Carbon Capture Technology Won’t Solve Our Emissions Problems

Wenonah Hauter

The world is processing the dire warnings in the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report: We are on a path to see global temperature rise to surpass the 2-degree threshold, bringing more intense heat waves, droughts, and sea-level rise—unless we shift rapidly away from fossil fuels. And the climate movement is grappling with both a sense of urgency and profound disappointment with the Biden administration. It was bad enough that the administration backed a bipartisan infrastructure proposal that jettisoned many key clean energy provisions, but it’s even worse that the infrastructure plan includes billions of dollars in new fossil fuel subsidies.

That spending would support “carbon capture,” a category of technologies that are misleadingly categorized as climate-friendly. State agencies and lawmakers are making sure that Pennsylvania positions itself as a “carbon capture hub,” which means fitting existing power plants with technology to capture emissions, along with miles of new carbon dioxide pipelines and underground storage facilities in western parts of the state. There is even a plan to build a new “zero emissions” coal-fired power plant, thanks to the magic of carbon capture.

Proponents like to argue that this suite of technologies will help us reach our net-zero goals, envisioning a world where power plants can capture carbon dioxide from smokestacks—stopping the problem before it starts—or capturing CO2 from the atmosphere (what’s known as direct air capture). Either option would require massive amounts of energy or water. Despite billions of dollars in investments already, there is little progress to show for it.

But it’s just as revealing—and troubling—to see that the other goal is to actually increase our dependence on burning fossil fuels. When Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm recently touted the billions of dollars in new funding for carbon capture, she said it “will help the oil and gas sector to be able to ramp up production, but in a way that’s clean.” While that sounds nice, the catch is that there is no sign that you can make burning fossil fuels “clean.”

After billions of dollars in public and private investments, there are no carbon capture success stories. The Petra Nova coal plant in Texas, once the poster child for CO2 removal, consistently underperformed before closing last year. Another high-profile example—the San Juan Generating Station in New Mexico, pushed as the largest capture project in the world—may meet a similar fate.

Look beyond these examples and you find more bad news. A 2020 review of scientific research found that popular carbon capture methods have actually put more CO2 into the atmosphere than they have removed. “Successful” capture projects exist at facilities where the carbon is injected into existing wells to extract more oil, known as “enhanced oil recovery.” If you think that doubling down on fossil fuels is an effective climate solution, the planet begs to differ.

Even assuming these burgeoning capture projects are ever successful, their practical effects would be extremely limited. The Energy Department recently announced $12 million to fund “direct air capture” projects, with a goal to remove 100,000 tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. To put this in perspective, the largest corporate polluter in 2018 was responsible for releasing 119 million tons of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. And expanding these technologies would present other insurmountable problems: Removing one billion tons of carbon emissions (a fraction of our country’s yearly total) through direct air capture would require nearly the entire electricity output of the United States.

It’s not hard to see why swooning over carbon capture has been a bipartisan enterprise. There’s an unmistakable appeal to the idea that someday, somehow, we might bottle up climate-warming greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, install this technology on fossil fuel infrastructure, dust off our hands, and move on.

But this kind of wishful thinking is dangerous. Counting on carbon capture’s effectiveness squanders the opportunity to enact stronger measures (a phenomenon known as “mitigation deterrence“). In other words, we would extend the fossil fuel era instead of ending it, all while telling ourselves that we are doing the right thing. So long as techno-futurists, fossil fuel companies, and government officials are enraptured by carbon capture, there will be less pressure to stop climate pollution by putting an end to drilling and fracking.

The IPCC report is telling us—in no uncertain terms—that the worst-case climate scenarios are looming, and things are all but guaranteed to get worse before they get better. The energy industry’s advertisements promise us an easy fix: No need to transform these systems entirely when we can just capture the bad stuff and bury it. Any climate plan that relies on carbon capture is a foolish bet. Unfortunately, right now it is one the White House seems enthusiastic to make.

Oxford University study shows herd immunity a fiction as UK infections rise

Thomas Scripps

A major study by Oxford University, not yet peer reviewed, provides more proof that a strategy for combatting COVID-19 cannot rely on vaccination alone.

A Health Department worker fills a syringe with Moderna COVID-19 vaccine before administering it to emergency medical workers and healthcare personnel. (AP Photo/Matt Slocum)

The study is the largest yet of the effectiveness of vaccines against the Delta variant. Working with the Office for National Statistics (ONS) and the Department of Health and Social Care, the Oxford scientists looked at over 3.4 million test results from over 740,000 different adults in the UK.

According to their research, Pfizer’s efficacy in preventing symptomatic infection against the Delta variant was 90 percent after one month, 85 percent after two months and 78 percent after three months. AstraZeneca’s efficacy was 67 percent after one month, 65 percent after two and 61 percent after three. The faster decline for Pfizer led the researchers to speculate that efficacy for the two vaccines would converge after 4-5 months.

These numbers are significantly lower than those for protection against the Alpha variant.

Oxford’s findings are in line with those of two smaller studies conducted in the United States and Qatar, both of which found a higher-than-expected number of “breakthrough” infections in vaccinated people. Research in Israel has also reported substantially reduced vaccine effectiveness against symptomatic infection.

The study chimes with data from Imperial College London’s REACT survey for May to July, which found that, for adults up to the age of 64, the likelihood of someone who comes into contact with a positive COVID case themselves being infected is only reduced by half by full vaccination.

