The recent New York state $229 billion budget passed last week, over a month late, is catastrophic for the housing needs of the poorest layers of the working class all over the state and especially in New York City. Removed from the budget was a “good cause” eviction bill that would have prohibited landlords from evicting tenants for reasons other than violations of their leases, such as the failure to pay rent.
People watch as a formation of the Blue Angels and Thunderbirds flight teams pass in front of the New York City skyline as seen from Weehawken, N.J., Tuesday, April 28, 2020. [AP Photo/Seth Wenig]
Also removed from the budget was the Housing Access Voucher Program which would have allowed as many as 50,000 homeless people a relatively easy way to obtain housing vouchers. Other endeavors, such as a commitment to build 800,000 more units of housing statewide were also excluded.
To compound the social misery, the New York City Rent Guidelines Board, a city agency that sets the amounts by which landlords can raise rents in the nearly 1 million rent-stabilized apartments in the city, voted to allow increases for 1-year leases of 2-5 percent and for 2-year leases of 4-7 percent, a devastating burden on hundreds of thousands of the elderly and working class families.
Since the expiration of the New York State eviction moratorium in January 2022, evictions in the state have skyrocketed. There were nearly 194,000 of them in 2022 up from 69,000 in 2021.
Fearing a social explosion because of mass unemployment and poverty, Democratic politicians in New York state in March 2020 enacted the COVID-19 Emergency Eviction and Foreclosure Prevention Act, which suspended eviction and foreclosure procedures in the state for homeowners and renters who faced a loss of income due to the pandemic. The act was extended in 2021.
There are nearly 3.5 million renter occupied households in New York state of which 2.1 million are in New York City. Over half of renters in New York City spend more than 30 percent of their income on rent while one-third spend 50 percent or more.
The state has the highest percentage of renters in the US, with roughly 47 percent of the households being renter occupied. Manhattan is tied with Singapore as the most expensive city in the world, and housing costs are routinely cited as the main factor for the high cost of living.
In Manhattan, rent for a small studio (single room dwelling) averages $3,275 a month, and $5,173 for a two-bedroom apartment. Prices in the city’s outer boroughs are only nominally more affordable, though a few neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens are registering higher average rents than Manhattan.
According to The Eviction Lab at Princeton University, New York City led the nation in terms of evictions prior to the pandemic and the highest eviction rates are in the poorest areas. Last year, nearly 74,000 evictions were filed in the Bronx, the poorest urban county in the United States, compared to 38,000 in more affluent Manhattan, which has a somewhat larger population.
One issue facing the evicted is right to counsel. New York City’s Right to Counsel law was the country’s first to promise representation to the poorest tenants facing eviction. Statistics show that 84 percent of those targeted for eviction who received counsel stayed in their homes. However, the share of those receiving counsel has been trending downward.
State data shows that only 36 percent of tenants received legal counsel when appearing for an eviction case this year as opposed to 98 percent of landlords.
In February 2023 there were nearly 75,000 people spending the night in city run shelters and thousands more living on the streets, in encampments and in abandoned buildings. The city’s Department of Education estimates that 104,000 students are homeless, using a broader measure that includes families who have doubled up with relatives or live in their cars.
One of the huge contradictions in the housing crisis in New York City is found in the decades-long construction boom and the precipitous rise in homelessness in the same period. Between 2010 and 2020, some 206,000 new residential units were created. Over the same period, according to the Coalition for the Homeless, homelessness in New York City rose 112 percent.
Many of the new units built during the construction boom are rentals owned by large real estate concerns. There have been suggestions by some industry observers that the large landlords have been keeping apartments off the market to keep prices artificially high.
Many of the condominium units coming on the market are bought by investors who buy in bulk and then rent them. The housing boom, fueled by low interest rates and city tax incentives to builders, has done nothing to alleviate the housing crisis.
According to a report by the City Planning Commission, “Generally, the highest concentrations of housing growth were in transit-accessible neighborhoods in Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and portions of Manhattan. There has generally been little housing growth or loss in lower-density neighborhoods.”
In other words, most of the new housing has been built in areas served by existing transit lines. Decades of underfunding public transport has exacerbated the housing situation by limiting development in areas with inadequate public transit.
The housing crisis in New York is compounded by a systematic lack of investment in public housing. According to the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA), the number of vacant units in the city’s public housing system operated by NYCHA has jumped more than 600 percent in a year. It had 486 vacant units in January 2022. That number had risen to 3,593 by February.
But these have made little dent in the years-long waiting list, since they are withheld for move-in for a variety of reasons, such as the need for cleaning, which NYCHA cannot afford. An additional 1,000 apartments have been taken off the list of rentable apartments because they need extensive repairs. Over $40 billion is needed for repairs to NYCHA housing, and residents must wait years for the most basic maintenance requests to be fulfilled.
Ostensibly to fund repairs, NYCHA has allowed 36,000 units to come under private management. Housing advocates have expressed alarm over the creeping privatization or “collocation” of private development in the public housing projects. It is rightly seen as a prelude to complete privatization.
