Responding To Voter Suppression, Understanding Manipulated Elections

Kevin Zeese & Margaret Flowers

Voter suppression in the 2020 election has become a topic of great concern. In reality, voter suppression has been part of US politics since the founding of the country. The oligarchs who wrote the US Constitution enabled voter suppression by not including the right to vote in it and only allowing white male property owners to vote, suppressing the votes of 94 percent of the population.

Five of 16 states had white-only voting in 1800 and after 1802, every new state, free or slave, except for Maine banned Black people from voting. In 1807, New Jersey, which originally gave voting rights to “all inhabitants,” excluded women and Black men from voting. Maryland banned Jewish people from its polls until 1828. After the Civil War expanded voting rights to Black men, the Black vote was suppressed through intimidation campaigns and Jim Crow laws. After decades of protests, the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965 and voting by Black people increased, but in recent years suppression tactics are reducing that vote.

This year, the Republican Party and President Trump are working to suppress the votes of Black people, the working class, immigrants, and others, especially by attacking the US Postal Service to decrease mail-in voting.

The Democrats are also guilty of voter suppression as they do all they can to keep third parties off the ballot. Green Party presidential nominee Howie Hawkins explains party suppression is voter suppression because millions of people refuse to choose between two Wall Street-funded candidates and so they don’t vote. Sanders-Democrats also point to an unfair nomination process resulting in Joe Biden becoming the nominee.

Voter Suppression is Violence, From Cool revolution.

Voter Suppression Today

Voter suppression has gotten more sophisticated in recent elections through the massive de-registering of voters, abuse of voter ID laws, cutting the number of polling places in minority communities, felony disenfranchisement, not counting provisional ballots, and voter intimidation at the polls. In 2020, the battle over mail-in ballots and the Post Office is also a major issue.

On March 30, President Trump said in an interview on FOX, if there was high voter turnout “you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.” Trump was explaining why he opposed more money being spent to help states conduct the 2020 election during the pandemic. More recently, Trump floated the idea of delaying the November 3 election, an idea rejected by even Republican allies and something he does not have the power to do.

Removing people from voter registration lists has become a common practice. A Brennan Center study found that almost 16 million voters were purged from the rolls between 2014 and 2016. Jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination, which are no longer subject to pre-clearance after the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder in 2013, had a median purge rate 40% higher than other jurisdictions.

Voter ID laws have become a key tool in voter suppression. The ACLU reports that: “Thirty-six states have identification requirements at the polls. Seven states have strict photo ID laws.” Over 21 million U.S. citizens do not have government-issued photo identification resulting in ID laws reducing voter turnout by 2-3 percentage points, according to the US Government Accountability Office.

This year voter intimidation is making a comeback. Trump’s response to the closing night of the DNC was to tell Fox News that on election day he’s going to send law enforcement, sheriffs, US Attorneys, and Attorney  Generals to polling locations. While Trump has no control over sheriffs and police, making the threat is part of an intimidation campaign.

Republicans are recruiting an estimated 50,000 volunteers to act as “poll watchers” in November, part of a multi-million-dollar effort to control who votes. This campaign includes a $20 million fund for legal battles as well as the GOP’s first national poll-patrol operation in nearly 40 years.

Poll watchers in some states can challenge the eligibility of voters. After the 1981 election, Democrats sued over voter intimidation and a federal “consent decree” stopped the practice but the decree was allowed to expire at the end of 2017, and a judge declined to extend it in 2018.

The ACLU points to some of the impacts of these voter suppression efforts and how they are targeted at people of color and youth, writing:

• Seventy percent of Georgia voters purged in 2018 were Black.
• Across the country, one in 13 Blacks cannot vote due to disenfranchisement laws.
• One-third of voters who have a disability report difficulty voting.
• Only 40 percent of polling places fully accommodate people with disabilities.
• Counties with larger minority populations have fewer polling sites and poll workers per voter.
• Six in ten college students come from out of state in New Hampshire, the state trying to block residents with out of state drivers’ licenses.

