New board of directors restores Sam Altman as CEO of OpenAI

Kevin Reed

Sam Altman, left, CEO of OpenAI, appears onstage with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella at OpenAI DevDay, OpenAI's first developer conference, on Monday, Nov. 6, 2023 in San Francisco. [AP Photo/Barbara Ortutay]

Late Tuesday, Sam Altman was reinstated as CEO of the artificial intelligence technology company OpenAI, the firm behind the massively popular chatbot called ChatGPT.

As part of the arrangements to bring Altman back, OpenAI agreed to replace three of four members of the board of directors. These measures took place following the demand made by more than 90 percent of the OpenAI staff in an open letter signed on Monday that they would quit and go to work for Microsoft unless Altman was brought back as CEO and the entire board resigned.

In a post on X (formerly Twitter), OpenAI wrote, “We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI as CEO with a new initial board of Bret Taylor (Chair), Larry Summers, and Adam D’Angelo. We are collaborating to figure out the details. Thank you so much for your patience through this.”

OpenAI’s President Greg Brockman also agreed to return after having previously resigned in solidarity with Altman. Brockman is no longer on the board and another member, Ilya Sutskever, who is the chief research scientist at OpenAI and was involved in the initial removal of Altman, has also left the board.

In his own post on X, Altman wrote, “I love openai, and everything i’ve done over the past few days has been in service of keeping this team and its mission together,” adding that he was looking forward to returning to the company and “building on our strong partnership” with Microsoft, its biggest investor.

For its part, Microsoft also endorsed the OpenAI leadership moves. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella statement on X said, “We are encouraged by the changes to the OpenAI board. We believe this is a first essential step on a path to more stable, well-informed, and effective governance.”

Nadella added that Microsoft, which has a $2.8 trillion Wall Street market value, is likewise looking forward “to building on our strong partnership and delivering the value of this next generation of AI to our customers and partners.”

In a press statement, Thrive Capital, a venture capital firm and major shareholder that recently estimated the value of the artificial intelligence company at $90 billion, said of the restoration Altman and Brockman, “OpenAI has the potential to be one of the most consequential companies in the history of computing. Sam and Greg (Brockman) possess a profound commitment to the company’s integrity, and an unmatched ability to inspire and lead. … We believe this is the best outcome for the company, its employees, those who build on their technologies, and the world at large.”

The leadership crisis at OpenAI erupted one week ago when the company announced that Altman “would depart as CEO and leave the board of directors” because he had not been “consistently candid in his communications with the board.” An official company statement did not provide details about the reasons for the decision other than to say that the board “no longer had confidence” that Altman could lead OpenAI.

The new appointments to the board—Taylor, a former Google, Facebook, Twitter and Salesforce.com executive and Summers, the former Treasury secretary under Barack Obama and president of Harvard University (2001-2006)—along with the retention of D’Angelo, the current CEO of the question and answer site Quora, were part of the negotiations to bring Altman back as CEO of OpenAI.

According to a report in the New York Times based on comments from two unnamed people who were “in touch with the board,” D’Angelo led the arrangements which were “in place by late Sunday.” The Times said, “Determining the composition of the board slowed down the decision to bring Mr. Altman back,” and “OpenAI called the new board its ‘initial’ board, indicating it could expand.”

The Times also reported that “a person close to the board’s deliberations on Tuesday” said that D’Angelo and two other former board members, Tasha McCauley and Helen Toner, had pressed for unspecified concessions from Altman that included “an independent investigation into his leadership of OpenAI.” In the end, however, McCauley and Toner were forced to step down while D’Angelo was retained, and Altman and Brockman were also blocked from returning to the board.

Clearly, the appointment of Summers to the OpenAI board with the backing of Microsoft indicates that the ruling establishment is inserting a trusted representative of US financial, political and national security interests into the leadership turmoil at the world’s most influential AI company.

The release of the preview edition of the OpenAI text-based human conversation simulator called ChatGPT almost exactly one year ago led to the fastest mass adoption of a new technology in the history of the computer and information age. Within a few months more than 100 million people signed up for free online access to ChatGPT, which can automate the process of scientific research, create various forms of technical, legal and journalism writing, software development, language translation and solve complicated math problems, just to name a few uses.

Following the popular response to ChatGPT, numerous other consumer and business tools have been released that create images, photos, drawings or paintings based on a text description (Dall-E 2), create royalty-free music based on various inputs such as genre, instruments, mood and length of time (Soundraw), and generate new video content based on text and video input (Gen-1).

While many of these AI tools have been made available to individual users, Wall Street corporate and financial interests anticipate the greatest impact of artificial intelligence to be derived from increases in accuracy and productivity that will drive significant cost reductions across industry.

The automation of intellectual labor represented by artificial intelligence has the potential to eliminate much workplace drudgery and reduce necessary working time significantly, freeing people to engage many other forms of activity. But under capitalism, such developments in the productive forces are used to intensify exploitation, drive down the conditions of life for workers and amass even greater profits for the capitalist class.

The impact of AI on the healthcare, finance, transportation, manufacturing, entertainment and retail industries is expected to drive up capitalist profits by streamlining processes, automating decision-making, and, above all, eliminating jobs through automation derived from accessing vast stores of information and data.

