America has Just Destroyed a Great Empire

Michael Hudson

Photograph Source: Temple of Delphi – CC BY-SA 3.0

Herodotus (History, Book 1.53) tells the story of Croesus, king of Lydia c. 585-546 BC in what is now Western Turkey and the Ionian shore of the Mediterranean. Croesus conquered Ephesus, Miletus and neighboring Greek-speaking realms, obtaining tribute and booty that made him one of the richest rulers of his time. But these victories and wealth led to arrogance and hubris. Croesus turned his eyes eastward, ambitious to conquer Persia, ruled by Cyrus the Great.

Having endowed the region’s cosmopolitan Temple of Delphi with substantial silver and gold, Croesus asked its Oracle whether he would be successful in the conquest that he had planned. The Pythia priestess answered: “If you go to war against Persia, you will destroy a great empire.”

Croesus therefore set out to attack Persia c. 547 BC. Marching eastward, he attacked Persia’s vassal-state Phrygia. Cyrus mounted a Special Military Operation to drive Croesus back, defeating Croesus’s army, capturing him and taking the opportunity to seize Lydia’s gold to introduce his own Persian gold coinage. So Croesus did indeed destroy a great empire, but it was his own.

Fast-forward to today’s drive by the Biden administration to extend American military power against Russia and, behind it, China. The president asked for advice from today’s analogue to antiquity’s Delphi oracle: the CIA and its allied think tanks. Instead of warning against hubris, they encouraged the neocon dream that attacking Russia and China would consolidate U.S. control of the world economy, achieving the End of History.

Having organized a coup d’état in Ukraine in 2014, the United States sent its NATO proxy army eastward, giving weapons to Ukraine to fight an ethnic war against its Russian-speaking population and turn Russia’s Crimean naval base into a NATO fortress. This Croesus-level ambition aimed at drawing Russia into combat and depleting its ability to defend itself, wrecking its economy in the process and destroying its ability to provide military support to China and other countries targeted for seeking self-dependency as an alternative to U.S. hegemony.

 After eight years of provocation, a new military attack on Russian-speaking Ukrainians was conspicuously prepared, ready to drive toward the Russian border in February 2022. Russia protected its fellow Russian-speakers from further ethnic violence by mounting its own Special Military Operation. The United States and its NATO allies immediately seized Russia’s foreign-exchange reserves held in Europe and North America, and demanded that all countries impose sanctions against importing Russian energy and grain, hoping that this would crash the ruble’s exchange rate. The Delphic State Department expected that this would cause Russian consumers to revolt and overthrow Vladimir Putin’s government, enabling U.S. maneuvering to install a client oligarchy like the one it had nurtured in the 1990s under President Yeltsin.

A byproduct of this confrontation with Russia has been to lock in America’s control over its Western European satellites. The aim of this intra-NATO jockeying was to foreclose Europe’s dream of profiting from closer trade and investment relations with Russia by exchanging its industrial manufactures for Russian raw materials. The United States derailed that prospect by blowing up the Nord Stream gas pipelines, cutting off Germany and other countries from access to low-priced Russian gas. That left Europe’s leading economy dependent on higher-cost U.S. Liquified Natural Gas (LNG).

In addition to having to subsidize domestic European gas to prevent widespread insolvency, a large proportion of German Leopard tanks, U.S. Patriot missiles and other NATO “wonder weapons” are being destroyed in combat against the Russian army. It has become clear that the U.S. strategy is not simply to “fight to the last Ukrainian,” but to fight to the last tank, missile and other weapon being deleted from NATO stocks.

This depletion of NATO’s arms was expected to create a vast replacement market to enrich America’s military-industrial complex. Its NATO customers are being told to increase their military spending to 3 or even 4 percent of GDP. But the weak performance of U.S. and German arms on the Ukrainian battlefield may have crashed this dream, while Europe’s economies are sinking into depression. And with Germany’s industrial economy deranged by the severing of its trade with Russia, German Finance Minister Christian Lindner told the Die Welt newspaper on June 16, 2023 that his country cannot afford to pay more money into the European Union budget, to which it has long been the largest contributor.

Without German exports supporting the euro’s exchange rate, the currency will come under pressure against the dollar as Europe buys LNG and NATO replenishes its depleted weaponry stocks by buying new arms from America. A lower exchange rate will squeeze the purchasing power of European labor, while lowering social spending to pay for rearmament and provide gas subsidies is plunging the continent into a depression.

 A nationalist reaction against U.S. dominance is rising throughout European politics, and instead of America locking in its control over European policy, the United States may end up losing – not only in Europe but most crucially throughout the Global South. Instead of turning Russia’s “ruble to rubble” as President Biden promised, Russia’s balance of trade has soared and its gold supply has increased. So have the gold holdings of other countries whose governments are now aiming to de-dollarize their economies.

It is American diplomacy that is driving Eurasia and the Global South out of the U.S. orbit. America’s hubristic drive for unipolar world dominance could only have been dismantled so rapidly from within. The Biden-Blinken-Nuland administration has done what neither Vladimir Putin nor Chinese President Xi could have hoped to achieve in so short a period. Neither was prepared to throw down the gauntlet and create an alternative to the U.S.-centered world order. But U.S. sanctions against Russia, Iran, Venezuela and China have had the effect of protective tariff barriers to force self-sufficiency in what EU diplomat Josep Borrell calls the world “jungle” outside of the US/NATO “garden.”

