National (In)Security and the Pentagon Budget

Mandy Smithberger

A Post-Coronavirus Economy Can No Longer Afford to Put the Pentagon First

The inadequate response of both the federal and state governments to the Covid-19 pandemic has had a devastating impact on the United States, creating what could only be called a national security crisis. More than 190,000 Americans are dead, approximately half of them people of color. Yelp data show that more than 132,000 businesses have already closed and census data suggest that, thanks to lost wages, nearly 17% of Americans with children can’t afford to feed them enough food.

In this same period, a number of defense contractors have been doing remarkably well. Lockheed Martin, the Pentagon’s top contractor, reported that, compared to 2019, its earnings are actually up — yes, up! The company’s success led the financial magazine Barron’s to call it a “pandemic star.” And those profits are only likely to grow, given the Trump administration’s recent approval of a 10-year deal to sell $62 billion worth of its F-16s to Taiwan.

And Lockheed Martin is far from the only such outfit. As Defense One reported, “It’s becoming abundantly clear that companies with heavy defense business have been able to endure the coronavirus pandemic much better” than, for instance, commercial aerospace firms. And so it was that, while other companies have cut or suspended dividends during the pandemic, Lockheed Martin, which had already raised its gift to shareholders in late 2019, continued to pay the same amount this March and September.

The spread of Covid-19 has created one of the most significant crises of our time, but it’s also provided far greater clarity about just how misplaced the priorities of Washington have been all these years. Americans — the Trump administration aside — are now trying to deal with the health impacts of the pandemic and struggling to figure out how to safely reopen schools. It’s none too soon, however, to start thinking as well about how best to rebuild a devastated economy and create new jobs to replace those that have been lost. In that process, one thing is crucial: resisting the calls — and count on it, they will come — to “rebuild” the war economy that had betrayed us long before the coronavirus arrived on our shores, leaving this country in a distinctly weakened state.

A New Budget Debate?

For the past decade, the budget “debate” in this country has largely been shaped by the Budget Control Act, which tried to save $1 trillion over those 10 years by placing nominal caps on both defense and non-defense spending. Notably, however, it exempted “war spending” that falls in what the Pentagon calls its Overseas Contingency Operations account. While some argued that caps on both defense and non-defense spending created parity, the Pentagon’s ability to use and abuse that war slush fund (on top of an already gigantic base budget) meant that the Pentagon still disproportionately benefited by tens of billions of dollars annually.

In 2021, the Budget Control Act expires. That means a Biden or Trump administration will have an enormous opportunity to significantly reshape federal spending. At the very least, that Pentagon off-budget slush fund, which creates waste and undermines planning, could be ended. In addition, there’s more reason than ever for Congress to reassess its philosophy of this century that the desires of the Pentagon invariably come first, particularly given the need to address the significant economic damage the still-raging pandemic is creating.

In rebuilding the economy, however, count on one thing: defense contractors will put every last lobbying dollar into an attempt to convince the public, Congress, and whatever administration is in power that their sector is the country’s major engine for creating jobs. As TomDispatch regular Bill Hartung has shown, however, a close examination of such job-creation claims rarely stands up to serious scrutiny. For example, the number of jobs created by recent arms sales to Saudi Arabia are now expected to be less than a tenth of those President Trump initially bragged about. As Hartung noted in February, that’s “well under .03% of the U.S. labor force of more than 164 million people.”

As it turns out, creating jobs through Pentagon spending is among the least effective ways to rebuild the economy. As experts at the University of Massachusetts and Brown University have both discovered, this country would get significantly more job-creation bang for the bucks it spends on weaponry by investing in rebuilding domestic infrastructure, combating climate change, or creating more alternative energy. And such investments would pay additional dividends by making our communities and small businesses stronger and more resilient.

Defense Contractors Campaigning for Bailouts

At the Project On Government Oversight where I work, I spend my days looking at the many ways the arms industry exerts disproportionate influence over what’s still called (however erroneously in this Covid-19 moment) “national security” and the foreign policy that goes with it, including this country’s forever wars. That work has included, for instance, exposing how a bevy of retired military officers advocated buying more than even the Pentagon requested of the most expensive weapons system in history, Lockheed Martin’s F-35 jet fighter, while failing to disclose that they also had significant personal financial interests in supporting that very program. My colleagues and I are also continually tracking the many officials who leave the Pentagon to go to work on the boards of or to lobby for arms makers or leave those companies and end up in the Pentagon and elsewhere in the national security state. That’s known, of course, as the military-industrial complex’s “revolving door.” And as President Trump recently noted, it helps ensure that those endless wars never end, while stoking an ever-increasing Pentagon budget. While his actions on behalf of the arms industry don’t back up his rhetoric, his diagnosis of the problem is largely on target.

And yet, as familiar as I am with the damage that the weapons industry has done to our country, I still find myself shocked at how a number of those companies have responded to the current crisis. Almost immediately, they began lobbying the Department of Defense to make their employees part of this country’s “essential critical infrastructure,” so that they could force them to return to work, pandemic or not. That decision drew a rare rebuke from the unions representing those workers, many of whom feared for their lives.

And mind you, only then did things become truly perverse. In the initial Covid-19 relief bill, Congress gave the Pentagon $1 billion to help respond to the pandemic. Such aid, as congressional representatives imagined it, would be used to purchase personal protective equipment for employees who still had to show up at work, especially since the Department of Defense’s own initial estimate was that the country would need to produce as many as 3.3 billion N95 masks in six months. The Pentagon, however, promptly gave those funds to defense contractors, including paying for such diverse “needs” as golf-course staffing, hypersonic missile development, and microelectronics, a Washington Post investigation found. House appropriators responded that money for defense contractors “was not the original intent of the funds.”

And now those defense contractors are asking for yet more bailouts. Earlier this summer, they successfully convinced the Senate to put $30 billion for the arms industry in its next coronavirus relief bill. As CQ Roll Call reported, the top beneficiaries of that spending spree would be the Pentagon’s two largest contractors: Lockheed Martin and Boeing.

The pandemic has certainly resulted in some delays and unexpected expenses for such companies, but the costs borne by the weapons industry pale compared to the devastation caused to so many businesses that have had to close permanently. Every sector of the economy is undoubtedly facing unexpected costs due to the pandemic, but apparently the Department of Defense, despite being by far the best-funded military on the planet, and its major contractors, among the richest and most successful corporations in America, have essentially claimed that they will be unable to respond to the crisis without further taxpayer help. The chair of the House Armed Services Committee and the lead Democrat for the Senate’s defense appropriations subcommittee recently pointed out that, even though contractors across the federal government are facing pandemic challenges, no other agency has asked for additional funds to cover the costs of the crisis. Instead, they have worked on drawing from their existing resources.

