Why Taiwan is an explosive flashpoint for a US-China war

Peter Symonds

As the Biden administration ramps up its aggressive confrontation with China, Taiwan is rapidly becoming the most immediate and dangerous flashpoint for war between the world’s two largest economies—both armed with nuclear weapons.

The status of Taiwan has long been highly contentious and potentially explosive. However, for four decades, after the US and China established diplomatic relations in 1979, tensions over Taiwan were largely managed and contained within the framework of delicately balanced arrangements.

Beginning with the Trump administration, those agreements, diplomatic protocols and tacit understandings increasingly have been torn up—a process that Biden is accelerating. The most egregious step, so far, has been the provocative leak this month via the Wall Street Journal that US special forces have been on Taiwan training troops for more than a year.

In 1979, the US, as part of its arrangements with China, withdrew all of its military forces from Taiwan, broke off diplomatic relations and ended its military treaty with Taipei. The stationing of US troops on Taiwan is a flagrant breach of what has been the status quo for decades and calls into question the basis for US-China diplomatic ties.

To understand the great dangers posed by the Biden administration’s deliberately inflammatory actions it is necessary to examine the historical background. To justify its menacing military build-up in the region and the inflaming of this sensitive flashpoint, the US portrays Taiwan as a thriving democracy confronted with a growing Chinese threat of aggression.

In reality, US imperialism has never had the slightest concern for democracy on Taiwan or anywhere else in the region. Following Japan’s World War II defeat in 1945, the US helped install the dictatorial Kuomintang (KMT) regime of Chiang Kai-shek as the government of China. In October 1945, the US Navy transported KMT troops to Taiwan, which had been a Japanese colony following China’s defeat in the 1895 Sino-Japanese war.

The brutal US-backed Kuomintang regime

The KMT administration under the governorship of General Chen Yi was brutal from the outset as a worsening economic crisis strained relations between local Taiwanese and newly-arrived Chinese from the mainland. The shooting of a civilian protestor on February 28, 1947 provoked island-wide unrest that was violently suppressed by the KMT military. Estimates of the number killed range from 18,000 to 30,000.

The savage repression in Taiwan was part of the broader crisis of the Chiang Kai-shek regime, which was riddled with corruption. It used police-state measures against rising opposition that included a strike movement in the working class and from 1947 reignited a civil war against the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). In the wake of the CCP’s victory in 1949 and the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China, the KMT and its supporters fled to Taiwan.

Chiang Kai-shek reviewing troops in 1966 [Source: Wikimedia Commons]

The mass exodus of some two million people included the KMT leadership, soldiers, officials and the wealthy business elites. China’s gold and foreign currency reserves, as well as many national cultural treasures, were carted off to Taiwan. The KMT government proclaimed Taipei the temporary capital of the Republic of China (ROC) and declared that its aim was to retake the mainland.

Taiwan today, separate from China, is the creation of American imperialism. Following the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, then President Truman placed the island under the protection of the US Seventh Fleet. The KMT could only posture as a government-in-exile of all China with the backing of the United States. With Washington’s backing, China’s seat on the UN Security Council was handed to the ROC and Taipei, not Beijing, was recognised as the capital of China.

Just as it backed dictatorial and autocratic regimes throughout Asia, the US gave its full support to the KMT dictatorship, which imposed martial rule in May 1949 that continued for nearly four decades, until 1987. The KMT ruthlessly suppressed all political opposition, in what was known as the White Terror. According to one estimate, that involved the imprisonment or execution of 140,000 people for alleged anti-KMT or pro-Communist sentiments.

KMT provocations against Beijing, with US backing, including an air and naval blockade of the Chinese coast, were a constant source of tension. Taipei controlled, and continues to control, a number of fortified islets just kilometres off the Chinese mainland and close to major Chinese cities.

Two major crises erupted in the 1950s. In August 1954, the KMT put tens of thousands of troops onto the islets of Matsu and Kinmen and began building military installations, to which the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) responded by shelling Kinmen. At the height of the crisis, the US Congress authorised the use of military force against China and the Pentagon advocated nuclear strikes.

A second Taiwan Strait crisis erupted in August 1958 after the shelling of Matsu and Kinmen and clashes between KMT and PLA forces near Dongding Island. Air and sea engagements and artillery exchanges continued for three months, with losses amounting to hundreds dead on both sides. The US reinforced the KMT military, escorted KMT naval vessels to the beleaguered islets and the Pentagon again raised the necessity of using nuclear weapons.

The hostile standoff between China and the KMT regime on Taiwan, backed militarily by the US continued throughout the 1960s.

Washington’s rapprochement with Beijing

US President Nixon’s visit to China in February 1972 marked a major shift in geo-political relations. The trip had been announced the previous year, based on secret talks that Nixon’s National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger had held with senior CCP leaders. Nixon and Kissinger calculated that the US could exploit the Sino-Soviet split of the early 1960s and the sharp tensions between Moscow and Beijing, which included border clashes, to forge a quasi-alliance with China against the Soviet Union.

Nixon’s meeting with Chinese leader Mao Zedong and the release of the joint Shanghai Communiqué paved the way for the establishment of diplomatic relations. It was a reactionary partnership in which the CCP regime backed right-wing US allies such as the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile and the repressive Iranian regime of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The pact also opened the door for the reintegration of China into the world capitalist market as a cheap labour platform.

Mao Zedong with US President Richard Nixon in 1972 [Source: Wikimedia]

Washington’s abrupt about-face had far-reaching consequences for the KMT dictatorship on Taiwan. The status of Taiwan was a central issue in the protracted negotiations that eventually led to formal diplomatic ties between the US and China in 1979. The CCP insisted that the US recognise “One China” with Taiwan as part of China and end its military and diplomatic ties with Taipei.

In the Shanghai Communiqué, the US acknowledged: “[A]ll Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China. The United States Government does not challenge that position. It reaffirms its interest in a peaceful settlement of the Taiwan question by the Chinese themselves.” Furthermore, it affirmed “the ultimate objective of the withdrawal of all US forces and military installations from Taiwan.”

In 1979, when diplomatic ties were established, Washington broke diplomatic relations with Taipei, withdrew its forces and abrogated its military treaty—effectively, though not formally, acknowledging “One China” with the CCP regime in Beijing as the legitimate government. Taipei had already lost its seat in the UN in 1971 when Beijing took China’s position as a permanent member of the Security Council—a move that the US did not block.

At the same time, the US Congress passed the Taiwan Relations Act, which opposed any attempt by Beijing to reunify Taiwan by force, authorised the sale of “defensive” military weapons to Taiwan and established the American Institute in Taiwan, through which unofficial ties could be maintained. Washington adopted a stance of “strategic ambiguity” toward a conflict between China and Taiwan—that is, it did not give a guarantee as to whether it would intervene. This was aimed at curbing both Chinese aggression and provocative actions by Taiwan.

The end of the KMT dictatorship

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the US assisted Taiwan economically with financial assistance, investment and access to the American market that assisted in its state-supported industrialisation. During the 1970s, Taiwan was the fastest growing economy in Asia after Japan. With the turn to globalised production from the late 1970s, Taiwan became one of the major cheap labour platforms in Asia. Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea and Singapore—the four Asian Tigers—were held up as a new model for economic development.

