UN catalogues Libya war crimes, ignoring their source

Bill Van Auken

An independent fact-finding mission delivered a report to the United Nations Thursday cataloguing a plethora of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Libya, including mass killings, arbitrary detention, systemic torture and the forced displacement of hundreds of thousands.

Libyan security forces have rounded up thousands of African migrants in recent weeks [Source: Twitter]

The report, which was based on research in Libya, Tunisia and Italy and interviews with over 150 people, acknowledges that the work of the mission had been obstructed by the Western-backed government in Tripoli.

While it focuses on crimes carried out between 2016 and 2020, the report begins by acknowledging: “Since the fall of the [Muammar] Gaddafi regime in 2011, the fragmentation of the State and the proliferation of weapons and of militias vying for control of territory and resources has severely undermined the rule of law in Libya. Libya has also been the theater of quasi-uninterrupted armed conflicts” resulting in crimes “against the most vulnerable, including women, children, members of ethnic minorities, migrants, asylum seekers, and internally displaced persons.”

Nowhere, however, does the report refer to what precipitated the fall of the Gaddafi regime, the disintegration of both Libya’s state and its society and the resulting mass violence, i.e., the more than seven-month war of aggression launched by the United States and NATO in March of 2011.

The report highlights the eruption of violence during the 2019-2020 battle for the Libyan capital of Tripoli between the country’s two main factions: the UN-recognized, Tripoli-based Government of National Accord (GNA)—backed by Turkey, Qatar and Italy, along with Islamist militias supplemented by thousands of mercenary fighters from Syria—and its rival government in the east of the country, which is defended by the Libyan National Army (LNA) of ex-CIA “asset” Khalifa Haftar, with the backing of Egypt, the UAE, Russia and France.

“Airstrikes have killed dozens of families. The destruction of health-related facilities has impacted access to healthcare, and anti-personnel mines left by mercenaries in residential areas have killed and maimed civilians,” said the fact-finding mission’s chair, Mohamed Auajjar.

The report calls particular attention to the mass murder carried out by the Kaniyat militia, responsible for killing hundreds of civilians in the town of Tarhuna, southeast of Tripoli. Bodies recovered from mass graves there had been shot multiple times after the victims had been handcuffed, blindfolded and their legs tied. The Kaniyat militia has aligned itself with both the GNA and the LNA at different points in the conflict.

Arbitrary imprisonment and torture remain endemic in Libya, according to the report. It states:

Most of these prisoners have never been charged, convicted or sentenced to imprisonment following a fair and public hearing. Many are detained incommunicado, some in secret prisons that officially do not exist, sometimes for years without any prospect of release. The families of prisoners are not informed of the fate of their family member. Torture is an established feature of prison system. The conditions of detention are characterized by a lack of hygiene, adequate food and medical care, as well as no separation between children and adults. The Mission documented several cases of deaths through summary executions, torture, starvation, unsanitary conditions and denial of medical care. Sexual violence is prevalent, in particular during interrogation, and it takes different forms, including rape, threats to rape or coercion into engaging in sexual abuse against other inmates. Women find themselves particularly vulnerable and the evidence also indicated that men are not spared from sexual violence.”

The report cites the forced internal displacement of hundreds of thousands of Libyans who are unable to secure viable conditions of life. It highlights the case of Tawergha, where around 40,000 people, who belong to the ethnic group of the same name, were driven from their homes in 2011 by Islamist militias based in Misrata, backed by NATO airstrikes. A decade later, the people of Tawergha have yet to be allowed to return to the town, which was razed by the US-backed militias.

Also documented in the report are the wholesale crimes carried out against migrants, most of them from sub-Saharan Africa, who enter Libya in an attempt to cross the Mediterranean to Europe. The Libyan Coast Guard (LCG), trained and funded by the European Union, it states, intercepts boats carrying migrants in a manner that is “violent or reckless, resulting at times in deaths.” It continues:

On board, there are reports that LCGs confiscate belongings from migrants. Once disembarked, migrants are either transferred to detention centers or go missing, with reports that people are sold to traffickers. Interviews with migrants formerly held in DCIM detention centers established that all migrants—men and women, boys and girls—are kept in harsh conditions, some of whom die. Some children are held with adults, placing them at high risk of abuse. Torture (such as electric shocks) and sexual violence (including rape and forced prostitution) are prevalent.

The fact-finding mission states that “acts of murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, persecution and other inhumane acts committed against migrants form part of a systematic and widespread attack directed at this population, in furtherance of a State policy. As such, these acts may amount to crimes against humanity.”

This state policy involves a coordinated system of brutalization and exploitation of migrants, who are captured by the LCG, turned over to jails run by militias and released only after paying bribes or undergoing a period of forced labor or prostitution. The report says that some migrants have gone through this cycle as many as ten times.

It also cites the “responsibility that may be borne by third States,” without naming them, though certainly the crimes carried out by Libyan authorities against migrants are also in furtherance of the “Fortress Europe” policy aimed at keeping them out.

The report cites two incidents in May and July 2019 during the fighting around Tripoli in which a migrant detention camp set up next to a militia headquarters was bombed twice, killing scores of migrants, who were prevented from fleeing the attacks.

In conclusion, the fact-finding mission states that “The violence that has plagued Libya since 2011, and which has continued almost unabated since 2016, has enabled the commission of serious violations, abuses and crimes, including crimes against humanity and war crimes, against the most vulnerable.” The report’s authors state that they have identified “both Libyan and foreign actors” who may be responsible for these crimes, and that this information may be shared with the International Criminal Court (ICC).

