https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msiR3hxenMo
Friday, August 28, 2020
Workers anger grows as Turkish government downplays COVID-19 crisis
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/27/turk-a27.html
By Barış Demir and Çetin Akın
27 August 2020
The coronavirus continues to spread in Turkey after President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government re-opened the economy on June 1, backed by bourgeois opposition parties and trade unions.
As in countries all over the world, the coronavirus pandemic is out of control in Turkey after a deadly back-to-work campaign in the interests of the ruling class. The government only responds with unreliable statements and data. As the total official number of cases in Turkey reached 261,000, with more than 6,150 deaths, the number of daily cases on Tuesday was 1,502, the most since June 15.
As workplaces spread of the pandemic, companies and authorities are forcing even the infected to work, provoking growing opposition among workers.
After increasing COVID-19 cases on-site, the Artvin Governorate decided to keep the nearly 4,000 workers at the Yusufeli Dam and hydroelectric power plant construction sites. Workers responded with a walk-out on August 25.
One worker told sendika.org: “Many workers who wanted to leave work in this process. However, they did not give permission, and we heard that there were those who received threats like, ‘You cannot get your notice compensation and you cannot get your unemployment pay.’ Today, they force us to stay on the construction site with the agreement of the governor’s office.”
Last month, a canned fish company, Dardanel, in the western city of Çanakkale, forced all workers into its factory for 14 days after more than 40 workers tested positive for coronavirus. This decision was approved not only by the governor’s office, but also by city’s Republican People’s Party (CHP) mayor—exposing the reactionary collaboration between the government and so-called opposition parties at workers’ expense.
Reports of workplace outbreaks in provinces across Turkey are rising. They include:
• In factories in the Adana Organized Industrial Zone, COVID-19 cases have surged over the last week. Dozens of positive cases were found in Atlas Denim, Erbey İplik Dokuma and Kastamonu Entegre factories, and the virus has been also seen in many factories throughout the industrial zone. Workers reported more than 40 cases in Erbey İplik Dokuma and nearly 10 cases in Kastamonu Entegre.
• In a textile factory in Zonguldak, where 155 workers are employed, 43 workers tested positive and the other workers were quarantined. Production at the factory was stopped.
• Coronavirus tests of 36 workers at the Söke Flour Factory in Aydın were positive.
• Reportedly, despite the increase in the COVID-19 outbreak in the Manisa Organized Industrial Zone, no measures have been taken. In the Vestel factory alone, there are nearly 1,000 cases, and at least 8 workers have lost their lives.
• The virus is spreading rapidly among postal workers, considered among the most at-risk workers during the pandemic. Reportedly, 241 workers in the state-owned PTT mail distribution company have caught the virus.
Anger towards the government’s response is also increasing among health care workers, the most affected by the pandemic. Last week, the Diyarbakır Health Platform shared the latest data of COVID-19 Diagnosis Healthcare Professionals in the city. According to the report, while in total 476 healthcare workers were infected in Diyarbakır, 130 of them only got sick in the last two weeks.
Health care workers held a one-hour work stoppage and sit-in in Diyarbakır on August 20 to draw attention to difficult working conditions. They issued a statement declaring that the government’s measures are insufficient: “Unfortunately, just within last week, we have lost two physician friends, one health technician and one subcontracted worker in this period in Diyarbakır and Urfa.”
The Trade Union of Public Employees in Health and Social Services (SES) Batman branch co-chair Deniz Topkan recently stated that of 3,500 health workers in Batman city, 700 tested positive. As the health system was insufficient in the face of the intense increase in cases, he added, seven people died last week while waiting for intensive care—even though the 350-bed hospital’s capacity was increased to 450.
Workers spread reports about deadly workplace situations only via social media. While corporate media do not report them and line behind the political establishment, unions cooperate with state officials and companies, especially to hide the number of cases in the workplace. Workers are falling ill and even dying, but management and the union refuse to tell workers how many have COVID-19.
In the BMC auto factory in İzmir, where nearly 3,000 workers are employed, workers said the number of positive cases has risen from 12 last week to 70, and production has stopped. Mürsel Öcal, the Türk-Metal union’s İzmir branch head, denied that there were infected workers in the BMC. His statement about the situation expresses the utter contempt of the entire ruling class and all its servants for workers’ lives: “Factories are the most reliable places in İzmir.”