The KMT dictatorship was based on a nationally-regulated economy that was associated with corruption involving KMT cronies—“mainlanders”—at the expense of the indigenous Taiwanese elites. Under pressure from the US, the regime began to open up its economy in the 1980s, privatising state-owned corporations and eliminating state economic regulation—moves that led to a weakening of the KMT’s political base of support.

Political opposition remained illegal under martial law but was increasingly voiced through protests against the regime’s anti-democratic measures. Taiwan’s rapid economic expansion also led to a huge growth of the working class that was increasingly militant and conducted a wave of strikes demanding improved wages and conditions.

In response, the KMT conceded a series of limited democratic reforms. The bourgeois political opposition led by indigenous Taiwanese elites was able to form the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in 1986 and the following year martial law was lifted on the main island of Taiwan. The main legislative bodies—the Legislative Yuan and National Assembly—had been stacked with unelected KMT representatives for provinces in mainland China on the basis of the fiction that the government still represented all of China. A full election for a reformed National Assembly was held in 1991 and a reformed Legislative Yuan in 1992. The first direct election for the president and vice-president was held in 1996.

The status of Taiwan, which is inextricably intertwined with relations with mainland China, has increasingly dominated Taiwanese politics. President Lee Teng-hui, who initiated the limited democratic reforms, became the first Taiwanese-born president. Although a member of the KMT, he sought to promote a Taiwanese identity to counter the influence of the DPP and to project Taiwan on the international stage.

Lee challenged longstanding US diplomatic protocols against high-level visits by Taiwanese officials to the US by accepting an invitation in 1995 from Cornell University to deliver a speech on “Taiwan’s Democratisation Experience.” While the Clinton administration turned down his request for a visa, Congress supported the visit. It went ahead, provoking an angry reaction from Beijing, which denounced Lee as a “traitor” who was attempting to split China.

For its part, the CCP regime under Deng Xiaoping pushed the reunification of Taiwan on the basis of the formula “One Country, Two Systems”—that is, Taiwan would retain a significant degree of autonomy in politics, state structures and economy. Beijing was hostile to any suggestion that Taiwan could declare formal independence and regarded Lee’s visit to the US as a breach of undertakings given by Washington in 1979.

The visit provoked the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis of 1995–96, underscoring the dangers of the current deliberate breaches by the US of its arrangements with China. Beijing announced missile tests and a build-up of military forces in Fujian—the Chinese province adjacent to Taiwan across the Taiwan Strait. The Clinton administration responded with the largest show of military might in Asia since the Vietnam War, dispatching two aircraft carrier battle groups to waters near Taiwan and sending one through the narrow Taiwan Strait. Beijing backed down.

The polarisation of Taiwanese politics between a pro-independence DPP and a KMT oriented toward China is rooted in the island’s economy. On the one hand, the lack of diplomatic recognition is a barrier to Taiwan’s entry into international bodies, including economic institutions, and makes economic and trade relations more difficult. The 2000 election of the first DPP President Chen Shui-bian, who promoted greater Taiwanese autonomy, heightened tensions with Beijing, which warned it would respond to any formal declaration of Taiwanese independence with force.

On the other, capitalist restoration in China from 1978 onward opened up huge economic opportunities for Taiwanese corporations. Taiwanese businesses invested $US118 billion in China between 1991 and early 2020 and the value of cross-strait trade in 2019 was $149.2 billion. The KMT has sought to facilitate relations with China. Under KMT President Ma Ying-jeou, who was elected in 2008, a trade agreement opened up direct flights and cargo shipments between Taiwan and China, and economic relations strengthened.

In 2015, the first-ever meeting between Taiwanese and Chinese presidents—Ma and Xi Jinping took place in Singapore. They carefully stepped around any suggestion of two presidents of two countries by addressing each other as “Mr” and referring to “two coasts” rather than the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of China. Both adhered to what is known as the 1992 consensus whereby the CCP and KMT agree that there is One China but still disagree as to who rules it.

US heightens tensions over Taiwan

The installation of Obama as president in 2009 marked a sharp turn toward confrontation with China, reflecting Democrat criticism of the previous Bush administration for ignoring Asia while prosecuting wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East. While the “pivot to Asia” was formally announced in 2011, the Obama administration initiated a wide-ranging offensive aimed at boosting the US position in Asia, undermining China economically and strengthening the US military presence and alliances throughout the region. By 2020, 60 percent of US naval and air assets were to be positioned in the Indo-Pacific, in line with the Pentagon’s AirSea Battle strategy for war with China.

The Obama administration deliberately stoked up tensions in the South China Sea by declaring that it had a “national interest” in the low-key territorial disputes between China and its neighbours. It made no attempt to end festering tensions on the Korean Peninsula over North Korea’s nuclear programs. At the same time, however, Obama steered clear of de-stabilising the status quo over Taiwan, in recognition of its centrality to US relations with China and the potentially explosive consequences.

Trump had no such qualms. Even before his formal inauguration, Trump provocatively took a phone call from Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen from the DPP who had taken office in mid-2016. While the phone call was nominally to congratulate Trump on winning the election, it breached established protocols.

Tsai Ing-wen speaking on the phone with US President Trump in December 2016 [Source: Wikimedia]

Trump also put Beijing on notice by publicly declaring in an interview with Fox News in December 2016: “I don’t know why we have to be bound by a One China policy unless we make a deal with China having to do with other things, including trade.” The statement effectively transformed the “One China” policy from the basis for US-China relations to a bargaining chip in the trade and economic warfare Trump was to unleash.

The Trump administration included a number of top officials who had longstanding ties to Taiwan and who were deeply hostile to China, including his initial chief of staff Reince Priebus and White House trade adviser Peter Navarro. Under Trump, the US ramped up arms sales to Taiwan, increased the number of US warships passing through the Taiwan Strait, backed Taiwanese President Tsai’s anti-China stance and boosted contact between US and Taiwanese officials—all despite Chinese objections. In August 2020, Secretary of Health Alex Azar became the highest-ranking US official to visit Taiwan since 1979.

Trump’s deliberate and provocative stoking of the issue of Taiwan greatly heightened the danger of war. While the American propaganda incessantly warns of potential “Chinese aggression,” a new book, Peril, by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa published earlier this year revealed that General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was compelled to take extraordinary steps to counter Trump’s efforts to instigate a war with China as part of Trump’s attempt to overturn his election defeat.

Far from attempting to mend relations with China, the Biden administration has further heightened tensions, including over Taiwan. Biden signaled his intentions to develop close relations with Taiwan by being the first president to invite the de facto Taiwanese ambassador to Washington Hsiao Bi-Khim to attend his inauguration. In the dying days of the Trump administration, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had announced he was ending all limitations on contact between US and Taiwanese officials, civilian and military, at every level. With minor modifications, the Biden administration has continued that policy. In June, with Biden’s blessing, a group of US senators visited Taiwan nominally to announce a donation of COVID-19 vaccines.

