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 28 Apr 2009 @ 17:45
Europe faces ever deepening recession
By Chris Marsden
28 April 2009
Particularly revealing in the International Monetary Fund’s World Economic Outlook issued last week is its estimation of the precarious state of the European economies.
The IMF described the United States as lying at the centre of the global economic crisis, but also predicted a worsening recession in Europe. It estimates that the euro zone’s economy will contract by 4.2 percent this year, significantly worse than its January forecast of a 2 percent decline.
The EU states have incurred massive debts due to bank bailouts and stimulus packages, with a combined 2.3 trillion euros in financial guarantees, 300 billion euros in recapitalisation programmes and an additional 400 billion euros in various rescue and restructuring schemes.
The statistics agency Eurostat notes that Europe is in the midst of a deep economic recession, with industrial orders falling by 34.5 percent year-on-year. The euro zone’s external current account deficit reached 57.3 billion euros in the final quarter of 2008, almost three times the figure for the same period in 2007. It is not just exports that are declining as a result of the global slump. Direct investment abroad by the EU amounted to just 23.9 billion euros for the last three months of 2008, compared to 171.9 billion in the fourth quarter of 2007. Foreign investors also disinvested in the EU.
The cost of bailouts and declining tax revenues due to the slump has led to a spiraling of government deficits, which collectively have hit 2.3 percent of GDP for the 27-nation EU. The government debt to GDP ratio increased from 66 percent at the end of 2007 to 69.3 percent in the euro zone and from 58.7 percent to 61.5 percent in the EU.
Europe’s GDP is expected to fall by 1.2 percent, with the economy predicted to shrink by two percent, according to a report by the European Economic Advisory Group.
Unemployment is set to rise by an average rate of eight percent.
The IMF has said that the euro zone will face a worse recession than the United States, complaining that the European Central Bank was too slow to react to the impending recession and that Europe’s financial policies were not being implemented in a “sufficiently comprehensive and coordinated” fashion.
There is particular concern over the state of Europe’s banking system. While US banks have covered about half of their write-downs, Europe’s banks have taken only a fifth so far. In a bleak warning, the IMF noted that total write-downs would wipe out the world’s bank equity.
The Financial Times reported that Independent Credit View, the Swiss-based risk adviser, has warned of a “second wave” of debt stress hitting Europe under conditions in which its banks have much less in terms of reserve cushions than US banks.
Peter Jeggli, Credit View’s founder, states, “The biggest risk is in Europe... The Americans are ahead of the curve. European banks are exposed to US commercial real estate and to problems in Eastern Europe and Spain, where the situation is turning dramatic. We think the Spanish savings banks are basically bust and will need a government bail-out.”
The Financial Times comments, “Europe’s banks are exposed to a hydra-headed set of bubbles. They not only face heavy losses from US property, they also face collapsing credit booms in their own backyard and fallout from high levels of corporate debt in the eurozone. It takes longer for damage to surface with Europe’s traditional bank loans, which buckle later in the cycle as defaults rise. The ferocity of Europe’s recession leaves no doubt that losses will be huge this time.”
European banking is particularly exposed due to the collapse of the Eastern European economies.
Several countries have already gone cap-in-hand to the IMF, including Hungary, Serbia, Romania, Latvia and the Ukraine. In addition, the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development, the World Bank and the European Investment Bank have advanced a 24.5 billion euro support package for Eastern Europe’s banks.
Even so, there is every possibility of a collapse of one or more of the eastern European economies, which would have a domino effect that may lead to the collapse of neighbouring states and west European banks.
According to figures compiled by Handelsblad, Italy’s national debt is already well in excess of its GDP, Greece is approaching this figure and Belgium, France, Germany, Portugal and Austria all top 60 percent of GDP.
Germany
Numerous reports identify Germany as particularly vulnerable to the global recession due to its reliance on exports, which make up 40 percent of its GDP, and its exposure to east European debt.
The IMF has predicted that Germany’s economy will contract by 5.6 percent this year, while a group of German financial institutions predicts a 6 percent decline.
Germany may face an “especially persistent” recession and see a 23 percent decline in exports this year, pushing unemployment to close to 11 percent. Germany’s budget deficit will swell to 132.5 billion euros, or 5.5 percent of GDP in 2010, from 3.7 percent this year, the German institutes state.
Germany accounted for nearly a quarter of European bank write-downs last year. Its investments in eastern Europe ($450 billion, or four percent of German banking assets) raise further dangers. And not just for Germany.
Germany remains the engine of Europe’s economy. An ever worsening recession there will pull the rest of the continent in its wake.
Britain
The parlous state of the UK economy is the second major cause for concern, due primarily to the role of London as a finance centre.
The IMF has predicted that Britain’s GDP will contract by 4.1 percent this year, much greater than admitted by the government of Prime Minister Gordon Brown, and that Britain will suffer an ongoing recession.
In last week’s budget, Chancellor Alistair Darling predicted a 3.5 percent fall this year and a return to growth by 2010.
Commenting on the disparity, IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn said, “Part of the recovery relies on confidence and it is absolutely normal that governments all over the world will try to rebuild confidence in looking at the upper part of the range rather than the lower bound.”
