WHO warns Gaza children facing immediate threat of polio

Benjamin Mateus

The director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said on Wednesday that polio had been detected in Gaza and warned that urgent preventive measures had to be taken to protect children from the infection, which can cause death or crippling paralysis.

A boy sitting amongst rubble in Yarmouk Sports Stadium Friday, July 5, 2024 in Gaza City [AP Photo/AP Photo]

“The detection of polio in Gaza is another reminder of the dire conditions the population is facing,” the WHO director wrote on X, referring to the Israeli military onslaught on the Palestinian enclave. “The persistence of the conflict hampers efforts to identify and respond to preventable threats such as polio.”

The WHO has dispatched a million doses of polio vaccine to the Israeli-occupied territory, but how they will reach the population, particularly the children, under conditions of continuous military violence is unknown.

The Gaza Health Ministry declared a polio epidemic Monday based on testing of wastewater samples. No actual cases have yet been reported, but the chaotic conditions in Gaza, with constant bombing and shelling and forced movements of population make any systematic monitoring for the disease impossible.

In a statement posted on Telegram, the ministry warned that polio “poses a health threat to the residents of Gaza and neighboring countries,” referring to both Israel and Egypt, the two countries which border on the Gaza Strip, as well as the wider Middle East.

Gaza has been polio-free for a quarter of a century, thanks to effective mass vaccination, but this health achievement, like all the social gains of the Palestinians, is threatened with utter destruction under the impact of Israeli bombs, missiles and tank shells.

Miles of tents line the beaches and empty lots and fields, people are piled into tents in clothes that have not been washed for months, children are playing in and drinking from puddles of water contaminated with sewage. 

The primary means of spread for polio is fecal-oral contamination, and the targeting of water and sanitary facilities by the Israel Defense Forces has as a conscious aim the spreading of infectious disease to decimate the Palestinian population. 

Repeatedly during the ongoing genocide, health authorities had warned that the destruction of critical infrastructure would bring with it a public health crisis. And last week, six of seven routine sewage samples detected the virus.

The UN noted that besides polio, diseases like Hepatitis A, dysentery, and other gastrointestinal disorders are widespread and continue to rise. More than one million respiratory infections have been documented. Scabies and lice are running rampant among the population. And as many have noted, this is only the beginning of the broader public health crisis that the exhausted and trodden population will see adding to their historic misery. 

Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan, a pediatric intensive care physician, speaking with Al-Jazeera, called the detection of polio a “ticking time bomb.” She added, “Normally if you have a case of polio, you’re going to isolate them, you’re going to make sure that they use a bathroom that nobody else uses, make sure that they’re not in close proximity to other people, [but] that’s impossible. You have everybody clustering in refugee camps at the moment without vaccines for at least the past nine months, including children who would otherwise have been vaccinated for polio and adults who, in the setting of an outbreak, should receive a booster, including healthcare workers.”

Dr. Medhat Abbas, director general of Al Shifa Medical Complex, told the press that the streets were full of sewage. “Personal hygiene is absent. You can’t wash your hands, even after you’ve used the bathroom,” he said. “So, there’s pollution and this disease is spread through feces.”

In May, Oxfam’s Middle East director, Sally Abi Khalil, lamented, “The situation is desperate, with so many people in Gaza living in fear and being forced to endure inhumane and unsanitary conditions caused by sustained Israeli bombardment. One colleague told me there was so much human waste in the streets, it literally smelt like disease.”

She said at that time: “Israel’s military assault on Rafah could be devastating, not only because of the risk of mass civilian casualties, but also the repercussions of vast numbers of people being forced to move. With the infrastructure already beyond breaking point, little or no healthcare available, and widespread malnutrition this could quickly escalate into a major epidemic.”

This week, Dr. Ayadil Saparbekov, the World Health Organization’s (WHO) health emergency team lead for Gaza and the West Bank, told NPR, “It’s a very dangerous disease. And, in the situation of Gaza, it’s beyond dangerous.” The limited investigation indicates the virus came from Egypt sometime in September before the commencement of hostilities. 

Another important element in the policy of extermination through disease is the blockade-imposed famine, which starves some victims to death and weakens the resistance to infection among many more. 

This is combined with the military offensive on hospitals, clinics, and healthcare workers that has killed 500 physicians, 50 of them specialists. More than 200 medical staff have been imprisoned in detainee camps in Southern Israel where they undergo violent interrogations. Twenty of 36 hospitals have been completely destroyed and the rest are functioning under most barbaric conditions. The sick and injured have no place to turn to address any of their immediate and life-threatening injuries and illnesses. 

In response to the reports of polio, Israel said it was offering soldiers serving in the Gaza Strip the polio vaccine to be administered during routine troop turnover, although it was not mandatory for them to accept it. The Israeli army also indicated it would allow international groups to bring the polio vaccine into the enclave. According to the WHO, more than a million polio vaccine doses were being brought in to be given over the coming weeks. 

Even before the military assault on the defenseless enclave, in March 2023, Israeli physicians were urging the government and medical community to respond to an outbreak of polio and prioritize and vaccinate the 176,000 Israeli children who had never received any doses. At the time, four children had been diagnosed with polio, and one had paralysis in his limbs. Prior to that outbreak, Israel had no clinical cases of polio between 1988 and 2022.

Israel’s US-backed rampage across the Middle East threatens to ignite region-wide war

Keith Jones

With Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza now in its tenth month, the Netanyahu regime and its US imperialist paymasters and arms providers are relentlessly pushing the Middle East over the precipice and into the abyss of an all-out regional war.

