Coronavirus reproduction rate rises above 1 in UK, as infection cases surge

Robert Stevens

Coronavirus in Britain is spreading exponentially due to the reckless, homicidal reopening of the economy and schools by the Johnson government.

The R or R0 value (Reproduction rate) of COVID-19 is now at 1 or above nationally, meaning that every one person infected is infecting at least one other person.

Last Friday, the government’s scientific advisory group (SAGE) announced that R had risen to between 0.9 and 1.1 in the UK as a whole for the first time since weekly reporting of data began in May. This was an increase on an estimated range of 0.8-1.0 last week and a rate of 0.8-0.9 documented by SAGE two weeks ago.

Because the information used to calculate the R and growth rate includes epidemiological data such as hospital admissions, ICU admissions and deaths, SAGE’s estimates reflect the situation as it was up to three weeks ago. Subsequent changes in transmission levels—set to rocket with millions of children being back to school, along with hundreds of thousands of teachers and other education staff—are not yet fully reflected in the estimates.

Of the UK’s most populated area, SAGE announced it “does not have confidence that R is currently below 1 in England.” In London, SAGE calculates the R rate at 0.9-1.1. The rate is even higher in some parts of the UK, with Northern Ireland’s (population over 1.8 million) estimated to be as high as 1.6.

Between July 4 and August 15, virtually all remaining lockdown measures were ended nationally.

This criminal policy was enacted under conditions in which a large swathe of northern England was forced to go into a “local lockdown” at the end of July—impacting around 5 million people. This was after the entire city of Leicester had already been placed in lockdown for weeks.

Due to the rapid growth in infection rates over the weekend, the government was forced to impose further lockdown measures in Oldham and parts of Blackburn and Pendle in the north west of England. Last Friday, the east Midlands town of Northampton was named an “area of intervention” as a major sandwich producer, Greencore, was forced to close its factory in the town with nearly 300 workers infected. Northampton is one of 19 such areas of intervention, including major population centres like Leicester, Bradford and Manchester.

Even more significantly, Birmingham—the second largest city in the UK with a population of more than 1 million—was last Friday added to the government’s “watch list.” Its weekly rate of infections shot up by 27 percent, meaning it could be placed under lockdown imminently. The city’s infection rate is now at 30 cases per 100,000, the highest level since mid-June. This was up from up from 22.4 the week before and a substantial increase on the 12 per 100,000 recorded at the start of August.

Birmingham is now classified as requiring “enhanced support,” as is Luton (population over 211,000). Another seven towns and cities are listed as “areas of concern.”

Saturday’s 1,288 infections recorded nationally was the highest daily number in two months. In the last week to Monday, 4,364 new infections were recorded nationally, with the official death toll at 41,433.

In Scotland, Saturday’s 123 new cases were the highest daily total in three months. Nearly 80 were recorded in Tayside. Many of Tayside’s cases are centred on the Coupar Angus chicken processing plant, where at least 68 infections have been recorded (59 employees and 9 of their contacts).

Nicola Sturgeon’s Scottish National Party government reopened all schools on August 11, and its devastating impact is already manifest, with infections in nearly 30 schools. On Monday, it emerged that 21 staff and 2 pupils at Kingspark special school in Dundee—also in Tayside—have contracted COVID-19. Four of their contacts in the community were infected. The school was forced to close last Wednesday, just eight days after reopening.

Nothing is being allowed to intrude on the ruling elite’s maniacal rush to enforce its back to work agenda, with the damning R value data issued by SAGE totally ignored by the government. This is despite Johnson and his key scientific and medical advisors repeatedly claiming, for months, that its actions would be determined by the R value—which it insisted had to be kept below 1 at all costs.

At the start of lockdown, the R rate was between 2.4—as estimated by Imperial College London’s COVID-19 Response Team—and 4, according to other research.

The lockdown imposed on March 23 reduced R significantly within days and by at least two thirds in a matter of weeks.

Speaking at a Downing Street conference on March 30, just seven days after lockdown, Johnson’s Chief Scientific Officer, Sir Patrick Vallance, said, “Britain’s lockdown is having a very big effect on the R0, bringing it down to below one.”

Britain's prime Minister Boris Johnson, centre, Chief Medical Officer for England Chris Whitty, left, and Chief Scientific Adviser Patrick Vallance speak at a press conference at Downing Street on March 3, 2020. (AP Photo/Frank Augstein, Pool)

On April 16, the government introduced five tests that had to be met before the national lockdown could be ended. The third test was centred on lowering the R value, with Downing Street insisting it would count on “Reliable data [the R value] showing the rate of infection was decreasing to ‘manageable levels.’”

At the April 30 press conference, asked what the R rate should be, Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Chris Whitty said, “There isn’t a perfect answer to what should the R be [to lift the lockdown] but we’re absolutely confident that the wrong answer is anything over one.

“Because as soon as R goes over one, then you restart exponential growth— it may be slow if it is just over one, it may be a lot faster if it goes a lot above one—but exponential growth restarts and, sooner or later—and the higher it is, the sooner it is—the NHS [National Health Service] will go back to the risk of being overwhelmed and the number of cases will go up.”

At the same event, Johnson—in his first public event since almost dying after being struck down with COVID-19—stated, “the government will be monitoring R very carefully. It will be a key factor in how social distancing measures will be used in the future,” adding, “Let me just emphasise that keeping the R down is going to be absolutely vital to our recovery, keeping the reproduction rate of the disease down. …”

On May 11, Johnson announced that “in order to monitor our progress, we are establishing a new COVID Alert Level System. The COVID Alert Level has five levels, each relating to the level of threat posed by the virus.” Yet again the R rate was cited as all-important. “The [Alert] level will be primarily determined by the R value and the number of coronavirus cases.”

