Race and Class Gap Widening: Katrina Pain Index 2016 by the Numbers

Bill Quigley

Summary:  Hurricane Katrina hit eleven years ago. Population of the City of New Orleans is down by over 95,000 people from 484,674 in 2000 to 389,617 in 2015. Almost all this loss of people is in the African American community. Child poverty is up, double the national average.   The gap between rich and poor in New Orleans is massive, the largest in the country. The economic gap between well off whites and low income African Americans is widening.   Despite receiving $76 billion in assistance after Katrina, it is clear that poor and working people in New Orleans, especially African Americans, got very little of that help.  Here are the numbers.

35:  The New Orleans Regional Transit Authority reported that 62 percent of pre-Katrina service has been restored. But Ride New Orleans, a transit rider organization, says streetcar rides targeted at tourists are fully restored but bus service for regular people is way down, still only at 35 percent of what it was before Katrina.   That may explain why there has been a big dip in the number of people using public transportation in New Orleans, down from 13 percent in 2000 to 9 percent now.

44:   Over two of every five children in New Orleans lives in poverty about double the national rate.   The current rate of 44 percent is up 3 percentage points from 1999 and up 12 points from 2007.   Overall, there are 50,000 fewer children under the age of 18 living in New Orleans than there were in 2000. In 2000 there were 129,408 and the latest numbers have dropped to 79,432 according to the Census figures reported by The Data Center.

50: Since Hurricane Katrina, home values have risen 54 percent and rent is up 50 percent. The annual household income needed to afford rent in New Orleans is $38,000, but 71 percent of workers earn on average $35,000. The average yearly income for service workers is $23,000 and only $10,000 for musicians. New Orleans has only 47 affordable rental units for every 100 low-income residents. Thirty-seven percent of households in the city are paying half of their income for housing, which is much higher than recommended.   36 percent of renters pay more than 50 percent of their income for housing, up from 24 percent in 2004.   The New Orleans metro area ranks second in the top ten worst metro areas for cash strapped renters, according to the Make Room Initiative.   Government leaders bulldozed over 3000 apartments of occupied public housing right after Katrina but now say there is a critical immediate need for at least 5000 affordable low income apartments.

93: Ninety three percent of New Orleans’ 48,000 public school students are in charter schools, the highest percentage in the US.   Before Katrina, there were over 65,000 students enrolled in New Orleans public schools, less than 1 percent in charter schools. There are now 44 governing bodies for public schools in New Orleans.   There are seven types of charter schools in Louisiana. The public schools are 87 percent African American. Widespread charter school problems for students with disabilities are getting a little bit better according to a federal court monitor report.   The public has very mixed feelings about the system reflected in the most recent poll which shows 43 percent of whites think the schools are getting better compared to 31 percent of African Americans, while 23 percent of African-Americans thought schools were getting worse, in contrast to 15 percent of whites.

2,000: Black median income in New Orleans rose from $23,000 in 2005 to $25,000 eight years later while white median income rose by $11,000 from $49,000 to $60,000 during the same time.

6,811: White population of New Orleans is down from 128,871 in 2000 to 122,060 in 2015 according to The Data Center.

7,023: Hispanic population in New Orleans grew from 14,826 in 2000 to 21,849 in 2015.   There has been significant growth in the Hispanic population in metro New Orleans area from 58,545 in 2000 to 109,553 in 2015 mostly in Jefferson Parish.

64,000: Over 64,000 working women in New Orleans earn less than $17,500 per year.   One source of good jobs, working for the school board, was eliminated when 7500 employees were terminated right after Katrina.

95,057: The population of the City of New Orleans is 95,057 less in 2015 when it was 389,617 compared to 2000 when it was 484,674, according to the Data Center.

95,625: There are 95,625 fewer African Americans living in New Orleans (Orleans Parish) now than in the 2000 Census, according to Census figures reported by The Data Center.   The percentage of New Orleans that is African American has dropped from 66 percent to 58 percent. Overall African American population in New Orleans dropped from 323,000 in 2000 to 227,000 in 2015. Black residents of New Orleans continue to be unfairly and disproportionately stopped and searched by police and also more likely to be arrested for marijuana use than other residents. That situation is even worse for other New Orleans metro residents as Gretna Louisiana, just across the Mississippi River, was recently cited as the arrest capital of the entire nation.

2,800,000: The US Department of Justice reported Louisiana has 2.8 million people in its criminal database. There are 4.6 million people in Louisiana.

Last: Louisiana continues to rank dead last in poverty, racial disparities and exclusion of immigrants. But New Orleans has plenty of wealthy people, in fact Bloomberg ranked New Orleans the worst in the entire country in income inequality.   Louisiana also ranks last in national rankings of the quality and safety of school systems. Louisiana incarcerates more of its citizens than any of the other 50 states at a rate double the national average. And Louisiana has the highest healthcare costs because of high rates of premature deaths, diabetes, and obesity. In a welcome but too rare piece of good health news, Louisiana’s new Governor expanded Medicaid coverage and enrolled 250,000 additional people in the health care program in July 2016.

76 Billion dollars came to Louisiana because of Katrina. This information makes it clear who did not get the money.

Congress Must Take Action to Block Weapon Sales to Saudi Arabia

Medea Benjamin

Last week, the Pentagon announced the approval of the sale of an additional $1.15 billion worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia. The callousness of this announcement – just days after Saudi Arabia rebooted its devastating bombing campaign in Yemen – is breathtaking. The Saudi-led coalition has used American-made fighter jets, bombs and other munitions in a relentless onslaught against Yemen that has left thousands of innocent civilians dead and created a humanitarian crisis that the United Nations characterizes as a “catastrophe.” In just the last few days, the Saudi-led coalition has killed at least 35 people – most of them women and children – in three airstrikes against a school, a residential neighborhood and a hospital in northern Yemen.

Congress has thirty days to block the sale of these weapons. It is a moral imperative that they do so.

