Israel outlaws six Palestinian human rights groups, branding them “terrorist organisations”

Jean Shaoul

On Friday, Israel’s Defence Minister Benny Gantz signed a military order declaring six of the most prominent Palestinian non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in the occupied Palestinian territories “terrorist organizations.”

The decree is an attack on Palestinian human rights activists and the communities they represent, and on the local and international public’s right to information about the situation in the occupied territories. The six NGOs have documented abuses by Israel, the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Hamas, and sought to defend Palestinian prisoners, farmworkers, women and children.

Gantz claimed, without providing any evidence, that they are part of an international network run by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), designated as a terrorist organisation by Israel, the US and the European Union (EU). Once one of the most important Palestinian organisations, the PFLP, which rejected the Oslo Accords in favour of a one state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, views both the Fatah-led PA government in the West Bank and the Hamas government in Gaza as illegal because there have been no elections since 2006.

Palestinians evacuate a wounded man during clashes with Israeli security forces at the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem's Old City Monday, May 10, 2021. (AP Photo/Mahmoud Illean)

The military order asserted that the NGOs are “controlled by senior leaders” of the PFLP and employ its members, including some who had “participated in terror activity.” Furthermore, the order stated, they served as a “central source” of financing for the PFLP, having received “large sums of money from European countries and international organisations.”

Despite claiming to have “unambiguous and cast in concrete” evidence, Israel has not announced any plans for a criminal investigation. The six groups have two months to appeal the decision.

Gantz’s edict, issued under Israel’s domestic anti-terrorism law of 2016, enables the authorities to close the NGOs’ offices, seize assets, arrest staff and even prohibit funding or public expressions of support for their activities.

Crucially, it serves to intimidate and prevent third parties and international organisations from funding or supporting them and their work, since Israeli counterterrorism law mandates jail terms not just for members of groups designated as terrorist organizations but also for people in Israel who express support for them. It is thus aimed at depriving the NGOs of their funding as international opposition to Israel’s criminal suppression of the Palestinians has grown.

The order is explicitly aimed at human rights organisations that have played a major role in exposing the crimes committed by the military, security, police and intelligence forces against the Palestinians, as well as right-wing Jewish settlers’ violent and murderous attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank. The six organizations include:

• Addameer, which offers legal aid to Palestinians in Israeli prisons, collects information on prisoners and the conditions of their incarceration, campaigns against practices such as administrative detention without trial, torture and solitary confinement by the Israeli authorities.
• Al-Haq, which compiles reports on human rights violations in the occupied territories by both Israel and the PA and has published reports on torture in PA prisons and the lack of freedom of expression in Palestinian society.
• The Bisan Center, which has criticized the impact of the Israeli occupation on poverty in the West Bank and the PA's neoliberal policies.
• Defense for Children International Palestine, a branch of the Geneva-based Defense for Children, which provides aid to children being tried in Israeli military courts and researches children imprisoned by Israel, numbering 200, and the impact of the occupation on children’s rights.
• The Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees, which trains women to take part in politics, helps establish cooperatives and offers legal and psychological aid to women.
• The Union of Agricultural Work Committees, which seeks to promote “farmers’ steadfastness and sustainable livelihoods” and aids Palestinian farmers—mainly in Area C of the West Bank that is under Israeli military control and home to the vast majority of the Israeli settlements—who have been subject to years of harassment by settlers with the active support of the Israeli army.

Israel’s decision has been condemned by human rights organisations including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Israel’s B’Tselem. The UN Human Rights Office in the occupied Palestinian territories issued a statement saying, “Counter-terrorism legislation must not be used to constrain legitimate human rights and humanitarian work.” It described the reasons cited by Gantz as “vague or irrelevant” and his decision as the latest move in a “long-stigmatising campaign” against the Palestinian NGOs.

The PA called the military edict an “unhinged assault” on Palestinian civil society. Its statement said, “This fallacious and libelous slander is a strategic assault on Palestinian civil society and the Palestinian people’s fundamental right to oppose Israel’s illegal occupation and expose its continuing crimes.”

None of the Palestinian organisations has yet issued a response.

The major powers, including the US, Germany, Britain, France, and India, as well as Greece, that are currently participating in joint aerial exercises with Israel, have studiously avoided condemning Israel’s action.

The US State Department, Israel’s puppet master, issued a hypocritical, pro forma statement about the importance of human rights, emphasising it had not been informed about the measure and would request more information about the designations.

The EU, which claims to support the Palestinians’ human rights and has funded some of the NGOs while supplying Israel with weaponry, has remained silent on the issue. Similarly, the UK, which is cracking down on support for the Palestinians on university campuses under the pretext of fighting anti-Semitism, has said nothing.

Within Israel, B’Tselem and more than 20 NGOs ran a front-page ad in Ha’aretz stating, “Criminalizing human rights organizations is a cowardly act that is characteristic of oppressive authoritarian regimes” and pointing out that “Over the years, Israel has consistently framed any Palestinian move that was not a surrender to apartheid and occupation as ‘terrorism.’”

This latest escalation follows a long line of efforts to suppress protesters, activists, community organizers, lawyers and journalists in Palestine, Israel and internationally who seek to expose, challenge and sanction Israel’s human rights abuses. Israel’s ministry of strategic affairs, working with far-right nationalist forces and settler groups, has targeted and slandered Palestinian NGOs with claims of corruption and misuse of funds, clamped down on their finances, denied entry to their employees and international co-thinkers and raided their offices.

Last July, Israeli security forces broke into the offices of Defense for Children International and the Bisan Center for Research and Development, confiscating equipment and files, while Addameer has for years faced countless raids on its offices that have involved the damage or theft of equipment and files.

As Al-Haq points out, “It is no coincidence that Israel’s recent escalation of punitive measures against Al-Haq and fellow civil society organisations has come in the immediate aftermath of the opening of an International Criminal Court (ICC) investigation into Israel’s crimes in the Situation in Palestine.”