“I would certainly have more pessimistic forecasts than most governments. Last year we were proven right,” he added.
The April 25 Wall Street Journal was deeply skeptical regarding Britain’s prospects, noting that “The UK, with a capital city that serves as one of the world’s premier financial hubs, has depended on financial services for one in five jobs and more than a quarter of its tax revenues... the plunge in first-quarter gross domestic product—[1.9%] the biggest since the 2.4% drop posted in the third quarter of 1979—presents a challenge for the UK government, which is taking on debt at a rate not seen since World War II, as it spends money to cushion the downturn and salvage its banking system. Over the next three years the government’s net borrowing requirement will be £488 billion ($718 billion).”
The IMF predicts that government debt in Britain will reach more than 80 percent of GDP.
Some measure of the extent of the slump is provided by the rise in unemployment to over two million, with predictions that it will top three million by 2010. In addition the latest British Chambers of Commerce monthly business survey found that 70 percent of companies plan to freeze or cut wages this year and half are thinking of making staff redundant in the next six months.
The IMF has warned that Britain’s housing market has still further to fall. With house prices having declined by 20 percent, the IMF stated that, as with Spain and Ireland, there was “a considerable distance left to run”.
David Cameron, leader of the opposition Conservatives, who are predicted to win next year’s general election, has spoken of creating a new “age of austerity”, vowing even deeper cuts than those pledged by the Labour government.
Spain
Spain is amongst the western European nations worst hit by the recession.
The IMF has predicted a prolonged slump in Spain’s economy as a result of the collapse in its housing market. It expects the economy to contract by 3 percent in 2009, as against government predictions of 1.6 percent. This month, unemployment topped four million, having doubled in the past year. Now standing at 17.4 percent, it is widely expected to top 20 percent fairly shortly.
The Socialist Party government of Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero has responded with a 70 billion euro fiscal stimulus programme and has pledged more to come. But The IMF has issued a strong warning that a worsening budget deficit expected to rise to 8 percent of GDP raises dangers of economic collapse.
France
In France, the Sarkozy government has estimated that the economy will shrink by 2.5 percent this year. Prime Minister Francois Fillon said, “What is certain is that 2009 will be a year of severe recession.”
This estimate is contradicted by the OECD, which predicts a contraction of 3.3 percent. France’s budget deficit stands at six percent.
Last month, unemployment rose by between 60,000 and 70,000, following 79,900 job losses in February. The unemployment rate presently stands at 8.2 percent, but is expected to top 10 percent by the end of the year. Unemployment is already a massive 21.2 percent and rising amongst those in France who are under 25. More >
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11 Mar 2009 @ 22:39
From wsws.org....
US companies slash thousands more jobs in early March
By David Walsh
11 March 2009
The first ten days of March have seen no let-up in the destruction of jobs in the US. Large and small corporations, as well as state and local governments, school districts, public libraries and universities, are laying off workers in the most devastating slump since the Great Depression.
The official unemployment rate reported last Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) of 8.1 percent was the worst in the US in a quarter-century. The so-called underemployment rate of 14.8 percent—which also includes those who have given up looking for work and those involuntarily working part-time—gives a somewhat more accurate picture of the jobs situation. That figure jumped more than 6 percent from January to February.
More than one in seven workers in the US—an estimated 23.1 million people, according to the Economic Policy Institute—were either out of work or underemployed in February. The percent of the population employed stood at 60.3 percent, down from 63.4 percent in December 2006.
Forbes reports 15,890 layoffs at the 500 largest public companies in the first third of March, including 11,600 global job cuts at United Technologies. Officials at the aerospace, construction conglomerate and military contractor, headquartered in Hartford, Connecticut, indicated the commercial and housing construction slump was a key factor.
United Technologies Chief Executive Louis Chenevert told the media, "The economic recovery, anticipated in the second half of 2009 now appears unlikely." As for aerospace, Chenevert commented, "It looks like 2008 was the peak for commercial and business aircraft production." Conditions, he noted, "have been very challenging."
The acquisition of Schering-Plough by pharmaceutical giant Merck for $41.1 billion, which will further enrich the companies' executives, as well as assorted bankers and lawyers, will mean the destruction of an estimated 16,000 jobs. Ongoing mergers in "big Pharma" are expected to lead to at least 35,000 layoffs in total.
The Los Angeles Times noted: "The [various pharmaceutical] deals would be virtually impossible to complete if the banks had not received money from the Treasury Department under the Troubled Asset Relief Program. The bailout enabled them to lend the drug makers a combined $31 billion.
"‘These mergers are only happening now because the drug companies can get the money from the banks to make the deals happen,' said Dr. John Abramson, a clinical instructor at Harvard Medical School and the author of Overdosed America. ‘The TARP money is supposed to be loosening up credit and keeping Americans employed. They shouldn't be using bailout money to get rid of people.'"
Delta Air Lines announced March 10 a ten percent reduction in its international seat capacity and nearly 2,100 ‘voluntary' layoffs. Delta's trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific networks will be decreased 11-13 and 12-14 percent, respectively. This follows 6,000 cuts at the airline and at Northwest, before Delta bought the latter in October.
