Australian families struggle with escalating school costs

Karen Maxwell

Australian working-class families are finding it increasingly difficult to send their children to school due to the spiraling costs of education.

Overall, families in 2025 are expected to spend $13.6 billion on schooling costs, including uniforms, tuition, technology and excursions—up from $12.9 billion last year.

[Photo: Futurity Investment Group]

The Futurity Investment Group recently issued a “Cost of Education in Australia” report that estimated the average cost of putting a child through 13 years of school at $123,000. This represents a 33 percent increase from 2024, when the average cost was $92,000.

Futurity Group executive manager Sarah McCadie told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) that in an online survey of 2,385 families: “One in four parents told us they’re sacrificing family holidays, nearly 30 percent said they’re going without buying something for themselves, and 22 percent said they’re working more hours than they’d like to.”

Australia has one of the most privatised education systems in the world. A 2024 OECD report revealed that the country has the highest level of expenditure on private educational facilities in the OECD, totaling 0.7 percent of gross domestic product, more than double the OECD average of 0.3 percent.

Approximately 40 percent of all students attend private secondary schools. Many private schools have imposed sharp tuition fee hikes in recent years.

The Futurity Group report estimated that the average cost of sending a student to a Catholic school for 13 years is $194,000. Attending an independent school (non-Catholic private) for 13 years would cost an average of $350,000 in 2025, compared to $317,000 in 2024. Approximately 56 percent of these costs would comprise school fees, and 44 percent would represent ancillary costs.

Costs are even higher at elite private schools, which are inaccessible to the vast majority of the population. Several elite schools now charge more than $50,000 in annual tuition fees.

While public schools in Australia are supposed to be “free,” parents are regularly “invited” to make voluntary contributions. In 2023, the average annual “voluntary contribution” made by parents to government schools in Victoria was $570 per student.

Families often receive an official letter from the school at the start of the year presented on official school stationary resembling an itemised bill, according to Professor Emma Rowe in a recent article in the Conversation. Rowe recounted that in 2019, children at a government primary school in Sydney received free popcorn if their parents had paid the “voluntary” fees.

While schools cannot legally enforce the payment of these “voluntary contributions,” children can be denied participation in certain activities if their parents do not pay.

Parents from working-class families feel pressured to make these voluntary payments, fearing that otherwise their children will miss out on educational opportunities or suffer social stigmatism.

Damien Ellwood, president of the Australian Council of State School Organisations, told the ABC: “The feedback was that families didn’t feel like it was a voluntary contribution… families felt that if the schools did not receive that money, the children wouldn’t get access to the basic education they needed.”

In parallel research conducted by Compare Club, immediate back-to-school costs for each child returning to a public school was estimated on average to be $1,555. This included: $496 for technology and devices, $229 for uniform, and $255 for mandatory excursions. The annual cost of transport to and from school (often between $500 and $600), as well as the exorbitant cost of textbooks, must also be factored in.

Parents are resorting to desperate measures to try to ensure that their children are adequately equipped for school. These include credit card debt and other forms of personal debt, or assistance from grandparents. Opportunistic lenders are springing up, offering “back-to-school loans.”

Record numbers of families are turning to charities.

One such charity, the Smith Family, told the Melbourne Herald Sun that the number of students receiving assistance from its Learning for Life program in 2024 was 14,900—double the number recorded eight years ago in 2016.

In another survey of 359 parents by Finder, nearly a third reported financial difficulties. Two percent of the participating families said their children would be forced to go without basic supplies this year at school. Another 4 percent said their children would have to make do with last year’s supplies, 8 percent said they would have to purchase secondhand items or rely on hand-me-downs, and 15 percent said they would be forced to go into debt.

Cindy Eldridge, a single parent receiving support from the Smith Family, told the Herald Sun: “It brings you down. Sometimes I’ve gotta pick between am I getting my son’s school uniform this week or am I going to eat properly this week?”

“It’s hard trying to differ between the kids’ needs. One day I actually had to go to food banks just so the kids could have what they needed for school… I shouldn’t have to decide on whether my kids can eat lunch at the park or have everything they need for school.”

Working-class households should not have to rely on charity to access public education. Public education, like public healthcare and decent housing, is a fundamental social right, fought for by generations of workers and their families.

It is an indictment of the federal Labor government and all state governments, Labor and Liberal-National alike, that working-class families are being forced to the financial brink just to try to ensure that their children receive an adequately resourced public education.

Since scraping into office in May 2022, promising a “better future,” the Labor government has pursued a pro-corporate agenda of cuts to both real wages and social spending. At the same time, the Labor government backed repeated interest rate hikes by the Reserve Bank of Australia, driving up home mortgage repayments and rents.

The new funding model for schools recently implemented by the Albanese government, the so-called Better and Fairer Schools Act, will entrench the systemic underfunding of public schools. It allows for only a nominal increase of $16 billion in federal government spending for public education over the next 10 years. This is a drop in the ocean compared to what is needed to address the years of neglect and under-resourcing that have devastated the public education system.