On May 28, as a result of lockdown, the R rate was estimated to be between 0.7 and 0.9. Vallance told a press conference in Number 10, “We need to keep concentrating on R below one, that means making sure that the measures that are in place are adhered to and that we all stick to them to make sure that the right thing is done and that we end up in a position where we can get the numbers down and the R down a bit. But we are at a fragile state.”

But the over-riding goal of the government, while cynically citing the importance of lowering the rate of infection, was always to reopen the economy and force millions back to work—in order to restart the production of profits for the corporations and super-rich. Johnson said at the May 28 event, “When we are sure that this first phase is over and that we are meeting our five tests…then that will be the time to move on to the second phase in which we continue to suppress the disease and keep the reproduction rate—the R rate—down, but begin gradually to refine the economic and social restrictions and one-by-one to fire up the engines of this vast UK economy.”

As is now clear in the resurgence of coronavirus everywhere, preventing its spread is incompatible with the murderous agenda of flinging open the economy and reopening schools.

At the April 30 press conference, asked what would be a manageable R rate to control the spread of the pandemic, Johnson replied, “The crucial thing is to stop the overall national R from going over 1 again because as Chris [Whitty] and Patrick [Vallance] have explained, that’s the moment that you get the risk of another exponential curve upwards.” (emphasis added)

With R above 1, this point has already been reached even as the health and safety of the population are set to be further imperilled—with schools throughout Northern Ireland reopening yesterday and set to reopen in England from September.

That the R rate is not significantly higher is only due to the fact that millions are ignoring the government’s advice to carry on as normal, with many still shopping online, refusing to go to pubs and bars, and working from home rather than going to unsafe workplaces.

US stages military buildup to enforce deal to steal Syria’s oil

Bill Van Auken

The US military over the past week has been sending convoys across the border from Iraq into Syria in what appears to be a significant escalation of the US military intervention in the war-ravaged country.

According to sources in Syria, the convoys have come across at the al-Tanf crossing, where the US military maintains a garrison near the triple frontier between Iraq, Syria and Jordan. They have then traveled to US bases in the northeastern Syrian governorates of Deir ez-Zor and Al-Hasakah. Witnesses said that the convoys included tanks, armored vehicles, oil tankers and trucks bearing weapons and logistical equipment.

The buildup of the US forces east of the Euphrates River follows the revelation that Washington has concocted a deal with a newly minted American oil company, Delta Crescent Energy LLC, which has been signed by the so-called Syrian Democratic Forces, the proxy ground troops employed by Washington in Syria, which consist mainly of the Syrian Kurdish YPG militia.

Among the equipment being trucked in by the US military are believed to be components for two modular refineries to assist the company in exploiting and marketing Syrian oil.

This agreement constitutes a war crime under the Geneva Conventions, which bar the exploitation of the natural resources of an occupied country for the benefit of the occupier. In the case of the US occupation of Syria, this constitutes an even more blatant act of international piracy, as the US military presence in the country has been authorized neither by the Syrian government nor the United Nations.

The existence of the deal brokered by Washington between Delta Crescent Energy and the Pentagon’s Kurdish proxies was first revealed by Republican Senator Lindsey Graham during a July 30 Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Graham told US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that he had been informed by the commander of the Syrian Kurdish forces, known as Mazlum Kobani, of the deal to “modernize the oil fields in northeastern Syria”, and asked whether the Trump administration was supporting it.

“We are,” Pompeo replied. “The deal took a little longer than we had hoped, and now we're in implementation; it could be very powerful.”

It has since emerged that the principals in Delta Crescent Energy include James Cain, a North Carolina Republican Party official and former US ambassador to Denmark who gained brief notoriety by calling for the execution of Chelsea Manning, the courageous US soldier who was imprisoned for her role in exposing US war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq by leaking to WikiLeaks hundreds of thousands of military war logs and diplomatic cables. Also on the company’s board is James Reese, a former Delta Force officer who became a private security consultant and Fox News contributor after retiring from the military.

There is every reason to suspect that the company was formed as an act of political cronyism. The deal was reportedly “negotiated” under the auspices of the chief of the US Central Command (CENTCOM), Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, while US military is facilitating its implementation.

As for Pompeo’s claim that this agreement could prove “powerful,” it certainly is not a matter of its global economic significance, given that Syria accounts for just 0.1 percent of the world's oil reserves. Rather, the deal serves as a means of starving the Syrian government and people of resources that are desperately needed for reconstruction after nearly a decade of war, while simultaneously providing a pretext for the continued US military occupation and dismemberment of the country.

The deal is the outcome of the shift in US tactics initiated by Trump in October of last year, when he provided a green light for a Turkish invasion of northeast Syria for the purpose of driving Washington’s erstwhile Kurdish allies from the border. At the time, Trump spouted a great deal of demagogy about ending Washington’s “forever wars” and pulling all US troops out of Syria.

Facing a firestorm of criticism from within the US military and intelligence apparatus, Trump backed down, announcing that he would retain a US force in Syria to “keep the oil.”

At the time he stated, “We’ll work something out with the Kurds so that they have some money, so that they have some cash flow. Maybe we’ll get one of our big oil companies to go in and do it properly.”

