Inequality in India greater today than at the height of the British Raj

Wasantha Rupasinghe

While hundreds of millions of workers and rural poor in India struggle to make ends meet and some two hundred million people suffer from malnourishment, the income share of India’s wealthiest 1 percent has risen to among the highest anywhere in the world.

According to the latest World Inequality Database Paper on India, which was published last month under the title “Income and wealth inequality in India 1922-2023,” India’s top 1% now gorge on a larger share of the national income than do their counterparts in many of what have hitherto been considered among the world’s most unequal countries, including South Africa, Brazil and the US.

A girl stands in her shanty home on the outskirts of in Guwahati, India, Friday, Feb. 10, 2023. [AP Photo/Anupam Nath]

The report was authored by Nitin Kumar Bharti, Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty and Anmol Somanchi, economic experts at World Inequality Lab (WIL). It demonstrates that the fruits of India’s capitalist “rise” over the past three decades have been almost entirely monopolized by the Indian bourgeoisie, the more privileged sections of the middle class, and global capital, while the mass of the population remains mired in squalor, deprivation and extreme economic insecurity.  

This constitutes a searing indictment of the entire political establishment and governments at every level—above all the successive Union governments led by the principal parties of Indian big business, the Congress Party and the Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which under Prime Minister Narendra Modi has held office since 2014.

As the title indicates, the report found that contemporary India, supposedly “the world’s largest democracy,” has higher levels of economic inequality than prevailed at the height of the British Raj, which systematically looted India for the benefit of British-based investors and British imperialism’s wars.

The top 1 percent of India’s population (or 9,223,448 individuals) held 22.6 percent of national income and 40.1 percent of national wealth in 2022-23. Compared to this, the bottom 50 percent (or over 461 million adults) received only 15 percent of India’s national income. The middle 40 percent (or around 369 million adults) had an income share of 27.3 percent. In relation to the share of wealth, the bottom 50 percent owned just 6.4 percent in 2022-23, while the middle 40 percent had 28.6 percent.

To give a sense of the staggering level of income inequality, the report states, “The top 1% earn on average INR (Indian Rupees) 5.3 million (US $63,580), 23 times the national average of INR 0.23 million. Average incomes for the bottom 50% and the middle 40% stood at INR 71,000 (US $853) or 0.3 times national average and INR 165,000 (0.7 times national average) respectively. At the very top of the distribution, the richest 10,000 individuals (of 920 million Indian adults) earn on average INR 480 million (US $5.7 million or 2,069 times the average Indian). To get a sense of just how skewed the distribution is, one would have to be at nearly the 90th percentile to earn the average income in India.”

The following are some of the key figures presented in the report:

*“According to Forbes billionaire rankings, the number of Indians with net wealth exceeding 1 billion US$ at Market Exchange Rate (MER) increased from 1 to 51 to 162 in 1991, 2011 and 2022 respectively. Not only that, the total net wealth of these individuals as a share of India’s net national income boomed from under 1 percent in 1991 to a whopping 25 percent in 2022.” In other words, India’s 162 richest individuals own the equivalent of almost a quarter of India’s net national income.

* “In 2022-23, 22.6% of national income went to just the top 1%, the highest level recorded in our series since 1922, higher than even during the inter-war colonial period. The top 1% wealth share stood at 40.1% in 2022-23, also at its highest level since 1961 when our wealth series begins.”

* “As per the annual Forbes rich list, the net wealth of (US dollar) billionaire Indians has grown by over 280% cumulatively between 2014 and 2022 in real terms, 10 times the growth rate of national income over the same period (27.8%).” The period referred to here corresponds to the first eight years of the Modi-led BJP government, underscoring how its pro-investor policies have massively benefited the super-rich at the expense of the workers and rural toilers.

In 1961, the report found that the wealth share of the top 10 percent of India’s population was 45 percent. During the subsequent two decades, this did not change much, as this was the period when “socialist policies” were at their “peak” causing wealth concentration to be “more-or-less brought to a stand-still.” Contrary to the report’s characterization, the economic policies carried out by Congress-led Indian governments during this period had nothing to do with socialism. They were nationally regulated capitalist policies that kept a state monopoly on certain big corporations in key industries and highly restricted the entry of foreign capital, so as to boost indigenous Indian capitalist development. Those policies led to the enrichment of a tiny super-rich elite at the expense of the vast majority of the population, as underscored by the fact that even during this period, the top 10 percent controlled 45 percent of all national wealth.

However, according to the report, India’ social inequality began to grow sharply with the initiation of pro-investor/pro-market economic reforms in 1991, aimed at attracting international capital and fully integrating India into the US-led world capitalist order. Just over three decades later in 2022, the wealth share of the top 10 percent had reached 63 percent. This demonstrates emphatically that it was the Indian bourgeois that have been the primary beneficiaries of the “open” economic policies carried out by successive governments led by Congress and the BJP since 1991.

The report notes another important factor in the process of growing wealth inequality: “greater financialization of wealth as evidenced from a growing stock market (as a % of GDP).” Giving an example of this, the report noted: “The SENSEX (S&P Bombay Stock Exchange Sensitive Index) a free-float weighted stock market index of 30 companies listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange, grew by 7300% between 1990 and 2023.” What this exposes is that these billionaires, like their counterparts across the world, have pocketed huge amounts of money through speculation on the stock market and the privatization of publicly owned corporations (public sector units) while hardly creating jobs or producing anything of value.

