UN report details developing countries’ rising debt burden

Nick Beams

The global financial system is operating as a kind of giant vacuum cleaner sucking up the wealth of poorer and less developed countries to fatten the bottom line of the banks and financial institutions, as billions of people are driven deeper into poverty.

This fact of economic and political life leaps out of virtually every page of a report on global trade prepared by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) earlier this month.

United Nations Conference on Trade and Development report: “A world of debt” [Photo: UNCTAD]

The report began by noting that global public debt was continuing to escalate rapidly, “driven by cascading crises as well as the sluggish and uneven performance of the global economy.”

In 2023, total public debt, comprising domestic and external debt, reached $97 trillion, an increase of $5.6 trillion in a year.

The sharpest increase is occurring in so-called developing countries, where in 2023 it reached $29 trillion, accounting for 30 percent of the global total, compared to 16 percent in 2010.

The report noted that while the burden of debt varies, it is “exacerbated by the inequality embedded in the international financial architecture” where “those least able to afford it end up paying the most.”

This is a significant finding. It makes clear that for all the statements by political leaders and international organisations, such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, about the need to ease the debt burden and organise relief, there is no solution to be found within the framework of the international financial system. The increasing daily impoverishment of billions of people, outlined in the report, is rooted in the very structures of the system.

As the report explained:

“Developing countries are grappling with an international financial architecture, whose entrenched asymmetries exacerbate the impact of cascading crises on sustainable development. This system intensifies their debt burden by limiting access to affordable development finance and pushing them to borrow from more volatile and expensive sources.”

Overall external debt of developing countries was $3.2 trillion in 2022 and for half of these it was as high as 28.4 percent of their GDP and 92.4 percent of their exports.

The situation is worsening because governments are now allocating twice as many resources relative to revenue to service their debt as compared to 2011, “leaving a declining share of resources for investment in sustainable development.”

The picture that is so often presented is one in which loans and aid are being allocated to developing countries to finance economic development.

Actually, the flow of funds is in the other direction. This is the result of the increasing role of private credit funds within the international financial system, upon which developing countries are being forced to increasingly rely.

In 2022, developing countries paid $49 billion more to their creditors than they received in new funds. There was an inflow of $40 billion from bilateral and multilateral organisations, while private creditors, such as hedge funds and private equity groups, withdrew a record $89 billion. In effect, the money provided through official channels was used to finance private capital.

A total of 52 countries experienced an outflow of money in 2022, up from 32 in 2010. The increase reflects the impact of rising interest rates which began in 2022 as the US Federal Reserve, followed by other central banks, began lifting rates to their highest levels in several decades.

The perverse logic of the borrowing regime is illustrated by the fact that borrowing costs for developing countries were two to four times higher than in the US and six to twelve times higher than in Germany. Those who can least afford it are forced to pay more.

The effect of higher rates was reflected in the interest bill for developing countries. It rose to $847 billion in 2023, a 26 percent increase from 2021.

More than half of all developing countries allocate at least 8 percent of government revenue to interest rates. The figure has doubled over the past decade and in 2023 a record 54 developing countries, some 38 percent, most of them in Africa, allocated at least 10 percent of revenue on interest payments.

The outlay on the interest bill rose faster than spending on health and education in many developing countries in Africa, Asia and the Pacific region in the 2020‒2022 period.

During those years there were 15 countries where interest payments exceeded outlays on education and 46 where they were higher than health spending.

The report said that the number of countries where this was taking place was rising. A total of 3.3 billion people now lived in countries where spending on the interest bill was higher than on either education or health.

The UN report concluded with appeals for reforms to the “international financial architecture,” saying such calls were “loud” with more than 149 countries raising the issue at the most recent meeting of the UN General Assembly. But such calls have been made many times before and the situation has only worsened.

This is because, as the report itself acknowledged, inequality is “embedded” in the system itself.

Moreover, the same “international financial architecture” which is driving billions of people in poorer countries into ever-deeper poverty likewise dominates the lives of workers in the major economies, as parasitic finance capital demands ever-greater levels of exploitation of workers and cuts on social spending to meet its insatiable demands.

World Refugee Day 2024 sees record numbers of people fleeing conflict, wars and persecution

Jean Shaoul

World Refugee Day 2024, the United Nations’ annual event on June 20, sets a new record for the number of refugees, at more than 41 million. Under international law, refugees are people who are forced to flee their home countries to escape persecution or a serious threat to their life, physical integrity or freedom.

When the UN established the Refugee Convention in 1951 to protect the rights of refugees in Europe in the aftermath of World War II, there were 2.1 million refugees. In 1967, the Convention was expanded to cover displacement throughout the world. By 1980, the number had surpassed 10 million and in 1990, 20 million.

Sudanese refugees displaced by the conflict in Sudan gather to receive food staples from aid agencies at the Metche Camp in eastern Chad, March 5, 2024 [AP Photo/Jsarh Ngarndey Ulrish]

The US-led invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, along with the civil wars in South Sudan and Syria, and other wars, caused the number of refugees to surpass 30 million by the end of 2021. The wars in Ukraine and Sudan are leading some of the fastest growing refugee crises since World War II. Around 5.7 million people were forced to flee Ukraine in less than a year. Nearly 6.5 million people have crossed into neighbouring countries, including Poland, Hungary and Moldova.