It’s laughable to suggest that the very department that already has by far the most resources on hand and is, of course, charged with leading the country’s response to unexpected threats can’t figure out how to adjust without further funding. But most defense contractors see no reason to adapt since they know that they can continue to count on Washington to bail them out.

Still, the defense industry has become impatient that Congress hasn’t already acquiesced to their demands. In July, executives at most of the major contractors sent a letter to the White House demanding more money. In it, they included a not-so-subtle threat of electoral consequences for the president and Senate Republicans in close races if such funds weren’t provided. Only one major contractor, Northrop Grumman, has stayed away from such highly public lobbying efforts because its CEO apparently had the common sense to recognize that her company was doing too well to demand more when so many others are desperate for money, particularly minority-owned businesses, many of which are likely to never come back.

On a Glide Path to Disaster?

There are signs, however, that someday such eternal winners in the congressional financial sweepstakes may finally be made accountable thanks to the pandemic. This summer, both the House and the Senate for the first time each considered an amendment to cut the Pentagon’s budget by 10%. Such efforts even received support from at least some moderates, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), although it went down to defeat in both houses of Congress. Although Democratic vice presidential candidate Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA) refused to support the specifics of the amendment, she did at least express her agreement with the principle of needing to curtail the Pentagon’s spending spree during this crisis. “As a member of the Senate Intelligence and Homeland Security Committees, I’m keenly aware of the global threats facing our country,” she said in a statement she released after the vote. “I unequivocally agree with the goal of reducing the defense budget and redirecting funding to communities in need.”

The first real test of whether this country will learn any of the right lessons about national security from this ongoing pandemic moment will undoubtedly come in next year’s budget debate when the question will be: Is everything finally going to be on the table? As I previously wrote at TomDispatch, giving the Pentagon trillions of dollars in these years in no way prepared this country for the actual national security crisis of our lives. In fact, even considering the Pentagon’s ridiculously outsized budget, prioritizing funding for unaffordable and unproven weapons systems over healthcare hurt its ability to keep the military and its labor force safe. No less significantly, continuing to prioritize the Pentagon over the needs of every other agency and Americans more generally keeps us on a glidepath to disaster.

A genuinely new discussion of budget priorities would mean, as a start, changing the very definition of “security” to include responding to the many risks we actually face when it comes to our safety: not just pandemics, but the already increasing toll of climate change, a crumbling infrastructure, and a government that continues to disproportionately benefit the wealthy and well-connected over everyone else.

At the simplest level, the “defense” side of the budget ledger should be made to reflect what we’re really spending now on what passes for national security. That means counting homeland security and veterans’ benefits, along with many other expenses that often get left out of the budget equation. When such expenses are indeed included, as Brown University’s Costs of War Project has discovered, the real price tag for America’s wars in the Greater Middle East alone came to more than $6.4 trillion by 2020. In other words, even to begin to have an honest debate about how America’s other needs are funded, there would have to be a far more accurate accounting of what actually has been spent in these years on “national security.”

Surprisingly enough, unlike Congress (or the Pentagon), the voting public already seems to grasp the need for change. The nonprofit think tank Data for Progress found that more than half of likely voters support cutting the Pentagon’s budget by 10% to pay for domestic priorities like fighting the coronavirus. A University of Maryland poll found bipartisan majorities opposed to cutting funding generally with two notable exceptions: Pentagon spending and agricultural subsidies.

Unfortunately, those in the national security establishment are generally not listening to what the American people want. Instead, they’re the captives of a defense industry that eternally hypes new Cold War-style competition with China and Russia, both through donations to Washington think tanks and politicians and that infamous revolving door.

In fact, the Trump administration is a military-industrial nightmare when it comes to that endlessly spinning entrance and exit. Both of his confirmed secretaries of defense and one acting secretary of defense came directly from major defense contractors, including the current one, former Raytheon lobbyist Mark Esper — and the Biden administration seems unlikely to be all that different. As the American Prospect reported recently, several members of his foreign policy team have already circumvented ethics rules that would restrict lobbying activities by becoming “strategic consultants” to the very defense firms aiming to win more Pentagon contracts. For example, Biden’s most likely secretary of defense, Michèle Flournoy, became a senior adviser to Boston Consulting Group and the first three years she was with that company, it increased its Pentagon contract earnings by a factor of 20.

So whoever wins in 2020, increased spending for the Pentagon, rather than real national security, lies in store. The people, it seems, have spoken. The question remains: will anyone in Washington listen to them?

What A City-Wide Lockdown Means – Evidence from Germany

Thomas Klikauer & Nadine Campbell

Amidst 93,000 daily cases and 80,000 deaths, some cities in India are experiencing a lockdown because of the the Coronavirus pandemic also known as Covid-19. Just a few months ago, Germany’s capital Berlin experienced the very same. If Berlin’s experiences is anything to go by, here is what such a lockdown means for you and your city.

During the partial lockdown in Berlin, Berliners experienced less road traffic. Recent economic , social data and general statistics show how the Coronavirus has changed Berlin for good and for bad. According to the city’s statistic office, ten per cent more people stayed in parks in Berlin from March to mid-April, even though the police and virologists made this very difficult for a while – a small change. Many have the feeling that the city is no longer the same. Overall, the data showed what the Coronavirus crisis did to Berlin:

It was the dream of Germany’s environmental Green Party, inside Berlin’s current Red-Red-Green state government, to open parks and have fewer cars on the road. Berlin is run by the Greens together with the centre-left social-democratic SPD and the semi-socialist progressive Die Line. For a long time, their goal has been more public transport. It only took the nightmare of a deadly pandemic to make it a reality, at least temporarily. According to data from Apple, car traffic in Berlin fell by 54 per cent at the height of the initial restrictions. Apple has analyzed so-called “anonymized” search terms, navigation maps and traffic information.

For this, 15 kilometres of so-called “pop-up cycle paths” have been set up in Berlin’s hip suburb of Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg in recent weeks. These cycle pathways are simply separated from the road with temporary construction site bars. Still, the planning and implementation of new cycling infrastructure have taken years. Over recent years, the number of passengers on public transport has decreased by 70 per cent leading to further congestions throughout the city. Worse for public transportation, is the fact that Berlin’s state transport authority BVG “thinned out” – as it calls it – the usual state tram system during the Coronavirus crisis. Berlin’s BVG announced that there is no point in driving hot air back and forth – trams with virtually no passengers on board.

Drinks and Netflix are Up

Meanwhile, Berliners have increasingly reached for the bottle. According to a local bottle shop called “Getränke Hoffmann”, sales of wine in the Berlin and the adjacent state of Brandenburg has increased by 20 per cent in March. And that of spirits and beer by 15 per cent. Even with that, Berlin remains just below Germany’s national average, according to Germany’s Society for Consumer Research. The agency has found that 34 per cent more wine was sold throughout Germany, 31 per cent more spirits – Schnapps – and 11.5 per cent more beer.

