Zika, social inequality and capitalism

Bill Van Auken

The US Centers for Disease Control and Protection (CDC) Wednesday announced that it had determined sufficient evidence exists to establish that the Zika virus, which has spread like wildfire throughout the Americas, causes microcephaly, a devastating birth defect that leaves infants with smaller than normal heads as a result of the brain failing to develop properly.

The findings, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, came on the heels of a warning from US health officials that the danger posed to the United States by the virus was far greater than had originally been anticipated.

“Everything we look at with this virus seems to be a bit scarier than we initially thought,” said the CDC’s deputy director, Dr. Anne Schuchat. She explained that Aedes aegypti, the mosquito species that carries the virus as well as other illnesses, such as dengue fever, chikungunya and West Nile virus, was present in 30 US states, rather than 12 as originally believed.

In the US semi-colonial territory of Puerto Rico, she added, the number of Zika infections may rise into the hundreds of thousands, with hundreds of affected babies.

Within the continental US itself, there have been 700 people reportedly infected with the virus as of last week, including 69 pregnant women.

Zika is a global threat to public health. This week Brazil, the epicenter of the Zika outbreak, said it had confirmed 1,113 cases of microcephaly, with most of them thought to be caused by mothers contracting the virus during pregnancy. Crises of a similar scale face many countries in Latin America. The World Health Organization has predicted 3-4 million new infections throughout the hemisphere.

The virus has also been linked to severe neurological disorders in adults.

In the face of this crisis, the US Congress has rejected a request for slightly less than $2 billion to confront the Zika crisis. With no new funding, the Obama administration has siphoned $589 million from funds previously allocated to combat the 2014 Ebola outbreak that has ravaged West Africa, claiming over 11,000 lives.

The same Congress had no difficulty in approving hundreds of billions in military spending. The $2 billion proposed for Zika is equivalent to the amount spent to purchase a single Virginia Class nuclear submarine or two stealth bombers. However, there is supposedly no more money that can be allocated to protect mothers, infants and others from the tragic consequences of the Zika virus.

This criminal indifference of the US Congress to the spread of the Zika virus stands as an indictment not merely of its Republican leadership, but of an entire social system that subordinates the vital needs of humanity to profits and the accumulation of wealth by a tiny oligarchy.

There is a profound class basis for the failure of the US government’s response to this public health crisis. The Zika virus is overwhelmingly an illness rooted in poverty and social inequality.

The epicenter of the Zika outbreak was the Northeast of Brazil, the poorest region of a country, in which 35 million people have no running water and over 100 million lack access to sewage systems. Millions more live in impoverished favelas, slum neighborhoods, in which regular garbage collection does not exist. All of these factors are ideal for breeding the mosquito that spreads the virus as well as other deadly diseases. Conditions have only worsened as Brazil’s economy has descended into the worst crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Complacent predictions that the spread of the virus will not present a similar threat to the population of the United States deliberately ignore the fact that large sections of the US population also live in impoverished conditions, without adequate housing, social services or healthcare.

This is clearly true in Puerto Rico, where half the population lives below the poverty line. It is also the case in large sections of the south, where the danger is greatest, including in cities such as Miami, Orlando, New Orleans and Houston.

“This could be a catastrophe to rival Hurricane Katrina or other recent miseries that disproportionately affect the poor,” Peter Hotez, chief of the Baylor College of Medicine National School of Tropical Medicine, wrote in a column published in the New York Times last week.

The comparison is apt. What was revealed by Katrina was not just the incompetence and indifference of the government in the face of a widely predicted catastrophe, but also the terrible consequences of decades of deterioration and neglect of social infrastructure and the evisceration of social programs benefiting the broad masses of people in order to further enrich a ruling financial and corporate oligarchy.

The same attacks have been carried out against the public health care system through decades of budget cuts. This process has culminated in Obamacare, part of a calculated strategy to reorganize health care along class lines, while facilitating the profiteering of the big pharmaceutical and insurance corporations and hospital chains.

Revealingly, among the few initiatives announced by the Obama administration and Congress thus far in relation to Zika is an incentive program for the drug companies, offering them expedited regulatory review in order to get their most lucrative new drugs onto the market in return for studying “unprofitable” infectious diseases like Zika. While public health officials have called for a sharing of all information in regards to such developments, the big pharma companies in the US have given no indication that they will comply.

Just as the Ebola outbreak has been followed by Zika, many more devastating epidemics are inevitable, and, given global travel, they will spread around the world. They can be effectively combatted only through an internationally coordinated effort backed by the resources needed not only to rapidly develop and make universally available vaccines against these modern-day plagues, but to eradicate the conditions of poverty and oppression that allow them to spread.

Standing in the way of such a necessary effort is a failed capitalist system, which subordinates all social concerns, including health care, to corporate profit and the bitter rivalries between the capitalists of different nation-states.

The claim that resources are not available is a lie. The mountains of wealth hoarded by the 20 richest Americans who have more than the bottom 50 percent of the US population would pay for such vitally necessary changes many times over.

Confronting crises like the outbreaks of Ebola and Zika is fundamentally a political question. It requires a struggle by the working class internationally to reorganize society on socialist foundations to meet social needs, not private profit.

A Dictionary of Euphemisms for Imperial Decline

William J. Astore

The dishonesty of words illustrates the dishonesty of America's wars. 

Since 9/11, can there be any doubt that the public has become numb to the euphemisms that regularly accompany U.S. troops, drones, and CIA operatives into Washington's imperial conflicts across the Greater Middle East and Africa?  Such euphemisms are meant to take the sting out of America's wars back home.  Many of these words and phrases are already so well known and well worn that no one thinks twice about them anymore.

Here are just a few: collateral damage for killed and wounded civilians (a term used regularly since the First Gulf War of 1990-1991).   Enhanced interrogation techniques for torture, a term adopted with vigor by George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and the rest of their administration (“techniques” that were actually demonstrated in the White House).  Extraordinary rendition for CIA kidnappings of terror suspects off global streets or from remote badlands, often followed by the employment of enhanced interrogation techniques at U.S. black sites or other foreign hellholes.  Detainees for prisoners and detention camp for prison (or, in some cases, more honestly, concentration camp), used to describe Guantánamo (Gitmo), among other places established offshore of American justice.  Targeted killings for presidentially ordered drone assassinations. Boots on the ground for yet another deployment of “our” troops (and not just their boots) in harm's way. Even the Bush administration's Global War on Terror, its label for an attempt to transform the Greater Middle East into aPax Americana, would be redubbed in the Obama years overseas contingency operations (before any attempt at labeling was dropped for a no-name war pursued across major swathes of the planet). 