Around 72 percent of all refugees came from just five countries: Afghanistan (6.4 million), Syria (6.4 million), Venezuela (6.1 million), Ukraine (6 million) and Palestine (6 million). Most refugees live in neighbouring countries, with Iran hosting 3.8 million, Turkey 3.3 million, Columbia 2.9 million, Germany 2.6 million and Pakistan 2 million. Nearly all the refugees living in Iran and Pakistan are Afghans, while most refugees living in Turkey are Syrians.

Other countries hosting refugees include Lebanon, Jordan, Kenya and Uganda, despite their very limited resources. Even war-torn countries such as Yemen are hosting people fleeing conflict in the Horn of Africa via the Red Sea. The number of migrants arriving in Yemen in an effort to reach Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States rose from 27,000 in 2021 to more than 90,000 in 2023, according to the UN’s International Organisation of Migration (IOM), which estimates that about 380,000 migrants are currently in Yemen.

Europe and North America, with their vastly greater resources, are doing everything in their power to abrogate the Refugee Convention, turning away those seeking refuge from violence and making it all but impossible to seek asylum in their countries. Last year, 4,114 people died or were reported missing while trying to cross the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, according to the IOM.

But these 41 million souls are just some of those driven from their homes. Last year the number of people forced to flee their homes due to wars, conflicts and persecution rose to an all-time high of at least 117.3 million, and was expected to reach 120 million by last April, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). This is an increase of 8 percent, or 8.8 million people, compared to 2022, continuing 12 years of consecutive rises.

Of these 117 million people, 68.3 million were internally displaced (IDPs) within their own countries. The number of asylum seekers has risen from 4.1 million in 2020 to 5.4 million in 2022, an increase of more than 30 percent, according to the IOM’s latest World Migration Report.

It is not just from war-torn countries like Syria and Afghanistan that people are fleeing. Of particular note is the number of Turkish citizens—more than 100,000—who applied for asylum in European Union (EU) countries last year, an 82 percent increase from 2022, although 75 percent of applications were rejected. They now form the third largest nationality seeking protection in the EU after Syrians and Afghans. Last year, around 15,500 Turkish citizens were arrested while irregularly crossing the US-Mexico border, up from around 1,400 in 2021.

The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre’s (IDMC) annual Global Report notes that in addition to the 68.3 million IDPs due to violent conflicts, a further 7.7 million were displaced by floods, storms, earthquakes, wildfires and other disasters at the end of 2023. Some 148 countries, including some high-income countries, reported disaster displacement.

Climate change is making disasters more frequent and intense. Storm Daniel in the Mediterranean officially killed 4,000 people, with 10,000-100,000 people missing in Libya.

Globally, the numbers of forcibly displaced persons are staggering. They are the outcome of wars and conflicts frequently stoked or directly waged by the imperialist powers or their local allies, as well as natural disasters created or exacerbated by the activities of the world’s giant corporations and their governments.

In all, one in every 69 people worldwide remain forcibly displaced. This is more than the entire 117 million population of the Philippines, the world’s thirteenth most populous country, or more than 1.5 percent of the world’s 7.9 billion population.

According to the UNHCR, the number of those internally displaced within their own countries reached 68.3 million at the end of 2023, nearly double the one in 125 people displaced a decade ago. Nearly half of all IDPs live in sub-Saharan Africa, forced to flee conflicts that are barely reported in the Western media.

The Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip has uprooted at least 1.7 million Palestinians, or 75 percent of the Strip’s population. Most of them have been forced to move several times.

The wars in Sudan, Gaza and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) accounted for nearly two-thirds of the new displacements. At the end of 2023, fighting between rival factions of the Sudanese military that are backed by regional powers had forced 10.8 million Sudanese to flee their homes, one of the largest numbers ever recorded in a single country.

Some 13 years after the CIA, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, Turkey and Israel backed rival militias in a bid to topple the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad, Syria remains the world’s largest displacement crisis, with 13.8 million forcibly displaced in and outside the country.

The suffering encompassed by these statistics is impossible to fully grasp, but international funding for humanitarian relief is a pittance. While military spending rises—in 2023, the world’s total military outlay was $2.4 trillion—the UN and other aid organizations were only able to rustle up $24 billion for humanitarian aid. This was just 43 percent of the amount required to meet the most urgent needs of hundreds of millions of people.

The international media have barely mentioned the lack of funding, or the latest displacement figures. Wars, conflicts and disasters and their ensuing misery are not only normalized but have become preferred policy for the major imperialist powers and their puppet regimes in the world’s poorest countries.

African National Congress strikes coalition deal with apartheid-era party

Jean Shaoul

South Africa’s National Assembly re-elected Cyril Ramaphosa to the presidency for a second five-year term, after his African National Congress (ANC) Party struck a last-minute coalition deal with the right-wing Democratic Alliance (DA), the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) and the Patriotic Alliance.

