https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQkJD02SJL8
Friday, June 11, 2021
World food prices rose 40 percent over past year amid expanding global hunger triggered by pandemic
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/06/04/food-j04.html
Kevin Reed
3 June 2021
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) food price index rose by 40 percent over the past year, including a rise of 4.8 percent since April.
The FAO report released on Thursday states: “The May increase represented the biggest month-on-month gain since October 2010. It also marked the twelfth consecutive monthly rise in the value of the FFPI to its highest value since September 2011. ... The sharp increase in May reflected a surge in prices for oils, sugar and cereals along with firmer meat and dairy prices.” The FFPI (FAO food price index) is a measure of the monthly change in international prices of a basket of food commodities.
Women wait in line for food donated by the Covid Without Hunger organization in the Jardim Gramacho slum of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Saturday, May 22, 2021. (AP Photo/Silvia Izquierdo)
According to the report, corn prices are 67 percent higher than a year ago, sugar is up nearly 60 percent and prices for cooking oil have doubled. The surging food prices are catastrophic for millions of people around the globe—already facing desperate conditions from the coronavirus pandemic—with hunger driven up rapidly in the poorest countries of the world.
The UN World Food Program reports that 270 million people are currently suffering from acute malnutrition or worse situations in the 79 countries in which the agency operates, double the number in 2019. Among the regions facing a rising hunger crisis that is exacerbated by skyrocketing food prices are Southeast Asia, Africa and Central America.
The World Bank estimates that up to 124 million people sank below the international poverty line—living on less than $1.90 a day—in 2020 as a result of the pandemic. Up to 39 million people more are expected to be added in 2021, taking the total number of those living in extreme poverty to 750 million people.
Analysts attributed the food cost increases to a series of global climate and economic factors. Bloomberg, for example, reported: “Drought in key Brazilian growing regions is crippling crops from corn to coffee, and vegetable oil production growth has slowed in Southeast Asia. That’s boosting costs for livestock producers and risks further straining global grain stockpiles that have been depleted by soaring Chinese demand.”
Among the food supply issues driven by China’s economic expansion are an increased demand for feed to rebuild pig herds that were struck in recent years by disease. The pig feed contains staples, such as corn and soybeans, that are also consumed by people.
Other analysts have pointed to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the global food supply saying that restrictions on movement have increased logistics costs while decreased incomes have driven up demand for less expensive food items.
Economists have warned that the resumption of eating out around the world, following the lifting of COVID-19 restrictions despite the ongoing pandemic, is adding to price increases. Abdolreza Abbassian, senior economist at the FAO, said, “The decline in eating out was not totally compensated with eating at home, but as people start to go to restaurants again, you will see food prices rise.”
Comparing the present increases to the food price surge 10 years ago, chief economist at the United Nations World Food Program, Arif Husain, said, “What is unique about this time is that prices are going up, and at the same time people’s incomes have been decimated. The combination of the two, rising prices and no purchasing power, is the most lethal thing you could deal with.”
The extreme global food price increases and expanding hunger are among the sharpest manifestations of the crisis of the capitalist system, posing the necessity for socialist revolution and economic planning by the international working class as an immediate life-and-death matter.
Food price inflation has developed over the past year in parallel with the spread of the deadly pandemic across the globe. While the imperialist powers have hoarded the vaccines and denied them to the poorest countries, the pandemic is now surging among these populations as the cost of the basic necessities of life are becoming increasingly out of reach.
The Wall Street Journal got right down to the primary concerns of the financial aristocracy amid the food price crisis: social instability, migration and political unrest. In an article entitled “Food Prices Soar Compounding Woes of World’s Poor,” the Wall Street Journal wrote on May 20: “Previous spikes in food and fuel prices contributed to political instability in recent decades, including the ‘Arab Spring’ revolutions in 2011. While nothing of that scale has emerged this year, expensive food is part of the mix in several countries now experiencing unrest.”
Pointing to mass protests in Colombia and Sudan and rising hunger as a primary cause of migration across the US southern border—the number of people facing acute food insecurity jumped 20 percent in Guatemala and tripled in Honduras this year compared to 2019—the Wall Street Journal is raising alarm bells among the capitalist ruling elite.
The Wall Street Journal spoke with Guatemala’s coordinator of humanitarian programs for the global charity Oxfam, Iván Aguilar, who said: “In terms of food insecurity, we are at the worst point in Guatemala in at least 20 years. It’s a very worrisome combination of factors, and making things worse, you have weak governments in the region with scarce means to help the poor.”
The broader economic implications of price inflation have been discussed in recent weeks and are a growing area of concern within ruling circles, such as the US Federal Reserve Bank and the European Central Bank.
While the Biden administration has officially stated that inflation is not a concern, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said on May 4 that the Federal Reserve could easily control inflationary outbreaks with interest rate hikes. However, Yellen tried to walk back those comments later that same day because raising the rates would disrupt the flow of cash into the markets that is the basis of the ongoing spectacular rise of share values on Wall Street and the unprecedented increased in the number and wealth of billionaires throughout the pandemic.
According to the report, corn prices are 67 percent higher than a year ago, sugar is up nearly 60 percent and prices for cooking oil have doubled. The surging food prices are catastrophic for millions of people around the globe—already facing desperate conditions from the coronavirus pandemic—with hunger driven up rapidly in the poorest countries of the world.
The UN World Food Program reports that 270 million people are currently suffering from acute malnutrition or worse situations in the 79 countries in which the agency operates, double the number in 2019. Among the regions facing a rising hunger crisis that is exacerbated by skyrocketing food prices are Southeast Asia, Africa and Central America.
The World Bank estimates that up to 124 million people sank below the international poverty line—living on less than $1.90 a day—in 2020 as a result of the pandemic. Up to 39 million people more are expected to be added in 2021, taking the total number of those living in extreme poverty to 750 million people.
Analysts attributed the food cost increases to a series of global climate and economic factors. Bloomberg, for example, reported: “Drought in key Brazilian growing regions is crippling crops from corn to coffee, and vegetable oil production growth has slowed in Southeast Asia. That’s boosting costs for livestock producers and risks further straining global grain stockpiles that have been depleted by soaring Chinese demand.”
Among the food supply issues driven by China’s economic expansion are an increased demand for feed to rebuild pig herds that were struck in recent years by disease. The pig feed contains staples, such as corn and soybeans, that are also consumed by people.
Other analysts have pointed to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the global food supply saying that restrictions on movement have increased logistics costs while decreased incomes have driven up demand for less expensive food items.
Economists have warned that the resumption of eating out around the world, following the lifting of COVID-19 restrictions despite the ongoing pandemic, is adding to price increases. Abdolreza Abbassian, senior economist at the FAO, said, “The decline in eating out was not totally compensated with eating at home, but as people start to go to restaurants again, you will see food prices rise.”
Comparing the present increases to the food price surge 10 years ago, chief economist at the United Nations World Food Program, Arif Husain, said, “What is unique about this time is that prices are going up, and at the same time people’s incomes have been decimated. The combination of the two, rising prices and no purchasing power, is the most lethal thing you could deal with.”
The extreme global food price increases and expanding hunger are among the sharpest manifestations of the crisis of the capitalist system, posing the necessity for socialist revolution and economic planning by the international working class as an immediate life-and-death matter.
Food price inflation has developed over the past year in parallel with the spread of the deadly pandemic across the globe. While the imperialist powers have hoarded the vaccines and denied them to the poorest countries, the pandemic is now surging among these populations as the cost of the basic necessities of life are becoming increasingly out of reach.
The Wall Street Journal got right down to the primary concerns of the financial aristocracy amid the food price crisis: social instability, migration and political unrest. In an article entitled “Food Prices Soar Compounding Woes of World’s Poor,” the Wall Street Journal wrote on May 20: “Previous spikes in food and fuel prices contributed to political instability in recent decades, including the ‘Arab Spring’ revolutions in 2011. While nothing of that scale has emerged this year, expensive food is part of the mix in several countries now experiencing unrest.”
Pointing to mass protests in Colombia and Sudan and rising hunger as a primary cause of migration across the US southern border—the number of people facing acute food insecurity jumped 20 percent in Guatemala and tripled in Honduras this year compared to 2019—the Wall Street Journal is raising alarm bells among the capitalist ruling elite.
