Eligible Countries: GHC welcomes young professionals from Burundi, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Malawi, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe to apply for paid 13 month fellowships with health organizations in Malawi, Rwanda, Uganda, and Zambia.
To be taken at (country): Health organizations in Malawi, Rwanda, Uganda, and Zambia.
About the Award: Global Health Corps is building the next generation of diverse health leaders. We offer a range of paid fellowship positions with health organizations in Malawi, Rwanda, Uganda and Zambia and the opportunity to develop as a transformative leader in the health equity movement. Everyone has a role to play in the health equity movement.
Type: Fellowship
Eligibility: Global Health Corps Fellowship is looking for a global and diverse group of passionate and talented emerging leaders who:
Are willing to push themselves outside their comfort zones, to embrace failure, and to approach a personally transformative year – with many challenges in the day-to-day – with integrity, humility, and self-reflection.
Are ready to strengthen and use their voice — the most powerful tool for change that you have — in order to engage others, create space for critical conversation, and effect meaningful social change in global health.
Are excited by a design-thinking approach to building a better world, creatively embracing wicked problems and ready to embrace failure as learning.
Are committed to bringing your best and doing the work in the day-to-day, showing up as a critical part of the global health equity movement.
Are passionate about social justice in global health and about finding and building their voices to effect health impact.
Are committed to inclusivity and collaboration across sectors, cultures, and borders of all kinds, while investing in and supporting others.
Selection Criteria: By the start of the fellowship, fellows must:
Be 30 years or younger.
Hold a bachelor’s or undergraduate university degree.
Be proficient in English.
Number of Awardees: Not specified
Value of Global Health Corps Paid Fellowship: Yearlong paid placements within partner organizations in Malawi, Rwanda, Uganda and Zambia to address real-time capacity gaps and strengthen health systems.
In addition to on-the-job training, we engage fellows in a comprehensive leadership training curriculum to build effective, empathetic, and innovative leaders of tomorrow.
Fellow receive additional logistical and financial support during the year, including:
Monthly living and utilities stipend
Housing
Health insurance
Professional development grant of $600 and completion award of $1500
Travel coverage to and from placement site, all trainings, and retreats
Duration of Fellowship: 1 year
How to Apply for Global Health Corps Paid Fellowship:
Applications for our 2024-2025 Africa fellowship class are now open until January 10, 2024. For more information, read on and check out our Africa Fellowship FAQs page.
It is important to go through the Application Requirements before applying.
It would take a writer of the caliber of Honoré de Balzac or Upton Sinclair to describe the rise and fall of real estate speculator René Benko, whose Signa holding company filed for bankruptcy last Wednesday. Benko is the product and embodiment of a sick society in which profit and wealth count for everything, while the fate and even the lives of ordinary people count for nothing.
It is the biggest bankruptcy in the history of Austria. However, Benko’s business activities were not limited to the Alpine country. He had business interests all over the world and especially in Germany. His downfall could trigger an earthquake.
Galeria (formerly Kaufhof) at Frankfurt’s Hauptwache
Tens of thousands of jobs are at risk—in department store chains such as Galeria (Kaufhof and Karstadt), Globus and Selfridges, which Signa has taken over, and in the construction industry, where large-scale construction sites have come to a standstill and missed payments are putting numerous companies at risk. In 2022, around 40,000 people worldwide were employed in companies owned by Signa. Entire city centers threaten to become deserted if the holding company’s huge properties remain empty.
Some of the 120 banks that entrusted Benko with their money in the hope of making a quick profit could also find themselves in a tailspin. JPMorgan estimates that Signa owes its lenders a total of at least €13 billion. The company owes more than 600 million Swiss francs to the Swiss private bank Julius Bär and €750 million to the Austrian Raiffeisen Bank International. The Swiss USB, the French Natixis, the Italian UniCredit, the Bank of China and several German state banks are also affected to the tune of hundreds of millions.
A chain reaction is looming in the real estate sector. Benko was not the only one to take advantage of the combination of low interest rates and rising real estate prices to amass a fortune. He was just more brash and unscrupulous than others. The rise in interest rates and the accompanying fall in real estate prices have put paid to this model. After the Signa bankruptcy, it will also be more difficult for real estate groups to obtain new loans.
There is now much debate in the media as to whether the Signa bankruptcy could have been foreseen, whether Benko was an imposter who merely built castles in the air and if criminal activities were involved. As far as it is known, the public prosecutor’s office is not yet investigating Benko. He is, however, facing charges of delaying a declaration of bankruptcy.
But regardless of whether there will be trials and verdicts, the same social conditions that favoured fraudsters such as the crypto guru Sam Bankman-Fried and Wirecard bosses Markus Braun and Jan Masalek also boosted Benko’s career.
