Australian richest billionaires double their wealth during COVID-19 crisis

Clare Bruderlin

The global coronavirus pandemic has triggered the greatest public health and economic catastrophe since World War II and is being used in every country, including Australia, as the pretext for far deeper attacks on workers’ jobs, wages and conditions.

Yet the super-rich have prospered like never before. The Australian last month released The List, a glossy magazine insert glorifying the fact that the wealth of Australia’s richest 250 people has soared on the back of the crisis.

The Murdoch publication declared: “[T]he biggest names in Australian business thrived during the pandemic.” Together, the top 250 have a combined wealth of $470 billion, up from $377 billion last year, which was almost double the increase from 2019 to 2020.

The cut-off wealth for The List is $450 million, whereas last year it was $402 million. The number of billionaires grew to 122, with an average worth of $1.88 billion. The expansion of their fortunes far exceeds that during the 2008-09 global financial crisis, after which the number of billionaires increased from 30 to 35.

The greatest increases in wealth were among those in iron ore mining, cardboard box making, food deliveries and tech companies—all of which have profited from COVID-19.

The two richest on the list were iron ore magnates Gina Rinehart and Andrew Forrest, who both more than doubled their wealth in one year, almost totally thanks to soaring prices and exports to China.

Gina Rinehart [Source: Wikimedia Commons]

Rinehart increased her wealth by $20 billion, bringing her estimated fortune to $36.28 billion, up from $16.25 billion last year. Her company, Hancock Prospecting, recorded one of the biggest profits for a private company in Australian corporate history, with a $4 billion net profit for the 2020 financial year—50 percent more than it made the previous year.

Forrest, chair of Fortescue Metals Group, similarly doubled his wealth from $13.6 billion last year to $29.61 billion.

Andrew Forrest [Source: Wikimedia Commons]

There are 28 technology entrepreneurs on the list this year, up from 19 last year, benefitting from soaring share market valuations of the sector as a result of the pandemic.

Mike Cannon-Brookes and Andrew Farquhar of software company Atlassian, made third and fourth on the list, respectively. Speculative investors drove up the price of the US Nasdaq-listed shares of Atlassian by nearly 50 percent in 2020.

The List’s pages show off the opulent lifestyles of the wealthiest individuals.

Multi-billionaire real estate developer Harry Triguboff boasted that he swims 20 laps of breaststroke daily at the age of 88. When the Australian asked to photograph him at his private swimming pool for this year’s edition of The List, he responded: “Which pool? I have three swimming pools at my house.”

The magazine continued: “Despite already having two pools, [Triguboff] built a special indoor pool and a bubbling spa in the next-door neighbour’s house after adding it to his Vaucluse waterfront compound.” There was also a “lush Mediterranean garden, which includes a pond full of 10 sizeable carp as well as a resident water dragon.”

Harry Triguboff [Source: Wikimedia Commons]

Melbourne property developer Michael Buxton was described as “fresh from two days of playing golf with his brother on King Island in Bass Strait.” He lives in a “Portsea mansion on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula” with “towering palm trees that adorn the spacious front yard, some of which Buxton specially imported from China” and an “expansive backyard, complete with a butler’s kitchen (where he cleans the seafood he regularly catches in the bay), lush buffalo grass, and deck.”

The oldest billionaire on the list is 97-year-old Len Ainsworth, whose poker machine manufacturing company Aristocrat has increased by more than 70 times in its share price, since it was floated on the stock exchange in 1996. He ranked number 17, with a net worth of $4.01 billion.

The List reported that Ainsworth had “even reportedly stitched up a deal for Aristocrat to supply him with a new car every few years. He has variously driven a Rolls-Royce, an Audi, a Lexus or a Bentley ever since, though his most recent vehicle has been a Porsche Cayenne.”

For PR purposes, The List compiled a list of the top 25 philanthropists, entitled “The Givers.” It was an attempt to justify the unprecedented growth in wealth by portraying the billionaires as “generous.” The combined donations amounted to $385.5 million—less than the wealth cut off for The List.

At the top of “The Givers,” was number two on the rich list, Andrew Forrest. His Minderoo Foundation, which has a net worth of around $1.87 billion, said it donated $88 million in the past year. The List claimed that this money went to “helping to end slavery, fight cancer, indigenous programs and cutting plastic in oceans.”

Such charity is an obscenity in itself. It seeks to make a show of ameliorating a fraction of the crimes committed by the capitalist profit system, from which the billionaires all benefit, while putting a false gloss of humanity on their rapacious wealth accumulation.

The List noted that “the Forrests’ foundation spent $200 million on behalf of Australian governments to secure COVID-19 test kits and personal protective equipment at the height of the pandemic.”

This equipment was sold on-cost to the government. Forrest explained that the purchase was an effort to give the government confidence to “lift restrictions to rapidly expedite getting the country back to work.” That is, to help the drive to coerce workers back into unsafe workplaces in the midst of a deadly pandemic, in order to restore corporate profits.

Likewise, billionaire property developer Lang Walker, whose Walker Corporation continued with the “biggest commercial property project in Australia,” during the pandemic, insisted last June that “the country needs to get back to work.”

In his interview for The List, Walker declared that he “can’t handle people using COVID as an excuse.” Instead, “you need to keep a positive attitude and look for opportunities. There are a lot of opportunities around.”

Such is the mentality of the capitalist class. Economic and social crises, no matter how disastrous for millions of people, provide “opportunities” for money-making.

The pandemic has demonstrated that the interests of the ruling corporate and financial elite and the capitalist system as a whole are incompatible with the interests of the working class, the vast majority of the population.

Recent modelling from the Australia Institute estimates that the Liberal-National government’s scrapping of the coronavirus welfare supplement last week will see a further 155,000 people, including 18,000 children, living below the poverty line. The poverty line was defined as $377.69 per week, excluding household costs, for a single person.

Altogether, millions of workers, who have been depending on increased JobSeeker dole payments, or JobKeeper wage subsidies during the pandemic, face losing their jobs and being thrust into poverty.

The wealth of the financial and corporate elite has boomed during the pandemic in no small part due to the massive federal and state government bailout packages, which have amounted to more than $400 billion, including subsidies and cheap loans, over the past year.

The combined wealth of the richest 250 individuals is more than double the federal government’s total health expenditure in 2018-19, which amounted to $195.7 billion. During the pandemic, the Morrison government has allocated just $23 billion to its national COVID-19 Health Response and Suppression strategy, including just $6 billion for its vaccine rollout.

