Chants of “Housing is a human right!” filled Manhattan’s Third Avenue as more than a hundred angry tenants came to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s local office on Aug. 4. 

They demanded an end to evictions and foreclosures. They want Cuomo, whom the state attorney general’s report has shown to be a sexual predator, to resign. 

Cuomo’s Emergency Rental Assistance Program has been a fiasco. By the end of July only $1.2 million in ERAP money had been distributed out of the $2.7 billion in state and federal funds set aside for the program. 

That’s less than one dollar spent out of every two thousand dollars that was supposed to be used to pay back rent. Hundreds of thousands of tenants and homeowners are facing being thrown in the street once federal and state eviction bans end.

State Sen. Jabari Brisport chaired the rally. Brisport has spoken at rallies for reparations at the African Burial Ground in lower Manhattan.

Brisport saluted the courage of Rep. Cori Bush, who staged a sit-in on the steps of the U.S. Capitol that forced President Biden to extend the ban on evictions.

Many community organizations came, including Churches United For Fair Housing (CHFFH); the Cooper Square Committee; Crown Heights Tenant Union; the Flatbush Tenant Coalition; Good Old Lower East Side; Make the Road while Walking; New York Communities for Change and Southside United HDFC-Los Sures, of Williamsburg. Everybody’s sick of Cuomo!

The landlords and the entire ruling class want to strip all protections from tenants and homeowners. They don’t care if millions are made homeless.

Today’s rally shows that a fightback must and will be made. Housing is a human right.

 

Eleven million families face being thrown out of their homes. That’s because the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) ban on evictions and foreclosures expired July 31. 

So at least 30 million people have no legal protection from a landlord or bank kicking them out of their apartments and houses. At the same time, there’s another upsurge in the coronavirus pandemic.

The grave health risks caused by being homeless during the COVID-19 crisis are why the CDC imposed the moratorium. Evictions led to hundreds of thousands of more cases of the coronavirus.

Families living in shelters or in their cars are much more likely to get infected. So are elderly and disabled people.

Overcrowded housing is a big reason why the death rates from COVID-19 are two and three times as high among Black, Indigenous and Latinx people as among whites.

These facts of life and death don’t mean much to sexual predator Brett Kavanaugh. The U.S. Supreme Court judge told the Biden administration that he wasn’t going to allow more than a one-month extension on the CDC moratorium.

To judges like Kavanaugh, property rights always come before human rights. How are families supposed to pay their rent or mortgage when more than 30 million lost their jobs since the pandemic began? 

California, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, New York and Washington, D.C., have imposed their own bans on evictions and foreclosures. People living in these areas won’t be immediately affected by the CDC moratorium coming to an end.

Worst housing crisis since Great Depression

But in the rest of the United States, landlords and banksters will be running to court demanding an avalanche of evictions and foreclosures. This is the worst housing crisis since 90 years ago during the Great Depression. 

What is to be done?

Both the Biden administration and the Democratic Party leaders in Congress knew this catastrophe was coming. They did practically nothing to stop the runaway train.

Rep. Cori Bush from St. Louis is outraged at this inaction. She slept overnight outside the U.S. Capitol to demand Congress reconvene and stop evictions.

Representative Bush knows what it is to be homeless. After being evicted, she had to live in her car with her children.

Congress did authorize $47 billion to help pay back rent. But only $3 billion has been spent.

Many landlords are refusing to accept the money. They just want to evict people. That’s criminal.

That’s what Roxanne Schaefer is facing in West Warwick, R.I. The disabled woman lives in an apartment that is not properly serviced or maintained, with a rent of $995 per month. Her slumlord refuses to take federal rental assistance. 

Behind even the biggest landlords are the banks that own the mortgages. They would rather have millions on the street in cardboard boxes than lower rents.

It was because 26 million people took to the streets demanding justice for George Floyd that Congress did anything to stop evictions and foreclosures. They need to fear us again.

We need to join and support organizations like the Crown Heights Tenant Union in Brooklyn. The housing courts need to be surrounded by people.

Ninety years ago the Unemployed Councils stopped evictions in Chicago. The power of the people can stop the tidal wave of evictions and foreclosures.

For the people of Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld was their Hitler. The former Pentagon boss killed over a million people in Iraq. The country is still occupied by Big Oil.

Nobody in Iraq is mourning Rumsfeld, who died June 29. Neither should we.

The world was horrified in 2004 by the picture of Abdou Hussain Saad Faleh being tortured by U.S. interrogators in the Abu Ghraib, Iraq, prison. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld oversaw the torture of thousands. 

He and former Vice President Dick Cheney called waterboarding and other painful cruelties “enhanced interrogation.” Torture centers were set up in Iraq, Afghanistan and the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo, on land stolen from Cuba.

On Dec. 2, 2002, Rumsfeld approved a memo detailing torture methods with one reservation referring to prisoners being forced to stand. He wrote, “I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?”

Capitalism produces pigs like Donald Rumsfeld and Derek Chauvin, who tortured George Floyd to death. A century before Iraq was invaded in 2003, U.S. occupation forces used waterboarding to torture Filipinos. 

Enslaved Africans were regularly tortured on plantations. Every lynching was torture.

So was the hanging of 38 members of Dakota Sioux nation in Mankato, Minn., on Dec. 26, 1862. Texas Rangers regularly brutalized Mexican and Black people.

