Macron’s police state launches brutal crackdown on French protesters

Samuel Tissot

Clashes between protesters and police continued throughout France over the weekend, following the police murder of 17-year-old Nahel M. in the Parisian suburb of Nanterre last Tuesday. On Sunday evening, President Emmanuel Macron held an emergency cabinet meeting in response to the ongoing crisis.

Police officers patrol in front of the Arc de Triomphe on the Champs Elysees in Paris, Saturday, July 1, 2023. [AP Photo/Christophe Ena]

Not only the killing but also the attempt of officers involved to cover-up the murder as self-defence—before a video of the incident showed they shot the youth at point-blank under no threat to their life—has led to a massive outpouring of anger across France and internationally.

On Saturday, Nahel’s funeral was held in Nanterre attended by thousands of peaceful protesters.

Violent clashes across France saw 1,300 people arrested on Friday night and then a further 719 on Saturday night. This crackdown follows the arrest of thousands by the French police during Macron’s anti-democratic implementation of his pension cut this spring.

Major French cities have been besieged by a heavily armed police force equipped with helicopters, armoured cars, and “anti-riot” firearms. On Friday, Saturday and Sunday night 45,000 police were mobilized nationally with an additional 7,000 sent to Paris each night as reinforcements.

Over the weekend specialized RAID units, which occupy neighbourhoods with armoured cars, were deployed to Marseille and Lyon. The infamous BRAV-M units which provoked and terrorized demonstrators in Paris in April during the protests against Macron’s pension reform were also deployed.

Despite the Macron government’s efforts to censor evidence of police violence on social media, videos show violent police charges against mostly defenceless protesters. Other videos show police efforts to prevent journalists from recording the clashes.

Pitched battles between cops and mostly youthful protesters occurred in many French cities. Police stations were set on fire in the towns of Nemours, Pau and Combs-la-Ville. Public buildings throughout Paris, Marseille, and Lille were set ablaze. In the northern Parisian suburb of Aubervilliers, a bus station burned down with 12 buses destroyed. Groups in Lyon raided a police vehicle carrying weapons and live ammunition which has not yet been retrieved.

On Friday and Saturday night the tram and bus services throughout France were cancelled from 9p.m. onwards on the order of Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin. This was expanded to the Paris Metro service on Sunday. Over the weekend, in Lille, Marseille and Lyon, public transport was cancelled and meeting in groups was banned from the late afternoon onwards. Similar measures were taken in smaller towns throughout the territory that saw clashes earlier in the week.

Anger against police repression and social conditions spread to Belgium and Switzerland. In the Swiss city of Lausanne seven people were arrested on Saturday night. The French overseas territories of Réunion and French Guyana also saw significant clashes. Reflecting international nervousness over the situation in France, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz stated he was “watching with concern.”

One incident that gives an insight into the popular hatred of France’s capitalist politicians came in the small town of L’Haÿ-Les-Roses where a burning car was pushed into the driveway of a local mayor, a member of the right-wing Les Républicains political party. French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne rushed to the scene and publicly assured officials that the government and police would protect them from their constituents.

There has been a significant effort by the Macron government to deny the overtly political nature of these protests, which follow directly from the pension cut struggle. On Saturday Macron stated, “We’ve seen violent gatherings organized on several [social media platforms]—but also a kind of mimicry of violence… living the video games that have intoxicated them.”

This echoes Macron’s statement during the Yellow Vest protests when he blamed Facebook for the massive opposition to his presidency.

Government spokesperson Olivier Véran later attempted to portray the protests as the work of apolitical and hardened criminals: “There is no political message here. When you loot a Foot Locker, Lacoste or Sephora store, there is no political message. It’s looting.”

If youth in France feel they must resort to violence to express their dissatisfaction it is not due to social media or video games, but the horrific social conditions in which they live and the lack of political alternatives offered by the established political parties. In the suburbs of Paris, Lyon and Marseille where the most violent clashes have been concentrated, poverty and unemployment are endemic.

The reality facing youth in working-class areas is one with no jobs, no access to quality education, and under continuous harassment—if not deadly threat as in the case of Nahel—at the hands of the cops. As was shown in their treacherous role in the struggle against the pension reform, the pseudo-left parties and the union bureaucracies which claim to oppose Macron offer no real opposition to the capitalist system which has condemned these young men and women to lives of poverty.

The mass arrests over the weekend came after the fascistic joint statement of the police unions published Friday declaring, “we are at war” and threatening to “put those we arrest out of action.” The joint communiqué continued, “Faced with these savage hordes, asking for calm is no longer enough, we must impose it. … [it is time] for combat against these vermin.”

Significant sections of the French political class have fully solidarized themselves with the police’s “war” against “vermin” and demanded an even harsher response. In a video address on Sunday far-right leader Marine Le Pen lambasted the “anarchy” in France and called on authorities to declare a state of emergency or curfew. Leader of the conservative Les Républicains Eric Ciotti stated, “I support the police with all my force, the gendarmes and those that command them.”

Both denounced Jean Luc Mélenchon, leader of the pseudo-left NUPES alliance. Ciotti called him “a danger to the republic” because Mélenchon had described the police as “uncontrolled,” a huge understatement following months of violent repression against peaceful protests and the attempt to cover up the brutal killing of a 17-year-old boy.