The Democratic Alliance is made up of the remnants of parties from the apartheid era, including the National Party that ruled South Africa from 1948 to 1994.

The National Assembly elected an ANC politician as speaker and a DA lawmaker as deputy speaker. Ramaphosa will be sworn in as president Wednesday and then unveil a new cabinet expected to include DA members.

Cyril Ramaphosa in 2019 [Photo by International Labour Organization / FLickr / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]

The coalition deal follows the May 29 elections in which the ANC, synonymous with the decades-long struggle against South Africa’s hated racist regime, suffered its worst electoral result since taking office after the first post-apartheid election in 1994. This, along with the record low voter registration and turnout, testifies to the decline of the ANC’s political authority among broad layers of the working class, above all the younger generation.

The ANC won just 40 percent of the vote, giving it 159 of the 400 seats in parliament. Its loss of around 16 percent of the vote was the uMkhonto weSizwe’s (MK Party’s) gain. The MK is the newly formed breakaway party of former ANC President Jacob Zuma, who was ousted from power at the hands of Ramaphosa in 2018 over long-standing corruption.

Following the elections, Ramaphosa proposed a national unity government. But after two weeks of backroom talks and political horse trading, he was able to secure his political survival only by turning to John Steenhuisen’s Democratic Alliance, whose rabidly pro-business party came second, winning 22 percent of the vote.

DA leaders justified overturning last year’s resolution never to work with the ANC, saying that it was important to prevent a “doomsday coalition” between the ANC and the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF). Steenhuisen said that it was essential to come together and collaborate to prevent subversive forces filling the political vacuum, adding, “It’s the patriotic thing to do.”

Zuma’s MK Party, which got the third highest vote share, refused to work with the ANC as long as Ramaphosa remained leader. It disputed the election results, claiming the election had not been either free or fair, and called on South Africa’s top court to stop Friday’s convening of parliament. The election commission defended results that were accepted by the other main parties.

The EFF, an ANC splinter group led by Julius Malema that utilises leftist and hardline black nationalist phraseology and won nearly 10 percent of the vote, likewise refused to work with the ANC.

The ANC’s coalition also includes the small Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), a right-wing, Zulu nationalist party, with which it had fought a virtual civil war during the late 1980s and early 1990s that left thousands dead and threatened to derail the 1994 election. The inclusion of the IFP, which received 3.8 percent of the vote, provides the ANC a means of deflecting criticism for working with the white-led DA. Velenkosini Hlabisa, Inkatha’s leader, said, “This presents an important opportunity between the two political parties to heal the wounds of the past.”

A fourth member of the coalition is the deeply reactionary Patriotic Alliance (PA), which received 2 percent of the vote. The PA, which wants to bring back the death penalty and deport illegal immigrants, has its support base in South Africa’s communities in the Gauteng and Western Cape provinces.

Ramaphosa called the agreement with the DA a “new birth, a new era for our country,” adding that it was time for parties “to overcome their differences and to work together.” He has agreed an eight-page document governing their coalition, including fine phrases about decision-making based on consensus, respect for the constitution and opposition to racism and sexism, with a priority to be given to “rapid, inclusive and sustainable economic growth.” The financial markets, heaving a sigh of relief, approved of the deal, with the rand, South Africa’s currency, rallying slightly against the dollar.

Ramaphosa’s embrace of the Democratic Alliance—until now the official opposition party—and other right-wing parties, at the risk of splintering his faction-ridden ANC, is the logical expression of its pro-capitalist agenda. The ANC had from its inception a bourgeois nationalist program. Notwithstanding the socialist phraseology borrowed from the Stalinist South African Communist Party (SACP), the ANC’s 1955 Freedom Charter guaranteed bourgeois property rights and upheld the institutions of the capitalist state. That is why, after years of violently suppressing the ANC, the apartheid government of President F.W. De Clerk turned to Nelson Mandela and his ANC in 1990 to prevent a social revolution.

The ANC, with its pro-business agenda aimed at encouraging inward investment into South Africa—known unofficially as “cautious Thatcherism” after Britain’s notoriously pro-market prime minister of the 1980s—did nothing to improve the social conditions of the vast majority of South Africans. They still today live in conditions of utmost squalor, without secure access to electricity or running water, plagued by rampant crime, corruption, poverty and astronomic unemployment levels, particularly among South Africa’s predominantly young population.

While white South Africans continue to control the majority of the national wealth, the ANC’s Black Economic Empowerment programme enabled a thin layer of black businessmen and a handful of black politicians and trade union leaders to enrich themselves and provide a social base for the post-apartheid regime. Ramaphosa, the former head of the miners’ union, has an estimated personal wealth of $450 million–dwarfing that of his rival Zuma.

Ramaphosa’s decision to cut a deal with the vehemently pro-market and pro-Washington Democratic Alliance sparked fears among ANC members that it signals the end of affirmative action and even token efforts to end poverty. The Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), the trade union federation that is a key member of the ANC “Tripartite Alliance” along with the SACP, had threatened to quit the alliance if it entered government with the DA.

