Gaza slaughter: Israel’s war crimes and US hypocrisy

Patrick Martin

Over the past three days, relentless Israeli airstrikes killed at least 45 Palestinians, including 16 children, and caused extensive devastation.

At least 400 were wounded, many severely, and the handful of barely functioning hospitals and clinics were overwhelmed. Some 2.3 million Palestinians live in Gaza, confined by Israeli and Egyptian military cordons and fences. Hundreds of powerful bombs and missiles have rained down on a territory comprising only 141 square miles—exactly equal in area to the city of Detroit.

The most heavily bombed neighborhoods, where Israeli officials claimed leaders of the Islamic Jihad were the targets, were scenes of apocalyptic destruction, with apartment buildings transformed into craters and body parts strewn about. An Al-Jazeera montage of the faces of 12 martyred children, supplied by the Palestinian Health Ministry—shown here—was circulated throughout the Arab world, producing widespread outrage.

If it were Ukrainian children who suffered the same fate, there is no doubt that the American corporate media, the faithful servant of the CIA and State Department, would be providing saturation coverage. There would be endless hours devoted to mourning the loss of innocent lives and branding those responsible for their deaths as murderers and war criminals. No such terms will be used for Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid, Defense Minister Benny Gantz and other top Israeli military and intelligence officials.

Sixteen children aged 18 and under were killed by Israeli air strikes on Gaza over the past three days. Twelve are pictured here; the three without photos, all siblings, died in the Al-Jabaliya refugee camp in Gaza. The 16th child died in the hospital late Monday of wounds received earlier, and has not yet been named.

The New York Times, which has spearheaded the media’s campaign over supposed Russian atrocities in the Ukraine war, began its report on the temporary halt in the Gaza bombardment this way: “A cease-fire ending three days of fierce cross-border fighting between Israel and a Palestinian militant group in Gaza appeared to be holding on Monday, and life on both sides of the lines began to return to normal.”

The supposed “fierce cross-border fighting” was a completely one-sided affair, with the Israeli military, the most powerful in the Middle East, armed to the teeth by US imperialism, dropping bombs and missiles on a defenseless population. Meanwhile, militants of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) fired off hundreds of rudimentary home-made rockets, nearly all of them landing harmlessly or shot down by Israeli’s antimissile system.

As to the “return to normal,” for the people of Gaza, this means unbearable poverty, a 50 percent unemployment rate and a smashed infrastructure, in what is routinely described by observers as the largest open-air prison camp on the planet. Electricity is available only 11 hours a day even when the Gaza power plant is running, but it was shut down, not because of the bombing, but because Israel and Egypt halted the delivery of fuel supplies required to keep it running.

The Biden administration issued a brief statement welcoming the ceasefire, expressing appreciation for the role of Egypt, Qatar, Jordan and other reactionary Arab dictatorships and monarchies for their role in the diplomacy that brought a temporary end to the violence, while condemning Islamic Jihad for “indiscriminate rocket attacks.” Biden reaffirmed his “long-standing and unwavering” support for Israel, adding, “I commend Prime Minister Yair Lapid and his government’s steady leadership throughout the crisis.”

There is no doubt that the onslaught against Gaza was discussed and approved during Biden’s visit to Israel July 13-15, just three weeks before the well-prepared attack began. The Pentagon will now rush to resupply the munitions expended by the Israel Defense Force during the bombing campaign.

The rocket exchanges with PIJ were deliberately provoked by Israel’s arrest and detention of the senior leader of the group on the West Bank, Bassam al-Saadi, on August 1 in the city of Jenin. This was part of a systematic campaign of Israeli military violence in Jenin which has killed at least 30 Palestinians and wounded hundreds since the beginning of this year.

The timing of the attack seemed calculated to benefit Prime Minister Lapid, who heads a caretaker coalition regime headed into a November 1 general election. A Times of Israel headline declared: “With elections looming, Lapid’s Gaza gamble seems to have paid off” and cited the former television broadcaster’s need to burnish his military credentials before a contest where the main opposition comes from the right-wing militarist Benjamin Netanyahu, whose Likud Party coalition was ousted just last year.

Israeli press reports suggest that the main shift in policy since the fall of Netanyahu has been a decision to concentrate on the destruction of Islamic Jihad, the smaller of the two Islamist groups in Gaza, noting that Lapid had not mentioned Hamas, the ruling party in Gaza, in his public statements on the Israeli military attack. On Saturday night, General Oded Basyuk, the head of the Israeli Defense Forces Operations Unit, told reporters that the IDF had successfully killed “the entire senior security echelon of Islamic Jihad’s military wing in Gaza.” 

The response of the Arab rulers to the three-day bombardment of Gaza provided example of their cynical treachery and betrayal of the interests of the Palestinian people and the Arab masses as a whole. Most of the Gulf sheikdoms followed the lead of Saudi Arabia, whose media denounced Islamic Jihad as a tool of Iran and suggested that PIJ had provoked the conflict in conjunction with the resumption of nuclear energy talks between Iran and the so-called P5+1 group (the five full members of the UN Security Council plus Germany). These talks resumed in Vienna on August 4.

This allegation turns the world upside down. It is far more likely that the Israeli regime, not Islamic Jihad, timed the conflict to disrupt the nuclear talks because it stridently opposes any deal that would ease sanctions on Iran.

The bloodstained Egyptian military regime brokered the ceasefire, while maintaining its iron grip on Gaza’s western border, which it has largely closed since Hamas came to power in the territory in 2007.

The Gaza bloodbath also demonstrates the impotent and bankruptcy of the Palestinian bourgeois nationalists of every stripe, whether the Islamist variety, like Hamas, or the secular Fatah group which controls the Palestinian Authority and acts as Israel’s appointed prison guard on the West Bank. It is noteworthy that while the US and Israel still nominally treat Hamas as a “terrorist group,” Egypt, Qatar and the UN mediators “dealt with the Hamas leaders as if they were the legitimate and sole rulers of the Gaza Strip,” as the Jerusalem Post observed.

