Australian political turmoil intensifies as central bank predicts ongoing inflation

Mike Head

The latest media opinion polls released this week indicate continuing plunging support for the Albanese Labor government, primarily driven, according to the polls, by the soaring costs of housing and other living expenses for working-class households.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. [Photo: Twitter/@AlboMP]

The poll results confirm the increasing likelihood that the next federal election, which must be held before May, will produce a very unstable minority government, with either Labor or the Liberal-National Coalition trying to rule with the support of the Greens and/or various so-called independents.

Labor’s support has not recovered despite an anxious cabinet reshuffle by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on July 28, spearheaded by moves to further target refugees, international students, migrants and construction workers, making them scapegoats for the worsening cost-of-living and housing crisis.

The Resolve poll in the Nine television and print media outlets said Labor’s vote was on 29 percent. This was far below the 32.5 percent Labor got at the May 2022 election, and eight points behind the Coalition, whose voting base imploded at that election due to the popular hostility toward it.

The Murdoch media’s Newspoll said Labor’s primary vote support had dropped to 32 percent—seven points behind the Coalition headed by the widely detested far-right Peter Dutton.

Albanese had a Newspoll net approval rating of minus eight, almost as low as Dutton on minus 10. That reflects, at least partially, the growing political disaffection with both the virtually indistinguishable parties of big business that have ruled since World War II.

Newspoll reported that this was Labor’s lowest primary vote since the 31 percent recorded in the wake of the government’s failed Voice constitutional referendum last October to entrench an advisory indigenous body in the heart of the parliamentary and executive government apparatus.

That defeat, inflicted because most working-class people distrusted the government’s empty promises of improving the social conditions of ordinary indigenous people, was a major blow to the government’s effort to put a supposedly progressive gloss on its program of war and austerity.

Such polls provide only a limited and distorted view of the underlying political crisis. For a start, they do not ask voters about the bipartisan support of Labor and the Coalition for the US-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza, nor about their twin unconditional commitment to the US-NATO war against Russia and AUKUS plans for war against China.

Nevertheless, the results indicate that after two and a half years in office, the Labor government’s program of militarism, massive military spending, complicity in genocide and cuts to working-class living conditions has opened the door for the possible return of an openly right-wing Coalition government.

The polls were conducted just after the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) last Tuesday made it undeniable that the underlying economic and social conditions facing millions of working-class people will worsen over the coming period.

In the first instance, the central bank dashed any hopes that the Labor government had that the bank would cut interest rates this year. This is despite the deepening financial and social stress generated by high home mortgage repayments, sky-rocketing rents and prices for other essentials, like food, petrol and insurance.

The RBA board effectively scuttled the government’s claims that it was tackling the cost-of-living crisis with token temporary gestures, such as one-year energy bill rebates. The board’s statement predicted that inflation, currently running at 3.9 percent as measured by the RBA’s “trimmed” Consumer Price Index, would not come into the bank’s 2-3 percent target range before the end of 2025.

In fact, the RBA did not rule out again raising official interest rates, which it has hiked 13 times, to 4.25 percent since May 2022. The board declared that reducing inflation was still its “highest priority.” It stated: “The Board remains resolute in its determination to return inflation to target and will do what is necessary to achieve that outcome.”

Under the false banner of fighting inflation, the RBA—backed by the Labor government—followed other central banks internationally in increasing rates in a deliberate operation to induce a slump and increase unemployment, now officially above 4 percent, in order to suppress workers’ wage demands.

In remarks that went unreported in the corporate media, the RBA board also referred to “a high level of uncertainty about the overseas outlook.” It said the outlook for the Chinese economy—Australia’s biggest export market—had “softened” and this had been “reflected in commodity prices.”

Moreover, “globally, financial markets have been volatile of late,” the Australian dollar had depreciated and “geopolitical uncertainties remain elevated, which may have implications for supply chains.”

These comments are a significant understatement. US-led economic warfare measures are hitting China, and this is already slashing prices worldwide for iron ore and other minerals on which Australian capitalism has long depended.

At the same time, the “geopolitical uncertainties”—code words for the plunge into disastrous conflicts in the Middle East, Russia and the Indo-Pacific—will continue to disrupt “supply chains,” driving up energy and food prices.

Writing in the Guardian last week, economist Greg Jericho drew attention to some of the devastating impact on households. Mortgage repayments now consume a crippling 70 percent of average disposable household income, up from 46 percent in May 2022 when Labor took office.

New housing approvals have plunged from over 10,000 per million people in the 1990s to around 6,000, the lowest level in decades. That is because buying a new home is out of reach for anyone on an average wage.

Another factor in the housing crisis is that successive governments, Labor and Coalition alike, have gutted public housing. In the 1960s, the public sector accounted for nearly 20 percent of new builds. Today, it sits at less than 2 percent.

These figures alone expose the fraud of all the Albanese government’s vows, most recently mouthed by newly-installed Housing and Homelessness Minister Clare O’Neil, to tackle the housing crisis.

Labor’s housing program basically consists of further subsidising and deregulating the private housing market, which is dominated by the same property market speculators, billionaire developers and construction giants that have profited from this social reversal.

While cutting spending on public housing, along with public health, education and other essential social programs, the Labor government has allocated hundreds of billions of dollars for AUKUS nuclear-powered long-range submarines and other US-supplied weaponry, as well as agreeing to growing US military access to facilities across the country.

This is placing the Australian population even more on the frontline of a potentially nuclear war against China, while imposing the financial burden on workers and youth amid spiraling living costs and rising job losses.

A historic political crisis is developing. The disintegrating support for the Labor Party is on top of the implosion in its previous working-class base over the past four decades since the trade union-backed Hawke and Keating Labor governments of 1983 to 1996.

Major elements in the corporate and media establishment backed the return of a Labor government in 2022 in the hope that, with the help of the union bureaucrats, it could impose the required agenda of militarism and social sacrifice after the seething hostility toward the previous Coalition government.