According to a study published by Goldman Sachs Research in April, as the latest wave of generative AI technologies “work their way into businesses and society,” they could “drive a 7% (or almost $7 trillion) increase in global GDP and lift productivity growth by 1.5 percentage points over a 10-year period.”

Furthermore, the authors of the Goldman Sachs report, economists Joseph Briggs and Devesh Kodnani, wrote, “Despite significant uncertainty around the potential for generative AI, its ability to generate content that is indistinguishable from human-created output and to break down communication barriers between humans and machines reflects a major advancement with potentially large macroeconomic effects.”

Goldman Sachs, a multinational investment bank and financial services company with $2.55 trillion in global assets under management, says that the impact of AI on labor productivity depends on the specific application and speed of adoption. In general, however, Briggs and Kodnani project that “Shifts in workflows triggered by these advances could expose the equivalent of 300 million full-time jobs to automation.”

Meanwhile, the US military deployment of autonomous weapons and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) is moving ahead rapidly to integrate artificial intelligence tools into its present proxy war operations in Ukraine against Russia and in the preparations for war with China.

A report by Associated Press in January said that the use of drones in Ukraine has accelerated the trend toward deploying “the world’s first fully autonomous fighting robots to the battlefield, inaugurating a new age of warfare.”

The Pentagon is on a quest to develop drones that can “identify, select and attack targets without help from humans,” and this would “mark a revolution in military technology as profound as the introduction of the machine gun,” first introduced in 1884 and used widely in the imperialist slaughter of World War I.

The race to be the first to develop, in the next few years, lethal autonomous weapons (LAWs) is a top priority of the US military. In a program called Replicator, the AP report says the Pentagon “is intent on fielding multiple thousands of relatively inexpensive, expendable AI-enabled autonomous vehicles by 2026 to keep pace with China.”

AP also quoted the statements of Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks last August that the Replicator initiative seeks to “galvanize progress in the too-slow shift of U.S. military innovation to leverage platforms that are small, smart, cheap, and many.”

This is the corporate and military context within which the leadership crisis at OpenAI has erupted and no matter what political, philosophical or business differences led to Sam Altman’s firing and subsequent rehiring, the turmoil was the result of a ferocious struggle within the ruling class over who will be in control of these revolutionary technologies and what they will be used for.

Study finds that SARS-CoV-2 can shut down mitochondria, the cellular “power plants”

Bill Shaw

A recent study published by the journal Science Translational Medicine found that SARS-CoV-2 infection inhibits the ability of mitochondria to produce energy in the body’s cells. This is the latest of thousands of studies published on the myriad negative impacts of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, underscoring the reckless and criminal character of the “herd immunity” mass infection policy now in place globally amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

The mitochondrion is often referred to as the “powerplant of the cell” because of its key role in making a compound called adenosine triphosphate or ATP. ATP is ubiquitous in cells, playing a crucial role in a vast array of cellular processes by providing the energy needed to make them happen.

The mitochondrion has five major enzyme complexes involving 160 polypeptides that carry out the process of ATP production. These polypeptides are encoded by the DNA in both the mitochondrion itself and the cell’s nucleus.

Mitochondrial observation in epidermal layer of cassia occidentalis, stained with Janus Green B, a basic dye and vital stain used in histology. [Photo by Krishna satya 333 / CC BY-SA 4.0]

The study, produced by a multi-institutional group of researchers led by a team at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and the COVID-19 International Research Team (COV-IRT), found that SARS-CoV-2 can shut down cellular manufacture of key polypeptides in the five enzyme complexes. The mechanism by which it does so is to prevent transcription of the genes that encode the polypeptides into messenger RNA or mRNA.

The cell uses mRNA to build polypeptides in the process of translation. When transcription is suppressed, there are fewer mRNAs available to translate, and thus fewer polypeptides translated from them, in turn reducing the number of enzyme complexes in the mitochondrion for making ATP.

This phenomenon occurred in multiple tissues, including the mucosa of the nasopharynx, the heart, lungs, kidneys, and lymph nodes. In some cases, once the immune system cleared the SARS-CoV-2 virus, cells were able to resume production of the complexes. But in human autopsy specimens, the researchers found that production of these complexes in many tissues remained suppressed beyond viral clearance.

The researchers hypothesized that sustained suppression of mitochondrial energy production in the heart and kidneys resulted in the death of the patients they studied at autopsy. They also conjecture that ongoing inhibition of the mitochondria after infection in survivors might also play a role in the symptoms of Long COVID, especially general fatigue and malaise, two of the most common and often debilitating symptoms suffered by Long COVID patients.

Notably, at autopsy there was a tissue differential in whether genes encoding the peptides making up the enzyme complexes remained suppressed after viral clearance. In particular, lung tissue uniformly rebounded, with upregulation of the genes in order to make up for the deficit incurred during viral infection. In the heart, the sustained post-infection suppression was total, whereas it was only partial in the kidneys and lymph nodes.