Stop privatization of the Postal Service from PostalReporter.com.

Voting during the pandemic, mail-in voting and the Postal Service

The COVID-19 pandemic has created new issues for voting in 2020. More people will be voting by mail as 20 states expanded or eased access to voting by mail as a public health measure. The election could be decided by a fight over which mail ballots are counted. One of the most common reasons for invalidating a vote is if the ballot arrives late, making postal delivery of critical importance. In the primaries, more than 540,000 mail ballots were rejected during primaries across 23 states this year, nearly a quarter in key battlegrounds for the fall, i.e. Florida, Maine, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Last week, the Democrats in the House passed $25 billion in emergency funding for the Post Office. While this is insufficient, it is opposed by President Trump. Senator Mitch McConnell may not take the issue up in the Senate, saying it is too much money and other COVID-19 relief proposals should be included in it.

Trump is also trying to undermine the ability of the Post Office to deliver ballots on time.  Trump crony, Louis DeJoy, who was appointed Postmaster General, is a prominent Trump donor, deputy finance chairman for the Republican National Committee, and the former lead fundraiser for the Republican National Committee. DeJoy donated more than $2.5 million to the Republican Party and its candidates, so he is heavily invested in a Republican electoral victory.

DeJoy fired people with experience running the Postal Service on August 17, and twenty-three postal executives were reassigned or displaced in a new organizational structure that centralizes power around DeJoy. He stopped overtime work and mail sorting machines and mailboxes have been removed. As a result of public pressure, he  says he stopped further removals until after the election, although people are reporting finding locked mail boxes.

The Democrats, who have been complicit with the attack on the Post Office, are paying attention now that it is affecting the election. Unfortunately, their proposal falls far short of the $75 billion investment needed by the Postal Service, and doesn’t address the long term problems created by the Congress and president in 2006 when they required the Postal Service to fund 75 years worth of pension and healthcare costs.

We need to act now because they are likely to ignore the efforts at privatization of the postal service after November. We need to demand more money for the Post Office and insist on the end of any privatization of the Postal Service so it remains a public agency serving the public good. The so-called ‘Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act‘ of 2006, which was designed to weaken the Post Office, must be repealed. And, the Post Office should be given greater power to provide other services like a Postal Bank for the millions of people who do not have access to banking services.

Showing up by protesting for the Postal Service gives postal workers the power to defy the Postmaster General and speak out. Postal workers in Washington State are refusing to take mail sorting equipment offline. Postal workers have been ordered not to speak to the press so people are not aware how bad the situation is. If workers see the public is on their side, they may have the courage to speak or anonymously leak documents to the media.

Protests in the US in 2011 targeted greed and corruption among banking and business leaders. By Scott Olson for AFP-Getty Images.

2020 Highlights Mirage Democracy

The failure of US democracy is on display in the 2020 election but these are long-term problems. The United States is not a democracy; it is a plutocracy. Elections give people the illusion of choice when in reality the power elites are the ones who choose the candidates, as we described in this 2013 article.

Some people choose not to participate in the elections for this reason. Others choose to use the election to make a point by rejecting the corporate candidates and voting for third-party candidates who support their positions, such as national improved Medicare for All, acting on climate change, ending police violence and imperialism, and more or only voting in down-ballot races.

If you choose to participate in the election, here are some actions you can take to protect your vote:

1. If you want to vote in 2020, order your mail-in ballots, if they are available, as soon as possible. In our state, Maryland, the Board of Elections warns they may run out of ballots.
2. Know your rights. It is illegal to intimidate or coerce voters. If you experience it or see it happening to someone else, record it by video or in writing to poll workers.
3. If you are told you are not registered, demand a provisional ballot. Due to Voter-ID laws, each state has different requirements. Understand what is required in your state, and come prepared.

Finally, it is important to remember when we are inundated with a constant focus on the 2020 elections that the power of the people does not derive from elections. Our task is to build people’s power outside of elections.