As part of the continuing bloodletting in the newspaper business, McClatchy Co. announced March 10 it was cutting 1,600 jobs. The newspaper publisher has eliminated about one-third of its positions in less than a year. Several of the chain's 30 newspapers, including the Sacramento Bee, the Kansas City Star and the Bradenton (Florida) Herald, have already indicated how many workers they will shed.
Sources have told Florida media outlets that Disney is carrying out "massive layoffs" at its Disney World theme park in Orlando. Reportedly hundreds of workers have been let go, although the company would not confirm the report. A drop in tourism is responsible for the cutbacks.
Fleetwood Enterprises, a maker of recreational vehicles (RVs), announced plans March 9 to shut down two eastern Oregon plants, resulting in 415 job cuts. A company official commented, "It's pretty difficult here. ... We're no different from the places where manufacturing layoffs are happening across the state." The company's stock was delisted on the New York Stock Exchange in January. In 2006 Fleetwood sold 34,500 travel trailers—in 2008, only 11,000.
La Grande, Oregon, the location of one of the Fleetwood plants slated to be closed, already has an unemployment rate of 11.3 percent. "RV manufacturing and wood products are its top two employers," according to Oregonlive.com
Komatsu, the Japanese heavy equipment manufacturer, has stepped up plans to close plants in North America, including facilities in Quebec, Georgia, Kentucky and Wisconsin.
In an especially brutal act, the Pontiac, Michigan school board voted March 9 to lay off every district employee, 622 of them, and call them back later "as needed." The Detroit News quoted Sheila Williams, 56, a paraprofessional who has worked in the district for 12 years: "This is not right because it's the little people who are getting stepped on."
Eastman Chemical announced plans March 10 to slash 200 to 300 jobs in the next two months, many of them at its Kingsport, Tennessee headquarters. The company will also reduce the salaries of all US employees by 5 percent
Other major corporations announcing layoffs in March so far, according to Forbes, include Deere & Co. (325 employees at plants in Iowa due to weak construction demand); Northrop Grumman (750 administrative positions in California); Heil (waste and recycling collection trucks, a division of Dover, 180 jobs); General Dynamics (1,200 jobs cut "as turbulence in the aerospace sector continues"); US Steel (1,500 jobs through the closure of two plants in Ontario); and First Energy (335 workers cut to lower costs).
L.L. Bean is anticipating layoffs this year, after revenue dropped for only the third time since 1960 and, despite company claims to the contrary, strong rumors are circulating that Apple is cutting jobs.
The last week of February witnessed significant job cuts at Weyerhaeuser, JP Morgan Chase, Chesapeake Energy, Dow Corning, Coach and Micron Technology.
Significantly, large job cuts are occurring in the legal profession. On Monday, four major firms—White & Case, Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, King & Spalding and K&L Gates—cut some 300 attorneys and 522 support staff. In the 10-day period starting February 27, some 2,500 layoffs took place at well-known law partnerships.
William Brennan, a legal consultant with Altman Weil, told Law.com, "The problem is that lawyers have never seen this type of pain before. ... The layoffs have shocked many partners and created a tremendous amount of anxiety."
There is no sign of a let-up in the assault on jobs. Manpower International's survey of US employers' hiring plans came up with the worst figure since the company began polling companies in 1982. A net of -1.0 percent of firms expect to hire in the April through June period, down from 10 percent in the first quarter of 2009 and 15 percent from the second quarter in 2008. A company official commented, "That's about as bad as it gets with our survey."
The Society for Human Resource Management, which surveys human resource professionals at more than 500 manufacturing and 500 service-sector companies, reported in early March that this month's hiring expectations had taken "a precipitous drop from a year ago. Hiring is down in March by two-thirds in the manufacturing sector and one-third in the service sector compared with 2008." The Society called this "a dramatic reversal."
In the last period for which figures are available—the fourth quarter of 2008—83 of the country's 100 largest metropolitan markets lost jobs. The most hard-hit areas were the "industrial belt of the Midwest, where problems bedevilling automakers are harming other businesses, and Florida, where a collapse of the real estate market has triggered an especially deep recession." (www.bizjournals.com)
Dayton, Ohio has the longest streak of consecutive quarters with job losses, 32—the city last added jobs in the fourth quarter of 2000. Detroit has lost jobs in 13 straight quarters, followed by Toledo (10 quarters), and then Cleveland. Daytona Beach and Palm Bay-Melbourne, Florida, had nine consecutive quarters of job losses.
The Economic Policy Institute reported March 10 that BLS figures indicate that job openings declined 7.2 percent in January, to three million, a decline of 32 percent from the start of the recession 14 months earlier. In January, there were 3.9 job seekers for every job opening and, given the jump in the February jobless figure, "there were easily over 4 unemployed workers per job opening last month." The jobless "are seeing their chances of finding a job grow ever dimmer." More >
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18 Jan 2009 @ 23:25
From wsws.org....