These problems at NYCHA did not happen overnight, but rather are the result of years of underfunding under both Democratic and Republican administrations, and they have only been exacerbated by the social dislocation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Currently, over 70,000 NYCHA residents owe a total of $466 million in back rent, which is forcing NYCHA to use reserves slated for capital improvement. The average amount owed is $6,000 and the average annual income of an NYCHA resident is $24,000.
In stark relief to these conditions for the poor, an apartment on so called “Billionaires’ Row” near Central Park in Manhattan was listed last fall for $250 million. An 800-square-foot mobile home in a trailer park in the resort town of Montauk on Long Island sold for $3.75 million.
In New York City, the most densely populated and expensive big city in the country, the state and city governments, both controlled by Democrats have fueled the crisis by ending the eviction moratoriums as rents and living costs have increased.
The 75th anniversary of the establishment of the State of Israel takes place on May 14. It was officially marked in Israel on April 25, according to the Hebrew calendar, following the annual Memorial Day commemorating those who fought and died in the war that established the state and in Israel’s subsequent wars, as well as those on active duty in the service of the state.
The official anniversary was a muted occasion. It was held amid the largest eruption of mass protests by Jewish Israelis in the state’s history against plans to curb the powers of the Supreme Court in a constitutional coup by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud coalition government of fascistic religious and settler parties. The scale of opposition to the most far-right government in Israel’s history has led to repeated warnings of a descent into civil war, threatening the survival of the state. This has been accompanied by the deliberate stoking of war fever by Netanyahu, targeting the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, Israel’s own Arab citizens and neighbouring states, above all Iran and Syria, that support some Palestinian militant factions opposing Israel.
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]
Since Netanyahu and his far-right bloc took office last December, his government has set about consolidating its power at the expense of the judiciary to facilitate the suppression of social and political dissent. The government is seeking to pave the way for the permanent annexation of much of the occupied West Bank and bloody military interventions against not just the Palestinians but also Iran and its allies. Netanyahu’s coalition also plans to disqualify Palestinian Knesset members from serving in the Israeli parliament and to ban their parties from standing in elections, permanently disenfranchising 20 percent of Israeli citizens.
This would consolidate the apartheid-style constitutional changes centred on Israel’s 2018 Basic Law, the Nation-State Law, enshrining Jewish supremacy as the legal foundation of the state. The law proclaims, “The right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.” It declares support for the permanent annexation of the whole of Jerusalem “complete and united” as Israel’s capital and endorses settlement construction as a “national value.” This and the removal of Arabic as an official state language assigns a second-class status to Israel’s own Arab citizens, as numerous human rights groups have testified.
The official opposition to these moves is led by a disparate group of bourgeois Zionist parties whose disagreements with Netanyahu reflect concerns that he is endangering the interests of the state. They are implacably opposed to any linking of the emerging fascist threat in Israel with opposition to the oppression of the Palestinians and Arab Israelis. If a way of opposing the danger of dictatorship and war that would spread beyond Israel-Palestine is to be found, then this is the central issue that must be addressed.
Had Israel accepted the Gregorian calendar, the foundation anniversary would have taken place the day before Nakba Day, marking “the Catastrophe” suffered by the Palestinians and the displacement of most of the Palestinian people before and following Israel’s establishment. Only by examining the relationship between these two events can workers, Jewish and Arab, formulate a political response to the desperate and tragic situation into which Zionism has plunged them both.
The establishment of Israel
The crisis unfolding in Israel is the product of deep-rooted contradictions, political and ideological, within the Zionist state. It is fueled by the growing divisions between the working class and the ruling elite in one of the most unequal countries in the world. Israel’s foundation was rooted in the catastrophe that overtook European Jewry in the 1930s and 1940s, culminating in the extermination of six million Jews in the Nazi Holocaust following the defeat of the European working class by fascism.
"Selection" of Hungarian Jews at Auschwitz, 1944. Almost the entire Jewish community of Hungary, numbering 400,000 people, was gassed in Auschwitz in the summer of 1944.
As was explained in a WSWS perspective by Bill Van Auken written in 1998 to mark the 50th anniversary of Israel’s founding:
Within Israel’s birth and evolution are concentrated the great unresolved contradictions of the 20th century. Its essential origins lie in one of history’s greatest crimes against humanity, the Nazi Holocaust. The extermination of six million European Jews was, in turn, the terrible price paid for the crisis of the working-class movement brought on by the Stalinist degeneration of the Soviet Union and the Communist International. Stalinism’s crimes and its domination over the workers movement prevented the working class from putting an end to the crisis-ridden capitalist system, which found in fascism its last line of defense.
The defeats of the working class, the crimes of Stalinism and the horrors of the Holocaust created the historical conditions for Israel’s creation and the Zionist movement’s largely successful attempt, aided both by US imperialism and Stalinism, to equate Zionism with world Jewry. It was a movement and a state founded ultimately on discouragement and despair. Stalinism’s betrayals produced disillusionment in the socialist alternative that had exercised such a powerful appeal to Jewish working people all over the world. The crimes of German fascism were presented as the ultimate proof that it was impossible to vanquish anti-Semitism in Europe or anywhere else. Zionism’s answer was to get a state and an army and beat the historical oppressors of the Jewish people at their own game...