Mélenchon is anything but a danger to the capitalist fifth-republic, which he propped up through the 2022 election crisis and the struggle against Macron’s pension reform. He represents a wing of the bourgeoisie fearful of the social reaction that the brazen criminality of the police and their political sponsors may provoke, while remaining organically hostile to the social aspirations of the working class.

His response to the crisis has not been to call for the bringing down of the Macron government and its police state, but to produce a toothless “emergency declaration” whose principal demands are better training for the police and the formation of a series of independent oversight commissions. The absurd notion that an ultra-violent force of police officers who declare themselves “at war” with “vermin” can be “reformed” is another example of the political bankruptcy of the French pseudo-left.

The aftermath of the George Floyd protests, where the US Democratic Party solidarized themselves with anti-police violence protesters only to massively increase the funding and militarization of the police after Biden came to office, should be a warning to the French population that neither Mélenchon nor any other bourgeois politician will launch a struggle against the police or the capitalist system they defend.

Cities burn across France as cops assault protests against police murder of youth

Alex Lantier

Dozens of cities burned across France last night as anger mounted following Tuesday’s police murder, captured on video, of 17-year-old Nahel M. in his car. The protests also spread internationally, as Belgian police deployed water cannon against youth protesting in solidarity with Nahel’s family in downtown Brussels.

A demonstrator runs on the third night of protests sparked by the fatal police shooting of a 17-year-old driver in the Paris suburb of Nanterre, France, Friday, June 30, 2023. [AP Photo/Aurelien Morissard]

Yesterday morning, President Emmanuel Macron held an emergency meeting of his cabinet, which decided against immediately declaring a state of emergency. But despite Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin’s decision to deploy 40,000 cops nationwide to try to crush the protests, the riots are still escalating out of the government’s control.

French police assaulted the silent march yesterday morning of over 6,000 people called by Nahel’s family in his home town of Nanterre, outside Paris. Before the march began, Darmanin announced the deployment of heavily armed Search and Intervention Brigade (BRI) teams in armored cars to the city. During the march, police fired tear gas at the mourners, who held signs calling for “Justice for Nahel” and “Never again.”

Clashes continued into the night in Nanterre, where protesters burned a bank and fired fireworks at riot police, who fired tear gas and rubber bullets at protesters.

Rioting and violent clashes with police hit dozens of cities, including Lille, Lyon, Marseille, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Montpellier, Strasbourg, Nice, Rennes, Rouen, Tours and the Paris area. In Lille, protesters burned several local municipal buildings and police stations, while smoke rose up in multiple locations across Toulouse and Marseille as protesters burned cars and clashed with police using rocks and fireworks launchers.

In Lyon, France’s second-largest metropolitan area, protesters burned buses and tramways in a number of suburbs and clashed with police in the city center.

Police stations burned in Montpellier, Reims and Orléans, while across France protesters also commandeered construction equipment to smash surveillance cameras or break into and loot stores in a number of cities. There were several unconfirmed reports of BRI units opening fire on protesters with live ammunition, including near the Old Port in Marseille. Police helicopter units were deployed in Marseille, across the northern Paris area, and beyond.

In the Paris area, clashes erupted again in the 12th and 14th districts in the south of the city, and rioters also smashed and looted several large shops near the Louvre museum. In the suburbs, protesters burned the city hall of Clichy-sous-Bois and police stations in several municipalities. They overturned and burned cars and violently clashed with police in several cities, including Saint-Denis to the north of Paris and Montargis to the south.

For a second time this year, since the mass protests by millions against Macron’s massively unpopular pension reforms, the Macron government has gone into a potentially mortal political crisis as it came into direct collision with the working class. Macron is still widely hated, having slashed pensions in the face of opposition from 75 percent of the French people, and is correctly seen as ruling against the people. The murder of Nahel only underscores that the cops upon whom he has relied to violently assault and crush protests function as judge, jury and executioner.

Videos circulating of the event completely refuted the false version of events given by the police just after the murder, claiming that they fired to defend themselves. In fact, the video showed that the cops stopped, threatened and then shot Nahel at point-blank range, when there was no threat to themselves. Yesterday morning, Nanterre prosecutor Pascal Prache formally confirmed that the state would be compelled to bring charges against the policeman who killed Nahel.

“Given the investigations and the elements we have observed, the prosecutor’s office considers that the legal conditions for using a weapon were not fulfilled,” Prache said. He then announced that an investigation would be launched on charges of voluntary homicide.

The legal team of Nahel’s family criticized Prache’s handling of the case, however, for covering up several important further accusations against the police. They wrote, “the prosecutor has hidden the possible complicity in voluntary homicide of the second policeman [present at the shooting] and the possible issuing of false public documents because of the initial lying declarations of the shooter.” On this basis, they called for the case to be moved to another jurisdiction to ensure the court case proceeds “in an objective, independent and impartial way.”

French domestic intelligence agencies prepared for the government a report on the mass riots caused by the killing of Nahel, which was then leaked to the press. The intelligence agencies claimed that last night would be “decisive” to see how far the protests would continue to grow and how serious a crisis Macron faces.