The study found that not all polypeptides that compose the five enzyme complexes were suppressed. Indeed, the cell attempted to upregulate manufacture of the enzyme complexes in response to the deficit of ATP. Those genes not suppressed by the virus were upregulated, with increasing transcription and thus increasing translation and abundance of the associated polypeptides. However, without the missing polypeptides that were suppressed, assembly of additional enzyme complexes was blocked.

The researchers found other effects of SARS-CoV-2 on the mitochondrion. First, it induces the transcription of other mitochondrial genes that activate the immune system’s inflammatory response. Second, it suppresses the transcription of genes involved in a host of other mitochondrial functions. Third, it promotes the process of glycolysis—which converts glucose to pyruvate. This latter effect is important to viral replication because pyruvate is a substrate used to create lipids and nucleic acids, which are important in the process of creating new virions in the cell.

The finding that SARS-CoV-2 shuts down ATP production in mitochondria of cells is surprising. A review from 2022 of viral effects on mitochondria makes no mention of anything similar. It also suggests mechanisms for the higher fatality rates of SARS-CoV-2 infection relative to other viruses such as influenza, as well as for some of the symptomatology of Long COVID. These subjects—as well as the mechanism by which mitochondrial energy production remains suppressed after viral clearance—require further study.

This study illustrates once again why novel pandemic viruses must be taken seriously and confronted with the full force of modern public health approaches to limit viral spread. The indifference of the ruling class and its dismissal of SARS-CoV-2 as being merely “a cold” or “the flu” fly in the face of numerous studies showing that SARS-CoV-2 is a virus like none other that humanity has yet confronted. It is far more consequential than its predecessors, and thus the total repudiation of a proper public health response amounts to an unprecedented social crime.

Health crisis in Gaza intensifies as Israel deepens its genocidal attack

Benjamin Mateus

The healthcare crisis in Gaza has grown more catastrophic as a result of the continued shelling by the Israel Defense Forces—a grotesque contradiction in nomenclature—of the 140-square-mile enclave that is home to 2.3 million people.

Approximately 1.7 million Palestinians (three-quarters of the population of Gaza) have been internally displaced, without adequate shelter, water or food or access to medical treatment. According to a World Health Organization (WHO) report published on November 8, nearly 725,000 people had by then sought refuge at 149 United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) facilities. Another 122,000 were sheltering in “hospitals, churches and other public buildings.” Approximately 131,000 were being kept at 94 non-UNRWA schools, and the remainder with host families.

Israeli soldiers conduct combat operations at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. [AP Photo/Israel Defense Forces via AP]

The report noted:

As people face food shortages, malnutrition, and impending cold weather, they will be even more susceptible to contracting diseases. This is especially concerning for the more than 50,000 pregnant women and approximately 337,000 children under the age of five currently in Gaza.

Clearly, the targeting of hospitals, mosques and schools is intended both to terrorize the remaining population and to inflict as much damage as possible wherever large numbers of civilians are gathered to avoid attack from weapons of mass destruction.

Fundamentally, the attack on the healthcare system serves to ensure that no medical attention can be given to those who may have escaped immediate death from bullets and missiles, but have sustained potentially life-threatening injuries that require immediate care. If blood loss combined with lack of access to hydration and nutrition is not sufficient to ensure that the injured succumb, infection and disease will assuredly cause a horribly gruesome demise.

The current death toll is nearly 15,000 people, according to the Palestinian government media office, of which half are children. This figure is likely an undercount. More than 7,000 people are unaccounted for, including close to 5,000 children who are either buried under the rubble or whose remains have been decimated by the intense bombardment.

Given the complete and rapid collapse of the healthcare infrastructure in northern Gaza and the mass displacement of people, leading to the inundation of the remaining hospitals in southern Gaza, it can be expected that within the next few weeks, once Israel rearms and presses into southern Gaza, the entire healthcare delivery system in Gaza will become non-existent, worsening and compounding the already horrifying statistical indices of human devastation.

The recent images of mass graves with piles of bodies, both large and small, shrouded in white linen or blue plastic sheets—recalling the scenes of bodies piled high at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic—provide only a small window into the horrific crisis that has consumed the Palestinians over the last seven weeks, with the complete support of the Biden administration and the European heads of state.

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Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s injunction during the most deadly period of the pandemic to “let the bodies pile high” is equally descriptive of the policy of US and European imperialism today, as the US and its NATO allies foment a new world war, whose initial fronts are Ukraine and Gaza.

The favorable comments being made by political figures on the current pause in the fighting do not mean they are walking back their previous statements opposing a ceasefire or the drawing of “red lines” to limit the Netanyahu government’s policy of mass killing and ethnic cleansing. In point of fact, they are in complete agreement with Israel’s Final Solution to the Palestinian “problem.” Those politicians who praise the “humanitarian pause” as a step toward peace—such as Bernie Sanders in the US—consciously seek thereby to deflect the mass and intense opposition from the international working class to the genocidal policies being pursued by their respective national leaders, as witnessed by the hundreds of demonstrations demanding a ceasefire.

A statement issued on November 24 by Samantha Power, the administrator of the United States Agency for International Development, drips with hypocrisy and dishonesty. It reads:

The United States welcomes the pause in hostilities in Gaza as an opportunity to ramp up the safe delivery of life-saving humanitarian assistance to Palestinian civilians in grave need and facilitate the release of hostages captured by Hamas after 48 harrowing days of captivity.

