Driverless Cars Won’t be Good for the Environment If They Lead to More Auto Use

Giovanni Circella & Scott Hardman

For years, self-driving car technology has remained tantalizingly just beyond the horizon. Bold predictions notwithstanding, fully automated vehicles still haven’t appeared in showrooms. But the technology appears poised for a leap forward in 2022.

Companies including Mercedes-Benz, BMW and Honda are bringing so-called Level 3 AVs to market that will let drivers take their hands off the wheel under specific conditions, and virtually every major auto manufacturer is testing self-driving systems.

Automated vehicles hold tremendous promise. Cars that handle most or all of the driving tasks could be safer than human drivers, operate more efficiently and open up new opportunities for seniors, people with disabilities and others who can’t drive themselves. But while attention has understandably focused on safety, the potential environmental impacts of automated vehicles have largely taken a back seat.

We study automated vehicle technologies and how consumers are likely to use them. In two recent studies, our research teams found two creative ways to assess the real-life impacts that automated vehicles could have on the environment.

By analyzing drivers’ use of partially automated vehicles and simulating the expected impact of future driverless vehicles, we found that both automated vehicle types will encourage a lot more driving. This will increase transportation-related pollution and traffic congestion, unless regulators take steps to make car travel less appealing.

More miles, more carbon emissions

Research has previously suggested that automated vehicles could cause people to drive more than they currently do, leading to more congestion, energy consumption and pollution. Riding in a car as a passenger is much less stressful than driving, so people might be willing to sit through longer trips and battle more traffic if they can relax and do other things during the journey. The promise of a relaxed, comfortable commute to work could even make some people move farther away from their workplaces and accelerate suburban sprawl trends.

People would also have the ability to send their cars on “zero-occupancy” trips, or errands without passengers. For example, if you don’t want to pay for parking downtown, at some point you may be able to send your car back home while you’re at work and summon it when you need it. Convenient, but also twice the driving.

This could be a big problem. The transportation sector is already the leading contributor to U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. States like California with aggressive plans to combat climate change have recognized that reducing the number of vehicles miles that people travel is a critical strategy. What if automated vehicle technology makes it harder to achieve these goals?

The real-world environmental impacts of automated cars

While we and other researchers have predicted these outcomes through modeling, no one has been able to verify them because fully automated vehicles aren’t commercially available yet. We found two innovative ways to use currently available technologies to study the real-world impacts of automated vehicles.

In a study published in mid-2021, we surveyed 940 people who drive partially automated vehicles. Systems like Tesla’s Autopilot can assist with driving tasks and reduce the burden of driving, although to a lesser degree than fully automated vehicles will.

We found that drivers who used Autopilot drove an average of nearly 5,000 more miles per year than those who didn’t. In interviews with 36 drivers of partially automated vehicles, they generally said they were more willing to sit in traffic and took more long-distance trips, all because of the increased comfort and reduced stress provided by semi-automated systems.

In a separate study conducted in late 2019 and early 2020, we simulated the function of a fully automated vehicle by providing 43 households in Sacramento, California, with a chauffeur service to take over the family driving duties and tracking how they used it. These households increased their vehicle miles traveled by 60% over their pre-chauffeur travel, and dramatically reduced their use of transit, bicycling and walking. More than half of the increase in vehicle travel involved sending chauffeurs on zero-occupancy trips without a household member in the car.

Limiting pollution from automated car use

These findings show that automated vehicles will encourage a lot more driving in the future and that partially automated vehicles are doing so now. Is there any way to reap its benefits without making climate change, air quality, and congestion worse?

Requiring future automated vehicles to use zero-emission technology, as California is doing, can be a big help. But until the U.S. develops a 100% carbon-free electricity system, even electric cars will produce some upstream emissions from power generation. And all car travel causes other harmful impacts, such as water and air pollution from brake and tire wear, collisions with wildlife and traffic congestion.

To prevent an explosion in driving and associated harms, regulators and communities need to send signals that driving isn’t free. They could do this by putting a price on car travel – particularly on zero-occupancy trips.

The main policies that have this effect today are federal and state fuel taxes, which currently average around 49 cents per gallon for gasoline and 55 cents per gallon for diesel fuel. But the impact of fuel taxes on drivers’ behavior will decline with the adoption and spread of electric vehicles. This means that the transportation sector will need to develop new funding mechanisms for ongoing costs like maintaining roads.

In place of fuel taxes, state and federal governments could adopt user fees or charges for the number of vehicle miles that drivers travel. Correctly pricing the cost of private vehicle travel could encourage travelers to consider cheaper and more efficient modes, such as public transit, walking and bicycling.

These fees could be adjusted based on location – for example, charging more to drive into dense city centers – or other factors such as time of day, traffic congestion levels, vehicle occupancy and vehicle type. Modern communication technologies can enable such policies by tracking where and when cars are on the roads.

Another option would be to promote shared fleets of automated vehicles rather than privately owned ones. We envision these as commercial companies, similar to Uber, Lyft and other ride-sharing providers. Having a car available when needed could make it possible to forgo car ownership and could serve travel demand much more efficiently by essentially acting as on-demand transit. These networks could also help riders reach fixed-route public transportation services that operate on main transportation corridors.