COVID-19 cases surge in the Philippines

Isagani Sakay

COVID-19 daily cases are surging in the Philippines as hospitals declare themselves overwhelmed. On April 2, the seven-day moving average daily case rate hit 9,021, more than twice the peak of 4,421 cases reached last year. Active cases are at a new record of 153,809 and the death toll is now 13,297. The numbers continue to rise. The Department of Health reported 11,028 new cases on Sunday.

Figure 1: Graph from Philippine Department of Health, April 03, 2021

So far, Metro Manila, the national capital region (NCR) and four surrounding provinces have borne the brunt of the surge with 70 percent of active cases or 109,496.

According to the Philippine health department, the COVID-19 allotted beds in 26 out of 150 hospitals in the NCR were already fully occupied. Twenty-four hospitals were at over 85 percent occupancy. Of the 804 intensive care beds for COVID-19 patients, over 78.61 percent or 631 were in use. In addition, 69 percent or 3,143 isolation beds and 61 percent or 2180 ward beds were also occupied.

Around the world, COVID-19 cases are surging as capitalist governments herd students and workers back into unsafe schools and workplaces in a drive to restore the full production of profits even as the pandemic continues and vaccination programs are stalled by vaccine nationalism and outright hoarding by richer countries.

In New York City, 76,471 more cases and 7,763 deaths were recorded in March alone as Mayor Bill de Blasio ordered 80,000 city workers back to offices. The fascistic Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has continued to oppose even the minimal social distancing measures implemented by state and municipal governments as the 7-day moving average daily case rate is now a horrendous 73,993 cases.

Similarly, the government of President Rodrigo Duterte and the Philippine ruling elite have matched their international counterparts in cynicism, callousness and malign neglect in ensuring capitalist profits take precedence over the health and lives of the working masses.

Customers line up outside a grocery store while social distancing [Image License: @junpinzon/Shutterstock.com]

From the outset, the government response to the COVID-19 pandemic was essentially a militarized police operation aimed, not at halting viral transmission and eradicating the virus, but rather at suppressing social opposition. The government channeled desperately needed public funds, amounting to over $US19 billion, to paying off the public debt and to quantitative easing measures instead of implementing mass testing, organizing effective contact tracing, providing financial assistance and paid leave to allow the working class to shelter in place, and beefing up public hospitals.

As a result, mass testing remained inadequate with positivity rates above 5 percent, indicating that the real extent of the transmission was never tracked. Contact tracing efforts were hobbled. International health organizations recommended that for every confirmed case a ratio of 30 contacts be traced but the Philippines attained, at best, a 1:7 ratio. An estimated 40 percent of asymptomatic cases are therefore thought not to have been counted and the real number of COVID-19 infected cases may actually be over 1 million instead of the official count of 756,000.

COVID-19 related deaths are likely severely undercounted. Even numbers reported by the government vary wildly. According to the Philippine Statistical Authority, registered deaths due to COVID-19 accounted for a total of 27,967 deaths or 4.9 percent of the total registered deaths in 2020. This is more than twice the 13,320 deaths with confirmed test results officially reported by the health department as having resulted from the virus.

The Philippines has been widely reported as having implemented the longest running lockdown in the world in response to Covid-19, but this is essentially fraudulent. Workers in Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industries, export processing zones, banking, financing, and mining have all been exempted from the lockdowns and kept at work throughout the pandemic.

It has largely been business as usual as demonstrated by Google Mobility data for the Philippines, tracking mobile phone users in workplaces. It showed a drop of only 9 percent from January-February 2020. In the industrial area of Region 4 CALABARZON, the data revealed a mere 4 percent drop in work place traffic.

The present surge itself followed shortly after the government began to allow non-essential businesses to open up to 30 percent of their capacity in mid-February. Soon after, the count of daily cases began to increase from a 7-day average daily case rate of 1,675 to over 2,200 by the first week of March.

Nevertheless, the government economic managers doubled down on further opening the economy, in particular, the consumption side, insisting that the country or, to be more precise the ruling elites, could no longer afford lockdowns. The Joint Statement of the Duterte Administration’s Economic Managers published on January 28 underlined this point.

“On the demand side, private consumption, which comprises some 70 percent of GDP, remained weak with a -7.2 percent growth… Economic growth will be hard pressed to make a stronger recovery if children and families are restricted from participating in the economy, as up to 50 percent of non-essential retail sales are driven by family spending.

“Consequently, our quarantine restrictions reduced household spending by 801 billion pesos in 2020 or an average of around 2.2 billion pesos per day. The fall in consumption translates into a total income loss of around 1.04 trillion pesos in 2020 or an average of around 2.8 billion pesos per day.”

In other words, if children and their parents need to be sacrificed for profits, so be it.

Confronted, however, with the sharply rising infection numbers and fearful of social anger in the working class, the government, on March 29, 2021, placed Metro Manila and four surrounding provinces back under its strictest militarized lockdowns. It imposed curfews and checkpoints on working-class and poor neighbourhoods and forbade mass gatherings while, like previous lockdowns, keeping workers at work in BPO industries, export processing zones, banking, factories and offices.

The Philippine health care system is dominated by private hospitals. Geared towards medical tourism, in particular, and profits in general, the private hospitals have avoided pouring all available social resources into the fight against the pandemic. Only 20 percent of their bed capacity, the minimum mandated by the government, have been allocated for COVID-19 patients.

As Dr. Jaime Almora, the head of the Philippine Hospital Association, explained in an interview with GMA News, the hospitals are “overwhelmed” not for the lack of bed capacity but the lack of nurses because of the “phasing out of non-performing nursing schools, the K-12 program that resulted in no nursing graduates for a year, and the migration of nurses from private hospitals to the government due to bigger salaries.”

An estimated 30,000 nursing graduates have eschewed employment in the private hospitals, which underpay and overwork their staff, and have instead found work in the BPO industry where they are paid higher salaries.

With the fall of non-COVID-19 patients, the private hospitals have cut staff, citing delays in the government insurance reimbursement of their COVID-19 patient claims and, now with the surge, have demanded government-employed nurses be deployed to the private hospitals on a “voluntary” basis, that is, without additional pay from the private hospitals.

Japan lines up with US against China over Taiwan

Ben McGrath

The United States and Japan are preparing to escalate the confrontation with Beijing over Taiwan, which will be discussed in the upcoming summit between US President Joe Biden and Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga. Originally slated for April 9, the meeting—Biden’s first in-person meeting with a foreign leader since coming to office—will now take place a week later.

