that something was rotten, but no Federal Finance Minister from 1999 to 2017—Hans Eichel (Social Democratic Party, SPD), Peer Steinbrück (SPD) and Wolfgang Schäuble (Christian Democratic Union, CDU)—took measures that would have prevented the fraud. On the contrary, the financial jugglers’ legal firms were able to rely on laws that the governments had introduced since the 1990s.

* In December 1999, the Federal Fiscal Court (Germany’s highest court for tax and customs matters) confirmed that the “beneficial ownership” of shares is transferred to the buyer at the time the contract is concluded, i.e., before the share package is delivered later. In doing so, it provided the financial jugglers with the legal basis for their fraud, the so-called “short sale.” This involves selling and reselling shares that are not yet in the possession of the seller. They can thus pass through several owners at lightning speed without becoming their property.

* When this scam increased, at the end of 2002, the Association of German Banks got cold feet and drew the attention of the Finance Ministry to the problem of double tax certificates in the case of short sales of share packages, to protect its members from liability risks in these transactions. The SPD-Green Party government did not react for a long time, “because no other practicable technical-organisational procedure could be found that would not have affected the competitive situation of credit institutions,” according to a Bundestag (federal parliament) investigation report.

* It was not until five years later that changes were made to the Annual Tax Act 2007. However, this law did not hinder tax fraud, but acted as a fire accelerant, because now foreign banks were being brought on board. A confessed insider told the TV show Panorama “that from 2007, when this new law came into force, industry, investment bankers, lawyers, tax consultants and auditors knew exactly how to do it. There was now a blueprint, black on white in the Federal Law Gazette.”

* Another 2012 law was then supposed to put a stop to tax fraud. New research and searches of financial institutions and law firms have now revealed that tax fraud continued, but with more sophisticated tricks.

All governments bowed to the interests of the financial industry. The current federal Finance Minister, Olaf Scholz (SPD), was partly responsible in his tenure as Hamburg’s mayor for the fact that the tax authorities failed to reclaim an unjustly paid tax refund of €46.8 million from the Warburg Bank before the statute of limitations kicked in. At a hearing in the Bundestag, Scholz explained that the Hamburg tax authorities had not wanted to take the risk of a legal dispute with Warburg.

The sheer scale of the tax fraud and the complicity of the state show that these are not simply offences committed by disparate criminal individuals. The financialisation of the economy—the shift of the accumulation of profit and wealth from the real economy into speculative transactions—has increasingly blurred the line between business and crime.

Over the past 25 years, similar financial scandals have occurred at ever shorter intervals. Enron, WorldCom and Bernard Madoff in the US or Wirecard in Germany are just a few of the best-known cases. In 2008, the swindle with rotten mortgages, in which all the major banks in the world participated, brought the global economy to the brink of collapse. Governments and central banks reacted by pumping trillions into the banks, which had one main effect—criminal speculative transactions were fueled even further.

This is the background against which the close personnel links between the world of politics and the financial sector should be understood, which made the fraudulent CumEx transactions possible in the first place.

Lobbyists who were paid by banking associations and were thus able to exert direct influence on the drafting of corresponding financial market legislation, worked in the highest tax authority of the federal government, the Federal Central Tax Office (BZSt).

For example, lawyer Arnold Ramacker was financed by the Association of German Banks (BdB) for several years in the 1990s after a career in the Finance Ministry in North Rhine-Westphalia, as a judge at the Düsseldorf Finance Court and finally as a consultant in the Federal Ministry of Finance. He was significantly involved in the drafting of corresponding bills on stock trading.

Investment bankers and business lawyers recognized the opportunity for extra profits from these transactions. Many left their management positions in the major banks and established their own business, specializing in CumEx transactions.

A good example is Hanno Berger, a lawyer for tax and financial products, who after a career as a government official—as the highest ranking tax bank auditor in Hesse—continued his career in the private sector and, after several stations in US law firms, founded his own tax consultancy, with which he boosted the fraud business for numerous investors and financial institutions. When Berger’s firm came under the scrutiny of the judiciary, he dissolved it and moved to Switzerland. In court, he is being defended by leading Free Democratic Party (FDP) politician Wolfgang Kubicki and other lawyers.

Nobody should be under the illusion that the far too late investigations by the judiciary or the tame legislative proposals of the Bundestag will change anything about these conditions.

The judiciary only became active after a clerk at the Cologne tax office had received a strange demand for tax refunds of almost €54 million from an American one-man pension fund in 2011. Investigative journalists looked into the fraud, data from whistle-blowers with secret information were bought; but it was not until 2015 that the Bundestag set up a commission of inquiry.

In terms of personnel, the tax investigation offices are hopelessly outnumbered by the army of business lawyers representing the financial institutions accused. There can be no talk of an “equality of arms,” a phrase used by the daily Süddeutsche Zeitung, quoting an investigator from the public prosecutor’s office.

An 830-page report from June 2017 by the Bundestag investigative commission provides insight into the actors and describes their criminal activities, which were already verifiable in the 1970s and have rapidly increased in scale since the turn of the millennium.

State supervision of the financial sector is hampered by legal provisions. Wolfgang Schäuble, federal Finance Minister from 2009 to 2017, for example, justified the lack of supervision of the financial sector with the “strict obligation of secrecy.” He professed no such scruples when he ensured the Greek population had to strip naked to pay off debts to international banks.

Moreover, if there is “an overriding public interest” in the prosecution of a tax offence, this duty of confidentiality does not apply. But this does not include the CumEx transactions, as the Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (BaFin) wrote in its 2016 annual report. “Banks are often caught between the conflicting priorities of legality and legitimacy. Not everything legal is also legitimate,” writes BaFin. In other words: It may be morally reprehensible, but it is legal.

The federal government confirmed this in its response to a minor question in the Bundestag: BaFin does not examine “any concrete individual transactions of the supervised institutions,” but monitors the organisational requirements. In other words, BaFin checks whether the transactions—including criminal ones—are “properly” accounted for.

The big banks that were caught out are now relying on a statute of limitations to cover them for the criminal offences and tax refunds, because according to Paragraph 47 of the German Fiscal Code, the state’s claims to collect the tax debt expire when the criminal offence is time-barred. A new law passed by the Bundestag on 29 June extends the statute of limitations for organised fraud from 10 to 25 years. However, the accused’s lawyers claim that the legislation cannot change the rules retroactively.