The Wall Street Journal spoke with Guatemala’s coordinator of humanitarian programs for the global charity Oxfam, Iván Aguilar, who said: “In terms of food insecurity, we are at the worst point in Guatemala in at least 20 years. It’s a very worrisome combination of factors, and making things worse, you have weak governments in the region with scarce means to help the poor.”
The broader economic implications of price inflation have been discussed in recent weeks and are a growing area of concern within ruling circles, such as the US Federal Reserve Bank and the European Central Bank.
While the Biden administration has officially stated that inflation is not a concern, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said on May 4 that the Federal Reserve could easily control inflationary outbreaks with interest rate hikes. However, Yellen tried to walk back those comments later that same day because raising the rates would disrupt the flow of cash into the markets that is the basis of the ongoing spectacular rise of share values on Wall Street and the unprecedented increased in the number and wealth of billionaires throughout the pandemic.
COVID pandemic spawns vaccine billionaires amid global mass death
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/05/28/pers-m28.html
Bill Van Auken
27 May 2021
Profits reaped from the production of COVID-19 vaccines have spawned nine new billionaires with a combined wealth of $19.3 billion. They have likewise fattened the portfolios of eight existing billionaires with fortunes tied to corporations involved in vaccine production by $32 billion.
These staggering figures, exposing an obscene accumulation of private wealth in the midst of global mass death and immiseration, were released in a report produced by an alliance of aid organizations in advance of a G20 Global Health Summit.
Family members pray next to the burning pyre of a person who died of COVID-19, at a crematorium in Srinagar, May 25, 2021. (AP Photo/ Dar Yasin)
The report estimates that the newly minted fortunes of Moderna and Pfizer CEOs and investors-turned-billionaires could pay to vaccinate all 780 million people in the so-called “low-income countries” 1.3 times over.
The $32 billion raked in by the pre-existing billionaires over the past year would pay for the full vaccination of all 1.4 billion people in India. The country is the new epicenter of the COVID-19 catastrophe, where infections have doubled in the past two months. Recorded daily deaths have risen to 4,000, overwhelming the health care system and overflowing crematoriums and burial grounds with bodies.
The new vaccine billionaires include Stéphane Bancel, Moderna’s CEO ($4.3 billion); Ugur Sahin, CEO and co-founder of BioNTech ($4 billion); Timothy Springer, an immunologist and founding investor of Moderna ($2.2 billion), and Noubar Afeyan, Moderna’s chairman ($1.9 billion).
The foundation for the immense wealth amassed by these individuals was laid by government-funded research at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and university laboratories, along with the outlay of some $10.5 billion in public funding for the development and production of vaccines.
The private appropriation of socially produced scientific achievements has allowed Moderna, Pfizer-BioNTech and other corporations to jack up the price of the vaccines at least 20 percent over their production costs and secure monopoly control that bars countries desperately needing vaccines from making cheaper generics.
On top of that, the fortunes of the big pharma-biotech billionaires have been swelled by a soaring stock market underpinned by huge government cash infusions. Moderna’s share prices, for example, have quadrupled over the past year.
The Moderna and Pfizer CEOs and investors may be among the most direct, but are hardly the only, “pandemic profiteers.” As the annual report by Forbes magazine spelled out last month, the collective wealth of the world’s billionaires surged by more than 60 percent last year, from $8 trillion to $13.1 trillion. This, as the pandemic and its socio-economic effects have wiped out at least 255 million full-time jobs globally over the past year and will, according to the World Bank, push another 150 million people into extreme poverty in 2021.
While the production of vaccines has yielded immense fortunes for a tiny layer within the ruling oligarchy, the vast majority of the world’s population have been denied access to vaccinations. Distribution of vaccines has been hobbled by nationalism, profiteering and the outright sabotage by the major imperialist powers of any coordinated international campaign to combat the pandemic.
The corporations and finance capital have ferociously resisted calls for the World Trade Organization to waive patents on COVID-19 vaccines, effectively breaking the production monopolies. The companies and their lobbyists have insisted that the waiver would be ineffective because it would take months to transfer technology and develop manufacturing capacity in other countries. They have been making this argument for months, while the people of these countries are dying, deprived of the vaccines that could save their lives.
At the opening of the World Health Organization’s 74th World Health Assembly on Monday, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus noted that the number of coronavirus cases so far this year has surpassed those for all of 2020 and that, given existing trends, the number of COVID-19 deaths will outstrip 2020’s total death toll within the next three weeks.
In a report released last week, the WHO estimated that three times more people may have died from the pandemic than is reflected in official figures. This would put the real global death toll at over 10 million.
Pointing to the vast inequality in global vaccine distribution, Ghebreyesus declared that “the ongoing vaccine crisis is a scandalous inequity that is perpetuating the pandemic.” He noted that 75 percent of the world’s vaccines have been administered in just 10 countries.
“There is no diplomatic way to say it. A small group of countries that make and buy the majority of the world’s vaccines control the fate of the rest of the world,” he said, while pointing to the “vastly inadequate” doses supplied to COVAX, the global agency created to supposedly assure equitable vaccine distribution.
The stated aim of COVAX was to distribute two billion doses by the end of 2021. As of early this month, it had managed to distribute just 70 million doses to 125 countries, less than enough to vaccinate 1 percent of their combined populations even once.
Africa, with 17 percent of the world’s population, accounts for just 1.5 percent of vaccinations worldwide. COVAX has been able to distribute just 300,000 doses for the 15 million people of Somalia, 355,000 doses for 23 million in Niger and 175,000 for 6.8 million in Libya. In the Middle East, just 336,000 have been provided for 39 million Iraqis, 364,800 for 43 million Algerians and 164,000 for 4.7 million Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. Similar figures prevail in impoverished countries in Latin America, where Bolivia, for example, has received just 421,000 doses for its 12 million people; and in Asia, where the Philippines has gotten just 2.6 million doses for a population of 108 million.
COVAX was deprived of vaccines from the outset, and its mission of equitable distribution was sabotaged as the major imperialist powers, with Washington in the lead, signed deals with Pfizer, Moderna and other companies bypassing the international agency to buy up the lion’s share of vaccines for themselves.
The dire effects of this vaccine nationalism have been exacerbated further as the Indian government has responded to the uncontrolled surge of the pandemic that its own policies fueled by ordering the country’s Serum Institute (SII), the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer, to halt all exports. As a result, tens of millions of health care workers in the world’s poorest countries who had received a first dose of the vaccine will not be getting a second.
The US and the European imperialist powers have responded to the crisis with promises of vaccines that amount to less than a drop in the ocean. The Biden administration has pledged 80 million doses, and the European Union 100 million.
With new records of global infections and deaths being set daily, this response appears not only heartless, but irrational and indeed lunatic. There will be no end to the global coronavirus pandemic on a national basis. As the WHO’s Ghebreyesus warned Monday, “No country should assume it is out of the woods, no matter its vaccination rate.” With the virus spreading uncontrollably in India, Brazil and other countries, the threat remains that new vaccine-resistant variants will emerge.
The criminal indifference of capitalist governments and ruling classes to the burning need for a global vaccination campaign is in sync with their entire homicidal response to the pandemic. From the outset, they have subordinated the defense of human life to the profit interests of the banks and corporations and a ruling oligarchy that has concentrated unfathomable wealth in its hands.
The pandemic has laid bare the necessity of abolishing the capitalist nation-state system, expropriating the wealth accumulated by the financial oligarchy and ending private ownership of the means of production as the preconditions for defending the rights and interests of working people, including life itself.
Workers all over the world are entering into struggles fueled by the social catastrophe created by capitalism’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. These struggles must be armed with a socialist and internationalist program, uniting workers across national boundaries in a common fight for a society that places human needs over the profits and wealth of the oligarchs and advances the international unity of the working class against capitalism’s drive to war.
Global excess deaths during the pandemic range from 7 to 13 million lives lost according to new estimate
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/05/20/econ-m20.html
Benjamin Mateus
19 May 2021
Last week, the Economist published a special report, a modeling study looking at excess deaths attributable to the COVID-19 pandemic globally. As of May 2021, they concluded, there have been 7.1 to 12.7 million excess deaths worldwide. Their central estimate places the toll at 10.2 million people—three times the official figures—who would have otherwise been living today, had the world’s governments responded in earnest to the threat posed by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus.