Benko, who is only 46 years old, was able to become a billionaire in a very short space of time because the entire political system has long focused on enriching those already rich. Fantastic profits are made on the stock exchanges, in the financial and real estate sector, in industrial and IT monopolies with gigantic salaries paid to managers, while taxes are cut, exploitation is intensified and education, health and public infrastructure are cut to the bone.
As a 17-year-old, the school dropout from a modest background started converting attics in Innsbruck, which he then sold on as expensive apartments. “Buy, renovate in luxury and drive up rents: This is the successful model with which René Benko from Innsbruck went from 17-year-old school dropout to real estate tycoon,” wrote the German weekly Die Zeit one year ago.
As soon as word of Benko’s first successes circulated, he was inundated with funding. “Benko’s empire thrives above all from rich backers,” reported Die Zeit in another article. Among the backers who helped him build his billion-dollar real estate empire were Greek shipowner Georgios Ikonomou, ex-Porsche boss Wendelin Wiedeking, management consultant Roland Berger, logistics billionaire Klaus-Michael Kühne and many others.
Benko deliberately displayed pomp and splendour. He bought prestigious buildings—such as the Chrysler Building in New York—as well as luxury department stores—such as Selfridges in London, KaDeWe in Berlin, Oberpollinger in Munich and Alsterhaus in Hamburg. He built prestigious buildings such as the Elbtower in Hamburg, which is now languishing as a ruined building. He owns a private jet, a luxury villa in Ischgl and invited guests to parties on his €40 million yacht Roma.
“Benko obviously knew that the display of wealth attracts even more wealth,” Die Zeit quotes a business partner. He not only courted donors, but also politicians. He was a mentor of and maintained close relations with the then Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, who helped him find new donors on a joint trip to Abu Dhabi in 2018.
Benko’s unscrupulous methods are demonstrated by his involvement in the German department store chains Kaufhof and Karstadt, which had previously narrowly avoided bankruptcy. The trade union Verdi celebrated Benko as a “saviour,” helping him to collect €680 million from the German government’s economic stabilization fund, merge the two chains into Galeria, close dozens of stores and cut employees’ wages.
For Benko, this was a brilliant deal. He separated the valuable real estate from the department store group and charged the latter hugely inflated rents for their continued use. In this way, the real estate division of Signa Holding made a profit of €800 million in the coronavirus year of 2020 and paid out €200 million in dividends to shareholders, while Signa’s loss-making department store chain collected hundreds of millions in taxpayers’ money.
At the beginning of this year, Verdi agreed to another restructuring plan for Galeria, which had filed for insolvency again the previous year. Another 4,000 jobs fell victim to this plan. Now the 12,000 remaining employees, whose monthly wages are already €500 below the official collective agreement rate, due to the series of concessions made by Verdi, are now threatened with the final loss of their jobs. They cannot rely on the Verdi trade union, which bowed down in front of Benko and helped him slash wages and jobs. Defending the jobs at risk requires the establishment of independent action committees.
The increase in rents for the department stores not only filled the coffers of Signa’s real estate division, but also increased the paper value of its properties, which is calculated on the basis of rental income. Benko was thus able to take out ever bigger loans, offering these properties as collateral.
In the end, his Signa empire consisted of an impenetrable web of over 1,000 individual companies, which also did business with each other. In addition to real estate, department stores and luxury hotels, it also included holdings in daily newspapers (Funke Mediengruppe, Kronen Zeitung, Kurier ).
The entire house of cards began to collapse when rising interest rates made it increasingly difficult to refinance the high level of debt. The European Central Bank (ECB) finally initiated a special audit of banks that had granted loans to Signa and instructed them in August of this year to hedge their risks more effectively. At the beginning of November, the rating agency Fitch finally classified Signa as “high credit risk.”
It is not yet clear what the consequences of the insolvency will be for Benko personally. According to reports, he has secured his private assets, which are estimated at €5 billion, but even if he loses part of this sum he will continue to live in luxury.
Contrary to the general claims of politicians and the media, the coronavirus pandemic is neither over nor has the coronavirus become harmless. In fact, Germany is currently in the midst of another wave of infection as is shown by all available figures.
According to official figures from the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), 23,264 cases of infection were reported in the last calendar week. Just six weeks earlier, there were only around 13,000, meaning that the number of infections has almost doubled in a short space of time. The data from wastewater monitoring has also shown an increase in infections since the beginning of July. Although this has levelled off somewhat in recent days, 17 locations still reported an increasing incidence last week, while 13 reported a falling incidence.
While the official reporting figures confirm the sharp rise in the coronavirus wave, they can tell us little about the actual scale of the pandemic, as testing and reporting requirements have largely been abolished. However, sites such as SentiSurv—a project run by the Mainz University Medical Centre, which collects data from 14,000 people who regularly test themselves and make their data available—are able to determine incidence rates on this basis.
SentiSurv data indicates an incidence rate that would equate to one in 50 inhabitants being newly infected every week. The highest incidence figure ever reported by the Robert Koch Institute during the entire pandemic was 1,543 in March 2022. According to SentiSurv, the incidence level has risen by over 500 since the beginning of November alone.