The situation in Gaza remains fraught. The Israeli military has called up 25,000 reserves and has no plans to demobilize them, while an Islamic Jihad leader said that if Israel did not release two imprisoned PIJ leaders, including Bassam al-Saadi, by the weekend—as was apparently promised to Egypt—the conflict would be resumed.

Biden administration approves $1 billion military aid package for Ukraine, the largest yet

Clara Weiss

In the midst of its escalating provocations against China over Taiwan, the Biden administration approved yet another $1 billion in military aid to Ukraine. This brings the total direct military aid provided by the Pentagon to Ukraine since the beginning of the imperialist-provoked invasion by Russia to $9.8 billion. The White House also announced an additional $4.5 billion in financial aid for Ukraine on Monday. 

According to the Pentagon, the new tranche of weapons deliveries will include:

• additional ammunition for the 16 long-range HIMARS missiles which the Biden administration began delivering to Ukraine in May;
• 75,000 rounds of 155mm artillery ammunition; 
• 20 120 mm mortar systems and 20,000 rounds of 120 mm mortar ammunition;
• 1,000 Javelin (each worth about $78,000) and hundreds of AT4 anti-armor systems; 
• 50 armored medical treatment vehicles; 
• C-4 explosives, demolition munitions and demolition equipment; and
• Munitions for National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems (NASAMS).

This comes on top of $23.8 billion in military aid, including direct military aid and financial aid designed to help finance future weapons purchases, that the US had pledged as of July 1, according to the Kiehl Institute for the World Economy. 

The new tranche in weapons is aimed at bolstering the Ukrainian army as it is preparing an offensive in the south of the country which has been largely occupied by Russia. Ukrainian officials have also threatened an offensive targeting the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea, which was annexed by Russia in 2014, with a Pentagon spokesman refusing to rule out such attacks, even though Kremlin officials have threatened to retaliate with nuclear weapons. 

Highlighting the immense dangers posed by the conflict, there has been intense fighting at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant—the largest of its kind in Europe—over the past week. Russia and Ukraine have traded accusations of shelling the plant, which was reportedly damaged last week. Officials of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) have warned that “there’s a very real risk of a nuclear disaster.” According to Bloomberg, Russia has invited IAEA representatives to visit the plant, but they are still awaiting permission from Kiev, as well as security guarantees and a safe passage through the war zone.

The latest US weapons delivery announcement comes as more and more information emerges that confirms the utterly criminal character of the imperialist proxy war against Russia in Ukraine and its horrific toll on the civilian population and soldiers on both sides. Reports by Amnesty International and the United Nations have now confirmed that the Ukrainian military is deploying tactics that serve to drive up civilian casualties. In violation of international law, Ukrainian troops have been routinely launching rockets and stationing personnel in densely populated areas, including hospitals, and have been using civilians as human shields.

While the Ukrainian government responded with hysterical denunciations to the report by Amnesty International, there has been no credible denial of the allegations of serious violations of international law.

The United Nations now put the figures of civilian casualties at over 5,400 dead and over 7,300 wounded. At least 12 million people out of a pre-war population of less than 40 million have been displaced by the war. Out of these 12 million, about 5 million have fled to neighboring countries, primarily Poland, while at least 7 million were displaced within Ukraine.

Ever more horrifying figures are also emerging about the shocking number of casualties among the Ukrainian army. While it has been impossible to confirm the veracity of documents circulating on social media which suggest that a stunning 191,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been either killed or wounded in action, it is clear that the casualties among the Ukrainian army must by now be in the tens of thousands. In June, one of the advisers of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Aleksei Arestovich, publicly stated that about 10,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed with another 100 more dying each day. The total number of dead must have increased significantly in the past months since this public revelation. The Ukrainian army also admitted that 7,200 men were missing in action as of July 11. 

The Russian military has not made a single public statement on its casualties since March, when it acknowledged that 1,351 soldiers had died and 3,825 had been wounded in the first few weeks of the war. The Russian BBC wrote in June that it had established the names of at least 3,502 dead Russian soldiers and officers, based on official statements and information about funerals. The US government claims that the Russian military has had between 70,000 and 80,000 casualties.

Whatever the real numbers, it is already clear that the war in Ukraine is the bloodiest conflict in Europe since 1945, and, indeed, one of the bloodiest in modern history with the Washington Post noting in June that it “is killing far more soldiers per day than the typical war.” Yet Western weapons manufacturers are reaping profits from the slaughter and the massive military build-up by the imperialist powers. 

In the first month of the invasion alone, the shares of the two leading US weapons manufacturers, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon Technologies, increased by 28 and 20 percent respectively. A report by Business Insider from May revealed that 20 Democratic and Republican congressmen and women owned shares in these two weapons manufacturers, with some buying their shares on February 24 or just days before the war began. All of them voted in favor of a massive $40 billion bill, which provides for over $17 billion for weapons that are to be manufactured in the US, primarily by these two companies, and then sent to Ukraine. 

The bonanza of war profiteers is not limited to the US. The German weapons manufacturer Rheinmetall, a company that already ranked among the biggest profiteers from the horrific crimes of German imperialism in both world wars, saw its stock price surge a whopping 88 percent in the first three months of the war. Using the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a pretext, the German government announced a €100 billion rearmament program, the largest in German history, which included a €42 billion order to Rheinmetall.

The British Telegraph reported in late July that the UK’s BAE Systems, the largest weapons manufacturer in Europe, is “expecting a flood of new orders from countries preparing for the return of industrial war.” In the first six months of this year, the company already enjoyed a £18 billion (70 percent) boost in orders and saw its earnings before interest payments and tax rise to £1.11 billion. The UK has been the second-biggest weapons supplier to Ukraine, after the US.

