The speculative Bitcoin frenzy

Nick Beams

The spectacular rise of Bitcoin is not an indication that it and other cryptocurrencies represent a new form of finance or an alternative to the present system. Rather, it is the expression of the increasingly diseased character of the present financial order, a growing malignancy centered at its heart in the US.

An electronic signboard in the lounge of Bithumb cryptocurrency exchange in Seoul, South Korea, Thursday, Nov. 21, 2024. [AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon]

Last week, the price of Bitcoin rose to more than $100,000, as other cryptocurrencies also surged, bringing their total value, according to a report in the New York Times, to $2 trillion. The Wall Street Journal estimated the total value of the asset class at $3 trillion—“more than the combined worth of Mastercard, Walmart, and JPMorgan Chase.”

This has prompted claims in the so-called mainstream media, which previously tended to characterize it as some kind of scam, to hail the crypto surge as the wave of the future.

As the Times article went on to comment: “Bitcoin’s rise to $100,000 signals its now-undeniable status in the global economic system. The virtual currency has now become a staple of financial markets, embraced by Wall Street giants and amateur investors alike.”

At the end of 2022, Bitcoin underwent a precipitous fall in the wake of the collapse of the heavily promoted crypto exchange firm FTX and the charging and subsequent conviction of its owner, Sam Bankman-Fried, for fraud. The value of Bitcoin just two years ago was around $16,000.

Since then, it has enjoyed a spectacular rise. It began last January when regulatory authorities in the US allowed major asset managers and finance houses to establish financial products, exchange traded funds (ETFs), linked to the coin.

Crypto started its life as a supposed alternative to the existing financial system, allowing transactions to be conducted outside the purview of banks and regulatory authorities. As such, it only had a limited connection with major banks and financial institutions. All that has changed.

As a recent article in the Financial Times (FT) noted, since the approval by the Securities and Exchange Commission allowing Bitcoin ETFs, “crypto has become far more closely connected to the rest of the financial system. And the numbers are enormous: BlackRock’s recently launched ETF has already drawn an astonishing $48 billion.”

Bitcoin received a further boost with the election of Trump to the US presidency and his declaration that he wants to make the US the “crypto capital of the planet” and even to establish a fund to invest in it as part of the government’s reserve of financial assets.

Trump boosted the use of crypto during the election campaign and has since followed up with a series of appointments of crypto advocates and operators to key posts in his administration.

After the appointment of Howard Lutnick to head the commerce department and Elon Musk as the co-head of the “department of government efficiency” with the acronym DOGE, the same as Musk’s own crypto token, he announced that crypto advocate Paul Atkins would head the chief regulatory authority, the SEC, to replace outgoing head Gary Gensler, regarded as a thorn in the side of crypto.

Trump described Atkins as a leader for “common sense regulations”—code words for the scrapping of what remains of previous controls. Atkins has been critical of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB), which regulates accounting firms and is overseen by the SEC.

A member of the PCAOB’s advisory group, Lynn Turner, told the FT the appointment was possibly the worst outcome for the organization “short of an atomic bomb hitting their building.”

In announcing the appointment, Trump made crypto the central focus. In a post on his social media site, he said Atkins recognized that “digital assets & other innovations are crucial to Making America Greater than Ever Before.”

This was followed up by the announcement that Gail Slater, an aide to Vice President-elect JD Vance, an avid crypto supporter, would head the Department of Justice’s antitrust division, a move hailed by corporate and financial interests.

Trump’s announcements and appointments led to a rapid rise in Bitcoin, which is up by more than 50 percent since the November 5 election victory.

What is most significant is that it is being fueled by what the FT called a “flood of institutional money. Exchange traded funds investing in the cryptocurrency run by mainstream asset managers including BlackRock and Fidelity have poured in billions since they received regulatory approval in January.”

Other asset managers, including pension funds, are reported to be investing in cryptocurrency.

In grasping the significance of this phenomenon, it is vital not to become dazzled by the rise of Bitcoin and the fabulous fortunes that have been acquired, in some cases virtually overnight, and to focus on the fundamental issues.

No matter how steep its rise, and it may have further to go, the basic facts remain. Bitcoin is a financial asset that has no intrinsic value and does not generate an income stream. Other financial assets, such as holdings of commercial property and corporate debt, do, and, in the final analysis, rest on a real asset that generates a profit.

Profit from Bitcoin trading is generated solely by its price rise and nothing else. And its rise in price continues as long as money keeps flowing into the crypto market.

Many things have changed since the 1920s when Charles Ponzi gave his name to this type of operation. But the crypto market is, by any definition, a Ponzi scheme and, like all such schemes, considerable amounts of money can be acquired while they continue to operate.

The significance of the latest surge is that it is not being driven by rogue operators, outliers, and individual investors. Today it could be rightly characterized as a Ponzi scheme backed by the most powerful financial institutions in the world and by the capitalist state. Nothing like this has been seen in economic history.

Its promoters sometimes like to claim that it does have a real foundation in so-called blockchain technology. But the potential gains from this technology have nothing to do with the rise of the cryptocurrencies on which they are supposedly based.

In fact, a kind of inversion has taken place.

When Bitcoin was first proposed by its pseudonymous founder Satoshi Nakamoto in a paper published in 2008, it was advanced as a means of making payments without having to rely on the traditional banking system and free of control by the state.

