London housing rental crisis: “A bad situation is now becoming disastrous”

Dennis Moore

The number of rental properties in London has fallen substantially since the pandemic according to research from the London School of Economics (LSE) and property firm Savills.

A shortage of rental properties is forcing record numbers of tenants into temporary accommodation.

Avondale Square estate, Bermondsey, London [Photo by Stephen Craven / CC BY-SA 2.0]

The number of one-, two- and three-bedroom properties available to rent across London was down by 36 percent in January-March 2023 compared to the same period in 2017-2019. Available four-bedroom rental properties fell by 46 percent in London, compared to 33 percent for the rest of the UK.

Rental affordability has worsened dramatically as the gap between supply and demand has widened. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) surveyed tenants in February 2023 and found that half had experienced rent increases in the last year.

The LSE found that average rents listed for London were 20 percent above pre-Covid levels.

The overall lack of rental properties has seen an explosion in demand, with prospective tenants forced into bidding wars that have forced renters to offer above market value to secure accommodation.

A landlord who took part in an LSE focus group reported receiving 35 enquiries in one day about a vacant property. Asking prospective tenants to give their best offer, the owner received £350 above the monthly asking price, with one person offering to leave a deposit without even viewing the property.

An estimated 300,000 London renters who are dependent on housing benefits are being priced out of the private sector.

The dire shortfall between LHA rates and rents is confirmed by research from the Institute for Fiscal Studies, showing that just 5 percent of properties on the Zoopla platform are covered by housing benefit, compared with 23 percent when LHA rates were frozen in April 2020.

Emma Haddad, CEO of housing charity St Mungo’s, has called on the government to increase housing benefits to prevent people ending up on the streets.

With nowhere to live, increasing numbers of people are turning to local authorities. But the public housing system, largely run by local councils, has no capacity to help.

Councils in London have an estimated 166,000 people living in temporary accommodation, a number equal to the entire population of some London boroughs, or the population of cities the size of Oxford.

Local authorities are collectively spending £52 million each month on temporary accommodation, including hostels and refuges. They have warned that suitable accommodation is becoming increasingly difficult to acquire.

With a population of 9 million, London accounts for two thirds of all those living in temporary accommodation.

Darren Rodwell, London Councils’ executive member for regeneration, housing and planning, said, “A bad situation is now becoming disastrous. We’re seeing fast rising private rents and reduced availability of rental properties against a backdrop of continuing cost of living pressures and London’s long-standing shortage of affordable housing.”

Growing numbers of people are sleeping on the streets of London, with the Conservative government’s manifesto promise to eradicate rough sleeping by 2024 in tatters.

At the same time, home ownership is an ever-receding prospect for millions of people. According to Generation Rent it takes UK renters almost 10 years to save for a mortgage deposit.

Generation Rent’s director Ben Twomey said, “That gets close to two decades for Londoners and that’s only possible by sharing with other people into their forties.”

The rise in interest rates is putting intense pressure on monthly mortgage repayments, with a looming threat that many will lose their homes.

Recent forecasts by the Bank of England show that among 4 million homeowners expected to roll over to a new mortgage contract in the next three years, the majority will be paying an extra £220 each month by the end of this year.

By the end of 2026, nearly one million UK homeowners will need to find an extra £500 a month for mortgage repayments due to rising interest rates.

Mortgage providers say that households fixing deals now will face a typical increase of £350 per month in repayments. According to Moneyfacts, average two-year fixed mortgage rates rose last Monday by 6.7 percent--the highest level since the middle of the financial crisis in 2008.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies has warned that interest rate rises are hitting landlords’ borrowing costs and were part of the reason for the increases in rents.

Landlords have passed on higher mortgage repayments via rent hikes to an estimated 9.2 million tenants. Over 50 percent of landlords in England have a buy-to-let mortgage, with figures from UK Finance showing 2 million are outstanding, with 230,000 about to exit cheaper fixed-rate deals between March 2023 and March 2024.

Almost two thirds of surveyors reported rising numbers of buy-to-let landlords are looking to sell their properties, according to the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors, potentially reducing further the number of available properties to rent.

The freezing of the LHA rate and increased rent rises are a perfect storm for hundreds of thousands of renters amid the worst cost-of-living crisis in generations. Private rent paid by tenants across the UK rose by 5 percent in the twelve months to May 2023, the biggest jump since January 2016. Outside London, rents surged at the fastest rate since 2006.

Matt Downie, CEO of housing charity Crisis said, “Low-income renters face a catastrophe. They can’t rely on housing benefit as it’s been frozen since March 2020 and is completely inadequate. There isn’t enough social housing to go round and over a million households are on waiting lists for the few genuinely affordable homes we do have.”

Australian universities defunded by successive governments

Mike Head

Federal Minister for Education Jason Clare (right) with University of New South Wales Vice-Chancellor and President Professor Attila Brungs. [Photo: UNSW Media]

A report published this month provides a revealing, yet distorted, picture of how far Australian governments have slashed funding for universities over the past three decades and increasingly transformed them into corporate entities.

The report calculates that federal government funding for universities, excluding the HELP fees loan system that students must repay after graduation, fell from 0.9 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 1995 to 0.6 percent in 2021. That amounts to a $6.5 billion reduction in funding in 2021, equal to almost half (46.5 percent) of current higher education funding.