As the Economist explained, the number of fatalities officially reported country by country grossly underestimates the actual figures. This is a result of the lack of testing to confirm the cause of death and a lag in registering deaths. Inundated health systems also mean people who died at home have never been counted. Using “excess deaths,” a process that counts the number of people who die in a region and compares it to historical baselines, statistical models can be developed to address the question of the actual death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic.
A worker in protective suits takes a break amid graves at a newly opened cemetery for the victims of COVID-19 in Medan, North Sumatra, Indonesia, Monday, Nov. 16, 2020. (AP Photo/Binsar Bakkara)
They write, “Using known data on 121 variables, from recorded deaths to demography, geography, and mobility, we have built a pattern of correlations that lets us fill in gaps where numbers are lacking.” However, for the same reasons mentioned, many countries cannot provide reliable figures for excess deaths. Much of the available data was extracted from the data set kept at the Kohelet Economic Forum, an Israeli think-tank, with the World Mortality Dataset project.
According to Sondre Ulvund Solstad, the Economist’s senior data journalist, “The challenge becomes estimating excess deaths where they are unknown. You don’t just want to spit out a number and say, here is the truth, because the truth is you can’t know the exact number of excess deaths. The data doesn’t exist. So, what we have done and have invested tremendous effort in doing is to provide ranges that capture the variations that is possible…we tried to collect as much data as we could on all sorts of indicators so that if some data was missing at least, we would have some moderate data that could fill in.” He also explained that when data was missing, it was recorded as such, noting that “it says something in itself.”
He added that lack of data is most severe for low- and middle-income countries. “In these places, testing is less widespread mostly because it is expensive and not something elected officials there like to prioritize. We also suspect that in some countries governments would not want to prioritize testing because it would reveal how bad the pandemic really is.”
After the pandemic ravaged through Wuhan city and Hubei province in China, the coronavirus swept through the “rich world,” then moving into more isolated and internationally connected developing regions, causing mass amounts of fatalities. “Deaths have been rising for most of the past year [33 out of 52 weeks] and every month. That is not total deaths, but deaths per day. What we are seeing now is another spike by what’s happening in India.”
According to their modeling, India is experiencing 6,000 to 31,000 excess deaths per day, far above the 4,000 daily deaths reported. Their estimates are corroborated by other epidemiological models that place the numbers in the same range. If these are correct, then just in 2021 alone, more than one million have perished in India from COVID-19.
Solstad explained, “Unfortunately, India is not an outlier. Many countries’ modeling suggests they have been hit much harder than India. For instance, Peru, which is one of the worst hit in the world, has seen deaths per person per million population about 2.5 times what we currently estimate as to the case in India.”
The Economist model estimates that as of May 10, 2021 deaths in Asia ranged from 2.4 to 7.1 million excess deaths while the official COVID-19 deaths are around 0.6 million. Russia, by example, has an excess COVID-19 death rate of more than five times the official report. While Latin America and the Caribbean have reported 0.6 million COVID-19 fatalities, the number of excess deaths is 1.5 to 1.8 million.
In Africa, the range peaks at 2.1 million deaths, though the official figure stands at close to 130,000, an estimated death rate 14 times the official numbers. With a reported 55,000 COVID-19 deaths, South Africa has recorded 158,499 excess deaths. Health officials believe 85 to 95 percent are directly attributable to SARS-CoV-2, highlighting the difficulty to access tests and health care. Those over 60 have seen excess deaths of over 120,000.
Excess deaths in Europe stand at 50 to 60 percent higher, 1.5 to 1.6 million, than the official COVID-19 death figures. Estimates for the US and Canada combined are between 600,000 to 700,000. They calculated that excess deaths in the US are only seven percent higher than the official COVID-19 deaths, implying that the actual COVID-19 mortality is just over 650,000.
By the numbers, the working class of rich countries has faced the brunt of the pandemic where “herd immunity” was the de facto policy. But the modeling also tells the story of a very fast-moving pathogen that infects quickly, even the youngest. In a report published in the Journal of Public Health on April 12, 2021, a seroprevalence anti-SARS-COV-2 antibodies study conducted on 1,675 blood samples collected from residents in Karachi, Pakistan, from May to July 2020 found that 34 percent of the community’s population had contracted the virus, implying its high prevalence early in the course of the pandemic across many regions.
Solstad explained that age must be taken as a significant factor, meaning that older populations face a much higher consequence from the coronavirus. The estimate of the risk of dying from COVID-19 in Japan, for instance, where the median age is 48 versus in Uganda, where it is 17, is thirteen times higher. Yet, when age is accounted for, the younger population in developing countries faces a higher consequence from the coronavirus than their counterparts in more affluent regions simply because of the lack of health care resources.
The Economist notes the study published by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington on May 7, 2021 which estimates nearly 7 million excess deaths globally. They explained that the IHME applied fixed multipliers based on test-positivity rates to obtain estimates. Such a method can fail to match reported excess deaths as evidenced by their estimates for Japan and the US. But they applaud their effort highlighting the need for accurate data, which is woefully lacking. As they write, “Resources should be put into such measures not just to honor the dead and the truth, but also because, without such basic numbers, estimates of other impacts—economic, educational, cultural or in the health of survivors—are hard to understands, or to compare.”
One would think that such a devastating account of the actual toll of the COVID-19 pandemic’s human cost would make the front-page story of the leading press. The editorial boards would insist on opinion pieces that would explain to their readers the failures on the part of their respective governments to prepare for global threats. There may even be a statement by the paper calling for real-time data for every middle- and low-income country to address the grossly inadequate metrics to address medical and humanitarian needs in these regions. The British Journal of Medicine (BMJ) published a critical essay in February declaring the handling of the pandemic as tantamount to “social murder.”
Yet, there has not been any mention of this scathing report, which underscores the malign neglect pursued by the capitalist elite. The lives of these ten million are immaterial for them. The pandemic has shown that mass death is highly lucrative for the financial oligarchs. They increased their combined wealth by 60 percent, from $8 trillion to $13.1 trillion in 2020. The number of billionaires rocketed to 2,775, the highest rate of increase in history. In short, the coronavirus has been a critical instrument for amassing ever greater piles of wealth.
As the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response (IPPPR) noted, almost every wealthy nation chose not to heed the World Health Organization (WHO) warnings at the end of January 2020, when the virus was declared a global threat. The wasted month in February 2020 helped seed the pathogen throughout every region of the world, leading Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreysus to declare the coronavirus epidemic a pandemic on March 11, 2020.
Over the intervening months, wave after wave of horrific COVID-19 surges compelled many countries to implement lockdowns to stem a complete collapse of their health care systems, with bodies piling up in the corridors and backroom of hospitals and morgues. Health care workers without proper equipment, staffing, and emergency supplies were sent back into the deluge to shore up the crumbling edifice. Presently, Amnesty International has placed the figure of health care workers lost to COVID-19 at over 17,000.
While the wealth of the billionaires shot up, the pandemic led to the worst global economic crisis since the Great Depression. In April 2020 alone, 20.6 million jobs were wiped out in the United States. According to a collaborative study from the University of Chicago and Stanford, it is estimated that 32 to 42 percent of the COVID-induced layoffs will be permanent. Despite the push to reopen the economy full throttle, the current trend indicates that, as even President Joe Biden acknowledged, the US economy has a “long way to go,” with growth reportedly constrained by the shortage of workers and raw materials.
According to a report published on January 25, 8.8 percent of global working hours were lost relative to the fourth quarter of 2019, which amounts to 255 million full-time jobs, impacting hardest regions like Latin America, Southern Europe, and Southern Asia, amounting to $3.7 trillion in labor income lost. Estimates suggest that 2021 will continue to see losses in working hours equivalent to 90 to 130 million full-time equivalents. The IPPPR forecasted that the financial impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the world economy will amount to $22 trillion. The World Bank has estimated that an additional 150 million people may be pushed into extreme poverty this year.
After a year of death, human suffering continues to unfold on massive scale. Collapsing health systems are struggling to care for patients desperate for oxygen. Meanwhile, the COVID-19 vaccines trickle down all too slowly for the billions anxiously waiting for these lifesaving treatments. As the BMJ noted, the “vaccine gap between rich and poor countries is growing by the day.”