Now the Albanese government is increasingly unravelling, accompanied by attacks on anti-genocide and anti-war dissent and the threat of a return of an even more detested Coalition government.

Further mine closures point to deepening job cuts across Australia

Vicki Mylonas

Mining conglomerate BHP announced last month it would shut down its Western Australian nickel operations for at least three years, putting around 3,000 workers out of a job. The closure is likely to have a flow-on effect on mining and other industries in the region, meaning even more jobs will be destroyed.

Ravensthorpe nickel project [Photo: First Quantum Minerals]

Soon after BHP’s announcement, Glencore warned its Murrin Murrin cobalt mine, also in Western Australia, may cease operations, putting around 1,500 jobs in danger. Another major mining and energy giant, Fortescue, slashed 700 jobs last month in a cost-cutting exercise prompted by warnings the company’s share market value could be halved.

These announcements follow the destruction of thousands of jobs in the critical minerals sector, as falling prices on world markets threaten to cut into the rapacious profits demanded by mining corporations and their shareholders.

This is part of a broader trend of job cuts confronting the working class in numerous sectors, including telecommunications, banking, manufacturing, IT, aviation, education and hospitality.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), the official unemployment rate, seasonally adjusted, rose from 4 percent in May to 4.1 percent in June. This represents an additional 9,700 people who were unable to find work. The figures show a total of 608,200 people unemployed, 95,800 more than in June 2023, when the unemployment rate was at 3.5 percent.

In addition, the ABS data show that 6.5 percent of the workforce is underemployed and seeking more hours of work, meaning the total under-utilisation rate is 10.5 percent.

These official figures are a substantial underestimate of the actual situation. Market research firm Roy Morgan estimates the real rate of unemployment in June at 8.3 percent, with a total of around 2.7 million people (17.3 percent of the labour force) either unemployed or under-utilised.

Among those having the most difficulty finding work are demographics that are already economically vulnerable. According to the ABS, the youth unemployment rate, at 9.6 percent, is more than double the overall figure and the data also show a striking discrepancy in unemployment figures between socioeconomic regions.

The unemployment rate in Sydney’s wealthy eastern suburbs was 2.5 percent in June, less than half that of working-class areas such as Parramatta (5.1 percent) or the city’s south west (5.4 percent). In Melbourne’s west, the June unemployment rate was 6.2 percent, compared with 3.3 percent in the inner south. Inner-city Brisbane had a jobless rate of 3.2 percent, while Logan recorded 5.4 percent.

Compounding the social crisis in these working-class areas, many of those where unemployment is highest are also experiencing the worst rental pain.

Numerous economists and researchers are warning that finding work will become increasingly difficult over the coming months and years.

Moody’s economist Harry Murphy Cruise anticipates the official unemployment rate will increase to 4.5 per cent by the middle of 2025.

According to data from ANZ-Indeed, the number of job advertisements fell for a fifth straight month in June, down 2.2 percent from May and 17.6 percent from June 2023. The most affected jobs in June were cleaners, tradespeople and food service workers.

Another job advertisement platform, Seek, found that the number of applications per advertised job increased by 3 percent from May to June.

The hardest hit industries on Seek were hospitality and tourism, where there had been a 28.4 percent drop in job ads over the past year, and information technology, which saw a 30 percent decline.

In mid-July, CreditorWatch forecast that 1 in 11 hospitality businesses will fail in the next year, putting more people out of work. The credit reporting bureau attributed this to the sector’s “heavy reliance on discretionary spending, which has dried up as customers tighten their belts to cover increases in mortgage payments, rents, power bills and other essentials.”

CJ’s Group, master licensee for US fast-food chain Carl’s Jr, entered voluntary administration late last month, immediately shuttering 20 outlets and standing down hundreds of workers.

Good Group Australia, which operated a string of steak restaurants and Asian-fusion venues, entered voluntary administration and closed its doors in May, destroying at least 200 jobs.

Almost 1,000 workers, mostly in Melbourne, are set to lose their jobs at Crown Resorts as the company undergoes a major restructuring operation. This follows the slashing of 100 jobs at Crown Resorts in Sydney last year.

Artificial Intelligence (AI), has the potential to develop the productivity of labour in ways that enhance living standards for all. However, under capitalism, this, like all technological advancements, will be used to slash jobs and drive up corporate and shareholder profits. A report by analytics platform Faethm estimates that some 2.7 million Australian jobs are at risk from automation by 2035.

“Everyone is focusing on cost efficiency, reductions in staffing levels, the greater use of technology and AI [artificial intelligence] … you are seeing in almost all those white-collar areas, a pressure on reducing numbers,” Lendlease chairman and Westpac director Michael Ullmer declared in February.

Australia’s major banks cut more than 2,000 staff in 2023. This year, Westpac announced a further 132 jobs would be outsourced to India and the Philippines, Commonwealth Bank announced 83 job cuts and ANZ is expected to sack up to 170 staff in its business banking team. The cost slashing has continued, despite the fact that the “big four” banks (also including NAB) reported a combined profit after tax of $15 billion in the first half of this year.

Telecommunications provider Telstra is in the process of slashing 2,800 jobs, 9 percent of its workforce, by the end of the year. This follows 500 job cuts last year.

The impact of technological advances on jobs is by no means limited to white-collar” positions. Major supermarket chain Coles last week opened a new, highly automated distribution centre in Western Sydney which will replace two existing warehouses, cutting around 350 jobs by the end of the year.

Labor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese spoke at the official opening of the new Coles facility, falsely promoting it as a boon for jobs in the region. This underscores the pro-business austerity agenda of Labor governments at every level, state, territory and federal.

Service NSW, the state’s customer service agency, is undergoing a major restructure at the hands of the Labor government. Around 235 full-time positions have already been identified for the first wave of cuts but the full impact will not be known until later in the year. According to 7News, Service NSW chief executive Greg Wells told staff last month that some divisions would be cut by up to 60 percent.

