Living in a Time of Catastrophe

Patrick Mazza

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

There are times when the world seems to run so much in the wrong direction that words almost fail. How does one express what’s going on in a way that actually makes a difference? When the world seems determined to wheel off the deep end.

To start with the fundamental issue. If there ever was a moment in human existence when we were called to exhibit the solidarity of a common human family, it is now. The world’s climate scientists have issued a dire warning. The sixth global assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change runs over 3,000 pages. Carbon Brief has aptly summarized the key takeaways.

The threat that climate change poses to human well-being and the health of the planet is ‘unequivocal’ . . . any further delay in global action to slow climate change and adapt to its impacts ‘will miss a brief and rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a livable and sustainable future for all.’ Among the findings, the report concludes that:

+ Climate change has already caused ‘substantial damages and increasingly irreversible losses, in terrestrial, freshwater and coastal and open ocean marine ecosystems.’

+ It is likely that the proportion of all terrestrial and freshwater species ‘at very high risk of extinction will reach 9% (maximum 14%) at 1.5C.’ This rises to 10% (18%) at 2C and 12% (29%) at 3C.

+ Approximately 3.3 to 3.6 billion people ‘live in contexts that are highly vulnerable to climate change.’

+ Where climate change impacts intersect with areas of high vulnerability, it is ‘contributing to humanitarian crises’ and ’increasingly driving displacement in all regions, with small island states disproportionately affected.’

+ Increasing weather and climate extreme events ‘have exposed millions of people to acute food insecurity and reduced water security,’ with the most significant impacts seen in parts of Africa, Asia, Central and South America, small islands and the Arctic.

+ Approximately 50-75% of the global population could be exposed to periods of ‘life-threatening climatic conditions’ due to extreme heat and humidity by 2100.

+ Climate change ‘will increasingly put pressure on food production and access, especially in vulnerable regions, undermining food security and nutrition.’

+ Climate change and extreme weather events ‘will significantly increase ill health and premature deaths from the near- to long-term.’

Yet even as this urgent call to action was being issued, war was raging in Ukraine. Underscoring the incongruity of the situation, Ukrainian scientists involved in the process “forced some members of the Ukrainian delegation to pull out of the approval session and hide in bomb shelters,” Carbon Brief notes.

A world that urgently needs to come together to address the greatest crisis in the history of humanity is instead breaking apart into Western and Eurasian blocs. At the same time, the threat of nuclear war that seemed to have faded has now roared back. Nuclear arsenals are on high alert across the world.

The forces that divide us

Let’s be real about this. Powerful forces in the world seek exactly the outcomes we are seeing. A world divided into blocs enhances the potency of national security complexes on all sides. Even before the Ukraine War broke out, Raytheon CEO Greg Hayes said the company is seeing, “opportunities for international sales. We just have to look to last week where we saw the drone attack in the UAE, which have attacked some of their other facilities. And of course, the tensions in Eastern Europe, the tensions in the South China Sea, all of those things are putting pressure on some of the defense spending over there. So I fully expect we’re going to see some benefit from it.”

Meanwhile, a long-term economic crisis in Russia has been undermining support for the government. Boris Kagarlitsky, a genuine Russian Communist (the people from whom Putin steals elections nowadays), says, “The major thing is that Russian society and economy is in now in a very deep crisis. The neoliberal model of capitalism actually completely failed in Russia . . . The hard fact is that the system is not working . . . There is enormous social tension in Russia . . . The real background reason this is happening is that people were fed up . . . The unpopularity of every single governing figure in the country, of every single oligarch, of every single official, is absolutely incredible . . . Putin’s entourage . . . thought they were going to have a short and successful war, a little war, just to improve our ratings. It was very much domestic reasons . . . which led them to do that. It was an attempt to avoid reform or revolution . . . by presenting military threats as a reason for keeping sovereign power in a very autocratic, undemocratic way.”

“War is the health of the State,” wrote radical activist Russell Bourne during the First World War. “It automatically sets in motion throughout society those irresistible forces for uniformity, for passionate co-operation with the Government in coercing into obedience the minority groups and individuals which lack the larger herd sense.”

War is also the health of the fossil fuel energy complex. The connection of the Ukraine War with fossil fuels is so much in the foreground it barely needs to be emphasized. Russia propels its economy and war machine by being one of the world’s largest oil and gas producers. The growing China market gives Russia confidence it does not need Western markets.

Meanwhile, corks are popping in Houston at near record oil and gas prices that are exploding profits in what has been a financially troubled fossil fuel industry. They might even save the fracking industry, which has been a money-losing Ponzi scheme. Already fossil fuel executives and the politicians they own are using the war to argue for more public lands drilling and reversal of the Keystone XL pipeline cancellation.  Of course, the hope is that the war has so underscored the folly of fossil fuel dependence it will cause a more rapid transition to clean energy. But a climate of war magnifies the voices of so-called “serious people” and the status quo they represent, and that is fossil fuels.

The fundamental evolutionary question

At this stage in human history, we have arrived at fundamental questions about humanity’s growing powers. One can argue that the unique power of the human species to dominate Planet Earth is our employment of fire. While other species use natural fire, sometime between 400,000 and one million years ago, humans learned how to make and direct fire. Now our fires have reached a potency that we either learn to control them or be consumed by them, either the slow boil of climate heating or the rapid burnout out nuclear holocaust. The evolutionary challenge is staring us in the face. It is as basic as that.

This requires a new relationship with power itself. We have it in us to make that relationship. Most people do not want war, and certainly not nuclear war. Most people want to leave a world for our children that is not wrought by climate turmoil. It is in our better instincts as human beings. But somehow, the systems of power that rule the world, and those who climb to the top of them, continually violate our better instincts. The bigger are the systems, and the more massive their reach, the more this seems to be true.