Today, the price of Bitcoin is being sent further into the stratosphere by Trump’s proposal, among other things, to create a national reserve of Bitcoin holdings. That is, the state, which it was supposed to bypass, is to become one of its foundations. Its supposed role as an alternative currency has not materialized, except, by and large, for criminal activities.

As the Wall Street Journal pointed out in a recent article: “Bitcoin is practically never used today as a way to make payments—the original use envisioned by Nakamoto. Instead, proponents argue it is a form of ‘digital gold,’ a way to store monetary value and hedge against inflation.”

But there is a fundamental difference between so-called “digital gold” and real gold, and all that glitters is not gold. There are fluctuations in the price of gold as the result of speculation. But gold, as a commodity produced by human labor, does embody value. The rise in Bitcoin’s price is entirely the result of more money—the very money it was supposed to bypass—flowing into the crypto market.

Not only does Bitcoin embody no intrinsic value, but the process of “mining” new coins via complex computer-based calculations is extremely destructive and wasteful. It has been estimated that the creation of new Bitcoin by tens of thousands of computers uses as much as 0.9 percent of the global demand for electricity, roughly equivalent to the annual energy consumption of Australia.

The latest rise in the price of Bitcoin, driven by the intervention of Wall Street finance houses, has major implications for the stability of the entire financial system. When FTX went down two years ago, it had little effect on the broader financial market. Conditions have changed markedly since then.

As Martin Walker, a research fellow at Warwick Business School, commented to the FT: “One thing that history teaches us about financial crises is that risk always builds up and then explodes in areas the regulators never seem to expect. Fault lines in the financial system are not always obvious… Crypto finance is so large now there are sure to be macro risks… that are both dangerous and little understood.”

UK Labour chancellor pledges austerity offensive to fund military spending increase

Paul Bond & Robert Stevens

UK Chancellor Rachel Reeves has confirmed that the Labour government’s commitment to raised military spending will be funded by cuts elsewhere.

In an interview Saturday with the right-wing Daily Mail’s political editor Jason Groves, Reeves directly connected the astronomical costs of war abroad with austerity at home. Warning of spending cuts, her comments were to reassure the ruling class that Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour government can be relied on to hike up military spending by billions of pounds.

UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer (right) appoints Rachel Reeves as his Chancellor from the Cabinet Office in 10 Downing Street, July 5, 2024 [Photo by Simon Dawson/No 10 Downing Street / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]

Labour’s electoral pledges included ramping up military spending to 2.5 percent of GDP from its current level of just over 2.2 percent. But, aware of the broad unease in the working class over its warmongering offensive in Ukraine, and hostility to its support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Labour was cautious about setting a date to hit the 2.5 percent target.

On taking office, it said military spending decisions would follow a Strategic Defence Review next year, led by former Labour MP George Robertson, who was Tony Blair’s Secretary of State for Defence and then became NATO Secretary General.

In an interview which the Mail splashed across its front page and two inside pages, Reeves said, “the trajectory for defence spending” will be set out “alongside” the review’s report. Reeves pointed to her initial steps in raising defence spending by £2.9 billion in the October budget; and the £2.3 billion she allotted to Ukraine from frozen Russian assets.

The Daily Mail's front page headline reading "Reeves We can’t boost UK defence without making cuts" [Photo: Screenshot: Daily Mail]

Reeves would still not confirm whether the 2.5 percent target will be achieved by 2030—which could cost an extra £20 billion a year. But the Mail was partially assuaged by her message—given a block capitals front-page headline: “Reeves: We can’t boost UK defence without making cuts”.

The chancellor boasted that the defence review will take place alongside a “zero-based” audit of government spending “line by line.” Promoted as an efficiency drive to cut waste, it is being applied to departments that have already seen budgets slashed over decades of austerity. The audit review will see wider axing of projects as the timetable for increased military expenditure is established.

That the working class confronts in parliament a unified party of austerity and war was confirmed by Reeves’s rhetoric borrowed from Tory predecessors such as former prime minister Theresa May: “If you spend money on one thing, you can’t spend it elsewhere. There’s not a magic money tree.”

“There is not some magic pot for any area of government spending,” she went on, “it has to come out of this [spending] envelope.’’

Reeves emphasised that there was no threat of cutting defence expenditure in favour of other spending on health, education, housing, etc., nor any pledge of broader social provision. These departments must learn to “live within their means.” The 2 percent efficiency target imposed on the National Health Service, seamlessly carried over from the Tories—is to be extended to all departments.

Labour is looking to the public sector unions to police workers’ opposition, with any future pay deals conditional on productivity deals. Reeves warned that the spending review “is going to be tough.” The government is “not going to be coming back with more borrowing or more taxes… We’re going to have to be ruthlessly prioritising and targeted.”

The spending review would also involve intervention from the private sector, with Reeves promising, “We will also use outside people to challenge [every spending item] and look at that.”

A Parliamentary debate held last month titled, “Defence: 2.5% GDP Spending Commitment,” saw the major parties accusing each other of not being militaristic enough. In the words of Defence Secretary John Healey, “Everyone agrees that an increase in defence spending is needed.”

Labour MP Graeme Downie spoke of the “need to increase defence spending in response to emerging threats around the world,” asking whether the 2.5 percent “should be kept under review.”

Downie has since written on the LabourList blog that “we should make clear that this number should not be considered a ceiling.” He echoed calls by the Times, the main forum where military figures demand spending of 3 percent and more.

