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The heightened tensions come months after Lebanon and Israel signed a landmark U.S.-brokered maritime border agreement, which many analysts predicted would lower the risk of a future military confrontation.

By Associated Press

The Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah put on a show of force Sunday, extending a rare media invitation to one of its training sites in southern Lebanon, where its forces staged a simulated military exercise.

Masked fighters jumped through flaming hoops, fired from the backs of motorcycles and blew up Israeli flags posted in the hills above and a wall simulating the one at the border between Lebanon and Israel.

The exercise came ahead of “Liberation Day,” the annual celebration of the withdrawal of Israeli forces from south Lebanon on May 25, 2000, and in the wake of a recent escalation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Gaza. The Hamas terrorist group, which rules Gaza, has long had ties with Hezbollah.

The recent heightened tensions also come months after Lebanon and Israel signed a landmark U.S.-brokered maritime border agreement, which many analysts predicted would lower the risk of a future military confrontation between the two countries.

The Israeli military declined to comment on the Hezbollah exercise.

Senior Hezbollah official Hashem Safieddine said in a speech Sunday that the exercise was meant to “confirm our complete readiness to confront any aggression” by Israel.

On the other side of the border, Israeli forces have also occasionally invited journalists to watch exercises simulating a war with Hezbollah. Officials from both sides frequently allude to their readiness for conflict in public statements.

On the ground, however, the conflict has been largely frozen since the two sides fought a brutal and inconclusive one-month war in 2006.

Israel regularly strikes targets related to Hezbollah and its backer, Iran, in neighboring Syria.

In Lebanon, while Israel and Hezbollah, as well as armed Palestinian groups, have exchanged periodic strikes in the years since 2006, they have largely avoided casualties on either side.

Most recently, Israel launched rare strikes on southern Lebanon last month after terrorists fired nearly three dozen rockets from there, wounding two people in Israel and causing some property damage. The Israeli military said it targeted installations of Hamas, which it blamed for the rocket fire, in southern Lebanon. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah derided the claim, claiming the Israeli strikes had only hit “banana groves” and a water irrigation channel.

Safieddine in his speech Sunday alluded to the group’s possession of precision-guided missiles, which were not on display but which he said Israel would see “later.”

Elias Farhat, a retired Lebanese army general who is currently a researcher in military affairs, said Hezbollah’s “symbolic show of strength” on Sunday appeared to be in response to the recent escalation in Gaza. He said it could also be a response to a demonstration Thursday in Jerusalem by thousands of Jewish nationalists in celebration of “Jerusalem Day,” marking Israel’s liberation of the Old City 56 years ago.

Mohanad Hage Ali, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Middle East Center who researches Hezbollah, said that in the past when there was an escalation in the Israel-Palestine conflict, the Lebanese armed group would sometimes fire off rockets or allow a Palestinian faction in Lebanon to do so. But he said Sunday’s military exercise was a lower-risk way to show force.

Given that Friday marked the return of Syria — an ally of Hezbollah and Iran — to the Arab League, Hage Ali said, Hezbollah may not have wanted a clash on the border with Israel to distract from the Arab reconciliation.

While the military exercise “is showing how strong they are and sending a message to the Israelis, it also demonstrates that this time around, they don’t want to escalate,” he said.

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Thanks to activist efforts, corporate and government policies have begun to make insulin more affordable for diabetics. These changes were won by exposing Big Pharma’s role in the US’s unjust for-profit health care system.

Bernie Sanders, chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, holds a vial of insulin medicine during a hearing in Washington, DC on May 10, 2023. (Al Drago / Bloomberg via Getty Images)

The morning of Wednesday, May 10, a dozen or so diabetics gathered in the shade on the steps of the US Senate Hart Building. At 1:00 p.m., the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (the HELP Committee) was scheduled to hear testimony about the price of prescription drugs, with a focus on insulin. The CEOs of all three major insulin manufacturers — Eli Lilly, Sanofi, and Novo Nordisk — as well as executives from the three largest pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) were inside, preparing to testify about the cost of insulin and other drugs.