The report, produced by the Centre For Future Work, an arm of the Australia Institute think tank, and commissioned by the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU), shows that successive governments have defunded universities. This has forced them to rely ever-more heavily on private sources of cash, particularly full fee-paying international students and corporate partnerships, while casualising their workforces and ramping up class sizes.

Since 1995, private sources have doubled as a share of university revenue—increasing from 21.7 percent to an all-time high of 43 percent in 2019. Thus, the label “public” universities is no longer accurate. They have become substantially privatised.

Other findings of the report point to the damage done to staff and students.

• Casualisation is rampant. Between 1999 and 2019, casual employment grew by 4.5 percent per year, almost twice as fast as total employment. By best estimates, casual employment now accounts for 40 percent of jobs at public universities.
• Degrees are becoming more expensive for students. Average HELP debt has doubled since 2008: increasing from $12,990 to $24,771 in 2022.
• Despite a Labor government review of higher education in 2008 finding that rising student-staff ratios were jeopardising the quality of teaching and the learning support provided to students, class sizes have become even bigger since 2008.
• One of the clearest indications that public universities are being run like businesses is the salaries of vice chancellors, which averaged almost $1 million in 2020, putting them in the same league as corporate CEOs.

However, the report presents this process misleadingly. First, it is silent on how this offensive has been possible. It says nothing about the role of the NTEU and the other main campus union, the Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU) in stifling the resistance of university workers over many years.

Second, it chooses timelines that coincide with Liberal-National governments, thus camouflaging the pivotal part played by the Labor governments of 1983‒96 and 2007‒13, as well as the deeper cuts already made by the current Albanese Labor government.

For example, the report states:

While Federal Government funding for higher education has grown in nominal terms, it has not even kept up with inflation—let alone the growing population and enrolments. Figure 1 shows that in the decade since 2013, funding for higher education fell by 2.4 percent in real terms (after adjusting for inflation) by 2022‒23. This is despite growth in domestic student enrolment of 18 percent between 2013 and 2021, and the expectation of continued enrolment growth into the future. The combination of a decline in real federal funding with growth in enrolment has produced a more dramatic decline in the amount of real federal spending per domestic student.

Figure 1 in the report, however, shows that this decline began in 2011‒12, during the final years of the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd Labor governments, not 2013, when the Abbott Liberal-National government took office and continued Labor’s cuts.

In fact, the Rudd-Gillard government laid the basis for the accelerating pro-corporate restructuring of the universities through its market-based “education revolution.” It scrapped block funding for universities and forced them to compete for funds based on enrolments. It then cut tertiary education funding by some $3 billion in 2012‒13.

The earlier Hawke-Keating Labor government paved the foundations for this transformation by reintroducing fees, first for international students, turning them onto cash cows to offset declining funding, and then for domestic students, through the HECS (now HELP) loans scheme, loading students with huge debts.

The current Albanese government is intensifying this process. Its May 9 budget increased higher education spending for 2023‒24 only from $10.6 billion to $10.9 billion. That is less than 3 percent—a cut of about 4 percent in real terms compared to inflation.

Even more fundamentally, the Albanese government has launched a review of tertiary education—its University Accord—which aims to further subordinate universities to the demands of business, and the military and intelligence apparatus.

In the opening words of the discussion paper issued in February by the government’s handpicked advisory panel: “The Australian Government is working to establish an Australian Universities Accord to drive lasting alignment between Australia’s high quality higher education system and national needs.”

These “national needs” refer to the private profit, geo-strategic and military requirements of the Australian capitalist class, particularly for vocational training to meet the narrow needs of employers, and for the dedication of research to commercial and war preparation purposes.

That was highlighted by the April visit of Universities Australia (UA) chief executive Catriona Jackson to Washington to commit Australian universities to the development of nuclear-powered submarines and other hi-tech weaponry for the AUKUS pact and US-led war preparations against China.

This focus on corporate profit and war plans necessarily involves denying students the essential social right to an all-round critical education, exposing them to the full richness and historical content of human thought, and depriving educators and researchers of the capacity to conduct genuinely socially-useful and scientifically-important teaching and research.

Nevertheless, the NTEU is urging university workers and students to support the Labor government’s review, just as the NTEU did with the last review conducted by the Rudd-Gillard government, which became the basis for the “education revolution’s” market-driven regime.

In an email to NTEU members, promoting the “must-read” report, NTEU president Alison Barnes declared: “As we head towards a major reform of the higher education sector, these findings make it impossible to ignore that our sector needs to change, and this is our chance to have a say on our future.”

However, the NTEU’s submission to the Accord panel is aligned with the Labor government’s pro-business objectives. It calls for a higher education sector that “provides the graduates with the necessary skill sets for future productivity.”

The NTEU bureaucrats have a long record of suppressing educators’ hostility to the increasing corporatisation of universities, even when they claim to oppose it. While striking rotten enterprise bargaining deals with individual university managements, all designed to facilitate restructuring, the NTEU machine has blocked any unified mobilisation against it.

Free trade giving way to hi-tech war

Nick Beams

During the decade of the 1930s, the Great Depression ushered in by the 1929 Wall Street crash was characterised by the formation of trade and currency blocs as all the major capitalist countries carried out a nationalist economic agenda.

German Economy and Climate Minister Robert Habeck, center, talks with Justice Minister Marco Buschmann, left, and Finance Minister Christian Lindner, right, in Berlin, Germany, Wednesday, April 19, 2023. [AP Photo/Markus Schreiber]

The struggle of each against all, everyone for himself and the devil take the hindmost, led to a collapse of global trade—the world market all but disappeared—and played a not insignificant role in creating the conditions for World War II.