Britain’s second largest weapons manufacturer Babcock has also been seeing orders raining in from Eastern European NATO member states, which are massively building up their militaries and are trying to switch from Soviet-era weapons. After making a loss of £1.18 billion the year prior, Babcock unveiled a pre-tax profit of £182.3 million in March 2022, and an order book up more than a fifth to almost £10 billion.

Charles Woodburn, BAE chief executive, told the Financial Times last week that his company was negotiating more orders with multiple governments, including the British. He stated, “We see this playing out over a multiyear period now.”

Israeli airstrikes massacre Palestinian children in Gaza

Jean Shaoul

For three days, Israel has bombarded the densely populated and impoverished coastal enclave of Gaza, targeting leaders of Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), civilians and their property in the worst flare-up since May 2021.

As of Sunday evening, Israel’s “surgical” air strikes have killed at least 43 Palestinians, including Taysir al-Jabari and Khalid Mansour, senior PIJ military leaders in northern and southern Gaza. Fifteen children and four women have been killed since Friday. At least 300, more than half of them women and children, have been injured and at least 31 families made homeless. One Israeli civilian and two soldiers have been lightly wounded by shrapnel.

Smoke rises following Israeli airstrikes on a building in Gaza City's Shijaiyah neighborhood, Sunday, August. 7, 2022. [Photo: Hatem Moussa/WSWS]

The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) said its aerial bombardment was a preemptive operation aimed at preventing rocket attacks planned by Palestinian Islamic Jihad against Israel. It warned that its operation could last up to a week.

The continuous outbreaks of violence—Israel has launched at least eight murderous assaults on the besieged enclave since 2005 when it “withdrew” from Gaza—flows inexorably from the 15-year-long Israeli siege of Gaza that has been aided by the butcher of Cairo, General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt, and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. The blockade, an act of collective punishment banned under international law, has turned the enclave into an open-air prison for its two million inhabitants. Most lack even the most basic essentials of life, clean water, sanitation and electricity, while more than half the population is unemployed and the vast majority live in appalling poverty.

At the same time as waging war on Gaza, the caretaker government under Yair Lapid, who heads an eight-party coalition that includes one of Israel’s Arab parties and several Jewish parties ostensibly committed to a Palestinian state alongside Israel, gave free rein to the far right to incite violence against the Palestinians in Jerusalem.

Under the protection of armed Israeli security forces, 1,000 religious bigots, far right nationalists and settlers stormed the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in East Jerusalem on Sunday morning. They waved Israeli flags, prayed and chanted anti-Muslim and anti-Arab slogans, breaching long-standing agreements with Jordan, the official custodian of the site, whereby non-Muslims are not allowed to pray within the compound or display Israeli symbols. Israeli police have allowed settlers and far right activists entry to the site on a near-daily basis.

The authorities allowed this latest provocation to go ahead as Israel’s military onslaught on Gaza entered its third day, amid concerns that this would incite Palestinian protests and clashes. In May 2021, similar provocations at the al-Aqsa Mosque compound coinciding with Ramadan led to Israel’s 11-day assault on Gaza that killed 256 Palestinians and extensive riots in Israel’s mixed cities of Haifa, Acre, Lod and Ramla.

The latest conflict started on Monday with the storming by Israeli special forces of the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank. They fired live and rubber-coated bullets as well as tear gas at Palestinians and arrested senior Islamic Jihad leader Bassam al-Saadi, and his son-in-law, Ashraf al-Jada, at his home in Jenin. Pictures of al-Saadi being dragged across the ground accompanied by an attack dog provoked a storm of protest, amid fears for his life, from PIJ supporters. Islamic Jihad vowed revenge.

The PIJ has become the main force behind the armed resistance in Jenin and Nablus to both Israel and its subcontractor, the Palestinian Authority (PA) of President Mahmoud Abbas. During the raid, Israeli forces also shot and killed Derar Riyad al-Kafrini, a 17-year-old Palestinian youth and injured Saadi's wife as well as least one other.

Israel claimed that PIJ was planning to launch attacks from Gaza on Israel and made full-scale preparations for an extensive operation against Islamic Jihad. It ordered a lockdown on towns and villages in southern Israel, closing roads and sending reinforcements to the area, and called up 10 reserve Border Guard battalions in case rioting erupted in Israel’s predominantly Palestinian cities. It closed both the Erez and Kerem Shalom border crossings into Gaza, preventing essential commodities, including food and fuel, from entering the besieged enclave and medical patients and the 14,000 Palestinians from Gaza with work permits in Israel from leaving. Shortly afterwards, Gaza’s sole power plant announced it would close, citing a lack of fuel.

On Friday, Israel began pounding Gaza with what it said were targeted strikes to “take out” Islamic Jihad leaders and militants. The US and major European powers supported this latest war crime with nostrums about “Israel’s right to defend itself” from attack, although no such attack had taken place.

Yair Lapid, Israel’s caretaker prime minister until Israel’s fifth elections in four years on November 1, described the PIJ as “an Iranian proxy that wants to destroy the state of Israel.” His statement signals an Israeli offensive against Iran’s allies in the region.

PIJ and Hamas, an affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood that rules Gaza, are listed as “terrorist organisations” by the US and European powers. Backed by Iran, the PIJ also has supporters in Lebanon and Syria. Its leader Ziad al-Nakhalah was in Tehran for talks with Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi on Friday, the day Israel launched its bombardment on Gaza.

Al-Nakhalah pledged that the group would launch revenge attacks, including targeting Tel Aviv and other cities. But Islamic Jihad’s rockets, launched only after Israel’s onslaught, had little impact. Most of its 400 rockets were intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome missile defence system or fell on empty ground. One house was damaged.