The internal crisis in Yemen spiraled out of control when the Saudis intervened in March 2015. The BBC has reported that nearly all of the more than 3,000 civilian deaths reported in the conflict have been caused by airstrikes from the Saudi-led coalition. Saudi air strikes have also decimated Yemen’s infrastructure, leaving more than 21 million people desperately in need of humanitarian assistance.The Saudi aggression is only possible with U.S. weapons and logistical support. The U.S. government has authorized the sale of $20 billion of American-made weapons to the Saudis since their offensive began 18 months ago. Sen. Chris Murphy says this makes the U.S. complicit in a humanitarian crisis. “If you talk to Yemeni Americans, they will tell you in Yemen this isn’t a Saudi bombing campaign, it’s a U.S. bombing campaign,” said Sen. Murphy. “Every single civilian death inside Yemen is attributable to the United States.”

Given the devastation of the attack on Yemen, a diverse group of organizations and individuals have called on the U.S. government to stop the sale of additional weapons to Saudi Arabia. The United Nations has said that Saudi air strikes on civilian targets likely constitute war crimes. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have called for an end of all weapon sales to Saudi Arabia until the crisis is resolved. Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy and Republican Sen. Rand Paul have both voiced concern over the new weapon sales, with Paul stating “Saudi Arabia is an unreliable ally with a poor human rights record. We should not rush to sell them advanced arms and promote an arms race in the Middle East.”

Some would argue that the Saudis are a long-time stable ally in the turbulent Middle East. But to paraphrase the cliché, with allies like these, who needs enemies? Saudi Arabia is the number one exporter of radical Islamic extremism on the planet. Fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers were radicalized Saudi citizens and the recently declassified “28 pages” showed that a Saudi intelligence officer supplied the men with money, housing and training to carry out their attack. The Saudis oppress religious minorities, women, LGBT people and dissidents, and dozens of non-violent participants in Arab Spring protests face or have been executed, usually by beheading. Yet the United States continues its unquestioning support of this repressive, totalitarian regime.

In approving the sale of these weapons, the Obama Administration has abdicated responsibility for ensuring that the United States is not complicit in war crimes. Now it is up to Congress to stop this ill-conceived arms deal from going through. For the sake of the millions of displaced Yemenis still suffering through air strikes and thousands more innocent civilians who could be slaughtered with these weapons, I’m pleading that they do so.

Tourism and Religion Go Hand-in-Hand in the Caribbean

Manuel E. Yepe

“Religious tourism is part of the Caribbean culture, and is also good business. The local religions of the beautiful islands of the Caribbean, from voodoo in Haiti to obeah in Jamaica and santería in Cuba, provide valuable cultural and historical information about the Caribbean. This type of tourism allows visitors to become acquainted with the main religious sites in the region that are also related to important historical events.” This is the recommendation of a paper published by the Italian magazine TTC Caribbean dedicated to the promotion of tourism to the region.

“The voodoo cult, born in Haiti, has for decades been a good theme for horror movies; but along with other Caribbean religious creeds, it has also become a real attraction for international tourism,” says the promotional article about tourism in the Caribbean Sea area.

In Bonaire –an island in the Leeward Antilles in the Caribbean Sea– churches, mosques and synagogues provide a comprehensive service in Papiamento, Dutch, English and Spanish.

In Anguilla, a guide to “Places of Worship” was published with a list of churches of the predominant religious denominations, their addresses and schedules.

In the Dominican Republic there is the “Route of Faith” consisting of a journey or pilgrimage that stops at many monuments and sites of religious significance for Catholics. It includes a visit to Santo Domingo, the city that experienced the first evangelization in America. In addition, there is the “Holy Hill Sanctuary” where Christopher Columbus ordered the first Christian cross to be placed in America.sz

In eastern Cuba, there is the temple of Our Lady of Charity, also known as the Virgin of El Cobre or Our Lady Virgin of Charity in honor of the Virgin Mary, pontifically designated as the Patroness of Cuba.

The image of the virgin in Cuba is enshrined in the Basilica that is the National Sanctuary of Our Lady of Charity of El Cobre, built in 1926. The sanctuary is in the picturesque village of El Cobre, very near Santiago de Cuba.

On December 20, 1936, Pope Pius XI granted a canonical coronation of the image of the virgin which was found at sea in the 17th Century.

The Caribbean has also become a frequently visited site by tourists as a destination for weddings and other religious ceremonies.

The opinion of experts, says the TTC digital magazine, is that the Caribbean needs to constantly innovate the tourist offers. Religions have a crucial influence in the popular culture and are a major attraction, but they are not sufficiently exploited in the Caribbean.

The religious tourism sector is strongly rooted in Europe where it is estimated that more than fifteen million people enjoy some kind of tourism of this nature every yar. In Latin America, there are several specialized tourist agencies in this sector.

Generally, the main motivations for religious travel are visits to shrines and holy places, as well as pilgrimages, visits to the tombs of saints, attendance and participation in religious celebrations, visits to religious leaders, eucharistic congresses, holy years, etc.

Traditional African religions in the Caribbean and Brazil can greatly benefit tourism in the area, in the same way that religions have promoted the movement of people to remote sites since ancient times.

Religious tourism, says TTC, may be the main reason for travelling, but it can also be part of a holiday trip and provide additional attractions to a destination.

Such is the case, for example, of millions of non-Catholic persons who visit the Vatican each year.

All this makes religious tourism a thriving business. Two years ago, the annual value of religious travel around the world was estimated at 18 billion dollars, involving 300 million travelers.

Religious tourism, unlike all other segments of the tourist market, has faith as its fundamental motivation. At present, the holy cities that have historically been the destination of pilgrimages –Jerusalem, Mecca or Rome– continue to be important tourist landmarks. Perhaps the Caribbean region could also be one soon. Why not?