The Left Party’s parliamentary faction abstained in the Bundestag when the law was passed. But it too is relying on the capitalist state, which had its hand in all the fraud, to put a stop to the capitalist robbers. In the Bundestag’s investigative committee, it called for the establishment of a “federal financial police force” to combat organized financial crime.

There is no legal reform that would stop the criminal machinations of the financial industry. The German judiciary condemns the poor when they take food with an expired best before date from dumpsters outside shops—while the rich can escape punishment for billions of dollars in fraud with an army of law firms.

The parties in the governing grand coalition—CDU/CSU (Christian Social Union) and SPD—reject any responsibility in the majority report of the committee of inquiry. “This committee of inquiry was not necessary,” they write, “all accusations justifying its creation have been refuted. The committee has become convinced that the authorities from which it has consulted files and heard witnesses have worked properly and dutifully.”

In the coronavirus crisis, the grand coalition is once again throwing hundreds of billions of euros down the throats of the same banks that stole from the treasury. At the same time, it is preparing mass redundancies and wage cuts, reopening schools despite rising infection rates and driving workers back into the factories at risk to their health and lives to squeeze the money stolen from the public purse and freely handed over to the banks and corporations.

This irresponsible and criminal policy can only be stopped by an independent working class movement fighting for a socialist programme. The banks and financial speculators must be expropriated, and their assets confiscated. Economic life must serve the needs of the whole of society, not the maximisation of profits by the wealthy minority.

At least 13 Peruvian youth killed in police raid on Lima disco

Cesar Uco & Bill Van Auken

A brutal police raid on a youth disco in Los Olivos, a populous working class and lower-middle-class district of Lima, Peru’s capital, has left at least 13 young people dead, with another 23 under arrest.

The police launched the Saturday night operation against the Thomas Restobar discotheque, where approximately 120 youth had gathered. They moved in barely half an hour before the start of a night-time curfew that has been in place since March 16 in response to the country’s devastating COVID-19 pandemic.

According to multiple witnesses, police fired both tear gas and live rounds into the crowded second-floor dance hall, prompting the panicked youth to flee down a narrow stairway at the bottom of which was a door that had been sealed, either by the club’s owners, or the cops themselves.

A young man interviewed on television, and supported by neighbors who had gathered at the scene, told a television interviewer, “They didn’t die from suffocation but from exposure to the tear gas fired by the police when they entered the place.”

The young man added that the first thing the police did was “talk to the owners, [but] since they didn’t agree, they fired the tear gas.” The clear implication was that the cops and the owners had failed to agree on a bribe—commonly referred to in Peru as a coima—to allow the club to remain in operation.

We are “screwed by the coima,” the young man continued. “A friend of mine died ... they’ve been killed like dogs.”

A resident of the neighborhood confirmed the account given by the youth, telling RPP radio: “It appears that police entered and threw tear gas canisters at them, and boxed them in.”

Nieves Cántaro, who had come to the Clínica Jesús del Norte to identify the body of her 22-year-old daughter, also told RPP: “I know that they fired teargas grenades. In what kind of a mind would it occur to the police to do this? My daughter had just gone into the discotheque ... She was 22 and a university student. They took my daughter from me.”

Unsurprisingly, the police exonerated themselves of any responsibility for the mass killing, claiming that they had fired neither teargas nor bullets during the operation. The official version of tragedy was given by Gen. Orlando Velasco Mujica, the commander of the Peruvian National Police, who declared that “those present tried to escape during the police operation, using a back door to the premises. However, the crowd prevented them from opening the exit door, causing the crowd to riot and suffocate.”

The Peruvian media, echoed by their international counterparts, happily repeated this “official story.”

The cops and the media also claimed that this was the first time they had received a call about the existence of a clandestine discotheque, when in reality the neighbors had been complaining for weeks. People on the scene after the tragedy asked the television reporters to film a poster on the wall of the building that read, “The best weekends,” with pictures of young people dancing, making it clear that the parties were hardly hidden.

This operation, perhaps motivated in part by a failure of the cops to receive enough of a bribe, was also clearly organized to not only sow panic among those present, but to set an example for the wider population. The unit sent to the club was the so-called Green Squad, an elite paramilitary unit used in combating criminal gangs.

The contempt with which the government treated the lives of the young people was made grotesquely evident when the truck with the bodies of the dead arrived at the morgue on Sunday afternoon. This meant that the 13 bodies had been piled up inside for almost 18 hours.

With nearly 600,00 reported coronavirus cases and almost 30,000 deaths, Peru has the worst per capita fatality rate in the Americas and is second only to Belgium worldwide. Even the Peruvian Ministry of Health acknowledges that the real death toll is far higher, allowing that it is probably 40,000 or more.

The right-wing government of President Martin Vizcarra had initially been credited, both within the Peruvian establishment and internationally, for imposing strict quarantines, beginning in March, in a bid to stop the spread of the pandemic.

Now, however, it is more than evident that this strategy has failed. Meanwhile, Peru’s gross national product fell by 30 percent in the second quarter of this year, the worst decline in the country’s history, bringing with it a massive destruction of jobs and increase in poverty.

Since early July, Vizcarra’s crisis-ridden government has initiated a policy known as “Reactiva Perú” giving big business, and in particular the strategic transnational mining sector, a license to resume operations at the expense of the infection and deaths of large numbers of workers.

Meanwhile, the president’s approval rating has plummeted, falling from 83 percent in June to barely 50 percent today.

The government’s response to the tragedy in Los Olivos has been to vilify the owners of the club and those who were present, including the 13 dead.

There were extensive press reports on the fact that coronavirus tests were administered to those who were arrested at the scene of the disco massacre, and that 15 of the 23 had tested positive. This is hardly shocking given the government’s own estimate that roughly 20 percent of Lima’s population is infected. This is undoubtedly a vast underestimate, as Peru has conducted barely one-quarter of the tests carried out even in the United States.

