Application Deadline: For both April and fall (September/October) 2023 Enrollment. From: 13:00 JST on Saturday, October 1, 2022 To: 13:00 JST on Monday, October 31, 2022
Offered annually? Yes
Eligible Countries: International
To be taken at (country): Japanese Universities and Graduate Schools
Eligible Field of Study: All courses offered by the Japanese University or Graduate School in Japan
About Rotary Yoneyama Scholarship: The Foundation awards scholarships to overseas students who aspire to study or conduct research in Japanese universities or graduate schools. Its scholarship fund is supported by the contributions of Rotarians throughout Japan. The Foundation is Japan’s largest private scholarship organization, both in terms of program scale and number of scholarships awarded.
Rotary Yoneyama Scholarship for applicants residing abroad is for international students scheduled to enroll in a Japanese University or Graduate School. Applicants have to find out and apply a Japanese university or graduate school by themselves before they apply for this scholarship. And they are requested to submit the copy of the application for admission for the university / graduated school.
Type: Undergraduates, Master’s and PhD degree
Selection Criteria and Eligibility: The program’s eligibility requirements are as follows:
Have already chosen the university or graduate school s/he will apply for
Be in the process of applying for admission
Be able to submit his/her letter of acceptance (an admission approval or a pre-arrival admission approval) under the schedule below.
For April 2020 enrollment: Submit the letter of acceptance by the end of January 2021.
For fall 2020 enrollment: Submit the letter of acceptance by the end of June 2020.
Number of Scholarships: several
Value of Scholarship:
Undergraduates: 100,000 yen per month
Masters students: 140,000 yen per month
Doctoral students: 140,000 yen per month
Only for the first year of the scholarship, a supplemental of 400,000 yen is provided upon arrival in Japan.
Important Notes: Only for the first year of the scholarship, a supplemental of 400,000 yen is provided after arrival in Japan and attending an orientation. Yoneyama scholars are to arrive in Japan prior to the month of their admission. Irrespective of the reason, if they do not arrive in Japan by the month that their scholarship will begin to be paid, they will lose their eligibility.
Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain
Earlier this month, the Department of State circulated to our embassies around the world its report on Russian efforts to sway elections and exert political influence in more than two dozen countries over the past ten years. According to the study, Russia has covertly given at least $300 million to political parties and politicians in order to “shape foreign political environments in Moscow’s favor.”
The State Department wants our embassies to share this information widely as part of the Biden administration’s Summit for Democracy and to ensure that governments are not complacent about the Russian threat. In calling attention to this study, the Washington Post editorialized that “democracies must stand guard.”
The policy and intelligence communities have substantial expertise in this area because the United States has been the global leader in election interference and regime change since the end of the Second World War. The strategic failures of the Central Intelligence Agency in this field are legendary. The classic case of CIA interference took place in Guatemala from 1952 to 1954, an operation codenamed PBSUCCESS. The congressional investigations of illegal CIA activities in the 1970s omitted the Guatemalan operation because it was such an embarrassment to the image of the United States and the Eisenhower administration.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower was also responsible for the strategic nightmare in Iran in 1953, when we paved the way for the accession of the Shah of Iran, and in the Congo, which led to the emergence of Joseph Mobutu, the worse tyrant in Africa’s history. In Iran, the CIA harassed religious figures, even bombed their homes, in order to turn them against the Mossadegh government. In the Congo, Eisenhower endorsed an assassination attempt against Patrice Lumumba in 1959 because of the latter’s socialist leanings.
As a result, dozens of U.S. embassies should think twice before informing their host governments of Russian influence operations because these governmental officials presumably have vivid memories of far worse U.S. and CIA covert operations that supported various criminal, dictatorial, or militarist organizations in their own countries. The White House endorsed CIA operations that tried to assassinate foreign leaders; sponsor guerrilla wars or insurgencies; or bankroll key members of political parties, such as the Christian Democratic Party in Italy or the Liberal Democratic Party in Japan. The list of targeted countries is a long one that includes Afghanistan, Albania, Angola, Bolivia, China, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Georgia, Greece, Haiti, Hungary, Indonesia, Iraq, Laos, Malaysia, Nicaragua, North Korea, North Vietnam, Oman, Poland, Thailand, Tibet, Turkey, and Venezuela to name a few. We know little about the efforts of the United States to invest several billion dollars on influence operations in Ukraine and Georgia, including the promotion of anti-government riots, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union
Much of the covert activity stemmed from a putative belief in the domino theory that posited that, if one country in region came under the influence of communism, then the surrounding countries would follow suit. Again, it was President Eisenhower, referring to communism in Indochina, who described the “falling domino” theory as a “beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound influences.” In 1954, Eisenhower warned that “if Vietnam were lost, or if Laos and Vietnam were lost, the dominoes would fall.”
The military-industrial complex had enormous success using the simplistic domino theory to exaggerate the threat to U.S. interests. The Pentagon was the initial source of the threat exaggeration, regularly overestimating the military capabilities of the Soviet Union and now China. The U.S. General Accounting Office concluded in 1992 that the exaggeration of the Soviet threat was used to justify the modernization of U.S. strategic nuclear systems in the administrations of Carter, Reagan, and Bush. More recently, the importance of “counterinsurgency” and the tactics of “terror and extortion” have been similarly ridiculous battle cries. The mainstream media have largely echoed U.S. propaganda in this regard.
