We are seeing “ the great resignation ” in health care. Studies show three-tenths of health care workers are looking for new jobs. We ran on adrenaline for a year, burning the candle at both ends. Now we are empty and have nothing but time to reflect on the tragedy. The many lonely deaths witnessed left us traumatized. We remember feeling scared, unprotected and let down by our administration , who didn’t value us enough for a plastic gown. Every day a new direction and our lives, our families ’ lives and our patients ’ lives were caught in the balance. I will never be the same person as I was before this pandemic. I will never forget that management hid in offices and made decisions that I was not worth the value of a paper mask. I have never felt more strongly that nurses are not [considered] valuable. Every day I showed up and gave my whole heart to those who were scared and alone. I held their hand with empathy , knowing that their fate was inevitable. If you were a prostitute, a politician, a lawyer, a drug dealer , it didn’t matter. I would care for you , giving everything I had.
I am realizing that I am the one that is treated without care.
— Erin,a nurse inRiverside, California
The coronavirus pandemic has lasted for more than 15 months, severely impacting not only the physical but the mental health of the vast majority of the world’s population. While almost 4 million people have died globally, hundreds of millions more have experienced overwhelming levels of stress, loss, economic anxiety, depression, isolation and uncertainty.
In few other fields have workers been exposed to such high levels of stress as in health care. Health care workers, especially those on the frontline, have faced increased work hours, shortages of lifesaving personal protective equipment (PPE) and endless exposure to patient deaths. Large numbers of their colleagues have also died fighting to save lives.
Nurse Debbi Hinderliter (left) collects a sample from a woman at a coronavirus testing site near the nation's busiest pedestrian border crossing, August 13, 2020, in San Diego [Credit: AP Photo/Gregory Bull]
During the first year of the pandemic, more than 3,600 health care workers died in the United States, according to the ongoing study, “Lost on the frontline,” by Kaiser Health News and the Guardian newspaper. Nurses and health care support specialists accounted for the largest share of these deaths. More than 700 died in New York and New Jersey alone, the study found.
While the report outlines a shocking scale of death among health care workers, these statistics are not comprehensively tracked by the government, and the authors of the study suggest the true toll is higher.
Many of these deaths were the product of a direct failure of hospital administrators and governments to procure adequate supplies of masks and other personal protective gear, lack of mass testing and contact tracing, inadequate safety measures at workplaces, and refusal to implement necessary public health measures like lockdowns and restrictions until COVID-19 was successfully contained.
According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, “essential workers” are more likely to report symptoms of anxiety or depressive disorder, substance use and suicidal thoughts during the pandemic. Many current studies of health care workers are showing increased rates of post-traumatic symptoms among those workers caring for COVID-19 patients, with nurses being more often adversely impacted than doctors.
Psychiatrist Dr. Julian Lagoy at Community Psychology in California explained to Healthline: “Generally, PTSD trauma is defined as being exposed to a traumatic event, such as a sexual assault, war, a car accident, or child abuse. However, the current COVID-19 pandemic has qualities that qualify as a traumatic experience as it takes a physical and emotional toll on many people.”
In 2019, a review of available literature by The Journal of the Missouri State Medical Association found that burnout among health care workers was endemic even before the pandemic. After a year of exposure to massive deaths and increasing staffing shortages, burnout has certainly increased, and many health care workers are reaching a breaking point.
According to a survey by the Vivan Health website, in 2021, 43 percent of respondents considered leaving the health care profession in 2021. By comparison, at the start of the pandemic, 80 percent of respondents said they were likely to continue working in their field. Additionally, a staggering 87 percent of respondents now say that their hospitals or facilities are, on average, short staffed.
Data from staffing firm Aya Healthcare shows that such results are already being reflected in mass vacancies within the health care system. One year into the pandemic, permanent nurse vacancies have skyrocketed, with job postings at hospitals and health systems up 20 percent compared to the start of the pandemic.
These conditions are not isolated to the United States but are part of the international impact of the pandemic. In the United Kingdom, thousands of doctors plan to leave the National Health Service after the pandemic due to exhaustion and mental health concerns, according to a report released in May by the British Medical Association. The report finds that the number of UK doctors seeking early retirement has doubled, and 25 percent are more likely to take a break from their profession.
The disastrous state of health care is the result of decades of cuts to public and private health systems. Years of cost-cutting measures mean that the medical system has fewer resources to confront the worst global health crisis in a century. Health care systems in the US are both publicly and privately funded and lack proper coordination to treat the needs of society effectively and holistically.
Hospitals are still experiencing impacts from the virus with continued increasing staff shortages. In May of this year, Oregon State Hospital had to call in the National Guard for help with treating severely mentally ill patients. The hospital is chronically understaffed, by as much as 30 percent.
Despite a rising number of vaccinations, numbers are far below what is required for herd immunity, even in advanced countries. The more infectious and deadly Delta variant of the coronavirus is present in at least 80 countries, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). In the US, it accounts for at least 10 percent of all new cases and is probable to soon become the dominant variant, according to the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Rochelle Walensky. There exists the danger of new surges of the virus as the Delta variant spreads, as well as the threat of COVID-19 becoming an ongoing endemic lasting for years, so long as policy decisions remain in the hands of the profit-driven ruling class.
