Australian economy hit by rapid fall in iron ore price and Delta spread

Nick Beams

The state of the Australian economy has been thrown into the spotlight as a result of a dramatic fall in iron ore prices and a surge in Delta variant coronavirus infections in its two most populous states, New South Wales and Victoria.

In March, the Australian economy passed the level it had reached prior to pandemic, amid claims that it weathered the economic storm created by the arrival of COVID-19 in 2020. But it has been all downhill since then.

An iron ore train at Brockman 4 mine, Western Australia (Source: Wikipedia)

The most significant indication of the mounting economic problems now unfolding is the dramatic fall in the price of iron ore. This commodity is Australia’s largest export earner and a key component of the federal government budget because of the tax revenue it obtains from iron ore sales.

The iron ore price has crashed by 40 percent in the past month, falling from its peak of $233 a tonne to a level of around $133.

This is the result of cutbacks in Chinese steel production. China accounts for about 75 percent of the world’s iron ore inputs, with Australia its chief supplier.

Policymakers in Beijing have said they want to keep the production of steel in 2021 to the same level as in 2020, in part because of the need to reduce emissions.

According to comments to news.com.au by Vivek Dhar, the Commonwealth Bank’s mining and energy economist, the achievement of this goal requires a reduction of steel output at an annualised rate of 12.2 percent in the period from August to December. In July, China’s crude steel production contracted 8.4 percent on an annual basis, “signaling that output cuts are not just being talked about, but happening,” he said.

Steel production will also be hit by Chinese government efforts to rein in debt, particularly for infrastructure and property development. Dhar pointed out that demand for steel from these areas had weakened. This reaffirmed that “market anxieties that China’s steel output cuts for the remainder of the year are inevitable. The infrastructure and property sectors account for 20–25 percent and 25–30 percent respectively.”

The effect on the Australian economy and the federal government’s budget is expressed in the fact that, according to estimates, for every $US10 ($A14) fall in the price of iron ore Australia’s gross domestic product (GDP) in money terms falls by $A6.5 billion and government tax receipts by $A1.3 billion.

Commenting on the iron ore price crash in a client note, Morgan Stanley wrote: “A correction of the high iron-ore price was widely anticipated by us, but, despite iron ore’s volatile boom-bust history, we are somewhat surprised by how fast this is happening.”

The Australian economy has also been hit by a sharp decline in service industry exports, especially in the education sector where the flow of international students into the country’s universities has been cut off due to the pandemic.

According to the latest data, Australia’s exports of services have fallen back to 2006 levels when the economy was around two-thirds the size it is now. Overall exports are down by 10 percent with the contribution of exports cutting 1.5 percentage points from GDP growth since the start of 2020.

Depending on what the quarterly figures for GDP growth for the June quarter show—they are to be released next week—the economy is heading for a technical recession, defined as two quarters of negative growth. This is because, according to the treasurer Josh Frydenberg, the economy is set to contract by at least 2 percent in the September quarter as a result of the renewed upsurge of the pandemic.

Its impact has already been seen in the employment numbers. The official unemployment rate for July was 4.6 percent, the lowest since 2008. But rather than indicating economic health this was the result of tens of thousands of people withdrawing from the labour market. When the official figures are adjusted for the effects of the pandemic the level of unemployment is calculated to be at least 6 percent.

However, the official Bureau of Statistics jobless levels are notoriously understated as they count as employed those who have worked for just one hour a week. According to the Roy Morgan survey, the real level of unemployment is 9.7 percent, with the underemployment rate, based on people who want more hours, at 9.1 percent.

In an analysis of the employment data, Guardian economic columnist Greg Jericho wrote: “Hours worked in New South Wales in July fell 7 percent—some 40.5 million fewer hours in total, the third biggest drop in the history of the state. There was also a 0.9 percent drop in the number of people employed in NSW and a massive 28 percent increase in the number of people underemployed.”

The picture is the same on the wages front. Wages grew by only 0.4 percent in the June quarter. For these months lockdowns due to the pandemic were largely absent, but the quarter still recorded the lowest wages growth apart from the period of shutdowns in 2020.

Much of the fall is due to the activity of governments, state and federal, Liberal and Labor, with the support of the trade unions. The annual growth of public sector wages is now just 1.3 percent, the lowest ever recorded. When inflation is taken into account, real wages are declining in line with a trend that was apparent well before the pandemic hit.

In the wake of the first wave of the pandemic in 2020 there was much talk about how the Australian economy had bounced back, showing its underlying strength. That is not going to take place in the present situation.

According to a report in the Australian Financial Review , economists are now “playing down the chances of a repeat of the strong economic rebound seen when stay-at-home orders were previously lifted, leading to concerns of a cash flow canyon for many small and medium businesses.”

The Council of Small Business Organisations has warned that, without assistance in any post lockdown situation, businesses have to shed staff in order to survive because of reductions in their cash flows.

The rapidly worsening economic situation has immediate political implications. It will provide grist to the mill of governments and business organisations pushing for an end to lockdowns and other public health measures, and the opening of the economy regardless of the impact of the health of workers and their children.

This agenda must be opposed by the working class with a political struggle for a comprehensive program based on science: mass vaccinations combined with the necessary public health measures aimed at the eradication of the virus, together with full compensation for workers and small businesses paid for by making massive inroads into wealth which has been continued to be accumulated by the corporate and financial elites during the pandemic.

Australia: 7,000 Toll truck drivers to strike over pay and conditions

Martin Scott

Around 7,000 Toll truck drivers will strike for 24 hours on Friday. The nationwide strike was called on Monday after 94 percent of Transport Workers Union (TWU) members at the company voted in favour of industrial action.

The dispute is over a new enterprise agreement (EA), currently being negotiated between Toll and the TWU. The previous EA expired in June 2020, but bargaining was deferred until April 2021 in a union-management deal that also allowed the company to slash jobs in the event of any downturn in volume as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. In exchange, workers were granted ten days paid pandemic leave.

Toll facilities in Burnie, Tasmania (Source: Toll Group)

In fact, Toll’s annual revenue increased by almost one third to $6.3 billion for the year ending March 2021, while workers were subjected to a pay freeze as a result of the delayed negotiations.

