Winners and Losers in Sudan: On Proxy Wars and Superpower Rivalries in the Global South

Ramzy Baroud

The world is changing. In fact, it has been undergoing seismic change that long preceded the Russian-Ukraine war, and the recent US-Chinese tensions in the Taiwan Strait.

In fact, the US debacle in Iraq and the Middle East, and the humiliating retreat from Afghanistan were only signs of the decline in US power.

Leading US neoconservative strategists have once argued in “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategies, Forces, and Resources For a New Century” that aggressive intervention policies were meant to keep emerging great powers, like China, out of areas designated as US geopolitical domains. They sought to “preserve and extend (US) position of global leadership (through) maintaining the preeminence of U.S. military forces.”

They failed, and the future seems to head in a different direction than what the likes of Dick Cheney, John Bolton, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz had hoped for.

Instead, a whole new world order is emerging, one that is hardly centered round US-western priorities alone.

Indeed, what has taken place since the start of the Russia-Ukraine war in February 2022, and the provocative visit by then-US House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, to Taipei in August of the same year, are an acceleration of an existing momentum of global shifts, that ranged from the emergence of new economic alliances, geopolitical formations, turf wars and, of course, competing political discourses.

These changes are currently on full display in the Middle East, Africa and, indeed, much of the Global South.

While this can be considered a positive development, in the sense that a bipolar or multipolar world can offer alternatives to countries that have been at the receiving end of US-western exploitation and violence, it can – and will – have negative manifestations as well.

More Than a Power Struggle

Though the current war in Sudan is understood to be a power struggle between two rival generals or, more accurately, corrupt warlords, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, or Hemedti, it is also partly the outcome of a regional, and, increasingly, global power struggle as well. The regional and global dimension of the conflict in Sudan is itself an expression of the changing world order and the intense fight over resources and critical geographies.

Sudan is one of the richest African countries in terms of raw material, much of which remains un-exploited due to the country’s multifront and multilayered conflicts, starting in the South – which has led to the secession of the Republic of South Sudan, then West, namely Darfur and, as of now, everywhere else.

The North-South civil war and the Darfur crisis, too, were sustained and prolonged by outside parties, whether Sudan’s own neighbors or global powers. Sadly, in all these cases, the outcome was horrific in terms of human and material losses.

Sudan, however, was not the exception. Proxy wars in the Global South were one of the main features of the Cold War between Washington and Moscow, until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989-92. The dismantlement of the USSR, however, only exacerbated violence, this time channeled mostly through US-led or championed wars in the Middle East, Africa and Asia. Now that global rivalry is back with a vengeance, global conflicts, especially in resource-rich and strategic regions with no clear political allegiances, are also back.

Sudan will not be the last of such conflicts.

What complicates the picture in Sudan now is the involvement of other regional actors, each with a specific set of interests, as they take advantage of the quickly dwindling US leadership, which, till recently – was the Middle East’s primary political and military hegemon.

The current shifts in power relations in the Middle East – as in other parts of the world – are also significant within historical, not merely current political contexts.

History Reversed

Since the Sykes-Picot Agreement was signed in 1916 between old colonial powers – France and Britain – with a minor, but still important involvement of Tsarist Russia, the Middle East and North Africa, along with Central Asia, were divided into various spheres of influence. Global priorities then were almost entirely Western.

The Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 was a watershed moment in world history, as it sowed the seeds for a possibility of a new global bloc to rival Western domination.

It took decades for that new bloc to emerge. In 1955, the Warsaw Pact was born, “unifying the Soviet Union and its allies against the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a Western military alliance that saw the light six years earlier.

The rivalry between both camps was expressed in fierce economic competition, a political Cold War, a low-grade military conflict, proxy wars and two distinctly ideological discourses that defined our understanding of world politics for much of the 20th Century.

All of this came to a bitter end in the early 1990s. NATO won, while the Warsaw Pact, along with the USSR, disintegrated rapidly and in the most humiliating fashion. It was “the end of history”, Francis Fukuyama declared. It was the age of Western triumphalism and, by extension, more colonial wars, starting in Panama, then Iraq, Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq again, and elsewhere.

China factored in all of this, not as a major global political player, yet, but as a worthy adversary and prized ally. The historic visit by US President Richard Nixon to Beijing in 1972 thwarted efforts to unify the East against US-Western imperialism. That trip, which supposedly ‘changed the world’ – per the assessment of then-Ambassador Nicholas Plat, was indeed consequential. It was the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union as it gave Washington a massive advantage and strategic boost over its rivals.

But history is now being reversed in ways that only a few geopoliticians could have possibly predicted.

The New Powers

The road ahead is not entirely clear. But numerous signs, accompanied by tangible changes, suggest that the world is transforming. However, this metamorphosis is more visible in some regions than others. The geopolitical tug-of-war between old and new global rivals is most visible in the Middle East and Africa, in addition, of course, to South America, East Asia and Pacific regions. Each of these regions is undergoing its own re-ordering of power relations and dynamics.

In the Middle East, for example, Iran seems to be breaking away from its West-imposed isolation, while Saudi Arabia is challenging its old client regime status.

