In this photo, taken from video, released by the Russian Defense Ministry on Wednesday, April 2, 2025, a "Grad" self-propelled 122 mm multiple rocket launcher fires toward Ukrainian position in the Russian - Ukrainian border area in the Kursk region, Russia. [AP Photo/Russian Defense Ministry Press Service]
The Ukrainian military’s eight-month-long incursion into Russia’s Kursk region has effectively ended after Russia announced it had regained control over Guyevo, one of the last villages held by Ukrainian forces on Russian territory.
Amid mounting Russian advances into its own Donbass region, Ukraine launched the adventurist invasion in August of last year and seized between 1,000 and 1,300 square kilometers of land, making it the largest ground invasion of Russia since Nazi Germany’s Wehrmacht during World War II. The troops sent into Russian territory had been trained by the UK and used NATO battle tanks.
The right-wing dictatorial government of President Volodymyr Zelensky originally touted the invasion as a means to simultaneously take pressure off its own undermanned forces in Donbass and improve Ukraine’s position in any future negotiations to end the war. In doing so, the Ukrainian military redirected a significant number of its best forces into an ultimately doomed incursion that predictably led to the casualties of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers with no improvement in Kiev’s negotiating position or the creation of a “buffer zone” for Ukraine’s military.
Earlier in March, the BBC reported on the “catastrophic” withdrawal of Ukrainian forces from the strategically important city of Sudzha in the Kursk region. It was “like a horror movie,” according to the testimonies of Ukrainian soldiers who unanimously condemned the Ukrainian military leadership for the Kursk fiasco.
According to one soldier named Dmytro, “The roads are littered with hundreds of destroyed cars, armoured vehicles and ATVs (All Terrain Vehicles). There are a lot of wounded and dead.”
Dmytro estimated thousands of Ukrainian soldiers had perished needlessly since the beginning of the invasion in August 2024 and stated, “Everything is finished in the Kursk region ... the operation was not successful.”
Speaking to Reuters, Ukrainian soldier Oleksii Deshevyi, 32, a former supermarket security guard who lost his hand while fighting in Kursk in September, likewise condemned the disastrous Kursk invasion.
“We should not have started this operation at all,” Deshevyi told Reuters from a rehabilitation center in Kiev.
According to the Kyiv Independent, overall equipment losses for Ukraine amounted to 790 pieces of equipment in comparison to Russia’s 740.
In addition to its own military casualties and losses of Western-supplied equipment, the Russian government has implicated Ukrainian soldiers in the murder of 22 civilians in the occupied village of Russkoye Porechnoye between September and November.
The habitual liar Zelensky and his Commander in Chief General Oleksandr Syrskyi have continued to praise the Kursk operation as a “success.” In mid-March, as Kiev was withdrawing its forces from Kursk, Zelensky preposterously declared that the retreating soldiers were leaving with the “mission accomplished.” It will be up to military historians to make a full accounting for the death and destruction caused by the invasion.
Notwithstanding the false claims of Zelensky and Syrskyi, the failure of the operation has clearly undermined the position of both figures within the NATO-backed Ukrainian state.
Last week, the Guardian published an interview with Bohdan Krotevych, the former chief of staff of the infamous neo-Nazi Azov brigade. In it, he called for the removal of Syrskyi as the head of Ukraine’s Armed Forces. Krotevych is a known admirer of the Nazi war criminal Albert Kesselring who played a central role in the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 and is notorious for overseeing the Ardeatine massacre in Italy in 1944 in which 335 civilians were murdered.
Krotevych is a powerful figure. In June of last year, Zelensky replaced Ukraine’s Joint Forces Commander, Lt. General Yuriy Sodol, with Brigadier General Andrii Hnatov, at his behest, testifying to the enormous influence the far right has within the highest levels of the Ukrainian state.
While Krotevych initially supported the Kursk invasion, in his remarks to the British newspaper, he criticized Syrskyi for “remaining there too long,” particularly as Russian forces continued to advance towards the city of Pokrovsk in southern Donbass.
“Syrskyi is not trying to apply a high science and an art of war,” Krotevych said, accusing him of having “just two functions: if the enemy is attacking, you just throw more people in there. And if the enemy is overwhelming, withdraw the people and say that you’re concerned about the lives of the people.”
He also attacked Syrskyi for not granting mobilized soldiers sufficient rest from the front. Practically posturing as some sort of humanitarian when it comes to Ukraine’s soldiers, Krotevych stated that he quit his post at Azov after “receiving from the high army command, from the commander-in-chief HQ, orders that became more and more borderline criminal, which I, in my good conscience, was unable to fulfil and follow.”
While Krotevych is attempting ex post facto to absolve both himself and Azov from the failure of the Kursk invasion, the capture of “historically Ukrainian lands” in Russia has long been part of irredentist claims made by far-right Ukrainian nationalists.
In September of 2022, Dmytro Yarosh, the founder and former leader of the fascist Right Sector, foreshadowing the Kursk invasion, demanded on Facebook that Ukraine should make territorial claims on several Russian regions and cities. He cited specifically Belgorod, Kuban and Voronezh and called for an expansion of the war to capture “Ukrainian lands.”