Amid talk of cease-fire, eyewitness accounts describe Israel’s destruction of Gaza
By Julie Hyland
17 January 2009
"Armageddon" is the word used by Times of London correspondent Martin Fletcher, the first eyewitness from the British news media to see the devastation wrought by Israel in Gaza.
Twenty days after the Israeli military unleashed its firepower on the narrow strip of land containing 1.5 million people—more than half of them children—there is "no one left in the ruins to hear the thunder of Israel's guns," Fletcher wrote.
The Times correspondent was one of only a handful of journalists allowed into Gaza under tight Israeli supervision on Thursday, and even then only to the outskirts—the edge of the town of al-Atara.
Fletcher described houses and apartment blocks "mostly reduced to their shells" by the constant bombardment, commercial units "crushed" and vegetable fields "churned up by tanks and bulldozers."
"There is not a Palestinian to be seen," Fletcher wrote.
The Times supports Israel, but the open savagery it has displayed in Gaza, with the deliberate targeting of civilian areas and reports of summary executions, caused the newspaper to question the repercussions of Tel Aviv's actions for the long-term stability of the Middle East and Israel itself.
A BBC producer in Gaza, Hamada Abuqammar, said that Israeli air strikes had continued even during the supposed three-hour humanitarian ceasefires. Medics reported Friday that they had managed to pull a further 23 bodies from rubble in Gaza City, amid reports of "ferocious fighting" in residential areas.
With at least 1,133 Palestinians killed, including 355 children, and another 5,130 wounded, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) are now said to be in the centre of Gaza City in what a military spokesman said could be "the final act."
Some 40,000 people have fled to United Nations buildings for sanctuary—25,000 in the last week alone. But UN buildings are themselves targets for the IDF. Following last week's attack on a UN-run school that killed more than 40 people, the central UN headquarters holding humanitarian supplies was hit Thursday, destroying thousands of tonnes of food and supplies urgently required.
The blood-letting went on even as UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, on a "mediation tour" of the Middle East, expressed his "outrage" at the attack on the UN building.
An emergency session of the United Nations General Assembly late Thursday evening, requested by 118 non-aligned member states, also criticized Israel's offensive. The Israeli delegation had sought to prevent the session on procedural grounds, with Gabriela Shalev, the Israeli ambassador to the UN, dismissing it as a "cynical, hateful and politicised [attempt] to de-legitimize Israel's fundamental right to defend its citizens." But the session proceeded, with General Assembly President Miguel D'Escoto Brockmann accusing Israel of violating international law and stating that Gaza "has been turned into a burning hell."
As Brockmann spoke there was mounting evidence to confirm reports that Israel is using white phosphorus as a smokescreen for the incursions by its tanks and troops into residential areas. Phosphorus, which is illegal under Geneva Treaty of 1980 in built-up areas, causes terrible burns.
Abu Shaaban, director of the burns unit at Gaza's Shifa hospital, told Christian Aid that the situation was a "disaster."
"We have been receiving a very high number of patients with a strange burn," he said, "completely different to the burns we are used to managing, very deep burns with a very offensive, chemical odour coming from the wound site...
"In some cases there is then severe destruction of the tissue and we have had to amputate whole limbs."
During the emergency UN session, Brockmann rebuked UN member-states for failing "to take the necessary steps to impose an immediate cease-fire," stating, "[The UN] cannot continue to fiddle while Gaza burns."
But the UN is not simply sitting on the fence in the one-sided conflict. While distancing itself from Israel's worst atrocities, the major Western powers are working towards a conclusion that will leave the Palestinians in even more wretched conditions.
Writing in the Independent Friday, Alvaro de Soto, chief UN Middle East peace envoy from 2005-2007, reported that on December 16 the UN Security Council had adopted resolution 1850, reaffirming its support for the "agreements and negotiations resulting from the 2007 Middle East summit in Annapolis, Maryland."
The Annapolis agreement was supposedly an initiative by the US to help the "peace process" and establish a Palestinian state by 2009.
But as the World Socialist Web Site reported at the time, the Palestinian state envisaged is little more than a Western protectorate that could "be imposed on the Palestinians only through a military and political offensive involving the United States, Israel, the European powers and the Arab bourgeois regimes, particularly Egypt."
The agreement specifically ruled Hamas, which had won the majority of seats in the January 2006 elections to the Palestinian Legislative Council, out of any settlement. Israel had insisted there could be no reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas and that any "national unity" government was out of the question. With Washington's backing, Israel made a clear warning that "Abbas must wage all-out civil war against opposition to Israel. If Abbas can't or won't do it, then Israel will," the WSWS explained.
Despite its best efforts, Fatah is considered to have done too little, too late, while its alliance with the Zionist state has seen it even further isolated amongst the Palestinian masses. Twelve days after the UN adopted resolution 1850, the Israeli bombardment began.
Interviewed in Newsweek on January 10, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni explained, "[W]e have a situation in which... Hamas is getting stronger, while Abu Mazen [Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas] is getting weaker." Rejecting talk of a cease-fire for implying that Hamas could be a legitimate participant in negotiations, Livni said that agreement was possible only with those who accept Israel's "vision."