Lies are a weapon

The road to invading Iraq was paved with lies. Within five hours after the Pentagon was attacked on Sept. 11, 2001, Rumsfeld ordered his flunkies to start making plans to invade Iraq. 

There was never a link between Iraq and the 9/11/01 attacks. That didn’t prevent President George W. Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld from claiming there was. 

Even more lies were told about Iraq having “weapons of mass destruction.” The Bush administration was aided by the capitalist media, including the New York Times, which hyped the alleged threat.

Half of the Democrats in the U.S. Senate — including Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry — voted to authorize an invasion of Iraq. The blood of a million people is on their hands too.

There was almost no opposition in Congress to the U.S. invading Afghanistan. The Watson Institute at Brown University estimates that  241,000 civilians were killed in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Since 2016, 40 percent of those killed by U.S. airstrikes were children. 

These wars were a bonanza for Big Oil. ExxonMobil was making profits of $100 million per day. The rise in oil prices is what made fracking possible.

Iraq became a bloody playground for the Project for the New American Century, whose members included Rumsfeld and Cheney. They were convinced they could return to the days of open colonial rule since the Soviet Union had been overthrown.

U.S. occupation forces allowed the National Museum in Baghdad to be looted. Rumsfeld’s response to 15,000 priceless antiquities being stolen was “stuff happens.” 

White mercenaries who had fought for apartheid South Africa were recruited to kill Iraqis.

GIs were also roadkill. Over 6,700 came home from Afghanistan and Iraq in a box. Thousands of GIs were forced to stay in the military for longer than they signed up for under the Pentagon’s “stop loss” program.

Depleted uranium weapons sickened many. Around 1.7 million veterans of the post-9/11 wars are disabled. They aren’t mourning Rumsfeld either.

War on poor people

For both Rumsfeld and Cheney, their careers began and continued to be connected with the war against Black America and attacking all poor people. While trillions were spent on destroying Iraq and Afghanistan, they let Black and poor people drown and starve in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina.

As a Republican member of Congress from Illinois in the 1960s, Rumsfeld voted against establishing the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), part of the “War on Poverty.” 

President Richard Nixon then hired Rumsfeld to wreck it. A particular target was the Legal Assistance Corporation, which provided lawyers for poor people.

Rumsfeld hired Dick Cheney to be his sidekick at OEO. After Nixon was thrown out, Rumsfeld became President Gerald Ford’s chief of staff. Cheney was his assistant.

The tag team covered up the CIA murder of germ warfare expert Frank Olson. He had allegedly jumped to his death from Manhattan’s Statler Hotel (now the Hotel Pennsylvania), across from Penn Station, on Nov. 28, 1953. Future Watergate burglar James McCord made sure there weren’t any clues left in Olson’s hotel room.

More than 20 years later, a congressional committee revealed that Olson had been the subject of a previous LSD experiment. Cheney suggested that President Ford express regret to stop Olson’s family from filing a lawsuit. 

Congress appropriated $750,000 in hush money to the family while Ford met with them in the White House.

Olson was killed a few months after the armistice that ended the Korean War. The World Peace Council charged that the U.S. used germ warfare against Korean and Chinese soldiers.

Frank Olsen had been a scientist at the U.S. Army’s Fort Detrick, Md., germ warfare labs and worked on the CIA’s operation artichoke, which experimented on human beings. Was he about to blow the whistle on U.S. war crimes?

Frank Olson didn’t commit suicide. In 1994 forensic pathologist James Starrs examined Olson’s body and concluded that he “was intentionally, deliberately, with malice aforethought, thrown out of that window.” 

Like the lies they told about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction, the corporate media is trying to blame the COVID-19 pandemic on the People’s Republic of China. It’s the CIA and Fort Detrick that should be investigated instead.

Drug money

President Ford nominated Rumsfeld to be secretary of defense, the first of two times that he ran the Pentagon. But within 14 months he was out the door following Ford’s defeat in the 1976 presidential election.

Now was the time to make real money. Going back to Illinois, Rumsfeld was hired to be drug maker G.D. Searle’s boss. Between 1979 and 1984, Rumsfeld collected nearly $4 million in salary and bonuses.

Rumsfeld didn’t know much about chemistry, but he knew what palms to grease in Washington. He used all of his insider knowledge to get Searle’s artificial sweetener aspartame approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

For years the FDA refused approving aspartame because it kept flunking safety tests. But one day after Ronald Reagan was inaugurated president — with Rumsfeld on Reagan’s transition team — Searle filed again for approval. 

Six months later Reagan’s new FDA Commissioner Arthur Hayes Jr. gave the green light to aspartame. In 1985 Monsanto gobbled up Searle for $2.7 billion — quite a payday for the Searle family and Rumsfeld. 

During the 1980s Rumsfeld traveled to Baghdad twice on behalf of President Reagan to push for continuing the terrible Iran-Iraq War. U.S. big business wanted both these neighboring countries destroyed.

Rumsfeld later became CEO of Gilead, another big drug maker. It later wanted to sell its medication to cure hepatitis C for $1,000 per pill. The medical-industrial-complex is much like the military-industrial-complex. 

Rumsfeld made money off both. He ended up with a stash of $200 million. War crimes do pay. 

Hurry up Henry Kissinger. It’s time to join Donald Rumsfeld in hell.

