2022: A year of deepening economic and financial crisis

Nick Beams

The year 2022 has seen a sea change in the global economy and financial system, setting in motion tendencies that will continue and deepen in 2023.

The most significant shift in the economic and financial landscape has been the development of global inflation to the highest level in four decades and the response of central banks, led by the US Federal Reserve.

A person stands near an electronic stock board showing Japan's Nikkei 225 index at a securities firm Monday, Dec. 19, 2022, in Tokyo. [AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko]

In the name of “fighting inflation,” they have undertaken the sharpest rise in interest rates since those of Fed chief Paul Volcker in the early 1980s, part of a war against the working class spearheaded by the Reagan administration in the US and the Thatcher government in the UK.

This shift has not been initiated to bring down inflation—central bankers understand their policies will do nothing to reduce prices—but is aimed at suppressing the wages struggles of the working class by imposing an economic contraction, or even a recession.

There are many forecasts of recession next year, both in the major economies and globally, as the impact of interest rates rises takes hold.

The Centre for Economics and Business Research in London said it was “likely” that the world economy would face recession next year. It expected that central banks would continue with their tightening regime “despite the economic costs” and there was a “poorer growth outlook for a number of years to come.”

These findings are more pessimistic than the International Monetary Fund predictions in October that more than a third of the world economy would contract in 2023.

The development of recession, coupled with the higher interest rate regime, will have a significant effect on financial markets.

As Financial Times columnist John Plender noted in a recent comment entitled “Central bank horror story”: “A move into recession in 2023 could expose financial fragilities arising from the long period of ultra-low interest rates in which investors searched for yield regardless of risk.”

The low interest rate regime, intensified in March 2020 to prevent a meltdown of the financial system at the start of the pandemic, led to a new round of speculation which sent share markets to record highs.

With the shift in the policy of central banks this financial house of cards is becoming increasingly unstable.

The turn by the Fed and other central banks does not indicate any shift in their class orientation by the guardians of finance capital. Rather, it is based on the assessment that the most destabilising factor of all is the global upsurge of the working class in support of wage demands to counter rising inflation which must be suppressed at all costs.

The year has ended with a small downturn in goods inflation and a slight easing of the rate of interest rate hikes—the Fed reduced the increase in its base rate to 0.5 percentage points from the previous four consecutive rises of 0.75 percentage points at its last meeting. However, the major central banks have made it clear the rises must continue and have increasingly pointed to the “tightness” of labour markets as the reason for doing so.

The Fed has said it has “more work to do,” the European Central Bank has spoken of “more ground to cover” and the Bank of England, confronting struggles by millions of workers in support of pay demands, has insisted it must take “forceful” action.

Even before the interest rate rises have had their full impact, the effect on financial markets has already been felt. This was most notable in the September-October crisis in the UK financial system which followed the budget of the short-lived government of Liz Truss.

Her government’s decision to give massive tax handouts to the corporations and wealthy by increasing debt sparked a market meltdown which threatened the financing of the entire pensions system, estimated to amount to £1.5 trillion.

The turmoil in markets was not an expression of opposition to more wealth being showered on the super-rich but because the measures were not funded by major spending cuts and the increase in debt was not viable in the new financial conditions produced by interest rate rises.

The financial gyrations on Wall Street, while not yet as violent as those which erupted in the UK, are no less significant. The major index, the S&P 500, has fallen by almost 20 percent over the year, even as traders continue to speculate on the assumption that the Fed will have to begin cutting rates some time in 2023.

Notwithstanding these expectations, at least in some quarters, the direction is clear. One of the chief beneficiaries of ultra-cheap monetary policy, the Tesla car company of Elon Musk, has suffered a spectacular fall.

At the start of the year, the market value of the company was $1.2 trillion. In trading just before the Christmas break, its market capitalisation was below $400 billion, after its stock price fell $85 billion in a week, or 18 percent.

The rapid changes in financial conditions have led to calls for the Fed to pull back on the interest rate hikes lest they hit the entire financial system.

Writing in the FT, Bill Gross, once the world’s foremost bond market trader, called for a halt noting the “dangerous levels of debt” reported by the Bank for International Settlements earlier this month, but which are not reported on or tracked.

“Off-balance sheet dollar debt,” the BIS warned, “may remain out of sight and out of mind, but only until the next time dollar funding liquidity is squeezed.”

According to Gross, the BIS calculated that this “hidden ‘shadow bank’ debt may be as high as $65 trillion more than two and half times the size of the entire Treasury market and most of it owed to the banks.”

He noted that the lowest global interest rates in history had led to “massive misallocations of capital,” much of it “hidden in private equity” that ultimately had to be repriced “sharply lower.”

The collapse of the crypto bubble, expressed in the $32 billion demise of the FTX exchange owned by Sam Bankman-Fried, now facing multiple criminal charges, is not some kind of exception.

The rise and rise of crypto was fueled by the provision of virtually free money which lifted all areas of the financial system, but has now come to an end.

The year is concluding with another significant shift—the decision by the Bank of Japan to ease its so-called yield curve control. The measure involved buying up virtually all new government debt, which kept interest rates at near zero.

While the BoJ has yet to officially abandon the policy, there is no doubt as to its implications. Higher Japanese rates will mean the return of money previously invested internationally.

In an article entitled “Why Japan’s bombshell risks another global credit crunch,” the financial columnist of the UK-based Telegraph, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, noted that with $3.6 trillion of net assets overseas Japan is the world’s top creditor.

“When the flows reverse and the Japanese repatriate their money—as they did in late 2007 and 2008—it can lead very quickly to a systemic credit crunch and a financial chain reaction.”

He cited the remarks of one financial analyst who pointed out that ultra-monetary policy had been holding down rates in the rest of the world but “the tectonic plates are shifting.”

It is impossible to predict the exact course of events, but the general trend of developments is clear.

The onset of global recession, the growing prospect of another major financial crisis and the unbridled determination of governments and central banks to make the working class pay for the deepening crisis of the profit system is going to drive forward the development of the class struggle in the coming year.