Berlin’s bars and restaurants usually source their drinks wholesale. Now that they have all closed, people buy privately and drink at home. Nevertheless, it is reassuring that car traffic has decreased over the same period. People are now using more electricity at home, as the rapid growth of Netflix shows. Netflix alone has reported 15.8 million new customers. Still, the Coronavirus crisis – a crisis that even has impacted the sex industry.

Romance has Changed

Germans have always been a bit worried about sex. Under the heading “Coronavirus Sex”, a German website called “Deutsche Aidshilfe” lists in great detail the dangers of contagion with COVID-19 during sex. The website answers pressing questions such as: Is fellatio dangerous? And cunnilingus? And rimming? Yes, yes and yes! Oh no! Even cuddling and getting undressed with less than 1.5 meters distance stand next to each other is seen as dangerous – hard times in Germany’s Tinder capital Berlin. For this, users seem to have taken the tips of the Deutsche Aidshilfe for safe pandemic sex to heart. Sexting, for example, does not pose any risks even in the age of Coronavirus. In fact, dating portal Tinder has seen a 20 per cent increase in messages sent among users.

The Berlin-based sex toy manufacturer Amorelie.de currently sells about 50 per cent more remote-controlled vibrators, which can be used via an app and can thus be used virtually over all distances. However, the demand for its set boxes, such as the 14 Days Sex Life Challenge, for couples who have to kill time together in isolation, also increased by 65 per cent. A spokeswoman for the online sex shop Orion has a less lusty explanation for the trend. In economically turbulent times, you put aside larger expenses and indulge in smaller luxury or indulgence goods – some buy expensive lipstick, others just a vibrator or lingerie.

Traffic is down

If you seek to have a good time in another way, you can drive around at the Kottbusser Tor, Alexanderplatz or Hermannstraße. In the city, which is otherwise classified by the police as particularly crime-ridden, there are also fewer perpetrators in the absence of victims. Since 1 March, Berlin police have recorded fewer thefts, burglaries in shops, sexual offences and violent acts compared to the same period last year. Berlin’s police say there were 5.4 per cent fewer crimes overall. In particular, the reduction in violence is a huge relief for Berlin’s official agencies which no longer have to worry about pub brawls.

Homelessness Increases

It wasn’t that long ago that the issue of Berlin’s homeless was a big mystery to politics. Berliners still remember that barely a year ago during winter (2018/2019) Berlin’s Senate had no ideas for emergency accommodation at the end of November in sub-zero temperatures. Berlin’s state transport authority, the BVG, even refused to leave tube stations open overnight for safety reasons. In the end, all the city did was provide an emergency toilet at Moritzplatz underground station.

Even before Coronavirus, no one knew how many homeless people there were in the city, let alone where they were. It is impossible to find out and may even be impossible to help Berlin’s homeless. In January, a cumbersome, large-scale census attempted for the first time to use volunteers to record the number of homeless people. People who have always dealt with the concerns of the most vulnerable in society now see the Coronavirus crisis as a great opportunity.

Contact Ban and Video Calls

Despite the ban on personal contact – or perhaps better “because of” – the ban on personal contact, many Berliners became suddenly aware of what their colleagues private living environment looked like. Via video calls, they see ugly curtains, poorly sorted bookshelves and even of the colors of co-workers’ briefs on a clothes rack in the background. The newly established home office, combined with the inevitable video conferencing, provides insight into other people’s privacy that we have never seen before. But the realization that 90 per cent of all business meetings could be done online have been revolutionary.

Network node operator De-Cix reports that the use of video calls has increased by more than 50 per cent since the Coronavirus crisis. It demands a lot of data transfer volume, which is why overall Internet traffic increased by 10 per cent in February. Up to 9.1TB per second were transmitted in Germany alone. Germany’s Federal Statistical Office reports that sales of toilet paper have recently fallen by two-thirds – perhaps an early indication that the Coronavirus crisis is slowly ending in Berlin. Right now, there is no end of the Coronavirus in sight in India but eventually, it will end and, like Germany, India will have changed.

Congressional investigation opened into deaths of 27 soldiers this year at Fort Hood, Texas

Chase Lawrence

Over the last year, Fort Hood, in Killeen, Texas has been the scene of a string of murders, deaths, assaults, and other criminal behavior. The military newspaper Stars and Stripes has dubbed the base the Army’s “most crime ridden post.”

Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy stated in a visit to the base that it had the “highest, the most cases for sexual assault and harassment and murders for our entire formation of the US army.” Just within the past year 27 soldiers have died either on the base or in Killeen, with five homicides, seven suicides, eight accidents, two deaths from disease, and five as-of-yet undetermined deaths. A 28th soldier from the base was killed in combat.

Democrat representatives Stephen Lynch (Massachusetts), who chairs the House Subcommittee on National Security, and Jackie Speier (California), who chairs the House Subcommittee on Military Personnel, sent a letter Tuesday to McCarthy requesting information and documents on the deaths and announcing a joint investigation by the subcommittees into the spate of deaths.

The letter cited Army data that documented an average of 129 felonies annually at Fort Hood between 2014 and 2019. These felonies include homicide, kidnapping, aggravated assault, sexual assault, and robbery. For a base which hosts many active military personnel deployed around the world, Fort Hood has seen more soldiers die at the base and in the city of Killeen than soldiers killed in combat since 2016.

Fort Hood was also the site of some of the most infamous deadly shootings on a military bases with 13 dead and 30 wounded by then Major Nidal Hasan in 2009, and another shooting in 2014 carried out by Army Specialist Ivan Lopez who killed 4 and injured 14.

Representatives Lynch and Speier claimed that they would investigate and report on the reasons behind the murders and seek justice for the soldiers and families “who may have been failed by a military system and culture that was ultimately responsible for their care and protection.”

An “independent command climate review” has been announced by McCarthy.

The investigation was prompted by protests over the murder of a female soldier, Specialist Vanessa Guillen, who was allegedly sexually harassed before her murder. Her family called for a congressional investigation because of the long delay in searching for her by the military. Her family also alleged that Guillen’s fear of retribution prevented her from reporting the harassment to her superiors, a move that could have prevented her murderer from remaining in a position to kill her.

The leading causes of death at Fort Hood this year were accidents, followed by suicides, then murders. This only deviates slightly from the US military as a whole, where murders rank behind illness and injuries (which are distinct from accidents) as causes of death. Otherwise, the deaths on the base correspond to the military’s casualties on bases in general.

A July 2020 report by the Congressional Research Service found that between 2006 and 2020, “a total of 17,645 active-duty personnel have died while serving in the U.S. Armed Forces.” Of these deaths, 74 percent, or 13,068, are attributable to Non-Overseas Contingency Operations (Non-OCO), meaning on military bases outside of combat. Out of these, 93 percent happened in the United States, with the rest happening in countries with bases such as Germany and Japan.