Up to 200 non-teaching positions are “under review” at state-owned vocational education and training provider TAFE NSW.

Thousands more public sector jobs have been slashed by Labor governments around the country, including some 4,000 layoffs announced late last year in Victoria, eliminating 10 percent of the state’s public service.

Other Labor government policies are indirectly leading to the mass destruction of jobs. In a move aimed at making overseas students and immigrants scapegoats for Australia’s deepening cost-of-living, housing and social crisis, Albanese’s government plans to drastically reduce international student numbers. University of Sydney modelling has estimated that this may result in 21,922 direct and indirect job losses in 2025.

The federal Labor government has fully supported repeated interest rate rises by the Reserve Bank of Australia. This policy is not directed at reducing inflation, as is claimed, but at driving the economy into recession and increasing unemployment in order to shut down demands for higher wages.

Together with the global descent into war and barbarism, the deepening social crisis at home is producing growing anger and opposition among workers. The lead role in suppressing any struggle against the assault on jobs, wages and living conditions is being played by the corporatised trade unions which serve as an industrial police force of governments and big business. 

Market gyrations a symptom of a deep-seated crisis

Nick Beams

The gyrations on Wall Street and the Tokyo stock market last week, recalling those of 2008 and even the collapse of October 1987, have seen media pundits, commentators and financial analysts scratching their heads as they try to provide an explanation.

A woman walks by monitors showing Japan's Nikkei 225 index at a securities firm in Tokyo. [AP Photo/Hiro Komae]

When markets open this week, they will be slightly down on what they were after several days of turmoil, but no one is confident that any lasting stability has been restored.

Various explanations are being offered. One of the most prominent points to the lower-than-expected new US jobs numbers in July, 114,000 as compared to estimates of 175,000, and the fear that this indicates a coming recession in the economy.

Others maintain this cannot be the explanation because the number of new jobs created was still a relatively healthy number and was not the lowest so far this year. According to this view, the key factor was the surprise decision by the Bank of Japan to lift its base interest rate into positive territory to halt the downward slide of the yen on currency markets.

They maintain this led to a contraction in the so-called carry trade in which investors borrow cheap yen and then invest them in higher yielding assets in the US to make a profit. The rise in the yen’s value because of the BoJ’s actions led to a sell-off of stocks, mainly in the high-tech area.

Another explanation is that the sell-off was the result of the bubble in artificial intelligence (AI) starting to collapse as the high-blown expectations of the returns came up against the reality of lower and slower real gains.

Those who point to this factor note, for example, that the rise in the shares of Nvidia, the leading chipmaker for AI, had been responsible singled-handedly for almost one-third of the total rise in the market in the first six months of 2024. In that time two-thirds of the rise in the S&P 500 was linked to the handful of tech stocks known as the Magnificent Seven – Alphabet (the owner of Google), Meta (the owner of Facebook), Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Nvidia and Tesla.

Whatever the different explanations of the immediate trigger or combination of factors there is no doubt about the extent of the turmoil which has seen confidence severely shaken.

The Financial Times reported that as the sell-off was developing last Monday, “officials and traders at the New York Stock Exchange were discussing whether circuit breakers would force a market wide trading halt for the first time since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic.”

It noted that by the end of the day almost 90 percent of all stocks in a worldwide index “had fallen in an indiscriminate global selloff.”

On Wall Street the Vix volatility index, known as the “fear gauge,” went as high as 65.73 from a level of below 20. It was the third highest level since records started to be collected in 1992, exceeded only by levels reached in the crisis of 2008 and at the start of the pandemic in 2020.

In Tokyo, stocks had started to fall on the preceding Friday on the back of the BoJ’s interest rate decision and the upward movement in the value of the yen because of its effect on the ability of major Japanese companies to compete and profit from their sales in world markets.

Following the release of the US jobs data, the selloff on Friday turned into a rout when trading began on Monday morning, setting the stage for a plunge on Wall Street.

An article in the FT cited a fund manager who recalled that at the time of the nuclear plant explosion at Fukushima in 2011 there was talk of evacuating Tokyo, but all it took to wipe billions off the Japanese markets was a “soft US jobs report and a modest hike in the Bank of Japan’s overnight rate to send the Nikkei average down 12 percent in a day” and that the whole market was “trading like a penny stock.”

In the space of a week, the article noted “the broad Topix Index lurched drunkenly from being one of the best performing benchmarks of 2024 to one of the worst, and then back to narrowly positive territory.”

The single day fall in the Japanese market was the most significant such event since the Wall Street and global market crash of October 1987. According to calculations by analysts at Goldman Sachs reported in the New York Times, the three-day loss of 20 percent in Japanese stocks through to last Monday was the largest since 1950.

The impact of the carry trade on Wall Street has attracted considerable attention. Because of the anarchy and chaos of the so-called free market, no one can put an accurate figure on its extent, with estimates ranging from billions of dollars to trillions.

For example, Bloomberg reported that the amount of money involved is disputed and that “estimates range from tens of billions of dollars into the trillions.”

The New York Times reported that “a tremendous amount of money has been borrowed in yen by investors outside Japan, with economists at the European Bank ING estimating that these cross-border loans have increased by more than $721 billion since 2021.”

Long-time FT financial columnist John Plender reported that the dynamics of the unwinding of the yen carry trade were difficult to determine because of the data, but the financial firm TS Lombard had estimated “investors may need to find $1.1 trillion to pay off yen carry trade borrowing.”

The rise of the yen carry trade has been in operation since the 1990s, but there appears to have been an acceleration in the recent period. In late 2021 the US Federal Reserve ended its quantitative easing – the buying of government bonds keeping interest rates at historic low levels – and then began lifting interest rates sharply in 2022. This led to an explosion in the carry trade to continue financial arrangements and profit-making based on cheap money.