As a result of this experience, one of the key components of the global economic framework designed by the US, as it emerged from the war as the dominant imperialist power, was the insistence that the restrictive measures of the disastrous 1930s could not be allowed to return and free market principles had to be developed and extended.

This agenda is now being reversed by the US through the increase in tariffs and other restrictions in the crucial area of high-tech development. The latter is vital for the development of green industrial processes and more advanced computer chips necessary for the advancement of communications and artificial intelligence.

The Biden administration is providing major subsidies to high-tech firms which base all or part of their operations in the US. Its actions are bringing counteractions by other major powers leading to what has been described as a global subsidies race.

As an article in the Financial Times (FT) last week put it: “Billion-dollar packages including subsidies and investment incentives such as the US’s Inflation Reduction Act and Chips Act are already shaping business decisions and threatening a global subsides race.”

Referring to the rise of protectionist measures, it continued, “this wave of national industrial policies contrasts with decades of globalisation underpinned by free trade.” According to a survey of economists by the World Economic Forum (the organisers of the annual Davos gathering), “most experts think this paradigm shift will become the de facto approach to economic policy over the coming years.”

The level of tensions generated by the US measures is indicated by the remarks of Germany’s vice-chancellor and economics minister Robert Habeck to a business conference last month.

“It’s like a declaration of war,” he said. “The [Americans] want to have the semiconductors, they want the solar industry, they want the hydrogen industry, they want the electrolysers.”

In response, the FT reported, the European Union, Japan and South Korea have introduced subsidies for their high-tech and clean energy industries.

As Habeck remarked: “If we don’t keep up, they’ll have them [the key industries] and we won’t. That’s the brutal reality.”

The latest US measures are the acceleration of a trend going back to the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2008, which was the focus of a one-day conference on geo-economic fragmentation convened by the International Monetary Fund in May.

In her opening remarks to the gathering, IMF deputy managing director Gita Gopinath said the present situation did not develop overnight.

“As momentum for traditional trade reforms stalled, trade restrictions and other distortive measures began to spread, especially in the aftermath of the global financial crisis,” she said.

The process accelerated because of the pandemic and the war in Ukraine which had “heightened concerns about national security and supply chain resilience.”

“These changes have ushered in the beginning of a new paradigm in the global economic order—one that shifts away from decades of global economic integration and in which inward- and alliance-oriented policies are gaining traction. Let me be clear, this is not just rhetoric. The early signs of fragmentation are taking root,” Gopinath said. She pointed to a “surge” in the number of trade and investment restrictions particularly in the high-tech sector.

The paradigm shift in the functioning of the global economy has attracted the attention of a number of economists concerned about where it is heading. Adam Posen, the president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, has been one of the most vocal critics of what he calls “zero-sum economics.”

In an article in the Spring edition of the Foreign Policy magazine this year, he noted that the US was attacking the very basis of the international trade and investment order which it had designed.

“Along with members of Congress from both parties, the Biden administration has sought to take away production from others in a zero-sum way—explicitly from China and a bit more courteously from others,” Posen wrote.

Drawing out the implications of US attempts to impose “arbitrary export and import restrictions on China that extend to other countries,” he continued: “In order for such restrictions to succeed the United States would have to become a commercial police state on an unprecedented scale.”

He opposed the claim that the Inflation Reduction Act and the Chips Act would accelerate US growth beyond an initial spending bump, stating: “They will not revolutionise US competitiveness, and their implementation will most likely enrich small pockets of protected businesses rather than making a dent in reducing inequality. … What these programs will not do is accelerate the adoption of technology.”

He expanded on the central themes of the article in an interview with the FT last week.

Posen explained that what made the present version of industrial policy worse “isn’t just that they are large-scale and wasteful. The first big problem is viewing industrial competition as zero sum; the idea that you can create lasting competitive advantage so that your locally headquartered companies dominate an industry. The reason that’s bad is because a) it doesn’t usually work, and b) it just invites retaliation.”

In a caustic comment, he noted: “Russia and North Korea have worked very hard to be self-sufficient, with limited supply chains, and it has not worked out well for them.”

The real damage from decoupling and the conflict between the US, China and other economic blocs would be reduced productivity growth.

“So, if we continue down this path, we’re looking at a meaningfully bleaker outlook for average growth in the world,” he said.

Posen also referenced the experiences of the pandemic when hoarding by the major economics, including the US, resulted in the slow dissemination of vaccines and quality medical equipment to the developing world.

“There is no reason to think, barring significant changes in policy … that it will be any different with green technology.”

The analysis from the IMF and economists amid warnings that the policies initiated by the US can only bring about lower growth in an already fragile world economy raise the question: why are they being implemented?

The analysis by Leon Trotsky of the deepening trade wars of the 1930s points to the essential driving forces.

The idea of a planned or corporative state capitalism remained a lie, he wrote, insofar as it set itself the task of constructing a harmonious national economy on the basis of private property.

“But it is a menacing reality insofar as it is a question of concentrating all the economic forces of the nation for the preparation of a new war. This work is proceeding now with full steam. A new great war is knocking at the gates.”

The same can be said today. Much has changed since Trotsky wrote these lines in 1934. But the fundamental contradictions of capitalism, arising from private property and that between global economy and the system of rival nation state not only remain but have intensified and are threatening to plunge humanity into another global conflict.