Their efforts were successful, as Europe’s stateless and homeless surviving Jewish population was directed to Palestine for very definite geopolitical reasons. Washington, which had closed US borders to Jews fleeing Nazi oppression, saw the emergence of the Jewish state in the Middle East as an instrument for asserting its own hegemony in the region at the expense of the old colonial powers, Britain and France.
Israel’s founding as a Jewish state was only made possible by involving a people who were seeking a safe-haven from persecution and brutality in a great crime—the forcible expulsion of almost a million Palestinians and the seizure of their land in a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing.
The founding myths promoted by Zionism include the claims that Jews had returned to their biblical “promised land”, from which they had been expelled 2,000 years ago, and that the establishment of a Jewish capitalist state would provide “A land without people for a people without land”.
This latter claim was a transparent but politically necessary lie.
Following World War II, the newly formed United Nations, successor to the League of Nations that had awarded a 25-year “Mandate” to Britain in 1922 to control Palestine in preparation for independence, proposed the partition of Palestine—reduced in size after Britain’s creation of what is now Jordan—into two separate and non-contiguous Arab and Jewish statelets, with Jerusalem under international control. The reactionary proposal, which was never ratified, sparked the eruption of a civil war between Jews and Palestinians and the 1948 Arab-Israeli war involving Egypt, Jordan, Iraq and other Arab states. The latter followed proclamation of the State of Israel on May 14, following the expiry of the British Mandate. Israel was to take control of over one-third more territory than called for under the partition plan. The Palestinians were largely driven out.
When Israel was founded, Jews made up only one third of the population of Mandatory Palestine, with 1,157,000 Palestinian Muslims, 146,000 Christians, and 580,000 Jews. Two years later, only about 200,000 Palestinians remained in what became Israel. They were to remain under military rule until 1966.
Israeli soldiers in battle with the Arab village of Sassa in the upper Galilee. [Photo by National Library of Israel/digital ID. 990040390490205171/Gideon Markowiz / CC BY-SA 3.0]
Several thousand Palestinians were killed, while at least 700,000 were driven out or fled, becoming refugees in neighbouring countries where they found shelter in makeshift tent camps. There are at least 31 confirmed massacres. Accounts of atrocities include those at the village of al-Dawayima, where Israeli forces killed children by “smashing their skulls with sticks”, and Saliha, where soldiers executed between 60 and 80 inhabitants by driving them into a building and then blowing it up.
Those Palestinians who were driven out, along with their descendants, were banned from returning to Israel. Their homes and property were seized by the Israeli state. Israel has ever since refused to acknowledge the Nakba and its ethnic cleansing or to accept the Palestinians’ Right of Return, as enshrined in international law and UN Resolution 194 passed in 1948 during the Arab-Israel war.
In contrast, Israel’s 1950 Law of Return and the Citizenship Law of 1952 granted every Jew the right to immediate citizenship on arrival in Israel. In the three years following the war, about one million Jews emigrated, some from the ruins of Europe but mainly from the Middle East and North Africa.
An organically anti-democratic society
From its inception, therefore, Israel, built on the forcible suppression of the Palestinians and at war with its neighbours, was organically incapable of developing a genuinely democratic society. It emerged as a militarised state surrounded by hostile neighbours and based on upholding religious exclusivism. It rapidly developed nuclear capabilities, becoming the heavily funded garrison of US imperialism, with the army serving as the central pillar of society.
The greater Israel’s military and political “successes”, the more surely its rightward and anti-democratic trajectory was confirmed. Once viewed by many as a valiant underdog and home to a population that had suffered terrible historical wrongs, Israel was to become the preeminent military force and sole nuclear power in the region.
Israeli tanks advancing on the Golan Heights, June 1967 [Photo by Government Press Office (Israel) / CC BY-SA 4.0]
In 1967, with US backing, Israel invaded Egypt, Syria and Jordan, seizing the West Bank of the Jordan River, East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights and the Gaza Strip and creating a fresh round of refugees. This conflict gave rise to the formation of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) under the leadership of Yasser Arafat and an unequal military struggle between Israel and the Palestinians.
Israel’s political landscape was transformed, along with economic and social life.
The war and settlement construction heralded the shift to an expansionist “Greater Israel” policy, with a resurgent right wing demanding that the newly occupied territories be brought under Israeli sovereignty as the biblical lands of Samaria and Judea, promised by God to the Jewish people. This necessitated the continued ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians and Jewish colonial-style settlement.
The course was set for the constant eruption of wars, including the Arab-Israeli war in 1973, military aggression against Syria, Lebanon, and Iran and repeated assaults on the essentially defenceless and impoverished Palestinians in the occupied territories that created new waves of refugees and internally displaced people.
Israel’s ultra-Orthodox political parties, especially in the context of periodic waves of Jewish immigration, became a powerful force, imposing Jewish religious law in areas previously deemed secular, and determining the formation of governments that became ever more right-wing. Conflict between secular and orthodox Jews has become a feature of social life in every sphere.
This is what created the basis for the emergence of the fascist tendencies within the political and military establishment. As the World Socialist Web Site has explained, “These are the forces that now dictate government policy and threaten not only the Palestinians but most Israelis with brutal repression.”