In parliament, Healey agreed with Downie that “the starting point for any defence planning must be the threats that we face.” He recently announced the establishment of a UK Defence Industrial Council to “improve decision making and productivity by sharing information between market participants and government” and “shaping public-private investment strategies.”

This is the lucrative business of militarism, as Downie appreciatively cooed in LabourList, calling the council “the latest sign that this UK Labour government is mobilising British industry for our security and to support Ukraine in a way which supports our economy, building on work such as the loan fund to support Ukraine in buying the weapons it needs.”

Reeves’s interview with the Mail was part of the paper’s “Don’t Leave Britain Defenceless” campaign calling for “significant increases in Armed Forces investment, to meet the growing threat.” It is shaped by the demands of the ruling elite that Labour hand the Treasury’s keys to the armed forces to pursue their war aims against Russia and—in alliance with the incoming Trump administration in the US—a conflict with China.

In July, army head General Sir Roland Walker called for the doubling of Britain’s “fighting power” in three years and its tripling by the end of the decade to confront “an increasingly aligned axis of upheaval.” Walker said the UK and its NATO allies had to be able “to deter or fight a war in three years.”

Although the Tories included a manifesto target for 2.5 of GDP for military spending, that is now viewed as old hat. Following the general election, Tory leadership candidates James Cleverly and Tom Tugendhat both called for military spending of a minimum 3 percent. This would require a war on the working class at home.

According to a Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) think tank estimate made in 2022, going to 3 percent of GDP would cost an extra £157 billion over the course of eight years. Put into context, £157 billion is approaching the entire cost of the NHS for a year, serving a population of 66 million people, including wages for 1.5 million full-time staff. It is more than total education spending in Britain, which was £116 billion in 2023-24. It dwarfs the housing benefit budget of about £30 billion a year.

Even this onslaught on the working class pales in comparison to what is required to wage a full-scale war against a major power like Russia. In a Q&A at the Chief of the Air Staff (CAS) Lecture at the Freeman Air and Space Institute this month, head of the Royal Air Force Chief Air Marshal Sir Richard Knighton argued, “We are witnessing a return to great power competition.” He declared, “In 1936, Britain was spending 2.9 percent of its GDP on defence. By 1945, that figure was 52 percent. War is incredibly costly”.

Speaking at a conference on reserves at RUSI in London, Labour MP Alistair Carns, the government’s veterans minister, warned, “In a war of scale—not a limited intervention, but one similar to Ukraine—our army for example on the current casualty rates would be expended—as part of a broader multinational coalition—in six months to a year.”

Carns, a former Royal Marines Colonel, pointed to the Russian casualty rate in Ukraine as an argument for the broader militarisation of society. The Russian experience, he said, “doesn’t mean we need a bigger army, but it does mean you need to generate depth and mass rapidly in the event of a crisis.” He cited the argument of military commanders that war is started by professional armies but ended by civilians taking up arms as volunteers and reservists. He described the army’s reserves as “absolutely central… Without them we cannot generate mass, we cannot meet the plethora of defence tasks.”

Carns insisted, “There is a requirement across government to remind people that freedom is not free.”

More than 16 million people in poverty in UK, including one in three children

Simon Whelan

The Social Metrics Commission (SMC) annual report reveal a staggering increase in social inequality in the UK.

In 2022/23, more than 16 million people, almost a quarter of the population (24 percent) were living in poverty. Over one in three children, 5.2 million (36 percent) are included in the figures.

Homeless people opposite London Victoria station, November 2024

The SMC’s Measuring Poverty 2024 found that the COVID-19 pandemic and cost of living crisis plunged 2.1 million additional people into poverty since 2019/20, raising poverty rates by two percentage points. An extra 260,000 children are in poverty, an almost five percentage point increase since 2019/20 and the highest of any social group.

The SMC gives a more accurate understanding of poverty by providing an analysis of “poverty depth” and the “persistence of poverty”, its magnitude and longevity. It analyses “below average resources”, includes costs such as childcare, the extra costs of being disabled, and factors in rent and mortgage payments.

The SMC finds:

• “Deep poverty” has increased in Britain over the last two decades. 4.1 million people, 6 percent of the population, live in the deepest form of poverty. This is defined as being more than 50 percent below the poverty line—compared to 2.7 million people (5 percent of the population), in 2000/01.
• Persistence of poverty—defined as an individual being in poverty in the year in question, in addition to two out of three years prior to that—has risen to almost six in ten. 57 percent of those in poverty were living in persistent poverty in 2022/23, a rise of four percentage points since 2014/15.
• More than half of the people (8.7 million; 54 percent) in poverty live in a family that includes a disabled person. Over three in 10 (31 percent) of those in poverty are disabled: a total of 4.9 million people.
• Poverty rates in workless families have risen rapidly, by seven percentage points, to 75 percent.
• Those in poverty are more likely to have poor self-reported mental health. More than one in three (33 percent) live in a family that includes someone with poor self-reported mental health.
• The poor are more likely to be living on their own, as 45 percent of those in poverty live in a household with only one adult.
• Those in poverty experience poorer physical health outcomes as over a quarter; 27 percent, are in a family that includes at least one adult self-reporting poor physical health.
• Nearly four in 10 (38 percent) people living in poverty in London are in deep poverty—at least 50 percent below the poverty line. The South East of England, despite a lower overall poverty rate than London, sees three in 10 (31 percent) of those in poverty in deep poverty.
• Persistent poverty affects almost four in 10 people (38 percent) living in London.
• Those in the deepest levels of poverty are the most likely to be in persistent poverty. 57 percent in deep poverty are also in persistent poverty.
• Around 17 percent of the population is less than 50 percent below the poverty line, but either in persistent poverty (5.7 million), or non-persistent poverty, (5.8 million).