Costa Rican workers strike against health care privatization

Andrea Lobo

Hundreds of workers and students joined a “Great March” against the ongoing privatization of the Costa Rican Social Security Fund (CCSS), known as the “Caja”, which manages the public health sector and pension system. The protest follows two strikes by health care workers on July 5 and 13 and a massive march in defense of public universities on June 21, in which thousands of workers and students participated.

Demonstration in defense of the Social Security Fund, or Caja, in San Jose, Costa Rica, July 15

The current upsurge of struggles in the Central American country of 5 million is part of a growing offensive by the working class to resist the attacks by the ruling elites against living standards and social rights amid rampant inflation, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the Ukraine war and economic stagnation. There have been significant strikes and protests in recent weeks by health care workers in Argentina, Brazil, Britain and other countries, while major struggles continue in France against pension cuts and Sri Lanka against the IMF austerity cuts.

Often portrayed as a beacon of democracy and stability in Central America, Costa Rica is one of the most unequal countries in the world, and the ruling elite is sharply escalating a decades-long effort to dismantle the universal systems of public health care, pensions and education. 

Particularly since the 1980s, these institutions have been decimated in terms of infrastructure, finances and personnel.

Merceditas at July 15 march

Merceditas, a nurse at the Mental Health and Psychiatry Hospital, explained to the World Socialist Web Site at the demonstration, “We are in no condition to privatize the medical services. This is a plot that has been intentionally provoked to say the Caja is bankrupt. It is not. We, the workers, maintain it with our salaries. Every two weeks it gets deducted automatically from our paycheck. The issue is that the government refuses to pay its debt to the Caja and forgives the large corporate tax evaders.” 

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, she said, “we gave our lives and continue to give our lives. We will continue to give everything. We are very responsible workers and will always be there for the patient. Costa Rican nurses have come out very hurt, with all the human pain we have endured and continue to suffer.” She added, “for three years, they have not raised our wages and everything keeps getting more expensive, gas, food; everything goes up and we need to live.” 

Doris, a nutritionist with 30 years experience at the Caja, said to the WSWS: “If you are unemployed and do some paperwork, you can get insured by the state, even if you don’t contribute 5 colones, you have the right to be treated. This struggle is for the Caja to have the economic solvency to attend everyone equally and for the quality to improve.”

As a result of decades of austerity diktats from the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, workers have been increasingly compelled to spend more for services in the growing private insurance services, clinics, pensions and schools. 

Over three-fourths of Costa Ricans now frequently use private health care services, given the long waiting times of months and even years for tests, medical evaluations, treatments and surgeries under the Caja. The vast majority of Costa Ricans, however, still rely on the more than 30 hospitals and 1,000 local clinics (EBAIS) under the Caja. 

Jonathan, a private sector worker at the protest, explained: “I am receiving treatments by the Caja so I’m supporting them. We are living through a crisis and they want to cut everything with scissors. This is bad because it creates economic stagnation; there is no employment. Costa Ricans need to understand that we need skilled professionals for everything, with a good salary, quality people that earn well. If you make enough to pay a private clinic, that is only for a few tests, not all, and much less a surgery… We must fight.”

University of Costa Rica students demonstrate in defense of the CCSS. Mariel and Luis, on the left

Luis, a University of Costa Rica (UCR) student, explained that all sectors of workers and youth need to defend the Caja. “Many of us can’t afford a private hospital and when we graduate from college and have a decent job, we will be able to pay to the Caja and strengthen the health care system so that workers who have not had the same opportunities as us, those who have to work in extremely precarious employment, have access to an institution like the Caja, to be insured with decent healthcare and a living pension.”

In Costa Rica, 12 percent of the workforce is unemployed and 44 percent work informally, which means they are unaffiliated to the CCSS. “These attacks,” Luis added, “will only make it harder for all these people struggling and the next generations to have access to such basic rights as a decent health care and pensions, because we don’t live in an egalitarian society.”

Mariel, another UCR student at the demonstration, added: “This is an issue that will require a lot of strength [to counter]. We need people to get angry, to understand the gravity of the situation in the Caja, the gravity of the employment situation, of public education, how the government is going crazy with all this. It’s necessary for people to get involved, for the student and workers movements to rise up against these moves.” 

In 2018, a three-month strike by public sector workers —the longest strike in the country’s history— led to a general strike and the largest demonstrations seen in decades to oppose regressive taxes and attacks on social spending. The government of then-president Carlos Alvarado (Citizens’ Action Party; PAC) responded with police repression, the ramming through of the regressive value-added tax, spending ceilings, pension cuts and other social attacks, as well as a draconian anti-strike law. 

Regardless, 2018, 2019 and 2020 were characterized by mass strikes, widespread roadblocks by workers in the most impoverished suburbs and rural communities, and occupations by students against these attacks. But each time the trade unions and their pseudo-left apologists, chiefly the Broad Front, have betrayed these struggles. These layers of the upper middle class have consistently prioritized keeping a seat at the table and enjoying the revolving door between unions, politics, posts in the bureaucracy, NGOs and academia.

In particular, the Broad Front, which joined the government of Alvarado, has played a key role in channeling social opposition behind the trade union bureaucracy and talks with the government and the same political forces that have rammed through one wave of cuts after the other.