People have the power to make the country ungovernable. Both parties are ignoring issues supported by a majority of the people, including, improved Medicare for all, a robust Green New Deal, a guaranteed basic income, a tax on the wealth to shrink the wealth divide, cuts to the bloated military budget, free college and vocational education and confronting the climate crisis, which is already wreaking havoc across the nation.

The Occupy Movement, the Fight for $15, the student debt movement, labor strikes and the uprising against police violence show people have power. We have only begun to scratch the surface of our potential. We have to build the power to rule from below, no matter who is elected president in 2020.

The origins and evolution of the SARS-CoV-2 virus

Frank Gaglioti

The SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes the disease COVID-19 is nimbly and stealthily racing through community after community devastating the world’s population. Over 23 million people have contracted the virus worldwide and 810,000 have died. It is critical to review the evolutionary history of this particular virus to provide necessary insights into how the pandemic can be brought under control.

Researchers worldwide are working arduously to trace the virus globally by studying samples obtained from various nations looking for subtle mutations that it undergoes as it infects, replicates and multiplies, providing them clues to the source and route of spread.

COVID-19 is caused by a type of coronavirus known as SARS-CoV-2, named for its similarity to the coronavirus that caused SARS. The virus is called a coronavirus because it is covered by club-like structures that give the virus a similar look to the sun’s corona in electron micrographs.

The SARS-CoV-2 virus is part of a family of organisms that are known to infect mammals and birds. The Coronaviridae family are made up of a positive-sense single-stranded RNA completely enveloped in a complex protein and bilipid shell. These viruses are relatively large, consisting of 26 to 32 kilobase pairs. RNA or ribonucleic acid is a nucleic acid that is essential for all reproductive processes and like DNA.

The first known scientific encounter with this family of virus is thought to be when veterinarians puzzled over bronchial infections afflicting cats, pigs, and chickens in the early 20th century.

Study of disease afflicting and damaging tobacco crops in the late 19th century led some thoughtful scientists like Dimitri Ivanovsky to conjecture the existence of non-bacterial infectious agents causing the “tobacco mosaic disease.” It would take another 50 years to capture the first images of the Tobacco Mosaic Virus. The invention of the electron microscope in 1931 enabled scientists to observe viruses more closely, allowing a more extensive and direct study of these micro-organisms. Virology as a field began to flourish.

Human coronaviruses were first identified in the 1960s. Seven species of coronavirus are known to afflict humans. Four result in relatively mild upper respiratory tract conditions, including the virus 229E that causes the common cold, along with NL63, OC43 and HKU1.

The other three strains, SARS, MERS, and SARS-CoV-2, are far more virulent. All these viruses were new to human populations when they first arose in the 21st century. A feature of SARS, MERS and COVID-19 is that they had a zoonotic origin, that is they originated in animal populations and then jumped into humans. The SARS outbreak in 2002, with a case fatality rate of 11 percent, showed the world the deadly potential of coronaviruses, but this was a warning that was mostly ignored. There had only been 8,422 cases and since 2004 no SARS-CoV has been reported worldwide. One advantage for public health responses to SARS was that it had an incubation period of 4 to 6 days and patients presented with symptoms prior to becoming infectious.

In their extensive investigations, the World Health Organisation (WHO) concluded that the SARS virus originated in bat populations, but the exact species remains unknown. Work commenced on the development of a SARS vaccine with testing on animals. The vaccine resulted in protective immunity but produced an immune mediated hypersensitivity as an adverse effect. The SARS threat, for unknown reasons, expired after six months though limited outbreaks did occur later.

With the threat of a pandemic having ended after six months, so did any interest in funding a vaccine, as pharmaceutical companies saw no profit in funding or exploring such research. The co-director of the Center for Vaccine Development at Texas Children’s Hospital and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Dr. Peter Hotez, had been attempting to develop a SARS vaccine in 2016 but couldn’t get funding for his work. “We tried like heck to see if we could get investors or grants to move this into the clinic ... But we just could not generate much interest,” he said.

“We could have had this ready to go and been testing the vaccine’s efficacy at the start of this new outbreak in China (COVID-19) … There is a problem with the ecosystem in vaccine development, and we’ve got to fix this,” Hotez said.

