Wildfires raging across southern Europe and north Africa kill more than 40 people

Robert Stevens

A catastrophe is engulfing southern Europe and north Africa as forest fires rage across nine countries—Greece, Portugal, Turkey, Italy, France, Croatia, Spain, Algeria and Tunisia—endangering a population of around 500 million people.

Wildfires have become more devastating in recent years as a result of capitalism-driven climate change, resulting in scorching weather and winds of up to 35 miles an hour. With the 20 days from July 3 the hottest ever recorded on the planet, it is set be confirmed that this month will be the hottest since records began and most likely in 120,000 years.

Locals try to extinguish a wildfire burning in Gennadi village, on the Aegean Sea island of Rhodes, southeastern Greece, on July 25, 2023 [AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris]

More than 40 people have been killed so far, 34 in Algeria when surrounded by flames in an evacuation attempt. The heat according to witnesses felt “like a blowtorch”. Five lives have been lost to the fires in Greece, including pilots of a firefighting plane. At least eight people have been killed in Italy, including in Sicily, where temperatures are now just below the record for Europe of 48.8 degrees Celsius, set in 2021. Firefighters in the country have tackled almost 1,400 blazes nationwide, including 650 in Sicily and 390 in Calabria, reported the Guardian. A number of news reports stress that the death toll is likely much higher.

This week, Italy also saw deadly torrential rain, tornadoes, and floods in the north of the country, with a 16-year-old old girl among the four fatalities.

Workers are being killed on the job, forced to labour in unsafe temperatures. On July 20, a 46-year-old Greek worker suffered a heatstroke and died after making deliveries for a local tavern at the peak of the heat that day. According to the hospital management at Halkida General Hospital, the probable cause of his death was “cardio-respiratory arrest after exposure to very high temperatures.”

Workers at several factories and other workplaces in Italy have walked off the job, in order to protect themselves, in protest at being forced to work in dangerous heat. These included a four-hour strike July 20 at the Rossi auto parts factory in Modena, and a series of strikes in the last hour of each shift at an auto parts factory owned by the Japanese multinational HI-LEX in Chiavari near Genoa, reported Euronews. The latter began when the company refused to keep the air conditioning on after 7pm, despite the last shift ending at 10pm. A strike was threatened last week at the Magneti Marelli car battery plant in Sulmona.

Workers in two McDonald’s kitchens in Apulia started a strike on Sunday due to the temperatures in the kitchen. ANSA reported that the strike broke out after McDonald’s closed one of the two restaurants to the public, but kept the other open, arguing the air conditioning was sufficient.

Greece has been at the epicentre of the fires, with the Greek Fire Brigade fighting a losing battle against more than 500 blazes for almost two weeks. On Thursday, the fire brigade said the situation remained “extreme” for several regions, with the Ministry of Climate Crisis & Civil Protection warning of a very high risk of fire in seven regions Thursday-Friday, including Attica (the location of the capital Athens) and on the country’s largest island Crete.

When the fires initially broke-out they came within a few miles of Athens, a metropolis of 3.6 million people. That the fires are still out of control was clear on Thursday as fire, carried by strong gusts of wind, again reached the outskirts of the city, disrupting motorway traffic and rail services. Firefighters in water-dropping helicopters and a ground crew put out a blaze in Kifissia, just north of Athens.

Near Volos, a wildfire burned on two fronts, shutting part of Greece’s busiest motorway for several hours, and forcing the delay of national rail services near the area.

Harrowing scenes on the island of Rhodes, one of many popular tourist destinations in Greece—where firefighters battled fires for a 10th successive day Thursday—were described as “hell”. Worsening annual fires threaten the resident population of 125,000 and a tourist population of tens of thousands.

At the beginning of the week Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis’s government was finally forced to mount what was Greece’s biggest evacuation ever by land and sea, moving around 20,000 people from many villages and holiday resorts. Most were moved from Rhodes, with thousands also evacuated from Evia and, another major tourist destination, Corfu. Tourists were told to immediately leave their hotels, many of which were subsequently burnt to the ground, and forced to flee on foot as the fires reached the seaside villages of Kiotari, Gennadi, Pefki, Lindos, Lardos and Kalathos.

Thousands, including the elderly and children, walked for up to seven miles, many dragging their suitcases, fearing death as smoke filled the air and the fires closed in on them from behind. No contingency plans were in place, aside from people receiving a government alert text on their phones telling them to leave the area. The majority were forced to spend the night and days after wherever they could escape the fires, alongside locals who also had to flee—on beaches, in gyms, school buildings, indoor stadiums and hotel conference centres.

Social media was flooded with comments including: “Currently stranded in Rhodes escaping the wildfires on foot—left everything at the hotel and fled with towels across our faces”; “My youngest just told me he doesn’t want to die. Terrifying situation here”; “[We] had to walk four miles in the heat across dirt tracks in smoke and ash with a five year old. No possessions”.

Many explained that the only help they received was from the local population, not the government, airlines or holiday companies that provided their vacations and flights. It was not until Wednesday, after two weeks of fires, that a state of emergency initially in place in just the south of Rhodes was extended to the entire island.

Greece’s economy is dependent on tourism, which accounts for 25 percent of GDP and one in five jobs. Rhodes alone receives around 150,000 tourists at a time, more people than the resident population, with 2.5 million tourists on the island overall last year. Keeping the economy open to reap the profits and allowing tourists to flood in despite the perilous situation has been the priority of the right-wing New Democracy government.