Major-General Hossein Salami, the head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, said Saturday the Palestinians are “not alone” in their fight against Israel, declaring, “We are with you on this path until the end, and let Palestine and the Palestinians know that they are not alone.” He added that Israel “will pay another heavy price for the recent crime.”

Hamas, despite its bitter opposition to its rival, said it supported Islamic Jihad’s response to Israel’s bombardment. However, it took no action against Israel, as it tried to prevent the conflict erupting into a full-scale war. It also stood aside during Israel’s two-day assault on Gaza in November 2019 that assassinated PIJ’s southern military leader Bahaa Abu el-Atta and his wife.

Israel’s government, under Naftali Bennett and now under Lapid, has in contrast to that of former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sought to bolster Hamas at the expense of the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority as a means of dividing the Palestinians. Israel has lifted a few of the restrictions on Gaza, increasing its power supply and ability to carry out reconstruction work. It has granted work permits to 20,000 Gaza residents that enable them to cross into Israel daily to work for wages that are some 10 times the rate paid in Gaza, where the unemployment rate tops 50 percent.

Lapid’s government has reportedly agreed to an Egypt-brokered ceasefire between Israel and Islamic Jihad set to take effect at 8 p.m. Sunday, with pledges from Israel to alleviate Gaza's fuel shortage in return for a crackdown on PIJ by Hamas. It remains to be seen whether it will take effect or hold.

Lapid is fighting a bitterly contested election against two rivals for the premiership. The first is Netanyahu, who, despite fighting criminal charges of bribery, corruption and breach of trust in three separate cases, is currently predicted to receive the largest number of votes for his coalition. This is more likely if his far-right religious allies, Itamar Ben Gvir’s Jewish Power and Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism party, agree on a merger for electoral purposes as they did ahead of last year’s election. The second is Defence Minister Benny Gantz, the former army chief. Lapid, who has never held a security post, is thus anxious to bolster his militarist credentials.

His efforts to terrorise the Palestinians and give succour to the fascistic far right seek to deflect the immense social tensions within Israeli society outward as the elections—unusually—focus on the rising cost of living and the increasing poverty. One of the most unequal societies in the advanced world, Israel has the highest poverty rate for any country in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

The coalition government, in power for just a year, has widened the already vast socioeconomic gaps in Israeli society, offering tax breaks to the wealthy, raising prices on basic household goods and promoting agricultural reforms that would devastate farmers, while failing to curb the soaring cost of housing. As elsewhere, deteriorating conditions for most Israeli workers and their families have led to a growing number of working class strikes and protests.

Bank of England maps out social counter-revolution

Chris Marsden

The Bank of England (BoE) has increased interest rates by 0.5 percentage points to 1.75, the largest rise in 27 years. It did so to deepen the long recession now begun in the UK, intending to push up unemployment and social hardship for millions.

The Bank of England’s Monetary Price Committee (MPC) announced its decision on Friday. The rate rise is part of aggressive moves by the world’s leading central banks led by the US Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank to “crush” demands for higher wages amid the greatest cost-of-living crisis since the 1930s.

Governor of the Bank of England, Andrew Bailey sits during the Bank of England's financial stability report press conference, at the Bank of England, London, Thursday, August 4, 2022. The Bank of England says the United Kingdom’s economy is projected to enter a recession in the final three months of the year. The bank said Thursday that inflation will accelerate to over 13% in the fourth quarter and remain “very elevated,” for much of 2023. [AP Photo/Yui Mok/Pool Photo]

In its statement released Friday, the BoE said inflation had “intensified significantly” since its May Monetary Policy Report and the MPC’s previous meeting, saying “this largely reflects a near doubling in wholesale gas prices since May, owing to Russia’s restriction of gas supplies to Europe and the risk of further curbs.”

It predicted Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation would rise to over 13 percent by October, and “remain at very elevated levels throughout much of 2023”, driven largely by the lifting of energy price caps. Domestic fuel bills are expected to rise by a further 50 percent in October and again in January.

The BoE made clear its central concern is to contain demands for higher wages. The governors complained that job vacancies were at “historically high levels” with unemployment at just 3.8 percent. This, combined with labour shortages in key sectors, was encouraging high “underlying nominal wage growth” and a broad “increase in recent wage settlements”.

Despite wages lagging far behind inflation, the BoE sounded the alarm over a 5 percent growth in private sector wages compared with 3.5 percent before the pandemic. It warned that public sector pay was set to grow by 4 percent, compared to 1.8 percent in the three months to May.

Significantly, the BoE’s survey of employers “suggested that businesses expected to increase pay deals by around 6 percent over the next twelve months”, less than half the current rate of (Retail Prices Index) RPI measure of inflation, yet sufficient to raise the BoE’s hackles.

The bank explained that “the pressure on wage growth” can only be combatted via recessionary policies, especially via a surge in unemployment by at least 600,000 next year.

The bank’s governors described the risks to the economy from external and domestic “shocks” as “exceptionally large”.

In raising interest rates, the BoE is enforcing the dictates of financial markets, corporate boardrooms and banks in response to a growing wave of strikes and wildcat actions that is threatening to snowball. Its supposedly impartial economic pronouncements are an agenda for class war.

The working class is to be forced to pay for a global inflationary crisis triggered by: 1) trillions of pounds in corporate and financial bailouts by central banks during the pandemic, 2) NATO’s proxy war against Russia that has led to fuel and commodity price hikes, and 3) unprecedented profiteering by the financial oligarchy that has inflated global asset prices worldwide.

The ruling elite intends to force through the largest ever increase in defence spending to wage war against Russia and China via a frontal assault on the working class.

Its tightening of monetary policy is above all a response to the eruption of strikes involving hundreds of thousands of workers after decades in which the class struggle has been suppressed.