Even if the numbers of hospitalisations and deaths are lower than in the first years of the pandemic as a result of an increased vaccination rate, the virus has by no means become harmless. According to the State Statistical Office, COVID-19 was still one of the three most common causes of death in 2022, along with coronary heart disease and dementia. COVID-19 was identified as the main cause of death in 52,357 instances. And this does not include the cases in which COVID-19 was only documented on the death certificate as a concomitant illness. These figures will be published at a later date.
Markus Beier, chairman of the German Association of General Practitioners, explained in Die Welt: “For particularly vulnerable groups without appropriate vaccination protection, coronavirus can still be a serious illness.” And epidemiologist and virologist Klaus Stöhr warned in the Frankfurter Rundschau with regard to the wave of infections: “I believe that it will be more severe this winter.”
Even when the infection runs a relatively harmless course this can be followed by extremely severe long-term consequences (Long COVID). This can affect the heart, lungs, kidneys and practically all organs.
The deadly effects of the pandemic are particularly evident in the continuing decline in life expectancy. As the Federal Institute for Population Research recently announced, life expectancy in Germany fell for the third year in a row in 2022. Since the start of the pandemic, life expectancy has fallen from 78.7 years to 78.1 years for men and from 83.5 to 82.8 years for women.
Another worrying aspect of the current autumn and winter wave is the spread of new variants. The dominant variant at present is the Omicron subvariant EG.5, also known as “Eris,” which accounts for almost half of infections. Eris, which has been categorised as a “variant of interest” by the WHO, already has a growth advantage and better immune escape properties.
The sub-variant BA.2.86 “Pirola,” which was detected for the first time in Germany at the end of August, also accounts for 14 percent of infections. Pirola has around 30 mutations in the spike protein compared to its predecessor variants. These many changes in the genetic material are particularly worrying as they could make it more difficult for the body’s defences to recognise vaccinated and recovered people.
Many scientists are currently sounding the alarm about the Pirola offshoot JN.1, which is responsible for almost 5 percent of infections in Germany. JN.1 contains a mutation which, according to laboratory results, has a significantly better immune escape than Pirola. The American scientist J.P. Weiland therefore warns: “A change in the symptom profile or severity cannot be ruled out. ... Additional mutations in JN.1 with an even higher transmissibility are to be expected.” Many experts assume that JN.1 will dominate cases worldwide in the coming months.
The high infection numbers are already causing a nationwide wave of illness, especially in schools and nurseries. “The staffing situation in many primary schools in the country is on edge and in some cases is below the calculated staffing budget,” said Edgar Bohn, chairman of the Primary School Association, to RedaktionsNetzwerk Deutschland (RND). Depending on the levels of sick absences, some locations will no longer be able to fully compensate for staff shortages from their own resources.
“Many nurseries across Germany are currently struggling with a high number of staff shortages,” Waltraud Weegmann, chairwoman of the German Daycare Association, also told RND. Due to the acute shortage of skilled labour, urgently needed substitutes were lacking. Daycare centres therefore often had to reduce opening hours due to the legally prescribed staffing ratio. “This usually happens gradually, groups are merged, or children are only looked after on individual days,” says the head of the daycare centre association. “Ultimately, nurseries or groups can be partially or completely closed.”
Numerous hospitals are already responding to the rising number of infections by introducing compulsory mask wearing or restricting the number of visits. At Tübingen University Hospital, masks have been compulsory for visitors, outpatients, and staff in direct contact with patients since last week. Marburg University Hospital has also introduced a mask requirement and restricted visiting hours to protect patients from infection.
At Frankfurt University Hospital, masks are mandatory in-patient care. At Frankfurt Höchst Hospital, visitors must wear FFP2 masks and at Darmstadt Hospital, the mask requirement is limited to “high-risk areas” such as oncology or the intensive care unit.
All government parties at federal and state level are directly responsible for this catastrophic situation, as they have subordinated health to profits and have long since ended all protective measures. The consequences of this murderous pandemic policy were summarised in a letter from 15 leading Austrian doctors back in September:
“Since the removal of mandatory protective measures in the medical field, all patients, including highly vulnerable individuals, are being exposed to the risks of a SARS-CoV-2 infection in primary care settings as well as in hospitals. Many people have no way to reliably protect themselves in healthcare settings and are thus forced to contract COVID-19.
At oral arguments Wednesday morning the right-wing majority of Supreme Court justices sympathized openly with an extremist position advocated by the attorney for a fascistic con artist that threatens longstanding federal powers to regulate the securities markets and other major business activities, including workplace safety, environmental protections and health care.
The decision in the closely watched case could strip about two dozen federal agencies of the authority to hold administrative hearings to assess penalties for regulatory violations. Instead, agency lawyers will be forced to litigate such claims in the already congested federal court system, where alleged violators can invoke the right to a jury trial.