The announcement of the oil deal provoked bitter criticism from the Syrian government. Syria’s Ambassador to the United Nations Bashar Ja’afari spoke before the Security Council last week, denouncing Washington for “stealing Syrian oil and depriving the Syrian state and Syrian people of the basic revenues necessary to improve the humanitarian situation, provide for livelihood needs and reconstruction.” He also charged both the US and the European Union with enforcing a sanctions regime that serves to “prevent the Syrians from obtaining their basic needs of food, medicine and medical equipment, especially in light of the spread of the corona pandemic and its dire effects.”

The principal allies of the Damascus government of President Bashar al-Assad, Iran and Russia, also denounced the US oil deal as a violation of Syria’s national sovereignty. Also condemning the agreement was the government of Turkey, which is continuing its own occupation and de facto annexation of Syrian territory.

The government of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan issued a statement hypocritically denouncing Washington for “disregarding international law, violating territorial integrity, unity and sovereignty of Syria,” while going on to charge that the oil deal amounted to “financing terrorism.” Ankara regards the Syrian Kurdish YPG as a branch of the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) Kurdish separatist movement inside Turkey, which is designated by both the US and Turkey as a “terrorist” organization. The Erdogan government regards the consolidation of any Kurdish-controlled entity near its border with Syria as a threat to Turkish national security.

The oil deal has ratcheted up dangerous tensions in northeastern Syria, where US, Russian, Turkish, Syrian government and Kurdish YPG forces, along with remnants of the Islamic State (ISIS) militia, are all operating in close proximity.

Last week, on the same day, August 18, a US base near Syria’s Conoco oil field in Deir ez-Zor—now under the control of the American military and its Kurdish proxies—came under rocket attack for the first time, and a Russian major general was killed by an improvised explosive device.

The Pentagon blamed the rocket attack on Iran and Iranian-aligned militias, while the killing of the senior Russian officer was initially blamed on ISIS. There is no proof that either is the case, and there is reportedly substantial speculation that the killing of the Russian general may have been the work of Washington and its Kurdish proxies.

A day earlier, on August 17, a US convoy engaged in a firefight with Syrian government forces at a checkpoint in al-Hasakah, leaving one Syrian soldier dead and two others wounded. US and Syrian accounts of the incident were at odds, with the Pentagon claiming that the convoy came under attack from unknown elements after passing through the checkpoint, and the Syrian government reporting that the shooting began when the Syrians tried to stop the convoy. Apache helicopters were escorting the US armored vehicles.

US military officials have reported that encounters between US and Russian soldiers are virtually a daily occurrence. For its part, Russia has built up its forces in the region, strengthening its base at the Qamishli airport on the Turkish border and bringing in attack helicopters. Meanwhile, Russia has deployed some two dozen tanks and armored vehicles to the village of Mazloum, little more than a mile from a US base.

US imperialism has been at war in Syria since launching a regime change operation in 2011, using CIA-backed Islamist militias as its proxies in a bid to topple the Assad government and impose a US puppet government in Damascus. It subsequently launched a direct military intervention in Syria as well as Iraq on the pretext of combating ISIS, an offshoot of the very Islamist militias that it had previously armed and funded. The toll of these interventions numbers in the hundreds of thousands of dead and millions of displaced.

Now the US remains in Syria for the purpose of controlling and exploiting the country’s oil, as part of a broader military campaign to impose a neo-colonial US hegemony in the Middle East at the expense of Iran, and the countries the Pentagon defines as “great power” rivals, China and Russia.

These aims, combined with the profound political instability driven by the economic and social crisis within the United States itself, pose a growing danger that the heightened military frictions in Syria can metastasize into a broader war, drawing in regional and major powers alike.

Thai protest movement spreads across country’s northeast

Owen Howell

Thailand’s student-led protest movement shows no signs of diminishing, as major rallies erupted over the past few days in the northeastern region of Isan. For more than a month now, large anti-government protests have been held almost daily.

Last week’s police operation, in which seven student leaders were arrested on charges including sedition, has done little to intimidate or stifle the growing movement.

On Thursday, a protest in the northeastern city of Khon Kaen was organised by a local student group called Khon Kaen’s Had Enough. Around 1,000 people, mostly high school students, gathered at the Chao Por Lak Muang Shrine, where numerous students were invited on stage to deliver speeches.

The protest’s organisers also performed a Buddhist ritual, intended to chase Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha out of power. A main road was closed for the event, which drew a much larger crowd than anticipated.

Nakhon Ratchasima protest on Thursday, Credit: @arthemmarach (Twitter)

Siwakorn Namnuad, a leader of Khon Kaen’s Had Enough, told Khaosod reporters that Thursday was the first large-scale protest in the city centre. He noted the crowd’s enthusiastic response to the three demands of the protest movement: to dissolve parliament, end intimidation of political opponents, and rewrite the constitution.

“If our demands are not met, we will increase the scale of our operations. Students are ready to call for change; we are waiting for working age people to join us,” Siwakorn said. Opposition in Thailand’s rural north and northeast to Prayut’s military-controlled government has meant that the movement is expanding beyond high schools and universities in the region.

Another large demonstration was held on Thursday at the Yo Ma Monument in the city of Nakhon Ratchasima. As in Khon Kaen, the crowd was estimated at over 1,000, while the stage was dominated by high school pupils.

Speakers denounced the 250 senators in office, all of them appointed by the military junta that assumed power in 2014, under Prayut’s leadership. They also made special appeals for the resignation of Deputy Prime Minister Prawit Wongsuwan, widely despised for his critical role in the military coup and involvement in a 2018 corruption scandal.