At a June 16 news conference after meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Joe Biden was asked about the phony accusations of Russian interference in U.S. elections. Incredibly, he responded by saying: “How would it be if the United States were viewed by the rest of the world as interfering with the elections directly of other countries, and everybody knew it?”

The fact is that hundreds of thousands of people around the world have been victims of violence, been imprisoned and/or lost family members because of U.S. interventions in their elections. 

The United States is the most prodigious rigger of elections in the world by far. Most often, the “victors” in the rigged elections were dictatorial right-wing figures that used bloody repression to help keep massive profits flowing into the vaults of U.S. banks and corporations.

‘Yanks to the rescue’

One example particularly relevant now is a covert campaign to fix the 1996 Russian presidential election. A cartoon caricature of Boris Yeltsin holding a U.S. flag above the words “Yanks to the rescue” was featured on the cover of Time magazine in 1996. 

Yeltsin “won” against First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation Gennady Zyuganov by 13 points — in spite of the fact that only months earlier, Yeltsin had been polling at 6% and communists had just won a majority in the Duma (parliament). 

Zyuganov had been calling for a return to socialism. The historic freefall in living standards after the collapse of the Soviet Union fueled his popularity. With covert help and millions of U.S. dollars, Yeltin’s campaign spread fear that a Zyuganov victory would result in civil war.

CIA campaigns to fix elections or to overthrow newly-elected leftists and progressives are so numerous that Dov Levin, a political scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, created a database that lists U.S. interventions in elections from 1946 to 2000. 

Levin doesn’t count the bloody coups that have taken place soon after leftist victories. Still, Levin’s database lists 81 covert campaigns, most attributed to the CIA, to assure a victory for a pro-U.S. candidate. The tactics included threatening rival candidates, threats to withdraw aid and pumping money into ads to promote lies.

CIA braggards

Many U.S. politicians, former CIA officers and operatives are quite candid about U.S. interference when asked, differing only in how much they’re willing to reveal. 

Regarding the 2000 election in Yugoslavia, President Bill Clinton made no bones about the fact that the CIA spent $40 million to try to defeat President Slobodan Milosovic. “I didn’t have a problem with it,” said Clinton.

Some operatives deny influencing elections altogether. Others, like former CIA Director Leon Panetta, admit that the agency’s method was often to “acquire media within a country or a region that could very well be used for being able to deliver a specific message” or work to “influence those that may own elements of the media.”

The consequences of U.S. election meddling are tragic. When the schemes are successful, they block plans for the targeted country to develop independently of the tiny clique of multibillionaires in the U.S. that exploit so much of the world. They impose deep poverty and repression.

Although the bloody overthrows and assassinations of newly-elected progressive leaders aren’t tabulated in Levin’s database, he acknowledges that his count would be much higher if they were.

Over the years, thousands have been massacred while the U.S. was eliminating anti-imperialist figures and progressives who already held office.

Assassination of Lumumba

Called the most important assassination of the 20th century by progressive Belgian author Ludo De Witte, the 1961 U.S./Belgian coup and assassination of Democratic Republic of the Congo Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba was a profound setback to Africa and to all people fighting against colonialism. 

The U.S. had been the first to recognize the claims of Belgium’s King Leopold, who murdered millions of Congolese people in the 19th century. By the mid-20th century the colonialists were robbing the country’s uranium for nuclear weapons, as well as other valuable natural resources. 

Lumumba was determined to win control over his country’s resources and improve living conditions for his people. After Lumumba declared Congo to be independent of Belgian colonization, the CIA and Belgian intelligence whipped up secessionist movements in the mineral-rich areas of the country, and within seven months captured and executed the young anti-imperialist leader.

1953 coup in Iran

In 1953, the CIA — along with British intelligence — orchestrated a coup to overthrow Iranian Prime Minister Mohamad Mosaddegh and reinstall Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. 

The popular Mosaddegh had spent his short time in office struggling to limit the amount of control the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now BP) had over the country’s oil, to alleviate widespread poverty in Iran. When the British refused even an audit, Iran’s parliament voted to nationalize the oil and expel foreign executives. 

The U.S. and Britain had operatives lined up from among the various police forces and convoyed paid thugs into Teheran to launch the coup. Hundreds were killed in the coup itself, and SAVAK, the Shah’s secret police, murdered tens of thousands over the next 25 years.

200,000 killed, ‘disappeared’ in Guatemala

In 1954, the CIA organized a coup to overthrow leftist Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz, to put an end to a revolutionary period that began in 1944 with a people’s uprising that toppled a military dictatorship and brought in President Juan Jose Arevalo. 

Many foreign estates were confiscated and redistributed to peasants; landowners were obliged to provide adequate housing for workers; new schools, hospitals and houses were built; and a new minimum wage was introduced.

Arevalo was succeeded by Árbenz, who continued the process with more land reforms and the legalization of the communist Guatemalan Party of Labor. The United Fruit Company pressed the Eisenhower administration for action to safeguard its profits.

Using psychological warfare and an armed force of several hundred, the CIA overthrew President Árbenz. The Guatemalan people’s guerrilla armies courageously fought a series of brutal U.S.-backed dictatorships that targeted Indigenous populations most heavily. The toll of people killed and “disappeared” is believed to be at least 200,000 over 40 years.

There are many, many more examples that can be given, including the 2019 coup against Bolivian President Evo Morales.