But the “foreign actors” who bear the greatest responsibility for transforming Libya from what was widely considered one of the most advanced countries in Africa into a hellscape are never named. They remain in top state positions in Washington, Paris and London after launching an unprovoked war against Libya based on the phony pretext of a supposedly imminent massacre in the eastern city of Benghazi and under the filthy banner of “human rights.”

The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, which tried Germany’s former Nazi rulers, called the waging of an aggressive war “not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

The truth of this principle finds bloody verification in the unending crimes carried out against the Libyan people in the decade since the US and NATO killed thousands and razed much of the country through seven months of continuous bombing, while arming and aiding Al Qaeda-linked militias to serve as their proxy ground troops.

Those responsible for this “supreme international crime” committed in Libya have never been held to account. They include former president Barack Obama, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton—who gleefully hailed the torture-murder of Muammar Gaddafi by declaring “We came, we saw, he died”—along with current President Joe Biden, his secretary of state, Antony Blinken, and other senior administration officials.

There is no prospect of the Libya fact-finding mission handing their names over to the International Criminal Court, and even if it did, the ICC would do nothing. Its standard operating procedure is to ignore the massive war crimes carried out by US imperialism—which have claimed well over a million lives over the last decade—while prosecuting minor dictators and warlords in oppressed and former colonial countries.

Of the ICC’s 30 open cases, all are against Africans, while the court has scandalously announced its dropping of any investigation of war crimes committed by Washington in Afghanistan, instead focusing its entire attention on the Taliban.

Financial parasitism and the decline of US industry

Nick Beams

US President Joe Biden’s October 5 Michigan speech in support of his administration’s infrastructure spending program consisted in large part of a chronicle of the decline of American capitalism.

Repeating his assertion that the US was now at an “inflection point,” Biden began by noting that for the better part of the 20th century the US led the world by a significant margin through investment in infrastructure such as roads, highways, bridges, ports and airports.

“We invested to win the space race. We led the world in research and development, which led to the creation of the Internet, but then something happened. We slowed up, we stopped investing in ourselves.”

American infrastructure used to be the best in the world, he continued, but now the World Economic Forum ranks the US as 13th. The situation was even worse in early childhood education with the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development ranking the US 35th out of 37 countries.

“All those investments that fueled the strong economy, we’ve taken the foot off the gas,” he said. And then came an astonishing remark from the leader of the world’s most powerful economy: “I don’t know what’s happened.”

As the World Socialist Web Site reported yesterday, Biden’s speech was framed in terms of competition with China as he noted significant areas of the economy where China is outstripping the US.

But Biden left unanswered the question of the underlying reason for the historic decline of the industrial capacity of US capitalism.

The answer is to be found in an another “inflection point”—the end of the post war economic boom and the transition in the US economy from the beginning of the 1980s.

The decline in profit rates that ended the boom refuted the myth of so-called Keynesian economics that skillful demand management by governments could regulate the contradictions of capitalism.

The rise in profits and living standards that had marked the 1950s and 1960s was replaced in the 1970s by the phenomenon of stagflation—the combination of low growth, significant unemployment and rising prices—something which had never previously occurred.

The crisis of profitability drove the American ruling class to launch a violent restructuring of the economy and class relations—a process that was followed, with national variations, by its counterparts around the world.

The spearhead for the US and global offensive was the high interest rate regime initiated by the Federal Reserve under the chairmanship of Carter appointee Paul Volcker.

Whole swathes of US industry were destroyed, and a massive offensive was launched against the working class, starting with the smashing of the air traffic controllers’ strike in 1981 and the destruction of their union, PATCO—an operation carried out with the complete collaboration of the AFL-CIO trade union bureaucracy.

The US economy eventually emerged from the Volcker-induced recession—the deepest to that point since the Great Depression of the 1930s—but it was undergoing a vast transformation.

This involved the development of globalised methods of production through which major corporations outsourced manufacturing activities, very often to other firms and other countries including China, to take advantage of cheaper sources of labour.

At home, the profits derived from these operations were deployed to the financial markets with the result that increasingly the dominant form of corporate wealth accumulation was not investment in new plant and equipment—the growth of industrial capacity leading to the expansion of jobs as it had been in the period of the boom—but the securing of profits through financial manipulation. That is, parasitism, not productive activity, was now front and centre of the US economy.

This process, aided and abetted by the policies of the US Federal Reserve, began under Reagan in the 1980s and then rose to ever greater heights in the 1990s under the Clinton administration which dismantled the last remaining vestiges of the regulations imposed on finance as a result of the Depression.

The internal rot and decay at the heart of this new mode of accumulation was laid bare in the financial crisis of 2008. A Senate report of 2011 into the crisis found it was not a “natural disaster, but the result of high-risk complex financial products; undisclosed conflicts of interest; and the failure of credit rating agencies, and the market itself to rein in the excesses of Wall Street.”

In the words of Democrat Senator Carl Levin, who chaired the subcommittee that carried it out, the investigation found a “financial snake pit rife with greed, conflicts of interest, and wrongdoing.”

However, in the aftermath of this devastating report, nothing was done to address the cause of the crisis. Rather, Wall Street was bailed out by the government to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. The Fed instituted the policy of quantitative easing through which trillions of dollars were injected into the financial markets, not only to continue the speculation that had led to the crisis, but enabling it to reach new heights.

Not one of those responsible was charged for the criminal offences they had committed. In fact, such action was explicitly ruled out by Obama’s attorney-general Eric Holder in 2013 when he said it could destabilise both the US and world economy. The banks and finance houses were not only “too big to fail,” those in charge of their operations were “too big to jail.”

