On Saturday, the Sri Lanka parliament approved the domestic debt restructuring/optimization (DDR) plan presented by President Ranil Wickremesinghe, who is also finance minister. The plan will slash billions of rupees from the pension funds of millions of workers, mainly the Employee Provident Fund (EPF). This devastating blow is part of the International Monetary Fund-dictated austerity program now being ruthlessly implemented by the government.
According to the proposed DDR, Treasury is retrieving all existing bonds in which superannuation funds such as the EPF have invested and issuing new bonds in which it calls a step-down process. The new bonds will receive 12 percent interest until 2025 and thereafter the much lower rate of 9 percent will be paid until 2038.
Health workers march Colombo on July 7, 2022 [Photo: WSWS]
In this manner, pension funds will not receive much higher prevailing interest rates. For instance, in recent years, the interest rates on government treasury bonds surpassed 30 percent.
Wickremesinghe issued an extraordinary gazette yesterday, empowering the secretary to the finance ministry to convert or exchange any stock or securities issued in Sri Lanka, as of June 28, 2023.
According to independent think tank, Verite Research, even based on the prevailing average interest rate, conservatively calculated as 13 percent, the EPF will lose a staggering 12 trillion rupees ($US39 billion) by 2038.
The EPF is mainly managed by the Central Bank and 95 percent of its 3.5 trillion rupees ($US11 billion) is invested in government securities in the form of treasury bonds. The government’s total domestic debt amounts to around 15 trillion rupees, thus the pension funds hold almost 25 percent of domestic debt.
Under the agreement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to obtain $US3 billion loan, approved in March, the government pledged to reduce its debt from 125 percent of GDP to 95 percent of GDP in 2032. The DDR plan is a crucial part of achieving this target.
The government was desperate to implement the DDR prior to the next IMF review scheduled for September in order to obtain the next loan tranche. Last week, President Ranil Wickremesinghe told the media: “So, before we can get to the next tranche from the IMF, it’s a question of us now mapping the road out.”
The majority of private sector and state-owned enterprises deposit their employer and employee pension shares in the EPF as a statutory requirement.
The workers are eligible for payouts from the fund only after retirement beyond the age of 55 years. Until then, the EPF’s custodian is the Central Bank. So this captive pension fund is being manipulated by the government, behind the back of its 2.6 million workers.
The pension fund is the only hope of workers to settle their loans, mortgages, other financial commitments and if possible build a house for the family after their retirement. Some deposit their retirement earning in banks to obtain a meagre income on which to live for the rest of their lives.
As dictated by the IMF, the government has adopted a policy of currency depreciation. Hyper-inflation shot up last year to more than 70 percent but has since dropped to 12 percent. Inflation and currency depreciation have sharply affected the real value of EPF deposits. According to estimates, the US dollar value of the fund fell from $15.8 billion in 2021 to $9.5 billion in 2022.
Wickremesinghe also announced slashing the state contribution for government employees’ pensions in his budget speech. Previously the government was committed to paying a full pension for their employees, but starting this year all new recruits must put 15 percent of their income into their pension.
While targeting workers, the government has excluded the commercial banks from the DDR, claiming they have been overburdened. Central Bank governor Nandalal Weerasinghe said: “[B]banks have already made a huge contribution to the Treasury in terms of 50 percent taxation and their contribution to the economy in terms of debt moratoriums, and state loan provisioning…”
It’s not a surprise that the government excluded the DDR impact from the shareholders of banking capital. The after-tax profits of the banking industry were over 172 billion and 150 billion rupees in 2021 and 2022 respectively.
Big business was jubilant that banks were excluded and the DDR plan targeted workers’ pension funds. Ceylon Chamber of Commerce chairman Vish Govindasamy thanked the government at a meeting convened by Wickremesinghe on June 29, saying: “I think this [DDR]is probably the best thing that could have happened…”
Yesterday, the Colombo stock market shot up by 7 percent, indicating the enthusiasm of the capitalist class for the government’s action.
Colombo is under pressure from major international lenders to implement domestic debt restructuring before they take measures to restructure their loans. To date, foreign creditors have not agreed to reduce loan repayments or lengthen the period for repayments. Their preoccupation is to ensure defaulted loans are repaid in full by making workers and the poor bear the full burden of the country’s unprecedented economic crisis.
The main opposition party, the Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB), voted against the bill, shedding a few crocodile tears over the impact on workers. Its financial spokesman, Harsha de Silva, backed the cuts to the EPF while mildly criticizing it as a “potential opportunity loss” for the fund.
The SJB has been an ardent supporter of the IMF austerity program, condemning the government for not approaching the IMF much earlier. Significantly, four SJB MPs broke ranks and voted for the DDR plan.
The opposition Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) also voted against the DDR motion. Its speaker demagogically declared that those voting for the plan should “apologize to the country’s workforce” for endangering the EPF. The party has made clear that it sees no alternative to the IMF demands and will impose harsh austerity measures if it forms government.
The trade unions have largely kept silent. The Ceylon Bank Employees Union issued a statement calling on bank depositors not to panic and withdraw their deposits. Its concern was to prevent banks being destabilized, not the devastating impact on workers.
The Free Trade Zone and General Service Union sent a letter begging the Governor of the Central Bank to act on behalf of workers’ benefits and not to take “any steps to affect EPF and other superannuation funds…”
JVP-controlled All Ceylon General Port Employees Union and All Ceylon Telecom Workers Union leaders issued a leaflet declaring “Let us organise to defend EPF and ETF pension funds! Let us fight and show our strength!” However, no action has been proposed.