As euphemisms were deployed to cloak that war's bitter and brutal realities, over-the-top honorifics were assigned to America's embattled role in the world. Exceptional, indispensable, and greatest have been the three words most commonly used by presidents, politicians, and the gung ho to describe this country. Once upon a time, if Americans thought this way, they felt no need to have their presidents and presidential candidates actually say so -- such was the confidence of the golden age of American power.  So consider the constant redeployment of these terms a small measure of America's growing defensiveness about itself, its sense of doubt and decline rather than strength and confidence.

To what end this concerted assault on the words we use? In George Orwell's classic 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” he noted that his era's equivalents for “collateral damage” were “needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.” Obviously, not much has changed in the intervening seven decades.  And this is, as Orwell intuited, a dangerous way to go.  Cloaking violent, even murderous actions in anodyne language might help a few doubting functionaries sleep easier at night, but it should make the rest of us profoundly uneasy.

The more American leaders and officials -- and the media that quotes them endlessly -- employ such euphemisms to cloak harsh realities, the more they ensure that such harshness will endure; indeed, that it is likely to grow harsher and more pernicious as we continue to settle into a world of euphemistic thinking.   

The Emptiness of Acronyms

In the future, some linguist or lexicographer will doubtless compile a dictionary of perpetual war and perhaps (since they may be linked) imperial decline, focusing on the grim processes and versions of failure language can cloak.  It would undoubtedly explore how certain words and rhetorical devices were used in twenty-first-century America to obscure the heavy burdens that war placed on the country, even as they facilitated its continuing failed conflicts.  It would obviously include classic examples like surge, used in both Iraq and Afghanistan to obscure the way our government rushed extra troops into a battle zone in a moment of failure only ensuring the extension of that failure, and the now-classic phrase shock and awe that obscured the reality of a massive air strike on Baghdad that resulted in the deaths of dozens of civilians (“collateral damage”), but not the “decapitation” of a hated regime.

Don't think, however, that the language of twenty-first-century American war was only meant to lull the public.  Less familiar words and terms continue to be used within the military not to clarify tasks at hand but to obscure certain obvious realities even from those sanctioned to deal with them.  Take asymmetrical warfare, the gray zone, and VUCA.  Unless you spend time in Department of Defense and military circles, you probably haven't heard of these. 

Asymmetrical warfare suggests that the enemy fights unfairly and in a thoroughly cowardly fashion, regularly lurking behind and mixing with civilians (“hostages”), because that enemy doesn't have the moxie to don uniforms and stand toe-to-toe in a “kinetic” smack-down with U.S. troops.  As a result, of course, the U.S. must be prepared for underhanded tactics and devious weaponry, including ambushes and IEDs (improvised explosive devices, or roadside bombs), as well as a range of other “unconventional” tactics now all too familiar in a world plagued by violent attacks against “soft” targets (aka civilians).  It must also be prepared to engage an enemy mixed in with a civilian population and so brace itself for the inevitable collateral damage that is now so much the essence of American war. 

That groups like the Islamic State (ISIS) would choose to fight “asymmetrically” should hardly come as a surprise to anyone who's ever been confronted by a much bigger and better armed kid in a schoolyard.  Misdirection, a sucker punch, a slingshot, even running away to fight another day are “asymmetrical” approaches that are sensible indeed for any outgunned and overmatched opponent.  The term is a truism, nothing more, when it comes to the realities of our world. It is, however, a useful way of framing matters for those in the Pentagon and the military who don't want to think seriously about the grim course of action, focused significantly on civilian populations, they are pursuing, which often instills anger and the urge for revenge in such populations and so, in the end, runs at cross purposes to stated U.S. aims.

The “gray zone” is a fuzzy term used in military circles to describe the perplexing nature of lower-level conflicts, often involving non-state actors, that don't qualify as full-fledged wars. These are often fought using non-traditional weapons and tactics ranging from cyber attacks to the propagandizing of potential terror recruits via social media. This “zone” is unnerving to Pentagon types in part because the vast majority of the Pentagon's funding goes to conventional weaponry that's as subtle as a sledgehammer: big-ticket items like aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines, main battle tanks, strategic bombers, and wildly expensive multi-role aircraft such as the F-35 (now estimated to cost roughly $1.4 trillion through its lifecycle).  Much of this weaponry is “too big to fail” in the funding wars in Washington, but regularly fails in the field precisely because it's too big to be used effectively against the latest crop of evasive enemies.  Hence, that irresolvable gray zone which plagues America's defense planners and operatives.

The question the gray zone both raises and obscures is: Why has the U.S. done so poorly when, by its own definition, it remains the biggest, baddest superpower around, the one that outspends its non-state enemies by a factor so large it can't even be calculated?  Keep in mind, for instance, that the 9/11 attacks on American soil were estimated to have cost Osama bin Laden at most a half-million dollars. Multiply that by 400 and you can buy one “made in America” F-35 jet fighter.

If the gray zone offers little help clarifying America's military dilemmas, what about VUCA?  It's an acronym for volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous, which is meant to describe our post-9/11 world.  Of course, there's nothing like an acronym to take the sting out of any world.  But as an historian who has read a lot of history books, let me confess that, to the best of my knowledge, the world has always been, is now, and will always be VUCA.

For any future historian of the Pentagon's language, let me sum things up this way: instead of honest talk about war in all its ugliness and uncertainty, military professionals of our era have tended to substitute buzz words, catchphrases, and acronyms.  It's a way of muddying the water.  It allows the world of war to tumble on without serious challenge, which is why it's been so useful in these years to speak of, say, COIN (Counterinsurgency) or 4GW (Fourth-Generation Warfare).

Much like its most recent enthusiast, General David Petraeus, COIN has once again lost favor in the military, but Fourth-Generation Warfare is still riding high and sounds so refreshingly forward-looking, not like the stale Vietnam-era wine in a post-9/11 bottle that it is.  In reality, it's another iteration of insurgency and COIN mixed and matched with Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong's people's war.  To prevail in places like Afghanistan, so 4GW thinkers suggest, one needs to win hearts and minds -- yes, that classic phrase of defeat in Vietnam -- while securing and protecting (a definite COINage) the people against insurgents and terrorists.  In other words, we're talking about an acronym that immediately begins to congeal if you use older words to describe it like “pacification” and “nation-building.” The latest 4GW jargon may not help win wars, but it does sometimes win healthy research grants from the government.

