After the anti CAA protest at Saheen Bagah in Delhi, the farmers protest is the second protest in Delhi that is currently underway in 2020. Thousands of farmers from Haryana and Punjab have marched towards Delhi to press the central government to repeal the recently enacted farm laws.
They are stopped at Haryana Delhi border by the Delhi police using water cannons and lathi charge and are dissuaded from entering the national capital. But undeterred, the farmers have not stopped their march and have vowed to continue their agitation on the Delhi border, unless the government scraps the farm laws.
Remember, the anti CAA protest at Saheen Bagah that erupted in a big way in January and February was of similar nature. Then the protests were held in a peaceful manner and was sustained by community leadership in which farmers from Punjab had some role to play. The anti- CAA protests abruptly ended without accomplishing the goal to force the government to roll back the citizenship laws. This was due to Delhi riots, Coronavirus alarm and the national lockdown.
Now it remains to be seen, how the farmers protest may play itself out in the current situation. The news amid the farmers’ protest is that some mosques in Delhi have opened community kitchens to provide food to the agitating farmers arriving from Punjab and other states.
These food kitchens are set up in Delhi mosques and the organizers have shared their number to farmers to contact them for free delivery of food. The organizers plan to do this activity as long as the situation demands.
It may be recalled that during anti-CAA-NRC in Delhi farmers from Punjab came to Delhi and stood by the side of the protestors running the community kitchen to sustain the protest. Now it looks that the anti – CAA protestors want to pay back the famers by serving them with food that they did so months ago.
It remains to be seen how the BJP government responds to the farmers’ protest. Will they call the farmers for talks or continue to ignore them as they did to the anti- CAA protesters at Saheen Bagh. Will the government use strong arm tactics to clear the protesters as they did in the last stage of the anti-CAA protests.
What will be the role of BJP leader Kapil Mishra in removing the protestors? Everyone remembers his warning in which he wanted to clear the anti-CAA protests. His role in Delhi communal riots that targeted the Muslims. Will this BJP leader organize 1984 programme against the farmer’s majority the protesters being the Sikhs.
Will the anti-CAA protesters spring up again in Delhi and join the farmers’ protest on the border and storm the national capital to press for their demands jointly.
If all this happens will the government allow it or try a Tiananmen Square solution that remains to be seen? As all this happens how the media is going to report this story. Will it side with the protesters or make them doing acts of sedition?
This is a powerful situation that is building on the borders of the national capital. At the heart of the farms protest is a test of people’s power vs state power.
A video published Thursday of the violent police assault of a music producer in central Paris has provoked outrage in France and internationally.
The video’s release comes three days after the police rampage at Republic Square against a peaceful refugee encampment, and as the Macron government is pushing through a law to criminalize the filming of the actions of police officers. Published by the online publication Loopsider, the video of the attack has already been seen more than 12 million times.
The victim, Michel Zecler, was returning to his recording studio in the city’s 17th district last Saturday evening, just after 7:30pm. He entered the building after seeing a group of police officers nearby. He was not wearing a mask, which is required by coronavirus lock-down restrictions. Unknown to Michel, and without any warning, the police entered the studio as well and approached him from behind.
The video taken by a neighbour showing a group of police assaulting Michel on the street outside his studio
“Before hearing anything I felt a hand that pushed me, or pulled me, and then they asked me to leave. I said I was in my place… It happened so fast that I asked myself if they were real police.” One of the police officers was in civilian clothing. The events were captured on the studio’s CCTV camera. The police entered the room with Michel, closed the door behind them, and beat him for several minutes. He was kicked a dozen times, punched twenty times, and hit with a truncheon another 15 times, mainly on the face and the skull.
“I said to myself, if I fall to the ground I am not going to get back up,” Michel, who has come forward publicly to the media, told Loopside. At no point in the video does he offer any resistance. Michel, who is black, said the officers repeatedly abused him with racial slurs, calling him a “dirty negro.” The attack only stopped when a group of teenage music artists who were in the recording studio on the floor below managed to force their way into the room, causing the police to flee outside.
“They are 16-year-old kids,” Michel said. “They asked me what happened, and I said I had no idea. I was covered in blood.” The officers then smashed a window and threw a teargas canister into the room. “I told myself this is going to be my last day,” he said.
A second video of the street shot from above by neighbors shows a group of at least seven police huddled around the entrance of the building as Michel leaves. Two of them are pointing what appear to be guns at him. When he leaves onto the street, the police surround him and beat him from all sides. Two officers went inside to find the youth, who had hidden from the teargas. “They started hitting us,” one told the media later. “Then I heard, ‘Camera! Camera!’ It was the [neighbours] who were filming. From the moment I heard that, they stopped hitting us.”
Michel was then brought to the local police office, where the officers—unaware of the CCTV footage—filed false charges of rebellion against him, claiming he had “dragged” them into his studio, attacked them, and reached for their weapons. He was placed in detention for 48 hours. The charges were only dropped when the video was shown to the police.
Music producer identified only by his first name, Michel, is pictured at a press conference in Paris. (Image credit: screen capture)
“Without this video, I would be in prison today,” Michel said. “I would be in prison and all my loved ones, my friends, would have thought, like the police said in their statements, that I had wanted to take their weapon, that I had hit them.” As his comments make clear, there is nothing particularly unique about the latest incident of police violence. Had it not been filmed, Michel would have been like countless other victims of police aggression whose claims are denied by the police themselves.
The Macron government, fearful of an explosion of opposition in the population, released a cynical statement Friday that the president was “shocked” when he saw the videos. He has allegedly requested a report from Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin. The three police have been suspended, and Darmanin has claimed he will “press” for their dismissal. Another internal police investigation, which invariably result in clearing the officers of all wrongdoing, has also been announced for Monday’s police assault at Republic Square.