The period since the global financial crisis has seen speculative parasitism escalate to ever-greater heights. The rise and rise of the stock market and the emergence of ever more arcane forms of speculation was fueled by the ever-greater injections of money from the Fed—more than $4 trillion since the near total financial meltdown in March 2020 at the start of the pandemic.

The development of high-tech and the production of ever-more sophisticated computer chips is one of the key areas for the economy of the future. It is here that some of the most egregious expressions of parasitism are to be found, as a recent report by economist William O Lazonick, published on the New Economic Thinking web site, makes clear.

Lazonick has for some time been documenting the growth of share buybacks by major corporations, to boost the value of their stocks, at the expense of productive investment. He holds out the reformist utopian prospect that if this could be halted then corporations could at least be turned in the direction of acting for the common good.

Nevertheless, his work has provided some valuable insights. In his latest analysis he focuses attention on the high-tech firms that are seeking billions of dollars from the Biden administration under the Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) for America Act.

The Act, which provides $52 billion, was passed by the Senate in June and now awaits approval by the House. The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) describes it as “bipartisan legislation that would invest tens of billions of dollars in semiconductor manufacturing incentives and research initiatives over the next 5–10 years to strengthen and sustain American leadership in chip technology, which is essential to our economy and national security.”

But as Lazonick and his co-author Matt Hopkins report, most of the corporate members lobbying for the passage of the CHIPS for America Act have squandered the support they have received in the past.

They note that among the signatories on the SIA letter sent to Biden in February this year are five large stock repurchasers. Intel, IBM, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments and Broadcom did a combined total of $249 billion in buybacks over the decade 2011–2020, equal to 71 percent of their profits and almost five times the subsidies they are now seeking over the next decade.

The extent of buybacks is even greater in another lobby group, the Semiconductors in America Coalition (SIAC) formed in May this year to push for passage of the legislation. This group includes Apple, Microsoft, Cisco and Google. These firms spent a combined $633 billion on share buybacks in the period 2011–2020, more than 12 times money under the Act.

In the period from October 2012 to June 2021, Apple alone spent $444 billion on buybacks, equal to 87 percent of its net income. This is on top of the $114 billion paid out as dividends, representing an additional 22 percent of net income.

The corporate lobbyists of the SIA have a clear sense of where the political winds are blowing, with the emphasis by the Biden administration on the need to combat China. They wrote in their February letter that the decline in the US share of global semiconductor chip manufacturing capacity from 37 percent in 1990 to 12 percent in 2020 was “largely because the governments of our global competitors offer significant incentives and subsidies to attract new semiconductor manufacturing facilities, while the US does not.”

As for Biden’s professed ignorance as to the reasons for the American decline, Lazonick and Hopkins make clear he is well aware of the role of share buybacks. They note that as vice-president in 2016 he wrote an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal that “the government should take a look at regulations that promote share buybacks and tax laws that discourage long-term investment, saying “the future of the economy depends on it.”

But this president from Delaware, the home of American tax avoidance companies, is a long ago bought-and-paid-for creature of Wall Street. Moreover, the growth of parasitism has become so entrenched within the financial system and the economy as a whole that attempts to curb it threaten to set off a financial and economic crisis. The US response to its manufacturing decline is not going to be a return to the past but rather, as the crippling of the Chinese telecoms giant Huawei demonstrates, an intensified attack on its rivals.

To the extent that industrial and manufacturing capacity is developed it will arise from the drive to war, rooted in objective logic of the strategy of the “strategic competition” with China that the Biden administration has made central to its agenda.

Pandora Papers reveal finance minister profited from offshore account as misery ravages Brazil

Miguel Andrade

The recent leak of the so-called Pandora Papers by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) has revealed that Brazil’s Finance Minister, Paulo Guedes, has since 2014 kept a sum of US$ 9.5 million invested in a company named Dreadnoughts International, based in the British Virgin Islands. These assets have been protected from the massive 40 percent devaluation of the Brazilian Real since Guedes took over the post at the beginning of the Bolsonaro government, in January 2019.

The same period has seen a massive economic crisis that has plunged 112 million Brazilians—over half of the population—into food insecurity, while 19 million face outright destitution and hunger. The number of unemployed stands at 14 percent of the workforce, or 14 million workers, while another 20 million work partial hours.

The leak also revealed that from 2004 to 2019, an offshore account was kept by the head of Brazil’s Central Bank, Roberto Campos Neto. It was closed 14 months after he took office.

These revelations stand as a testimony to the rampant social inequality that is the defining trait of Brazilian capitalism. Only the 12th largest economy in the world, Brazil boasts the second largest number of billionaire offshore asset holders in the Pandora leak. Nearly 60,000 Brazilians keep US$ 192.6 billion exempt of taxes abroad.

The Pandora Papers revelations have provoked deep nervousness within Brazilian ruling circles. The major corporate newspapers— Folha de S. Paulo, Estado de S. Paulo, O Globo and Valor —have either ignored the scandal or focused entirely on foreign officials and international sports and pop music celebrities. Infamously, the financial daily Valor interviewed Campos Neto on Monday and failed to ask him a single question on the revelations. None of these corporate outlets is part of the IUCRJ, which is represented in Brazil by the web-based Metrópolis and Poder360 and the magazine piauí.