Khon Kaen was the location for another rally on Saturday, arranged by student organisations from nine provinces under the name of the Isan Liberation Network. At the same time, a protest in Ubon Ratchathani was notable for the appearance of Parit Chirawak, a central leader of the Free Youth movement that has orchestrated the Thai protests.

In the north, a significant student rally within the grounds of Chiang Mai University was held by student group Community of MorChor. Attendance was so much greater than expected that the venue overflowed with students, and barriers had to be dismantled to accommodate members of the public drawn to the event. Police officers were reportedly scattered through the crowd taking pictures of the organisers.

According to Prachatai, student representatives on stage read out a list of Chiang Mai University students who had been killed during the bloody Thammasat University massacre in 1976. They also read the names of members of the Farmers’ Federation of Thailand (FFT), involved in the peasant revolts of the 1970s, who died in the massacre.

One student leader called on the Red Shirts movement to participate more openly in upcoming protests. The Red Shirts, supporters of former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, staged mass demonstrations in Bangkok in 2010, and were largely based in the north and northeast.

Anti-government activity in Bangkok, meanwhile, has continued since the August 16 rally, which drew tens of thousands of people and was the largest demonstration since the 2014 coup.

Around 400 high school students from across the capital besieged the Ministry of Education on Wednesday, showing the three-fingered salute in solidarity with the protests. When Education Minister Nataphol Teepsuwan and his aides appeared outside, the students treated them with contempt, jeering loudly and making thumbs-down gestures and then ordered them to the back of the crowd.

Some students blew whistles as he tried speaking to them, a disruptive tactic notoriously used in the 2014 protests that helped trigger the military coup, in which Nataphol himself had played a role.

Students from Rajini School, a private girls’ school in Bangkok, yesterday wore white ribbons (a symbol of the protests), even after the school’s administration banned all forms of political expression on campus. A group of nearly 1,000 alumnae have signed an open letter to protest the ban.

On Sunday, students from four major Bangkok universities—Kasetsart, Silpakorn, Bangkok, and Rangsit—assembled on Sunday at the Lan Khon Meaung Square in Phra Nakhon district.

Nakhon Ratchasima protest on Thursday, Credit: @arthemmarach (Twitter)

They were campaigning against the state persecution of political activists, in particular those condemned under the country’s draconian lèse majesté law, which criminalises any alleged criticism of the Thai monarchy. The student leaders announced that they would gather more often every time the government used the law to arrest protesters.

The response of Prayut’s government to the protest movement changed markedly after a rally on August 3, when student leaders added to the three initial demands a call to reform the monarchy.

King Vajiralongkorn’s ties with the military-backed government, along with his personal possession of crown assets, has provoked hostility throughout the population. This was demonstrated in the outrage on social media when Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit, leader of the disbanded Future Forward Party, exposed a steep rise in the annual budget for Palace agencies over the last three years.

The amount was pegged at $US285 million for the next fiscal year—up 16.8 percent from last year, compared to a 3.1 percent rise in the overall national budget, Nation Thailand reported.

After the seven arrests last week, protest leader and vocal critic of the monarchy Panupong Jaadnok was arrested yesterday on sedition charges related to his participation in the August 10 rally, where a manifesto of 10 demands for monarchy reform was declared. Yesterday evening, he was transported to a police station in Pathum Thani, where Parit Chirawak said a protest would be held in his defence.

Two organisers of a student rally in the northern city of Lamphun have been ordered to report to police and hear charges against them. One of the students, Thanatorn Vitayabenjang, said in an interview with Al Jazeera: “There’s been many cases where [police] tried to report protesters, but at the end of the day, after everyone is over that fear, it becomes a catalyst to come out more and go against the government.”

Many more protests are planned for the coming weeks. In Nakhon Ratchasima, protesters announced that a major student rally would take place on September 19 at Thammasat University’s main Tha Prachan campus in Bangkok. Free Youth has not yet revealed details, but stated its plans to camp out overnight, in what could be a massive rally of students and broader sections of society.

The Bangkok Post reported that security agencies were fearful of the upcoming protests. A meeting between Prime Minister Prayut and high-ranking military generals was held on Friday, in which preparations for possible mass upheavals were discussed.

Never Again: 75 years After Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Manpreet Sethi

This August marks 75 years of the dropping of Little Boy and Fat Man on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These were the first two nuclear bombs built by the US in the secret Manhattan Project; run at a frenzied pace to beat the possibility of Germany getting to the weapon before the Allied powers. Within minutes of the nuclear attack, a bustling city turned into a wasteland, as nearly 60,000-80,000 people vaporised immediately. None had seen such death and destruction being caused by just one bomb.

At 75 years of age now, nuclear weapons and the era of nuclear deterrence they heralded are going strong, immune to all efforts at dislodging them. Just as we have been asked to learn to live with COVID-19, we have long learned to live in a balance of terror with these weapons. But it has always been a delicate balance, and has become more so in the past few years.

Today, there are nine nuclear-armed states, each engaged in a process of strategic modernisation to hone a capability to which they attach great value. Consequently, the state of the global nuclear order is far more complex and full of risks. What kinds of risks are these? What are the factors exacerbating them? What can be done to address them?

Kinds of Nuclear Risks

Two kinds of risks have preoccupied the imagination ever since nuclear weapons entered inter-state equations: proliferation and use. Interestingly, the possibility of uncontrolled horizontal nuclear proliferation was perceived to be at its lowest just about a decade ago. It was widely believed that owing to a well-crafted non-proliferation regime comprising multilateral treaties, export control arrangements, norms of behaviour, etc, the world had overcome the nth country problem. With NPT membership being nearly universal except for four nuclear-armed states outside of it, the norm of nuclear non-proliferation was believed to be robust.