War: The Islamic State and Western Politicians Against the Rest of Us

Thomas L. Knapp

On July 28, London’s Central Criminal Court of England and Wales, aka “the Old Bailey,” announced the conviction of Islamist preacher Anjem Choudary on charges of “inviting support for a proscribed organization” (the Islamic State). He’ll be sentenced, likely to a long stint in prison, in September.

On August 18, social networking service Twitter announced that it has suspended 360,000 user accounts since mid-2015 — 235,000 of them just since February — for “promoting extremism.” While Twitter is theoretically a private sector entity, the New York Times reports that the company’s actions are motivated by “intensifying pressure on Twitter and other technology companies from the White House, presidential candidates like Hillary Clinton and government agencies.”

The United Kingdom is back in the business of holding political prisoners on a scale not seen since before the 1997 ceasefire in occupied … er, “Northern” … Ireland, and American social networks are handing the US government de facto power to censor Internet communications. What could possibly go wrong?

It’s easy to look the other way and whistle when the roundups target people like Choudary and the censorship is aimed at a particular variety of “extremism” enjoying little support in the UK or the US apart from small groups within insular communities.

First they came for the Islamists …

It’s easy not to notice that the terrorists who “hate us for our freedoms” chalk up a win each time those freedoms are diminished, openly or surreptitiously, in the name of fighting terrorism.

It became necessary to destroy the Constitution in order to save it …

We are told the west is at war. That much is true. But the central front in that war isn’t Iraq or Syria or Libya, nor is the enemy the Islamic State. “Daesh” is a gnat in a hurricane, empowered solely by western forces toppling secular regimes and creating power vacuums in which it can set up shop.

The real central front is the west itself and the real enemy is the western governments transforming themselves into totalitarian regimes before our eyes.

Every time an Anjem Choudary is imprisoned, or a Twitter account is shut down for “extremism,” or a beachfront town in France bans “burkinis,” the west looks less like the cradle of the Enlightenment and more like the Soviet Union circa 1937 or Germany circa 1939.

The best weapon against bad ideas is better ideas, not censorship and political imprisonment. Don’t let London or Washington wrest that weapon from us.

Dissecting Suicide Bombing For Answers

Arshad M Khan


That perception is prelude to reality is implicit. We may believe it in our bones but it is not always so, particularly in the case of suicide bombing. For example, our gut reactions for prevention would only exacerbate the situation. And the origins of suicide bombing it turns out belie common belief.

So asserts the University of Chicago’s Robert Pape, a political science professor and an expert on the subject who directs CPOST (Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism). Among other things, the project compiles a Suicide Attack index in which data are gathered combing through media, and from reports by the terrorist groups themselves. One of its findings is that large-scale attacks like in Paris and Nigeria reached a 12-year high in 2015 without signs of a let-up. This year we have already had Kabul in July and Quetta, Pakistan this month. The Nice truck driver who mowed down the strollers on the Promenade des Anglais, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, had a history of petty crime and violence against women. He was also disturbed and had stopped taking his medication — clearly not the genuine article.

On Monday (August 8), lawyers had gathered at the Government Hospital, Quetta for a procession to mourn a prominent lawyer, shot dead earlier in the day. His body was about to be brought out when a suicide bomber struck, killing 70 and wounding more than 120. It is significant that suicide and terrorist bombings of civilians was a rarity until Pakistan joined the US war on terror aimed initially at Taliban rule in Afghanistan — last month’s bombing in Kabul killing 80 people points to US inability to bring stability after almost 15 years. Mr. Trump, it ain’t that easy to eradicate these movements.

What has Professor Pape learned from his research? First, his research is persuasive that suicide terrorism is a direct consequence of military intervention, more so in territory prized by the adversaries.

They fight back and lacking advanced weapons and the equipment of modern militaries, suicide bombing becomes by default the most effective weapon at their disposal. The data clearly reveal the effectiveness of the method for roughly a third of suicide attacks enable these groups to seize and hold territory.

Next, Pape’s data challenge the common perception that suicide bombing is a tactic employed only by Islamic radicals. No, it was the secularist Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka fighting a Tamil-Sinhalese war against a militarily superior enemy, who pioneered this modern phenomenon as a war tactic. They bombed the military; they bombed civilians in the city; they even used a Tamil woman wearing a suicide vest to kill Rajiv Gandhi, the then Indian Prime Minister who was trying to mediate a solution. From 1980 to 2003, Pape’s data show they launched more suicide attacks than any other group, including Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Israel-Palestine.

One might add that terrorist bombings without suicide have been used even earlier in numerous struggles for independence: against the British in Cyprus and Kenya; and against the French in Algeria to name a few.

Poor knowledge of suicide bombers and their motivations abounds: Presidential candidate Donald Trump speaking in Ohio recently, unveiled plans to forestall attacks by screening immigrants, using as a prop the rise in Syrian refugees. He also stokes fear after each European incident. Well here is news for him on those counts: The Nice lorry incident was carried out by a Frenchman born in Tunisia. The Bataclan attackers last November were Belgian and French nationals of Algerian and Moroccan descent. The axe-wielding teenager on the German train was from Afghanistan. No Syrians. No Libyans. And then there are numerous (sadly) incidents of an individual, not an immigrant, going berserk in the US.

To the extent there can be any answers, Pape’s stem from his data. And what do they reveal? After reaching an annual peak of about 525 in 2007, attacks were on a steady decline down to about half. Then came the Libyan intervention and Syria in quick succession. Following the escalation of the conflict in Syria (the end of 2011 into early 2012) they had risen dramatically: soaring 56 percent in 2012 over the previous year which had itself shown a 12 percent increase; then a 22 percent rise in 2013 to reach a new high of 600 in 2015 with no let-up in 2016. Military intervention therefore results in more attacks. The data could not be clearer.

Limit military intervention, says Professor Pape. Focus on improving domestic security. And support stable governance to benefit local people not just American interests — usually corporate, if the past is a guide. It is a simple recipe and brings to end the destabilizing, unwinnable, endless wars.