Power, a veteran exponent of “human rights imperialism,” promoted the US regime-change military operation that overthrew Libya’s Gaddafi in 2011 as a member of Obama’s National Security Council. She then propagandized in support of the US effort to overthrow Bashar al-Assad in Syria while serving as US ambassador to the UN in 2013.

Her statement on the Gaza pause went on to boast of Washington’s “humanitarian efforts” to deliver food [500,000 pounds—a pittance] and solemnly pledged that “we will continue to emphasize to the parties the critical importance of protecting civilians in accordance with international humanitarian law.”

Needless to say, she made no mention of the billions in bombs, missiles, shells and other instruments of war funneled by the US to Israel to enable Washington’s military outpost in the Middle East to brutally suppress Palestinian resistance and now engage in genocide against the population of Gaza.

Such cynical statements are issued under conditions where sewage is flowing in the streets of Gaza. Health authorities are raising the alarm that dysentery and gastrointestinal diseases, including infectious diseases like cholera, will rapidly escalate.

Safe drinkable water is almost impossible to come by, and people are resorting to drinking contaminated water or seawater.

The WHO reports that there have been 40,000 cases of diarrhea, the bulk of them among children under five, and 70,000 acute respiratory infections. There have also been over 1,000 cases of chickenpox, amid concerns over a rise in the incidence of typhoid, cholera and measles. As winter approaches and the rains begin to fall, the inclement weather will worsen an already impossible situation.

Richard Brennan, the regional emergency director for the Eastern Mediterranean region at WHO, told Al Jazeera:

We are hearing about several hundred people per toilet at the UNRWA centers and those have been overflowing, so people are doing open defecation. They have to find a place to go to the bathroom in the grounds where they are staying. That’s a huge public health risk and also very humiliating.

While nearly the entirety of northern Gaza’s infrastructure has been devastated, in the south, to which people have been fleeing, all 76 water wells in the governates of Dier el-Balah, Khan Younis and Rafah are no longer operable, according to the UNRWA. The inoperable facilities include two main drinking water plants and 15 sewage pumping stations.

The average Gazan is currently limited to just 3 liters of water for drinking and sanitation, far less than the 7.5 liters the international agency recommends in emergency situations. Meanwhile, Israel is only allowing enough water for 4 percent of Gazans to trickle in.

The agency also noted that on Wednesday the Israeli authorities allowed just 23,000 liters of fuel into Gaza via Egypt, when 160,000 liters a day are required to adequately address the ongoing and urgent humanitarian crisis.

General Philippe Lazzarini, the UNRWA’s general commissioner, said at a press conference:

This fuel cannot be used for the overall humanitarian response, including for medical and water facilities or the work of UNRWA. It is appalling that fuel continues to be used as a weapon of war. This seriously paralyses our work and the delivery of assistance to the Palestinian communities in Gaza.

The coordinated attacks on Al-Shifa Hospital and now the Indonesian Hospital and Al-Awda Hospital in northern Gaza continue. Several doctors were killed at the latter on November 21—Mahmoud Abu Nujaila, Ahmad Al Sahar and Ziad Al-Tatari.

Doctors Without Borders (MSF) wrote of the situation at Al-Awda:

At time of writing, more than 200 patients are still in Al-Awda and are unable to receive the level of care they need. These patients must be urgently and safely evacuated to other hospitals that are still functioning, although all hospitals in Gaza have been working beyond their capacities since October due to ongoing shortages, attacks, and extremely high caseloads.

The group added:

This is yet another incident that MSF staff have been subjected to in the last few days. Our colleagues who are assisting hundreds of patients in Gaza are facing extremely difficult times in providing the little medical care they can. Seeing doctors killed next to hospital beds is beyond tragic, and this must stop now. Attacks on medical facilities are a serious violation of International Humanitarian Law, and this has become systematic in the past weeks.

Israel, in an attempt to defend its carnage against these healthcare systems, has been promoting the lie that Al-Shifa and other hospitals are being used as centers for Hamas’ operations, without providing a shred of evidence to back these claims. After taking over the besieged medical complex, the IDF arrested the director of Al-Shifa and held several doctors for questioning as they were evacuating patients via a WHO convoy.

A November 22 Flash Update noted that only two small hospitals in northern Gaza remain partially operational, with 22 out of service. In the south, only 7 of 11 medical facilities are still functioning, of which only one has the capacity to perform critical trauma care and complex surgery. Hundreds of patients with life-threatening injuries (including spinal cord injuries) and illnesses, including infants and children, remain in these non-functioning facilities.

Wounded Palestinians at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City following Israeli airstrikes. [AP Photo/Abed Khaled]

That Israel is deliberately targeting healthcare systems is confirmed by a November 19 column in Yediot Ahronot by by retired IDF Major General Giora Eiland titled, “Let’s not be intimidated by the world.”

Eiland explains why it is important to ensure Israel’s success in the conflict not just through “military combat” but also by destroying Gaza’s economic stability and access to energy. He writes:

Israel must therefore not provide the other side with any capability that prolongs its life. Moreover, we say that [Hamas Leader Yahya] Sinwar is so evil that he does not care if all the residents of Gaza die. Such a presentation is not accurate, since who are the “poor” women of Gaza? They are all the mothers, sisters or wives of Hamas murderers.