Joe Biden knows this history. His pretense of U.S. innocence convinced no one and can never change the fact that each counter-revolutionary operation, each action to strengthen U.S. dominance, has galvanized anti-imperialist forces around the world.

In his funeral eulogy for Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, W.E.B. Du Bois declared, “They died because they would not lie.” The Rosenbergs were burned to death in the electric chair by the U.S. government on Juneteenth 1953.

Du Bois, the legendary Black scholar, also arranged the adoption of the Rosenbergs’ two young children, Michael and Robert. The Jewish orphans were adopted by Anne Meeropol and Abel Meeropol. Abel wrote “Strange Fruit,” a song about lynching that Billie Holiday made famous. 

The Rosenbergs were blamed for the Soviet Union being able to develop an atomic bomb. Their frame-up and execution for espionage during the Korean War was the peak of the anti-communist witch hunt in the United States. 

The ruling class was in a frenzy because of the Chinese Revolution. The Soviet Union’s ability to defend itself against the Pentagon’s nukes made the banksters even more mad.

The FBI and corporate media insisted the Soviets “stole the secret” of the atom bomb. The real secret was revealed when the U.S. dropped an atom bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, on Aug. 6, 1945. By incinerating 100,000 people, including 30,000 Korean slave laborers, the Pentagon showed it was possible to develop nuclear weapons.

Showing it was what made it knowable. Some of the scientists involved in the Manhattan Project — the code name for the U.S. atom bomb project — gave the Soviets five years to match the U.S. effort. 

The rub wouldn’t be in the theoretical work. U.S. scientists knew the Soviet Union had capable physicists.

Among them was Lev Landau, who would win the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1962. Even before the Bolshevik Revolution, the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev had devised the periodic table of the elements.

U.S. scientists thought the Soviets would have difficulty in making extremely pure chemicals and seals to lock in corrosive gases. Because of socialist economic planning, the Soviet Union was able to concentrate its efforts and explode a nuclear device on Aug. 29, 1949. It took four years, not five, to produce.

Decades of lies

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover immediately set out to nab the “communist spies” that smuggled secrets. How else could those “stupid people” in the Soviet Union have produced nuclear weapons? 

U.S. schoolchildren were taught their country was the land of great inventors like Thomas Edison. Newspapers told their readers that only the U.S. could have built the bomb.

Thirty years later, President Ronald Reagan said there wasn’t a Russian word for freedom. (There is. It’s svoboda.) 

So U.S. capitalists were astonished when the Soviet Union sent the first artificial satellite into space on Nov. 7, 1957 — the 40th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution.

Claims that the Sputnik satellite was the result of spying fell flat. The Pentagon wasn’t able to launch its own satellite until months later, on Jan. 31, 1958.

It would have been much more difficult to execute the Rosenbergs after Sputnik. It shattered the bigoted conception that 150 different nationalities in the Soviet Union couldn’t do science.

Today another big lie is being told. The People’s Republic of China is being blamed for the COVID-19 pandemic.

With no evidence, the media and even comedians like Jon Stewart are claiming the coronavirus “leaked” from a Wuhan laboratory. This is a blood libel similar to blaming Jewish people for plagues in medieval Europe or the racist myth that immigrants bring diseases to the U.S.

Building a frame-up

The FBI framed the Rosenbergs and a co-defendant, Morton Sobell, by connecting dots and forging evidence. At the end of World War II, the Communist Party in the United States had around 75,000 members, according to the University of Washington’s “Mapping Social Movements” project, including thousands of Black members. They fought racism and built unions.  

Over 10,000 party members were members of the U.S. armed forces. Some party members had government jobs, including the electrical engineer Julius Rosenberg, who was employed at Fort Monmouth army base in New Jersey.

The Manhattan Project had 130,000 employees. U.S. army counterintelligence agents constantly spied on them. 

Even J. Robert Oppenheimer, considered to be the father of the atomic bomb, was a suspect. The army hesitated appointing Oppenheimer to lead the Manhattan Project’s Los Alamos laboratory because of his left-wing associations before the war.

Yet with thousands of U.S. Army and FBI agents prowling around, nobody claimed to have found any spy rings until after the Soviets exploded their bomb.

Julius Rosenberg was fired from his civilian job with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in January 1945 as a suspected communist. (He actually resigned his membership in 1942.) But Julius wasn’t arrested until July 1950.

At the time there were still around 40,000 Communist Party members. Hundreds of thousands of people had worked with the CP or the Young Communist League.

That was a big talent pool for Hoover and his FBI agents to construct a frame-up by matching people with left-wing backgrounds. They found out that Julius Rosenberg’s brother-in-law David Greenglass, an ex-YCL member, had worked as a machinist at Los Alamos. 

Presto! The “Rosenberg spy ring” was invented.

Under threat of the death penalty, David Greenglass told prosecutors whatever they wanted. His lying testimony sent his sister Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair. It took five jolts of electricity to kill her.

Show trial

The Rosenbergs and Morton Sobell were convicted in a show trial. Although at the time a quarter of New York City’s population was Jewish, not a single Jewish juror was chosen.

One of the federal prosecutors was Roy Cohn, who had illegal “ex parte” conversations with presiding Judge Irving Kaufman in which Cohn urged the death penalty. After serving as Senator Joe McCarthy’s sidekick, Cohn became a lawyer and mentor for Donald Trump.