In the end, “political solutions are the true lasting solutions,” adds the professor. Sound advice it seems, both for interventionists and oppressive governments.

China's Second Forum on the Development of Tibet: Propaganda or Development?

Tenzin Lhadon


The recent 2016 Forum on the Development of Tibet, labelled as the second of its kind, was held in Lhasa in July 2016. The highly publicised forum was attended by 130 people, including politicians and journalists from around 30 countries. The conference brought out the developments made in Tibet and exhibited its modern infrastructure and achievements to foreign and high profile visitors for an exchange of a token of acknowledgment. At its conclusion, the Forum came up with the 'Lhasa Consensus', which in itself is a non-consensus for propounding an accord that had already been reached prior to the Forum.

More importantly, questions need to be answered. How significant is this Forum? What does the participation of foreign delegates indicate? Does the international participation make this Forum more credible?

The first Forum on Development of Tibet was held in Lhasa in August 2014. This forum is officially being touted as the '4th Forum' with earlier forums held in Vienna in 2007, Rome in 2009, and Athens in 2011. The Forum is held every two years. This year’s Forum was attended by Liu Qibao, head of the Publicity Department of the Communist Party of China (CPC Central Committee, and Jiang Jie, who is the Vice Chairman of the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR),both of whom have jointly organised the Forum.  Surprisingly, no members of the Politburo Standing Committee (PSC), which is the top leadership of the CPC, were present during the forum, thereby questioning the significance of this forum. 

The forum calls it a new historic starting point for Tibet, imbibing the "new development concepts of innovative, coordinated, green, open and shared development are in line with the times and the norms of development". It is crucial, at the same time, to underscore the statist notion behind the new development concept, with a top-down approach that can either boost development or impose development on the region. The Chinese government's efforts to promote growth in Tibetan-inhabited regions has induced high-level economic development – from modern buildings, expressways and highways to railroads and the bustling markets in central Lhasa and Shigatse. This reinforces the Chinese propaganda that Tibet has benefited from the six decades of the CPC, which has helped in bringing Tibet from a backward region to a modern civilisation. China has certainly made a difference in Tibet's landscape in terms of development and it is an impressive contrast to the Tibet of a decade ago.

The 2014 Forum, for example, yielded positive results for Beijing with a British parliamentarian commending Chinese policies in TAR although he subsequently issued a clarification. Additionally, Nancy Pelosi, a US politician and a staunch Dalai Lama supporter, acknowledged progress made in Tibet on her visit with two US Congressmen in November 2015.  Taking such high profile politicians on a tour around Lhasa to receive their acknowledgment was so that the CPC could claim international legitimacy.

Interestingly, there has also been an increase in the number of foreign visitors being taken to Tibet by the Chinese propaganda and United Front authorities. It seems that the 2016 forum has higher participation from India, unlike the one held earlier. The effort to generate positive news coverage for China in India is noticeable considering most of the participants were from the media. A growing number of Indian journalists and opinion-makers were invited to Tibet to see the progress and effort put in "liberating Tibet from a backward and dark age under theocracy of the Dalai Lama leading them to a more progressive socialist society".

This could either imply that people who were attending the Forum are pronouncing that they are pro-China through their participation or that people who are invited and chosen as participants are considered pro-China. N Ram, editor-in-chief of The Hindu and a prominent journalist, makes regular visits to Tibet and publishes articles praising its regional economic development, which are seen as goodwill for his visits to Tibet.

Convening the Forums in Tibet has an additional agenda. Participants to both the 2014 and 2016 Forums, which were held in Lhasa, were taken to Nyingchi and the Lhoka region, which border India and Bhutan. Nyingchi Prefecture, is seen as including the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh and is regarded as southern Tibet under Chinese territory. Taking Indian participants willingly into territory that is disputed between India and China could mean that certain journalists have fewer objections over China's stand on the disputed territory.

Though the 2016 Lhasa Consensus was comparatively more comprehensive than the previous one, it lacked clarity or a conclusion when addressing issues pertinent to Tibet. It is interesting that the participants arrived at a consensus even before the meeting ended. More importantly, the 2016 Consensus conveniently missed out on reviewing the 2014 Consensus, leaving a gap in the Forum for a comprehensive evaluation. 

China's decision to hold this Forum could be an indication of the sentiment that it may be losing the propaganda war, or to relay its development message, or both.

British Columbia Liberals impose anti-Chinese property transfer tax

Dylan Lubao

In a rare summer session of the provincial legislature, British Columbia’s Liberal government adopted legislation earlier this month imposing a 15 percent property transfer tax on Metro Vancouver area homes purchased by those without Canadian citizenship or permanent residency status. This xenophobic tax follows an extended right-wing campaign by the political establishment and the corporate media to scapegoat foreign buyers for the region's soaring house prices, with an emphasis on buyers from China.

The Liberals announced the tax in late July and justified it on the basis of real estate purchase data collected over a period of just one-and-a-half months, from June to mid-July of this year. According to the Liberals, this data supposedly uncovered the central role foreign buyers are playing in driving up home prices in the B.C. lower mainland. The average price of a single-family detached home in the region now exceeds $1.5 million.

Rich foreign investors have played a part in this process, but the scale of their involvement has been inflated so as to channel anger over the lack of affordable housing into a right-wing, xenophobic campaign. The political establishment has united behind false claims that the more than 30 percent increase in property prices over the past year in Metro Vancouver is chiefly the responsibility of Chinese investors. The vast amounts of speculation undertaken by Canadian banks and the financial elite in real estate, which also finds expression in a 15 percent increase in property prices in Toronto over the past year, has been systematically covered up.

In reality, the figures show that foreign buyers made up just 5.08 percent of home buyers across the province, and represented only 6.5 percent of total investment in the Metro Vancouver housing market. In some areas, such as Vancouver City proper and nearby Surrey, the proportion of foreign buyers was even lower, at 4 and 3 percent, respectively.