The genomic sequence of the SARS virus was published in August 2003 by Chinese scientists in Beijing. In actuality, when the cause of the pneumonia-like illness was first identified in Wuhan, some believed this was a new outbreak of the SARS virus. SARS-CoV-2 and SARS share a genomic sequence that is approximately an 80 percent match.

Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, or MERS, emerged in Saudi Arabia in 2012 and had a zoonotic origin in bats and was spread to humans through contact with dromedary camels. The virus produced symptoms similar to SARS but it had a low infectivity though highly lethal. Of the reported 2,500 cases, 35 percent died from the disease.

With limited capacity to spread from human to human, it was mainly passed through contact with infected people in hospitals. In the main it was concentrated in the Arabian Peninsula, although there were further outbreaks in South Korea in 2015 and Saudi Arabia in 2018. It continues to smoulder in the Middle East.

When the SARS CoV-2 virus emerged in late 2019, the world was totally unprepared. Health systems internationally had been systematically run down and were ill-equipped to respond. The warnings from WHO of the dangerous potential of the virus were largely ignored or belittled. The murderous government policies that dominated have been described as malign neglect or herd immunity.

SARS CoV-2 arose in Wuhan in December 2019. The virus is thought to have originated from bats and to have transferred to humans through an intermediary species. The exact origins of the virus may never be known. “It is quite possible we won’t find it (the species). In fact, it would be exceptionally lucky if we land on something,” a geneticist from University College London, Lucy van Dorp, told Nature .

Back in 2013, the Wuhan Institute of Virology had investigated the coronavirus genome from the horseshoe bat ( Rhinolophus affinis ). The viruses named RATG13 and SARS-CoV-2 were found to be 96 percent genetically similar. There are, however, subtle molecular changes that continue to be investigated that contribute to selection pressures that drive the virulence, pathogenicity, and immunogenic qualities of the virus.

In their detailed analysis of the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, Andersen et al., 2020, offered three possible explanations: 1) natural selection in an animal host before jumping into humans, 2) natural selection in humans after the virus transferred into human hosts, and 3) the product of artificial manipulation, which has been refuted by several virologists. According to Van Dorp, “… the 4% difference between the genomes of SARS-CoV-2 and RATG13 still represents some 50 years since they last shared a common ancestor.”

It was thought that pangolins ( Manis javanica ), a scaly ant-eating mammal, may be the intermediate host between bats and humans, but genetic studies indicate that as unlikely. However, some scientists think that because coronavirus-like SARS-CoV-2 cases have been found in pangolins, that species cannot be ruled out as the intermediary source.

Scientists are currently examining species of animals that were kept and sold in the live markets in Wuhan where bats may have been in the buildings’ roof near animals and humans. Presently a team of experts from the WHO are working with their Chinese counterparts to answer this pressing question.

“The opportunities for these viruses to spill over across a very active wildlife-livestock-human interface is clear and obvious,” the president of the EcoHealth Alliance in New York City, Peter Daszak, told Nature. The complex evolutionary history of SARS-CoV-2 disproves President Donald Trump’s ignorant claims (which have a political purpose) that the virus came out of a Chinese laboratory. “Whether they [China] made a mistake, or whether it started off as a mistake and then they made another one, or did somebody do something on purpose?” Trump said.

In a recent paper published in Nature Microbiology —“Evolutionary origins of the SARS-CoV-2 sarbecovirus lineage responsible for the covid-19 pandemic,” led by Maciej F Boni from the Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics at Pennsylvania State University—found that the lineage of SARS-CoV-2 had been circulating in bat populations for decades. “If these viruses have been around for decades that means that they’ve had lots of opportunity to find new host species, including humans,” said Professor David Robertson from the University of Glasgow.

Scientists have carefully examined the Receptor Binding Domain (RBD) of the genetic sequence that codes for the spike protein, the necessary structure on the virus’ exterior shell that is used to bind and penetrate the human cell. The spike protein has been compared to a grappling hook that grips the host cell, then creates a cleavage site that enables the opening and penetration into the host cell.