The US Supreme Court building in Washington DC. [Photo by Joe Ravi / CC BY-SA 3.0]
George Jarkesy is a former stockbroker turned right-wing media commentator and conspiracy theorist who established a reputation in certain circles by supporting the Tea Party and attacking then president Barack Obama as a communist surrounded by advisers from the Muslim Brotherhood. In one segment, Jarkesy claimed the Civil War was driven by over-taxation in the North and the need for money from the South.
To cash in on his fascist audience, Jarkesy set up small hedge funds, totaling $20-30 million, by attracting between 100 and 200 gullible investors.
After the funds predictably collapsed, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged Jarkesy with bilking his investors by lying about the assets held, inflating their values to generate excessive fees, and misrepresenting the identities of auditors and brokers.
Instead of suing in court, the SEC presented its case to an administrative law judge, employed by the Commission itself, who held a 12-day hearing, rejected Jarkesy’s testimony as evasive and unreliable, and sustained the charges. Jarkesy was ordered to stop his fraudulent activities, return almost $700,000 stolen from investors and pay a $300,000 penalty.
Such administrative proceedings have become ubiquitous over the last 75 years as the primary mechanism for enforcing federal regulations that provide at least a modicum of protection for the public. Accordingly they have become the target of pro-business and libertarian organizations bent on removing all impediments to generating profits through fraud, exploitation, environmental pollution and outright swindling.
Jarkesy petitioned for review of the SEC penalty in the right-wing dominated Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, headquartered in New Orleans. Instead of asserting his innocence, he challenged the constitutionality of the SEC’s administrative procedures themselves. Shocking many legal observers, two of the three judges, one nominated by George W. Bush and the other by Donald Trump, essentially ruled the entire federal administrative law system that has been in place since 1946 to be unconstitutional. The dissent was by an 87-year-old Reagan-nominated judge.
There are nearly 2,000 administrative law judges compared to less than 900 federal court judges. Forcing all their cases into the federal judiciary for resolution will result in logjams making meaningful enforcement of federal regulations impossible. That is the purpose of the ruling.
The SEC appealed to the Supreme Court, where a conglomeration of pro-business and libertarian organizations, right-wing “think tanks,” and billionaires, including Mark Cuban and Elon Musk, have filed friend of the court briefs in support of Jarkesy.
Wednesday’s oral arguments focused entirely on the Seventh Amendment of the Bill of Rights that guarantees “the right of trial by jury” for “suits at common law,” which would apply were the SEC limited to civil actions in federal courts rather than the more streamlined administrative proceedings to assess fines for regulatory violations.
In a landmark 1977 workplace safety case, Atlas Roofing Company v. Occupational Safety & Health Commission, the Supreme Court ruled explicitly that administrative law courts have the power to assess fines based on regulatory violations because such proceedings enforce “public rights” and are not “suits at common law.” That precedent would seem to resolve the issue, except that the corrupt right-wing bloc in control of the Supreme Court has no regard for precedents or the rule of stare decisis that interfere with its overtly political goals.
For those familiar with the Supreme Court’s outrageous expansion of “qualified immunity,” a doctrine fabricated by the court that frequently deprives civil-rights plaintiffs of their right to jury trials for police killings and other egregious official misconduct, the sanctimonious defense of the Seventh Amendment for a Wall Street swindler by these justices was truly stomach-churning.
Most outspoken was Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch. After calling “the right to trial by jury” a “very important foundational freedom in American society and a check on all branches of government,” he told the SEC’s attorney, “the Seventh Amendment would, on your account, dissipate, disappear, whatever verb you want to use.”
Some may recall that Gorsuch’s first Supreme Court opinion, 2018’s Epic Systems v. Lewis, upheld the blanket use of compulsory arbitration clauses by businesses to deny their aggrieved employees the Seventh Amendment right to present employment-based cases to a jury.
Associate Justice Elena Kagan spoke most directly for the three moderate justices, and the status quo, telling Jarkesy’s lawyer that the use of administrative fines has stood for “50 or 60 years” because “nobody has had the chutzpah, to quote my people, to bring it up since Atlas Roofing.”
Kagan added, “When you say, well, we should go back to the common law suits that were brought 200 years ago in the courts of Westminster, is Congress’ judgment—after the Depression, after the savings and loan crisis, after the Great Recession—is Congress’ judgment that more powers were needed within an administrative agency entitled to no respect?”
There are two other challenges to federal regulatory agencies pending in the Supreme Court. The first, which challenged funding for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, was argued last month. In January the Supreme Court will hear arguments on the Chevron doctrine, which requires that courts defer to an agency’s interpretation of a statute.
Many commentators are predicting that by the end of the Supreme Court’s current term next June there will be insufficient power remaining for federal agencies to regulate businesses and commerce effectively, turning the clock back to the wide open practices that culminated in the 1929 stock market crash and ensuing Great Depression.