Political theorists and politicians are citing the combined Sino-Russian threat to justify another wasteful round of spending on strategic weaponry. The lead editorial in the New York Times on September 28 argued that the Biden administration is “endangering” the United States by not funding a military that can “adequately carry out our defense commitments, a dangerous posture for a great power.” In fact, the United States allocates more spending to defense than the rest of the world combined. The editorial argued that Congress was forced to increase the defense budget because the Biden administration has not issued a National Security Strategy, a boilerplate document that actually carries little weight in national security decision making. Congress typically asks for greater spending on defense than the White House or even the Pentagon deems sufficient because of a bipartisan agreement that views the defense budget as a jobs bill to bolster the economies of each and every state.
Democratic and Republican administrations have used false notions regarding a domino theory to justify various covert actions, including political assassination and regime change. The Truman administration used the domino theory to justify aid to Greece and Turkey. The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Arthur Vandenberg, told Truman that he would have to “scare the hell out of the American people” to get support for aiding Greece and Turkey.
Secretary of State Dean Acheson argued that “corruption of Greece would infect Iran and all [nations] to the east. Such corruption would also carry infection to Africa through Asia Minor and Egypt, and to Europe through Italy and France.” The domino theory was similarly used to justify U.S. involvement in Vietnam, although the North Vietnamese were conducting a nationalist revolution. American presidents regularly use Vandenberg’s scare tactics to bolster defense spending.
Most recently, the Pentagon used the domino theory to defend a continued military presence in Afghanistan, and to provide an obstacle to the efforts of the past three presidents to withdraw U.S. forces. Politicians and pundits are arguing that Russian success in Ukraine would enable the Kremlin to threaten Ukraine’s neighbors, even though it is obvious that Russian forces cannot even contend with the challenge of occupying Ukraine, let alone take on additional military challenges. Decades of political and military futility in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan have only worsened the atmosphere of fear and uncertainty in decision making circles that leads to the exaggeration of the threat and the misuse of military and clandestine capabilities.
The United States and Russia are powers with self-serving ambitions, but their covert actions have produced more failures than successes. Even so-called short-term “successes” such as the coup in Iran have become long-term failures or liabilities. Clandestine Soviet activities in East Europe in the Cold War have created an East European membership for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization that is passionately anti-Russian. U.S. covert action in Central America merely increased the violence in that region, bringing great embarrassment and substantial emigration to the United States.
“Whatsoever a man sowed, that shall he also reap.”
The first round of Brazil’s presidential elections, which took place on Sunday, have set a runoff between the country’s current fascistic president Jair Bolsonaro and former president Lula da Silva of the Workers Party (PT). Lula won 48.4 percent of the vote, against 43.2 percent for Bolsonaro.
Voters waiting to cast ballots in Rio de Janeiro (Tomaz Silva/Agência Brasil)
The result was a setback for the PT candidate, whom election-eve polls had shown winning a possible first-round victory with up to 51 percent. Above all, however, Bolsonaro performance exceeded expectations. Until the last moment, polls had him at between 36 percent and 38 percent of likely voters.
The coming period, until the second round of voting on October 30, will be one of intensification of the acute political crisis overshadowing the Brazilian elections.
The fascistic president, who has declared that he will accept no result other than his victory, will use the next period to promote a series of maneuvers aimed at subverting the elections and remaining in power regardless of their outcome.
Interviewed on Sunday night after the Electoral Court (TSE) announced that there will be a second round, Bolsonaro refused to answer reporters’ questions as to whether he thought “there was fraud” in the vote count and whether he trusted the announced results. Instead, he stated, “I will await the assessment of the armed forces ... That is up to my defense minister.”
For the first time in the history of Brazil’s current civilian regime, the military conducted a parallel vote count. The defense minister and key collaborator in the president’s dictatorial conspiracy, Gen. Paulo Sergio Oliveira, was invited to accompany the work in the room where the vote tallying is done, which Bolsonaro called a “secret room” and pointed to as the incubator of an electoral fraud.
Neither General Oliveira nor any other military body has so far spoken out about the first-round results. This silence, after the military arrogated to itself the role of arbiter of the vote, reveals the political instability that will mark the coming period.
On the social media of the president’s far-right supporters, graphics are beginning to appear showing a progressive drop in Bolsonaro’s lead in the vote count. They insinuate that the turnaround in favor of Lula was the product of fraud. The same fraudulent argument was used by Donald Trump in his attempt to subvert the 2020 US election, which serves as a model for Bolsonaro’s conspiracy in Brazil.
Lula is heading for a much tougher runoff than expected. Even if elected, he will have his inauguration challenged by the current president supported by sections of the state and the military, forcing him to make a series of deals with these right-wing elements before coming to power. But his problems do not stop there.