In response to the deadly, stressful and unsafe conditions facing health care workers, exacerbated by the pandemic, nurses, hospital workers, and other health professionals have gone on strike throughout the world over the last year. Recently, health care professionals throughout India have been on strike, including thousands of doctors, health care teachers and hospital workers.
Earlier this year, hundreds of doctors went on a 24-hour strike in Israel, midwives went on a one-day strike in France, and health care workers in Bolivia also went on strike. In May, 30,000 New Zealand public sector nurses voted to strike, while in Massachusetts, 700 nurses at Saint Vincent Hospital have been striking for weeks over patient care and unsafe conditions.
While trillions of dollars have been handed out to the major banks to weather the economic fallout from the pandemic, vital frontline health care professionals face death, sickness, burnout and poor conditions that have led them to the brink.
Health care workers worldwide have suffered immensely under the decaying capitalist health care system that was ill prepared for a global pandemic. It is time for health care workers and all workers to fight for a rational, science-based plan to suppress the virus, based on putting human lives before profits.
The Cowessess First Nation has announced that 751 unmarked graves have been discovered on reserve land that once housed the Marieval Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan’s Qu’Appelle Valley.
This grisly discovery comes just weeks after the remains of 215 children were discovered on the site of an Indian residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia, and sheds light, yet again, on the brutal and inhumane treatment Canadian capitalism and its state have meted out to the indigenous population.
A group of students from the Marieval Indian Residential School (National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation)
Cowessess Chief Cadmus Delorme addressed reporters at a virtual news conference last Thursday morning, where he relayed details of the operation that has been underway to locate the graves.
The First Nation partnered with technical teams from Saskatchewan Polytechnic to begin the search in early June. Using ground-penetrating radar (GPR), the teams covered the 44,000 square metres that previously constituted the residential school’s Roman Catholic cemetery.
Delorme said that there could be more than 751 bodies buried at the site. GPR registered 751 “recorded hits” during the searches. However, it is possible that more than one set of remains are buried at some “hit” locations. He noted that penetrating radar has a 10 to 15 percent error rate and that technical teams will announce a verified number of how many remains have been found in the weeks to come.
“This is not a mass grave site. These are unmarked graves,” he clarified at Thursday’s press conference. He explained that the community will now be treating the site “like a crime scene,” with the goal of matching names to those in the graves and eventually erecting a monument on the site to memorialize them. On Saturday, a vigil involving members of the First Nation band was held at which 751 solar-powered lamps were placed on the 751 grave sites identified to date.
Memorial on the steps of the Vancouver Art gallery for the 215 children whose corpses were recently discovered on the grounds of the Kamloops Indian Residential School. (Wikimedia Commons)
The search efforts are “Phase 1” of ongoing work within the Cowessess First Nation, guided by the community’s oral history, to locate the victims of the residential school system as well as other unmarked gravesites. These include unbaptized babies whom Church authorities refused to allow to be buried alongside those inducted into the Catholic faith.
Chief Delorme says that oral history indicates that adults were buried at the site, as well as children, and that it is possible people who attended the church or lived in nearby towns may be among the remains.
The Marieval Indian Residential School operated from 1899 to 1997 and was long run by organizations affiliated with the Roman Catholic Church. The school building itself was controversially demolished in 1999. However, the church, rectory and grassy plot of land that was the cemetery remain.
The federal government—which at one time funded 130 residential schools across Canada—purchased Marieval for $70,000 in January 1926. The site is located approximately 140 kilometres east of Regina, Saskatchewan. On government orders and with the support of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and “Indian Agents,” the Department of Indian Affairs’ representatives on reserves, native children, as young as five or six from across southeastern Saskatchewan and southwestern Manitoba, were separated from their parents and sent to the Marieval School.
Saskatchewan had the highest number of residential schools of any province or territory in Canada and has the highest number of survivors. It is currently known that 566 children died at residential schools within the province, although the single site at Marieval indicates that the true death count is much higher.
In the face of mounting protests by residential school survivors and native groups, the Harper Conservative government convened a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in 2008 to investigate the abuse faced by First Nations, Inuit and Metis children at Canada’s residential schools. The TRC’s final report, issued in 2015, identified 4,100 children who had died at or while trying to escape residential schools. However, it estimated the real death toll could exceed 6,000. It also documented tens of thousands of cases of physical and sexual abuse.
An estimated 150,000 children were enlisted in Canada’s government-ordered, church-administered residential school system during its more than century-long existence. This puts the odds of dying in a residential school as high as a Canadian soldier who served in the armed forces during World War II.
The youngest survivor to provide the TRC with a statement about Marieval attended from 1993 to 1997. Amber K.K. Pelletier wrote that during her time there, students had their hair cut by teachers upon arrival. They were also assigned numbers, and when staff were upset, they would refer to students by these numbers instead of their names. As well as the haircuts that Pelletier described, children were stripped of their traditional clothing upon arrival.
Classes at the school were taught in English and French; it is widely known that children were routinely beaten in residential schools for speaking their native language. Survivors that attended Marieval report that staff at the school were very physical with the children and that students were repeatedly slapped, kicked, hit and punched.
Residence at Marieval was enforced. Local parents were allowed to visit their children and take them home for a meal during the first few decades after the school’s establishment, but this was disallowed in 1933. From then on, children were only allowed to visit their homes and families under special circumstances.