The decades since the 1970s also saw an extraordinary funneling of social wealth upwards and the growth of desperate poverty. By 2010, around 20 Israeli families controlled about half the Israeli stock market and owned one in four Israeli firms. Ten business groups, mostly owned by wealthy families, controlled 30 percent of the market value of public companies. Israel boasts 71 US dollar billionaires, 6.7 for every million people, one of the highest per capita in the world, although not all are resident there.
A homeless man in Israel in 2006. [Photo by charcoal soul/Flickr / CC BY-ND 2.0]
At the opposite pole, Israel today ranks second only to the US as the most unequal among the Organization for Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. It has the third highest poverty rate in the OECD, behind Bulgaria and Costa Rica. Its poverty rate is almost double the OECD average. Poverty now impacts more than 27 percent of all Israelis and more than a third of all children, with over 10 percent (312,000 families) facing severe food insecurity. This prompted mass protests in 2011 in the wake of the Arab Spring—a precursor to the political unrest that has now erupted against Netanyahu’s judicial reform.
The false promise of Oslo, the PLO and the Palestinian Authority
The constant feature of Israeli life has been the grotesque treatment of the Palestinians. No official move to end this conflict has changed political realities. The much-heralded 1993 Oslo Accords brought an end to the almost six-year Palestinian intifada against Israeli occupation. But its terms, determined by Israel, set a trap for the Palestinians. It offered the mirage of a “two state solution”, which in fact consisted of a mini-bifurcated and non-contiguous Palestinian statelet alongside Israel. In return, Arafat and the PLO agreed to recognize Israel, guarantee its security and renounce the armed struggle for Palestinian liberation.
Prime Minister of the Palestinian National Authority Mahmoud Abbas, United States President George W. Bush, and Ariel Sharon, Red Sea Summit, Aqaba, June 2003
Ignoring the Nakba, the Right of Return, the position of Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian entity, and the future of the Zionist settlements, Oslo established the Palestinian Authority (PA). A nominal government in waiting, it had no control over its borders, with supposedly full jurisdiction over Gaza and just 18 percent of the West Bank (Area A), and joint jurisdiction with Israel over 22 percent (Area B). Fully 60 percent of the West Bank (Area C), home to most of the settlements, remains under Israeli military control.
Its central function was to police Palestinian opposition to Israel, with Prime Minister Yitzakh Rabin hailing the fact that the PA “will allow no appeals to the Supreme Court and will prevent the Israeli Association of Civil Rights from criticising the conditions there by denying it access to the area.”
Even this caricature of a state was an anathema to Ariel Sharon, Benjamin Netanyahu and their Likud Party. They cheered on the crowds baying for the blood of Rabin, just days before he was assassinated by a right-wing Israeli fanatic in November 1995. At Camp David in the summer of 2000, Labour Prime Minister Ehud Barak made clear that a proposed withdrawal from parts of the West Bank and Gaza would leave the Palestinians just 15 percent of original Palestine. Arafat refused to sign, and the “peace process” was at an end. This was exemplified by Sharon’s provocative visit to the Al-Aqsa Mosque/Temple Mount compound and the eruption of a second intifada.
Yasser Arafat in 1997 [Photo by National Library of Israel/digital ID. 990040390490205171/Gideon Markowiz / CC BY 4.0]
Thereafter, all the Zionist parties put forward policies aimed at countering the “demographic problem” and expanding control over West Bank.
Today, there are approximately equal numbers of Jewish Israelis and Palestinians living in Israel-Palestine, with the Palestinians soon set to become the majority. Moreover, if the State of Israel was measured by the reality of the population whose fate it determines, it would include not only the 9.3 million Israelis living within its internationally recognised pre-1967 borders, of whom 2 million are Palestinians, but also around 5.4 million Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian territories captured in the 1967 Arab Israeli war who live under Israeli military rule.
Thus, soon, demography and attrition will lead to a territorial area/state with a Muslim majority and a Jewish minority. Zionism’s only answer to what it sees as an existential threat is war and ethnic cleansing. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in December 2002 declared that Palestinians must be driven out of the occupied territories to make way for Jewish settlements, while Netanyahu thundered, “We are going to cleanse the whole area…”
Sharon used the second intifada as the justification for building the Separation Wall between Israel and the West Bank with the backing of Labour. In the process, Israel permanently seized up to 18 kms of land inside the West Bank, including the major settlement blocs, taking 9 percent of the territory and isolating around 30,000 Palestinians on the Israeli side and 230,000 Palestinians in East Jerusalem on the West Bank side. Israel’s control over the western aquifer, courtesy of the Separation Wall, and 80 percent of the West Bank’s groundwater has led to a chronic and artificial water crisis for millions of people and a drastic reduction in the amount of irrigated agricultural land, from 14 percent before 1967 to less than 2 percent today.
All this was deemed legal by Israel’s vaunted Supreme Court.
Art depicting slain Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, West Bank separation wall in Bethlehem, 2022 [Photo by Dan Palraz / CC BY-SA 4.0]
Gaza was further isolated in 2005 under Sharon’s disengagement plan, aimed at securing US approval for settlement expansion and consolidation in the West Bank. When Hamas seized control of the enclave in 2007, Israel’s containment strategy turned into a full-scale economic blockade. In the process, the West Bank has been transformed into an impoverished ghetto and Gaza into a prison.