The evidence was flimsy. David Greenglass produced three crude sketches. One looked like a pie chart. A baby carriage couldn’t have been made from them, much less an atomic bomb.

Greenglass said his spy contact was Harry Gold, a chemist and pathological liar who admitted that he “lied for a period of 16 years.” Gold also claimed to be a courier for Klaus Fuchs, a scientist at Los Alamos.

Fuchs confessed he was a spy to a Scotland Yard detective and was jailed in Britain. Fuchs identified Gold as his contact from a picture.  

Fuchs’ statement and identification of Gold is questionable. Fuchs never confronted Gold in a U.S. court and thus couldn’t be cross-examined. It’s striking that the convictions of Greenglass, Gold and Fuchs would have been impossible without their confessions.

The FBI even suspected future Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman, who had been Fuchs’ roommate at Los Alamos. FBI agents changed their mind only because Feynman was completely non-political.

Morton Sobell was indicted because he was a schoolmate of Julius Rosenberg at New York’s City College and a former YCL member. The only witness against Sobell was Max Elitcher, who claimed vaguely to have seen Sobell visit Julius Rosenberg while carrying a container that could have had film in it. 

He then said he had no idea what was in the container, yet Sobell was sentenced to 30 years in prison.  He served 17, including five years at Alcatraz.

The prosecution stressed that Sobell and his family went to Mexico after David Greenglass was arrested. If Sobell was such a master spy, wouldn’t the Soviets have tried to help him escape?

Instead Mexican secret police kidnapped Sobell and turned him over to FBI agents at the border.

A key piece of evidence was forged. A hotel card from the Albuquerque Hilton was introduced to prove Harry Gold was in town to meet David Greenglass on June 3, 1945.

Miriam and Walter Schneir were authors of “Invitation to an Inquest,” a detailed exposé of the Rosnberg-Sobell case. They looked at copies of the card. It had different date stamps on the front and back despite Gold having checked in and out on the same day. 

When the Schneirs sought to examine the original card, the FBI told them that the evidence was destroyed, even though J. Edgar Hoover called the Rosenberg case “the crime of the century.”

Smearing the dead

Millions of people around the world rallied around the Rosenbergs. They saw parallels between their frame-up and the anti-Jewish persecution of French army officer Alfred Dreyfus decades before.

The American Jewish Committee, which represents the small section of the Jewish Community that’s capitalist, didn’t think so. Writing in the AJC’s Commentary magazine, historian Lucy Dawidowicz endorsed the Rosenbergs’ execution. 

Today when Jewish youth join marches supporting Palestinian liberation, Commentary magazine supports bombing and starving Gaza.

The publication of “Invitation to an Inquest” in 1965 sparked new interest in the Rosenberg and Sobell cases. The U.S. deep state counterattacked, particularly after the overthrow of the Soviet Union.

The FBI and CIA say they have proof that the Rosenbergs and Sobell were guilty. They point to the “Venona Project,” which consists of allegedly deciphered messages between Soviet agents in the U.S. and their Moscow headquarters. The documents claim to show that the Rosenbergs, Sobell and dozens of other people in the U.S. were Soviet agents.

Why should anybody believe U.S. spy agencies? These are the folks that told the world that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

Even if the Venona papers are genuine, the rub is matching code names with individuals.  One of the alleged code names for Julius Rosenberg was “liberal.” Does that sound like a name for an accused communist super-spy? 

The code name linked to Morton Sobell described him as having a wooden leg, which he didn’t have. There was no code name for Ethel Rosenberg.

The Venona Project smeared a series of liberals who couldn’t defend themselves since they were dead. That was the case of the economist Harry Dexter White, who worked in the U.S. Treasury Department.

The deep state and the ultra-right use the Venona papers to support Joe McCarthy’s phony charge that President Franklin Roosevelt’s administration was filled with communists.

The documents have also been used to rehabilitate Elizabeth Bentley’s tarnished reputation. The professional liar gave dishonest testimony against the Rosenbergs, defendants in other trials and before a series of congressional witch-hunting committees.

Typical of the so-called “red spy queen” was her claim to have given the secret date of the Normandy landings to the Soviets. Actually, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower informed the Soviets of when D-Day would occur. He did so because he wanted them to launch an offensive and prevent German troops from being withdrawn from the Eastern Front.

Never forget the Rosenbergs

“I consider your crime worse than murder,” declared Judge Kaufman when he sentenced the Rosenbergs to the electric chair  

Worse than the killers of the 14-year-old Emmett Till? The two racists who tortured the Black youth to death got off scot-free. 

Gen. Douglas MacArthur wanted to drop dozens of atom bombs on Korea and China. Judge Kaufman blamed the Rosenbergs for the U.S. not being able to do so.

Former Secretary of State Dean Rusk wrote in his memoirs that the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs wanted President John F. Kennedy to approve a plan to launch nuclear first strikes against the socialist countries.

The whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg revealed that the Pentagon plan would have killed 600 million people. 

What if the Rosenbergs and Morton Sobell had helped the Soviets build an atom bomb? It was only because the Soviet Union — and later the People’s Republic of China and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea — were able to develop a deterrent to the Pentagon’s arsenal of atomic and hydrogen bombs that a nuclear holocaust was averted. 

But the Rosenbergs and Sobell didn’t have the ability to penetrate the Manhattan Project. The FBI wanted them to finger dozens of liberals to back up Joe McCarthy’s fantastic claim of “20 years of treason” under the Roosevelt and Truman administrations. 