The Albanese Labor government is already facing three High Court challenges by refugees to the manacling legislation that it and the Liberal-National Coalition jointly rammed through both houses of parliament in just 12 hours on November 16. Further challenges are likely as well.
In a blatant bid to evade a November 8 High Court order to release immigration detainees who had been imprisoned indefinitely, the legislation suddenly inflicted a new form of indefinite detention. It imposed an unprecedented regime of electronic monitoring by ankle bracelets, curfews and other draconian restrictions on all the detainees, as well as some previously released, potentially for the rest of their lives.
The legal challenges highlight two key reactionary features of the bipartisan parliamentary operation to effectively defy the supreme court’s ruling. After sanctioning for three decades the shameful practice of indefinite incarceration of asylum seekers and other non-citizens denied visas, the court said it was unconstitutional, even according to the 1901 Australian Constitution’s extremely limited restrictions on arbitrary detention.
First, the challenges show the human face of the 145 released detainees, who have been deliberately demonised by the government, the Coalition and the corporate media. Many of them are innocent refugees. They have been falsely depicted as “murderers” and “rapists” in an effort to justify police-state measures, including the government’s proposed “preventative detention” bill to re-detain many of them.
In fact, two of the cases involve men who had been earlier released into the community, long before the High Court ruling, having been assessed by the immigration authorities and government as no threat to anyone. They are not alone. At least 21 of the detainees—all witch-hunted as hardened or “disgusting” criminals—had previously been released from detention facilities.
This occurred under both the current Labor government and the previous Morrison Coalition government, exposing the claims that the detainees were too dangerous to release.
Second, the speed with which the three cases have been brought forward underscores the readiness of the political establishment to overturn even minimal constitutional restraints. There is strong legal opinion that the shackling and curfew legislation is just as unlawful, and cruel, as the indefinite detention system which the Keating Labor government pioneered in 1992.
Similar challenges are inevitable to the as-yet unseen preventative detention bill that is aimed at greatly widening the power to detain people without charge. The government is nevertheless demanding that parliament pass the legislation with equal haste this week, proclaiming that parliament must keep sitting until it does so.
In one legal challenge, the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre (ASRC) lodged a case on behalf of a 30-year-old Sudanese refugee who has been living in the community for nearly a year.
Despite his earlier release, the man has now been subjected to the same conditions—requiring him to wear an electronic monitoring ankle bracelet “at all times” and follow a strict 10 pm to 6 am curfew. Any departures from these conditions, even for an hour, could mean five years’ imprisonment.
The refugee—identified only as RVJB—arrived in Australia at the age of 13 after fleeing war-torn Sudan. According to the ASRC’s media release, he struggled as a young man to adjust to life in Australia and recover from trauma without adequate support. At the age of just 18, he was convicted of an offence, for which he was punished, but has had no convictions since he was 22.
“After careful assessment, health experts, the [Immigration] Department, courts and the Administrative Appeals Tribunal have all positively remarked on his character, assessing that he was not a danger to the community, and observing he had ‘turned his life around.’
“Despite this, he was subjected to seven years of immigration detention by the Australian Government, including on the notorious Christmas Island, where his health deteriorated and he experienced further trauma.”
His son, mother, two brothers, sister and nieces are all citizens and permanent Australian residents. The immigration minister finally released him from detention a year ago, but the new restrictions “will prevent RVJB from playing an active role in his son’s life and finding employment, impact his health, and expose him to further detention.”
In the media release, RVJB explained: “I’ve been an Australian since I was 13. I made mistakes when I was young after fleeing trauma. I served my time, and learned about consequences the hard way. I’ve worked so hard to change myself and make something of my life and I’ve proved myself over years and years…
“The last time I saw my son, he was three months old. He starts high school next year. When I got my bridging visa, his mother and I planned a special visit. But I don’t want him to see me like this.”
A second case is that of a 37-year-old Afghan refugee who fled Afghanistan and arrived in Australia in 2011. Refugee Legal lawyer David Manne said his client was fined $2,000 for indecent assault while in detention, where he remained for the next 11 years.
“He was then released into community detention and for the next nine months he has been able to live in the community without an ankle bracelet or curfew,” Manne said. “He is also extremely remorseful for what he did in detention and hasn’t committed any further offence over the last 12 years.”
The third challenge, by a Chinese refugee known only as S151, was launched less than a week after the shackling law was rushed through parliament. He arrived in Australia in September 2001 on a student visa, progressing on to other visas. After serving a sentence for an undisclosed offence, he was thrown into indefinite immigration detention, despite being determined to be a refugee in danger of persecution, preventing removal to China.
These three challenges come in the aftermath of the November 8 High Court ruling that led to the release of 145 detainees. The court declared that a stateless Rohingya Muslim asylum seeker from Myanmar, identified in a dehumanising fashion only as NZYQ, had been unlawfully detained since May, when it became clear that he could not be deported.