The school was overcrowded, something that was all too common in residential schools, which were often awarded funding on the basis of how many students they housed. Overcrowding, combined with malnutrition, unsanitary environments and other deplorable living conditions, made the schools ripe for the spread of tuberculosis and other often fatal diseases. Inspectors’ reports of appalling health and safety violations recorded at Marieval can be found in TRC documents.
Barry Kennedy, a survivor of Marieval, told CTV News that he “can’t find the words” to describe how he feels in light of the discovery of the graves. Kennedy spoke about a friend he had made at Marieval named Brian, who was “taken” one night “like everybody else” and was never seen again. Kennedy wonders today if Brian is among those buried at the site.
Having attended the school from the age of five, Kennedy said that he was witness to frequent burials during his time helping the church as an altar boy. “We were called to the church one early morning … we were brought outside and they were burying someone. Who it was, whether it was a boy or a girl, I don’t know. But what I do know is that this individual was wrapped in a sheet and there was a hole dug,” he recalled.
According to Chief Delorme, senior Cowessess First Nation members who are survivors of the Marieval school say that they were forced to dig graves for and bury their own classmates. Delorme also noted that formerly there were headstones on many or all of the now-unmarked graves, but that they were likely removed by Catholic Church officials at some point in the 1960s. This in itself is a crime under Canadian law.
Archbishop of Regina Donald Bolen commented that the graves were unmarked at least in part due to an argument that occurred between an oblate priest at the school and a local First Nations chief. According to Bolen, the priest took a bulldozer and knocked over huge numbers of headstones following the dispute.
On Friday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said that he had spoken personally with Pope Francis and implored him to visit Canada and make a formal apology to indigenous Canadians for the Roman Catholic Church’s role in operating 60 percent of the country’s residential schools. The Catholic Church has steadfastly refused to issue any apology for its role, so as to limit its financial liability and uphold its claims to infallibility. The most Pope Francis would do following the discovery of the 215 corpses on the site of the former Catholic Church-run Kamloops Indian Residential School was to express “sorrow” and call for “healing.”
In his initial media statements on the latest discovery of hundreds of unmarked indigenous graves, Trudeau said that the pain and grief indigenous communities are feeling is “Canada’s responsibility to bear.”
This is a despicable cover-up. The Canadian population at large is not responsible for the 751 unmarked graves in Saskatchewan or the 215 at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia. Nor should it be blamed for the genocidal policies pursued by the Canadian capitalist state and its representatives during the process of Confederation and its aftermath. The dispossession of the native people; the deliberate starvation of thousands of indigenous people in order to force them onto reserves and create space for agricultural and industrial expansion across Western Canada; the subsequent violations of “treaty rights” and encroachments on resource-rich reserve lands; and the seizure and forcible placing of children in residential schools with the aim of “killing the Indian in the child” and transforming them into pliant wage-labourers—these were crimes carried out by the Canadian ruling class and its state, not working people. They arose out of the conflict between capitalist private property and indigenous society. Similarly, the appalling conditions the majority of Canada’s native people face today derive from the requirements of the capitalist “market.”
All attempts to blame the entire population or “white society” are either aimed at whitewashing the role of Canadian capitalism or advancing the interests of a privileged minority of the native elite, which calls for “reconciliation” on a capitalist basis, i.e., the granting of positions of power within government and the private sector to a tiny minority of indigenous people while the majority continues to live in grinding poverty.
The hypocrisy of the prime minister’s empty pledges to “walk the shared path of reconciliation” in order to “build a better future” is exemplified by the fact that the federal Liberal federal government is currently embroiled in judicial proceedings to overturn two Canadian Human Rights Tribunal orders regarding discrimination against indigenous children and their families, resulting from the federal government’s decades-long systematic underfunding of child family services on the reserves.
The first of the two orders, issued in 2016, would widen the application of Jordan’s Principle, a child-first principle which states that First Nations children on reserves must not be deprived of critical social services in the event that Ottawa and the provinces cannot decide which level of government will pay for such services. The principle was created because native children were suffering and, in some cases, dying while governments wrangled over who would pay for essential services the state was legally obligated to provide.
NATO intensified its provocations against Russia Monday, with the launch of two weeks of military exercises in the Black Sea region. Operation Sea Breeze will continue until at least July 10.
The largest ever NATO operation in the Black Sea takes place under explosive conditions, beginning just six days after Russian armed forced fired warning shots and then dropped four bombs in the path of HMS Defender, a British warship that entered Russia’s territorial waters off Crimea. The US ignored a request made June 22 from Russia's embassy in Washington—just hours before the UK warship incident—for Sea Breeze to be cancelled this year, with Moscow warning of the danger of military confrontation.
This week’s Sea Breeze manoeuvres, which have taken place annually since 1997, are the largest ever. Co-hosted by the US and Ukrainian navies, Sea Breeze 2021 will involve 32 countries, 5,000 troops, 32 ships, 40 aircraft and 18 special operations. It is being led by the Standing NATO Maritime Group 2 (SNMG2), an immediate reaction force which consists of four to six destroyers and frigates. A squadron of US Marines are taking part, with the main naval force involved the US Navy’s Sixth Fleet headquartered in Naples, Italy.
Ships and aircrafts from eight countries participate in the 2020 Operation Sea Breeze exercises (navy.mil/Ukraine Navy)
The NATO website states that “allies and partners” will participate from “Albania, Australia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Denmark, Egypt, Estonia, France, Georgia, Greece, Israel, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Morocco, Norway, Pakistan, Poland, Romania, Senegal, Spain, South Korea, Sweden, Tunisia, Turkey, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, and the United States.”