They write, “Using known data on 121 variables, from recorded deaths to demography, geography, and mobility, we have built a pattern of correlations that lets us fill in gaps where numbers are lacking.” However, for the same reasons mentioned, many countries cannot provide reliable figures for excess deaths. Much of the available data was extracted from the data set kept at the Kohelet Economic Forum, an Israeli think-tank, with the World Mortality Dataset project.
According to Sondre Ulvund Solstad, the Economist’s senior data journalist, “The challenge becomes estimating excess deaths where they are unknown. You don’t just want to spit out a number and say, here is the truth, because the truth is you can’t know the exact number of excess deaths. The data doesn’t exist. So, what we have done and have invested tremendous effort in doing is to provide ranges that capture the variations that is possible…we tried to collect as much data as we could on all sorts of indicators so that if some data was missing at least, we would have some moderate data that could fill in.” He also explained that when data was missing, it was recorded as such, noting that “it says something in itself.”
He added that lack of data is most severe for low- and middle-income countries. “In these places, testing is less widespread mostly because it is expensive and not something elected officials there like to prioritize. We also suspect that in some countries governments would not want to prioritize testing because it would reveal how bad the pandemic really is.”
After the pandemic ravaged through Wuhan city and Hubei province in China, the coronavirus swept through the “rich world,” then moving into more isolated and internationally connected developing regions, causing mass amounts of fatalities. “Deaths have been rising for most of the past year [33 out of 52 weeks] and every month. That is not total deaths, but deaths per day. What we are seeing now is another spike by what’s happening in India.”
According to their modeling, India is experiencing 6,000 to 31,000 excess deaths per day, far above the 4,000 daily deaths reported. Their estimates are corroborated by other epidemiological models that place the numbers in the same range. If these are correct, then just in 2021 alone, more than one million have perished in India from COVID-19.
Solstad explained, “Unfortunately, India is not an outlier. Many countries’ modeling suggests they have been hit much harder than India. For instance, Peru, which is one of the worst hit in the world, has seen deaths per person per million population about 2.5 times what we currently estimate as to the case in India.”
The Economist model estimates that as of May 10, 2021 deaths in Asia ranged from 2.4 to 7.1 million excess deaths while the official COVID-19 deaths are around 0.6 million. Russia, by example, has an excess COVID-19 death rate of more than five times the official report. While Latin America and the Caribbean have reported 0.6 million COVID-19 fatalities, the number of excess deaths is 1.5 to 1.8 million.
In Africa, the range peaks at 2.1 million deaths, though the official figure stands at close to 130,000, an estimated death rate 14 times the official numbers. With a reported 55,000 COVID-19 deaths, South Africa has recorded 158,499 excess deaths. Health officials believe 85 to 95 percent are directly attributable to SARS-CoV-2, highlighting the difficulty to access tests and health care. Those over 60 have seen excess deaths of over 120,000.
Excess deaths in Europe stand at 50 to 60 percent higher, 1.5 to 1.6 million, than the official COVID-19 death figures. Estimates for the US and Canada combined are between 600,000 to 700,000. They calculated that excess deaths in the US are only seven percent higher than the official COVID-19 deaths, implying that the actual COVID-19 mortality is just over 650,000.
By the numbers, the working class of rich countries has faced the brunt of the pandemic where “herd immunity” was the de facto policy. But the modeling also tells the story of a very fast-moving pathogen that infects quickly, even the youngest. In a report published in the Journal of Public Health on April 12, 2021, a seroprevalence anti-SARS-COV-2 antibodies study conducted on 1,675 blood samples collected from residents in Karachi, Pakistan, from May to July 2020 found that 34 percent of the community’s population had contracted the virus, implying its high prevalence early in the course of the pandemic across many regions.
Solstad explained that age must be taken as a significant factor, meaning that older populations face a much higher consequence from the coronavirus. The estimate of the risk of dying from COVID-19 in Japan, for instance, where the median age is 48 versus in Uganda, where it is 17, is thirteen times higher. Yet, when age is accounted for, the younger population in developing countries faces a higher consequence from the coronavirus than their counterparts in more affluent regions simply because of the lack of health care resources.
The Economist notes the study published by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington on May 7, 2021 which estimates nearly 7 million excess deaths globally. They explained that the IHME applied fixed multipliers based on test-positivity rates to obtain estimates. Such a method can fail to match reported excess deaths as evidenced by their estimates for Japan and the US. But they applaud their effort highlighting the need for accurate data, which is woefully lacking. As they write, “Resources should be put into such measures not just to honor the dead and the truth, but also because, without such basic numbers, estimates of other impacts—economic, educational, cultural or in the health of survivors—are hard to understands, or to compare.”
One would think that such a devastating account of the actual toll of the COVID-19 pandemic’s human cost would make the front-page story of the leading press. The editorial boards would insist on opinion pieces that would explain to their readers the failures on the part of their respective governments to prepare for global threats. There may even be a statement by the paper calling for real-time data for every middle- and low-income country to address the grossly inadequate metrics to address medical and humanitarian needs in these regions. The British Journal of Medicine (BMJ) published a critical essay in February declaring the handling of the pandemic as tantamount to “social murder.”
Yet, there has not been any mention of this scathing report, which underscores the malign neglect pursued by the capitalist elite. The lives of these ten million are immaterial for them. The pandemic has shown that mass death is highly lucrative for the financial oligarchs. They increased their combined wealth by 60 percent, from $8 trillion to $13.1 trillion in 2020. The number of billionaires rocketed to 2,775, the highest rate of increase in history. In short, the coronavirus has been a critical instrument for amassing ever greater piles of wealth.
As the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response (IPPPR) noted, almost every wealthy nation chose not to heed the World Health Organization (WHO) warnings at the end of January 2020, when the virus was declared a global threat. The wasted month in February 2020 helped seed the pathogen throughout every region of the world, leading Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreysus to declare the coronavirus epidemic a pandemic on March 11, 2020.
Over the intervening months, wave after wave of horrific COVID-19 surges compelled many countries to implement lockdowns to stem a complete collapse of their health care systems, with bodies piling up in the corridors and backroom of hospitals and morgues. Health care workers without proper equipment, staffing, and emergency supplies were sent back into the deluge to shore up the crumbling edifice. Presently, Amnesty International has placed the figure of health care workers lost to COVID-19 at over 17,000.
While the wealth of the billionaires shot up, the pandemic led to the worst global economic crisis since the Great Depression. In April 2020 alone, 20.6 million jobs were wiped out in the United States. According to a collaborative study from the University of Chicago and Stanford, it is estimated that 32 to 42 percent of the COVID-induced layoffs will be permanent. Despite the push to reopen the economy full throttle, the current trend indicates that, as even President Joe Biden acknowledged, the US economy has a “long way to go,” with growth reportedly constrained by the shortage of workers and raw materials.
According to a report published on January 25, 8.8 percent of global working hours were lost relative to the fourth quarter of 2019, which amounts to 255 million full-time jobs, impacting hardest regions like Latin America, Southern Europe, and Southern Asia, amounting to $3.7 trillion in labor income lost. Estimates suggest that 2021 will continue to see losses in working hours equivalent to 90 to 130 million full-time equivalents. The IPPPR forecasted that the financial impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the world economy will amount to $22 trillion. The World Bank has estimated that an additional 150 million people may be pushed into extreme poverty this year.
After a year of death, human suffering continues to unfold on massive scale. Collapsing health systems are struggling to care for patients desperate for oxygen. Meanwhile, the COVID-19 vaccines trickle down all too slowly for the billions anxiously waiting for these lifesaving treatments. As the BMJ noted, the “vaccine gap between rich and poor countries is growing by the day.”
Report shows CEOs in US cashed in during the pandemic as workers lost jobs, wages and lives
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/05/17/plun-m17.html
Kevin Reed
16 May 2021
The Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) published a significant report on May 11 that details the rigging of executive compensation plans by corporate boards during the pandemic, so that vast sums could be funneled into the pockets of millionaire executives while workers suffered unemployment, reduced wages, exposure to COVID-19 and death.
Under the title “Pandemic Pay Plunder,” the top finding of the IPS’ 27th Annual Executive Excess report is that among the top US corporations with the lowest paid workforces, CEOs received a 29 percent increase in compensation, while workers’ wages fell by 2 percent on average last year.