The SMC’s data is more accurate and detailed than the UK government’s current definition of poverty, which measures only average income and housing costs. With such a limited calculation, a still terrible 18 percent of the population was defined as living in absolute poverty in the year to March 2023, including 3.6 million children. But according to the SMC figures 9.3 million people (14 percent), exist more than 25 percent below the poverty line. A further 4.1 million (6 percent of the UK population) are 50 percent beneath the poverty line

Another 4 percent (2.5 million people), live less than 10 percent above the poverty line. Those only just above the poverty line are some of the most likely families to fall into poverty.

The SMC explain their poverty measurement is a “hybrid between the traditional absolute and relative approaches to measuring poverty.” Absolute poverty is based on subsistence, i.e., the minimum needed to sustain life. Those suffering absolute poverty literally do not have enough money to live on. Relative poverty is a social measurement evaluating prevalent living standards. In his 1847 work, Wage Labour and Capital, Karl Marx wrote:

 “Our desires and pleasures spring from society; we measure them, therefore, by society… they are of a relative nature”.

The SMC sliding scale of “poverty depth” brings more nuance and continuity between levels of poverty severity than can be provided by static binary concepts, absolute and relative—as crucial as they are.

The SMC is led by commissioners from several thinktanks across the political spectrum including the Sutton Trust, Institute for Fiscal Studies, Centre for Social Policy Studies, Trussell Trust, with input from academics. Its chair is Baroness Philippa Stroud, who stood but failed to win a seat for the Conservatives in 2010 in a marginal seat taken by the Liberal Democrats. The Tories ruled in coalition with the Lib Dems for five years, imposing brutal austerity. Stroud co-founded the Centre for Social Justice with former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith and was an adviser to the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions helping create and implement the punitive Universal Credit welfare system.

While the SMC claims to be independent in their prescriptions to combat poverty, its main call is that the unemployed must accept work regardless of the paucity of wages. “Work provides an effective protection from poverty, with poverty rates for those in workless families having risen rapidly since the pandemic,” it states. But contrary to successive government’s “work is the only route out of poverty” mantra, echoed by the SMC, nearly two thirds (62 percent) of people in poverty today live in a family where someone works at least part time.

The expected acceptance of the SMC definition of poverty by the Labour government will do nothing to halt its austerity agenda defined by Chancellor Rachel Reeves as she outlined October’s budget as, “If we cannot afford it, we cannot do it”.

Labour has intensified poverty by refusing to scrap the two-child welfare benefit cap, introduced by the Tories, meaning 5.2 million children (55 percent) live in families with three or more children but who receive zero benefits beyond the first two. The Tories introduced the cap to make billions in welfare cuts, with the Malthusian justification of blaming the poor for having too many children.

Further tens of billions of pounds are to be raided from public spending with Labour’s plan to increase military spending to 2.5 percent of GDP within months—on top of their commitment to renew Britain’s nuclear weapons arsenal costing many billions more.

Thousands protest in Berlin against massive public service cuts

Gregor Link & Gustav Kemper

On December 5, thousands of teachers, public employees, artists and cultural workers, carers and educators protested in Berlin against the Berlin Senate’s plans to cut billions of euros from the city’s budgets for education, culture, health and other areas.

In the social and education sector, the Senate cuts threaten funding for youth social work, integration projects, programmes for the homeless, addiction counselling and digitalisation processes in schools.

#Unkürzbar demonstration in front of the Berlin House of Representatives, 5.12.2024

Trade unions, social organisations and schools called for a rally in front of the Senate under the slogan #Unkürzbar (#Uncuttable), attended by around 5,000 protesters, including several primary school classes plus parents and teachers.

The Senate has threatened to implement devastating cuts and job cuts to Berlin’s social fabric, including its main charitable organisations (AWO, Caritas and Diakonie), whereupon the chairpersons of these organisations claimed they were “systemically relevant” to the “functioning of the economy”—as the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic had shown. The supposedly “mitigated” result nevertheless amounts to “huge social cuts to take place in installments,” according to Oliver Bürgel, director of the AWO.

A total of €370 million [$US 390.6 million] is to be cut from the education budget, as well as €14 million from the expansion of day care centres. In the cultural sector, 12 percent of the total budget will be cut. Around €660 million are also to be cut from the budget for mobility, transport and the environment, which accounts for almost 20 percent of the total budget. Subsidies to the student union will also fall by €7.5 million.

Teachers protest against cuts in Berlin, 05.12.2024

Campaigners from the Socialist Equality Party (SGP) discussed a socialist perspective against the policy of social cuts, which has been supported and promoted by all parties in the Bundestag and the Berlin Senate for decades, with participants in the demonstration. The SGP’s call for the Bundestag elections on February 23 states:

This all-party coalition in favour of war and cuts has deep objective causes. In the face of the capitalist crisis, the ruling class is focussing on war abroad and class war at home in order to defend its wealth and overwhelm its competitors. This is why all the ghosts of the past are returning. Germany is at war with the nuclear power Russia, democratic rights are under attack and the fascists of the Alternative for Germany AfD are being courted by all parties.