We used to think evolution took place in a gradual manner. But evolutionary biologists Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge took a deeper look at the fossil record and found a different story. Whole suites of species suddenly vanished to be replaced by others. From this they developed the theory of punctuated equilibrium, that catastrophes which wiped out previously dominant species opened up ecological niches for new species to rise. The classic example is the comet strike which caused the dinosaurs to go extinct, opening the way for us mammals. Abrupt change seems to be a rule in human society as well. Big changes happen rapidly, as a result of crisis. The French Revolution stirred by famine. The Russian and Chinese revolutions of this century caused by world wars.

This is one of those punctuated moments, with both exclamation points and question marks. It is never easy to live through a time of catastrophe. We can hope we will avoid absolute worst case scenarios such as nuclear war. But we should use this time of crisis to call into question a world system that has brought us to this point. When things go as wrong as they are going today, when a world that desperately needs to come together breaking into pieces, we need to ask fundamental questions about the system itself and how to replace it.

At a basic level, we need to learn to say enough. To restrain the pursuit of power for its own sake, and embed it within broader and, yes, moral goals. There is a basic lesson that ramifies through the world’s major spiritual paths that we must somehow bring to the way the world is governed. Compassion. Respect for the other. That golden mean of actually treating other people the way we hope to be treated ourselves. And when institutions violate it in their pursuit of power, whether they are governments waging wars or corporations abusing workers, we need to find ways to call them back to our better human instincts. That is up to us as people, working in movements for change.

A world grounded in compassion may seem utopian. But sometimes, what seems utopian is actually realistic, and what seems realistic is the road to radically dystopian outcomes. We are presented now with the picture of a world going toward just such outcomes. At this stage of human history and evolution, our powers having grown to the point where it is all too easy to envision us destroying ourselves, let us value the clarity of the moment and ask the fundamental questions of how we live here together. Let us make that other world we have said is possible. It will be if we learn to embody compassion in our institutions and our ways of life.

UK: Johnson government keeps Ukrainian refugees entry to bare minimum

Steve James

The response from Boris Johnson's Conservative government to the Ukrainian refugee crisis has been brutal and laced with breathtaking hypocrisy. Having played a leading role, along with the US, in provoking the Russian government into launching its catastrophic invasion, British imperialism is indifferent to the millions of people they have forced to flee for their lives.

Some two and half million refugees have already left Ukraine. Four million, and possibly as many as seven million, are anticipated. Of these, the vast majority are in Poland, where a largely voluntary effort centred on the country’s large Ukrainian population is seeking to house as many as 1.5 million people.

Women take care of children as they sit with their possessions at the train station in Warsaw, Poland, Sunday, March 13, 2022. More than 1.5 million refugees have arrived in Poland since the start of Russia's invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, out of a total of around 2.7 million people that the United Nations say have fled so far. (AP Photo/Czarek Sokolowski)

Following the invasion, the European Union (EU), on March 2, ordered its members prepare to receive a “mass influx” of refugees. A directive instructed member states to allow those fleeing to stay for at least one year, with the option of extending their stay to three, with no visa requirement. In contrast with the EU's general attitude towards refugees and asylum seekers fleeing poverty and imperialist generated bloodbaths, Ukrainian refugees are also allowed to receive social benefits, housing, education and be able to work.

Britain is no longer in the EU, and the marginal loosening of Fortress Europe's brutal rules to those fleeing the worst refugee crisis in Europe since World War 2, does not apply. The Tory government insisted it would enforce its own visa rules to refugees from Ukraine. Johnson told parliament, “The EU already, because of its Schengen border-free zone, has its own arrangements with Ukraine. They differed for a long time from those of the UK, but what we do have is a plan to be as generous as we possibly can to the people of Ukraine…” He added, “What we won’t do is simply abandon all checks. We don’t think that, that is sensible, particularly in view of the security concerns, the reasonable security concerns about people coming from that theatre of war.”

By Wednesday last week, only 957 Ukrainians had been granted visas to enter the UK, around 0.05 percent of the total and 4.5 percent of the 22,000 that had applied to the UK. By Friday the figure has risen to just 1,305 visas. The government continued to insist on onsite processing of forms, personal security checks and biometric data capture before only those with close family ties to Britain could enter the country.

Many reports emerged last week of Ukrainian refugees confronting incompetence and chaos in their efforts to stay with families and friends in the UK. Despite Johnson's claims of a “huge and very generous” visa programme, the implementation of the Ukraine Family Scheme has resulted in hundreds of traumatised people becoming victims of a vicious bureaucratic roller coaster.

Many arrived at the British Visa Application Centre (VAC) in Lviv, Ukraine only to find the office closed and the next available appointments the following week in Prague, Czech Republic. VACs are scattered in around 140 countries, but access to them is through a privately run portal run by visa outsourcing outfits such as TLSContact or VFSGlobal. Refugees, who have left their homes in mortal danger and without documentation are being shunted from one to the other in pursuit of biometric data and correctly completed forms.

Marianne Kay, whose 79-year-old mother is trying to reach the UK, described the atmosphere at a VAC in Rzeszow, Poland, near the Ukrainian border, where people are gathering from early morning in freezing temperatures. Marianne told the BBC people were “desperate”, “shouting at each other all time”. Staff were overwhelmed and “there is absolutely no way that people who work here can process so many applications. So it’s not working. People are very frustrated, very angry. They ran out of patience. If this continues for much longer, it does feel like there will be riots.”

Marianne had to wait two days in Rzeszow to even get the visa application processed. She and her mother will now have to travel to yet another VAC in Warsaw to see if their application has been successful.