Some of the six groups played an important role in the campaign to prosecute Israeli leaders at the ICC that culminated in the ruling last March by then ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda that there was enough preliminary evidence to justify an investigation into possible war crimes in the Palestinian territories. Israel has refused to cooperate with the inquiry. By designating these groups as terrorist, Israel is seeking to undermine the case and their witness statements in the eyes of the court.

The outlawing of human rights groups and persecution of humanitarian activists follows Israel’s decades-long suppression of the Palestinians that has included collective punishment, house demolitions, deportations, detention without trial, torture, targeted assassinations and most recently the denial of COVID-19 vaccinations. This, along with legislation establishing an apartheid state, confirms that Israel has repudiated all the limited characteristics of bourgeois democracy.

It demonstrates that it is impossible for Israel’s financial and political elite to maintain even the semblance of democratic rule while illegally occupying Palestinian land and the Golan Heights, discriminating against their own Palestinian citizens and systematically impoverishing the vast majority of Jewish and Palestinian Israelis.

Canada’s Liberal government eliminates all pandemic support for workers, amid country’s fourth wave

Roger Jordan

Canada’s Liberal minority government has effectively eliminated all emergency pandemic financial support for unemployed workers, with the aim of enforcing big business’ drive to increase economic output and profits amid the country’s fourth wave of COVID-19 infections and deaths.

The more than 800,000 workers who have been receiving the Canada Recovery Benefit (CRB), which paid up to $400 a week to those either jobless or with sharply reduced working hours, have had the rug pulled out from under them. Many are now threatened with destitution, even hunger and homelessness.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

Flanked by Prime Minster Justin Trudeau, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland told a press conference last Thursday that the CRB would not be further extended. Consequently, last week is the final week for which CRB payments will be made. This callous decision will impact those ineligible for employment insurance—that is, largely younger workers and those who were employed in the so-called gig economy.

Freeland announced the CRB would be replaced by a new benefit, but this is nothing more than a sham. The new benefit has been expressly designed to make it all but impossible for jobless or underemployed workers to obtain a single cent in future government assistance, even as the COVID-19 pandemic rages across the country. For her part, Freeland said the goal of the changes is to make government support “more narrow, more targeted and less expensive.”

The Liberals’ Canada Worker Lockdown Benefit will provide a meagre $300 per week and only to workers who cannot go to work during a provincially ordered pandemic lockdown. Under these terms, none of the more than 800,000 people receiving CRB benefits last week will be eligible for the Canada Worker Lockdown Benefit once, weeks’ hence, it gets parliamentary sanction. Nor would they or any other workers likely ever be eligible, since the provincial governments have uniformly vowed not to reimpose lockdowns no matter how high COVID-19 infections and deaths rise.

In comments to CTV News, Employment Minister Carla Qualtrough emphasized that workers would only be eligible for the benefit under a “complete lockdown.” Anyone losing their job due to the tightening of public health restrictions short of a “complete lockdown” will get nothing.

Although Canada continues to record almost 3,000 new infections per day and almost 2,000 people have died of COVID since September 1, governments across the country are once again rushing to remove any and all public health restrictions as they double-down on the ruling class’s homicidal “live with the virus” strategy. Yesterday, John Horgan’s trade union-backed New Democratic Party government in BC and Doug Ford’s hard-right Conservative government in Ontario lifted virtually all capacity restrictions in indoor settings. In announcing its latest rollback of COVID restrictions, the Ontario government stressed its aim is to continue aggressively removing public health measures, with all of them, including mask mandates, ended by March 2022.

Ford’s plans to abolish all COVID restrictions “seem to complement what is occurring federally”—i.e., both underpin the corporate drive to churn out bigger profits—observed an Ottawa Citizen editorial Saturday. “Now that the federal government is ending COVID relief programs such as the Canada Recovery Benefit,” the Citizen continued, “it is possible more people who depended on such subsidies will seek work. As Ontario loosens restrictions on small business, demand for employees will rise. All of this, presumably, will be good for the economy.”

The criminal character of the ruling elite’s drive to deprive workers of any financial support to force them to accept dangerous low-paid jobs, where they will face a high risk of infecting themselves and their loved ones, is underscored by the ongoing progression of the pandemic. One day prior to Freeland’s announcement, Saskatchewan’s chief medical health officer, Dr. Saqib Shahab, broke down in tears as he informed the province’s residents that his agency’s modelling shows that the number of intensive care patients infected with COVID-19 could more than double by the new year. Saskatchewan is already sending patients to Ontario due to a lack of health care staff and beds. In neighbouring Alberta, where some hospitals were forced to deny care to patients deemed least likely to survive over recent weeks, the COVID-19 fatality rate is three times higher than for the rest of Canada. According to Worldometers, 765 people are currently in critical condition across the country, and the death toll reached 28,750 Monday.

Corporate Canada and its political representatives are positively reveling in this mass death, applauding the Liberal government for scrapping the last vestiges of financial support for workers. Big business had long complained that the CRB was “overly generous” and blamed it for the staff shortages, especially in the low-wage restaurant, hospitality and retail sectors. The Canadian Chamber of Commerce declared Freeland’s announcement “the fair thing to do for businesses.” It praised the fact that while financial supports for workers were effectively removed, companies that hire new employees can continue to receive a subsidy worth 50 percent of their salary costs until May 2022.

The official opposition Conservatives, who have long echoed business complaints about the CRB, were likewise full of praise. “The Prime Minister followed (party leader Erin) O’Toole’s fiscal plan and announced that the CRB would be ending,” said Tory finance critic Ed Fast, before going on to demand that Trudeau “halt” his government’s “out of control spending.”

The reality is that the big business Liberals, together with their allies in the trade unions and NDP, have been working throughout the pandemic to protect the interests of big business at the expense of the working class. The Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB), the CRB’s predecessor, extended a pittance of $500 per week to workers laid off following the outbreak of the pandemic. This program, touted as generous by NDP leader Jagmeet Singh and Canadian Labour Congress head Hassan Yussuff, was a drop in the bucket compared to the more than $650 billion forked over to the banks and big business by the Trudeau Liberal government in March 2020. This unprecedented bailout of Canada’s financial oligarchy led to the accumulation of fabulous quantities of wealth, with the country’s super-rich billionaires becoming $78 billion richer during the pandemic’s first year.