Another difference between the variants identified by the Oxford study was that those infected with Delta after full vaccination had a much higher viral load than those fully vaccinated and infected with Alpha. The viral load refers to the amount of virus carried by the infected person, in this case in the nose and throat, which can be “shed”, for example through coughing and sneezing, and transmitted to others. Fully vaccinated adults infected with Delta had similar peak viral loads to unvaccinated individuals.

Although the exact amount of transmission from vaccinated people cannot be estimated from this study, its findings clearly indicate that the Delta variant has reduced the effectiveness of vaccination in bringing the pandemic under control.

Sarah Walker, professor of medical statistics and epidemiology at the University of Oxford, commented, “We don’t yet know how much transmission can happen from people who get Covid-19 after being vaccinated—for example, they may have high levels of virus for shorter periods of time.

“But the fact that they can have high levels of virus suggests that people who aren’t yet vaccinated may not be as protected from the Delta variant as we hoped.”

If vaccinated people can still contribute substantially to the spread of COVID-19, then even high levels of immunisation will not be enough to stop the virus circulating, especially in the face of more transmissible variants. 'The fact that you see more viral load [with the Delta variant] hints towards herd immunity being more challenging,” warned Dr Koen Pouwels, one of the lead researchers on the Oxford study.

Although every effort is made in the capitalist media to downplay the dangers of this development, the continued spread of COVID-19 poses a serious threat.

Firstly, there are still huge numbers of people globally who remain unvaccinated. In the UK, this applies to most children. Even those who are vaccinated can still suffer severe disease and death in a small minority of cases, which nonetheless translates into large numbers of hospital patients in situations of high community transmission, stretching healthcare services.

Secondly, the more prevalent the virus is, the more chance it has of developing new, more dangerous variants. The Delta variant is the product of the herd immunity strategy pursued by the world’s governments, likely arising in the massive surge of cases which swept through India this spring and then allowed to spread across the world.

There are already two further mutations of the Delta variant that are causing concern. Eight cases have been identified in Upsala in Sweden of the E484Q mutation, which studies indicate could be more transmissible. All these cases are linked to travel abroad.

In the US, the AY.3 subtype of Delta now accounts for roughly 9 percent of cases, and it appears to be outcompeting the Delta variant in the UK, although currently at very low numbers. Early data from India suggests it is more immune evasive than its predecessor.

The only rational conclusion to draw from these developments is for public health measures to be urgently implemented as the first step of a globally coordinated programme for the eradication of the virus. But capitalist governments the world over are pursuing the opposite policy, removing restrictions and allowing the virus to spread freely.

The Oxford study comes with the UK already well into the early stages of a resurgence of the virus, after a brief fall in recorded infections. Another 36,572 cases were recorded yesterday, taking the total for the last seven days to 214,736, a 7.8 percent increase on the week before.

Deaths and hospitalisations are also increasing. 113 new deaths were recorded yesterday, bringing the total for the last week to 674, a 9.6 percent increase.

The latest data for hospitalisations shows 804 people were admitted with COVID-19 on August 15, giving 5,698 in the prior seven days, a 5.6 percent increase. There were a total of 6,379 people in hospital with COVID-19 on Wednesday, 909 on ventilators.

Dr Simon Clarke, associate professor in cellular microbiology at the University of Reading, commented last Friday that high and rising case numbers and rising hospitalisations were giving “an early sense of what living with COVID-19 looks like. As restrictions are lifted and the economy rebounds, we are 'running hot' when it comes to managing COVID spread.” He warned that although vaccines currently significantly reduce rates of hospitalisation, high case numbers “still place an unnecessary burden on the NHS.”

Infections will rise far more sharply in the next months as schools and universities, major vectors for the spread of the virus, reopen with next to no mitigation measures in place. The latest available data from the ONS shows that infection rates are still highest among, in descending order, secondary school-age pupils, young adults up to 24 years old, and primary school-age pupils.

Other factors like the ending of self-isolation for doubled-jabbed contacts and all under-18s, the ongoing efforts to force the last workers back into workplaces, the continuous propaganda that things are back to normal, and the worsening of the weather will add fuel to the fire. Leading government modeler Professor Neil Fergusson told BBC Radio 4 ’s Today programme that the country confronts a “sobering situation,” with “the potential of quite a large wave of infection in September, October”.

Heading into winter, when the under-resourced, understaffed NHS was annually put under extreme pressure before the pandemic, the crisis will be all the more severe.

Professor Peter Openshaw, a member of the government’s New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (Nervtag), spoke to Times Radio yesterday and described the recent daily increases in new infections as “very worrying”:

“This is a very large number. If you think, 34,000 people, that’s a lot of people testing positive, and to be seeing over 100 deaths a day at this stage, you know before schools have gone back, while the weather is still relatively good, we’re not back into winter yet.

“I think we’re all really anxious about what’s going to happen once we return to normality.

“We’re going into the winter with really very high levels of infection out there in the community and we just don’t really know what’s going to happen.”

New Zealand ruling elite whitewashes its “contribution” to Afghan war

John Braddock

The New Zealand government this week dispatched an Air Force Hercules plane with 40 military personnel to Afghanistan to evacuate over 100 NZ citizens, plus foreign nationals and Afghanis who collaborated with the allied occupation of the country.