The ANC sought to counter this, with party official Fikile Mbalula pointing out that in the first government of national unity in 1994, the ANC’s coalition included the National Party, the party of apartheid! He asked rhetorically, “We went into government with people who took us to jail. Did we die? We didn’t. Did we survive that moment? We did.”

Cutting a deal with the Democratic Alliance means intensifying a programme of class war at home in the interest of South African and international capital under conditions where South Africa, the world’s most unequal society, is a social and political powder keg. It is likely to entail closer relations with US imperialism under conditions where the ANC had sought to use its economic relations with China, Russia, Iran and Cuba and its membership of the BRICS group of countries as a bargaining chip in its dealings with the Washington-dominated financial and political institutions.

There was a noticeable absence of any discussion during the election campaign of the global war initiated by US imperialism of which the NATO-instigated war with Russia over Ukraine, the imperialist-backed Israeli genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza and Washington’s military-strategic offensive against China are three key arenas.

The ANC has for decades supported the Palestinians, most recently bringing charges of genocide and war crimes against Israel to the International Court of Justice. In relation to the US proxy war in Ukraine against Russia, Pretoria has refused to fall in line with Washington—abstaining on six UN resolutions condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, refusing to implement sanctions against Russia and appealing to the International Criminal Court not to enforce an arrest warrant on Vladimir Putin so the Russian president could visit their country.

Last year, South Africa carried out naval exercises with China and Russia, seriously straining relations with Washington. In May 2023, US ambassador to South Africa Reuben Brigety called a press conference to denounce South Africa for selling weapons to Russia, without producing any evidence to back his claim.

None of this was the subject of any debate during the election campaign, even though the ANC and DA hold opposing views on all these issues.

The fracturing of the ANC and its disastrous election results gives a pale and distorted indication of the mass anger against the whole rotten capitalist set-up of post-apartheid South Africa. There have been numerous and very bitter working-class struggles, most notably the 2012 miners’ strike where Ramaphosa’s demand for a police clampdown precipitated the Marikana massacre of 34 striking miners, who were shot dead at a mine owned by the Lonmin group where the former head of the National Union of Mineworkers was a non-executive director.

Since then, the “Butcher of Marikana” has done everything he could to prop up South African capitalism, cutting corporate taxation as he drove down workers’ pay, reneging on public sector wage deals and slashing living standards. It has earned him the undying hatred of South African workers. Striking gold miners at Sibanye-Stillwater booed Ramaphosa—COSATU’s guest of honour—off the stage at the 2022 May Day rally in Rustenburg, the centre of the country’s mining region.

Repeated strikes for higher wages by metalworkers, public sector workers, teachers, healthcare and transport workers, as well as one- and two-day mass protest strikes have been systematically isolated by COSATU and the trade unions that are politically tied to the ANC.

The elections have underscored that the ANC is sitting on a political and social volcano. The new ANC-Democratic Alliance government will be a regime of extreme crisis.

Infectious diseases skyrocket worldwide fueled by COVID-19 pandemic

Benjamin Mateus

A new study has found that the global impact of the COVID-19 pandemic over the past four years coincides with a new surge in many other infectious diseases far beyond their pre-pandemic levels. The study was reported by Airfinity, a UK-based data and analytics company that specializes in monitoring and forecasting trends in global disease and public health.

The implication of this finding is that the systematic dismantling of public health measures by capitalist governments worldwide, allowing SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, unimpeded access to the world’s population, has created the conditions for even greater damage to human health.

Airfinity previously tracked the horrendous impact of lifting Zero-COVID in China at the end of 2022, which led to hundreds of millions of people being infected and more than a million deaths. Last week the company posted a new analysis on its webpage showing that “the world is seeing a resurgence of at least 13 infectious diseases, with cases higher than before the pandemic in many regions. Over 40 countries or territories have reported at least one infectious disease resurgence that’s 10-fold or more over their pre-pandemic baseline.”

Global map of recent outbreaks of 13 infectious diseases. [Photo: Airfinity]

As the figure above indicates in the upper left-hand corner, these include cholera, dengue, invasive group A streptococcal disease, which can cause “strep throat” but with severe and deadly ramifications, tuberculosis, polio and influenza. Other diseases on the rise that have significant consequences for children and immunocompromised people include measles, respiratory syncytial virus, chickenpox and pertussis. 

The surges in these diseases beyond their pre-pandemic levels, in some cases by many orders of magnitude, are deeply troubling. In this process, Long COVID seems to play a central role. It can affect nearly every organ system in the human body and acts as a mass disabling event, with more than 200 symptoms meticulously documented by the National Academy of Sciences. 

In the US alone, nearly one in five people has experienced Long COVID, amounting to 50 million people. The prevalence of the chronic disease stands at almost 7 percent, or around 17.6 million.

Phillip Alvelda, CEO & chairman of Brainworks Foundry and a former program manager in the Pentagon’s Biological Technologies Office, which was instrumental in the development of the mRNA vaccine technology, described the impact of Long COVID exposure on immune resistance to other diseases in a recent two-part interview published by the Institute of New Economic Thinking. He stated emphatically:

Even a mild or asymptomatic infection can harm the immune system. It can make you susceptible to new diseases that might not have bothered you before, but now, with your weakened immune system, these new diseases can find a foothold and attack you. Also, conditions that may have been dormant or held in check in your body by your immune system could resurface now that it’s weakened—things like shingles, HIV, or a resurgence of herpes. We’re seeing resurgences of all those things in the general population. We’re also seeing a resurgence in measles, whooping cough, and polio—all these things that we thought we’d gotten rid of.