Japan Maritime Self-Defence Force [Credit: Destroyer Squadron 15]

Reportedly, the two leaders will release a joint statement on Taiwan—the first since 1969 when Richard Nixon and Eisaku Sato declared Taiwan was important for Japan’s security. On Sunday, Suga pledged to work closely with Washington in ratcheting up its pressure on Beijing. “It is important for Japan and the United States to work together and maintain deterrence to create an environment in which Taiwan and China can find a peaceful solution,” he stated.

The talk of “a peaceful solution” seeks to mask the fact that Tokyo is trying to justify “deterrence”—that is, a military build-up by Japan and the US targeting China. Moreover, it is Washington, not Beijing that is deliberately undermining the “One China” framework, which has maintained a shaky peace in the Taiwan Strait since 1979.

During last month’s “two plus-two” meeting involving US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Secretary of State Antony Blinken with their Japanese counterparts, Taiwan was a major focus of discussion. Austin raised the possibility, with Defense Minister Nobuo Kishi, of the Japanese military being deployed in the event of a US or Taiwanese clash with Beijing.

Kishi told Austin that Tokyo would review the possibility of dispatching troops “given the strait’s geographical proximity and the possibility of an armed conflict there, affecting the safety of Japanese citizens,” according to the Kyodo news agency, despite that being a clear violation of Japan’s post-World War II constitution. Even under Japan’s 2015 “collective self-defense” security legislation, Tokyo would have to claim that conflict over Taiwan jeopardized Japan.

Last Thursday, Taiwan’s representative in Japan, Hsieh Chang-ting, called for Japan to play a larger role in confronting Beijing, suggesting that it enact legislation similar to the US 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, which authorizes US arms sales to Taiwan and military action against supposed Chinese aggression. He declared: “The current enemy [of China] is the United States. Japan will be next… If Taiwan is unified by China, Japan would have to face China directly.”

Beijing’s hawkish Global Times hit back in an opinion piece on March 30, warning: “If Japan makes any substantive move that impairs China’s national interests on the Taiwan question, China will take countermeasures against it. Japan’s loss will sharply outweigh its gain if it ties itself on the US anti-China chariot and sows discord across the Taiwan Straits.”

Among the other accusations directed at Beijing, Washington and Tokyo are seizing on Beijing’s new coast guard law, which took effect in February, in an attempt to paint Beijing as an immediate threat to Japan, and thereby provide the justification for Japanese military intervention over Taiwan. However, the law is itself a response to numerous and increasingly belligerent US provocations during the Trump administration, including calling into question the “One China” policy, which states that Taiwan is a part of China and to which Washington formally agrees.

Beijing’s law was drawn up toward the end of 2020. It allows the coast guard to use weaponry in territory Beijing claims, risking a clash with Japanese vessels around the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands in the East China Sea. Biden and Suga are also set to reconfirm that the US-Japan Security Treaty covers the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands.

The US and Japan are preparing joint military drills focused on the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands, including the possibility that exercises could take place on two of the uninhabited rocky outcrops, which would undoubtedly further antagonize China. In 2014, the US, for the first time, openly sided with Japan over the territorial dispute.

Under guidelines updated in 2015 under the Obama administration, the Japanese military would play the leading role in a military response to China, while the US would provide support, including transporting Japanese troops into potential battles.

Washington has fraudulently painted the confrontation with Beijing as concerning “human rights” and the need to maintain a “free and open” Indo-Pacific. While again seizing on Hong Kong and Xinjiang to distract from the real issues, on March 25 Biden bluntly stated the motivating fear in Washington, that China would eclipse the US economically and strategically.

“China has an overall goal, and I don’t criticize them for the goal, but they have an overall goal to become the leading country in the world, the wealthiest country in the world and the most powerful country in the world. That’s not going to happen on my watch because the United States are (sic) going to continue to grow and expand,” Biden declared.

Biden, along with both the Democratic and Republican parties, is seeking to whip up an anti-China atmosphere over Taiwan, Hong Kong and Xinjiang in order to justify military intervention that would quickly grow into a devastating conflict with another nuclear-armed country.

The US and Japan are directly responsible for transforming Taiwan into one of the world’s most dangerous flashpoints. Japan annexed Taiwan in 1895, after defeating China in the First Sino-Japanese War, recognizing that the island was a strategic base for its broader ambitions in Southeast Asia and the Chinese mainland. After a half century of brutal Japanese colonial rule, the island was returned to China following Japan’s defeat in World War II.

When the 1949 Chinese Revolution overthrew the Kuomintang (KMT) regime headed by the US-backed dictator Chiang Kai-shek, he fled with his forces to Taiwan. The repressive KMT regime on Taiwan was protected by the US navy and allowed to posture as the legitimate government of all China. In the lengthy negotiations following US President Nixon’s 1972 visit to Beijing, the status of Taiwan was the most fraught obstacle to establishing diplomatic relations. While Washington finally agreed to the One China Policy, signaling that Beijing, not Taipei, was the legitimate government of all China, the Taiwan Relations Act ensured Beijing had only nominal jurisdiction over Taiwan.

By forging closer ties with Taiwan against China, Japan and the US are moving toward the junking of the One China policy, which has been the bedrock of diplomatic relations with China for more than four decades and, in doing so, setting course for an inevitable clash involving the world’s three largest economies.

Australian workers face poverty as wage subsidies and welfare supplements end

Martin Scott

The Liberal-National government’s termination of its JobKeeper wage subsidy scheme and reduction of the JobSeeker unemployment payment last week will deepen a social crisis.

The $100 per fortnight reduction in JobSeeker from last Thursday will push an estimated 155,000 people into poverty, bringing the total to 4.5 million, including more than 1 million children, according to a report by the Australia Institute. This represents an increase of 600,000 since the beginning of 2020.

A mass unemployment queue outside a Sydney Centrelink office last March [Credit: WSWS]

The think tank did not factor in the additional impact of job losses stemming from the end of JobKeeper on March 28, meaning the figures may prove to be an underestimation. The Treasury department predicted late last month that 150,000 jobs and 110,000 small businesses could be destroyed with the end of JobKeeper.

Recent research by analysts SGS Economics and Planning revealed that last year’s economic devastation disproportionately affected the poorest areas. In Sydney, the working-class suburbs of Fairfield and Campbelltown lost a total of 5,267 jobs, while 2,010 jobs were created in the affluent Northern Beaches. In Melbourne, 14,259 jobs were destroyed in Wyndham, Dandenong and Casey, while the wealthy Yarra and Melbourne metropolitan areas gained 2,188.