The list of dollar billionaires in India shows the impact of the Modi government’s anti-working class policies. According to the Hurun Global rich list, in 2014, when Modi first came to power, India had 70 dollar billionaires. Today, this number has reached 271, with their combined wealth at $1 trillion. Mukesh Ambani, a leading beneficiary of Modi’s pro-corporate policies and now Asia’s richest person, has increased his wealth to $115 billion from $18 billion in 2014.

According to the Hurun Global Rich List, the city of Mumbai, India’s financial capital, officially surpassed Shanghai (87 billionaires) as the Asian city with the most billionaires, with 92 in 2024. This year’s list marked Mumbai’s entry for the first time into the ranks of the world’s top three billionaire home-city, the report noted.

The report “Income and wealth inequality in India 1922-2023: The Rise of the Billionaire Raj” makes the following comment: “[T]he ‘Billionaire Raj’ headed by India’s modern bourgeoisie is now more unequal than the British Raj headed by the colonial forces.” Then it makes a timely warning to the capitalist elite: “It is unclear how long such inequality levels can sustain without major social and political upheaval.”

They then propose some timid reforms be enacted with the aim of preventing such a social explosion: “While there is no reason to believe income and wealth inequality will slow down by itself,” writes Piketty and his co-authors, “historical evidence suggests that it can be kept in check via policy.” The report proposes implementing a “super tax” on Indian billionaires and multimillionaires, along with restructuring the tax schedule to include both income and wealth, so as “to finance major investments in education, health and other public infrastructure.”

Neither Modi nor the Congress and the other opposition parties, which all represent India’s ravenous ruling elite, will pay any heed to such appeals. On the contrary, they will take all possible measures to further enrich the tiny corporate and financial elite, impoverishing the workers and rural poor. They are bitterly hostile to the multi-million Indian working class and the oppressed, as clearly shown during the COVID-19 pandemic. The ruling class’s “profits before life” policy sacrificed between 5-6 million Indians as the virus was allowed to freely spread to protect the profits of Indian and foreign capital. Modi’s refusal to adopt serious public health measures resulted in the collapse of India’s healthcare system during peak periods of infection and death.

India’s ruling elite also fully endorses the spending of billions to make the country a frontline state in US imperialism’s war preparations against China. While millions struggle to find enough food to eat and die from preventable diseases, India invests huge sums of money in modern weapons of death and destruction.

Brazilian federal education strikes expose broad attacks by Lula government

Guilherme Ferreira

Since the beginning of March, workers at federal education institutions have been on strike in Brazil, challenging the claim by the government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Workers Party – PT) that “there is no money” for public education.

Protest by teachers and staff of federal education in Brasilia on April 17. [Photo: SINASEFE]

The strike movement was launched on March 11 by employees of 66 federal universities. It was followed on April 3 by teachers and staff at 522 federal basic, professional, and technological education units and on April 15 by teachers at 31 federal universities. It is the largest strike against the Lula government since his inauguration at the beginning of last year.

This week, students at several federal universities have also gone on strike for better educational conditions. They are also protesting against a cut of 4 billion reais (782 million dollars) from the health and education budget announced on April 11 by the Lula government.

In the most recent negotiation between representatives of the Lula government and the teachers and staff unions, on April 19, the Lula government maintained the previous year’s proposal for a wage freeze this year, only increasing food, health, and daycare benefits. These benefits do not cover retirees.

The Lula government has also proposed increasing wage increases from 9 percent to up to 13 percent in 2025 and 2026. These figures, however, far from cover losses in real wages, which since 2016 have totaled 39 percent for teachers and 53 percent for employees of federal education.

The staff and teachers’ unions, controlled by the PT and the pseudo-left Socialism and Freedom Party (PSOL), have played a treacherous role not only in launching separate strikes on different dates and isolating the struggles, but also in ignoring past and future wage losses. They are negotiating with the government for an increase of 22.7 percent for teachers and 34.3 percent for staff, divided equally between 2024 and 2026, and disregarding the losses caused by inflation over this period.

After supporting Lula’s candidacy in the 2022 election against the fascistic ex-president Jair Bolsonaro and serving as an important support base for the Lula government, the unions have advanced the claim that “only pressure will get the government out of inertia,” as expressed by the National Association of Higher Education Teachers. In practice, this means subordinating the struggle of teachers and staff to negotiations with the Lula government and covering up the PT’s long-standing attacks on education.

Since the beginning of the last decade, as the commodities boom waned and Dilma Rousseff’s PT government (2011-2016) began to place the growing weight of the capitalist crisis on the backs of the Brazilian working class, teachers and staffs of federal education held countless walkouts and strikes. Under the Rousseff government alone, there were strikes in 2011, 2012 and 2015. In the largest of these, in 2012, teachers went on strike for four months for better salaries and working conditions.

After Rousseff’s fraudulent impeachment in August 2016, a broad movement of student occupations in hundreds of universities and secondary schools took place against the pro-corporate high school reform and a bill that limited social spending by the government of Michel Temer (2016-2018), Rousseff’s successor.

In all the attacks by the Temer and Bolsonaro (2018-2022) governments, such as the 2017 labor reform and the 2019 pension reform, the unions have isolated the struggles of teachers and staff at federal universities from the other sectors of the Brazilian working class, diverting all the walkouts and protests towards Lula’s election in 2022.

As the strikes under the Dilma government show, far from representing a break with the PT government’s previous policy, Temer and Bolsonaro only intensified the attacks begun under Rousseff. Today, in turn, the Lula government is continuing these attacks.

In an attack on the right to strike, on April 10 the Lula government demanded that negotiations with the unions be conditional on the end of the strikes. Faced with a backlash, it was forced to back down. Even so, on April 16, Camilo Santana, the Lula government’s minister of education and defender of both the 2016 high school reform and pro-corporate programs in education, criticized the strikes, insisting that “A strike for me is when there is no more dialogue, when negotiation or any possibility of improvement is over.”