The PT and its allies suffered an overwhelming defeat to the extreme right in the legislative elections. While the electoral bloc consisting of the PT, the Maoist PCdoB, and the Greens elected 79 congressmen, Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party elected 99 and will have the largest caucus in the House (a position held so far by the PT). More than 300 of the 513 elected deputies belong to parties on the extreme right of the Brazilian political spectrum.
These developments make even more concrete the analysis made by the Brazilian Socialist Equality Group (GSI) that a potential new PT government will have a deeply reactionary and politically unstable character from the outset.
But while analysts in the bourgeois media are quick to declare the consolidation of the “right-wing wave” among the Brazilian population, the swing to the right of the political system provides only a grossly distorted and one-sided expression of the class conflicts maturing in Brazil.
A phenomenon growing year after year, in a country where voting is mandatory, is the high abstention rate of Brazilian voters. This year it reached over 21 percent, the highest figure in 24 years. Behind it, there is a widespread rejection of the capitalist political and economic setup that has not yet found a direct political form.
In 2018, the Latinobarómetro survey reported the widespread view among Latin Americans that their countries are ruled “by a few powerful groups for their own benefit.” This idea was shared by 90 percent of Brazilians. The survey also reported that only 6 percent of the population saw economic distribution as fair.
Since Bolsonaro’s election in 2018, when the survey was conducted, the crisis conditions faced by the working class have worsened profoundly. Tens of millions have been pushed below the poverty line, while the criminal policies adopted by the government in response to the COVID-19 pandemic have produced an official toll of 686,000 entirely preventable deaths in Brazil, second in number only to the United States.
The fact that the PT and its pseudo-left allies have proven incapable of strengthening their influence amid the crisis of the hated Bolsonaro government is indicative of their political bankruptcy and the mass hostility towards them within the working class.
Lula’s presidential campaign was fundamentally aimed at winning the support of the capitalist and traditional bourgeois political forces deeply rejected by the Brazilian masses. By allying itself with right-wing figures it had previously presented as the worst enemies of the working class, like Lula’s vice-presidential running mate Geraldo Alckmin, the PT made clear its intention to preserve a system of exploitation that has become intolerable for the masses.
The votes for Lula represented, above all, a rejection of Bolsonaro. On the other hand, the sudden strengthening of Bolsonaro, capturing votes destined for candidates presented as agent’s of Brazil’s“renewal,” expresses the consolidated rejection of the PT after the party’s 13 years of ruling in the interests of capitalism.
Regardless of which government takes power, the workers will face policies of deepening capitalist attacks on their living standards and the advance of the fascist forces that intend to reintroduce a dictatorial regime in Brazil.
The Berlin Children’s Hospitals Initiative (IBK) has sent a second open letter to Federal Health Minister Karl Lauterbach (Social Democrats, SPD) as well as to Berlin Health Senator Ulrike Gote (Greens) and the management of Berlin’s children’s hospitals.
Charité hospital tower
It draws attention to the devastating situation at children’s hospitals and child emergency centres in the capital. The letter was signed by paediatricians from many hospitals, including Charité, Vivantes Neukölln and Friedrichshain, Helios Berlin-Buch and Emil-von-Behring, St. Joseph hospital, DRK-clinic Westend, Sana clinic Lichtenberg and Evangelisches Waldkrankenhaus Spandau.
Following the first open letter in January this year, no concrete measures were taken despite the precarious situation. Now the IBK sees the health of patients in “immediate danger.”
In the past years the situation on children’s wards, as well as in other hospital areas, was extremely precarious. With the coronavirus pandemic, this had become even worse. “Medical care” would not be “guaranteed in the next waves of infections” if “no drastic changes are implemented by the autumn,” the letter states.
“The situation in children’s hospitals is very serious,” according to a spokeswoman for the IBK. “We are at the beginning of the RSV wave [respiratory syncytial virus, which causes acute respiratory illness and can be especially dangerous for those under age one].” This again threatens “unacceptable conditions for patients and staff,” as was the case last year.
The already far too small number of nursing staff will be further reduced by the unfettered spread of the coronavirus: “Staffing levels are now so thin that patient care is at risk. This is further exacerbated by the novel coronavirus variants already emerging and resulting staff shortages.” It is not uncommon for hospitals and other medical or nursing facilities to struggle with sick leave rates of 10 to 20 percent. This is primarily due to the removal of any protective measures against the pandemic.
The understaffing of paediatric emergency departments with qualified personnel is so severe that the consequences are being felt directly. In the child emergency centres, the severity of an illness or injury determines the time frame in which treatment must be initiated. However, such an assessment can only be made by personnel qualified to do so.
According to the IBK, the designated time window for treatment is “regularly” exceeded due to the lack of personnel in non-life-threatening emergencies. Patients must sometimes wait up to six hours to receive treatment, which not only pushes children and parents to the limit, but also creates avoidable emergency situations, as reported by the Berlin Tagesspiegel.
That this is common practice was also shown in a Twitter post by Berlin state parliamentarian Orkan Özdemir from late September. During his three-hour wait in the emergency room at St. Joseph Children’s Hospital, “not even a registration or initial assessment was made.” “Absolute chaos and excessive demands,” was his conclusion. The SPD deputy conceals the fact that it is his party, which has held the Berlin mayor’s post for most of the past 20 years, that is largely responsible for these conditions. But what Özdemir describes is the experience of thousands of patients, doctors and nurses.