This means that the SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins had evolved to target a feature of human cells known as angiotensin converting enzyme 2 receptor (ACE2) which are well known to assist in regulating blood pressure.

Andersen et al ., remark that the RBD is the critical component of the spike protein that allows it to bind to ACE2 receptors. SARS-CoV-2 appears to bind with great affinity to the human ACE2 receptors, but computational analysis predicted that the interaction is not ideal. According to the New York Times, “the authors indicate that the high-affinity bindings of the virus’ spike protein to human ACE2 is most likely a by-product of natural selection that has permitted another ‘optimal binding solution to arise.’ They then conclude that this is strong evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is not a product of genetic reconstruction or tampering.”

“These two features of the virus, the mutations in the RBD portion of the spike protein and its distinct backbone, rule out laboratory manipulation as a potential origin for SARS-CoV-2,” wrote Kristian Andersen, associate professor of immunology and microbiology at Scripps Research, and co-leader of the study.

With SARS-CoV-2 virus proliferating around the world, the opportunity arises for further mutations and the emergence of new strains of the virus. This can mean that new virus strains may develop in the future not treatable by possible vaccines that were originally made to treat older strains.

According to Assistant Teaching Professor of Computer Science and Technology Niema Moshiri, COVID-19’s mutation rate is lower than seasonal influenza. The SARS-CoV-2 genome has a limited repair function that edits out most mutations. This has meant the virus has remained relatively uniform.

“What we are finding is that the SARS-CoV-2 virus appears to be mutating more slowly than the seasonal flu which may allow scientists to develop a vaccine,” Moshiri wrote on LiveScience. Despite this, variations do occur, and virologists are constantly looking at the variants to determine if a more virulent strain may be emerging or if the virus is losing its potency.

Scientists are collecting virus sequences and storing them in a globally available database. This is used to determine the rate of mutation and where in the virus genome mutations are occurring. Such mutations can affect the virulence and how effectively the virus can infect human host cells. The existence of different viral strains can be used to trace outbreaks.

Analysis of the SARS-CoV-2 virus from different countries has shown that the virus has undergone several predicted but insignificant mutations already. Scientists led by Peter Forster, along with researchers based in the UK and Germany, traced 160 COVID-19 genomes from China, Europe, and the US. They identified three strains of the virus called A, B and C. Type A is considered to be the original Chinese “ancestral type.” Type B is found in Asia, Europe and the US and has diverged from A with 2 mutations. Type C differs from type B at one site and is mostly confined to Europe and mostly absent from China.

More recently, researchers have alerted that a new strain, D614G, has become dominant in many countries. “The D614G variant first came to our attention in early April, as we had observed a strikingly repetitive pattern. All over the world, even when local epidemics had many cases of the original form circulating, soon after the D614G variant was introduced into a region it became the prevalent form,” wrote theoretical biologist at Los Alamos National Laboratory Bette Korber, in the journal Cell .

“This mutation is present in roughly two third of all global strains,” according to Associate Professor Denis Bauer, transformational bioinformatics team leader at CSIRO’s Australian e-Health Research Centre. The mutation that originated in the virus’ spike protein (not the RBD section) is thought to make it more contagious, but speculation that the virus is more virulent is extremely difficult to prove.

Scientists from the Department of Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases at the Yale School of Public Health led by Nathan D. Grubaugh published a paper in Cell titled “Making Sense of Mutation: What D614G Means for the COVID-19 Pandemic Remains Unclear.” The paper examines whether the strain is more transmissible, infectious, or deadly, but concludes that “these data do not prove that G614 is more infectious or transmissible than viruses containing D614.” They conclude there is no evidence that the virus strain leads “to more severe disease.”

The history of human populations and coronaviruses indicate a possible course for the current pandemic. For instance, the virus OC43 is responsible for the common cold, but a study by researchers from the University of Leuven in Belgium suggest it may have been responsible for a pandemic in 1889 that killed more than 1 million people internationally. They speculate that humans eventually developed immunity against the virus, making future infections more benign.