At the conclusion of his interview, Krotevych announced he would be spending time in London and starting “up a private company, Strategic Operational and Intelligence Agency (Soia), obtaining intelligence on Russia, Belarus, North Korea and other countries unfriendly to Ukraine and acting as an expert liaison with the west.”
Krotevych stressed that his visits to London are not tied to Valery Zaluzhny, the former Commander in Chief of Ukraine’s Armed Forces. After a major public row with President Zelensky, Zaluzhny was dismissed from his position and sent to the UK where he is currently serving as the country’s ambassador.
Valery Zaluzhny (left) with Andriy Stempitsky, a commander of the fascist Right Sector during his last days in office. Both men are photographed in front of a portrait of Ukrainian fascist leader Stepan Bandera
A known admirer of Ukrainian fascist leader Stepan Bandera, Zaluzhny is a favorite in any potential future presidential elections and would likely be supported by the country’s various far-right military and political organizations such as Azov. In March, amidst the ongoing attempts by the Trump White House to broker a deal with Russia and Ukraine to end the war and plunder the countries’ resources, Zaluzhny gave a provocative speech at Chatham House in London, declaring that the US was “destroying” the world order and had joined “the axis of evil.” The Zelensky government publicly distanced itself from Zaluzhny’s remarks.
While Ukrainian forces have been expelled from Kursk, Kiev has continued its cross-border attacks in the Belgorod region. “We continue to carry out active operations in the border areas on enemy territory, and that is absolutely just—war must return to where it came from,” Zelensky stated last Monday in a nightly video address.
China has taken a significant step in the intensifying economic war with the US by moving to tighten controls on the export of rare earth minerals and magnets critical for many advanced technologies in auto production, electronics and military equipment. Restrictions had already been imposed on the exports of some rare earths as the Trump tariff war has escalated, but the latest moves appear to be the most significant retaliatory measure so far.
Outside the Beijing Stock Exchange in China on April 10, 2025. [AP Photo/Andy Wong]
According to a report in the New York Times by its Beijing bureau chief Keith Bradsher published yesterday, shipments of magnets “essential for assembling everything from cars and drones to robots and missiles, have been halted at many Chinese ports while the Chinese government drafts a new regulatory system. Once in place, the new system could permanently prevent supplies from reaching certain companies, including American military contractors.”
On April 4, two days after Trump’s announcement of his “reciprocal tariff” war—since suspended for all countries for 90 days except China for which tariffs have been raised in 145 percent—Beijing ordered restrictions on the export of six heavy rare earth metals refined in China and rare earth magnets.
The magnets are crucial for the production of electric motors for cars and other products. China produces around 90 percent of the 200,000 tonnes of rare earth magnets each year. Japan produces a large portion of the rest while a small quantity, dependent on China for raw material supplies, comes from Germany.
The Times article cited comments by Daniel Pickard, an adviser to the US trade representative and the Commerce Department on critical minerals. “Does the export control or ban potentially have severe effects in the US? Yes,” he said.
James Litinsky, the chief executive of MP Materials which supplies rare earths, said supplies to military contractors were of particular concern. “Drones and robotics are widely considered the future of warfare, and based on everything we are seeing, the critical inputs for our future supply chain are shut down.”
MP Materials owns the only sole rare earths mine in the US, Mountain Pass in California.
The key issue is not so much obtaining supplies of rare earths and critical minerals but in processing them. The US has considerable supplies of rare earths. Getting them out of the ground is one thing, processing and refining them is another.
Rare earths can be found all over the world but often not in sufficient concentrations to make mining them economically viable. And the refinement process itself is complex and expensive because the rare earths are found in combination with minerals having similar chemical properties, which makes it difficult to extract them.
An article in the Financial Times in early March cited remarks by Pierre Josso, deputy director of the UK Critical Minerals Intelligence Centre, who pointed to this issue. “Refining is where things become difficult. Managing to separate them into individual elements takes a lot of time and energy. You can mine anywhere in the world, but if you don’t build the smelting and refining capacity, you’ll send your ore to China to be refined,” he said.
The US at present mines about 12 percent of the world’s supply of rare earths, putting it second only to China, according to the United States Geological Survey. But refining is capital intensive and not particularly profitable and so China is the main center for processing.
An article in the Wall Street Journal in March noted that the “US exports about two-thirds of its rare earths to China. It has little choice: China is responsible for around 85 percent of the world’s rare earth refining. Chinese companies then turn the ore into the final product—rare-earth magnets—and export the magnets back to the US.”
According to Morgan Bazilian, director of the Payne Institute at the Colorado Institute of Mines, whose remarks were cited in the article, the so-called “midstream piece of processing and refining ores into chemicals and metals is really important and dominated by China. I don’t see it becoming undominated.”
His remarks are borne out by the data. According to industry estimates, the cost of building a refinery plant in China is one-third of the cost in the US.
