Australian budget entrenches inequities in aged care

Margaret Rees

In its annual budget last week, the Liberal-National Coalition government announced that it would spend $17.7 billion over the next five years on aged care.

The outlay falls far short of the $20 billion per year that a recent Royal Commission calculated would be required to address the neglect and social misery in the sector.

Australia Prime Minister Scott Morrison (AP/Kiyoshi Ota)

The budget, moreover, entrenches the dominance of highly-profitable financial operators. They are notorious for operating for-profit homes, often characterised by substandard care, where nearly 700 of Australia’s 910 COVID-19 deaths in 2020 occurred.

The government spend is a further windfall for these corporations. Shares in several of them shot up between 3 and 4 percent on news of the allocation.

The budget outlays some $6.5 billion over four years to fund 80,000 home-care packages, purported to enable elderly people to remain in their own homes for as long as possible.

This, however, does not even meet the number of people on the existing waiting list for such packages, who currently number 102,000. It has been calculated that $7.9 billion would be required to eliminate the waiting list, which has resulted in some elderly people dying before they receive a package.

Paul Versteege from the Combined Pensioners and Superannuants’ Association responded to the budget by stating that the home care spend represented “a shortfall of $1.4 billion. The government’s two previous announcements about increased homecare places—10,000 in 2018–19 and 12,000 in 2019–20—were also deceptive because there also wasn’t enough money to deliver the care.”

Furthermore, 19 percent of older people in Australia do not own their own homes but are forced to rent. Access to a home-care package is irrelevant for those who are homeless or insecurely housed.

Prominent representatives of the aged care sector have warned against any increased funding of home care, because of the impact that it would have on their own operations.

Bupa chief executive Hisham El-Ansery told the Australian Financial Review that, “For those people who are able to afford it, we should consider their contributing more to the cost of their accommodation and daily needs. Why shouldn’t they spend a reasonable proportion of their accumulated wealth looking after themselves at the sunset period of their life?”

David Stanto, head of healthcare equity at Jefferies, bluntly stated that higher government spending on home-care packages “has the potential to decrease residential aged-care occupancy, a critical input into profitability for residential aged care.”

For those in the aging population unable to care for their own needs, the prospect of residential aged care can be terrifying. The royal commission, and media reports, documented multiple instances of neglect and insufficient care, some of which have led to premature death.

The budget allocates $3.9 billion over three years to increase the number of frontline staff. This will purportedly deliver an increase of care time for residents to an average of 200 minutes per day, including up to 40 minutes with a registered nurse (RN).

These care times will only become mandatory in October 2023. They do not even meet the limited royal commission recommendations that a registered nurse (RN) be present at aged-care facilities all times, and that by 2024, 215 minutes of care be provided per day with 44 minutes of those by an RN.

The new policy does not mandate a minimum staffing ratio, or a wage rise above the current poverty-level $21.96 per hour for a personal-care assistant.

On Facebook, one professional in the sector wrote: “Today I taught at a workshop for 20 RNs working in residential aged-care facilities. When asked how many residents they were responsible for on their usual shift, answers ranged from 40 to 70.”

In comments beneath the post, one nurse stated: “When I do aged-care shifts I have 92 residents that I’m responsible for.” Another: “Where I work it is one RN to 120.” And a third: “As an RN on dayshift I oversee the care of 36 high-care residents with care staff. PM [afternoon] shift its 73 and ND [night duty] 146. Mandatory ratios are desperately needed now, not in 2023. Our elderly deserves better.”

The budget allocates $3.2 billion to provide a Basic Fee Supplement of $10 per bed per day for nutrition, linen and cleaning. This recommendation of the Royal Commission is to supplement a base of just $6.08 per resident per day, the average spent currently.

While 85 percent of the pension is deducted per resident, amounting to $802.66 a fortnight for a single pension, currently just $85.12 is expended on food, meant to cover three meals a day, as well as morning and afternoon tea.

The new amount of $16 will supposedly improve meals. In reality it will swell the private operators’ coffers. Jarden Australia financial analysts expect incremental funding of $21.5 million for Estia Health, $14.6 million for Japara Healthcare and $23.6 million for Regis Healthcare.

In addition, the Coalition government will implement a new funding model for residential aged-care services from October 2022 at a cost of $189.2 million. This will replace the existing Aged Care Funding Instrument.

The new system known as the Australian National Aged Care Classification (AN-ACC) was commissioned from the University of Wollongong in 2017 to develop a casemix funding model based on evidence of the relative costs of delivering care to different types of residents.

Casemix or activity-based funding has been used as a battering ram in the general hospital system since its introduction in Australia in 1993–94. Yardsticks such as length of stay and throughput have been particularly harsh on hospitals dealing with complex and often intractable conditions.

Under the AN-ACC, aged-care residents varying frailty and health status will be weighed for funding. But aged care is fundamentally different from hospital admission in that its duration is indefinite. The complexities of imposing such a system are to be intensified by adjustment of care minutes (from the 200 per day), according to the casemix assessment of resident need. Allied health provision for therapy, massage and entertainment may not be included.

The budget papers state that within two years the aged-care workforce will need to increase by around 3,600 RNs and 34,200 personal-care workers. The claim is made that $338.5 million will be allocated over three years to grow, train and upskill the workforce. But this amount includes $91.8 million that had already been announced in March 2021 in response to the royal commission to attract 13,000 new personal-care workers for home care support.

Nothing will be done to address the high rates of casual staffing that exacerbated the COVID-19 crisis of 2020. An estimated 25,000 casual workers are employed in the sector.