The latter move is particularly troubling for Washington, as it challenges two layers of Western domination of the Middle East: one which followed the Sykes-Picot agreement in 1916 – thus dividing the region into sub-regions under Western ‘protection’ and influence; and the other which resulted from the US-NATO invasion of Iraq. With massive political sway, an ever-growing military presence, and a weaponized US currency, Washington had dominated the Middle East with no serious competition for many years. This is no longer the case.

For years, Russia and China have been staking claims in the region, though using mechanisms that are wholly removed from the Western style of old colonialism and neocolonialism. While the Russians tapped into their long Soviet tradition of cooperation, the Chinese resorted to a more ancient history of friendly trade and cultural exchanges.

Now that Beijing has developed a more candid and unapologetic approach to foreign policy, China’s status as a new superpower shall demonstrate its effectiveness in the Middle East in unprecedented ways. In fact, it already has. The recent Iran-Saudi Accords was a tremendous achievement for the new politically-oriented China, but the road ahead is still very challenging, as the region is rife with foreign contenders, and old and new conflicts. For China to succeed, it must present itself as a new and better model, to be contrasted with Western exploitation and violence.

But China does not hold all the keys, as the US and its Western and regional allies continue to hold significant influence. For example, the UAE is emerging as a powerful player in the current war in Sudan.

What is certain is that the consequences of the current fight for resources, influence and domination are likely to lead to smaller, though bloody conflicts, especially in countries that are politically and socially unstable. Sudan fits perfectly into this category, which makes its current war particularly alarming.

Although much has been said and written about Sudan’s gold, agriculture potential and massive wealth of raw materials, the fight over Sudan by outside parties is essentially a turf war due to Sudan’s unparalleled geopolitical location. Egypt, Ethiopia, UAE, Israel, and others are all keen to emerge winners in the ongoing war. Russia is monitoring the situation closely from its various African bases. The US, Britain and France are wary of the dire consequences of direct intervention and the equally costly price of no intervention at all. China is still gauging the challenges and opportunities.

The outcome of the bloody Sudan war is likely to redefine, not only Sudan’s own political balances but the power relations of the whole region as well.

Netanyahu’s far-right government presses ahead with judicial coup

Jean Shaoul

The largest outpouring of popular opposition in Israel’s history took place on March 26, when hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in protest against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plans to neuter the country’s judicial system, the only arm of the state that his coalition of fascists and ultra-orthodox religious parties does not control.

It culminated in a full-scale walk out by workers the following day, shutting down government operations in Israel and overseas, education, healthcare, public services, transport and major industries.

Israelis opposed to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's judicial overhaul plan set up bonfires and block a highway during a protest moments after the Israeli leader fired his defense minister, in Tel Aviv, Israel, Sunday, March 26, 2023. [AP Photo/Ohad Zwigenberg]

Netanyahu’s judicial coup is bound up with a broader agenda of reinforcing Jewish Supremacy, apartheid rule, Jewish prayer at the al-Aqsa Mosque; rolling back already circumscribed anti-discrimination measures through sweeping changes to Israel’s legal system; and stepping up police and military repression against the Palestinians, and workers, Jewish and Palestinian, in Israel itself. It entails the gutting of what remains of Israel’s public services and massive transfers to the religious schools and seminaries.

Such a programme means eliminating the few restrictions on government power.

The scale of the opposition, precipitated by Netanyahu’s firing of his defence minister, Yoav Gallantwho warned that the plan to curtail the powers of the Supreme Court was splitting the Israel Defense Forces and posed a threat to Israel’s security—led to the temporary suspension of the legislative plans.

This came after three months of Saturday evening protests animated by justified fears of a dictatorship of the religious Zionists and the extremist settlers and anger over Netanyahu’s corruption, now the subject of a major trial. The protest movement has been fueled by immense social inequality, under conditions of soaring rents and prices in a country where around 20 percent of its 9.3 million population live in poverty and a handful of families have staggering levels of wealth; the impact of the global pandemic and the broader capitalist crisis fueling a strike wave by millions globally. It was also spurred on by opposition to the pogrom-like attack by settlers on Palestinians in Huwara in February.

This marked the greatest political crisis in Israel’s 75-year history, with Netanyahu and others admitting the country was on the brink of “civil war.” The weekly protests have continued, even after Netanyahu retracted his firing of Gallant. Repeated polls have shown that the vote for Netanyahu’s Likud party would collapse if an election were held now. He would win just 20 seats, down from 32 today, and his coalition bloc 50 seats, down from 64. Former Defence Minister Benny Gantz and his National Unity party would win around 30 seats, enabling him to form a coalition government.

But Netanyahu is pressing ahead nevertheless. His legislative pause came with a concession to the far-right, the establishment of a new National Guard, under the control of National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir of the fascist Jewish Power. The same forces employed against the Palestinians—fascistic settlers—in the occupied territories will now to be used against Israel’s Palestinian citizens and Jewish workers and youth as well.