2021 Operation Sea Breeze poster showing participating countries (Credit: navy.mil)
Last year Sea Breeze took place over just four days between July 20 and 24. with only ships, aircraft and personnel from the United States Ukraine, Bulgaria, Georgia, Norway, Romania, Spain and Turkey.
In a June 25 statement NATO said, “The exercise will focus on multiple warfare areas including amphibious warfare, land manoeuvre warfare, diving operations, maritime interdiction operations, air defence, special operations integration, anti-submarine warfare, and search and rescue operations.”
USS Ross begins its northbound transit into the Black Sea (Credit: U.S. Naval Forces Europe-Africa/U.S. Sixth Fleet/Twitter)
While Sea Breeze was only formally announced this month, its planning has been worked out for months. In April, the London Times reported “according to senior naval sources' that “one Type 45 destroyer armed with anti-aircraft missiles and an anti-submarine Type 23 frigate will peel off from the Royal Navy’s carrier task group in the Mediterranean and head through the Bosphorus into the Black Sea.”
The Carrier Strike Group left the UK on May 23 and the Type 45 destroyer—HMS Defender—entered the Black Sea last week to carry out its provocation off the coat of Crimea, just a few miles from Russia’s major Black Sea fleet based at Sevastopol.
NATO’s statement announcing Sea Breeze denounced “Russia's illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014,” in response to which “NATO has increased its presence in the Black Sea. NATO supports Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity within its internationally recognized borders, extending to its territorial waters. NATO does not and will not recognize Russia's illegal and illegitimate annexation of Crimea and denounces its temporary occupation.”
The exercise began despite Russia’s warnings last week against further incursions into its territory. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said after the Defender incident, “Over the past seven years, the intensity of flights of strategic bomber aviation of the US Air Force in Europe has increased 14-fold.” He noted that seven joint military exercises with the alliance countries are planned in Ukraine in 2021 alone.
The war danger is being heightened daily in one of the world’s major flashpoints. Russia’s response to NATO operations on its borders has been a substantial show of force. Russia’s Defense Ministry said that its navy closely monitored the USS Ross as it entered the Black Sea.
The previous day Russia began its own large scale military exercises in the eastern Mediterranean, where the main ship in the UK’s/NATO’s Carrier Strike Group, the HMS Queen Elizabeth aircraft carrier, is located.
Russia’s manoeuvres involved several warships, two submarines, long-range Tu-22M3 bombers and other warplanes. According to the Russian Defense Ministry, two MiG-31 fighter jets capable of carrying Kinzhal hypersonic missiles, operating from the Moscow-run Hemeimeem airbase in Syria, practiced strikes on targets in the Mediterranean. The missiles can travel at 10 times the speed of sound and have a range of up to 2,000 kilometres (about 1,250 miles). The Washington Post reported that it was the “first time the warplanes capable of carrying Kinzhal have been deployed outside Russia’s borders.”
Russia’s submarine arsenal is also being massively upgraded. Last month the Russian Navy launched the Kazan, its first Yasen-M-class nuclear-powered guided missile submarine and the first of seven under construction.
This ratcheting up of Russia’s military operations follows the May 31 announcement by Defense Minister Shoigu that Vladimir Putin’s government will establish a further 20 military bases in the country’s west before the year’s end. NATO’s continuing encirclement and operations near Russia’s borders would “destroy the international security system and force us to take the relevant countermeasures,' Shoigu said.
With the world’s attention focused on the dangerous events in the Black Sea, Russia’s military, including destroyers and fighter jets, also carried out military exercises on June 19 within 35 miles of Hawaii. According to the Daily Mail, these were the “largest war games since Cold War” and involved “at least 20 Russian warships, submarines, and support vessels, flanked by 20 fighter jets…”
The Russian Defence Minister said that during the exercise, two detachments “worked out the tasks of detecting, countering and delivering missile strikes against an aircraft carrier strike group of a mock enemy.”
NATO’s reckless provocations against Moscow can spill over into outright conflict at any time—a danger the military heads of the major imperialist nations is well aware of.
Speaking at the Chalke Valley History Festival in England, just two days after Russia fired upon HMS Defender, General Sir Nick Carter, the head of the UK’s armed forces, pointed out that such events could rapidly escalate out of control into a shooting war. “The thing that keeps me awake in bed at night is a miscalculation that comes from unwarranted escalation,” he said.
In an extraordinary intervention given that Sea Breeze was just hours away from launch, Carter, an anti-Kremlin hawk, said, “The sort of thing we saw in the Black Sea on Monday and Tuesday is the sort of thing it could come from. It wouldn’t have done on that occasion but it’s the type of thing one needs to think quite hard about.”
For four days, tens of thousands of Palestinians have taken to the streets across the West Bank demanding an end to the Palestinian Authority (PA) and the presidency of Mahmoud Abbas. The mass anti-PA protests followed the death of Nazar Banat, an activist and critic of the PA, who died after being arrested and beaten by security forces on Thursday morning.
Protesters marched through the streets accusing the PA of killing Banat and chanting slogans that included “Go away, go away, Abbas,” “Abu Mazen [Abbas] is a traitor,” “The people say, ‘Down with the Authority!’” and “The people want to overthrow the regime!”