All of these policies will be most effective if they are adopted now, before automated vehicles are widespread. A transportation future that is automated, electric and shared could be environmentally sustainable – but in our view, it’s unlikely to evolve that way on its own.

How the U.S. Transportation System Fuels Inequality

Basav Sen

For decades, the federal government has allocated about four times as much funding to roadways as it has to public transit such as buses and subways.

This policy choice has consequences for racial and economic justice, the environment, and more. Here, we focus only on the racial and economic justice questions – whose interests are not served, and who are excluded, by the policy choice to prioritize an ever-expanding roadway system over public transit?

When the federal government pours money into highways and starves public transit of resources, an inevitable consequence is that the road network keeps expanding, and public transit systems face resource constraints that impact their operation.

Between 1990 and 2020, the extent of roadways in the U.S. measured in lane miles grew by 9 percent. (One lane of roadway over a one-mile length is one lane mile. Thus, a 10-mile length of a four-lane roadway is 40 lane miles, and a 20-mile length of a two-lane roadway is also 40 lane-miles.)

However, what this overall number masks is the dramatic growth of urban roadways. Even as the overall extent of rural roadways shrank by almost 6 percent over this period, urban roadways overall expanded by almost 67 percent, and urban interstate highways in particular expanded by almost 73 percent. Federal transportation funding has subsidized urban sprawl.

Meanwhile, public transportation systems have an accumulated maintenance and repairs backlog that is estimated by different sources as between $90 billion and $176 billion. The $39 billion in new transit funding provided by recent federal infrastructure legislation is less than half of the lower estimate of this maintenance backlog (and less than a quarter of the higher estimate).

When transit systems are poorly maintained, the frequency and reliability of service suffers, making transit a less viable form of personal transportation. Faced with unreliable (and for as many as 45 percent of people in the U.S., non-existent) transit systems, people often have no choice but to drive a personal vehicle to get to work, medical appointments, the grocery store, or anywhere else. Who does this impact?

Who Are the Carless?

Obviously, in a society where ownership of a personal vehicle is essential for basic personal mobility, those without a vehicle (about 18 percent of all U.S. households) are excluded. But the degree of exclusion can be far worse for some people.

Personal vehicle ownership rates by households are distinctly lower for people of color than for white people, as seen from U.S. Census Bureau data. Barely more than two-thirds of Black households own vehicles, compared to about 82 percent of all households and 86 percent of white households.

The same data show even more striking disparities in vehicle ownership by household income, with only 61 percent of households in the lowest income quintile owning a vehicle, compared to 90 percent of households in the highest income quintile. (A quintile is one-fifth of a distribution. If all household incomes in the U.S. were arranged in order from the lowest to the highest, the lowest one-fifth of household incomes would be called the lowest income quintile, the next one-fifth would be called the second quintile, and so on.)

A transportation system that assumes universal private vehicle ownership denies basic mobility to two out of five of the poorest one-fifth of U.S. families.

The High Costs of Vehicle Ownership

But what about households that do own vehicles? Costs such as gasoline, vehicle insurance, and maintenance and repairs add up to a significant share of income for lower-income families. For the poorest 10 percent of U.S. households, the share of after-tax income going to vehicle costs (22.6 percent) is 7.5 times as large as the share spent on vehicle costs by the richest 10 percent.

(A decile is conceptually similar to a quintile, but with the population divided into tenths instead of fifths.)

A transportation system where people have to rely on their own vehicles doesn’t merely exclude those who don’t own vehicles – it imposes a severe financial burden on poorer households that do own vehicles.

U.S. transportation policies privileging roadways and personal vehicles over all other modes of travel have not served the economic and transportation needs of all. They are a public subsidy for disproportionately white, wealthier households, at the expense of the rest of the population.

---

Transit Creates Good Jobs

Transforming U.S. transportation policy priorities from its current overemphasis on (and excessive funding for) roadways at the expense of all other forms of transportation will clearly serve the needs of people of color and low-income people by providing them more affordable and accessible mobility choices that don’t require them to own cars. But such a transformation will also create another important economic benefit for these currently underserved communities, in the form of good jobs.

Transit jobs are good blue-collar jobs, with high wages compared to the economy-wide average. Subway and streetcar operators, for example, have a median wage of $33.38, which is more than 50 percent higher than the median wage for all U.S. occupations. Even entry-level transit workers make relatively high wages. Subway and streetcar operators who are in the bottom 10 percent of wage earners in their occupation earn a median of $19.66 per hour. That’s nearly twice the median for workers in the bottom 10 percent wage group for all U.S. occupations.

Following the Money

Shifting U.S. transportation priorities away from their disproportionate focus on highways and towards public transit would actually serve the interests of people of color and low-income people, by improving mobility options for people who don’t own vehicles, and people for whom owning and operating a vehicle is a serious financial burden. Why, then, has this shift not happened?