In a further attack on working-class households, moratoriums on evictions were lifted last week in New South Wales, Victoria, and Western Australia. Many of the 75,000 households who deferred rent payments due to loss of income during the pandemic now confront the possibility of homelessness.

Also concluded last week were “mortgage holidays” offered by banks in 2020 with the backing of cheap money from the Reserve Bank. The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority reports that $11.7 billion worth of home loans were still deferred in February.

In the face of this mounting catastrophe, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg claimed in the Australian on March 29: “Australians can now see light at the end of the tunnel.”

Frydenberg boasted of the “remarkably resilient” labour market, yet more than 3 million workers are unemployed or underemployed, an increase greater than 900,000 since February 2020.

After handing out billions of dollars to big business, Frydenberg asserted: “We can’t keep spending borrowed money forever.”

The ruling class insistence that financial support for the working class must be slashed comes despite the ongoing threat from the coronavirus pandemic.

Just one day after the end of JobKeeper, a COVID-19 outbreak in Brisbane forced the Queensland government to impose a three-day “snap” lockdown, leaving businesses with millions of dollars in lost revenue and no wage subsidy. In January, almost 28,000 businesses in the greater Brisbane area still depended on JobKeeper to pay workers.

The hospitality and tourism industries remain particularly vulnerable. The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry expects 30,000 jobs will be destroyed in the tourism sector as a result of the removal of JobKeeper.

Australia’s second-largest airline, Virgin Australia, has stood down 170 ramp and maintenance workers for three weeks in a move that coincided with the termination of the JobKeeper scheme.

The workers received an email last Thursday informing them: “During the stand down, you remain employed but are not required to attend work for the hours you are stood down, and you will not be paid for those hours.”

Virgin insisted the stand down was not connected to the end of the wage subsidy, but the timing of the memo, which was sent before the Brisbane lockdown, suggests otherwise.

The Brisbane outbreak threatens to reduce demand for Morrison’s supposed replacement for JobKeeper in the tourism industry—800,000 subsidised fares to a handful of destinations, four of which are in Queensland.

The entertainment industry also suffered a major blow last week, with the cancellation of the Byron Bay Bluesfest. Organisers were forced to call off the event, which would have featured more than 60 acts and hosted 15,000 fans, after community transmission of COVID-19 was discovered in the northern New South Wales town.

These experiences, along with the shambolic character of the vaccine roll out, underscore the fraudulent character of claims that the pandemic is over. Without the JobKeeper wage subsidy, further lockdowns and capacity restrictions necessitated by inevitable virus outbreaks will lead to more job losses and small business closures.

As is the case internationally, the ruling elite and its political representatives, including Labor and the trade unions, are using the pandemic to intensify a pro-business economic restructuring. The end of the various subsidies, which were always geared to the interests of the corporations, is aimed at entrenching a mass pool of cheap labour so that workers can be compelled to work in low-paid and precarious positions.

WSWS reporters spoke to workers in southwestern Sydney about the termination of JobKeeper and the reduction of the JobSeeker payment.

Kai commented: “The end of the JobSeeker coronavirus supplement will have a devastating impact on the community, especially for those already struggling on the dole.

“People could eat better food and pay their rent more comfortably with the supplement. That keeps people in good mental health in order to look for work. To take that away from them is just cruel and inhumane.

“I work just around the corner, and the line at the Centrelink welfare shopfront is always out the door. The government could relieve some of that pressure by giving people an income that’s liveable. It’s a punitive measure to keep this class of people poor and keep that class of people rich.

“If you give people more money, they spend more money; that means more jobs. People can’t get jobs in poverty. They’ve got to feed themselves and their kids. People aren’t gonna be looking for jobs, they’re going to be trying to find money in other ways.”

Ali said: “The supplement helped a little bit, but now it is hard. I have a car, and just the insurance costs $260 per month.

“I’m from Iraq. I finished Year 10 here, and completed Certificate II, III and IV in business administration at TAFE. I couldn’t get in to a university because I only finished half of Year 11. I’m still looking for work after two years.

“When I try to apply for apprenticeships, they say I am too old because I am 25. Many of my friends are between 23 and 30 and they have the same problem.

“The JobSearch provider says everything is quiet because of the virus and I should just wait.”

Joanna commented: “There will be a rise in unemployment, that’s for sure. There’s going to be more desperate people out there as JobKeeper ends. It’s going to put a lot of pressure on community organisations as well. There are people already struggling who are going to food banks and that sort of stuff.

“Other things will come from this that we probably don’t even know yet. As desperation goes up, crime will go up.

“People are relying on it, and the government has just pulled the carpet out from under them and I don’t know what their options are. $308 a week is really not much to live on.

“It looks like this pandemic is not going away anytime soon. The vaccine roll out just keeps getting pushed back even further. Even that doesn’t mean it will get rid of the whole COVID-19. There’s no guarantee.

“More flare-ups are going to happen, and what do people do then without JobKeeper? Where do people turn? Maybe Salvation Army or something, or move back home with parents? There’s going to be a lot of desperation.”

Government of Poland POLONISTA Scholarship Program 2021

Application Deadline: 30th April 2021 at 15:00 local time for Warsaw.

About the Award: The objective of the Program is to promote Polish language in the world by enabling foreigners interested in Polish language and Polish culture to study or carry out research projects in Poland. The program is addressed to students of Polish philology, Polish studies or Polish programs implemented among others as part of Slavic studies (in the field of Polish language, Polish culture and knowledge about Poland) as well as to scientists from foreign universities and scientific institutions.

Students

During the stay at a Polish university, NAWA Scholarship Holders may develop their interest in Polish matters by participating in lectures and classes in accordance with the program of selected studies, conducting research, carrying out scientific projects, collecting materials for their thesis or scientific work, improving the command of Polish language as well as using resources of libraries, universities and archives.

As part of the Program, partial studies (one or two semesters) or full second cycle studies may be implemented. Applicants shall choose the university at which they plan to study by themselves. The field of studies chosen by the Applicant should be consistent with the program of studies carried out at the Home university. The Applicant has to obtain the consent of the Host university to undertake studies, and in the case of candidates for full studies – has to successfully complete the recruitment procedure at the selected university.

A novelty in this year’s recruitment (2021) is the possibility to apply for a scholarship for doctoral students and students who intend to undertake doctoral studies in Poland.