“Three days after the events, the excitement has still not died down,” their report noted, adding: “The pre-summer period which moreover features pleasant weather encourages youth to gather together in public areas, and rapidly commit various acts of violence. The persistence of these incidents is therefore to be expected across the entire country, with a probable extension, starting this evening, to neighborhoods that had until now remained calm.”

Indeed, this has led to a torrent of statements from right-wing and far-right politicians demanding the reimposition of a state of emergency, which was imposed after the 2015 terror attacks in Paris, allowing the state to suspend all basic democratic rights.

After the French cabinet’s crisis meeting yesterday morning, however, Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne told reporters her government would not immediately impose a state of emergency. “We are not in those circumstances,” she said, adding: “The justice system is advancing, it is doing its work. We must look for calm.”

In reality, by rejecting the immediate option of installing an overtly dictatorial emergency regime, the Macron government is not trying to obtain justice for Nahel. Given the explosive anger that exists against Macron, it aims to avoid provoking a further escalation of the political crisis which could completely escape its control. For now at least, it is trying to ride out the crisis and avoid triggering an even greater social explosion in the working class.

It is ordering its highly unpopular ministers to stay out of sight, so the cops can focus on attacking protesters, not protecting ministers. Official sources confirmed to BFM-TV that all “non-priority” movements by ministers were canceled, and all their movements organized around “the subject of the day,” that is, the crisis caused by Nahel’s murder. BFM-TV concluded that in this situation, using police to protect ministers going about other business would “uselessly mobilize the security forces.”

As they try to ride out the crisis, Macron’s ministers are relying on the political assistance of the pseudo-left party run by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Unsubmissive France (LFI). LFI parliamentarian Mathilde Panot is currently running a political operation in the National Assembly to blame the murder on a part of a law that allows French police to rapidly shoot when they are faced with a car they can claim has refused to stop. She is proposing to rescind this measure.

“The LFI parliamentary group is submitting a bill to abrogate article 435-1 of the Cazeneuve law,” Panot announced yesterday on Twitter, referring to this measure, which she called a “license to kill.”

However reactionary the role played by this legislation, it is apparent that broader issues are raised by Nahel’s murder. The relentless resort to police violence to crush mass social opposition has been a constant of Macron’s presidency for over six years now, involving massive powers to detain, wiretap, and assault protesters exercising fundamental democratic rights to free speech, free movement, and to strike. This cannot be overturned simply by changing the rules of engagement governing when police are allowed to shoot motorists.

The privatization of public education in the US is accelerating backed by billionaires including Betsy DeVos

Harvey Simpkins

Donald Trump and former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos [AP Photo/AP / Evan Vucci]

The privatization of K-12 public education in the United States is accelerating. In 2023, 14 states have passed bills either establishing privatization schemes (euphemistically referred to as “school choice”) or expanding existing ones. Overall, 42 states have introduced “school choice” bills this year.

So far this year Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Oklahoma and Utah have passed legislation making school vouchers available to all or nearly all students, regardless of family income or current private school attendance status, joining existing universal programs in Arizona and West Virginia.

Eight other states have passed laws in 2023 increasing the number of students eligible to use public funds for private education: Alabama, Idaho, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Tennessee and Wyoming. Wisconsin and North Carolina are also poised to soon pass large expansions of their already-existing programs.

While privatization schemes have been around for years, they were generally restricted to students from low-income households and in low performing schools. Under the new privatization efforts, all or nearly all students, even those already attending private schools and those from wealthy families can access public funds to attend private schools.

“Private school choice is not a new thing, but what we’re seeing now is very new,” Bella DiMarco, a policy analyst at FutureEd, told Education Week “This is really the universal year.”

The new laws amount to a direct transfer of public funds to the super wealthy to continue to send their children to elite private institutions. To take one example, the Arizona education department reported that in 2022, 75 percent of students applying for vouchers had never attended public schools.

Those using vouchers also tend to be from wealthy families. According to K-12 Dive, more than half of school privatization tax credits in Arizona, Louisiana and Virginia go to families with incomes over $200,000.

“School choice” programs also decimate funding for public education. A recent analysis by the non-profit Public Funds Public Schools examined voucher programs in seven states and found that in six of them, investment in public schools fell as voucher spending increased.

In Florida, between 2008 and 2019, state spending on three tax credit or voucher programs increased by 313 percent. During the same period, per-pupil funding for public education decreased by 12 percent, from $9,799 in 2008 to $8,628 in 2019. On average, in all other states, per-pupil spending increased by 9.6 percent during this time.

Voucher programs do not improve educational outcomes for students. Numerous studies have shown that the large majority of charter schools and private institutions receiving vouchers perform worse than public schools. Academic studies on voucher programs in Washington D.C., Indiana, Louisiana and Ohio showed drops in standardized test scores larger than Hurricane Katrina’s devastating impact on public schools in New Orleans in 2005.

In the typical voucher scheme, students receive, at most, the state equivalent of per pupil funding for education to then attend a private school. In North Carolina, for example, that amounts to $7,213 per year. Elite private institution tuition typically exceeds $25,000 per year or more. Thus, the vast majority of working class students using vouchers will end up in poor performing private institutions, sometimes with religious-based curriculums rejecting basic scientific facts such as evolution.