These trade unions overtly or covertly support the IMF program and oppose any mobilisation of the working class against the savage austerity measures that have already devastated the lives of millions of workers and the poor.
A significant study published July 1 in NatureCommunications sheds light on the horrific wave of COVID-19 infections and deaths that swept across China last winter after the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) abruptly ended its life-saving Zero-COVID policy. The study, titled “Swift and extensive Omicron outbreak in China after sudden exit from ‘zero-COVID’ policy,” is the most comprehensive model published to date detailing the impacts of the rapid lifting of all mitigation measures, testing, and reporting of cases.
On November 11, 2022, China began to lift its longstanding Zero-COVID policy, instead adopting a suite of 20 measures that could be characterized as a stringent mitigationist strategy. City-wide lockdowns were replaced with targeted, smaller-scale lockdowns. Travel restrictions were partially lifted, and compulsory mass testing and reporting were ended. Contact tracing was limited to direct contacts of infected persons, and quarantine periods were shortened.
On December 7, all core public health measures associated with Zero-COVID were fully lifted. Lockdowns were prohibited, all contact tracing was stopped and quarantining at home was encouraged instead of at a centralized location. Testing and reporting became voluntary.
The study provides a granular breakdown of the respective effects of the November 11 and December 7 policy changes, showing how the highly transmissible Omicron BA.5 and BF.7 subvariants ravaged the population of 1.4 billion people after December 7 in particular. In this short time period of less than two months, an estimated 97 percent of the Chinese population (1.37 billion people) were infected.
The model-inferred daily cases (orange bands) during the three policy periods (zero-COVID, 20 Measures, and 10 Measures) near the end of 2022, and official case counts (points). Shades of orange show the median, 50% credibility interval (CrI), and 95% CrI. [Photo by Goldberg, E.E., Lin, Q., Romero-Severson, E.O. et al. / CC BY 4.0]
Due to the drastic decline in COVID-19 testing and reporting starting on November 11, the official figures quickly became inaccurate. Thus, the study draws data from online surveys conducted by a website for the Chinese health authorities on December 26. The authors note:
We developed a modeling approach that integrates both the official case count data before Nov 11 and the December survey data to reveal a more complete picture of the dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 before and after the dismantling of zero-COVID. Extensive sensitivity analyses confirm that our conclusions are robust to many assumptions about the data and model, and our findings are validated by comparison against two other independent datasets.
The study found that the December 7 full lifting of Zero-COVID caused a precipitous increase in transmission, reducing the total infection doubling time from 4.7 days to 1.6 days, producing these shocking figures:
Our results suggest that on Dec. 7, the day when full exit from zero-COVID was announced, there were ~1 million new infections. Because of the extremely high rate of spread afterwards, the outbreak ballooned such that 97% [95%, 99%] of the population (i.e., 1.37 billion people) became infected in December. As a result of the exponential nature of the spread, the vast majority of people (88% [83%, 93%] of the population) became infected during the short window of time between Dec. 15 and 31, 2022….
With an infection fatality ratio between 0.1 and 0.2% for the Omicron variant, we would expect between 1.3 and 2.6 million COVID-19 deaths in China during Dec. 2022 as well as Jan. 2023 (because of the delay from infection to death).
The conclusions of the study validate the continuous warnings made by the World Socialist Web Site on the dangers of lifting Zero-COVID. On November 15, the WSWS was the first outlet in the world to note that the CCP was initiating the process of lifting Zero-COVID, after over a year of intense pressure from Western governments and corporate media outlets. We warned, “There is no scientific justification for this move, which is based solely on political and economic considerations. In the coming days and weeks, the situation could quickly spiral out of control, particularly in places with lower vaccination rates.”
In the first of many Perspective statements on the lifting of Zero-COVID in China, we deepened these warnings and advocated for the reversal of this policy change, noting:
[T]he objective laws of viral transmission could quickly spiral out of control. Any shift away from a Zero-COVID elimination strategy carries with it the potential for a monumental catastrophe…
The lifting of Zero-COVID is a political question which confronts the entire world’s population. Allowing the virus to spread in this immunologically naive population could provide it with over 1 billion new hosts in which it could further mutate and spawn new variants. This reactionary policy change in China thus poses the need for workers internationally to renew their struggle against the policies of their own governments and to unify across national boundaries.
These warnings by the WSWS were developed throughout November, as we continued to advocate the full deployment of all available public health measures. Examining the time period between November 11 and December 7, the study makes clear that it was still possible to reverse the lifting of Zero-COVID and contain the growing outbreak.
Throughout the first phase of scrapping mitigation measures, the “20 measures” phase, the CCP still could have reversed course. But the government and media downplayed the dangers as the number of infections grew. The dramatic increase in cases that occurred as the “10 measures” phase began on December 7 shows how quickly the situation became catastrophic.
The emergency ward of a hospital in China, January 3, 2023. [AP Photo/Andy Wong]
Fundamentally, the lifting of Zero-COVID was not done in the interests of public health, but in response to enormous financial and geopolitical pressures from the imperialist powers and growing opposition within sections of the Chinese ruling class and upper middle class.
The tipping point that prompted the November 11 transition away from Zero-COVID came when multinational corporations, including Nike and Apple, threatened to move their business out of China. Then, in late November a series of small, choreographed protests against Zero-COVID were trumpeted in the bourgeois media internationally.