The Australian Education Union (AEU) has responded to the back-to-school financial crisis by reporting that teachers are feeling compelled to pitch in from their own wages to supply basic equipment or financially assist their students who come from low-income families.

Yet the same AEU bureaucracy has played the most critical role in imposing regressive industrial agreements on teachers’ wages and conditions, while refusing to mount any struggle against the diversion of funding by governments away from public education and into the private sector.

Major reduction in Fed’s US growth forecast

Nick Beams

The US Federal Reserve made a sharp downward revision in its forecast for US economic growth this year at its meeting yesterday amid what chair Jerome Powell referred to as “high uncertainty” surrounding the effect of the economic policies of the Trump administration.

A news conference by Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell is displayed on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange in New York, Wednesday, March 19, 2025. [AP Photo/Seth Wenig]

Projections by Fed officials cut the growth forecast for this year to 1.7 percent from the 2.1 percent forecast last December, a significant reduction. They also forecast a rise in the Fed’s measure of inflation from 2.5 percent to 2.7 percent with the main reason being the tariff increases so far and the threat of more to come.

Powell said it was not possible to separate out the causes of the elevation but a “good part” of it was coming from tariffs and “there may be a delay in further progress” in bringing inflation down to the Fed’s target of 2 percent.

In his prepared remarks he said the new administration was implementing “significant changes” in trade, immigration, fiscal policy and regulation which would matter for the economy and monetary policy. “[U]ncertainty around the changes and their effects on the economic outlook is high.”

The Fed, as expected, decided to hold interest rates at their present level while projecting two cuts by the end of the year.

It also decided to slow the pace of its balance sheet reduction from $25 billion a month to $5 billion because of “some signs of tightness in money markets.” The Fed wants to avoid the situation which developed in September 2019, when an earlier rundown of its Treasury bond holdings led to a major spike in interest rates in the ultra-short term repo market that required its intervention.

The meeting was held amid a major shift in economic prospects. The year began with expectation that “American exceptionalism”—a growth rate higher than other major economies and an elevated stock market—would continue. Three months later the economic landscape has dramatically shifted.

Recession, which was then regarded as a negligible risk, is now a real prospect. Consumer spending is down, consumer confidence is falling, business planning and investment decisions have become more difficult because of tariff uncertainty and the effect of government spending cuts, and the stock market is down around 10 percent from its high of a month ago.

And in a sign of longer-term concerns about the stability of the US financial system and the position of the dollar, the price of gold continues to reach record highs.

The sharp downturn in the US economy and the impact of uncertainty over Trump’s policies was highlighted by a survey of leading economists conducted by the Financial Times (FT), published earlier this week.

The median forecast for US growth from the 49 economists surveyed was 1.6 percent this month, down from 2.3 percent in a survey conducted in December and a marked reduction from the growth rate of 2.8 percent for 2024.

The extent of the transformation in the US economic outlook was highlighted by economist Robert Barbera of Johns Hopkins University.

“Tariffs, tax cuts, government employment and expenditure cuts, assaults on education funding and [Fed] independence all are in play. Nothing of this sort has been in play in my 50 years of forecasting,” he said.

Karen Dynan, a professor at Harvard University, said while economists had struggled in the past to find evidence of how uncertainty affected the economy, it was “so high now that it seems likely to reduce investment. How much will depend on how long it persists.”

After he went to the election pledging his policies would produce a new “golden age,” Trump and members of his administration are now touting the benefits of a recession.

In an interview with Fox News last Sunday week, Trump refused to rule it out, saying there was a “period of transition.” He was followed two days later by commerce secretary Howard Lutnick who told CBS News that Trump’s policies were “worth it” even if they led to a recession.

The Trump agenda of economic war against the rest of the world and the working class at home is starting to impact on the global economy with the OECD, the grouping of more than 30 major economies, warning it would slow global growth this year and next.

“The message is clearly that trade uncertainty and economic policy uncertainty are having a significant toll,” OECD chief economist Álvaro Pereira told the FT.

It cut the growth forecast for 12 of the G20 group, with the largest falls in Canada and Mexico as a result of tariff hikes. The growth forecast for Canada for this year and next was more than halved to just 0.7 percent, while Mexico is now predicted to fall into recession this year and contract by 1.3 percent.

And the tariff war has only just begun.

Anxious to try to avoid any conflict with the Trump administration, Powell, while forced to refer to tariffs in his remarks, did not utter a word about the April 2 deadline set by Trump for the unleashing of his so-called “reciprocal tariff” agenda.

The basis of this plan is that the US will impose retaliatory measures not just against tariffs on its goods but in response to any policies of other countries which it deems to be inimical to the profit interests of US corporations. This could include measures such as the value added tax in Europe, regulations on the high-tech social media giants as well as the pharmaceutical benefits scheme in Australia.

Apart from the effect on the real economy, the OECD warned that a resurgence of inflation as a result of tariff increases, which by their very nature are inflationary, could trigger a “rapid repricing” in financial markets.