He adds:

The way to win the war faster and at a lower cost for us requires a system collapse on the other side and not the mere killing of more Hamas fighters. The international community warns us of a humanitarian disaster in Gaza and of severe epidemics. We must not shy away from this.

Neo-fascist Wilders wins Dutch general elections

Parwini Zora & Daniel Woreck

The November 22 Dutch general elections have yielded to Geert Wilders’ fascistic Party for Freedom (PVV) an unprecedented electoral gain at the polls. The PVV doubled its parliamentary seats in the Dutch Tweede Kamer from 17 in 2021 to 37 of the 150 seats, with 25 percent of the votes cast. This must be taken as a serious political warning to the Dutch and the international working class.

Geert Wilders, leader of the far-right party PVV, or Party for Freedom, talks to the media after a meeting with speaker of the House Vera Bergkamp, two days after Wilders won the most votes in a general election, in The Hague, Netherlands, Friday November 24, 2023. [AP Photo/Peter Dejong]

The election was a debacle for the right-wing parties in the caretaker coalition government of Prime Minister Mark Rutte, which all suffered humiliating losses. Rutte’s People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), led by Dilan Yesilgöz, collapsed from 34 to 24 seats. Similarly, the Social-Liberal Democrats (D66) fell from 24 to 9, the Christian-Democratic Appeal (CDA) from 15 to 5, and the Christian Union (CU) from 5 to 3.

The discredited Greens and the Labour Party (GL, PvdA) tried to position themselves as the lesser evil than the right-wing parties, issuing a joint manifesto and electoral slate led by former European Commissioner Frans Timmermans. However, this was insufficient to profit significantly from the collapse of Rutte’s allies. Tactical voting saw their totals rise from 17 to 25 seats, far behind Wilders’ PVV.

The newly-formed National Social Contract (NSC) party, led by former CDA parliamentarian Pieter Omtzigt, won 20 seats based on its empty calls for “good governance.” 

After the elections, Wilders spoke at a café in the North Sea town of Scheveningen, saying: “The Dutchman will be back in first place. The Netherlands has hope … the people of the Netherlands will get their country back, and the tsunami of refugees and immigrants will be limited.” 

Wilders addressed local media on Thursday and declared his ambitions to be prime minister, saying he was “in favour of a referendum on whether the Netherlands should leave the EU.” He added, “the first thing is a significant restriction on asylum and immigration. We don’t do that for ourselves, we do that for all Dutch people who voted for us.”

Far-right outfits across the globe congratulated Wilders, including Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, who said, “The winds of change are here!” and far-right Flemish politician Tom van Grieken, who declared, “Parties like ours are on their way in the whole of Europe.”

The Guardian called the Dutch election results “chilling,” Politico called it “the EU’s worst nightmare,” while the New York Times warned it could “send shockwaves throughout Europe.” Similarly, in the Netherlands, De Telegraaf declared that “the Netherlands turn right” and spoke of “a shockwave to the other parties.” De Volkskrant called it a “startling comeback of the PVV that creates major dilemmas,” with other media outlets following suit.

While the international press painted Wilders’ victory as a “shock” outcome, it was in reality the product of the policies of the entire Dutch and European ruling class.

Wilders’ win comes just two months after the arrival in power of Slovakia’s Robert Fico, who also pledged to cut immigration, and of far-right Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni. During his campaign, Wilders pledged to close the borders to all immigration, calling for a “Nexit,” the Dutch version of Brexit, and to “de-Islamize” the Netherlands. He called for a stop to providing arms to Ukraine and a staunch pro-Israel stance amid the unfolding war in Gaza.

The Dutch ruling elite and the major parties and media overwhelmingly ran the election campaign based on foul, anti-immigrant propaganda. The result was a poisonous election climate of distortions and confusion. According to certain estimates, as many as 60 percent of the voters were unsure whom to vote for, given that no candidate clearly articulated the real political questions of social austerity, war, and genocide in Gaza facing workers in the Netherlands and internationally.

The establishment parties legitimized Wilders not only by promoting anti-immigrant hatred but also by declaring their willingness to ally with him. In this, Rutte’s VVD played a leading role. In August, during the campaign, VVD leader and Justice Minister Dilan Yesilgöz emphasized that in regards to Wilders, she did not “want to keep the door shut as a matter of course.” She said, “I am more interested in who will be at the [negotiations] table and with what intentions.”

Later in the campaign, as it became clear that such positions strengthened the PVV at the VVD’s expense, Yesilgöz shifted her position again to deny plans to form a coalition with Wilders.

In Dutch official circles, it is admitted that not just the right-wing or social democratic parties but also the political forces tied to the parasitic Dutch trade union bureaucracy all joined in a xenophobic campaign that ultimately turned Wilders into a clear favorite.

“The main reasons voters have supported Wilders in these elections is his anti-immigration agenda, followed by his stance on the cost-of-living crisis and his healthcare position,” University of Amsterdam Professor Sarah de Lange told Politico. The mainstream parties “legitimised Wilders” by making immigration a key issue, she added. “Voters might have thought that if that is the issue at stake, why not vote for the original rather than the copy,” she said.