The courage of Ethel Rosenberg, Julius Rosenberg and Morton Sobell prevented this nightmare.

Ethel Rosenberg was electrocuted for supposedly typing reports. She was arrested almost a month after Julius Rosenberg was jailed to put pressure on him to lie.

David Greenglass later admitted he lied about Ethel Rosenberg’s typing. Justice demands that Ethel Rosenberg be given a presidential pardon.

When Morton Sobell was 91 years old, he was badgered by New York Times reporter Sam Harris into saying he and Julius Rosenberg offered information to the Soviets. It was from their jobs as electrical engineers, not from the Manhattan Project.

Twenty-seven million Soviet people died defeating Hitler. Yet during World War II both Britain and the United States refused to share new anti-aircraft weapons and radar with the Soviets.

If Morton Sobell and Julius Rosenberg did indeed help the Soviets, it wasn’t espionage to help a gallant ally. It was whistleblowing, like Daniel Ellsberg did when he released the Pentagon Papers or the truth-telling by Chelsea Manning about U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The best way to honor the Rosenbergs is to fight even harder to free Mumia Abu-Jamal, Leonard Peltier, Ruchell Cinque Magee, Sundiata Acoli, Mutulu Shakur and dozens of other political prisoners.

One way to do so is to donate to the Rosenberg Fund for Children, which helps the children of political prisoners, at RFC.org.

Long live the memory of Ethel Rosenberg, Julius Rosenberg and Morton Sobell! 

A message to those who leaked the tax records of the extremely wealthy who do not pay taxes:

Whoever leaked this report deserves a reward for revealing the information. Access to these tax reports is the right of all working people, who pay a disproportionate share of their income in taxes.

ProPublica released its report, “The Secret IRS Files: Trove of Never-Before-Seen Records Reveal How the Wealthiest Avoid Income Tax,” on June 8. It revealed that:

• In 2007, Jeff Bezos, then a multi-billionaire and now the world’s richest man, did not pay a penny in federal income taxes. He achieved the feat again in 2011. 
• In 2018, Tesla founder Elon Musk, the second-richest person in the world, also paid no federal income taxes.
• Michael Bloomberg managed to do the same in recent years. 
• Billionaire investor Carl Icahn did it twice. 
• George Soros paid no federal income tax three years in a row.

The data provides an unprecedented look inside the financial lives of U.S. capitalist titans, including Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch and Mark Zuckerberg.

A tax rate of only 3.4%

According to Forbes, the 25 wealthiest saw their worth rise a collective $401 billion from 2014 to 2018. They paid a total of $13.6 billion in federal income taxes in those five years, IRS data shows. That’s a staggering sum, but it amounts to a true tax rate of only 3.4%.

By the end of 2018, the 25 were worth $1.1 trillion.

For comparison, it would take 14.3 million ordinary workers in the U.S. put together to equal that same amount of wealth.

The personal federal tax bill for the top 25 in 2018: $1.9 billion.

The bill for real wage earners: $1.24 trillion (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, April 17, 2020).

Wealthy did not earn their riches

The wealthy did not gain their immeasurable riches by some magic elixir they may claim to have cooked up by their “rare genius.” Instead, the source of their wealth is unpaid labor, extracted in profits from the sweat and blood of the workers who have to pay taxes. 

Workers earn the miserly wages allotted to them so that they can continue to create more wealth. Then this income is taxed. It can be bitterly joked that the poorer you are, the more it costs to live.

The small, ultra-wealthy sector of society does not pay taxes because they do not report an income. They do not work for wages. Also, they employ tax attorneys who write the tax laws to make sure their profits are exempt.

Biden’s response

In response to the ProPublica report, the Biden administration announced it was conducting a multi-pronged investigation to determine the source of the IRS leak. They claim the unauthorized disclosure of tax return information is the crime — not the failure to pay taxes. 

This is in spite of Biden’s “Made in America” tax plan that vaguely promises more equitable taxation.

Workers have little access to information on the value of the wealth they create. According to the U.S. Treasury Department, they are not even supposed to know that the super-rich are not taxed on the growth of that wealth.

Certainly wage earners who pay income taxes have little control on how the proceeds are spent, including the U.S. military-industrial complex that is destroying the planet, as well as the cost of supporting a murderously racist police force for the protection of the wealthy and their property.

Another tax evasion by the wealthy is hidden in their “philanthropy.” One result of this philanthropy is the privatization of services that are supposed to be provided by the government.

Is the solution a tax on the wealthy? Who would administer that wealth tax? This government is dedicated to and run for the benefit of the ruling capitalist class. It’s a classic case of the fox guarding the chicken house. 

How could there be justice without getting rid of the fox?

The May unemployment report wasn’t much better than the April disaster.  

Business news site CNBC summed it up: “Job creation disappointed again in May, with nonfarm payrolls up what normally would be considered a solid 559,000 but still short of lofty expectations, the Labor Department reported Friday. … May’s letdown came after April sharply undershot expectations.” 

The “jobs gap” remains more than 9 million down from pre-pandemic levels. “We are now short between 9.1 million and 11.0 million jobs since February 2020,” said Elise Gould of the Economic Policy Institute. At the rate of about 550,000 new jobs a month, the number of jobs won’t reach the level of February 2020 until the end of the year in 2022. That’s not a booming economy.