The course of this pandemic is on par with one of history’s most severe health crisis in modern times. For humanity to develop herd immunity to SARS-CoV-2 would imply untold millions of deaths and incompletely understood chronic health morbidities. Yet, in the 21st century, where scientific knowledge is capable with confronting the threat, capitalism enchains humanity’s ability to respond in kind.

Australian universities unveil job cuts of up to 30 percent

Mike Head

Assisted by the role of the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) in continuing to push through historic cuts in jobs, wages and conditions, Australian university managements are unveiling plans to intensify their offensive, eliminating thousands more jobs.

In line with the demands of the federal government and the corporate elite, the employers are exploiting the fallout from the global COVID-19 pandemic to demand further pro-business restructuring.

There was outrage by staff at the University of Sydney last week, after it was revealed that all departments have been asked to plan scenarios to cut full-time jobs by up to 30 percent next year to deal with the pandemic’s impact, which the management now admits will worsen next year.

With a workforce of about 9,000 full-time equivalent jobs, a 30 percent cut would slash 2,700. But many more people would be affected because the university employs a high proportion of part-time and casual workers, hundreds of whom have been cut already.

The University of Sydney

In an email last Wednesday, the head of the university’s School of Education and Social Work, Deb Hayes, said Arts and Social Sciences dean Annamarie Jagose had asked her to propose “how we might restructure to reduce by up to 30 percent FTE (full-time equivalent jobs).” Hayes suggested that one scenario would be for academics to take one day’s leave without pay each week.

In a bid to quell staff anger the management denied any final decisions had been made, but similar “scenarios” are being drafted across the university. The NTEU also sought to head off unrest by claiming that its enterprise agreement with the university would protect jobs, even though that agreement permits restructuring and retrenchments provided there is consultation with union representatives.

A hastily-called meeting, joined by more than 200 Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences workers last Thursday, committed to fight the cuts, possibly including by industrial action. But the motion put to the meeting offered no alternative perspective except to call on the management to borrow money on the basis of the university’s significant assets.

That call leaves unchallenged the underlying agenda of accelerating the decades-long transformation of universities into corporatised and casualised facilities serving the vocational requirements of the corporate elite. It echoes similar NTEU pleas at other universities for managements to sell off assets and axe jobs only as a “last resort.”

During the meeting, one professional staff member pointed to the wider cuts and restructuring throughout the universities in Australia and globally. He explained the culpability of governments and big business for their profit-driven response to the pandemic, and their bailouts of the corporate elite. He raised the necessity therefore to fight for the reorganisation of society on a socialist basis to meet social needs, not boost private profits.

The next day, the need for that perspective was highlighted when Melbourne’s RMIT University announced that it had eliminated 355 jobs via so-called voluntary redundancies, on top of the destruction of hundreds of casual jobs in April. A spokesperson said the measures would save $48 million and foreshadowed further cuts, saying the university’s revenue would fall by $175 million in 2020 alone.

Earlier in the week, Sydney’s Macquarie University told its staff that forced redundancies would follow if proposed “voluntary” redundancies failed to meet an expected a $175 million revenue shortfall this year, and an even bigger loss next year. This would mean eliminating between 600 and 1,000 full-time equivalent jobs.

The email from Macquarie’s vice chancellor also announced a “strategic alignment” of its academic workforce, including increased use of the “job families” scheme. This scheme, which forces targeted academics to devote 80 percent of their workloads to teaching, with no time for research, was imposed by the NTEU in its 2018 enterprise agreement despite significant opposition from academic staff.

Two weeks ago, Victoria’s La Trobe University launched a second round of voluntary redundancies following the axing of 239 jobs in an earlier round. It told staff it plans to cut costs by 20 percent and reduce the range of academic disciplines it teaches.

Remaining staff will be expected to lift their productivity by 20 percent as the ratio of full-time students to full-time staff member is lifted from 8.7 to 10.5. This was after a majority of staff voted, at the NTEU’s urging, to take salary reductions, supposedly to limit job losses.