The hypocrisy of this campaign was summed up in the statement of Rosario Sasieta, the minister for Women and Vulnerable Populations, who was dispatched to the scene of the tragedy to declare that she was “outraged” because “some businessmen who, with a lust for profit, gathered 120 youth and, this lust, this avarice, has caused the deaths of these youth.”

Who do they think they’re kidding? No one in the Peruvian government will accuse the transnational mining companies of a “lust for profit” as miners are herded back to work, with thousands contracting the virus and many dying.

The gathering of 120 youths, ignoring calls for social distancing and the wearing of masks, and the desire for a small business owner to stay afloat by allowing them to dance, are no doubt antithetical to the social practices needed to combat the virus.

But on the scale of the poverty, immense social inequality and the genuine “lust for profit” on the part of Southern Copper Corp., Anglo-American, Rio Tinto, BHP Billiton and other transnational mining companies that have resumed operations, the party in Los Olivios is less than a drop in the bucket in terms of factors contributing to the spread of the coronavirus.

The wildly disproportionate violence unleashed against the youth present at the discotheque is emblematic of the turn by the Peruvian state and ruling class to reliance upon the military and police to suppress growing opposition within the working class.

Canada’s Liberal government slashes COVID-19 emergency aid

Roger Jordan

Canada’s Justin Trudeau-led Liberal government is dramatically scaling back the financial assistance provided the millions of workers who have lost their jobs due to the COVID-19 pandemic. On Thursday, Chrystia Freeland, the newly-appointed finance minister, announced that the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) will be terminated at the end of September, and that the financial aid for the vast majority of the more than 3 million jobless workers now dependent on the CERB for their livelihood will be slashed by 20 percent.

This attack on working people and their families is central to the ruling elite’s homicidal back-to-work and back-to-school drive, which is aimed at forcing workers to return to unsafe workplaces so as to generate profits for big business and investors.

The majority of those now receiving the CERB, which pays a miserly $500 a week, will be transitioned to Employment Insurance (EI). This change will result in most cases in a 20 percent cut in their weekly assistance, from the lordly sum of $500 to just $400.

In steps that only highlight how impoverished the EI program has become after decades of Liberal and Conservative cuts, the government has temporarily eased the number of hours of work needed to obtain benefits and raised the minimum weekly payout.

However, overall, eligibility requirements remain much more stringent than for the CERB. EI claimants can be required at any time to prove they are actively seeking employment. Failure to do so can result in sanctions, including the loss of all benefits.

Under EI rules, even if they cannot find work, many of those now unemployed will be threatened after just 26 weeks with the loss of all EI benefits and destitution.

All of this will, and is meant, to push the jobless into competing for low-paid, precarious employment opportunities.

That the government is determined to dramatically curtail assistance to those without work or unable to work due to the pandemic is underscored by the modest sums the government has budgeted for its post-CERB worker-support programs. A mere $15.3 billion is being injected into EI, while $22 billion has been set aside for three new makeshift benefits, all of which will last for just one year. The Canada Recovery Benefit (CRB) will provide $400 per week for a maximum of 26 weeks for jobless workers ineligible for EI, principally the self-employed and contract “gig workers.” The same requirements for accessing EI, including the need to actively seek employment, will apply to the CRB.

The Canada Recovery Sickness Benefit and Canada Recovery Caregivers Benefit are cheapened replacements for other elements of the CERB program. The Sickness Benefit will provide $500 per week for two weeks to workers who become sick or must self-isolate, but only if their employer does not provide paid sick leave.

The Caregivers Benefit will provide financial support to parents or family members who have to stay home to look after a child or other relative during the pandemic. However, the government has made clear that this benefit will be paid only in the event of COVID-19 closures. Parents who wish to keep their children at home for fear of infection in overcrowded and under-resourced schools will not be eligible for the benefit. Additionally, only one adult member of a household can claim the $400 weekly payment at any one time.

The presentation of the Liberal government’s new package of post-CERB measures was preceded by weeks of internal squabbling that culminated in last Monday’s “resignation”—in reality, forced departure—of Finance Minister Bill Morneau, a former corporate CEO who enjoys close ties to Bay Street.

In the weeks prior to Morneau’s announcement that he was stepping down to seek the post of OECD secretary-general, the corporate media was full of reports of disagreements between Morneau’s office and Trudeau’s staff on various aspects of government policy. These included the decision to raise the wage subsidy paid to employers to help cover workers’ wages from the original level of 10 percent to 75 percent, and over whether the CERB was “too generous” and a “disincentive to work.” These factional conflicts point to the deepening crisis of the minority Trudeau government, which is under mounting pressure from big business to accelerate the onslaught on the working class so as to make it pay for the Trudeau government and Bank of Canada’s $650 billion bailout of the banks and financial markets.

Under these conditions, and with Morneau increasingly discredited by the ongoing WE Charity scandal, Trudeau concluded that a new face with the political clout to impose deeply unpopular measures was necessary. For a week prior to Morneau’s resignation, staff in the Prime Minister’s Office leaked a steady stream of embarrassing details about the finance minister’s disagreements with Trudeau to the G lobe and Mail and other publications.

Trudeau also announced Wednesday he was proroguing parliament until September 23. This anti-democratic manoeuvre is aimed at suppressing further embarrassing revelations about the Liberals’ incestuous, corrupt ties with WE, and enabling the government to seize back the political initiative.

When parliament reconvenes, the government will present a Throne Speech, outlining its plans for the next stage in the “recovery.” Both the Throne Speech and the new shrunken financial support for working people impacted by the pandemic will need to secure parliament’s approval, which means one of the three major opposition parties will have to vote with the government.

The Liberals and media have made much of the fact that Freeland is Canada’s first female finance minister. The real reason for her appointment is that she is a notorious right-winger and war-hawk, touted by the corporate media as a “safe pair of hands,” whom Trudeau calculates can mollify his big business critics and oversee the acceleration of the back-to-work drive.

In her previous roles, Freeland has spearheaded the government’s rearmament program, its courting of Trump in the NAFTA renegotiation, and since last fall’s election its “outreach” to the hard-right provincial governments of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Ontario. Predictably, one-time Trump enthusiast Ontario Premier Doug Ford was one of the first to applaud Freeland on her appointment as finance minister, hailing her as “amazing” and “incredible.” Ford, whose government has imposed savage social spending cuts and real wage cuts on one million public sector workers, added, “I’ll have her back. I’ll help her any way we can.”