The fact is that trendy acronyms and snappy buzz words have a way of limiting genuine thinking on war.  If America is to win (or, far better, avoid) future wars, its war professionals need to look more honestly at that phenomenon in all of its dimensions.  So, too, do the American people, for it's in their name that such wars are allegedly waged.

The Truth About “Progress” in America's Wars

These days, Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter often resorts to cancer imagery when describing the Islamic state. "Parent tumor" is an image he especially favors -- that is, terrorism as a cancer that America's militarized surgeons need to attack and destroy before it metastasizes and has “children.”  (Think of the ISIS franchises in Libya, where the organization has recently doubled in size, Afghanistan, and Yemen.)  Hence the proliferation of “surgical strikes” by drones and similarly “surgical” Special Ops raids, both of which you could think of as America's equivalent of white blood cells in its war on the cancer of terrorism.

But is terrorism really a civilizational cancer that can be “cured” via the most aggressive “kinetic” treatments?  Can the U.S. render the world cancer-free?  For that's what Carter's language implies.  And how does one measure “progress” in a “war” on the cancer of ISIS?  Indeed, from an outsider's perspective, the proliferation of U.S. military bases around the world (there are now roughly 800), as well as of drone strikes, Special Ops raids, and massive weapons exports might have a cancerous look to them.  In other words, what constitutes a “cancer” depends on one's perspective -- and perhaps one's definition of world “health,” too.

The very notion of progress in America's recent wars is one that a colleague, Michael Murry, recently critiqued.  A U.S. Navy Vietnam War Veteran, he wrote me that, for his favorite military euphemism, “I have to go with ‘progress' as incessantly chanted by the American military brass in Iraq and Afghanistan…

“We go on hearing about 14 years of ‘progress' which, to hear our generals tell it, would vanish in an instant should the United States withdraw its forces and let the locals and their neighbors sort things out. Since when do ‘fragile gains' equate to ‘progress'? Who in their right mind would invest rivers of blood and trillions of dollars in ‘fragility'?  Now that I think of it, we also have the euphemistic expression of ‘drawdown' substituting for ‘withdrawal' which in turn substitutes for ‘retreat.' The U.S. military and the civilian government it has browbeaten into hapless acquiescence simply cannot face the truth of their monumental failures and so must continually bastardize our language in a losing -- almost comical -- attempt to stay one linguistic step ahead of the truth.”

Progress, as Murry notes, basically means nothing when such “gains,” in the words of David Petraeus during the surge months in Iraq in 2007, are both “fragile” and “reversible.” Indeed, Petraeus repeated the same two words in 2011 to describe similar U.S. “progress” in Afghanistan, and today it couldn't be clearer just how much “progress” was truly made there.  Isn't it time for government officials to stop banging the drums of war talk in favor of “progress” when none exists? 

Think, for instance, of the American-trained (and now re-trained) Iraqi security forces. Each year U.S. officials swear that the Iraqi military is getting ever closer to combat readiness, but much like one of Zeno's paradoxes, the half-steps that military takes under American tutelage never seem to get it into fighting shape.  Progress, eternally touted, seems always to lead to regress, eternally explained away, as that army regularly underperforms or its units simply collapse, often abandoning their American-supplied weaponry to the enemy.  Here we are, 12 years after the U.S. began training the Iraqi military and once again it seems to be cratering, this time while supposedly on the road to retaking Iraq's second largest city, Mosul, from its Islamic State occupiers.  Progress, anyone?

In short, the dishonesty of the words the U.S. military regularly wields illustrates the dishonesty of its never-ending wars. After so many years of failure and frustration, of wars that aren't won and terrorist movements that only seem to spread as its leaders are knocked off, isn't it past time for Americans to ditch phrases like “collateral damage,” “enemy noncombatant,” “no-fly zone” (or even worse, “safe zone”), and “surgical strike” and adopt a language, however grim, that accurately describes the military realities of this era? 

Words matter, especially words about war.  So as a change of pace, instead of the usual bloodless euphemisms and vapid acronyms, perhaps the U.S. government could tell the shocking and awful truth to the American people in plain language about the realities and dangers of never-ending war. 

The Case Against Glyphosate

Colin Todhunter

On 13 April, the EU Parliament called on the European Commission to restrict certain permitted uses of the toxic herbicide glyphosate, best known in Monsanto's 'Roundup' formulation.

Glyphosate was last year determined to be "probably carcinogenic" by the WHO, and the resolution calls for no approval for many uses now considered acceptable, including use in or close to public parks, playgrounds and gardens and use where integrated pest management systems are sufficient for necessary weed control. The resolution falls short of an outright ban called for by many and also calls for the renewal of the licence for glyphosate to be limited to just seven years instead of the 15 proposed by the Commission.

Nearly 700 MEPs voted on the seven-year licensing of glyphosate and the vote was passed by 374 votes in favor to 225 votes against.

The resolution also demands strict limits on 'pre-harvest' applications on crops, which refers to the practice of spraying crops up to two weeks before harvest to dessicate the plants and make harvesting easier. This use of glyphosate is believed to be a main source of residue exposure to humans, especially those found in bread

Among other things, the resolution calls for the Commission and European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) to immediately disclose all scientific evidence for its recent positive classification of glyphosate and the Commission to test and monitor glyphosate residues in foods and drinks produced in the EU as well as in imported produce.

Moreover, it strongly criticised the Commission for accepting an incomplete dossier with regard to endocrine disruption and the toxic spiral by agro-biotech companies adding further resistances to plants.

This European Parliament vote to re-approve glyphosate for 7 years as opposed to the usual 15 years is non-binding on the Commission and EU member states. The EU member states will take the final vote in May.

Czech MEP Kateřina Konečná, GUE/NGL coordinator on the Parliament’s Committee on the Environment and Public Health, said:

“I am really disappointed by the outcome of today’s vote on our objection to the re-authorisation of the glyphosate herbicide. Our objection has been distorted. Some really bad amendments were tabled by right-wing groups in order to weaken a ban on glyphosate in the resolution and, unfortunately, they were approved.”

(For a more detailed review of the developments described above, see this piece in The Ecologist.)

Limited ‘victory’

What transpired on 13 April represents a very limited 'victory'. To understand why this is the case, readers are urged to consult the attached fully-referenced document at the end of this article. Campaigner Rosemary Mason put together the 18-page document in question, which was produced to accompany an open letter sent by Mason to British Medical Journal Editor-in-Chief Fiona Godlee.