On Thursday evening, tens of thousands of pro-government protesters gathered in Jerusalem in what was advertised as the “march of a million,” in support of the government’s plans and to insist that the judicial coup go ahead. Protesters chanted “We don't want compromise,” and “Fire [Attorney General Gali Baharav] Miara!” as prominent coalition figures, including Justice Minister and Likud member Yariv Levin, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich of the fascist Religious Zionism, Ben-Gvir and his fellow Religious Zionism legislator Simcha Rothman, took to the stage.

Ha’aretz reported that Israel's anti-overhaul protest movement responded to the right-wing demonstration by saying, “From this evening, the mask is off, and Israel is on the brink of dictatorship,” and pledging to continue the protests. It added, “Only one vote separates Israel from a dangerous messianic dictatorship,” saying that talks entered by the opposition parties, brokered by Israel’s figurehead president Israel Herzog, have proven a “scam.”

Parliament, reconvening on Sunday after a one-month recess, is expected to pass legislation that will enable the government to control the appointments to the Supreme Court. Gantz said that the talks at the President’s Residence, “haven't seen progress on any of the issues - especially the issue of the judicial appointments' committee.”

Throughout, Gantz and other opposition leaders, including former Prime Minister Yair Lapid and former generals and security and intelligence chiefs, have sought to confine the protests to vague demands for an end to the judicial coup. They have refused to even call for new elections.

According to leaked reports from US intelligence, moreover, the Histadrut corporatist trade union federation called the mass strike on March 27 only after a call from Netanyahu—stressing that this would in fact give him bargaining power with his coalition partners, calling it off the minute after his announcement of the legislative pause.

Committed like Netanyahu to the Zionist project of settlement expansion, annexation of the occupied territories and Jewish Supremacy, these self-proclaimed leaders have opposed all attempts to mobilise support among Israeli Arabs and the Palestinian population of the occupied territories more so. Early attempts to include the Palestinians were discouraged and Palestinian flags were ruled out of order. Instead, the demonstrations have been drowned in a sea of blue and white Israeli flags, provided and paid for by the organisers and distributed every week, crowding out the home-made banners that were a feature of the earlier protests. Their intention was to send a signal to the bourgeoisie and Israel’s international backers in the US and Europe that this was not a “left,” pro-Palestinian or anti-Zionist movement.

These Zionist leaders have stolen the traditional symbol of right-wing protests, including the infamous annual Jerusalem Day Flag March, marking the capture of East Jerusalem during the June 1967 Arab Israeli war. Far-right and religious Israelis celebrate the day, which falls on May 18 this year, by marching through the Damascus Gate and the Old City carrying Israeli flags and hurling racist abuse at East Jerusalem’s Palestinian residents.

Gantz and Co are right-wing politicians who represent Israel’s high-tech employers and the most affluent social layers. Differing little in their policies from Netanyahu, they fear that a power grab by a scandal-ridden and indicted prime minister, beholden to fascistic forces, endangers the stability of capitalist rule and the Zionist state. Their aim is to engineer some kind of national unity government that would oust the fascists. They have the backing of the Biden administration, “concerned” that its regional subcontractor will provoke a Palestinian uprising that could spill over into Israel and its neighbours and jeopardise the covert war against Iran and its allies in the region that is an essential component of Washington’s broader plans for war with Russia and China.

The so-called centrist leaders that presently control the protest movement offer no way forward for either Israeli or Palestinian workers and are handing the initiative back to Netanyahu and his fascistic supporters. The struggle against Netanyahu’s judicial coup takes place as workers are coming into struggle against their capitalist leaders all over the world, including in the occupied West Bank where teachers have been on strike for the last two months. It is part of a broader, international struggle whose features, whatever the local differences, are broadly similar: opposition to war, dictatorship and economic hardship.

Arcturus COVID mutation claims five lives in Britain

Barry Mason

The new Arcturus variant of COVID-19 had claimed five lives in the UK as of April 17, with 120 infections recorded. Arcturus is now present in over 30 countries.

Cases of the new variant have been reported in all areas of Britain apart from the North East. The largest numbers are in London, with 31, and the North West, with 22. The median age of those affected is 74.

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in Britain there have been nearly 25 million cases officially reported and over 224,000 deaths. There has long been no daily reporting of COVID infections and fatalities. The latest figures for weekly deaths are only available to April 14, showing 547 with COVID-19 on the death certificate.

According to the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), Arcturus is responsible for around 2.3 percent of new UK COVID cases. The Centre for Disease Control reports that the new variant accounts for 9.6 percent of COVID cases in the United States.

In late April, the World Health Organisation (WHO) upgraded Arcturus to a variant of interest. It is one of 600 subvariants of the Omicron virus and was first detected in India on January 23, where it has since led to a surge in cases. The WHO said the proportion of cases of COVID caused by Arcturus rose from 15 percent to 58 percent between February and March this year.

Arcturus is closely related to another COVID subvariant, XBB1.5, known as Kraken, which is currently dominant in Britain.

Research indicates that Arcturus could be 1.2 times more infectious than the last major sub-variant and the most transmissible variant yet. University of Tokyo scientists have suggested its increased infectivity compared to the Kraken variant means it will spread globally in the near future and that it appears resistant to antibodies produced by previous COVID-19 infections.