At the Brussels VAC just 60 visa applications per day has overwhelmed the poorly staffed service. Politico.eu reported an A4 sheet stuck to the VAC office door apologising “if we are unable assit (sic) all of you quickly”. A couple with two children and a mother in law were turned away because only one of them had filled in a form. They would have to return later with correctly completed forms to get fingerprinted. The family had driven 2,500 km from Irpin, near Kyiv, when bombs starting falling, have been sleeping in their car and have run out of money.

An Afghan man, with Ukrainian citizenship, his wife and three children abandoned his cosmetics shop to flee Odesa as the war neared. The family had been waiting for hours outside the VAC. He said that the UK “always has been the most difficult country to get in for the refugees.”

Over 300 refugees hoping to reach the UK have arrived at Calais, France only to be turned back by the UK Border Force or French police and told they too had to go to Brussels or Paris for their biometric data to be taken. The Home Office, with its massive resources, had set up a trestle table offering bottled water, crisps and biscuits.

A temporary VAC was supposed to be set up in Lille, France—over 100 km from Calais—to which those turned back by the border forces were to be referred. Summing up the anti-immigration agenda that social policy is geared to, Home Secretary Priti Patel said the Home Office had not set up a VAC in Calais on the pretext it might attract people considering the desperate trip across the English Channel by inflatable dinghy.

The Daily Mail reported hundreds making their way from Calais to Lille only to find that the “pop-up” VAC did not yet exist. 22-year-old Roksolana, told the Mail, 'We were told that the visa centre would be open for business on Thursday but nothing's happened. It's just one of the many lies that we've been told by the British Government.”

Official brutality quickly generated broad disgust, with 182,000 people signing a petition calling for visa restrictions to be waived, forcing the matter to be debated in Westminster today.

Labour’s Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper called for the army to be used and more processing centres to be opened and various Tories, including Brexit hard right MPs such as Steve Baker, urged action in line with their support for NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine.

So determined was the government to keep Ukrainians out that Patel raised concerns with the Irish government—who have allowed refuge to over 2,500 people fleeing war—The Independent reported, “Priti Patel told Dublin she was concerned that the country’s welcoming policy towards Ukrainian refugees would allow them to reach the UK by the back door.”

By late last week, the government conceded marginal changes. Patel allowed that biometric data could be collected after refugees had arrived in the UK, although confusion persists over whether a second route beyond the Ukraine Family Scheme will be opened. Patel's Home Office was reported as having conceded that families of people already in the UK on temporary visas could travel to the UK. This, however, was too much for Johnson. Instead, a scheme to allow third parties, such as employers and local authorities to “sponsor” refugees is to be introduced.

Once they arrive, desperate Ukrainians are to be utilised as cheap labour for Britain's collapsing services and building industries, all of which have been reporting disastrous post Brexit labour shortages, intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic. Founder of building firm Redrow, Steve Morgan, personal worth £881 million, announced he intended to fund 1,000 Ukrainian refugees. Late February, immigration minister Kevin Foster tweeted, later deleted, a comment that refugees could apply to the “seasonal worker scheme”, mostly aimed at recruiting fruit pickers for backbreaking work in farms.

Saudi monarchy executes 81 men in one day: Medieval barbarism from top US ally in Mideast

Patrick Martin

In a brutal act of mass murder, the US-backed Saudi monarchy executed 81 men Saturday, the largest such massacre in the history of the kingdom. The Saudi government did not say how the executions were carried out, but beheading is the method it usually employs against its victims. Seven of those executed were Yemenis, one was Syrian, and the rest were Saudi citizens.

The barbaric action received only perfunctory attention in the American media, in sharp contrast to the saturation coverage of every alleged atrocity carried out by Russian forces in Ukraine. The White House and State Department did not issue any public statements.

While the Saudi Ministry of Interior claimed that the capital crimes for which the 81 had been executed included terrorism and “multiple heinous crimes that left a large number of civilians and law enforcement officers dead,” it gave no details of the alleged offenses or name any of the supposed victims killed by those executed.

The death toll was largest in a single day of executions since the bloodstained kingdom was founded by Ibn Saud in 1932, when he united the Arabian Peninsula in the wake of the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I by British and French imperialism.

The largest previous mass execution came in 1980, when 63 men were put to death after Islamist militants seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca in an effort to overthrow the regime. In 2016, the monarchy executed 47 people, including the Shi’ite Muslim leader Nimr al-Nimr, to suppress political opposition in the eastern provinces, largely populated by the Shi’ite minority.

Similar political considerations were apparently involved in Saturday’s bloodbath, as Shi’ite young men were the majority of those executed. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman—the real ruler of Saudi Arabia under the nominal reign of his senile, 85-year-old father King Salman—has focused internal repressive measures on Shi’ite opposition, portraying all dissidents as agents of Iran.

Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia Mohammad bin Salman Al Saud (Credit: en.kremlin.ru)

The regime dropped the death penalty for drug offenses in 2019, resulting in a sharp fall in state killings in 2020. This underscores the fact that Saturday’s mass execution, which produced a greater death toll in a single day than during all of 2020 or 2021, was for political offenses.

The Ministry of Interior issued a lurid statement portraying the victims as linked to foreign terrorist groups, including ISIS and Al Qaeda (both of them past beneficiaries of Saudi government support), who targeted government officials and “vital economic sites,” killed police and planted land mines, all without any evidence. The ministry did not even bother to present “confessions” extracted from the prisoners.

Some prisoners were said to be linked to the Houthis, the Yemeni group that overthrew a Saudi-backed regime and has been fighting a protracted war against Saudi military intervention in that country since 2015.