"The only way to continue the peace process is not only by continuing the dialogue with their [the Palestinians'] pragmatic leadership, but also by weakening those who are not willing to live in peace in this region. This is the strategy," she said.
In the same magazine, Daniel Klaidman explained that Israel's "strikes [on Gaza] were not simply a reaction; they were a calculation." The ultimate aim, he continued, was "to crush Hamas altogether, first by aerial attacks and then with a grinding artillery and infantry assault. The hope, however faint, is eventually to allow Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah government to reassert control in Gaza."
The Jerusalem Post reported that Fatah and the IDF are currently imposing an "Iron Fist" policy in the West Bank, to extinguish Hamas and any other oppositional forces.
The operation is "being carried out in coordination with the IDF and under the supervision of US security experts," the Post said. In addition to bans on oppositional activity at universities and schools, "[T]he IDF has also been helping the PA security forces by arresting dozens of Hamas men in the West Bank," it continued.
The article added, "In Bethlehem, Hebron and Ramallah, policemen beat a number of Palestinian reporters and photographers who were covering protests against the IDF operation. Other journalists have been receiving threats almost on a daily basis from the PA security forces in the West Bank."
Palestinian Authority policemen "responsible for the massive crackdown received special training in Jordan and the West Bank as part of a security plan engineered by the US," the newspaper said.
On Friday, it was reported that a teenager had been killed during clashes between demonstrators and Israeli soldiers in the West Bank town of Hebron.
Tayeb Abdel Rahim, a senior aide to Abbas, said that Hamas must be excluded from any talks on the situation in Gaza. Similarly, UN Secretary General Ban has said that "a return to the status quo ante cannot be an option," and that the unification of Gaza and the West Bank must be "under one legitimate Palestinian authority."
Whether Hamas is sufficiently weakened to achieve this end is a calculation in on-going efforts to draw up cease-fire terms.
Reports indicate that Israel and Washington hope to have brokered a deal before US President-elect Barak Obama's inauguration on Tuesday.
Israeli negotiator Amos Gilad returned to Cairo to discuss terms of an Egyptian-sponsored "peace" deal, which Hamas agreed on Wednesday. In Washington, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Israeli Foreign Minister Livni signed an agreement "committing the United States to measures to stop Hamas re-arming itself." Israel said it will mean the US and NATO taking responsibility for monitoring shipments into Gaza.
In her Newsweek interview, Livni boasted that Israel's offensive was supported by the Middle East bourgeoisie.
"I don't want to embarrass anybody, but I know I represent their interests as well. It is no longer the Israeli-Palestinian or the Jewish-Arab conflict, but it is a conflict between moderates and extremists. This is the way this region is now divided."
Mass demonstrations across the Middle East in support of Gaza are increasingly turning on the Arab regimes themselves for facilitating Israel's slaughter.
In an attempt to rescue some credibility, Qatar had called for an emergency summit of the Arab League on Friday. The aim, said Qatar's emir, Shaykh Hamad Bin-Khalifah al-Thani, was not to jeopardise a truce, but to enable a unified Arab position to be formulated.
But US allies Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Tunisia, Jordan, Iraq, Bahrain and Kuwait boycotted the meeting, leaving it without a quorum. A rival summit of the six Gulf Cooperation Council countries called by Saudi Arabia and held in Riyadh on Thursday agreed only to continue its deliberations in Kuwait on Monday, on the eve of a previously arranged Arab economic summit.
Egypt had insisted that no meeting should be held before then. It has led the way in facilitating Israel's objectives—participating in the blockade of Gaza and ensuring its borders remain closed, sealing its inhabitants into what has effectively become an open-air tomb.
Its primary concern is that nothing be done to disrupt an Israeli/US-dictated settlement. According to reports, the truce being formulated under Egyptian auspices would see the IDF remain in Gaza until a timetable for the opening of crossing points—possibly overseen by unspecified "international monitors"—is agreed. More >
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12 Jan 2009 @ 22:33
Israel prepares to escalate its war on Gaza
By Peter Symonds
12 January 2009
As the Palestinian death toll climbed to 869 on Sunday, the Israeli military was poised to launch a major escalation of its one-sided war against Gaza. The third phase—following the aerial bombardment and the initial ground invasion—involves an all-out assault on the densely populated Gaza City, home to more than 400,000 people.
Early yesterday morning, the Israeli army advanced into Gaza City from three sides. Fierce fighting erupted in the southwestern district of Sheik al-Ajlin as Israeli troops, backed by tanks and helicopter gunships, battled Hamas militiamen armed with rifles and mortars. Israeli forces withdrew after several hours of what appeared to be a probing operation in preparation for a full-scale attack on the city.
The fighting sent a new flood of people fleeing their homes in search of refuge. The Israeli military dropped leaflets on Saturday over Gaza City and Rafah warning that its forces would escalate operations in the Gaza Strip and to stay away from Hamas. But in Gaza, there is no safe place to go. Residential blocks, shelters and mosques have all been targetted. On January 6, Israeli shells killed at least 40 people, including women and children, sheltering in a UN-run refuge at the al-Fakhora school.
