50,000 foreclosures expected to be enforced in Greece this year

John Vassilopoulos

There has been a sharp upturn in electronic foreclosures in Greece, with 50,000 expected to take place this year. Electronic foreclosure is the process by which the assets of people with bank debt arrears or outstanding tax liabilities are forcibly auctioned off in specially created internet platforms. Last year saw 35,401 auctions.

Alongside the introduction of electronic foreclosures has been the systematic offloading of “non-performing loans” (NPLs) from the ledgers of Greek banks through the so-called Hercules Scheme.

Athens with the Acropolis (centre) [Photo by George E. Koronaios / CC BY-SA 4.0]

Initially introduced in October 2019 at the behest of the European Commission (EC), the scheme oversaw the transfer of bad loans by Greek banks to funds who in turn packaged the loans and sold them to investors as securities. Third-party entities acting on behalf of the funds, known as “servicers”, were set up to aggressively pursue debtors for the funder to make good on their acquisitions. By the end of 2022, the proportion of non-performing loans held by Greek banks was reduced from 42 percent to 8.2 percent.

According to recent figures, the NPL industry in Greece is managing 90 billion euros worth of loans which correspond to 2.4 million debtors—amounting to over a fifth of the country’s population! In the last five years only 800,000 debtors have come to a financial arrangement while more than a million are reportedly avoiding all contact with the servicer companies.

Electronic foreclosures have failed so far to deliver for the banks since being introduced in 2017.

In its Post-Programme Surveillance report for Spring 2024 published last month, the EC bemoaned the slow pace of foreclosures, stating that it “remains a difficult and laborious task.” In particular, it cited the backlog of foreclosures due to “low recoveries from collateral liquidations owing to the suspension of enforcement proceedings during the COVID-19 pandemic.” The EC complained of “delays in court procedures, a high ratio of unsuccessful auctions and the illiquid secondary market for NPLs are also slowing down the process.”

Konstantinos Mitsotakis’ conservative New Democracy (ND) government introduced legislation late last year to address these concerns. The laws formalised last year’s decision of Greece’s Supreme Court to allow servicers to be able to foreclose on properties even though they are not formally the debt titleholders. Prior to this ruling many legal challenges hinged on this point.

The new legislation built upon ND’s bankruptcy law passed in 2020, which did away with previous protections against a household’s primary residence being foreclosed.

At the last minute the new law was even amended so as not to incorporate the token provisions under the 2020 law for so-called “vulnerable households”. These were set at woefully paltry levels€7,000 euros or less for a single person with an additional €3,500 euros for each child up to a maximum of €21,000 euros. Even then the property is still essentially foreclosed with the family only able to remain in the property for a maximum of 12 years in exchange for paying rent. Even this was considered too big a burden on the profits of the NPL industry.

Countless stories in the media over the past few years have laid bare the devastation these foreclosures have wrought upon Greek working-class families. In May, a 49-year-old mother of two committed suicide after three attempts to foreclose on her house. A further attempt to auction the dead woman’s house off at the beginning of June was cancelled after the local outcry.

In an interview with the weekly satirical newspaper To Pontiki, lawyer Katerina Fragkaki laid bare the outright criminality with which foreclosures are carried out: “There are many instances where someone is officially certified as vulnerable, their property is auctioned off illegally and they insist on putting a vulnerable person out on the street. I have one such case. At the same time there are instances where they poison a family dog because when there is a dog at the property it makes the process harder to remove it.”

Fragkaki’s worst experience was with an 85-year-old bedridden woman: “When the officers of the court turned up at [her property] with the police I asked them for a delay due to the circumstances. They told me that the previous week they had evicted a cancer patient who was taken away in an ambulance.”

The most high-profile eviction case was that of Ioanna Kolovou, a retired journalist. She was evicted from her home along with her 28-year-old disabled son at the end of January this year. According to reports a large crowd gathered outside her home which was attacked with tear gas by the riot police who then arrested Kolovou and her son.

Previous attempts to evict her were forestalled, most notably in November 2022 after court officials and police were faced with protests.

At that time former Syriza (Coalition of the Radical Left) leader Alexis Tsipras visited Kolovou and cynically told her, “You’re holding on strong. The best security door is the solidarity of simple people.” He added, “we will see this sort of thing all the time because of the Mitsotakis government’s bankruptcy law,” while claiming that “during the bailout programme period, despite facing pressure from the troika, people’s first homes were protected.”

The exact opposite is true. Syriza’s tenure in power under Tsipras between 2015 and 2019 set the stage for the devastating attacks currently carried out by ND. Having been swept to power in January 2015 on an anti-austerity ticket, Syriza junked its mandate and signed a new austerity package in summer of 2015. In coalition with the far-right Independent Greeks for the next four years, Syriza went on to impose successive rounds of austerity even more brutal than its conservative and social democratic predecessors. This included junking their pre-election pledge of “No homes in the hands of bankers.”

A law passed by Syriza in 2015 set the ball rolling in phasing out the legislation that offered protection against foreclosures on primary residences by a deadline of December 31, 2018 for anyone seeking to apply for protection under that legislation. After that the protection ceased to apply to any new debtors while the protection afforded to cases pre-dating the cut-off point was only extended until the end of 2019.

By this time Syriza’s collaboration with the banks in seizing people’s homes was so pervasive that an estimated up to 1 million people—some of the poorest and amounting to one in 10 of the national population population—were impacted and further pauperised.