A young private sector worker at the march, Diego, said the government is seeking to “create a failed state so that many sectors of society have little incentive to defend what is already failing; the health care system is failing them, the education system is failing them. What incentive is there to respond to the call by a trade union when they feel that it’s not working, that political movements are unable to make it work.” He added, “This is leading to a situation similar to other countries in the region where policies are imposed by force.” 

Alvarado’s former finance minister, Rodrigo Chaves, was elected President in 2022 as candidate of the new Social Democratic Progress Party. A former World Bank official, Chaves had already made clear that the CCSS was his main target, declaring shortly after the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020 that “the country could not go bankrupt to save it.” 

Since coming to power, he has made repeated attacks on the CCSS, public health—including support for anti-vaccine activists—the universities, the Bank of Costa Rica and other public institutions. A Public Employment Law came into effect in March establishing a “global wage” level for most workers in public institutions, eliminating most benefits, wage adjustments to inflation and seniority won in numerous struggles in the 20th century. The measures will freeze salaries for decades until the “global salary” creeps up each year and matches their current wages. 

Workers at the march, as well as several analysts, have indicated that these measures are unconstitutional and will disproportionately impact those workers at lower wage levels. Moreover, this will accelerate privatization, creating incentives for employees and users to switch to the private sector.

One of the triggers for the recent protests in defense of the Caja was the announcement that about one-third of health care employees, some 20,000, have been deemed “non-essential” and will be deprived of their “exclusive” status, which comprises higher wages and benefits. Moreover, the government has openly refused to meet its obligation to pay its US$5.5 billion “debt” to the CCSS derived from the care for uninsured patients, as part of the “solidarity” model established constitutionally since the institution was created in 1941. 

While the corporate media and Chaves have claimed that public sector workers are privileged and their relatively higher wages are the cause of government debt and “necessary” social cuts in general, his government and its predecessors have acted as puppets of the international and local banks that profit from debt payments, as well as the corporations enjoying tax breaks and cheap labor in special “free zones.”

According to the Economy Ministry’s 2023 proposal, 47 percent of the national budget will be assigned to paying debt holders, which has been the fastest growing component for years, while only 22.5 percent will go to wages, benefits and pensions of public employees.

US flying blind amid warnings of new COVID-19 surge

Evan Blake

By multiple early indications, the United States has entered yet another surge of the COVID-19 pandemic, with wastewater levels, emergency room visits for COVID-19 and test positivity rates all on the rise across much of the country.

Between June 24 and July 12, the Biobot wastewater tracker showed a 46 percent increase nationally, concentrated in the South and on the coasts. According to one infectious disease modeler, these wastewater levels translate to roughly 280,000 Americans presently being infected with COVID-19 each day and rising.

The latest data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show that there were 10.7 percent more emergency department visits for COVID-19 nationally last week compared to the previous week, with Alaska, Florida and Hawaii reporting the highest rates of growth. CDC data also show that test positivity rates nationally were up by 0.7 percent last week, with Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas and Washington logging rates above 7 percent.

If these data continue along current trends, this will be the first surge in the US since the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Biden administration ended their COVID-19 public health emergency (PHE) declarations in early May.

These premature and unscientific decisions prompted numerous world governments to stop virtually all surveillance of the pandemic. In the US, the CDC abruptly ended all COVID-19 case reporting, while the Biden administration disbanded the White House COVID Response Team and CDC Director Rochelle Walensky resigned from her post.

As a result of the ending of COVID-19 case reporting, it is impossible to correlate early warning signs like wastewater data and emergency room admissions with national or local statistics on the number of COVID-19 cases. These simply do not exist, because the means to track them have been systematically dismantled.

In response to this total abrogation of public health, every corporate media outlet in the world largely stopped covering the pandemic altogether, a sinister form of silent propaganda meant to provide cover for the ongoing crimes of the capitalist ruling elites.

On Monday, New York Times columnist David Leonhardt broke this silence with a dishonest and evidently mistimed editorial that cherry-picked a single data point in just four countries to falsely proclaim that “the pandemic really is over.”

Leonhardt is the Times’ pandemic minimizer-in-chief. Through his widely read newsletter The Morning, which was launched in May 2020 to serve as a daily pandemic update, he has repeatedly declared the pandemic over prematurely, discouraged masking and other mitigation measures, downplayed the severity of COVID-19 in children and immunocompromised people, erased the experience of millions suffering from Long COVID, and sought to elevate individualism as the guiding principle of public health policy.

Leonhardt’s pragmatic, shortsighted and unscientific views epitomize and guide those of the Times’ largely affluent middle-class subscribers, and have helped craft and justify every criminal pandemic policy of the Biden administration over the past two-and-a-half years. Earlier in the pandemic, Biden himself stated that he was one of Leonhardt’s readers.

Titled, “A Positive Covid Milestone,” Monday’s newsletter cites data indicating that excess deaths in the United States, India, Britain and Brazil are currently at pre-pandemic levels. From this single data point, Leonhardt draws the sweeping and false conclusions that “[t]he pandemic is finally over,” COVID-19 is no longer “a dire threat to large numbers of people” and “the virus has turned into an ordinary illness.”

Leonhardt, who is widely loathed by principled epidemiologists and scientists who have sought to educate the public throughout the pandemic, was lambasted on Twitter for his latest piece of drivel. One of the most widely shared rebuttals of Leonhardt came from health law scholar and bioethicist Blake Murdoch of the University of Alberta.