Last fall, the Trudeau government took the first step in scrapping financial support for workers by replacing the CERB with the CRB. Initially, the government planned to accompany this change by slashing benefit payments from the already inadequate $500 per week to just $400. However, faced with the rapidly accelerating second wave of the pandemic, which was the product of the reopening of the economy and schools pursued by all provincial governments and overseen by Trudeau, the Liberals backtracked and maintained the $500-a-week payments until the spring. In their 2021 budget, they cut CRB payments to $400 a week, a move which secured the needed majority parliamentary support thanks to the votes of the New Democrats.

No such “fiscal prudence,” to use Freeland’s corporate jargon, is exercised when dealing with Canada’s wealthy elite. The Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy, which also expired last weekend, was a massive corporate slush fund that paid for bumper shareholder payouts and lavish executive salaries at many of the country’s leading businesses.

There is also nothing new in Trudeau’s partnership with hard-right provincial governments in implementing the ruling elite’s murderous open economy/open schools policy. In its September 2020 throne speech, which passed with NDP support, the Trudeau government called for any future anti-COVID lockdowns to be adopted “at the local level” and on a “short-term” basis. This gave the likes of Quebec’s “herd immunity”-promoting premier, Francois Legault, and Alberta Premier Jason Kenney, who was describing COVID-19 as a “flu” as late as June 2020, a free hand to pursue a policy of mass infection and death.

In early July 2021, when Kenney declared that Alberta was “open for summer” and eliminated almost all public health measures, Trudeau and his Liberal government said and did nothing. Over two months later, when Alberta’s ICUs were already full to the brim with seriously ill patients, the prime minister cynically seized on Kenney’s reckless reopening strategy to attack the federal Conservatives in the final days of the federal election campaign.

The scrapping of what little remained in the way of financial support for Canadian workers marks a further stage in the intimate collaboration between all Canada’s parliamentary parties in enforcing the interests of the ruling elite during the pandemic. It and the recent joint US-Canadian naval provocation against China in the Taiwan Strait provide a foretaste of how ruthless the incoming Liberal minority government will be in attacking the rights and living standards of working people and in pursuing an aggressive foreign policy aimed at upholding the global interests of Canadian imperialism.

Today Trudeau is to announce the cabinet for his third term in office. Business lobby groups and media commentators have been clamouring for months about the need to make Canada more “competitive” and ready to take advantage of the “economic recovery,” code words for forcing workers to accept brutal exploitation, low wages, and next to no benefits and job protections. To make clear that he supports this agenda, Trudeau promptly announced after last month’s election that Freeland, a darling of the financial and corporate elite for her hawkish fiscal policies and virulent anti-Russia stance, will remain deputy prime minister and finance minister.

The aggressive class war program of big business and all its political representatives from Trudeau and Ford to Legault and Horgan is increasingly meeting with resistance from the working class. Like their counterparts in the United States—where a massive strike wave among manufacturing, health care and other workers is being fueled by decades of concession contracts and the corporate oligarchy’s prioritization of profits over human lives during the pandemic—workers across Canada have waged a series of militant strikes in recent months for improvements in wages and conditions. The mass protests which swept Alberta in opposition to the Kenney government’s dismantling of public health measures also revealed the broad-based hostility to the ruling elite’s strategy of “living with the virus.”

The dangers of a California megaflood

Michael Dunn

The ongoing record breaking rainfall in California, which started on Saturday, raises the danger of a potential megaflood.

While California suffers many devastating natural disasters, such as earthquakes, as well as wildfires and droughts—which have repeatedly broken records in recent years under the influence of man-made climate change—among the worst natural disasters to hit the western United States in the last 160 years was the Great Flood of 1862.

Lithograph of K Street in the city of Sacramento, California—during the Great Flood of 1862

Set off by a series of storms that inundated much of the land from Oregon to San Diego, the agriculturally rich Central Valley became a vast inland sea, 300 miles long and 20 miles wide. The state capital in Sacramento was under water for six months, forcing the government to relocate to San Francisco. One-third of California’s state property was destroyed, along with one in every eight private homes.

Thousands of people died, possibly up to 1 percent of California’s entire population. And while floods of this magnitude used to happen every 200 years or so, models generated by Daniel Swain and researchers at UCLA’s Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences found that they will now happen roughly every 65 years, due to the effects of climate change. Swain also predicts a 20 percent increase in the intensity of megastorms, meaning the next one could be far more devastating.

Worryingly, the period leading up to the Great Flood of 1862 was similar to today. The state was emerging from two decades of severe drought. Farmers and ranchers had been praying for a wet winter. At first, it looked like they would get what they wanted. The storms began in November, 1861, with weeks of snow at high elevations.

But then it started to rain. In California, it rained for 43 straight days, starting on Christmas Eve. Entire communities were swept away. Transportation, mail and communication across the state were disrupted for a month. California’s new governor, Leland Stanford, had to take a rowboat to get to his inauguration. In Nevada, the Carson Valley became a lake. In Idaho, the Boise River swelled to two miles wide, washing away portions of the Oregon Trail. The Colorado and Gila Rivers flooded in New Mexico Territory, turning Fort Yuma into an island.

A diagram of the flood areas of the December 1861–January 1862 California Megastorm [Credit: USGS]

The flood also impacted the course of California’s economy. Prior to the storm, it had been dominated by cattle ranching in the Central Valley, run predominantly by Mexicans who had gained citizenship and land rights at the end of the Mexican-American War (1846–1848) under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Those who survived the 20-year drought, saw their lands flooded and cattle drowned by the storms. One quarter of the state’s 800,000 head of cattle perished in the flood. The ranchers had to sell their land to Anglo settlers at pennies per acre. And the Anglo farmers began growing nuts, cotton and vegetables. Meanwhile, many of the Mexican ranchers were forced to become day laborers just to survive.