The IPS research shows that 51 out of the 100 corporations on the S&P 500 list with the lowest median worker wages bent corporate rules during the pandemic to ensure that their CEOs increased their compensation by an average of $4 million, to a total of $15.3 million, while workers’ wages fell by more than $550 to $28,187. The CEO-to-worker pay ratio for these corporations reached 830 to 1.
Carnival Cruise CEO Arnold Donald made $13.3 million while his company lost $10.2 billion. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)
In introducing the report, IPS authors Sarah Anderson, director of the Global Economy Project and co-editor of Inequality.org, and Sam Pizzigati, IPS associate fellow and co-editor of Inequality.org, write: “American families have been simply unable, on their own, to bear the COVID crisis. Meanwhile, corporate chief executives in the United States have continued to score the sorts of windfalls that have ballooned billionaire wealth.”
In explaining how corporate boards modified compensation rules to ensure a windfall for executives, the report says that the companies engaged “in various rigging maneuvers” such as (1) lowering the performance numbers so executives could meet their bonus targets, (2) awarding special “retention” bonuses, (3) excluding poor second-quarter (March-May 2020) results from performance evaluations and (4) replacing performance-based awards with time-based awards.
The IPS report says that “an army of ‘independent’ compensation consultants” was retained by the corporate boards in order to “give all this rule-rigging a veneer of legitimacy.” For example, Carnival—the largest international cruise line company—paid Frederick W. Cook & Co. $423,274 to give its CEO bonus “a stamp of fiscal probity as the company’s profits cratered and workers suffered.”
In relation to the Carnival compensation scam, the report notes that the company stranded employees at sea for months while it scrambled to get customers back home. But after securing $6 billion in low-cost financing from the US Federal Reserve, it gave CEO Arnold Donald special pandemic “retention and incentive” stock grants valued at more than $5 million. “Arnold’s total 2020 compensation came to $13.3 million, 490 times the company’s $27,151 median worker pay” the report states.
The IPS study does not mention reports that nearly a dozen cruise line workers died in suicides committed during the lengthy period of forced isolation without pay on ships, or as a result of mental health problems after they came ashore.
Other specific examples given by IPS of corporate manipulation of executive compensation in the midst of the pandemic include the meatpacking, poultry and automotive industries. In the case of $30 billion Arkansas-based Tyson Foods, the report says that “executives didn’t meet their cash bonus targets last year,” but the board “gave them stock awards to make up the difference.”
Tyson CEO Noel White earned $11 million, which is 294 times Tyson’s $37,444 median worker pay. The report states, “Another recipient of those special stock awards was company chair John Tyson, a billionaire hardly in dire need of special support. The heir and grandson of the company founder, Tyson has watched his personal wealth increase 72 percent during the pandemic—to $2.6 billion.”
Tyson workers, like all poultry and meatpacking employees, were declared essential workers during the pandemic and forced to stay on the job. The report says the Tyson workers suffered the most COVID-19 infections and deaths in the industry, noting: “As of February 2021, more than 12,000 Tyson workers had been infected by the virus and at least 38 had lost their lives to it.”
The automotive supplier Aptiv—one of the spin-offs from Delphi Automotive, itself a spin-off from GM—has the widest pay gap (5,294 to 1) on the IPS list of 51 low wage corporations. Aptiv CEO Kevin Clark was paid $31.3 million while the median wage earner made $5,906 in 2020. The report says, “The Aptiv board inflated Clark’s paycheck by moving bonus goalposts and excluding 2020 results from the 2018-2020 performance period for long-term executive incentive awards.”
The report also explains that the company justified the massive payout to Clark—totaling an additional $18 million—“as nothing more than the product of ‘accounting adjustments’ related to 2019 and 2020 stock awards.”
Aptiv operates in 44 countries and did not disclose to IPS where the workers earning a median wage of a little less than $6,000 are employed. The global corporation—which specializes in automotive cooling systems—was the product of the multi-billion-dollar July 2015 merger of Delphi Thermal with the German-based Mahle-Behr GmbH and British-based HellermannTyton.
Some of the other companies highlighted in the IPS report for extreme CEO-worker pay ratios in 2020 are:
* Hospitality corporation Hilton Worldwide, where CEO Christopher Nassetta pocketed the largest rigged pay-package adjustments, for a total compensation of $55.9 million in 2020.
*Apparel corporation Under Armour, where half the workforce earns less than $6,669 per year. There, the company board “altered bonus metrics and replaced performance-based with time-based stock awards” for CEO Patrik Frisk, so as to pay him $7.4 million.
* Chipotle Mexican Grill, where CEO Brian Niccol “received $38 million in 2020 compensation, 2,898 times the restaurant chain’s median worker pay.” The firm’s board of directors inflated his bonus by tossing out the company’s poor financial results from the peak shutdown period and excluding COVID-related costs.
While the political conclusions of the IPS editors are for tax reform that will force companies to pay increased taxes for CEO-worker wage gaps of more than 50-1—which is itself a defense of social inequality—the facts and figures presented in the report are a devastating exposure of the criminality of the ruling class under conditions of the worst public health crisis in a century.
The IPS report was published just as the US political establishment was launching a campaign to eliminate weekly supplemental unemployment benefits for millions of workers who remain unemployed as a result of the economic crisis and deadly health conditions caused by the response of the corporate and financial elite to the pandemic.
Already more than half of US states have revived their work search requirements in an effort to force workers back to work at low-paying jobs. As reported by the New York Times on Sunday, Arkansas and Louisiana brought back these requirements months ago and others such as Vermont and Kentucky have done so in the last few weeks.
Laying bare the economic interests that lie behind the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention decision to lift the mask requirement for “anyone who is fully vaccinated” last Thursday, President Biden ordered the Labor Department four days before to pressure state governments to put the job search requirements back into place.
The IPS report is a further confirmation of the analysis made by the World Socialist Web Site that the capitalist ruling class lives by the motto, “Never let a good crisis go to waste,” and has used the pandemic to intensify the exploitation of the working class, further enrich itself and expand social inequality to unprecedented levels.
In introducing the report, IPS authors Sarah Anderson, director of the Global Economy Project and co-editor of Inequality.org, and Sam Pizzigati, IPS associate fellow and co-editor of Inequality.org, write: “American families have been simply unable, on their own, to bear the COVID crisis. Meanwhile, corporate chief executives in the United States have continued to score the sorts of windfalls that have ballooned billionaire wealth.”
In explaining how corporate boards modified compensation rules to ensure a windfall for executives, the report says that the companies engaged “in various rigging maneuvers” such as (1) lowering the performance numbers so executives could meet their bonus targets, (2) awarding special “retention” bonuses, (3) excluding poor second-quarter (March-May 2020) results from performance evaluations and (4) replacing performance-based awards with time-based awards.
The IPS report says that “an army of ‘independent’ compensation consultants” was retained by the corporate boards in order to “give all this rule-rigging a veneer of legitimacy.” For example, Carnival—the largest international cruise line company—paid Frederick W. Cook & Co. $423,274 to give its CEO bonus “a stamp of fiscal probity as the company’s profits cratered and workers suffered.”
In relation to the Carnival compensation scam, the report notes that the company stranded employees at sea for months while it scrambled to get customers back home. But after securing $6 billion in low-cost financing from the US Federal Reserve, it gave CEO Arnold Donald special pandemic “retention and incentive” stock grants valued at more than $5 million. “Arnold’s total 2020 compensation came to $13.3 million, 490 times the company’s $27,151 median worker pay” the report states.
The IPS study does not mention reports that nearly a dozen cruise line workers died in suicides committed during the lengthy period of forced isolation without pay on ships, or as a result of mental health problems after they came ashore.
Other specific examples given by IPS of corporate manipulation of executive compensation in the midst of the pandemic include the meatpacking, poultry and automotive industries. In the case of $30 billion Arkansas-based Tyson Foods, the report says that “executives didn’t meet their cash bonus targets last year,” but the board “gave them stock awards to make up the difference.”
Tyson CEO Noel White earned $11 million, which is 294 times Tyson’s $37,444 median worker pay. The report states, “Another recipient of those special stock awards was company chair John Tyson, a billionaire hardly in dire need of special support. The heir and grandson of the company founder, Tyson has watched his personal wealth increase 72 percent during the pandemic—to $2.6 billion.”