Unsurprisingly, that’s partly attributable to industry lobbying pressure, backed by campaign money. For the oil and gas industry in particular, highway-centric transportation is a gift that keeps on giving, because it provides a captive market for their product. Lack of other dependable transportation options compels people to drive everywhere, boosting sales of gasoline and diesel.

We know this anecdotally, through an Exxon lobbyist bragging to undercover investigative journalists that the company lobbied to turn the American Infrastructure and Jobs Act (popularly known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill) into a “highway bill.”

But we know this more definitively as well. Political campaign contributions by the oil and gas industry over the last five election cycles (2012 through 2020) have totaled $485 million, including $140 million in the last election cycle alone.

In the current (2022) election cycle, a huge share of oil and gas money has gone to just one politician – Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV). The industry’s campaign contributions to Manchin are nearly four times their contributions to the next highest recipient.

Manchin was part of the group of Senators who came up with the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill, and one of its most vocal proponents. And the bill continues the longstanding practice of allocating a disproportionate share of funding to highways at the expense of other modes of transportation.

Clearly, fossil fuel interests are rewarding him for serving their interests.

Brazil’s Workers Party lays out 2022 election program: austerity and corporatism

Miguel Andrade

The Workers Party (PT) has marked the beginning of Brazil’s 2022 electoral year with a series of announcements meant to suggest that the party is intent on reversing the austerity imposed over the past five years.

The most significant claim is that, if it returns to power, the party will “revoke” the 2017 labor reform enacted under president Michel Temer, the former vice president of the PT’s Dilma Rousseff, who succeeded her after the trumped-up 2016 impeachment. The reform widely expanded casual labor and provoked a massive reduction of wages. At the same time, it drastically cut funding for the demoralized unions, leading many of them to fire scores of officials. The increase in union funding is one of the central aims of the PT’s so-called “revocation.”

The party has also announced it will seek the revocation of the 20-year freeze on spending, enshrined in the Brazilian Constitution in 2017, which has caused a massive deterioration in public services, infrastructure and poverty relief programs. The PT claims the 2017 spending cap is the only obstacle to a massive investment program to bring back good paying jobs—its own version of the fraudulent “Build Back Better” promises of Joe Biden in the United States.

Former PT president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (right) with favored running mate, his former right-wing rival Geraldo Alckmin (Credit Ana Nascimento, AgenciaBrasil)

The PT’s renewed bid for the presidency with the candidacy of former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva takes place under extraordinary social conditions. Massive death from COVID-19 has been joined with a sharp growth in extreme poverty, hunger, unemployment and inflation. With the ruling class conscious it is presiding over a social powder keg that is irreconcilable with democratic forms of rule, the fascistic President Jair Bolsonaro and his far-right allies are working day and night on preparations to overturn a likely defeat at the polls in October.

Their attacks on the electoral system have reached such a pitch that the chiefs of the armed forces themselves warn of a putsch, or a “Capitol scenario,” ordering that military exercises be brought forward in order to have the entire armed forces available for action during the elections—above all to suppress workers’ resistance to a coup.

Under these conditions, the Workers Party is entirely dedicated to stabilizing Brazilian capitalism and preventing popular opposition to Bolsonaro developing into a massive movement against capitalism itself. The PT’s recent announcements are designed to lend a “left” veneer to Lula’s essentially right-wing, pro-business electoral campaign. That campaign has followed in the footsteps of the PT’s right-wing opposition to Bolsonaro since 2018, based entirely on criticisms of his incapacity to please foreign capital, peppered with feigned concern over the massive COVID death rate and the record poverty engulfing Brazilian workers.

In launching his presidential bid in November 2021, Lula toured Europe, meeting Germany’s then chancellor-in-waiting Olaf Scholtz, Spain’s Pedro Sánchez and France’s Emmanuel Macron, who staged a high-profile reception with honor guards, as he used Lula’s visit to bolster his own right-wing presidential campaign. Speaking before the European Parliament, Lula extolled the ever more right-wing and militarized European Union as a beacon of peace and democracy, signaling to European capitalism a future shift from Bolsonaro’s US-centric foreign policy, which has attracted both internal and external criticism.

Later in December, Lula made public his negotiations to have as his running mate Geraldo Alckmin, the four-time São Paulo governor who twice led the presidential ticket of the Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB), the main right-wing opposition to PT rule in a de facto two-party system that prevailed from 1994 to 2018. Alckmin finished the 2018 race with only 5 percent of the vote, the worst performance since the PSDB was founded in 1988.

Alckmin left the PSDB in November after years of a thoroughly opportunistic feud with current São Paulo Governor João Doria. Supporting Bolsonaro against him in 2018 and pushing the PSDB even further to the right, Doria also blocked Alckmin’s internal party bid to reclaim the São Paulo governorship in 2022. Alckmin has a firm base in the murderous São Paulo Military Police corps and the conservative countryside of the state, as well as in the most right-wing unions, which have historically opposed the PT and are dominated by the Solidarity and Social Democratic (PSD) parties.