Unemployment plagues capitalism and has been a constant since the beginning of wage labor. Prior to the capitalist era, structural unemployment on a mass scale never existed, other than that caused by natural disasters.

While the current high level of unemployment — 23.1% according to the Ludwig Institute’s True Rate of Unemployment — is in part the result of the pandemic response, the underlying reason remains the same: to protect profits.

The reserve army of labor

As Karl Marx detailed in “Capital,” capitalism constantly produces a pool of unemployed workers. Capitalists refer to this as “surplus population” or “the unemployables.” Marx called this a “reserve army of labor.”

Marx said that in the drive to increase profits, capitalists try to reduce their costs by increasing productivity through the replacement of labor with machinery and new technology. This, in turn, creates an artificial surplus population of the unemployed.

This “reserve army of labor” influences wage rates. The larger the unemployed workforce grows, the more this forces down wages. On the other hand, if there is low unemployment and plenty of jobs available, this tends to raise the average level of wages, as workers are able to change jobs easily to get better pay.

In recent years, part of the reserve army of labor in the U.S. has been identified as “the precariat.” That is the growing number of temporary, contract and part-time workers (part of the proletariat) with precarious status. 

Precarious workers are part-time or full-time in temporary jobs, but don’t earn enough to live on. The Bureau of Labor Statistics does not count them as unemployed, but they do not receive a living wage.

Labor shortage?

In the media there have been claims that the depressing monthly employment reports are caused by a so-called “labor shortage.” This is political propaganda attacking unemployed workers, blaming the unemployed for the lack of available jobs. It’s being used to cut the meager federal supplemental unemployment benefits of $300 per week for those who lost their jobs because of the pandemic.

Twenty-five states are ending the $300 federal supplement and also the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) for the self-employed and gig workers.

The PUA is a program that should never be cut, but rather should become a permanent program. A growing number of businesses like Uber and Lyft now call their workforce “independent contractors.” These workers are not covered by traditional unemployment insurance. They are covered by the PUA, which is actually paying benefits to more jobless workers than the regular state unemployment programs.

As for so-called labor shortages, there is only one measure of a labor shortage — wages. In a real labor shortage, wages start rising. Capitalists who face a shortage of qualified workers respond by offering higher wages and/or benefits, while capitalists who risk losing workers will raise wages to retain workers. 

But wages are not rising and, for some, are now lower than they were before the pandemic. If wages aren’t rising, it is certain that there is no labor shortage.

This was even admitted by Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, who dismissed claims of labor shortages, saying, “We don’t see wages moving up yet. And presumably we would see that in a really tight labor market.”

For the mass of unemployed — and a quarter of the workforce is without a full-time, living-wage job, according to the Ludwig Institute — the jobs are gone; there is no returning to the old job. New jobs won’t be the same. Most may require new skills along with new transportation needs, housing locations, childcare requirements, etc.

Even with restaurant jobs, where “tipped” workers often get sub-minimum-wage pay, the jobs are changed. While pay hasn’t gone up, these jobs are now more stressful and potentially dangerous as workers have to deal with anti-maskers and ongoing health concerns. The wages for a harder, riskier job should be higher.

In the “leisure and hospitality” sector, average weekly earnings have not gone up, remaining at a level of about $19,651 per year for full-time employment. 

Far more unemployed than jobs available

There are far more unemployed people than available jobs. 

In the latest data on job openings, there were nearly 40% more unemployed workers than job openings overall, and more than 80% more unemployed workers than job openings in “leisure and hospitality.”

For low-income workers with a job, pay has not been rising over the past year, but the consumer inflation rate has been steadily rising. In April, the consumer inflation rate reached 4.2%. 

That’s a backhanded cut in wages, so that workers are really getting paid less than they were a year ago. 

Food, housing, jobs

Most significant has been the continuous inflationary rise of food prices, actually double the overall rate of inflation in 2020. For the unemployed and low-wage workers, more than a third of their income is being spent on food, leaving most of them short of funds for housing or transportation.

This is the crisis for jobless workers. What is going to happen when the federal eviction moratorium ends on June 30? More than 10 million tenants are behind on their rent and face eviction once this moratorium is dropped. 

A job is required in order to have housing, food and transportation. Everyone needs a job at a living wage to survive. It’s a basic human right.

The right to a job is even backed up by federal law. The 1946 Employment Act and the 1978 Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act legally obligate the president and Congress to use all available means to achieve full employment.

Also adopted in 1946, the United Nations Charter on Human Rights declares, “Everyone has the right to work … and to protection against unemployment,” as well as the right to housing, education and health care.

Now more than ever, the government should be made to enforce these laws.

Dear President Biden,

Your broken promises are piling up. I took note of these headlines in just the last couple of weeks: “Joe Biden Surrenders On Federal Unemployment Benefits,” “Biden Drops Student Loan Forgiveness From Latest Budget,” “Biden offers to keep 2017 Trump tax cuts intact in infrastructure counteroffer to GOP,” “U.S. Says It Will Not Rejoin Open Skies Treaty With Russia.”

Whew! Your haste to screw over the people who voted for you is breathtaking, I’ll give you that.

It seems like your Democratic White House hasn’t met a Trump policy it didn’t like. 