In her remarks announcing the winding down of the CERB, Freeland made clear that the Liberal government is curtailing and phasing out even the limited measures it took to mitigate the pandemic’s impact on working people, and is now focused on ensuring “economic recovery,” i.e., boosting corporate profitability. “As we shift from our initial emergency response to a safe and prudent restart, as we shift to living with COVID-19,” declared Freeland, “our approach also needs to evolve.” Underlining that the government plans to unveil a broad range of pro-business measures when parliament reconvenes, Freeland added that the ending of CERB marks only the first step in the Liberals’ recovery plan.

There is nothing “safe” or “prudent” about the policies being pursued by the Canadian ruling elite. The Liberal government has spearheaded the reckless back-to-work drive, which has been implemented most aggressively by hard-right provincial governments in Quebec, Ontario, and Alberta. Workplace safety regulations have been systematically ignored or abused, and the vast majority of complaints filed by workers over unsafe conditions have been curtly dismissed by provincial and federal labour boards.

Freeland’s insistence that workers learn to “live with COVID-19” is in line with the demands of the Trump administration and the Democrats in the United States, who have allowed the virus to run rampant. As deaths in the US rapidly approach the 200,000 mark, a bipartisan drive is well-advanced to reopen schools across the country, subjecting teachers, parents, and students to life-threatening conditions. This criminal campaign is being justified by the need to get back to “normal” conditions, and to learn to “live with COVID-19.”

A central role in enforcing the ruling elite’s reactionary back-to-work agenda is being played by the trade unions and New Democratic Party. Since the outbreak of the pandemic, the unions have shut down all expressions of working class opposition, including teacher strikes in Ontario and protests by health workers and others over a lack of personal protective equipment.

At the same time, the unions have deepened their long-standing partnership with the Liberal government and big business, as shown by their participation in a series of closed-door meetings with business lobby groups and government officials to plot the “economic recovery.” A joint statement released after one such consultation in April pledged the participants would work to create conditions so that “Canadian businesses can come roaring back” after the crisis.

For its part, the NDP has provided critical parliamentary support to the Liberal government. In May, it backed the Trudeau government’s move to suspend regular parliamentary sittings until September.

With the “Quebec First” Bloc Quebecois announcing that it will vote against the Throne Speech, the NDP has rushed to signal that it can be “persuaded” to once again come to the Liberals’ rescue.

Even so, such is the state of crisis facing Canadian capitalism, it cannot be excluded that the parliamentary support for the Trudeau government could suddenly evaporate. While some sections of big business continue to believe that the Liberal government, due to its phony “progressive” image and partnership with the unions, remains the best vehicle for imposing their class war agenda; others are dissatisfied with what they consider to be impermissible delays in slashing financial support to workers and using the crisis to step up capitalist exploitation.

The latter faction doubts whether the Trudeau government, weakened by a series of scandals and increasingly discredited in the eyes of the population, is capable of implementing the attacks on the working class they see as essential in the coming months. As Dan Kelly, president of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, said with regard to the Liberal government’s proposal to transfer most CERB claimants to EI, “This is just too low a bar for many part-time workers to return to their pre-COVID employment.”

With the official opposition Conservatives selecting their new leader this past weekend, powerful forces within the corporate elite could quickly coalesce behind the drive to bring an even more reactionary government to power to implement sweeping austerity measures.

Postmaster General testifies before a Senate Committee on mail crisis

Shuvu Batta

Reports and images from around the country of torn postboxes, dismantled mail processing machines, live animals delivered dead and the delayed shipments of medicine to elderly and veterans have ignited widespread public outrage. It is now very clear that the drive to wreck an institution older than the United States itself, to justify its privatization and sale to profit-driven corporations, is proceeding at a rapid pace.

The USPS expects to run out of cash by 2021, but it is the delivery crisis, particularly its potential impact on the US elections, which has created a deadlock in Congress, with the Democratic-controlled House passing a bill to provide an additional $25 billion in funding and the Senate Republicans expected to reject it.

President Donald Trump recently denounced this appropriation effort, initiated partly to offset the losses caused by the coronavirus crisis and partly to insure proper functioning during an election in which mail ballots will be critical. Trump claimed, “This is all another HOAX by the Democrats to give $25 billion unneeded dollars for political purposes without talking about the Universal Mail-in Ballot scam … that they are trying to pull off in violation of everything that our Country stands for.”

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy testified before an emergency session called by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs on Friday. Two competing and false narratives were on display, with the Democrats blaming Trump and the Republicans as sole authors of the postal crisis, while the Republicans essentially denounced the USPS as “a sort of perhaps unfixable problem,” in the words of Senator Rand Paul, which required complete dismantling and privatization.

Republican committee chair Ron Johnson of Wisconsin started the meeting off by pointing out that DeJoy was not a Trump appointee, but rather had been chosen by “the bipartisan Postal Board of Governors.” All of these governors, however, whether Democratic or Republican, were appointed by Trump.

Ranking Democrat Gary Peters scolded DeJoy over the impact of the policies he has implemented since taking the reins in the spring. He revealed that his office had received over “7500 reports of delays from Michigan and around the country in less than two weeks. They have written to me about skipping doses of their medication and their small businesses losing customers or having to lay off employees, all because of changes that you directed.”

Among the changes instituted by DeJoy were an effective ban on overtime, leading to the piling-up of mail in facilities and lengthy delays.

As the WSWS had reported earlier on the hiding of COVID-19 deaths and infections at USPS by management, it was further revealed over the course of the meeting that the USPS leadership is hiding important data which reveal the internal operations of the Post Office.

DeJoy contradicted himself throughout the meeting. He claimed at one point, “We serve 161 million people. We still deliver at 99.5 percent of the time. We have significant efforts to continue to improve on that process,” and then later, “I won’t go as far as to not say that we had maybe a four or five percent hit on our service level for delayed, all sorts of mail, marketing mail, everything, because it got stuck on a dock and we’re drastically bringing that down.”

He even stated at one point, “Theoretically everyone should have gotten their mail faster.”