The WSWS noted on April 3, that the “K478R mutation on the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein makes the new variant more capable of dodging antibodies from prior immunity, whether due to vaccination or infection. The mutation also enhances its infectiousness and virulence. Since XBB.1.6 has emerged, it has quickly outpaced XBB.1.5, spreading almost twice as fast.”

The abandonment long ago in Britain of all mitigation measures and monitoring has enhanced the danger any new variant presents. Professor Stephen Griffin, chair of the Independent SAGE body, which criticised the Conservative government’s response to COVID, has called for regular testing the use of face masks.

He told the Daily Mail, “the reality is the virus continues to do harm and those least able to cope continue to suffer… In the absence of population-scale mitigations... the focus remains upon individual risk… vulnerable people will continue to require precautions and, ideally, others will act with an appropriate level of altruism.”

The fact that a new variant is now taking lives underscores the warnings from scientists that new waves of disease are likely and that the defunding of infection monitoring, the dismantling of key infrastructure and the erosion of National Health Service provision leave the country unprepared to deal with them.

Computer modelling shows a more than one in three chance of another pandemic along the lines of COVID-19 in our lifetimes. The increasing encroachment of humans on natural ecosystems increases the possibility of new zoonotic infections, those spread to people by bacterial or viral infection existing within a reservoir of host animals.

Sir John Bell, an immunologist who was a member of the UK Covid Vaccine Taskforce and former government chief scientific adviser, warned last month that Britain is now no more prepared for a new novel pandemic than it was for COVID-19. Quoted in an April 24 Independent article, Bell explained, “Despite everything we have learned, we are not ready for the next pandemic. The next pandemic could be even more devastating than the last. We must be in a constant state of readiness for the next big health crisis if we do not act now, we will not be forgiven.”

Sir David King, a former chief scientific adviser to the government who formed and led Independent SAGE, accused the government of failing to provide the funding for NHS investment to prepare for a new pandemic threat—which he predicted would occur within the next 15 years.

He told the Independent, “We’re in the same position as we were in 2020. Nothing has changed... if anything it has got worse… If you wait for the next epidemic, which I think is where the government may be now – if you wait until the next vaccine is developed, for whatever disease that is, it will take months and months for that vaccine to arrive. We cannot rely on that. We will have many, many cases, it’ll get really out of hand again, and then we’ll have hospitals completely overwhelmed by an outbreak of this kind.”

A section of the 500-metre-long National Covid Memorial Wall in May 2021, which had 150,000 hearts on representing the number of people who have lost their lives to COVID. The wall is opposite the Houses of Parliament in London. In the months since the UK death toll has risen to above 200,000. [Photo: WSWS]

The newspaper also published a warning from Professor Teresa Lambe, one of the leading members of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine programme, who criticised the dismantling of COVID-19 tracking systems.

Lambe said of the new variant, “We have learnt time and again that we need to track this virus carefully to distinguish if the current vaccine recommendations are enough. Without more of a concerted effort to work together and invest in pandemic preparedness, we are sitting ducks for the next virus.”

Other experts warned of the consequences of mothballing COVID testing labs and suspending construction of the UK Vaccine Manufacturing and Innovation Centre.

In a Research Professional News article of November 30 last year, Deepti Gurdasani, a clinical epidemiologist at Queen Mary University of London, said, “There is this idea in the UK that the pandemic is over, and the worrying part is that vaccine development is also ending. This is very concerning because we’ve already had four waves this year and we are seeing variants which are becoming increasingly resistant.”

In line with the anti-scientific and profit-driven response of the ruling elite internationally, the Tory government turned off the NHS COVID app on April 27. Initially beset by technical failures, the app was ultimately downloaded by over 21 million users and enabled around 1.7 million people to self-isolate after the app showed they had been in close contact with an infected person. It is estimated to have saved thousands of lives and prevented millions of people from becoming infected.

The app was a vital tool in particular for the half a million immune-compromised, clinically vulnerable people whose health and lives are most at threat from COVID-19 infection.

The UK’s estimated two million Long COVID sufferers have also been abandoned. An example of its crippling impact was provided by Tanysha Dissanayake in a Sky News broadcast of April 26. A promising tennis prodigy, Dissanayake told Sky how the disease had put paid to her career: “I have come a long way since a year ago… I couldn’t even open by eyes to watch Netflix. But in terms of my life and full recovery, I am still so far away from where I need to be.”

New reports on Jeffrey Epstein demonstrate deep-going corruption of US ruling elite

Patrick Martin

A report in the Wall Street Journal, published on the newspaper’s front page Monday morning, links important figures in the US business and political elite to financier and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, who died in a federal prison in Manhattan in 2019 under circumstances that strongly suggest he was murdered to keep him quiet.

The Journal reporters wrote that they had gained access to Epstein’s private diary and other documents, “which include thousands of pages of emails and schedules from 2013 to 2017, [that] haven’t been previously reported.” The diary listed meetings with dozens of individuals, though it supplied little information about the content or subject of the meetings. The bulk of these engagements were at Epstein’s palatial townhouse in Manhattan.