As Ärzte Zeitung (Doctors Newspaper) reported in 2020, the number of trained paediatric nurses nationwide dropped “from nearly 42,000” (in 1996) to “fewer than 38,000” (in 2017). That number has continued to drop dramatically since the pandemic began, after thousands of nurses could no longer tolerate conditions in hospitals and resigned or reduced their hours.
Current staffing requirements are often no longer being met, especially in intensive care units, Ärzte Zeitung notes. For Level 1 maternity hospitals, the nursing ratio of one paediatric nurse per preterm infant requiring intensive therapy with a birth weight of less than 1,500 grams could be met in only 38.1 percent of centres. The nursing ratio of one paediatric nurse per two preterm infants requiring intensive monitoring with a birth weight of 1,500 grams was met by only 46.9 percent of the Level 1 centres.
Even after initial treatment, there is no guarantee of receiving a hospital bed if needed. In any case, the capital city has only 735 beds in paediatric wards, a fact that has long been criticized. But even these beds can not be occupied because many must remain vacant due to the extreme staffing shortage. Frequently, children and adolescents have to be transported to hospitals in Brandenburg, some of which are far away.
Nationwide, the number of beds in clinical departments for paediatric and adolescent medicine fell from 35,160 (1991) to 20,331 (2017), according to the Federal Statistical Office.
For this reason, the Berlin Children’s Hospital Initiative calls for supra-regional bed coordination and modernization of the infrastructure as a whole. The IBK’s central demands are for more medically qualified staff in paediatric emergency departments and a fixed doctor-patient ratio of 1:6 in paediatric wards.
The abolition of per-case charges, according to which hospitals and departments must charge for treatment, medicine and medical equipment, and time spent, is also among the IBK’s demands.
As important and justified as these demands are, they are falling on deaf ears among those with political responsibility.
The emergency conditions in Berlin’s children’s hospitals reflects the deplorable situation of the entire hospital and health service. Staff shortages and miserable working conditions are the result of a policy that has been pursued for decades by governments of all stripes. In the process, the health care system has been underfunded and completely subordinated to the profit interests of the shareholders of the private providers. In particular, the profits-before-lives policies of the ruling class in response to the global pandemic have revealed how indifferent the political, business and financial elites are to the health and lives of the population.
Despite the growing number of cases requiring treatment, the federal government claims there is no threat of “a shortage of provisions for children and adolescents,” according to Ärzte Zeitung, pointing instead to the lack of bed utilization.
Stefanie Stoff-Ahnis, from the board of directors of the leading association of statutory health insurers, told Tagesspiegel that “rather fewer” hospitals were needed nationwide because of vacant beds, coupled with a lack of nursing staff and constantly rising costs.
Health Minister Karl Lauterbach, whose declared goal is to destroy the “abundant” supply of beds in hospitals, is singing from the same hymn sheet. At a September 27 press conference, he declared, “In Germany, it is striking that we have about 50 percent more bed capacity than in other European countries ... and a 50 percent above-average rate of full inpatient care.”
His conclusions from this are not unknown. Two years ago, when the Bertelsmann Foundation called for the closing of one in two hospitals in Germany, Lauterbach explicitly supported it. Now the consequences of the pandemic and rising costs due to NATO’s war against Russia are to be used to radically change public health care.
Rising costs, a lack of revenue due to a lack of staff and insufficient public financial support threatens to drive masses of hospitals into bankruptcy. Johannes Denckert, chairman of the Management Board of Berlin’s Vivantes Kliniken, has already outlined in Business Insider “an uncontrolled death of hospitals throughout Germany.”
Lauterbach’s latest statements should also be understood against this background. As he announced, the DRGs (Diagnosis Related Groups) in children’s wards and hospitals are to be dropped. In the future, he said, there should be a fixed budget outside the DRG system for the 350 children’s clinics and departments in hospitals, through which the costs are to be settled.
It is patently clear this is not a departure from the free-market policy of flat rate charges per case. Rather, it is part of Lauterbach’s efforts to push the sick away from hospitals and towards outpatient treatment on a grand scale in order to save costs and close hospitals. In the current federal budget, the health care budget is to be cut from €64 billion to €22 billion—and this amid the COVID-19 pandemic, which has already cost more than 150,000 lives in Germany alone.
A stampede at an Indonesian soccer stadium on Saturday night has left at least 125 people dead and 323 injured. The crush of thousands of spectators hurrying to escape the arena was triggered after police fired tear gas into the crowd. The horrific event is one of the world’s deadliest sports stadium disasters on record.
Police officers fire tear gas in response to clashes between fans at a soccer match at Kanjuruhan Stadium in Malang, East Java, Indonesia, Saturday, Oct. 1, 2022. [AP Photo/Yudha Prabowo]
The Kanjuruhan Stadium, in the city of Malang, East Java, hosted a soccer match where home team Arema FC was defeated by their rivals Persebaya Surabaya. After the game, the pitch was invaded by an estimated 3,000 fans of the losing side, local reports claimed. Soldiers and police in riot gear, armed with shields and batons, stepped onto the ground before numerous tear gas cannisters were fired on the pitch and into the stands.