Although the Global South and other countries have been complaining about U.S. dominance ever since the Bandung Conference of Non-Aligned Nations in 1955, they have lacked a critical mass to create a viable alternative. But their attention has now been focused by the U.S. confiscation of Russia’s official dollar reserves in NATO countries. That dispelled the thought of the dollar as a safe vehicle in which to hold international savings. The Bank of England’s earlier seizure of Venezuela’s gold reserves kept in London – promising to donate them to whatever unelected opponents of its socialist regime U.S. diplomats designate – shows how sterling and the euro as well as the dollar have been weaponized. And by the way, what ever happened to Libya’s gold reserves?

American diplomats avoid thinking about this scenario. They rely to the one unique advantage the United States has to offer. It may refrain from bombing them, from staging a color revolution to “Pinochet” them by the National Endowment for Democracy, or install a new “Yeltsin” giving the economy away to a client oligarchy.

But refraining from such behavior is all that America can offer. It has de-industrialized its own economy, and its idea of foreign investment is to carve out monopoly-rent seeking opportunities by concentrating technological monopolies and control of oil and grain trade in U.S. hands, as if this is economic efficiency, not rent-seeking.

What has occurred is a change in consciousness. We are seeing the Global Majority trying to create an independent and peacefully negotiated choice as to just what kind of an international order they want. Their aim is not merely to create alternatives to the use of dollars, but an entire new set of institutional alternatives to the IMF and World Bank, the SWIFT bank clearing system, the International Criminal Court and the entire array of institutions that U.S. diplomats have hijacked from the United Nations.

The upshot will be civilizational in scope. We are seeing not the End of History but a fresh alternative to U.S.-centered neoliberal finance capitalism and its junk economics of privatization, class war against labor, and the idea that money and credit should be privatized in the hands of a narrow financial class instead of being a public utility to finance economic needs and rising living standards.

The irony is that America’s historical role has been that although it itself was not able to lead the world forward along these lines, its attempts to lock the world into an antithetical imperial system by conquering Russia on the plains of Ukraine and trying to isolate China’s technology from breaking the U.S. attempt at IT monopoly have been the great catalysts pushing the global majority along these lines.

UK plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda ruled unlawful by Court of Appeal

Robert Stevens

In a blow to the Conservative government, the Court of Appeal in London ruled Thursday that its plan to relocate asylum seekers to Rwanda is unlawful.

In a two-to-one majority decision, the ruling by Lord Burnett of Maldon, Sir Geoffrey Vos, and Lord Justice Underhill was handed down following a four-day hearing in April. The Court of Appeal was hearing the case after the High Court had ruled, last December, that the Rwanda policy was lawful. That decision was challenged by 10 asylum-seeker appellants and a charity, Asylum Aid, after the High Court left open the possibility of an appeal.

Ahead of the Court of Appeal ruling, UK Home Secretary Suella Braverman held a bilateral with Rwandan Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation Dr Vincent Biruta. June 22, 2023, [Photo by Lauren Hurley/DHSC / CC BY 2.0]

The court cases stem from the eleventh-hour ruling last June by the European Court of Human Rights to stop a deportation flight to Rwanda, after an appeal was made by asylum seekers. Hailing from Syria, Iraq, Iran, Vietnam, Sudan and Albania, they had arrived in Britain by crossing the English Channel from France in small boats. Central to the government’s Illegal Migrants Bill is a policy allowing the deportation of asylum seekers who reach the UK via the Channel to Rwanda and other destinations deemed “safe third countries”.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has made one of his five policy promises a pledge to “Stop the Boats”, appearing at press conferences and other events with the slogan on podiums and backdrops.

The Court of Appeal’s response was given in a 161-page judgement. It ruled that “there are substantial grounds for believing that there is a real risk that persons sent to Rwanda will be returned to their home countries where they faced persecution or other inhumane treatment, when, in fact, they have a good claim for asylum”.

In their five-page summary judgement, the judges said, “The central issue before the High Court and before the Court of Appeal was whether the asylum system in Rwanda was capable of delivering reliable outcomes. The Appellants’ case is that there are substantial grounds for believing that there is a real risk that any persons sent to Rwanda will be removed to their home country when, in fact, they have a good claim for asylum. Sending them to Rwanda in those circumstances would breach article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights. In that sense, the appellants submitted that Rwanda is not a ‘safe third country’.”

The summary judgment states, “That conclusion is founded on the evidence which was before the High Court that Rwanda’s system for deciding asylum claims was, in the period up to the conclusion of the Rwanda agreement, inadequate.”

While “accepting that the assurances given by the Rwandan government were made in good faith and were intended to address any defects in its asylum processes,” the judges believed “that the evidence does not establish that the necessary changes had by then been reliably effected or would have been at the time of the proposed removals. In consequence sending anyone to Rwanda would constitute a breach of article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights, with which Parliament has required that the Government must comply (Human Rights Act 1998, section 6).”

Home Secretary Priti Patel and Minister Biruta sign the migration and economic development partnership between the UK and Rwanda. April 14, 2022 [Photo by UK Home Office / CC BY 2.0]

Lord Burnett dissented and “reached the opposite conclusion,” the summary explains. “He agrees that the procedures put in place under the Rwanda agreement and the assurances given by the Rwandan government are sufficient to ensure that there is no real risk that asylum-seekers relocated under the Rwanda policy will be wrongly returned to countries where they face persecution or other inhumane treatment.”