US military and economic threats

The dispute between China and the US over Taiwan is not simply about diplomatic protocols. The strengthening of US ties with Taiwan poses definite threats to China—strategically and economically. The secret deployment of US special forces trainers to Taiwan coincides with a more sinister possibility, revealed in the Japanese Nikkei news agency, that the US was considering the stationing of medium-range offensive missiles in Asia, including on Taiwan.

The island of Taiwan is not only strategically located close to the Chinese mainland but forms part of the first island chain, stretching from Japan through to the Philippines, that US strategic planners regard as vital to hemming in Chinese naval forces in the event of war. During the Korean War, General Douglas MacArthur stated that Taiwan was “an unsinkable aircraft carrier” able to project American power along China’s coast in a containment strategy.

Economically, Taiwan is home to the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), which accounts for a 55 percent of international chip production and a massive 90 percent of the most advanced chips required both for industrial and military use. Trump has already dealt Chinese tech giant Huawei a huge blow by pressuring TSMC to stop supplying it chips.

In US military circles an intense discussion is underway over the danger of war with China over Taiwan. In March, Admiral Phil Davidson—the outgoing head of the US Indo-Pacific Command which would be on the frontline of any conflict with China—warned that the US could be at war with China in less than six years and called for a huge increase in his command’s budget. Pointing to Chinese advances in military technology, Davidson and others have called for the accelerated development of new weapons systems for use in a conflict with China.

Behind the war drive by US imperialism against China is both the fear in Washington it is being overtaken economically and the profound political and social crisis at home. Amid huge social tensions and mounting struggles of the American working class, the ruling class could resort to war as a means of turning social tensions outward against an external enemy and at the same time reversing its historic decline and reasserting the regional and global hegemony it obtained after World War II.

For all the claims that China is considering an invasion of Taiwan, the US—by undermining the One China policy, step-by-step strengthening ties with Taipei and integrating it into US war plans—is goading Beijing toward making military moves. Any war between the world’s two largest economies, both nuclear-armed, would be catastrophic for the working class in China, Taiwan, the United States and the world.

Afghanistan Tackles the Islamic State

Vijay Prashad

On October 8, a terrible blast struck the worshippers attending Friday noon prayers at the Gozar-e-Sayed Abad Mosque in the Khan Abad district of Bandar, the capital of Kunduz, one of Afghanistan’s largest cities in its northern belt. This is a mosque frequented by Shia Muslims, who were referred to as “our compatriots” by Taliban spokesperson Zabiullah Mujahid. Forty-six people died immediately in the blast, and local officials said that many more people were injured in the incident. Not long afterward, the Islamic State in Khorasan Province, ISKP (ISIS-K), took credit for the attack on its Telegram channel. The suicide bomber was identified as Mohammed al-Uyguri by ISIS-K.

The name of the attacker raised red flags across the region. It indicated that he belonged to the Uyghur community and had a relationship with the Xinjiang region of western China, which is home to most of the world’s Uyghur population. That a Chinese extremist attacked a Shia mosque raised eyebrows in Beijing and in Tehran.

Foreign Terrorists

In June 2021, the United Nations reported on the presence of between 8,000 and 10,000 “foreign terrorist fighters” in Afghanistan. The report further stated that these fighters were mainly “from Central Asia, the north Caucasus region of the Russian Federation, Pakistan and the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region of China.” Although most of the fighters had reported an affiliation with the Taliban, “many also support Al-Qaida” and “[o]thers are allied with ISIL or have ISIL sympathies,” said the report. ISIL refers to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, whose Afghan franchise is ISIS-K.

In 2019, in Turkey, I encountered a group of Uyghur fighters from various terrorist organizations, including the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), which is now called the Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP). These were hardened fighters, whose main goal was to fight “infidels”; they did not seem interested in anything other than that. The United Nations placed the ETIM on their terrorist list in 2002.

During the war on Syria, large sections of the ETIM—as the TIP—moved to the Syria-Turkey border. The TIP is now largely based in Idlib, Syria, which is the hub of various global jihadi organizations. When it became clear that the Taliban was going to take power in Afghanistan, many jihadis from Central Asia—including from China and Tajikistan—left Idlib for Afghanistan. ETIM’s leader Abdul Haq remains in Syria, where he is also a member of the Shura Council of Al Qaeda.

Worries Abound in Iran…

On October 4, four days before the attack on the mosque in Afghanistan, an Iranian delegation arrived in Afghanistan to hold talks about cross-border trade and to seek assurances that the Taliban will not permit attacks on either Afghan Shia or on Iran. Meanwhile, in Kabul, governors of two neighboring border provinces of Iran’s Khorasan Razavi (Mohammad Sadegh Motamedian) and Afghanistan’s Herat (Maulvi Abdul Qayum Rohani) agreed on facilitating more cross-border trade and ensuring that there is no cross-border violence. In another meeting that took place on October 4 with Motamedian at the Iranian border town of Taybad, Rohani’s deputy Maulvi Sher Ahmad Ammar Mohajer said that the Afghan government will “never allow individuals or foreign groups such as ISIS to use Afghan territory against the Islamic Republic of Iran.” “We (Iran and Afghanistan) have defeated the common enemy,” Maulvi Rohani said in reference to the United States.

All signs indicate some sincerity on the part of the Taliban government. On October 7, the day before the ISIS-K attack on the Shia mosque in Kunduz, Maulvi Abdul Salam Hanafi—the deputy prime minister of Afghanistan—met with a group of Shia elders to assure them that the Taliban would not allow anti-Shia activity. Nevertheless, members of the Hazara community—who are the Shia community of Afghanistan—tell me that they fear a return to the previous rule of the Taliban; during that time, documented massacres by the Taliban against the Hazara Shia community provided evidence of the Taliban’s sectarianism. This is why Iran opposed the Taliban, and why Iran has not formally recognized the current government in Kabul. However, for the past few years, the Iranians have been working with the Taliban against ISIS and ISIS-K, with Iran’s Brigadier General Esmail Qaani as the liaison to the Taliban.

…And in China

In the 1990s, the Taliban government allowed the ETIM and other Uyghur groups to operate from Afghanistan. This time, there is already evidence that they will not officially permit such activity. Earlier this year, ETIM fighters had relocated from Syria to the Badakhshan province in Afghanistan; reports suggested that the fighters had gathered in the sparsely populated Wakhan Corridor in the province, which leads to China. But in recent weeks, the Taliban security has moved them from the towns surrounding the “Afghan-Chinese border” to other parts of Afghanistan (rumors have been flying about the Taliban’s intention to extradite the ETIM—if not all the 2,000 Uyghurs in Afghanistan—to China, but these rumors are unconfirmed).

In late August, Mattia Sorbi of Italy’s La Repubblica newspaper met with Taliban spokesperson Zabiullah Mujahid. This was a significant interview for the Taliban because Italy is a key partner of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Mujahid told Sorbi that China is currently assisting Afghanistan with short-term funds (including $31 million in emergency funds) and that the Taliban see the BRI as their “passport to markets around the world.” China’s long-term concession of the Mes Aynak copper mine, south of Kabul, will allow it “to come back to life and be modernized,” said Mujahid. The Taliban is keen on the BRI, he said, “which will lead to reviving the ancient Silk Road.”