The company responded to the workers’ vote to strike with a marginally increased pay rise offer, up from 1.5 percent in 2021 and 1.75 in 2022 to 2 percent each year. The TWU has made no explicit mention of this bump, merely characterising the pay offer as “unacceptably low,” indicating that it may push workers to sign on to a figure short of the meagre 3 percent the union has previously demanded.

In key disputes over recent months, including at General Mills and McCormick Foods, unions have presented 3 percent (or “almost” 3 percent) annual pay rises as victories. In current negotiations with Australia Post, the Communications Electrical and Plumbers Union (CEPU) has proudly noted that it is twice the national average.

These claims serve only as an indictment of the massive assault being carried out against the Australian working class, accelerated by the pandemic and enforced by the trade unions.

In real terms, 3 percent is a pay cut, especially given that Toll workers, like those at Australia Post, did not receive a pay rise at all last year. The Australian Bureau of Statistics last month announced a 3.8 percent rise in the Consumer Price Index, which vastly underestimates increases in the cost of living, for the year to June 30.

The union is also calling for a 0.25 point increase in employer superannuation contributions to 15 percent.

Toll has backed down on moves to implement a “B rate” tiered wage system under which new hires would receive up to 30 percent less than the rates paid to existing workers. The company’s proposal to introduce fixed term contracts, a proposal which has not been rescinded, still threatens secure, full-time jobs.

While the company has walked back a plan to stop paying overtime rates to part-time drivers working less than 38 hours per week, Toll still plans to pay ordinary rates if these workers “volunteer” for overtime.

The TWU complains of the company’s “rejection of limits on outside hire and real commitments to full utilisation,” but in reality this simply means the retention of conditions signed off on by the TWU in previous EAs.

Clause 17 of the 2017 agreement states, in part: “Toll commits (a) to the full-time engagement of its Transport Workers wherever possible; (b) subject to reasonable practical requirements, such as adequately servicing industry peaks, to promote job security through the full utilisation of full-time permanent Transport Workers/Owner-Drivers before the engagement of part-time Transport Workers/Owner-Drivers, or casual Transport Workers/Owner-Drivers or Outside Hire.” [Emphasis added]

In other words, Toll is “committed” to nothing. Under the current union-management agreement, the company has carte blanche to declare that “reasonable practical requirements” mean it is not “possible” to offer overtime hours to full-time drivers in preference to cheaper part-time, casual, contract, or outsourced labour.

The fact that so many of the union’s claims relate to overtime payments is itself an indictment of the union’s role over decades in creating a situation in which workers cannot live on their base rates and are forced to consistently work dangerously long hours to make ends meet.

The proliferation of casual, contract, labour-hire and other insecure forms of work has been facilitated by the unions since it began under the Hawke-Keating Labor government Accords of the 1980s and 1990s.

In recent years the TWU has promoted illusions that the rampant abuse of these work arrangements could be fought in the courts or through parliamentary reforms. The bankruptcy of this perspective of appealing to the bourgeois state was borne out earlier this month when the High Court ruling upheld the primacy of “freedom of contract” over the “true nature of the employment relationship.” Far from protecting workers’ conditions, the High Court has now enshrined in law that workers are completely at the mercy of their employers and their contracts.

Following the principle of “never let a good crisis go to waste,” Toll Global Express President Alan Beacham said: “Threatening industrial action at a time when our country is in the middle of a global pandemic is playing politics with people’s lives and jobs.”

This suggestion that drivers should be deprived of the basic right to defend their working conditions because of a pandemic that they have been forced to work through is particularly filthy given that the Global Express courier division is being sold “in the middle of a global pandemic.” Toll has refused to guarantee that Global Express workers’ pay and conditions will be maintained after the sale to private equity firm Allegro Funds.

Federal Health Minister Greg Hunt used Wednesday’s parliamentary “question time” to divert responsibility for the disastrous vaccine roll out onto Toll workers.

Hunt said: “I would also note that there is one element which may affect distribution over the coming days. There is the risk of a transport strike on Friday—and we hope that there is no impact on distribution.”

The TWU continues to insist that, as the union outlined at it’s national council meeting in May, Toll, and Australia’s other multi-billion dollar fleet operators are victims of “the major retailers, the manufacturers, the oil companies, the banks, who sweat the trucking companies and the owner drivers.”

TWU New South Wales (NSW) state secretary Richard Olsen said this week: “We should not forget that the squeeze comes from clients at the top like Amazon whose profits ballooned 224 per cent to $11 billion in just the first quarter this year. The TWU fight is about holding these companies to account and stopping the “race to the bottom” that sees bankruptcies and a lowering of standards for the small business operator.”

This utterly disingenuous attempt to equate major logistics companies with troubled small businesses serves only as a cynical attempt to justify the close alignment of the TWU with management.

It is also an entirely nationalist agenda that “Australian” companies (notwithstanding the 2015 sale of Toll to Japan Post) must be defended against their purportedly more competitive and powerful international rivals. This only serves to pit workers in Australia against the working class internationally. The assault on the wages, conditions and very lives of transport workers is being conducted throughout every country and it is among these workers that support must be fought for, not the Australian ruling class.

Alongside the Toll dispute, 6,000 drivers at StarTrack and FedEx and 2,000 workers at Linfox are also in the process of voting on whether to carry out strike action. Workers at all of these major logistics companies confront similar issues and the TWU’s staggered approach to the disputes can only be seen as a ploy to isolate workers and limit the impact of strikes on the supply chain as a whole.

The conduct of Australia’s unions, including the TWU, over the last 15 months stands as a stark warning for workers of the perfidious role played by these organisations. From the outset of the pandemic, the unions have been at the forefront of a major assault on the working class.

Australian Council of Trade Unions boss Sally McManus and her “best friend forever,” then Attorney-General Christian Porter, were the architects of the JobKeeper wage subsidy, a $90 billion handout to big business which granted employers unprecedented powers to restructure their workforces.

When NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian belatedly announced tightened movement restrictions for workers in Sydney’s COVID-19 “hotspots,” the TWU was among the most eager and vociferous defenders, not of workers’ health and safety, but of the unimpeded operations and profitability of big business.

Within hours of the July 17 announcement, the TWU demanded: “ALL essential transport workers must be automatically exempt from panicked snap restrictions from the NSW Government.”

This callous subjugation of the health of workers, their families, and the population as a whole to corporate profit interests is a sharp demonstration that workers cannot entrust their fate to the TWU or any other union.

The Great Game of Smashing Countries

John Pilger

As a tsunami of crocodile tears engulfs Western politicians, history is suppressed. More than a generation ago, Afghanistan won its freedom, which the United States, Britain and their “allies” destroyed.

In 1978, a liberation movement led by the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) overthrew the dictatorship of Mohammad Dawd, the cousin of King Zahir Shar. It was an immensely popular revolution that took the British and Americans by surprise.

Foreign journalists in Kabul, reported the New York Times, were surprised to find that “nearly every Afghan they interviewed said [they were] delighted with the coup”. The Wall Street Journal reported that “150,000 persons … marched to honour the new flag …the participants appeared genuinely enthusiastic.”

The Washington Post reported that “Afghan loyalty to the government can scarcely be questioned”. Secular, modernist and, to a considerable degree, socialist, the government declared a programme of visionary reforms that included equal rights for women and minorities. Political prisoners were freed and police files publicly burned.

Under the monarchy, life expectancy was thirty-five; one in three children died in infancy. Ninety per cent of the population was illiterate. The new government introduced free medical care. A mass literacy campaign was launched.

For women, the gains had no precedent; by the late 1980s, half the university students were women, and women made up 40 per cent of Afghanistan’s doctors, 70 per cent of its teachers and 30 per cent of its civil servants.

So radical were the changes that they remain vivid in the memories of those who benefited. Saira Noorani, a female surgeon who fled Afghanistan in 2001, recalled:

Every girl could go to high school and university. We could go where we wanted and wear what we liked … We used to go to cafes and the cinema to see the latest Indian films on a Friday … it all started to go wrong when the mujahedin started winning … these were the people the West supported.

For the United States, the problem with the PDPA government was that it was supported by the Soviet Union. Yet it was never the “puppet” derided in the West, neither was the coup against the monarchy “Soviet backed”, as the American and British press claimed at the time.

President Jimmy Carter’s Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, later wrote in his memoirs: “We had no evidence of any Soviet complicity in the coup.”

In the same administration was Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s National Security Adviser, a Polish émigré and fanatical anti-communist and moral extremist whose enduring influence on American presidents expired only with his death in 2017.

On 3 July 1979, unknown to the American people and Congress, Carter authorised a $500 million “covert action” programme to overthrow Afghanistan’s first secular, progressive government.  This was code-named by the CIA Operation Cyclone.

The $500 million bought, bribed and armed a group of tribal and religious zealots known as the mujahedin. In his semi-official history, Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward wrote that the CIA spent $70 million on bribes alone. He describes a meeting between a CIA agent known as “Gary” and a warlord called Amniat-Melli:

Gary placed a bundle of cash on the table: $500,000 in one-foot stacks of $100 bills. He believed it would be more impressive than the usual $200,000, the best way to say we’re here, we’re serious, here’s money, we know you need it … Gary would soon ask CIA headquarters for and receive $10 million in cash.

Recruited from all over the Muslim world, America’s secret army was trained in camps in Pakistan run by Pakistani intelligence, the CIA and Britain’s MI6. Others were recruited at an Islamic College in Brooklyn, New York – within sight of the doomed Twin Towers. One of the recruits was a Saudi engineer called Osama bin Laden.

The aim was to spread Islamic fundamentalism in Central Asia and destabilise and eventually destroy the Soviet Union.

In August, 1979, the US Embassy in Kabul reported that “the United States’ larger interests … would be served by the demise of the PDPA government, despite whatever setbacks this might mean for future social and economic reforms in Afghanistan.”

Read again the words above I have italicised. It is not often that such cynical intent is spelt out as clearly.  The US was saying that a genuinely progressive Afghan government and the rights of Afghan women could go to hell.

Six months later, the Soviets made their fatal move into Afghanistan in response to the American-created jihadist threat on their doorstep. Armed with CIA-supplied Stinger missiles and celebrated as “freedom fighters” by Margaret Thatcher, the mujahedine ventually drove the Red Army out of Afghanistan.

Calling themselves the Northern Alliance, the mujahedin were dominated by war lords who controlled the heroin trade and terrorised rural women. The Taliban were an ultra-puritanical faction, whose mullahs wore black and punished banditry, rape and murder but banished women from public life.

In the 1980s, I made contact with the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, known as RAWA, which had tried to alert the world to the suffering of Afghan women. During the Taliban time they concealed cameras beneath their burqas to film evidence of atrocities, and did the same to expose the brutality of the Western-backed mujahedin. “Marina” of RAWA told me, “We took the videotape to all the main media groups, but they didn’t want to know ….”

In1996, the enlightened PDPA government was overrun. The Prime Minister, Mohammad Najibullah, had gone to the United Nations to appeal to for help. On his return, he was hanged from a street light.

“I confess that [countries] are pieces on a chessboard,” said Lord Curzon in 1898, “upon which is being played out a great game for the domination of the world.”

The Viceroy of India was referring in particular to Afghanistan. A century later, Prime Minister Tony Blair used slightly different words.

“This is a moment to seize,” he said following 9/11. “The Kaleidoscope has been shaken. The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us re-order this world around us.”

On Afghanistan, he added this: “We will not walk away [but ensure] some way out of the poverty that is your miserable existence.”

Blair echoed his mentor, President George W. Bush, who spoke to the victims of his bombs from the Oval Office: “The oppressed people of Afghanistan will know the generosity of America. As we strike military targets, we will also drop food, medicine and supplies to the starving and suffering … “

Almost every word was false. Their declarations of concern were cruel illusions for an imperial savagery “we” in the West rarely recognise as such.