According to the scientists and medical experts, Health Ministry figures are well below the actual number of cases and deaths, which are no longer reliable at all. Even the sum of the figures for a few cities announced by branches of the Turkish Medical Association (TTB) exceeds the total daily national number provided by the Health Ministry.
Many doctors, health care workers and patients’ relatives report that many infected people have lost their lives during treatment for COVID-19, but hospitals list other causes of death. While the number of intensive care and intubated patients is rising, the Health Ministry has claimed the daily death toll is just between 18 and 24 for more than two months. While health workers from various provinces state on social media that the situation in hospitals is the worst it has been since the pandemic began, official figures are well below the worst period recorded in Turkey.
In an August 25 interview, TTB Central Council Member Dr. Halis Yerlikaya said: “Almost half of the figures by the Ministry are from Diyarbakır… On the day the Ministry announced the number of cases as 1,200-1,300, the Diyarbakır Medical Association announced that 601 people in Diyarbakır tested positive. If it was transparent and the actual figures were revealed, perhaps the reflexes and behavior of society would develop accordingly.”
Despite the growth in the number of cases, expert warnings that the pandemic will increase in the coming months, as well as the destructive examples of America and Europe, the government is also preparing to re-open schools in September 21. In October, football matches are to be played with thousands of fans attending.
Private schools which the government has highly promoted in past decades already opened on August 17, and public school teachers returned to school on Monday for the so-called “seminar” process. The government is set to open all schools as part of its opening of the economy.
The government has had to postpone the opening of public schools from September 1 to September 21 due to mounting social opposition. At the beginning of this month, the Education and Science Workers’ Union (Eğitim-Sen) published a survey titled “Education in Pandemic Conditions” with 2,239 teachers nationwide. The vast majority of the participants (96.4 percent) said that if face-to-face education is initiated during the pandemic, their health and the health of their family will be in danger.
As COVID-19 spreads due to the ruling class’ deadly response to the pandemic, leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths, the only way forward for the working class is to take action. To save lives, workers including teachers and health care workers in should build rank-and-file safety committees in their workplaces, independent of pro-capitalist trade-unions, in Turkey and internationally.
TikTok files federal lawsuit against the Trump administration
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/27/tikt-a27.html
By Kevin Reed
27 August 2020
On Monday, the social media platform TikTok filed a federal lawsuit to block the Trump administration’s xenophobic ban of the Chinese-owned company in the US if it is not sold within 45 days to an American-owned firm. The lawsuit was filed in the US District Court for the Central District of California.
In a blog post entitled, “Why we are suing the Administration,” the company explains that President Trump’s executive order on August 6 forcing TikTok to divest its US assets on the basis of national security emergency powers is a violation of Fifth Amendment due process rights.
The TikTok statement says, “the Administration failed to follow due process and act in good faith, neither providing evidence that TikTok was an actual threat, nor justification for its punitive actions.” Trump’s executive orders against TikTok and the Chinese-owned app WeChat were based on provisions of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) that permit the president to regulate economic transactions during a national emergency.
The TikTok blog says, “Now is the time for us to act. We do not take suing the government lightly, however we feel we have no choice but to take action to protect our rights, and the rights of our community and employees.” The short-form video sharing app, owned by Beijing-based ByteDance, has 1,500 employees and 100 million users in the US.
TikTok’s lawsuit thoroughly exposes the anti-Chinese political purpose of Trump’s executive order, “The executive order seeks to ban TikTok purportedly because of the speculative possibility that the application could be manipulated by the Chinese government. But, as the U.S. government is well aware, Plaintiffs have taken extraordinary measures to protect the privacy and security of TikTok’s U.S. user data, including by having TikTok store such data outside of China (in the United States and Singapore) and by erecting software barriers that help ensure that TikTok stores its U.S. user data separately from the user data of other ByteDance products.”
These measures were well-known by the US government as they were part of the requirements imposed on ByteDance at the start-up of TikTok in the US following the company’s acquisition of the Chinese company Musical.ly in 2017. At that time, ByteDance went through an extensive national security inspection which “provided voluminous documentation to the U.S. government documenting TikTok’s security practices and made commitments that were more than sufficient to address any conceivable U.S. government privacy or national security concerns.”
The lawsuit also says that “key personnel responsible for TikTok, including its CEO, Global Chief Security Officer, and General Counsel, are all Americans based in the United States—and therefore are not subject to Chinese law. U.S. content moderation is likewise led by a U.S.-based team and operates independently from China, and, as noted above, the TikTok application stores U.S. user data on servers located in the United States and Singapore.”