The BRI runs on both sides of Afghanistan, the northern route through Tajikistan to Iran and the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor running southward. The mouth of the Wakhan Corridor would be the opening of a third route, running toward Kabul and to Iran (and linking Pakistan’s agricultural goods to markets in Central Asia and Russia).

Isolation from China and Iran is not a welcome thought in Kabul. The United States is prepared to reengage with the Taliban, which could alter the equations on the ground. If the U.S. allows Kabul to access the funds in its central bank, Da Afghanistan Bank, (sitting in New York) or the IMF funds, these funds will help provide the Taliban with a lifeline. But they are not a solution for Afghanistan, which is caught as it is between China and Iran and the possibility of its connection to the new silk road.

Captives of Coca-Cola

Stephen Shenfield

In July 2018 the attention of The New York Times and then Esquire magazine was somehow drawn to a mountain town in southern Mexico and the truly remarkable amount of Coca-Cola drunk by its residents. The British Broadcasting Corporation has produced a documentary on the same topic.

The town is San Cristobal, in the Central Highlands of Chiapas, Mexico’s poorest and southernmost state. A third of its quarter-million or so residents are of Mayan descent. Their average per capita daily consumption of ‘the friendliest drink on earth’ is a gallon – the whole of a two-liter bottle and most of a second, delivered to numerous local convenience stores from a bottling plant on the town’s outskirts.

Health impacts

Coca-Cola was first marketed in 1886. The name refers to two of the original ingredients – coca leaves, which are the source of cocaine, and kola nuts, which contain caffeine. Both are addictive. Since 1904 the coca leaves used have been not fresh but ‘spent’ – left over after the cocaine extraction process is complete. However, despite claims to the contrary, they still contain traces of cocaine.

This daily dose of Coca-Cola taken by residents of San Cristobal contains a whole pound of sugar. So it should be no surprise that each year over 3,000 of them die of diabetes. It’s an unpleasant way to die. Typical symptoms are frequent urination, hunger and thirst (despite eating and drinking), fatigue, blurred vision, slow-healing sores, recurrent infections, tingling, pain, or numbness in the hands or feet, sunken eyes, rapid breathing, headache, muscle aches, dehydration, nausea, stomach pain and cramping, vomiting, cerebral edema, and coma.

Besides diabetes, excessive sugar causes obesity, tooth decay, and fatty liver disease and increases the risk of strokes, heart disease, cancer, and dementia. Researchers who estimated the burden of disease associated with consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) in 2010 found such consumption responsible for 184,000 deaths a year — 133,000 from diabetes, 45,000 from heart disease, 6,500 from cancer.

These deaths were concentrated in high-income (24%) and especially medium-income (71%) countries. SSBs accounted for the highest proportion of all deaths – 12% — in Mexico, rising to 30% in Mexicans under the age of 45. In 2014 Mexico overtook the United States in per capita SSB consumption. In that year Mexicans drank on average 106 liters of Coca-Cola, Americans 99.5.

Sugar, moreover, is not the only harmful ingredient in Coca-Cola. There is also caffeine, which raises blood pressure and can cause dehydration as well as urinary and respiratory problems. There is phosphoric acid, which like sugar causes tooth decay, slows down digestion, may produce kidney failure or kidney stones, and impedes the absorption of calcium by the bones, leading to osteoporosis. Finally, the caramel used to color the drink is carcinogenic.

Why do they drink so much Coca-Cola?

Observers talk about ‘addiction’ to Coca-Cola, and it does contain three addictive substances – cocaine, caffeine, and sugar. It is also said that Coca-Cola has become an integral part of the local culture in Chiapas. Many indigenous people believe that Coca-Cola can heal the sick. The BBC documentary features a ‘healer’ sacrificing a chicken to ‘Goddess Maria’ together with an offering of Coca-Cola.

However, framing the problem in terms of addiction or ‘culture’ gives the impression that it might be solved with the aid of therapy and health education. This is not the case. The residents of San Cristobal have no real choice. Even those fully aware of the ham done to their health by imbibing huge quantities of Coca-Cola have no better alternative. After all, they need to drink water and Coca-Cola does at least contain clean water, drawn from a deep unpolluted aquifer.

Is clean water available from any other source? Consider possible alternatives.

The town has no wastewater treatment facilities. Untreated sewage goes straight into the waterways. This is the water that comes, now and then, from the faucet, contaminated by E. Coli and other pathogens:

Symptoms of Shiga toxin-producing E. coli (STEC) infection vary for each person, but often include severe stomach cramps, diarrhea (often bloody), and vomiting. Some people may have a fever, which usually is not very high (less than 101˚F/38.5˚C). Most people get better within 5 to 7 days. Some infections are very mild, but others are severe or even life-threatening.

What about the water trucks that occasionally pass through your neighborhood? I have information specifically about trucked water in San Cristobal, but here is an assessment of trucked water in Mexico City:

Trucked water is often higher in quality than the city’s notorious tap water, but its quality does vary significantly. Many suppliers simply provide filtered tap water in steel trucks — and others may bring water of such poor quality that it is unsafe to drink.

The situation in poverty-stricken San Cristobal is presumably worse than in the capital.

If water from the faucet and trucked water are not safe options, then why not buy not Coca-Cola but bottled water drawn from the aquifer? And/or other drinks known to contain clean water — milk, fruit juice, beer?

This would indeed be a sensible thing to do. But Esquire remarks, without further explanation, that bottled water is ‘hard to find.’ So, perhaps, are other clean-water drinks. Perhaps Coca-Cola is the only clean-water drink that is at all widely available in this town?

In order to show why this may be so, I must go into the commercial aspect of the production and distribution of Coca-Cola in San Cristobal.

The commercial aspect

The Coca-Cola Company is a US-based multinational corporation. It produces not Coca-Cola but a syrup or paste concentrate that has to be diluted with water to make Coca-Cola. it sells the concentrate to bottling companies that make the Coca-Cola, bottle it, and sell it in various regions of the world to which they have bought exclusive rights. The bottling company that owns the rights to bottle and sell Coca-Cola in Mexico as well as nine other Latin American countries is FEMSA (a Spanish acronym for Mexican Economic Promotions). FEMSA is a Mexico-based multinational beverage and retail company. It is FEMSA that owns and operates the bottling plant in San Cristobal. It also owns retail chains, including OXXO, Mexico’s largest chain of convenience stores.

Here again I have no information specific to San Cristobal, but a plausible reason why bottled water is ‘hard to find’ would be FEMSA’s ownership of the town’s retail stores. If one and the same company were to own the retail stores and the Coca-Cola bottling plant, it would hardly allow its stores to display drinks that would compete with Coca-Cola.

In accordance with an old agreement between FEMSA and the Mexican federal government, the company pays for the water it takes from the aquifer at a very low rate – about 10 cents for every 260 gallons, which comes to $120 per day or $44,000 per year. Even this very modest payment goes to the federal not the local government and cannot be used for local needs. FEMSA offered to build a sewage treatment plant to provide 500 families with clean drinking water, but this token measure was abandoned when the company realized that it would not stop local protests.