Footage posted on social media showed clouds of the gas engulfing the stadium and police beating spectators as they ran to escape. Some were seen carrying those injured to safety. Many were crushed, suffocated, or trampled when the crowd of 42,000 ran to the stadium’s only exit.
Malang hospitals were quickly overwhelmed by an influx of over 300 injured people rushed to emergency. Many victims died on the way to hospital or during treatment from trauma, shortness of breath and lack of oxygen. The head of nearby Kanjuruhan Hospital told Metro TV that some victims had sustained brain injuries and that the dead included a five-year-old child.
At least 32 children, aged between 3 and 17, were reported among the dead. These included two brothers, aged 14 and 15, whose family had brought them to their first soccer match. Their elder sister told Reuters: “My family and I didn’t think it would turn out like this.”
While most victims died in hospital, 34 people died inside the stadium, after being brought to the soccer team doctor for treatment. Their bodies were carried off by players of the Arema FC team. Two police officers also died, East Java police chief Nico Afinta told the press.
Witnesses and victims spoke to local media about the brutality of the police. “Many of our friends lost their lives because of the officers who dehumanised us,” said Muhammad Rian Dwicahyono, 22, in hospital with a broken arm. “Many lives have been wasted.”
In a BBC interview, Muhamad Dipo Maulana, 21, claimed that police beatings of a few initial pitch invaders after the match caused more spectators to flood the ground in protest. Dipo said he heard over 20 tear gas shots fired “continuously and fast” all around the stadium.
Graffiti painted on the stadium’s walls the day after, highlighting the police’s role in the disaster. Messages included: “Savage Police,” “ACAB” [All Cops Are Bastards], and “My siblings were killed—investigate thoroughly.”
This anger was reflected on social media, with many Twitter posts outraged by the police’s actions going viral just hours after the stampede. “Firing tear gas in a closed space full of humans is a serious violation,” read one tweet that was liked 11,000 times.
Mourners gathered outside the Malang stadium on Sunday to lay flowers for the dead, with a candle-lit vigil held that night. In the capital city of Jakarta, hundreds attended a similar vigil, carrying placards that read “Stop Police Brutality!” The demonstrators chanted repeatedly “Murderer! Murderer!” and placed police tape around a major Jakarta soccer stadium.
In a bid to quell public anger, Indonesian President Joko Widodo announced token investigations. He told authorities to re-evaluate security at soccer matches and ordered the suspension of the Indonesian Premier League until an investigation was completed. The government announced it would form an independent fact-finding team, including academics, soccer experts, and government officials.
Meanwhile, world soccer’s governing body FIFA ordered the Football Association of Indonesia to send an investigative team to Malang, as the possession or use of “crowd control gas” by stewards or police is a violation of FIFA guidelines.
In addition, the incident raises serious questions of safety regulations at the stadium. Indonesia’s chief security minister Mahfud MD wrote in an Instagram post Sunday that 42,000 tickets had been issued for a stadium that holds a maximum of 38,000 people.
The above-capacity crowd, moreover, could only leave the stadium through one exit. The lack of safety at the Kanjuruhan Stadium is symptomatic of the much broader problem in Indonesia of inadequate investment in social infrastructure and public safety. The neglect is the result of the subordination of social need to profit interests by successive Indonesian governments.
Widodo said Saturday’s stampede should be the “last soccer tragedy in the nation.” According to Chanell News Asia, 78 people have died in soccer-related incidents over the past three decades.
Violent outbreaks at sporting events, often between fan bases of clubs with strong rivalries, have always been a distorted expression of underlying social tensions. In Indonesia, the decades-long social immiseration of workers and rural toilers has accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic, which has not only killed hundreds of thousands, but thrown tens of millions into poverty. Global inflation is driving up the prices of basic goods and is fueling protests and strikes.
The death toll in the police-provoked stampede is one of the worst tragedies at football stadiums in the world.
In 1964, a total of 320 people were killed and more than 1,000 injured during a stampede at a Peru-Argentina Olympic qualifier in Lima.
In the United Kingdom, a crush developed at the Hillsborough stadium in Sheffield in 1989, resulting in the deaths of 97 Liverpool fans attending a match against Nottingham Forest.
There is a growing sense among media commentators and analysts that the financial crisis in the UK signifies the emergence of an inflection point in the operations of the global financial system.
That is, to use the often-employed metaphor, it is the canary in the coal mine for the eruption of a crisis, suppressed for more than a decade and a half by the provision of trillions of dollars by central banks to the financial markets.
The Bank of England has launched a temporary bond-buying programme as it takes emergency action to prevent “material risk” to UK financial stability. Frank Augstein [AP Photo/Frank Augstein]
The UK events, involving an emergency £65 billion intervention by the Bank of England last week, doled out in daily injections of £5 billion until October 14 in order to halt a collapse of the bond market, are a case in point.