Furthermore, since the onset of the anti-Chinese campaign of the Trump administration and the Democrats and Republicans in Congress, the company has cooperated for more than a year with a review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), headed by US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.
The TikTok brief explains, “During this period, and through the course of the CFIUS review, ByteDance provided voluminous documentation and information in response to CFIUS’s questions. Among other evidence, ByteDance submitted detailed documentation to CFIUS demonstrating TikTok’s security measures to help ensure U.S. user data is safeguarded in storage and in transit and cannot be accessed by unauthorized persons—including any government—outside the United States.”
Despite the cooperation, acting under the direction of the Trump administration and its increasingly aggressive economic attacks and military threats against China, CFIUS issued a letter five minutes before the expiration of its review deadline—at 11:55 p.m. on July 30—that was “principally based on outdated news articles, failed to address the voluminous documentation that Plaintiffs had provided demonstrating the security of TikTok user data, and was flawed in numerous other respects.”
True to his US imperialist bullying form and with a real estate speculator’s mentality, President Trump not only demanded that the assets of TikTok be handed over to American corporate executives and Wall Street speculators, he also insisted that a “very substantial portion of that price is going to have to come into the treasury of the United States. … It’s a little bit like the landlord-tenant. Without a lease, the tenant has nothing. So, they pay what’s called key money or they pay something.”
In response to this particularly criminal aspect of the entire project, the TikTok lawsuit says, “The President’s demands for payments have no relationship to any conceivable national security concern and serve only to underscore that Defendants failed [attempt] to provide Plaintiffs with the due process required by law.”
The US corporations Microsoft and Oracle were all too eager to jump on Trump’s anti-Chinese bandwagon. With dollar signs swirling around in their minds, corporate executives and investors for both software tech giants have gotten in line to make the purchase at a steep discount with the expectation of a massive post-purchase valuation on Wall Street.
A report in the New York Times on Wednesday said, “a deal with Microsoft could help propel the valuation of the app’s business outside China to as high as $80 billion,” and would provide TikTok with “the endorsement of a blue-chip American company to mollify the Trump administration, which had called TikTok’s Chinese ties a national security threat.”
Additionally, the Times report went on, “Bankers and investors, some authorized and some simply trying to gin up a deal, have also called Netflix and Twitter about buying TikTok, they said, though it is unclear if those companies have a genuine interest in an acquisition. … A deal price is unclear, though numbers have ranged from $20 billion to $50 billion depending on what parts of TikTok will be sold, the people said.”
In other words, the vultures of the American oligarchy are expecting the forced sale of TikTok to rapidly yield as much as a 4-to-1 return on investment.
That there is both bipartisan support within the US political establishment and unanimity with the corporate elite for an aggressive takedown of the enormously successful Chinese mobile app developers was exposed by the Wall Street Journal on August 23.
In an article entitled, “Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Stoked Washington’s Fears About TikTok,” the Journal wrote, “In a private dinner at the White House in late October, Mr. Zuckerberg made the case to President Trump that the rise of Chinese internet companies threatens American business, and should be a bigger concern than reining in Facebook,” according to unnamed sources.
It was also after meetings that Zuckerberg held with Senator Tom Cotton (Republican-Arkansas) and Senator Chuck Schumer (Democrat-New York) that the two wrote a letter to intelligence officials demanding an inquiry into TikTok. A national-security review of the company began in November and the Trump administration began its offensive against TikTok in the spring.
Zuckerberg’s attempt to deflect government criticism of Facebook into a campaign against Chinese app developers is a particularly reactionary, but not surprising tactic for the American billionaire. In the end, the aggressive methods being deployed against TikTok will also be applied to the US-based social media platforms as part of the drive by the state to gain control of the information flow and to spy on the organization of the growing social unrest and class struggle against capitalism.
Markets focus on Fed chair’s Jackson Hole speech
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/27/hole-a27.html
By Nick Beams
27 August 2020
The eyes of financial markets around the world will be focused today on the keynote address to be delivered by US Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell to the annual Jackson Hole conclave of central bankers.
Powell’s speech, to be given in a completely virtual format because of the COVID-19 pandemic, will focus on the two-year review by the Fed of its monetary policy. The key question concerning financial elites around the world is how the Fed and other central banks intend to continue the stimulus to markets that has sent Wall Street to new record highs after it plunged in mid-March.
The massive $3 trillion injection by the Fed since the plunge, backing every sector of the financial markets, has poured hundreds of billions of dollars into the coffers of the financial elites, above all those holding technology-based stocks.