Accidents accounted for 39 percent of Non-OCO deaths, while self-inflicted deaths accounted for 30 percent and illness / injury accounting for 23 percent. Homicide accounts for 4 percent of Non-OCO deaths.

Of the murders at Fort Hood this year the victims were overwhelmingly soldiers drawn from working class areas and of low-rank.

On March 1, Specialist Shelby Tyler Jones, 20, was shot in Killeen outside of a strip club and later died of his wounds, with 15 people either witnessing or involved in the incident. Jones joined the Army in 2017 as a cavalry scout from the small town of Jena, Louisiana. According to US Census numbers, 20 percent of residents of the parish where Jena is located live in poverty. It is likely that Jones joined, as many others do, to escape poverty.

The Army Times reports that Jones was a member of the 3rd Cavalry Regiment, also called the Brave Rifles, and deployed to Iraq in Operation Inherent Resolve between May 2018 and January 2019. The 3rd Cavalry regiment commander said that Jones was a “dedicated professional who truly loved his family and the Army.”

Guillen, 20, was killed with a hammer in a base armory by a fellow soldier after having been continuously sexually harassed, reportedly by the suspect. The suspect shot himself after having been confronted by law enforcement. Guillen was born to immigrant parents and grew up in Houston, Texas. The poverty rate in Harris County stands at 1 out of every 5 people.

During the search for Guillen the body of another missing soldier, Private Gregory Morales, was found. Morales had been put down as a deserter at the time that he went missing in August 2019.

On May 18, Pfc Brandon Scott Rosecrans, 27, was shot and killed in his Jeep Wrangler by a civilian allegedly following a disagreement over a gun sale. Rosecran hailed from Kimberling City, Missouri, a town with around 2,300 people located in Stone County, Missouri. Rosecran joined the Army in May 2018 and had served as a quartermaster.

By and large, the military enlists working class people from impoverished areas who have few other options to make decent living or afford higher education after high school. The aforementioned are representative of the rank-and-file. US Army infantry usually receive around $20,000 in pay, not including benefits and housing. Despite the Pentagon’s massive budget, the rank-and-file of the US military is still afflicted by poverty, and with that comes social ills, suicide, homicide, and poor health.

Fort Hood, which is situated in Killeen, Texas, is one of the largest military bases in the country, housing 36,500 soldiers and another 30,000 family members. It is situated on 340 square miles of land and is home to an almost 200,000-acre training area and two airstrips. According to the US Army’s website, it is home to an extensive collection of military units that play and have played key roles in the last three decades of unending war with seven brigades, two divisions, a battalion, III Corps headquarters, a regiment, a garrison and medical center, and the US Army Operational Test Command.

The base also has around 500 tanks, 1,600 tracked vehicles, 10,000 wheeled vehicles, and 200 aircraft including AH-64 attack helicopters.

Many of the base’s brigades are deployed or have been deployed recently overseas in some capacity and have long histories of being used in US imperialism’s wars and occupations, with most recent being Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Thousands of soldiers based at Fort Hood have been killed in these deployments.

This, combined with the poverty of the rank-and-file, the absolute indifference of the military to them, and the fostering of backwards and reactionary sentiments in the military, provides the necessary context in order to understand why the base, in fact the entire military, is beset by this wave of death.

COVID-19 outbreak at Virginia migrant detention center caused by repression of anti-police brutality protesters

Joe Williams

A COVID-19 outbreak at an immigration detention center in rural Virginia was caused by the rapid transfer of Department of Homeland Security (DHS) assault teams chauffeured into the area by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as part of the crackdown on anti-police brutality protests that broke out throughout the United States in late May and early June.

As of Sunday, 339 of the facility’s inmates and staff at the Immigration Centers of America (ICA) private prison in Farmville, Virginia have tested positive for COVID-19. The outbreak is the most serious recorded at any immigrant detention center across the country. Last month the World Socialist Web Site reported that the outbreak claimed the life of a 72-year-old detainee and Canadian national, James Thomas Hill.

The revelation of the source of the outbreak is part of an ongoing lawsuit brought against the detention center by four migrant detainees. According to sources inside ICE that spoke to the Washington Post, prisoners were moved to the Farmville center in order to give cover for the Trump administration’s operation involving militarized agents of the state apparatus to repress protests in Washington, DC.

Detention facility in McAllen, Texas, Sunday, June 17, 2018 (Photo US Customs and Border Protection).

“They needed to justify the movement of SRT [special response teams],” a Department of Homeland Security official told the Post. According to ICE lawyer Yuri Fuchs, “there is an ICE Air regulation that requires detainees and staff to be on the same flight, so they’re being moved around,” referring to the colloquial name of a program ICE uses to shuttle prisoners, material, and personnel around the country on charter commercial flights.

This open admission by a United States federal official of the use of immigrant detainees as human shields for an operation of mass repression prompted federal judge Leonie Brinkema of the US District Court in Alexandria, Virginia to help cover for the overshare of information by rewording the sentence into a legally permissible action: “I think what you’re saying then is when you move inmates, or detainees, you have to have ICE people with them,” Brinkema said. “That’s got to be what that means.” Fuchs replied: “Yes.”

The units sent on the flights were Special Response Teams (SRTs), ICE’s most elite paramilitary units. Actual security and logistics for the transfer of prisoners was handled by private security firms and regular ICE officers, while the SRT troops deployed to the DC protests as soon as they landed.

According to the administration’s cover story, the prisoner transfers were done to alleviate overcrowding and allow social distancing at ICE prisons throughout the US. This account is directly contradicted by multiple current and former DHS officials who took part in the operation. They confirmed to the Post that the primary purpose of the flights was to mobilize SRTs to DC, over the objections of DC field office commanders.

The officials stated that numerous other immigration prisons in the country were less filled than Farmville at that time, including a facility in Arizona that supplied many of the infected inmates who were transferred, which was at only 35 percent capacity at a time when Farmville was 57 percent full.

It is also likely that ICE simply fabricated any documents or information needed to effect the transfers. Jeffrey Crawford, Director of Immigration Centers of America (ICA), the for-profit prison company that owns the Farmville facility, told the Farmville Town Council that the local ICE field office rejected the proposed transfer because there wasn’t enough room at the nearby jail to quarantine the transferees appropriately.

According to Crawford, ICE headquarters responded that quarantine was not necessary because all of the inmates were known to be uninfected. But when they arrived, one was visibly sick with COVID-19 symptoms and tested positive right away. The rest of the group was then tested, with 51 coming back positive.

“We were assured before they came that these folks were healthy. We were told that one of the facilities where the detainees were coming from had no instances of COVID-19. In hindsight, we believe we’ve discovered information that that is not accurate. But that is what we were told at the time,” the ICA director complained. It is difficult to say which is more jarring, ICE’s criminal disregard for detainees’ health or the ignorance and greed of the ICA officials, who were only too eager to increase the prisoner headcount at the for-profit facility.