China’s lifting of Zero-COVID and the ongoing dangers of the pandemic

Evan Blake

As the year 2022 draws to a close, a dangerous new stage of the COVID-19 pandemic has opened with the universal lifting of all measures that slow the spread of the coronavirus. Throughout the world, governments have decided to allow COVID-19 to spread entirely unchecked, infecting or reinfecting billions of people. This policy allows the virus to mutate and produce new and potentially more dangerous variants.

The global epicenter of the pandemic is now China, where the ruling Communist Party (CCP) has dismantled its Zero-COVID policy, which had kept China’s per capita infection and death rates the lowest of any major country. Since November 11, the CCP has ended lockdowns, mass testing, contact tracing, quarantine and isolation protocols, and every other public health measure.

On Monday, China’s National Health Commission (NHC) reclassified COVID-19 from a Class A to a Class B infectious disease starting on January 8, prompting the scrapping of all quarantine requirements for inbound travelers. This followed Sunday’s NHC announcement that they will no longer report COVID-19 infections, after last week adjusting their definition of a COVID-19 death, in a transparent effort to suppress all data on the spread of the pandemic.

The reversal of Zero-COVID in China has produced a wave of mass infection. A leaked report by Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention Deputy Director Sun Yang estimated that 248 million people were infected with COVID-19 across China during the first 20 days of December. The majority of China’s 1.4 billion people are expected to be infected over the next two months amid the Lunar New Year travel season.

Hospitals in Beijing, Shanghai and other major cities are collapsing under a massive influx of patients, morgues are suspending burial services, and hundreds, if not thousands, of people are believed to be dying at home every day. Social media posts by people suffering from Long COVID describe prolonged symptoms, including extreme fatigue, deep coughs, shortness of breath, difficulties concentrating and more.

Breaking his month-long silence on the disastrous spread of COVID throughout China, President Xi Jinping employed Orwellian double-speak at a press conference Monday, stating, “We should launch the patriotic health campaign in a more targeted way. … fortify a community line of defense for epidemic prevention and control, and effectively protect people’s lives, safety and health.”

In justifying the abandonment of Zero-COVID, CCP officials and the Chinese state media have repackaged all the lies and propaganda developed over the past year throughout the rest of the world, particularly in the United States. Referring to the Omicron variant as “mild,” they falsely claim that the current surge of infections will be their “COVID exit wave.” In the words of Zhong Nanshan, a doctor and spokesperson for the CCP’s COVID policy, China will return to “pre-epidemic conditions” by mid-2023.

Three recent articles published in the New York Times and Financial Times have stated that China appears to be striving for “herd immunity” through rapid mass infection. But the reality is that “herd immunity” is a mirage manufactured by far-right politicians and corrupt scientists in 2020 which has no scientific basis. The Chinese population is being forced to join the rest of the world in a horrific cycle of ongoing mass COVID infections and reinfections, which will cause compounding damage to the physical and economic health of society, with global ramifications.

The future confronting Chinese society can be seen in the United States and throughout the Northern Hemisphere, where the third winter of mass infection is now underway.

Despite the suppression of data over the past year, throughout December official COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths have climbed steadily in the US. According to more accurate wastewater sampling, COVID-19 is currently spreading at the third-highest rate of the entire pandemic, surpassed only by previous surges of Omicron subvariants last winter and spring.

Hospitalizations and deaths are increasingly impacting the elderly, with hospitalization rates among those 70 years and older now at the highest point since last winter. The seven-day average of daily new deaths now stands at 426, meaning that each week the number of Americans dying from COVID-19 is now equivalent to the death toll from the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Over 90 percent of these deaths are people over the age of 65.

Last week, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) confirmed that life expectancy in the US decreased for the second year in a row in 2021, by roughly 0.6 years, bringing the figure to 76.4 years, the lowest level since 1996. The pandemic thus amounts to a social retrogression of roughly a quarter-century. This is part of a global trend, in which life expectancy declined worldwide in 2020 and 2021 for the first time since World War II. Notably, the first two years of the pandemic saw life expectancy increase in China and surpass the US in 2021, a process now set to reverse.

Another recent study on excess deaths found that COVID-19 was among the leading causes of death in 2020 and the leading cause of death in 2021 globally, killing a combined 14.83 million people by the end of 2021.

Alongside and connected to the spread of COVID-19, unprecedented numbers of children are being hospitalized by the flu and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), in what has been termed a “tripledemic.” Across the US, Canada, Germany and other countries in North America and Europe, pediatric hospitals are at or above capacity and children are dying from these preventable diseases.

A growing body of research indicates that COVID-19 can substantially damage a patient’s immune system, through the depletion of naive T-cells, rendering them susceptible to more serious disease from other viral or bacterial infections. Many scientists and physicians have warned that the mass infection and reinfection of children and all of society is a primary factor behind the present surge of hospitalizations due to other respiratory viruses.

Finally, the immense societal impact of Long COVID is increasingly coming into focus. According to the latest data from the CDC, roughly 17.7 million Americans are presently experiencing Long COVID, of whom 23.1 percent report that this affliction causes “significant activity limitations.” The most significant study on COVID-19 reinfections, published in October, found that each reinfection greatly compounds one’s risk of Long COVID, a risk only slightly reduced by vaccination.

The growing volume of scientific data which prove the ongoing and alarming dangers of COVID-19 can only be covered up and suppressed with a continuous stream of lies and propaganda. In the United States, the White House, the corporate media and all official institutions peddle unending happy talk, speak of the pandemic in the past tense and denigrate the most basic public health measures.

Last week, White House COVID Response Coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha absurdly stated, “There is no study in the world that shows that masks work that well.” Media talking heads routinely compare COVID-19 to the flu and promote holiday shopping and travel. In August, US President Joe Biden declared, “the pandemic is over.” This propaganda has had an impact, with a recent Ipsos poll finding that only 30 percent of Americans still wear masks at least some of the time, down from 90 percent in December 2020 and 69 percent just one year ago.