The long-term impacts are considerable and most likely lifelong. Even two years out, risks of heart attack are double and risks of stroke triple, to say nothing of the myriad neurological and metabolic issues that contribute to the overall deterioration of health. This only raises the specter that repeat infections cause cumulative damage, further weakening the entire human organism. Presently, on average, every American has experienced three bouts of COVID-19, a figure now estimated to more than double by next year at the current pace.

Worse, how such infections have impacted children who are repeatedly exposed to COVID-19 and other respiratory pathogens in crowded and poorly ventilated schools remains a largely uninvestigated area. This is a direct consequence of the ruling class campaign to reopen “the economy,” i.e., capitalist profit-making, by reopening the schools so that parents of school-aged children could be forced to go to work.

Communities have been inundated by the perpetuation of the lie that children are impervious to COVID-19. The current figures showing widespread academic declines are being falsely attributed to lockdowns, which helped save lives in the initial throes of the pandemic, and not to the impact of the health consequences of the disease itself on children’s ability to learn.

The point on children was made obvious in a recent report from Australia titled, “Too many children with Long COVID are suffering in silence.” David Putrino of Putrino Labs, a rehabilitation innovation body for the Mount Sinai Health System in New York, who has been at the forefront on studying and treating the condition, said, “These kids’ world just gets very small, very quickly.”

He added:

We see kids missing school, being unable to participate in sports. We see social isolation. Long COVID is a lot more complicated and more brutal for young people. Adults tend to be better able to navigate the medical intricacies and politics of their illness. I don’t like comparative suffering as a concept, but I do know that kids are having a harder time with it because people seem to be less understanding of it.

All this also means that Long COVID kills, a point that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and federal public health officials have downplayed. As Alvelda noted, Long COVID is killing “immediately one and a half percent of the people that get it.”

However, discussions about COVID-19 and its consequences have largely disappeared from the corporate media. Public health dashboards have been taken down. Instead, anti-scientific policies that assure the public it is safe to return to work despite being infected with a contagious pathogen are being promulgated. This simply means that the policy of mass death has become “officially” normalized.

The only significant exception to the corporate silence was the major Bloomberg News report produced in collaboration with Airfinity, which documented the resurgence of the 13 communicable diseases. Some of the facts noted in this report are startling:

• Influenza cases in the US have jumped 40 percent compared to pre-pandemic years.
• Whooping cough, or pertussis cases, rose by 45 times in China in the first four months of 2024 compared to the year before.
• In Australia, cases of respiratory syncytial virus, RSV, have nearly doubled from a year ago.
• Argentina and Brazil are facing their worst ever outbreaks of dengue fever.
• In Japan, there is an unexplained surge of Streptococcal A.
• Measles is resurgent in Britain, parts of continental Europe and 20 states in the US.
• On a world scale, there were 7.5 million people with new cases of tuberculosis in 2022, the worst total since the World Health Organization started global monitoring in the mid-1990s.

Table of infectious diseases, geographic regions affected. [Photo: Airfinity]

As the table suggests, there are numerous causes, which differ from region to region, but nearly all are related to the COVID-19 pandemic, and all are exacerbated by the global crisis of capitalism.

Even as the FDA debates the next strain the COVID-19 vaccines will target, principled experts in the field warn that this attempt to play catch up will do little to alleviate the public health concerns raised by “forever” Long COVID. The SARS-CoV-2’s ability to constantly adapt and change, making the latest vaccines passé, has the effect of engendering complacency even though it is the only treatment that can reduce the risk of Long COVID.

The only effective means to combat COVID-19 and these reemerging pathogens, whether common or rare, are basic tried and tested public health policies: testing, tracking and isolation; masking with N95 masks; cleaning indoor air. Healthcare systems and public health infrastructure need resources to function as they were intended. And with the threat posed by the highly pathogenic bird virus, there are immediate concerns for which the world is less prepared than ever before.

Record breaking heat wave puts hundreds of millions in US and Canada under heat risk advisories

Alex Findijs

A record-breaking heat wave is making its way across much of the Eastern and Southern United States and Eastern Canada this week, sending temperatures into the high 90s and over 100 degrees Fahrenheit for hundreds of millions of people. As of Monday the National Weather Service estimated that over 72.6 million people are under heat alerts, more than a fifth of the entire US population, and CNN Weather predicts that more than 260 million people will see temperatures of 90 degrees or more over the coming week. Overall, temperatures will reach 15–25 degrees above normal for this time of year in areas affected.

Heat warning posted at the U.S. Open golf tournament Saturday, June 15, 2024, in Pinehurst, North Carolina [AP Photo/Frank Franklin II]

For many areas affected, the heat dome will break records for June temperatures. Cities like Pittsburgh and Syracuse, New York, have not seen June temperatures this hot in nearly three decades.