Joshua Cowen, Professor of Education Policy at Michigan State University, noted in Time recently that “the typical voucher school is a financially distressed, sub-prime private provider, often jumping at the chance for a tax bailout to stay open a few extra years.” Taking Wisconsin as an example, Cowen noted that 41 percent of voucher schools have closed in the state since the program began in 1990. For schools that opened in response to the voucher program, the average survival time was just four years.

Further, private schools receiving public funds, including in Florida and Indiana, are often allowed to decline students for any reason, banning LGBTQ children. They also can decline special needs students, who often require more resources than voucher programs provide. So much for parental rights to “school choice.”

Thomas Jefferson’s “wall of separation,” which is supposed to exist under the First Amendment, between the government and religion has also been punctured as private religious schools are permitted in many states to accept vouchers. In Oklahoma, that wall threatens to be completely torn down. Earlier this month, the state approved a fully publicly funded Catholic charter school, with an anticipated cost of $23.3 million in state funding over the first five years. The non-profit Americans United for Separation of Church and State is planning a legal challenge.

The wave of privatization efforts has been funded in large measure by Betsy DeVos, the billionaire and former education secretary in the Trump administration. Her organization, American Federation for Children, provided $9 million to fund candidates in 2022 state elections, backing almost 200 candidates. The DeVos-backed candidates have in turn spearheaded the wave of voucher legislation in 2023, including in Florida, Iowa, Arkansas, Texas and Georgia. Financial backers of DeVos’s organization include Cleveland Browns co-owners Jimmy and Dee Haslam, and Jim Walton, son of Walmart founder Sam Walton.

Concomitant with the rise in public school privatization have been rising demands in right-wing circles for so-called “parental rights” in education. Their demands include restrictions on public school curricula and censorship of books related to sexuality, gender identity and racism. In their efforts at restricting what teachers can teach and what children can read, they accuse public schools of “indoctrinating” students, while insisting that students be indoctrinated through a curriculum consisting of a steady diet of historical mischaracterization and falsification of the many crimes of the American ruling class.

The recent efforts at censorship began in a wave of state bills passed in 2021, restricting or banning the teaching of so-called “divisive concepts” related to race, gender, sexuality and social class. Building on this, in the first half of 2022, an additional 84 bills in 26 states were pre-filed or introduced to further expand so-called parents’ rights.

In March 2023, at the federal level, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives passed the “Parents Bill of Rights Act.” While it is not expected to pass the Democratic-controlled Senate, the bill echoes many of the state bills in allowing parents to inspect books and other library materials, and requiring the public posting of curricula.

The right-wing campaign to stifle discussion and prevent the free expression of ideas in public schools is bearing its poisonous fruit: during the 2021-22 school year, PEN America found that more than 1,600 book titles were banned in schools across the country, written by over 1,200 different authors, along with the contributions of 290 illustrators and 18 translators.

US Supreme Court majority abolishes racial preferences in university admission

John Burton & Tom Carter

Members of the Supreme Court sit for a group portrait following the addition of Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, at the Supreme Court building in Washington, Octobert 7, 2022. [AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite]

On Thursday, the corrupt far-right majority on the US Supreme Court issued a decision effectively abolishing racial preferences in university admissions. By a 6-3 vote, the court held that racial preferences in the admissions process at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, also known as “affirmative action,” violated the constitutional right of “equal protection” as well as a federal statute that prohibits racial discrimination by recipients of federal funding.

The decision overturns decades of deliberate national policy, with far-reaching implications across numerous institutions and professions. While most students attend colleges and universities with little or no selectiveness in terms of admissions, the most disruptive effects of the decision will be concentrated in the most elite institutions, where dozens or even hundreds of applicants often compete for the privilege of a single spot.

Contrary to the way the decision has been portrayed in the American media—equating it with the infamous Dobbs decision last year abolishing the right to abortion—the issue in the cases decided Thursday was not whether to improve the overall quality of education or broaden access to it for millions of students. Instead, the dispute was over the methods for allocating the privilege of obtaining a quality higher education within the existing framework, which remains unchanged.

Affirmative action policies have been bitterly litigated by rival factions of the American ruling class for decades, resulting in splintered Supreme Court decisions that until recently have narrowly permitted racial preferences. In the most recent case, the Biden administration, the justices aligned with the Democratic Party, and the universities defended affirmative action. But the new majority of far-right and Republican-aligned justices, including three appointed by the fascistic ex-president Donald Trump, took the opportunity to transform what had previously been the subject of angry dissents into the supreme law of the land.

An extraordinary five hours of oral arguments were devoted to the case in November. By the end of those arguments, the 6-3 decision against affirmative action was all but assured. The seven-month delay as well as the extraordinary length of the decision (237 pages split among six different opinions) testify to the bitterness of the disagreements over terminating an entrenched decades-old policy.

“Amicus” or “friend of court” briefs were submitted in the case by groups representing substantial swaths of the American academic, corporate, government, and military elite. Many of these groups expressly defended affirmative action as a key institution in the “pipeline” for selecting and grooming the next generation of the elite, and ultimately for ensuring the long-term stability of the capitalist social order. They feared that flipping the tables on this well-established practice could have far-reaching and destabilizing implications.

These fears were articulated in the principal dissenting opinion filed by justice Sonia Sotomayor. Defending affirmative action, she wrote, “History teaches that racial diversity is a national security imperative.”