In what was simultaneously a calculated provocation and an act of extreme recklessness, Israel assassinated Ismail Haniyeh, the leader of Hamas’s political wing, in Iran’s capital early Wednesday morning.

Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh speaks during a press briefing after his meeting with Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian in Tehran, Iran, Tuesday, March 26, 2024. [AP Photo/Vahid Salemi]

Haniyeh, who was in Tehran to attend the inauguration of Iran’s new president, was killed along with his bodyguard when a guided missile, said by Iranian authorities to have been launched from outside the country, hit the compound where he was staying.

Only hours before this brazen act of criminality, Israeli drones demolished a five-story building in a heavily populated area of Beirut. Described by the Israeli government as “targeted,” the drone strike killed five and injured scores of other residents of the apartment block. The five fatalities included Fuad Shukr, said to be the right-hand man of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, and two children aged 10 and 6.

The Gaza-born 62 year-old Haniyeh was Hamas’s chief negotiator in the protracted, on-again off-again Gaza war peace negotiations.

“How can mediation succeed when one party assassinates the negotiator on other side?” asked Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, who has hosted the peace negotiations, in a post on X.

The reality is the negotiations have been a Biden-Harris administration-orchestrated sham. Israel, with the full support of the US, Canada and the European imperialist powers, has used them as a smokescreen for its continuing prosecution, through mass murder, ethnic cleansing and the destruction of civilian infrastructure, of a “final solution” to the Palestinian question.

Haniyeh’s summary execution was a war crime. That it was carried out on Iranian soil and amid the ceremonies marking the assumption of office by a new president, Masoud Pezeshkian, adds a further explosive dimension of criminality and provocation.

The Israeli strike was aimed at humiliating Iran, destabilizing its leadership, undermining confidence in its security forces and, last but not least, forcing it to respond, providing Israel with a pretext for still more aggression. Just hours before his death, Haniyeh had met with Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei.

For an Israeli government that is pursuing genocide and is responsible—according to The Lancet, one of the world’s leading medical journals—for at least 186,000 deaths during the Gaza War, there are truly no limits. Still, the execution of Haniyeh, who for the last seven years had headed Hamas’s Politburo and prior to that led the civil administration in Gaza, represents a new level of lawlessness and brutality in international relations. By way of comparison, Israel’s murder by missile strike of the head of Hamas’s political wing would be akin to Russia using a drone to kill Ukrainian President Zelensky when he was visiting Washington or Berlin.

In the imperialist capitals, this is no cause for even a quiver of embarrassment. Their universal response to the Israeli strikes in Tehran and Beirut has been to threaten Iran and Hezbollah and reaffirm their unflinching commitment to Israeli “self-defence.”

As is now a familiar pattern after every Israeli escalation, there has been a flurry of statements from Washington, London, Berlin and Paris that blame Iran and its allies for the growing threat of a wider war and demand they stand down. “Hezbollah’s attacks on Israel must stop,” exclaimed German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock. “It is important to prevent a regional conflagration.”

US Deputy Ambassador to the UN Robert Wood, in an emergency Security Council session Wednesday afternoon, declared: “We call on the Security Council to send an unambiguous message to Hezbollah by standing with Israel as it defends itself against Hezbollah’s repeated attacks.”

Continuing in the same vein, Wood demanded the Security Council take actions, including possibly new sanctions, to “hold Iran accountable and address repeated action by its terrorist proxies.”

Earlier Wednesday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken claimed the US was “not aware of or involved in” the Israeli assassination of Haniyeh in Tehran. Even if one were to accept that Tel Aviv did not share the operational details, Washington’s hands are smeared with the blood of this crime.

Blinken, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and other White House officials have been publicly urging Israel to make greater use of “targeted” assassinations against Hamas and its allies. Moreover, even amid the so-called “peace negotiations,” Washington has been pressing Qatar to expel the Hamas leadership in exile.

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has issued an ominously worded statement preparing the population for an expansion of the war. “Citizens of Israel,” he declared, “challenging days lie ahead. Since the strike in Beirut there are threats sounding from all directions We are prepared for any scenario [and] will exact a heavy price for any aggression.”

Since Netanyahu’s visit to Washington last week, which included meetings with President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic Party presidential nominee, Israel has gone on a rampage. In addition to the attacks on Beirut and Tehran, Israel has carried out strikes in southern Lebanon, Syria and Iraq. On July 20, it struck Yemen’s port of Hodeida, which is under the control of the Houthi insurgency.

The timing of Israel’s escalation of the war makes clear that the expansion of the Gaza genocide into a major regional conflict was greenlighted by Washington during Netanyahu’s visit. At the key public event of his trip, his July 24 address to a joint session of Congress, the Israeli prime minister centered much of his remarks on bellicose denunciations of Iran.

Turning reality on its head, he painted Tehran as the aggressor, just as he grotesquely claimed there have been almost no civilian casualties in Gaza. To boisterous applause, Netanyahu declared that in fighting Iran and its allies, Israel was waging America’s fight and that Israel deserved Washington’s unstinting support in using genocidal methods and otherwise shredding international law. “If Israel’s hands are tied,” he declared, “America is next.”

Exactly how the war will develop in the coming days and weeks cannot be said with any certainty. What is incontestable is that the crisis of the Israeli regime and its imperialist backers, above all, Washington, and the logic of the war they have initiated—the predatory aims they are pursuing and the escalating violence and recklessness with which they are seeking to realize them—lead inexorably to a region-wide Mideast war, with the US joining in the assault on Iran and its allies.