New Zealand Army soldier and NZLAV in Afghanistan (Credit: Wikimedia/NZ Defence Force)

Following the ignominious collapse of the US-backed regime in Kabul, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern told a press conference that the “security situation” in the beleaguered country had deteriorated far more quickly than could have been predicted. “What will matter,” Ardern intoned, “is the actions, particularly around human rights, and particularly from New Zealand’s perspective, we’ll be looking to see how women and girls under a Taliban regime will be treated.”

The comment underscores the attempt by the government, media and entire ruling elite to whitewash the country’s near 20-year involvement in the US-led imperialist invasion and occupation involving 3,500 New Zealand troops and 10 combat deaths.

Asked to reflect on New Zealand’s role, Ardern bluntly declared that it would be “a complete disservice to go back and rewrite history.” Decisions were made at the time, she said, “that we could make a contribution for the better.” New Zealand’s “contribution” was not a “failure,” she added, baldly claiming: “It made a difference for those living in Afghanistan and their daily lives.”

Defence Minister Peeni Henare concurred, declaring: “our contribution was a positive one.” The Dominion Post also assured readers that New Zealand’s “peacekeeping presence” in Afghanistan was essentially a “human story,” that had brought “advances like education and plumbing to the community.”

The invasion and occupation of the impoverished country was in reality a filthy criminal enterprise from the start that ensured the virtual destruction of an entire society. New Zealand’s Labour-Alliance government had joined the invasion primarily to fully restore relations with the US following the Labour-led “anti-nuclear” posturing in the 1980s, and as a quid-pro-quo for Washington’s endorsement of its own neo-colonial operations in the Pacific.

On October 3, 2001, the NZ parliament approved a motion presented by Prime Minister Helen Clark that it endorse Labour’s despatch of Special Air Services troops and “totally” support the US in Afghanistan. The record shows Labour in favour with 49 votes; it’s “left wing” coalition partner the Alliance with 10 votes for, and the conservative opposition parties ACT and National both in favour. The Greens with 7 votes opposed the deployment, but would later justify NZ’s role in the ongoing occupation as “peacekeeping.”

The media hailed the operation. The Evening Post in December 2001 excoriated “doubters” who dared to make any comparison with Vietnam. “In the space of little more than two months,” the Post insisted, “America, with the support of opposition Afghan forces, has routed the Taleban… President George W Bush’s war against terrorism has been far more decisive than his critics ever imagined.” The newspaper brushed aside concerns about “civilian casualties,” asserting that “the world is a safer place” because of the invasion. It added that America was sending a “blunt message” to “countries such as Yemen and the Sudan”: “If you follow Afghanistan’s example, we will come after you too.”

Speaking to media this week Clark decried the “surreal and devastating” outcome, but declared she had “no regrets” about the decision to join the occupation. She told Stuff: “There’s so much effort gone on to investing in human development, and people’s rights, and better governance. And it’s just gone up in smoke.” The US should have played the role it had after the Korean War, Clark said, i.e., deploying 50,000 soldiers in the country for decades.

Tens of thousands of civilians were killed during nearly two decades of war. Drone strikes, bombings, assassinations and torture were routinely used to instill terror in the population. The NZ military, which received a unit citation from Bush, was complicit in serious war crimes. A royal commission of inquiry into Operation Burnham, a night-time raid on a village by the SAS in 2010, confirmed that a child and at least seven other people were killed. Labour’s Attorney-General David Parker defended the killings, saying they were “undesirable” but “legal.”

Several civilians, including children, were also killed by unexploded ordnance left behind by NZ troops.

Green Party co-leaders James Shaw and Marama Davidson have issued a statement condemning “the new surge in terror by the Taliban.” Employing the nostrums of “human rights” imperialism, they declared: “It is heart-breaking to know that Afghans face the prospect of living under Taliban rule once again, with women and girls at the greatest risk of sexual and gender-based violence.” The pair called on “allies and partners” to ensure the Taliban has no more funding and resources, “even if that means standing up to our trading partners”—thus inviting a confrontation with China.

Meanwhile, the pseudo-left fraternity who in 2001 gave their imprimatur to Labour’s imperialist venture are now scrambling to wash their hands of any culpability. Writing in the Daily Blog on August 16, Liz Gordon, one of the 10 Alliance MPs who voted in support, described how the party leader, Jim Anderton, “for some reason that is still not clear,” was “set on” sending the troops. Gordon described how she was later pressured against her “instincts and beliefs” to speak in defence of the party’s pro-war position. “Not a moment of great glory in my life. I hope you can all forgive me now,” she wanly pleaded.

Others simply engage in blatant lying and historical falsification. Laila Harre, at the time a cabinet minister and another hand-raiser in parliament, tweeted on February 17, after the announcement of NZ’s troop withdrawal in May: “20 years since the Alliance stood against this predictably destructive deployment. 20 years wasted on war.”

Alliance operative and former Pabloite Mike Treen also posted on Facebook this week: “We can collectively be proud that ultimately we stood up against war and empire and were proved right.” The word “ultimately” betrays the fact that Treen has nothing to say about this bourgeois party’s abject capitulation in parliament. Treen then moved to cover his tracks by reposting a December 2001 letter to the Labour Party, written on behalf of the so-called “Antiwar coalition,” in which he unsuccessfully appealed for it to reverse course.