The central role in denying workers and youth the opportunity to vote for left-wing opposition to anti-immigrant hatreds was played by the ex-Maoist Socialist Party (SP). This party, which in recent years has in various polls won as much as 30 percent support, ran based on calls for harsher policies against asylum seekers. It was not spared by the broader election debacle, falling from 9 to 5 seats in parliament. Indeed, its election manifesto declared:

Uncontrolled labor migration currently leads to exploitation, the exodus from other countries (the so-called “brain drain”) and the uprooting of communities. … In this way we break the social isolation of many migrant workers. Anyone who wants to work in the Netherlands and is not a resident must be in possession of a work permit. Depending on the situation, the maximum number of work permits per year can be adjusted. Until this is in order, we will temporarily stop economic migration.

Broad sections of the Dutch ruling elite are now maneuvering aggressively to install Wilders in office. Not even 24 hours after the elections, Timmermans of the GL/PvDA suggested that he might lead the opposition, paving the way for the formation of a government coalition between Wilders’ PVV, Yesilgöz’s VVD, and Pieter Omtzigt’s NSC that would have 81 seats in all. The newly-formed right-wing populist party BBB (Farmer-Citizen Movement) has already declared its interest to join Wilders with its 7 seats.

NCS party leader Omtzigt said, “We are available to govern. This is a difficult outcome. We will discuss on Thursday in what way we could best contribute.” 

Netherlands public television NOS also reported: “VVD leader Dilan Yesilgoz, who earlier this week said her party wouldn’t join a government led by Wilders, said it was now up to the winner to show he could get a majority.”

Irrespective of which capitalist parties form the ruling coalition and which postured as a so-called ‘opposition,’ the incoming Dutch political establishment will mount a ferocious attack on the working class. It will respond to growing social protests against genocide, war and austerity with an attempt to impose neo-fascistic, police state rule. This is true whether the Netherlands are ruled openly by Wilders, or by a coalition drawn from the Netherlands’ other anti-immigrant parties.

In the Netherlands, as in around the world, there is deep opposition in the working class to capitalist governments’ policies of war, genocide, austerity and police-state rule. The Netherlands has seen mass protests against the genocide in Gaza, including large rallies around Amsterdam’s central train station. After Wilders’ election victory, several thousand people turned out to protest in the Netherlands’ largest cities, Amsterdam and Utrecht.

Far-right government formed in New Zealand

Tom Peters

After 40 days of secret negotiations following New Zealand’s October 14 election, the conservative National Party leader Christopher Luxon yesterday signed a coalition deal to form a government with two widely despised far-right parties, ACT and New Zealand First.

National Party leader Christopher Luxon addressing National members the day before the election, October 13, 2023 [Photo: Christopher Luxon]

The agreement brings to power the country’s most right-wing government in decades. Its task will be to make drastic cuts to public services and ramp up the exploitation of the working class, while significantly increasing spending on the military to prepare the country to join imperialist wars.

Notwithstanding Luxon’s mantra that he has built a “strong and stable government,” the protracted negotiation period indicates that the three-way coalition will be profoundly unstable. The three parties failed to reach an agreement in time for Luxon to join world leaders at the APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) summit in mid-November, a major international forum.

The absence of a government for nearly six weeks—during which mass protests erupted opposing the US-backed genocide by Israel against the people of Gaza—will have caused concern among NZ allies in Washington and Canberra. New Zealand is a minor imperialist power in the Pacific region and a member of the US-led Five Eyes intelligence-sharing network. Successive governments have joined US-led wars against Iraq and Afghanistan, and the political establishment is supporting the US-NATO war against Russia over Ukraine and the militarisation of the Indo-Pacific region against China.

None of the three parties has any significant popular support. The National Party only got 38 percent of the votes, while ACT received 8.6 percent and NZ First just 6 percent. Taking account of roughly one million eligible adults—one quarter—who did not vote for anyone, National’s support falls to 28 percent.

Responsibility for the right-wing victory rests with the outgoing Labour Party, which received 26.9 percent of the votes, a dramatic collapse from 50 percent in its 2020 election victory. After six years in government—in coalition with the Greens and, during 2017–2020, NZ First—Labour’s claims that it would alleviate the housing crisis and end child poverty were completely discredited.

Under Labour, living standards collapsed amid soaring costs for food and housing. About 600,000 people—11.5 percent of the population—relies on food parcels to survive. More than 100,000 people, one in 50, are homeless or severely housing deprived. Meanwhile, tens of billions of dollars were found to provide subsidies and bailouts for big business during the pandemic.

The Labour government’s support plummeted after it ended New Zealand’s effective COVID-19 elimination strategy in late 2021 and allowed the coronavirus to infect millions of people. Since then, more than 3,500 people have been killed by COVID and 34,000 hospitalised in what is an ongoing public health disaster.

The new National-led government will intensify the attacks on the working class, with the two extreme-right parties wielding disproportionate power. Newsroom journalist Marc Daalder posted on X that based on the coalition deals, “it’s hard not to get a sense that this is ACT and New Zealand First’s government, and National is just running it.”