The same applies to electronic foreclosures, first introduced in 2017 at the behest of the EU and International Monetary Fund as part of the austerity package signed by Syriza.

Praising the measure in November of that year Syriza’s Finance Minister Euclid Tsakalotos stated: “electronic auctions are important, not just so we have good functioning banks but also for development and social reasons. For instance if banks can’t lend to small and medium sized businesses we have a problem. If banks can’t give money and new loans to young couples we have a social problem.”

The real “social problem” Tsakalotos had in mind was the fact that electronic foreclosures would minimise the disruption of real time auctions. Around the same time as Tsakalotos made his remarks riot police were called to a court in Athens to attack protesters disrupting repossessed properties from being auctioned off.

Syriza’s commitment to the offloading of non-performing loans to the mafia funds was made clear in September 2016, with then Finance Minister Giorgos Stathakis declaring that “the deregulation of the ‘red’ loans market was an explicit commitment in the memorandum agreement in August. To say otherwise would therefore be misleading.”

Zelensky government prepares further social cuts ahead of new debt negotiations

Jason Melanovski

The far-right, crisis-plagued government of President Volodymyr Zelensky is preparing to renegotiate its $20 billion debt with Eurobond holders as the pause on its payments following the outbreak of the NATO proxy war against Russia in February 2022 is set to end on August 1.

Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky speaks during a meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Kiev, Ukraine, Tuesday, May 14, 2024. [AP Photo/Ukrainian Presidential Press Office]

As the Kyiv Post reported, initial negotiations already took place June 3-14 between the Ukrainian government and its creditors, but they did not go well. Bondholders were reportedly unhappy with a cut of up to 60 percent of the original agreement. Should negotiations fail, after August 1, Ukraine will be forced to pay $3.75 billion by the end of 2024.

The various major bondholders are using the name Ad Hoc Creditor Committee during negotiations. The Committee consists of Amundi, BlackRock and Amia Capital, according to Bloomberg. PJT Partners Ltd. and Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP are participating as the group’s financial and legal advisors. These giant hedge funds as well as banks like JP Morgan Chase are deeply involved in the so called “reconstruction” effort in Ukraine, whose fundamental aim is to subordinate the economy and its working class directly to the predatory interests of finance capital. 

If negotiations do not end in Ukraine’s favor, the impoverished country of 32 million will greatly increase its chances of defaulting on foreign debt, threatening both the continuation of the imperialist-provoked war with Russia and the Zelensky government itself whose popularity ratings are already tanking due to a highly unpopular mobilization law passed earlier this year. As the Wilson Center think tank noted, while default is not certain “it is obvious that the longer the war drags on, the closer Ukraine will come to defaulting. Already in 2025, the national debt is projected to exceed 100 percent of Ukraine’s GDP.”

As a result of previous loan agreements with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Zelensky government is unable to offer any more favorable terms to its creditors, “otherwise International Monetary Fund (IMF) debt sustainability targets risk not being reached” the Kyiv Post reported. As a result, the government has been forced into a corner during negotiations as it must pay interest on its Eurobonds for three years all at once.

Last week, Ukraine received another $2.2 billion from the IMF as part of its participation in the Extended Fund Facility (EFF) program which lasts 48 months and will loan the country approximately $16 billion. Ukraine is now the second largest debtor to the IMF after Egypt. 

These agreements entail mass privatizations, further reductions in already minimal social spending and various anti-corruption “reforms” demanded by Western imperialism. Despite their title, such “anti-corruption” efforts are essentially a means to insert Western elites into dictating the social and economic decisions of the indebted governments.

The severity of the debt crisis is shaking up the already crisis-ridden NATO-backed Zelensky government and threatens to undermine the war effort. For the past year, the Zelensky regime has been dealing with a severe manpower and ammunition shortage at the front as it continues to lose territory to Russia.

Earlier this week, the Ukrainska Pravda reported that Zelensky would soon replace the country’s Prime Minister Denis Shmigal, who had taken a leading role in negotiating with the IMF and assuring Ukraine’s compliance with its various agreements.

The longest-serving Prime Minister in post-Soviet Ukraine, Shmigal was first appointed Prime Minister in 2020 following the resignation of Oleksiy Honcharuk, who made international news in October 2019 when he attended a neo-Nazi rock concert in Kiev.

While much of the article attributed Shmigal’s potential dismissal to mere personality and power conflicts between him and Zelensky, it also cited a sense of great nervousness within the Zelensky regime over the implications of a number of “reform” agreements with both the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the United States.

According to Ukrainska Pravda, it was Shmigal’s “government that signed memorandums of commitment with the IMF and other international structures. And what’s bad is that the government was the addressee of the so-called ‘reform plan’ that the White House sent to donors and the government of Ukraine.”

It went on to add that by sacrificing Shmigal, the Zelensky government hopes its foreign creditors will be more open to new negotiations.

Shmigal is likely to be replaced by First Deputy Prime Minister Yulia Sviridenko who is reportedly close to Zelensky’s wife. Sviridenko is also viewed as “100 percent loyal” by Zelensky’s powerful aide Andriy Yermak. Reports suggested that Yermak already played a major role in forcing out the former Ukrainian commander in chief, Valery Zaluzhny in February.