The horse had, by then, well and truly bolted. In April 2002 the Alliance split, just seven months out from a general election, and after six months of internecine warfare, brought on by the rightward, anti-working class trajectory of the coalition government and its craven support for the US-led war in Afghanistan. The Alliance is now defunct, a case study in the dead-end of opportunist, pro-capitalist politics.

German militarism and the debacle in Afghanistan

Peter Schwarz

The takeover of power by the Taliban in Afghanistan has not only led to the complete collapse of the puppet regime headed by President Ashraf Ghani and the Afghan army, it has also exploded the mountain of lies used to justify the longest, biggest and most expensive military mission conducted by Germany’s post-war army (Bundeswehr).

Soldiers of the German army in Afghanistan

For 20 years, the government, the opposition and the country’s servile media have led the German public to believe that the Bundeswehr was in Afghanistan to drill wells, enable girls to go to school and encourage nation building. None of this was true. The Afghan war was a dirty colonial war from the very start, with all that entails: massacres, torture, crime and corruption.

Bagram was not only the largest American airbase in the country, but also a prison and torture centre where political prisoners from all over the world were interrogated and transferred to Guantanamo. Two Kabul prisons alone held close to 10,000 political prisoners who were set free by the Taliban when they took over the city.

According to official figures, almost 165,000 Afghans were killed during the war. The actual number is probably many times higher. Thousands of civilians died under a hail of bombs from American planes. The largest such massacre, which claimed the lives of over 130 civilians and numerous children, was ordered by a Bundeswehr officer, Colonel Georg Klein, near Kunduz, on September 4, 2009.

Even before the Bundeswehr entered the north of the country, the ally of the Western powers, Abdul Rashid Dostum, had murdered between 3,000 to 8,000 captured Taliban fighters. They were squeezed like sardines into containers, where they died in agony from lack of oxygen, overheating and thirst. Those who survived the ordeal were shot.

The Afghan governments of Hamid Karzai and Ashraf Ghani, who installed, propped up and funded to the tune of billions by the Western powers, were, like other imperialist puppet regimes in Africa, Latin America and Asia, brutal, ruthless and corrupt to the bone.

The Afghanistan Papers—internal US government documents leaked in 2019—estimate that 40 percent of the US aid of over a trillion dollars landed in the pockets of corrupt officials, officers, warlords and criminals. President Ghani had $169 million in cash when he fled the country last week, according to the Afghan ambassador to Tajikistan, Mohammad Zahir Aghbar.

This is the reason for the precipitous collapse of the Afghan government and army after imperialist troops left. Ghani’s supposedly democratic regime lacked any social support, apart from a layer of Kabul’s narrow middle and upper class. For the vast majority of the Afghan population, his regime and the imperialist occupation were hell on earth.

When the German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas and Chancellor Angela Merkel now declare in unison that “we misjudged the situation,” this can only mean that they earnestly believed their own propaganda and have lost all sight of social reality. In fact, there was never the slightest doubt, even in Berlin, about the real aim of the war.

When the US used the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 as a pretext to attack Afghanistan and overthrow the Taliban regime, it was putting into action plans prepared long before. In reality, the American strategy was, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, to dominate a region of extraordinary importance with regard to geopolitics and energy supplies.

“By attacking Afghanistan, setting up a client regime and moving vast military forces into the region, the US aims to establish a new political framework within which it will exert hegemonic control,” wrote the WSWS, three days after the war began, in the statement “Why We Oppose the War in Afghanistan.”

German imperialism could not and would not stand aside. Since the reunification of Germany in 1991, there have been intensive discussions in leading political and military circles about how Germany could once again play a global political and military role in line with its economic interests. In 1999, the SPD and the Greens dispatched the Bundeswehr to Yugoslavia to conduct its first post-World War II foreign combat mission. Then the opportunity arose to gain a foothold in one of the world’s most important geostrategic regions.

On October 11, 2001, four days after the start of American hostilities in Afghanistan, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder (Social Democratic Party, SPD) announced to the Bundestag a fundamental reorientation of German foreign policy. The period during which Germany had merely participated in “international efforts to secure freedom, justice and stability” through “secondary aid” was “irretrievably over,” he declared. “We Germans in particular ... now also have an obligation to do full justice to our new responsibility. This explicitly includes—and I say this unequivocally—participation in military operations.”

One month later, the Bundestag decided by an overwhelming majority to provide 3,900 Bundeswehr soldiers for the fight “against international terrorism.” In addition to the governing parties, the SPD and the Greens, the conservative opposition at that time led by Angela Merkel, also voted in favour of the Afghanistan mission.

In addition to foreign policy aims, the intervention also served domestic political purposes. German soldiers were once again expected to get use to killing and dying on the battlefield, following decades of abstinence from war, while the broad mass of the population was expected to overcome its deep, historically rooted anti-militarism and become enthusiastic about war missions.

Since then, more than 150,000 German servicemen and women have received their baptism of fire in Afghanistan, 59 died and thousands more have been injured and traumatised. At the same time, the mission has become a breeding ground for right-wing extremist tendencies. When the extent emerged of the influence of far-right elements in the Special Forces Command (KSK)—which carried out behind-the-lines operations in Afghanistan—the German Defence Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer felt compelled to disband one of the four KSK companies.