The deliberate disarming of the global population to the dangers of the pandemic and promotion of unending mass infection—from China to the US, and everywhere in between—places society in great danger in the face of future variants.

The laws of viral evolution are objective and detached from baseless claims of governments that COVID-19 will gradually become less dangerous. At any point, a new variant could evolve that combines increased immune-resistance, transmissibility and virulence, producing an even greater global wave of infections and deaths.

Up to 25,000 COVID-19 deaths in Australia this year

Oscar Grenfell

As the year draws to a close, COVID-19 continues to inflict a deadly toll with no end in sight. In Australia, 2022 has been by far the worst year of the pandemic, with fatalities an order of magnitude higher than in the first two years of the global crisis.

The country is a graphic demonstration of the fact that this carnage is the result, not primarily of the biological characteristics of a virus, but of political decisions made in the interests of private profit.

COVID-19 deaths in Australia up to December 23, 2022 [Photo: Data from covidlive.com.au/WSWS]

In 2020 and 2021, Australia’s death toll was comparatively low as a result of successful mitigation measures implemented by the country’s governments under popular pressure. The huge number of deaths over the past 12 months is the direct result of the dismantling of those restrictions and the adoption of a “let it rip” strategy aimed at “reopening the economy.”

This essential point was made by Professor Brendan Crabb, one of Australia’s leading infectious disease experts and the director of the Burnet Institute. He was interviewed on the popular podcast, Australia Today’s Morning Agenda with Natarsha Belling, last week. It was a rare breach in the wall of silence surrounding with the pandemic, which is either presented as a thing of the past or a minor inconvenience.

Crabb noted, however, that including excess deaths it is likely that the virus will have claimed 25,000 lives in 2022 by year’s end.

Even that figure may be an underestimate. Crabb was extrapolating from excess death figures released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics this month. They show that in the nine months to the end of September there were 19,986 more fatalities than the historical average.

If that rate holds for the last three months of the year, excess deaths for 2022 would reach 26,648. However, the public healthcare systems, decimated by decades of funding cuts and brought to a breaking point by the “let it rip” program, will be under even greater pressure during the holiday season. That means there is every prospect that the rate of excess deaths will increase.

As Crabb stated, these are “people who otherwise would not have died. In fact, excess deaths in Australia are normally negative, less than zero. That’s why life expectancy has increased every year for the last 70 years in Australia.”

Crabb pointedly noted that this historic reversal exposed the fraudulent propaganda used to justify the “reopening” of December 2021. “Can you imagine us sitting here a year ago saying ‘we’re going to open up and we’ll cope with 25,000 deaths?’ No one would’ve accepted that, it would have been outrageous,” he said.

Later, the professor remarked: “Nothing else kills 25,000 extra people in a year. COVID is doing that. Influenza killed 300 people this year. And yet influenza was compared to COVID in Australia.”

Of the likely 25,000 fatalities of 2022, 14,662 have thus far been officially recorded as directly caused by the virus. That compares with 909 in 2020 and 1,344 in 2021 or a total of 2,253 for the two years. In other words, even going by the official toll, the annual coronavirus death rate has jumped 11-fold this year as compared to last year.

Crabb explained, however, that the fatalities only provide one indication of the broader long-term health crisis that has been unleashed.

He cited recent analyses indicating that as many as half a million Australians, in a population of 25 million, are likely afflicted with Long-COVID. That term designates a host of potentially debilitating conditions that can impact upon virtually every organ of the body. Treasury figures earlier this year indicated that at least 30,000 people were no longer able to work, having been effectively disabled by the virus.

Speaking to this broader situation, Crabb stated: “COVID is driving this crisis, all of it. What happens with Covid infection is a serious infection that leaves you susceptible to other infections.

“And even more worryingly a signature of Long COVID is what we call immune dysfunction, reactivating Epstein-Barr virus or chickenpox in people because their immune systems aren’t working as they should. This means we have the likelihood of quite a lot of people in the community far more susceptible to infection than they otherwise would be. It’s all COVID, we have to get our head around that.”

The damage caused by the virus refutes the claims, used to justify the reopening, that repeat infections would generate immunity and thereby end the pandemic.

As Crabb noted, while there have been four major COVID waves this year, “we never had a low point. The difference between the lowest point of a wave and the top is only about 4 times. The lowest number of people in hospital in 2022 for Covid was 1,400 people, the maximum 5,500.”

He elaborated: “The July-August wave was Australia’s worst. This one’s looking pretty bad. You would have to be a very optimistic person to think the next one we have in January-February next year is somehow going to be fine.

“The likelihood is that if we keep our current approach of being casual about infection, we’ll keep having waves of this sort. Even more worrying is that the virus evolves in a step change way, like it did when omicron arose in the first place, where this completely different looking COVID arises. The driver of that happening is numbers. The more viral numbers out there, the more opportunity the virus has to evolve into something that can transmit better in the face of immunity that’s out there.”

Like many principled epidemiologists, Crabb framed his important remarks as an appeal to governments to see sense and to adopt essential public health measures necessary to stem transmission.

The experiences of the past year however, in Australia and internationally, have demonstrated the collapse of any mitigation strategy. The alternatives are between a homicidal “let it rip” policy, supported by the entire capitalist political establishment, and the fight for the elimination of the virus, which requires the mobilisation of the working class against the governments and the profit system itself.

That is underscored by the role of the current federal Australian Labor government. In the seven months since it was elected in May, Labor has presided over more deaths than in the entire preceding period of the pandemic.

Labor has gone further than its conservative Liberal-National predecessor in dismantling even the semblance of a coordinated public health response to the virus. It has overseen the ending of daily reporting of pandemic statistics, including infections and deaths.

This has gone hand in hand with measures virtually designed to further spread the virus. They included the abolition of any requirement to report a positive Rapid Antigen Test (RAT) to the health authorities. Even more significant was the ending of any mandatory isolation period for people who test positive. Together with the termination of limited pandemic leave payments, the clear purpose was to force infected workers to remain on the job.