Human rights groups, including those formed by Saudi dissidents in exile, condemned the executions and said that the majority of the victims were from the brutally oppressed Shi’ite minority in the eastern region.

Reprieve, an advocacy group that tracks Saudi executions, said in a statement, “The world should know by now that when Mohammed bin Salman promises reform, bloodshed is bound to follow,” adding, “We fear for every [prisoner] following this brutal display of impunity.”

The statement noted the upcoming visit of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson to Riyadh, “to beg for Saudi oil to replace Russian gas,” and pointed to the contrast between US and European denunciation of Russian actions in Ukraine and “rewarding those of the crown prince.”

The Iran-based Shi’ite news aggregator Ahlul Bayt News Agency (ABNA) reported that those killed in the mass executions included “41 from the peace protest movement in Al-Ahsa and Qatif [eastern Saudi Arabia], under the false accusation of committing ‘terrorist’ acts,” and accused the Saudi regime of “committing more crimes against innocent people, exploiting the so-called war on terror and making use of the current international situation, where the world is preoccupied with what is happening in Ukraine, to carry out a horrific massacre against a group of young people who only exercised their legitimate right of expressing their right to freedom.”

The European Saudi Organization for Human Rights said that in the cases it had been able to document, the charges involved “not a drop of blood,” even under the rules laid down by the Saudi monarchy to establish criteria justifying executions. The nature of the charges in many of the cases could not be determined because of judicial secrecy and intimidation of family members of those put to death.

The group said it had documented cases in which prisoners had been tortured, held incommunicado and denied access to lawyers, despite the official claims that all the victims had full access to legal defense.

Ali Adubusi, the head of the group, said in a statement: “These executions are the opposite of justice. Some of these men were tortured, most trials were carried out in secret. This horrific massacre took place days after Mohammed bin Salman declared executions would be limited. It is the third such mass killing in the seven-year reign of King Salman and his son.”

Adubusi was referring to the long interview with the crown prince published in The Atlantic last week, one of the most shameful efforts to glorify the Saudi butcher. Bin Salman is portrayed in the article as an autocratic but liberal reformer who seeks to put an end to mass executions.

Such groveling—once the province of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman and other admirers of brute force—has been out of favor in the American corporate press since the crown prince was publicly linked to the killing of Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi, a regular op-ed contributor of the Washington Post. Khashoggi was murdered and dismembered inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey in 2018, by a hit squad dispatched by bin Salman.

The Saudi regime has been emboldened by the US-led war hysteria over Ukraine, not only to intensify its internal repression, but also to step up its near-genocidal war in Yemen. The assault on Yemen which began in 2015 has driven millions to the brink of starvation, creating what international agencies have characterized as the worst humanitarian crisis in the world, with more than 377,000 dead. The US government has been the principal enabler of these attacks, providing targeting information and replenishing Saudi weapons stockpiles.

According to a report Sunday in the Wall Street Journal, Saudi-led forces in Yemen carried out more than 700 airstrikes in February, the most since 2018, killing hundreds of Yemeni civilians. Most of the bombing raids have been focused on the oil-rich Marib area, where a Houthi offensive threatens to take the last significant portion of northern Yemen still under control of the Saudi puppet regime of ousted president Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi.

International Monetary Fund calls for drastic austerity measures in Sri Lanka

Saman Gunadasa

Early this month, as COVID-19 and the UN-NATO war drive against Russia battered the Sri Lankan economy, the International Monetary Fund Executive Board issued a report proposing brutal austerity measures to “solve” the country’s economic crisis. The program is a prescription for driving workers and the poor into even deeper poverty and starvation.

The IMF report noted that Sri Lanka had been “hit hard” by COVID-19 and faced a “highly vulnerable situation” with inadequate foreign reserves and an unsustainable public debt.

The Sri Lankan authorities’ response to the pandemic, the report said, was to implement “a broad-based set of relief measures,” including macroeconomic policy stimulus, an increase in social safety net spending and loan moratoriums for businesses, which led to increased government expenditure. As a result, the annual fiscal deficits for 2020 and 2021 exceeded 10 percent, it added.

Gotabhaya Rajapakse (AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena)

In reality, the Rajapakse government’s “relief measures” consisted of a meagre handout to the poor during the COVID-19 lockdown while providing hundreds of billions of rupees as “stimulus” for big business.

The IMF report warned that Sri Lanka had recorded negative 3.6 percent growth in 2020, with growth for 2021 estimated to be 3.6 percent. Public debt has grown to 119 percent of the GDP, foreign reserves have dried up and foreign loans repayment commitments will be $US7 billion for 2022 alone.

Implying that an economic implosion is imminent, the IMF Executive Board proposed a detailed list of austerity measures including:

* Restoring macroeconomic stability and debt sustainability, with “expenditure rationalisation, budget formulation and execution, and the fiscal rule” and the removal of state subsidies with meagre subsidies limited only to the “poorest of the poor.”

* Increasing interest rates.

* Reform state-owned enterprises, that is, privatisation and commercialisation of government corporations.

* The adoption of “cost-recovery energy pricing,” which means further increases in the price of fuel and electricity and the withdrawal of treasury funding for the Ceylon Petroleum Corporation and Ceylon Electricity Board.

* Increased taxation, including income tax and value added tax (VAT) and “revenue administration reform.”

* “Gradual return to market-determined and flexible exchange rates,” which means further devaluation of the rupee and higher prices for imported goods.

While the Rajapakse government has not yet approved the IMF program, Finance Minister Basil Rajapakse is scheduled to visit New York in early April for discussions.

The masses have already been devastated by the pandemic, scarcities of essentials and escalating commodity prices.