Quoting from the Biden administration’s brief in support of affirmative action, Sotomayor expressly tied the policy of affirmative action to the war plans of the American government: “Based on ‘lessons from decades of battlefield experience,’ it has been the ‘longstanding military judgment’ across administrations that racial diversity ‘is essential to achieving a mission-ready’ military and to ensuring the Nation’s ‘ability to compete, deter, and win in today’s increasingly complex global security environment.’”

Indeed, during the oral arguments in November, the Biden administration’s solicitor general made this argument with an implicit reference to the phenomenon of “fragging” during the Vietnam War, when a pattern emerged of black conscripts killing their white officers.

Taking up this argument, Sotomayor wrote, “During the Vietnam War, for example, lack of racial diversity threatened the integrity and performance of the Nation’s military because it fueled perceptions of racial/ethnic minorities serving as ‘cannon fodder’ for white military leaders.”

Sotomayor warned of “the costly result” of eliminating affirmative action, again quoting the Biden administration brief. “‘The Nation’s military strength and readiness depend on a pipeline of officers who are both highly qualified and racially diverse—and who have been educated in diverse environments that prepare them to lead increasingly diverse forces.’ That is true not just at the military service academies but ‘at civilian universities, including Harvard, that host Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) programs and educate students who go on to become officers.’”

Extending these rationales from military officers to the business elite, Sotomayor cited a brief filed on behalf of “Major American Business Enterprises” that argued that “a diverse workforce improves business performance.”

“A college degree, particularly from an elite institution, carries with it the benefit of powerful networks and the opportunity for socioeconomic mobility,” she acknowledged. “Admission to college is therefore often the entry ticket to top jobs in workplaces where important decisions are made.”

In so many words, the dissenting justices opposed the abolition of affirmative action on the grounds that it would undermine the illusion of social mobility as well as the perceived legitimacy of the American government, military, financial institutions, and the capitalist social order.

As for the far-right Supreme Court majority, their decision to abolish affirmative action is based on a number of no less cynical calculations. Alongside fascistic figures like former Trump aide Steven Bannon, the far-right wing of the American political establishment senses that identity politics enjoys weak popular support, and seek to exploit decades of accumulated grievances resulting from the application of racial preferences.

The cases that were decided Thursday were brought by an organization called the “Students For Fair Admissions” (SFFA), which is associated with right-wing legal activist Edward Blum, who has previously been behind legal attacks on the Voting Rights Act.

In the Harvard case in particular, a number of documents came to light in the course of the litigation that were highly embarrassing for the university, exposing the capricious manner in which students from some backgrounds were assigned high “leadership” scores.

While affirmative action was ostensibly aimed at the elimination of racial prejudice, in practice the distribution of racial preferences frequently involved the direct application of such prejudices, such as students from Asian backgrounds being arbitrarily given low scores for “personality” in order to make room for students from other backgrounds.

In the decades during which affirmative action became more and more entrenched, a whole rotten cottage industry emerged that was dedicated to assisting students with navigating these arbitrary preferences, such as advising students on how to appear “less Asian” in their applications.

As it relates to the extremely sensitive issue of the military in particular, it is noteworthy that the Supreme Court decision carves out “military academies” from the direct impact of the ruling, adding that the “opinion does not address the issue, in light of the potentially distinct interests that military academies may present.”

The conflict over affirmative action in the Supreme Court is a facet of broader conflicts within the American political establishment that have also been reflected in the controversies between the New York Times’ 1619 Project and the Trump administration’s “1776 Report” and over “critical race theory.”

Denouncing the “superficial rule of colorblindness as a constitutional principle,” Sotomayor’s dissent described America as an “endemically segregated society.” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who formerly sat on the Board of Overseers of Harvard, wrote separately that the US “has never been colorblind.” The implication is that America is a society that has always been divided by race, that will be divided along racial lines for the foreseeable future, and within which a system of allocating privileges based on race will necessarily play a more or less permanent role.

By attacking the Democratic Party where they sense it is weakest, the far-right seeks to win support for its own fascistic policies, as well as to establish a platform for anti-democratic legal rulings in the future.

The attempt by the far-right Supreme Court majority to posture as paragons of “equality” lacks any credibility whatsoever. On Friday, just one day after the decision abolishing affirmative action, the Supreme Court majority sided with a Christian fundamentalist bigot who refused to design a website for a gay couple. Invoking religious “freedom,” the decision recalls the infamous legal decisions from the Jim Crow period that upheld the “freedom” of restaurant owners to refuse to serve food to black people. The same day, the Supreme Court blocked a federal student loan forgiveness plan, preventing hundreds of thousands of former students from escaping crushing debt that many will never be able to repay.

Earlier this month, by a vote of 8 to 1, the Supreme Court issued a far-reaching attack on the right to strike, opening the door for employers to file lawsuits against striking workers for “damages” resulting from a strike. Sotomayor, who authored the principal dissent in Thursday’s affirmative action ruling, joined the right-wing majority in that decision.

The current Supreme Court, stacked with unelected far-right justices, is embroiled in a historically unprecedented corruption scandal that undermines the legitimacy of any of its purported decisions. Numerous justices have been exposed accepting undisclosed “gifts,” including from people and entities with definite political agendas and even pecuniary interests in pending court cases.