The CCP seized upon these “white paper” protests against Zero-COVID to fully implement a policy they were already intending to carry out. In this, they were supported by virtually every pseudo-left political tendency in the world, who share with the protesters a social base among the upper middle class.
The latest study on China’s first COVID-19 wave was published roughly one month after the World Health Organization (WHO) and US President Joe Biden rescinded their COVID-19 public health emergency declarations. At the behest of global finance capital, capitalist world governments have demanded that there be no interruptions in the process of wealth accumulation regardless of the cost in human life. The Western media, after continuously demanding the end of Zero-COVID in China, has now dropped the subject of the pandemic altogether.
The study, which was first submitted on March 7, contains the following statement warning about a second wave of the pandemic in China:
A slower epidemic wave would help to ease hospital burden, allow sufficient health care for infected people, prevent epidemic overshoot (i.e., a large final epidemic size because of rapid spread), and ultimately reduce the number of deaths. Such considerations may be of renewed importance later in 2023, when the large cohort of people infected at the end of 2022 may become susceptible to reinfection.
This second wave is currently ripping through China just as the study was published, while the government and the media are working to cover it up. The WSWS recently published a four-part series on this second wave, by far the most comprehensive report on this ongoing catastrophe.
The national strike of Romanian teachers was broken up on Monday, June 12, in a blatant act of betrayal and collusion with the authorities by the union bureaucracy. The strike involved hundreds of thousands of education workers, many of whom participated in rallies and demonstrations throughout the country for several weeks.
Striking Romanian teachers march in Bucharest [Photo: WSWS]
The teachers’ strike has formed part of a surge in industrial actions in the country, with workers in healthcare, on the railways and subways, and miners all engaged in some form of industrial action. Under these conditions the teachers’ union has been working hand in glove with the government to end the strike.
One major objective underlay this reactionary move. The union bureaucracy is fearful of a broader movement of the working class which would threaten its control over the workers and undermine the pro-capitalist and militarist agenda of the government which the union supports.
The Romanian ruling class is attempting to use the crisis created by the pandemic and the drive to war against Russia to bolster its position as one of imperialism’s main client states in the Balkans and Black Sea region.
The ambitions of the Romanian oligarchy were spelled out by NATO vice president and Romanian PSD politician Mircea Geoana. Geoana spoke of a “historical opportunity” for the Romanian bourgeoisie:
“[..] I will say one thing: the entire modern history of Romania is made up of chances taken by the Romanian elites, in moments of geopolitical shocks. This is how Little Romania [Old Kingdom] was born. Little Romania was born after the Crimean war, Greater Romania was born after the First World War and Western Romania was born after the fall of Communism. [..] For the first time in the history of this country, called Romania, we will no longer be a frontier country, but the new center of gravity of Europe. It is important, beyond this war, because Europe is being reconfigured.”
A vast expansion of military spending and acquisitions is accompanied by EU-wide deficit reduction and austerity measures. The teachers’ main demands, for an end to poverty wages and for the allocation of 6 percent of GDP to education, were seen as incompatible with the government’s fundamental aims.
The government has broken its own laws in order to impose as much as possible of the cost of the war and economic crisis on the workers. It has “postponed” for the past 12 years the law that requires the allocation of 6 percent of GDP to education. It also refused to apply the salary law dating from 2017 which provided for annual pay increase for state employees. The 2017 law, which did not account for the explosive increase in prices in recent years, was never applied by the authorities for many categories of workers, including teachers and healthcare workers.
Negotiations were conducted in bad faith by the government, which never had any intention of giving an inch to the teachers, lest it encourage other sections of workers to demand increases. From the first days of the strike, the government issued ultimatums to the teachers. Its offer centered on the application of the 2017 law and a scheme for yearly bonuses of around 300 euros.
Teachers repeatedly rejected these ultimatums, despite the union leadership’s attempts to ram them through.
On June 10 at night, union executives and government officials told teachers they had until June 11 at 9am to accept the latest offer. Teachers protested against this obvious provocation, made worse by the fact that it was composed of different packages, and obscured by formulas and different indices. The unions not only did not explain the offer to the membership, they did not carry out even formal consultations. Teachers were forced to employ their own juridical and economic experts.
On June 12, after a morning meeting with the government, union bosses “suspended” the strike until the government passes legislation that includes Saturday night’s “offer”. Teachers were caught unawares, only learning about the betrayal from television. Protests were held in Suceava county, with educators storming the offices of county unions. Others denounced the betrayal on social media.
The offer for which the union had broken up the strike was presented to the public as a “25% increase in wages, yearly bonuses and a 50% increase from 1st of January 2024.”
This is a complete fraud. The government passed two emergency laws on June 12. One of them required the government to apply the 2017 salary law, at the level of 2022, as well as an additional raise equal to 50 percent of the difference between the base salary and the expected base salary on January 1, 2024. Additionally, auxiliary teaching staff will receive 260 euros before taxes, and non-teaching staff will receive 80 euros, starting from June.
The second emergency law refers to a “teaching career bonus” sum of 400 euros for teachers and 100 euros for non-teaching staff, to be paid in the month of October. This payment, that the government called “a national measure to support educational activity”, is set to take place annually until 2027 and is tied to work-related expenditure.
The unions have made much of the government’s inclusion of the “principle” that the salary of debutante teachers will be calculated “based off” the median base salary in the country, starting from 2024. But as teachers have stated, the government has proven that it will not honor its own laws, let alone any future principles.
The actual wage increase for all the workers is close to zero, especially when considering lost wages and benefits for the duration of the strike. Romanian teachers earn between 500 and 850 euros, depending on seniority.