Last May, Forbes ’ global rich list reported that the world’s 25 richest individuals had increased their total wealth by $255 billion in the space of just two months. With the continued rise of Wall Street since then, that figure will have further increased.
Powell has previously stated there are no limits to the Fed’s action so far as injecting money is concerned, and if there is another crisis it will act. But there are questions about what form such action will take under conditions where the world economy is experiencing its worst downturn since the Great Depression.
Mark Sobel, a former US Treasury official and now the chairman of a central bank think tank, told the Financial Times: “The Fed and the European Central Bank have used up a lot of ammo. Even when advanced economies are significantly recovering, there will still be a legacy of sky-high unemployment, large output gaps and enormous dislocations to deal with.”
As far as the real economy is concerned, further monetary stimulus will do nothing to lift output or ease unemployment. The central bank is “pushing on a string,” according to Adam Posen, the president of the Washington-based Peterson Institute for International Economics.
“You can alleviate liquidity problems, you can put a floor under some asset prices, you can stabilise credit markets, all of which is constructive, but none of which is sufficient to create recovery,” he said.
Investors in the financial markets, however, are eagerly anticipating that the Fed will signal action to further expand monetary intervention to keep the Wall Street surge going.
However, there are concerns in some quarters about where the unprecedented intervention is going to end. According to Robin Brooks, chief economist at the Institute of International Finance, “There’s a legitimate worry at this point that we are doing a bit of levitation. The massive increase in leverage and the low rates forever… all of these things are worrying from a financial stability point of view.”
In the past five months, corporations have taken on massive amounts of new debt in order to stave off bankruptcy. According to the rating agency S&P, corporations globally have raised $2 trillion in bonds alone so far this year, an increase of $600 billion over the same period last year.
In the US, companies have issued a record $1.25 trillion in debt, of which almost $1 trillion was raised following the March 23 decision by the Fed that it would intervene to buy corporate bonds as a backstop to the market.
The largest share of borrowing has been by investment-grade companies. But money has also been raised by junk-rated companies, which have issued $220 billion worth of bonds so far this year.
The debt issuance has been predicated on the assumption that the economy will “bounce back” and the debt will be able to be paid back. But these expectations will be thrown awry if there is a second wave of infections and consumer demand does not recover. There is no prospect for an increase in investment—the key driver of the economy—as it was already in decline before the pandemic struck.
Even under relatively favourable conditions, S&P estimates that the default rate for US junk-rated companies will rise to 15.5 percent by next March, higher than the peak experienced in 2009 in the wake of the global financial crisis. And if there is a deepening downturn in the global economy, investment-grade companies will also be hit.
There is another significant development in the stock market that underscores the unprecedented character of the present economic and financial crisis. While Wall Street indexes continue to surge, the so-called “recovery” has been far from broad-based. It is concentrated in the high-tech stocks such as Apple, Google, Microsoft and Amazon, which make up a large proportion of the S&P 500 index.
This has given rise to what is being referred to as a K-shaped development—a situation in which the share prices of market leaders diverge from others. In analysis of the market, Vincent Deluard, the director of global macro strategy at the brokerage firm Stone Group, told Bloomberg: “I would summarize 2020 as the bear market for humans. Like many things, COVID is just accelerating social transformation, concentration of wealth in a few hands, massive inequalities, competition issues and all that.”
He pointed out that firms that have relatively few employees have beaten the more labour-intensive ones by 37 percentage points in 2020.
One aspect of the divergence is the fact that high-tech companies employ relatively few workers and have been able to benefit from the pandemic, as reflected in the 33 percent rise in the tech-heavy NASDQ index so far this year. The one exception is Amazon, which has been able to increase its sales because of the increased turn to online purchases.
Bloomberg cited one extreme example of this process. MarketAxess Holdings, an automated bond trading firm, has seen its shares rise by 29 percent this year, five times the gain in the S&P 500, and now has a market capitalisation of $19 billion, while employing just 530 people.
According to Deluard’s calculations, the cluster of companies with the smallest number of employees relative to market value has risen by 18 percent this year, while the group with the highest labour intensity has recorded a 19 percent loss.
This situation has far-reaching implications the workers employed in these industries. Under conditions where all companies operate under the dictates of market value and returns to shareholders—the vast bulk of which are hedge funds and investment banks—these companies will be under increasing pressure to boost their share price through job cuts and ever-intensifying exploitation.
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