Like its counterparts around the world, the Rajapakse government’s criminal “profits before human lives” policies have seen COVID-19 infections rising to 655,000, even with abysmally low levels of testing, and the official death toll climb to over 16,370.

Sri Lanka’s official year-on-year rate of inflation in February hit 15.1 percent with food inflation 25.7 percent, a steep rise from September 202. Food prices have increased by 35 percent since February 2020.

The government has resorted to extended power cuts because of a scarcity of US dollars to pay for the oil shipments needed for thermal power generation. People are being forced into long queues to obtain cooking gas and fuel, while some essentials, including important medicines and milk powder, are not available.

On March 7, five days after the IMF released its report, the Central Bank devalued the rupee against the dollar by 15 percent to 230 rupees and allowed its value to be determined by the market. Last Thursday, the rupee climbed to 260 rupees a dollar and on Friday hit 265 rupees, setting the stage for further increases in inflation.

The Central Bank increased interest rates by 1 percent on March 7 while proposing higher prices for fuel, electricity, and water.

Interest rate increases by the US Federal Reserve and other major central banks in response to rising inflation amidst the global pandemic, have heavily impacted on Sri Lanka and many other so-called emerging market economies and low-income countries.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine, the US-NATO war drive and anti-Russian sanctions by the US and European imperialists are also hitting Sri Lanka hard.

An article entitled “Ukraine crisis batters Sri Lanka’s tea and tourism recovery strategy,” published in the Financial Times on March 7 noted that Sri Lankan tea sales to Russia, the second largest buyer of Sri Lankan tea and worth around $US500 million, could be blocked.

The rising oil prices caused by the Ukraine conflict, now exceeding $130 per barrel, is further depleting Sri Lanka’s very limited foreign currency reserves. Russia and Ukraine are respectively the first and third largest source of tourists to Sri Lanka.

The IMF’s warnings were released two weeks after the Financial Times published an editorial warning that Sri Lanka and Zambia were the most vulnerable of the world’s most heavily-indebted emerging economies.

Entitled “Better mechanisms are needed to help Sri Lanka, Zambia and others resolve their debts,” it declared on February 15 that the IMF existed to deal with such situations and insisted that reforms were needed to “put their economies back on track.”

Zambia has already agreed to implement IMF austerity measures and is moving to restructure its $15 billion debt, especially with China, a significant creditor of both Zambia and Sri Lanka.

Like all highly indebted countries, an IMF “restructuring” intervention or outright default will lead to harsh social attacks on the working class, as international finance capital demands a continuous inflow of money into its coffers.

Moody’s, S&P, Fitch and other ratings agencies have downgraded Sri Lanka’s credit rating to junk status and urged Sri Lanka to accept IMF intervention.

The Rajapakse government has already obtained swap facilities to avert a default, mainly from China and India and is also seeking another $US1 billion loan from India.

On March 6, the Colombo-based Sunday Times reported that Finance Minister Rajapakse was told by the Indian government that until he presented a plan for “economic recovery”—in other words, harsh austerity—it would be difficult for India to crisis-manage the Sri Lanka’s financial situation. Basil Rajapakse is scheduled to visit New Delhi later this month for discussions with India’s External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar.

On March 7, Sri Lanka’s big business lobby groups held a joint media conference echoing IMF demands and urging the government to engage with the IMF.

Big business representatives called on the government to cut subsidies, establish a “market driven pricing formula” for fuel, gas and electricity and allowing exchange rate flexibility. They also warned that apparel exporters were threatening to relocate their factories to Bangladesh, Vietnam or Africa and destroy thousands of Sri Lankan jobs if the economic crisis continued.

Construction companies said building materials shortages were threatening their 650,000-strong workforce, which has already shed around 50,000 workers due to stalled projects and other disruptions.

“Go to the IMF” has become the mantra of almost all economists in Sri Lanka and the opposition parties. Samagi Jana Balawegaya, the main parliamentary opposition party, and the United National Party had called for the IMF report to be tabled and debated in parliament.

Seeking to enlist their support for austerity measures, President Rajapakse announced plans to hold an all-party conference. The political establishment as a whole is determined to make the working class pay for the economic crisis and to use repressive measures to suppress opposition.

Last year mass strikes and protests involving hundreds of thousands of workers took place in the health, education, state administration, railways and plantations sectors demanding higher wages and better conditions.

New rounds of austerity measures will produce even greater struggles of the working class and the rural masses and bring them into direct political confrontation with the Rajapakse government.

New Zealand government expedites law to ramp up Russian sanctions

John Braddock

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern last week announced “significant” new sanctions would be placed on Russia, including oligarchs, individuals and companies “responsible for or associated with the invasion of Ukraine.”

The Russia Sanctions Bill was rushed through parliament under urgency on March 9. It provides a targeted, autonomous sanctions regime on the Russian government. “A Bill of this nature has never been brought before our Parliament, but with Russia vetoing UN sanctions we must act ourselves to support Ukraine and our partners in opposition to this invasion,” Ardern said.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern answers a question during a press conference at Parliament in Wellington, New Zealand. (Robert Kitchin/Pool Photo via AP)

New Zealand could not previously impose economic sanctions outside the UN. According to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, it has been restricted to sanctions authorised by the UN Security Council in regulations under the United Nations Act 1946. The new law circumvents this while the government considers a broader sanctions regime.

The Ardern government initially responded to Russia’s invasion by issuing travel bans, prohibiting exports to the military and suspending bilateral foreign ministry consultations. International pressure to apply wider sanctions soon followed. The Wall Street Journal noted on March 1 that while the US and its allies were ramping up sanctions, New Zealand—a member of the Five Eyes intelligence network including the US, Canada, Australia and the UK—was the “one country sitting out.”