NZ First leader Winston Peters and ACT leader David Seymour will split the role of deputy prime minister, with Peters taking the job for 18 months before handing it to Seymour. Disagreement between the two leaders over the role was reportedly one issue that dragged out the coalition talks. During the election campaign, ACT and NZ First competed for the small number of far-right voters, with Seymour attacking Peters as untrustworthy.

Peters—whose party has a long record of racist agitation against immigrants, especially Muslims and Chinese people—has also been made foreign minister. NZ First’s Shane Jones will be minister of regional development and the party’s Casey Costello will be in charge of customs.

Labour and the Greens hypocritically denounce NZ First as racist, despite the fact that in 2017 then Labour leader Jacinda Ardern formed a coalition with NZ First and made Peters both deputy prime minister and foreign minister. The deal was supported by the Greens, which joined the Ardern government.

NZ First chose to form a government with Labour rather than National in 2017 because at that time Labour was viewed in Washington as the preferred party to strengthen military and intelligence ties, and to integrate New Zealand into the build-up to war against China.

Both National and Labour committed to increasing military spending from 1.4 to 2 percent of gross domestic product. Labour’s defence minister Andrew Little stated in August that this was necessary in case New Zealand is “called on” to join a war against China.

National’s commitment to boost military spending, along with income tax cuts which will overwhelmingly benefit the rich, will be paid for through drastic austerity measures in other areas. The libertarian ACT will play a major role with Seymour as minister of regulation and ACT’s deputy leader Brooke Van Velden as minister of internal affairs, workplace relations and safety.

Seymour said yesterday that the number of public servants will return “to the levels we saw in 2017,” which entails about 15,000 job cuts. Already WorkSafe and Statistics NZ have indicated that hundreds of jobs will be lost, and under Labour thousands of jobs were destroyed across the university sector.

The National-ACT deal includes tax cuts for landlords and greater powers to evict tenants. A so-called 90-day trial period during which new employees can easily be sacked will be expanded to cover all businesses, not just small ones.

With unemployment rising from 3.4 to 3.9 percent this year and likely to increase further, the three parties agreed on sanctions and “electronic money management” for people receiving the Jobseeker benefit who fail to find employment.

In education, the government has adopted ACT’s policy of reintroducing privately-run charter schools, which can set their own pay rates and curricula. National also agreed to NZ First’s reactionary policy of ending sex and gender education in schools.

NZ First’s demand for an expanded “inquiry” into the previous government’s COVID-19 response has also been adopted, with the aim of delegitimizing the temporary lockdowns and other public health measures used during the first two years of the pandemic.

To deal with the inevitable opposition and fallout from these anti-working class policies, the government is promising tougher criminal sentencing, an increased prison population, and to train at least 500 new police officers (about a 5 percent increase).

The “law and order” policies include a ban on gang insignia and powers for the police to carry out warrantless searches and to break up alleged gang meetings. These anti-democratic laws, initially aimed against alleged criminal gangs, can easily be modified to target left-wing protests and groups of workers who seek to oppose the government’s attacks.

For youth offenders, the government will introduce military-run boot camps, in order to enhance the role of the armed forces in society and recruit more young people into the military.

A major component of the coalition agreement is an attempt to exploit widespread animosity towards the Labour-Green government’s promotion of race-based identity politics, and to steer it in a reactionary, racist direction. The new government aims to divert anger over the social crisis by scapegoating indigenous Māori, most of whom are part of the poorest layer of the working class.

National has adopted the demands of ACT and NZ First, which both campaigned against policies which they falsely claimed gave Māori a “privileged” status—including Labour’s “by Māori, for Māori” healthcare authority and Māori tribal “co-governance” of water infrastructure. The vast majority of Māori did not benefit from these policies.

The new government will disestablish the Māori health authority and “examine” affirmative action initiatives for Māori healthcare students. It will withdraw from the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples—which NZ First denounced as a document enshrining “race-based preference”—and instruct public agencies to communicate primarily in English, not Māori.

ACT will draft legislation to define the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi, but National would not agree to its policy of holding a referendum on those principles. The Treaty, signed in 1840 between the British and representatives of most Māori tribes, was elevated in the 1970s and 1980s with the establishment of the Waitangi Tribunal to investigate the crimes of colonialism. Its findings led to multi-million dollar payouts to the tribes, under successive Labour and National governments, creating an affluent layer of Māori committed to the defence of capitalism.

ACT and NZ First support the payouts to the tribes, but have called for the removal of references to “Treaty principles” in many other pieces of legislation, and are seeking to diminish the status of the Treaty in public life more broadly.

Members of Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori (the Māori Party, TPM) have warned that ACT’s proposed law change will provoke a backlash or even civil unrest. This is precisely the point. The entire political establishment—including the previous Labour-Greens-NZ First government—is complicit in promoting racism and xenophobia to block the development of a unified working class movement against capitalism.

New surge in New Zealand COVID-19 cases and deaths

John Braddock

In line with a global surge in COVID-19 cases, powered by the emergence of new variants, New Zealand’s pandemic tragedy is again escalating. Reported case numbers across the country increased more than 32 percent last week, according to data released by Te Whatu Ora Health NZ.