Why would the Mexican government allow this situation to continue? It may be recalled that Vicente Fox, the president of Mexico in 2000—2006, was a former chief executive of the Coca-Cola Company in Mexico. This fact suggests the political clout of the Coca-Cola business in Mexico.

A clean-water monopoly

Propagandists for capitalism like to dwell on the wide choice that ‘the market economy’ gives consumers. They forget to mention that this is true only of a competitive market and that most markets are no longer competitive. They are either oligopolistic, with a few big companies that conspire to limit consumer choice, or monopolistic, with a single company in a position to dictate terms to its customers.

In a place like San Cristobal, a vital human need – clean water – has been turned into a commodity monopolized by a single supplier. This supplier exploits its monopoly position to compel residents to buy clean water from itself and mixed with other substances that destroy their health and doom many of them to an early and miserable death.

End of the story?

Climate change has brought a sharp and persistent reduction in rainfall to the Central Highlands of Chiapas State. Both surface and deep water sources are undergoing rapid depletion. If this continues for very long, the region will no longer be able to support a large population and most of the people of San Cristobal will join the swelling stream of environmental refugees. At a certain point, whether due to exhaustion of the aquifer or to the falling number of consumers, the making, bottling, and selling of Coca-Cola will cease to be a commercially viable operation. The managers of the plant will depart, well satisfied with the splendid job they have done for the shareholders of FEMSA.

And so the story will end. Unless?

Northwest Territories grappling with Canada’s highest COVID-19 infection rate

Alexandra Greene

The Northwest Territories (NWT) currently has the highest rate of active COVID-19 cases in Canada, with the equivalent of 740 cases per 100,000 people. This is more than one-and-a-half times the rate in Alberta, where hospitals have had to implement triage protocols, denying vitally needed care to some patients, due to an unprecedented explosion of infections and hospital admissions.

While the NWT’s 356 active infections may seem small in comparison to Alberta’s 15,295, the difference in their respective populations means that the situation in the territory, which makes up much of Canada’s far north, is dire. The Northwest Territories has a population of just 45,500, almost half of whom, some 21,400 people, reside in its capital, Yellowknife.

A nurse holds a phone while a patient affected with COVID-19 speaks with his family from the intensive care unit. (Image Credit: AP/Daniel Cole)

NWT has now recorded nine total COVID-19 deaths, all of them since August, including two that were reported on Tuesday and Wednesday of this week.

The territory had largely escaped the ravages of COVID-19 until the country’s current Delta-driven fourth wave erupted in early August. Since the pandemic began in Canada in March 2020, the Northwest Territories has had 1,537 confirmed COVID-19 cases. Of these, close to 1,400 have been reported since mid-August 2021.

This rapid increase in infections has been largely caused by an outbreak of the Delta variant in the Sahtu region, which subsequently spread to Yellowknife.

On Sunday, NWT’s chief public health officer announced that an exposure to COVID-19 had occurred last week at the territory’s legislature building. This alone has resulted in six confirmed cases and two probable cases to date. Other outbreaks declared this week include one at the Inuvik homeless shelter and another at Diamond Jenness Secondary School, both in Hay River.

Located in Yellowknife, the territory’s main hospital, Stanton Territorial Hospital, has just six ICU (intensive care) beds. By October 4, all six of these beds were occupied by patients suffering from COVID-19. The federal government sent oxygen concentrators from the national stockpile to the territory, after a public alert was issued by the NWT health authority that Stanton Territorial Hospital was struggling with oxygen supply issues.

The federal government also requested that the Red Cross send health care workers to assist in the territory. Nurses, doctors and health care staff have since been deployed to work at the temporary shelter set up at the Yellowknife Arena in September to provide services to the city’s large “underhoused” population.

The territory’s health care system is under immense pressure and was already becoming overwhelmed by mid-September. In Yellowknife as well as smaller communities throughout the NWT, health care staff have been moved out of clinics and redeployed to facilities where there are greater numbers of severely ill or at-risk patients. Non-urgent procedures and appointments have been cancelled and postponed. The health care authority announced that opioid maintenance treatment appointments and mental health and addictions counselling sessions are being triaged and moved online.

In recent weeks, there have been 36 hospitalizations due to the virus, including 13 ICU admissions. Prior to the current surge in cases, the territory had seen only four COVID-related hospitalizations during the entire pandemic.

The first six people who died from COVID-19 in the Northwest Territories ranged in their ages and the communities they came from but were all indigenous. This was confirmed by Health Minister Julie Green, who stated that some of those who died from the virus were indigenous elders, adding that important knowledge of their culture and communities died with them.

To try and counteract the spread of the virus, in-person schooling has been halted in communities across the territory and gathering restrictions are in place in the two most heavily affected communities of Yellowknife and Behchokǫ̀.

“If I were to lift the orders, it would overwhelm the health hospital system for sure,” Dr. Kami Kandola, NWT’s chief medical officer of health, told CBC News in a recent interview. Kandola also pointed out that if the health care system in the NWT were to become further taxed, the normal course of action would be to transport critically ill patients to Alberta for treatment. However, with Alberta’s own health care system overwhelmed, that option is largely if not entirely foreclosed—placing the territories’ population at still greater risk.

Kandola said that the waning immunity provide by mRNA COVID-19 vaccines is a major factor in the current surge of infections. The Northwest Territories began vaccinating elders on December 31, 2020, months ahead of the vaccine rollout in other parts of the country. “Because we were privileged to get the vaccine first, we unfortunately are going to be the first ones to experience the waning immunity, which we’re seeing in our own case numbers,” she warned in a September interview with CBC.

At the beginning of October, the territory began to supply third doses of the vaccine for people aged 75 and over in its hardest hit communities as part of a “limited roll-out.” Care home residents received a third dose in August.

While waning vaccination efficacy may well be a critical factor in the spread of the virus, the premature repeal of public health orders is ultimately what has enabled the virus to again take root in the Northwest Territories. Epidemiologists and other health experts have long warned of the consequences of relying solely on vaccinations to protect a given population.

The dismantling of many of the most basic public health protections by the territorial government was in line with policies pursued by governments across Canada. With the support and encouragement of the federal Liberal government led by Justin Trudeau, provinces from coast to coast lifted restrictions following the deadly third pandemic wave last spring. The most disastrous consequences of this “profits before life” strategy can be seen in Alberta. Overall, Canada’s official COVID-19 death toll has surpassed 28,000, but credible studies suggest the figure is actually over 50,000.

The current outbreak in Yellowknife has severely impacted the city’s large homeless population. Critics have pointed out that this could have been avoided had the territorial government not rolled back safety measures that were put in place early on in the pandemic.

Initially, the territorial government turned the downtown Aspen Apartment complex and the city’s Arnica Inn into isolation centres for those experiencing homelessness. A second day shelter was also opened downtown. Aspen Apartments had 36 rooms in which homeless people could isolate while awaiting COVID test results and remain isolated and sheltered if they did test positive for the virus. However, when case numbers declined last spring, the government closed the centre, saying it was not being used. A day shelter also closed in the spring, and now as Yellowknife struggles with the Delta variant-fueled outbreak, there are few places for the homeless population to isolate or find safe shelter. Places to access food and other essential services and escape the harsh Northern elements have also been shut.