The infighting within the Zelensky regime is fundamentally a symptom of the ongoing NATO proxy war in Ukraine, which has cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers and created over 6 million refugees, while devastating the economy already ranked as Europe’s poorest prior to the war.

The extent to which the war has further impoverished Ukrainian society was underlined last week by the head of the Ukrainian parliament’s Committee on Social Policy and Veterans’ Rights, Galyna Tretiakova.

In a rare official acknowledgement of the social disaster in Ukraine, Tretiakova stated, “We have a catastrophic ratio of people who are considered poor. In fact, the war has thrown us back 16 years in terms of overcoming the problem of poverty.” A World Bank report released last month indicated that the number of people living in poverty in Ukraine had grown by about 1.8 million since 2020, increasing to almost a third of the entire population at 29 percent.

In total, 9 million Ukrainians were living in poverty as of last year, while the country’s overall population has dropped precipitously from 40 million to 32 million. These figures do not take into account the immense loss of life among Ukrainian soldiers, which is estimated at well over half a million now.

The report also showed that the increase in poverty was driven by skyrocketing unemployment. A fifth of working adults have lost their jobs following the outbreak of full-scale war in February 2022. One in four Ukrainians surveyed did not have enough money to buy food at some point in June 2023, according to the World Bank report.

Amidst this social disaster, the Zelensky government, seeking to both finance the war effort and placate its international creditors, is preparing further cuts to social spending. Ukraine’s Minister of Social Policy Oksana Zholnovych declared last week, “We have taken on an excessive number of social obligations, social payments, which cannot always be supported by financial resources. And this imbalance entails a huge number of judgments that cannot be fulfilled in terms of the economy’s ability to cover such expenses.”

Already, Ukraine spends more on its military than on social spending, but, according to Zholnovych, the government now has to further “revise the philosophy of social payments” and “optimize” them. 

While it is as yet unclear exactly how the Zelensky regime plans to cut social spending further, Zholnovych told UNN that a draft law had already been prepared to revise social payments as Ukraine continues its necessary “reforms” to fulfill its obligations to the IMF and Western imperialism.

UAE imposes life sentences on 43 defendants in second-largest trial in its history

Jean Shaoul

On Wednesday, a court in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), following a mass trial of 84 defendants, sentenced 43 dissidents to life in prison for operating what it said was a Muslim Brotherhood group that aimed to commit attacks in the country.

The Abu Dhabi Federal Court of Appeal handed down lesser sentences of 10 to 15 years to 10 others, dismissed the cases against 24 and acquitted just one person. The fate of the remaining defendants remains unclear. It convicted six companies of money laundering to support a terrorist organisation.

Abu Dhabi Federal Court of Appeal [Photo: UAE Ministry of Justice]

Many of the 84 defendants, now in in their 50s, 60s and older, include a senior member of the ruling family in the northern emirate of Ras Al-Khaimah, lawyers, academics, writers, former government employees, a television presenter and activists known as the “UAE84”. They were convicted a decade ago in the UAE’s largest-ever mass trial held in the aftermath of the 2011 Arab Spring.

The court, in that earlier trial in 2013 of 94 people who had called in an open letter for democratic reforms, including an elected Parliament with legislative powers, had sentenced them to 10 years imprisonment. In 2014, a United Nations working group found that their convictions had been “based on charges of acts that would fall under the rights to freedom of expression and of assembly,” and that their detention had been “arbitrary.”

Due for release last year, the defendants were charged with new offences relating to the same events under legislation passed in 2014, using new legislation retrogressively based on double jeopardy—trying people for the same offence twice. Confident that it had the support of the US and other major powers, the UAE announced the new charges during COP28, the UN climate talks held in Dubai last November-December.

The trial was a travesty of justice. The defendants had restricted access to case material and information and limited legal assistance, with the defence lawyers banned from sharing the details of the indictment even with their own clients. The trial judges directed witness testimony and held the hearings in secrecy. There were credible allegations of serious abuse and ill-treatment. Some of the defendants had protested prolonged solitary confinement and other abusive detention conditions, including assaults and the failure to provide them with prescribed medications.

Family members told Amnesty International, “Nobody has read the court files. Nobody has seen them. We’re forbidden from attending. And the attorneys are under strict order not to cooperate with the prisoners or their families, and not to give them full, transparent information.”

Joey Shea, UAE researcher at Human Rights Watch (HRW), said, “This unfair mass trial is a farce, and the allegations of torture and gross fair trial violations lay bare the UAE’s hollow rule of law and utter lack of access to justice.” She made a forlorn appeal for the UAE’s imperialist allies, the US, UK and the European Union, to “urgently call for an end to these abuses and for the release of human rights activists.”

This sham trial has attracted little publicity in the international media. One can only imagine the furore that would have erupted if this had happened in Iran, with the Biden administration and its allies spreading the news far and wide. But the UAE has close political and economic relations with Washington, which rarely criticises its atrocious human rights record.

Abu Dhabi has installed a vast surveillance system across the city purchased from an Israeli-owned security company. Its Falcon Eye surveillance system “links thousands of cameras spread across the city, as well as thousands of other cameras installed at facilities and buildings in the emirate.”