NZYO had arrived in Australia by boat in 2012. He was locked in immigration detention until 2014 before being granted a temporary bridging visa. In 2016, he was convicted of a sexual offence against a child but had served his time by 2018, when he was placed back into immigration detention.
Even more damning cases are coming to light. Last Thursday, a Federal Court judge ordered the government to immediately free an Iranian asylum seeker, Ned Kelly Emeralds, who had spent a decade in immigration detention after arriving by boat in 2013, despite never committing an offence.
Emeralds had applied for a refugee protection visa, but his application was eventually rejected in 2018 on the basis he did not have a well-founded fear of returning to Iran.
Matthew Albert, Emeralds’ counsel, told the hearing his client had tried to kill himself in detention, vowing: “I will not go back to be tortured and killed by a regime I despise.”
After the ruling, Emeralds said: “Over 10 years ago, I came to Australia to seek protection from torture in my country, and instead I was tortured. I had no way to escape. I could not go home, and the government chose not to release me. Nobody should be asked to choose between their life and their freedom. What happened to me should not have happened, and it should not happen to anyone else.”
Justice Geoffrey Kennett found Emeralds’ detention was unlawful because there was “no real prospect” of his deportation “becoming practicable in the reasonably foreseeable future.” That is the narrow test applied by the High Court in the initial NZYO ruling, which still permits detention, or re-detention, if deportation becomes “reasonably foreseeable.”
Throughout what has become a political crisis over the detainees, the Labor government has led the way in slandering the detainees, and therefore refugees more generally. In fact, it has criticised the Coalition, especially opposition leader Peter Dutton, from the right.
Australian Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil [Photo: Clare O’Neil MP]
Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil and other government ministers have branded Dutton as “weak” for releasing some detainees while he was home affairs minister in the previous Morrison government. They even accused him of protecting paedophiles by opposing an amendment last Monday to ban released “child sex offenders” from going near schools.
Dutton was actually demanding harsher measures, notably preventative detention, a reactionary proposal that the Labor government took up the next day when the High Court published its reasons for the NZYO ruling. The judges advised that detention could be reimposed via a preventive detention law.
Labor seized on that suggestion to again join hands with the Coalition to try to push through unprecedented measures this week, now to incarcerate people for what they might do in the future, according to the government’s police and intelligence agencies, not for any crime they have committed.
Israel resumed its genocidal assault on Gaza Friday morning within minutes of the seven-day “operational pause” expiring. By the end of the day, at least 178 more Palestinians had been reported killed, and 589 injured. A woman and her son were killed in Lebanon by Israeli artillery fire, after shooting restarted across the border.
The Netanyahu government blamed Hamas for ending the truce—the latest in a long list of lies. Rocket fire into Israel, still unattributed, came only after Israel claimed that Hamas had failed to honour commitments to free all the women and children it was holding when it released eight hostages yesterday.
Palestinians look at destruction after the Israeli bombing In Khan Younis refugee camp in Gaza Strip on December 1, 2023. [Photo: Mohammed Dahman/WSWS]
Hamas responded that there were no more such hostages to return. They had offered to hand over the bodies of a mother, Shiri Bibas, her 10-month-old son, Kfir, and his four-year-old brother, Ariel, who were killed by an Israeli bomb. “Hamas also offered to transfer the Bibas family’s bodies and release their father [Yarden] for their burial, along with two Zionist detainees,” it said in a statement, but Israeli authorities “remained unresponsive.”
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had already determined to resume military action, come what may, after repeated complaints that it was “losing momentum”. Citing Hamas’s supposed failure to uphold its side of the bargain was a transparent justification for doing so.
Only a day before, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich had raved that Israel would “chase and destroy” its enemies “everywhere with the help of God.” The pretext for this outburst was an attack in Jerusalem in which two alleged Hamas members killed four people at a bus stop before they were fired on by an armed civilian and then killed by the IDF.
National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir boasted that this proved he was correct to arm civilians with assault rifles. The “hero gunman” died Friday from multiple gunshot wounds inflicted by the IDF, who mistook him for an enemy combatant.
Netanyahu’s response made clear that what is planned in the name of eliminating Hamas is the ethnic cleansing not only of Gaza, but of the West Bank and Israel itself. “All Hamas terrorists will die—in Jerusalem, in Gaza, in the West Bank, and everywhere,” he thundered.
No secret is made of the brutal, criminal character of the second phase of the IDF’s assault now underway. Government spokesperson Eylon Levy told reporters thuggishly, “Having chosen to hold onto our women, Hamas will now take the mother of all thumpings.”
Reviewing the day’s slaughter, Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said, “The results are impressive. Hamas only understands force and therefore we will continue to act until we achieve the goals of the war.”
The destruction wrought in the north of the Gaza strip is now planned for the south, focusing on the city of Khan Yunis, where Israel claims Hamas is headquartered. Leaflets have been dropped on the city, which has already come under repeated and deadly attack, telling residents to evacuate and describing the area as a “dangerous battle zone”.