From mid-August to September 12 alone, 19 people using shelters in Yellowknife tested positive for the virus, as did 10 health care and shelter workers. The number of shelter workers who contracted the virus or were otherwise affected by the outbreak and unable to come to work forced a further day shelter to close and, as of September 11, Yellowknife’s sobering centre close its doors indefinitely.

The Northwest Territories, and especially its indigenous population, have long been severely impacted by a chronic shortage of proper housing and rampant homelessness. (Senate of Canada)

With temperatures dropping as winter draws nearer, there is no 24-hour shelter available for those without anywhere else to go. A Quality Inn has now been converted into an isolation centre, but shelter workers and advocates for the homeless population have said that the process of setting this up has been an “intense scramble to throw things together.”

Since the start of September, numerous outbreaks at worksites have occurred across the Northwest Territories. Two workers tested positive for COVID-19 at the NWT Power Corporation’s Snare Hydro System worksite, which is located roughly 140 kilometres northwest of Yellowknife. There were also two confirmed cases among workers at the Ekati diamond mine, as well as one case at the Gahcho Kué diamond mine in Fort Smith. Cases were also recorded at the Diavik mine and the Imperial Oil facility in Norman Wells.

In all the cases at the various diamond mines and the Imperial Oil facility, the workers who tested positive had travelled into the Northwest Territories for work and do not reside there. Many workers live in Alberta and travel north to jobs in the NWT. Alberta’s skyrocketing case numbers make it all the more reckless and irresponsible to force workers to keep non-essential production facilities, such as diamond mines, operating throughout the pandemic.

Washington strangles Afghanistan’s economy as millions face starvation

Bill Van Auken

Two months after the August 15 fall of Kabul to the Taliban and the ignominious end of Washington’s 20-year war and occupation in Afghanistan, the country is teetering on the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe.

Measures being taken by the Biden administration to strangle the country’s economy threaten to inflict the greatest crime against humanity committed in Afghanistan over the course of decades of US imperialist intervention.

An internally displaced Afghan child looks for plastic and other items which can be used as a replacement for firewood, at a garbage dump in Kabul, Afghanistan, Sunday, Dec. 15, 2019. (AP Photo/Altaf Qadri)

United Nations agencies are warning that over nine out of 10 Afghan families are already unable to obtain sufficient food and that over 1 million children could face acute malnutrition and even death by starvation in the coming year. Already almost half the country’s children are malnourished, while there is a mounting danger of diseases like the measles and polio spreading throughout the population.

Conditions were already dire before the final withdrawal of US troops and the collapse of the American puppet regime in Kabul, with Afghanistan ranking 169th out of 189 countries on the UN’s human development index. A drought has destroyed much of the wheat harvest and inflation has sent food prices soaring.

Since the consummation of the US debacle, however, the country has suffered two hammer blows. First, all foreign aid and development funds have been summarily cut off. While a large portion of this money went directly into the pockets of corrupt US-backed officials, it accounted for roughly 80 percent of the government’s budget and was the mainstay of the country’s economy, which in 20 years of US occupation never developed any significant industry.

Second, and even more devastating, the US has imposed unilateral sanctions against the Taliban-controlled government on the basis of having classified the former insurgent movement as a Specially Designated Terrorist Group (SDGT), making it a potential crime for anyone in the US—and given secondary sanctions, anyone in the world—from dealing with it.

The US, meanwhile, has frozen some $9.5 billion in Afghanistan government assets, most of it held by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Under pressure from the Biden administration, the International Monetary Fund has also cut off Kabul’s access to hundreds of millions of dollars in emergency reserves.

The cutoff of dollar assets to Afghanistan’s dollarized economy is bringing economic activity to a grinding halt, while depriving the government of cash to meet payrolls of teachers, health care professionals and other workers in vital public services, some of whom have already gone months without salaries. Non-governmental aid agencies are also unable to pay their employees or fund their operations.

Also under US pressure, the World Bank cut off $600 million in funding that underpins the country’s health care system. With NGOs responsible for much of the country’s health care also deprived of funds, some 2,000 hospitals and clinics, including those dedicated to treating COVID-19 patients, have been forced to shut down across Afghanistan, the Red Cross reports.

“Unless money starts flowing soon, a total economic collapse will plunge Afghans into a humanitarian catastrophe,” Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, warned after a visit to Afghanistan last week.

Egeland reported that the cutoff of liquidity had left his organization unable to pay staff or suppliers in Afghanistan. “Instead, we are forced to purchase tents, blankets and food in neighboring Pakistan. Now imagine this dilemma multiplied for every employer in Afghanistan.”

The Biden administration’s policies represent an act of raw revenge for the debacle that ended the 20-year US war, an act of collective punishment against an entire population of 40 million people for failing to support US imperialism’s attempt to impose colonial-style rule. At the same time, they are driven by definite geostrategic considerations. Washington is opposed to the consolidation of any regime in Kabul that is not under its thumb, and particularly to a regime that would forge closer ties to China.

It was in this context that the G20 countries met Tuesday to consider the crisis in Afghanistan. Divisions between the US, Europe and China over the issue were readily apparent.

In advance of the meeting, the European Union began the talks by announcing €1 billion ($1.2 billion) “to avert a major humanitarian and socioeconomic collapse,” the EU’s chief Ursula von der Leyen said. The gesture no doubt expresses concerns in European capitals that the country’s economic collapse will trigger a refugee flow even greater than that of 2015.

At the same time, however, there was much less than met the eye in the European package. It included €300 million already pledged, with an addition of just €250 million for Afghanistan and the rest going to neighboring countries to manage refugee flows. Given that roughly 50 percent of aid money is spent on administrative costs, this means that little more than €125 million will reach the starving Afghan people. This after a 20-year war in which Washington spent some $2 trillion and its European allies spent tens of billions of dollars.

In a thinly veiled condemnation of US policy in Afghanistan, Germany’s lame-duck Chancellor Angela Merkel told reporters covering the G20, “To stand by and watch 40 million people plunge into chaos because electricity can’t be supplied and no financial system exists, that cannot and should not be the goal of the international community.”

Neither China’s President Xi Jinping nor Russia’s President Vladimir Putin participated in the G20 virtual summit. Beijing is set to participate next week in a meeting in Moscow that will include Afghanistan’s neighboring countries as well as a large delegation from the Taliban.

China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi, however, told a G20 foreign ministers meeting that sanctions against Afghanistan’s de facto government must be lifted and the country’s assets unfrozen. Participating in the virtual summit, he stressed that the countries that “caused the current predicament” had a responsibility to prevent a humanitarian disaster.

A White House readout of President Joe Biden’s meeting with the G20 leaders on Afghanistan stressed US determination to “maintain a laser-focus on our enduring counterterrorism efforts, including against threats from ISIS-K, and ensuring safe passage for those foreign nationals and Afghan partners with documentation seeking to depart Afghanistan,” while mentioning humanitarian aid as an afterthought.