Researchers

Under the Program, Researchers from foreign academic and research centres may realize at Polish universities and scientific institutions research projects lasting from 3 to 12 months the purpose of which is, among others, conducting scientific research (including in cooperation with Polish scientists), obtaining research materials or scientific publications, postdoctoral internship, conducting classes at the Host centre, intensive learning of Polish language.

Type: Research, Doctoral

Eligibility: Foreign students & scientists interested in Polish language and Polish culture, interested in studying or carrying out research projects in Poland.

To be Taken at (Country): Poland

Number of Awards: Not specified

Value of Award: Fully-funded

How to Apply: Applications should be submitted via the NAWA ICT system: here

• It is important to go through all application requirements in the Award Webpage (see Link below) before applying.

Visit Award Webpage for Details

IsDB-Türkiye Scholarships International Joint Scholarship Programme 2021/2022

Application Deadline: 15th April 2021

About the Award: The jointly funded scholarship programme is awarded to successful candidates for studies in most reputable universities in Turkey, effective September 2021.

The Programme is designed to provide educational opportunities for the academically meritorious students from member countries and Muslim communities in non-member countries to pursue a full-time study for Undergraduate, Masters’ and PhD degree aiming to build the right competencies required with a special focus on sustainability sciences to empower communities and to assist them in achieving their national and global development plans including the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). 

Type: Undergraduate, Masters’ and PhD degree

Eligibility:

• Most programmes in Turkish universities are instructed in Turkish language. However, candidate who wish to study in English medium of instructions must provide evidence of language proficiency (TOEFL or other equivalent certificates). Most of these programmes require international admission test scores, such as GRE, GMAT, SAT etc. Candidates must check the language of instruction while selecting the programme in the application system.
• For more information about the programme features, criteria, fields of study and conditions, candidate should visit the IsDB Scholarship Website (www.isdb.org/scholarships).

Eligible Countries: IsDB Member countries

To be Taken at (Country): Turkey

Number of Awards: Not specified

Value of Award: The scholarship covers tuition fees, living allowance, accommodation, health insurance, and round-trip air-ticket.

How to Apply: Eligible candidates must apply for the programme through Türkiye Scholarships website (www.turkiyeburslari.gov.tr).

• It is important to go through all application requirements in the Award Webpage (see Link below) before applying.

Visit Award Webpage for Details

Coronavirus pandemic escalates in Poland, with 400 dying every day

Martin Nowak

Schools, day-care centres, retail outlets, theatres, hairdressers, museums, cinemas and DIY stores have been closed again in Poland since the beginning of last week. This is the right-wing conservative government’s reaction to the escalation of the coronavirus pandemic in recent weeks, which was its own fault.

For the time being, these measures will apply until April 9. It is already clear that this time will not be enough to bring the pandemic under control. In the meantime, the economy is to continue running at full capacity.

Polish miners at the Wujek mine in Katowice (AP Photo / Czarek Sokolowski)

With over 35,000 new infections in one day, Poland set a new, sad record the weekend before last. Conducting around 100,000 tests per day is resulting in a positive test rate of more than one third, raising fears of a significantly higher number of unreported cases.

With 38 million inhabitants, the country has the second-highest number of infections in Europe after France, and the seven-day incidence value has exceeded the 500 mark. In the capital, Warsaw, the incidence rate is already above 700, eclipsing the deadly November 2020 wave and with no end in sight. Around 400 people are now dying every day as a result of COVID-19.

The government’s responsibility becomes particularly clear when looking back. Thanks to a comparatively hard lockdown in spring 2020, Poland was hardly affected by the pandemic for a long time. Only during the Europe-wide opening up of the economy at the end of the summer did the numbers slowly increase in Poland, reaching a seven-day incidence level of 50 per 100,000 inhabitants for the first time in early October.

By early November 2020, around 5,000 people had died from the pandemic in Poland. In the five months since then, the death toll has increased thirteenfold and currently stands at 52,400. In the same period, the death toll in Germany has increased tenfold and in the Czech Republic ninefold.

At the beginning of February, the Polish government, like all European governments, decided on extensive relaxations. Although the nationwide incidence rate had only just fallen below 100, schools were reopened to first through third graders, as well as shopping malls, museums, cinemas, swimming pools and other facilities. The World Socialist Web Site warned strongly at the time: “Despite the murderous consequences of its policies, the Polish bourgeoisie is hell-bent on ending the lockdown.”

In addition to the Mazowieckie administrative area (Masovia) with its capital Warsaw, the much more densely populated industrial and mining region of Slaskie (Silesia) is once again a hotspot of the pandemic. In the first half of last year, at times, half of all infections were in the mining region.

The main reason for this is that despite the lockdown measures, production continued everywhere. The underground coal miners are exposed to particular danger when working in a confined space. Also, due to the long tradition of mining, and insufficient protection, there is a disproportionate share of chronic respiratory diseases. Combined with the generally disastrous level of the Polish health system, this is a lethal combination that particularly affects the Polish working class.

From Częstochowa, the second-largest city in the region, the head of the emergency service, Marian Nowak, reported that children were also increasingly affected by coronavirus infections. The youngest infected child last week was 17 months old, according to a report in Gazeta Wyborcza .

The emergency services are also having to travel ever-longer distances to find free beds for the sick. The Faktach programme on TVN reported on an ambulance that had to travel 700 kilometres with a sick person on board.

Marian Nowak says that one night five of his ambulances drove to Prudnik, 180 kilometres away, because there was free bed capacity there. Upon arrival, the ambulances usually have to wait for hours before they can hand over the patients.

Czestochowa’s specialist hospital, which a few weeks ago was accepting patients from other regions, is now overcrowded. Although it has only 123 COVID beds, it has accommodated 132 COVID-19 patients. In the city hospital, 124 patients share the official 118 beds. As a result, the 20 beds in trauma surgery will soon be converted into a COVID ward.

However, the creation of further capacity is failing due to the lack of doctors, as Michał Dworczyk, head of the Prime Minister’s Office, admitted at a press conference last Tuesday. The number of Poland’s doctors per 1,000 inhabitants is the fifth worst of all OECD countries.

At the joint press conference, government spokesman Michal Dworczyk, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki and Health Minister Adam Niedzielski tried to argue for perseverance and sought to pull the wool over the eyes of the population. They declared that the vaccination programme was the all-important, final show of strength, the “ray of hope,” announcing that 20 million people would be vaccinated by June and the entire population by the end of August.

With about 5 million first vaccinations and 2 million second vaccinations, Poland has so far fully vaccinated only 5.1 percent of its population. Although this is slightly above the catastrophic European average, it is still far from having vaccinated the entire population.