In a draft 10-year strategy for 2020 to 2030, the La Trobe management said it may lose up to 25 percent of revenue by the end of next year and would resort to more online teaching. “We will be a smaller institution measured by revenue, staff and students for the foreseeable future,” the draft strategy stated.

In the same week, Melbourne’s Victoria University revealed a plan to cut up to 190 jobs. Vice-chancellor Professor Peter Dawkins said the number of positions lost would depend on staff’s willingness to accept a pay-cutting variation to their enterprise agreement.

These losses came in the wake of those at other Melbourne universities, with the University of Melbourne to lose 450 full-time positions and Monash University to shed 277 jobs despite Monash workers accepting an NTEU proposal to cut wages.

Universities Australia, the employers’ body, previously projected that the higher education sector would lose up to 21,000 jobs this year alone. That is now an under-estimate because of the pandemic’s resurgence since July, particularly in the state of Victoria.

In response, the NTEU has stepped up its collaboration with university managements, policing cuts to wages, jobs and basic conditions. It has defied the opposition of union members in May that triggered the collapse of the union’s “national framework,” which volunteered wage cuts of up to 15 percent and still accepted the loss of 18,000 jobs.

The NTEU and its allies are also trying to divert the outrage of university workers and students into a parliamentary petition campaign. They are appealing to right-wing senators to block the Liberal-National government’s latest student fee hikes and funding cuts on the basis of arguing that universities make a valuable contribution to Australian capitalism. This campaign buries the record of successive governments in cutting billions of dollars from the public universities, starting with the last Greens-backed Labor Party government of 2010-2013.

These bitter experiences demonstrate that university academics, staff and students can defend jobs and fight for free, high-quality education, only through a rebellion against the NTEU and all the other pro-capitalist unions and the entire political establishment.

The Committee for Public Education (CFPE) and the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) have jointly called for the formation of independent rank-and-file committees to prosecute a genuine industrial and political struggle against all the union-enforced attacks.

That requires challenging the capitalist profit system and turning to a socialist perspective based on the total reorganisation of society in the interests of all, instead of the financial oligarchy. We urge all university workers and students who want to take forward this fight to contact us.

Australia’s two major airlines axe thousands of jobs

Terry Cook

A wave of job cuts is being unleashed across Australia’s aviation sector with Qantas and Virgin Australia, the country’s two major airlines, dramatically restructuring operations to slash costs amid ongoing turmoil in the global airline industry.

After claiming a net financial year after-tax loss of $1.9 billion last week, Qantas CEO Allan Joyce declared there would be further job cuts on top of the 6,000, or about 20 percent of the airline’s workforce, announced in June. Joyce did not say how many additional positions would be eliminated but made clear that 4,000 of the previously announced cuts would be imposed by the end of September.

The earlier cull was part of Qantas’s plan to achieve $15 billion in savings by 2023 and $1 billion in annual benefits into the future. In April, at the outset of the imposition of COVID-19 travel restrictions, Qantas, which had a total workforce of 29,000, stood down around 20,000 employees and grounded large sections of its fleet.

While Joyce has used the reported financial year loss to justify the ongoing job destruction, the loss was partly driven by a $1.2 billion write-down of its Airbus A380 superjumbos, which were placed in storage after the company suspended numbers of domestic and international services when the pandemic restrictions began.

Excluding the write-downs and various one-off costs, Qantas remains in the black with a reported financial profit of $124 million. The job destruction at the giant corporation, moreover, is being stepped up, despite the fact that it has received millions of dollars in government assistance and is asking for even more.

Last week, a Qantas spokesman confirmed that the company had received $248 million from aviation-specific government support schemes and $267 million through the government’s JobKeeper scheme that provides selected employers with $1,500 per fortnight per employee they keep on the books.

While Qantas claims that the majority of JobKeeper payments were given to stood-down workers, it admitted that the remainder were used to subsidise the wages of staff who continued to work. In other words, Qantas has been able to reduce its wages bill at public expense. In fact, Qantas reported a $15 million net benefit to its bottom line from the total $515 million it obtained in government support.