The event also influenced the course of wars. In New Mexico Territory, for example, the flooded Rio Grande impeded the California Column as it attempted to cut off the retreating Confederate Army of New Mexico, allowing them to escape into Texas. And in California’s Owens Valley, it brought the Paiutes, who were on the brink of starvation because the storms had decimated the wild game they relied on, into conflict with ranchers, who were trespassing on their lands to graze their herds. Over 200 Native Americans died in the Owens Valley Indian War (1862-1867), along with roughly 60 members of the California Militia.

Research indicates that storms of this magnitude have occurred roughly every 200 years in California, which means another is likely, possibly soon. The United States Geological Survey (USGS) examined sediment data from the San Francisco Bay Area, Santa Barbara basin, Sacramento Valley, and Klamath Mountain region, and found megafloods occurred in the years 212, 440, 603, 1029, c.1300, 1418, 1605, 1750, 1810, as well as 1861–62. Many were worse than the flood of 1862, especially the one in 1605, which researchers believe was 50 percent worse than any of the others.

The storms that caused these megafloods were the result of atmospheric rivers, thin belts of water vapor that hover about a mile above the Earth’s surface, extending thousands of miles over the sea. They originate in the tropics and carry as much water as 10 Mississippi Rivers. Weaker atmospheric rivers hit the California coast yearly, producing 30–50 percent of the state’s rain and snow in just 10 days each year.

Even these “minor” atmospheric river events are significant. They cause more than 80 percent of the flooding in California’s rivers and 80 percent of the levee breaks that occur in the Central Valley. Another atmospheric river hit Northern California on Sunday, October 24, with a predicted three inches of rain in a single day and some areas seeing significantly more. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has declared a La Niña for the second winter in a row. Because La Niñas often bring increased rain to Northern California, this coming atmospheric river could be the beginning of a very wet winter.

According to climate models, global warming will increase the number of atmospheric rivers hitting California each year and they will carry more water than previous ones, increasing the intensity of megastorms. Some models predict that the odds of another megastorm like 1862 will at least double by 2100 due to the extra moisture caused by global warming. Swain says that if greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase at today’s rate, the US could see a 30 to 127 percent increase in the number of people at risk from floods nationwide.

Even without the effects of climate change, the consequences of a megaflood today will be much more serious than they were in 1862, when California had only 500,000 residents. Today there are hundreds of communities and large cities in the Central Valley, with a combined population of 6.5 million people. The Sacramento area alone is home to more than 1 million people, while Fresno has over 500,000 people, and Bakersfield has nearly 400,000 residents. The Central Valley includes the flood plains of two major rivers, the Sacramento and the San Joaquin, as well as many smaller rivers that drain down from the Sierra Nevada mountains.

This is not just a problem for Californians, either. Another flood like the one in 1862 would have a dire impact on the availability and cost of food for everyone in the US. The Central Valley comprises less than 1 percent of all US farmland, yet it produces 25 percent of the nation’s food supply, including 90 percent of the broccoli, carrots, garlic, celery, grapes, tangerines and plums, as well as 40 percent of the lettuce, cabbage, oranges, peaches and peppers, and over 20 percent of the milk. That is $46 billion worth of food annually, double the next most agriculturally productive state in the US.

A megaflood would also be an ecological nightmare. There are 4 million cows in the state and a massive flood would severely pollute the soil and groundwater with rotting carcasses and concentrated manure from drowned cattle. The hundreds of millions of pounds of fertilizers and pesticides used in the state each year would be similarly thoroughly mixed into California’s broader ecology.

Oil spills are a further danger. Kern County, for example, is one of the nation’s most prolific oil-producing regions, generating 70 percent of California’s oil and more than double what the state of Louisiana produces. It also has two large refineries. A major flood would pull much of these toxins into the soil and ground water and quickly spread them throughout the flooded regions, potentially creating by far the biggest cleanup site in the nation’s history.

In 2005, in the wake of the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, the US Army Corps of Engineers inspected California’s flood control infrastructure and found that many of its levies were built between 1850 and 1920, with outdated engineering criteria and only sporadic improvements since then. Sacramento, which is situated at the confluence of two major rivers, the Sacramento and the American, had levees designed for an 80-year flood. It was the most at-risk metropolitan area in the country at the time, with less than half the flood protection of New Orleans.

In 2009, the Multi Hazards Demonstration Project (MHDP) of the USGS examined California’s historical record for flooding, as well as its flood control infrastructure. From that data, they made a prediction of the likely effects of a 1-in-1,000-year storm event called ARkStorm (Atmospheric River 1,000 Storm). They found that an atmospheric river lasting just 23 days would cause more than $725 billion in damage to property, business and agriculture, three times the damage from a hypothetical super earthquake (i.e., the Big One). It would affect up to 25 percent of all California homes and disrupt power, water and sewage for months; 1.5 million people would have to evacuate. And it would likely lead to food shortages.

The California and federal governments have largely ignored these reports. The state has spent only $2 billion on Central Valley flood control improvements since 2007, much of it on refortifying hundreds of miles of substandard levees. In 2018, Californians passed Proposition 68, which allocated $4 billion for parks and water projects. While the majority of the funding went to parks and recreational projects, just $550 million was allocated for flood protection. Proposition 3, which would have allocated another $700 million to Central Valley flood protection and $300 million to dam renovations, was rejected by voters in 2018. Nevertheless, as a result of the investments that have gone toward flood protection, Sacramento is now a Class 2 FEMA community (2nd highest level of premium reductions by flood insurance companies). And Roseville, also in the Central Valley, is the first and only Class 1 FEMA community in the US.

Flooded roads in Southern California in 2018

The reality is, however, that California still needs an additional $80 billion in investment and three decade’s worth of work to bring the rest of the state up to today’s flood safety standards. A 2017 analysis found that 50 percent of the urban levees in the Central Valley were not up to current engineering standards. And most of the rural communities in the Central Valley still had not received any funding to shore up their flood protections. The state’s dams are also in deplorable condition and are on average 70 years old.

The ARkStorm report warned that spillways could fail in a megastorm. A harbinger of this came during the 2017 AR event, when the Oroville Dam’s spillway failed and 188,000 people had to be evacuated, some on only a few minutes notice. That year was Northern California’s wettest winter in 100 years and the flooding resulted in $1.5 billion in damage. Yet, it was still a “mild” winter compared with 1862.