The most egregious offender, Clarence Thomas, has refused to step down even after being caught accepting large “gifts” from Harlan Crow, a billionaire anti-communist zealot whose hobbies include collecting Nazi artifacts. Clarence Thomas’s wife, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, was a key Trump operative during the time the January 6, 2021 coup was being planned.

The abolition of affirmative action by the Supreme Court on Thursday brings to a close a whole era during which racial preferences constituted a major component of state policy in the US. Originating in the Nixon years alongside the slogan of “black capitalism,” affirmative action was increasingly embraced by the Democratic Party in the subsequent decades as the party turned away from the last vestiges of a program of social reform, replacing it with a concentration on various forms of “identity.”

It is a matter of objective historical fact that these policies benefited only a narrow and privileged layer of minorities, while social inequality increased and wages and living conditions steadily declined across the board.

More than two decades ago the World Socialist Web Site published a statement, “Affirmative action and the right to education: a socialist response,” which rejected a choice between the advocates of racial preferences and their right-wing detractors.

“A genuine improvement of the state of education in the United States requires massive public investment in primary, secondary and tertiary education,” the statement concluded. “Grade schools must be supplied with the funds necessary to provide a quality education to all. Teachers must be paid more, class sizes reduced, school buildings improved, and their surrounding neighborhoods renovated. Remedial college classes must be made available to all who have suffered from the decay of primary schooling. Quality education at all levels should be provided, free of cost and as a basic democratic right, to anyone who wants it, regardless of race or gender. In relation to higher education, this approach involves a policy of open admissions.”

Supreme Court strikes down Biden’s partial student loan forgiveness plan, 43 million borrowers denied debt relief

Barry Grey

The US Supreme Court on Friday with a stroke of the pen blocked a measure that would have provided limited relief for 43 million Americans suffering under a crushing debt burden of $1.7 trillion in outstanding federal student loans.

On the same day that the Supreme Court struck down the student debt relief program, it sanctioned discrimination against LGBTQ people by the same 6-3 margin, siding with a bigoted web designer who refuses to accept same-sex couples as customers. With these rulings, the unelected and unaccountable justices, appointed for life terms, are exposing the Supreme Court as a thoroughly corrupt instrument and discredited institution.

The fact that the same justices who are snatching desperately needed funds from working class families and opening the door to fascistic persecution of minorities have been exposed as takers of massive payoffs from billionaire sponsors, including those who come before the court, is not lost on the population.

The executive order enacted by President Joe Biden last August fell far short of his 2020 election pledge to forgive all federal student loans and was a transparent effort to boost the Democrats’ chances ahead of the 2022 midterm elections. It would have cancelled up to $10,000 in loan principal for borrowers earning up to $125,000 a year, and up to $20,000 for recipients of Pell Grants, which target low-income students. It would have added up to $400 billion in loan forgiveness over 30 years, or $13.3 billion a year.

$10,000 is less than a third of the average $35,574 student loan debt per federal borrower and the program would have erased only a fraction of the total student debt load. The average US student pays $2,186 a year in interest each year, or $43,000 over 20 years.

Average monthly student loan payments are $234 for those with undergraduate degrees and $570 a month for those with master’s degrees. A nurse with a salary of $70,000 would have saved $200 a month under the program.

The U.S. Supreme Court is seen on Friday, June 30, 2023, in Washington. [AP Photo/Mariam Zuhaib]

The explosion in student debt in the US has been fueled by the skyrocketing cost of higher education, which has more than doubled over the last two decades. The average total cost for a public four-year degree in the US is today over $100,000. At the same time, government aid to higher education has steadily fallen.

So crushing is the burden of student loan debt that some 22 million borrowers applied for relief under the Biden plan in the first five days following the posting of the website. Nearly 90 percent of the loan applicants came from zip codes where the median income is less than $59,999, with over 60 percent from zip codes where the median income is between $20,000 and $39,999.

The 6-3 ruling in Biden v. Nebraska, with the far-right Republican bloc lining up behind the opinion authored by Chief Justice John Roberts and the three Democratic appointees uniting behind Justice Elena Kagan’s dissent, was widely anticipated. The Biden administration handed the Republicans the best possible conditions for them to block the program.

In the first two years of his term, when the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress as well as the White House, neither Biden nor the congressional leadership made any serious attempt to get a student debt relief plan passed by Congress. When he finally enacted the program, under pressure from congressional Democrats fearing a rout in the 2022 midterm elections, Biden did so under the provisions of the emergency 2003 HEROES Act, which was passed to lessen the debt burden on soldiers during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The White House used the COVID-19 pandemic emergency to invoke the 2003 law.

In so doing, Biden was following the example of Trump, who had used the HEROES Act three times to extend a moratorium on student loan interest payments and interest accrual due to the pandemic. Biden also used the 2003 law to further extend the moratorium. But with his ending of the official COVID emergency, he has set the stage for borrowers to resume these payments beginning October 1—another cruel financial burden, which will be compounded by the rise in interest rates and price gouging for staple goods and rents.

Avoiding a conflict in Congress was in line with the Democrats’ overriding concern with maintaining bipartisan support for the proxy war in Ukraine against Russia and suppressing the growing resistance of the working class at home. Biden announced his student loan forgiveness plan when he was intervening, in alliance for the union bureaucracy, to block a strike by 120,000 rail workers. This ultimately took the form of a bipartisan bill banning a strike and imposing a pro-company contract that had been rejected by tens of thousands of railroaders.