Such a war could rapidly draw in a host of regional and great powers and threaten to ignite a global conflagration. At issue would be the fate of the region that is the world’s largest exporter of oil, and that, because of its location at the intersection of Europe, Asia and Africa, is of enormous geo-strategic importance.

The imperialist powers, led by the US, have backed Israel to the hilt in its genocide for they see the Gaza war as a first step to realizing their plans for the establishment of unbridled imperialist domination over the Middle East. Moreover, as Biden and Blinken have themselves made clear, the war they are prosecuting alongside Israel is only one front in a developing global war. Securing domination over the Middle East is viewed as critical to subjugating Russia, with which the US and NATO powers are already at war, and prevailing in what is an all-sided military-strategic and economic offensive against China.

Maduro declared winner of presidential vote, as Washington escalates drive for regime change in Venezuela

Andrea Lobo

The National Election Committee (CNE) in Venezuela declared the re-election of President Nicolás Maduro early Monday by a margin of 51.2 percent against 44.2 percent for right-wing challenger Edmundo González. 

Venezuelan troops carry ballot boxes in ceremony ahead of the Presidential elections, July 24 [Photo: @cneesvzla]

The electoral body blamed a cyberattack for delays but said it counted 80 percent of the votes and that these show Maduro’s victory to be “irreversible.” As of this writing, the CNE website is still down, and no further results have been published. 

As expected, the Biden administration, its puppet regimes in the region, and the US-funded Unitary Platform have refused to acknowledge the results. In a response clearly coordinated beforehand, US imperialism is instead using the elections to escalate its efforts for regime change. 

Washington has repeatedly employed failed attempts to kidnap and kill the Venezuelan leadership, brutal sanctions to starve the population into submission and threats of a military invasion—all aimed at pressuring sections of the Venezuelan military and ruling circles to oust the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV).

Despite earlier statements by opposition officials concluding that irregularities in the voting process had been rare and insignificant, opposition leader María Corina Machado immediately claimed the results announced by the CNE were the product of a massive fraud. The Unitary Platform had access to 40 percent of voting center reports, she said, and these gave Gonzalez 70 percent of the vote. 

While demanding that the CNE show the records from all polling stations, Machado made clear that the exact results are really beside the point. Her main appeal was to the military leadership, subtly arguing that the large vote for the opposition makes clear that Maduro can’t secure its interests or capitalist rule any longer. 

Machado declared: “Today we defeated them in votes all over Venezuela, but also the members of the Plan República [military oversight of the elections], the military-citizens know it, they were there in the front row, they saw the people with joy and hope, organized in a civic, peaceful way. They know it and the duty of the Armed Forces is to enforce the popular sovereignty expressed in the vote.” 

She concluded by warning of future actions “in the coming days.” 

The key to understanding the political crisis in Venezuela is that neither the PSUV regime, US imperialism nor its proxies give a second thought to the democratic will of the Venezuelan people or to resolving the humanitarian catastrophe.

All contenders in the election represent factions of the capitalist class associated with foreign powers that are squabbling over access to the profits from exploiting Venezuelan workers and the world’s largest oil reserves. 

The overall strategy of Washington was summed up in plain terms by Geoff Ramsey of the Atlantic Council, a think-tank with close ties to the US intelligence apparatus. “This isn’t over,” he wrote, “Maduro has to convince the ruling elite that he can keep things under control, but both he and the military know that he can’t govern a country in flames. He’s effectively inviting the biggest loyalty test he’s faced in years. I doubt Venezuelan elites are eager for six more years of repression, sanctions, and economic catastrophe.” 

Shortly after the preliminary results, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken predictably expressed “serious concerns that the results announced does not reflect the will or the votes of the Venezuelan people.”

Speaking for a power that has installed more dictators than any other—from Pinochet and Videla to Suharto and countless others— and that employs proxy wars and invasions as preferred policies for securing geopolitical and corporate interests around the world, Blinken said in a menacing tone: “The international community is watching this very closely and will respond accordingly.”

Earlier during the day, US Vice President and presidential candidate Kamala Harris wrote on X, “The will of the Venezuelan people must be respected.” 

Blinken and Harris would be hard-pressed to find a less democratic society than the United States, where a group of billionaires have purchased control over all institutions and media and enforce its interests through bipartisan tyranny. With the acquiescence of the Democratic Party, the US Supreme Court not only stole an election in 2000, but has now turned the American president into a king above the law. 

The threat of international action beyond the sanctions that have already devastated the Venezuelan economy poses a real threat that a new front of the expanding third world war will erupt in Latin America. For US-NATO imperialism, Venezuela is already a key battlefield in its efforts to undermine Russia, China, and Iran, all of whose governments maintain economic and political ties with Caracas and have already congratulated Maduro.

The regime of Argentine President Javier Milei—a defender of the fascist-military dictatorship under Gen. Jorge Rafael Videla—has been assigned the role of spearheading the response of pro-US forces to the Venezuelan elections. This operation follows months of meetings between Milei  and other Argentine officials with the leadership of the CIA and Pentagon. 

Nothing else could better express the predatory and anti-democratic character of US interests in the region than its partnership with these forces. 

On Monday, Argentina led a meeting and joint statement with eight countries (Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Dominican Republic and Uruguay) echoing the “serious concerns about the conduct of the presidential elections” in Venezuela. The document then demands a “full review of the results.”

