Israeli military bombs hospitals, ambulance convoys and schools

Kevin Reed

The bombing of Al Shifa hospital

The Israeli military, with the backing of the Biden administration, has targeted hospitals and medical staff for missile strikes in Gaza over the past 24 hours. On Friday, Israel carried out an airstrike on an ambulance at the gate of Al Shifa hospital, killing 15 people and injuring 60 others, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry. The strike near the hospital, located in the neighborhood of North Rimal in Gaza City, was confirmed by the Israeli government, which claimed the ambulance was being “used by a Hamas terrorist cell.” The Israeli allegation was “rejected by Health Ministry spokesmen.”

The Palestine Red Crescent Society issued a statement condemning the bombing of the ambulance convoy. The statement said, “Upon the arrival of Palestine Red Crescent society’s ambulance (Mercedes 3-1242-55) at the hospital gate to unload the injured (Najwa Toutah, 35 years old, shrapnel in the chest and leg, in an ICU condition), who was destined for Rafah Crossing to receive the required medical treatment in Egyptian hospitals, the vehicle was struck by a missile fired by the Israeli forces, only at a distance of about two meters from the hospital gate.”

The New York Times reported that “an explosion” occurred near the hospital at 4:30 p.m. local time on Friday. The Israeli strike was carried out after a spokesman from the Palestinian Health Ministry announced at a news conference that a convoy carrying “a large number of injured people” would be heading south on the coastal road of Al Rasheed near the Rafah border crossing with Egypt.

A graphic video at the scene at the gate of the Al Shifa hospital was posted on Twitter/X showing the death and destruction from the airstrike.

The post by Al Jazeera journalist Muhammad Shehada included the following description: “Israeli just bombed the main gate of al-Shifa medical compound where over 30,000 refugees are sheltering. Dozens killed & wounded; literal pools of blood everywhere! Multiple ambulances were damaged as they attempted to transport the critically wounded to Rafah.”

Speaking after the attack, Ashraf al-Qudra told the press that the convoy had left the hospital and made its way to a nearby roundabout when it was hit by an airstrike. The Times reported that al-Qudra said, “The convoy turned back, and when it got back to the entrance of Al Shifa, it was hit again.”

The Health Ministry and international aid groups say Al Shifa hospital is running out of fuel and has curtailed services amid the cutoff of electricity and fuel by Israel. Doctors have reported that large numbers of people have been wounded in airstrikes and are being treated without enough medicine and supplies.

In addition to the strike on the Al Shifa medical facility, Al Jazeera reported that Israel also struck the Indonesian Hospital in Bait Lahia located in the North Gaza Governorate. The report said people in the area were combing through the rubble using their cell phones as torches. The report also said, “Large plumes of smoke could be seen in the evening sky as small fires had broken out amid the mounds of debris.”

Al Jazeera also reported an air raid in the vicinity of the al-Quds hospital in the Tel al-Hawa area of Gaza City. A post on Twitter/X said that Israeli jets targeted the hospital and that there were “several casualties.” The al-Quds facility is providing shelter and basic needs for 14,000 people, mainly women and children.

The Palestine Chronicle reported on Friday that Israel struck the Osama Ben Zaid school on Friday afternoon, killing 20 people and injuring dozens of others. The school was being used to house displaced people whose homes have been destroyed by the war.

Numerous media outlets are reporting that Israeli forces have surrounded Gaza City on three sides and are operating within the city, fighting in close combat. In a televised statement, Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi, the Israel Defence Forces chief of staff, said Israeli forces “are in the heart of northern Gaza, operating in Gaza City, surrounding it.”

The siege of Gaza City is the latest in the ethnic cleansing operation of the Zionist state against Palestinians which has so far killed more than 9,200 people, mostly women and children, and injured at least 32,000 others. The death toll in Gaza is horrific and is without precedent in the history of Israeli violence against Palestinians, recalling the crimes of the Nazis in World War II.

Well aware that the Palestinian death toll will climb dramatically in the coming days, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was dispatched to Israel on Friday for the purpose of backing the genocide and covering up the scale of the crimes being committed.

The global charity Oxfam issued a statement on Friday saying it was “gravely concerned for the lives of around 500,000 Palestinians, alongside any of the more than 200 Israeli and other hostages, currently trapped in a ‘siege within a siege’ in northern Gaza.”

The Oxfam statement also said, “Israel’s decision to deprive civilians in Gaza of items essential to their survival such as food, water, fuel, medicines, and other aid amounts to collective punishment and a violation of international humanitarian law.”

On Friday, the World Health Organization (WHO) also released a statement saying that women, children and newborn infants are “bearing the burden of the escalation of hostilities in the occupied Palestinian territory.”

The WHO statement went on to say, “As of 3 November, according to Ministry of Health data, 2,326 women and 3,760 children have been killed in the Gaza Strip, representing 67% of all casualties, while thousands more have been injured. This means that 420 children are killed or injured every day, some of them only a few months old.”

The WHO said that there are an estimated 50,000 pregnant women in Gaza with more than 180 giving birth every day. The statement goes on, “These women are unable to access the emergency obstetric services they need to give birth safely and care for their newborns. With 14 hospitals and 45 primary health care centers closed, some women are having to give birth in shelters, in their homes, in the streets amid rubble, or in overwhelmed healthcare facilities, where sanitation is worsening, and the risk of infection and medical complications is on the rise.”