As the heatwave and fires broke out, the world was shocked by scenes of thousands of people atop the Acropolis in Athens, a major tourist attraction which the government kept open. The Acropolis offers no shelter and the only measure taken by the government was to shut it for a few hours during the hottest parts of the day. It was left to the Red Cross and volunteers to provide tourists with bottles of water, and offer them umbrellas to shade.

Before any deaths had taken place, Prime Minister Mitsotakis washed the government’s hands of any responsibility, declaring in parliament, “Fortunately despite the unprecedented onslaught of the fires there have been no lives lost or serious injuries, proving once again that against nature’s assault no measures would ever be enough”.

Even as mass evacuations were underway on Monday, and with Mitsotakis stating that Greece was “at war” with wildfires, his tourism minister, Olga Kefalogianni, told the BBC that UK holidaymakers—which make up the largest portion of those visiting Greece—should not cancel holidays already booked as, “It’s particularly important to stress only a small part of the island of Rhodes is affected”. Meanwhile tourists arriving were finding their hotels and other accommodation were out of bounds due to wildfires.

The vast majority will be uncompensated as airlines and holiday firms classify fires an “act of god”—a move facilitated by the UK government and others stopping short of advising against travelling to Rhodes, Corfu and other islands.

Any ability to respond effectively to the emergency has been critically undermined by the gutting of social infrastructure over the last 15 years amid continent-wide austerity.

More than any other country, Greece was devastated by this offensive, carried out by all political parties, with a major role played by the pseudo-left Syriza. There is, absurdly, a dire lack of firefighting planes in the country, leaving the cut-back firefighting service totally overwhelmed, especially in many rural areas in which around 2 million people (19 percent of the population) reside.

In Rhodes, there have often been no fire brigade personnel available to confront the fires, only volunteers, with one resident declaring, “If it weren’t for the volunteers, we would have been burned alive”.

European Union and Tunisia agree dirty deal to keep refugees out of Europe

Martin Kreickenbaum

The European Union is willing to use any means to keep refugees beyond its borders. Last week, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, far-right Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and Tunisian President Kais Saied signed a memorandum of understanding in Tunis that promises the country €900 million in financial aid for preventing refugees from crossing to Europe.

In this Friday, Feb. 12, 2021 file photo, migrants and refugees from different African nationalities wait for assistance on an overcrowded wooden boat, as aid workers of the Spanish NGO Open Arms approach them in the Mediterranean Sea, international waters, at 122 miles off the Libyan coast. (AP Photo/Bruno Thevenin, file)

What this means was shown by the simultaneous ruthless expulsion of refugees from the Tunisian port city of Sfax into the desert. The coincidence of the two events reveals in all its brutality the true face of the EU: an ugly grimace that condones, incites, finances and organises racist and inhuman atrocities committed by autocratic regimes against refugees.

At the centre of the memorandum of understanding is the tightening of Europe’s borders to all refugees. A total of €105 million are earmarked for the upgrading of the Tunisian border police and the deportation of refugees alone.

The EU wanted a partnership to combat people smuggling, von der Leyen said afterwards. “We will also strengthen our coordination in search and rescue operations. And we have agreed to work together on border management, on returns and on tackling root causes, in full respect of international law.”

These words make a mockery of the refugees who are being subjected to arbitrary persecution, ill-treatment and deadly risks in Tunisia at the behest of the EU. Even as von der Leyen, Rutte and Meloni were shaking hands with the authoritarian Saied, Tunisian security authorities had already begun to put the agreement into practice.

For days, migrants from sub-Saharan countries, but also from Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Syria, have been transported out of Sfax by bus. This was preceded by a fight between local youths and migrants in which a 41-year-old Tunisian died. Since then, refugees have been systematically persecuted, driven from their homes, chased, beaten and finally transported away.

The Libyan border police picked up about 700 refugees near the Ras Jadir border crossing. They had been exposed to the scorching sun without water or food and were completely exhausted. The Libyan border police provided the refugees with water and food, but then sent them back to the Tunisian side of the border.

A border police officer told the taz newspaper, “Tunisia wants to solve its social problems on the backs of migrants and neighbouring countries. This is a dangerous precedent.” In this way, refugees become victims of the EU, which pays autocratic regimes to act as Europe’s gatekeepers.

At least 80 more refugees were apprehended by Libyan border guards further south near the town of Al-Assah. Two men from Nigeria reported being beaten with iron bars by Tunisian security forces and forcibly driven across the border into Libya.

According to the Guardian, around 165 refugees have been rescued in western Tunisia near the border with Algeria. However, there is still no trace of 250 refugees who were abandoned in the desert near Tozeur. The refugee aid organisation Alarm Phone, which was in contact with the group during their transport from Sfax to the desert, fears that their mobile phones have been destroyed and that they have been abandoned without water and food. Aid agencies report they have discovered several bodies in the desert.

“Dumping people in the middle of the desert without access to roads, shelter, shade, food or water is a form of state-authorised violence that flies in the face of basic human rights,” Monica Marks, assistant professor of Middle East politics at New York University, told broadcaster ARD’s Tagesschau news programme.

In a statement published on Facebook, Tunisian president Saied cynically dismissed concerns over the mistreatment and deportation of the refugees to the desert by saying that “the migrants receive humane treatment … in accordance with Tunisia’s values” and that the Tunisian security forces protect them.