Earlier, on April 10, Lula’s finance minister, Fernando Haddad, bluntly declared that “the federal budget is closed” to the demands of teachers and employees of federal education. Last year, Haddad, on behalf of the Lula government, managed to pass a “new fiscal framework” that replaced the Temer government’s “spending ceiling” to offer “more rational” management of the Brazilian budget and a “zero deficit” target for this year’s budget. Both measures, widely welcomed by the international financial markets, now threaten the constitutional spending floors for health and education.

Committed to establishing a good business environment in Brazil, Lula celebrated on X/Twitter an April 23 report from the economic daily Valor Econômico that the country “has returned to the list of the 25 most attractive countries for Foreign Direct Investment developed by the consultancy Kearney.” Occupying position 19, it is the country’s best result since 2017. Significantly, the Argentina of fascistic president Javier Milei, hailed worldwide as a model of austerity and repression, also returned to the list, ranking position 24.

Almost a year and five months after Lula took office, the reactionary character of his third term has been exposed on a number of fronts.

Last week, the Brazilian media reported that, after ruling out universal vaccination against COVID-19, the Lula government had postponed the COVID-19 vaccination campaign due to a delay in the purchase of doses. This week, organizations of indigenous peoples in Brazil, who were brutally attacked under the Bolsonaro government, excluded Lula’s participation in their annual event because of the delay in demarcating indigenous lands.

The Brazilian pseudo-left has played its part in covering up the Lula government’s attacks on workers and sowing illusions that it and the unions controlled by the PT and PSOL can be pushed to the left. This includes not only Pabloite and Morenoite organizations in the PSOL, but also those that claim to want to carry out an “independent struggle” and end up providing a “left” cover by posing instruments of pressure on the Lula government.

This is the case of the Morenoite Workers Revolutionary Movement (MRT), the sister organization in Brazil of the Socialist Workers Party (PTS) in Argentina. In Esquerda Diario, its youth organization, Faísca Revolucionaria, wrote on April 24 that it is a “mistake” for the unions and youth organizations to concentrate their “demands on budget recomposition, outside the fight against this neoliberal measure [the ‘new fiscal framework’] of the Lula government.”

However, the Lula government’s attacks on education and the Brazilian working class are not just the result of its neoliberal measures, but of the pro-capitalist character of the PT, PSOL and the unions and youth organizations they control as a whole. This, in turn, is ignored by the MRT, which considers the PT a “worker-bourgeois” party and insists that “the trade union federations, as well as the student organizations, can play an essential role in coordinating the struggle nationally in a united front.”

In fact, the PT’s “workers’ base” collapsed as it shifted increasingly to the right since its foundation in 1980. In a period marked by capitalist globalization, it became, from 2003, when Lula was elected for the first time, the preferred governing party of the Brazilian and international bourgeoisie for thirteen years. Today, one of the PT’s main bases is the union bureaucracy and the middle class, of which the MRT itself and other pseudo-left organizations are a part.

Australia: Qenos collapse threatens hundreds of manufacturing jobs

Paul Bartizan & Martin Scott

Around 700 Australian manufacturing jobs are likely to be destroyed, as petrochemical company Qenos prepares to shut up shop after being placed in administration on April 17. The company produces ethylene and polyethylene at two plants in Australia: Altona in Melbourne and Botany in Sydney.

A section of the Qenos plant in Altona, Australia [Photo: Qenos Media]

Qenos was placed under administration by LAOP Bidco, a subsidiary of property developer LOGOS, which acquired the company earlier this month. Previous owner China National Chemical had been looking to sell Qenos since at least July last year, after recording financial losses over the past few years, largely as a result of soaring natural gas prices.

Administrators have confirmed the closure of the Sydney plant, which has been out of action since a cooling tower collapsed in February 2023. A planned restart last month, following the completion of extensive repairs, did not go ahead.

While the Melbourne plant will continue to operate for now, administrators have flagged that it too will be shuttered. McGrathNicol administrator Jason Preston told workers this week, “the intention is to continue trading the Altona plant in the near term. We will provide further updates as the timing for the shutdown of Altona becomes clearer.”

In response to the April 17 announcement, Australian Workers Union (AWU) national secretary Paul Farrow said: “Right now there seems to be some uncertainty about the future of the Altona site. If there’s a chance of retaining operations we want every option explored. We will be meeting with the administrators and with Qenos leadership to make sure no stone is left unturned.”

Qenos workers should take this as a sharp warning that the AWU is ready to sacrifice workers’ jobs, wages and conditions in order to make the operation a profitable venture for its new owners.

Accepting that even this is unlikely to reverse the imminent closure, and attempting to hose down workers’ opposition to the destruction of their livelihoods, Farrow continued: “We have been assured that Qenos Group’s new owner, LAOP Bidco, has indicated it will propose a Deed of Company Arrangement that will fund employee’s pre-appointment entitlements, including redundancy.”

In other words, the best workers can hope for is that they are paid what they are owed before they are thrown on the scrapheap. According to the Australian, workers “could be owed more than $100m in leave, redundancy, and other entitlements.”

This is a clear attempt by the AWU bureaucracy to categorically rule out any possibility of workers taking up a struggle against the shutdown.

The union leadership is preparing to deliver yet another “orderly closure,” just as it is doing at the Alcoa alumina refinery in Kwinana, Western Australia, and as it did in the recent partial closure of Molycop’s Newcastle steel plant.

Similar operations have been carried out countless times before, by the AWU and other unions, including with the complete destruction of the Australian car industry.