Professor Joseph Ibrahim, head of the health, law and ageing research unit at Monash University’s forensic medicine department, told the Guardian: “We can’t be fooled by the pile of gold, because a lot of it is just going towards meeting existing requirements. The industry really requires a culture change and I don’t believe this has been set within the budget, because the key elements remain within the government.”

In his budget reply, Labor leader Anthony Albanese bemoaned the crisis of aged care but presented virtually no policies to address it. Albanese referenced the poverty-level wages of care staff but would not commit to supporting any concrete pay rise.

The abysmal conditions confronting staff and residents in the sector are the outcome of pro-business policies implemented by Labor and Coalition governments over decades. The crisis can only be resolved on the basis of a socialist program, aimed at placing the entire health and care sector under public ownership, to meet social need, not private profit.

Australian High Court rubber stamps sweeping “foreign interference” laws

Mike Head

Australia’s supreme court last week issued a brief unanimous ruling, written jointly by all seven judges, flatly dismissing the first legal challenge to reactionary “foreign interference” legislation introduced in 2018.

High Court of Australia (Source: Wikipedia)

The verdict, issued against a former Labor Party policy adviser, further demonstrates the anti-democratic character of the laws, which were imposed by the Liberal-National government with the Labor Party’s wholesale backing.

Introduced under intense pressure from Washington to set a global lead for the adoption of such measures, the legislation potentially outlaws any opposition to the escalating US-led preparations for war against China.

As the WSWS has warned, the legislation also is a far-wider attack on free speech. Never before has it been a crime, punishable by up to 20 years’ imprisonment, to work with an overseas group or individual to seek political change, whether on issues relating to war, the environment, refugees, social inequality or any other political questions.

Most immediately, the High Court’s judgment clears the way for the Australian Federal Police (AFP) to pursue a much-publicised investigation into John Zhang, a Chinese-born Australian citizen, who is accused of “recklessly” seeking to influence Australian politics on behalf of the Chinese government.

NSW Labor MP Shaoquett Moselmane's and John Zhang (Source: Facebook)

The verdict also sets a precedent for police raids and seizures against anyone linked to China or anti-war views.

Zhang had asked the court to quash three search warrants allowing the AFP to access his social media chats on phones and other devices that were seized by AFP and Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) officers during raids on his home and business last June. Zhang objected that the warrants were too broad and vague, and violated an implied constitutional freedom of political communication.

In rejecting his case, the court adopted a sweeping interpretation of the term “covert” in the legislation, which prohibits alleged “covert or deceptive” conduct seeking political influence.

The judges accepted the Morrison government’s argument that “a choice to communicate using an encrypted social media platform can answer the description of ‘covert’ in some circumstances,” even though “the Attorney-General was disinclined to be definitive as to when those circumstances might exist.”

This opens the way for prosecutions of people just because they communicate political views via encrypted phones or social media platforms, which are used by millions of people for privacy reasons.

The judges agreed with the government that the word “covert” is “sufficiently generic to cover concealment of different things from different people through the adoption of different guises.”

Having abruptly reached that sweeping conclusion, the court said it would dismiss Zhang’s challenge without even considering his other main argument, that the legislation breaches the implied freedom of political communication.

This underscores the fact that the 1901 Australian Constitution contains no bill of rights, or any guarantee of free speech. Even the limited “implied” freedom has been further eroded by the ruling, on top of earlier High Court judgments endorsing the sacking of a federal public servant for criticising—even anonymously—the country’s brutal refugee detention regime, and permitting the banning of the distribution of leaflets in public places.

Last June, amid a blaze of prejudicial media headlines about “Chinese agents” being uncovered in Sydney, the AFP also raided the home and parliamentary office of New South Wales (NSW) state upper house Labor MP Shaoquett Moselmane, for whom Zhang was working as a part-time staff member.

Then Attorney-General Christian Porter personally authorised the raids, exposing the involvement of Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s government at the highest levels.

In line with the escalating demonisation of China, the Labor Party backed the operation, forcing Moselmane to stand aside from the party and parliament for months. He was only permitted to return after the AFP indicated that he was not the target of its investigation.

As yet, Zhang has not been charged with any offence. But the warrants alleged that he and undefined other people had acted on behalf of the “Chinese state and party apparatus” by “providing support and encouragement to [Moselmane] for the advocacy of Chinese state interests.”

The High Court gave equally short shrift to Zhang’s other objection, that the warrants were unclear in identifying which foreign power’s interests he had allegedly advanced. The judges dismissed that argument as “untenable,” declaring that each warrant identified “the foreign principal as the Government of the PRC [People’s Republic of China].”

The precedent set by the ruling is all the more chilling because the warrants referred to Zhang being “reckless” as to whether his conduct would influence Labor policy positions and the views of voters on the Chinese government. That offence of “reckless foreign interference,” punishable by 15 years’ imprisonment, illustrates the far-reaching scope of the legislation.

The law defines “reckless” as simply being “aware of a substantial risk” that the “influence” would occur and knowing it was “unjustifiable to take the risk.” In other words, people can be convicted without even intending to influence a political outcome.

The warrants enabled the AFP and ASIO officers to seize material they believed was relevant to the “reckless” offence, and copy information from mobile phones and other electronic devices. They extracted data by using passcodes that Zhang was compelled to provide.

Neither Zhang nor Moselmane had been “covert” in making public statements regarding China. Moselmane, as deputy president of the NSW state parliament upper house, had praised Chinese President Xi Jinping’s decisiveness in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

As Moselmane later pointed out, similar opinions had been voiced by the World Health Organisation and initially by US President Donald Trump.