Industrial dominance goes beyond rare earths and extends to cobalt and copper. The top six refiners of cobalt—vital for military industries and batteries—are Chinese. China’s share of the production of refined cobalt is estimated to have grown from 65 percent in 2018 to 83 percent in 2024.
In copper, crucial for all areas of electronics, US refining capacity lags behind China and the Trump administration has initiated an investigation into how dependence on imports of the metal is a threat to US “national security.”
The issue of rare earths and its importance for US military capacity has concerned Trump for some time. In 2017 he signed an executive order to secure supplies of critical minerals and issued another in 2020 regarding Chinese dominance.
In his address to the joint session of Congress in March, Trump said he planned “historic action to dramatically expand production of critical minerals and rare earths.” These minerals are part of his drive to annex Greenland and were at the center of his proposed agreement with Ukraine.
For its part, the actions of the Chinese government to tighten its grip on their supply and the magnets it produces is another indication that President Xi Jinping considers that whatever the short-term problems caused by the Trump tariffs—and they will be significant—over the longer haul China is in a stronger position than the US.
Such views will have been buttressed by the turbulence in financial markets, centered on the $29 trillion bond market, and the growing international sentiment that the US is no longer a safe haven for investment.
Significantly, while Trump has boasted of a line of countries “kissing my ass” in order to enter negotiations and make trade deals, China is not among them and Xi has not sought a phone call. The view in Beijing appears to be that despite being virtually shut out of the US market, any blow on that score will be able to be countered by boosting its domestic market with government stimulus measures.
The latest response by China is not likely, however, to produce any lasting US economic concessions, despite urging by financial oligarchs, such as billionaire founder of the Bridgewater hedge fund Ray Dalio, for a “win-win” US-China trade deal.
Given its lag on the production front, sharply expressed in the refining of critical minerals but present in many other areas of manufacturing as well, the response of the Trump regime will be to step up preparations in the one area where it considers it has superiority, that is, through war.
A sign outside the U.S. Social Security Administration advertises its online services in downtown Welch, West Virginia Thursday, March 20, 2025. [AP Photo/Leah Willingham]
While denying plans to directly slash Social Security checks, the Trump administration is imposing job cuts, office closures and “identity-proofing” requirements designed to wreck the Social Security Administration and block seniors from applying for and receiving benefits.
Under the cynical pretext of fighting “waste, fraud and abuse,” Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is sowing chaos and paving the way for the privatization of the retirement benefit system established in 1935 at the height of the Depression and amid great class battles.
Some 73 million people, 21.5 percent of the US population, receive monthly checks from the Social Security Administration (SSA) worth a total of $1.5 trillion annually. Social Security accounts for 22 percent of the US federal budget. The average monthly Social Security benefit for 65.8 million retired workers is about $1,980. For 4.5 million disabled workers who receive Supplemental Security Income (SSI), the average monthly benefit is around $1,580.
Workers pay into the system, which has net assets estimated at $2.7 trillion, their entire working lives. Now they are facing website crashes, interminable waits on phone calls and long lines at SSA offices as Trump, Musk and DOGE take a wrecking ball to the system. This is under conditions where, due to cuts imposed under previous administrations, Democratic as well as Republican, the SSA was already at a 50-year low in staffing while the number of beneficiaries grows by 10,000 people daily.
On February 28, the SSA, under Trump’s hand-picked acting commissioner Leland Dudek, announced the elimination of 7,000 jobs, more than 12 percent of the agency’s staff. The announcement cited the agency’s “bloated workforce and organizational structure.”
On the same day, the multi-billionaire fascist Musk claimed, falsely, on Joe Rogan’s podcast that a search of the Social Security database showed there were 20 million dead people marked as alive. He said, “Social Security is the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.”
During his address to a joint session of Congress in February, Trump promoted the lie that millions of people over the age 100 were receiving benefit checks, based on a misrepresentation of SSA databases.
On April 3, Vice President JD Vance said on “Fox & Friends” that 40 percent of the people who call the Social Security Administration “are actually committing fraud.” The Washington Post, based on figures released in March by Acting SSA Commissioner Dudek, calculated the actual percentage to be 0.0025 percent.
The SSA has also announced the closure of six of 10 regional offices and the shutdown or consolidation of 47 field offices across the country. For some people, this will mean traveling 100 miles or more to the closest SSA location. Twenty-six field offices are scheduled to close in 2025.
Acting Deputy SSA Commissioner Doris Diaz issued a memo on March 18 stating that the agency going forward would require “internet identity proofing” for “benefit claims… made over the phone.” When an SSA customer is “unable to utilize the internet ID proofing, customers will be required to visit a field office to provide in-person identity documentation.”
The Diaz memo estimates it would require 75,000 to 85,000 in-person visitors per week to the SSA’s offices to implement the policy. This is a 14 percent increase in daily visits. The wait time for an appointment, even before these changes, averaged over a month.
Earlier this month, the SSA announced a two-week delay in implementing this change, saying that “in-person identity proofing” would be effective April 14.