“False,” Murdoch wrote. “If the pandemic was truly over, excess deaths would run significantly below historical averages for quite a while, reflecting all the people who didn’t die because they already died prematurely of covid. Many people are still dying.”

In addition to drawing sweeping conclusions from this single data point, the fundamental fallacy of Leonhardt’s argument is its nationalist perspective. By definition, a pandemic is a global phenomenon whose development is not determined by any single country.

When examined at the global level, the data point that Leonhardt cites—excess deaths—clearly remains highly elevated, with The Economist estimating that nearly 9,000 people continue to die each day globally above pre-pandemic figures. In total, there are now 24.1 million excess deaths, with nearly one million added to the death toll every three months.

Further, the pandemic cannot be measured solely by excess deaths. In this respect, Leonhardt’s cherry-picking of this data point underscores the dishonesty of his writing. The words “variant,” “viral evolution,” “Long COVID,” “cases,” “testing” and “wastewater” are all omitted from his article, because each of these facets of the pandemic shows that it is ongoing and remains a threat to masses of people globally.

Alongside the evident surge in the US, Japan is now in the grips of its ninth wave of the pandemic, centered on the poorest island, Okinawa. Hospitals are once again strained to capacity, with one healthcare worker telling the Okinawa Times, “The situation is not so much a medical crisis as a collapse of the system.”

This follows China’s massive second wave of the pandemic in recent months after the disastrous lifting of its Zero-COVID elimination strategy last winter.

For those suffering from Long COVID—now estimated at roughly 20 million Americans and potentially hundreds of millions more people globally—the pandemic is an ongoing nightmare. As he has done throughout the pandemic, Leonhardt ignores and covers up this hidden iceberg of masses consigned to a fate of perpetual disability with no end in sight.

Finally, contrary to the self-deluded view of the Times and the Biden administration that “the pandemic really is over” and “the virus has turned into an ordinary illness,” principled scientists remain deeply concerned about the ongoing dangers of viral evolution.

Speaking at last month’s American Society for Virology conference, noted evolutionary biologist Trevor Bedford stressed that SARS-CoV-2 is “evolving just as fast as it was in 2021, evolving about two-and-a-half times faster than influenza H3N2… and is not really showing signs of slowing down.”

In one of the sharpest warnings against the flippant outlook epitomized by Leonhardt, last month biologist Arijit Chakravarty told the World Socialist Web Site, “Not only is the pandemic very much not over, but by creating the impression that the pandemic is over in the face of rampant viral spread and continuing rapid viral evolution, we are essentially sticking our chin out and asking the virus to do its worst.”

Chakravarty, whose research team has continuously been proven correct in its pandemic projections, stated emphatically:

I can’t predict the outcome of the next wave. I can’t predict the outcome of the next five waves. But, at the rate that we are going, a prediction can be made with a high degree of certainty that something bad will happen sooner than later along these lines. Keep this pandemic running for another five years, and you’ll face a debacle on a scale that you haven’t yet seen. That’s a given.

Throughout the pandemic, the New York Times has provided essential ideological justification for the American ruling class’s homicidal profits-over-lives policies and the destruction of public health. This began with Thomas Friedman’s infamous declaration that “the cure cannot be worse than the disease,” picked up by Trump as his “herd immunity” mantra. The baton was soon passed to Leonhardt, whose latest column is one of dozens filled with misinformation.

At the same time, the Times, the Washington Post and numerous other outlets gave credence to the Wuhan Lab Lie concocted by the fascist Steve Bannon in January 2020. This conspiracy theory, designed to deflect anger towards China for the US ruling elite’s policies that have killed well over 1.1 million Americans, was most recently given an antisemitic spin by Democratic presidential hopeful Robert Kennedy, Jr., which the Times and other media outlets have downplayed.

Hundreds of refugees missing near the Canary Islands

Martin Kreickenbaum

Three boats with a total of more than 300 refugees are missing in the Atlantic Ocean off the Canary Islands. A search has so far been unsuccessful. As a result of this new horror, the official number of refugees who have drowned in the Mediterranean and Atlantic while attempting to reach European Union (EU) countries this year has risen to more than 2,000, and the actual death toll is undoubtedly much higher.

Photo from a migrant boat [Photo by Sara Prestianni / Flickr / CC BY 2.0]

The responsibility for this mass death lies entirely with the EU leaders: in their refugee deterrence, they have no compunction about allowing people to drown to prevent others from fleeing to Europe.

Dozens if not hundreds of refugees who set out on the dangerous sea passage but don’t reach their destination are added to the registry of the dead each week.

A spokesman for the Spanish refugee aid organization Caminando Fronteras (Walking Borders) reported that two boats, each carrying around 60 refugees, left Senegal on June 23. Following that, an even larger boat with 200 refugees on board, including many children, ventured on the more than 1,700 kilometer-long route to the Canary Islands from the Senegalese coastal village of Kafountine on June 27. Caminando Fronteras fears “another catastrophe.”

Family members of the refugees informed the aid organization after contact with the boats was lost. A search initiated by the Spanish Maritime Rescue has so far been unsuccessful. The rescuers found a boat with 78 refugees on board last Monday, but according to Caminando Fronteras, it is not one of the three missing boats. Reports that the 200 refugees were found on Monday also turned out to be false.

According to the Senegalese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the 260 refugees rescued from distress in Moroccan waters between June 28 and July 9 are also passengers from other boats, not the missing ones.