“Schools must not be victims of austerity measures” Teachers protest against cuts in Berlin, 05.12.2024

With regard to the Senate’s policy, SGP members explained that the billions saved are to be channeled into war policy and rearmament and that the struggle against the cuts must therefore be directly linked to the struggle against war. Instead of making hundreds of billions of euros available for arming German troops and continuing the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, these sums must be used for schools, day care centres, clinics and social services.

Consequently, entire groups of demonstrators signed in favour of allowing the SGP to stand in the Bundestag elections.

Teachers protest against cuts in Berlin, 05.12.2024

Syrian government collapses after Bashar Al-Assad flees to Russia

Jordan Shilton

Islamist militia supported by the United States and Turkey seized Damascus, the capital of Syria on Sunday, after Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad fled to Russia.

US-backed opposition fighters celebrate as they burn down a military court in Damascus, Syria, Sunday, December 8, 2024. [AP Photo/Hussein Malla]

After nearly 14 years of war, the so-called “rebels,” dominated by the al-Qaeda-affiliated Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) militia, won a lightning victory. Reports Saturday evening were that HTS forces had entered into the central Syrian cities of Hama and Homs. However, news broke barely a few hours later that the Syrian capital, Damascus, had fallen, and that Assad had taken a plane to flee the country. Last night, Russia’s Interfax news agency reported that Assad was in Moscow.

Assad’s collapse could not have occurred without the complicity of factions of the Syrian, Iranian and Russian regimes. On Sunday morning, HTS leaders announced they were in discussion with Syrian Prime Minister Mohamed al-Jalali. On Telegram, they instructed their troops that “public institutions [should] stay under the supervision of the former prime minister until they are formally handed over.” Jalali, for his part, declared he is “ready for cooperation” with the new authorities.

Yesterday, the Russian government announced that, after talks with the “rebel” factions, Assad had ordered his troops not to fight the HTS-led offensive. The Russian Foreign Ministry stated: “As a result of negotiations between Bashar al-Assad and a number of participants in the armed conflict in the Syrian Arab Republic, he decided to leave the presidential post and left the country, giving instructions to transfer power peacefully.” It added that “the Russian Federation is in contact with all groups of the Syrian opposition.”

The Iranian government similarly called to “end military conflicts as soon as possible, prevent terrorist acts, and initiate national dialogue with the participation of all segments of Syrian society.”

The imperialist powers responded in a celebratory mood to news of Assad’s downfall. French President Emmanuel Macron enthused, “The barbaric state has fallen,” while German Foreign Minister Analena Baerbock declared it was a “great relief” for the Syrian people. Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s foreign affairs representative, gloated that the fall of Assad was “a positive and long-awaited development,” adding, “It also shows the weakness of Assad’s backers, Russia and Iran.”

HTS and its leader, Abu Mohammad al-Golani, a former al-Qaeda asset who had ties to Islamic State, have become the darlings of Western media outlets virtually overnight. Even though HTS was designated a foreign terrorist organisation by Washington and Golani was the subject of a $10 million bounty in 2018, he has received overwhelmingly favourable coverage in the US and European media. Perhaps giving away more than it intended, CNN observed in an article based on an “exclusive interview” with Golani on December 5 that he “exuded confidence” and sought to “project modernity” during a meeting “which took place in broad daylight and with little security.”

The HTS-led forces’ pro-imperialist character was underscored soon after they seized Damascus. Fighters ransacked the Iranian embassy, destroying pictures of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commander Qasem Soleimani, assassinated at Baghdad’s international airport by the Trump administration in January 2020, and Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah, assassinated in the Lebanese capital, Beirut, by the genocidal Zionist regime in September 2024. International media outlets were all conveniently on hand to capture these events.

By acquiescing to a handover of Syria to an al-Qaeda-linked militia, Assad and his allies in Moscow and Tehran are falling in line with longstanding foreign policy objectives of Washington and its NATO allies. Particularly since Israel began its US-backed genocide of the Palestinians in October 2023, the Zionist regime has waged a low-level war on Syria with US-supplied bombs and missiles. Al Jazeera reported that Israel Defence Forces (IDF) warplanes have struck Syrian military sites three times a week on average over the past 14 months.

These attacks were directed not only at Syrian forces but also at weakening Iran’s presence in the country. The most high-profile of these was the April 2024 bombing of Iran’s Damascus consulate, killing a high-level IRGC commander and other officials. Israel’s attacks continued over the weekend, striking the Mazzeh district of Damascus and southern areas of Syria following Assad’s downfall on Sunday. IDF soldiers have also advanced into Syrian territory on the Golan Heights, where a “closed military zone” has been declared.

Offensive operations by the “rebels” were launched less than a day after US President Joe Biden unilaterally announced a ceasefire between its regional attack dog, Israel, and Lebanon’s Hezbollah from the White House. The announcement brought to an end a two-month savage bombardment of Lebanon by the IDF that decimated one of the Assad regime’s most important allies and suppliers of military manpower.