The WHO statement reports that over half of the population of Gaza is being sheltered at UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) facilities “in dire conditions, with inadequate water and food supplies, which is causing hunger and malnutrition, dehydration and the spread of waterborne diseases.”

Food bank usage in Canada up one-third in a year as social crisis dramatically worsens

Penny Smith

Recent nationwide reports from Food Bank Canada paint a dire picture of the soaring number of Canadians living in poverty and suffering food insecurity.

The charity’s annual Hunger Report explains that food bank usage has reached “unthinkable levels,” with a record 1.9 million visits to food banks in Canada in the month of March alone—a 32 percent increase year on year, and the highest numbers since the agency began collecting data in 1989. 

Volunteers pack boxes of food outside of a food bank [AP Photo/Ashley Landis]

Accelerating inflation at levels not seen in 40 years has driven up costs for basics such as transportation, food and shelter, while wages have not kept pace. Although the main cause of food insecurity is low income, as one food bank recipient in Ontario explains, “since September 2022, the cost of food and housing have been major issues.”

The increasingly precarious conditions for the country’s most vulnerable is underscored by the fact that children comprise over a third of all food bank recipients despite representing only 20 percent of the population. Additionally, seniors on a fixed pension income represent 8 percent of Canadian food banks users, rising at a rate far outpacing other age groups. Moreover, more than a quarter of food bank recipients are immigrants who have been in Canada for less than a decade, a usage rate that has doubled since 2016.

Notably, the expanding pool of food bank patronage—often the desperate last resort for people once all other avenues are exhausted—is no longer limited to those in the lowest-income households, such as people dependent on social assistance. As the report explains, “Never before have food banks seen such a high level of need among the working population,” and more and more of those in higher income brackets are turning to food banks for the first time. According to the Food Bank survey, one in five food bank recipients have employment and over a quarter live in a two-parent household.

Skyrocketing rents, the outcome of the decades-long privatization and deregulation of the housing stock by all the official political parties, are eating into an ever greater share of Canadian incomes. The Food Bank survey reveals that nearly 70 percent of food bank clients live in rental housing, 36 percent of whom pay more than a third of their income on housing and 13 percent of whom pay more than half of their income on rental expenses. Additionally, single person households account for 43.8 percent of food banks users in Canada, while representing 29.3 percent of the population.

The report also notes that Canada’s Indigenous population, where one in four live in poverty, is also disproportionately represented among food bank users at 12 percent, while making up only 5 percent of the general population.

Not included in the Food Bank report is data for Canada’s three impoverished northern territories, where the majority Indigenous population suffers from the highest rates of food insecurity in the country. In the largest and northernmost territory of Nunavut, the food insecurity rate has reached a catastrophic 57 percent, prompting doctors to declare food insecurity among Indigenous children an “urgent public health crisis.”

Across the country, funding-starved food banks are struggling to meet the explosion in demand. In Ontario, Toronto-based Charity Daily Bread reported Toronto’s largest food bank is at “breaking point” and cannot keep up with the organization’s quadrupling in patronage, from an estimated 65,000 client visits per month before the pandemic to an estimated 275,000 visits per month. Demand at the Food Bank of Waterloo Region has reached a “crisis” level and annual funding needs to double to more than $1.6 million to keep up with demand. One food bank in Newfoundland said former donors are now coming to their doorstep for help themselves, and another in Prince Edward Island has been forced to turn people away.

As millions of Canadians struggle to feed themselves, the grocery giants rake in record profits. Loblaws, Sobeys, and Metro reported a combined $100 billion in sales and $3.6 billion in profits in 2022. In June, public outrage over the corporate profit gouging compelled Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to make a hollow appeal to Canada’s top five grocery giants—Loblaws, Sobeys, Metro, Walmart and Costco—to voluntarily curb food prices before the Thanksgiving holiday. Yet corporate profits continue unmitigated and the cost of food in Canada increased 5.9 percent in September year-on-year. 

The Trudeau government continues to show callous indifference to what Food Banks Canada calls a “dire situation” confronting the one in five Canadians living with food insecurity. In the face of the greatest cost of living crisis in 40 years, it has allocated a pathetic $10 million in its 2023 budget for food infrastructure needs. 

The “historic” Affordable Housing and Groceries Act tabled in September with the ostensible aim of curbing the affordability crisis amounts in reality to yet another tax exemption for private sector developers who exploit the loose definition of “affordable” to win subsidies for near market value housing. The “affordable” price tags are still out of reach for most Canadians.

Trudeau’s cynical scapegoating of the grocery giants is rhetorical in content and will do nothing to resolve the problem of food insecurity and only deflects from the underlying political issues driving the affordability crisis. The efforts of the scrambling food charities, as crucial as they are in providing emergency relief, amount to a bandage on a haemorrhage.

The decades-long erosion of the social position of the working class steadily undermined by the austerity policies and corporate enrichment of governments of all political stripes with the aid of the trade unions has left wide swathes of the Canadian population living in poverty and food insecurity. Despite these bleak statistics, the Liberals, propped up by the New Democratic Party, have committed to a 70 percent increase in the military spending budget, costs which are being redirected from essential social services and protections that vulnerable people rely on.

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and supply chain disruptions served as an accelerant to this underlying process and provided the pretext for corporate profiteering. The escalating war against Russia in Ukraine that the Canadian government plays an outsized role in triggered a worldwide food and energy crisis and runaway inflation.