The document shows that poisoning the public and the environment with a cocktail of pesticides, not least glyphosate, on a massive scale is nothing short of criminal. Powerful commercial interests have colluded with governments, regulatory bodies and decision makers to ensure this has continued for decades (see this list of reports on the Corporate Europe Observatory website that highlight how in Europe public institutions have been compromised over the regulation of chemicals, not least pesticides, due to serious and persistent conflicts of interest; also see this report on how the previous Commission served a corporate agenda).

Mason implies that the public are being hoodwinked by messages about health and that these messages serve agritech interests. In her letter to the BMJ, she notes a major conflict of interest was unaddressed.

A piece, ‘People lack awareness of link between alcohol and cancer’, was published in the BMJ by Anne Gulland reporting about a survey commissioned by Cancer Research UK (CRUK),

Dr Penny Buykx, a senior research fellow at The University of Sheffield and lead author of the report, is quoted as saying:
“We’ve shown that public awareness of the increased cancer risk from drinking alcohol remains worryingly low. People link drinking and liver cancer, but most still don’t realise that cancers including breast cancer, mouth and throat cancers and bowel cancer are also linked with alcohol, and that risks for some cancers go up even by drinking a small amount.”

Mason argues that the way health-related research is reported serves the interests of pesticide manufacturers because something other than pesticides can be blamed for the epidemic of cancers. Messages about lifestyle behaviour and individual responsibility for health are constantly being reinforced by politicians, the media and research studies.

According to Mason, since November 2010 Michael Pragnell has been the Chairman of Cancer Research UK (CRUK). She notes Pragnell was the founder of Syngenta and CEO of Syngenta AG based in Switzerland (from its public listing in 2000 to the end of 2007). He was also Chairman of CropLife International from 2002 to 2005.

Numerous studies and data sources are cited by Mason to highlight the deleterious health and environmental impacts of glyphosate. She implies that it is very convenient to lay the blame for poor health and disease elsewhere or at the door of things like alcohol consumption or individual behaviour.

Implying that poor health is the outcome of individual choice and lifestyle behaviour serves to divert the focus of attention away from commercial interests that profit from institutionalised health-damaging practices that affect the public. This dovetails with ‘free-market’ ideology whereby free will and choice prevail and illness, unemployment, poverty, etc, are the fault of the victim, rather than the consequences of a system structured (politically and economically) to serve the needs of powerful commercial interests and which, as in the case of exposure to glyphosate, the public has no control over.

Instead of holding these interests to account, we are left with messages that say follow a low carb diet, it’s OK to drink sugary drinks because it a lack of exercise that causes obesity or drink a glass of red wine a day to keep the doctor away.

The Chief Medical Officer (England) and Cancer Research UK blame liver failure and liver cancers in the public on ‘lifestyle choices’ i.e. the consumption of alcohol. However, as Mason argues, Séralini’s rats in France and dairy cows in Denmark also had liver pathologies. They cannot be blamed on ‘lifestyle choices’ but on glyphosate residues in food.

Mason states that since 2013 the Department of Health, Public Health England and the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs have been made aware that independent scientists have shown that glyphosate is linked to most of the diseases and conditions associated with those in a Western diet, including: gastrointestinal disorders, obesity, depression, autism, infertility, cancer and Alzheimer’s disease, celiac sprue and gluten intolerance. Celiac disease is a multifactorial disease associated with numerous nutritional deficiencies as well as reproductive issues and increased risk to thyroid disease, kidney failure and cancer.

In addition, problems with low manganese levels (shown in cows fed GM soya and maize) are associated with gut dysbiosis as well as neuropathologies such as autism, Alzheimer’s disease, depression, anxiety syndrome, Parkinson’s disease, and prion diseases.

Mason argues that Monsanto knew that glyphosate caused cancer in animals but manipulated the data. US Scientist Anthony Samsel is the first independent researcher to examine Monsanto’s secret toxicology studies on glyphosate obtained under Freedom of Information from the US EPA. They reported a variety of cancers in animals.

If the EU Commission and the EFSA manage to renew the licence for glyphosate, the public’s health will continue to deteriorate, while the agritech industry and drug companies will continue to profit.

Rosemary Mason's paper on glyphosate can be read here

FMLN government escalates repression amid civil war-level violence in El Salvador

Andrea Lobo

In response to a dramatic rise in the homicide rate, the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) government in El Salvador has imposed greater militarization in the streets and a state of emergency in seven prisons.

The new measures consist of banning cellphone use, limiting visits, increasing surveillance, and placing gang leaders in isolation. The plan was approved by the Legislative Assembly on April 1 with 83 out of 84 members voting in favor. A special $100 million loan to finance it was approved on April 6.

The vice president, Oscar Ortiz, stated, “Today we are making right with this crusade against crime and extortion.”

This is expected to worsen the already horrid conditions in prisons, holding over three times their capacity and described by the U.S. State Department as “harsh and life threatening.” Out of the 30,000 prisoners, the Salvadorian authorities estimate that about 13,000 belong to gangs and claim that high-level decision making in these criminal organizations happens inside prisons and gets communicated out.

The 6,656 killings last year brought the murder rate back to civil war levels. At 103 per 100,000 inhabitants, El Salvador is the most violent country in the hemisphere. In comparison, the rates in Honduras and Guatemala have slowly decreased in recent years but remain in the top five most violent countries in the Americas with respective rates of 57 and 30. According to the Salvadoran National Police, 1,380 people were murdered in January and February of this year, a rate that, if continued, would lead to over 8,000 deaths for 2016.

The violence primarily affects poor and working class neighborhoods. As reported by La Prensa, 70 percent of small shops and small businesses are extorted by gangs, who exert de facto rule over large parts of the country. The Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) reports that violence is meted out for “bearing witness to a crime, attempting to leave a gang, or failing to pay an extortion fee or war tax.”

As is to be expected from the bourgeois press, there has been no attempt to look into the deeper causes of violence, which are rooted in the history of the local ruling layers defending their interests with extreme state violence, while today forcing thousands of youth into the dead ends of migrating or joining organized crime.

The consolidation of the two largest gangs―the MS-13 (Mara Salvatrucha) and the 18th Street Gang (Barrio 18)―arose as byproducts of the 1990s Clinton administration crackdown on crime and mass deportation of members of smaller gangs formed in the U.S. “Eventually it became a gang, but initially it was just to protect each other from other groups that were harassing us…These kids were being treated like trash,” told one of the deportees during this period to the Huffington Post.

During his second year in office in 2010, FMLN President Mauricio Funes was criticized for lacking a plan to deal with gang violence, so he pushed for cooperation between the police and the military. A series of massacres began, which analysts and former police officials and directors have linked to highly-trained special forces. The second documented incident was a massacre of five young construction workers and students, who, as recounted by a survivor, were mistaken for gang members.