Even further attacks come into effect on January 1. For most testing sites, it will become necessary to obtain a doctor’s referral to be given a Polymerase chain reaction test (PCR), even though they are more reliable than RATs. Many general practitioners are ending free bulk-billing consultations in response to a virtual freeze on government subsidies, meaning a lot of people will have to pay up to $70 for such a referral. But Labor’s guidelines indicate that they could be still denied a PCR, given that the tests will now largely be restricted to those deemed vulnerable to the virus.

With testing already at record lows, the obvious aim is to claim that the pandemic is over by no longer registering the vast majority of cases.

Even with the current breakdown of testing, however, more than a hundred thousand infections are being reported across the country every week and there were almost 700 official deaths in the three weeks to Christmas. The Labor government’s program, identical to that of its counterparts internationally, is guaranteeing that the pandemic will continue to exact a heavy toll in 2023.

Netanyahu forms far-right Israeli coalition government

Jean Shaoul

Former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is set to return to power after 18 months in opposition, after announcing a series of deals with the fascistic Religious Zionism Party and the ultra-orthodox religious parties, Shas and United Torah Judaism (UTJ).

Former Israeli Prime Minister and the head of Likud party, Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife Sara gesture after first exit poll results for the Israeli Parliamentary election at his party's headquarters in Jerusalem, Wednesday, Nov. 2, 2022. [AP Photo/Tsafrir Abayov]

Having pushed Israeli politics to the right during his 15 years of premiership, he will now head the most right-wing government in Israel’s 75-year history. It will empower the violent, racist and fascist forces seeking to incite political violence against the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and within Israel, cement Israel’s Jewish Supremacy policy enshrined in its 2018 Nation-State law and clamp down on Jewish workers opposing its policies.

It puts paid to the claim that Israel is “the only democracy” in the Middle East. The inclusion of Religious Zionism makes explicit what was always implicit: Israel’s government will be committed to Jewish Supremacy and apartheid rule, the annexation of large swaths of the occupied West Bank illegally occupied since the Arab Israeli war of 1967, the expansion of settlements illegal even under current Israeli law and Jewish prayer at al-Aqsa Mosque.

Netanyahu tweeted triumphantly, “I got it,” on Wednesday night, just minutes before the deadline for forming a new government following the fifth elections in less than four years on November 1. It is expected that the new government, which will have a majority of four, will be sworn in early in the new year.

The election, the fifth in four years, was precipitated by the collapse last June of the fragile coalition headed by Yair Lapid and Naftali Bennett of eight parties united only by opposition to the scandal-ridden Netanyahu. Their “government of change” that included Labour and Meretz—both ostensibly committed to a Palestinian statelet alongside Israel—paved the way for the rise of the far-right Religious Zionism. It presided over more killings of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories than at any time since 2005, escalated Israel’s covert wars against Iran and its allies, lifted all measures aimed at restricting the spread of the pandemic and did nothing to alleviate social inequality—one of the highest in the OECD group of advanced countries.

Netanyahu, currently in court on charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust in three separate cases, brokered an electoral alliance of the three far-right parties—Religious Zionism, Jewish Power and Noam—to bolster its vote in the November 1 election because of its willingness to introduce a law preventing a sitting prime minister from being indicted while in office. Religious Zionism won 10 percent of the vote and 14 seats, making it the third largest party in the Knesset, enabling Netanyahu to form a 64-seat coalition, the largest majority for any government since 2018.

With Religious Zionism in a position to call the shots, Bezalel Smotrich, leader of the Religious Zionism alliance, has secured the finance portfolio for himself and a newly created ministerial position within the defence ministry with powers over the civil administration of the West Bank for his party. This Jewish Supremacist, homophobe and proponent of annexation of Palestinian territories has control over building permits in the settlements, demolitions of Palestinian homes, land issues, access to water. It has oversight of two military units that run civilian and security issues in the West Bank’s Area C, including the movement of people and goods between Gaza, Israel and the West Bank.

Likud Party leader Benjamin Netanyahu (left,) far-right Israeli lawmaker Bezalel Smotrich and Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid (centre) and and leaders of all Israel's political parties pose for a group photo after the swearing-in ceremony for lawmakers at the Knesset, Israel's parliament, in Jerusalem, Tuesday, November 15, 2022. [AP Photo/Tsafrir Abayov]

This is nothing less than the de facto annexation of Area C, designated under the Oslo Accords as being under Israeli military control, where Israel’s West Bank settlements, home to more than 450,000 Israelis, are located. While Netanyahu had sought to annex parts of the West Bank during his earlier premiership, he was forced to drop the plan after “normalizing” relations with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco. These states had earlier signaled their unease over the new government that has—according to the New York Times—'quickly morphed into a more pragmatic approach: Business as usual, at least for now.”

Itamar Ben-Gvir, leader of the fascistic Jewish Power, has secured the post of national security. This convicted racist, supporter of the virulent anti-Arab Kahanist organization, once designated as a terrorist organization in both Israel and the US, who threatened to expel Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, will have oversight of the police within Israel and the force that controls access to and security at al-Aqsa Mosque. Ben-Gvir demanded and won an extension of his remit to include the Border Police, a paramilitary force that chiefly operates in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, a change that requires parliamentary approval. The security forces that have long allowed the settlers to attack the property and lives of Palestinians living in the West Bank with impunity—often under the protection if not active assistance of the military—will now actively encourage it in order to drive them from their homes and their land.

Netanyahu has appointed Avi Maoz, head of the Noam party and notorious for his racist, homophobic and misogynist views, is deputy minister in charge of “Jewish identity,” with control over parts of Israel’s national education system and authority to approve or expunge external content programmes from the list currently offered to Israeli schools.

Netanyahu has promised the interior and health portfolios to Aryeh Deri, leader of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, who served time in jail for corruption and left office as part of a plea deal for a new indictment of tax evasion. Since Israel’s attorney general has stated that his conviction for tax offences disqualifies him from serving in the cabinet, this will require the Knesset to fast-track legislation to overturning the ban on convicted legislators serving as ministers.