The NZ parliament has united behind the Sanctions Bill, with National, ACT, the Maori Party and the Greens, which is part of the government, voting unanimously in support. The main opposition National Party last year attempted to introduce a similar autonomous sanctions law, principally aimed at China, but was blocked by Labour.

Ardern said New Zealand had tried to work with the UN in recent years on relevant issues. However, with the Ukraine crisis, she said, the multilateral system had failed. “Ultimately if we had a Security Council that was more functional, we would not be in this situation in the first place,” Ardern added.

The move further exposes the falsehood of New Zealand’s decades-long posturing over its “independent,” approach to foreign policy. Washington suspended defence agreements with Wellington under the ANZUS treaty, which included Australia, in 1985 after the David Lange-led Labour government adopted a nuclear-free policy and refused entry to US warships.

Since then, successive governments have worked to rebuild relations with Washington. In 2001 the Helen Clark-led Labour government, supported by the “left-wing” Alliance, despatched SAS troops to the invasion of Afghanistan, followed by army engineers to Iraq. Hillary Clinton used her official visit to Wellington in 2010 as Secretary of State to formally end the 25-year rift and restore the two countries’ military relationship.

Wellington, however, retained a certain room to maneuver. Successive administrations have operated trade and diplomatic ties with countries that suited their immediate purpose—particularly China. Labour has maintained a delicate balancing act with Beijing, the country’s major trading partner, while coming under intensifying pressure from the US and Australia to more overtly join the anti-China confrontation.

The US-NATO war against Russia has now provided the opportunity to advance a strategy that has been under preparation for some time. A NZ Defence Ministry assessment released in December demanded a more aggressive military stance against both China and Russia, which were accused of “undermining the international rules-based system”—i.e. the post-World War II rules established by Washington to enforce its global hegemony.

The new law provides for sanctions on people, services, companies, and assets related to those in Russia who are responsible for or associated with the invasion, or that are of economic or strategic relevance to Russia, including oligarchs. It also allows for sanctions against other states “complicit with Russia’s illegal actions,” such as Belarus.

The first tranche of sanctions will be relatively straightforward, such as travel ban extensions and banking restrictions. The list of those banned from travelling to NZ has just been published and includes Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The second tranche will take longer to activate and will involve identifying more people to be targeted. Russian investment in New Zealand is only about $NZ40 million, but according to Ardern “it’s not just about what’s already invested here, but what might be invested here.”

A host of purported “peace” organisations and pseudo-left groups are playing a central role in whipping up support for the intensifying diplomatic and financial isolation of Russia, while suppressing longstanding anti-war sentiment among the population.

The Green Party, notwithstanding that the declared “centre-piece” of its global affairs policy is “to join with peoples around the world to oppose war,” dutifully fell into line. Foreign affairs spokeswoman Golriz Gharhaman said the Greens were initially concerned about not wanting sanctions to affect ordinary Russians. Supporting the Bill, however, she declared: “We feel it is focused on those most responsible and it has a higher level of transparency than sanctions regimes previously [proposed].”

Among the most vociferous advocates is Greenpeace Aotearoa whose director, Russel Norman, a former Green Party leader, said the government was acting “too slowly.” It was necessary, he declared, “to make it very clear to the elites that run Russia … that what they’re doing is completely unacceptable, and we’re going to freeze their assets if they continue to do it.” Norman is organising a flotilla to Helena Bay north of Auckland to protest a locally-based wealthy Russian resident, Alexander Abramov.

The pseudo-left International Socialist Organisation has taken part in protests, including at the Russian embassy in Wellington, and posted material online with the slogan “We stand with Ukraine!” accompanied by the Ukrainian flag. Ukraine is depicted as an innocent party caught “in the crosshairs” between US imperialism on the one hand and “Russian imperialism,” on the other.

“Standing with Ukraine” is not an anti-war position—it is the slogan of the ruling elites in every capitalist country, including New Zealand. It means support for the current pro-EU and pro-NATO Ukrainian government which is falsely depicted as “democratic” and was complicit in preparing the conditions for the invasion. The branding of Russia falsely as an imperialist power only serves to diminish the central responsibility of Washington and its allies for the war.

The corporate media and business elite are joining in the demonisation of Russia. Sky TV has dropped Russia Today (RT), a Russian government-funded 24-hour news channel, from its services. A Sky spokesman claimed the Broadcasting Standards Authority had warned broadcasters “of the need for particular care when reporting on crises.” The move follows a pattern of censorship aimed at RT and other media sources with Russian connections imposed across the US and Europe.

A major liquor supplier, Liquorland, has also declared it will not promote or buy any more Russian products. The West Auckland Trusts, which owns 26 retail stores and hospitality venues, announced this week it was stopping selling Russian-made products and would replace their shelves with a Ukrainian flag.

In the increasingly foetid political atmosphere, reports are emerging of New Zealand resident Russians receiving abuse and harassment, including children bullied at school. The Russian Orthodox Church in Mt Eden was reportedly vandalised earlier this week. Photos posted online showed red paint thrown on the door, and posters comparing Putin to Hitler. This came less than a week after a Christchurch shop selling Russian goods was vandalised with graffiti.

China locks down Shanghai and Shenzhen as Omicron BA.2 subvariant surges

Bryan Dyne

Outbreaks of the highly transmissible Omicron BA.2 coronavirus subvariant surged across China over the weekend. According to the National Health Commission, there were 1,938 new confirmed cases of infection on Saturday across 31 provinces. The vast majority of cases, 1,421, were detected in the northeastern province of Jilin. Media reports indicate that the case count nearly doubled to just under 3,400 on Sunday.