The Republican Senators received DeJoy with great fanfare and admiration, with former Florida governor and now Senator Rick Scott introducing DeJoy with, “can you just talk about why you’re uniquely qualified” to lead the USPS and, “How does it make you feel when you have people make these unsubstantiated claims that you personally have a goal to slow down the mail?”

DeJoy is a major GOP donor, according to FEC Data since 2016 he has given roughly $1.2 million to the Trump Victory Committee and the Republican National Committee each alongside smaller contributions to Republican House and Senate Candidates. Simultaneously, according to a report by USA Today, he and his wife may claim up to a total $75,815,000 in assets from US Postal Service competitors.

Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky inadvertently suggested the reality of the situation by asking DeJoy, “If you came in as a venture capitalist and a venture capitalist group took over the post office and named you CEO what would you do that you are unable to do because it’s a government agency?”

DeJoy thanked Paul for the question and answered, “Number one, the legislative reform that I would ask is what I said in my written testimony and opening remarks on integration of Medicaid and pension reform. I would like to be kind of liberated on pricing, it’s a very, very competitive market out there now. I would like more pricing freedom.”

The Postal Service Reform Act of 2018 was a bipartisan bill which had aimed to achieve part of what is outlined, the bill would have led to a retiree paying an additional $1,600 or more per year in Medicare premiums, according to National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association President Richard G. Thissen.

Senator Paul called for further assaults on postal services to his own rural constituents, declaring, “We also need to look at—the easiest way to continue personalized service to each person individually at their house would be to do it less frequently, and frankly, people who live 20 miles down a shell road, if you told them they were going to get twice a week versus six times a week, I think we’d actually live with this.”

In the almost two-hour meeting, a critical element missing was any discussion on DeJoy’s move to centralize his leadership and create a new department responsible for sorting mail during an election cycle, which will be largely decided through mail-in ballots.

Senator Kamala Harris, who is a part of the Senate committee, decided to spend her time on the campaign trail rather than question an individual who may have conspired against her campaign. This only demonstrates the unseriousness of the Democrats’ posturing as defenders of democracy against Trump.

In stark contrast to the duplicitous role of the Democrats, who are equally as responsible for the manufactured crisis at USPS, postal workers in Wenatchee and Seattle-Tacoma in Washington have restored into service dismantled mail-sorting units. Workers in Dallas, Texas, have ignored the USPS’ directives.

The Senate hearing was largely political theater. Much noise was made about the $25 billion which USPS needs in order to maintain its function of providing essential items such as life saving medicine to all Americans, but no such noise was made in regards to the $738 billion budget to the US military approved last year, with even the so-called socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez voting in favor.

Hundreds of thousands displaced, six dead as 600 fires rip across California

Norissa Santa Cruz

A hellish nightmare has engulfed the West Coast of the United States. Record breaking heat waves, fire and lightning storms have led to the outbreak of over 600 fires throughout the state. The nation's largest and most populous state, and a global breadbasket, has been turned into a deadly inferno fueled by extreme heat waves and weather conditions that sparked fires which have decimated land areas larger than the state of Rhode Island. Currently some 13,700 firefighters are battling the blazes, air pollution is at hazardous levels and at least six lives have been lost.

The dead include a helicopter pilot who crashed while dropping water on blazes in Fresno County, a still unidentified family of three in Napa County, a male Solano County resident and a Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) utility employee working in the Vacaville area.

Two firefighters in Marin County nearly lost their lives on Friday after they were surrounded by flames from the Woodward fire. By chance, a helicopter was nearby and rescued them with minutes to spare. “Had it not been for that helicopter there, those firefighters would certainly have perished,” said Sonoma County Sheriff Mark Essick.

Scorched homes and vehicles fill Spanish Flat Mobile Villa following the LNU Lightning Complex fires in unincorporated Napa County, Calif., Thursday, Aug. 20, 2020. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)

Rare August thunderstorms last week above the Northern California Bay Area produced more than 20,000 lightning strikes that hit trees and vegetation, at a time when vegetation is at its driest, resulting in fires and “complexes” of numerous fires that have merged into major conflagrations in parts of the state. As of Saturday night, more than 140,000 people in the Bay Area have been evacuated while many are choosing to stay behind and attempt to protect their home from approaching walls of fire.

The group of fires known as the L.N.U. Lightning Complex in Napa Valley, burning across the counties of Sonoma, Lake, Napa, Yolo and Solano is the second largest fire in California history. Fire has burned through more than 341,000 acres and consumed 845 buildings and damaged another 230 and is only 17 percent contained as of midday Sunday.

At least 20 fires continue to rage East of Silicon Valley, also known as the S.C.U. Lightning Complex group fires, affecting locations in Santa Clara, Alameda, Contra Costa, San Joaquin and Stanislaus counties. The S.C.U complex fires have grown to 339,968 acres and are now the third largest fire in state history, primarily overtaking less-populated areas. They are only ten percent contained.

The CZU Lightning Complex started August 16 from lightning strikes in San Mateo and Santa Cruz Counties. The complex has charred 71,000 acres, 24,000 structures are threatened, and it is eight percent contained as of Sunday. The River Fire in Monterey County has scorched 42,583 acres, up from 10,000 acres Wednesday, and is 12 percent contained.

The Lake Fire near Lake Hughes in Los Angeles County has continued to burn since August 12 when it began near the Angeles National Forest. So far, it has destroyed 12 structures and 21 outbuildings, damaged six structures and threatens 1,329 others, and has consumed a total of 30,763 acres. By Sunday evening it was only 52 percent contained. Full containment is not expected until early next month.

81-year-old Vacaville resident Hank Hanson lost everything in the fires. He told the Independent, “Tuesday night when I went to bed, I had a beautiful home on a beautiful ranch... By Wednesday night, I have nothing but a bunch of ashes.”

Added to this is the painful devastation of Big Basin Redwood State Park—the oldest in California where 1500 to 1800-year-old living redwood giants and remains of their over 2,000-year-old ancestors became towering kindling over the weekend.

While the extent of the devastation has already hit near records, CAL FIRE expects conditions to worsen this week with dry heat, low humidity, and potential dry lightning expected to begin Sunday and continue over the next several days with another round of thunderstorms that will produce little rain. The National Weather Service issued a red-flag warning of extreme fire danger from 5 a.m. Sunday to 5 p.m. Monday, stretching from Sonoma County all the way through Monterey County.