The big-business Liberals acknowledged in a November 2015 document that “foreign investment in residential real estate may not be sufficient to impact the Metro Vancouver housing market, except for a small segment of luxury homes.” This conclusion was abandoned just months later, despite its validation by the June-July purchase data.

The blaming of Chinese investors for the housing crisis is a deliberate attempt to obscure the real cause of the unaffordability of housing for working people: the capitalist profit system.

The Metro Vancouver region is the most expensive place to live in Canada. It is, moreover, rapidly overtaking other high-priced housing markets like New York, San Francisco and London as the most expensive place to live on Earth. In June, the average cost of a single-family home had jumped 39 percent from the year before, to $1.6 million.

The sheer unaffordability of residential real estate in Vancouver is underscored further by the fact that half of the population rents. Yet, with vacancy rates at 0.8 percent as of last year, rents have skyrocketed to just under $2,000 a month for a two-bedroom apartment. The median income for renters in the city is less than $41,000 per year, meaning that many people pay more than half of their take-home wages just to stay housed.

With a median family income of $76,040 in 2014, Metro Vancouver incomes rank in the bottom quarter of Canada’s major metropolitan areas. For families who manage to secure a “starter” condominium unit, upgrading to a slightly more spacious town home would cost an additional $147,000 and this is projected to skyrocket to $341,000 by 2026. Moving from a town home to a single-family detached would cost a family an additional $880,000.

An important factor driving up the surging price of real estate in B.C. and other lucrative housing markets worldwide is a crooked sales technique known as “shadow flipping”, which is practiced by a significant number of realtors. This involves a realtor working with a buyer to purchase and re-sell a property, sometimes multiple times, before the deal is closed between the original seller and a final buyer. This nets both the initial buyer and the middleman realtor tens of thousands of dollars in untaxed profit, because tax is only paid at the end of sale.

The practice is widespread, with the self-regulated Real Estate Council of B.C. largely turning a blind eye and imposing only token fines on the few who do get caught.

For decades, all levels of government have been slashing support for social housing. In a phony attempt to dress up the new transfer tax as of benefit to working people, the Liberals have said its proceeds will be invested in a new Housing Priority Initiatives Fund. But it concedes that it has no idea how much money the tax will generate, nor has it provided any details whatsoever as to how the fund will be used.

The lack of affordable housing in Metro Vancouver is only the sharpest expression of a much wider phenomenon affecting workers across Canada and beyond. A recent report by the Parliamentary Budget Officer showed that Canadians have the highest household debt levels among G-7 countries. By the third quarter of 2015, household debt had reached 171 percent of disposable income, as working people scramble to cope with rising housing prices and decades of stagnant and falling incomes.

Even representatives of the financial elite, like Bank of Canada Governor Stephen Polloz, have acknowledged that such levels of debt are unsustainable and have issued warnings that they could trigger a financial crisis as the housing bubble in the US did in 2007-08.

The political establishment is seeking to channel the considerable social anger generated by the housing crisis in a reactionary direction.

Anti-Chinese and anti-Asian xenophobia has been a tool employed for over a century by the ruling class in western Canada to divide the working class. The new property tax on foreign buyers recalls the racist Chinese Head Tax enacted by the Canadian government in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to prevent Chinese labourers who had worked on the Canadian Pacific Railway from bringing their wives and other relatives to come to Canada.

The corporate media has played a central role in promoting the anti-Chinese hysteria, publishing incendiary headlines. The Globe and Mail, the traditional mouthpiece of the Canadian ruling class, justified this noxious narrative with an article titled “Meet the wealthy immigrants at the centre of Vancouver's housing debate.” A column in Bloomberg warned of “The Canadian Housing Boom Fueled by China's Billionaires.”

The Globe has been no less aggressive in its denunciation of Beijing over the South China Sea dispute, with an editorial describing it as a “rogue state” following the politically-motivated ruling of the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague that China had no valid territorial claims in the region.

B.C.'s trade union-backed New Democratic Party (NDP) has played a particularly odious role. Last month when the Liberals released preliminary figures illustrating the relatively minor influence of foreign buyers on the provincial housing market, NDP leader John Horgan made baseless accusations that the numbers were too low and that the province was suffering from an invasion of foreign investors “coming in based on greed rather than a desire to live and work in British Columbia.”

Such economic nationalism and anti-immigrant chauvinism is the stock-in-trade of the NDP. They vigorously promote, in tandem with their union allies, the slogan of “Canadian jobs for Canadians.” In 2012, the NDP-allied British Columbia Federation of Labour demanded that Chinese workers who had come to Canada to work at a mine owned by H.D. Mining International be sent home for costing Canadians jobs. In reality, the corporatist perspective of the trade unions—their slavish subordination of workers’ interests to capitalist profit—has led them to collude in the destruction of countless numbers of jobs and the imposition of wage cuts and other concessions.

The anti-Chinese campaign plays directly into the hands of the Canadian ruling class, which fully supports the Obama administration's “Pivot to Asia,” a strategy to economically and militarily encircle China and compel it to submit to Washington's demands. Ottawa has shown its full support for this agenda by backing the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal which excludes Beijing, and by lining up with the US and Japan over the territorial disputes in the South China Sea.

According to some legal experts, the Liberals' new tax violates the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which guarantees certain civil rights to citizens and non-citizens alike. However, repealing the tax would not solve the fundamental question of affordable housing for workers and youth, who have been priced out of the market.

The reality of the housing crisis in B.C. is one of social polarization. Workers and youth are forced to surrender an ever greater portion of their earnings for ever-smaller residences, or seek more affordable housing dozens and even hundreds of kilometres away from their jobs. Many others cram themselves and their families into substandard housing, or, as many post-secondary students do, couch-surf in their friends' homes or sneak around campus looking for places to sleep. The most marginalized of society are forced to sleep rough and expose themselves to all the attendant dangers.