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. You’ve continued deporting migrants and refugees and refused to defund ICE; you’ve upped the Pentagon’s war budget yet again; you’re planning to give more money to Israel after it carried out its brutal May assault on the Palestinian people; and you decided to keep the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem, where Trump moved it despite an international outcry — an added slap in the face to the Palestinians.

The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which you said you wanted to revive, has gone nowhere, since you refuse to drop the illegal sanctions on Iran. You’ve even picked up Trump’s bogus “Wuhan lab leak” story, blaming China for COVID-19, to further the new Cold War. No points for originality there.

You’ve continued to let Louis DeJoy wreak havoc on the Postal Service and threaten the very existence of one of the few major unionized employers of Black and Brown workers. You twiddle your thumbs and release nicely-crafted statements while the right-wing continues its attacks on Black voting rights, trans youth’s health care and education, and women’s reproductive rights. 

George Floyd’s family came to the White House on the anniversary of his murder by the Minneapolis police. All they got was another load of vague, empty platitudes with nothing to back it up. (Shoot ‘em “in the leg instead of the heart” was your campaign’s solution to racist police terror, right?)

You won election as the anti-Trump. You said you were going to reverse his bad policies. 

Despite grave doubts among the masses, the Democratic Party leadership pushed you forward as the “more electable” alternative to Bernie Sanders. Remember? 

And the publicity hacks at the New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, CNN et. al. have been trying to paint your administration as the second coming of the New Deal.

So what happened? One might say, based on your record thus far, that you’re just trying to put a human face on Trump’s inhumane program. 

It seems like the only promise you’ve kept is the one you made to super-rich campaign donors in 2019, when you said that if elected, “Nothing would fundamentally change.”

Now I think we’re on to something.

The ugly truth

Elections under the U.S. two-party monopoly are all about money first, and personality second. First get the money from Wall Street and Big Business — your real employers — to fund your campaign. Then sell a personality and some promises to get people to vote for you, usually against their own interests.

You’ve been part of that system for a long, long time, President Biden. 

Here’s the part you and your colleagues, Democrats and Republicans, White House and Congress, don’t want people to know:

Your loyalty is to the profit system and its super-wealthy owners. It’s not to any principles, much less to the voters. 

This explains your actions in office. 

A substantial part of the capitalist ruling class — the owners of the banks, online stores, shopping centers, factories, real estate, Big Oil, the military-industrial complex — got tired of the racist bluster and open thievery of Trump and his entourage. They felt it was a danger to their rule, especially after the massive uprising for Black Lives in the summer of 2020.

But here’s the thing — they liked his policies.

They liked his war on immigrants and poor communities. They liked his war-mongering abroad and repression at home. They liked his privatization of public resources, and especially his tax cuts for the rich.

All of those policies were picked up and extended by Trump from earlier presidential administrations — Obama, Bush, Clinton, etc. — Republicans and Democrats alike.

And the job you were hired for by the super-rich, as their political CEO, is to continue those anti-people policies — only with a little more tact and skillful deception.

But there’s a problem with this well-worn scheme. U.S. imperialism is no longer a rising system, and world capitalism is in an ever-deepening crisis. Your bosses are no longer willing to trim their profit margins to buy a little class peace. 

You can only sell empty promises for so long.

You’re joining the Republican campaign to cut off pandemic unemployment benefits. That’s meant to force more unemployed workers to compete for the relatively few jobs available, driving down wages and benefits for everyone. 

The pandemic ban on evictions will end soon, with no plan in place to wipe out the billions of dollars of owed back rent. Food prices are rapidly rising as money gets harder to come by.

I do want to thank you for one thing. Your shallow veneer of being something other than a Trump clone is quickly melting away. 

Last Election Day, millions of working-class people were already aware that they were being sold a bill of goods when they voted for you. But they felt they had no choice but to get Trump out. Those numbers are only going to grow as your broken promises — and the system’s inability to provide even the most basic needs of the masses — pile up.

The working class will have no choice but to learn to organize independently to abolish this awful, racist, anti-people system that breeds monsters like Trump — and you. And there’s nothing you can do to stop it.

Sincerely yours,

Greg Butterfield
June 6, 2021

In Capital, Karl Marx wrote about the laws of capitalism and the ruthless capitalist competition for greater profits. In the drive to increase profits, capitalists try to reduce their costs by increasing productivity through the replacement of labor with machinery, new technology, robotics. This, in turn, creates an “artificial surplus population” of the unemployed:

“The fall in prices and the competitive struggle would have driven every capitalist to lower the individual value of his total product below its general value by means of new machines, new and improved working methods, new combinations, i.e., to increase the productivity of a given quantity of labor, to lower the proportion of variable to constant capital, and thereby to release some laborers; in short, to create an artificial overpopulation. …

“The circumstances which increased the productiveness of labor, augmented the mass of produced commodities, expanded markets, accelerated accumulation of capital both in terms of its mass and its value, and lowered the rate of profit – these same circumstances have also created, and continuously create, a relative overpopulation, an overpopulation of laborers not employed by the surplus-capital owing to the low degree of exploitation at which alone they could be employed, or at least owing to the low rate of profit which they would yield at the given degree of exploitation.” (Capital, Volume III, Chapter 15)

The technology itself does not lead to unemployment. Instead, as Marx indicates, it is the use of technology under capitalism, implemented in an anarchic and unplanned way for the sole purpose of increasing profit, that leads to mass unemployment and places pressure on those still working to accept lower wages, as competition for the remaining jobs increases.