Qantas’s restructure is an attempt to position itself in the ruthless competitive war for market share in the global aviation that will see airlines go under and tens of thousands of jobs destroyed.

Joyce made the company’s predatory aims clear during a media briefing last week. Referencing the cost-cutting plan now being implemented by rival Virgin Australia, which has been taken over by private equity firm Bain Capital, he declared: “They [Virgin] will come out leaner and meaner and that’s a big challenge for us because the margin [advantage] that Qantas had is really important.”

Insisting that Qantas’s restructuring program was “now even more important,” Joyce added: “If Virgin were able to overcome that cost-base advantage, that’s a long term threat to Qantas.”

Joyce’s statement followed announcements by Virgin Australia earlier this month that it was shedding 3,000 jobs, or about one third of the carrier’s workforce. The cuts are part of Bain Capital’s restructuring of the failed carrier, aimed at establishing what it describes as “a leaner, fitter” operation. This savage attack has not deterred the Queensland state Labor government from offering Bain Capital $200 million in assistance and other incentives to maintain Virgin Australia’s home base in that state.

Virgin Australia was placed in administration in March this year owing more than $6.8 billion to creditors, including banks and major investors. Along with its job destruction, Bain Capital announced it was ditching Virgin’s low-cost carrier Tigerair, a move that will cost hundreds more positions. Around 220 Tigerair pilots have been made redundant.

Some of Virgin’s assets are being sold off, including a number of Boeing 737s to Rex, a regional airline that has already received $54 million in government assistance. The proceeds will go towards paying off Virgin’s secured creditors.

Bain Capital’s bid for Virgin, for an undisclosed amount, was selected by administrator Deloitte Australia in June, as a host of corporate takeover firms were circling the failed airline looking for lucrative pickings.

In a development that locks in Bain Capital’s takeover bid, the Federal Court last week ruled against an application by Asia-based hedge funds Broad Peak Investment and Tor Investments, who are representing Virgin bondholders for an alternate deal to be presented to a creditors’ meeting scheduled for September 1.

The deal, which was supported by major investment giants, including Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank and UBS, involved Virgin’s bondholders swapping $2 billion in debt for shares in a relaunched airline and the raising of an additional $800 million to recapitalise the company.

The bondholders’ application was not motivated by any concern for Virgin workers but fear that if Bain Capital, succeeded they could end up getting as little as ten cents in the dollar on their debt holdings. Even if the bondholders’ proposal had succeeded, workers would have faced the same type of cost-cutting measures being implemented by Bain Capital.

From the outset, the airline unions’ response to the jobs slaughter at Qantas and Virgin Australia has been to deepen their collaboration with management, prevent any unified action by workers in the industry, and echo company appeals to the government for even larger financial handouts to the carriers.

Transport Workers Union (TWU) national secretary Michael Kaine insisted that further government support was “imperative.” He called on the federal government to “meet aviation businesses, airports and workers right now to work out a plan of action to stop aviation hitting a wall”—i.e., to involve the unions in airline industry job destruction and restructuring.

The airline unions endorsed Bain Capital’s takeover of Virgin Australia, even after the announcement this month of its massive job cuts.

Kaine cynically told the media that while the job cuts announcement was a “difficult day” for workers, the company’s decision to avoid becoming a solely low-cost carrier was “broadly positive.”

The mounting onslaught on jobs and conditions across the aviation sector in Australia and internationally underscores the necessity for a unified global struggle by airline workers. The long record of union-enforced cuts demonstrates the need for a decisive break with the unions and the establishment of new organisations of struggle, including independent rank-and-file committees.

Such committees would be tasked with turning to other sections of workers in Australia and internationally, who are all facing similar attacks, and developing a globally coordinated counter offensive of the entire working class. This struggle must be based on a socialist perspective and the fight for a workers' government that would place the airlines and all essential industries, along with the major banks and corporations, under public ownership and democratic workers' control.

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.