In 2001, Afghanistan was stricken and depended on emergency relief convoys from Pakistan. As the journalist Jonathan Steele reported, the invasion indirectly caused the deaths of some 20,000 people as supplies to drought victims stopped and people fled their homes.

Eighteen months later, I found unexploded American cluster bombs in the rubble of Kabul which were often mistaken for yellow relief packages dropped from the air. They blew the limbs off foraging, hungry children.

In the village of Bibi Maru, I watched a woman called Orifa kneel at the graves of her husband, Gul Ahmed, a carpet weaver, and seven other members of her family, including six children, and two children who were killed next door.

An American F-16 aircraft had come out of a clear blue sky and dropped a Mk82 500-pound bomb on Orifa’s mud, stone and straw house. Orifa was away at the time. When she returned, she gathered the body parts.

Months later, a group of Americans came from Kabul and gave her an envelope with fifteen notes: a total of 15 dollars. “Two dollars for each of my family killed,” she said.

The invasion of Afghanistan was a fraud. In the wake of 9/11, the Taliban sought to distant themselves from Osama bin Laden. They were, in many respects, an American client with which the administration of Bill Clinton had done a series of secret deals to allow the building of a $3 billion natural gas pipeline by a US oil company consortium.

In high secrecy, Taliban leaders had been invited to the US and entertained by the CEO of the Unocal company in his Texas mansion and by the CIA at its headquarters in Virginia. One of the deal-makers was Dick Cheney, later George W. Bush’s Vice-President.

In 2010, I was in Washington and arranged to interview the mastermind of Afghanistan’s modern era of suffering, Zbigniew Brzezinski. I quoted to him his autobiography in which he admitted that his grand scheme for drawing the Soviets into Afghanistan had created “a few stirred up Muslims”.

“Do you have any regrets?” I asked.

“Regrets! Regrets! What regrets?”

When we watch the current scenes of panic at Kabul airport, and listen to journalists and generals in distant TV studios bewailing the withdrawal of “our protection”, isn’t it time to heed the truth of the past so that all this suffering never happens again?

The Moral Implications of Bloodlust, White Supremacy, Christian Nationalism

Wendell Griffen

It is hard to be dispassionate when people have died fighting for a cause. Objectivity seems especially hard when it comes to the outcome after 20 years of United States-led war in Afghanistan.

The U.S. invaded Afghanistan after Al Qaeda terrorist followers of Osama Bin Laden commandeered and crash-bombed four commercial airliners on Sept. 11, 2001, killing 2,977 and wounding more than 6,000 people in New York City, Washington, D.C., and in Pennsylvania. When intelligence assessments traced the terrorists to Afghanistan, Congress authorized President George W. Bush to use military force.

The “war on terror” began in Afghanistan because that was where Osama Bin Laden lived. Bin Laden finally was found in Pakistan and killed in 2011, 10 years after the Taliban regime that governed Afghanistan was defeated by U.S. forces at the end of 2001.

For the next 20 years, Taliban fighters matched wits and tactics while waging guerilla warfare against a multi-national military force led by the U.S. that was better equipped, had more personnel and was better financed. In total, 2,448 U.S. service members have died. Tens of thousands more were injured. The U.S. spent more than $2.26 trillion — including more than $500 billion for interest — for the military effort in Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan since 2001.

The result of those sacrifices is more than disappointing to U.S. families who lost loved ones, to veterans who lost comrades, to veterans who are permanently maimed and scarred in ways that only war can cause, and to people who care for them. The sorrow and anguish felt by men, women and children in Afghanistan who hoped the U.S.-led war would defeat the Taliban goes beyond disappointment. For those persons, the outcome of the war in Afghanistan is so heartbreaking that we will never have enough money and words to tally and talk about it.

Yet, the war in Afghanistan reminds us that those who do not learn from past mistakes are likely to repeat them. Years ago, scholar Akhilesh Pillalamarri wrote that Afghanistan has long been known as the graveyard of empires. Nevertheless, the U.S. repeated the respective mistakes of the British and Soviet empires in the 19th and 20th centuries by invading and trying to occupy the country.

In doing so, U.S. political and military leaders disregarded other truths. Despite U.S. outrage about the 9/11 terrorist attacks and determination to seek revenge on Osama Bin Laden and the Al Qaeda network that operated from Afghanistan, Afghanistan never was our society to rule, let alone transform into an inclusive liberal democracy. Foreign troops and weapons never would outlast Afghan mores, customs, history, ancestral warrior pride and centuries of refusal to be ruled by foreign invaders, especially when the invaders propped up corrupt and incompetent indigenous rulers and Afghan military personnel who would not fight for the future of their society even with overwhelming military, logistical and diplomatic advantages.

A combination of bloodlust, Western hubris, white supremacy and racism, conservative Christian nationalist imperialism, and capitalist greed also must be admitted. The monetary cost of wars always produces wealth for people who profit in supplying weapons and war materiel.

For these reasons, it was not enough to invade Afghanistan in 2001.

It was not enough to chase Bin Laden from Afghanistan.

It was not enough to displace the Taliban from political power 20 years ago.

It was not enough to eventually find and kill Bin Laden in 2011.

It was not enough to capture, kill, torture and hold his lieutenants indefinitely in Guantanamo and other sites around the world, but never in the United States.

No matter how many troops were deployed, how many drone missions were flown, and how many U.S. military personnel were killed and wounded, bloodlust, cultural incompetence, disregard for military and political history, hubris, white supremacy and racism, Christian national imperialism, capitalist greed and national pride transformed the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan into a 20-year fiasco that bedeviled the presidencies of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

History will not be kind to the political and military leaders who counseled the nation to commit itself to that misadventure. And history will not be kind to religious leaders in the United States who cheered and counseled the nation to go along with it.

Religious leaders did not warn the nation about the moral and mortal dangers of bloodlust. Some religious leaders even blessed the bloodlust even as they offered pastoral support to grieving families and to people maimed and scarred by the physical, emotional, social and spiritual wounds of warfare.