Moselmane, a Muslim MP who represents an area of Sydney with a large Chinese population, also made speeches, some in state parliament, calling into question Australia’s alignment behind the intensifying US confrontation with China, and opposing the foreign interference laws.

The allegedly “covert” communications consisted of a discussion group on WeChat, which reportedly mostly consisted of sharing articles, speeches, jokes and memes. People around the world use WeChat.

The continued pursuit of Zhang thus opens up to prosecution people who express anti-war views, oppose the foreign interference laws or criticise US and Australian government attempts to divert attention from their own catastrophic responses to the pandemic by falsely accusing China of letting the coronavirus loose on the world.

The Labor Party has been in the forefront of the anti-China offensive since 2010, when US “protected sources” in the party’s leadership executed a backroom coup to install Julia Gillard as prime minister. She aligned the country completely behind the Obama administration’s anti-China “pivot to Asia.”

That was one of many such US political interventions over decades, underscoring that the real source of “foreign influence” in Australia is US imperialism, which is now intent on preventing China from ever challenging its post-World War II global hegemony.

Increasingly, Australia’s people have been placed on the frontline of the conflict with Beijing. But concerns exist in Washington about popular anti-war sentiment, and the dependence of sections of Australia’s wealthy elite on iron ore, gas and other exports to China. Hence police operations are being used to send a threatening message not to deviate from the pro-US commitment.

The AFP-ASIO operation against Moselmane and Zhang itself served to escalate tensions between Australia and China. Federal agents, including the Australian Border Force, accessed the communications of Chinese diplomats, in violation of international law.

Three Chinese journalists who were allegedly part of a WeChat group with Zhang left Australia last June after being questioned by ASIO. The government also cancelled the visas of two Chinese scholars and exacerbated the resulting diplomatic crisis by evacuating two Australian journalists from China to avoid a Chinese police investigation.

How Bill Gates Set the Stage for Modi’s Disastrous Response to COVID-19 in India

Prabir Purkayastha

While the incompetence of the Indian government is starkly visible in its handling of the second wave of the COVID-19 crisis, its performance has been far worse on the vaccine front. The BJP-led government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which seems to believe in the ideology of free-market capitalism, thinks that the market will magically produce the number of vaccines the country needs. This would explain why it has starved seven public sector vaccine manufacturing units—according to an April 17 article in Down to Earth—of any support instead of ramping up much-needed vaccine production.

The rights to produce the public sector vaccine, Covaxin, which has been developed by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and National Institute of Virology (NIV), in collaboration with Bharat Biotech, have been given to the private company partner on an exclusive basis. The Indian government also believed that Serum Institute of India, another private sector company and the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer, which has tied up with AstraZeneca for producing Covishield, would make vaccines according to the country’s requirements without any prior orders or capital support. The government did not even see the necessity to intervene and prevent India’s new Quad ally, the U.S., from stopping sending India supplies of the required raw materials needed by India for manufacturing vaccines.

The sheer negligence by the government is further highlighted by the fact that even though India has about 20 licensed manufacturing facilities for vaccines and 30 biologic manufacturers, all of which could have been harnessed for vaccine manufacturing, only two companies are presently producing vaccines. That too is at a pace completely inadequate for India’s needs.

India has a long history of vaccine development, which can be traced back to the Haffkine Institute for Training, Research and Testing, in Mumbai, in the 1920s. With the Patents Act, 1970 and the reverse engineering of drugs by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) laboratories, the country also broke the monopoly of global multinationals. It is this change, fought for by the Left, that led to India emerging as the largest generic supplier of drugs and vaccines in the world and becoming the global pharmacy of the poor.

Bill Gates recently spoke to Sky News in the UK regarding India and South Africa’s proposal to the World Trade Organization on the need to lift intellectual property (IP) protection for COVID-19 vaccines and medicines during the pandemic. Gates claimed that IP is not the issue and that “moving a vaccine… into a factory in India… It’s only because of our grants and our expertise that can happen at all.” In other words, without the white man coming in to tell India and other middle-income countries how to make vaccines and provide them with his money, these countries would not be able to make vaccines on their own.

This is a rehash of the AIDS debate, where the Western governments and Big Pharma argued that developing generic AIDS drugs would lead to the manufacturing of poor-quality drugs and theft of Western intellectual property. Bill Gates, who built his fortune on Microsoft’s IP, is the leading defender of IP in the world. With his newfound halo as a great philanthropist, he is leading Big Pharma’s charge against the weakening of patents on the global stage. The role of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a major funder of the World Health Organization, is also to dilute any move by the WHO to share patents and knowledge during the pandemic.

Indian companies are the largest manufacturers of existing vaccines by volume in the world, according to the WHO’s Global Vaccine Market Report 2020. When it comes to measuring vaccine manufacturing by value, however, the global share held by multinational corporations or Big Pharma is much bigger than that of India. For example, as per the WHO report, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), with 11 percent of the global market by volume, generates 40 percent of the market by value, while Serum Institute with 28 percent of the market by volume has only 3 percent of the market by value. This shows that the patent-protected vaccines with monopoly pricing get much higher prices. This is the model that Bill Gates and his ilk are selling. Let Big Pharma make the big bucks even if it bankrupts the poorer countries. The Western philanthropic money of Gates and Warren Buffett will ‘help’ the poor Third World to get some vaccines, albeit slowly. As long as they get to call the shots.

The Modi government’s approach to vaccines is based on the central pillar of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh ideology—which serves as the ideological parent of the ruling BJP—that the task of the state is only to help big capital. Anything else including planning is seen by the right wing as socialism. In the case of vaccines, it means not to make any attempt to get the companies, both in the public and private sectors, to make necessary preparations for a quick vaccination program: to put in the money and provide the necessary supply chain. Instead, the government believed that India’s private pharmaceutical industry would do all of this on its own.