Tyson workers, like all poultry and meatpacking employees, were declared essential workers during the pandemic and forced to stay on the job. The report says the Tyson workers suffered the most COVID-19 infections and deaths in the industry, noting: “As of February 2021, more than 12,000 Tyson workers had been infected by the virus and at least 38 had lost their lives to it.”
The automotive supplier Aptiv—one of the spin-offs from Delphi Automotive, itself a spin-off from GM—has the widest pay gap (5,294 to 1) on the IPS list of 51 low wage corporations. Aptiv CEO Kevin Clark was paid $31.3 million while the median wage earner made $5,906 in 2020. The report says, “The Aptiv board inflated Clark’s paycheck by moving bonus goalposts and excluding 2020 results from the 2018-2020 performance period for long-term executive incentive awards.”
The report also explains that the company justified the massive payout to Clark—totaling an additional $18 million—“as nothing more than the product of ‘accounting adjustments’ related to 2019 and 2020 stock awards.”
Aptiv operates in 44 countries and did not disclose to IPS where the workers earning a median wage of a little less than $6,000 are employed. The global corporation—which specializes in automotive cooling systems—was the product of the multi-billion-dollar July 2015 merger of Delphi Thermal with the German-based Mahle-Behr GmbH and British-based HellermannTyton.
Some of the other companies highlighted in the IPS report for extreme CEO-worker pay ratios in 2020 are:
* Hospitality corporation Hilton Worldwide, where CEO Christopher Nassetta pocketed the largest rigged pay-package adjustments, for a total compensation of $55.9 million in 2020.
*Apparel corporation Under Armour, where half the workforce earns less than $6,669 per year. There, the company board “altered bonus metrics and replaced performance-based with time-based stock awards” for CEO Patrik Frisk, so as to pay him $7.4 million.
* Chipotle Mexican Grill, where CEO Brian Niccol “received $38 million in 2020 compensation, 2,898 times the restaurant chain’s median worker pay.” The firm’s board of directors inflated his bonus by tossing out the company’s poor financial results from the peak shutdown period and excluding COVID-related costs.
While the political conclusions of the IPS editors are for tax reform that will force companies to pay increased taxes for CEO-worker wage gaps of more than 50-1—which is itself a defense of social inequality—the facts and figures presented in the report are a devastating exposure of the criminality of the ruling class under conditions of the worst public health crisis in a century.
The IPS report was published just as the US political establishment was launching a campaign to eliminate weekly supplemental unemployment benefits for millions of workers who remain unemployed as a result of the economic crisis and deadly health conditions caused by the response of the corporate and financial elite to the pandemic.
Already more than half of US states have revived their work search requirements in an effort to force workers back to work at low-paying jobs. As reported by the New York Times on Sunday, Arkansas and Louisiana brought back these requirements months ago and others such as Vermont and Kentucky have done so in the last few weeks.
Laying bare the economic interests that lie behind the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention decision to lift the mask requirement for “anyone who is fully vaccinated” last Thursday, President Biden ordered the Labor Department four days before to pressure state governments to put the job search requirements back into place.
The IPS report is a further confirmation of the analysis made by the World Socialist Web Site that the capitalist ruling class lives by the motto, “Never let a good crisis go to waste,” and has used the pandemic to intensify the exploitation of the working class, further enrich itself and expand social inequality to unprecedented levels.
HOW WASHINGTON IS POSITIONING SYRIAN AL-QAEDA’S FOUNDER AS ITS ‘ASSET’
By Ben Norton and Max Blumenthal, The Grayzone.
June 10, 2021
https://popularresistance.org/how-washington-is-positioning-syrian-al-qaedas-founder-as-its-asset/
A PBS Frontline Special Is The Latest Vehicle In A PR Campaign To Legitimize Rebranded Syrian Al-Qaeda, HTS, And Market Its Leader Mohammad Jolani As A Competent American “Asset.”
March 2021 – marked the 10th anniversary of the Western regime-change war on Syria. And after a decade of grueling conflict, Washington is still maneuvering to extend its longstanding relationship with the Salafi-jihadist militants fighting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
With the northeastern province of Idlib under the control of a self-proclaimed “Syrian Salvation Government” led by the rebranded version of Syria’s al-Qaeda franchise, and protected under the military aegis of NATO member state Turkey, powerful elements from Brussels to Washington have been working to legitimize its leader.
This June, PBS Frontline aired a special, “The Jihadist,” featuring a sit-down interview with Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, de facto president of the “Syrian Salvation Government” and founder of the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda originally called Jabhat al-Nusra, today re-branded as Hay-at Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS.
Having traded in his battlefield garb for a freshly pressed suit, Jolani was presented with the once unthinkable opportunity to market himself to a Western audience and pledge that his forces pose no threat to the US homeland because they were merely focused on waging war against Syria’s “loyalist” population.
The PBS correspondent who conducted the interview, Martin Smith, previously starred in a 2015 PBS special, “Inside Assad’s Syria,” which presented a US audience with a rare and relatively objective look at life inside Syrian government-controlled territory, as insurgents backed by NATO and Gulf monarchies encircled and terrorized its population.
Whether or not he realized it, when Smith returned to Syria this March to meet Jolani, he was on more than a journalistic field expedition. A network of think tanks and Beltway foreign policy veterans were engaged in a simultaneous push to remove Jolani and his militant faction HTS from the State Department’s list of designated terrorist groups.
This would open the door for international acceptance of his de facto government in Idlib, which regime-change advocates view as an important piece of leverage against Damascus, and as a human warehouse for the millions of refugees languishing there.
In turn, the audacious PR campaign would consolidate a branch of the organization responsible for the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States into a de facto US asset.
The campaign to normalize Jolani was publicly initiated by the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank with close ties to the Biden administration and NATO. By the time of Smith’s interview, operatives from a network of Gulf-funded, pro-Israel think tanks had spent years quietly lobbying for Washington to support al-Qaeda’s Syrian franchise, and succeeded in securing shipments of weapons from the CIA to some of its battlefield allies.
Though figures involved in this coordinated lobbying push were featured in Smith’s PBS Frontline report, they were presented to viewers as dispassionate analysts or former officials with no ulterior interests.
Framed as hard news yet shaped by one of the most insidious public relations campaigns in recent history, the nationally broadcast PBS special provided an effective vehicle for rehabilitating a jihadist leader and perpetuating the decades-long dirty war against Syria.
Whitewashing US And Foreign Support For Syria’s Extremist Insurgency
When Muhammad Jolani first crossed the Syrian-Iraqi border in 2012 with a small detachment of fighters, he belonged officially to al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, an extremist group responsible for countless attacks on US military occupiers and Shia civilians across Iraq.
Upon their thrust into Syria, Jolani’s forces enabled the late self-proclaimed leader of the caliphate, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, to establish his Islamic State, or ISIS, in the northeastern city of Raqqa. A feud over strategy and finances soon prompted Jolani to split from the Islamic State and establish Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian franchise of al-Qaeda, with the explicit blessing of the jihadist group’s global leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Martin Smith recounted this history in his PBS Frontline report, albeit briefly, while neglecting any mention of the scandalous covert US operation that made Nusra’s rise possible.
Smith, for instance, neglected mention of the prescient August 2012 Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) assessment which stated clearly that “the Salafist, the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI [al-Qaeda in Iraq] are the major forces driving the insurgency in Syria,” and that the Western-backed opposition would likely create a “Salafist principality in eastern Syria” if weapons were placed in the hands of anti-Assad Islamist militants.
Despite the warning, in 2013, the CIA launched Operation Timber Sycamore, an arm-and-equip program that funneled up to $1 billion per year (one out of every $15 in the CIA’s budget) into material support for an armed opposition thoroughly dominated by Islamist extremists. It was the agency’s largest covert operation since a similar initiative in Afghanistan in the 1980s, which gave birth to al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
Just as the DIA predicted, an extremist “Salafist principality” took root in northeastern Syria, while Al Qaeda’s local franchise quickly emerged as the dominant force within the armed opposition.
Nusra militants – including a former fighters of the CIA-created “Free Syrian Army” – were filmed cutting open the chests of Syrian soldiers, tearing their hearts out, and eating the organs raw (while receiving sympathetic media coverage from the BBC).