In his press conference Powell maintained that while it might take longer, the inflation rate was trending down, implying that the effect of Trump’s tariffs was transitory. He was reminded by one questioner that the last time the Fed had put forward such a claim was during the pandemic price hikes.

They were the start of an inflation cycle, the highest for 40 years, which continues to impact on the wages and living standards of millions. Powell tried to bat away the question by maintaining that the current circumstances were very different.

Evidence of potential financial turbulence warned of by the OECD emerged this week in a closely watched survey conducted by the Bank of America (BofA) of major investment firms. They made their “biggest ever” cut in allocations to US equity markets.

The drop was 40 percentage points as the surveyed firms went from 17 percent overweight in US equities in February to 23 percent underweight in March. The turnaround was the largest since the fall in March 2020 at the start of the pandemic.

Elyas Galou, senior investment strategist at the BofA, said that at the beginning of the year investors were all “raging bulls” on the US but this had now changed “significantly.”

Eduardo Bolsonaro Flees Brazil

Brian Mier

Eduardo Bolsonaro with then-U.S. President Donald Trump in the Oval Office, 30 August 2019. Photo: White House.

Brazilian Liberal Party lawmaker Eduardo Bolsonaro, son of indicted former President Jair Bolsonaro and South American representative for CPAC, took a leave of absence from Congress today and announced he will remain in the United States to escape “political persecution” and pressure U.S. officials to impose sanctions against Alexandre de Moraes—one of Brazil’s 11 Supreme Court Ministers—in an attempt to keep his father out of jail.

It is no secret that Eduardo Bolsonaro has been close to Steve Bannon and other key figures in Donald Trump’s circle since 2018. Similarities in billionaire-funded social media tactics used by Trump and the Bolsonaros are living testament to this, and the closeness that Eduardo has to leaders of the American far right is also demonstrated by his presence at the January 5, 2021, “war council” meeting in Washington, hosted by Mike Lindell on the eve of the U.S. Capitol invasion.

On February 18, 2025, Brazil’s Attorney General’s Office issued a formal indictment of former President Jair Bolsonaro and 32 of his cronies for the crimes of attempting a violent abolition of the Democratic Rule of Law, attempting a coup d’état, and forming an armed criminal organization.

Eduardo Bolsonaro immediately swung into action, contacting friends in the Republican Party and private sector alike. The next day, Rumble and Truth Social filed a frivolous lawsuit against Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who was in charge of the investigation against his father. On February 24, Republican Congressman Rich McCormick released a public letter to President Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in which he called for punitive actions against Moraes, including “Magnitsky sanctions, immediate visa bans, and economic penalties.”

On February 27, Workers’ Party Congressmen Lindbergh Farias and Rogério Correia filed a criminal complaint with the Attorney General’s Office against Eduardo Bolsonaro for conspiring against Brazil with members of a foreign government.

“The individual in question, completely disconnected from reality and acting against Brazil’s national interests, is encouraging a foreign government to impose retaliatory measures against his own country and one of the justices of the Supreme Federal Court,” reads a section of the complaint. Judging him a probable flight risk due to his network of connections in the American far right, they requested that the Federal Police confiscate his passport. Time has proven them correct, but the police did not act quickly enough.

On March 13, the net began to tighten around Jair Bolsonaro as the Attorney General’s Office officially upheld the indictment against Bolsonaro and his cronies, after a procedural period in which they were allowed to present their defense arguments. The Supreme Court then set March 25 as the date for the final review of evidence before formally setting a trial date.

This put Eduardo Bolsonaro in a quandary. With a complaint already filed against him for illegally abusing the power of his office to lobby for intervention in Brazil’s internal affairs by a foreign government—a crime so serious that, in theory, it could result in charges of treason—he had to choose between keeping his position as Congressman and complying with national security laws, or renouncing and moving to Florida, like so many right-wing Latin American politicians before him.

Bolsonaro is claiming his leave will be temporary, but going on leave of absence will not shield him from criminal prosecution for abuse of authority, crimes against the judiciary, and violation of national security laws. Like all Members of Congress, he enjoys a certain level of parliamentary immunity, but can still be investigated and tried by the same Supreme Court that he has been publicly attacking for the past five years. So if, as he announced on his social media today, his plan is to stay in the U.S. to find some way to “punish Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes,” he will probably have to stay there for a long time. The question is, how much damage can he do to Brazil’s national sovereignty while he’s up there?

Britain’s Labour government announces savage welfare cuts targeting sick and disabled

Robert Stevens

The Labour government’s work and pensions minister Liz Kendall has laid out a savage programme of attacks on welfare recipients, aimed at saving more than £5 billion. 

They are the most brutal cuts to welfare carried out by any post-war government, Conservative or Labour, removing disability and incapacity benefits from hundreds of thousands of people. Kendall, a leading Blairite, gleefully outlined her key proposals from the government’s 80-page Green Paper in the House of Commons on Tuesday.