Behind these empty statements, Macron, who hailed fascist dictator Petain as a “great soldier” in 2018, is rapidly building an authoritarian police state, and moving to grant the police impunity for their violence against the population. The assault of Michel has only underscored the significance of the government’s “global security” law, passed by the National Assembly on Monday, which criminalizes filming police in public places, on the basis of subjective criteria that the police fear they may be physically or psychologically harmed as a result of the video.
The government is now attempting to counter mass opposition to the law with the announcement that it has appointed a special commission to “re-write” the relevant Article 24 before the law is submitted to the Senate in January. A demonstration today against the law was banned by police, but the ban was overturned by the administrative court last night, allowing the protest to proceed.
The latest police outrages and the government’s law have been criticized by the Socialist Party, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s Unsubmissive France, and the Greens. All of these parties support the buildup of a police state in France, having backed the two-year state of emergency imposed under the Socialist Party government of François Hollande.
Their fear is that Macron’s open turn toward a dictatorship will trigger an explosion of working class opposition. Voicing these fears, Le Monde published an editorial yesterday, “Police: A grave crisis of command,” warning: “Gérald Darmanin, chosen by the President of the Republic to appeal to conservative voters, is threatening to drag the country into a terribly dangerous spiral of unrest, aggravated by the many tensions tied to the lock-down.”
The editorial absurdly presents police violence as a problem of “leadership,” and its proposal amounts to a call to replace the internal police control organization with a “control organization that is truly independent.”
In reality, Macron’s drive to a police state is part of a turn toward authoritarian forms of rule by capitalist governments around the world. It is driven by the tremendous growth of social inequality that has been intensified by the coronavirus pandemic and the preparations of the ruling class to brutally suppress opposition in the working class. For the past two years, Macron’s police have beaten thousands of “yellow vest” protesters and striking workers, shot dozens of eyes out with rubber bullets, and blown off hands with stun grenades.
The fact that this repression has been directed at the entire working class demonstrates that police violence is fundamentally a product of class, not racial, oppression.
The latest assault on Michel appears to have been motivated at least in part by racism, which is deliberately cultivated in the police forces by the ruling class, where there is a strong base of support for the neo-fascist right. The cultivation of fascistic police aims to ensure that these forces are capable of brutal violence against the entire working population.
Moreover, countless similar incidents have taken place against workers of all ethnicities. On January 3, police killed Cédric Chouviat, a white delivery driver, during a traffic stop, by kneeling on him as he cried “I’m suffocating”—the same phrase used by George Floyd before he was killed by police earlier this year in the United States. In June, Farida, a white health worker of Arabic background, was filmed being violently assaulted by police during a protest demanding improved health funding.
Paramedics are in a frontline profession subject to the danger of coronavirus infection, with at least coronavirus 42 of them contracting the virus during Victoria’s recent “second wave.” Even before the pandemic, however, paramedicine was recognised as one of the most dangerous jobs in Australia.
An ambulance in Sydney earlier this year (Credit: Wikimedia, Helitak430)
According to Safer Work Australia, the government body responsible for workplace health and safety and compensation, paramedics had the highest rate of injury of any occupation prior to the COVID-19 crisis.
Consequently, these workers are subject to extremely high stress levels, and many face serious physical and mental health issues.
One 2020 academicpaper from South Australia’s Flinders University examined the mental health and wellbeing of paramedics compared with other professions. It discovered they have far higher rates of mental health disorders, workplace violence and injuries, fatigue, sleep disorders and suicidal ideation than other jobs.
The study outlined patterns of frustration, helplessness, trepidation and feelings of being overwhelmed, leading to compassion fatigue and self-blame. Shift work reduced the time for recovery and had a negative impact on family roles, disrupting the structure of home life. Most paramedics work a mixture of day and night shifts, which is known to be one of the most damaging work patterns.
The paper described the workplace as resembling a “big brother” environment, in which relations with management were increasingly strained.
On-road staff felt that managers failed to understand, appreciate or respond to the distress of critical incidents.
Particular case types, such as the death of a baby or child, could contribute to significant distress. The strategy to cope was often to “compartmentalise” the event and associated emotions.
Given the workload pressures and performance indicators governing their jobs, the paramedics often had no time to deal with the effects of critical events.
The report explained: “In Australia, historically, these services had their origins in paramilitary culture, with a strong hierarchical chain of command, which in turn prizes stoicism in the face of adversity and compliance, with little sense of worker control or clinical autonomy, but also a high level of teamwork, camaraderie and public service.”
International studies also identified the adverse psychological, physical and social effects that can ensue for ambulance personnel. An English study has shown that a “mixture of high intensity and mundane work often created a difficult shift for paramedics’ mindset, with little respite or time for debriefing and dealing with administrative requirements during periods of intense emotions.”
That is, it can be extremely stressful to alternate a period of high intensity work such as dealing with injured or dangerously ill patients, and then to have to turn to operational and bureaucratic work requirements, with little time in between.
Often the culture of metrics (key performance indicators used by managers) meant that on-road staff become more concerned about the speed in which a job was performed, than caring for the patient.
Recently the issue of workplace culture came to the fore in Ambulance Victoria. Rasa Piggott is an advanced life support paramedic who wrote an open letter to Ambulance Victoria’s board chair Ken Lay alleging “active discrimination and instances of abuse in our workplace” and “horrible instances of sexual misconduct.”
Piggott called for an independent review and cited instances of “managers advising staff not to get pregnant if wanting to pursue a higher role, stating that they will not be considered for promotion if they plan on becoming pregnant and attempting to demote a person to a junior role for taking parental leave.”
Many paramedics have reported that most male paramedics supported gender equality, but a “boys club” culture was entrenched in some long-standing pockets of management.
Complaints cited by the Victorian Ambulance Union also related to the ‘culture” fostered by Ambulance Victoria and “the feeling that current or prospective MICA [intensive care] paramedics cannot voice their concerns due to fear of vilification, victimisation or other differential treatment.”