The high temperatures are the result of a “heat dome,” a high pressure atmospheric system that produces extreme heat events. The heat dome is produced by a high pressure system that pushes and compresses air from the atmosphere to the surface. As the air warms under compression it begins to rise but is pushed back down by the high pressure, creating a large mass of stagnant heated air that is made hotter as cloud formation is prevented and solar radiation heats the air even more.

This process has been compared to placing a lid on a pan on a stove, trapping heat inside.

This heat dome began forming over the American Southwest and Mexico two weeks ago, putting 20 million people from California to Eastern Texas under federal excessive heat advisories with a further 11 million under general heat advisories.

As of Monday the center of the heat wave had moved to the area around St. Louis, placing parts of Illinois and Missouri under extreme heat risk, the highest rating by the National Weather Service. Large sections of Kansas, Iowa, Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan and Ohio were also under major heat risk advisories.

According to projections from the NWS, the heat wave will peak from Tuesday through Saturday with extreme heat risks affecting the Midwest and Northeast from Missouri to Maine. States like Texas, New Mexico and Oklahoma, currently under moderate to extreme heat risk, will see a brief respite from the heat but the heat dome is expected to move south over the weekend, putting much of the Southern US under major heat risk advisories. Southwestern states will also see a resurgence in moderate to major heat risks at that time.

By the weekend the heat dome is expected to break into two systems, with one traveling out into the Atlantic and one migrating south. This will weaken the system somewhat across much of the US.

Heat domes are a common natural phenomenon, but climate scientists have noted that the intensity and frequency of them is fueled by climate change driven by the emission of carbon dioxide from capitalist industrial production into the atmosphere. One study estimates that the conditions that cause heat domes could double in magnitude by the end of the century.

As such events become more common and stronger the risk to public health increases.

Excessive heat is the top weather-related cause of death in the US, with more than 1,200 people killed by extreme heat each year. The intense temperatures from heat domes make them a deadly event.

The Western North America heat wave of 2021, caused by a heat dome, resulted in prolonged temperatures up to of 121 degrees Fahrenheit across much of Washington and Oregon in the US and British Columbia in Canada. The high heat caused damage to roads and railways, melted snow caps resulting in flooding, destroyed crops, killed livestock and caused wildfires that destroyed the town of Lytton in British Columbia, Canada.

In total, that heat wave killed between 1,400–1,600 people and cause nearly $9 billion in damage.

Multiple studies attributed the 2021 heat wave directly to climate change, finding that it would have been virtually impossible without human-caused climate change and that the likelihood of such events occurring is increasing as the Earth warms.

Cities are especially vulnerable to the increasing severity of heat waves. Urban areas can suffer from the “urban heat island effect” whereby concrete and asphalt absorbs more heat than more vegetated suburban and rural areas, increasing temperatures. When large heat waves set in, they can cause even higher temperatures in cities, especially areas that lack trees.

In order to combat extreme summer heat, many cities have set up heat warning systems and cooling stations with water misters and shade to help provide respite from the heat. Such services can be lifesaving for many. After a deadly heat wave in 1993 which killed more than 100 residents, Philadelphia implemented a system of heat warnings and cooling centers that has resulted in a decline in heat-related deaths. But the limited nature of such measures nationally still leaves millions at risk.

While air conditioning has become widespread in the US, many households still do not have it or lack reliable cooling. In Vermont and New Hampshire, which will see several days of extreme heat this week, 67 percent and 77 percent of residences respectively do not have any air conditioning and many homes, schools and businesses do not have adequate systems for countering the high heat.

Many occupations and workplaces suffer from a lack of air conditioning or proper climate control as well. People who work in industries such as construction and landscaping are exposed to the full brunt of the heat and those working in warehouses and factories without air conditioning or even ventilation will find themselves working in a veritable oven. And the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has no requirements on workplaces to maintain a certain temperature, only a vague mandate for a workplace to be “free from recognizable hazards.”

According to OSHA, 50–70 percent of outdoor fatalities occur in the first few days of working in hot weather. This is because the human body requires time to acclimate to the new temperatures and is susceptible to heat-related risks when temperatures rise. By failing to provide adequate protective measures against extreme temperatures, employers put millions of workers at risk every year.

The influence of climate change also reflects a broader social crime against the working class. The first warnings against the adverse impacts of greenhouse gasses on the climate go back to the 1960s, yet only limited measures have been taken by capitalist governments to fight climate change. Today, the Earth has seen an increase in average temperatures of 1.36 degrees Celsius (2.45 degrees Fahrenheit). Every month globally for the past year has been the warmest on record.

Climate scientists warn that if average temperature increases reach 1.5–2 degrees Celsius, the Earth could reach a tipping point of no return, making certain climatic events irreversible and having disastrous effects on global climate and weather patterns.

Social banditry: Oligarch Elon Musk takes record $45 billion payout

Kevin Reed

On Thursday, Tesla announced its shareholders had reapproved an unprecedented pay package for CEO Elon Musk, which is currently valued at more than $45 billion. As noted by the Delaware judge who previously blocked the payout for “unjustly enriching the billionaire,” the sum is “the largest potential compensation opportunity ever observed in public markets by multiple orders of magnitude.”