The cost of living crisis is being met with growing opposition internationally, from France to Sri Lanka, stoking fear in the Canadian ruling class that this spontaneous strike and protest action will quickly galvanize into a politically conscious movement against imperialist war and austerity.

The atrocities now being committed by the Israeli government and backed by all the imperialist powers against the defenceless population of Gaza mark a new stage in the imperialist effort to carve up the energy-rich Middle East. 

Under the guise of Israel’s “right to defend itself,” the Canadian political establishment has given unanimous support for the continuation of the bloody massacre in Gaza that has now killed over 9,000 innocent Palestinians—almost half of whom are children. This underscores the hypocrisy and cynicism behind the $60 million in humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip and surrounding areas Trudeau has pledged, which is really intended to paper over Canada’s predatory role in the region as the junior partner to US imperialism.

Israel strikes Jabaliya refugee camp for third day running as war crimes pile up in Gaza

Jordan Shilton

The Israeli regime is carrying out horrendous war crimes on a daily basis, with Thursday marking the third day in a row that the Jabaliya refugee camp was struck. As the official death toll among Palestinian civilians surpassed 9,000, the Israel Defence Forces also reportedly struck four schools within 24 hours and is preparing a horrific massacre of civilians in Gaza City.

The latest attack on Jabaliya, where over 195 were confirmed dead in two previous strikes Tuesday and Wednesday, hit a school used by the United Nations Relief and Work Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) as a shelter. At least 20 people were killed in the bombardment, according to UNRWA head Philippe Lazzarini. Schools were also struck by the IDF in the Beach refugee camp in northern Gaza, killing one child, and the Al-Bureij refugee camp, killing two people and injuring 31.

The locations struck by Israel are hosting some 20,000 displaced civilians, the UNRWA reported. Underscoring the systematic targeting of infrastructure designed to provide humanitarian support for the civilian population, the UNRWA wrote, “Since the start of the war on 7 October, nearly 50 UNRWA buildings and assets have been impacted, with some being directly hit. Like today’s, this includes UNRWA buildings used as shelters where UNRWA is currently hosting around 700,000 people. Twenty-five of these shelters are in northern Gaza, hosting 112,000 people.”

A brutal slaughter of thousands of civilians is looming in Gaza City, which the Israeli military claims to have “encircled” as part of its ground offensive. Al Jazeera journalist Youmna ElSayed, reporting from the city, noted that one of the main escape routes to the south is entirely blocked, while another is being closed off. “Many civilian cars have been shot at as they’re trying to evacuate from the north of Gaza or from Gaza City to the south,” she said.

“There are thousands of people who had returned to the northern Strip and to Gaza City itself, and there are thousands that did not evacuate.

“We saw at the Jabaliya camp, as it has been bombarded over three days, how many people were still in their homes. We’re talking about huge numbers.”

Speaking from the city’s Al-Shifa Hospital, the largest in the Gaza Strip, Dr. Marwan Abusada described the conditions as “beyond catastrophic.” “The corridors are full of injured people,” he continued. “The ER rooms are beyond full. We have zero capacity to treat all the injured people.

“The high number of displaced people are no longer sheltering in the courtyard of the hospital but are now inside the hospital, including in the corridors. There is a high chance of infectious diseases spreading between patients and those displaced.”

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs confirmed that the Israeli military advance in northern Gaza “is impeding the delivery of humanitarian aid to about 300,000 displaced people.” A separate group of UN experts issued a statement warning that the Palestinian people face “a grave threat of genocide.”

Israeli army spokesman Daniel Hagari dismissed any talk of a ceasefire to allow the thousands of civilians to depart Gaza City, asserting that this is “not on the table.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated that no fuel shipments will be allowed into the Gaza Strip as part of the trickle of aid trucks crossing the Rafah entry point from Egypt. At least 16 of Gaza’s 35 hospitals have stopped operating due to a lack of fuel, with the remainder running on low supplies. Al-Shifa and the Indonesian Hospital are reportedly at risk of imminent collapse as their generators run out of fuel.

Bakeries have also been directly targeted, contributing to the shortage of food. Al Jazeera reported Thursday that five bakeries have been directly targeted across Gaza in air strikes, while another eight suffered so much damage in nearby strikes that they are now out of service.

Under these conditions, the report that US secretary of State Anthony Blinken will seek to achieve “humanitarian pauses” of a few hours in the fighting during his trip Friday to Israel is akin to providing morphine to a dying patient. The few additional aid trucks that would reach Gaza during these brief windows of respite would still be prevented from transporting fuel, furthering the total collapse of any medical care in the enclave. Moreover, the Israeli regime demonstrates every day its utter disregard for any limits on its genocidal savagery, which would continue after any “pause” orchestrated by Blinken.

In a cynical statement Thursday, Blinken performed the necessary hand-wringing by noting that civilians are “bearing the brunt” of attacks by the IDF. However, he hastened to stress, “Israel has not only the right but the obligation to defend itself and also to take steps to try to ensure that this never happens again.”

Blinken claimed that the “pauses” would allow aid to reach Gaza and hostages taken by Hamas on 7 October to be freed. In reality, Israel’s savage onslaught is showing almost as little concern for the lives of the hostages—who are most likely being held in Hamas’ underground tunnel network—as for the Palestinian population. According to the IDF, soldiers will not enter Hamas tunnels but will use robots and explosive devices to collapse and destroy them. A senior army commander said, “It will become a death zone.”