Addressing the Insulin Crisis

Thanks to a decade-long fight to protest price gouging and raise awareness, insulin has become a centerpiece in the fight for universal health care. “The fact that all those people were in the room, that there’s a united bipartisan effort to question the big three insulin manufacturers — those things are really encouraging,” said Max Goldberg, a diabetic who traveled from New York City to attend the proceedings.

HELP chair Bernie Sanders announced the hearing on April 21, after a string of policy victories in the fight for affordable insulin. Over the past three years, twenty-two states as well as Washington, DC have passed laws capping the co-pays that insurers can charge patients for insulin prescriptions. California recently contracted with a biotech firm to produce generic insulins for the state to sell at cost. With the enactment of the Inflation Reduction Act this year, seniors on Medicare have their insulin co-pays capped to $35 a month per prescription, drugmakers will be penalized for overcharging prescriptions filled through Medicaid, and diabetics on certain high-deductible plans now pay less for insulin before their deductibles are met. Most notably, the hearing took place a month after all three major insulin producers announced expansions to their coupon programs and price reductions on some of their insulins.

Yet far too many diabetics still lack access to affordable insulin. State and federal laws regulating insulin costs have provided protection only for the insured, leaving behind hundreds of thousands of uninsured diabetics. Manufacturer discount coupons are notoriously unreliable and often require smartphone or printer access. Millions of patients rely on newer insulins that will still cost hundreds of dollars per month. As of May 2023, only one brand of insulin — Eli Lilly’s Lispro — has actually seen its price reduced. And according to ongoing research by the nonprofit T1International, no respondent to its survey was able to access the low-price insulin before the hearing took place.

Forcing pharma and insurance executives to testify before the Senate is part of a wider legislative push to expand access to insulin. The Senate is currently debating a few different proposals about the cost of the drug. One of the major bills, introduced by Senators Raphael Warnock, a Georgia Democrat, and John Kennedy, a Louisiana Republican, caps co-pays for diabetics with private insurance at $35 and sets up a funding mechanism to help the uninsured pay the same rate. The second bill, introduced by Senators Jeanne Shaheen, a New Hampshire Democrat, and Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, has the same co-pay cap for insured diabetics and adds new regulations on the backend to blunt PBM profiteering and increase access to generics, but does not directly address patients without insurance. Both proposals have their limitations, but the passage of either would help millions afford their insulin.

The HELP hearing was called in part to assist the committee members’ choice of which bill to back. Senator Sanders called the hearing to order and laid out the issue in simple terms:

1.3 million Americans in the richest country on earth cannot afford insulin. . . . This committee is not only going to be dealing with the crisis in insulin; we’re going to do everything we can to end the outrage that the American people, by far, pay the highest prices in the world for virtually every brand-name prescription drug on the market.

As straightforward as the issue is, the hearing quickly devolved into a mess of technicalities and blame-shifting. Pharma CEOs blamed the PBMs, which choose which prescriptions are covered and negotiate the secret discounts that insurers pay for them. The PBMs in turn pointed out that they don’t set the high prices themselves and take no responsibility for driving industry costs up, because their only goal is serving their specific clients. The few substantive questions that cut through the morass were either evaded or focused on minute details, such as the requirement that PBMs charge only a flat fee for their services instead of receiving a percentage of the savings. Finding specific policy changes to lower drug prices is both possible and beneficial, but the system’s complexity obscures the core issue harming patients.

“The reasons why [insulin] is so expensive are both really complicated and also extremely simple,” said Shaina Kasper, US policy manager at T1International and a type 1 diabetic herself. “It’s just pharmaceutical greed.”

Of the twenty-one senators at the committee hearing, only two spoke to the true nature of health care in the United States: Bernie Sanders and Rand Paul. While most of their colleagues on both sides of the aisle gestured vaguely toward “misaligned incentives” as the culprit for high prices, only Paul and Sanders openly acknowledged that in the United States, the lodestar of the health care industry is profit, not health. For Sanders, this truth is the root cause of medical injustice.