The return of death squads, called “groups for social cleansing,” has been connected to government authorities. This was made especially clear after Funes discounted their existence without any investigations. Extrajudicial executions, as reported by several newspapers, have been increasingly linked with the Armed Forces.

Since 2009, the military has reportedly defended one or another gang in order to generate some authority and even receive kickbacks. In one instance, in February, members of the Armed Forces beat up and threatened with death a 19-year-old worker, Cristian Campos, for scoring a goal against an MS-13 team. He was killed a few days later at 6 a.m., presumably on his way to work.

After a temporary truce between gangs, which led to a drop in homicides in 2012 and 2013, extrajudicial executions and militarization of policing have escalated to levels not seen since the end of the civil war in 1992. During the war, although 85 percent of violence complaints were against government forces and only 5 percent to FMLN forces, the latter also carried out documented torture and killings of civilians.

Since taking office in June 2014, FMLN President Sanchez Sánchez Cerén, a former guerrilla leader himself, has continued an “iron fist” against gangs, with policies “nearly identical to the ‘mano dura’ policies of the past,” according to WorldPost.

During 2015, 74 percent of alleged human rights charges submitted to the attorney general’s office were against cops and soldiers, compared to 40 percent in 2014. The National Police estimated that 30 percent of murder victims belonged to gangs.

U.S. imperialism has continued to finance state terror in El Salvador, which has served to maintain one of the cheapest and most vulnerable labor forces in the world. It continues to protect its economic and political dominance.Forbes Magazine reports, “Venezuela’s economic decline and El Salvador’s poor relationship with China (due to its recognition of Taiwan) mean that El Salvador has few alternatives to U.S. support.” However, the Salvadoran Ministry of the Economy announced “multimillion investments” by Chinese companies for this year, which has surely raised some eyebrows in Washington.

Supposedly aimed against violence and corruption in the Northern Triangle countries (El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala), the U.S. Congress approved $750 million in “assistance to Central America” for the current year, a 155 percent increase over 2015.

Importantly, 25 percent of the funding is directed at preventing undocumented migrants from fleeing to the U.S., thereby encouraging even greater abuses by government authorities against the population.

During the civil war, Washington provided more than $4 billion to the Salvadoran government, leaving it hungry for more military aid packages and incentivizing future state-sponsored violence and collusion of gangs and government forces.

Economic policies bound to U.S. ruling class interests have long exacerbated the abysmal living standards of the Salvadoran working class and destroyed opportunities for the youth. Export-led industrialization, primarily with U.S. capital dressed as national enterprises during the 1970s, led to greater unemployment, lower shares of income going to labor, and a greater economic dependence on imports from the U.S. in the forms of machinery, pesticides, and oil.

These were major causes of the civil war during the 1980s, which in turn led to high inflation, capital flight, economic contraction, and a crushing external debt, which remains today the highest in Central America in proportion to GDP (64 percent and increasing).

Abiding by World Bank and IMF orders, the government has continuously placed the mounting debt on the shoulders of the working class through cuts in social spending and privatizations, which began in the 1980s with coffee and sugar exports, banks, electricity, and telecommunications.

The extreme right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) of death squad organizer Roberto d’Aubuisson, in power between 1989 and 2009, expanded the attacks on workers by privatizing the pension system and water, and dollarizing the economy. The ensuing social crisis came to a head in 2009, amid the global financial crisis, with the country registering the highest youth homicide rate in the world, 40 percent of the population in poverty, and 0.3 percent of the population owning 44 percent of all assets.

Desperate for a change, Salvadorans elected the FMLN. Coming into power under the banner of “national unity,” it proved to be an even more ruthless defender of imperialist interests. Aside from limited social assistance programs and education, the focus has been to protect previous privatizations, apply regressive sales taxes and impose austerity measures, mainly in health care and agricultural subsidies.

The government has increased military repression by enlarging its security budget. With this week’s addition, it has climbed to $680 million for 2016, becoming higher than the total spent on health.

Violence is being used by the business elite and its current political representative, the FMLN, to implement further attacks against the working population. “The problem with El Salvador is not the lack of resources (to finance the Safe El Salvador plan that needs $2.1 billion), but the lack of good austerity government policies,” said the president of the National Association of Private Enterprise (ANEP) last September.

According to a 2015 report by Oxfam, despite growth slowing to around 2 percent, the number of millionaires has increased by 6.7 percent, and they have amassed a fortune equal to 87 percent of the GDP. In 2014, the two richest people owned $7.5 billion or three times the social development budget for that year. In contrast, El Salvador has, along with Nicaragua, the lowest minimum wages in Central America, which ranges by sector between $94.80 and $242 per month, while the basic food basket costs $193.

Rural areas have been virtually abandoned leading to 60 percent of inhabitants living in poverty and 30 percent in extreme poverty. Work is scarce and insecure in both the cities and rural towns. According to the World Labor Organization, 65.7 percent of the labor force works in the informal sector, with 44 percent of them living in poverty. Moreover, the youth suffer a school desertion rate of 70 percent, with only 14.8 percent of students going to high school in 2013.

Corruption and corporate tax evasion are especially widespread, with private enterprises evading 35 percent of their taxes or $1.2 billion yearly, according to the Foundation for the Study and Application of Law (FESPAD). The FMLN has staunchly opposed the creation of any anti-corruption agency.

Only the mobilization of the working class on the basis of a revolutionary socialist program―independent from all bourgeois parties like FMLN and ARENA―can successfully combat the local ruling oligarchy’s and U.S. imperialism’s violent defense of their interests, using gang violence as the pretext for employing repressive measures to attack the living standards and democratic rights of the workers and youth.

German undercover agent employed National Socialist Underground terrorists

Dietmar Henning

It has been known for some time that the ten murders carried out by the National Socialist Underground (NSU) took place under the noses of the German intelligence agencies, and that undercover agents financed this neo-Nazi scene. New facts have now come to light, showing that the undercover agents and the intelligence agencies not only supervised individuals in the milieu of the NSU, but also the NSU itself.

The documentary film “The NSU Network” by Stefan Aust and Dirk Laabs, which aired on ARD last week, and a long article in the newspaper Die Welt, show that Ralf Marschner, an undercover agent of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), employed Uwe Mundlos in his construction company after the latter disappeared. It is also possible that both of the other members of the NSU involved in the murders, Uwe Böhnhardt and Beate Zschäpe, worked for Marschner, whose alias is “Primus.”