“Count what is countable, measure what is measurable, and what is not measurable, make measurable”—attributed to Galileo Galilei
The detection of a predicted universal background of gravitational waves rippling across the fabric of space-time was announced last Wednesday by the NANOGrav consortium of over 190 scientists at more than 70 institutions. Like the very first detection of gravitational waves themselves, made just eight years ago, it represents a triumph of mankind’s increasing technical mastery of the natural world.
The 2015 experimental discovery of gravitational waves targeted “high frequency” waves produced by merging compact objects weighing around the mass of heavy stars, whose oscillations have periods in the range from a fraction of a second to several seconds. This week’s announcement, using an entirely different technique, probes a very different frequency range of waves whose periods range from months to decades. In doing so, it probes a very different set of physical phenomena but confirms the same underlying physical principle, that matter in motion also sets space-time into rippling motion.
The NANOGrav discovery builds upon decades of work in opening gravitational radiation as a new window into probing the universe and some of its most exotic elements and builds atop a great edifice of physics whose foundation was laid in the opening years of the 20th century by Albert Einstein in his theories of Special and General Relativity. That such a large consortium and such an immense undertaking could be confidently assembled and brought to fruition is itself a validation of the materialist conception of nature and the harmonious and comprehensive achievements in physics over the past two centuries.
To properly explain this week’s announcement requires a digression into the history of gravitational waves and their background. Einstein carried to its natural conclusion the idea of Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) that the Earth was not the center of the Universe: he modified and extended the tremendously successful physical theories of Isaac Newton (1642-1727) so that they had no presumption of any special “center” or reference frame from which physical laws emerged. To make the unification, he had to integrate time itself in a fundamentally new way into the mathematical fabric on which physical laws of motion were built. With his General Relativity of 1915, he additionally incorporated curvature into this fabric to describe the motion of bodies acting under the influence of gravity.
A common summary of General Relativity is that matter tells space how to bend and bent space tells matter how to move. But behind this simple explanation lies fiendishly difficult mathematics and predictions once thought so exotic that some felt they would forever remain an exercise in pure thought.
General Relativity and astronomy
The impact of Einstein’s theory and the equally transformative introduction of the new Quantum Mechanics into physical law wrought a qualitative reformation in astronomy. Oddities were already piling up: a new class of object, the “white dwarf,” had by 1914 already stretched physical conceptions based on prior knowledge to their limits. The physicist Arthur Eddington would write in his Stars and Atoms of 1927:
We learn about the stars by receiving and interpreting the messages which their light brings to us. The message of the companion of Sirius when it was decoded ran: “I am composed of material 3,000 times denser than anything you have ever come across; a ton of my material would be a little nugget that you could put in a matchbox.” What reply can one make to such a message? The reply which most of us made in 1914 was—“Shut up. Don’t talk nonsense.”
And yet only three years later in 1930 the physical nature, drawing from both Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, of such “white dwarf” stars would be worked out by Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, and a limit to their mass derived. And four years following that, even more exotic objects would be hypothesized.
The discovery of the atomic nucleus in 1906 by Ernest Rutherford had revealed the astonishing truth that most of the mass of an atom was localized in its very compact nucleus: and that most of the atom itself was empty space. Rutherford aimed high-speed helium atoms (called alpha particles) at a very thin foil of gold. Most passed through unaffected or with only the slightest deviation. But for a few, Rutherford would later recount, “It was quite the most incredible event that has ever happened to me in my life. It was almost as incredible as if you fired a 15-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you.” Those alpha particles had made rare hits on the tiny gold nucleus and bounced back, revealing the concentration of mass inside the atom. That most passed through undeflected revealed that most of the space inside the atom was empty.
And so, in 1934, Fritz Zwicky would hypothesize an even more exotic object, the “neutron star” (just two years after the discovery of the particle whose name it bore), in which the empty space of atoms was eliminated, and the entire star was at the density of the matter of the atomic nucleus. In it, the density was not a mere 3,000 times higher than anything ordinary, but yet another millionfold higher, such that a tablespoon’s volume would have similar mass to Mount Everest. By the end of the decade, physicists had made the first calculations of the structures and limits on such stars. Zwicky correctly surmised that the violence of rare supernovae explosions would necessarily involve energies and densities out of which such exotic objects could emerge, though none immediately saw any prospects for their detection.
But astronomy marched forward. The century saw the expansion of the range of telescopes from visible light to the longer wavelengths of radio (and eventually to all wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum), and one fruit of this labor was the detection of peculiar radio sources that chirped with astonishing precision and that would come to be known as “pulsars.”
Artist's rendering of a pulsar - a rapidly rotating neutron star that emits a beam of radiation that passes the Earth once every rotation. This results in the appearance of a pulsating star, hence the term pulsar. [Photo: Illustration by Olena Shmahalo for NANOGrav]
The first, detected by Jocelyn Bell in 1968, was so novel in this periodicity that Bell scribbled next to the peaks on the strip chart showing radio emission the letters “LGM?”—wondering whether alien intelligence or “little green men” were its authors. Once searches were targeted for such objects, many more followed; over 3,000 are now known. And with them, physicist Thomas Gold would make a compelling case that these were in fact Zwicky’s neutron stars, but with a twist: the magnetic fields which had once threaded their parent star had been compressed by the same factor as the neutron star itself, intensifying them billionfold or more (in some cases more than a quadrillion) over the magnetic field that orients compasses on the Earth. These magnetic fields, locked into the rapidly spun up neutron stars (whose spin also increases during their compression), would generally lie at some offset from the rotation axis, creating the effect of a lighthouse whose rotating beam periodically announced itself as the neutron star.