Strikes by rail, post and British Telecoms and bus workers have already taken place, and this week saw wildcat strikes over pay at three Amazon warehouses and a food manufacturing company. The ruling class fears this movement will spread, with nurses, doctors, teachers, firefighters, lecturers, civil servants, lawyers and council workers determined to strike after being offered pay rises of as little as 2 percent that will push millions over the edge.

The Bank’s aim is to counter this rising wave of militancy by forcing desperate workers to accept further savage pay cuts or face mass unemployment and financial ruin.

While workers wage demands are being blamed for inflation, the real cause is a staggering increase in corporate profits. Amid the pandemic and NATO’s proxy war against Russia, profit gouging is responsible for around 60 percent of the increases in inflation.

Record profits of nearly £50 billion have been announced by the world’s five biggest oil companies, including £6.9 billion for BP between April and June, and $11.5 billion for Shell. A June 2022 report by the Unite union notes that the top 350 companies listed on the London Stock Exchange saw profits jump by 73 percent in 2021 compared with the year before the pandemic. UK-wide company profits jumped 11.74 percent in the six months from October 2021 to March 2022.

In stark contrast, average wages remain no higher today than they were before the 2008 financial crisis, a loss of £9,200 per year. As a result, galloping inflation means more than two million households are going without “heating or eating”, according to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, and seven million families are living through a “frightening year of financial fear”.

Low-income households have borrowed £12.5 billion of new debt in 2022, including £3.5 billion from doorstep lenders and loan sharks. Now they will be squeezed for even high loan repayments. The rise in interest rates will also be passed on to mortgage holders. With average house prices already nine times more than average annual income, millions will go to the wall.

Half of families have savings of less than a month’s income and over 1.3 million households have no savings at all. With UK energy bills set to double to nearly £4,000 this winter, alongside soaring food prices, the number of families without savings will reach 5.3 million. For 1.2 million families, food and energy bills alone will exceed their disposable incomes.

In this explosive situation, the ruling class has relied on the trade unions to impose de facto pay cuts by isolating and suppressing strikes and agreeing sell-out pay deals. This led to a decline in real wages of 3.7 percent in the three months to the end of May.

But this cannot continue. Massive social anger threatens to erupt outside of the control of the trade unions.  

The raising of interest rates is only one aspect of the ruling class offensive. The Conservative government is using its leadership contest to fashion the most right-wing policy agenda since the 1930s and is introducing a battery of repressive measures against the right to strike and protest.

Labour’s role is critical in enforcing this agenda. Its leader Sir Keir Starmer denounces “magic money tree economics” almost as often as he condemns strikes. Speaking to BBC Radio Merseyside he said Labour was “being very clear we unshakably support NATO, being very clear we are unashamedly pro-business, we work with business.”

CDC, Reuters suppress warnings about airborne transmission of monkeypox

Bryan Dyne

On Friday, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the news outlet Reuters escalated the attacks against those warning that the deadly monkeypox virus can be transmitted through the air. In a “fact check” article published by Reuters, the news outlet claims that social media posts exposing unexplained changes made in late May to the CDC’s guidelines on monkeypox, are “missing the context” of the changes.

The Reuters piece was published after Dana Parish, an author and advocate for those suffering from Long COVID, wrote a series of tweets on July 30 showing that CDC guidelines have been “scrubbed” of clear references to the danger of airborne transmission of monkeypox.

Parish compared the CDC Yellow Book, which is published to provide health and disease information for those traveling internationally, to the agency’s current Monkeypox FAQ, which present conflicting guidelines. The Yellow Book, published every two years and most recently in 2020, states, “monkeypox spread from person to person is principally respiratory; contact with infectious skin lesions or scabs is another, albeit less common, means of person-to-person spread.”

In contrast, the most recent CDC guidance claims that “direct contact” is the primary mode of transmission. “Respiratory secretions,” a term which is not defined or explained, is listed as a secondary mode of transmission at best. To reinforce its assertions, the CDC also writes that, “In the current monkeypox outbreak, the virus is spreading primarily through close personal contact,” including sex.

The conception that monkeypox is primarily transmitted sexually has been massively promoted since the monkeypox pandemic began in early May. The World Health Organization (WHO) and virtually every public health agency of the major capitalist governments have promoted the fact that 98 percent of confirmed so far have been among men sexually active with other men. In reality, testing has been largely confined to this demographic with nearly every non-endemic country refusing to conduct widespread testing to trace the extent of the disease among the entire population. Significantly, in Africa, where monkeypox is endemic in a number of countries and at least 350 cases have been detected this year, 60 percent of all cases are among men and 40 percent have occurred among women.

Historically, airborne transmission has long been recognized as one of the key ways that monkeypox can jump from person to person, and the science of the virus has not changed overnight during the current unprecedented outbreak. A recent preprint article studying this year’s monkeypox outbreak in the United Kingdom showed that “three of four air samples collected” during the study tested positive for monkeypox, indicating that the disease is airborne. In Nigeria, a country where monkeypox outbreaks are more commonplace, their Monkeypox Public Health Response Guidelines have always had “airborne precautions” in place. In July, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHC) published an extensive report on monkeypox, which notes that monkeypox can spread through aerosols and recommends that healthcare workers wear N95 masks for protection.

In an extensive thread defending Parish against the attack by Reuters, anti-COVID advocate Lazarus Long documents numerous sources which have noted the airborne transmission of monkeypox, including multiple screenshots from the CDC’s prior guidance.

Parish commented on the Reuters piece to the World Socialist Web Site, noting that “Fact checkers are supposed to use facts, not government hearsay without any data to back it up. The government refused to test women, children, and straight men saying the virus was only spreading among men having sex with men. This doesn’t show a mode of transmission, it shows that one community was tested while others weren’t. If a virus was known to be primarily airborne before the current outbreak, what evidence is there to show that those cases weren’t spread by airborne transmission? Having sex would put these men at close range for a long enough period to have an infectious dose.