Religious leaders cannot blame the Central Intelligence Agency, State Department, Pentagon and political parties for failure to discern and denounce the patriarchy, misogyny and militarism that drove so-called Christian evangelical conservatives to champion war in Afghanistan a decade after Bin Laden was killed. Meanwhile, the same Christian evangelical conservatives railed against the Taliban and other Muslim extremists. Prophetic discernment should have led more clergy in the United States to know and declare that these forces are merely different sides of the same hateful faith coin.

The failure of prophetic discernment and activity concerning the war in Afghanistan did not honor the tradition of the Hebrew prophets. It did not honor the tradition of prophetic men and women who condemned bloodlust in later centuries. It did not honor the tradition of prophetic people who challenged the imperialist aims of the Crusades.

That failure also disregarded the example of clergy who challenged the war in Vietnam three decades before 2001. Over the course of 20 years, religious leaders in the U.S. did not challenge public thinking about the war in Afghanistan the way Clergy and Laity Concerned About Vietnam challenged the public 50 years ago. Religious leaders refused to follow the prophetic examples of William Sloan Coffin, Martin Luther King Jr., Father Theodore Hesburgh, and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel in calling on political, military and opinion leaders to ponder the tragic mistakes that were being made in Afghanistan.

Instead, Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Tony Perkins, Phyllis Schlafly, Richard Land, Robert Jeffress, Paige Patterson, James Dobson and Franklin Graham were considered by journalists, including religious writers, as exemplars of strong religious leadership. Meanwhile, the same journalists — including religious writers — dismissed Jeremiah Wright Jr., Jim Wallis and Congresswoman Barbara Lee of Oakland, Calif. (and Allen Temple Baptist Church), who cast the only vote in the U.S. House of Representatives against the Authorization of Military Force in Afghanistan that set the stage for what became known as the Forever War. To make matters worse, U.S. religious leaders and congregations courted Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and other politicians and distanced themselves from Wright, Wallis and Lee.

Somehow, religious leaders lost the moral, spiritual and ethical ability to understand that times of societal turmoil — such as during a war — demand that we not only function as pastors and priests, but that we also discharge the duties of prophets.

Other realities are more sobering, if not chilling.

Many religious leaders cringe — like cowards — at the thought of being prophetic.

More religious leaders prefer pietistic popularity and abhor prophetic perseverance than we dare admit.

Too many religious leaders — clergy and laity — are more committed to being comfortable than conscientious about love, justice and peace.

Too many religious leaders equate love of empire with love for God.

Too many religious leaders love empire more than God.

The failure of prophetic discernment and activity concerning the war in Afghanistan was more than disappointing.

It was dishonorable.

One wonders whether faithful people in the U.S. can learn from these realities. If not, the tragic outcome of the war in Afghanistan will not only disappoint and haunt the nation.

It will doom it.

Israel escalates attack on the Palestinians in Gaza

Jean Shaoul

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have ramped up their attacks on Gaza, with fighter jets launching strikes on Hamas targets on Monday and Saturday in response to home-made incendiary balloons set afloat from the besieged Palestinian enclave.

It marks the heaviest escalation in hostilities since Israel’s 11-day war on Gaza last May that killed more than 250 Palestinians, including at least 66 children and 41 women.

Israel’s attacks follow Saturday’s demonstration near Gaza’s border with Israel, when Israeli soldiers fired lives shots and injured at least 41 Palestinians, including two people who were critically injured, one of whom was a 13-year-old boy shot in the head. The IDF said that the Palestinians had shot and critically injured one of its security personnel, a 21-year-old sniper from the Border Police undercover antiterrorism unit.

Protestors evacuate a serious wounded person from the fence of Gaza Strip border with Israel, during a protest marking the anniversary of a 1969 arson attack at Jerusalem's Al-Aqsa mosque by an Australian tourist later found to be mentally ill, east of Gaza City, Saturday, Aug. 21, 2021. (AP Photo/Adel Hana)

On Monday, Palestinian groups, including Hamas and Islamic Jihad, announced plans to hold a major rally on Wednesday in southern Gaza near the border with Israel. The IDF responded by building up its forces along the heavily fortified border with the Gaza Strip and instructing its officers and soldiers to respond 'more aggressively' to any attempts to breach the border fence or attack soldiers.

Hundreds of Palestinians had gathered on Saturday near the border to mark the 52nd anniversary of the arson attack on the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, Islam’s third holiest site. Built on the site of the second Jewish temple destroyed by the Roman Empire 2,000 years ago, it is one of the most contested religious sites in the world. While the attack was carried out by a mentally unstable Christian Australian tourist, there were suspicions that Israel had been actively involved in planning and facilitating the arson attempt.

The Mosque has become a symbol of the ongoing violations of the basic rights of Palestinians, including their ability to worship freely, most recently during Ramadan earlier this year, precipitating the tensions that gave rise to Israel’s murderous assault on Gaza. Since Israel’s capture and annexation of Jerusalem’s Old City after the June 1967 Arab-Israeli war, it has become a frequent flashpoint, regularly stormed by Jewish settlers and armed security forces, while worshippers are turned away at the gates and its foundations are being damaged by tunneling.

Israel’s Channel 7 reported “Temple Mount groups” saying there had been a 60 percent increase in the number of Jewish Israeli incursions into Al-Aqsa Mosque compound over the past three months, with some 9,804 Jewish Israelis storming the compound over the past three months, compared to 6,133 over the same period last year.

Under an agreement with Jordan, only Muslims can worship at the Mosque compound, while Jews can pray at the Western Wall below. But recently, Israel’s newly installed government, led by Naftali Bennett, a former leader of a West Bank settlers council, has allowed increasing numbers of Jews to pray there; a move that will exacerbate tensions in East Jerusalem. While he initially appeared to confirm a formal change in policy, saying that all religions would have “freedom of worship” on Temple Mount, he was forced to backtrack after criticism from Jordan and leftist and Arab members of his coalition, saying that the status quo ante continued.

In the days before Saturday’s demonstration, Palestinian fighters had launched a rocket, the first since the May 21 ceasefire, towards Israel that was shot down by Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile system.