In response, Chinese authorities have initiated emergency measures to contain the spread of the virus, including mass testing, contact tracing and lockdowns. Residents of Jilin City have undergone six rounds of testing, according to local officials. The neighboring city of Changchun, home to 9 million residents and China’s largest automobile producer, has been put into lockdown. The mayors of both Jilin City and Changchun have been fired in the wake of the virus’ spread, the largest outbreak in China since February 2020.

Lockdowns, including the closure of schools, workplaces and nonessential businesses, have also been implemented in Shanghai, home to 25 million people and one of the world’s largest ports, where 64 cases were detected in one day. In Shenzhen, located on China’s border with Hong Kong, its 18 million residents went into lockdown after 60 infections were detected.

These lockdowns, part of China’s “Zero COVID” public health policy, have been denounced by the Western media as “draconian” (the Associated Press). Other outlets have been more reserved, such as the Guardian, calling the effort “challenging.” All only acknowledge in passing that, in pursuing such a scientifically guided policy to fight the pandemic, China has only suffered 4,636 coronavirus deaths since December 2019, and only four deaths since April 2020.

Visitors line up outside an office building that was closed off after a case of coronavirus was detected on Sunday, March 13, 2022, in Beijing. The number of new coronavirus cases in an outbreak in China's northeast tripled Sunday and authorities responded with protective measures. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)

Nor does the Western media note that previous lockdowns have proven successful. Outbreaks of Omicron earlier this year in Tianjin, population 14 million, and Xi’an, population 13 million, were successfully contained through such stringent measures. It does not require political agreement with the Stalinist government in Beijing to acknowledge these facts.

There is concern within China, however, among both the population and public officials, that even the immense public health measures that currently exist will falter in the face of the virulence of the BA.2 subvariant. At a press conference Sunday, Lin Hancheng, a public health official in Shenzhen, warned, “If the prevention and control is not strengthened in time and decisively, it is easy to cause large-scale transmission in the community and a rapid increase in cases.”

Hancheng then called on the city’s populace to “do a good job in personal protection such as wearing masks, washing hands frequently, ventilating more, disinfecting frequently, and maintaining social distancing, actively cooperate with nucleic acid testing, make every effort to block the risk of epidemic transmission.”

The danger of lifting the Zero COVID policy in China has been demonstrated in Hong Kong. At the start of the year, there had only been 13,000 confirmed cases in total in the Special Administration Region. Restrictions were lifted just as Omicron and BA.2 hit the city, causing total cases to skyrocket to more than 706,000 in less than three months. Total deaths have shot up from 213 to 3,993, with the city attaining the highest per capita daily death rate in the world.

If such an approach were taken across China, millions would be infected within weeks and tens of thousands would be dead.

The Omicron BA.2 subvariant has also begun surging across Europe. Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Switzerland and the United Kingdom have all seen sharp upturns in their daily confirmed COVID-19 case counts, many just weeks after experiencing a surge of the Omicron BA.1 subvariant. There are currently more than 63,000 daily new cases in France, nearly 68,000 daily new cases in the Netherlands, and at least 186,000 daily new cases in Germany.

Hospitalizations in Europe are also on the rise, indicating that serious illness from BA.2 has already begun to take hold among those infected and that it is only a matter of time before another wave of deaths begins. Daily deaths across Europe currently stand at around 1,500 deaths each day.

In countries where the BA.2 wave has seemingly peaked, such as Denmark, test positivity rates and deaths are still rising, indicating that their surveillance system is inadequate for knowing the true spread of the virus.

The stark difference in the evolution of the pandemic in China and Europe is a consequence of the complete surrender to the pandemic by the capitalist European governments. All restrictions aimed at preventing the spread of the disease ended in Britain on March 2. The German government is slated to end all mask mandates by March 20. In France, one negative test just two days after COVID-19 exposure is sufficient to exit isolation. In Spain, the Socialist Party-Podemos government has effectively declared the pandemic over, despite hundreds of deaths each week.

Such policies are directly responsible for the 1.7 million official COVID-19 deaths in Europe since the start of the pandemic. A recent study on excess deaths published in the Lancet show that the true number of deaths caused by the pandemic in Europe is likely closer to 3.2 million. It remains unclear how many millions or tens of millions of patients across the continent had or continue to suffer from Long COVID symptoms, including potentially lifelong heart, lung and brain damage.

The rapid spread of BA.2 in Europe is also a warning for workers and youth in the United States, where there have been more than 81 million confirmed COVID-19 cases and nearly 1 million official deaths. While the first wave of Omicron in December, January and February has largely died down, data indicates that the descent has plateaued and cases of BA.2 are now on the rise.

Despite knowing that the next surge of the pandemic is just around the corner, the Biden administration has abandoned all public health measures. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) now only recommend masking when hospitalizations, not cases, are rising, which will allow the pandemic to spread for weeks before any action will be taken. Critical data such as centralized death reporting has been ended.

Nearly 200,000 people in the US have died from COVID-19 since mid-November and the start of the first Omicron wave. The policies of Biden and his advisors are setting up the American working class for an even greater tide of death.

Australian governments ending all “close contact” rules as COVID infections increase

Oscar Grenfell

As COVID infections increase sharply, Australia’s state and federal governments are again responding by ending the token restrictions that remain.

Amid warnings that the BA.2 variant of Omicron will fuel a surge that could eclipse the COVID tsunami of December-January, the entire preoccupation of the political establishment is to continue the profit-driven “live with the virus” program, whatever the consequences in illness and death.

Having dispensed with almost all safety measures as Omicron entered the country in December, Australia’s governments are now ending any semblance of a coordinated, society-wide public health response to the pandemic. Their policies are the same as those of Prime Minister Boris Johnson in Britain and President Joe Biden in the US.