Major government critics in the corporate press, such as Globo’s Miriam Leitão, rushed to clear Guedes of any wrongdoing, stressing that he had duly reported his foreign assets to Brazil’s Federal Internal Revenue Service and the Presidential Ethics Committee. The latter is responsible for evaluating possible “conflicts of interest” involving the state officials and cabinet members, who are forbidden by law from holding financial interests directly affected by their policy decisions—such as the exchange rate of the Real, in the case of the finance minister and the Central Bank chief. In any case, the committee is known for rubber-stamping whatever “lack of conflict of interest” is declared by cabinet members.

Senior authorities also attempted to minimize the issue. Speaking for Congress, the president of the Senate, Rodrigo Pacheco, declared that “personal issues” related to Guedes “should not interfere in the country’s agenda.” The press conference in which he spoke had been called to announce a major breakthrough in negotiations between states, local governments and the federal government in a tax reform which has been dragging on since Bolsonaro took office, despite the fact that Guedes has repeatedly defined it as a government priority.

The corporate press and senior officials have shielded Guedes out of concern that his fall would generate further financial instability. The bourgeois opposition and major news corporations have opposed the Bolsonaro government largely on the basis that it is incapable of consolidating the “free market reforms” sponsored by Guedes.

The leading force within the political opposition, the Workers Party (PT), has fully lined up behind this right-wing opposition to Bolsonaro, despite its nominal criticism of Guedes’ “social insensitivity.” The party has for almost three years centered its criticism of Bolsonaro on the charge that he is incapable of stemming the hemorrhaging of financial assets from the country and the São Paulo stock exchange, driving the value of the Real down, and that he has damaged trade with China and Europe due to his reactionary anti-Chinese rhetoric and anti-environmental demagoguery.

More fundamentally, however, all of these forces are concerned with the explosive effect of the fact that Guedes has protected his private interests abroad while sponsoring brutal austerity, high inflation and Bolsonaro’s herd immunity policy at home—and that this has been a common practice of the country’s entire ruling elite. That includes the owners of the major news outlets, such as the Globo owners, the Marinho family, the owners of CNN Brasil, the Menin family, and of the far-right Jovem Pan radio.

Most significantly, it also includes several businessmen investigated by the Senate’s Commission of Inquiry (CPI) into Bolsonaro’s murderous herd immunity policy towards the COVID-19 pandemic. Some of the high-profile names in the Pandora Papers are major backers of the government, such as Otávio Fakhoury and Luciano Hang, who are accused of financing the president’s far-right rallies, and the Parrillo brothers, owners of the Prevent Senior private health care provider, all of whom have recently testified before the CPI. The Parrillo brothers stand accused of organizing barbaric experiments with quack cures for COVID-19 and hiding the resulting deaths at their hospitals.

Guedes has himself been recently brought to the center of the CPI, with the lawyer representing a group of doctors who previously worked for the Prevent Senior health provider declaring in her testimony that the criminal experiments in its hospitals were coordinated with Guedes’ ministry to provide public reassurances that the economy could be opened without provoking mass death, as “cures” for COVID-19 would be promptly available.

These mounting scandals are emerging against the backdrop of not only the COVID-19 pandemic’s mass death and destruction of entire families, but also the mass destitution of workers. Last week, horrific images circulated worldwide of workers in Rio de Janeiro scavenging for leftover bones and carcasses inside a meat delivery truck, while TV cooking programs were showing how to use chicken feet in soup recipes and avoid impossible meat prices.

Also last week, in the leading meat-producing state of Santa Catarina in the south of the country, one of Brazil’s richest states, an image went viral of a butcher’s shop which put a plaque warning costumers that bones were “sold and not given away,” prompting the state Attorney General’s Office to intervene to prohibit charging for scraps. In northern Pará state, where the fishing industry dominates the protein market, fish carcasses are being sold.

Meat prices have gone up 30 percent in Brazil on a yearly basis. That is far above the record-breaking 10.42 percent inflation recorded for September against September 2020, the highest figure since February 2016, months before PT president Dilma Rousseff was impeached by the House on trumped-up charges of breaking budget rules.

For September alone, the inflation rate stood at 1.16 percent, the highest figure since the Real was established in 1994, ending hyperinflation in Brazil. At the same time, the yearly inflation rate for meat is lower than the 40 percent inflation for gasoline, and 37 percent for diesel oil, the main fuel used by Brazil’s truck-dependent internal transport of goods. Staples such as rice and beans have gone up by over 30 percent, cooking and heating gas by 32 percent, and 21 percent for household electricity. The worst drought in 90 years in the Southern Cone, caused by global warming, has dried up hydroelectric dams and rivers, affecting energy output, agriculture and inland shipping between major agricultural regions of Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina.

On Tuesday, despite attempts by the media and state authorities to minimize or ignore the revelations, their explosive fallout forced the House to call Guedes to speak on the issue in a session scheduled for October 19. It is the first time ever that a finance minister has been called to Congress to testify on such matters in Brazil. A poll by Realtime BigData on Friday found that 64 percent of respondents believe Guedes should be fired.

It is unclear whether deputies will pressure Bolsonaro to dismiss Guedes in order to dissociate himself from the scandal. Whatever his fate, it is clear that Congress, including the PT-led opposition, is working to cover up the intractable crisis of Brazilian and international capitalism, denying the connection between financial speculation and the capitalist system in Brazil and internationally.

After announcing that the PT would ask the Attorney General’s Office to investigate Guedes, the party’s leader in the House, Deputy Elvino Bohn Gass, tried to blame Brazil’s high inflation on Guedes’ profiteering in betting against the Real. He tweeted, in a stupid attempt at irony: “Do you understand? The higher the exchange rate to the dollar, the richer Paulo Guedes gets.” Former president Rousseff, interviewed on Thursday by the union-sponsored Workers’ TV news agency, said Guedes exemplified the “insensitivity of a ruling elite heir to slavery,” that is, which is not capitalist enough.