Further Israeli atrocities took place during the weekend. On Saturday, at least seven members of the Abed Rabbo clan were killed when their grocery store in a village just east of the Jabaliya refugee camp was shelled. Ambulance driver Zaid Barquouni told the Los Angeles Times that neighbours told him that the shelling had come from an Israeli tank several blocks away.
According to the Associated Press, four members of one family died when a tank shell hit their home near Gaza City. By midday yesterday, at least 20 people had been killed. As the death toll climbed over 860, health authorities in Gaza reported that the victims included 270 children, 93 women and 12 paramedics. The World Health Organisation put the casualties among medical staff even higher—at 21 killed, 30 injured—and the number of ambulances hit by Israeli fire at 11.
Fresh allegations surfaced over the weekend of the Israeli military's use of white phosphorus in breach of international humanitarian law. Palestinian medics told the BBC that phosphorus shells had been fired at Khouza, killing a woman and injuring at least 60 people. "These people were burned over their bodies in a way that can only be caused by white phosphorus," Dr Yousef Abu Rish said.
The US-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) issued a statement on Saturday condemning the Israeli military's use of white phosphorus as illegal. "White phosphorus can burn down houses and cause horrific burns when it touches the skin," senior HRW analyst Marc Garlasco said. "Israel should not use it in Gaza's densely populated areas."
While Israeli authorities deny breaking international law, the use of white phosphorus is only permitted under international law as a smokescreen, not as a weapon of war or in civilian areas. In the crowded conditions of Gaza, death and injuries are all but inevitable. As the HRW statement pointed out, the danger has been greatly amplified by the technique of air-bursting shells that send out scores of phosphorus wafers over wide areas.
The humanitarian crisis in the besieged Gaza Strip is worsening. The UN estimates that two thirds of the 1.5 million people are without electricity and half have no running water. The British-based Independent pointed out that a three-hour pause in the fighting on Saturday was insufficient to allow aid groups to distribute food, and medics to reach casualties. Salam Kanaan of Save the Children said that in previous lulls the agency had reached just 9,500 people out of the 150,000 people it served.
Conditions in hospitals are appalling. At Shifa hospital, Gaza's largest, about 70 patients in the intensive care unit only survive because of four electricity generators. The hospital itself has been without power for the past seven days because Gaza's only power plant has stopped functioning due to the lack of fuel. "How terrible it would be if our patients survive the attacks and then die because of the lack of electricity," the hospital's director, Dr Hassan Khalaf, told the Independent.
Israel bluntly rejected last Friday's UN Security Council resolution calling for a ceasefire, declaring it to be "unworkable" because it failed to meet Israeli demands to seal the border between Egypt and Gaza and prevent the firing of rockets into Israeli territory.
Prior to a cabinet meeting yesterday, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert declared that Israel was nearing its goals. What was under discussion, however, was not an end to the war, but its further escalation. The only hesitation in launching "phase three" of the operation—an assault on Gaza City—is the potential for heavy Israeli military casualties in street fighting, which could provoke opposition in Israel. The Israeli death toll since December 27 is just 13—nine soldiers and four civilians.
Any Israeli invasion of Gaza City would require the deployment of tens of thousands of reservists who were called up for active service in the first days of the war. In another indication that troops will be sent into Gaza City, the Haaretz newspaper reported yesterday that Israeli reservists began entering Gaza for the first time.
Israel's escalation is being encouraged by the support of the US as well as the complicity of the European powers and the venal Middle Eastern regimes. In a vote last Friday, the US House of Representatives passed a motion by 390 to 5 expressing "vigorous support and unwavering commitment" for Israel and repeating the lie that Israel was waging a war of "self-defence". A similar motion previously passed the Senate unanimously.
Democrat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called on countries around the world to "lay blame both for breaking the ‘calm' and for subsequent civilian casualties in Gaza precisely where blame belongs, that is, on Hamas". Israel's criminal war against the largely defenceless population of Gaza was, however, planned well in advance. Hamas's firing of rockets was the pretext for an offensive aimed at imposing Israeli control in Gaza and bolstering its strategic position throughout the Middle East.
The European powers and Middle Eastern regimes have supported talks being held in Egypt on a French-Egyptian plan for a ceasefire. Like the US, the proposal implicitly blames Hamas for the war and ensures that all of Israel's demands are met, for an end to rocket attacks and to cross-border smuggling via Egypt. Israel has called for the presence of international monitors along the border, which Egypt to date has refused.
If talks fail, Israeli officials told the New York Times that it was likely that the "third phase" of the war would begin. As well as occupying Gaza City, Israeli troops would seize a strip of land at least 500 metres wide inside Egypt—an act of war that threatens a wider conflict. Israeli war planes have been intensively bombing the border in a bid to destroy cross-border tunnels and, in doing so, frequently infringing Egyptian air space. Yesterday, Israeli air strikes near the Rafah border crossing wounded three Egyptian policemen, two seriously, as well as two children.