Ambulance Victoria had to resort to engaging the Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission to investigate the allegations of bullying.
Management treatment of staff also came under fire on social media. One female paramedic wrote on Facebook: “You are my hero Rasa. Well done, young lady. I’ve put up with this for over 20 years. I love what I do. I’m proud to be a paramedic. But it has been the most stressful career I’ve ever had. Not due to the work, but dealing with management.”
These allegations highlight the range of problems faced by paramedics.
The issue of shift work was the subject of a 2018 nationalstudy, which found that of 18,600 employees, 57.8 were doing rotating shift work, 20.2 percent had a regular daytime schedule and 27.1 percent would often return to work with less than a 12 hour break.
The same survey revealed that 6.5 percent had suicidal thoughts and three percent had suicide plans.
Another nationalstudy of 893 paramedics in 2018 found that 55.9 percent suffered total burnout, 43.4 percent suffered patient related burnout, 62.7 percent suffered work related burnout and 69.1 percent suffered personal related burnout.
These figures make clear that problems with the workplace culture in Victoria are not confined to that state, but are prevalent nationally. The emphasis on productivity, regardless of the human consequences, has created a crisis everywhere.
Above all, the plight of paramedics is the outcome of the gutting of public healthcare by successive governments, Labor and Liberal-National alike, at the state and federal levels. As part of a broader onslaught on social spending and working class conditions, they have refused to provide the necessary funding for paramedics and every other aspect of the health system, while presiding over a massive growth in the wealth and profits of the corporate and financial elite.
The government of Papua New Guinea (PNG), led by Prime Minister James Marape, has plunged into turmoil after the defection of over a dozen MPs to the opposition. The crisis comes barely 18 months after Marape ousted previous Prime Minister Peter O’Neill in a similar manner over corruption allegations, leading to his arrest in May.
PNG Prime Minister James Marape (left) with Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison in 2019 [Credit: Wikimedia Commons]
The defectors included 12 cabinet ministers, among them Deputy Prime Minister Sam Basil and leader of the National Alliance Party, Foreign Affairs Minister Patrick Pruaitch. Basil, leader of the United Labour Party, had been appointed deputy prime minister just last month in a Cabinet reshuffle, justified by Marape as necessary for the “stability” of his coalition.
Basil said “the cries of the people” had spurred the defectors to act, adding that the country had gone backwards under Marape’s leadership. The timing appears to be linked to plans to bring forward a vote of no confidence, which can only occur 18 months after a prime minister takes office, i.e., not before November 30.
Marape declared on Facebook that he would not be easily removed. “It’s not over until it’s over, leadership has its moments,” he said. The government staved off the no confidence vote last week by passing the budget before abruptly adjourning parliament until April.
While the opposition coalition currently holds a parliamentary majority, it was caught out by the government’s manoeuvre. The opposition had earlier called for an adjournment vote, which they won. An estimated 43 opposition MPs, including the defectors, then travelled to remote Vanimo to prepare for the confidence vote.
On November 16, however, parliament’s speaker Job Pomat announced that opposition leader Belden Namah had no right to call an adjournment and that parliament was still in session. The house sitting was brought forward to 10 a.m. the next day. With the opposition absent, the government mustered the required quorum of one third of all 111 MPs. With less than half MPs present, they approved the budget without any debate, before adjourning parliament.
The legality of the sitting was promptly challenged in court by O’Neill. Both camps are now waiting for the Supreme Court to rule on the matter, and on a separate case previously brought by Namah challenging the legality of last year’s installation of Marape as prime minister.
A vote of no confidence remains possible next April, but it would be unlikely unless the governor general dissolves parliament and calls an early poll. According to the parliamentary rules, a confidence vote cannot be put any later than next July.
The cynical manoeuvring between rival groups of parliamentarians highlights the vast gulf that separates the poverty-stricken PNG masses and the country’s corrupt and venal political elite.
Marape last week summoned public service heads, including the police commissioner and defence force commander, for a briefing. His message, later broadcast to the general population, was that nobody should “get caught up” in the crisis. “Leave politics to the politicians,” he said, “remain focused and get on with your life.” Police have mobilised extra personnel to beef up “security” around the capital Port Moresby.
Behind the turmoil is the spiraling social and economic crisis intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic fallout. After a period of several months during which the country remained isolated from the pandemic, a surge in cases erupted in July and August. PNG has now recorded 609 cases of COVID-19 with seven deaths. Only 30,000 people have been tested from the population of 8 million.
The pandemic has caused major disruption. The massive Ok Tedi mine was at the centre of a COVID-19 outbreak over August and September with staff and contractors accounting for the majority of the almost 200 confirmed cases in Western province. A shortfall in production due to a six-week shutdown is likely to continue for some time.
Despite the ongoing surge in COVID-19 cases, the government last month lifted some restrictions it had previously imposed. Police Commissioner David Manning, who is also the pandemic response controller, opened international flights from Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan and Solomon Islands, in addition to Australia which already had access. The daily curfew in Port Moresby was also lifted.
Before the pandemic hit, the economy was already reeling from a collapse in earnings from the major resources industries. There is a severe budget shortfall, with government debt near 40 percent of GDP. In May, Marape was reportedly seeking a $US2 billion bailout from international institutions, including the IMF and Asian Development Bank (ADB), to prevent PNG becoming a “failed state.”
Radio NZ reported on November 19 that before his defection, Basil had authorised a “large payout” from the supplementary budget to address the “towering challenges” of the economy. The government secured an IMF loan of $US340 million and another $28 million from the ADB to “restructure” Air Niugini. The IMF and ADB are certain to demand brutal attacks on the social position of the working class in return.