Liz Kendall, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions announcing welfare cuts in Parliament, March 18, 2025 [Photo by House of Commons/Flickr / CC BY-NC-ND 4.0]

The Starmer government aims to legislate its Dickensian onslaught before the summer recess using Labour’s substantial majority.

Access to disability benefits known as Personal Independence Payments (PIP), covering living costs and mobility costs, will be severely restricted.

Only a small minority of PIP recipients, those deemed unfit to ever work again, will retain their claim. The first of hundreds of thousands of current PIP recipients will lose their entire £70 a week payment in November 2026.

The government’s torching of disability payments was trailed over several days, with its plans leaked for a multiyear freeze on the value of PIP, a real-terms cut of £600 million in 2026-27, rising to £3.3 billion by 2029.

Over the weekend media outlets including the Guardian reported a (non-existent) “rebellion” by a handful of Labour MPs, claiming this had forced the government to backtrack. But the Financial Times cited a “senior MP” saying government leaks about a PIP freeze “was a classic ‘bleeding stump’ tactic… To make it look like they’ve made concessions and the actual cuts aren’t as bad.”

In fact, Kendall’s welfare cuts go way beyond the leaked measures.

An estimated around one million people will lose their entitlement to disability benefits altogether. To qualify for PIP in future, a minimum of four points under the “daily living” component will be required under the draconian Work Capability Assessment (WCA). People struggling with washing, eating and dressing themselves will not qualify.  

Those too ill to work receive a health “top-up” currently through a Universal Credit payment, which is twice as much as that paid to job-seekers who are not ill. The new regime will freeze this health top-up for existing claimants, and it will be slashed for new claimants also, by £47 a week (£2,444 a year).

As part of Labour’s demonising the disabled as work-shy, Kendall announced a “Right to Try” scheme “giving people the confidence to take the plunge and try work without the fear this will put their benefits at risk”. This measure will create a ready-made pool of ill and vulnerable people who will be pressured into jobs, while eligibility for health-related benefits is drastically narrowed.

Kendall announced the WCA will be scrapped from 2028, due to it being “complex, time-consuming and often stressful for claimants”. But the Kafkaesque WCA will be replaced by increased face-to-face assessments, with Kendall attacking previous Conservative governments for allowing a fall in the number of claimants assessed, from seven in 10 to only one in 10 currently.

One of Labour’s first measures on taking office in July last year was the axing of winter fuel payments to 10 million pensioners. But the £1.3 billion saved annually was ridiculed by corporate media outlets as chickenfeed. They demanded far harsher attacks on welfare to pay for military spending.

Starmer’s government is on message. In parliament today, Kendall railed against the disabled and sick, vilifying the “1 in 10 people of working age now claiming a sickness or disability benefit… 2.8 million out of work due to long term sickness… And the number of people claiming Personal Independence Payments set to double this decade, from 2 to 4.3 million… with the growth in claims rising faster among young people and mental health conditions.” 

Following her sickening performance in the Commons, the media faithfully regurgitated her talking points. BBC News displayed graphs showing “the UK is an outlier in terms of the percentage of the population claiming sickness benefits”. Kendall had earlier railed at “taxpayers paying millions more on the costs of failure” with “working age sickness and disability benefits up £20 billion since the pandemic, set to rise by a further £18 billion by the end of this Parliament to £70 billion a year.”

Such a massive toll of illness and disability is a direct outcome of decades of austerity. Boris Johnson’s declaration, “Let the bodies pile high in their thousands”, expressed the homicidal attitude of the ruling class toward the working class. Almost 250,000 people have died from COVID-19 in Britain, millions have suffered the effects of Long COVID, while the entire hospital system is on life support.

Labour’s welfare cuts were denounced by disability rights groups.

Richard Kramer, former Chief Executive of Sense, posted on X, “The government has announced the biggest cuts to disability benefits on record. These cuts are wrong and punitive and affect the poorest and most marginalised individuals in the country. Cutting the income of disabled people will not help them return to work.”

Dr. Jay Watts, a consultant clinical psychologist, posted: “Can we take a moment for the sheer cruelty of increasing reassessments & face-to-face assessments—when terror of them has been explicitly linked to suicide & self-harm in Prevention of Future Deaths reports? Labour knows this. Yet here we are.”

Sam The Long Covid Unicorn wrote: “Liz Kendall’s bullying and cruel #DisabilityBenefits cuts are worse than anything the Tories have ever done. Watching Liz Kendall’s gruesome hate-filled expression was genuinely upsetting and unsettling for me. Labour is a fascist endeavour.”

Outrage and disgust was summed up by a photoshopped image of an incapacitated woman hauling a trailer-load of bricks underneath the Nazi concentration camp slogan, “Work sets you free”.

Labour’s assault on welfare follows last week’s announcement axing NHS England, part of Labour’s plans to privatise the National Health Service. Labour is emulating the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency headed by fascist oligarch Elon Musk. Starmer’s operation has been dubbed “Project Chainsaw”, mimicking the tool Musk wielded in the air, symbolising his plans to slash $2 trillion from government spending.