To avoid the same fate, workers will have to take matters into their own hands. But this does not mean Qenos employees must fight alone.

As Australia’s sole manufacturer of high-density polyethylene, the Qenos shutdown will likely lead to further closures and job cuts around the country.

Business analysts have warned that the demise of Qenos is a sign of things to come and increasing gas prices will lead other energy intensive industries to cease operations in Australia, destroying thousands more jobs.

More broadly, corporate insolvencies are at record levels. More than 1,100 companies appointed administrators in March, 26 percent higher than in March 2023, and the first time a figure of over 1,000 has been recorded in a single month since 2015.

The Australian Securities and Investments Commission anticipates at least 10,000 insolvencies in 2023‒24, the highest in a decade. While the Construction industry is the worst affected, the number of insolvencies in manufacturing has risen to three times that recorded in 2021.

In the same week the Qenos administration was announced, high-tech “green-energy” company Tritium also collapsed. The Queensland-based company that made electric vehicle fast chargers was established in 2001, and when it was floated on the share market in 2022, was valued at $2 billion.

Having already shut down its Australian manufacturing operation late last year, Tritium has now been placed in administration after it failed to secure a $90 million handout from the state government. Around 200 jobs will be lost with the closure of its Brisbane research and development division and headquarters.

Tritium had previously been hailed by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese as an exemplar of the his governments supposed plan to boost Australian manufacturing, especially in the “green” sector. When the company’s financial woes became clear last year, it was flagged by analysts as a likely candidate for funding from Labor’s National Reconstruction Fund. Despite being announced more than a year ago, the fund has not dispensed a single dollar.

The collapse of Qenos and Tritium, and the resultant destruction of hundreds of jobs, exposes the reality behind Labor’s phoney rhetoric on the manufacturing industry. News of their failures emerged just a week after Albanese, announced the “Future Made in Australia Act,” hailed by the Australian Council of Trade Unions as a “historic step forward for workers.”

In reality, it has nothing to do with the interests of workers. Albanese made this clear, underscoring that the growth of Australia’s manufacturing sector was predicated on the reduction in labour costs—that is, the destruction of jobs—made possible by advances in automation.

The real purpose is to hand out billions of dollars to corporations involved in strategic, war-related industries. This is part of the Labor government’s completion of the transformation of Australia into a frontline state for a catastrophic war with China.

The AWU is completely on board with these plans. Farrow declared: “We are currently on a trajectory to lose core elements of our sovereign capability… Without this capability, Australia would be further at the mercy of unstable global supply chains to meet our essential daily needs.”

Workers at Qenos and throughout the manufacturing sector should reject this attempt by the AWU bureaucracy to tie their fate to corporate profits and the war plans of Australian imperialism. They also need to draw lessons from their experiences with the union.

In October 2022, the company locked out 33 workers at its Altona plant in response to strike action over wages, conditions and safety issues. Qenos had offered workers a real wage cut—just a 2 percent pay increase as inflation peaked at 8 percent.

Workers demanded a wage increase of 7 percent in each of the three years of the contract, increased staffing to address safety concerns and the abolition of a two-tier wage structure. After declaring a Fair Work Commission ruling suspending industrial action over the dispute a “huge victory,” the AWU imposed a sell-out deal containing a pay rise of less than 4 percent a year.

For more than two decades, the AWU and all other unions covering workers at the Qenos plants, operating as an industrial police force of management, have presided over a constant restructuring process, in order to boost company profits. This has resulted in the slashing of hundreds of jobs and the continual erosion of working conditions and safety.

Polish government steps up military indoctrination in schools

Martin Nowak

In future, Polish schoolchildren are to be indoctrinated in militarism beginning in primary school. Polish Education Minister Barbara Nowacka and Defence Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz presented a program to this effect titled “Edukacja z wojskiem” (”Education with the army”) last Wednesday.

The governing coalition in Poland led by former European Union Council President Donald Tusk, which has been in office since last autumn, is thereby increasing the militarisation of Polish schools.

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, Prime Minister Donald Tusk and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg during a visit to Poland [Photo by Krystian Maj/KPRM / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]

During the pilot programme, Polish soldiers will conduct a three-hour training course in primary and secondary schools. “The main objective of the programme is to raise the awareness of children and young people in the field of security and defence and develop basic habits and skills in the field of defence and civil protection as well as behaviour in crisis situations,” reads the ministry’s statement.

All grades from the first year of primary school to secondary school are eligible to participate. Only the eighth year of primary school and the first year of secondary school are excluded. The PiS (Law and Justice Party)-led government, which was voted out of office in 2022, had already introduced “security training,” i.e., military training including shooting practice, into the curriculum for these grades.

Registration takes place via the local authorities. The program will run from May 6 to June 20 and cover around 3,500 schools. If the program proves successful, it will be permanently established in the curriculum, the two ministers announced.

At the press conference, the ministers made it abundantly clear that the programme is not about imparting neutral knowledge about first aid and disaster control, but instead is aimed at creating a militaristic culture (”showing the army at school”).

“We are increasing the resilience of our society. We live in times in which all measures that can improve security must be taken... From pre-school children to senior citizens, everyone must be prepared for challenges,” emphasised Kosiniak-Kamysz.

The education minister added that patriotism is “the willingness to act for the fatherland, but above all to acquire the skills necessary to serve one’s country and one’s neighbour. And that is exactly what our programme is for.”

The praise for “patriotism” is reminiscent of speeches made by the former PiS education minister Przemysław Czarnek, who introduced military training and a new civics lesson, “History and the Present” (”Historia i teraźniejszość,” HiT), in 2022. According to Nowacka, HiT is to be replaced in 2025 by the subject “political education.”