The PT’s feigned “indignation” is ludicrous. Guedes was the founder of one of the largest investment banks in Brazil, BTG Pactual – after being trained as an economist in Chicago and working under the fascist dictator Augusto Pinochet in Chile amid his “neoliberal” shock policies. The story of his Dreadnoughts International company begins in 2014, as the Brazilian Central Bank, under the Rousseff presidency, began a massive sale of reserves to calm the markets and avoid the devaluation of the Real.

The PT, whose primary function has been to serve national and international financial interests, was thoroughly unable to stem capital flight. Having won reelection on a bogus anti-austerity platform in October 2014, Rousseff reshuffled her cabinet and named as finance minister another Chicago-trained economist, Joaquim Levy, who would be appointed by Guedes himself as the head of the country’s development bank, BNDES, when he took office. On September 1, the PT-led opposition vote massively in favor of Guedes’ income tax reform which kept offshore assets exempt of taxation.

A genuine struggle against growing social inequality in Brazil and internationally requires a break with capitalism and all of its nationalist defenders such as the Brazilian PT, whose sole concern is that of avoiding the exposure of the massive untaxed assets of the rich provoking a social explosion.

Philippines overwhelmed by COVID-19 onslaught

John Braddock

Southeast Asia, home to more than 650 million people, has reportedly experienced the worst COVID-19 outbreak in the world in recent months. The Delta variant has devastated countries which have failed to contain the more contagious strain, amid delayed and chaotic vaccination rollouts.

The region’s disaster has been compounded by the near-collapse of chronically underfunded healthcare systems and widespread losses of jobs and incomes. Popular disaffection is rising as millions of people, mostly impoverished, suffer the worsening impact on lives and livelihoods of the failure of capitalist governments, locally and around the globe, to protect them from COVID-19.

Bloomberg’s Covid Resilience Ranking for September listed Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam in the bottom five countries worst hit. The Philippines fell to last place following a sharp decline over the course of 2021.

The monthly snapshot—a pointer to where finance capital sees the virus being handled the most effectively and with the least social and economic upheaval—ranks 53 major economies on 12 data points related to virus containment, “the economy” and “opening up.”

On October 6 the Philippines recorded 9,847 new cases with a 7-day average running at 12,455. Total cases have risen to over 2.6 million, with 115,328 active cases and a death toll of 38,937. Most of the deaths occurred during a spike in March–April, followed by the latest surge beginning in July.

Vendors sell food and water to waiting residents at a vaccination center in Quezon city, Philippines on Monday, Sept. 13, 2021 [Credit: AP Photo/Aaron Favila]

At its peak in mid-September, the 7-day average was running at 21,000 cases and 400 deaths. The death total is second-worst in Southeast Asia after Indonesia, which has registered 142,600 dead among a population of 273.5 million.

The Philippines last month had the second-worst positive test rate in Bloomberg’s rankings, at 27 percent—only above Mexico. The government is however only testing the sickest patients for COVID and there are likely high levels of undetected community infections.

According to the Philippine News Agency on October 5, the country has a total of just 77,410,640 doses. Fewer than 22 million people are fully vaccinated, in a population of 110 million. Spokesman Harry Roque stated the government was “not surprised” that the Philippines and other Southeast Asian nations landed at the bottom the Bloomberg list, as richer countries get more vaccines.

Attempting to shift blame from his own government, authoritarian President Rodrigo Duterte previously threatened to arrest people who do not get a vaccine. Limited access to vaccines, however, has been compounded by official inefficiency, callousness and neglect. Chaos overtook vaccination sites in Manila in August as thousands of people tried to receive a shot before a partial two-week lockdown. Rumours had spread that unvaccinated people would not be allowed to claim government aid or go outside.

The WSWS last April characterised Duterte’s response from the outset as a “militarized police operation,” aimed not at ending the transmission of the virus, but at suppressing social opposition. The government channeled over $US19 billion in public funds towards paying off state debt to major investors instead of implementing proper public health measures.

In spite of a long running lockdown in March–April 2020, workers were kept on the job in unsafe factories and offices, continuing to pump out profits for capitalist corporations. Workers in Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industries, export processing zones, banking, financing, and mining were exempted from lockdowns and forced to work throughout the pandemic.

Duterte has used the pandemic to boost the role of the military in line with his brutal authoritarian agenda. In April last year, he declared he would order the police and military to shoot dead anyone “who creates trouble” during lockdowns. The warning came after residents in Quezon City staged a protest along a highway near their shanty houses, declaring they had not received any food packs and other relief supplies since the lockdown began two weeks earlier. After they refused to disperse, police broke up the protest and made arrests.

Government handling of the pandemic has further been hampered by a 1991 law that made city, town and village leaders responsible for the health system. Village-level health teams often follow rules set by mayors or chieftains, resulting in a fragmented response. Tracing and testing remain slow with local officials in charge. The goal of inoculating all adults, or 70 percent of the population, this year is unlikely to be met.

The pandemic has exposed the under-staffing and dire working conditions in the health sector, particularly for nurses. Hospitals are understaffed and low on beds, forcing patients to queue. Nurse-to-patient ratios are at a low of 12.6 nurses per 10,000 people.