Elon Musk, center, attend the 10th World Water Forum in Nusa Dua, Bali, Indonesia on Monday, May 20, 2024. [AP Photo/Firdia Lisnawati]

The payout is a form of social robbery, equivalent to every single household in America being forced to send the world’s richest man a check for $350 at a time when most can barely pay their bills. The aristocratic “robber barons” of the Middle Ages stole from travelers one by one on the side of the road. But through the workings of the capitalist “free market,” Musk and his fellow oligarchs are swindling and defrauding all of humanity.

Musk’s payout is larger than what is estimated it would cost to eliminate homelessness ($20 billion) and hunger ($25 billion) in the US. It is equivalent to what is made, before taxes, by 1.2 million workers who earn the median income in the US ($37,500) in an entire year.

According to the latest Forbes list of the top 10 richest people, Elon Musk is already the wealthiest individual on the planet, with a net worth of $208.4 billion. Along with others in this group, including Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Mark Zuckerberg (Meta/Facebook) and Bernard Arnault (LVMH), Musk’s wealth is greater than the gross domestic product (GDP) of three-quarters of the world’s countries (156 out of 212).

The decision by Tesla shareholders to award the package to Musk takes place within the context of an accelerating growth of social inequality, financialization of the economy, imperialist war and the collapse of democratic government.

According to figures published by the Financial Times on Saturday, trends in executive compensation are increasing at the fastest rate for at least the last 14 years, bringing the separation of the ultra-wealthy from the rest of the population to record levels.

The FT report says:

So far in 2024, median chief executive pay at S&P 500 companies has risen by 12 per cent, according to ISS Corporate, part of proxy adviser Institutional Shareholder Services. That compares with a 4.1 per cent year-on-year increase in US wage growth, according to official figures.

The FT quotes William George, former compensation committee chair on Exxon’s board and former chief executive of Medtronic, who said executive pay “has gotten out of control.” He added that the Musk pay package sent the message that “the sky’s the limit here . . . you can earn as much as you want to.”

Expressing concern over the growth of social anger and opposition, George warned:

This is going to cause a further split in our country between the haves and the have nots. This is a grave concern to me because I think there will be a loss of trust [in companies].

The wealth controlled by Musk and other oligarchs is directly related to the extreme social crisis facing millions of workers and young people in the US and around the world.

Officially, there are 582,500 homeless people in the United States, which is known to be a significant undercount. While tens of billions are being handed over to Musk, workers and their families are confronting soaring prices and working multiple jobs just to get by while the government is cutting funds for social programs, education, healthcare and infrastructure.

Both the Democrats and Republicans at every level of government claim there is no money for basic social programs, while the rich pay little or no taxes, and countless billions are provided for the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine and for the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza by the Israeli government.

The wealth accumulated by the billionaire elites is bound up with the decades-long rise of the stock market, a mechanism for funneling society’s wealth into the hands of the corporate and financial oligarchy. The $45 billion going to Musk is in the form of Tesla stock options, a reward for the rapid increase of the company’s share values since 2018 from $50 billion to $558 billion today.

The rise in share values is the result of unrestrained speculation on Wall Street, fueled by a Federal Reserve policy of printing money for the rich. The transfer of assets from the central bank to the extremely wealthy reached a high point during the response of Democrats and Republicans to the coronavirus pandemic, when $3 trillion was handed over to the financial oligarchy between February and June 2020.

After the CARES Act was passed in March 2020, the ruling class launched a campaign to force workers back to work, leading to more than 1.5 million “excess deaths” in the US and more than 27 million globally. Musk was a leading proponent of mass infection with COVID-19, even defying California state law and reopening Tesla plants, a criminal policy that was accepted by the Democrats, who controlled the state government.

Rescue efforts end following Papua New Guinea landslide disaster

John Braddock

Two weeks after the landslide disaster in Enga Province in the Papua New Guinea (PNG) highlands, the Provincial Administrator formally ended the search and recovery on Friday, June 7. Authorities stopped searching for bodies and the landslide area will be designated as a mass burial site with monuments erected.

Villagers desperately searching for bodies following catastrophic landslide in Enga Province, Papua New Guinea [Photo: International Organization of Migration]

Two days earlier the PNG government had ruled out finding more survivors and Armed Forces Major Joe Aku told media that the area was a “no-go zone,” deeming it unsafe due to the risk of contamination and disease. Some locals ignored warnings and continued their desperate search for victims.

The death toll, according to government figures, is 670, down from earlier estimates of over 2,000. On June 5, the National reported that only 11 bodies had been recovered, including two children. On May 29, chair of the Mulitaka Disaster Committee Jaman Yandam told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that more than 160 people had died, citing village leaders who had conducted a head count.

The final toll remains unclear and will never be fully known. The current figures are based largely on information by village and provincial officials. About 150 homes were totally buried. The average PNG household has between five and eight people, but one resident who survived said a dozen of her family members were buried.