The basic problem with all the analysis in the financial press is that while it provides some important and significant data, it is at best superficial because it does not seek to probe the underlying forces at work in the capitalist system. It deals only with the transmission mechanisms by which the fundamental historic crisis of the capitalist system is expressed in the financial markets.

This leads to the kind of bromides that were offered in an article published in the Wall Street Journal which declared: “A crash driven by complex undercurrents is the most benign kind of crash because it doesn’t reflect a deeper problem. ‘Black Monday’ in 1987 ended up being a blip, and even the 1998 Russian crisis that took down Long-Term Capital Management didn’t keep equities down for that long.”

This is a complete misreading of history and the forces at work which produce continual financial storms. The crash of 1987 marked a major turning point in that the stock market was only “saved” by the commitment of the Fed to supply liquidity.

This decision was not a one off. It inaugurated a new agenda advanced by the then Fed chair Alan Greenspan, continued by his successors, that its task was not to prevent the development of financial bubbles based on speculation, but to supply free money when they burst to facilitate a new round of speculation.

The collapse of Long-Term Capital Management and the $3 billion intervention by the New York Fed to prevent a financial market disaster was a preview of the crisis of 2008 which had major consequences for the working class, including wage cuts, unemployment and the repossession of homes.

The injection of ultra-cheap money into the financial system has created a huge inverse pyramid of fictitious capital which embodies no real value, divorced from the real economy,  and in and of itself, in the final analysis, is but a claim on the surplus value extracted from the working class. The bail-out operations by the Fed to sustain it cannot go in indefinitely.

Finance capital will be driven to respond, and is already responding, to this crisis by demanding a full-scale assault on the social position of the working class, not only though the cutting of wages and the destruction of vital social spending, but with the imposition of authoritarian and even fascist forms of rule to enforce it.

German army recruits more and more minors

Florian Hasek

While Germany wages war against Russia in Ukraine and supports genocide against the Palestinians in the Middle East, the militarisation of society continues, extending to the enlistment of minors. In step with the planned reintroduction of compulsory military service, the Bundeswehr (Armed Forces) is targeting teenagers for recruitment.

Bundeswehr propaganda in the Berlin underground.

A response from the German government to a parliamentary question from the Left Party reveals that a total of 1,996 young people under the age of 18 were recruited by the Bundeswehr in 2023. That is just under 10 percent of the total number of new recruits this year and an all-time high.

The figures have risen sharply in recent years. In 2022, 1,773 minors were recruited, in 2021 it was 1,239, and in 2020 the number was 1,148. In 2019, the year before the outbreak of the pandemic, the Bundeswehr recruited 1,705 minors. In total, 7,861 minors have been recruited in the last five years.

The increasing recruitment of minors goes hand in hand with the growing presence of the Bundeswehr in schools and other educational and youth facilities. The Bundeswehr now has 85 youth officers, compared to 73 in 2019.

The Ministry of Defence officially defines the tasks of the youth officers as follows:

The youth officers of the Bundeswehr are available as expert speakers on the subject of defence and security policy and as discussion partners. They offer the interested public a wide range of information in the form of lectures, events and educational trips.

In other words, the youth officers act as propagandists of militarism, whose work consists of getting young people excited about the army and luring them into the barracks. In 2023, youth officers gave over 3,400 talks at schools and universities. According to the government, they reached almost 90,000 students. Almost 3,000 of these then visited Bundeswehr facilities. Personnel costs for the youth officers rose from €5.4 million in 2019 to €5.8 million in 2023.

The government justifies the recruitment of minors by pointing out that they will not be trained in the use of weapons or take part in missions abroad. But this merely postpones their possible deployment in war.

The threat these recruits face is evident in Ukraine. After two-and-a-half years of NATO warfare, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian soldiers are dead or wounded. Ukrainian labourers and now also young people are increasingly being forcibly recruited off of the street and sent to the front.

Such methods are also being prepared in Germany. Just a few days ago, Hesse became the first federal state to decide to send Ukrainian men of military age whose residency papers have expired back to Ukraine—thus forcing them to serve as cannon fodder at the front.

The International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) condemns the recruitment of minors and the murderous pro-war policy in the strongest possible terms. After two world wars, in which tens of thousands of children and young people and millions of workers were sacrificed to the interests of the German ruling class, there is strong anti-war sentiment in Germany and throughout Europe. For example, 59 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds are against the return of conscription, which the German government is preparing. The number of professional and regular soldiers has been falling steadily for years.

The multimillion-euro advertising campaigns aimed at enticing teenagers and young adults to join the military have had no major impact. The Bundeswehr’s latest campaign, which is being run mainly via Tik-Tok and YouTube, is primarily intended to appeal to a young audience. In the €6 million campaign titled “Explorers—A roadtrip through the Bundeswehr,” the military is working with four influencers, who guide the viewer through various areas of the Bundeswehr. The army is presented in propaganda terms as a great adventure with excellent career and promotion opportunities.

The fact that the parliamentary question to the federal government comes from the Left Party cannot hide the fact that this party, like all other bourgeois parties, supports the militarisation of society and the Bundeswehr’s war operations. From the outset, it has backed the NATO offensive against Russia in Ukraine and supported arms deliveries to Kiev. The Left Party Youth even organised a fundraising campaign for the Ukrainian army, which is riddled with fascists.

The Left Party also supports Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza. On October 10 last year, for example, a pro-Israeli parliamentary motion was passed with the support of all (!) members of the Left Party in the Bundestag. Dietmar Bartsch, then the parliamentary group leader of the Left Party in the Bundestag, celebrated the motion as “Germany’s contribution to the fight against terror.”

Tunisia’s President Saied announces bogus election as judiciary disqualifies and imprisons opposition leaders

Jean Shaoul

Tunisia’s authoritarian President Kais Saied, who has ruled by decree since suspending parliament in July 2021, has announced he will stand in the elections for another five-year term. He was answering the “country's sacred call” that left him no choice but to run for a second term.