Within days of the debt relief plan’s announcement, Republican-led state governments began filing lawsuits to block it, along with right-wing groups funded by billionaire Republican donors and Trump supporters such as Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus, Koch Enterprises and the Mercer family. At a point when the Department of Education had already approved the loan relief applications of 16 million borrowers, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals put the program on ice and channeled the case to the Supreme Court.

Roberts, in his decision, cynically argued that Biden had overstepped his authority by launching the debt relief program without specific congressional authorization. In his majority opinion, he quoted then-Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who told a press conference in July of 2021: “People think that the president of the United States has the power for debt forgiveness, he does not. He can postpone. He can delay. But he does not have that power. That has to be an act of Congress.”

Channeling many of the legal shibboleths of the Republican right, Roberts decried the so-called “administrative state” and invoked the “major questions” doctrine that is used to attack federal regulations that impinge on the profit interests of the corporate elite. Echoing Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who had absurdly denounced Biden’s modest plan as “socialism,” and expressing the fear within the ruling class of revolution, Roberts wrote:

The [education] secretary’s plan has “modified” the cited provisions only in the same sense that the French Revolution “modified” the status of the French nobility—it has abolished them and supplanted them with a new regime entirely.

No faction of the court expressed any concerns about administrative “overreach” only weeks ago when the Treasury, the Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation unilaterally declared a systemic financial risk and made available hundreds of billions of dollars to guarantee the assets of rich depositors at three failing banks—Silicon Valley, Signature and First Republic—undermined by the Fed’s program of interest rate hikes directed at driving up unemployment and slowing wage growth.

As for the scale of the debt relief proposed by Biden—deemed an impossible imposition on the profits and property of banks and loan companies—at $13.3 billion a year, it would have paled in comparison to Biden’s record $1 trillion fiscal year 2024 military budget, not to mention the limitless funds allocated to arm Ukraine in the war against Russia.

On Friday afternoon, Biden gave a desultory televised response to the ruling striking down his debt relief program. He announced a new plan, based on the 1965 Higher Education Act, to make certain unspecified reductions in student loan debt. He also said he would limit monthly payments for undergraduate loans to 5 percent of disposable income, as opposed to the current level of 10 percent. Finally, he said the Department of Education would refrain for 12 months, beginning October 1, from referring borrowers who miss payments to credit agencies or consider them delinquent.

These measures, which themselves are likely to be challenged in the courts, are driven in large part by concerns that a surge in loan defaults could undermine trillions in financial assets tied to student loans. In November, Investopedia warned that “because of the inherent similarities between the student loan market and the sub-prime mortgage market, there is rampant fear that the student loan industry will be the next market implosion to trigger a financial crisis.”

Justice Department report fails to substantiate the suicide narrative of Jeffrey Epstein’s death in federal custody

Kevin Reed

The U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General (OIG) released on Tuesday a long-awaited report summarizing its investigation into the August 10, 2019, death of billionaire financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein while he was in the custody of the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) in New York City.

The main purpose of the OIG report is to uncritically bolster the findings of the Chief New York Medical Examiner Dr. Barbara Sampson the day after Epstein was found at 6:30 a.m. unresponsive in his cell at the Manhattan Correctional Center (MCC) and pronounced dead at 7:36 a.m. at New York Presbyterian Lower Manhattan Hospital.

The executive summary of the OIG report states, “On August 11, 2019, the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner performed an autopsy and determined the cause of death was hanging and the method was suicide.”

Furthermore, the OIG report fails to address in any substantial manner the widespread public belief that Jeffrey Epstein was murdered to prevent him from exposing others within the financial, political and celebrity elite who were participants in and/or facilitators of his sex trafficking operation.

The report states, “The Medical Examiner who performed the autopsy told the OIG that Epstein’s injuries were consistent with suicide by hanging and that there was no evidence of defensive wounds that would be expected if his death had been a homicide.”

The OIG does not address itself, for example, to the independent autopsy conducted on behalf of Epstein’s family by forensic pathologist Dr. Michael Baden who determined in October 2019 that the injuries suffered by Epstein, such as his fractured hyoid bone, “points to homicide rather than suicide.”

Instead, the OIG report moves quickly onto an analysis of the “job performance and management failures on the part of BOP personnel,” and “widespread disregard of BOP policies that are designed to ensure that inmates are safe, secure and in good health,” that it presents as the reasons Epstein was able to take his own life.

Among the “failures” acknowledged by the OIG was that Epstein was left in his jail cell alone with a surplus of bed linens on the night of his death, nearly every surveillance camera on his unit did not record what was happening outside cell and despite a purported suicide attempt two weeks earlier, Epstein was not checked on regularly as required by BOP procedures.

As is stated in the OIG Executive Summary, “The combination of negligence, misconduct, and outright job performance failures documented in this report all contributed to an environment in which one of the BOP’s most notorious inmates was provided with the opportunity to take his own life, resulting in numerous questions being asked about the circumstances of his death, how it could have been allowed to happen, and most importantly, depriving his numerous victims, many of whom were underage girls at the time of the alleged crimes, of their ability to seek justice through the criminal justice system.”