And finally, only months after Einstein’s publication of his theory of General Relativity, the physicist Karl Schwarzschild, working on the German front with Russia in World War I in 1916, would produce the first exact mathematical solution to Einstein’s equations of General Relativity, and die only months later at age 42 from illness exacerbated by his time in the trenches. Schwarzschild’s work predicted the existence of an even more exotic object, one in which the density of matter had grown beyond the ability of space-time to support it, with it folding up into a “black hole” in space-time itself, possessing mass and a type of one-way horizon, but little else. And yet motivated by Bell’s 1968 discovery and Gold’s identification of it as a neutron star, by 1971 several astronomers would independently make the case that another source, Cygnus X-1, identified by new space-borne x-ray telescopes, was the first identified astrophysical black hole.
Gravitational waves
That the mathematical framework of General Relativity admitted “wave-like” solutions rippling across their description of space-time was evident from the start. Einstein predicted their existence only months after he developed his theory’s framework but considered them of “negligible practical effect.” But even their author changed his mind—several times!—as to whether these represented a real physical phenomenon or arose as an artifact of the mathematics, in which both matter and wave moved in lockstep and produced no tangible external action. It was 48 years later and nine years after Einstein’s death, in 1964, that the physicist Richard Feynman gave a compelling argument that the waves would actually result in the observable motion of matter, elevating them from a curiosity into something potentially measurable.
Within the decade, the first efforts to actually detect such waves permeating the Universe were made by Joseph Weber at the University of Maryland, and eventually by many small groups. But even as efforts progressed to blindly detect gravitational waves, astrophysics moved forward to better understand the population of phenomena in the universe that would create these waves, and to estimate their intensity. And it turned out that the extreme weakness of the waves, predicted by General Relativity, also made them excellent probes of the most extreme objects, whose understanding itself required the mastery of Relativity, neutron stars and black holes, in their interactions with other objects.
The results were initially demoralizing. The strongest likely waves that were forecast to routinely occur, lasting only seconds, would be expected to move matter by an almost inconceivably small amount: by a thousandth the width of an individual proton over a path length of a few kilometers. The precision inherent in such a measure is equivalent to measuring the distance to the nearest star to a fineness smaller than the width of a human hair.
But astrophysical sources would reveal their existence in another way: most stars are part of multiple systems, and the same processes that give rise to neutron stars or black holes at the end of their lifetime can occur to their companions as well, producing binary or higher systems of these compact objects. If the objects are in very tight, fast orbits, their gravitational wave emission is so energetic that it materially changes their orbits as energy is lost from the system to this radiation.
In 1974, Russell Hulse, working with Joseph Taylor Jr., discovered the first known “binary” neutron star, in which a radio-“loud” pulsar is seen to change its cadence slightly but repeatably every 7.75 hours, evidence of it orbiting very close by another compact but invisible object, now ascribed to be a second neutron star whose radio pulsations are either too faint or mis-aimed to be detectable. Analysis of the system showed that both neutron stars weigh about half again more than our Sun, yet the two, each the size of a small city, orbit one another in a volume that would itself fit inside our Sun.
Artist's rendering of black hole binaries emitting gravitational waves. As the waves overlap, they produce a background of gravitational waves that creates a distinctive correlation pattern in the timing of pulses coming from pairs of pulsars. [Photo: Illustration by Olena Shmahalo for NANOGrav]
The observational precision possible for some measurements when you have a high-precision clock orbiting another object is astonishing. Within a short period of time, it was seen that the orbit was varying in precisely the way expected by General Relativity, another triumph for its predictive power, and that the system was shrinking from the loss of energy through gravitational wave radiation by about 3.5 meters a year (in an orbit with a close approach of about half a million miles), predicting a final inspiral and merger in about 300 million years.
Experimental discovery of gravitational waves
As the WSWS has described previously, the development of technology to confirm these predictions moved from the efforts of individual and poorly funded researchers to a coordinated international effort in the 1980s and 1990s, with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) entering operation at an initial low sensitivity in 2002. The lack of detections in its first 13 years of operation was disappointing but not surprising: the community was well aware that its initial sensitivity would only record exceptional events.
But from the start, the project planned upgrades made possible by anticipated and commissioned technology development. An “advanced” version began operation in September 2015 with about 60 times the expected detection rate of the initial project and made its first detection during engineering commissioning even before routine scientific observations began. Since then, nearly a hundred detections have been made, with a new and even more sensitive version of the LIGO detectors entering service on May 24 of this year. What was once thought far beyond human capability is now, thanks to achievements across the sciences and the organized labor of thousands, a routine measurement.
NANOGrav—the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves
The same science-based confidence and optimism that enabled decades of work on LIGO, leading to the realization of its aspirations, were at work in the building of the NANOGrav collaboration, which was assembled in 2007, eight years before LIGO would finally achieve its first success, and funded in 2010, five years before LIGO finally triumphed.
LIGO was built to probe a particular wavelength of gravitational wave, those produced through mergers of objects massing a few times to a few tens of times that of the Sun. But other astrophysical processes produce gravitational waves, and the existence of detected black holes, with masses millions to billions of times the mass of our Sun, in the centers of some galaxies shows that much larger mergers must take place in the Universe. Some large galactic mergers result in binary supermassive black holes at the centers of their galaxies, which take years to orbit one another.