For his part, State Department spokesman Ned Price dodged a question about the US allowing Afghanistan access to its frozen assets, asserting that Washington would wait to see what the Taliban would do “six weeks from now, six months from now” to determine “what our set of incentives—sticks, carrots, everything in between—looks like with any future government of Afghanistan.”

Washington has justified its policy of starving the Afghan population with references to “human rights” and by invoking the Taliban’s policies towards women. Answering this propaganda line, Taliban spokesperson Inamullah Samangani said, “If they ban our assets, 90 percent of the Afghan people will fall into poverty. Isn’t this also in contradiction with the principles of human rights?”

There is no doubt that the homicidal US policy toward Afghanistan is driven in large measure by Washington’s ever more bellicose confrontation with China. The Taliban government has described China, with which Afghanistan shares a narrow border, as its “most important partner” and a “dependable friend.”

Cut off from aid and the country’s reserves by Washington and its allies, the Taliban sees China as potentially filling the vacuum, including through investments connected to its Belt and Road Initiative.

Chinese investment in the country increased by nearly 12 percent in 2020, and Beijing has interest in exploiting Afghanistan’s rare earth metals, estimated at between 1 and 3 trillion dollars in value. The Chinese media Wednesday attributed a fall in the price of stocks connected to lithium to the prospect that exploitation of Afghanistan’s lithium reserves, the largest in the world, would bring down the price of the mineral, which is key to the development of China’s electric car industry.

After waging a two-decade dirty war that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives before ending in a debacle, Washington is embarked on policies that threaten to condemn millions of Afghans to starvation, while turning the ravaged country into a battlefield in a US war against China.

Pandemic continues to kill in America, while the ruling elite squabbles over mandates

Benjamin Mateus

There is barely a mention of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States any more, other than the assertions by the mainstream press that the worst is now behind us or announcements of new approvals of vaccinations. The recent declines have been celebrated even though the daily infection rates remain above most of the previous peaks, and new waves—and variants—could well arise.

The pandemic has had and continues to have a massive impact on the population regardless of the media’s silence on the matter. There have been more than 45.4 million reported COVID-19 infections during the pandemic. The reported number of COVID-related deaths is approaching 740,000. Over the last three months, 10 million infections were registered with 114,000 deaths, demonstrating the virulence of the Delta variant despite more than half the population being fully vaccinated.

However, even these figures are a significant underreporting of the true calamity. According to data provided by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation’s model of excess COVID-19 deaths, the death toll stands at a horrific 1.33 million lives lost over the span of 18 months. Nearly 300,000 of these deaths occurred during the last wave of infections.

The discrepancy between the reported COVID deaths and the excess deaths estimated on the basis of COVID-19 models is staggering, and yet there is not a mention of it in the bourgeoisie press and by the political establishment.

And despite these horrific developments, instead of employing any significant public health measures to save lives and livelihoods, the message has evolved into mitigate through vaccinations only.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, speaking on ABC’s “This Week,” provided what passes for caution in the official discourse. He told anchor Jonathan Karl, “We certainly are turning the corner on this particular surge, Jon. But we have experienced over now close to 20 months of surges that go up and then come down, and then go back up again. The way to keep it down, to make that turnaround continue to go down, is to do what we mentioned: get people vaccinated.”

Critical modeling of the dynamics of community spread employing various strategies for dealing with the pandemic has shown that vaccinations alone will not stem the tide of infections. The vaccination campaigns have all but stalled, making any stated vaccination goal difficult to achieve. Currently, only 56.6 percent of the population is fully vaccinated, below what would be required even to slow the spread of the highly transmissible Delta variant.

As for eradicating the virus and freeing humanity from this deadly threat, neither of the two camps in bourgeois politics hold out any such prospect.

Placing the discussion into context, even before the last surge in the US this summer, scientists had estimated that combined with infections and vaccines, approximately 83.3 percent of the population had some level of immunity. And yet, the last wave was only second in its destructive force to the winter surge. Without measures in place to curtail the spread of infection, the virus will continue to spark new fires across the country, including a likely new surge accompanying the colder weather that is imminent in the Northern US states.

Presently, the pandemic is rippling through dispersed populations of rural regions for whom the lack of infrastructure and access to health care are playing havoc. A new study from the University of Iowa College of Public Health found COVID-19 death rates in rural regions were double those reported in urban areas.

On Wednesday, Alaska saw 18 more people hospitalized for COVID-19, bringing the total to 204. Cases also doubled overnight with 1,220 new infections. The state continues to lead in infection rates. Earlier in the month the state health officials activated a “crisis standard of care” policy across 20 hospitals, which means critical life-sustaining care is being rationed to those deemed best fit to survive. For instance, at Providence Alaska Medical Center in Anchorage, treatment for a 70-year-old woman on a ventilator and dialysis machine was terminated to free up the machine for a 48-year-old man, according to CNBC . Both patients, however, passed away.

The current surge in hospitalizations in Montana has persisted. This week the state broke the 2,000 mark for the first time during the pandemic as the figure rose to 2,227 COVID-19 cases on Tuesday, breaking the previous record of 1,456 on October 4, 2020. Wyoming and West Virginia are experiencing similar surges of cases.

But more densely populated states are also suffering anew. Michigan has witnessed a resurgence of the infection. The state’s health department reported on Wednesday that there were 8,671 newly confirmed COVID-19 cases and 110 deaths over the span of just two days. Hospital emergency rooms are filled with patients lying on stretchers in the crowded hallways left unattended from staffing shortages. However, many are also there not because of COVID-19 but other ailments that have been long neglected, but which are now forcing people to overcome their understandable reluctance to seek hospital treatment.

Dr. Brad Uren, an emergency medicine professor at the University of Michigan College of Emergency Physicians, told the Detroit Free Press, “We’re back to pre-COVID volumes, but also have the added burden of the COVID patients and the sort of backlog of patients that have been deferring some of their care over the last year.”

Wisconsin has seen cases peak across the state, with the seven-day average having reached over 2,600 cases. As schools there ended even mitigation policies, the number of infections among children has soared, contributing to the present dire situation. Deaths have begun to track upwards again. According to the Wisconsin Hospital Association, more than 1,170 people are admitted to the hospitals in the state with 310 in intensive care units.

Though the number of new cases nationally has been declining, with the seven-day average now a little over 91,000 per day, the death toll remains high, with more than 1,900 people dying each day. There are also indications that the decline in national COVID-19 cases is slowing, which has ominous implications as the country is heading into winter with the added burden of the flu season.

Though full vaccination status for the elderly has reached 80 percent, they were also the first to be vaccinated, meaning their immunity to the coronavirus is most likely to have weakened. The continuing drive to return to pre-pandemic norms means that this age group faces renewed dangers of the full implementation of the “learning to live with the virus” policy. Though one in 450 people has died from COVID-19 in the United States, COVID-19 deaths among the elderly are now at one in 100, highlighting the dangers for this age group. Thus far, more than a half million people aged 65 or older have died from coronavirus in America.