The OIG’s reference to Epstein’s victims is for public relations purposes only, since the report provides no new information about the criminal enterprise that the billionaire was running with the tacit support of both his wealthy friends and federal law enforcement officials for at least 15 years.

The report does not bother to mention, for example, that it was the DoJ—specifically U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida Alexander Acosta—that intervened in 2008 to arrange a non-prosecution agreement with Epstein that effectively blocked a probe into his sex crimes involving at least three dozen victims.

In any event, the 128-page OIG report offers a series of “recommendations to the BOP to address the numerous issues identified during our investigation and review.” Among these are calls for BOP to address staffing shortages, to adequately train the staff on cell inspections, to ensure security cameras are functioning properly and, above all, develop procedures for protecting inmates who are on suicide watch.

It must be stated that, even if Jeffrey Epstein did commit suicide—and this has by no means been proven conclusively by the Department of Justice—the facts presented in the OIG report demonstrate that the BOP staff at MCC and, by extension, the U.S. government facilitated it.

As has been established during numerous lawsuits brought against the deceased billionaire’s estate that Jeffrey Epstein had many relationships with individuals within the ruling establishment in the U.S. and around the world who were well-aware of his criminal sex trafficking of underage girls and, in some cases, participated in it.

Among the significant individuals with known connections to Jeffrey Epstein are Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Prince Andrew, Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, Elon Musk and Bill Gates.

These revelations came to a head recently in a class action lawsuit brought by Epstein’s victims against JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in the U.S., which had continued to do business with the billionaire long after his depraved criminal activities became public knowledge. In the end, to prevent further revelations about the bank’s collaboration with and financial support for the sex trafficker Epstein and to avoid admitting any wrongdoing whatsoever, JPMorgan settled out of court with the group of victims for a reported $290 million.

The wealthy and well-connected Jeffrey Epstein was arrested on July 6, 2019, by federal and New York City police at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey on numerous sex trafficking charges. He pleaded not guilty on July 8 and, after his request for pretrial release—including an offer to pay $100 million bond—was denied on the grounds that he posed a danger to the public and was a serious flight risk, Epstein was jailed at MCC awaiting his trial.

The events of July 23, 2019, when Epstein was found injured and semiconscious at 1:30 a.m. on the floor of his cell and with marks on his neck, is critical to the narrative that the billionaire killed himself. His cellmate, referred to in the OIG report as Inmate 1, was former New York City police officer Nicholas Tartaglione, who was awaiting trial on four counts of murder. Tartaglione has maintained that he had no knowledge of what happened to Epstein that night and he was officially cleared of any wrongdoing by the BOP within days of the event.

However, the OIG report says the billionaire stated multiple times that he believed someone had tried to kill him that morning and the last thing he remembered was going for a drink of water at 1:00 a.m. before he woke up on the floor. Epstein said he could not remember exactly what happened on July 23.

Meanwhile, there is a glaring contradiction in the report that is not addressed in the OIG executive summary or the conclusion. This has to do with the extensive details about Epstein’s mental health condition in Chapter 4 of the report entitled, “Custody and Care of Epstein Prior to His Death.”

From the day he arrived at MCC, Epstein was screened and evaluated repeatedly by medical and psychological professionals. The report says numerous times that Epstein “denied having a history of mental health treatment and any history of mental health symptoms,” and “denied passive or active suicidal ideation.”

As standard procedure, Epstein was initially place on “psychological evaluation status,” and he was given a psychological care rating of level 1, which means that “they have no needs and will not be followed up with unless requested by staff or the inmates.”

On July 11, the report notes that Epstein’s attorney, whom he met with on nearly a daily basis while at MCC, were laughing at the fact that the Chief Psychologist “was inquiring as to whether Epstein was suicidal and dismissing the possibility that Epstein could be suicidal.”

After the incident on July 23, Epstein was placed on suicide watch. However, he was removed from suicide watch a day later and then, after he was seen daily by the Chief Psychologist daily between July 25 and 29, he was removed from psychological observation altogether on July 30, following an evaluation in which Epstein, “identified reasons to live and was future-oriented.”

All of this is consistent with information on Epstein’s “clear mental status” days before his death derived from documents in the JPMorgan Chase lawsuit obtained by the Associated Press in early June. It is also consistent with the statements of Epstein’s lawyers shortly after his death, who said that he was looking forward to pursuing his legal defense and showed no indications of suicidal tendencies.

Responding to the conclusions in the OIG report, which took four years for the U.S. Justice Department to produce, Mark Epstein, brother of the deceased billionaire told Insider on Tuesday, “It doesn’t make sense.”

Mark Epstein said the marks on his brother’s neck were inconsistent with suicidal hanging, “if he was hanging from the way they said, that doesn’t match up to where the broken bones are in his neck.” He added, “What most likely happened is that those marks are probably because he got either punched or a karate chop into the neck by whoever killed him. Because that’s a technique they use to incapacitate people that they’re going to eliminate. That makes much more sense.”

The corporate media has dutifully picked up the conclusions of the OIG report and repeated them without a word of criticism. The New York Times, for example, begins its report by saying Jeffrey Epstein, “died by suicide, not foul play—after a cascade of negligence and mismanagement at the now-shuttered federal jail in Manhattan where he was housed, according to the Justice Department’s inspector general.”