“Remember when the government said you’d only catch COVID if you were around someone for 15 minutes? That was untrue and unsupported, and this all feels too eerily familiar.”

Parish also spoke to the lack of genuine research in the “fact check” article, asking, “Why did Reuters report that the CDC used to explain that respiratory was a primary mode of transmission without showing any evidence that it's no longer happening? Also, why did Reuters talk about the Department of Homeland Security document without explaining that they’re telling health care workers to use N95s at minimum around Monkeypox patients and that there is mention of airborne spread in that document?'

She added, “Reuters confirmed that up until the current outbreak, the CDC and other experts knew airborne was the primary mode of transmission but have provided no evidence to show it’s not or an explanation as to how a virus can suddenly no longer have airborne transmission, especially as cases are spreading so fast.”

Parish also noted that Reuters only contacted the CDC for their article and did not ask her for comment. In other words, attempts are being made to discredit and silence those that argue for the precautionary principle, which demands that the whole arsenal of public health measures be deployed against a deadly viral outbreak which has still many unknown characteristics.

The timing of the Reuters piece suggests there are a variety of high level discussions within the US state regarding its response to the monkeypox pandemic. The same day the “fact check” was published, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authorized the use of the Jynneos smallpox vaccine for children under 18 years old who were potentially exposed to monkeypox at a daycare center in Illinois, despite the absence of clinical trials to test the safety and efficacy of the vaccine for this demographic. The move by the FDA suggests that the government is aware that in previous outbreaks, as recorded in the report from Nigeria, “the majority of deaths [occurred] in younger age groups.” The immediate authorization of the Jynneos vaccine stands in stark contrast to the extended delay in granting emergency use authorization to anti-COVID vaccines for children over the past two years.

At the same time, cases among young people are growing. Over the weekend, Florida reported three new cases of monkeypox in children under the age of fourteen, bringing the total number of infections in children in the US to at least eight. There are now over 7,500 cases in the US and nearly 29,000 cases worldwide. The death toll, according to Our World In Data, currently stands at nine.

As with the coronavirus pandemic, the working class as a whole must ask, “What does the government know about the dangers of monkeypox and when did it know it?” It is increasingly clear that the same backhanded dealings that occurred at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, done in order to ensure the stock market could be propped up at the expense of human lives, are being repeated by withholding the immense dangers of monkeypox from the American and world population.

Nicolas Smit, an expert on airborne transmission and masks, told the WSWS, “The CDC has a record of hiding evidence of airborne transmission from the public and purposefully misleading them to believe it isn't happening until they are forced to admit it. The CDC admitted to airborne transmission for COVID in January 2020, then told the public for over a year there was no evidence of airborne transmission. The CDC only admitted to airborne transmission a week after the WHO did in May 2021.”

Smit added, “The CDC and President Biden said that once airborne transmission was confirmed, they would recommend airborne PPE like N95s be put into widespread use. But once it happened, they continued to recommend cloth masks and kept a veil of secrecy over superior options like elastomeric respirators.”

Concerns over the airborne transmission of monkeypox are particularly important as schools reopen. Schools, as well as factories, offices and other workplaces, have been shown to be a key vector of transmission for airborne viruses such as the coronavirus and monkeypox. The fact that warnings that monkeypox is airborne are being suppressed suggest that the government is aware of the dangers and attempting to ultimately suppress social opposition to the unchecked spread of a second deadly pandemic virus among children.

“The bottom line is that we need transparency and clear, science-based guidance in order to protect children, their families, teachers, and the broader community,” Parish wrote. “Rather than spend so much energy trying to craft their image by discrediting me and others who have called them out and are rightfully concerned, the CDC and all public health officials should be laser focused on understanding and mitigating the outbreak, and direct communication to the public about how to protect themselves.”

US Senate targets Social Security and Medicare

Andre Damon

Last week, Republican Senator Ron Johnson called for ending Social Security and Medicare as entitlement programs, instead transferring them into the discretionary budget where they would be gutted.

Johnson’s proposal follows a similar call by Florida Senator Rick Scott, who earlier this year called for putting Social Security and Medicare up for renewal every five years.

Social Security and Medicare spending is allocated as mandatory spending, funded by workers’ payroll taxes, to prevent them from being pillaged.  Transferring these programs to the discretionary budget would mean their abolition, slashing US life expectancy as millions of retirees die in poverty and from preventable disease.

Seymour Fogel, "The Wealth of the Nation," commissioned for the Social Security Board Building, Washingon DC in 1938.

“If you qualify for the entitlement, you just get it no matter what the cost,” Johnson said. “And our problem in this country is that [mandatory spending takes up] more than 70% of our federal budget, of our federal spending.”

Yes, retired workers are “entitled” to these benefits, because they have been paying for them their entire lives. Out of every dollar workers have earned, they paid eight cents to finance their Social Security and Medicare benefits, matched by equal payments from their employer.

But Johnson and Scott, lackeys for the billionaires that rule over America, are demanding that these funds that workers have been paying into over a lifetime of toil and struggle be stolen from them to make the oligarchy richer and to fund America’s new “forever wars.”

Social Security was created in 1935 as part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, in response to a wave of social struggles during the Great Depression. Medicare was created in 1965 during President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society reforms, against the backdrop of the Civil Rights movement and a strike wave gripping large portions of the country.

With both of these programs, the leaders of American capitalism sought to convince workers that the capitalist system was capable of providing for the needs of society and preventing the mass poverty and early death of millions of elderly people.

Johnson, Scott and their co-conspirators are making the opposite clear: Capitalism means social misery for the workers and the unending enrichment for the capitalist class.