Hundreds of thousands have been ordered to flee their homes as dozens of wide scale evacuation orders have been called in many areas throughout dozens of counties. Schools and fairgrounds have been hastily turned into shelters. In the time of COVID-19, residents have been forced to flee one deadly situation to another, leaving behind homes and all possessions to enter into crowded fairgrounds and school sites—many of which are at capacity.

More than 77,000 people were forced to evacuate due to the CZU August Lightning Complex Fire in Santa Cruz County, but the main evacuation center is at max capacity due to COVID-19 social distancing with seventy-nine evacuees and their families living in tents inside the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium. The vast majority are forced to live in their cars or rely on family. State provided hotel vouchers were quickly depleted. Evacuee Liz Jackson told KGO-TV ABC News 7, "We are frustrated and desperate... feeling like we're not in control, it's been horrible.”

Hazardous smoke from the hundreds of fires is flooding the Bay Area and Southern California, endangering the respiratory health of millions of residents in the metropolitan areas. In San Jose, Concord and Vallejo, the air quality index has surpassed 150, threatening everyone in the region.

Many residents have chosen to stay behind to battle the flames and risk their lives, with the full knowledge that if they lose their homes, they will struggle for years with displacement, insurance battles—assuming they are covered—and the rebuilding of a life from scratch under economic conditions akin to the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Cheryl Martin, a 61-year-old high school teacher in Santa Cruz County, told the Washington Post that she and her husband packed up to flee their home on Tuesday when the smoke became so unbearable that she needed a mask in the house. Her husband waited until she was on the freeway to tell her he was going to stay behind to try to save their home. Only on Thursday did he end up fleeing at the last minute, when he could see glowing flames approaching.

Daron Wyatt, public information officer for the California Interagency Emergency Response Team, told reporters, “That’s one of the biggest problems is people decide that they want to stay that they’re not in great danger and then if it does, the situation does change, the firefighters have to shift their focus from fighting the fire to try to protect life.”

The fact that many are choosing to risk their lives or face destitution in a terrible economic crisis is a complete indictment of the capitalist system. In fact, thousands were never made whole and are still homeless and displaced from the record-setting wildfires in 2018 which claimed 84 lives, wiped out the entire town of Paradise, California and produced apocalyptic scenes of people forced to exit their vehicles and run for their lives on gridlocked highways as flames engulfed rows of cars.

It was only in June of this year that PG&E, the Northern California energy utility, pleaded guilty to 84 felony counts of involuntary manslaughter and one felony count of unlawfully causing the devastating Paradise fire. The agency routinely failed to inspect and repair its power lines for years and attempted to declare bankruptcy to escape its debt obligations and other legal liabilities.

While the annual fires are portrayed as being purely environmental and unpredictable, nothing could be further from the case. Like clockwork, every year the fire season arrives between April and October, and every year lasts longer, but also like clockwork the state is always unprepared, with firehouses grossly underfunded and understaffed, while annually the summers get hotter, vegetation drier, and more days with extreme weather are added every season, the result of man-made climate change, which is causing more frequent and severe heat waves in the region and ever larger wildfires across the West.

The current heat wave throughout the state is extremely deadly and breaking records. The temperature at Death Valley National Park hit a scorching 130 degrees Fahrenheit (54.4 Celsius) last week, marking what is likely the hottest temperature ever recorded on Earth. In coastal Santa Cruz, temperatures reached 107 degrees Fahrenheit (41.7 Celsius) and along the agricultural Central Valley they exceeded 110 degrees F (38.3 C).

Exposing the poor state of infrastructure, many utility companies have enforced rolling blackouts in the middle of the deadly heat wave, cutting power to 130,000 people in southern California and 220,000 people in the Central Coast and Central Valley areas.

The journal Environmental Epidemiology estimated that across the US, some 5,600 deaths are attributable to heat annually. Extreme heat disproportionately affects farm and agricultural workers, children and the elderly, with the vast majority of deaths in poor and working class neighborhoods that lack access to cool spaces. Heat stroke is the leading cause of work-related death among farm laborers.

The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee predicts that wildfire blackouts could be California’s “new normal for the next 10 to 30 years, or even longer.” A 2019 University of Southern California environmental study found that the number of extreme heat days—those with temperatures above 95 degrees Fahrenheit—will more than double by 2070 in urban South Los Angeles.

So far in 2020 there have been over 6,000 wildfires of varying sizes throughout California, including the hundreds that are currently burning, compared to over 8,000 in 2019. Despite the predictability of the annual fires, there is nowhere near the number of fire crews, airplanes and helicopters needed to put out the fires. While the state relies on over 2,200 cheap prison laborers to risk their lives battling fires for $2-5 dollars a day, many are currently unavailable due to an early release initiative aimed at limiting the spread of coronavirus in the state’s prisons.

California Governor Gavin Newsom reported Saturday that his office has sent for firefighters from the East Coast and Australia, cynically stating that “These are unprecedented times and conditions, but California is strong—we will get through this.” In line with the push to reopen schools and the economy, Newsom’s callous statement amounts to an acceptance of mounting devastation and death from wildfires.

Newsom recently proposed cutting $681 million from the state budget for environmental protection.

The state has systematically cut funding for social infrastructure, fire department budgets continue to be slashed, and nothing has been done to mitigate the wildfire danger.

In the wealthiest state, home to 154 billionaires—the largest number in the US—as well as Silicon Valley and the Hollywood film studios, the resources more than exist to adequately prepare for the annual fire season by injecting billions into the fire departments, upgrading the states aging energy infrastructure and carrying out controlled burns to clear dry vegetation, but these are not the priorities of the ruling elite.

States and counties across US conceal COVID-19 outbreaks at schools

Evan Blake

Using the fraudulent pretext of “protecting medical privacy,” a growing number of states and school districts across the United States are deliberately concealing information from the public on COVID-19 outbreaks in schools that have reopened. These include the states of Maine, Virginia and Oklahoma, as well as Camden County, Georgia, and Orange County, Florida. In Tennessee, Louisiana, and many other states, the decision is left to each individual county, and an unknown number of county officials are concealing outbreaks in schools from the public.