This places an immense burden on Social Security claimants and beneficiaries. A quarter of elderly people in the US do not use the internet and many of those who do have difficulty working with it. It is a cynical and cruel attempt to discourage people who rely on Social Security to survive from trying to navigate the system.
Speaking of the cuts and policy changes, Independent Senator Angus King of Maine told the Washington Post, “What’s going on is the destruction of the agency from the inside out…”
A report by Popular Information on March 17 said the changes to the claims process would “debilitate the agency, cause significant processing delays, and prevent many Americans from applying for or receiving benefits.”
On March 28, Bill Sweeney, the government affairs senior vice president of the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), was interviewed on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal program.
He said:
I’m hearing reports of waiting two-and-a-half hours when they need help… Social Security has the lowest staffing levels in 20 years and a record high number of Americans who are claiming Social Security every day as a result of the generational changes in this country. You have more customers and less staff handling the customers and it’s a recipe for disaster…
You have got to go to a field office to get basic stuff you have been able to do over the phone… In parts of Alaska you can’t drive to a field office, you have to fly on a plane.
On March 30, Sweeney told the National Public Radio station in Boston, WBUR, “In this country, 10,000 Americans die every year waiting for Social Security to process their disability claims.”
Dudek is expected to serve as acting commissioner until the Trump nominee for SSA commissioner, Frank Bisignano, the chief executive of the financial service technology company Fiserv, is confirmed by the Senate. Bisignano’s net worth is estimated to be between $697.7 million and $942 million as of 2025.
The criminal US financial oligarchy, wielding power in the form of the Trump administration and personified by Musk, the world’s richest individual, is determined to get its hands on the SSA trust fund. DOGE’s original stated goal of cutting the federal budget by at least $2 trillion requires the gutting of Social Security, as well as Medicare and Medicaid.
Republicans in Congress are discussing legislation to slash Social Security directly. USA Today reported on April 8:
Maybe such a plan would include raising the full retirement age from 67 now for those born in 1960 and after. Some GOP proposals have suggested increasing the age for full retirement benefits from 67 to 69 over an eight-year period beginning in 2026.
The Democratic Party’s response is silence, punctuated by impotent calls to telephone Republican lawmakers. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, known as the senator from Wall Street, recently declared, “We need every person who is a recipient… to call their Republican congressmen and senators and give them one sentence: Hands off my Social Security.”
In fact, the Democrats agree with plans for massive cuts in basic social programs, including Social Security, in the face of an unsustainable national debt of $36 trillion and rising, and the prospect of state bankruptcy of American capitalism.
This article takes stock of the cumulative long-term impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, which are staggering and growing. The capitalist response to the pandemic has exacted a stark toll of mass death and disability, while accelerating social inequality and initiating the destruction of the world’s public health infrastructure.
Furthermore, despite the repeated and false claims by the ruling class and its bourgeois press, the pandemic is ongoing and both COVID-19 and Long COVID remain significant health risks for the entire world population. The most recent and brazen salvo in the ruling elites’ incessant propaganda campaign portraying the pandemic as over came as the Trump administration canceled $11.4 billion in COVID-19 grants to state and local health departments and revoked all long COVID research grants, stating:
The COVID-19 pandemic is over, and HHS will no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a non-existent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago.
This is a blatant lie. Fresh off the tenth wave of mass infection in the US, which spanned from mid-December to late March, the world is poised to enter its eleventh wave, with the new LP.8.1 variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus now predominant. The current levels of SARS-CoV-2 virus in US wastewater correspond to approximately 400,000 new infections per day, resulting in over 140,000 new cases of Long COVID and 1,000-1,700 excess deaths per week in the US alone. Extrapolated globally, likely over 20,000 people continue to die each week from COVID-19 or associated long-term damage.
[Photo by PMC (Dr. Mike Hoerger)]
Thus it is a particularly pervasive and pernicious practice of the bourgeois media to refer to the pandemic in the past tense. In doing so, they are erasing the deaths of thousands each week, as well as the suffering of literally hundreds of millions of people globally who are afflicted with Long COVID, while covering up the ongoing risks faced by everyone.
It is important to state clearly that the Trump administration’s false assertion of the end of the pandemic was enabled by his predecessor Joe Biden, who notoriously declared “the pandemic is over” in an interview in September 2022. At that time, there were 800,000 infections per day. Since then, five additional waves of the pandemic have occurred, while the death toll has grown by at least 7 million worldwide and by 250,000 in the US.
The long-term impacts of the pandemic, as reviewed here, will tragically continue to mount unless robust public health measures are taken. Even then, if COVID-19 were eradicated today, the ruling elites’ socially criminal response to the pandemic has already baked in enormous damage not yet manifest but which will emerge as future death and disability.
The overall health impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic
The pandemic has claimed approximately 30 million lives, a figure which comes from a standard epidemiological method known as “excess deaths.” If the number of deaths during the pandemic exceeds the expected number based on pre-pandemic trends, this method ascribes a proportion of the excess deaths to COVID-19. Many of these excess deaths are attributable to the long-term impacts of COVID-19 on the heart, brain, kidneys, etc.