UAE citizens, less than 15 percent of the 9.7 million population, have no political rights. The government clamps down on freedom of speech and freedom of the press. Local media are censored to prevent criticism of the government, government officials or royal families governing the seven states that constitute the UAE. Anyone who dares criticise the unelected government is detained and imprisoned, and their families subject to harassment by the state security apparatus. The Emirati authorities hold at least 26 prisoners of conscience.

The state maintains capital punishment and discriminates against women, migrants and LGBT individuals. Earlier this week, Tori Towey, a 28-year-old Irish woman from Ireland who works in the UAE as an airline cabin crew member, was charged with “attempting suicide” and abusing alcohol after she was attacked and left with severe bruising and other injuries in a violent incident. She was only released and allowed to leave the country after the Irish government intervened on her behalf.

The 8.2 million non-nationals have even fewer rights. Most are labourers working without the protection of a minimum wage and under the laxest safety standards for outdoor work in the Gulf region. In the peak summer months, the Emirati government limits its protection measures to a ban on outdoor physical labour during just 2.5 hours in mid-afternoon, even though evidence shows that outdoor workers face significant health dangers from the heat for at least half the year.

The UAE plays a crucial role in American imperialism’s plans to undermine Iran and dominate the resource-rich region as “a long-established partner in security and intelligence matters,” while helping the US stave off Chinese dominance in Africa by outspending Beijing in return for diplomatic protection at the United Nations. Abu Dhabi joined the NATO-led intervention to topple Colonel Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, where it continues to support the forces of General Khalifa Hiftar in the Benghazi region in opposition to the UN-recognized government in Tripoli. It financed, sponsored and trained proxy forces to overthrow the regime of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

But the UAE is increasingly, along with Saudi Arabia, pursuing its own interests that on occasion conflict with those of the imperialist and regional powers. Their joint opposition to the Muslim Brotherhood, shared by Egypt’s brutal dictator, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, set them against Qatar—showing sympathy with Qatar became punishable by up to 15 years in jail—and Turkey, which hosts Egyptian members of the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist exiles, although relations have improved since 2021.  The UAE provided the ground forces for the Saudi-sponsored war against the Houthi rebels in Yemen in 2015 before pulling out of the coalition in 2020 to support the Southern Transitional Council, a secessionist organization in Southern Yemen.

In June last year, the UAE president welcomed Iran’s visiting foreign minister to Abu Dhabi in an indication of the warming relations between the Gulf states and Iran, despite having signed up to Washington’s Abraham Accords with Israel in an anti-Iran alliance. It followed the announcement the previous month that the UAE would no longer take part in a US-led task force protecting Gulf shipping. The UAE, along with Saudi Arabia and Egypt, has also refused to join the multinational naval alliance in the Red Sea led by the US against Yemen’s Houthi rebels who have pledged to disrupt shipping to Israel during its war on Gaza.

Sudan, which has witnessed a horrific, 15-month long civil war by rival army factions that has displaced 10 million people and brought the country to the brink of famine, has become the most recent focus for Gulf rivalries. The UAE is backing the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) of the former Sudanese deputy army chief Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, which is accused of carrying out war crimes in Darfur. Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Iran are backing the Sudanese army led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, while Russia has switched sides to support Burhan in a bid to secure a Red Sea naval base. The war threatens to spillover and destabilise Libya, Chad and other parts of the Sahel.

This week, the UAE is holding joint military training exercises—dubbed Falcon Shield—with China in the mainly Muslim province of Xinjiang. The exercise, which follows one last year, indicates deepening defence ties between the two countries, giving rise to growing US concerns. China was the UAE’s largest trading partner in 2022, while the UAE was China’s biggest partner in the Arab world, exporting $17.4 billion in crude petroleum and $4.12 billion in petroleum gas to China in 2022. Last year, China paid for its purchase of liquefied natural gas from the UAE in yuan instead of dollars for the first time. In 2022, the UAE’s Defence Ministry announced it was buying 12 L-15 light attack planes from the China National Aero-Technology Import & Export Corporation.

The summer surge of COVID in the US and the implications of the anti-public health policy

Benjamin Mateus

The US is in the midst of an accelerating summer COVID wave, the ninth such wave since March 2020. The current epicenters are located in the West (one in 37 infected) and the South (one in 43) of the country. Given the complete abandonment of all public health measures, including vaccination, this development is being driven more by waning population immunity coming off the winter peak and less by any unusual “seasonality” patterns to SARS-CoV-2.

It also underscores the important fact that we are not in any long-term, low-level endemic phase, a lie that has been perpetuated by every national and international public health official. The virus remains a pandemic pathogen. Its inherent viral characteristics indicate that it will continue to evolve and adapt, given the wide berth provided it by the political elites, whose primary concern is to do the bidding of the financial oligarchs.

COVID’s persistence is intimately tied to the nature of a beleaguered globalized capitalism that has placed the profits of a few thousand people over the lives of a working class population numbering in the billions.

According to two data websites that model COVID concentrations found in wastewater, those of JPWeiland and Professor Mike Hoerger, the rates of daily COVID infections have risen four-fold since the lows in mid-May. Currently, somewhere between 620,000 and 720,000 Americans are being infected each day, or one in 50 to 70 people.

This also means that somewhere between 36,000 and 144,000 people can expect to develop Long COVID. The surge in infections is being driven by the latest variants of SARS-CoV-2, the FliRT subvariants of Omicron, KP.3 and KP.2, which account for 61 percent of all strains, and the LB.1, which accounts for just over 10 percent.