Neither Zionism nor Arab nationalism but socialist internationalism!
The most fundamental aspect of the conflict between Netanyahu’s governing coalition and the opposition bloc is their agreement on all fundamentals. It is not an abstract love of “democracy” but intransigent advocacy of Zionism and the social interests of the Israeli bourgeoisie that has set the protest leaders against the assault on the Supreme Court. Unindicted war criminals such as opposition leader Benny Gantz and Netanyahu’s rebellious Defence Minister Yoav Gallant fear that Netanyahu and his fascist backers, in pursuing an escalated agenda of ethnic cleansing, a religio-cultural offensive and legal manoeuvres to save Netanyahu from jail, are undermining the bogus “democratic” cover provided by the Supreme Court and the judiciary over decades of relentless attacks on the Palestinians.
Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, left, Israeli President Reuven Rivlin, second left, Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz, third left, former Prime minister and leader of the opposition Benjamin Netanyahu, fourth left, and other dignitaries attend a memorial ceremony in Jerusalem, Israel, Sunday, June 20, 2021. [AP Photo/Abir Sultan/Pool Photo via AP]
Destabilising Israeli society by handing the initiative to Jewish supremacist and religious reactionaries has undermined support for Israel the world over, including the Jewish community in the United States, the largest in the world, which rests in part on Washington and Europe’s capitals portraying Israel as the Middle East’s “sole democracy”. It has gravely undermined efforts to portray opposition to Zionism as a form of “left anti-Semitism” that holds Israel up to standards not expected of similar “liberal democracies” and makes a false equivalence between Israel and South Africa under apartheid.
Above all, this threatens Washington’s aggressive military policy in the region where Israel acts as it attack-dog in pursuit of its geostrategic interests.
Domestically, though the agenda of the protest movement is presently dictated by the Zionist bourgeoisie and draws social support from sections of the urban middle class, political upheaval risks an explosion of social struggles against the repression of democratic rights and the economic policies of austerity needed to pay for the occupation and war and to enrich Israel’s oligarchs.
Zionism—promoting a state based upon religio-cultural identity and a supposed common national interest for all Jews—has long formed the basis for opposing not only the defence of Palestinian rights, but any assertion of the independent social and political interests of Jewish workers.
Histadrut headquarters in Tel Aviv [Photo by צילום:ד"ר אבישי טייכר / CC BY 2.5]
The Histadrut trade union federation emerged as a state institution, controlling Israel’s service sector, its largest conglomerates, national bank and health and medical institutions. Economic liberalisation and privatisation saw its membership collapse without global precedent, from around 1.8 million (then 85 percent of the workforce) in 1983 to less than 200,000 today. All but excluding Arab and migrant workers, its call for a general strike during the mass protests was carried out in coordination with Netanyahu to combat the danger of strikes developing outside of bureaucratic control.
Labour Zionism, the founding ideology of the Israel state, has suffered a worse collapse than its trade union arm, as its socialist pretensions have been shipwrecked by the realities of a state and society based on capitalism and sectarian religious exclusivism.
The political and social turmoil wracking Israel on its 75th anniversary confirm that the conditions exist to fight for a revolutionary socialist alternative. But as long as the basic tenets of Zionism are not challenged, then the crisis of bourgeois rule will be resolved on the basis of a further lurch rightwards.
Most dangerous of all, the escalating political crisis is leading to an ever-sharper turn towards the military repression of the Palestinians and the stoking of war with Syria and Iran. With Israel occupying a central role in US imperialism’s military drive to secure global hegemony, stretching from the de facto war with Russia in Ukraine to China, the threat of a war engulfing the entire Middle East grows ever nearer.
The lives of children and adolescents in Europe are being placed in danger due to a shortage of appropriate drugs. On April 27, 2023, paediatricians drew attention to this in an open letter to the health ministers of Germany, France, South Tyrol (Italy), Austria and Switzerland, calling for action to “ensure sufficient production and stockpiling of key paediatric primary care medicines in Europe.”
In an interview with the Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung, Thomas Fischbach, president of the Professional Association of Paediatricians and Adolescents, warned of a serious shortage of medicines for children in the coming autumn and winter. Fischbach, who is a co-signatory of the open letter, commented on the situation as follows: “We are already treating far from the guidelines, and next autumn is just around the corner. We’re going to be back in a supply shortage that could be even worse than last time.”
A child in a hospital bed [Photo: Medical University of South Carolina]
The alarming shortage of medicines suitable for children is a Europe-wide phenomenon due to the profit interests of the pharmaceutical corporations as well as the policies of capitalist governments.
Pharmaceutical companies focus on the production of profitable medicines for adults and neglect the development of medicines suitable for children because the market for these is smaller and profit margins are lower. As a result, doctors are forced to prescribe adult medications that are not suitable for children and can have serious side effects.
The Professional Association of Paediatricians and Adolescents (BVKJ) emphasizes that children often require different dosages and forms of medications than adults. The lack of medications appropriate for children often forces physicians to prescribe inadequate or riskier drugs, posing a significant health risk.
The letter states, “Children and adolescents require comparatively few medications, but they are not readily interchangeable. In particular, antibiotics, antipyretics, analgesics, medications for asthma, and vaccines represent indispensable and essential basic needs.”