Given that the vast bulk of northern Gaza’s population is already crowded into the south—with 1.8 million of a 2.3 million total population displaced—there is nowhere to go. The IDF has told civilians to move towards the border with Egypt at Rafah, confirming fears that Israel is seeking to drive the Palestinians out of the strip entirely and into the Sinai desert.
Al Jazeera journalist Zoran Kusovac commented, “the south is now so overcrowded that there is a danger that an all-out ground assault from Israel might leave the people of Gaza with no option but to try to force their way across the border fence into Egypt.
“From the beginning of the conflict, Egypt has been warning that it would not accept any refugees, fearful of political destabilisation and security risks. If it is confronted with that reality, it might find itself in the worst-case scenario of having to use force.”
The humanitarian situation in Gaza was described by the World Health Organization as a “horror movie”. During the truce, roughly 150 trucks of aid entered the strip each day, less than a third of the 500 a day on average before October 7, and less even than the 200 a day believed necessary to meet the most basic needs of the population. Supplies have ground to a halt again with the resumption of the bombing.
International agencies have issued dire warnings. Speaking from the strip’s largest still-functioning hospital, shortly after an airstrike landed barely 50 metres away, UNICEF chief of communications James Elder asked, “Has humanity given up on the children of Gaza?
“I cannot overstate how the capacity has been reduced in hospitals over the last seven weeks. We cannot see more children with the wounds of war, with the burns, the shrapnel littering their body, with their broken bones. Inaction from those with influence is allowing the killing of children. This is a war on children.”
At al-Nasr hospital, International Red Cross surgeon Paul Ley warned, “We are already overwhelmed. There are something like 2,000 patients in a hospital built for 300, and over half need surgery. But we don’t have enough drugs, and insufficient anaesthetics. There is very little pain control and we have to use techniques that have been abandoned for many years because they are seen as dangerous.”
Head of the UN relief agency for Palestinian refugee UNRWA Philippe Lazzarini referred to a “staggering human tragedy” and a “race against time… already disease is becoming as much a threat as the bombardment.”
He described the south of Gaza as “completely overloaded… It simply cannot cater to so many people. Remember people from Gaza City and the north have been asked to go to the south because they were told the south would be safer. Yet a large proportion have been killed in the south.”
Condemning the “siege on an entire population” as “collective punishment”, he referred to the “one million people in UN installations, including 100,000 in the north… Their locations are known, and despite that, nearly 100 installations have been hit directly or indirectly.”
A joint investigation by Israeli outlets 972+ Mag and Local Call, published Thursday, confirmed the deliberate process used to carry out strikes on civilians in unprecedented numbers.
A source told the journalists, “The numbers increased from dozens of civilian deaths [permitted] as collateral damage as part of an attack on a senior official in previous operations, to hundreds of civilian deaths as collateral damage.”
An artificial intelligence programme called “The Gospel” has been used to select targets, powering what one source called a “mass assassination factory,” with the “emphasis… on quantity and not on quality.” Reporting the story, the Guardian explained that the programme “was created to address a chronic problem for the IDF: in earlier operations in Gaza, the air force repeatedly ran out of targets to strike.”
At the start of the war, the head of the Israeli air force made a point of emphasising that in carrying out “around the clock airstrikes… We are not being surgical.”
The massacre in Gaza resumes with the continuing support of US and world imperialism. Speaking in Dubai, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken backed Israel’s lie that the pause “came to an end because of Hamas, Hamas reneged on the commitments it made.” He reiterated Washington’s “strong solidarity with Israel defending itself” while cynically insisting that it was doing “everything possible to protect civilians.”
On Wednesday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published two studies of the United States in 2022 that highlight the stark inequality that constitutes the social fabric of life for the working class: the provisional life expectancy estimates and the provisional estimates of suicide by demographic characteristics.
Life expectancy at birth, by sex in the United States, 2000-2022 [Photo: National center for Health Statistics, National Vital Statistics System]
In the first study, life expectancy rose by a mere 1.1 years, from 76.4 years in 2021 to 77.5 years in 2022. This only partially offsets the 2.4 year drop in life expectancy during the first two years of the COVID pandemic, while in countries like Portugal, Belgium and Sweden, pandemic-related declines have been completely offset.
The gains were highest for the American Indian and Alaska Native category, which saw life expectancy climb from an abysmal 65.6 years to a still atrocious 67.9 years, or 6.5 years less than the rest of the country. Life expectancy for Blacks climbed from 71.2 to 72.8 years. Hispanics saw their life expectancy rise from 77.8 to 80, while non-Hispanic Whites saw life expectancy climb from 76.7 to 77.5. Asians, who have the highest life expectancy, had a one-year rise to 84.5.
The gains were not unexpected. After the 1918 Influenza pandemic, life expectancy leaped back to its previous trajectory. Similarly, the main factor in the current rises in life expectancy was significant declines (approximately 47 percent) in COVID-19-related deaths compared to the previous year, 2021.