The government’s grandly announced target of 10 million vaccinations per month would require more than doubling the current vaccination capacity. Expecting such an increase while the health system is collapsing due to the consequences of the pandemic and the vaccination nationalism that also dominated the last EU summit is simply absurd.

Where the priorities of the vaccination campaign lie became clear again only recently. Poland sent 7,000 vaccine doses from its stockpile to NATO headquarters in Brussels to vaccinate military personnel there ahead of time. NATO Secretary-General Stoltenberg thanked Poland for this and remained silent on the question of whether this was morally justifiable when risk groups in Poland were still waiting for the vaccine. Poland occupies a central position in NATO’s deployment plans against Russia.

In the past, cases of Polish politicians and celebrities who had themselves vaccinated prematurely by recourse to illegally diverted vaccine doses have repeatedly come to public attention. The vaccination of Interior Ministry officials began the week before last. Police officers, border guards and customs and tax investigators have already been vaccinated by the thousands, while registration of people born in 1962 will not begin until April 12.

It is not surprising that the government cares more about protecting state power than protecting older citizens. The Polish police are increasingly discredited, with only one third of the population still having confidence in it. Even the ongoing protests against the abortion law have repeatedly met with brutal police violence. Particularly notorious is the use of the BOA anti-terrorist unit, which in November beat demonstrators with telescopic batons while in plainclothes.

This contrasts with scenes like those that took place recently at the University Hospital in Wroclaw, where hundreds of people stormed into the vaccination centre to get one of the daily 500 doses.

A hectic vaccination campaign amid a rampant pandemic also poses another danger. As experts warn, the interplay between a high number of active infections and long delays between the first and second vaccinations could lead to mutations against which the vaccines lose their effectiveness.

According to expert estimates, another 25,000 people will die by July, writes Der Spiegel —a very conservative estimate. With an average of 400 deaths per day, almost 40,000 people would die in three months. Prof. Andrzej Horban, the government’s chief epidemiologist, estimated in an interview with TVN24 that the peak of the current wave has been reached, at “just over 40,000” new infections per day. It is unclear what is prompting him to make this assumption. In fact, there is still no sign of the situation calming down due to the measures taken far too late.

Prof. Horban, however, has already attracted attention on several occasions by his trivialising statements and has openly declared his support for a herd immunity policy. “Protect a little, infect a little,” is how he summarised his strategy. Thus, as late as mid-February he had held out the prospect of further school reopenings if “regional differentiations” were taken into account. This was even though at that time he already assumed that the British variant accounted for 10 percent of the total. In the meantime, the share of this strain is around 80 percent.

Horban also denies the proven long-term effects of COVID-19 and scoffs at the idea that such a thing exists. At the same time, he relativises the government’s responsibility for the scale of the wave, describing the pandemic as a storm, the kind that sometimes comes out of the blue.

The government and its advisers are fully responsible for the current mass deaths. Even without the mutations, the explosion of new infections because of the relaxations introduced was inevitable. Instead of consistently containing the pandemic at the outset, they have relied on the capacity of the health system. The emergency hospitals opened to great media fanfare, such as the one in Warsaw’s National Stadium, are like Potemkin villages, hiding the reality of Poland’s ailing health system, whose main problem is the severe shortage of doctors and nurses.

The situation in Poland also highlights the bankruptcy of the European Union, which is organically incapable of taking coordinated and rational action across Europe. This is exemplified by the German-Polish border, which around 70,000 people cross every day for professional reasons.

A week ago, Germany declared Poland a high-risk area and rapidly introduced border controls with mandatory testing. As a result, queues have formed for hours. On top of that, there are not even uniform regulations across Germany. While Brandenburg and Saxony require a test twice a week, Berlin and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania have a 48-hour time limit.

The measures now adopted in Poland are insufficient and come far too late. As in all countries, the government is deliberately limiting itself to measures that do not endanger the profits of big business, something on which the government and opposition agree.

Right-wing extremists from the Konfederacja party have organised protests against the government’s half-baked lockdown measures. Among the best-known organisers are the “Góralskie Veto” (Veto of the Mountain People) movement led by Sebastian Pitoń in the Polish Carpathians and “OtwieraMY” (We Open Up), supported by Sławomir Mentzen, president of the Polish Economic Congress (Kongres Polskiego Biznesu).

As in other countries, these right-wing forces are using the economic problems of the self-employed and micro-enterprises, such as those in the catering and tourism sectors, who sometimes find themselves penniless and without any income after more than a year of the pandemic, for their anti-lockdown campaigns.

But broad sections of the working class also face acute poverty. The number of unemployed is growing; the rate has risen to 6.5 percent. Parents who have to care for their children at home receive 80 percent of their wages. In the face of chronic low wages, this is not enough for many to pay their bills.

While the working class and lower middle class are being plunged into misery, the government has decided on aid programmes worth billions for the banks and corporations. The interest base rate was cut from 1.5 to 0.1 percent a year ago.

The government and the opposition are in absolute agreement about the murderous pandemic policies that place the defence of profits first. Borys Budka, head of Civic Platform (PO), the largest opposition party, constantly criticises the government from the right. For him, too, the interests of the economy come before the health and lives of the population.

“Clear criteria for the functioning of all sectors of the economy based on COVID standards are needed,” he said at a joint press conference with regional entrepreneurs in Olsztyn at the end of February. “Instead, the government has spent over a year constantly closing and opening individual industries without any logic.”

One looks in vain for criticism from the opposition of the relaxation measures. This also applies to the new movement “Polska 2050” around Szymon Hołownia, which combines economic liberalism with climate policy and an orientation towards the European Union. In recent polls, it has achieved 18 percent, more than the PO with 12 percent.

Brazilian political establishment, corporate media promote military as opposition to Bolsonaro

Miguel Andrade

On Tuesday, Brazil’s fascistic President Jair Bolsonaro sacked the country’s military command in order to consolidate his grip over the state in anticipation of dictatorial measures against the working class amid a catastrophic spread of the COVID-19 pandemic and a dramatic intensification of the social crisis.

Since then, a consensus has begun to emerge from every faction of the political establishment and the corporate media in response to this ominous episode, which is without precedent in Brazilian history: the Brazilian military command was sacked because the Army, Navy and Air Force are committed to democracy and will not violate the Constitution.

Jair Bolsonaro. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Brazil is currently the world epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic, with an accelerating rate of more than 3,000 daily deaths, which is projected to reach 5,000 at some point between April and May. The country’s health care system is in a state of collapse, with hospitals overflowing, and at least one cemetery in Sao Paulo digging up old graves to make way for a flood of new corpses.