The controversy surrounding HiT shows just how small are the differences between the old and new governments. While in opposition, the current governing parties criticised HiT’s textbook as a right-wing construct because it demonised feminism, communism and even parts of pop culture as anti-Polish ideologies.

Now, however, Barbara Nowacka, leader of the feminist party Inicjatywa Polska (iPL), is praising the promotion of “patriotic” attitudes among seven-year-olds. Pseudo-left organisations and parties play a key role, not only in Poland but worldwide, in accompanying the return of militarism and war with phraseology embracing feminist and identity politics.

The Tusk government is seamlessly continuing and intensifying the PiS’s war policy, not only in education but also in all other areas. A few weeks ago, Tusk publicly declared that the world had entered a “pre-war era” and had to prepare accordingly. Poland has long played a key role in the NATO war offensive against the nuclear power, Russia. Foreign Minister Sikorski recently refused to rule out the deployment of NATO troops to Ukraine.

Certain disagreements between Tusk’s PO (Citizens Platform) and the PiS are primarily of a tactical nature. For example, President Andrzej Duda, who belongs to the PiS camp, recently confirmed in an interview his willingness to station US nuclear weapons in Poland as part of “nuclear sharing.” Tusk reacted coolly and called on Duda to hold consultations on this issue.

According to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, the military alliance currently has no plans to station nuclear weapons in other member states. Stoltenberg stated this while visiting British troops stationed in Poland alongside British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.

This does not mean Stoltenberg and Tusk advocate a less aggressive nuclear policy towards Moscow. According to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), around 150 US nuclear weapons are currently stored in Europe as part of “nuclear sharing”—in Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy and Turkey.

The differences of opinion between Duda and Tusk over the stationing of US nuclear weapons in Poland are primarily about foreign policy orientation. While Tusk favours close cooperation with the major European powers, especially Germany, the PiS is seeking to strengthen its close military alliance with the US—also as a counterweight to Germany’s dominance in the EU. Both camps are prepared to risk and wage a third world war and militarise all of society right down to the schools.

The WHO updates its terminology for pathogens that transmit through the air

Benjamin Mateus

More than four years into the COVID pandemic, on April 18, 2024, the World Health Organization (WHO) updated their terminology on airborne transmissions of pathogens in a way that finally aligns it with the evidence that had been presented to the UN health agency by scientists, including aerosol physicists, at the beginning of the global outbreak. The report acknowledges that the virus that is causing COVID is, indeed, airborne. Other airborne pathogens listed include influenza, MERS, SARS and tuberculosis, among others.

Notably, it was on December 23, 2021, during the initial surge of the Omicron variant, when the WHO, after repeated denunciations of the airborne mode of transmission was forced to accept this simple premise. At the time, there had been 5.4 million confirmed deaths and over 17 million excess deaths. 

Quietly, they updated their guidance, writing, “Current evidence suggests that the virus spreads mainly between people who are in close contact with each other, for example at conversational distance … the virus can also spread in poorly ventilated and/or crowded indoor settings, where people tend to spend longer periods of time. This is because aerosols can remain suspended in the air or travel farther than conversational distance (this is often called long-range aerosol or long-range airborne transmission.”

World Health Organization Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (center) declaring the coronavirus pandemic a Public Health emergency of International Concern in March 2020. [Photo: Fabrice Coffrini]

The new consensus was reached after the WHO consulted with multiple agencies and several hundred experts from a broad range of fields across a span of two years, and vetted by the CDCs of Africa, China, Europe, and the United States. Not surprisingly, much about the global technical consultation report “on proposed terminology for pathogens that transmit through the air” falls short of what is required from such a document. 

Foremost, the new nomenclature, “through the air transmission,” which has been substituted for the straightforward and commonly used term “airborne,” seem intentionally laborious and clumsy, and, in the final analysis, muddles what is a simple concept in a way that will only sow further confusion and effectively forestall or prevent implementing the necessary public health measures to make indoor spaces safe from pathogens. 

As the report explicitly noted, “[The] process aimed to be a starting point for what is anticipated to be difficult and complicated discussions on a topic with enormous complexity, which would form the basis for common language across disciplines. However, it would likely require further work in order to operationalize and implement within pathogen-, discipline- and setting-specific contexts.” [Emphasis added] 

This gets at the crux of the problem of the definition of airborne and goes a long way to explaining the WHO’s persistent refusal, well into the COVID pandemic, to acknowledge the mode of transmission of SARS-CoV-2 as the implication would have been profound.

By way of an example, the recent attempts by the federal advisory committee, HICPAC, which is dominated by the hospital industry, to weaken infection control protections in healthcare as cost saving measures, are only strengthened by such caveats, which will have an impact on how airborne precautions are implemented in other aspects of society. As Dr. Jose-Luis Jimenez, professor of chemistry at the University of Colorado-Boulder, recently noted on social media, “Medical infection prevention and control still DOES NOT want airborne protections used more widely. And they want the POWER over WHEN they should be used (as @microlabdoc points out).”

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However, if it is acknowledged that the airborne transmission is the dominant mode by which respiratory pathogens infect people, then appropriate equipment and infrastructure are needed to prevent the transmission of respiratory pathogens anywhere. These become urgent social priorities.

A study published in The Lancet last year found that children who developed lower respiratory infections before the age of two were twice as likely to die prematurely from respiratory diseases. The findings persisted even after they adjusted for socioeconomic factors and adult habits, such as smoking. Chronic respiratory diseases account for nearly 4 million deaths annually, 7 percent of the global figure. 