The debacle in Afghanistan is a major blow to German militarism. “The willingness of the already pacifistically inclined Germans to choose militarily robust means to enforce security policy interests will decline even further in view of the images of the past few days,” complained the right-wing Neue Zürcher Zeitung.

However, this will not stop the German ruling class from pushing ahead with its militaristic plans. It will rely even more than ever on the far-right Alternative for Germany and repressive measures against opponents of war. The plans by the Berlin police to ban demonstrations and the hanging up of posters throughout the entire government district during the course of the official ceremony to salute soldiers returning from Afghanistan on August 31 must be seen as a warning.

Militarism is supported by all parties represented in the Bundestag. While they blame each other for the Afghanistan debacle in the current election campaign, not one of them denounces the criminal character of the war. This is also true of the Left Party, which has long signaled its willingness to support Bundeswehr war missions if the party is accepted as a coalition partner by the SPD and the Greens at the federal level.

White House doubles down on reopening schools as COVID-19 cases surge

Andre Damon

The Biden administration doubled down Wednesday on its efforts to force schools to resume in-person education amid a surge of COVID-19 cases, with Education Secretary Miguel Cardona declaring “our priority must be” to “return to school in person.”

Caleb Laurent, a Minnesota teen intubated while suffering from multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children, or MIS-C, a COVID-related illness that crops up in children and teens. (Courtesy photo)

The White House’s statement came as COVID-19 cases continued to surge nationwide, with 155,000 cases reported Thursday, a more than ten-fold increase in the span of just two months.

In states throughout the country, hospitals were filled to capacity as the number of hospitalized COVID-19 patients hit 85,000, a six-fold increase since June.

And most troubling of all, 967 people died Thursday, representing a quadrupling of the daily deaths compared to two months ago.

Cardona opened his statement Wednesday by boasting that “more than 62 percent of students across the country will complete their first day of school” this week.

“As educators, we know in our hearts how important in-person learning is for student success,” Cardona said, adding, “The truth is that we know what works to keep students and educators safe: following the science-based strategies for preventing the spread of COVID-19 recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).”

In reality, the CDC, under political pressure from a White House determined to reopen schools at any cost, is directly contradicting public health guidance that has been used to successfully control the spread of COVID-19 in China.

In July, the CDC encouraged schools to reopen at any level of community spread and with any level of social distancing—even if they cannot guarantee three feet of distance between students.

The CDC took another step this month, encouraging students who come into contact with infected students not to quarantine if both were wearing masks.

As Yahoo News reported, “Under many school systems’ quarantine protocols, spending 15 minutes within a six foot radius of an infected individual—sitting next to them in class, for example—can force students to stay home for up to two weeks. The new exemption allows schools to bypass that rule in cases where both individuals mask up.”

The practice of quarantine—practiced for millennia—is critical to stopping the spread of infectious diseases like COVID-19, and its abandonment effectively guarantees the uncontained spread of COVID-19 in classrooms.

The reopening of schools is already fueling a massive surge in cases. At least 5,993 Mississippi students tested positive for COVID-19 in the last two weeks, a case rate 30 times higher than in the previous school year. This has been accompanied by 1,496 teachers getting sick—a six-fold increase over the previous school year.

In Mississippi, only seven ICU beds were available in the state, and 96 patients needed them, the state Department of Health said Thursday.

Despite this disaster, Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves made clear that the state would continue its efforts to reopen as cases surge throughout the state.

Children’s of Mississippi, the only pediatric hospital in the state, said it was treating the largest number of COVID-19 patients during the entire pandemic.

“Today, Children’s of Mississippi and the University of Mississippi Medical Center reported 28 children with confirmed or suspected cases of COVID-19, the highest number of pediatric COVID-19 patients at the state’s only children’s hospital since the beginning of the pandemic,” the hospital said in a statement on Facebook. “Of these hospitalized children, 100% are unvaccinated. This number includes eight children in the ICU, including five who are too young to receive the vaccine.”

As cases continue to surge throughout Florida, the Florida Hospital Association said in a statement that hospitals will soon run out of capacity.

“While hospitalizations continue to increase, three out of four Florida hospitals expect to face critical staff shortages in the next seven days, an increase of nearly ten percent since last week, and half of our hospitals will no longer accept transfer patients from other facilities,” the FHA said in a statement.

The continued drive to reopen comes amid a torrent of new information pointing to the dangers of in-person instruction not only to children, teachers and school staff—but to the families of students.

Research published this week showed that children eight and under are 40 percent more likely to spread COVID-19 than the general population. Commenting on the data, epidemiologist Eric Feigl-Ding warned, “Kids transmit damnit. And younger kids transmit even more!!”

It is becoming clear that the ongoing reopening of schools amid a massive surge of the COVID-19 pandemic is a recipe for the preventable deaths of tens or hundreds of thousands of children, educators, family members and the general public.

The Biden administration, speaking for the entire political establishment and with the support of the pro-corporate trade unions, is determined to push ahead with the reopening of schools with the aim of getting parents back to work—increasing the pool of labor available to major corporations and pushing down wages to boost profits.