Underlining US imperialism’s attitude to the genocide in Gaza, White House spokespersons made clear Thursday that the Biden administration remains opposed to calling for a “ceasefire.” There is bipartisan backing for the provision of over $14 billion in additional military aid to Israel. The European imperialist powers are no less enthusiastic. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz called Netanyahu Wednesday following the Jabaliya massacre to reaffirm Berlin’s “unwavering” support for Israel, while at home the German government is criminalizing protests against the genocide. France announced the dispatch of a second warship to the region Thursday, citing the threadbare pretext of providing additional medical care to Gaza residents.

One especially barbaric aspect of the Israeli regime’s onslaught on Gaza that has gone almost entirely unmentioned by the imperialist powers is its deliberate targeting of journalists. Mohammed Abu Hatab, a correspondent with Palestine TV, became the 30th Palestinian media worker to be killed since Israel’s bombardment began. According to a colleague, Hatab was killed in an air strike on his home in Khan Younis when he returned from work to check on his family.

A systematic witch-hunt on journalists in the Gaza Strip is being whipped up in the Israeli media. The Jerusalem Post reported Thursday that it had identified “around five dozen individuals associated with Hamas” who “are often seen sporting blue press vests and helmets” and have been “waging a propaganda campaign against Israel on various social media platforms.” Echoing Israeli military propaganda, the newspaper continued that they have “found refuge in Al-Shifa Hospital, which the IDF recently disclosed serves as a Hamas command and control centre.” The implication is clear: the targeted killing of further journalists will be justified as a blow against “Hamas terrorists.”

The IDF’s genocidal onslaught on Gaza over the past three-and-a-half weeks has gone hand-in-hand with a dramatic escalation of violence by the military and far-right settler gangs in the occupied West Bank. Military raids on Wednesday night led to the detention of 49 Palestinians, bringing the total taken into custody in the West Bank since 7 October to more than 1,200.

After clashes between Palestinians and Israeli settlers led to the fatal shooting of an Israeli reservist Thursday morning, a gang of settler thugs descended on the Palestinian village of Deir Sharaf, where they torched cars and shops, and threw rocks at Palestinian residences. Israeli security forces killed three Palestinians in the West Bank Thursday, bringing the death toll there since 7 October to at least 135.

Fighting also intensified on the Lebanese border Thursday, where Hizbollah claimed it had fired at 19 IDF targets. Hamas’ Lebanese wing also claimed responsibility for a rocket barrage on the northern city of Kiryat Shmona, where two people were injured. The Israeli military responded by striking a series of positions in southern Lebanon.

The Return of the Aging Crisis: a Diversion From Inequality

Dean Baker

Photo by Matt Bennett

Back in the 1990s, whining about the impending disaster from the retirement of baby boomer cohorts was all the rage. Private equity billionaire Peter Peterson’s polemics were big sellers, as very serious people struggled with how we could deal with this tidal wave of retirees. The basic story was that a rising ratio of retirees to workers would create a crushing burden for the younger people that were still in the labor force.

This argument went somewhat out of style over time. In part, the projection of exploding healthcare costs that drove the horror story turned out not to happen. Back in 2000, the long-term projections showed that healthcare would account for roughly one-third of total consumption spending by now. In fact, actual healthcare spending is less than 25.0 percent of total consumption. The difference between the 2000 projection and actual healthcare spending leaves about $1.5 trillion on the table (around $12k per family, each year) for us to spend on other things.

The second reason this demographic horror story went out of style was the slow recovery from the Great Recession. It took us over a decade to return to full employment following the collapse of the housing bubble. The problem for the economy in this decade was not that spending was too high, but rather that it was too low. (This is known as the “which way is up?” problem in economics.) If we had larger deficits during the last decade it would have provided a boost to growth and led to less unemployment.

Finally, the impending retirement of the baby boomers was no longer impending as they began to retire in the last decade. At the start of the decade the oldest baby boomers were already age 64. By 2020, the oldest baby boomers were age 74 and the youngest were already age 56. A substantial portion of the baby boom generation was already retired and the world had not ended.

The Return of the Demographic Crisis

But, as they say in Washington, no bad idea ever stays dead for long. In recent months the demographic crisis from retiring baby boomers seems to be everywhere. The major news outlets are filled with piece after piece telling us that we are running out of workers, at least when they are not telling us how the spread of robots and AI will create mass unemployment. (Yes, those claims are contradictory, but don’t tell any elite intellectual type.)

Anyhow, the basic story of the aging crisis is that workers will have to turn over a large portion of their paycheck to cover the costs of a growing population of retirees. This concern is supposed to lead us to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits and tell workers that they have to work later in life.

There are a couple of important points to be made at the start of any serious discussion. First, we have already raised the age at which people are eligible for full Social Security benefits. It had been 65 for people born before 1940. It has been gradually raised to 67 for people born after 1960. So, we have already taken account of people’s increased longevity in setting the parameters for Social Security.

The second point is that the gains in life expectancy have not been evenly shared. For people born in 1930 the gap in life expectancy, at age 50, between the top income quintile and the bottom income quintile for men was 5.0 years, and for women was 3.9 years. For the cohort born in 1960, the gap had increased to 12.7 years for men and 13.6 years for women. This means that almost all the gains in life expectancy over the last half century have been for those at the top of the income ladder. Those further down have seen little or no gains in life expectancy.