The European Union’s commissioner for home affairs, Ylva Johannson, defended the agreement between the EU and Tunisia in similar words. It was very important, she said, “that our main objective is always to save lives, to stop people from [making] these journeys that too often end in death, that is a priority.”

In fact, the agreement provides for the exact opposite. Migration is one of five pillars that the agreement covers. Literally, it is about “combating irregular migration,” strengthening the “operational partnership against smuggling and trafficking in human beings,” “improving the coordination of search and rescue operations at sea,” “effective border management” and “developing a system for the identification and return of irregular migrants” from Tunisia to their countries of origin.

The European Union is shamelessly exploiting the fact that Tunisia is on the verge of economic collapse and is in urgent need of financial aid. However, this aid is only granted if the country allows itself to become Europe’s guard dog, preventing refugees from reaching the Mediterranean, intercepting and returning boats and organising the deportation of the refugees who are stopped.

The EU also makes no secret of the fact that the dirty deal on preventing refugees reaching Europe is based on blackmail. EU Home Affairs Commissioner Ylva Johansson stated freely that it was “clear that Tunisia is under pressure. I think this is a reason to strengthen and deepen cooperation and increase support to Tunisia.”

Of the €900 million the EU plans to pay Tunisia, €105 million is earmarked for “border management.” Johansson claimed that this money will mainly flow through international organisations working on the ground and helping refugees, such as the International Organisation for Migration (IOM). She claimed that the EU was “not involved in the repatriation of third-country nationals to their country of origin.” It only “funds the voluntary return and reintegration of third-country nationals through the IOM.”

But this is a pathetic attempt by the EU to whitewash itself. Formally, the IOM is a UN agency, but it will organise the deportation of refugees, funded by and at the behest of the EU. To date, the IOM has not said a word about the expulsions of refugees into the Sahara Desert.

The agreement signed also states that the EU will not only finance the IOM, but will primarily provide patrol boats, jeeps, thermal imaging cameras, radar equipment and drones and thus massively arm the Tunisian border guards.

The consequences of this criminal anti-refugee policy are starkly demonstrated by the evictions in Tunisia. Lauren Seibert of the human rights organisation Human Rights Watch said, “By funding security forces that commit abuses in migration control, the EU is complicit in the suffering of migrants, refugees and asylum seekers in Tunisia.”

The hollow words about human rights and democratic values that supposedly guide EU and German foreign policy are not worth the paper they are printed on. Last Monday, the German government declared “full support” for the agreement. It was hoped that together with Tunisia, irregular migration will be reduced, said Christiane Hoffmann, deputy government spokesperson. There was quiet criticism of the agreement from the Green Party’s parliamentary group in the Bundestag, but Green Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock also declared her approval of the dirty deal.

The German government is even pushing for a more far-reaching agreement, as the current declaration excludes the establishment of internment camps for refugees as well as the readmission of non-Tunisian refugees from the EU. While it states that Tunisia is not a country that “agrees to the settlement of migrants with irregular status,” the migration commissioner of the German government, Joachim Stamp, named European “asylum procedures in North Africa” as a priority political goal.

The agreement between the EU and Tunisia is also intended to serve as a blueprint for further deals with the autocratic regimes in Egypt and Morocco. There are already agreements with both countries, but the measures to prevent refugee defences in these countries, and especially the deportation of refugees, are to be further tightened. The Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who rules with extreme brutality, already received €80 million from the EU last year for upgrading migration defences to keep refugees from Sudan out of Europe and to prevent refugee boats from leaving Egypt.

The consequences of these agreements can be observed in Niger and Algeria. In 2015, destitute Niger criminalised the accommodation and transport of refugees in return for European development aid. Germany equipped the Nigerien army with vehicles and radar equipment with €1 billion of EU money. EU border agency Frontex sent liaison officers to Niger.

Since then, the smugglers, and with them the refugees, of necessity, have taken more dangerous routes off the main roads, with the result that the number of refugees who have died has risen enormously. Four years ago, Albert Chaibou, a journalist from Niger and founder of a migrant emergency hotline, had already complained: “Our country has degenerated into a graveyard in the service of Europe.”

Apprehended refugees are put in camps run by the IOM but funded by the EU. There is neither enough water nor food there, the IOM is only interested in deporting the desperate people to their countries of origin, as is now planned in Tunisia. “We are being treated like cattle,” a refugee shouted in despair to journalists from the AFP news agency recently.

Many of the refugees stranded in Niger have in turn been driven out of Algeria and abandoned in the Sahara in the border region with Niger. The number of refugees who have died of thirst and starvation while fleeing in the Sahara is unknown, but aid organisations fear that it exceeds the number of people who have drowned in the Mediterranean. According to this estimate, far more than 20,000 refugees would have died in North Africa since 2016 simply because they fled war, civil war and economic hardship and dreamed of a decent life in Europe.

With the extortionate, dirty deals it makes with North Africa’s autocratic regimes, the EU is complicit in the state-organised persecution and displacement of refugees and the killing of thousands of people.

Days after Teamsters calls off strike, Yellow freight prepares to declare bankruptcy

Alex Findijs

Yellow freight trailer [Photo by Mark Collins / CC BY 2.0]

Yellow Corp, the third largest less-than-truckload freight company in the United States, plans to declare bankruptcy on Monday according to a report from FreightWaves. Three employees of Yellow’s sales team spoke to FreightWaves after the company’s senior vice president of sales informed them of the plan Wednesday morning. The executive advised them that they were approved to discuss the bankruptcy with customers.