The judgement gave the government immediate grounds to appeal, ruling out other grounds on which the appellant’s case was founded. These were centred on issues of law relating to the effect of the Refugee Convention, retained EU law, the designation of a country as a safe third country, data protection, and the fairness of procedures.

Moreover, the summary judgment concluded, “the Court of Appeal makes clear that its decision implies no view whatever about the political merits or otherwise of the Rwanda policy. Those are entirely a matter for the Government, on which the Court has nothing to say. The Court’s concern is only whether the policy complies with the law as laid down by Parliament.”

Teeing up a government appeal, it added, “a deliberately tight timetable has been set for consequential orders and directions, partly so that any application for permission to appeal to the Supreme Court can be decided promptly.”

Sunak responded that his government “fundamentally disagrees” with the decision, would challenge it and would consider an appeal to the Supreme Court. Home Secretary Suella Braverman said she was “determined” to stick with the Rwanda policy. Seizing the opportunity to whip up further hostility to refugees among the Tories’ right-wing constituency, she told a reporter, “We need to change the system, we need to change our laws, that’s how we're going to stop the boats”. Taxpayers were paying £6 million a day in hotels for asylum seekers, she continued, and the “problem is out of control”.

This far-right sociopath, who said at the Tory Party conference last October that her “dream” and “obsession” was to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda, doubled down on her incendiary language, telling Parliament Thursday that the government had to stop providing hotel accommodation for asylum seekers and  putting up people who have “broken into this country”. To do so was “madness” and the government would do “whatever it takes to stop the boats”.

The Tories used the Court of Appeal judgement to justify an appeal to strike it out completely, saying that it “broadly agreed” with the government and found it is “lawful in principle for the government to relocate people who come illegally to a safe third country”. Sunak noted also that it was not a unanimous verdict.

The government is intent on pushing through its reactionary law, as a right-wing media echo chamber churns out non-stop vitriol about the UK being “invaded.” This is the case even though only a few tens of thousands of people attempt to make the hazardous Channel crossing each year. The Tories are proceeding despite the Home Office’s own official economic assessment of the Illegal Migration Bill showing that it would cost £169,000 per person to send an asylum seeker to Rwanda—£63,000 more per person than allowing them to remain in Britain.

The government has until July 6 to lodge an appeal. While it is unlikely to be heard until the autumn, the Tories intend to have their legislation in place, up to and including the UK leaving the European Convention on Human Rights if that is required.

A substantial body of Tory MPs would back such a move, with Sunak declaring, “The policy of this government is very simple: it is this country—and your government—who should decide who comes here, not criminal gangs. And I will do whatever is necessary to make that happen.” Braverman has supported leaving the European Convention on Human Rights. Were the government to win the case at appeal in the Supreme Court, the appellants could take the case to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).

Every person on the planet has a right to asylum under international law stretching back decades. The Court of Appeal ruling noted, “The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees was permitted to make submissions as an interested party and evidence filed on behalf of the UNHCR formed the foundation for much of the Appellants’ case.”

The UNHCR statement released after the Court of Appeal judgement said there were “longstanding and well-known concerns about the ‘externalization’ of asylum obligations” by states seeking to offload their responsibilities to people seeking refugee status to other nations.

None of the parties of the ruling elite have any fundamental differences with the Tories. Labour Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper called for a stricter enforcing of current anti-immigrant legislation, saying, “Time and again, ministers have gone for gimmicks instead of getting a grip, and slogans instead of solutions, while the Tory boats chaos has got worse.”

Party leader Sir Keir Starmer said, “The government hasn’t got a plan. It’s had one gimmick, one headline-grabbing gimmick, Rwanda, which has already cost the taxpayer £140 million without anybody having gone to Rwanda. What the court’s judgment shows is they’ve spent that £140 million of taxpayers’ money without even doing the basics to see whether the scheme was really fit for purpose.”

From Argentina to the Rio Grande, wave of teachers’ strikes sweeps Latin America

Andrea Lobo & Guilherme Ferreira

In at least a dozen countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, teachers have carried out major strikes and protests in the last month against the erosion of their pay by rampant inflation, understaffing and the deplorable state of schools. 

Both the openly right-wing and the so-called “Pink-Tide” governments have rejected their demands and claimed that “there is no money.” In numerous cases, they have used brutal police and military repression, as well as reprisals like layoffs.

Rio de Janeiro teachers gathered for the May 18 assembly that voted to strike

Everywhere, the trade union bureaucracies are moving to isolate these struggles within each nation, province or even school, while using limited strikes and protests to blow off steam and impose the wage and social cuts demanded by the ruling elites. 

The protest actions are a response to the attacks on living standards and social services as the ruling elites subordinate the education, healthcare and lives of workers and their children to the imperative of competing for foreign capital and markets. These struggles have intensified amid a deepening crisis of global capitalism accelerated by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the US-led war drives against Russia and China. They are an important harbinger of a wider eruption of the class struggle globally. 

After the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, when teachers and families were deprived of the technological, instructional, and economic resources needed for adequate remote learning, the UN has declared the worst educational crisis in the last 100 years in Latin America. 

A study by UNESCO and the World Bank found a dramatic setback in reading, math and other skills, which are associated with lifelong socio-economic effects most heavily impacting the poorest layers. 