A recent study by the Swiss Re Institute found that under its optimistic scenario, excess deaths due to COVID-19 in the United States and United Kingdom will continue through 2028. Under its pessimistic scenario, they will continue through 2033 and beyond.
The excess deaths estimate is far more reliable than the official totals reported to the World Health Organization (WHO), as virtually every country in the world has dismantled its pandemic surveillance systems. To date, countries globally have reported 7 million confirmed deaths to the WHO.
This is a vast undercount, especially in nations without the means required to properly collect and report data. For example, India, with a population of 1.4 billion people, has reported only 500,000 confirmed deaths due to COVID-19, but has an estimated excess death toll of 6 million.
[Photo by Our World In Data (citing The Economist) / CC BY 4.0]
Deaths from COVID-19 caused the first decline in global life expectancy since World War 2, a fall of 1.8 years to 71.4 years old. This decline erased a full decade of gains in life expectancy prior to the pandemic. In the US, life expectancy still has not regained its pre-pandemic high of 78.8 years in 2019.
The COVID-19 pandemic is also a mass disabling event. In the US alone, Census data indicate that the number of adults reporting a disability has surged from a baseline of 30 million to nearly 35 million since the pandemic began, an increase of over 12 percent.
The increase in disability has affected young and old alike. According to Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED), the number of women aged 16 to 64 years with a disability has increased by 1.12 million individuals or by 46 percent from February 2020 to February 2025. For men of the same age, the figures are increases of 0.589 million and 21 percent.
The net effect of these numbers is that at any given time, approximately 1 million Americans are out of the workforce due to the persistent disabling effects of COVID-19 or Long COVID. Globally, the annual economic cost of worker disability due to Long COVID is $1 trillion.
The cumulative toll of Long COVID
Over 400 million individuals worldwide now suffer from Long COVID, which is generally defined as persistent symptoms that occur three months or more after an acute infection with the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Mild and even asymptomatic infections can result in Long COVID.
The risk for developing Long COVID increases with greater number of reinfections with the virus, being unvaccinated, higher severity of infection, female sex, being age 35 to 64 years, greater socioeconomic deprivation, higher body mass index and the presence of certain medical conditions. These conditions include type 2 diabetes, allergies, a past history of post-viral fatigue, asthma, chronic lung disease, heart failure and chronic kidney disease.
Overall, estimates indicate that at least 10 percent of people infected with COVID-19 will develop Long COVID, while some estimates are as high as 45 percent.
Long COVID affects nearly every organ system in the body. Over 200 symptoms are associated with the illness, most commonly malaise, shortness of breath, fatigue, brain fog, autonomic dysfunction, headache, persistent loss of smell or taste, cough, depression, low-grade fevers, palpitations, dizziness, muscle pain and joint pains.
These symptoms can persist for long periods of time. In one study, 71 percent of individuals with long COVID had symptoms for at least one year, 51 percent for at least two years, and 31 percent for at least three years.
The symptoms are also frequently debilitating. Approximately one in four patients with Long COVID report significant limitations in their activities of daily living.
The impacts of Long COVID also include dramatic damage to body organs and subsequent dysfunction. Measurable cognitive deficits can persist for over one year. There is evidence that Long COVID increases the risks of developing Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, type 1 diabetes mellitus, retinal damage in the eye, epilepsy, heart arrhythmias, coronary artery disease, postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), stroke and erectile dysfunction.
Some of the most prevalent symptoms of Long COVID
It is notable too that there is evidence that Long COVID is associated with immunosuppression and immune dysregulation. This has been hypothesized to make Long COVID patients more susceptible to other infectious diseases and therefore to have fueled so-called “quademics” of COVID-19, influenza, respiratory syncytial virus and norovirus in recent winters globally. It also has been associated with reactivation of latent viruses such as Epstein-Barr Virus (EBV).
The prognosis of Long COVID is not currently known, and studies are required over the coming years to understand whether long COVID shortens lifespan and by how much, and the extent to which it causes permanent disabilities. One review of Long COVID offers reason to be pessimistic: because Long COVID resembles other post-viral syndromes and myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), morbidity and mortality from long COVID will likely last for years.
It is known that patients who required intensive care for COVID-19 have persistent increased mortality up to 30 months post-hospitalization regardless of whether they developed Long COVID.
In summary, Long COVID is a dangerous multi-system disease whose impacts on death and disability will persist for decades to come.
The pandemic’s far-reaching social impacts
Beyond the massive direct health and economic impacts of the mass disabling of workers internationally, the pandemic has been used by the ruling class as an opportunity to deepen their extraction of enormous wealth from the working class.
By early 2024, the world’s billionaires had accumulated $3.3 trillion in new wealth since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. A new Oxfam report shows that these trends actually accelerated during 2024, noting:
In 2024, the world’s billionaires got $2 trillion richer, growing their wealth by roughly $5.7 billion a day. Their fortunes increased three times faster than in 2023, with nearly four new billionaires minted every week. At current rates, the world will see five trillionaires within the next decade. Meanwhile, the number of people experiencing poverty remains pretty much unchanged from 1990.