These senators have articulated as a positive proposal what has been a goal of generations of Democratic and Republican politicians, military strategists and leading think tanks. In 2010, Democratic President Barack Obama formed the bipartisan “National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility,” chaired by former Republican Senator Alan Simpson and Democrat Erskine Bowles, a former chief of staff in the Clinton administration.

The commission called for slashing funding for Social Security and Medicare. On the basis of its proposals, the federal government oversaw a squeeze on social spending at the federal, state and local levels, together with significant cuts to Medicare and Social Security.  

Now, amid the social crisis triggered by the pandemic, the eruption of war with Russia and the conflict with China, America’s financial oligarchy is renewing its calls for the dismantling of these bedrock social safety net programs.

In March Glenn Hubbard, the former Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal calling for slashing Social Security and Medicare to fund a massive surge in military spending, declaring, “NATO Needs More Guns and Less Butter.” Hubbard, a Republican, praised the conclusions of Obama’s 2010 deficit reduction committee and called for the full implementation of its demands.

Hubbard echoed the themes of a 2013 paper by Anthony Cordesman of the Washington think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), which stated: “The US does not face any foreign threat as serious as its failure to come to grips with … the rise in the cost of federal entitlement spending.”

But while there is allegedly no money to pay retirees their retirement benefits, there is no limit to what can be handed out to defense contractors to fund the US conflicts with Russia and China.

In the six months since the outbreak of the US-NATO proxy war against Russia, the United States has pledged over $54 billion to the war effort, equivalent to $2 billion per week. The Senate is currently debating a bill that would send an additional $4.5 billion in weapons to Taiwan as part of the US military standoff with China. 

In June, the Senate Armed Services Committee voted to approve a record $858 billion in military spending for Fiscal Year 2023, an increase of $45 billion over the Biden administration’s budget request and nearly $80 billion over the amount appropriated by Congress for the current fiscal year.

This massive surge in military spending is accompanied by a systematic effort to reduce workers’ wages with the aim of further enriching the financial oligarchy.

In June, announcing a surprise 75 basis point increase in the federal funds rate, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said, “You have a lot of surplus demand … in the labor market … you have two job vacancies for every person seeking a job, and that has led to a real imbalance in wage negotiations.”

Powell made clear that the Federal Reserve is deliberately seeking to increase the unemployment rate, with the aim of further impoverishing workers, even to the point of triggering a recession.

He complained about the power of workers who are drowning in rising prices, even as corporations rake in the highest levels of corporate profits in years.

Nowhere in any section of the US political establishment is there a single mention of stopping the rampant price-gouging by corporations.

The overwhelming factor driving the increase in prices, according to an April 2022 study by the Economic Policy Institute, has been corporate price-gouging that feeds directly into profit margins. The study found that rising corporate profits contributed six times more to rising prices than rising labor costs, in a significant reversal of the previous period.

In 2021, profits surged 35 percent compared to the previous year, in the highest increase in corporate profitability since 1950.

By contrast, over the past 12 months, average hourly earnings for US workers have increased by just 5.2 percent, meaning that a typical worker makes 4 percent less per hour than he or she did a year ago.

The clear intention of the financial oligarchy that Johnson speaks for is to ensure that the impoverishment of workers taking place throughout the United States is transferred to retirees.

The American financial oligarchy has declared war on the working class. After ending of all restrictions on the spread of COVID-19 and forcing workers back into workplaces that are hotbeds for the transmission of the pandemic, the ruling class is engaged in an all-out effort not only to reduce workers’ wages but to slash whatever remains of America’s badly tattered social safety net.

This policy is creating a wave of social opposition in the United States and throughout the world, taking the form of strikes and protests. The growing mood of militancy and determined struggle has found expression in the campaign of Will Lehman, a socialist worker from Mack Trucks in Macungie, Pennsylvania, for president of the United Auto Workers.

In a letter to UAW members, Lehman demanded “Massive pay increases to make up for decades of givebacks,” “mandatory Cost-of-Living Adjustments (COLA) to keep pace with soaring inflation” and “the re-establishment of the 8-hour day, not on the basis of poverty-level wages, but with wages that allow us to provide for ourselves and our families.”

Russian-Turkish talks raise concerns in Western capitals amid NATO war on Russia

Ulaş Ateşçi

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Russian President Vladimir Putin held talks in the Black Sea resort town of Sochi Friday. The summit, only 17 days after a trilateral meeting with Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi in Tehran in July, was closely followed by the NATO powers, which are waging war on Russia in Ukraine and imposing sanctions in Moscow.

The meeting lasted more than four hours and focused on the Ukraine war, related difficulties with grain exports from Ukraine and Russia, the deepening economic, energy and tourism ties between Russia and Turkey, and ongoing wars in Syria and Libya.

Before the bilateral meeting, which was not followed by a press conference, Putin emphasized the growing trade between Turkey and Russia, despite US-European economic and financial sanctions targeting Russia. He said, “last year our trade grew 57 percent, and it doubled in the first few months of this year, from January to May.”

Putin also pointed to ongoing Russia gas deliveries to Europe via Turkey: “TurkStream, the construction of which we completed some time ago, is today one of the most important routes for supplying Europe with Russian gas. TurkStream, unlike all other directions of our hydrocarbon supplies to Europe, is operating well, smoothly, and without failure.”

He thanked Erdoğan for the “grain corridor” agreement reached in Istanbul late July. “The problem of Ukrainian grain exports through Black Sea ports has been settled thanks to your personal involvement and the UN Secretariat’s mediation,” he said.

The first grain vessel under the agreement left Odessa last week and, after being checked in Istanbul, sailed to Lebanon. Three vessels loaded with about 60,000 tons of grain bound for Ireland and Britain are reportedly preparing to depart from Ukrainian ports.