It forgot that the Indian pharmaceutical industry was the product of public domain science—the CSIR institutions—the public sector and nationalist companies like Cipla. They all came out of the national movement and built India’s pharmaceutical industry. It is institutions like the Haffkine Institute under Sahib Sokhey’s leadership and the Center for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) built under the leadership of Dr. Pushpa Bhargava that led to India’s vaccine and biologics capacity. It is on this base that India’s vaccine manufacturing capacity rests.

It is not niji (private) companies that built the vaccine capacity in India, as Prime Minister Narendra Modi claims. The private sector companies rode on the back of public sector science and technology that was built in the country between the 1950s and the 1990s.

The Indian government recently opened up vaccinations for all adults in the country on May 1. To vaccinate all the eligible population—above 18 years of age—India would require about 2 billion doses of the vaccine in order to give the required two shots per person. To plan for the production of an order of this size, apart from technology and capital support, India also needs to plan for the complex supply chain that is required for production. This includes raw materials and intermediate supplies such as filters and special bags. There are at least 37 “critical items” that are currently embargoed by the U.S. from exports under the Defense Production Act, 1950, a relic of the U.S.’s Korean War.

On April 16, Adar Poonawalla, head of the Serum Institute of India, had taken to Twitter to ask U.S. President Joe Biden “to lift the embargo of raw material exports out of the U.S. so that vaccine production can ramp up.”

If India puts together the production capacity of the Serum Institute, Bharat Biotech, Biological E, and Haffkine Bio-Pharmaceutical Corporation Limited, and the five other companies that have signed up to manufacture Sputnik V, developed by the Gamaleya National Center of Epidemiology, India could have planned for an annual production capacity of more than 3 billion doses. If it also included the public sector units idling under the Modi government, India could have easily boosted its vaccine manufacturing capacity to 4 billion doses and produced the necessary 2 billion doses and more in 2021. It would then have made it possible for India to completely vaccinate its target population and yet have enough left to meet its export commitments including for the WHO’s Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT)-Accelerator program and its vaccines pillar of COVAX. What is missing is a planning commission that could plan this exercise and create the political will to carry it forward. Not a vacuous Niti Ayog—the public policy think tank of the Indian government—and an incompetent government.

Instead, the Modi government did not even bother to place an order with the Serum Institute until January 11, and that too for a measly 11 million doses. The next order of 120 million Covishield and Covaxin doses was placed only in the third week of March when the number of cases had reached a daily caseload of nearly 40,000, and India was well into its deadly second wave. The government seemed to bank on its belief in the magic of the capitalist market, which it thought would solve all its problems, without any real effort on the center’s part.

India and South Africa have asked the WTO to consider waiving the rules relating to intellectual property during the pandemic, and further sought that knowledge, including patents and know-how, should be shared without restrictions. This proposal has been backed by the WHO and has huge support among most countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The holdouts predictably are from the rich countries that want to protect the global vaccine market for their Big Pharma companies. Under pressure from the global community and the bad optics of the U.S. hoarding vaccines, the Biden administration has finally just decided to accept South Africa and India’s initiative of a temporary patent waiver, after stonewalling it in the WTO until now. But this waiver is restricted to vaccine patents only and does not extend to other patents or associated intellectual property as South Africa and India’s proposal had suggested. This is still a victory for the global public health community, though only a first step.

While India is spearheading the need to share know-how with all companies capable of manufacturing vaccines, it still has explaining to do as to why it has given an exclusive license to Bharat Biotech to manufacture a vaccine developed with public money and in public institutions like ICMR and NIV. Why is it not being shared under a nonexclusive license with both Indian companies and those companies outside India? Instead, ICMR is receiving royalties from Bharat Biotech from sharing its know-how exclusively with Bharat Biotech. Under public pressure, ICMR is now sharing its know-how with the government of the Indian state of Maharashtra’s public sector Haffkine Bio-Pharmaceutical Corporation Limited, while giving Bharat Biotech six months’ lead time with financial support money from the central government.

Modi had dreamed that India would be the vaccine arm of the Quad. He forgot that in order to compete with China, India needs a vaccine production base that not only takes care of its vaccination needs but also fulfills all its external commitments. China can do this because it has developed at least three vaccines already—from Sinopharm, Sinovac, and CanSino—that have been licensed to others. Their production is now being ramped up, and China is the largest supplier of vaccines to countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. And it has also managed to control the spread of the COVID-19 virus, unlike India.

This is where the Modi government has failed and failed badly. An incompetent, vainglorious leadership, combined with the RSS belief in magical capitalism, has led to the disaster that we are now facing.

In defence of youthful deviations

Bhabani Shankar Nayak

The blaming of young people as ‘lazy, deviants, drug abusers, materialists, selfish, directionless, apolitical and other stereotypes continue to dominate public narratives. The objectives of these borderless narratives are designed to weaken young people’s ability to challenge and transform the society in which they live. The blame culture and negative portrayals are control mechanisms of old and established social, political, cultural and economic order to tame the youth power. It is a mechanism to create hopelessness and domesticate youth to normalise the crisis faced by the young people. Each generation of young people face their own problems of their times, but some problems are inherited from their predecessors. However, the challenges faced by the youth today are neither created by the young people nor promoted by them. The issues of inequality based on gender, class, race, sexuality, religious and regional backgrounds are not created by the young people. The denial of accessibility and availability of opportunities for a dignified living condition is not created by the young people.