According to the letter, “the impact of government austerity measures and price regulation ... is hitting the medication sector for children and adolescents particularly hard ... Yet medication costs for children and adolescents are marginal compared to adults.”
However, the current shortage of medicines does not only affect preparations for children. Across Germany, pharmacies are short of cough syrups, asthma medicines, blood pressure-lowering drugs, painkillers and cancer drugs, among others. In addition, the German Hospital Association warned of an increasing shortage of medicines in hospitals.
The situation in health care is not only strained when it comes to medicines. Cuts are also being made everywhere else.
The situation in hospitals has become increasingly unbearable over the past three years due to the burden of the coronavirus pandemic. With a shortage of 200,000 nurses, those remaining in the hospitals have shouldered the situation provoked by politicians, sometimes at the risk of their lives. Now they are being forced to accept a further loss in real wages in the current contract bargaining round despite catastrophic working conditions and already low wages.
As a result, many qualified and experienced professionals are leaving their jobs, further exacerbating the overall situation in the health care sector, while hospital operating companies are profiting from the increasingly precarious situation.
The causes of the drug shortage and the catastrophic situation in the health care system are closely linked. The government has used the pandemic to enforce a new principle: Preventable deaths must be accepted to increase profits. This is now evident everywhere, including in the care of children.
The current crisis in health care is symptomatic of the inhumanity of the capitalist system, which subordinates people’s needs to profit. While health and education are being cut to the bone by governments, tens of billions are being poured into military rearmament against the will of the people. This misanthropic policy is particularly drastic in the handling of the pandemic. While it has been officially declared over, more than 12,000 people worldwide are still dying every day as a result of the pandemic and the virus continues to mutate.
Adequate supplies of children’s medicines, the fight for decent wages in health care, and an effective strategy against COVID-19 require a fight against capitalism. All the establishment parties have shown that they place profits above people’s lives. What is needed is a society that focuses on the needs of the people, especially the needs of children. This is the only way to establish health care that is truly accessible to all and prioritises life.
Amid widespread social discontent, Thailand is holding a general election this Sunday. Whatever the outcome, none of the parties taking part in the contest has any progressive solutions to the crisis facing the country’s working class and youth. All of the parties represent the interests of rival factions of the country’s ruling class.
Pheu Thai Party candidates, real estate mogul Srettha Thavisin (left) and Paetongtarn Shinawatra, the youngest daughter of exiled former deposed Thai leader Thaksin Shinawatra, at general election final campaign rallies in Bangkok, Thailand, Friday, May 12, 2023. [AP Photo/Wason Wanichakorn]
The opposition bloc headed by the Pheu Thai Party (PTP) is expected to make a strong showing. According to Thai newspaper Matichon, the PTP is expected to win as many as 200 seats while its ally, the Move Forward Party (MFP), could take up to 70. While this would give the bloc a slender majority in the 500-seat lower house in the National Assembly, this is not enough to form a government.
The election is heavily rigged in favour of the military junta, which seized power in a coup in 2014, led by Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha. A party must win support from a majority of the entire National Assembly, which includes 250 seats in the upper house, which are appointed by the military.
The leading parties tied to the armed forces—the outgoing ruling Palang Pracharath Party (PPRP) and the United Thai Nation Party (UTN)—are expected to win about 50 seats each. The PPRP has put forward Deputy Prime Minister Prawit Wongsuwon as its candidate for prime minister while UTN is backing Prayut, who left the PPRP at the end of 2022.
The military also has control of critical state bodies, including the supposedly independent Election Commission, which has not shied away from vote rigging in the past, including during the last general election in 2019.
In fact, with early voting taking place on May 7, reports are already emerging of irregularities with ballots, including missing names or incomplete candidate lists. After the early voting, the hashtag “Why do we have an election commission?” trended on social media.
Many voters are turning to the PTP and MFP in the hope of reducing the power and influence of the military in Thai politics. There is widespread hostility towards the Prayut regime for its inaction on the COVID-19 pandemic and sharp growth in social inequality.
However, the opposition PTP, led by prime ministerial candidate Paetongtarn Shinawatra, offers no alternative for working people. She has ruled out joining hands with the ruling PPRP specifically, but this does not mean Pheu Thai will not cobble together an alliance with other sections of the conservative bloc. Speaking on Monday, Paetongtarn stated, “We are joining hands with the democratic side as the first option, but we will have to debate about party policies.”
In other words, so long as a party is not openly in favour of military rule and influence, the PTP views them as an acceptable partner, regardless of their political stances. A “debate” on policy, in real terms, means the abandonment of even the PTP’s meagre election pledges, such as the doubling of the daily minimum wage to 600 baht ($US17.85) by 2027 should it come to power.
However, the critical question for the Thai ruling class is not so much the matter of transitioning leadership to Pheu Thai, which does not represent a threat to capitalism, the military, or the monarchy, but its capacity to contain the growing struggles of workers and youth, amongst whom there is immense opposition to the military regime, not only for its flagrant attacks on democratic rights, but on its handling of the economy.