In addition, there are indications that the company owned by Marschner may have provided logistical support for some of the murders. According to the research of Aust and Laabs, Mundlos was employed at construction sites in the region of Nuremburg and Munich, where the NSU murdered four people of Turkish origin during the same period. The company hired rental cars several times, which may have been used for the murders.

Aust and Laabs were unable to determine whether Marschner had informed his contacts at the intelligence agency that he was employing Mundlos or whether he acted on his own initiative or with the knowledge or even the support of his supervisors at the intelligence agency.

Ralf Marschner was known to be a leading neo-Nazi, who worked from 1992 to at least 2002 as a paid spy for the domestic intelligence agency. He was charged for arson attacks on refugee lodgings. In 2007, Marschner, like many other undercover agents in the NSU milieu, disappeared. He travelled through Ireland and Austria before reaching Switzerland, where he lives today. He runs an antique shop in neighbouring Liechtenstein.

Between 2000 and 2002, his Marschner Construction Service in Zwickau employed Saxon neo-Nazis in demolition work. Uwe Mundlos worked there during this time as a foreman under the alias “Max-Florian Burkhardt.” The real Burkhardt, a former neo-Nazi, has admitted to allowing the three murderers to occupy his flat for half a year in 1998, and then giving his identity to Mundlos, who lived under his name for 13 years.

Arne-Andreas Ernst, the construction site manager at various building projects, gave a sworn affidavit to the television team that confirmed that the “Burkhardt” employed by Marschner was indeed Mundlos. He acted as contact person when Marschner was not there.

Marschner’s construction company frequently hired rental cars from the same company in Zwickau from which the NSU trio rented cars for bank robberies. On June 13, 2001, the day on which the second NSU victim, the tailor Abdurrahim Özüdogru, was shot in Nuremburg, Marschner rented a Mercedes Sprinter. The rental car was returned the next day with 980 kilometers on it. On August 29, 2001, the day on which the fourth NSU victim, Munich greengrocer Habil Kilic, was shot, Marschner Construction Service rented an Audi A2 and a VW Golf.

Marschner was listed as the driver of the first car and he and his Nazi crony Jens G. were listed as drivers of the second car. Jens G. still lives on Polenstraße in Zickau, in sight of the house where Mundlos, Böhnhardt and Zschäpe lived for seven years and which Zschäpe is presumed to have set on fire on November 4, 2011. The car rental company did not check who actually drove the cars, according to Die Welt. This means it is possible that Mundlos and Böhnhardt used them to carry out their crimes.

Aust and Laabs based their documentary partly on the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) record of interrogation from between October 2012 and February 2013 in Switzerland. Although these records provide numerous clues that the journalists were able to follow with relative ease, the BKA never made an effort to do so themselves. Marschner was not called as a witness by any of the numerous committees investigating the NSU or during the NSU trial in Munich.

However, the BfV did show an interest in Marschner. Although it had supposedly already rejected Marschner as a witness in 2002, according to statements made by his undercover superior, whose alias is “Richard Kaldrack,” before the NSU parliamentary investigation committee in May 2013, it made contact with him again in 2002 “for reasons of care.” Since November 2011, Kaldrack contacted Marschner seven times by telephone and once in person.

Did the intelligence agency have something to hide? In this case as well, one encounters the suspicious connections and circumstances that continually arise in connection with the NSU and for which there is no innocent explanation.

Kaldrack was obviously a key intermediary between the BfV and the NSU. In addition to Marschner, he controlled at least two other important spies—Mirko Hesse, alias “Strontium,” and Thomas Richter, alias “Corelli.” The latter had worked as an undercover agent for 18 years in the right-wing extremist scene and lived in disguise in a witness protection program in 2012. In April 2014, a day before he was supposed to be interrogated about the NSU by the chief federal prosecutor, the 39-year-old was found dead in his flat.

Kaldrack’s superior at the BfV was an official whose alias was “Lindner,” responsible for monitoring radical right-wingers and for watching scientologists. The main client of Marschner’s construction service was, however, a high-ranking scientologist and real estate businessman. Lindner was also the one who supervised the destruction of the documents of undercover agents from the right-wing radical scene after Beate Zschäpe gave herself up to police in November 2011 and the crimes of the NSU were subsequently revealed.

There are indications that, in addition to Mundlos, the two other known NSU members, Uwe Böhnhardt and Beate Zschäpe, were also employed by Marschner. However, that is not so clearly documented as in the case of Mundlos.

Marschner told the BKA interrogators that, in addition to “Max Burkhardt” (Mundlos), he also employed his brother. This could have been Böhnhardt. The two of them were repeatedly described as “twins” or “brothers” by witnesses and profilers.

After the NSU documentary was aired, the German Press Agency (DPA) reported that several years later, Zschäpe had worked for a company financed by Marschner, the neo-Nazi shop “Heaven and Hell.” The DPA based this report on the statements of a former business partner of Marschner’s.

According to the 2012 interrogation records of another Zwickau neo-Nazi, the authorities knew about Zschäpe’s employment in the shop. Officials confronted the neo-Nazi in the interrogation: “There is information according to which Beate Zschäpe was employed or at least helped out at the shop ‘Heaven and Hell.’”

The documentary film by Aust and Laabs also confirms many known facts about the close connection between the neo-Nazi scene, the NSU and the state. For example, it contains a detailed interview with Tino Brandt, a leading figure in the neo-Nazi scene in the state of Thuringia, who worked as an undercover agent for the BfV between 1994 and 2004, and received 200,000 DM in compensation. “Political work costs money,” emphasized Brandt, who confirmed that the BfV helped out when there was a shortage of money.

Mario Melzer, who was a member of the Thuringia State Office of Criminal Investigation (LKA) special commission “Rex” (right-wing extremism), reported in the film that the neo-Nazi scene was aware that Brandt was an undercover agent. This was the only reason he was included. They did not consider the danger of being found guilty of offences to be very great. “The deeper I penetrated, the more bewildered I became,” commented Melzer on the role of the intelligence agencies.

Uwe Kranz, president of the Thuringia LKA between 1991 and 1997, confirmed this. His officials repeatedly complained about the “high-spirited mood” of the neo-Nazis during house searches and raids. There was never anything to be found. Obviously, they had been forewarned.

The new revelations once again pose the question to what extent the state was not only aware but also complicit in the NSU murders.

In reaction to the ARD documentary, the Munich attorney Yavuz Narin said that it was hard for his clients to stand the fact that “spies paid by the state possibly participated in the NSU killings.” Narin represents the family of Theodoros Boulgarides, who was shot in June 2005. He demanded that the government explain its role.