Al Jazeera reported that in April 2020, just a month into the first outbreak, nurses and hospital staff were resorting to using rubbish bags and motorcycle helmets as protective gear. A video went viral on social media, prompting an outpouring of donations from citizens. The health department’s 2020 budget was cut by 10 billion Philippine pesos ($US197m), with Duterte calling health workers heroes who would be “lucky to die for their country.”

Before the pandemic, one in five was living in extreme poverty. Government policies have worsened inequality. As of last February, 4.2 million people over the age of fifteen were unemployed, while 7.9 million were underemployed or worked reduced hours. Many are unable to buy food and other essential items to survive, but the government has offered only paltry support payments of $US20 to $80 per fortnight to low-income households.

A grass-roots movement of community pantries has sprung up on the streets to provide food and other assistance. Some marginally better off sections of the population have spontaneously organised to provide aid to those who are enduring harsh food shortages. Meanwhile, according to Forbes, 17 billionaires have increased their combined wealth to over $US45.6 billion.

The crisis has developed into a widespread social disaster in densely populated, impoverished communities such as San Roque, where families live in one or two-room dwellings and share bathrooms with neighbours. The lack of running water, access to nutritious food and dilapidated housing in poor communities makes hand washing, maintaining good nutrition, and self-quarantine virtually impossible.

Short-lived lockdowns were re-imposed in March and again in August on Manila’s National Capital Region and surrounding provinces, home to 14 million people. While curfews and checkpoints on working-class and poor neighbourhoods were set up, workers were again kept working in BPO industries, export processing, banking, factories and offices. This did not stop Philippine shares falling by 3.5 percent on the stock exchange in early August.

Under a new “localised” lockdown introduced in Manila on September 13, the government eased movement restrictions and allowed fully-vaccinated people more public access. Restaurants and beauty salons have been reopened, public transport is operational, and limited in-person classes will soon resume, though with vaccination so low that raises the risk of further transmission. Although borders are closed to most foreigners, migrant workers can return, straining inadequate quarantine facilities.

Like other countries throughout Southeast Asia, the Philippines is under enormous pressure to “open up” its economy and force the impoverished masses to “learn to live with the virus.” Bloomberg commends the action taken by European countries now leading its Resilience Ranking, linking improved vaccination rates to a program of “normalisation,” that is, the homicidal policy of “herd immunity.”

375 Michigan children infected with COVID-19 every day

Zac Corrigan & Genevieve Leigh

A new report from the state of Michigan released Tuesday shows a steady rise in COVID-19 cases among children, with over 375 children under 12 years old becoming infected each day over the previous week. As of Friday, 35 children are now hospitalized with the virus across the state, more than double the number from one month ago.

The report also makes an explicit warning about the dangers of Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children (MIS-C), stating, “Expect cases to rise in future” because “Higher community transmission is followed by higher incidence of MIS-C cases nationally.”

Slide from "MI Covid response data and modeling update", October 5, 2021 [Source: State of Michigan]

MIS-C is a horrific condition observed in some children infected with COVID-19, in which “multiple organ systems become inflamed or dysfunctional,” as the report explains. At least 169 children and adolescents in Michigan alone have suffered MIS-C so far, the majority of them younger than 12. Over 70 percent of MIS-C patients have been sent to the ICU and five have died so far.

Contrary to the claims of the Biden administration, children can catch COVID-19, suffer severe symptoms, and even die from the virus. Last week, 22 children died from COVID-19 in the US, bringing the nationwide pediatric death toll to 520. Michigan is one of several states that do not report the total number of child COVID-19 deaths, but among the victims was an 18-year-old student at Decatur High School, near Kalamazoo. Internationally, COVID-19 is now the leading cause of death among children in Brazil.

Recent studies also indicate that roughly one in seven infected children develops Long COVID, suffering debilitating symptoms months after infection. Another study showed an average loss of two to seven IQ points in those who have recovered from COVID-19. For comparison, lead poisoning can cause a loss of two IQ points.

In-person learning is not only putting children’s lives and health at risk; it is fueling the spread of the pandemic through communities throughout Michigan and nationally. The daily new case rate in Michigan has increased over 75 percent since schools fully reopened across the state one month ago, with the seven-day average going from 2,360 on September 7 to 4,175 on October 7. The new report shows that school-aged children (5-18 years old) saw a rapid rise in infections and hospitalizations over the same time period, larger than any other age group.

With Michigan’s daily new case rate on the rise, K-12 schools are not only the largest source of the recorded COVID-19 outbreaks across the state. For the third week in a row, schools are the source of the absolute majority of new outbreaks in Michigan.

The latest weekly data from the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services shows 167 new recorded outbreaks. Ninety-four of them were at K-12 schools. The next most likely place to catch COVID-19 in Michigan last week was at a nursing home, where 26 outbreaks were recorded.

This is in spite of the fact that on September 28, Michigan changed the way it measures outbreaks in schools, now requiring at least three related cases to constitute an outbreak instead of two. Schools were the only type of location which underwent that change, yet even with this handicap they remain the highest recorded source of transmission.

The 94 new outbreaks are on top of another 270 ongoing outbreaks at K-12 schools in Michigan that were initially recorded last month but continue to grow. The state’s largest ongoing outbreak is at St. Charles High School in Saginaw County, where 48 students have tested positive so far in a growing outbreak first recorded on September 20. Next is Cedar Springs High School in Kent County, outside of Grand Rapids, with 44 COVID-positive students.

Click here for interactive map of COVID outbreaks in Michigan K-12 schools.