Starmer began this week with an op-ed statement in business newspaper City A.M. saying of Labour’s deregulation and cuts agenda: “It will take years of discipline, focus and a willingness to make tough choices. But my government is taking on that challenge to bring back the animal spirits of the private sector, and to make Britain the best place in the world to start and build a business.”

Starmer has explicitly linked the gutting of public spending and the destruction of the welfare state with preparation for war and the government’s massive increase in military spending, declaring “now more than ever, national security is economic security… And you’re not strong if you lose control of your public finances.”

Today’s Telegraph carried an article by its Senior Economics Reporter Eir Nolsøe headlined, “Britain can’t afford to defend itself—the expanding welfare state is to blame”, stating bluntly, “The UK’s ballooning benefits bill threatens the Government’s ambitions to rearm”.

Germany: Thousands protest in Cologne against massacre of Alawites in Syria

Dietmar Gaisenkersting

Demonstration in Cologne against the massacre of Alawites in Syria, March 15, 2025

On Saturday March 15, several thousand people protested in the German city of Cologne against the recent massacres of members of the Alawite minority in Syria.

Several Alawite associations had called for the rally under the slogan “Stop the genocide of the Alawite population in Syria.” The protest was directed against the massacres recently perpetrated by the Western-backed Islamist militia Haiat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) against the Alawite population.

The violence began after residents of the village of Beit Ana refused to hand over a suspect to the security forces on March 6. Fighting quickly spread from there between former soldiers of the Syrian army under Bashar al-Assad and troops of the HTS government led by Abu Mohammad al-Jolani (real name Ahmed al-Scharaa). In response, the HTS troops launched a large-scale operation.

Within two days, at least 745 civilians were killed. Soldiers of the new government executed Alawite men who had served in the security forces under the Assad regime. Several Alawite villages were looted and burned, and their inhabitants shot.

The president of the umbrella organisation of the Alevi community in Germany (AABF), Hüseyin Mat, opened the rally by accusing the international community and regional actors of simply ignoring the mass murder of the Alawite community that had taken place on the Syrian coast between Latakia and Tartus.

One poster addressed the complicity of the German government. It showed HTS founder and Syrian transitional president al-Sharaa with the Green Party Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock. After the fall of Bashar al-Assad, the German government promised the HTS regime aid projects worth over €60 million. On Monday, during a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Brussels, Baerbock pledged a further €300 million in aid. The poster at the demonstration demanded the “Immediate arrest of Syrian’s IS founder—I don’t want to finance terrorism with my taxes.”

Poster against the German government's complicity with the Islamist militia Haiat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in Syria

At the rally, Süleyman Serhan Narlı from the Federation of Arab Alevis in Europe (AAAF) stated: “Since the beginning of the latest massacres, more than 7,000 civilians have been killed on the Syrian Mediterranean coast solely for their beliefs, according to our information.” He calls for the establishment of a humanitarian corridor from Hatay in southern Turkey to Latakia to evacuate the Alawite population if necessary and to deliver aid. “The systematic extermination of Alawites in the region must be stopped,” he demanded.

Many participants carried their own placards with photos of their family members and friends who have been murdered by the HTS militia. Lara and Adam, two hospital doctors who came to Germany a few years ago, are among them. They carried several signs and expressed their despair at having already lost many friends and acquaintances. They fear for their families and friends in Syria.

“We are from Latakia,” said Lara. “They have not only carried out these massacres in Latakia, but also in Tartus. The victims are civilians, both women and men, who we know, with whom we studied.” She points to a photo on her placard. “That’s the sister of a colleague of ours. He’s also a doctor. We studied together and worked together. And that’s his mother and his father.” The terrorists had entered the family home and “They killed his mother and sister. His father survived because he was at work in the hospital at the time. It wasn’t a fight. They entered the home of civilians and shot them all dead.”

Posters of participants in the Cologne rally with photos of their family members and friends murdered by HTS militiamen

She pointed excitedly to another photo. “And this one here is a pharmacist.” Adam added, “He is a pharmacist and also our colleague. First they killed him and then the next day they killed his pregnant wife. They killed them in cold blood. They killed the whole village.” He immediately pointed to another photo. “Here, too. Dead. They’re innocent people—civilians, unarmed people, doctors.” Lara adds, pointing to a picture of a young person, “And that’s a child.” The boy had nothing to do with the Assad regime, Adam said.

“This family,” he continued, “are relatives of a friend of ours.” He is a doctor in Syria and Adam related how his relatives were killed. “And there are thousands of these reports, thousands,” he said.

“Here is our friend,” he says, bursting with emotion. “His name is Brahim and he is a trauma surgeon. These are two pharmacists, a husband and wife. They never had anything to do with the war, they never fought. They were happy that Assad had gone and thought that peace had finally come.” Instead, they were killed.