Among those prominently mentioned in the Journal report were two high-level officials of Democratic administrations: William Burns, currently CIA director, formerly deputy secretary of state in the Obama administration; and Kathryn Ruemmler, currently general counsel for Goldman Sachs investment bank, who was White House counsel in the Obama administration.

CIA Director William J. Burns [Photo: Central Intelligence Agency]

Two liberal, pro-Democratic Party cultural figures were also named in Epstein’s diary: Leon Botstein, president of Bard College and director of the American Symphony Orchestra; and Noam Chomsky, retired MIT professor (now 94) and occasional critic of US foreign policy, one of the founding fathers of the anti-Marxist pseudo-left.

There is no suggestion that any of these individuals took part in Epstein’s now notorious exploitation of teenage girls. They did not fly on Epstein’s private plane to his estate in Florida or his private island in the Caribbean, like former President Bill Clinton, future President Donald Trump, senators George Mitchell and John Glenn, attorney Alan Dershowitz and Britain’s Prince Andrew (brother of the new king).

Rather, they met with Epstein as a billionaire who had unparalleled connections with other billionaires, long after his role as master procurer for the US ruling elite had begun to come to light. 

In particular, Ruemmler, who had been a US Attorney in Georgia and headed the Justice Department prosecution of Enron, would have been acquainted with the prosecutor who let Epstein off with a legal slap on the wrist, Alexander Acosta, the US Attorney for south Florida, who was later Trump’s secretary of labor.

Ruemmler had several dozen meetings with Epstein as the Manhattan legal representative of Ariane de Rothschild, when the banking family was seeking new sources of investment among the US super-rich.

Kathryn Ruemmler (former White House counsel, now Goldman Sachs counsel) [Photo: Pete Souza]

The most important connection reviewed by the Journal account was between Epstein and his longtime banker, JPMorgan Chase, which only closed Epstein’s accounts in 2013, five years after the financier pled guilty to a solicitation charge in Florida involving a 14-year-old girl. Representatives of JP Morgan’s private bank, which handles the affairs of super-rich clients, continued to meet with Epstein until at least 2017.

In the course of their nearly 20-year relationship, “the bank would come to manage some 55 Epstein-related accounts containing hundreds of millions of dollars,” the Journal reported. Epstein’s principal advocate within the bank was Jes Staley, who ran the Asset Management Division from 2001 to 2009. During that period the division more than doubled in size, from $605 billion to $1.3 trillion. 

Staley went on to become CEO of Barclay’s Bank in Britain from 2015 to 2021, when he was forced out over revelations that he had concealed his close ties to Epstein. This relationship included exchanging 1,200 emails during a four-year period, in the course of which Epstein sent him suggestive photos of teenage girls, while Staley, a visitor to Epstein’s properties in Florida and the Virgin Islands, wrote back at one point, “That was fun. Say hi to Snow White.”

Much of the new information is the result of two lawsuits filed in federal court in Manhattan concerning Epstein’s activities in the Virgin Islands, where his private island, Little St. James, the scene of much of the sexual abuse, is located.

The suits by the Virgin Islands Attorney General and by one of Epstein’s victims, now a young woman, are against JPMorgan Chase. (The young woman, identified only as “Jane Doe,” is also suing Deutsche Bank.) They charge that the bank played a major role in financing the abuse that continued in the decade after Epstein’s initial conviction for solicitation and are seeking compensation for the victims.

JPMorgan acknowledged the meetings with Epstein but claimed bank officials met with him as the representative of other bank clients, not about his own investments. Such “work” was the starting point for Epstein’s rise to great wealth and the continuing source of his enormous income. In a single such deal in 2004, for connecting Highbridge Capital Management with JPMorgan, Epstein raked in a $15 million “finder’s fee” when the bank bought a controlling stake in the hedge fund for $1 billion. 

The bank has also countersued Jes Staley, claiming that he knew of Epstein’s involvement in sex trafficking but concealed this information from other bank executives. Despite this claim, federal District Judge Jed Rakoff issued a ruling May 1 that JPMorgan could be found liable for damages if the plaintiffs could prove that Staley or other bank officers knew of Epstein’s exploitation of young girls.

Given the existence of internal emails, uncovered in the lawsuits, in which mid-level JPMorgan employees discussed Epstein’s indictment in 2006 and subsequent guilty plea to one count of soliciting, this should be easy to demonstrate. JPMorgan compliance staff warned executives about Epstein, and they reclassified his accounts as “high risk,” the Virgin Islands lawsuit claims.

In 2010, a compliance officer sent an email to an executive that read: “See below new allegations of an investigation related to child trafficking—are you still comfortable with this client who is now a registered sex offender.” The bank continued to profit from Epstein’s accounts for another three years, and bank officials met with him regularly for four years after that, according to his private diary.

From left, billionaires Mortimer Zuckerman, Sergey Brin, and Michael Ovitz [AP Photo/Scott Roth, Evan Agostini, Evan Agostini]

The list of those who have already given depositions in the Virgin Islands suits is a who’s who of billion-dollar fortunes. They include Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google; Thomas Pritzker, executive chairman of Hyatt Hotels and brother of Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker and Obama Education Secretary Penny Pritzker; Michael Ovitz, former CEO of Disney; Leon Black, Wall Street financier; and Mortimer Zuckerman, real estate mogul and publisher.

JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, himself a billionaire, has been subpoenaed. On April 25, Judge Rakoff ordered him to set aside two entire days to give sworn testimony in the suits. At least 20 lower-level bank officials have already given depositions, according to reports in the Journal and the Business Insider website.

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon [AP Photo/Michel Euler]

The suits have become the subject of a vicious conflict within top circles in the US Virgin Islands. Governor Albert Bryan, a Democrat who once approved “lucrative tax benefits” for an Epstein-owned company, according to the New York Times, fired Attorney General Denise George on December 31, 2022, four days after she filed the lawsuit against JPMorgan Chase. In March of this year, he removed her interim successor, Deputy Attorney General Carol Thomas-Jacobs, by appointing her to a judgeship. Assistant Attorney General Ariel Smith is now interim attorney general, but the lawsuit continues.

Significantly, there has been almost no reporting of the Virgin Islands suits and the high-profile depositions in the corporate media aligned with the Democratic Party, particularly the New York Times. This is in keeping with the role of the Times in relation to Epstein’s death in prison, where the newspaper unquestioningly parroted the declarations of prison officials that he had died by suicide, despite the contrary evidence uncovered by his family, who hired longtime medical examiner Dr. Michael Baden to conduct a second autopsy.

The Times continues its silence on this topic even as the federal Department of Justice refuses to release its final report on Epstein’s death. A lengthy article in Business Insider March 14 documented the complaints of lawyers for Epstein’s victims and of Mark Epstein, Epstein’s brother and next of kin, that the DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz has still not released a final report, some three and a half years after the alleged suicide.

Mark Epstein said he still had not been able to obtain some medical records, including the report by the EMTs who were called to the scene when Epstein was found hanging from a rolled-up sheet in his cell. The two critical questions—how did Epstein die, and how did the prison staff in the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) allow it?—have not been answered, the Business Insider account declared. The report continues:

Within those questions are a number of smaller mysteries, still unresolved. Why was Epstein’s body moved after his death, in violation of jail protocol? If his body was found hours after he already died, why did paramedics try to push air into his lungs? If he hanged himself, why does Baden believe the bone fractures in his neck were more consistent with strangling? Why would he tear strips of bedsheets to make a noose instead of using the cord of his sleep-apnea machine? Why weren’t the cameras watching his cellblock working the day he died? Who else was incarcerated in the same block, and did they see anything?

Two MCC prison guards were fired for failing to regularly check on Epstein, as required, particularly given a previous suicide attempt. The Bureau of Prisons shut down the MCC in August 2021 and transferred all the inmates to other prisons.

In a separate criminal case, Nicholas Tartaglione, the former cellmate of Epstein’s, who was moved out just before the alleged suicide, was convicted April 6 of four counts of murder. A policeman turned drug dealer, Tartaglione killed Martin Luna, subordinate in the drug ring whom he suspected of stealing money, and three nephews whom Luna had brought to a meeting as reinforcements.

Tartaglione was in the cell during the first “suicide” attempt by Epstein, and the selection of such a prisoner, charged with crimes involving torture and execution-style killings, to share quarters with Epstein, raises many unanswered questions.

It appears that the reports in the Wall Street Journal, owned by ultra-right billionaire Rupert Murdoch, and in Business Insider, owned by the Axel Springer media group, publisher of several Murdoch-style right-wing tabloids in Germany, are part of a ferocious conflict within the ruling elite. 

The Journal report comes only two weeks after Murdoch was forced to agree to a $787 million payment to Dominion Voting Systems to settle a lawsuit over slanders against the company promoted by Fox News after the November 2020 US presidential election, which provided political fuel for Trump’s attempted coup against Congress on January 6, 2021.

Viewers of Succession will have no difficulty in recognizing the methods employed in the largely subterranean conflict within this narrow and infinitely corrupt social stratum—perhaps 2,000 billionaires who actually rule America. Here everyone knows everyone (including their vices and weaknesses), but a mutual amnesty usually keeps such information out of the public domain.

And there is little doubt that some scenes in the film Eyes Wide Shut, which depict depravity and violence among wealthy New Yorkers, are inspired by a reality that goes much further.

New Zealand COVID deaths continue to mount

Tom Peters

New Zealand is currently experiencing its fourth wave of COVID-19 infections since the Labour Party-led government ended its Zero COVID policy in late 2021 and adopted the criminal program of mass infection demanded by the corporate and financial elite.

Since the start of the pandemic, according to the Ministry of Health, there have been 2,682 confirmed COVID deaths and another 392 where data is “not available,” but which occurred within 28 days of getting the virus—a total of 3,074 deaths.

[Photo: Ministry of Health data/WSWS]

A further 1,080 people died within 28 days of testing positive, but the Ministry claims that these deaths had nothing to do with COVID-19, giving no further details. The country’s all-cause mortality increased by 10 percent in 2022, with 3,642 more deaths compared to 2021.

With about 20 COVID-related deaths per week, epidemiologist Michael Baker estimated last month that 1,000 people could die from COVID-19 in 2023—about twice as many as die from influenza each year. 