Map of COVID-19 outbreaks in K-12 schools in Michigan [map data Copyright 2021 Google Maps]

Even these figures underestimate the degree to which schools cause community spread, because only students and teachers are included in the case totals. Family members of children and teachers who become infected in the same chain of transmission are not included in these outbreaks, nor are any other members of their communities who may catch COVID-19 from a child, teacher or school staff member outside of a school. Since the pandemic began, over 140,000 US children have lost a parent or caregiver to COVID-19.

This is not the first time that school reopenings have fueled a surge in cases in Michigan. In March, the reopening of schools while the Alpha variant was spreading produced a massive spike in cases throughout the state.

The Delta variant—which is now responsible for 99 percent of COVID-19 cases in Michigan—is at least twice as contagious as the original “wild type” of COVID-19 and can cause “breakthrough” cases among those who are fully vaccinated.

Science shows that although masks and vaccines reduce the spread of COVID-19, these measures cannot stop the spread of the highly contagious Delta variant. However, school districts across the state are touting these inadequate mitigation measures to pretend schools are safe to open when they are not.

The mask issue is being used to attack public health and public education from two flanks: on one side, the Michigan State Legislature recently passed a reactionary law that takes away funding from schools that have mask mandates; on the other side, schools that do have mask mandates are using it as an excuse to flout contact tracing and quarantines.

As Evart Public Schools Superintendent Shirley Howard wrote in a letter to parents on September 21, “Wearing a mask prevents your child from having to quarantine if they are identified as a close contact to someone who has tested positive for COVID.” Since then, outbreaks have been recorded at Evart High School (3 cases), Evart Middle School (9 cases) and Evart Elementary School (5 cases).

Masks, vaccines and other mitigation measures are important, but they must be incorporated into a comprehensive program of public health measures aimed at bringing COVID-19 infections down to zero in ever-broader geographic regions and ultimately eradicating the virus worldwide. These necessary measures include the temporary closure of schools and nonessential workplaces, mass testing, contact tracing, the safe isolation of infected patients, travel restrictions, and more. If implemented in a combined manner and coordinated globally, the pandemic could be brought to an end within months.

How to Avert Afghanistan’s Food and Economic Crises

John Sifton

Afghanistan’s humanitarian situation is spiraling into catastrophe.

Millions of Afghans are now facing severe economic stress and food insecurity in the wake of the Taliban’s August takeover, set off by widespread lost income, cash shortages, and rising food costs. Officials with the UN and several foreign governments are warning of an economic collapse and risks of worsening acute malnutrition and outright famine.

Surveys by the World Food Program (WFP) reveal over nine in ten Afghan families have insufficient food for daily consumption, half stating they have run out of food at least once in the last two weeks. One in three Afghans is already acutely hungry. Other United Nations reports warn that over 1 million more children could face acute malnutrition in the coming year.

One main cause of the crisis is that governments in August stopped payments from the World Bank-administered Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund, previously used to pay salaries to millions of civil servants, doctors, nurses, teachers, and other essential workers. Afghanistan’s health and education systems, among other sectors, are collapsing. Millions of Afghan families have lost their incomes.

At the same time, Afghan banks and global financial institutions, including Western Union, MoneyGram, and the Central Bank of Afghanistan, now lack enough paper currency to cover withdrawals. Account holders receiving foreign transfers or with “money in the bank” — ordinary Afghans, companies, UN agencies, humanitarian aid organizations — can’t access their money.

Donor governments are understandably concerned about actions that would bolster or appear to legitimate Taliban authorities who are arbitrarily arresting and attacking activists, journalists, and former government workers and adopting policies and practices that violate the rights of women and girls to education, employment, and freedom of movement. They have already imposed severe restraints on activists, women, and the media and resumed executions.

But Afghanistan’s underlying economic and humanitarian problems, which disproportionately affect women and girls, cannot simply be ignored because of the Taliban’s record.

The U.S. Treasury on September 24 did issue new guidance and licenses that authorize electronic transfers with Afghanistan banks and other entities for humanitarian purposes. The problem is that electronic transactions alone cannot address the crisis. The Afghan Central Bank needs to be able to supply physical dollars and afghanis.

But after the Taliban takeover, the New York Federal Reserve cut off the Central Bank’s access to its U.S. dollar assets and capacity to settle U.S. dollar transactions with other banks — and its capacity to purchase paper dollars from the Federal Reserve to ensure liquidity and currency stability. The World Bank also stopped the bank from accessing its assets held by the International Monetary Fund.

U.S. dollar transactions, including paper transactions, are integral to Afghanistan’s economy. Most of the country’s gross domestic product comes from outside the country in the form of dollars — donor money, remittances, export income. If the Afghan Central Bank isn’t provided with a method of settling dollar accounts and obtaining new paper currency in dollars, liquidity problems and cash shortages will only grow worse. Local currency issues also need to be addressed. Companies that print Afghan currency in Europe, concerned about sanctions, still cannot ship new bills to Kabul. Taliban authorities have no capacity to print money.

Afghanistan’s economy has a limited capacity for resilience. The new Taliban authorities, like the previous government, do not possess adequate revenue sources to fund basic government services. This is a country that has relied on outside donors to help with such services for most of its modern existence.

The UN has announced a plan to send $45 million to support the health sector via UN agencies — but this will not solve the paper and liquidity crises. It’s not the UN’s role to fly millions of physical U.S. dollars into Afghanistan. Foreign governments need to figure out how to restore funding to public services, not only health but also education, using the country’s banks and without enriching the Taliban or facilitating their abuses.