He then told of another tragedy. He points to a photo of a little girl. “There were groups that only took the men and boys out of their apartments and shot them.” The girl’s father took his son and fled, believing this to be the case. He left his wife and little daughter behind. “He thought they would never kill his wife and daughter. But they did that too. Both are dead. The little girl was three or four years old.”

It was important for Lara to address the media reports in Germany: “The media reports that this is just a fight between Assad supporters and the army and the new government. Yes, there was fighting and as a result, there were also victims on both sides who died. But what are we talking about now? Civilians.” They had nothing to do with the fighting. “Nobody is saying that thousands of civilians have been executed in cold blood.” The massacres lasted three days.

“We saw it here in Germany on Instagram,” said Lara, “a video of the jihadists gathering and saying, “We’re coming to your village and we’re going to kill you all.” We thought it was just a threat to spread fear. But no, they went to the villages, one after the other, and killed the inhabitants. People asked us on social media to do something. To make it stop! But there was nothing we could do.”

“We are sitting here in Germany and have to watch helplessly,” said Adam. Lara continued, “It’s not over yet. They stole the mobile phones of those killed. And they call every number and say: “We know your name, we know where you live, and you’re next.” The people who are still alive, who have survived, are paralysed with fear, and we can’t do anything from here. That’s why we’re here, to show and tell people what’s going on. That’s all we can do.”

At least 59 lives lost in nightclub fire in Kočani, North Macedonia

Katerina Selin

Police officers hold plastic bags on the site of a nightclub in the town of Kocani, North Macedonia, Sunday, March 16, 2025, following a massive fire in the nightclub early Sunday. [AP Photo/Visar Kryeziu]

In the early hours of Sunday morning, a devastating fire broke out in a club in Kočani, North Macedonia, killing at least 59 young people. A further 155 had to be treated in hospital for burns or smoke inhalation.

The victims are aged between 14 and 24. According to the North Macedonian health minister, the number could still rise, as at least 20 of the injured are in critical condition.

Around 1,500 partygoers were dancing at a concert by the popular North Macedonian hip-hop band DNK at Club Pulse when the ceiling went up in flames at around 2:30 a.m. During a stage show with pyrotechnics, sparks leapt onto the ceiling paneling, which was made of highly flammable material and immediately caught fire. The club burnt out completely and parts of the roof caved in. Many young people tried to escape through the windows.

This tragic disaster could have been avoided. More and more information is coming to light which makes it clear that the fire was the result of criminal neglect of all safety precautions.

The operator did not have a legal operating licence, but a fake one, as Interior Minister Panče Toškovski announced, and ordered an investigation into possible “bribery and corruption.” The club, which had a capacity of around 250, was completely overcrowded with over a thousand people. There were too few fire extinguishers and only one emergency exit, which was locked at the time of the concert. Also, no ambulances were available for emergencies, as is mandatory. According to the BBC, the building was a carpet warehouse before it was converted into a club.

Several band members died in the inferno, including the second frontman, Andrej Gjordjieski. As reported by local media, he is said to have returned to the club and tried to save other injured before succumbing to his own burns. The 43-year-old musician had studied at the music academy in the capital, Skopje, and is survived by his wife and daughter.

The victims also include backing singer Sara Projkovska, a single mother of two who taught piano at the music academy in Skopje, drummer Gorgi Gorgiev, keyboard player Filip Stevanovski and guitarist Aleksandar Kolarov. Co-founder and lead singer Vladimir Blazev, known as Pancho, was hospitalised with injuries.

Based on North Macedonian accounts, Der Spiegel reports how desperate parents searched for their children on social media. “Citizens helped out by using their own cars and following the ambulances to take the seriously injured to hospitals.” The hospital in Kočani was overwhelmed by the number of emergencies, meaning that the injured had to be transferred to other cities or abroad. Kočani, a city of 25,000, is located in the northeast of the country, not far from the border with Bulgaria.

While relatives and the population are in shock and mourning, the government is in damage control mode. At least 15 people have been arrested, including officials from the Economics Ministry who are said to have issued a licence for the club, and the club owner. The government under right-wing conservative Prime Minister Hristijan Mickoski, which has been in office since June 2024, accuses the previous government of corruption.

In a speech to the nation on Sunday, President Gordana Davkova Siljanovska said: “None of those responsible should escape the law, justice and punishment.”

The government is obviously worried that anger will follow mourning. German broadcaster ZDF quotes a 19-year-old student speaking on the sidelines of yesterday’s funeral service: “This was not an accident, but literally murder, with all the security breaches in this country. We cannot remain silent about this, even if we are afraid.”

The ruling class must fear that such a disaster will trigger widespread protests, as happened recently in neighboring Greece after the Tempi train crash in 2023 and in Serbia after the collapse of a station roof in Novi Sad in 2024.

Regardless of what else is known about the background to the accident, it is already clear that the trail of clues leads into the highest circles of North Macedonian politics. It is obvious that entrepreneurs and politicians have stopped at nothing in pursuing their profit interests.