Thailand’s economic growth has recently been the slowest in Southeast Asia increasing only 2.6 percent in 2022 and 1.5 percent in 2021. Inflation hit a 24-year high last year of 6.08 percent, driven by increased costs in fuel prices, which increased the cost of transportation and logistics. According to the National Statistical Office, average monthly expenses were 18,145 baht ($US540) in the fourth quarter of 2022, and 40 percent of Thais earned less than 17,000 baht.
Household debt is also outstripping income growth. The University of Thai Chamber of Commerce provided a snapshot of this crisis with a debt survey of labourers who earn less than the average wage of 15,000 baht a month.
It found that 99.1 percent of those surveyed were in debt, and 77.2 percent were not able to cover their daily expenses. Only 4.3 percent of those in debt could afford to repay their debt in full, 26.7 percent had to rely on partial payments, and only 68.8 percent could barely scrape up the minimum monthly payments.
Of those surveyed, 73.5 percent reported zero savings, which corresponds to Bank of Thailand estimates that 88.2 percent of deposit holders possessed an average deposit of just over 4,000 baht ($US119), or the equivalent of a car service.
These conditions, coupled with attacks on democratic rights, led to mass student-led protests in 2020 and 2021, with demonstrators demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Prayut and his cabinet, the reform of the monarchy, and the re-writing of Thailand’s anti-democratic constitution drawn up by the junta.
If the ruling class fears that the PTP and MFP cannot contain the resurging growth in opposition, it may once again resort to a military coup—that is, a government directly, rather than indirectly, controlled by the armed forces.
Speaking in March, Deputy Prime Minister Prawit stated, “There will be no more coups if the country is united and there are no conflicts that lead to casualties, but if the country is in turmoil, it [a coup] may be necessary.”
The Thai Enquirer on May 5 reported “numerous sources” within the pro-military coalition as well as Pheu Thai and Move Forward disclosing that Thailand’s political establishment, including the courts, is building a case to dissolve the opposition parties. Sources in the PPRP and UTN have disclosed that plans are being made to bribe PTP and MFP members to join these parties tied to the military in the event the dissolutions take place.
The PTP has called for a “people’s constitution” and a law against coups, backed by the MFP as a way to “prevent dictatorship.” This undoubtedly resonates with broad sections of workers and youth.
A law against coups is not going to stop coups taking place. The obvious contradiction is that if a coup is successful—as has happened 13 times in Thailand since 1932—the junta will make laws as it sees fit.
At 12:01 am Eastern Daylight Time on Friday, the Biden administration lifted Title 42 and imposed a new ban on refugees seeking to apply for asylum at the southern border. In March of 2020 Donald Trump invoked Title 42, an obscure emergency public health provision, as the pretext, citing the coronavirus, for summarily expelling migrants fleeing poverty, repression and state-sanctioned violence in Central and Latin American countries that have been subjected to more than a century of subversion and exploitation by US imperialism.
Joe Biden continued and expanded the use of Title 42, expelling millions of asylum seekers, as well as his predecessor’s policy of mass detention of refugees. He was forced to end the provision when he criminally ended the COVID-19 national emergency in order to terminate all financial support for COVID testing and treatment, cut social spending and further boost corporate profits, despite the continuing toll from COVID in needless deaths and the ravages of Long COVID.
In its place he and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) chief Alejandro Mayorkas are requiring asylum seekers to file their claims in their home country or in “regional processing centers” to be set up in Colombia, Guatemala and other Latin American countries. Of course, this leaves them in peril of attack or murder by the drug cartels, gangs and government assassins they are seeking to escape. Those who try to apply at the US border will be sent back to their home countries. Migrants from Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti and Nicaragua—countries where the US is either unable or unwilling to deport directly—will be sent back to Mexico under the terms of an agreement with the Mexican government.
The brutal and anti-democratic policies of both capitalist parties, in defiance of international laws guaranteeing asylum rights, have produced a nightmare scene at the southern border. Amid blazing heat, and lacking food, water, shelter or medical care, some 65,000 desperate emigrants from what Washington calls its “backyard” are gathered along the border. They are confronted from the US side with 24,000 armed Customs and Border Protection (CBP) guards and 1,500 active duty US troops, bolstered by 2,500 Texas National Guard troops deployed unilaterally by the state’s fascistic Republican governor, Greg Abbott.
Migrants line-up between a barbed-wire barrier and the border fence at the US-Mexico border, as seen from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, Tuesday, May 9, 2023. [AP Photo/Christian Chavez]
On the Mexican side, Washington’s accomplice in its war against refugees, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), has deployed 25,000 Mexican troops to terrorize and suppress migrants who have come not only from Latin America, but also from Asia, Africa and war-devastated parts of the Middle East and Europe.
Already in the first hours of the post-Title 42 border crisis, the US government acknowledged the death of an unaccompanied migrant child in US custody. The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) confirmed a report from Honduran authorities that 17-year-old Ángel Eduardo Maradiaga Espinoza, who had arrived in the US without a parent or guardian, died in government custody at a shelter west of Tampa, Florida.
As of Wednesday, according to US government figures, there were 8,681 unaccompanied children in HSS detention facilities. Border Patrol officials say they encountered more than 152,000 unaccompanied minors in fiscal year 2022, and have encountered more than 70,000 since October 1, 2022. Desperate parents, barred from applying for asylum at the border themselves, in some cases allow a child to attempt the crossing because, under law, they cannot be sent back to Mexico. The hope is that the child will get a sponsor in the US who will then help bring in the rest of the family.