The Palestinians’ balloons and rockets are aimed at securing the release of Hamas prisoners detained in Israeli jails, the lifting of Israel and Egypt’s 14 year-long blockade and the release of funds pledged by international donors for Gaza’s reconstruction following Israel’s criminal wars on Gaza in 2008-09, 2012, 2014 and 2021.

While Israel claimed its 2,750 aerial attacks and 2,300 artillery shells on Gaza last May were aimed at Palestinian militants’ arms factories and warehouses, most of the damage (61 percent) fell on the housing and infrastructure sector, 33 percent on the economic and business sectors, with some 1,500 economic establishments destroyed or damaged, and 7 percent on the social development sector. This caused losses and damages amounting to $479 million, according to the Higher Governmental Committee for the Reconstruction of Gaza, with the World Bank estimating Gaza needed $485 million to restore it to the same penurious state it was before the war.

On Monday, a third report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) on last May’s war concluded that Israeli air raids that demolished four high-rise buildings in Gaza City, including the 12-storey al-Jalaa building housing the local offices of the Associated Press and Al Jazeera and many families, damaged neighbouring buildings, left dozens of people homeless and destroyed scores of businesses, and “apparently” had not violated international laws of war.

HRW’s earlier reports accused Israel of war crimes for attacks it said had no clear military targets but killed dozens of civilians, while it said the actions of Palestinian groups based in Gaza, by firing rockets indiscriminately at Israeli cities, also constituted a war crime. HRW has called on the International Criminal Court to include last May’s assault on Gaza in its ongoing investigation into possible war crimes by Israel and Palestinian fighters.

Israel’s targeting of businesses and factories and small businesses, along with its repeated closure of Gaza's borders, has pushed the Palestinians even further into poverty. According to the International Labour Organisation, fewer than 20 percent of people of working age in Gaza has a job, while two-thirds of women and young people are unemployed.

Since the war, Israel has refused to allow building materials needed for reconstruction that would provide work for 60,000 workers to enter Gaza until Hamas agrees to release two Israeli civilians and the bodies of two Israeli soldiers. Hamas has made this release conditional on the release of Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails.

Last Thursday, the United Nations and Qatar agreed to channel aid to impoverished families in Gaza whereby 100,000 families will each receive $100 monthly starting in September from funds provided by the Qatari government and distributed by the UN’s World Food Programme and bank transfers rather than direct cash transfers. The deal did not address the broader issue of Gaza’s reconstruction, nor did it include any arrangement to pay the salaries of the civil servants in the Hamas-run government.

In a move evidently designed to ramp up the pressure on Hamas and the Palestinians in Gaza, Egypt confirmed that it would close its border crossing at Rafah with Gaza, the only point of entry and exit not controlled by Israel, indefinitely starting on Monday. Neither Hamas nor Egypt explained the reasoning behind the closure of the crossing that Egypt had opened in May to allow wounded Gazans to be treated in Egyptian hospitals and to deliver aid. Yesterday, Al Arabiya network reported that Hamas had agreed to stop launching incendiary balloons from Gaza following talks with Egyptian intelligence officials.

Israel’s increasingly aggressive stance towards Hamas in Gaza takes place amid stepped up violence against the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. Yesterday, an Israeli soldier shot and killed a 16-year-old Palestinian after security forces stormed the Balata refugee camp near Nablus. Earlier this month, Israeli troops shot and killed a Palestinian man and injured 21 others during a protest in Nablus when Israeli troops fired on them with rubber bullets.

Israel has been waging a covert war against Iran, targeting its nuclear facilities, basic infrastructure and shipping. Last Thursday night, Israel struck Syrian military camps near Damascus and Homs, targeting weapons stores linked to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Shi’ite militias, including Lebanon’s Hezbollah, that were reportedly intercepted by the Syrian army’s Russian air defense systems.

Experts warn India rapidly heading to COVID-19 “third wave”

Wasantha Rupasinghe

As India’s far-right Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government and its counterparts at the state level, whether led by the BJP or the opposition, increasingly abandon even limited COVID-19 restrictions, India continues to record 30,000 to 40,000 new infections and 350-500 deaths, on average, each day. With the virus continuing to circulate across the country at such a high rate, scientific experts warn that a deadly third wave of the pandemic, driven by the far more contagious and lethal Delta variant, could soon strike.

India’s extremely low COVID-19 testing rate will make it difficult to assess the rapidity and extent of the virus’s spread when a third wave hits. The country’s botched vaccine rollout has left the vast majority of India’s 1.39 billion people without any protection from serious illness and death. In addition, the country’s largely rudimentary and depleted health care system, particularly in rural areas where two-thirds of the population live, is in no position to treat another surge of COVID-19 patients comparable to that in April and May. Even then, faced with a tsunami of cases, hospitals in India’s largest urban centres, Delhi and Mumbai, ran out of beds, oxygen, and crucial drugs, resulting in mass death.

A health worker takes a mouth swab sample of a Kashmiri boy to test for COVID-19 in Srinagar, Indian controlled Kashmir, Saturday, May 8, 2021. (AP Photo/Dar Yasin)

On Monday, an expert panel convened under the auspices of the Modi government’s Ministry of Home Affairs warned that the third wave could be as large as the second. If the pace of vaccinations remains slow, the panel predicted that there would be up to 5 lakh (500,000) new cases daily at the expected peak of the third wave in late September or October. Even less dramatic projections based on better vaccine coverage estimated that between 200,000 and 320,000 new infections will be recorded each day.

Pointing to the continuing worldwide spread of COVID-19 fueled by the Delta and other new variants, Dr. Pooja Khosla of Delhi’s Sir Ganga Ram Hospital recently warned, “Infections can increase exponentially at any time.” Speaking to the Hindusthan Times she added, “I think one should not assume anything and make all efforts to prevent a second wave-like crisis, which was a nightmare. … Reopening everything is not appropriate.”

In a Reuters snap survey completed in June, 40 health care specialists, doctors, scientists, virologists and epidemiologists from around the world predicted that a third wave of coronavirus infections is likely to hit India by October. The experts, Reuters reported, “cautioned against an early removal of restrictions, as some states have done.”