The economic crisis resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic has thrown 22 million Brazilians into poverty, and unemployment has reached an all-time high of 14.2 percent in the first quarter.

Tensions within the ruling class, which has no progressive solution to the crisis, are mounting by the day. Deeply fearful of the consequences of the explosive social conditions, every political faction has lined up behind the assessment made by the conservative daily Estado de S. Paulo, which editorialized on April 1: “... faced with the perception that his government has been losing support, the president decided to apply pressure on the leaders of the Armed Forces to pick a side—him or the Constitution. The military obviously chose the Constitution.”

Treating the sacking of the entire high command as a non-event due to the supposedly constitutionalist role of the military, the next day Estado de S. Paulo’s editorial board wrote in a piece titled “Ignore the president”: “One should not waste one’s time correcting Bolsonaro’s nonsense about a state of siege.”

The “nonsense” the editorialists were directing the public to ignore is the president’s assertion that any restraints on economic activity decreed by local authorities to stem the tide of COVID-19 deaths amount to a “state of siege.” The appropriate response, according to Bolsonaro, is for himself to assume dictatorial powers in order to overthrow the local authorities.

On the very day of the dismissal of the military command, Bolsonaro’s ally in the House, Representative Maj. Victor Hugo, attempted to push through a measure including pandemics among the situations in which the president could decree a “state of mobilization.” The “state of mobilization” is a wartime measure allowing the president to direct the production of public and private companies, and, most significantly, take control of the 560,000 members of the 27 state-controlled Military Police corps.

The emergency vote, ultimately blocked by House Speaker Arthur Lira, was the legal embodiment of the public declarations by Bolsonaro and his Congressional allies that “his armed forces” would not enforce anti-COVID-19 lockdowns.

Less than 24 hours before Tuesday’s firing of the high command, the head of the House Constitutional Panel, a Bolsonaro ultra-loyalist, tweeted that a psychotic episode by a Military Police soldier in the state of Bahia, who broke into a section of beach blocked to reduce COVID-19 contagion, shouting confused populist slogans about “not arresting workers” and shooting rifle rounds into the air before being brutally gunned down by a special forces squad, represented the beginning of a mutiny by security forces against local authorities.

On the previous day, in the industrial city of Juiz de Fora, in the state of Minas Gerais, a council member from the Bolsonaro-allied Brazilian Labor Party (PTB), Military Police Sgt. Mello Casal, declared in a live transmission on Facebook that a “militia” was set to assault the city’s municipal guard. Both the state of Bahia and the city of Juiz de Fora are ruled by the Workers Party (PT), which responded to the fascistic incitement by the PTB by posting on social media a video of the city guard’s officers armed and in uniform shouting law-and-order slogans.

Another vital component of the crisis which the bourgeois press wants the people to “ignore” is that the sacking of the military chiefs, including Gen. Fernando Azevedo e Silva, who headed the Defense Ministry, was decided on the eve of the commemoration by the Armed Forces of the 1964 US-backed military coup which inaugurated a 21-year blood-soaked regime. The first act of the new defense minister, Bolsonaro’s former chief-of-staff Gen. Walter Braga Netto, was to order an open celebration of the March 31, 1964 coup in barracks across the country.

Braga Netto’s military order of the day followed in the footsteps of the celebrations ordered by Bolsonaro since he took office in 2019, which were undersigned by the sacked commanders for two straight years. The two previous March 31 commemorations portrayed the coup as the result of a popular movement against the bourgeois-nationalist government of President João Goulart of the Brazilian Labor Party. This year, however, marked the first time since 1985 that he word “celebration” was actually used in the military “order of the day.” After a falsely claiming popular “support” for the military’s seizure of power, it concluded, “so those events of March 31 must be understood and celebrated.”

Later in the day, the daily Folha de S. Paulo revealed that Braga Netto had changed the address prepared two days earlier by former Defense Minister Azevedo e Silva and presented to Bolsonaro on the day of his firing, excluding a previous reference to the armed forces as “state institutions” and including the celebratory conclusion.

Expressing the extraordinary tensions within the military ranks, both the capital and the east military commands had to issue express orders for soldiers and officers not to discuss publicly or on social media the sacking of the high command.

Such gag orders are taken at face value by the corporate media and political establishment as a defense of constitutional norms. They studiously ignore the historical revisionism being promoted by Bolsonaro, and fully supported by the sacked commanders, that the coup was a result of “pressure from below.”

Former Army commander, Gen. Eduardo Villas Bôas, who recently authored a book of memoirs describing the protracted drive towards dictatorship in Brazil since 2013, used precisely the idea of “pressure from below” to justify his 2018 tweet threatening a coup in case the Brazilian Supreme Court (STF) granted former Workers Party (PT) president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva a habeas corpus motion that would allow him to campaign alongside the party’s candidate and main Bolsonaro rival in that year’s election.

The same historical revisionist line toed by the high command was embraced by Bolsonaro’s vice president, Gen. Hamilton Mourão, who tweeted on March 31: “On this day 57 years ago, the Brazilian population, supported by the Armed Forces, stopped the International Communist Movement from putting its claws into Brazil. Strength and Honor!”

Last Friday, March 26, the Communist Party (PCdoB) governor of Maranhão, Flávio Dino, one of the most prominent leaders of the purported political opposition to Bolsonaro, declared that replacing Bolsonaro with Mourão would mean “substituting civilization for barbarism.”

The main opposition party, the PT, has also fully embraced the line that the military represents the bulwark of democracy, with its House leader, Elvino Bohn Gass, stating that the sacking of the military command: “was a message that the Armed Forces are not in the service of a coup attempt.”

From Estado de S. Paulo—which openly supported the 1964 coup—to the PT, the Brazilian political establishment is attempting to conceal the real extent of the crisis of bourgeois rule in the country and the threat of an upheaval from below by Brazil’s increasingly restive working class.

Their promotion of a supposedly “constitutionalist” military echoes the pre-1964 crisis of the Goulart government. Then, the “legal” right wing represented by, among others, Estado de S. Paulo, predicted that the military would carry out a surgical coup, handing power back to civilians after Goulart’s ouster. For its part, the Labor Party, supported by the Stalinist Communist Party, trusted “nationalist” and “constitutionalist” elements within the high command to reign in the fascistic moods being whipped up by Goulart’s opposition. The result was 21 years of state terror, torture and murder that spread from Brazil to throughout Latin America.