Such mergers and binary black holes, despite pouring out far more energy, would be difficult or impossible to detect with LIGO because they operate on much larger timescales and produce waves of much larger wavelengths.
While much rarer, such mergers, plus the drumbeat of orbiting supermassive binary black holes, would create an overall “sloshing” of space-time just as distant storms on an ocean leave their imprint on waves crashing onto a shore. And it is possible that the detection and ultimate characterization of such long-wavelength gravitational radiation in detail may reveal yet-unknown astrophysical processes at work, or a signature of the early Universe.
NANOGrav’s technology aims at detection of gravitational waves whose timescale is not seconds but rather years or decades. Since the physical size of such a detector along the lines of LIGO would have to be of interstellar scale, other techniques must be used rather than construction. An idea put forward in the 1970s by Soviet astronomer Mikhail Sazhin and American astronomer Steven Detweiler cleverly uses objects understood by General Relativity, pulsars, as a probe of another prediction of General Relativity, gravitational radiation.
This technique, adopted by NANOGrav, uses the sightlines to dozens (now 68 and growing) of the most rapidly spinning and stable pulsars as yardsticks across cosmic distances. A passing gravitational wave would distort, over months and years, the time-base recorded from each. While individual pulsars may alter their behavior slightly due to local circumstances, a gravitational wave would act in concert on multiple sightlines, producing correlated advances and delays in the beat of their rhythms.
Artist's rendering of an array of millisecond pulsars in our galaxy being used to search for a background of low-frequency gravitational waves permeating the Universe. [Photo: Illustration by Tonia Klein / NANOGrav]
As the consortium has expanded and more telescopes provided more simultaneous sightlines to remote pulsars, the effective sensitivity of NANOGrav has increased. The longer it operates, as well, the better it can detect the longest-period gravitational waves. The Wednesday announcement is only the opening salvo in its work, an announcement, confident, at roughly the 999 out of 1,000 level, of detecting this universal background of waves.
The expansion of astronomical work from visible light to other frequencies opened new windows onto the phenomena of the Universe. The entire electromagnetic spectrum, from gamma waves at high frequencies to radio waves at low frequencies, is the target of specialized observatories. And just as with visible light, the opening of gravitational wave astronomy to greater frequencies will also enlarge the scope of its scientific reach.
Prospects
Over the coming years, it is planned that NANOGrav’s work will move from detection to characterization and the production of a “spectrum” of the intensity of waves over a range of their lengths, from which the growing body of information on supermassive black holes can be contrasted. And as with all new experimental endeavors, there will be careful examination for surprises. If, for instance, the dark matter that comprises substantially more of the Universe than its visible counterpart exists in “clumps” and a clump would happen to pass by a cluster of sightlines, it would be detected. If exotic objects such as “cosmic strings” exist, which some extensions to our physical theories permit, their signature might be detected. And other gravitational wave observatories are being planned to bridge the immense gap between the low frequencies recorded by NANOGrav and the high frequencies recorded by LIGO.
For all the sophistication and refinements in technique since Galileo, he would have recognized NANOGrav (and LIGO) as examples of his dictum quoted at the start of this article: “Count what is countable, measure what is measurable, and what is not measurable, make measurable.” From the correspondence of experiment with theory, confidence is gained in theory. And where experiment and theory differ, signposts to the refinement of theory are provided, which themselves feed back into refinements in technique.
Smoke rises during an Israeli military raid on Jenin in the occupied West Bank, Monday, July 3, 2023. (AP Photo/Majdi Mohammed)
Israel’s military launched an aerial and armoured vehicle attack on the northern West Bank city of Jenin and the city’s densely populated refugee camp in the early hours of Monday morning, killing at least 10 Palestinians, including three children, and wounding dozens more. With 10 of the wounded in serious condition, the death toll is expected to mount.
Some 2,000 Israeli soldiers are involved in a mass arrest operation, with at least 20 Palestinians thus far detained for further interrogation.
Israel’s air strikes on Jenin have hit homes, the city’s utilities, a hospital and a mosque, with ground troops storming the Al-Ansar Mosque, claiming—falsely—that armed men were holed up inside it and others were preventing ambulances from transporting people to the hospital. Israeli forces have surrounded the refugee camp that is home to 14,000 Palestinians and are not allowing anyone to enter or leave. Connections to the internet, the electricity network and water supplies have been cut. Soldiers attacked journalists wearing press vests, including staff from Al Araby TV, who were covering the offensive and their video cameras set on fire.
The Lion’s Den, a Palestinian militant group based in Jenin, called on people across the West Bank and Gaza to mobilise and demonstrate in support of the people in Jenin, urging them to close the roads and routes used by Israeli forces and settlers to get their supplies into the city. Palestinians in Gaza have responded by gathering along the border with Israel, waving flags and setting fire to tyres to protest Israel’s attack on Jenin. They were met with tear gas from Israeli troops.
This criminal operation is the largest since Israel’s siege of the Jenin refugee camp in April 2002 that killed at least 52 Palestinians and left many homeless. Twenty-three Israeli soldiers lost their lives in that battle. It follows repeated demands from the fascistic forces in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to launch a large-scale military operation to suppress the Palestinians—similar to its murderous assaults on the besieged Gaza Strip—in the West Bank, which Israel has occupied illegally since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. Such an operation, which would meet fierce resistance, would lead to mass killings and devastation. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said the army needed to “demolish buildings” and kill “thousands of terrorists,” while encouraging his supporters to “run to the hill tops and settle them.”