20 years on, however, fears of more countries harbouring the desire for nuclear weapons has surfaced. In Northeast Asia, incipient debates in favour of acquiring nuclear weapons are being heard. In South Korea and Japan, they have emerged in response to DPRK's nuclear programme and difficult relations with China. The US nuclear umbrella, supposed to keep its allies non-nuclear, has been affected by President Trump’s approach towards alliances.

In West Asia, with the US withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), Iran is back in the reckoning as a proliferation possibility. Saudi Arabia has indicated its intention to go nuclear in case Iran moves in that direction. Recent reports about Chinese enrichment help to Saudi Arabia are worrisome. The UAE, Egypt, and Turkey could also display a similar interest in nuclear weapons. The issue of nuclear proliferation is once again a live challenge to the global nuclear order.

The second palpable nuclear risk is that of the use of the weapon. This could happen in three ways, though the chances of each possibility vary. First, it could happen through a pre-meditated or deliberate decision to use. The possibility of such an eventuality is low, however, because every adversarial nuclear relationship confronts a secure second-strike capability in the other. So the prospect of assured retaliation is likely to keep deterrence in place.

Second, nuclear use could take place through an accident caused by malfunctioning command and control (C2) systems. But, this eventuality too is relatively low given that states take great care in building positive and negative controls in their C2. The highest probability is in the third scenario, that of inadvertent escalation as a result of miscalculation or misperception. The risk of stumbling into a nuclear war that no one wanted or anticipated is the highest.

Factors Exacerbating Nuclear Risks

A slew of current political, technological, and doctrinal factors heighten the chances of nuclear use. High trust deficits between major nuclear-armed states create nuclear dyads that assume the worst of the other, and believe in the utility of hedging. These dyads entangle states in capability build-ups to meet their concepts of credible deterrence.

The collapse of US-Russia arms control arrangements has led to an offence-defence spiral and mutual arms racing, whose implications are being felt in other states as well. China, for instance, responds to these developments in the US and sets into motion a new set of threat perceptions in India. Indian responses, or even a sense of what these will be, leads to actions in Pakistan. A chain conundrum thus complicates the nuclear landscape.

Meanwhile, new technologies like cyber offensives, artificial intelligence (AI), and hypersonics are certain to make states unsure about the credibility of their nuclear deterrence. The fear of a loss of nuclear assets to an adversary’s first strike could move states into accepting more hair trigger postures. The attendant risks can well be imagined.

At the doctrinal level, the US and Russia are reviving the concept of fighting ‘limited wars’ with low-yield nuclear weapons. Such a belief system makes the use of the weapon more likely. 'Limited' use of the weapon is peddled for greater credibility, and to signal the ability to control and manage escalation. This, however, is an extremely risky venture with no guarantee of how it would end.

Addressing Risks

Acknowledging the existence of risks is the first step towards finding ways to deal with them. However, none of the nuclear-armed states appear to be in the mood to do so. They could be jolted into this reality in three ways.

One, through the emergence of a situation akin to the Cuban Missile Crisis that brought the US and the USSR to the brink of a nuclear precipice, and to their senses about its existential dangers. Two, the emergence of a wise, statesman-like leader who is able to mobilise political opinion on the issue, much like how former US President Obama managed through the Nuclear Security Summits (NSS) that provided a platform for dialogue on the risk of nuclear terrorism. A similar forum is needed to engage nuclear-armed states on doctrines, force postures, and structures to address misperception, foster habits of engagement, and help create a shared understanding of risks.

The third way is by bringing nuclear risks into public imagination through creative media such as movies, art, and music, etc. This would infuse the knowledge of risks more generally and create momentum for public demands to make such issues a part of inter-state dialogue.

Marking the 75th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings must involve an understanding of where the world stands today, to ensure that such a disaster never happens again.

Socialist or Capitalist: What is China’s Model, Exactly?

Richard Wolff

Near the end of his life Lenin gave a speech that referred to the USSR as a transitional society. He explained that socialists had taken state power and could thereby take the post-revolutionary economy—which he labeled “state capitalism”—further. The socialists’ state could achieve transition to a genuinely post-capitalist economy. He never spelled out exactly what that meant, but he clearly saw that transition as the revolution’s goal. In any event, conditions inside and outside the USSR effectively halted further transition. Stalin’s USSR came to define socialism as state power in socialists’ hands overseeing an economy that mixed private and state enterprises with market and state planning mechanisms of distribution. The state capitalism originally conceived as a transitional stage en route to a socialism different from and beyond state capitalism came instead to define socialism. The transition had become the end.*

The “different from and beyond” faded into a vague goal located in a distant future. It was a “communism” described by slogans such as “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” It named a party with communism as its goal, but socialism as its present reality.

The hallmark of capitalism, what distinguished it from feudalism (lord/serf) and slavery (master/slave), was the employer/employee relationship structuring its enterprises. In Stalin’s USSR and since, the employer/employee relationship became, instead, a necessary, unquestioned presumption common to any and all “modern” economies, capitalist and socialist alike (rather like machinery or raw materials). That Stalinist view of the universality of the employer/employee relationship was also the view of all major strains of economic thought in the capitalist world outside the USSR.