The search for the refugees sheds light on one of the deadliest sea routes in the world. The EU’s brutal closed-border policy forces refugees to choose longer and more dangerous routes to escape war and misery. The Canary Islands, a Spanish autonomous community and archipelago, are only 100 nautical miles from the Moroccan coast. However, many refugee boats depart further south from Senegal, Gambia or Guinea.

The crossings take between one and ten days depending on the length of the route. An EU report on the West African route asserts: “Usually, after only a few days, migrants face significant problems such as food, water and fuel shortages.” Nevertheless, the EU has drastically reduced sea rescue efforts in this region, as well as in the central Mediterranean.

The Spanish government recognized Morocco as the administrative power of Western Sahara in early 2022, and has since shifted responsibility for sea rescue missions to the Moroccan coast guard. However, it is far less well equipped and takes far more time than its Spanish counterpart to reach the people in distress at sea.

At the end of June, an inflatable boat that had left Dakhla in Western Sahara with 60 refugees on board was in distress at sea. After a Spanish reconnaissance plane spotted the stranded boat, it took more than twelve hours for a Moroccan coast guard patrol boat to arrive at the scene of the accident. Only 24 people were rescued.

“The people in this inflatable boat were hoping to be rescued in Spanish waters for more than twelve hours in vain,” Helena Maleno Garzon, founder of Caminando Fronteras, said in a social media post.

The aid organization Alarm Phone, which accepts and forwards emergency calls from refugees in distress at sea, also strongly criticized the expansion of the Moroccan area of responsibility for sea rescue. “This is very worrying, because the Moroccan authorities have repeatedly shown an unwillingness to carry out a safe and rapid rescue–often at the expense of human lives,” a September 2022 report said. In addition, Morocco does not send rescue boats, but warships, and deports the apprehended refugees to the countries from which they fled.

Four refugees die every day in the Atlantic

On the route to the Canary Islands alone, according to Caminando Fronteras, 778 refugees have drowned in 28 boat accidents in the first six months of this year. And this figure does not include the 300 missing refugees. Every day, more than four people die in the Atlantic. Between 2020 and 2022, more than 7,500 refugees drowned on their way to the Canary Islands. With the total number of registered arrivals being 60,000, the death rate is more than 10 percent.

Caminando Fronteras' figures significantly exceed those of the International Organization for Migration's (IOM) Missing Migrants Project, as it also includes information from family members who are missing their relatives. The IOM, which has so far registered “only” 200 drowned refugees on the Atlantic route for this year and cites official figures, itself says that it is “a cautious estimate” and that the actual number of victims is far higher.

Last Wednesday, eight bodies were recovered from a wooden boat off the coast of Senegal, while 155 refugees were rescued in the incident. A few days earlier, a boat with 57 refugees on board capsized, of whom only 50 could be rescued. At the beginning of July, 51 refugees, including three children, perished trying to cross from southern Morocco to the Canary Islands. Motor damage caused the inflatable boat to drift in the Atlantic for more than a week. Rescuers found only four survivors.

Mehdi Lahlou, migration expert at the National Institute of Statistics and Applied Economy in Morocco, told Deutsche Welle: “Due to increased controls in northern Morocco, Libya and Tunisia, migrants from the countries of northwest Africa are increasingly choosing the route via the Canary Islands.” In view of the risks of the crossing, however, professional and coordinated sea rescue is absolutely necessary. In fact, rescue missions are launched much too late, poorly coordinated and poorly equipped. Caminando Fronteras therefore insists that both the Spanish and Moroccan authorities “instead of defending the right to life are guided only by the geopolitical interest of controlling and limiting immigration.”

EU agreement with Tunisia

The EU is deliberately shifting the responsibility for sea rescue to the countries from which the refugee boats leave. This policy prevents refugees rescued at sea from having to be brought to European ports, and thereby accepts the deaths of thousands of refugees. In recent years, the EU has intensified cooperation with the Libyan government and Libyan warlords, resulting in refugees being detained, mistreated and sold as slaves in Libyan detention camps under horrendous conditions.

Most recently, the EU reached an agreement with the Tunisian government on refugee deterrence. This was preceded by high-level visits by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen together with Italy's fascist Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, as well as a visit by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz together with French President Emmanuel Macron.

They met with Tunisian President Kais Saied, who only a short time prior was being criticised by the EU Parliament for human rights violations and his authoritarian style of government. The EU has pledged at least €100 million [$US112 million] to Saied for refugee deterrence and intends to deliver boats and other equipment.

Immediately following the visits, the Tunisian authorities began fulfilling their assigned role as the guard dog of Europe’s external borders with brutality and ruthlessness. Hundreds of refugees in the Tunisian port city of Sfax were transported in buses and deposited in the Tunisian-Libyan or Tunisian-Algerian border area without any supplies. An eyewitness told AFP that two convoys of refugees had been brought to the border region. Youssouf Bilayer, a 25-year-old Ivorian, reported that the refugees were “transported in six buses and dropped off in the forest. They beat us up to get us out of the vehicle.”

The human rights organization Human Rights Watch (HRW) estimates that there are many children among the hundreds of such displaced refugees. If they don't get help as soon as possible, their lives will be in serious danger. According to HRW, several people have already died. A heavily pregnant woman from Guinea died when her contractions started as a result of the stress, and her baby also died with her.