“Major drug companies made $100 billion last year . . . and more money went into stock buybacks than research and development,” he said in his closing remarks. “The system is broken.”

Senator Paul also emphasized the importance of profit in driving pharmaceutical companies’ decisions — but unlike Sanders, he celebrated it. Paul’s only complaint with the for-profit health care system is that there are any policies at all that attempt to protect patients. The hearing itself was a farce for Paul, as any decision made by the executives was beyond moral reproach: “Their obligation is to their stockholders. They are legally bound to make a profit.” Paul’s callousness shocked even the seasoned activists in the audience, but his statements pointed to an important truth — serving patient needs is fundamentally incompatible with maximizing profits.

The Fight Continues

Decades of industry price gouging have resulted in needless suffering, countless health complications, and many early deaths. Activists have gained widespread support by showcasing this failure of the health care system.

In 2019, activists protested the lack of price regulation in the United States by chartering a busload of diabetics to Canada and back to smuggle in affordable insulin, publicly breaking federal law in the process. When nonprofits like JDRF and the American Diabetes Association began taking money from the very pharma companies killing diabetics, patients founded their own advocacy groups to counteract corporate corruption. In 2018, activists staged a protest at drugmaker Sanofi’s headquarters, and two mothers who lost a child to insulin rationing were forced off the property by police when they attempted to scatter their children’s ashes. Diabetics have also set up mutual-aid networks both above and underground to share their insulin prescriptions, even when doing so means breaking the law.

“The entire movement can be a model for how we get broader, systemic health care and joint pricing reform in America,” said Goldberg, reflecting on his years of advocacy. “Almost everybody can agree that people shouldn’t die because a pharmaceutical company is price gouging medicine that they need to stay alive.”

Insulin may be a particularly egregious example of profiteering, but it is not unique: our health care system unjustly deprives people of access to lifesaving medicines and treatments of all kinds. The movement for affordable insulin can be the spearhead in the fight for universal care — because once the public understands the injustice of insulin in the United States, they understand the foundational injustice of for-profit care itself.

After more than three hours, the gavel fell, and the hearing adjourned inconclusively. The industry executives exited first, flanked on both sides by Capitol Police. Outside, the activists gathered again to debrief and reflect on the work ahead, both for full insulin access and health justice for all.

One of the few nondiabetics who had attended was Shannon Vance, whose twenty-one-year-old son Gavin died from a lack of insulin. She wore a shirt with his smiling face on the front, visible just behind two CEOs on a few of the hearing’s livestreams. “No parent should have to suffer the loss of their child for something that is 100 percent avoidable,” said Vance. She wiped her face. “I didn’t think I was going to cry, but the man next to me gave himself an injection, and it just hit me: I hadn’t smelled insulin since Gavin died.”

Just because not all jobs can be done at home does not mean that no jobs should be done at home. Working from home won’t end exploitation, but it’s nonetheless an important front on which labor can strive to secure improved working arrangements.

The remote-work debate is essentially a power struggle to determine who has the authority to define work conditions. (Getty Images)

It is an open secret that workers are immiserated in both take-home pay and in spirit. That the lives of those whose labor becomes profit should be miserable is not a result, of course, of widespread sadism. That would be barbaric. No, it’s for the sake of returns, progress, and supporting the local Subway sandwich shop. It is, in a nutshell, simply the ruthless workaday logic of capitalism. Owners and bosses wish to extract maximum efficiency from workers. To extract as much value from labor, with as little pay as possible, extra work hours must be squeezed out of people whenever possible. Workplaces must be surveilled to keep employees in line, and workers must pay for their own commute in time and money if it serves the company to have them on site.

The resulting world is one in which rampant exploitation and draconian work arrangements are very necessary indeed. And that is why owners and bosses are keen to limit or eliminate remote work. They dislike remote work for the exact same reason that they dislike the idea of democratizing the workplace.