The toll could well be higher if there is a spike in deaths during the winter months (June-August), as happened last year, or if more immune-evading and severe variants become dominant. The Arcturus or XBB.1.16 variant, which has fueled an explosion of cases in India and is spreading throughout the world, was detected in New Zealand in mid-April.

Hospitalisations have risen sharply in the past two months. In the week ending April 23 there were 365 hospital admissions for COVID-19, more than double the 148 admissions for the week ending February 19.

So far, New Zealand has recorded a total of 28,223 hospitalisations for COVID-19, including 3,060 among children under 10 years old. It is estimated that about half the population has been infected at least once, meaning that tens of thousands of people are likely to have Long COVID, a debilitating condition affecting multiple organs including the heart, lungs and brain.

The government insists that working people must accept continual waves of infections, deaths and long-term illnesses from COVID-19. Last September, mask mandates and practically all other remaining public health measures were lifted, leaving few obstacles to the spread of infection.

Chris Hipkins speaking to the media on April 11, 2023 [Photo: Chris Hipkins MP]

On April 11, Prime Minister Chris Hipkins told the media: “We are heading towards a point where COVID-19 is becoming normal,” with hardly any public health restrictions remaining. “We are moving to that era where COVID-19 is just one of those things the Ministry of Health manages,” he said, adding that the mandatory seven-day self-isolation period for positive cases could be lifted in coming months.

The government is also refusing to keep track of the real levels of infection. On April 27 the Ministry of Health announced it would not proceed with two planned surveys—an infection prevalence survey and a sero-prevalence survey—that would have indicated the amount of COVID-19 in circulation and the level of immunity in the population.

A spokesperson for the Ministry told the New Zealand Herald that the country had “passed the emergency stage” of the pandemic and such surveys “would be unlikely to meaningfully alter any current public health response.”

Despite official claims that the “emergency” is over, COVID-19 is still tearing through schools, workplaces, and aged care facilities. The unions, which fully collaborated in reopening the economy and scrapping public health measures such as masks, have remained silent about the crisis.

Otorohanga College in the central North Island has announced on Facebook that it will move to distance learning this Thursday and Friday because of the rise in staff testing positive for COVID. The closure has not been reported in the media or by the Post-Primary Teachers’ Association (PPTA), which raises the question: how many other schools are having to make similar decisions?

An editorial in the New Zealand Medical Journal in March, by epidemiologist Amanda Kvalsvig and colleagues, pointed out that the Disability Rights Commissioner had called on the government to reinstate mandatory masking in schools during periods of high transmission, but this and other recommendations to improve air quality and properly track infections had been ignored. Meanwhile, “when families opted to keep children at home these absences were recorded as ‘unjustified.’”

The scrapping of public health measures is part of a broader austerity agenda. Speaking to a business audience on April 27, Hipkins boasted that “between now and 2024, government spending is set to fall by the largest amount since at least 1987, due in part to the rapid rollback of COVID spending underway.” 

The government is slashing spending from about 35 percent of gross domestic product to “the low thirties,” with major cuts to health, education and other services. 

Around 1,600 administrative jobs are likely to be lost in a restructure of the public health system. This is in the context of a deepening staffing crisis, with a shortage of 4,000-5,000 nurses and a major shortage of doctors and other staff.

According to a parliamentary select committee report, in the Counties Manukau district of South Auckland alone last year there was “a shortfall of 127 [general practice doctors] already, and with population growth, this situation could worsen.” 

Throughout the country, hospital emergency departments are often dangerously overcrowded. Today, Stuff reported that a 79-year-old man with serious heart and breathing problems, taken by ambulance to Palmerston North Hospital on April 24, had to wait 30 hours to be admitted. A staff member said the hospital was “hugely unsafe, underfunded and under-staffed.”

Health NZ spokesperson Lyn Horgan said: “An increase in patients presenting with COVID-19 and winter-related illness, especially over the past two weeks, has stretched our capacity even more.”

Waiting times for vital surgeries have also soared. Dunedin Hospital, which serves a population of 300,000 people, has reportedly closed down some of its cancer services due to a shortage of radiation oncology consultants. Brain Tumour Support Trust spokesperson Chris Tse told Radio NZ on April 3 that the situation was “a slow-moving train wreck” leading to shorter lives. In one case, a patient diagnosed with “an aggressive brain tumour” in December had still not seen a radiation oncologist by late February.

After First Republic takeover, banking crisis deepens

Nick Beams

A security officer walks outside of a First Republic Bank location in San Francisco, Wednesday, April 26, 2023. [AP Photo/Jeff Chiu]

Throughout the latest phase of the US financial crisis, which started with the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in mid-March, the Biden administration, regulators, and financial authorities have insisted the banking system is “sound” and “resilient” because their interventions, at least so far, have prevented a meltdown on the scale of 2008.

But reality is speaking louder. The past two months have seen three of the four largest banking failures in US history, eclipsed only by the failure of Washington Mutual in 2008.

In the wake of the deal to take over the failed First Republic bank—the second biggest collapse in history—Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, which bought the bank, said, “This part of the crisis is over” and the rescue operation “pretty much resolves them all.”