Many, many more have died as a result of the brutal anti-immigrant policy of the American ruling class and both of its parties, as well as the ruling classes of Europe, and those numbers will only increase without the mass, united and international intervention of the working class. Less than two months ago, on March 27, at least 40 refugees were killed in a fire that broke out in a crowded detention center in the Mexican border town of Ciudad Juarez. The victims were locked in a cell and AMLO’s guards refused to let them out.
The US Border Patrol, which claims a capacity to detain 10,000 migrants in its border facilities, says it is already holding over 28,000. The Biden administration says this number could rise to 45,000 by the end of this month. As a stopgap measure to relieve some of the pressure, the DHS this week announced a plan to allow a fraction of those being held to be released into the US prior to receiving a hearing date. A Trump-appointed judge immediately blocked implementation of the order.
The Republicans and the corporate media, echoed by Biden and the Democrats, are whipping up a pogrom atmosphere. Just days after a neo-Nazi shot and killed eight people at a mall in Allen Texas, and a man drove his car into a group of immigrants in the border town of Brownsville, killing eight, CNN extended a national platform for Trump to spew his anti-immigrant filth at its town hall event Wednesday evening.
In Texas, Governor Abbott not only deployed his National Guard to the border, in what he called “Operation Lone Star,” he denounced Biden’s decision to order 1,500 active-duty troops to the border as a token measure and demanded between 15,000 and 150,000 troops. He is supporting a state bill that would create a “Border Protection Unit” empowering citizens to “arrest, detain, and deter individuals crossing the border illegally, including with the use of non-deadly force.”
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, another Republican fascist, on Wednesday signed a sweeping state law on immigration policy. Its provisions include:
Banning local governments from issuing identification cards for people who can’t prove citizenship.
Requiring hospitals that accept Medicaid to include a question on intake forms about the patient’s citizenship status.
Banning undocumented law school graduates from being admitted to the Florida bar.
Increasing penalties for human trafficking-related offenses.
On Thursday, House Republicans passed the “Secure the Border” bill, which would allocate millions of dollars to hire thousands more border patrol agents and enlarge Trump’s southern border wall.
The response of Biden and the Democrats is to adapt to the fascistic agitation of the Republicans and implement their own barbaric assault on immigrants’ rights. In October of 2020, during his final pre-election debate with Trump, candidate Biden denounced Trump for tearing up the right to asylum. “This is the first president in the history of the United States of America that anybody seeking asylum has to do it in another country,” Biden declared, concisely summing up the policy he is now implementing.
Other Democrats are seeking to attack the GOP from the right. On Thursday, California Governor Gavin Newsom denounced House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s budget-cutting bill on the grounds that it would slash $4 billion from Customs and Border Protection and “result in the loss of 2,400-plus officers.”
To this must be added the reactionary role of the Democratic Socialists of America and other pseudo-left organizations of the upper-middle class, which seek to lend the Democratic Party in the US and AMLO’s party in Mexico a “progressive” veneer.
The savage treatment of asylum-seekers, overwhelmingly impoverished and oppressed workers, coincides with US escalation of the war against Russia in Ukraine and the intensification of military preparations against China. This is not an accident. The horrific scenes of mass suffering playing out at the US border completely explode Washington’s pretensions to be threatening nuclear war against Russia in order to defend democratic rights. But such wanton attacks on the rights of immigrants and promotion of chauvinistic and racist sentiments have always accompanied the turn by imperialism to war. They have always been part of a broader assault on the democratic and social rights of the working class in every capitalist nation involved in the struggle over markets, natural resources and sources of cheap labor.
American entry into World War I was accompanied by the Espionage Act, which outlawed anti-war speech and led to the jailing of socialist leader Eugene V. Debs, followed by the deportation of socialist immigrants in the Palmer Raids of 1919-1920. The entry of the US into World War Two was preceded by the passage of the Smith Act, which Roosevelt used to jail 18 Trotskyists in 1944. The US declaration of war against Japan was followed by the mass incarceration of Japanese-Americans.
The so-called “war on terror” after 9/11 was accompanied by the opening of the Guantanimo gulag and the establishment of the Homeland Security department as well as the Northern Command.
The enforcement of what imperialist leaders are today calling a “war economy” and the conduct of “total war” for control of the Eurasian landmass requires the suppression of the class struggle in the United States as well as across Latin America, under conditions of a growing upsurge of working class opposition and a mounting rank-and-file rebellion against the pro-war, pro-corporate trade union apparatus.
What Leon Trotsky wrote in May of 1940, some 10 months into World War II, could, with minor updating, be used to describe present conditions:
The world of decaying capitalism is overcrowded. The question of admitting a few hundred extra refugees becomes a major problem for such a world power as the United States… Amid the vast expanse of land and the marvels of technology, which has also conquered the skies for man as well as the earth, the bourgeoisie has managed to convert our planet into a foul prison.
The brutalization of immigrants is a damning expression of the bankruptcy of the nation state system to which capitalism is tied. The globalization of economic life and the technological integration of the world population have progressed far beyond what existed in Trotsky’s day.