There are 26 dams in California with extremely high downstream risk, meaning hundreds of thousands, or millions, of people could be affected by a failure of any one of them. History has shown the consequences of not shoring up dams for severe storm events and maintaining them to modern engineering standards. In 1975, Typhoon Nina produced so much rain that the Banquio and Shimantan Dams failed, killing 240,000 people in China and making 11 million homeless. A similar event in India killed 5,000 people in 1979. And in 1928, the St. Francis Dam, just 40 miles north of downtown Los Angeles, failed because of engineering flaws, killing at least 431 people. (In 1928, the population of Los Angeles County was only 10-20 percent of what it is today).

Though flood experts have known for decades about the threat of another megaflood, many regional flood managers, particularly in Los Angeles and Orange Counties, have argued that resources would be better spent on educating the public about the risks of living in a floodplain than on shoring up the state’s outdated dams and levees.

Many people who live in flood plains, however, cannot afford to move or put their homes on stilts. Many are living there precisely because of the skyrocketing rents and mortgages in the less flood-prone areas of San Francisco, San Jose, San Diego or Los Angeles, or because their jobs are there. And even if these workers did have the economic means to leave the area, such measures do nothing to protect against the catastrophic agricultural and ecological consequences of a megaflood.

Southern California is particularly at risk. During the 1862 flood, the Santa Ana, Los Angeles and San Gabriel rivers merged, creating an inland sea in Los Angeles and Orange Counties. In his book, Ecology of Fear, Mike Davis explains that residents were able to row from where the Los Angeles Civic Center is today to Newport Beach. Like the Central Valley, Los Angeles and Orange Counties were sparsely populated then. Now there are millions of people living in the floodplains of those two counties.

For a moment in history, it looked like development might not go the way it did. According to Davis, there were several developers, like the Olmsted Brothers, who, in the 1920s and 1930s, wanted to turn the Los Angeles River and adjacent plains into a green beltway, specifically for flood control and public recreation. They even called for the parklands to extend into low-income neighborhoods to benefit working class families. They envisioned retaining the broad natural channels of the alluvial plain as a nature preserve and as a sponge for the next flood. Instead, Southern Pacific Railroad, which owned much of the land, began the process of developing the area into a private subdivision, to the cheers of the Los Angeles Times and large speculators.

The flood of 1938 put a temporary damper on this speculative exuberance. Southern California got a year’s worth of rain in about two days, likely from an atmospheric river. Again, the Los Angeles, San Gabriel and Santa Ana Rivers merged, creating another inland sea. Up to 115 people died in that flood, while 5,600 homes were destroyed. In response, the US Army Corps of Engineers and other agencies began converting the Los Angeles River into a paved channel that would flush future storms out to sea. Reassured, the speculators returned and the housing boom resumed.

The channel is, however, only designed for a relatively small 50-year flood. A 100-year storm would likely flood 1,000 acres of adjacent lands, up to 18 feet deep in some places, affecting 3,300 parcels of land, including parts of Griffith Park, Glendale and Burbank. An ARkStorm would be far worse.

Like with the COVID-19 pandemic, scientists have known for decades about the risks of the next megaflood and government agencies have had ample opportunities to prepare. And as with the pandemic, there was very little done to prepare for such eventuality. It is up to the social force that will be most impacted by such devastating events, the working class, to fight for the resources and measures needed to avert such disasters and save lives.

Far-right and Stalinists maneuver in Philippine presidential election

John Malvar

Political jostling and maneuvering are at a fever pitch in the Philippines, as the November 15 deadline for withdrawals and substitutions of candidates in the 2022 presidential election approaches. Campaigns are being run by a collection of scoundrels and reactionaries in what is proving to be the most right-wing election in the country’s history. All of the various Stalinist and pseudo-left organizations have thrown themselves into the mix, adapting to the general atmosphere of reaction.

The current front-runner in early polling is Ferdinand Marcos Jr., son of the former dictator who ruled the country in a brutal martial law regime in the 1970s and early 1980s. Marcos represents an explicit continuation and escalation of the repressive policies of the outgoing administration of Rodrigo Duterte.

Former senator Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. speaks to reporters after filing his certificate of candidacy for next year's presidential elections in Manila, Philippines Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2021 [Credit: Rouelle Umali/Pool Photo via AP]

He has launched a well-funded campaign of disinformation in both mainstream and social media aimed at rehabilitating the martial law period of his parents’ rule. Armies of online trolls churn out lies on a daily basis depicting the Marcos regime as a “golden era” in Philippine history. Next year 2022 marks the 50th anniversary of the imposition of martial law. Marcos Jr has declared that he will overhaul the country’s textbooks on the dictatorship if he is elected.

Marcos continues the policies of the current Duterte administration in another respect. Over the course of his presidency, Duterte dramatically reoriented Philippine diplomatic and economic ties away from Washington and toward Beijing. In an interview with ABS-CBN, Marcos declared that he intended to continue Duterte’s China policy.

Over the weekend, Marcos met with possible presidential candidate Sarah Duterte-Carpio, daughter of President Duterte, in Cebu City. They spoke extensively and posed for photographs flashing the V for victory gesture of the Marcos’ campaign and the extended fist salute of Duterte.

Duterte-Carpio told the media that their meeting was held to discuss how Davao, the city where she is mayor, could best support the Marcos campaign. It is widely speculated, however, that the possibility of a tandem campaign—in which one would run for president, the other vice president—was being discussed.

The degree of criminality and murder represented by the social forces around these two campaigns, as they smiled and posed for the press, is perhaps without precedent in this country’s bloody history. A formal alliance between the camps of Duterte and Marcos is highly plausible, but it is also possible that Duterte-Carpio is contemplating a separate bid for president.

Senator Ronald dela Rosa, who is currently the presidential candidate of President Duterte’s PDP-Laban party, is widely speculated to be a placeholder for Duterte-Carpio. Dela Rosa has repeatedly declared that he is ready to drop out and offer her his slot if Duterte-Carpio decided to run for president.