The crisis centred on pension funds. In the past these funds were able to meet their liabilities by investing in long-term government bonds of 10- and 30-years duration, known as gilts, confident they were able to secure an adequate rate of return. But the initiation of quantitative easing after 2008, combined with central bank interest rate cuts, meant that bond yields fell to historic lows.
To meet their obligations in conditions where their traditional sources of income were drying up, pension funds had to undertake investments in riskier assets such as corporate credit, equities and property in order to meet their liabilities.
They sought to hedge their risks from such investments through financial market operations via derivatives. They borrowed funds for this purpose using their holdings of government bonds, regarded as the safest of all assets, as collateral.
However, the price of bonds plunged following the Tory government’s mini budget of September 23, which cut taxes on the corporations and the super-rich to the tune of £45 billion, financed by an increase in government debt of £72 billion. So the value of the collateral fell, and the pension funds were faced with margin calls from their lenders.
This led to a further bond selloff as the funds sought to meet these demands, exacerbating the plunge in bond prices and leading to demands for more collateral. Had this situation continued some 90 percent of pension funds, holding £1.5 trillion of assets, could have been rendered insolvent.
Like all crises, this one had its own national forms. But the concern is being voiced that in the final analysis it was the outcome of global processes.
The ultra-low interest rate regime of the past 15 years, which has boosted stock markets, is now being reversed as central banks around the world, led by the US Fed, are tightening monetary policy as they seek to suppress workers’ wage demands in the face of the highest inflation in four decades.
In a recent comment on the UK crisis, Wall Street Journal columnist James Mackintosh wrote that it had sent a shock wave through global markets. It is “providing a warning to governments everywhere of the dangers of the new economic era we are entering,” expressed in Britain through a toxic mix of politics, inflation and higher interest rates.
He noted that while superlatives were often used in market reporting “the ructions” in the UK were “truly extraordinary.”
The Tory government’s measures had such a “big effect because of the broader background of soaring interest rates, high debt, dire communications and the erosion of the country’s institutional credibility” with most of those conditions applying “to a greater or lesser degree across the developed world.”
“The most apocalyptic risk is that Britain is merely the first major victim of higher [interest] rates,” he wrote, noting that, as had often happened in the past, it was problems in an area regarded as safe, in this case pension funds, that caused difficulties.
The Fed is basing its program on the belief that higher interest rates will be able to halt inflation as took place in the class war launched under Fed chair Paul Volcker in the 1980s.
But as Financial Times columnist John Plender commented, “changes in financial structure since Volcker’s day point to looming financial instability.”
According to Plender, “the chief role of the financial system is no longer to take deposits and make loans but to refinance the debt that sustains global growth and consumption” and “this complex system is increasingly dependent on shaky collateral.”
Another FT columnist, Robin Wigglesworth, has noted that the pension fund measures were not some flashy hedge fund strategy, but the “financial market equivalent of doing your family taxes.”
He noted that “true cataclysmic financial debacles tend to involve investment strategies and financial securities that everyone thought were boring,” raising the question of “what else like this may be lurking out there” in some “unlikely corner of the global financial system.”
In a recent comment on his Chartbook blog, dealing with the “bond market massacre of September 2022,” economic historian Adam Tooze, the author of a major study on the global financial crisis of 2008, began by noting it was not just the UK that was under stress.
“On the other side of the Atlantic too, tremors are running through the US treasury markets, the foundation of the dollar system,” he wrote.
Tooze cited a recent Bloomberg report, based on data from JP Morgan, according to which, “liquidity in the treasury market in extremely low” as conditions resemble “those seen in the pandemic and the period after the Lehman crisis.”
He said it was unclear to him who exactly benefited from the Bank of England bailout, and this suggested we are dealing with a system “riven with conflicts of interest.”
“Does it really make sense to perpetuate a system in which disastrous risks are built into the profit-driven provision of basic financial products like pensions and mortgages?” he continued.
He concluded with the observation that the crisis is the result not of some “some metaphysical uncertainty”, but rather of a “contradictory, incoherent and hazardous profit-driven system, which the status quo underwrites.”
Just days after Russia officially announced the annexation of four regions of Ukraine, the Ukrainian military staged its biggest military breakthrough in southern Ukraine since the start of the war, advancing 20 miles as Russian forces carried out a precipitous retreat.
The Ukrainian offensive follows a similar lightning breakthrough in northeastern Ukraine last month, in which the Russian front collapsed in a disorganized rout and Ukrainian forces advanced dozens of miles in the span of days.
Ukrainian servicemen drives atop on an APC in recently recaptured area of Lyman, Ukraine, Monday, Oct. 3, 2022. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)
Reuters called this weekend’s advance the “biggest breakthrough in the south of the country since the war began, bursting through the front and advancing rapidly along the Dnipro River on Monday, threatening supply lines for thousands of Russian troops.” Reuters added, “Ukrainian troops had advanced dozens of kilometers along the river’s west bank, recapturing a number of villages along the way.”
On Sunday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced that the strategic town of Lyman had been fully occupied by Ukrainian forces.