In essence, these immigrants were collateral damage in the attempted coup d’état launched by the Trump administration against Constitutional rule in the United States in June. The apparatus of state repression was hindered not one iota by concerns that this move would seed coronavirus throughout the country, or in Farmville—a rural, mountainous region with two major universities.

SRT’s have been central to the Trump administration’s strategy of using shock-and-awe tactics, including overtly fascistic methods like snatch-and-grab disappearances in unmarked vehicles, to suppress protests against police murder. In addition to Washington, DC, paramilitary shock troops from Arizona, Texas, and Florida have been deployed against protesting workers and youth in Portland, Oregon.

In this episode one sees the American ruling class’s equal disdain for democratic rights and the lives of the population. It points to the overtly fascistic character of the US immigration agencies, which are emerging as the incubators for paramilitary domestic repression units. While immigrants currently bear the brunt of this apparatus, it is directed at the working class as a whole.

In fascistic Independence Day speech, Brazil’s Bolsonaro condemns “strikes, social disorder”

Miguel Andrade

On September 7, Brazil’s Independence Day, the country’s fascistic President Jair Bolsonaro delivered a far-right rant centered on what he defined as a national identity based upon “fear of god,” “respect for the family” and a struggle for “liberty” and against “communism.”

In his two-and-a-half-minute speech delivered on prime-time national TV and radio, Bolsonaro omitted any mention of the social disaster caused by the criminal response to the COVID-19 pandemic by his government and the Brazilian ruling class as a whole.

Instead, he presented a short and twisted history of Brazil in which “Brazilians always spilled their blood for liberty.”

The short statement began by resurrecting old tropes about “racial harmony” in Brazil; that “national identity began to be drawn by means of miscegenation between Indians, whites and blacks.” These conceptions have been used historically to impose “national unity,” deny social inequality and portray movements opposing it as agents of “foreign meddling.”

Bolsonaro reviewing naval troops in Rio de Janeiro (Credit: Agência Brasil)

Bolsonaro then drew a straight line from independence in 1822 to the delirious claim that Brazil had beaten back “numerous invasions” in the 19th century—which was actually dominated by civil wars. He then skipped to the Brazilian military’s participation in World War II “to help the world defeat fascism and Nazism” and, finally, his main theme, to the 1964 US-backed coup against the bourgeois-nationalist President João Goulart.

Bolsonaro stated that “in the 1960s, when the shadow of communism threatened us, millions of Brazilians who identified with the national desire to preserve democratic institutions took to the streets against a country gripped by ideological radicalization, strikes, social disorder and generalized corruption.”

He concluded by portraying his own administration as the continuation of this history, stating “we have won yesterday, we are winning now and we will always win.”

The open praise for the bloody 1964 coup, which established a 21-year dictatorship and initiated a series of US-backed military takeovers across South America, as a movement fulfilling the desire of “millions” in a moment of “social disorder” and “strikes” is not only a historical falsification, but a grave threat.

Bolsonaro, a former Army captain who spent his whole 28-year career as a House backbencher for the state of Rio de Janeiro making apologies for the cruelest acts of military repression of the regime, has been obsessed with “social disorder” breaking out in Brazil since the first day of his administration.

His coup threats are generally dismissed by authorities in Congress, the Supreme Court, state governments and the press as delusional and inconsequential. This was the ruling establishment’s response in April, after Bolsonaro took part in a fascist rally in front of the Army headquarters in the capital of Brasília calling for the outlawing of the opposition to his gross mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic. Their attitude was summed up by the conservative Estado de S. Paulo daily, which editorialized: “It is comforting to realize, however, that, this time, authorities from every institution in the Republic reacted strongly against another offense to democracy by Bolsonaro and his followers.”

Only three days after Bolsonaro’s Independence Day fascist appeal, the outgoing Supreme Court president, Justice Dias Toffoli, stated that he had “never seen directly on the part of Bolsonaro or his ministers any action against democracy.” This statement was made even as the Supreme Court is judging cases linking Bolsonaro to the organization of the far-right demonstrations in which the president regularly takes part, and amid the Justice Ministry’s drawing up of a so-called “anti-fascist list” of public servants, mostly law-enforcement officials, who are seen as not sufficiently adhering to Bolsonaro’s drive to build a far-right base within the police forces—all but setting them up as targets for his supporters.

Bolsonaro’s threats and open references to the legitimacy of a military takeover stem not from his psychotic personality, as deranged as it is, but from the broader requirements of Brazilian capitalism, whose crisis has been massively deepened by the world impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. As with Donald Trump in the United States and other fascistic world leaders, Bolsonaro is not the cause, but the product of a broad turn towards authoritarianism in face of the deepest crisis of capitalism since the 1930s.

The particular focus of his speech on the role of “strikes” in the situation in Brazil in 1964, which was chiefly characterized by a broad working-class offensive which the military feared would get out of the control of the bourgeois-reformist Goulart, is significant. It is not merely a right-wing historical viewpoint, but rather a direct response to the eruption of working class opposition to the homicidal policies of the Brazilian and world bourgeoisie towards the COVID-19 pandemic and their use of the crisis to further advance their interests with corporate bailouts, austerity measures and the driving down of wages.

This reaction is already being seen across Brazil, where autoworkers have begun fighting against a jobs bloodbath, teachers and parents are opposing a homicidal back-to-school drive and Brazilian Post Office workers are entering the fourth week of a militant strike against the destruction of wages and working conditions.

Moreover, outrage over the absolute indifference of the ruling class to the more than 130,000 COVID-19 deaths and more than 4.3 million cases is joined by increasing popular anger over mass impoverishment and rising inflation, as the government cuts its so-called emergency relief to 67 million poor, informal and unemployed workers in half, to 300 reais (US$50) monthly.

Just two days after Bolsonaro’s speech, it was reported that in several cities, markets were rationing sales of staples such as rice, milk and cooking oil. Prices of these commodities have gone up almost 20 percent since the beginning of the year due to the anarchic pursuit of profit by major capitalist producers, who were exporting their production amid a record fall in the value of the national currency, the real.

The cut to emergency relief is now being combined with a massive spike in official unemployment figures, previously hidden by workers dropping out of the workforce in order to take care of their families amid the uncontrolled spread of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This socially explosive situation is threatening the Brazilian ruling class with a major confrontation with the working class, and it is preparing accordingly. Bolsonaro’s threats closely mirror the terrified response to mass working class opposition in the United States on the part of the Trump administration, with which Bolsonaro has worked in close coordination on many geopolitical issues.