It is worth adding that fascistic billionaire Elon Musk re-tweeted a statement by Milei denouncing a “fraud” in Venezuela. Musk added lamely, “Shame on Dictator Maduro.”

In a signal of what is to come, Milei’s Security Minister Patricia Bullrich rallied thousands of Venezuelan opposition supporters to effectively lay siege to the Venezuelan Embassy in Buenos Aires on Sunday. 

While not signing the Argentine statement, the pseudo-left Presidents Gustavo Petro of Colombia and Gabriel Boric of Chile, as well as the Brazilian President Lula da Silva, made similar appeals, casting doubt on the results and submissively joining the US-led push for regime change. 

For its part, the PSUV has sought to preempt moves from outside or within the state apparatus to carry out a coup. Colectivos, gangs of loyalists on motorcycles, and supporters were called to protect the presidential Miraflores Palace in Caracas on Sunday night and celebrate a victory hours before the results were announced. 

Having previously warned of a civil war and bloodbath, Maduro told a meeting of international observers on Saturday evening, that “the Militia is the secret weapon of the doctrine of national defense, of the war of all the people.” This was a call to armed and trained pro-government forces who act as an extra-constitutional unit of the army to stand by in case sections of the military turn against his regime.

This was followed by a statement by Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino: “Count on the Bolivarian Militia for all the battles to come!”

Even while insisting that the military will not be an “arbiter” of the elections, Padrino ordered the deployment of 388,000 military, police and other security officials to patrol polling stations, guard and transport all electoral material and “guarantee order at all costs”.  

This was an affirmation that, after all, the military will intervene to secure bourgeois rule, even if that means settling the election results.

In Tachira, a historically pro-opposition state bordering Colombia, men with face masks are shown in numerous videos using stun grenades and live ammunition against crowds. There are confirmed reports of the death of one man, Julio Valerio García, and several injured. 

Venezuela stands on the verge of civil war, even deeper economic misery, and becoming an active front in an imperialist world war. It is high time for workers to draw far-reaching conclusions. 

The fact that an unknown stand-in for Machado—a creature of the CIA, an extreme right-winger and proponent of US sanctions and even invasion—could plausibly have defeated Maduro is an indictment of the entire Bolivarian project and the pink-tide regionally.

The Chavistas have been unable to respond to US imperialist aggression and the crisis of capitalism other than by shifting aggressively to the right, relying increasingly on police state repression and becoming direct servants to the oil companies and Wall Street.

With US imperialism weakened and discredited like never before and with factions of the ruling class at each other’s throats, any revolutionary movement that represented the interests of the working class would use this juncture to fight for power and further the socialist revolution internationally.

But there is no revolutionary or genuinely left-wing alternative in Venezuela. Instead, at one point or another, all organizations claiming to fight for workers channeled popular opposition behind Chavismo, whose main role has always been to preempt any independent political intervention of the working class.

Hugo Chávez, a lieutenant coronel, won prominence in 1992 after leading a failed coup against the unpopular presidency of Carlos Andrés Pérez. Two years later, amid an unraveling financial crisis and low oil prices, President Rafael Caldera freed Chávez from jail, seeing him as a useful figure to contain massive opposition against IMF austerity diktats, privatizations, high inflation, and the hated bipartisan system under the Puntofijo Pact, which Caldera had himself engineered in 1958. Chávez would win the election in 1998 having campaigned for years across the country for a constitutional assembly, along with democratic and social reforms.

World economy “stuck in a low gear”

Nick Beams

Key data released last week show that hopes of a recovery in the euro zone economy for the second half of this year, after stagnation for 2023 and the first six months of this year, have taken a significant hit.

The purchasing managers’ index (PMI) compiled by S&P Global fell to a five-month low of 50.1, barely above the level of 50 which is the boundary between expansion and contraction. This was mainly as a result in weaker growth in services and falls in manufacturing in Germany, the region’s largest economy.

The PMI for services fell from 52.8 to 51.9 while that for manufacturing went from 45.8 to 45.6.

In its report on the PMI results, the Financial Times (FT) noted that the results for Germany were “noticeably weaker than forecast.”

“The German PMI reading fell from 50.6 to a four-month low of 48.7, signaling a contraction of the country’s business activity. German factory output fell at the fastest rate for nine months.”

Vincent Stamer, an economist at the German Commerzbank, told the FT the “weak figures put a question mark over a noticeable economic recovery expected by many forecasters for the second half of the year.”

Others have used stronger language. Pointing to a sharp fall in German manufacturing Norman Liebke, an economist at Hamburg Commercial Bank, told the Wall Street Journal: “This looks like a serious problem.” He noted a “steep and dramatic” drop in manufacturing output.

Echoing these comments, the chief economist at the Hamburg bank, Cyrus de la Rubia, told the FT: “It’s unsettling how steadily companies are slashing jobs month by month.”

Franziska Palmas, an economist at Capital Economics said the euro zone could slide back into contraction after some limited growth in the first part of the year.

“Germany’s underperformance since the energy crisis is persisting,” she told the Journal.

President of the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde, at a press conference after an ECB governing council meeting in Frankfurt, Germany on January 25, 2024. [AP Photo/Michael Probst]

In her remarks on the decision of the European Central Bank earlier this month to hold interest rates steady, president Christine Lagarde said the “risks to economic growth are tilted to the downside,” noting that manufacturing had “declined in the past few months” and investment remained “weak.”