On taking office, Marape had resorted to nationalist demagogy, proclaiming he would “take back PNG,” and pledged “regime shifts” in the resources industry to “bring more wealth to the people.” He stirred fears in Canberra with a proposal that the Chinese government refinance the national debt of 26 billion kina ($A11.3 billion). While this did not eventuate, Marape signalled a move away from an “aid-donor” dependency on Australia.
The government then announced it would not extend the lease on the Porgera goldmine that contributes some 10 percent of the country’s total exports. The mine’s Canadian operator Barrick Gold and Chinese partner Zijin Mining condemned the move as “tantamount to nationalisation without due process,” and initiated legal action. With 3,500 jobs on the line, and millions of dollars in lost revenue accumulating each week a deal was struck. It will see PNG take a major share of equity, while Barrick retains operatorship. The mine, however, is still not reopened.
The extraction projects have done nothing to improve the lives of the people. Members of the ruling class, on the other hand, have reaped enormous personal wealth through their collaboration with Australian imperialism and services rendered to the giant transnational corporations.
PNG remains among the poorest countries in the world, despite having lucrative natural resources. Most of the country’s people confront limited or non-existent health care, education, and other social services and infrastructure, with preventable disease and other indices of social distress comparable to sub-Saharan Africa.
PNG’s former colonial overlord, Australia, will be watching developments closely. Prime Minister Scott Morrison deferred a planned trip to Port Moresby this month after Namah challenged the timing as “highly suspicious,” suggesting it was “bad diplomacy” that would unduly influence local politics.
Canberra will not, however, hesitate to act to defend the billions worth of investments by Australia’s multi-national companies. PNG is, moreover, on the frontline of great power competition with China in the Pacific, as far as both Canberra and Washington are concerned. It is a contest in which Australian imperialism is determined to maintain its hegemony.
Using specious claims of religious liberty to trump scientifically based measures for protecting public health by limiting large, lengthy indoor gatherings, the United States Supreme Court ruled 5–4 shortly before midnight Wednesday that local authorities cannot prevent mass religious services in areas where COVID-19 transmissions are spiking.
The decision is the Supreme Court’s first to curtail the power of local officials to enact public health measures to protect the population from the pandemic. It is also the first Supreme Court ruling to rest entirely on the new, ultra-reactionary five-justice majority created by the installation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
Judge Amy Coney Barrett delivers remarks after Trump announced her as his nominee for Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the US, Sept. 26, 2020 [Credit: Official White House Photo by Andrea Hanks]
In response to a sharp upsurge in positive COVID-19 cases, last October New York Governor Andrew Cuomo issued an executive order that established a “red” zone in the area immediately around a documented severe infection cluster. Among the consequences, most lengthy indoor gatherings are banned. Religious gatherings in the red zone itself are limited to 10 people. Moving further away from the epicenter, in “orange” zones the limit increases to 25 people, and in “yellow” zones religious gatherings can be up to fifty percent of capacity.
The limitations on religious gatherings have a strong foundation in science. Large numbers arrive and leave services at the same time. Co-worshipers tend to physically greet one another, sit or stand close together in poorly ventilated indoor spaces for an hour or more, share or pass objects, and sing or chant in ways that promote airborne transmission of the virus.
It is no surprise that multiple religious gatherings have been identified as “superspreader” events traced earlier this year to hundreds of thousands of COVID-19 infections and tens of thousands of deaths. According to Stanford University research published in Nature magazine, religious aggregations, along with restaurants, gyms, and hotels “produced the largest predicted increases in infections when reopened.”
Rather than using video and other technologies to protect public health—even Pope Francis has conducted mass online—the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn and two Orthodox Jewish synagogues in Queens sued New York to block enforcement of the executive order. Last summer, the Supreme Court turned down similar requests from Nevada and California.
Nothing has changed other than the court’s composition, with Amy Coney Barrett, a reactionary professor from Notre Dame who belongs to an evangelical faction of Catholics, replacing the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg, leader of the court’s moderate liberals, only a week before Trump’s election defeat.
The ruling on the New York case is an unmistakable sign that for the foreseeable future the nine-member Supreme Court will be dominated by an aggressive five-justice, ultra-reactionary bloc of Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and the three Trump appointees, Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch and Barrett.
The political tensions within the court itself are demonstrated by the issuing of six separate opinions—the majority opinion, which appears to have been written by Barrett, a vitriolic concurrence by Gorsuch, another concurrence by Kavanaugh, and dissents by the conventionally conservative chief justice John Roberts, and by moderate liberals Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor. A seventh justice, the reactionary Samuel Alito, delivered a harshly right-wing speech earlier this month to the Federalist Society in which he portrayed all COVID-19 restrictions, not just the church limitations, as attacks on constitutional freedoms.
As a technical matter, the ruling was unnecessary because the injunction was being sought to maintain the status quo while the case worked its way through the lower courts. A hearing is set in the Court of Appeals for early next month. In the meantime, the risk waned from “red” to “yellow,” and the restrictions were lifted. The Supreme Court could have declined to act on the application for an immediate stay and nothing would have changed.
The majority opinion rests on the paranoid assertion that the restrictions “single out houses of worship for especially harsh treatment” in violation of the “minimum requirement of neutrality” under the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment.
The premise is nonsense. The only reason that religious facilities are mentioned in the order is to give them preferential treatment over comparable locations, such as restaurants and theaters, where throngs congregate inside for extended periods. Those places must close entirely.
Ducking this distinction, the majority cited provisions that allow certain stores and salons to remain open. The comparison to places of worship is invalid because those establishments do not attract the same density of crowds for the same extended periods of time, and the activity is less likely to spread the virus.
According to the Supreme Court majority, “the Governor has stated that factories and schools have contributed to the spread of COVID-19 ... but they are treated less harshly than” places of worship. That is absolutely correct, but the rational solution is to close those factories and schools too, not to increase the spread of the virus through additional vectors such as large religious gatherings.