The Lost Promise of the Remote Work Revolution

Writing in the Globe and Mail last week, Vanmala Subramaniam, the paper’s future of work correspondent, took a dive into “the remote work revolution that never took place.” Throughout the pandemic, as workers who could do so spent more time away from the office working at home, the notion of a new way of laboring became mainstream. Many workers could stay home and do their jobs — just as well, if not better than they had before — and enjoyed doing so. It offered more flexibility and eliminated awful commutes. You didn’t have to eat your lunch at your desk or in a cramped break room or in a mall food court.

Working from home wasn’t a new concept that emerged during the pandemic, but after the arrival of COVID, it had finally scaled up. As it did, work-from-home arrangements not only proved the concept that such a setup was feasible, but showed that it worked just fine, in the long term, for most of those who could do so — and the economy didn’t collapse because of it.

As the pandemic chugs along, diminished but persistent, some continue to work from home full-time or in a hybrid model, with some days at home and some days spent at the office. As Subramaniam points out, hybrid work options are becoming more common compared to full remote work arrangements.

Working from home isn’t an option for everyone, or even for most people. Service workers, manufacturing laborers, and so many others have no choice but to work from the jobsite. Their labor requires them to be on-site, wherever that site may be, stocking shelves, caring for patients, or delivering goods. They ought to be compensated for the fact that they have no option to work from home, just as they ought to also have democratic control over their working conditions.

But the fact that not everyone can work from home does not mean that no one should. Indeed, opponents of working from home may try to divide and conquer this way, sowing discord by arguing that since many can’t work from home, no one should. They are the opponents of solidarity.

These opponents include bosses and owners who have their own ends in mind, but they include other voices, too. These are the selfsame who oppose unions and resent public sector bargaining. They represent a failure to recognize the collective benefits unions generate for the many. These opinions, however, are hardly surprising in a world in which anti-labor sentiment is ubiquitous — from dark money union-busting campaigns to the editorial viewpoint of national papers.

Let Workers Decide

There’s no sense in which working from home ends exploitation within a capitalist framework — it doesn’t fundamentally shift who controls the workplace, who sets the rules, who watches whom, or who makes a profit off whose back. But it does provide workers with a bit more freedom, a bit more time to live their lives without having to commute and be sucked into an extra minute or fifteen of work here and there.

By allowing labor to decide for itself, making remote work an option recognizes the diverse preferences, styles, and needs of individuals. It signifies a shift toward a more democratic workspace and society, empowering people to have greater autonomy in shaping their lives and work.

Not all work can always be done at home, even for the many for whom working from home is a regular option. There are benefits of on-site work in certain cases. This is worth keeping in mind. Imagine a utopian counterfactual in which workplaces were democratized and not exploited by bosses and owners. Perhaps workers would choose, collectively, to keep some people on-site for building solidarity, keeping neighborhoods vibrant, in-person socializing, and so forth.

It is undeniably the case that some workers have suffered profound isolation and loneliness working from home. And downtown cores in many cities have become ghost towns as a result of remote work. But the difference in the scenario drawn here is that workers could weigh the pros and cons of collective-action problems like abandoned city centers — just as they could likewise choose for and among themselves when and how to work, and thus how to live their own lives alongside others who are choosing how to live theirs.

A Struggle Worth Having

A recent strike by federal public service workers in Canada centered on both pay and remote-work arrangements. As Graham Lowe, Karen D. Hughes, and Jim Stanford argued in a recent op-ed, these striking civil servants helped secure work from home as a job norm. They managed to get a deal with the government, outside of the collective agreement, to negotiate remote-work deals case by case.

That may turn out fine for some. But it’s a risky approach that leaves workers stuck having to negotiate ad hoc arrangements with bosses and owners instead of deciding for and among themselves. In this arrangement, worker needs and well-being will always be second to the needs of those with whom they negotiate. And negotiations will be made from a position of weakness, sundered from the collective strength of the many. Not all workers are going to be able to negotiate as well as the rest. Some will be left behind. Outcomes will be unequal. In that sense, the public service’s deal isn’t even close to ideal. In the absence of genuinely democratic workplaces, advocating solely for the freedom to work remotely amounts to a mere partial solution. That does not mean, however, that it is not a struggle worth engaging in.