Next, it is important to have some idea of the dimensions of the aging “crisis.” We all know about the widely touted projected shortfalls in Social Security and Medicare. Let’s imagine that we made them up by raising the payroll tax. (That’s not the best way to deal with the problem, but this is just a hypothetical exercise.)

Suppose we raised the payroll tax by 4.0 percentage points tomorrow. Given current projections, this would be roughly enough to make the Social Security and Medicare trust funds solvent forever.

The graph below shows the current annual wage for a person getting the median wage, working full-time full year (50 weeks at 40 hours a week). It also shows what this worker would be getting if the median wage had kept pace with productivity growth, as it did in the long post-war boom from 1947 to 1973. And, it shows what this pay would have been if, in this scenario, we increased the payroll tax by 4.0 percentage points.[1]

Source: Economic Policy Institute, BEA, BLS, and author’s calculations.

Given the current median wage of just over $24 an hour, the full-year pay, net of payroll taxes (7.65 percent on the worker’s side) would be just under $46,600. By contrast, if their pay had kept pace with productivity growth over the last half-century, it would be over $79,700 net of payroll taxes.

If we said that it was necessary to raise the payroll tax by 4.0 percentage points (half on the employer and half on the employee) to deal with the cost of supporting an aging population, then the annual wage would fall to $76,500.[2] That would still be more than 70 percent above its current level.

The reality is that most workers stand to lose an order of magnitude more income due to upward redistribution than what they could conceivably risk from the changing demographics of the country. If we think that an aging population poses a risk to the living standards of younger workers, then upward redistribution is a disaster.

The Causes of Inequality

The hawkers of the demographic crisis story seem to want us to believe that inequality just happened and we just have to live with it. Of course, that is a lie. Inequality was the result of deliberate policy choices. We could have pursued different policies that would have not led to the rise in inequality we have seen over the last half century.

My book, Rigged, goes through the story in more detail, but I will quickly outline the basic picture. First, we have redistributed a massive amount of income upward with longer and stronger patent and copyright monopolies and related protections. Bill Gates would likely still be working for a living (actually, he could be collecting Social Security) if the government didn’t threaten to imprison people who made copies of Microsoft software without his permission.

It is common for economists to claim that technology was a major factor in upward redistribution. That is not true, it was our rules on technology that drove the upward redistribution. There are other, arguably more efficient, mechanisms for supporting innovation and creative work. These would likely not lead to as much inequality.

We also have pursued a narrow path of globalization where we quite deliberately put our manufacturing workers in direct competition with low-paid workers in the developing world. This had the predicted and actual effect of lowering the wages of manufacturing workers and non-college-educated workers more generally.

At the same time, we maintained or even increased the protections for highly educated professionals, like doctors and dentists. As a result, our doctors earn twice as much as doctors in other wealthy countries.

If we didn’t want to increase inequality, we could have pursued a course of globalization that focused foremost on reducing the barriers that protected our most highly paid workers. But these professionals, unlike manufacturing workers, have enough political power to ensure that trade deals will not be structured in ways that threaten their livelihood.

Our financial sector is a cesspool of waste and corruption. An efficient financial sector is a small financial sector. Instead of pursuing policies to promote efficiency, we have pursued policies that have encouraged bloat in this sector, which is the source of many of the biggest fortunes in the country.

When the market would have massively downsized the financial industry in the financial crisis, leaders of both political parties could not move quickly enough to rush to its rescue. There were no market fundamentalists when the great fortunes in the industry were in jeopardy.

We have also structured rules on corporate governance in ways that allow CEOs to rip off the companies they work for. The corporate directors, who are ostensibly charged with making sure CEOs and top management aren’t overpaid, for the most part, don’t even see this as part of their job description.

The bloated pay for CEOs warps the pay structure more generally. When a CEO can get $30 million and third-tier execs can get $2-$3 million, it creates a situation where even heads of charities and universities can command multi-million dollar paychecks.

High unemployment has also been a tool for lowering the pay of the typical worker. The only times where the pay of the median worker has outpaced inflation in the last half century have been when the unemployment rate was close to or below 4.0 percent.

The fact that anti-trust policy has been little used in the last four decades has likely also played a role in the recent shift from wages to profits. It will be interesting to see if the more aggressive policies pursued by the Biden administration have any effect in this area.

In short, we have made a series of policy decisions that have led to a massive upward redistribution of income in the last half-century. The impact of this upward redistribution on the income of young workers dwarfs the impact of demographics. Unfortunately, our news outlets seem more interested in highlighting the demographic issue than the causes of inequality.

There is one final point. We absolutely should be spending more money on daycare, healthcare for pregnant women and young children, early childhood education, and a variety of other areas that would benefit the young. However, there is no reason to believe that spending on the elderly is the obstacle preventing more spending in these areas.

US Fed pauses interest rate hikes amid rising bond yields

Nick Beams

The US Federal Reserve has paused its interest rate hikes for the second meeting in a row and sent out some mixed signals about whether it will lift rates at its last meeting for the year in December.

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell. [AP Photo/Tom Williams, Pool]

In response to questions at his press conference, though not in his prepared remarks, Fed chair Jerome Powell indicated that risks were evenly balanced. That was taken by some market commentators as an indication that, while not officially announcing it, the central bank’s hiking cycle had come to an end.

On the other hand, Powell left open the door for a further rate increase, saying that given the “uncertainties we face the Committee is proceeding carefully.”