Alckmin has been chosen by Lula as the ideal running mate to reassure Brazilian and foreign capital that the PT will defend their interests, whatever talk of “social reform” it feeds into the electoral propaganda mill for the benefit of the party’s left wing, the pseudo-lefts that orbit it and the unions.

Both of the high-profile economic promises made by the PT must be taken for what they are: lies.

The use of the term “revocation” for the PT’s proposal for new labor laws is a lie in itself. It is used deliberately by the party president, Gleisi Hoffmann, and the likes of Brasil de Fato and Brasil247 in a bid to hide the true content of the proposal. Lula himself cited as his “model” a law in Spain sponsored by the pseudo-left Podemos, the junior partner in the ruling coalition, which it claimed during its own electoral campaign would “reverse” the 2012 labor reform imposed by the European Union. The 2012 bill made casual labor in Spain grow to 25 percent of the workforce and imposed massive cuts to severance pay, allowing employers to fire workers en masse.

Despite the PT’s false claims, not even Spain’s labor minister, Yolanda Diaz, claims the new Podemos bill to be a “revocation” of the 2012 act. It barely touches the casualization of labor and the previous cuts to severance pay. The new bill in Spain is part of a brutal austerity package demanded by the European Union in exchange for funds that will immediately be diverted to the stock markets. It was tied to yet another “pension reform” increasing contributions and retirement age.

At the same time, the Socialist Party-Podemos government has doubled the state funding for the unions which are needed, in the words of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, to “maintain social peace” and allow “flexibility for employers to adapt to circumstances through the use of furlough schemes” such as those authorized in Brazil by Rousseff in 2015.

The increase in union funding is also the sole concern of the Brazilian unions. The Alckmin-allied Força Sindical reacted to the PT’s announcement of the “revocation” program by declaring the unions are seeking “improvements” in the law, but not its revocation.

The need to increase union funding in exchange for “social peace”—that is, the suppression of class struggle—was recognized by one of the chief sponsors of the Brazilian labor reform, former House speaker Rodrigo Maia, who is currently a coordinator in the campaign of the PSDB’s Doria for the presidency. Maia reacted to the PT’s proposal with a heavy handed overture to the unions, disguised as “democratic” concerns. “I’m convinced they are right,” he said. “Unions are a fundamental structure for the defense of workers and democracy. The first thing Hitler did in Germany was to suppress German unions. We really went too far” in the reform.

As for the promise to repeal the spending cap, its starting point is a thoroughly right-wing attack on a series of measures bypassing the cap sponsored by the Bolsonaro government, which the PT claims hurt Brazil’s “credibility.” PT president Hoffmann has repeatedly declared that the spending cap is effectively defunct. She told CNN last week that “this spending cap has already been abandoned by everybody. By the way, this is an embarrassment. Nobody respected it,” concluding that “the markets can’t defend something that nobody respects.” In other words, the PT’s program is to sponsor a spending cap that is “respected,” i.e., more reliable austerity.

Nelson Barbosa, who was Rousseff’s economy minister, spoke recently to Folha de S. Paulo as a representative of the PT’s Perseu Abramo think-tank economics team and explained the PT’s proposal is to start the government with a civil service reform that would cut entry level wages and lengthen the span of career progression. That would allow freeing up room for “investments”—that is, a boon to major companies and stock markets such as the “furlough schemes” of 2015, before Rousseff’s impeachment.

The PT’s austerity promises are being welcomed by the financial markets, with the financial daily Valor crediting the fall of the US dollar against the Brazilian real on January 19 largely to Lula’s defense of Alckmin to a group of PT-aligned websites such as Brasil247, excluding major dailies and TV stations.

The true aim of the PT’s economic announcements was to provide the pseudo-lefts and the unions talking points to convince workers and youth that the party can be pushed to the left and that Lula’s right-wing campaign is to be “disputed” with the likes of his running-mate, Alckmin.

The lies about the “revocation” of the labor reform were immediately echoed by the leader of the PT’s supposed left wing, Rui Falcão, who currently feigns opposition to the alliance with Alckmin. Falcão declared that “Lula’s and Hoffman’s declarations about changing the labor laws set a good tone for the program by bringing the working class to the agenda.”

Predictably, the issue was also amplified by the international voice of pro-imperialist “socialists,” Jacobin magazine, which ran an article on January 20 claiming Lula’s declarations were causing “desperation” in the ruling class. That would imply a possible third Lula government would be nothing less than anti-capitalist.

The turn to the unions by the PT in alliance with major right-wing figures such as Maia and Alckmin, with Força Sindical and the Solidarity party playing a major role in the rehabilitation of the hated former São Paulo governor, is designed to push a corporatist agenda in which the unions take center stage in anticipation of a major eruption of class struggle. Such opposition is already developing, with workers unwilling to accept the economic disaster engulfing tens of millions, the threats of dictatorship, and the onslaught of Omicron, for which the PT offers no solution, except for an entirely inadequate campaign to expand vaccinations. The task of the unions is to impose poverty wages in so-called “negotiations” in the name of “national unity” and “keeping up the economy” as the ruling class seeks “competitiveness” by cutting labor costs.