“The information is tense, let’s put it that way, because yes, there were indeed breakthroughs,” Vladimir Saldo, the head of the Russian-occupied section of Ukraine's Kherson province, told Russian state television.
Video posted on social media showed dozens of Russian corpses, alongside discarded clothing and equipment. The Ukrainian military claimed it destroyed 31 Russian tanks during the offensive.
Commenting on the significance of the Ukraine victory, the Washington Post noted that “Lyman is a key supply hub on the western edge of Ukraine’s Donbas region, where Russia has concentrated its military campaign for months. Russian forces have used it to supply operations to the east since capturing Lyman in the spring.”
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg attributed the breakthrough to the “advanced weapons that the United States and other allies are providing,” adding, “This is making a difference on the battlefield every day,” he told NBC.
Stoltenberg is correct. The breakthroughs in the Russian lines were made possible by the advanced weapons systems provided by the United States to Ukraine since April. In particular, Russia has been denied air superiority by the NASAMS anti-aircraft system, and radar installations have been pulverized by the HAARM anti-radiation missile.
This has allowed the American HIMARS system to strike targets unobstructed dozens of miles behind the Russian front, systematically dismantling the Russian logistics and supply system, as well as its command structure, leading Russian troops to effectively melt away before the Ukrainian advances.
“The fact we have broken through the front means that ... the Russian army has already lost the ability to attack, and today or tomorrow it could lose the ability to defend,” Oleh Zhdanov, a Ukraine military analyst, told Reuters.
He continued, “A month of our work destroying their supplies and reducing the combat effectiveness of this group means that they are functioning on minimal rations in terms of ammunition, fuel and food.”
The collapse of the Russian line in southern Ukraine led to a wave of triumphalism among US military figures. Former National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster claimed that the Russian military is at the “breaking point.”
“What we might be at here is really at the precipice of really the collapse of the Russian army in Ukraine. A moral collapse,” McMaster told CBS on Sunday.
A Defense Department official told Politico, however, that such claims were premature, and that as Russian forces retreat to established defensive lines in the Donbas, both sides are likely in for a bloodbath.
“There’s lots of heavy fighting ahead,” the Defense Department official told Politico. Another added, “It’s important strategically, but they still have a long way to go.”
The disaster has prompted a series of recriminations within the Russian political and military establishment. On Saturday, Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov openly criticized the Russian military command, encouraging Russian President Vladimir Putin to use nuclear weapons.
“More drastic measures should be taken,” Kadyrov said, “up to the declaration of martial law in the border areas and the use of low-yield nuclear weapons.”
Putin confidante Yevgeniy Prigozhin, founder of mercenary group Wagner, said of the Russian military command, “I think that we should send all these bastards barefoot to the front with machine guns.”
Elena Panina, a former lawmaker, commented, “According to numerous estimates, Russia is facing an enemy that is more numerous, better armed, better prepared and better motivated.”
In a further indication of the crisis of the Putin government, the Kremlin’s press secretary Dmitri S. Peskov could not specify the borders of the Russian Federation following the referendums and the military debacle this weekend, declaring, “In terms of the borders, we’re going to continue to consult with the population of these regions.”
The growing crisis for Russia’s armed forces only escalates the danger that the Putin regime, backed into a corner, could use nuclear weapons in the face of battlefield defeats.
The United States is actively making preparations for such a scenario. The New York Times reported on US preparations to respond to a nuclear escalation of the war:
For months now, computer simulations from the Pentagon, American nuclear labs and intelligence agencies have been trying to model what might happen and how the United States could respond. It is no easy task because tactical weapons come in many sizes and varieties, most with a small fraction of the destructive power of the bombs the United States dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
In the most troubling development yet, however, the British Telegraph reported potential indications that Russian nuclear forces may be moving toward the front.
The Telegraph reported Monday that a “train operated by the secretive nuclear division and linked to the 12th main directorate of the Russian ministry of defense was spotted in central Russia over the weekend heading towards the front line in Ukraine.”
It cited Polish defense analyst Konrad Muzyka, who wrote that “this is actually a kit belonging to the 12th Main Directorate of the Russian MoD… The directorate is responsible for nuclear munitions, their storage, maintenance, transport, and issuance to units.”
The latest military debacle suffered by Russia only presages a further bloodbath for Ukrainian and Russian forces alike, as Russian forces retreat to well-entrenched positions in the Donbas, and the Ukrainian forces, at the instigation of the US military officers now in full command of the operation, press to retake the entirety of the Donbas and Crimea.
The German government has reacted to the Russian annexation of Ukrainian territories and Putin’s threat to use nuclear weapons by intensifying its own war offensive, which is ever more directly leading to a third world war. Defence Minister Christine Lambrecht (SPD) travelled to Ukraine at the weekend for the first time, inspected German tanks on site and announced further massive arms deliveries for the anti-Russian war regime in Kiev.
Ukrainian Defence Minister Oleksii Reznikov celebrated Lambrecht's visit on Twitter, stating: “Hosted my German colleague Christine Lambrecht in the southern Ukraine. Frau Minister brought good news & more tools to strengthen the Ukrainian army. We had a discussion about current geopolitical and security situation. [Frau] Minister was glad to talk with our soldiers and see Gepard [Cheetah] system on combat duty.”