From the ‘Greatest generation’ to the ‘Silent generation’, the old people categorised the young as baby boomers and the baby boomers categorised the young as Generation-X.  The meaningless categorisation continues. The young people are categorised today as ‘Generation Z-ers, millennials, iGeneration, or post-millennials’ without any rhyme or reason. These fancy terms are designed to describe young people as ‘useless and youthful idiots’ to hide the prevalent predicaments created and established by the previous generations. The young people don’t need categorisation. The young people are defined by their idealism and commitment to the greater causes of life and their contributions in the making of the world, states, societies, families and communities all over the world. All the challenges faced by the youth today are inherited from the social, economic, political, religious, and cultural conditions established by reactionary geriatrics called ‘authority’ represented by various institutions, processes and traditions in local, national, regional and international level.

The pre-pandemic World Youth Report (2018) published by the United Nations outlines the complex challenges faced by the 1.2 billion young people aged 15 to 24 years, accounting for 16% of the global population. The issues of inequality, unemployment, poverty, hunger, migration, conflict and lack of access to quality education, health, housing, air and water continue grow in an enormous scale during the last two years of the Coronavirus led pandemic. A recent report by the Swiss bank UBS found that the number of billionaires and their wealth increased to $10.2 trillion amidst the deaths and destitutions of the pandemic. Such an unequal life experience created by capitalism is neither sustainable nor healthy for the present and future of people and planet.

The capitalism as a political, economic, social and cultural system has failed to promote an egalitarian society focusing on people’s wellbeing.  In order to avoid its internal contradictions, capitalism is promoting war, regional and religious conflicts to sustain itself. It also works as patron of the right-wing and reactionary politics around to globe to promote itself as only alternative and outsource its problems as social and political instabilities. The young people are the net victims of capitalism and its geriatric culture which is intolerant of the beauties of youthful creativity and deviations.

The capitalist priests in the World Economic Forum believe that young people are only facing three biggest challenges.  It considers that young people staying with parents, declining life expectancy among working age and lack of home ownership among young are three major problems. It does not outline the conditions that caused these problems. The capitalist confession is an amoral religious strategy of the capitalism as a system, where accountability is outsources to an unknown power called ‘god’.

The world is facing five major challenges today i.e., modern wars, climate change, religious conflicts, reactionary and authoritarian politics, capitalist alienation. These challenges are not created by the young people but annihilating for them. The young people are victims of a capitalist system that manufactures such challenges to hide its own problems. The capitalist ruling classes are putting guns, globalised market led consumerism, god, nationalist and religious glory on the shoulders of the young people to dismantle the creative power and common experiences that unites the youth all over the world. The young people are being branded merely as anonymise social media handles or a self-seeking number in the Excel spreadsheets of either government agencies or corporate shop floors. The young people are losing their identity as idealist and creative communities due to the capitalist conditions in which they experience their lives. The commodification of life experience by the capitalist culture of consumerism is destroying the diverse world of youths and their power to change the course of history.

All the progressive and democratic upheavals of history are the products of young people and their sacrifices. The idealist young people have led the struggle against colonialism, imperialism, apartheid and defeated feudalism, fascism and dictatorships. The young people can face the challenges of war, capitalism, religious fundamentalism, reactionary politics, global pandemic and climate crisis and rise above as a borderless community. The youthful feelings of love is more common than the territorial, cultural and religious differences.

The struggle for peace, equality, freedom and climate actions are common battles that the youth of the world can win. The young people don’t need the perverted geriatric analysis based on blame culture that domesticates young people within a narrow silo of market, religion and nation states. The future of the world depends on the future of the young people and their ability to dismantle the old hangovers within new bottles of power. The young people will find their deviant ways to subvert all obstacles on their way of establishing a diverse, progressive and peaceful world devoid of hunger, homelessness, inequalities and exploitations. Therefore, it is important to dream and work in defence of youthful deviations.

Israel escalates assaults on Palestinians with US backing

Jean Shaoul

The weekend saw no let-up in Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, even as security forces cracked down on Nakba Day protests across the occupied West Bank.

In Gaza, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) attacked Hamas and other militant groups, assassinated senior Hamas personnel and terrorised the defenceless population in Gaza with merciless air strikes. Among the targets was the home of Yehya al-Sinwar, Hamas’s most senior official in Gaza, who heads the group’s political and military wings—the third such attack on the home of a senior Hamas official. Hamas and Islamic Jihad have confirmed that 20 of their members have been killed. The IDF has sought approval for further attacks on Hamas, including assassinations.

A single bombing in Gaza City overnight Saturday—the deadliest since Monday—killed at least 42 people, including 12 women and eight children, and wounded 50 others, numbers likely to rise as rescuers bring out victims from under the rubble. Another airstrike hit a house in the Shati refugee camp in Gaza City, killing at least 10 members of an extended family, mostly children, while at least eight people were killed and 45 wounded on Saturday night, mostly civilians, including two doctors.

Mourners pray over the bodies of 17 Palestinians who were killed in overnight Israeli airstrikes in Gaza City, Sunday, May 16, 2021. (AP Photo/Sanad Latifa)

The Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza has confirmed that at least 192 Palestinians have been killed, including 58 children, and about 1,200 wounded since Israel started its bombardment of the besieged enclave Monday evening. Around 220 homes have been destroyed or damaged, rendering 20,000 homeless.

Indicating the one-sided nature of the slaughter, Israel has reported 10 deaths, including two children and a soldier as 3,000 projectiles were launched from Gaza, most of which either landed inside Gaza or were intercepted by Israel’s sophisticated Iron Dome system—funded by US aid to the tune of $1.5 billion.