What is usually dismissed and covered up in North Macedonia, like in all Balkan countries, as individual “corruption,” has been systematic for years and decades. The destruction of Yugoslavia as a result of the NATO wars in the 1990s has created small mini-states torn by ethnic and political conflicts, where naked capitalist greed reigns.

North Macedonia, which declared independence in 1991, has a population of 1.8 million. Until 2001, civil war-like conflicts escalated between the Slav-Macedonian majority (58.4 percent) and the Albanian minority (approx. 24.3 percent).

Poverty, social inequality and a lack of prospects characterise everyday life for the working class. Although unemployment has fallen slightly in recent years, it still stands at 13.2 percent, with youth unemployment double that figure at 27.2 percent,.

North Macedonia has been a candidate for accession to the European Union (EU) since 2005. German companies in particular benefit from the country’s low-cost labour and production conditions. Some 47 percent of all the country’s exports go to Germany, one of its main trading partners.

According to a report published in December 2024 by GTAI (Germany Trade and Invest, the federally-owned marketing agency for German business), North Macedonia is closely integrated into the supply chains of carmakers. As a result, the local supply industry is now also feeling the effects of the German auto crisis. At the same time, foreign direct investment has increased significantly. German companies are the largest investors, including automotive suppliers, electronics manufacturers, Deutsche Telekom and the discount supermarket chain Lidl.

As in all European countries, military expenditure is also increasing in North Macedonia—at the expense of social spending. Since North Macedonia joined NATO in March 2020, military spending has risen sharply more than doubling from $119.6 million in 2018 to a record high of $266.6 million in 2023, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).

It was the Greek government under the pseudo-left Syriza that cleared the way for North Macedonia’s admission to NATO. In the 2019 Prespes Agreement, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras agreed to the renaming of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) as North Macedonia. This settled the decades-long dispute between Greece and Macedonia over the territory’s name.

While the Prespes Agreement was celebrated as a major step forward by the bourgeois media and pseudo-left organisations, the World Socialist Web Site emphasised that it primarily serves reactionary goals. The renaming was a step towards the rapid integration of the small Balkan state into NATO and imperialist war planning.

The Balkan region is regarded by Germany and the EU as an important geopolitical sphere of influence and is exploited as a low-wage platform, which promotes corruption and benefits from low safety standards. As the Greek train crash at Tempi (57 dead), the collapse of the roof of the Novi Sad railway station (15 dead) and the fire disaster in the Grand Kartal Hotel in Turkey (78 dead) also show, the fire at Kočani shows that under capitalism a human life is worth very little.

Gold hits $3,000 per ounce in another expression of dollar turmoil

Nick Beams

The price of gold hit a new record high last week, passing the $3,000 mark, in a sign of the growing uncertainty surrounding the stability of the dollar—the result both of long-term trends and the consequences of the economic policies of the Trump administration.

Gold bars are shown stacked in a vault at the United States Mint on July 22, 2014 in West Point, New York [AP Photo/Mike Groll]

So far this year the price of gold has increased by 14 percent, with all indications that its rise will continue as both institutional and private investors look for a safe haven as global economic and financial turbulence intensifies.

Since 2000 gold has risen ten-fold amid a series of crises which have centred on the US financial system and raised the question of the long-term viability of the international financial system based on a fiat currency, the dollar, which is not backed by any real value but is dependent on the waning economic power of the US state.

Gold passed the $1,000 mark in March 2008 when the US financial system was showing signs of turbulence, starting in the sub-prime mortgage market, which lead to the global financial crisis of 2008 when major US financial institutions as well has corporations had to be bailed out by the US government and the Federal Reserve.

The price of gold went past $2,000 in August 2020 in the wake of the financial crisis at the start of the pandemic when the US Treasury market, a foundation of the global financial system, froze and the Fed had to intervene to the tune of trillions of dollars.

One of the sources of the latest surge in the gold price has been increased buying by central banks in so-called emerging markets and China which have bought more than 1,000 tonnes of gold in each of the last three years.

This has been coupled with efforts by the BRICS group of countries—Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, now being joined by others—to develop alternative systems of payments outside the US dollar.

The decision the major powers, led by the US, to freeze Russian central bank assets at the start of the Ukraine war in February and the exclusion of Russia from the SWIFT international payments system has been a major impetus for these moves because of the fear that what was done to Russia could be done to any country which crossed the US path.

Another major impetus has been the rapid rise in US government debt resulting from increased military spending, government spending to bolster corporations in the COVID crisis, and the rise in interest rate since 2022.

The US debt has now risen to $36 trillion with the interest bill running at an annual rate of $1 trillion a year—a situation which is acknowledged to be unsustainable, including by the Fed.

As John Ciampaglia, chief executive of Sprott Asset Management, a firm which specialises in precious metals and critical minerals, told the Financial Times one of the biggest drivers of the gold price since 2000 has been the growth of government debt.