The European experience is the expression of what is a growing trend in the major economies. Last week Deloitte Access Economics warned that if the Reserve Bank of Australia lifted interest rates in response to higher inflation it could tip the economy into recession and that without the effect of tax cuts, which came into effect on July 1, the economy would be on its way there.

Surveying the global economic outlook at a meeting of G20 finance ministers and central bankers held in Rio de Janeiro last week, International Monetary Fund (IMF) chief Kristalina Georgieva said the global economy was “stuck in a low gear” and the meeting faced a “sobering outlook.”

Global growth is predicted to reach 3.2 percent this year and 3.3 percent in 2025, “well below the 3.8 percent average from the turn of the century until the pandemic. Meanwhile, our medium-term growth projections continue to languish at their lowest in decades.”

The effects will hit the working class and the poorest sections of society the hardest.

“New IMF analysis,” she said, “suggests that periods of stagnation lasting four years or more tend to push up inequality within countries by almost 20 percent—considerably higher than the increase due to outright recession.”

Many economies, she noted, were facing “severe fiscal pressures” and in developing countries “debt-servicing costs are taking up a bigger share of tax revenue.”

Apart from the marked slowdown in the so-called advanced economies, another major area of concern is China. Since the financial crisis of 2008, China has been the mainstay of global growth. But its rate of economic expansion has now slowed markedly.

The official target rate is around 5 percent—the lowest in more than three decades—and there is considerable doubt as to whether even this much lower rate will be achieved. Even if it is reached the IMF has forecast that Chinese growth will continue to slow over the medium term.

The US economy, the world’s largest, appears to be the exception to the rule having recorded an annualised growth rate of 2.8 percent in the second quarter. This was well above expectations of a 2 percent rise and a significant jump from the rate of 1.4 percent for the first three months of the year.

However, there are warnings that this increase, which has been largely based on consumer spending, will not be sustained. Last week the University of Michigan’s index of consumer sentiment fell to its lowest level since November.

“High prices continue to drag down attitudes, particularly for those with lower incomes,” the director of the survey said.

Companies ranging from appliance makers to airline companies have reported a fall in demand.

The latest results from the so-called beige book of the US Federal Reserve have suggested that the US economy is slowing. In June, five out of the 12 Fed districts reported flat or declining activity in June as compared to three in May.

There is also evidence of a slackening labour market with the unemployment rate for June rising to 4.1 percent, up from 4 percent the previous month, and now at its highest level since November 2021.

Notwithstanding the higher growth numbers, there are warnings about the longer-term direction of the US economy.

Commenting on the latest GDP numbers to the FT, Citigroup economist Veronica Clark, said the Fed would be “encouraged” by them. But she added: “If you look at other monthly data, the trend is still that consumption is slowing and there are concerning signs in the labor market data.”

The signs of a slowing economy are building pressures on the Fed to start cutting interest rates. While this is not expected to be announced at the Fed’s meeting this week, the remarks of chair Jerome Powell will be examined for indications that a rate cut has been put on the agenda for its September meeting.

The chief US economist at TS Lombard, Steven Blitz, has warned that if the Fed does not soon lower interest rates “we will get a recession later this year.”

The 2024 Paris Olympics COVID-19 superspreader event

Benjamin Mateus

The normalization of massive police presence targeting the working class in Paris during the 2024 Olympic games has gone hand in hand with the normalization of mass infection with COVID-19. At the Paris Olympics, all public health precautions have been cast to the wind.

Millions of people, including 2 million tourists from abroad, are expected to visit the various venues being held across France to watch 11,310 athletes from 206 countries competing in 48 different sporting events. More than 45,000 riot and military police are deployed on the ground, water and air, with helicopters, drones and snipers at the ready, placing Paris in a state of siege. 

Security patrol in front of the Louvre Museum in Paris, France, ahead of the opening ceremony of the 2024 Summer Olympics, Friday, July 26, 2024. [AP Photo/John Locher]

Before the games started, five of Australia’s women water polo players tested positive for COVID-19. This was followed by several as yet unidentified members of the Belgian Olympic delegation. This led to mounting concerns among workers that the Olympics will lead to a massive superspreading event, particularly as mutations to the virus have accelerated transmission.

A group of volunteer workers at the Olympics issued a public statement on the Médiapart website threatening to resign en masse if public authorities did not address the COVID-19 threat. Demanding policies of masking, vaccination, ventilation and air purification, they wrote: “Covid-19 pandemic threat denial is not an antidote to contamination.”

They added:

We have been enthusiastic in the preparation of the Games as international volunteers. However, we are more and more worried at the lack of any action from the organizers to address the epidemic of Covid-19 that is still going on across Europe and the world. We demand effective sanitary measures against the virus, to protect the inhabitants of Paris and Seine-Saint-Denis, the athletes, the public, and the volunteers. If no steps are taken, we will collectively resign of our assignments, and will not show up on the Oympic and Paralympic sites we have been staffed.

While French authorities and the Olympic organizers have not acknowledged the COVID-19 threat, the same summer surge in France is well underway that has impacted neighboring countries since June, including Germany and Italy, as a result of waning population immunity. The impact of the virus at the recent Tour de France, which took place from the end of June to July 21, should be seen as a warning of things to come at the Olympics. 

The entire event was plagued by COVID-19 infections among the elite riders, four of whom had to drop out to recover from their infections, while others continued to ride and place other competitors at risk. No protocols were established ahead of the multi-day racing event. Only near the end of the event, on July 14, did Amaury Sport Organization, the main organizer of the cycling event, ask journalists to don masks when interacting with the riders and their support staff.