Following an outbreak in Camden County in early August, Deputy Superintendent Jon Miller sent a district-wide email to administrators, writing, “Staff who test positive are not to notify any other staff members, parents of their students or any other person/entity that they may have exposed them.” The district has not publicly confirmed a single case, while the virus is raging throughout the state, and there have been rumors of infections at multiple schools.

This criminal policy of concealment has become the modus operandi across industries—including in logistics, auto, meatpacking, health care, and more—and serves as a primary mechanism for implementing the homicidal return-to-work campaign of the ruling class. If cases are concealed and no one knows whether their coworkers have been infected, the powers-that-be can justify reopening while the pandemic spreads even more rapidly.

Washoe County Schools Superintendent Kristen McNeill talks to students returning to Greenbrae Elementary School in Sparks, Nev., on Tuesday, Aug. 18, 2020 (AP Photo/Scott Sonner).

The American ruling class, like its counterparts in Sweden and many other countries, is actively seeking to develop “herd immunity” based on infecting huge sections of the population, which will produce further mass deaths. Already, over 180,000 Americans have been killed as a result of this murderous policy. In Sweden, authorities deliberately kept schools open in pursuit of “herd immunity,” producing a per capita death rate nearly 10 times that of its neighbor, Finland, which in contrast closed schools and most businesses.

The drive to reopen schools is now the linchpin of the broader campaign to resume production in the US and globally. In order to force parents back into unsafe factories and workplaces, the ruling elites in the US, Brazil, Britain, Germany, Australia and a growing number of countries are determined to force educators and children back into unsafe classrooms. Setting a precedent of not reporting COVID-19 outbreaks in schools in the US will have immense ramifications for the working class internationally.

Since late July, there have been well over 2,800 reported infections of students and staff from at least 800 schools in 46 states. Dozens of schools in Florida have reported infections, with at least 1,200 confirmed cases. In Mississippi, 71 of the state’s 82 counties have reported outbreaks of COVID-19 in schools, and at least 200 students and 250 teachers have tested positive statewide.

In Georgia, at least 84 schools have already had outbreaks, with a combined 337 confirmed cases. In the Cherokee County School District alone, nearly 2,500 students and 62 staff members have gone into quarantine.

No doubt authorities also fear that the release of information about new outbreaks will provoke teacher strikes and student walkouts. The drive to reopen schools has already encountered enormous opposition. Since the beginning of July, there have been hundreds of protests in nearly every state. Last week, nearly half of all teachers and support staff in J.O. Combs Unified School District, a suburb of Phoenix, Arizona, carried out a wildcat sickout strike.

The news that districts are keeping COVID-19 cases secret was widely shared in the dozens of Facebook groups that have formed to oppose school openings. In one group in Rhode Island, which has over 15,000 members, a member commented, “By staying hush, they are aware that basically, it could kill people. I can’t believe what’s happening.” Another wrote, “This makes tracing impossible. Absolutely irresponsible and dangerous. Denial is just going to make a bad situation worse!”

Last week, the Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee was founded to organize the immense opposition to the drive to reopen schools and the assault on public education. Safety committees, which are independent of the unions, are being built on district and state levels. These committees demand the immediate release of all known and suspected COVID-19 cases at every school and workplace, and comprehensive testing and contact tracing programs, which are the prerequisite of any rational plan to contain and eradicate the virus.

Even the most basic right to information can only be secured through the independent initiative of educators, parents and students. The teacher unions at every level, and both the Democratic and Republican parties, have made clear that they will facilitate the covering up of this vital information, and do everything they can to keep educators isolated by district and state.

The situation is now critical. The lives of hundreds of thousands are on the line. Last week, the Department of Homeland Security quietly branded teachers and all education workers “critical infrastructure workers” on the instructions of the Trump White House. The DHS is the same agency that oversees the paramilitary BORTAC forces which Trump deployed in Portland and other cities last month, as part of his preparations to erect a presidential dictatorship.

By attaching this label to educators, Trump is enabling state and local officials to invoke “national security” and use their repressive state apparatus to force teachers and school workers back to work, even if they are known to have come into contact with someone infected with COVID-19.

Demonstrating the manipulation of science in the interests of the ruling class, last week the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued updated guidelines that fully sanction the reopening of schools. Where outbreaks of COVID-19 occur, the guidelines advocate the short-term suspension of individual classes and the cancellation of events and afterschool activities, rather than the shutdown of the entire campus.

While acknowledging that “children of all ages are susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 infection,” the CDC falsely claims that the children “might play a role in transmission.” This is despite multiple comprehensive studies proving that children do transmit the virus. The CDC concludes that “in-person learning is in the best interests of students,” ignoring the permanent physical and emotional damage that will be inflicted upon children who spread the disease to teachers, parents and grandparents, dwarfing any disruption caused by online learning.

In the struggle for their health and safety—and for the social interests of the vast majority—educators, parents and students must base themselves on the latest science, which proves demonstratively that reopening schools is a deadly endeavor.

The Educators Rank-and-File Safety Committee is working to coordinate a unified opposition to the nationwide campaign to reopen schools. We will do everything in our power to assist in the building of local rank-and-file committees in every school and neighborhood, to unite with broader sections of the working class in preparation for a nationwide general strike to halt the reopening schools, stop the spread of the pandemic, and save lives.

Amelia Earhart Fellowship 2021

Application deadline: 15th November 2020

Offered annually? Yes

Eligible Countries: Women from Any Country

To be taken at (country): Any University or College offering Accredited Degrees in any country.

Subject Areas: PhD/Doctoral degrees in Aerospace-related Sciences and Aerospace-related Engineering

About the Award: Zonta International established the Amelia Earhart Fellowship in 1938 in honor of legendary pilot and Zontian, Amelia Earhart. Today, the Fellowship of US$10,000 is awarded annually to 35 talented women, pursuing Ph.D./doctoral degrees in aerospace-related sciences or aerospace-related engineering around the globe.