Mamadou, who had fled Gambia, spoke to AFP on the phone. “If you can send the Red Cross, help us–otherwise we will die. There's nothing here. There is no food, no water.” The next day Mamadou was no longer available. According to HRW, the Tunisian security forces are systematically destroying the refugees’ mobile phones. The region is also extremely remote and militarized, making aid operations next to impossible. The Tunisian government is using this inhumane and murderous approach to obtain much-needed loans and financial aid from the EU.

Global heatwave exacerbates social crisis across US, Europe, Asia and Middle East

Bryan Dyne

Phoenix, Arizona, recorded its 19th consecutive day with high temperatures above 110 degrees Fahrenheit (43.3 degrees Celsius) on Tuesday, temperatures that are forecast to persist through Sunday. The town of Sanbao, China, registered a national record high temperature of 126 degrees Fahrenheit (52.2 C), shooting past a record 122 degrees Fahrenheit (50.3 C) set in 2015.

Two homeless men with ice on July 14, 2023 in downtown Phoenix, which hit 112 degrees that day, marking the city's 15th consecutive day of 110 degree-plus temperatures. [AP Photo/Matt York]

In Italy, temperatures shot past 107 degrees Fahrenheit (41.8 C) in Rome and 113 degrees Fahrenheit (45 C) in Sardinia. And at the Persian Gulf International Airport in Iran, the heat index soared to an unprecedented 152 degrees Fahrenheit (66.7 C).

The temperature records set Tuesday and those that have been set since the beginning of July are demonstrative of what is increasingly emerging as a “new normal” for the world’s climate. With the continual increase in the emission of greenhouse gases into Earth’s atmosphere (e.g., carbon dioxide, methane), more heat from sunlight is trapped and gives rise to the extreme weather phenomena—heat domes, polar vortexes, prolonged wildfires, torrential flooding, savage hurricanes—that are now directly attributed to global warming.

The immediate cause of the current temperatures are four “heat domes” that have currently centralized over the southern United States, the North Atlantic, North Africa and the Middle East and South Asia. Heat domes are immense high pressure systems filled with hot air that prevent colder air from coming in and reducing temperatures. In addition to heatwaves, heat domes exacerbate wildfires, droughts and other heat-related weather disasters.

The toll on human life is immense. There were more than 61,000 heatstroke and heat-related deaths in Europe last summer, according to a study in Nature Medicine published last Friday. Data from the National Weather Service in the United States shows that deaths from extreme heat are eight times higher than deaths caused by hurricanes over the last decade.

Heat deaths particularly impact workers forced on the job in unsafe and deadly conditions. Thousands of migrant workers in Qatar, many of whom were construction workers building stadiums and other facilities for last year’s world cup, have died from heatstroke and other related illnesses such as kidney failure from dehydration, according to separate research by the journal Cardiology and the Guardian. A 2021 study by the Los Angeles Times found that nearly 400 people die from heat in California each year, the majority of them among the elderly, the homeless and construction, agricultural and warehouse workers.

Just last month, USPS letter carrier Eugene Gates Jr. died on the job the same day temperatures in Dallas-Fort Worth spiked to 113 degrees Fahrenheit (45 C). His story is among the many thousands of workers in construction, auto, logistics and numerous other industries being forced into unsafe and deadly conditions without safety equipment for the profits of their employers. All of these deaths have gone largely unreported by the corporate media.

And the scale of death is only going to increase as global temperatures continue to rise. The temperature noted above in Iran in particular is a warning that portions of Earth’s surface may become uninhabitable to human life in the near future. The temperature, humidity and other factors reached 92.7 degrees Fahrenheit (33.7 C) on what is known as the “wet bulb” temperature scale.

While not designed as a metric of how hot a given day feels, the scale estimates at what point the human body’s ability to cool itself, such as through radiating heat and sweating, stops working. That limit is 95 degrees wet-bulb Fahrenheit (35 C), which was almost reached in Iran. If carbon emissions continue unabated, large portions of South Asia and the Middle East could reach these inhospitable conditions regularly in the second half of the 21st century.

Shelter, rest and water are largely the solution to mitigating and preventing heat-related injuries and deaths, but the infrastructure to provide such things is largely crumbling, even, in fact especially, in the world’s richest countries. In Phoenix, Arizona, as a result of budget cuts for cooling centers and hydration stations, only one city-run cooling center for the metropolitan area’s homeless population remains open during the nighttime, when the lows only drop to 90 degrees Fahrenheit (32 C). Just last year, the county in which the city resides recorded 425 heat-related deaths. Alongside those are thousands of heat-related injuries, including simply standing on hot concrete while barefoot, which can result in second-degree burns in seconds.

The lack of infrastructure in Phoenix for workers and the poor to protect themselves against extreme weather is just one example of the class divide that exists surrounding climate change. The capitalists have caused the crisis and their loyal corporate media acolytes worked to suppress warnings about the dangers for decades, until the impacts were too apparent to ignore. Moreover, the wealthy have the resources to either survive extreme heat or frigid cold, or simply relocate elsewhere temporarily to avoid the impacts of the ecological crisis the social system which they defend caused.

The deaths caused by climate change are among the many ways the ruling elite expresses its indifference to the lives of workers. Just as with the coronavirus pandemic and the US/NATO war against Russia in Ukraine, no amount of suffering is allowed to get in the way of soaring Wall Street profits. Vast sums of money are spent for colossally destructive ends while an increasingly small pittance is given for the basic maintenance of social life.