At the other pole, the wealthiest strata of society enjoy unlimited freedom to live and work anywhere in the region, treating it as their own personal playground. The richest tenth of the population monopolize over half of the province's wealth, including real estate, hoarding it and lording it over the vast majority of the population.

Mounting calls for Australian universities to slash enrolments

Oscar Grenfell

Over the past weeks, there have been repeated calls, including from the Liberal-National government, for a new overhaul of tertiary education in Australia, including a dramatic reduction in the number of university enrolments. The campaign is a continuation of the bipartisan assault on higher education carried out by successive governments, Coalition and Labor, and is aimed at entrenching universities as elite institutions responsive to the needs of the market and accessible to only a wealthy few.

Earlier this month, Education Minister Simon Birmingham spelt out the federal government’s agenda at the “Australian Davos Connection Education Summit.” The forum, “brings together leaders from business [and] government” to discuss public policy.

In his speech, Birmingham flagged financial measures to cut student numbers. He said the government would, “look at how the financial incentives the government has in place actually drive behaviour by the universities in their decision in how many people to enrol in different disciplines.”

Birmingham also indicated steps to direct resources to areas that would have a direct benefit to business. “We need to find a method that drives an outcome which is frankly more attuned with what the employment market demands,” he declared. The minister contemptuously told students to consider the prospects of finding work in a particular field before beginning their studies.

The speech followed a string of commentaries in the financial press complaining about the high numbers of students enrolled in courses such as law and teaching, compared to fields such as IT, which are central to the “innovation economy” being touted by the government.

An Australian editorial last week, for instance, declared that the government “would do students, universities and the national interest a major service by reforming a system in which too many students with low tertiary entrance scores, who may not finish their degrees, are being drawn to courses with poor job prospects.” The newspaper repeated its call for the government to “direct resources to increasing places in fields with the most pressing skills shortages.”

The editorial made clear that any conception of education as a social right aimed at the all-rounded cultural and intellectual development of individuals is a thing of the past as far as the corporate elite is concerned.

The heads of various university institutions have voiced similar conclusions. On August 17, Vicki Thomson, head of the Group of Eight wealthiest “sandstone universities,” called for an end to uncapped student enrolments. She called for a “new model,” to ensure “access and equity for all who are eligible to the program most suited for them but not at the expense of quality.”

In an earlier speech, Thomson said: “Why are we all so reticent about stating the obvious—that university isn’t for everyone. It was never intended for everyone.”

In 2012, the previous Labor government uncapped the number of places universities could offer to students, while making their funding dependent on how many they enrolled. The move was aimed at opening higher education up to the demands of the market and driving ever-greater competition between universities for enrolments, particularly in the most lucrative business-related degrees.

At the same time, the Labor government, under both Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, slashed a total of $6.6 billion from higher education and research between 2011 and 2013. This only intensified the fight between universities to attract both domestic students and full fee-paying international students, while cutting costs, thus driving up class sizes and reliance on lower-wage casual staff.

Both the Coalition and Labor opposition are committed to further cuts. The government is seeking to slash $3.2 billion from the sector. Birmingham earlier this month likened universities to “five-year-olds pleading for more chocolate who don’t appear to realise that budgets may have reached their limits already.”

The government has also advanced plans for higher student fees for “flagship courses.” In 2014, the government sought to deregulate all fees, which could have seen the average three-year bachelor’s degree priced at $100,000. That plan stalled in the Senate. The latest proposal to partially deregulate fees is aimed at developing a two-tier system, with the most sought-after degrees accessible only to the wealthiest students.

For its part, during the campaign for the July 2 federal election, Labor announced at least $320 million in university funding cuts. Labor’s measures included lowering the repayment threshold for student fees and loans, so that students would be forced to pay back their debts when they begin earning $50,000, rather than the current $54,000. Labor also called for the abolition of concessional fees for students in numbers of fields, including early childhood education.

Already, there is a stepped-up assault on the jobs and conditions of staff and academics at universities. Last December, the University of Sydney (USYD) adopted plans to slash undergraduate degrees from 122 to just 20, and to amalgamate 16 faculties and schools into six faculties and three schools. The restructure is based on a model previously implemented at the University of Melbourne, including the destruction of hundreds of jobs. USYD’s move includes the relocation of its visual design school, the Sydney College of the Arts, and the axing of 50 of its staff, or some 60 percent of the workforce.

Flinders University in Adelaide is similarly planning to merge its 14 schools and four faculties into six colleges, sparking fears of jobs cuts. Adelaide University is planning a restructure, while the University of Western Australia began the destruction of 300 jobs in June.

In addition, as a result of Labor’s restructuring of university funding, rates of casualisation across the sector have soared. Casual and sessional academics, most of whom earn less than $500 per week while teaching, now do half the teaching and research in Australian universities.

The National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU), which covers most academics and university staff, has played the central role in enforcing the ongoing restructure of universities. The union has done everything it can to politically subordinate the widespread hostility among staff and students to the process to its chief architect, the Labor Party, as well as the Greens, who kept the last minority Labor government in office. At the same time, the NTEU has worked hand-in-hand with university authorities to force through redundancies, faculty mergers and other pro-business moves.

Appalling conditions in Greek refugee camps

Katerina Selin

The mainstream media has gone silent on refugees in Greece. But the suffering of these people, who fled war and poverty, continues without interruption. At present, more than 57,000 people sit in makeshift tent camps and shelters.

“The majority of these people have been living for months in unbearable and increasingly desperate conditions,” warns the human rights organization Amnesty International in a statement on the situation in Greece. “They receive only limited support from volunteers, activists and NGOs. They are forced to linger in these unspeakable conditions with insufficient information and uncertainty about their futures.”

After the closure of escape routes over the Balkans, thousands of people endured weeks at the muddy camp in the village of Idomeni on the border with Macedonia. After the camp was broken up in May, the people there were divided up among several reception centers. The government of the pseudo-left party Syriza (Coalition of the Radical Left) had promised the desperate refugees humane living conditions.