China’s Communist Party largely replicated the USSR’s history in terms of constructing a state capitalism overseen by the party and the government it controls. One key difference from the USSR has been China’s ability to engage with the world market in ways and to degrees the USSR never could. China also allowed a far larger component of private enterprises, foreign and domestic, alongside state-owned and operated enterprises than the USSR did. Yet China today, like the USSR a century ago, faces the same transition problem: transition to a post-capitalist society has been stalled.

In China since at least the 1970s, the Communist Party and the government it controls have managed state-owned and supervised private enterprises. Both kinds of enterprise exhibited the same employer/employee structure. Chinese state capitalism is a hierarchy with the party and government at the top, state and private employers below them, and the mass of employees comprising the bottom. Western private capitalism has a slightly different hierarchy: private employers at the top, parties and government below them, and the mass of employees comprise the bottom.

China’s economy has grown or “developed” much faster over recent decades and now rivals the United States and EU economies. China was better prepared for and better contained the damages flowing from the 2000 dot-com crisis, the 2008-09 Great Recession, and the 2020 COVID-19 crisis. The party and government in China mobilized private and public resources to focus on prioritized social problems that also included reduced dependence on exports and massive infrastructural expansion.

China’s party and government have produced a huge, well-educated labor force working for private and state enterprises, foreign and domestic. Popular support for China’s existing economic system seems widespread notwithstanding considerable criticism and some opposition. Rising labor productivity yielded rising average real wages (also rising far faster than in the West). Across these years, no Chinese troops fought in any foreign wars. Housing, education, health care, and transportation received massive investments; their supplies often grew ahead of Chinese demand for them.

A key lesson of Chinese development is that economic objectives are better met faster if a dominant social agency prioritizes achieving them and can mobilize the maximum resources, private as well as public, to that end. China’s party and government were that agency.

In Western capitalism, no comparably empowered social agency possessed that power. Private and public sectors stayed separate. Ideology and politics generally kept the public subordinate to the private. The private employers’ differing particular interests and profit-driven goals discouraged many kinds of coordinated behavior among them as did their system’s structures of competition. Party and state apparatuses depended on corporate donations and corporate media supports. Thus, in Western capitalism, no social agency played the national resource-mobilizing role that the party and government played in China.

Some Western capitalist countries embraced social democracy (as in much of western Europe). There states provided major social supports (national health insurance, subsidized schools, transport, housing, etc.) that enabled some state-mobilized national resources for social priorities. The less capitalist countries embraced social democracy—the more committed to laissez-faire ideology and private-sector dominance—the less they could mobilize national resources. The United States and UK are prime examples of such countries; hence their poor preparations for and containments of the COVID-19 pandemic and the capitalist crash of 2020.

A second lesson China offers the world concerns the relationship between the basic structure its private and public enterprises share and the nature of its socialism. Almost all enterprises in China have an employer/employee internal structure; they differ in who the employers are. In state owned and operated enterprises, state officials occupy the employer position. In private enterprises, the employers are private citizens; they occupy no position within the state apparatus.

China’s economic system differs sharply from a Western capitalist system. First, it has a larger sector of state owned and operated enterprises than what Western capitalisms display. Second, it accords a dominant political and social role to the party and government. The latter together direct the economy’s development and coordinate how economy, politics and culture interact to achieve its goals.

China’s economic system is also clearly not a communism in the sense of having overcome the employer/employee structure or mode of production. To the extent that such overcoming once occurred during the era of communes early in the history of the People’s Republic of China, it mostly vanished. Employer/employee structures of enterprises are today’s Chinese norm. China is not post-capitalist. China is, as the USSR was, socialist in the sense of a state capitalism whose further transition to post-capitalism has been blocked.

There is an alternative way of drawing a second lesson from China’s remarkable history over the last half-century. We could infer that by socialism with Chinese characteristics, China means its system of a socially dominant party and state directing a mix of private and state-owned enterprises, both organized in the typically capitalist structure of employer and employee. Western European “socialisms” (Scandinavia, Germany, Italy, etc.) would thus also, like China, fall somewhere in the blocked transition from capitalism to post-capitalism. Despite Europe’s different politics and multiple-party system, most of its parties accept and reinforce a commitment to a kind of state capitalism.

The socialisms of the USSR, China, and western Europe were and are transitional. They all embody a process that got stopped or stalled en route to a post-capitalist society barely imagined. “Actually existing socialisms” were actually state capitalisms ruled, more or less, by persons and associations who wanted to go somewhere further, beyond, to a society much more different from capitalism. Hence the gap felt deeply by so many socialists and socialist organizations (parties, etc.) between what motivates their commitment (socialist ideals) and what they can and must do in their practical lives.

The Cold War waged against the USSR added to the pressures that blocked transition from going beyond state capitalism. A cold war now against China will do the same. Even without cold wars, internal pressures in the USSR and China likely sufficed then and suffice now to stall any transition beyond state capitalism. And so it is as well with western European-type socialisms. The only way the transition can be resumed would be if some force within the private and/or state capitalisms emerged that defined its project as precisely that resumption.

Global capitalism today exhibits historic difficulties: pandemic closures, global depressions (in 2008 and worse in 2020), extreme and deepening inequalities within nations, unsustainable government, corporate and household debts, and collapsing coordination among blocs (the United States, China, the EU, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, etc.). Long-deferred social problems (global warming, racism, labor migration, and gender inequality) are exploding as partial effects and partial further causes of those difficulties. Everywhere social movements are emerging or struggling to emerge in response to the difficulties and problems besieging modern societies.