Military clashes raise danger of major escalation between Russia and Ukraine

Clara Weiss

The past week has seen a significant escalation of fighting between the Ukrainian army and Russian-backed separatists in the Donbass region. While the Western media is decrying an alleged “Russian aggression,” the military clashes have, in fact, taken place against the backdrop of a series of major provocations by the Ukrainian government which is calculating to receive NATO support in a potential war with Russia.

The level of tensions between Russia and Ukraine is greater now than at any time since a US-German-backed coup by far-right forces toppled the Yanukovich government in February 2014. The coup, part of a decades-long strategy by imperialism to encircle Russia, triggered the annexation of Crimea by the Kremlin and a civil war in the east of the country, which has claimed the lives of over 13,500 people.

A Ukrainian soldier, donning U.S. made equipment, takes his front line position at destroyed Butovka coal mine in the town of Avdiivka in the Donetsk region, Ukraine. (AP Photo/Vitali Komar)

Earlier in March, Kiev approved a strategy aimed at “recovering Crimea.” The peninsula in the Black Sea is of major geopolitical importance and and home to the naval base of Russia’s Black Sea fleet. Any move by Kiev to seize it would be tantamount to a declaration of war.

On March 25, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky approved a new military strategy which emphasizes the need to prepare for the mobilization of the entire population in a war against Russia that would be conducted on Ukrainian soil. The strategy acknowledged that no such war could be won without NATO support and mentions Ukraine’s planned accession to the military alliance no less than 19 times.

In a recent interview, the commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian armed forces, Colonel General Ruslan Khomchak, discussed a possible offensive to retake the separatist-controlled Donbass in East Ukraine. Acknowledging that such an offensive would require huge civilian casualties, Khomchak stressed that Zelensky “has every power to give the command or take a decision.”

At the same time, a hysterical anti-Russian atmosphere is being whipped up in Ukraine. Over the past months, Zelensky has cracked down on key outlets and TV channels of the pro-Russian faction of the Ukrainian oligarchy. The leader of the opposition, the billionaire Viktor Medvedchuk, who has close ties to the Kremlin, has been sanctioned. On Friday, the head of the Independent Miners’ Union, Mikhail Volyntsev, spoke in the Ukrainian Rada (parliament), accusing Russia of a supposed attack on Ukraine’s electrical grid.

This week, reports have emerged of significant Russian troop movements in Crimea and East Ukraine, involving infantry fighting vehicles and anti-tank missiles. Reports have also indicated that Belarusian troops are being mobilized on the border of Ukraine.

On Wednesday, the Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has warned that “Ukraine may take provocative actions which could lead to war.” He accused the US of using Ukraine as a means to create conditions for war, stating, “The West is preparing for nothing less than war with us.” That same day, Russian president Vladimir Putin met with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French president Emmanuel Macron to discuss the situation in Ukraine.

On Friday, US President Joe Biden spoke with Zelensky for the first time since he took office. Biden pledged “unwavering support” for Ukraine against Russia. Throughout the week, there were at least three high-level calls between the American and Ukrainian government, involving Secretary of State Antony Blinken, the Joint Chiefs Chairman General Mark Milley and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. The Wall Street Journal described the crisis as a “test” for the Biden administration.

Map of the Black Sea region

Since coming into office, the Biden administration has made clear that it would pursue an extremely aggressive course toward Russia. In one of his first foreign policy acts as president, Biden bombed an Iranian-backed Iraqi militia position on the Syria-Iraq border, a move that was targeted against not just Iran, but also Russia. At a NATO summit last week, the NATO powers launched a “NATO 2030” effort to prepare for nuclear war against Russia and China. Just before the summit, Biden called Putin a “killer without a soul” in an interview—an extraordinary attack on the head of state of another country—triggering a diplomatic crisis. Underlying the growing danger of war and the increasingly reckless moves of the imperialist powers and their allies is the profound crisis of the world capitalist system which has been significantly accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic.

In Ukraine, the social and political crisis is particularly sharp. Over a year into the pandemic, the coronavirus is ripping through the impoverished population completely unhinged. On April 1, 421 people died, and new daily infections hit the second highest number in the pandemic. Over 33,200 people have officially died from the virus, but the real number is likely much higher. With hospitals overwhelmed and some people reportedly taking medication meant for animals, an adviser to the Ukrainian health ministry recommended people who contracted COVID-19 to be prepared “to die at home.”

The same imperialist powers that have pumped billions of dollars into Ukraine’s far right and military to prepare for war against Russia have refused to provide any meaningful help with COVID-19 vaccine distribution. The Zelensky government has rejected the Russian Sputnik V vaccine, arguing that accepting it would mean a “geopolitical blow.” As a result, only 220,000 people out of a population of 44 million had received the first jab of a vaccine and only two individuals were fully vaccinated as of March 30. Millions of migrant workers have lost their jobs, while many more were laid off or experienced significant income losses. In the war zone in East Ukraine, millions of people lack access to drinking water, with some villages having no access to water at all, according to UNICEF. Like capitalist governments across the world, the Ukrainian government, far from doing anything to alleviate the social suffering, used the crisis to carry out further social attacks on the working class.

While the Ukrainian oligarchy’s reckless provocations are no doubt in part an effort to divert the enormous class tensions outward, the main driving force behind the conflict is the historic decline of US imperialism and its efforts to offset it by military means. Aiming to gain full control over the vast resources of the former Soviet Union, the US and NATO have systematically encircled Russia since 1991 and orchestrated numerous coups on its borders, including two in Ukraine, in 2004 and 2014.

A 2019 document by the RAND Corporation, one of the most important think tanks advising the US government, outlined a strategy of forcing Russia to “overextend” itself militarily in conflicts on its borders. The aim of this strategy is to weaken the Putin regime economically and politically while enabling the US to focus more directly on its main strategic rival: China. The military conflict in East Ukraine is a central part of that strategy.

The report noted, “The Ukrainian military already is bleeding Russia in the Donbass region (and vice versa). Providing more U.S. military equipment and advice could lead Russia to increase its direct involvement in the conflict and the price it pays for it.” It then warned that such a strategy could come at a significant cost to the US itself and was extremely risky, yet it is precisely this strategy that the US has been pursuing.

Over the past seven years, the US has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the Ukrainian military, and US military advisers play a major role in training the Ukrainian army. The RAND Corporation acknowledged that all its proposed strategies involved the risk of an uncontrollable military escalation, including the deployment of nuclear weapons—risks US imperialism is clearly prepared to take.