His condemnation of “ideological radicalization,” generally mocked by pundits as inconsequential “Cold War lunacy,” is a close imitation of Trump’s own denunciations of Democratic mayors, and even the tried and tested corporate shill Joe Biden as “radical leftists.” These denunciations are directed not against right-wingers in the Brazilian Congress or the unions, but against working class opposition, which the government already denounced as “terrorist” when demonstrations erupted in June, amid the worldwide wave of opposition to police violence and inequality stemming from the murder of George Floyd.

Preparations for repression involve many other political actors beyond Bolsonaro and his inner circle This was highlighted by the chilling censorship imposed by Rio de Janeiro courts against Brazil’s most powerful media group, the Globo conglomerate. Globo was prohibited from publishing material it had obtained from the investigation into the involvement of Bolsonaro’s son, Flávio, a Senator for Rio de Janeiro, in a money laundering scheme. The case ties the Bolsonaro family to the “Crime Office” gang, one of Rio’s infamous “militias” which terrorize working-class areas of the city and its outskirts. Globo claimed that the Rio de Janeiro Attorney General’s Office was preparing to formally charge Flávio and moving toward an indictment of Bolsonaro himself.

The corruption charges against Bolsonaro have been seen as a “cheap” means to remove him from office without involving a formal impeachment vote, which the Workers Party (PT)-led opposition has deemed “too costly” politically. At the same time, the censorship drive that has accompanied the worsening of the Brazilian social crisis indicates that significant sections of the ruling class may consider such charges also “too costly,” as they may not be able to remove Bolsonaro without further destabilizing the whole of Brazilian capitalism.

Under these conditions, the most urgent task facing Brazilian workers is breaking free from the political straitjacket imposed by the official opposition to Bolsonaro, led by the PT and its pseudo-left apologists in the PSOL (Socialism and Liberty Party). They are working to subordinate the growing movement of the working class to the stability of the capitalist state, ultimately collaborating with the ruling class in the strengthening of the repressive forces.

UK firms announce hundreds of thousands of redundancies

Barry Mason

Hundreds of thousands of workers are being laid off in the UK, as corporations impose restructuring programmes during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Last week, the BBC revealed that 3,672 employers had given notice of more than 300,000 planned redundancies in June and July. The BBC obtained the figures under a Freedom of Information request. Under government legislation, firms planning to make more than 20 workers redundant at a specified workplace must give notice to allow for a 90-day collective consultation period. These are sent to the government via a form called HR1—the total number of which the BBC was able to access.

The BBC revealed, “1,784 firms made plans to cut nearly 150,000 jobs in July almost a sevenfold increase on July 2019 … In June, 1,888 employers filed plans for 156,000 job cuts, a sixfold increase on the previous year.” Firms planning less than 20 redundancies do not have to give notice, so the number of jobs slated for redundancy is probably much higher.

Among the firms giving notice of redundancies in July were high street chemists Boots, which announced 4,000 job losses, while high-end retail chain store John Lewis announced 1,300 jobs were to go. High street staple Marks and Spencer announced 950 job losses, with a further 7,000 announced in August. Azzurri, which owns Italian restaurant and food outlet Zizzi, announced it would close 75 outlets with the loss of 1,200 jobs. Furniture retailer DFS is cutting 200 jobs.

Other companies announcing substantial job cuts over the summer include Pizza Express, Virgin Atlantic, department store chain Debenhams, TSB bank group, Centrica (the energy group which owns British Gas), the Royal Mail Group and the Arcadia, the clothes retail group that includes Topshop and Dorothy Perkins.

Nye Cominetti, a senior economist at the Resolution Foundation think tank, said of the survey, “The businesses making the announcements during the summer even while furloughing [UK government job retention scheme] was still in place are not expecting any big pickup in demand any time soon … this data, taken alongside other business surveys and forecasts from both the Bank (Bank of England) and the OBR (Office for Budget Responsibility), all paint a fairly bleak—and consistent—picture of the next couple of months …”

The figures obtained by the BBC underscore the result of a survey published by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) along with the job recruitment agency Adecco. Describing a “challenging autumn” for pay and job prospects, the survey of more than 2,000 employers showed one in three expected to cut jobs in the third quarter of the year. It noted 38 percent of private companies expected to make redundancies, compared to 16 percent of public sector employers.

Its measure of the net employment balance, the difference in the proportion of employers expecting to take staff on to those expecting to let staff go, had fallen from -4 to -8 over the summer. This was the lowest figure since the survey was first produced in 2013.

Workers face further pay cuts, with the survey showing that companies would be restraining pay over the next year. Even those planning a pay rise would not go above a 1 percent increase. This represents a freeze, with inflation at 1 percent.

Commenting, Gerwyn Davies, a senior advisor at CIPD, said, “This is the weakest set of data we’ve seen for several years. Until now, redundancies have been low—no doubt due to the Job Retention Scheme—but we expect to see more redundancies come through this autumn, especially in the private sector once the scheme closes.”

The cut in job numbers, “will likely be accompanied by a pay squeeze for workers…” He expected to see a “freezing [of] recruitment, reducing hours or restricting overtime, or cuts to bonuses and deferring salary increases.”

The list of coming redundancies is on top of the jobs lost during the pandemic. An Independent newspaper survey estimates that over 185,000 job cuts have already been announced over the last six-month. This includes:

* March 30: BrightHouse (household goods, hire purchase), 2,400 at risk

* April 28: British Airways, 12,000

* May 5: Virgin Atlantic, 3,150

* May 19: Ovo Energy, 2,600

* May 20: Rolls Royce, 9,000

* June 4: Lookers (car dealership), 1,500

* June 10: The Restaurant Group (Frankie and Benny’s), 3,000

* June 15: Travis Perkins (builders’ suppliers), 2,500

* June 15: Jaguar Land Rover, 1,100

* June 25: Royal Mail, 2,000

* June 30: Airbus, 1,700

* July 1: Harrods (retail), 700

* July 9: John Lewis, 1,300 at risk

* July 30: Pendragon (motor retailer), 1,800

* August 5: WH Smith, 1,500

* August 11: Debenhams, 2,500

* August 18: Marks and Spencer, 7,000

* August 27: Pret a Manger, 2,800

* September 3: Costa Coffee (coffee chain), 1,650

Jobs continue to go in car manufacturing. BMW Mini intends to cut 400 out of 950 GI Group agency jobs at its Cowley plant in Oxford. Those affected will be informed in mid-September. The firm is to move from a three-shift day to a two-shift day in October. The company says it will also cut a small number of core employee jobs through voluntary redundancies and early retirement.

Restaurant chain Pizza Hut is closing 29 of its 245 outlets with the loss of 450 jobs. The chain has over 5,000 workers in the UK. It is seeking to use an insolvency mechanism to reduce its rental costs.

Costa Coffee, owned by Coca-Cola, has reopened 2,400 of its 2,700 outlets following a six-week shutdown. It plans to cut staff numbers by 1,650 mainly through the abolition of the assistant manager role.