The PT’s Senate leader Paulo Paim had already declared in July that the party intended to emulate the pro-union campaigns of US president Joe Biden, which are an integral part of US war preparations against China. While the PT is nominally seeking a rapprochement with China and the European Union, the nationalist logic of international geopolitical competition imposes the same need to increase working class exploitation and suppress opposition in every country.

Canada’s opposition parties line up behind imperialist war drive against Russia

James Clayton & Roger Jordan

Canada’s opposition parties have lined up squarely behind the imperialist war drive against Russia, which is being spearheaded by the Biden administration in Washington and backed to the hilt by the Trudeau Liberal government. There is not a single principled opponent of imperialist aggression to be found in Canada’s Parliament, only cheerleaders for war. From the “left” New Democrats to the avowedly right-wing Conservatives, the Greens and the pro-Quebec independence Bloc Quebecois, all the opposition parties are whipping up war fever.

The Trudeau government announced last Wednesday that it is extending its participation in NATO’s training mission for the Ukrainian military, Operation Unifier, for three years until 2025. Ottawa will send 60 additional Canadian Armed Forces personnel, raising the Ukraine deployment to 260, provide a $120 million loan and grant Kiev access to Canadian signals intelligence. The troop deployment, Ottawa has added, could be increased to 400 at any time.

In his announcement, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau struck a provocative tone, declaring that his government supports “the Ukrainian people” in their struggle to “choose the course of their country” and “defend their territorial integrity.” This was a reference to the Trudeau government’s support for Kiev’s reconquest of Crimea, which was annexed by Russia following a referendum in 2014. The annexation was Russia’s response to the fascist-spearheaded coup in Kiev, orchestrated by the US, Germany and Canada to overthrow pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovitch and install a pro-Western puppet regime.

Trudeau’s remarks came as top Biden administration officials ratcheted up pressure on Russia by refusing to rule out Ukraine’s admission to NATO, sending massive amounts of military gear to Kiev and preparing to deploy up to 50,000 troops to Eastern Europe. As the World Socialist Web Site noted in a statement Friday, Washington’s primary goal is to goad President Vladimir Putin into attacking Ukraine and triggering a military conflict. “The conflict that Washington is provoking with Russia over Ukraine threatens the globe with a catastrophe beyond measure,” the statement warned. “Driven by insoluble internal crisis and rapacious geopolitical ambition, US imperialism is recklessly marching to the brink of World War III.”

Canadian imperialism fully endorses this reckless policy for the same reasons.

On her arrival in Kiev yesterday for talks with top Ukrainian leaders, Canada’s Defense Minister Anita Anand said Canada stood by the claims of Biden, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and other NATO leaders that a Russian invasion is imminent, although Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has called them unhelpful and untrue. Later in the week Anand is to travel to Latvia, the Baltic republic where Canada has deployed over 500 soldiers since 2017, to lead NATO’s new Forward Presence Battle Group against Russia.

Speaking alongside Trudeau, Anand and Foreign Minister Mélane Joly last Wednesday, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, a longtime supporter of the Ukrainian far right, stood reality on its head and accused Russia of attempting to create “a world in which might makes right and where the great powers ... have the authority to redraw the borders, dictate the foreign policies...” This comes from a representative of the Western imperialist powers whose wars of aggression have razed Yugoslavia, Iraq, Haiti, Yemen, Afghanistan, Syria and Libya and imposed murderous sanctions on governments who refuse to obey their diktats.

In so far as the opposition parties have criticized the Liberal government’s role in NATO’s war threats and preparations against Russia, it is for not providing Ukraine more fulsome support. The Conservatives have complained that the Trudeau government is only sending “non-lethal” support to Ukraine. They are demanding that Ottawa provide Ukraine with offensive weapons originally intended for the Kurdish Peshmerga guerrillas in Iraq. “Ukraine has been clear in its request to the Trudeau government of what it needs to defend itself: Lethal defensive weapons,” declared a statement signed by three Tory frontbench MPs. “The time for half-measures has long passed. Ukraine needs Canada’s support, and today Mr. Trudeau let them down.”

This position was backed up by the Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC), which has its origins in the pro-Nazi Ukrainian nationalist movement of the 1930 and 1940s. The UCC declared, “It is disappointing that Canada has not joined our allies in providing Ukraine with weapons.”

Full support for Canada’s continued military deployment to the Ukraine was extended by the New Democrats. In a statement on Ukraine, the party declared, “New Democrats stand in solidarity with the people of Ukraine. We are alarmed by escalating threats of further Russian invasion. Canada was the first country to recognize Ukraine’s independence 30 years ago, and we must continue to support an independent and democratic Ukraine.”

To cover its support for imperialist violence in a “progressive” garb, the NDP said it opposed Ottawa providing “lethal” aid to Kiev—leaving that, for the moment, to the US, Britain and other “allies” it wants Canada to work in close concert with; expressed concern about “extremists” in Ukraine’s military; and concluded with an appeal for a “diplomatic solution” with Russia.