Having been compelled to return to unsafe in-person learning so that parents could go back full time to produce profits for corporations and the banks, teachers, students and parents are being forced to face the burden of the accumulated deficits in learning and the emotional-health damages amid massive wage and budget cuts.

These intolerable conditions are fueling struggles across the region, which has the highest inequality in the world. The following is not a complete list, but includes the major protests waged by teachers in the recent period.

Teachers have been on strike this month in at least seven provinces in Argentina, including Salta, Santa Cruz, Chubut, Misiones, Jujuy, Buenos Aires Province and the city of Buenos Aires. These have been triggered by the agreement between the union apparatus and the governments to pay raises far below inflation, which is expected to reach 150 percent this year. Teachers are also fighting a massive attack against public education by the Peronist government of Alberto Fernandez, who abandoned promises to spend 6 percent of GDP on education and instead reduced the budget to the lowest level in 11 years.

These protests are being organized largely in opposition to the union bureaucracy, including assemblies of “self-convoked” rank-and-file teachers in Salta that voted to reject each offer by the government. In response, the pseudo-left is acting systematically to channel the anger behind appeals to vote in new, “combative” bureaucrats, or to merely demand that the same Peronist union leadership which belongs to the government call for a national strike.

In Brazil, teachers have held numerous strikes and protests for compliance with the national minimum wage since the beginning of the year. After strikes in Maranhão and Rio Grande do Norte, states governed respectively by the Workers Party (PT) and its ally, the Brazilian Socialist Party, in March and April, starting in May teachers in Amazonas, Amapá, and the Federal District began massive mobilizations. Next week, teachers in Pernambuco also threaten to go on strike. 

Today, the struggle of Brazilian teachers is centered in Rio de Janeiro, where a strike completed its 44th day today (June 29). Last week, the courts ruled the strike illegal, but teachers have been challenging this decision.

Like the strike in Rio de Janeiro, many of the other strikes have lasted more than a month and teachers have suffered pay cuts, revealing their willingness to fight to reverse years of attacks on public education, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The precarious situation of teachers has been compounded by the implementation of a pro-corporate high school reform that has also generated protests from students.

However, despite the national character of this movement, the unions controlled by the PT and its pseudo-left allies have isolated the teachers’ and students’ struggles and subordinated them to the PT government of President Lula da Silva. Highly discredited among teachers after years of boycotting their struggles, the actions of the teachers’ unions took on a criminal character when they betrayed teachers’ struggles demanding the closure of school at the peak of the pandemic.

Uruguayan workers striking to mark 50th anniversary of 1973 coup, June 27 [Photo: @PITCNT1]

On June 21, public education teachers in Uruguay carried out a one-day strike and marched to the executive office building to protest budget cuts, demand wage increases and higher social spending in general. This was followed on June 27 by a national strike convoked by the main union confederation PIT-CNT to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the 1973 US-backed military coup.  

In Mexico, teachers have carried out numerous strikes and marches throughout the year to protest the inadequate 8.2 percent pay increase announced by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) after promises of a major hike in real wages. In comparison, the cost of the basic basket of goods jumped 13.5 percent annually. 

On May 16, a demonstration outside of the presidential palace by teachers demanding a 100 percent increase and educational guarantees for indigenous communities was attacked by hundreds of anti-riot police.

High school teachers have also gone on strike repeatedly, charging that not even AMLO’s meager increase has been applied. The National Front of Middle-High School Teachers (FNSEMS) was forced to organize a national strike on June 22. Moreover, teachers have denounced AMLO’s failure to fulfill his promise to centralize all payments to teachers under the federal government. Instead, the fund for such payments (Fone) has shrunk nearly 10 percent since 2015, while salaries are still going unpaid across many regions. Protests over these issues in Michoacán, where teachers have blocked major railways, have been met with brutal repression by National Guard soldiers. 

Elementary and high school teachers in Santiago, Chile, struck on June 14 over the “historic debt” owed to teachers that pseudo-left President Gabriel Boric had promised to pay, as well as the mental health and overwork crises facing teachers. The teachers’ union, Colegio de Profesores, has continuously postponed an indefinite national strike over the “debt,” which refers to the accumulation of stipulated wage and budget increases that have gone unpaid since 1981, when the Pinochet dictatorship bulldozed much of the public education system. 

Boric’s response to calls by teachers for a national strike earlier this month sums up the attitude of the ruling class everywhere to public education. “Chile has a historic debt with teachers that began during the dictatorship. I must be frank and responsible: the Chilean state doesn’t have enough money for such reparations.”

Teachers in Peru have been at the forefront of the mass demonstrations against the US-backed coup last December and the regime of Dina Boluarte, which has responded with murderous repression and threats to simply fire striking teachers. Teachers and other workers in the southern department of Puno have carried out a series of 24-hour strikes in May and June, demanding Boluarte’s resignation, while teachers’ unions have announced strikes in support of a “Third Takeover of Lima,” led by indigenous organizations, planned for July 19. 

Bolivian educators carried out major nationwide strikes, roadblocks and demonstrations in March and April to protest a “historic deficit,” referring to unpaid hours, as well as the deterioration of conditions at schools. Teachers did not get paid for much of the time they were teaching remotely, and many schools depend on parents’ associations to raise money for wages.

The Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) administration of President Luis Arce responded by deploying riot police against demonstrators and declaring that teachers have no right to strike. Since the last major demonstrations on May Day, the Urban Teachers Union Federation has kept announcing further mobilizations “in the coming weeks” while postponing these indefinitely.