Lambrecht announced in Odessa the delivery of further Cheetah anti-aircraft guns and the accelerated delivery of the IRIS-T air defense system. The system manufactured by the German defence company Diehl Defence is one of the most modern of its kind and, according to the manufacturer, is suitable for 360-degree all-round defence against aircraft, helicopters, drones, cruise missiles and short-range ballistic missiles. Even the German army (Bundeswehr) does not yet have such a system in its arsenal.
Immediately after her return from Odessa on Sunday, Lambrecht went one step further. On public broadcaster ARD’s Bericht aus Berlin, she announced a further round of weapons deliveries. “We will continue to engage in a variety of ways, as we have done with partners so far,” she said. “That is why we will be able to deliver 16 ‘Zuzana’ self-propelled guns to Ukraine next year, financed by Germany together with Denmark and Norway and produced in Slovakia.”
According to media reports, the cost of the announced delivery amounts to €93 million. According to the Ukrainian Ambassador to Germany, the Iris T system—consisting of high-performance radar, launching device and control car as well as missiles—will cost €140 million. In other words, Lambrecht promised Ukraine military aid worth well over €200 million during a single weekend.
Overall, German military aid now amounts to several billion euros, making Germany one of Kiev’s leading supporters. “Contrary to popular perception, Germany has delivered significant amounts of arms and equipment to Ukraine to aid the country in its fight against the Russian military,” wrote the Dutch military news website Oryx in early September. “In fact, the volume of arms deliveries by Berlin exceeds that of every other country save for the United States and the United Kingdom.”
According to Oryx, the support already provided to Ukraine includes 30 Gepard anti-aircraft guns, three M270 multiple launch rocket systems, ten PzH 2000 self-propelled guns (SPGs) along with guided artillery rounds, 3,200 man-portable air-defence systems (MANPADS), close to 10,000 Panzerfaust 3 and RWG 90 MATADOR anti-tank weapons, hundreds of vehicles, nearly 22 million rounds of ammunition, and a plethora of other equipment including 28,000 helmets and MiG-29 spare parts.
These weapons “are soon to be followed” by a further four PzH 2000s and two M270s, four IRIS-T SLM SAM batteries, 20 laser-guided rocket systems, 43 reconnaissance UAVs and up to 20 unmanned ships. The German government also “contributed at least €2 billion to Ukraine’s security capacity building fund with which the Ukrainian government can purchase armaments from other countries, including a further 100 PzH 2000s and 18 RCH-155 SPGs from German arms manufacturer Krauss-Maffei Wegmann.”
Despite this vast military support, Lambrecht insisted to ARD that it is clear that Germany and its allies are not parties to the war. “This has guided us from the very beginning. And that hasn’t changed,” she claimed.
This is utterly preposterous. As early as March, a report by the Parliamentary Research Service stated that the training of Ukrainian soldiers on German soil amounted to participation in the war under international law. “If, in addition to the supply of weapons, the instruction of a conflict party or training in such weapons were also up for discussion, one would leave the secure area of a noncombatant,” it says.
This is exactly what has happened, and the training of the Ukrainian armed forces is being massively expanded. On Monday, Der Spiegel reported that “the EU Member States have agreed in recent weeks at working group level to train as many as 15,000 Ukrainian soldiers outside the country as quickly as possible.” Of these, “3,000 Ukrainian soldiers should receive special training.” Examples include 'tactical combat training for commanders or training courses for privates.”
Germany’s support for the war goes far beyond arms deliveries and the training of the Ukrainian army. Last week, the ARD magazine Kontraste reported that the German foreign intelligence service BND is supplying Ukraine with “militarily useful data.” In other words, Berlin is directly involved in the war and played a central role in Kiev’s recent offensive, which led to severe defeats for the Russian army.
The ARD writes: “The information that the BND transmits to the Ukrainian secret service with the approval of the Federal Government includes not only analyses, for example on the fighting power and morale of Russian units in Ukraine, but also bugged radio messages and mobile phone calls as well as satellite images. These BND reports can help Ukraine prepare for military operations.”
The fact that Germany and NATO are in reality at war with Russia and pursue the goal of defeating a nuclear-armed power militarily is openly stated by representatives of the German government. On October 1, Health Minister Karl Lauterbach (SPD) wrote on Twitter: “Let's face it: What is groveling before Putin supposed to achieve? We’re at war with Putin, not his psychotherapists. Victory in the form of the liberation of Ukraine must continue to be decisively pursued. It doesn’t matter whether Putin’s psyche can handle it.”
Comments like this give a shocking insight into the mindset of the ruling class. Eighty years after the Wehrmacht’s invasion of the Soviet Union and the war of annihilation in the east, the capitalist governments are once again prepared to sacrifice millions for their predatory interests. After 150,000 deaths in the pandemic alone in Germany, Lauterbach should explain how many lives he is willing to sacrifice in the “war with Putin.” Although the latter threatens the use of nuclear weapons, the leading representatives of the NATO powers insist on defeating Russia “decisively” in Ukraine.