On the issue of the labour market, the key issue for the Fed in its so-called fight against inflation, Powell said the labour market remained “tight” but supply and demand conditions continued to come into “better balance.”

Nominal wage growth had shown “some signs of easing” and job vacancies had declined but, although the jobs to workers ratio had narrowed, “labor demand still exceeds the supply of available workers.”

One of the aims of its policy aims since it started raising rates in March last year, lifting them to their highest level in 22 years, has been to increase that supply by trying to slow the economy and create unemployment if necessary.

A key factor in the decision to keep interest rates on hold appears to be the recent selloff in the bond market which has sent the yield on the benchmark 10-year US Treasury bond close to 5 percent on occasions—its highest level since before the global financial crisis of 2008.

It is considered that the rise in interest rates in the bond market has similar effects to an increase in the Fed’s rate, meaning it could pull back somewhat.

Powell indirectly pointed to these considerations in his remarks.

“Financial conditions have tightened significantly in recent months, driven by higher longer-term bond yields, among other factors. Because persistent changes in financial conditions can have implications for the path of monetary policy, we monitor financial developments closely. In light of the uncertainties and risks, and how far we have come, the Committee is proceeding carefully.”

No doubt Powell had in mind the experience of last March when the fall in bond prices and the rise in yields (the two move in opposite directions) led to three of the four largest bank failures in US history when Silicon Valley Bank, along with two others, collapsed and the major global bank Credit Suisse had to be taken over.

Confirmation of the serious nature of the March crisis came yesterday when the head of the Swiss National Bank Jordan Thomas said its intervention was “crucial” in avoiding a “financial crisis” worldwide.

Against considerable opposition, the Swiss National Bank threw away previous agreements on the liquidation of major banks, wiping out bondholders while giving payments to stockholders, contrary to common practice, in organising the bailout.

“The SNB’s willingness and ability to provide liquidity was crucial in managing the acute crisis at Credit Suisse and thus avoiding a financial crisis with serious economic consequences for Switzerland and the rest of the world,” Thomas told an event in Bern, Switzerland.

Of course, none of these experiences were mentioned by Powell in his remarks on the ramifications of bond market tightening—that would contradict the official mantra that the banking system is “sound and resilient”—but it would have been one of the factors in the Fed decision not to add to that tightening by lifting rates.

While third quarter GDP rose at an annual rate of 4.9 percent, largely on the back of a surge in consumer spending, there are signs that the underlying trend in the US economy is a slowdown.

 Powell said after a boost in the summer, activity in the housing sectors was “flattening out” and remained well below the levels of a year ago “largely reflecting higher mortgage rates” while higher rates “also appear to be weighing on business fixed investment.”

Evidence of a slowdown was contained in the latest purchasing managers’ index issued by the Institute for Supply Management. The index, which tracks factory activity, fell to 46.7 last month, a fall of 2.7 points from September. This was well below expectations of a reading of 49, with below 50 indicating a contraction. It is the 12th consecutive month the index has fallen.

The chairman of ISM’s business survey committee Timothy Fiore said of the six biggest manufacturing industries, only one—food, beverage and tobacco products—showed growth.

While the increase in bond yields meant the Fed could ease back on further hikes it is very much a two-edged sword.

The selloff on the bond market means that interest payments on government debt consume an ever-greater portion of its revenue. This is under conditions where there is increasing nervousness as to how much government debt financial markets can absorb. In other words, will there be a sufficient buyers for new bonds.

These concerns were reflected in another event yesterday—the announcement by the US Treasury of its plans to issue new bonds.

Normally this hardly rates a mention because the Treasury market is considered to be highly liquid, that is, even major moves have little effect. But this is no longer the case because, as a recent Fed report noted, liquidity in Treasury markets is “challenged” and so the announcement was carefully watched without causing any disturbance as took place in August.

As the Financial Times warned in a recent editorial, sharp shifts in financial markets pose risks “particularly when Treasury liquidity remains below historic norms.”

“Investors looking to lock in high yields may be reticent to buy if they think prices could fall further. The risk of sharp yield movements could also threaten institutions holding large bond losses and stoke distressed Treasury sales.”

It said the US had to exercise “fiscal prudence”—a call for spending cuts—and warned that high interest rates combined with “lax fiscal policy and political chaos” were a recipe for a vicious cycle of rising government yields. This was evidenced in Britain a year when the attempt by the short-lived Liz Truss government to fund tax cuts for the wealthy without spending cuts threw markets into chaos.

It warned that “if the US has its own Liz Truss moment, the damage will not be contained to its shores.”

The FT did not indicate where the spending axe should fall.

But the agenda of powerful sections of finance capital was laid out by billionaire investor Stanley Druckenmiller in comments made on the business channel CNBC yesterday.

The US government was “spending like drunken sailors” and entitlement programs that make up almost half of spending had to be cut, particular Social Security benefits for retirees. “I want to go after entitlements,” he said. “It’s where the money is. This generation has to take a cut.”

Right now, he continued, seniors were getting 100 cents on the dollar, and it was “not unreasonable” for that to be reduced.

But at the same time, articulating the program of war abroad and war against the working class at home, Druckenmiller said he was “actually happy” to see the government announcement of $106 billion of military support for Ukraine and Israel.