On Friday, the Labor Party-majority national cabinet held its latest meeting on COVID. The extra-constitutional body, composed of Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s Liberal-National government and the state and territory administrations, has dictated coronavirus policies by decree for most of the past two years.

Scott Morrison addresses National Press Club [Image: ABC News screen shot]

Friday’s document declared as a priority “transition[ing] to no longer requiring quarantining of all close contacts as soon as possible.” During the height of the last Omicron wave, which has still not ended, governments neutered close contact rules, essentially excluding all workplace transmission.

Only individuals who lived with someone who had tested COVID-positive were deemed close contacts and required to isolate, in most jurisdictions for just seven days. Now, even they will be compelled to attend work and study, despite being likely to have the virus, given the transmissibility of Omicron BA.2.

The national cabinet requested “urgent advice” from the Australian Health Protection Principal Committee on the proposal. This body has functioned as a hand-raising committee for government decisions. The only purpose of the “advice” will be to provide the policy with a veneer of medical authority.

The ending of close contact rules is the focal point of a push to keep COVID-positive workers on the job. The polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing system was allowed to crash during the last surge, to justify shifting to less reliable and self-administered rapid antigen tests.

National cabinet has now decided to “transition to not routinely undertaking PCR testing in otherwise healthy people with mild respiratory illness and promote voluntary self-isolation while symptomatic for this group.” In other words, people who almost certainly have the virus will not be able to get a reliable test and will be permitted to forgo any isolation.

The imperatives driving these policies were spelt out very bluntly. It was necessary to “reinforce business and individual responsibility for prevention, preparedness and response efforts.” As with the country’s ongoing flooding crisis, individuals are on their own and governments are responsible for nothing.

National cabinet said the priority was to “ensure health, economic and social measures are in place to address the impacts of a possible new COVID-19 wave, including workforce shortages, supply chain issues, and pressures on specific sectors and individuals.”

That is, the governments acknowledged that a new surge is likely already developing, which their policies will help fuel. The only issue is to make sure major businesses are not impacted by their workers having to isolate when they fall sick. In January, as many as half of all truck drivers were off at one time due to COVID. Treasury estimated total workforce shortages at 10 percent.

Morrison reinforced the message at a press conference on Saturday. After defending his government’s criminally negligent response to the floods, Morrison declared that the country was now “living with the virus like the flu.” The likening of COVID to influenza, condemned by all principled epidemiologists as dangerous medical misinformation, is part of the official national cabinet program for the final “phase D” of the “reopening.”

Morrison said “it makes a lot of sense” to “get rid of the close contact rule” because it was “starving businesses of staff.”

The prime minister acknowledged that the mass reopening of face-to-face teaching in the schools had resulted in a greater spread of the virus. While the state and federal authorities are covering up the infection tolls, it is clear from reports to the Committee for Public Education that virtually every school in the country has probably been hit by infections.

Large clusters have emerged. At Castle Hill High School in northwestern Sydney, for instance, there are 650 confirmed active infections in a school population of roughly 2,000. In New South Wales (NSW), the twice-weekly provision of rapid tests to students was ended after the fourth week of term. The measure was largely cosmetic, but its termination means nobody knows how much COVID there is in the classrooms.

Mask requirements were also ended in the public schools, but a number of Sydney private schools are reintroducing a mandate due to rising infections.

Morrison’s reference to the schools was not an expression of concern over children and teachers contracting a potentially deadly disease. Instead, he raised that kids were catching the virus at school and bringing it home to their parents, preventing them from going to work. The solution was to end close contact isolation!

The PM did not mention BA.2 by name but said, “We discussed the mutations of the existing variant with Omicron yesterday, but we’re largely talking about the same virus. The difference with Omicron and Delta is like a completely different virus.” The comment was made in response to a journalist who asked if there were any circumstances under which restrictions would be reintroduced. “Oh no, I can’t see that,” Morrison replied.

In reality, BA.1, the initial Omicron variant, has killed more people in Australia than any previous iteration of the virus. Some 3,351 deaths have been reported this year amid the Omicron spread, compared with 2,239 fatalities in the two years prior.

Medical experts, moreover, have stated that BA.2 is so different from BA.1 that it should be considered an entirely new variant. Initial studies have shown that BA.2 is both more transmissible and lethal than the initial Omicron strain. It is fueling a massive surge in Hong Kong, that is claiming a greater number of lives, per capita, than any wave of the virus around the world.

Hardly any cases are genomically sequenced in Australia. According to the latest NSW Health surveillance report, however, BA.2 accounted for two-thirds of sequenced infections in the final fortnight of February.

University of NSW School of Population associate professor James Wood told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation he and other researchers forecast that BA.2 would account for 90 percent of infections in the state by the end of the month.

NSW Health Minister Brad Hazzard predicted that cases could double in six weeks. But the NSW government rejected advice from the state health authorities for the reintroduction of indoor mask mandates and density limits on venues. All the other governments, Labor and Liberal-National alike, hold the same position.

In Western Australia (WA), over 4,000 infections are being recorded nearly every day, after the state Labor government abandoned a suppression policy that had prevented an Omicron wave in December-January. At his Saturday press conference, Morrison congratulated WA Premier Mark McGowan on this “let it rip” program.

In five of the past seven days, daily national infections have exceeded 30,000, with more than 40,000 on one day. In NSW, cases are frequently above 13,000, after having been below 10,000 most days for several weeks. Given the dismantling of testing, the official numbers likely understate the true extent of transmission several times over.

Even as the politicians and corporate media present the pandemic as a thing of the past, it is entirely possible that current infections are comparable to those at the height of the Omicron wave, when more than 100,000 cases were being recorded each day. Now the governments are unleashing an even more deadly variant.