Sections of the political and military establishment are pressing for an even more aggressive approach to stamp Israeli control over Gaza. Retired general Avigdor BenGal told the Times: "We need to conquer the Gaza Strip and put the Hamas military and political leaders on a French ship to leave Gaza for good, just as we did with [former Palestinian leader Yasser] Arafat in Beirut in 1982. We've already conquered a bigger Arab city than Gaza [namely, Beirut], our army is trained and fit for the mission. The politicians should give the order."
Ominously, unnamed Israeli officials have hinted to the media that the current military offensive potentially has a planned "phase four"—the full reoccupation of Gaza and the toppling of the Hamas regime. More >
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29 Dec 2008 @ 23:17
So many innocents are being killed in this massacre! The rockets that were targeted at Israel did not Kill even one Israeli and yet the massive attacks by Israel that are being conducted now, as we speak, is said to be in retalliation. Read on for an accurate report.......
Washington bears guilt for Gaza war crimes
29 December 2008
The Israeli massacre of Palestinians in Gaza is a war crime for which not only the government of Israel but also that of the United States bears full responsibility.
The relentless bombing campaign, which in its first 48 hours has left at least 300 dead and 1,000 wounded, is a deliberate slaughter of innocent civilians and an act of state terror. The toll of casualties, many of them women and children, is certain to rise. As Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) Chief of Staff Lieutenant-General Gabi Ashkenaz put it, "This is only the beginning."
The pretense that this assault is an act of retaliation for the recent scattered rocket attacks that have been carried out against Israeli territory from inside Gaza is preposterous. Israel, with the collaboration of Washington, has been preparing the current bombing campaign and threatened ground assault for months, under the cover of the supposed cease-fire with Gaza's Hamas-led administration.
"These people are nothing but thugs," said White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe, who insisted that Israel was only acting to "defend itself" against "terrorists."
This is the official story that is largely echoed by the mass media and endorsed by the leadership of the Democratic Party.
Few bother to point out that not a single Israeli was killed by the homemade rockets that supposedly justified Israel launching its Gaza bombardments and killing 300 (one Israeli died in a rocket attack afterwards.) Such a disproportionate response is hardly an aberration. During the last eight years, barely a score of Israelis have died in rocket and mortar attacks from Gaza. During the same period, Israeli forces have killed nearly 5,000 Palestinians.
Nor is there much concern over the fact that Israel chose to launch its bombing in the most crowded and desperately poor urban area on the face of the earth precisely at the hour that schoolchildren were making their way home. Under these conditions, ritualistic US statements urging Israel to "avoid civilian casualties" amount to mocking the victims.
Having maligned an entire people as "thugs," the White House has given the green light for a bloodbath. More importantly, it has provided the indispensable resources for carrying out this crime, assuring Israel more than $3 billion a year in US military aid and supplying the IDF with the deadly tools of its trade—F-16 fighter jets, Apache attack helicopters, TOW and Hellfire missiles and the fuel and spare parts needed to keep them in operation.
The dispatches from inside Gaza provide a graphic accounting of what Washington got for its arms and money.
Safa Joudeh, a freelance journalist in Gaza City, writes: "There were piles and piles of bodies in the locations that were hit. As you looked at them you could see that a few of the young men were still alive, someone lifts a hand, and another raises his head. They probably died within moments because their bodies were burned, most had lost limbs, some of their guts were hanging out and they were all lying in pools of blood."
Ewa Jasiewicz reports from Gaza: "We saw a bearded man, on a stretcher on the floor of an intensive care unit, shaking and shaking, involuntarily, legs rigid and thrusting downwards. A spasm coherent with a spinal chord injury. Would he ever walk again or talk again? In another unit, a baby girl, no older than six months, had shrapnel wounds to her face. A relative lifted a blanket to show us her fragile bandaged leg. Her eyes were saucer-wide and she was making stilted, repetitive, squeaking sounds."
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz carried a report from its correspondent on the scene: "Relatives search among the bodies and the wounded in order to bring the dead quickly to burial. A mother whose three school-age children were killed, and are piled one on top of the other in the morgue, screams and then cries, screams again and then is silent."
The New York Times, hardly known for its sympathy for the Palestinians, acknowledged: "Still, there was a shocking quality to Saturday's attacks, which began in broad daylight as police cadets were graduating, women were shopping at the outdoor market, and children were emerging from school.
"The center of Gaza City was a scene of chaotic horror, with rubble everywhere, sirens wailing, and women shrieking as dozens of mutilated bodies were laid out on the pavement and in the lobby of Shifa Hospital so that family members could identify them. The dead included civilians, including several construction workers and at least two children in school uniforms."
This is not self-defense; it is premeditated mass murder. The aim of the "shock and awe" campaign, as the assault on Gaza is widely described in Israel, is similar to that conducted by the US against Iraq—regime change.
Neither the Zionist regime nor Washington accepted the victory of Hamas in the 2006 Palestinian election—hailed by the Bush administration (before the results were known) as part of a flowering of democracy in the Middle East wrought by American militarism.