Yet the Paris Olympics are proceeding without any significant public health safeguards, even after the catastrophic experience of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics that were postponed to 2021 due to the pandemic.

At that time, amid mass protests and concerns about the potential consequences of allowing the games to proceed, Olympic organizers held the event with hardly any spectators to watch the games, at a cost of $6 billion in public money. Still, Japan saw a massive wave of infections that late summer and early fall. The Tokyo COVID-19 Monitoring Committee meeting held on August 20, 2021 warned: “Infections will rampage through the nation to a disastrous level. This is an emergency.” 

And indeed, after the 2021 Olympics, the surge of infections across Japan accelerated, and health authorities soon abandoned any pretense of trying to keep the Omicron strain from running rampant in the population. More than 80 percent of all the official 75,000 COVID-19 deaths in Japan occurred after the Olympics. This was in keeping with the official practice, promoted in the United States by Anthony Fauci, of using the Omicron strain as a “live virus vaccine.”

The pandemic has claimed over 27 million excess deaths, and the number of people afflicted with Long COVID runs in the hundreds of millions. The current, utter contempt of the authorities for public health threatens disastrous consequences. Beyond the obvious implications to the population, elite athletes who have come to Paris to represent their countries in these sporting events face a formidable risk that an infection may very well end their hopes to compete or win a medal. 

Indeed, a 2023 study in the Annals of Medicine found that aerobic performance of elite football players remained lowered for weeks after a COVID-19 infection, noting, “SARS-CoV-2 infection has been shown to induce capillary flow disturbances, which are shown to shorten blood transit times through the remaining, patent capillaries, thereby limiting oxygen uptake. So, these capillary disturbances are expected to reduce the endurance capacity of elite players.”

The contempt for the health and well-being of athletes and the broader public is inseparable from the grotesque social inequality of contemporary society. Le Monde provided a glimpse of the siege-like state forced on the population before the opening ceremony, writing:

More than 40,000 barriers lining the streets of Paris, security perimeters forbidding any access to the Seine without a QR code, hundreds of police and gendarmerie patrols, and closed metro stations: Rarely in peacetime has the French capital experienced such high levels of security.

The entire two-week sporting event will cost upwards of €9-10 billion, of which only a third will be covered by sponsors. The rest will be appropriated from the public, that is to say, in their large majority working people who will be forced to fork over their earnings to a spectacle to which they have not been invited or welcomed. 

Marie Léon, a 38-year-old mother of two living near the Stade de France in the working class suburb of Saint Denis, bitterly told AP, “You will see, there will be police officers blocking us from getting there anyway. From my window, I can listen to the roars and cheers of the Stade de France. That will be the only way I’ll be included in the Olympics.”

Much has been made of the novel character of the setting for the Paris Olympics, which are taking place largely in the river Seine or in temporary facilities and seating built around the river. In reality, this choice also exposes the authorities’ complete contempt for the public.

Breaking with tradition of opening the Olympics in sporting venues, the opening ceremony for the Olympic Games was held as a boat parade down the Seine. Around 10,500 athletes boarded an armada of 85 boats at Pont d’Austerlitz, its name commemorating Napoleon Bonaparte’s military victory against Russian and Austrian forces in 1805. The boats sailed west for 6 kilometers before reaching the Trocadéro esplanade across the river from the Eiffel Tower, where the official protocols took place, and the Olympic cauldron was lit.

Along this scenic route, with the iconic Notre-Dame and the Louvre as backdrops, 320,000 spectators filling 124 grandstands were packed together for hours on Friday, despite rain that left them soaked. 

After having attended a soirée at the Élysée Palace, more than 100 heads of state greeted the disembarking athletes amid performances by Céline Dion and Lady Gaga. US President Joe Biden, recovering from his third bout with COVID-19 at home under close medical observation, was substituted by his wife Jill. In all, more than 15,000 performers and behind-the-scenes technicians produced a gaudy spectacle on a budget of €120 million for the evening festivities.

For the athletes, however, the reliance on the heavily-polluted Seine River as a venue for the swimming portion of the triathlon event poses a major health threat. The spending of a whopping $1.5 billion on building wastewater facilities to treat polluted water from storm surges failed to cleanse the river, with rain forcing officials to cancel a training session on Sunday. The Seine continues to present unsafe levels of bacteria, including E. coli and enterococcus that could produce dangerous illnesses in swimmers, but officials nevertheless plan to go ahead with the triathlon Tuesday.

Australian, Chinese and other teams announced they would design special treatments to administer to their swimmers to minimize the chances of contracting serious illnesses after participating in the Olympics.

New Zealand health system faces steep funding cuts, possible privatisation

John Braddock

Last week the health minister in New Zealand’s right-wing National Party-led government, Shane Reti, announced he was replacing the board of Health NZ Te Whata Ora with a commissioner. The sudden move, Reti declared, was due to “serious concerns around oversight, overspend and a significant deterioration in financial outlook.”

New Zealand Minister of Health Shane Reti [Photo: Facebook/Shane Reti]

Reti claimed the country’s public health system is headed towards a $1.4 billion deficit by the end of the financial year with “overspending” of $130 million per month. In a post-cabinet press conference on July 22, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said there was a lack of “performance management” at Health NZ, which he described as an overly centralised system with a “massive bureaucracy” and financial mismanagement.

Luxon claimed it was “not an issue of lack of funding,” but that the failures “require an urgent and significant intervention.” He pointed to the government investing an additional $16.3 billion into the health system over the next three budgets.