IDF Chief Spokesman Brigadier General Daniel Hagari said the operation was a “wide scale effort against terror”, referring to the militant Palestinian groups, including Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Lions’ Den, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and others. While it was focused on Jenin, it could expand to other parts of the northern West Bank. He refused to say how long the operation would last but gave the impression it would last at least a week. He added that the military was on high alert in case Gaza, Lebanon’s Hezbollah or other groups tried to intervene or attack Israel.
Israel’s National Security Advisor Tzachi Hanegbi claimed that “the intelligence that has been accumulated has indicated that there is an effort by Iran and its proxies, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, to transfer a lot of money and weapons to terrorists.”
Major General Yehuda Fox, the chief of the IDF’s Central Command, insisted the Jenin operation was not going to be a one-off. “There is a series of operations here, just like we were here a week ago and two weeks ago, we will finish this operation, and we will come back in a few days or a week, and we will not allow this city of refuge for terror.”
Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, only recently lionised by opposition leaders for criticizing Netanyahu’s plans to overhaul the judiciary, approved the attack. He said the military operation in the West Bank city of Jenin “is progressing as planned.” The troops “will receive full support to do whatever is necessary and to operate on the ground and in the air, in order to protect the citizens of Israel and preserve full freedom of action throughout [the West Bank].”
This was tantamount to announcing a military dictatorship over the West Bank, including in areas designated under the 1993 Oslo Accords as under the full control of the Palestinian Authority (PA). Furthermore, it makes explicit what has long been implicit, the PA’s complete irrelevance as far as Israel—and Washington—is concerned.
According to Ha’aretz, Israel informed the US of its intention of carrying out the operation in Jenin and was evidently given the green light. On Monday, the White House National Security Council stated, “We support Israel’s security and right to defend its people against Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other terrorist groups.”
Far-right forces have repeatedly demanded the annexation of the West Bank—as has Netanyahu himself—in pursuit of their aim of establishing a Jewish supremacist state in both Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. Monday’s attack on Jenin follows a series of murderous military raids in the West Bank, constant settler violence watched over and protected by the Israel Defense Forces, and the government’s announcement of 13,000 new settlement homes since the start of the year. The IDF’s deployment of an Apache helicopter and armed drones in Jenin two weeks ago marked a significant escalation in Israeli aggression, which has seen around 190 Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem and Israel killed since Netanyahu’s far-right coalition took office.
Monday’s assault on Jenin, following months of near nightly raids on Jenin and Nablus, comes as Palestinians in the West Bank face an increasingly desperate economic situation. The 1993 Oslo Accords, which saw foreign direct investment in Israel soar and in practice ended the Arab League boycott of Israel, have crippled the Palestinian economy. Israel imposed restrictions on the movement of people, labour and goods, fragmented the territories with settlements, settler-only access roads and nature reserves, confiscated land, water and other natural resources, tied the Palestinian economy to the Israeli economy and cut it off from international markets.
Industry has withered, farmers have been driven off their land and per capita income has remained stagnant since 1994. The PA is utterly dependent upon international aid, even as the UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, announced last month that the $107 million in new funds falls significantly short of the $300 million needed to support millions of Palestinians in the occupied territories and refugee camps in neighbouring countries.
Thirty percent of the young people in the West Bank—where 50 percent of the population is under 30 years of age—are unemployed. More than one-third of young people who are employed work in the informal sector, while more than half of those working in the formal sector have no social security, medical insurance or entitlement to sick and holiday leave.
Netanyahu has deliberately stoked war, targeting the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, Israel’s Arab citizens and neighbouring states, above all, Iran and Syria, as he faces widespread opposition to his efforts to assume dictatorial powers by neutering a largely compliant judiciary that has provided cover for Israel’s expansionist drive and relentless attacks on the Palestinians. His aim is to deflect social tensions outwards against a perceived external enemy.
For 25 consecutive weeks, hundreds of thousands of Israelis have turned out to protest his judicial coup. But this movement is led by bourgeois Zionist parties whose opposition to Netanyahu reflects only their fears that he is endangering the interests of the state. They refuse to link the emerging fascist threat in Israel with opposition to the oppression of the Palestinians. Indeed, on Monday morning, the heads of the biggest opposition parties rushed to support the IDF’s offensive against Jenin.
The luxury, residential skyscraper buildings of "Billionaire's Row" in Manhattan are visible from Central Park in New York City, Feb. 20, 2022. (AP Photo/Ted Shaffrey)
The world’s richest people added $852 billion to their fortunes in the first half of 2023, according to data compiled by Bloomberg and released on Monday. Each member of the Bloomberg Billionaires Index made an average of over $14 million per day over the last six months—even as 47 percent of the world’s population barely survived on $6.25 a day.
The rise in the wealth of the world’s 2,640 billionaires was the largest six-month spike since the second half of 2020. The previous jump was the result of the trillions of dollars the US and other governments around the world poured into the financial markets to protect the assets of the super-rich from the impact of the pandemic. In the three years between March 2020 and March 2023, all three of the New York Stock Exchange’s largest indexes have risen by 70 percent. They have continued to rise in the last quarter despite the growing signs of financial instability and warnings of economic recession.
“The gains,” Bloomberg noted, “coincided with a broad stock market rally, as investors brushed off the effects of central bank interest rate hikes, the ongoing war in Ukraine and a crisis in regional banks. The S&P 500 rose 16% and the Nasdaq 100 surged 39% for its best-ever first half as investor mania over artificial intelligence boosted tech stocks.”