Offered Since: 1938

Type: PhD/Doctoral

Eligibility

• Women of any nationality pursuing a Ph.D./doctoral degree who demonstrate a superior academic record in the field of aerospace-applied sciences or aerospace-applied engineering are eligible.
• Students must be registered in a full-time Ph.D./doctoral program and completed at least one year of that program or have received a master’s degree in an aerospace-applied field at the time the application is submitted.
• Applicants must not graduate from their Ph.D. or doctoral program before April 2022.
• Please note that post-doctoral research programs are not eligible for the Fellowship.
• Members and employees of Zonta International or the Zonta International Foundation are also not eligible to apply for the Fellowship.
• Note that previous Amelia Earhart Fellows are not eligible to apply to renew the Fellowship for a second year.

Number of Awards: Not specified

Benefits of Fellowship:

• Fellowship of US$10,000 is awarded annually
  
• The Fellowship enables these women to invest in state-of-the-art computers to conduct their research, purchase expensive books and resource materials, and participate in specialized studies around the globe.
• Amelia Earhart Fellows have gone on to become astronauts, aerospace engineers, astronomers, professors, geologists, business owners, heads of companies, even Secretary of the US Air Force.

Duration of Fellowship: One year (current fellows can reapply to renew the fellowship each year)

How to Apply: The Zonta International Amelia Earhart Fellowship Committee reviews the applications and recommends recipients to the Zonta International Board of Directors. All applicants will be notified of their status by the end of April.

Apply Now

Visit Scholarship Webpage for details

Important Note: Please note that post-doctoral research programs are not eligible for the Fellowship. Members and employees of Zonta International or the Zonta International Foundation are also not eligible to apply for the Fellowship.

The Historic Bastardization of “Freedom” in the US

Peter F. Crowley

The bastardization of liberty and freedom is nothing new in the United States. It extends far beyond the recent “Liberate” protests in response to pandemic lockdowns, the result of which have borne fruit in an earlier than predicted second wave of Covid-19. It is not confined to just the 21st century, during which all three presidents have directed acts of war against Iraq, Libya, Iran and Venezuela, in part, so that the people there may live in “freedom.” Nor is the specious use of these terms merely associated with tax cuts or the supposed “freedom” of the lobbyist.

It extends back to the earliest days of the British colonies and speeds full tilt ahead from there.

Following England’s 1688 Glorious Revolution, the Royal African Company’s monopoly on British slave trade eroded, following persistent pressure from merchants and colonial planters (p. 44-45). Such “free trade” (p. 43) deregulation caused the number of British colony slaves to exponentially multiple. Disproportionate numbers of black slaves compared with whites led to slave revolts and fear of it, causing the concept of whiteness (p.12) to burgeon at the end of the 17th century (though this remained tenuous due to imperial rivalries with France and Spain, and the rebelliousness of Scots and Irish).

Fast forward to the 1770s, when the desire for independence from Britain was brewing in the 13 colonies. Colonists were fretting about two court cases in Great Britain that seemed to indicate that colonists’ “liberty” to enslave people of African descent would be barred by an increasingly abolitionist mother country.

In 1772, British officers boarded the Gaspee in Newport, Rhode Island to investigate illicit slave trading. Viewing this as an infringement on their trading rights, the colonists rioted. An enslaved black man, Aaron Briggs, was made the chief witness against the rioters in an English court (p.202-203), causing a general clamor in the colonies over the fact that an American black slave was treated on equal footing in Britain. Then there was the Somerset case, where the American slave James Somerset was found in bondage on the Thames River. The abolitionist mood in London helped lead to his emancipation after a contentious trial (p. 209-212).

The pro-emancipation zeitgeist in Britain is an important and often overlooked factor in the US’s founding. Settlers worried that African slaves, who were relied upon for generating much of their wealth, would soon be manumitted by the Crown. To a certain degree, this caused their revolt; and, ironically, the slaveholding colonists themselves often claimed that they were being treated like “slaves” to Britain.

While Americans have long heard the founding mythology that a desire for liberty alone led to the Revolutionary War, the rebels’ contemporary, Samuel Johnson, mused (p. 242), “how is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?” In other words, how could colonists claim that liberty caused them to revolt against the Crown when they were preventing the liberty of wide swathes of the population because they were black. Exiled Massachusetts colonial governor Thomas Hutchinson wondered, “if the rights were so ‘absolutely inalienable’,” as stated in the Declaration of Independence, then how could people of African descent be deprived of them (p. 238).

Later on, after the founding of the republic, American settlers flooded into the Mexican territory of Texas. After Mexican independence in 1824, the new government soon passed laws to end the slave trade and slavery, but allowed Texas an exemption. Fearing that this exemption would be temporal and they would be deprived of human property (limitations on slavery is cited as Anglo-Texans’ “greatest problem under Mexican rule” in the Republic of Texas Constitution), the Anglo-Texans revolted to maintain “liberty.” As the “Ballad of Davy Crockett” goes, “To the Texas plains he jest had to go / Where freedom was fightin’ another foe.” Once again, the prattle of liberty and freedom was an obfuscation to maintain a system based on the most inhumane form of human exploitation: slavery.

Since then, we have seen liberty and freedom used throughout American history in various efforts towards furthering unfreedom. The Confederate leaders claimed they wanted constitutional liberty to maintained a slave system. William McKinley wanted to bring freedom to Filipinos, just as Lyndon Johnson did for the Vietnamese and Reagan for Chile. With the most pro-lobbying laws in the Western world, US courts and legislators have consistently misappropriated the First Amendment allowing for the legal purchase of politicians with money, culminating in Citizens United in 2010.

Today, with the Covid pandemic, there is unending drivel about liberty and freedom by those who want to reopen everything, without restriction, and who refuse to wear masks in public places. Just as with rebel colonists’ citing of liberty to maintain a slave system and lobbyists’ advocating for free speech rights to diminish citizens’ political power and freedom, the plandemic acolytes act in ways that hasten the spread of Covid-19, causing societal freedoms and well-being to diminish. Yet, unlike slaveholding Texas and colonist rebels who directly benefited from bastardizing the concept of freedom, the plandemic advocates gain next to nothing, other than the ability to walk into a mall, restaurant or bar without restriction.

This may speak to the extent that unreality, untruth and illogicity has inundated many Americans’ minds today. However, in bastardizing the concepts of freedom and liberty, there is a long trail of precedent.