The other ruling class response to the pandemic has been the gutting of public health infrastructure. This includes not only the dismantling of surveillance for COVID-19 and other diseases, but also frontal attacks on public health capacity to control disease spread including vaccination.
With respect to surveillance infrastructure to even count cases and deaths, the ruling class has ended all traditional case reporting of COVID-19. Even excess death monitoring is at a standstill: the data from The Economist which were once updated regularly are now current only to June 2024 and future updates are uncertain.
The Biden administration notoriously ended the public health emergency (PHE) declaration for COVID-19 in 2023, which immediately led to reduced surveillance for the disease. Now, as of January 2—in an action taken under Biden just prior to Trump’s inauguration—the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) officially removed COVID-19 from its Nationally Notifiable Disease list.
The sole source of remaining data on COVID-19 transmission in the United States is wastewater surveillance data, which is used most rigorously by the Pandemic Mitigation Collaborative (PMC) in its weekly COVID-19 reports.
However, the Trump administration is now threatening wastewater surveillance, too. Its cancelation of $11.4 billion in grants to state and community health departments will undermine their ability to continue wastewater surveillance and provide those data to the CDC.
Donald Trump walks with Joe Biden to the Oval Office on November 13, 2024 [Photo: The White House]
The destruction of public health more generally is exemplified by the Biden and Trump administrations’ mishandling of the H5N1 “bird flu” panzootic event. The leap of the virus from avian species to mammalian ones involved outbreaks in Texas cattle in early 2024. The opportunity existed at that time to stamp out the variant of the virus that had jumped to cattle. However, then-Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, in a direct anti-scientific stance and policy, cynically declared that the virus would “burn itself out.”
Since that time, the H5N1 virus has gone on to spread to cattle in nearly 1,000 herds across 17 US states. Over 70 humans have officially been infected, with one death. All along the way, financial and profit considerations have trumped concerns for the welfare of humans and animals.
The next phase in the bipartisan war on public health began with the second inauguration of Trump, with critical assistance from the Democrats. Charlatans have now been put in charge of five of six public health agencies, with the well-known anti-vaccination fraudster Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. at the helm as Secretary of Health and Human Services.
Since confirmation, Kennedy has responded to a large measles outbreak in Texas with indifference to death and the promotion of quack remedies including Vitamin A, cod liver oil, budesonide and clarithromycin. Several children in Texas admitted to the hospital with measles also required treatment for liver toxicity due to excessive ingestion of Vitamin A.
With the revocation of the $11.4 billion in grants to state and local health departments, the NIH and CDC also revoked grant funding for long COVID research. Hundreds of millions of people globally were relying on this research for understanding their long-term illness, as well as the development of new treatments.
Notably, the grants also included money that Texas was using to respond to its ongoing measles outbreak, which recently saw a second unvaccinated child needlessly perish. Although a judge blocked the revocation of the funds, it is only a temporary restraining order.
Once Kennedy was put in charge of HHS, the confirmations of a series of additional, lesser-known anti-science, anti-public health hucksters was all but certain. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, author of the Great Barrington Declaration, the manifesto of the “herd immunity” policy of mass infection and death, was recently confirmed as Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Bhattacharya’s first day at NIH was significant, as it coincided with the new and escalated phase of the destruction of public health, as HHS fired thousands of workers that day, eliminating many entire agencies and gutting others.
As the WSWS noted:
The administration is gutting these agencies, systematically firing scientists and health workers en masse and without cause. Thousands of years of collective knowledge and expertise are being shown the door, leaving these agencies without the workforce required to function.
News continues to emerge of entire offices having been purged, including the elimination of the CDC’s top laboratory for testing for sexually transmitted diseases. This was one of only three such reference laboratories—where specimens are sent for definitive and confirmatory testing—in the world.
The mass firings came at the same time as the revocation of over 230 NIH grants studying HIV and AIDS and the cancelation of a global AIDS relief program called the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief or PEPFAR. PEPFAR was designed to eradicate HIV in 50 nations worldwide, including the United States, by 2030.
The war on science has also manifested as gutting funding for training the next generation of scientists. Entire training grant programs have been eliminated. The threats to science funding overall have also caused universities to pause admissions to PhD programs, revoke existing offers, and limit admissions to smaller numbers of students.
Shipping containers are loaded onto waiting trucks at the Long Beach Container Terminal in Long Beach, California, April 8, 2025. [AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes]
The shock waves from US President Trump’s tariff war, the chief focus of which is China, are spreading throughout the global economy and its financial system, with the US $29 trillion Treasury bond market very much at the center of the storm.
Trump’s 90-day “pause” in the implementation of so-called “reciprocal tariffs” announced on Wednesday was the result of fears—conveyed to him by leading members of his administration, as well as bank chiefs such as Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan—that the bond market was on the brink of a freeze akin to that which took place in March 2020 at the start of the pandemic.