The remote-work debate is essentially a power struggle to determine who has the authority to define work conditions. It revolves around the conflict between individual well-being and the right of workers to make choices, versus the objectives of bosses and owners, whose interests diverge sharply from the best interests of their employees. While remote work will not in and of itself end exploitation or fully transform power relations between management and labor, it is a front of the battle between an overbearing, surveillant, exploitative class and those who it seeks to control. And it is a front on which labor ought to give its all as it tries to secure better arrangements for all workers.

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Greece votes in a general election today, with the right-wing New Democracy resisting the challenge from Alexis Tsipras’s Syriza. The campaign has been subdued, reflecting voters’ limited faith in Syriza’s ability to undo the austerity it helped to impose.

Greek prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis casts his vote for the general election at a polling station in Athens, Greece on May 21, 2023. (Ayhan Mehmet / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

For the past few months, Ero feels like she and her friends have been discussing today’s elections constantly: “How do we vote? Or do we vote?” Based in Athens, the twenty-five-year-old occupational therapist is unsure who she’ll pick: “I don’t feel one party will honor what I have in mind, and the last few years I haven’t been following politics, because I’m very disappointed. This makes it very difficult to decide.”

According to polls, Ero is part of over 10 percent of the Greek electorate who are undecided ahead of today’s elections. The right-wing New Democracy, in power since 2019, looks unlikely to gather the numbers needed to win another majority. Yet polls indicate that the Left isn’t exactly rallying a wave of support, either. Potential voters and political analysts told Jacobin that none of the parties on the Greek left seem to have hit on a message that speaks to voters.

Over a decade since the beginning of the country’s debt crisis, the atmosphere ahead of the vote instead seems to be one of disappointment and malaise.

Right-Wing Government

Recent polls show New Democracy still ahead, backed by around 36 percent of respondents. It leads Alexis Tsipras’s Syriza, at 29 percent, and the historic social democratic party Pasok, at around 10 percent. Other parties trailing further back include the Communist Party of Greece (ΚΚΕ) at around 7 percent, the far-right Greek Solution at 4 percent, and the radical left MeRA25, led by former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, at around the same level. While two or more parties could form a coalition, this possibility seems remote, meaning that Greeks will probably have another election as soon as six weeks from now.

New Democracy and its prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis have focused the campaign on a message of stability. Billboards across Athens feature the prime minister’s pensive face and the slogan “firmly, boldly, forward.” The Mitsotakis administration has argued that it has brought the country economic successes — a return to GDP growth, and exiting the surveillance mechanisms imposed on the country after the debt crisis and the subsequent bailouts. In a TV debate between candidates on May 10, Mitsotakis claimed that voters will have to decide if the country “will continue to move forward or roll back into a past that I believe we want to forget.” With this he suggested that should Syriza gain control of the parliament again, Greece will topple back into the financial chaos of 2015. That said, the administration’s delivery of this financial stability is surely up for debate: Greece’s GDP has rebounded rapidly but from a very low base (around 80 percent of precrisis numbers), wages are still lagging far behind 2008 levels, and the unemployment rate is the second highest in the EU.

For their part, Syriza and the rest of the Greek left have spent much of the campaign highlighting the scandals of New Democracy’s last four years, zeroing in on the surveillance scandal that revealed that the Greek government was wiretapping journalists and opposition politicians. (One of the people wiretapped was Nikos Androulakis, the Pasok leader currently also campaigning to be prime minister.) The surveillance scandal took up much of the debate between the candidates, with fingers being pointed toward Mitsotakis.