This is all hogwash. Ukraine today is neither “democratic” nor “independent.” The current regime has its origins in the imperialist-sponsored 2014 coup, in which far-right and outright neo-Nazi elements such as “Svoboda” (Freedom), “Right Sector” and the Azov Battalion played key roles. These fascists provide the Ukrainian state with its shock troops on the front line against Russian speakers in Donetsk and Lugansk, regions that only attempted to separate from Ukraine after the far-right government passed legislation suppressing the Russian language and launched hysterical campaigns targeting ethnic Russians.

Ukraine is governed by some of the most corrupt oligarchs to emerge from the Stalinist bureaucracy, which liquidated the Soviet Union in order to enrich themselves. The top 10 percent of the population controls 60 percent of national wealth.

“Independent” Ukraine is, in fact, a political dependency of American, Canadian, British and German imperialism, whose collective will is expressed through NATO and the IMF, and to which Ukraine says, “Yes, sir.”

As for its professed commitment to “diplomacy,” the NDP supports economic sanctions on Russia under the 2015 Magnitsky Act, which would target Russia’s political leadership. The Russian government has declared that such sanctions would result in the severing of all diplomatic relations, a development associated historically with the commencement of military hostilities. In calling for these sanctions, the NDP is thus seeking to provoke an end to diplomatic efforts.

The bogus character of the NDP’s “concern” about extremists in the Ukrainian military was underscored by its participation in a bellicose mobilization organized by the far-right UCC on January 23.

NDP Foreign Affairs critic Heather McPherson and Blake Desjarlais, the deputy chair of the party’s parliamentary caucus, joined the UCC-initiated “Stand with Ukraine” mobilization. Also participating were former Defense Minister Harjit Sajan, Mary Ng, and Marco Mendicino from the Liberals, Dave Epp and others from the Conservatives and the BQ’s Foreign Affairs and National Security critic Stéphane Bergeron.

NDP Foreign Affairs critic Heather McPherson and other NDP MPs joined the bellicose "Stand with Ukraine" mobilization mounted by the Ukrainian Canadian Congress.

McPherson’s and Desjarlais’ tweets of support for the UCC and the right-wing Kiev regime are in keeping with their party’s support for Canadian imperialism’s participation in a long series of US-led wars of aggression. From the 1999 NATO assault on Yugoslavia, through the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, the 2011 “regime change” war in Libya and the ongoing interventions in Iraq and Syria, Canada’s social democrats have dressed up their support for imperialist war and intrigue in phoney “human rights” and “responsibility to protect” rhetoric.

The NDP’s visceral hostility to any opposition to Canadian imperialism and its far-right allies was underscored by the party leadership’s refusal to defend MPs Leah Gazan, Nikki Ashton and Don Davies, after they came under vicious attack from the UCC for posting tweets critical of Canada’s full-throated support for NATO’s provocative and threatening stance on Ukraine.

Gazan, who counts Holocaust survivors among her relatives, came under special attack for pointing to Canada’s support of “an anti-Semitic, neo-nazi [sic] and fascist militia,” referring to the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, whose members have received training from Canada’s government. 

The UCC, along with the Zionist Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, preposterously accused Gazan of trivializing the Holocaust, claiming her tweet was “ignorant, inaccurate and hurtful” and “could provoke attacks against our community.”

Gazan quickly walked back her comments and voiced her support for the Canadian imperialist-NATO narrative that Ukraine is a victim of Russian aggression, when it is the NATO powers that have encircled Russia and are intent on using Ukraine as an economic vassal and geostrategic outpost.

Of course, Gazan said nothing about the political origins and record of the UCC, which has long enjoyed the sponsorship of the Canadian state and, like the contemporary far-right and neo-Nazi militia groups in the Ukraine, celebrates the Ukrainian ultra-nationalists and fascists who collaborated with the Nazis during the Second World War, including in the mass murder of Jews and Poles. The UCC recently saluted the 70th anniversary of the creation of the League for the Liberation of Ukraine, which was founded by members of Stepan Bandera’s fascist and Nazi collaborationist Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists who were given safe haven in Canada after the Third Reich’s defeat.

Meanwhile, in its official statement of last week on Ukraine, the NDP top brass went out of its way to downplay the significant role fascists play in Ukraine’s security forces and allied militia, saying it was “concerned” about “reports of extremism within a small part of the Ukrainian military,” a “problem,” that it hastened to add “many militaries, including our own, have faced.”

Ukraine war would threaten regional and global food prices

Jason Melanovski

A potential war between Ukraine and Russia, provoked by the United States and NATO, and the economic disruption it would inevitably cause, would have a disastrous effect on already rising regional and global food prices.

Ukraine—long known as the “bread basket” of Europe—is expected to be the world’s third largest exporter of corn and fourth largest exporter of wheat for the 2021-2022 harvest year, according to the International Grains Council. In addition, the former Soviet Republic of 40 million people is also a major exporter of barley, sunflower oil and rapeseed. Russia, meanwhile, is the world’s largest wheat exporter, and is expected to export 36.5 million metric tons of wheat for the 2021-2022 harvest year.

Any of the “crippling sanctions” that the Biden administration is threatening Russia with would prove disastrous for global food prices by further limiting the supply of wheat and grain.