Despite these grim statistics, the Biden administration is pushing ahead with a policy focused almost exclusively on vaccinations, while other public health measures go by the boards. Biden signed an executive order implementing emergency temporary standards (ETS) that would force companies with more than 100 employees to mandate vaccination or regular testing. Once it goes into effect, the ETS would impact around 80 million workers, half the US workforce. Yesterday, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) submitted the text of the new vaccine rule for large employers to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

Texas Governor Greg Abbott, June 2021 (AP Photo/Eric Gay)

Texas Governor Greg Abbott has taken the offensive against the vaccine mandate push by signing an executive order on Monday that would prohibit companies and organizations from enforcing a COVID-19 mandate on workers . The order states, “No entity in Texas can compel receipt of a COVID-19 vaccine by any individual, including any employee or a consumer, who objects to such vaccination for any reason of personal conscience, based on a religious belief, including prior recovery from COVID-19.” However, as many of these corporate “entities” operate across multiple states, it will only further exacerbate the global supply chain issues and the chaotic economic situation as companies have to determine which rules they will abide by.

The vaccinated governor presides over a state with one of the highest COVID-19 death tolls. Close to 69,000 people have died thus far, and more than 200 are still dying each day. Assuredly, these decisions are driven by personal political ambitions and not based on any moral stance or consideration based on sound scientific advice. In this regard, both the Democrats and Republicans are complicit in the massive number of deaths caused by their policies.

As Biden remarked last month during a White House speech urging large companies to enforce vaccination mandates on their labor force, “While America is in much better shape than it was seven months ago when I took office, I need to tell you a second fact: we’re in a tough stretch and it could last a while.” The president said more than he had probably intended.

South African metalworkers strike expands

Patrick Martin

Some 16,000 workers in a smaller union have joined the 155,000 members of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA), who walked out October 5 over demands for wage increases and other improvements.

Members of the Metal and Electrical Workers Union of South Africa (MEWUSA) announced that its members in the industry had come out on the picket lines. A third union, UASA, said it was in dispute with the employers but had not yet approved a walkout.

The strike has begun to have an impact on the South African auto industry, which is entirely dependent on steel and auto parts that come from the factories where NUMSA members have walked out. The German-based carmaker BMW was the first automaker to announce the disruption of production, saying that its main assembly plant was affected on Monday, losing 700 vehicles.

Striking members of NUMSA (Source: Twitter/Unati Msuthu)

The executive director of the National Association of Automotive Component and Allied Manufacturers (NAACAM) said in a statement, “We expect more OEM [Original Equipment Manufacturer] assembly lines to be impacted if the strike continues into next week, due to lack of production in parts of the supply chain.”

The auto industry accounts for 5 percent of South Africa’s GDP, on top of the 8 percent of GDP represented by the output of the steel and metal industries themselves.

The strikers continue to encounter widespread violence from police and security guards. At least six workers were injured Monday when police fired rubber bullets at a picket line outside the Wireforce plant in Germiston. Edward Matube, the union secretary in Germiston, said police told the workers they were to keep at least 150 meters from the Wireforce premise.

Matube said one of the police began counting down from 10 for them to disperse. “We were leaving when they started shooting, so they shot at our backs,” he told the press. Another union officer, Nelson Kiyane, released photos the next day showing bullet wounds on his thighs and on other workers’ backs and legs, confirming that they were shot as they were moving away from the factory, not toward it.

The expansion of the strike coincides with an official statement from NUMSA rejecting the latest contract offered by the major employers federation, as well as attacking two smaller employers groups which have failed to make any new offer at all.

NUMSA announced Wednesday it was rejecting the offer by the Steel and Engineering Industries Federation of South Africa (SEIFSA), which raised the proposed first-year wage increase from 4.4 percent to 6 percent but still well below the 8 percent demanded by the union and limited only to the lowest paid workers. Metalworkers received no wage increase at all in 2020 because the union agreed to freeze all bargaining during the initial period of the COVID-19 pandemic.

At a press conference Thursday, NUMSA General Secretary Irvin Jim put on a demagogic show of intransigence, while at the same time holding out an olive branch to SEIFSA. He used as props for this cynical performance the refusal of two smaller employer groups, the National Employers’ Association of South Africa (NEASA) and the South African Engineers’ and Founders’ Association (SAEFA), to match the offer made by SEIFSA.

Jim said that SEIFSA had limited its offer to workers currently making the minimum pay at each company, while the union wanted any increase to apply to all workers at all pay grades. But NEASA and SAEFA, whose member companies tend to be smaller, less well financed and based in the regions rather than the central industrial area around Johannesburg, have refused to make a new offer to the union. The union leader called the 4.28 percent raise proposed by NEASA a “non-offer.”

While SEIFSA had reached out to NUMSA after the beginning of the strike, the other two associations were sabotaging the structure of collective bargaining and seeking to “advance down variation of wages in industrial sectors.”

“Our message to SAEFA, NEASA and their CEOs is that they must stop their shenanigans of working to break down the collective bargaining power of workers and come to the negotiation table,” he concluded.

The effect of these statements was to present SEIFSA as the “good” employers’ group and the other two as “bad” federations, although SEIFSA includes the largest and wealthiest of the corporations, including those linked most closely to globally mobile capital. The result could well be a settlement with SEIFSA only that leaves workers at the two smaller groups in the lurch.

It is extremely significant that the NUMSA leader declared his support for a deal at the 6 percent level, provided that this was extended to all pay rates and not just the minimums, effectively abandoning the 8 percent demand for which the workers went on strike.

Irvin Jim said that for the past decade metalworkers had received “unilaterally imposed crumbs or no increase at all,” although his own organization is by far the largest in the industry and has done nothing to fight back, including the betrayal of the last major strike in 2014.

He went on to criticize the government of President Cyril Ramaphosa and the ruling African National Congress. “The working class across all sectors, particularly the industrial proletariat with hard skills, have been victims of an ANC government that failed to impose a meaningful national minimum wage that breaks the back of the apartheid wage gap,” Jim said.

This government, however, depends for its existence on the support from the trade unions. The biggest labor federation, COSATU, is actually part of the government, and Ramaphosa himself, before he became a billionaire capitalist boss, was the leader of the National Union of Mineworkers.

NUMSA broke away from COSATU, but it never broke with the fundamental political perspective of the ANC, the Stalinist South African Communist Party, and COSATU, which is the development of “black capitalism” in South Africa to replace the apartheid monstrosity, rather than the mobilization of the vast power of the South African working class on the basis of revolutionary socialist politics.

In the current strike, the ANC government will inevitably play a reactionary anti-working-class role. Employment and Labour Minister Thulas Nxesi has limited his statements so far to calling for calm. “It is common cause that the country is now going through one of the most difficult periods occasioned by the pandemic on one hand and the inclement economic conditions that prevailed even before COVID-19 on the other,” he said.

“It is against this background that we appeal to all the players—workers and employers, unions, federations and employer bodies—to handle the sensitive talks with the necessary caution,” he said, adding, “Cool heads should prevail and the good of the country and our economy should always be at the top of mind.”

What terrifies the ANC government and the capitalist class which it serves is that the trade union organizations, which act to defend the ruling elite and suppress the working class, are increasingly discredited, and the working class is now coming forward into revolutionary action.