As the lead author, Dr. James Allinson from the National Heart & Lung Institute at Imperial College London said, “Current preventative measures for adult respiratory disease mainly focus on adult lifestyle risk factors such as smoking. Linking one in five adult respiratory deaths to common infection many decades earlier in childhood shows the need to target risk well before adulthood.” 

In other words, it is not just preventing pandemics and epidemics. Eradicating all respiratory infections becomes a primary goal for public health. Failing to “operationalize and implement” broad airborne precautions as a public concern of international scope represents public health negligence of a criminal character.

Perhaps one positive aspect of the consensus report is that it did away with the previous construct that only particles five microns or less can become airborne and all larger particles are therefore transmitted through “droplet transmission,” and would fall to the ground under gravitational force within one or two meters. This was the basic erroneous dogma that had been in place for more than a century as Dr. Jose-Luis Jimenez explained in July 2021 in an interview with the World Socialist Web Site.

The WHO declares that “infectious respiratory particles [IRPs]” that travel “through the air” are of any size across any distance. They also acknowledge that IRPs can be released not just through coughs or sneezes, but through talking and exhaling. Under the mode of transmission labeled “through the air,” these are further subcategorized as “Airborne transmission/inhalation” and “direct deposition,” which is the new term for droplet transmission.

More than just awkward usage, presenting the two terms as subcategories of a larger unit, instead of making them separate modes of transmission only perpetuates the misleading characterization of how COVID is transmitted. Direct deposition has not been the dominant route of sustained human-to-human transmission of COVID, characterized by superspreading events and the mass infection of hundreds of millions of people each year. 

It has taken two years and 52 pages to acknowledge the airborne nature of COVID-19. Moreover, the document fails to promulgate any guidance on what needs to be done to protect populations from pathogens that transmit “through the air.” Anticipating the political difficulties the WHO would face in acknowledging the airborne nature of respiratory pathogens, they concluded their executive summary with a backhanded apology for their oversight on issuing any guidance. 

They said, “This consultation is the first phase of the global scientific debate led by WHO. From which the next steps will require further technical and multidisciplinary research and exploration of the wider implications of the updated descriptors before any update on infection prevention and control or other mitigation measures guidance is issued by WHO.” 

The implication of this admission by the WHO, even as COVID continues to mutate and infect millions of people across the world, means that despite having accepted the airborne nature of SARS-CoV-2, they will not issue any guidance to prevent and mitigate the spread of this disease or any other respiratory pathogens present and future. 

Clearly, the inability by member states to agree on the text of the “first-ever” global pandemic accord, being voted on at the end of May at this year’s World Health Assembly, means that the world is even less prepared to address future global outbreaks than on the eve of the COVID pandemic. This includes equitable sharing of technical information on therapeutics and vaccines and their distribution to populations. 

Speaking with Human Rights Watch, the legal adviser at Amnesty International, Tamaryn Nelson, said, “Creating a new pandemic treaty could offer an opportunity to ensure that countries are equipped with proper mechanisms for cooperation and principles to prevent the level of devastation wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic, and the rights violations resulting from government responses. By failing to ground the treaty in existing human rights obligation and inadequately addressing human rights concerns arising during public health emergencies, governments risk repeating history when the next global health crisis hits.”

The former chief scientist at the WHO, Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, an Indian pediatrician, who left her position in mid-November 2022 after a series of high-profile departures, has not fully explained why she resigned. But in an interview with Science Insider she expressed regrets over the UN agency’s handling of the COVID pandemic. 

She said, “We should have done it much earlier, based on the available evidence, and it is something that has cost the organization. You can argue that [the criticism of WHO] is unfair, because when it comes to mitigation, we did talk about methods, including ventilation and masking. But at the same time, we were not forcefully saying, ‘This is an airborne virus.’ I regret that we didn’t do this much, much earlier.”

Higher for longer interest rates hit the global economy

Nick Beams

If one had gone by so-called “market expectations” at the start of the year, then it was going to be relatively plain sailing for the world economy.

Inflation was coming down, there were going to be as many as six interest rate cuts by the US Federal Reserve this year, and at least three, the stock market boom would continue on the bank of the potential of artificial intelligence and there would be a “soft landing” for the global economy.

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell at news conference following the Federal Open Market Committee meeting, Wednesday, Sept. 20, 2023, in Washington. [AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin]

Four months on, this happy scenario is in tatters. The latest data from the US, reflected in other countries as well, indicates that inflation after falling from its previous high levels has reach a sticking point above the target of 2 percent, meaning interest rate cuts markets have been clamouring for are being pushed further down the track.

Fed chair Jerome Powell indicated as much in remarks earlier this month saying that the central bank would need to have “confidence” inflation was moving sustainably down to the target before it would be appropriate to ease monetary policy.

“The recent data have clearly not given us greater confidence, and instead indicate that it’s likely to take longer than expected to achieve that confidence,” Powell said.

The change in the interest landscape saw options markets suggesting a roughly 20 percent chance of a rise in rates over the next 12 months with the yield on 10-year Treasury bonds spiking to more than 5 percent. Wall Street experienced its longest losing streak in 18 months before rebounding somewhat at the start of this week.

In the longer term the growing problems for the US and world economy were outlined in reports prepared for the annual spring meeting of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) held last week.

While it put forward what has been described as a relatively “sunny” outlook for the near term—estimates of global growth were revised upwards—the IMF forecast for the long term presented a different picture.

It noted that since the global financial crisis, amid fluctuations, the general trend for growth was down which would continue with global growth at the end of the decade falling to more than a percentage point below the pre-pandemic average.