That same vice president then backtracked the statement after the news was leaked, informing the sales team that afternoon to “correct” any news of bankruptcy to customers and that “Yellow’s talks with the IBT are ongoing. As previously stated, and in keeping with fiduciary responsibility of the company’s executives, the company continues to prepare for a range of contingencies.”

However, this appears to be just a “correction” to the company’s public messaging on its financial situation. A bankruptcy has been widely expected for months as the company is deep in debt and continues to burn through cash. FreightWaves reported that a tech employee was also told that the company would file for bankruptcy on Monday and that they should start sending out resumes for other jobs.

The news comes only days after the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) called off a strike by its 22,000 members at Yellow, which had been due to begin on Monday. Instead, the union bureaucrats announced a “deal” under which the company would have another 30 days to pay a $50 million pension obligation, which it missed in mid-July, “with the understanding the company will do so within the next two weeks.” Instead, the company is using the added time to file for bankruptcy within one week, putting the pensions and jobs of thousands of workers on the chopping block.

The cancellation of the strike was a major betrayal whose aim was not only to sell out workers at Yellow, but to clear the deck for a betrayal at UPS. Two days later, the union announced a miserable tentative agreement to head off a strike of 340,000 workers at the logistics giant, sparking mass outrage among the rank and file.

Yellow has so far not made an official announcement of its bankruptcy plans, but the financial situation of the company is dire. Corporate liquidity was reported to just be $100 million at the end of June. Market analysts from Stephens, a financial services company, estimated that Yellow was losing $4 million a week during the second quarter of this year. Additional reports of customers leaving Yellow after the brief threat to strike point to a rapid loss of revenue and cash on hand.

The Stephens analysts estimated that Yellow spent $20 to $25 million in cash just in the last week and that it could be losing as much as $10 million a day due to the drop in volume. If these numbers are accurate then Yellow is most likely well below $35 million in cash and could possibly be out of money entirely.

Thirty-five million dollars in cash is the threshold set by Yellow’s lenders, led by Apollo Global Management, in an agreement between lenders and the company earlier this summer to relax Yellow’s debt conditions in exchange for direct oversight of Yellow’s finances by lenders.

Once Yellow drops below $35 million in cash holdings, it will be in breach of the debt covenant and Apollo and other lenders could demand immediate repayment on hundreds of millions of dollars. Lacking the funds to repay its investors, Yellow would be forced to declare bankruptcy and sell off its assets, putting 30,000 jobs, including 22,000 Teamsters, at risk.

Wall Street, however, has made it clear it will not inject additional cash without major cuts at Yellow.

Over the past few years Yellow has worked to implement its One Yellow plan, a consolidation of its subsidiaries including the closure of several hubs and the conversion of many jobs into “utility” positions, in which workers both drive trucks and work the docks. The intention is to cut expenses by shuttering physical locations and slashing labor costs.

Yellow’s investors have demanded that Yellow demonstrate its ability to eliminate jobs and cut pay and benefits before it is given another infusion of cash.

While phase one of One Yellow has already been implemented and thousands of jobs already lost, the Teamsters have offered no opposition to this consolidation except on the grounds that Yellow must codify the changes in contract language—in other words, that it carry out these cuts with the involvement of the union bureaucracy.

Over the past three contracts, the Teamsters agreed to a total of 30 percent wage cuts and the reduction of Yellow’s contributions to the Central States Pension Fund to a quarter of what it was. Workers received an 18 percent wage increase in 2018 which was promptly wiped out by inflation as the pandemic caused double-digit inflation rates.

Since the deregulation of the trucking industry under the Carter administration in the late 1970s, union membership in freight has collapsed. Union pay at Yellow is regularly below what non-union freight companies now offer.

Teamsters President Sean O’Brien has attempted to present himself as a reformer and a new militant voice of workers following the years of concessions under James Hoffa Jr. In reality, O’Brien was the right-hand man of Hoffa during his administration and a key architect of the 2013 UPS contract. The new administration’s top concern, as with the previous one, is the containment of worker’s anger at UPS and the prevention of strikes. The months-long theatrical “strike ready campaign,” in which O’Brien pledged thousands of times to strike UPS by August 1, was designed to get in front of this anger before it escaped their control.

Last winter he had the same objective when he sold out railroad workers, blocking strike action and working with the Biden administration to enforce a substandard contract that failed to meet workers needs.

O’Brien has spouted off tough talk about refusing to allow further concessions at Yellow, but has no strategy to oppose it. He has even stated implicit support for Yellow closing, stating that sometimes “a bad job isn’t worth it” and posting a meme on Twitter of a gravestone with Yellow’s logo on it.

O’Brien and the Teamsters appear unconcerned by the idea of Yellow closing and 22,000 union jobs being eliminated. As of this writing, they have made no public comment about the potential of an imminent Yellow bankruptcy. As far as the Teamsters are concerned the loss of 22,000 jobs is a small price to pay to keep UPS workers isolated. Moreover, Yellow’s reduced pension payments make Yellow workers a burden on the Central States Pension Fund, long used as a slush fund for union officials.