On Saturday afternoon, the IDF downed the media tower in Gaza housing the offices of Al Jazeera, the Associated Press (AP) and other outlets after giving the occupants less than an hour to evacuate. It follows the bombing of two other buildings housing media outlets earlier in the week in a deliberate attempt to silence the reporting of Israel’s crimes.

While the IDF claimed that the building was used by Hamas, it has failed to produce any evidence. Gary Pruitt, the head of AP, said that despite using the building for 15 years, AP had never seen any indication that the building was used by Hamas. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu applauded the air raid as a successful attack on “terrorist organisations.”

The near-destitute Palestinians now have to cope with a shortage of electricity as Israel halted the supply of diesel fuel to Gaza’s power station days ago and power lines from Israel to Gaza have been hit.

The IDF mounted a brutal crackdown on demonstrations all over the West Bank marking Nakba Day, also known as the Palestinian Catastrophe. It is usually commemorated on or around May 15, marking Britain’s official departure from Palestine in 1948 and the establishment of the State of Israel. This saw the start of the first Arab-Israeli war, the destruction of Palestinian society, and the permanent displacement of the vast majority of the Palestinian people. Between 750,000 and 900,000 Palestinians became refugees or internally displaced persons after fleeing the war or being forced to leave their homes, in a campaign of ethnic cleansing, the necessary corollary of establishing a homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine, where they were a minority.

Today, the Palestinians and their descendants around the world number around 13 million, of whom five million live in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, 1.5 million live in Israel and a further 6.5 million either live as refugees in Lebanon, Jordan and Syria or are scattered throughout the world. They have been denied the right to return to their homeland, despite in many cases still holding the title deeds to their property, while Jews who have never lived in Palestine are entitled to claim Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return.

However, while their dispossession has been maintained through numerous wars and repression, their number in Israel/Palestine will soon outstrip that of the Jews. It is the realisation that Israel’s Palestinian residents in occupied East Jerusalem and its citizens in Israel itself will now be subject to ethnic cleansing that has brought so many Palestinians onto the streets. In East Jerusalem, families in Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan face court-ordered evictions to make way for Jewish homes. In Israel, ultra-nationalist and fascistic parties have for years been calling for “population transfers” and far right forces have moved into mixed population towns like Lod, which saw forced evictions in 1948 and is now subject to emergency rule and curfews, with the explicit aim of “judaicising” them.

The IDF dispersed angry protesters in the West Bank with rubber tipped bullets, stun grenades and tear gas, killing nine. Soldiers killed a further two protesters, allegedly because they were attempting to carry out a terrorist attack, who turned out to be unarmed, making it the deadliest day since the military invasion of the West Bank in April 2002. It brings to 14 the number killed in the West Bank since the start of the week. The army has deployed additional troops to the West Bank, nearly doubling the usual number, including both regular units and reservists to replace the Border Police sent to crush the Palestinian protests within Israel.

Minister of Defence Benny Gantz, who earlier in the week pledged that “Gaza will burn,” declared that Israel was “seeing an escalation” of tension and conflict in the West Bank and was “ready for any scenario.” He threatened that if the Palestinians did not submit to Israeli rule quietly and without resistance, “We’ll be forced to cancel steps that are meant to help the Palestinian economy and society after the year of coronavirus.”

Israel has rejected Hamas’ attempts to reach a cease-fire, along with Egypt’s efforts to broker an agreement to end the fighting. On Saturday evening, reassured by the unquestioning support of US President Joe Biden, who only sent mid-tier diplomat Hady Amr, the deputy assistant secretary of state for Israel and Palestinian affairs, to Israel to work on a ceasefire, Netanyahu declared there would be no let-up in the onslaught on Gaza. He said Israel was “still in the midst of this operation, it is still not over and this operation will continue as long as necessary.”

He warned Hamas that Israel had a list of assassination targets, declaring, “You can’t hide, not above land or below it. No one is immune,” and thanked the US president for his “clear and unequivocal support.”

Netanyahu condemned the recent riots in Israeli towns and cities provoked by vigilante groups belonging to his far right, Jewish supremacist allies that have left mixed population towns and cities looking like war zones while the police turned a blind eye. A dozen people have died and nearly 1,000 have been arrested, mostly Palestinians. He said, “The Jewish state will not tolerate pogroms against our citizens. We will not allow our Jewish citizens to be lynched or live in fear of murderous Arab gangs. We will not tolerate the torching of synagogues and the torching of property. Whoever incites will pay a very heavy price.”

Report shows CEOs in US cashed in during the pandemic as workers lost jobs, wages and lives

Kevin Reed

The Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) published a significant report on May 11 that details the rigging of executive compensation plans by corporate boards during the pandemic, so that vast sums could be funneled into the pockets of millionaire executives while workers suffered unemployment, reduced wages, exposure to COVID-19 and death.

Under the title “Pandemic Pay Plunder,” the top finding of the IPS’ 27th Annual Executive Excess report is that among the top US corporations with the lowest paid workforces, CEOs received a 29 percent increase in compensation, while workers’ wages fell by 2 percent on average last year.

The IPS research shows that 51 out of the 100 corporations on the S&P 500 list with the lowest median worker wages bent corporate rules during the pandemic to ensure that their CEOs increased their compensation by an average of $4 million, to a total of $15.3 million, while workers’ wages fell by more than $550 to $28,187. The CEO-to-worker pay ratio for these corporations reached 830 to 1.