The reality is something else entirely. The conditions in the camps are appalling. In several regions, refugees repeatedly protest against the abuses in their shelters and demand the most basic standards of humane accommodations.

In the Vial internment center on the north Aegean island of Chios, one of the so-called “hot spots,” more than 1,300 refugees live crammed together in shelters made from shipping containers. Surrounding the camp is a towering barbed wire fence that lends the hot spot the “appearance of a concentration camp,” as the daily Greek newspaper To Vima writes. In the first 25 days, the refugees lived as prisoners. After that, they were able to leave the camp only by special permission.

The refugees are supposed to be registered in the camp and given the opportunity to apply for asylum. Most have requested asylum. So far, 960 interviews, primarily with Syrians, have been conducted. But even though their country has for years been plunged into a bloody civil war, 69 percent of asylum applications by Syrian refugees are rejected, as the asylum official from Vial, Nikos Papamanolis, explained to To Vima.

Since the agreement with Turkey in March, asylum procedures have been reworked in Greece. First, authorities examine whether Turkey is a safe third-party state for petitioners. Only if that is excluded can the asylum application be considered further.

Many refugees are refused asylum because they are alleged to be safe if returned to Turkey and can be sent back to that country. Once there, however, they can expect more war and poverty than ever before. They are even threatened with deportation back to their countries of origin.

Since the establishment of detention facilities on Chios, protest actions by refugees have been a regular occurrence along with violent conflicts with the police and military who operate the camp. Since the end of July, the situation has only worsened.

In a video posted online earlier this month, refugees told aid workers and activists about conditions in the camp. They are often given bad food, consisting of nothing more than rice and beans, and sometimes contaminated with insects. When they throw it away, the military authorities serve the same rations to them again. During a protest, the police treated them with the utmost severity. The same day, no food was provided to them and for the next three days they received only bread and water.

Many children living in Vial are malnourished. Only rarely do they get meat, eggs or fruit. No new clothing or shoes have been provided. One woman reports that the military authorities respond with contempt to any complaint from the refugees. They are told they should go back to their own countries if they don’t like the food.

Faced with this situation, some refugees have tried to cook for themselves. Sneaking through holes in the fence, they go into the surrounding villages and get their own food. Because most of them have no money to shop at the market, they have resorted to breaking into the homes and gardens of local residents. The items stolen shed light on their desperate situation: fruit, vegetables, chickens or drinks from the kiosk.

The dealings with the people in the Vial camp have provoked regular conflicts with residents. The fascist organization Golden Dawn has exploited the volatile atmosphere for their xenophobic propaganda among the Greek islanders.

Altogether, there are now more than 10,000 refugees in the hot spots on the Aegean islands, though officially there is only room enough for 7,450 people.

On the mainland, the situation facing refugees is also unbearable. Refugees in the Ritsona camp in the Evia region have addressed a letter “to the Greek government, the political parties, the international community and Greek society,” in which they describe their living conditions.

“We are Syrians and Iraqis who have escaped injustice and are now held captive in squalor. We live in tents under the hot sun and in hellish temperatures, while in previous months we spent the nights in bitter cold.” The provisions from the military are inadequate and do not meet the needs of children, pregnant women and the elderly in particular.

“No one is in a position to tell us what the future holds. Such waiting produces an enormously stressful situation and puts a strain on our mental health. We literally live in isolation in the middle of a forest in appalling conditions that lead to infections and illnesses, because we are exposed to insects and animals.”

Twenty cases of hepatitis have recently been reported. The hygienic conditions—no warm water, few and poorly functioning toilets, infrequent waste disposal and insufficient health care—are intolerable. There are too few doctors and at night there are none at all to care for newborns, pregnant woman and the elderly. The refugees ended their letter with a series of demands for humane accommodations and provisions.

Refugees have also demonstrated in the Kilkis region in northern Greece. In the reception centre Nea Kavala, women and children organized a protest march on August 3. At least eight refugee children have contracted hepatitis A thanks to the inhumane conditions there.

Further north, on the border with Macedonia, near the former Idomeni camp, more and more refugees attempt to travel illegally. According to the daily paper Kathimerini, the police locate around 60 people hiding in the woods every day and bring them by bus to one of 20 military camps in central Macedonia where 20,000 refugees are already being held. The people often huddle together for days in the bushes and fields near the border and drink water from the pipes of the irrigation systems.

The conditions in the camps around Thessaloniki are no better. There is only cold water and scarce food rations. Children grow up in an environment increasingly characterized by sickness, drugs and violence.

In recent days, the media and representatives of the government have voiced their fears that the refugee agreement between Greece and Turkey could fail and the number of refugees coming over the Aegean into the European Union could again grow. Following the implementation of the agreement, which provides for the deportation of refugees back to Turkey, between 50 and 150 people a day have made the treacherous journey across the sea to Greece.

In the middle of August, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras interrupted his vacation to hold discussions on refugee policy with his cabinet. The Syriza government is doing everything it can to maintain the cruel deal with Turkey and has announced it will evenly distribute the refugees imprisoned in Greece throughout the country. In accordance with this, 2,000 people are to be resettled in Crete. The Minister for Civil Protection has been instructed to increase police surveillance on the island.

The Syriza government, like its European partners in Brussels and Berlin, treats refugees as a mass that can be moved from place to place at will. They are dealt with like criminals in prison camps, for whom basic democratic rights do not apply.

Over 1,800 extra-judicial killings under new Philippine government

Joseph Santolan

Ronald de la Rosa, chief of the Philippine National Police (PNP) testified Monday before a Senate investigation into the extra-judicial killings since President Rodrigo Duterte took office on June 1. He said the official police count of those who were killed by either police or vigilantes for the first six weeks of the Duterte administration was 1,789.

De la Rosa told the Senate that from June 1 to July 15, 712 people had been killed by the police as part of Duterte’s “war on drugs.” Vigilantes, he stated, had killed 1,067 in the same time frame.