The elections, set for October 6, are a fraud. Saied is setting himself up to be the only candidate as his tamed judiciary eliminates many of his potential opponents, disqualifying, imprisoning or holding them in pre-trial detention on an array of charges, including some under Tunisia’s counter-terrorism law carrying heavy sentences.

Saied (second right) with President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen (second left), Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni (right) and Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte (left), July 16, 2023 [Photo by European Union, 2024 / CC BY 4.0]

His aim is to consolidate his one-man dictatorship and impose the full burden of Tunisia’s deep-rooted economic problems on the working class on behalf of the country’s corrupt financial elite.

Among those sentenced to imprisonment are:

* Lotfi Mraihi, head of the Republican People’s Union and one of Saied’s foremost critics. Having announced his intention to stand for the presidency, he was arrested in July on suspicion of corruption and money laundering and sentenced to eight months in prison and a lifetime ban on standing for office.

* Abir Moussi, secretary general of the Free Destourian Party that reveres the autocracies of Habib Bourguiba and his successor Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who was toppled in the popular uprising of 2011. She was sentenced to two years in prison on a charge of insulting the election commission, having been held in detention since October 2013.

* Issam Chebbi, general secretary of the Republican (Jomhouri) Party. Arrested in February 2023 and detained for “plotting against the state,” he has been forced to withdraw his candidacy after the electoral commission tightened its rules on sponsorship. More than 20 other opposition figures have faced similar accusations. In February, Chebbi and five other political prisoners went on hunger strike to protest a year of “unjust detention and injustice.”

* Abdellatif Mekki, a former health minister and leader of the Islamist Ennahda Party who now heads the Amal w Injaz party. He faces charges of fraud and money laundering and has now withdrawn his candidacy. Mekki, along with activist Nizar Chaari, Judge Mourad Massoudi and Adel Dou, was sentenced to eight months in prison and banned from running for office on a charge of vote buying.

Several other candidates are facing charges such as fraud and money laundering, while Mondher Znaidi, another prominent potential candidate living in France, is facing corruption charges.

According to Amnesty International, most of the opposition parties’ senior members are being held in pre-trial detention on charges of corruption, including Ghazi Chaouachi, former secretary general of the Attayar party, Jaouher Ben Mbarek, one of the leaders of the Salvation Front, and many high-level Ennahdha leaders, including Rached Ghannouchi, Noureddine Bhiri and Sahbi Atig.

These prosecutions and arrests are part of a broader crackdown on freedom of expression, association and peaceful assembly that demonstrate Saied’s refusal to countenance dissent or challenge to his rule.

In September 2022, Saied issued a presidential decree imposing prison sentences of up to 10 years for the vague charge of spreading “rumours and fake news.”

Since then, the authorities have carried out a series of arrests. They have subjected more than 70 people, including political opponents, lawyers, journalists, activists and human rights defenders, to arbitrary prosecutions and/or arbitrary detention. As of last May, at least 40 people remained arbitrarily detained for exercising internationally protected rights such freedom of expression and peaceful assembly.

The media has been all but silenced. According to a report by several journalists’ organisations, at least nine journalists faced harassment and assaults by protesters or security forces during demonstrations in the days after Saied’s power grab in July 2021 began.

Security forces, reportedly under orders from the Tunisian interior ministry, attacked newsrooms. They raided Al Jazeera’s offices in July 2021 and stormed the broadcasting rooms of Tunisian public television in January 2023. Later, police raided the home of Noureddine Boutar, head of Mosaique FM, one of Tunisia’s largest independent radio stations. He now faces charges of money laundering and “illicit enrichment.” The head of Tunisia’s Journalists Syndicate (SNJT), Mohamed Mehdi Jelassi, said he was facing a criminal investigation over his coverage of a July 2022 protest against Tunisia’s constitutional referendum.

Having signed a deal with the European Union in July 2023 worth €900 million in financial aid in return for preventing refugees from crossing to Europe, Saied has received €105 million to upgrade his border police and deport refugees. He launched a clampdown on migrants, refugees, and human rights defenders working to protect their rights, as well as journalists. It followed a meeting in April with the Italian Ministry of Interior about “migration management.”

This crackdown has included arresting, summoning and investigating the heads, former staff or members of at least 12 organizations over vague allegations, such as “financial crimes,” for providing aid to migrants. The authorities have arrested at least two journalists and referred them to trial because of their comments in the media. Tunisia’s security forces have escalated their deportations of refugees and migrants, as well as multiple forced evictions, and have arrested and convicted landlords for renting apartments to migrants without permits.

The European Union shamelessly exploited Tunisia facing economic meltdown and urgent need for financial aid. Economic growth has fallen from 3.5 percent between 2000 to 2010 to 1.7 percent between 2011 and 2019, while the COVID 19 pandemic decimated the economy which relies heavily on tourism. Around 20 percent of the workforce—and 37 percent of young workers—are officially unemployed, but the number of people hanging out in the streets of the towns and cities outside the capital Tunis suggest the reality is far worse. Over the past year, inflation rose to around 9 to 10 percent, driven by the rise in food prices by 15.3 percent in the first half of the year. Wages have remained stagnant, leading to a precipitous decline in living standards.

Hunger has increased dramatically, with two thirds of Tunisians saying they have gone without food at least once in the previous month. Nearly half, particularly the young and better educated, say they have considered emigrating. The war in Gaza has deeply affected Tunisians’ view of the US and its allies, which have backed Israel to the hilt, with favourable views of the US declining from 40 percent before the war to just 10 percent afterwards.

Western governments and think tanks had hailed Tunisia as the “success story” of the Arab Spring on the grounds that it has not been subjected to the kind of sociocide meted out to Iraq, Libya and Syria in Washington’s wars for regime change or seen the kind of mass arrests and killings that have taken place under the US-backed dictatorship of former army commander Abdel-Fatah El Sisi in Egypt.