While the collapse of Yellow is the immediate fault of management and the vultures of Wall Street, the Teamsters would bear responsibility for the loss of jobs as well. They have made no effort to defend jobs and there has been no talk of what will happen to Yellow workers if the company goes under.

Australian Education Union boasts of time in lieu gain as schools crisis escalates

Sue Phillips

The Australian Education Union (AEU) in Victoria has boasted of a Fair Work Commission ruling that expanded school teachers’ time in lieu compensation for attending camps, and required an additional $130 million in government funding for school budgets.

Victorian Labor Premier Daniel Andrews addresses AEU state conference in 2022. [Photo: AEU Victoria Facebook]

After Fair Work ruled last month on the case brought by the union against the Department of Education, AEU state president Meredith Peace (annual salary and benefits $247,000) declared it an “important win,” with “significant new funding reduc[ing] the pressure on schools to provide time in lieu to staff.” Such statements have since been amplified in numerous union bulletins and newsletters sent to union members and schools.

None of the AEU’s boasts hold water. At most, the Fair Work decision serves to plug a glaring hole left by the state Labor government’s refusal to commit any additional funding to cover a minor concession on time in lieu for camps that was agreed to with the union as part of last year’s highly regressive, wage cutting industrial agreement.

The government and AEU knew that signing off on new time in lieu provisions without matching funding would create significant disruption. The funding gap that existed for the first six months of 2023 saw numerous schools cancel or cut back on camps and other extra-curricular activities. One camp operator told the Age that 20 percent of schools were deferring or shortening bookings. These events provide important experiences for children, exposing them to new environments and developing their social skills.

The Fair Work ruling appears to provide a degree of certainty for schools managing camp arrangements, but it does nothing to meaningfully reduce teacher workloads.

When the AEU promoted the time in lieu provisions during last year’s industrial agreement negotiations, the Committee for Public Education (CFPE) characterised these and other purported gains as “amounting to crudely smeared lipstick on the pig.”

This has since been borne out. The union imposed a massive real wage cut—for the next four years, teachers and school workers receive a nominal pay rise of just 1 percent every 6 months. The official inflation rate is currently 6-7 percent, with cost of living on essential items such as housing, electricity and groceries rising substantially higher than that.

At the same time, arduous workloads remain in place. The AEU-Labor government agreement did nothing to reduce the excessive administrative duties and standardised testing requirements that have contributed to a staffing crisis driven by teachers quitting the profession. The agreement involved a reduction of 1.5 hours a week in face to face teaching, but this was offset by other giveaways, including the reduction of out-of-the-classroom professional practice days from 4 to just 1 a year.

Teachers still have one of the largest weekly teaching loads among OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) education systems. A survey released last March by the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership found that more than one-third of teachers across the country planned to leave the profession before reaching retirement age, with workload the leading problem.

The new time in lieu provisions do nothing to address this. Exactly how they are implemented is left to individual schools. Teachers are supposed to be repaid, either with reduced working hours or with financial payment, for mandatory hours worked outside of the official 38-hour work week.

This 38-hour provision is a fiction—it is impossible to complete the various tasks now demanded of a classroom teacher within this time. An AEU survey of 10,000 teachers in 2021 reported that average weekly hours worked was in fact 53, that is, an average of 15 hours unpaid overtime is carried out by each fulltime educator.

Nevertheless the 38-hour week is the basis for calculating and paying out (or acquitting, in the Department of Education’s jargon) time in lieu.

Accrued time in lieu can be claimed by teachers through three mechanisms—acquittal without replacement, acquittal through replacement by a relief teacher, and payment at the hourly rate of pay. The first method, acquittal without replacement, can mean in effect that principals instruct teachers to stay off site for a designated time. If, for example, a teacher was owed an hour of time in lieu, they can be instructed to be at school on a given day for 7 hours rather than the mandated 8 hours. This does nothing to reduce that teacher’s work, so tasks will be done at their home rather than their classroom.

Time in lieu in the form of payment at the hourly rate of pay is limited when accrued on camps. The Fair Work ruling recognised that teachers are “on call” when supervising overnight, but added that those not “on duty” between 11 p.m. and 7 a.m., i.e. awake all night dealing with students, will only receive 50 percent of their regular hourly wage.

There is a definite element of diversion in the AEU bureaucracy’s promotion of the time in lieu question.

While individual teachers are left to log their extra working hours and negotiate with principals on the repayment of time in lieu, the entire public education system is falling further into crisis. The state Labor government in Victoria has maintained the lowest per student funding of public schools in the country. The federal Labor government of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has likewise cut real spending for public schools, while entrenching the lucrative flow of public funding for private schools, including the most exclusive. Australia has one of the most privatised and socially polarised school systems in the world.

The Widening Breach, in Israel and in Israel-US Relations

Mel Gurtov

Image of Israeli flag.

Image by Cole Keister.

The Growing Divide

Israel’s Knesset, or parliament, has passed the first law to scale back judicial independence, in line with the ambitions of Benjamin Netanyahu’s largely far-right, ultra-religious cabinet. The law will sharply limit the power of courts to rule on matters that “reasonably” require judicial intervention, giving his government far greater power to push its agenda, which includes opening Palestinian land to thousands of Israeli settlers.

Corruption charges against Netanyahu himself are likely to be dropped. Large-scale popular protests are entering their fifth month, joined by a wide swath of Israeli society that includes military reservists, doctors, women’s groups, and labor unions. A general strike is possible.