But the “pause” has not halted the turmoil in the US Treasury market, where government debt is bought and sold, but is continuing.
Yesterday, the yield on the 10-year Treasury bond rose during the day by 0.19 percentage points to 4.58 percent before falling back to 4.48 percent after Boston Fed President Susan Collins told the Financial Times the US central bank “would absolutely be prepared” to use its financial power to stabilize the market should that be necessary.
The Fed, she said, “does have tools to address concerns about market functioning or liquidity should they arise” but insisted that the central bank was not seeing liquidity problems overall and that the market was continuing to “function well.”
She was hardly likely to have said anything else because even the slightest hint that the Fed was seeing growing problems would almost certainly have set off a panic, such is the fragility of the financial system.
Collins’ remarks, which would certainly have been cleared by Fed Chair Jerome Powell and were most likely instigated by him, also had the effect of producing an uptick on Wall Street after selling had resumed on Thursday.
Overall, the yield on 10-year bonds rose by 0.5 percentage points during the week, the result of the selling of US government debt, bringing down their price. (Bond prices and yields move in opposite directions.)
In a market where moves of small fractions of a percentage point can be significant, a shift of half a percentage is a big one and was the largest rise since 2001, according to Bloomberg.
As numerous comments have made clear, it is an expression of the growing lack of confidence in the US financial system, particularly internationally, which threatens to have major effects because around one-third of US debt is foreign-owned, with Japan and China being the two biggest holders.
Peter Tchir, in charge of macro strategy at Academy Securities, an international investment bank, told the Financial Times:
There is real pressure across the globe to sell Treasuries and corporate bonds if you are a foreign holder. There is a real global concern that they don’t know where Trump is going.
An unnamed European bank executive told the FT:
We are concerned because the movements you see point to something else other than a normal sell-off. They point to a complete loss of faith in the strongest bond market in the world.
Despite Collins’ claims that liquidity is not a problem, analysts at JPMorgan have said so-called market depth—that is, its ability to absorb large trades without shifting significantly, a measure of liquidity—worsened this week.
Comments by leading financial executives, reported by the Wall Street Journal, indicate the growing concerns about the stability of financial markets and the US economy.
Both Dimon and Larry Fink, the head of BlackRock, the world’s largest hedge fund with $11.6 trillion worth of assets under management, said the present turbulence was unlike anything they had seen before.
“This is different,” Dimon said. “It’s a significant change we’ve never seen in our lives.”
Fink said the economy was “at risk,” adding, “The sweeping tariff announcements went further than I could have imagined in my 49 years in finance.”
In response to the latest Trump measures, which have lifted the US tariff rates against China to 145 percent—125 percent in “reciprocal tariffs” plus retaliation hikes, on top of a previous 20 percent impost—Beijing announced yesterday it was raising its tariffs on US goods to 125 percent.
The finance ministry said there would be no further increases, and it would ignore whatever the US did thereafter
given that at the current tariff level there is no market acceptance for US goods exported to China... The US’s imposition of abnormally high tariffs on China seriously violates international economic and trade rules, basic economic laws, and common sense, and is completely unilateral bullying and coercion.
The tariff war is often described in the so-called mainstream media as a “tit-for-tat” conflict. Such characterizations completely ignore the seriousness of the situation. In the space of just 10 days, under conditions where every country on the planet is intimately connected to a system of international trade and finance, the world’s number one and number two economies are effectively walled off from each other.
History points to the consequences. In the 1930s, when the world market collapsed, there arose rival trade and currency blocs and deep economic conflicts that played a role in creating the conditions for war. There are now signs that such developments are getting underway.
Warning that the world is “undergoing accelerated changes unseen in a century, with overlapping risks and challenges,” China’s President Xi Jinping is trying to reach out across the world to develop a common front against the US.
Many countries, however, are wary of such a development because they fear their markets will be flooded by Chinese goods excluded from the US under conditions where growth in the Chinese economy is slowing, and it has become increasingly dependent on exports to reach official growth targets. The European Union, one of the key areas with which China would like to have closer collaboration, has already raised its own tariffs against it.
To try to counter these fears, Beijing is issuing verbal assurances that the domestic market will be boosted to take up the slack.
For their part, countries hit by Trump’s “reciprocal tariffs,” ranging from 30 percent to almost 50 percent, especially in Southeast Asia, are fearful of what may be demanded in any negotiations with the US during the 90-day “pause” and what might come after.
Trump has made it clear that the talks will go beyond the issue of tariffs per se. The Fact Sheet issued on April 2 set out that tariffs could be reduced but only if countries aligned themselves with the US not only on economic matters but also on its “national security”—code words for China—as well.
The fears gripping countries around the world, reeling from the historic shock delivered to them as they try to put in place arrangements that are less dependent on the US, were summed up by Singapore Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishhnan.
As preparations are being made for talks in the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur, in May to try to devise an agreement between the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and Middle East Gulf nations, he said: “This is the end of an era.”
The architect, the master planner, the developer of the rules-based system of economic integration has decided that it now needs to engage in a full-scale demolition of the same system that it created.