One year ago at this time, the daily case rates were at 150,000 infections, indicating that we are not only seeing the summer wave peak earlier than before, but that the lows from one summer to the next are growing higher. And, leaving aside the Omicron peak in late 2021, the peak-to-peak incidence for each winter wave has also grown higher throughout the pandemic.

No principled public health figure has ever defined an endemic state as a perpetual saturation of the population with a viral pathogen as is the current situation.

Professor Hoerger, the program director of health psychiatry at Tulane University, who runs the top public US COVID forecasting dashboard, warned:

Assume co-workers will be working sick or out sick, many people with new “allergies” and “summer colds,” camp closures, delays in auto repairs, sickness after medical and dental visits, flight delays, fender benders, longer wait times, covering other people’s work obligations, missed deadlines, errors and mistakes, sick politicians, increased geopolitical instability, angry outbursts, athletes dropping out of the Olympics and other sporting events, music concert cancelations, nonsensical email, more poorly managed weather events, last minute cancellations, brief small business closures, more conversations about specialty medical appointments, reliving conversations that have already happened but the person forgot, and more co-workers retiring early.

These observations are corroborated by the limited data that remains available on the dashboards of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). In the last six months, more than 25,000 people have succumbed to infections. The number of fatalities week to week is climbing again. However, these figures must be viewed as undercounts, given the changes in hospital reporting and dismantling of COVID trackers that have placed the country in a mandated blackout. The undercounting is corroborated by the rise in test positivity, emergency department visits and hospitalizations.

Given the dangers associated with chronic debility and the long-term health consequences even with asymptomatic infections, the insistence on a “forever COVID” policy is simply criminal and insane.

One example is a recent television interview by Dr. Ashish Jha with Christopher Cuomo. Jha is the dean of the Brown University School of Public Health and a former White House COVID-19 coordinator in the Biden administration. Jha dismissed calls for people to continue to mask indoors as a “fringe” position of the “left” comparable to right-wing conspiracy theories about the pandemic and its origins. He said:

There are a lot of loud fringe voices from the left and the right. The left that is convinced that the pandemic is just as bad as ever and we all should still be masking indoors, and the right with, you know, all of its conspiracy theories as well.

He made no attempt to square this with data that show the pandemic remains virulent and that masking is an effective protective measure against infection. More than this, his comments run counter to alerts being issued by the CDC and public health agencies about the rise in COVID cases and the need to consider taking mitigation measures to avoid catching the virus.

By equating masking with conspiracy theories, Jha lends credence to efforts by governors, Democratic as well as Republican, to criminalize masking in public in response to legitimate protests by people who choose to protect themselves from infection, under conditions where, on average, every American has been infected at least three times in the course of the pandemic.

Nassau County on Long Island, New York may become the first jurisdiction in the tri-state region to ban face masks, with violators potentially facing fines of up to $1,000 and possible jail time. The proposed bill, by legislator Mazi Pilip, could be voted into law as early as next month.

One must assume that Violet Affleck, who last week addressed the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors wearing an N95 respirator, could face judicial repercussions were she to repeat such an action if and when such bans are made law and enforced. Notably, despite the high rates of COVID infections in California, no one on the panel was wearing any face covering.

What she had to say to the board, including the excerpt cited below, was of immense importance. Assuming she was under a time constraint, she spoke quickly:

Hi, Violet Affleck, Los Angeles resident, first-time voter. I’m 18. I contracted a post-viral condition in 2019. I’m okay now, but I saw first-hand that medicine does not always have answers to the consequences of even minor viruses. The COVID-19 pandemic has thrown [this] into sharp relief. One in 10 infections leads to Long COVID, which is a devastating neurological, cardiovascular illness that can take away people’s ability to work, move, see, and even think, and stands to exacerbate our homelessness crisis as well as the suffering of many people in our city.

It hits communities of color, disabled people, elderly people, trans people, women and anyone in a public-facing essential job the hardest. To confront the Long COVID crisis, I demand mask availability, air filtration, and far-UVC light in government facilities, including jails [and] detention centers, and mask mandates in county medical facilities. We must expand the availability of high-quality free tests and treatment.

And most importantly, the county must oppose mask bans for any reason. They do not keep us safer. They make them—vulnerable members of our community—less safe and make anyone less able to participate in Los Angeles together.

Even as the ruling class minimizes the ongoing and devastating impact of COVID-19, it spares no effort to use the pandemic as a political weapon to blame the Chinese authorities for the devastation wrought on the world’s population. Efforts to legitimize the Wuhan lab leak conspiracy theory are being expanded in order to foment anti-Chinese sentiment and beat the war drums for a confrontation with China.

A report by the far-right Heritage Foundation, which propagates what is a real fringe conspiracy theory—the baseless claim that SARS-CoV-2 originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology—has been promoted by politicians of both parties to blame China for the deaths of over 1.1 million Americans, as well as 28 million global excess deaths and more than $18 trillion in economic losses.

The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic in recent hearings has made use of the report to witch-hunt scientists who reject the Wuhan Lab theory and oppose the “forever COVID” policy of the government and both capitalist parties. With the compliance of the Democrats and the Biden administration, the anti-China libel has become the semi-official pandemic narrative.