Carnival Cruise CEO Arnold Donald made $13.3 million while his company lost $10.2 billion. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

In introducing the report, IPS authors Sarah Anderson, director of the Global Economy Project and co-editor of Inequality.org, and Sam Pizzigati, IPS associate fellow and co-editor of Inequality.org, write: “American families have been simply unable, on their own, to bear the COVID crisis. Meanwhile, corporate chief executives in the United States have continued to score the sorts of windfalls that have ballooned billionaire wealth.”

In explaining how corporate boards modified compensation rules to ensure a windfall for executives, the report says that the companies engaged “in various rigging maneuvers” such as (1) lowering the performance numbers so executives could meet their bonus targets, (2) awarding special “retention” bonuses, (3) excluding poor second-quarter (March-May 2020) results from performance evaluations and (4) replacing performance-based awards with time-based awards.

The IPS report says that “an army of ‘independent’ compensation consultants” was retained by the corporate boards in order to “give all this rule-rigging a veneer of legitimacy.” For example, Carnival—the largest international cruise line company—paid Frederick W. Cook & Co. $423,274 to give its CEO bonus “a stamp of fiscal probity as the company’s profits cratered and workers suffered.”

In relation to the Carnival compensation scam, the report notes that the company stranded employees at sea for months while it scrambled to get customers back home. But after securing $6 billion in low-cost financing from the US Federal Reserve, it gave CEO Arnold Donald special pandemic “retention and incentive” stock grants valued at more than $5 million. “Arnold’s total 2020 compensation came to $13.3 million, 490 times the company’s $27,151 median worker pay” the report states.

The IPS study does not mention reports that nearly a dozen cruise line workers died in suicides committed during the lengthy period of forced isolation without pay on ships, or as a result of mental health problems after they came ashore.

Other specific examples given by IPS of corporate manipulation of executive compensation in the midst of the pandemic include the meatpacking, poultry and automotive industries. In the case of $30 billion Arkansas-based Tyson Foods, the report says that “executives didn’t meet their cash bonus targets last year,” but the board “gave them stock awards to make up the difference.”

Tyson CEO Noel White earned $11 million, which is 294 times Tyson’s $37,444 median worker pay. The report states, “Another recipient of those special stock awards was company chair John Tyson, a billionaire hardly in dire need of special support. The heir and grandson of the company founder, Tyson has watched his personal wealth increase 72 percent during the pandemic—to $2.6 billion.”

Tyson workers, like all poultry and meatpacking employees, were declared essential workers during the pandemic and forced to stay on the job. The report says the Tyson workers suffered the most COVID-19 infections and deaths in the industry, noting: “As of February 2021, more than 12,000 Tyson workers had been infected by the virus and at least 38 had lost their lives to it.”

The automotive supplier Aptiv—one of the spin-offs from Delphi Automotive, itself a spin-off from GM—has the widest pay gap (5,294 to 1) on the IPS list of 51 low wage corporations. Aptiv CEO Kevin Clark was paid $31.3 million while the median wage earner made $5,906 in 2020. The report says, “The Aptiv board inflated Clark’s paycheck by moving bonus goalposts and excluding 2020 results from the 2018-2020 performance period for long-term executive incentive awards.”

The report also explains that the company justified the massive payout to Clark—totaling an additional $18 million—“as nothing more than the product of ‘accounting adjustments’ related to 2019 and 2020 stock awards.”

Aptiv operates in 44 countries and did not disclose to IPS where the workers earning a median wage of a little less than $6,000 are employed. The global corporation—which specializes in automotive cooling systems—was the product of the multi-billion-dollar July 2015 merger of Delphi Thermal with the German-based Mahle-Behr GmbH and British-based HellermannTyton.

Some of the other companies highlighted in the IPS report for extreme CEO-worker pay ratios in 2020 are:

* Hospitality corporation Hilton Worldwide, where CEO Christopher Nassetta pocketed the largest rigged pay-package adjustments, for a total compensation of $55.9 million in 2020.

*Apparel corporation Under Armour, where half the workforce earns less than $6,669 per year. There, the company board “altered bonus metrics and replaced performance-based with time-based stock awards” for CEO Patrik Frisk, so as to pay him $7.4 million.

* Chipotle Mexican Grill, where CEO Brian Niccol “received $38 million in 2020 compensation, 2,898 times the restaurant chain’s median worker pay.” The firm’s board of directors inflated his bonus by tossing out the company’s poor financial results from the peak shutdown period and excluding COVID-related costs.

While the political conclusions of the IPS editors are for tax reform that will force companies to pay increased taxes for CEO-worker wage gaps of more than 50-1—which is itself a defense of social inequality—the facts and figures presented in the report are a devastating exposure of the criminality of the ruling class under conditions of the worst public health crisis in a century.

The IPS report was published just as the US political establishment was launching a campaign to eliminate weekly supplemental unemployment benefits for millions of workers who remain unemployed as a result of the economic crisis and deadly health conditions caused by the response of the corporate and financial elite to the pandemic.

Already more than half of US states have revived their work search requirements in an effort to force workers back to work at low-paying jobs. As reported by the New York Times on Sunday, Arkansas and Louisiana brought back these requirements months ago and others such as Vermont and Kentucky have done so in the last few weeks.

Laying bare the economic interests that lie behind the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention decision to lift the mask requirement for “anyone who is fully vaccinated” last Thursday, President Biden ordered the Labor Department four days before to pressure state governments to put the job search requirements back into place.

New Zealand and France host “Christchurch Call” summit to expand internet censorship

Tom Peters

Last weekend, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and French President Emmanuel Macron hosted an online meeting of world leaders and technology company executives, for the second anniversary summit of the Christchurch Call to Action.