The dissents by Breyer and Sotomayor highlight the horrific toll the pandemic has already exacted, particularly in the boroughs of New York City. “The nature of the epidemic, the spikes, the uncertainties, and the need for quick action, taken together, mean that the State has countervailing arguments based upon health, safety, and administrative considerations that must be balanced against the applicants’ First Amendment challenges,” Breyer wrote.
Sotomayor, whose dissent was joined by Justice Elena Kagan, added, “Amidst a pandemic that has already claimed over a quarter million American lives, the Court today enjoins one of New York’s public health measures aimed at containing the spread of COVID-19 in areas facing the most severe outbreaks,” an action that “will only exacerbate the Nation’s suffering.”
Commentators on the ruling have noted how Gorsuch’s concurrence drips with sarcasm and directs venom at the dissenters. One example: “According to the Governor, it may be unsafe to go to church, but it is always fine to pick up another bottle of wine, shop for a new bike, or spend the afternoon exploring your distal points and meridians. Who knew public health would so perfectly align with secular convenience?”
In his dissent, Chief Justice Roberts answered with the obvious, that “it is a significant matter to override determinations made by public health officials concerning what is necessary for public safety in the midst of a deadly pandemic.” With the case still working its way through the lower courts, Roberts said there was no reason to rule so long as the strict restrictions were not in effect.
“To be clear,” Roberts wrote in direct response to Gorsuch’s crude attack on the three moderate justices, “I do not regard my dissenting colleagues as ‘cutting the Constitution loose during a pandemic,’ yielding to ‘a particular judicial impulse to stay out of the way in times of crisis,’ or ‘sheltering in place when the Constitution is under attack.’ They simply view the matter differently after careful study and analysis reflecting their best efforts to fulfill their responsibility under the Constitution.”
The ruling makes clear that the Supreme Court is entering a period of reaction reminiscent of the “Four Horsemen” era that ended during the Franklin Roosevelt administration, and even that of Chief Justice Roger Taney, which produced the decision in Dred Scott v. Sanford, the pro-slavery ruling that was among the triggers for the Civil War.
Today, it is all varieties of democratic rights, workers’ rights, abortion rights, civil rights and environmental protections that are being queued up for the chopping block.
The U.S Treasury Department and Internal Revenue Service (IRS) released a new ruling November 18 which will affect millions of small businesses that received a portion of the total $717 billion in relief funds from the US Small Business Administration (SBA) through the federal Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) beginning in April 2020.
A man looks at signs of a closed store due to COVID-19 in Niles, Illinois [Credit: AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh]
Revenue Ruling 2020-27 and Revenue Procedure 2020-51 clarify “the tax treatment of expenses where a Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan has not been forgiven by the end of the year the loan was received,” according to the US Treasury Department website.
The latest ruling outlines a number of restrictions that small businesses owners will face if they attempt to deduct business expenses from their annual tax returns if those expenses were paid for with money from a PPP loan. It states that a small business which “applies for loan forgiveness in 2020 and reasonably expects that its loan will be forgiven... may not deduct otherwise deductible expenses paid for with PPP funds.” The same rule applies to small business owners that have not applied for a PPP loan in 2020 but plan to do so in 2021 and who expect that the loan will be forgiven.
This affects a great majority of small businesses, who due to their ability to maintain full-time employees with the loans are expected to be eligible for some level of forgiveness. The rate of forgiveness is reduced if a small business spends the loan on anything other than rent, mortgage, utilities and payroll costs, and if wages were reduced by over 25 percent for employees earning less than $100,000 per year.
Faced with a mounting economic crisis which was exploding the social tensions in the US caused by mounting inequality, the federal government enacted the PPP as part of the over $3 trillion CARES Act. The PPP officially authorized up to $349 billion in forgivable loans to small businesses to pay employees during the crisis, up to $100,000 on a yearly basis per employee and $10 million per business or non-profit organization.
Small businesses in the US are allowed to deduct business expenses before ordinary income rates are applied each year. For many small business owners, the ability to write off significant amounts of operating costs and expenses spells the difference between staying afloat or going under financially.
After the PPP application process had begun, the IRS released Notice 2020-32 in May, which outlined that a small business that received a loan would not be able to deduct otherwise deductible expenses if paid with funds from a PPP loan that was later forgiven.
These types of expenses include rent, mortgages and utilities, but also a number of others which small, independent retail shops, restaurants, service centers, studios, and others have had to take on to operate as safely as possible under conditions which no substantial form relief from the federal government was provided to working class people and small business owners. These could include personal protective equipment, plexiglass barriers, sanitizers, cleaning services, webconferencing tools, packaging and shipping costs, air filtration devices, outdoor dining permits and furnishings and more.
For many small businesses, the costs of operating during the pandemic have come at great expense. Out of an estimated 31 million small businesses in the US, at least 97,966 have closed permanently as of September, according to data from the online review site Yelp. Taking into account the number of unreported closures and accelerating rate of closures since COVID-19 spiked again in July, the real number of permanent small business closures in the US is likely far higher.
The latest IRS ruling will further devastate many small businesses in the US that have been staring down destitution. Varying lockdown measures across the US and the shift to remote work and schooling upended certain sections of the small business economy. The World Economic Forum noted October 6 that “in the US as a whole, data suggests that nearly a quarter of all small businesses remain closed” either temporarily or permanently during the ongoing health crisis and that “many of these temporary closures are looking to be permanent.”
The World Economic Forum suggested that 37 percent of small businesses in the leisure and hospitality sector have recorded no transactions since mid-March when statewide lockdown orders first went into effect. It also reported that over half of small business closures in the retail and nightlife categories have become permanent.
To add insult to injury, Gallup reported that the average holiday spending budget for individual Americans is expected to drop by over 14 percent this year compared to 2019, to the lowest level since 2016. The drop in spending will disproportionately affect small businesses, which lack the capital and resources to offset the projected sales dip.