In doing so, the U.S. government and other main donors to Afghanistan will need to adjust sanctions policies and reach agreements allowing the Central Bank to process selected transactions and obtain paper currency. Donors and the Taliban will also need to agree on methods for supporting vital services through independent organizations such as the UN or non-governmental organizations.

The Taliban will have to accept that concerns about providing direct budgetary support, and preventing corruption, will require independent financial oversight of transactions — something UN and international financial authorities already do. The Taliban will also need to accept that donors will only support assistance and services that are equitably distributed to women and men, girls and boys, and allow systems to monitor and ensure that services benefit all Afghans.

Inaction is untenable. The Taliban’s cruelties are horrendous, but walking away from past support for vital services, politically and economically isolating the country, and maintaining overbroad, blanket financial restrictions, won’t mitigate the abuses, but only hurt the Afghan people more.

The Privatization of “Jihad”

Ron Jacobs

Modern jihad is exactly that—modern. It is not a revival of an ancient instruction from the Koran, nor is it even what the author of the Koran or its classical interpreters had in mind. Instead, modern jihad as practiced by self-proclaimed Islamic organizations like Al-Queda and the Islamic State(ISIS) is a manifestation of this age of neoliberal capitalism. No longer is jihad carried out with an army of the Caliphate or even a state, but by a private group of individuals acting perhaps in concert, but just as likely as disconnected individuals angry at their lives and the society they exist in. Like those who shoot up high schools and those who murder dozens from hotel windows in Las Vegas or nightclubs in Orlando, the protagonist of this so-called jihad are symptoms of the economics and politics of their time and the atomized society of today.

This atomization is the result, if not the intention, of capitalism’s latest phase—neoliberalism. As the reader most likely knows, the main features of neoliberalism involve the destruction of the social element of human civilization. Services provided by the state are either privatized or just terminated. The process begins with services provided to the poor. From there, other services follow. Universities once generously subsidized by the state find their budgets reduced, causing them to raise tuition, hire part-time instructors, and farm out their research resources to the very industries benefiting from the end of state-funded education. Roads and other infrastructure are left to disintegrate while private developments and their financiers build private roads while state governments push through more and more tolls on existing and new construction. The wealthiest few pay little or no taxes to the state, which now serves them to a degree never before seen in recorded history. Indeed, the system for which Wall Street is a synonym is now the state in the USA, if not the world. Traditional forms of resistance seem increasingly futile; antiwar movements mutate into support for one of the war parties while social democrats and democratic socialists in power lead the rush to transform the government into another set of privatized entities funneling the public money to the bank accounts of that wealthy few.

This is the foundation of author Suzanne Schneider’s new book, The Apocalypse and the End of History: Modern Jihad and the Crisis of Liberalism. Simultaneously a brief history of the roots of jihad, its meaning throughout history and its relationship to the Muslim worshiper, the text is also a critique of modern capitalism and the effects of its predatory nature. The reader is presented with the essence of western colonialism and imperialism and their role in the creation of today’s increasing inequalities and accompanying despair. In addition, the discussions of the changing roles of state actors in relation to private capital and the effect those roles have on the ordinary human provide a context that applies to phenomena well beyond the primary focus of this book—modern jihad. Perhaps even more important is her argument that neoliberal capitalism was “prefigured—if not actively constructed—in the colonial world.” (227) In other words, the trappings of neoliberalism we are growing more familiar with each day—authoritarian mechanisms to control the population, hyper-surveillance, the privatization of the public sphere, and the irrelevance of popular politics—were created and honed by the west in its colonies. Now, not only are the populations of former colonial and imperial powers experiencing the economic and racial inequalities that were the basis of colonial rule, those populations are also experiencing the measures of control developed and refined in the former colonies by the imperial powers. Of course, certain elements of the populations in the imperial states have always been under the regimes of poverty and oppression; especially the Black population in the United States.

In her look at acts and groups of individual terror throughout history, Schneider considers groups as disparate (and similar) as the FLN in Algeria, various anarchists and leftists in Europe, Tsarist Russia and the United States, and certain Latin American organizations. She correctly compares the nature of the works of modern religious terrorists—suicide bombings, car bombs—to those historical actors. The difference in the two lies in their intent. Schneider points out that the majority of the leftist and anarchist terrorists undertook their actions as a means of moving the revolutionary struggle for social justice forward. Targets were usually chosen because of their status and their meaning in the structures of oppression. ISIS, on the other hand, seems to act out of a desire to kill anyone because we are all guilty. The hope for a better existence for the ISIS terrorist exists after they are dead. Making life on earth better is apparently a pointless exercise. This is one reason why she connects the modern “jihadist” with those young men who shoot up schools and other public facilities; they share a similar hopelessness and disconnect from the world the live in. Both have been given lives empty of meaning in a world full of distractions designed for profit-making and without regard to the human need for purpose and connection. In the extreme cases of this “jihadism” and mass shootings identified with solitary young men, their purpose is destruction and their connection is to a glory fostered by hate and despair. As the examples of ISIS and various violence by far right actors especially in the US make clear, when these extremists are provided political/religious rationales for their violence by self-proclaimed leaders, their rage becomes murderous.

The Apocalypse and the End of History makes clear that there is no imperial military solution for the episodic terrorism done these days in the name of jihad. Indeed, it is the actions of the imperial military that help create the grounds for these self-proclaimed jihadists. Although Schneider provides little if any answers to the problems she examines, her discussion of the “jihadists,” their motivations and rationales most certainly need to be heard by those who would send their military to foreign lands. Their reasoning might be more similar to those of these “jihadists” than they think.