But more than 13 years after the mass revolutionary upheavals that toppled the Western-backed dictatorship of Zine El Abidine Ben-Ali, none of the aspirations for jobs, democratic rights and social equality that brought the Tunisian working class into struggle have been realized.

Homeless encampments proliferate across Canada as government policies fuel bonanza for property speculators

Matthew Richter

The springing up of dozens of homeless encampments in large and regional cities, and even small towns across Canada is a significant indicator of the catastrophic housing crisis gripping the country. As the Liberal government, backed by the trade unions and New Democrats, spend tens of billions on waging war around the world and enriching their corporate paymasters, growing numbers of people are forced to resort to permanently living in tents with virtually none of the amenities necessary for modern living.

A homeless encampment in Kitchener, Ontario, in front of the former Krug Furniture factory

Canada’s Federal Housing Advocate, Marie-Josée Houle, published a report under the aegis of the Canadian Human Rights Commission in February. Her findings note that a growing number of people live in homeless encampments.

In her report, she asserts that these conditions are a violation of the human right to adequate shelter. This is all the more damning given the fact that the union-backed Trudeau Liberals enshrined housing as a basic right in the 2019 National Housing Strategy Act (NHSA), a move touted by liberal publications and union bureaucrats as an example of the Trudeau government’s supposedly progressive credentials.

Speaking to CBC last February, Houle said that the homeless encampments were “a physical manifestation of how broken our homeless and housing system is from coast to coast in Canada. It needs urgent measures … Government must act immediately to save lives.”

Her report documented that an estimated 20 to 25 percent of the homeless population in Canada lives in encampments, from the temperate south to the prairies and the Pacific Coast, to the frigid, inhospitable climes of Labrador and Nunavut. Houle has called on the federal government to implement a national encampment response plan to ensure that those living in camps would have access to potable water, food, and healthcare. She also called for an end to evictions and a strengthening of the NHSA. 

Estimates of the number of homeless people in Canada vary. Statistics Canada places the number at 235,000 individuals, with an estimated 35,000 experiencing homelessness on any given night as of 2019. To put this number into perspective, it is roughly equivalent to the combined populations of Prince Edward Island, the Yukon and the Northwest Territories.

Other figures from the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness place the estimate anywhere from 150,000 to 300,000 people, larger, at the higher end, than Saskatoon, the largest city in Saskatchewan. The real number is undoubtedly much higher, if one takes into account forms of hidden homelessness, such as “couch surfing.”

An accurate count is further hampered by the fractured mosaic of government agencies at the federal, provincial, and municipal levels. Homeless advocacy groups and government agencies admit as much, noting that these figures are at best wild estimates. While unsheltered homelessness that is visible, such as those living in encampments and homeless shelters, is relatively well documented, hidden homelessness—those who “couch surf” or otherwise lack a fixed address—is less prominently covered. 

However, census data, polls, and point-in-time (PiT) surveys help shed some light on the extent of the crisis. The most recent PiT survey conducted by Infrastructure Canada, the federal government agency that currently overseas national policy relating to homelessness, provides damning findings of the extent of homelessness in Canada. Published in late 2022, it provides a snapshot into the extent of the crisis in 87 communities across the country. The PiT notes that: 

• 40,000 people experienced homelessness on any given night, up 5,000 from the 2019 figure.
• Among the 67 communities and regions that participated in the survey in both 2018 and 2022, the total number of homeless people increased by 20 percent.
• Unsheltered homelessness increased by an astounding 88 percent from 2018.
• Highlighting the burden that the pandemic has on the most vulnerable, counts that were undertaken in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic reported a 125 percent increase in unsheltered homelessness and a 57 percent increase in the use of shelters. This is a damning exposure of the profits-before-lives strategy of the Canadian government, which is focused on keeping business booming as workers, students, the elderly and the most vulnerable, like the homeless, get infected with a debilitating and potentially fatal disease.
• There was an increase in chronic homelessness, with 69 percent of respondents reporting that they had experienced the condition, up from 60 percent in 2018. Chronic homelessness is generally defined as an individual experiencing up to six or more months of homelessness.
• Unsurprisingly, the main reason cited by respondents as the cause of homelessness was not having enough income to cover the costs of housing. Domestic violence, mental health, and substance abuse issues were also cited. 

The PiT also included revealing demographic facts concerning homelessness. Based on 25,000 surveys covering the 87 municipalities that took part in the study, it was discovered that 55 percent of the respondents were in the 25 to 49 cohort. The second most numerous cohort were the 50 to 64 age group, accounting for 24 percent of the respondents. In other words, the largest number of homeless people are of working age, which corresponds with other research demonstrating a growing number of homeless people with a job who are unable to afford exorbitant rents and other daily living costs. Indigenous people are also overrepresented at about 30-35 percent of the homeless population, despite only accounting for 5 percent of the total population.

A cross-Canada problem

Vancouver, British Columbia, has seen a marked increase in homelessness since the beginning of the pandemic, with the homeless population rising from 3,634 in 2020 to 4,821 in 2024, a 32 percent increase in a report cited by the CBC. In the Prairies, Alberta has upwards of 8,000 homeless people in Calgary and Edmonton, Regina and Saskatoon in Saskatchewan reported at least 1,000 homeless people in recent PiT surveys, and Winnipeg, Manitoba has at least 1,000 people sleeping unhoused.

Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, has as many as 16,000 homeless people on any given night, with 8,000 of them in Toronto. Canada’s most populous city and the home to Bay Street financial speculators only has enough space in its shelters to house 2,000 people on any given night. Smaller, de-industrialized cities in the GTA have also seen a proliferation of homeless encampments, including Hamilton, Kitchener-Waterloo, and Oshawa.