IHS Markit chief business economist Chris Williamson stated, “Worryingly, many companies are already preparing for tougher times ahead, notably via further fierce job cutting.” In August, the UK economy officially went into recession for the first time in 11 years. A recession is defined as two consecutive quarters of economic decline. For April to June the economy shrank by just over 20 percent compared to the previous quarter.

The job retention scheme is due to close completely at the end of October. The scheme has kept millions of workers on company payrolls through government financial support, under which the state paid 80 percent of employee’s wages—already slashed to 70 percent. Major corporations, to remain competitive, are preparing for the end of the state’s largesse by laying off thousands. There is a fear among some bourgeois commentators and political representatives that a sudden end to the scheme could lead to social upheaval. A Treasury Select Committee of MPs has called for a targeted extension of the furlough scheme.

While the official unemployment rate is currently just under 4 percent, the Bank of England expects it to rise to 7.5 percent following the end of the furlough scheme. Other estimates warn that unemployment could almost treble to 15 percent.

Job cuts on the scale already carried out and those to be made soon can only be imposed due to the connivance of the trade unions, who have not lifted a finger in opposition. The collaboration of the unions in job losses extends to their prior agreement on “redundancy caps,” such as the 10 percent of redundancies accepted by the Unite union for the airline industry. As the WSWS noted, “If Unite’s stated redundancy cap is enforced, this will mean the destruction of 4,500 jobs at BA, 1,500 at EasyJet, 1,750 at Ryanair and 1,350 at Airbus.”

Floods inundate Sudan amid escalating economic crisis

Jean Shaoul

A month of torrential rains has brought record-breaking floods to Sudan, killing at least 100 people, injuring 46, and destroying more than 100,000 homes. Hundreds of thousands of people have lost everything they owned.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said that more than 557,000 people had already been “affected” by this year’s floods. As Sudan’s rainy season lasts from June to October and always brings flooding—last year’s floods affected 400,000 people—the country is likely to face more rains and displacement.

The OCHA warned that the humanitarian situation in Sudan is worsening and that the supplies needed to respond to the crisis are running out, while the destruction of roads has made it difficult to deliver aid to communities in need. Access to clean water has been affected, with around 2,000 water sources broken or contaminated, increasing the danger of water borne diseases.

The hardest hit has been the capital Khartoum, where the Blue and White Nile Rivers meet, as the Nile burst its banks, demolishing everything in its way. Blue Nile and River Nile states have seen similar devastation, while the Gezira, Gadarif, West Kordofan, and South Darfur regions have reported damage. At least 16 of Sudan’s 18 states have seen some flood damage.

The level of the Blue Nile hit a record high of 17.58 metres due to heavy seasonal rains in Sudan and Ethiopia, the source of the Blue Nile that accounts for about 80 percent of its waters. It is the highest since the 1912 flood in Sudan when the level reached 17.14 meters. Further heavy rains are forecast for neighbouring Ethiopia and parts of Sudan.

The volume of rain has been the highest on record. Marwa Taha, a climate change expert, told Al Jazeera, “But this year we’ve seen an increase in the amount of rainfall because of climate change and so the Nile has flooded more than before. In addition, a lot of trees have been cut down to make place for residential areas near the Nile, affecting the valleys where the water would flow through.”

The rising Nile floodwaters could also inundate one of Sudan’s ancient archaeological sites at Al-Bajrawiya, the capital of the Kushite Kingdom of 2,600 years ago that also includes the famous Meroe pyramids, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Marc Maillot, head of the French Archaeological Unit in the Sudan Antiquities Service, said, “The floods had never affected the site before.”

Teams are building sandbag walls and pumping out water to prevent damage to the site, which is usually some 500 metres away from the river.

Sudan has declared a national emergency for three months and designated the country a natural disaster zone.

While some tents have been erected to accommodate the displaced, many families have had to sleep in the open on whatever dry land they could find in Khartoum. Ezz Aldin Hussein, an engineer whose home in south Khartoum was badly damaged, blamed the government. He told Al-Jazeera, “The rainy season is known to come every year, but we don’t see the government seriously prepare for it.”

Not only have successive governments failed to take preventative measures to minimize flood damage, they have also failed to make basic preparations to help people affected.

As Hussein explained, when he called the police and civil defence authorities for help, “no one came to help us.” People have had to rely on neighbours and charities for help.

The government’s failure to help people who have lost everything in the floods has added to the mounting perception that Sudan’s new military-dominated transitional “technocratic” government, headed by Dr Abdalla Hamdok, differs little in substance from the regime of former President Omar al-Bashir. Al-Bashir, who came to power in an Islamist-backed coup in 1989, was overthrown in a pre-emptive coup by the Sudanese military, with the support of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia, in April last year after months of anti-government protests.

In practice, the country is ruled by the deputy chairman of the Transitional Military Council (TMC), Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, who heads the paramilitary Rapid Support Force (RSF), widely hated for its brutal operations in the Darfur conflict. The RSF, more powerful than the Sudanese army, controls most of Sudan’s towns and cities.

On June 30, tens of thousands of Sudanese demonstrators took to the streets of Khartoum and other major cities demanding change, including a full transition to democracy and civilian rule.

The government’s handling of the pandemic has been widely criticized. As cases emerged, widely believed to have been transmitted by the hundreds of Sudanese migrant workers returning from Egypt and the UAE in March because of the outbreak, the government sent them to quarantine centres. Conditions were so bad that many left prematurely. Students returning from Wuhan, where the virus was first detected, protested at the airport when the government tried to put them into quarantine, forcing the government to let them go home.

The government imposed a nationwide lockdown in April. Police beat up and arrested doctors, including the head of the largest maternity hospital in Sudan, as they were heading to work even though they were carrying travel permits.

Dozens of health centres, including hospitals, closed after the outbreak of the pandemic, with many doctors refusing to work because of the lack of protective equipment.

Since the government lifted the lockdown and reopened its borders, the number of cases and deaths has doubled to reach just under 13,500 cases and 833 deaths.

The lockdown left millions of Sudan’s day labourers without income, as the government provided no safety net. Inflation running at 100 percent and unemployment at 25 percent compounded their plight. Sudan’s $34.5-billion economy contracted 2.5 percent in 2019, with a further 8 percent expected this year, exacerbating a fiscal crisis that has sent living costs soaring and sparked the mass protests that led to Bashir’s ouster.

Sudan is seeking an International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan that entails persuading the Trump administration to drop its long-standing listing of Sudan as a state sponsor of terrorism—although most long-running US sanctions were removed in 2017—and settling or rescheduling its $1.3 billion arrears to the IMF and $57.5 billion external debt. The $3 billion pledged by Riyadh and Abu Dhabi last year comes nowhere near resolving Sudan’s economic crisis and has not been followed by further aid.