The IMF said this was a result of weak productivity, a fall back in globalisation as countries pursue increasingly nationalist economic policies, the misallocation of capital resources and increasing geopolitical turmoil.

In her remarks to the gathering, IMF managing director Kristalina Georgieva warned the global economy was at risk of falling into what she called “the tepid Twenties.”

The class struggle does not usually get much of a mention in IMF reports although it is always present in the thinking of the guardians of the interests of global capital. But on this occasion, it was referred to directly by the IMF chief as she warned that the fall in global growth could lead to “popular discontent” with the political establishment.

The downward trend and how to address it is “what I think [about] when I wake up in the middle of the night,” Georgieva said.

Another issue of concern was the stability of the financial system due to the rise of US public debt. At around the equivalent of US GDP and set to rise even further in coming years, it has reached what is universally acknowledged as an “unsustainable” level.

The IMF Fiscal Monitor report was replete with calls for the US and other governments to tackle this issue with the restoration of “fiscal buffers” to be achieved by targeting spending on health and pensions and social service entitlement programs.

The toxic combination of higher for longer interest rates and slower growth are beginning to become ever more apparent.

This week Bloomberg reported that South Korea is “emerging as a closely watched weak link in the $63 trillion world of shadow banking”—the growing role of hedge funds, equity funds and other non-bank institutions in the global financial system.

The cause of concern is the rise in delinquency rates under conditions where because of higher interest rates Citigroup economists estimate that around $80 billion worth of project-finance debt is “troubled.”

Shadow banking finance to the real estate sector is now more than four times the level it was a decade ago.

According to the Bloomberg report, the role of South Korea’s shadow banking sector in areas that may risk financial stability is “second only to the US in relative size.”

Quentin Fitzsimmons, a financial manager at the T. Rowe Price Group, told the news agency: “What is happening in Korea is probably a microcosm of what could be happening elsewhere. It has made me concerned.”

The growing financial problems in South Korea, one of the world’s major industrial centres, come amidst mounting concerns that its economic growth “model”—heavy industry and computer chip production backed by the state—is running out of steam.

This week, the Financial Times (FT) published an article headlined “Is South Korea’s economic miracle over?”

The answer it gave is almost certainly yes.

The FT reported that the government is seeking to boost the development of new computer chip technologies and their manufacture “amid growing anxiety that the country’s leading export industry will be usurped by rivals across Asia and the west.”

According to a Bank of Korea report last year, cited in the article, having risen at an average of 6.4 percent between 1970 and 2022, annual growth was set to slow to an average of 2.1 percent in the 2020s, 0.6 percent in the 2030s and then start to shrink by 0.1 percent a year in the 2040s.

For China, the world’s largest manufacturing centre, whose growth has been pivotal to the expansion of the world economy for more than a quarter of a century, the situation is no better.

The crisis in the Chinese real estate and property development sector which has seen the collapse of at least 50 companies, of which Evergrande is the most well-known, has not been resolved as the problems of the economy are compounded by a global economic slowdown and escalating warfare measures by the US and increasingly the European powers.

On Wednesday, the New York Times reported on the growing crisis in the car industry resulting from the slowing of demand and the switch to electric vehicles, leading off a with a description of the fate of a major complex in Chongqing, China’s largest western city.

The complex, which was a joint venture of a Chinese company and Hyundai, the South Korean industrial giant, was opened in 2017 with high levels of robots and other equipment to produce petrol-driven cars. It was sold late last year for fraction of the $1.1 billion it cost to build and “unmown grass at the site has already grown knee high.”

According to the article: “Dozens of gasoline-powered vehicle factories are barely running or have already been mothballed.”

The slowdown goes beyond petrol-driven cars and extends to the electric vehicle market not only in China but globally with major car firms, including Tesla, announcing price cuts.

The developing car industry crisis is symptomatic of the marked slowdown in the global economy which will be exacerbated by the continuation of elevated interest rates.

The US is the only major economy experiencing growth, but it does so under conditions where the boost provided by the Biden administration—handouts to corporations under the Inflation Reduction Act and increased military spending—is raising the mountain of unsustainable debt.

The European economy, led down by the world’s third largest economy, Germany, is barely growing. The UK economy is at or near recession and growth in Japan, the world’s fourth largest is barely above zero.

The target for Chinese growth is 5 percent. But this is the lowest level in more than three decades and the government will be struggling to meet it.

Survivors and families of the victims of Manchester Arena bombing to sue MI5

Margot Miller & Robert Stevens

Survivors and families of victims of the 2017 suicide bombing at the Manchester Arena which killed 22 concert-goers are suing the UK’s domestic intelligence agency MI5, for failing to prevent the terror attack. This is the first case of its kind against the intelligence service.

On May 22, 2017, Libyan Islamist Salman Abedi walked into the foyer of the venue and blew himself up with a home-made bomb, as fans were leaving a performance by singer Ariana Grande. The blast killed 22 men, women and children and injured over 100. Many survivors suffered life changing injuries as Abedi added metal nuts and bolts to his home-made device to inflict maximum injury.

Forensic officers work near the Manchester Arena in Manchester, Wednesday, May 24, 2017. [AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth]

The bombing was planned by Salman Abedi and his brother Hashem Abedi. In August 2020, Hashem, after being extradited from Libya, was jailed for 55 years for the 22 murders.

Hudgell Solicitors, Slater & Gordon and Broudie Jackson Canter are leading the legal suit on behalf of 250 complainants, on the grounds MI5 negligence breached the injured survivors’ “right to life” under the Human Rights Act. A legal source told the Sunday Times: “This... action is not about money or compensation. It’s about holding MI5 to account for failing to prevent 22 people dying and many hundreds more being seriously injured.”