There are an estimated 10,000 homeless people in Quebec, with nearly half of them in Montreal. Quebec city has seen a 32 percent increase in homelessness since 2018, according to Radio Canada. Major homeless encampments also exist across Atlantic Canada, with hundreds living in tent cities, including an estimated 800 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and 900 in St John’s, Newfoundland. 

As grim as all of these figures of social distress are, they are invariably an undercount for the reasons noted above. Speaking to CBC News, Brenna Jarrar, the director of housing for the Nunatsiavut Housing Commission, commented on the underreporting of homelessness in Canada. In addition to addressing the fact that the Labrador government is short staffed, she also noted that the homeless population is not always found in shelters. Noting the lack of resources allocated to the homeless crisis, so remarked, “I think it’s a problem where you’re often screaming for attention and there’s not really enough to go around when there’s such a crisis everywhere.”

Encampments unfit for human habitation

Conditions in the encampments across Canada are universally squalid. Tents and other forms of makeshift shelters are entirely inadequate to shelter people from the elements, particularly the harsh Canadian winters. Improvised attempts to heat the encampments regularly lead to tragic deaths at homeless encampments.

A report in the Ottawa Citizen noted that two homeless people died in a homeless camp in Canada’s national capital while trying to heat their tent by burning hand sanitizer in a metal can and lighting their tent with candles. Another death related to an encampment fire was reported last winter in St John, New Brunswick. Three homeless people died at an encampment fire in a Lowes parking lot in Calgary last December. 

These deaths are but a snapshot of the tragic human toll that homelessness is claiming across Canada. According to a report from the Calgary Homelessness Foundation, 436 people perished on the streets of Calgary in 2023, nearly double the toll for 2022.

Toronto reported 91 deaths in homeless shelters for 2023. The Annual Review of Homeless Deaths published by the city claims that roughly half of these deaths could be attributed to opioid overdose, down 19 percent from the preceding year.

In Vancouver, 51 people experiencing homelessness passed away last year. The problem has become so visible that the city felt compelled to declare homelessness a “civil emergency” last November.

The province of Quebec does not record statistics on the number of deaths, even for those who are housed in shelters. No central database exists tabulating the number of homeless people who die each year. Estimates can only be culled from municipal statistics and media reports. One thing is clear: this is not something that the government considers to be a significant issue. 

In addition to the dismal conditions stemming from exposure, the homeless in Canada also experience significant health problems. The 2022 PiT survey notes that 85 percent of all respondents have at least one significant health challenge. Substance use issues topped the list, with 61 percent citing this as a major challenge, followed closely by mental health issues (60 percent). Struggles with addiction to crack cocaine and fentanyl further complicate the picture, frequently leading to overdoses. 

Access to adequate sanitation also poses a problem, as the encampments lack the amenities that housed people would enjoy, such as potable water. Unsanitary living conditions can attract rodents. Rats, for instance, were a problem at a homeless encampment in Kitchener, Ontario, posing a significant threat to the health of the residents. The authorities invariably respond to these and other problems at the encampments not by offering homeless people much-needed help, but by deploying the police to violently disperse the camps and criminalize inhabitants.

The main contributing factor to homelessness and the rapid growth of homeless encampments is the stratospheric increase in rent across the country. The median rent in Toronto was $2,600 in July, well beyond the grasp of an individual working full time on minimum wage, which currently stands at a derisory $16.55 per hour. Simply being able to cover the cost of rent is extremely difficult for many who are on a fixed income such as a pension or disability payments, as many homeless people are.

As noted above, affordability is cited as the main reason by many respondents to the 2022 PiT survey in all but the youngest cohort. Roughly one-third of all respondents in the cohorts aged 25 to senior cited insufficient income as an impediment to procuring housing.  

The increase in rents is driven by capital seeking ever greater sources of profit from as many “diversified” sources as possible. Renovictions are one form in which this is expressed. The portmanteau refers to the legal process by which a landlord can evict a tenant to “renovate” an apartment (in practice they frequently change virtually nothing) and relist it for a much higher price.

According to a report in Macleans, Hamilton saw a 983 percent increase in renoviction notices between 2017 to 2022. The tenants who were evicted included everyone from single mothers, to families, to seniors. Similar stories play out in Toronto, where homeless shelters have noticed a 30 percent increase in people entering shelters for the first time due to renovictions.  

Speculation in residential properties in the form of investment vehicles such as Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) are another glaring example of the profit motive at work in housing. Halifax is a case in point, where two REITs, Killam Apartment REIT and CAPREIT dominate the rental market.

Killam Apartment REIT reported a net operating income of $15.24 million at the end of the last quarter, an increase of 12 percent year over year, while CAPREIT reported $9.24 million, up almost 14 percent from the previous year. The REITs increased rents 19.6 percent and 23 percent respectively, for new tenants.

Paramount Global to slash 15 percent of workforce as jobs disaster in film and television deepens

David Walsh

Officials of beleaguered Paramount Global announced Thursday plans to cut 15 percent of the company’s US workforce, or some 2,000 jobs. The layoffs are part of a company plan to lower costs by approximately $500 million. The news of the job destruction, harming the lives of tens of thousands of people, caused the firm’s stock price to “surge” on Friday.

Striking writers picket in front of Paramount Pictures, Los Angeles, California, May, 3, 2023.

Paramount, which eliminated 800 positions in February, is a US-based multinational entertainment conglomerate owned by National Amusements, the billionaire Redstone family business, which was recently sold to Skydance Media, a deal scheduled to be realized in 2025. Skydance was founded by David Ellison, son of another billionaire, Oracle’s Larry Ellison, the ninth-richest person in the world.

Paramount’s assets in the US include Paramount Pictures, the CBS Entertainment Group, BET Media Group, MTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, CMT, Showtime and Paramount+.

The job cuts at Paramount were long expected. The workers are being made to pay for the ongoing sharp crisis in Hollywood and the profit drive of Wall Street and other financial sharks.