The new government’s agenda includes an overhaul of the judicial system, subjecting the decisions of the Supreme Court to an override by the Knesset that will also be given the power to appoint judges, ending any independence of the judiciary. It is following the path taken by far-right governments in Poland and Hungary. Also expected is legislation aimed at securing the dismissal of Netanyahu’s ongoing corruption trial.

His agreement with Religious Zionism includes steps to promote Orthodox and nationalist interpretations of Judaism, including narrowing the definition of who is a Jew—and thus eligible for automatic citizenship under Israel’s law of return. It also includes a pledge to introduce legislation revoking the ban under Israel’s Basic Law on a party that incites racism that was introduced to block the return of the outlawed Kach party, led by ultra-nationalist Meir Kahane who advocated for the mass expulsion of Palestinians, to the Knesset. In 2019, this law was used to prevent Jewish Power members Baruch Marzel—who has called for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians—and Bentzi Gopstein—who has called for the dismantling of the Dome of the Rock Mosque—from running for the Knesset.

Netanyahu has already agreed to legalise Jewish settler outposts in the West Bank and transferring jurisdiction over settlers from military administrators to civilian ministries. This would legally place settlers and Palestinians under entirely different systems and confirm charges that Israel is running an apartheid regime.

There are plans to enforce the “Judaisation” of the Galilee and Negev in the north and south of Israel respectively, that are home to significant numbers of Israel’s Palestinian citizens, via the offer of economic benefits and discounts to Israeli Jews who move there.

According to Arab 48, Ben-Gvir has won agreement from Netanyahu to sack and refuse to hire teachers who criticise the Israeli occupation or take part in anti-Israeli occupation protest, claiming “this is terrorism.” Smotrich has declared that human rights groups—both Palestinian and Israeli—pose an “existential threat” to Israel and called for their funds to be seized and their activities banned. Amichai Chikli, a Likud legislator, said “under the guise of human rights organisations and humanitarian activity hides a radical antisemitic and anti-Zionist ideology, whose purpose is to undermine the legitimacy of the State of Israel and spill the blood of its soldiers and citizens.”

At a recent clash between Israeli activists opposed to the settlements in Hebron in the West Bank, one soldier was filmed hurling an activist to the ground and then punching him in the head, while a second warned, “Ben-Gvir is going to put things in order here. You’re done making a mess… I decide what’s legal here.” While the first soldier was suspended and the second jailed for six days, Ben-Gvir is pushing an immunity bill for soldiers against trials and investigations for acts carried out during their service.

An estimated 250 million Chinese people were infected with COVID-19 through December 20

Aaron Edwards

The immense scale of the social crime unfolding across China as a result of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) abandoning its Zero-COVID policy is increasingly coming into focus. According to a leaked report presented by Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention Deputy Director Sun Yang at a closed-door health briefing last Wednesday, roughly 250 million people were infected with COVID-19 across China within just the first 20 days of December.

This massive number of infections amounts to 18 percent of China’s 1.4 billion people and starkly contrasts with official figures of the National Health Commission (NHC), which reported 62,592 symptomatic cases over the same 20-day period. Sun estimated that on a single day, Tuesday, December 20, roughly 37 million people were infected.

Sun’s private estimates coincide with public approximations made last week by two individual cities, Qingdao and Dongguan. The head of Qingdao’s health commission, Bo Tao, estimated that there were about 490,000-530,000 new infections in the city each day as of Friday, and he expected an increase of 10 percent to those numbers on Saturday and Sunday based on modeling data.

A patient is wheeled into the fever clinic at a hospital in Beijing, Monday, Dec. 19, 2022. (AP Photo/Andy Wong)

In Dongguan, the city commission’s computer modeling and experts estimated Friday that there are now roughly 250,000-300,000 infections per day throughout the city. This figure, as well as infection levels throughout the country, are expected to increase massively over the next month due to the Lunar New Year holiday season.

The abandonment of regular testing and even the reporting of cases by the NHC has resulted in vast undercounts of infections and deaths, prompting a hypocritical response from the imperialist powers and other countries which have overseen mass infection policies throughout the pandemic.

In a recent phone call between US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, Blinken stressed the need for “transparency” regarding COVID-19. The World Health Organization (WHO) and officials in India have also expressed concerns over Beijing’s lack of accurate case reporting.

One need only recall the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) blatant distortion of infection data to discourage masking last February, or the mass funeral pyres in India during the devastating outbreak of the Delta variant last year, to recognize the hypocrisy of these figures’ supposed concern for human life.

In essence, the CCP is repeating the same process pioneered by the United States, India and other countries of minimizing the effects of COVID-19, manipulating the criteria for cause of death, undercounting cases and pushing propaganda through the media.

The scenes in Chinese hospitals as described by doctors, nurses and patients testify to the number of cases surging through major cities, where most of China’s 267 million citizens over the age of 60 live. Elderly patients are flooding the hospitals, which are running out of portable beds, oxygen hookups and places to put sick patients. Many doctors are too sick to carry on working, and others are working while infected.

A neurologist at Beijing Friendship Hospital told the Financial Times in a recent interview, “All the doctors are laid up, we don’t have anywhere to send patients because other departments do not have enough doctors, the ER is clogged with patients—it is taking us much longer to move them onwards.” The neurologist interviewed was herself recovering from COVID-19 and visibly coughing through her face mask.

Ambulances are backed up and cannot get patients off of their stretchers. In the city of Hangzhou, volunteer drivers are being recruited to meet the demand for emergency ambulance services. State-run funeral services are suspending burials due to a high volume of corpses. Specially-built emergency facilities, such as Beijing Chaoyang Integrative Medicine, have rooms that have been converted into makeshift morgues.

Other signs indicate that people are dying at home in large numbers. The demand for oxygen machines for at-home use is soaring. There is a shortage of cough medicine and other drugs. In Yunnan, officials have limited the sale of ibuprofen to one box per buyer and the sale of antigen tests to six tests per week. Sales of oximeters, a device to measure pulse rates and oxygen saturation, have skyrocketed. Production of these devices, which are useful to determine heart and lung health, is being boosted to meet demand.