Ostensibly enacted to preserve workers’ jobs, in many instances the PPP took on the form of an added corporate bailout. Far from glorifying the small business owner and entrepreneur as it likes to proclaim, the US federal government gave nearly three quarters of all larger loans under the program to large organizations including big corporations, religious institutions, charter schools, and Democratic and Republican think tanks.
There is ample reason to believe these large-scale recipients make up the bulk of those using the loans for their own financial interests, instead of using them to preserve employment. As the WSWS noted in its perspective, “What the rich are thankful for” on November 25, “An MIT team concluded that the PPP [Paycheck Protection Program] handed out $500 billion in loans yet saved only 2.3 million jobs over roughly six months… the annualized cost of the program comes out to roughly $500,000 per job.”
Although large corporations dominate the total share of wealth, small businesses make up a significant section of the US economy. According to the World Economic Forum, small businesses employ nearly half of all workers in the US private sector. The closure of more small businesses and layoffs that will follow when business owners cannot make ends meet because of the IRS rule will fan the flames of the ongoing social crisis well into 2021.
On Monday, Motherboard, a project of Vice News, published the contents of dozens of documents leaked from Amazon’s Global Security Operations Center (GSOC), a secretive division of the company dedicated to spying on the approximately one million Amazon workers worldwide and suppressing resistance to the company’s exploitative practices.
Amazon fulfillment center in San Fernando de Henares, Spain [Credit: Wikipedia/Álvaro Ibáñez]
According to Motherboard, the leaked documents, which date from 2019, show that the GSOC surveillance apparatus tracks in detail “the exact date, time, location, the source [and] the number of participants” in any acts of opposition by Amazon workers, including everything from “strikes” to “the distribution of leaflets.”
GSOC operatives also track political and organizational discussions online, emerging leaders among workers, workplace grievances, union organizing efforts, and the activities of workers on social media and on company listservs.
In particular, according to Motherboard, Amazon intelligence operatives have been tracking with great sensitivity the larger social movements emerging around the world, including everything from the “yellow vest” protests in France to environmental activist Greta Thunberg’s climate strikes.
One such report on the “yellow vest” protests reads, in part: “Protests in Paris are planned, both by striking union members and [Yellow Vests], on 7 December. A march is planned by Yellow Vest activists [sic] from Bercy at 1130 CET to porte de Versailles via Austerlitz, Denfert, Place de la Catalogne and porte de Vanves. It is unclear whether striking unions will participate in the same march organized by [Yellow Vests] but it is expected of them to join starting at Montparnasse.”
Amazon’s GSOC operatives are clearly concerned that social movements emerging around the world could quickly draw in significant numbers of Amazon workers, disrupting the company’s global operations and profits.
Also exposed by the leaked documents are links between Amazon and the infamous Pinkerton detective agency. In November 2019, according to the leaked documents, Amazon “inserted” Pinkerton spies into a warehouse in Wroclaw, Poland, purportedly to investigate whether management was engaged in wrongful hiring practices.
The leaked report states that “PINKERTON operatives were inserted into WRO1 ADECCO between 2019-11-19 and 2019-11-21,” but that the investigation had not reached a conclusive determination. “WRO1” is Amazon’s designation for the Wroclaw warehouse and Adecco is the Amazon contractor operating the facility.
The information that has been revealed so far about the company’s relationship with Pinkerton is limited, but the exposure of Pinkerton spies being “inserted” into a warehouse to provide intelligence to GSOC in itself raises numerous questions.
How many Pinkerton spies have been “inserted” into Amazon warehouses globally? How many other warehouses have had corporate spies in them? Have Pinkerton spies or GSOC informants attended political meetings of Amazon workers outside the workplace?
Besides Pinkerton operatives, how many other spies have been “inserted” into Amazon warehouses? Have these spies violated workers’ legal and democratic rights in the countries where they have been “inserted,” including the right to privacy, the right to freedom of association, the right to organize, and the right to free speech?
Amazon, an international conglomerate valued at $1.5 trillion, is headed by the world’s richest person, Jeff Bezos, whose personal fortune is estimated at around $200 billion. While the company’s earnings and market capitalization have soared during the coronavirus pandemic, management’s failure to ensure safe working conditions has triggered walkouts and protests among Amazon workers around the world. By October, around 20,000 Amazon workers in the US had been confirmed to have been infected with the virus.
The Pinkerton detective agency has a villainous history of surveillance, infiltration, violence, and other anti-democratic schemes directed against the workers’ movement in the US stretching back more than a century and a half. It was the Pinkertons who helped bring phrases like “labor spies” and “gun thugs” into the national vocabulary.
Pinkerton spies played an infamous role in the suppression of “The Long Strike” of 1875, which witnessed some of the bloodiest and bitterest episodes in all of labor history. In the aftermath of the strike, twenty Irish immigrants, dubbed the “Molly Maguires,” were martyred after drumhead trials between 1876 and 1879, including ten hanged in one day on June 21, 1877, known as the “Day of the Rope.”
Particularly during the Coal Wars (1890–1930) and the nationwide struggle for the eight-hour day, squads of thugs from companies like Pinkerton could be found anywhere that management was trying to suppress workers’ resistance.
Pinkerton agents were called in during the Colorado Coalfield War in 1914, during which National Guard soldiers machine-gunned striking workers and their families in the Ludlow Massacre. Around 300 Pinkertons were brought into Chicago to escort scabs through picket lines the day before the Haymarket Square massacre on May 4, 1886. And a small army of Pinkerton thugs were dispatched to suppress the 1892 Homestead steel strike, where they opened fire on a crowd of workers and their families in a massacre that made the name “Pinkerton” notorious internationally.
Private intelligence agencies like Pinkerton, which played a major role in the suppression of workers’ struggles in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, were largely displaced in the US by the development of the Federal Bureau of Investigation as well as by the expansion of city and county police departments by the mid-20th century. However, the Pinkerton agency still survives to this day as a division of the Swedish security company Securitas AB, where the Pinkertons are billed as providers of “intelligence” and “protection” services.