Puerto Rican firefighters at the scene of the Jet Set Club roof collapse, April 9 [Photo: Department of Public Safety of Puerto Rico]
The catastrophic collapse of the Jet Set nightclub roof in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, in the early hours of Tuesday has shocked people around the world.
The roof of one of the most iconic venues in the Dominican capital suddenly caved in as attendees enjoyed a concert by popular merengue artist Rubby Pérez. With rescuers still searching for bodies, 221 people have been found dead, while about 200 others were injured.
Jet Set nightclub, renowned for its “Monday Merengue Nights,” was packed with over 1,000 attendees when disaster struck, while some reports indicate that it had reached full capacity of over 2,000. Most of the victims were workers or middle-class attendees who paid about $30 to experience the atmosphere at the top club.
Pérez, 69, was found dead in the rubble. A beloved artist in the Dominican Republic and internationally, Pérez was among the most recognizable voices in merengue music with hits like “Tu vas a volar,” “Volveré,” and “Enamorado de Ella.” Videos showing his hypnotic stage presence and merry vibe just minutes before the disaster have gone viral, filling fans with grief.
Other prominent figures among the deceased include former MLB players Octavio Dotel and Tony Blanco, and Monte Cristi provincial governor Nelsy Cruz.
Relatives have flocked to the site, hospitals, and forensic institutes in search of missing loved ones. Shailyn Peña, the BBC reports, spent her 17th birthday waiting outside the rubble for news of her father and other family members who were trapped inside. Like many others, she expressed frustration at the lack of updates.
Crowds, with many holding pictures of relatives with the word MISSING, also gathered at the National Institute of Forensic Pathology to hear officials read aloud names of identified victims. Screams of anguish broke out as names of loved-ones were announced. Others moved from hospital to hospital in desperation. For families still awaiting answers, each passing hour compounds their grief.
Doctors warn that some hospitalized victims remain in critical condition having endured hours trapped with multiple injuries.
Rescue teams from Israel, Mexico, and Puerto Rico joined local crews to search for survivors using thermal cameras and sonar technology. Over 189 individuals have been rescued so far. As hopes were fading since no survivors have been found since Tuesday afternoon, The Guardian reported that responders have stopped searching for survivors.
Emergency Operations Director Juan Manuel Méndez assured families that efforts would continue until every person is accounted for. However, with much of the site already searched, authorities are transitioning to recovery operations focused on locating bodies.
The cause of the collapse remains under investigation. Eyewitnesses reported dust falling moments before large chunks of concrete came crashing down on concertgoers. The building’s history raises questions about oversight: originally a cinema from the 1970s, Jet Set underwent renovations in 2010 and 2015, but had not adhered to modern safety standards.
This highlights systemic failures in enforcing building codes, which have themselves failed to keep up with advancements in science and engineering. While Jet Set catered to a relatively more affluent crowd, its structural vulnerabilities reflect a broader neglect that is even more pronounced for the working class.
President Luis Abinader expressed condolences for the victims at the site and attended the funeral of Pérez, but criticisms have been raised that the government is covering up a record of negligence and ignored warnings.
The owner of a neighboring building, Karina Suero Moquete, told the media that she had filed one of several lawsuits against the building over sound pollution and nonstop vibration all night long. Prosecutors responded to them that, “It is part of the national brand.”
The prominence of the locale and the oligarchic character of the Espaillat family that owns it, has raised widespread suspicions of an official coverup. Dozens have commented on a statement on social media published by Antonio Espaillat calling for his arrest.
Only a day before disaster struck, Abinader announced 15 measures modeled after Trump’s fascist agenda and openly advertised as “painful” to crack down on Haitian immigrants. These include raising the number of troops at the border with Haiti to 11,000, building a border wall, new restrictions on migrants’ access to healthcare and public education, and several actions to drive out Haitians from the labor market.
That day, the administration boasted of a historic record of deportations, reaching 187,983 in six months. The announcements, made in the framework of “national security,” have set the stage for media outlets to scapegoat Haitian immigrants to divert attention from the Jet Set club disaster and systemic issues like infrastructure safety. Some tabloids have already begun denouncing the use of Haitian construction workers.
Disasters like the Jet Set Club collapse or the 2017 Grenfell Tower inferno in London, England expose how profit-driven neglect make preventable mass death and suffering inevitable. While in Grenfell’s case, cost-cutting measures led to unsafe cladding; inadequate oversight at Jet Set allowed structural vulnerabilities to persist unnoticed.
As Dominicans are left grappling with grief and anger, some media commentators are calling for stricter enforcement of building codes and greater transparency in government actions.
Such events, however, underscore that disasters are rarely isolated incidents—they are symptoms of systemic failures prioritizing profit over human lives in capitalist society. As in the case of the Grenfell fire and the construction firm and companies responsible, families and the working class hoped to settle accounts and make changes to prevent future catastrophes. The Dominican ruling class is already conceiving a whitewash as it exploits the disaster to promote nationalist chauvinism and anti-Haitian xenophobia.