In Costa Rica, thousands of university students and teachers across all levels marched on June 20 to Congress to protest cuts to the education budget aimed at building up the police, in the first major demonstrations against the right-wing Rodrigo Chaves administration.

In the Dominican Republic, teachers carried out repeated strikes and major demonstrations throughout May and June to demand higher salaries and pensions, as well as better conditions, including the timely delivery of textbooks and materials, school lunches, more staff, a proper healthcare service and the completion of countless unfinished school buildings.

In late May, teachers staged a two-day national strike over pay in Jamaica, and issues have not been resolved. 

Throughout June, school occupations by parents, teachers and students have taken place almost daily across Honduras, chiefly because of understaffing. After two years of remote classes under conditions of generalized poverty and widespread illiteracy among parents, thousands of students still have no teachers. 

In February, teachers from Cauca, Colombia, set up a camp for two weeks outside of Congress demanding better healthcare. And in late March, more than 10,000 Bogotá teachers struck and marched against overwork, pay cuts and understaffing, and were subjected to reprisals. 

Beyond Latin America, recent weeks have seen ongoing strikes by UK university and college staff and strike votes by teachers in England over pay, pensions and staffing; a nearly month-long strike by 150,000 teachers in Romania demanding a major pay increase; a strike by Portuguese teachers over pay; strikes by public university workers in Slovenia; and an indefinite strike by supply teachers in Catalonia, among other struggles.

CDC issues advisory alert after several cases of “locally acquired mosquito-borne” malaria found in Florida and Texas

Benjamin Mateus

On Monday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued a health advisory via their Health Alert Network (HAN) on five cases of locally acquired malaria in Florida (four) and Texas (one) over the last two months. The public health agency said that there is no evidence that the cases in the two states are related. They are currently working with the state health departments in Florida and Texas to implement “active surveillance for additional cases.”

According to the CDC, the infected patients are all being treated at local health facilities and should make a complete recovery. They also assured the public that “despite these cases, the risk of locally acquired malaria remains extremely low in the United States.”

The last such outbreak of “locally acquired mosquito-borne” malaria in the US occurred two decades ago in Palm Beach County, Florida, when eight cases were reported.

This 2014 photo made available by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows a feeding female Anopheles gambiae mosquito. The species is a known vector for the parasitic disease malaria. The United States has seen five cases of malaria spread by mosquitos in the last two months...the first time there's been local spread in 20 years. There were four cases detected in Florida and one in Texas, according to a health alert issued Monday, June 26, 2023, by the CDC. [AP Photo/James Gathany]

Although malaria was eliminated in the US in the early 1950s through the implementation of sanitation, widespread use of insecticides and technological advances, Anopheles mosquitoes, known vectors for the transmission of the disease, which are found throughout many parts of the country, can feed on a person with malarial infection and cause larger outbreaks.

The fatality rate associated with severe malaria has also been dramatically reduced from a multitude of treatments that include quinine, chloroquine, proguanil, and mefloquine, although if left untreated the infection can be lethal in a significant number of cases. Artemether-lumefantrine is the preferred option, if available, for the initial uncomplicated treatment of malaria caused by the Plasmodium falciparum parasite, its most deadly form. However, the specific parasite species causing malaria should be diagnosed so that appropriate treatment can be administered. There are also concerns of rising drug-resistant forms of the parasite.

Once a person is infected with the parasite, typical symptoms include intense cyclic bouts of high fevers and chills, severe fatigue, vomiting and headaches. However, symptoms only begin about two weeks after being bitten by an infected mosquito. It is critically important for people traveling into regions where the infection is endemic to have prophylactic treatment with the combination medication sulfadoxine/pyrimethamine ahead of time.

The parasite passes from the mosquito saliva into a person’s blood. If not treated, disease recurrence can occur, although usually in a milder form months later. Mosquito nets, insect repellents and control measures such as draining standing water can mitigate the risks. 

Severe forms of the disease can lead to respiratory failure, critical anemia from the damage to the blood cells, kidney failure, and encephalopathy or brain inflammation. Patients may develop spontaneous bleeding and a failure of their own blood to coagulate, leading to shock and death. In pregnant women, malaria can cause stillbirths, miscarriages and low birth weights. 

As the CDC wrote, “The risk is higher in areas where local climatic conditions allow the Anopheles mosquito to survive during most of or the entire year and where travelers from malaria-endemic areas are found,” which include sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. The CDC has cautioned clinicians to stay abreast of advisories from their local health departments and entertain a malarial diagnosis in anyone with a fever of unknown origin, because a prompt diagnosis and treatment can prevent the progression of the disease to a more severe form or even death. 

One can’t help reading between these lines that such a vital public health concern may assume political and social dimensions, as the blame for any large scale outbreak will fall on the backs of immigrants. Sadly, such are the times we live in where reaction and xenophobia have come to dominate the official public discourse. Nonetheless, given climate change, globalization and decay in the public health system, malaria and other disease previously eliminated may once more become endemic in the US. 

The term malaria literally means “bad air,” first used in a medical book by English physician J. Macculoch, which was borrowed from the condition known as Roman fever that was linked to swamps that inspired the name. Indeed, world history, including the wars of the last several centuries, included the history of repeated outbreaks of the deadly disease, and efforts to understand how it spread and evolve measures to prevent the disease. 