Pres. Biden offered rare criticism of Israel’s government while the new law was being debated in Tel Aviv, saying it contains some “of the most extreme members” he’s seen in Israel. He said that cabinet ministers who support Israelis settling “anywhere they want” in the West Bank are “part of the problem” in the conflict with Palestinians.

Welcoming Israel’s president Isaac Herzog to the White House, Biden still offered the usual “ironclad” and “unbreakable” US support of Israel. Herzog, who has been very critical of the judicial reforms, was careful not to go deeply into the crisis at home. All he would allow is that Israel always finds an “amicable consensus,” and that he was working “in order to find solutions and exit out of this crisis properly.”

Shortly after the meeting with Herzog, Biden finally extended an invitation to Netanyahu to visit Washington. It was probably a grudging invitation, reflecting growing unease in the White House and among liberals with politics in Tel Aviv.

“Given the range of threats and challenges confronting Israel right now.” The Times columnist Thomas Friedman, in a scathing critique of the Netanyahu government’s willingness to dispense with democratic norms, cited this comment by David Horovitz, the founding editor of Times of Israel:

“Only a government bent on doing the unreasonable would move to ensure that the justices — the only brake on majority power in a country with no constitution and no enshrined, unbreachable defense of freedom of religion, freedom of speech and other basic rights — cannot review the reasonableness of its policies.”

Former Prime Minister Ehud Barack put the matter even more strongly, saying the new law would “degrade Israel into a corrupt and racist dictatorship that will crumble society, isolate the country.”

The End of Shared Values?

Those comments only reinforce Biden’s convictions that Israel, long upheld in Washington as “the only democracy in the Middle East,” has gone astray. Just a day before the Knesset vote, Biden said: “it doesn’t make sense for Israeli leaders to rush this — the focus should be on pulling people together and finding consensus.”

An Israeli writer offered that “the Biden administration views the right’s judicial overhaul as an effort to eliminate Israeli democracy from within — and as such, erasing what it considers the central foundation of the relationship between the two countries.” The notion of shared values is being shattered.

A further sign of American liberals’ disenchantment is Nicholas Kristof’s July 22 op-ed in the New York Times. He raised the once-taboo subject of ending US aid to Israel. Kristof cited several people whose support for Israel is unimpeachable but who now believe US aid needs to be reexamined for at least two reasons: At $3.8 billion annually to an economically advanced country, aid seems unnecessary and would be better used elsewhere; and the military component essentially subsidizes US weapons manufacturers, which is Israel’s required supplier.

Aid makes the US-Israel relationship “unhealthy,” Kristof wrote, while affording no leverage over Netanyahu’s decision making. He quotes Daniel Kurtzer, a former US ambassador to Israel: “Aid provides the U.S. with no leverage or influence over Israeli decisions to use force; because we sit by quietly while Israel pursues policies we oppose, we are seen as ‘enablers’ of Israel’s occupation.”

Another Illiberal Democracy?

In short, Israel’s right-wing government is driving a wedge between Israel and the US, at the expense of Israelis’ as well as Palestinians’ real security. Voices of compromise within the government, such as Herzog and defense minister Yoav Gallant, had called for a watered-down judicial bill and a lengthy pause before a vote.

But to no avail; Netanyahu put himself at the service of morally bankrupt and politically extremist cabinet members with radical goals: the removal of all Palestinians from Israel, the elimination of checks on the prime minister’s authority, resistance to US pressure, and declaration of Israel as a Jewish state.

Achieving those aims would move Israel from the democratic to the authoritarian column, in a class with Erdogan’s Turkey, Modi’s India, and el-Sisi’s Egypt. Netanyahu has reinforced such comparisons by using the same victim language other far-right leaders have used: witch hunt, deep state, “judicial coup.”

Those leaders—I’m thinking of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and of course Donald Trump—were deposed. If Netanyahu’s blind ambition means another illiberal democracy, will the Biden administration redefine relations with Israel, ending its special status, a move that previous liberal administrations have been desperate to avoid?

Netanyahu’s judicial coup and the dead end of Zionism

Jean Shaoul & Chris Marsden

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government passed legislation Monday giving itself untrammeled power, in the face of mass popular opposition unprecedented in Israel’s history.

The new law ends the Supreme Court’s power to strike down the decisions of elected officials on the grounds of “unreasonableness,” granting the Knesset the power to overturn the Court’s ruling with a simple majority. At a stroke, this removes any separation of powers between the legislature, the executive and the judiciary.

From now on the government can politicize the selection of judges, appoint convicted criminals to the highest offices of the state and allow Netanyahu, currently on trial on corruption charges that could put him behind bars for years, to evade conviction.

In the Supreme Court, Netanyahu is targeting an institution that has repeatedly colluded in the brutal suppression of the Palestinians, shielded settler violence and presided over the 2018 Nation State Law defining Israel as “the national home of the Jewish people” and confirming its Arab population as second-class citizens.

Even this is not enough for Netanyahu’s government of ultra-nationalists and religious Zionists. Their aims are the total annexation of the Occupied West Bank, ethnic cleansing throughout Israel and the imposition of authoritarian rule over a society characterized by acute social inequality, stepped up militarism and cultural reaction.

The prospect of such measures has sparked an existential crisis for the State of Israel, igniting seven months of demonstrations, mobilizing hundreds of thousands of people amid scenes of vicious police attacks on demonstrators. Speaking on Britain’s Channel 4 television, former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert now warns, “This is a serious threat. It’s never happened before, and we are going into a civil war now.”