All those movements share the problem of defining just what they will do to solve the problems motivating them. Many will yet again see government as the solution. Their program will give the state more power to oversee, regulate, control, and spend for the solution. Those people may or may not label their views as “socialism.” Either way, their proposals advocate for or sustain another blocked transition: from a private to a state capitalism or from a lesser to a greater degree of state capitalism.

Over the last century, many attracted to socialism have come to understand that blocked transitions did not and do not suffice to solve the problems created by modern capitalism. Those people can now become the new social force to unblock the socialist transition. From below, they can demand an end to the employer/employee structure of enterprises, public as well as private.

That end would help define the new society to which an unblocked socialist transition can and must now proceed. That society would be post-capitalist: different from and beyond all actually existing socialisms. It will have displaced the employer/employee structure of enterprises in favor of the democratic, worker cooperative structure.

In the late 18th century, the French and American Revolutions marked the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Leaders of those revolutions believed that they would bring into being a new society characterized by liberty, equality, fraternity, and democracy. But that transition also stalled: it did achieve the change from lord/serf to employer/employee, but it did not achieve the further changes to that desired new society. Socialism mostly represented the continuation of the drive toward those further changes.

But the socialisms of the USSR, China and western Europe stalled too. Their advocates and leaders had believed that a transition from private to state capitalism would bring those further changes that capitalism never did. The lessons of Soviet and Chinese socialisms offer a profound critique of stalled socialism, their own and others’. The completion of the passage from capitalism and beyond socialism as a transitional stage requires a micro-level economic revolution. The dichotomous employer/employee relationship inside enterprises must give way to a democratically organized community of workers who collectively employ themselves as well as direct the enterprise. That economic foundation—what communism concretely means—offers us a better chance to realize the goals of liberty, equality, fraternity, and democracy than capitalism or socialism ever could.

40 Acres and a Mule: the Plight of Black Farmers

Evaggelos Vallianatos

The most deleterious of the effects of the industrialization of farming in the United States is the drastic decline of the small white family farmers and the near disappearance of the black family farmers.

Rise and fall

In 1900, there were 746,717 black farmers in the United States. In the next ten years, by 1910, black farmers increased by 19.6 percent, becoming 893,377. The next decade, black farmers increased by 3.6 percent, reaching in 1920 their highest number ever: 925,710.

Then white racism triggered an unstoppable decline and fall. White society, its government, and large farmers hit the landed black farmers with a ton of bricks. Most black farmers abandoned farming.

The government waged an invisible war of cheating the former slaves of their promised forty acres and a mule. Large white farmers, agribusiness, and government agencies at the county, state, and federal level scared black farmers, giving them the wrong information, denying them loans, harassing them out of their land.

When black Americans started demanding civil rights in the 1950s, the wrath of the large white farmers boiled over. Black farmers ran away from the countryside to the northern cities as fast as they could. The legacy of slavery, the failure to distribute land to black Americans after the Civil War, and the racism of the federal land grant universities and extension service had had their terrible impact on black farmers as well.

Joel Schor

This story became alive in the writings and discussions of a colleague: Joel Schor. I met him in Washington, DC, where he was a historian with the US Department of Agriculture. We used to have lunches together and speak on the phone. We shared our concerns. I kept talking about corruption at the EPA, and he complained about racism at USDA.

He was courageous enough he reminded his supervisors of the destructive policies of USDA toward black farmers.

He gave me an unpublished paper he had written for USDA (“Black Farmers / Farms: The Search for Equity,” Spring 1995), in which he said that, by 1995, the vanishing black farmers were, at the most, one percent of the country’s farmers. Agriculture for blacks was becoming “a cultural memory.” It was no longer a way of life or a source of employment. The number of black farmers told their tragic history: They declined by 51.3 percent in the 1950s, 50.8 percent in the 1960s, and 57.3 percent in the 1970s. By 1997, the brave new rural world of America had cleansed itself of black farmers. Less than 18,000 black farmers were still farming in the year 2000, their numbers hitting the catastrophic level of 98 percent decline in the twentieth century.

Protesting racism at USDA

I remember walking with a few black farmers protesting the discriminatory and racist policies of USDA. The silent protest took place in Washington, DC on September 28, 2004. We were walking from the headquarters of USDA to Capitol Hill where the Constitutional Subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee was preparing to have a hearing about the legal problems of the black farmers suing USDA.

What startled me was that there were so few people in the protest march, and those who marched, were overwhelmingly old and black. The Congressman who chaired the hearing, Steve Chabot, captured the tragedy of the black farmers, saying:

“When slavery was ended in the United States, our government made a promise – a restitution of sorts – to the former slaves that they would be given 40 acres and a mule…what is clear is that promise was intended to help freed slaves be independent economically and psychologically, as holders of private property rights. What also is clear is that the very government that made this promise, the “People’s Agency” [US Department of Agriculture] established in 1862 under President Abraham Lincoln, has sabotaged it by creating conditions that make sovereign and economically-viable farm ownership extremely difficult.”

Justice and support for black family farmers

It’s never too late to undo wrongs. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are potentially moving into the White House this November. They can finally fulfill the promise of the government to the black farmers: assist them with enough land and agroecological knowledge to become successful small family farmers. Those of the black farmers wishing to have 40 acres and a mule, give them 40 acres and a mule.

Such a policy should reorder USDA to cease telling family farmers to get big or get out, and, above all, abandon agribusiness and its sick animal farms and return to its original mission of helping small family farmers, no matter their skin color, raise community, democracy and wholesome organic food while protecting the natural world.