Posting on social media, Reti claimed that the deficit could not be blamed on “underfunding” by the present government. “This is not a money problem,” he declared, but was “thanks to Labour’s botched reforms.” The reference was to the previous Labour government’s restructuring which amalgamated 20 District Health Boards (DHBs) into the single agency Health NZ.

The commissioner, Lester Levy, has been appointed to impose swinging cuts to the fragile health system, eliminating the deficit by focusing on “cost efficiencies” and stopping the monthly “overspend.” Levy is a former chairman of three Auckland region DHBs. An ex-pathologist, he has served on a series of corporate boards while founding and heading a private hospital. There are widespread fears that his real task is to prepare the health system for privatisation.

In April, Health NZ ordered “emergency measures” to clamp down on expenditure, claiming it could not go into the new financial year in deficit. It instructed hospitals to address “personnel related costs” including an end to working double shifts, limitations on replacing sick staff and forcing doctors and nurses to use their accumulated leave, leaving hospitals desperately understaffed.

The claim there is “no lack of funding” is a blatant lie. Although the health allocation went up by 2.9 percent in the budget, inflation is running at 3.3 percent and population growth 2.6 percent. According to Council of Trade Unions economist Craig Renney, prior expenditure commitments mean the real net increase is only 0.4 percent. Health economist Peter Huskinson wrote in New Zealand Doctor that health spending per person will reduce by 3 percent over the next year.

Conditions in the health system have deteriorated dramatically over the past decade. Following the global financial crisis of 2008, the then-National Party government effectively froze wages for nurses and other health workers and starved hospitals of funding for staff, building upgrades and other resources. Levy told a parliamentary committee in 2018 that over the previous five years resourcing of hospitals had not kept pace with population growth of 9.4 percent, an 18.8 percent increase in emergency department admissions and 15 percent rise in in-patient discharges.

Nothing was resolved with the election of the Labour Party-led government in 2017. A sellout pay agreement settled by the NZ Nurses Association (NZNO) maintained low wages, with an increase of just 3 percent per year for 2017-2019 for most nurses, midwives and healthcare assistants. Funding to increase staff numbers was a meagre 500 places nationally, maintaining conditions of severe understaffing.

The decision by the last Labour government to end its COVID-19 elimination strategy in late 2021 and adopt a policy of mass infection, has led to more than 4,300 avoidable deaths and 42,400 hospitalisations, exacerbating the crisis of unmet need. Official figures show that in December 2023, 68,179 people were waiting longer than four months for a first specialist appointment—the number almost doubling since September 2022—and 30,757 were waiting longer than four months for a procedure.

Christchurch surgeon Phil Bagshaw told the Post last week: “The health system has been seriously underfunded for decades. Anybody who thinks they can come in and make sweeping changes to the system should talk to the doctors and nurses who are working themselves to exhaustion to keep a failing system going.”

Recently doctors at Rotorua Hospital’s emergency department were told by letter the region was moving to a “single roster” with the department at Taupo Hospital, which is in danger of closing due to a shortage of five doctors. Senior clinicians said they were “blind-sided” by the “bombshell” directive, which involves a two-hour round trip or overnight stays.

Staff shortages at Rotorua Hospital are so dire that patients are being sent back to the emergency department from other wards, according to the junior doctors’ union. In April, it was reported that the children’s ward was missing a third of its beds as winter hit because Health NZ had halted an upgrade partway through to “review costs.”

Under Labour and National governments repeated strikes involving nurses, doctors, midwives, laboratory workers and allied health workers have erupted over the atrocious conditions in the health system. They were, however, kept isolated from each other and limited to one or two days by the union bureaucracy who pushed through deals that failed to address the staffing crisis, unsafe working hours and low pay.

Levy last week falsely described Health NZ as “totally bloated.” Speaking to Radio NZ (RNZ), he emphasised: “We have to reduce the size of the organisation in order to allow the organisation to be financially sustainable over time.” Health NZ must “live within its budget,” he declared, adding “we need to do more with the resources we’ve got rather than just constantly asking for more resources [be]cause we need to provide more value.”

As many as 3,000 jobs may now be axed. RNZ reported that, according to a leaked letter, the time frame is “brutally fast.” Jobs of two national directors and their support staff will go, while a freeze on filling vacancies—including at the clinical coalface—will be maintained until the “financial freefall” is turned around. “The mood among staff is “shock and dismay,” RNZ reported.

The cost-cutting is being instigated amid a sweeping assault on the public sector as part of the far-right National Party-ACT-NZ First government’s austerity agenda. Over 6,000 public service jobs have already been axed as Finance Minister Nicola Willis imposes annual spending cuts of $NZ1.5 billion, up to 7.5 percent in each government department.

There is deep hostility to the government’s agenda, with its massive attack on the social position of working people while handing millions in tax cuts to the wealthy and a layer of privileged landlords. When Willis presented the budget in May, thousands protested in major centres and many regional locations while in the capital, Wellington, a crowd estimated at 5,000-7,000 descended onto parliament grounds.

The corporatist trade unions, however, have made clear that nothing will be done to defend any jobs. Far from mobilising an industrial and political campaign across the working class, they are already enforcing the cuts, including by corralling workers behind whatever paltry exit provisions may be on offer as they are ushered out the doors.

The Public Service Association and E tū, the principal unions in the public sector, have meanwhile channeled widespread opposition into the legal system claiming that the sackings have been executed outside employment contract provisions. These legal cases change nothing—the sackings still proceed but now with the collaboration of union bureaucrats who ensure that the correct “process” is followed, while each group of workers is kept isolated from others.