As it seized control of the Idlib province and moved to take Damascus, Nusra earned a reputation for grisly suicide attacks and executions, while instituting a medieval-style theocratic regime in the areas it controlled. An undercover 2017 documentary filmed by local residents, “Undercover Idlib,” exposed the dystopia that unfolded under Nusra control, with all non-religious music and public celebrations banned, the wearing of colorful headscarves outlawed, and Druze and Christian residents killed or forced to convert at gunpoint.
Rather than being uprooted from its “safe haven,” Nusra was encouraged by its NATO-aligned sponsors to rebrand and superficially distance itself from al-Qaeda so it could survive. First, in 2016, the al-Qaeda franchise changed its name to Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, then morphed into Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) the following year.
Under tutelage from Turkey, which controlled the northern border of Idlib, HTS subsequently formed the “Syrian Salvation Government,” and embarked on a PR campaign for international legitimacy.
Syria’s Rebranded Al Qaeda Branch Courts Western Media
In 2020, Idlib’s “Salvation Government” established a media relations office to assist the entry of Western journalists and provide them with fixers to guide them in its territory. While independent reporters (including the co-author of this article) have been subjected to waves of online abuse by mainstream Western correspondents for visiting Damascus, a New York Times tour of Idlib that was openly managed by al-Qeada’s Syrian affiliate took place without a hint of criticism.
Martin Smith’s March 2021 visit to Idlib was a similarly guided venture. His report on Jolani blended interview footage with scenes of the HTS leader pressing the flesh with residents of Idlib City, conveying the image of a popular retail politician stumping for local office.
Idlib “does not represent a threat to the security of Europe and America. This region is not a staging ground for executing foreign jihad,” Jolani reassured Smith. Over the past decade, he added, “we haven’t posed any threat to the West.”
In the interview, Smith focused entirely on whether Jolani would attack the West or not, demonstrating a near-total lack of interest in the lives of the millions of Syrians trapped under HTS’ neo-feudal rule in Idlib, and the minority groups threatened by its sectarian violence in nearby areas.
Dressed in a pressed shirt and blazer suitable for any job interview, Jolani rattled off rhetoric about the “Syrian revolution,” while stressing that his Salafi-jihadist brethren and Washington shared a common goal: regime change in Damascus.
Days after Smith left Idlib, HTS stoned three women to death as punishment for alleged adultery. It was far from the first public execution carried out by the group. Back when it was still known as Nusra, the al-Qaeda affiliate shot a woman in the head in the middle of a plaza in Idlib because she, too, had been accused of adultery.
None of these gruesome events were mentioned in Smith’s June 2021 PBS report, which represented the culmination of a years-long campaign to normalize HTS control in northeastern Syria.
“Al Qaeda Has Really Got It Right”
A powerful Brussels-based think tank that is funded by Western governments helped ignite the PR campaign to legitimize HTS with a highly sympathetic 2020 “conversation” with Jolani.
The think tank behind the whitewash, the International Crisis Group, gets the plurality of its funding from the European Union, Germany, France, and Australia, among other countries. It is effectively a Western intelligence cutout, and has consistently, over years, advocated for more Western military intervention in Syria.
The Crisis Group revealed that it had “[spoken] with Jolani in Idlib for four hours in late January” of 2020 while it pushed a narrative that he had become a new man.
“Following a series of rebranding efforts and internal transformations, Jolani told us, HTS presents itself today as a local group, independent of al-Qaeda’s chain of command, with a strictly Syrian, not a transnational, Islamist agenda,” the think tank wrote.
The softball interview was promoted by prominent members of the Syria regime-change lobby, including an Israeli fellow at the neoconservative, Washington DC-based Newlines Institute, Elizabeth Tsurkov, who has emerged as a de facto jihadi whisperer of the US and Israeli foreign policy nexus.
Tsurkov complimented the extremist rulers of Idlib, writing, “HTS is arguably the most pragmatic al-Qaeda offshoot to exist.”
Then there was Ken Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch (HRW), a billionaire oligarch-funded NGO that frequently promotes sanctions and regime-change operations against governments that have been targeted by Washington, from Syria to Venezuela, China to Nicaragua, Belarus to Bolivia.
Roth took to Twitter twice to promote the International Crisis Group’s interview with Jolani. Both of his tweets demonized the Syrian government and its ally Russia while making no mention of the array of crimes committed by the Salafi-jihadist militia in Idlib.
Roth’s message was clear: liberal interventionists in the Western human rights industry were on board with the HTS rebranding campaign.
In February 2021, the International Crisis Group published a follow-up paper explicitly aimed at convincing policy makers to remove the rebranded Syrian al-Qaeda franchise from the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations.
“HTS’s continued status as a ‘terrorist’ organisation (as designated by the U.S., Russia, the UN Security Council and Turkey) presents a major obstacle,” lamented the authors of the absurdly titled paper, “In Syria’s Idlib, Washington’s Chance to Reimagine Counter-terrorism.”
A co-author of the document, Syria consultant Noah Bonsey, called for Western policymakers to show more “nuance” on the rebranded al-Qaeda extremists.
The thrust of the think tank’s argument was that, unlike ISIS and other al-Qaeda affiliates, “HTS has distanced itself from transnational attacks and the militants who advocate for them.” In other words, the extremist group’s campaign of violence is acceptable as long as it stays focused on the Syrian government and its allies – not on targets in Western countries.
The usual suspects enthusiastically promoted the policy paper, including the former Israeli soldier, Tsurkov.
Perhaps the most influential member of the Syria regime-change lobby on Washington’s K Street, Charles Lister, happily promoted the proposal as well.
The British pundit, who does not speak Arabic, has spent years advocating for Syria’s Islamist extremist occupation from within think tanks such as the Brookings Doha Center and Middle East Institute, which are funded by theocratic Gulf monarchies.
During a 2017 panel discussion at NATO’s de facto think tank, the Atlantic Council, Lister described Idlib as “the heartland of al-Nusra,” acknowledging that “Al-Qaeda’s relative success in Syria has seen its ideology and its narrative mainstreamed, not just in parts of Syria, but also in parts of the region.”
At a subsequent 2018 Capitol Hill panel discussion aimed at gathering congressional support for military intervention, Lister gushed about Nusra, “Al Qaeda has really got it right, I hate to say… Their strategy is so much more effective on the ground. They are winning hearts and minds.”
Lister has even celebrated Jolani as an Islamist version of Che Guevara who “goes deep on modern Arab political history.” As for HTS, Lister praised them as “a more politically mature and intelligent jihadist movement.”
Rankled by the successful advocacy by Lister and his Gulf monarchy-backed colleagues for arming Islamist fanatics in Syria, Brett McGurk, the former US special envoy against ISIS, grumbled to a reporter that the think tankers “got a lot of people killed.”
By 2021, Lister was comfortable enough to call for the rebranded al-Nusra franchise to become an official Western asset.
James Jeffrey And Andrew Tabler’s Undisclosed Turkish And Israeli Ties
The PBS Frontline special on Jolani provided an uncritical platform to James Jeffrey, the former US special representative for Syria engagement, and Andrew Tabler, a de facto Israel lobbyist and think tank pundit, presenting them to viewers as serious Syria experts without disclosing their longstanding ties to two of the most pernicious foreign backers of Syria’s Islamist insurgency.
HTS is “the least bad option of the various options on Idlib, and Idlib is one of the most important places in Syria, which is one of the most important places right now in the Middle East,” Jeffrey declared to Frontline’s Martin Smith. He was finally acknowledging what was already well known in foreign policy circles but which few dared to say out loud: Washington has been allied with al-Qaeda in Syria.
The United States has not had formal diplomatic relations with Syria for years. Damascus formally broke contact with Washington in 2012 over its support for armed militants seeking to overthrow the country’s internationally recognized government.
The absence of diplomatic relations has led to the appointment of a series of US special envoys. One of the most influential, and aggressively interventionist, of these envoys has been Jeffrey.
When mainstream US media outlets mention Jeffrey, they are often careful to stress that he has served in both Republican and Democratic administrations, branding him as a bipartisan figure with extensive experience working at diplomatic posts in the Middle East.
What is almost never mentioned in the many glowing media portraits of Jeffrey, however, is his deep commitment to strengthening ties with Turkey, his close personal ties to the government in Ankara, and his fellowship with one of the most influential pro-Israel think tanks in Washington.