Four years into the global pandemic, cases are again exploding in one country after another. The resumption of wastewater analysis in the United States indicates cases have climbed by 28 percent over the past month, heading into winter. In Australia, experts have warned of millions of looming cases as an eighth wave hits, with Omicron subvariants EG.5 (Eris) and BA.2.86 (Pirola) circulating nationwide.

Data on the current surge in New Zealand is based on wastewater tests, case counts and deaths. Director of Public Health Dr Nick Jones said: “These waves are likely due to people’s immunity waning, and the introduction of new hybrid variants which increase the community’s susceptibility.”

In the seven days to midnight on November 19, 7,881​ COVID-19 cases were reported—up from 5,947​ the previous week: an increase of 32.5 percent​. The seven-day rolling average of daily new cases was 1,124​, compared to 849​ a week prior. The real numbers are undoubtedly much higher, given that many people have stopped reporting positive tests.

Hospitalisations have increased significantly. At midnight last Sunday, 349​ people were in hospital with COVID-19, up from 284​ the same time a week earlier. Working class areas in Auckland, the country’s biggest city, are the hardest hit. The Waitematā district (north and west Auckland) reported the highest number of cases (1,171​), followed by Counties Manukau (south and east Auckland), with 1,060​ cases.

To date, officials have attributed a total of 3,522​ deaths to COVID-19, which is likely an understatement. In a further 176 deaths among people who had the virus, the cause is unconfirmed. There are an additional 1,520 deaths recorded among people with COVID, where the cause has been listed as “not COVID,” without any further details.

All but 30 of these deaths occurred after then Labour Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced the abandonment of the COVID-19 elimination policy in late 2021 and adopted the criminal “let it rip” policy that has now killed more than 27.4 million people globally.

On August 14, Ardern’s successor, Chris Hipkins, announced the “formal end” of the remaining public health measures: a seven-day isolation requirement for people infected with COVID and mandatory masking in health facilities.

Business groups, who had lobbied strenuously against any measures impacting on private profits, welcomed the decision. Public health experts, however, questioned the rationale. Professor Nick Wilson from the University of Otago bluntly said the government was wrong to end isolation requirements. “The government is so keen to pretend it’s all over, despite people dying daily in hospital. It’s not trivial,” he said.

Microbiologist Siouxsie Wiles, one of the scientific experts who had fronted the initially successful elimination response, told the Post: “We should keep what little protections we have until better vaccines are available and we’ve upgraded our ventilation standards to get the virus out of the air… These protections will help keep future Covid waves to a minimum.”

Wiles is currently suing her employer, Auckland University, over what she claims was its failure to protect her from widespread and vicious threats by anti-vaxxers. Wiles told the court she was asked by her managers to limit her science communications to one day a week and that employment law required her to step back if the “situation” was unsafe. Wiles interpreted this as a “threat” by the university to stop her from functioning as critic and conscience—a role academics carry out as part of their wider social responsibility.

Big business, the government and the corporatist trade unions are all suppressing warnings about COVID amid an escalating assault on the social, economic and health conditions of the working class. There is scant information on the current surge in the corporate media.

The incoming National Party coalition government, which includes the far-right ACT and NZ First parties, opposes any ongoing measures to protect public health. As early as February 2022, National Party leader and now prime minister Christopher Luxon demanded “a pathway out of ever more restrictions, rules and controls which are driving so much hurt and anger.” Luxon falsely claimed that “COVID is now manageable for the vast bulk of people at home,” while vaccination and boosters “are protecting our hospital system.”

NZ First leader Winston Peters has courted COVID-19 deniers and opponents of vaccination associated with the Voices for Freedom group, which led an occupation of the lawn outside parliament for three weeks in early 2022.

Writing in Stuff on April 15, David Seymour, leader of the “libertarian” big business mouthpiece ACT, denounced the “saga of the mandatory isolation” requirements as “bad decisions made on bad advice.” ACT advocates greater privatisation of healthcare services as a means to cut costs and open up new opportunities for profit-making.

Health experts and COVID sufferers are meanwhile warning about the increasingly dire personal and social consequences of Long COVID. The Long COVID Registry, an authoritative research project in New Zealand, into what is described as a “mass disabling event,” has just been released to the publication Newsroom.

The project found that between 6 and 10 percent of those who get COVID-19, thousands of people, end up with symptoms that persist beyond the period of acute illness. These range from minor symptoms which eventually go away, to symptoms that are “grievous and chronic.”

Newsroom notes that the findings, and testimonies collected by the researchers, make for grim reading. “The testimonies are reminiscent of obituaries, albeit written by the person who has died. Long Covid patients describe their lives in the past tense, because the lives they used to have are now gone,” it states. Health related quality of life scores for sufferers were in many cases on a par with those reported by people with multiple sclerosis. Globally, hundreds of millions of people are now believed to be suffering from symptomatic Long COVID.

Scientists, including epidemiologist Michael Baker, are calling for New Zealand to establish a dedicated centre for disease control (CDC) to better prepare for future pandemics and take responsibility for surveillance, co-ordinated laboratory testing, outbreak response, workforce training, and strategic capacity building.