These warnings have been further underscored by the results of the fourth and latest serosurvey from the Indian Center of Medical Research (ICMR). Conducted between June 14 and July 6, and based on samples drawn from 29,000 people across 70 districts in 21 states, it concluded that 67.6 percent of the Indian population has developed antibodies to SARS-CoV-2. If the findings are accurate, this would mean that Indian health authorities have “missed” the overwhelming majority of COVID-19 cases—including registering less than 2 percent of all infections in densely populated states like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. This speaks to the deplorable state of India’s health care system and the catastrophic failure of the state’s response to the pandemic. It also lends still further credibility to the growing number of scientific studies that place the true number of deaths from the pandemic in India in the millions.

At the same time, the serosurvey highlights the extremely grave threat a third wave poses to the population, the majority of whom either live in teeming slums or in rural areas without ready access to proper medical care. Per the serosurvey’s findings, 450 million Indians—a population larger than that of the United States—lack any immunity to COVID-19, a horrifying prospect in light of the systematic dismantling of all public health measures to contain and suppress the virus.

India’s efforts to sequence genomes to track for emerging variants have also been drastically curtailed. This despite the government having designated a Delta-plus variant as a “Variant of Concern” on June 22. Preliminary research suggests the Delta-plus strain of SARS-CoV-2 is even more contagious and vaccine-resistant than the Delta variant, which having ravaged India is now fueling a global resurgence of the pandemic.

Citing data from the National SARS-CoV-2 Genomic Consortium (INSACOG), a network of the 28 labs in India that are equipped to do genome sequencing of the coronavirus, the Hindu reported that in July just 184 genome samples were sequenced. This marked a steep decline from June, when 4,381 were sequenced. In April and May, when the devastating second wave was at its peak, 15,546 and 13,142 samples were sequenced respectively. A scientist from one of the INSACOG labs complained that many states were not sending enough samples and the “funds available to labs for carrying out sequences” have been “delayed.”

The refusal of the central and state governments to fund the necessary surveillance mechanisms to monitor the spread of the virus and the potential emergence of new variants is bound up with the Indian ruling elite’s criminal policy of prioritizing corporate profits over saving human lives—a policy that has already resulted in mass death. The Delta variant was first detected in India in October, but for want of resources its progress and potency were not scientifically scrutinized. Then, last February and March as new infections surged, the Narendra Modi-led BJP government pressed forward with India’s “reopening.” On April 20 as daily new COVID-19 infections were reaching 300,000 per day, Modi infamously told the Indian people in a nationwide televised address that it was necessary to “save India from lockdowns,” not COVID-19.

A comprehensive study issued by the US-based Center for Global Development last month substantiated previous reports that estimated the true death toll from India’s April-June 2021 second pandemic wave as five to 10 times higher than the government’s official claim of some 235,000 COVID-19 fatalities. Based on analysis of three separate data sets, the Center for Global Development study concluded that there were between 1.5 and 3.4 million COVID-19-related deaths in those three months, and that India’s total excess fatalities during the pandemic number between 3.4 and 4.9 million.

The Modi government, with the assistance of the corporate media and the opposition parties, has sought to prevent any serious examination of the causes and catastrophic impact of India’s second wave. Instead it has prioritized the rapid dismantling of all remaining anti-COVID measures, based on the lie that the worst is over; insisted that the population must, in any event, learn to live with the virus; and pushed forward with a raft of new pro-investor measures to “revive” the economy.

At least 11 of India’s 28 states have opened schools, and many other states have announced school reopening dates. As in every other country, the rush to reopen schools is not motivated by any concern about the education and well-being of children but rather aimed at freeing up parents for the labour market so they can continue producing profits for big business.

With all those under age 18 currently ineligible for vaccination, a third wave threatens to especially impact children. Dr. Devi Shetty, a cardiologist at Narayana Health and an adviser to the Karnataka state government on pandemic response planning, told Reuters, “If children get infected in large numbers and we are not prepared, there is nothing you can do at the last minute.” She added, “It will be a whole different problem (from the previous two waves) as the country has very, very few pediatric intensive care unit beds, and that is going to be a disaster.”

Just days after reopening schools, a number of students were infected with COVID-19, according to media reports.

The Modi government and its state counterparts are making no serious effort to strengthen the dilapidated health care system as it faces a potential mass influx of patients due to the ruling class’s homicidal policies. India is among the countries with the lowest public health care expenditure as a percentage of GDP in the world, with India’s governments for decades spending the equivalent of 1.5 percent of GDP or less on health care per annum.

The opposition-led state governments are pursuing essentially the same ruinous pandemic policy as Modi and his Hindu supremacist BJP. This includes the Stalinist Communist Party of India (Marxist)-led government in Kerala. For weeks, Kerala has recorded 15,000 to 20,000 new cases per day, as a direct consequence of the government’s decision to reopen the economy, including all export industries, and to allow mass gatherings during recent Muslim and Hindu religious festivals. On Tuesday, Kerala reported 24,296 new cases and a test positivity rate of more than 18 percent. Earlier this month, a six-member team appointed by the central government to study the COVID-19 situation in the state criticized Kerala’s government for limiting testing to those who have symptoms and using the less reliable antigen test rather than RT-PCR tests.

On top of the lifting of almost all COVID-19 restrictions and the failure to test adequately and monitor the spread of the disease, India’s shambolic vaccine campaign threatens to make the looming third wave even worse. According to Our World in Data, as of August 23, just 9.4 percent of Indians had been fully inoculated against COVID-19, with a further 23.4 percent having received one vaccine shot. In other words, well over 60 percent of the population has yet to receive a single dose as the third wave gathers pace. These figures underscore that the Indian government will not come close to fulfilling its goal of vaccinating the country’s adult population of over 900 million people by December. To reach this target, India would need to vaccinate around 8.8 million people per day on average. Currently, around 4 million people are being vaccinated daily.

Afghan refugees face steel border walls and barbed wire from Europe’s powers

Robert Stevens

Since the fall of Kabul to the Taliban on August 15, governments internationally have engaged in non-stop handwringing over the fate of tens of thousands of refugees desperate to flee the country. These are the same governments whose wars over the last three decades, including in Afghanistan, have turned tens of millions of people into refugees and destroyed entire societies.