During the ongoing genocide against the Palestinians and the war in Lebanon, Israel also struck—with US approval—targets in Iran, Assad’s key regional backer. These attacks included the July assassination of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh, present in the Iranian capital as an official guest of the regime, and the 26 October strikes on Iranian military facilities. All of this unfolded amid an illegal, years-long occupation by 900 US troops of northeast Syria, denying the Assad regime any revenue from the region’s substantial oil reserves.

The HTS offensive is closely linked to the war in Ukraine, where the imperialists are recklessly escalating towards a direct conflict with Russia. Just weeks before fighting erupted in Syria, the Biden administration approved Ukraine’s firing of long-range missiles into Russia, bringing NATO and Moscow ever closer to all-out war. This reckless step was taken to avert Ukraine’s collapse on the battlefield, where Russia is making substantial advances.

Indeed, it appears this explosive international situation, with Europe teetering on the verge of a vast military escalation, played a critical role in the decision of Moscow and Tehran to acquiesce, for now at least, to the HTS-led takeover of Syria. The offensive and the sudden collapse of Assad’s regime come amid signs that the incoming Trump administration may believe opening negotiations is the best way to secure its interests. Trump himself issued a long post on Syria and the Ukraine war on his Truth Social network.

Trump wrote:

Assad is gone. He has fled his country. His protector, Russia, led by Vladimir Putin, was not interested in protecting him any longer. There was no reason for Russia to be there in the first place. They lose all interest in Syria because of Ukraine, where close to 600,000 Russian soldiers are wounded or dead, in a war that should never have started... Too many lives are being so needlessly wasted… I know Vladimir well. This is his time to act. China can help. The World is waiting!

The decision to place an al-Qaeda-linked organization at the head of the Syrian government is, however, monumentally reckless, and the events in Syria are by no means fully under US imperialism’s control.

On the contrary, the contradictory and mutually antagonistic interests of multiple imperialist and major powers, as well as regional players, in and around the country give an especially explosive character to the sudden revival of the 13-year-old Syrian civil war. Provoked in 2011 by Washington’s arming and training of the predecessors of HTS, with the aim of ousting Assad, the conflict has claimed at least 500,000 lives and forced millions to flee the country.

The volatility of the Syrian events is chiefly due to the fact that American imperialism and its allies are engaged in a region-wide war to secure Washington’s hegemony. The US is determined to exert control over the Middle East’s rich energy reserves and geostrategic location on key trade routes as a gateway to the Eurasian landmass. It is one front in a rapidly escalating third world war involving the US and its European imperialist allies against Russia in Eastern Europe and China in the Asia-Pacific. As David North wrote in his 2016 preface to A Quarter Century of War: The US Drive for Global Hegemony:

The last quarter century of US-instigated wars must be studied as a chain of interconnected events. The strategic logic of the US drive for global hegemony extends beyond the neocolonial operations in the Middle East and Africa. The ongoing regional wars are component elements of the rapidly escalating confrontation of the United States with Russia and China.

All of these conflicts find a reflection in Syria, which is forcing major and regional powers to pursue their own interests ever more aggressively and could trigger a region-wide bloodbath endangering millions of lives. Washington, which inflamed the Syrian civil war in 2011 by funding and supplying Islamist terrorist groups, including the al-Qaeda-linked Al-Nusra Front, one of the forerunners of HTS, never accepted the outcome of Russia’s 2015 intervention, which stabilised the Assad regime.

The Putin regime profited with the establishment of the Khmeimim air base near the city of Latakia, which served both as a base for Russian air operations in Syria and a transit point for flights to Africa. Russia’s naval military base at Tartus, the only such base Moscow has in the Mediterranean, is a holdover from the Soviet era, having been established in 1971. Together with Iran, which depended on Damascus for land access to Lebanon to supply its ally Hezbollah, Russia was the Assad regime’s main backer.

In the north, Turkey has patronised Islamist militias under the Syrian National Army banner. Although these militias are not directly part of the forces led by HTS, the latter could only operate and received their military supplies through Turkey, a NATO member state. As a result, it is widely acknowledged that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had foreknowledge of the HTS-led offensive.

Erdogan declared Saturday that “a new political and diplomatic reality” existed in Syria. Ankara’s principal concern is to prevent the emergence of a unified Kurdish territory on its southern border, which it has sought to do by funding SNA operations and launching invasions of its own to target the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG). For their part, the Kurds receive backing from the US. Reuters reported last Tuesday that US-backed Kurdish forces launched an offensive in eastern Syria against Assad’s troops, resulting later in the week in the capture of Deir Ezzor.

While the timing of the Islamists’ advance and its rapid progress speak to the deep involvement of the imperialist powers and Turkey, the ignominious collapse of Assad’s forces demonstrates the utter bankruptcy of the region’s bourgeois nationalist regimes. The Assad family, first under the regime of Hafez al-Assad (1971-2000) and then his son Bashar (2000-24), ruled Syria as a one-party dictatorship for 53 years. But by the end it effectively worked to dissolve itself and hand over power to the forces it had fought against for 14 years.

More than 2,000 people hospitalised as UK faces "quad-demic" including COVID

Robert Stevens

The winter season has opened with Britain’s population hit by four respiratory illnesses—dubbed the “quad-demic”—including the COVID-19 virus.

The illnesses, which spread at different times during winter, also include the flu, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and norovirus.