Death toll in Jabaliya refugee camp massacre soars to 195

Jordan Shilton

Palestinians try to pull a girl out of the rubble of a building that was destroyed by Israeli airstrikes in Jabaliya refugee camp, northern Gaza Strip, Wednesday, Nov. 1, 2023. [AP Photo/Abed Khaled]

One day after its brutal bombardment of the Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza, the Israeli regime intensified its onslaught on the Palestinians, including with a second strike on the camp. The official death toll among civilians from the more than three weeks of constant air strikes is likely to pass 9,000 today, as Secretary of State Antony Blinken prepares to make another trip to the region to reaffirm US imperialism’s unconditional support for the Israeli regime’s genocide.

The two strikes claimed at least 195 civilian lives, with over 120 still missing as of late Wednesday evening. According to Gaza’s Government Media Office, a further 777 people were wounded in the twin attacks on the enclave’s largest refugee camp.

Al-Jazeera reported that most of the victims were being treated at the Indonesian Hospital, which like almost all health facilities in Gaza now operates without fuel. Al-Shifa Hospital, the largest in Gaza, “has announced that in a few hours it will completely stop operating because of a shortage of fuel,” the broadcaster noted.

Responding to the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, the UN Human Rights Office declared that the air strikes “are disproportionate attacks that could amount to war crimes” due to the “high number of civilian casualties and the scale of destruction.” Chris Gunness, the former spokesman for the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) told Al-Jazeera that Gaza is rapidly becoming “the world’s largest open-air death camp.”

Knowing full well that its war crimes enjoy the support of all the imperialist powers, the Israeli regime has increasingly given up any pretense of justifying them. In what amounted to a brazen provocation, the Israeli military said of Tuesday’s air bombardment of Jabaliya that it had targeted “tunnels underneath the buildings, which resulted in the collapse of the buildings on top,” according to Times of Israel.

Representatives of the imperialist powers issued typical anodyne statements following the massacre, prefaced as always with declarations of Israel’s “right” to “self-defence.” US President Joe Biden, in remarks that failed to mention the flattening of residential buildings in Jabaliya, stated, “Israel has a right to defend itself in a manner consistent with international humanitarian law.”

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz was no less fulsome in his backing for the Israeli regime, telling Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a Wednesday telephone call that he “renewed Germany’s unwavering solidarity with Israel” and “underlined the importance of protecting civilians and humanitarian supplies.”

A mere 61 aid trucks made it into Gaza Wednesday, less than a drop in the bucket for the 2.3 million residents. Israel continues to block all shipments of fuel from passing the Rafah crossing.

A statement from the French Foreign Ministry was one of the few to even mention the bombardment of the refugee camp. However, after stating that Paris was “deeply concerned” by the attack, it restricted itself to the bland declaration that “protection of civilian populations is an obligation of international law, which is binding on everyone.”

Behind such empty references to “international law,” the reality is that the imperialist powers have facilitated Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people. The multibillion-dollar military aid packages Washington has provided Israel over the years has turned the country into a garrison state for US imperialist interests in the Middle East. Biden has just requested another $14 billion in military assistance to enable the Israeli regime to continue its slaughter. Biden, Scholz and French President Emmanuel Macron have all visited Israel to give Netanyahu their full backing since the beginning of the war. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is scheduled to pay another visit to Israel Friday to underscore Washington’s support for the genocide.

The Israeli regime clearly felt emboldened by the reaction of its imperialist backers. Late Wednesday, the Palestine Health Ministry reported that a maternity ward at the Al-Helou International Hospital in Gaza City was “bombarded.“ Air strikes also occurred in the vicinity of Al-Quds Hospital, according to the Palestine Red Crescent.

Ground operations have also expanded, with Israeli Army spokesman Daniel Haggari claiming that Israeli forces have “broken through” Hamas defences in northern Gaza. Soldiers are reportedly approaching the outskirts of Gaza City. So far 16 Israeli soldiers have died in the intervention.

While fully endorsing Israel’s pummeling of Gaza and slaughtering of its civilian population, some US officials have sought to give the impression that more clarity is needed from Israel on what its plans are for Gaza after Hamas has been defeated. US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby, for example, answered a question about what would follow Hamas by saying, “We don’t have all the answers to that.”

A letter signed by US senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren as part of the debate on the $14 billion in aid to Israel asserted, “Congress needs more information about Israel’s long-term plans and goals, as well as the United States government’s assessments of those prospects.”

The fact of the matter is that Israel has been more than explicit about its plans for Gaza, which consist in exterminating a significant section of the population and forcing the rest to flee to Egypt. Last month, Israel’s Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, who described Palestinians at the outset of the onslaught on Gaza as “human animals,” laid out three phases in the war. After eliminating Hamas’s military and governmental capabilities, Gallant vowed that Israel would remove any responsibility it has for Gaza by creating a new “security reality.” Plans to force Egypt to set up refugee camps in the Sinai Peninsula, where those fleeing Gaza could be housed, are under discussion.

On Wednesday, Galit Distel Atbaryan, a former minister in the Netanyahu government, explicitly called for the “erasure” of “all of Gaza from the face of the earth” in a post on X. “Gazan monsters” have the option of heading to Egypt or dying, she continued, while the occupied West Bank should experience “fire and smoke on the heads of Nazis.”