In a more recent example, Pinkerton agents escorted right-wing extremist and “Campus Watch” founder Daniel Pipes to a provocation at York University in Toronto in 2003. And in 2018, striking Frontier Communications workers in West Virginia and Virginia reported to the World Socialist Web Site that agents from Pinkerton and Securitas USA had been hired to monitor and intimidate the strikers.
In a statement responding to the leaked documents, Amazon management acknowledged that it had hired Pinkerton agents but claimed that that they were only providing security for high-value shipments.
“We have business partnerships with specialist companies for many different reasons—in the case of Pinkerton, to secure high-value shipments in transit,” the company’s representative stated. However, this statement is directly contradicted by the text of the leaked documents, which show Amazon “inserting” Pinkerton agents into a warehouse in Poland as part of an investigation that had nothing to do with “securing high-value shipments in transit.”
Amazon’s official statement also included this remarkable sentence: “We do not use our partners to gather intelligence on warehouse workers.” Far from providing any sort of reassurance to Amazon warehouse workers, this carefully-worded statement, even if it is to be believed, implies only that “partners” like the Pinkertons do not directly gather intelligence on warehouse workers. In other words, Amazon’s GSOC takes care of that sort of dirty work in-house.
Indeed, in September, Vice News exposed an intricate spying operation by Amazon against its Flex Drivers, with company operatives infiltrating private Facebook Groups to snitch on efforts to organize opposition. Later in September, a whistleblower revealed that management operatives have been monitoring opposition on listservs at the “amazon.com” domain.
These exposures came alongside revelations of the company’s efforts to hire ex-military, ex-police, and ex-intelligence agents for the positions of “Intelligence Analyst” and “Senior Intelligence Analyst” at GSOC. These veterans from the repressive apparatus of the state and with experience in imperialist wars abroad are being tasked with monitoring “threats” to company profits from industrial actions by workers.
In an article published on September 28 documenting Amazon’s campaign of surveillance and repression against its own workforce, the World Socialist Web Site compared the activities of Amazon’s GSOC to the role of the Pinkertons a century ago.
This comparison turned out to be accurate in more ways than one: not only does Amazon’s 21st-century apparatus of surveillance and repression resemble a high-tech version of the Pinkertons—it turns out that Amazon has hired the actual Pinkertons.
It is important for workers to be on guard against the ruthless efforts by GSOC and its security “partners” to monitor and block any effort to organize resistance. Amazon workers are encouraged to spread awareness of these practices among fellow workers and to contact the International Amazon Workers’ Voice to report any additional evidence of such efforts by management.
However, this opposition to Amazon’s repressive apparatus does not imply any support for the ongoing efforts of various trade unions and their affiliates to win union recognition at Amazon warehouses. These unions have spent decades cooperating with management to betray their existing memberships, and if successful in winning legal representation at Amazon, they will play the same role in muzzling and suppressing the voices of Amazon workers.
Amazon workers should join with fellow workers in other industries who have rejected the efforts of unions to impose their corrupt bureaucracies on workers’ struggles, as in the case of auto workers at the Faurecia Interior Systems facility in Spring Hill, Tennessee, who rejected UAW representation in March, as well as the auto workers at the Volkswagen assembly plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee who have twice rebuffed the UAW.
The World Socialist Web Site and the International Amazon Workers’ Voice are assisting Amazon workers with the establishment of rank-and-file safety committees in their workplaces. These committees will function to expose the management cover-up of the spread of the coronavirus, to defend workers against surveillance and retaliation by company spies, as well as to resist the efforts of the Democratic Party and their trade union affiliates to hijack and control workers’ opposition.
These committees will fight to unite all workers in the logistics industry, not just those directly employed by Amazon, in a common struggle to advance demands based on the needs of the working class, not demands of the world’s richest person for more profits.
To fight against a colossal global conglomerate like Amazon, which has its tentacles and security “partners” encircling the world, Amazon workers must reject the nationalism promoted by the unions and embrace a common struggle with their brothers and sisters in every country. Just as Amazon’s “security operations” are global, workers’ opposition must also be organized globally.
The brutal assassination Friday of top Iranian nuclear physicist Moshen Fakhrizadeh marks a major escalation of the US-Israeli campaign to provoke a war with Iran in the less than two months before the scheduled end of Donald Trump’s presidency.
The Iranian scientist was ambushed by a team of assassins Friday morning in Absard, an eastern suburb of Tehran. His vehicle was attacked with automatic weapons fire, and then a pickup truck loaded with lumber covering explosives blew up next to the scientist’s car.
Photographs of the scene posted online showed the damaged vehicle surrounded by shattered glass, bits of wood, car parts and a puddle of blood.
Scene of the assassination of Iranian scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh [Credit: Fars News Agency via AP]
Three to four of the terrorists were reported killed in the incident. Fakhrizadeh and his wounded bodyguards were rushed to a nearby hospital, but doctors were unable to revive him.
Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif confirmed the killing, writing on Twitter: “Terrorists murdered an eminent Iranian scientist today. This cowardice—with serious indications of Israeli role—shows desperate warmongering of perpetrators. Iran calls on the international community—and especially EU to end their shameful double standards & condemn this act of state terror.”
While officials in Israel and the US refused to comment on the assassination, the response in both countries left little to the imagination as to the authorship of this extraordinary act of international lawlessness. Trump triumphantly retweeted a comment by an Israeli journalist that the murder represented “a major psychological and professional blow for Iran.”
Israel’s Jerusalem Post, reflecting the views of the right-wing government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, commented that the assassination was “a major signal that Israel and the United States will not give up on preventing the country from obtaining such weaponry. The message is clear: Remember, no nuclear scientist is safe.”