Clinical staff care for a patient with coronavirus in the intensive care unit at the Royal Papworth Hospital in Cambridge, England, May 5, 2020 [AP Photo/Neil Hall Pool via AP]

On December 5, National Health Service England issued a statement headlined, “Hospitals managing record flu levels going into Winter”, warning, “NHS fears of a potential ‘quad-demic’ are rising with a 350% increase in flu cases and an 86% rise in norovirus cases in hospital compared to same week last year—alongside concerns about rising COVID-19 and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV)c levels in hospitals.”

The agency’s first report of the winter warned, “New weekly figures published today for the first time this year show the NHS is going into winter under more pressure than ever before with an average of 1,099 people in hospital with flu every day last week compared to 243 in the same week last year—the highest number of cases heading into winter for at least three years.” Of the 1,099 hospitalised, 39 were in critical care, compared to nine last year.

NHS England statement: "Hospitals managing record flu levels going into Winter" [Photo: screenshot from NHS England web site]

The NHS England alert included a statement from national medical director Professor Sir Stephen Powis who said, “The NHS is busier than it has ever been before heading into winter, with flu and norovirus numbers in hospital rising sharply—and we are still only at the start of December, so we expect pressure to increase and there is a long winter ahead of us.”

Calling for everyone who was eligible to be vaccinated he explained, “For a while there have been warnings of a ‘tripledemic’ of COVID-19, flu and RSV this winter, but with rising cases of norovirus this could fast become a ‘quad-demic’.”

The statements by NHS England and Powis point to the terrible situation facing a health service systematically underfunded for decades, with staff run off their feet and unable to cope with demand for treatment. As noted in the NHS report, “a record number of patients were in hospital for this time of year, with an average of 96,587 hospital beds occupied each day.”

The fact that COVID continues to spread, 20 months after the World Health Organisation said in May 2023 that it was no longer a public health emergency, is an indictment of the capitalist governments internationally who had by that point already torn up every major mitigation in place against the disease.

The situation report found there were an average of 1,390 patients with COVID in hospital beds each day last week. Several hundred people are still dying of the disease every week. As seen on the banner at the National Covid Memorial Wall in London—the COVID death toll in Britain, to November 22—stands at almost 246,000.

Many more will die due to the lack of free vaccines. The only cohorts of the population now offered free vaccines are people aged 65 years and over, those in older adult care homes, and those aged six months and over in clinical risk groups. Frontline health and social care professionals, including clinical and non-clinical staff who have direct contact with patients, are also offered the flu and COVID vaccines. Otherwise people must find a private vaccine provider with costs varying from about £45 to £99.

Many thousands die each winter from flu, but the number dying from COVID has now outstripped those fatalities. The Times noted, “Over the past two winters, flu has killed 18,000 people, while Covid has killed 19,500.”

Despite COVID being a killer, eligibility for a vaccine is set to be restricted even further from next autumn. The website of medical magazine Pulse Today reported November 14 that although the final decision would be taken by ministers, the “Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) said both the spring and autumn COVID vaccine campaigns in 2025 should be restricted to the over-75s, residents of a care home for older adults and those six months and over who are immunosuppressed.”

Pulse Today added, “The committee said over the past four years, population immunity to SARS-CoV-2 had been increasing ‘due to a combination of naturally acquired immunity following recovery from infection and vaccine-derived immunity’.

“As COVID becomes an endemic disease, the JCVI has moved from a pandemic response to a standard assessment of cost effectiveness, it said.”

The JCVI “Statement on COVID-19 vaccination in 2025 and spring 2026”, published November 14, is a full-throated defence of the reactionary nostrum of “herd immunity”, declaring, “Over the last 4 years, population immunity to SARS-CoV-2 has been increasing due to a combination of naturally acquired immunity following recovery from infection and vaccine-derived immunity (this combination is termed ‘hybrid immunity’).”

In the face of thousands dying from the disease each year—and the estimated 1 million suffering from Long COVID—the update states breezily, “COVID-19 is now a relatively mild disease for most people, though it can still be unpleasant, with rates of hospitalisation and death from COVID-19 having reduced significantly since SARS-CoV-2 first emerged.”

The NHS winter situation report also found that there were a daily average of 756 patients in hospital with norovirus—the winter vomiting bug—nearly twice as many as this time last year.

Children were particularly affected by circulating diseases, with the NHS report finding that 142 children were in hospital each day with Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA)’s COVID-19, influenza (flu), RSV and norovirus surveillance bulletin, published weekly, found in week 48 that there were increases of RSV “seen in most age groups, the highest activity was in under 5s.”

Cases of flu were “rising rapidly” among various age groups but were the highest among children aged five to 14. Almost 17 percent of tests for flu in that age group were positive in the first week of December—up from 11.5 percent last week.

The substantial and likely further circulation of dangerous respiratory disease is overwhelming the NHS, under conditions in which the incoming Labour government has demanded it end its “begging bowl culture”.

Health Secretary Wes Streeting responded to the NHS winter report showing the need for vastly more resources to be allocated to the health service with an order to NHS workers essentially to get on with it. He stated, “We’re backing them with an extra £26 billion secured in the recent Budget and we’ve already resolved the industrial action to ensure A&Es will be strike-free for the first time in three years.”

Streeting added, “For too long, an annual winter crisis has become the norm. We will deliver long term reforms through our 10 Year Health Plan that will create a health service that will be there for all of us all year round.”