From 2013 to 2018, Jeffrey was a “distinguished fellow” at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a DC-based think tank that effectively serves as a cutout for Israeli intelligence. There, Jeffrey co-authored policy papers with neoconservative operatives such as Dennis Ross, advocating for hardline anti-Iran positions and even more US intervention in the Middle East.
While presenting Tehran as the “biggest challenge” for the United States, Jeffrey has been an enthusiastic advocate of closer cooperation with the Turkish government. In a report at WINEP, he maintained that “Turkey is one of the most important countries for the United States overall, and of central importance for U.S. policy.”
Jeffrey called for Washington to build deeper ties with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who he noted is “the most powerful Turkish leader since Mustafa Kemal Ataturk established the Turkish republic in 1923.” Jeffrey warned that failing to do so could inspire Ankara to improve its relations with longtime rival Russia.
Alongside the United States, Turkey has played a pivotal role in the regime-change war on Syria. Ankara worked with the CIA to create training camps inside Turkish territory, while southern Turkey became the de facto base for Syria’s political opposition in exile, with cities like Gaziantep serving as a hub for Western intelligence agencies and their assets.
For years, Erdogan maintained an open border with his southern neighbor, allowing tens of thousands of hardened Salafi-jihadists from around the world to enter Syria and wage war on the Assad government. This arrangement, known informally as the “jihadi highway,” allowed the Syrian opposition’s foreign sponsors to send billions of dollars worth of advanced weapons, including anti-tank missiles. It also gave extremist insurgents free rein to go back and forth across the porous border, seeking reinforcements and escaping retaliations by Damascus.
Ankara directly supported fanatical Islamist groups inside Syria, playing a “double game” with ISIS and effectively turning al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra into a proxy.
The Turkish military has illegally invaded Syrian sovereign territory several times since 2016, and Ankara military occupies parts of Idlib and northern Syria. The rebranded al-Qaeda extremists who run Idlib, HTS, collaborate openly with the Turkish military.
Jeffrey publicly broadcasted his pro-Ankara views when, in March 2020, he and then US Ambassador to United Nations Kelly Craft visited Turkey on a joint trip. On the southern border with Syria, the two diplomats posed for a photo op with the Western government-funded White Helmets, while calling for the overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad and reaffirming Washington’s support for Turkey’s policy in Idlib.
A few weeks before the visit, Jeffrey conducted an interview on Turkish TV that was republished by the US embassy. The US special envoy on Syria enthusiastically defended Ankara’s military occupation of parts of Idlib: “There the United States totally agrees with Turkey on the legal presence and justification for Turkey defending its existential interests against refugee flow and dealing with terror and finding a solution to the terrible Syrian conflict with the war criminal regime of President Assad. We understand and support these legitimate Turkish interests that have Turkish forces in Syria and specifically in Idlib.”
Jeffrey later admitted that he had lied to then-President Trump about the number of troops in Syria to prevent a total withdrawal. “We were always playing shell games to not make clear to our leadership how many troops we had there,” he boasted to the military website Defense One.
A 2019 report in Foreign Policy identified Jeffrey, alongside neoconservative operative and former National Security Advisor John Bolton, as part of a group of anti-Iran hawks who “repeatedly sought to reverse Trump’s Syria withdrawal over nearly two years, culminating in a disastrous Turkish invasion that has destabilized the region.”
Foreign Policy explained: “Jeffrey began making plans to stay in northeastern Syria indefinitely as an obstacle to Assad’s attempts to consolidate power. In particular, Jeffrey’s team aimed to deny the Syrian president and his Iranian backers access to the coveted oil fields in Deir Ezzor province, which are mostly under SDF control.”
Despite Jeffrey’s relentless advocacy for more Turkish control in northern Syria, PBS Frontline’s Martin Smith portrayed him as an objective expert who was delivering clinical policy analysis uncorrupted by any ulterior political interest.
Similarly, Smith interviewed Andrew Tabler, who offered effusive praise for Turkey’s role in Idlib. Though Tabler works for the same pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy which employed Jeffrey for years, Smith presented him to viewers as a former journalist with years of supposed expertise on Syria.
In fact, Tabler has aggressively advocated a US regime-change war on Syria during apparently paid Israel lobby lectures like the one he delivered to the Israel Club of Florida’s Valencia Isles.
“The United States needs to develop and execute a plan to develop its Sunni allies’ spheres of influence in Syria to help retake and stabilize those areas from ISIS and al Qaeda,” Tabler told his pro-Israel audience. “However, such an operation will only succeed if Washington not only maintains its goal of al-Assad stepping aside, but adds a military component to the strategy as well.”
Both Israel and Turkey have played central roles in destabilizing Syria from its north and south. And in Washington, figures like Jeffrey and Tabler have helped advance the interests of these two religiously sectarian human rights violators with zealous dedication.
But none of this context was provided to viewers of Smith’s PBS Frontline special on Jolani, leaving them with the impression that the two regime-change lobbyists were merely a couple of seasoned and unbiased analysts.
“Well, It’s Complicated”: A PBS Reporter On Jolani’s Record As Al Qaeda Leader
The June 2021 release of Smith’s PBS Frontline report prompted an exuberant Twitter victory lap by Lister, who erupted in quasi-orgasmic celebration at the portrayal of HTS as a “semi-technocratic ‘govt’”, and touted his own 10 years of work whitewashing the exploits of its jihadist founders.
Though Jolani’s de facto job interview with the US government was received positively inside the Beltway, an independent interviewer managed to challenge Smith on his approach.
He was Scott Horton, the Austin, Texas-based libertarian anti-war author and Pacifica radio host. In an interview with Smith before the full PBS special appeared, Horton asked Smith if he confronted Jolani about his militia’s record of slaughtering members of Syria’s Druze religious minority who refused to convert to Islam, or the vicious theocratic regime he operated from East Aleppo to Idlib.
Smith responded with spin that sounded like damage control for al-Nusra: “Jolani says that a lot of mistakes were made,” the journalist said. Later, he insisted, “Well, it’s complicated,” when challenged about Jolani’s rampage of sectarian violence.
HTS is “considerably different” from al-Qaeda, Smith maintained, and “don’t participate in large-scale attacks against civilians.” He even insisted that Jolani had pledged protect the rights of Druze, Christians, and other religious minorities – although all have been ethnically cleansed from Idlib or forced to convert.
Finally, Smith claimed that Syria’s secular president was exponentially worse than the rebranded al-Qaeda leader, whose forces permitted no one but Sunni Muslims to exist under their rule. “There is no comparison between Assad and Jolani,” he argued.
In one of his only direct criticisms of HTS in the interview with Horton, Smith conceded that HTS’ prisons “can be pretty nasty places,” adding in another massive understatement that Jolani “still runs a pretty tough ship.”
However, the PBS reporter insisted that Jolani never affiliated with al-Qaeda because of ideology, but rather because of the terrorist group’s powerful “branding.”
“At this point they’re trying to get the West to warm up to them,” Smith conceded. “They are engaged now in an ongoing effort to try to set up dialogue with the West; they would like to have the terrorism designation lifted.”
Smith insisted that despite the ongoing public relations campaign on HTS’s behalf, he was not a participant in it. “The Americans are tired of wars in the Middle East,” the journalist claimed, implying that Jolani is someone the imperial planners in Washington can rely on to leave in charge.
Whether or not he was wittingly complicit, Martin Smith and his PBS Frontline report represented the culmination of the Washington-led lobbying campaign to clean up Syrian al-Qaeda’s image and secure its status as a respectable US proxy.
Lindsey Snell, an American independent journalist who was held captive by Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria, scoffed at the public relations campaign waged on behalf of HTS by American media and think tanks. In an interview with The Grayzone, Snell said HTS still upholds the same ideology as ISIS, but has decided to appeal to the West in order to preserve its influence in Idlib while pocketing millions of dollars a month in international aid and oil money.
“Actually, their rebranding campaign started when I was their captive,” Snell told The Grayzone. “They changed their name for the first time and they announced their split from Al Qaeda when I was their captive. And of course, it didn’t actually change anything.”
“To this day most of them still call themselves ‘Nusra,’” Snell added. “Their split from Al Qaeda was really just a cosmetic, surface level thing and they’re still the same terrorists inflicting Sharia law on everyone in their territories.”
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