Just days after Sun’s estimates were leaked, on Sunday the NHS released a statement saying it would no longer report COVID-19 cases whatsoever. Provocatively, the agency has also narrowed the definition of a COVID-19 death solely to “respiratory failure,” excluding other related issues, underscoring that the official numbers of infections and deaths are now completely unreliable.

There have been at least three recent high profile deaths in Beijing presumed to be from COVID-19. In the case of 67-year-old Wu Guanying, a lead designer of the 2008 Beijing Olympics mascot, the media reported his death as the result of a “severe cold,” prompting opposition on social media. Footballer Wang Ruoji of the Shenyang Jinde team died at the age of 37 of “diabetes complications” believed to be caused by COVID-19 infection. Opera singer Chu Lanlan, 40, died shortly after contracting the virus.

The highly infectious nature of the current dominant variant in China, the Omicron BF.7 subvariant, has made it particularly dangerous to a population who have mostly never been exposed to the virus. The overall vaccination rate is above 90 percent, but only 57.9 percent of adults have had a booster shot, and the booster rate for those above 80 years old is only 42.3 percent.

Vaccination rates alone, however, are not to blame for this unraveling catastrophe. It is the scrapping of the Zero-COVID elimination strategy by the CCP, under continuous pressure from the imperialist powers, that is endangering and killing masses of Chinese citizens.

The direct pressure of major corporations such as Nike and Apple, which in November threatened to move their businesses elsewhere if supply chain and labor-related shortages continued, prompted the rapid lifting of Zero-COVID. China is expected to be the world’s cheap labor sweatshop, and the CCP is forcing the working class back into dangerous conditions that will lead to their sickness, disability and death.

With the Lunar New Year festivities approaching, the loosening of travel restrictions poses a major threat to the rural provinces, where hundreds of millions of workers are expected to travel in the coming weeks. Having fully embraced the “forever COVID” policy, the CCP is doing everything it can to open up the country to travel with no restrictions on borders or public gatherings.

On Saturday, the Ministry of Education ensured that 4.74 million students took national postgraduate admissions exams in-person. Even those who tested positive for COVID-19 were expected to take the exams in-person, in a separate room from those who tested negative.

These policies are giving COVID-19 a new lease on life. Unleashing this highly infectious disease on such a massive population so suddenly and without any real attempt to isolate people or implement basic mitigation measures greatly accelerates the evolutionary path towards new and potentially more dangerous variants.

A recent article in Nature warned, “China is likely to discover what other countries with limited previous exposure to the virus have found over the past year: that there won’t be a single ‘exit’ wave to mark the lifting of pandemic restrictions. Further waves of infection and death are likely to follow, either from new variants that arise in the population, or from variants imported as the country opens its borders to visitors.”

The scrapping of Zero-COVID measures, motivated by the class interests of China’s national bourgeoisie under pressures from global finance capital, is as shortsighted as it is criminal. There are plenty of examples around the world of what will happen to the population, but they are being purposefully ignored by the Chinese ruling class. An estimation from the health data firm Airfinity states that 1.3-2.1 million people could die in China from the current surge alone.

While the bourgeoisie of the imperialist powers and within China have lifted Zero-COVID in a pragmatic attempt to fully resume capitalist production and restore stability to global supply chains, in actuality, this reckless policy will further destabilize the entire world economy.

In the short term, the center of world production is now engulfed in a massive social crisis of sickness and death. In the long term, potentially tens of millions of Chinese workers will join the ranks of those disabled by Long COVID. In the US alone, an estimated 4 million people have been so disabled by Long COVID that they have dropped out of the workforce.

US life expectancy drops to lowest level since 1996

Emma Arceneaux

Life expectancy in the United States decreased for the second year in a row in 2021, according to final mortality data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).  The death rate for the population increased by 5.3 percent above 2020, leading to a decline in life expectancy from 77 years to 76.4 years, the lowest level since 1996. 

Emergency medical technician Thomas Hoang, left, of Emergency Ambulance Service, and paramedic Trenton Amaro prepare to unload a COVID-19 patient from an ambulance in Placentia, Calif., Jan. 8, 2021. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong, File)

The progress of a quarter-century of medical advances has essentially been wiped out in just two years.

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, life expectancy in the US has fallen by 2.4 years total. The decrease of a .6 year in 2021 mounts on top of the loss of 1.8 years recorded in 2020.

As the World Socialist Web Site noted when the CDC’s preliminary mortality report was issued in August, the figures constitute “a damning indictment of the homicidal response to the pandemic that has characterized the Trump and Biden administrations. Biden—who was elected in large part because of popular revulsion at Trump’s callous and anti-scientific response to COVID-19 and who was armed with effective vaccines from the beginning of his term—stands thoroughly exposed.”

Indeed, despite the availability of lifesaving COVID-19 vaccines and Democratic control of the White House and Congress, 2021 was far deadlier than 2020. According to CDC data, total US deaths increased by 80,502 compared to 2020, above all, due to the continuing pandemic.

Citing CDC statistician Kenneth Kochanek, NPR notes that COVID-19 accounted for nearly 60 percent of the decline in life expectancy in 2021. The total number of deaths in which COVID-19 was the underlying cause increased by 18.8 percent, from 350,831 in 2020 to 416,893 in 2021. It remained the third leading cause of death in 2021 following heart disease and cancer.

In addition to COVID-19, death rates also increased for eight of the 10 leading causes of death. These include unintentional injuries (which increased 12.3 percent), a category which includes the soaring rates of drug overdose; chronic liver disease and cirrhosis (which increased 9.0 percent); kidney disease (which increased 7.1 percent) and stroke (which increased 5.9 percent). 