Twenty years of war, with the imperialist military forces only finally departing this month, have left 550,000 internally displaced in Afghanistan since the beginning of this year, adding to the almost 3 million Afghans who had met this fate by the end of 2020.

For all the crocodile tears shed over those who worked with the occupation now seeking to flee, Europe’s governments, since the fall of the Taliban, have refused to take more than a few thousand refugees.

In this May 21, 2021, file photo, policemen patrol alongside a steel wall at Evros river, near the village of Poros, at the Greek -Turkish border, Greece. (AP Photo/Giannis Papanikos, File)

In 2015, far-right political forces mobilised against German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s policy to open the country’s borders to allow in around 1 million refugees from the Syrian war in a settlement scheme. This time there is to be no such policy, with the European Union (EU) and its member states focusing on tightening the borders of Fortress Europe.

On Sunday, Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Jansa tweeted, “The EU will NOT open any European migration corridors for Afghanistan” stating there would be no repeat of the “strategic mistake” of 2015. Slovenia is the current holder of the six-month rotating EU presidency. Jansa, a former Stalinist and right-wing zealot, is a close ally of the fascistic Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orban.

Jansa’s statement was opposed by European Parliament president Davide Sassoli, but it accurately reflects EU policy. In a statement issued August 18, three days after the fall of Kabul, EU Commissioner Ylva Julia Margareta Johansson declared from an extraordinary meeting of Interior Ministers, “We should not wait until people arrive at the external borders of the European Union. This is not a solution. We should prevent people from heading towards the European Union through unsafe, irregular and uncontrolled routes run by smugglers.”

The problem was not Europe’s, as “A significant number of Afghan nationals have already fled to neighbouring countries. … We will continue our ongoing programmes and intensify our cooperation with host communities in Pakistan, Iran and Tajikistan, as well as other countries in the region such as Turkey.”

No concrete plans were put in place for any EU member to take in a single Afghan refugee. The major powers have concentrated solely on getting their military forces out, and a few thousand civilian personnel who helped prop up President Ashraf Ghani’s puppet government.

Armin Laschet, leader of Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, whom Merkel has backed to succeed her as chancellor, tweeted almost as soon as Kabul fell, “The mistakes regarding the Syrian civil war must not be made again … 2015 shall not be repeated.” A day later Alice Weidel, leader of the far-right main opposition party Alternative for Germany, declared, “2015 must not be allowed to repeat itself. Genuine refugees must be helped in their home region if possible.”

French President Emmanuel Macron refused to commit to taking any refugees from Afghanistan, declaring his main concern that France had to “anticipate and protect itself from a wave of migrants.” Paris would insist on an “initiative to build a robust, coordinated and united response without delay, which will involve the fight against irregular flows … and the establishment of cooperation with transit and host countries such as Pakistan, Turkey and Iran.”

Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz said Sunday that he was “clearly against the fact that we now voluntarily accept more people—that will not happen under my chancellorship either.” Instead, “We have to deport as long as possible.”

Britain will take in just 5,000 Afghan people this year, as part of its Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy scheme, chosen from those who collaborated alongside UK forces or officials. These are “Afghans who have supported British efforts in Afghanistan, for example interpreters and other personnel.” Among those listed as priorities to enter are “Afghan government officials”. Only another 20,000 will be allowed to enter over the next few years.

The US has promised to take just 10,000 people from Afghanistan out of a population of 38 million. Australia will take in 3,000, the figure they were already committed to under an existing programme.

The now forbidden policy of 2015 was abandoned rapidly by Germany in 2016. On behalf of the EU, Merkel signed an agreement that year with Greece’s pseudo-left Syriza government and Turkey to seal off Europe’s southern border to asylum seekers. Under this filthy deal—a flagrant violation of international law effectively abolishing the right to asylum—the EU pays Turkey’s authoritarian regime billions to take in tens of thousands of migrants. Greece facilitates the mass deportation of refugees to Turkey as they reach the EU’s shores via the Aegean Sea.

Greek Migration Minister Notis Mitarachi announced as the Taliban came to power, “Our country will not be a gateway to Europe for illegal Afghan migrants.”

Epitomising the vicious response of the EU powers to refugee victims of their wars, Greece announced last Friday that it had completed sealing off its northern border with Turkey with a massive 40km (25-mile) steel fence and new electronic monitoring system. Work to complete the wall, initially begun in 2012, and continued by Syriza while in power (2015-2019), was rushed ahead due to events in Afghanistan. Last Friday, Michalis Chrisochoidis, the Citizens’ Protection Minister of Greece’s New Democracy government, visited the region of Evros alongside the defence minister and head of the armed forces to inspect the border wall. He declared the fall of Kabul had created “possibilities for migrant flows … We cannot wait, passively, for the possible impact… Our borders will remain safe and inviolable.”

Every single land route is being systematically closed off to refugees by fences and barbed wire and every sea passage by patrol ships.

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan warned that Turkey would not become “Europe's migrant storage unit”. Mehmet Emin Bilmez, governor of the eastern border province of Van, said, “We want to show the whole world that our borders are unpassable … Our biggest hope is that there is no migrant wave from Afghanistan.”

On Monday, Ankara announced it would add by the end of the year another 64 km to its existing three-metre-high border wall with Iran. The wall, started in 2017, will prevent entry to Turkey by any refugee making the weeks-long journey across Iran on foot. Reuters reported that the rest of the 560 km frontier would be fortified by “Ditches, wire and security patrols around the clock”.

Britain’s Home Secretary Priti Patel is enforcing one of the most restrictive anti-immigration policies on the planet, with much of it modelled on the savage system imposed in Greece. In a newspaper column Sunday, UK Defense Secretary Ben Wallace wrote that the Johnson government would set up “A series of ‘processing hubs’... in countries neighboring Afghanistan for refugees who manage to escape. If they can establish their right to come to the UK, they will be flown to Britain.”

On Sunday, Turkey denied that it would allow such a hub on its territory with its foreign ministry warning, “It is not possible for us to accept it even if such a request was made in this regard.”