Some 15,000 people took part in Banat’s funeral procession in the southern city of Hebron on Friday, chanting, “Your blood won’t be in vain,” while several hundred Palestinians gathered for Friday prayers at the al-Aqsa mosque in occupied East Jerusalem, chanting anti-Abbas slogans and accusing the PA of acting as “Israel’s spies.”
Angry demonstrators carry pictures of Palestinian Authority outspoken critic Nizar Banat and chant anti PA slogans during a rally protesting his death before clashing with riot police, in the West Bank city of Ramallah, Saturday, June 26, 2021.
More demonstrations are planned, while protests in support have taken place internationally, in Boston, Beirut, London and Amman.
The protests highlight the growing anger on the part of the Palestinians over terrible economic and social conditions amid the systemic corruption of the PA, which serves as Israel’s subcontractor in the decades-long Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza, while enriching a handful of Palestinian families. The PA is dominated by the Fatah movement within the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) that was led by Yasser Arafat, the international symbol of Palestinian resistance, until his death in 2004.
In a pre-dawn raid Thursday morning, at least 20 Palestinian security force officers arrested the 44-year-old father of five Nazar Banat, who had long been a vocal critic of Abbas and the PA on social media, excoriating the PA for its corruption, close security cooperation with Israel’s military forces and handling of the pandemic. One of his last Facebook posts attacked Abbas for his botched effort to secure vaccines from Israel that turned out to be too close to their expiry date to be used in time.
A former member of Fatah, Banat had campaigned on the Freedom and Dignity List in the election that Abbas called off in April after it became clear his Fatah faction would lose. The PA cited as a pretext Israel’s refusal to guarantee that Palestinians in East Jerusalem would be able to vote. Suha Arafat, Arafat’s widow, called for PA Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh to resign after Banat’s murder.
Banat had been arrested and detained eight times in the last 14 years, most recently seven weeks ago, and survived several assassination attempts. He was, according to Al-Jazeera, in hiding and sleeping at the home of one of his uncles in the H2 area of Hebron that is under the direct control of Israel’s security forces, suggesting that the Israeli security forces had given the PA permission to enter the neighbourhood and arrest him.
The Hebron governorate claimed that Banat’s “health deteriorated” after his arrest and he was taken to hospital semi-conscious where he was later pronounced dead. A Palestinian coroner, however, stated that Banat had died within one hour of his arrest due to “blows to the body including to the head, chest, and lower and upper parts of his body,” with evidence of bruises and fractures across his body. This prompted an angry demonstration later that day in Ramallah, the seat of the PA administration, that was broken up with great force by the PA’s security forces.
Palestinian security forces launched tear gas and stun grenades against protesters in Ramallah on Saturday, attacking the crowd, hitting at least four journalists, including a reporter for the Middle East Eye, all of whom were clearly identifiable as reporters, and confiscating their mobile phones. They blocked demonstrators from approaching the presidential offices in the city centre, closing off the area and forcing shops to close. Video clips have circulated of plainclothes security forces beating and dragging a protester across the road. Other protests took place in Al-Bireh and Hebron.
While Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh has promised an investigation, no one believes it will reveal the truth or that anyone will be held accountable or punished.
The United States, Canada and the European Union issued the usual pro forma expressions of concern over Banat’s death, condemning the security services’ actions. Such statements are utterly hypocritical given that the imperialist powers play a major role in funding, training and politically justifying the PA’s security services in Israel’s interest.
The PA’s security services were set up under the 1993 Oslo Accords that criminalized the armed struggle while supposedly promising a mini-Palestinian state through negotiations with Israel. The various branches employ 83,000 people or one security officer for every 50 Palestinians in the occupied territories, one of the highest ratios in the world. They account for nearly half of all the PA’s employees at a cost of almost $1 billion, a sum equal to around 30 percent of total international aid to Palestinians.
Far from securing their safety from Israel’s military oppression and settlement expansion, the PA’s multiple security services serve to suppress the Palestinian people in the interests of the Israeli and Palestinian bourgeoisie, without even the fig leaf of democratic control, accountability or elections. The recently cancelled vote was the fifth abortive attempt to hold elections since the last in January 2006, when the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated group Hamas, much to everyone’s surprise, defeated Fatah.
Abbas suspended the PA’s security coordination with Israel in May 2020 in protest over President Donald Trump’s “deal of the century” that purported to bring “peace” based on Israel’s annexation of the settlements, but he resumed relations with Israel in November when it became clear Democrat Joe Biden had won the presidency. This was despite the PA’s rejection of the Abraham Accords under which the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain—with the green light from its puppet master Saudi Arabia--Morocco and Sudan established formal diplomatic relations with Israel.
Israel’s withholding of the tax transfers due to the PA during the suspension of relations, amounting to some $1 billion, brought the PA to the point of bankruptcy, forcing it to declare a state of emergency amid the COVID pandemic.
The resumption of security coordination with Israel signified Abbas’s recognition that the PA cannot exert authority and its leaders secure access to privileges or wealth without the security services, as well as the tacit acceptance of the Abraham Accords.
This decision portended ever greater concessions to Israel, including the ending of payments to the families of the 4,500 Palestinian political prisoners held in Israel jails, to avoid Israel’s punitive sanctions on the Palestinian banks transferring the funds. At the same time, the decision to resume relations with Israel intensified the divisions within Fatah and antagonised Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the secular Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 has increasingly orientated towards Iran.