What he didn’t say was that the paltry extra funding—which does nothing to address the hundreds of billions of pounds the NHS has been deprived of going back decades—and any further funding is dependent on pro-market reforms being implemented, including the private sector making further inroads into healthcare provision, and staff increasing productivity by an initial 2 percent.

On Monday, Streeting was forced to hold “crisis talks” with NHS leaders in England, including those in charge of the largest hospital trusts. The Guardian reported the meeting was called amid “mounting alarm that more than 2,000 of the service’s 100,000 beds are already filled with people with Covid (1,390) or norovirus (756), another 142 occupied by children with RSV and that ambulance services are struggling to cope with the number of 999 calls they are receiving.”

Australia’s housing crisis sees more retirees burdened with mortgage debt

Vicki Mylonas

A growing number of workers are reaching retirement age with huge mortgage debts still outstanding. Many more are going their whole working lives without being able to afford a home, leaving them struggling to pay rising rent prices out of superannuation or the poverty-level age pension.

According to Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) data, the proportion of Australians aged 55 to 64 who own their homes outright fell by almost half between 2000 and 2020, from 63.9 percent to 36.1 percent.

This trend is only likely to worsen, with even sharper declines revealed in younger cohorts. The home ownership rate among those aged 45 to 54 fell from 38.8 percent in 2000 to 15.2 percent in 2020. Just 5.4 percent of those aged between 35 and 44 owned their homes in full, down from 17.1 percent in 2000.

Suburban housing in Hobart, the Tasmanian capital, Australia. [Photo by Graeme Bartlett / CC BY-SA 3.0]

Two decades ago, average first home buyers were in their 20s, now they are in their mid-30s and taking out longer mortgages, up from 20 to 30 years. In 1971, around two-thirds of 30–34 year olds either had a mortgage or owned their home outright; by 2021, this had fallen to just 50 percent.

This is primarily a product of the soaring housing market. Between 1992 and 2022, according to data from CoreLogic, the capital city median house value rose by 453.1 percent to $928,812. The median value of apartments went up by 306.7 percent to $636,352 over the same period. In Sydney, the median house is now worth $1.48 million, while units cost an average of $846,000.

Exacerbating the financial pain for workers, 13 interest rate hikes have been imposed since May 2022 by the Reserve Bank of Australia on behalf of the federal Labor government. This has resulted in households with a average mortgage of around $750,000 having to pay $1,815 more in repayments every month.

This situation is forcing some older workers to delay retirement. Linda Thoresen, a 66-year-old civil servant who still owes $170,000 on her mortgage, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC): “There will come a time when I go, ‘no, I really have had enough of work.’ But unless I have a windfall, I can’t see a solution other than having to sell and find somewhere else to live.”

Michael Fotheringham, managing director of the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI) stated that the number of older Australians forced to sell their homes and enter the very tight rental market has increased in the last decade.

For some, the only source of income is the age pension. The maximum basic rate for a single pensioner is $1,144.40 per fortnight, and $862.60 each for couples.

National Seniors Australia, a not-for-profit organisation, says that 23.7 percent of pensioners live in poverty and need additional support just to meet everyday living costs. Almost 40 percent of older renters have been severely impacted by cost-of-living pressures, intensified under the Albanese Labor government.

Despite more than three decades of compulsory superannuation, three-quarters of retirees with a mortgage owe more than they have in super, according to a survey by Digital Finance Analytics. On average, they had an outstanding loan balance of around $190,000, while some still owed more than half a million dollars.

In 2022, the median superannuation balance for people aged between 60 to 64 was $205,000 for men, and $154,000 for women, according to the Association of Super Funds Australia (ASFA).

The federal Labor government’s 2023 “Intergenerational Report” states that “superannuation will become the primary source of retirement income for many future retirees.” However, this is predicated on retirees owning their homes outright.

Compulsory superannuation was introduced by the Keating Labor government in 1992 with the full support of the unions, the bureaucratic leaders of which serve as directors of the super funds, alongside corporate executives. The arrangement initially involved an obligatory “employer contribution” of 3 percent of each worker’s wage to super, which has subsequently been increased to a minimum of 11.5 percent.

In reality, Labor and the unions have ensured that these “employer contributions” have effectively been extracted from workers’ wages, through other concessions pushed through in “exchange” for super. As a result the major super funds are now the largest financial institutions in the country, controlling more wealth than the banks.

By contrast, only 30 percent of Australians have enough super to be able to retire comfortably, according to research from the Association of Super Funds Australia (ASFA). However, this is likely an understatement, as it is based on the needs of retired couples who already own their own home outright.

The “Intergenerational Report” notes that “high rates of home ownership have historically played an important role in supporting retirement outcomes.” The decline in home ownership, it warns, presents a “fiscal risk to Age Pension spending” in the future.

In other words, the Labor government’s “concern” is that the growing number of workers reaching retirement age without a home or adequate superannuation to live off will be a burden to the budget.

This is a reflection of the same callous indifference to the elderly that has been starkly demonstrated throughout the COVID pandemic. The homicidal “let-it-rip” policies, begun under the Morrison Liberal-National government but continued and expanded by Labor, have allowed the deadly virus to spread unchecked, killing more than 25,000 people, with older people among the most at risk.

This underscores that the Labor government, like all capitalist regimes, is fundamentally hostile to the basic needs of ordinary people, including the elderly and other vulnerable layers.