Duterte-Carpio is currently running for re-election in the southern city of Davao, where she succeeded her father as mayor. Dela Rosa met privately with Duterte-Carpio on Monday at Davao City Hall. Asked afterwards about the substance of their meeting, dela Rosa responded, “I just reminded her that November 15 is fast approaching.”

A critical consideration of the dela Rosa campaign is to protect himself and the outgoing administration from charges now being raised in the International Criminal Court (ICC) of crimes against humanity for the brutal conduct of its “war on drugs.”

Dela Rosa, as head of the Philippine National Police (PNP), was the architect and implementer of the Duterte administration’s strategy of state sanctioned mass murder. Official police data report over 6,100 “suspects” were killed by the police in the past five years. If one includes those killed by paramilitary death squads overseen and often paid by the police, the death toll is over 30,000.

President Duterte, speaking to his anti-Communist taskforce, a formal government body, declared that dela Rosa was “getting nervous… I told him not to worry.” Dela Rosa told ABS-CBN news in a recent interview that “he will move to protect President Duterte and himself from the investigation by the ICC if elected president.”

In the three weeks that remain before the November 15 deadline, it is expected that campaigns will merge, candidates drop out and take up new positions. With an eye to not being left out of the spoils, most of the various candidates for the senate are simultaneous running on multiple slates.

The leading candidate of the bourgeois opposition to Duterte is Liberal Party head and current Vice President Leni Robredo. Her senatorial slate reveals the right-wing character of her election campaign. Among her senatorial candidates is Antonio Trillanes of the far-right Magdalo party, who was responsible for multiple military coup attempts in the past two decades.

The names on Robredo’s slate include known scoundrels of long-standing: Richard Gordon, Miguel Zubiri, Francis Escudero, and Joel Villanueva, the corrupt son of a televangelist—members of the landed elite, former Duterte supporters, and proponents of lowering the age of criminality.

Some of the members of Robredo’s slate are also running as candidates on the slate of Panfilo Lacson, a candidate known for being the head of the Marcos dictatorship’s torture apparatus. Two of her candidates, Zubiri and Binay, are running on three slates—Robredo, Lacson and Manny Pacquiao, the boxer and, until recently, key ally of Duterte.

Robredo announced that she was keeping the final, twelfth senatorial slot open to a candidate who “represented the marginalized sector.” All of the various “left” groupings—Makabayan [Nationalist] and Laban ng Masa [Fight of the masses] in particular—publicly stumbled over themselves to secure this slot.

In the end, Robredo selected Sonny Matula, president of the trade union umbrella group, Federation of Free Workers (FFW). The FFW is a right-wing organization, founded on anticommunism. It served as a source of unionized scab labor during major labor conflicts in the 1960s.

In 2016, the FFW staged an event to host Marcos Jr. during his run for vice president, giving him the stage to promote his campaign to the union membership. Matula issued a statement that “First of all, [Marcos] fights for the security of tenure of workers in the Philippines.”

Makabayan and the various other political organizations that share the Stalinist political line of the CPP failed to secure a slot on Robredo’s slate, despite a mass campaign demanding that their front-runner, Neri Colmenares, to be included.

Unwilling to even posture as an independent candidate, Colmenares told the press that “he is not ruling out the possibility of working with Vice President Leni Robredo despite his exclusion from her senatorial line-up for the 2022 elections.” Colmenares stressed that they had reached out to Robredo’s team, but “had yet to meet with the vice president in person.”

“It is for this reason,” a Makabayan representative told the Philippine Star, “that they have not yet endorsed Robredo or any other presidential aspirant.” The Star wrote, “It is not clear why Robredo, who has also been advocating for a broad coalition to crush Duterte and Marcos in the polls, did not personally meet Colmenares and members of Makabayan.”

Robredo’s refusal to even meet with Makabayan has several underlying motivations. First, the Liberal Party already has its own pseudo-left wing: Akbayan, an organization formed in the 1990s by social democrat and ex-CPP forces. Akbayan has longstanding bad blood with the so-called “national democratic” organizations that continue to follow the CPP’s political line.

There is a powerful strain of outrage in the popular opposition to Duterte at the support which the national democratic organizations, and the CPP itself, gave to Duterte in 2016.

In 2016, on the southern island of Mindanao, Colmenares campaigned for Duterte’s election. Makabayan, and its sister organizations, celebrated his victory, initially supported his war on drugs as a “boon to the poor,” and entered his cabinet.

Finally, Robredo’s reluctance to engage with Makabayan expresses the right-wing campaign that she is attempting to run. Robredo is attempting to incorporate the backing of Lacson, Pacquiao and former Duterte supporter Isko Moreno. She has held unification meetings with each of these camps. Some of these forces will not come anywhere near Makabayan, and thus Robredo, for the time being, excludes them.

Makabayan is maneuvering, looking to increase their value to Robredo, and have secured slots on Manny Pacquiao’s senatorial slate, where Neri Colmenares is running alongside fascist news personality Raffy Tulfo.

Laban ng Masa, associated with the various organizations founded by Popoy Lagman after he broke with the CPP, is running their own presidential candidate, labor union leader Leody de Guzman. De Guzman’s declaration of candidacy was initially a bid to secure the final senatorial slot on Robredo’s ticket. When de Guzman was passed over, Laban ng Masa issued a statement that “though we do not agree, we nonetheless respect their decision.” They made clear their goal, declaring in the same statement, “our representatives should have a seat in every table.”

As it was now apparent that their bid to secure a senatorial slot had failed, Laban ng Masa found itself trapped in an independent presidential bid. Prominent intellectual Walden Bello, formerly of the CPP and now chair of Laban ng Masa, announced that he was running for vice president.

Laban ng Masa began to promote a platform promising various progressive measures, including disbanding the anti-Communist taskforce, increasing taxes on the wealthiest Filipinos, raising the minimum wage, and ending contractual labor.

There is, however, no genuine political independence to this campaign, which but weeks ago was pleading to be included on the right-wing slate of Leni Robredo.

Laban ng Masa’s continuing attempt to integrate itself into elite politics is highlighted by the inclusion of Makabayan on de Guzman’s slate. The forces of Makabayan and Laban ng Masa represent political tendencies that for decades were murderously opposed to each other. Now they are uniting.