The Return of the Taliban 20 Years Later

Vijay Prashad

On August 15, the Taliban arrived in Kabul. The Taliban’s leadership entered the presidential palace, which Afghan President Ashraf Ghani had vacated when he fled into exile abroad hours before. The country’s borders shut down and Kabul’s main international airport lay silent, except for the cries of those Afghans who had worked for the U.S. and NATO; they knew that their lives would now be at serious risk. The Taliban’s leadership, meanwhile, tried to reassure the public of a “peaceful transition” by saying in several statements that they would not seek retribution, but would go after corruption and lawlessness.

The Taliban’s Entry in Kabul Is a Defeat for the United States

In recent years, the United States has failed to accomplish any of the objectives of its wars. The U.S. entered Afghanistan with horrendous bombing and a lawless campaign of extraordinary rendition in October 2001 with the objective of ejecting the Taliban from the country; now, 20 years later, the Taliban is back. In 2003, two years after the U.S. unleashed a war in Afghanistan, it opened an illegal war against Iraq, which ultimately resulted in an unconditional withdrawal of the United States in 2011 after the refusal by the Iraqi parliament to allow U.S. troops extralegal protections. As the U.S. withdrew from Iraq, it opened a terrible war against Libya in 2011, which resulted in the creation of chaos in the region.

Not one of these wars—Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya—resulted in the creation of a pro-U.S. government. Each of these wars created needless suffering for the civilian populations. Millions of people had their lives disrupted, while hundreds of thousands of people lost their lives in these senseless wars. What faith in humanity can now be expected from a young person in Jalalabad or in Sirte? Will they now turn inward, fearing that any possibility of change has been seized from them by the barbaric wars inflicted upon them and other residents of their countries?

There is no question that the United States continues to have the world’s largest military and that by using its base structure and its aerial and naval power, the U.S. can strike any country at any time. But what is the point of bombing a country if that violence attains no political ends? The U.S. used its advanced drones to assassinate the Taliban leaders, but for each leader that it killed, another half a dozen have emerged. Besides, the men in charge of the Taliban now—including the co-founder of the Taliban and head of its political commission, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar—were there from the start; it would never have been possible to decapitate the entire Taliban leadership. More than $2 trillion has been spent by the United States on a war that it knew could not be won.

Corruption Was the Trojan Horse

In early statements, Mullah Baradar said that his government will focus its attention on the endemic corruption in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, stories spread across Kabul about ministers of Ashraf Ghani’s government attempting to leave the country in cars filled with dollar bills, which was supposed to be the money that was provided by the U.S. to Afghanistan for aid and infrastructure. The drain of wealth from the aid given to the country has been significant. In a 2016 report by the U.S. government’s Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) relating to the “Lessons Learned from the U.S. Experience with Corruption in Afghanistan,” the investigators write, “Corruption significantly undermined the U.S. mission in Afghanistan by damaging the legitimacy of the Afghan government, strengthening popular support for the insurgency, and channeling material resources to insurgent groups.” SIGAR created a “gallery of greed,” which listed U.S. contractors who siphoned aid money and pocketed it through fraud. More than $2 trillion has been spent on the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan, but it went neither to provide relief nor to build the country’s infrastructure. The money fattened the rich in the United States, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.

Corruption at the very top of the government depleted morale below. The U.S. pinned its hopes on the training of 300,000 soldiers of the Afghan National Army (ANA), spending $88 billion on this pursuit. In 2019, a purge of “ghost soldiers” in the rolls—soldiers who did not exist—led to the loss of 42,000 troops; it is likely that the number might have been higher. Morale in the ANA has plunged over the past few years, with defections from the army to other forces escalating. Defense of the provincial capitals was also weak, with Kabul falling to the Taliban almost without a fight.

To this end, the recently appointed defense minister to the Ghani government, General Bismillah Mohammadi, commented on Twitter about the governments that have been in power in Afghanistan since late 2001, “They tied our hands behind our backs and sold the homeland. Damn the rich man [Ghani] and his people.” This captures the popular mood in Afghanistan right now.

Afghanistan and Its Neighbors

Hours after taking power, a spokesperson for the Taliban’s political office, Dr. M. Naeem, said that all embassies will be protected, while another spokesperson for the Taliban, Zabihullah Mujahid, said that all former government officials did not need to fear for their lives. These are reassuring messages for now.

It has also been reassuring that the Taliban has said that it is not averse to a government of national unity, although there should be no doubt that such a government would be a rubber stamp for the Taliban’s own political agenda. So far, the Taliban has not articulated a plan for Afghanistan, which is something that the country has needed for at least a generation.

On July 28, Taliban leader Mullah Baradar met with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Tianjin, China. The outlines of the discussion have not been fully revealed, but what is known is that the Chinese extracted a promise from the Taliban not to allow attacks on China from Afghanistan and not to allow attacks on the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) infrastructure in Central Asia. In return, China would continue its BRI investments in the region, including in Pakistan, which is a key Taliban supporter.

Whether or not the Taliban will be able to control extremist groups is not clear, but what is abundantly clear—in the absence of any credible Afghan opposition to the Taliban—is that the regional powers will have to exert their influence on Kabul to ameliorate the harsh program of the Taliban and its history of support for extremist groups. For instance, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (set up in 2001) revived in 2017 its Afghanistan Contact Group, which held a meeting in Dushanbe in July 2021, and called for a national unity government.