A striking feature of the oppositional wave is the announcement by more than 10,000 army reservists that they will refuse to serve if the judicial coup goes ahead, saying they are unwilling to continue risking their lives for a government that is no longer democratic.

The army demands several years of military service for young Jewish Israelis and annual reservist duty. For 56 years, military service has meant enforcing Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian and Syrian land, carrying out search and arrest raids, forced evictions, demolitions and other punitive measures as well as providing cover for settlers carrying out vigilante attacks.

The reservists’ refusal to serve reflects growing concern among workers and professional middle-class layers over the far-right and extremist settlers’ efforts to provoke an all-out war against the Palestinians, even as Netanyahu steps up the covert war against Iran and its allies in Syria and Lebanon. It takes place under conditions where Israel is a social and political powder keg and the entire Middle East has been destabilised by the deepening global economic crisis, the pandemic, climate change and US-led plans to escalate the war against Russia in Ukraine and its regional allies, Iran and Syria, with Tel Aviv as its chief attack dog. This prompted IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi to warn that without “a strong and united defence force,” Israel would “no longer be able to exist as a country in the region.”

These are the concerns animating the self-proclaimed leaders of the opposition to Netanyahu’s judicial coup—former ministers, generals and security and intelligence chiefs. The opposition leaders are no less committed to the expansion of Israel’s borders at the expense of the Palestinians, but they fear the turn to open dictatorship will jeopardise the interests of Israel’s corporate and financial elite and have begged Netanyahu to “compromise.”

Israel has long depended for its survival on massive economic and military support from the United States, particularly after its success against the Arab armies in 1967, in return for acting as US imperialism’s policeman in the Middle East. Now, instead of being an effective policeman, Netanyahu’s actions have undermined Washington’s protracted efforts to secure alliances with Arab regimes in the Middle East, threatening its plans to isolate and crush Iran and exposing the fraud of its claim to be upholding democracy in waging its de facto war against Russia in Ukraine.

In addition, the prospect of protracted social upheaval in Israel and throughout the region has spooked international investors, with Morgan Stanley cutting its sovereign credit to a “dislike stance” and credit rating agency Moody’s warning of “negative consequences” and “significant risk” for Israel’s economy and security.

The vast outpouring of opposition to the government has, crucially, politically discredited the fraudulent claims of those equating criticism of Israel with antisemitism. This has undermined a global witch-hunt of the left to silence and discredit opponents of Israel’s repression of the Palestinians and the broader war aims of the state’s imperialist backers.

It has at the same time refuted the central tenet of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Campaign blaming all Israelis for the crimes of their government. Citing the pro-Zionist leadership of the protest movement, numerous pseudo-left and liberal publications have insisted that all that is happening is a fall-out between rival Zionist cliques and that Jewish workers can never be won to united struggle with the Palestinians because they are loyal to the “settler colonial state” which provides them with a supposedly privileged existence.

There are complex problems in developing a genuine socialist opposition to Netanyahu’s fascistic agenda. But the working class—Israeli and Palestinian, Jewish, secular, Muslim and Christian—is being objectively driven into struggle against the ruling class and its state apparatus.

What is necessary is for the working class and its younger generation to draw the central political lessons of the history of Israel since its foundation.

The central myths of the Zionist project have been dealt a body blow from which they will never recover. Nothing is left of the insistence on “national unity” on which Zionism rests. The claim that its establishment 75 years ago through the forcible expulsion of the Palestinians would provide a democratic haven for the Jewish people after the horrors of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust has turned into a nightmare.

Zionism emerged as a right-wing ethno-nationalist movement in the 19th century based on exclusivist conceptions of racial, religious and linguistic separatism to justify the establishment of a Jewish capitalist state. The growth of its influence among a people deeply rooted in the Enlightenment and then the socialist movement was due to the catastrophe that overtook European Jewry in the 1930s and 1940s, culminating in the extermination of 6 million European Jews in the Nazi Holocaust. This defeat of the European working class by fascism was facilitated by the Stalinist degeneration of the Soviet Union and the Communist International, and the Soviet bureaucracy’s betrayal of the struggle for world socialism.

Zionism politically exploited the widespread political disillusionment among Jews to urge the creation of a Jewish state through emigration to British-controlled Palestine. Israel was established in 1948 through the forcible and brutal expulsion of almost a million Palestinians and the seizure of their land.

A state founded on this basis and the ongoing repression of the Palestinians was always incapable of developing a genuinely democratic society. Its evolution as a garrison state for US imperialism, repeatedly at war with its Arab neighbours and in perpetual war with the Palestinians; pursuing an expansionist “Greater Israel” policy; resting ever more firmly on the right-wing settler population in the Occupied Territories and US military subventions to offset the destabilising impact of acute levels of social inequality among the highest in the world, is what has paved the way for the Frankenstein monster of Netanyahu’s government.

Hunter Biden plea deal blocked by federal judge as Republicans threaten impeachment probe

Patrick Martin

On Wednesday, a federal judge in Delaware unexpectedly blocked a plea deal for Hunter Biden, son of President Joe Biden, on tax and gun charges, setting the stage for an escalation of the crisis wracking the US political system.