The New York Times, meanwhile, reported that “One American official—along with two other intelligence officials—said that Israel was behind the attack on the scientist.” It added that “It was unclear how much the United States may have known about the operation in advance, but the two nations are the closest of allies and have long shared intelligence regarding Iran.”
Fakhrizadeh, 63, was a professor of physics at the Imam Hussein University in Tehran and a former head of Iran’s Physics Research Center (PHRC). An expert on nuclear technology, as well as missile production, he led a previous Iranian nuclear program known as Amad (Hope), which was terminated in 2003. Israel and the US alleged that the program was directed at determining the feasibility of building an Iranian nuclear weapon. Tehran has insisted that the program, like all of its nuclear operations, was for civilian purposes only.
Iran’s Defense Minister Brig. Gen. Amir Hatami reported that Fakhrizadeh had, in addition to his work on nuclear and military technology, been the leader of the team that developed one of the first Iranian kits for diagnosis of coronavirus.
In 2018, in a presentation of alleged nuclear documents stolen from a Tehran warehouse, Netanyahu showed a slide bearing a photograph of Fakhrizadeh, while making the unsubstantiated allegation that the scientist was involved in a covert operation aimed at pursuing an Iranian nuclear weapon. In what amounted to a clear threat of assassination, Netanyahu declared that Fakhrizadeh’s was “a name to remember.”
Screenshot of video in which Netanyahu in 2018 signaled that Fakhrizadeh was a target
Tehran had rebuffed requests by the (International Atomic Energy Agency) IAEA to interview Fakhrizadeh for fear that information would be passed on to Tel Aviv to assist in organizing his murder.
In the period preceding the signing of the nuclear accord between the major powers and Tehran, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), Tel Aviv organized a string of assassinations of prominent Iranian scientists, killing five and wounding several others.
The killings were combined with acts of sabotage, including the use by both the US and Israel in 2010 of the “Stuxnet” computer worm to destroy about 1,000 of Iran’s 5,000 centrifuges operating at the country’s main nuclear center at Natanz.
In July of this year, a major fire at Natanz caused extensive damage to the facility, in particular its workshops and laboratories dedicated to assembling and testing newly developed centrifuges for the enrichment of uranium. Israeli intelligence officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed that the fire had been caused by a bomb smuggled into the facility.
These attacks have been joined with the “maximum pressure” campaign launched by the Trump White House after it unilaterally abrogated the JCPOA in 2018. This regime of ever-tightening economic sanctions, tantamount to a state of war, has ravaged Iran’s economy, while condemning millions of Iranians to hunger and disease, choking off vital medicines and medical supplies in the midst of the raging COVID-19 pandemic.
The assassination of Fakhrizadeh is the highest-profile attack on Iran since the January 3 US drone missile murder of Iranian general Qassem Suleimani, one of the country’s top officials, after he arrived at Baghdad’s international airport for an official state visit.
It comes less than a week after Prime Minister Netanyahu and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo made a semi-secret trip to the Saudi city of Neom for a meeting with Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, whose principal topic was Iran. While bin Salman was reportedly less than enthusiastic about a military strike against Iran—no doubt fearing Saudi oil installations would be a likely target for retaliation—both the Netanyahu and Trump governments have been pushing relentlessly toward confrontation.
There is no doubt that the latest assassination was discussed with and approved by Pompeo and the Trump administration. It is the latest and most serious in a series of provocations being carried out by both the US and Israeli governments with the objective of igniting a war.
In addition to the latest assassination, Tel Aviv has carried out increasingly aggressive and openly declared airstrikes against Iranian and Iranian-connected targets in Syria, including three in the last week alone. The latest, on Friday, reportedly killed at least 19 people in Syria’s embattled eastern region of Deir Ezzor.
For its part, the Trump administration has vowed to introduce new sanctions aimed against Iran on at least a weekly basis over the next two months to tighten the economic stranglehold over the country.
At the same time, the Pentagon has steadily built up offensive forces in the Persian Gulf, dispatching B-52s and a squadron of F-16s to the region, while deploying the USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group in the Gulf.
According to both the New York Times and Reuters, Trump met with his national security cabinet on November 12 to discuss a proposal to conduct airstrikes against Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility, a war crime that could claim the lives of thousands. While Trump’s top aides reportedly talked him out of launching such an attack, there are still mounting fears that military action is being prepared, with Pompeo and his aides insisting during the secretary of state’s Mideast tour that the option remains “on the table.”
Israeli journalist Barak Ravid, in an article on Axios, cited unnamed Israeli officials as saying, “The Israel Defense Forces have in recent weeks been instructed to prepare for the possibility that the U.S. will conduct a military strike against Iran before President Trump leaves office.” Such preparations no doubt include an escalation of Israel’s own plans to attack Iran.
Why would the Trump administration launch a military attack on Iran, unleashing a potentially world catastrophic war in the Persian Gulf, in what are ostensibly its last few weeks in office?
Bourgeois foreign policy analysts have suggested that the aim is to sabotage any attempt by an incoming Biden administration to rejoin the JCPOA and lift sanctions against Iran.
While Biden’s statements along these lines are highly conditional, indicating that he would demand significant new concessions from and continue military aggression against Iran, there are elements within the US ruling establishment that see an immediate war as the only means of achieving US hegemony over the Middle East and denying its strategic energy resources to American capitalism’s chief rival, China.
Under conditions in which Trump still refuses to concede the election, a war and potential mass casualties for US troops deployed in the Middle East could be seized upon -- much as the 9/11 attacks were -- as the pretext for carrying out far-reaching extra-constitutional measures, including the declaration of a state of emergency, imposing martial law and nullifying the transfer of power.
The danger of war and dictatorship, which will continue whatever the final outcome of the 2020 election, can be answered only by means of the independent political mobilization of the working class in a struggle to break the control of society by the financial-corporate oligarchy and restructure economic life on a socialist basis.