“Global levels of debt have exploded over the past 25 years, they are starting to really weigh in economies and budgets,” he said.

The US is at the centre of this growing crisis. It has only been able to sustain its debt because of the role of the US dollar as the global reserve currency, but in the long run an international financial system based on the currency of the most indebted country in the world is unviable.

All of these longer-term trends are now being exacerbated by the economic war being waged by the Trump administration, at this stage chiefly via tariffs but set to extend, against the rest of the world.

There are two contradictory positions being advanced from within the administration. On the one hand it is asserted that the reason for the US trade deficit with most of the rest of the world is the result of the high value of the US dollar which is pricing US exports out of global markets.

At the same time the administration is determined to maintain the position of the dollar as the global reserve currency. Trump has said that losing that status would be the equivalent of losing a war and has threatened a tariff war against the BRICS group or anyone else which seeks to replace it.

One of the reasons for the higher dollar is that surplus countries invest in US financial assets, in particular US government debt, which is around one-third foreign owned.

Various positions are being discussed within the economic environs of the administration which are gaining the attention of sections of the financial press.

An article last week by FT columnist Gillian Tett pointed to some of the issues under consideration. She began by noting that with the intensification of the Trump tariff war “indices of economic uncertainty have skyrocketed above even the 2020 pandemic or the global financial crisis of 2008.”

“But the uncertainty could get worse. For all the tariff shocks, there is another question hovering: could Trump’s assault on free trade lead to attacks on capital flows too? Might tariffs on goods be a prelude to tariffs on money?”

That idea, she continued, until recently might have seemed “crazy” because of the role played by capital inflows in sustaining the burgeoning government debt, but it is now gaining currency. Last month, American Compass, a right-wing think tank, said to be close to vice president J D Vance, declared that taxes on capital inflows could raise $2 trillion over the next decade.

Various proposals were advanced in a paper published by economist Stephen Miran last November on restructuring the global trading system. Miran has since been confirmed as the chair of the White Council of Economic Advisers and as the Wall Street Journal noted in a recent article “some on Wall Street” are starting to take his ideas seriously.

Aside from a tax on capital inflows, Miran has proposed a revised version of the Plaza Accord of 1985 in which the US, Japan, Germany, the UK and France agreed to lower the value of the American dollar to reduce trade imbalances.

Miran has said a repeat is needed to correct “persistent dollar overvaluation that prevents a balancing of international trade” which has been dubbed a Mar-a-Lago accord.

Under present conditions, in which Trump is waging economic war against them, there is no way that the other major powers would voluntarily agree to such an accord.

As Michael Strain of the right-wing American Enterprise Institute told the FT: “Europe is not going to rejigger its savings and investments balance or take other big macroeconomic steps in order to revalue its currency just because the Trump administration wants it to.”

Moreover, in the 40 years since the Plaza Accord the world economy has been transformed by the growth of other economies such as China and Brazil.

But the Miran proposals go far beyond a Plaza-type agreement. They include a restructuring of US debt in which US Treasury bonds would be transformed into perpetual bonds. That is, they would continue to pay interest, but the principal would never be returned. The new system would be akin to the debt for equity swap sometimes employed by corporations when they cannot repay loans.

In exchange for their agreement foreign governments would remain under the US “defence umbrella” and not have punitive tariffs imposed on them.

In a column published today the FT economics commentator Martin Wolf wrote: “In a precise sense, this might be viewed as a ‘protection racket.’”

At this stage, such proposals are generally regarded as implausible not least because the rating agencies would almost certainly regard them as a default by the US on its debt, calling into question the position of the dollar as the reserve currency. In the words of the FT, it would be an event “so dramatic that the impact would be nearly impossible to predict.”

The fact they are even being discussed reveals the enormous crisis confronting US imperialism and its financial system.

Summing up the growing contradictions, Steven Englander of the Standard and Chartered Bank wrote in a note last month: “The problem for the new administration is that it simultaneously wants a weaker dollar, a reduced trade deficit, capital inflows and the [dollar] to remain the key currency in international reserves and payments.”

Whatever economic and financial measures are adopted, the contradictions of the capitalist system are always fought out in the form of conflict between the major imperialist powers—economic war and ultimately military conflict—and the class struggle at home.

Amid the apparent chaos of the Trump administration there is a clear logic at work: increased bellicosity against friend and foe alike and deepening attacks on the working class.

The mounting debt and dollar crisis, reflected in the rising price of gold, is not going to be resolved through some economic and financial rejigging. The debt accumulated by the US in its endless wars and bailouts for the corporate oligarchy requires a massive transfer of wealth from the working class.

This is why the Trump administration, starting with the chainsaw of DOGE, has placed front and centre attacks on governments spending which in any way benefit the working class, which it designates as “waste.”

But it knows that such measures will produce and are already producing an upsurge in the working class and cannot be imposed peacefully. This is why its economic agenda is being accompanied by a full-scale attack on democratic rights and the ongoing construction of a fascist state.