These official figures are at least twice the tally estimated by the press prior to de la Rosa’s testimony. They reveal that Duterte, who has repeatedly endorsed the state and vigilante killings of alleged criminals, has launched a crusade of mass murder.

This slaughter has received the support and funding of Washington. Secretary of State John Kerry visiting Duterte in Manila on July 30, pledged $32 million earmarked specifically to fund Duterte’s anti-drug crusade.

Washington is not pleased, however, with Duterte’s failure to aggressively assert the country’s territorial claims in the South China Sea following the ruling against China by the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) in The Hague. Where his predecessor, Benigno Aquino, actively spearheaded the US drive against China in the region, Duterte has pursued bilateral negotiations and trade talks with Beijing.

As Kerry’s visit to Manila demonstrates, Washington has no qualms about funding Duterte’s death squads, provided he toes its line. The recent flurry of negative international press about police and vigilante killings in the Philippines, headed up by the New York Times, is an implicit threat from Washington: Duterte will serve the US imperialist war drive against China, or the US will exploit “human rights” as a weapon against him.

On average, 40 people a day are being killed. Extrapolating on this basis, more than 2,000 would have been murdered by police and vigilantes under the Duterte administration by the time de la Rosa testified before the Senate.

The victims of the state murder campaign are the impoverished and oppressed. They are killed in the working class districts of Tondo and Quiapo. Their corpses, wrapped in duct tape and cellophane and shot through the back of the head, are abandoned in the narrow alleyways of shantytowns. Others, having been picked up without warrant, were executed while handcuffed in police custody.

The victims who have been identified in the press have been either unemployed or informally employed in occupations like pedicab driver or market vendor. Duterte is overseeing the systematic murder of the most oppressed layers of the Philippine population.

On August 18, United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur on summary executions, Agnes Callamard, called on the Philippines authorities “to adopt with immediate effect the necessary measures to protect all persons from targeted killings and extrajudicial executions.” She said Duterte’s calls for killing criminal suspects “amount to incitement to violence and killing, a crime under international law.”

Duterte staged a two-hour press conference at two in the morning from his home in Davao in the southern Philippines in which he launched a profanity-laden tirade against the UN. He called Callamard “a sh*t” and threatened to pull the Philippines out of the international body. He said his role model was the vigilante played by Charles Bronson in the movie Death Wish.

Duterte postured as an opponent of imperialist interference, denouncing the hypocrisy of the UN voicing concern over death squads in the Philippines while allowing the “big powers” to bomb Syria and US police to murder “black people.”

Duterte is no opponent of imperialism, but is attempting with populist rhetoric to secure support for his administration. He has announced his full support for the basing of US military forces in the country, and has repeatedly proposed to alter the country’s constitution to allow increased access for foreign investors.

The next morning, Secretary of Foreign Affairs Perfecto Yasay held a press conference for damage control. No, he stated, the Philippines would not be pulling out of the UN. The president, he stated, had been “tired and hungry” the night before. “We must give him leeway. He is also human.”

However, Yasay said UN rapporteurs were not welcome to come to the country to investigate, because “they had already jumped to conclusions.”

A ubiquitous claim in the international media is that Duterte’s murderous campaign enjoys mass support. The New York Times, for example, wrote on August 19 that “his drug war has proved wildly popular in a country plagued by crime.” This is a baseless slander against the majority of the Filipino people.

Only two pieces of evidence have been supplied to substantiate this claim. First, Duterte is stated to have “received overwhelming support” in the election, winning “by a landslide.” This is a lie. He received 38 percent of the vote, a mere plurality of those who actually went to the polls. Second, Duterte received a very high trust rating in a survey conducted in mid-June, that is to say before he ever took office.

The ruling class, on the other hand, has demonstrated that it supports the use of death squads and police killing. Virtually the entire political establishment has lined up behind the Duterte administration.

The Senate, under the joint leadership of the committee on Human Rights and Justice under Sen. Leila de Lima and the committee on Public Order and Dangerous Drugs under Sen. Panfilo Lacson, launched an investigation of the extrajudicial killings. PNP Chief de la Rosa testified before this committee regarding the number of people killed.

Lacson was one the chief torturers of the Marcos dictatorship in the Military Intelligence and Security Group before rising in the ranks of the PNP to become its head under the Estrada government. Lacson publicly stated that the investigation must not interfere with the “momentum” of the police war on drugs.

De Lima was head of the Justice Department under President Aquino. She was responsible for prosecuting corruption cases against various figures with economic ties to China as part the Aquino administration’s integration in the US “pivot to Asia.” De Lima was responsible for securing the imprisonment of former President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo as part of this campaign. Arroyo has now been rehabilitated under the Duterte government and is serving as a key ally in the legislature.

To the extent that there has been any political opposition to the extra-judicial killings it has been articulated by de Lima. At the opening of the Senate investigation she stated that Duterte “could face charges before the International Criminal Court.”

Duterte responded by denouncing de Lima as an “immoral, adulterous woman,” who had a long-standing affair with her driver. He claimed that her driver also served as her bagman to collect payoffs from various drug-lords.

There had been a proposal in the House of Representatives to carry out a parallel investigation into the police and vigilante killings, but this was immediately rejected and the lower body of the legislature voted instead to conduct an investigation of de Lima and her driver.

As the staggering figures of police and vigilante murders emerged on Monday, the Maoist Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) was preparing to hold the first round of formal peace negotiations with the government in Oslo. The talks are slated to run from August 22 to 26.

Joma Sison, the head of the party, hailed Duterte as a man who uses “street language and methods of the mass movement.” He declared that the CPP was “ever willing to cooperate with the Duterte government in pursuing the just cause of national and social liberation against foreign and feudal domination.”

The CPP is hostile to the working class and serves the interests of sections of the Filipino bourgeoisie. As Duterte, with funding from Washington, is carrying out a campaign of mass murder against the working class and the poor in the Philippines, the CPP is preparing to end its armed struggle and fully support his regime.