Fears that the assault is a prelude to wholesale privatisation of health care are well-founded. Health is the country’s biggest public agency, employing 90,000 staff with a budget of $NZ28 billion and assets of $25 billion. The government’s far-right coalition partner ACT is currently ramming through a privatisation model in education that will see the establishment of up to 80 publicly funded, privately run Charter Schools, designed to operate entirely independently of the public system. This is just the beginning.

German national rail operator Deutsche Bahn announces 30,000 job cuts

Ulrich Rippert

At its annual press conference on Thursday, the Deutsche Bahn Executive Board announced massive job cuts. “We want to reduce our workforce by around 30,000 full-time employees over the next five years,” said Deutsche Bahn CFO Levin Holle at the presentation of the half-year results.

Deutsche Bahn train [Photo by Mirkone / wikimedia / CC BY-SA 4.0]

Deutsche Bahn (DB) cites high losses in almost all business areas as the reason for these job cuts. In the first six months of the year, the company had a loss of €1.2 billion. This was unacceptable, the state-owned enterprise said. CEO Richard Lutz first cited the strike waves of recent months as the cause and then also spoke of major construction sites and extreme weather as additional cost factors.

In reality, the announced jobs massacre is a deliberate political decision by the coalition government comprising the Social Democrats (SPD), Liberal Democrats (FDP) and Greens. Deutsche Bahn AG is a 100 percent state-owned company. There are several state secretaries on the management and supervisory boards, and all important decisions are made via the Federal Ministry of Transport, where the FDP calls the shots. “The balance sheet figures show the urgent need for action,” commented Federal Transport Minister Volker Wissing on the figures. Deutsche Bahn “must become more economical and competitive,” he stressed.

The announced job cuts are part of a comprehensive rationalisation plan, which also includes the closure of so-called “unprofitable lines.” Rail services are to be further reduced, particularly in rural areas and structurally weak regions. Lutz told the press on Thursday that no decision had yet been made on the closure of unprofitable routes. However, news magazine Der Spiegel reported on a “secret paper” and has already named a number of specific railway lines that were planned for closure.

In other words: While the effects of climate change are becoming ever more drastic and the Deutschland-Ticket, a relatively low-cost monthly ticket that enables unlimited local travel, shows that many people want to travel by train—also for environmental reasons—the German government and the DB management are ruining the most environmentally friendly means of transport in the name of profit and personal enrichment. At the same time, the rationalisation plan is exacerbating the social divide in the country by leaving remote areas even further behind and commuters to fend for themselves.

What is more, such extensive staff cuts will change work processes, increase workloads and increase the risk of catastrophic accidents for employees and passengers. The number of fatal accidents at work on the railways has already increased significantly in recent months.

There is no doubt that the announced job cuts and the planned route reductions are part of a comprehensive attack on the working class. The huge increase in defence costs is being financed at their expense.

The same ruthlessness with which the coalition government has driven up energy prices and pursued a ruinous industrial policy is now being applied to the railways. The announced redundancies must be seen in the context of the ongoing jobs massacre in all industrial sectors. In the last few days alone, 14,000 job cuts have been announced at technology manufacturing company ZF, 500 at Bosch, 4,000 at battery manufacturer Varta and 10,000 at enterprise software firm SAP.

And as everywhere else, the German government and Deutsche Bahn are relying on the trade unions in their attacks on employees.

The job cuts will be “organised in a socially responsible manner” and redundancies for operational reasons will be “avoided wherever possible,” the union heads say. This means that the job cuts have already been discussed and agreed with the trade unions and their works council representatives.

The announcement that “initially, above all,” it is the white-collar sector that will be rationalised is also part of a pre-arranged fix. With regard to the administrative redundancies, the Executive Board is relying on the German Train Drivers’ Union (GDL), which has long denounced the administrative apparatus as a “bloated bureaucracy.” If the redundancies are then extended to the train drivers, the Executive Board will rely on the EVG railway and transport union, which accuses the train drivers of trying to gain privileges for themselves.

In an initial statement, the GDL also said it felt the job cuts were justified. However, only “if they take place in the administration and not in the direct area,” a GDL spokesperson said.

The EVG, on the other hand, criticised the extent of the planned redundancies, but made clear that there was nothing wrong with “putting processes and structures in the company to the test and questioning them.”

Both unions are working very closely with the management and have a key role in playing the employees off against each other and dividing them in order to prevent a joint fight in defence of all jobs.

Railway workers must prepare for a struggle that is directed against the DB board, the federal government and both trade unions.

Even though the Deutsche Bahn floatation on the stock market ultimately failed due to the global 2008 financial crisis, its transformation into a profit-oriented public limited company has led to the disintegration of the infrastructure and the current crisis.

In 2007, we analysed in detail the transformation of the railways from a state-owned service company into a profit-oriented global logistics group. Our assessment at the time has been fully confirmed. We wrote:

The aim of the privatisation is to transform a national service built up over decades with taxpayers’ money into a globally operating logistics enterprise and a lucrative asset for private investors. Such a step presupposes low levels of wages and social conditions. The high levels of profits expected by the private investors can only be achieved at the expense of the workforce and the quality of a service that, up until now, has been carried out by the railways as a public service.

We drew attention to the fact that the transformation of state railways into internationally active private companies is a pan-European development that has been driven forward under the leadership of the European Union and has had disastrous consequences in all countries.