The Arithmetic of Avarice

Sam Pizzigati

How much do America’s big-time corporate CEOs make? Such a simple question, right? Not quite. Economist Larry Mishel has been working to get the answer right — for decades. And now Mishel, a former president and currently a distinguished fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Economic Policy Institute, has just released his latest take on the corporate pay universe, a set of newly revised stats that track the past half-century of executive compensation.

Media coverage of Mishel’s dramatic new numbers, prepared with researcher Jori Kandra, has mostly focused on the top exec pay figures EPI is showing for last year.

“Average CEO pay increased 14% in 2019 to $21.3 million,” announced the CNBC headline over the network’s report coverage. The Fox Business lead picked the same numbers: “CEOs at the top 350 firms in the US were paid $21.3 million on average last year, a 14% increase over the year before, as top executives continue to see their compensation skyrocket.”

But the new 2019 CEO pay stats tell only part of the story Mishel and Kandra have to tell. Their most valuable contribution comes from the detailed historical context they provide: CEOs today aren’t just pulling down phenomenal sums. They’re pulling down phenomenally more than top execs used to pocket.

How phenomenally? Between 1978 and 2019, EPI calculates, the CEOs of America’s top 350 corporations realized — after taking inflation into account — an amazing 1,167 percent increase in their compensation. Worker pay after inflation averaged a miniscule 13.7 percent increase over the span of the same 41 years.

The new EPI calculations also reveal that the gap between executive pay decades ago and executive pay today is running even wider than previously thought. What explains this expanding gap? What’s made accurately calculating executive pay so devilishly difficult? A simple structural reality: Top execs today don’t get most of their pay from their paychecks.

Most of the rest of us, of course, do get most of our compensation from our paychecks. Add up the numbers on our paycheck stubs and you have the annual income we earn from our jobs.

Corporate chiefs, to be sure, do get paychecks. They all have fixed annual salaries. But these salaries account for just a small fraction of the compensation corporations bestow upon them. CEOs get the vast bulk of their pay — 79 percent last year — in the form of stock-based compensation. For top execs, this stock-based compensation has worked out wonderfully. For statisticians, this stock-based compensation has created nothing but endless headaches.

The problems come whenever analysts try to pin a dollar value on the stock-based compensation that top execs are receiving.

Some of this compensation comes as stock options. These options give executives the right to buy their company’s shares in the future at the current price, the price at the moment of the option award. If their firm’s share price increases, top execs can “exercise” their option to buy shares at the old low price and then sell them at the higher new one, snatching a tidy personal profit in the process.

So how should analysts value these stock options? The standard accounting practice has been to assign these options a “fair value” at the time companies hand them out. That fair value gets calculated via a formula that tries to forecast what options will eventually help executives clear.

But execs — in real corporate life — regularly clear far more than these “fair value” calculations. So Mishel and other analysts have rejected the traditional accounting route and have instead been including options in a CEO’s annual pay only when the options become “realized.”

Companies, meanwhile, seem to be moving away from awarding stock options. They’re increasingly awarding their execs outright shares of stock. These grants typically only take full effect — “vest” — several years after they initially get awarded.

Stock grants also raise valuation problems. Let’s say a CEO this year gets a grant of 100,000 shares currently worth $100 each. The shares will vest in three years. Before this year, the EPI approach to calculating annual CEO pay figures would have credited the current value of these shares — $10 million — to the exec’s 2020 compensation.

But what if these shares, when they vest three years from now, turn out to be worth $150 each? In that case, the exec will have gained another $5 million that goes unrecorded.

EPI’s new approach to calculating executive pay fixes this problem. The Institute is now only including the “realized” value of both stock options and stock grants in its calculations. And EPI’s new report applies this new methodology to CEO pay figures back over four decades.

This new EPI methodology has produced the stunning 1,167 percent increase in CEO pay noted above, the after-inflation explosion in big-time CEO pay since 1978. Under the previous EPI methodology, this increase would have been a still striking but smaller 1,033 percent.

The gap between the results the old and new methodologies generate has grown more pronounced as stock grants have made up a larger share of annual CEO pay. Under the previous EPI methodological approach, CEO pay at the nation’s top 350 companies rose 36 percent between 2009 and 2019. The new EPI methodology, with its focus on realized pay for both stock options and stock grants, shows that CEO pay increased at almost triple that rate, at 105 percent.

All this talk about methodology, unfortunately, can add to the confusion around executive pay. America’s top execs love this confusion. They can use it to distract attention from the windfalls they continue to receive, even during a pandemic that has the American economy reeling.

One example: This spring, top execs across the United States proudly announced they would be significantly cutting their salaries during the coronavirus crisis. How noble of them, exclaimed corporate PR departments!

Actually, not particularly noble at all. Salaries, remember, make up just a small piece of total executive compensation. Execs can cut their salaries and still end the year with higher total compensation. Disney executive chairman Bob Iger, for instance, has been refusing his salary paychecks since the end of March. For Iger, no big deal. His 2020 salary, the research firm CGLytics reports, equals just 3.3 percent of his total 2019 compensation.

Lawmakers could be doing plenty to end the confusion around executive compensation and discourage executive pay excess, and the new EPI corporate pay report helpfully lists a variety of promising approaches to getting executive pay under control, including tax hikes on companies where the ratio between CEO and worker pay has become clearly excessive.

How many major corporations have clearly excessive chief executive pay levels? Just about all of them. In 2019, the new EPI numbers show, big-time CEOs averaged 320 times more pay their average American workers. The ratio in 1978: 31.4 times.