French army physician Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran (1845-1922) was the first to hypothesize that not miasmas (evil vapors) but microbes caused the disease, in line with current scientific findings that “germs” caused these illnesses. He made the first microscopic discovery of the parasite that caused malaria in 1880 in a blood specimen from a soldier with fever. He went on to record distinct forms of the parasite which reflected the pathogen’s life cycle. In 1907, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for his discoveries.

In World War I, malaria affected at least 1.5 million soldiers and had a case fatality ratio of 0.2 to 5 percent affecting all sides in the war equally. With more countries entering hostilities, several major epidemics took place in Macedonia, Palestine, Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq) and Italy. During World War II, more than a half-million American soldiers were affected during the North African and South Pacific campaigns, with the disease killing 60,000.

The postwar efforts to eliminate malaria were remarkably effective. Arguably, globalization only became possible when malarial control measures were widely and fully implemented. The World Health Organization’s Global Malaria Eradication Program, 1955-1969, led to the elimination of the parasite in many countries. In the US, the National Malaria Eradication Program was launched in July 1947 and in four years, endemic malaria was ended. From 1957 to 2003, the CDC reported only a total of 63 malarial outbreaks in the country, all associated with infected individuals who had traveled to the US from malaria-endemic regions. 

However, in the last decade, in the US, the number of reported cases has been steadily climbing. In the last decade there were an average of 1,773 malaria cases, and more recently, around 2,000 annually. In 2020 alone, at the height of the COVID pandemic, the global burden of the disease was estimated at 241 million cases with 627,000 deaths. 

The transmission of Plasmodium, the parasite that causes malaria, requires favorable conditions—80 degrees Fahrenheit and 80 percent humidity—which are common in many regions of the US for many months of the year. And combined with the millions of cross-country and international flights that take place every year, it is inevitable that the number of such outbreaks will continue to rise.

According to a 2021 report, the top 10 states with the highest number of malaria cases were New York, Maryland, California, Texas, New Jersey, Georgia, Virginia, Florida, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. Either they all host millions of travelers in their airports or are located near international airports. And with the exception of California, these states have all reported the presence of at least three species of Anopheles mosquitoes that can transmit malaria.

Additionally, six of these states—Georgia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York and Virginia—have received low ranking for vector-borne disease outbreak preparedness from the National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO), which increases “their vulnerability for locally acquired malaria outbreaks.”

Indeed, even though there are only a handful of cases of locally acquired mosquito-borne malaria, their presence is but one measure in every social aspect of capitalist decay. In other words, every means—scientific, technological and economic—is available to prevent disease and fashion a world where the resources of the working class can be used to better life on this planet. However, such important measures are deemed superfluous and unnecessary. The return of once vanquished diseases is but one manifestation of the decay of the profit system.

US moves toward sending cluster bombs and long-range missiles to Ukraine

Andre Damon

The Army Tactical Missile System (ATCMS) [AP Photo]

In a script repeated over and over again since the start of the Ukraine war in February 2022, the United States is moving to send a new set of weapons to Ukraine that it had previously ruled out.

On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal reported, “Kyiv had received positive signs in recent weeks that the U.S. had come around on the ATACMS system,” a long-range missile system capable of striking deep inside Russian territory.

The ATACMS has a range of over 190 miles and is fired from the HIMARS missile launcher system.

The Journal wrote that “Officials said that the matter is pending approval at the highest levels.” In other words, the decision to send the weapon system has already been made, and all that is being awaited is the decision on how best to announce the escalation to the public.

In May, US President Joe Biden told journalists that the US was “not going to send rocket systems to Ukraine that can strike into Russia,” adding, “We are not encouraging or enabling Ukraine to strike beyond its borders.”

In reality, the United States has already provided Ukraine with the ground-launched small-diameter bombs (GLSDB) with a range of 93 miles, while the US’s NATO ally Britain has sent Ukraine Storm Shadow missiles, which can reach over 180 miles.

The US has given private authorization for Ukrainian strikes inside mainland Russia and publicly endorsed Ukrainian strikes inside Crimea. “Those are legitimate targets,” Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland said. “Ukraine is hitting them. We are supporting that.”

The Journal explained that a factor in the expected announcement was the domestic political crisis inside Russia, which US military strategists claim was proof that their efforts to weaken Russia are working. “Amid the domestic turmoil in Russia, where over the weekend the founder of the Wagner mercenary force staged an abortive mutiny, US and European officials indicated that now might be the time to provide the more advanced weaponry,” the Journal wrote.

An oil depot in a Russian-controlled area in Ukraine after a strike by missiles fired by Ukrainian military forces. [AP Photo/Author not attributed ]

On June 21, the House Foreign Affairs Committee passed a resolution calling on the White House to send the ATACMS missile system to Ukraine.

The resolution “calls on the United States to immediately provide Army Tactical Missile Systems to Ukraine in sufficient quantity to hasten Ukraine’s victory against Russia’s unprovoked war of aggression while still maintaining United States military readiness.”

The committee draft “expresses the belief that the expeditious provision of this critical weapon system will provide the Ukrainian military with a critical deep-strike capability they currently lack, disrupt Russia’s warfighting ability, and could hasten Ukraine’s victory.”

At the same time, both CNN and Politico report that the United States is moving closer toward announcing a decision to send cluster munitions to Ukraine, which are notorious for scattering unexploded bomblets that kill civilians for decades afterwards. They are infamous for maiming and killing children who attempt to play with them.