China experiencing torrential rain and major floods

Ben McGrath

Since the beginning of the rainy season on April 1, China has experienced heavy rainfall, causing 20 floods in major rivers around the country. Dozens have been killed, tens of thousands have been forced to evacuate, and countless more have been impacted. These types of extreme weather events and floods have become the annual norm in recent years amid ongoing climate change.

Flooding in Meizhou, Guangdong, China, June 20, 2024 [Photo by China News Service / CC BY 3.0]

As of Sunday night, 31 rivers had surpassed their warning levels with flooding expected to continue into August. The Ministry of Water Resources and the China Meteorological Administration (CMA) expect significant mountain flooding near the cities of Bazhong and Guangyuan in Sichuan Province on Sunday and Monday.

Also on Sunday, China’s National Meteorological Center (NMC), a subordinate body of the CMA, re-issued a “yellow” alert for rainstorms for the province-level administrations of Shaanxi, Sichuan, Hubei, Henan, Anhui, Jiangsu and Inner Mongolia. On Sunday and Monday, the regions were expected to experience torrential rains of up to 80mm an hour as well as thunderstorms and gales. China uses a four-tier colour warning system starting with blue and rising in severity to yellow, orange and red.

Beijing’s Ministry of Water Resources has also issued a warning for flooding at Lake Tai as water levels rose to 3.9 metres on Saturday, 0.1 meters above the warning level. The lake is located in the Yangtze River Delta in Jiangsu Province and is one of the largest lakes in the country. It experienced its first flood of the year on June 30.

The Yangtze River and its tributaries are particularly prone to flooding. Last Wednesday, the flood discharge gates on the Three Gorges Dam were opened for the first time this year as continuous rain was expected for the next week and a half in Sichuan Province and the city of Chongqing, which sit further upriver along the Yangtze. The NMC predicted that some areas of the Sichuan Basin would receive 50 to 90 percent more rain than usual for this time of year while the Three Gorges Reservoir had risen to 161.1 meters, or more than 15 metres above its usual level. It is a record high for July.

Last week, major flooding took place in Chongqing’s Dianjiang county, which received 269.2mm of rain in a single day alone, setting a record for the county. As a result, at least six people were killed. Chongqing is a direct-administered municipality in southwestern China with a population of 32 million people. The rains also damaged 1,800 hectares of crops and has so far caused an estimated 82 million yuan ($US11.3 million) in damages. The rain caused a highway to collapse in the city’s Kaizhou district.

Public anger over the government’s response to the flooding could develop into broader social unrest, particularly when combined with other issues such as workers’ declining economic conditions and the COVID-19 pandemic. Aware of this, Chongqing’s Mayor Hu Henghua said last Thursday, “As flood preparedness and response enter a critical period, we should strengthen warnings and monitoring, and timely evacuate people in areas at risk of geological disasters. It’s better to be extra careful to prevent any potential losses.”

President Xi Jinping has also emphasized this point, telling rescue workers in June that they should “guarantee the security of people’s lives and property, and overall social stability.”

China is no stranger to flooding. Following the Chinese Revolution, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) drew legitimacy from the ability to mitigate the damage from floods that the previous Kuomintang government was unable to address as a result of corruption and indifference. For many people, the memories of massive floods in 1931, for example, that killed as many as two million people, were still fresh in people’s minds. The party began a campaign to build dams and other flood prevention measures throughout the country while also prominently celebrating its achievements.

Today, there are approximately 98,000 dams in China as well as 320,000km of dykes. However, many dams were built between the 1950s and 1970s, and due to poor upkeep, are at risk of collapsing. In 2020, Beijing stated it would spend $US15 billion to fix 200 large dams and 8,000 smaller dams that were described as “sick and dangerous.” Dykes are in equally bad condition. A report released in April of last year stated that 70 percent of dykes in just the Hai River Basin, which includes Beijing, were in danger of collapse.

Now, under the impact of climate change, extreme weather events are growing in intensity. Higher temperatures increase evaporation and the moisture in the air, which leads to more intense rain storms. At the same time, areas that typically receive less precipitation face the increasing likelihood of heatwaves and droughts.

The NMC on Sunday also issued a heat warning, raising its warning level within its three-tier temperature warning system to yellow, with orange and red more severe levels. Some regions of China are expected to see temperatures as high as 39 degrees Celsius.

On July 5, the CMA introduced its new blue book on climate change in China, writing, “Extreme weather and climate events tend to be more frequent and severe. In China, extreme high temperatures and heavy precipitation events tend to be more frequent and severe while extreme low-temperature events have generally declined… And the average intensity of typhoons that have made landfall in China has fluctuated and strengthened since the late 1990s.”

The first serious flood this year occurred on April 7 in the Bei River in the Pearl River Basin. It was the earliest since 1998 when Beijing began numbering floods. Later that month, Guangdong, which is located in the basin, began receiving a large amount of rain and flooding, leading to 52 deaths. Another 47 people died in Guangdong in June from continued flooding.

At the end of June, Pingjiang County in Hunan Province experienced some of the worst flooding since 1954. The Miluo River, which runs through the county and joins with the Yangtze River, reached 77.7 meters, exceeding the alert level by seven metres. One-third of Pingjiang’s old town and one-half of its new town were under water by July 2 and more than 5,300 people were forced to evacuate. Pingjiang is a county in the city of Yueyang, a city in Hunan’s northeast. It is home to 1.15 million people.