In response, the US and its Israeli ally did their best to provoke a Palestinian civil war and military coup and, when this proved ineffective in ousting Hamas from power in Gaza, subjected the territory's one-and-a-half million people to relentless collective punishment. They imposed a siege that choked off supplies of food, medicine, potable water and electricity, condemning masses of people to poverty, unemployment, hunger and disease. The present killing represents a qualitative escalation of this merciless policy of making life for the people of Gaza so intolerable that the Hamas regime would fall.
The New York Times Sunday gave a concise analysis of the real relationship between the Israeli blockade and the rocket attacks from Gaza. The siege, it stated, had led to "the near death of the Gazan economy," adding, "While enough food has gone in to avoid starvation, the level of suffering is very high and getting worse every week."
Hamas had entered a cease-fire with Israel in a bid to reopen trade and alleviate this suffering. While the rocket attacks, supposedly Israel's main concern, fell "dramatically in the fall to 15 to 20 a month from hundreds a month," the Times noted, "Israel said it would not permit trade to begin again because the rocket fire had not completely stopped..." It was this intransigence that led to the collapse of the Israeli-Hamas cease-fire.
From the outset, Israeli actions have been motivated not by concerns for security, but rather by political aims. In the first instance, there is the desire to oust the Hamas administration in Gaza. Also in play are the desires of the Zionist establishment and military to offset the humiliation they suffered in Lebanon in 2006.
For Washington, support for and direct complicity in Israeli war crimes is bound up with a wider strategic policy of creating a new order in the Middle East, one designed to assure undisputed US domination of the region and its oil wealth. Israel represents the junior partner in this bloody venture and is allowed to satisfy its aggressive appetites because they are seen as furthering US imperialist interests.
Regime change in Gaza is viewed by US policymakers as a steppingstone to similar changes elsewhere, particularly in Syria and Iran. Indeed, the unfolding events in Gaza foreshadow a broader intervention in the Middle East and the threat of a new war against Iran.
It is not, it must be noted, merely a question of the US and Israel. The assault on Gaza has enjoyed the direct or tacit support of the Arab bourgeois regimes, in the first instance that of Egypt, which has set up machineguns on its border with Gaza to shoot down fleeing Palestinians. The West Bank-based Palestinian Authority of President Mahmoud Abbas has likewise offered justifications for Israel's crimes.
The Bush administration has pursued its policy in the Middle East with relentless violence for the past eight years. There is no indication, however, that it will fundamentally change with the transfer of the White House to President-elect Barack Obama in less than a month.
Obama has maintained a discreet silence on Gaza, while consulting with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice from his vacation home in Hawaii. His aides have complacently insisted that there is "one president at a time" and it would be inappropriate for the advocate of "change we can believe in" to voice an opinion on the slaughter being carried out with US-supplied warplanes, bombs and missiles.
Elements of the Zionist establishment in Israel have voiced suspicion about Obama's policies, and there have been some suggestions that his approaching January 20 inauguration may have played a role in the timing of the Israeli assault.
It strains credulity, however, that Israel would have carried out its actions without prior consultations not only with the Bush administration, but with the Obama camp as well. Rather than trying to push through its Gaza attack out of fear of a less sympathetic environment in Washington after Obama enters the White House, it is far more likely that the Israeli government was doing Obama a favor by carrying out a crime that he supported before he had to take public responsibility for it.
The reality is that the Democratic president-elect has sworn to maintain US support for Israel and has repeatedly defended Israel's "right to self-defense," including during its criminal war against Lebanon in 2006 and in regard to its repeated attacks on Gaza. He has likewise promised to maintain the US pledge of $30 billion in arms aid to Israel over the next decade.
Those he has chosen as his top aides—the congressman and former Israeli citizen Rahm Emanuel as chief of staff and his former presidential rival Hillary Clinton as secretary of state—are known for having criticized the Bush administration for being insufficiently supportive of Israeli aggression.
During the election campaign last summer, Obama made a trip to the southern Israeli town of Sderot, which had been a target of rocket attacks from Gaza, to provide an explicit justification for the kind of assault now being waged.
"If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I'm going to do everything in my power to stop that," Obama said during the visit. "And I would expect Israelis to do the same thing." He uttered not a word of sympathy for the Palestinians and gave no indication of what actions he expected from parents in Gaza who have watched their children torn to pieces by US-supplied bombs and missiles.
Meanwhile, Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi issued a statement providing an explicit endorsement of the Israeli bombing campaign. "When Israel is attacked," she said, "the United States must continue to stand strongly with its friend and democratic ally."
The response of Obama and the Democrats to the ongoing atrocity in Gaza represents a stark warning. Far from representing a last gasp of militarist aggression on the part of the lame duck Bush administration, the assault on Gaza is an indication of the shape of things to come.
The coming to office of the new Democratic administration will not spell an end to the crimes associated with US imperialism, but rather their continuation. Driven by the deepest economic crisis since the Great Depression, American militarism will play an ever more prominent role in Washington's desperate struggle against its rivals for the domination of dwindling markets and vital resources.
The struggle against war and the fight to hold accountable the authors of war crimes from Iraq to Gaza can be advanced only through the independent mobilization of the working class in a new mass political movement based upon a socialist program.
Bill Van Auken More >
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