Life expectancy in the United States, 1900-1960. Showing the impact of the 1918 infleunza pandemic [Photo: The Threat of Pandemic Influenza - Are We Ready, a workshop summary]
However, the fact that the gains barely made up for the declines during the height of the pandemic, exacerbated by the policy of mass infection, reflects the worsening of social conditions for the working class, despite the vast resources that could be used to address these conditions. The mainstream media obscures these social and class issues behind meaningless terms like “statistical incongruity.”
The death of 244,000 Americans from COVID-19 in 2022 was itself considerable and completely unnecessary, given the fact that the means to prevent these infections are well known and available to governments across the globe. The CDC and many in the media took pains to highlight that COVID had dropped to fourth place behind unintentional injuries as a leading cause of death in the US, meaning COVID remained behind cancer and heart disease for three years running.
Flags are placed on the lawn at a memorial for victims of COVID-19 at the Griffith Observatory, Friday, Nov. 19, 2021, in Los Angeles. [AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez]
Thus far in 2023, 60,000 people have died from COVID, while the public health system has continued to deteriorate. Under President Joe Biden, who promised to bring the pandemic to an end, more than 760,000 people have died, accounting for 67 percent of all those officially killed by COVID. This official figure is known to be a substantial under-count.
In short, the response of the White House to the pandemic punctuates the devastation brought on by the ruling elite’s starving of the social infrastructure in order to shore up its crumbling financial institutions. The US national debt has hit a staggering $33.8 trillion, up from $5.6 trillion in 2000, when the rate of gains in life expectancy for the working class began to turn downward.
Driving life expectancy down in 2022 were diseases such as Influenza and pneumonia, prenatal conditions, kidney disease and nutritional deficiencies. Deaths from heart disease, unintentional injuries, cancer and homicide slightly improved.
Contribution of leading causes of death to change in life expectancy in the United States, 2021-2022 [Photo: National Center for Health Statistics, National Vital Statistics System]
The CDC’s focus on race in regard to life expectancy obscures the more fundamental class issues of poverty and economic inequality. By comparison, a recent report submitted to the Brookings Institution by leading Princeton University economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton gives a conscientious account of the growing mortality gap, to a staggering 8.5 years, between Americans with and without a four-year college degree, a proxy for socioeconomic status. While those who have a four-year college degree saw life expectancy continue to climb at pace with Asian and Northern European countries, life expectancy for the working class in the US turned in 2010 and has continued to be in decline.
Adult life expectancy at 25 for Americans with a Bachelors Degree and without compared to 22 rich countries [Photo: Case and Deaton Brookings Papers on Economic Activity Conference Draft, September 28-29,2023]
A study published in June 2023 in the journal PNAS Nexus that assessed excess deaths in the US and comparative countries from 1933 to 2021 found that death rates began to diverge in the 1980s, accelerating in the last two decades. This staggering loss of life has been predominately borne by working people.
Age-standardized mortality trends in the United States versus other wealthy nations [Photo: PNAS Nexus]
The second report by the CDC, on provisional rates of suicide in the US, only substantiates the sharp decade in conditions faced by Americans. In 2022, 49,449 people committed suicide, the highest level the country has seen since 1941. Officials say this figure will continue to climb and possibly exceed 50,000 when all of 2022 is counted. The number of suicides carried out by means of firearms, 27,000, is the highest since at least 1968.
The data indicate that deaths of despair affect men disproportionately by a factor of four – 23.1 deaths for men and 5.9 deaths for women per 100,000 population. While rates among adolescent and working-age men and into retirement are similar, men over 75 are committing suicide at unprecedented rates. For women, the highest rates are among those between 25 and 65.
In conjunction with rising deaths of despair, there is a widening mortality gap between men (74.8 years) and women (80.2 years). This has grown from 4.8 years in 2010 to 5.8 years in 2021, the largest gap since 1996. In 2022 it slightly closed to 5.4 years. Besides suicide, COVID and the opioid crisis are factors affecting this trend.
A JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) report on this issue published in November noted:
Men experienced higher COVID-19 death rates for likely multifactorial reasons, including higher burden of comorbidities and differences in health behaviors and socioeconomic factors, such as labor force participation, incarceration, and homelessness. Differentially worsening mortality from diabetes, heart disease, homicide, and suicide underscores the twin crises of deaths from despair and firearm violence.
Professor Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota, speaking with Scientific American, said of the findings in the JAMA report:
The trends that reflect more deaths among men and countervailing trends such as increased maternal mortality are happening in the US, which has a significantly higher mortality rate than its peer countries. The right starting point for asking why any particular group in the US has such high mortality has is to ask why the entire United States does.
She added,
The answer isn’t simple. Poverty, overwork, a lack of safety nets, a fragmented medical system, and daily stressors could all play a role. But the truth is probably something like “all of the above.”