“There is an attempt to play up the problem, which is an existing problem, the problem of institutions,” modern history lecturer George Giannakopoulos told me. “We can say that certain scandals in Greece have shown that the government of New Democracy meddled with institutions. Syriza is trying to peddle this message to a wider audience but it doesn’t seem to be touching base. I think that’s a wider question for Syriza’s strategy: ‘what is the new message that makes a Syriza government radically different than a New Democracy government?’”

Syriza’s preelection campaign promised a “tide of change.” MeRA25’s billboards call for a “rupture” in the system, arguing that “everything could be different.” But what exactly this difference will be is unclear to voters. This is a particularly hard concept to sell to voters who have been so sorely disappointed by Syriza in the past, either during the economic bailout, or during their time in opposition.

“I don’t want to vote for Syriza, I don’t think they’ve done anything all these years to protect against the votes of New Democracy,” said Ero. She explained: “I don’t feel there was a counter-argument to what has happened — either with coronavirus, with the police, with the demonstrations, or in the universities,” referring to increased policing during the pandemic and the move to install police in Greek universities.

Discontent

Polls of undecided Greek voters indicate that many of their main concerns ahead of election day have to do with the increased cost of living. But a more specific issue important to Greeks, particularly younger voters, is the tragic train crash in Tempi, in which fifty-seven people died, many of them students who were returning to the city of Thessaloniki after a holiday weekend.

The train crashed due to inoperable signaling systems on the train lines — a failure that had been highlighted over and over by railway workers and safety oversight bodies but was never remedied. In the weeks after the crash there was a public outcry at the governmental failures, lack of investment, and years of negligence, which culminated in two days of national general strikes across the country. Much of the blame for this crash was placed on the shoulders of New Democracy, but also on Syriza, which oversaw the privatization of the national rail system during its time in government.

The KKE has tried to mobilize the rage and anguish at the system following the train crash. Its slogan, “Them alone, all of us,” seeks to draw contrast between a government interested in a few, and a Communist Party interested in the many.

The KKE and MeRA25 will each take seats in parliament, and are performing better in the polls than they have in previous years, but have no chance of winning. And while Syriza is the official opposition party, it cannot alone come close to a majority.

Syriza party leader Tsipras says his party is willing to form a coalition with the old center-left party Pasok and Varoufakis’s MeRA25 to take control of parliament. “I invite you on Monday to sit at one table after Syriza’s great victory, after our people’s great victory, which will open the way for a progressive government,” said Tsipras, addressing Pasok at a campaign rally. But it seems doubtful this this coalition can form — Pasok leader Androulakis has said that he will not form a coalition “either with Mr. Tsipras or with Mr. Mitsotakis,” and Varoufakis has said that a postelection agreement with Syriza is impossible.

For his part, Prime Minister Mitsotakis has scoffed at the idea of a coalition of losing parties, calling it a “political monstrosity.” It is likely that no single force will conquer the Greek parliament on May 21, but there will be no coalition, either.

The likely ambiguous result reflects the subdued campaign. “I don’t think there’s much enthusiasm for either New Democracy or Syriza, among anybody I’ve spoken to in Greece,” said Helena Sheehan, author of The Syriza Wave: Surging and Crashing with the Greek Left. “There’s a feeling of ‘this is all there is and we’re powerless in the face of this.’ And I think there’s still a lot of people not voting.” Sheehan contrasted this with when Syriza was first elected in 2015, and an enthusiasm for the party she described as “electric.” For many Greeks, that hope has since been broken.

Their views ahead of election day were well summed up by Miranda, twenty-eight, a psychologist in Athens. She told me that she is deeply frustrated with Greece’s economic situation and feels no political party is speaking to the needs of her generation. Last election she voted for Syriza, but she doubts she will this time. “I feel disappointed, and confused with how I should vote,” she said. “There is not one party that represents me politically and that I would want to vote for. I am thinking of just voting for the party that would do the least damage.”

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Editors Note:

We bring to our readers this carefully documented review article by Mojmir Babajek first published in 2004.

While the text deals with a number of complex scientific processes, the implications of these findings are far-reaching. This study also …

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The Global Deployment of US Military Personnel

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