At that meeting, India’s External Affairs Minister Dr. S. Jaishankar laid out a three-point plan, which achieved near consensus among the fractious neighbors:

“1. An independent, neutral, unified, peaceful, democratic and prosperous nation.

“2. Ceasing violence and terrorist attacks against civilians and state representatives, settle conflict through political dialogue, and respect interests of all ethnic groups, and

“3. Ensure that neighbors are not threatened by terrorism, separatism and extremism.”

That’s the most that can be expected at this moment. The plan promises peace, which is a great advance from what the people of Afghanistan have experienced over the past decades. But what kind of peace? This “peace” does not include the rights of women and children to a world of possibilities. During 20 years of the U.S. occupation, that “peace” was not in evidence either. This peace has no real political power behind it, but there are social movements beneath the surface that might emerge to put such a definition of “peace” on the table. Hope lies there.

Celebrate the Heroes Who Warned Us That Afghanistan Would Be a Disaster

Ted Rall

Thousands of dead Americans, tens of thousands of dead Afghans, $2 trillion down the toilet, a Taliban victory that leaves America’s international reputation in shambles. This disaster didn’t happen by itself. Political and military leaders, aided and abetted by the news media, are responsible and should be held accountable. Voters let themselves be led by the nose—and they should take a long hard look at themselves in the mirror because what they did and didn’t do caused many people to die.

Antiwar heroes deserve recognition and respect for telling us not to go into Afghanistan and, after we did, to get out despite being marginalized and ridiculed. They were lonely. Despite widespread reports of casualties among Afghan civilians and the glaring fact that the Taliban had nothing to do with 9/11, 88% of Americans—Democrats and Republicans alike—supported George W. Bush’s war three weeks after U.S. bombs began raining down on Kabul.

Let’s celebrate the good guys.

During the fall of 2001 tens of thousands of demonstrators marched against the war in Washington, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York and other U.S. cities. The marchers were too few and too peaceful to move the needle. But the judgment of history is now final: the tiny minority who opposed invading Afghanistan were morally upright and correctly skeptical about the outcome. If you know any of these true American heroes, thank them for their service and buy them a drink.

While nationalist nimrods drove around with their cars idiotically festooned by American flags, intelligent ethical individuals spoke out for what was right. “Under the [U.N.] charter, a country can use armed force against another country only in self-defense or when the [U.N.] Security Council approves,” said Marjorie Cohn, president of the National Lawyers Guild. “Neither of those conditions was met before the United States invaded Afghanistan. The Taliban did not attack us on 9/11. Nineteen men —15 from Saudi Arabia — did, and there was no imminent threat that Afghanistan would attack the U.S. or another U.N. member country. The council did not authorize the United States or any other country to use military force against Afghanistan. The U.S. war in Afghanistan is illegal.”

All 98 senators present, including Bernie Sanders, voted to bomb the hell out of Afghanistan and install the puppet regime whose corruption led to the Taliban takeover. In the House of Representatives, the vote was 420 to 1. There was only one sane, only one correct voice in opposition in the entire Congress: Barbara Lee of California. “As a member of the clergy so eloquently said, as we act, let us not become the evil that we deplore,” she implored.

“For her lone stance,” Glenn Greenwald wrote in 2016, “[Representative] Lee was deluged with rancid insults and death threats to the point where she needed around-the-clock bodyguards. She was vilified as ‘anti-American’ by numerous outlets including the Wall Street Journal. The Washington Times editorialized on September 18 that ‘Ms. Lee is a long-practicing supporter of America’s enemies — from Fidel Castro on down’ and that ‘while most of the left-wing Democrats spent the week praising President Bush and trying to sound as moderate as possible, Barbara Lee continued to sail under her true colors.’ Since then, she has been repeatedly rejected in her bids to join the House Democratic leadership, typically losing to candidates close to Wall Street and in support of militarism.” Two years later, pro-war Democrats denied her yet another post, as chairperson of their House caucus, to punish her for voting against the Afghan war.

Every congressman and senator who voted for this stupid Afghanistan war is a fool who should resign at once.

Americans who supported this stupid Afghanistan war should refrain from voting ever again.

Media outlets that editorialized in favor of this stupid Afghanistan war deserve to go out of business.

American history has been defined by war, mostly illegally and unjustified on the part of the United States government. That history will continue unless we recognize, elevate and employ the voices of people who speak out against stupid wars before they start.

UK Parliament mourns imperialism’s Afghan debacle

Chris Marsden

Yesterday’s UK parliamentary debate on Afghanistan had a funereal air, punctuated by bitter cries of betrayal from the Conservative government benches that were replicated by Labour MPs.

A collective howl of anguish, despite inevitable references to the fate of women, girls, gays and the Afghan people under the Taliban, was motivated solely by the defeat suffered by British imperialism.

The anger of the criminals and blowhards in the House of Commons was directed as much against the United States as the Taliban, with denunciations of both the Biden and Trump administrations. And Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his key frontbench team were denounced from the right, not the left, for relying too much on Washington and not being able to independently project Britain’s predatory ambitions on the world arena.

The rout in Afghanistan has assumed a significance similar to if not greater than the Suez crisis in 1956, as a symbol of British imperialism’s decline and the desperate need to claw back a place in the sun even in defiance of US imperialism.