Torrential rains caused a dyke along the Miluo River to burst. Pingjiang received 759.6mm of rain between June 18 and July 2, the most since 1961 when recordkeeping began. The county’s Flood Control and Drought Relief Headquarters compared it to a “wartime” situation.

Boeing near-disasters continue to pile up in wake of sweetheart plea deal

Bryan Dyne

A plea agreement was reached between Boeing and the US federal government on Sunday in which the aerospace corporation would plead guilty to fraud in order to avoid further charges stemming from the two 737 MAX 8 crashes in 2018 and 2019, which killed 346 passengers and crew.

A Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner

Under the agreement, Boeing will pay $698.6 million, including a minimum of $455 million in “safety and compliance” programs and a $243.6 million in fines. The totals are barely a slap on the wrist for the aerospace giant, which made $7.7 billion in 2023. They are also an insult to the families of those who died after the company knowingly put the faulty 737 MAX 8 into service. Moreover, nothing is being put into place to force Boeing to change its practices.

The current plea deal only came about after an investigation by the Department of Justice began this year in the wake of the near-fatal door blowout in January on a 737 MAX 9 shortly after take-off. Dozens were injured and it was only luck that the blowout occurred so soon after takeoff, and not while the plane was cruising and tens of thousands of feet higher in altitude, which would have resulted in the death of all on board.

All that emerged from the government’s investigation is that Boeing had not developed its internal quality control methods as much as previously agreed, thus violating a deferred prosecution agreement from 2021. The only people being held accountable are two employees who lied to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) about the risks of the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, the immediate cause of the two MAX 8 crashes.

The executives who pushed for the system in the pursuit of faster production over airplane safety, including ex-CEO Dennis Muilenburg and current Boeing head David Calhoun, have gotten off scot-free. Numerous testimonies, including at Congressional hearings, show Boeing’s management was aware of the dangers of MCAS and proceeded with making the MAX 8 anyway in order to keep Boeing’s profits and stock prices high.

None of them have faced charges for the manslaughter, much less murder, of passengers and crew caused by crashes that were a known inevitability.

Nor have any of them faced charges related to the numerous other serious quality control problems at Boeing that have come to light this year. In the wake of the January door blowout, dozens of whistleblowers have come forth exposing the fact that management at the airplane company and its supplier, Spirit AeroSystems (recently re-acquired by Boeing), were not only aware of but encouraged shortcuts in production at the expense of the safety of the flying public.

In the words of Joe Jacobson, a technical adviser to the Foundation for Aviation Safety and former FAA engineer who testified before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee in April, all Boeing was concerned about was “trying to maximize profits.”

Among the most significant whistleblowers at Bowing have been John “Mitch” Barnett and Joshua Dean. Barnett was a quality manager at the company for three decades who attempted repeatedly to bring to management’s attention serious issues in the production of Boeing’s 787 “Dreamliner” at the company’s facility in South Carolina.

Boeing Whistleblowers John Barnett (left) and Joshua Dean [Photo: Facebook]

Joshua Dean worked at Spirit AeroSystems and gave a deposition against his former employer that alleged “serious and gross misconduct by senior quality management of the 737 production line.”

Both faced repeated retaliation from their respective companies while still working for them, and were both forced out, Barnett in 2017 and Dean in 2020 and then again, after being rehired, in 2023. Both died earlier this year under suspicious circumstances. Barnett in particular told a family friend, “If anything happens to me, it’s not suicide.”

Alongside the whistleblower comments, Boeing has continued to face a deluge of accidents on its planes, further exposing the lack of quality and safety controls inside the company.

On Sunday, a Boeing 737-700 operated by Air Do traveling to Tokyo had a hydraulic failure during its approach for landing to Kushiro Airport. As a result of the fault and adverse weather conditions, the aircraft was forced to divert north to Nakashibetsu Airport, where it landed successfully before becoming disabled on the taxiway.

On Monday, the FAA revealed it has ordered an inspection of 2,600 Boeing 737 MAX and Next Generation airplanes after reports came in that, in the event an airplane depressurizes, oxygen masks might not supply oxygen to passengers.

That same day, a Boeing 757 traveling from Los Angeles to Denver lost one of its tires for its main landing gear during takeoff. The flight proceeded and landed successfully with no injuries during takeoff, flight or landing.

On Tuesday, a Boeing 777 scraped its tail along the runway for hundreds of meters while attempting to takeoff. The jetliner is from the Chilean airline Latam and was attempting to takeoff from Italy’s Milan Malpensa Airport. The plane, which can carry more than 500 passengers, was “packed” and only barely averted a disaster that could have killed everyone on board.

On Wednesday, a tire caught fire during the takeoff of an American Airlines flight of a Boeing 737-800. The 180 passengers were “safely deplaned,” according to airline spokesman Alfredo Garduño in a comment to the USA Today.

And on Friday, the pilot of a Boeing 757-23N declared a “squawking 7700” emergency after reportedly losing control of their plane as a result of leaked hydraulic fluid, according to FlightRadar24. The flight, which was headed from Spain to England, was successfully rerouted and landed safely at Manchester Airport.

The numerous ongoing and potentially fatal problems make the plea deal all the more egregious. Every sign points to serious and systemic problems with Boeing’s quality control and safety measures that are driven by management solely for corporate profits and stockholder dividends. The same issues that caused the MAX 8 crashes persist and will inevitably lead to the further loss of human life.