However, Federal Interior Minister Thomas de Mazière (Christian Democratic Union/CDU) has refused “in the interests of the state” to answer a request from the Left Party parliamentary representative Martina Renner for reports on Marschner, alias “Primus.” This would have “negative consequences for the future ability to work and fulfillment of responsibilities of the intelligence agencies as well and result in damage to the security of the Federal Republic,” he claimed. Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU), on the other hand, has said that the documents would be released.

The documentary “The NSU Network” has shown that nothing cannot be ruled out with regard to the NSU murders.

Significant price hikes for insulin and top selling US drugs

Brad Dixon

Since 2011, the prices of four of the top 10 drugs in the United States have risen by over 100 percent, while the prices of the six remaining drugs increased by more than 50 percent, according to a recent analysis by Reuters.

The price of Humira, AbbVie’s anti-inflammatory drug, rose by 126.4 percent, from $1,677 to $3,797. Amgen’s anti-inflammatory medication, Enbrel, saw its price increase by 118.2 percent, from $427 to $932. The multiple sclerosis treatment, Copaxone, marketed by Teva, increased by 118 percent, from $3,025 to $6,593. AstraZeneca’s cholesterol drug, Crestor, saw its price go up by 113 percent, from $350 to $745.

Reuters’ research, which used 2014 sales figures to compile the list, is based on proprietary pricing data from Truven Health Analytics and looked at the average wholesale price of the drug. “Reuters shared its method and findings with the eight companies that sell the top 10 drugs,” notes the news outlet, “none disputed the findings.”

The Reuters’ report coincided with the April 5 publication of a research letter in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), which found that between 2002 and 2013 the cost of insulin, the most widely used treatment for diabetes, rose nearly 200 percent—increasing from $4.34 per milliliter to $12.92. Annual spending on insulin by patients more than tripled, increasing from $231 to $736.

“I can tell you from seeing patients myself that there are many who can’t afford their insulin and don’t take it or take less of it and they’re worse off for it,” Dr. Robert Gabbay, chief medical officer of the Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston, told Reuters. Gabbay was not involved with the research published in the JAMA.

The researchers noted that the cost increases were largely due to the introduction of insulin analogs—insulin modified to be rapid or long acting—such as Lantus, Levemir, and Humalog.

A report by Bloomberg last year found evidence of “shadow pricing” among diabetes medication manufacturers, where competitors followed each other’s price increases. For example, when Sanofi increased the price of Lantus by 16.1 percent on May 30, 2014, Novo Nordisk increased the price of its competing drug, Levemir, the following day by the exact same amount. The two companies have increased the U.S. prices of their respective drugs 13 times in tandem since 2009. Similar shadow pricing was seen for Eli Lilly’s Humalog and Novo Nordisk’s Novolog.

Insulin has been available for over 90 years, yet there is still no generic alternative. A study published last year in the New England Journal of Medicine described how pharmaceutical companies made a series of patented improvements to the drug—longer-acting versions in the 1930s and 1940s, improved purity in the 1970s and 1980s, and synthetic analogs in subsequent decades—that they characterized as an example of patent “evergreening.” Since doctors are hesitant to prescribe medicines considered obsolete, there has been no incentive to develop generic versions.

Diabetes is a chronic disease characterized by high levels of blood sugar as a result of the pancreas not producing enough insulin or the body being unable to effectively use the insulin produced. The disease caused 1.5 million deaths worldwide in 2012, and complications from the disease can lead to heart attack, stroke, kidney failure, and lower limb amputation.

According to a report by the World Health Organization (WHO) released on April 6, the prevalence of diabetes among the world’s population has increased from 108 million (4.7 percent of the population) in 1980 to 422 million (8.5 percent) in 2014.

“Around 100 years after the insulin hormone was discovered, the ‘Global report on diabetes’ shows that essential diabetes medicines and technologies, including insulin, needed for treatment are generally available in only 1 in 3 of the world’s poorest countries,” said Dr. Etienne Krug, Director of WHO’s Department for the Management of Noncommunicable Diseases, Disability, Violence and Injury Prevention.

The drug companies contacted by journalists for the stories on the price hikes provided the standard excuses: the prices do not take into account the discounts and rebates offered by the drugmakers, and reflect the costs of producing new drugs, including lost income from drug failures. Neither excuse holds up to scrutiny.

It is true that the average wholesale price (AWP) of drugs is generally not the actual cost of the drug. The methods by which drugs are priced in the U.S. are complex and shrouded in secrecy. The Reuters report notes that data on discounts and rebates is “information [drugmakers] closely guard.” In this way, the drug industry attempts to deflect attention from its significant price hikes—allowing it to claim that patients and insurers pay less than the sticker price, but refusing to reveal the extent of the discounts.

“Even after discounts,” the Reuters article points out, “pharmacy benefit managers told Reuters they pay annual price increases on top medications of up to 10 percent. By comparison, the U.S. consumer price index rose an average of 2 percent annually over the last five years.”

One reason for the discrepancy between the AWP and the actual drug price paid by pharmacies is so that drug companies can “market the spread” to pharmacies. That is, insurers, including Medicare and Medicaid, generally reimburse pharmacies based on the AWP. Pharmacies stand to make more money if the price they pay for the drug is lower than the insurance reimbursement. Drug companies enable this practice by inflating the AWP and concealing the level of discounts and rebates. In return, pharmacies are more likely to prescribe their drugs—often in lieu of lower-cost alternatives.

These practices occasionally come to light in court cases brought by whistleblowers under Federal and State False Claims Acts. For example, in 2009 a jury found that Pharmacia violated Wisconsin’s Medicaid fraud statute 1,440,000 times by inflating the AWP to enable overpayment by Medicaid, although a circuit court later lowered the number to 4,758 violations.

The pharmaceutical industry also justifies the high prices based on the research and development costs of producing new drugs, including the cost of failures. “Our industry invests on average 20 percent of our revenues into research and development. It’s a fundamentally different business model,” Robert Zirkelbach, a spokesman for the industry trade group Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), told Reuters.

According to the Tufts University Center for the Study of Drug Development, which was formed in the mid-1980s with financing from the drug industry, the average cost of producing a new drug in 2014 was $2.6 billion. However, the findings of the study, which are endlessly touted by the industry, are based on assumptions that inevitably inflate the price.

For example, the study arrived at a figure of $1.4 billion for average out of-pocket costs, including failures. It then added $1.2 billion in “time costs,” or returns that investors forgo while the drug is under development. Thus, in addition to other methodological limitations, the figure completely eliminates any risk for the drug company.