The 11-day assault on Gaza in May further discredited Abbas. The PA stood back as Israel violently suppressed protests in support of the Palestinians facing eviction in Sheikh Jarrah and other neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem, stormed the al-Aqsa Mosque compound during Ramadan and bombed Gaza, bolstering Hamas’s popularity.
Washington and the major powers have insisted that any aid for reconstruction in Gaza must be channeled through the PA in order to shore it up at the expense of Hamas, with US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken visiting Ramallah in May in a show of support for Abbas, whose approval rating has sunk to an all-time low.
The PA has stepped up its political arrests and the detention of people without trial in the West Bank as the Palestinians in the West Bank and Israel protested against the actions of the Israeli authorities in East Jerusalem, the vigilante gangs of Jewish extremists that incited violence in mixed towns and cities and the bombardment of Gaza. This comes amid Israel’s arrest of more than 2,150, of whom 90 percent were Palestinian Israelis, up until June 10.
The situation has exacerbated the internal divisions within the PA, with Nasri Abu Jaish, the PA’s minister of labour, resigning on Monday and pulling his Palestinian People's Party out of the PA due to “its lack of respect for laws and public freedoms.”
Over the last several years, news of a “racial wealth gap” has flooded America’s airwaves and print media. According to those pushing the concept, white Americans have a great deal more in all respects than black Americans, and that, therefore, race-based remedies tailored to upper income blacks—such as reparations, set-asides, and affirmative action—must be deployed.
New apartment buildings are under construction overlooking Central Park, Tuesday, April 17, 2018, in New York. (AP Photo - Mark Lennihan)
These racialist politics share one common feature: They leave untouched the actual source of social inequality for workers of all races—capitalism.
The concept of the racial wealth gap, and the attendant idea of “white privilege,” have been promoted by academics for some time, but it is only recently that they have appeared broadly in the news media. An analysis of newspaper articles on the archive Newspapers.com shows that the terms “racial wealth gap,” “racial wealth divide,” “racial inequality,” and “white privilege” appeared 4,689 times in the 1990s and then more than tripled in the 2010s, reaching 15,758 mentions. Over the 2020s—that is, just the last year-and-a-half—there have already been 10,658 references to these terms. By contrast, during the 1960s, the height of the civil rights era, they only appeared 4,560 times.
The deluge coincides with a massive growth in overall wealth and income inequality in the US and globally. The wealthiest 10 percent of US households owns 34.5 times more than the bottom 50 percent, and over the course of just 2020 they increased their fortune by more than $18.8 trillion—about $1.53 million per household, with far higher going to the super-rich. As the richest of all races have seen their fortunes climb into the stratosphere and their counterparts in the bottom 90 percent have seen theirs stagnate and crumble, an obsessive focus on race has emerged. It is being pumped into the veins of American society. The purpose is to transform a looming class war into a race war.
The argument that the racial wealth gap is the most salient feature of American society today is, to be blunt, a fraud. It is based on the tendentious selection and presentation of data. There is nothing about it that is remotely progressive or left-wing, much less Marxist, as those on the political right claim.
Before delving into the data, it is essential to underscore one point. Race is neither biologically real nor socially immutable. But when it comes to the creation of categories of people for the purposes of social analysis, it is assumed that it is. The data spin around the idea that there is some sort of clear distinction as to what constitutes a “white household” and what constitutes a “black household,” even though people have always formed, and increasingly continue to form, family bonds across these lines.
Each “racial group” in fact subsumes within it populations with extremely different histories. So-called “white households” may include the children of Appalachian coal miners, Soviet-Jewish immigrants from the Caucasus, Persians from modern-day Iran, Spaniards from the Mediterranean, Arabs from Morocco, the great-great-great grandchildren of American slaves, dispossessed Palestinians, and so on. So-called “black households” might include some of the same groups, as well as Caribbean islanders, individuals from the Indian subcontinent, French immigrants of west African descent, etc.
But census forms, surveys, and medical histories require Americans to adopt some sort of racial identity. The resulting data is then utilized to argue that race is the overwhelming determinant of social reality—regardless of whether it is personally meaningful or significant in explaining any given individual’s place in the social structure. All other factors—such as language, culture, citizenship status, time of arrival in the United States, role in the labor force, and, above all, class—are regarded as small change in the face of the concept of race.
Thedata
When investigating the racial wealth gap, mean and median wealth for different racial groups is commonly cited to demonstrate the existence of universal “white privilege.” Analysts and commentators draw on different data sources, generally surveys, the census, and tax records, of which the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) is frequently cited.
In 2020, the Federal Reserve published the results of its 2019 Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF). The data were picked up by the media, with news articles on the findings appearing in many press outlets. According to the SCF:
In 2019, the typical white family had $188,200 in wealth and the typical Black family had $24,100… [T]he typical White family has $50,600 in equities they could tap into in an emergency compared to just $14,400 for the typical Black family and $14,900 for the typical Hispanic family… The typical White families’ home value is $230,000 and the typical other families’ home value is $310,000. The typical Black and Hispanic families’ home values are lower, at $150,000 and $200,000, respectively…. While the typical Black or Hispanic family has $2,000 or less in liquid savings, the typical White family has more than four times that amount [emphases added].
In the Federal Reserve’s ten pages of analysis of the SCF, “typical” appears 25 times. The use of the word gives the impression that the great majority of whites possess eight times more, own homes worth $80,000 more, and have quadruple the financial reserves of their black counterparts. This implies that white families are overwhelmingly comfortable and secure, and that they have tidy bundles in the bank.