Erdoğan said: “We will open a new page in our bilateral relations. This concerns energy, and especially the ‘grain corridor’ via the Black Sea where we have taken steps… From Turkey’s point of view, I want to note that Russia plays a special role on the world stage.”

Aware of NATO allies’ concern on Russia-Turkey ties and the possibility of sanctions being circumvented, Erdoğan said, “Today the world fixed all eyes on Sochi: What will they do in Sochi, what will they address in Sochi, what will they discuss? Perhaps the world is watching our meeting in Sochi closely. And, perhaps the best answers to these questions will be given after our meeting.”

Supplying Kiev with Bayraktar drones, Ankara has condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. However, it did not participate in Western sanctions and has tried to mediate a ceasefire since the war in Ukraine began, as it has also close economic and military ties with Moscow. This is unacceptable for the United States and other NATO imperialist powers, which seek to prolong the war, imposed regime change in Kremlin and subordinate Russia to their dictates.

Erdoğan said, “I reminded Putin that we could have his meeting with Zelensky” in Istanbul. Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu also wrote on Twitter that Ankara hopes the grain agreements will serve as a basis “to ensure a cease-fire and stable peace” in Ukraine.

However, the joint press statement issued after the meeting made no mention of these issues; nor did it mention Ankara’s potential assault on US-backed Kurdish nationalist forces in Syria.

It announced that they agreed “to boost collaboration about issues that have been pending on the agenda of both countries for a long time, concerning sectors such as transportation, commerce, agriculture, industry, finance, tourism and construction.” The joint statement also called for “the full implementation of the Istanbul agreement, including the unimpeded export of Russia’s grain, fertilizer and raw materials stocks needed for its production.”

Though Turkey illegally keeps troops on Syrian soil, Russian and Turkish leaders committed to “the preservation of Syria’s political unity and territorial integrity,” and “to act in coordination and solidarity in the fight against all terrorist organizations.”

Since May, Erdoğan has been threatening a new military operation against the Kurdish nationalist People’s Protection Units (YPG) in Syria, to create a 30-kilometer-deep zone in which Ankara could resettle around 1 million Syrian refugees. However, the joint statement indicates that Russia, one of the main backers of the Damascus regime together with Iran, still opposes this plan. Moreover, Moscow, unlike Ankara, does not consider the YPG a terrorist organization and maintains significant relations with it.

After Erdogan’s invasion threats, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), of which the YPG is the backbone, appealed for support not only to the “international community,” i.e., Washington and the other imperialist powers, but also to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

According to recent reports, the Syrian military is building up forces in YPG-held territory against Turkey. Kommersant reported, “the Syrian army conducted large-scale exercises with the participation of the Russian military. In addition, there are rumors in social networks that for the first time SDF fighters joined the Syrian army. Officially, this report is not confirmed by either the Russian or the Syrian side, but it was picked up by highly respected Arab media, including the Al-Jazeera TV channel and the Al-Sharq Al-Awsat newspaper.”

One of the most significant consequences of the summit was announced by Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak after talks between the two leaders. He said, “Deliveries of gas to the Republic of Turkey were discussed, which is supplied in a fairly huge volume—26 bln cubic meters per year. The Presidents agreed during talks that we will start partial gas deliveries and payment in rubles.”

“Supplies will be partly paid in Russian rubles then at the first stage. This is indeed the new stage, new opportunities, including for development of our monetary and financial relations,” Novak added.

After the meeting, Erdogan said there are efforts to let Russian tourists use Russia’s MIR card for shopping and accommodation in Turkey, a move to avoid Western financial sanctions.

Despite Turkey’s lifting of its veto on Sweden and Finland’s NATO membership after various negotiations, the recent Erdoğan-Putin meeting and potential agreements blunting Western sanctions raised serious concerns in the US and European political and media establishment.

On Friday, the Washington Post wrote, “Concerns are increasing in both the West and Ukraine that Moscow is seeking Erdogan’s assistance to bypass restrictions on its banking, energy and industrial sectors, which are biting deeper into its economy.”

The Post claimed, “A Russian proposal intercepted ahead of the meeting and shared with The Washington Post by Ukrainian intelligence” called for Erdoğan to “permit Russia to buy stakes in Turkish oil refineries, terminals and reservoirs—a move that economists say could help disguise the origin of its exports after the European Union’s oil embargo kicks in fully next year.”

According to the report, “Russia also requested that several state-owned Turkish banks allow correspondent accounts for Russia’s biggest banks—which economists and sanctions experts say would be a flagrant breach of Western sanctions—and that Russian industrial producers be allowed to operate out of free economic zones in Turkey.”

The Post acknowledged, “There was no indication after the talks that Turkey had agreed to such arrangements,” but threatened that this leaves Turkey’s “own banks and companies at risk of secondary sanctions [cutting] off their access to Western markets.”

“Alarm mounts in western capitals over Turkey’s deepening ties with Russia,” the Financial Times (FT) wrote, citing six Western officials “concerned about the pledge made on Friday by the Turkish and Russian leaders to expand their co-operation on trade and energy after a four-hour meeting in Sochi.”

It cited an EU official’s concern that Turkey is “increasingly” a platform for trade with Russia. Another senior Western official “suggested that countries could call on their companies and banks to pull out of Turkey.” The official added that he would “not rule out any negative actions [if] Turkey gets too close to Russia.”

Major NATO powers’ anger at Ankara’s deepening ties with Moscow previously led them to back a failed military coup attempt in 2016 to overthrow Erdoğan.

On Thursday, Turkey’s main financial daily, Dünya, reported: “Cargoes from different countries around the world are unloaded at various ports in Turkey after embargo screening, and the goods are transferred to ships destined for Russia through a reexport process.” It cited Russian Economic Development Minister Maxim Reshetnikov’s claim that the total volume of products brought into the Russia from Turkey “approached USD 4 billion.”