Market response yesterday told a different story as the shares of significant regional banks plunged. The shares of PacWest dropped by 27.8 percent, and trading was briefly halted because the fall was so steep, and an index of regional bank stocks dropped 5.5 percent, its worst day since March 17 as the SVB crisis was spreading.

A chain reaction has been set in motion as the market “is focusing on the weakest links and looking for banks that are vulnerable” and going from “the weakest bank to the [next] weakest bank,” one analyst told the Financial Times.

Another commented that it was “one domino after the next at the moment” with the bears in the market “moving on the next place to short.” Short selling involves borrowing a stock and selling it in anticipation it will fall in price and then buying it back at the lower price and returning it to the lender, making a profit on the deal.

Other comments have focused on the longer-term situation for middle-sized and regional banks.

Mimi Duff, managing director of the wealth management firm GenTrust, said: “What’s going on today is a flight to quality. We feel like the stresses in the banking system are not over.”

According to Julian Wellesley, global banks analyst at the financial firm Loomis Sayles, “We may be moving into a chronic phase of the crisis. It’s a difficult outlook for regional banks.”

Those difficulties center on fears that depositors will withdraw their money and place it with safer larger banks and concerns that the value of loans made by regional and middle-sized banks, particularly in real estate and commercial property, are being hit hard by the Federal Reserve’s rapid hike in interest rates.

The crisis at each bank has its own set of circumstances. For SVB it was set off by the loss in market value of the US Treasury bonds on which it gorged itself when interest rates were low, and it was flush with cash from high-tech start-up companies bankrolled by venture capitalists. In the case of the failed Signature Bank, it was its connection with crypto currencies.

For First Republic, it was the mortgages it had made at very low rates to high-wealth individuals. Others will be hit by the loss of value on commercial property and real estate.

But these problems have the same root cause: the Fed’s escalation of interest rates from near zero just a year ago to around 5 percent, with a further rise expected to be announced tomorrow.

The interest rate hikes are the outcome of a protracted crisis of the American financial system which has been developing over the course of several decades, going back to the stock market crash of October 1987.

That crisis resulted in a major shift by the Fed in which it responded to the crash and every succeeding financial storm, arising from speculation, by pumping money into the financial system to fund the next round.

This policy was put on steroids after the crash of 2008, in the wake of which the Fed began its quantitative easing program, buying up government debt to keep interest rates at historical lows.

It was further accelerated after the crisis of March 2020 when the US Treasury bond market froze at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Fed doubled its holdings of financial assets virtually overnight to around $8 trillion.

At the same time, the refusal of the US government and governments around the world to eliminate COVID, fearing that necessary public health measures would produce a stock market crash, created a supply chain crisis which set in motion the largest rise in inflation in four decades.

This created a situation with which the Fed and other central banks had not had to confront over the previous period—the upsurge of the working class for wage demands, striving to break out of the shackles imposed by the trade unions from the end of the 1980s.

The Fed, together with other major central banks, then turned to deal with what it considers the greatest danger of all—a resurgent working class—and initiated interest rate hikes to try and suppress it by inducing a major economic slowdown and recession if necessary.

This has now transformed the financial landscape, a transformation which was the subject of discussion involving top-level financiers organised by the Milken Institute in Los Angeles over the weekend.

Addressing the new conditions, Karen Karniol-Tambour, co-chief investment officer of the giant hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, took issue with market beliefs that the Fed will cut interest rates before the end of the year.

“It’s time for the markets to fully digest how constrained central banks are going to be relative to the last 30, 40 years, when every time there was a tiny murmur of a problem, you could just lower rates [and] print money,” she said.

IMF chief Kristalina Georgieva presented a picture of a financial system, bloated by the trillions of dollars pumped into it, that is out of the control of would-be regulators.

She blamed “complacency” for the US banks runs, saying there was unnecessary deregulation with a price to pay. “Supervision has not been up to par” as she pointed to the rapid pace of the US bank runs, the like of which has never been seen.

“It is the speed money can move from one place to another. It goes into the territory of the unthinkable,” she said.

And the outlook is not for improvement but a worsening of conditions. The expected Fed interest increase has already produced warnings of recession as the number of job openings had fallen to its lowest level in two years, under conditions where the banking crisis is leading to a credit crunch.

Then there is the issue of the US debt ceiling. US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen sent a letter to Congress on Monday warning if is not lifted, the Treasury may not be able to pay its bills by June 1. This could spark a default and cause serious harm to business and consumer confidence, raise short-term borrowing costs and “negatively impact the credit rating of the United States.”

The latter issue has major significance.

One of the reasons the Fed has been able to turn on the financial taps every time a major problem emerges is because of the role of the dollar as the global currency.

But this is now being undermined both because of the continuing banking and financial crises and the ongoing war within the American political establishment manifested in the Trump coup attempt of January 6, 2021, a war which is being continued with the debt ceiling standoff in Congress.

Viewed in this context, the banking turmoil is a major component of a deep-seated crisis of American capitalism. It is not possible to predict the exact course of events. But one thing is clear: the response of the ruling class to this crisis will be to intensify its attacks on the working class to make it pay.