But this is an intentionally distorted portrait of social reality. In order to arrive at it, analysts have to do several things. First, they attach to mathematical measures a social meaning that they lack. Second, they remain silent about the scale of inequality that exists within racial groups, and within societyas a whole, both of which dwarf by many times the racial wealth gap. Third, they focus on strata of whites and blacks and make no mention of the absolute numbers of people that these percentages encompass. Because the white population is five to six times the size of the black population, even if lower percentages of white households are poor, in aggregate tens of millions of whites—actually more—share the same level of social deprivation as the most oppressed minorities.
Returning to the question of the median wealth of white versus black households, it is essential to realize that the description of this value as reflective of the wealth of the “typical” or “average” white family in the US is deceptive. A median is a halfway point in a data set. When dealing with wealth and income, in which there is a massive chasm between the best and least-well off, a median is often a better measure of the overall situation than a mean (commonly referred to as an “average”), which is pulled upward by the super wealthy and extremely high-income earners. However, under situations in which there are very high levels of inequality, a median also hides more than it reveals.
Using the median, SCF data found that half of all white families own more, and half own less, than $188,200, compared to $24,100 for the fiftieth percentile division among black families. But what is lost by focusing on the median for the white population as a whole is the fact that among those who own less than the median, tens of millions of families own vastly less. Massive numbers of white households are not experiencing anything like this allegedly “typical” reality.
According to SCF data, the bottom 20 percent of white households—18.6 million (using an average household size of 2.53, about 47 million people)—own virtually nothing or are so indebted that the total value of their wealth is negative. Their reality is shared by the 30 percent of black households—4.5 million (approximately 11 million people)—and 20 percent of Latino households—3.4 million (an estimated 8.6 million people). Using different data, economist Gabriel Zucman calculated in 2014 that as much as 50 percent of the total US population—nearly 160 million people at the time—has zero or negative wealth.
In other words, forthe tens of millions of householdsthat have zero or negative wealth, the “racial wealth gap” is a meaningless concept. It does not exist. Regardless of skin color, no one has anything. A more “equitable” distribution of wealth across the lower strata of racial groups would not pay a single bill for a poor black family, for the simple reason that you cannot divide something that does not exist.
The United States is a sea of multi-racial destitution. According to the analysis of SCF data by Matt Bruenig with the People’s Policy Project, the poorest 10 percent of the US population is about 54 percent white, 27 percent black, 12 percent Hispanic, and 3 percent some other group. The next most impoverished layer is 42 percent white, 32 percent black, 20 percent Hispanic, and 5 percent other. And the third one up from the bottom is 53 percent white, 20 percent black, 20 percent Hispanic and 7 percent other. When one gets to the top three deciles of wealth holders, the racial composition begins to strongly favor whites. The largest imbalance exists in the highest tier. The racial wealth gap is primarily meaningful for elite African Americans, who are frustrated at being underrepresented where the vast majority of net worth is concentrated.
Looking at the middle of the wealth pyramid, white households whose net worth puts them in the fifth decile (the 40th to 50th percentiles) control just 1.5 percent of the total $93.82 trillion possessed by white households, according to the Federal Reserve. Imagining this tiny share could be spread evenly among all families in that decile group, it would amount to about $151,200 per household. This is $30,000 shy of the median wealth of white households as a whole, which is $188,200, and about 16 percent of the mean wealth of all white households, which stands at around $950,000.
White Household Wealth Share by White Wealth Decile (2019)
The fifth decile of black households possess only 0.9 percent of the approximately $4.46 trillion held by all households in this racial categorization. If we divided this share up evenly among fifth-decile black households, we find an average wealth for black families of about $26,760. White households in the parallel bracket, in other words, own about 5.5 times more than black households because African Americans are overrepresented among the poor. According to the racial wealth gap proponents, having $151,200—which as Federal Reserve data show will be largely comprised of a partially paid off mortgage and a small retirement fund—is an incredible level of “white privilege.”
Black Household Wealth Share by Black Wealth Decile (2019)
However, when we consider the privilege that accrues to the richest households of all races, the real stratification in society becomes evident. Today, the top 10 percent of white households control 74.4 percent of all the wealth for that group. The situation for rich blacks is similar. They have 70.6 percent of everything held by their racial category as a whole. Imagining that this is divided equally among the white households in the top 10 percent, each would have a net worth of $7.5 million. The equivalent number for black households is “only” $2.1 million.
Inequality is greater among black households than among white households. The average wealth of top white households and the fifth decile of white households—technically families that fall somewhere near the middle of the wealth pyramid—differs by a factor of nearly 50. Comparing black households at the top to blacks in the fifth decile yields a difference of 78.5 times.
Looking at the data cross-racially, we also see big differences between the wealthiest black families and middle class white families, with the former being 14 times richer than the latter. This gives the lie to the claim that “all whites” enjoy “skin privilege.”
Fifth vs. Top Decile Average Wealth of Black and White Households (2019)
The gap between the wealthiest white and wealthiest black households is 3.5 times, tiny compared to what exists more broadly in society. But because the volume of assets at stake at the upper echelons is so large, such a discrepancy is intolerable to the richest African Americans.