The initiative is portrayed as the response by Ardern’s Labour Party government, and governments throughout the world, to the massacre of 51 people by fascist terrorist Brenton Tarrant, at two mosques in Christchurch on March 15, 2019. Ardern declared at the summit: “My hope is that the work we do will prevent others from suffering the same impacts.”

Its real aim is to promote mechanisms for governments and tech companies to increase their ability to censor online content that they deem to be promoting terrorism or “violent extremism.” What counts as extremism is determined by the state.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, left, gestures during a press conference with Stacey Kirk, moderator of the Christchurch Call in Wellington, New Zealand, Saturday, May 15, 2021. (AP Photo/Nick Perry)

The real target is not the far-right, but left-wing and socialist organisations and individuals. In every country, the ruling class is building up police state powers in preparation for suppressing mass opposition from the working class to austerity, war preparations, and the murderous policies that have allowed the COVID-19 pandemic to spread, killing millions of people.

There are now 55 countries supporting the Christchurch Call, including the United States, India, Australia, Japan and the UK. In a joint statement on May 8, Ardern and Macron welcomed the recent decision by US President Joe Biden’s administration to officially endorse the initiative. Ardern declared that “having the US government on board will further strengthen actions to reduce the risk of the internet being used as a tool for terrorists… It also recognises the importance of protecting human rights and fundamental freedoms online.”

Biden administration spokesperson Jen Psaki told the media: “Countering the use of the internet by terrorists and violent extremists to radicalise and recruit is a significant priority” for the US.

The hypocrisy of these statements is underscored by Biden’s defence of the Israeli military’s murderous assault on Palestinian civilians in Gaza, on the bogus grounds that Israel has a “right to self-defence” against “terrorism.”

Macron described the US as “a critically important ally in shared efforts against terrorism and violent extremism.” In fact, the former Trump administration actively encouraged right-wing extremists, who stormed the US Capitol building on January 6, 2021, in an attempt to overturn the election result. Military leaders and law enforcement agencies took no action to prevent the violent rampage, which was openly planned through social media. The Biden administration is continuing to work collaboratively with the right-wing and fascistic Republican Party members who backed the assault.

Moreover, for the past two decades, the US and its allies have waged a series of criminal imperialist wars, including the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, accompanied by widespread torture, mass surveillance and other attacks on democratic rights, using the pretext of a “war on terror.”

The leading role played by France in the Christchurch Call further exposes the fraud that the initiative has anything to do with protecting minorities from far-right violence. The Macron government is inciting anti-Muslim bigotry, by campaigning against mosques and promoting “anti-separatism” laws that will ban the use of headscarves by government employees, and make it easier for the state to ban religious or political organisations. Significant sections of the French military, emboldened by the government’s actions, are threatening to carry out a coup to stop the “Islamisation” of the country.

Despite the events of January 6 and other far-right and racist attacks internationally since 2019—many inspired by Trump and other capitalist politicians—Ardern declared that the Christchurch Call has been a success, saying: “I have no doubt that progress to date has already made it harder for those pushing terrorist or violent extremist content online.”

Ardern and Macron both praised the US-based tech giants that are part of the Christchurch Call, including Amazon, Facebook, Google, YouTube and Twitter. These corporations, which are working together in the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT), are engaged in sweeping censorship, primarily targeting left-wing, socialist and anti-war publications—especially the World Socialist Web Site. Last October, Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google’s parent company Alphabet, admitted to censoring the WSWS by burying its articles in search results.

In January this year, Facebook carried out a purge of accounts linked to the Socialist Equality Party and the WSWS, and other left-wing pages. The social media giant has also taken down WSWS articles exposing the US media’s propaganda blaming China for the coronavirus pandemic.

Ardern said “the biggest focus” for the Christchurch Call, at present, was the “ethical use of algorithms… how they can be used in a positive way and for positive interventions.” Speaking to Radio NZ, she said a royal commission of inquiry into the 2019 terror attack found that Tarrant “accessed content that led to what you could assume would be further radicalisation,” meaning that social media and YouTube algorithms steered him towards extremist material.

YouTube’s chief executive Susan Wojcicki tweeted in response that YouTube would continue to “restrict borderline content”—a euphemism for anything which goes against the US corporate media’s narrative.

The Christchurch royal commission’s report falsely portrayed the attack as the work of an isolated individual, radicalised via the internet. It downplayed his extensive links with fascist groups in Australia and Europe, and failed to explain how Tarrant was able to spend two years planning his attack and then carry it out without being stopped. The report whitewashed the role of intelligence agencies and the police, in New Zealand and Australia. At the very least, these agencies turned a blind eye to the threat posed by violent fascists, and specific warnings that should have led to Tarrant’s arrest.

The royal commission’s findings also covered up the political responsibility of Trump—whom Tarrant idolised—and successive Australian and New Zealand governments, which have stoked xenophobia and anti-Muslim sentiment, including to justify participation in the US “war on terror.” The Ardern government is scapegoating foreigners for the social crisis and whipping up nationalism to prepare the population for future wars, all of which fuel the growth of the far-right.

In the week before the Christchurch Call summit, thousands of migrants protested across New Zealand against the government’s brutal anti-immigrant policies, which have been largely adopted from Labour and the Greens’ former coalition partner, the right-wing nationalist NZ First Party. Australia recently followed New Zealand in imposing a discriminatory ban on any inbound flights from India, leaving thousands of Australian citizens stranded and unable to return home.

Over the past two years, New Zealand and Australia have passed anti-democratic laws, aimed at boosting the powers of the state to force social media companies to take down online content more rapidly. These measures, like all those advocated by the Christchurch Call, are intended to crack down on growing working-class opposition to attacks on their rights and living standards.