Politico reported, “The Biden administration is actively considering sending cluster munitions to Ukraine to help Kyiv’s counteroffensive punch through Russia’s defenses, two US officials and a person familiar with the debate said.”

CNN reported that “a final decision is expected soon from the White House, and that if approved, the weapons could be included in a new military aid package to Ukraine as soon as next month.”

These systems violate the Convention on Cluster Munitions, but the United States, which has killed thousands of people with cluster munitions in wars all over the world, does not abide by the treaty.

The 2010 Convention on Cluster Munitions, signed by more than 100 countries, and Congress has restricted the White House’s ability to transfer cluster bombs to other countries, citing the immense dangers they pose to the civilian population.

In May, Senator Lindsey Graham, who had previously lobbied for the White House to provide HIMARS missiles, Abrams tanks and F-16 fighters—all of which were subsequently sent—called for the US to ship cluster munitions to Ukraine.

“The sooner long-range ATACMS missiles and cluster munitions are provided, the more territory they [Ukrainian government forces] will be able to regain, and the fewer lives will be lost,” Graham stated.

In a recent hearing before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Laura Cooper, the Pentagon’s Europe chief, emphasized the value of the munitions, stating that they “would be useful, especially against dug-in Russian positions on the battlefield.”

As the US moves toward sending more and more escalatory weapons to Ukraine, NATO leaders have made clear that they are seeking to massively intensify their involvement in the conflict at the upcoming July 11-12 NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania.

In a briefing on Thursday, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said, “At the summit, I expect new announcements of military support to Ukraine. We will also have a multi-year program to help Ukraine move towards NATO to be fully interoperable with NATO.”

He added, “At the NATO Summit, we will address Ukraine’s membership aspirations. And I’m absolutely confident that NATO allies will send a very strong message of support to Ukraine. We also have to remember that all NATO allies agree that NATO’s door is open.”

At a press briefing the same day, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said that “we do expect at the NATO summit to see a significant package of support, both political and practical, for Ukraine.”

Miller was then asked, point-blank, whether NATO was preparing to “put their troops on the ground in Ukraine,” to which Miller replied that Biden had said that NATO would not do so. (For the record, Biden had also claimed that the United States would not send tanks and F-16s to Ukraine.)

This question followed the publication in Politico on Wednesday of an article by Ivo Daalder, former US ambassador to NATO, who raised the prospect of deploying US troops to Ukraine.

“In case of any deliberate nuclear incident, the US and key NATO allies need to intervene directly and bring the war to a swift and complete end by helping Ukraine restore control over all its territory,” he wrote.

The moves by the United States to escalate NATO’s involvement in the war with Russia came against the background of the political crisis that erupted in Russia with the attempted coup over the weekend by Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the Wagner group.

In an article approvingly retweeted by former US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, the Daily Beast writes that the “US and Ukraine Should Take Advantage of a Weakened Putin.”

The Daily Beast concludes, “With Russia’s military position in Ukraine weakened by the loss of Wagner’s troops there, with the insurrection serving as a blow to Russian morale, and with potential changes atop the Russian command structure (like the rumored arrest of Surovikin), Russia seems more vulnerable than before.”

Arguing for the effective abandonment of all remaining restraints on direct US involvement in the war, the article declares, “Putin’s red lines have for the most part been illusory.”

UK slips down child height ranking as a result of austerity

Paul Bond

A survey of average children’s height across 200 countries has shown British children slipping down the global rankings. The most pronounced decline is among children born since David Cameron’s Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government launched its austerity programme in 2010.

The Non-Communicable Diseases Risk Factor Collaboration (NCD-RisC), a global network of health scientists, has collated national measurement data at the ages of five and 19 between 1985 and 2019.

Prime Minister David Cameron and Chancellor George Osbourne visit a transport infrastructure project in 2014, four years after launching their savage austerity programme in Britain, April 23, 2014 [Photo by No 10/Flickr/Crown Copyright. / CC BY-ND 2.0]

British children’s average height has risen marginally, but this has been outstripped by improvements elsewhere. Boys aged 19 fell from 28th of the 200 countries in 1985, with an average height of 176.3 cm, to 39th in 2019 (178.2 cm). Girls of that age fell from 42nd (162.7 cm) to 49th (163.9 cm).

The reasons become clearer looking at average height of five-year-olds, where the decline in ranking is more dramatic. In 1985, both boys and girls ranked 69th of the 200 countries, with boys averaging 111.4 cm, girls 111 cm. In 2019, girls now ranked 96th (111.7 cm), boys 102nd (112.5 cm).

The British data were drawn from a 2019 study at the School of Public Health, Imperial College London (ICL). When the ICL study was published in 2020, senior author Professor Majid Ezzati explained, “Children in some countries grow healthily to five years, but fall behind in school years,” which “shows an imbalance between investment in improving nutrition in pre-schoolers, and in school-aged children and adolescents.”

Responding to the NCD-RisC survey, Professor Tim Cole, an expert in child growth rates at the Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health, University College London (UCL), called the 30-place fall down the global rankings “pretty startling,” and asked, “Why?”

Cole said comparison with the data on 19-year-olds suggested austerity. These children grew up in the 2010s, he told the Times, “which happens to coincide with the period of austerity… [that] tells me that austerity has clobbered the height of children in the UK.”

Austerity has devastated health generally. Height reflects diet and medical care but is also a good indicator of general living conditions such as stress, poverty and sleep quality.