Both influenza and pneumonia dropped from the top 10 causes of death in 2021, likely due to the limited mitigation measures that were still in place last year but which have since been abandoned. As the WSWS correctly warned, with the ending of remaining COVID-19 mitigations, viruses such as influenza would be able to freely circulate and deaths from these illnesses could easily climb again. 

Data suggests this is exactly what is taking place. The CDC currently estimates there have been between 12,000 and 35,000 influenza deaths so far this season, compared to an estimated 5,000 deaths last flu season. In late November, weekly influenza cases reached the highest level on record.

One of the most alarming aspects of the report is the fact that death rates are increasing in every age group above one year old. Among ages 1-4, the death rate increased by 10.1 percent. Adults aged 35-44 experienced the largest increase in the death rate at 16.1 percent.

Should these trends continue, a child born in the US today is expected to live a shorter life than his or her grandparents. The CDC report estimates that the average 65 year old in America will live another 18.4 years, bringing them to age 83.4 years old, compared to the 76.4 years now expected at birth. 

According to a study published this October in the journal Nature Human Behavior, increasing mortality among the younger population is the leading cause of the US’s declining life expectancy. The study examined life expectancy in 29 countries throughout the pandemic. Speaking to the USA Today, the authors noted that the US was the only country that had continued life expectancy losses in 2021 attributed to increasing mortality in people under 60. They found that “more than half of the loss in U.S. life expectancy since the start of the pandemic” was due to increasing mortality in this age group. 

While COVID-19 has greatly accelerated this regressive trend in one of the most significant indices of population health, the process predated the pandemic, beginning nearly a decade ago. A report by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health released earlier this month notes that US life expectancy steadily increased until 2014, peaking at 78.9 years, then stagnated between 2015-2019 before turning sharply down in 2020. 

A major factor driving down life expectancy before the pandemic was the staggering rise in “deaths of despair,” driven mainly by rising social inequality. These include fatal drug overdoses, which doubled between 2014 and 2021 and killed over 106,000 people last year. During this same period, gun-related homicides and suicides rose by 44 percent, and alcohol-related liver disease rose by 63 percent. Teen suicides (ages 13-19) rose by 29 percent.

As was true in the preliminary CDC report in August, absent from the final report is any analysis of the relationship between socioeconomic status and life expectancy. Data are presented for race and gender but not class. However, multiple studies during the pandemic have strongly associated income and socioeconomic status with life expectancy, with the gap between the economic elite and the working class widening dramatically in the last three years across racial and gender groups. 

Adding to this, the CDC data refutes the notion that the pandemic’s impact is primarily driven by race. After non-Hispanic, American Indian or Alaskan Native females, the largest increase in death rates in 2021 occurred in non-Hispanic white males, followed by non-Hispanic white females. Death rates decreased last year among Hispanic males and non-Hispanic black males. 

Though the United States saw a decline in COVID-19 deaths in 2022 compared to the two previous years of the pandemic, over 250,000 Americans have needlessly died so far this year, according to Our World in Data, while cases and hospitalizations have been rising since November. Globally, The Economist’s excess death estimate indicates that around 5 million people died from COVID-19 in 2022.

Since the beginning of 2022, the Biden administration has overseen the systematic dismantling of testing, reporting and what else remained of the mitigation measures that were in place during the first two years of the pandemic. The CDC played a central role in this, including with the agency’s guidelines released in August that recommended quarantine, isolation and testing be discontinued in most settings, including schools. This agenda has been justified under the false claim that the population must “learn to live with” COVID-19 forever. 

Now, the third year of the pandemic is drawing to a close with one of the most horrific developments to date—the abandonment of Zero-COVID by the Chinese Communist Party government and its rapid embrace of “herd immunity.” In addition to the immediate catastrophe that is unfolding in China, one-sixth of the world’s population is being exposed to the virus for the first time, creating conditions for the virus to mutate into even more transmissible, and potentially more virulent, variants which will spread quickly around the world. As the WSWS commented in a recent perspective, a whole new stage in the pandemic is now beginning. 

The decline in life expectancy signifies that a terrible social regression is occurring in the United States. Despite continuous advances in scientific and medical knowledge and tools, society in the wealthiest country is moving backward. The capitalist system, under which human life is subordinated to private profit, can neither answer this indictment nor reverse course. On the contrary, capitalist governments worldwide have consciously adopted policies that they know will kill masses of their own citizens in the pursuit of profit.

Death toll continues to mount as extreme winter weather inundates Buffalo and freezes much of United States

Samuel Davidson

Freezing temperatures and massive snowfall are blamed for at least 57 deaths across the US as of Monday evening, with many more expected as temperatures remain below freezing and people are trapped in their cars.

Since Friday, more than 200 million people have been affected by a massive winter storm stretching from Maine in the Northeast down to the Gulf of Mexico and as far west as the Rocky Mountains. Over 1.7 million people have lost power.

People move about the streets of the Elmwood Village neighborhood of Buffalo, New York, Monday, Dec. 26, 2022, after a massive snow storm blanketed the city [AP Photo/Craig Ruttle]

Buffalo, New York, where at least 27 people have died, has seen some of the worst winter weather recorded. As of Monday, the Buffalo airport reported over 40 inches (101.6 cm) of snow with another 9 inches (22.86 cm) to a foot (30.48 cm) being predicted before snow is expected to stop on Tuesday.

Hurricane strength winds knocked out power for many, created whiteout conditions and prevented emergency crews from reaching those in need.

Many of those who died were trapped in their cars or homes without power. One person was found dead in a snow drift, and several people died while shoveling snow. At least two people died when they had a medical emergency, but first responders were not able to get through.

William Clay was found lying face down in the snow on Christmas Eve. Relatives said it was his 56th birthday and that he may have been seeking to buy something from a nearby convenience store.

People placed desperate calls on social media for assistance, asking for food and, in one case, diapers.

Facebook comments from a western New Yorker desperate for help exemplify the disorganized response of the capitalist system to extreme yet predictable storms: “Anyone have an update on the Parkside area and when they should get power back? My family including my 94 year old grandma live in the smaller neighborhood next to Medaille college and have been without heat/power since Friday am. National Grid maps are totally incorrect and there hasn’t been a crew out. No plowing has been done so no one can get in or out. They’ve tried the 858-snow number which has been useless so far.”