Makabayan keeps one foot in Pacquiao’s camp and one in Laban ng Masa. All have their eyes on Robredo, waiting for the moment when they are called upon to support her.

White House lifts ban on international travel amid rising global COVID-19 cases

Benjamin Mateus

Earlier this month, the White House announced that the COVID-19 restrictions placed into effect in March 2020 that effectively barred international travel to the United States would be lifted on November 8, 2021, to all fully vaccinated foreign visitors.

A student listens to the teacher's instructions at iPrep Academy on the first day of school in Miami [Credit: AP Photo/Lynne Sladky, File]

White House spokesman Kevin Munoz confirmed the lifting of the ban on Twitter after the pronouncement, writing on October 15 that “the US’ new travel policy that requires vaccination for foreign travelers to the United States will begin on November 8. This announcement and date apply to both international air travel and land travel.”

For all practical purposes, the announcement ushers in a complete end to any mitigation attempts to check the spread of the virus and inaugurates the concept of allowing the virus to become endemic like the influenza virus.

The call for the shift in policy was undoubtedly coordinated to coincide with the decline in recent cases and hospitalizations, which garnered national attention. Last month more than 1,700 people were dying each day. The healthcare systems from the South through the mid-West into the mountain regions were inundated with patients. Some states were enacting crisis standards of care that limited emergency healthcare measures to those deemed to have best chance of surviving.

More than 11 million people were infected in the last wave. More than 120,000 died. Still, daily new cases remain above 60,000 per day, and more than 1,200 people are dying each day from COVID. Presently, more than 46 million have reportedly been infected, and more than three-quarter million have perished.

Yet, the lobbying groups representing airlines have been clamoring incessantly for months for lifting these bans.

Not surprisingly, with the declaration to lift the travel restrictions, the stock prices for all the major airlines took off. In an email statement, Jonathan Root, senior vice president at Moody’s Investors Services, wrote, “Leisure bookings for the holidays from inbound tourist visits and non-US citizens visiting friends and relatives will accelerate in upcoming weeks. We also now expect a stronger increase in business travel by the first quarter of 2022 than would have occurred if the borders remained closed.”

Nicholas Calio, president of Airlines for America, the lobbying group for the major US carriers, cheered Biden’s decision, adding “The full reopening of international travel is also critical to reviving economies around the globe,”

In an attempt to cover for the deranged policy that will further the global transmission of the coronavirus, the Biden administration is promising that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will require airlines to collect and pass on information on passengers to aid contact tracing.

White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Jeff Zients said at a press conference, “In the coming weeks, CDC will be issuing a contact tracing order requiring airlines to collect current information for each US-bound traveler, including their phone number and email address.”

Contact tracing infrastructure in the United States is largely non-existent. Rather than bolstering the efforts of public health departments across the country to assist them during the pandemic, the federal and state governments have all been gutted through years of attrition. There have been widespread defections by public health officials due to aggressions and threats made against them by right-wing organizations. Having served years in their capacity, many of these same officials report being entirely spent and severely depressed. Funding has been vastly eroded—their authority to impose health orders removed—these hollow public health institutions stand in name only.

Adrian Casalotti, chief of public and government affairs for the National Association of County and City Health Officials, an organization representing the nearly 3,000 local health departments across the nation, told the New York Times, “We have learned all the wrong lessons from the pandemic. We are attacking and removing authority from the people who are trying to protect us.”

By contrast, while the public health infrastructure was caving in, the airline industry was being buoyed by federal aid to the tune of over $74 billion in government relief.

The rule in effect means that on November 8, any adult eligible to receive the vaccine must have been fully inoculated with a vaccine that has received emergency use listing by the World Health Organization and proof of this vaccination before entering the US. Children under 18, however, will be exempt from these requirements, which poses a significant public health risk.

The United States will also be opening air travel to individuals from the so-called Schengen countries, European countries that have officially abolished controls between their mutual borders. These include Germany, Italy, Spain, France, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Poland, etc.

Last week Europe had 1.67 million new cases of COVID-19, a weekly increase of 251,000 or a 17.7 percent increase from the previous week. Cases have been climbing for four straight weeks even though many of these countries have surpassed the US in the number of fully vaccinated individuals. These developments have significant implications for a virus that has kept pace with the rising tides of infection and vaccinations. As it stands, the globe is beginning the sixth wave of the pandemic.

The case of the UK is worth reviewing. With 68 percent of its population fully vaccinated and one-sixth previously infected, the country is reporting more than 46,000 daily cases of COVID-19, highlighting the difficulty of ever achieving herd immunity. They are also facing the rise in a new lineage of the Delta variant called AY.4. It is beginning to displace Delta, accounting for 62.4 percent of sequenced COVID-19 cases in the last 28 days.

At present, there are 75 AY lineages, each with specific mutations that have been identified, and their numbers continue to increase. AY.4.2, a sub-lineage of AY.4, was first discovered in June but came to researchers’ attention in September. In four weeks, it rose to account for ten percent of all UK cases. Two additional mutations involving its spike protein may have made it slightly more transmissible than Delta. Researchers, however, suspect that one of these mutations gives it even more ability to escape immunity by making its spike region less recognizable by antibodies.

They admit it remains too early to say if it will become a dominant strain of the coronavirus. But in the context of a complete resumption of global air travel with a billion or two more people traveling to every region of the globe in 2022, it seems every advantage is being forwarded to the virus.

Sudan’s military oust transitional civilian-military government

Jean Shaoul

General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, head of the Sovereign Council, the joint civilian-military body that has governed the country since August 2019, ousted Prime Minister Abdulla Hamdok’s government Monday.

Hamdok was running the supposed transition to full civilian rule scheduled for 2023. The move comes just weeks before al-Burhan was due to hand over his position to a civilian.