The judge’s intervention gives tacit encouragement to the Republican Party’s ongoing campaign to destabilize the Biden administration, which now includes open threats to launch an impeachment inquiry based on unsupported claims that the president shared in the profits from his son’s shady business dealings in Ukraine and China.

Judge Maryellen Noreika questioned lawyers for Hunter Biden and representatives of the US Attorney for Delaware, David Weiss, about the terms of the plea deal. Noreika focused on the disparity between the claims of Biden’s lawyers that the plea deal ended all possibility of further prosecution and the US Attorney’s office’s position that its investigation into Hunter Biden, in progress for five years, was continuing.

Former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, centre, his son Hunter Biden, left, and his sister Valerie Biden Owens, right (AP Photo/Visar Kryeziu)

Asked directly whether he would plead guilty to two misdemeanor tax charges, as provided in the plea deal, if there was no assurance against further prosecution, Hunter Biden said he would not do so. This set off a contentious discussion between the judge and the lawyers for both sides, in the course of which Biden’s lead attorney, Christopher Clark, threatened to “rip up” the plea deal.

Judge Noreika also expressed concern about how the gun charge would be resolved. Biden is charged with illegal possession of a firearm by a convicted felon (he had pled guilty to drug charges and has repeatedly admitted his addiction) because he bought a pistol in 2018. Under the plea deal, if Biden remained drug-free for two years, the gun charge would be waived.

Technically, the gun charge is the most serious of those against Biden, even though he only held the weapon for 11 days before disposing of it, since it is a felony with a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison—an indication of the savagery of the US judicial system.

The judge objected to the inclusion of a provision related to the tax charges in the part of the agreement relating to the gun charge. She also objected to a provision giving her a role in approving the finding that Biden had been drug-free for two years, when she had no part in drafting or approving the gun charge agreement. She suggested that this violated the constitutional separation of powers between the judiciary and the executive branch.

While these legal points may have some validity, it is considered unusual for a federal judge to reject a plea deal negotiated between prosecution and defense, particularly concerning charges of essentially a minor character.

The hearing ended after three hours of wrangling, with the judge giving the prosecution and defense 30 days to work out a plea deal more satisfactory to her. Hunter Biden was then booked and finger-printed on the tax charges, to which he pleaded not guilty.

The temporary rebuff to the plea deal helps fuel the anti-Biden campaign by Republicans in the House of Representatives who have opened up a series of investigations into Hunter Biden’s business dealings, claiming that President Biden is implicated in the shady operations of his son in Ukraine and China.

In Ukraine, Hunter Biden occupied a well-paid position on the board of directors of Burisma, a large energy company, although he had no expertise in the business at all. The appointment was an obvious effort by the oligarch owner of the company to curry favor with Joe Biden, then vice president in the Obama administration. Vice President Biden was named by Obama to head US efforts in Ukraine after the Maidan coup, in which fascist groups drove out the pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, and replaced him with a pro-NATO puppet.

In China, Hunter Biden had a deal with a company that was of disputed profitability. Biden says he made little money, while Republicans claim he netted millions and shared the loot with his father. There has been no actual evidence to back up these charges, which have rocketed around the ultra-right media for years.

House Republicans have repeatedly cited Hunter Biden’s business dealings as the basis for an impeachment drive against President Biden, based on the claim that he participated in and profited from his son’s activities in Ukraine and China. It was then-president Trump’s effort to blackmail Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into digging into the Burisma deal that led to Trump’s first impeachment in 2019.

Until this week, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy resisted appeals from the right wing of the House Republican caucus, particularly the fascistic Freedom Caucus, to back an effort to impeach Joe Biden. But in media appearances on Monday and Tuesday, and then in remarks to the House Republicans on Wednesday, McCarthy modified his stance, suggesting that an impeachment inquiry might be in order.

He presented this not as a decision to vote on impeachment—which would likely fail in the House, where the Republicans could suffer enough defections to defeat it—but to begin an investigation into the Bidens with greater powers to gather evidence and compel testimony than a routine committee investigation.

Given the likelihood that Trump will be indicted shortly for his role in leading and instigating the attack on Congress on January 6, 2021, McCarthy’s statements amount to a threat that if the Justice Department goes ahead with the prosecution of Trump, the House will go ahead with the impeachment of Biden in a tit-for-tat at the highest levels of the American state.

This prospect underscores the acuteness of the political crisis, in which each party treats the other’s top leader not as an opponent, but as a criminal who should be jailed.

There is, of course, a significant difference in the two cases. Trump faces indictment for an actual crime, the attempt to overthrow the US government and establish a presidential dictatorship. Biden would be impeached for a wholly manufactured crime for which there is no evidence.

President Biden is guilty of many other crimes, those common to all recent American presidents, including mass murder against the population of countries targeted by the US military-intelligence apparatus, particularly in the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia, and now in Ukraine in the proxy war against Russia.

He is also responsible for vicious attacks on the American working class, as in the passage of legislation banning a strike by railroad workers and imposing a contract settlement they had already rejected.

And Biden, like Trump, is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans in the Covid pandemic, in which the federal government abandoned efforts to use lockdowns and public health measures to actually fight the pandemic, substituting ineffective mitigation efforts that have now been abandoned in favor of happy talk about the end of the pandemic.

The Republicans do not propose to impeach Biden for any of these actual crimes, however, because they agree with all of them, only berating the current president because he does not go far enough in attacking the working class and promoting the profit interests of corporate America.