Another pleaded for help as fuel ran out to light candles and phones were dying: “Anybody near Rhode Island st that can help my family out ? We’ve had no power/ no heat for over 24hrs now. We are also very limited on the food that we can make. All of our phones are dying/almost dead and we won’t have anything in case of a emergency. and we barley have any butane left for our Stick lighter to light candles! if you can help out please pm me 🙏🏽 thank you. — feeling cold.”

At 10 a.m. Monday morning, one person wrote: “120 Minnesota Ave is now going on 72 hours without power or heat. there has been a report of one resident deceased. I was able to escape with my family, but there is no way the other residents are able to leave and walk through the snow. Many are elderly and physically unable to walk. We need snowmobiles sent to 120 Minnesota asap. One neighbor is trapped on the 3rd floor and cannot walk down the stairs without assistance we have been communicating with him via text and he is now not making sense and says he thinks he’s going to die. I will pay for someone with a snowmobile to please help them!” 

Later on, they were able to report that they had been evacuated.

This is the second major snow fall to inundate Western New York this season. A massive storm in November dumped a record of over 5 feet (1.52 meters) of snow on the region.

While bringing slightly less snow, this latest storm is having a bigger impact because of the extremely high winds and the much broader scope of the storm.

Officials say that on any given night, 2,500 to 4,000 people in Buffalo are homeless, living with others, in shelters or out on the streets. They are the most exposed to the deadly effects of winter weather and are at most risk to be injured or killed.

Maruce, who works at the Faith Based Fellowship, a homeless shelter near downtown Buffalo, told the World Socialist Web Site that they are completely full and are being forced to refer those seeking shelter to a social services hotline. “We are all snowed in, everyone is in the house. Nice and warm. We have been getting a lot of calls the last couple of days, we are full. I direct them to 211 and they will get them placed somewhere.

“It is hard, they are calling and knowing they are in need and we are just unable to help. There is help out there and everything I can do I will do.”

Lack of affordable housing and homelessness is a big problem in Buffalo as it is in the rest of the country.

Maruce pointed out that the city owns a lot of abandoned properties that they could renovate as housing for the homeless. “There are even some abandoned housing projects, these could be fixed for the homeless. They have been abandoned for years.”

Across the country, Maruce pointed out that not enough is being done for the homeless. Pointing to a recent decision by the state of California, “Banning homeless camps is not a solution. Where do you want them to go? You are just trying to ship them to somewhere else.”

Thomas Green, the shelter’s director, explained that housing has become unaffordable for many people who cannot afford the rent for apartments and that the COVID-19 pandemic has made the homeless problem a lot worse. 

“We have seen homelessness increase. A lot of people lost jobs, lots of small businesses having to close, the smaller places couldn’t remain open. Plus people got sick, went to hospitals and they lost their jobs and weren’t able to maintain their situation.

“When the moratorium on evictions was ended, a lot of people had to leave their homes.”

Green explained that even when the moratorium was in effect, “many people lost their homes if they had to go into the hospital for a long time or weren’t able to get the mental health assistance that they needed.”

On Saturday, nearly every fire truck in Buffalo was stranded in the snow. Overworked health care and emergency workers, already depleted from three years of the pandemic, are again being asked to sacrifice to address this crisis. One Buffalo health care worker posted on social media that they have been working for 48 hours straight and pleaded for anyone who was able to get to the hospital to relieve them.

The current cold weather and storm are caused by a massive movement of cold air from the Arctic region across Canada and down south as far as Texas. 

The intensity and severity of the storm is another product of global warming. Scientists explain that the warming atmosphere can carry more water vapor, which in turn acts as fuel for the storms and brings more snow and ice.

Warming in the Arctic weakens the jet stream that travels west to east which typically acts as a barrier to the colder Arctic air moving south.

Such storms will increase in both frequency and intensity as the world continues to warm.

Throughout the country, the storm has brought deadly conditions. From Friday through Sunday, much of the country suffered freezing conditions, with single-digit and subzero weather reaching as far south as parts of Louisiana, Alabama and Texas.

A mother in Georgia tweeted that temperatures had fallen to 17 degrees Fahrenheit (-8.3 degrees Celsius) Monday night, and they have been without power. She has a 14-year-old son who is on a ventilator, and they were going to have to transport him to a hospital.

The speed at which temperatures dropped was especially hard for the homeless.

In Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, temperatures dropped from 28 degrees F. (-2.2 degrees C.) Friday morning at 5:30 to -2 degrees F. (-18.9 degrees C.) just four hours later, with wind chills of minus 26 degrees (-32 degrees C.). 

Terry, a homeless man who can often be seen panhandling in downtown Pittsburgh, explained that he is dropped off in downtown at 7:00 a.m. to beg for money and is not picked up until 7:00 p.m. 

“It started getting real cold real fast. We had no place to go, you would get a few dollars and maybe go into a 7-11 [convenience store] for coffee, but they don’t want you standing around.”

Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey, who promised to address the city’s lack of affordable housing and homeless problems, recently opened a 122-bed shelter, but this has already filled up. At the same time he has also cleared out homeless encampments from under overpasses and bridges to make the problem less visible.

Water has become a major problem for many people in the South, where freezing temperatures cause unprotected pipes to burst. 

Residents in Jackson, Mississippi, must now boil their drinking water as water lines burst in the freezing temperatures. Earlier this year, residents did not have safe drinking water for weeks because of the decay of their water system.

The Associated Press (AP) is reporting that some residents of Shreveport, Louisiana, were without water on Monday, and that in Selma, Alabama, the mayor has declared a state of emergency because the city is worried it will run out of water.

Workers at a South Carolina food bank are trying to save over $1 million in food as water pipes froze and broke over the weekend. And the AP reports that emergency dispatchers around Atlanta are being overwhelmed with people calling about broken pipes.