The Pryvoz Market in Odessa, Ukraine. (Visavis/Flickr)

In early January, the United Nations Food Price Index reported that global food prices had already risen 28.1 percent in 2021, the highest level since 2008. According to UN senior economist Abdolreza Abbassian, food prices normally settle after production rises to meet demand. However, such a scenario is unlikely to occur in 2022.

Citing the high price of basic commodities, global climate change and the unceasing global COVID-19 pandemic, Abbassian wrote that such conditions “leave little room for optimism about a return to more stable market conditions, even in 2022.”

A disruption to Ukrainian exports would be especially damaging to countries in Africa and Asia such as Afghanistan, Sudan, Yemen, Libya, Lebanon, Indonesia, Malaysia and Bangladesh. Many of these countries are already considered “food insecure” and all of them import a large amount of Ukrainian wheat.

Alex Smith, a food and agricultural analyst at the Breakthrough Institute, wrote in Foreign Policy, “Of the 14 countries that rely on Ukrainian imports for more than 10 percent of their wheat consumption, a significant number already face food insecurity from ongoing political instability or outright violence.”

It should be noted that the “political instability” cited in Yemen, Libya and Afghanistan is the direct result of criminal interventions and wars by US imperialism.

While the poorer countries of Africa and Asia would suffer greatly, the major industrialized countries of Europe and North America would not be spared from a rapid spike in food prices caused by a US-provoked war in Ukraine.

Senior British Conservative MP Tobias Ellwood warned British consumers they should brace for even higher food prices.

“There will be huge impact on gas and oil prices and grain as well. The price of biscuits, can you believe it, will actually increase simply because Ukraine produces a third of the world’s grain,” Ellwood told the Times Radio.

Ukraine itself has already been hit by rapidly rising food prices, and the administration of President Voldymyr Zelensky has warned Ukrainians to expect a 10 to 20 percent jump in basic food prices in 2022.

Food prices in Russia likewise are rising, climbing 7.7 percent last year. In December, the Russian government responded to the crisis by capping prices on basic items like sugar and sunflower oil. The Kremlin also imposed export taxes on wheat and grain to discourage sales abroad.

In both countries, workers are forced to spend an even larger amount of their income on food than workers in Europe and North America, who are also struggling with rapidly rising inflation.

Over 60 percent of Russians spend half their monthly income on food, and average Ukrainians similarly spend more than 50 percent of their income on food.

While food prices rise in both countries, the COVID-19 pandemic continues to infect and claim the lives of ten of thousands of Russians and Ukrainians.

On January 29, Ukraine's Ministry of Health reported a record daily high of 37,351 new infections, surpassing the previous record set a day earlier. With an additional 149 deaths reported, the country officially passed 100,000 deaths. In November, the country regularly reported 700 to 800 deaths per day.

Rather than implementing any serious prevention measures, the Zelensky administration suggested schools move online and offered a $37 cash payment for vaccination.

In neighboring Russia the Omicron variant continues to cause case rates to explode .

While the world's capitalist governments continue to concern themselves with preparing what would be the biggest military conflict in Europe since the end of World War II in 1945, opinion polls in both Russia and the United States continue to demonstrate widespread opposition to a war over Ukraine.

In Ukraine itself, polls persistently show that Ukrainians are primarily worried over the rising costs of food and energy and the COVID-19 pandemic, rather than the threat of war with Russia.

According to a December 2021 opinion poll by Rating, 72 percent of Ukrainians consider inflation the most pressing issue, 70 percent stated the country was moving in the “wrong direction” under Zelensky and less than half believe a war will actually happen, despite the warmongering hysteria promoted by the Biden administration.

That the Biden administration and NATO are continuing to move towards war with Russia despite widespread working class opposition and concerns over rapid inflation and the ongoing pandemic is an indictment of the entire capitalist system.

Expiration of expanded tax credit throws millions of US children into poverty

Chase Lawrence

Amid a surge in the Omicron variant in the United States, the Democrats have allowed expanded Child Tax Credit (CTC) payments to expire with 30 million families not seeing the payments on January 15 after just six months of the program.

The program, approved as part of President Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan (ARP) bailout, paid about $80 billion over six months for up to $300 per child each month and was set to expire in January 2022. The total amount paid amounts to a little over one fifth of the $350 billion in the ARP, which states can use for police, and a fraction of the total $1.9 trillion bill.

Students walk down the hallway at Tussahaw Elementary school on Wednesday, Aug. 4, 2021, in McDonough, Ga. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson)

The end of the payments come as the Biden administration pushes forwards with its policy of keeping workplaces and schools open, with the predictable result being millions of workers and children getting infected and child hospitalizations soaring. Roughly 2,500 people are dying of COVID-19 in the US every day, with 900,000 people in the US having died from the virus to date. Twenty-seven children died and over 1.15 million were infected with COVID-19 in the week ending January 20.

Approximately 35 million families with 65 million children have relied on the expanded monthly child tax credits to make life a little more bearable. About four in 10 households receiving CTC checks from late July to September 2021 used the checks to pay off debt, according to the US Census Bureau.