Many have been left without the money to meet food bills that are rising faster than wages. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation charity reported last week that 5.7 million low-income households are having to cut down or skip meals because they cannot afford them.

Figures from the Food Foundation, published in April, showed that the households at greatest risk of food insecurity were those with children under four. Their data showed that 27.3 percent of such households were food insecure in January 2023. The poorest fifth of the population would need to spend half their disposable income on food to meet the cost of the government-recommended healthy diet. For the top 20 percent of the population, it would be just 11 percent of disposable income.

The Food Foundation notes that healthier foods can be more than twice as expensive per calorie than less healthy alternatives. Children from the most deprived 20 percent of families eat around one third less fruit and vegetables, 75 percent less oily fish, and one fifth less fibre than children from the top 20 percent.

The 2020 ICL study also identified dietary inequality as key. Dr Andrea Rodriguez Martinez, its lead author, said its findings “should motive policies that increase the availability and reduce the cost of nutritious foods, as this will help children grow taller without gaining excessive weight for their height.”

Initiatives such as “food vouchers towards nutritious foods for low-income families, and free healthy school meal programmes,” which she noted were particularly threatened under pandemic conditions, would provide “lifelong benefits for their health and wellbeing.”

That hardly figures in the calculations of the ruling class, which has systematically defunded and axed public health provision, cutting the National Health Service (NHS) to the bone.

Hard-pressed medical staff are reporting a resurgence of diseases associated with nutritional deficiencies. Around 700 children a year are admitted to hospital in England with malnutrition, rickets or scurvy.

Cheap junk food makes people simultaneously overweight and undernourished, with direct effect on child development. Henry Dimbleby, the former government food health adviser, noted the height differential between the richest and poorest and its health corollaries: “Children in the most deprived 10 percent of the population are shorter on average than the most affluent 10 percent, and are three times more likely to have tooth decay at age five.”

Writing in the Daily Mail, Dimbleby noted “a problem last experienced in the Victorian era.” When the poorest lived on bread and tea, he wrote, “army generals expressed concern about the stunted height and physical weaknesses of the soldiers they were sending to the Boer War.”

Dietary inequality is driving a range of medical problems, including obesity, type 2 diabetes and dental issues. According to NHS figures, children in the most deprived areas were more than twice as likely to be living with obesity than those in the least deprived areas. Hospital admissions of obese children had tripled from 3,370 in 2011-12 to 9,431 in 2021-22, according to NHS England.

A recent report from the King’s Fund thinktank confirmed that inactivity during the pandemic only increased the effects of years of cuts. Siva Anandaciva, the report’s author, said the pandemic had just “compounded the consequences of more than a decade of squeezed investment in staff, equipment and wider services.”

Anandaciva’s report looked at 19 affluent countries, including France, Germany, Sweden, Japan and the US. The UK had the second-lowest life expectancy of the studied countries, with the report saying it “underperforms significantly” on tackling cancer and heart disease. There are “below average” survival rates for the commonest cancers.

The UK “performs poorly” when judged by avoidable deaths and fatalities that could have been prevented by better or quicker treatment. These “below average” health outcomes are the result of “below average” expenditure per person on healthcare. The UK had fewer CT and MRI scanners than any of the other countries included, and the second smallest number of hospital beds. Access to NHS dental care is “worryingly threadbare in some areas,” all as a result of cuts.

“The NHS… trails behind its international cousins on some key markers of a good healthcare system,” said Anandaciva.

Professor Sir Michael Marmot, director of the Institute of Health Equity at UCL, cited a Unicef report on child poverty in 41 (mostly rich) OECD countries. Using the relative measure of children in households at less than 60 percent median income, this placed Britain 31st. Using this measure, and excluding housing costs, child poverty in England rose from 27 percent in 2010 to 30 percent in 2019.

The government instead uses an absolute measure of poverty “because,” as Marmot writes, “that looks more favourable,” even though its baseline is the 2010-11 relative poverty level. Marmot cites another absolute measure, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s minimum income standard, according to which child poverty was 39 percent in 2008-9 and 40 percent in 2020-21.

A closed down Sure Start children's centre and adjoining play area in Ardwick, Manchester. The Bushmore Sure Start site was one of two children's centres closed in Ardwick in 2013 by Labour Party-run Manchester City Council. [Photo: WSWS]

He notes that public spending on child education and care for children up to age five is $4,000 per child, when the OECD average is £6,000, with Norway and Sweden spending around £12,000, and France close to $9,000.

Marmot and Clare Bambra, professor of public health at Newcastle University, told the government’s official COVID inquiry that Britain went into the pandemic with “public services depleted, health improvements stalled, health inequalities increased and health among the poorest people in a state of decline.”

The COVID inquiry has already confirmed that the British ruling class remains committed to exactly this policy. Both former Prime Minister David Cameron and his Chancellor George Osborne gave opening testimony in which they stood by their austerity programme and denied that it had caused any damage.

At the same time, one of current Chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s advisers was telling the BBC that the Bank of England would “have to create a recession” to bring inflation down. Karen Ward, from JP Morgan Asset Management, who sits on Hunt’s economic advisory council, said the Bank would “have to create uncertainty and frailty, because it’s only when companies feel nervous about the future that they will think ‘Well, maybe I won’t put through that price rise,’ or workers, when they’re a little bit less confident about their job, think ‘Oh, I won’t push my boss for that higher pay.’ It’s that weakness in activity which eventually gets rid of inflation.”