Zvi Succot of the ultra-nationalist Religious Zionist party was also nominated to head the Knesset (Israeli parliament) Defence subcommittee for Judea and Samaria, which is responsible for security in the West Bank. Succot, a far-right settler activist who has been arrested on several occasions, said on his appointment that he would aim to “expand the settlements as much as possible” and ensure “personal security” for the residents, i.e., continue the brutalization of Palestinians in the West Bank at the hands of settler thugs that has intensified dramatically since the war began.

World Bank warns of possible major oil price hike

Nick Beams

The World Bank has warned that oil prices could rise to as high as $157 per barrel, up from $90, because of the Israeli war on Gaza.

The warning is contained in the bank’s Commodities Outlook Report issued on Monday. Rising oil prices will not only lift energy and fuel costs but will increase food inflation, via the impact on fertiliser prices. This would worsen the situation for more than 700 million people, almost one-tenth of the world’s population, who the bank says are already malnourished.

The World Bank says oil prices could be pushed into “uncharted waters” by Israel’s war on Gaza. [AP Photo/Martin Meissner]

Under the bank’s baseline scenario, which it set out before the war, oil prices were predicted to fall to around $81 per barrel while overall commodity prices were projected to decline by 4.1 percent next year.

These forecasts have been thrown into disarray by the war on Gaza and the prospect of an even wider conflict, possibly an attack on Iran, which has been a long-held objective of the US, and which has come closer to realisation with the movement of naval and air forces into the Gulf.

The World Bank said the outlook for commodity prices would “darken quickly” were the conflict to escalate. It set out three possible scenarios.

Under a “small disruption,” such as took place with the war on Libya in 2011, the oil price would increase by 3 percent to 13 percent and reach a range of $93 to $102 per barrel.

In a “medium disruption,” equivalent to what occurred in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, prices would be driven up by 21 percent to 35 percent and oil would fetch between $109 and $121 per barrel.

In a “large disruption,” the global oil supply would contract by between 6 million to 8 million barrels a day. This would drive up oil prices by between 56 percent and 75 percent with the price ranging from $140 per barrel to as high as $157. The record price for crude is $147 per barrel which it reached in 2008 on the eve of the global financial crisis.

The World Bank forecast came in the wake of a recent note by the Bank of America which said the oil price could soar to as high as $250 a barrel.

Indermit Gill, the World Bank’s chief economist, noted that the conflict in the Middle East came on the heels of the biggest shock to commodity markets since the 1970s—the war in Ukraine.

“That had disruptive effects on the global economy that persist to this day.… If the conflict were to escalate, the global economy would face a dual shock for the first time in decades—not just from the war in Ukraine but also from the Middle East,” Gill said.

It is not just fuel and energy prices that are impacted.

“Higher oil prices, if sustained, inevitably mean higher food prices,” said Kose, the bank’s deputy chief economist.

He stated: “If a severe oil-price disruption materialises, it would push up food price inflation that has already been elevated in many developing countries. At the end of 2022, more than 700 million people—nearly a tenth of the global population—were undernourished. An escalation of the latest conflict would intensify food insecurity not only within the region but also across the world.”

Comparisons have been made with the oil shock of 1973 when prices quadrupled as a result of the Yom Kippur war. The percentage of oil supplied from the Middle East is now down to around 30 percent. But as Kose noted in an interview with the Financial Times, that was still a big share.

“When you think about oil prices, what happens in the Middle East does not stay in the Middle East,” he said. “It has huge global repercussions.”

Kose warned that an escalation of the conflict which drove a persistent increase in commodity prices would set off “another wave of inflation” and lead central bankers to further increase interest rates.

While price rises have been trending down over the past period, the last quarter saw a 5 percent increase in the World Bank commodity price index, mainly due to an 11 percent rise in oil prices. This more than offset the fall in price declines for 24 of the 43 commodities in the index.

The bank reported that before the conflict in the Middle East, commodity prices were already 45 percent above their 2015-2019 level in nominal terms and 25 percent higher when adjusted for inflation.

Since the beginning of the Israeli war energy prices have increase overall by 9 percent.

Despite the increase in stockpiles in Europe, natural gas prices were 82 percent above their 2015‒19 average. Fertiliser prices, which are linked to oil and form an important component of food prices, were 85 percent higher than 2015‒19 average levels.

As a recent UN report detailed, much of the elevation in fertiliser prices is due to trading and financial speculation by the giant agribusinesses and commodity traders that dominate the global food market.

Metal prices were forecast to go down, largely because of the slowdown in the world economy, much of it induced by the higher interest rates of the US Federal Reserve and other major central banks.

The World Bank noted that metal prices had edged down by 1 percent since the Middle East conflict began.

“However,” it continued, “gold prices—which usually move in tandem with geopolitical concerns—have increased by 8 percent. An escalation of the conflict would push metal prices up, mainly through indirect channels. Prolonged disruption to energy markets can raise production costs of energy-intensive metals such as aluminium and zinc.”

There could also be “much higher gold prices” as investors shifted to “safe-haven assets” because of heightened geo-political risks.

The initial reaction of central bankers to the prospect of a new inflation wave will be seen on Wednesday when the Fed announces its interest rate policy. At this stage it is expected that it will keep rates on hold as it has done since they were last raised in July following the fastest hiking cycle in four decades.

There is also the view that the selloff on the bond market, which has lifted market interest rates, makes further increases by the Fed unnecessary at this point. But no doubt the remarks and answers at Fed chair Jerome Powell’s press conference following its meeting will be closely followed to see if they provide any indication as to how the central bank will respond to the prospect of a new inflation surge.