Since the first quarter of 2020, total white household wealth has grown by $21.3 trillion and total black household wealth has increased by $1.12 trillion. Again, the racial wealth gap proponents point to the fact that white household wealth grew by far more than that of black households. But as the increase for both groups was driven by an extraordinary run-up in stocks, of which the bottom 50 percent of the population owns just 0.7 percent compared to 87.2 percent for the top 10 percent, virtually all of this wealth has been captured by the rich of all races. Of the entirety of the wealth generated over the course of 2020, the bottom half of the population shared in just 2.8 percent.
In addition to net worth, it is often emphasized that “typical” white families have significantly more back-up reserves than blacks and Hispanics. Again, an image of relative security is imposed on white families. But this betrays, on the part of the government analysts, journalists, and academics with six-figure salaries, a complete lack of understanding of how what most people have really stacks up against the economic burdens they face.
The SCF data show that the average black, Latino, and white families have somewhere between $14,000 and $50,000 of equities (including stocks, mutual funds, and retirement accounts) that theoretically could be transformed into cash in the event of an emergency. In addition, the “typical” white family has $8,000 in liquid savings compared to the “typical” black family with just $2,000. That is, white households, it would appear, have about four times as much.
But these numbers simply do not apply to the bottom 20 to 30 percent of any racial group, who own nothing. And four times a pittance is still a pittance. While some white households are in a better position to hold out against financial blows for a longer period of time, in the event of a job loss, unexpected medical bill, major home repair, or similar disaster, tens of thousands of dollars can swiftly evaporate.
A 2018 report, based on a survey also conducted by the Federal Reserve, found that four out of ten adults said they could not cope with an unexpected expense of just $400—the equivalent of a set of tires blown out on a freeway or a flu test not covered by insurance—without taking out a loan, overdrawing on their bank account, borrowing from a friend or family member, or simply not paying the bill. Among this group are tens of millions of people from all races.
This data took on a human face during the COVID-19 crisis in the form of miles-long lines of cars that appeared at food banks. Those queues were made up of families of all backgrounds who, it seems, somehow did not get the memo about their net worth, equity, and liquid savings calculated by the “racial wealth gap” specialists.
It must be stressed that the way the Federal Reserve measures net worth minimizes the wealth of the very richest, who are very adept at hiding their fortunes, while overstating the wealth in the working class. In its calculation of household net worth, the Federal Reserve includes unfunded pensions, for instance, of which 99 percent are promised to government employees. When the 2019 SCF data were released, analysts highlighted the fact that more white households tend to have pensions and retirement accounts than black households. However, as Gabriel Zucman and Emanuel Saez noted in September 2020, unfunded pensions are not backed by anything. They actually have no real value.
Conclusion
The overrepresentation of black families in the poorest strata of society is the outcome of history—namely, specific forms of capitalist exploitation for which racism provided ideological justification, including slavery and sharecropping. Historically, African Americans have suffered from horrendous forms of prejudice and discrimination, with many pushed into the most oppressed layers of the population as a consequence. But the origins of racism do not lie in the “DNA” of white people, as is claimed by the NewYorkTimes 1619 Project, but in capitalism. The capitalist class foments divisions among workers in order to exercise its rule. All those who insist that the racial wealth gap, not the class gap, is most important division in society do the same.
The dire conditions facing masses of black workers today arise out of a sweeping assault on living standards that started in the 1960s and 1970s and was overseen by both Democrats and Republicans, black and white. The advances of the civil rights movement and mass entry of African Americans into industrial work in northern cities during the post-World War II era had just begun to lift sections of that population out of the extreme poverty and oppression of the Jim Crow era. For a short time, some black workers began to share in the rising living standards of the American working class, experiencing modest gains that were won through hard-fought class battles. But the weakening global position of American capitalism led the US ruling class to determine that such concessions were intolerable. While the South, where many blacks lived, remained poor, deindustrialization hammered northern city after city, such as Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and Cleveland, which were home to millions of blacks. African American workers shared the fate of their class as a whole: job losses, wage cuts, collapsing property values, the destruction of whole communities.
But a narrow layer, including a black elite, shared in the spoils of the wreckage. In the 1970s, as the assault on the working class intensified, affirmative action, “black capitalism,” and “black power” in the form of black mayors, police chiefs, and school boards were part of the thin gruel dished out to the residents of America’s hollowed-out cities. They did nothing for the overwhelming majority of the African American population, but a great deal for a small few. The obsession with the racial wealth gap is intended to obscure these class realities, hide this history, and drown class anger in a toxic swamp of racial hatred.
Social scientists expend incredible effort to suppress the reality of social class. Unlike race, class is not a scientifically false category. It arises objectively from control over the means of production. There are those who own great wealth and those who labor to produce it. But in contemporary American sociology, class is, at best, of tertiary interest, important to the allegedly more decisive categories of “race, gender, and sexuality” only as it “intersects” with them. More often it is treated as essentially meaningless.
Trotsky once explained that behind every social categorization is a political prognosis. Those that insist that universal “white privilege” is the cornerstone of modern American reality demand more racial “equity.” In doing so, they reveal more than they intend to. In the original meaning of the term, to have “equity” means to own stocks. Indeed, this is what they are after. It is to be achieved by impoverishing a section of the white population, ensuring that poor blacks stay poor, and growing the share of total wealth that goes to the African American population at the top. Class inequality is not only to remain untouched, it is to be defended, deepened, and expanded.