Also on Thursday, Paramount wrote down the value of its cable networks by nearly $6 billion. MSN noted that Paramount “reported an 11% year-over-year decline in second-quarter sales to $6.81 billion.”

According to the Hollywood Reporter, in the wake of the Skydance purchase-merger, the areas at Paramount “hit will be redundant functions within marketing and communications and in finance, legal, technology and other support functions. These actions will take place in the coming weeks and will largely be completed by the end of the year, according to management.”

Deadline writes that Paramount+, the company’s streaming service, “is likely to take some of the brunt of the latest staff reductions as media companies, including Paramount, are trying to cut streaming losses by reducing spending and original output in the push to make their platforms profitable.”

On Disney’s quarterly earnings call Wednesday, Deadline observed, “CFO Hugh Johnston hinted that new cost cuts may be in the offing, assuring Wall Street analysts that there would be more ways to do ‘more with less’ in the near future.”

The same day, Warner Bros. Discovery, which has also laid off workers this year, reported it was taking a write-down of $9.1 billion at its networks division “to align the book value of its linear television business with the reality of uncertain advertising and sports rights renewals. … The value of the linear assets when Discovery and Warner Media merged two and half year ago (sic) was significantly higher than it is now as consumers migrated and advertising dipped. That’s across the industry.” (Deadline) Since the merger of Warner Media and Discovery became final in April 2022, “shares have fallen about 70%,” comments CNBC.

Variety points out that the

cost-cutting targets of the Skydance team have been even more aggressive. Jeff Shell, set to become president of the combined company, has said Skydance, working with consulting firm Bain & Co., is aiming to achieve at least $2 billion in annualized cost synergies at Paramount.

A jobs and career bloodbath is currently going on in the entertainment industry.

California’s Employment Development Department reported more than 12,000 job losses from May 2023 to May 2024, with more anticipated at Warner Bros. and Disney, in addition now to the Paramount cuts.

But that doesn’t begin to tell the whole story, in an industry where most workers are unemployed, “between jobs,” at any given moment.

Tens of thousands have not been able to find new jobs this year in acting, writing, technical and other fields.

As a result, many in the industry are simply leaving the Los Angeles area, according to the L.A. Times. In “Hollywood’s exodus: Why film and TV workers are leaving Los Angeles,” the newspaper reported recently that as

the streaming boom has faded, entertainment companies have hemorrhaged jobs, and networks, studios and streamers have pared back their programming slates. … Some have left for work in places like Atlanta and New Mexico … Others have given up on the entertainment business altogether and are trying to forge new careers.

Driven as well by the introduction of Artificial Intelligence (AI), entire crafts and professions are on the chopping block. The goal of the conglomerates is to decrease the number of productions sharply, while reducing wide layers of cast and crew to casual workers, low-paid, almost instantly replaceable, at the slavish beck and call of the companies.

One recent report (from ProdPro) notes that over

the past 6 months, the total number of productions filming globally in 2024 is still 16% lower than in 2022, and 37% lower in the US. … The lower volumes are here to stay. Comparing the number of productions that started principal photography in Q2 2024 to those in 2022, the US saw a decrease of approximately 40%, while globally there was a ~20% decrease.

Los Angeles on-location filming declined 12.4 percent year-over-year from April through June. Feature film production, FilmLA reports, fell 3.3 percent and commercial production 5.1 percent, but both figures seem “minor when compared to a steep plunge in unscripted television production. Filming of Reality TV fell -56.9 percent.”

Deadline has been running a series of articles on “Hollywood’s Mental Health Crisis.” It reports that it “has gathered a list of mental health resources for Hollywood union members who may need support during this time.”

These recent headlines provide something of a picture: “Hollywood Contraction Hits Entertainment Executive Jobs: ‘This Is A Full-Scale Depression,’” “This time last year, Hollywood writers were on strike. Now, many can’t find work,” “Why Hollywood jobs haven’t come back, in three charts,” “Hollywood execs call industry job cuts ‘full-scale depression’” and “Behind the stunning job losses in Hollywood: ‘The audience has moved on.’”

The Wrap recently described

a growing pool of Hollywood workers—both above and below the line—[who] are fighting to stay in the industry to which they dedicated their careers. With jobs drying up and the uncertainties around artificial intelligence, the competition for gigs has become fierce, with hundreds of people applying for the same positions.

It depicted what it termed an “entertainment industry apocalypse.”

Entertainment and media companies, aside from Paramount, Warner Bros. and Disney, that have carried out job cuts so far this year include Fox Entertainment, CNN, Pixar, Take-Two, Marvel, Participant, Electronic Arts, Chicken Soup for the Soul, Entertainment Tonight, Bungie (Sony-owned game developer), Rooster Teeth, Buzzfeed, PlayStation and Vice Media Group.

With the ratification of the Basic Crafts agreement, between the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) and Teamsters Local 399, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 40 (IBEW), Laborers International Union of North America Local 724 and two smaller craft unions, Hollywood has attained “labor peace” for the moment.

The Writers and Directors Guild, SAG-AFTRA, IATSE and now the Teamsters and company have helped the companies prepare for their new assault on workers’ jobs and conditions. Aside from relatively meager wage increases, which will be quickly swallowed up by rising housing, food and transportation costs, the unions obtained nothing in the negotiations. Their vaunted “protections” against AI are not worth the paper they are written on. The companies, under Wall Street’s whip, are on the warpath. They will wring “consent” from actors and others for the use of their replicas, or simply find means of going around that requirement, in the time-honored criminal manner of the studios.

Organizations that accept the present economic and cultural status quo, in which the vast film, television and media resources are the mere private playthings of pirate-parasites like Iger, Ellison, Redstone, Bezos, Zaslav, Sarandos and the others, will acquiesce in the end to every action the conglomerates take, even if it means the destruction of wide swaths of the industry.