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer speaking in Parliament (credit: UK Parliament/Jessica Taylor)

Johnson exhibited no trace of his usual bravado. He tried to placate his critics by praising the supposed “achievements” of the 20 years of war and occupation of Afghanistan, while bluntly stating the military and political realities facing the UK.

Replying to hostile questions from his predecessor as Tory leader, Theresa May, he said that the UK “came up against hard reality”. Afghanistan was an occupation led by the US, which could not continue without US military might once President Donald Trump announced a pull-out last year and President Joe Biden carried it through last week. No matter the sincerity of those calling for a non-US led military response, there was no appetite among any of the UK’s other partners for a “continued military presence” and hadn’t been since the official combat mission ended in 2018.

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer’s reply began with a hymn of praise to the occupation of Afghanistan. A “disastrous week, an unfolding tragedy” should not detract from the fact that, instead of rule by the Taliban, “a fragile democracy emerged.” By “no means perfect,” it had prevented “international terrorist attacks,” won “liberty” for women and allowed Afghans “to dream of a better future.”

These boons were all won by the “sacrifice by the Afghan people” and “over 150,000 UK personnel… including members across this house.”

Speaking to the military, Starmer emoted, “Your sacrifice was not in vain, you brought stability, reduced the terrorist threat and enabled progress. We are all proud of what you did.” He reiterated the trope of every right-wing demagogue in history, including Hitler, of a betrayal of those whose “sacrifice deserves better than this,” thanks to the “staggering complacency from our government about the Taliban threat.” Johnson, he added, was “a threat to national security”

When Tory MP Sir Iain Duncan Smith asked Starmer whether he agreed that Biden’s statement blaming Afghan forces for not fighting the Taliban was “shameful”, he agreed “that’s wrong.”

The tone set by Starmer was continued by the Tories, starting with May who said, “We all understand the importance of American support, but I do find it incomprehensible and worrying that the UK was not able to bring together an alternative alliance of countries to continue to provide the support necessary to sustain a government in Afghanistan… I am afraid I think this has been a major setback for British foreign policy.”

Things reached a new low with every speech by an MP who has served in the armed forces. Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Tom Tugenhadt, a former officer in the intelligence corps in Iraq and then Afghanistan, was treated to silent awe by MPs. He attacked Biden’s calling “into question the courage of men I fought with” once again as “shameful,” continuing, “Those who have not fought for the colours they fly should be careful about criticising those who have.”

He called on the UK to “make sure that we are not dependent on a single ally, on the decision of a single leader, that that we can work together with Japan and Australia, France and Germany, with partners large and small and make sure we hold the line together.” His “emotional” diatribe won a round of applause.

Tobias Elwood, chair of the defence select committee and a former captain in the Royal Green Jackets, said he regretted there would be no vote today that would show the government did not have the support of parliament. The UK should have more confidence to pursue its own strategy. “We have the means, the hard power, the connections to lead. What we require is the backbone.”

Johnny Mercer, a former Army captain, declared that people who sign up for the military “do not serve the American flag, they serve the British flag. It dishonours their service to simply say: the Americans have left, we are leaving.” Soldiers are not trained to lose, and “we're not trained for ministers to, in a way, choose to be defeated by the Taliban”.

Not to be outdone, Labour’s Dan Jarvis, an Iraq and Afghanistan veteran and member of the parachute Regiment, asked of Afghan army personnel, “Where were we in their hour of need? We were nowhere, that was shameful”.

One Blairite scoundrel after another sought to demonstrate their jingoistic bona fides. Former Shadow Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper added “disturbing” and “distressful” to the now obligatory “shameful” in her description of events. Chris Bryant referenced the plight of gay men to bemoan “the most sudden collapse of any foreign and military policy objective on the part of the UK since Suez, and you might argue further back.”

Shadow Foreign Secretary Lisa Nandy said, “This is an unparalleled moment of shame for this government,” which was “behaving as if they have no agency and no power… We have so much to be proud of as a country, Mr Speaker. Can it again include our government?”

What then of those who are supposed to stem this tide of nationalist warmongering and cut through the lying defences of a filthy war of colonial conquest? Ex-Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, having participated in a small demonstration by the Stop The War Coalition outside parliament along with a handful of Labour “left” MPs, strained every sinew in his efforts not to unduly antagonise his audience.

After calling on the UK to allow all Afghan collaborators with the occupation into the country, he advanced a critique of the war that never mentioned anyone involved in starting it or waging it for two decades—including Labour’s former leaders, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown—and certainly nothing critical of Starmer and company.

He offered instead a history lesson that proves wars in Afghanistan “do fail… three in the 19th century and a number in this century.” There were, he concluded, “some serious historical lessons to be learned here about how we take major foreign policy decisions” and a need for “sober reflection on the disaster which has happened in Afghanistan.”

The debacle in Afghanistan, following on from Iraq, Libya and Syria, the desperate crisis provoked by Brexit, and the protracted economic and social tensions amplified by the pandemic, have derailed the strategic ambitions of British imperialism. Its political representatives gathered in Westminster yesterday have all but lost their heads in response, dreaming of a return to the glory days of Empire just as darkness is falling.

Outside of parliament, meanwhile, millions of working people opposed to these wars, who see these same MPs as the architects of their own hardship and suffering, will come to see the debacle in Afghanistan as an indication that they too can challenge and defeat Britain’s “mighty” ruling elite.