And while the pharmaceutical industry may invest 20 percent of its revenues on average in research and development (although this figure, too, is questionable), this is generally lower than the amount it spends on SG&A (sales, general, and administrative, which includes marketing).

A recent investigation by CBS Money Watch looked at the 2014 financial data for 16 publicly held pharmaceutical companies. “In all cases but one, corporate overhead was higher than R&D, and often significantly so. In half, after-tax profits were higher than the research-and-development expenses the industry typically points to as the major reason for high costs,” the article found.

In fact, pharmaceutical companies spent $5.4 billion in 2015 on advertising, an increase of 19 percent over the 2014 figure and tying the previous industry record established in 2006, according to data from Kantar Media that was shared with FiercePharma Marketing.

The costs associated with drug development, however, have not prevented the pharmaceutical industry from making a respectable return. Between 2003 and 2012, the eleven largest drugmakers made $711.4 billion in profits, according to an analysis of corporate filings by the lobbying group Health Care for America Now (HCAN). In 2014, the world’s ten largest publicly held pharmaceutical companies had an average profit margin of 19 percent, according to an analysis by Forbes.

While drugmakers have attempted to cast the widely publicized price hikes by Turing Pharmaceuticals and Valeant Pharmaceuticals as exceptions to the rule, their activities are merely the most extreme examples of what is a common and widely shared practice in the pharmaceutical industry.

This was underscored by the price hikes at the start of the year by Pfizer and a number of other pharmaceutical companies. Last month, the pharmacy benefits manager Express Scripts published a report that found that U.S. drug prices had nearly doubled since 2011.

Financial instability far from over, says IMF

Nick Beams

If the IMF’s World Economic Outlook (WEO) report issued on Tuesday, in which it again revised down its forecasts for global growth, could be accurately described as gloomy, then the Global Financial Stability report issued the following day was even gloomier.

Pointing to financial market turbulence in the first two months of the year, during which oil prices plummeted and bank shares experienced sharp declines, the report stated that over the past six months financial stability risks had increased. It cited economic developments, falling commodity prices and concerns over the direction of China’s economy as the underlying causes.

Delivering the report, José Viñals, the head of the IMF’s monetary and capital markets department, said a key question it addressed was “whether the turmoil over the past months is now safely behind us, or is it a warning signal that more needs to be done? I believe it is the latter: more needs to be done to secure global stability.”

The threats to financial stability are across the board. The IMF said banks in advanced economies were now safer but “they came under significant pressure from financial markets at the start of the year, as the economic outlook weakened and became more uncertain.”

In the euro area, market pressures highlighted long-standing issues and banks needed to “urgently tackle elevated nonperforming loans” and address overcapacity in some banking sectors.

In emerging markets, the sharp fall in commodity prices had exacerbated risks for both corporate and government debt and these countries faced “a difficult combination of slower growth, tighter credit conditions and volatile capital flows.” So far, they had been able to withstand this difficult environment because of buffers accumulated during boom years but “buffers are depleting, with some countries running out of room to maneuver.”

The report also warned that, as the health of the corporate sector in emerging markets deteriorated, this could make refinancing pressures “more acute” with possible spillover effects for governments as many weaker corporate debtors were state-owned.

It also raised specific concerns about the level of Chinese debt. Corporate health in China was declining due to lower growth and profitability and this was reflected in the rising share of debt held by firms that do not earn sufficient to cover their interest payments. The report said “debt at risk” had risen to 14 percent of the total debt of Chinese companies, more than tripling since 2010.

In its Fiscal Monitor Report on government debt, also issued on Wednesday, the IMF said public debt ratios had increased in most countries, with the largest increase taking place in emerging market and middle-income countries. Debt ratios in 2015-2016 were now expected to exceed the levels reached at the beginning of the global financial crisis.

However, advanced economies were not immune from this trend. They were now facing “the triple threat of low growth, low inflation and high public debt” and this combination of factors “could generate downward spirals where economic activity and prices decline—leading to increases in the ratio of debt to GDP—and further, self-defeating attempts to reduce debt.”

The IMF said unless policymakers delivered additional measures to reduce risks and support growth, market turmoil could recur and “create a pernicious feedback loop of fragile confidence, weaker growth, tighter financial conditions and rising debt burdens.” This could tip the global economy into “economic and financial stagnation.” It estimated that world output could be lowered by almost 4 percent over baseline forecasts over the next five years, an amount “roughly equivalent to foregoing one year of global growth.”

The main focus of the IMF policy prescriptions is that governments should provide a boost to aggregate demand by increasing spending on infrastructure and other projects and do so in a coordinated manner. However, there is absolutely no sign that such measures are even being contemplated, apart from some stimulus measures by the Chinese government in recent months that have provided at least a temporary economic boost.

Following the issue of the WEO, some of its implications are being drawn out. In an article published on Wednesday, Financial Times columnist Martin Sandbu said the “harsh searchlight” of the report left policymakers with nowhere to hide. IMF chief economist Maurice Obstfeld may have couched his analysis in the “measured language of technical economics, but nobody should be fooled: this is a stark warning that the world has taken a turn for the worse, and a stern rebuke of politicians who have, at best, allowed this to happen, and at worst, contributed to it with misguided policies.”

Sandbu said the IMF had gone a long way towards condemning the policy approach to the weak recovery from the global financial crisis. “The global investment decline, and the trade downturn it has caused, mean more demand stimulus is needed.”

Behind such remarks are the growing fears in ruling circles of social and political upheaval in the event of another financial crisis or major economic downturn.

These concerns are being fueled by the recognition that there is a deepening hostility among broad masses of the population to the political establishment and a realization, as reflected in the Panama Papers tax scandal, that as the ruling elites impose never-ending austerity, they are engaged in criminal activities to salt away vast fortunes.

Significantly the WEO pointed to a serious of non-economic factors including “political discord” which could have considerable spillover effects on economic activity.

While pointing to the worsening economic and financial situation, the IMF and other major institutions can offer no policy prescriptions.

There was a revealing incident at the press conference conducted by Obstfeld as he delivered the WEO report on Tuesday.

Pointing out that he had been coming to such meetings for 20 years, one journalist noted that he had heard the same themes endlessly repeated: monetary policy had to be placed on sound foundations, fiscal measures should be employed and structural reforms should be implemented to increase productivity.

Given that monetary policies, based on quantitative easing had largely run their course, a growing number of governments had no room for fiscal stimulus, and structural reforms took a long time to have any effect, the journalist asked: what did the IMF propose to do to meet the immediate situation?

He received no answer.