The side of Mount Mungalo sheared away and fell at around 3 a.m. on May 24, almost entirely obliterating the village of Yambali under mud, debris and rubble 20 to 26 feet deep. Massive boulders and dense earth caused major destruction to buildings, a makeshift hotel, medical facility and food gardens. Over 4,000 people were immediately affected. The area is accessible by only one highway, a section of which was covered by rubble.

Little aid reached the displaced villagers for the first week with officials blaming difficult terrain and tribal unrest. Such delays are in fact bound up with the lack of basic infrastructure, especially in PNG’s remote highlands region.

The Red Cross reported that the initial emergency response consisted of police, military, officials from the provincial governor’s office and local nongovernmental organisations. Helicopters carrying machinery and supplies began to arrive on May 29. World Vision said humanitarian aid groups began travelling to the site that same week and UNICEF was able to supply medical kits for about 1,000 people for three months plus sanitary products and food.

The Enga provincial government last week issued a 72-hour evacuation order for the surrounding area due to the risk of more earth movement. The UN International Organization for Migration (IOM) told the Associated Press that 7,847 people had been affected by the landslide and 1,650 were displaced.

The IOM’s PNG chief, Serhan Aktoprak, said, “Working across the debris is very dangerous and the land is still sliding.” He added: “People are coming to terms with this [the deaths and destruction] so there is a serious level of grieving and mourning.”

New Zealand geotechnical engineers sent to PNG released a report raising concerns about the instability of the ground. “We believe that there is real potential for further landslides to occur in the near or medium term,” Aaron Waterreus, leader of the Fire and Emergency NZ (FENZ) team, told a news conference.

FENZ geotechnical engineer Jan Kupec said the landslide, which covers about 35 acres, could continue to move for months or even years. He said the avalanche was likely part of an old landslide that had been reactivated and there are concerns that coming monsoon rains will liquify the debris and reactivate the landslide again.

If correct, the comments raise serious questions about why a village of 4,000 people remained in an area of proven land instability and avalanche risks—and how many more are in equally precarious situations given the propensity of the vast PNG interior to landslides.

UN Humanitarian Affairs advisor Mate Bagossy said poor road conditions have cut off some surrounding villages, which are also in need of assistance. “It seems re-opening the road is not safe. So the back road will need to be opened. The original road could be declared a burial site,” Bagossy said.

Radio NZ (RNZ) reported that aid groups have expressed particular concern for pregnant women and children. “Women affected by the landslide tell us they have no spare clothes or food. It’s beginning to get very cold in the Highlands,” CARE program director PNG, Doreen Fernando warned. “Many mothers have been telling us their children are beginning to fall sick. There’s also been a diarrhoea outbreak due to lack of sanitation and hygiene options,” she said.

UNICEF PNG representative Angela Kearney said: “There are just so many needs there. Everything is gone.” Avoiding malnutrition was a priority with about 50 percent of PNG children “stunted… not the right height for their weight. A week with no food can tip them into acute-severe malnutrition.”

The social disaster is compounded by the deterioration of public services, in particular the health system. Malaria, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS are rife. Many children in remote areas are poorly vaccinated. As well as the COVID-19 pandemic, there have been outbreaks of whooping cough and measles.

PNG, an Australian colony until 1975, is one of the world’s poorest countries. It ranks 154th out of 193 countries on the UN Human Development Index. Its considerable valuable resources, including oil, gas, gold, silver and timber are exploited by transnational companies that make vast profits from their operations.

The landslide site is near the giant Porgera gold and silver mine co-owned by Canadian-based Barrick Gold and China’s Zijin Mining. Initially mainly concerned about accessibility of the road to the site, the mine’s management has now donated $US1 million to the relief effort, including supplies of food, medical items and tarpaulins. The company has a long history of environmental damage and degradation in a region where 50,000 villagers rely mainly on subsistence farming.

The corrupt PNG ruling elite, which garners its share of the profits from the resources industry, displays disdain for the majority of the country’s 10.5 million people. With parliament reportedly “distracted” by an impending vote of no confidence in the government, Prime Minister James Marape took until May 31 to visit the site.

Marape dismissively told parliament that “nature threw a disastrous landslip.” According to the prime minister, natural disasters have cost the country more than 500 million kina ($A196 million) this year, before the landslide at Enga, blaming “extraordinary rainfall.”

Culpability lies with the PNG government, which prioritises business interests above the health and welfare of the population. This was highlighted during the COVID pandemic when, ending a national lockdown in July 2020, Marape bluntly declared: “COVID-19 not only affects us health-wise, but also economically. We must adjust to living with the COVID-19… we will not shut down our country again.”

Australia and New Zealand made paltry offers of assistance to what is an unfolding humanitarian disaster. In addition to disaster response teams and supplies, Canberra pledged $A2.5 million while NZ Foreign Minister Winston Peters gave $NZ1.5 million. Australia’s Foreign Minister Penny Wong absurdly declared; “Australia stands with the people of Papua New Guinea.”

While routinely evincing sympathy for the plight of the so-called “Pacific family” on the frequent occasions the vulnerable island states fall victim to destructive natural disasters, the imperialist powers are above all concerned about defending their geo-strategic and economic interests in the region.