Of households earning less than $35,000 per year, 91 percent used the money for food, utilities, rent or mortgage, clothing, or education costs between July 21 and September 27, 2021, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP).

The CBPP, a liberal think tank, had warned that 10 million children would be at risk of falling below the already extremely low poverty line or becoming even more impoverished should the payments expire, with another 27 million expected to lose all or part of the credit, and all 65 million recipients losing some credit.

The expanded tax credit was found to keep 3.7 million children out of poverty last year according to an analysis by Columbia University’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy, with the rate of childhood poverty expected to jump as much as 5 percent from 12.1 to 17.1 percent in the early part of 2022. Some estimates put the reduction in childhood poverty at close to 30 percent from the program alone.

At his press conference on January 19, President Biden indicated the White House would not try to reinstate the program, saying he was “not sure” if the CTC would go into a new and even more watered-down version of the failed Build Back Better social infrastructure legislation.

The Build Back Better legislation was severely cut back, and then scrapped entirely due to the opposition of right-wing Democratic Senators Joe Manchin, of West Virginia, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, despite Democrats enjoying majorities in both House and Senate as well as holding the presidency.

Under Biden, the federal eviction moratorium started under the Trump administration has come to an end, as well as federal jobless aid and other federal assistance programs. The predictable consequence of the Democrats’ failure to continue the expanded child tax credit will be a further impoverishment of millions of working people and their children as their standards of living continue to erode, aided by inflation, which rocketed upward in December reaching the highest rate in 40 years.

Xenia, Ohio city councilman Will Urschel, who is also vice president of the Bridges of Hope nonprofit, told the Dayton Daily about evictions, “The moratorium is finished, families with children had their tax credit terminated in December, COVID unemployment benefits are gone.” Comparing the precarious position families are being put into, he said “It’s like Jenga. When’s the tower going to fall?”

Urschel stated that “The consensus was a lot of families were using that to supplement their income. With the termination of that, in next couple months, families are going to be struggling to meet basic needs.”

Biden’s proposal for extending the CTC payments was shot down by Manchin on the basis that it does not exclude those without employment income, such as grandparents on fixed income as well as parents who are students or disabled, with Manchin going on Fox News in December to declare his opposition.

Manchin opposed the “fully refundable” tax credit, which is available to people who have no taxable income, unlike the pre-pandemic program. Manchin demanded the inclusion of a work requirement in a permanent tax credit plan, as well as an upper limit requirement of $60,000 per family—meaning families who increased their incomes would lose the tax credit, as well as families living in urban areas, which on average have high cost of living.

Republican senators echoed Manchin’s opposition to the “fully refundable” tax credit, with Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine turning reality on its head claiming the “fully refundable” tax credit “went to very high-income people.”

Under the old rules, 23 million children did not qualify because their families did not make enough money, being required to earn at least $36,000 a year according to Megan Curran, policy director at the Columbia University Center on Poverty and Social Policy, speaking to NPR. Curran and her Columbia colleagues project a jump in the child poverty rate by a third or more between December and January alone.

Hunger was already on the rise in December. Twenty-one million Americans did not have enough to eat in early December, according to the US Census Bureau, as relief payments ended and inflation ate away at workers’ incomes. Hunger, particularly among children, will no doubt be exacerbated for the poorest segments of the American population by the end of CTC.

Millions of working class and poor families will be losing hundreds of dollars per month at a point at which more than half of Americans cannot afford $1,000 in unplanned expenses, according to a recent survey by personal finance company Bankrate.

The survey found little difference in the ability of different age groups to cover a surprise expense. Inflation is responsible for a large part of this, with Bankrate finding that prices were rising at the fastest pace in nearly 40 years. Nearly half (49 percent) of adults surveyed cited inflation as the reason they were saving less. The Personal Saving Rate reported by the Bureau of Economic Analysis fell by almost 3 percent between August and November 2021.

The elimination of the CTC has been demanded by sections of big business, as a “disincentive to work” with the aim of forcing workers to risk their lives in the pandemic, taking whatever low wage work is available.

In the end, this policy is a confirmation of the law of capitalist production laid out by Karl Marx in his landmark work Capital: that an industrial reserve army kept at, or below, near-starvation levels of existence is necessitated by modern capitalist industry such that it can be called upon in times of expansion and thrown to the curb in times of contraction.

That millions of poor children are going hungry and tens of thousands of families are being evicted constitutes a social crime. The resources clearly exist to wipe out hunger, childhood poverty, homelessness, and every other major social ill facing modern society. Yet the government, the entire political establishment, and American capitalism have deliberately cut off limited aid provided at the outset of the pandemic in order to coerce workers back into unsafe and underpaid jobs, as well as to redirect social spending to war and bailing out the financial oligarchy.

No constituency for social reform exists within the ruling class. The elimination of hunger, poverty, and the coronavirus requires a mass movement of the working class on the basis of a socialist program to expropriate the financial oligarchy, put its massive wealth under workers’ control to pay for the social programs to eliminate these social ills along with other pressing social issues.