Al-Burhan ordered the arrest of Hamdok, his wife and several cabinet members who have not been seen since. He went on television to announce the dissolution of Hamdok’s government, declaring a nationwide state of emergency, and shut down the internet. Members of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the militia widely hated for its brutal operations in the Darfur conflict and that is commanded by his rival and deputy, General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (also known as Hemedti), took up positions on the bridges over the Nile and other key infrastructure in the Khartoum conurbation.

Demonstration against the coup in Khartoum (Twitter)

Hamdok condemned al-Burhan’s power grab as a “rupture” of the 2019 deal setting up the transitional civilian front for continued military rule and urged Sudanese to “resist” peacefully. The Sudan Professionals' Association and Resistance Committees, part of the Forces of Freedom and Change (FFC) that led the country-wide protests that broke out at the end of 2018, called for mass protests and a general strike, as did the Umma Party and Sudan’s Stalinist Communist Party.

Al-Burhan had sought to dampen down opposition by signaling that the coup was just a temporary measure with the promise of elections in July 2023. But thousands took to the streets of Khartoum, the capital, and other towns and cities chanting, “The people are stronger, stronger” and “Retreat is not an option!” Troops fired tear gas and live bullets at the crowds, killing seven, injuring dozens more and bringing commercial life to a standstill.

Al-Burhan came to power in April 2019, with the support of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia, ousting long-term dictator President Omar al-Bashir. The aim was to prevent the overthrow of the entire state apparatus in the face of months-long protests against al-Bashir’s Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated military regime in which he played a leading role.

A few months later, Forces of Freedom and Change (FFC), an umbrella group of 22 bourgeois and petty bourgeois opposition organisations, signed a wretched deal with the military. The military would be fronted by a transitional “technocratic” government, to be headed by Dr Hamdok, a former economist at the African Development Bank and later the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa.

This betrayal ushered in a government that maintained the power of the tiny venal elite that has controlled the country under the military boot since independence in 1956. In practice, the country has been ruled by Dagalo, al-Burhan’s deputy, whose Rapid Support Force is more powerful than the Sudanese army and controls most of Sudan’s towns and cities.

Monday’s coup follows months of mounting unrest over the government’s failure to bring to justice those responsible for the deaths of 1,800 protesters at the mass sit-in in Khartoum in June 2019, inflation that is running at 400 percent, countrywide shortages of food, fuel, and medicine, mishandling of the pandemic and the recent flash flooding. This is in a country where in 2018 at least 80 percent of the 40 million population were living on less than US$1 per day, with 5.8 million in need of humanitarian assistance, an increase of 700,000 on 2017, and more than 2.7 million children suffering from acute malnutrition.

Hamdok had sought debt relief from the US-dominated International Monetary Fund (IMF), whose political price was an agreement to hand over al-Bashir to the International Criminal Court for war crimes and genocide in Darfur, investigate the role of other senior officials and sign up to the normalisation of relations with Israel, as part of a broader anti-Iran alliance. The IMF’s economic price included the ending of fuel subsidies, doubling prices at the pumps, abandoning Sudan’s fixed exchange rate and moving to a floating currency, stoking inflation now running at more than 400 percent, up from 144 percent a year ago. But the IMF’s demands for the privatisation of 600 state firms, many controlled by the military and intelligence apparatus, strike at the heart of the junta’s financial interests.

It is the fear of these measures that would strip the generals of their access to state funding and practical immunity from prosecution for war crimes that led them to oppose the Hamdok government.

The Transitional Military Council (TMC), made up of a disparate alliance of warlords, military commanders, militia leaders and al-Bashir loyalists who have repeatedly switched sides, is riven with dissent. The two men at the top, al-Burhan and Dagalo are rivals, with the former close to Cairo and the latter to Riyadh and Abu Dhabi.

While the TMC had signed the Juba Peace Agreement, bringing five of the seven armed rebel groups on board in October 2020, the two largest groups based in Darfur in the west and South Kordofan and West Nile in the south, refused to sign. The deal angered the tribal leaders and impoverished ethnic groups based in East Sudan, allied with former leader al-Bashir, who feared their position would be further diluted by the greater representation given to the rebel groups and their regions.

They mounted a blockade in Port Sudan, Sudan’s main port on the Red Sea, and the roads leading to Khartoum, leading to drastic shortages of basic commodities, including oil, in the capital. Leaders from the Forces of Freedom and Change accused the military of encouraging the blockade to sow ethnic divisions. Last month, the military mounted an attempted putsch, seen as a dress rehearsal for Monday’s coup. It incited pro-military demonstrations in the capital calling for the overthrow of the civilian government, with many people bussed in from outside Khartoum and security forces protecting government buildings and staff withdrawn.

Al-Burhan’s coup comes the day after the visit to Khartoum of Jeffrey Feltman, US envoy to the Horn of Africa, to demand Sudan continue to adhere to the IMF’s political and economic demands. Washington’s primary concern is to ensure that rising social tensions, replicated across the region, do not spread to its allies, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt, which fear their own working class and poor peasants. The last thing the US and Europe want is instability in Sudan, strategically located in the Horn of Africa, alongside the Red Sea and the entrance to the Suez Canal through which much of the region’s oil passes, and a new wave of refugees heading for Europe.

The United Nations and the Arab League say they are “deeply concerned” about the coup, calling on “all sides” to respect the 2019 accord. The Inter-Governmental Association on Development (IGAD), the main regional organisation, currently chaired by Sudan, condemned the coup. Their statements follow US and European Union condemnation, with Washington demanding that the Sudanese military immediately release civilian leaders and restore the transitional government and announcing it would suspend its $700 million aid programme to the country.

The generals believe they have the support of Egypt’s President Abdel Fatteh el-Sisi. Cairo wants a government in Khartoum that will oppose the Ethiopian government’s plans to fill the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam on the Nile and start electricity production, potentially restricting flows into Sudan and Egypt in the event of a drought. But el-Sisi has refrained from openly backing Burhan's putsch. Tensions have risen as talks to resolve the crisis, which Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry has described as an “existential threat” to his country, have stalled.

Workers’ opposition to al-Burhan’s power grab takes place amid growing militancy throughout the Middle East and North Africa, including protests and strikes in Algeria, Tunisia, Lebanon and Iran against corruption, poverty and social inequality.