The group claim has been submitted to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT).

The legal action against MI5 is important not just to establish the truth about the circumstances leading to the deaths of 22 people, but because it threatens to unravel the cover-up organised at the highest levels of the state.

The action follows the conclusion last year of the official inquiry into the Arena bombing, set up by then Conservative Home Secretary Priti Patel. The inquiry was an attempt to placate the families, but its main role was to conceal the role successive governments and the intelligence agencies played that culminated in the mass murder carried out by the Abedis.

The inquiry sat for 18 months from September 2020 at Manchester’s Magistrates Court. It revealed that Salman Abedi came to the attention of MI5 as many as 18 times over a seven-year period before he perpetrated his crime.

Given the extensive surveillance of both Abedi brothers by the intelligence agencies, the crime could have been foiled in the planning stage. Five months prior to the bombing, the FBI informed British intelligence that Abedi was planning a terrorist attack.

That they were not prevented from carrying out their heinous crime was because Salman and his brother were protected assets of British intelligence, given free rein to travel back and forth between the UK and Syria and Libya during the 2011 US-led NATO proxy war to topple the regime of Muammar Gaddafi.

The British-born brothers visited Libya regularly, where their parents returned in 2016. Their father, Ramadan, and an elder son fought against the Gaddafi regime as proxy forces of US and British imperialism in the savage regime change operation. British intelligence were well aware that the Abedi family and their Manchester group were funnelling rebel fighters into Libya. According to then Defence Secretary Phillip Hammond, the UK military spent £212 million supporting Libyan rebel forces in 2011.

In 2011, David Cameron’s Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition allowed members of the Al Qaeda-linked Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) to travel to Libya from Britain in 2011. Abedi’s parents were both LIFG members, as were other anti-Gaddafi Libyans in his neighbourhood in Manchester. Control orders previously restricting their movements during a thaw in UK-Libyan relations were lifted as London swung against Gaddafi.

The Daily Mail revealed in 2018 that as the post-war conflict in Libya intensified in 2014, Salman and Hashem Abedi fled Libya with British government assistance onboard the Royal Navy vessel, HMS Enterprise and were evacuated back to Britain. This operation was sanctioned at the top of government with the Mail report confirming, “The information [on the soldiers lists of who boarded HMS Enterprise] was subsequently passed on to Number Ten [Downing Street to Cameron], the Foreign Office and the Home Office.”

HMS Enterprise sea training in UK waters in 2019 [Photo: Ministry of Defence-Open Government Licence version 1.0]

When it came to examining the links between the Abedis and British intelligence, the inquiry barred the public, including the affected families, and entered closed session.

The final inquiry report by Sir John Saunders covered up the role of MI5, MI6, the Ministry of Defence and successive British governments, in recruiting and protecting Islamists sent to Libya to expedite regime change.

The first volume of the inquiry was made public but such was the close relationship of the Abedis to the intelligence agencies that the second has only been circulated to those with security clearance. The inquiry was told that the closed report contained “material that would be damaging to national security if it were to become public.”

The final verdict that the public were expected to swallow—was that “It is not possible to reach any conclusion on the balance of probabilities or to any other evidential standard as to whether the Attack would have been prevented.”

Downplaying damning evidence, inquiry chair Saunders said there was a “realistic possibility” the bombing could have been stopped, but it was “quite impossible” to declare there could have been a different outcome. MI5 Director General Ken McCallum stated there was only a “slim” chance the plot could have been foiled.

As the legal action taken out makes clear, the families do not accept this whitewash.

The inquiry heard in a closed doors session that in the months before the attack, two pieces of information about Abedi were received by MI5. One specific piece of intelligence—the details of which have not been made public with “national security” being given as the reason—could “have led to actions which prevented the attack.” This intelligence is understood to be related to Abedi’s return to Britain from Libya four days before the attack. He wasn’t being stopped at the airport, because MI5 failed to flag him up with counter-terrorism police. Had this been done he could have been followed back to the block of flats in south Manchester where his car was being used to store explosives.

The Times reported on the news that the families were to sue MI5, “It is possible that Abedi had a switch for the bomb when he went through the airport. Had he been subject to an investigation, he would have been stopped and the authorities might have discovered it.”

So overwhelming was the evidence that MI5 could have prevented the bombing that McCallum was obliged to issue an apology to the families on behalf of MI5, saying he was “profoundly sorry”. He said, “There was a realistic possibility that actionable intelligence could have been obtained which might have led to actions preventing the attack… I deeply regret that such intelligence was not obtained.”

The father of the youngest victim, eight-year-old Saffie-Rose Roussos, told Sky News he believed his daughter would still be alive “if MI5 did their job”. Speaking to Times Radio last year after McCallum made his apology, Andrew Roussos said, “At 2017 we were at the highest alert and everybody was warned of an attack in this country, and MI5… had 22 pieces of information about Salman Abedi.” He added, “Salman Abedi should not have made it to that arena that night.”

He told ITV’s Good Morning Britain, “I'm sorry but yes, they [MI5] have blood on their hands.”

The Investigatory Powers Tribunal hearing the case of the families is expected to begin next spring. It is a government body, part of the Home Office, with the powers of the High Court that listens to complaints against the intelligence services. In most of cases, neither side wins. In 2020 and 2021, no complaint was upheld. The ITP is no more likely to reveal the truth than the public inquiry, on the grounds of national security.

Since the Arena bombing, Britain has become further embroiled in expanding NATO wars in the Middle East—against the Palestinians in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, in Syria, the Yemen and against Iran, stoking tensions that could result in further terrorist attacks in the UK.