Even as billions of people on the planet face soaring living costs, declining real wages and growing destitution, Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest person, got $96 billion richer in the first six months of 2023. Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook parent Meta Platforms (Number 10 on Bloomberg’s list of the richest 500 billionaires), saw the second highest jump in his fortune, up $58.9 billion in the first six months of 2023, to $99.2 billion.
Fifteen current and former employees at Musk’s Tesla factory in California describe, according to TheGuardian, a work culture of “long hours under intense pressure, sometimes through pain and injury, in order to fulfill the CEO’s ambitious production goals.” Jonathan Galescu, a production technician at Tesla, describes to TheGuardian witnessing “people pass out, hit the floor like a pancake and smash their face open.” He added, “They just send us to work around him while he’s still lying on the floor.”
[Photo: World Inequality Report 2022]
Last year Musk cut 10,000 workers at Tesla and another 3,700 at Twitter. For his part, Zuckerberg began his third round of layoffs at Meta in May, part of a cost-cutting plan to eliminate 21,000 jobs over two years.
Musk is followed on Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index by Bernard Arnault, who controls half of European luxury goods maker LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton.
Arnault fell out of first place earlier after $11.2 billion was wiped out from his fortune in one day due to concerns that a potential US economic slowdown would lessen demand for luxury goods. Even with the selloff, the French billionaire still has a net worth of $191.6 billion, according to Bloomberg, and has added $29.5 billion so far this year.
In 2012, Arnault tried to switch his citizenship to Belgium to avoid paying taxes. In April, workers protesting President Emmanuel Macron’s pension cuts stormed LVMH’s headquarters, saying if the government needed money to fund pensions it should get it from Arnault.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is the third richest with a fortune of $154 billion, up $47.4 billion over the first six months of this year. Amazon is currently under investigation by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) for repeated violations. In 2021, Amazon had a serious injury rate of 6.8 per 100 workers, more than twice as high as 3.3 for every 100 workers at all other warehouses.
Following Bezos on the list is Microsoft founder Bill Gates ($134 billion, up $24.4 billion). Last year, Gates sold off $940 million of his shares in Canadian National Railway Co. but still has a 9 percent stake in CN Rail. It is one of North America’s top seven Class 1 railroads, which have carried out a savage cost-cutting attack on workers and cuts to infrastructure that have resulted in repeated derailments, including in East Palestine, Ohio.
Number seven on the list is Warren Buffett ($113 billion, up $5.6 billion), who owns BNSF railroad, along with Berkshire Hathaway, the investment group that owns Geico, Clayton Homes and Dairy Queen, and has stakes in Coca-Cola and American Express.
This is the anti-social character of just a few of Bloomberg’s list of billionaires whose wealth has ballooned during the pandemic as some 22 million have died and tens of millions more suffer long-term debilitation.
[Photo: World Inequality Report 2022]
According to a report released by the Oxfam charity ahead of the World Economic Forum earlier this year:
“The richest 1% have grabbed nearly two-thirds of the $42 trillion of wealth newly-created since 2020. This is nearly twice as much money as gained over the same period by the remaining 99% of humanity. During the past decade, the number and wealth of the billionaires has doubled and richest 1% of people captured around half of all new global wealth.”
“The ‘average’ billionaire has gained roughly $1.7 million for every $1 of new wealth earned by a person in the bottom 90%. The collective wealth of the world’s super-rich is increasing by $2.7 billion a day.”
“Over the next five years, three-quarters of the world’s governments are planning public spending cuts of $7.8 trillion.”
“More than 820 million people are now going hungry, most of them women who have to eat last and least. In addition, 339 million people now need humanitarian aid, including emergency food rations, clean water and shelter—the most ever.”
Every aspect of life in the United States and around the world is subordinated to the enrichment of this social layer, whose parasitism and decadence was highlighted in the TV series Succession.
In the United States, the Supreme Court declares it is unconstitutional to provide the slightest debt relief to working class and middle class college students. At the same time, the Biden administration and Congress find endless resources to bail out the banks, prop up the stock markets and wage war against Russia and China to extend control over the world’s resources to the same corporate and financial oligarchy, which is waging war against workers at home.
The irreconcilable conflict between the ruling elite and the great mass of working people is fueling an explosive resurgence of the class struggle around the world. This includes the mass protests against pension cuts and police violence in France, the strikes and struggles by railway, postal, airline and other workers in the UK, Germany, Italy and Spain, the wave of Latin American teacher strikes and the mass protests against austerity and privatization in Sri Lanka.
In North America, 7,400 Canadian dockworkers and 1,500 National Steel Car workers in Hamilton, Ontario, have struck. In the US, 15,000 hotel workers are striking in the Los Angeles area, more than 160,000 actors are striving to join the ongoing writers’ strike, 1,600 Wabtec locomotive workers are striking in Erie, Pennsylvania, West Coast dockers and New York City transit workers are opposing union-backed sellout agreements, and more than a half million UPS and auto industry workers are pressing for strike action this summer.
Within the ruling class there is a growing fear over the revolutionary implications of the ever-greater militancy and political radicalization of the working class. TheGuardian recently reported about an investment conference organized by Spear’s wealth management magazine in London, where “members of the global elite and their financial teams were told by progressive advisers that there was a ‘real risk of actual insurrection’ and ‘civil disruption’ if the yawning inequality gap between rich and poor was allowed to widen as a result of energy and food price hikes hitting squeezed households.”