Workers and youth are increasingly aware of these dangers. In a poll taken in April, more than 50 percent of US flyers said they would pay $50-$150 more for flights not on Boeing aircraft. Nearly 24 percent said they would pay up to $50 to avoid Boeing and more than 19 percent said they would pay $151-$250 to stay away from the dangerous planes. And nearly 37 percent of respondents said that, if they could, they would avoid flying on Boeing aircraft altogether.

Yet nothing substantial will come from the federal government. Last year, Boeing earned 37 percent of its $78 billion revenue from government contracts, primarily in defense. It is a key part of the US-backed genocide in Gaza and NATO’s war drive against Russia and China. The lives lost on commercial airlines barely register on the war plans of the imperialist powers.

Indonesian government attacks wages through phony public housing scheme

Aditya Syed

The Indonesian government under out-going president Joko Widodo is expanding its Public Housing Savings program, known as Tapera, a scheme ostensibly meant to alleviate the country’s growing housing crisis. While the program is already in effect for civil servants, participation will become mandatory for almost all workers by 2027.

Temporary housing in Indonesia, April 2019 [AP Photo/Tatan Syuflana]

Under the Tapera program, workers will be forced to contribute 2.5 percent of their salaries that will be automatically deducted, while employers must supply only an additional 0.5 percent. Self-employed people are also being required to participate, contributing the full 3 percent on their own. Workers will then supposedly be able to use the fund for financial assistance when buying or renovating a house in the form of reduced interest rates on loans.

In other words, money is being funneled from the working class to boost government finances and the banks in return for limited financial help. Supposedly, workers will receive a lump sum after reaching the retirement age of 58, but there is no guarantee this will take place amid growing financial instability internationally.

There is a serious shortage of housing in Indonesia, which has the fourth largest population in the world, with 280 million people. Approximately 26 million houses in the country do not meet standards for habitation and there is a backlog of almost 10 million dwellings that need to be built. The Indonesian government would need to construct about 800,000 homes annually to meet the needs of the population. Yet only 229,000 homes were built using state funds in 2023 and the figure is set to be even lower this year at fewer than 200,000.

The Widodo administration claims that the cause of this shortage is financial constraint, and that the expansion of the Tapera program will lessen the severity of the housing shortage by gathering funds from a greater proportion of workers.

However, the staggering wealth of the Indonesian elite would be more than enough to fund social housing to match the country’s needs. In the last year, ten of the largest companies and banks in Indonesia accumulated combined profits of over $US28 billion, or about 463 trillion rupiah. In comparison, the amount of money put towards subsidizing housing in 2024 is projected to be approximately 9 trillion rupiah ($US550 million), or about one fiftieth of these massive profits. The government is forcing the working class to pay to fix the housing crisis, while the wealth of the financial elite will only be enhanced.

Indonesian workers, like their class brothers and sisters internationally, are finding the rising costs of living intolerable. The minimum monthly wage in Indonesia varies widely, from about 2 million rupiah ($US123) to as high as 5 million rupiah ($US306), depending on the province. The average salary also falls within these amounts, at about 3 million rupiah ($US183). The Tapera program will be a significant cut to workers’ real wages.

Housing is also costly. In the capital of Jakarta, the monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment can range from 3 to 9 million rupiah. The monthly cost of living for an average household can range from 10 to 15 million rupiah ($US611 to $US917) in metropolitan areas.

Workers, particularly youth, are also struggling to find work. The official unemployment rate in Indonesia was 5.3 percent in 2023, totaling 7.9 million people. The real scale of unemployment in the country is undoubtedly higher, as this figure does not include people who are in insecure work, underemployed, or counted as “not actively looking for work.” For young people aged 15 to 24, the unemployment rate was 19.4 percent last year.

Now, through the Tapera program, the Indonesian elite is demanding that more money be squeezed from workers facing these crippling financial conditions and having difficulty finding and holding on to employment. Despite claims to the contrary, the real reason for the government to enforce this measure is that the fund would serve as increased state revenue.

Saiful Islam, a member of the Ministry of Finance, stated that the Tapera fund would not be included in the state budget and would be used solely and directly to subsidize housing prices and interest rates. However, the Center for Economics and Law Studies in Jakarta cast doubt on this claim, saying Tapera “won’t only be used to fund housing, but also government programs from the new capital city [being built in Nusantara] to the free lunch program in the future.”

Given these conditions, workers have responded to the announcement of the expansion of Tapera with anger. Thousands of workers protested outside the presidential palace in Jakarta on June 6 to denounce the government’s agenda. Elza Yulianti, a 30-year-old freelance worker, criticized the lack of clarity about the program. She told Australia’s ABC News, “At a time when income is uncertain—when workers can get fired anytime—the Tapera obligation would reduce our income. My income is just around $AUD500 ($US334) per month and the price of land in Jakarta is very, very expensive.”

Elvia Shauki, who has worked as a civil servant for nearly 30 years and therefore is already a part of Tapera, stated at the protest that she had been unaware money was being taken from her pay and that when she checked her fund, she only had 4.5 million rupiah ($US275), which would not be enough to purchase a doll house. “The issue with this is the visibility, transparency and the fact that we had been robbed. The civil servants had suffered enough… I think it’s just a trickery on how they can raise funds cheaply on a massive scale,” she said.