The Hamdok government is looking at scrapping subsidies for fuel products that would trim about $2.5 billion from the budget and regaining the assets, believed to be worth $3.5 to $4 billion, illicitly stolen by al-Bashir and his cronies.

Key to gaining US consent to an IMF loan is the agreement to pay about $826 million (up from a previous $300 million deal) to the families of the 200 or more people killed in the bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania by al-Qaeda in 1998, allegedly with the support of the al-Bashir regime. While the new government has agreed to pay compensation, it is unclear how it will raise the money to do so. This follows Sudan’s payment in February of $30 million to the families of 17 US Navy sailors killed in the 2000 suicide-bombing of the USS Cole, although Sudan’s government “explicitly denies” any involvement in the attack.

Last month, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visited Khartoum to press the US’s demands, including the strengthening of Sudan’s relations with Israel following the UAE’s “normalization” of its relations with Israel as part of its closer alignment with Saudi Arabia and the UAE against Iran. It follows the meeting in February between General Abdul Fattah al-Burhan, Sudan’s de facto head of state, and Israel’s Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu in Uganda. This contrasts with the al-Bashir regime that was aligned with Qatar, Turkey, and Russia, although it had more recently sought to gain US support.

Sudan is under pressure to resolve multiple long-running armed conflicts that threaten the further breakup of the country following South Sudan’s secession in 2011. The government has signed a peace deal, which covers issues such as land ownership, power sharing, and the return of the millions displaced by the fighting, with five of seven rebel groups in Juba, the capital of South Sudan, aimed at ending 17 years of conflict in the western region of Darfur and southern states.

Millions in the US choke on hazardous air as West Coast fires continue to rage

Kayla Costa

As fires continue to rage across the West Coast of the United States, millions of people have suffered from the destruction of their homes, the deaths of loved ones and animals, mass evacuation, and the health risks posed by hazardous air quality. The 2020 fire season has quickly spiraled into a social and environmental catastrophe, far surpassing California’s last historic Camp Fire in 2018.

Roughly 100 large fires, some of which have merged into massive complexes, have broken historical records as 3.4 million acres have burned in California, joined by over one million acres in Oregon and over 600,000 acres in Washington.

Experts can only describe the fires as “unprecedented” in their size, speed, and destruction. To give a sense of the nature of these flames, 900,000 acres burned in a single 72-hour period in Oregon alone.

Thirty-three confirmed deaths have been counted as of Sunday, including a one-year-old boy in Renton, Washington. Dozens were missing in Oregon over the weekend, with rescue crews working to identify them.

The western US wildfires, seen from space, on Sept 9, 2020. (NASA Earth Observatory image by Lauren Dauphin)

Further, tens of thousands of people have been evacuated, sometimes scrambling in a matter of minutes as flames quickly approach their neighborhoods. About 12 percent of the Oregon state population, or more than 500,000 people, were given varying degrees of evacuation alerts for the weekend.

“We didn't know what to grab. We didn’t pack. Who knows what to do when you're going through this?” Nailah Garner told KOMO News regarding her husband’s and her experience fleeing their home in a small forested town of Vida, Oregon. After the fires swept through the area and she returned to the apocalyptic scenes, Garner commented, “It's all gone, and it looks like a war zone hit it.”

Many have sought refuge with family members or friends who lived in less risky areas, soon after being forced to pack up again and travel further as evacuation orders expanded. Others have traveled to evacuation sites that were hastily set up at churches, schools, fairgrounds, and event centers.

Given the heavy agricultural importance of many of the affected regions, families have had to find shelter not only for themselves but for their livestock as well. The Oregon State Fairgrounds is currently housing 500 animals and 1,500 families.

The National Interagency Fire Center reported on Sunday that over 30,000 firefighters and support personnel were deployed to fires across the US. While the majority of the fires are along the West Coast, firefighters are combating blazes in Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming.

While 30,000 may seem like a large number, the firefighting teams are overwhelmed and understaffed for the complex task of managing the infernos. Angeles National Forest Fire Chief Robert Garcia told CNN on Saturday that his department is fighting the 32,000-acre Bobcat Fire with “500 personnel, when it usually has 1,000 to 1,500” and that “some firefighters are working more than 24 hours in a shift.”

Adding to the risks posed to the lives and health of West Coast residents is the giant smoke plume that is currently resting on the densely populated western half of California, Oregon, and Washington. The smoke has created very hazardous air conditions which began last week and are expected to last for weeks in California.

Scientists use the Air Quality Index (AQI) to monitor air pollution throughout the world, measuring the parts of fine particulate matter within a cubic meter of air. The AQI measurements were created for a scale of 0 to 500, ranging from healthy air quality to dangerous air quality.

The entire West Coast has had AQI over 100, which is considered unhealthy for at-risk groups with lung conditions and asthma. Many cities have recorded far higher levels, surpassing 300 AQI that is “unhealthy for all groups.” Air quality index measurements between 500 and 820 were recorded in Southern and Central Oregon, the northeastern outskirts of the San Francisco Bay Area, and the Central Valley in California.

Portland, Oregon has been placed under a State of Emergency due to the combination of hazardous air quality as well as the threat of fires creeping towards its suburbs. On Sunday morning, Portland’s air quality index value averaged about 516, becoming the number one major city with the worst air quality in the world. The recent events strike parallels with modern records of 755 AQI in Beijing, China in 2011 and over 1,200 in New Delhi, India last November, where urban pollution reached obscene heights.

The number of tiny particles of hazardous smoke entering residents’ lungs and bloodstreams can cause serious health consequences, straining their respiratory and cardiovascular systems. This can cause irritated throats, burning eye sensations, compromised immunity, asthma attacks, bronchitis, lung failure, heart attacks, cardiac arrest, and other severe conditions.

These health risks have caused an uptick in immediate hospitalizations, while also making the population more susceptible to the COVID-19 virus, the symptoms of which become more severe for those with compromised respiratory and immune systems.

“There’s that aspect that people who are sick with COVID, but maybe not sick enough to notice or go to the hospital. But then when you add smoke on top of it, it could kick them into an extra-bad respiratory response,” Jeffrey Pierce, an atmospheric scientist at Colorado State University, explained to Oregon Public Broadcasting.

These hazardous conditions have affected well over 20 million people, taking into account the most populous metro areas in the region: Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle.

The combination of little to no preparation by the ruling class for disasters and the extreme weather conditions fueled by climate change has made it possible for these annual fires to become such devastating experiences for millions.

As with all natural disasters, the brunt of the damage will fall to the working class and the most vulnerable in society. Thousands of “essential” workers are forced to labor in toxic air and become more susceptible to the coronavirus, the elderly and those with chronic health conditions confront life-threatening conditions from the smoke, the homeless are not sheltered in the countless empty housing units that could be utilized, and many of those who have lost their homes will be left with nothing.